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Five Powerful Actions that Will Fuel Your Sense of Well-being
Isolation is the disease; connection is the cure.
I’ve noticed that when I feel most ill, I move into isolation.
Alone with my aching body and dark thoughts, I lose hope.
From the outside, it seems perfectly reasonable: If my body is sick and tired, why not put it to bed? Why not hunker down in front of the TV and give myself physical and mental rest?
Deprived of the company of living things, my monster-mind takes flight. Without noticing, I begin thinking that I am worthless. My presence in this world seems to be a black blob – a stain on the universe. I begin feeling more tired and sicker. I believe the critical voices.
All I need do, to escape this heavy place, is to make a connection with another living being. I can pick up the phone and talk to a friend, watch a bird on the fence outside or consider the colors in a flower.
Psychological research agrees with the need for human connection. People who have a confidant – someone with whom to share a personal problem – get sick less often, have higher self-esteem and empathy, better emotional regulation skills, lower rates of anxiety and will live longer .
Faced with such data, I often start complaining about being an introvert. Happily, the research shows that what is important is not any objectively-defined number of friends or quality of connection. Instead, it is a subjective feeling that I’m connected.
How, then, do I nurture and grow my feeling of connection? We can continue to follow the research. Kevin Hunt suggests three ways to increase a sense of connection:
- Volunteer: volunteers reported lower disability and higher levels of well-being compared to non-volunteers. Do something nice for someone else and feel connected.
- Exercise: keeping active not only improves physical health, it also increases a sense of connection.
- Get online: using technology to connect with other people increases our subjective sense of connection.
My own experience suggests two more sources of feeling connected: - Spend time in nature: I feel a sense of kinship and connection when I am in nature. The World Forum Foundation has collected studies showing cognitive, mental and physical health benefits for children who connect with nature. I’m not aware of similar studies for adults, but I’ll wager I’m not alone.
- Believe: one of the shared values of many religions is a sense of all of us as children of God. Sons and daughters of a loving Creator, we are kin.
When illness and disability threaten my well-being, I have (at least) five tools that can call me into a sense of connection. From connectedness comes a sense of well-being, higher self-esteem, less anxiety and stress. From connectedness comes healing.
Please feel free to send me email and ask for support.
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