Did you know healthy bonds actually have a physiological effect on your body? Social connections that make you feel secure are essential for mental health, resilience, performance, and well-being. Try out the practices below to help you build relationships that make you feel safe and relaxed in multiple ways.
- Supportive community. Finding others you relate to helps lower stress hormones like cortisol and activates your body’s relaxation response. It’s important to find a community that makes you feel safe and valued because chronic social stress, like conflict or isolation, can harm your health in the long term.
- Enhanced social connections. Strengthened bonds can boost positive emotions and levels of safety and trust. The practices below also can create a positive feedback loop within your relationships, optimizing your stress and promoting well-being.
- Healthy boundaries. Creating spaces for balance helps you define physical and emotional limits within your relationships. Connections that induce chronic stress may activate the sympathetic nervous system, which can cause a spike in heart rate, blood pressure, or alertness, also known as “fight or flight mode.” Establishing boundaries can regulate stress exposure and help your body find balance.
The practice
Time needed: Varies by individual
Supportive community
A safe and supportive community gives you the foundation to build strong social connections and activate your body’s relaxation response. Leverage military resources, focus on unit cohesion, volunteer, or join groups with common interests and ideologies to nurture your circle. Go beyond close family and friends, and try to put down roots with team members, coworkers, neighbors, and casual acquaintances to optimize your social health. Check out the resources below to start building your community!
Get Involved in Your Community to Boost Your Social Fitness
Military Community Resource Finder
Military Community Support Programs
Enhanced social connections
Once you build your community, focus on strengthening the relationships within it. Work on improving your communication skills and showing more appreciation and respect in your relationships. Use the techniques below to help foster and strengthen your bonds.
- Actively listen and respond. Good communication is the key to building strong connections! Practice active listening—by giving the other party your undivided attention and engagement—to create mutual trust and safety in your relationships.
- Be open. To deepen connections, be willing to share personal experiences, thoughts, and feelings. Speak from the heart to encourage others to open up too, creating mutual vulnerability and understanding. In addition, the enhanced connection can trigger the release of oxytocin, a brain chemical that promotes relaxation.
- Express gratitude. Appreciating others boosts positive emotions, strengthens connection, and supports the relaxation response by creating a sense of calm and safety.
- Check in consistently. When you can, check in with your circle. Even a short, quick message lets someone know you’re thinking of them and fosters mutual positive feelings. Doing so also increases their perception of your reliability, improving mutual feelings of safety and trust in the relationship.
- Keep things low-key. While structured and planned activities can build great relationships, casual time together often builds the most relaxed, real connections.
Check out these resources for more on team building, trust, and connection!
Create Healthy Team Environments
How Teams Build Trust for Peak Performance
Interpersonal Skills to Optimize Effective Military Teamwork
Healthy boundaries
Setting boundaries in your career and personal life can be a balancing act for some. Since Service Members are typically required to be operationally ready and willing to prioritize the mission at all times, boundary setting requires a more nuanced approach. First, identify areas in your life where boundaries can be set. Then, decide what those limits should be and communicate them clearly to others. Here are some easy steps to get started.
- Identify where you need boundaries and determine if your situation allows for flexibility. Set clear, specific limits and communicate them to whom it applies. Here are a few examples:
- If a teammate tends to speak negatively about someone else, you could say, “I’d rather not talk about Sam that way. Let's stay focused on our task.”
- If a family member tries to pry when you’re stressed, you might say, “When I’m anxious, I need some alone time to work through things. I can open up after I have some time to collect myself.”
- Stay consistent with your boundaries and reassess when needed. If you need to adjust based on personal or work events, that’s okay! Your boundaries are meant to support your functioning and well-being, and aid in strengthening connections, so tweak them to find balance.
- Reinforce boundaries when they’re crossed. If someone doesn’t respect a boundary you set, calmly remind them. It might take a few reminders, especially if the boundary is new, so be patient but stay firm. If it’s still problematic, seek support from a counselor or chaplain.
Maintaining boundaries can help you feel more secure in relationships as they build mutual trust and respect. There will be moments in high-pressure environments where boundaries can’t be firmly set. For example, your boundary may be disregarded because of a particular mission or an order. During these moments, lean on other relaxation response techniques, safe social connections, unit cohesion, and dedicated recovery periods to get you close to your optimal zone of functioning. Here are a few that might be especially helpful.
- Journaling. When a boundary is ignored, you may feel frustrated and disrespected. Expressive journaling is a healthy way to vent and let out any emotions.
- Self-talk. You might feel uncomfortable when a boundary is ignored, but self-talk can help you reframe the situation. You might say to yourself, “It’s okay to feel uncomfortable, but you got this. Let’s finish the mission, John.”
Breathing. When a boundary is ignored, it can trigger a stress response. Use a breathing technique to quickly recalibrate, regain clarity, and soothe your nervous system.
