Last week, I shared my annual review of my gratitude journal, highlighting, in the process, the importance of people. That list included people who had offered support or counsel, who are wonderful colleagues, who are doing inspiring work with our girls, and beloved students – current and former, friends and family. It probably won’t surprise many of you to know that people, or rather having positive relationships, is one of the most important components of happiness or well-being. Indeed, Caroline Adams Miller and Michael B. Frisch in their book, Creating Your Best Life: The Ultimate Life List Guide, call relationships “the Holy Grail of Happiness.”
The research on this topic is so extensive that I can’t exhaust it here, but I’ll share some of the more interesting findings. Martin Seligman, the father of Positive Psychology, has consistently identified relationships as key to happiness. He and Ed Diener, another student of happiness, took a random sample of 222 college students and examined their levels of happiness based on six different scales; from those 222, they analyzed the characteristics of the happiest 10%: what distinguished them from averagely happy and unhappy peers. They discovered one key distinction: “These “very happy” people differed markedly from average people and unhappy people in one principal way: a rich and fulfilling social life.” They spent less time alone, more time socializing, and “they were rated highest on good relationships by themselves and by their friends.”[i] Seligman has actually moved beyond happiness to study and advocate for what he calls “well-being” or “flourishing” which he has decided constitutes a better measure of life satisfaction than happiness. He has identified five pillars for well-being: positive emotions, engagement, relationships, meaning and accomplishment. [ii] Connections with other people remain central to fulfillment and life satisfaction.
Every researcher and writer on positive psychology emphasizes the importance of relationships. Sonja Lyubormirsky in The How of Happiness has a whole chapter entitled “Investing in Social Connections” which includes two (of a total of twelve) Happiness Activities related to this topic: “Practicing Acts of Kindness” and “Nurturing Social Relations.” Based on her own and others’ research, she identifies eight characteristics of the happiest people. The first of these is that “they devote a great amount of time to their family and friends, nurturing and enjoying those relationships.”[iii] She begins the chapter asserting, “The centrality of social connections to our health and well-being cannot be overstressed.”[iv] Echoing Seligman, she goes on to explain that “The happier a person is, the more likely he or she is to have a large circle of friends or companions, a romantic partner, and ample social support.”
Having positive relationships enjoys the added benefit of being “bidirectional,” meaning that having good friends and strong romantic relationships both makes us happy and promotes having more positive relationships. As Lyubormirsky says, “romantic partners and friends make people happy, but it also means that happy people are more likely to acquire lovers and friends.”[v] Indeed, both Seligman and Lyubormirsky point out that we don’t really know which comes first, being a happy person or having friends, but regardless, the data is very clear that happy people have strong social networks.
Women particularly benefit from strong relationships, a fact borne out by a Harvard Medical School study of nurses’ health. This longitudinal study of thousands of nurses over more than thirty years has found that the more friends participants have the more joyful their lives and the physically healthier they were as they grew old. [vi] And this, by the way, is one of the many values of girls schools. Girls in girls schools develop particularly strong friendships that they maintain through their lives, providing crucially important emotional support.
As the Nurses’ Study showed, having positive social relationships with romantic partners, friends and family also promotes good health. Scientists have found that surgical patients with more friends suffered less post-surgical pain than patients with few friends. They have also found that social isolation leads to faster aging.[vii] A Duke Medical Center study discovered that four friends proved a magical number in predicting heart disease mortality: patients with fewer than four friends were more than two times as likely to die of heart disease than those who had four or more friends.[viii] Studies of communities with unusual longevity, Sardinia, Italy, Okinawa, Japan, and Seventh Day Adventists in Loma Linda, California, point to five characteristics these disparate peoples shared, and at the top of the list for all three was making family a priority and “keep[ing] socially engaged.”[ix]
Having strong social networks also provides significant assistance in weathering life’s challenges, even tragedies. People who lost a spouse to accidental death or suicide who have a confidante, someone with whom they can share their true feelings, experienced fewer health problems following their spouse’s death than those without that emotional outlet. Social support may even stimulate our bodies to fight disease. Women undergoing surgery for life-threatening cancer who availed themselves of social support “showed greater natural killer cell activity.” Participation in weekly support groups correlated with living on average eighteen months longer for female cancer patients.[x]
I think we all know this, but having friends support us in achieving goals makes us much more likely to succeed. Ninety-five percent of participants in a four-month weight-loss program who were joined by several friends or family members reached their weight-loss goals as opposed to only 76% of those who participated alone; likewise, 66% of the group members kept the weight off for six months as compared to only 24% of the solitary participants. The same goes for New Year’s Resolutions. If you enlist others to support you in achieving your goals, you’re more likely to do so – for at least two years and as long as six years, which considering how few New Year’s Resolutions come to fruition, is an impressive statistic.[xi]
Despite what we may think, having friends also provides much more positive impact in our lives than money. While good things, such as winning the lottery, make us happy for a while, overtime we adjust back to our previous happiness level, our hedonic set point, leading us to want more and more – and never be satisfied. But that doesn’t happen with friendships, family, and strong romantic relationships. Lyubormirsky explains, “One economist[!]has shown, for example, that people’s desires for happy marriages, for children, and for ‘quality’ children (as bizarre as that term sounds) do not change as they successfully attain those things.”[xii] People often think that money will make them happy, and while we certainly need a reasonable income to be happy (and conversely poverty often leads to unhappy lives), it does not actually have the effect we anticipate. There’s much research to support this contention. In one example, researchers polled 792 “well-off adults” about their attitudes towards wealth; more than 50% asserted that happiness did not result from wealth and “a third of those with assets of over $10 million said that money brought more problems than it solved.”[xiii]
Nurturing and maintaining positive relationships with family and friends requires that we invest time and emotional energy, listening, celebrating others’ successes, and being there in times of need. However, the investment clearly pays off, making our lives richer, healthier, more fulfilling, and happier – flourishing.
[i] Martin E.P. Seligman, Ph.D., Authentic Happiness (New York, 2002), 42.
[ii] Seligman, Flourish (New York, 2011), 16.
[iii] Sonja Lyubormirsky, The How of Happiness (New York, 2007), 22.
[iv] Lyubormirsky, 125.
[v] Lyubormirsky, 138.
[vi] Caroline Adams Miller, MAPP and Dr. Michael B. Frisch, Creating Your Best Life: The Ultimate Life List Guide (New York, 2009), 157.
[vii] Miller and Frisch, 107.
[viii] Miller and Frisch, 157.
[ix] Lyubormirsky, 139-40.
[x] Lyubormirsky, 161.
[xi] Lyubormirsky, 272-3; Miller and Frisch, 108.
[xii] Lyubormirky, 140-1.
[xiii] Lyubormirky, 44.
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