Harvard study director Robert Waldinger provides the data-backed answer to what makes people live happier and longer lives and shares the choices anyone can make to start feeling more fulfilled right now.
What is the Harvard Study of Adult Development?
This is, as far as we know, the longest study of human life that’s ever been done: the longest study of the same people going through their entire adult lives.
It is based at Harvard Medical School and at Massachusetts General Hospital, and the study is today in the 85th year. It covers 2,000 people altogether and three generations: grandparents, parents, and children, who are now baby boomers.
What have the study’s happiest participants all had in common?
What is it that was found that really contributes to well-being?
There were two big items over 85 years: one is taking care of our health: “the people who were happiest, who stayed healthiest as they grew old, and who lived the longest were the people who had the warmest connections with other people.“ In fact, good relationships were the strongest predictor of who was going to be happy and healthy as they grew old.
Hmmm – at first the thinking was that it stands to reason that you’d be happier if you had good relationships—those two things go together—but how could good relationships predict that you’d be less likely to get coronary artery disease or type 2 diabetes or arthritis?
Can you get the same happiness from a meaningful career as from a meaningful relationship?
You can’t. It’s different.
There is a lot to be said for achievement if what you’re doing is meaningful to you. What the study found is that the badges of achievement don’t make people happy: there were people who were CEOs, who made lots of money, or who became famous. Those things did not relate to happiness.
But, to the extent that achieving things that are important to you is fulfilling, that does make a difference in well-being. Study findings were that the people who were the happiest were not isolated. They were not workaholics who didn’t pay any attention to their relationships. Those people were some of the saddest folks in our study and were filled with regret when they were in their 80s and we asked them to look back on their lives.
Why is loneliness a ‘major public health challenge,’ and how was this affected by the COVID-19 pandemic?
The pandemic didn’t create this crisis. Loneliness increased during the pandemic, to be sure, but before COVID, about one in three people around the globe said that they are lonely, chronically lonely. This increasing sense of disconnection in our lives has been going on for decades now. What we know is that loneliness is a stressor.
The study found that relationships protect our health by helping us manage stress. Stress happens all day long. Something upsetting happens to us during the day, and people feel themselves rev up: heart rate increases, blood pressure probably goes up, we start to ruminate about it, and the body goes into fight-or-flight mode, which it’s meant to do because we want the body to be able to meet challenges.
“If you don’t have people to help you weather the inevitable stresses that come along, the body stays in a low-level fight-or-flight mode, with higher levels of circulating stress hormones and higher levels of inflammation, and we know that those things gradually wear away many different body systems.”
But when the stressor is removed, we want the body to return to equilibrium—to baseline. The belief is that if you have something upsetting happen, and you have someone to talk to or can call on the phone, it is felt that the body is literally calming down.
The thinking about loneliness and social isolation is that if you don’t have people to help you weather the inevitable stresses that come along, the body stays in a low-level fight-or-flight mode.
What can people do to run their own ‘mini-Harvard study’ on themselves?
The first thing to do is to take stock of where you are in your social world: What do you have already, and what are you getting from different relationships? We get different things from different relationships. That’s to be expected. Some relationships give us fun. Some relationships include confidants. Some relationships include my neighbor, who loans me tools all the time.
So, the first thing is to think about your relationship world, and think, “What am I getting? What do I have enough of? What would I like more of? And is there a way to strengthen some relationships I already have, or is there a way to make some new connections?”
In terms of strengthening connections, you could do this right now. You could think of somebody who you haven’t seen in a while, somebody who you really enjoy but who you don’t stay in touch with as much as you want to.
Take out your phone, send them a text or an email, and say, “I was thinking of you, just wanted to say hello.” It’ll take you 15 seconds, and if you do that, you will be amazed at what comes back. Not every time, but if you did one of those every day, you would get lots and lots of positive response, including requests to have coffee or dinner, and people beginning to reinvigorate their connections with you—but it takes activity.
What the study showed is that when they followed these lives over decades is that perfectly good friendships wither away from neglect. The people were asked to think about is how to be active, even in small ways every day or week, to nurture those relationships and keep them alive.
What if you want to make new relationships? The research shows us that when we do something we enjoy or something we care about alongside other people, we’re likely to strike up conversations. If we see those people again, we’re likely to strike up deeper conversations. From there, relationships can develop.
It could be anything. If you’re doing something you care about or you enjoy and you’re with people who enjoy something similar, that’s a natural place to start conversations.