It's Okay to Ask For Help
No, really. Science says so.
Hiya!
Maybe it’s just me, but it feels like society (specifically, American society) has been promoting a modern version of doing everything on our own — to “pull ourselves up by our bootstraps,” if you will. That independence should always be our goal as if asking for or receiving help is a weakness, a clear sign of incompetence or neediness.
Yet, it hasn’t always been like this. I bet you can remember a time when it wasn’t. It’s not even always true today because while many people are scared of asking for help, like so many things, the fear is worse than reality. Science shows that asking for help is good for both the asker and the askee.
Humans Are Social Creatures
Cooperation is one of our species’ greatest evolutionary adaptations — and cooperation requires socialization. Researchers believe humans’ innate ability for collaboration and socialization became more prominent 3.5 million years ago, or longer, among one of our earliest hominin relatives, the Australopithecines.
The Australopithecines are one of the longest-lived and most well-known early hominin species. You’ve likely heard of Lucy, the most famous member of this lineage, but archeologists have uncovered remains from over 300 Australopithecine individuals so far.
The idea, Peter Richerson, a biologist and emeritus professor at the University of California, Davis, told Annika Hom of National Geographic, is that Australopithecines split from other primate species when they left the predominately tree-living environment of the rainforests to set out on their own in the drier, sparser, “predator-rich” savannahs.
Richerson explained how this transition led the Australopithecines to cooperate with members of their species, even when not biologically related — a sort of “I’ll watch your back if you watch mine” situation. In turn, this shift led to them creating social networks, which enabled weapon development and strategy formation, such as the power in numbers, which Richerson said can create a “mob capable of chasing really tough predators.”
As with other human species that left the forests, switching from spending most of their time in trees to spending more time on the ground led to the Australopithecines becoming bipedal or walking on two legs. This adaptation allowed them to travel greater distances, which led to more diverse diets. It also freed up their hands, which opened the door to an array of advantages, especially for hunting, because now they could easily carry weapons.
The key to bipedalism is to remain balanced on one leg while the other is raised, but achieving this meant reshaping the pelvis and lower limbs to bring the feet and knees under the body’s center of gravity or in line with the hips. However, these adaptations had a significant drawback: The changes in the female pelvis made giving birth more dangerous and laborious.
To circumvent this life-threatening side effect of evolution, Lesley Newson, an evolutionary biologist and co-author of A Story of Us: A New Look at Human Evolution, believes Australopithecine mothers helped each other during childbirth. This cooperation benefited everyone and likely prevented many maternal fatalities caused by childbirth.
Evolutionary anthropologist Sarah Hrdy, author of Father of Time: A Natural History of Men and Babies, told Hom that cooperation during labor likely transferred to raising children.
Early humans, including Australopithecines, participated in what’s known as cooperative breeding, which is when community members beyond the mother or direct family help raise and teach the baby. It’s a literal version of the “it takes a village” saying. Cooperative breeding was a drastic evolutionary change and isn’t observed among other primate species related to us.
(Side note: Scientists believe both the cooperation required for successful births and cooperative breeding may have spurred another of our greatest evolutionary adaptations: verbal language.)
Anyway, psychologists propose our cooperative evolution is why isolation and social rejection are so painful even today. Neuroscientists confirmed this (multiple times) by finding that social pain, such as rejection and exclusion, shares some of the neural circuitry involved in processing physical pain.
It may initially seem strange that emotional and physical pain share brain circuitry, but Gaurav Suri, an experimental psychologist and computational neuroscientist at San Francisco State University, explained to Hom that this shared network makes sense from an evolutionary perspective. He states:
“[I]t stands to reason that social exclusion should feel unpleasant, right? The pain of social exclusion is a signal for us to rectify things that are causing social exclusion.”
You’ve undoubtedly experienced the emotional pain of feeling left out or rejected. I sure have. It’s Human. Yet, the fabric of such trust, communication, and cooperation has frayed recently as distrust and growing isolation seep into society.
It Takes A Village No More
While we once had robust social networks and relationships, modern research shows the Pandemic shrunk the size of Americans’ social networks, and the time we spent socializing between 2003 and 2020 decreased.
A 2021 survey by the Survey Center on American Life showed that 16 percent of Americans said they’d turn to a friend when confronting a personal issue, 10 percent less than in 1990, when 26 percent of people said the same.
However, even though the Pandemic has simmered, in May 2023, the US Surgeon General declared loneliness a new epidemic in The United States. The “loneliness epidemic,” as it’s being called, persists, and experts today, in 2024, struggle to reverse course and are seeking government policy changes in hopes of quelling it.
However, experts believe there are a couple of reasons behind this social shift toward dwindling social circles besides the Pandemic.
Technology
As much as technological advancements have progressed science, they’ve also rapidly changed society. The invention of smartphones and apps and the rise of gig work offer new ways to get things done. Now, between the rise in post-pandemic remote work options and online shopping, we don’t need to leave our houses anymore if we don’t want to.
But Xuan Zhao, a psychology research scientist at Stanford University and co-founder of the AI mental health start-up Flourish, offers another perspective — that these tools, which were created to make our lives easier, can also “sacrifice human interaction.”
Research by Vanessa Bohns, a social psychologist and professor of organizational behavior at Cornell University, suggests that paying for a service reduces some of the anxiety. This might explain why people find hiring help, such as a contractor, easier than asking a friend.
Zhao proposes a possible psychological explanation for Bohn’s results. He tells Hom in National Geographic:
“Technology provides us with this sense of agency, the competence, the autonomy that we want.”
Zhao’s observation touches on something important. Yes, humans are social creatures, but we also value our autonomy. The key is finding a balance. While modern conveniences may offer us more control and independence, they also put us at risk of missing out on the opportunity to experience reciprocity, kindness, and growing our relationships.
It Can Be Scary
However, Bohns has a far simpler and oh-so-human explanation for our aversion to asking for help: fear. She points out how asking for help can feel emotionally “risky,” and explains that,
“We worry asking [for help] is somehow going to jeopardize the relationship.”
Fear of rejection is a huge motivator, but unfortunately, it is also a significant barrier to asking for what we need. After all, no one wants to be considered “needy” or have their favor thrown back at them in the future (“After everything I‘ve done for you…”).
Then there’s Zhao’s previous point — that asking for help means surrendering control to someone else. But research, including Zhao’s and Bohns’, shows that once again, our worrying is for naught.
Beyond Our Perspective
As is often the case, our fears are worse than reality. In 2022, research by Zhao and Nicholas Epley, a professor of behavioral science at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, found that:
“[T]hose needing help consistently underestimated others’ willingness to help, underestimated how positively helpers would feel, and overestimated how inconvenienced helpers would feel.”
Supporting evidence comes from a 2022 meta-analysis of 511 studies conducted between 1956 and 2017, totaling 63,342 participants, to determine whether “the idea that social capital and civic cooperation among strangers have declined in the United States over time” is true. The researchers conclude:
We found no evidence for a decline in cooperation over the 61-year period. Instead, we found a slight increase in cooperation over time.
These findings challenge the idea that Americans have become less cooperative over time. Instead, the analysis suggests that Americans have become more cooperative. Well, at least until 2017, the year their data stopped. The results may differ if the last five years or so were included, but I digress.
The point is that people are typically more likely to help us out than we assume, and Zhao thinks there’s a simple reason to explain people’s willingness to help.
“It’s a pleasant experience to connect with another person and for them to do us a favor. It unlocks an experience of kindness to flow from one person to another.”
Epley agrees and adds a nice little perspective shift:
“I’ve actually come to think of not asking people for help when you need it as harming somebody else because you’re not giving them the chance to help you, and hence feel much better than they would have otherwise.”
In other words, not asking for help deprives us of an opportunity to strengthen our relationships with others.
It Feels Good
Pushing past our fears of asking for help and limiting our reliance on apps and gig work has many positive effects, one of which is improving our mental health. Razia Sahi, a doctoral research fellow at Princeton University’s Logic of Emotion Lab, explained to Hom that when we allow someone to help us, we reduce our cognitive effort and create “space to move through that stressor.”
Healthy venting is a prime example. Even when there’s no resolution, just having someone listen, support, and validate us can decrease stress levels and make us feel emotionally closer to others by providing a sense of belonging.
Of course, venting without also addressing our cognitive needs, such as gaining insight and perspective into what’s causing our difficult feelings, can result in getting caught up in an emotional whirlwind.
Beyond mental and emotional well-being, strong social connections benefit physical health, too. Research shows that when people reflect on a challenging experience, they report feeling less pain if they were holding a partner’s hand. Not to mention, there is an abundance of research linking strong social connections and a sense of community with longevity.
Perspective Shift
It seems simple, really. Asking people for help makes them feel needed and appreciated, helps you feel supported, and strengthens your relationship with each other. Although, I learned a long time ago that “simple” doesn’t always mean “easy.” Fear is an intimidating beast, even when you know it’s made of shadows.
And, yes, we’re all busy, and none of us want to add another item to our friends and family’s to-do lists. None of us want to be a bother or an inconvenience, and we’re all perfectly capable of doing everything ourselves. Still… we are, at heart, social animals. It’s in our nature to seek connections with others, and cooperation is one of our greatest survival techniques. So, maybe the next time you need a favor, you should ask a friend before you pull up an app.
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Excellent insight. Reminds me of how Ben Franklin turned his enemy in Congress into an ally by asking him for a favor.