Professor Bob Waldinger

Like, how could that be?

How could that be a thing?

Well...

I know more about it now because we've been spending a bunch of years investigating that.

It seems to have to do with stress.

The best hypothesis we have is that relationships are stress regulators for us.

So for example, stress happens every day, right?

Something upsetting may happen and your body revs up, your blood pressure goes up, your heart rate goes up.

then the body's meant to come back to equilibrium.

And what we find is that if you have somebody you can call and complain to, or you have someone at home you can go home and say, you won't believe what happened today, and you get to explain what happened, you can feel your body calm down.

And we think that good relationships help our bodies go back to equilibrium after they're stressed.

And what we know is that people who are isolated, people who are lonely, have chronic stress because loneliness is a stressor.

So we think that those people may not ever go back to the baseline that they're supposed to go back to when they've been stressed, that they may have low levels of stress all the time.

in their body, higher levels of circulating stress hormones, a weaker immune system, chronic inflammation that breaks down different body systems.

So that's how we think it works.

This was work done at Ohio State University.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And what they did was they took two groups of older adults.

One group was caring for demented relatives and one group was not.

And otherwise they were kind of equal in terms of health status and all that.