- serving overseas during WWII increases one’s chance of death. The chances are further increased if one served in the nasty Pacific Front, and also further increased if one actually faced combat. though a lot of this has to do with the personalities of people who tend to face combat, and also with how well they coped (obviously, some of the oldest living men in the late 2000s were WWI soldiers who served in frontline combat)
- decreasing homocysteine with b vitamins doesn’t decrease risk of death
- being neurotic actually HALVES the increase in male death rates following the death of their spouses
- similarly, being neurotic actually doesn’t increase death rates that much at all (because neurotic people tend to take better care of themselves)
- very good insight about exercise. forcing yourself to jog for an hour every day is pointless when you may only gain a few additional years from it - because you actually might lose MORE time from jogging than you can gain out of the additional years. AND you only gain those additional years at the end of your life, when it isn’t that great anyways
- depression is more like a chronic illness (diabetes) than it is an acute one. you can’t really be “cured” of it
- people who remarry tend to have the shortest lifespans of all
- the study actually DID separate conscientiousness into 4 categories depending on stage of life: low/high, high/low, low/low, high/high (where first is conscientiousness in early life and second is conscientiousness in later life). unfortunately, low/high still had higher death rates than high/high (but was still closer to high/high than to low/low)
- feminine men actually have death rates more similar to feminine women than to masculine women. the more feminine the male, the lower the death rate
- high-achieving people in highly stressful jobs did tend to live long as long as they were realizing their potential
- marital divorce hurts people when the divorce happens in a happy family. it actually doesnt hurt ppl that much when it happens in a family prone to conflict (since the kid then thinks the divorce was good)
- starting 1st grade early is actually bad for one’s social life (and may have permanent consequences too). but skipping grades is fine. as it turns out, people who start early have less preschool playtime, and apparently that really helps
- people who were always cheerful often lived shorter lives (they were more sociable and often hung out with more risky people). they also underestimated risks and took fewer precautions
- extraversion correlates with physical activity
- people don’t respond well to long lists telling them what to do
- people who were lazy when young, and who exercised more in mid-life, lived JUST as long as those who were always active. and longer than those who were active when young, and whose physical activity declined as they got older (this was my favorite finding of them all, and yet another finding that I can use to retaliate against parents)
