Does Having More Friends Help Boost Mental Health?

Having friends can have a significant impact on one's mental well-being and happiness. It is even much better if these friendships can lead someone to join activities that could help them have better mental health. But forging friendships is not always easy and harder to maintain.

According to Mayo Clinic, having friends could increase one's sense of belongingness and purpose, boost happiness, reduce stress, improve self-confidence and self-worth, help cope with traumatic events in life, and encourage changing an unhealthy lifestyle.

In a recent study, researchers tracked people aged 50 years old and above from 13 European countries for two years to see how friendships have influenced their mental health. The friendships have to lead to joining various activities, such as volunteering, getting involved in religious activities, or participating in sports or social events.

Moreover, they also looked at how the number of friends could be beneficial to a person. They found that those considered socially isolated, having only three or fewer close relationships tend to benefit more than those with a higher number of friends as it did not appear to benefit them at all and sometimes even be detrimental.

Benefits of Social Activities To Socially Isolated People

Being socially isolated could be bad for mental well-being because it is linked to dementia, heart problems and stroke, and premature death. But socially isolated people can improve their health by slowly engaging in formal social activities, Science Alert reported.

However, being socially isolated does not mean not having any friends. These people enjoy the company of three or fewer friends. The study shows that socially isolated people who engage in social activities with their peers tend to show improvement in their quality of life and fewer depression symptoms.

That means that if they regularly engage in social events, the population would see an increase of 5% to 12% of people having a better quality of life and a 4% to 8% reduction in people experiencing symptoms of depression, a substantial increase given that most people in their 50s have three or fewer friends.

Indeed, social activities are a way to build new relationships and provide support by fostering a sense of belongingness within the community.

Mmore Is Not Always Merrier

Although studies confirmed that the more friends you have, is merrier, it is not always true based on the recent study. Like many things, too much is always bad. Likewise, having too many friends could not give the person the healthy mental well-being they aspire.

The quality of life and symptoms of depression are the two variables used to measure if the number of social activities and close friendship matters. The study showed a U-shaped curve, which means that having low social activities is bad while having moderate social activities is good, and having many social activities is also bad.

It seems that depression symptoms are minimized when people have fewer close relationships and engaged in social activities every week. Having more than four to five friends and engaging in many social activities appears to have lessened the mental health benefits that socializing gives.

Typically, extroverts would report having more than five friends in which they pay the price of having low-quality friendships. Extroverts would stretch their time and effort to cater to all their friends, which eventually could lead to poorer mental well-being.

Meanwhile, introverts tend to focus on fewer close relationships, therefore forging higher quality of friendships. In conclusion, having an active social life is good as long as it is done in moderation.