Happiness poison—and the antidote | Robert Waldinger
Summary
TLDRThe Harvard Study of Adult Development reveals that the key to a happy and healthy life is investing in relationships. Robert Waldinger emphasizes that maintaining warm connections with others is more crucial than wealth or success for well-being. The study, which began in 1938, has tracked over 2,000 lives, showing that good relationships can mitigate the effects of stress and adversity, and that 'social fitness' is as important as physical fitness for long-term health and happiness.
Takeaways
- 💡 Investing in relationships with others is crucial for a happy and healthy life.
- 🎓 The Harvard Study of Adult Development found that the happiest and healthiest individuals had the warmest connections with others.
- 🔄 The study, directed by Robert Waldinger, is the longest of its kind, tracking participants from adolescence into old age.
- 👪 Relationships can counteract negative childhood experiences and shape our expectations of the world.
- 💼 Disagreements are normal and can strengthen relationships when worked through effectively.
- 🛡️ Social connections act as a buffer against life's hardships, providing emotional support during difficult times.
- 🚫 Chronic stress from loneliness or toxic relationships can lead to physical health issues.
- 💖 Positive relationships promote a sense of safety and physiological equilibrium, which is beneficial for health.
- 🏋️♂️ Social fitness, akin to physical fitness, involves maintaining and nurturing relationships through regular interaction.
- 📈 Assess your social health by evaluating the frequency and quality of your relationships, and adjust as necessary to improve your social well-being.
- 🌟 The good life is a continuous process of growth, change, and dealing with challenges, rather than a static state of constant happiness.
Q & A
What is the main focus of the investment advice given in the transcript?
-The main focus of the investment advice is on investing in relationships with other people, as it is suggested to be the most significant factor in maintaining happiness and health throughout one's life.
Who is Robert Waldinger and what is his role in the context of the transcript?
-Robert Waldinger is a psychiatrist and professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. He is the fourth director of the Harvard Study of Adult Development at Massachusetts General Hospital.
What is the Harvard Study of Adult Development?
-The Harvard Study of Adult Development is the longest study of adult life ever conducted, starting in 1938. It aims to understand what makes people thrive as they grow and develop by following the same individuals throughout their entire lives, including their families.
How has the study evolved over time in terms of methodology?
-The study has evolved by incorporating new methods of studying human life over time. It started with psychological and medical examinations, then included home visits and observations. As technology advanced, methods like audio and video recording, DNA analysis, and MRI scans were adopted.
What are some key lessons learned from the study about relationships?
-The study has identified that childhood experiences set the stage for our expectations of the world, that adult experiences can correct some negative childhood lessons, that disagreements are normal and can strengthen relationships, and that relationships help us weather life's hard times.
How do positive relationships affect our physical health?
-Positive relationships are believed to affect our physical health by reducing stress. When we're stressed and can talk to someone, our bodies can return to equilibrium. Without such support, we may stay in a chronic fight or flight mode, leading to higher stress hormone levels and increased inflammation, which can contribute to various health issues.
What is the impact of loneliness and toxic relationships on health?
-Loneliness and toxic relationships, characterized by constant arguing and unhappiness, can lead to chronic stress. This stress can result in higher levels of stress hormones and inflammation, which can wear away different body systems and increase the likelihood of diseases such as coronary artery disease, Type 2 diabetes, or arthritis.
How can we maintain social fitness?
-Maintaining social fitness involves regularly reaching out to friends and family, ensuring in-person meetings, paying attention to the frequency and quality of our interactions, and adjusting our social networks to keep them vibrant and supportive.
What is the concept of 'social universe' mapping?
-Mapping your 'social universe' involves considering your relationships on a grid with two axes: frequency of interaction (from infrequently to frequently) and the energizing or depleting nature of the relationship. This helps identify areas for improvement in your relationships.
What is the importance of understanding one's place on the shyness to extroversion continuum?
-Understanding one's place on the shyness to extroversion continuum is important for determining the number and type of social interactions one needs. Shy individuals may gain energy from solitude, while extroverts thrive on social interactions. Recognizing this can help individuals cultivate relationships that suit their social needs.
What is the overarching message of the transcript regarding life and relationships?
-The overarching message is that a good life is an ongoing process of growth and change, requiring continual care for ourselves and our relationships. It emphasizes that ups and downs are a normal part of life, making it rich and interesting, and that maintaining social fitness is key to happiness and health.
Outlines
🤝 Investing in Relationships for Well-Being
This paragraph emphasizes the importance of investing in relationships for long-term happiness and health. It highlights findings from the Harvard Study of Adult Development, which indicates that people with warm connections to others tend to be happier and healthier. The study, directed by psychiatrist Robert Waldinger, focuses on what leads to a good life rather than what goes wrong in human development. It has followed participants from adolescence into old age, examining various aspects of their lives, including psychological and medical examinations, family dynamics, and even DNA analysis. The key takeaway is that nurturing relationships is crucial for maintaining well-being throughout life.
💔 Overcoming Challenges in Relationships
This section discusses the role of challenges and disagreements in relationships and how facing them can strengthen bonds. It suggests that having a supportive network, whether it's a good partner or reliable friends, can significantly alter negative expectations about the world and relationships. The paragraph also explores how relationships help us cope with life's hardships, as evidenced by the experiences of the study's participants during the Great Depression and World War II. The physical effects of positive relationships are contrasted with the detrimental effects of loneliness and toxic relationships, which are linked to chronic stress and various health issues. The importance of resolving conflicts and maintaining affection and respect in relationships is underscored.
🏋️♂️ Social Fitness for Lifelong Happiness
This paragraph likens the maintenance of relationships to physical fitness, emphasizing that our happiest and healthiest individuals actively engage in 'social fitness.' It describes how these individuals invite people over, join clubs, and maintain connections with family, friends, and community. The concept of 'social universe' is introduced, suggesting a way to map out relationships based on frequency and energy levels. The paragraph encourages individuals to assess their social health and make necessary adjustments to foster more energizing connections. It acknowledges the natural human continuum from shyness to extroversion and the need for self-reflection to determine what amount and type of social interaction is personally fulfilling. The paragraph concludes by reinforcing the idea that a good life is an ongoing process of change and adaptation, rather than a static state of happiness.
Mindmap
Keywords
💡Investment in Relationships
💡Harvard Study of Adult Development
💡Mental Health
💡Childhood Experiences
💡Stress
💡Social Fitness
💡Loneliness
💡Toxic Relationships
💡Positive Relationships
💡Ongoing Process
💡Big Think
Highlights
The key to a happy and healthy life is investing in relationships with others.
People who had the warmest connections with others were the happiest and healthiest.
The Harvard Study of Adult Development is the longest study of adult life, starting in 1938.
The study followed participants from adolescence into old age, including their families.
Methods of the study evolved over time, including psychological, medical exams, and DNA analysis.
Good relationships can correct negative childhood experiences and change expectations about the world.
Disagreements are normal and can strengthen relationships when worked through.
Connections with others help us weather life's hard times, providing a protective effect.
Physical effects of positive relationships differ greatly from those of loneliness or unhappy relationships.
Stress is the primary way relationships affect our physical health, through the fight or flight response.
Loneliness and toxic relationships can lead to chronic stress, impacting multiple body systems.
Couples can argue without negative effects if there is a foundation of affection and respect.
Happy and healthy individuals maintained connections with family, friends, and community.
Social fitness, akin to physical fitness, is achieved by maintaining and nurturing relationships.
Assess your social fitness by evaluating the quality and frequency of your relationships.
Map your social universe using a quadrant system to identify energizing and depleting relationships.
Individuals vary in their social needs based on personality traits like shyness or extroversion.
The good life is a continuous process of change and adaptation, not a static state of happiness.
Ups and downs are a normal part of life, as seen across thousands of lives studied over decades.
Transcripts
- If you had to make one choice right now to invest
in what would keep you happy and healthy
as you go through the rest of your life,
what would that investment be?
Most of us think it's something to do with getting rich
or achieving a lot to have a happy, healthy life-
but the single choice we can make that's most likely
to keep us on a good path of well-being is to invest
in your relationships with other people.
The people in our 85-year study who stayed the happiest
and the healthiest were the people who had the warmest
connections with others.
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.
I'm Robert Waldinger. I am a psychiatrist
and I'm professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School.
I direct the Harvard Study of Adult Development
at Massachusetts General Hospital.
Hey, Big Thinkers we’ll return to the video in a moment.
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All right. Now back to the video.
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.
It started in 1938.
- 'Oldest of Harvard's professional
schools is the medical school.'
- This study set out to understand what makes people thrive
as they grow and develop, and it has followed
the same people throughout their entire lives
from the time they were teenagers all the way
into old age, they began to include their wives
and eventually all their children.
Now there are over 2,000 people in these 724 families
who we have followed year after year after year.
We started collecting information
by giving elaborate psychological examinations,
also medical examinations.
Then we went to their homes, we talked to their parents,
and sometimes even their grandparents.
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, video-taping, DNA wasn't even imagined
in 1938 when the study began, but we now draw blood for DNA.
aAnd 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 well-being.
So we've learned several big lessons about relationships,
about good relationships.
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.
That's often a good thing if we are raised by people
who are warm and caring and reliable.
But some people are raised in environments
where they feel like the people who are supposed
to take care of them 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.
Well, it turns out our study shows 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.
Another lesson that we learned is that all relationships
that are important have some disagreements
or some difficulties.
Actually, facing those difficulties goes a long way
to strengthen relationships much of the time.
It's normal to have disagreements,
it's normal to have difficulties,
and the more skill we can develop in working
through difficulties, the better our social worlds are.
And finally, one of the biggest lessons
is that our connections with other people help us
weather the hard times of life-
and hard times are there in every life.
Our original participants were born
during the Great Depression and many 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 know that the physical effects of positive relationships
are very different from the physical effects of loneliness
or of actively unhappy, acrimonious relationships.
The best hypothesis about how relationships
get into our bodies and affect our physical health
is through stress.
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.
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,
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,
and 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 or Type 2 diabetes or arthritis;
could affect multiple body systems
through this common denominator of chronic stress.
Loneliness is certainly a stressor,
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.
A toxic relationship is one where we can't get beyond
difficulties, unhappiness, anger;
we can't ever 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.
Staying in a really toxic intimate relationship
may be worse than splitting up because a really difficult
acrimonious relationship is that source of chronic stress
that breaks down our body systems.
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.
Being connected to another person makes us feel safer
and keeps our bodies at a kind of physiologic equilibrium
that promotes health.
We know that maintaining our physical fitness
is an ongoing practice, and what we found
was that our happiest, healthiest people
did the same with their relationships.
When we looked at all these lives
and how they played out over time,
we found that the people who were the happiest
and the healthiest were inviting people over.
They were joining clubs, they were maintaining connections
with family and friends and in community.
We began to think of this as a kind of fitness,
a 'social fitness,' analogous to physical fitness.
So the question comes up: How do I know how I'm doing?
Am I socially fit?
Check in with yourself and say, "Do I have the kinds
of relationships that I would like?
Do I have as many relationships as I would like?"
And if it doesn't feel like the right amount,
there are things you can do to make things
the way you would like them to be.
Each of us can do that through small actions
that we repeat over and over again:
reaching out to friends, to family,
through little texts or emails or phone calls,
making sure that we see people in person
who we want to keep in our lives,
paying attention to how often we're seeing people,
how often we're in touch with people,
pay off into social networks that are vibrant
and make us happier and keep us healthier.
One way to map your 'social universe'
is to think of it as four quadrants,
that on the horizontal axis it's how frequently
do I see this person from infrequently to frequently?
And on the vertical axis, it could be,
how energizing is this relationship?
Up at the top, it could be very energizing,
down at the bottom, it could be depleting.
And then see where each important person in your life
fits on this grid.
You might find that there are some people you see frequently
who are quite depleting, who drain your energy.
You might see that there other people
who you don't see very often,
but are so energizing when you're with them.
And that can give you some pointers in terms of changes
you might like to make in your relationships.
A lot depends on what you see in that little diagram
that you make, and then what you want do about it.
We're all on a continuum from shyness to extroversion.
Shy people may need just a few others in their life,
and actually shy people get a lot of their energy
from solitude, from alone time.
Whereas extroverts get their energy from people
and they may want a lot of people in their lives.
And so each of us needs to check in with ourselves,
what's right for me, and to really work on our social world
based on what we know works for us, whether it's a lot
of people or a small number of people,
or something in-between.
When we watch these thousands of lives play out over time,
what we see is that the good life is an ongoing process,
and it's a process of continual change;
which is different from what we all wish for,
which is that we would finally get to a place
where everything's good and it's gonna stay that way.
That's not the truth of anybody's life.
The good life involves a practice of ongoing care
for each other, for our relationships, care for ourselves,
and weathering all the unexpected challenges
that come along day after day, week after week.
My hope for what people will take away
from these ideas is the truth,
that if you're not happy all the time,
that doesn't mean you're doing something wrong;
that we can sometimes imagine that other people
have it all figured out, and we're the only one
who has ups and downs in our life.
Let me tell you, from having studied thousands
of people over eight decades,
that everybody has ups and downs.
We never figure it out ultimately,
and that that's perfectly normal.
And actually, it's what makes life rich and interesting.
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