Research from the University of Missouri suggests that one way to bolster your health is to trust your neighbors. Eileen Bjornstrom analyzed the 2001 Los Angeles Family and Neighborhood Survey and found those who said that “their neighbors can be trusted” also reported better self-health.

“Because human beings engage in interpersonal comparisons in order to gauge individual characteristics, it has been suggested that a low relative position, or feeling that you are below another person financially, leads to stress and negative emotions such as shame, hostility and distrust, and that health suffers as a consequence,” she said in a Missouri press release. “While most people aren’t aware of how trust impacts them, results indicated that trust was a factor in a person’s overall health.”

And, Bjornstrom discovered, the participants who were most distrusting were people living in neighborhoods that had a higher income compared with the rest of the community.

But she said she believes this distrust can be remedied.

“It is possible that shared community resources that promote interaction, such as sidewalks and parks, could help bridge the neighborhood trust gap, and also promote health and well-being,” she said in the release. “Residents of all economic statuses might then benefit if community cohesion was increased. Additional research can address those questions.”