Question

Describe how social support can affect health both directly and indirectly.

Answer 1

Social support can affect health both indirectly and directly. It can indirectly affect your health by making you feel involved and cared for which can increase your will to remain healthy. For example, many cancer patients are put into support groups whose sole purpose is to fill in the gaps and inspire the patients to keep fighting. A direct way it can help is by reducing stress. Stress is a great factor in diseases like cardiovascular disease or obesity. Therefore, social support can lower stress which directly lowers your chance to obtain these diseases. Hope this helped :))