Friends, Family and Your Health

Life Support to the Soul

As I write this, I am in the thick of losing my daughter to a long-term battle with alcohol.

I have a broken heart.

With that, sure there is gratitude for the time we had and the gift of motherhood. To be candid, though, none of that gratitude is helping me cope right now. It hurts all the time.

What is helping me is the love, prayers and effort of friends and family to walk alongside me.

Having a community that supports you is crucial to managing difficult things in life. Human beings were designed for community. As an empath, it has taken me many years to find the people to help me carry my burden. Empaths like me can be busy-bodies because we care deeply about others. Often, I would choose people more for what they needed from me than anything else. This emptied my tank much of the time and that affected my chronic pain and energy.

Here are the physical and emotional benefits from community support on your health:

Emotional Support and Stress Relief

Friends provide comfort during hard times, which reduces stress hormones like cortisol.

• Health Impact: Lower stress reduces the risk of heart disease, high blood pressure, anxiety, and depression.

  Encouraging Healthy Behaviors

• Good friends can motivate you to eat well, exercise, avoid smoking, and go for medical checkups.

• Health Impact: This peer influence helps you maintain better physical and mental health.

  Boosting Self-Esteem

• Supportive friends make you feel valued and confident.

• Health Impact: High self-esteem is linked to lower rates of depression and better coping with illness.

  Longevity

• Studies show people with strong friendships tend to live longer.

• Health Impact: Social interaction improves immune function and reduces the risk of chronic diseases.

Over the next several months, I will occasionally touch on addiction of various types since it affects every family regardless of status or background or genetics.

We live in a culture that breeds individualism and isolation.

What seems to help people push themselves toward lives of meaning and recovery is realizing they are not alone and have support.

If you or someone you love is struggling with an eating disorder, studies show having a nutritionist on the recovery team makes the difference in recovery.

Grab a time on my link “free introduction” (below) to talk about this privately.

Remember we are all BIOINDIVIDUAL, what works for one does not work the same for another.

For more info on packages and classes with Angie’s Real Food look here:

https://angiesrealfood.com/