Saints Healthy Marriage Project

Welcome to Saints Healthy Marriage Project.
Please be patient with us while we move into our new online home.
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lisa@saintshealthymarriages.com

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: BEING HEALTHY :

The number and quality of your relationships affect your health in direct and indirect ways. People with a large number of satisfying relationships live longer and stay healthier than those with none or few.

Lonliness leads to High Blood Pressure ...
Posted by Mark Dombeck, Ph.D. on Tue, Mar 28th 2006

There are all sorts of studies out there (decent summary here) that suggest that being married can help you live a healthier, longer life. We can add to this literature new evidence that suggests that being older and lonely is positively bad for your health. A new study out of the University of Chicago that looked at the physical health of people 50 years and older was able to demonstrate that subjects who thought of themselves as lonely and who reported lacking companionship had blood pressure measurements which were as much as 30 points higher than those subjects who reported adequate social interactions and that they were not particularly lonely. Study co-author Dr. John Cacioppo has already observed similar findings (blood vessel problems indicative of later-life blood pressure issues) in a separate study of younger adults. So - here is the mind-body connection at work. People are social creatures by nature, and as it seems to be turning out, isolation (a psychological condition) has real negative physical health consequences.