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Chronic stress can speed up biological aging — no matter if the stress is from mounting debts, overtime work or your terminally annoying uncle who always wants to “play devil’s advocate.”
That’s right: Researchers have measured the effects of “hasslers” — people in your life who regularly “create problems” or make things more difficult — on the rate at which your cells age. And the results are grim.
According to the findings of a study conducted in Indiana, hasslers have the potential to speed up cellular aging by roughly 1.5%, meaning hassler-aggravated cells age about 1.015 biological years for every calendar year.
Lead author and New York University sociology professor Byungkyu Lee clarified that this doesn’t necessarily mean hasslers cause people to age. Instead, he and the other researchers observed “a kind of association between having hasslers and the rate of aging.”
The researchers found that habitual hassling does the same biological harm as “traditional chronic stressors” like finances, systemic discrimination and the workplace.
The resulting accelerated aging can lead to inflammation, a compromised immune system and an elevated risk of cardiovascular disease, among other dangers.
Co-author Brea Perry, a sociology professor at Indiana University, told The Washington Post that “even small effects in terms of biological aging can accumulate.”
To reach their conclusions, the researchers analyzed data from a recent health survey in Indiana that included over 2,000 participants. Participants were asked to reflect on their relationships in the previous six months and to rate their overall health as well as how often other people in their lives hassled them or caused problems.
Researchers also collected saliva samples to study each participant’s epigenetic markers. Advanced DNA assessment tools enabled the team to predict individual aging patterns, other health conditions and mortality risk.
The outlook would seem to be especially bleak for people who report close ties with several hasslers. And the negative impact on cellular health was even greater when the hassler was a family member (most commonly a child or a parent).
Negative social relationships, with family or otherwise, are somewhat common, with 30% of people reporting at least one hassler in their close circle.
But, the authors explained, hasslers were “disproportionately experienced by individuals facing greater social and health vulnerabilities.”
In particular, the study found that people with worse overall health and those who identified as having difficult childhoods were more likely to report having hasslers.
Women, regardless of other factors, also reported having more hasslers than men, which didn’t shock the research team.
“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 explained.
“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,” she added.
But of course, while negative social relationships can do real biological harm, the inverse is also true: strong, positive relationships yield many benefits, from a lower risk of cognitive decline to an overall longer life.
The answer, therefore, is not to isolate from people, which has its own detrimental effect on health: a recent World Health Organization report said about 871,000 deaths annually can be attributed to loneliness.
Still, prolonging close contact with hasslers could be shaving years off your life. If the tried-and-true cancellation method isn’t an option — as with family members, roommates, neighbors, colleagues or anyone else who can’t so easily be cut out — Perry said the best approach is to try some boundary-setting.
“As soon as you recognize that someone who is a hassler has these negative biological consequences for you, set limits on the effort you’re putting into that relationship,” she advised.
