Health and Medicine
PUBLISHED
It’s time to ditch the “hasslers” in your life, for the good of your health. A new study could provide the excuse we all need to jettison those acquaintances, friends, and relatives who bring us down by demonstrating how negative social ties are linked to chronic health issues and even faster aging.
The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or subscribe to access the full content.For the purposes of their research, the US-based scientists defined “hasslers” as people with whom we have “relationships characterized by hostility, strain, or excessive burden, making one’s life difficult.” They hypothesized that the presence of hasslers in someone’s close social network would be bad news for their health and wellbeing.
Many of us will be able to relate. Perhaps there’s a family member you feel obliged to invite to events, but you leave every interaction with them feeling frustrated and belittled. Or perhaps it’s a friend who drains your cup whenever you get together, rather than filling it. As lead author Byungkyu Lee of New York University put it to the Washington Post, “not all social ties are supportive.”
You might think dealing with hasslers is just a part of life. “Negative social ties have long been understood as a persistent element of human social life,” write the authors in their paper. But in the social media age, it’s become easier than ever before to hear testimony from those – celebrities and ordinary folks alike – who have taken the leap to cut contact with friends or family members, as well as a wealth of advice on how you can approach this yourself.
Beyond boosting psychological health, this new study suggests that doing so could benefit your physical health as well.
The team gathered data from over 2,000 participants with an exceptionally wide age range of 18 to 103 years. They were asked questions about their social lives and experiences with hasslers. The average social network size was around five people, but went as high as 25.
Around 29 percent of participants reported having at least one hassler in their lives, and about 10 percent said they knew two or more.
To quantify biological vs. chronological age, the team used two tools: GrimAge2 and DunedinPACE. The latter has been well publicized since the Kardashians tried it out – it uses DNA methylation, where small molecules are attached to DNA strands, as a marker of aging. This is known as an epigenetic change, meaning that it changes how the DNA is “read” by the cell without actually changing the fundamental DNA sequence.
Basically, the scientists were trying to assess whether each participant’s internal biology appeared older than they actually were. And the results?
“Individuals reporting more hasslers exhibit meaningful differences in both the rate and acceleration of biological aging,” they write. For the PACE tool, each extra hassler in someone’s life added up to a 1.5 percent increase in the pace of aging. Over a 10-year period, the authors explain, that means an extra 1.8 months of aging for each additional hassler.
Among participants of the same chronological age, each additional hassler was associated with nine months of extra biological aging.
And it wasn’t just aging – participants reporting a higher number of hasslers in their lives also self-reported worse scores for a range of health indicators including psychiatric and physical markers.
We can’t prove causality from this data – we don’t know if the presence of hasslers directly leads to poorer health. “What we observe here is a kind of association between having hasslers and the rate of aging,” Lee told the Washington Post.
But it does make sense. Chronic stress is known to be linked to premature aging, and what’s more stressful than having to spend time with your conspiracy theorist great uncle, for instance?
“Frequent exposure to hasslers may chronically activate stress-sensitive systems, fueling systemic inflammation, epigenetic dysregulation, and metabolic strain,” the authors explain.
Lots of attention has been paid to the negative health effects of loneliness and isolation. That’s important to consider, but this study highlights that having more social connections may not necessarily be better if those connections are bringing more hasslers into your orbit.
So, if you’ve already been thinking it might be time to decrease the frequency of those visits with Great Uncle Hank, we'd understand if these results are the thing that tips the scales.
The study is published in PNAS.
