For 84 years, the Harvard Study of Adult Development has tracked the lives of hundreds of Americans. The research, says its director Dr Robert Waldinger, has taught him a lot about happiness, health and fulfilment, and the importance of qualities like generosity, well-being and taking care of important relationships.
In the 1980s, when data from the world’s longest-running study on happiness started to show that good relationships kept us healthier and happier, the researchers didn’t really believe it, he told The Guardian.
“We know there’s a mind-body connection and we all pay lip service to it,” he says, “but how could warmer relationships make it less likely you would develop coronary artery disease or arthritis? How could relationships affect our physiology?”
Then, other studies started to show the same. “We thought: OK, we can begin to have confidence in this finding.”
It was still a surprise, he says, but so convinced is he of this fundamental truth that a recent book he has co-written with Dr Marc Schulz, The Good Life, focuses mainly on relationships and how to improve them. There are other components, of course, and they tend to be similar across countries, cultures and social grades.
These include good health and a healthy life expectancy, plus the freedom and capacity to make significant life decisions. Trust is important, he says – not just in friends and neighbours, but also in governments.
Money – or, rather, economic security – is also important. “We are less happy when we struggle for food security and housing and all that, which is obvious,” he says.
What is less obvious is that, above a certain income level, happiness doesn’t go up by much, at least according to a 2010 study that set the threshold for US households at $75 000. The enduring factor is relationships with other people.
Waldinger, a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and a practising psychiatrist, became director of the study in 2005; he is the fourth steward of the research, which began in 1938. Originally, there were two unrelated studies – one group of 268 students at Harvard, another of 456 boys from deprived areas of Boston – but they later merged.
Over the years, whole lives have been recorded in real time: health, employment, details about friends and spouses, religious beliefs, how they voted, how they felt about the births of their children, what they worried about in the middle of the night. The list seems endless.
The study has its limits, he acknowledges. All of the original participants were male and white, although this will change gradually as the more diverse third generation is brought in. For the book, he and Schulz include many other, more diverse, worldwide studies, but they all show a similar pattern: the more socially connected you are, the stronger chance you will live longer and live well.
Loneliness is now considered to be as bad for your health as smoking – and there is a loneliness epidemic. “The best hypothesis for which there’s good data is the idea that relationships help us manage stress,” he says.
“We know that stress is a part of life. What we think happens is that relationships help our bodies manage and recover from stress. People who are lonely and socially isolated stay in a kind of chronic fight-or-flight mode where, at a low level, they have higher levels of circulating stress hormones like cortisol, higher levels of inflammation, and those things gradually wear away different body systems.”
Waldinger subscribes to the theory that happiness falls into two categories. Hedonic well-being can be summed up as “am I having a good time right now?” he says. Then there is the Aristotelian idea of eudaimonic well-being: “That sense of life being meaningful and basically good.”
We don’t necessarily enjoy the things that contribute to eudaimonic well-being. The example Waldinger gives is having to read the same story to your child at bedtime when you are exhausted after a hard day.
“Are you having fun? Is it hedonic well-being? No. But is reading that book for the seventh time the most meaningful thing you could do right then? Yes. Often, there’s this difference between what’s fun right now and what we are invested in.”
Everyone needs a bit of both. The problems tend to come from chasing only hedonic happiness, rather than the more mundane, but ultimately more meaningful, kind.
“We are also not very good at knowing what will make us happy. It is partly cultural – we receive messages constantly that we will be happy if we buy something, or if we have more money, or if we succeed at work. There was this interesting survey where they asked millennials what they thought they would need to have a happy life, and fame was a really prevalent goal,” says Waldinger.
But it is also due to human nature. When researchers in one study asked people to talk to strangers on a train on their morning commute, those who had predicted it would be a negative experience discovered it was the opposite.
“Talking to strangers is a little risky,” he says. “Even calling a friend is risky, because you don’t know whether your friend is going to want to hear from you. Human relations always have that element of unpredictability.”
This is why staying in alone rather than going out can feel preferable. “If I stay home and watch something on TV, it’s a predictable evening for me. Part of it is this path of least resistance – away from relationships and towards something more predictable and manageable.”
Waldinger didn’t want to be a doctor; he wanted to be an actor and did drama alongside his academic studies. Before going to medical school, he came to the UK, where he had a fellowship at the University of Cambridge, and continued theatre. “I had such a good time, but I knew I wasn’t good enough to be a professional.”
Once he became a doctor, though, he found that he loved psychiatry. “I was just fascinated by people’s lives and how their minds worked.”
He looks incredibly happy – and says he is. “I’m in my early 70s and basically my health is okay. I’ve done my best to take care of myself, but that’s not the whole story. My happiness depends in part on luck, it depends in part on privilege. I have a partner and it’s a good partnership.” He and his wife, Jennifer, a clinical psychologist, have been married for nearly 37 years and have two grownup sons.
Relationships don’t just make us happy; they also help us weather the unhappy times
He hasn’t always been happy, of course. The times he describes as less happy are characterised by disconnection from other people.
As a small-town boy at Harvard, he was miserable and lonely for at least his first year, until he made friends. Later, when his children were small, his parents died. “People go through those times – it can be hard to sustain your happiness.”
It is unrealistic to be happy all the time, but the message has become that if you are not happy, you are not doing life right. Similarly, there is an idea that happiness is something you can achieve and then relax.
“The good life is a complicated life for everybody,” says Waldinger. “We study thousands of lives. Nobody is happy all the time. The myth that you could be happy all the time if you just do all the right things is not true. Happiness waxes and wanes.”
Happiness “happens” to us, he says. “But there are things we can put in place that make us more likely to feel happiness more of the time.”
Taking care of your health, diet, sleep and exercise are big ones: “If you are in better health, you are likelier to be happy.” But so is taking care of your relationships. “That’s partly because they help us with the flip side: they don’t just make us happy; they also help us weather the unhappy times, the challenges.”
In a world ravaged by Covid and economic crisis, we might feel that we are in particularly challenging times, but so did the first participants of the Harvard study, who had grown up in the Great Depression and, when the study started, were months away from the outbreak of World War 2 (many participants fought in it).
“We asked them what got them through it and everybody said something about people. Soldiers said: ‘It was the people writing to me from home, and fellow soldiers.’ When people were asked about the Great Depression, it was the neighbours pulling together and sharing what limited resources they had,” says Waldinger.
“What we find is that if people maintain a network of good relationships, they’re more likely to weather the storms and more likely to be happy.”
Every generation feels the world is “going to hell”, he says, “but there are some unique things happening to us”. Economic inequality is rising. There is increasing social disconnection. “Loneliness is on the rise, but also tribalism, and that is fuelled by the digital revolution.”
The study is starting to ask questions about social media usage and its effect on well-being. “Other research is showing that, if we use social media actively to connect with each other, that’s more likely to enhance well-being. But if we passively consume, that often lowers our well-being.”
The study has made him pay more attention to his own behaviour, he says. “Now, I’m more careful about my own relationships and making sure I keep them up.”
He describes it as “social fitness”: you don’t go to the gym once or twice and then assume your physical fitness has been addressed, he says.
The same applies to friendships. “Good relationships wither away from neglect. There doesn’t have to be a problem, but if you don’t keep them up they fall out of your life. We find that the people who maintain vibrant social networks are those who make an effort.”
It doesn’t have to be big or time-consuming – a regular text, a coffee, a walk. The quality of the relationship is important, regardless of who it is with – friend, partner, sibling, neighbour.
“We asked people once: ‘Who could you call in the middle of the night if you were sick or scared?’ We believe everybody needs at least one or two people like that,” says Waldinger.
“If you don’t have that, you’re probably hurting.
Harvard Study of Human Development (Open access)
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