How many friends do you have? How many best friends? A study of over 10,000 people by Snapchat in 2019 found that the average number of best friends people have is 4.3 and we have 7.2 good friends. Now of course, with any average, there are people that have more and some who have less.
I have thought about this statistic long and hard to try to work out how many best friends, good friends (and they go on to discuss acquaintances) and I think I’m about average. So I have friends, in fact the average number of friends, yet I sometimes feel lonely – why?
Now this isn’t to bad mouth my friends, they’re great, all 7.2 of them. But I think we can often forget that we have to work at maintaining connections. The report found this too in that we seek out authenticity and honesty. Having any number of friends or colleagues around us means nothing if we don’t have that authentic connection.
And that requires some two-way openness and vulnerability. We need to feel that we can be honest with the people around us and to do that we generally need to feel that we are being heard. There’s little worse that opening up to someone and being dismissed. That’s an automatic way to feel disconnected and lonely.
From October 2020 to February 2021, of those who said their well-being had been affected in the last seven days by the pandemic, 38.6% (about 10.5 million people) said it was because they were lonely. We didn’t suddenly lose our friends but we lost the way we normally connected with them and it was hard to forge a new path.
Johann Hari, the author of Lost Connections shares that in order to reconnect with others, some people believe that it’s important to take into account our inherent tribal nature and the want to be part of a mutually beneficial community based on sharing, helping, and protecting one another.
As children we tend to automatically know this but as we grow up, we are in this world of thinking that to get ahead we have to think only of ourselves and that being independent is the aim. I’m reminded of this constantly – be an independent woman – build a world that means you don’t rely on other people – problem is I do have to rely on other people, at home and at work.
If we change our mindset and look at our world in the frame of it’s good to need others, does that make you think about your connections differently? Could you rate your sense of connection with each team member and as a whole? Do you think everyone else would rate it the same?
How can you build this sense of community in your workplace? Can you simply reach out more to team members that seem to be more isolated? Can you start a social group that allows you to connect on a level beyond simply the job?
If you’re finding it difficult to deal with these challenges in-house, there are many ways Stress Matters can help to make this easy for you. Our Making Connections and Building Life Bonds workshop has been a very popular one recently as a result of this year’s Mental Health Awareness Week topic of loneliness. Reach out to find out more about this workshop and the many others we offer that help to increase connection and decrease loneliness in your team.
Article published by StressMatters.org.uk