I like to start this next section on the relationship between social connection

and happiness with a quote by Brene Brown what she says

is connection is why we're here
that's what gives us meaning and purpose in life
Another interesting set of thinkers in the space are Ed Diener and Marty Seligma
n
and Ed Diener and Marty did a a research paper called
very happy people and what they did is they looked around and
interviewed and surveyed people about their levels of happiness
and other aspects of their life and properties of their personality
and what they found you know overall was that very happy people tended to have
rich and satisfying relationships and the spend little time alone
relative to people with average levels of happiness
and what they sort of claim is a social relationships form a necessary
but not sufficient condition for high happiness in other words
you can't only have social relationships but if you don't have
strong social relationships you're not likely to end up
a person who would be characterized as very happy
another study that looked at the relationship between social connection
and happiness interviewed people about how many friends they have
and then ask them how happy they were and it turns out that having more
friends is a great predictor of subjective well-being
also known as happiness another thinker in this space is
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi took some high and and Csikszentmihalyi is famous for ha
ving
come up with a term called flow
and flow is a topic that we'll cover later in the course
but one of the studies that he did showed that when
when you ask people what they're doing on a day-to-day basis and how it
contributes to their happiness the things that are most strongly related
to feeling happy is talking with friends
another research group looked at people in a cafe in sort of naturalistic
observations as Cassie Mogilner and what she did is she had people do a little
task that sort of made them think more about time
they think more about money and what happens when people thought about time
they spent more time socializing when they thought about money
they spent more time working and then the crux is the people that spent more
time socializing reported greater happiness when they were
walking out the cafe so again spending time investing resources
in connecting with people is something that that is associated with
greater happiness finally Dan Kahneman and a researcher from
Princeton when he developed a method for measuring
wellness your positive emotions and emotional states in general
called The Daily reconstruction method he asked people to recount experiences
in their day and talk about how they made them feel with
regards to positive emotion negative emotion
and a couple other dimensions and what he found was the things the activities
experiences that were most highly associated with positive emotion was number on
e intimate
relations but number two socializing so again time and
time again when you ask people what makes them happier when you look at when
people are happiest tends to be when they are around other people
when they're engaged and meaningful social interactions one of
the last little pieces of literature we're gonna look to in
in looking at or when thinking about happiness and social connection
is the impact the deleterious impact of isolation and loneliness
turns out that loneliness has all kinds of negative
impacts on health and well-being measure both physiologically
and through questionnaires in survey methods for example
people who are lonely show decreased inflammatory control or hyper inflammation

in their bodies
a worsened immune responses and difficulty sleeping
another little piece of the story that's really interesting has to do with what
it feels like in in the brain and to actually be socially
excluded and researchers at UCLA Matt Lieberman and
Naomi Eisenberger have been studying this issue and shown that
when people are actively excluded from the game their brains
light up regions that are the same regions that light
up when when they feel pain when they're
undergoing physical physically painful experiences so again being isolated
being alone is is associated with with states that really don't know contribute
substantially to happiness