THE FAMILY YOU CHOOSE

BREAKING: This practically guarantees to lengthen your life, improve your memory and ward off disease. Can you guess it?

Friendship! It's no secret that it feels goood to have a close-knit circle, but research links social connection to overall well-being. This includes strengthening your mind.

Study after study shows that strong social connections are a brain's best friend. That said, along with providing an immediate mood boost (gotta love that), your lunch date with friends provides long-lasting benefits. High-quality friendships not only protect against dementia, they also do so for up to fifteen years.

What's more...a tight social circle could even trick your brain into thinking it's younger. Of course, maintaining an overall positive attitude helps, but only one variable makes a vast difference across age, race, gender and education: high-quality social relationships.

With friends, think fewer, think better. Sure, cultivating friendships takes time and effort...the greater the quality of a relationship, the greater its benefits. It's not just about having a bunch of friends, it's all about having friends who will be there for you---friends who are respectful, supportive and sensitive.

And although we live in the digital age where plenty of us having hundreds, even thousands of social-media "friends", keep in mind that digital interactions don't provide the same emotional glue as real-life ones do. For example, opening up to a friend in-person typically increases intimacy. Although on the contrary, disclosing an emotional dilemma via Facebook actually does more harm than good on the relationship. It's common knowledge that our social media ties tend to lean towards superficiality. Imperative relationships are close, intimate and meaningful. In other words, think face time...not FaceTime.

Think you've drifted apart from an existing friend? Hitting them up for a coffee date may be all that's needed to right the course. Opening up lines of communication does wonders, along with sharing your feelings. In this way, there are good chances that the friendship will last.

So goes the friendship, so goes the long life.

#healthyliving