Are We Losing Our Words?
I read an article recently about how we are speaking fewer words than we ever used to due to the lack of small daily social interactions that we have, such as speaking to the checkout person when we buy our shopping due to the self-service tills, the fact that we can use an app to deliver things to our door instead of ringing someone up and so on.
And even though we have made life easy to avoid contact with another, are we missing out? Are we losing something of what it means to be human? And when it comes to our wellbeing do we want to outsource it purely to algorithms and AI, or is it better to have a real person in your corner supporting you?
The Importance of Small Conversations
It can be easy to dismiss the value of small conversations because they may feel unnecessary. And many of us can feel awkward, uncomfortable and maybe tongue-tied at the everyday small talk that life requires of us, so the convenience of not talking can feel like a relief.
Yet research by Gillian Sandstrom and Elizabeth Dunn (2014) suggests otherwise. They ran a study in which people buying coffee were asked to be as efficient as possible or to make eye contact, smile, and exchange a few words with the barista. The people who had the small exchange with the barista came away in a better mood and with a stronger sense of belonging.
Their wider work found the same thing across ordinary days: people felt happier and more connected on the days they had more of these minor interactions with the peripheral people in their lives, such as the neighbour, the dog walker, and the person at the checkout, rather than only with the people closest to them.
So the exchanges, whilst seemingly trivial on their own, when done regularly could result in an increase in our perceived sense of wellbeing.
Why The Body Treats Isolation as an Emergency
The neuroscientist John Cacioppo spent decades studying loneliness and concluded that it works as an alarm. In much the same way that hunger tells you the body needs food and thirst tells you it needs water, loneliness is telling you that you have drifted to the edge of the group. And for most of human history, being at the edge of the group was genuinely dangerous.
Feeling lonely, therefore, puts us on high alert for social threats. This threat signals an emergency, which creates discomfort, so we would return to our group. In our modern world, this manifests as a short reply to your message that feels cold or an unanswered message that feels like rejection.
Paradoxically, because our lonely brains are on high alert, we can end up in a self-preservation mode, turning down friendly invites for fear that we are not really wanted. Meaning loneliness deepens the less contact we have, so friendships can quietly lapse, or you don’t send the message or have the small chat when getting your coffee.
Connection Sits At The Heart Of Wellbeing
In Martin Seligman’s PERMA model of wellbeing, he identifies five core components that enable us to flourish: positive emotion, engagement, relationships, meaning, and accomplishment.
Relationships are, therefore, within this model, fundamental to our wellbeing, as it assumes we are social creatures and refers to our need to be supported, loved and valued. What interests me is that if we lack relationships, can we make it up for it with solo activities and an optimised wellbeing routine designed to do on your own? Or do we need closeness to another person to have true wellbeing?
When the researchers of “The Harvard Study of Adult Development”, which has been running since 1938, looked for what predicted who would be thriving at the age of eighty, they expected to find those with good health indicators, such as low cholesterol and normal blood pressure, as the reasons. However, what they found was that those who thrived did so because of how satisfied they were with their close relationships.
Do We Want To Outsource Our Connection?
As mentioned, we can go about our daily lives without needing to converse with another person if we choose, and we can increasingly get by without connecting with anyone else to support our wellbeing. For example, we can use an AI to build us a fabulous routine or create a plan to follow; we can use an app to track our habits, count our calories, and track our steps; we can use a wearable to score our sleep and tell us our stress levels.
But do we want to?
Whilst I personally am not against using the technology available to us, as they can be invaluable and provide great data, but it cannot notice you. Technology cannot hear that you hesitate before you answer a question and are curious as to why, it will not enquire as to whether you still want the goal you set six weeks ago but have put on hold for personal reasons, and it will never truly hold you to what you say you want, as you can easily argue with it, delete it or simply switch it off!
What we know about behaviour change is that information is rarely the thing that changes us. Most of us already know perfectly well what would help.
What actually helps is cultivating a relationship in which we feel seen, believed in and held accountable. Which is why I would always recommend having a real person in your corner.
Something To Try
Can you choose the small interaction of speaking to someone once a day? Go to the till and say hello and thank you rather than the self-service checkout; can you ring someone rather than send a text; can you talk with the barista at your coffee shop; or find out something about the person next to you on public transport?
Notice how you feel before you have the interaction – what is the story you are telling yourself? Observe your body’s hypervigilance and how that feels.
Compare it to how you feel afterwards (and was it really so difficult?).
Remember, we are increasingly living in a world which makes it possible to not need anyone, but for our own wellbeing – choose people anyway.
