While once upon a time, the focus was on living a long life or a healthy life, we are now more focused on the idea of living a healthy life to enjoy our twilight years properly. Typically, when we think of what we need to do to maintain our health we look out our diet, we consider how much we exercise, and maybe think about our sleeping habits.
Those are all wonderful places to start, and they are absolutely important to your overall health at every stage of your life. There is one thing, though, that we don’t pay enough attention to and that is our human connections.
Building strong relationships with family and friends is important at every age, but it’s increasingly important as we get older. It can help us age healthily and even extend our lifespan.
Research Shows That Relationships Matter
Harvard has been running an ongoing research study that involves thousands of men. It started eight decades ago and some of the original participants are still taking part, now well into their 90s (Harvard Study Of Adult Development).
The participants went through blood samples and brain scans, answering questions about their home lives as well as their working life, emotional wellness, and mental health. The researchers then branched out to speak to the children and spouses of these men taking part.
The results haven’t been swayed by the men’s childhoods or what tribulations and triumphs they have gone through. What has helped them maintain their happiness and influenced their health has all boiled down to just one thing – their relationships or more specifically the happiness that comes from them.
In the years of the study, researchers have found that people who build strong social connections will live a life that is longer, healthier, and happier when compared to those who fail to retain ties to friends and family. That doesn’t mean any relationship will do, though.
Staying in stressful marriages with a lot of conflict is naturally bad for anyone’s health. However, Harvard’s researchers discovered that people in satisfying relationships when they’re 50 are the happiest and healthiest when they reach the age of 80. Even during days of extreme physical pain, their mood was able to stay up.
George Vaillant, Psychiatrist and one of the researchers in the Harvard Study says, “When the study began, nobody cared about empathy or attachment. But the key to healthy aging is relationships, relationships, relationships.”
There’s another important aspect of solid relationships that we must touch on – cognitive function. It’s natural for older people to experience a decline in their memory, yet in this study, those in happy relationships and with strong social connections are able to maintain their memory for longer.