Episode 1: April 9, 2019
Melody Warnick: How To Make Friends In a New City & Belong
Author Melody Warnick joins Wellness 3.0 to teach us how to make friends in a new city as an adult and the importance of feeling a sense of belonging.
Listen Now!
Episode 1: April 9, 2019
Melody Warnick: How To Make Friends In a New City & Belong
Author Melody Warnick joins Wellness 3.0 to teach us how to make friends in a new city as an adult and the importance of feeling a sense of belonging.
Listen Now!
Episode Overview
In the first Wellness 3.0 interview, Amy connects with Melody Warnick, a journalist who set out to find out how to fall in love with and feel at home in the places where we already live. Author of This is Where You Belong: Finding Home Wherever You Are, Melody interviewed long-time residents who are thriving in their cities to learn what keeps them where they are.
She took the best ideas back to her new hometown of Blacksburg, Virginia, and began a series of “Love Where You Live” experiments to feel a better sense of belonging in her own community. Listen to find out which experiments worked best, how nature and contribution matter a lot more than you might think, and how to make friends in a new city as an adult.
What we cover:
- Why Neko Atsume, a Japanese game about virtual cats, is really a metaphor for the novelty we crave in life
- How to put down roots and achieve place attachment
- The benefits of walking & biking around your community. Hint: You’ll instantly like where you live more.
- What it takes to put on a successful chalk art festival
- The meaning of place
- Creating bucket lists!
- And how social media can both keep us from having meaningful friendships and serve as a tool to connect
Feeling like you belong in any place, new or old, can be tough without the right mindset and the right people in your court. This episode will give you some practical tips on how to make new friends with whom you can share experiences in your city and how to engage with your community. Soon enough, you may just be calling this place home — and mean it.
Social Wellness Challenge
Extend an invitation to someone this week!
You don’t have to plan a big event to host or invite a whole bunch of people. Simply think of something that you’d like to do — maybe there’s an event you’ve been meaning to go to, a restaurant you want to try, or you just want to spend time at a park as the weather warms up. Whatever it is, invite someone to join you to do that.
Links
This is Where You Belong: Finding Home Wherever You Are – Melody Warnick
Relocation Recovery Course led by Melody Warnick and Marni Cummings
New Power – Jeremy Heimans and Henry Timms
Place Match: The City Doctor’s Guide to Finding Where You Belong – Dr. Katherine Loflin
Soul of the Community Study – The Knight Foundation
The Surrender Experiment – Michael A. Singer
This Week’s Guest
Melody Warnick
Melody Warnick is the author of This Is Where You Belong: Finding Home Wherever You Are (Viking, 2016), an exploration of the groundbreaking concept of place attachment. This Is Where You Belong helps movers and stayers alike rethink the value of their community.
In her 15 years as a freelance journalist, Warnick has written for The Guardian, Atlantic CityLab, Quartz, Reader’s Digest, O: The Oprah Magazine, Redbook, Better Homes and Gardens, and many other publications. She and her book have been featured in the likes of Time, Fast Company, Psychology Today, Realtor.com, Forbes.com, and Inc.com. A chronic mover, Warnick managed to fall madly in love with her adopted town of Blacksburg, Virginia, where she lives with her husband and two daughters.
Her favorite things include: Hamilton, libraries, quirky small towns, The Great British Bake-Off, pandas, Kate Atkinson, Richard Russo, Spotify, Evernote, zoos, bookstores, hiking, and food that involves sugar.
I think of social wellness as being a sense of interconnectedness and interdependence — kind of a sense of belonging . I talk a lot about wellness as a result of place attachment, and I think of it just as contentment, but when you add that ‘social’ on, I think it’s the relationships that we have that help us feel like part of a whole. It’s easy today to get really isolated. I want people to understand that feeling like you are part of something bigger than yourself , feeling like you are interrelated in your community is one of the healthiest things you can do for yourself — physically, emotionally, and mentally.
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Our Mission
Building Better Social Habits, Together
Fulfilling relationships are scientifically proven to keep you happy and healthy — boosting your immunity and longevity. When you prioritize the people that matter most, even when life gets full, you naturally show up better for them and yourself. We started Wellness 3.0 to bring awareness to this phenomenon and discover how we can improve social health and build better social habits, together.
