Cork Views: 'We've turned living into a full-time job'

In our obsession to live longer, we’ve forgotten how to live better and the power of connection.

An aunt of mine, a sister in a community of nuns, lived to be 93 before she died after a stroke that left her unable to swallow.

For the three weeks she was in hospital longing for a cup of tea, the community of sisters rallied around her to make sure she was not alone for a moment during those last few weeks of her life.

That gesture was an example of how the community lived their lives – sharing meals, conversation and support as their numbers dwindled with their health over the previous three decades. They lived simply, shared lifts into town, prayed together daily, and went to bed early. They walked the strand and swam in the sea on their holidays to Garretstown, and mainly lived well into their eighties and nineties. Their greatest support was each other. They were always laughing.

To me, the sisters had figured out the secret to a healthy, happy life without any help from the billion-dollar longevity industry. 

Meanwhile, anxiety and depression are at an all-time high at all ages. Have we got it all wrong? Is chasing a longer life making us miserable?

We’ve turned living into a full-time job. Tracking our steps. Monitoring our sleep. Measuring calories. But when did we last just… live?

The modern wellness warrior starts their day with ice baths, green juice, meditation apps, red light therapy, gratitude journals – all before 8am. The anxiety of ‘not doing enough’ is killing us as fast as the things we are trying to prevent.

Our parents and grandparents didn’t track their sleep cycles. They didn’t wear apps to monitor activity and recovery - yet many lived long, fulfilling lives.

The longest-living people don’t obsess about longevity. Older people living in Blue Zones with high numbers of centenarians have been highlighted as knowing how to enjoy their food, rest without guilt, work with purpose, and love their community.

More important than any tracker app for longevity is connection with friends and family. Our friends literally keep us alive.

In Age Proof, Head of the Academic Department of Gerontology at Trinity College Dublin, Rose Anne Kenny, stated that when she started to study the association between family ties, friendship and health in the Irish Longitudinal Study on Ageing (TILDA) study, she was staggered by how powerful the physical effects of friendship are. She was surprised by how much difference good friendships make – “not only to pleasure and quality of life, but to hard outcomes like heart disease and even determining how we die”.

Prof Kenny concluded: “Good friendships add years to our lives.”

Why does the strength of our friendships affect how long we live?

Some explanations include more stress, higher levels of stress hormones, more heart disease, and higher levels of inflammation in the absence of strong social ties. In a large study of human social networks, Harvard researchers reported low levels of blood clotting factor, fibrinogen in the blood – a marker for inflammation and increased risk of blood clots and heart attacks. The strength of the association between fibrinogen and social isolation was noted to be remarkable.

Prolonged high levels of stress hormones trigger a cascade of physiological responses that increase risk for heart disease, brain disease and early death, further explaining why strong friendships are so important for longer healthier lives.

Laughter plays a big part in social connections. Friends spend about 10% of a conversation laughing. It connects us with others. Just as with smiling and kindness, laughter is contagious. We can ‘catch’ it from someone else and are more likely to do so if we know them. By elevating mood, laughter plays a key role in reducing stress.

High-stress hormones also weaken our immune system, so lowering these hormones is one way that frequent laughter benefits immunity and reduces infections.

The opposite of strong friendships for many is loneliness. The US Surgeon General, Vivek H Murthy, has placed loneliness as a central public health concern and the root cause of many of the epidemics sweeping the world today, including alcoholism, drug abuse, violence and mental health issues.

Prof Kenny suggests loneliness is toxic to human health because of our innate desire to connect, stating: “We have evolved to participate in community, forge lasting bond with others, to help one another and to share life experiences. We are, quite simply, better together.”

In 2018, the UK government appointed the world’s first minister for loneliness, after a report found more than nine million people – about 14% of the population - often or always feel lonely.

TILDA research identified a quarter of Irish adults feel lonely some of the time and 5% often feel lonely. Men who live alone tend to be lonelier than women who live alone. Loneliness increases with age, and lonely people are more likely to be prone to depression.

Much of the modern epidemic of loneliness is associated with smaller family sizes and the increase in single-person households in Europe.

Both strong family bonds as well as strong friendships are important for overall health.

Decades of research confirm that being in a long-term committed relationship that offers reliable support and a social context for meaningful shared experiences is good for wellbeing.

Strong friendships too offer lifetime rewards. In one decades-long study by Harvard researchers, people who enjoyed strong social bonds into their eighties were less likely to succumb to cognitive decline and dementia.

Rose Anne Kenny agrees: “Being married or partnered, having more frequent contact with children and friends and experiencing less strain in relationships were each independently associated with cognitive functions such as better memory and less memory decline over time. So the clear message is that frequent quality relationships are good for the brain.”

We don’t need to feel guilty about rest days, lose sleep over sleep scores or track every breath to reduce stress. We don’t need to stress about meditation targets.

Your body knows what it needs.

Our grandparents didn’t have fitness trackers. They had dinner together in the evening. They didn’t count steps. They walked to do the shopping, go to work, or visit friends. They wrote cards or notes to friends or family rather than WhatsApp messages and socialised together rather than online.

The longest longevity drug is living a life of joy, and real relationships add more to years than any tracker. In our obsession to live longer, we have forgotten how to live better.

Sometimes, the healthiest thing you can do is to stop trying to be healthy all the time - just live in the moment right now.

Taking time to build friendships will make a difference to your longevity and wellbeing as well, potentially making a huge difference to those whom you take time to connect with.