Why Your Friendships are Important to Your Health

Friendships Promote a Sense of Belonging

No matter what unites you with your group of friends, simply feeling included is beneficial, according to research on friendships and the benefits of close relationships. A sense of belonging fulfills an important emotional health need and helps decreases feelings of depression and hopelessness, according to a study published 2015 in in Psychiatry.

Friends Can Help Boost Self-Esteem

Friends can improve your self-confidence and self-worth. Good friends support you, want to share in your success and are happy for you. Recent studies support that belonging to a social group goes hand in hand with increased self-esteem because people take pride in these relationships and derive meaning from them.

Strong Social Connections Help Offset Stressors in Your Life

Friendships go a long way in helping us buffer stress. Friends help get us through the difficult days--and having someone to share the details of a bad day helps to relieve stress. 

Physical touch can make a difference, too. A studies reveal that receiving a hug relieved negative emotions like stress. Positive and welcome physical touch is great for connection and health.

Friendships May Help Protect Cognitive Health

Research involving elderly women found that having a social network offers a protective effect over cognition and reduces the risk of dementia.

Other studies found that having someone to have good conversations with may help to protect brain health. The data showed that in a group of 2,171 adults who had participated in the Framingham Heart Study, those who reported having someone in their lives they could count on as a good listener were more likely to have higher levels of cognitive resilience (a measure of brain health known to be protective against brain aging and disease, like dementia).

Friends Help Us Cope With Grief of All Kinds

Think about the last time you faced a challenging situation, such as a death in the family or loss of something else important to you (like a job, a pet, or a relationship). Having friends you could lean on likely helped you pull through. 

Friends Can Encourage Healthy Behaviors

Having positive relationships with people who make healthy choices can motivate you to make healthy choices as well.  For example, if you have friends to walk with, or work out, you're more likely to continue with the healthy activity.  And, your friends are more likely to step up if they're concerned about you. 

They can also speak up if they’re concerned about you. “If you’re engaging in unhealthy behavior, friends are the ones who see it if you’re drinking too much or you’re gaining too much weight, because they’re seeing you and they’re interacting with you every day,” Hojjat says.

Many experts believe that relationships have an effect on physical health because of the body’s stress response. Feeling isolated and lonely can increase chronic stress, which can negatively impact health, while the flip side — maintaining positive friendships can keep you healthy.

Staying Socially Connected to Others May Lower the Risk of Long-Term Health Problems

Experts believe our ability to have social connection is so essential to our ability to live a healthy life.

A review published in May 2020 in Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews found that social isolation and loneliness may be linked with inflammation. Unhealthy levels of inflammation can be dangerous and may lead to heart disease, arthritis, stroke, or Alzheimer’s disease, according to Harvard Health Publishing.

Having social ties has been been linked with a lower risk of depression and healthier blood pressure and body mass indexes, according to Mayo Clinic.

Healthy Friendships Make Us Happier

A study published in June 2019 found that a strong social circle was a better predictor of happiness and general wellness than fitness tracker data, such as heart rate and physical activity.

It helps if you associate with happy people, especially if they live close by. Research involving more than 4,000 adults showed that having a happy friend who lives within a mile from you increases your own likelihood of being happy by 25 percent.

Whether you have 20 or just a few good friends research supports that those relationships have a direct impact on your health and well-being. 

Happy Galentines Day Ladies!