How to control your stress levels: connect to people

In October I promised to write some posts on what I belief are ingredients to control our stress levels.  First of all I believe we need to learn to make more choices.  Almost as importantly,  we need to learn to embrace imperfectionism. When confronted with stress, we need to re-energise by planning activities that re-energise us. 

In the last year I've also been thinking about the importance to connect to people.  Real connections, real conversations that are honest and authentic.

We all need someone that knows us, to whom we can in all honesty say "it's not going so well" at this moment, someone who listens.  And even if things go well, I guess we can build up our resilience by having strong connections with people. 

Since we must all make choices and all our time is limited and much in demand for so many activities, sometimes it is hard to maintain our friendships. I know my friendships have suffered from motherhood but also for my need of peace and quiet regularly. But I'm trying to maintain my friendships a little better lately now that I am out of the baby phase. I probably still suck in being a very good friend but it's my working point. 

With my previous jobs, I've travelled a lot and spent a lot of time in hotels, often with other colleagues. Spending many evenings in restaurants etc, created friendships that I thought would last. But with each job change I've learned that these contacts evaporated very quickly much to my disappointment.  With my current employer I told myself there were no true friendships among collagues...not that you can't have pleasant conversations etc but I didn't expect anything lasting.  Until I read an article this Spring about the normal evolution from friendships in the different phases of our lives...that it is normal and ok that friendships come but also go and that it was fine and purposefull for the time there were there. It made me rethink things. At the same time I was on a training where building our networks  and building trust was also a topic.  So last year I tried to build stronger relationships, build more trust by investing in the connections at my work.  For the last months I've taken out every so many weeks a colleague for a lunch outside the office where we don't talk work and it's fun. 

The last year has been tough but I've also been very open about that to anyone who cared to listen. I've cried with friends, I've cried at work, I've said that I had a hard time etc and my experience was that people are empathic, caring and listening.  And it feels good to express yourself and talk in good times but definitely also in difficult times. 

When I talk about "connect" to people, I'm not just talking about collecting as much social contacts as possible.  There's been good documentaries on tv lately on loneliness and Samaja wrote about recognizing the feeling of being eenzaam sometimes, despite many social contacts.  I guess in the times of social media, we stay in touch with so many more people more frequently than in pre-digital times. We might have the illusion to know what's going on, that we don't ask anymore how we are really doing.  Maybe we don't ask enough and listen enough to the stories that are behind the posts or that do not appear etc.    And that needs trust.  And to build trust we also need to offer trust and a listening ear to others.  Having a few good friends (we don't need many) , probably means we first of all need to be a good friend. 

I think I've lost the structure in my post a little (ha, that's not the first time) but my point is: we all need true connections with true conversations. We need to give and receive empathy.   Let that be our new year's resolution.