As for the number of friends, it seems more important to meet your specific needs than to strive for some gold standard of two, three, or four BFFs. Do you get invited to go out and do things with other people? Could you find someone to drive you places if you needed it? Do you have someone to help if you are sick in bed? Do you have a friend who will listen when you need to talk? While it may seem that a romantic partner may be enough to supply all this, plenty of research reveals that having both a significant other and friends is the best scenario. A Dutch study showed, for example, that each additional contact in your network with whom you have regular interactions, be it a spouse, a child, a sibling, a parent, a parent-in-law, a close friend, or a neighbour, lowers your risk of dying within the next five years by two percent. Family and friends can be substituted for one another to some extent, though—for example, the well-being of grandmothers who have good contact with their kids is comparable to that of childless old women surrounded by friends, while people who have fewer siblings and cousins tend to make up for such shortages by having more friends.
Yet all this doesn’t mean that you should strive to collect as many friends as possible. University of Oxford anthropologist Robin Dunbar has famously calculated that humans can support only one to two special friends, about five intimate friends, and 150 “kind-of” friends. A special friend is basically your BFF. As for the five intimate friends, Dunbar told me that we should think about these people as our “shoulders to cry on” circle. “These are the people you go to for emotional support, social support, financial support, or when a crisis is happening, and it varies among people from about three to seven. We don’t know why that varies, but that’s the range. The average is five,” Dunbar told me. This is supported by studies of hunter-gatherer tribes. Among the San of Botswana, for instance, women have on average 3.8 friends in their “hair-care” networks, meaning the groups of women who groom each other to pick out lice.
The 150 “kind-of” friends, meanwhile, are the people with whom we can support meaningful relationships. Dunbar has calculated that number based on the correlation between neocortex size and group size across primates—he basically checked how many “friends” each brain size can support. For humans, that works out to about 150, which is now known as “Dunbar’s number.” Our inner computers simply can’t comfortably deal with more buddies.
It’s not surprising, then, that the most common number of so-called “friends” on Facebook is between 150 and 250. But many psychologists warn that we should be careful with Facebook friendships. Two large studies published in 2017 and conducted on over a thousand people found that even though real-life friendships boosted self-reported health, Facebook ones did not. In yet another, high proportions of Facebook friends to offline ones meant higher levels of social isolation and loneliness.
The reason for these results may be the lack of deep emotional connection when we communicate over apps and websites. When pairs of friends were asked to talk either face-to-face or online, the degree of emotional bonding was the lowest among those who chatted over a messaging system. Other research reveals that hearing your mom’s reassuring words on the phone causes a larger oxytocin release than does receiving similar support through a text message.
And although Facebook and its cousins can help some of us overcome loneliness (especially people who struggle with conditions like agoraphobia or physical disabilities), large societal trends suggest that our increasing reliance on online relationships is not helping us live happily ever after. Consider this: in the US between 2000 and 2015, the number of teenagers who went out with their friends almost every day plummeted 40 percent, while the rates of teen suicide went through the roof (it’s been increasing on average by 6 percent a year since 2011). Heavy use of social media is often blamed as the likely cause of such changes. After all, young people who spend the most hours glued to their smartphones are most likely to have suicidal thoughts, and to suffer from depression and garden-variety unhappiness.
This may have something to do with social rejection, or what it’s often called these days, FOMO—fear of missing out. Just think of what people post on Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat: images of happiness, parties, fancy holidays, and delicious foods eaten with friends in hip restaurants. You see it, and if you are not there, you feel left out. As you may recall from previous chapters, even being excluded in Cyberball, a simple computer game, makes people feel lonely and activates neural networks that normally respond to physical pain. Although research on social media is only now picking up, we may soon see studies testing how our brains respond to FOMO experienced through Instagram or Snapchat. I bet that response will be at least as powerful as the response to shunning through Cyberball.
What’s more, connecting online simply can’t provide us with trust-enhancing physical warmth or offer the same boost of social neuropeptides as does holding a friend’s hand or getting a hug. Some of those working with digital communicators technology are beginning to realize these are serious drawbacks and are developing technological remedies. Huggy Pajama, for instance, is a jacket you connect to the internet that can reproduce a hug remotely. One person embraces a doll that has embedded pressure-sensing circuits, while another can feel the touch through the compression and warmth re-created by the Huggy Pajama. A similar invention, HotHands, is based on personalized casts of your hand and that of your partner. When you talk using Skype or FaceTime, you place your palm onto the model hand, which causes the other person’s model to warm up, too. Whether people who use HotHands or Huggy Pajamas really feel connected, and whether these tools can even partially replace the power of real, offline touch remains to be seen. I have to admit, I have my doubts.
Technology also likely won’t solve another common relationship grievance created by smartphones and social media: phubbing. Even if you haven’t heard the word yet, you have likely experienced the phenomenon: being ignored by someone who turns away from you to attend to their phone. The word comes from a mix of “snubbing” and “phone,” and already has sub-varieties, such as “p-phubbing” (“partner”+“phubbing”). We’ve all seen it in practice. A family at a restaurant table, all checking their phones instead of talking. A parent at a playground cold-shouldering a whiny toddler to post an Instagram photo. A friend picking up a phone mid-conversation to reply to a text that’s just arrived.
I’ve been guilty of phubbing myself on more occasions than I’d like to admit (women, in general, phubb more often than men do). It may appear to be just a simple annoyance, but in reality phubbing is a type of ostracism, with all its relationship- and health-damaging consequences. Research that’s just beginning to emerge shows that phubbing makes the offline conversation appear somehow less satisfying to us, the harmful effects spilling over to taint our perception of the whole relationship with the phubber or phubbee. In other words: the more you text and check your Instagram feed, the lower your partner will rate your relationship—and so will you.
If phubbing, smartphone addiction, and social media damage our perception of the value of our relationships, it follows that they may harm our health and even shorten our lives (and not just because some smartphones explode). To stave off heart disease, diabetes, and even cancer, what you need are high-quality friendships that you nurture offline, while your phone is far, far, away.
BFFs and KOFs
When my daughter was three years old, all she needed to find a new BFF was about ninety seconds on the playground. If only things were that easy for adults. In a 2012 New York Times article that went viral, Alex Williams describes the hardships of making friends if you are over thirty: “Schedules compress, priorities change and people often become pickier in what they want in their friends. No matter how many friends you make, a sense of fatalism can creep in: the period for making B.F.F.’s, the way you did in your teens or early 20s, is pretty much over. It’s time to resign yourself to situational friends: K.O.F.’s (kind of friends)—for now.”
Williams illustrates his essay with a personal story, which starts, “It was like one of those magical blind-date scenes out of a Hollywood rom-com, without the ‘rom.’ ” He met Brian, a screenwriter, through work, and over dinner discovered an instant “friend chemistry.” The story of Alex and Brian does not end well, though. With busy schedules in the way, they’ve only managed to meet four times in as many years, and the budding friendship never blossomed.
Yet research does confirm that this kind of instant friend chemistry indeed exists. We certainly form first impressions fast. Within a hundred milliseconds of meeting a new person—that’s around the duration of an average eye blink—we already judge how likable or trustworthy the other one is, and we stick to that judgement later on. Young women and people with open, conscientious personalities are more likely to enjoy such immediate connections.
C. S. Lewis may have been on to something when he wrote that “Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another: ‘What! You, too? Thought I was the only one.’ ” Similarity certainly aids in becoming friends—and that applies even to non-human apes. In zoos, chimpanzees spend the most time with those fellow cage-mates with whom they share certain personality characteristics, like boldness or sociabiltity. This suggests that our penchant for the “two peas in a pod” scenario may have deep evolutionary roots. What’s more, we choose our friends based on their genes. Yes, really. Friends resemble each other on a genotypic level far above what you might expect from chance or from population stratification due to geography or social divides. The genes we are particularly after are those related to dopamine, such as DRD2.
It doesn’t mean, however, that if you are looking for a BFF you should fixate on finding your own twin. In reality we become friends with people who are similar enough but share something else with us that might be even more important than personality or age: geography. Police trainees, for example, are more likely to become buddies with other trainees whose last names start with the same letter. The reason? Alphabetized seating in police academy classrooms. In a similar fashion, the layout of your house may matter, too. Among university students, those who live in apartments without ensuite bathrooms tend to have stronger interpersonal bonds with their roommates.
Here is a tip, then: if you want to make friends in the office, try to get a desk in a high-traffic area. Close to the kitchen, perhaps? That also raises the question of how McMansion-style houses affect the relationship quality of the people that inhabit them. If everyone has their own bathroom, their own TV, and so on, and the spaces inside are so vast that you rarely cross paths with your fellow family members, are you missing out on a close bond? Can your health suffer because of that? Going even further—could McMansions shorten lifespans? As you may have guessed, so far there is no research to check this out—I have an inkling, though, that there may very well be a connection between poor health and overly large houses.
Yet even if you are geographically challenged where friendships are concerned—say your office desk is in the building’s Siberia, or you live off-grid in the literal Siberia—there are ways to strengthen bonds with people you already know. First, give out your secrets. Studies show that self-disclosure brings people closer together. You don’t really like your job? Your mother-in-law gets on your nerves? Share it with your favourite acquaintance, and she may well become a friend. Second is a somewhat less obvious strategy: let the other person do you a favour to harness a psychological phenomenon known as the “Ben Franklin Effect,” inspired by the founding father’s quote: “He that has once done you a kindness will be more ready to do you another than he whom you yourself have obliged.” It may seem counterintuitive, but according to this theory, people feel so good about helping others that they start liking those they’ve helped more—possibly because subconsciously we want to reconcile our actions with our thoughts: “I’m helping this guy, so it must mean he is nice, right? Otherwise, why would I be doing this?”
Last but not least—commit more time to your friendships. Set up regular “dates” with your friends, or even simply pick up a phone and call them. Obvious? Maybe, but think how much time we spend obsessing about weight loss, exercise routines, pesticides in food, etc. Considering the importance of friendships to our health and longevity, we should spend more time on them each day than we spend thinking about nutrition.
What if you are an introvert, though? If every additional friend prolongs our lives, do introverts live shorter ones? Unfortunately, so it seems. In several studies, highly extroverted people tended to outlive the rest. Among the elderly of Chicago, for instance, a high level of extraversion meant a 21 percent lower risk of death, and similar findings came from Japan and Sweden. The good news here is that personality is not set in stone, and even if you are very introverted there are things you can do to mitigate potential impacts on your centenarian potential (more on this in chapter 9). Besides, in one of his studies, Robin Dunbar has found that even though extroverts tend to have more friends, the quality of their relationships isn’t necessarily any better than that of introverts. He told me that what’s important is to work with whatever seems best for you: “you may choose to spread your emotional capital thickly among a few people or thinly among many people.” So the tip here would be: if you are an introvert, make sure to take particularly good care of your close relationships—and remember to meet with your friends regularly.
* * *
If you can do just one single thing for your health and longevity, that thing should be finding a great partner and committing to the relationship. Marriage, and in particular a happy one, can stave off cancer, diabetes, heart disease, the flu—the list goes on. Not only does it calm our stress response and the HPA axis, it can also boost the release of health-relevant social hormones. The effects are so large that if a twenty-a-day smoker, instead of ditching the cigarette habit, found lasting love, health-wise they might still come out on zero: their mortality risk might just be the same as if they didn’t smoke at all (of course, the best would be to not smoke and have love).
And then there is friendship—the close second when it comes to boosting your centenarian potential. Yet we sabotage such relationships by phubbing and by running away from in-person interaction for the deceptive ease of Facebook connections. But Facebook friendships don’t translate into better health. For most of us, they don’t bring higher well-being, either. And yes, we are busy. But often we could choose to invest our time in different ways. Do you really need that house renovation? Do you have to sign your kid up for five extracurricular activities? Take some time to consider how you’re spending your time, attention, and energy—and perhaps invest it in some of the relationships around you instead.
The problem is that although marriage and friendships are great at keeping our minds and bodies in shape, they are hard work—of a type whose effects are hard to measure (no “grams of companionship” to count per day). It’s so much easier to try to fix your health by changing your exercise routine or by trying a new fad diet. Nutrition and fitness are quantifiable and often come with easy instructions. To make a watercress smoothie, place a bunch of watercress in a blender. Add one tablespoon of chia seeds and two cups of soy milk, and mix. That’s easy to follow. If you do twenty minutes of strength training on Monday and walk ten thousand steps on Tuesday you know you are doing well in terms of exercise. But how do you judge the quality of a marriage? How do you know if your friendships are strong enough? We, the people of the twenty-first century, like easy prescriptions and instant gratification. With relationships, these things are hard to get.
About 90 percent of Americans will marry at least once in their lifetimes, yet many take this social bond for granted. Consider how much time some of us commit to training for marathons or similar sporting events. Do you know anyone who, every day, allocates the same amount of effort to improving his or her romantic relationship—excluding newlyweds, that is? From a longevity perspective, that�
�s not a good thing. We should spend at least as much time reading about marriage-improving strategies as we do about diets and fitness. If time is limited, it’s better to skip a gym session than a date night.
The good news is that science has discovered quite a few strategies for improving our relationships all in one go. You can boost your empathy, work on your attachment style, and engage in something psychologists call “social grooming.” What’s more, some of these strategies are actually quite quantifiable and almost as easy to do as making a watercress smoothie (and potentially more pleasant). Even line dancing, it appears, can prolong your life.
A FEW SUGGESTIONS TO BOOST YOUR LONGEVITY
Prioritize your romantic relationship and really commit to it. Read books and articles on how to be a better partner. Avoid the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse: contempt, criticism, stonewalling, and defensiveness. Talk with your spouse often about good things that happen in your daily life. Try new, exciting things together and have fun (rollercoasters and balloon rides are great). Invest in friendships. Spend more time together, disclose your secrets, and ask for favours. Stop phubbing your close ones—put your phone away and cut down on social media.
7
CHAMELEONS LIVE LONG
Empathy, Attachment, and Social Grooming
BACK IN THE 1960S, some people called the University of Wisconsin at Madison primate lab at 600 North Park Street the “Goon Park”—and not just because of the address—and the scientist who worked there, Harry Harlow, eccentric or even pure crazy. Yet no matter how odd the research done at Goon Park appeared at the time, it has changed the way we now see love and attachment—both between monkeys and between humans.
Growing Young Page 15