Social Wellness

As we become more and more dependent on technology, our social wellness becomes more compromised.  As described in the NYT article Antisocial Networking? by Hilary Stout, friends text each other instead of calling them, flirting is conducted on Facebook, and teenagers think that they're closer to each other than ever before.  But these "digital natives," or people who have grown up with these technologies, face severe disabilities when it comes to developing trusting relationships, handling face-to-face interaction, or thinking

on their feet. 

The University of California-Riverside, whose HR department has successfully articulated several dimensions of wellness, defines social wellness as "the ability to relate to and connect with other people in our world...to establish and maintain positive relationships with family, friends, and co-workers...."  This is a good start to identifying what it means to be socially well, but I think that it is necessary to identify different forms of connection, so that we may become aware of how often we interact with others in a healthy, pre-tech overload way, and often we rely on the crutch of impersonal, text-based messaging. 

When author Dennis Lehane gave the commencement address at my college graduation, he shared a longing for the times before iPod, texting, and Facebook, when he might meet a stranger in public, as they wait for a bus or walk through the park, and have a real conversation.  He anticipated a growing reliance on technology-based interaction that would corrode the value we can add and the benefits that we can get from human-to-human interactions.  He forewarned that these enablers of artificial interaction would devalue business, friendship, and even spousal relationships.  And just a few years after that commencement speech, it appears that he was right. 

In pursuit of social wellness, we cannot settle for content-only interaction.  After a text-messaging "conversation" with an old friend, do you feel warm and happy, as you would have if you met them in a coffee shop?  Do you email your boss to clarify a project, or do you walk down the hall to talk in person?  Which is more rewarding?  As a former staff manager, I can say that only the employees who participated in person, who started conversations with me, gave themselves the opportunity to stand out.  Those others who never left their desk or spoke out loud did not.  In pursuit of social wellness, we should maximize the percentage of our interactions that are more personable: 1) in person instead of through email; 2) phone call instead of text message; 3) hand-written letter instead of email, etc. 

Obviously there is a benefit to technology.  Without video chat, for example, you might go years without seeing your loved ones.  Without the time that email saves us, we might not be able to accomplish nearly as much as we intend to.  But for the interactions that we can "upgrade" in how intimate they are, we should seize the opportunity to do so.  As Dennis Lehane asked of us, we should take the iPod out of our ears when we're in a crowd of people; we should hand-write thank you letters and post cards; and we should reinstate the pop-in to reverse the destructive reactions that we can all have when someone rings our home doorbell (who is trying to sell me something now??).  Add social wellness to our growing framework of integrated wellness.  In addition to physical wellness (nutrition, exercise, sleep), be mindful of your interpersonal interactions, and strive to make them as human-to-human as possible.  They more you can upgrade your relationships, the more benefits you'll receive from them, and the more "well" you will be.