What fun would you say is optimal for preserving mental health? Seems like that would be social contact, but it’s not clear whether that intuition is correct.
This intuition is correct if you take mental health to highly correlate health in general.
Except for Ageing, and Tabagism (also called slow motion suicide), not having a deeply rewarding and intrincate social life is the most important factor determining your health.
“People with strong social relationships were 50 percent less likely to die
early than people without such support, the team at Brigham Young University
in Utah found.
They suggest that policymakers look at ways to help people maintain social
relationships as a way of keeping the population healthy.
“A lack of social relationships was equivalent to smoking up to 15 cigarettes
a day,” psychologist Julianne Holt-Lunstad, who led the study, said in a
telephone interview.
Her team conducted a meta-analysis of studies that examine social
relationships and their effects on health. They looked at 148 studies that
covered more than 308,000 people.
Having low levels of social interaction was equivalent to being an alcoholic,
was more harmful than not exercising and was twice as harmful as obesity.
Social relationships had a bigger impact on premature death than getting an
adult vaccine to prevent pneumonia, than taking drugs for high blood pressure
and far more important than exposure to air pollution, they found.
META--: Will someone Please create a way in which comments can use italicized text so I don’t have to do This to emphasize a word!
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One reason is that if you attempt to be an optimized world-saving robot, your mental health will deteriorate.
Mine did, at least. Now I’m in therapy. Take your mental health seriously, don’t think you can sweep it under the rug.
What fun would you say is optimal for preserving mental health? Seems like that would be social contact, but it’s not clear whether that intuition is correct.
Yeah, profound isolation is definitely my #1 problem. Apart from that, I couldn’t say. I have the problem, not the solution.
This intuition is correct if you take mental health to highly correlate health in general.
Except for Ageing, and Tabagism (also called slow motion suicide), not having a deeply rewarding and intrincate social life is the most important factor determining your health.
“People with strong social relationships were 50 percent less likely to die early than people without such support, the team at Brigham Young University in Utah found. They suggest that policymakers look at ways to help people maintain social relationships as a way of keeping the population healthy. “A lack of social relationships was equivalent to smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day,” psychologist Julianne Holt-Lunstad, who led the study, said in a telephone interview. Her team conducted a meta-analysis of studies that examine social relationships and their effects on health. They looked at 148 studies that covered more than 308,000 people.
Having low levels of social interaction was equivalent to being an alcoholic, was more harmful than not exercising and was twice as harmful as obesity. Social relationships had a bigger impact on premature death than getting an adult vaccine to prevent pneumonia, than taking drugs for high blood pressure and far more important than exposure to air pollution, they found.
Paper is here: http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pmed.1000316
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I made this same mistake, and ended up being significantly less optimized at world-saving as a result.
Yes, Will’s intuition is right. The literature is clear on how important social connectedness is to human health and well-being.