Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee - BITESIZE | The # 1 Lesson From The World’s Longest Scientific Study of Happiness | Robert Waldinger and Marc Schulz #603

Episode Date: December 12, 2025

Today’s guests are both passionate about spreading the crucial message that high-quality relationships are one of the biggest predictors of happiness, health, and longevity. Feel Better Live More Bitesize is my weekly podcast for your mind, body, and heart. Each week I’ll be featuring inspirational stories and practical tips from some of my former guests. Today’s clip is from episode 364 of the podcast with co-authors of The Good Life: Lessons From The World’s Longest Scientific Study of Happiness – Professors Robert Waldinger and Marc Schulz.  They are directors of the Harvard Study of Adult Development, an extraordinary research project that began in 1938 and has followed participants for more than eight decades. In this clip, they explain why nurturing high-quality relationships may be one of the most powerful things we can do to support both our long-term health and our happiness. By the end of today’s episode, I’m pretty sure you’ll feel inspired to reconnect with an old friend, phone that family member you don’t see enough of, or make plans for a face-to-face get-together. You’ll feel happier, and even be healthier, if you do because the quality of our relationships determines the quality of our lives. Thanks to our sponsor ⁠⁠⁠https://drinkag1.com/livemore Show notes and the full podcast are available at https://drchatterjee.com/364 Support the podcast and enjoy Ad-Free episodes. Try FREE for 7 days on Apple Podcasts ⁠⁠https://apple.co/feelbetterlivemore⁠⁠ For other podcast platforms go to ⁠⁠https://fblm.supercast.com. DISCLAIMER: The content in the podcast and on this webpage is not intended to constitute or be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your doctor or other qualified health care provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition. Never disregard professional medical advice or delay in seeking it because of something you have heard on the podcast or on my website.

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that I have been taking in the evening for the past few months. That's $126 in free gifts for new subscribers only until the end of December. You can see all details at drinkag1.com forward slash live more. Welcome to Feel Better Live More bite size. You'll weekly dose of positivity and optimism to get you ready for the weekend. Today's clip is from episode 364 of the podcast with co-authors of the Good Life, Professor's Robert Wardinger and Mark Shorts. Roberts and Mark are directors of the Harvard Study of Adult Development, an extraordinary research project that started all the way back in 1938

and has followed participants for more. than eight decades. In this clip, they explain why nurturing high-quality relationships may be one of the most powerful things we can do to support both our long-term health and our happiness. You are both, I guess, guardians of one of the most important studies on human happiness. I think there's so much that you've learnt, there's so much that we can all learn from your findings. But I thought a really interesting place to start would be with something you've written about in your book that there are two major predictors of our happiness, our health, maybe even our longevity. And that's the frequency and the quality of our contact with other

people. Why are those two things so important? Well, frequency has to do with this observation that when we don't keep current with each other, with the really important people in our lives, that perfectly good relationships can simply wither away from neglect. And the quality has a lot to do with what actually is restorative and energizing about relationships, which is the sense of relationships being stress reducers, the sense of relationships being energizers, affirmers of our identity, so many different things that we get in a positive way from good quality relationships. So it is, it's frequency and quality. Yeah. I think if you walk out on the street and you were to talk to people about their, let's say their longevity, right? Their health, both now and into the future, what's important, I think many people would immediately go to things like nutrition, physical activity, sleep, for example. Yet, you guys are making the case that sitting above them all,

potentially the quality of our relationships. Yeah, it's remarkable. I mean, I think we were surprised when we started to find how important relationships were for our physical health. And then when we started to look at other studies and it's the loneliness research that's maybe the most compelling now that you see these incredible links

with the amount of time that people spend on the earth, the amount of time that they live. It's just extraordinary. And that relationship is of a similar magnitude to the things that we commonly think about as serious health risks like smoking and obesity. So there's so many indications of how powerful relationships are. I think we take them for granted.

And it's clear science is telling us that they're important. You mentioned their relationships and physical health. And I think that's where some people have to make a leap into the dark. I get it. Good relationships feel good. We enjoy ourselves when we're in the company of people that we like, who means something to us. but how does that impact of physical health?

Well, that's the interesting research question. So we're always asking if we see a connection between one thing and another, how does it work? What's the mechanism? And probably the best hypothesis that we have, for which we have the most evidence, is a hypothesis about stress, that good relationships help us regulate emotion, particularly negative emotion. So stress is there all day long. I mean, something upsetting happens to me, and I can literally feel my body change,

go into fight or flight mode. And what we know is that when we have someone we can talk to, when I can go home and complain to my wife about my day, I can literally feel my body calm down. And what we know is that loneliness and social isolation are stressors, that we evolved to be social animals. So if we are too alone, what we think happens is that we stay in a low-level fight or flight mode.

The body doesn't return to equilibrium, and that means higher levels of circulating stress hormones like cortisol, higher levels of chronic inflammation. And those things can gradually break down multiple body systems, which is how you could get a connection between relationships and arthritis or between relationships and cardiovascular. disease because the stress hypothesis posits that these connections are with multiple body systems. So if I think about relationships, so that's your pitch, relationships are front and center of what it means to live a happy, healthy, and long life. And of course, we started off this conversation talking about those two major predictors that you write about in your book,

the frequency and the quality of our contact with other people. So, If we think about relationships, how can we break that down? There's a relationship with myself. And if we start to expand it out, there's a relationship maybe with a romantic partner, if we have one. Relationship with our family. Relationship with our friends. Relationship with our work colleagues. The list goes on and relationship with the baristas and the coffee shops, right?

So there's all these kind of circles that are getting bigger and bigger and bigger. So if we're to take you guys at face value and say, okay, relationships are important, which are the most important? There's no which about it. There's no most important about it. They're all important. What we do believe is that everybody needs one or two, what we call securely attached relationships. that at one point in our study, we asked our participants, who could you call in the middle of the night if you were sick or scared? And most people could list several people, but some people couldn't list anyone.

And a few of those people were married, and they couldn't list anyone. What we believe is that everybody, whether you're shy or extroverted, everybody needs at least one or two of what we call security. attached relationships where you feel like someone will be there for me if I'm really in trouble. Yeah, so loneliness, significant problem in all Western countries and also non-Western

countries as well. So, you know, the rates are in the U.S., somewhere between 20 and 40% of adults talk about being lonely. And what that means, it's the opposite of what Bob is describing. It's not having a sense that someone has your back or knows who you are, but people just don't care whether you exist or not. So those are incredible rates. If you think about 20 to 40, percent in the adult population says that there's no one that really knows who they are and can they could depend on so the word intimacy the roots of the word intimacy about are being known right so we talk about physical intimacy or emotional intimacy it's the same it's we want to be known by somebody else and very powerful experience for all of us that's simple this idea that we want to be

seen and heard and appreciated and understood so people can get that in all sorts of relationships And the other thing I want to say that's really critical, because I think this is another modern trend that we tend to invest a lot in our primary attachment, our primary relationship and intimate partnership. And that's a lot to invest in one person, all the things that we can get out of relationships. You know, the ways in which our self and connection with others, we learn about who we are, the kinds of support that we need from other people, the kinds of fun that we can have with our mates, that there are so many things that relationships give us, that it makes sense

that distributing that among not just one person, but a collection of people might have some benefits for us as well. There's a romantic ideal in the culture now that didn't used to be there. The romantic ideal is if my primary relationship is good, I don't need anybody else. That's a fiction, a complete fiction. Actually, Eli Finkel, one of our colleagues, has written a book called The All or Nothing Marriage where he talks about this and about the idea that we imagine that the relationship isn't good if we need to go elsewhere for some of our fun, for some of our confiding, for whatever else we need. And when in fact the truth is that we get many different things from different kinds of relationships, and we want that to be the case, ideally.

I think partly because of this idea that we choose our friends, that friendships are particularly prone to distancing, that we sort of let our friendships wither. We figure that they're going to work, and we don't have to sort of lean in and put energy into them. So we talk in the book about this idea about social fitness, and social fitness applies to all of your relationships. But we need to kind of exercise those relationship muscles to really connect with people to spend time to a lot time that we can be together with the people that are important to us.

And friends are particularly vulnerable, I think, because of this idea that there are folks that we choose. And oftentimes we make friends through the activities that we're doing in life. So they might be schoolmates from university. that we're no longer doing the same activities. So we have to figure out ways to keep those relationships going. Whereas relatives, I think we often feel that connection around holiday times or family events, that there are ways in which they keep going.

But I think the kind of bigger issue here is that there's so many distractions today for our time that all of us spend a lot of time on screens these days, sometimes doing work, sometimes being distracted. It could be by social media or traditional media. But we have to really kind of harvest our time. for the things that are most important for us. And it's harder and harder to do that with these devices that pull us away from those things that are critical for us.

You know, and I think the whole thrust of the book, really, is that it's to be more intentional, right? To allow us to take a look at something we mostly have on the periphery of our vision as life is so busy, right? And in fact, we asked our study participants at one point, how has it affected your life to be part of the study? And some people said your questions are annoying or it hasn't had any effect. But most people said this was a really important part of my life

because it got me to look at my life regularly, right? And I think that's what we're talking about. What we're saying is if we look at our lives regularly, we'll see what we're doing. And then we can decide if it's time to make some changes, to make some adjustments rather than just letting the days and the weeks and the years slip by. And there's a, if we think about what we know, just the basic ideas about a secure attachment and a connection to other people that when we look at infants, infants on the playground

or toddlers on the playground, they'll social reference, we call it. They'll see kids out there. They're a little nervous, so they look back at their parent and is it okay, right? And a parent nods that an adult relationship can provide that same kind of support, right? So if we're in a strong relationship, it could be a primary relationship or it could be a friendship that we have. Bob says, you know, you can do this, right? That's encouragement like the kid on the playground. You know, go out and do this.

It would be good for you to do that. So good relationships are in some ways outward facing, right? They allow us to have new experiences. They're the basis, that kind of support basis that gives us the confidence to try new things. Bob, you want to write a book? Yeah. Let's write a book together. You know, that's what a relationship is about.

You know, and a hallmark of a securely attached relationship is where you feel the freedom to take risks because the other person will support it. That's ultimately one of the challenges, isn't it, that people find with relationships, they're messy, they're confusing, there's risk. Yeah. That's what makes them so beautiful and so nourishing, but at the same time, that can be why they can affect us so much when they're not going well, right? So let's talk a little bit about risk. Well, the other thing is that relationships are risky because we're each always

changing. We're each a work in progress every moment, right? So it's not like you know exactly what you're going to get the next time you talk to your partner or the next time you talk to your friend because life is constantly changing. And so then the question is, how do we keep up with each other. How do we support each other in that process of continual evolving? Yeah. So there's two areas of practical tools I thought we could briefly cover. One was in the, I think it's in chapter four in the section on social fitness. You had these, I think it was in that chapter, these three tools, generosity, learning new dance steps and radical curiosity. I wonder if either if you'd mind speaking to those three just briefly to help people understand what they can then do.

So it turns out that being generous to others, being kind to others, and that could be telling them that you really appreciate them, it could be doing something kind. Doing that act of kindness benefits the giver in ways that are really quite amazing, that givers experience a kind of sense of joy, a sense of connection. There's lots of research on generosity in the ways in which it gives dividends back to the person. So we want to do kind things because we think it's important for other people, but an engagement. person who does these acts of generosity also reaps benefits for themselves and those benefits are emotional and they're also physical yeah i have a quote from the dalai lama about this he said the wise selfish person takes care of other people the wise selfish person takes care of other people because it comes back to you yeah so practice generosity yeah so what the second one was it was it was

learning new dance steps. Oh yeah. Yeah, yeah. What did you mean by that? Well, that has to do, if we think about a relationship as a dance, that we, without even deliberately trying, develop with another person, we find ways, I say this, you say that. I know that if I do this, you're likely to do that in response. And that some of those dance steps involve stepping on each other's toes, some of those dance steps involved gliding smoothly around. But what we know is that the relationships change over time. Certainly, good Lord, a marriage or an intimate partnership is going to change over time. And so, you know, my wife and I are about to celebrate our 37th anniversary. Congratulations. We have had to develop a lot of new dance steps over time. And we're not the same

people we were when we got together 37 years ago. And that happens with friendships too. So the idea is find ways to see where the other person is going and see how you can follow them, how you can complement them in the new things they're doing in the ways that they're changing and hoping that they'll do the same with you. And change it up. A relationship that you've had for a long time. A marriage is a good example. It can get stale. It can get boring. And I think the idea about new dance steps is also the idea of trying new things so i know bob and his wife are taking voice lessons both of them and they might be singing together on occasion yeah no i love that well let's go to the third tool there which i loved curious radical curiosity yeah so this is an idea again that

that all people are interesting that if we give our attention to trying to figure out what it is they're experiencing what's important to them what motivates them what their experience of something that we're a doing might be if it's different, that we can be radically curious. It's an idea that we can take a kind of beginner's mind to any experience that we've had and say, what have we been missing? What's interesting here that I haven't realized before? And, you know, Bob and I are both therapists. We've been in this business for a long time. We're radically curious about other people. That's part of what nourishes us. It's that privilege not getting to know people. But everyone can have a taste of that by being radically curious. And it has benefits again for us. We learn

more about other people. We appreciate those differences that they may have with us, and people appreciate our interest. That's another key part of it. Yeah. Curiosity is massive. I think it's such an important value to adopt in life. I can't see any downsides to being curious, personally. Well, it's curiosity with a kind of lack of judgment, right? It's a curiosity, gee, it's so interesting, Bob, that you're interested in this opera, and I have no interest in that opera. You know, what is that? Because I respect Bob. I know he's not a crazy person. You know, what is it that's really important? What is it that's important about that particular work of art that moves you, right? So we learn things by asking those questions. And it's, you know, it's a privilege to be able to do that.

So the families or the individuals who are thriving in the study throughout life or later run in life, have you managed to identify any practices that seem to help? I mean, I can think of two that I'll mention. Bob may have others. But, you know, when we look, this is more anecdotal, but when we look at some of the folks in the study and the gifts that they bring to bear on their life and their families, part of that gift is being interested in attentive. So in the book, we talk a lot about Leo DeMarco is one of the happiest people in the study. And when Leo was with you, he listened to you, he was. present, he was attentive, his family felt that experience. So I think that's one example that

we see. There's another one from some research that Bob and I did years ago in which we were studying couples talking about an incident in which their partner had done something that upset or angered them. So we were interested in when they get angry, when the heat is turned up in a relationship. And it turned out it was less important that your partner could figure out what was going on in your head than your perception that your partner was interested in what was going on in your head, right? So we can give our partner the gift that we're interested in their experience. Even if we're not so good at figuring it out always, I'm curious what was going on for you. I'm care about you is really what we've found. Yeah, I remember reading that in the book,

thinking that is powerful. It's not about right or wrong. It's just showing that person that you care. Yeah. It's being there. It's so important. So if you were going to tell someone in one minute, what are the key things that you have learned from this study about the human experience? What would you say? I would say, take care of your body like you're going to need it for 100 years and invest in relationships. It's the best payoff you'll get throughout your life. Love it. It was under 15 seconds. That was brilliant. And Mark, how would you answer that same question. I certainly would say similar things to Bob, but I also would say there's a kind of basic

humanity that we all have when we look hard enough at folks' lives and really try and understand what their experience is. There's a commonality. We're human. We're all human. And that comes through when we look at these lives across time. Yeah. And one of the things I love about your book, I mean, it's a wonderful book. I honestly can't imagine anyone who wouldn't get something from reading it. It's because you're talking about the human experience, we all have relationships. We only exist in relation to other people, don't we? I always love finishing off the conversation with practical tips for my audience, but perhaps for people listening who are realizing throughout this conversation

that they have let certain relationships go, they've maybe not prioritized them as much as they might have, what final words do you have for them? When our original participants got to be about 80, we asked them to look back on their lives and we asked them, what do you regret the most and what are you proudest of? And one of the most frequent regrets was, I didn't spend enough time with the people I care about. And I spent too much time at work. Yeah. And so it's really, it's a cliche for a reason when people say nobody on their deathbed ever

wishes that they'd spent more time at the office. And so your decision to say, look, this, this friend is really important to me. I'm going to make sure we get together is one of those things you'll look back on and be glad you did. Doing this research, I've realized that I have to start taking my own medicine. And so, you know, I realized that particularly once my kids were grown and out of the house and they weren't like pulling me away and saying, dad, do this or drive me here that I could just work all the time. And so what I've had to do is be much more intentional about scheduling walks with people, scheduling dinners out. Mark and I have a call every Friday noon. And we talk, yes, we talk about our writing and our research, but we also just talk about

our lives. And I find that if I'm not active, really active, every week in doing things with people who I want to keep current with, it'll wither away. And so I'm doing more of that now than I ever did when I was younger. I would say, think of someone you've let go or someone you miss and would like to connect with again and simply take out your phone and send them a little text or an email or use the phone to use your voice to call them and simply say, hi, I was just thinking of you and wanted to connect. And you will be amazed at how often people will be thrilled to hear from you. Yeah.

So I think another critical idea is it's never too late that those who feel like they just have, you know, had a hard lot in life, that they don't feel connected to others, that they wish their friendships could be better than they are. It's never too late. There are things that we can do starting now that can really have an impact on our lives. We see it in our study, and we see it in many other studies, seize the moment. You can change your life. I love it. Hope you enjoyed that bite-sized clip. I hope you have a wonderful weekend.

I'll be back next week with my long-form conversation on Wednesday and the latest episode of bite science next Friday.