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For 84 years, the Harvard Study of Adult Development has tracked the lives of hundreds of Americans. Now its director, Robert Waldinger, is explaining what it has taught him about health and fulfilment
In the 1980s, when data from the world’s longest-running study on happiness started to show that good relationships kept us healthier and happier, the researchers didn’t really believe it. “We know there’s a mind-body connection and we all pay lip service to it,” says Dr Robert Waldinger, the director of the Harvard Study of Adult Development, which has been running for 84 years. “But how could warmer relationships make it less likely that you would develop coronary artery disease or arthritis? How could relationships get into the body and affect our physiology?” Then, other studies started to show the same. “We thought: OK, we can begin to have confidence in this finding.”
It was still a surprise, says Waldinger, but so convinced is he of this fundamental truth that the new book he has co-written with Dr Marc Schulz, The Good Life, focuses mainly on relationships and how to improve them. There are other components, of course, and they tend to be similar across countries, cultures and social grades (he points to the UN’s annual World Happiness report). These include good health and a healthy life expectancy, plus the freedom and capacity to make significant life decisions. Trust is important, he says – not just in friends and neighbours, but also in governments. “One interesting thing that people mention around the world is generosity and opportunities to be generous,” says Waldinger.
Money – or, rather, economic security – is important. “We are less happy when we struggle for food security and housing and all that, which is obvious,” he says. What is less obvious is that, above a certain income level, happiness doesn’t go up by much, at least according to a 2010 study that set the threshold for US households at $75,000 (£49,000 at that time). The enduring factor is relationships with other people. Waldinger has boiled down his definition of a good life to this: “Being engaged in activities I care about with people I care about.”
Waldinger, a professor of psychiatry at Harvard medical school and a practising psychiatrist, became director of the study in 2005; he is the fourth steward of the research, which began in 1938. Originally, there were two unrelated studies – one group of 268 students at Harvard, another of 456 boys from deprived areas of Boston – but they later merged. Over the years, whole lives have been recorded in real time: health, employment, details about friends and spouses, religious beliefs, how they voted, how they felt about the births of their children, what they worried about in the middle of the night. The list seems endless.