Longevity: One simple way to live longer

 Laurence Tabanao Gayao MD

When it comes to health maintenance and longevity, the recommendations are pretty well-established: Maintain a healthy weight and eating pattern, exercise, practice good sleep hygiene, and refrain from using cigarettes, exposure hazardous chemical, harmful drugs or alcohol. There is however a crucial aspect to good health that is just as important and too often overlooked: socializing.

“Hanging out with family and friends not only can be fun, but research also shows it benefits your mental and physical health.” Dr. Craig Sawchuk, a Mayo Clinic psychologist, agrees that socializing is key to good health.

 

Multiple studies shows that socializing contributes to important health benefits, including improved cognition. “We are social animals by nature, so we tend to function better when we’re in a community and being around others,” Dr. Sawchuk says.

`Cultivating social connections has significant physical, mental health, and cognitive benefits, and that it may be an even more important driver of longevity than other well-known factors.

 

Let’s take a look at the science around socializing.

Benefits of socializing

One would think in our hyperconnected society in the era of Facebook, Instagram, Viber and many other means of messaging social isolation would a think of the past. Studies have consistently showed that more people are reporting not having a single person they feel that they can confide in and the rise has been about three fold from what it was 20 years ago according to Julianne Holt-Lunstad.

 

Socializing can mean the difference in keeping mental agility as one ages. Northwestern University is studying a rare group of individuals known as cognitive “super agers”—people aged 80 or older who have the mental agility of middle-aged individuals. They perform demonstrably better on memory tests, such as remembering past events or recalling lists of words, compared with other adults their age. One recent study of super agers found what set them apart from their cognitively average peers is their far higher levels of positive social relationships, according to the report published in PLOS One. Authors concluded that positive social relationships may be an important factor for exceptional cognitive aging.

 

Landmark research by Julianne Holt-Lunstad, PhD, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Brigham Young University, analyzed worldwide data measuring subjects’ social participation, perception of support, and relationship satisfaction, to see if their degree of social connectedness predicted mortality. Nearly 309,000 people were followed for an average of 7.5 years.

 

What did they find? Individuals with adequate social relationships were a whopping 50% more likely to survive compared to those with poor or insufficient social relationships. The effect of social connectedness was comparable with quitting smoking. In fact, it exceeded many well-known risk factors for mortality, including air pollution, obesity, excessive alcohol consumption (more than six drinks a day), and physical inactivity, according to the report in PLOS One.

 

“My research suggests that one of the single best things that you can do for your health is to nurture your relationships,” Holt-Lunstad said in a recent TED Talk. “I’m not claiming that if you have close intimate relationships with friends and family that you can still smoke, quit exercising, or forgo life-saving treatments, or that we should stop caring about any of these things. Each of these will also significantly increase your risk of dying. Rather, what I am arguing is that we need to take our social relationships just as seriously for our health as we do these other things.”

 

More than 100 years of research shows that having a healthy social lifestyle is vitally important the staying physically healthy. It even show that social support increases the survival by about 50 percent after analyzing the data.

 

“There’s a pretty large literature linking social relationships to a variety of physiological processes that are linked to disease risk,” Holt-Lunstad says. Social support has been linked to lower blood pressure, and a diverse collection of contacts is associated with better immune system functioning. The list continues to grow, she says, now encompassing other bodily processes such as wound healing and inflammation.

 

The Harm of loneliness

The benefits of socializing can also be seen by examining its opposite side: social isolation and loneliness. A recent report focusing on people aged 50 and up by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine found that more than one-third of US adults aged 45 and older feel lonely. In addition, nearly one-quarter of adults aged 65 and older are considered to be socially isolated. Other findings include the following:

 

• Social isolation was linked with a 50% increased risk of dementia.
• Poor social connectedness was associated with a 29% higher risk of heart disease and a 32% increased risk of stroke.
• Loneliness was correlated with elevated rates of depression, anxiety, and suicide.
• In heart failure patients, loneliness was linked with a nearly four times increased risk of death, 68% higher risk of hospitalization, and 57% increased risk of emergency department visits.
• Immigrant and LGBTQ individuals are at greater risk for experiencing isolation and loneliness.

Improving social relationships

The good news is that people generally are social by nature, and high-quality social relationships can help them live longer, healthier lives. It may be especially important for people in the United States to look for opportunities to socialize beyond their own home. That’s because Americans are far more likely to live alone or with just one or two other family members; just 11% live with extended family, compared to 39% of people globally, according to a report by the Pew Research Center.

 

Experts recommends:

• boosting social contact by starting up conversations with people as you go about your day-to-day life;
• setting up a standing weekly brunch or coffee date with a friend;
• getting involved with volunteer work;
• taking a class to learn a new skill,
• participating in community and social groups, such as choirs, book clubs, athletic activities, or church groups.

Rx: friendship

Health professionals with the help of relatives and friends might be better able to find people at risk if they know to look more deeply at an individual’s social environment. So rather than only focusing on those who seem to be entirely socially isolated, health care workers could also encourage friendship and personal connectedness for a larger number of people—thus perhaps boosting overall population survival rates. Instead on relaying only on medications to treat mental and physical problems in the elderly we need to aware that giving them a good dose of improving their social support may make the difference in giving a  more satisfying and longer life.