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What keeps us healthy and happy
As we go through life
If you were going to invest now in your future best self
Where would you put your time and your energy
There was a recent survey of millennios asking them what their most important life goals were and over eighty percent said that a major life goal for them was to get rich
And another fifty percent of those same young adults said that another major life goal was to become famous
And we're constantly told to lean in
To work
To push harder and achieve more
We're given the impression
That these are the things that we need to go after in order to have a good life pictures of entire lives of the choices that people make
And how those choices work out for them
Those pictures are almost impossible to get most of what we know about human life
We know from asking people to remember the past
And as we know hindsight is anything
But twenty
Twenty we forget vast amounts of what happens to us in life
And sometimes memory is downright creative
But what if we could watch entire lives as they unfold through time
What if we could study people from the time that they were teenagers all the way into old age to see what really keeps people happy and healthy
We did that the harvard study of adult development may be the longest study of adult life
That's ever been done for seventy five years
We've track the lives of seven hundred twenty four men year after year asking about their work
Their homelives
Their health
And of course asking all along the way without knowing how their life stories were going to turn out studies like this are exceedingly rare
Almost all projects of this kind full apart within a decade
Because too many people drop out of the study or funding for the research dries up
Or the researchers get distracted where they die and nobody moves the ball further down the field
But through a combination of luck and the persistence of several generations of researchers
This study has survived about sixty of our original seven hundred twenty four men are still alive
Still participating in the study
Most of them in their nineties
And we are now beginning to study the more than two thousand children of these men
And i'm the fourth director of the study
Since nineteen thirty eight we've tracked the lives of two groups of men
The first group started in the study
When they were soft more at harvard college
They all finished college during war
War two
And then most went off to serve in the war
And the second group that we've followed was a group of boys from boston's poorest neighborhoods boys who were chosen for the study
Specifically
Because they were from some of the most troubled and disadvantaged families in the boston of the nineteen thirties most lived in tentenments
Many without hutton called running water
When they entered the study
All of these teenagers were interviewed they were given medical exams
We went to their homes
And we interviewed their parents
And then these teenagers grew up into adults
Who entered all walks of life
They became factory workers and lawyers and brick layers and doctors
One president of the united states
Some developed alcoholism
A few developed chizophrenia
Some climb the social latter from the bottom all the way to the very top
And some made that journey in the opposite direction
The founders of this study would never in their wildest dreams
I imagine that i would be standing here to day seventy five years later telling you that the study still continues every two years
Our patient and dedicated research staff calls up our men and ask them
If we can send them yet one more set of questions about their lives
Many of the inner city boston men ask us
Why do you keep wanting to studying me
My life just isn't that interesting
The harvard man never asked that question to get the clearest picture of these lives
We don't just send them questionnairs
We interview them in their living rooms
We get their medical records from their doctors
We draw their blood
We scan their brains
We talk to their children
We videotate them talking with their wives about their deepest concerns
And when about a decade ago we finally asked the wives
If they would join us as members of the study many of the women said
You know it's about time
So what have we learned
What are the lessons that come from the tens of thousands of pages of information that we've generated on these lives
While the lessons aren't about wealth or fame or working
Harder and harder
The clearest message that we get from this seventy five years study is this good relationships keep us happier and healthier period
We've learned three big lessons about relationships
The first is that social connections are really good for us
And that loneliness kills it turns out
That people who are more socially connected to family to friends to community are happier
They're physically healthier
And they live longer than people who are less well connected
And the experience of loneliness turns out to be toxic
People who are more isolated than they want to be from others fine that they are less happy
Their health declines earlier in midlife
Their brain functioning decline sooner
And they live shorter lives than people who are not lonely
And the sad fact is that at any given time
More than one in five americans will report that they're lonely
And we know that you can be lonely in a crowd
And you can be lonely in a marriage
So the second big lesson that we learned is that it's not just a number of friends you have
And it's not whether or not you're in a committed relarelashiship
But it's the quality of your close relationships that matters
It turns out that living in the midst of conflict is really bad for our health
High conflict marriages for example without much affection turn out to be very bad for our health
Perhaps worse than getting divorced living in the midst of of warm relationships is protective
And once we had followed our man all the way into their eighty
So we want to look back at them at midlife
And to see if we could predict who was gna grow into a happy healthy optigeneria
And who wasn't n't when we gathered together
Everything we knew about them at age fifty
It wasn't their middle aged collestroal levels that predicted how they were going to grow old
It was how satisfied they were in their relationships
The people who were the most satisfied in their relationships at age fifty
Were the healthest at a ad and good close relationships
Seem to buffer us from some of the slings and arrows of getting old
Our most happily partnered men and women reported in their eighties that on the days
When they had more physical pain
Their mood stays just as happy
But the people who were in unhappy relationships on the days when they reported more physical pain
It was magnified by more emotional pain and the third big lesson
That we learn about relationships on our health is that good relationships don't just protect our bodies
They protect our brains
It turns out that being in a security attached relationship to another person in your eighties is protective that the people who are in relationship
Where they really feel they can count on the other person in times of need
Those people's memies stay shararper longer
And the people in relationships
Where they feel they really can't count on the other one
Those are the people who experience earlier memory decline
And those good relationships they don't have to be smooth all the time
Some of our octogenarian couples could bikger with each other day and and day out
But as long as they felt that they could really count on the other
When they they going
Got tough
Those arguments didn't take a toll on their memories
So this message that good close relationships are good for our health and well being
This is wisdom
That is all as the hills
Why is it so hard to get and so easy to ignore well we're human
What we're really like is a quick fix
Something we can get that i'll make our lives good
And keep in that way relationships are messy and they're complicated
And the hard work of tending to family and friends
It's not sexy or glamorous
It's also lifelong
It never ends the people in our seventy five years study
Who were the happiest in retirement
Where the people who had actively work to replace workmates with new playmates
Just like the millenniels in that recent survey many of our men
When they were starting out young adululreally believed that fame and wealth and high achievement
Were what they needed to go after to have a good life
But over and over over these seventy five years
Our study has shown that the people who fared the best
Were the people who leaned into relationships with family
With friends
With community
So what about you let's say you're twenty five or you're forty or your sixty
What might blleaning into relationships
Even look like well the possibilities are practically endless
It might be something as simple as we're replacing screen time with people time or lighghing up a stale relationby by dosomething new together long walks or date nights or reaching out to that family member who you haven't spoken to in years
Because those all two common family fields take a terrible toll on the people who hold the grugeges
I'd like to close with a quote from mark twin more than a century ago
He was looking back on his life
And he wrote this there isn't time so grief 's life for biggerings
Apologies
Heart burnings
Callings to account
There is only time for loving
And but an instance so to speak for that the good life is built with good relationships
Thank you
