Life is full of stress. Bills, health issues, work, forgetting to get the wifi password from the coffee shop and realizing it was on the receipt but you’ve already thrown it out. It’s all just too much sometimes. Can our friends ease stress?
Stress doesn’t only produce physical discomfort. It also ages our bodies and shortens our lifespan. A review of research on stress finds that it spikes our blood pressure, fries our immune system, unsettles our sleep, and makes us more susceptible to physical and mental health issues. Remember when you were a kid and you were afraid of monsters? Then you got a little older and you realized monsters weren’t real. Then you got older and realized those monsters were a metaphor for stress, a beast who lives everywhere instead of just under your bed.
Researchers have been proposing new solutions to reduce the abysmal impact of stress. Some of these methods have focused on diminishing the effects of stress via reappraisal. This involves seeing stress as a “challenge” or “extra energy” in your body that you can expend to achieve goals.
What if instead of reducing the impact of stress, there was a way to alter our view of it? So stressful things wouldn’t be perceived as stressful? In contrast to reappraisal, this sort of intervention would upend stress by its roots, rather than weed whacking it after it has already sprouted in our bodies. Friendship is just that solution.
Research on Why Friends Ease Stress
The presence of friends makes us view stress through rose-colored glasses. For example, a highly publicized study involved asking people who were either alone or with a friend to estimate the steepness of a hill in front of them. Those who were alone viewed the hill as steeper than those who were with a friend.
Another study involved researchers approaching men walking around a college campus either alone or with friends. The researcher escorted the participant away from his companions to take part in the study. Each man was shown a picture of an alleged terrorist and was asked to estimate the terrorist’s size, height, and muscularity. The scores were integrated to create a composite “physical formidability” score. Men who were alone estimated that the terrorist was more physically formidable than men who were with friends. Threats are less threatening when we are with friends.
So what does this mean for those of us who are stewing in stress and looking for relief? Importantly, these studies found that we view stress optimistically when we’re around friends.
This brings me to one of the secrets of friendship—reaching out, such as via Zoom in times of social distancing. It’s not enough to just have friends. When we’re stressed, we must seek out friends. The “strong friend,” who is tight-lipped and reclusive when facing stress, won’t bust their stress as much as the friend who is vulnerable during hard times. When you’re about to undergo potentially stressful events—enlisting in a triathlon, waiting on medical results, undergoing your annual evaluation at work—that’s your cue to reach out to friends and reap the stress softening rewards.
For more on friendship, order my book: Platonic: How the Science of Attachment Can Help You Make- and Keep -Friends.
