Here’s the push you needed to schedule that lunch date.
When we talk about aging in America, we tend to hit the same talking points over and over again: watch your cholesterol, keep active, and don’t make doomscrolling a regular part of your bedtime routine. While all of those tips are absolutely important to keep in mind, it’s equally crucial for your health that you spend an hour each week gossiping on the phone with a friend, never skip a practice with your bowling team, and reschedule that lunch date you canceled weeks ago.
Countless studies in the last several decades have revealed a piece of information about longevity that may surprise you: Social connections don’t just improve your life emotionally, but physically and psychologically as well.
“It doesn’t matter how long you live, or even how well you live from a cognitive and physical perspective if you’re miserable,” explains Peter Attia, M.D., a Canadian-American physician and author of Outlive: The Science & Art of Longevity, in conversation with Katie Couric Media. “If your relationships stink, if your wife hates you, if your kids don’t know you, then nothing else could possibly matter in that context.”
Dr. Attia goes on, “That’s something that scientists really care about today. In fact, I think they care about it as much, if not more than, the more measurable and quantifiable metrics of health.”
We’re exploring how relationships keep us going (literally) and why that’s a good thing for people approaching old age.
How relationships help us live longer
“People who live long, healthy lives are often in psychologically good health,” says Dilip Jeste, M.D., an American geriatric neuropsychiatrist who studies the process of successful aging. “These folks are resilient; have good social relationships; maintain control over their own emotions; and exhibit positivity, self-reflection, and a balanced approach to life.”
Other psychological factors for a lengthier lifespan include having a sense of purpose, Dr. Jeste says, or a feeling that one’s life is meaningful. “A growing number of scientists also believe religiosity and spirituality can help people live longer, too,” he adds.
The longest-running study on joy serves as a strong piece of evidence for Dr. Jeste’s argument. This research project by the Harvard Study of Adult Development officially launched in 1938, when scientists began tracking the well-being of 268 Harvard sophomores, all of whom were men (women weren’t yet allowed to enroll in Harvard).
In the years since, researchers expanded the study to include the 1,300 offspring (of both sexes) of those original men, and they also added more control groups, including 456 inner-city residents of Boston. What the 80-plus-year study has shown is astonishing: Close social relationships are the most powerful determinant of healthy, happy lives. In fact, having strong bonds appears to have a greater effect on a person’s lifespan than their social class, genes, or base-level intelligence does.
The remarkable results of this ongoing study are one of the many reasons that scientists have begun to take the Social Determinants of Health (SDoH) more seriously as factors in human wellness, Dr. Jeste explains.
According to the Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion, SDoH are “the conditions in the environments where people are born, live, learn, work, play, worship, and age that affect a wide range of health, functioning, and quality-of-life outcomes and risks.” There are five domain groupings beneath this umbrella:
- Education access and quality
- Neighborhood and built environment
- Healthcare access and quality
- Social and community context
- Economic stability
These “soft science” factors in a person’s life (like the neighborhood they choose to live in, the discrimination they do or don’t face, and the friendships they maintain) have previously been perceived as less significant than “hard science” factors like genetic inheritance. Now, scientists are starting to think otherwise.
“Perhaps the most impactful single SDoH domain is social and community context,” Dr. Jeste says. “What we’ve found is that it’s not necessarily about the number of connections one has, but rather the quality of connections they have, which make a difference over the course of their life.”
Studies have proven social connections to be so critical to someone’s well-being over the course of a lifetime, Dr. Jeste notes, that he has personally decided to shift his professional focus from psychopharmacology research to better understanding the social and psychological factors that influence longevity.
What loneliness does to your body
If strong social relationships are like a balm for our lives, then the opposite of that — loneliness — is like a sickness.
“Social connections are a really powerful predictor of length and quality of life,” says Laura Carstensen, Ph.D., the founding director of the Stanford Center on Longevity and the principal investigator for the Stanford Life-span Development Laboratory. “For people who feel like they’re alone in the world, that is a predictor of early death.”
A 2015 review of 70 studies confirmed (again and again) that Dr. Carstensen isn’t being hyperbolic when she says loneliness can actually kill you. In fact, long-term loneliness can increase your risk of death by 26 percent, while living alone can increase your risk of death by 32 percent.
Even if you don’t literally die from social isolation or a lack of meaningful relationships, your health can still suffer from it. “When you feel like there’s no one you can count on, that seems to actually have a physiological effect on the body,” Dr. Carstensen explains.
These physiological effects often manifest as an inflammation response, which otherwise usually happens after an acute physical injury. As a result, your white blood cells remain in a state of chronic hyper-attention, which can make it more difficult for your body to fight off infection and disease.
Yes, that’s how powerful loneliness can be: Your body responds to it as if it’s a literal injury, and it can impact you on the molecular level. As for why our nervous systems are so sensitive to loneliness, Dr. Carstensen has a compelling answer: evolution.
“We are inherently social creatures,” Dr. Carstensen says. “Humans literally wouldn’t survive without the help of other people at the beginning of their lives.” It makes sense, then, that we would be hardwired to seek out relationships and to feel the pain when we don’t have them.
The silver lining of growing old: stronger and more meaningful relationships
In the modern day, we tend to view older age as, well, a death sentence. But there’s a major upside to all this talk around the importance of social connections: As it turns out, the most meaningful relationships often happen in your old age, not when you’re young.
“Emotionally, we get better over time,” Dr. Carstensen says. “Contrary to public opinion, studies consistently show that we become happier and more grateful as we age. Most people report their lives peaking in their 60s and 70s. It’s during those later decades that our social networks and social relationships are at their peak as well.”
Dr. Carstensen notes a particular irony to this statistical fact: In America, there’s so much generalized negativity about growing older, which is portrayed in media and enshrined in our products, that some older people don’t realize how happy they are until someone, like Dr. Carstensen, reminds them.
“I’ve given many talks about emotion and aging,” Dr. Carstensen said, “And often older people will come up to me after the talks, and they’ll say, ‘I hadn’t realized it, but you’re right: I am so much happier than I used to be.’”
So why do friendships get better as you get older?
“When you’re older, you can have friends who have known you for 30, 40 years,” Dr. Carstensen says. “If you’re 20, or 30, you don’t have that. But as you get older, your social networks get smaller and stronger.” Dr. Carstensen laughs and adds, “For a long time people worried about those poor lonely old folks, when in fact young people are the lonely ones. Twice as many young people are lonely as older people.”
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