When it comes to staying healthy, science shows that social connection is as important as diet and exercise…

The Harvard Study of Adult Development has been minutely tracking the lives of some 724 original participants (and some of their descendants) since 1938.  One of its biggest takeaways is that the greatest predictor of health and happiness isn’t a factor like cholesterol levels or blood pressure.  It is the strength of a person’s social ties. 

But social fitness, one of the study’s directors said, is just like physical fitness:  You must work at it.  Harvard-trained social scientist and author Kasey Killam has a framework for doing so, calling it the 5-3-1 rule. 

At a minimum:
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• Spend time with 5 different people each week.  These can even be casual acquaintances like someone from your gym or book club.
• Nurture 3 close relationships.  This means maintaining the close bonds you have with family or good friends.
• Aim for an hour of social interaction each day.  This doesn’t have to be all at once, and can be combined with activities like doing errands. ​

Of course, these research-based guidelines can be flexed, depending on circumstances like age, lifestyle, and physical limitations.  However, the 5-3-1 rule makes for a great baseline.  Offering some helpful tips to get started, Killam suggests putting some friendships on auto-pilot with a weekly or monthly dinner, walk, or other activity.  You can also put a post-it on your bathroom mirror reminding you to reach out to someone.  You can volunteer in your community, or commit to a set number of 10-minute phone calls each week.  These strategies can help you create new habits that, in time, will become self-reinforcing.

Are you getting your 5-3-1 in, and, if not, how can you create a new habit to do so?  To join the conversation, click on "comments" below.

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Trapped in continual “doing mode?” You’re not alone. Here’s how to give yourself permission to pause… and think bigger.

So many of us are focused on doing mode — achieving goals and checking items off to-do lists. But better relationships, bigger-picture strategies, and creative thinking all depend on pausing and entering into spacious mode. 

Writing in the Harvard Business Review, Megan Reitz of Oxford University’s Said Business School, and John Higgins, director of research at The Right Conversation, share their research-based tips for making it easier and safer to occasionally switch modes.

• Give yourself permission:  Pausing requires a leap of faith at first, but soon its benefits will become clear.
• Train your mind: A mere 10 minutes of mindfulness practice daily will, over time, help you develop a capacity to pay attention differently.
• Practice guerilla spaciousness:  If your organization is relentlessly promoting doing, be stealthy. Develop small habits that allow you to shift into spacious mode under the radar. Try changing up your environment or scheduling pauses. 
• Ask bigger questions: Pose broader questions to yourself and others, e.g. “What have we not talked about that would help us work together better?”
• Choose good company:  While you cannot choose your work colleagues, spend more time when you can with individuals and groups that help you expand your thought processes and see things in new ways.

When was the last time you deliberately took a pause to create thinking time, and what were the results? To join the conversation, click on "comments" below.  We'd really like to hear from you.

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Friendships are so important, they can literally impact life and death…

Romance gets a lot of attention but, according to a growing body of research, friendships are critical to our health and well being. A review of 38 studies found that adult friendships, especially high-quality ones that provide social support and companionship, significantly predict wellness and can protect against mental health issues like anxiety and depression. Those benefits persist across the life span.

Friendships protect to some degree by altering the way we respond to stress. Our blood pressure can lower when we talk to a supportive friend. When we have a friend by our side while completing a tough task, we have less heart rate reactivity than those working alone. Friendships can also change our perspective. In one study, people even judged a hill to be less steep when accompanied by a friend.

Fortunately, research also suggests that friendships can be forged and maintained at any age. Even minimal social interactions can be powerful. So-called “weak ties” -- interactions we have with casual acquaintances -- can boost our health and sustain positivity.  

Isolation during the pandemic proved hard on nearly everyone, but it did focus scientific attention on how important human connection is across all ages and all spheres of life. 

Do you have friendships that nourish you, and do you actively make an effort to keep them going? Let us know if you’ve found a way to start new friendships as an adult. To join the conversation, click on "comments" below.

Learn more about creating a habit around masterful communication with our online learning courses awarded International Gold for Best Hybrid Learning of 2022. 

New Years resolutions have terrible staying power. Here are 3 steps to be more successful this year…

According to Forbes, merely 8 percent of people keep their resolutions twelve months later. (You may have already noticed this happening, just 2 weeks into 2025.) The reasons for broken resolutions go beyond lack of will power. According to Elizabeth Grace Saunders, time management coach and author of How To Invest Your Time Like Money, many people fail to accomplish new goals because they don’t consciously eliminate old activities from their schedule to make room for the new. It’s like “trying to stuff more papers into a file drawer that’s already packed tight.”

If your resolutions involve workplace goals and behaviors, consider the following:

• Evaluate all your work commitments.  The start of a new year marks the perfect time to reevaluate what you’re doing, how you are doing it, and why. Are there routine activities you can drop?
• Reassess your work style. Examine how you accomplish work. Are you using meetings efficiently? Can you have fewer or shorter meetings? Does completing the projects you’re currently working on still make sense? 
• Add new goals strategically. Once you intentionally create space, you can strategically add in the activities that you want in your life. To say “yes” to the new, you must say “no” to some of the old.

What can you un- resolve for this coming year to make room for new priorities? To join the conversation, click on "comments" below.

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Gratitude has consistently been shown to lower stress, reduce pain, boost immunity, and improve blood pressure and heart function. Here’s how to spread gratitude not just on Thanksgiving…but always.​

We recently released a micro learning video series on how to express gratitude so it sticks, and these tools are easy to learn.  Neuroscientist Glen Fox has spent his entire adult life studying gratitude. “Grateful people tend to recover faster from trauma and injury, have better and closer personal relationships and may even just have improved health overall.” Fox did an experiment using brain-imaging scans to map which circuits in the brain become active when we feel grateful.

“We saw that the participants’ ratings of gratitude correlated with activity in a set of brain regions associated with interpersonal bonding and with relief from stress,” he said. To up your conscious gratitude, Fox suggests keeping a gratitude journal. On a regular basis, write down what you are grateful for, even if those things seem mundane. The positive effect is cumulative so it’s a good idea to make this a habit. You can also write letters of gratitude to those who have helped you along your way. Says Fox, “I think that gratitude can be much more like a muscle, like a trained response or a skill that we can develop over time.”

When was the last time you actively expressed gratitude, and how did you feel? To join the conversation, click on "comments" below.

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