By Gwen Rockwood, newspaper columnist and mom of 3
If you opened my text messaging app and scrolled through it, there’s one question you’d see repeated over and over again, year after year, between me and my best friend: “How’s your nervous system?”
As friends often do, Shannon and I are continuing conversations we started years ago. The origin of that question about the nervous system stems back to a conversation we began in 2022. After listening to a podcast interview with Dr. Lisa Feldman-Barrett, a neuroscientist, I called Shannon because I’d just heard something so absolutely true that it reverberated all the way to my bones: “The best thing for your nervous system is another human. The worst thing for your nervous system is also another human.”
The message underneath that paradoxical quote is that humans are caretakers of each other’s nervous systems. And ironically, we need human friends to help us regulate our nervous systems after we get irritated, inflamed or exhausted by other humans.
It’s one of the many reasons it’s important to choose friends carefully and to nurture those friendships like your life depends on it. Because, in many ways, the quality of your life does depend on it. Friends are powerful. They can both break our hearts and help us put them back together when someone else has done the breaking or the world has handed out too much hardship.
Marriage and family bonds are also incredibly important, but friendships often become so essential that your closest friends are the ones who celebrate your best moments and hold you up through the hardest ones.
Ever since that phone conversation about the neuroscience of friendship, Shannon and I often start phone calls, dinner conversations, or text messages like a doctor checking in on her patient: “How’s your nervous system?” That’s our shorthand for skipping over the chit-chat and going straight to what matters. It’s how we remind each other to tell it like it is, no sugarcoating necessary. And we know the other will listen, support and, when necessary, soothe. It has been a balm for rattled nerves more often than I can count.
I’m not the kind of person who can walk into a room full of strangers and leave with five new friends. A childhood spent as a shy girl still rears its hesitant head from time to time. What I do have, however, is the blessing of long, deep friendships that have spanned decades. Today I came home from a three-day weekend spent with three friends I made in junior high school who have since become my oldest, dearest buddies. Though we don’t all live near each other, we talk on a long-running group text and on occasional FaceTime calls.
Even though it had been three years since our last reunion, this one picked up right where we left off. Suddenly, I felt 16 again, cruising around with my besties, eating cupcakes and staying up way too late just to keep talking and laughing. It was exactly the kind of soul medicine my nervous system needed most. And it reminded me that we all need a safety net woven together with the love of family and friendships that go the distance.
Cartoonist Bill Watterson, who created the syndicated comic strip “Calvin & Hobbes” about a little boy and his stuffed tiger buddy, summed it up perfectly in one simple quote: “Things are never quite as scary when you’ve got a best friend.”
Here’s hoping we all take a moment this month to check on our friends’ nervous systems and to allow them to shore up our own when we need it.
Gwen Rockwood is a syndicated freelance columnist. Email her at gwenrockwood5@gmail.com. Her book is available on Amazon.
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