Pillar 5 Social

This is post 5 of 6 focused on exploring my 'six pillars of health'. 

Coming at longevity medicine without a mental model leads me to fall down a dizzying rabbit hole of options which are overwhelming and exhausting. Thus, I created a six pillar model of health that allows me to sort, triage, and critically assess all the information I obtain in my never ending journey to optimize health. 

My six pillars are Life Philosophy, Sleep, Exercise, Nutrition, Social, and Sex. Is there something sacred about these 6 pillars? No, these pillars were not divine revelation delivered to me on tablets of stone. However, I have found that designing specific and actionable interventions to improve health works well in the 6 pillar paradigm. It’s broad enough to cover the most important bases but not so broad as to be directionless and unhelpful; they are useful guide-rails that are not overly ridged. 

With that being said, let's take a look at our fifth pillar, 'Social'.

We are social creatures. Our interpersonal relationships with other humans is key to our physical survival and essential to all aspects of our health. A shitty social environment will inevitably lead to shitty health. An exceptional social environment will keep us resilient and contribute to deeper satisfaction in life even amidst setbacks in the other pillars of health. 

Like exercise, this is intuitive to most people, so the real leverage point is exploring why we so often fail to act in optimize our social pillar. One of the main reasons we fail to optimize our social pillar is that we often take it for granted. We humans in our social world are like fish in water. It’s often difficult to realize the magnitude of importance or our social world because it’s so ubiquitous and completely immersive; it is the milieu we live in.

I like to use analogies to help me understand concepts, so to 'dive deeper' into the fish in water analogy, imagine a room with several fish tanks, each one with a single fish going about its life. In one tank, the water is completely normal water. In another tank the water is old and stagnant. In another tank the water is constantly filtered and infused with some fish optimization nutrients. In yet another tank the water is tainted with an incredibly small dose of poison. Each fish might be able to survive in their bowl for the next hour, the next day, the next week... but over time I bet you can easily predict which fish is healthier a month out. 

Our social environment is just like this. Our day to day decision, what kind of food we eat, how much alcohol we drink that day, when we eat, what we eat, if we exercise, if our weekend outing is a hike or run versus if is it a fried food and beer infused football Sunday, if Thursday another happy hour, if we volunteer time to causes we believe in, if we talk about and develop meaningful conversations or if we stay surface level... all of these I would argue are incredibly dependent on your social circle and who you are choosing to spend time with. Each and every one of these decisions accrues over time to form the habits that determine your health.

There is a lot to think about, so I often employ useful thought experiments when exploring a client's social pillar. To give an example, one of my favorite thought experiments is the "Start-up Hypothetical". In this you are imagining approaching your relationship with someone else (be this a friendship or a romantic relationship) as if you were starting a business. You would never start a business with one big enthusiastic launch and then put no effort into it. Your business would inevitably implode. Similarly you would never start a business without a 'business plan' defining what you wanted to get out of the business, what the business does, responsibilities within the business, prepare for how many hours you are expected to put in, and thoughtfully manage how you communicate and address inevitable conflicts that arise. You would try to remain agile and responsive to the market forces, assess your business's weaknesses, be proactive, and keep a good culture. All of these require a lot of work. Now am I asking you to make a written contract with the other person... no... most people would avoid friendship with you if you were to do such a thing. Instead I want you to consciously think about all of these aspects when going into a friendship or a relationship. You might find that some relationships are not worth investing in right now. Boom, you just saved yourself a lot of frustration, resources, and heartache. 

Similar to business acumen, social skill... is just that... a skill. Like most skills when you don't use it, you lose it. For men specifically, their social skills of making new friends, and maintaining old relationships are almost completely atrophied from lack of use. Often at this point, when men face see the importance of their social life and are asked to work on improving their social pillar of health, many of them throw up their hands and say, "I'm just not good at it." And they are correct. They are not good at it. But to leave it at that is to doom yourself to an unhappy and early demise. This stuff is completely learnable. You just have to be committed to getting over your fear of social rejection, get out of your comfort-zone of what you have always done (if you want a different outcome you need to do a different input) and employ some new techniques. Then it becomes fun.

To wrap up this post, I think it is important to communicate the idea that building reserve and postponing decline applies to the social pillar just as much as it does any other pillar. Like our muscle mass and strength, the natural trajectory of our social life is to build in robustness over the first several decades of our lives. If left to it's own devices we will naturally hit a zenith in our 20s and 30s and start an incrementally worsening decline over the decades unless we intentionally change the natural course. The difference is that unlike muscle mass and strength, I believe there is no upper limit to the reserve we can amass in social health and we can continue to build robust reserves of the social pillar well into old age.

There is no shortage of books and articles screaming at us that we are in a 'loneliness pandemic', that when it comes to effects on our health feeling lonely is equivalent to smoking 15 cigarettes a day, that social media is the devil, and that men specifically are terrible at making new friends. Where we start is in exploring your specific social life, observe what it is doing for your health, and then make conscientious interventions that improve this fundamental aspect of you we exist. I promise you that every ounce of sweat you put into improving this pillar will pay off ten fold in the health and happiness rewards you reap.