Plays Well with Others: The Surprising Science Behind Why Everything You Know About Relationships Is (Mostly) Wrong

by Eric Barker

body’s natural opiates, endorphins.

they’re a normal process that leverages the body’s natural painkillers in some way that modern medicine did not yet understand.

The placebo effect was about the ritual. It was about the patient’s belief that they would get better. Injections look more serious than pills, so they increase the placebo effect. Brand-names and big price tags scream legitimacy, ergo, more placebo effect.

More empathy, more attention, and more concern from a doctor conveyed the same power.

Think of pain not as a direct effect of injury but more like the “NEEDS SERVICE” light on your car dashboard. It tells you something is wrong and needs addressing. Your body is saying: You need to stop what you’re doing and take care of this.

When someone cares for us, the more attention they give us, the more competent they seem, the better tools they use, the more time they spend with us, the more our bodies notice.

It says, Someone is looking out for us. Backup has arrived. We are safe now. Up to 66 percent of therapy clients say they felt better before they even had their first appointment, just as a result of an intake interview. Help is on the way. I can turn the light off.

it wasn’t just the amount of bad stuff that led to depression; it was the ratio of problems to stabilizers in your life—how much support you received from those around you. Big problems and no support? The chance of depression hit 75 percent.

In the paper “Is Social Attachment an Addictive Disorder?”, neuroscientist Thomas Insel’s conclusion was: yup, our brains are addicted to other people.

Our default is to trust one another. To work together.

“An optimist believes we live in the best possible of worlds. A pessimist fears that this is true.”

but we still need to be needed. Junger wrote, “Humans don’t mind hardship, in fact they thrive on it; what they mind is not feeling necessary. Modern society has perfected the art of making people not feel necessary.”

a 2020 study found that we feel the most support from friends when they’re connected to one another. Feeling loved by five separate pals is less loving than five mutual pals. Friends are great. Communities can be even better.

You lived longer only by spending time with those you really knew and felt close to.

With community comes obligation. But we need the burden, as we need the responsibilities

have gone a little too far in the way of freedom. We want a two-way street because too much control is unfulfilling. We need to share and...

“The more you think happiness is a social thing, the better off you are.” You can get happier. But to rise, you must first think of how to lift others.

Because “irrational” cooperation is what led to our success as a species.

Hey, hold on a second. Nineteenth century. Just like loneliness. Before then, meaning came prepackaged and ready-made. We had stories that satisfied the need for meaning, so we didn’t bother to ask. Then all those new individualistic ideas started taking over. Science bloomed. It gave us better answers about the material world and more control over it,

But it didn’t fill the emotional void it created when we lost our stories of meaning . . .

sense of belonging. In fact, that paper, “To Belong Is to Matter: Sense of Belonging Enhances Meaning in Life,” didn’t just find a correlation. Belonging caused a feeling of meaning in life.

belonging is the meaning of life.

Meaning and belonging have always come wrapped in stories and helped form the ideologies we live by.

As Neal Gaiman said, “Stories may well be lies, but they are good lies that say true things.”

New stories can unite us when the old ones fail to. We can always be a part of the same tribe and share a story of belonging. We have an infinite number of ways to connect if we try. We

That said, we won’t find the meaning of life through scientific theories. We need a uniting story that goes beyond the individual and makes us feel we belong. Mark Twain wrote, “Don’t part with your illusions. When they are gone you may still exist, but you have ceased to live.”