People who are social have better health....

Today's Post: Tuesday, 9-22-2009

Yesterday we posted on 12 ways to stay healthy. One of the less known and appreciated surprisingly is that people who are social have better health.

We posted this yesterday.:

“People who are social, even if they aren’t unusually outgoing, have many regular acquaintances and friends they speak to often. Or they speak to family members often. Or they attend a church or other social networking event regularly.

They have more resources and tend to be much more resilient under stress and tend to have better health. They also are much less likely to develop mental decline. (This may be because conversing, it was recently discovered, is MUCH better mental exercise than it seems.) They are also less likely to get or stay depressed.”

I was reminded earlier today that we all have regular opportunities to practice these skills and benefit from them in a usually safe way.

Today, TIME magazine, in its online health articles, published an interview with one of the authors of a new book on how the people that we see regularly , even those we don’t know well or just a little bit, wind up being a very important part of our lives.

The new book is: Consequential Strangers: The Power of People Who Don't Seem to Matter... But Really Do (W.W. Norton), by Melinda Blau, a writer, and Karen Fingerman, a Purdue psychology professor.

Most of us tend to be regulars at grocery stores. Or we are regulars at a health food store. Many of us go to gyms regularly and often get to know the people who work out at the same times of the same days. We get to know some of the people where we work.

The authors point out that these people are actually quite important in our lives. TIME quotes Melinda Blau, who they interviewed, as saying, “….it's important to look at your life as a cavalcade of people, not just a series of events, because then you get to see how all relationships matter and all relationships affect you.”

I discovered recently that a surprising benefit to using public transit is that this effect is quite strong because you ride a certain distance with people and often talk to them as being far less boring than staring off into space. So you interact with them more.

She also points out that people in our families and close friends, “think the way we think and they know what we know, whereas people who are what the sociologists call "weak ties" don't.

They're different from us, they link to other networks and different kinds of information, and therefore they are the place where we find opportunity.”

One of the wisest and best trainers ever in becoming more socially skilled was the self-help author, David Schwartz, who wrote the book, The Magic of Thinking Big. Some of the business ideas are quite dated since he wrote the book in the 1950’s. But his advice on noticing what you like about people and reaching out to people in a friendly way is the best I’ve ever seen.

So, ever since I decided to try his advice, I’ve done well using it in my life with the people I meet that this new book describes.

Some of these people are friendly and smile often. Some are extremely well informed. Many of them I remember also remember me.

And, just as the author suggests, some of them have very different views of the world than me or any of my friends and family.

This new book is well worth checking out as is David Schwartz’s book. Both are available on Amazon and his book is available in many libraries.

But even if you don’t read either book, it’s well worth noticing and reaching out to these everyday people in your life.

Your social skills will be better. You’ll be less likely to get or stay depressed. Your health will be better.

Best of all, this is a resource that’s free money-wise and readily available.