Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - 549: Lessons From the World’s Longest Scientific Study of Happiness | Dr. Robert Waldinger

Episode Date: January 23, 2023

Today’s guest is the man in charge of the world’s longest scientific study of happiness, a study that has been running since 1938. Dr. Robert Waldinger is a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, the director of the Harvard Study of Adult Development at Massachusetts General Hospital, and co-founder of the Lifespan Research Foundation. He is also a Zen master and teaches meditation in New England and around the world. His TED Talk is one of the most viewed of all time, with over 43 million views. He’s the co-author, along with Dr. Marc Schulz, of The Good Life.In this episode we talk about: What the Harvard Study of Adult Development is and how it got startedHow much of our happiness is really under our controlWhy you can’t you be happy all the timeThe concept of “social fitness” Why you should “never worry alone” How having best friends at work can make you more productiveAnd why, in his words, it’s never too late to be happyFull Shownotes: https://www.tenpercent.com/podcast-episode/robert-waldinger-549See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This is the 10% happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hello, everybody. Today, we are going to talk to the man in charge of the world's longest scientific study of happiness. The Harvard study of adult development has been running since 1938 and has shed an enormous amount of light onto what actually works when it comes to human happiness. There are many game-changing learnings here, but there is one clear, screaming, simple headline

which I will let my guest reveal. I will say without a spoiler here that this headline may sound simple, but it's something many of us overlook or downplay because our culture really militates against it at every turn. Good news, though, is that my guest has a lot of practical tips. Robert Waldinger is a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, director of the Harvard study of adult development at Massachusetts General Hospital and co-founder of the Life Spand Research Foundation. He's also a Zen master and teaches meditation in New England and around the world. His TED talk is one of the most viewed of all time with over 43 million views and his

new book, which he co-authored with Mark Scholes, is called The Good Life. In this conversation, we talked about what the Harvard study of adult development is and how it got started. How much of your happiness is really under your control? Why you cannot be happy all the time. The concept of social fitness, how friends can make your problems feel less stressful and why you should, and this is a quote here, never worry alone. How having work friends can make you more productive, what the wiser model is, that's an acronym, WISER, and how it can help us react in a smoother way to

emotionally challenging situations, and why in his words, it is never too late to be happy. We'll get started with Robert Wilder-Graph to this. Before we jump into today's show, many of us wanna live healthier lives, but keep bumping our heads up against the same obstacles over and over again. But what if there was a different way to relate to this gap between what you wanna do and what you actually do?

What if you could find intrinsic motivation for habit change that will make you happier instead of sending you into a shame spiral? Learn how to form healthy habits without kicking your own ass unnecessarily by taking our healthy habits course over on the 10% happier app. It's taught by the Stanford psychologist Kelly McGonical and the great meditation teacher Alexis Santos to access the course. Just download the 10% happier app wherever you get your apps or by visiting 10% calm.

All one word spelled out. Okay. On with the show. Hey, y'all. It's your girl, Kiki Palmer. I'm an actress, singer and entrepreneur on my new podcast, Baby. This is Kiki Palmer. I'm asking friends, family and experts, the questions that are in my head,

like it's only fans only bad. Where did memes come from and where's Tom from my space? Listen to baby. This is Kiki Palmer on Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcast. Yeah. Dr. Robert Waldinger, welcome to the show. Thank you. Glad to be here.

Glad you are here. Let's start with this famous study at Harvard. Can you give us the basics? Sure. This is, as far as we know, the longest study of the same people that's ever been done. Started with a group of teenagers in 1938, followed them all the way into old age,

and now we've been studying their children who are mostly baby boomers. And what was the study designed to study? Well, two studies initially. It was a study of Harvard College undergrads, sophomores, who were thought by their deans to be fine, upstanding young men who were likely to develop well into young adults. Because if you want to study normal adult development, you study all white men from Harvard, right? I mean, that's the it is the most politically incorrect sample you could possibly have.

And we're constantly trying to explain to the federal government why they should still fund us. And then the other study was a study of boys from Boston's not just poorest neighborhoods, but the most troubled families. And it was a study of how some children who should have become juvenile delinquents did not become juvenile delinquents stayed out of trouble and studying their families and their development to try to understand what promoted health even when you were born with two strikes against you. And what promoted health even when you were born with two strikes against you? So the population of the study now consists of a may launch of these two groups. Exactly.

And their spouses and their children. If memory serves, John F. Kennedy was on the privilege and end of the spectrum in this population pool. He was and Ben Bradley, editor of the Washington Post, yeah. As you know, because we talked about it before we started rolling, grew up in the Boston area, and my grandfather gave me a book in the 90s, I think, called Adaptation to Life, which was a sort of a based on their findings of this study. I don't remember what the headline was, but this all sound familiar to you.

Well, it's totally familiar. It was my predecessor, George Valiant. He was the third director of the study. I'm the fourth. And he wrote a book that was a really important book about how people adapt to all of life's challenges as they go through early and mid-adultoid. I remember something about the word sublimation. I don't even know if I could define that word, maybe you can, but I remember that being an important part of the book. Yeah, sublimation is channeling energy that might be a problem socially into socially acceptable outlets. So think about the football player who can channel all that aggression into something that's socially sanctioned and maybe even highly paid. Think about the surgeon, you know, the act of like taking a knife and cutting into people day after day is a socially sanctioned endeavor when you sublimate that energy in surgery. So I think the point that Valiant was trying to make was that the folks who adapted well to life sublimated any

difficult or challenging energies into something positive. Yes, at least express the energies in socially acceptable ways. So, now we're further along. You're the fourth director of the study. You've just written a book about the findings and how we can apply them to our own lives. Let's start with a former here, the findings. How would you discuss and you can discuss it at length if you would like, what are the main findings of this study that's been running since 1938?

Two huge findings. One, will not surprise you or your listeners that if we take care of our health, if we take care of our bodies, it pays us back, that we live longer, we stay healthier longer. So that means exercising, not smoking, not abusing alcohol or drugs, getting the health care that we need, all that good stuff that your grandmother would tell you. But the finding that we did not expect began to emerge in the 1980s and keeps emerging, which is that the

people who were not just happiest but stayed healthiest and lived longer were the people who had warmer connections with other people. And at first we didn't believe our data because we thought, okay, yeah, the mind and body are connected, but really, I mean, is it really as powerful as our data suggests? And then other studies began to find the same thing. And what happens is when other studies point in the same direction, we have more confidence in our own findings. And that's what happened. That really, the people who were who were more connected throughout their week with other people. And the people who had warmer relationships were less likely to develop heart disease,

or type two diabetes, or arthritis. And we have spent the last 10 to 15 years trying to study how that happens, like how could warm relationships get into our bodies and actually change our physiology? And we're learning about that. What are you learning? Because I'm curious. Yeah, we're learning about stress. So one of the things we've come to understand

is that relationships are what we call emotion regulators. What I mean by that is that if you have something upsetting happen in your day, like you start ruminating about it, you're bothered about it, you can literally feel your body change. You can feel yourself going to fight or flight mode. Like heart rate goes up, a lot of bodily changes. And we're meant to return to equilibrium. And if you go home at the end of the day and you've got somebody at home or somebody you can call on the phone who's a good listener, you can tell them about your awful day and you can literally feel your body calm down going back to equilibrium. What if you don't have anybody you can do that with?

What if you're isolated? What if you don't have anybody you can do that with what if you're isolated what if you're lonely What we find is that that is the link to chronic Stress chronic inflammation higher levels of circulating stress hormones So that's the best evidence we have so far and they are doing a lot of Genetic studies epigenetic studies to understand how this is built in the body and how it's shaped by our stressful experiences and our helpful connections with other people that help us calm down.

So stress kills and warm relationships can help us navigate the life's ups and downs more effectively. And so that is having a direct bearing in your study findings and the findings of similar studies on stress-related conditions like heart disease. Is it having a bearing on say cancer? Some studies suggest it is. I think there are other studies that call that into question

so that the danger is that we can imagine that cancer is under our control. And if we're just chill enough, cancer will go away. We know that's not the truth. So there's really no clear evidence that you can either prevent or cure cancer by means of how you handle your stress. Never the less stress reduction does seem to contribute to resilience in the face of

that kind of health challenge. So it might not prevent you from getting cancer, but it might help you manage the treatment more effectively and perhaps that would feed into odds of recovery. Yes, and there have been some studies, but the results are mixed about the odds of recovery? Yes, and there have been some studies, but the the results are mixed about the odds of recovery and how much that's influenced by stress management. Bottom line is managing stress is almost always a good thing, even if it's just for your momentary well-being, and it could be for your long-term health when you're facing something like cancer. I think I know the answer to this question, but I'm going to give you a chance to answer it better than I would. What is it about the human animal that makes relationships so important for our health? We think that we evolved to be social. That basically evolution is all about survival,

right? It's about passing on our genes and keeping our species going. So the question is how do you best keep the species going? And one of the things that is pretty clear is that we are much better at surviving the dangers out there in the world in groups that we can help each other. We can manage dangers better. We can fight off challenges more effectively if we're in groups. And so that's why we think that we evolved in this way to yearn for tribe formation. And if you think about it, exile was the most terrible punishment you could have in ancient societies. And it wasn't just because you'd be lonely, it was because you were much more likely to die if you got exiled from your tribe. likely to die if you got exiled from your tribe. Yeah, and this is why solitary confinement is inhumane.

John McCain now deceased US Senator POW during Vietnam said, the worst thing that happened to him while he was a prisoner of war four years was not the beatings, not the torture, not the big way from home. It was solitary. Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. That this drive for connection is so powerful. I like what you said about exile.

Previous guests have described what loneliness does to the body, and you might want to say a few words about it too, but just to tee you up, it's a real danger to your health. And that speaks, I'm stealing this from somebody else. It speaks to the fact that as you said before, a lonely human on the savanna in evolutionary times was likely a dead human. And so we have a physiological reaction. At least it seems that that's at least partly an explanation. So please take my amateurish ramblings and hone them into something more bonaafide. You're right on target. I mean, we know, for example, that sleep is lighter and more easily disrupted when we feel lonely or when we're unexpectedly alone. Because if we think about it, that kind of vigilance, if you're all by yourself, is necessary, particularly if you're out on the Savannah, right?

There's no one else to stand guard. And so we believe that these are really Anciently evolved patterns of brain behavior. And that's why loneliness continues to have this kind of abiding Wearing away effects on body systems and on the brain. So relationships are incredibly important for our mental health and our physical health. And yet I don't think most people who are trying to get happier, either consciously or subconsciously, pick relationships as the starting point. I think they try to lose some weight. They maybe try to tweak their sleep. They do some meditation, but very few of us

when we decide to get happier, make a hard run at our relationships. Why is that? I think it has to do with all the messages we get all day long from the culture. Think about all the subliminal and overt messages. If you buy this car, you're going to be more interesting to the opposite sex. If you use this face cream, you're never going to look old. If you serve this pasta, your family is always going to have joyous family dinners. I mean, these messages are just there all the time. And so we get the impression that you need these material things, you need money to buy material

things, you need fame in order to feel like you're having a good life. And of course, we know it's just not true, but the messages come at us all day long. And social media seems to have heightened this. I mean, if you look at somebody's Instagram feed, what do we, what do we put out there for each other? We curate our lives. I don't post those pictures of me waking up in the morning feeling lousy, feeling kind of depressed. I post the beautiful meal I'm about to dig into or this lovely scene I'm in on vacation, right? And yes, we know that this goes on, but it can leave most of us looking at other people's

social media posts and saying, I'm missing out. Everybody else has a better life than I do. I've said this for sure I'm being repetitive, but by any standard, current or historical, I have an extraordinary life. And yet when I look at Instagram, I feel like shit. I feel like shit and of all people who should ever feel like shit, I am very low on that list because I've been so lucky

and it the power of social comparison is that insidious. Yes, and they've done good research studies that show that the more often someone compares themselves to others during a given day, the less happy they are. And so we are on a spectrum of how often we compare ourselves, but believe me, we all do it. And unfortunately, social media begs us to keep comparing. If you're having this problem and I'm having

this problem, what if you're a young teenager trying to figure out what life is supposed to be about and trying to figure out who you are? They are so vulnerable to depression and anxiety because of the doom scrolling that goes on on social media. Yeah, well, doom scrolling in my mind usually speaks to just getting a ton of bad news, but it's both the doom that you can invite on social media and the social comparison. That seems like a noxious pairing. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Well, that's the other thing that the doom in terms of social divisions and acrimony is the opposite of what we're looking at as contributing to health, right?

So the things that make us more afraid that divide us from each other are exactly the recipe for making our health and happiness worse. And here we are doing it non-stop. Okay, so I suspect everybody's sold by this point in the interview. Yeah, right. Sorry about that. No, no, no, no, apology. You should be doing a victory lap because this is an incredibly important message and it's evidence based.

So what do we do about it? You have this term social fitness. What does that mean? We think of it as analogous to physical fitness. So we know that we need to take care of our bodies. And like if I go to the gym today, I don't come home and say, great, done that. Don't ever have to do it again, right? We think of it as an ongoing practice. I think most of us think of our relationships as just kind of there, not needing to be actively

maintained. My good friends will always be my good friends. Those old friends, they'll always be there. But what we notice when we actually studied this is that that isn't the case, that friendships wane. And it's not because there's anything wrong, not because there's any conflict, it's because people's lives cause them to just drift away.

And so what we're trying to think about is this idea of social fitness being a well-being practice where you keep making small choices day to day, week to week to maintain those relationships. So I'll give you an example. Like I sit there on a Saturday afternoon and I've got a ton of email or I could be editing some scientific paper. And I can either do that, which is always there for me or I could reach out to my friend

and say, you know, I haven't seen you in a while. Let's go take a walk. And what my own study has made me start doing is more of the reaching out to friends, being really proactive in a way that I didn't used to be. There are so many ways to integrate this knowledge into our lives. I mean, just one tiny example from this morning

because I too am obsessed with productivity. I work at home and so I get up and my most productive hours are right first thing in the morning, but I'm traveling tonight. So I'm not gonna see my son for a couple of nights, actually. And so I was hanging out with him for a little bit and I was about to get up and go back to the office and I looked to my little home office and I looked at the clock and I said, oh, he's going to be leaving for school in 15 minutes.

I won't see him for a few days, even though this is the most productive time of the day for me. I'm going to sit here with him with no agenda. And it was a little counter intuitive given by habits, but it's governed by the insights from your study. Oh, and I want to totally riff on that because when our participants in the study were in their 80s, we asked them to look back on what they regretted the most and many of them said they regretted spending too much time at work and not enough time with the people they loved that you know that old saying on their deathbed nobody ever wished they'd spent more time at the office. you to make that small choice right then just to hang out with your son instead of use those productive moments right to achieve more in your work life. That's the kind of decision I'm talking

about. Are any of the initial study participants still alive? Yes. Less than 40 out of an original 724. They're all in their late 90s, a few over age 100. Wow. But of course, the vast majority have passed away. Let's keep talking about how we can operationalize the wisdom of the study into our lives. You may be familiar with her work, but Barbara Fredrickson, great researcher, came on the show. She wrote a book called Love 2.0 and she talked about many things, but one of her big points, I'm gonna probably get this term wrong, but it's something like the importance

of the micro interactions we have throughout the day with baristas, people were passing out the street, people were passing at the office, tradesmen and women who may come through your house to fix something. Her argument is that, and it's not based on evidence, is that if you compare attention to those relationships, fleeting

as though they may be, that will up your happiness. That's what we find. And it's something we don't think is going to make us happy. There's a cool study that you may know about. But some researchers assigned people who are about to go on the subway, a a task either take your subway ride doing what you normally do Look at your phone listen to music whatever you do keep to yourself or Talk to a stranger and they asked people how much do you think you're going to enjoy this and the people who were assigned to talk to a stranger said

I'm not going to enjoy this so much When they were done, they asked everybody, how much did you enjoy that subway ride? The people who talked to a stranger were way happier on average than the people who did what they normally do, kept to themselves. And so it's an amplification of what Barbara Fredrickson studies, which is that this idea that these small connections make us

happier, they energize us, but we imagine we're not going to like it. Coming up, Dr. Waldinger talks about how our friendships can make stressful situations seem less stressful. What the wiser model is, WISER, and how it can help us deal with challenges in our relationships and how we can do our romantic and family relationships better. That's coming up next. Raising kids can be one of the greatest rewards of a parent's life. But come on, someday, parenting is unbearable.

I love my kid, but is a new parenting podcast from Wondry that shares a our freshly honest and insightful take on parenting. Hosted by myself, Megan Galey, Chris Garcia, and Kurt Brown-Oller, we will be your resident not-so-expert experts. Each week we'll share a parenting story that'll have you laughing, nodding, and thinking. Oh yeah, I have absolutely been there. We'll talk about what went right and wrong.

What would we do differently? And the next time you step on yet another stray Lego in the middle of the night, you'll feel less alone. So if you like to laugh with us as we talk about the hardest job in the world, listen to, I love my kid, but wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen ad-free on the Amazon Music or Wondery app. Okay, so relationships are good for us, but some relationships are bad for us. Oh, yeah. So how do we, what's your advice for distinguishing between the two in navigating this

reality? Well, if I had the answer, I would be so famous. I'd win the Nobel Prize. But really, the answer is they take some discernment, right? So how every relationship has difficulty, any relationship of any depth, right? And any length is gonna have conflict. There's gonna be disagreement, right?

How do we decide which relationships are so aversive that it's time to step away, to give up? And how do we decide which relationships are really worth working out the difficulties? And I would argue that since most relationships of any significance have difficulties, we really wanna try when we can to work out the problems. And what's shown is when we can to work out the problems.

And what's shown is that when you do work out the problems, actually the relationship gets stronger, that said, some relationships are so toxic, emotionally abusive or even physically abusive, that when you can, you want to step away from them. But that takes discernment. It's not as though there's a formula for telling you, okay, this one you to step away from them. But that takes discernment. It's not as though there's a formula for telling you, okay, this one you should step away from, this one you should work out the kinks. And I imagine that you can get help in this discernment process by having other relationships that you can run this problematic relationship by.

Totally, totally. You know, in my, so I'm a psychiatrist and I was taught in my training, the mantra, never worry alone. If you're worried, talk to somebody and I would say that about a really problematic relationship, talk to other people, see if people can give you perspective on it. I do this a lot

because we get lost in our own heads, right? We get lost in our own views. And sometimes someone else can really turn things around for you about a relationship that's troubling you. I could be professional help, too. There's individual psychotherapy. There's couples therapy, family therapy, but often it's just a friend or a relative who can be a wise advisor. On the subject of friendships, you say in the book, and this really jumped out at me, so I'm going to read it to you. And maybe you could riff on it afterwards.

This is the quote, friends, diminish our perception of hardship, making us perceive adverse events as less stressful than we might otherwise see them. And even when we do experience extreme stress, friends can diminish its impact and duration. We feel the stress, but with the help of friends, we're better able to manage it. That's what we find. And there's actually a cool study that we didn't do,

but where they put some people in an MRI scanner and looked at their brains as they were receiving electric shocks. And they found that the people who had someone there to hold their hand experienced the shock as less painful and experienced less anxiety anticipating whether or not they were going to get a shock. It could even be a stranger holding your hand, but the effect was much more powerful. If it was somebody you were close to. And so we know that literally having someone there with you diminishes pain, diminishes

anxiety. I've been struggling with claustrophobia of late or I've always had it, but it's just come back in a very fierce fashion. And to practice exposure therapy, which is what's called for in these situations, they want me to get on elevators and things like that. And it is so much easier with my wife or my son with me. Absolutely. Absolutely.

You know, and isn't it wonderful? I mean, I don't know how old your son is. Seven. But so even with a seven year old, who, what's he going to do except that there's something, right? You know, some catastrophe happens. And yet there he is, this wonderful seven year old, they're calming you down, right? It's just a, it's a demonstrable effect.

We can see it over and over again. Yeah, he holds my hand. And yes, I know there's nothing he could do in an emergency, but him holding my hand just fixes it and really does. Exactly. Exactly. Okay, so let's talk more about social fitness. What is empathetic accuracy? Oh, yeah, empathic accuracy. It's essentially getting what somebody else is feeling. So if you you and I are talking, and I guess what you're feeling without you telling me, like, you know, it seems like you're feeling curious now, or you're feeling happy, or you're feeling annoyed, and I get it right, and you say, yes, you're right about that. That's accurate. And we think about that in terms of trying to understand how well people connect with each

other. And the capacity to read someone else's emotions is one of those facets of emotional intelligence that we talk a lot about that can be cultivated, can be learned, and is really useful. It's useful in our personal lives. It's useful in our work lives. How do you cultivate it? You cultivated by checking it out. So if you were to say to me, Bob, I'm really annoyed with you right now, I would check it

out. Well, Dan, you didn't look like that or I didn't get that. What am I missing here? And so you kind of check out, you ask people to tell you more. So if I'm puzzled by your behavior, just being curious is one way to learn and to get better at reading somebody else's signals, right? So curiosity is probably the first step. But this curiosity, I would imagine, has to be deployed with some discretion given that if you're just asking people how they're feeling all the time and make, may come like, may may come across this kind of anxious, self-absorbed, sonar pangs.

And yeah, and really annoying. Like, I don't want to tell you how I'm feeling right now. Absolutely. So you send out gentle feelers with some people and then other people you know well enough that you can say, you know, tell me what's going on now. I'm not sure I get what's happening right now for you. Is that the only tool for developing empathic accuracy? No, it's not the only tool. I think the other is really reading, doing your best to learn more and more

about someone else's behavior and learning what that, you know, he's connected with. So if I notice that every time you scratch your ear, which I just did. Yeah. And I realize that each time you do that, you know, he's connected with. So if I notice that every time you scratch your ear, which I just did. Yeah. And I realized that each time you do that, you're starting to get annoyed with me, that that that's something I file away, right? And so the next time you scratch your ear, I'm thinking, I wonder if he's getting annoyed now. You know, so you kind of file away both visual cues, as well as the reports that someone might be willing to give you about how they are feeling.

Just to assure you, you're the opposite of annoying. Thank you. But if I'm hearing you correctly, this kind of data gathering, what is reminding me of, and let's see if I can make this connection in a cogent fashion, which reminds me a little of a technique we've talked about on this show many times, reflective listening, which is where you listen carefully to what's being said to you, and then you repeat kind of the bones of the person's message back to them, very briefly and in your own language, to illustrate to them that you've understood, which is good because sometimes you haven't understood,

and it also really gives people this thing we all have this primordial need for, which is to be seen and heard. And where I'm drawing the connection is that the practicing of the skill can really kind of pull your head out of your ass. Like you're less self-absorbed because you are deliberately dedicating bandwidth towards other people.

And I was reminded of that as I was listening to you talk about looking for these little details and the behaviors of others so that you can learn from it. That practice I would imagine would have the same salutary effect of getting you out of your own spitting stories. Yes. And getting you out of your own spitting stories is key. And think about how much we spend our time listening to another person, but really just thinking of the next thing we want to say. Right. And so, and of course, we're doing this back and forth now, which may involve some of

that. But, but if you can really be curious about this other person, you are getting outside of what David Foster Wallace used to call our own skull sized kingdoms, you get outside of the self centered me and really get curious. The other thing is we all know what it's like when somebody is interested in us. It feels great. So when somebody really wants to know what you're thinking and feeling, most of the time it feels really good unless you want them to back off, but most of the time, especially with people we're trying to get to know, it can feel

like genuine interest that's energizing to the other person. I've been working on a book for many years that my poor listeners of the show have from me, Yammer, on about at length, I won't do it at length right now just to say that I briefly entertain the notion of calling the book Escape from the Skullsize Kingdom because I love that term so much, but it doesn't roll off the tongue. But it's so right. It's so right on because I'm so often locked in my own Skullsize Kingdom in my splendid isolation. Not so splendid, but yes. So splendid. Totally relate. So what is, again, continuing with this theme of social fitness here, what is the wiser

model? That's an acronym, W-I-S-E-R. What is that model? It was originally developed by a psychologist named Kenneth Dodge and he was trying to see if he could find a way to teach kids to get better at dealing with puzzling situations like on the playground. You know, a kid does something. You don't understand what they're doing.

Often, if you think about it, we fill in blanks when somebody does something and we don't understand what it means. So I'll give you an example. Like my boss sends me an email saying, I need to talk to you right away. And that's all it says, right? But I can start making up stories. Oh my gosh.

He's going to fire me. I've done something wrong. He's going to ask me to do something I really don't want to do. I mean, I can spin out doom and gloom scenarios, right? And what Ken Dodge found was that kids would do this. You know, a kid might throw the ball a little too hard at them on the playground, and they might fill in the blank about why the kid did that. And so what the wiser model does is it's just a way to slow down the interpreting of what's

going on in your world. So when you have a challenging situation, it's an acronym and you start with W, you start with wash. So first of all, look, look at what's happened. So I got this email from my boss. So what are the details? Well, I got it at 10 in the morning. I didn't get it at 2 in the morning.

He often sends me emails saying, I need to talk to you. Okay. No alarm bells going off yet. So you emails saying, I need to talk to you. Okay, no alarm bills going off yet. So you collect data, okay, you see, okay, what are all the circumstances around this situation where I'm starting to make up stories? And then interpret. So you assess, okay, what's the most likely scenario here? And I stop and think, okay, the most likely scenario is that he's not going to fire me. It's that he had an idea and he wants to talk to me about it. So watch, interpret, select, and you select your option. So my option could be to tell my boss, I can't meet with you. I'm sorry. You could do that. It could be just not to answer the email. That would

be another option or it could be to send them a note saying, yeah, when's good for you, right? So you have these options and you select which option you want to use and then you do it. You engage. That's the E of Wizer. And then you see how it worked, right? So that's the reflect.

You look back and say, was that a good way to handle it? So when I decided I just wasn't going to answer my boss's email, that didn't work out so well. So what we want to do is we want to be able to circle back and learn from how we handle situations. But the first step probably of the wiser model is really to find a way to slow everything down, get out of our heads, and get out of the stories we start making up about what's going on to fill in the blank and just watch, interpret, select, engage, and then reflect. How often are you putting this to work in your own life and how often would you recommend

we do it? I would do it when you can. And the first step is simply to buy time. So one of my friends is to say, I really need a button on my email that says, do not send instead of the send button. Right? You know, I get an email, it makes me really mad and I write this angry email and then I need to have the do not send button to push.

So what I would recommend is that we start just when you can by buying time. So sometimes you can't, Sometimes you just got to react. And then you take your best shot and you do what you can. But if you can buy time, think, okay, I don't have to answer this now. I don't have to decide now. Let me sleep on it. Let me see how it looks in the morning. Let me put some distance. Let me have time to talk to someone else about it. Okay. So I think that the first question is, can I postpone my response? Annie, if so, how do I handle that? How do I postpone it? And what can I do in the interim to set myself up for success?

I could benefit from this practice. You talk at length in the book about how to do romantic relationships better and the role of emotions within romantic relationships. What have you learned on that score? Well, we learned that first of all, romantic relationships are never always smooth, right? There's always conflict. They're always ups and downs, both in how satisfied we are in the relationship and in whether we're pretty good with each other or whether we're having arguments, that changes as relationships go on. That's to be expected. That doesn't mean there's something wrong with the relationship. And so the first thing is to go in with reasonable expectations that there are going to be conflicts that my partner can't provide everything I want.

We sometimes have this notion that, well, if I'm in a good relationship, it should provide everything fun and sex and emotional support and material support and all that stuff. No single relationship can give us everything. And I think that when we go in with that expectation, we are more flexible when we realize that there are limitations to what an intimate partnership can do for

us. And so I think trying to keep our expectations reasonable and understand that the relationship is going to change. So if you think about it, think about how much you've changed in the years you've been with your partner. Think about how much you've changed. A lot. Yeah, right? So you didn't start out saying, I'm going to get together with you

and we're going to be the same forever and ever, right? You know, and your partner didn't do that either. So I think what the other thing we have to remember is that when we're in an intimate relationship, it's two people who are in constant motion that change is constant and that that's okay, and that the aim is to grow together and not to grow apart. I think that's an extremely wise strategy. Have you learned anything on a more tactical day to day level on ways to make our

romantic relationships more smooth that the ups and downs are navigated in a more supple fashion? Would you recommend couples counseling? What's on the action plan? Couples counseling can really be helpful. I would say that if a couple starts to feel stuck, we're stuck in the same patterns of, you know, the same arguments that don't go anywhere and really wear us down. And that if you start to feel that that bedrock, a goodwill, is wearing away, that that's a time to think about couples work because couples work can be so helpful to have a third party there. And so I would say yes, do that if you're feeling like, gosh, the good stuff is kind of ebbing away in our relationship.

And let's see if we can get unstuck here. But other than that, there's a lot that couples can do on their own. In terms of, again, bringing curiosity, bringing flexibility, remembering that nothing stays the same. I mean, you and I are meditators. All you have to do is sit on a cushion for 10 minutes and you realize nothing ever stays the same. Everything's constantly changing. So you have this argument with your partner and you say, Oh, God, my relationship is terrible and it's always going to be like this because feelings feel like they're forever.

And then what we know is that everything passes. And so the first thing that's And it's always going to be like this because feelings feel like they're forever. And then what we know is that everything passes. And so the first thing that's useful to remember when we're having a hard time with our partner is just that it's not always going to feel like this. So give things time to ebb and flow and shift. In your view, and I know you became a Zen practitioner in midlife, and maybe there's not an evidence base for this, but even if there's not, what's your intuition about the impact meditation can have on the kind of social fitness you're encouraging us to work on as a way to live happier

and longer lives. For me, meditation really brings compassion. Like when I look at the mess that's inside me, you know, my mind and all the junk that comes up and all the trivial petty stuff I worry about, I begin to realize, oh God, everybody's doing this. And so I begin to have more compassion for other people as I begin to have some compassion for myself. And that can go a long way, I find, in helping me be more generous toward other people, kinder toward other people, giving people more of the benefit of the doubt. And so I have found that meditation has made me

kinder, gentler, and less prone to believe my own stories about life and other people and myself. I imagine it could supercharge the wiser model. Yeah, it does. You also talked about family relationships. What have you learned there? Well, again, that idea of constant change, we've found a very helpful framework. Because one of the issues for families is we know each other, you know, often we know each other from the time we're tiny, right? So you knew your siblings or your parents knew you as some little kid. So my 30-year-old son is about to go out the door and I find this up wanted to ask him,

don't you want a warmer coat? And then I have to stop and think, wait a minute, he's not six years old. He'll manage with whatever kind of coat he chooses, right? He's 30 years old. What I notice is that my own sense of who he is doesn't always shift with time. We see this with siblings where an older sibling was always the bossy older brother or older sister and the younger ones are resentful we all change and in fact yeah This person could still be bossy, but often they've moved on and we might want to move on too

so we all want to keep looking closely at each other right to see okay Who are you now and? closely at each other, right? To see, okay, who are you now? And for this, I go back to actually one of my meditation teachers who gave me an instruction that I found very helpful with family members, which is, with this person who I feel I know everything about and I know so well, what's here right now

that I haven't noticed before? And if you can just set yourself that exercise with the person you think you've known forever and always know, that can be really helpful in making you more curious again and being more open to somebody showing up differently than they did 10 years ago. I like that. I'm not an expert in Zen at all, but to the extent that I know anything, there seems to be a large emphasis on freshness, spontaneity, beginner's mind, not getting stuck in pattern recognition in such a way that you can't see what's actually here right now.

Exactly. There was a great quote by Suzuki Rochi, who was a prominent Zen teacher in the 60s and 70s. He said, in the beginner's mind, there are many possibilities in the expert's mind. There are few, you know, that we get so sure of ourselves, and I can be guilty of this for sure. We get so sure of ourselves that we stop being open to surprise and all the richness of stuff we haven't encountered yet. Coming up, Robert talks about why you should have a best friend at work, how much of our

happiness is under our control, actually, and why it's never too late to be happy. Let's talk about another area that you write about in your book where relationships can be really impactful, which is work. I believe you argue that paying attention to our work relationships can actually boost our productivity, which may be counterintuitive because you might think, and I've been guilty of this kind of thinking, chitchat at the office is taken away from my productivity. Yes. Well, the Gallup organization did a survey of 15 million workers, 15 million. And they asked a question, do you have a best friend at work? And what they meant by that was, is there somebody at work who you can talk to about your life, your personal life, right?

Only three out of ten workers had a best friend at work, but those three out of ten were more engaged, more productive. They were less likely to leave their jobs because their jobs weren't as interchangeable anymore because they had a friend there who they look forward to seeing every day and talking to. And so the problem of loneliness at work has come to be not just a personal problem, but an economic problem, a problem of productivity because lonely people are seven times more likely to be disengaged to be phoning it in at work. And so what we want to do is change that sense among leaders in workplaces that,

no, no, no, it's a distraction. Don't let people socialize. Turns out to be just the opposite. And yet, should leaders be expected to take responsibility for the interior lives of their employees? No, we can't. I mean, we can't take responsibility for anybody's interior life, right? But leaders can set an example and can create structures to

make this happen. So, first of all, in that Gallup survey, one third of C E O's said they were lonely at work. And one of the things we know is that you can create structures so that people share more. Vivek Murthy, our surgeon general, has a staff meeting every week where, for the first five minutes, one person on the team

just talks about something in their life that people may not know about. You know, a hobby or something they like to do or, you know, just something about themselves. People love that meeting and they look forward to that part of the meeting. And so it is possible to create little places where we get to know each other. But they can spend on the show and we'll put some links to his prior visits. There's been at least one. You conclude the book on a very upbeat note, which is that it's never too late to be happy.

Can you say more about what you mean by that? Yeah, I've got data to prove it. So, and there's some stories in the book, as you know, that the stories are real stories about the real people. We've disguised the names to make sure that confidentiality is not breached. And some of those stories are stories of people who thought, yeah, my life is really not very good and I'm not good at relationships. And it has turned around for them in their 60s or in their 70s. We have a story of one man who discovered a community at his gym for the first time in

his 60s and became a much more socially engaged and much happier person. So the message really from our data is that if you think it's too late for you, think again, because it doesn't have to be. Two stories I can name names just to support your point. First, my grandfather, the guy who gave me the adaptation to lifebook back in the 90s, was a curmudgeonly sour, pessimistic, defensive, unpleasant guy in many, many ways for much of his life.

He was also really smart and had lots of positive points, but he was a difficult dude. Yeah. Until his 80s, but he was a difficult dude. Yeah. Until his 80s, when he got a computer, I remember I was there the day one of his kids gave a computer to my grandfather's wife, my grandmother, who didn't want it, and my grandfather took it and started emailing all of his grandchildren. And then he got on Twitter and he spent his 80s all the way up until he died one day of

a stroke in his garden at age 90, very happy and transformed person. His daughter, my mom, amazing person, trailblazing academic physician, but also a bit of a, you know, not the most social person now lives in an assisted living facility and she's basically the mayor of the place. She's involved in every social activity. Wow. And it's incredible to see it. She told me a while ago that she was in one of the happiest periods of her life. So just to support your point, it is never too late to get your

act together in this regard. It is never too late. And the other thing is that we get happier as we get older. So as a species, literally our moods get happier from about midlife onward. And that's another sort of flag that you can become a more upbeat outgoing person as you age. Why do you think evolution would design us that way? Oh, that's a good question. They do think that this comes about in part because of the sense of limited time

that we start to get in our like mid 40s, literally. You start to get this vague awareness of, oh, this isn't a dress rehearsal. This really is finite. And I'm not gonna be the exception. I am gonna die. Time is short. But rather than being depressing, it seems that it makes us more aware of savoring the moment of doing

more of what we really care about. And to your question, why would evolution do this for us? I don't know. First of all, we weren't meant to live as long as we're living. Right. But it's also possible that the function of the grandfatherly, grandmotherly people is to spread more of this kind of upbeat wisdom of, you know, don't sweat the small stuff

that we can, you know, maybe not your grandfather who was kind of a curmudgeon, but that many grandparents offer that kind of broader, longer-term perspective and unconditional love to grandkids, that parents can't do because they're so hassled and they're still worried about being good parents and all that stuff. And so maybe there is a kind of wise elder role that works well for societies and that societies that have those wise elders as part of them might be societies that thrive more. I mean, this is me completely making it up, but that's one theory about why we might have evolved this way.

I believe we had a guest on the show whose name is evading me right now, who's looked at this very question and his thesis is memory serves remarkably similar to yours. And just to say in defense of my grandfather, Robert Johnson, in his 80s, he did distribute lots of grandfatherly advice and good vibes. A few other questions, you raised the question of how much of our happiness is under our control. What's the answer? the question of how much of our happiness is under our control. What's the answer? There's a psychologist, Sonia Lubamirsky, who says, she's been on the show. Oh, she has. Okay. So you know, Sonia estimates that 40% of our happiness is under our control, that about 40% is genetics, about 20% is life circumstance, and about 40% is under our control. And 40% can sound like a lot or a little depending,

but from my viewpoint as a scientist, 40%'s a lot. You can do a lot with 40%. Another interesting question you raise is, what we get wrong about achievement? So what we get wrong is that it's gonna make us completely happy that it's all we're gonna need. So achievement is satisfying. I mean, if you think about it, you know,

you've done stuff I expect that you're proud of and that you're glad you did, right? So there's real satisfaction there. The problem is when we substitute achievement for the other forms of satisfaction that we need to get through life, like warm connections, like feeling loved, and feeling like we can give love

and give of ourselves to other people. We need that stuff. If we simply say, well, I just need to win this award, I just need to win the Nobel Prize, often that leads us to a place where we turn around and feel empty, right? And say that just didn't do it for me. So that the fantasy that reaching

some goal, some achievement goal is going to finally get us to the place where we feel fulfilled, that's a fallacy. And it's worth noting so that people don't end up as the kind of deeply depressed Nobel Prize winner of which there have been a number. I'm sure. What's the first step somebody can take if they want to live a good life? Invest in your relationships, really. Like, just say, okay, what would I like? You know, where am I wanting some more of some kind of emotional connection or physical connection or fun connection?

And how could I work on having more of that? How could I work on some relationships? What we find is that it's probably the best long-term investment we can make in well-being. One of the gnarlier aspects of loneliness, the reason why it's such quicksand is that as I understand it from my previous interview with Vivek Marthy is that it can make you, when you're lonely, you're less social, less trusting, less pleasant. And so the catch 22 is you're, if you're lonely, you need other people, but it's harder to get other people to want to be around you. Yes. Because what we know from research is that lonely people can accidentally give off a vibe that says, don't come near me. So it is a difficult conundrum and Vivek is right about

that. And so then the question is, what can we do? Well, one thing is they've actually developed forms of therapy, like cognitive behavior therapy for lonely people, to help them over then the question is, what can we do? Well, one thing is they've actually developed forms of therapy, like cognitive behavior therapy for lonely people to help them overcome some of the hurdles of reaching out and being more interactive. The other thing that, actually I think it was Sir John Templeton, but I'm not sure I've got this right, but someone said, if you are lonely, the cure is to work with lonely people. In other words, find people who are themselves

feeling isolated or cut off and offer yourself, offer your help, offer something you know how to do. I mean, self, for example, I mean, tutor English as a second language. Tutor your native language to people who want that skill. There's so many ways that we can have things to offer that might not be heavy lifting for us, but might allow us to connect with other people even when we're shy and even when we're worried about being rejected about people not wanting us.

and we're worried about being rejected about people not wanting us. Is it true that service volunteer work has many, many psychological and physiological benefits? Absolutely, for all of us. For all of us. We know that people who invest in things beyond the self, you know, as we were talking about, that that has huge benefits for well-being,

that we know that people who have a purpose beyond the self, and purpose just meaning this is why I get up in the morning these days, that those people live longer, they stay healthier and they live longer, then people who don't have that. So they're huge benefits. I'm also, I'm going to try to out a quote from the Dalai Lama here. He said, even the wise selfish person takes care of other people. Because even if you're the most selfish person in the world, what goes around comes around. And what you learn is that when you give of yourself to others, you get stuff back.

The first time I ever interviewed the Dalai Lama, he used that term, wise selfishness with me. And it was prior exhortations to like be a good person and be nice all kind of landed to me as the stuff of throw pillows and hashtags. And that really, that really landed as, yeah, yeah, do selfishness right? Exactly, exactly, yeah.

I mean, that man has a lot of wisdom. Yes. Yes, he does. So in closing, I'm just going to ask two questions. One is, is there something I should have asked but failed to ask? So one, one thing people do ask is, can you be happy all the time? And I, I do want to put it out there because the answer is absolutely not. Sometimes I know I can give off this vibe that looks like, oh, I must be happy all the time. So not the truth, that none of us is happy all the time. And that that's important again because we can have the fantasy, the mistaken fantasy, that if you just do the right stuff, you'll be happy all the time. That is not the truth of anybody's life. We all suffer, we all have periods of difficulty. And there's one more thing I'd love to talk about, which is, do you need a lot of friends?

What about introverts? And I just want to name that introverts are totally healthy, normal people. Introverts don't need a lot of people. They need people, but they might need one close friend or two relationships that introverts are often people who find being with lots of people exhausting. And we're all usually on a spectrum somewhere between introversion and extroversion. But we don't want to come away with the message that, well, you just need to be a party animal and that's the key to happiness. Not at all. That you need to check in and see what's energizing for you and what's draining.

And if just one or two good relationships gives you the most energy and sense of well-being, that's all you need. No standard out there that says you need something more. I'm really glad you added those points, especially the latter. I'm clearly an extrovert, so I didn't think to ask that question. You probably just protected me from leaving a lot of frustrated listeners. Let me actually just re-ask the question. Now at this point, are there other points from your book that you would like to make

that I've failed to give you an opportunity to make? You've covered so many subjects. No, I think just that, if you think about it, you and I have never met before, but this has been a really energizing discussion, right? So here I was, not sure what this was going to be like at all, and this has turned out to be a really good experience. I'm going to go away from this call with a hit of energy. And so I just want to say that it's an example of those kind of unexpected things that happened

during your day that can really give you a boost. And what I might say to people is, you know, if you're thinking you wanna reach out to somebody, try it, try it now, you know, you're listening here, just take out your phone or your email or whatever you really do, and think of somebody you wanna connect with and just send them a note and see what you get back

and see the ripples that it creates. My meditation teacher, Joseph Goldstein, often advises people that this is a practice he follows himself that if the thought arises to give something, don't second guess it, just do it. In my case, there are thoughts that arise, oh, this random person randomly popped into my head. Maybe I should send him a text. They don't want to hear from me. It's been too long. It's be so be awkward, whatever. Now I just do it. And it's really, it's great. Exactly. I love that pointer from Joseph Goldstein about generosity. And I think the same goes for reaching out. If you

think to reach out, do it. It's a form of generosity to that person and to yourself. Yeah, absolutely. Before I let you go, can you please shamelessly promote your book and anything else you've put out into the university. You want people to access? I would love to encourage people to buy the book because we put our hearts and soul into it. I wrote it with my colleague and friend, Mark Schultz. It's called The Good Life. It's just been published.

It's available. We hope everywhere. And we hope that it prompts more of the kinds of discussions you and I are having. And ideally sets people up to take this more active stance in making their relationships better. So thank you for letting me come and talk about it. Thanks for coming on.

This is fantastic. Really appreciate it. This was really fun, Dan. This was a pleasure. Thank you. Thanks again to Dr. Waldinger. Go check out his book. I should also say he did a special New Year's challenge with our friends over at the New

York Times Well Desk. You can go take that challenge right now. You can find it at nytimes.com slash well challenge 2023. In case you don't have a pen, we're going to put the link in the show notes. Go check it out. And thanks as well to everybody who works so hard on this show. 10% happier is produced by Justin David DJ Cashmere, Gabrielle Zuckerman and Lauren Smith. Our senior producer is Marissa Schneiderman, Kimmy Regler is our managing producer, and our executive producer is Jen Poient, scoring and mixing by Peter Bonaventure of Ultraviolet Audio.

We'll see you on Wednesday for a brand new episode. Hey, hey, prime members. You can listen to 10% happier early and ad-free on Amazon Music. Download the Amazon Music app today, or you can listen early and ad-free with Wondery Plus in Apple Podcasts. Before you go, do us a solid and tell us all about yourself by completing a short survey at Wondery.com slash survey. solid and tell us all about yourself by completing a short survey at Wondery.com Slash Survey.