Friendship and Health
The conventional wisdom is that good friendships enhance an individual's sense of happiness and overall well-being, but a number of solid studies support the notion that strong social supports improve a woman's prospects for good health and longevity. Conversely, it has been shown that loneliness and lack of social supports are linked to an increased risk of heart disease, viral infections, and cancer as well as higher mortality rates. Two researchers have even termed friendship networks a "behavioral vaccine" that protects both physical and mental health.
While there is an impressive body of research linking friendship and health status, the precise reasons for this connection are still far from clear. Most of the studies are large prospective studies (that follow people over a period of time), and while there may be a correlation between the two variables (friendship and health status), researchers still do not know if there is a cause-and-effect relationship, i. e., that good friendships actually improve health.
There are a number of theories that attempt to explain the link, including: Good friends encourage their friends to lead more healthy lifestyles; Good friends encourage their friends to seek help and access services when needed; Good friends enhance their friends' coping skills in dealing with illness and other health problems; and/or Good friends actually affect physiological pathways that are protective of health.
Read more about this topic: Friendship
Famous quotes containing the words friendship and, friendship and/or health:
“What a perpetual disappointment is actual society, even of the virtuous and gifted! After interviews have been compassed with long foresight, we must be tormented presently by baffled blows, by sudden, unseasonable apathies, by epilepsies of wit and of animal spirits, in the heyday of friendship and thought. Our faculties do not play us true, and both parties are relieved by solitude.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“A noble person confers no such gift as his whole confidence: none so exalts the giver and the receiver; it produces the truest gratitude. Perhaps it is only essential to friendship that some vital trust should have been reposed by the one in the other. I feel addressed and probed even to the remotest parts of my being when one nobly shows, even in trivial things, an implicit faith in me.... A threat or a curse may be forgotten, but this mild trust translates me.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“While I am to crawl upon this Planet, I would willingly enjoy the health at least of an insect.”
—Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl Chesterfield (1694–1773)