Confidence Classic: What 80+ Years Of Research Says About Happiness with Dr. Marc Schulz

19:11Heather Monahan:And you will. Now available in Canada too. Don't keep settling for clothes that don't last. Go to Q-U-I-N-C-E dot com slash confidence for free shipping and 365 day returns. Quince dot com slash confidence. I ask you to try to find your passion. When you mentioned reaching out to, you know, relationships that you want to do better, how can we advise everyone listening right now? So for some of my listeners, maybe they've put themselves last and they're always going back to someone who isn't treating them very well, but in their heart, they want to repair that. And of course, there's something that you're longing for, like feeling that void.

19:54Heather Monahan:How do they know when they tried enough or they shouldn't be trying anymore?

19:58Dr. Marc Schulz:Yeah, this is a question we get a lot when we talk about the research and we offer up some of the advice. And that's really a hard decision to make about someone that's been in your life, that's been important to you. And you're thinking about how challenging it's been and maybe the things that you're not getting out of that relationship. That's a very personal decision, but part of it might be based on the idea of how energizing that relationship is, how connected you feel when you're with that person and what the history is. So if it's a relative that you really want to make the relationship work or an old friend that you haven't really been connecting with or haven't been doing well with, then I think there are things that you can do.

20:37Dr. Marc Schulz:So one of the benefits of running a study that's followed people for 80 years is that we see that people change. It's quite remarkable the amount of change that we see. So this is one of the first studies that followed people into adulthood through their entire adult life. And one of the constants we find is really that people change in their adult life. So people who are stuck for various reasons and relationships, they find ways to make things better at any age. So we tell one story in the book of, this is to me, a really inspiring story of someone who struggled through much of his adult life, was in a marriage that wasn't very rewarding for him, had to retire.

21:17Dr. Marc Schulz:Work was really all that was important to him and all that was rewarding to him. And he felt pretty miserable and very alone. He was one of the most lonely people in our study. And he decided to go to a gym mainly for physical health reasons. but one of the byproducts of going to the gym daily is he started seeing people on a regular basis. Initially, in that sort of casual way, he'd nod to people and say hello. But over time, he realized that some of these people had real connections to the kinds of things that he was interested in. So one of them was old movies. And he would start to go to old movies with folks or have them over to his house to watch old movies.

21:54Dr. Marc Schulz:So this was a man who went from being extraordinarily very lonely to seeing people that were important to him on a daily basis at the gym and also having a much more active social life. He did this in his late 60s or early 70s, right? So it's never too late. But this challenge that you're raising about figuring out whether a relationship is worth putting effort into, really important. I think there's another piece to it too, which is we also need to think hard about our own roles and relationships. Do we have a hard time asking for help? Do we have a hard time asserting ourselves around certain needs that we have?

22:27Dr. Marc Schulz:Is it hard for us to listen sometimes because we're so distracted? Is that part of what's going on in this relationship? Is maybe the other person doesn't feel heard because when we talk, you're often on the phone or I'm getting a call and I can't really spend all the time that I should be spending. So part of this look at our social universe also is a hard look at ourselves, just like we do when we do physical fitness is trying to figure out what we're good at, what we need to get better at, what we need to strengthen.

22:53Heather Monahan:I love that. Thank you. I know that you mentioned it's so interesting, the work you do, because you've been able to follow people all through their lives, which sounds, I'm so interested in this. What did you find about childhood impacting people later in life?

23:09Dr. Marc Schulz:Yeah, great question. So the study started, you know, 80 years, a long period of time. We're actually going on the 85th year of the study. It started in the 1930s, and it started with two very different groups of people. So almost two-thirds of the original 724 participants were young boys who were growing up in some of the worst or poorest neighborhoods of Boston. They were really facing lots of social disadvantage. Most of them had come from immigrant families. They lived in tenement buildings without running water at that time. And then the remaining one-third came from Harvard University, so literally down the block from these poor neighborhoods.

23:45Dr. Marc Schulz:But these were young men also who had a very different outlook in their life at that time. And we followed them through their entire life. And now we're following the daughters and sons of the original participants, right? So we're following the second generation. So you asked about the impact of early experience. And what we found is there are connections. So again, one of the few studies that can really trace these connections. We didn't ask people about what they remember about their childhood. We knew because from the time they started the study, we went to visit their homes. and we interviewed their parents and we watched what it was like in their home when they were interacting with their parents.

24:19Dr. Marc Schulz:And the warmth, consistency, structure of childhood has an impact on the relationships that people have late in their life. So across six decades, you can see that connection. So that's kind of extraordinary that it can have that longer reach. But what I wanna say, because it's so important for listeners who are thinking about, I didn't have such a good childhood. My parents weren't always there for me. This connection was present, but it was small. So early experience is important. It gives you a leg up on people that don't have that positive early family environment, but it's not destiny at all.

24:55Dr. Marc Schulz:In fact, we think that part of the connection between that early family experience and later relationship functioning has to do with a way in which a family and parents can help teach us skills for dealing with adversity, for dealing with our emotions when we're challenged. We have evidence that that's the kind of mechanism that links that early experienced to late life relationship functioning. And we can all learn at any age, these skills that help us manage our emotions and help us lean into challenges in ways that can be effective. So there is a link surprising across six decades. We think it's pretty extraordinary, but I think it's also important to temper that with saying that that link has a small effect on your relationships as you age.

25:37Heather Monahan:I was just thinking of my own family when you were talking about that there's four children in my family. And while some of us might be similar, some of us are nothing alike in our relationships at all.

25:48Dr. Marc Schulz:Exactly. Yeah. So that's one of the ways that we know that environment doesn't do it all. Genes are important. The way we each construct our experiences. I have three siblings and sometimes I think we grew up in a different world. It doesn't sound like the world that I felt I experienced as a child. So it's interesting both to look at the objective of world, what we could see in the 1930s about their world. But it's also interesting to look at how they recollect their experience. And that's one of the things we're doing with the second generation studies. So the children of the original participants, we followed them as they were born into their parents' life.

26:22Dr. Marc Schulz:We asked the parents about what home life was like and what their kids were like. And now as they're adults, the second generation, we're asking them about their recollections of what it was like growing up in their house. And one of the things we're finding Heather is exactly what you're describing. Not everyone that grows up in the same house experiences the same kinds of family rearing environment, their differences. And those differences are really interesting.

26:46Heather Monahan:Absolutely. What has surprised you the most by this work that you're doing with your findings?

26:52Dr. Marc Schulz:I think there are two things that have been really surprising. So the first one I began to allude to before, we were surprised by the depth, the amount of influence that it looks like relationship experiences have on our bodies. So I'll give you one example. Our research, this is research that we're doing now, and the research of others shows pretty clearly that relationship experiences, the experience of loneliness or the experience of close connections to others has an impact on the way our genes are expressed. And it's a particular set of genes that are really important. So it's genes that have an influence on inflammatory patterns in the body, which we know are not good for our physical health.

27:30Dr. Marc Schulz:those experiences also influence our antibacterial and antiviral experiences. So then we have an effect, for example, on how we respond to exposure to COVID, for example. So very powerful indications that experiences that are based in relationships, that are based in our connections, really affect our body in important ways and even affect our brain health as well. We have some evidence that people who are able to maintain close and what we call secure relationships late in life. So security means being able to trust your partner, being able to depend on them, and a reciprocal piece, being able to provide help for your partner.

28:06Dr. Marc Schulz:Really important as we get older, because physically we may really need assistance, that people who are in those close and secure relationships show less cognitive decline three and a half years later. So there are links with physical health, there are links with cognitive health. And I think that was really surprising to us. The other piece I think I also alluded to, which is the amount of change that people have. I think, you know, when I went to graduate school, I studied developmental theories. I studied a little bit about what we knew about adult development and lifespan development. But there really wasn't a lot of research yet.

28:39Dr. Marc Schulz:And this 84-year-old study was one of the first studies that really tracked the ways that people changed in adulthood. And we do change in adulthood. One of the things that happens, for example, from middle age to late life is that people typically get happier. There's a kind of boost in happiness over time. So the more we look at adult life, the more we recognize that, of course, there's some theme for people that we don't lose the core of who we are. But there's also important variation that happens as we age, as we encounter new relationships, as we grow because of experiences, as we meet challenges in our life and figure out ways to move forward.

29:17Dr. Marc Schulz:We tend to grow, acquire new skills, and we change. And to me, that's a very optimistic thing that we have the capacity to change right up into the very end of our lives.

29:27Heather Monahan:Okay. On the flip side of this optimism, because I just got a little taken aback. So I'm sure some of my listeners did. I'm single right now and hearing how healthy it is and how great it is to be in a fruitful, strong relationship, literally for your life. It's making someone like me feel discouraged all of a sudden. What do you think of someone like me?

29:45Dr. Marc Schulz:So when I say in connection with others and relationships with others, I mean all kinds of relationships. So we started by talking about your barista, for example. Now, of course, your barista is going to have only a limited impact on your well-being, but your friends, your relatives, it doesn't have to be an intimate relationship. There are benefits to intimate relationships, and those people who are in good ones reap some of those benefits. But relationships of all kinds give us benefits. So all we have to do, any listener can be, can think about a recent challenge that they experienced and the likelihood that at some point they shared some of that challenge with a friend or a relative, a confidant of some kind, that relationships turned out to be really good stress busters.

30:29Dr. Marc Schulz:People help us calm down when we need to calm down. They challenge us when we're not thinking about things in a way that can be productive. They provide expertise that we might not have. So the colleague that I wrote the book, The Good Life With, is a few years older than me and my wife, when we had our first child, we had a big pregnancy crisis and he was there when our first son was born and he's a medical doctor. So he had expertise that kind of helped us through some of it, but he was also there as a kind of emotional confidant as well. So I don't just mean relationships with an intimate partner or a long-term relationship.

31:04Dr. Marc Schulz:I'm talking about friends. I'm talking about colleagues at work that you see every day and may become important in your life and certainly talking about other relatives other than an intimate partner.

31:12Heather Monahan:Okay, thank you for giving us that hall pass. All right. So Mark, you just mentioned challenges, and I'm interested to hear what you've learned from this work on how challenges impact people. Yeah.

31:26Dr. Marc Schulz:So again, I like to start by just thinking historically to give us some perspective. So this pandemic has been extraordinary in many ways. I think we'll have to look back at it after decades to really think about its impact. But one of the things that you learn by studying people's lives across time is that there have been other major societal challenges. So they're always there. And challenges in our life are inevitable in everyone's life. So these participants grew up in the 20s and 30s in the throes of the Depression. The men at Harvard, 91 percent of them, I think, fought in World War II, which is a major challenge for them.

32:04Dr. Marc Schulz:They went through the Korean War, the upheaval of the 60s and the challenges that we faced there. So if we look historically, there are always challenges. And I think that's another important lesson that we have an idea that our life would be better if we can avoid challenges, if we could stay out of trouble. If we do the right thing, we won't have stress in our life. And I think instead the message is that stuff finds us, that stress is inevitable. The real trick is how we engage with stress, how we engage with challenges. And one of the big findings from this study is that the people overall, flexibility in engaging with stress is a good thing.

32:40Dr. Marc Schulz:If you have more than one coping skill in your kind of toolbox, that's a good thing because one may not work in this particular challenge. They may have to use another tool. but in general, people who lean into challenges as opposed to avoid them or make believe they don't avoid the challenges or make believe that they don't exist, that folks who can lean into challenge are able to acknowledge to themselves and equally important, acknowledge to people in their social world that they're experiencing a challenge and they may need help. We find that those people who do that are able to engage others, engage the power of support, that big stress buster from others and able to move forward.

33:19Dr. Marc Schulz:So a lot of challenges we can learn from if we have the right resources and the right support. And that's another important lesson from this study.

33:27Heather Monahan:Okay. I feel like my stock is rising again. Thank you very much for that.

33:30Dr. Marc Schulz:You're good at responding to challenges.

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38:46Heather Monahan:You shared that loneliness is one of the biggest deterrents from finding happiness. What's another big finding that you really want to share with our listeners today?

38:55Dr. Marc Schulz:I think this is, again, sort of big picture thinking about it. There's so many distractions in our world today. So there are lots of messages that what's most important in life is finding fame or making lots of money or, you know, achievement at work. If I just achieve at this level, then I'll be happy. And what we found partly from studying people with very different prospects in life, right? People who grew up dirt poor and people who were at least privileged enough, they were at Harvard in their early, you know, late teens, early 20s, is that your lot in life isn't what shapes your happiness.

39:28Dr. Marc Schulz:It's really your connections to others. It's your sense of purpose and a sense that you have something important in your life that's probably more important than just yourself. And that's part of the idea of connection. So I think really important that it's not just the circumstances that we live in that lead us to be happy so money can get us distracted. And then distractions have another meaning, which is separate from that. Those are kind of social messages that distract us from the things that we know deep down are really important. But distractions also mean that our attention is often given to things that maybe aren't as important to us as they should be.

40:07Dr. Marc Schulz:So if we think about what's most important in life, many people talk about their connections to others, their family, the people they care about. But a lot of us spend an awful lot of time on screens. There was some recent research that in the United States, people are spending over 10 hours a day on screens, including social media and their phones. If you think about the precious time that you have with those people you really care about, those distractions take away from those relationships in important ways. So I think that's another challenge. It's a modern challenge. The folks that we studied growing up, the television entered their lives, telephones entered their lives.

40:45Dr. Marc Schulz:There have been distractions like this before, intrusions on our kind of personal space. But we're at a level of technological change that these intrusions now are really hard to ignore and hard to put away in that box. So what do I mean by that? The time we spend with our kids? Are we really present? Are we there for them? When we talk to our partners, if we're lucky enough to have a partner, do we give them our attention and our presence? Do we remember what they said to us? Are we interested in what they said? So those are the kinds of lessons about leaning into relationships as well as challenges.

41:19Dr. Marc Schulz:Really important.

41:21Heather Monahan:Thank you for that. Did you have any insight or findings around faith, religion, or an idea that there's something greater than ourselves out there?

41:30Dr. Marc Schulz:I've been working with this study now for about 20 years, and the previous director was a man named George Valiant, who was really interested in this question. And George thought that one of the keys to health, particularly late in life, was getting engaged in activities that sort of broaden our perspective beyond ourself, that really connected us with something beyond our individual self. There are a number of ways that you can do that. So George was interested in the role of religion and spirituality and thought that that could have a positive benefit for folks. And there's research that suggests that that's true as well.

42:03Dr. Marc Schulz:But he was also interested in the ways, for example, that we might mentor young people or grandparents might connect with a grandchild, that these ways of going beyond our own experience help us think that our legacy is broader than ourselves. And they become particularly important as we age, it turns out. So we get a lot of meaning and sense of purpose as we move into our later life by doing things that help the world beyond ourself. Could be volunteer work, could be teaching, something that I get to do incredibly rewarding, working with young people and helping them learn about things that they really care about.

42:43Dr. Marc Schulz:That helps keep me vital, which is really important.

42:47Heather Monahan:No one's ever going to feel worse when you're out there doing good and helping others. You inevitably will feel better. Tell me, what is some of the most common misconceptions about happiness that you've found?

42:58Dr. Marc Schulz:Yeah, so I started to talk about one, which is this idea that money is critical for happiness. And what we find, and the data I think is fairly consistent here, although there's still research going on to try and clarify pieces of this, is that beyond a kind of subsistence level of living, wherever, whatever that might be in the world that you live in, that happiness is virtually unrelated to the amount of money that you make. So if you think about maybe middle class incomes in the United States, there might be a link as you get up to that middle class income with people's happiness and their satisfaction in life.

43:32Dr. Marc Schulz:And that probably has to do with control over circumstances and access to things like healthcare and things like that. But once we get beyond that sort of middle average income, the relationship between happiness and income is almost non-existent. There's some studies that suggest there's a small relationship, but most studies suggest that it's not a significant relationship. So I think that's important because a lot of us, again, are very career oriented. One of the things that marks our success and career for many people is the amount of money that we make, right? We tend to take track of things that are easy to count.

44:06Dr. Marc Schulz:Money is easy to count. The number of, in my work, the number of publications you might have are easy to count, or the number of friends we have on social media. We tend to count things that are easily quantifiable. And I think we get distracted. So that's a kind of an illusion and a kind of myth that I think a lot of people have gotten caught up with. In our study, when folks were in their 80s, we asked them, as they look back on their lives are their regrets that they have. And almost everyone had regrets. And almost all the regrets were about one thing. I should have spent more time with people that I cared about.

44:40Dr. Marc Schulz:I should have been kinder to people that were important to me. So they were about those important connections. And I think that's really important. So it's the stuff that gets in the way there. And it's often career. It's often worries about money. And I'm not suggesting money is not important, right? In our society, in particular in the U.S., money buys certain privileges. It allows you a certain amount of freedom and control. But people have this idea that more and more money will give us more control and more happiness. And the data is just not there. There are lots of unhappy, really wealthy people.

45:12Heather Monahan:So how much of our actual happiness is within our control?

45:16Dr. Marc Schulz:Yeah. So lots of researchers have been trying to figure that out. And the estimates vary a lot. So So the one that's the most common estimate, people say about 50 % is within our control. And by that, they mean the other 50 % probably has something to do with genes or early experience. So that's a lot on some level, but it's one of those, you know, glass half empty, half full or flip side of a coin. To me, when 50 % of our happiness is under our control, that's a huge opportunity. So what kinds of things affect that? It's the kinds of things we do on a daily basis. It's our activities. And for us, it's very clearly the connection that we have with others and the ways that we do that.

45:56Dr. Marc Schulz:So if you go through a day, just think about it. And for the pandemic, it was almost like a natural experiment to see what this was like. If you live alone and you're socially isolating and you go through an entire day in which the only sound you hear is something coming from your phone or your TV and not another human person, that's an aversive experience for most of us. And it's aversive for people even who talk about being introverted or shy. So that means like introversion could mean that maybe I'm not going to get my social connections at a big party where it's loud and there are lots of people.

46:29Dr. Marc Schulz:But all of us need social connection. So think about that happening day after day, the lack of connection with other people. It's incredibly aversive. And we've just been through this incredibly trying time in which many people experience that. And even people who were socially isolated with other people, it was a different kind of experience, right? You had partners that were home together that had never spent that much time together, introduced new challenges into their life. And I think that the ways in which the day was less structured at the time blended in some ways in which our connections, the time that we often spent with our partners or our children or with friends after work, that that special time got lost for a lot of people.

47:12Dr. Marc Schulz:I think there are a bunch of people that figure that out during the pandemic, right? They figured out how to get that special social time. Some people did it over Zoom meetings with friends or cocktail hours with friends or game nights with friends. And I love those very clever solutions. And I think as the world is becoming a little more normal as the pandemic is ebbing, really important to figure out ways to continue those kinds of efforts. A big idea here is that things wane, just like physical fitness, our social engagement or social fitness wanes if we don't give it the attention it needs.

47:48Heather Monahan:Oh, so true. Tell me, who did you write the book The Good Life for?

47:52Dr. Marc Schulz:Yeah, good question. So we brought it for a lot of people, really. So my colleague Bob Walder and I are the two authors, and we've been working together in research for years. And a little while ago, I think six or seven years ago, Bob did a TED Talk in which he talked for the first time in a kind of public way about some of the intricate findings, but tried to talk about them in a way that might be more helpful for people. And that TED Talk went viral. That's the ninth most watched TED Talk of all time. And it made us both realize I was the first person to hear that talk before it was publicly done.

48:24Dr. Marc Schulz:And I said to Bob, I said, I think this could work. I think people might be interested. That was the worst prediction of all time. People are really interested. They're really thirsting for this. So we decided that we should spend some of our time not doing more research, although we continue to do that research, but to devote part of our time to figure out how to take these findings and to put them out there in a way that would be accessible and helpful to people. And what we've been finding, the book has been, it officially comes out a week from the time we're doing this interview, but people have been reading about it in various venues.

48:56Dr. Marc Schulz:We've been doing other interviews and people are really responding well to the ideas in the book and some of the actions. So it feels great to have this impact on people's lives. Some of it is common sense that many of us know, but the advantage that we have is we have the research findings from our study and also the research that's out there beyond our study. So this is science-based kind of wisdom that aligns with a lot of what we know, but we don't necessarily do in our life. So we wrote it for really everyone out there.

49:29Heather Monahan:For everyone listening right now, when you hear this episode, the book is live, The Good Life. Where can people go buy it today?

49:37Dr. Marc Schulz:The Good Life is available everywhere. It's online. It should be at your local bookstores. The early reception has been tremendous. So we're really excited about people trying to take advantage of the book. and what we know.

49:48Heather Monahan:Well, thank you so much for the work you're doing. It is so needed. And for everyone listening, get the book, The Good Life, make your life happier and send someone you're thinking about a text or a call and start taking these teachings that Dr. Schultz is giving us and put them into motion. Dr. Schultz, thank you so much for the work you're doing.

50:05Dr. Marc Schulz:Such a pleasure to be here. Thank you, Heather, for having me. It was fun talking to you.

50:09Heather Monahan:Until next week, keep creating your confidence. I decided to change that dynamic. I couldn't be more excited for what you're going to hear. Start learning and growing. Inevitably, something will happen. No one succeeds alone. You don't stop and look around once in a while. You could miss it. I'm on this journey with me.