Science Vs - The Secret to Happiness?

Episode Date: January 22, 2026

There's claims out there that all kinds of things can make us happy in life, from making money to having kids to buying your dream home. But what actually works?? What does it take to have a happy life??  Professor Bob Waldinger is a psychiatrist at Harvard who has spent more than two decades as the director of this amazing study. It has tracked hundreds of people for decades and is the world's longest scientific study into happiness. So we're gonna find out what a lot of us get wrong in searching for the good life. Where we should be putting our time and attention. And we'll get this huge insight into how we can all be happier — and healthier. Find our transcript here: https://bit.ly/ScienceVsHappiness In this episode, we cover: (00:00) What makes us happy? (01:48) The world's longest study into happiness  (07:25) The biggest finding of the study (13:18) How do you build good relationships? (18:26) How did Bob get happier?? (21:53) How childhood adversity changes us (24:12) Does having kids make you happy?  (25:22) Does making money make us happy?  (27:55) The Happiest Person (29:40) Looking back on our lives Don't forget to text a friend you haven't seen in a while! Let us know what they say. Send us a photo if you end up catching up!! You can email us at [e-mail] or tag us in an instagram post — we're at @science_vs. And come say hello to Wendy on tiktok, I'm @wendyzukerman This episode was produced by Wendy Zukerman, with help from Ekedi Fausther-Keeys, Rose Rimler, Meryl Horn, and Michelle Dang. We’re edited by Blythe Terrell. Fact checking help by Ekedi Fauster-Keeys. Mix and sound design by Bobby Lord. Music written by Bobby Lord, Bumi Hidaka, So Wiley, Emma Munger and Peter Leonard. An extra thanks to the Zukerman Family and Joseph Lavelle Wilson. Science Vs is a Spotify Studios Original. Listen for free on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Follow us and tap the bell for episode notifications. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi, I'm Wendy Zuckerman and you're listening to Science Verses. Today on the show, we're pitting facts against finding happiness. That's right. There's claims out there that all kinds of things can make us happy, from making money to having kids to buying your dream home. But what actually works? What does it take to have a happy life? To find out, Harvard has been running this amazing study

which has tracked hundreds of people for decades. It's actually the longest-running scientific study into happiness. And as a result, we now have all of these awesome insights into how we can not only be happier, but healthier too. And so today on the show, we're chatting with the guy who has been the director of this study for more than two decades. His name is Professor Bob Waldinger. He's also a psychiatrist.

and he co-wrote a book about this study. Bob is going to tell us what a lot of us get wrong in searching for the good life. And ultimately, how science can help us all to be happy. Here's Bob. Well, the biggest finding is that the people who stayed healthiest and happiest, the longest, were the people who were... Come on, I'm not going to give it away that easily.

You've got to listen to the people. episode. Science spills the beads on how to be happy, just after the break. Welcome back. Today, we're talking about the world's longest grudding study into happiness. It's officially called the Harvard Study of Adult Development. At the start of the study, pretty much everyone was a white guy. Eventually, they led in women. And a lot of their findings have been repeated by different groups all around the world. So let's jump in. Here's Professor Bob Waldinger. Bob, you are the director of this amazing study. For those who have never heard of it,

what is kind of the driving question of this study? How do we live a good life? That's really it. And what are the conditions that predict who's going to thrive as they go through their life and who isn't? That's what we were asking. So set the scene of how this study began. It's the 1930s. Who are scientists picking to study?

Well, there were two separate studies that didn't actually know about each other. One was a study of Harvard College undergraduate students, 19-year-olds, who were thought by their deans to be fine, outstanding specimens. And so they were chosen to study normal development from adolescence to young adulthood. And of course, now we realize how ridiculous that is if you want to study normal development, you study all white guys from Harvard, no. But the other group was also a study of normal development, but it was a study of boys from Boston's poorest neighborhoods and their most troubled families.

So families known for domestic violence, parental illness, mental illness, known to social service agencies for so much trouble. And the question that these researchers had was, what allows some children born into such difficult circumstances to thrive, to stay out of trouble, to do well? So it started in the 30s and 40s. It's going all the way up to today, following the kids then of these people,

because none of the original participants still are living? There were 724 original participants, fewer than 10 are still living, and they're all over age 100. Wow. Wow, wow, wow. And even John F. Kennedy was an original participant? Is this right? He was. He was. Yeah. You got any goss on John F. Kennedy? No, we don't. Because when he was running for senator, so long before he was president, when he was running for senator, when he was running for senator,

His campaign managers said, you know, you probably shouldn't be giving a lot of confidential information to some researchers at Harvard. So they withdrew his records. Oh, well. And so what kinds of questions were you asking these participants, both JFK and everyone, really? Well, first we did these interviews with them about their mental health, about their physical health. they were asked about what they hoped for in their lives, what they enjoyed the most, what they believed in, so many questions. Very deep questions.

Other ones that I really sort of loved were if you woke up frightened in the middle of the night, who would you call? Yes. And some random questions, like they asked everybody, are you ticklish? Like, we have no idea why they asked that question, but they did. So if you would like to analyze the data on who was ticklish and who wasn't, Let me know. Tell me about what sort of scientific measurements you're doing.

Brain waves, even in the 1930s and 40s, when brain waves were quite new, they measured their brain waves. Then what we did was as new methods came online, we started using modern methods. So we started drawing blood to measure their DNA. I mean, DNA wasn't even imagined in the 1930s. and we put people into the scanner and we scan their brains. We bring them into our laboratory and we deliberately stress them out and then see how their cardiovascular systems recover from stress. All this as a way to measure well-being in many different ways.

Now, when you were first asked to join the study, because you're the fourth director. Right. In your book, you say that you were actually hesitant to join because you weren't sure how relevant this study was, because as you mentioned, these were old, mostly white men. What made you change your mind? So my processor, the third director, said,

come to my office and just read through one man's papers, read through his file. And I started flipping through, and I started reading about what he had said as a 19-year-old, about what he hoped for in his life. And then I flipped to when he was in his 40s and how he felt about his life and his marriage and his work. And then I looked at him in his 50s. And I thought, this is the most amazing thing in the world to be able to read forward somebody's life and then read about what they thought 20 years later and 20 years after that.

So I said, I'm hooked. I'm going to do this. Okay. So what is the biggest finding of this study in terms of what makes us happy, what makes the good life? Well, the biggest finding is that the people who stayed healthiest and happiest, the longest, were the people who were most connected to other people, that people who had good relationships with others, warm relationships, and made that a priority. Those were the people who didn't develop the diseases of aging as soon if they developed them at all. They were the people who stayed happier. And we didn't believe it at first.

Why do you think you were so surprised back then? You know, we say yes, we know the mind and the body are connected, but that strong a connection? Like adding years to your life, like preventing you from getting type 2 diabetes or heart disease? I've heard you say you actually, when you started to see that in the data, you didn't publish it right away because you were so skeptical at what you were saying. Is that right? Well, we wanted to be sure that other studies were finding the same thing, similar things. And then we saw that several other research groups were finding exactly the same thing. That good relationships not only made you happier, but healthier. It kept you healthier, exactly. I mean, it makes sense that you'd be happier. if you had better relationships,

but how could relationships actually get inside our bodies and shape our physiology? Like, how could that be? How could that be a thing? How could that be? Well, I know more about it now because we've been spending a bunch of years investigating that. It seems to have to do with stress.

The best hypothesis we have is that relationships are stress regulators for us, that so for example like stress happens every day right something upsetting may happen and your body revs up your blood pressure goes up your heart rate goes up then the body's meant to come back to

equilibrium and what we find is that if you have somebody you can call and complain to or you have someone at home you can go home and say you won't believe what happened today and you get to explain what happened you can feel your body calmed down And we think that good relationships help our bodies go back to equilibrium after they're stressed.

And what we know is that people who are isolated, people who are lonely, have chronic stress because loneliness is a stresser. So we think that those people may not ever go back to the baseline that they're supposed to go back to when they've been stressed, that they may have low levels of stress all the time. in their bodies, higher levels of circulating stress hormones, a weaker immune system, chronic inflammation that breaks down different body systems. So that's how we think it works. When we think about the damage that stress can cause, there is this really interesting study that you talk about around stress and wound healing. This was work done at Ohio State University. It's a study that does make me cringe, I have to say. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And what they did was they took two groups of older adults. One group was caring for demented relatives, and one group was not. And otherwise, they were kind of equal in terms of health status and all that. And then they did a little skin biopsy, the kind that you do in the dermatologist's office, if they see something they want to look at under the microscope. Didn't hurt much. It's a small little wound. and then they just watched to see how long everybody's little biopsy took to heal,

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

Absolutely. Yeah. And then in your research, you also found this connection between physical pain and good relationships. Can you tell us about that? Yes. what we know is that people who are having physical problems, people who are in physical pain, are less happy. You know, think about it. If you're having a bad day, you have some physical pain, your mood is kind of grumpier usually, right?

Yeah. But what we found was that people who were having pain, who were in a happy relationship with a partner, they reported better mood on the days, even on the days when they had pain than people who were in unhappy relationships or who were alone. So what that means to us is that being in a happy relationship kind of is a buffer. It kind of buffers you from the worst effects of pain on your mood. It allows you to still be kind of happy even when things are hurting in your body. You know, your research and others find that good relationships are so important. The question then becomes, how do you build those good relationships?

And George Balliot, your predecessor, wrote this really lovely quote that I want to talk about. He said, there are two pillars of happiness revealed by this study. One is love. The other is finding a way of coping with life that does not push love away. Yes. Well, they totally agree with what George says there. Because one of the ways we can protect ourselves psychologically is to push people away. You know, if we're afraid of people, if we're worried about being disliked, being disapproved of, if we're worried about somebody hurting us, we can put up barriers. And you've probably seen this. You know, you've probably seen it in yourself sometimes. Yeah, I don't need to look very far above. I don't know. Yeah, yeah. And what we see is that the people who do that their whole lives really are pushing love away. And that means you could even be in a marriage, but it could be a very distant marriage.

And many people never find a romantic partner. Not that you have to find a romantic partner because you could have friends, really good friendships. That's fine. It's the people who are scared to let themselves express love and express affection who often keep love at a distance, and they're less happy and less healthy. So in your study, this was really interesting to me. You looked at how people coped with difficulties

and the consequences of avoiding dealing with difficult things in life. How do you actually study that? Well, it's a really hard thing to study, actually. But the way we did it was we interviewed people, and we said, tell us about different things, time you've had recently, and how did you cope? And usually we'd ask them about a few difficult times. And then what we would do is we would get researchers to, we would just take the stories

and we'd show them the stories and we'd say, what coping mechanisms are being used here? And people were really able to rate whether someone was like bearing their head in this saying, I'm not going to deal with this stressor. I'm going to pretend it doesn't exist, as opposed to the people who face toward a challenge and take steps to cope with it. Interesting. And what did you find generally that if you tend to avoid things,

let me guess. It doesn't know well. Now, so you mentioned that with these relationships, they don't have to be romantic. And I want you to tell me a little more about that. In this study, what did you? find. Well, actually, some people sometimes ask me when I give a talk about this. They say, you know, if I don't have a partner, am I doomed? Should I just throw myself in front of a bus?

And I say, no, absolutely not. So it's whether we cultivate close relationships. So all of us, we think, need at least one or two people who we're close to, who we feel would be there if we needed them, who we feel we can talk to about personal matters. All of us need that. But it doesn't have to be a romantic partner. It could be a friend. It could be a sibling. Could be a workmate. And in the study, there were some people who were married, but still didn't, their partner wasn't that person that they would call in the middle of the night. Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. Sometimes people live in very distant marriages, and they're very lonely. On the other hand, there are people who aren't married who are totally happy with their social connections, right?

After the break, how folks in this study overcame a difficult childhood. Plus, does having kids make you happy? Coming up. Welcome back today on the show, What Makes Us Happy? Research shows that part of the reason that some of us are happier than others is genetics. That is, there are those of us that are just kind of wired to be happier. But still, if this is something that you want to work on in your life to boost your happiness meter a little, there is some wiggle room.

And Professor Bob Waldinger and his team at Harvard have found that there is something we can try to do to bump up our happiness meter. which is to build relationships, all kinds of relationships, not just romantic, but friendships too. And so I asked Bob, how has knowing this changed you? Have you made more of an effort to build these relationships? Yes, I have. So I'm a Harvard professor. I could work 24-7 to do nothing but work. And I realized if I keep doing this, I'm going to end up so alone. Yes, I do. have a wife and she's a wonderful partner. She's fantastic. But my kids were grown. They were no longer pulling me away saying, Dad, come do this or drive me here. And I realized I was just going to end up with nobody except my spouse. And then I said, oh my gosh, I have to take my own medicine here.

And so I started being much more active and intentional in making dates with my friends. Let's go for a walk. Let's go out to dinner. Like two guys going out for a dinner that that our wives didn't derange, right? That's unheard of. Who would have thought? There is actually a stat from your study that it found that while only 6% of the women in the study were not satisfied with their relationships,

almost a third of the men weren't. Yeah. Why is this, I mean, it's almost like a meme. It's a meme. It's a total meme. You know why? I think it's how we all get socialized. I think that women growing up see their mothers being the social directors in the home, right?

And they see other girls paying attention to, okay, who's doing what and what are we getting together? And the guys just, you know, they see their father's not paying attention. I think it's kind of handed down generationally, not in every family at all, not to stereotype it. But it is much more common for the women to be the more connected people. And so men really, I've had to learn to do that. And it's because of my own research that I've made myself learned. And has it worked for you? Do you think you're a happier person because of it?

Yeah, I do. I do. I really do. And more connected. I'm really stamping on this point. Yeah. And that at any age, you can turn things around and start building these relationships. Oh, totally.

Totally. In fact, if your listeners want to just try something, it's a little exercise to show you how easy it is. just think of somebody you kind of miss that you haven't seen in a while or you've been out of touch with, you want to connect with. And when you're done listening to this recording, just send them a little text or an email. Just send them a little text saying, hi, I was just thinking of you and wanted to connect. That's all you have to do.

It will take you 30 seconds and then see what comes back to you. I mean, I do this sometimes when I give talks. I'll do this. I'll ask the audience. I'll say, okay, take out your phone, think of somebody, text them, and then during the Q&A, I'll say, did anybody get anything back? And all these hands shoot up, and people say, oh, yeah. And the reason for doing that is just to show us all that this is not heavy lifting.

This is not adding huge amounts of time to your day at all. It's little small actions you could do every day. You could do it on your commute, right? You could do it while you're out jogging. You could call someone. You could invite someone to meet you at the gym to work out. There are lots of ways to do this stuff. Yeah.

And then looking at some of the other findings of your study, because it was this beautiful, longitudinal research project, what did you find about how childhood adversity can then affect us as we grow up? because you did have these two groups, the Harvard quote-unquote, well-adjusted men versus those who came from quite poor and difficult backgrounds. Yeah. Well, one interesting thing is that not all the Harvard men were well-adjusted. And many of the inner-city men were very well-adjusted,

even though they'd come from difficult backgrounds. A lot had to do with what kind of supports they had. So maybe they had one parent who was really consistent and loving. And that was enough. or even an older sibling who was caring and took care of them, watched out for them. And so all you need is one older person who's crazy about you and is consistent. And that's often a key to thriving. So for those who are listening and for those in the study who did not have any caring individuals growing up,

what patterns did you see and were they able to overcome them? times people have what we call corrective experiences. And what I mean by that is they meet somebody who is a good person and who treats them kindly and with respect. The worst thing about trauma is that it creates the sense that the world isn't safe and that people aren't safe. They can't be trusted. They can't be relied on. And that's one of the most horrible legacies of trauma. So you send children out into the world believing they can't trust anybody so the people who are lucky meet friends meet a romantic partner who is trustworthy who doesn't betray you who is kind who you know and then you can realize oh okay not everybody is like the people were when I was growing up there are people who can't be

trusted and so that's what I mean by a corrective experience where having a new experience with a different kind of person changes our mindset about what's possible in relationships. Now, some of the things that I guess people associate with the good life are having kids. And one of the participants, Rosa, who was married to Hank, they had five children of their own, which Rosa said was plenty but not enough. Yes. Which makes me clench five kids. But does having children make you happy?

They've done studies of this. And actually, when they look at couples who choose not to have children and who choose to have children, neither group is happier than the other. It's just a choice, right? And if you think about it, you know, kids are wonderful. I mean, I have kids. I'm so glad I had kids. And it was one of the hardest things I ever did.

And it was boring. And it was infuriating. It was all those things. And it was absolutely joyous. and my friends who didn't have children got to do much more travel, they got to take other career opportunities that I wouldn't take. So it's not that one is better than the other. They're really different life choices.

And then another thing that comes up when we think about happiness is money. Does making money make us happy? Yeah, well, that's complicated. So it depends on where you're starting from. we know that if you don't have your basic needs met, making more money will make you happier. So, like, right, if you don't have food security, if you don't have stable housing, if you don't have good access to health care, if you can't educate your children in good schools, that makes you unhappy. So if you make more money until you get to the point where you can meet all

those needs, that's hugely important for happiness. But then getting the second home, getting the flashier car, buying the boat, they can make you happier, but they don't really make you feel like you've hit the jackpot. Yeah. Yeah, there is this really interesting idea out there based on research from years ago that once you earn a certain amount in the study, it was 60 to 90, thousand dollars a year, but I guess with inflation, probably talking around $100,000 a year, that your happiness level levels out. The more and more money doesn't equal more and more happiness. But then this new study came out that found it's not so simple and that actually

if you are a happy person, then making more and more and more and more money does actually boost your happiness a little bit. Maybe not making you feel like you've just won the jackpot. But the thing is, what this new study found is that if you were unhappy to begin with, then making more and more and more and more money that did not help. Exactly, exactly. Bob, what did you find in the Harvard study? So we found that the Harvard group, the privileged group, was no happier on average than the inner city group.

that there were happy people in both groups, and there were unhappy people in both groups. Privilege and money were not the ticket to happiness. However, the Harvard group lived on average 10 years longer than the inner city group. And that has to do with privilege and access to health care and education. They probably had access to much better health care. When you look at some of the happiest people in the study, Is there a person that springs to mind?

The guy who in the book we call Leo, we changed all the names in the book, but the stories are absolutely real. And Leo was a man who, actually, my predecessor thought Leo was the most boring man in the study when he interviewed him, you know, like 30 years ago, because he had such a stable life. He was a high school teacher.

And that's all he did his whole life. And he had a marriage and kids and grandkids. But it turned out he was a high school. teacher who loved his students, he loved his colleagues, had a really warm marriage, was such a good dad to his three daughters, and then love teaching his grandchildren how to sail his little sailboat that he built, right? So he wasn't rich, he wasn't famous, he was just living his life, doing something he cared about and loved the people he was with. So that's our happiest man in the study. He's by far the happiest man. I love that. I love that. I love

that as a message because so many of the messages that you get now around happiness have to do with, you know, you want the most likes on social media. Oh God, yeah. You want this, you want that. So empty. I mean, likes are empty, right? Followers are empty. It's like you can't cuddle up to them at night, right? No, that's right. We could all just have a little Leo in us, I feel like. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Look, you really can invest. and stuff that will make you happier. Just don't reach for all those shiny objects that the culture keeps telling us will make us happy,

that they don't. You asked one of the questions in the study is one that I feel like it always kind of breaks my heart every time I read this, but it's asking people, as they were older, as you look back on your life, what do you wish you had done less of? What do you wish you'd done more of?

What do people tend to say? Well, the thing they wish they'd done less of is spent so much time at work. All right, let's finish this interview. Really? And they wish they had spent more time with people they cared about them when they looked back on their lives. And the thing they were proud of stuff was usually something to do with people. It wasn't, I won this award, I made this amount of money. It was, I was a good parent, I was a good boss, I was a good mentor, I was a good friend.

And so it was always about their connections with other people when they look back. Nobody cares what we accomplish, really. Nobody cares. Yeah. And this is coming from a Harvard professor. It's hard, though. It's hard. It's hard.

It's hard. Because we got to work, you know. Well, and it doesn't mean to stop doing things you care about. It doesn't mean don't set goals. Absolutely. It just means the awards, the shiny plaque on the wall isn't going to be what makes you happy. It's the process of doing something you care about. If you care about doing this podcast, that's wonderful. And you want to keep doing it, right? That's not a problem, right? It's that because if you enjoy the process, you're enjoying your life. If you just enjoy the number of followers you have, that's, that's, that's, That's kind of not so. It's true. It's so empty. Yeah.

So, Bob, I guess my last question is if there is just one message from this research, from this impressive study, what would you want it to be? People should just invest in the people they care about and in the things they care about because nothing else really matters much. That's great. Thanks, Bob. You're welcome. This was fun. I really appreciate your time again. It's a pleasure.

Take care. Bye, bye, bye, bye. That was my interview with Professor Bob Fultinger. And don't forget to text a friend that you haven't seen in a while. And you know what? Let us know what they say. If you do end up catching up, send us a photo. You could email us at Science Verses at SidesVs team at gmail.com.

Tag us in an Instagram post where it's Sides underscore VS. And you can come say hello to me on TikTok. I'm at Wendy Zuckerman. I want to see if it worked, if you were able to reconnect it if you had a good time. If you want to read more about Bob's research, the book that he co-wrote is called The Good Life. And also in the show notes, there's a cited transcription for this episode with links to key studies that Bob is talking about. This episode was produced by me, Wendy Zuckerman, with help from Akeddy Foster Keys, Rose Rimler, Merrill Horn and Michelle Dang. We're edited by Blythe Terrell.

Fact-checking help by Akedie Fosser. Koster Keys. Mix and sound design by Bobby Lord. Music written by Bobby Lord, Bumi Hidaka, So Wiley, Emma Munga and Peter Leonard. An extra thanks to the Zuckerman family and Joseph Lavelle Wilson. Science Versus is a Spotify studio's original. Listen to us for free on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. And if you are listening on Spotify, then you should follow us and also tap the bell so you get notifications when new episodes come out. And if you like the show, on whatever podcast app you're listening to us on, please rate us, give us a five-star review.

It helps other people find the show. Thank you so much. I'm Wendy Zuckerman. Fact you next time.