Our relationships shape our health in many ways. Friends and family can provide support during difficult times and encourage healthy habits. But not all relationships are positive – some can be a persistent source of stress.
A new study published in the journal PNAS asked what happens when the stress in our lives comes from the people around us. The researchers focused on difficult ties in people’s social networks – individuals they called “hasslers”.
The researchers wondered whether difficult relationships might affect ageing in the same way as other chronic stressors.
Stress is not always bad for us. Short bursts of stress can help us learn coping skills, become more adaptable and trigger hormone and brain changes that prepare us for future challenges. But long-term stress – such as poverty, discrimination or unemployment – can wear down the body and speed up ageing.
Participants were asked to name people they spent time with, talked to about personal or health matters, or who influenced their health habits. Crucially, participants were also asked whether there were people in their network who often caused them stress or made life difficult – the hasslers.
Only those reported as often causing stress were classified as hasslers. People who only occasionally caused stress were not considered hasslers. Importantly, the same person could be nominated in multiple categories, meaning that a single relationship could serve several social roles.
People taking part also provided saliva samples to calculate two complementary measures of biological ageing. The first measures your biological age relative to your age in years. In other words, is your body older or younger than your numerical age? The second measures how quickly you are ageing right now.
Almost 30% of participants had at least one hassler in their social network, with about 10% reporting at least two hasslers, confirming that hasslers are reasonably common and “negative” ties are part of our social worlds.
This is certainly worth noting since negative ties and their effects are understudied in comparison to positive or neutral ties. Each additional hassler was associated with roughly nine months higher biological age, and with a slightly faster pace of biological ageing (1.5% faster).
Since the saliva samples were only measured once, we can’t be sure how this builds up over time, but if the pace of ageing is faster for the rest of your life, it certainly feels worth reflecting on.
This effect was strongest when the difficult relationship was between family members, rather than between friends or acquaintances. This might reflect the challenges in extricating oneself from family relationships.
Family ties are the hardest to cut
It’s a lot easier to slowly distance oneself from an acquaintance than to discard a relationship that may have existed for your entire lifetime and which is embedded in other close relationships. Besides, most relationships aren’t purely positive or negative. Even the most stressful family relationships can have some positive aspects – and vice versa.
Only 3.5% of friendships were classified as hasslers, compared with almost 10% of parents and of children, supporting the notion that hasslers are more difficult to discard when they are part of our families.
Interestingly, negative relationships with spouses and partners did not show the same association with accelerated ageing. One possible explanation is that occasional conflict or stress within these partnerships happens alongside substantial support, which could mitigate the physiological consequences of these negative interactions.
Nenad Cavoski/Shutterstock.com
Also, hasslers were less likely to appear across multiple domains of interaction – such as both a confidant and a companion. In contrast, supportive relationships often spanned several domains of social life.
Once relationships become difficult, people might gradually reduce the number of ways they interact. Or, high-conflict relationships may be less likely to develop into deeply embedded ties that we engage with in multiple ways.
Nonetheless, it’s worth considering alternative explanations before we ditch our hassler ties. Experiencing accelerated ageing could make people feel more poorly, and perhaps more irritable.
Irritable people might more easily interpret interactions as “hassling”, meaning that accelerated ageing could be contributing to perceptions of hasslers, rather than the other way around.
Similarly, depression can both accelerate the ageing process and contribute to generally negative evaluations of different aspects of life, including relationships. Not all of us are equally likely to have hasslers in our networks. Women, smokers and those with greater histories of life stress in childhood tended to report more hasslers.
Extra hasslers were also associated with poorer evaluations of one’s own health, more anxiety and depression symptoms, more long-term health conditions and higher body weight, suggesting that difficult ties are relevant across several aspects of health.
Negative social ties might act similarly to other chronic stressors in our lives, influencing health and wellbeing, with accelerated ageing as one potential pathway identified in this study.
Although it’s important to nurture our social connections, these findings suggest we should also reflect on those connections that often bring “hassle” to our daily lives.
The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
