If you’re interested in determining your life expectancy, researchers at Washington University in St. Louis, know who you should ask. And it isn’t your doctor.
It’s your closest friends.
An 80-year study shows that the way your intimate friends view your personality and behavior is one of the most accurate ways to calculate how long you will probably live.
“You expect your friends to be inclined to see you in a positive manner, but they also are keen observers of the personality traits that could send you to an early grave,” says researcher Joshua Jackson.
The study indicates that your personality, established by the time you are a young adult, in your twenties, forecasts the length of your chances of surviving the next 75 years and that your friends are best at recognizing the personality traits that improve your chances of longevity.
Men who are considered to be conscientious and open live longer. Women who are rated high in agreeableness and emotionally stable also live the longest.
The reasons: Conscientious men are more likely to eat a healthier diet, exercise consistently and not take risks. Emotionally stable women, according to Jackson, are more adept at avoiding harmful anger and suffer less depression and anxiety.
“Our study shows that people are able to observe and rate a friend’s personality accurately enough to predict early mortality decades down the road,” Jackson says. “It suggests that people are able to see important characteristics related to health even when their friends were, for the most part, healthy and many years from death.”
In this study, researchers crunched data from research starting in the 1930s that compiled personality information on young adults. The personality data included self-reported personality traits along with observations by close friends. Then health data were added into the mix, along with searches of death certificates.
Friends’ ratings of personality were better predictors of longevity than self-ratings.
“There are two potential reasons for the superiority of peer ratings over self-ratings,” Jackson says. “First, friends may see something that you miss; they may have some insight that you do not. Second, because people have multiple friends, we are able to average the idiosyncrasies of any one friend to obtain a more reliable assessment of personality. With self-reports, people may be biased or miss certain aspects of themselves and we are not able to counteract that because there is only one you, only one self-report.”
So if you want to understand your medical future – survey your friends.
“This is one of the longest studies in psychology,” Jackson says. “It shows how important personality is in influencing significant life outcomes like health and demonstrates that information from friends and other observers can play a critical role in understanding a person’s health issues.
If conscientiousness and emotional stability will help you live longer, you may be asking yourself, well, how do I achieve that for longer life?
The answer is meditation. Easy Health Options’ Dr. Isaac Eliaz talked about this just last month. If you want his quick primer on how and why to meditate, and a routine that’s easy to learn, just click here.
