Psychology: 4 Ways to Make Your Closest Relationships Even More Strong

psychology
4 ways to make your closest relationships even stronger

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Relationships with loved ones are like the foundation of our life and happiness. You can read here how we can maintain it and possibly improve it.

According to Harvard Professor Robert Waldinger, our relationships with our friends, relatives, and partners are the key to a happy, healthy, successful life. How we can strengthen and improve these relationships even more is what the psychologist Mark Travers has for the online portal Psychologytoday compiled on the basis of current research results.

4 ways to make your closest relationships even stronger

1. Treat yourself well

Self-love and self-confidence are the prerequisites for being able to love and trust other people – most of us have probably heard or read somewhere. Recent research, first published in the Journal of Positive Psychology have now even shown that certain techniques from the field of lifestyle medicine and positive psychology can have beneficial effects on our relationships.

Specifically, based on their research in the field of lifestyle medicine, the authors recommend paying attention to basics such as eight hours of sleep per night, a healthy diet and 10,000 steps per day. With regard to positive psychology, it makes sense to take around 15 minutes a day to think about things that went well, to specifically compliment another person and to consciously forgive people who have hurt us.

2. Common goals

According to RelationshipHealth Report 2020 Stable relationships that have survived the corona crisis safe and sound, for example, are characterized by the fact that those involved pursue common goals and work together to plan and plan something for the future. In relationships that were particularly stressed or broken during the pandemic, this aspect seems to have been largely absent. According to the study, it is just as important to spend quality time together in the here and now. But shared visions of the future and goals towards which we work together apparently strengthen our connections like hardly anything else. After all, they often also help us to experience quality time in the here and now – while we dream together and shape our future.

3. Show commitment and appreciation

As a study with around 11,000 couples found, the likelihood that we will have a long, stable partnership, the greater the certainty we are of mutual commitment and mutual appreciation in our relationship. And that can also be applied to friendships. Reliability and respect build our trust and motivation to get involved in a relationship. Actively showing interest in the life of the other person, if necessary taking the effort to be there for this person, can be small levers with a big effect for a friendship, partnership or family relationship.

4. Appreciate and respect differences

As a study among around 31,000 participants has shown, there are still noticeable differences between men and women in terms of their personality traits. But even if we are of the same gender: Every person is unique. There will be differences in all of our relationships and points on which we will disagree. Consciously accepting these instead of belittling them and trying to ignore them promotes respect and acceptance between us. And thus strengthens our relationship in the long term

Sources used: psychologytoday.com, Global sex differences in personality: Replication with an open online dataset, Machine learning uncovers the most robust self-report predictors of relationship quality across 43 longitudinal couples studies, An interdisciplinary mental wellbeing intervention for increasing flourishing: two experimental studies, Relationship Health Report 2020

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Brigitte