Health Benefits of Friendships & Walking Backwards

Weekly Resource Roundup

Health Benefits of Friendships

The book Growing Young: How Friendship, Optimism, and Kindness Can Help You Live to 100, author Marta Zaraska describes the health benefits of having social connections and friendships.

• One study showed that people who score low on social integration—have few friends and relatives, aren’t married, and don’t belong to community organizations—are as much as three times as likely to die over the next seven years than those blessed with close-knit relationships.
• Increases disability, risk of falling, hospitalization, and higher mortality in the year following critical illness .
• Loneliness causes us to become overly critical of ourselves and those around us and leads us to behave in self-defeating ways.
• When we feel lonely, our immune systems switch away from fighting viruses and towards fighting bacteria. When we’re in groups, viruses spread easily, so the body has to be ready to take them on. But once a person is secluded, the risk of a virus goes down, while the risk of lion-induced wounds with bacteria goes up, and that’s what the body focuses on.

If we’re interested in improving our health and quality of life, it’s worth the effort to invest time and energy into cultivating and nurturing friendships that can be just as beneficial (maybe even more so) as the time we spend exercising. Kat Vellos’s book We Should Get Together: The Secret to Cultivating Better Friendships is a great instruction manual for making friends.

Movement to Try

Walking backwards is one of the simplest ways to train knees over the toes and helps to strengthen the knees.  The better you are backwards, the more protected you are going forward and less likely you are to get injured walking forward. Walking backwards can also helps to relieve arthritis pain in the knees.

The Anatomy of a Good Shoe

Shoes are critical for maintaining the health of our feet. It’s worth the investment to purchase a good shoe for the activities we choose to do.