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Be A Good Friend
Be a good friend — that’s the next step in our happiness plan. As a reminder, our other steps are:
Be A Good Friend
To have a good friend you must first be a good friend. It is critical to your mental, physical and spiritual health, as well as your happiness and longevity to have good friends.
A review of several research studies reached an interesting conclusion: from a life-span perspective, strong social ties are twice as likely to extend your life as exercising is and equivalent to that of quitting smoking.
Harvard’s long-running Study of Adult Development started in 1938 supports this, and points to friendships being a strong predictor of a happy life, as well. Dr. Robert Waldinger, the current director of this study, says the most important barometer of long-term health and well-being is in the strength of your relationships.
“Over and over in these 75 years,” Dr. Waldinger said, “our study has shown that the people who fared the best were the people who leaned into relationships with family, with friends and with community.”
You don’t have to maintain dozens of relationships in order to derive the health benefits. In fact, quite the opposite. It’s the quality, not the quantity of friends that counts the most.
You may have hundreds of digital friends in the social media world but most of us have only a handful of strong, real, analog, carbon-based friends. In fact, Robin Dunbar, a professor of evolutionary anthropology at the University of Oxford, has a body of research showing humans can only support about 150 total relationships.
This so-called Dunbar’s Number is actually several numbers, with 150 being “casual friends”.
The next step down is “close friends” of which we can have about 50.
Next is a circle of 15 people we can confide in and count on for sympathy when we need it.
Finally, there are five people in your life that are your “best friends”, your close support group, most of whom typically are…
