Family
You’re eating dinner … in front of the TV. You go to a party with your spouse and instead of holding his hand, you’re clutching onto your iPhone. Technology is connecting families across borders, allowing grandparents to Skype with their grandchildren, aunts get to know their newborn nephews, and long-distance siblings have three-hour long conversations in the middle of the night. Technology can keep us together, but can just as easily pull as apart.
If you want long-lasting relationships with the family physically sitting in front of you at the table, science says you’re going to need to put away that phone. A study in the Journal of Couple & Relationship Therapy found that having relationship-shaping conversations via text messages could negatively affect the level of emotional connection in a relationship, as do digital distractions while having in-person conversations, since you’re constantly switching from faces to your LCD screen. This is just as true for familial relationships as it is for couples.
And not to be too obvious, but do stuff together. Go to the museum, take a hike, travel abroad. If you are going to be stuck at home playing on the Wii, however, do it together. A study from the Queensland University of Technology found that playing video games has more neurological benefits than previously thought. Far from making you a couch potato, video games, particularly ones that use a network with multiple players, can help gamers build strong emotional connections and relationships. Not to mention, gaming can help improve mood, reduce stress, and levels of frustration and anxiety.
Professional Relationships
As with family, people who do things together tend to have better, happier, stronger, and yes, more long-lasting relationships than those who don’t. This doesn’t just apply to your social and family life, but to your business life as well. The people you hang out with, drink with, sometimes even live with, are the ones who have the potential to become lifelong friends, people who recommend you, business partners, or the contact you need to put your name forward when there’s a high-paying position available at their company.
You know what people do when they hang out together and do fun things together? They laugh. And that, too, is key in making your relationships better and longer lasting, according to a study published in the journal Motivation and Emotion. So avoid the temptation to get caught up on your email the next time you and your co-workers go out to eat.
A good rule my friends at work and I have established is to set everyone’s phones to the side of the table when eating out. Whoever is the first to reach for their phone, picks up the check for lunch. In less than a week, we began sitting down to a lunch full of good conversation and little interruption!
Having a passion for your work and putting other people’s needs ahead of your own is the key to successful business relationships. Oh, and don’t forget to say please and thank you. According to a study in the journal Interpersonal Relations and Group Processes, simple gestures such as saying thank you can improve overall happiness not only in business, but in your personal life, too. As anti-social as you might fancy yourself to be, humans are social by nature — the more you strive to maintain relationships, even just working relationships, the happier you’ll be.
This article is updated from its initial publication in Brain World Magazine’s print edition.
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