Healthy Relationships Can Improve Your Health, Here’s How.

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We are heading into February, so I thought it would be the perfect time to review for you what the medical literature has to say about the health benefits that come from relationships with others.  Whether we are connecting with partners, friends, or even our pets, it’s clear that healthy relationships improve health outcomes.

How much better do you feel after a warm hug from a friend, the comforting squeeze of a partner’s hand, or the joy of laughing around a dinner table with your children. Sharing space with a loved one for even one minute is enough to completely turn a bad day into a good one. Medical studies have shown that increasing your connection to others not only improves your health, it actually increases your lifespan. 

I feel this has something to do with the fact that we merge our natural energy fields together when we are close to one another. We each produce our own healthy, natural EMF fields. 

Both the brain and the heart emit measurable energy fields, and it’s a beautiful thing. Which one do you think is largest and extends furthest from our bodies, the brain or the heart? It’s the heart field.  Our heart center expands outwards in a powerful, measurable energy field, right from the center of our being. In fact, our heart’s energy field is actually bigger than our brain’s measurable energy field, and maybe even best of all, they overlap.

 

 

You can literally feel this in your body. Have you ever sat, focusing on something that made you so happy that you literally felt your heart grow larger and larger and larger still?

That’s why I painted the original artwork “Attuning” shown above (you can find prints of this artwork and lots of other original healing paintings I have painted on my website in the Healing Artwork section here.)

When our heart energy fields are overlapping, we can become attuned to others, and we can literally feel when we are resonant (or discordant) with others.  Have you ever felt that your chest was going to explode, your heart energy got so big?  Have you ever felt your heart vibration reach past your chest, past your body, reach into the space around, to the people around you, to the world around you?  It feels so good, and it feels so good because it is the healthy state of being connected to another person’s heart field.  I felt this most effortlessly as a new mom, holding my babies. I can bring back that feeling any time I wish by remembering what it was like to hold them in my arms. To love on them. To take care of them. To adore them.  Recall your own times when your have felt your heart swell and reach for that feeling as often as you can.

 

 

Connecting and attuning with each other, overlapping our heart energy fields with those that we love.  So when you fall in love, you are specifically overlapping your heart energy with your lovers heart energy. Your bodies naturally attune together. You grow in love as you grow in sync.  Energy matches, breath matches, you literally become one energy field, together. As you attune together, you feel connected. They become your favorite person, an extended part of yourself.

And it’s not just human beings who can attune with each other — do you have a beloved pet?

I absolutely did, a once-in-a-lifetime pup, and unfortunately she passed away well two years ago and I still miss her –painfully so — every single day.  And there is a reason why: our heart fields were attuned to one another for 17 years.  As I wrote about in this blog post here: The Health Benefits Of Having A Pet, pets actually boost health and longevity, much like connecting to your favorite human.

From boosted cardiac health and improved survival rates after heart attack to improved outcomes in cancer treatment, your life is absolutely enhanced by your fur baby and that special connection you share.  In fact, studies have found that animals can decrease stress in our bodies after literally only 5 minutes (and not only that, but they decrease stress more effectively than other activities, such as coloring or taking a break to relax!). For example one study, published in the Academy of Emergency Medicine in 2020 found that spending 5 minutes with a dog was able to significantly lower participants cortisol levels. From walking your dog to playing with your cat to letting your guinea pig or bird out of his or her cage for a little play time, pets provide us precious time bonding with a heart energy field that absolutely loves you unconditionally.

 

 

Connecting to others is so important that it can even help provide anesthesia to pain. Physical touch from a loved one calms brain activity during distress, which helps explain why it reduces the brain’s perception of pain, as one study (published in 2006 in Psychological Science) found. In this study, brain activity was measured via a functional MRI while partners held hands with their spouse — hand holding significantly reduced levels of brain activity during painful stimuli.  Another study (published in 2018 in the Proceedings Of The National Academy of Sciences) confirmed that simply holding hands provided statistically significant analgesia during pain.  

Physical touch even has the power to calm your heart rate and respiratory rate, as well as lower blood pressure.  A study published in 2017 in Scientific Reports found patients in pain who held their partners hands had significant analgesia which resulted in lowered blood pressure, lowered heart rate response, and a lowered respiratory rate.

 

 

Another interesting medical review, published in 2010 in PLOS Medicine, looked at over 300,000 participants in over 145 medical studies about relationships and mortality rates and found that no matter your age, sex, health status, disease status, or cause of death, having social ties (like friends, family, neighbors and colleagues) increased your survival rate by 50%. This protective health boost is dramatic, meaningful and significant.  The study also found that having low social interactions is actually a risk factor for death similar to or even more impactful than other well known health risk factors. For example, having less social interactions was equivalent to smoking 15 cigarettes a day, equivalent to being an alcoholic, more harmful than not exercising, and twice as harmful as obesity.  It makes sense that if having healthy relationships protects your lifespan, having low social relationships drops it.  And that’s exactly what researchers found in a medical study published in 2015 in Perspectives on Psychological Science.  They found that isolation, loneliness and living alone each increases likelihood of mortality rates by 29%, 26% and 32%, respectively.

Researchers postulate that one reason being connected to others is protective to our health is that giving support actually helps mitigate the body’s stress response.  In a study published in 2019 in Psychosomatic Medicine, researchers used functional MRI imaging to examine what happens to the brain during the giving and receiving of social support. Researchers found that not only were there beneficial, protective brain changes during social interactions, but giving support was associated with the additional benefit of significantly reduced stress. They found that giving support to others actually buffers the experience of stress by supporting areas of the brain that would typically activate during stressful situations.

So if you are looking to strengthen your connections to loved ones that live near and far, here are 7 simple ways to get started:


 

 

1. Connect through texting:

 

While studies show that social media can dramatically decrease mental health, direct texting is different, allowing you to stay in touch with people who are meaningful to you in real life, in real time. Make a list of one, two, three, or twenty people you love and miss, and make a point to start each day off with a text to each, touching base with them. Their responses throughout your day will help you feel connected. Repeat daily.


 

 

2. Connect through writing letters:

 

Yep, snail mail is still a thing. Write a letter to someone you love and send it in the mail. You can even include a folded up self addressed envelop and a request that they write you back!  For a special gift to my son, when he graduated high school a few years ago, I asked family and friends to each write him a letter, then collected them all and put them into a special binder.  He told me that opening it and reading the letters, page after page, was the best gift I had ever given him.  

Hate to write? Of course calling over the phone is a classic way to reach out to someone, or you can FaceTime or use any other video or streaming app (like Marco Polo, which is how I stay in touch with my mom and my childhood bestie!) to stay connected to your favorite loved ones who live far away. 


 

 

3. Connect by organizing a get together:

 

It doesn’t have to be fancy, you don’t need to clean your home, and you don’t need to cook a stressful meal in order to gather a few friends together. Host a book club at a coffee shop, a potluck dinner (all you provide is the plates and cutlery!), a group picnic at a local park (no cleaning your house at all!), a beautiful night under the stars around a fire pit at a campsite, an after dinner walk with a group of neighbors, a cocktail or dessert party after dinnertime (skipping the meal all together!), an art night or a craft night in your backyard, a sewing or knitting circle on your patio, a karaoke or music night gathered on your front porch, there is no limit to the ways you can bring people together in simple and fun ways.


 

 

4. Connect through playing games:

 

Something as simple as playing a game together can boost your connections to others easily.  Card games, board games, golf, tennis, pickleball, horseshoes, tic tac toe, water balloon toss, nerf gun battles… basically any game you think to play can bring people together in endless fun ways. 

If you have in person loved ones, you can play cards or a board game together, but even if you live alone, you can connect to others through online platforms. From playing online games together through apps like Words With Friends or Chess, or even buying multiple sets of the same puzzle and shipping to a few of your friends or family members for a grand Puzzle Race — see who can finish it first! — there are plenty of fun ways to stay playful, even if virtually, connected with those that you love.

For more fun ideas on how to introduce more play into your life, and to take an easy quiz that will tell you your own favorite “play style”, read my free blog post to discover your play style here.


 

 

5.  Connect through healing touch:

 

When you were a kid, did you ever walk around in your socks, rubbing them on a carpet repeatedly so you could sneak up to your sibling and shock them? (Or was that just me, LOL? My poor older brother.) If you’ve ever shocked someone when touching them, you know this on a large scale — you could literally feel the large quantity of electrons passing between the two of you that caused the shock. 

On a smaller scale, this is happening with every interaction, all day long. Because no two bodies are 100% completely balanced and neutral in respect to each other, electrons are always flowing one way or another when you touch someone else, or they touch you. Although the amount of electrons transferring is such a small amount relative to the amount of electrons in a human body, I believe this is in part why healing touch is so powerful. When you “donate” some of your electrons to someone who is in worse physical condition than you (such as someone in pain, with an inflammatory process going on) you are supporting them in many ways. I think this is part of what massage therapists, physical therapists, acupuncturists and other healers are doing when they touch you. Even your pet can donate electrons to you when it snuggles up with you while you are sick or have a chronic condition bringing you down. 

So touch those that you love, offer a foot massage, shoulder massage, scalp massage, a warm hug, or ask for any of these things you need, or invite your pet to take a nap on your lap.


 

6. Connect to your pet:

 

We just went over this in the #5 above, but it bares repeating: don’t forget to stay connected to your beloved pet!  Spend extra time each day getting into a routine of connecting with them at least morning and night.  From walking your dog to playing with your cat to letting your guinea pig or bird out of his or her cage for a little play time, enjoy spending time with someone who absolutely loves you unconditionally.


 

7. Connect through a class or group:

 

Want to expand the amount of connections you currently have?  From online classes you can join into from the comfort of your own home, to in-person gatherings, one easy way to meet new people and make new social connections is to join a group or sign up for a class.

From a meditation or breath work class, to an exercise class, to a cooking class, to learning a new language at your local community college, to learning a new musical instrument, to taking voice lessons, and so much more… there are lots of classes just waiting for you to sign up for. Or, instead of signing up for a class, you might consider just joining an established group. There are lots of ways to find a new group to join in person, for example, Meetup ( meetup.com ) Meetup can search your local community by city or zip code to find you anything from a local improv group, a toastmasters group, a yoga or tai chi meet up, a group to go running or biking with, a coffee lovers meet up, a local foodies group, a hiking club, a book club, a wine club, a gardeners club, a beekeepers club… you name it, if you have even a passing interest in an activity, there’s a club for that!


 

 

Don’t want to connect with another person at the moment? 

That’s okay, did you know you can boost your own health by practicing self compassion and loving yourself?  A study on self compassion, published in 2021 in Health Psychology, found that folks who reported extending compassion to themselves during times of suffering not only had better psychological outcomes and protected their heart health.  Researchers used ultrasound technology to look at participants carotid artery health and measured carotid artery IMT (a well documented measure of cardiac disease.) They found that participants who practiced self compassion actually had healthier IMT measurements, lower rates of subclinical cardiovascular disease and lower over all cardiac risk factors, even after adjusting for all other standard cardiac risk factors.

So today, consider protecting your health through connection in many many ways… through sharing a deep connection with loved ones, through spending quality time with your fur babies, through practicing self compassion by dropping into your own heart space.  

And if you are lucky enough to be near someone you love, take a few minutes to drop down into your heart space and literally feel their energy. Over time you will get incredibly good at attuning with your loved ones, even matching your breathing to theirs without effort, calming and centering them as well as yourself.  Loved ones protect our health and buffer us from stress, so let’s become acutely aware of the precious heart energy of those we love and cherish the time that we are lucky enough to overlap them.

Xoxox,

Laura Koniver MD