3 Takeaways - What the Good Life Actually Looks Like Based on Harvard’s 75 Year Study with the Director of the Study, Robert Waldinger (#20)

Episode Date: December 22, 2020

Find out what the good life actually looks like based on Harvard's 75 year study of over 700 men from when they were teenagers through old age, with director of the study, Robert Waldinger. Learn the single most important thing that keeps us healthy and happy as we go through life and predicts who will stay healthy longer and live longer. To learn more about Robert Waldinger and the Harvard Study of Adult Development, visit https://robertwaldinger.com. 

Welcome to the Three Takeaways podcast, which features short, memorable conversations with the world's best thinkers, business leaders, writers, politicians, scientists, and other newsmakers. Each episode ends with the three key takeaways that person has learned over their lives and their careers. And now your host and board member of schools at Harvard, Princeton, and Columbia, Lynn Thoman. Hi, everyone. It's Lynn Thoman. Hi, everyone. It's Lynn Thoman. Welcome to another episode. Today, I'm delighted to be here with Robert Waldinger, who's going to talk about what the good life actually looks like, based on Harvard's 75-year study of over 700 men from

when they were teenagers through old age. Bob will share three important lessons on what actually keeps us healthy and happy as we go through life. Welcome, Bob, and thanks so much for being here today. It's great to be here. Before we talk about what's important for a good life, can you tell us about this incredible 75-year study and why it's so important and unique? This study is now actually 83 years old. It started in 1938. And what's important about it is that it's the longest study of adult life that has ever been done, where we followed the same people all the way from their teenage years into old age. Fascinating. Can you tell us what was the single most important finding?

The most surprising finding was that relationships keep us healthy and happy as we go through life, that we thought that good relationships would make us happier. But we were really surprised by the fact that relationships actually predicted who would live longer and who would grow old in a healthier way. That the people who had more relationships and better relationships stayed healthy longer and lived longer. So what do relationships actually impact? That's a question we've been studying for the last five years. We've been studying all the children of the original people in our study. The original people are now in their mid-90s. Most have died, but the children are all baby boomers. And we've been studying how relationships actually get into the body and affect our health. We've been studying things like stress and how stress sets up chronic inflammation in

the body and promotes heart disease and type 2 diabetes and arthritis. And so what we've learned is that good relationships help reduce stress. They help us manage difficult emotions, which occur for all of us throughout life. And so that seems to be one of the most important ways that relationships keep us healthier. What kinds of relationships are important? Is it any relationship, lots of relationships? It's all kinds of relationships. It depends on who we are as individuals. Some of us are more introverted, and we just need a few relationships. And actually having lots of relationships could be stressful. Some of us are quite extroverted. We need lots of relationships.

They give us energy. So for those people, more relationships are better. One of the things we know is that relationships where there's lots of conflict that never gets resolved, those relationships take a toll on our health. They break down body systems. But good relationships, everything from the person who sleeps beside you every night to the person who delivers your mail each day, good relationships energize us, make us feel better about life and keep us healthier. Do they need to be smooth relationships or perfect marriages? Absolutely not. There's no such thing as a smooth relationship that never

has a ripple in it or a perfect marriage doesn't exist. In fact, conflict in relationships can be a real source of connection and growth if people learn how to work with it. No, nothing needs to be perfect and always a source of growth and development for us when we have bumps in the road in our relationships. So I know you've said that good relationships protect our health. Do they protect our brains, our memory? What else do they impact? We found that people in good relationships had better memory function when we tested them several years after we checked out their relationships, and that the people in poorer relationships had cognitive decline earlier in older age. So for some reason,

probably to do with these same mechanisms, better relationships keep our brains healthier. The opposite of relationships is probably loneliness. What did you find out about loneliness or people that did not have good relationships? We've found and many studies have found that loneliness takes a terrible toll on our health, not just on our emotional well-being and our mental health, but on our bodies. Let me just clarify that loneliness is different from being alone or liking to be solitary. Loneliness is that feeling of not being connected to other people as much as you'd like to be. So you can be lonely in a crowd, you can be lonely in a marriage, or you can be totally happy all by yourself in a hermitage at the top of a mountain. So what we're talking

about is that subjective feeling of wanting more connection than you have. And that's the feeling that's a chronic stressor and promotes poor health. And that loneliness, what you call a chronic stressor. Do a lot of people have that? How serious a problem is it? It's a huge problem. Estimates are anywhere from one in four people, particularly in the United States, will tell you on any given day that they are lonely. And now during the pandemic, people talk about 40% or more of people reporting that they are lonely. Can you predict for someone at middle age, who the healthiest at 80 or so would be? We did that with our study, we looked at all

the things we knew about them, like their cholesterol levels, their blood pressure at age 50, and took all that information. And then we had already followed them to the time they were 80 years old and said, Okay, how could we predict who was going to be a healthy 80 year old, and it turned out that more important than your cholesterol level or your blood pressure was the satisfaction you had in your relationships. And at first, we didn't even believe it. We thought this can't be true. But other studies began to find similar results. And from your study, who is happiest in retirement? The people who are happiest are the people who find

ways to play with other people, to be with other people in activities that they enjoy or find meaningful. And that's important because we often take our work relationships for granted. The people we see at the office every day or on Zoom during COVID in our business meetings. And many of us don't realize until we retire that those people were important sources of well-being. One of the most important things we can do is replace our workmates with new playmates. And that could be doing anything from gardening to golfing to working on political campaigns. All kinds of things can bring us into contact with people who share interests. Do you have any findings about pain?

What about people in or out of relationships in pain? We do. When we looked at people as they got older and asked them every day to tell us how much pain they were in and also how satisfied they were with their relationships with other people, we found that yes, people in pain had lower moods, but that the people who had better relationships were sort of buffered from the ups and downs of mood that go with being in pain. And so relationships have a kind of protective effect as we get more aches and pains as we go through adult life. This importance of relationships is fascinating and so important. Why is this wisdom on strong relationships so easy for people to ignore?

Well, one is that we assume that relationships are just the background, that we don't think of them as something we need to pay a lot of attention to. The other thing is that relationships are not easy, that there are two, at least two people in any relationship, and each person has their own needs and desires, and they change. So relationships are never something you can just get and then be done with it. Unlike this fantasy that, well, if we just get a certain amount of money, we'll be happy, or if we just get this award, we'll be happy. That's a fantasy that many of us hold. Turns out not to be true. But relationships, first of all, are in the background and then are also complicated and always changing. So we never think of those as something we can just get and then we're done and we're happy.

You talked about money and achievement. And of course, every young person is told to work hard and achieve. How important is money and achievement career success? They are important up to a point. The question is, what are money and achievement for? What do you want them for? So if you want money to take care of your needs and your family's needs, that's important. And we know that people are less happy if they do not have enough to meet family needs. Achievement is important because we can take

pride and satisfaction in doing things that we care about and find meaningful in the world. But if money and achievement are just there because we imagine that they alone are going to make us happy, that doesn't work out so well. What we really need to pay attention to is what we care about, our intrinsic goals, we say, as opposed to the extrinsic goals of fame and fortune. So the men who did achieve fame and fortune were actually, how did they compare to others that did not? They were not happier, and they were no less happy. It varied a lot. There were some highly accomplished people who were deeply unhappy most of their lives. There were some highly accomplished people who were very happy. And there were people who were quite poor most of their lives, and lived lives that didn't have any fame or awards attached

to them. And yet they were very happy and very fulfilled. So fame, fortune, achievement are not a prescription for happiness. You talk about leaning into relationships with family, friends, and community. Can you give us some examples? What does that look like? It looks like making deliberate decisions day to day, week to week about connecting with people, staying connected, putting in the time with people. That can be people right there at home with you, or it can be people who live across town or across the world, but making the choice to connect with them rather than spending an extra hour on email or flipping through your social media feeds, that these connections are decisions we have to make about investing our time day after

day. Interesting. What are the other insights on living a good life? Are there other things like meditation or anything else that we should be practicing for a better, more fulfilling life? Yes. And what I'm going to say now is really boring, and I'm going to sound like your grandmother. Taking care of ourselves is really important, physically taking care of ourselves. So one maxim I like is take care of your body as though you were going to need it for a hundred years. So what does that mean? It means not smoking. It means not abusing alcohol. It means exercising regularly. It means being careful about your weight. All of those things make a huge difference, not just in how long we live, but in how many years we have of life free of disability.

So yes, meditation is a really good thing. Yoga, prayer, all of those things help us stay grounded and centered. Are those de-stressors? Is stress an important factor? Stress is a hugely important factor and they are all de-stressors. Alcohol is enormously stressful. Tobacco, nicotine changes the body's functioning. Obesity secretes hormones that break down body systems. All of those things contribute to physical and psychological stress. Is there anything we should be doing in addition to nurturing our relationships to de-stress?

Yes, there are certainly ways that we can check in with ourselves to kind of take stock periodically of whether we are doing the things that we care about the most. One of the things that happens to us, we get so pulled by the demands of modern life that we can get pulled away from what we care about the most. And so taking time to just say, okay, what's most important to me? What do I really want to live in the world because I'm here? To keep asking that question and then trying to align your energies with what you care about the most, that's a way to de-stress and to give your life more of a sense of meaning and purpose. Bob, if you don't mind,

if I could ask you a personal question. Sure. Since you are so knowledgeable now about relationships and a good life, are you just a wonderful friend, the best friend that everybody has? Because you're so conscious of what happiness is and brings to people how much we impact other people? No, I wish I were the best friend everybody has, but I'm not. For me, it's a practice. It's constantly trying to be better at it.

I don't love talking on the phone. And actually, I get tired and don't love the Zoom social hours that we have. So I have to really try to make an effort to find ways to connect with people, sometimes even when I don't feel like it, but also just to find ways that are right for me to connect with people, sometimes even when I don't feel like it, but also just to find ways that are right for me to connect. So I take walks with people. And for me, that's better than talking on the phone. As I say, it's a practice, and I have to keep practicing at it and trying to get better. You have such a wonderful positive attitude of finding joy and relationships everywhere. It's lovely. Before I ask you for your three key takeaways or insights, is there anything else that you would like to discuss?

I think the one message I'd like to convey, which may seem obvious, but is really important, is that we are never always happy. And so the idea of finding happiness and then always being happy is a myth. And that's important because we can get the feeling that if we're not happy, we're doing something wrong, and that it's our fault. When in fact, our moods fluctuate. They go up and down, and that's normal. And so what we can do in all the ways you and I've been talking about is we can foster well-being. We can build a bedrock of well-being with relationships and self-care. That doesn't mean we're going to feel happy every hour of every day. And that's not a problem.

And that's nobody's fault. That's just the way we're built as human beings. There's a wonderful Mark Quaint quote that you talk about. Can you tell us what that quote says? The quote about there isn't time? Yes. Oh, yes. He wrote, there isn't time. So brief is life for heart burnings, bickerings, callings to account. There is only time for loving and but an instant, so to speak for that. That's lovely. Last question. What are the

three key takeaways or insights that you'd like to leave the audience with today? They are the insights we've been talking about. It's first that relationships matter a huge amount for our well-being, for our physical health, as well as our mental health. The second one is that relationships don't just take care of themselves. They require active maintenance, almost like physical fitness. They require work day in and day out. The third thing is that relationships always contain challenges and that we can get better at meeting those challenges, at riding the waves that inevitably come our way in relationships. Thank you, Bob. This has been terrific. It's so important for everybody. So thank you for all of your work and thank you for this conversation

today. It's been a pleasure, Lynn. If you enjoyed today's episode, you can listen or subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen. If you would like to receive information on upcoming episodes, be sure to sign up for our newsletter at 3takeaways.com or follow us on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn. Note that 3takeaways.com is with the number three. Three is not spelled out. For all social media and podcast links, go to 3takeaways.com.