For 84 years, the Harvard Study of Adult Development has tracked the lives of hundreds of Americans. Now its director, Dr. Robert Waldinger, is explaining what it has taught him about health and fulfilment.
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. “We know there’s a mind-body connection and we all pay lip service to it,” said Dr. Robert Waldinger, the director of the Harvard Study of Adult Development, which has been running for 84 years.
“But how could warmer relationships make it less likely that you would develop coronary artery disease or arthritis? How could relationships get into the body and 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, said Dr. Waldinger, but so convinced is he of this fundamental truth that the new 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 (he points to the UN’s annual World Happiness report).
These include good health and a healthy life expectancy, plus the freedom and capacity to make significant life decisions. Trust is important, he said – not just in friends and neighbours, but also in governments. “One interesting thing that people mention around the world is generosity and opportunities to be generous,” said Dr. Waldinger.
Money – or, rather, economic security – is important. “We are less happy when we struggle for food security and housing and all that, which is obvious,” he said. 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 (£49,000 at that time). The enduring factor is relationships with other people. Dr. Waldinger has boiled down his definition of a good life to this: “Being engaged in activities I care about with people I care about.”
Dr. 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.
“I’m sort of a voyeur,” said Dr. Waldinger, beaming through my screen when we talk on a video call. “I’ve followed all these lives – you can take someone’s folder, thousands of pages, and you can flip through a life. Yes, we do a lot of sophisticated number crunching, but being able to read a life is pretty amazing.”
The study has its limits, he acknowledged. All the original participants were male (Dr. Waldinger introduced women by including their partners and children) 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, studies from around the world, but he stressed that they all show a similar pattern: the more socially connected you are, the more likely you are to live longer and live well.
Dr. Waldinger subscribes to the theory that happiness falls into two categories. Hedonic wellbeing can be summed up as “am I having a good time right now?” he said. Then there is the Aristotelian idea of eudaimonic wellbeing: “That sense of life being meaningful and basically good.”
We don’t necessarily enjoy the things that contribute to eudaimonic wellbeing. The example Dr. Waldinger likes to give 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 wellbeing? 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, he said. 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 really interesting survey where they asked millennials what they thought they were going to need to have a happy life, and fame was a really prevalent goal,” said Dr. 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,” said Dr. Waldinger.
“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 Netflix, 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.” Dr. Waldinger’s parents were from the same generation as the study’s first cohort. He had a happy childhood, although there were times when his mother, Miriam, didn’t seem content – she was a clever woman who was unfulfilled as a housewife. They lived in Des Moines, Iowa – “midwest, small town” – and the family was Jewish.
Dr. Waldinger’s father, David, went to law school, but couldn’t get a job when he left. “That’s what life was like for Jewish professionals in the United States in the 1930s.” He went into business instead, but he didn’t love it; the lesson his son learned was to pursue work that was enjoyable and meaningful.
He looks incredibly happy – and he says he is. “I’m in my early 70s and basically my health is OK.
– Guardian.co.uk