Your social life can really protect your health....

Today's Post: Friday, 7-30-2010

Smoking really can speed aging and harm your health. So, if you smoke and quit at a young age, you will live longer in far better health.

That means that anything that can boost your health as much as quitting smoking is incredibly powerful indeed. Getting regular exercise is in that category.

This week, research was reported that having a strong social network is also that important for your health. They even say that not having one harms your health overall by as much as smoking about 15 cigarettes a day or three fourths of a pack.

This information is consistent with studies showing lonely people are more likely to have high blood pressure and those showing that good shared experiences help make people happy on the life enjoyment part of it & with Dr Stephen Ilardi's finding that increasing social interaction helps stop depression.

But even so, that’s a very powerful effect.

There are 3 likely reasons for this.

One is that being in the presence of people you know or even better people who you see often who like you has been shown to have a soothing and stress relieving effect.

This effect is so powerful that being in a happy marriage makes an even more powerful difference. In fact, people in an unhappy marriage on the average are happier and healthier than divorced people!

The second reason is that speaking to people is a tonic for your brain. It is as if it’s like working out with a good personal trainer is for your body. Peter Drucker once said that people sometimes don’t realize that they are extremely and unusually good at something because it feels so easy for them. This effect is so strong, they can miss that it’s hard for other people or that some people cannot do it at all

It turns out that simple conversation is that kind of skill. People grow up doing it and develop their skills over many years. So, it feels somewhere from effortless to reasonably easy to do.

However, researchers once got curious as to what parts of the brain were involved and found that conversation used more of people’s brains and used them more intensely than they had previously imagined.

Between the stress relieving aspects and the intense mental exercise, this may be why people with strong social networks are far less likely to develop Alzheimer’s disease or other kind of dementia.

Lastly, no matter how competent you are, the people around you have far more time than you do by yourself. Many of them know important things you do not or have developed key skills to a high degree that you don’t have yourself.

So, at some level I think most people know this. And, as a result social people have a network and skills that enable them to be more effective in life and that sense that they can cope enables them to take the actions that sustain and protect their health.

A book that helped me with this is the Magic of Thinking Big by David Schwartz. Despite its somewhat “hypy” title, focus on sales and business success and it’s outdated examples for some things, it is still in print. This is because of the great wisdom the author passes along about what he calls “thinking right” towards the people around you and his real life examples of how to learn to reach out to people and converse even if you are shy and new to doing so.

My life has been enriched a great deal by learning what he taught.

Now I find out that it may also have helped my health to be better too.

So, I commend it to you.