Can Social Wellness Improve you?
Can Enhancing Social Wellness Lead to Personal Improvement?
The month of July is dedicated to social wellness, how do you think your social wellness is right now? No matter what level you are at we want to tell you about how social wellness affects your everyday life and offer tips to get you out of that box and go out building relationships and bonds that will satisfy your mental and physical health!
Often many of us can find ourselves stuck on the same draining routine and everyone can agree that after a while you can feel that drain on your mind and your body. This can cause us to develop mental health issues and physical issues such as our heart health.
Social Wellness Facts
Staying isolated is twice as lethal as obesity,
Those of us with stronger social connections are 50% more likely to survive during adversity
Loneliness results in the brain never shutting down for rest,
You are 64% more likely to develop dementia by not feeding your brains social needs and remaining lonely
You can only go so long being alone before you emotionally crave connection, which in turn can turn into depression
The workplace suffers when there are no proper connections made, causing disengagement
Just by having a couple of good work friends can boost engagement and overall morale by 50%
Impacts of poor Social Wellness
- Poor Sleep
- High blood pressure
- High heart rate
- Increased chance of heart attack
- Increased cortisol and stress hormones
- Decreased sense of contentment
- Increased social isolation
- Depression
- Suicide
- Increased risk of obesity
- Inflammation
- Heart disease risks
- Increased risk of stroke
- Increased risk of cancer
Ways to Improve Social Wellness
Build intimate connections: work to build close relationships with the people who love and care for you and will be there when needed. This is typically family or long-term friends
Build relational connections: this is the connections with people you see regularly like coworkers or classmates and are more of acquaintances typically. Doing this will improve your feeling of belonging and connecting. You can do this by finding things in common with them or creating little traditions like drinking coffee together or eating lunch with them.
Build collective connections: these relations are typically built with people who share the same views or people in your community with similar interests, like clubs in high school or community programs that a group of people participates in that share common interests
Ideas to meet new people and improve relationships
- Join Facebook groups and connect with others
- Go out to places like coffee shops
- Attend events around the area
- If comfortable go up to someone and strike up a conversation
- Give someone a compliment
- Organize your time to have social time
- Join events or clubs
- Join a sports team
- Do something you enjoy
- Put yourself out there as much as you can
- Try not to take yourself so seriously
- Try icebreakers like a joke
- Ask people about themselves
- Ask how someone’s day is going
- Smiling at everyone you pass
- Find out what they like that is the same
- Small talk
- Be the genuine you
Create Harmony in the office
Engagement
Employees should have a feeling of welcoming and friendliness when coming into work this can be done by things like:
- Company lunches
- team bonding
- communication
- Actively involve everyone
Mental Health
Today mental health is not thought of in as hard of light as it used to be. Due to that companies should be actively improving the mental health resources to aid their teams/employees.
Social Support
We are hardwired to need some sort of social support no matter who it comes from. In a company setting this can be achieved by instrumental support resources to help their employee’s needs.
Step 1: Understand your Employee’s Needs
As a leader, there should be an attempt to understand how your employees work. Each person is different and requires different forms of support. Try a company survey to better understand what the company needs to thrive.
Step 4: Review
After changes are made, take the time again for company surveys to see if there is an improvement to the employee morale
Step 2: Set Goals
- Gather employee feedback
- how do you want to support them
- what do you need to accomplish this
- how will you measure success
Step 3: Implement Change
Change is not easy for everyone, but change needs to begin for the employees to thrive and grow in the company.
do Hugs Increase Physical Health?
Yes!
According to Forbes, there are 4 main reasons to get enough hugs in our life:
- Hugs can strengthen the immune system and help keep the body balanced. This is because when the sternum has pressure applied it causes the thymus gland to work more in producing white blood cells. Hugs also increase circulation in the body to balance the sympathetic system which controls our fight/flight/freeze instincts and the parasympathetic system which controls resting and digesting!
2. Receiving hugs relaxes the body and brain while increasing the feeling of safety for the body, which in turn can lower your blood pressure and anxiety levels!
3. giving and receiving hugs releases the drug oxytocin in the brain which promotes attachment and relationship-building with people and can help with getting better sleep!
4. Hugging for just 20 seconds physically low heart rate, blood pressure, and the stress hormone norepinephrine ultimately reducing stress and chances of heart attacks!
Physical Health Benefits from social connection
We live longer
We Heal faster
Strengthened immune system
Physical fitness
Heart health
Less pain
“A healthy outside starts from the inside”
Robert Urich
