In her new book, Lydia Denworth makes the case for the vital necessity of friendship, tracing its effects on your genes, on your brain and even on animals like sheep and fish.
Muaz Bin Saat/EyeEm/Getty ImagesWe don't fully appreciate our friendships, says the science writer and author of the new bookIf we did, we'd take cultivating those intimate bonds as seriously as working out or eating well. Because, she writes, a new field of science is revealing that social connections play a vital role in our health.
On average, people have only four very close relationships, Denworth finds, and very few people can sustain more than six. But the effect of these few core relationships extends beyond our social lives, influencing our health on the cellular level — from our immune system to our cardiovascular system.Denworth spoke with NPR about the science of friendship and its underestimated value to kids and adults and even for other species like sheep and fish.
Very few people understand that your social relationships can actually change your health. They can change your cardiovascular system, your immune system, how you sleep, your cognitive health. How could this thing that exists entirely outside the body affect whether you're likely to catch a virus? And yet that's exactly what we now know that social connection does. We thought of loneliness as this difficult emotion, but just an emotion.
One of your chapters focuses on the social aspect of middle school. How did researching that affect your thinking as a parent? The middle school thing, it's such a crucible. And it really is true: Middle school is about lunch. Most parents thinking about their kids going into middle school, they do know that socially it can be a very difficult time, but they don't necessarily think about how that plays out in the course of a day.
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