People who eat socially are more likely to feel better about themselves.
Photograph: PeopleImages/Getty Images
This research is far from the first to suggest a link between eating
with others and happiness.
Researchers at the University of Oxford last
year found that the more that people eat with others, the more likely
they are to feel happy and satisfied with their lives.
The study also
found that people who eat socially are more likely to feel better about
themselves and have wider social and emotional support networks.
Robin Dunbar, a professor of psychology, worked on the Oxford
University study.
He says that “we simply don’t know” why people who eat
together are happier.
But it is clear that this is a regular social
ritual, a moment of union and communion in our often chaotic lives.
It
can be a place of conversation, storytelling and closeness.
“At a psychological level, having friends just makes you happier,”
says Dunbar. “The kinds of things that you do around the table with
other people are very good at triggering the endorphin system, which is
part of the brain’s pain-management system. Endorphins are opioids, they
are chemically related to morphine – they are produced by the brain and
give you an opiate high. That’s what you get when you do all this
social stuff, including patting, cuddling and stroking. It is central to
the way primates in general bond in their social groups and
relationships.”
Our face-to-face relationships are, quite literally, a matter of life
or death. “One of the biggest predictors of physical and mental health
problems is loneliness,” says Dr Nick Lake, joint director for
psychology and psychological therapy at Sussex Partnership NHS
Foundation Trust. “That makes sense to people when they think of mental
health. But the evidence is also clear that if you are someone who is
lonely and isolated, your chance of suffering a major long-term
condition such as coronary heart disease or cancer is also significantly
increased, to the extent that
it is almost as big a risk factor as smoking.”
it is almost as big a risk factor as smoking.”
One of the most striking pieces of evidence for this, says Dunbar, is
a meta-analysis of 148 epidemiological studies that looked for the best
predictors that patients would survive for 12 months after a heart
attack. “The best two predictors, by a long way, are the number and
quality of friends you have and giving up smoking,” he says. “You can
eat as much as you like, you can slob about, you can drink as much
alcohol as you like – the effect is very modest compared with these
other two factors.”
Human beings are biologically engineered for human interaction – and
particularly face-to-face interaction. One study from the University of
Michigan found that replacing face-to-face contact with friends and
family with messages on social media, emails or text messages could double our risk of depression.
The study also found that those who made social contact with family and
friends at least three times a week had the lowest level of depressive
symptoms.
“We are the most social of all the animals,”
says Prof Paul Gilbert, a psychologist and the founder of
compassion-focused therapy. “Our brains and our bodies are built to be
regulated through interactions with others from the day that we are
born.” This is not the case with many creatures, such as turtles and
fish, that procreate in vast numbers. “They don’t need looking after,”
says Gilbert. “Many of them will die before they reach reproductive age.
The caring behaviour [associated] with mammals is a major evolutionary
adaptation – it changes the brain and the physiology of the body so that
a parent is interested in staying close to an infant. One of the most
important things is the human capacity for soothing and engaging. So,
when a mother smiles at a baby and makes eye contact, that positive
emotion in the face and the voice of the mother is stimulating
positivity in the child. You can see why it’s called mirroring, the baby
smiles back.
“The
ability to stimulate positive emotions, which is linked to happiness,
begins in interactions with others who are having positive emotions
about you. So, when we see our friends and they say, ‘Good to see you’ –
it’s important.”
But there are many factors that might prevent us from seeing friends
and family: mental ill health, immobility, a lack of money. Alison
Harris is a consultant clinical psychologist and professional lead for
psychological services in Salford. “Austerity has a huge influence on
the loss of happiness and wellbeing,” she says. “Homelessness and
unemployment in particular takes us out of contact with others. In
addition to the obvious harms of homelessness, it does massively
increase social isolation and anxiety. To take that even further, many people are in exile from their communities.
In mental health services, we see an enormous amount of grief,
depression and anxiety in people who are asylum seekers and refugees and
much of that is not just due to trauma or torture or detention or
fleeing from their country, but from the severe rupture of being cut off
from their families and communities of origin.”
When we are around others, it has an effect on our body. Some forms
of friendship – going to parties, getting married, having positive
interactions with others – stimulate our sympathetic nervous system.
Gilbert says that the parasympathetic nervous system (otherwise known as
the “rest and digest” system) “is stimulated through the verbal and
voice tone of relations with each other. As far as we know, it’s not
that stimulated through texts. Generally speaking, you’re designed to
respond to voice tone and expression, and stroking. We are physiologically designed for face-to-face interaction.”
Of course, for those struggling with depression, the idea of physical
contact can be impossible to fathom. At those moments, the capacity to
lift up a mobile phone and type out a text is an enormous mark of
progress. It may not be the ideal form of interaction, but it’s a vast
improvement on staring at a wall.
Dragging ourselves out of low energy states – be that by trying to
cultivate compassionate voices internally or having compassionate
relationships with others – is key to Gilbert’s work. “If you ask
someone, ‘What is your internal critic most frightened of?’ [you will
find] it’s frightened of rejection, of being seen as no good. Of being
unlovable, of not being wanted. All the raging that goes on beneath us,
the thing that we fear most is shame – not being good enough or wanted.
We are frightened of being revealed to be not so nice.”
He says that what has happened in the past decade, with the rise of
social media, “is that it has become a very plastic society.
We are all
living like theatrical actors, presenting ourselves as our best.
That
can’t be real, and so we have many people who feel like failures or
useless.
They say: ‘I’m not as attractive as that, I’m overweight, I’m
not kind or compassionate to others.’”
As
Gilbert says, the best relationships are the ones where people love us
for our perceived dark sides and flaws.
“People forget that love is
about loving you for the difficult things, not the easy things”
he
says. It is those who know us intimately who can provide that, and they
do it through their physical presence, through touch, and through
eating, drinking and sharing with us.
Spending time together is social
nourishment.
So, instead of texting a friend or messaging them on social
media,
why not knock on their door, look them in the eye and make
yourselves both feel better?
BHP
from the Guardian which I read every day.
