060. You Need a Friend

Speaker A: Welcome to the Therapist burnout podcast, episode 60.

So today, today on the podcast, I am going to do a little focus on friendships and why, therapist, you need a friend.

I hope that if I’ve been in your ears for a little bit, that you consider me a friend in some way.

But I know that this is an important issue, so I want to dive into that. My mind was just blown, I think, a couple weeks ago, hearing a podcast on friendships and the importance of why we need them.

So just to back up, I have been focusing this month a little bit on mental health, on therapist mental health. And I’m shocked, y’all. I am shocked by the dearth of resources for therapists who are struggling with their own mental health issue.

I put a post on LinkedIn just to see is there like a hotline or somewhere we can call or any kind of resources online?

I really didn’t find much. I mean, there’s some stuff on burnout, there’s some stuff on vicarious trauma, but not really. There’s not really a lot. There’s hotlines for, like, nurses and doctors and cobblers. No, I’m kidding.

But you would think that in our profession that we’re thinking.

We’re thinking about all these different groups, right? And so my focus is thinking about you. And, yeah, I. I think part of it also. I alluded to this on my last episode. So if you didn’t hear my last episode, a lot of vulnerable shares from me.

That episode felt really vulnerable. I’m not going to lie. I know that I am really open about my mental health and my mental health struggles, and I see a therapist and all the things.

Uh, but I think it was like talking about my depression that I talked about in my last episode. So check that out. That’s 59. Are you burnt out or are you depressed?

Got all the insights there. Because I was just sharing last week that at the top of this year, I thought I was burnt out again. Turns out I was really depressed and, you know, got some support for that. Feel like I’m really doing a lot better. And I think one of the antecedents to that was feeling disconnected. Right. So if feeling down and blue and alone and isolated and lonely is how depression feels, feeling connected and loved and having meaning in your life is the other side of that and also going to be vulnerable today.

Just it’s going to happen.

I want to talk about friendships and connection, I think in the context of the lens of you who are still working as a therapist and you needing your own relationship, your own Friendships and your own connections as an individual.

So I have heard, and I’m sure most of you have heard this study. The first time I heard about this study was probably in a suicide awareness training, and I was just shocked. I. I was like, literally shocked about the effect size.

So in the Hunt Lunstead study on mortality, they looked at various different risk factors for mortality. Some of those were smoking cigarettes, like smoking in excess of 20 cigarettes a day, the quality of your social relationships and other factors like drinking, like doing your cardio, your cardiac rehab, like if you had a cardiac event, things of that nature.

And this study, so it looked at how friendships protect us in part by changing the way we, we respond to stress.

Blood pressure reactivity is lower when we talk to a supportive friend rather than a friend whom they feel ambivalent. That’s directly from that study that, you know, I think we’ve all seen, right?

We’ve all seen this research, and it showed that people with strong social bonds or percent less likely to die over a given period of time than those who have fewer social connections.

I think one of those risk factors was smoking cigarettes. And so if you had strong social connections, you’re doing better than the person who is smoking in excess of 15 cigarettes a day. So if that’s a stronger protective factor, then we can all smoke cigarettes and drink now.

Right? Just kidding.

But really, I think, you know, it highlights just the importance of social connection. And I think we’re all feeling our patterns of disconnection in modern, modern life. Last year, I talked about anxious generation and how the ways in which we’re connecting are so different from connecting socially in person.

There was already an, a loneliness epidemic before social media and, and the advent of the smartphone. But since then, people are not social socializing in the same ways that they were before.

So tying this kind of back to friendships.

Where I started in this conversation was I just remember working as a therapist, and I feel like the prescription for many of my clients was that they needed people in their life, right?

They were lonely, they were sad, they felt like they didn’t have anyone that knew them. And that was kind of the crux of what they needed in their life. Yet it felt like they couldn’t get into patterns of connecting people.

And honestly, in the pandemic, that hit me very, very hard. So I’ve talked about this a lot on the podcast, but as therapists in the therapy room, we are pretty isolated, right?

So therapy work in. It is in itself isolating.

And also, we, especially those of us who are in solo practice or were in solo practice, go our whole day without seeing someone that we’ll see in the outside world. So if we don’t really connect with anybody outside of work, we have a reduced ability to be able to make connections in our life.

So I was listening to the Mel Robbins podcast. I just started listening to that, and I love her new book, Let Them Theory. I don’t know if you guys have heard of it.

It’s basically radical acceptance. But you know what I love is that non mental health clinicians and podcasters and people that write these books, they distill our ideas into like two word things and the public grabs onto that like it’s something new, but really they’re basing it off of psychological theory or things that we have great deep expertise in, but we can utilize that. And clients will maybe come in and say, have you heard the let them theory? And I’m like, that’s radical acceptance. Or I’m trying to think of another parallel.

Oh, there was a coach that I liked her stuff and I was like, oh, I was good. I want to like, get into her stuff. And I’m like, you are packaging CBT as like the panacea for all the world.

And part of me would be mad at that. But now the way I’m seeing it is when people can make something sticky in our minds, that that’s a great thing.

And so I just know that I have nuance behind that discussion. So in her book, Let Them Theory, it’s basically like, you know, like, if people don’t, like you, let them.

If people don’t call you back, let them.

And so if I think of radical acceptance, I’m like, yeah, I’m just going to let them do that. I’m just going to accept that that’s, that’s what happened. That’s the choice.

And she kind of says, let them and let me. So I have to, you know, let me still initiate relationships with people. Let me still do these things. And just a nice vulnerable story because it’s great to share these.

So I, I’m a fitness instructor. I’ve shared about that before in the podcast and I teach all kinds of classes now. I teach a form, a format called warrior rhythm.

I’ve talked about that before. Basically, it’s like everything in fitness you’d want into a little ball. So it’s a little bit of yoga, a little bit of cardio, a little bit of weights, a little bit of this and that, and also teach weight training, things like that. But I got into group fitness. Because I loved dance. I’ve always loved to dance and I loved Zumba. And so back when the Zumba craze kind of came out in the early 2000s, I was Zoom being my way across the gyms and all the places.

And I, I moved here to Maine and I had to find a Zumba class because that’s what I, that’s what you do. You gotta find your Zumba class if you’re.

I don’t do Zumba anymore really. But it was my thing, probably in my late 20s and early 30s, is I had to get to Zumba class. And there was this one instructor and I don’t know, there’s this thing like when you, when you’re into a class and the instructor kind of feels like, cool. You know, they’re like the cool person. And I really liked this instructor. She’s probably one of my favorite Zumba instructors ever.

And I try to fend. Maybe I just friended her on Facebook or maybe I, I don’t know if I gave her my number. I don’t think I even did that.

I think I just tried to friend. Friend her on Facebook and she didn’t respond to it, like, ever.

And yeah, I felt, I felt salty about that in some ways, but I also felt rejected.

And my mode. So if I before in friendships was I try once and if you don’t lean in, if you don’t reciprocate that I bounce them out.

No, not going to put myself. My neck out there and just get rejected.

And it’s just so funny because I feel like that becomes. And you know, one of these. Another book that I’ve been looking into around this topic of friendships is Platonic.

So it’s the science of, I don’t know the whole title of Platonic. I talked about it last week. I’ll link that again.

But that’s what Dr. Dr. Marissa Franco wrote Platonic, which I haven’t read yet. But I listened to her talk on EPA’s website and loved just her thoughts around friendship.

And I think that happens, right? We, we, we attempt to get to know people as an adult, but we don’t see them enough. And so going back to Mel Robbins. So start talking about I’m squirrely today.

It’s a squirrely episode.

So going back to, to Mel Robbins, she had on her podcast and she called, she, she talked about friendships, right? And I love this conceptualization of friendships. She’s saying it’s hers. I don’t know if it’s hers. I couldn’t find this term the scattering. So perhaps it’s her.

She. She coined it. So I will also link her podcast, which was great. So I am kind of summarizing my thoughts on this.

So she was talking about how when we grew up in school, like, friendship is just baked in, but right. We are on the same trajectory with our classmates, so they are going through school.

We spend hours and hours and hours a day with these same people. So we have exposure. We have similar interests. We are in the same life timeline as our friends in school.

And something happens when we, you know, first there’s a great. So you call. She calls like what happens in her 20s as the great scattering. So when we leave school, essentially all of our friends scatter and we start our working lives.

And at work we kind of wonder like, well, why don’t I have a work bff?

Because perhaps they aren’t the same timeline. So I think of the person I work with in the schools that I work in, and they are in a very different lifetimeline.

They don’t have kids the same age, they don’t do the same thing, and there’s someone else else in my life stage, but I don’t live in the same town. So oftentimes there’s kind of these barriers to friendship that we don’t think through.

And so understanding a little bit about friendship can be helpful. So Mel Robbins talked about, you know, when we’re in school, friendship is a group sport. We always see our friends.

We’re always around people that we know. And it just seems like it will always be that way. We have our parents plan play dates for to get our friends together, even after school, which is what I do, which feels like a lot of work, by the way.

I will have to say I don’t remember my mom ever.

No, maybe she did, maybe she did plan, but I don’t know because I had a, I had a landline and I feel like I was just like, mom, I’m going to go to, you know, Susie’s house.

Can you, can you like, call her mom and make sure that’s okay? So even I’m like pre doing the planning, whereas I am some like a million text threads trying to text parent of my, my son’s friends trying to figure this all out, which then adds to my overload of things that are on my list.

Anyway, so kids have their, their parents like planning the play dates. And you know, I, I thought about that after listening to that podcast and I was like, what if I put that much effort into planning My own playdates with my friends.

Would I.

Would I have better results?

Probably.

Probably.

But I’m more motivated to do it for my kids, right. Because I want my kids to have good friends. I want them to be connected to their friends. But it’s like, we need that.

That same level of energy, and so for our clients. So when I had a client with physiological depression, I just found it so difficult because I know they don’t have the energy to do that, but they need that, so the thing they need, they can’t do.

And I felt like my hands were tied. And I think a lot of times in today’s day and age, we feel like it’s so much work, right. Because there’s that other research on friendship about the number of hours that’s required to make a friend.

So in an article by Jeffrey hall in the Journal of Social and personal relationships in 2019, he talked about the amount of time that it takes to form a friendship. And I think he. He indicated that casual friendships can emerge around 30 hours, followed by friendships around 50 hours.

And good friendships begin to emerge after 140 hours.

So it just.

I think whenever I heard that amount of research,

I just felt like it was literally hopeless for me to make a friend in today’s day and age, and especially with feeling more disconnected after the pandemic. So, you know, I think the scattering, for me, I definitely felt those. Right. There’s a great scattering in your 20s when you leave school and your friends kind of scatter all over the place. So your friends from high school, friends from college.

And then also, you know, I had a cohort with my grad school, and so that was a lovely time. We were all on the same trajectory. And then literally, because as a psychologist, you have to go on internship, and typically that’s all around the country.

So we went on internship and literally scattered across the country.

And I keep up with one of my classmates from grad school, but not more than that. Except, you know, Facebook just feels like, I don’t know, some kind of creepy way to, like, see what people are doing, but not doing. I don’t really post on there anymore anyway.

But, yeah, so it just had me think whenever I read the research about that I’m going back to the scattering. Right? And, you know, I. I feel like I got a little more connected with people when my kids were very small. So I had a couple of friends that I would do things with when my kids were small.

And I wasn’t working very much, but I was tending to young children and so then there was another scattering when school started for my kids, right when I had a friend move away.

And I guess I felt like in some ways that was the theme for me, right? That I was the only one that experienced this.

And I think hearing that, it’s normal. It’s normal for adult friendships to kind of flow in and out of our lives. So I had a close friend during that time.

When my. My son was young, he had heart surgery. And it was a lovely friendship. And I don’t talk with her anymore. And part of me was very sad by that.

And of course it’s sad, you know, when we have a friend move away or we have a friend that’s no longer in our life. But I think one thing that Mel Robbins said is that we just have to be more flexible in adult friendships.

We have to let people come in and out of our life and rekindle relationships. You know, our friendships still are there, you know, so if you have a friend from the past, they are still available to you.

They’re. You’re still able to rekindle that. And perhaps you’ve spent that amount of time with them, you’ve spent that 140 hours or 200 hours to be close friends with them, yet you just don’t see them anymore.

And so there’s potential there to think through texting someone, like literally putting in your phone to text someone once or twice a week so that you can feel that sense of connection.

And so what she talked about was three pillars of friendship that we. To think about. We have to do. So. The first is proximity, and that’s very well known that we connect with people who are closest to us.

So with the,like, romantic relationship data, but also for friendships, like, the person has to physically be near us so that we see them in some context. So maybe we see them at the gym.

Maybe we see them in different settings. I. My patterns of connection or my patterns of relationships are in my work life. So I work in a school, and I also play tennis.

So I see my tennis friends often.

And I also teach fitness classes. So those are my. My people. So people in my proximity is. Or people that I should be thinking of.

And I think sometimes we’re. If someone goes out of our proximity, right, if they move away or if they stop taking our fitness class or they stop playing tennis. I had that happen where I had a really good friend in the pandemic, and we got together once a week and played tennis for an hour and a half and talked for two hours.

And I Feel like probably over the pandemic, we probably got to that like at least 50 hour mark where we could call each other friends,

but maybe not to that 200 hour mark where maybe we’d be called close friends.

And so part of me felt, wow, I invested all that time and then they stopped playing tennis. And they also had a scattering of their own. Like they, you know, changed their relationship structure and started doing different things.

They got a dog and so they weren’t in my proximity anymore. And I internalized that. Right. So if I internalize, oh, they just don’t like me. That’s not necessarily true. They just were no longer in my proximity because their life circumstances change. And I’ve seen that person. I’ve, you know, it was lovely when I saw them like we hugged.

How have you been? I’ve missed you. It’s been so, it’s so great to see you.

So just thinking through that like adult friendships are different and also giving this information to your clients, right. That trying not to take a push to see this like adult friendships do take a different lens.

So the second is timing or life stage. So it may not be the right, you might vibe with this person at work or you want to get along with them, but they’re in a different life stage than you and that’s not possible.

And that’s why you’re not work BFFs.

And the third is energy. Like we can’t force the energy. And I think of that Zumba instructor friend, I guess her energy wasn’t my energy, even though I thought I had great Zumba energy. Maybe it just wasn’t the energy she wanted or needed. And that is fine.

And to just notice like, hey, sometimes someone will be like they will meet all those things but it’s not the right energy that they have for you.

So I just want to reinforce that. Research suggests that friendships can be made and maintained at any age. Relationships with friends can strengthen or stand in for romantic relationships. Even minimal social interactions can be powerful.

So there’s some really great research on minimal social interactions. So the interactions that we actually have at like the grocery store can be meaningful to our health and can impact our health and outcomes.

And this is from an APO article, the Science of why Friendships Keep Us Healthy.

So in a review of 38 studies, they found that adult friendships, especially high quality ones, provide social support and companionship, significant and significantly predict well being and can protect us against mental health issues such as depression and anxiety.

Across our lifespan, people with no friends or poor quality friendships are Twice as likely to die prematurely and again in Hunt Lundsed’s Meta Atlantic meta analysis of more than 300,000 people, a risk factor even greater than the effects of smoking 20 cigarettes a day.

And I think they also talked about the risks. So Americans are definitely getting lonelier. In 2020, 1, 12% of adults said they did not have any close friends, up from 3% in 1990.

That’s huge. That’s a huge increase.

And that was before the pandemic. I’m just giving you the research that I knew in my brain but didn’t have it in front of me. I’m glad it’s internalized. How about that?

And social disconnection, which is rising across age groups, appears to have worsened after 2012, when smartphones and social media became virtually ubiquitous. Ubiquitous.

So just going on the strength of weak ties. So having someone close to us is good for us, but those interactions with acquaintances and even strangers can give us a mental health boost.

And my personal example of this is going skiing. So this past week, oh my goodness, the wind was so high. I don’t know if you guys, at the time of this recording, it’s February, and in the US There was such high winds that a plane landed and it, it flipped on its.

On its side. And I, my family and I happened to be up on a ski vacation and I did not choose to get on the chairlift that day because the winds were so high.

But I’ve enjoyed just being in the lodge at a ski resort or at the ski hill. I live in Maine and so there’s lots of little mountains where people ski.

And I just find people are very lovely, they’re chatty, they want to talk to you.

And I had wonderful conversations almost every time that I go skiing and choose not to ski.

And so I know my partner probably thinks that I’m not having fun, but I actually really enjoy going to the mountains and just talking to people. It’s interesting.

This is super interesting. So people often avoid conversations with strangers, assuming they will be awkward or shallow. But research suggests that those worries may be overblown.

So in a so psychologist Nicholas Epley found that conversations with strangers tend to be less awkward, more enjoyable, and more connecting than people expect.

To their surprise, people also tend to prefer having deep conversations with strangers or shallow ones.

So, yeah, some advice for connecting with strangers is tap into your curiosity.

Ask someone what they’re reading, for example, or why they’re wearing earplugs or airplane earrings or wearing earrings. There’s actually that makes me think of The. The person that I go to the store here wears, like, ketchup earrings or like, you know, random cool earrings, and I’ll always compliment them.

A big point is that we tend to see friendship on romance as separate entities, but the two maybe have more in common than we realize.

So psychological research points to qualities such as chemistry, intimacy, and warmth as building blocks for a close, stable friendship. And I think that goes with kind of Mel Robbins, like, the energy or the chemistry.

Sometimes we may not have energy or chemistry with a particular person, and that’s okay. That’s normal. And in relationships that we need that to connect.

Also, romantic relationships may be more fulfilling. They look more like friendships. So in an analysis of 8,000 respondents to the British household panel study, it showed that life satisfaction was about twice as high among people who said their spouse was also their best friend.

Oh, I consider my spouse my best friend. Yay. Okay,

I could. I could read your research all day, but I will leave you with that. I. So what I hope you’re taking away from this conversation is, number one, we need more friends.

We know our clients need more friends. And I think, thinking through these pillars of connection, how do we connect with people? Like, it’s proximity, it’s timing, it’s energy. It’s that chemistry. And Dr. Franco also talks about, like, we have to have initiate, and we have to create some initiative as adults to have friends.

And for my clients who are therapists, if you’re burned out, it’s hard to have that energy and have that initiative. But we know from some of this research, but even these micro moments of connection are really important.

Mel Robbins really talked about, you know, starting. Maybe starting to go to a coffee shop and remembering the name of the barista. You know, writing down in your notes, app of your phone the name of the barista and say, oh, hey, I remember if you lost time, you’re, you know, Danny, and you play drums. I don’t know whatever they’re doing. So you just try to remember and say that. And some of Dr. Franco’s book, she talked about complimenting people goes a long way. So if you like someone’s hairstyle or someone’s shirt or someone’s shoes, compliment them. And that is a social lubricant.

People really respond well to compliments. So when in doubt, compliment and. And, you know, really empower your clients as well with this information. Because I think part of the burden clinically I felt from my clients was feeling like I was their social connection, and I can’t be their social connection.

And that felt like a big burden to me. And so maybe empowering them with some of this knowledge and yourself, because I know therapists tend to be disconnected because of their work, that I hope that you can start to feel more connected in your life. Reach out to me. So if you haven’t joined the pen pal list, I write back.

So I would love to hear how you’re doing and how this is resonating and if you need support. So right now I have a program. It’s called Leaving Therapy.

At the time of this recording, I don’t have spots open until April, so I’m closed right now. But I hope to have some opening soon. So if you’re listening to this from a different time, you can certainly check out my website. And I’m excited just to.

To help therapists start to find different things. So I work often with people who either want to leave therapy or they’re done doing as much one to one. So figuring out, like, how do I feel alive?

Like, how do I feel connected? Like, this is why I’m bringing this to you, because I know how burnout feels, and I know that you need to feel like a human, like you’re connected, like you’re alive, like how we were meant to feel.

And I know sometimes they’re in the role as therapists, we don’t feel that.

And I desperately want that for you.

Okay, I’m not gonna cry.

No, you’re crying. No, I’m crying. Okay. Have a good day. By.