[Book] Friendship: The Evolution, Biology and Extraordinary Power of Life's Fundamental Bond by Lydia Denworth

 

“Friendship marks a life even more deeply than love. Love risks degenerating into obsession, friendship is never anything but sharing.”―Elie Wiesel

This is the second book I've read this year. The first book is Malay and insyaAllah I'll write about it on my Malay Blog. I bought this book at Bookxcess Tamarind Square, Cyberjaya. The title caught my attention as I was about to leave the store. So, I bought it. For me, this book is good. The only problem maybe it is full of researches and findings by professionals, I found it quite hard to understand all the scientific and technical terms. But overall, I could understand the main point that the author want to convey, the importance of friendship in our lives. Here are a few points that I highlighted in the books;

• social relationships, or the relative lack thereof, constitute a major risk factor for health - rivaling the effects of well-established health risk factors such as cigarette smoking, blood pressure, blood lipids, obesity and physical activity [House et al., 1988]
• Loneliness was a convenient, helpful way of assessing a fundamental need of human existence, that we are bred to connectedness, we are bred in connectedness, that we cannot avoid it and that to the extent we have those needs thwarted we are going to pay the price [Hawkley, 2018]
• Social buffering is a way of describing the protective, positive effect of one individual on another. It describes the power of one person to reduce another's stress
• Happiness is slightly more contagious than unhappiness. Each additional happy friend boosted your cheeriness by 9 percent, while each additional unhappy friend dragged you down by only 7 percent. The more links you have in your network - the larger your wider social net is cast - the happier you will be [Christakis & Fowler, 2009]
• With friends our attention becomes focused, distractions lessen, awareness of time disappears: we emerge into a world which the intimacy and joy shared with others is the fundamental reality, and for a time the world becomes a different place.
• it took between 40 and 60 hours to move from acquaintance to a casual friendship, from 80 to 100 hours to call someone a friend and over 200 hours of togetherness before someone rated as best friend [Hall, 2019] 
• Those who spent the most time on social media were twice as likely to feel lonely, and those who visited social-media sites most frequently were more than three times as likely to have higher perceived social isolation [Primack et al., 2017]

There are many other interesting information like the researches done on different animals to study their connections and 'friendships.' Most of the findings stated that animals also need to form some sort of friendship to thrive better in life. That's all for today's entry. I'll write again when I feel like it. See you when I see you then...