Lessons From The World's Longest Happiness Study - Dr Robert Waldinger

What they find now is that social isolation and loneliness are as toxic to our health as smoking half a pack of cigarettes a day or being obese. So this is huge. The health effects are very real.

Tell me about the origins of this study that you're currently in charge of.

The study started in 1938. It's the longest study that we know of, of the same people going through their entire lives. Uh, and it started as two studies that didn't even know about each other. One was started at Harvard College, undergraduate students, a 19-year-olds who were chosen by their professors as fine upstanding specimens, and it was to be a study of adolescence, moving into young adulthood. So of course, if you wanna study normal young adult development, you study all white males from Harvard, right? It's like so politically incorrect. Um, and then the other (laughs) study, uh, was a study of juvenile delinquency. It was started at Harvard Law School by a professor named Sheldon Glueck and his wife Eleanor Glueck. They were interested in why some children from really disadvantaged backgrounds and troubled homes managed to stay on good developmental paths and stayed out of trouble. And so both of those studies were then put together in the 1970s as contrasting groups, one very privileged, one very underprivileged. And we've followed them, their spouses, and now their children for 85 years.

It was all men to start with.

It was all men-

Yeah.

... now more than half women.

Why? Because that's kids plus spouses that have been introduced.

Yeah.

And this is only in America?

Only in America.

Right.

I mean, some now live abroad-

Yeah.

... but they all started in America.

Do you see any issues about this being WEIRD, uh, Western, educated, industrialized, et cetera, et cetera?

It is totally weird. (laughs) It is totally that. And so what we've done, and, and this is particularly in the book that we're just publishing, um, we've made sure only to present findings that have been corroborated by other studies around the world, studies of groups that are not WEIRD, Western, educated, white, right? No, we have a... So, so people of color, people of very different ethnic groups and cultural backgrounds, so that we're not presenting findings that we believe are pretty specific to this very narrow demographic. That's what our-

Yeah, you don't just want that cohort, right? You want everybody, you want it to be as applicable as possible.

Yeah. Yeah.

Okay. So what are the sort of things that you're asking people?

Oh boy. (laughs) Well, we're, w- we're studying the big domains of human life, okay? Mental health, physical health, work, including, uh, promotions, getting fired, successes, failures, um, relationships, not just intimate relationships, but all kinds of relationships. So we're studying all of that and we're studying, we've studied the same things for 85 years, but then we've used different methods. So, you know, to be sure we ask them, "How happy are we, are you?" We ask them many, many different sorts of questions, but we also ask other people about them, like spouses and children and friends. We also then use other measures. We videotape them talking to their spouses about their biggest concerns. We, um, bring them into our laboratory and deliberately stress them out and then watch how quickly they recover from stress. We put them into MRI scanners, we scan their brains, and we watch how their brains light up when we show them different kinds of pictures to see how the brain is interconnected and wired when it's looking at happy pictures and sad pictures, for example. So these are all different ways of trying to get windows on wellbeing 'cause that's what we're studying. We're studying human thriving, human wellbeing.