How Relationships Feed Your Brain
By Jill Suttie
By now you’ve probably heard that your relationships are key to a long, happy life. Research keeps confirming their importance over and over again. But why is that? What is it about our relationships that make them so central to our lives?
According to neuroscientist Ben Rein’s new book, Why Brains Need Friends, it comes down to our brains. As he explains in the book, that grey matter in our heads is exquisitely optimized for social connection, and our relationships keep our brains (and, therefore, ourselves) healthy and happy.
“The human brain has been shaped through evolution to reward us for connection and punish us for isolation,” he writes. “As such, we have so much to gain from socializing, and arguably even more to lose without it.”
How Our Brains Respond to Socializing
Our brains tend to release three neurochemicals in response to socializing, all of which play a role in making us want to connect, writes Rein: oxytocin, serotonin, and dopamine. Oxytocin earns the moniker of the “love” or “tend and befriend” hormone because of how it stimulates the reward center of our brain when we’re with loved ones, which helps us feel good.
Oxytocin offers more than a warm glow feeling, though — it also has positive health effects. Oxytocin has been found to reduce stress, anxiety, and inflammation, and to be neuro-protective and support healing from wounds, writes Rein.
“Thanks to the restorative nature of oxytocin, love may offer systemic benefits for our health and well-being,” he writes.
Oxytocin also triggers the release of the other two chemicals, which have their own benefits. Serotonin augments the good feelings you get from social encounters, while dopamine (implicated in learning) motivates you to want “more of the same” — which in this case means more social contact. Its release during pleasurable social encounters helps us to want to seek out more socializing.
This reinforcing system has evolutionary roots, says Rein, because it’s linked to safety and reproduction — our two strongest biological drives.
Empathy and Mimicry
Rein goes on to explain other ways our brains assist us in socializing. One is through emotional contagion, an element of empathy that can attune us to another person’s feelings. We are built to resonate with others’ feelings, he writes, which helps us to better understand them, feel in sync with them, and care about them.
We unconsciously mimic each other’s facial expressions when we’re with them, grimacing or smiling when they do, for example. In this way, you’ll feel a bit happier when someone smiles or cringe if you see someone else cringe.
“Our bodies are stocked with powerful and sneaky systems that guide our emotions beneath our awareness,” writes Rein. “The muscles in your face do more than help you express emotions. They also help you understand and take on others’ emotions.”
While empathy often develops naturally over time, sometimes people’s brain chemistry or negative experiences will hamper that process, says Rein. Fortunately, though, he adds, we can become more empathic through certain practices, like meditation or compassion training.
“When you take on someone else’s pain, you become more motivated to step in and help them, because you feel bad,” he writes. “Sure, empathy can hurt, but what would we be without it?”
Brains Can Also Interfere With Connection
While we may be built for social connection, that doesn’t mean we always seek it, though. As Rein notes, we live in a world that sometimes makes social connection more difficult, whether that’s due to our over-reliance on technology, changing expectations for family and community life, or pandemics that keep us isolated from one another.
And that’s a problem when it comes to our brains. To enhance communication and understanding by making the most of our brain’s strengths, says Rein, we need in-person interactions, which are superior to video-chatting, phoning, or texting for making relationships work.
“After experiencing less ‘lifelike’ interactions (like texts or phone calls), people tend to feel lonelier, sadder, less affectionate, less supported, and less happy than after interacting in person,” he writes.
While we need to socialize, we also have a biological need for safety. That means our amygdala (the part of our brain that alerts us to danger) can be active (a little or a lot) when we encounter uncertain situations, including social ones. Our amygdala is alert to potential threats, keeping us from feeling comfortable around people who aren’t predictable (who aren’t, for example, part of our “tribe”).
Rein recounts the many research studies showing how bad we are at predicting the outcomes of socializing. We tend to underestimate how much we’ll enjoy a conversation and overestimate how likely we’ll be rejected by someone else. By going over these studies, Rein hopes to encourage us to go beyond our fears or assumptions and engage in conversing more than we think we should — even those of us who are introverts.
“Your unique combination of nature and nurture may determine how much pleasure your brain experiences from being around others; but at the end of the day, everybody needs social connection,” he writes.
“Division is the enemy of brain health,” he writes. “To construct a society in which we truly choose and prioritize connection, I believe we must identify these barriers and address them head on.”
Our brains are counting on us to do so.
This article originally appeared on Greater Good, the online magazine of the Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley. Click here to read the original article.
