How important are they?????

Well, in continuation of my previous blog of Sustaining Happiness…..

Don’t you think ??????? For a person who is hungry for days just one meal to satisfy his hunger means happiness to him, for a sick person, health brings happiness, for another its money or fame. The list can go on and on and may be never ending.

Happiness has many definitions and the reason can be different for each one of us. It’s an emotional state associated with feelings of joy, satisfaction, contentment and fulfilment. And there are many ways to achieve happiness and remaining in that state for a certain duration, again depends on each one of us.

Even though there are innumerable keys to happiness. I would like to share one of the keys here.

That one key to happiness is OUR SOCIAL RELATIONSHIPS....

Having said this I feel during this pandemic we may have come a lot more closer to our immediate family members but in some way or the other distanced ourselves from many of our social connections or extended family. And what we can do now is to work on those connections and make an effort to reconnect with the old ones and connect with new people.

According to psychology. The most important characteristic that differentiated happy people from others was their strong ties to family and friends and their commitment to spending time with them. The happiest people were most likely to say that they have good friends, had a happy childhood and supportive parents. In other words they were more satisfied with their friends and family and were more socially active with everyone around in a positive way.

But what we need to understand here is that happy people are not happy or super happy all the time. Although good social relationships did not guarantee happiness in every group and it is not a single ingredient in the recipe for happiness. And we might have had our own share of unhappiness or other issues with people around us. But we humans are social beings and isolation was and is used as a form of punishment.

In general what I mean is …. Satisfying and meaningful connections with people seem to have a correlation with happiness. It is not the number of social relationships that we have, not the number of contacts in our cell phone or the number of facebook friends that we have. It’s rather, having people that we can count on and confide in when in trouble, people who treat us with respect and people who we feel comfortable with…..

Happiness means being our own self around people who bring out the best in us....

That’s what actually matters and that’s what Social Relationships should be all about.

Don't you think so ???????????????