By Jancee Dunn
We have reached the seventh and final day of the Happiness Challenge! Congratulations on your efforts to take care of your emotional, psychological, and physical health by building and strengthening your connections. You’ve assessed your social universe, made an eight-minute phone call (or two), chatted up someone you didn’t know, expressed your thanks, reached out to people at work, and put plans on the calendar. (If you missed a day, that’s OK. You can find the previous installments here, then do them at your own pace.)
As I’ve taken this challenge alongside you, I’ve made a vow to prioritize my relationships and view them as a vital component of my overall health. Just like prioritizing exercise, or sleep, I’ve come to understand that my relationships require maintenance.
Now that we have the tools to improve our “social fitness,” the work of sustaining it begins. I called Dr. Bob Waldinger, a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and the co-author of “The Good Life” who created this challenge with me and other experts, to get three quick tips for the year ahead.
1. Set specific relationship goals for the year
Dr. Waldinger advised to commit to making strengthening your bonds an ongoing practice. “Be realistic,” he said. “Could you do one small thing a few times a week to promote connections, like send one text or email to someone to say hello? Could your goal be to get together with a friend once each week?” Start small and level up as time allows, he said.
Shasta Nelson, the author of “Frientimacy: How to Deepen Friendships for Lifelong Health and Happiness,” suggested making a list of the people you want to feel closer to a year from now. Having this physical reminder will help you look for opportunities to connect with them throughout the year.
It’s helpful to use that same specificity when making plans, Ms. Nelson added. Replace vague invitations like “We should get together sometime” with “How’s next Tuesday?”
2. Commit to consistency
“This is a hard one,” Ms. Nelson said, “but recognize that you won’t grow closer to people unless, and until, you’re interacting with them consistently. If you are not participating in something where you’re seeing the same people regularly, like a book club, or church, then you have to set up the consistency yourself, and make that happen. That involves scheduling and reaching out and initiating.” The relationships with the people you wrote down on that piece of paper won’t go forward, she added, “if you don’t figure out ways to have more shared experiences and conversations.”
I am haunted by a data point Dr. Waldinger mentioned: Over and over, throughout the lives of participants in the Harvard Study of Adult Development, he saw friendships deteriorate because of neglect.
Being purposeful about investing time and energy in your relationships is critical for your well-being, Dr. Waldinger said. “The frequency and the quality of contact with other people are two major predictors of happiness,” he said.
Dr. Waldinger phones the co-author of “The Good Life,” Marc Schulz, a friend of 30 years, every Friday. “We talk a lot about our research, but also about our families and our travels and all sorts of things, and I cherish it and look forward to it,” he said.
I have decided to focus on my relationships every Saturday, and to make concrete plans with people for the week ahead. Yesterday, I reached out to a friend I hadn’t seen in years, and we have an eight-minute phone date on Wednesday and plans to go to dinner in two weeks.
3. Ritual is key
An easy way to make the habit stick is to transform even mundane activities into rituals. Cassie Holmes, a professor at U.C.L.A.’s Anderson School of Management and the author of “Happier Hour: How to Beat Distraction, Expand Your Time, and Focus on What Matters Most,” said her research showed that “among some folks, ordinary experiences with loved ones at the kitchen table produce as much happiness as extraordinary experiences like that once-in-a-lifetime-vacation.”
A nudge to make you prioritize these ordinary moments with others, Dr. Holmes said, is to routinize them and rebrand them as rituals. Give them a name, she said, like the standing “Thursday morning coffee date” she has with her daughter.
If you have extended family nearby, Dr. Waldinger suggested starting new traditions or solidifying old ones with them. You can try a new inexpensive restaurant together every month, watch backyard movies if the weather allows or have a family trivia night.
In the past few years, a tradition has sprung up in my extended family in which we all converge at one house to help do a hated, frequently-postponed chore in exchange for a meal. Most recently, the task was to pick up stones in my parents’ yard, which had always enraged my dad by damaging his lawn mower. There were a dozen of us, so the task was accomplished quickly and with good humor. In the end, we were rewarded with chicken and biscuits.