Dr's Casebook: Face to face chats are good for your wellbeing

Dr Keith Souter writes: While social media communication was a godsend to many of us during the pandemic lockdowns, this research indicates that good old fashioned face to face chats, to catch up and joke around are superior to social media communications. Especially, conversations where you express to the other person that you are thinking of them are more likely to stave off loneliness and make both parties feel less stressed.

The authors said that the study aimed to define quality communication in the context of relationships. They looked at seven types of communication that had previously been studied to look at how well people bond. These types were – catching up chats, meaningful talk, joking chat, caring talk, listening, valuing others and their opinions, chats offering sincere compliments.

They included over 900 people in the study over five different university campuses, before, during and after pandemic lockdowns. All participants were asked to engage in one of the seven communication types on a single day, They then reported that night about their feelings of stress, connection, anxiety, wellbeing, loneliness and the quality of their day.

They found that it didn’t matter which of these quality conversations someone had. The very act of intentionally reaching out to a friend in one of these ways was what mattered most. They also found that those who chose to have more than one quality conversations had better days. Effectively, the more that you listened to your friends, the more that you showed care, the more that you took time to value others’ opinions, the more content and less stressed you feel at the end of the day.

Most significantly, they found that face to face communication was far more likely to improve wellbeing and de-stress than electronic or social media contact. They suggest striving to have at least one good face to face chat each day.