yeah
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 millennials asking them what their most important
life goals were and over eighty percent said that a major life goals 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 into work to push harder and achieve more were 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 2020 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 75 years we've tracked the lives of 720 for men
year after year asking about their work their home lives 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 fall
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 or 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 60 of our original 724 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
2,000 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 sophomores at harvard
college they all finish college during world war two and then most went off to
serve in the war and the second group that we have 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 tenements many
without hot and cold 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 bricklayers and doctors one president of
the united states
some developed alcoholism a few develop schizophrenia
some climb the social ladder 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 have imagined
that I would be standing here today 75 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 then asked us why do you keep wanting to study me
my life just isn't that interesting
the Harvard men never ask that question
yeah
to get the clearest picture of these lives
we don't just send them questionnaires 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 videotape 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
well the lessons aren't about wealth or fame or working harder and harder
the clearest message that we get from this 75 years study is this good
relationships keep us happier and healthier . we've learned three big
lessons about relationships
the first is that social connections are really good for us and the loneliness
kills it turns out that people who are more socially connected to family to
friends to community are happier there 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 find 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 their 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 the number of friends you have and it's not whether or not you're in a
committed relationship 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 and living in the
midst of good warm relationships is protective
once we had followed our men all the way into their eighties we want to look back
at them at midlife and to see if we could predict who is going to grow into
a happy healthy octogenarian and who wasn't
when we gathered together everything we knew about them at age 50
it wasn't their middle age cholesterol 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 50 where
the healthiest and a JD and good close relationships seem to buffer us from
some of the slings and arrows of getting old
our most happily partnered man and women reported in their eighties that on the
days when they had more physical pain their mood state 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 securely attached relationship to another person
in you're a tease is protective that the people who are in relationships where
they really feel they can count on the other person in times of need those
people's memories stay sharper longer and the people in relationships where
they feel they really can't count on
the other one those are the people who experienced earlier memory decline and
those good relationships they don't have to be smooth all the time some of our
octogenarian couples could bicker with each other day in and day out
but as long as they felt that they could really count on the other when the 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's as old as the hills
why is it so hard to get and so easy to ignore
well we're human what we'd really like is a quick fix something we can get that
will make our lives good and keep them that way
relationships are messy and they're complicated and the the hard work of
tending to family and friends
that's not sexy or glamorous it's also a lifelong it never ends
the people in our 75 years study who were the happiest in retirement
where the people who had actively work to replace work mates with new playmates
just like the Millennials in that recent survey
many of our men when they were starting out as young adults really believed that
Fame and wealth and high achievement or what they needed to go after to have a
good life but over and over over these 75 years our study has shown that the
people who feared the best for the people who leaned into relationships
with family with friends with community
so what about you let's say you're 25 or your 40 or 60 what might leaning into
relationships even look like
well the possibilities are practically endless it might be something as simple
as replacing screen time with people time or lighting up a stale relationship
by doing something new together long walks or date nights
for reaching out to that family member who you haven't spoken to in years
because those all too common family feud's take a terrible toll on the
people who hold the grudges
I'd like to close with a quote from Mark Twain more than a century ago he was
looking back on his life and he wrote this
there isn't time so brief his life for bickerings 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