The Surprising Impact of Social Connections on Longevity

Video: https://www.tiktok.com/@distilledscience/video/7475897574910643487

Transcript

Here's some science I wish I knew before I was in my 30s. The strength of your social connections has a bigger impact on how long you will live than exercise, obesity, daily binge drinking, or even smoking. Let's look at the data. Welcome back to 30 Studies to Change Your Life. Relationship Science Week. I've always been a bit obsessed with health. Yes, just a bit. Constantly looking for the little hacks to optimize my diet, sleep, or exercise. And of course I knew that things like alcohol and smoking were bad and social activity good. that put solid numbers to all these factors. They combined data from hundreds of studies across millions of people, controlling for factors like age, wealth, social status, disease, and even cause of death. And they came up with numbers for how different factors impact our odds of survival across any given period of time. Going from an area of high to low air pollution gave a 6% increased odds of survival. Obese to lean, a 23% increase. Physical activity, 25% increase. Going from heavy drinking, more than six drinks per day, to come. complete abstinence gave a 37% increased survival chance. We'll cover smaller doses in another video. Going from smoking up to 15 cigarettes per day to not smoking, gave a whopping 70% increased survival chance. And pooling all the studies on complex measures of social integration, combining things like relationship status, social network size, and a degree of connection, a whopping 91% increased chance of survival. Even just adequate social relationships gave a 51% percent. percent increased chance compared to poor. A nice thing to discover after spending another week working alone in my basement. So maybe don't ditch your friends to go to the gym? But why does our biology respond this way to human contact and can we hack it? The short answer is that loneliness lowers immune function and raises systemic inflammation. The long answer is coming in my next few videos.

Additional notes

⚠️ Important note: these links are based on observational data and so cannot fully establish causality. This particular meta analysis was of 148 studies across 308,849 participants and focused on the impact of social relationships. The numbers for the other risk factors used as comparisons were each established by their own cited meta analyses. That being said, there is a large amount of variability when it comes to these types of estimates, so the big takeaway shouldn’t be the precise numbers of the comparison so much as the extremely high impact of strong social connections on our health and well being! Coming up: some cool science around oxytocin, both more nuance around what it is (not just a love hormone), and how to boost it + take advantage of it! 📚 Main study: doi: 10.1371/journal.pmed.1000316 #science #health #longevity #30studiestochangeyourlife #distilledscience #edutok

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