And that’s even if nobody ever gets physical
(CC) Craig Sunter/Flickr
If you don’t like argumentative types, those hair-trigger individuals who just seem to go through life spoiling for verbal fights, take heart: according to Danish behavioral scientists, they probably won’t be around all that long. Of course, if you happen to be one of those chip-shouldered types yourself, you may want to speed up any long-term plans you’ve made. According to research reported in the latest Journal of Epidemiology & Community Health, people who chronically bicker with family members, friends, or even neighbors have an ugly tendency to not make it past middle age.
The nuts and bolts: 10,000 volunteers in the 36–52 age range, a hefty sample population, were questioned as to how frequently they “experienced conflict” with relatives, partners, neighbors or associates, and to what degree they worried about their relationships, or felt others made too many demands on them. Then the researchers waited for eleven years. Then they looked at the subjects’ subsequent health records. They found that the habitual arguers were fully two to three times more likely to have already died than were their even-tempered, go-along peers.
Mind you, we’ve learned through previous studies that excessive arguing can put a strain on your health; we just didn’t realize it had such a tendency to be a fatal strain. That new knowledge suggests a fairly convincing reason to curtail your beefing: if you don’t, you could triple your chances of not lasting another full decade.
We also knew that members of argumentative families tended to have more health problems – in one vaguely macabre study, researchers made cuts in the arms of married couples and instructed them to then either argue or chat cordially; the arguers took measurably longer to heal – but the Danish group was surprised that the death effect applied even to those who mainly argued not with family members but with outsiders. Another thing that surprised them was an increased death rate among subjects who tended to frequently worry about or feel put upon by their children or partners – but not by others, family or otherwise.
Your personality is to blame
Nobody seems to think that it’s the act of arguing that proves prematurely fatal, but rather that both the poor health and the argumentativeness spring from some underlying personality factor. It’s been well established that hostility is associated with heart disease and early death from heart attack, for example; but arguing, which is basically just putting hostility into action, seems to elevate the effect and bring a number of other serious health risks into play: the leading cause of death in the study was cancer, followed in turn by heart disease and stroke, liver disease, accidents, and suicide. Exactly how each of these outcomes might be associated with arguing is a study it itself: are belligerent types also heavy drinkers (liver disease) or projecting self-hatred onto others (suicide)?
What the Danish researchers can say is that the link between interpersonal conflict and early demise held up even when they controlled for everything from sex and income to symptoms of depression. So it seems only prudent to heed the conclusion of the study’s lead author: “It would be a good idea to reduce the amount of conflict in your life.”
Or in blunter terms: Stay cool, stay composed, and stay alive.
(By Robert S. Wieder for CalorieLab)
