When I was in law school, people used to say: “If you don’t know who the class jerk is, it’s you.”
Actually, they didn’t say “jerk,” but you get the point. And it rang true.
It also gave me a quiet goal for the rest of my time there: Figure out who the class jerk is — or take a good long look in the mirror.
Now science has an update that makes the whole idea a little more serious: Difficult people in your life might actually make you age faster.
“Hasslers”
That’s the conclusion of a new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Researchers examined the impact of what they called “hasslers” — people in someone’s social circle who regularly cause problems or make life more difficult.
The study used data from more than 2,300 adults in Indiana, combining detailed surveys about participants’ social networks with saliva samples that allowed researchers to measure biological aging through DNA markers.
The result: Each additional hassler in a person’s life was associated with a roughly 1.5 percent faster pace of biological aging.
“Those less-positive relationships may function as chronic stressors, so having those people around you actually makes your life really challenging,” saidByungkyu Lee, an assistant professor of sociology at New York University and lead author of the study.
The researchers also estimated that each additional hassler corresponded to being roughly nine months older biologically than someone of the same chronological age.
Put simply, the wrong people can wear you down.
“Chronic stress”
The study also found that difficult relationships correlate with a wide range of other health issues. Participants who reported more hasslers tended to have worse mental health, higher levels of anxiety and depression, poorer self-rated health, and higher body mass indexes.
Researchers think the mechanism is fairly straightforward: chronic stress.
Repeated interpersonal tension can keep the body’s stress systems activated, increasing hormones such as cortisol and triggering inflammation. Over time, that kind of physiological strain can affect the biological processes associated with aging.
One interesting twist in the study involves who the “hasslers” are most likely to be.
Friends, it turns out, were relatively unlikely to fall into that category. Only a small percentage of friendships were described as regularly stressful.
Family members were far more likely to be identified as hasslers — especially parents and children. Co-workers and roommates also appeared frequently on the list.
The explanation is intuitive. Relationships based on obligation or shared space are harder to escape or redefine. You can slowly drift away from a difficult friend. It is much harder to create distance from someone you work with, live with, or share a family with.
(Can I point out that law school classmates — especially since first-year law students often take all their classes with the same people — fit this almost perfectly?)
Looking in the mirror, again …
The researchers were careful about how far to take their findings. The study identifies an association between hasslers and faster biological aging, but it does not prove direct cause and effect. Other factors could contribute to the pattern.
Still, the research highlights something worth thinking about: Chronic stress from difficult interactions has real consequences.
So one obvious takeaway is to think carefully about the people who occupy the center of your life — the people who get your time, attention, and emotional energy.
But there’s a second takeaway that might be just as important.
It’s easy to read about hasslers and immediately picture someone else: the impossible co-worker, the exhausting relative, the friend who always brings drama.
The harder question is whether we ever play that role ourselves.
Choose carefully
Most people probably have moments when they are the one creating the strain, escalating conflicts, or leaving other people feeling drained after an interaction.
Which makes the goal pretty simple.
Choose your relationships carefully. Protect your time and energy. Invest in the people who make life calmer, steadier, and better.
And try not to become the kind of person who speeds up someone else’s biological clock.
So here’s to science, and living longer, and being careful about whom we allow to get close to us and take up our time.
And also, here’s to being able — even all these years later — to remember pretty quickly who the class jerk was — and being pretty sure it wasn’t me.
Other things worth knowing …
S&P 500 stock and crude oil futures — contracts that let traders bet on where markets are headed — both saw sharp, isolated volume spikes around 6:50 a.m. Monday, 15 minutes before President Trump posted on Truth Social that the U.S. and Iran had held talks and that he was halting planned strikes on Iranian energy infrastructure. The timing raised eyebrows, as anyone who bought stock futures and shorted crude at that moment stood to profit handsomely just minutes later. (CNBC)
Senior military officials are weighing a possible deployment of a combat brigade from the Army’s 82nd Airborne Division and some elements of the division’s headquarters staff to support U.S. military operations in Iran. The officials described the military’s actions as prudent planning, noting that nothing had been ordered by the Pentagon or U.S. Central Command, which declined to comment, speaking on the condition of anonymity. (NYT)
A civil jury in California on Monday found that Bill Cosby had drugged and sexually assaulted Donna Motsinger, a former waitress at a Sausalito restaurant, after escorting her to one of his comedy shows in 1972. The jury awarded Ms. Motsinger $59.25 million in damages, a judgment that comes as Mr. Cosby, by his own account, has run into financial difficulties. (NYT)
Covid gave us hybrid work. The Iran War might give us a four-day week—and this time, experts say it could stick. (Fortune)
2,100 years ago, someone hurled a rock inscribed with ‘Learn your lesson!’ The ancient sling bullet certainly added insult to injury. (Popular Science)
The 10-second trick to spot a liar, according to a psychopathy researcher. (Business Insider)
Thanks for reading. Photo by Miguel Tomás on Unsplash. I wrote about some of this before at Inc.com. See you in the comments.
Another outstanding essay! Here is an unavoidable hassler in my life:
Trump, Who Calls Mail-in Voting ‘Cheating,’ Just Voted by Mail
President Trump has long fixated on mail-in voting to bolster his baseless claims of widespread voter fraud. But he recently used the method in a Florida special election.
— NYT
Jerks. Hasslers. Garden-variety assholes. The older I get, the easier it becomes to delete these people from my life as quickly as possible without any residual feelings of guilt or regret.
Growing up on a farm as an only child expected to entertain myself has proven to be an incredible gift of my busy, hard-working parents. I learned quite early to enjoy my own company and be happy in my solitude.