The Benefits of Friendships for Young Adults
This month we will be focusing on friendships! As a young adult, friendships can fill your heart with joy, give you insight into who you are and who you want to be, and make for some incredible memories. They can also rip your heart out, cause you more drama than you imagined, and make you wish you could transfer schools.
We’re going to talk about it all- and most importantly, we are going to talk about how you can navigate friendships and emerge feeling confident about not only yourself, but how you treat others.
So let’s kick it off this week with the benefits of friendships.
Friendships play an important role in how we develop our identity, from what we enjoy doing for fun (and don’t enjoy) to what we desire from our relationships (and where our boundaries lie)- and so much more. Let’s explore…
Friendships help you figure out who you are and who you want to be.
As you make friends, develop connections, and even have relationships fall apart, you will learn more about your values, interests, identity, and beliefs. Interacting with others, seeing how they see the world, seeing what their inner lives are like- all of these can help you figure out what feels right for you, and what doesn’t.
You will find that some people just feel “right,” while others don’t convey that same feeling for you. When you feel safe, supported, and comfortable with someone, it can help you realize what you need from relationships, which is invaluable information for life!
Friendships provide the comfort of inclusion and belonging, stress relief and emotional support.
With healthy friendships, you can blow off steam, let your hair down, and be your true self. You can reach out when you feel stressed and overwhelmed, whether for a listening ear or someone to come pick you up so you can get a change of scenery.
Feeling valued and accepted by your peers helps boost your self-esteem and confidence as well.
Friendships help reduce anxiety and depression and promote positive mental health in general.
It doesn’t require a big friend group to feel these benefits, either! Simply having one or two close friends that you can trust and count on to be there for you can reduce feelings of loneliness and isolation, contributing to better mental wellness.
Friends can also help you achieve more! If you happen to choose friends who are active in extracurriculars, you are more likely to want to participate in more activities as well. Hang around with the smart kids? You may discover you suddenly care a bit more about working hard to achieve better grades!
Friends can help you become more independent.
Simply becoming close with those outside your own family helps you to begin to develop an identity outside your family. Becoming more independent and autonomous is an important developmental step in being a young adult, and friends can help you begin to move in that direction.
Additionally, friendships provide opportunities to make decisions and learn from your experiences without your family there, meaning that it’s up to you to figure out how you want to handle situations- including challenging situations like whether to try substances or engage in dangerous behaviors. Choosing wisely in those moments can help you develop maturity and responsibility, as well as confidence in your ability to take care of yourself when needed!
Friendships teach you how to care for others and develop social skills.
Learning how to listen to another’s story or struggles is a life skill that helps you develop empathy and realize that healthy and thriving relationships will involve give and take. Not only are these social skills essential as you move through life and navigate relationships from college to family to work, but being someone who feels confident in your ability to support another person boosts your self-esteem. Kindness feels good, and healthy friendships offer the opportunity to be kind and help the other person as much as they help you!
And an important note about popularity!
One thing that is important to understand: popularity is not necessarily (or often) correlated with mental wellness.
Having lots of people know you superficially is not the same as having deep and meaningful connections with a handful or even one or two people.
In the end, it will always be better to feel truly seen by even one person than to be “popular” with many, but truly connected with none of them.
In the end- friendships benefit us in the same way all healthy connections benefit us.
Friends are the family you choose, yes. But all healthy connections help us to develop greater empathy and trust, healthier immune systems through lowered stress and cortisol levels, and a happier, more optimistic, more positive outlook overall.
We want you to feel connected and have healthy friendships!
In our workshops we offer a safe space to meet new people or to dive deeper and connect more meaningfully with people you may already know!
In addition, we have a club at Carmel High School that’s devoted to spreading the message of positive mental wellness and reducing the stigma around talking about our stress, sadness, and overwhelm- because we ALL feel it from time to time!
Get on our email list below to be sure you know when the next workshop is, or follow our Insta, also below!