Why connection matters
This weekend, after spending a wonderful evening at a good friend’s birthday, I came home with that special kind of happy feeling, the one you get after being surrounded by people you genuinely feel connected to.
It made me think about connection and the role it plays in how we feel. We talk so much about movement, nutrition and sleep when it comes to our health, but perhaps we don’t talk enough about the people around us.
And yet, connection may be much more important to our health than we realise.
Connection is part of our health
I read The Good Life by Robert Waldinger and Marc Schulz some time ago, and this weekend made me think about it again.
The book draws on the Harvard Study of Adult Development, one of the longest-running studies of adult life. The study began in 1938, initially following 724 men from very different backgrounds. Over the decades, it expanded to include their partners and more than 1,300 descendants, allowing researchers to look at health, relationships and wellbeing across generations.
One of the study’s most important findings is remarkably simple: the quality of our relationships matters.
When researchers looked at the participants in midlife and tried to understand who would go on to be healthier and happier later in life, satisfaction with their relationships turned out to be a particularly important indicator.
Waldinger and Schulz also introduce the idea of “social fitness.”
Much like physical fitness, our relationships need regular attention. Friendships can fade simply because life gets busy and we stop making time for them. Social fitness is about actively maintaining the relationships that matter — reaching out, making plans, staying in touch and showing up for each other.
It also raises an interesting question: how do we actually feel after spending time with certain people?
Some relationships leave us feeling energised, supported and simply better. Others can leave us feeling drained.
Paying attention to that might be part of taking care of our health too.
Movement. Attention. Connection.
Interestingly, I heard Jay Shetty talking about something very similar this week.
In a recent podcast, he distilled years of conversations with health and science experts into three simple habits:
Move your body.
Protect your attention.
Invest in your relationships.
I liked that.
Because connection suddenly sits exactly where I think it belongs: next to the other things we already consider part of taking care of ourselves.
And you see versions of this idea elsewhere too.
When researchers and writers look at communities known for longevity – including places such as Okinawa, strong social ties and a sense of belonging repeatedly appear alongside things like natural movement and simple food.
In Okinawa, there is even a tradition called moai: small groups of people who form long-term social networks and support one another throughout life.
Different culture, different way of living, but a lovely reminder that perhaps we were never meant to do everything alone.
Who makes you feel good?
Connection isn’t about having a huge circle of friends. It is about the quality of the relationships we have.
The people we can call when something isn’t right. The ones we can talk to when our heart feels heavy. But equally, the people we want to celebrate with when life is good.
Maybe it is worth occasionally taking a little inventory of our own social fitness.
Who do you leave feeling better after spending time with them?
Who makes you laugh? Who can you really talk to? Who gives you energy? And who haven’t you seen for far too long?
So maybe that happy feeling on my way home wasn’t just the afterglow of a great evening.
It was connection.
And perhaps that’s something worth making a little more room for in our lives.
Until next time,
Stef
