Healthline Wellness Wire

In a Nutshell

Get out and meet people, they said. Expand your social circle and spend more time with your family and friends. After all, human interactions are generally positive, so even spending time with a moody, demanding, confrontational, manipulative individual is worth the hassle, right?

New research suggests otherwise. Hasslers can take years off your life if you let ’em. And the more hasslers in your life, the worse it may be for your overall mental and physical health.

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Let’s look into it,
Tim Snaith
Newsletter Editor, Healthline

Written by Tim Snaith
April 15, 2026 • 3 min read

what’s got us buzzing

Are they worth the hassle?

We all have one. The friend who turns every coffee into a pity party. The sibling who brings up Thanksgiving '08 every time you meet. The neighbor who treats the shared driveway like the Strait of Hormuz.

We now have a term for these people: hasslers. And a new study suggests they may be doing more than ruining your day.

Researchers analyzed data from 2,345 participants in a health survey, ages 18 to 103. Each participant was asked to identify someone in their social network who regularly caused problems or made life difficult. Saliva samples were then used to measure biological aging.

Each additional hassler in a person’s life was associated with a 1.5% faster pace of biological aging and roughly 9 months of additional biological age. Nearly 30% of participants reported at least one hassler in their close network — 10% reported two or more.

The mental health picture was even more dramatic. Having more hasslers increased the severity of depression and anxiety, and affected self-rated mental health. Associations with physical signs, such as higher BMI, higher waist-to-hip ratio, and worse overall health were more modest, but still detectable.

Family hasslers, especially parents and children, were more strongly associated with faster aging than nonfamily ones. Spouse hasslers, surprisingly, showed no significant effect. The researchers suspect that the everyday benefits of a shared domestic life cushion against the biological toll in ways that other relationships cannot.

But this is only observational research. It isn’t cast iron proof that hasslers cause faster aging. The study’s lead author noted that reverse causation is plausible — people who are aging faster may become more irritable and invite negative interactions from those around them.

However, the findings do align with a larger body of stress research showing that chronic interpersonal strain drives cortisol and inflammation, and accumulates over time.

What to do about the hasslers in your life

Broadening your social network may help offset some of the aging effect. The balance of your relationships matters when you have enough positive connections to outnumber the negative.

While some hasslers can’t be cut out because they’re your parent, boss, or co-parent, there are ways to manage the toll they take on your health. The psychiatrists and psychologist Healthline spoke with agree on what it takes to protect yourself from this type of relationship stress, as you’ll discover in our full report of this research.

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✉️ Tell us: How do you cope with the difficult people in your life? How do you stop people from getting to you? Email wellnesswire@healthline.com to share your thoughts.