Investing In Your Friendships Is Good For Your Health | A Bit of Optimism #Podcast

19 Nov 2024 · 1 min

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Excerpt of a podcast episode (A Bit of Optimism) discussing the health impacts of loneliness and the value of investing in friendships. Speakers state that loneliness can be as harmful as heavy smoking, encourage taking inventory of one’s friendships, and describe a personal anecdote where one friend proposed "friends therapy"—advocating that, like troubled romantic relationships, friendships merit attempted repair (therapy) rather than immediate breakup or avoidance.

It's amazing how many people are coming up to me who are saying to me, I don't know how to make friends. I struggle to make friends.
Loneliness is as big a killer as anything else. Some have said it's equivalent to smoking two packs of cigarettes a day. It's important to take an inventory of your life and your friends. And if you don't have good friends, it's really important to cultivate them, to invest in them, to find them.
Another friend of mine is struggling with one of her friends, and she asked herself if I was in a marriage or a long term romantic relationship and the relationship was struggling, we wouldn't just break up, we would. We would get help, we would seek therapy, Couples counseling.
Yeah.
And so she went to her friend and said, this attention has been going on for too long. We're gonna go to therapy together. Friends therapy.
Yeah.
If a marriage or a relationship is struggling, we expect people to at least try the couples therapy before you call the whole things quit. And yet we don't do that with friendships. When we have tension with friendships, we're quicker to end the friendship or sit in weird tension or avoid the person than to go to the therapy with the person to try and work through the struggles. We may still end up breaking up, but let's at least put in the effort to rescue this friendship that we claim we care about.