Instant Genius - Key lessons from the world’s longest happiness study, with Prof Robert Waldinger

Episode Date: March 17, 2023

What are the most important, achievable things you can do to live a happier life? It’s a big question that’s been researched for many years by Robert Waldinger. He’s a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and the man in charge of the world’s longest-running scientific study of happiness. Waldinger joins us to discuss the key findings of this research, the biggest happiness myths and also how much money you actually need to be happy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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What are the most important, simple things you can do to live a happier life? It's a big question and one that's been researched for many years by Professor Robert Waldinger. He's a Harvard psychiatrist, author of book The Good Life, and also the man in charge of the world's longest running scientific study of happiness. He joins me today to discuss the key findings of this research, the biggest happiness myths, and also whether money or having children will truly make us. happy. Hello, Bob. Thank you very much for joining me today. It's a pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me.

So you are, you're known for the fantastic Harvard study of adult development. For listeners who might not be too familiar with it, can you outline how this study works? You know, who are the participants? What are the studies aims? This is, as far as we know, the longest study of adult life that's ever been done. A study that's lasted 85 years, and we're still collecting data even as we speak. So it started in 1938, and we are still following the same people and their children, the same families after 85 years. It started with two studies that didn't know about each other. One started at the Harvard University Student Health Service. It was a study of undergraduates, a study of normal young adult development.

So of course, if you want to study normal young adult development, you study all white men from Harvard. I mean, it's the most politically incorrect sample you could possibly have, but that was what they wanted to do. And then the other study was at Harvard Law School, and it was a study of juvenile delinquency. And they were asking the question, why do some children born into really disadvantage,

circumstances, manage to stay on good developmental paths. What are the factors that predict that they will lead good lives and go on good trajectories toward adulthood? So both of them were studies of thriving, but one with a really privileged group of people, one with a really underprivileged group of people. And then since then we brought in spouses and children, more than half of whom are women, that we have gender balance now. So it's quite a long, complicated endeavor. Yeah, and what sort of data are you collecting and how are you doing it? Is it just through questionnaires?

Well, it started out with questionnaires regularly every two years, also started with detailed medical exams and psychological interviews. And also, workers went to these young men's homes and sat down and talked to their parents and took notes about what was being served for dinner and what the disciplinary style of the family was, all kinds of sociological bits of information. So all of that was done from the beginning. But then, as the study went on, we're kind of a history of science, if you will, that we began to add audio tape and then videotape and then drawing blood for DNA, which I love, Because if you think about it, DNA wasn't even imagined in 1938.

And here we are looking at genetics, epigenetics. We've put people into the MRI scanner and looked at their brains, things that the founders of these studies could never have imagined we would be doing. It really is an extraordinary insight into these people's lives into human happiness in general. And I know the study has uncovered quite a lot, but what would you say is the most important factor when it comes to living a happy life? There are two factors, one of which won't surprise any of our listeners, which is the first factor is if you take care of your health, it really matters for your longevity, for your well-being. So taking care of getting regular exercise, getting preventive health care, not abusing drugs or alcohol, not smoking.

All of that really matters. But our grandmothers could have told us that, right? But the thing that we were not expecting to find was that the people who stayed healthiest and lived the longest had the warmest connections with other people and more connections with other people. Because the surprise was not so much that if you have good relationships, you'll be happier. That stands to reason. The surprise was, how could having warmer relationships make it less likely that you would get coronary artery disease or type 2 diabetes?

How could that possibly be? And then other studies began to find exactly the same thing so that we began to have quite a bit of confidence in these scientific findings. And then we've spent the last 10 years in our lab exploring how that works, how relationships actually get into our bodies and alter our physiology. So I'm going to ask the obvious question then. And I ask, do we really understand how relationships do impact your physical help? So were you talking about sort of heart disease, for instance? How can a warm relationship with a loved one for 30 years protect you from heart disease?

Do we really understand it? No. Are we beginning to understand it? Yes. So that's just to say there's a whole lot of research going on because what we know is that the mind-body connection and the connection between social life and social systems and individual health. These are enormously complex connections. And so what we're doing is simply starting down this path of discovery. But the best hypothesis we have, is that relationships are stress regulators for us. The idea being that stress is a natural part of life, you know, something stressful may happen to me this morning and I'll, you know, and my body will rev up, my blood pressure will go up, my heart rate will increase, all those changes will happen. That's normal. That's, you know, what we refer to as fight or flight mode. We want the body to do that, to be able to be able to meet challenges. But, then we want the body to calm down when the challenge is removed. And what we think happens is that, you know, if I have something upsetting happen in my day and I can come home and talk to my partner

or call a friend, I can literally feel my body calm down when I can just vent about how terrible my day was, for example. And that what we understand now is that loneliness and social isolation are stressful. And that if you don't have anyone to talk to about the stresses in your life, that we believe from pretty good data that the body stays in a kind of low-level fight-or-flight mode, which means higher levels of circulating stress hormones like cortisol, higher levels of inflammation. And what we know is that those things, when they are ongoing in the body, gradually break down multiple bodies systems. And that's how we think this works.

And how could that sort of low level of stress really impact the brain and how that works? Well, again, what we know is that, for example, chronic inflammation is not good for our brain, for brain development, for brain health. So good studies have found that lonely people, compared with non-loanly people, experience earlier cognitive decline as they get older, and the cognitive decline that happens goes faster. So what we can't say is exactly how chronic inflammation, for example, affects neurons that contribute to cognitive decline, but we're beginning to get some ideas of that in terms

of breaking down myelin sheaths and other kinds of brain structures that we won't go into here. So relationships, obviously very, very, very important to prevent this kind of mental decline, particularly in later life. What sort of relationships are best for us then? All kinds of relationships are good for us. What we know is that everybody needs at least one or two relationships that we call securely attached relationships. That's psychological jargon. It basically says, who would be there for me if I really needed them. And in fact, we asked our original participants. We said, who could you call in the middle of the night if you were sick or scared?

List all the people in your life like that. And most people could list quite a number of people. Some people couldn't list anyone. And some people who couldn't list anyone were married. So we believe that all of us, no matter how shy or extroverted we are, that all of us need at least one or two people in our lives who we could go to when things really got tough.

And that we know that and that that knowledge helps us to feel more secure, just moving through our lives. So yes, so those securely attached relationships really matter. But then all of them matter. So, you know, other friends, family members, workmates for sure. Also, what we're finding in research is that more casual relationships actually give us little hits of well-being. So that person, the barista who makes you your coffee in the morning at the coffee shop,

if you have a friendly interaction with that person, or the person who delivers your mail, or the person who's the cashier at the grocery store, that all of those friendly interactions give us little hits of a sense that we belong. that we're recognized, that we're connected to the world. Does the amount of secure relationships make you happier? So if you want to get really happy, do you need to get as many secure relationships as possible? Or we'll just one do? Well, that's a great question.

It's highly individual. And one of the things you learn when you follow thousands of people across many decades is that one size never fits all. So what we know is that for some very shy people, having many relationships is quite stressful. They don't want that. It's not good for them. Whereas extroverted people get their energy from being with others. So they want more people in their life.

So it's a highly individual matter. And I think for each of us, we can literally take a reading from time to time. Do I have the kind of connection I want and need? and if not, how can I change that to have more or less better connections? So you can still be happy if you're an introvert or an outrovert? Oh, totally. Introverts are very happy. It's really about whether your social resources match your personal needs.

That's really the issue. A concept of yours I find really, really interesting is social fitness. Is it okay if you could unpack that a bit for me? Well, we just coined that term. We made it up. But we made it up because our findings kept showing us that relationships need to be taken care of in the same way that we take care of our bodies, in the same way that we take care of flexibility and muscle development, right? That we don't go to the gym today, work out and come back and say, I'm done. I don't ever have to do that again. And what we found was that many people in our our study felt, well, I've got my friends from school, from work, I don't need to really take care of them. Friendships take care of themselves. And what we found was that perfectly good relationships will often wither away from neglect and that the people who were best at having vibrant social networks were the people who took care of them, who were actively maintaining

their connections with other people. That's why we coined the term social fitness to be deliberately analogous with physical fitness. So how can somebody check how socially fit they are? Well, I think the question is, are there people you want in your life or you want more time within your life? And you don't have that. So you can check in with yourself today, right now, and think, well, who do I miss? Who do I want in my life?

Who I don't see very often? And I keep telling myself, oh, I need to see this person more. but I don't do it and then do it. You know, just literally send a text, send an email, call someone on the phone and just say, hi, I was thinking of you and just wanted to connect. I mean, it doesn't have to be an enormous effort. They can be tiny little bits of outreach that keep our social connections strong. So if you do that thought experiment, like if someone was to do that thought experiment and they

concluded they have a poor social fitness that they are quite, lonely, how difficult is it to turn that around and achieve the same level of happiness? Will it permanently hold you back if you're lonely now? It can be difficult, but as we say in the book, we have a whole chapter entitled It's Never Too Late. And we mean that because what we find is that people in our study who thought they were never going to find friends or they were never going to find love in their lives, they end up finding it in places. And at times they didn't expect to. And so then to your question, how do you do that? Let's say you're lonely and you don't have enough connection in your life. One of the things we find, and other studies find this too,

is that when we are in situations with other people and we see those people again and again, we're more likely to start up conversations with them. And some of those conversations are likely to deepen and perhaps eventually become friendships. So one way to think about this is, can I do something I enjoy alongside other people? So it could be a hobby, you know, it could be a gardening club or a football club or anything, right? It could be a political campaign or working to prevent climate change. And if you put yourself in a situation where you are alongside

other people who happen to care about the same thing. First of all, you have something immediate to talk about because you have something in common. And if you see those same people over and over again, you are likely to find it easier to strike up conversations and make new relationships. A second thing is that many of us feel like, well, people don't want me around.

One of the things we know is that, Many people need help, need our help. And it's easy to think, well, I don't have anything to offer, but of course we all do. We have time and energy. We can volunteer at a food pantry. We can volunteer to deliver meals to people who are shut-ins. In fact, I have a cousin who does that. She's done it for years.

And she's made friends with these people who can't leave their homes and are these lovely people who she, and it's the highlight of their week when she comes with her, little delivery box of meals. But in addition, there are people who teach English as a second language. There are programs where older adults are paired with children, some of them preschoolers, and they read to the preschoolers, and the preschoolers love it. They love being read to, and the older adults love it. So there are ways that we can use talents that we take for granted and simply find ways to be of service to people who want our help. Kayak gets my flight, hotel, and rental car right, so I can tune out travel advice that's

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with pioneering thinking. Name Audio pushes cutting edge technology to ensure digital precision whilst sustaining Pratt, pace, rhythm and timing, the elusive quality that makes music feel alive and gives it emotional texture. Today, in partnership with French acoustic specialist focal, name audio creates systems that deliver exceptional sound and unforgettable listening experiences at home. Try it for yourself at a focal powered by name boutique. Visit focal powered by name.com for more information. So how important is that altruistic factor? Should ideally you be meeting up with other people

to be helping the wider community? Is that important? I'm going to bring in a quote from the Dalai Lama that I love. He says, the wise, selfish person takes care of other people. And what he means is, you know, what goes around comes back around to you. So what we find in, that people who take care of others, who have the well-being of other people in mind and use some of their energy for that, those people feel like they're living more satisfying and more meaningful lives. And there's a lot of research on this. There's a lot of evidence. Certainly, there's a lot in our spiritual traditions that talk about this, but there's science behind it as well. That the people who simply remain focused on the self and,

self-aggrandizement and self-protection, those people are less happy and feel less good about their lives than people who widen their scope of concern to other people. Do you worry due to the digital world that we actually are all becoming a bit lonelier? Or are, you know, phone text? Are, like, text messages a good substitute for meeting up with somebody? Nobody knows the answer to that last question you asked. And yes, I do worry about this. There's some research on it, although we need a lot more research,

but the early research on how we're using the digital world suggests that how we use it makes a big difference in whether our well-being goes up or goes down. So the finding is that if we are more active in using social media, for example, to connect with other people, that our well-being usually goes up. I'll give you an example. One of my friends during the COVID lockdown reconnected with his friends from primary school. And they all started having coffee on Zoom every Sunday morning. And they are thrilled with this new set of connections. And so that was an example of my friend actively using social media to connect with others.

On the other hand, what the research shows us is that if we passively consume what other people post on their social media feeds, that our well-being goes down, that we get more depressed, more anxious, we feel like other people are having good lives. And we're not because we know that we're all curating our lives in terms of, of selecting what we show to other people on social media. I'm not showing my photos of myself when I wake up in the morning depressed or terribly pessimistic about the world. I'm posting a photo of having a nice dinner out with friends, right?

And even though we know this intellectually, we can look at other people's social media feeds and say, oh my gosh, they're having a good life and I'm not. So all of that is to say that how we We use social media and the digital world seems to make a big difference. And we know that the digital revolution is not going away. Social media is not going away. So we probably want to learn how to be more intentional in how we use it.

That to me sounds quite worrying because the main or the biggest growing social media service at the moment is TikTok. And that's more of a passive platform where people aren't sort of socializing in groups. Does that worry you? Yes, it does. It worries me a lot. Because I think that the other thing we know is that when we connect with each other, there's a great deal more stimulation. It literally stimulates our brains.

And that's one of the ways we think we all stay healthier and stay sharper. And also get more social skills. If we passively consume other people's content, we're not getting social skills. It's really through this inter-exam. the complexities of interactions with other human beings who aren't totally predictable, that we develop better emotional intelligence, better social skills, all of that. So I would say that at any age, but particularly for younger people, it's really important to interact, not simply to passively consume.

So what is the relationship between money and happiness? Well, it's complicated. So there is a relationship. So let's say, you know, they've done a study of this. Actually, Daniel Kahneman, the psychologist, who has done work on this. He did a famous study several years ago, in which he asked the question, as income goes up, does our level of happiness goes up? And he finds that at the lowest levels, yes, it does. So, What he saw was that as people made more money until they reached a threshold in the U.S. of about $75,000 a year household income, and this was a few years ago, that their happiness did go up because what we understand is that, you know, as we move from, you know, $5,000 a year to $10 to 20, we're able to pay for more of our basic needs, you know, having shelter and food and health care and being able to educate our children, all of that. So yes, our happiness goes up as our income goes up. But then once our basic material needs are met, then we can make millions of dollars more.

In fact, billions of dollars more. We don't get much of an increase in happiness at all. And that's very disappointing to the people who have devoted their lives to making as much money as they can because they turn around and they find it just doesn't really do that much for them. Once you've bought your third vacation home and your second yacht, you just kind of, you don't get the same hit of pleasure. And we know this to be a fact that we return to our baseline levels of well-being. So what should people be spending their money on? Well, there's research on that too. Some researchers have asked the question, how do we use our discretionary income? Should we use it to buy material object or should we use it to pay for experiences?

So material objects like the flat screen TV that's sitting there behind me or experiences like a ticket to a football match or to a museum or a family vacation, right? And what they find is that we are happier and we stay happier for longer when we pay for experiences, not when we pay for material things. And then the question researchers ask is, well, why? How does that work? And it turns out that material objects just beg for comparison. We know that when we compare ourselves to other people, literally, more often during a given day, when we compare ourselves to other people, we are less happy.

and material things call forth the need to compare. If I go to somebody else's home and find that they have a bigger flat screen TV, then I'm immediately comparing my TV to theirs. Whereas, you know, if we go to a football match with friends or family, yes, other people went to the same football match, but it wasn't quite the same. We didn't have quite the same conversations or the same experiences, and certainly vacations, that kind of thing.

So what we find is that using our discretionary income for experience connects us with other people and is less likely to make us negatively compare ourselves to others. So I find the relationship between wealth and happiness really, really interesting, especially when thinking about how countries tend to measure their success in terms of economic growth. Do you think that governments should be looking closer at happy? and things like the World Health Organization's annual happiness index, for instance. Absolutely, they should. Also, what they should be looking at is income inequality,

because what we know is a major driver of societal unhappiness is huge disparities in wealth, that countries where there is less disparity are countries that have higher levels of happiness, because people don't look around and compare themselves negatively to others in the same way. And, you know, we know that there are countries that prioritize happiness. Bhutan is famous for its gross national happiness index, and they put this into action with every piece of legislation that's proposed in the Bhutan parliament. when someone proposes a new law, it has to be considered from the point of view of collective happiness. Will this new law raise everybody's level of well-being or lower it?

And the law is not allowed to be passed if people can demonstrate that it's not going to enhance communal well-being. That's a pretty cool standard to have. We certainly don't have that in the United States. Yeah, that is really, really cool. But I imagine that trying to judge happiness across a country is also really, really difficult to do. It is. So Bhutan has the Center for Bhutan Studies that does a gross national happiness survey every five years. But even that, five years is a wide spacing of a survey.

It's difficult to assess. The UN does a world happiness report where they look at this all around the world. And of course, we're not able to talk to every person on the planet, but they take representative samples. And that's probably the best we can do to try to get at these parameters of happiness around the world. And what are the things that drive our happiness? And what are the things that inhibit our happiness? And it's knowable. It's very knowable.

So coming back to relationships, and obviously relationships, as you've said, very, very important to our happiness, does having children necessarily make somebody happy? No. It doesn't make you happy and it doesn't make you unhappy. So that's in the broadest sense. When we study thousands of people, not in our study, but there have been other studies, that look at people who choose to have children and people who choose not to have children. And neither group is happier than the other. Even though most of us would say, oh my gosh, I can't imagine my life going a different way. You know, I have children. And I can't imagine not having those children. It's been a great, profoundly impactful part of my life. But if I'm honest with myself, I could imagine a life where I never had children and I did different things instead, you know? And so it doesn't actually surprise me that when they look at large groups of people, one group is not happier than the other, whether you choose or don't choose children. Do you know if that varies around the world? I don't know if that varies around the world. I think it's a great question.

because there are cultures where the expectation is you have to have children to have a good life. So I don't know if that's the case. The studies I'm familiar with were done in the United States. So much of our research is done on westernized, educated, industrialized populations, right? We call it weird science where our samples are skewed. And so I think your question is right on target, and we should be asking that question about every research finding we have. You know, how does this apply all around the world, not just in our industrialized Western societies? So when you spoke about weird science, then, are you worried that what makes people in the US happy?

Is it necessarily the same what makes people across the globe happy? I am worried about it. And so what we do, and in fact, in the book, we take care only to present findings that have been corroborated in other samples around the world and in more diverse samples racially and ethnically. Because I am worried about it. We should be worried about it. And even so, it's possible that findings have slipped in there that are not representative of everybody around the world. It's very difficult to, to get a sample of people to tell you about their lives that is truly representative of the whole human race. That's just never going to happen. And so we're always doing our best to approximate more representative samples, but we never get it exactly right. So in the sample you do have, have you notice a difference between what makes men happy and what makes women happy?

Yes. To some extent. What we thought was that women were much better at relationships than men, because a lot of the hype in our culture is that, oh, women are so much better at relationships and they care about relationships more. There are those gender differences, but they're not as great as one would think. When my co-author, Mark Schultz, and I reviewed the literature when we were writing this new book, we found that the gender differences weren't as great, that, that, that men also find relationships to be very important in their lives. Women are more likely to share confidences. Men are more likely to do activities with other men, but the differences about the

importance of relationships are as great. The other thing we know from research is that marriage has a longevity benefit for men and women, but it's greater for men. Men actually get a bigger hit in years of life lived, longer life than women, although women live longer lives when they are partnered as well as men. And finally, what are some of the biggest myths of being happy? Are there still things that you read about that just make you angry about happiness? Oh, yes, absolutely. Are you allowed to be angry?

Yeah, yeah, it makes me angry. So the biggest myth is you can always be happy. The biggest myth is if you're just doing the right things, you'll be happy all the time. That is not the truth of anybody's life. But we can sell each other these myths that, oh, well, if you just, you know, if you buy the right automobile, or you use the right brand of dental floss, you'll be happy. You know, if you do the right things, if you have the right diet, you know, no, actually life is filled. with challenge and difficulty for absolutely everybody. And it's one of the things that we built into the book.

We don't tell stories of people who lead nonstop happy lives at all. These are real stories of real lives that include lots of challenge and unexpected twists and turns. And I say this because we don't want people to believe that the goal is to seek a life that's nonstop happy and without challenge because you're just not going to ever find that. And I think then the other myth is that other people have happiness figured out and I don't. That nobody has it all figured out. Nobody, certainly not me, and no guru anywhere. And that if there are people who hold out to you the idea that I've got it all figured out and

and I'm happy all the time and I can solve your problems, run as fast as you can away from that person. That was Robert Waldinger, Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and author of book The Good Life. Thank you for listening to this episode of Instant Genius, brought to you by the team behind BBC Science Focus magazine, which you can find on sale now in supermarkets and newsagents as well as your preferred app store. You can of course also find us online at sciencefocus.com. This podcast is sponsored by Name, Audio and Focal. The texture and emotional depth of music can be lost through digital sources or poor signal. Name Audio believes you can have digital precision with analogue warmth.

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