“Each insecure relationship you have ages you by nine months,” says psychiatrist and neuroscientist Dr Amir Levine, citing research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal earlier this year. He then brings up another landmark study which found a 50 per cent reduction in mortality risk among those who felt more securely connected.
“There is so much evidence like this out there, it is crazy,” he says. “People do all these cold plunges, peptides, vitamins and supplements, when the evidence is very flimsy. Yet having secure, happy relationships is this scientifically-proven longevity hack that really works on acellular level.”
The question, of course, is how to achieve such a longevity hack when most of us have relationships that unsettle us: the friend who is warm one week and distant the next; the family member who leaves us feeling small; the boss whose emails make our stomach drop; the partner who seems to retreat just as we reach for them.
Levine understands relationships like these all too well – 15 years ago, his bestselling book Attached, co-authored with Rachel Heller, helped turn attachment theory into part of our everyday vocabulary. It saw the theory, first developed by psychologists John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth in the 1950s and 60s to explain the bond between children and caregivers, applied to adult relationships, broadly grouping people into secure, anxious or avoidant patterns of relating.
