Excelerated Relationships™ and Happiness

Humans are social animals. We need each other. We are made to seek companionship and a lack of social support negatively impacts our potential for happiness and well-being. Social connections increase our feelings of happiness, contentment, and well-being. And they not only make us happier but they improve our health and perhaps help us live longer.

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Nurturing Healthy Relationships

Just as we have financial accounts into which we deposit and withdraw money, we have “emotional bank accounts” with loved ones, friends, and colleagues. We make deposits and withdrawals into these accounts as well. If our balance in these accounts is high, we can make the occasional withdrawal without any harmful consequences. But too few deposits and too many withdrawals can leave us with an overdrawn account. Nurturing healthy relationships includes making frequent deposits into the emotional bank account, especially of those closest to us.

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How To Build Healthy Relationships – And Why

We need each other. We depend on each other. We literally cannot live without each other and we cannot be our happiest, our best, and our most productive without building healthy relationships.

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All Together Now

“We’re all in this together.” I can’t count the number of times nor the number of people from whom I have heard this sentiment over the past months of the pandemic. I suspect you’ve had a similar experience. From doctors on TV to product advertisements to personal injury lawyers to friends on Zoom, these words have been spoken again and again. “We’re all in this together.”

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Why Relationships Matter

The “rugged individual” is a false ideal. We are social animals who have evolved to bond with and depend on other human beings. Our attitude and actions can improve the quality of our relationships or cause them to deteriorate.

Poison!

A story from India about relationships [1]:

A young woman married and went to live with her husband. Her mother-in-law also lived in the house.

It didn’t take long for the young woman to discover that it was nearly impossible to get along with her mother-in-law, a critical and mean-spirited woman, able to find something wrong with anything the young wife did. They constantly argued and bickered, even though custom dictated that the mother-in-law was to be treated with respect.

Finally, the young wife reached the breaking point. She went to see one of her father’s old friends, a dealer of herbs, wise to the ways of the world. There she poured out her sad story about the situation that had become unbearable to her. She asked if he could give her a poison that would solve her problem once and for all.

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Creating Positive Relationships

Developing and enjoying positive relationships is an important part of well-being — one of the 5 core concepts identified by Martin Seligman in his PERMA model of well-being theory. [Seligman] Positive relationships can even help us live longer, as shown by the evidence in the “Blue Zones”, areas of the world with the longest-lived peoples. [Kotifani]

The Fable Of The Porcupines

It was a frigid cold winter. The earth was frozen and many animals died from the cold. And so a group of porcupines agreed to huddle together that they might keep warm.

But as they lay up close to one another, the quills of each porcupine pricked and injured the ones they were closest to. After a while, the porcupines decided they couldn’t take this anymore, so they moved apart. And one by one, they began freezing to death.

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