Surrounding yourself with people who make you feel good and doing good to others yourself are protective factors for your physical and mental health.
Creating and maintaining a social network can take many forms:
- Seeing friends or family members
It is possible to feel lonely although our loved ones are well and truly there for us. You need to question your feelings of loneliness and ask yourself if there are people you could rely on, talk to, confide in, and then go to them.
- Getting help from those around you (services, materials, comfort, listening)
It is rare that the people around us guess our needs. Asking for help from those around you is a difficult process. Be honest and open about what you are going through. Just talking about your problems can make you feel better.
- Participating in a support or self-help group
Support or self-help groups allow for meetings where it is possible to express one’s experiences and emotions in an atmosphere characterized by listening and respect.
- Doing activities with other people
This can be a source of motivation to perform physical activities, but it is mostly about maintaining social ties and sometimes overcoming fears of reaching out to others.
Participating in the well-being around youis:
- Caring for one or more people (spouse, children, friends)
This helps to maintain one’s social network, value one’s action and increase one’s self-esteem.
- Voluntarily helping people who are experiencing difficulties
Be careful, volunteering with other people involves being on the same level as them. The aim is to listen to them, respect them and make them understand that they have the key to their own problem. This can be emotionally challenging. It might be better to find different ways to help and develop empathy: give money, clothes, food… The important thing is to cultivate self-esteem.
- Caring for an animal
An animal is is a comforting and calming presence, an incentive for physical activity. It offers unconditional love and contagious joie de vivre. It encourages contact.