A recent study shows that hasslers, defined as “people in one’s close social networks who create problems or make life more difficult,” are often associated with faster biological aging
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NEED TO KNOW
- A recent study links difficult relationships to “faster biological aging”
- Each additional “hassler” in one’s life may add approximately nine months to biological age
- Researchers also claim that family members seem to have the most pronounced effects on aging, while marital relationships have less influence
Dealing with difficult people may speed up the aging process.
According to a study published in Proceedings of the National Academy Sciences on Feb. 18, researchers found that hasslers, defined as “people in one’s close social networks who create problems or make life more difficult,” are often associated with faster biological aging.
"Having more hasslers is associated with accelerated biological aging in both rate and cumulative burden,” the study reads. “Each additional hassler corresponds to approximately 1.5% faster pace of aging and roughly 9 [months] older biological age.”
While researchers acknowledged that other stressors, including financial strain or workplace stress, also contribute to “increased inflammation, compromised Immune function, and elevated risk for cardiovascular and other diseases," they could not overlook the evidence that hostile relationships have similar biological effects.
“Each additional hassler is associated with faster biological aging, with especially pronounced effects when the hassler is a family member,” the study continues. “These findings together highlight the critical role of negative social ties in biological aging as chronic stressors and the need for interventions that reduce harmful social exposures to promote healthier aging trajectories.”
Furthermore, not all hasslers have the same influence. While family members and friends showed “detrimental associations,” marital hasslers did not.
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“Our analyses show clearly that not all hasslers are the same,” the researchers explained. “The nature of relationships and the network context substantially condition both the exposure to hasslers and their biological consequences. Ties characterized by obligation, shared space, or structural interdependence, such as parents, children, coworkers, or roommates, are more likely to be hasslers than voluntary, self-selected ties such as friends, church members, and neighbors.”
As for why spouses do not fit into this category? Research suggests that “the ambivalent mix of support and obligation within intimate partnerships” separate marital relationships from familial ones, which are “often emotionally salient yet hard to abandon.”
While the researchers have landed on the hypothesis that hasslers are associated with faster biological aging and poorer health, researchers ultimately emphasized that these relationships “do not, on their own, establish a causal effect of negative social ties on aging processes.”
After all, researchers must consider the possibility of reverse causation, which indicates that "individuals experiencing accelerated biological aging may become more irritable, thereby eliciting more negative interactions,” in addition to possibilities of perceptual or reporting bias and unobserved traits that “jointly shape exposure to negative social ties and biological aging.”
Read the full article here
