Retirement initially felt fun for Susan Matthews, but after a few months she started to miss the connections she had with her colleagues and the daily routine work provided.
She decided to delve into volunteering, finding a community among six women who she now connects with each week at three Chicago area nonprofits.
On a recent Monday, Matthews, 73, and another volunteer she met through the group, Karen Jensen, sorted through a pallet of prepared salads and juice boxes they organized by category and expiration date for Nourishing Hope’s nutritional programs. They were among about a dozen volunteers working in the warehouse, listening to ’80s music and occasionally taste-testing an orange creme refresher.
“After a few weeks, you’re a familiar face, and the other faces are familiar, and suddenly there’s a group dynamic,” Matthews said. “You realize that humans are hardwired to collaborate, and you’re working on a project together. You know everyone’s strong point, you have these really good, utilitarian team-spirit kind of feelings. It’s a wonderful thing.”
These types of connections are particularly important for older adults and are tied to improved health outcomes, according to a study published in the Innovation in Aging journal recently. The analysis was led by Lissette Piedra, a professor of social work at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, who found three types of social networks emerged among older adults.
Those in an “enriched” network — a larger social circle filled with diverse relationships that included friends and relatives from different social circles — reported better health scores and lower rates of loneliness, Piedra said. Researchers used a health indicator model in which adults in the study ranked their own health.
Adults in so-called “focused” groups had smaller networks, consisting of close-knit relationships with frequent interactions. Adults in this group reported lower rates of loneliness than older adults in “restricted” groups, and their self-rated health scores remained between the two other groups. The “restricted” group had a smaller social circle, consisting only of relatives. They consistently reported poorer health scores and feeling more lonely.
“Being socially active is connected to brain health,” Piedra said. “Being lonely is one of the worst things that you can do for your health, especially as you age.”
Using data from the National Social Life, Health and Aging Project, Piedra said they found that Black and Latino older adults from across the country were less likely than their white counterparts to have an enriched social circle and more likely to have a restricted network. Older adults rated their physical health on a scale of 1 to 5.
But Piedra said patterns are not set. The analysis, which looked at survey data from a sample of 3,005 older adults from 2005 to 2016, found that they were able to move from focused into enriched groups, Piedra said.
“Human beings have the capacity to reconfigure their networks, and understanding what it is that nudges people in the right direction would be really interesting to know,” Piedra said.
Diversity in friendships
The enriched networks, in which people reported being in the best health, included relatives, a spouse and diverse friendships, Piedra said. She said researchers have found evidence that having friends different from you is tied to cognitive health.
“In order to have people that are different than you in your network, that represents a level of social facility, social skills that is very health-promoting,” Piedra said. “It might be a reflection of that or it might be just the challenges of interacting with people who are different than you is very sort of brain-promoting.”
Sisters Sandra Brown and Susan Ackerman have created a blended social network of people of various ages. Brown, 79, said she likes to strike up conversations with her neighbors or while out walking her dog. They like hosting intimate gatherings and large holiday parties.
“We don’t differentiate who our friends are — they’re anywhere from 18 to 90,” Ackerman said. “Because age is a wrong way to look at people. Don’t look at the numbers, look at the person.”
Matthews prioritizes maintaining relationships, logging on to Zoom once a month to catch up with high school friends.
“It enriches your life so much because they know the whole story,” Matthews said.
Staying busy
Jensen, 72, of Evanston, had breast cancer, and she also had her thyroid removed. She said she feels lucky to be healthy and active.
When she’s not volunteering with Matthews and the group of women, she spends some evenings as a volunteer theater usher at performances around Chicago. Jensen delivers food through Meals on Wheels in the suburbs. Some mornings, she joins an informal group that practices tai chi.
“I have two children, I have grandchildren — they live in the area, so they are a big part of my social life for sure,” Jensen said. “Staying busy. I don’t like to be bored, I like to have something to do.”
A community can be helpful, she said, recalling how the tai chi group sent cards and food to one of the members after he was diagnosed with cancer.
“You’re in a group like this, and that is gonna happen because basically we are all older, and we all headed for that,” she said.
Ackerman, 85, uses a walker but that doesn’t stop her from being active.
“It’s just grandma’s gotta go slower,” she said.
Brown and Ackerman recently moved from Lincoln Square to Streeterville because it was getting difficult to walk up and down stairs. They joke that they finally get to live in a deluxe apartment in the sky, a reference to the show, “The Jeffersons.” Brown said they plan to attend summer music events in the area.
“We’re both in good health. I think part of it is because we do take care of ourselves,” Ackerman said. “We have a wonderful family and friends around us. We get all excited about everything from a new recipe to a protest down the street.”
Piedra said more research is needed to determine how older adults can move into enriched networks when it is more common to have restricted social circles. That could mean creating targeted interventions to help them expand their social circle, she said.
She said it’s important to realize the link between social behavior and physical health, adding that people tend to have a change in their social life before their physical health declines.
“Someone’s maybe depressed, or they’re lonely. Their social network shrinks, and you don’t see the physical ramifications until later on,” she said. “But everyone else around you can tell that something’s wrong with this person because they’ve changed in some social kind of way.”