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Our social life – the family ties and connections you have with friends and the community – could also play a vital role.
Adolfo Melis, who lives on the island of Sardinia in Italy, testifies to this way of thinking.
He may be 94, but he says he is 50 years old. Melis is still active – he is an impressive billiard player – he does not need glasses to read the newspaper and he gets up early enough to serve coffee from 6 am. in his coffee. It's important to note that "all my clients are my friends and everyone knows each other," said Melis.
Dr. Gianni Pes has studied the population of this region – one of the "blue zones" of the world, a region where the population lives extraordinarily long – and thinks that people live there longer and healthier because they do more. outdoor physical activity strong links with each other.
"The community is strong and supports the elderly," he said. For example, there is no nursing home in the village of Arzana in Sardinia. "The elderly remain in the family until the end of their lives," Pes said.
"There have been some comparisons that social isolation has a mortality risk about the same as other major risk factors. that we think, so smoking, for example, is at the same level as that " said Lisa Berkman, Professor of Public Policy, Epidemiology and Global Health and Population at Harvard University T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
A common social activity, in particular, helps us stay healthy: having a meal together. Melis himself regularly enjoys dining with his friends and family.
People who have social ties tend to eat together, said Berkman, who is also director of the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies. She thinks that, in doing so, they tend to avoid consuming the types of foods that people with a lot of stress turn to, such as comfort foods.
"What we do know is that people who have strong social relationships tend not to be so obese," she added.
The most obvious reason for socializing to do good is that social people have better health behaviors, she said. People with close ties tend to eat better, smoke less, and be slightly more physically active. In turn, people with stressful relationships tend to engage in certain unhealthy behaviors, such as eating less healthily and smoking more. "In a number of studies, these behaviors have proven to be important."
Stress and tension related to lack of connections can usually make you more vulnerable to anything that exists because it can weaken people's immune systems, Berkman said.
When isolated people are exposed to an infectious agent, they are more vulnerable, she said. That's why disconnection can make people more susceptible to infectious diseases, such as cold, tuberculosis or even AIDS progression.
The "why" still unanswered
Research carried out as early as the 1900s shows the danger of the absence of social links. But the exact reasons for this have not been identified.
"It's probably over 40 years since people have been trying to understand why it's social relationships that can impact health and well-being," said Janelle Jones, a lecturer in social psychology at the University of Toronto. Queen Mary University London.
Feeling connected to others and sharing experiences allows people to build an identity, Jones believes. This allows people to access support and get good feelings from others, which can be a source of activity. "We know that all of these things together are actually linked to better health outcomes."
The study of 107 people showed that participants with more friends were able to withstand a pain test – squatting against the wall, legs bent at 90 degrees – longer.
"It may sound a little strange, but we expected to find that result," said Johnson, "because we think this relationship is related to the activity of a chemical in the brain called endorphin" .
Endorphins are natural body pain relievers and are stronger than morphine. These chemicals "help alleviate any form of body stress," which is a physical or social pain, Johnson said. They also have an important role to play: to give people a good buzz in company, which encourages us to look for social links.
The underlying idea of well-connected people having a higher pain tolerance is that, if they maintain social bonds, their brain adapts to have a higher endorphin activity, a she explained.
Another discovery from Johnson's study is that the most stressed people tend to have smaller social networks. Socialization can reduce the body's stress response and endorphins reduce stress, she said.
The key message is that "our social relationships are not just a complementary part of our lives, they are actually part of our physical and mental well-being," said Johnson.
The doctor will prescribe you … a reading club
Some British doctors are in agreement with this feeling. Family physicians or general practitioners in the United Kingdom have started to prescribe social activities such as reading clubs for patients to meet their medical and non-medical needs.
The way social prescription works is that general practitioners determine when a patient has non-medical needs, such as needing help with finances, mobility, or socialization. These patients will be connected to a liaison officer for the social prescription, a non-medical professional who will get to know the person, get to the bottom of the problems, develop a plan with them based on their own desires and associate them with this. resources they need.
These liaison workers are important, especially with regard to the emotional needs of people, because people with chronic loneliness lose confidence in themselves and when they have the opportunity to connect with others, the task can prove difficult. Liaison workers can provide additional support, for example by accompanying the person to social activities.
"We know that people are more likely to connect when they do something together," and they have a common interest or area of common interest at that time, Field said. If you eat together, the focus can be partly on the food and partly on the other, making it less intense than sitting in a room without anything to attract attention or distract between conversations, she said.
"We know that loneliness can be triggered by the onset of a health problem or an illness, but the experience of loneliness itself can exacerbate this state of health" said Field.
The social prescription is "massively effective," according to Field. About half of 9,000 People assisted by the British Red Cross Liaison Officers reported that they no longer feel lonely after 12 weeks on average. The measure of loneliness was carried out using a solitude scale developed by the University of California at Los Angeles, a standard measure recommended by the government, Field added.
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