Live Longer - Reduce Stress

Do you want to live a longer, happier, healthier and more fulfilling life? Well get involved in the world!

The more you are connected to others and try and help others the more you will help and develop yourself.

Experts and academics continue to stress the importance of social interaction, because we need social interaction to nourish our development at different stages of our life. If a person remains isolated from their family, peers or anyone in their community, then it becomes much more difficult to learn necessary social skills. These skills allow people to interact and establish good relationships and support networks with others around them. People who are isolated from others usually suffer from boredom, low self esteem, low motivation, and poor job performance, as well as many other consequences - physical, emotional and psychological. This will mean that you are more likely to have a negative outlook on life.

Some of the ways in which social interaction helps to reduce stress:

• Understanding our world and forming our own views and opinions requires interaction with people from all around the world. This social interaction also helps shape our identity and our concept of the self, therefore avoiding any internal conflicts which can lead to stress.

• Social support can also help to develop our coping and reasoning abilities, and thus our ability to cope with stress and anger. Having social supports in your community is very important as it offers an outlet for which people can share their concerns and help lift the burden off their shoulders. For example, if anger management is important to you or if controlling your anger seems too hard to do on your own, it would be very beneficial to have adequate and culturally appropriate services in place in your local community. These could act as social supports for people who have concerns related to stress, anger, violence or abuse. These services can be an anger management program or an anger management class, and can also include the provision of anger management counseling.

We are born to interact with others, and the more we seek the positive company of like minded people the happier our mind will become.

"Human beings are intrinsically, necessarily and by definition social beings who - beyond being gregarious creatures - cannot survive and meet their needs other than through social cooperation and association" - Karl Marx