Your social network may influence your health as much as your exercise routine.
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To get a measure of the social health boost’s overall importance, Julianne Holt-Lunstad, a psychologist at Brigham Young University, in Provo, Utah, compiled the findings of 148 studies. Together they covered 300,000 participants and had looked at the benefits of social integration and the hazard of social disconnection. She then compared the effects of loneliness with the risks of various other lifestyle factors, including smoking, drinking alcohol, exercise and physical activity, body mass index (a measure of obesity), air pollution and taking medication to control blood pressure.
The results, published in 2010, were astonishing: Holt-Lunstad found that the size and quality of people’s social relationships either equalled or outmatched almost all the other factors in determining people’s mortality. The more people feel supported by the people around them, the better their health and the less likely they were to die. Overall, social connection – or its absence – played a larger role in people’s health than alcohol consumption, exercise, body mass index and air pollution. Only the effects of smoking came close.