Staying socially connected in later life is one of the better-evidenced predictors of living longer: a review of 148 studies found people with stronger relationships had about a 50 percent higher chance of survival, an association comparable to well-known risk factors like smoking

Advice about aging well tends to focus on the body: eat this, walk that far, watch these numbers. Some of the strongest predictors of how long and how well people live in their later years are not in the bloodwork at all. We are writers, not clinicians, and what follows is a reading of the research, not medical advice. What the largest review foundIn 2010, Julianne Holt-Lunstad and colleagues published a meta-analysis in PLoS Medicine that pooled 148 studies covering more than 308,000 people. Across all of them, participants with stronger social relationships had about a 50 percent higher likelihood of surviving over the study periods than those with weaker ones.