- Healthy Relationships
- Strengthen Your Relationships
- Love and Mindfulness
- Mindful Communication
- How to Connect More
You don’t have to wait for Valentine’s day to pause and reflect on the relationships you value in your life. Whether it be with colleagues, friends, lovers, or a spouse, you can always benefit from taking a step back, appreciating the love you have in your life and making the time to show others you care about them.
When you are mindful of the love in your life you open yourself up to the opportunity for love to grow. And not just romantic love, but self-love, and loving friendships as well.
The Benefits of Healthy Relationships
Plenty of exercise. Healthy food. Positive attitude. Plain old good luck. There’s lots of advice out there about how to keep body and brain in optimal shape as the years roll by.
But Louis Cozolino, professor of psychology at Pepperdine University, is deeply engaged with another idea. In Cozolino’s book, Timeless: Nature’s Formula for Health and Longevity, he emphasizes the positive impact of human relationships.
“Of all the experiences we need to survive and thrive, it is the experience of relating to others that is the most meaningful and important,” he writes.
His thinking grows out of the relatively new field of interpersonal neurobiology, based on the recognition that humans are best understood not in isolation, but in the context of their connections with others. Our brains, Cozolino writes, are social organs, and that means that we are wired to connect with each other and to interact in groups. A life that maximizes social interaction and human-to-human contact is good for the brain at every stage, particularly for the aging brain.
Since the publication of Cozolino’s earlier book, The Neuroscience of Human Relationships, the field of social neuroscience has expanded tremendously. We now know that people who have more social support tend to have better mental health, cardiovascular health, immunological functioning, and cognitive performance. The well-known, long-running Harvard Medical School Nurses’ Health Study was one of the early studies to reveal how being socially integrated can lead to greater health, life satisfaction, and longevity over time.
“How we bond and stay attached to others is at the core of our resilience, self-esteem, and physical health,” Cozolino writes. “We build the brains of our children through our interaction with them, and we keep our own brains growing and changing throughout life by staying connected to others.”
6 Ways Relationships Help You Thrive
When we think about personal growth, we often envision a solo quest, like Don Quixote on a journey of self-improvement. We are advised to increase our self-control, get grittier, and develop a sense of purpose. So we hunker down, turn inward, and start the solitary task of reshaping our habits and behaviors.
And yet people who are thriving are usually doing so with the help of others. Peak athletes have coaches. Top executives have mentors. Great parents have parenting blogs and other great parents to bounce ideas off of.
Research backs this up, suggesting that positive relationships can help us succeed, grow, and become better people. Romantic partners often encourage and support one another toward shared goals. When parents are highly involved in school, their children tend to do well academically. And positive support from friends, especially during adolescence and early adulthood, can encourage us to be more empathic and helpful toward others.
Across all spheres of our lives, our relationships can not only help us feel good, but they can also help us be good. If you want to tap into these benefits, here are six simple ways to draw on your relationships to fuel your growth.
1. Spend time with the right people
We generally become more and more like the people with whom we spend our time. The more we see someone model a behavior and see that behavior being reinforced in positive ways, the more likely we are to try it out ourselves—whether it’s a friend having success with a new exercise routine or a partner staying calm during disagreements by tuning into their breath.
One of the most fundamental ways to make sure your relationships are helping you grow is to surround yourself with the right people. Some relationships frustrate us, some make us happy, and some challenge us (and some relationships do all three!). While it isn’t always easy to stop and start relationships, of course, we can aim to spend more time with the people who challenge us.
2. Create goals with others
Who says that goal setting should be a solitary venture?
When we share our goals with others, we immediately have someone to keep us accountable. It is difficult to stay on track with a goal all the time, but it’s easier if we have someone to help us work through an obstacle or pick us up when we fall.
The social support that we receive from others is incredibly powerful, particularly during those tough times. When the pressure is high, those who have greater levels of social support tend to experience less stress.
We may also be more motivated when we are working toward a goal with someone else. Think about being pushed by a running mate to jog a little faster than you would otherwise. Or giving up your Saturday for a service project because a friend is doing the same thing. Sometimes we need someone else to inspire us to be our best.
3. Ask for feedback
It’s usually up to us to decide on the areas where we could use some self-improvement. And while this process of self-reflection is important, we can sometimes be bad judges of our own abilities; we usually assume we know much more than we actually do. So why not look to our relationships as a source of feedback about where we can improve?
Feedback is crucial for our development. Research has shown that when we seek feedback and use it as an opportunity for growth, we are more likely to improve over time. How much faster would that process be if we went and asked for feedback instead of waiting for it to come? Imagine your partner’s reaction if you were to ask for feedback on what you could have done differently after a big fight, or how blown away your teenager would be if you asked how you could be a better parent this school year.
Our positive relationships represent a safe space for us to work on ourselves with support from people who care about us. But sometimes we have to make the first move and ask for that support.
4. Use your broader network
Just like financial capital, social capital is a valuable resource that we can invest in for our own good. The more meaningful relationships we have, the more social resources become available. We often find work or beloved hobbies through our relationships, even at three or four degrees of separation—like your brother’s wife’s friend, who heard about that great new job opening.
In addition to exposing us to new ideas, activities, and opportunities, social capital also frees us up to do more of the things we are good at when we find others to help with the things we aren’t as good at. This has benefits at home and at work: For example, employees are more engaged when they get to spend more time using their strengths. And teenagers are happier and less stressed when their parents focus on building their strengths.
5. Be grateful
Gratitude has long been promoted as a way of increasing our happiness, but it also motivates us toward self-improvement. If you want a simple boost from your relationships, you can start by just practicing gratitude for them. The act of being thankful can increase our confidence and encourage us to move forward with our goals, perhaps because it tends to make us feel more connected to people and creates feelings of elevation—a strong positive emotion that comes when we see others do good deeds.
So think about someone who has helped you a great deal in the past, and reach out to thank them. Not only will that exchange feel good for both of you, but it might also reignite a relationship that can spark your further growth.
6. Invest in others
As you’re tapping into your relationships for social capital, you can contribute to the growth of others, as well—which is another way to show gratitude.
We as humans are motivated by reciprocity. When we receive a favor, we often want to pay it back (or pay it forward). So offer to help a neighbor with a home improvement project just like another neighbor helped you. Or reach out to someone you have helped in the past, and check in to see how they are doing.
While supporting others is meaningful in and of itself, it doesn’t hurt that it tends to be a mutually beneficial experience. We help someone else, and we usually feel pretty good—and might even learn something in the process. That is one reason mentoring has become so common in the workplace. It is an exchange that benefits both parties, as the mentee gains valuable wisdom while the mentor gets to brush up on skills and take in new perspectives.
Lessons from the Longest Study on Happiness
In this TEDx talk, Robert Waldinger, a clinical professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, director of the Center for Psychodynamic Therapy and Research at Massachusetts General Hospital, and director of the Harvard Study of Adult Development, shares three important lessons learned from a 75-year study as well as some practical wisdom on how to build a fulfilling, long life filled with true happiness and satisfaction.
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What Makes a Good Life?
1. Social connections are good for us, and loneliness kills. It turns out people who are more socially connected to family, to friends, to the community are happier, they’re physically healthier, and they live longer than people who are less connected. People who are more isolated than they want to be from others find that they are less happy, their health declines earlier in midlife, their brain functioning declines sooner, and they live shorter lives than people who are not lonely, Dr. Waldinger explains.
2. Keeping your close relationships, closer. It’s not the number of close friends you have, or whether or not you’re in a committed relationship, but the quality of your close relationships that matter. Living in the midst of conflict is bad for your health. High-conflict marriages without much affection, according to Dr. Waldinger, are perhaps worse than getting divorced. And living in the midst of good, warm relationships is protective.
3. Good relationships don’t just affect our bodies, they protect our brains. The same study also showed that being in a securely attached relationship to another person in your 80s is protective, that the people who are in relationships where they feel they can count on the other person in times of need, those people’s memories stay sharper and longer.
How to Strengthen Relationships with Mindfulness
Having strong relationships is one of the single greatest predictors of wellness, happiness, and longevity. And our connections flourish when we take time to get to know ourselves, and others, better.
Here are three simple ways to strengthen the relationships you have, and nourish the ones that might need some work.
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3 Simple Ways to Strengthen Your Relationships
1. Start with kindness
Kindness is like a magnet. People like to be around others who are kind because they feel cared about and safe with them. The Golden Rule, “Do unto others as you would want them to do to you” still rings true today.
It’s also reciprocal. When we practice kindness, not only do we feel better, but we help others feel good, too. And this just increases opportunities for positive connections throughout our day, which, in turn, contributes to our own health and well-being.
2. Let go of toxic people
Take an inventory of your relationships to get a sense of who’s nourishing you and who’s depleting you. A strong relationship will make you feel comfortable, confident, and fully supported.
Once you know who is really there for you, try to spend a little less time with those who deplete you. This isn’t always possible, of course (ie: family members, coworkers, etc.), so in those cases, see if you can change your relationship a little bit by recognizing that those people may be dealing with some instability in their lives. Practice sending them some kind intentions using a loving-kindness meditation and see what comes up.
3. Focus on similarities, not differences
If you want to foster a greater sense of connection in your life, it’s helpful to think of what we share as human beings—even with the people you might not always see eye to eye on.
As you go through your day and encounter someone who you think is different from you, silently say, “Just like me,” and see what you notice. You may just experience the awareness that each of us wants the same things: to feel cared for and understood, and to experience a sense of belonging.
How Practicing Gratitude Helps Relationships
Imagine that you’ve embarked on a quest to be more grateful. You dutifully journal about the happy events in your day. You notice and begin to appreciate all the little things your partner does for you, from brewing your morning coffee to letting you pick what movie to watch. This can only be good for your relationship, right?
According to a recent study, it depends—on whether your partner is grateful, too.
While gratitude has been shown to be a boon for individuals—making you happier, healthier, and more successful—less is known about how gratitude works in relationships, where personalities and habits collide to create complex, dynamic interactions.
To go deeper into whether gratitude helps relationships, Florida State University psychologist James K. McNulty and his coauthor Alexander Dugas recruited 120 newlywed couples to fill out surveys. Initially, they reported how happy and satisfied they were with their marriage and their partner, and how much gratitude they felt and expressed for their partner and the nice things they did. They repeated the gratitude survey a year later and the marriage survey every four months for three years.
That gave researchers a snapshot of how each partner’s gratitude and marital satisfaction changed over time. And they found that spouses heavily influenced each other.
How a Lack of Gratitude Hurts Relationships
If your mate is low in gratitude, the results suggest, you seem to miss out on some of the benefits of being a grateful person yourself. More grateful people started out more satisfied with their marriages and were more satisfied three years in—but only if their partner was high in gratitude, too. Marital satisfaction naturally declined in couples over time, but it declined even more steeply for grateful people wedded to ungrateful ones.
In extreme cases, when their partner showed very little gratitude, being more grateful actually seemed to hurt their romantic happiness.
This worked the other way around, too. Grateful partners typically make our lives better, but we might not benefit as much if we’re not also grateful. People with more grateful partners tended to start out more satisfied with their marriages and still be more satisfied three years later—but only if they were high in gratitude. A grateful partner helped stave off the natural declines in people’s marital satisfaction over time—but, again, only for the highly grateful. When people were extremely ungrateful, their partner’s thankfulness seemed to backfire.
Not only are ungrateful partners missing out on genuine moments of positivity and connection, but their other halves may be less willing to contribute to the couple if their efforts aren’t recognized.
Surprisingly, the study suggested that two less grateful partners might be happier together than partners with mismatched levels of gratitude. “I suspect that the mismatch is troubling for the same reasons other mismatches in personality can be troubling—the two partners just aren’t on the same page in terms of how to treat one another,” says McNulty.
Does that mean we should blame our partners for all our relationship woes, or coerce them into saying “thank you” more?
Not necessarily. This is a single study, and it measured gratitude in a specific way, points out relationship well-being researcher Amie Gordon: asking people about their own appreciation, not asking the other partner how appreciated they actually felt. Different ways of measuring gratitude may yield different results—including a situation where our own expressions of thanks can rub off on our partner, making them more grateful in turn. Plus, gratitude is only one piece of the relationship puzzle—and practicing gratitude has lots of other benefits to our lives. At the end of the day, for many of us, it probably helps to try to see the good in the person we love.
The One Question That Can Save Your Relationship
For a moment, think of seeing your partner or close friend as they walk in your front door. You jump up to greet them, exclaiming that their new jacket looks great on them, and you’ve been excited to see them all day. In the midst of your rush of enthusiasm, how are they reacting? Do you have a sense that they believe and trust what you’re saying, or do your compliments seem to isolate them?
Although love is the quality we tend to glorify the most in romantic relationships, trust is equally indispensable. It’s the sustaining, slow-burning element of love. If you want to actively cultivate a deeper trust with your partner, research has found it could be as simple as asking them one important question.
Low Self-Esteem Interferes with Trust
Researchers from the University of Waterloo conducted five studies with people in romantic relationships who suffer from a similar problem: One partner has a poor opinion of themselves. This insecurity makes that partner more likely to reject expressions of praise and esteem—even from the people closest to them—and thus to feel less satisfied in their relationship.
If your partner is already sure of themselves, the occasional shower of praise will have the desired effect of reaffirming to your sweetheart that they can trust you. This, of course, reinforces your relationship. But when a partner is insecure about themselves, being praised can spark an anxious reaction. Instead, praise becomes a trigger for doubting the sincerity of their partner because the compliment contradicts the negative emotions they have toward themselves.
How to Show You Care
To avoid having your communication backfire, the researchers found that trust is gained by asking simple, meaningful questions about their daily experience. Simply asking “How was your day?” and then mindfully listening to the answer conveys your genuine interest and attention in how they’re doing and feeling. Other, more specific versions of the question work as well, for example: “What were your classes like today?” or “Where did you go for lunch?”
For a person with insecurities, this form of curious, caring inquiry, paired with mindful listening, can fly under the radar of their “praise triggers,” building trust without activating self-judgment. In fact, the researchers found that being asked about their day increased a partner’s sense of satisfaction in the relationship, regardless of whether one or both of the partners was insecure.
Curiosity Creates the Space to Trust
One of the studies found that it wasn’t describing their day that made people feel better, but rather, feeling listened to and cared for in that moment. The surprising thing is that curiosity did not seem to give an extra boost in all relationships. Couples whose levels of self-regard and trust were already normal or above-average did not experience that jump in relationship satisfaction from the “How was your day?” check-in.
On the other hand, paying attention to your partner’s experiences can’t hurt your relationship. As the study authors noted, “Showing attention and interest in someone, especially in a society as filled with distractions as ours, can be the most important signal of caring there is.”
How Love and Mindfulness Go Hand in Hand
Remember, “love” is a verb. Are you so busy that you forget to prioritize romance? Be honest. How strong is your current love connection on a scale from zero to 10? If it’s less than 10, read on. Here’s how you can slow down and show up for love, over and over again.
Tips for Mindful Loving
1. Remember why you love your partner
Take each sighting of cheap chocolates or drooping roses as a cue to take a mindful breath. Then connect with your heart. Recall special moments the two of you have shared—your first kiss, what they wore on your wedding day, the most outrageous place you’ve made love. Later, share those memories with your sweetie and celebrate some of the moments that led you along the path to now.
2. Commit to date your mate
Give the gift of interest and time, and book non-negotiable weekly dates. Try recreating your first date, but tell each other what you were privately thinking and feeling during that life-changing encounter. Plan occasional adventures—research shows that novelty and excitement heighten sexual attraction, so skip the movie and head for a climbing wall, an erotic massage class, or a spot for skinny dipping.
How a Mindful Marriage Can Reinvigorate Your Relationship
When you were first dating you naturally treated love like a hobby. In the throes of early infatuation everything seemed effortless. Thanks to hopping hormones your sex drive was high. Thanks to neurochemicals of love creating mindfulness that resembled obsessive compulsions, your beloved was always in your thoughts and you planned your life around them. The friendship was wonderful. So how do you get that back?
Bids for Closeness
Underneath that deep, seemingly effortless, early passion and intimacy was a hidden skill: the ability to make and accept bids for emotional closeness. According Gottman, successful couples are mindful of these bids for connection and pay attention to them. These bids might be a look, a question, an affectionate stroke of the cheek, anything that says, “Hey, I want to be connected to you.” Most bids happen in simple, mundane ways, and if we are mindless we miss the overture.
Gottman’s studies indicate that couples who eventually divorce ignore their spouse’s bids for connection 50-80% of the time, while those in happy marriages catch most of these emotional cues and respond kindly.
Make Time to Connect
Long-term great relationships are not an accident. They thrive by design. Great couples pay attention and create connection. These tiny and frequent connections weave an intimate fabric of closeness, creating a blanket of security that wraps us up in love. So give it a try. Make a hobby of your love life and hone happiness habits. Then no matter how life teeters or totters, the two of you can dance in the middle, holding hands, friends for life.
5 Research-Backed Ways to Strengthen Your Marriage
There’s something odd about the very idea of “the science of marriage.” Raising kids together, negotiating disputes, or having good sex—these aren’t “scientific” activities. It would be odd to use predictive analytics to improve your parenting. It would be even stranger to use data sets of your past trysts to spice up your sex life.
Science can’t explain the mystery of marriage—the actual experience of being in love. And yet, over the last 30 years, a growing body of evidence has helped shed some light on what works and what doesn’t in marriage.
1. Focus on positive interactions
John Gottman, a preeminent marriage researcher, purports to be able to predict the likelihood of divorce with over 90% accuracy. How does he do it? It all comes down to what he calls the 5-to-1 ratio. Couples that interact with five positive interactions for every one negative interaction are likely to stay together. Couples that get caught in a cycle of negative interactions, on the other hand, seem destined for divorce.
2. Communicate
University of Utah sociologist Daniel Carlson’s research points to another foundational skill in marriage: communication. His studies show that communication leads to a more egalitarian division of labor, which in turn leads to greater relationship satisfaction as well as more and better sex.
3. Divide your labor
It’s great to interact positively and communicate well. But recent polling shows that an equal distribution of household labor ranks among the top three reasons people cite as keys to making marriage work. The Pew Research Center notes that over 60% of married people view sharing household tasks as essential to the success of marriage. In one woman’s words, “I like hugs. I like kisses. But what I really love is help with the dishes.”
4. Be friends with each other
Gottman’s research points to one other important insight: Couples with deep friendships report higher levels of marital satisfaction. The reason? Friendship is correlated to deeper levels of understanding, admiration, and mutual respect.
5. Have sex at least once a week
Researchers have long known that sex is linked to relationship satisfaction. However, the research of psychologist Amy Muise shows that the link between sexual frequency and relationship well-being stops at having sex once per week. It’s what researchers call a “curvilinear” association. The more sex you have, the more your relationship satisfaction improves—that is, until you hit once a week. From there on out, relationship satisfaction stays the same, no matter how much mind-blowing sex you have.
Did you marry the wrong person? Here are three ways to find out:
1. Let Go of Fantasy
Do you sometimes have a sinking feeling that you did not marry “the one?” Perhaps you have married a person with whom the sex is not always frequent, passionate, and surprising. Perhaps your spouse’s blind adoration seems to be fading? Do the two of you sometimes feel contempt or defensiveness in the face of each other’s “helpful” feedback? If that sounds familiar, you have likely married the wrong person.
That’s okay. We all marry the wrong person. Or, rather, we marry people for reasons that don’t really pan out over the long haul.
According to the founder and chairman of The School of Life Alain de Botton, we mustn’t abandon our flawed spouses simply because our marriages aren’t living up to childhood daydreams. Instead, we need to jettison “the Romantic idea upon which the Western understanding of marriage has been based the last 250 years: that a perfect being exists who can meet all our needs and satisfy our every yearning.”
We human beings have a wonderful capacity to create rich fantasies. But when we expect our reality to match a fantasy and life doesn’t deliver what we imagined it would, it’s hard to feel anything other than cheated.
The truth is not very appealing: There is no prince in shining armor coming to save us from loneliness and anxiety, to rescue us from feelings of inadequacy. It begs hard questions: Can I consistently feel grateful for what I do have, rather than disappointed in what I don’t? Can I let go of my attachment to a cultural idea that is, quite literally, a fairy tale?
2. Accept Imperfection
Ask yourself if you would marry your partner again. In your heart you may know it’s true: you would marry them again and again, even knowing that marriage is not necessarily easier or more pleasant than being alone, even accepting that marriage does not have any power to transport us back into a state of romantic bliss.
No actual human being can ever measure up to the romantic fantasy of a soulmate. Your partner might be imperfect (and imperfect-for-you), but we’re all highly imperfect and, as such, imperfect for our partners. It’s such a fair match.
3. Ask the Right Questions
It’s clear that all along we’ve been asking the wrong question. “Are you the right person for me?” leads only to stress and judgment and suffering.
Determining the rightness of a match between ourselves and another is a fundamentally flawed enterprise, because nothing outside of ourselves—nothing we can buy, achieve, and certainly no other person—can fix our brokenness, can bring us the lasting joy that we crave.
A more empowering—and more deeply romantic—question is: Am I the right person for you?
A more constructive (and potentially satisfying) proposition is to ask: Can I accommodate your imperfections with humor and grace?
Can I tolerate your inability to read my mind and make everything all-better?
Can I negotiate our disagreements with love and intelligence? Without losing myself to fear and emotion?
Am I willing to do the introspective work required of marriage? Can I muster the self-awareness needed to keep from driving you away?
Do I think I am brave enough to continue loving you, despite your flaws, and, more importantly, despite mine?
Tips for Meditating as a Couple
Critics of the modern mindfulness movement often note that those of us who promote the benefits of mindfulness have a way of getting evangelical in our attempts to raise awareness about the practice. “If it’s great for me,” we think, “it must be good for you, and you are missing out!”
The culture of mindfulness often reinforces this attitude in subtle ways: books, articles, and podcasts present these practices as a kind of panacean remedy for all our ills, so we struggle to understand why others wouldn’t want to give it a try.
Being excited about mindfulness may seem harmless, but when we get too pushy about it in our most intimate relationships—especially with our partners and spouses—it can become a sour