14 DAY TRIAL // A team of investigators from the Brigham Young University in Utah has recently determined that making friends is a very important factor in predicting the life span of individuals. The researchers say that, while things such as exercising and not smoking do have a large influence on the length of one's life span, having multiple friends is equally as important. The conclusions of the new study reveal that chances of experiencing a long, healthy life after making several friends increase by over 50 percent, LiveScience reports.
“I think we make a compelling case that social relationships should also be taken quite seriously in terms of reducing risk of mortality,” explains BYU psychologist and study researcher Julianne Holt-Lunstad. She explains that getting to know many people is about twice as efficient in terms of preventing the risk of premature death as engaging in a lot of physical activities and exercises. Details of the new investigation appear in the latest online issue of the esteemed open-access publication PLoS Medicine, a journal of the Public Library of Science.
“As we encounter potentially stressful events in our lives, if we know that we've got people we can count on or that we can turn to, we may be less likely to even perceive it as stressful, because we know we can handle it. But also, let's say we're already in the throes of some kind of stressful event, our relationships can also help us cope with it and buffer that reaction to the stress,” the researcher adds. Stress is one of the factors that can shorten our life spans considerably. Its influence on our lives has been on the rise for over a century, and this has earned it nickname “silent killer.”
The BYU team carried out a thorough survey of no less than 148 research studies, each of which investigated possible correlations that may exist between social relationships and mortality. A total of 308,000 test subjects participated in these studies, and all of them were followed up for a period of about 7.5 years. An immediate application of the newly-found knowledge is informing physicians and healthcare personnel on how to better treat their patients. For example, one of the first things the specialists could do for people recovering from illness would be to assign them to social support networks.