Happiness poison—and the antidote

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

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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, then 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, audiotaping, videotaping. DNA wasn even imagined in 1938 when the study began But we now draw blood for DNA And we 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're 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 learn 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

It 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

Good relationships are emotion regulators. 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

ogous 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 are 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 to 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 going to 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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