Dr. Dawn-Elise Snipes (with Mojo) explains how relationships — healthy or unhealthy — influence mental health across five domains: physical (stress regulation, sleep, inflammation, immune function, oxytocin), interpersonal (social support, belonging, unconditional positive regard, self-esteem), emotional (resilience, increased happiness/contentment), cognitive (safe sharing of thoughts, exposure to new perspectives, schema development, help with decision-making), and environmental (practical daily support like errands, childcare, moving). The talk emphasizes quality over quantity of relationships and invites listeners to evaluate their relationship with themselves and specific people to identify supportive versus stress-inducing dynamics and act to address imbalance.
Chapters
Hey there everybody. Doc Snipes and Mojo here to talk with you about the hidden impact of relationships on your mental health. Relationships, whether they're good or bad, impact every piece of your life. It impacts you physically, interpersonally, emotionally, cognitively and even sometimes environmentally. So we're going to talk about that and I'm really going to focus today on how healthy relationships build benefit each piece of your life. And you can extrapolate that the negative relationships or unhealthy relationships probably have the opposite impact physically. When we're in healthy relationships, it helps with stress regulation. If we trust the people around us, if we feel safe, if we feel loved and empowered, then our natural stress response goes down because we don't feel like we have to be hypervigilant. When our stress response goes down, our sleep quality improves, our inflammation goes down, our immune function goes up, as does our oxytocin, which is one of our bonding hormones. But oxytocin also has a significant anti inflammatory component to it. So as we feel safer in our environment, in our relationship with ourself and our relationship with others, as we feel supported, we naturally have this reduction in that stress response which has all of these beneficial physical aspects to it interpersonally. When we're in healthy relationships, we obviously feel like we've got social support. We don't feel like we have to do everything on our own. We don't feel like we're overwhelmed, or at least not quite as much. We have a sense of belonging and safety. We know that there are people we can call who care about us and maybe they can't do anything to fix the problem, but they love us despite the problem. They have that unconditional positive regard and that helps build self esteem. When we are in healthy relationships, when we realize that people love us for who we are, even if we disagree on thoughts, if we disagree about feelings, if we disagree about opinions, that's okay. If we make a mistake, that's okay. We're still lovable. We can have differences, we can be imperfect and still be lovable. And that really helps increase our sense of self esteem and self worth. Emotionally. This is probably the easiest one. When you're in healthy relationships, you are able to bounce back from distress more easily because you're not already stressed out, feeling isolated and alone and maybe bad about yourself. So you have more emotional resilience and, and you tend to feel happier and more content when you're in healthy relationships. Now there are some introverts out there who may have one or two really good Friends, and that's okay. And there are extroverts out there who may have 15 or 20 people that they consider friends, and that's okay too. It's not about the quantity of friendships you have or the quantity of relationships you have. It's about the quality. Quality and whether they feel to you like they are supportive, they're consistent, they're responsive, and they are safe. Cognitively, when we're in healthy relationships, we're able to share our thoughts without worrying about, well, if this person disagrees, maybe they'll reject me. No, we can share our thoughts and they, they may disagree, but, but it doesn't mean they don't like us. It doesn't mean they're going to reject us. It just means they're saying no. I have, I have a different opinion on that. But the beauty of that is that it can help with giving us new information or new perspectives about something which may change our mind or it may not, but it gets us out of our own echo chamber where we're just listening to what we have to say. It also helps with schema development. As we do things with people, we have experiences and these experiences are filed away as schema. When we do things with people and we feel empowered, we feel loved, we feel safe, then it helps us create schema or mental shortcuts that tell us we are loved, we are safe, we are empowered, which helps us approach life from a much more survivor oriented standpoint. And good friends can also help with decision making and problem solving. If they have gotten to know you, then they can serve as sort of that sounding board when you've got to make a decision or solve a problem. And they can help you sort through the different options that are out there and get sort of an objective opinion on what's going on. And finally, environmentally, relationships can impact us because they help us meet our basic needs. If you're sick and you need somebody to get milk for your kids because you know you're out of milk, but you really don't feel like going down to the grocery store snotting all over the place, friendships can provide people that will be available to do that. And I know in today's world we have all kinds of other services, but you know, when I was younger we didn't have those. When you need help moving, when you need help doing, picking up your laundry, picking up your kids from school because you've got to work late, this is where friends can really help us. Environmentally, they help us manage our day to day life and feel safer and more empowered in the environment. So I encourage you to think about your relationship first with yourself. In what ways does your relationship with yourself have these positive impacts on you? In what ways does it help you feel safe, loved, empowered, distressed? And in what ways does your relationship with yourself add distress? Are you regularly criticizing yourself or saying ugly things to yourself? Are you regularly ignoring your own needs, needs to do things for others to the point where you're getting burned out? And how can you address that? And then think about your relationship with specific people in your life. Not in general, but identify specific people that are important in your life and think about in what ways do they have positive impacts on each piece of your life? And if they add distress, in what ways do they add to stress and how can you address that? Maybe you've got a friend that is loving and caring and a lot of fun to be around, but they constantly want you to help with this, that or the other and you feel like you should be employed by them sometimes rather than just being their friend. Well, if that's causing a stressor, then it's important to address that with that person. Or maybe you don't feel like it's enough of a give and take in terms of sharing an intimacy and you're wondering what they're thinking, what they're feeling, you feel kind of boxed out. Well, you can address that too. So I encourage you to go back through the presentation and identify again how your relationship with yourself promotes each of those effects and how your relationship with other people that are important in your life also promote those effects.
