Interview

Study helps unlock key to long life

Reporter: Nancy J. White

Who tends to live longer:

The happy-go-lucky type or the plodding worrier?

The slacker or the workaholic?

The never-married female or the divorced male?

A study of 1,500 people over the course of eight decades found that some of our common notions about longevity are dead wrong.

The key factor leading to a long life? Not cheerfulness, not marriage. It’s conscientiousness.

“This is the first study to ever follow people over such a long time period and gather this type of data,” says research psychologist Leslie Martin, co-author of the new book The Longevity Project.

In 1921, Stanford University psychologist Lewis Terman began studying a sample of 1,500 bright boys and girls, most born around 1910, to discover what traits — social, psychological and physical — are sources of leadership. On his death in 1956, researchers continued collecting information about the now middle-aged participants.

Terman’s bright boys and girls grew up to lead diverse lives — as businesspeople, lawyers, engineers, housewives, clerks, policemen and technicians. A few gained some fame: Shelley Smith Mydans was a reporter for Life covering World War II in Asia, where she was captured and spent months in a prisoner-of-war camp; Jess Oppenheimer helped create the I Love Lucy show.

In 1990, psychologist Howard Friedman, co-author of The Longevity Project, began collecting data on the surviving participants, now elderly men and women, to analyze the lifespan factors they shared.

Martin, a psychology professor at La Sierra University in Riverside, Calif., spoke to the Star recently about the traits that promote a long life. Here is an edited version of the conversation:

So who lives the longest?

A number of factors predict a long life, but one of the most consistent findings is that people who are conscientious lived a long time. Another characteristic is social connectedness, particularly if it involved helping others. We also found that individuals who worked hard tended to live long lives. And we found that worry is not the risk that people think.

Conscientiousness is the top predictor. How so?

A conscientious person is responsible and organized and not very full of ego. They’re pragmatic and they think ahead. It makes sense that these qualities would be related to a long life. Because they think ahead, they are less likely to encounter as many stressors. They tended to wind up in more stable marriages. They gravitated to stable careers that they found fulfilling. All these dimensions are pathways that can lead to a long life. The highly conscientious were more likely to be moderate drinkers or abstainers and were less likely to smoke.

What if you weren’t conscientious as a child but became more so as an adult?

We divided the data into categories: stably conscientious, stably not so and those who switch, becoming more conscientious over time or becoming less so. The stably conscientious lived the longest and the always not conscientious fared the worst. Those who took steps to be more so in early adulthood improved their life expectancy and those who became less so had greater risk of a shorter life.

What finding surprised you the most?

The difference for men versus women who divorced and remarried. Divorce is harmful to anyone. But men who remarried diminished their risk quite a bit. For women, remarrying didn’t help. Many of them had similar outcomes to those who stayed single after divorce. For both men and women, being steadily single was almost as good as being steadily married.

What common beliefs about living a long happy life are wrong?

You commonly hear, “You’re working yourself to death. Take it easy.” That’s wrong. Those who worked the hardest tended to live the longest.

And contrary to what most people think, the most happy-go-lucky, cheerful people had the greater risk of dying earlier.

How do you explain that?

That was one of the most surprising and hardest to explain. We looked at other studies to reconcile our findings. If you are faced with a crisis, being cheerfully optimistic is a good thing, enabling you to engage the problem and recover. But as a life approach, where decisions are shaded by unrealistic optimism, it leads people to take more risks and make potentially problematic choices. In our study, the most cheerful kids grew up to smoke and drink more and have riskier hobbies.

The participants in your study were all smart and nearly all white and middle class. They were born and grew up long ago. How relevant are the findings to people today?

When we look at personality characteristics, the participants are not so different from people in a developed country today. These were all smart kids but they ran the gamut of educational and career success. Personality characteristics don’t vary according to IQ. It would have been great if the sample had more ethnic diversity, but we fortunately had almost half girls. Nobody looked at girls in the 1920s. When we look at other studies with a more diverse sample — none go back 80 years — we see our findings are confirmed.

Maybe the ones who lived longer just had better genes.

We didn’t have genetic data for our sample but because we have the full-spectrum of a life span, we are able to look at all these other factors. Certainly genetics plays a role but these other characteristics also play a very big role.

What about exercise? Do nerds live as long as jocks?

Yes, they do. People who were active early in life often feel they’ve built up a bank of activeness that will protect them. We found that’s not the case. Being active in mid-life and later was important regardless of what you did early on.

The other important thing, if you don’t like going to the gym or jogging, we recommend you don’t do it. These participants tended not to jog or have formal exercise regimens. We found that the people who stayed active were doing the things they liked, maybe playing tennis, gardening, skiing, woodworking, and they were more likely to be consistent.

You say that being sociable doesn’t necessarily help you live longer, but social connectedness does. That’s confusing.

Envision a social butterfly with lots of casual friends. A sociable person doesn’t necessarily have the kind of deeper, emotional connections that are protective.

After doing this research, how have you changed your life?

I’m a workaholic and it used to bother me that I wasn’t doing myself any favours. I would hear that from my parents. Now I don’t worry about it. I‘ve always valued my friends, but now I value them even more, recognizing how vital they are to my own well-being, not just my happiness but perhaps my life span.