This book summarizes the most important findings from the Harvard Study of Adult Development, which has followed the lives of two generations of individuals from the same families for more than eighty years. The study set out to understand human health by investigating not what made people sick, but what made them thrive. This prospective study began in 1938 and is still running today. Robert Waldinger is the fourth director of the study and Marc Schultz is its associate director. The study includes more than 1,300 of the descendants of its original 724 participants. It is the longest longitudinal study of human life ever done. Remarkably, the study has maintained a participation rate of 84% over its entire span.
The authors briefly discuss the different definitions of happiness, but note early in the book that they’re talking about eudaimonic happiness, which refers to a state of deep well-being in which a person feels that their life has meaning and purpose.
The main message of the book is that close relationships are the largest factor in happiness. The people who were the most satisfied in their relationships at age 50 were the healthiest (mentally and physically) at age 80.
What leads us astray from the path of happiness? Life today is a haze of competing social, political, and cultural priorities, some of which have very little to do with improving people’s lives. The second reason is related and even more fundamental: our brains often mislead us in our quest for lasting pleasure and satisfaction. For example, we’re poor at forecasting how we’ll feel in a given set of circumstances.
For example, a study performed at the University of Chicago asked commuters to predict which of two scenarios - talking to a stranger or minding your own business - would make for a more positive experience. Then they instructed one group to intentionally connect with a nearby stranger and the other group to remain disconnected. When the ride was over, they asked the commuters how they felt about the train ride. When commuters were told to strike up a conversation, most had a positive experience and rated their commute as better than usual, even though they didn’t predict that would be the case. It’s not just that we are seeking solitude; it’s that we want to avoid the potential mess of connecting with others. But we overestimate that mess and underestimate the beneficial effects of human connection.
Study population: While almost two thirds of the original men in the Harvard Study came from the poorest and most disadvantaged neighborhoods in Boston, the remaining third attended Harvard as undergraduates. 89% of first generation men fought in WWII. Those that had better relationships in the armed forces had lowered chance of PTSD. Authors do not discuss effect size for this finding, or any other from the Harvard study.
Life stages: In adolescence we begin asking Who am I? Then young adulthood is the time potential answers to that question are really put to the test. We typically become more independent from our family of origin, and this means creating new bonds to fill that vacuum. Midlife is an inflection point, not only between young and old, but also between the self-focused, inward-looking way of living that many of us developed in young adulthood and a more generous, outward-looking way of living. This is the most important and enlivening task of midlife: to expand one’s focus to the world beyond the self. Good friends and important family connections become more important and should be savored. The sense of limited time makes all of our relationships more important: we have to learn how to balance an awareness of death with staying engaged with life. Frustrations we have with each other can be avoided, and deeper connections made, by remembering that our views of life depend on where we stand in the life cycle.
The benefits of relationships: Julianne Holt-Lunstad and her colleagues looked at 148 studies conducted in countries all over the world (Canada, Denmark, Germany, China, Japan, Israel, and others) with a combined total of more than 300,000 participants. They found that social connection increased the likelihood of surviving in any given year by more than 50 percent, an effect on par with that of smoking on getting cancer.
We tend to think that once we establish friendships and intimate relationships, they will take care of themselves. But like muscles, neglected relationships atrophy.
Loneliness is associated with being more sensitive to pain, suppression of the immune system, diminished brain function, and less effective sleep, making an already lonely person even more tired and irritable. Recent research has shown that for older people loneliness is twice as unhealthy as obesity, and chronic loneliness increases a person’s odds of death in any given year by 26 percent. In a study conducted online that sampled 55,000 respondents from across the world, one out of every three people of all ages reported that they often feel lonely. Among these, the loneliest group were 16-24-year-olds, 40 percent of whom reported feeling lonely “often or very often” (more on this phenomenon soon). In the United States, a 2018 study suggested that three out of four adults felt moderate to high levels of loneliness.
In the first generation of the Harvard study, 30% of men said they’d like much closer relationships, but only 6% of women did. So there does seem to be a sex difference, at least historically.
I’m too busy to be happy: The authors contend that one reason some of us feel so busy is not because of the number of tasks we have to complete in the day, but because of the sheer number of things competing for our attention. What is commonly called “distraction” is probably better understood as overstimulation. It may feel like you are able to multitask and think about two (or more) things at once, but really your mind is switching between them. This is a costly process neurologically speaking. When we focus on one thing, we are at our most thoughtful, creative, and productive. The authors do not present any evidence supporting this claim.
Is social media bad for happiness? Not always, when social media is used to sustain relationships with friends and family, it can enhance feelings of connectedness and belonging. Actively engaging rather than passively scrolling, as well as resisting the urge to compare yourself with others is helpful. Research has shown that the more we compare ourselves to others - even when the comparison is in our favor - the less happy we are. The authors also suggest you check in with yourself. What does it feel like to refrain from looking at social media for four hours? If your phone is unavailable, are you more attentive to the people you love?
The W.I.S.E.R. model of reacting to emotionally challenging situations: Our ability to process emotions is malleable. In fact, managing emotions is one of the things we actually get better at as we grow old. And there is strong evidence that we don’t have to wait until late in our lives for this to happen. With the right guidance and some practice, we can learn to be better at managing our feelings at any age. It is important to tune in to difficult feelings rather than ignoring them.
Watch refers to the entire situation: the environment, the person you’re interacting with, and you. Is the situation unusual or common? What typically happens next? What have I not considered that might be an important part of what is unfolding?
Interpret: expand our understanding beyond our initial automatic perception
Select a course of action
Engage tactfully, with timing in mind
Reflect on how the situation went and if anything could be improved for next time
If I had a terrible childhood am I somehow irreparably broken? In 1955, developmental psychologist Emmy Werner conducted a study in Kauai. The study included every child born on the island of Kauai in 1955 - 690 total - and the study lasted for over thirty years. Using data from their childhoods, adolescence, and adult lives, Werner was able to show a clear connection between adverse childhood events and the trajectory of well-being in individual lives. However, a third of all children who had adverse childhoods still managed to develop into attentive, kind, and emotionally well-adjusted adults. One of the major sources of protection was the consistent presence of at least one caring adult.
Happiness at work: We may not always get to choose what we do for a living, but making work work for us may be more possible than we think. The authors suggest cultivating relationships at work so that you have a friend “in the trenches” which makes it more bearable. Also, achievements are most meaningful when they’re relational, so doing it with someone else can help you get more meaning out of work. If we feel disconnected from others at work, that means we feel lonely for the majority of our waking hours. But not having a friend in your current environment is not the same thing as being lonely. The authors do not address this. Also, the authors don’t advocate much for simply working less, since one study participant worked a lot but was attentive when he spent time with his family, and was one of the happies study participants. In general, they treat work as something you don’t have much control over, they don’t advocate for changing your work environment either so you’re not overworked or feeling like you’re “in the trenches.”
What can we do to be happier? While we do seem to have a happiness set point that is largely genetic, our actions and choices account for about 40% of our happiness.
Prioritize the cultivation and maintenance of close relationships. You can think about the quality and the frequency of contact you have with each person and use two broad dimensions to capture your social world: 1) How a relationship makes you feel, and 2) How often that happens. Try to maximize frequent contact with people that make you feel energized rather than depleted. Tell (and show) those people how much you appreciate them, and why. For borderline relationships, is there a way you can give these relationships a nudge, and make them more energizing?
In general, an energizing relationship enlivens and invigorates you, and it gives you a sense of connection and belonging that remains after the two of you part ways. It makes you feel better than you would feel if you were alone. A depleting relationship induces tension, frustration, or anxiety, and makes you feel worried, or even demoralized. In some ways, it makes you feel lesser or more disconnected than you would feel if you were alone.
Sometimes it’s difficult to understand and connect with the people in our lives when all we’re thinking about is what’s right in front of us. Stepping back now and then to take a wider view, to place ourselves and the people we care about into the context of a longer life, is a great way to inject empathy and understanding into our relationships.
Cultivate curiosity about others, generosity, and gratitude.
Practice mindfulness, or immersion in the present moment. A 2010 study by Matthew Killingsworth and Daniel Gilbert, conducted using random check ins through the day on participants’ smartphones collected millions of samples from more than five thousand people of all ages in eighty-three countries and across eighty-six occupational categories. They found that close to half of our waking moments are spent thinking about something other than what we are doing. Here the authors say that “a wandering mind is connected to unhappiness” but don’t present any data about that.
Check in with yourself regarding your relationships, your goals, and your habits.
Open up to others. The Harvard study found that a tendency to avoid thinking and talking about difficulties in middle age was associated with negative consequences more than thirty years later. The authors don’t elaborate on what the negative consequences were.
Regarding romantic relationships: there are limits to what they can do. If we want to give a relationship the best chance of success, we have to support it by sustaining other parts of our lives. Without realizing it, many of us expect our partners to provide money, love, sex, and to be our best friends. Some relationships do provide all those things, but they’re very rare.
We can notice when we are having experiences that are more positive than we expected. Remain open to the possibility of people behaving differently than we expect.
Try to catch people being kind. Most of us are very good at noticing when people are behaving badly, but we’re not so skilled at noticing when people are behaving well.
Step out of your old routines.
Try to engage with people casually in your daily routine. This gives you and possibly the other person a daily uplift, and also, repeated casual contact has been shown to foster the formation of closer friendships. The authors do not address the question of if this is also beneficial for introverts.
Thought questions
- Did you disagree with any of the authors’ perspectives on happiness? Did any of the advice ring particularly true or untrue in your experience?
- Which piece of advice was most different from how you live your life today?
- Why do you think humans are consistently poor at affective forecasting?
- Are there any topics related to happiness you’re like to see covered in more depth in this book?
- After mapping your social connections as the authors suggest on axes of frequency and affect, did any of what you found surprise you?