What if the secret of longevity was not in the mind or intestine, but in the heart?
Speaking on Wednesday at the opening of the New York Times Festival, the psychiatrist and researcher, Dr. Robert Waldinger, announced that he and his team were “shocked” by the “greatest predictor of those who were going to live a long time and keep it.”
Waldinger, the director of Harvard’s study on adult development, the fastest scientific study of adult life, revealed that it was “the connection you had with other people and, in particular, the heat of your connection with other people.”
Researchers were reportedly flooded by these findings.
“How could our relationships enter our body and change our physiology?” Waldinger thought.
“The best hypothesis is that it has to do with stress, which, in fact, relationships, when they are good, are lifeguards.”
After all, as we feel physically manifests: you can feel that your pulse begins to run and breathing accelerates when something happens that annoys or occurs anxiety, and the opposite is true when you calm down, he explained.
Having someone to move on, as it turns out, plays a very important role in it.
“People who do not have connections with other people, these people do not have the same mechanisms of stress regulation in their lives that people with good relationships have,” said Waldinger.
The secret sauce is recognizing that it is not enough to have relationships: they must be cultivated -as a garden would.
Most of us do not expect to fit physically without doing -why the relationships would be different?
“People who were the best relationships were the people who were actively involved in keeping in contact with people, people who really fueled their relationships,” he said. “Most of us give our relationships of course.”
He came to say that people who intend to keep in touch and foster relationships had a “superpower” that “happened under the radar”.
The best thing is that you do not need to plan an elaborate trip or reserve a link activity to get the benefits. Small things, such as making contact with the barista, making your Coffee O-El Heaven Forbidden-TSA Agent checking the passport, gives us “small successes of well-being”, according to Waldinger.
It is the last call for an increasing number of experts reminding people that social connection is a fundamental part of being human and an essential aspect of good health.
A recent study even identified socialization as one of the six factors that you can control that reduce the risk of dementia, stroke and depression, adding to the existing research that indicates that it is an advantage for longevity.
It seems easy to forget in the increasingly virtual world today, as psychotherapist Kathryn Smerling said in the publication that he prescribes “very often socialization” to his clients.
On any other place in Nyt’s talk, Waldinger noted that our culture may not always be directed in the right direction when it comes to happiness.
“These badges of achievement that we all proposed for ourselves, money, prizes, followers on social networks, these badges of achievement are quantifiable, so they seem to make us happy, but not,” he said.
“Culture can sell us this idea that if we only do all the right things, we will be happy all the time,” he added. “This is not true. No one is happy all the time.”
That said, the next time you want to feel -you like a superhero -try to call your mother.
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Image Source : nypost.com