“I want to have a million friends,” the song read. From now on, we will all want to make that wish come true even more, since, according to a study carried out by the University of Oxford (United Kingdom) and recently published in the journal Scientific Reports , having more friends would make us enjoy greater resistance to physical pain.
The researchers who carried out this study, led by Katerina Johnson, a PhD student in Experimental Psychology at the University of Oxford, wanted to know if having wider circles of friends promotes the synthesis of endorphins, neurotransmitters that, among Other positive effects make us feel pleasure and also relieve pain by acting as a powerful natural analgesic (and, therefore, making us more resistant to it).
The people who participated in the study Pain tolerance predicts the size of the human social circle – 101 healthy young people between 18 and 35 years, recruited mainly from the University of Oxford – filled out a questionnaire about their social life and answered questions about your lifestyle and your personality.
They also had to perform a quadriceps exercise: the researchers asked them to squat with their backs straight against a wall, and the test consisted of how long they were able to support such an uncomfortable posture. The goal was none other than to measure his tolerance for pain . As expected, those with a wider circle of friends held out the longest.
In some way, this study also highlights that it is necessary to take care of human interactions because they are linked to our physical and mental well-being. As Katerina Johnson explains: “As a species, we have evolved to thrive in a rich social environment; and instead, in this digital age, deficiencies in our social interactions could be one of the factors that we overlook and may be contributing to the deterioration of the health of our modern society ”.
