Why Putting Friends First can Help Your Good Mood
As the year rolls on, the holidays are in the rearview and we’re all back to the daily grind. Sometimes it’s easy to let the little things of every day life get under your skin, it happens to all of us.
However, a surefire antidote to letting little irritations get the best of you is having your good friends close by.
We all have things we go through that can be stressful and annoying, but having a buddy around to commiserate can certainly make a difference in my mood.
My friends have always been a big inspiration in my life, so it is important for me to keep them around in order maintain my good mood. My best buds have an uncanny ability to pull me out of even the cloudiest of days. Between my friends, family, and pets, I feel like I always have someone to turn to.
But it’s not just your immediate group of friends that can affect your mood. It turns out that THEIR friends can affect your mood, too. According to an article on New Scientist, your friends’ friends can have social influence on how you feel. The article mentions that through our networks:
“… we are also beholden to the moods of friends of friends, and of friends of friends of friends - people three degrees of separation away from us who we have never met, but whose disposition can pass through our social network like a virus.” The article goes on to discuss how social influence can be good thing, but also be detrimental as well.
“Happiness, obesity, smoking habits - activities that we traditionally think of as shaped by individual circumstances, turn out to be ruled to a large degree by social forces.”
This article poses an interesting question, though: is happiness contagious?
Some scientists might argue that proximity has a lot to do with it, but there are other factors at play, such as mirror neurons reacting to the emotions and actions of others. For more about this, check out the full article.
Now, because happiness very well may be contagious, I also did a little research and found an article on Oprah.com explaining the Five Things Happy People Do. Of the five things, one stood out to me most: they put their best friends first. The article explains that you can get more enjoyment out of spending a length of time with one close friend than you would jumping around trying to spend a little bit of time with a lot of different people. Meliksah Demir, PhD, an assistant psychology professor at Northern Arizona University said one of the merits of close friendship “is simple companionship, ‘just hanging out,’ as he says, hitting the mall or going to the movies together and eating popcorn in the dark.”
Sounds good to me, too. How do your friends affect your mood?
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