The Beauty of Friendship
Having great quality friendships is a beautiful thing. Not only do our friends offer support, love, and understanding, having quality relationships with them also helps reduce feelings of loneliness as well as symptoms of anxiety and depression.
We are wired to want to share our emotions with each other. In times of emotional stress, we adaptively seek the support of others, but research has shown that even the knowledge that a friend is experiencing something at the same time as you — positive or negative — can improve how you feel about it.
Even if we don’t get to see our friends as much as we’d like - life gets busy, people move away, we experienced a global pandemic - knowing they are out there and sharing how we are doing can be helpful in itself. Sharing an emotional experience, even if separated by distance, lights up reward centres in our brains.
Researchers showed emotionally charged images to sets of friends who were in different rooms. They either told them that their friend was seeing the same images or not. When people knew they were sharing the experience with their friends, more reward areas of their brain lit up and they had fewer negative emotions. Pretty cool!
Interestingly, we are also hardwired to cheer our friends on. One study showed similar reward centre activation for those winning in gambling - even if that was winning for a friend. Our brains seem reward us when our friends succeed as well.
Do you have high quality friendships? What does this mean?
We see this as those who fit into Brene Browns anatomy of trust and the acronym BRAVING
Boundaries - respecting each other’s limits
Reliability - consistently follows through on what they say they will do
Accountability - apologizes and owns their mistakes
Vault - holds your secrets, stories, private information in confidence
Integrity - living within our values
Non-Judgement - ability to be vulnerable with them without judgement.
Generosity -assuming the best and most generous thing in each others’ sorties, actions and intentions
Do you live by these principles with your friends and check in on them? Sometimes it can also be helpful to check-in with someone outside your circle - like a psychotherapist. Sharing your emotions with another human who creates a safe space for you can be therapeutic in itself.