Friendship Is good for you

Friendship Is Good For You—Unless it Is Strained

We know that friendship can benefit health. What we don’t know is what kind of friendships are most beneficial. Robert M. Sapolsky on new research. 

Suppose you’re a stressed baboon. You’re having a bad hair day, or the alpha male is harassing you. Maybe, more tragically, your infant has died. In all these cases, spending more time with friends, grooming and sitting in contact with them, will lower your stress-hormone levels.

We know that friends are good for the health of baboons and of humans, too.

Recent research suggests, however, that the kind of friend makes all the difference—and the link between bad friends and health problems can be stronger than the one between good friends and their positive impact on health.

Studies have long associated social isolation in humans with poor health, on roughly the same scale as smoking or obesity. Conversely, social affiliation—a significant other, best friend and/or close group of friends—is linked to good health. Some studies have given insight into the chicken-and-egg nature of this relationship, showing that levels of social connection precede and predict aspects of health at later times.

In work published in January in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Yang Claire Yang and Kathleen Harris of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and colleagues examined all these issues. They combined existing data sets containing information about health and social connections in people studied at multiple points in time. The researchers looked at nearly 15,000 subjects, a large number in this field, ranging from adolescents to the elderly.

The authors confirmed that beginning in adolescence, more social connections predicted less hypertension, inflammation, obesity and other signs of bad health at later times of life. This connection between isolation and health problems was weakest in middle age, probably because during those years people tend to build large social networks around work, community and parenting. The type of health problems tied to sociality seemed to vary according to different stages of life. For adolescents, social isolation was best at predicting subsequent obesity, while among the elderly, isolation most often predicted hypertension.

None of this proves that social factors caused the changes in health.

But the findings align with animal research showing that altering an individual’s social setting does “get under the skin,” as health psychologists like to say. A wide range of animal studies have uncovered some of the hormonal, immune-system and neurobiological mechanisms that are responsible for these effects.

The PNAS authors also turned their attention to the quality of people’s relationships. They asked subjects to rate on a scale the level of support they perceived from family, friends and significant others. (Adolescents were asked about school instead of significant others.) In many respects, these qualitative measures predicted health outcomes more accurately than did the quantitative ones. It’s probably better for your health, for instance, to have a few good friends than thousands of Facebook acquaintances.

The authors also studied the negative aspects of relationships, asking subjects to rate the level of strain that they felt with friends, family and significant others. Back came the key finding: Supportive ties to others had positive effects, but they were outweighed by the adverse effects of strained relationships.

What does this tell us?

From a health point of view, it’s good to form a new, supportive relationship, but it’s even better to jettison that high-maintenance, exasperating friend whom you don’t really want to see. It may well help you more in keeping your blood pressure down and your waist size in check.

@Richard Waita

#life #ideas