"Better in the Long Run" - (positive sense of life = better health and longer life)
Posted by Michael Stuart Kelly on 3/26, 12:44pm

The issues in this article deserve study from an Objectivist point of view - principally the life enhancing points. The overtly religious/altruistic ones will be blatant to any Objectivist worth his/her salt and can be easily seen and dismissed for such study. I especially think that forums like SOLO are providing some of the health benefits mentioned that are normally gained from religion.

Better in the Long Run

Social scientists suspect that a sense of meaning fosters health and longevity. Yet, as sociologist Linda George tells us, not all of our sources of meaning do us good.
by Marianna Krejci-Papa

Practicing a religion—any religion—leads to better health and longer life. Sociologists have the data to support this claim, but do not have a clear explanation for it. Once attributed to secondary factors, such as the social connections that are forged through group worship, religion’s salubrious effects are now thought to derive from the sense of meaning that religion offers. For adherents, the ability to find meaning in even the most horrible of life’s circumstances seems to confer a clear health advantage.

Duke University sociologist Linda George has spent the last twenty years studying the impact of social bonds and religion on health and longevity. Her research has shed light on a disturbing trend: the quasi-religious role that work now plays in the lives of many Americans, a role that is by and large boding ill for our health. In return for our daily offerings to the gods of productivity, George suspects, Americans are sacrificing the sense of meaning that comes from solid social relationships. While the United States spends far more of its gross domestic product on health care than any other industrialized country, it fares poorly compared to many of these countries on some key health indicators.

George spoke with Science & Spirit’s Marianna Krejci-Papa about searching for meaning, achieving balance, and the lessons her work holds for those of us hoping to one day blow out 100 birthday candles.

Science & Spirit: How widespread is the evidence for a link between religious belief and longevity?
Linda George: Studies have been done on multiple populations in multiple locations in the United States: California, North Carolina, and Connecticut. Many factors predict how long we live, including socioeconomic status, race, gender, obesity, cigarette smoking, and disability. We can calculate the difference in years of survival between smoking and nonsmoking populations, and we can do the same thing with attendance at religious service. Controlling for everything, we found the difference between attending religious services once a week or more compared to never attending is eight years of life. That’s significant. There are studies now in England and the rest of Europe, which show that the benefits are the same on both sides of the Atlantic.

S&S: You originally thought that secondary factors like social support networks and strengthened self-esteem explained the health benefits of religious activity. But your research proved this hypothesis wrong.
LG: High self-esteem and strong social support are independently predictive of better health, but they do not explain the health differences between people who actively participate in religion and those who do not.

S&S: So what is your current hypothesis?
LG: A number of people are working on this, [as was the late] sociologist Aaron Antonovsky, who studied aging Holocaust survivors. Some, who looked at life as a gift, fared well, while others were broken by their experiences and couldn’t move on. Those in this latter group had less satisfying and less stable lives and lower-quality relationships. They died much sooner than the other survivors. Antonovsky wanted to figure out what allowed one group to go back to living after a trauma, while the other group could not. He developed a concept he called “coherence,” which means viewing the world as a rational, meaningful place. Those who recovered saw meaning in the trauma they’d been through. They found answers they could live with to the profound questions they had about their experiences. Those who fared poorly simply could not do this.

S&S: Did Antonovsky think religious faith was the distinguishing factor?
LG: He made no link to religious participation in his study. But a number of contemporary researchers think that religions help people find meaning in tragedy and sorrow, and help them accept awful things when they happen. Meaning gives people hope that the world is, at its essence, a good place. Religion gives people an organized set of beliefs and fosters coherence. I personally think this explains the positive relationship between religion and health. I also think it is hard to sustain coherence without participating in a religious community. Attending services continually reinforces beliefs.

S&S: So meaning is necessary for our physical, as well as our mental, well-being?
LG: I think so. Researchers in the positive psychology movement have found that the most psychologically healthy members of the population believe life has purpose and meaning. This ties in very much with research on how religion affects health. I see people coming to recognize that having sustained meaning and purpose is an important component of thriving as human beings.

S&S: If lack of meaning debilitates our mental and physical health over the long term, then people who are committed to a religious worldview, and sustain it through regular worship, are better equipped to live longer and healthier lives?
LG: I’m not saying organized religion is the only route—by no means is it. But I do think that for the population as a whole, it’s the most direct and most accessible route. Organized religions offer a pre-existing structure, philosophy, ideology, whatever you want to call it. It’s there, and if it resonates with you, you don’t have to sit for years by yourself or with a therapist to figure it all out.

S&S: Have you found health benefits to vary among religions?
LG: Overall, no. Muslims aren’t well-studied, but we have a lot of information for other religious groups in the United States. Evangelical Christians, mainstream Protestants, Catholics, Jews, followers of New Age religions— they all have the same benefits. We find variations only to the extent that particular denominations prescribe health-related behaviors. For example, Seventh-Day Adventists and Mormons have healthier eating habits and lifestyles than other denominations, and that shows up in the statistics. On the other hand, Christian Scientists, who do not believe in seeking medical care, have a lower life expectancy than members of other Christian denominations and the general public.

S&S: Can we compare organized religious communities to secular communities that also give structure and meaning, in terms of health benefits for participants?
LG: Everyone has a religion. That point was made [more than] twenty years ago by psychiatrist M. Scott Peck in The Road Less Traveled, the Mercedes of self-help books. Some people have religion with a capital R, and some have it with a small r. There are many kinds of religions with a lowercase r. If Peck asked me to describe the religion of my colleagues, for example, I would say, “science.” Science has many of the properties of other comprehensive belief systems: It gives us criteria for evaluating truth, and it focuses us on the processes we use to answer questions. For many of the intellectual elite, the philosophy of science is a substitute, an alternative source of meaning that supplants organized religion. But in its own way, it is still religion with a lowercase r. Sometimes, in our personal lives, we come up against questions that science can’t answer. If we run into a tragedy—a child dying, for instance—we begin to realize the limits of science in providing personal meaning.

S&S: Do you believe the need for meaning is genetically encoded in humans? Is there a gene that drives us to believe in something—to be religious, whether with a capital R or a lowercase r?
LG: There are geneticists who argue that there is, but I doubt it. Some evolutionary biologists have suggested that way back in human history, humans who banded together and developed a sense of meaning and rituals—religion, in other words—had a survival advantage over those who didn’t. If it’s true that religion enhanced survival of the species, then religion would be perpetuated, making it a universal part of our cultural heritage. That’s not the same as being encoded in our genes. Maybe the need for meaning is a human drive—I’m not sure. Whatever it is, it’s there.

S&S: Changing gears, you’ve written that social bonds and social networks are vital to health. Yet the Industrial Revolution and the rise of consumer society helped weaken these bonds for most Americans during the twentieth century. We substitute work and career for social bonds, and turn to work to provide meaning. Is this bad for our national health?
LG: Very bad. An enlightened cardiologist named James Lynch wrote a book called The Broken Heart on this subject twentyfive years ago. He found in his practice that people with good social relationships had fewer heart problems and higher recovery rates, and he was bothered by the trends he saw then in American society. Today, the United States lags behind other industrialized countries in terms of life expectancy and has a relatively high infant mortality rate, although we have the most technologically advanced health care in the world and spend a larger proportion of our gross domestic product on health care than any other country in the world. In Japan, life expectancy is substantially higher than in the United States, even though Japan has the highest rate of smoking in the world. The same goes for some European countries: People smoke more, drink more, spend less on health care, and don’t go to church as much as we do, but still have longer life expectancies and lower infant mortality rates than we do. And we are health conscious in this country, even health obsessed.

S&S: So even though Americans attend church more often than people in other industrialized countries, there are larger forces at work that impact well-being and longevity. Do different social values account for this tremendous difference?
LG: Not just values. Social relationships. In Germany, for instance, increases in productivity have been invested in time off. On average, German workers get a month paid vacation every year. Many get six weeks. This allows them to pursue personal and social goals, and for families to spend more time together. It’s a testimony to a greater concern for the whole person. In the United States, the whole rationale for time off from work is that it makes you more productive when you come back. People need a vacation to “recharge their batteries.”
Highly educated people in the United States are working longer hours than they did twenty-five or thirty years ago. They’re making more money and are spending more. Ours is a very materialistic culture. People sacrifice personal and social good to economic success. We’re out of balance.

S&S: If people want to foster a more balanced lifestyle, how can they do it?
LG: American society values quantity and productivity. But what people need to learn to ask is, “What do I give up for every extra hour of the workday?” We need to balance our overwhelming concern with material outcome with concern for the nonmaterial components of life. Our physical health rests on our mental health. I think we need to grapple a lot more than we do with the basic question of human existence: Why are we here?

S&S: And some answers to that are better for our long-term health?
LG: Chaos theory—the belief that everything in the universe is random, and nothing we do makes a difference—was the worst thing that could happen philosophically for human beings. One can take this perspective, that there is no point and no meaning to life—and that the reward for a good life is a painful death. However legitimate this perspective is, it is not good for our health.

To develop a healthy lifestyle, come to know who you are and what you believe—not as a once-and-for-all thing, but throughout the whole journey of life. And, at some basic level, we need to believe we’re part of a bigger picture. If we can’t achieve that, then not only are we not as healthy and won’t live as long, but we will never experience the great gift that life is.

© 2002 Science & Spirit Magazine. All rights reserved.

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