Are these the secrets of happiness, health and a long life?
Many doctors will disagree, but an Oxford professor of evolutionary psychology argues alcohol has been key to mankind’s survival and success. What a tonic for the Bank Holiday weekend!
embedded in a supportive network that protects against dementia as much as anything else.
Friends engage us in conversation in ways that keep the brain ticking over, as well as providing us with endorphin-related health benefits. When we meet over a beer, we talk, laugh, tell stories, occasionally even sing and dance.
All of these have been shown to trigger the endorphin system, and so help the process of social bonding as well as the processes of healing. At the University of Oxford, we recently undertook a set of studies in collaboration with the Campaign for Real Ale to look at the benefits of old-style community pubs relative to the high street bars that have come to dominate our social horizons in recent years. One component of this was a national survey of pub use.
Rather strikingly, this showed that people who had a ‘local’ that they patronised regularly had more close friends, felt happier, were more satisfied with their lives, more embedded into their local communities, and more trusting of those around them.
Those who never drank did consistently worse on all these criteria, while those who frequented a local did better than regular drinkers who had no local that they visited regularly.
A more detailed analysis suggested that it was the frequency of pub visits that lay at the heart of this: it seemed that those who visited the same pub more often were more engaged with, and trusting of, their local community, and as a result had more friends.
In a separate study of social eating, we found that eating with others also positively affected these same outcomes, especially if this was done in the evening.
When we asked what other things happened during the meal that might have produced these effects, the three things most frequently listed were laughter, reminiscences and — yes, you’ve guessed it — the consumption of alcohol, all three of which are good at triggering the endorphin system.
The fact that evening meals, in this study, seemed to be more important than lunchtime meals is interesting, because there seems to be something especially magical about doing social things in the evening that enhances all these effects. Think of the very different buzz you get from going to an evening performance at the theatre compared to the matinee.
This may well be a hangover that dates back 400,000 years to the time we mastered fire. Doing so allowed our early ancestors to shift all their social bonding activities to the evening, so freeing off a lot of extra time during daylight for foraging and other economically essential activities. Add a few fermenting fruits to the mix and. . .
In the flickering light of the campfire, you can’t do much that requires keen eyesight such as sewing or making tools, but you can chat away across the flames.
This is nicely illustrated by what South African San Bushmen talk about around their campfires.
When anthropologist Polly Wiesner listened in on their conversations, she found daytime conversations typically consisted of boring factual topics and discussions of trading agreements with neighbours, but evening conversations were invariably about social topics or involved stories and jokes.
Friendships work because they provide us with ‘a shoulder to cry on’ on that handful of occasions when our world falls apart.
But friendships have to be set up ahead of need if they are to work for us, and that means investing a lot of time in them.
Our studies suggest we devote 40 per cent of our available social time (and the same proportion of our emotional capital) to an inner core of about five shoulders-tocry-on. And we devote another 20 per cent to the next ten people who are socially most important to us. In other words, about twothirds of our total social effort is devoted to just 15 people.
That is a very substantial commitment, and amounts to an average of about two hours a day. It makes it all the more necessary that what we do with them is fun, otherwise they won’t keep coming back for more.
SO, if you want to know the secret of a long and happy life, money is not the answer. Get rid of the takeaway in front of the telly and bin the hasty sandwich at your desk: the important thing is to take time out with people you know and talk to them over a beer or two, even a bottle of Prosecco if you really must.
There’s nothing quite like a convivial evening wrapped around a pint to give you health, happiness and a sense of well-being.
Robin DunbaR is Professor of Evolutionary Psychology at the university of oxford and a Fellow of the british academy. This article first appeared in the Financial Times.