I promised in a post a few weeks back that I’d be inviting more guest bloggers to join me on my blog and I’m happy to welcome Dr Jill Flint-Taylor. Jill is a Director at my University spin off company Robertson Cooper and heads up the London office. Jill has a wealth of experience to share with you and specialises in the areas of leadership development, employee engagement and well‐being, as well as helping organisations to attract, retain and develop the best talent. I hope you enjoy her post and as always please comment if you find it interesting.
Thanks for joining me Jill!
Dr Jill Flint-Talyor
Social networks
I know what you’re thinking – yet another article on the proliferation of social networking sites on the internet! Well, I guess I do want to talk about the effect of sites like Facebook, MySpace and Bebo – but as part of the bigger picture of what social contacts can do for our personal well-being. Establishing and maintaining strong social relationships is one of the ways we can increase our ability to cope with stressful situations in a resilient way. This makes perfect sense – we know that “a problem shared is a problem halved”, and we also know that socialising with our friends can help us to take our minds off our worries.
But this raises a number of questions. Is it the case, for example, that people who are more extraverted are more resilient, because they have a larger social network? Does online social networking bring the same kind of benefits for our well-being as meeting up with our friends in person? What happens to our social networking – online and in person – when we’re under pressure? These apparently simple questions are really quite complex and I won’t claim to be able to do them justice here. But let’s have a quick look at each of them in turn.
Taking the question of extraversion and resilience, over the years a number of studies have found that people who are more outgoing, energetic and assertive tend to be more resilient. However, this doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s the size of your social network that counts. The key to this aspect of resilience is more likely to lie in two important factors. Firstly, the strength of the relationships from which you draw your social support and secondly, how good you are at keeping contact when you are very busy or stressed.
The last point relates directly to the question of what happens to our social networks when we’re under pressure. The research on depression shows clearly that many people withdraw and focus inwards when severely depressed, even if they are normally friendly and sociable. In terms of resilience, this creates a circular problem – being depressed causes us to withdraw, which in turn has a detrimental effect on our ability to draw on the social support that could help us to come out of our depression. Something similar happens if we are stressed, and this effect is compounded if the stress is caused by overload at home or work, because time constraints make it even more difficult to keep up with our friends and colleagues.
So what about social networking online? Does it help that it’s easier to fit this into a busy day – making it possible for us to stay in touch with our close friends? Or do we become too reliant on “relationships” where most of our contact is with people we hardly know and where contact with our close friends becomes so superficial that they’re not there when we need them? This is a fascinating new area of research and I’d like to come back to it in more detail in a future blog. For now, I’d say that the use of social networking sites must be a good thing if it helps us keep in touch and make new friends in an increasingly busy and fragmented world. But as with all things, the key is a strong dose of common sense, and we need to make a conscious effort to keep the right balance between online contact and meeting up with our friends in person. There’s no question that a few very strong friendships are worth more in terms of meeting our needs for social support than a large number of “friends” who don’t know us well and have no reason to really care about us.
