Improved Lives

In my post on positive emotions being a means to personal growth I mentioned a few different ways to create more positive emotions in your life, and one of those ways was by changing your social network to include more positive people and less negative people. This study on obesity demonstrates the importance of who is in your social network in a very real way.

If a lot of people in your social network are obese, you’re more likely to be obese:

A person’s chances of becoming obese increased by 57% if he or she had a friend who became obese in a given interval. Among pairs of adult siblings, if one sibling became obese, the chance that the other would become obese increased by 40%. If one spouse became obese, the likelihood that the other spouse would become obese increased by 37%. - Christakis and Fowler

But obesity is not the only thing that spreads in social networks:

We also have found in our work that things beyond obesity and smoking cessation spread in networks. Happiness spreads in networks. If your friend’s friend becomes happy, it ripples through the network and can make you happy. We have found that depression can spread, and drinking behaviors can spread, and the kinds of foods people choose to eat can spread. - Christakis

Who your friends are, who you choose to spend time with, these things really matter. You are very much the product of your environment and who and what is in your environment has huge impacts on your personal growth, or lack thereof.

If you want to be successful and happy surround yourself with successful and happy people.

Further Reading:
- Photo Credit
- The Spread of Obestiy in a Large Social Network over 32 Years (pdf) by Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler
- Edge Video of Nicholas A. Christakis (to get to the video scroll down a bit)

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