Researchers found that stressful relationships can increase chronic stress and markers linked to ageing. Photo / Getty Images
Spending time with a difficult person can impact your mood in the moment. But over time, these challenging social interactions might also have a detrimental effect on your physical health, possibly making you age faster, new research suggests.
The study, which was funded by the National Institute on Ageing and published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, looked at the health impacts of “hasslers” – people the researchers defined as those “who create problems or make life more difficult”.
While positive relationships have long been linked to healthier, longer lives, hasslers seem to have the opposite effect, increasing chronic stress and elevating epigenetic biomarkers associated with ageing.
The study also found that some people are more likely to report knowing hasslers, including women and those in poorer health.
We asked experts to explain the phenomenon – and share what you can do to prevent these types of relationships from chipping away at your health.
Having a strong social network is known to offer protective benefits as you age, including lowering risk of cognitive impairment and mortality.
Friendships may even help slow ageing on a cellular level, some research has shown. “But not all social ties are supportive,” said Byungkyu Lee, an assistant professor of sociology at New York University and lead author of the study.
For example, some friendships might be ambivalent, meaning they cause problems or create stress but also provide positive things, like support and companionship, said Brea Perry, associate director at the Irsay Institute for Sociomedical Sciences Research, professor of sociology at Indiana University at Bloomington and co-author of the study. Others are “pretty much exclusively stressful”.
Those less-positive relationships “may function as chronic stressors, so having those people around you actually makes your life really challenging”, Lee said.
To understand how negative relationships might affect biological ageing – how quickly your cells are ageing, which doesn’t always align with a person’s chronological age – Lee and his colleagues collected data from more than 2000 individuals in a health survey conducted in Indiana.
Participants answered questions about their social relationships during the previous six months. They then answered follow-up questions, including how often that person hassled them, caused problems or generally made their lives more difficult. Participants were also asked to self-rate their overall health.
They also gave saliva samples, which researchers analysed for DNA changes that signify biological ageing, allowing them to compare the ageing rates of those who had hasslers in their networks and those who did not.
Researchers found that for every additional hassler participants regularly interacted with, their pace of ageing increased by 1.5%.
In other words, instead of ageing one biological year per calendar year, a person with at least one extra hassler would age around 1.015 years during the same time.
“Even small effects in terms of biological ageing can accumulate,” Perry said, which can contribute to earlier onset of chronic disease, she added.
These effects were especially pronounced for participants who reported having two or more hasslers in their orbit.
This study does not prove cause-and-effect.
“We do not know whether hasslers actually cause people to age,” Lee noted. “What we observe here is a kind of association between having hasslers and the rate of ageing.”
The study authors found that certain groups were more likely to report hasslers in their networks. Women typically had more hasslers than men, a result that is “not completely shocking”, said Debra Umberson, a sociology professor and director of the Centre on Ageing and Population Sciences at the University of Texas at Austin, who wasn’t involved in the study.
“It adds to what we know about men and women’s relationships,” she said.
Existing literature suggests that men and women may experience relationships differently.
For example, “women tend to be disproportionately affected both positively and negatively by things that are happening in relationships and by their relationship with other people”, Perry said.
“So it wasn’t that surprising to us that women might have more people who cause problems in their lives, in part because they are probably more likely to perceive the problems that others are having and to feel them and to sort of take those on as stress,” Perry explained.
People in poorer health were also more likely to have hasslers, as were study participants who’d had adverse childhood experiences. If a person has health challenges, it’s possible they may feel hassled by those around them regulating their health, Perry theorised.
“They may need caregiving, for example, and so those kinds of relationships can become sort of one-sided and difficult to negotiate,” she said.
Individuals who experienced a difficult childhood “tend to be more vulnerable to chronic stressors and to negative life events, and so they may be more vulnerable to hassling”, Perry said.
Any relationship can feature periods of frustration. Still, some types of social connections may be more hassle-prone.
“We found that a lot of these hasslers are family members,” Perry said. “Those are people who are embedded in your life in ways that are difficult to escape or difficult to kind of renegotiate.”
Among families, parents and children were more likely to be hasslers than partners or spouses.
With non-kin relationships, people reported that co-workers, roommates and, to a lesser extent, neighbours were more likely to be hasslers than their friends. Like family members, these groups often involve obligation and navigating shared spaces, the study authors noted.
The obvious advice, Lee said, is to consider relationships carefully, avoiding hasslers whenever possible and cutting ties if you feel like someone is adding lots of negativity and stress to your life, although that can be an incredibly difficult decision.
In reality, though, extracting yourself from every hassler relationship is probably not realistic.
You may feel obligated to maintain certain ones, such as those with family members, Lee said. Other connections might add some positives to your life in addition to a degree of hassle.
“That’s the definition of relationships, they have hassle, right? I mean, you can get support and love from them, but they all come with hassles,” Umberson said.
When you’re around a hassler, limiting the amount of time you spend with that person or considering therapy to improve difficult aspects of the relationship might be worthwhile, Perry said.
“I think for me, boundary setting is important,” she said. “As soon as you recognise that someone who is a hassler has these negative biological consequences for you, set limits on the effort you’re putting into that relationship.”
Planning self-care activities before and after hassler interactions may also reduce stress and help you externalise conflict, Perry added.
Make sure, too, to create plenty of social buffers by consistently investing in relationships that do provide support, Lee said.
“If you have enough non-hasslers in your network or environment, there might be some kind of calming effects on your ageing,” he said. Though researchers did not specifically investigate this.
That’s especially critical because strong companionship is associated with so many protective health benefits.
“To me, one of the more striking things as somebody who studies this [topic] is social isolation,” Umberson said.
Last year, the World Health Organisation released a global report highlighting the effect of isolation on health and wellbeing and linked loneliness to 871,000 deaths every year.
“It’s just very important to have relationships,” Umberson said. “I wouldn’t want to overlook that part of it.”
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