Health & Happiness From Outside & In

A friend in need…

In a recent large (n=3,486) poll across the US:

• 90% of people aged 50 and older say they have at least one close friend
• 75% say they have enough close friends
• 70% of those with a close friend say they can definitely count on them to provide health-related support

However, those numbers shrink by half when it comes to people whose physical and/or mental health is not so great, resulting in a negative feedback loop of fewer close friends whom one sees less often, and progressively worse physical and/or mental health. In other words, the healthier you are, the more likely you are to have a friend who’ll support you in your health:

Read in full: Friendships promote healthier living in older adults, says new survey

Related: How To Beat Loneliness & Isolation

Kindness makes a difference to healthcare outcomes

Defining kindness as action-oriented, positively focused, and purposeful in nature, this sets kindness apart from compassion and empathy, when it’s otherwise often been conflated with those, and thus overlooked. This also means that kindness can still be effected when clinicians are too burned-out to be compassionate, and/or when patients are not in a state of mind where empathy is useful.

Furthermore, unkindness (again, as defined by this review) was found in large studies to be the root cause of ¾ of patient harm events in hospital settings. This means that far from being a wishy-washy abstraction, kindness/unkindness can be a very serious factor when it comes to healthcare outcomes:

Read in full: Review suggests kindness could make for better health care

Related: The Human Touch vs AI, The Doctor That Never Tires

The gift of health?

🎵 Last Christmas, I gave you my heart
Which turned out to be a silly idea
This year, to save me from tears
I’ll just get you a Fitbit or something🎵

Health & happiness go hand in hand, so does that make health stuff a good gift? It can do! But there are also plenty of opportunities for misfires.

For example, getting someone a gym membership when they don’t have time for that may not help them at all, and sports equipment that they’ll use once and then leave to gather dust might not be great either. In contrast, the American Heart Association recommends to first consider what they enjoy doing, and work with that, and ideally make it something versatile and/or portable. Wearable gadgets are a fine option for many, but a gift doesn’t have to be fancy to be good—with a blood pressure monitoring cuff being a suggestion from Dr. Sperling (a professor of preventative cardiology):

Read in full: Oh, there’s no gift like health for the holidays

Related: Here’s Where Activity Trackers Help (And Also Where They Don’t)

How you use social media matters more than how much

A study commissioned by the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre found that while the quantity of time one spends on social media is not associated (positively or negatively) with loneliness, they did find a correlation between passive (as opposed to engaged) use of social media, and loneliness. In other words, people who were chatting with friends less, were more lonely! Shocking news.

While the findings may seem obvious, it does present a call-to-action for anyone who is feeling lonely: to use social media not just to see what everyone else is up to, but also, to reach out to people.

Read in full: Unpacking the link between social media and loneliness

Related: Make Social Media Work For Your Mental Health Rather Than Against It

Gut-only antidepressants

Many antidepressants work by increasing serotonin levels in the brain; a new study suggests that targeting antidepressants to work only in the gut (which is where serotonin is made, not the brain) could not only be an effective treatment for mood disorders, but also cause fewer adverse side-effects:

Read in full: Antidepressants may act in gut to reduce depression and anxiety

Related: Antidepressants: Personalization Is Key!

Take care!