The Good Life: Lessons from the World's Longest Scientific Study of Happiness

by Robert Waldinger

the frequency and the quality of our contact with other people are two major predictors of happiness.

Friends from childhood, siblings, people you shared major life experiences with—these relationships are often neglected because they have been with us for so long, but they are especially valuable because they cannot be replaced. As the song goes, You can’t make old friends.

Relationships are necessarily reciprocal systems. Support goes both ways. The support we receive is rarely an exact mirror image of the support we provide, but the old adage “you get what you give” is a good general rule. This idea of giving what you’d like to receive in return is one answer to the powerlessness and hopelessness that people sometimes feel when they think of their relationships. We can’t directly control the way other people engage with us, but we can control the way we engage with them. We may not be receiving a certain kind of support, but that doesn’t mean we can’t give it.

helping others benefits the one who helps. There is both a neural and a practical link between generosity and happiness. Being generous is a way to prime your brain for good feelings, and those good feelings in turn make us more likely to help others in the future. Generosity is an upward spiral.

Every man I meet is my master in some point, and in that I learn of him. Ralph Waldo Emerson

Curiosity—real, deep curiosity about what others are experiencing—goes a long way in important relationships. It opens up avenues of conversation and knowledge that we never knew were there. It helps others feel understood and appreciated. It’s important even in less significant relationships, where it can set a precedent of caring and increase the strength of new, fragile bonds.

Maybe you know someone in your life who is always talking to people, rooting out their stories and opinions. It’s no coincidence that these people are often very joyful and alive. Just as the “strangers on a train” experiment we mentioned in Chapter Two demonstrated, interacting with other people improves our mood and makes us happier than we expect it will.

Hearing an accurate understanding of our own experience coming from another person, articulated in their words, can be thrilling, especially when we’re feeling alienated in a social setting. Suddenly someone is seeing us as we are, and that experience momentarily breaches the barrier that we feel between us and the world. To be seen is an amazing thing.

Time and attention are not something we can replenish. They are what our life is. When we offer our time and attention, we are not merely spending and paying. We are giving our lives. As the philosopher Simone Weil once wrote, “Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.” That’s because attention—time—is the most valuable thing we possess.

like love, attention is a gift that flows both ways. When we give our attention, we are giving life, but we are also feeling more alive in the process.

people are less busy with work than in recent generations, and yet we still feel that our time is stretched to the max. Why?

a wandering mind is connected to unhappiness. “The ability to think about what is not happening,” they wrote, “is a cognitive achievement that comes at an emotional cost.”

Human awareness is not the speedy, nimble creature some of us believe it to be. Our brains have evolved to be more like owls than hummingbirds: we notice something, turn our attention to it, and focus in. It is in this state of intense, solitary focus that we are in possession of our most uniquely human and powerful mental faculties. When we focus on one thing, we are at our most thoughtful, creative, and productive. But in the screen-heavy environment of the twenty-first century, our mind-owls, large and unwieldy, are treated like hummingbirds, and they end up flopping ineffectively from one thing to the next. Doing this day in and day out accommodates us to what is actually an unnatural, anxiety-producing mode in which the mind struggles to find nourishment.

Leo gave his children his focused attention, and he offered it to his wife, Grace, as well. In his early 80s, when Leo was asked what kinds of activities they did together as a couple, he said: We’ll garden together or I’ll just walk along with her and we just talk about the landscape. I mean, yesterday we went for a three- or four-mile hike. Bundled up, deep in the woods, and we kept stopping and watching the ducks fly out of the creek that we were crossing over. There’s a lot of that in my life. These are things that we share. Or when I read a book, I know what kinds of things appeal to her so I can suggest that she take a look at something. And she does the same for me. These are small things, small moments in the days of Leo and Grace’s life, but taken together over a lifetime, these small moments add up. “Attention is the most basic form of love.” It’s not a coincidence that Leo is both one of the more attentive, present members of the Study and one of its happiest.

Are there set times in the week or in the month that you can dedicate to a certain person? Can a change in your daily schedule lead to a regular time for coffee or a walk with a loved one or a new friend? Can you arrange a few pieces of furniture to facilitate conversation rather than facilitate screen time?

Attention is your most precious asset, and deciding how to invest it is one of the most important decisions you can make. The good news is you can make that decision now, in this moment, and in each moment of your life.

It doesn’t matter how wise, how experienced, or how capable we are; we will sometimes feel overmatched. And yet if we are willing to face into these challenges, there is a tremendous amount that can be done. “You can’t stop the waves,” Jon Kabat-Zinn wrote, “but you can learn to surf.”

Many studies have shown that when we avoid confronting challenges in a relationship, not only does the problem not go away, but it can get worse. The original problem keeps burrowing down into the relationship and can lead to a variety of other problems.

Each of us has cultivated certain coping strategies through our lives, and they can become set in stone. This kind of “strength” can actually make us more fragile. In an earthquake, the sturdiest, most rigid structures are not the ones that survive. In fact, they might be the first to crumble. Structural science has figured this out, and building codes now require flexibility in tall structures, so that buildings are able to ride the literal wave rolling through the earth. The same with human beings. Being able to flex with changing circumstance is an incredibly powerful skill to learn. It might be the difference between getting through with minor damage and falling apart.

It’s not bad to have a marriage where there’s little disagreement. But are there costs to always keeping the peace? By being so protective of his inner experience, and so selective about what he shared—by not being daring enough to open himself up—was Joseph denying both himself and Olivia the full benefits of an intimate connection?

In any situation in life, emotions are a signal that there are matters of significance to us at play, and they are especially revealing when it comes to intimate relationships. If we take some time to pause and examine that seemingly simple thing, how we feel, we can develop an invaluable life tool: the ability to look beneath the surface of our relationships. Our emotions can point us to hidden truths about our wishes and fears, our expectations about how others should behave, and the reasons we view our partners the way we do.

The research is clear: intimate relationships can be an incredible source of sustenance for our minds and bodies. But 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. Our partners may in fact be our better halves, but they can’t, by themselves, make us whole.

One third of all children who had adverse childhoods still managed to develop into attentive, kind, and emotionally well-adjusted adults. These kids overcame their difficult childhoods, and Werner was able to point to some of the reasons.

a critical link between childhood experience and positive adult social connections is our ability to process emotions.

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.

But there is a middle way. We’ve been advocating a strategy of facing toward problems, rather than avoiding them, but facing a problem is not always the same as fixing it. Sometimes facing-in to our families means learning how to sit with uncomfortable situations and emotions, and allowing ourselves to feel and express the emotions that many of us try to avoid. Sometimes the best thing we can do is respond in a way that is less absolute and more flexible, as Neal and Gail managed to do.

It’s true that childhood matters, and parenting matters, but no single element of a person’s life fully shapes their future. Parents can neither take as much credit nor as much blame as they think they should for the way their children turn out. Nature and nurture, heredity and environment, parenting and peers are all tightly woven together, and all have served to mold each of us into the adults we are today. Finding a definitive reason for why a particular person is having the struggles they are having is not always possible. All we can do is to meet our emotions, as Neal did, with as much bravery as we can, and respond in the best way we know how.

The final and most powerful approach is simply to remain open to the possibility of people behaving differently than we expect. The more ready we are to be surprised by people, the more likely we are to notice when they do something that doesn’t match our expectation. This kind of noticing is especially important within our families.

One thing we can be sure of—nobody we encounter in life can ever be fully known. There is always more to discover. Making those discoveries, and taking them to heart, can sometimes correct biases that have been stifling our relationships with the people we’ve known the longest—our families.

There are mysterious and subtle currents of feeling that pass between two people who are physically present with each other.

in some workplaces, good friendships at work are looked at warily. If employees are chitchatting and seem to be having a good time together, some think that means they’re not working and their productivity is probably suffering. In fact, the opposite is true. Research has shown that people who have a best friend at work are more engaged than those who don’t. The effect is especially pronounced for women, who are twice as likely to be engaged in their jobs if they “strongly agree” that they have a best friend at work.

Our life doesn’t wait at the door when we walk into work. It doesn’t stand on the side of the road when we climb into the seat of our truck. It doesn’t peer through the classroom window as we meet with our students on the first day of class. Every workday is an important personal experience, and to the extent we can enrich each one with relationships, we benefit. Work, too, is life.

Research indicates that differences in friendship patterns between men and women are actually small. A number of longitudinal studies show that male adolescents from many different backgrounds connect intimately with close friends in ways that defy gender stereotypes.

one thing the large body of research into human flourishing clearly shows—from our longitudinal study and from dozens of others—is that it doesn’t matter how old you are, where you are in the life cycle, whether you are married or not married, introverted or extroverted; everyone can make positive turns in their life.

Asking honest questions about ourselves is the first step toward recognizing that we may not be experts on our own lives. When we accept this, and we accept that we may not have all the answers, we step into the realm of possibility. And that is a step in the right direction.

science can’t know the turmoil or contradictions you feel in your heart. It can’t quantify the stir that you experience when a certain friend calls. It can’t know what keeps you up at night, or what you regret, or how you express your love. Science can’t say whether you’re calling your kids too much or too little, or whether you should reconnect with a particular family member. It can’t say if it would be better for you to have a heart-to-heart over a cup of coffee or play a game of basketball or go for a walk with a friend. Those answers can only come through reflection, and figuring out what works for you.

the good life is not found by providing ourselves with leisure and ease. Rather, it arises from the act of facing inevitable challenges, and from fully inhabiting the moments of our lives. It appears, quietly, as we learn how to love and how to open ourselves to being loved, as we grow from our experiences, and as we stand in solidarity with others through the inevitable string of joys and adversities in every human life.

the good life is not a destination. It is the path itself, and the people who are walking it with you.