What do we need for a long and happy life? The answer to this question is emerging from the longest study on happiness conducted by the Harvard Study of Adult Development.
We spoke with the program’s director, Dr. Robert Waldinger, a clinical professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School.
Join Dan and Dr. Waldinger as they discuss the root of happiness, long life, and the practical tips on how to reach that goal.
Interview trailer:
Watch the full interview: https://www.theepochtimes.com/worlds-longest-study-do-this-now-to-have-great-health-in-your-80s_5119533.html
FULL TRANSCRIPT:
DAN SKORBACH:
In the 1950s this place, Roseto, Pennsylvania, shocked the medical community.
From 1954 to 1961, Roseto had nearly no heart attacks for men ages 55 to 64. And for men over 65, the death rate was half of that of the U.S. average.
Maybe it’s their health conscious lifestyle, doctors pondered. But no, they smoked cigars and drank wine with seeming abandon.
How about their Italian food? Most of them came from an Italian village that goes by the same name, Roseto. But no, they forgot about their Mediterranean diet and fell in love with meatballs and sausages fried in lard with hard and soft cheeses.
Maybe it’s what they did for work? Well, most men worked in slate quarries where they contracted all kinds of illnesses.
So what was their secret? If I tell you, you won’t believe me. So let’s look at a few more places.
Sardinia in Italy, Okinawa in Japan, Loma Linda in California, Icaria in Greece and Nicoya in Costa Rica. These places have the highest proportions of people who live to be 100 years old.
So Roseto, Pennsylvania was not alone in this phenomenon. And turns out that all these places have exactly the same thing in common.
What is it?
Let’s ask Dr. Robert J. Waldinger, a Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. He is conducting the longest scientific study on health and happiness in history.
They questioned 724 men about their jobs, family life, and health. They also studied their medical information, from blood tests to brain scans.
They started this study in 1938.
ROBERT WALDINGER:
What we started to find when we looked at happiness, and we looked at what predicted having a good life, we looked at so many different things.
We had more than 40 years of data. We began to find that when we looked at our 80 year olds, and we looked back at what we knew about them when they were 50, that the strongest predictor of who was going to be happy and healthy at age 80, was the quality of their relationships at age 50.
Not their cholesterol levels, not their blood pressure. And so we thought, how could this be? Actually it makes sense that if you had warmer relationships, you’d be happier. But how could warmer relationships make it less likely that you would get coronary artery disease, or type two diabetes, or arthritis? We didn’t believe our own findings until other studies began to find the same thing.
DAN SKORBACH:
Of course, it’s easy to understand how physical exercise or a healthy diet affects our body and how that can make us healthier because it’s so tangible.
But how can relationships with people affect our health?
ROBERT WALDINGER:
What we know is that when something stresses us, or when there’s a danger, our bodies go into fight or flight mode. Literally our blood pressure goes up, our heart rate goes up. Lots of different things happen physiologically, and that’s good, because we want our bodies to be able to meet challenges. And this prepares us to do that.
But then when the challenge is gone, or the upsetting thing is no longer there, we want our bodies to return to equilibrium. And, you know, if I have something upsetting happen in my day, and I have a good listener at home, or I can call someone on the phone, I can literally feel my body calm down as I talk about what was upsetting me.
We think that if people don’t have any one like that in their lives, that they stay in a kind of low level fight or flight mode, where their bodies never calm down. And what that means is they have higher levels of circulating stress hormones like cortisol, they have higher levels of inflammation. And we think that those things then break down many body systems very slowly, but they do it over time.
DAN SKORBACH:
Recently Dr. Waldinger published a book about all his findings titled “The Good Life.”
But what does it mean for you and me?
ROBERT WALDINGER:
Everybody needs at least one relationship where they feel like the person will be there when they’re in trouble. So at one point, we asked our original participants, we asked them, “who could you call in the middle of the night, if you were sick or scared? List everybody.”
Most of our people could list several people that they could call. Some of our people couldn’t list anyone. And a few of them were married, and they didn’t list anyone. So we believe that if you don’t have someone like that in your life, that’s a source of stress and trouble.
DAN SKORBACH:
And if close healthy relationships are so important to your health, it could be said that today the U.S. is facing a real epidemic of loneliness. It affects one-third of the population between the ages of 43 and 65—more than ever before.
And this is happening in an era of social media, the technology that is supposed to connect us.
ROBERT WALDINGER:
Social media has perhaps made it worse. When we look at other people’s lives that they present to us on social media—I mean, think about what people present. I post pictures of being on a beach or being at a party. I don’t post a picture of myself when I’m hungover in the morning. Or when I wake up depressed, I don’t do that. So when we watch other people’s curated lives, if you will, it’s easy to get the feeling that you’re the only one who isn’t having a perfect life, and that you’re missing out.
And it’s worse for teenagers and young adults who are more susceptible to that because identity formation—that process of figuring out who am—it’s one of the main tasks of adolescence. So if when we’re trying to figure out who we are, we look at the Kardashians posting about perfect lives, it’s very easy to feel terrible about yourself. So social media may have accelerated the problem of loneliness and disconnection.
DAN SKORBACH:
But the good thing is that there’s a simple way you can change this around.
ROBERT WALDINGER:
There’s a good study of people taking a train ride in Chicago, you know, the commuter train. And the study assigned people—randomly [to] some people they said, “just do what you normally do on the train. Listen to your music, read a book, read the news. Whatever you do on the train, do that.”
The other people they assigned to talk to a stranger. And they asked everybody, before they did it, “how happy do you think this is going to make you?”
The people who had to talk to a stranger thought this was not going to make them happy. After they were done with their assignment, they asked people again, “how did you feel?”
Having done this, the people who talk to a stranger were much happier, on average, than the people who just did their usual thing on the training.
So to your point, when we connect with other people, first of all, it makes us happier. And it very often makes other people happier if you just strike up a casual conversation.
There’s also someone, a clergy person, who emailed me, telling me what she does, which is that she has started using people’s names in public places when she meets people who are wearing name tags.
So let’s say the TSA person at the airport, she’ll say, “hi, Susan, how’s your morning going?”
And Susan, who’s the TSA officer, smiles and says, “whoa, this person sees me, this person is making eye contact, this person is using my name.”
The person who’s the cashier at the grocery store, or the barista at Starbucks, or the Dunkin Donuts—if you actually look at them, use their name, it means a lot to people because we all want to be seen, instead of treated as these anonymous beings who we don’t even look at as we go through our day.
DAN SKORBACH:
So remember those places we talked about? They are governed by these ideas to this day. They are called Blue Zones and we will talk more about them in another video.
And all of these ideas were alive and well in Roseto, Pennsylvania in the 1950s.
But as the demographics changed, the culture changed.
Today Roseto is just an average American town with average heart disease statistics. Which just proves that if you don’t treasure your relationships, your health can decline in the long term.
So ask yourself today, who is that one person you’re going to reconnect with?
Maybe share this video with them.
This is Frontline Health, I’m Dan Skorbach. Stay healthy, America.
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