Ideally, friendships are helpful in maintaining your health and overall health, yet it’s not always easy to establish a friendly connection, or maintain one. Learn the role of social relationships in your life, the strategies for getting and building friendships.
What advantages do friendships offer?
Friendship as one of the social relations is good for your health. Friends are those who can motivate you when things are tough and share the benefits when it is sweet. Friends provide you the opportunity to provide much-needed companionship while also preventing loneliness and isolation. Additionally, friends can:
- Boost your sense of purpose and belonging
- Reduce stress and increase happiness
- Boost your self-esteem and confidence
- assist you in overcoming traumas like divorce, a significant illness, losing your job, or losing a loved one.
- Urge you to modify or stay away from bad lifestyle choices like binge drinking or not exercising.
It is also good for your overall health to have friends. Healthy social relationships reduce the risks of developing many adverse health outcomes to adulthood, including depression, hypertension and being underweight. Studies carried out show that elderly people with connection and or a sense of social interaction are likely to have longer lives compared to their counter parts with less or no connections.
What causes some of the friendships to be forged or sustained to be elusive?
Many adults struggle with current or new friendships. Other social activities, house chores, work or even having to attend to sickly parents or children play a role in overshadowing friendship. Perhaps, by now, some of you have shifted on your interests or in your lives which made you and your buddies drifted apart. Or maybe you have not yet determined where you could get acquainted in this or that neighbouring community.
Building, and especially maintaining, friendships that are good for you takes effort. However, the comfort as well as the pleasure that friendship may afford do justify the expense.
Ways to Meet New Friends
As you will notice below there are a number of ways through which one can expand his/her circle of friends. But of cause as everyone knows making new friends is a process that may require change of some programs and a single meeting isn’t a guarantee. But every interaction is a chance.
If you continue to searching diligently and continually, then you’ll surely find your own people.
1. Join Groups
One of the most effective methods to find people is to look for groups because everyone in such groups has at least one common interest with you.
This could involve participation in associations, clubs, sporting activities and cultural activities and other social functions among them. You will make a chance to find people and start a conversation because of your common topics by it.
2. Travel Alone
One of the best opportunities for building relationships: traveling alone. Yes, that may sound paradoxical as there are people who think that travelling solo will make them lonely, but it is a social action.
Travelling alone allows one move around and interact with other people be them locals or fellow travellers. Still, as expected though, one must be friendly and open minded to new things.
3. Volunteer
Regardless of whether you live in a city or someplace else, it is always great to make a positive change while using your free time to get involved and make new friends. When you give your time and effort to a cause that matters to you, you will encounter other volunteers, and some of them are likely to become your closest buddies.
By doing so, the focus returned on the importance of identifying volunteer activity that would appeal to those interests. If you are volunteering in areas related to art the chances are that you are going to catch up with artistic people. For instance, one can look for something at the galleristic premises, museums, cultural fairs, and such social-artistic projects.
4. Friendship Apps and Websites
Other are dating apps and social networks which are also rather useful for navigating the realm of potential new friends. MeetMe, Slowly, Patook, Bumble, and Yubo are novel platforms all of which offer distinct attributes. Some are strictly limited to communication over the Internet, some aim at developing face-to-face friendships only, and the others incorporate elements from both virtual and real life.
My advice is to give them a try and find the platforms that you prefer the most by using them. In either case, such opportunities are convenient and rather inexpensive to implement to help one actually interact with other individuals and expand ones circle of contacts.
5. Embrace New Experiences
Presumably, if you want to meet innovative people, then it is essential to accept new experiences. We provide opportunities to interact with interesting people and expand networks when we explore the unknown territory. As with all crowds, please remember, that all people can speak, all can be useful, the initiation of contact to the new people must be open.
It could mean engaging in activities and programs that are not normally we rarely engage in, finding out what we like, places we have not been to before, or even travelling to new districts.
Conclusion:
Did you know that you could never be out of friends or you could always reconnect with a friend or two. Time that could be spent investing in friendships can help to lead to better health and a happier future for years to come.
