harvard research study on happiness

What the Longest Study on Human Happiness Found Is the Key to a Good Life

The Harvard Study of Adult Development has established a strong correlation between deep relationships and well-being. The question is, how does a person nurture those deep relationships?

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T urn your mind for a moment to a friend or family member you cherish but don’t spend as much time with as you would like. This needn’t be your most significant relationship, just someone who makes you feel energized when you’re with them, and whom you’d like to see more regularly.

How often do you see that person? Every day? Once a month? Once a year? Do the math and project how many hours annually you spend with them. Write this number down and hang on to it.

For us, Bob and Marc, though we work closely together and meet every week by phone or video call, we see each other in person for only a total of about two days (48 hours) every year.

How does this add up for the coming years? Bob is 71 years old. Marc is 60. Let’s be (very) generous and say we will both be around to celebrate Bob’s 100th birthday. At two days a year for 29 years, that’s 58 days that we have left to spend together in our lifetimes.

Fifty-eight out of 10,585 days.

Of course, this is assuming a lot of good fortune, and the real number is almost certainly going to be lower.

Since 1938, the Harvard Study of Adult Development has been investigating what makes people flourish. After starting with 724 participants—boys from disadvantaged and troubled families in Boston, and Harvard undergraduates—the study incorporated the spouses of the original men and, more recently, more than 1,300 descendants of the initial group. Researchers periodically interview participants, ask them to fill out questionnaires, and collect information about their physical health. As the study’s director (Bob) and associate director (Marc), we’ve been able to watch participants fall in and out of relationships, find success and failure at their jobs, become mothers and fathers. It’s the longest in-depth longitudinal study on human life ever done, and it’s brought us to a simple and profound conclusion: Good relationships lead to health and happiness. The trick is that those relationships must be nurtured.

From the June 2009 issue: What makes us happy?

We don’t always put our relationships first. Consider the fact that the average American in 2018 spent 11 hours every day on solitary activities such as watching television and listening to the radio. Spending 58 days over 29 years with a friend is infinitesimal compared with the 4,851 days that Americans will spend interacting with media during that same time period. Distractions are hard to avoid.

Thinking about these numbers can help us put our own relationships in perspective. Try figuring out how much time you spend with a good friend or family member. We don’t have to spend every hour with our friends, and some relationships work because they’re exercised sparingly. But nearly all of us have people in our lives whom we’d like to see more. Are you spending time with the people you most care about? Is there a relationship in your life that would benefit both of you if you could spend more time together? Many of these are untapped resources, waiting for us to put them to use. And, enriching these relationships can in turn nourish our minds and bodies.

Y ou don’t have to examine scientific findings to recognize that relationships affect you physically. All you have to do is notice the invigoration you feel when you believe that someone has really understood you during a good conversation, or the tension and distress you feel after an argument, or how little sleep you get during a period of romantic strife.

In this sense, having healthy, fulfilling relationships is its own kind of fitness—social fitness—and like physical fitness, it takes work to maintain. Unlike stepping on the scale, taking a quick look in the mirror, or getting readouts for blood pressure and cholesterol, assessing our social fitness requires a bit more sustained self-reflection. It requires stepping back from the crush of modern life, taking stock of our relationships, and being honest with ourselves about where we’re devoting our time and whether we are tending to the connections that help us thrive. Finding the time for this type of reflection can be hard, and sometimes it’s uncomfortable. But it can yield enormous benefits.

Many of our Harvard Study participants have told us that filling out questionnaires every two years and being interviewed regularly have given them a welcome perspective on their life and relationships. We ask them to really think about themselves and the people they love, and that process of self-reflection helps some of them.

Read: 10 practical ways to improve happiness

This is a practice that could help anyone. Looking in the mirror and thinking honestly about where your life stands is a first step in trying to live a good life. Noticing where you are can help put into relief where you would like to be. Having some reservations about this kind of self-reflection is understandable. Our study participants were not always keen on filling out our questionnaires, or eager to consider the larger picture of their life. Some would skip difficult questions or leave entire pages blank, and some would just not return certain surveys. Some even wrote comments in the margins of their questionnaires about what they thought of our requests. “What kinds of questions are these!?” is a response we received occasionally, often from participants who preferred not to think about difficulties in their life. The experiences of the people who skipped questions or entire questionnaires were also important, though—they were just as crucial in understanding adult development as the experiences of people eager to share. A lot of useful data and gems of experience were buried in the shadowed corners of their lives. We just had to go through a little extra effort to excavate them.

One of these people was a man we’ll call Sterling Ainsley. (We are using a pseudonym to protect his confidentiality as a study participant.)

S terling Ainsley was a hopeful guy. He graduated from Harvard in the 1940s and then served in World War II. After he left the service, he got a job as a scientist and retired in his 60s. When asked to describe his philosophy for getting through hard times, he said, “You try not to let life get to you. You remember your victories and take a positive attitude.”

The year was 1986. George Vaillant, the then-director of the study, was on a long interview trek, driving through the Rocky Mountains to visit the study’s participants who lived in Colorado, Utah, Idaho, and Montana. Sterling had not returned the most recent survey, and there was some catching up to do. He met Vaillant at a hotel to give him a ride to the diner where Sterling wanted to do his scheduled interview. When Vaillant buckled himself into the passenger seat of Sterling’s car, the seat belt left a stripe of dust across his chest. “I was left to wonder,” he wrote, “the last time somebody had used it.”

Sterling was technically married, but his wife lived far away, and they hadn’t slept in the same room in years. They spoke only every few months.

Read: The six forces that fuel friendship

When asked why they had not gotten a divorce, he said, “I wouldn’t want to do that to the children,” even though his kids were grown and had children of their own. Sterling was proud of his kids and beamed when he spoke of them, saying they were the most important thing in his life. But he rarely saw them and seemed to prefer to keep his relationships with them thriving mostly in his imagination. Vaillant noted that Sterling seemed to be using optimism to push away some of his fears and avoid challenges in his life. Putting a positive spin on every matter and then pushing it out of his mind made it possible for him to believe that nothing was wrong, he was fine, he was happy, his kids didn’t need him.

He didn’t travel to see his son’s new home abroad, because he didn’t “want to be a burden”—even though he’d been learning a new language to prepare for the trip. He had another child who lived closer, but he hadn’t visited in more than a year. He didn’t have a relationship with his grandchildren, and he wasn’t in contact with any friends.

When asked about his older sister, Sterling seemed startled. “My sister?” he said.

Yes, the sister he had told the study so much about when he was younger.

Sterling thought about it for a long time, and then told Vaillant that it must have been decades since he last spoke with her. A frightened expression came over his face. “Would she still be living?” he said.

Sterling tried not to think about his relationships, and he was even less inclined to talk about them. This is a common experience. We don’t always know why we do things or why we don’t do things, and we may not understand what is holding us at a distance from the people in our life. Taking some time to look in the mirror can help. Sometimes there are needs inside of us that are looking for a voice, a way to get out. They might be things that we have never seen or articulated to ourselves.

This seemed to be the case with Sterling. Asked how he spent his evenings, he said he spent time with an elderly woman who lived in a nearby trailer. Each night he would walk over, and they’d watch TV and talk. Eventually she would fall asleep, and he would help her into bed and wash her dishes and close the shades before walking home. She was the closest thing he had to a confidant.

“I don’t know what I’ll do if she dies,” he said.

Listen to Robert Waldinger in conversation with Arthur Brooks and Rebecca Rashid on "How to Build a Happy Life":

L oneliness has a physical effect on the body. It can render people more sensitive to pain, suppress their immune system, diminish brain function, and disrupt sleep, which in turn can make an already lonely person even more tired and irritable. Research has found that, for older adults, loneliness is far more dangerous than obesity. Ongoing loneliness raises a person’s odds of death by 26 percent in any given year. A study in the U.K., the Environmental Risk (E-Risk) Longitudinal Twin Study, recently reported on the connections between loneliness and poorer health and self-care in young adults. This ongoing study includes more than 2,200 people born in England and Wales in 1994 and 1995. When they were 18, the researchers asked them how lonely they were. Those who reported being lonelier had a greater chance of facing mental-health issues, partaking in unsafe physical-health behaviors, and coping with stress in negative ways. Add to this the fact that a tide of loneliness is flooding through modern societies, and we have a serious problem. Recent stats should make us take notice.

In a study conducted online that sampled 55,000 respondents from across the world, one out of every three people of all ages reported that they often feel lonely. Among these, the loneliest group were 16-to-24-year-olds, 40 percent of whom reported feeling lonely “often or very often.” In the U.K., the economic cost of this loneliness—because lonely people are less productive and more prone to employment turnover—is estimated at more than £2.5 billion (about $3.1 billion) annually and helped lead to the establishment of a U.K. Ministry of Loneliness.

Read: Why do we look down on lonely people?

In Japan, 32 percent of adults expected to feel lonely most of the time during 2020. In the United States, a 2019 study suggested that three out of four adults felt moderate to high levels of loneliness. As of this writing, the long-term effects of the coronavirus pandemic, which separated us from one another on a massive scale and left many feeling more isolated than ever, are still being studied.

Alleviating this epidemic of loneliness is difficult because what makes one person feel lonely might have no effect on someone else. We can’t rely entirely on easily observed indicators such as whether or not one lives alone, because loneliness is a subjective experience. One person might have a significant other and too many friends to count and yet feel lonely, while another person might live alone and have a few close contacts and yet feel very connected. The objective facts of a person’s life are not enough to explain why someone is lonely. Regardless of your race or class or gender, the feeling resides in the difference between the kind of social contact you want and the social contact you actually have.

I t never hurts —especially if you’ve been feeling low—to take a minute to reflect on how your relationships are faring and what you wish could be different about them. If you’re the scheduling type, you could make it a regular thing; perhaps every year on New Year’s Day or the morning of your birthday, take a few moments to draw up your current social universe, and consider what you’re receiving, what you’re giving, and where you would like to be in another year. You could keep your chart or relationships assessment in a special place, so you know where to look the next time you want to peek at it to see how things have changed.

If nothing else, doing this reminds us of what’s most important. Repeatedly, when the participants in our study reached old age, they would make a point to say that what they treasured most were their relationships. Sterling Ainsley himself made that point. He loved his older sister deeply—but he lost touch with her. Some of his fondest memories were of his friends—whom he never contacted. There was nothing he cared more about than his children—whom he rarely saw. From the outside it might look like he didn’t care. That was not the case. Sterling was quite emotional in his recounting of his most cherished relationships, and his reluctance to answer certain study questions was clearly connected to the pain that keeping his distance had caused him over the years. Sterling never sat down to really think about how he might conduct his relationships or what he might do to properly care for the people he loved most.

Sterling’s life reminds us of the fragility of our connections, and it echoes the lessons of science: Relationships keep us happier and healthier throughout our life spans. We neglect our connections with others at our peril. Investing in our social fitness is possible each day, each week of our lives. Even small investments today in our relationships with others can create long-term ripples of well-being.

This article is adapted from Robert Waldinger and Marc Schulz’s new book, The Good Life: Lessons From the World’s Longest Scientific Study of Happiness .

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​When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

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Work Insights from the World’s Longest Happiness Study

A conversation with Harvard psychiatrist Robert Waldinger about what makes us happy in the long term.

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It’s the start of a fresh year, and optimism is in the air. But if you want happiness to extend far beyond your New Year’s resolution, Robert Waldinger says you can take some inspiration from the longest-running study of happiness out there. He’s a psychiatrist who runs the Harvard Study of Adult Development. The longitudinal research has followed individuals and their families for nine decades. He shares what makes people happiest in the long run and how their work factors into that. Waldinger is the author of the new book The Good Life: Lessons from the World’s Longest Scientific Study of Happiness .

CURT NICKISCH: Welcome to the HBR IdeaCast from Harvard Business Review. I’m Curt Nickisch.

Some people take the flipping of the calendar as an opportunity to step back and reevaluate where they are in their personal lives and careers. New Year’s resolutions can be one way of reprioritizing those activities and downtime. For other people, it’s a personal milestone, like a birthday, or maybe a professional one like the end of a big project.

We all have our own ways of measuring for ourselves the returns on our investment. That’s not always figured in money or time. It can also be about satisfaction, dare I say, happiness. Now, as we all do this for ourselves, often year in and year out, there are also researchers out there measuring some of the same things and asking the same questions on a much broader scale with a large number of people over a long time.

Today, we’re going to the source of one of the largest studies on human development and happiness in history, a study more than eight decades in the making.

Our guest today is Robert Waldinger. He’s the Director of the Harvard Study of Adult Development and he’s the author of the new book, The Good Life: Lessons from the World’s Longest Scientific Study of Happiness . Bob, welcome.

ROBERT WALDINGER: Thanks for having me.

CURT NICKISCH: This study got its start in 1938, 84 years ago before you were born. How did you come to step into this kind of long-flowing river of research and why did you end up choosing this as the core of your life’s work?

ROBERT WALDINGER: Well, I stepped into it because it chose me. My predecessor, the third director of the study, took me out to lunch one day and said, “How would you like to inherit the Harvard Study of Adult Development?,” and I nearly dropped my fork. I was a medical student who heard the third director of the study lecture about this amazing group of people who we had followed for, at that time, 50 plus years, and it seemed to me the most exciting thing I could imagine doing.

I didn’t dream at that time as a first year med student that I would eventually be directing the study, but to your question, “Why did I decide to do it?,” I’ve always been essentially fascinated by the experience of being human. I’m a psychiatrist, and my specialty is psychotherapy, so I do talk therapy with people, spending our time hour after hour trying to understand their experiences of life.

I also am a Zen practitioner and Zen teacher, and a lot of what you do when you meditate on a cushion is look at the experience of being human as you watch your own mind, so in many ways, studying hundreds of lives, thousands of lives now over decades was just another way of looking at human life.

CURT NICKISCH: Now, as long running as this study is, it also has some limitations right there. It looks at a certain population. Is it only Americans, U.S. Americans?

ROBERT WALDINGER: That’s right.

CURT NICKISCH: And only white people as well?

ROBERT WALDINGER: And only white people. The study started out in 1938 as two separate studies that did not know about each other. One started at the Harvard Student Health Services with undergraduate students, sophomores, 19 years old, 268 of them who their Deans thought would be fine, upstanding, young men who could be perfect for a study of normal development from adolescence to young adulthood. And of course, the irony is the idea that if you want to study normal development, you choose all white males from Harvard, but at that time, it was novel. What was novel was to study health.

Then, the other study was started at Harvard Law School by a professor named Sheldon Glueck, and his wife, Eleanor Glueck, who was a social worker. They were interested in the problem of juvenile delinquency, and they were particularly interested in why some children from, not just poor families, but from really troubled families, managed to stay on good developmental paths and managed not to get into trouble, so they were looking for the conditions that helped disadvantaged children thrive.

Then, my predecessor, George Vaillant, combined these two studies into one, and so we have followed essentially two ends of the socioeconomic spectrum, and the diversity, although it was not in race, was certainly in ethnicity. More than half the inner city families were immigrants, many from the Middle East and Eastern Europe, and then gradually, when I came on, we brought women into the study, so now it’s not just males, it’s now more than half women as we’ve reached out and studied the second generation.

CURT NICKISCH: The women who were studied were family members of the participants, is that right?

ROBERT WALDINGER: Exactly. We don’t add new people. We would like to, and if so, we would add a more diverse group of people, but because what’s unique about us is that we have this treasure trove of history on each person and each family. That’s what’s unique. We can’t replace that when we start today with a new person.

CURT NICKISCH: Why is happiness a big thread that’s been pulled out of this research? Is there a philosophy or a research question that it’s a goal of life to be happy?

ROBERT WALDINGER: Yes. Actually, what we’re talking about is not happiness, but well-being. What we have done since 1938 is study the big domains of human life, of human thriving, so mental health, physical health, work life, relationships, and so the study is about what helps people have flourishing lives and what unfortunately gets people into situations where they don’t flourish.

CURT NICKISCH: I’m curious about how much we can get into the lives of workers and managers as we continue this conversation. What did you find when it comes to happiness?

ROBERT WALDINGER: Well, we’ve published hundreds of academic papers and over 10 books, but the two big findings that we can boil it down to are that if you take care of your health, it matters tremendously for how long you live and how much you stay disability-free, and so what that means is not smoking, not abusing alcohol or drugs, exercising regularly, getting preventive healthcare, not becoming obese, so all those things that our grandmothers could have told us turn out to have huge impact when we look at it empirically.

But the finding that surprised us was there is tremendous predictive power in predicting who’s going to be happy and live longer in the quality of their relationships, that the people who have the warmest relationships and the people who are most connected to other people in their lives are the people who stay healthier and live longer.

The surprising part of that is the health part. It sort of stands to reason that if you have better relationships, yeah, you’re probably going to be happier, but how could good relationships get into your body and change your physiology? How could better relationships predict that you’re less likely to get cardiovascular disease, that you’re less likely to get arthritis? That is the puzzle that we’ve been working on for the last 10 years in our research, and many other studies are looking at that as well.

CURT NICKISCH: Well, the staying healthy, the self-care component that you talked about first, that clearly has implications for work environments and organizations think a lot about giving people the flexibility to be able to take care of their physical and mental health. You haven’t talked about work as a driver. One of the big takeaways that you just mentioned is not finding your calling or going after your passion, it’s relationships, and I’m just curious how much work and work environments overlap with that?

ROBERT WALDINGER: They do overlap, absolutely, and so finding work you love, finding work you find meaningful really is a driver of well-being and happiness to be sure, but what we find is that some of that has to do with your connections with other people at work, that the people who are more engaged in their work and feel that their work is more rewarding are the people who have at least one friend at work, at least one person who they can talk to about personal matters, and you probably know there’s been a Gallup organization survey of 15 million workers in recent years, that asks this question, “Do you have a best friend at work?” Only three out of 10 workers have a best friend at work, and so the value of work includes the importance of connections that feel rewarding and meaningful, and that make you want to come to work every day.

CURT NICKISCH: A lot of people feel very burnt out by work.

ROBERT WALDINGER: Yeah.

CURT NICKISCH: It can feel like a hamster wheel.

CURT NICKISCH: For other people, they really feel fulfilled by what they do. Relationships may be a tell here, but what are the factors about work that might tip someone one way or the other towards the hamster wheel or towards fulfillment?

ROBERT WALDINGER: Well, there’s actually another good set of studies. They’re called the White Hall studies. They come out of Britain, and they studied people’s job satisfaction. One of the things that it shows clearly is that the people who feel that they have more control in their work lives are happier and less stressed, so that is a factor, and certainly, we found that in our study that the people who felt that they could do more of what they cared about and that they could determine some of the basics of their working conditions were far happier than the people who felt that most of it was completely out of their control. The other thing we do know is that, again, interpersonal functioning is huge, that if you are having trouble with a boss or a co-worker, that’s a big driver of dissatisfaction and eventually, disengagement.

CURT NICKISCH: I’m curious if you’ve seen in the research how the pandemic has affected this.

ROBERT WALDINGER: We are now collecting data on, “How has the pandemic affected your engagement with people, if you’re still at work, your engagement at work, if you’re not at work, your engagement with people in the rest of your life?,” so we don’t know yet. We don’t know how remote work is changing our sense of engagement, our sense of belonging, our sense of meaning, and those are crucial questions as we try to understand the workforce going forward ’cause a great many of us. My son, for example, just got his first job after business school with a company that has no physical existence. It’s all remote. That’s a completely different experience than my experience of starting out on my first job in a hospital, where I was with hundreds of people all day every day.

CURT NICKISCH: Why is loneliness a problem at work?

ROBERT WALDINGER: Loneliness is a stressor, and we know that if you were in a dangerous environment, say out on the savannah somewhere, you didn’t want to be isolated from your tribe because you were more subject to dangerous. What we know is that people who are isolated now are more stressed. Their bodies go into what we think of as chronic fight-or-flight mode, so the idea is that when the stress is removed, we want our bodies to go back to equilibrium, to some baseline.

Our understanding now is that people who are lonely and people who are chronically isolated are likely to be in chronic fight-or-flight mode, that they never go back to their baseline equilibrium, and so there are higher levels of circulating stress hormones, there are higher levels of chronic inflammation that breaks down body systems slowly but inexorably, and that’s how we think that loneliness and social isolation can gradually break down multiple body systems.

CURT NICKISCH: What do you see for women who came into being research participants later in this period, but in 1938, the labor force participation was, of course, much, much lower, the double burden for women was maybe not there like it is today? What takeaways are there for working as a woman and finding happiness?

ROBERT WALDINGER: Well, you are pointing to the double burden, that idea that women who are in the workplace have to function at work and they have to function at home, and they still, by and large, have more of the burden of household duties and childcare duties compared with their male counterparts. As far as we can tell, there is no formula for happiness, which is, in some ways, to state the obvious, that some women who start out as career people decide they want to stay home when they have children, and for other people, it’s vice versa. Other people think, “I’m going to really want to stay home and raise my kids,” and they realize, “No, I want to be in the workplace,” and that many people do both. Many women do both. It is more stressful to do both, but what we’re finding is that it’s a highly individual matter.

What we found in our original participants, when we interviewed the wives, but again, this is the World War II generation, we had 20 something interviewers, these bright women mostly, who were between college and grad school, who were our research assistants, and they would go and interview the women about their lives, and they couldn’t believe that these women were happy being at home, being the traditional 1950’s housewives and taking care of the kids and doing volunteer work.

They hated this because it just didn’t fit with our young women’s expectations of what ought to make for a happy life, but what we found was that many of these women, having more traditional roles, was enormously satisfying, partly because that’s what they had been raised to expect they would do, partly because so many of the other women they respected were doing the same things, so I think it’s just a way to underline that we see in our longitudinal study that one size never fits all, that the paths that people take, men and women, are so varied and should be varied, that in essence, the options are even greater now than they used to be for different kinds of paths, and that seems to be a key to greater well-being and greater satisfaction, the ability to choose one’s path, and I think more women have that ability now than had, let’s say 50 years ago.

CURT NICKISCH: Yeah, this idea that what’s true for the average is not true in the specific is really important here, right? You, on average, might live longer and be happier in a partnered relationship, but there are many people who are very happy single, and many people who are very unhappy married, so you really can’t use these averages to decide your own life. You really do have to listen to your heart. Why is self-awareness so important, do you think, for finding happiness in your life and in your career?

ROBERT WALDINGER: Well, for just the reason that you named, which is that we are all different, and it’s a cliche, but what we find is that what lights us up, what energizes us, what feels meaningful varies so much, depending on who you are. You can see that even among siblings, among twins, raised in the same family, that even with all that in common, we are so different from one another, and so one of the greatest gifts, I think we can give to people starting out to kids, and also to people starting out on their work careers, is really try to tune in to which activities energize you and feel meaningful, and try when you can to steer toward those, and let go of the things that are more draining and depleting, and that no one can tell you what those are. There’s a Joseph Campbell quote that I love. Joseph Campbell, who wrote The Power of Myth. He said once, “If the path before you is clear, you’re probably on somebody else’s path.”

CURT NICKISCH: A lot of people have the idea that you can get inherent happiness from work, that if you find work that’s meaningful or follow a calling, you will reach happiness. How true is that?

ROBERT WALDINGER: It’s such a good question, and I think it can be a true. It depends on what it is from work that you find meaningful and derive satisfaction. It depends on what you emphasize. There are activities at work that are very satisfying, that feel quite meaningful, and that is a huge contributor to a happy life, but there are these metrics, these badges of achievement that we can emphasize to the exclusion of what lights us up and what feels meaningful. For example, wealth.

“Do I have a higher salary? Am I making more than my peers? Am I getting the awards? Am I getting the accolades?,” that, yes, getting accolades is important in terms of being recognized for good work, but accolades feel okay for about 10 minutes, and then they’re gone, right? Wealth is empty, that what we want to think about is, “How do we find accomplishments that are truly meaningful in their own right, not just because they earn us a bunch of money or they get us some badge of distinction?”

The badges of distinction don’t do it, and just to point that out, in that Gallup survey, one-third of CEOs said that they felt lonely, so being a CEO is not a recipe for happiness.

CURT NICKISCH: You mentioned accolades, but salary, our sense of worth often comes from how much we’re paid. Is there any insight, advice that you might give somebody who’s trying to move forward in their life in a happy way and also feel like they’re being valued?

ROBERT WALDINGER: Well, probably two things. One is feeling valued, and I think what happens is we naturally compare ourselves to other people, particularly around pay. We do know that people need to feel that they are being paid fairly for their work when compared with their co-workers, but then, when we think about this idea that becoming rich is going to make us happy, studies are very clear that that’s not the truth. There was a really good study several years ago that asked, “As your income goes up, do you get happier?”

What they saw was that as our income goes up from, let’s say zero to $75,000 a year household income, yes, our happiness goes up, and so what that means is that while we’re still working to meet our basic material needs, yes, the more money we earn, the happier we get, but once you get above $75,000 a year, it turns out you don’t get much of an increase in happiness at all, so the difference between 75,000 and 75 million a year is not really that great, and that’s important because so many of us are sold this bill of goods, that, “Oh, if I just make a lot of money, that’s going to do it for me.” What we find over and over again is that’s not the truth.

CURT NICKISCH: Part of what you ask people, especially at the end of their careers or lives, is what their regrets are. I’m curious, what kind of things do people cite?

ROBERT WALDINGER: Two big themes When we asked people what they regretted. So this was when they were in their 80’s, and we said, “Look back on your life. Tell us what you regret the most. Tell us what you’re proudest of,” and the two biggest regrets were, this one more from men, “I wish I hadn’t spent so much time at work,” and, “I wish I had spent more time with the people I cared about.” It’s that whole cliche on their deathbed, nobody ever wished they’d spent more time at the office.

It’s a cliche because it’s true for so many people. Then, the other one, and this came more from women, but also from men, the regret was, “I wish I hadn’t spent so much time worrying about what other people thought.” Both of those seem really useful to know when you’re younger and you still have time to make these choices about how you want to live your adult life.

CURT NICKISCH: Any other wisdom to share with people earlier in their careers?

ROBERT WALDINGER: The things people were proudest of. So almost always, when people said what they were proudest of, it had to do with their relationships with other people. So, “I was a good partner,” “I raised good kids,” “I was a good friend to people,” “I was a good mentor at work,” “I was a good boss,” so it wasn’t about, “I did this thing,” “I won this award,” and many of our people won quite fancy awards. It was always looking back to do with how they were in their relationships that they were proudest of.

CURT NICKISCH: Bob, this has been a real pleasure. Thanks for coming on the show to talk about this.

ROBERT WALDINGER: Yeah. Well, it was a pleasure doing it. Thank you for having me, and thanks for these thoughtful questions.

CURT NICKISCH: That’s Robert Waldinger, Director of the Harvard Study of Adult Development and author of the new book, The Good Life: Lessons From the World’s Longest Scientific Study of Happiness.

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The Good Life: A Discussion with Dr. Robert Waldinger

Dr. Waldinger began by exploring what people think makes a good life. Many across the world, especially millennials, believe that the answer can be found with fame and fortune. In a recent survey of millennials, when asked what they wanted in their adult life, over 80% said they wanted to get rich, 50% said they wanted to get famous, and 50% said they wanted high career achievements.

However, studies show that as many western countries, including the US, have become wealthier, general happiness levels have decreased . $75,000 a year average household income is the level at which happiness seems to peak— the level at which the basic economic needs of food, housing, healthcare, child support, etc. can be met. When people’s annual income became higher than that sum, their happiness levels didn’t go up much. The difference between $75,000 and $75 million was hardly significant.

Dr. Waldinger believes that the reason many hold this false belief in the power of money to improve happiness is because the good life is defined for us, not by us . This is a result of the digital revolution, social media, unrealistic standards, and omnipresent advertising. Ads tell us that consumption ought to make us happy, that we ought to look and act a certain way. We judge our everyday lives against the curated lives of others, and young people, who are more deeply entrenched in digital media than any generation before them, are particularly vulnerable to this constant self-comparison. “As a mentor of mine once said,” stated Dr. Waldinger, “‘ we are always comparing our insides to other people’s outsides. ’”

The Harvard Study of Adult Development

So what do we really need for a good life? As Director of the Harvard Study of Adult Development, Dr. Waldinger was ideally placed to search for an answer. This 85-year study started in 1938 as two studies. One followed a group of 19-year-old Harvard students, while the other followed a younger group of juvenile delinquents. Both groups were exclusively white, male, and based out of Boston. The two studies were combined to make up a group of 725 men. As time passed, their wives were brought into the study, and then their children. The group even included John F Kennedy. Participants’ physical, mental, and emotional health were studied. They were photographed, audiotaped, and videotaped. Their blood was drawn, their brains were scanned, and their DNA was studied.

The study found that the people who stayed healthiest and lived longest were the people who had the strongest connections to others . The warmth of these connections had a direct positive impact on their health and well-being. Good relationships meant participants were less likely to develop heart disease, diabetes, or arthritis. Broader social networks and more social activity resulted in later onset and slower rates of cognitive decline. The study even found that married people lived longer—an average of 5-12 years longer for women, and 7-17 years longer for men .

Interestingly, the study also found that participants became happier as they aged . From middle age onward, participants paid more attention to positive information than negative information, remembered the past more positively, became more selective about how they spent their time, and increasingly savored the present moment. Dr. Waldinger’s explanation for this trend was that “When we sense that time is limited, emotional well-being becomes a priority.” There is a downside to this, however—older brains are more responsive to positive information, and tend to disregard negative information, making them more susceptible to scams.

When the first round of participants were in their 80s, the interviewers asked them what they wished they had done differently, and what they were most proud of. The men replied that they wished they hadn’t spent as much time at work, but with the people they cared about. The women replied that they wished they hadn’t worried about what people thought of them. For both genders, their proudest achievements all had to do with relationships. Participants were proud of being a good parent, partner, friend, or mentor.

These findings affected Dr. Waldinger personally. He realized that he had to listen to his own research, and so instead of working 24/7, he began to intentionally reach out to his friends, telling him that he was thinking of them, inviting them to go out for a walk or get dinner. While he was proud of his work, he realized that his greatest source of satisfaction wasn’t the academic awards he had received, but instead maintaining vibrant connections with others.

Expounding on this, Dr. Waldinger added that when it came to work and relationships, he understood that it couldn’t be either or. He explained that people need enough money to be financially secure, to support themselves and their families. But the people who sacrifice everything for work end up feeling like they’ve given up too much in their lives. It may be tempting to focus on money or achievements because they’re measurable, and we tend to prioritize what we can measure. Relationships change all the time, and cannot be measured in the same way; but this does not make them any less important.

In terms of spending money to achieve happiness, Dr. Waldinger recommended paying for experiences, rather than material things. “ The best things in life aren’t things ,” he explained. “Material things lend themselves to comparisons. But experiences either strengthen pre-existing relationships with people, or help us meet new people.”

The Loneliness Pandemic

Developing and strengthening relationships with others is a skill that has decreased in the general US population since the 1950s, with the introduction of the television. Over the last 25 years, people have become half as likely to join clubs and civic organizations, while family dinners and vacations are down by a third. In 1983, 12% of Americans lacked a confidant, someone they could speak to about personal matters, while in 2003, 25% lacked a confidant. In a global poll of 15 million workers, only a third said they had a best friend at work, and of those, only 1 in 12 said they were engaged in their job. Half of CEOs report feeling lonely. Dr. Waldinger and many others believe that this loneliness pandemic was accelerated by the digital revolution. “We’re all on our phones, on our screens, so much of the time that we neglect each other, and we neglect the world around us.”

Studies have found that loneliness is as powerful a predictor of poor health as smoking half a pack of cigarettes a day, having high blood pressure, or being obese. Loneliness results in earlier cognitive and physical decline, stress-induced hypertension, impaired sleep, heightened cardiovascular reactivity, decreased immune function, and chronic inflammation.

How We Can Fix It

Dr. Waldinger began with a quote from one of his Zen teachers, John Tarrant, stating “ Attention is the most basic form of love. ” He went on to explain that “our undivided attention is the most valuable thing we have to give each other. It is also the most difficult thing, these days, to give each other, because screens are so programmed to take us away from each other. The path of least resistance seems to be driving us towards increasing social isolation, so we need to be intentional in structuring our lives both at home and at work to counter this trend. ”

Of course, there are other factors to consider, such as where an individual is on the scale of introversion to extroversion. Introverts may only need a few relationships, and become stressed out by too many, while extroverts need a wider circle. “Our culture tends to glorify extroverts, which is silly,” said Dr. Waldinger. “Other cultures glorify a more contemplative approach to life.” The answer to finding a good life isn’t one size fits all.

Then there is an individual’s baseline level mood to consider. People can have the exact same circumstances, and some can happier and others sadder. Dr. Waldinger explained that about 50% of happiness comes from genetically based, temperamental factors, about 10% comes from life circumstances, and about 40% can be changed.

As the webinar came to an end, Dr. Viswanath read a final comment from an attendee. “It seems that we are discovering things that women have always understood, valuing relationships and loving our people.” Dr. Waldinger responded that there had been people who responded to his TED talks with “duh”. He explained that women are typically socialized to care more about relationships. “I am not revealing something to this world that’s a shocker,” he concluded. “We just now have good scientific data to back up what our grandmothers always knew and were telling us all along.”

If you missed the seminar, you can watch a recording here . 

Written by Ayla Fudala, Communications Coordinator

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Book by Harvard Study of Adult Development director details what research says about value of relationships to physical, mental health

Robert Waldinger , director of the Harvard Study of Adult Development , says one of the biggest surprises they encountered was that what makes people happy is also what helps keep them healthy — relationships. The research project, the longest in-depth study of physical and mental well-being among adults, began in 1938 with 724 participants: 268 Harvard College sophomores and 456 young adults from Boston. It now includes 1,300 descendants of its original participants. The Gazette spoke with Waldinger about his new book, “The Good Life,” which he co-wrote with Marc Schulz. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Robert Waldinger

GAZETTE:  One of the conclusions of your book involves how key good relationships are to both physical as well as mental well-being. Were researchers expecting that to be true?

WALDINGER:  As part of the study, we followed our first generation of participants through their entire adult lives — from teenage years all the way into old age. When they reached age 80, we realized we had all these data about their physical and mental health, which we had collected year after year after year.

We started wondering whether we could look back at our participants’ lives in middle age and see what the biggest predictors were of who’s going to be happy and healthy by age 80. We thought that cholesterol level or blood pressure at age 50 would be more important. They were not. It was satisfaction in their relationships, particularly in their marriages, that was the best predictor of a happy and healthy life.

At first, we didn’t believe it; we were wondering how this could be possible. We thought, “It makes sense that if you have happy relationships, you’ll be happier, but how could the quality of your relationships make it more or less likely that you would get coronary artery disease or Type 2 diabetes or arthritis?” We thought maybe this isn’t a real finding, maybe it’s by chance. Then other research groups began to find the same thing. Now it is a very robust finding. It’s very well established that interpersonal connectedness, and the quality of those connections, really impact health, as well as happiness.

“[I]f you are alone and feel stressed and lonely, that’s part of what breaks down your health. That’s why we think loneliness is as dangerous to your health as smoking half a pack of cigarettes a day or being obese.”

GAZETTE:   Is there solid medical evidence that supports how good relationships might affect physical health?

WALDINGER:  Some people might think this finding is very touchy-feely, right? The question you are asking is exactly what researchers were asking, which is, “How does that work? What would the mechanism be by which relationships affect physiology?” We have spent the last 10 years in our lab studying this. The best hypothesis for which there are good data suggests that it is about stress and the regulation of stress by our relationships.

First, stress is a natural part of life. It happens every day to most of us: Something will come along that will stress us, and when that happens, the body goes into fight-or-flight mode. When that happens, you can feel your heart rate increase, your blood pressure goes up, you might start to sweat, and that’s normal because we want the body to prepare itself to meet a challenge. But when the challenge is removed, we want the body to go back to equilibrium. For example, if I have something upsetting happen during the day, and I’m churning or ruminating about it, I go home and talk to my wife or a friend, and if that person is a good listener, I can literally feel my body calm down.

But if you don’t have anyone like that, and many people don’t, if you are isolated or you don’t have a confidant, what we think happens is that the body stays in a kind of low-level fight-or-flight mode, and that means that there are higher levels of circulating stress hormones and higher levels of inflammation, and those things can gradually wear away many body systems. That’s how we think stress can wear down multiple body systems and how good relationships can be protective of our health.

GAZETTE:  How about career and financial success ? Are they as important as good relationships?

WALDINGER:  Certainly, having a job you enjoy or care about and find meaningful is important. Having a job you hate lowers your well-being for sure. But what we know from good studies is that wealth does not increase well-being significantly once we have our basic needs met. Once you get beyond basic financial security, your happiness doesn’t go up very much.

Similarly, fame or high achievement — becoming a Harvard professor or winning the Nobel Prize — won’t make you happier. Maybe the work that got you the Nobel Prize is meaningful to you, and that can make you happy. But the badges of achievement and the badges of wealth don’t make people happy. That’s important to keep in mind because we tell each other a lot of stories about what’s going to make us happy. We get these messages all day long from ads that convey the message that if you just buy this thing, you’ll be happier, or they show people living these beautiful and wealthy lives, and that’s the key to a happy life. It turns out that’s not true.

“What we see in our research is that everybody needs at least one solid relationship, someone whom they feel they can count on in times of need.”

GAZETTE:  Your book highlights the importance of having good relationships with your parents, siblings, neighbors, coworkers, even acquaintances. Can you expand on that?

WALDINGER:  There’s no set number of connections you need to have. If you have everything you need in your family, that’s great. Maybe, you don’t need a wider circle. But what we find is that the benefits of relationships come from anywhere. They certainly come from family, but they can come from friends, from work colleagues, and we even get small bits of well-being from a chat with the person who makes coffee for us in the coffee shop or from a chat with the cashier who checks us out in the grocery store, or the mail carrier. If we have pleasant connections with those people, those also contribute to our well-being.

Some of us are more shy, and some of us are more extroverted. Shy people need fewer relationships whereas an extrovert needs more. What we see in our research is that everybody needs at least one solid relationship, someone whom they feel they can count on in times of need. In one of our questionnaires, we asked our participants, “Who could you call in the middle of the night, if you were sick or scared? List everybody.” Most people could list several people, but some people, even some who were married, couldn’t list anyone. We think that everybody needs at least one person that you know would be there for you.

“Our social life is a living system, and it needs maintenance too. One of the ways you can do it is through tiny actions.”

GAZETTE:  What is the impact of loneliness on your physical health? In your book you write that loneliness could be as dangerous to your health as smoking or being obese.

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WALDINGER:  We think that it operates through this mechanism of chronic stress — that loneliness is a stressor. We evolved to be social creatures because it was safer to be in a group. If you think about when we were trying to survive out in the wilderness, you realize that people who banded together survived longer. We hypothesize that there was genetic selection for being more social. Being alone is a stressor; being isolated is a stressor. Many people feel chronically unsafe when they are lonely. If you’re alone and you’re content, that’s different. But if you are alone and feel stressed and lonely, that’s part of what breaks down your health. That’s why we think loneliness is as dangerous to your health as smoking half a pack of cigarettes a day or being obese. Loneliness has a similar physiologic fingerprint as those other two problems.

GAZETTE:  What if people feel it’s too late in life to have good relationships?

WALDINGER:  What we find in following thousands of people is that many people who thought it was too late for them, who thought, “I’m no good at relationships,” found relationships at a time when they didn’t expect to. We have a story in the book of one man who retired. He didn’t have a good marriage, and he never had friends. He joined a gym, and he found a group of friends who became his tribe, and they started socializing together. And he wrote to us that he was happy in a way he had never been because he had these people in his life. We find people who find love in their 70s and 80s who never expected it. Based on our science, we can say that it’s never too late. And if you think you’re never going to have good relationships, you don’t know that for sure. It’s worth the effort. People can make an effort.

GAZETTE:  What steps should people take to start working on building good relationships?

WALDINGER:  We talk in the book about what we call “social fitness.” The reason we call it that is to frame it as analogous to physical fitness. We think of physical fitness as a practice, as something we do to maintain our bodies. Our social life is a living system, and it needs maintenance too. One of the ways you can do it is through tiny actions. You could think right now, “Whom do I miss? Who would I like to see more of? Who haven’t I been in touch with?” and send them a text, an email, or call them on the phone. You will be amazed at the positive responses that you get for this tiny action.

The piece of advice I’d like to give is that there are some small actions we can take to enliven our social world. The other thing is to think about how you could make new connections, and probably one of the easiest ways to do that is to do something you care about or enjoy doing and do it alongside other people. It could be a bowling league, a gardening club, a knitting group, a political campaign, or working to prevent climate change. Just remember that when you do something you care about in a group, you already have something in common with the people you’re with. It’s a natural place to start conversations, and what we find is that when people repeatedly have casual contact with the same people, that’s the easiest place to start deepening relationships.

One last point I want to make is that nobody is happy all the time. That’s important to know because we can end up believing that if we’re not happy all the time, we’re doing something wrong. No life is happy all the time. Every life is filled with challenge and hard times. This idea about strengthening relationships is a way to increase our happiness, but also to build a safety net that helps us weather those hard times that all of us have in our lives.

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The Key To Happiness, According To A Decades-Long Study

Sending a text to a friend can bring a smile to your face. Now, research suggests it could also help bring long-term health benefits. guoya/Getty Images hide caption

Sending a text to a friend can bring a smile to your face. Now, research suggests it could also help bring long-term health benefits.

If you could change one thing in your life to become a happier person — like your income, a job, your relationships or your health — what would make the biggest difference? That's the question Harvard psychiatrist Dr. Robert Waldinger has been attempting to answer through decades of research. He's the director of "the world's longest-running scientific study of happiness," and he spoke with Ari Shapiro about the factor that appears to make the biggest difference in people's lives. Waldinger is a co-author of The Good Life: Lessons from the world's longest scientific study of happiness . In participating regions, you'll also hear a local news segment to help you make sense of what's going on in your community. Email us at [email protected] .

This episode was produced by Lee Hale and Megan Lim. It was edited by William Troop and Christopher Intagliata. Our executive producer is Sami Yenigun.