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Here are two remarkable excerpts from NY Times bestselling author Daniel Goleman’s book Social Intelligence:  The Revolutionary New Science of Human Relationships that may change the way you go about staying healthy.  I’m not saying quit exercising and eat more Big Macs, but the simplicity of these solutions astound me.

If you’re in a hurry, read the emphasized passages.

Cuddling Keeps You Healthy

“Picture a woman in the maws of an MRI, lying on her back on a gurney that’s been wheeled into a human-shaped cavity, one that leaves just inches to spare, in the midst of this vast piece of machinery.  She’s hearing the unsettling whine of huge electric magnets whirling around her and peering at a video monitor just inches above her face.

The screen flashes a sequence of colored geometric shapes - a green square, a red triangle - every twelve seconds.  She’s been told that when a certain shape and color come on the screen, she’ll receive an electric shock - not very painful but unpleasant nonetheless.

At times she endures her apprehension alone.  At other times a stranger holders her hand.  And sometimes she feels the reassuring touch of her husband’s hand.

That was the predicament of eight women who had volunteered for a study in Richard Davidson’s laboratory, one designed to assess the extent to which the people we love can lend us biological assistance in moments of stress and anxiety. The results: when a woman held her husband’s hand, she felt far less anxiety than when she faced the shock alone.

Holding a stranger’s hand helped a bit, though not nearly so much. Intriguingly, Davidson’s group found that it was impossible to conduct the study so that the women were “blind” to whose hand they were holding: on a trial run, wives always guessed correctly whether the hand was their husband’s or a stranger’s.

When the wives faced the shock alone, fMRI analysis showed activity in the regions of the brain the drive the HPA axis into its emergency response, pumping stress hormones through the body. Had the threat been not just a mild shock but personal – say, a hostile job interviewer – these regions almost certainly would have been even more aroused.

Yet this volatile circuitry was pacified strikingly with the calming clasp of a husband’s hand. The study fills in an important blank in our understanding of just how our relationships can matter biologically for better or for worse. We now have a snapshot of the brain undergoing emotional rescue.

Just as telling was another finding: the more highly satisfied a wife feels with her marriage, the grater the biological benefit from holding hands. This clinches the answer to that old scientific mystery of why some marriages appear to challenge women’s health, while others protect it.

Skin-on-skin touch is particularly soothing because it primes oxytocin, as do warmth and vibration (which may explain much of the stress relief that comes from massage or a cozy cuddle). Oxytocin acts as a stress hormone “down-regulator,” reducing the very HPA and SNS activity that, when sustained, puts our health at risk.

When oxytocin releases, the body undergoes a host of healthy changes. Blood pressure lowers as we slide into the relaxed mode of parasympathetic activity. That shifts metabolism from the ready-to-run large muscle boost of stress arousal to a restorative mode where energy goes into storing nutrients, growth, and healing. Cortisol levels plummet, signifying decreased HPA action. Our pain threshold rises, so that we are less sensitive to discomforts. Even wounds heal faster.”

Be around MORE people, not FEWER.

“Enter Sheldon Cohen, a psychologist at Carnegie Mellon University who has intentionally given colds to hundreds of people. Not that Cohen has a malicious streak–it’s all in the interest of science. Under meticulously controlled conditions, he systematically exposes volunteers to a rhinovirus that causes the common cold. About a third of people exposed to the virus develop the full panoply of symptoms, while the rest walk away with nary a sniffle. The controlled conditions allow him to determine why.

His methods are exacting.  Cohen’s experimental volunteers are quarantined for twenty-four hours before they are exposed, to be sure they have not picked up a cold elsewhere.  For the next five days (and for $800) the volunteers are housed in a special unit with other volunteers, all of whom are kept at least three feet from one another, lest they reinfect someone.

During those five days their nasal secretions are tested for technical indicators of colds (like the total weight of their mucus) as well as the presence of the specific rhinovirus, and their blood samples are tested for antibodies.  This way Cohen takes the measure of the cold with a precision that goes far beyond counting runny noses and sneezes.

We know that low levels of vitamin C, smoking, and sleeping poorly all increase the likelihood of infection. The question is, can a stressful relationship be added to that list? Cohen’s answer: definitely. Cohen assigns precise numerical values to the factors that make one person come down with a cold while another stays healthy. Those with an ongoing personal conflict were 2.5 times as likely as the others to get a cold, putting rocky relationships in the same causal range as vitamin C deficiency and poor sleep. (Smoking, the most damaging unhealthy habit, made people three times more likely to succumb.) Conflicts that lasted a month or longer boosted susceptibility, but an occasional argument presented no health hazard.

While perpetual arguments are bad for our health, isolating ourselves is worse. Compared to those with a rich web of social connections, those with the fewest close relationships were 4.2 times more likely to come down with a cold, making loneliness riskier than smoking.

The more we socialize, the less susceptible to colds we become. This idea seems counterintuitive: don’t we increase the likelihood of being exposed to a cold virus the more people we interact with? Sure. But vibrant social connections boost our good moods and limit our negative ones, suppressing cortisol and enhancing immune function under stress. Relationships themselves seem to protect us from risk of exposure to the very cold virus they pose.”

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