Your Social Health - How to Evaluate

Your health can be broken down into three pieces; physical, mental and social. The next challenge is to measure how healthy you are in each category. There are well known tests for physical health and mental health, but how to measure your social health?

You could go with your gut and your current feelings. Do you feel lonely? Do you feel like part of a community? Are you supported by those those around you?

I am suggesting another approach on how to measure your Personal Social Health. Consider that your life, like everyones, is too large to handle on your own. You will need to “share the load” so to speak. Get help, whether you have to ask for it or it is given freely. Find support and companionship in some form.

Lets start by breaking your social health into smaller pieces. Take a piece of paper and draw a small circle in the center. No surprise that this represents you. Your first source of support is yourself, because while you may not be able to do it all on your own, you are a very capable person.

Next think of the different aspects of your life. You are not so linear as to have only one part of your life that defines you. Draw a short line and label each. Some questions to get you started:

Do you have a work aspect of your life? Are you a Parent, or other caregiver? What do you do for fun, biking, happy hour, sports, television/movies? Do you volunteer? Are there things you would like to start doing?

You should now have a sea urchin looking drawing with each ‘leg’ labeled with a different aspect of your life, these legs are going to be the Radii ((Rey-Dee-Ahy) Plural for Radius) of your Personal Community.

Now you want to give a weight to each of these aspects. Not to judge how important they are or how much time you spend with them but rather how many people you share that aspect with.

The weight is going to be calculated by considering two things, the quantity and the quality. Quantity refers to the number of people, for example, I like to play kickball, and I have about 70 people who I can share that with. I can count on them to join in games, help to spread the word about upcoming events and help increase the overall Social Health of the event.

Of those 70 people I can really count on about 8 of them to come through for me if I asked them. There are about 4 that I can count on and don’t even need to ask, and the rest are people who I can count on to improve the experience but aren’t really a part of my Inner Circle.

Thus I might score my Kickball Radius like so: (4*1) + (8*.5) + (58*.1) = 13.8

Wondering if that is a high or low weight? Well, me too, lets calculate a few more before we decide.

Once you have calculated the weight of your Radii draw them out. Now your sea urchin should have some really long legs and a few might even have ended up on an extra sheet of paper. Now it is time to draw your Personal Community.

Connect the tips of your Radii by drawing a circle around all radii. I say circle but it should look more like a blob.

This Personal Community is a representation of your Personal Social Health. Dunbar’s Number is a suggested limit to the number of people that can be in your Personal Community. This number applies to people, so remember that if your Radii sum up to more than 150 you may have one person who spans many Radii.

How close to 150 is your Personal Community? Do you have room for growth? Is it way over the suggested limit? Are you socially healthy? These are questions are questions that ultimately need to be answered for yourself.

So what now? Use this information as a starting point. Do you want to increase the social health of a single Radii that you really enjoy but has a low weight? Then try to meet more people that may share that same radii. Want to increase the Quality of a Radii? Then perhaps it is time to decrease the quantity of that Radii and focus more on enhancing relationships in that Radii.