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What happens when you ask for help? So it benefits your mind to feel that they support you
Psychology
PM2:38The human being is a social animal. We have been on the face of the earth for thousands of years and if we have managed to survive as a species it has been thanks to cooperation among us.
We have to bear in mind that thousands of years ago life was tremendously hard. We lived surrounded by predators with claws sharper than ours, larger teeth, and with bodies much faster and more agile than ours. The only way we had to survive was teamwork.
A real case to think about
At the beginning of the XNUMXth century, a disease called Marasmus. The children who came to these institutions contracted the disease and began to enter a kind of depression which in the end led them to stop eating and, in some cases, some of those children even died. This disease came to affect a large percentage of minors, and scientists around the world tried to find a remedy for this disease through their research.
One of the most prominent researchers in this field was Dr. Talbot, an American pediatrician who decided to travel to a small orphanage in Düsseldorf, Germany, to study the reason why there was hardly any mortality from Marasmus in that center. When he asked the children’s health care providers, they told him that they did everything medically possible, but that when there was nothing left to do, they handed the child over to a caregiver named Anna who, “miraculously”, it made the children better.
Upon learning about this case and the work that Anna carried out with these children, Dr. Talbot discovered that this rare disease was caused by fdischarge of children’s contact with a caregiver. In fact, when Anna took care of them and played, listened to them, cared for them and gave them affection, they were cured. This almost literally confirms that “Without social contact we die.”
But it is also that social support that we perceive works as a stress buffer. That is, people who perceive that they have someone to lean on, have lower levels of stress.
In the end, the mere fact of being able talk with a friend about what concerns us helps us manage emotions. Just by expressing how we feel we have a long way to go. Thus, we invite you to follow this maxim: Learn to ask for help!
Inés Santos and Jesús Matos are part of the team of «In Mental Balance» (evidence-based psychology). Santos is, in addition to being a psychologist, a master’s degree in Evidence-based Clinical Psychology with a degree in “Child and Adolescent Behavior Therapy” and “Orientation and care in crisis.” She is a supervisor at the PsiCall Telematic Psychological Care Service of the UCM and is the author of the “Guide against hate speech and radicalization”.
For his part, Jesús Matos has a Master’s degree in clinical and health psychology (UCM) and in Legal and Forensic Psychology (European Foundation of Psychology). He is the author of the book “Good morning, Joy” (Zenith), director of the website enequilibriomental.net, collaborator of specialized scientific media and speaker at numerous national and international conferences.