Good Social Support may add to Longevity

Over the years I have read that it’s important to have good quality relationships with friends, family and your community. Now there is an exhaustive report (out this past July) that simply confirms that notion. 

People with adequate social relationships friends, family and community involvement were 50% less likely to die during study periods than those with sparse social support, the authors found. It’s an effect comparable to that of quitting smoking.

Wow! And there is more!

People with little social support have a mortality risk equal to alcoholism and even higher than either obesity or physical inactivity, the study found. I think these are stunning conclusions!

Researchers at Brigham Young University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, compiled data from 148 studies. More than 300,000 people were in the data pool, followed for an average of 7.5 years. The link between social support and mortality risk was found for men and women of all ages, regardless of initial health condition, years of a study or cause of death.

 In concrete terms, that 50% number means that socially connected people would live an average of 3.7 years longer than less-connected people, says study co-author Timothy B. Smith, a psychology professor at Brigham Young.

Of course, the 50% survival edge is not an absolute number. This number was an average across results from all the studies pooled together, says Julianne Holt-Lunstad, associate professor of psychology at Brigham Young and lead author of the review, which was published in the Journal PLoS Medicine.

Some studies measured social connectedness in simple ways, such as whether a person lived alone. Others used complex measures, such as tallying how many people were included in a person’s social network, the extent to which people were involved in a community, a person’s perceived degree of loneliness and the extent to which people felt they made a contribution.

The study is “very telling,” says Dr. Antonio Gomez, assistant clinical professor of pulmonary and critical care medicine at UC San Francisco. Physicians and the public should take note, he says. But it’s still not clear what the practical implications are for improving people’s health.

The studies, Gomez notes, have their limitations, primarily the trickiness of teasing out cause and effect. Does social connectedness foster good health or are people in good health simply more likely to be socially connected? “We can’t make the broad, sweeping claim that social relationships cause increased survivability, at least, not yet,” he says. 

Gomez adds that the studies don’t explain how social contacts could drive good health. And they don’t rule out the possibility of unknown differences that may exist between people who are social and those who are not, and that those differences, not the social links that ride along with them, could be the real things driving health outcomes.

Yet there is mounting evidence in the scientific literature that social relationships do affect health. 

In an earlier study by Janice Kiecolt-Glaser, professor of psychiatry at Ohio State University, medical students who described themselves as lonely had poorer immune responses than their colleagues who described themselves as less lonely. 

”As humans, we have many different regulatory systems, blood pressure, metabolism, stress hormones,” says Teresa Ellen Seeman, professor of medicine at the UCLA School of Public Health. “There are data that suggest all these systems are affected by social relationships.

People who report more supportive and positive social relationships have lower blood pressure, lower cholesterol levels, better glucose metabolism and lower levels of various stress hormones.”

To study the effect of social support on blood pressure, which is a predictor of cardiovascular disease, Bert Uchino, psychology professor at the University of Utah, put a portable blood pressure cuff on study subjects, monitoring their blood pressure throughout the day.

During the study period, subjects also filled out diaries. Those who recorded feeling more loved and cared for had lower blood pressures than those who recorded feeling lower levels of support.

 “Friends and supportive people can make life easier on a basic, everyday level,” Uchino says. “They can lend you money, offer rides or provide baby-sitting. They can also encourage you to have better health practices, see a doctor, exercise more. They may also help you indirectly by making you feel you have something to live for. A good example is a new parent. You might want to take better care of yourself so you can see your daughter graduate from high school.

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The emotional support people receive from friends and loved ones “can help you think about problems in ways that decrease their [perceived] severity or even make them non-problems,” Uchino adds. “By having a secure relationship and feeling loved, people live much more secure, calm lives.”,

Hope Really Does Float!

My husband’s Mom is truly the most optimistic person I’ve ever known. At 93, she has been unable to get out of bed due to her very frail body, but that doesn’t seem to stop her. I phone her often and always ask her how she is. She responds with the same answer in an unusually upbeat tone, “I’m still here!” she rings out. At her recent birthday party, many of us agreed that it’s been her keen sense of optimism that has kept her alive. One friend remembered the phone call she shared with my mother in law a few years ago, immediately after she had lost her home in a fire. “Well,” said my mother in law “don’t you worry. Now you can go ahead and build the home you’ve always wanted!”

I, on the other hand, question whether or not I’m that optimistic. It’s not as though I’m pessimistic, but I’ve grown to be a bit cynical. On the other hand, I really seem to be hopeful. Is that the same thing as being optimistic? Not at all, according to Vaclav Havel. “Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.”

Much to my surprise, it turns out that the sheer quality of having hope is a very potent weapon. According to Jennifer Cheavens, assistant professor of psychology at Ohio State University, “hope is consistently associated with fewer symptoms of depression. And the good news is that hope is something that can be taught, and can be developed in many of the people who need it.” Hope is different from optimism, which is the expectancy that good things will happen. Instead, hope involves having goals, along with the desire and plan to achieve them.

Cheavens and her colleagues tested a hope therapy treatment by sampling a number of people recruited through flyers and newspaper ads. The ads asked the participants to attend weekly group meetings designed to increase the participants’ abilities to reach goals. Specifically, the researchers looked for people who were not diagnosed with mental illness or depression, but had a level of dissatisfaction with their lives. In the study, half the participants took part in group sessions led by trained leaders. Here they were taught hope-related skills, like identifying goals and ways to achieve them, along with how to motivate themselves to do so. The results, published in the journal Social Indicators Research, illustrated that the participants in the hope therapy had fewer depressive symptoms compared to the control group that didn’t participate.

“We’re finding that people can learn to be more hopeful. We have been figuring out what hopeful people are doing right, and taking those lessons and developing therapies and interventions for people who are not doing as well. And the great news is that it seems to work. We can teach people how to be more hopeful.”

The methodology used focused on developing a blueprint for goals, and using positive motivators to keep the goals in check. (Positive motivators can be anything from self-help talk with yourself, a friend or a source.) Not a bad piece of information to share, especially to folks like me who don’t always have the gut feeling that the glass is half full. With hope and a road map to get there, I plan on crafting a way to maintain a hopeful attitude which keeps my level of motivation in full gear.