Having a healthy lifestyle is not enough to live a long life. The secret to longevity also lies in knowing how to cut yourself off from work by taking a vacation.
This is good news for everyone. Holidays are good for your health and science says so. According to a Finnish study presented this summer in Munich (Germany) at the Congress of the European Society of Cardiology (SEC), taking regular time off to cut yourself off from the stress of work could increase longevity.
To reach these conclusions, researchers from the University of Helsinki in Finland will have worked on the subject for 40 years. From 1974 and 1975, they followed 1,222 men born between 1919 and 1934. Among these participants, all had at least one risk factor for cardiovascular disease (smoker, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, glucose intolerance, overweight, etc. ).
At the start of the study, half of the participants were in a control group and the other half in an intervention group. For five years, he received oral and written advice every four months on physical activity, healthy eating and achieving a healthy weight, and quitting smoking. And when that wasn’t enough, participants were also provided with medication to lower blood pressure and lipid levels. Meanwhile, the men in the first group lived their lives without any intervention from scientists.
Shorter vacations associated with a higher mortality rate
At the end of the follow-up, the researchers noticed a 46% reduced risk of cardiovascular disease among the volunteers in the intervention group compared to the others. However, fifteen years later, the trend was reversed: they noted more deaths in the intervention group than in the control group. And this until 2004. From then until the end of the study in 2014, the mortality rate was the same in both groups.
Thus, a very healthy lifestyle in no way compensates for the lack of rest, comment the researchers. “Holidays can be a great way to relieve stress,” says Professor Timo Strandberg, who presented the study at the SEC Congress.
Indeed, in the intervention group, the researchers noted that shorter vacations were associated with a higher mortality rate: between 1997 and 2004, men who had taken three weeks or less of annual vacation had 37% more likely to die than those who had taken more than three weeks of leave.
The intervention itself may have added stress to the participants
“The harm caused by an overly hectic pace of life was concentrated in a small group of men who took short vacations. These men worked more and slept less than those who took longer vacations. This stressful lifestyle may have negated the benefits of our interventions. We also believe that the intervention itself may have had an adverse psychological effect on these men, adding stress to their lives,” says Professor Strandberg.
But if the management of stress was by no means approached in medicine in the 1970s, doctors now pay great attention to it as a risk factor for cardiovascular disease. What’s more, more effective drugs are now available to lower lipid levels and blood pressure, he recalls. And to conclude: “our results in no way indicate that health prevention is harmful. Rather, they suggest that stress reduction is essential in programs aimed at reducing the risk of cardiovascular disease. “Lifestyle” advice should be combined to modern treatments to prevent cardiovascular attacks in high-risk individuals”.
Scientists regularly make the link between stress and life expectancy. In August, a study conducted by the University of Minnesota (USA) has, for example, proven that mice subjected to more social stress than others live shorter lives. The animals abused by others notably had a higher blood glucose level and were more overweight. As a result, they suffered from more cardiovascular diseases. “Thus, social stress would lead in mice to accelerated aging of organs, of the cardiovascular system, all associated with poor health”, therefore concluded the researchers calling for taking time for oneself and relaxing on a daily basis to live longer. .
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