Perhaps it doesn’t take a rocket scientist — or a researcher — to know that people who have a few good friends at work fare better than the loners. Especially when it comes to stress.

Tara Parker-Pope over at the NY Times has the scoop:

While those findings were consistent with earlier research on job stress, the Rochester scientists detected a surprising trend. People who said they felt generally supported by their colleagues and could lean on co-workers in a time of crisis were spared the rigors of job stress. In the study, men and women who felt little social support at work were two to three times more likely to suffer major bouts of depression.

“It’s more than just friendship,’’ said Emma Robertson Blackmore, assistant professor of psychiatry at the University of Rochester and the lead author on the study. “Your family and friends give you support, but because they’re not in your work environment they don’t have the level of understanding that your work colleagues do.’’ Work friends, she noted, “get where you’re coming from.’’

For years, I avoided close friendships at my job because I worked for a lot of dot.com startups. What’s the point of befriending someone when it’s likely that either them or you will be cut in the next round of layoffs? But I learned to work against the feeling of futility and have tried to make more friends the longer I worked at a place.

Like any good friendship, friendships at work take time, nurturing and effort on your part. It’s easy to brush them off as somehow being less important (“Oh, he’s just my work friend”), but they’re really not. You spend 8+ hours a day at work, which is more than many of us spend with our significant others or outside-of-work friends. And while most people actually spend most of their time working at their job, on-the-job friendships are valuable for your mental well-being, health, and keeping stress at bay.

Make a new friend at work today!

Dr. John Grohol is the CEO and founder of Psych Central. He is an author, researcher and expert in mental health online, and has been writing about online behavior, mental health and psychology issues -- as well as the intersection of technology and human behavior -- since 1992. Dr. Grohol sits on the editorial board of the journal Cyberpsychology, Behavior and Social Networking and is a founding board member and treasurer of the Society for Participatory Medicine.

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    Last reviewed: By John M. Grohol, Psy.D. on 16 Nov 2007
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