Spending time together, hugging each other is good for your health, as well as for the heart (photo Getty Images).
D.we obey fire, it seems, our sociability. The human beings who preceded us have learned from the flames to defend themselves, to keep warm, to eat cooked foods, but not only. It is around the bonfires that the days got longer and that the ancestors began to tell each other the stories of hunting, and of pain, and of healings..
Until, evening after evening, year after year, the beauty of those words to be exchanged remained so impressed in the brain that it became necessity. We need to be with others.
Friends around a bonfire
The study on the role of fire in human evolution was conducted by the University of Utah (Published on Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences) and explained for the first time that our ability to make a group dates back to finding ourselves crouched in the red-lit night.
Today, in front of a fireplace that hypnotizes us, near the lights of a Christmas tree or sitting around a table, we find joy in sharing moments with other people. Loving good is good for us, we could say.
«Taking care of your body is important, but also taking care of one’s social relationships is a form of self-care»Explained Robert Waldinger, professor of psychiatry atHarvard Medical School. He directs one of the longest ever studies on adult life (the Harvard Study of Adult Development), the conclusions of which are clear: deep relationships make you happy more than money or fame, protect you from sadness and help delay mental decline and physicist.
Great loves and great friends have a potentially greater weight on longevity than wealth, intelligence and the same genes we inherited.
The study: more love, more health
Sociability is not an easy aspect to measure. The Harvard investigation has been set up since the 1930s. The information was stored in a small room at Boston University, in filing cabinets that contain details about the participants, from health to friends, from intellectual performance tests to MRI brain scans.
While Hitler in Europe sent millions of Jews to death, scientists in the United States began a collection of data that would show that the key to a satisfying existence is affection.
The researchers started between 1938 and 1944 with a series of tests on 268 college students promising school curriculum: among others, future president John Fitzgerald Kennedy and Ben Bradlee, who would be at the helm of the Washington Post during the Watergate scandal.
The goal was to follow them for about twenty years, but the study went on and the groups of participants expanded. The statements that stunned the academic world in 2009 are from the first director of the project, George Vaillant, in 2009: “Looking at the results, I realized that the only thing that really matters in life is relationships with other people : it is having emotional relationships that makes you age better, love is the secret of well-being“.
The psychiatrist Waldinger, who then took over the investigation, did not deviate from his predecessor: “The quality of people’s relationships is much more important than we thought, even for health”.
We are social animals
Strong personal ties leave marks in emotions, feelings, and ways of thinking. Harvard professors, using imaging technologies, i.e. taking a look at the brains of some study participants, found that the people who were more satisfied with social life had a greater number of synapses, that is, of connections between neurons, compared to those who were less satisfied.
As John Donne wrote, “no man is an island, complete in himself.” Aristotle held it even earlier, in his Politics, that man is a social animal. Today science proves it: in some researches it has been found that lonely people have very high levels of chronic inflammation, comparable to those of heavy smokers.
And losing contact with others after the age of 50 can be twice as deadly as obesity and nearly as much as black misery, according to a 2014 study by the University of Chicago.
The loneliness of mobile phones
“Slaves of love” by Tonino Cantelmi, Emiliano Lambiase and Michela Pensavalli (Edizioni San Paolo).
In the book Slaves of love (just published by Edizioni San Paolo), the psychotherapists Tonino Cantelmi, Emiliano Lambiase and Michela Pensavalli warn against a new form of loneliness typical of the age in which we live, the age of hyper-connectedness.
The compulsive use of smartphones and other devices, we read in the essay, lowers the intensity and duration of bonds between people: “More and more frequently, the new generations prefer to delegate even the most delicate discussions to a Whatsapp message, they struggle to cross each other’s eyes and to talk face to face because in person one feels more “uncovered”, almost naked, vulnerable, since one cannot hide one’s imperfections, the most uncertain parts of us, our ambivalences. Therefore, virtualized social interactions, rapidly achievable, begin to prevail, read, and that just as quickly and simply can be suspended, interrupted, blocked “.
Against liquid bonds
However, the need for profound communication is inherent, it remains, and virtual connections fill it superficially, without satisfying it.. «The new relational modalities» write the authors in Slaves of love, “Respond more and more to a dynamic of satisfaction of individual pleasure, quite similar to that implemented in all types of addiction.”
Staring at the phone instead of talking to each other is a form of separation.
Eliana Liotta (photo by Carlo Furgeri Gilbert).
A few years ago Zygmunt Bauman said that we have forgotten about happiness, that for its construction we have replaced desire, and the desire of desire, super fast, doped with technology, which neither sees nor wants problems, which builds walls between us and the others.
The Polish sociologist coined the famous definition of liquid modernity to define the present-day trend towards the rarefaction of every bond. The solution to get out of it can only be as old as man: to love, to see each other, to talk.
Eliana Liotta is a journalist, writer and science writer. On iodonna.it and on the main platforms (Spreaker, Spotify, Apple Podcast and Google Podcast) you will find his podcast series The good that I want.
All the articles by Eliana Liotta.
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