The Mindset Mentor - Ep 59 - 75 Year Study on Happiness

Episode Date: January 4, 2016

In this episode I go over a 75 year Harvard study on the keys to human happiness. It is the longest single study on humans ever recorded and has some very interesting keys to living a happy life. Want to learn more about Mindset Mentor+? For nearly nine years, the Mindset Mentor Podcast has guided you through life's ups and downs. Now, you can dive even deeper with Mindset Mentor Plus. Turn every podcast lesson into real-world results with detailed worksheets, journaling prompts, and a supportive community of like-minded people. Enjoy monthly live Q&A sessions with me, and all this for less than a dollar a day. If you’re committed to real, lasting change, this is for you.Join here 👉 www.mindsetmentor.com My first book that I’ve ever written is now available. It’s called LEVEL UP and It’s a step-by-step guide to go from where you are now, to where you want to be as fast as possible.📚If you want to order yours today, you can just head over to robdial.com/bookHere are some useful links for you… If you want access to a multitude of life advice, self development tips, and exclusive content daily that will help you improve your life, then you can follow me around the web at these links here:Instagram TikTokFacebookYoutube

Before we dive into today's episode, if you would like a free copy of our motivational ebook called Hack Your Goals, the Step-by-Step Guide to Achieving Success, go to mwfmotivation.com and download it. It's already been downloaded over a thousand times, so go ahead and get your copy now. All right, I'll get you the podcast right now. Welcome to the MWF Motivation Podcast, which I am proud to say has been rated the number one podcast in iTunes new and noteworthy in six different categories, including self-help and business, and is a podcast designed to help you grow into the best version of yourself in 10 to 20 minutes. Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, we'll take a life topic, break it down, discuss it, and leave you with thoughts to impact your life and mind. My name is Rob Dial, and the podcast

starts now. Welcome to the MWF Motivation Podcast. I am your host, Rob Dial. And if you have not yet done so, please subscribe to us on iTunes, Stitcher, or SoundCloud, however you listen to us. And if you like this episode, I just please ask that you share it with a friend. We are currently over 175,000 downloads in less than four months, and our goal is to get to over a million in 12 months total. So today what I'm going to talk about is something that I actually shared. It's something that I shared on the MWF Motivation Facebook. So if you're not following us on there, you can. I put up a lot of videos. I put up a lot of links. We had almost a thousand people that are actually following on Facebook.

And it was a study that was actually done on happiness. And I'm going to go over what the guy says in the video. It's actually a 75-year Harvard study on the key to health and the key to happiness. And what they did was they said that recent millennial surveys show that the most important life goal for millennials, 80% of them said their most important life goal is to get rich. And 50% of them said their most important life goal is to become famous. And you have to realize, and I understand this completely, we're constantly told that

we need to work harder. We need to achieve more. We need to become better. We need to work and just, you know, just put as much time as we possibly can into work and that will make us happy. But are these really the things that will truly make us happy? So the best part of this story is that this literally follows people through their entire lives,

and Harvard's been doing this for 75 years, and it started with teenagers all the way into their 90s. It went through the longest study of adult lives that has ever been done. And it was 724 men. And they asked them questions about work. They asked them questions about their home lives, about their health. And 60 of these 724 are actually still alive. And so they're still going through this study and still asking them every couple of years, all of these questions, doing interviews with them. And now, because obviously they have kids and they have grandkids, they're now studying over 2000 of these men's children and grandkids as

well. And there were two separate groups. One of them, one of the groups, they were sophomores in college at Harvard and they studied them. And the second group was teenage boys that were from the worst part of Boston in the 1930s. So literally they grew up in all facets of life. And in these interviews, they go over their medical records. They do brain scans. They ask their wives questions about how the relationship is and how this person's doing. And they found that the number one fine to good relationship, or number one fine was actually that to keep us happy and healthier was good relationships. And what they found was this, was that loneliness actually kills. It was a crazy study to watch this entire thing.

So I promise you, if you go onto the Facebook, MWF Motivation Facebook, no spaces on there. It's a good thing to actually watch. It's about a 17 minute video. And it says, loneliness kills that actually people that are more lonely end up dying earlier and have more health problems. And they said, when you have actual good relationships, you're happier, you're healthier, and you actually live longer. And people who are more isolated than they want to be are less happy and their brain function actually stops sooner. And then they also said, it's not just the number of friends that you have, or if you're in a committed relationship, it's the quality of all of your close relationships. So not just your marriage or not just your significant other, whatever it might be,

or not how many friends you have. It's the quality of your close relationships that you have. And they said that high conflict relationships were actually worse than a divorce in most cases. So to stay in a really bad relationship was actually worse than divorce. And they said at age 50, when they went through this, the thing that predicted the future health of somebody, they were able to find out was how their quality relationships were at age 50. The people who had the best relationships at 50 were actually the healthiest people at 80 years old. And people in their 80s with good relationships said the days

when they were in the most physical pain in their 80s, their happiness actually never changed. So their physical pain, everything that was happening with their physical body, their happiness actually never changed if they were in good, close relationships with people. Now, people who are in bad relationships or that were lonely or in no relationships in people. Now, people who are in bad relationships or that were lonely or in no relationships in their 80s, on the days when physical pain was bad, they said that their mental pain actually magnified their physical pain and their mental pain was bad as well. So they weren't happy at all. And then they had physical pain, which actually made them more unhappy in these situations. So what they found out was, was if we're trying to strive to be successful

and trying to strive for money, that's not necessarily going to make happiness. Good relationships actually make us happier. But then they said good relationships actually protect our bodies and protect our brains, make us more healthy, make our brain function better. And they said people that were in good relationships, they feel that they can trust their spouse, they can trust their friends. The people that had those relationships in their 80s, their brain that actually stayed stronger and sharper longer. Their memory stayed sharper. They were able to remember stuff better and they were just much sharper in their eighties. And a perfect example of this,

after I was watching it, I was like, this is a perfect example of my grandparents. My grandfather just turned 95. My grandmother is 92 and they are two of the sharpest people that I know. They remember everything, which is crazy to think about. But then I also know friends, grandparents who were put into a retirement home. And there's also a lot of really good retirement homes where they get a lot of good relationships for being there. But I know friends who have had their grandparents in those situations where they're not good relationships that they build inside of these retirement homes. And you could see their brain function and them just in general, their memories start to fade away by 75, 80 sometimes. So people in bad relationships or that were lonely actually declined quicker than people that were in good

relationships. So the moral of the story and the reason why I wanted to share it with you is because we're all working to become better. We're all working to become successful, but we have to concentrate on relationships as well. So the moral of the story is that good relationships actually create better health, a better brain, and a longer life. People who are the happiest in retirement were those that actively, this is an interesting study that they found, people who were the happiest in retirement when they were starting to retire were those who actively worked to replace their workmates with new playmates after they retired. So what they recommend is start replacing screen time, start replacing all of your TV and your computer and your phone time

and all of those things with people time. Reach out to family members who you haven't spoken to in a few years because what they found was that family feuds take a terrible toll on those who are actually holding the grudges. And I'm going to leave you with a quote and it says more than a century ago, Mark Twain actually had this quote and it says, there isn't time so brief as life for bickerings, There isn't time, so brief as life, for bickerings, apologies, heartburns, callings to account. There's only time for loving, but an instant, so to speak, for that as well. So with that, I will leave you with one thing, and it's the one thing I leave you with at every episode.

Make it your mission to make somebody else's day better. And I hope that you have an amazing day. Well, that's it for today's podcast. If you want the show notes for this episode, they can be found at mwfmotivation.com. Also, if you liked this episode, please spread the love and share it with a friend because it's our mission to help as many people as we can. And to keep in touch, you can follow us on Instagram and Facebook. Both handles are at MWFMotivation with no spaces. Now you know what time it is no finer achievement than doing absolutely nothing holiday, there is no finer achievement than doing absolutely nothing. Nothing on the beach, nothing by the pool, walking kind of nowhere and chatting about nothing. As an Expedia member, you can save up to 30% when you add a hotel to your flight. So you can have a bit more money to go out there with great ambition to do absolutely nothing. Expedia. Made to travel.