Are you flexing your social muscles this winter? Here's how you can improve your 'social fitness'

Have you thought of adding social fitness onto your list of new year's resolutions for 2026?

A leisure and recreation expert thinks you should.

Troy Glover, a professor of recreation and leisure studies at the University of Waterloo, says social isolation can cause a slew of impacts to your mental, physical and emotional health. Studies show loneliness can even raise the risk of early death.

"Social fitness is being proactive and intentional about engaging in positive social interactions," he said on The Morning Edition with Craig Norris on CBC Radio.

"We're discovering over about 15 years of research that there's an enormous body of literature that emphasizes the importance of social health when it comes to your overall health and well-being, including happiness."

Glover says everyone is at risk of experiencing social isolation, regardless of factors like age.

"We're living through an age where increasingly the activities in which we engage tend to be solitary. And we're also living through an age where in the past, we kind of depended on the feeling of loneliness to signal to our bodies that we need to connect with other people. But our entertainment, our distractions are blunting that signal," he said.

"The problem is actually worse than it is in terms of people engaging in solitary activities and solitude but not really recognizing how lonely they actually are."

Glover is encouraging people to flex their social muscles by doing simple things like interacting with neighbours and strangers.

He says you can also take it a step beyond just smiling and waving hello by engaging in small talk and making more of an effort to connect with people.

Homewood Health, a mental health and treatment centre based in Guelph, is addressing winter mental health through a compilation of videos called Winter Wellbeing Mental Health Series.

The videos include a variety of approaches to help people with winter wellbeing through the entire season, not just the holidays.

Gabrielle Provencher, director of enhanced mental health care at Homewood Health, says their data shows a big dip in demand for mental-health care in December, followed by a big spike in January.

"The heavy commercialization of the holidays really amplifies the way that we compare each other during the holidays," she said, adding that Canadians can experience “grief, loss and recovery” during the winter holidays when comparing their lives to others.