March 10, 2026
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Being around hasslers — people who cause problems or make life more difficult — creates chronic stress that expedites the biological aging process, a new study finds.
You might want to be more choosy about who you spend time with given new research suggesting that difficult people not only cause emotional stress, but also may hasten the aging process.
The study, published last month, examined how "hasslers" – "people who create problems or make life more difficult" – affect the biological aging process of the people around them. The researchers found that having more hasslers in a person's social network is linked to faster biological aging — age measured at the cellular level rather than in chronological years. This is especially true if the difficult people are family members, the research showed.
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Relationships with hasslers "may function as chronic stressors, so having those people around you actually makes your life really challenging," Byungkyu Lee, an assistant professor of sociology at New York University and lead author of the study, told the Washington Post.
Chronic stress has been shown to have adverse health effects and hasten biological aging. To measure how hasslers may impact biological aging, Lee and his team surveyed more than 2,000 people in Indiana about their social interactions in the previous six months.
The researchers followed up with questions about how often hasslers made their lives more difficult and created problems. They also asked people to answer questions about their overall health and used saliva samples to check for DNA markers related to biological aging.
Even considering other factors, such as smoking, occupation and adverse childhood experiences, researchers found that being around hasslers led people to have higher biological ages than chronological ages. Each hassler increased the biological aging process by about 1.5%, the equivalent of nine months.
"Even small effects in terms of biological aging can accumulate" and in turn increase the risk of chronic health problems, Brea Perry, a sociology professor at Indiana University at Bloomington and co-author of the study, told the Post.
Family members, or "kin" as the researchers referred to them, were especially linked to more rapid biological aging among those around them. But being married to a hassler did not seem to affect biological aging. This may be because other factors involved in being married or having a life partner somehow counterbalance the negative effects of the hassler's problematic behavior, the researchers said.
Overall, the study "highlights that the 'dark side' of social connections can wear down physiological resilience and hasten aging and the development of multiple morbidities," the researchers wrote.
Strategies to "mitigate relationship strain" and bolster "positive support" are important for promoting healthier aging and reducing the risk of chronic disease, the researchers said.
