You won’t be able to cover everything, but something is better than nothing

Things I discussed with friends this week, in no particular order: our dating lives. The nursing strikes. Someone’s life-altering breakup. The parties we went to on Saturday night. The novel Fleishman Is In Trouble and its forthcoming TV adaptation. Whether someone was likely to get a job they’d interviewed for. A house move. How to support a mutual friend going through a bereavement. The sunny weather. The impending birth of someone else’s first baby.

The brevity of the calls wasn’t an impediment to important conversations. In fact, it made us more likely to skip the small talk (I maintain that sunny weather isn’t small talk in the UK in February) and get straight to the big stuff. In future, I won’t feel the need to carve out half an hour to talk to a friend – I’ll know that I can feel connected to them after a quick chat while walking to the Tube.

Even short phone calls will make you feel good

All the conversations I had this week lifted my spirits and made me feel closer to my friends. This tracks with what research tells us about the benefits of phone calls. That previously mentioned 2021 study found that voice-based interactions, including phone calls, created stronger social bonds than text-first communication such as instant messaging. In a separate study published the same year, people who had brief phone calls a few times a week experienced “rapidly reduced” levels of depression, loneliness and anxiety compared with people who didn’t receive a call.

Plumbly says connecting with good friends is “really protective” for our mental wellbeing, even if we can only spare a few minutes over the phone. “When someone’s depressed, [many therapists] would look at ways [that person] can reconnect with their friendship groups and social circle,” she says. “Connecting with our social group is a really good way of closing the stress cycle.”

In The Good Life: Lessons From The World’s Longest Scientific Study Of Happiness, Waldinger and Schulz observe that “a few adjustments to our most treasured relationships can have real effects on how we feel, and on how we feel about our lives. We might be sitting on a goldmine of vitality that we are not paying attention to.” My brief phone calls this week gave me a genuine boost. It was as though my pilot light was being ignited, warming me from within and creating a glow to power me through my week. I won’t be ringing my friends every day, but I will call them more often. Who knows – one day, I might even convince Oscar to pick up.

“I called my friends for 8 minutes a day to see what it did for our relationships”