Happiness poison—and the antidote | Robert Waldinger

Summary

The 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

00:00

🤝 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.

05:01

💔 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.

10:05

🏋️‍♂️ 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.

Keywords

💡Investment in Relationships

The concept of investing in relationships refers to the deliberate effort and resources allocated to nurturing and maintaining connections with others. In the context of the video, it is highlighted as the most significant investment one can make for long-term happiness and health. This is exemplified by the findings from the Harvard Study of Adult Development, which indicates that individuals with warm connections to others tend to be happier and healthier.

💡Harvard Study of Adult Development

This is a longitudinal study conducted by Harvard University that began in 1938, aiming to understand what contributes to human flourishing throughout adulthood. The study has followed participants from adolescence into old age, examining various aspects of their lives, including psychological, medical, and social factors. It is presented in the video as a source of evidence for the benefits of strong social connections.

💡Mental Health

Mental health refers to an individual's psychological and emotional well-being. The video emphasizes the importance of mental health and how it affects one's overall quality of life. It suggests that seeking therapy, especially during difficult periods, can provide valuable insights and tools for managing life's challenges.

💡Childhood Experiences

Childhood experiences are the events and interactions a person has during their early years, which can significantly shape their expectations and perceptions of the world. The video posits that being raised in a nurturing environment can lead to positive adult experiences, while adverse childhood experiences may require corrective experiences in adulthood.

💡Stress

Stress is the body's response to perceived threats or challenges, often leading to the 'fight or flight' mode. The video discusses how positive relationships can help mitigate the negative physical effects of stress by providing a support system that allows the body to return to equilibrium after a stressful event.

💡Social Fitness

Social fitness is a concept analogous to physical fitness, referring to the quality and strength of an individual's social connections and relationships. The video suggests that maintaining social fitness is crucial for happiness and health, and it involves actively nurturing and engaging in social interactions.

💡Loneliness

Loneliness is the subjective feeling of being isolated or disconnected from others. In the video, it is presented as a stressor that can have detrimental effects on both mental and physical health, leading to chronic stress and inflammation in the body.

💡Toxic Relationships

Toxic relationships are those characterized by continuous conflict, unhappiness, and resentment without resolution. The video suggests that staying in such relationships can be more harmful than ending them, as they are a source of chronic stress that can negatively impact physical health.

💡Positive Relationships

Positive relationships are those characterized by warmth, affection, respect, and support. The video emphasizes that these relationships contribute to happiness and health by providing a sense of safety and promoting physiological equilibrium.

💡Ongoing Process

The concept of an ongoing process refers to the continuous and dynamic nature of life, which involves constant change and adaptation. The video uses this term to convey that a good life is not a static state but rather involves ongoing care and adjustment to challenges.

💡Big Think

Big Think is a platform that provides videos and content focused on education, science, and diverse perspectives on various topics. In the video, it serves as the medium through which the insights from the Harvard Study of Adult Development are shared with the audience.

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.

But first, a brief word about the sponsor of this video, BetterHelp.

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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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