Life Shift - 7 Create Community

Bonding with others can be tricky. If we bond with losers, we'll become...well...you know. The clear thing that relationship research (Holt-Lunstad & Smith, 2012) does teach us is that solid bonding experiences with healthy people are highly associated with better emotional, mental, and physical well-being.  

In fact, having strong positive relationships is a better predictor of mortality than any other healthy lifestyle behavior. Having strong support systems for times of stress helps us flourish for using challenges to give us strength and a sense of community for fighting stress at home and the workplace.

Research by Feeney and Collins (2014) indicates there are two ways for us to thrive in life: 1) successfully coping with adversity, and 2) the ability to pursue personal and professional goals and opportunities for moving ahead. Strong support systems can help us with challenges and goal pursuits. When coping with adversity, strong support systems buffer us from negative effects of stress by providing us reassurance and acceptance that we are not in "the battle" alone. We have a team behind us that strengthens our resolve and ability to stay motivated for staying on task.

Bonding with others also encourages us to thrive for taking advantage of opportunities for advancement and growth. According to Feeney and Collins, strong supportive relationships can push us to take chances based on positive assessments of the situation and our own strengths and skills for planning winning strategies for tackling a situation courageously.  

Being well bonded to people we trust can also serve as a "launching function" for helping us get new projects started and sustained over prolonged endeavors. Knowing we have friends and colleagues cheering us on encourages us to "stay the course" for anticipating the celebration we hope to share with our supportive teammates.

Solid support systems help us to regulate our emotional state, help us to be more resilient, and interpret events and situations around us as being more manageable. Our motivation to overcome adversity goes up and our physiological functioning improves. Being securely connected with caring friends and colleagues, frees our minds to be more creative and to learn from our mistakes in productive fashion.  

With our support people there to cheer us on, our bodies stay empowered and lifestyle behaviors, like better eating, sleeping, and exercise are easier to stay consistent. And when others can lean on us, the mutual rewarding experience of "secure team" allows everyone to share in the adventure. Everybody wins and everybody has someone to lean on in both good times and bad.