Research links strong social connections with longevity. Two men are living proof.
By Anna Medaris Miller
WASHINGTON, DC, 5 May 2013 — When you’re eight, making a new friend is as easy as sharing a shovel on the playground or the driveway between your yards. When you’re eighteen, it means keeping your dorm room door open or tapping a keg on your lawn.
But when you’re 88? That’s a different story.
According to a study this year in Psychological Bulletin, social networks tend to increase throughout adolescence and early adulthood, reaching a plateau around age 30 and declining steadily thereafter. By the time you reach 70 or 80, that circle is small. What’s more, the likelihood that your friends have passed away — or at least moved away — is great. But maintaining friendships or making new friends is no less important in old age.
“What has been clear in the close relationship literature is just how crucial relationships are for our emotional well-being [and] physical well-being,” says Beverley Fehr, a social psychologist at the University of Winnipeg and author of the book “Friendship Processes.” “Even mortality rates are being connected to whether or not one has close relationships in one’s life.”
In one 2010 meta-analysis of 148 studies comprising more than 308,000 people, for example, researchers found that participants with weaker social relationships were 50 percent more likely to die than those with stronger connections — a risk comparable to smoking 15 cigarettes a day and one more deadly than obesity. And that’s likely a conservative estimate, the researchers say, since the studies didn’t distinguish between positive and negative connections.
Quality and quantity
Why might friends be so good for our health — not to mention our happiness? There’s likely an evolutionary explanation, says UCLA psychologist Steve Cole.
“The most distinctive feature of human beings relative to other animals is the extent to which we assemble into big groups for our basic survival,” he says. “So humans, in our evolution, made this unusually strong bet on sociality as the way that we’re going to be living in the world.”
Cole and colleagues have found that the gene expression profiles of people who are “chronically lonely” are different from those with strong social connections. The differences seem to make the loners’ immune systems more susceptible to diseases including atherosclerosis and cancer.
Cole says the most “biologically toxic” aspect of loneliness is that it can make you feel chronically threatened, an emotion that can wear on the immune system. “It’s really that sense of unsafe threat, that vague worry, that’s probably what’s actually kicking off the fight-or-flight stress responses that affect the immune system most directly,” he says.
But recently, research has suggested that quantity of friendships might be just as — if not more so — important than quality. In the study, published in the journal PNAS, scientists evaluated the mortality rates of 6,500 British men and women over age 52 for about seven years. As expected, they found that participants who had reported feeling lonely were more likely to die. Those who were more socially isolated had higher mortality rates, too. But when those factors were teased apart, the researchers found that social isolation — not loneliness — appeared to be the real death threat.
“Although both isolation and loneliness impair quality of life and well-being, efforts to reduce isolation are likely to be more relevant to mortality,” the researchers write.
‘The Pied Pipers of Grand Oaks’
Benjamin Nickson, an 88-year-old resident of Grand Oaks Assisted Living Facility in Washington, DC, knows the importance of exercising his social skills in addition to his mind and body. Since his wife died in 2008, the World War II veteran has made many new friends. He says the best place to make new friends at Grand Oaks is in the dining room.
“I’ve never regarded myself as a really gregarious, open person, but I find myself interested in people,” says Nickson, who’s a graduate of Harvard Law School and a former budget analyst for the Pentagon. “I like to ask questions and respond to questions, and visit them in their room[s]. That’s the way you build it up.”
One of Nickson’s best friends is Seymour Rubin, an 89-year-old philosopher who has a condition that causes joint pain. Rubin moved to Grand Oaks three months ago to recover from several operations. He was planning to stay only temporarily, but after meeting Nickson, he’s changed his mind.
“What attracted me to Ben was his patience,” says Rubin, who’s also a World War II veteran and a widower.
Every morning at 6:30 a.m., Nickson and Rubin take a walk through the corridors of Grand Oaks. They often eat together and recently, Nickson begun teaching Rubin how to play the trumpet.
“To cement the friendship, he’s teaching me to blow the horn,” says Rubin. “We’ve already picked out a name for ourselves for when we go on the road: We are the ‘Pied Pipers of Grand Oaks.’”
The pair is proof that you’re never too old to make a new friend. After all, your life may depend on it.
This story is adapted from an article in Monitor on Psychology, also by Anna Miller. Read it here.