I personally couldn’t change after years of trying myself. I didn’t want friends and family to know about my weakness. After feeling like it was hopeless, I opened up to a friend. It was miraculous! He had the same issue and we kept each other accountable. This is called peer Support. So I wanted to share the benefits of using peer support since it changed my life.
Peer support substantially improves one’s mental prosperity just as their physical wellbeing and life span or longevity. While being supported by peers is instrumental to wellbeing, it is especially valuable to people who experience elevated levels of stress in their day by day lives.
One broadly known system behind peer support is stress buffering which functions by alleviating distress while giving incremented feelings of self-esteem, purpose, and belonging. So even though we are talking about an issue, talking about it helps in many areas.
In this manner, a solid system of social help and support can offer nurturance and fortification to the individual so that they are able to manage the difficulties in life. We call this developing resiliency.
Resiliency is an important part of peer support. It is a natural part of breaking free of your habits. You will gain the ability to resist those habits as your resilient nature improves.
Peer support is likewise entrenched as a defensive factor against substance misuse and has been shown to build the chances of recovery among those affected by addiction.
Specifically, past research has exhibited that peer support can have constructive effects on maintenance and cessation of drug abuse; explicitly, peer support is linked to decreased drug use and better treatment results.
Peer support prompts better treatment results for this populace and is being studied because it is a newer approach to addiction recovery. But immediate results show major promises.
It has been shown that having peer support in one’s life is beneficial to the severity of other psychological problems, which is why it has benefits for addiction research.
Peer support has been considered a defensive factor against numerous psychological ailments like depression as it can bring down one’s level of psychological distress, which further prompts diminished side effects of the mental illness (Hodge 1).
The literature on the link between drug use and psychological distress is difficult, but is being explicitly examined in individuals who are already enrolled in treatment programs.
While these studies have proven to be significant in increasing the knowledge on how distress affects outcomes of treatments, they can’t help individuals who are yet to enroll or willing to participate in a treatment program.
Presently, there are studies which explored the combined effects peer support and distress have on the severity of the addiction. Which are showing increased resilience to addiction.