Sarah N.
I don’t need friends.
I have never been a super social, outgoing person. I like being at home, doing solitary hobbies, and going to bed early. I’m also really independent…and really busy.
I don’t need friends.
Right?
I mean, it’s always nice to see a friendly person, but I don’t NEED close friends, do I? I’m perfectly fine on my own, not to mention it’s really not that easy to make new friends…So why bother?
These are all thoughts I’ve had in my life, and probably more than once, honestly. And while I’ve always been blessed with really good friends at various points in my life, I’ve never really felt that strong of a need to always have them near me or even to be in regular contact with them.
Well, I have grown to realize that I, in fact, not only want close friends in my life, I do NEED them. I need them desperately.
All of those times I told myself that I was fine being alone, were just times that I was scared of putting myself out there for new people, selfish with my time and resources, or too proud to admit my dependency on another person.
So why do we need friends though?
I’m a researcher, so to answer this question I wanted to find some “real” information and not just people’s feelings (although I will get into some feelings later). So, if super interesting facts and scientific research aren’t your thing, feel free to skip to part 2 of this series when it is shared soon. But I highly recommend checking out a few of these facts I found. I bet you’ll learn something new.
It turns out that close friendships (or the lack thereof) can have a huge impact on our physical, mental, and emotional health.
How Friendships Affect Our Physical Health
Sharing life with friends isn’t just about having a fun time, it actually helps us live longer. According to a study in Australia, people with close social connections (ie, friends), lived longer than those without such relationships. It showed that people with good friends even lived longer than people who lacked friends, but still had good relationships with their families.
So friends are even better than family when it comes to prolonging your life!
In this article, from Harvard Medical School, Dr Robert Waldinger, a psychiatrist with Harvard-affiliated Massachusetts General Hospital is quoted saying, “Good, close relationships appear to buffer us from the problems of getting old.” So friendships help us not only live longer, but also improve our quality of life as we age.
In addition, good friendships make us LESS likely to die! This study involved more than 308,000 participants and indicated a 50% increased likelihood of survival for participants with stronger social relationships. It showed that having weak social connections is comparable to risk factors such as smoking and alcohol consumption and exceeds the influence of other risk factors such as physical inactivity and obesity. Also, A 2019 study led by Kassandra Alcaraz, PhD, MPH, a public health researcher with the American Cancer Society, analyzed data from more than 580,000 adults and found that social isolation increases the risk of premature death from every cause for every race (American Journal of Epidemiology, Vol. 188, No. 1, 2019).
Another study shows that close friendships help relieve harmful levels of stress, which can adversely affect coronary arteries, gut function, insulin regulation, and the immune system. Another line of research suggests that caring behaviors trigger the release of stress-reducing hormones.
Similarly, this article shows that having a best friend present during a negative experience lowers cortisol and improves global self worth. Global self-worth is defined as the awareness of good possessed by the self and refers to the overall appraisal of one’s worth or value as a person. So, if your friend is with you when you’re going through a bad time, your stress can lower, and your self worth can rise!
Further benefits of friendship found in this article include a 54% reduction in the odds of developing hypertension, 40% lower odds of inflammation, lower blood pressure, lower BMI, and lower waist circumference.
Good friendships can make us skinnier!? Sign me up!
How Friendships Affect Our Mental Health
Some of the benefits for our physical health also overlap into our mental health. Lower cortisol means less stress, and better quality of physical life translates to better quality of mental life.
In Germany, a team of researchers studied nearly 3,000 people and made this statement “Our results indicate that living a socially active life and prioritizing social goals are associated with higher late-life satisfaction and less severe declines toward the end of life.”
The Mayo Clinic says that having close friendships can have many effects including:
- Increase your sense of belonging and purpose
- Boost your happiness and reduce your stress
- Improve your self-confidence and self-worth
- Help you cope with traumas, such as divorce, serious illness, job loss or the death of a loved one
- Encourage you to change or avoid unhealthy lifestyle habits, such as excessive drinking or lack of exercise
How Friendships Affect Our Emotional Health
I’m going to start out with an obvious, yet essential effect of close friendships. With good friends, we feel less lonely. Loneliness is a growing topic of research, and according to this article, feeling less lonely even results in less dementia.
The article explains that researchers in the Netherlands focused on 2,000 people over the age of 65. They found that participants who had reported feeling lonely at the start of the study were twice as likely to have developed dementia as those who were happy with their social life. TWICE as likely to develop dementia just due to feeling more lonely!
For further information on loneliness and its effects, I highly recommend this article from the American Psychological Association, https://www.apa.org/monitor/2019/05/ce-corner-isolation.
Having friends not only decreases feelings of loneliness, but also increases feelings of self worth. As a Christian, I believe Christ has called us to live humbly and not to think of ourselves as higher than, or better than others. Philippians 2:3 says “Do nothing from rivalry or conceit, but in humility count others more significant than yourselves.” But this does not mean we cannot invest in our self worth. The Bible says to love others as we love ourselves (Matthew 22:37-39). We can’t rightly love others if we hate ourselves and have no self-esteem. God created us to be relational, and we honor him and strengthen our own hearts by having Godly friendships.
(Disclaimer here: any worth we have in the eyes of our friends or ourselves, is not the same as the worth bestowed on us by God, and based on God’s redeeming power. This blog post is not meant to be a discussion on holiness and sovereignty, but I’m always open to further friendly conversation on a different platform.)
Friends are also great motivators. This motivation can be a call to action, such as work out buddies, accountability partners, or healthy competition in the workplace. But motivation may also look like a friend checking on you because you seem to be feeling down and then encouraging you to overcome anxiety and depression.
Having friends increases our sense of belonging and purpose. Humans want to feel wanted. We want to feel like we belong to a group or have a bond with another person or people. When we belong to someone, we feel like our life has more purpose because our choices can affect that person also.
But ultimately, I did not choose to make or find friends because I wanted to lower my blood pressure, improve my immune system, or live longer. I need friends for more personal reasons.
Check back soon for part 2 in this series on why we need friends!
[update! Read Part 2 HERE!]
