We all need support sometimes. Whether it is a shoulder to cry on when we are feeling sad or advice about how to handle a sticky issue at work. Unfortunately, receiving support from others is not as simple as it should be. Decades of research have shown that perceiving you have people in your life who can provide you with social support is crucial. People who believe they have people they can count on tend to be healthier, sleep better, and even live longer.
Actually receiving support, however, can be a mixed bag. Receiving support can help, but it can also lead to negative feelings, including making people feel less effective and guilty for needing help (“I should have been able to handle this on my own!”). And even when we really do want support, we don’t always receive the right kind—you might be looking for a shoulder to cry on and instead get advice on how to solve your problem (a support situation so classic you have probably seen it recently in a TV show).
The good news is that when we do provide the right kind of support, what support researchers call “responsive support," it does help. When people receive responsive support, they experience more positive feelings and feel less stressed.
Perhaps because of the trickiness of actually providing effective support, in a survey from 2020, over 60% of Americans reported needing more emotional support than they received. So how can we get the support we need?
We often expect other people, especially those closest to us, to know what we are thinking. But they do not. When you need support, communicating that need clearly and directly (“I need a shoulder to cry on,” “I need advice on how to solve this problem”) lets the other person know not only that you need support, but the type of support you are looking for.
This is a simple step we can take to get responsive support, but one that can get overlooked. Instead, people might indirectly suggest they need support by complaining about being stressed or talking about a problem they are experiencing, but without ever actually asking for help.
Indirect methods tend to backfire—we think we have communicated our needs, but our complaints can be misinterpreted or misunderstood and may lead people to believe their support won’t be effective (they haven't been told how they can help).
Not everyone has the skills or motivation to provide good support. And not everyone is a good fit for every situation. You might have a friend who is great at listening when you want to vent, and another one who always drills right down to the center of the problem to help you identify a solution. Figuring out what type of support you actually want and going to the person most likely to provide it could help you get the support you need.
More generally, there are people who tend to want to help others (termed “compassionate motivation”) and people who believe they can provide effective help (termed “efficacy beliefs”). Identifying who these people are in your life (ideally the person who wants to help and has the skills to do so) may be helpful.
THE BASICSGetting upset is a clear sign that you need help. However, chronically expressing negativity makes it harder to tell when you actually need help. We all have a friend who seems to always be upset and complaining about every little problem (or maybe we are that friend). This type of chronic negativity tends to demotivate people from wanting to help and can undermine their belief that their support will be helpful. It also makes it harder to tell when support is really needed.
On the other hand, never expressing negativity and always staying positive may make people think you have everything under control and don’t really need help. As with asking for support directly, expressing your distress when you are actually really feeling distressed and need support can help the people in your life know when it’s time to help you.
Relationships Essential ReadsThere is surprisingly little research on how we can influence the type of support we receive, but the work that has been done makes it clear that we have some control over getting good support. We can help people understand the type of support we need and we can help motivate them to want to provide that support. The steps we can take may seem simple (asking for support from the right people), but they are often steps we don't actually bother to take when we find ourselves needing help.
We can also increase the likelihood of receiving good support by building up strong relationships with people when we aren't needing help and giving our close others opportunities to help us in low-cost situations. By investing in our relationships during good times, we can provide ourselves with a strong network of support that will be there when we need it.
Forest, A. L., Walsh, R. M., & Krueger, K. L. (2021). Facilitating and motivating support: How support‐seekers can affect the support they receive in times of distress. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, e12600.
Gordon, A. M., Carrillo, B., & Barnes, C. M. Sleep and social relationships in healthy populations: A systematic review. Sleep Medicine Reviews, 57, 101428.
Holt-Lunstad, J., Smith, T. B., & Layton, J. B. (2010). Social relationships and mortality risk: a meta-analytic review. PLoS medicine, 7(7), e1000316.
Walsh, R. M., & Forest, A. L. (2021). Can expressing positivity elicit support for negative events? A process model and review. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 25(1), 3-40.
