Relationships: their impact on our life

The powerful effect of having positive and healthy close relationships is very often undervalued.

This can be true especially for young adults working hard in big and international cities, that are often only temporary homes where people come and go, making it very difficult to cultivate close relationships over time. Let’s add work, stress, distances, little free time… and social networks and online dating that sometimes may give people the utopian feeling of being hyper connected with a large amount of people.

But in reality how many of these connections are effectively supportive and close relationships?

In the last century, an increasing number of psychologists and scientists have highlighted the importance of healthy relationships in our well-being: from the development of our personality and identity to its positive effect in mediating the impact of stress and trauma.

Relationships, perceived happiness and life length

Recently, psychiatrist Robert Waldinger found interesting results about relationships from the Harvard Study of Adult Development, a longitudinal study that surveyed the life of around 700 participants during a period of 75 years. Researchers kept track of important variables like the participant’s physical health, quality of their marriages, work satisfaction and social activities.

In this research they found out that the element that impacted the most on the participant’s health and happiness was the perception of having good quality relationships.

Indeed people having positive relationships with friends, family or the community tended to be happier, healthier and to live longer. Secondly, it is the quality of the relationships that matters for people over 30, not the quantity: unhappy married couples described themselves as less happy than people who were not married at all.

Relationships and pain tolerance

Another research study carried out by Katerina Johnson’s group found out that pain tolerance seems to be linked to social network size. Having a good and supportive social network may be linked to the production of endorphins in our brain, helping us to better tolerate pain.

These results highlight the importance of taking care of our relationships, of nurturing and cultivating them, as when they are positive and supportive they can be so beneficial for our wellbeing.
As their positive impact can be so powerful, unfortunately their negative impact can be as intense.

If you feel that you are having troubles in your relationships and you would like to understand better what is preventing you to fully benefit from your social network, you may consider talking it through with a counsellor or a psychotherapist.

References

Johnson K., Dunbar R; “Pain tolerance predicts human social network size”. Scientific Report 6: 25267, 2016.

Lewis T; “A Harvard psychiatrist says 3 things are the secret to real happiness”, 2015. 
http://uk.businessinsider.com/robert-waldinger-says-3-things-are-the-secret-to-happiness-2015-12?r=US&IR=T

http://robertwaldinger.com/

Health anxiety

Health anxiety is very often underestimated. Let’s see what happens in the mind of an hypochondriac.

A little tingling in our cheek, an anomalous heart beat, maybe slightly faster then usual, a pain in our back that doesn’t seem to leave, a particular ache in a muscle… and in a blink of an eye we are immediately alerted, fully focused on our bodily signals scanning any potential change.

So many worries come to our mind: what is this? Am I having a heart attack? Is this cancer? Or maybe an aneurysm? All raised by a tremendous amount of anxiety.

If it happened to you, how would you behave?

It would be quite normal to gather information from books or the Internet about signs and symptoms of the disease you think you may have and very probably you will urgently book an appointment with your GP asking him/her to run several medical tests.

But what happens to some of us is that books and the Internet will provide much information and many negative scenarios that will scare us even more, and very likely we may focus only on the information that confirm our worries. Moreover, even if test results will show that nothing is wrong with our body, we will feel reassured only for a short period of time, until the next strange body signal appears, which will prompt us to request other specialist exams. And so on…

What is happening?

What was once a normal and understandable way to react to possible abnormal symptoms has become a pervasive and exaggerated way of dealing with our body, which creates intense distress in the person experiencing it and hence several negative consequences and limitations to their everyday life.

This is the so-called hypochondria or health anxiety, a distressful condition where a person’s beliefs and worries are often considered by others as imaginary or fake, making the person feel even more misunderstood and lonely.

On the contrary, health anxiety is a real problem, the person’s symptoms are real and the worries are extremely distressful.

Health anxiety treatment

The good news is that health anxiety can be treated and cognitive behavioural psychotherapy is the most recommended form of therapy in these instances. CBT can indeed help you in acknowledging and changing the cognitive misinterpretations that maintain the problem and in finding new coping mechanisms to better deal with anxiety.