The 5 Friend Theory: Uncover The Type You're Missing & Unlock Your Dream Friendships
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Why do we feel lonely even with friends?
Even though I have friends, I still feel really lonely sometimes. And I know that's a big thing that you guys struggle with as well. You'll write to me and you'll tell me how lonely you feel, but that you're not sure why or what to do about it. So I dove into the research around friendships and loneliness. And it turns out that there are five specific types of friends that we all need. And if you are missing even one of these friends, your brain is literally wired to feel lonely no matter how many friends that you might have. So today we are going to go through all of the five friend types and we're going to get into exactly how to make the friends that you might be missing. Welcome to the Liz Moody podcast, where we share real solutions that fit into your actual life to the trickiest problems so that you can feel as good as possible every single day.
I'm your host, Liz, and I've been a journalist for two decades. I love diving into the research. I love the actionable, pragmatic tips you can apply to your life. So my very first question was, what are we actually getting from our friendships? There was a meta-analysis of 148 studies looking at over 300,000 people, and it showed that we are 50% less likely to die if we have good friends. That is wild. The impact of having strong social relationships on our health is literally bigger than obesity. It is equivalent to quitting smoking. So I was like, okay, clearly friendship is important, but what is specifically happening? Like, how is it having this effect? And what I realized when I dove into the research is that there's a number of specific mechanisms by which friendships are having this impact on our bodies and on our brains.
And because of that, I came up with the five specific types of friends that are going to have these impacts. So there are scrapbook friends. There are expander friends. There are eras friends. There are last call friends. And there are anchor friends. And here's the key. If you are missing one of those, you're going to feel an impact even if you have the other four. This is the reason why you can feel like you have all of these friends, but you still feel lonely because you are missing the type of friendship that has that specific impact on your brain and on your body.
What are the five specific types of friends we need?
To start off, I want you to picture a graph in your head. So on one side, we have the levels of friendship, the depth of friendship. talked about this in an earlier episode, that's going to go from the creation era friend. I think even as I say that, you're probably like, I kind of know what that means. Creation era is at the beginning of a friendship where you're still kind of learning about each other. You're learning preferences. You're learning what's okay to say and what's not okay to say. And then that's going to go up to the cozy era. That is when you can sit in silence with this person. You get to be your whole unedited, complete self. So that's one axis of the graph. The other axis of the graph is these five types of friendship.
So for all five types, you can be anywhere from the lowest level of friendship that we just met, we're just discovering each other, all the way up to the deepest level of friendship, the cozy era of friendship. You can go all the way from creation to cozy era in any of these five types. The first type is what I call scrapbook friends. These are your friends that are the holders of your memories. These are the friends from childhood or from high school or from college. These are the friends where you get together and a lot of what you're talking about is from the past. Like you're like, oh my God, do you remember when Jack got really drunk at that party? I'm gonna be really honest with you. This is a type of friendship that I used to feel really nervous about.
I was constantly trying to take scrapbook friends and move them into another category because I was like, oh, it's really not good that our relationship is just based around memories. We shouldn't be just sitting around and rehashing the past.
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Chapters
5 chapters
1
Why do we feel lonely even with friends?
0:00–2:08
2
What are the five specific types of friends we need?
2:08–5:44
3
How do friendships impact our health and identity?
5:44–14:58
4
What are scrapbook friends and why are they important?
14:58–25:06
5
How do expander friends influence our lives?
25:06–36:32
Speakers
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