The happiness shortcut that hides in plain sight

Who's in the Video Robert Waldinger Robert Waldinger, MD is a Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, a practicing psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, and a Zen teacher and practitioner.For the last two decades, Waldinger has been the[…] Go to Profile Part of the Series The Big Think Interview Explore series

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Become a Member Login The happiness shortcut that hides in plain sight “Being connected to another person makes us feel safer and keeps our bodies at a kind of physiologic equilibrium that promotes health.” ▸ 17 min — with Robert Waldinger Description Transcript Copy a link to the article entitled http://The%20happiness%20shortcut%20that%20hides%20in%20plain%20sight Share The happiness shortcut that hides in plain sight on Facebook Share The happiness shortcut that hides in plain sight on Twitter (X) Share The happiness shortcut that hides in plain sight on LinkedIn Sign up for Big Think on Substack The most surprising and impactful new stories delivered to your inbox every week, for free. Subscribe

Most of us think happiness is something you achieve: status, money, accomplishment. Robert Waldinger’s work asks a more unsettling question: what if happiness is less about what you get and more about who you keep? 

Drawing on the longest study of adult life ever conducted, Waldinger traces human wellbeing across 8 decades, from the Great Depression to old age, following people from radically different starting points to see what endures.

ROBERT WALDINGER: I started out as an intern in pediatrics and I would see one ear infection after another, and the kids were adorable, but one ear infection is pretty much the same as every other. Whereas when you talk to people about their lives, it's never the same. And I knew that that would keep me interested for my whole career, which it has.

- [Narrator] The secret to happiness.

- I became interested in psychiatry unexpectedly. I had never known a psychiatrist growing up. But when I was in medical school, I found that the way people's minds worked was the most fascinating thing I could possibly study. So I eventually found that there was really nothing else for me in medicine, but doing psychiatry. I am the fourth director of the Harvard Study of Adult Development, and it is the longest study of adult life that's ever been done. We're in our 85th year. It started in 1938 as two studies that weren't even aware of each other. One study started at Harvard Student Health Service with 19-year-old sophomores who were thought by their deans to be fine, upstanding young men. And the other study was a study of juvenile delinquency and it selected boys middle school age from Boston's poorest families, but also the most troubled families, families beset by problems like domestic violence and parental mental illness and physical illness. This study set out to understand what makes people thrive as they grow and develop. And that was unusual because most research that's been done is done on what goes wrong in human development so that we can help people. But this was a study of what goes right, so it was how do kids from disadvantaged families stay on good paths and develop well? And then, of course, the very privileged Harvard group was meant to be a study of normal young adult development. We now know that if you wanna study normal young adult development, you don't just study white men from Harvard, but at that time, that's what they did. We study wellbeing as people go through life, and our big question is, if you could make one choice today to make it likely that you would stay happy and stay healthy throughout your life, what single choice would you make? And most of us think it's something to do with getting rich or achieving a lot, and some people even think they need to become famous to have a happy, healthy life. But our study and many other studies show that the single choice we can make that's most likely to keep us on a good path of wellbeing is to invest in our relationships with other people. The people in our study who had the happiest, warmest relationships were the people who stayed healthy longest and who lived the longest. The Harvard study started in 1938, and it has followed the same people throughout their entire lives, from the time they were teenagers all the way into old age. The study began with 724 young men, and then we brought in most of their wives and eventually most of their children, so that now there are over 2,000 people in these 724 families who we have followed through their entire adult lives. We started collecting information by giving these young men elaborate psychological examinations, also medical examinations. Then we went to their homes, we talked to their parents, and sometimes even their grandparents, and the workers made elaborate notes about what was being served for dinner and what the discipline style was in the family and even what the curtains looked like. And then eventually, as new methods of studying human life came on board, we adopted those methods. So audio taping, videotaping, we now draw blood for DNA, and DNA wasn't even imagined in 1938 when the study began. We've put many of our people into an MRI scanner and watched how their brains light up as we show them different visual images. We bring them into our laboratory and we deliberately stress them out, and then we watch how they recover from stress as one more way of understanding wellbeing. One of the things that is more common now, but was unusual when we started it was combining biological measures and psychological measures and seeing how our biology is influenced by our mental states and vice versa. So it's this combining of mind and body measurement that was relatively new in the last 20 years. The question comes up, how much of our happiness is under our control? And they've actually done some scientific analysis of this. A psychologist named Sonja Lyubomirsky did an analysis in which she estimates that about 50% of our happiness is a kind of biological set point, probably determined by our genes. That has to do with inborn temperament. We all know people who are kind of naturally gloomy and other people who are naturally chipper no matter what's going on. So about half of our happiness is that inborn temperament. And then about 10% she finds is based on our current life circumstances. And then the last 40% is under our control. We can move the needle. We can make ourselves more likely to be happy by building a life that includes the conditions that make for happiness. The questions that we might ask ourselves about our relationships are kind of simple. One is, do I have enough connection in my life or do I even have too much connection? If I'm a shyer person and don't need as many people in my life, so do I have what I need? And each person can check in with themselves about that. Then the question is, do I have relationships that are warm and supportive? And there again, each of us needs to ask that question, do I have people who have my back, who I feel I could call and would be there in an emergency? Because hard times are always coming our way. And then the question is also, what am I getting from relationships? Do I have enough people to have fun with? Do I have enough people who will loan me their tools when I need to fix something in my house, or who will drive me to the doctor when I need a ride? Do I have those kinds of friends? One of the things we know about life is that we all have worries. We all have concerns that come along, worries about children, worries about health, worries about finances. And one of the best teachings I got in my training as a psychiatrist was from one of my mentors who said, "Never worry alone." And this teacher meant that about being worried about a patient who I was treating. But what I've come to understand that it's really good advice for just about everything in life, that if I'm really worried about something and I share it with somebody I trust, it makes all the difference in how much better I feel and how much less alone I feel with my worry. There are so many different things we get from relationships, and so each of us can check in with ourselves about what we have and what we would like a little more of. So we've learned several big lessons about relationships, about good relationships, and one of them is that childhood experience really does matter. What happens to us in childhood sets the stage for what we come to expect from the world, and that's often a good thing if we're raised by people who are warm and caring and reliable. Some people don't have that luck and are raised in environments where they feel like the people who are supposed to take care of aren't trustworthy, can't be relied upon. And so many of those people come into adulthood with the expectation that the world is not a safe place and that people can't be relied on. The other thing we've learned is that adult experience can correct for some of those unfortunate lessons that people learn in childhood. Becoming connected with a good partner, with good friends who you can count on can go a long way to change those gloomy expectations about the world and about relationships, and allow us to realize that yes, we can find people who are good, reliable partners in our relational world. So another lesson that we learn is that all relationships that are important have some disagreements or some difficulties. And that actually, facing those difficulties goes a long way to strengthen relationships much of the time so that if we can work on relationships, that turns out to have great payoff in terms of keeping our connections stronger. What that means is that it's normal to have disagreements, it's normal to have difficulties, and that the more skill we can develop in working through difficulties, the better our social worlds are. One of the biggest lessons we learned from our study is that our connections with other people help us weather the hard times of life and hard times are there in every life. So our original participants were born during the Great Depression and many of the Harvard undergraduates were of an age to go and serve in World War II. And when we asked them, how did you get through these really difficult times? All of them to a person talked about their relationships. Our neighbors shared what little we had during the depression. My fellow soldiers in the trenches were the people who kept me going. The letters that came to me from back home while I was overseas in the war were what sustained me. And so what we find is that these connections turn out to be the best protection against the difficult times that are always coming our way. We are pretty sure that we human beings evolved to be social animals, that in fact, staying together in groups made it more likely that we would survive the dangers that are out there in the world and pass on our genes, which is the goal of evolution. So we evolved to find being together secure and safe and to find being alone a stressor. And what we find is that that is still the case, that people who are more isolated than they want to be are stressed. Loneliness is a big stressor, and we think that that is biologically based as well as emotionally based. The best hypothesis about how relationships get into our bodies and affect our physical health is through stress, that we're having stressful experiences often all day long, and that's normal. And that when we're stressed, the body is meant to go into what we call fight or flight mode, where essentially heart rate goes up, might start to sweat, a variety of changes happen. But then when the stressor is removed, the body is meant to return to equilibrium. What we think happens is that if I have something stressful happen during the day and I can go home and talk to a friend or call someone, I can literally feel my body calm down. If I don't have anyone I can talk to about something that happens in my life that's stressful, we believe what happens is we stay in a kind of low level chronic fight or flight mode. And what that means is that we have higher levels of circulating stress hormones like cortisol. We have higher levels of inflammation going on in the body all the time, and that these changes gradually wear away different body systems, which is how stress and loneliness could make it more likely that we would get coronary artery disease and more likely that we would get type two diabetes or arthritis could affect multiple body systems through this common denominator of chronic stress. Our understanding is that good relationships actually are emotion regulators, that what happens is that good relationships involve the exchange of positive emotion that helps our bodies stay in equilibrium. So in fact, they've put people in MRI scanners and watched what happens to them when they go through a stressful medical procedure, and they find that if they're holding someone's hand, even a stranger, but certainly someone they know, their bodies stay much closer to equilibrium than if they're alone undergoing the same medical procedure. And so what it shows us is that being connected to another person makes us feel safer and keeps our bodies at a kind of physiologic equilibrium that promotes health. A toxic relationship is one where we can't get beyond difficulties, unhappiness, anger. We can't come out the other side to a place where we're okay again with each other. And so a toxic relationship involves unhappiness, even if you're quiet about it. Chronic resentment, often withdrawal, and then active arguing. On the other hand, couples argue all the time without having these detrimental effects. What we've found from our research is that couples can argue often and quite vocally, but if there is a bedrock of affection and respect, those relationships continue to be positive and stable. Research shows us that loneliness is certainly a stressor and that we have increased levels of stress hormones, increased levels of chronic inflammation, but research also shows us that ongoing acrimony in a relationship, constant arguing and unhappiness, is also hazardous to our health for just the same reasons. So there was in fact a study that suggested that staying in a really toxic intimate relationship may be worse than splitting up for that reason because a really difficult acrimonious relationship is that source of chronic stress that keeps us in fight or flight mode most of the time and breaks down our body systems. The research shows that people who have a secure connection with a partner in late life have slower brain decline. In addition, the research shows that people who are lonely in late life have more rapid brain decline. So we know that this same process of increased stress or decreased stress affects how our brains age.

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