Increase Your Happiness Level by Increasing Your Number of Close Friends

One of the most important ways to improve personal happiness is to improve personal relationships. Author Gretchen Rubin who writes the Happiness Project blog and is an expert in such things calls personal relationships the major key to personal happiness. In fact in a bid to increase her own happiness she has given herself a target of increasing her friendships by three.

This might seem a bit too calculating to some but it makes perfect sense if you think about it. If you want to have enough money in retirement, you come up with a target amount that you can set aside from each paycheck. If you want to lose weight, you weigh yourself and come up with a target amount you want to lose. If you want to increase your long-term happiness (and who doesn't), then why wouldn't you come up for a goal for one of the most important variables in your happiness?

Here is what she has to say about friendships and happiness:

...people who claim to have at least five friends with whom they can discuss important problems are 60% more likely to describe themselves as “very happy.”

Unfortunately, a study published by the American Sociological Review in 2006 shows the average American has only two close friends, and almost a quarter of Americans have no friend in whom they can confide – a number that has doubled in the last two decades. (On the good side, family ties are strengthening.)

Because I feel busy and sometimes overwhelmed, I have a tendency to say to myself, “I don’t have time to meet new people or make new friends.” But that’s not true. I do have time, and making a new friend is tremendously energizing, not enervating.

I did something similar last year but did it with my old friends. I updated my contact database and then made a point of connecting with at least one old friend a week. It was a lot of fun and a worthwhile exercise. I also started more actively using LinkedIn (which will be covered in a future post) to keep in touch with people I'd worked with. Did these activities contribute to long-term happiness for me? Yes, I think so.