Stop Making Me Fat!

(This is my favorite photo of me and some of my closest friends.)

(I'm pregnant in both of these photos, but they show a lot of happiness!)

The other day I was feeling a bit glum because I had been trying to reach a good friend and she hadn't returned any of my calls or emails. Sometimes stuff like that bothers me, but other times it's no big deal. I stewed on it a couple of days and kind of let it get to me. Then, I decided it was silly to let some unknown explanation cause me to be down. I don't know what it was exactly that helped me to feel better or to just "let it go," as the saying goes. However, I haven't felt down since.

Now, I may have the answer. It's here. To sum it up, ('cause it's a rather long, but well worth the read 'cause it's a fascinating article) it may not have been my fault that I was glum. Perhaps it was because my neighbor's daughter had a bad day that I was feeling a bit blue. No, I'm not joking. There's a theory called the "'three degrees of influence' rule about human behavior: We are tied not just to those around us, but to others in a web that stretches farther than we know." In other words, the effect we have on other people doesn't disappear until three people later. Kind of hard to understand in the abstract, but here's a good example:


"Smoking, they discovered, also appeared to spread socially — in fact, a friend taking up smoking increased your chance of lighting up by 36 percent, and if you had a three-degrees-removed friend who started smoking, you were 11 percent more likely to do the same. Drinking spread socially, as did happiness and even loneliness. And in each case one’s individual influence stretched out three degrees before it faded out. "


AND


"But how, exactly, could obesity or happiness spread through so many links? Between one immediate peer and another, some contagious behaviors — like smoking — seem pretty commonsensical. If lots of people around you are smoking, there’s going to be peer pressure for you to start, whereas if nobody’s smoking, you’ll be more likely to stop. But the simple peer-pressure explanation doesn’t work as well with happiness or obesity: we don’t often urge people around us to eat more or implore them to be happier. (In any case, simply telling someone to be happier or unhappier isn’t likely to work.) Instead, Christakis and Fowler hypothesize that these behaviors spread partly through the subconscious social signals that we pick up from those around us, which serve as cues to what is considered normal behavior. Scientists have been documenting this phenomenon; for example, experiments have shown that if a person is seated next to someone who’s eating more, he will eat more, too, unwittingly calibrating his sense of what constitutes a normal meal. Christakis and Fowler suspect that as friends around us become heavier, we gradually change our mental picture of what “obese” looks like and give ourselves tacit permission to add pounds. With happiness, the two argue that the contagion may be even more deeply subconscious: the spread of good or bad feelings, they say, might be driven partly by “mirror neurons” in the brain that automatically mimic what we see in the faces of those around us — which is why looking at photographs of smiling people can itself often lift your mood. "


Sure, you could say, oh just a coincidence. Or you could go a bit further and say what's the causation/correlation there? Do we gravitate toward people who share similar interests and that explains why we tend to spend time with people who share our views, our builds, our beliefs? I'm not quite sure myself that I'm sold on the whole idea, but it is fascinating to think about.


You might then say, "Well, I want to be thin, so I'll only hang out with skinny people," but according to the theory that may not be enough right? After all the people you're hanging out with are being influenced by their own three degrees of influence which may be putting pressure on them to eat more.


Another idea that was presented in the article that fascinated me dealt with friendship. I've always treasured friends because none of my siblings are close to my age, so I was raised as an only child. I would say I have a large group of friends that are important to me. I'm very intrigued by people and their decisions. I like to know everyone's story. So, what else did the study find?


"The subconscious nature of emotional mirroring might explain one of the more curious findings in their research: If you want to be happy, what’s most important is to have lots of friends. Historically, we have often thought that having a small cluster of tight, long-term friends is crucial to being happy. But Christakis and Fowler found that the happiest people in Framingham were those who had the most connections, even if the relationships weren’t necessarily deep ones.
The reason these people were the happiest, the duo theorize, is that happiness doesn’t come only from having deep, heart-to-heart talks. It also comes from having daily exposure to many small moments of contagious happiness. When you frequently see other people smile — at home, in the street, at your local bar — your spirits are repeatedly affected by your mirroring of their emotional state."


So, what I'm saying is, let's be friends. But please, watch what you eat, I'm trying to get thin!