Modern Wisdom - #578 - Dr Robert Waldinger - Lessons From The World's Longest Study On Happiness

Episode Date: January 19, 2023

Robert Waldinger is a psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, Zen priest and Director of the Harvard Study of Adult Development, the longest-running study of adult life ever conducted. What makes for a good life? That was one of the main questions I asked myself when I began this podcast. A far easier solution would have been to speak to Dr Waldinger as his team has been researching thousands of the same individuals for 75 years to answer this question definitively. Expect to learn how you operate a longitudinal study that spans more time than any researcher's career, just how in depth this study went with brain scans and blood tests, what the most important factors which determined life happiness were, how many friends people should have, whether being married makes you live longer, what role achievement has on happiness and much more... Sponsors: Get 83% discount & 3 months free from Surfshark VPN at https://surfshark.deals/MODERNWISDOM (use code MODERNWISDOM) Get over 37% discount on all products site-wide from MyProtein at https://bit.ly/proteinwisdom (use code: MODERNWISDOM) Get 10% discount on all Optimal Carnivore’s products at www.amazon.com/optimalcarnivore (use code: WISDOMSAVE10) Extra Stuff: Buy The Good Life - https://amzn.to/3QwWQ5D  Check out Bob's website - http://www.robertwaldinger.com/  Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello friends, welcome back to the show. My guest today is Dr. Robert Waldinger, he's a psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, Zen Priest, and director of the Harvard study of adult development, the longest running study of adult life ever conducted. What makes for a good life? That was one of the main questions I asked myself when I began this podcast. A far easier solution would have been to just speak to Dr. Waldinger as his team has been researching thousands of the same individuals for 75 years to answer this question definitively. Expect to learn how you operate a longitudinal study that spans more time than any research as career. Just how in depth this study went with brain scans and blood tests, what the most important factors which determine life happiness were, how many friends people should have if they

want to be happy, whether being married makes you live longer, what role achievement has on life satisfaction, and much more. But now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Dr. Robert Waldinger. Tell me about the origins of this study that you're currently in charge of. The study started in 1938. It's the longest study that we know of of the same people going through their entire lives and it started as two studies that didn't even know about each other. One was started at Harvard College undergraduate students, a 19-year-old who were chosen by their professors as fine upstanding specimens.

And it was to be a study of adolescents moving into young adulthood. So of course, if you want to study normal young adult development, you study all white males from Harvard, right? It's like so politically incorrect. And then the other study was a study of juvenile delinquency. It was started at Harvard Law School by a professor named Sheldon Gluck and

his wife, Eleanor Gluck. They were interested in why some children from really disadvantaged backgrounds and troubled homes managed to stay on good developmental paths and stayed out of trouble. And so both of those studies were then put together in the 1970s as contrasting groups, one very privileged, one very under-privileged, and we've followed them, their spouses, and now their children, for 85 years. It was all men to start with. Was all men now more than half women?

Why? Because that's kids plus spouses that have been introduced. Yeah. And this is only in America? Only in America. Right. I mean, some now live abroad, but they all started in America? Only in America. Right. I mean, some now live abroad, but they all started in America.

Do you see any issues about this being weird, Western educated, industrialized, et cetera, et cetera? It is totally weird. It is totally that. And so what we've done, and this is particularly in the book that we're just publishing, we've made sure only to present findings that have been corroborated by other studies around the world, studies of groups that are not weird, Western, educated, white.

So people of color, people of very different ethnic groups and cultural backgrounds, so that we're not presenting findings that we believe are pretty specific to this very narrow demographic. That's what I... You just want that cool hot, right? You want everybody you want it to be as applicable as possible. Yeah. Okay, so what are the sort of things that you're asking people? Oh, boy. Well, we're studying the big domains of human life. Okay. Mental health, physical health, work, including promotions, getting fired, successes, failures, relationships, not just intimate relationships, but all kinds of relationships. So we're studying all of that,

and we're studying, we've studied the same things for 85 years But then we've used different methods. So you know to be sure we ask them how happy are we are you we ask them Many many different sorts of questions, but we also ask other people about them like spouses and children and friends, we also then use other measures. We videotape them talking to their spouses about their biggest concerns. We bring them into our laboratory and deliberately stress them out and then watch how quickly

they recover from stress. We put them into MRI scanners, we scan their brains, and we watch how their brains light up when we show them different kinds of pictures to see how the brain is interconnected and wired when it's looking at happy pictures and sad pictures, for example. So these are all different ways of trying to get windows on well-being, because that's what we're studying. We're studying human thriving, human well-being. You did DNA testing, blood samples, EEG, EKG, all manner of different health markers. So this isn't just self-reatitude happiness, how much do you know? No, not at all. And in

fact, what I love about this is it's kind of a history of science because, you know, like we're drawing blood for DNA and mRNA, right? And those things weren't even imagined in 1938 when the study began. So what we love is seeing ourselves bring new methods online to study the same things. Wasn't there some really stupid questions that you asked people, like whether someone's ticklish or not? Exactly. We still don't know why they asked, are you ticklish? But they did. They must have thought that they're supposed to. And you have that in. Well, we didn't keep it in. We don't repeat. We don't repeat the

questions that we don't see a reason to continue. Right. Okay. So it's gone now. You know and knows if you're, if they're ticklish, what if, what if all of the most interesting questions? What if all of the most interesting insights were coming out of ticklishness correlation? Well, you know, that's actually been one of the cool things about the digital age. We scanned all of these paper documents, you know, hundreds of thousands of pieces of paper, scanned them into searchable PDFs. And now we can search them. We didn't even know that we asked them if they were ticklish until we had these searchable PDFs. And then we started, you know, putting in,

you could put in the term mother, and it will pull up every mention of the word mother in a man's file over his entire life, or a woman's file now. So what we have is the ability to find things that we did not know existed in our database. Who is the person or team that is in charge of pulling this data out? Because it must be an incredibly sophisticated data science group of people that's managing all of this. Well, my co-author, Mark Schultz, is really the best, most sophisticated data science person. I know, thank goodness.

I mean, he is my partner in all of this. And Mark Schultz now heads the data science program at Bryn Mark College. It's a new program. And what we need is people who are sophisticated in managing multi-generational data. And also what's cool is, you know, when you study siblings, like we've studied all the children, and that includes siblings in the same families, but you can't treat them as separate beings out in the world. You have to know that siblings are more connected than to other intonation. The data needs to be able to map the interrelations between people too. Exactly. So we use something called multi-level modeling, which is a very sophisticated theoretical,

a statistical modeling technique. And thank goodness I have people who know how to do that because I don't do it. I think that's really cool. I also read about how there's a particular uniqueness between longitudinal versus a cross-sectional study, and the fact that most studies at the moment are this sort of snapshot in time,

asking people to relive memories and to sort of give you self ratings based on things that happened in the past. What's the advantage that you guys have got by doing it the way that you have? Longitudinal studies get to follow people over their entire lives and come back and ask them the same things and take the same measurements over time. The problem with snapshots is that it can generate false correlations. So if we take a snapshot of a group in their 20s, a group today and their 40s, a group today and their 60s, we can believe that we see the progression of life from age 20 to 60, but that can lead us into trouble. The best, the best illustration of this comes from a joke that is kind of particular

to the US, but maybe your international audience will get it. Claude Pepper was a senator from the state of Florida, and he once quipped that when he looked at South Florida, which is filled with many younger Cuban Americans and many older Jewish Americans who have retired there. He said, when I look at South Florida, I would have to believe that you are born Cuban and you die Jewish. Because if we just take snapshots, we can imagine that that's how life progresses, that you start out as a little Cuban child and you become an old Jewish person. Okay. So that's that's the problem we're dealing with. And that's why longitudinal studies offer a really unique and important perspective on how life progresses.

You have this huge data set. You have how many people have been included in the entire study now altogether over 2000. Okay. You have over 2000 people millions, probably a probably of bits of data. Oh, yeah. You have decided to focus this book on happiness. Why? You could have done it on approaches to culture. You could have had it on voting history. You could have had it on anything, right? Yeah, we could have. Why choose happiness? Well, we chose happiness from a particular angle. And the angle is the role that

relationships play human connections play in our lives, both in our happiness and in our physical health. Because what surprised us was was certainly that relationships make us happier. Actually, that wasn't such a surprise, that stands to reason. But we began to find that the people who stayed healthy longer and who lived longer were the ones who were better connected and were more satisfied with their relationships. And this began to emerge in the 1980s. We didn't even believe it at first until other studies began to find the same thing because the question was how could the quality of my relationships get into my body? How could it predict whether I'm likely to get coronary artery disease or arthritis? How could that possibly be a fact?

And so we thought that this was powerful enough and the effect of good relationships was powerful enough that we wanted to bring this to the world because it really matters for well-being. So the single biggest influence on happiness is relationships. Well, two big influences. One is taking care of your health. So that turns out to be hugely important. It's not a surprise, but not smoking, regular exercise, eating well, not abusing alcohol or drugs. All of that matters tremendously. But we felt that what wasn't neglected in the public discussion of well-being was the power of relationships which turn out to be so powerful. Let me give you an example that what they find now is that social isolation and loneliness are as toxic to our health as smoking half a pack

of cigarettes a day or being obese. So this is huge. The health effects are very real. Was there anything else that competed with health or relationships when it came to determining happiness in terms of the size of the effect? No, not that I'm aware of. Could we set up some analyses that might show us something new perhaps, but those were just the big elephants in the room, if you will. And health is maybe not when you started this study, so much of a priority, but the communication around the wellness industry, around food, diet, you know, smoking, just looking at how difficult it is to get a packet of cigarettes and how

much less sexy they are than they would have been when this study began. Yes. Yes. Absolutely. Not a massive smoking fan. Okay, so let's invert it. What are the biggest misconceptions that people have in your opinion when it comes to what constitutes a happy life?

Yes. I'm so glad you asked that because there's so many big misconceptions. Probably the biggest is that if you do all the right stuff, you can be happy all the time. Because one of the things that's very clear from following these thousands of people is that nobody's happy all the time that a happy life does not mean being happy 24-7 and In some ways that's obvious But we can sell each other the myth that if we just do all the right stuff will be happy no matter what that You know if you think about social media now, we curate our lives for each other in such a way that you could look at somebody else's Instagram feed

of being on beautiful beaches or beautiful meals or happy times with friends and you could imagine oh that person has it all figured out. That person's having the good life. Because I don't post my photos of myself getting up in the morning hungover or really confused about my life. I don't do that, right? The problem with this curation that we all do for each other is that can lead us to feel like

we are the only one who, for whom life isn't beautiful all the time. And so I just want to name that, that is a myth that we accidentally sell each other. And the media sells it to us, right? Because they want us to buy things. And they say, you know, if you buy this car, you'll be happier. You know, if you use this face cream, you'll look young forever. And so we are constantly being given these messages that there is a way to have the non-stop

happy life. So I just want to name that. The other thing that's worth saying, I think, is that you do not need to be an extrovert to get these benefits. You can be quite shy that that's not a problem. That what we know is that we all differ in the extent to which we need people and benefit from people. That what we do believe from our research is that everybody needs like somebody who they feel has their back, right?

And that you need one connection that's really solid to feel like the world is an okay place for you. But that you can be a shy person who finds a lot of people exhausting and that that's perfectly fine, not to have a large circle of friends or connections. And so I wanna name that because sometimes in talking about this subject, people

can hear it and say, well, if I'm shy, I'm out of luck. And that's not true. Does that suggest that introverts in one regard actually might have a little bit of an easier time here because they need to find fewer people in order to get themselves to the level of social satisfaction that they need? Well, that's an interesting idea. I haven't thought of it that way. need to find fewer people in order to get themselves to the level of social satisfaction that they need. Well, that's an interesting idea. I haven't thought about that way. I don't.

I don't. I don't. I don't. I don't. I don't. I don't. I don't. I don't. I don't. I don't.

I don't. I don't. I don't. I don't. I don't. I don't. I don't. I don't. I don't.

I don't. I don't. I don't. I don't. I don't. I don't. It's harder in one regard because you need to be able to recruit all of these people but I suppose you are predisposed to be the kind of person that would go out and not find that effortful. So the point is balancing your predisposition for sociality with the people that are in your life. And yes, and I think what you said is the key that that if you are an extrovert, you find other people energizing, which means that it's motivating to go out and find people to be with. If you're an introvert, you find a lot of other people draining, exhausting, right?

So you're not motivated to go seek out the parties. That is my favorite definition of introversion and extraversion. It's the most useful one. Do you find yourself being energized by being around people or do you find yourself being energized by being on your own way more useful than the other definitions of introversion and extraversion? Yeah, and less pathologizing.

We sort of glorify extraversion, at least in the American culture. And introversion is a perfectly wonderful way to go through life. It's just a different way of being. How much of our happiness is genetically predetermined? Somebody has actually tried to work this out. There's a psychologist named Sonja luba mursky. And she has calculated that about half, about 50% of our well-being is genetically determined. And about 10% she estimates is based on our current life situation. And then another 40% is more under our control. It's malleable. We can move the needle about 40% in our level of happiness. What does happiness mean? So we're going to use that word a lot during this conversation.

In this context, what do you optimize for? What is the happiness concept that we're looking at? Again, there's research on this and it seems that happiness falls into two big buckets. One is hedonic wellbeing. It comes from hedonism, right? It's like, am I having fun right now? Okay? So like, I'm having a good time having this conversation with you. So my hedonic wellbeing is, is high, right? In a few minutes, something really annoying may happen. Am I hedonic well-being, might plummet. Then there's this other flavor of well-being called Udomonic well-being.

The term comes from, I think, Aristotle, Udomonia. And it means the quality of life that is meaningful, satisfying, right? The best example was given to me by a mother of young children. So she said, you know, I'm reading to my daughter before she goes to bed. I'm trying to get her to go to sleep. And I've read her the book Good Night Moon seven times. And she says, Mommy, read it to me one more time, one more time. And I'm exhausted, right? I've had a horror, I'm just so exhausted, I'm falling asleep reading this book. Am I having fun reading Good Night Moon for the eighth time?

No way. Is this the most meaningful thing I could be doing right now with my life? Absolutely. And that's the difference between hedonic and eudomonic well-being. I've got a theory about that, how do you say, diversion or that separation between those two. So let me throw some broch signs back at you. I first learned about that difference between,

let's call it pleasure and meaning or happiness and meaning, perhaps. Daniel Kahneman and Daniel Gilbert, two big psychologists from the last 50 years. Daniel Kahneman mentioned he thinks a good life is one which in retrospect you are glad that you lived. So that's one which is meaningful, which moment to moment may not maximize pleasure,

but in retrospect is one that gives you meaning. Daniel Gilbert, on the other hand, said he was much more, and in the moment, heed an asm kind of guy, not sort of strippers in cocaine, but a lounge chair in a nice cocktail, perhaps. I've got it in my head that the waiting that people should prioritize in their lives about whether or not they're optimizing more for hedonism or more for you, pneumonia, heavily should be influenced by their disposition in the same way of the introversion

and extroversion thing that we were talking about. So you can imagine, for me, I'm an introspective guy, I ruminate, I like to consider myself as part of a grander plan. I reflect on things that have gone, I plan for things that are about to come. For me, if I optimize for hedonism, I will spend a good bit of time reflecting on something which doesn't give me a massive amount of meaning in the moment. Whereas if I am the sort of person that makes sacrifices in the now, that makes me feel good in the future, that achieves things that I feel have got a greater contribution to them overall, that is the sort of thing that's going to make

me feel good longer term. So I actually think that there is some sort of a spectrum that we've got going on here where people can optimize for a more hedonistic or a more eudion demonic life. Yes. And your propensity to reflect, to ruminate, to introspect is very important at deciding how you should do this. And I have friends who are perfectly fine just chewing through kind of a very similar routine. They've got the things that bring them pleasure,

they've got their golf, they've got their holidays, they've got their dog walks, they've got the whatever. And they don't need to go through perhaps as elaborate of a construction of life in order to try and generate this meaning because they just don't ruminate quite so much. They haven't got that same introspection. Whereas I have friends who are even more tuned up

on the introspection side than I am, and they can't bear to give themselves a day off, they can't bear to have. So I think that very much people are optimizing for the kind of life that they are predisposed to find value in. I think that's absolutely right. And in fact, you and I are more similar in that regard.

You know, in that I'm kind of am very introspective too. And I, and sometimes I envy my friends who can just go through their, you know, their lives of golf and tennis and bridge games. And yeah, like, why can't I just do that? There's another flavor of happiness that some researchers at Columbia University have begun to find.

And again, what they do is they measure people and on these three dimensions, there's a third. And they call it the psychologically rich life. So rather than prioritizing the pleasure I get right now from my golf game or the feeling that I'm doing something meaningful by talking on this podcast with you right the you demonia it's the psychologically rich life it's new rich experiences so it might be travel to new places there some people who just want to spend their whole lives traveling to places they've never been before. traveling to places they've never been before. Not because they build anything, not even because it's fun in the moment all the time, but because this novelty and the psychological richness is what they crave. And I think that one way of thinking about this is that we all have these desires in us but that they are higher or lower depending depending on how we're built psychologically,

probably even neurologically and physically, that some people prioritize one over the others. Where would you rate on this curiosity scale? I think I rate high on the psychologically rich scale, that I find that I get bored, that I'm a good starter of things, but I'm not so great at maintaining. So that's why like, you know, it turned out that like I was on track to run like, like psychiatry departments. Like in my field, you know, I'm a psychiatrist like you, you would run a psychiatry department

in a hospital and I was on that track and I realized, oh my God, I would just hate this. You know, that I sat around these meetings with all these people in suits and that they were talking about problems that I know were really important, but I just didn't care, like insurance regulations and things like that. And so I realized that I'm just not going to be one of those people that for me, I need some stimulation. And so actually, that's why like doing this with you is that is very in liveening for me. It's not just that I'm having a good time. It's that it's stimulating because you have different takes than I've heard before on some of these matters. You ask me questions that I haven't thought up before. That is, that's unlivening for me.

I think that the perfect way, if you weren't to have any sort of routine, life is going to be so chaotic that you basically can't do anything, right? There has to be some sort of routine. I have some friends that are total nomadic wanderers and they wake up in a different time zone in a different city in a different whatever.

Fair play, I think that's a very small cohort of people. I think most people want some sort of routine with some amount of variety within it. And from my side, again, I think whatever that curiosity scale is pick your 100th percentile, and that's where I would be. Now, what I have is the opportunity to do something which is still routineized, but within that, I get to cycle through the novelty as well.

This is not a conversation I've had before. This is not a person that I've spoken to before. This is a topic that I've got some idea about, but not all of it, and it's new and it's different, and the backdrop and all the rest of it. So I think just trying to think about an applied or continuing to dig into applied solutions here, certainly for people that have that high degree of novelty seeking that they want, they want to have adventure and do new things, but are restricted by any one of the million things that life can stop

you from doing, whether it be responsibilities, financial restrictions, just time, whatever, bravery even. There are ways that you can cycle through that, give yourself that psychological, what was it? Psychological richness. Psychological richness, while not throwing everything out of the window, selling your possessions and going to Vietnam. Right, right.

Okay, so give me, you said in the book that a good life is by its very nature a complicated life. Why is that the case? Why is a good life not just a simple life? Because life is complicated by definition. I mean, think about the pandemic. None of us expected that. And then suddenly life was way more complex in a moment,

in a week, everything changed, so much changed in our lives, for most of us, some more than others. And I think that what we know is that life is constantly bringing us things we don't expect. There's a, it's a proverb that I'm sure you've heard, people plan and God laughs. You know, this idea that we can, you know, we can predict what's going to happen, it can be simple, it can be controllable, and that's just not the truth of human existence. And so I think that's why we say, the good life is a complicated life

because a bad life is a complicated life too. It's just that every life is complicated. Okay, relationships. You said health, massive impact on happiness, relationships next biggest happiness impact. Why? Why do relationships matter? Well we believe that relationships are stress regulators.

That in fact, we're all meant to respond to stress, right? We're all meant to go into fight or flight mode when we're having a challenge, you know, and you can feel it if something scary happens or challenging your heart rate goes up, the blood goes to your muscles because you're ready to move into action. That's what the body is designed to do, but the body is also meant to go back to equilibrium, to baseline, when the threat is removed. So if I have something happen that's really upsetting during my day and I start ruminating about it, I can feel my heart rate increase.

I can feel myself really start to rev up, right? If I go home and I can talk to my partner or you know I can call somebody on the phone who's a good listener, I can literally feel my body calm down again. And what we think happens is that people who can't do that stay in a kind of chronic fight or flight mode because stressors come along every day and that we can, if we don't have those emotion regulators that relationships can be for us, that we stay in this mode where the body has higher levels of circulating stress hormones,

the body has higher levels of chronic inflammation, and that those things break down body systems. So that question of, well, how could it be that stress, bad relationships, loneliness makes you more likely to get coronary artery disease and arthritis? How could it be both? Well, it seems that there are these general effects of the chronic stress mode that break down multiple body systems. And that's what, so that's what we're saying that good relationships protect us from. And there's pretty good data so far to support this hypothesis.

That is mitigating the impact of stress by giving yourself a sense of support from the people that are around you, somebody to talk to. What about the other side of that? Did you look at how relationships play a role in allowing you to further sort of revel and enjoy good things that happen in life? Are they able to extend out the enjoyment as opposed to just restrict down the negative? Absolutely. Absolutely. You know, they've done studies of laughter. I mean, then that people who laugh more are healthier. That there is something about releasing these hormones that enhance physical well-being. I can't get into the neuroscience of that. That's above my pay grade. But what we know is that when people are relaxed, this is why meditation works as well. So it's not just in relationships, but laughter, warm but enhances our well-being, our sense of connectedness.

And we believe that that then has these positive protective effects. You know that there is a maximum speed that you can stroke somebody's arm at in order to release the amount of oxytocin. I did not know that. Okay, so we have around our body still got the upper bound that is set by when we were furry apes or the speed at which you would be able to pick and groom the people around you that is still the upper bound i want to say that it is about that it is about, it's between three and 20 centimeters per second. I can't remember. I'll find the book that I was talking to Roy about. But once you get above that, it would be, you would be moving so quickly that you wouldn't be able to effectively pick anything out.

So the oxytocin release that you get from paired grooming occurs within this particular window for stroking. I love this. I love this. I love this. And I bet if you do it more rapidly, it's just annoying. 100%. Yeah. You see this in studies of toddlers and babies as well that are crying. You can test by moving your hand up and down them.

And it's this particular speed, whatever it is, centimeters per second. That's the one that comes crying the quickest. Wow. Wow. So clever. Okay, so obviously people who have good relationships are likely to be like other people who have good relationships, which means that you're going to select for a cohort of people that may have other things in common as well. How are you able to separate out the people that have good relationships from the other people who also were in a good financial situation or they had this particular start in life or lived in this particular area or economic influences all of the other life stuff? Well, that's a methodology question, an important one.

Like, how do you know that an effect isn't being driven by something else, like your income or where you were born? And so, what we try to do is statistically level the playing field, control for in the jargon, control for these other things. So, we make sure that we level the playing field that we, that you are socioeconomic status where you were born, privileged, underprivileged, ethnicity, all of that gets taken into account when we do these analyses. And then if we still see an effect, then we know we've got something. If the effect goes away, then we say,

oh, well, okay, so maybe this is more about social class, and it's not about what we think it is. And this is how we, so the analysis, just a physical analysis is a really complicated endeavor. What about marriage? What role does marriage play in happiness? It plays a big role. I married people happier. They are actually. They are.

And they live longer. Now, are some married people unhappy? Absolutely. We know that. Right. You know, so it's all over the map. But if you just take thousands of people and you do great big averages, married people are on average somewhat happier, but that also, that doesn't include, it doesn't mean that if you have to have a marriage license, it just means that people in an intimate partnership are as a group happier. Can you be happy without an intimate partnership?

Absolutely. But you have to beat the odds. Not that great. The odds aren't. It's not like these effects are that massive. What's, I was going to say, what's the size of the effect that we're talking about with marriage?

You know, I can't, I would be making it up if I quoted you in effect size, but you're asking exactly the right question because it is. What's the effect size? It's going to be statistically significant, right? It's not nothing. It's not nothing, but it could be statistically significant,

particularly if you're studying thousands of people and quite small effects. So you're asking the right question, I just don't have the answer, am I fingertips? What about the introduction of children? It neither makes us happier nor less happy, at least from the studies that have been done. Right? It's a life path, it's a life choice.

Right? And so the people who choose to have children are neither happier nor less happy than the people who choose not to have children. Now that said, you know, I had two kids and I can't imagine my life without them was life hard because I had kids. Yes, was it wonderful? Yes, it was all of that. So I think there, you know, what we know, I think from the research is that these life choices do not prescribe whether you're going to be happy or not. They are simply life choices do not prescribe whether you're gonna be happy or not.

They are simply life choices. There has to be things that engender a better type of life and things that don't though. So for instance, the life choice to not have any friends would be a life choice, but it would impact our happiness. But it would impact happiness. The life choice to, if you, if you call it a choice to abuse alcohol, to abuse drugs, is a bad choice.

The life choice to engage in things that harm other people, turn out to engenderless happiness. The life goes just... Dig into that, what do you mean? Well, things that harm other people give you less happiness. It usually what goes around comes around. There's a way. Did it show up in the data at all? Yeah, yeah.

That the people who were really self-centered and the people who did not take care of others were less happy. Wow. And that leads into presumably does that control for the number of social connections that they have? Did we do that precise analysis? I am not sure. I have to go back and look at the absolute pinnacle or that the center point of this, the hope at the middle of all of these spokes is social relationships. And then you have a person, the one that's likely

to be self-centered, that's maybe, and no committing more crime, or petty theft from close friends or relatives, is likely to have fewer friends. Is it because that's self-centered or is it because they've got fewer friends? That's an interesting question. Well, we do think that these kind of anti-social behaviors are drivers of not just fewer friends,

but of less happiness, that it doesn't work well. You know, I'm not going to get into this because we don't want to get political, but I would believe that some of the most egregiously self-centered people in our political worlds actually have the most troubled inner lives. From all the clues I can get, and again, I'm observing from the outside, but I am a psychiatrist, and it does seem that the people who are much more self-centered are more troubled, more tormented. Well, then there's going to be a piece. You don't look at anybody like that and think piece. Yeah. Now, you don't. Did you look at the sort of characteristics in an intimate

relationship that you should look to optimize for in a partner, the things that predicted happiness in that relationship the best or in terms of life. Yeah, yeah. Two things a lot. One was maintaining curiosity about the other person and adapting to change. And I'll say something about each. So maintaining curiosity. There was a study of how well, how good people were at guessing what the other one was feeling. And it turns out that we are best at knowing what our partner is feeling when

we first get together. Because if you think about it, when you're dating someone, you're really trying, is this person into me? And how do I tell? And so you're really attuned to them. You're attuned to every little signal, right? What they find is that when people have been together a long time, they're much less tuned into each other. They are much less good at knowing what the other's feeling. Pardon me. That it turns out that we stop paying attention.

That we think we know each, oh, I know what she's going to say. I know this. I got this. So it turns out that staying attuned is really helpful. Maintaining curiosity. Even about this person, you think you know so well. So one of my meditation teachers taught me this and he taught it to me

about meditation, but it works in relationships too. To ask yourself the question, what's here now that I haven't noticed before? So, you know, I'm having dinner with this person, and I've had dinner with her for years. What's here now that I haven't noticed before about this person? Like that can be a really useful, interesting exercise. Okay, so that's the curiosity part, maintaining curiosity. Just to hold, just to dig in there. Why do you think it is that maintaining curiosity impact happiness? Because we all want to be seen, right? We really do. We want to be known for who we are. So what we do, what we hate is being stereotyped, being typed. So you want to optimize for a partner that is the type of person who will stay curious, that will, stay curious. Notice if you change your

shoes, that will ask you about your day at work, that will care about your whatever. Yeah, yeah. The worst thing you can say to your partner is, you always, or you never, that's like a real problem in a relationship. And the reason why it's a problem is that it's a stereotype. Nobody always, anything, or does, never does something. You know, it's, it's, I wonder whether I'm gonna forget about it again. What was it? psychological

richness richness. God psychological richness has to correlate your desire for psychological richness 100% has to correlate with your level of curiosity when it comes to your partner. I think so. It must not would be the driving for one of the driving forces behind it. So that would be interesting to see the psychological richness mapped over the top of that. That would be super interesting. Are people who prioritize psychological richness more likely to choose partners who also prioritize that? Are they more likely to have happier relationships because they're the curious ones? Yep.

Yeah. Speak to Mark. Ask Mark. Tell Mark to do the, to do the, I will. All right, what's up? So we've got curiosity caring about the other person, what they're doing, what was the other, the other thing that you should.

The other one is adaptability to change. So if you think about it, each of us is always a work in progress. We're always changing as human beings. But you get together with somebody and you say, oh, I really like this person. I want to be with this person. But this person is evolving right before your eyes and you're evolving right before your eyes. And so what happens is that the in the most stable relationships, you have two people who are constantly evolving. people who are constantly evolving. If we can adapt to that, accept it and even support it, then those relationships are more satisfying. They're more stable. If we want to fix the person

we're with in a certain mold and never let them out of that mold, that's stultifying for both people. And so this idea of adaptability, it's almost like learning new dance steps as you go, as a couple, that those are the relationships that seem to do the best. The other data science book that I got really interested in over the last year was Don't Trust Your Gut by Seth Stevens-Davidowitz. So interesting guy, X-Date the scientist at Google,

and he looked at the strongest predictors for long-term relationship success. Now, this wasn't necessarily happiness. This was, do they stay together the longest? And all of the things that people optimize for on dating apps and when speaking to each other and asking questions, are none of the things that predict? So height had no bearing on it,

income had no bearing on it, education level had no bearing on it. The things that did that came up that are interesting to kind of tell you with what you're talking about, psychological stability. So how long after an incident, do you get back to baseline?

Growth mindset, conscientiousness, and there was one other thing that I can't remember. But just thinking about that, happiness in a relationship and longevity in a relationship will probably be correlated, but they're not exactly the same thing. They're going to be slightly different, you can imagine somebody that is very stubborn in a relationship miserable, but will stay together, that could be an archetype of person that you could find. But certainly that conscientiousness, i.e. attentive, focused, disciplined, paying, like giving my all to the partner, the psychological stability would allow you

to be adaptable, to deal with things and to not be too swayed by them. And the growth mindset is precisely what you're talking about. So it's interesting to see those two studies kind of marry over the top. It is. I'm going to take a look at that because the things you listed make total sense to me, given what I know about human development. Can friendships replace a marriage? Yes, they can.

They don't, and you never have to be married to get these benefits. The friendships can totally be in that place, be the people who have your back, the people who support you. The support we get from relationships, first of all, we can't get it all from a marriage anyway. You can't get everything from an intimate partnership. That's another myth. That's worth calling out. But think of all-

They can be exclusively reliant on just you and just significant other isn't enough. No, and we can imagine that, well, if my relationship doesn't provide me with everything I need, then there must be something wrong with the relationship. Not true. Think of all the things that we need from relationships. I mean, certainly we need intimacy and we need sex. But we also, you know, we need fun, which you can get in many different relationships. We need moral support. My neighbor who always has the right tool when I need to fix something in my house and I never have the right tool. You know, he'll support me by bringing over his toolbox.

And, you know, the people who you play tennis with, or the people who drive you to the doctor, there's so many ways that we support each other. And so the idea is that we ought to have people in our lives who provide us with different things. And certainly, friendships can provide all of what we need. There does not have to be an intimate partnership in the picture. Did you not say, though, that the intimate partnership is the most important relationship

to have? Presumably, that means that it can't be replaced by even a million friends wouldn't be able to replace everything of that. You know, in fairness, nobody's done that comparison. I think it would be an impossible one to do in a rigorous way. So I guess the bottom line is I don't know, but I know people who have never had an intimate partnership and have very satisfying rich lives. That would be presumably an outlier. Most people end up in some sort of a partnership or at least sequential partnerships throughout their life. Most people do, but there's a growing cohort of people, a growing percentage of people who don't do that. Still, you're right, the majority of people who don't do that. Still, you're right. The majority of people do have some intimate

partnership as they go through life. What is the optimal number of friends? Ha ha. There isn't an optimal number for just the reasons we talked about, right? There's no optimal number that for, you know, for me, it might be one person, for you, it might be 50 people. I know there have been all these calculations about we can't really have more than 150 relationships in our lives. Who knows? It varies so much depending on our temperaments, our proclivities, so no optimal number. Okay, what about the relationship between relationships and our health and body? You mentioned that earlier on, but there was some

stuff to do with it being neuroprotective later in life, links to all sorts of things. What are, someone's a little skeptical about the relationship to, between relationships and their health, what some of the stats that you can hammer that home with? Well, in terms of living longer, I mean, we know, for example, that married people live longer than single people, like by several years. Men actually get an even bigger benefit than women, but women get a longevity benefit, too. People who are more socially connected live longer. People who are more socially connected and not lonely have slower cognitive decline as they get

old. They are less likely to develop dementia if they're more socially engaged and they develop it later if they're going to develop it. So all of these things are backed by hard scientific data. It's, I had a conversation about you're and a half ago talking about divorce and it was the same insight that you had that loneliness is the same impact of smoking half a pack of cigarettes every single day. And it just, it's such a non-galve at the moment. I don't think that this view of relationships as being an impact on our health has really hit people sufficiently hard.

It doesn't galvanize your motivation in the same way as stopping smoking or stopping eating rubbish food or reducing your alcohol content on a night time. I do think that this is just conceptual inertia, that it, it as yet hasn't been impacted. But one of the challenges is that stopping smoking, changing your diets, improving your health regime, all of those are things that you are 100% completely in control of. But it's very nature with relationships. It takes two to tango. You need another person in the situation. And I don't know how familiar you are with this sort of vibe

online, this corner of the internet, but there is a growing cohort of people for whom they say, I don't need anybody in my life. I've tried to have friends or I've tried to have a relationship and people are just too difficult. I'm alone wolf, I don't need anybody. And they're as convinced as it's possible to be about this stance. And they're killing themselves. And I really want, I really hope that this conversation sort of drives it home, that you can eat all of the organic food that you want, you can

train as much as you want, you can do all the rest of it. But if you're neglecting your social relationships, you're literally killing yourself. That's true, however, that's on average. It might be that if you just find people toxic, maybe the less stressful thing for you is to remain alone, who knows? Like it's all, you know, we're talking about big statistical averages, right? And, you know, individual performance may vary,

as they say, in the prospectus. Everyone is super idiosyncratic. Everybody is an end of one. I understand. Exactly. Exactly. But it is, it is really important to call out this idea that, well, I, this is never going to happen for me. There are people who, in fact, people in their 20s have said to me, it's too late for me. It's like really. But what we find, you know, when we follow all these lives for decades, is that it's never too late that people get surprised by what happens to them, that we've had people people get surprised by what happens to them, that we've had people in their 50s, 60s, 80s find a group of friends like they've never had before,

or find love. People find love in their 70s and 80s who've never had it before. So what I wanna just name is that if you think it's never gonna happen for you, you don't know, you just don't know what's going to happen. I have a friend who is in his late 60s and he recently had a child with his partner and he was talking to me just before Christmas and said, I didn't really understand what it meant to have a

family in the same kind of way now. And there's dogs and there's wife and there's baby and there's him. And this is a guy who's in his 60s, learning what it feels like to have a family unit. And it's beautiful. It's really, really, it's insane. It's so beautiful. What you were talking about before, is that what you refer to as social fitness?

Is that what you mean by social fitness? Well, social fitness is this idea, like physical fitness, that it's a practice, that it's not something to take for granted. When I was in my 20s, I used to think, well, my friends are my friends, they're always gonna be my friends. I don't have to do anything.

But what we see as people go through their lives is that perfectly good relationships can wither away just from neglect. And so we coined this term social fitness to be analogous with physical fitness. If you work out today, you don't come back home and say, good, I'm done, I never have to do that again. We know that it's an ongoing practice.

And what we find is that the people who are best at maintaining vibrant connections, they're the people who work at it. And it's small decisions. It's not hard work. It's little things. It's sending a text today to somebody you haven't seen in a while and say, hey, I'm thinking about you.

Just wanted to say hi. You know, it's that kind of thing. There is a quote that I put in my newsletter a couple of months ago. If you don't grow together, you grow apart. And I think that that... It's very difficult to reach inertia with a friendship. It usually turns... I can see this in my own life. My friendships are either getting better or getting worse.

Very few of them stay the same. And even if it is staying the same, that's effortful. Not staying the same, just idling away on neutral and cruise control, it's effort in order to keep it at that same level. It's not nothing, right? I came back to the UK, I think four times last year.

Once was for a bachelor party. Once was for the wedding that the bachelor party was for. Yeah. And then the final time was for Christmas. And I'd be there at the beginning of the year. Like those things like, yeah, I probably didn't need to come back for the bachelor party. That was, that was elective. But I know that apart from the fact it was great. And I care about him coming back is kept a ton of friendships.

It's taking over. It was an important investment that I needed to make. Exactly. Showing up really matters. And that's what actually one of my teachers once told me when he said, when in doubt, show up for people. Like just do it, right? You know, and that's for weddings, for funerals, for whatever it is.

If you think about going, if you think about picking up the phone, do it. You know, act on the impulse, don't second guess it. Unless it's three in the morning and you don't want to wake up your friend, but really make yourself overcome those doubts. How can people understand the influence of their childhood on their adult relationships? We know that childhood matters a lot because, you know, we're raised in these families that teach us what to expect of the world. They teach us what to expect of other people.

You don't, as a three-year-old, think, well, I wonder what other fathers are like or other mothers. This is just like, this is what moms are like. This is what dads are like. This is it, right? And so it's very powerful. And it's only as we get older and we are world broadens that we begin to look around and say, oh, families can operate differently. And by then we've really been conditioned to have certain

expectations of our relationships and of the world. And those expectations don't have to be our destiny. So like if you've had bad relationships with parents, with siblings, if you've come to believe they can't be trusted, that can change. But it means cultivating and finding relationships with people who are more trustworthy, who are not hurtful. So it can change, we saw it change in many of the people we studied. But in some of the people we studied, they ended up recreating the same kinds of relationships they had in childhood.

And so it really is a matter of trying to find relationships that don't make you relive your childhood if your childhood was hurtful. If we're lucky and we had good childhoods, then we want to find relationships that are similar to what we had in childhood. In its strange that we sort of look for comfort even in a pretty nasty place to grow up in later life.

Yeah, that's one of the, I learned that from a lander bot on from the School of Life. It's one of the oddest and kind of most uncomfortable sides of our preferences for partners. Is it a lot of the time we look for some of the negative qualities that we had in our parents? You know, to me, it's not surprising, because one of the things we gravitate toward is what feels like home, what feels familiar, even if it's not good, even if it's painful. And so like, because you know, oh, I know what this feels like and all this feels so familiar.

And so what we find and Freud talked about this. And I see this all the time. So I did my specialty in in psychiatry is doing psychotherapy. So I see people every day in psychotherapy. And one of the things I notice is that they end up seeking out. They're like heat-seeking missiles. They seek out what feels familiar. And sometimes that's painful stuff that feels familiar. And so part of the learning in a good psychotherapy is to help people see, oh my god, I'm choosing. learning in a good psychotherapy is to help people see, oh my god, I'm choosing. I'm choosing the wrong partners because they feel so much like the people I knew as a kid. What else had important impacts on happiness? Health, relationships. Have you got any idea what comes next?

Luck. There is a lot of luck. You know, when our health breaks down, it's harder to maintain relationships. We don't have the energy. We don't feel as well. So there's a lot of luck. And I want to name that because it really does matter what happens to us. And we can't control everything that happens to us. I'm stating the obvious, but sometimes people can believe that it's their fault if bad stuff happens, and so much of the time it's nobody's fault.

And so I just wanna name that so that we don't end up leaving people feeling blamed if they're not having the life they'd hoped for. What about achievement? Does achievement have an input on happiness? It does and it doesn't. So achievement does, if you do things you're proud of, so I'll give you an example.

We've written this book and I love this book. I feel good, because it conveys ideas that mattered to me personally very deeply. So I wanna get this book. I feel good, you know, because it conveys ideas that matter to me personally, very deeply, right? So I want to get this book out there. And that achievement feels good to me. But does it feel good if it's named to this or that or wins this or that award? Yeah, it'll feel good maybe for a day, but that's it. You know, like we know Nobel Prize winners who get depressed after they win the Nobel Prize because it's like, well, but now I still have to live my life and it's just my life, right?

So, middleist syndrome, yeah. Exactly, exactly. So really it's that achieving something that's meaningful to you can feel good because you care about it, right? And that's good. So, you know, your personal best in something. Like, I ran that race at my personal best and that feels good to me. That's a good thing. So, so in that way achievement can matter in a good way. But achievement has a way to be a badge of having arrived. That never lasts. What about income? Did you look at that? I mean, I've heard a number of insights around where that relates to happiness. Yeah. Well, you know, there's this famous study that I know you've heard of. $75,000 a year. $75,000 a year. And that amount varies. But basically,

what all the studies show us is that we do need to have our basic needs met What all the studies show us is that we do need to have our basic needs met economically to have a sense of well-being. And so that means having enough money for food and shelter and health care and education to take care of our families, okay? But once we get there, then adding income doesn't increase our happiness. And that's what people find it hard to believe. Wait, you mean that making $75 million isn't going to increase my happiness? Actually, no. It won't decrease your happiness either, but it won't make you happy. And it's a cliche that

money doesn't buy happiness, but it's a cliche for a reason because people end up finding figuring it out. They did this study of lottery winners, people who win scads of money through luck. And they find that their state of well-being goes back to a baseline a year before they won the lottery. It goes back to about that a year after they win the lottery. Same thing happens to people that become disabled as well. Exactly. Exactly. about that a year after they win the lottery. Same theory happens to people that become disabled as well. Exactly, exactly. The Donnic adaptations are hell of a drug. So when you, I will send it over on email afterward,

that book Don't Trust Your Got By Seth, he tries to dig into this as well. I think it'd be interesting for you guys to look at too. What he seems to find is that there is definitely a top out. It's around about that sort of figure, that sort of upper, that sort of upper like tens of thousands. And then in order to achieve the same increase in happiness, you need to double the amount of money that you want. So in order to be able to get the increase

in happiness that you would from let's say 70 to 140, you then need to go 140 to 280 and then 280 to 560. So it's this ever-decreasing tolerance or ever-increasing tolerance should I say for money. Yeah. Right. What he's pointing to is what the economist called diminishing returns that you can work harder and harder, make more and more money and you get less happiness as a result. What about get less happiness as a result. What about population-wide trends? Because there is a criticism at the moment that we are becoming ever more detached from the typical kind of life that we would have lived. Men's testosterone levels have dropped by 1% every year since 1980.

We have chronic diseases, loneliness, all of this sort of stuff. Have you guys been able to work out whether self-rated happiness in 1940 was higher than self-rated happiness in 2020? We have not been able to work out that. I don't know if anybody has studied it. The difficulty is using measures that are essentially either the same or equivalent. And so we have that all the time.

You know, we ask, we ask the same questions about marriage eight times over five decades, right? And just happen that we repeated those questions, but that's rare. Still, I think your question is super interesting, and I don't know that anybody has done that comparison. I think the other question I would add to it is, were there different priorities? So did, you know, this kind of sense of happiness as in hedonic well-being, I bet that wasn't so much a thing. I, people talk to more

in our study, the World War II generation, talked more about having a meaningful life, taking care of families, that kind of thing, rather than actualizing my true self. That's become more of a kind of 1980s-on concept. Yeah. So, I had a theory about that as well that I've been playing with for ages, which is Mazzo's hierarchy of needs, which he didn't actually make as a pyramid to begin with, but Mazzo's hierarchy of needs, where you've got actually make as a pyramid to begin with, but Mazzo's hierarchy of needs, where you've got your food and shelter, et cetera, et cetera, all the way up social connection.

If you are somebody for whom the bottom level of that pyramid is not yet filled, worrying about whether you're actualizing your logos and speaking your truth forward into the world is not a luxury that you can have. An existential crisis is not, it's oddly a very luxurious position to be in, because it's only been enabled due to the fact

that all of the bottom levels of the pyramid have been fixed. Exactly, exactly. The other critique of Maslow, which I share, is that it's very individually focused, very self-focused. I want to put my truth out into the world. I want to express my true self as opposed to investing in things beyond the self

in taking care of others, in seeing oneself as part of a much larger whole, which Maslow's hierarchy doesn't do. Given that you are somebody who has a background clinically and in terms of practice and now in terms of data and research, what are the daily practices that you do yourself to give yourself the best chance to be happy in life? Yeah, they're kind of simple and dull. I meditate every day. I exercise every day. I connect with people every day. Those are the three things. And sometimes I watch trash TV.

That can also be a contributor to how many I suppose. Oh, and I eat dark chocolate. Okay, dark chocolate is the key to happiness. We can take it from there. All right, what's next for this study that you guys are doing? Is there anything else that you're thinking that you would love to work on with the cohort?

Well, we're collecting data even now, as we speak, on the second generation cohort. And what we've focused on this time, so we come back in different waves, this time we're focusing on what was life like for you during the pandemic, what's it been like? And tell us more about your use of social media because we're interested in, and these are all mostly baby boomers, so it's a particular cohort.

Their social media use is different from, you know, 12 year olds and 25 year olds. But we're interested in that. And I think we're interested in collaborating with other researchers a lot. We've always done that. We're doing it more. So right now we're collaborating with another research study looking at exposure to lead in the environment because we know where people grew up and we know whether their Houses were in buildings that had lead piping in the buildings. We know how How near they lived to what are called lead smelters that used to put tons of lead into the air as they melted scrap lead down and

So how much did lead exposure Influence their health there will be and how did it influence how long they lived? So we're collaborating with another study that followed people from the time they were young until they died. And we're pooling our data. And we're going to find out, does it do this exposure to toxins really matter and in what ways? Because it still is a thing. We still have lead in our water, in what ways. Because it still is a thing. You know, we still have lead in our water,

in our air. And so we're trying to be, if we can, a little more socially active in understanding the conditions that we need to create to foster well-being. That's very cool. Robert Waldinger, ladies and gentlemen, if people want to check out the stuff that you do, where should they go? So we have a book website. It's the GoodLifebook.com. But in'll get lots of technical papers if you do. Robert, I appreciate you. I love your work. Thank you. Thank you. This is such an interesting interview. I really appreciate it. you