Issue link: https://www.newlifestylesdigital.com/i/796044
5 Social Relationships Critical to Good Health for Older Adults OFFERING EXCEPTIONAL MEDICAL, DENTAL AND BEHAVIORAL HEALTH CARE TO PEOPLE OF ALL AGES. FIND A HEALTH CENTER NEAR YOU BY VISITING US ONLINE AT PEAKVISTA.ORG OR CALLING (719) 632-5700 We're here for Connections with family and friends are as impor- tant as diet and exercise to your health. e impact of social relationships on health, both physical and mental health, is now well established. Longitudi- nal studies that follow adults into late life show that loneliness is a major risk factor for illnesses and death (Hawkley & Cacioppo, 2010). Imagine – your life expectancy is as influenced by social factors as it is by illnesses or health behaviors such as physical activity and food intake! Loneliness, and the depression so oen associated with it, has negative impacts on our basic physiol- ogy, including blood pressure (Hawkley, isted, Masi, & Cacioppo, 2010). Social isolation changes the brain structure and processing in social animals (Cacioppo, Capitanio & Cacciopo, 2014). Although solitude—a positive state of being alone with one- self—can be valuable to our well-being, loneliness is not. Loneliness is associated with depression and anxiety as well as increased rates of illness and earlier death. Is it the size of your network or the support you receive from that network that matters? It turns out that both the number and quality of relationships are important. Older adults with larger and more diverse networks have better health than those with small, more constrained networks (Windsor, Rio- seco, Fiori, Curtis, & Booth, 2016). Larger networks afford you more choices from which to meet social needs. People who perceive their relationship net- works to be supportive also have better health than those who lack support in their social network. Of course, perception is in the eye of the beholder, so we must be open to perceiving social support and the supportive people must be there. How does our management of social relation- ships change as we age? Laura Carstensen, Director of Stanford Univer- sity's Center for Longevity, has established that humans prune their networks with advancing age, reducing the number of acquaintances and focus- ing on closer inner circles (Lang & Carstensen, 1994). Inner circles tend to be family and close friends, who continue to be stable members of the network into advanced old age. Socioemotional selectivity theory predicts that despite smaller networks, older adults will gain the same levels of satisfaction from them (Carstensen, Isaacowitz, & Charles, 1999). Data from three decades of studies support the core tenets of this theory. Karen Rook, Chair of the Psychology and Social Behavior Department at the University of Cali- fornia Irvine, has studied the challenges faced by older adults in maintaining networks in the face of uncontrollable loss through illness or death. She points out two obvious deviations from Carstensen's model. First, older adults experience considerable social loss that they did not choose, as friends and family become ill or die, thus shrinking their social network (Rook, 2009). Most older adults adapt well to social losses over time, but an accumulation of losses that devastate the inner circle of family and close friends have Continued on page 6...