Difficult People Literally Age You, Study Finds

“Hasslers,” or people who repeatedly “create problems or make life more difficult” for you, can literally age you, a new study published in PNAS found.

Stating that relationships like these are “not rare,” the researchers added that they are “disproportionately experienced by individuals facing greater social and health vulnerabilities, and consequential for ageing”.

And the more of these sorts of relationships, the worse the health outcomes seem to be.

This research showed that for every “hassler” in a person’s life, biological ageing sped up by 1.5%, or nine months.

The authors think this could happen because negative interactions chronically strain the body’s hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis, which helps to regulate stress hormones like cortisol and adrenaline.

And, they posit, the chronic stress of talking to “hasslers” leads to lasting inflammation, which is linked to ageing if it lasts when the body doesn’t need it.

This could, they say, be an example of allostatic load; a form of “wear and tear” that happens when we try repeatedly to adapt to ongoing stress.

That might be why people with more “hasslers” fared worse, on average, on measures like self-reported health, psychiatric symptoms, epigenetic inflammation scores, and waist-to-hip ratio.

Almost 30% of us have one or more in our lives, the paper stated.

But some people are more likely than others to have “hasslers”.

This study looked at kin and nonkin hasslers as well as spouse hasslers.

In this research, only the first two were found to affect participants’ biological ageing.

“Ties characterised by obligation, shared space, or structural interdependence, such as parents, children, coworkers, or roommates, are more likely to be hasslers than voluntary, self-selected ties such as friends, church members, and neighbours,” the paper reads.

Kin hasslers are the most linked to accelerated ageing, while nonkin hasslers seemed to affect mortality-sensitive metrics the most.