The hidden power of just one conversation a day…
Monday, July 24, 2023. Fascinating new research is explaining the healing power of words of meaningful discourse on the human nervous system..
The hidden power of just one conversation a day…
New research claims that you can measurably improve your well-being with just one “meaningful conversation” per day.
But what was noteworthy was the low bar for defining “meaningful.” It seems that just one conversation with another human per day is sufficient to boost measurable happiness, and lower detectable stress levels, according to breaking research.
This research confirms earlier similar findings from 2018.
How the study was conducted…
Researchers in this study included over 900 students who were told to engage in one of the following 7 modes of communication:
Catching Up on Recent Personal Events.
Meaningful Talk with an Exchange of Useful Ideas and/or Information
Light-Hearted Kidding and Joking Around
Showing Care and Concern Appropriately.
Listening With Care.
Valuing Other Humans and Validating Their Opinions
Offering Sincere Compliments to Other Humans.
The study subjects had one intentional conversation from one of the above categories each day.
And at the end of the day, the study volunteers reported their levels of anxiety, well-being, stress and how lonely they felt at day’s end.
The results were very interesting. Research showed that it was the predictable regularity of a daily conversation that was more essential than the mode of conversation.
Professor Jeffrey Hall, the study’s first author, said:
“One of the take-home messages of this study is that there are many paths toward the same goal.
There’s a lot of good research that says the number of interactions you have as well as the quality of interactions are both associated with being a less lonely, happier and more connected person.”
Quality conversations
Indeed, the researchers found that the more quality conversations people had with each other, the more their well-being was boosted.
Professor Hall said:
“This means 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 better you felt at the end of the day.”
Because of the study’s experimental design, it strongly suggests that meaningful conversations cause the uplift to well-being.
Professor Hall said:
“The experimental design means that it’s not just people who are already having fulfilling lives who have higher-quality conversations.
This study suggests that anyone who makes time for high-quality conversation can improve their well-being.
We can change how we feel on any given day through communication. Just once is all it takes.”
Face-to-face is better
People who communicated face-to-face got a an even greater boon to their reported level of happiness than those communicating electronically, Professor Hall said:
“If at least one of their quality conversations was face-to-face, that mattered.
Across these three studies, quality conversation mattered most for connection and stress.
This supports the idea that we use communication to get our need to belong met, and, in doing so, it helps us manage our stress.”
RESEARCH:
The study was published in the journal Communication Research (Hall et al., 2023).
Quality Conversation Can Increase Daily Well-Being
Jeffrey A. Hall https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8252-3184 hallj@ku.edu, Amanda J. Holmstrom https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5054-735X, […], and Daniel Totzkay+2View all authors and affiliations
