You may, like many, believe that your life would be a whole lot less stressful if it weren’t for all the people. This is especially true when life is getting on top of us, and we don’t have the time, money, or energy to devote to our friends.
Some of the most significant changes we face as a society today are cultural; changes to our social world and the way we interact with one another. Our social relationships are based on habits of altruism, reciprocity, commerce, physical attraction, and procreation. Our need to be close to others socially results in the unpleasant by-products of jealousy, rivalry, hurt feelings, suspicion, and competition for an increased social standing.
The people that we see daily constitute much of our social world and are implicitly categorized into groups like, family, friends, coworkers, service providers, and professional advisors. These categories are further subdivided. Your family may include your immediate family, your extended family, relatives you look forward to seeing and those who you don’t. There are your coworkers who you will go out and have a beer with after work, and those you wouldn’t.
An added complexity to your social relationships are the contextual factors that have to do with your job, where you live and your personality. As you learned in Chapter 6, categories are often more useful when they have flexible, fuzzy boundaries. Your social groups benefit from this greatly. The concept of “friend” will depend on how far you are from home, how busy your social life is, and many other circumstances.
Organizing Our Social World
Unlike our ancestors, whose social groups changed slowly, it has become increasingly difficult to keep track of all the social details that you need to know in your head. Cognitive neuroscience says that we should externalize information to keep our minds clear.
This is why many successful people keep contact files with contextual information, like where they met someone new, what they talked about, and who introduced them.
While organizing your social contacts in this way may seem like a lot of busywork, keeping this information nicely organized will allow you to have spontaneous interactions with others that will be more emotionally meaningful.
One practical solution for staying in touch with a vast array of friends and social contacts is using a tickler. A tickler is a reminder, or something that tickles your memory. It works best as a note on your calendar. You set a reminder for every month or two to check in with friends. When the reminder goes off, you send them a note, text, phone call, or Facebook post to check in. After doing this a couple of times, you’ll start to settle into a rhythm and begin to look forward to staying in touch with your friends.
Externalizing memory doesn’t have to be in physical form like a calendar, tickler file, key hooks, or index cards, but can include other people as well. You may call on your spouse to remember the name of the restaurant you liked in Denver or call a wife’s friend or children if you’ve lost their cell phone number. The part of external memory that includes other people is called transactive memory and includes the knowledge of those in your social network who might possess the knowledge you seek.
A large part of organizing your social world successfully, is being able to identify what you want from it. For most of us we want to feel like we fit in somewhere and are a part of a group. Having a social network fulfills a deep biological need and activates regions of the brain that help us to position ourselves in relation to others.
It also activates emotional centers in our mind that help us to regulate emotions. So, how can we stay on top of all the things we need to do?
Prioritize
The first step to organizing your social world is to prioritize your calendar. If you have a busy social schedule, you may often feel overly stressed and put upon to participate in activities even when you don’t have the time or inclination. However, there comes a time in life where you just can’t do everything you want to do. This is when you have to start pruning your social network and start prioritizing.
At the top of your priorities should be your partner, children, and immediate family. If you’re having a hard time turning down invitations, then you need to remind yourself that you need to spend most of your time and energy on your family. This doesn’t mean you have to cut off all contact with your friends. All it means is that you might decide to accept only one invitation to spend time with friends a week.
Dunbar’s Number is the number of contacts that we can realistically maintain relationships with. He puts this number at somewhere between 100-250, with ‘150′ being the most commonly quoted figure. In reality, you can probably only maintain about ten genuinely close relationships before you become overwhelmed.
Get Rid of Frenemies
With Dunbar’s Number, you don’t have enough room in your life for people that aren’t really friends. These are the people that you may tend to count as friends but that you don’t actually enjoy spending time with. These are the friends that constantly let us down and that we complain about with our other friends.
As you get older, you don’t have time to keep people in your life that you don’t enjoy being around. It’s time to put these people aside and focus on those people that you really enjoy spending time with and who are there for you. By just removing some of the unnecessary people from your life, you’ll be able to spend more time and energy on those who deserve it.
Limiting Facebook
Facebook is one of the largest culprits for many when it comes to stress, procrastination, and overwhelm. Not only does it take up a considerable amount of time by giving us something to browse through randomly, but it can also lead to stress and depression through what is called ‘social comparison theory.’
Then there’s the fact that Facebook allows us to keep in touch with people we no longer know, and no longer care about. While you might think that deleting Facebook is the best way to deal with this problem, in actuality you merely need to focus on streamlining your profile.
The first thing that you’ll want to do is get rid of the Facebook app on your phone. Not only does it take a lot of juice to run, but it also continuously send you notifications and messages that aren’t all that pressing.
Next, you want to go through your friend’s list and delete those contacts that aren’t really your friends. People you went to Kindergarten with, people you met at random parties and people who you don’t like can all get removed. When it comes to your news feeds, unfollow those people that you don’t really want to see.
Taking these simple steps to streamline your Facebook profile will allow you to make better use of the site without the stressful, distracting, and time-consuming elements.
Organizing your social life will not only free up your time and energy to devote to the more essential things in your life, but it can also help you to reduce the information overload that you are subjected to on a daily basis through the site.
