All of these studies, as well as our own Harvard Study, bear witness to the importance of human connections. They show that people who are more connected to family, to friends, and to community, are happier and physically healthier than people who are less well connected. People who are more isolated than they want to be find their health declining sooner than people who feel connected to others. Lonely people also live shorter lives. Sadly, this sense of disconnection from others is growing across the world. About one in four Americans report feeling lonely—more than sixty million people. In China, loneliness among older adults has markedly increased in recent years, and Great Britain has appointed a minister of loneliness to address what has become a major public health challenge.

Here is where Emmy Werner’s research, our own Harvard Study research, and many other pieces of research from across cultures and populations converge to show that a critical link between childhood experience and positive adult social connections is our ability to process

emotions.

It is from our relationships as children—especially our relationships with our family—that we first learn what to expect from others. This is when we begin to develop the emotional habits, so to speak, that will be with us for the rest of our lives. These habits often define the way we connect to others and our ability to engage others in mutually supportive ways.

A crucial point here is that our ability to process emotions is malleable. In fact, managing emotions is one of the things we actually get better at as we grow old. And there is strong evidence that we don’t have to wait until late in our lives for this to happen. With the right guidance and some practice, we can learn to be better at managing our feelings at any age.

If we feel disconnected from others at work, that means we feel lonely for the majority of our waking hours. This is a health concern. As we’ve mentioned elsewhere, loneliness increases our risk of death as much as smoking or obesity. If we find ourselves feeling lonely at work, it may be up to us to create opportunities for social connection to the extent that we can. For parents raising their kids at home, play dates or visits to a local park (which are often as much for the parents as for the kids) can be restorative. For warehouse workers, there may be opportunities to connect with people directly before a shift, or directly after.

The power of friendship isn’t just the stuff of anecdotes or philosophical observation; science has clearly shown this effect. Friends diminish our perception of hardship—making us perceive adverse events as less stressful than we might otherwise see them—and even when we do experience extreme stress, friends can diminish its impact and duration. We feel the stress, but with the help of friends we’re better able to manage it. Less stress and better stress management lead to less wear and tear on our bodies.

Friends, in short, keep us healthier.

In Chapter Two we discussed a 2010 review conducted by Julianne Holt-Lunstad and others that brought together 148 studies and a vast amount of data to analyze the effect that social connections have on health and longevity. Among those 148 studies were a number that focused specifically on friendship. Here are a few that make the point:

• A large longitudinal study in Australia found that people over 70 with the strongest network of friends were 22 percent less likely to die during the study period (ten years) than those with the weakest network of friends

• A longitudinal study of 2,835 nurses with breast cancer found that women who had ten or more friends were four times more likely to survive than women who had no close friends.

• A longitudinal study of over 17,000 men and women between the ages of 29 and 74 in Sweden found that stronger social connections decreased the risk of dying from all causes by almost a fourth over a period of six years.

The sociologist Mark Granovetter has done important research showing the crucial significance of these casual ties. People we know only peripherally, Granovetter has argued, create important bridges to new social networks.