For the last few years I’ve been talking to people about kindness. I started doing this at a time in my life where I wanted to become a little more kind, and this evolved into me hosting a podcast with my daughter and interviewing hundreds of people about their unique perspectives on kindness for over 6 years.

I even ended up writing a book about this subject (which you can find here) and whilst this project came to a natural end, I learned so much from listening to the stories of people and what they do to be more kind.

In the early days of the podcast, I interviewed a guy called Jason. Jason worked in the city for a big financial services company and one day, someone was talking to him about Befriending.

Jason hadn’t heard about Befriending before and the guy explained that once a week he spoke to a lady in her 80’s.

As I’ve already mentioned, Loneliness has a massive detrimental impact on our health, and the idea of Befriending meant that you got the opportunity to support someone by chatting to them weekly to help them “be less lonely”. 

Jason thought it was a brilliant idea but was worried about the time commitment, however when he spoke to Age UK and Silverline, the organisation Jason used who was running the befriending service, they explained it was only an hour a week.

Jason, who was in his early 40’s when he started befriending, was connected with a lady from Liverpool called Dellis. Whilst this lady was in her early 80’s and widowed, she’d lived a life full of stories. She’d seen the Beatles play in the cavern club, she’d travelled and had great experiences with her family, she was wise and wanted to share this wisdom with Jason.

After a couple of weeks Jason realised that getting involved in Befriending wasn’t only a kind thing to do. It was a two way street. His social wellbeing was significantly increasing because of his friendship with Dellis.

“It’s interesting Chris” Jason told me when I interviewed him “The relationship started off with me wanting to help someone feeling lonely. Now I’m just regularly chatting to my friend.”

I love the idea of this. Just two friends, four decades apart phoning each other for a regular chat. Helping each other increase their social wellbeing.

When we’re thinking about ‘what happens next’ in our lives, one factor we don’t consider is how our social lives, and in turn our social wellbeing, might change when we make a decision to change our lives.

For some of us, particularly if we’ve got loads of social networks outside of work, this isn’t an issue.

For some of us however this might be a bit more of a challenge. However what this story illustrates is social wellbeing comes in so many forms.

It comes from the friendship groups we build doing things we enjoy. It comes from spending time socialising with people we love and like. However it can also come from doing things initially designed to help others, but eventually turning into a relationship where social wellbeing is increased all the way around.

You can find out more about befriending on the Age UK website, and if you’re thinking about improving your social wellbeing, particularly if you’re thinking about ‘what happens next’ it might be worth thinking about… …and of course if you do end up befriending someone like Dellis, I’d love to hear your story!