The exception being family members and relatives, who require less constant interaction to maintain connections. He says we need to interact “at least once a week for the inner core of five intimates, at least once a month for the next layer of 15 best friends, and at least once a year for the main layer of 150 ‘just friends.’” Dunbar concludes that each circle requires different amounts of commitment and interaction. Think about your own social circle and how many of those friends you consider closer than others.
Often, within the 150-limit network, we have inner circles or layers that require a certain amount of regular interaction to maintain the friendship, whether that’s grabbing coffee or at least having some type of back-and-forth conversation.
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“The time you invest in a relationship determines the strength of the relationship,” Dunbar says.īut Dunbar’s recent study, published in 2016, suggests that even though social media allows us to “break through the glass ceiling” of maintaining offline relationships and have larger social networks, it doesn’t overcome our natural capacity for friendships. This is half an hour more than in 2012 and likely to continue to increase as time goes on. He tells Healthline that this “limit is set by the size of our brains.”Īccording to Dunbar, this is one of the two constraints that determine how many friends we have.ĭunbar and other researchers established this by conducting brain scans, finding that the number of friends we have, offline and online, is related to the size of our neocortex, the part of the brain that manages relationships.Īccording to data from GlobalWebIndex, people were spending an average of more than 2 hours a day on social media and messaging in 2017. Dunbar, PhD, a professor in the Department of Experimental Psychology at the University of Oxford. “It seems we really can only handle about 150 friends, including family members,” says R.I.M. That even means that the late-night hours spent engaging in conversations with strangers online takes away from the energy we have to care for people we actually know offline. There’s a limit as to how many people we’re truly in touch with and have the energy for. While our brains can tell the difference between chatting online and in-person social interaction, it’s unlikely we’ve developed more - or a separate set of - energy just for social media use. There’s a capacity for friendships, even online What if every like, heart, and reply we give to someone on the internet is actually taking away from our energy for offline friendships? Maybe, as we tell ourselves that we’re online to stay connected, we’re unknowingly draining our social energy for in-person interactions. Being unrested can explain the grogginess and irritability one has. Maybe the blue light that illuminates our faces as we scroll through feeds and friends’ profiles is to blame for disrupting our sleep cycle. The next morning, I wake up feeling drained. I’ll comment on a friend’s post and then Facebook suggests friending a former classmate, but instead of doing that, I’ll scroll through their profile and learn about the last few years of their life… until I see an article that sends me down a research spiral and a comment section that leaves my brain on hyperdrive. You know the scenario.įor me, it’s a Tuesday night, and I’m unwinding in bed, mindlessly scrolling “just a little,” when half an hour later, I’m no closer to resting. Nobody is a stranger to deep diving into the Facebook rabbit hole. Share on Pinterest Tang Ming Tung/Getty Images
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