According to an article by Market Watch, the key to longevity isn’t money, health, or even your diet. It turns out that the most important thing to living a long life is the number of strong relationships you have. These relationships can be with family or friends, but the more of them you have, the longer you’re going to live, and they have a Harvard study to prove their claim. Ironically, this study included one of the shortest-lived presidents of The United States, but that data point doesn’t have any bearing on the results they’ve published.
Harvard Study on Development
The Harvard Study of Adult Development started way back in 1938 with researchers studying second year students and tracking them throughout their entire lives from that point onward. One of those students tracked was none other than John F. Kennedy, who was attending Harvard at the time. It’s one of the longest and most extensive studies in the world and the results have been the subject of TED talks and plenty of academic papers. Their biggest finding is that close relationships are the best predictor of how long you’ll live. The more you have, the longer you’ll live and the opposite is also true.
Social Creatures
It makes sense when you think about it and what human beings happen to be. We’re all social animals and crave interaction with other humans. The Journal of Psychiatry and Neuroscience, which is part of the National Library of Medicine released their own study on The Neurobiology of Human Social Behavior. In it, they say “Humans are inherently social. We are not special in this way; it is hard to think of any animal for whom the regulation of social behavior is not important. Something akin to social behavior may even occur in organisms lacking a nervous system. For example, Science recently published an article titled ‘Genetic determinants of self-identity and social recognition in bacteria.’ Different animals, including humans, share many of the same types of social behavior such as affiliation and aggression, the establishment of hierarchy and territoriality. This can be the case even in species, such as ants, with a primitive brain… Given the importance of social interactions for humans, it is not surprising that most psychiatric disorders involve some disruption of normal social behavior, and that in several disorders finds abnormal social functioning is one of the central symptoms. Examples are autism, social anxiety disorder, borderline personality disorder and schizotypal personality disorder.”
All Life is Social in Some Way
What that means is, not only do we need each other to survive, pretty much every lifeform does. Not needing other members of your species means you have some sort of dysfunction. That’s how common sociality is within a species. It only stands to reason that something so important would be a big part of how long we live and how happy those lives are. In fact, we’ve even identified real chemicals responsible for the whole thing. They go on to say “Oxytocin is another compound that has been shown to influence social behavior in animals, and its effect on humans has been tested recently. Animal studies have shown that oxytocin is involved in the formation of bonds between mates and between mothers and their offspring, including the use of aggression in the protection of these relationships. In laboratory studies involving healthy humans, intranasal administration of oxytocin altered behavior in a way that indicated increased trust in others.”
Strengthen your Bonds
This is really all to say that, if you want to love a long life, the best way to make it happen is to strengthen your bonds to other people. If you don’t have family members to connect with, try making a new family out of your friends. Not only will it benefit you, it will also benefit those friends as well. The more time you spend together and the better you know each other, the more longevity you’ll be adding to each other’s lives. It’s simply a matter of giving into your societal needs and connecting on deeper levels whenever you can. Then you can work together to deal with those health and wealth aspects of your life that everyone talks about so often. It’s how human life is supposed to work!