Between texting, social media, FaceTime, Instagram and Zoom, we have plenty of virtual ways to communicate. There's no doubt that this kind of electronic contact helps us to check in with our friends and family, but is it enough?

When it comes to a deeper type of social interaction, a new study shows that being with our friends in person is a much better way to connect.

The power of in-person contact was confirmed by Stanford University researchers. They kept track of the social lives of three groups of nearly 2900 university students over a three-year period.

You don't need a huge network of friends to make it happen. Sharing your authentic self with a few good buddies can not only ease your mind, it will benefit your overall health and well-being.

The team focused their attention on what they considered to be “meaningful interactions” and looked at how these encounters affected the participants' well-being. In particular, they measured the students' levels of loneliness.

“Our research indicated that engaging in meaningful social interactions have net positive outcomes for affective well-being, stress, and loneliness,” lead author Mahnaz Roshanaei, Stanford University research scientist in the Department of Communication, said in a press release. “Spending more time in substantive and deep conversations with anyone with either strong or weak ties, results in benefits for the average person's wellbeing outcomes.”

How and where contact and conversations take place are also important, they found. Communication was better when people were:

  • Face-to-face: There are bigger benefits for well-being when meaningful social interactions happened in person, compared to other communication channels like messaging and texting.
  • Just listening: Meaningful social interactions while resting led to higher well-being compared to those occurring during activities like studying or dining.

As you would expect, the COVID-19 pandemic had a big effect on the way social interactions played out. Before the pandemic, the researchers found that the setting of social interactions was what mattered most when it came to well-being. That changed during the quarantine — during lockdown social interactions were likely to have a positive impact on well-being whether they happened online or in-person.

The researchers acknowledge that there are limitations to their study. For instance, it focused exclusively on students, and the conclusions drawn from the study might not extend to the entire population. Future studies will look into more diverse groups and deeply explore their subjective experiences.

“In the future, the results of this study can be used in designing personalized intervention-oriented strategies for encouraging healthy social lives,” Roshanaei said, “such as personalized recommendations for maintaining social support and connections.”

There are also health perks to deep connections. Even casual conversations can pave the way for closer interactions and significantly reduce stress levels. You don't need a huge network of friends to make it happen. Sharing your authentic self with a few good buddies can not only ease your mind, it will benefit your overall health and well-being.

The study is published in Social Psychological and Personality Science.