The Actual (and Very Heartwarming) Science Behind Happiness with Dr. Mark Schulz

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Listen, it's a four week trial. It's free postage. It's a digital scale. You're going to go to www.stamps.com slash best and thanks to stamps.com for sponsoring the show. This is one of those episodes where I'm like, thank God, I have a podcast. I'm so happy to be able to share this type of information. We have on Dr. Mark Schultz, who's the associate director of the Harvard study of adult development. The Harvard study of adult development is the longest scientific study of happiness ever conducted. It's been going on since 1938, the first of its kind. And it boasts even JFK as a participant going on for 84 years. How adorable is this? This is what this man, this is this man's life's work is seeing what makes people happy. So we're going to talk about what that is. We're going to talk about what's in his book, The Good Life that he co-authored. We're going to talk about the most common misconceptions about happiness. We're going to talk about the fact that being lonely is just as dangerous for us as smoking a pack of cigarettes a day. That the joy people feel in their lives can help them and heal them on a cellular level. It's just adorable. I get choked up a couple of times because it just makes you think that there just has to be some. Level of goodness at the end of all of this are up there. Whatever is in charge, whoever is in charge, please enjoy. I hope this gives you a fabulous serotonin boost and what makes you reevaluate a few things. I'm lucky to be able to deliver such a positive message to everybody today. So I love you guys. And by the way, by the way, if you don't mind, if you like the podcast and you listen to it every week, you like this episode, you like me even just a little bit. Would you mind rating and leaving a review on the little review section of Apple? It would mean the world to me. Thank you. OK, doctor, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. My pleasure. Good to be here. I'm so fascinated by this study. I mean, how cool. What a cool job you have. It is cool. I feel very lucky. Right? So I'd love to know a little bit about your background before we get into how you ended up, you know, in. Helping everybody live their true best lives. Well, yeah, so I started off trying to figure out how to live my own best life. Of course. Yeah. So my backgrounds in clinical psychology, my train to do research and also to do therapy, to help people address problems in their life and also to thrive. And after I earned my degree, I started doing research in another longitudinal study that looked at the transition from adolescence into adulthood. And then later on in my career, I got lucky enough to be involved in the Harvard study of adult development, which traced people from their teen years all the way through to the end of their life. So that remarkable study that you were alluding to. And I've been doing this for about 20 years with that study at this point. Wow, who started that? It was a study that started in the 1930s. It was theory unusual for its time. It was actually two separate studies in the beginning. Two thirds of the original, there are 724 original participants. Two thirds came from the poorest areas of Boston. This was a study that was interested in trying to understand how some kids growing up in poor areas of Boston in the inner city could thrive. And other kids maybe had consequences associated with delinquency and other struggles during their adolescence. And then across the city over in Cambridge was another study that started with Harvard University students for consecutive years and their sophomore year. And they were interested also in trying to understand what led to people thriving. And the Harvard one was started by the Harvard Health Center. They had this very unique idea in the 1930s on the E of World War II. Let's study normal people and try and understand how people might thrive or flourish. And the inner city kids, it was a similar idea under different circumstances. One of the ingredients to flourishing in that particular environment. And that was started by a law professor and his wife. Oh wow, wow, that just out of curiosity. They were interested in delinquency. So the participants that we have in our sample from the inner city were kind of what we would call the control group. These were adolescents that were doing okay despite the challenging circumstances. And then there were adolescents that were already identified as juvenile delinquents that had run into trouble with the law and were well identified to law enforcement folks in Boston. So that control group eventually got merged with the Harvard students. And that has formed the Harvard study of adult development. Those people we follow throughout their entire life, their wives became involved in the study along the way. And now we're actually studying the 1300 children of those original teachers. Amazing. Yeah. How many people are involved initially? They're 1300 children. So how many people are total involved in this study? So it's over 2000. The original group was 724. Then their wives became involved. And now the 1300 children. So it's an amazing study. And as you said, I feel very lucky to be able to be part of it. The gift that these folks have given us extraordinary. So they opened their lives up to people studying them. In the beginning of the study, they were poked and prodded every way. They were asked very personal questions. Of course. They were interviewed. They were home visits to their families. Their parents were interviewed. And along the way, the study has kept up that focus on really trying to know intimately the lives of these folks as they grew up. So it's a remarkable study. And it's fairly unique. It's the only one that we know of its kind. Is it all? Are these people all over the US? So initially it was an inner city group in Boston that were located within the city. And then the Harvard students came from all over the United States. And now of course they moved all over the world. It gets harder as it goes on because we have to travel to find those participants or bring them into our lab in Boston. So it's a study that logistically has gotten more challenging. Because of a lot of luck and some incredible leadership over the years. It's kept going, which is again just remarkable. And it was the findings in this that led you to write your book, correct? Yeah. So we, Bob Walder and I, who's the director, I'm the associate director, we have been involved in the study for 20 years. And we decided it was time to step back a little bit. And we had an interest in trying to think about ways to bring these findings, which exist in academic journals that very few people read to figure out a way to bring them to a larger group. So we started to think about the hundreds of papers. What's the kind of common signal? What's the most important factor that we're finding that affects your happiness and your health? And it was clearly relationships in our own data. But because any one study, no matter how interesting it is, isn't good enough. We wanted to look at other studies to see whether there were similar findings across other studies that involved people that didn't grow up in the 1920s that were not initially all men, our sample is initially all men from Boston. So we tried to look for replication across many studies and we found a similar thing. It turns out that relationships are critical, maybe not surprising to your listeners for our happiness, but what is surprising is how much it affects our health as well. So that prompted us to write a book, the good life. I'm sure you've also read outliers at some point, right? There are like three things that stood out to me that I think about constantly from that book. And one is the one study about the Italian immigrants and how what was it was like, like heart disease was taking over America and people were having heart attacks and high cholesterol and this one group had none of it, but they were eating the same things, but they found that they were a community and they knew their neighbors and they had tight relationships with everybody. Yeah, yeah. Because it just made my heart explode. I was like, that's all we need. Well, it seems so simple, but it turns out, of course, to be challenging as we all know, relationships can be messy and complicated in their heart to control. But this is a finding across many studies. Sometimes it's accidental, the importance of relationships and whatever they're studying. But at this point, we know very clearly that relationships affect our health in important ways, affect how long we live. The clearest data on this or when we think about people who are lonely. So these are large portions of our adult populations report being lonely 20-50% in the United States, right? Very high numbers. 20-50%. 20-50%. 20-50%. Say they're lonely. Report their lonely on a daily basis. This includes some of the highest that risk folks are young people, for example, at college that are surrounded by thousands of people that are like them doing similar things. So it's not just physical isolation from others, but it's a sense that other people don't know you or don't have your back, that you're kind of living life on your own without being seen and heard. And it turns out that that's a clear risk factor for our health and also affects how long we live. And it's a risk factor on the same order of magnitude as smoking, domestic packaged cigarettes, or obesity. No. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It makes sense. Oh, that's so hard. It makes me like emotional. It's so sad. Yeah. Yeah. Sundays for dogs. 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And that's why I'm so happy to be working with them because we get to give you a discount code exclusively for everything is the best listeners parallel is offering 15% off your first three months with code best 15 head to parallel.co that is P-E-R-E-L-E-L dot C-O and if you don't love it, just cancel it anytime and you get a 30 day money back guarantee. So you must then also like it must be interesting to see in the study at what point then like social media became prevalent, right? Because that must have been a huge, I mean, it's a huge impact on society. Okay, so let's talk about the quality of these relationships and what kind of relationships we're talking about because this can't just be, you know, people who get married in the happily ever after. This is just having some core friendships or relationships with your family. I'm assuming correct. So the first thing that's important is that it's all relationships we're talking about. So folks that haven't found a mate or they were in a horrible marriage and they got out of it, relationships are so important to our well-being. They provide so many important things to us that it's rare that we would get it from one person. So it's your friends, it's your relatives, it's your neighbors, the people you work with, even those peripheral relationships, maybe the person who serves you coffee in the morning or the person delivers your mail, having a connection with those kind of people can be important to our well-being. You asked about the quality and it's important. The quality, it's not just the number of connections we have, but the quality is also critically important. So we're talking about at most important relationships, people who really have your back that in the study we ask folks if you're sick or scared in the middle of the night, is there someone you can call? So for all of us it's important to have that person to think about, who am I going to call? Some people could list five, six people and some people, even though they were in a marriage, they said they didn't really know who they could depend on in the middle of the night. So really important to have that kind of support. And then there are other kinds of support. People who we have connections with teach us new things, they expose us to new ideas and new people. Certainly dealing with stress is critical. So when we're stressed out, we have our emotions to deal with. Most of us often turn to others to help us regulate those emotions in ways that are useful for us. People help give us ideas about how to navigate challenges a new path forward. People of course are also the source of most of our joy and are just having a great time, a good friend, a relatively really enjoy with that kind of lift is also important for our well-being and our physical health as well. It's so sad. I mean, it's just the sad part. They get the lonely people and I'm like, oh my God, it's like joy that keeps us connected. So you as a human being, hearing that there was a virus happening in China and seeing the visuals of people falling over and what they were doing started isolating there. And we all kind of were like, is that coming here? Is that coming here? Is that coming here? What's going through your head? And during that time, with all you know, I mean, that must just struck you to your core. Well, yeah. So first of all, I was scared, like everyone else trying to figure out what this meant. And also because I'm a psychologist, I was thinking about what it means to certainly for our well-being to separate from others physically, to not have that kind of contact, to not be able to be in the same room as people that we care about. And then as we moved into the phase where we were wearing masks, what a strange social experiment, right? To interact with people where you can't see their faces. And in some ways, we begin to think the worst of people because we can't really see what's going on behind their mask. It becomes difficult to personalize or sort of really know people are human in that way. So it was a kind of grand social experiment that was very difficult on so many levels, but certainly got me thinking personally about the importance of connection. And even silly things like, you know, video meetings obviously became much more important in the last three years. And we're talking on a video connection. What does it mean when we only see the top of a person, right? So the torso and head, I think in some ways we're going to learn that that is a little bit of aversive for us, that there's a kind of instinctual need that we have to see people's whole bodies, because that allows us to assess whether they're friend or foe, for example, it's much harder to do that if we're just seeing their faces. So the pandemic has been this extraordinary time to think about the consequences of physical distancing, not being able to see people's faces and just social isolation more generally. I remember reading at one point that a troubled student getting expelled or suspended from school is really the actual worst thing that you could do for a student, correct? Because taking them away from other kids is really putting more harm than it is to try to come up with a solution. What are your thoughts on that? I think those kinds of situations are complicated, but I think what you're pointing to is critical that we need to weigh the consequences of people being socially isolated. When the pandemic first started, I'm at a university and I happen to be in a meeting with the president when the pandemic started. And grandma college where I teach was trying to figure out what to do and whether we're going to go remotely. And I remember having a conversation, we were lucky our president was thinking about this. She's a psychologist and she said, I'm worried as much about the mental health of the students being isolated from each other and not having that support as I am about their physical health. Again, there were unknowns at that point, but I think her thought her worries were appropriate. So in the case of suspending someone from school, there are consequences for that student for the social connections that are critical, not just an immediate part of a person's life, but long term we're learning how to navigate our connections to others when we're adolescents. We're learning how to resolve conflicts, how to deal with our feelings when we have feelings in the presence of others. So removing people from those contexts definitely have important consequences that I think we need to weigh as we figure out what the right path is. And it's the same with social media, right? Social media has a great impact on our ability to connect. At the beginning of the pandemic was so critical to connect us with our loved ones, but we also need to think about what the consequences are of relying totally on texting and less lifelike forms of communication. What does that do to our relationships? What does that do to our ability to resolve conflicts and deal with our emotions that we have to deal with them eventually in person in real time? So we all need to think about that. I know because so often I see, I mean, I've done this endless amount of times and now as I'm older and have nieces and cousins that are younger and having most of their relationships take place over a phone. How context is missing and tone is missing and facial expression is missing so much and communication gets so lost so easily. Exactly. And I think there's some of us and it makes sense. They say, well, texting is great, there's less emotion attached. You can kind of do it when you have time to focus on it. And those are advantages, but there may also be costs. And the costs are again that at some point, we're going to have to deal with a person who's right across from us that has a difference of opinion with us that has strong feelings. We may have strong feelings. So we need to learn those skills. And I think that's an important scientific question. So you asked at the beginning, are we interested in social media and the impact that has on people's lives? Yes, that's really an important focus of what we're doing now. The children of that first generation of- So I'd say the children of the first, I mean, what an interesting, I mean, I can't wait to fast forward 50, 100 years to now and look back at that big change, right? Yeah, exactly. So we're interested in people who grew up with phones in their hands when they were young and were native to digital technologies and social media and people who adopted it like I did when I was older. Does that affect the way that you resolve conflict and relationships? Does it affect the size of your true social network, not just the friends you might have on Instagram or Facebook or wherever you spend your time on social media, but the friends that are really an important part of your life, those kinds of connections. So we're interested in seeing how people navigate depending on where they were born and how much digital technologies they've adopted. And of course, we use the technologies for different things. So some of us are good about using the technologies to connect with others. And some of us spend maybe too much time comparing our own lives to the lives of other people online. Yeah, of course. I mean, I wasn't good for us. No, I mean, I do a lot of both. I really find that, you know, having a presence on Instagram, which started by the way, with like a blog I had when I moved to college, which was like a journal, that being able to connect with people over similar feelings was truly one of the best feelings in the world, right? Made me feel not alone. It made me feel like I was connected to a group and I still do via my Instagram. But you know, of course, like anything, that's why I don't like when people say social media is bad, or give like one term to this. This is a dynamic, layered, nuanced divide. Absolutely. There are so many good parts of it too. And I love what you're talking about, right? The first example you gave our examples that you felt connected to people that you might not have been able to connect with. So we all use social media in different ways, and it's dynamic in the way that you suggest. But we know that certain kinds of views put people at risk. So the folks who spend a lot of time, the majority of their time looking online, comparing their lives to others, it often makes us feel less than others, because of course, the life that people put online is curated. It looks wonderful. People are doing things that some of us don't get to do often enough. So we always feel that we're missing something. If it's used for connection and the way that you're describing, particularly connections that are hard to do in our locality, in our geographic location. I met my husband on Instagram. You're not alone, right? You're not alone these days. So that's a connection. Absolutely. Have you spent any time even thinking about like people meeting on dating apps? We haven't. Like, you know, I thought about it on my own. I'm married, so I haven't used them myself. I've married before this stuff happened. I met my wife when I was in school. So I, you know, I've thought about the ways in which our social life has moved online, our dating life has moved online. And I think it's probably part of a trend that's happening more broadly. Like, if we think about the fact that people are moving a lot in the United States away from where they grew up, we're very mobile. So we've lost the connections we have to family and friends. Those used to be the people that connected us to our potential spouses. Now the advantages, you know, the world is our oyster. Any potential partner might be out there we could reach. But the challenge is that we're doing this in a less personal way in some ways than we've done in the past. It's different. Yeah. When you meet someone online, you don't have the kind of point of reference of the connection that someone may have made in the past, right? So it's changed. And it's changed, you know, I mean, it's changed. I'm not sure we're ever going to go back to because many people find their partners online. Yeah, I mean, all my single friends all constantly are saying, where am I supposed to meet someone? And I was like, how did people meet before? Go to a grocery store. I don't know. Yeah, I mean, there are other ways that there were connections. There were bars that are still important for some people. But I think we've changed the way that we often meet people in the same history in the work world as well. We're making contacts that we never would have made otherwise. The example, again, that I really loved with yours about making using technology to connect with people, if you're different than the people that you've grown up with and whatever way that may mean for you, being able to reach out to people that share an interest or an identity with you online, so valuable for people. So the technologies have brought us incredible new opportunities, but they also come with challenges as technologies always do. What did the people say in the study towards the end of their life? I mean, what questions did you ask them? So we ask a lot of questions and a lot of them are really challenging. One of the questions we asked was, do you have any regrets? So these were when our participants were in their 80s, and we asked them, do you have regrets? And just about everyone said, yes, I have regrets. And almost all the regrets involve relationships that they involve not spending enough time with my family, not being kind enough to my partner in life, wishing I had spent less energy on work and more energy on the things that matter to me, people in my life. So the majority of these regrets centered around relationships that they had invested more time in. Sad to think about it at the end of your life having those kinds of regrets, but an incredible gift for all of us, about a reminder about what we might prioritize in our life. There are lots of sayings about no one ever at the end of their life, wishes they had one more achievement, whatever that would have been at work than they had before that. People really focused on their connections with others. That's what they were worried about. It's so move. I mean, this has to be a documentary. There has to be something where people can, because it's just, it's so important. Do you just want to scream this from the rooftops every day? Well, I think there are two things that are important about this. One is the wisdom of people who have lived a life, right? So really interesting to ask people who have experienced in life in their 80s or 70s or your grandparents or the person you've worked with for a long time to ask them. I don't want to interrupt, but I want to bring up a point here that my husband brought up and a friend from London brought it up the other day. My mother lives with us and we have a multi-generational household. My husband's from Sicily. He grew up in the square, in the bar, which is not like a bar, like a tear, the bar is where you get your coffee and you can have apple to tevoe and you're there, right? He was talking, we had a new, we have to like, we like to have dinner parties a lot and we often have people bring new people so we can be more people. And a friend came over from London and my mom was here and he had such a long conversation with her and she went to bed early and we were staying up late doing bad stuff. And he said before he left, I would love to take your mom out to lunch, not in a creepy, not in a creepy way. There are no, I'm never around people who are older here, because in America, we don't have those kinds of communities. He's like, I miss talking to people with wisdom. And my husband chined in and said, that's how I learned everything was for the old men in the square and the old men at the bar. They gave me advice on how to navigate relationships or what to do with my own parents or how to get the girl or politics. He said, exactly. Or no young people interacting, getting the wisdom of older people anymore. Yeah, no, so important. And I think that's part of what I mean by the what's happened over the last several decades in the United States in particular. We moved away from our communities. The communities themselves have become less a central part of people's lives. So the model that we have, whether it's from Sicily or other parts of Italy, although their challenges in Italy as well, that model is decaying as modern international society begins to take over in other countries as well. Everyone wants to be an influencer. Yeah, exactly. It's very different, right, than being part of a community. So, yeah, I think that lesson is a really important one that people learn things as they age. But the other piece that I wanted to emphasize is the beauty of a study like this is that, you know, we started talking to people when they were in their teens. And this is how they imagine their life would play out, they tell us, and then we get to follow them and see how their life actually plays out. Very few lives play out as people imagine. There's so many unpredictable turns and changes in our life and challenges that we don't anticipate that we're likely to follow. So both pieces are important. The wisdom of old people looking back on their life and also following people forward and learning the twists and turns that they experience that they didn't necessarily expect. So in our book, The Good Life, there are lots of stories that we bring in from the participants. And those stories are intended to illustrate the research findings that we found in our study and these hundreds of other studies that we look at. But one of the take-home points is that life is unpredictable and it's very hard to anticipate the kinds of challenges that we're going to have. So these original participants, the college sample, for example, they went to college in the 30s, war was looming in Europe, war started to happen. 91% of them served in World War II, mostly volunteered to serve. So, you know, extraordinary times meant extraordinary commitments and responsibilities. And this was a generation that met those responsibilities because they felt that it was an important purpose. So, scariest experience in their lives. For many of them, they describe it as the worst experience in their lives. But many of those same people will also say it was one of the best experiences in their lives. They had purpose and meaning and they also had a camaraderie that they've never experienced in any other place. Having people next to them, their lives depended on each other, fostered a kind of connection that was very important to them. So, we learned to rise to the challenges that we encounter in life that's hard to predict what they are. We certainly couldn't have predicted the pandemic before it happened. Very few people had any idea this was coming. Of course, that's where grit comes in. That's my favorite word. So, what are the... I feel like there must... You must have found a lot of happiness traps in these conversations. There must be a lot of moments where people thought, I mean, can you name some of those or give any... Yeah. So, I mean, I think one idea is that we can be happy all the time is not a healthy idea for us. That with happiness, almost necessarily, is going to come sadness and loss. That happiness is a kind of momentary experience. We can experience joy and happiness and excitement. Maybe when we're with a loved one or in the presence of some beautiful music or a piece of art, we can experience those peak experiences, but they wane. They're ephemeral. They don't last forever. Really, our goal should be experiences of happiness, but also a sense of meaning and purpose in our life that transcends time, that stays with us over time. So, really important not to get caught up in this idea that we could be happy all the time, because I think when we're not, we start to punish ourselves. Why can't I be happy like everyone else is apparently, and everyone else is not happy all the time. It's very hard to be that way. Another idea is one, I think we've been alluding to, but I'm going to make explicit that it's hard to live a life if we lean into it, if we have those important connections with others in our life, that's not going to also include challenge. So, the good life isn't only about the good stuff, it's also about meeting the challenges that we face as we've been talking about. And I think recognizing that all of us face challenges is really important. It's not whether they are in our life or not. It's really how we meet them is the most critical thing. So, you alluded to grit, but this idea about how we cope with our challenges, can we rise to the occasion, can we use the resources that we have, particularly the people around us to help make those challenges easier and more navigable, or more likely that we're going to learn and grow from those experiences. Those are really important keys. And then I'll give you a third one, Pia, about this is really a myth that I think we're bombarded these days more than ever. And they're more effective the messages that we get from media, from social media, from film, from TV, from everywhere about the things that are supposedly going to make us happy. So, fame is going to make us happy. Having more money is going to make us happy. Achieving, just getting one more promotion and then I'll really work on how, you know, happy I can be your my well-being, that we get distracted by things that turn out not to be so connected to how happy people are. Oh, yeah, because it's just this like weird thing. I always say that to my husband, we talk about like, he's given, he's brought so much joy to my life because he says things that are so happy I married somebody with a different perspective, because, you know, as we, you know, start to become more successful and make more money, oftentimes we'll spend it in a way that we shouldn't. And I'll say, you know, we need to, we need to save our money because what about this and what about that? And he'll always say to me, what about now? He's like, yes, we need to not be completely irresponsible. But he's like, I work hard so I can enjoy my life. He's like, I never thought I would have these things. And I want to be in the moment and enjoy them. And I don't want to have this idea that one day, if we all do these things that will be in some good place later and suffer now, I'm like, well, there you go. That's smart. You know, I'm like, it allows us to have more of a better attitude about really being in the now because, you know, who knows what God forbid something happened to one of us or, and we were, or both of us, and we've wasted this time thinking about this end moment where if all these things happen, we will be happy. Yeah. So I think a bunch of important things that you said, I just want to highlight because they're consistent with some of what we're talking about. First of all, we learn from our differences, right? It's great to be in a relationship where people bring complimentary views. They can be challenging, of course, because sometimes we desperately want that person to change their mind. But we can learn to live with differences, right? And then we sometimes have the best of both worlds in the way that you describe. The other thing that's really important is I think there's, there's a kind of attitude, particularly, among young people, right, where we are in the lifespan, dictates our priorities, that much is important to us. And when we're young, we're really worried about being successful. We want to get ahead. We want to have a secure source of income and provide for our families, all reasonable and important ideas. But there's also this idea that somehow our life is just on the outside. It's out of reach right now, that when we do this, then we'll live our life, then we'll really have fun. It sounds like your husband is the one in the family that reminds you, and all, hopefully, everyone in your family, that life is now. This is life and we need to live it in a way that's going to be enjoyable. People have found there's lots of research on this that, instead of acquiring goods, like a new car, that's fancier than your other car, but serves the same function probably isn't going to make you that much happier. No matter how neat you think that new car is, a new experience is together with the people that you care about. So visiting your husband's family in Sicily, what a great experience to do with money that you acquire. Totally. Yeah, absolutely. Yes. I know, because I'm like, listen, I've not been able to afford to go to Italy and I have been able to afford to go to Italy and being able to afford it has been great. So there's somebody so clearly like money doesn't, but it's like, yeah, what are you doing with it? What's the intention? I think it's really the difference. And it's also really clear, Pete, I think this isn't intuitive. The data is just so clear when you look at it. So if you look at the connection between how much money we earn, our income and our happiness levels, there is a small connection. It's not as big as people think up to about the point where in the United States, you can live at a subsistence middle class level. And the study was done in the 2000s. It was 75,000 was the figure that was cited. After that, the relationship between income and happiness almost disappears. Completely disappears almost. Well, in one study, lots of studies, most of the studies say that it almost disappears. In one study, there was a small connection and a small connection means that you literally have to triple your income to see a difference in your happiness. And for most people, that's just not going to happen. So this idea that making more money will make us happy is, I think, a modern illusion, that there are limits on how much it's going to affect our emotional well-being. It may give us more control. 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And each week I'm joined by experts to help you overcome your workplace woes with actionable advice that you can use today. Subscribe to the Career Contest podcast and make progress in your career every Tuesday. What are the major health issues that you see from people? I mean, you said it's just as dangerous to our health as smoking and obesity. So really the revolution that's been so exciting and I've been around now long enough that I can remember my graduate school days 30, 40 years ago when we were just imagining how this might happen. So the thing that's amazing is that relationships get under our skin and affect our bodies and our brains in ways that we could never have conceived of three or four decades ago. So I'll give you some examples and these are examples we talked about in our book. One cool example is a study that sounds cruel. That's the kind of study that psychologists do when they get consent, of course, before they do it. But they give people wounds on their arms pointing to my arm and it's a puncture wound. So it's a standard wound in which they take a little piece of skin off. It hurts a little bit. But the idea of the study is to watch carefully so they bring people in, they photograph them every day to see how quickly that wound heals. Do you not tell me it heals faster and happy people? For people who are in better relationships, more satisfying relationships, we're talking about marriages now. Their wounds heal quicker. So this is like just on a cellular level. We're like a cellular level. And we think there are other examples that are related to our immune functioning as well. So we know people who are burdened by caretaking roles have are more likely to get colds and viruses. Their immune functioning isn't firing as strongly as people who don't have that kind of burden. One other example, which again I think is dramatic, but it makes this point. If you expose people to pain, and again, these are modest levels of pain, but it hurts, and you put them in a brain scanner. And in one condition, they're all alone. And another condition to get to hold the hand of someone they love in the condition of the hand holding the areas of the brain that experience pain are less active. And people report experiencing less pain. So again and again, very different kinds of studies. We see this getting into our skin at a cellular level, at a brain level, we see the way in which relationships affect our physical health, and explain why we see this incredible connection between loneliness and longevity and physical health. Wow. Yeah, wow, it's right. I'm fortunate enough to have a functional medicine doctor that will not work with a patient if they wake up sad and angry every day, because he said there's nothing I can do. There's no pill, there's no diet I can give you that will cure you until you have found happiness in your life. I love that. Really need to attend to our emotional well-being. Really critical on a daily love. I love that. Yeah, it's really I was like, oh, this is because he's like, I've been working in this long enough to know that if you don't have any sense of happiness or joy that we have to do that first, because there's just nothing I can do, which I think is just fascinating. Does that make you believe in God a little bit, or that there has to be just like some higher power? Which part, Pia, how you're thinking, which part? Just all of this, that like joy is what makes us, you know, if it seems it's like a movie, you know, it just seems beautiful. Yeah, there are two parts that for me feel somewhat spiritual around this. One is this gift of being able to see people's lives live. So we have, you know, file drawers full of people's experiences across an 85 year period filled out by their own, you know, handwriting. So there's circling responses. They're writing in answers that are answering, you know, open-ended questions in their long hand. We have photos of them, we have correspondence. So it's a little bit like a family album, but there's 724 of these families, right? So that feels somewhat, you know, it feels quite profound, almost spiritual to me. And I think it's given me a clearer appreciation to be able to see their whole lives, a clearer appreciation for how we need to prioritize in our lives every day, all of us at all our ages, what's important to us? So what do we value? What do we want to make happen in our lives? That life is fleeting. We all know that, but we tend to try to not think about it as we get older. It becomes a more present, you know, kind of experience or worry in people's minds. But this, working with the study has made me appreciate more the limit of life and the importance of trying to really make happen while we have time on the earth, what's important to us. Are there certain rituals that you do on like a daily or weekly basis that you've learned from these studies? I'm sure it has to have impacted your personal life immensely. Yeah, of course, it's impacted me. And I think, you know, part of it is learning by writing about the stuff as well, both the academic articles and also the book that we wrote. And I should also add that I'm a clinician. So I've worked with folks over the years trying to think about these things, but it's had a big impact on myself. And I think part of it is being intentional about our social life. So in our book, The Good Life, we talk about this idea of social fitness, that just like we attend to our physical fitness by actively thinking about the things we need to work on to improve our, you know, the strength of our muscles or our flexibility. We also need to reflect and think about our social life so that we don't go through on kind of automatic pilot, but we intentionally think about which relationships we want to continue to cultivate and lean into maybe see some of those people more frequently. And which of our relationships have been depleting for us have been difficult for us over a period of time where we really recognize either we need to or we want to change them. So maybe it's a sibling that you've lost touch with, or you had an argument with, and you want to kind of figure out a way to fix that relationship that time keeps marching on, that we need to lean in with intention and effort and devote our precious resources, which are really our time and our attention to relationships. So that's a key lesson for me. And one we certainly talk a lot about in our book. I can't thank you enough for speaking to me today. This has just been it's just fascinating and it's sweet and it warms my heart. I can't tell you every time I drive by a person who's sitting alone at a bus stop and they're older, I always think to myself, I need to just ask this person if I can drive them home and have a conversation with them. I've felt that since I was a little kid and it's very dangerous to put a stranger in your vehicle, but I keep thinking to myself. I keep thinking to myself if it's like somebody who looks like I clearly have more physical strength than this person than maybe it's okay. But I keep, it's always been something that I've felt the need to do since I was a little, little, little, little kid. And I just do it. It breaks my heart that so many people are lonely. And I think there are lots of opportunities where we can do this safely. So I hear stories now people tell me these stories and I've had some of these experiences myself. But in the grocery store that that older woman who's resting on the car because she can't really walk by herself who's going through the grocery store very slowly, that's an opportunity to have a connection, to ask them what their favorite meal that they're preparing is that oftentimes we're not brave enough even in those places where it's safe and the grocery store is different than bringing a stranger into your car. We, you know, conjure up all sorts of worries. This person is going to think we're silly or they're going to be mean and not like us. That effort's just brave enough to have those conversations like that visitor that got to talk to your husband's mom. We can benefit from those connections and we can even learn things along the way. So be brave, talk to strangers. I saw women once when we were in Sicily last time, this really darling old older woman and she was kind of shuffling and she was holding a bag and we walked by really fast and I was like, I should have helped her. And then two seconds behind me was another younger woman and the older woman looked at her and she said, my love, can you walk me home? My arms are getting tired. And she said, of course, and she, oh, I'm going to cry. And they interlocked arms and they like walked out the street together and they filmed it like a, like a savage, like a foyer and put it on Instagram. And I was like, I just saw the most beautiful moment, you know, and that it was a, you know, there is something to like the way that people live in different parts of the world where there isn't so much, there's just more human connection. And it's not weird. I think that it's exactly right that we get a kind of jolt of joy. You're experiencing us, you know, it's kind of a emotion that's so poignant that you're crying about it, right? But it's that connection that we really, they thirst for. And when we see moments where we experience that or we witness others, we get this kind of jolt of energy reminds us what it's like to be human. It reminds us of how important connecting with others can be. And it's just a great feeling at something we don't forget. I hope that this study gets looked at by people who run large institutions and can make institutional changes even the way that we function at the airport or, because I don't know why the airport just brings out the worst in people. I think if really you see people act crazy in their airport or on plane, I was just like, I don't know what is in the air. Like it gets bad over there. But even in colleges, like redirecting the way that dorms are designed or prison systems or anything like that, because they're really, I just think that we've, it would just be so helpful. Sidewalks, public spaces, absolutely. There are lots of implications that I think are really important. We need to figure out ways in a world where the social forces that pushed us apart, we really need to think intentionally and thoughtfully about how to bring people together. So I think you're describing some of them as great. Where can people buy the book? Books available everywhere, the Good Life, lessons from the world's longest scientific study of happiness online, local bookstore, and we have a webpage if people want to learn more, thegoodlifebook.com with hyphens between those words in lots of places to learn more about the book. Wonderful. Well, congratulations. What a wonderful thing you get to do. Thank you. All right. Thank you so much. It was nice meeting you. Good to meet you, Pia. Take care. And that, ladies and gentlemen, concludes this week's episode of Everything is the Best. I hope you enjoyed it. Please rate, review, subscribe, all that stuff. Maybe leave a comment, but remember, shitty comments are for shitty people. Go ahead and follow me on Instagram at PiaBaronGenie, and I hope you have a fabulous, fabulous rest of your day. Love you. Tau. Please note that this episode may contain paid endorsements and advertisements for products and services. Individuals on the show may have a direct or indirect financial interest in products or services referred to in this episode.