Lessons From The World's Longest Happiness Study - Dr Robert Waldinger

what they have discovered now is that social isolation and loneliness are as toxic to our health as smoking half a pack of cigarettes a day or being obese, so this is huge, the health effects are very real, tell me about the origins of this

study

that is currently in charge of the

study

that began in 1938. It is the

longest

study that we know of of the same people going through their entire lives. And it started as two studios that didn't even know each other. One started at Harvard University. 19-year-old students who were chosen by their teachers as excellent and outstanding specimens and it was going to be a study of adolescence moving into adulthood, so of course, if you want to study the normal development of young adults, you study to all the white men at Harvard, right? so Politically Incorrect and then the other study was a study on juvenile delinquency that was started at Harvard Law School by a professor named Sheldon Gluck and his wife Eleanor Gluck.

They were interested in why some children from really disadvantaged backgrounds and troubled homes managed to stay. on good developmental paths and didn't get into trouble, so both studios came together in the 1970s as contrasting groups, one very privileged and one very disadvantaged, and we've followed them, their spouses and now their children for 85 years, they were all men. To begin with, they were all men, now more than half women, why? Because there are children plus spouses who have come forward, yes, and this is only in the United States, only in the United States, right. I mean, some of them live abroad now, but they all started in America.

Do you see any problems with this? This is strange, uh, Western, educated, industrialized, etc., etc., it is totally strange, it is totally that, so what we have done and this is particularly in the book that we just published. We have made sure to only present findings that have been corroborated by other studies around the

world

studies of groups that are not Western-educated white strangers, right, no, we haven't, so people of color, people of ethnic groups and very different cultural backgrounds, so we don't present findings that we think are quite specific to this very limited demographic, yeah, sure, you want them all to be as applicable as possible, yeah, okay, so what are the type of things you ask people?

Oh well, we're studying the big domains of human life well mental health physical health work including promotions layoffs successes failures relationships not just intimate relationships but all kinds of relationships, so we're studying all of that and we're studying, we've studied the same things for 85 years, but then we have used different methods so you know, to be sure, we ask them how happy we are, we ask them many different types of questions, but we also ask other people about them, like spouses, children and friends, we also use others. measures we videotape them talking to their spouses about their biggest worries we take them to our lab and deliberately stress them and then watch how quickly they recover from the stress we put them in MRI scanners we scan their brains and watch how their brains light up when We show them different types of images to see how the brain is interconnected and wired when it looks at happy images and sad images, for example, these are all different ways of trying to get Windows to work on wellness because that's what we're studying. we are studying human prosperous human well-being, you did DNA tests, blood samples, EEG, EKG, all kinds of different health markets, so this is not just self-assessed

happiness

, how much not, at all and, in fact, what I love about this is it's kind of the history of science because you know we're taking blood for DNA and mRNA, and those things weren't even imagined in 1938 when the study started, so what we love is seeing us. same bring new online methods to study the Same thing, weren't there some really stupid questions you asked people, like whether someone is ticklish or not exactly?

We still don't know why they asked are you ticklish, but they did, they must have thought well, we don't leave it at no re we don't repeat the questions we don't see a reason to continue well, okay, then it's gone, no one knows if You are ticklish, and yes, yes, all the best. We could tell if they are ticklish. What if all the most interesting ideas came from tickling correlation? Well, you know, that's actually been one of the interesting things about the digital age: we scan all these paper documents, you know, hundreds of thousands of pieces. of paper, scan them into searchable PDF files and now we can search them.

We didn't even know we asked them if they were ticklish until we had these searchable PDF files and then we started, you know, putting in the term mother and it will pull up every mention of the word mother in a man's file for his entire life or in a woman's file now, so what we have is the ability to find things that we didn't know existed in our database, who is the person or the team that is in charge of extracting this data because it must be a group of incredibly sophisticated data science people who are handling all of this well.

My co-author Mark Schultz is really the most sophisticated data science person I know, thank goodness, I mean, that's him. he's my partner in all of this and Mark Schultz now runs the data science program at Bryn Mawr College. It is a new program and what we need is people who are sophisticated in managing multigenerational data and, in addition, the good thing is that you know when it studies the siblings as we have studied all the children and that includes the siblings and the families themselves , but you can't treat them as separate beings in the

world

. You have to know that brothers are more connected than others.

The data must be capable. to map the interrelationships between people too accurately, so we use something called multilevel modeling, which is a very sophisticated theoretical statistical modeling technique, and thank God I have people who know how to do it because I don't do it. I think it's really cool. I also read about how there is a particular uniqueness between a longitudinal study versus a cross-sectional study; the fact that most studies right now are these kinds of snapshots in time that ask people to relive memories and give themselves a kind of self-assessment based on things that happened in the past, what's the advantage?

What do you have by doing it the way you have longitudinal studies, can you follow people throughout their lives and go back and ask them the same things and take the same measurements over time? The problem with snapshots. is that it can generate false correlations, so if we take a snapshot of a person, a group of 20 years old, a group of today's 40s, a group of today's 60s, we can believe that we see the progression of life from the 20s at 60, but that can get us into trouble. The best illustration of this comes from a joke that's a little particular to the US, but maybe your international audience will understand.

Claude Pepper was a Florida state senator and once joked about it when he looked on. South Florida, which is filled with a lot of younger Cuban Americans and a lot of older Jewish Americans who have retired there, he said when I look at South Florida I would have to believe that you are born Cuban and you die Jewish, right? because if we just take pictures we can imagine that this is how life progresses, that you start as a little Cuban boy and become an old Jew. Well, that's the problem we're facing and that's why longitudinal studies offer a really unique and important perspective on how life progresses.

If you have this huge data set, you have how many people have been included in the entire study. Now, in total, more than two thousand. Okay, you have more than 2,000 people. Millions probably have small bits of data. Oh yes, you've decided to focus this book on

happiness

. Because? You could have done it in approaches to culture. You could have done it in the voting history. You could have made it into anything. Yes, we could have chosen why to choose happiness. Well, we choose happiness from a particular angle and the angle is the role that relationships play.

Human connections influence our lives in both our happiness and our physical health, because what surprised us was certainly that relationships make us happier. Actually, that wasn't that much of a surprise, but we started to discover that the people who stayed healthy longer and who lived longer were the ones who were better connected and more satisfied with their relationships and this started to emerge in the 1980s. We didn't even believe it at first until other studies started finding the same thing because the question How could the quality of my relationships get into my body? How could you predict whether you are likely to have coronary artery disease or arthritis?

How could that be a fact? So we thought this was powerful enough and the effect of good relationships. was powerful enough to want to bring this to the world because it really matters for well-being, so the biggest influence on happiness is relationships. Well, two big influences, one is taking care of your health, so it turns out to be hugely important, it's not. a surprise, um, but you know, not smoking, exercising regularly, eating well, not abusing alcohol or drugs, all of that matters enormously, but we feel like what was neglected in the public debate about wellness was power of relationships, which happen to be so powerful, let me give you an example that what you find now is that social isolation and loneliness are as toxic to our health as smoking half a pack of cigarettes a day or being obese, so this It's huge, the health effects are very real.

There was something? other things that competed with health or relationships in determining happiness in terms of effect size. No, as far as I know, we could set up some analytics that could show us something new, maybe, but those were just the big elephants? in the room, so to speak, and you know that health is a priority, but maybe not when you started this study, but the communication around the wellness industry around food, diet, you know, smoking, just looking at how hard it is to get a pack of cigarettes. and how much less sexy they are than they would have been when this study started, you know, yeah, I'm not a big fan of smoking, okay, so let's reverse what are the biggest misconceptions that people have in your opinion when it comes of what constitutes happiness. life, yes, I'm really glad you asked that because there are a lot of misconceptions, probably the biggest one is that if you do all the right things you can be happy all the time because one of the things that becomes very clear from following these thousands of people is that no one is happy all the time that a happy life does not mean being happy 24/7.

And in some ways that's obvious, but we can sell each other the myth that if we do all the right things we'll be happy no matter what happens. You know, if you think about social media, we now curate our lives for each other in such a way that you could look at someone else's Instagram feed of beautiful beaches, beautiful meals, or happy times with friends and you could imagine, oh, that . person has it all figured out that person is having a good life because I don't know. I don't post pictures of myself waking up in the morning hungover or really confused about my life.

I don't do that well. The problem with this healing that we all do for each other is that it can lead us to feel like we are the only ones for whom life isn't beautiful all the time and that's why I just want to mention that it's a myth that we accidentally sell to each other. others and the media sell it well to us because they want us to buy things and they say you know if you buy this car you will be happier you know if you use this face cream you will look young forever um and that's how we are I constantly get these messages that there is a way to have a non-stop happy life, so I just want to mention that.

The other thing worth saying, I think, is that you don't have to be an extrovert to get these benefits. be quite shy that that's not a problem that what we know is that we all differ in the extent to which we need people and benefit from people that what we believe from our research is that everyone needs someone that they feel that has its own Turn right and that you need a connection that is really strong to feel like the world is a good place for you, but that you may be a shy person who finds a lot of people exhausting and it's perfectly okay not to have a great friend circle. or connections and that's why I want to name that because sometimes when you talk about this topic people can hear it and say well if I'm shy I'm out of luck and that's not true it suggests that introverts in one aspect might actually haveIt's a little easier here because they need to find fewer people in order to achieve the level of social satisfaction they need.

It's an interesting idea. I hadn't thought of it that way. If you need to have four different ones. groups, you have your dance class and your comedy class and your movie night and your game night and everything else, it's actually harder in a sense because you need to be able to recruit all these people, but I guess so. you're predisposed to be the type of person who would go out and not find it difficult, so the point is to balance your predisposition to sociability with the people who are in your life and yeah, and I think what you said is the key, if you're As an extrovert, you find other people energizing, which means it's motivating to go out and find people to be with.

If you're an introvert, you find a lot of other people exhausting, so you're not motivated to go looking for parties. That's my favorite. The definition of introversion and extroversion is the most useful. Do you feel energized by being around people or do you find energized by being alone? It's much more useful than the other definitions of introversion than extroversion, yes, and less pathologizing, you know? We kind of glorify extroversion at least in American culture and, uh, introversion is a perfectly wonderful way to live life, it's just a different way of being, how much of our happiness is genetically predetermined, has anyone actually tried to figure this out? . a psychologist named Sonya lubemiersky and she has calculated that about half, about 50 percent of our well-being is determined genetically and about 10, according to her, is based on our current life situation and then another 40 percent is under our control, it is malleable, we can move. the needle about 40 percent in our happiness level, what does happiness mean?

So we're going to use that word a lot during this conversation in this context. What are you optimizing for? What is the concept of happiness that we are analyzing again? I researched this and it seems that happiness is divided into two large groups one is hedonic well-being comes from hedonism right it's like I'm having fun right now well so I'm having fun having this conversation with you so my hedonic well-being is high, right, um, in a few minutes something really annoying could happen to my hedonic well-being, I could take a nosedive, so there's this other flavor of well-being called demonic well-being, the term comes from, I think, Aristotle's eudemonia and it means the quality of life that It's meaningful, satisfying, right, the best example was given to me by a mother of young children, so she said, you know, I'm reading to my daughter before she goes to bed, I'm trying to get her to go to sleep. and I read the book Goodnight Moon to her seven times and she says mommy reads it to me one more time one more time and I'm exhausted, right?

I've had it or I'm, I'm so exhausted. I'm falling asleep reading this book. Am I having fun reading Goodnight Moon for the eighth time? This is by no means the most meaningful thing I could be doing right now with my life, and that is the difference between hedonic and eudemonic well-being. I have a theory about that, um, how do you say fun or that separation between those two? So let me throw some brother signs back at you. Yeah, I first learned about that difference between let's call it um like pleasure and meaning or happiness and meaning maybe.

Daniel Kahneman and Daniel Gilbert, two great psychologists of the last 50 years. Daniel Kahneman mentioned that he believes a good life is one that, in retrospect, you're glad you lived it, so it's meaningful and, moment to moment, it may not maximize pleasure, but in retrospect. it's one that gives you meaning Daniel Gilbert, on the other hand, said it was much more and at the time eh, a kind of hedonism, not a kind of strippers and cocaine, but a couch and a good cocktail, maybe I have it in my head. The expectation that people should prioritize in their lives about whether or not they are optimizing more for hedonism or more for eudaimonia should be largely influenced by their disposition in the same way as the introversion and extroversion we were talking about, so that you can imagine it.

For me I'm an introspective guy. Rumination. I like to think of myself as part of a larger plan. I reflect on the things that have already happened. I plan for things to come. If I optimize for hedonism, I'll have a good time. a little time reflecting on something that doesn't give me a huge amount of meaning in the moment, whereas if I'm the type of person who makes sacrifices in the now, it makes me feel good in the future, achieves things that I feel I have . a greater contribution to them overall, that's the kind of thing that's going to make me feel good in the long run, so I really think there's kind of a spectrum that we have here where people can optimize for a more hedonistic view or a more demonic, yes, and your propensity to reflect, ruminate and introspect is very important in deciding how you should do this and I have friends who are perfectly fine just chewing a very similar routine, they have the things that bring them pleasure they have golf they have holidays they have walks with your dogs have whatever and they don't need to go through uh maybe such an elaborate life construct to be able to try to generate this meaning because they just don't reflect as much, they don't have the same introspection, whereas I have friends who are even more attuned to the side of introspection that I and can't stand it. giving themselves a day off that they can't stand, so I think a lot of people are optimizing the type of life that they are predisposed to find value in.

I think that's absolutely right and, in fact, you and I are more similar in that sense, you know, I'm also very introspective and sometimes I envy my friends who can go through their lives of golf, tennis and bridge, and yes, why can they? I just do that, there is another flavor of happiness that some researchers at Columbia University have started to find and again what they do is they measure people, and in these three dimensions there is a third and they call it the psychologically rich life, so instead of prioritizing the pleasure I get right now from my golf game or the feeling that I'm doing something meaningful by talking to you on this podcast eudaimonia is psychologically rich life is new Rich experiences from what it might be like to travel to new places There are some people who simply want to spend their entire lives traveling to places they have never been before, not because they build something, not even because it is fun in the moment all the time, but because this novelty and psychological richness is what they crave. and I think One way to think about this is that we all have these Desires in us, but that they are greater or lesser depending on how we are built psychologically, probably even neurologically and physically, you know some people prioritize one over the others.

Why would you write on this curiosity scale? I think I score high on the psychologically rich scale. I think I'm bored. I'm a good initiator of things, but I'm not so good at maintaining them. That's why I like it. You know, it turned out that I was on the path to organizing psychiatry departments like in my field, you know I'm a psychiatrist like you, you would run a psychiatry department in a hospital and I was on that path and I realized. Oh my god, I would hate this. You know, I sat in these meetings with all these people in suits, um, and they were talking about issues that I know were really important, but I just didn't care about insurance regulations and things like. that and then I realized that I'm just not going to be one of those people that for me I need some stimulation and that's actually why I like doing this with you because it's very stimulating for me, it's not just that I'm having a good time is stimulating because you have different points of view than I have heard before on some of these topics.

You ask me questions I hadn't thought about before. that's um, that cheers me up. I think it's the perfect way. If you didn't have any kind of routine, life would be so chaotic that you basically couldn't do anything right, there has to be some kind of routine. I have some friends who are totally nomadic Wanderers and they wake up. in a different time zone, in a different city, in a different fair game, I think it's a very small group of people. I think most people want some kind of routine with some variety and again, you know that from me, I think.

Whatever that scale of curiosity is, pick a hundredth percentile and that's where you'd be right now. What I have is the opportunity to do something that is still routine, but within that I can also explore novelty. Well, this is not a conversation. I've had before this is not a person I've talked to before this is a topic that I have some idea about but not all of it and it's new and it's different and the backdrop and everything else so I think, I'm just trying to think about an application or continue to research applied solutions here, certainly for people who have that high degree of novelty that they are looking for what they want, they want to have adventures and do new things, but they are restricted by any of the millions of things. that life can prevent you from doing, whether it be responsibilities, financial restrictions, just time, any courage, there are even ways that you can go through and that give you that psychological wealth, what was it?, psychological wealth, without throwing everything out the window, selling your possessions and go to Vietnam, right, okay, yeah, tell me, you said in the book that a good life is, by its very nature, a complicated life, why is that?

Why a good knife is not just a simple life? Because life is complicated by definition, I mean, I think. about the pandemic, none of us expected you to know and then suddenly life became much more complex in one moment, just in one week, everything changed a lot in our lives, for most of us, some more than others, and I think what we know. It's that life constantly brings us things that we don't expect. There's a proverb that I'm sure you've heard people plan and God laughs. You know this idea that we can know that we can predict what's going to happen.

It can be simple. it can be controllable and that's not the truth of human existence so I think that's why we say you know the good life is a complicated life because a bad life is also a complicated life it's just that all life is complicated , OK? relationships you said Health massive impact on happiness relationships next biggest impact on happiness happy why why relationships matter well we believe that relationships are stress regulators um that in fact we are all meant to respond to stress correctly in the that we all have to go into fight or flight mode when we have a challenge, you know it and you can feel it if something scary or challenging happens, your heart rate increases, blood goes to your muscles because you are ready to spring into action, that's what it is the body. designed to do so, but the body must also return to equilibrium back to baseline when the threat is removed, um, so if something happens to me that is really disturbing during my day and I start to reflect on it, I can feel my heart rate increases.

I feel like I really start to speed up, if I go home and I can talk to my partner or you know, I can call someone who can listen to me on the phone, I can literally feel my body calm down again and what we think happens is that people Who They can't do that they stay in a kind of chronic fight or flight mode because stressors appear every day and we can do that if we don't have those emotion regulators that relationships can be for us that we stay in this mode where the body has higher levels of circulating stress hormones, the body has higher levels of chronic inflammation and those things break down the body's systems, so the question is: how can that stress, bad relationships, loneliness, make you more likely to get coronary artery disease and arthritis?

Could it be both? Well, it seems like there are these general effects of chronic stress mode that break down multiple body systems and that's what we're saying that good relationships protect us from and so far there's pretty good data to support this. hypothesis which is to mitigate the impact of stress by giving you a sense of support from the people around you, someone to talk to, what about the other side of that? Did you notice how relationships play a role in allowing you to move further? Delight and enjoy the good things that happen in life, are you able to extend the enjoyment instead of simply restricting the negative?

Absolutely, you know that they've done studies on laughter, I mean, and that people who laugh more are healthier, that there's something. about the release of these hormones that improve physical well-being. I can't get into the neuroscience of that which is above my pay grade, but what we know is that when people are relaxed, that's why meditation works too, so it's not just in relationships. but laughter warm connections you know that the touch of another person uh not only not only calms us but it improvesour well-being our sense of connection and we believe that that has these positive protective effects you know there's a maximum speed that you can stroke someone's arm to release the amount of oxytocin.

I didn't know, okay, so we have around our body we still have the upper limit set when we were furry apes or the speed at which you would be able to choose and prepare the people around you, that is still the upper limit. I mean it's about three to eight centimeters per second. I don't remember. I'll find the book I was talking to, uh Roy. but once you get past that, you'd be moving so fast that you wouldn't be able to pick anything out effectively, so the oxytocin release that you get from partner grooming happens within this particular petting window.

I love it. I love this and I bet if you do it faster it's 100 um annoying. This is also seen in studies of crying toddlers and babies. You can try moving your hand up and down and it's this. particular speed whatever centimeters per second that's the one that calms crying the fastest wow wow how clever um Well, obviously people who have good relationships will probably be like other people who have good relationships, which means you're going to select for a group of people who may have other things in common too, how can you separate people who have good relationships from other people who were also in a good financial situation or who had this particular start in life or lived in this particular area or economic influences everywhere? other things in life, well, that's a methodological question, an important question like how do you know that an effect isn't being driven by something else like your income or where you were born?

So what we're trying to do is statistically level the game. field control in the lingo uh control of these other things, so we make sure that we level the playing field that we, but that your socioeconomic status where you were born, privileged, disadvantaged, uh, ethnicity, all of that is taken into account when we do this. analyze and then if we still see an effect then we know we have something, if the effect goes away then we say, well okay then maybe this is more about social class and not what we think it is and this is this.

How do we do the analysis? Statistical analysis is a really complicated endeavor. What about marriage? What role does marriage play in happiness? Plays an important role. I married people are happier, actually they are and they live longer now. Some married people are unhappy. We absolutely know it. That's right, you know, it's all over the map, but if you take thousands of people and do big averages, married people are on average somewhat happier, but that also doesn't include that doesn't mean you have to have a marriage license it just means that people in an intimate relationship are happier as a group.

Can you be happy without an intimate relationship at all? But you have to beat the odds. It's not that big. The odds are not. massive. I was going to say what the size of the effect is that we're talking about with marriage. You know I can not. I'd be making it up if I quoted you on the effect size, but you're asking exactly the right thing. question because what are enough effects for you tonight are going to be statistically significant, right, that's right, it's nothing, but it could be statistically significant, particularly if you're studying thousands of people and fairly small effects, then you're asking. the right question I just don't have the answer at my fingertips.

What about the introduction of foreign children? It does not make us happier or less happy, at least according to studies that have been well done. It is a path of life. It's a life choice. people who choose to have children are no happier or less happy than people who choose not to have children now that said: you know, I had two children and I can't imagine my life without them, it was a difficult life because I had children, yes. It was wonderful, yes, it was all that, so I think you know what we know. I think from the research that these Life Choices do not prescribe whether you are going to be happy or not, they are simply Life Choices, hmm.

There have to be things that engender a better kind of life and things that don't, for example, like the life choice of not having friends, it would be a life choice, but it would impact our happiness, but it would impact happiness, um, the choice of life. a if you call it a choice abusing alcohol abusing drugs uh it's a bad choice um the life choice engaging in things that harm other people results in genderless happiness Life Choices goes deeper into that what do you mean the good things? that harming other people gives you less happiness uh usually what happens comes around um there is a did they appear in the data?

Yes, yes, that the people who were really self-centered and the people who didn't care about others. they were less happy wow and that presumably leads to controlling the amount of social connections they have. Did we do that precise analysis? I'm not sure if it's the absolute Pinnacle or the central point of this The Hub in the middle of all these spokes are social relationships and then you have a person who is probably self-centered and maybe doesn't commit any more crimes or petty theft from close friends or relatives, you probably have fewer friends, is it because they are themselves? -centered or is it because they have fewer friends, that's an interesting question, well, we believe that these types of antisocial behaviors drive not only fewer friends but also less happiness, which doesn't work well, you know, I'm not going to get into this because We don't want to get political, but I think some of the most notoriously self-centered people in our political worlds actually have the most troubled inner lives, based on all the clues I can get. and again I am observing from the outside but I am a psychiatrist and it seems that people who are much more self-centered are more troubled, more tormented, well, they are not going to be at peace, there is no one like that. that and think in peace, yes, right now you don't.

Did you look at the type of characteristics in an intimate relationship that you should look for to optimize in a partner? The things that best predict happiness in that relationship or in terms of life. Yes. Yes, two things, one was staying curious about the other person and adapting to the change, and I'll say something about each, so staying curious, there was a study on how good people were at guessing what the other person was feeling. another and that. It turns out that we are better at knowing what our partner feels when we first get together because if you think about it when you're dating someone, what you're really trying to do is for this person to be interested in me and how I say it, then you're really on the same page. . to them you're in tune with every little sign, but what they find is that when people have been together a long time they're much less in tune with each other and they're much less good at knowing what each other is feeling, forgive me, that turns out. that we stop paying attention that we think we know each other oh, I know what she's going to say, I know you know, I know, I got this, so it turns out that being in tune is really helpful in staying curious even about this person who you think you know Well, one of my meditation teachers taught me this and he taught it to me about meditation, but it also works in relationships.

Ask yourself what's here now that I haven't noticed before, so you know I'm having dinner on this. This person and I have had dinner with her for years. What's here now that you hadn't noticed before about this person like this can be a really useful and interesting exercise. Well, that's the Curiosity part. Stay curious just to stay curious. Just to dig deeper. Because? Do you think that staying curious affects happiness because we all want to be seen well, we really want to be known for who we are, so what we do, what we hate, is being stereotyped, being typed, so you want to optimize for a partner ? that's the kind of person who will continue to be curious who will continue to be curious you will notice if you change your shoes who will ask you about your day at work who will worry about your whatever yes yes the worst thing you can say to your partner is you Always or Never, that's a real problem in a relationship and the reason it's a problem is because it's a stereotype.

Nobody always does anything or never does anything. Do you know what it is. I wonder if I'll forget it again. What was psychological? wealth wealth thank God psychological wealth has to correlate with your desire for psychological wealth 100 has to correlate with your level of curiosity when it comes to your partner. I think so. I think that would be the impetus for one of the driving forces behind this so that it would be interesting to see the psychological richness mapped at the top. It would be very interesting if people who prioritize psychological wealth are more likely to choose partners who also prioritize who are more likely to have happier relationships because they are the curious ones. yeah, yeah, talk to Mark, ask Mark, tell Mark to do that, do that, okay, so we're curious to care about the other person, what they're doing, what the other thing was, the other thing.

Another is adaptability to change. If you think about it, each of us is always a work in progress, we are always changing as human beings, you meet someone and you say, oh, I really like this person, I want to be with this person, but this person is evolving just before . Your eyes and you are evolving right before your eyes and then what happens is that in the most stable relationships you have two people who are constantly evolving, if we can adapt to that, accept it and even support it, then those relationships are more satisfying. We are more stable if we want to fix the person we are with in a certain mold and never let them out of that mold which is brutalizing for both people, so this idea of ​​adaptability is almost like learning new dance steps as you go As a Couple, those are the relationships that seem to work best.

The other data science book that I've been really interested in over the last year was Don't Trust Your Instincts by Seth Stevens Davidowitz, such an interesting guy, hang out with the Google scientist and look. In the strongest predictors for long-term relationship success now, this wasn't necessarily happiness, it was whether you stayed together longer, yeah, and all the things that people optimize on dating apps and when they talk to each other and they ask questions, and none of the things they predict, so height had nothing to do with it, income had nothing to do with it, education level had nothing to do with it, the things that came up and that are interesting to agree with what you are talking about about psychological stability, then.

How long after an incident do you return to baseline? um growth mindset, uh, conscientiousness and there's another thing I can't remember, but just thinking about happiness in a relationship and longevity in a relationship are probably going to be correlated, but they're not exactly the same, they're going to be slightly different, TRUE? You can imagine someone who is very stubborn in a miserable relationship but they will stay together, that could be an archetypal person that you could find, yes, yes, but certainly that conscientiousness, I mean. attentive um focused uh discipline pain like giving everything to your partner psychological stability would allow you to be adaptable to deal with things and not get too carried away with them and the growth mindset is precisely what you're talking about, so it's interesting to see that These two studies are married in an exaggerated way.

I'm going to take a look at that because if that makes the things you listed make total sense to me, given what I know about human development, can friendships replace a marriage? Yes they can, they don't and you never have to be married to get these benefits, friendships can totally be in that place, being the people who have your back, the people who support you and the support we get from relationships, first and foremost. place. We can't get everything from a marriage anyway, you can't get everything from an intimate relationship, that's another myth worth calling out, but think about relying solely on yourself and your partner isn't enough, no, and we can imagine. .

Well, if my relationship doesn't provide me with everything I need, then there must be something wrong with the relationship. It isn't true. Think about all the things we need from relationships. I mean, we certainly need intimacy and we need sex, but you also know that. We need fun, which you can also get in many different relationships. We need moral support. My neighbor, who always has the right tool when I need to fix something in my house and I never have the right tool. You know he will. You will support me by bringing his toolbox and you already know the people you play tennis with or the people who take you to the doctor.

There are so many ways we support each other, so the idea is that we should have people in our lives who give us different things and certainly friendships canprovide us with everything we need. There doesn't have to be an intimate association in the image. Didn't you say that intimate partnership is the most important relationship you can have? Presumably that means he can't be replaced by even a million friends, he couldn't replace all that, you know. To be fair, no one has made that comparison. I think it would be impossible to do it rigorously, so I guess the bottom line is I don't know, but I know people who have never been in an intimate relationship and have very satisfying rich lives who would presumably be an outlier.

Most people end up in some type of partnership or at least sequential partnerships throughout their lives. but there is a growing group of people, a growing percentage of people who don't do that, still you're right, most people have some intimate relationship as they go through life, what is the optimal number of friends what's up? It's not an optimal number just for the reasons we talked about, right, there's no optimal number. For me, it could be one person, for you it could be 50 people. I know there have been all these calculations done that we really can't do.

We have more than 150 relationships in Our Lives, who knows, it varies a lot depending on our temperament, our inclinations, so there is no optimal number, what about the relationship between relationships and health and the body? You mentioned that before, but there were some things to do with being neuroprotective later in life it ties in with all kinds of things, yeah, someone's a little skeptical about the relationship between relationships and your health, what are some of these statistics with that you can hammer that home with abroad in terms of living longer, I mean, we know that. example that married people live longer than single people, for example several years.

Men actually get an even greater benefit than women, but women also get a longevity benefit. People who are more socially connected live longer. People who are more socially connected and don't feel lonely do so more slowly. cognitive decline as they get older, they are less likely to develop dementia if they are more socially engaged and they develop it later if they are going to develop it, so all of these things are supported by solid scientific data. I had a conversation. About a year and a half ago I was talking about divorce and it was the same idea you had that loneliness has the same impact as smoking half a pack of cigarettes every day and right now it's not that easy.

I don't think this view of relationships as impacting our health has really hit people hard enough to not galvanize your motivation in the same way as quitting smoking or stopping eating junk food or, you know, reducing your alcohol content at night. time and I think this is just a conceptual inertia that hasn't been affected yet, but one of the challenges is that quitting smoking, changing your diet, improving your health regimen, those are all things that you have 100 percent control over. % of control. It's the very nature of relationships, it takes two to tango, you need another person in the situation and I don't know how familiar you are with this kind of vibe online in this corner of the internet, but there is a growing group of people who say I don't need anyone in my life.

I've tried to have friends or I've tried to have a relationship and people are too difficult. I am a lonely wolf. I don't need anyone and they are as convinced as they are. It is possible to be in this position and they are killing themselves and I really want, I really hope that this conversation leads you to understand that you can eat all the organic foods you want, you can train as much as you want, you can do. everything else, but if you neglect your social relationships, you are literally killing yourself, that is true, however, that is on average, it could be that if you find toxic people, maybe the least stressful thing for you is to stay alone, who knows. that's all you know, we're talking about big statistical averages, right, and you know, individual performance can vary, like they say in the prospectuses, everyone's super idiosyncratic, everyone's an N of one, yeah, I understand exactly exactly, um, but it's really important.

I brought up this idea that well, this is never going to happen to me. There are people who, in fact, people in their 20s have told me that it's too late for me, as if it really is, but what we find, you know when we follow you. all these lives for decades is that it is never too late for people to be surprised by what happens to them, that we have had people in their 50s, 60s and 80s find a group of friends like they never had before or if they find the love, people find love in people in their 70s and 80s who have never had it before, so what I want to just point out is that if you think it will never happen to you, you don't know, you just don't know what's going to happen.

A friend who is over 60 and recently had a child with his partner and was talking to me just before Christmas and said, "I didn't really understand what it meant to have a family in the same way now and there are dogs and there's a wife." and there's a baby and there's him and this is a guy who's 60 years old learning what it's like to have a family unit and it's beautiful, it's really, really, it's crazy, it's so beautiful, yeah, what you were talking about before that's what you mean by social fitness is what you mean by social fitness, well social fitness is this idea like physical fitness, it's a practice, it's not something that should be taken for granted when I was 20 years old. , I used to think well that my friends are my friends, they will always be my friends.

I don't have to do anything, but what we see as people go through their lives is that perfectly good relationships can wither simply from neglect, from neglect. That's why we coined this term Social Fitness. To be analogous to fitness, you know that if you work out today you don't come home and say, "Well, I'm done, I'll never have to do that again." We know it's an ongoing practice and what we've found is that the people who are best at maintaining vibrant connections are the people who work at it who and it's small decisions it's not hard work it's small things it's texting someone today that you haven't seen in a long time and say hi, I'm thinking you just wanted to say hi, you know, it's that kind of thing, there's a quote I put in my newsletter a couple of months ago, if you don't grow up together, you grow apart and I think that it is very difficult to get to that. the inertia with a friendship usually changes and I can see this in my own life, my friendships are getting better or worse, very few of them stay the same and even if it stays the same, it's an effort not to stay the same, just slack off. in neutral on cruise control it's an effort to keep it at the same level it's not true at all I'm back I'm back in the UK I think four times last year one time it was for a stag party another time it was for the wedding the stag party it was for himself and then the last time was for Christmas and he would be there at the beginning of the year like those things like yeah, he probably didn't need to come back for the bachelor party that was optional, but I know.

Aside from the fact that it was great and I care about him coming back, he's maintained a lot of friendships, it's growing on him, it was an important investment that I needed to make, exactly, showing up really matters and that's what one of my teachers told me. he once said when he said when in doubt show up for people like just do it right, you know, and that's for weddings, funerals, whatever forever, if you think about going, if you think about picking up the phone, do it, You know, act on the Impulse, don't hesitate unless it's three in the morning and you don't want to wake up your friend, but really make yourself overcome those doubts.

How can people understand the influence of their childhood on their adult relationships? We know that. childhood matters a lot because you know that we grew up in these families that teach us what to expect from the world, they teach us what to expect from other people, you don't think well like a three-year-old child, I wonder what other parents we are like or other mothers this is this is what moms are like this is what dads are like this is right and that's why it's very powerful and it's only as we get older and our world expands that we start to look around us and say oh, families can function this way. different and by then we have already been conditioned to have certain expectations of our relationships and the world and those expectations do not have to be our destiny, so if you have had bad relationships with parents and siblings If you have come to believe that you cannot trust them, that can change, but it means cultivating and finding relationships with people who are more trustworthy and not harmful, so it can change.

We saw it change in many of the people we studied, but in some of the people we studied they ended up recreating the same type of relationships they had in childhood, so it's really a matter of trying to find relationships that don't make you relive your childhood. If your childhood was painful, if we are lucky. and we had a good childhood, so we want to find relationships that are similar to the ones we had in childhood, isn't it strange that we seek comfort even in a rather unpleasant place to grow in later life? Yes, that's one of What I learned from Orlando Button in the school of life is that one of the strangest and most uncomfortable sides of our partner preferences is that we often look for some of the negative qualities that we had in our parents.

I know it's not surprising to me because one of the things we gravitate toward is what feels like home, what feels familiar, even if it's not good, even if it's painful, and I like that because you know, oh , I know how this feels and oh, this feels so familiar. And so what we found and Freud talked about this and I see this all the time, so I do my specialty in Psychiatry, is doing Psychotherapy, so I see people every day in Psychotherapy and one of the things I notice is that they end up looking for They're like heat-seeking missiles, they look for what's familiar and sometimes it's painful things that are familiar, so part of the learning in good psychotherapy is helping people see, oh my God, I'm choosing. , I'm choosing the wrong thing. partners because they are a lot like the people I knew when I was a child.

What else had a major impact on happiness? Health. Relations. Do you have any idea what's coming next? We're in relationships, we don't have the energy, we don't feel that good, so there's a lot of luck. And I and I want to name that because, it really matters what happens to us and we can't control. Everything that happens to us, I'm stating the obvious, but sometimes people can think it's their fault if bad things happen and most of the time it's no one's fault, so I just want to name that so we don't do it. They end up leaving people feeling guilty if they are not having the life they expected.

What about achievements? Do achievements influence happiness? Yes, and they don't like it. So I'll give you an example that we've written this book and I love this book because it feels good, you know, because it conveys ideas that I personally care about very deeply, so I want to publish this book. and that achievement makes me feel good, but does it feel good if you receive this or that award or when will this or that award be? Yes, it will feel good maybe for a day, but that's it. You know, we know Nobel Prize winners who get depressed afterwards. they win the Nobel Prize because it's good, but now I still have to live my life and it's just my life, the gold medalist syndrome, yes, exactly, so it really is that achieving something that is meaningful to you can make you feel good because you care about it and that's good so you know your personal best in something like I ran that race with my personal best and that makes me feel good, uh, that's a good thing, that way the achievement can matter in the good sense, but achievement as a way of being a badge of having arrived that never lasts.

What about income? You looked? I mean, I've heard a number of ideas about what that relates to happiness, yeah, well, you know there's a famous study that I know you've heard about about five. one thousand dollars seventy-five thousand dollars a year and that amount varies, but basically what all the studies show us is that we need to financially meet our basic needs to have a sense of well-being and that means having enough money to eat. and shelter, healthcare and education to take care of our families, that's fine, but once we get there, adding income doesn't increase our happiness and that's what people find hard to believe, wait, you mean earning 75 million dollars it is not.

It's not going to increase my happiness, not really, it won't decrease your happiness either but it won't make you happy and it's a cliché that money doesn't buy happiness but it's a cliché for a reason because people end up finding out. right, they did this study of lottery winners, you know people who win lots of money through luck, right, and they find that their state of well-being returns to its initial level a year before winning the lottery, and it returns at that level approximately ayear later. they win the lottery, the same thing happens to people who become disabled and exactly exactly adaptation is an incredible drug, so when I'll email it to you later, that book don't trust your instinct by Seth, he tries to Go deeper into this too.

I think it would be interesting for you to see also what you seem to find is that there's definitely a cap around that kind of number which is like tens of thousands, um and then to achieve the same increase in happiness, you need to double the amount of money that you you want, so in order to get the increase in happiness that you would get from, say, 75, 70 to 140, then you have to get to 140. to 280 and then from 280 to 560. So it's this decreasing or increasing tolerance . Should I say yes for money? um, yeah, right, what he's pointing out is what economists call diminishing returns, that you can work harder and harder to earn more and more. more money and as a result you get less happiness.

What happens at the population level? Trends because there is a criticism right now that we are moving further and further away from the typical type of life that we would have lived. Men's testosterone levels have fallen. by one percent every year since 1980, you know, we have chronic illnesses, loneliness, all these kinds of things, have you been able to determine if self-rated happiness in 1940 was higher than self-rated happiness in 2020? to figure that out, uh, I don't know if anyone has studied it, the difficulty is using measures that are essentially the same or equivalent and we have that all the time we do, you know, we ask the same questions about marriage, uh, eight times over five decades, right, and it just happened that we repeated those questions, but it's still weird, I think your question is great.

Interesting and I don't know if anyone has made that comparison. I think the other question I would add is whether there were different priorities. Did you know this type of feeling of happiness as in hedonic well-being? I bet it wasn't. There are so many things that people talk about more in our study, the World War II generation talked more about having a meaningful life, taking care of families, that kind of thing instead of actualizing my true self, which has become more in a kind of '80s concept. Yeah, I also had a theory about that that I've been playing with for years, which is the Mazzo hierarchy of needs, which he didn't actually make like a pyramid to begin with, but the Mazda's hierarchy of needs, well, you've got your food. and refuge, etc., until the end.

Social connection, if you are someone for whom the bottom level of that pyramid is not yet full, worrying about whether you are updating your logos and speaking your truth to the world is not a luxury you can afford. Having an existential crisis is interestingly not a very luxurious position because it has only been allowed due to the fact that all the lower levels of the pyramid have been arranged exactly exactly. The other criticism of Maslow that I share is that he is very interesting. individually focused very self centered I want to expose my truth to the world I want to express my true self instead of investing in things beyond myself, caring for others and seeing yourself as part of a much bigger whole, you know which Maslow's hierarchy doesn't work given that you are someone who has clinical experience and in terms of practice and now in terms of data and research, what are the daily practices that you yourself do to give yourself the best chance of being happy in the life?

Yes, they are somewhat simple and boring. I meditate every day, I exercise every day, I connect with people every day, those are the three things and sometimes I watch Trash TV, that can also contribute to that yeah, I guess so, well, and like. dark chocolate Okay, dark chocolate is the key to happiness, I think we can, so I take it from there, what's next for this study you guys are doing? Is there anything else you're thinking about that you'd love to work on? Well, with the cohort, we are collecting data even now as we talk about the second generation cohort and what we have focused on this time, so we come back in different waves this time, we will focus on what life was like for you during the pandemic, how it's been and tell us more about your social media use because we're interested and they're all mostly Baby Boomers so it's a particular cohort, your social media use is different than 12 year olds and 25 years. but we are interested in that and I think we are interested in collaborating with other researchers.

Many things that we have always done and are doing more now are collaborating with another research study that looks at lead exposure. in the environment because we know where people grew up and we know if their homes were in buildings that had lead pipes in the buildings, we know how close they live to what are called lead smelters that used to put tons of lead into the air while melted lead scrap and how much lead exposure influenced their health their well-being how it influenced how long they lived so we're collaborating with another study that followed people from when they were young until they died and we're putting together our data and we're going to figuring out if and how this toxin exposure really matters because it's still something you know, we still have lead in the water, in the air, um, and so we're trying to be, if we can, a little bit more socially active to understand. the conditions we need to create to promote well-being.

That's great, Robert Walden, ladies and gentlemen, if people want to see the things you make, where should they do it? Wow, so we have a book website which is thegoodlifebook.com um, but also you can go to our study website, the website is adult development study, all in one word, adult development study, Study .org and you'll get a lot of technical articles if you do, Robert. I appreciate you I love your work thank you thank you this is a very interesting interview I really appreciate what you're going through people thank you very much for tuning in if you enjoyed that episode then press here to see a selection of the best clips from the podcast. the last few weeks and don't forget to subscribe peace