Lee
[00:00:00] Hello friends, Lee Camp here. You're listening to one of our 'Best Of' episodes, today with Robert Waldinger and Marc Schulz, Director and Co-Director of the Harvard Adult Study of Human Development, one of the longest running - as far as I know, the longest running - study on human happiness and human flourishing. A remarkable study. Enjoy.
I'm Lee C. Camp and this is No Small Endeavor - exploring what it means to live a good life.
Robert
How could good relationships actually make it less likely that you'd get coronary artery disease or type 2 diabetes? Like how could that be?
Lee
That's Robert Waldinger, Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, and one of my two guests today who direct what is now an 85-year-long running study on what factors make for a happy and healthy life.
Marc
In the United States 20-50% of the population feels lonely on a daily basis.
Lee
And that's Marc Schulz, Professor of Psychology at Bryn Mawr College. Together, Marc and Robert wrote The New York Times Bestselling book, The Good Life: Lessons from the World's Longest Scientific Study on Happiness.
Find out what actually makes us happy. All coming right up.[00:01:00]
I'm Lee C. Camp. This is No Small Endeavor, exploring what it means to live a good life.
/p>
My two guests today piqued my interest because of two things. First
Robert
Thanks! Great to be here.
Marc
Thank you. Pleasure to be with you.
Lee
Great to have you guys with us. So Bob, you're the Director, and I think Marc, you're the Associate Director of the Harvard Study of Adult Development, which is, as I understand it, is just that study itself is something of a significant historical accomplishment.
So give us just a little bit of, kind of, [00:05:00] of overview, uh, briefly of what the study has tried to do and why it's significant, historically, as a scientific study.
Robert
The study started out out as two studies that didn't know about each other when they started in 1938. They were both studies of what made young people thrive as they moved into adulthood, which was radical at that time because most research is on what goes wrong in human development, and this was what goes right.
/p>
But they were such different populations. One was a group of Harvard college undergraduates
Lee
This study is also remarkable, not just for its longevity, but its methods, the kind of data it collected, and the extent of the information gathered.
Marc
There's so many different indicators that we've collected over time. So at the beginning we used standard questionnaires to get a sense of how their life was going. This was a study that was really interested in the lived experience of participants, so it also included interviews and visits to the homes of participants at the beginning. More recently, we've, uh, included digital recordings of them interacting with partners, we've included brain scans and modern technology to capture their lives in many ways.
/p>
So the answer to the question of how we know they're thriving is we really try and get at it from a number of different angles. We ask the participants
Lee
Hmm. What, what was the impetus for this kind of significant shift, of moving from a set of questions about what's gone wrong towards what goes right?
Robert
Well, it depends on who the impetus was coming from. So the Harvard undergraduate study was started by W.T. Grant, the department store magnate, and he wanted to find out which young men would make good department store managers.
/p>
[Lee laughs]
"/p>
Now
Lee
The book, of course, is making the case that you found at least one persistent, significant finding about one major element of what contributes to a good life. So, describe that for us.
Marc
So when we step back and look at the hundreds of findings from our study - and also importantly from studies outside of the Harvard study, 'cause no one study is ever definitive - what we find is that relationships keep us happier and healthier throughout our lifespan.
/p>
It's as simple as that. It's all kinds of relationships we're talking about
Robert
Well, we didn't [00:09:00] believe it at first when the data began to come in, because, you know, it makes sense that if you have better relationships, you're happier. But how could good relationships actually make it less likely that you'd get coronary artery disease? Or type 2 diabetes, like how could that be?
/p>
And many other studies began to find the same thing. So for the last 10 years
Lee
So I, I'm not a statistician, but I, I at least know the difference between correlation and causation, right. And so, talk to us a little bit about how-- you're making the case, as I understand it, [00:10:00]not simply that there's a correlation, but there, there's some sort of causation between good relationships and all of these positive outcomes that you're pointing to.
So talk to us about how you identify the causative direction here in this set of variables.
Marc
Yeah. Such an important question, and it's a complicated one, of course. So, it's likely that the direction of influence goes both ways, right, that our health could also influence how happy we are. But when we look across a number of different kinds of studies-- so we're talking about studies with humans, studies with animals, and the advantage of working with animals is that we can do experiments that we wouldn't do with humans, we can rear them in certain ways that we would never do with human beings. And we learn a lot about the causal influences by looking across a number of studies, in a similar way that we know that smoking causes cancer. If we can triangulate across a number of different types of studies, and the single is always the same, that relationships are connected with health, [00:11:00] we have a pretty good idea that that connection may be causal.
/p>
Bob was describing the last 10 years
Lee
You also point to studies that have been done that indicate over the last 20, 30 years, that there's a kind of a shift in, I don't know if it's adolescents, college-aged students, in which they're increasingly desiring certain things that you now know from your study simply do not give what we anticipate it might giv - greater wealth, fame, and so forth. So talk to us a little bit about those studies and kind of the, the shifting sands of what people think will give them some, some sort of good life.
Robert
Well, those things have been around, those [00:12:00] myths have been around for ages, right? I mean, the, the myth that wealth is gonna make you happy. And the culture of materialism that we live in now kind of amplifies that, and social media certainly does, but it's been around. And now there've been, you know, some decent studies. One famous one you may know about, where they looked at how much happiness increases as your income goes up.
Lee
Yeah, that's the study by, what, Deaton and Kahneman, I think it is.
Robert
Yeah, yeah. And their, their estimate, it was a few years ago, was $75,000 a year annual income was about the threshold. That one-- before you get to that level, you're meeting your basic material needs, and so happiness really does go up the more money you make until you get there. And then once you get beyond that, once your material needs are met, your happiness doesn't go up very much at all. So, you know, difference between $75,000 and $75 million isn't nearly as [00:13:00] great as we would imagine it to be.
Lee
Marc
If I can just piggyback on that, the, the thing that is unique, and I think Bob started to allude to it, but really important to highlight, is that media influences have gotten only stronger in the last few decades, and it's because we carry around a source of communication with media in our pockets all the time, so it's hard to get away from that.
So we're bombarded by messages about the importance of acquiring certain goods or about making a certain amount of money, and I think it's become harder to get away from those messages than it has been in the past. It's not just a matter of turning off the television anymore, um, because of the, the ubiquity of the technologies that deliver those messages. So it's, it's harder. That message has been around for a while, but I, I think it's just more present in our lives.
Robert
Yeah. It also, it amplifies the culture of fame. The fascination, you know, with influencers, media influencers are so much more present in, in daily life now because of [00:14:00] these little devices we got in our pockets. So there are people who are just famous for being famous. Like, that, that wasn't so much a thing 30, 40 years ago.
Lee
Robert
Uh, so now, many, many young people think that's what they want, that's what's gonna let them have a good life - if they're famous.
Lee
You-- yeah, you cite a 2007 survey in which millennials were asked about their most important life goals. 76% said that becoming rich was their number one goal. 50% said a major goal was to become famous. Remarkable, uh, data there.
/p>
That reminds me of one of your Harvard colleagues
Marc
I think that there is a lot of truth there, that when we try and figure out what's good for us, that we often make mistakes. That-- we, we talk about, psychologists use this term 'affective [00:15:00]forecasting' to capture the idea of what we imagine will make us happy.
/p>
And I think we make mistakes when we predict the kinds of things that will make us happy. We probably pay attention too much to threats or to negative events. So talking to a stranger is scary for us 'cause we imagine that that stranger will reject us or think that we're not interesting or not cool enough.
So we tend to be biased towards negative outcomes and it influences the decisions we make in terms of the social engagements that we have
Lee
So lemme ask-- come back and kind of ask a question - that if, if that's true, that we can't necessarily trust our own sort of inclinations about what's gonna make us happy or what, what is making us happy or could make us happy, how does your study get around the potential problem that you cannot trust people's self-reports on happiness? [00:16:00]
Robert
Hm. Well, we, you know, as Marc was saying, we come at thriving from a whole lot of different angles.
So we don't just ask people and get their self-reports, which we certainly do, but we look at their lives. We look at how satisfied they feel in their work. We look at what other people say about them. We look at how warm their relationships look to people, just watching them talk with someone else on video. We put them in scanners and look at how their brains light up when we show them positive versus negative images. We, we bring them into our laboratory, deliberately stress them out, and then see how quickly they recover from stress. So there are all these different ways besides self-report to look at thriving.
Marc
That's such an interesting question you're asking Lee, and, and I do think that there's a difference between trying to figure out what's gonna make me happy - that's a much more complicated cognitive activity than letting you [00:17:00] know, Lee, I'm kind of excited about talking to you right now, so that we don't wanna dismiss self-report. When we think about happiness and people's wellbeing, what people say is really important.
I think that's a key part of the, the tools that we wanna use. As Bob and I have been describing, we don't rely just on those self-reports.
Lee
Yeah. I think, don't y'all even test, like, cortisol levels in the blood?
Robert
We, we don't do cortisol in the blood, 'cause that goes up and down all day long. We do cortisol in your hair, 'cause it turns out that a metabolite of cortisol gets deposited in your hair as it grows. And so you can look at your average level of circulating cortisol over the last two to three months by getting a little sample of hair. And that's what we're interested in.
/p>
So part of what we do is we try to pick a measurement that corresponds to what we wanna learn about. We don't care how much your cortisol level goes up from nine o'clock in the morning till noon.
We care about what it's been [00:18:00] like over the last two months.
"
Lee
Yeah. That is fascinating. Cortisol level here, I guess being one indicator of how stressed you are?
Robert
Marc
Lee
Yeah. Yeah, that, that's remarkable. Yeah, the, the holistic nature of the study is just so fascinating. I mean, that's just a huge investment of time and resources that the study represents. That's remarkable to me.
Marc
It is an amazing study, you know, started long before Bob and I were involved, but from the very beginning there was this commitment to really understanding people's experience. And that meant, you know, relying on interviews, open-ended questions, uh, really following up and making a relationship with participants.
We've had 84% retention across the length of the study, meaning people who started have continued to participate. So I, I think there was something about this holistic approach and really being interested in the experience of others that captured people's interest and, and allowed them to connect to the study across time as well.
And of course, for Bob and I, it's just an incredible, it's a [00:19:00] treasure trove. We're really interested in trying to understand other people and what, you know, makes them tick and what motivates them, and the way the study's gone about trying to understand people allows you to do that in a way that's just extraordinary.
Lee
You're listening to No Small Endeavor, and our interview with Robert Waldinger and Marc Schulz.
I love hearing from you. Tell us what you're reading, who you're paying attention to, or send us feedback about today's episode. You can reach me at lee@nosmallendeavor.com or find me on social media @leeccamp.
You can get show notes for this episode in your podcast app or wherever you listen. These notes include links to resources mentioned in this episode, as well as a PDF of my complete interview notes, and a full transcript.
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Coming up, Robert, Marc and I continue to discuss their findings from the world famous Good Life study and just why strong relationships lead to a longer and healthier life.
You've already pointed to, briefly, a couple of the studies that you cite in the book, but we talk a little bit more about the connection that you're seeing between healthy relationships and longevity of life, and or physical health.
Marc
So one way to talk about it, and, you know, there are a few ways, and Bob have, may have additional thoughts.
We can think about the opposite end of the spectrum. If you think about disconnection and a sense of loneliness. And that's important because, in the United States, for [00:21:00] example, depending on the survey, 20-50% of the population feels lonely on a daily basis. So it's not an unusual experience.
/p>
And it turns out that loneliness is a pretty significant risk for physical health problems
Lee
Yeah.
/p>
Anything to add to that
Robert
Well, the other thing we find is that having at least one really close relationship seems to be essential to wellbeing. Some people don't need a lot of relationships, but they may need at least one or two.
We ask people, who could you call in the middle of the night if you were sick [00:22:00] or scared? And most of our folks could list several people, but some people couldn't list anybody, and some of the people who couldn't list anybody were married.
/p>
So what we think is essential is to have at least one person in the world who you know would have your back if you were in trouble. We think of that as a relationship that is securely attached in the psychological terminology
Lee
So I can, I can imagine-- and I've even heard from some folks who will react negatively to even questions about what it means to live a good life, as a sort [00:23:00] of elitist pursuit.
And you know, I suppose at one level it's, it's true, right? If, if your, if your daily basic needs are not met and you're facing extreme poverty, these sets of questions that we're asking are from a place of some privilege. But I also find it striking that one of the things that you're doing in this study, in, in the, in your, your particular study, is that you're looking at people who have immense social privilege and those who do not, and you're saying you're finding kind of the same thing across those demographics.
So would you give us a little more commentary on that?
Marc
I think that's right and you're really pointing to something that's so important. So the study in the 1930s included these two very distinct groups. Almost two thirds of the participants were these boys that were growing up in very challenging circumstances in Boston.
It, they tended to be kids that grew up in immigrant families, living in tenement buildings, sort of squeezed in with their large [00:24:00] families, so facing real challenges. Very different than the Harvard University students across the city that were perched in a very different place. But we find across a number of our studies that connection matters, no matter your circumstance.
It's not to say that other things are unimportant. So Bob talked about the importance of meeting your material needs, so, you know, not having a basic income, not having access to healthcare. All of those things are important. And if we look even within our sample, the average age of death, there's a difference between those two cohorts.
On average, the college participants lived almost 10 years longer than the inner city participants. It's not that there are no disparities that are related to privilege and wealth and, and the kinds of benefits that we talk about, but the importance of connections is true in both of those contexts of people growing up.
And if we look at other studies, we find the same thing. That social connection makes it less likely that you're gonna get disease, and more [00:25:00] likely that you'll live longer.
Lee
Hmm. Other surprises that you've discovered looking at two such fundamentally different demographics?
Robert
Well, one was about the value of education.
So our inner city young men, almost none of them went to college, but 25 of them actually graduated from college, out of 456. And those 25 young men lived just as long, on average, as the Harvard men. So that extra 10 years, those 25 men got the same longevity boost, probably not because of their college diplomas per se, but probably because of, first of all, all the resources it must have taken to support these young men to get to college and then stay in college.
But also, the education that may have meant they were more likely to get the messages about taking [00:26:00] care of their health that really began to come into the public sphere in the '60s, '70s, '80s, about not smoking, not abusing alcohol and drugs, regular exercise, preventive healthcare. All of that, we think, probably had something to do with that advantage that those 25 young men had.
Lee
Yeah, that's remarkable and fascinating.
/p>
One
Marc
I lo-- I love that you bring it up. [00:27:00] Nice to remember those words. I, I think it's important for a few reasons.
/p>
One is that it's hard to-- you know
Robert
In some ways, that's stating the obvious, right? We state the obvious on page 3. But we need to state it because we often accidentally, or on purpose, sell each other the myth that you can have a life that's happy all the time, right?
/p>
That
Lee
Yeah, the, the, uh, paragraph I skipped over here a moment ago, on page 3 there, that gets at this beautifully, I think.
/p>
You say
Robert
Spoiler alert, right? [Laughs]
Lee
Marc
So I'll start with just one that I think is important, which is, over the [00:31:00] last several decades, long before COVID came along, people were growing more disconnected from others. Our sense of community and connection, certainly to the places we grew up, 'cause we're a very mobile society, was becoming less strong.
And I think people were beginning to feel the sense of disconnection that we now recognize as part of that loneliness epidemic. And you know, there are lots of reasons for it, I think, although I'm not sure it's been planned for in a logical way, but that's the place that we've arrived at.
/p>
Part of it
Robert
And you probably know about Robert Putnam's work, the sociologist who wrote that book called Bowling Alone, and his idea is that we have stopped investing in what he calls social capital.
And that means all the ways that we connect with other people in our lives. Certainly the work issues that Marc just talked about, but also, you know, going to [00:33:00] houses of worship, joining clubs, joining bowling leagues, having people over to your house for dinner, families eating together, families taking vacations, that all of those things have decreased, really since the 1950s, pretty steadily, uh, with some boosts in the early 2000s, and then boosts from COVID.
/p>
So this increasing disconnection from social networks is something that people are more and more concerned about
Lee
We're gonna take a short break, but coming right up - why one is [00:34:00] never too far gone or too late in life to apply the lessons learned from the Good Life study to their own life.
So let me ask a personal question, and give you maybe two sub-questions, one to choose from, for each of you. One, how would you narrate why this research has been important to you and why you've invested so much of yourself in it, would be one possibility. A second possibility I'd love to hear from you on, is how has what you've learned from this research changed your own life individually or relationally?
Marc
I'll start, I'll do the, the, I'll take on the first one, but I, I can't wait to hear my colleague's answer to whichever one, so. [Lee laughs]
/p>
I think this research has been important to me in so many ways. As a younger person
Robert
Yeah, similar for me. I mean, I think I've just been fascinated with the experience of being human, and, and in different ways. Like, getting to look at these life stories has been an amazing way to understand so many different ways of going through life.
And in addition, I do clinical work. I see patients in psychotherapy every day. I'll see two patients later this afternoon. And that lets me take a deep dive into someone else's experience of being in the world. And then I also practice Zen, which is a lot of time on a meditation cushion, watching my mind and my body go through time.
And so, all of these are different lenses on the experience of being alive, and that seems to [00:37:00]me to be the most exciting thing I could do.
/p>
And then
Lee
Yeah, fascinating. I appreciate you sharing that.
/p>
So it's
Marc
So, one way we think about this is that we try and use the metaphor of social fitness, that just like our physical fitness, if we don't kind of exercise our social muscles, that they're gonna wane. They're gonna get weaker over time.
/p>
So we all have people that we were quite close to in our life
Robert
You know, another avenue is to think about ways you may want new relationships. So some people feel they don't have enough connection in their lives and they've actually done research on this and found that when you are in a situation where you see the same people repeatedly, you're more likely to strike up conversations and eventually deepen some of those conversations.
/p>
And so one idea is to simply put yourself in a situation where you're doing something you care about alongside other people who care about the same thing
Lee
Yeah. We don't have time to discuss it, but I'll note for the, for listeners that what I find a very helpful model that you call the Wiser [00:41:00] Model to, to watch, interpret, select, engage, and reflect, which lists a, a great-- a very helpful number of questions that we might ask ourselves as we attend to relationships.
And then, the third thing I had noted here in thinking about practices was, the more I talk to people who have done lots of fascinating research about what it means to try to live a good life, it so often comes back to at least one element being attentiveness and mindfulness, and just to, to learn to pay better attention.
But that seems also to be crucial to what you're pointing us to. Is that, is that fair?
Marc
Absolutely. Really critical, this idea of attention. You know, our attention is such a valuable resource that we tend to just let it be devoted to things that maybe aren't consistent with what our priorities are in life. So if we catch ourselves sort of scrolling on the internet for an hour and we've lost that hour, we can think about if we took that energy and time [00:42:00] and, and attention and devoted it to the people that we really care about.
So, one of the things we talk a lot about in the book is this notion of really prioritizing our attention for the things that are most important to us, particularly the people that are most important to us. There's nothing better than being in a discussion and interaction with someone who's really paying attention and curious about what your experience is, and, and we wanna give people the benefit of that attention in our own lives, and we also thirst for it for ourselves as well.
Robert
And that's becoming more difficult. 'Cause, as we know, you know, screens and the software on those screens are now constructed to capture our attention and hold it. And so it's more and more difficult to intentionally take your attention away from those screens to the people who you're with.
/p>
You know
Lee
So I, I can imagine some folks listening and perhaps thinking, well, this is all fine and good, but too many adverse childhood experiences, or, I'm too old, or too much has happened and I'm too far down the road with too many broken relationships. What, what would be kind of some encouragement, challenge, suggestions for those who might be listening to this and, and, and finding that sort of reaction come up in themselves?[00:44:00]
Marc
So we, we have a whole chapter devoted to this question. We call it, It's Never Too Late,, and the, the message is, is exactly what it would appear to be. That what we find in studying the lives very closely of these, you know, 724 participants across time, and now their more than 1,300 children, is that people change across their lifespan.
Sometimes it's because of serendipity, they're in different circumstances. And sometimes it's with intention, that they purposely pursue a different path. And people who have lived quite difficult and challenging lives begin to flourish, even into their... we describe one man in this chapter who flourished in his late sixties and early seventies and he was one of the most isolated men in the study.
Started to go to a gym late in life, made connections in the way Bob was describing. Saw people every day, recognized their faces at first, began to notice that they had some shared similar interests. And in his seventies, really for the first time in adulthood, would talk about having friends, uh, so that people really can [00:45:00] change their lives.
I think one other thing I wanna say is that our study is one of the few studies that's followed people long enough to see that there are indeed connections between your early childhood experiences and even late life experiences in close connections with others, like with your partner. But the strength of that connection is modest, it's rather small.
/p>
Which means that there's a
Lee
Bob, your thought on that?
Robert
Well, yeah. I mean, many people assume they know what's gonna happen. You know? So some people, even in their twenties, have said, it's too late for me. I'm no good at relationships. It's never [00:46:00] gonna happen. [Lee laughs]
Marc
Robert
You know, but think, if-- any one of us can think back on all the things that happened that we never imagined would've happened, and that's what we see in following all these lives, that surprises are coming our way all the time, and that things we're sure of about the future turn out not to be true.
And that's really important for people to hold onto as a mindset when they're so sure that good connections aren't gonna happen in their lives. That's just not the truth when you follow these thousands of lives across time.
Lee
What might be some next steps you might challenge folks to go, to just go try?
Marc
I mean, a simple step that people can take right now is to, to. Right in this minute, take out their phone, that device that sometimes can get us into trouble, but can also connect us to others.
Send a text to someone who's important to you. Let them know that they're important, that you wanna see them soon or talk to them soon. [00:47:00] So making that first step, this idea that the good life is right within our reach, we're surrounded by people that we can have those connections with. So why not take the opportunity now, or when you stop listening, to reach out to someone who's important?
It can be as simple as a text to start.
Robert
And for those relationships you take for granted, 'cause they've been going on for a long time, try something new. Plan something you and this other person have never done before. Just come up with something and surprise the other person or get the other's permission and, and do something different to, we'll change the mix.
Lee
I've been talking to Professor Marc Schulz and Dr. Robert Waldinger, on their New York Times Bestseller, The Good Life: Lessons from the World's Longest Scientific Study on Happiness.
Thanks so much. It's a delight to get to be with both of you, and congratulations on the new book and hope it finds [00:48:00] many, many more readers. And, uh, thank you for the good work.
Robert
Marc
Thank you, Lee, for having us. Really a pleasure to talk with you.
Lee
You've been listening to No Small Endeavor and our interview with Robert Waldinger and Marc Schulz on their New York Times Bestseller, The Good Life: Lessons from the World's Longest Study on Happiness.
We gratefully acknowledge the support of Lilly Endowment Incorporated, a private philanthropic foundation supporting the causes of community development, education, and religion, and the support of the John Templeton Foundation, whose vision is to become a global catalyst for discoveries that contribute to human flourishing.
Our thanks to all the stellar team that makes this show [00:49:00] possible. Christie Bragg, Jakob Lewis, Sophie Byard, Tom Anderson, Kate Hays, Mary Eveleen Brown, Cariad Harmon, Jason Sheesley, Ellis Osburn and Tim Lauer.
Thanks for listening, and let's keep exploring what it means to live a good life, together.
No Small Endeavor is a production of PRX, Tokens Media, LLC and Great Feeling Studio.