Social Wellness: The Health Metric Nobody Tracks
You know your resting heart rate. Maybe your body fat percentage, your step count, how well you slept according to the thing on your wrist. Here is a number almost nobody tracks: how many real conversations you had this week with someone who is not your spouse, your kids, or your coworkers.
That number is your social wellness, and it predicts your health better than most of the others.
In 1938, Harvard researchers started following a group of young men to find out what makes a life go well. The study is still running, now on its third generation of participants, and after 85 years its director puts the finding in one sentence: the people most satisfied with their relationships at 50 were the healthiest at 80. Not the leanest. Not the fittest. The most connected. The National Institutes of Health says the same thing in plainer terms: strong social ties are linked to a longer life, while loneliness and isolation are linked to poorer health, depression, and a higher risk of early death. In 2023 the U.S. Surgeon General put a number on it: the health risk of weak social ties is comparable to smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day.
The problem is that social wellness is the one metric that gets worse on its own. Nobody decides to stop seeing people. The days get shorter, the evenings start earlier, and the couch wins a few nights in a row until it has quietly won the season.
The good news is that the fix is not complicated. Public health guidance on social wellness comes down to a short list: make new connections, practice the skills that keep relationships healthy, and make your physical activity social. This fall we built the calendar around all three. Here is what that looks like.
Make new connections: borrow someone else’s clarity
Kathleen is a coach and the author of Strength Becomes You, and this fall she is turning the book into a three-part coaching series for women, meeting on Wednesday evenings in Bliss. Ask her what works in the room and she will not point to anything she says, or anything she wrote. After years of coaching women one-on-one, she noticed something the profession tends to keep quiet: put the same question to a group and it gets answered faster. You sit with something you have been circling for months, a woman across from you answers it for herself, and suddenly yours is obvious. That is the whole design. A dozen or so women, one question at a time, and the odd relief of borrowing someone else’s clarity until you find your own.
There is a reason this matters especially for women. The people who spend their days taking care of everyone else are the ones most likely to let their own connections lapse, and the standard advice for caregivers is to take a daily break, keep a hobby, and find a group of people who understand. Kathleen’s circle is all three on one Wednesday night.
The series follows the arc of the book, and each evening stands alone. Finding Clarity on September 23 sorts the voices in your head that are yours from the ones you inherited. Living with Purpose on October 14 looks at what you are already good at and where you have been holding back. Growing in Wisdom on November 18 is about setting things down before the holidays ask you to pick more up. Then Bliss, where the group usually finishes the conversation without her.
Practice disagreeing well: gossip about people who do not exist
Every list of what makes relationships healthy includes the same two skills: disagreeing respectfully and saying what you really think. Almost nobody practices either one. Book club is where you do.
Heather Vroman is a wellness coach and one of our most familiar faces: she teaches Balanced Bodies and leads Contrast Therapy on Wednesday mornings, where the sauna rounds come with a guided conversation and near-strangers end up talking like old friends. On the first Wednesday evening of every month she puts that same gift to work hosting Book Club at Release. Her theory, which holds up: talking about people behind their backs is bad for you, unless the people are fictional. Then it is one of the healthiest things you can do with an evening. Researchers have shown for years that reading fiction improves your ability to read real people. Arguing about that fiction with a table of near-strangers is the advanced class. Was she right to open the box? Do you believe the captain or the mutineers? Which of the four retirees would you trust with your secret? Shared judgment, shared outrage, zero consequences, and by the end of the night you understand the people at the table a little better too.
The evening starts with an hour in Bliss, then Tacoborough at the table. The Measure in October, The Wager in November, The Thursday Murder Club in December. Come with a strong opinion or a half-finished book. Both are welcome.
Sit next to someone calm
One of the most useful findings in nervous system science is co-regulation: we settle faster near people who are settled. It is social wellness at the level of biology, measurable rather than metaphorical. On Saturday, November 7, somatic psychotherapists Brittany Petty and Anne Kulakowski spend an afternoon in the Sanctuary teaching how your body responds to stress and to other people, then put you through practices built on that fact, some of them in pairs. Breathwork, yoga nidra, orienting, gentle movement, and then Bliss. Bring a friend, or come alone and leave with one.
Make your physical activity social
Of everything on the public health list, this is the one with the best return, because it fixes two metrics at once. Exercise you do alone is good for you. Exercise you do with the same people every week is good for you and gives you people. The people who nod at you in week one are the people asking where you were by week six, and that is not a small thing. It is the mechanism.
The fall schedule has more new additions and more variety than it has had in a while, at both ends of the day. Early risers have Contrast Therapy with Heather on Wednesday mornings, guided sauna and cold plunge rounds done as a group, where it is a lot harder to skip the plunge when the person next to you just went. People who cannot make mornings now have Cycle and Strength with Megan on Thursday evenings. In between, the schedule is full of classes that already have their regulars. Bring a friend and make it a standing date, or come alone and let the class supply the friend. Any class, at any hour, counts.
How to track it
No app required. Put one thing on the calendar this month the way you would a workout, and treat it with the same seriousness. Bring someone if you can. Come alone if you cannot. Then count it. Of everything you measure, social wellness is the number that improves fastest once you start paying attention.