What is social support?
Social support plays a crucial role in maintaining a person’s mental well-being. But what exactly is social support? It is a network of friends and family that you can rely on in times of need. Whether it's job stress or managing academic expectations, having good social support acts like a glue to the wall of resilience. A strong social support system acts as a protector against stressors in a way that alters social life and health.(1) Social support helps a person grow and feel capable in face of a crisis. Social support has been shown to reduce effects of mental stress by improving access to help, information, feedback from others, enhancing the ability to read emotions and by making one sociable.
Types of Social Support
There are different types of social support available. A hearty talk with a close friend feels different than a conversation or advice from a teacher or a counsellor. The type of social support that helps an individual depends completely on what they feel is important to them or what they need at the given moment.
There are four commonly known types of social support:
Emotional support
Emotional support usually involves emotional or physical comfort like a warm hug or a
supportive pat in the back. The most important form of emotional support is non-judgement and active listening. This is helpful in times when we just want someone to hear us and understand our experience so that we feel a little less alone.
Sometimes we all just need a friend who is compassionate and with whom we can just bawl our eyes out without any fear of being judged. Emotional support is the most basic yet the most crucial forms of social support.
Esteem Support
Esteem support is offering words of encouragement or boosting confidence. It’s reminding the person about their strengths and their resilient qualities. This could help them feel confident in their own abilities to bounce back. During rough and tough times, we often forget what we are capable of and how much we can persevere. Having someone who can remind us of that can help us feel like we can tackle anything!
Informational Support
This type of support takes the form of giving advice on how to pass through a stressful situation. It involves gathering and sharing information about the potential next steps that may work well. It includes providing relevant resources to the person, offering facts or other relevant information, providing guidance and sharing your own personal experience. Such support can help dilute our anxiety a little and also help us make effective decisions.
Tangible Support
Tangible support or instrumental support, involves taking some of the responsibilities off the
person’s back so that they can deal with their stressful situation. Sometimes, it can also involve directly engaging with the situation and helping the other person manage it. This can include helping the person with their chores, lending money, running errands or simply cooking them a meal. Who doesn't love soup, am I right?
It's important to know when the person might need a certain type of social support. Offering
informational support when they just need someone who can listen to them can do more harm than good. In cases where you do not know what kind of support to offer, it is best to ask the person!
Barriers to Help-seeking
Having a social support system is good, but what are things that can make a person hesitate to ask for help? What can make a person not utilise this system?
Stigmatisation and embarrassment: People might feel embarrassed about their problems or
feel like they will be judged for not being able to cope with it. Fear of ridicule is sometimes
too real for a person, to the extent that they may not even share their experience let alone seek advice/help for it. When it comes to mental well-being, general society often tends to think that if you cannot see it then it’s not real. This is where awareness about mental health comes in. It’s one of the most powerful tools in breaking stigma.
Problems in recognising symptoms: People sometimes don't know how to identify the
problems that are beyond their normal threshold of endurance and coping. It’s difficult to seek help when the person is unable to recognise what is normal stress and what is concerning stress.
Confidentiality and trust is a major barrier especially in young people. When the trust we put
in to other people feels like it has been violated, it becomes difficult and hard to do that again. Thinking or feeling like we cannot trust our friends or anyone may make us feel more isolated.
Building Social Support Network
This generation has got the advantage of online networking and online friendships. Online
friendships can help you learn different types of cultural backgrounds and lifestyles. It becomes a little easier to express your feelings behind the mask of anonymity. People in online spaces generally feel comfortable much easily because there is no pressure for face-to-face interaction and the social awkwardness that can accompany it. Online space helps one take their own time to respond and one can always stop the conversation if they feel uncomfortable. However, developing friendships in online spaces can have its own set of cons. Firstly, lack of non-verbal language can lead to misreading of textual tones and create misunderstandings. Secondly, it can lead to information dumping. A person may just dump all their feelings and emotions in the space and just disappear overnight. This leaves the other person overwhelmed with all the information they received and not know what to do with it. This can be risky. People may sometimes create a fake persona. At the end of the day, if the anonymity is maintained, then they are just strangers you do not know well enough, which, well, is quite frankly a bit dangerous. Building friendships in online spaces can turn out to be something truly beautiful given that the person knows how to operate these online spaces. There are always pros and cons.
Here are some ways you can build a social hive for yourself:
Join a club
Volunteer at organisations with shared values and interests
Take up sports activity
Join the gym culture
These are just a few ways you can develop your own cluster of social support.
Maintaining Social Support System
Every relationship includes give-and-take. It’s good to treat your loved ones the way you want to be treated. Show up for the members of your social circle in however way needed. Basically, be the friend you want to have.
Show your appreciation to your loved ones, tell them how important they are to you and
appreciate all they do for you. Acknowledging their little acts of help can make them feel noticed and appreciated. This creates a warm halo of love and gratitude.
Stay in touch with your circle. Be in contact. This of course does not mean you cannot take
your own space or you overflood their personal space. However, staying in contact and letting them know that you are always there is helpful. Sometimes just saying that you are there and that they can talk to you can help the other person feel better. It’s knowing that they have someone to rely on that helps them get back up. Invest in having a reciprocal relationship.
Accept their help. Let them know what they can do for you no matter how little it is. People
want to feel like they are needed. Talk to them about what works for you and what are the things that will help you. Accept the support they are providing. This way they can also feel
comfortable taking your help when they are in need. Otherwise, it wouldn't feel like a reciprocal relationship and they would end up feeling like a burden.
Respect boundaries. Let them stay in their space for a while. Sometimes people need to be with themselves in order to process their emotions and feelings. Allow them that space. Every person has their own limit to how much social interactions they can engage in. It’s good to know your own limits and theirs, even if they are different from each other.
Know when to step back. Staying in a relationship that is not working for you can do more
harm than good. If you feel disrespected or that you are not valued enough, take a step back. If your social support is creating distress instead of helping you reduce it, then it's probably not good to keep that support around.
All in all, social support has been shown to reduce stress and increase mental well-being in more than one way. It's shown to improve physical health and cognitive functioning, increase
happiness levels, offer new perspectives and help in problem-solving, reinforce healthy habits, add a stronger sense of purpose and meaning in life and increase life span as well. Research has shown a strong association between supportive social communities and a longer life. Humans are sociable creatures. Even when we feel drained out, overwhelmed and exhausted, having a close knit network of loved ones can help us feel at ease some of the stress and pain we are feeling. Social support is vital in managing all stressors of life.
References
Bakhshi Pour Roudsari A, Peyravi H, Abedian A. Investigating relationship between
satisfaction with life and social support with mental health among freshman students of
Tehran University. Fundamentals of Mental Health. 2005;7(3):145–52.