Why Connection Matters: Coming Back to Yourself and Each Other

We tend to think about connection in terms of other people. Our partners, our children, our friends, the people we work with, the people we love. We know when we feel close to someone and we certainly know when something has shifted and that closeness has gone. But I think connection begins much earlier than that, because our ability to connect meaningfully with another person has a lot to do with how connected to ourselves.

That might sound like another rather vague personal-development idea, but I mean something quite practical. Can you actually feel what is happening inside you? Do you notice when you are becoming stressed before you snap at somebody? Do you know when you are tired, angry, frightened, overwhelmed or simply in need of some space? Can you tell the difference between what you genuinely want and what you think you should want? Can you be with yourself for a moment without immediately reaching for your phone, getting busy, having a drink, scrolling, fixing something or finding another way to distract yourself?

That, to me, is where connection begins.

Connection starts with noticing

In the reel I shared this week, I talked about starting with something very simple: your breath.

Obviously, we are all breathing. We wouldn’t get very far otherwise. But there is a difference between breathing and consciously noticing that you are breathing.

The moment you turn your attention towards your breath, something changes. Your attention comes away from whatever is happening outside you, or from the endless conversation going on inside your head, and you begin to notice your actual physical experience.

How am I breathing? Is it fast or slow? Is my breath high in my chest or moving down into my belly? Am I holding it? Am I breathing through my nose or my mouth? Am I taking full breaths or hardly breathing at all?

The point isn’t immediately to change anything. In fact, I think we are sometimes too quick to do that. We notice something uncomfortable and immediately want a technique to make it go away. There is another step before that, which is simply becoming curious about what is there.

That awareness starts to reconnect the mind with the body. Your breath can give you information about how you are doing before you have necessarily put words around it. You may think you are absolutely fine while your shoulders are somewhere around your ears, your jaw is clenched and you have barely exhaled properly for the last hour.

This is one of the reasons I talk so much about awareness in my coaching and retreats….we cannot change something we haven’t noticed yet.

How we become disconnected from ourselves

It is remarkably easy to lose this connection with ourselves because modern life rewards us for doing exactly that.

You can be incredibly capable and still be disconnected. You can run a business, raise children, manage teams, exercise, travel, make decisions, organise everybody else and keep functioning beautifully from the outside, while having very little idea what is actually happening inside you.

For many people, it works for quite a long time. You keep pushing because you can. You deal with the next problem, answer the next message, meet the next deadline and tell yourself that you’ll slow down when things become quieter.

Except things rarely become quieter.

Eventually that disconnection can start showing up in other ways. You may find yourself more irritable, more anxious, unable to switch off, overthinking everything or reacting much more strongly than the situation seems to warrant. Perhaps you become completely exhausted, or you start to feel strangely flat and disconnected from a life that, on paper, looks perfectly good.

We often try to fix these things individually. Better sleep. More exercise. Less alcohol. Meditation. A holiday. A breathing practice. All of those things can be useful, but underneath them there may be a more fundamental question: how connected am I to myself at the moment?

Because if I cannot recognise what is happening inside me, it becomes much harder to respond to it wisely.

Connection and the nervous system

This is where nervous system regulation comes into the conversation, although I think it is important not to turn regulation into another thing we have to perform well.

Our physiological state affects the way we experience the world around us. When we are stressed or under threat, our attention changes. We can become more reactive, defensive, impatient or withdrawn. Something somebody says may land very differently when we are already exhausted or overwhelmed than it would when we feel steady and safe.

This matters enormously in relationships.

Sometimes what looks like a communication problem is partly a regulation problem. Two people can love each other very much and still find themselves having the same argument repeatedly because neither person is actually available to listen once their own stress response has taken over.

For me, nervous system regulation isn’t about becoming calm all the time. That isn’t realistic and it isn’t the point. It is about developing enough awareness that you begin to recognise what is happening in you and have more choice about what happens next.

That might mean noticing that your heart is racing before you send the email. Taking a physiological sigh before you walk into a difficult meeting. Feeling your feet on the floor when you notice yourself becoming overwhelmed. Taking ten minutes before continuing an argument rather than saying the thing you know you will regret.

We are not regulating ourselves so that nothing affects us. We are learning to stay connected to ourselves, and therefore more available to other people, while life is affecting us.

We are not designed to do all of this alone

There has been an enormous emphasis in the personal-development world on self-regulation, self-care, self-awareness, self-improvement and self-reliance. I teach many of those skills myself because the ability to understand and steady ourselves matters.

But human beings are also relational.

The long-running Harvard Study of Adult Development has repeatedly found that the quality of our relationships is strongly associated with our health and happiness across the lifespan, while public-health research increasingly recognises social connection as an important part of physical and mental wellbeing. This is not simply about having lots of people around us either; the quality of those relationships matters.

Sometimes another person helps us settle simply through their presence. A friend who doesn’t panic when we panic. Someone who sits next to us when life has gone horribly wrong. A partner who listens instead of immediately trying to fix the problem. A group in which we suddenly realise that other people are dealing with many of the same things that we are.

This is co-regulation, in its broadest sense, and it is something I think we need to talk about much more. Learning to regulate ourselves is important, but so is learning how to be with other people and allowing ourselves to be supported by them.

Strength is not needing nobody.

Listening is one of the ways we create connection

Most of us would say that we are good listeners. I’m not entirely sure we are.

We listen while thinking about what we are going to say next. We listen and immediately compare somebody’s experience with our own. We listen for the part we disagree with. We offer solutions because we want to help. We reassure. We explain why they shouldn’t feel like that. We pick up our phones halfway through. Sometimes we are technically listening while not really being present at all.

There is something very different about being properly listened to.

When another person is genuinely interested in our experience, we tend to feel less alone. Research on high-quality listening has found that it can help people feel more understood, become less defensive and even gain greater clarity about their own thinking. Sometimes speaking to somebody who really listens allows us to hear ourselves more clearly.

And listening does not mean agreeing.

That distinction is enormously important, particularly in close relationships. I can understand that something hurt you without agreeing with every detail of your interpretation. I can acknowledge your experience without abandoning my own. I can remain curious about what happened for you instead of immediately defending what happened for me.

That is connection.

Connection is built in much smaller moments than we realise

One of the things I love about John and Julie Gottman’s work on relationships is their idea of “bids for connection.”

A bid can be incredibly small. Someone points something out of the window. Sends you something they think you’ll find funny. Tells you a tiny detail about their day. Reaches for your hand. Starts telling you a story that may not be particularly interesting to you but is obviously interesting to them.

In that moment we have a choice. We can turn towards it or away from it.

The Gottmans’ research suggests that these repeated tiny interactions matter enormously to the quality of our relationships. Connection isn’t only created by romantic holidays, big conversations or dramatic declarations of love. Much of it is created in ordinary Tuesday-night moments when one person reaches out and the other person looks up.

I think this applies far beyond romantic relationships too. It happens with our children, our friends, our parents and the people we work with.

Someone is constantly saying, in a hundred tiny ways, “Are you there?”

And our response tells them whether we are.

Connection doesn’t mean never getting it wrong

This is another part of the conversation I want to explore because I think we can have a very unrealistic idea of what healthy connection should look like.

Good relationships aren’t relationships in which nobody gets triggered, nobody becomes defensive and nobody says the wrong thing.

We are human. We will misunderstand each other. We will occasionally be insensitive. We will become tired and reactive. We will withdraw when we should speak and speak when perhaps we should have waited.

What matters is whether we can recognise what has happened and find our way back.

Repair is part of connection.

Can I say, “I wasn’t really listening to you earlier”?

Can I recognise that I became defensive because something touched a nerve in me?

Can I apologise without immediately explaining why what I did was understandable?

Can I stay curious enough to hear somebody else’s experience even when it makes me uncomfortable?

And can I allow somebody else to repair with me rather than making them pay indefinitely for getting something wrong?

Connection is not perfection. In fact, some of our deepest relationships become deep precisely because they have survived moments of disconnection and both people have learned that they can come back.

Connection to something beyond ourselves

There is one final part of connection that I think we have also neglected, which is our need to belong to something bigger than ourselves.

Connection isn’t only about our partner or immediate family. It is friendship, community, shared experience, nature, movement, laughter, eating together, working alongside people, sitting in a circle, being part of something without having to be the centre of it.

This is one of the reasons I love retreats and group work.

There is something profoundly different that happens when people step out of their normal roles for a while. They arrive as the mother, the executive, the wife, the person who keeps everything together, the one everyone relies upon, and slowly those roles begin to soften. People talk. They listen. They eat together. They move together. They laugh. They sometimes cry. And they realise that underneath all the different lives we are living, many of us are struggling with remarkably similar things.

That sense of “me too” is powerful.

Not because somebody else can fix your life, but because for a moment you are no longer carrying it entirely on your own.

So where do we start?

I think we start much smaller than we imagine.

We start by noticing our breath.

We notice our body.

We notice when we are stressed instead of only noticing the behaviour that comes afterwards.

We notice when someone we love is trying to connect with us.

We put the phone down.

We ask another question.

We listen without immediately fixing.

We tell somebody how we are actually doing rather than automatically saying, “Fine.”

We reach out instead of waiting to be reached for.

We begin to pay attention to the people after whose company we feel more ourselves, rather than less.

And perhaps we start asking a very simple question: Where in my life do I feel genuinely connected, and where have I become disconnected without really noticing?

Because connection isn’t a soft extra that we add to life when everything else is sorted.

It is part of what makes life feel like ours.