Getting married, exercising regularly, thinking happy thoughts, not working so hard— according to The Longevity Project are not shortcuts to immortality, and for certain groups of people, they can actually have the opposite effect! Veronique Greenwood writes in the Atlantic about the Longevity Project which debunks conventional wisdom. that “Worrying is always bad for your health.
Optimistic people have a tendency to ignore details, meaning they don’t follow doctor’s orders correctly or lead themselves into unhealthy situations or addictions. It was the conscientious people—careful, sometimes even neurotic, but not catastrophizing—who lived longer, write Friedman and Martin, researchers at the University of California, Riverside. And, their studies show, some of what we think will benefit our children may actually rob them of years later in life. In the Terman study, precocious, active children who were sent to school a year early, as Philip was, tended to have emotional problems that led to unhealthy behaviors and shortened life span.
A new Brigham Young University study adds our social relationships to the “short list” of factors that predict a person’s odds of living or dying.
In the journal PLoS Medicine, BYU professors Julianne Holt-Lunstad and Timothy Smith report that social connections – friends, family, neighbors or colleagues – improve our odds of survival by 50 percent. Here is how low social interaction compares to more well-known risk factors:
Equivalent to smoking 15 cigarettes a day
Equivalent to being an alcoholic
More harmful than not exercising
Twice as harmful as obesity
“The idea that a lack of social relationships is a risk factor for death is still not widely recognized by health organizations and the public,” write the PLoS Medicine editors in a summary of the BYU study and why it was done. [continue reading…]
Put on a happy face – and you may live to be 103. Researchers at Wayne State University examining a database of baseball players found that people who smile in photographs live longer than those who don’t. This is the first study to find a link between smile intensity and a biological outcome. [continue reading…]
