Do virtual friends help our health, too?

Under Friendship

When this New York Times story popped up on my screen yesterday, I was immediately drawn in. The article, a compilation of studies and scientific opinion on how friendships fuel our well-being in marked and sometimes tangible ways, falls right into my own area of interest. I’ve researched, written, and read with great interest for years about how our social connections help us recover from illnesses, injuries, and trauma. And I’ve certainly been there, felt the fierce support of my own friends during the toughest of times.

But something else struck me about this article, with its 743 comments that streamed down my stream. I was reading it in the news feed of my Facebook page, there with the status updates, blog posts, breaking news, and mundane details of the hundreds of friends I meet there every day.

Later, I saw a link to the article posted on Twitter. A few minutes after that, I saw the link “re-Tweeted” and more links of posts by bloggers responding to the findings on how friends may help us heal quicker, age slower, feel better, and maybe even live longer.

The synapses were firing. What does it mean to think, not just how critical our friendships are to our health, but also to think about how social networking, message boards, and other online advances are making our circle of friends grow so expansively and with such intense speed?

One expert quote in the New York Times article says that friendships impact our psychological well-being even more than our family relationships. Another researcher who focuses on single people and friendships echoes that, noting that many studies have shown friendships are more impacting on a person’s health than their relationship with a partner or spouse. Finally, a study of 3,000 female nurses with breast cancer revealed that although having a spouse wasn’t associated with the patient’s survival, having close friends was. The results here are astounding, showing that the women without close friends were four times more likely to die from the cancer than the patients who could count ten or more friends.

The studies themselves are fascinating, and I love considering how my tribe — the girlfriends I call to laugh about a bad date or text pictures to get an opinion of an outfit I’m wearing or with whom I can spend hours and hours re-telling the same old high school stories — are directly impacting the health of my body, brain, and belief I can survive even the gravest diagnosis.

I also am curious how all the people in my new(er) online tribes — all the virtual friends on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, in the comments sections of the blogs I read, on the message boards I’ve belonged to for years — are also factoring into my well-being. Do all these virtual friends — even the random person I had a semester of chemistry with or my mother’s friend’s stepdaughter — count when it comes to being a healthier, happier, more-likely-to-survive human being?

I imagine that Heather Spohr would say, perhaps emphatically, that virtual friends do count when it comes to well-being. Heather Spohr is the mother of Maddie, who died suddenly ten days ago at the age of 17-months old.  Heather blogged about her journey in mothering the prematurely born Maddie, and updated her experiences on Twitter up to the point when Maddie was surprisingly intebated in the hospital. The grief and shock of Maddie’s death quickly swept Twitter, Facebook, and many other mommy blogs,causing the Spohr’s own site to crash and many others to repost updates on her behalf.

Then came the well-wishes from Jimmy Fallon, Demi Moore, and many others known widely among parent bloggers. Soon followed donations to help cover funeral expenses and avatars shaded purple in support of the Spohr family’s commitment to the March of Dimes. For days, the Spohr story was painfully, hopefully, warmly all over the Internet.

Did all this virtual talk take away the awful loss Maddie’s parents were (or are) feeling? I don’t see how it ever could. But the outpouring from people who the family may have never met in person must have felt (or perhaps soon will feel) like a nod of understanding from across the room.

One of the advantages of having virtual friends is that we have access to each other all the time. I know that one of my best friends cannot take calls at work, and that I must factor in the time zone when I try to get a hold of another friend on the left coast. But my blog friends, my Facebook friends, my Twitter friends, they are always accessible. Someone is always out there to follow or send a message to or ask a question, even in the desperate hours of 2 a.m. or from my BlackBerry in the doctor’s office waiting room.

A disadvantage is that those friends only know what I type out. My virtual friends might know that I am cooking up quinoa for lunch, but my offline friends remember who I took to prom and how truly fabulous/crazy my family is. Catherine Connors speaks to the teetering balance of blogging through health heartaches and fear in a post up today on her blog, Her Bad Mother. In her own raw, honest, and beautiful words, she admits that sharing those experiences can be both a lifeline and too much. That’s a valid point, don’t you think? That the outpouring can aslo be overwhelming.

These are interesting questions to consider, especially when we aren’t facing a tragedy or suffering a loss or dealing with a diagnosis, but when we are just moving through our daily lives both online and off:

How are our friends not just making our lives better, but helping us live?

And does it matter at all if our friends are nodding at us from across cyberspace or right here, holding our hand?

Does every friend count when it comes to our health and wellness?

What do you think? How have your friends helped you stay or get well?

Is technology adding to or detracting from the support your friends give?

[photo credit: Getty Images]

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What about you? What do you think?