I listen to the Plain English podcast, hosted by The Atlantic writer Derek Thompson, pretty often. It has good guests, good information, and a pretty wide variety of topics although I tend to shy away from the politics focused episodes and lean toward the economic / finance ones.
A recent episode on loneliness in America was very good. Highly recommend for a listen and I was specifically struck by the following statement (which I need to investigate further as it was new to me and seems incredibly important). From the Spotify transcription:
It certainly suggests that there are mind-body connections that social relationships appear to trigger which is why, you know just last week the Harvard Gazette wrote up at this thing about this 80-year study that Harvard’s been tracking people and you know, the guy who runs the study basically his pithy line is, you know, the number one thing that predicts how long you’re going to live at age at age, 50 is the quality of your Social relationships at age. 50 right is more than your genes more than your cholesterol, you know, more than you’re Any Behavior diet?
Right?
What matters is your social relationships?
And yeah, we don’t understand fully how that all works, but you know, it certainly seems like relationships matter, and it certainly seems like time spent in relationships in physical presence matters for the quality of those relationships.
A great episode, and I’m flummoxed I’ve never heard the above statement before. If relationships are that critical to lifespan it seems worth paying attention to, and probably investing more time to cultivating throughout our lives.
Check it out –
