Chronic sleep deprivation, heavy smoking, high stress, and excessive alcohol speed up aging. But the Harvard longevity study found something unexpected: high-quality relationships matter more than almost anything else for how long and well you live.
Let's say that I were somewhat reckless and masochistic and wanted to speed up that Dunedin pacing clock a little bit. What would be my strategy? What would be your recommendations to someone as far as the top things that are going to make you age faster?
Yeah, we could do it all at once. What I'd say is stay up all night and don't sleep. And, while you're up, smoke as much as you can smoke, be as stressed out as you can be, and then just overeat. Like, those are the biggest things. It's like excess calories, lack of sleep, stress, and then the things that we know, like smoking and excess alcohol. Like, those are the big ones that everybody—
So, basically, go to college to age faster. Yeah, exactly. A few years. Yeah. Yeah. What about anything related to more, like, psychosocial dynamics, relationships, et cetera? I mean, you know about Harvard's longevity study that was like 80+ years long showing that when isolating for a lot of confounding variables, relationship quality seemed to trump everything.
Yeah, that's right. It was by far the bigger than smoking versus not smoking, bigger than everything. So, again, because the studies are expensive to fund, there's not been a ton on psychosocial, but there's some like the one that I mentioned around kids and parents just getting good, better parenting skills. So we know that exists. And what I would say about that is I wish more people would do those studies. But all of these studies on, like, the pace of aging and biologic age, we're looking at— those are surrogate markers. They're really good surrogate markers. The fact that this Harvard study on healthy aging was 80 years and 1,000 people, it is the definitive. So in my mind, we don't need studies on biologic aging, pace of aging, to know that the number one intervention over everything I'll ever tell you about, oh, they studied this supplement, they studied this medication, none of that is close to the strength of your social relationships. And I think that study was so definitive on that, that anyone who's biohacking and not focusing on that, they're wasting their time with everything else. That is the biggest thing, is the strength of those social relationships.
The Solution to Aging Might Be Closer Than Anyone Realizes - With Ben Goertzel
