Be a Good Friend
Are you being a good friend to someone? Are you appreciating the role friendships play in your overall health (and maybe even your life expectancy)!
Enjoying strong friendships brings a wealth of benefits, many of which are obvious. But one gift of having close relationships that you may be less familiar with, is the potential power to become a “SuperAger!”
A SuperAger is someone who is older than 80, but who is as mentally and physically able as an average middle aged person.
One recent study has found that SuperAgers reported having more positive, satisfying and stronger relationships that their peers with “more average” brain health. It's encouraged to become a social butterfly as we age. This supports previous research that has shown that careful tending to your friendships can also lead to less physical & mental health issues and greater longevity.
As we go through mid-life, we get busier with lots more responsibilities, so unlike when we’re young, free and single and making friends with just about everyone, we start to withdraw investing any time in our friendships and satisfy ourselves to just keeping in contact over social media or in WhatsApp groups, posting updates so everyone will see. But this isn’t what you’d exactly call quality time, now is it?
Research led by Robin Dunbar in the 1990’s suggests that we have about 150 meaningful relationships at any one point, including our family members, and a friendship psychologist, Marissa Franco, identified in 2012 that people who regularly interact with 10 or more friends in midlife have higher levels of psychological wellbeing than those who had fewer than 10.
However, Dunbar’s focus was on having 5 close relationships, and a 2020 study indicated that having just 3 good friends, could be enough. Even Marissa Franco acknowledged that having one good friend who you get deep and meaningful with greatly outweighs not having one.
So how do you be a good friend? Well, one key ingredient absolutely needed is time. Another is effort. As I write this, I know I need to commit more to both of these things for my best friends. Another magical ingredient to create more closeness in friendship is sharing leisure activities together (like the two friends in the image above).
So, this week’s challenge to for everyone is to be a good friend. (i) make 3 phone calls this week to friends you haven’t spoken to in a while and set aside a chunk of time to enquiry how they are doing. If you reach their voicemail, leave a message that you’d like to catch up.
(ii) meet up with someone for some physical activity outside, go for a walk or a run together, or play golf, and don’t be in a hurry away anywhere afterwards.
(iii) perform one random act of kindness this week. It might be a for a colleague, a neighbour or a stranger.
Together we can become all become stronger in more ways that one…..in fact we may even all become Super!
If you’ve enjoyed this article and challenge, please do share it with others and help me to grow my audience so others can benefit. My aim is to keep providing simple practical advice, for simple practical people.
Have a lovely week.
#HealthyHabits
Sources:
Psychological well-being in elderly adults with extraordinary episodic memory.
Wide circle of friends key to mid-life wellbeing for both sexes
How many hours does it take to make a friend
