Difficult People in Your Life May Speed Up Biological Aging, New Study Suggests

Researchers at New York University and Indiana University have put a number on something most people feel without measuring: the cost of having difficult people around. In a study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and funded by the National Institute on Aging, they found that each additional "hassler" a person regularly deals with was associated with a 1.5 percent faster pace of biological aging.

The researchers defined hasslers as people who create problems or make life more difficult. The work was led by Byungkyu Lee, an assistant professor of sociology at NYU, with Brea Perry, a sociology professor at Indiana University at Bloomington and associate director of the Irsay Institute for Sociomedical Sciences Research, as co-author. Their starting point was that strong social networks are known to protect health, lowering the risk of cognitive impairment and death, and that friendships may even slow aging at the cellular level. But, Lee said, not all social ties are supportive.

The team drew on data from more than 2,000 people in a health survey conducted in Indiana. Participants described their relationships over the previous six months, then answered follow-up questions about how often a given person hassled them, caused problems or made life harder. They also rated their own overall health and provided saliva samples, which were analyzed for DNA changes that signal biological aging. That let the researchers compare people with hasslers in their networks against those without.

The arithmetic is modest. A person would normally age one biological year per calendar year; with one extra hassler, the study suggests, that becomes about 1.015 years. Perry said even small effects can accumulate and may contribute to earlier onset of chronic disease. The association was especially strong for people with two or more hasslers in their lives.

The authors are explicit about the limits. The study does not prove cause and effect. "We do not know whether hasslers actually cause people to age," Lee said; what the data show is an association between having hasslers and the rate of aging.

Certain groups reported more hasslers. Women generally had more than men, a finding Debra Umberson, a sociology professor and director of the Center on Aging and Population Sciences at the University of Texas at Austin, called "not completely shocking." She was not involved in the study. Perry noted that women tend to be more strongly affected, for better and worse, by their relationships, and may be more likely to perceive and take on others' problems as stress. People in poorer health and those with adverse childhood experiences also reported more hasslers. Perry theorized that people with health problems may need caregiving, which can make relationships one-sided and hard to negotiate, while those with difficult childhoods may be more vulnerable to chronic stressors.

Many hasslers turned out to be family. Perry described them as people embedded in your life in ways that are hard to escape or renegotiate. Among relatives, parents and children were more likely to be named than partners or spouses. Among non-relatives, co-workers, roommates and, to a lesser degree, neighbors were more often hasslers than friends were, groups that, like family, involve obligation and shared space.

The obvious advice, Lee said, is to avoid hasslers or cut ties when someone adds heavy stress, though that is a hard decision and often unrealistic, especially with family. Umberson pointed out that every relationship carries some hassle alongside support and love. Perry suggested limiting time with a hassler, considering therapy, setting limits on the effort you put in, and planning self-care before and after encounters. Lee recommended investing steadily in supportive relationships as a buffer, though the study did not test whether that calms aging.

Umberson stressed that connection still matters most. Last year the World Health Organization released a global report linking loneliness to 871,000 deaths every year. The next step for researchers is untangling cause from association.