A shared universe › Blog › The help nobody notices · Español
There is help we are grateful for that nonetheless leaves an uncomfortable aftertaste: the feeling of owing something, or of not having managed on our own. Psychology has been studying this paradox for over twenty years, and what it has found invites us to lend a hand in a different way.
Knowing you have someone to count on protects you in bad times; that is very well established. The odd thing is that when researchers looked at the specific help people received on difficult days, the result was not always good. Sometimes the days on which someone received most support were the days on which they felt worst.
In 2000, Niall Bolger, of New York University, with Adam Zuckerman and Ronald Kessler, published a study of couples in which one partner, recently graduated in law, was preparing for the exam that gives access to the legal profession in the state of New York. During the month beforehand, both of them noted down every day what support they had given and what they had received.
When the diaries were compared, something curious appeared: many of the kinds of help the partner recorded did not appear in the diary of the person preparing for the exam. They hadn’t noticed them. And those unnoticed kinds of help were the ones that did most to cushion the stress, while realising they were being supported came at a cost: lower mood and more anxiety.
It remained to check this with experiments. In 2007, Bolger and David Amarel, by then at Columbia University, ran three of them with 257 women who were told they would have to give a speech, something that makes almost everyone nervous. A fellow participant, who was in fact part of the team, offered them support either openly or discreetly, without it seeming like help.
Discreet support, both practical and emotional, reduced nerves more than receiving none. Open support did not help or even increased them. Analysing why, the authors saw that help worked when it did not carry the message “you can’t cope with this”.
There is another piece. In 2003, Marci Gleason and her colleagues, also from New York University, asked 85 couples to note down every day, for four weeks, the support they gave, the support they received and how they felt. Receiving without giving back was associated with a lower mood. When support went in both directions, mood was better. And giving support, whether or not you received any, eased the distress of the person giving it.
That is why, sometimes, the best way to help someone is to let them help you too.
None of this means that good help is always secret. In 2009, Maisel and Gable, of the University of California, followed 67 couples who lived together and found that both visible and invisible support did good, on one condition: that it responded to what the other person truly needed.
In 2018, Girme and her colleagues, studying 322 married couples, found that visible support increased satisfaction with the partner that same day, although it also raised anxiety a little, while invisible support went unnoticed at the time but improved satisfaction the next day. That same year, a team at Columbia found that what each person is like makes a difference: people who tend to scrutinise everything do better with discreet help, and people who tend to leap into action do better with clear, direct help.
Some ways of helping that take all of the above into account:
Invisible help has a price for the person giving it: nobody thanks them, because nobody sees it. A 2016 study from the University of Zurich, with 97 people whose partner was about to give up smoking, found that this kind of practical help felt bad to those giving it when they were not satisfied with their relationship, and good when they were happy with it.
If you often help without it showing, you deserve to be looked after too. And if one day you discover what someone did for you without telling you, tell them so: saying thank you is also a way of giving something back.
In A shared universe all help is of this kind. Whoever lights a star sees that it has been kept company, but never by whom. You can leave a touch or a few words of encouragement and go on your way, with nobody in your debt.