Nurture your social relationships to be happy

Humans are the most social beings on Earth. We thrive when we live in groups. Our need to bond out of a sense of love or to have physical and emotional contact with others is part of what makes us human. We have a structural mechanism that rewards us when we do these things. We release oxytocin when we share positive emotions. The times of the day when we feel the best are when we have social contact. For example, we laugh 30 times more when we are with people than when we are alone!

The famous GRANT STUDY conducted at Harvard University is the world's longest scientific study, lasting over 70 years, and the most important conclusion is this: Connecting makes us healthy and long-lived.

Taking care of yourself is of course important, but taking care of your relationships is also a form of taking care of yourself. This is one of the examples that shows that we cannot live by saying "just me", that we are part of a big whole, and that it is valuable to live in harmony with that whole and to give at least as much importance to that whole as we give to ourselves. When we live in harmony with others, we contribute to both ourselves and our environment.

"The most powerful factor known to increase and guarantee long-term levels of happiness is having quality social relationships."

Martin Seligman, the father of positive psychology, says that there are 5 key areas to increase our happiness levels. These elements, which he shares as PERMA, can be listed as follows: Positive emotions, Engagement, Relationships, Meaning and Achievement.

The biggest contributor to happiness among the PERMA elements is the area of social relationships. Scientists can make predictions about future happiness levels by looking at and evaluating a person's current social relationships. People whose social relationships are satisfactory in terms of quality today are more likely to be happy 5 years later.

What is meant by social relationships is not the number of followers on social media, but the relationships where we can actually share emotions, get support and contribute... Therefore, people who have close relationships with a few people are more likely to be happy, not people who have thousands of followers and cannot establish close relationships, even if they have few followers or a small circle.

If social relationships are so important, how can we improve the quality of our relationships in our lives? According to science, here are 3 key actions that improve social relationships:

Making eye contact and touching: Look your loved ones in the eye more, take the opportunity to hug them.

Sharing positive emotions: Plan activities to share feelings of joy, inspiration, peace, fun, hope, honor, etc. with your loved ones.

Don't be grateful: Say thank you and express gratitude to loved ones for their good qualities.

If you want to improve your social relationships in one small step, I have a suggestion for you: List 30 people you are grateful to have in your life. If you want to go deeper, choose one of these people and write down why you are grateful to have them in your life and then share what you wrote with them. I can guarantee that you will feel high emotions that you haven't experienced in a long time.