Producers' Pick | Dr. Robert Waldinger: Lessons From the World's Longest Scientific Study of Happiness

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This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. We are back. Finally, the key to happiness. Man, this is no small study. One of the most comprehensive studies, if not the most comprehensive study you will ever hear about. It lasted 84 years and still exists.

It began in 1938. There's 724 people. 60 are still alive. Think about how old they are. They're studying 2,000 of their descendants, their kids. And we're talking about two groups of people. I guess one poor, one middle class, upper class.

And then it's game on. Study their lives, keep in touch with them along the way, and see what we can glean to make all of our lives, living today and after us, better. Finding the key to happiness.

The name of the book is called The Good Life. Lessons from the World's Longest Scientific Study. And we're privileged to have with us right now the fourth director of that study, Dr. Robert Waldinger, author and, as I mentioned, director. Doctor, fascinated by your TED Talk. Love the book and the insight. It's just great to talk to you. Well, I'm so excited to be here.

And I know we'll talk to you over the weekend at 8 o'clock on One Nation. But first off, this study preceded you. What prompted it?

And can you tell everyone how it started? Well, it started with two groups of people, one a group of Harvard College undergrads, very privileged, and one a very underprivileged group of kids from Boston's poorest neighborhoods. But both studies were studies of what makes people thrive as they go through their lives.

And we've been studying the same families for 84 years. So what were the two groups? How were the two groups put together? What was the criteria? Well, the first group, the Harvard College undergrads were 19 years old, and their deans thought they were fine, upstanding young men.

And the inner city group in 1938 Boston was put together by a Harvard Law School professor who was interested in how some children who were raised in really disadvantaged homes managed to stay on good paths and not get into trouble and build good lives for themselves. So what you did is every five years you asked for their health records. Every 15 you met face to face, taking notes along the way. You would also tape some of these conversations. Every two years you would interact with the subjects. And you also invited their wives to join along the way. Is there anything else? So before we get into what you found out that we should know about how you tracked everybody.

Yes. So we invited their wives and then all their children, more than half of whom are women. So even though we started out as a study of all young men, we became a very gender-balanced study of men and women. And how would you keep in touch with them and what were you measuring? Well, so we sent them questionnaires every two years. And then, as you said, we got their medical records. We checked in with their doctors.

We called them on the phone periodically. We went to their homes and interviewed them. And we started using methods that weren't even dreamed of when the study started in 1938. So we started drawing blood for their DNA. And DNA wasn't even imagined in 1938.

We put them into MRI scanners and scanned their brains to see what lights up when we show them happy pictures and sad pictures. We did so many different things to try to get different windows on this thing we're after, which is what makes people thrive. Even though it's well-financed and it's from Harvard, it's very rare for any study to last this long. This may be the longest study ever of things that matter most to everybody listening, people's lives and happiness.

That's right. Then you said, let life happen. What are some commonalities? What are some of the things that you began to glean from this study? Well, we certainly began to glean that taking care of your health matters a lot.

And that wasn't a surprise. But the surprise was that the people who were more connected to other people and had better relationships with other people stayed healthier. They were happier, but also their bodies stayed healthier and their brains stayed healthier as they got older.

We were so surprised. That's unbelievable that just connecting with those friends and staying connected with your neighbors and your family could be the key to a long, happy life. The other thing to keep in mind, what helped you determine that? Because I'm sure some people got rich, some people didn't. Some people had happy marriages, unhappy marriages, some got divorced, some had tragedy.

So what made you come to that conclusion? Well, we saw that the people who got rich weren't happier than the people who were not rich. That it was important to have your basic needs met for your happiness, but beyond that, wealth didn't matter. Fame didn't matter. We had some very famous people in the study, like John F. Kennedy, didn't matter for happiness. And high achievement didn't matter.

It wasn't like you had to win all these awards to be happy. It was really mostly about your connections with other people in your life, family, friends, community. And you have to make the effort, and you also conclude that it's never too late. So maybe you're a senior, didn't have many friends. You go into that senior community, you become the mayor of that, and then you'll see your life improve.

Exactly. We followed all these lives, and in the book we have life stories, real life stories of people. And what we found is that many of them who thought they were never going to have good connections with other people, they found their friend group in their 60s. They found love in their 70s or 80s when they least expected it.

So, you know, we say it's never too late because these stories tell us it isn't too late for anybody. So when it comes to marriage, that's a relationship. You conclude, I don't want to put words in your study or conclusions, but you conclude better to get divorced from a bad relationship than stay in it. We do, because there is some research that says really acrimonious marriages are bad for our health. But what we do argue from our science is that trying to work out those differences in a marriage can have huge payoffs, because many marriages can be saved. And working out our differences in relationships actually makes relationships stronger. When it comes to loneliness, you say that there's one of every five people, Americans, report that they are lonely. That's the recipe, not only obviously being lonely by definition is not an aspiration for almost anyone we know.

How do you explain that? Well, what we think happens is that loneliness is a stressor. So we all have stress every day, right? And our bodies rev up when we're stressed, and that's not a problem. But when the stress is removed, we want our bodies to come back to equilibrium. And what we think happens is that if we have good people in our lives that we can talk to about our problems, our bodies calm down. But if we're lonely or disconnected, our bodies stay in a kind of fight or flight mode with chronic inflammation that breaks down body systems. You mentioned don't wait to make personal connections, don't wait to establish yourselves, keep in touch with people. And also keep in mind, too, that eventually you will have stress in your life, things will go bad, and that's when you need to have a network around you.

Exactly. And one of the things we find is that these efforts to take care of your relationships don't have to be big efforts. Like, people could, listening to us right now, they could think, who do I miss?

Who do I want to connect with? And just send them a text or an email and say, I was just thinking about you and wanted to say hi. And you would be amazed at what comes back to you when you reach out in those small ways.

Yeah, you say people who have the best relationships at 50 are the healthiest at 80. The other thing is you also say you did this to help people, not just to reveal to people. So you say, map, there's a way to do this, begin to take action. And you talk about mapping your social universe, advice for communicating during challenging times. How do you map your social universe?

Well, we actually have little maps you can use in the book, but the way you do it is to think about, okay, who's in my life? Who's important? What do I have in these relationships? Who do I have fun with? Who do I confide in? Who's a work friend? And just see, okay, what do I have?

What would I like some more of? And then how could I work on that part of my social universe? Interesting. You just talk about this, it's counterintuitive, that life challenges are as important as life's joys. In what respect?

Absolutely. Because meeting challenges is part of what makes us stronger if we have the resources to meet those challenges, if we're not overwhelmed. And it makes us stronger, it makes us more engaged with the world, and every life has challenges. So the hope is that we build connections with people that help us meet big challenges. You know, think about the pandemic.

None of us could have seen that coming, and many of our people are saying that the way they're getting through this pandemic is through their connections with other people. That's interesting, because millennials, this next generation, a lot of them don't go to work, or they're told to stay home to remote from school for about a year and a half, then maybe they're back and maybe they have an option to stay home. In a way, looking at your 84-year study that's still ongoing, that is not something they should subscribe to, because you're not going to build a relationship with anyone. You're not going to meet anyone, and that gets people insular, which is a recipe for disaster. Yeah, find ways to be with people.

I mean, just reach out and go take a walk. Do anything, small things, have a cup of coffee, have a beer, whatever, to just connect with people. If you are working at home, find ways to connect with people in your neighborhood and in your social network, but don't get more isolated.

That's the message that our scientific study provides loud and clear. Social media not all bad. In what way? No, what we find is that people who use social media to reach out and actively connect with other people, those people get happier.

I have a friend who started connecting with his buddies from elementary school, and now they have a coffee on Zoom every week, and they love it. But if we do scroll through somebody else's Instagram feed, it makes us feel like we're missing out. It makes us compare ourselves negatively to other people's curated lives, their beautiful photos of beaches and parties. That passive use of social media makes us feel worse.

Actively connecting with others makes us feel better. So you have people out there who you study that have aspirations to be, let's say, a big actor, a singer, they want to own their own business. And when they don't get there, does that necessarily lead to a life of feeling inadequate?

Did you find? I'm sure you found people in your study, when you look at the numbers, over a thousand, starting with 724, thousands as their kids and wives become part of your study. I'm sure you have people that don't reach their goals. How does that relate to their happiness? Well, nobody reaches all of their goals, and that's really important to put out there, right?

You know, none of us get everything we want in life, and the people who do the best are the people who make lemonades out of lemons, you know? Who find ways to pivot and say, okay, if I'm not going to make it as an actor, I'm going to do this with my talent, right? Those are the people who thrive as they go through life.

You know what's interesting, too? You start off one of your talks by saying Millennials were asked what you want, and it was money and fame. Is that unlike previous generations? Since you do study generations of Americans, you probably can drill down and figure out how things might have changed. You know, there's more of an emphasis on fame and money now than there used to be. We started with the World War II generation. Those were the folks we were studying, and many of them wanted more to take care of their families and were more community-oriented. Now there's this culture of rugged individualism and making myself powerful or rich, and I think that what we want to get back to is that culture of community and taking care of each other, because that's what keeps us happy and healthy.

Bring back the block parties and make the neighbors talk to each other again. That's interesting. Yeah, exactly. But the other thing to keep in mind, too, is that people do want their privacy.

That is certainly it. The other thing, people listening to us right now, they say one of the things that gets me happy is my religion. I know it's going to happen after this life. What role does religion play in happiness? You know, we had a group of people who were religious and a group of people who were not, and one group wasn't happier than the other group. But the people who did turn to religion found it a great comfort during difficult times.

So we know that religion and spiritual practice can work in that very good way to keep us happier and healthier when we're stressed. You started this whole study with some rich kids, men, boys, and the kids that had those intenements and really tough upbringings. Did you drill down and see what happened to the Ivy Leaguers as compared to the working class? Yes, and we found Ivy Leaguers whose lives went downhill and had miserable, unhappy lives. We had really poor, disadvantaged people who made wonderful lives for themselves, rich lives of family, friends. Some of them even got rich, but that wasn't what made them happy.

But there's no particular formula. It's true that being born into privilege makes a difference, absolutely. And in fact, our Harvard group lived on average 10 years longer than our inner-city group, probably because the Harvard group had more education and they knew sooner the importance of taking care of your health in the way that the inner-city group didn't. But wealth didn't make you happier and being from a disadvantaged family didn't mean your life was going to be less happy. If you're looking for fulfillment, wanting to know the keys to happiness, which everybody listening wants to know, take it from the conclusions of an 84-year ongoing study about happiness. It's called The Good Life, Lessons from the World's Longest Scientific Study of Happiness. Dr. Robert Waldinger, thanks so much. This was a pleasure. All right. Go get them, Robert.