Lessons from the world's longest happiness study

For decades, Harvard researchers have been studying what makes people happy --- and what they found surprised them.

“This guy that we call Leo – he went off to World War II, as all the Harvard undergrads did. And when he came back, his mother was ill, and he needed to take care of his mother. So, he went home, he found a job teaching history. And that's where he stayed his whole life. George, my predecessor, thought he's so boring. And then later on, George agreed that he was our happiest person in our study," says Bob Waldinger.

It wasn’t big adventures or accomplishments. What was Leo's secret?

Today, On Point: Lessons from the world's longest study on happiness.

Robert Waldinger, director of the Harvard Study of Adult Development. Clinical professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. Co-author of The Good Life: Lessons From the World’s Longest Scientific Study of Happiness.

Marc Schulz, associate director of the Harvard Study of Adult Development. Professor of Psychology and Director of Data Science at Bryn Mawr College. Co-author of The Good Life: Lessons From the World’s Longest Scientific Study of Happiness.

Part I

DEBORAH BECKER: Today we're helping start the new year with stories of meaningful relationships.

(LISTENER MONTAGE)

PAULA: I am almost 61 and I have a group of friends. We have been together since we were 12 and we see each other at least once a year. Now that we're older, we see each other two, three, four times a year and we have been there through obviously high school, college, marriage, children, divorce, death, our aging parents, and we are just each other's rocks, best friends, sisters, and couldn't live without them.

RONALD: I grew up the seventh of nine children on a farm near Niagara Falls, New York. My most vital social influence has been my eight brothers and sisters. Our most important activity has been singing together, all nine of us. My three brothers and I also had our own barbershop quartet.

SUE: I have a friend who we have been friends since 1961. We were born in 1959. So we don't really remember not knowing each other. And I cannot give words to how I could never have managed this life alone. And truthfully, the thing I worry about most in life is which one of us is going to go first. Because the other one will be completely undone.

BECKER: Those are On Point listeners Paula Sweeney from Seattle; Ronald Harrington from Ventura, California; and Sue Seibert from Montrose, Colorado.

Their stories might make all of us consider what makes us healthiest and happiest in life. Harvard researchers have been trying to scientifically answer that question since at least 1938, when two studies began following the lives of 268 undergraduate students at Harvard and another group of 456 boys from disadvantaged families in Boston.

These two efforts later merged into what's now called the Harvard Study of Adult Development. For more than 85 years, scientists have followed the lives of these boys and young men as they got older. Later, it included their spouses and, more recently, the lives of their descendants. It's called the longest scientific study of happiness ever conducted.

So what have they learned? Joining us to talk about that is Bob Waldinger. He's director of the Harvard Study of Adult Development and a clinical professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. Welcome to On Point.

BOB WALDINGER: Thank you. It's great to be here.

BECKER: And Marc Schulz is also with us. He's associate director of the study and professor of psychology at Bryn Mawr College.

Together, they wrote, they co-wrote the book, The Good Life: Lessons From the World’s Longest Scientific Study of Happiness. Marc, it's great to have you as well.

MARC SCHULZ: It was such a pleasure to be with you.

BECKER: So I wonder, Bob, if we could start with you. When you heard the montage of our listeners sharing their stories about what is important to them and their relationships, what stood out for you?

WALDINGER: It felt so familiar because we've studied now thousands of lives over 85 years. And the reports that we got from people were exactly these about the family members. I couldn't imagine my life without the friends who helped me through the most important milestones of my life, that these are the kind of messages that came to us from the people who led the happiest and the healthiest lives.

BECKER: And Marc, I wonder, we might all think it's intuitive, right? That relationships are very important. That relationships affect us probably in the deepest ways in our lives. But I wonder, what does this study say about how they affect us specifically, and why? What do we know about that?

SCHULZ: Yeah, that's such an important and a big question. So it turns out relationships affect us in lots of ways, that they serve many functions for us that really lead to both happiness and health, as Bob suggested. So one of the ways they help us is that they provide us a sense of who we are, they connect us with our past.

Your listeners, their testimonies talked about that sort of connection to their childhood and how they've gone through the journey of life with other people. And that's important to us. Another really critical function of relationships is they're really good at helping us navigate challenges and stress in our life.

So we all experience challenges. The trick is navigating them. And it turns out that relationships are really important resource when we're facing stress, our friends, our relatives, people that we're close with, help us deal with our emotions, help us think about the challenge and maybe a path forward.

So relationships serve many functions, more than I think many of us assume. But they contribute through those many functions to our health and our happiness. Can you tell me a little bit more, Bob, about health wise, what do we know about, they might make us feel good, better relationships, but really do they really help our health?

WALDINGER: They really do. And in fact, when we began to find that in our study, we didn't believe it at first. Because it makes sense that we'd be happier if we have better relationships. But how could relationships actually make it more likely that we wouldn't get heart disease or type two diabetes or arthritis as we get older?

How could that be possible? So for the last 10 years, we've been studying how relationships get into our bodies and actually shape our physiology.

BECKER: And many other laboratories have been studying this as well. And they actually do. You've actually seen a positive correlation between good relationships and good health.

WALDINGER: Oh yes, and many studies, not just our own. The best hypothesis about this is that relationships help us manage stress. Because if you think about it, stress comes at us in life all the time. I'm having a good time talking with you right now, but an hour from now something stressful may happen and my body will change.

Blood pressure will go up, my heart rate will go up. If I can go home and talk to somebody, I can literally feel my body calm down. And we think that function of relationships goes a long way to helping us stay healthy as we get older.

BECKER: Now, we said you followed these folks through their lives.

This has been a study that's followed people. I wonder what it means to follow them. Can you tell me, Marc, a little bit about that? It's questionnaires, it's surveys, it's meetings. What does that mean exactly to look at the lives and the relationship lives of the subjects in your study?

SCHULZ: Yeah. We like to say we followed them really closely.

BECKER: (LAUGHS)

SCHULZ: Yeah. So this was a study from its very origins, both of the studies that started separately were really interested in the daily experience of their participants and getting a sense of what was going on inside their heads. So interviews were always an important part of the study, in depth interviews in which folks got a chance to talk about their lives, their perceptions, what was important, what was challenging in their life.

There are observations of the original participants with their parents, interviews with their parents as well. And over the 85 years of the study, regular questionnaires about every two years, very lengthy ones, including standard psychological questionnaires, but also open-ended questions. We collected medical information regularly about every five years for the participants, observed them in different settings.

And continue to interview them regularly about every decade over the last 85 years. And since Bob and I have been involved, which is roughly for the last 20 years, we also introduced more modern strategies. So we put people in situations that were stressful and watched how their bodies responded while we were collecting physiology data.

We collected blood assays, so that we could understand their immune functioning. We put them in scanners so we could look at their brain activity when they were experiencing certain challenges. And we also observed them very closely interacting with a partner, with a loved one.

So we follow them very closely, and we try and think about both relationships and wellbeing in a broad and multi factorial way, so we're looking at multiple factors, not just one, not just what they say about themselves, but also trying to observe them, trying to collect data from people that know them well. So this was an intensively close study, even though it lasted over 85 years.

BECKER: And still with the same conclusion, that it's relationships that really matter and that are key to having, to thriving, if you will.

SCHULZ: That's right. When we step back and try and see is there a signal, because good science is really about a common signal, what we call replication. So even in our study, where we have hundreds of separate studies that have been published over the years, is there a common signal among many of those studies?

And the common signal in our data was the importance of relationships, both for happiness and for health. And then we looked more broadly when we wrote the book, The Good Life, we looked more broadly to see whether that was true in other studies, because it's really important to look at replication across different samples, across time, across culture, across gender, and we found that the power of relationships was present in many studies, thousands of studies.

BECKER: And that's even though you started with subjects from very different backgrounds, right? Folks who, students at Harvard and men from very disadvantaged backgrounds in Boston. So it didn't really matter, would you say that, Bob, where people came from?

WALDINGER: It did matter where they came from.

So what we learned was that the inner-city men who were from not just the poorest families, but the most disadvantaged families. So known to five social service agencies on average, each family, for domestic violence, familial illness and mental illness. So those young men who were born with so many strikes against them, they lived on average 10 years shorter than the Harvard men.

And we think that had something to do with privilege, with access to health care, with access to information about how to take care of yourself. So it did matter. But when it comes to happiness, the inner-city men were just as happy as the Harvard men, and their families were just as happy.

BECKER: And in some cases, happier.

WALDINGER: Yes, exactly. Privilege does not guarantee happiness at all.

BECKER: Marc, would you like to add to that before we go to a break in about a minute?

SCHULZ: No, I think what you're describing, Deborah, is absolutely right, that despite these incredible differences in the circumstances in which we started with these participants, the same factors, the quality of their relationships turned out to be the most robust predictor of their health and happiness.

And that's quite startling. I think it's really important.

Part II

BECKER: So many of you left us messages about the meaningful relationships in your lives. Let's take a listen to some.

(LISTENER MONTAGE)

CALE: I have two really great friends, Kelton and Corey. We did debate together in high school, both of them have been there throughout the highs and the lows in my life, through the tough times of high school, all of us getting married, all of us having kids.

So they are probably the most meaningful friendships that I have outside of the one where I'm married to my very lovely wife.

KATE: The most meaningful relationship in my life is my best friend, Elizabeth. Currently, we live on opposite coasts and we're both working on novels. And we submit our writing to one another four days a week, and we talk like clockwork once a week, eight o'clock in the morning on Mondays, and it is the highlight of my week. We're always there for one another. And there is nothing that we don't talk about.

AL: My dad, he and I used to butt heads every single moment when I was a kid. But as I got older, we both really learned to see each other as individuals. And he is one of my best friends in the world. I can go to him with anything, knowing full well that I'll never be judged.

That he'll always be there for me. And I having that type of relationship has been really beneficial in my life because it allows me to feel like I can carry on other meaningful long-term relationships that are vulnerable and honest.

BECKER: Those were On Point listeners Al Russo from Boston; Kate Pretorius from Redlands, California; and Cale Lively from Spokane, Washington.

So whether it's a relationship with someone we call a best friend, maybe a writing partner, maybe a family member, we all tend to have different types of relationships. And we're talking about how important relationships are to our overall health. So I want to ask Marc Schulz if he can tell us a little bit about defining a good relationship and the relationships that seem to be the most important to folks and their happiness.

SCHULZ: Sure. This idea that relationships bring so many benefits also means that all sorts of relationships can be important to us. That it's unlikely we're going to get all we need from one relationship. But if we think about the elements that make for a good relationship, we probably need to start with trust, a sense that the person will be there for you, that has your back.

It's really looking out for your welfare and is interested in knowing who you are. So when we talk about intimacy, the roots of that word really mean to share important aspects of oneself with another. So that's an important aspect of relationships. Another key is really providing support.

So relationships provide all sorts of support during times of stress, instrumental kinds of support, helping us figuring out how to do things or get to an appointment that we need to get to. So those are the elements of relationships. I would add one other thing, which is reciprocity. This is an idea that we need to both give things in relationships and receive them.

It doesn't need to be the same things, but relationships that are successful often have a degree of reciprocity that's really important to that relationship.

BECKER: And we should say we're talking about what's considered the longest study of human happiness ever conducted and what makes people happy.

And you both, Bob and Marc, have found that relationships are key here. And I'd like to know if there is someone, Bob, who really stands out from the study to you who epitomizes this or maybe even surprised you. Is there an anecdote of someone in the study that you like to bring up when you're talking about now what you've learned through the years.

WALDINGER: There is, there's a man we call Leo in the book.

The stories are real, but we disguise the names for privacy. But Leo was a Harvard undergraduate, seemed like his life was all set up to be great. And he went off to World War II. Because most of those men were of that age. He came back from the war. He wanted to be a writer. But, his mother was ill.

He needed to come back and take care of his mother. And he had to set aside his dream of being a writer. And he became a high school teacher. He became a history teacher and he loved his students, he loved his colleagues, he really enjoyed being with his kids and grandkids, and he was a high school teacher his whole life.

Had to set aside this more illustrious dream. Being a famous writer, but really found what lit him up in his relationships with other people. So that, in fact, we at one point estimated that he was probably our happiest person in our study.

BECKER: And could someone be happy even if they didn't, say, have purposeful work, where they were highly regarded, and, or perhaps didn't have an intimate partner, or unmarried. How does that fit in?

WALDINGER: Absolutely. Because it doesn't usually have to do with the external trappings. It doesn't have to do with what kind of job you have. It doesn't have to do with whether you have an intimate partner, it has to do with having a connection with somebody that's of the quality that Marc was describing, where you feel like there's reciprocity, somebody really gets you, and you really get them, and you're there for each other in hard times.

Doesn't matter if you live together, doesn't matter if they're a workmate, there are all kinds of places to get these energizing elements into our lives.

BECKER: And Marc, I wonder, Bob mentioned World War II. So there were cultural factors going on at the time. The Great Depression, many of the men in this study had lived through the Great Depression.

Served in World War II. I wonder how you think that affected their relationships. And in the same token, maybe compare it to some of the cultural things that we've gone through more recently.

SCHULZ: Yeah. So I think, you know, one of the things that really for me has been just a great pleasure being part of the study is really learning history in this way.

So these were men and young boys who grew up at a particular time in our history, and at that time they were really socialized to not talk a lot about their feelings, to be independent. The college sample, remarkable, close to 90% of that sample served in World War II. Most of them volunteered to serve, which I think is incredible to today's younger folks, that people would volunteer to serve in the military in that way.

So there were definitely generational differences that are important in terms of the things that they valued and the way they talk, particularly about feelings and their sense of how important it was to be independent and to provide for others, as well. So those have changed over the years. Sort of cultural values, and that was part of the task when we wrote The Good Life, was to be sure that we were looking beyond a particular period of time and beyond a particular set of cultures, to look across countries and time, to look for that, again, that common signal that we could see.

And I think we saw it. But I think you're also asking about another thing, which is this idea that there are always going to be challenges. So for this generation, the depression seemed like it was perhaps a singular challenge. World War II happened, which was an incredible challenge and inspired people to serve their country in ways that were quite unusual.

The sixties was a time of great upheaval for these folks. There were periods of great recession, and we continue to live through these kinds of challenges at the societal level. So it's very clear that life is filled with expected and unexpected challenges, and the key is really adapting to those challenges, to rising to the occasion, to learning new things about ourself when we meet challenges, and also depending on others in our network to meet those challenges.

They continue to happen, the pandemic being the latest example of a worldwide challenge.

BECKER: Wanted to make sure you mentioned that one in there, because that certainly taught us a lot about relationships. Bob, you wanted to add something.

WALDINGER: Yes, because we asked people when they were nearing the end of their life, we said, you grew up during the Great Depression.

You, the Harvard men, served in World War II. How did you get through these big global challenges, these scary times? And everybody, to a person, mentioned their relationships as getting them through the hard times. People would talk about the Depression, saying, "All of our neighbors shared whatever they had in order for us all to get by."

The soldiers would say, "It was the people who wrote me letters. It was my fellow soldiers who got me through the scariest times." And I think what we find now when we talk to people about the pandemic is that much of the sustenance we got was from other people as we tried to get through these scary times.

BECKER: Yeah. And also, because of, we'll make a little bit of a follow here, because of the pandemic, we also learned how we might be able to use technology to help us, right? To help us maintain contact with each other, which can be very good. You're lighting up, Bob, but it can be very bad too.

So I'm going to let you talk about that.

WALDINGER: All right. So in my other jobs. I do two things that I never dreamed you could do online. One is, I'm a psychiatrist, I do psychotherapy every day. If you had told me you could do meaningful psychotherapy with people on Zoom, I would have said that's impossible.

It's quite possible. The other thing is that I teach Zen meditation, and if you had told me that a meditation group could meet online and find it really powerful and useful, I would have said that's impossible, but we're doing it. And what I find, and I think Marc would agree with this as a researcher, is that we just want to stay open to being surprised.

Rather than assuming we know what's possible and what's not possible.

BECKER: Would you agree with that, Marc?

SCHULZ: I would. I also think there are clear challenges. I'm a professor. I taught throughout the pandemic. And we learned new tricks in terms of reaching students remotely. But we also learned some of the challenges.

And I think these are challenges that are commonly experienced by people in the workplace and just with the connections they have, if they live distant from people. That technologies, we have to be creative. There are memes out there about the problem with new technologies.

You can think about when newspapers were introduced and people on the trolleys were sitting in front of people with newspapers blocking their view of others. That the technologies that we carry with us have the capacity to separate us from others. So we need to use their incredible powers to figure out ways to improve connections and to cultivate those connections rather than to allow us to spend less time with others.

So I think there's wide variability in the impact of technologies. And part of that is for some people that technologies means that they don't have to be in as many meetings, they don't have to spend as much time with colleagues. They don't have that opportunity. They lose that opportunity to have those water cooler conversations that were important or that pre meeting time where people gather, and we ask each other about how their weekend was.

We need to be more creative, and I love the idea of being open to the wonder that Bob is talking about, but we really need to lean in and think about the ways to harness technologies to improve connections. Because I think they also have the capacity to make us more distant as well.

BECKER: I also wonder, everyone knows that the people you care about the most can also hurt you the most. And that hurt can affect not only the relationship with that person, but your ability to develop relationships in the future to a large degree. Bob, I'm wondering, in the book you do talk about managing relationship challenges and conflict.

What advice do you give to folks to not be so burned by a bad relationship that you have trouble forging relationships in the future, or to maybe restore a broken relationship. What would you say?

WALDINGER: It is true that when we've had bad experiences, particularly in childhood, we come to expect that relationships aren't going to go well.

And so we do really need to be open to different possibilities as new people come into our lives. And as you're saying, working on relationships turns out to be a very important challenge for all of us. No important relationship is going to be without conflict or disagreement. So the question is not, can I have a relationship that's always smooth?

That's never going to be possible. But can I find a way with this person to work out the conflicts so that we both get to the other side feeling good about each other and feeling okay about ourselves. If that can't happen, and we try again and again, then many times it's important to step away, because relationships that keep causing us pain and don't seem workable, can be, in many cases, stepped away from, and we can move on and find new people in our lives.

BECKER: The book also mentions a method, what you call it, the WISER method, where you ask people to really take stock of what's going on. And I wonder, Marc, can you explain that? Can you explain? Do you think that a lot of people can benefit from this type of method in dealing with challenges that will, as Bob said, inevitably arise in relationships?

SCHULZ: I think they can. Part of the task is normalizing those challenges as Bob was doing, recognizing that they're expectable and they're common across relationships. And more generally in the book, part of what we're advocating is for people to reflect on their experiences and be more proactive.

So we want to think about relationships as something akin to physical fitness. It's like social fitness and we want to put energy into those relationships and spend some time reflecting about what's working and what's not working. So the WISER method is just a structured way of thinking about challenging relationships.

It's an acronym for a series of steps that you can go through. The W stands for watch, so when you experience a stressful encounter with someone, maybe a sibling that you're having some challenges with, or a friend. You want to really pay attention and particularly ask yourself the question of what may I miss here?

What is here that perhaps I haven't seen? And then we take people through a series of steps that involves really thinking about what the stake is for them. What's the critical issue? Are there different ways of thinking about this situation and thinking about how I interpret it, particularly how we interpret the actions of others.

We tend to often intuit intent when it may not be there. So maybe a friend of mine does something that I get upset about and part of the upset is that I think they did it intentionally and when we talk about it, it's very clear that it was completely unintentional. It had to do with being stuck in traffic or distracted by something.

So these are a series of steps that we suggest people can use to really think about difficult encounters, thinking about the strategies that they can use to respond and also to evaluate how they do when they enact those strategies, what's working, what's not working. So this is just one example of being more reflective and intentional about one's social fitness.

BECKER: And I wonder, Bob, briefly, could you just explain that idea of social fitness?

WALDINGER: Yes. We coined the term because it seemed to us that keeping your relationships strong and healthy was like keeping your body strong and healthy. It was analogous to physical fitness. So the hope is that like physical fitness, we practice connecting with other people day in and day out.

We go back and do it again and again by calling people, texting people, spending time in person with people. That it's a regular, ongoing practice that keeps us fit socially.

Part III

BECKER: Bob and Marc, again, we're going to ask you to stand by for a minute because so many listeners have shared stories with us about their relationships.

Let's listen.

(LISTENER MONTAGE)

EMMA: When my husband and I retired, we suddenly made many new friends, even though we were in a very rural area. Because we joined up in a hiking group all through COVID. We were able to hike together. We weren't able to carpool anymore, but we were able to hike together and socially distance, but still talk.

JASON: Thomas was born two weeks and two days after I was. Our parents placed us together in the same crib approximately four weeks after my birth. Since then, we've been very close, growing up together. Our families would take trips together. But the most joyful moment occurred when he came to my mom's 81st birthday. When he appeared, he hadn't seen my mom for over 11 years and the look on her face was so joyful. She was so thrilled to see him.

JODY: A couple of months before my husband and I got married, he took his ex-wife and me and their eight-year-old son to a baseball game. And during the game, my soon to be stepson snuggled up beside me and leaned on me.

And I nervously glanced over at his mom and thought, she might not like having her son show me such affection and warmth. But instead, she kindly smiled and encouraged our bonding together. Now, almost 30 years later, we share a seven-year-old granddaughter, and she shares her with me the same way she shared her son with love, maturity, and grace.

BECKER: Those were On Point listeners, Jody Huntington in Aurora, Colorado; Jason Vincente in Newington, Connecticut; and Emma Stamas in Shelburne Falls, Massachusetts. Wonderful stories about warm relationships. And we were talking about social fitness, this idea of social fitness before the break. I want to ask, though Marc Schulz, what about people who have real difficulty with social fitness?

What advice do you give to them?

SCHULZ: Yeah. So first, such incredible stories, right? This is the limits of radio, as I'm smiling. I even have a kind of tear I recognize in the corner of my eye, just hearing these stories. But these are really stories of success and relationships. And we need to remember that not everyone is so fortunate, or at various times in our life, we may struggle in relationships, or we might experience that loss that many of the listeners talked about. Where they have grown fond and close to someone, and they worry about losing that person in their life.

So important to remember, one way of thinking about this or the reports of loneliness, which are quite high in the United States and other advanced countries. So in a given week somewhere between 20% and 50% of the population reports feeling lonely. And what that means is they feel like someone doesn't have their back or doesn't really know them or doesn't really care about what's happening to them.

Surprisingly, higher rates for young people, for example, in universities, they report some of the highest rates of loneliness. So it's not about physical proximity. It's about a sense that someone doesn't really know you or care about you. So lots of people struggle in relationships and one of the lessons I think from our 85 years of research is that it's never too late for anyone to do something about that.

So we hear stories of people making new friends, of really intentionally being proactive and leaning into the task of social fitness, so doing things like joining a hiking group. I love that story from the listener. Going to a gym and discovering new friends, making new friends often involves spending time with others, and an activity that's important to you.

It can be a recreational activity. It can be volunteering. That's the way we often make new connections. It takes time. It often takes something like on the order of 40 or 50 hours of that repeated contact. And during that contact, we begin to share things about ourselves that are important to us. And we allow the other person into our life that way.

So really important for people who feel alone, and I think there are lots of people that feel that, that there are ways to improve those connections. And it's never too late. We have people in our study that did it in their 60s and 70s after feeling quite lonely.

BECKER: It raises the question, doesn't it? When someone says they're lonely, they could be surrounded by people. This is a very subjective thing that's going on in someone's life. So it's hard, I imagine, as a scientist to measure, but it's also hard for folks to maybe realize when it really is a problem for them and how they might be able to improve.

What do you say to that, Bob?

WALDINGER: We know that the causes of loneliness are many. So some people are lonely because they are physically isolated from other people, but as you say, you can be lonely in a crowd, you can be lonely in a marriage. So the first step is to figure out, what do I want? Do I need more people in my life?

And if I do, what's getting in the way? Sometimes it's our own fears, and there's a lot of good help for that. Even psychotherapy, various forms of help for loneliness and certainly joining various groups can help. But in addition, sometimes it's really structuring our lives to make sure that we do have contact with new people, because that is the surest way to make new connections.

The other thing that's worth mentioning is that being an introvert is perfectly normal. All of us are on a spectrum somewhere from being introverts to being extroverts, being party animals. And there's nothing healthier about one or the other. Introverts are people who need a lot of alone time and they get refueled.

By being on their own, they may just need one or two good, close relationships, and that's perfectly healthy for them. Extroverts get their energy from other people, so they need more people in their lives. The first step, I think, for each of us is just to check in with ourselves and say, Okay, what works for me in terms of the number of important relationships that are good for me in my life?

BECKER: And then, of course, it's defining important relationships, right? Casual relationships, are they just as important as deeper relationships? Or, how does all the whole picture fit into this? Marc, I want to bring you into this. What would you say?

SCHULZ: So we really emphasize the idea that it's all kinds of relationships that are important. Of course, there's certain functions that are often served by key people in your network. So someone that really has your back. In the study, we asked participants in the middle of the night if you were scared or sick, is there someone that you can contact?

And some people said yes, and some people who were married said that they really couldn't rely on their partner, for example. So we need that person who has our back when times are tough, and we need assistance. But I think we tend to discount how important some of those more distant ties can be for us.

The person who we might grab coffee with or serve us coffee in the morning, the people we see on our commute to work. In fact, there's a great study that we talk about in the book that was done in Chicago as people were commuting to work. So they grabbed people before they went on the L and they said, what are you going to do on the train?

And they said, I'm going to read a book. I'm going to zone out. I'm going to sleep. Are you going to talk to people? Oh, I don't do that. Yeah, this is Chicago, mind you, the Midwest. I don't do that. And they still don't talk. I don't do that. So these were psychologists, and we do cruel things.

And they said we're going to randomly assign half of you to talk to strangers, is what they did. And they caught people, it was a very clever study. They asked them how they felt before they even started the study. And then they grabbed them at the end of their commute. And they said, how are you feeling now?

And it turned out that the people that talked to strangers felt a lift. They felt their mood improved quite dramatically. And the folks who did the usual zone out and sleep on the train didn't have that lift. So this is just one example of that kind of uplift that we get when we talk to people that may be more distant, our neighbors that we wave at, the people again that we see on the way to work, the people we meet when we travel.

I think that kind of jolt of energy is about a recognition that we're part of a larger community, that the world is larger than what goes on just in my own brain. And that's really important to us. I think it has healthful and energizing effects on us that we tend to discount.

BECKER: I also, because you're bringing this up and bringing up folks' perspectives and even beliefs to a certain degree, we do have to point out that when this study began, we were talking about Harvard graduates. And men, young men or teenagers from disadvantaged families in Boston, but it's all white men, really, right?

So that's how this began. So what steps have you taken to diversify your subjects, but also does the lack of diversity affect the lens at which you're examining this issue? Bob, what would you say?

WALDINGER: We were very concerned about that. That the reason why the study began with all white men was because that was the bias, of course, at the time.

But also the city of Boston where the study began was 97.4% white in 1938, but half of those families were immigrant. families. Many people from the Middle East, not just Europeans. And in addition, what we have done since then has been very careful to look at other studies of more diverse populations to make sure that other studies point in the same direction.

That they also point to the importance of relationships, whether you're an African American sharecropper in rural Georgia or you are someone in Northern Finland. Studies of all these different populations point in the same direction, to the centrality of relationships.

And in the book, if studies don't corroborate our findings, we either don't present the findings, or we're very clear that this is a limitation of our study. But basically, what we present in the book are findings that are, we believe, universal.

BECKER: Marc, would you like to add to that?

SCHULZ: I think that's right, perfectly said. So the key here is looking at groups of studies.

So science moves slowly. Bob and I are both scientists. Very conservative in terms of our willingness to state something that we don't believe is supported by research. And when we began the book, we started by, our work on the book, we started by, is there something we can say that might be of importance to folks?

And we did that by looking beyond our study, at hundreds and hundreds of other studies. So we talk about what are called meta-analyses, which are studies of studies, sometimes there are hundreds or thousands of studies, and it's really clear that the signal that we're talking about here, which is that relationships are linked to better health and happiness, is supported by studies across culture, across ancestry, across time.

It's a pretty phenomenal kind of robustness. When you see that pattern in science, it's remarkable. And that's what inspired us to write the book. And that's the message that we're trying to bring to folks.

BECKER: It struck me in the book that a lot of this really is about taking stock of your life and your priorities.

And there's a really interesting exercise in the book about finding an old photograph of yourself and thinking about it. Can you explain that a little bit, Bob? Because I thought that was really wonderful.

WALDINGER: Yes. The exercise is asking people to find an old photograph when they were, say, half the age they are now and to look at that photograph and to think to yourself, what was life like then?

How did life look to me? What was important and how is that the same as now, and how is it different? How do I look at life differently? Because one of the things that we have seen as lifespan researchers is that so much changes over the course of adult life. We followed these people from their teenage years into their nineties.

Think about how different you are today from when you were a teenager. And what we do is we want to help people appreciate the fact that life is a continual process of growth and change, and that how we see life changes as we move through it.

BECKER: And I wonder, the two of you in doing this work all this time, are friends, right?

WALDINGER: Yeah, we are.

BECKER: You have a strong relationship. So Marc let's start with you. Describe your relationship with each other and how it's affected your life.

SCHULZ: I think one of your listeners, that was probably part of what I was smiling about, described I think it was the writing partners that talk once a week, and they have a date every week. And Bob and I have effectively had that for a long time. So Bob and I got to know each other a little over 30 years ago, when we began what was really a kind of collegial relationship working together with common interests and research, helping each other with the things that we didn't know.

And I think we started having lunch regularly at that point when I was in Boston. About 27 years ago, I moved to the Philadelphia area to teach at Bryn Mawr College. And since that time, Bob and I have had a regular date for the last 15 years, at least. It's always been Fridays at noon, and it's something we both look forward to, and there's lots of work that gets conducted during that hour and a half, but there's also a lot of sharing of our experiences and checking up on our families and some gossip, we don't always talk about important things. So our relationship has grown from a collegial one to a real friendship, and it's one that I certainly value and helped sustain us.

I have to say, I've been writing for a long time and writing is always hard. I think people are surprised to hear that; successful writers also find the task hard. It's hard work. It's also lonely work, generally. But there's nothing better for me than writing with Bob. Bob and I've written a lot together and I think we bring out the best in each other and complement each other in important ways.

So it's an enriching work relationship and also an important friendship for me.

BECKER: Very nice. Bob, what would you say?

WALDINGER: Yeah. I would echo all that and also say that we have different skills, which is one of the fun things about this. Like Marc is really great at crunching numbers and I'm not so good at crunching numbers.

And so we rely on each other. Different strengths and together we are way stronger as a research team then I think either of us would be on our own. And that's, you know, the rising tide floats all boats. I'm not sure what the right phrase is but it's really important to realize how much we can contribute to each other's strengths by sharing what we know how to do together.

BECKER: In work and in life, I bet you would say.

WALDINGER: Absolutely.