The Secret to Happiness?

0:00Hi, I'm Wendy Zukerman and you're listening to Science Versus. Today on the show, we're pitting facts against finding happiness.

0:14That's right. There's claims out there that all kinds of things can make us happy, from making money to having kids to buying your dream home. But what actually works? What does it take to have a happy life? To find out, Harvard has been running this amazing study which has tracked hundreds of people for decades. It's actually the longest-running scientific study into happiness. And as a result, we now have all of these awesome insights into how we can not only be happier but healthier too. And so today on the show, we're chatting with the guy who has been the director of this study for more than two decades.

0:58His name is Professor Bob Waldinger. He's also a psychiatrist, and he co-wrote a book about this study. Bob is going to tell us what a lot of us get wrong in searching for the good life, and ultimately, how science can help us all to be happy. Here's Bob. Well, the biggest finding is that the people who stayed healthiest and happiest the longest were the people who were... Come on, I'm not going to give it away that easily. You got to listen to the episode. Science spills the beans on how to be happy just after the break.

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3:20Welcome back. Today, we're talking about the world's longest-running study into happiness. It's officially called the Harvard Study of Adult Development. At the start of the study, pretty much everyone was a white guy. Eventually, they let in women. And a lot of their findings have been repeated by different groups all around the world. So let's jump in. Here's Professor Bob Waldinger. Bob, you are the director of this amazing study. For those who have never heard of it, what is kind of the driving question of this study? How do we live a good life? That's really it. And what are the conditions that predict who's going to thrive as they go through their life and who isn't?

4:07That's what we were asking. So set the scene of how this study began. It's the 1930s. Who are scientists picking to study? Well, they were two separate studies that didn't actually know about each other. One was a study of Harvard College undergraduate students, 19-year-olds, who were thought by their deans to be fine, upstanding specimens. And so they were chosen to study normal development from adolescence to young adulthood. And of course, now we realize how ridiculous that is. If you want to study normal development, you study all white guys from Harvard? No. But the other group was also a study of normal development, but it was a study of boys from Boston's poorest neighborhoods and their most troubled families.

5:01So families known for domestic violence, parental illness, mental illness, known to social service agencies for so much trouble. And the question that these researchers had was, what allows some children born into such difficult circumstances to thrive, to stay out of trouble, to do well? So it started in the 30s and 40s. It's going all the way up to today, following the kids then of these people, because none of the original participants still are living. There were 724 original participants. Fewer than 10 are still living, and they're all over age 100. Wow. Wow, wow, wow. Yeah. And even John F.

5:50Kennedy was an original participant. Is this right? He was. He was. You got any goss on John F. Kennedy? No, we didn't. Because when he was running for senator, so long before he was president, when he was running for senator, his campaign manager said, you know, you probably shouldn't be giving a lot of confidential information to some researchers at Harvard. So they withdrew his records. Oh, well. And so what kinds of questions were you asking these participants, both JFK and everyone, really? Well, first we did these interviews with them about about their mental health, about their physical health.

6:36They were asked about what they hoped for in their lives, what they enjoyed the most, what they believed in. So many questions. Very deep questions. Other ones that I really sort of loved were, if you woke up frightened in the middle of the night, who would you call? Yes. And some random questions, like they asked everybody, are you ticklish? Like we have no idea why they asked that question, but they did. So if you would like to analyze the data on who was ticklish and who wasn't, let me know. Tell me about what sort of scientific measurements you're doing. Brainwaves. Even in the 1930s and 40s when brainwaves were quite new, they measured their brainwaves.

7:17Then what we did was as new methods came online, we started using modern methods. So we started drawing blood to measure their DNA. I mean, DNA wasn't even imagined in the 1930s. And we put people into the scanner and we scan their brains. We bring them into our laboratory and we deliberately stress them out and then see how their cardiovascular systems recover from stress. All this as a way to measure well-being in many different ways. Now, when you were first asked to join the study, because you're the fourth director. That's right. In your book, you say that you were actually hesitant to join because you weren't sure how relevant this study was.

8:04Because as you mentioned, these were old, mostly white men. What made you change your mind? So my processor, the third director, said, come to my office and just read through one man's papers. Read through his file. And I started flipping through. And I started reading about what he had said as a 19-year-old about what he hoped for in his life. And then I flipped to when he was in his 40s and how he felt about his life and his marriage and his work. And then I looked at him in his 50s. And I thought, this is the most amazing thing in the world. to be able to read forward somebody's life and then read about what they thought 20 years later and 20 years after that.

8:52So I said, I'm hooked. I'm going to do this.

8:59Okay, so what is the biggest finding of this study in terms of what makes us happy, what makes the good life? Well, the biggest finding is that the people who stayed healthiest and happiest the longest were the people who were most connected to other people. That people who had good relationships with others, warm relationships, and made that a priority. Those were the people who didn't develop the diseases of aging as soon if they developed them at all. They were the people who stayed happier. and we didn't believe it at first. Why do you think you were so surprised back then? You know, we say, yes, we know the mind and the body are connected, but that strong a connection, like adding years to your life, like preventing you from getting type 2 diabetes or heart disease?

9:58Yeah, I've heard you say you actually, when you started to see that in the data, you didn't publish it right away because you were so skeptical at what you were saying. Is that right? Well, we wanted to be sure that other studies were finding the same thing, similar things. And then we saw that several other research groups were finding exactly the same thing. That good relationships not only made you happier, but healthier. It kept you healthier, exactly. I mean, it makes sense that you'd be happier if you had better relationships, but how could relationships actually get inside our bodies and shape our physiology?

10:36Like, how could that be? How could that be a thing? How could that be? Well, I know more about it now because we've been spending a bunch of years investigating that. It seems to have to do with stress. The best hypothesis we have is that relationships are stress regulators for us. So for example, like stress happens every day, right? Something upsetting may happen and your body revs up, your blood pressure goes up, your heart rate goes up, then the body's meant to come back to equilibrium. And what we find is that if you have somebody you can call and complain to, or you have someone at home, you can go home and say, you won't believe what happened today, and you get to explain what happened, you can feel your body calm down.

11:25And we think that good relationships help our bodies go back to equilibrium after they're stressed. And what we know is that people who are isolated, people who are lonely, have chronic stress because loneliness is a stressor. So we think that those people may not ever go back to the baseline that they're supposed to go back to when they've been stressed, that they may have low levels of stress all the time in their body, higher levels of circulating stress hormones, a weaker immune system, chronic inflammation that breaks down different body systems. So that's how we think it works. When we think about the damage that stress can cause, there is this really interesting study that you talk about around stress and wound healing.

12:18This was work done at Ohio State University. It's a study that does make me cringe, I have to say. Yeah, yeah, yeah. and what they did was they took two groups of older adults. One group was caring for demented relatives and one group was not. And otherwise, they were kind of equal in terms of health status and all that. And then they did a little skin biopsy, the kind that you do in the dermatologist's office if they see something they want to look at under the microscope. didn't hurt much. It's a small little wound. And then they just watched to see how long everybody's little biopsy took to heal, how long the little wound took to heal in their skin.

13:04The people who were caring for demented relatives took on average nine days longer for those little tiny wounds to heal than the people who were not caring for demented relatives. And because we know that caring for somebody who's disabled and particularly for somebody with dementia is one of the most stressful things that we can do. Wow. And so to tie it back to your research, any way that we can try to buffer that stress, including having good relationships, can help with that process. Absolutely. Yeah.

13:47And then in your research, you also found this connection between physical pain and good relationships. Can you tell us about that? Yes. What we know is that people who are having physical problems, people who are in physical pain, are less happy. You know, think about it. If you're having a bad day, you have some physical pain, your mood is kind of grumpier usually, right? Yeah. But what we found was that people who were having pain, who were in a happy relationship with a partner, they reported better mood on the days, even on the days when they had pain, than people who were in unhappy relationships or who were alone.

14:32So what that means to us is that being in a happy relationship kind of is a buffer. It kind of buffers you from the worst effects of pain on your mood. It allows you to still be kind of happy even when things are hurting in your body. You know, your research and others find that good relationships are so important. The question then becomes, how do you build those good relationships? Yeah. George Valiant, your predecessor, wrote this really lovely quote that I want to talk about. He said, there are two pillars of happiness revealed by this study. One is love. The other is finding a way of coping with life that does not push love away.

15:19Yes. Well, we totally agree with what George says there. because one of the ways we can protect ourselves psychologically is to push people away. You know, if we're afraid of people, if we're worried about being disliked, being disapproved of, if we're worried about somebody hurting us, we can put up barriers. And you've probably seen this. You know, you've probably seen it in yourself sometimes. Yeah, I don't need to look very far above. Yeah, yeah. And what we see is that the people who do that their whole lives really are pushing love away. And that means you could even be in a marriage, but it could be a very distant marriage.

16:01And many people never find a romantic partner. Not that you have to find a romantic partner because you could have friends, really good friendships. That's fine. It's the people who are scared to let themselves express love and express affection who often keep love at a distance and they're less happy and less healthy. So in your study, this is really interesting to me. You looked at how people coped with difficulties and the consequences of avoiding dealing with difficult things in life. How do you actually study that? Well, it's a really hard thing to study, actually. But the way we did it was we interviewed people and we said, tell us about a difficult time you've had recently and how did you cope?

16:52And usually we'd ask them about a few difficult times. And then what we would do is we would get researchers to, we would just take the stories and we'd show them the stories and we'd say, what coping mechanisms are being used here? And people were really able to rate whether someone was like burying their head in the sand saying, I'm not going to deal with this stressor. I'm going to pretend it doesn't exist. As opposed to the people who face toward a challenge and take steps to cope with it. Interesting. And what did you find generally that if you tend to avoid things? Let me guess. It doesn't go well.

17:35So you mentioned that with these relationships, they don't have to be romantic. And I want you to tell me a little more about that. In this study, what did you find? Well, actually, some people sometimes ask me when I give a talk about this. They say, you know, if I don't have a partner, am I doomed? Should I just throw myself in front of a bus? And I say, no, absolutely not. So it's whether we cultivate close relationships. So all of us, we think, need at least one or two people who we're close to, who we feel would be there if we needed them, who we feel we can talk to about personal matters.

18:16All of us need that. But it doesn't have to be a romantic partner. It could be a friend. It could be a sibling. It could be a workmate. And in the study, there were some people who were married, but still didn't, their partner wasn't that person that they would call in the middle of the night. Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. Sometimes people live in very distant marriages and they're very lonely. On the other hand, there are people who aren't married who are totally happy with their social connections, right?

18:52After the break, how folks in this study overcame a difficult childhood. Plus, does having kids make you happy? Coming up.

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21:22Welcome back today on the show, What Makes Us Happy? Research shows that part of the reason that some of us are happier than others is genetics. That is, there are those of us that are just kind of wired to be happier. But still, if this is something that you want to work on in your life to boost your happiness meter a little, there is some wiggle room. And Professor Bob Waldinger and his team at Harvard have found that there is something we can try to do to bump up our happiness meter, which is to build relationships, all kinds of relationships, not just romantic, but friendships too. And so I asked Bob, how has knowing this changed you?

22:07Have you made more of an effort to build these relationships? Yes, I have. So I'm a Harvard professor. I could work 24-7, do nothing but work. And I realized if I keep doing this, I'm going to end up so alone. Yes, I do have a wife and she's a wonderful partner. She's fantastic. But my kids were grown. They were no longer pulling me away saying, dad, come do this or drive me here. And I realized I was just going to end up with nobody except my spouse. And then I said, oh my gosh, I have to take my own medicine here. And so I started being much more active and intentional in making dates with my friends.

22:50Let's go for a walk. Let's go out to dinner. Like two guys going out for a dinner that our wives didn't arrange, right? That's unheard of. Who would have thought? There is actually a stat from your study that it found that while only 6 % of the women in the study were not satisfied with their relationships, almost a third of the men weren't. Yeah. Why is this? I mean, it's almost like a meme. It's a meme. It's a total meme. You know why? I think it's how we all get socialized. I think that women growing up see their mothers being the social directors in the home, right? And they see other girls paying attention to, okay, who's doing what and what are we getting together?

23:36And the guys just, you know, they see their fathers not paying attention. I think it's kind of handed down generationally, not in every family at all, not to stereotype it, but it is much more common for the women to be the more connected people. And so men really, I've had to learn to do that. And it's because of my own research that I've made myself learn. And has it worked for you? Do you think you're a happier person because of it? Yeah, I do. I do. I really do. And more connected. Really stamping on this point. And that at any age, you can turn things around and start building these relationships.

24:14Oh, totally. Totally. In fact, If your listeners want to just try something, it's a little exercise to show you how easy it is. Just think of somebody you kind of miss that you haven't seen in a while or you've been out of touch with, you want to connect with. And when you're done listening to this recording, just send them a little text or an email. Just send them a little text saying, hi, I was just thinking of you and wanted to connect. That's all you have to do. It will take you 30 seconds and then see what comes back to you. I mean, I do this sometimes when I give talks. I'll do this. I'll ask the audience.

24:51I'll say, okay, take out your phone, think of somebody, text them. And then during the Q &A, I'll say, did anybody get anything back? And all these hands shoot up and people say, oh yeah. And the reason for doing that is just to show us all that this is not heavy lifting. This is not adding huge amounts of time to your day at all. It's little small actions you could do every day. You could do it on your commute, right? You could do it while you're out jogging. You could call someone. You could invite someone to meet you at the gym to work out. There are lots of ways to do this stuff. Yeah.

25:32And then looking at some of the other findings of your study, because it was this beautiful, longitudinal research project. What did you find about how childhood adversity can then affect us as we grow up? Because you did have these two groups, the Harvard, quote unquote, well-adjusted men versus those who came from quite poor and difficult backgrounds. Yeah. Well, one interesting thing is that not all the Harvard men were well-adjusted. And many of the inner city men were very well-adjusted, even though they'd come from difficult backgrounds. A lot had to do with what kind of supports they had.

26:11So maybe they had one parent who was really consistent and loving, and that was enough, right? Or even an older sibling who was caring and took care of them, watched out for them. And so all you need is one older person who's crazy about you and is consistent, and that's often a key to thriving. So for those who are listening and for those in the study who did not have any caring individuals growing up, what patterns did you see and were they able to overcome them? Sometimes people have what we call corrective experiences. And what I mean by that is they meet somebody who is a good person and who treats them kindly and with respect.

26:59The worst thing about trauma is that it creates the sense that the world isn't safe and that people aren't safe. They can't be trusted. They can't be relied on. And that's one of the most horrible legacies of trauma. So you send children out into the world believing they can't trust anybody. So the people who are lucky meet friends, meet a romantic partner who is trustworthy, who doesn't betray you, who is kind, and then you can realize, oh, okay, not everybody is like the people were when I was growing up. There are people who can be trusted. And so that's what I mean by a corrective experience where having a new experience with a different kind of person changes our mindset about what's possible in relationships.