Last week, we talked about the dangers of loneliness and how friends are the cure that protect you from the harmful physical, mental, and emotional impacts of living your life mostly (or entirely) alone.
What we now know beyond any doubt is that being in community and having friends is the most important thing we can do to improve our lives.
Friending impacts our mental wellbeing and our mental resilience. It reduces stress and anxiety and increases our likelihood of educational success.
Friending impacts our professional success, connecting us to meaning and purpose at work.
It impacts our health span and our lifespan – more than quitting smoking, diet, exercise, or purposeful work.
Think about that for a hot second:
Our friendships are the single most important predictor of our longevity.
We've known this for a very long time, and there's a ton of research supporting this finding.
Yet friends don’t automatically come to us.
The effort required is implied in the bones of the language: we make friends. We build community.
It’s not something that just happens. You have to work to make it happen.
There’s something else you should know:
The true benefits of friendship don't just come from your close relationships.
Of course your intimate friends are important – the handful of people you can count on to take you to the doctor, sit with you when you’re having an existential crisis, or pick you up when your car breaks down.
But the larger network of acquaintances you interact with as you go about your day is also critical – the person who makes your coffee, the neighbor who walks his dog by your house every morning, the farmer at the local market who grows the food you eat, the people you see at game night at the local pub or coffee shop.
Research shows that the strength of the bonds you forge with your network of acquaintances is highly correlated with how long you will live.
In fact, our social integration predicts our longevity even more strongly than our close friends.
So as you head into the holiday season and spend more time in the company of others, remember that the people you run across every day, say hello to, and wave at as you pass are critical to your health.
Those casual hellos impact how long you live.
This is the true value of our “social capital”: our community.
It’s entirely possible that a bit of extra effort to be friendly at the supermarket checkout could add years to your life
Jeff Hamaoui
MEA co-founder and Chief Education Officer