The benefit of friends, family and even colleagues turns out to be just as good for long-term survival as giving up a 15-cigarette-a-day smoking habit. Despite this hyperconnected era, social isolation is on the rise. More people than not report feeling that they don't have a single person they can confide in - a percentage up threefold from 20 years ago. In fact, the decades of research that Julianne Holt-Lunstad and her colleagues at Brigham Young University examined showed that social support and survival operate on a continuum: "The greater the extent of the relationships, the lower the [mortality] risk." Their studies also conclude that complex social networks can increase survival rates by 91 percent!
