Plenty of research has shown time and time again that the biggest source of happiness is our social connections (only health is bigger). Yet, most of us end up ignoring some of our most precious relationships as we get caught up in our pursuit of professional success or its exigencies. In this blog, Rob Henderson specifically focus on our long lost friendships and why we should make an effort to renew them.
He refers to a study where participants were reluctant to reach out to an old friend.
“The researchers believe the reason for this reluctance is that if enough time elapses without regular contact, people eventually come to see their old friends not as friends at all but as strangers. Just as you’d probably feel awkward about texting or emailing a stranger out of the blue to tell them you’re thinking about them and hope they’re well, so it is with old friends.
…One lesson here is preventive — don’t let your friends become strangers. The more time that passes between conversations, the more they become an unfamiliar person.”
He points to this multi-decadal trend where people are having fewer friends and spending even less time with them:
“In his classic 1990 book “Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience,” the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi observed: “Unfortunately, few people nowadays are able to maintain friendships into adulthood. We are too mobile, too specialized and narrow in our professional interests to cultivate enduring relationships. . . . It is a constant surprise to hear successful adults, especially men — managers of large companies, brilliant lawyers and doctors — speak about how isolated and lonely their lives have become.””
And then cites studies showing the link between happiness and social ties:
“Friendship, in fact, accounts for about 60 percent of the difference in happiness between people, even for introverts.
In their book “The Social Brain: The Psychology of Successful Groups,” the Oxford psychologist Robin Dunbar and his coauthors report that the number and quality of your friendships have a larger effect on your health than your weight, how much exercise you do, what you eat, and the quality of air you breathe. They go on to write, “By far the biggest medical surprise of the past decade has been the extraordinary number of studies showing that the single best predictor of health and wellbeing is simply the number and quality of close friendships you have.”
He cites Dr Robert Waldinger’s concept of social fitness:
““He points out that just as you don’t go to the gym once or twice and assume your physical fitness has been addressed, the same applies to friendships. Good relationships wither away from neglect; if you don’t keep them up, they disappear from your life.
The unhappy truth is that relationship deterioration is the natural state of things unless we’re willing to do the work of maintenance.
Indeed, in his 2010 book on friendship, the anthropologist Daniel Hruschka writes that the most common friendship conflicts boil down to time commitments. No one likes to feel unnoticed or undervalued. This is the modern paradox of friendship: Despite their importance for our health and happiness, despite the fact that we often want to spend more time with friends, they are often relegated to the bottom of our to-do list. The sociologist Dalton Conley has pointed out that today, college-educated Americans spend more time with their children and at work than their parents did. “So what else have we given up,” Conley asks, “besides sleep? We’ve given up friendship.””
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