ADOPTING THESE Habits Will Lead To A LONGER Life Expectancy! | Robert Waldinger

How could your relationships at age 50 predict whether you're going to get type two diabetes in older age? Loneliness is a stressor.

If you had one life choice to make right now that would set you on the path to future health and happiness, what would it be?

It would be to invest your time and energy in people, in your relationships with other people. Wow.

So really it's not about what you're eating or how much you're exercising or making a lot of money or advancing yourself in the world, being famous, whatever it is that people think might be linked to happiness and a good life. It's your connections, your community, your relationships.

Well, let me unpack that just a bit because when you said it's not about what you're eating or exercising, it is. And in fact, our study, our 85-year study of these people shows that taking care of your health is hugely important. So let's bracket that and say, no, health care, self-care is really important, but the making a lot of money, the getting famous, the winning the Nobel Prize, that stuff doesn't make you happier.

Yeah, and in your TED Talk, you were very direct about this. You were saying essentially that it isn't any of those things, it's those relationships, but that loneliness, was a killer. Loneliness is such a high risk factor for disease and death. It's striking. I think we've had Dr. Vivek Murthy, who's the current Surgeon General on the podcast before, and he wrote a book about this and looked at all the research about this. And I'm curious, you know, you did this study called the Harvard Study of Adult Development. I mean, you didn't start it. It was started 80 years ago, but it was fascinating. They took, you know, young boys from the poorest most underserved neighborhoods in Boston and then a bunch of Harvard dudes. So more privileged group. And you studied these people over a period of 80 years, which is remarkable. Generations of people. And the study, I mean, it's hard to do a study like that for 80 years, but somehow you guys have managed to keep it going. But you sort of this loneliness framework was really interesting to me because if you're saying that the key to a good life is connections and relationships and happiness, The converse is that loneliness is actually a huge risk factor, right?

Absolutely. And loneliness, as you know, is a subjective experience. So, you know, you can be lonely in a crowd, you can be lonely in an intimate relationship, you can be perfectly happy on a mountaintop as a hermit. It all depends on that subjective sense of whether I'm connected Enough to the people I want to be connected to. And if I am connected enough, then I won't say that I'm lonely. But I think that, you know, what we've learned, and we're doing more research on this, is that loneliness is a stressor. That loneliness actually keeps us in chronic fight or flight mode, keeps our bodies revved up slightly because we're more vigilant to threat. when we are lonely. And that seems to contribute a lot to breaking down health as well as happiness.

So literally it's a physiological stress to be lonely and isolated.

Exactly.

Wow, amazing. This sort of brings me to the question of what is the biology of all of this? You're a psychiatrist and we were chatting before we started the podcast that typically psychiatrists pay no attention to the brain. and focus on the mind, whereas neurologists focus on the brain and not the mind. It's all connected. So how does connections and relationships foster health and how does loneliness biologically create disease and shorter lifespans? Because that's fascinating to me as a functional medicine doctor. I kind of want to know the why and the cause.

Absolutely. Well, let me give an example. So let's say you have something really upsetting happen during your day. Right? And you find that you're thinking about it, you're kind of ruminating about it. And then at the end of the day, there's somebody you can talk to. Maybe somebody at home or maybe you call somebody up, somebody who's a good listener, a sympathetic listener. You can literally feel your body calm down as you get to talk about it, right? And you can literally feel your body return to equilibrium from that fight or flight mode, that agitation. Because what we know is that when you're upset, that your body secretes stress hormones, circulating levels of cortisol go up, inflammation goes up, and then the body's meant to return to equilibrium. But what if you don't have anybody to talk to about what's upsetting you? And so what we find is that good relationships seem to be stress regulators.

It's quite amazing. I think I noticed when I was researching in my book on longevity that I came upon a study that cuddling actually changes your epigenome, that just physical affection and connection. And it's true, you know, when you're with people who you have a deep connection with, who love you, who, you know, their nervous system is also sort of grounded, I would say. I just feel my nervous system start to kind of calm down at the same time. And I think that the data on all this really around sociogenomics, which is what is the biology and the effects of our social relationships and connections on our gene expression and everything downstream from that that you talked about, like inflammation, it's really, it's quite amazing. And so this is, this is really an important study because it, you know, wasn't focused so much on what makes people sick, but what makes people thrive, right? What makes people live a long time. and have a happy life. So, what was sort of the surprising and interesting findings? What were the surprisingly interesting findings that you had from the study? What are the important lessons that you learned about relationships in particular, but also in general, when you had this sort of 80 years of data on all these men who you studied?

Yeah. Well, the finding that relationships keep us happier and healthier was a surprise at first. It began to emerge in the 1980s and at first people running our study didn't believe the data because yeah, we know the mind and the body are connected. How could your relationships at age 50 predict whether you're going to get type 2 diabetes in older age or whether you're going to get arthritis? How could that possibly happen? And then other studies began to find the same thing. And that's where we begin to believe it. So no one study, even my famous longitudinal study, 85 years, no one study of this kind can prove anything. But if you have many studies pointing in the same direction, then we begin to have much more confidence and we begin to say, my gosh, this is real. This is powerful. And so I think one of the things that surprised us is the finding that loneliness and poor quality relationships are as damaging to your health as cigarette smoking, as obesity. So that these things that we consider so dangerous for us are no more dangerous than Isolation and loneliness.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And it's so interesting. We have such a, quote, connected society, but we're still often so isolated and disconnected from each other. You know, we have social media, but it doesn't feel very social. It often drives more stress in our nervous systems than, than actually healing from the nature of the way we kind of interact. And it's just, it's kind of a, it's kind of a weird moment, I think, in history where we've lost our tribal communities, we've lost our connections. We live in these nuclear families or these single parent families. I was a single parent. And, you know, we kind of navigate life in these little bubbles of isolation. And, you know, it's unusual to see today, you know, big extended families and communities and, and, and, you know, you have to really work at it. So I wonder, you know, how did, how did these people actually cultivate it? What were the life skills and hacks that allowed them to keep, maintain, build and nurture these relationships that actually determine their health span and their lifespan.

Well, one thing to point out is that not everybody was successful at cultivating this. So some of the stories in our book, we have stories of our real participants and their names are disguised to protect their privacy, but we have stories about their lives and not all the stories are happy. Not all the stories have happy endings because some of these people weren't successful. But the ones who were seemed to get it that making relationships a priority, no matter where you were, at home, at work, out in the community, that focusing on people really made a difference, really helped you cultivate this kind of well-being. And so, some of our folks got it right away. Some of our folks learned that lesson as they got older, as they had more life experience.

You know, yeah, you know, sort of thinking about my father, you know, and, and I, and I, you know, how isolated he was. And, I mean, he was married, but he really kind of focused on his career and focused on being successful and kind of lost a lot of his friends and ended up, you know, really, really without a lot of friends as he got older. And then I invited him to this men's work. I've done men's work for 30 years. And we had this thing called Spirit Camp, and we would go up to this sort of camp, like a YMCA camp on top of this mountain in the Berkshires. And I invited him to come, and my friend invited his father to come. And they were both like the same age, 79 years old. And they were both kind of New York Jews from Brooklyn. They both were kind of atheists. They both were, you know, joined the Navy at 17. They were very similar. both tall, interesting characters, and they kind of bonded and developed this incredible friendship. And I saw how much it enriched my father's life. And even on his deathbed, like this guy Jerry, his friend, was calling him on the phone. And, you know, I just realized how important those things are. And we often don't prioritize them in our lives. And I think it sounds like, you know, the people in the study who prioritize them actually did much better.

We asked our original people this question. We said, who could you call in the middle of the night if you were sick or scared? And some people couldn't list anybody. Some people who were married couldn't list anybody. And then some people could list several people. And I think what your dad found was a friend. He found a real friend who would call him when he was sick and who would who would be there, who would have his back. And I think one of the things we've learned is so powerful from our study is what we call in my jargon, secure attachment. That when you feel like there's somebody in the world who's got your back, who you could go to if you were really in trouble, that's what each of us needs in order to thrive, in order to feel okay about our lives.

Yeah, it's true. I mean, I don't want to make this about me, but just reflecting on how true this is. I remember when I was a little boy, I was very isolated. I was kind of a weird, nerdy kid and hid in my room with a lot of books. It's paid off in the end. Paid off in the end. But I really didn't have anybody who saw me as a kid. And then I went out west and I went backpacking. I was 18. I met this guy on the top of this mountain and we were both going to be in Ithaca in the fall. And we kind of bonded and we really had this incredible friendship. friendship for, like, 45 years. And he just, I'm in Baja, and he just left. And we had this, you know, mountain biking trip here, and, you know, we talked and we, we just, like, I don't, I, he's been such an integral part of my life throughout everything and has helped me feel like I have that secure attachment. Like, I have somebody to call. And, and now obviously, we've got many, many more people I can call, but it's, it's having that gave me a sense of being okay. Like, somehow life was quite different before and after that experience. So I don't know how to tell people to form those attachments or how you find those people, how do you build that? Like, I just wonder if there are any insights from the study about how to actually create it. Because you can say, oh, I want you to eat more vegetables. Okay, I got that. Oh, I want you to exercise more. Okay, I got that. But, like, I want you to have a deeper connections and relationships. Like, how do you get here to there? If you're in isolation stage.

Well, one thing is to be active. So you and your friend had to arrange that he would come be with you in Baja, right? You had to go out of your way, you had to carve out the time, you had to make the arrangements, you had to be active. And I think one of the things many of us, myself included, can fall into is the sense of, oh, my good friends are my good friends. The friendships will take care of themselves. I don't really have to do anything. And what we came to understand from our research is something that we're thinking about as a kind of social fitness, analogous to physical fitness, where you work out one day and then you don't say to yourself, well, I've done that. I don't have to do that ever again, right? You don't do that. Right? Really?

And the same thing... I eat one vegetable. I know I'm good now.

Exactly, exactly. So you don't do that. you say, okay, I need to have a routine. This is a practice both of self-care, of diet, of exercise, but also a self-caring practice of tending to important relationships. So part of it is actively maintaining the relationships that you've built to make sure they stay close, get closer. Another then is if you're isolated to find ways to have contact with people. And often one of the best ways is to have contact around a shared interest. So you happen to meet your friend on a mountaintop, which meant that you were both interested at least that day in taking a hike, right?

Back when we were back.

Yeah. So and you could connect around the trail, around nature, you could share things, right? So what if you volunteer for a cause you're passionate about? about. And so you might be shy, but if you're right next to people who also care about climate change or about saving the world in some other way.

Or about gardening or about golf, fishing or whatever, right.

Fishing, anything. That what you find is that the shared interest provides a place to start conversations. and that by starting those conversations, you can begin to get to know someone. I'll say one more thing which we find constantly is that bringing curiosity is a huge benefit to making a relationship. So we all love it when somebody is curious about us. Like, you know, Mark, if I ask you more about yourself, you'll want to talk about it, right? You know, you asked me about my Zen life and I told you about it a little bit before we started this podcast. And so what we find is that when you ask people about themselves, they feel your interest, they feel seen, and when they get to tell you about themselves, they feel known. And so if you can just bring curiosity, you don't have to bring anything else. Notice something, you know, I notice something in your Zoom background, notice something that's on a co-worker's desk. a photo or a little object. Just be curious and you will strike up conversations that turn out to be meaningful.

Robert, I think you just hit on something so fundamental, which is that all of us want really one thing, which is to be seen and known and heard and gotten. And how rare that is and how simple it is to actually create that experience for someone by just being curious about them. Tell me more about yourself or ask, like, you know, like, I went to there with some friends here in Mexico. I said, so how did you guys meet? What's your love story? And then the whole, like, it was like an hour and a half conversation, and it was great. It was so entertaining and fun, and, you know, they felt like we cared about them and it deepened our connection. And so I think. I think it's not that hard to do, but so many of us are just tired and burnt out and focused on what we have to do and getting through the next thing and, you know, on our own. But stopping that and taking a breath and actually figuring out how to get curious about people in your life will 100% create real connection. So that's such a beautiful, beautiful nugget. And I think we don't, we kind of lost the art of questions. I have a friend, Andrew, who's like, he's like the master. Like he'll just go in and ask you these piercing questions that literally, you know, probably may or may not want to share with anybody, but like they get, they get to the real essence of what matters and what you care about. and who you are. And those are now they're just talking about the weather or whatever. It's like having a more deeper sense of inquiry about another person's heart and soul and mind. It's beautiful. That's a great nugget.

You know, the other thing we can do is we can do that with people we think we know really well. So research tells us another interesting thing. So how much do you know your partner? Let's say you're in an intimate partnership. What they find is that we're most attuned to our partner's feelings when we first get together. because think about it, you're trying to figure out is this person into me? Like what's going on with this person, right? So you're really paying attention and then what they find is that partners know each other less well, they know each other's feelings less accurately the longer they're in the relationship. You would think it would be the opposite. So one of the tips that we find we can give to people for livening up old relationships is to bring that curiosity to a relationship, to somebody you feel you know everything about. Like one of my Zen teachers taught me this, the instruction in a meditation was, what's here right now that I have never noticed before? And if you could bring that curiosity to you know, having dinner with your longtime partner, that could get you into a much more interesting and interested space.

It's so true. I'm trying to remember the name of this incredible, like, little game that my friend Esther Perel created. And it's this beautiful little kit. I'll put it in the show notes, but essentially it's a game where you have to pull out a card and then you ask questions about your partner, about your friends. And so you get to these deeper things. And I've done this before with people I'm very, very close with. And it's like, I just learned stuff I wouldn't have known about them, right? There's that New York Times article about the 36 questions to ask to fall in love, right? You know those questions? I haven't seen that. They're great. We'll put those in the show notes too, but it's great. There's like really questions about asking to discover what someone's like. So I just wanna take a little bit of a left turn, Robert, here, 'cause I think, you know, the other side of loneliness is happiness. The book you created about the study, this 80-year study that detailed the things that you found about creating a healthy, happy, long life was sort of science of the antidote to loneliness and the antidote to, you know, what creates disease, which was sort of happiness. But then the question there is how do we get to happiness and what creates happiness? And in your life, you you sort of were sharing with me before the podcast, that about 18 years ago, you had the opportunity to meet someone who was a Zen master, what we call a roshi, a teacher, essentially. And it changed how you saw the world, changed how you thought about yourself, changed the quality of your life and happiness. And Buddhism is really a description of the mind and what creates suffering. And so the science of suffering is sort of, is important to understand to kind of create the science of happiness. So your book is really on the science of happiness, but your Zen studies really help you in a way get there through the science of suffering, right? And how to relieve suffering and why we suffer and what the cause of suffering are. So I'd love for you to sort of maybe take us down that journey of how as a psychiatrist from Harvard, you kind of got into this seemingly world that doesn't fit with Freudian psychoanalysis in my mind. And I'm like, okay, how do you reconcile that? And where did you get to? And what do you, who are you now? And, and how is, how is, how is this incredible project that you've been involved with informed all of that?

Sure.

Okay. It's a lot.

I know. It's a lot, but it's a wonderful question. And, and I, I'm so glad. Thank you for the Curiosity, Mark.

So. Well, I mean, just as a little background, everybody, I don't know if people listening know, but in my major in college with Asian Studies, and my focus was on Buddhism. And I did a lot of studies of Zen Buddhism and all kinds of Tibetan Buddhism and practiced. And so I'm really very curious about this kind of connection.

Well, you know, what happened for me? So I grew up in a family that really valued education. So they loved it when I got A's and, you know, when I get awards in school and stuff, right? And what I began to realize, we read a poem once by Yeats, about a man who comes across a fallen statue in the desert of some great conqueror. And the muse that he does, that Yeats does, is about what's happened to this great conqueror. You know, he was so mighty in his time and where is it all now? And I began to sort of really feel this fact that, you know, most of us are not going to be remembered 100 years from now, it's all gonna go away. So what really matters? And here I am, a guy who spent his whole adult life at Harvard, right?

And, you know, I've got- yeah, you never left. You're like, undergraduate, medical school, you're teaching there.

Exactly. And I have a resume as long as your arm. I've won lots of awards and none of it, I mean, I'm happy with the work I did. And yes, I'm proud of some of it. But that's not what really matters. It's not what really warms me. And so this problem of why do we all care about some of these things like badges of achievement or wealth or, you know, that really don't matter ultimately, why is it that we humans do that? And Buddhism helped me. So sitting and meditating and realizing how my mind creates all these stories about what's important stories that don't matter, don't amount to a hill of beans, right? That was so helpful and so healing for me and I could let go of some of the pressure to achieve, to be something special because none of us at the deepest level, all of us are special and none of us is special. All of us are just part of a great big universe doing what it does. And this has been an enormously healing perspective for me. It's helped me let go of some of my preoccupations.

It's amazing. How does it inform your psychiatric practice?

It does. It does a lot. So my specialty is psychotherapy. And so I'm a little bit unusual as a psychiatrist because a lot of psychiatrists do mostly medication work. I do mostly psychotherapy, although prescribe medication. But what it does is it helps me bring in and ask people about the perspective of, you know, 10 years from now when you're looking back, how important is this going to seem? Or, you know, 80 years from now when people remember you, what do you want them to remember? It's that kind of existential perspective that Zen helps me bring. And I find that it helps many of the people I work with kind of put things in a bigger perspective and calm down about some of the small stuff.

Yeah. You know, it's interesting that the sort of little tangent here, but, you know, the studies on meditators, I'm sure you've read the book, Alter Traits by Daniel Goleman and his colleague who studied the MRI of meditators who are Olympic meditators, literally 40,000 hours of meditation and what their brains look like. And there's a sort of part of the brain that sort of diminishes the strength of the ego. Like the ego kind of part of the brain is quiet called the default mode network. And that is also what's kind of quieted down with these new psychedelic therapies, these sort of psilocybin, MDMA compounds that seem to do very similar things that are being used in psychiatric treatment like depression and anxiety and PTSD and addiction. And it's fascinating to me how, you know, we're kind of in this world where we're starting to sort of rethink about how we deal with the sort of trauma and suffering. Right. So it's hard for people to think about, like, meditating for 40, 000 hours, like living in a cave for nine years. You know, I think people do that. I certainly haven't, and I don't think I can, but I think there's, there's ways that people can get to kind of calming that down. But even, even in meditation practice alone, that does help you to kind of have perspective on the monkey mind, they call it, and the, the ways in which our thoughts create suffering. And I think once you get that, you realize, wow, I can change my level of happiness and my well-being by changing my relationship to my thoughts and not thinking of them as things or as these fixed entities that actually kind of are real, but that are just constructs of my mind that create suffering for myself and I could change those.

Yes. And you don't need 80,000 hours of meditation to get this, as I think you know. That some meditation can give us those experiences of of feeling connected to the bigger world and not locked in, there's a phrase that David Foster Wallace used where he would say, we are trapped in our skull sized kingdoms. And what meditation helps us do, and also some of these psychedelic drugs, is to really experience the feeling of connection to something much bigger. and that that feeling doesn't last. So, you know, you can't be on psychedelic drugs all the time. You wouldn't want to be. You can't be meditating all the time, and you can't dictate what kind of experience you're gonna have on the cushion. But having those experiences gives us something to touch back to, to remember, like, oh, yeah, there's that perspective, too. When I'm all caught up in my little personal drama, I can, like, remember.

Oh, yeah. Yeah.

I know what it feels like to be connected to this bigger world.

Yeah. And then part of that's where happiness comes from. Right. I mean, I think the question is how. How much of Happiness is really under control? Sometimes I've sort of heard and read some of the research that shows that, you know, whether, wherever you are, your sort of happiness end point is fairly fixed. Like, if you win the lottery or if you get your legs. chopped off in an accident. Like, you kind of revert back to whatever your baseline level of happiness is after the initial stress of the event. But you're suggesting that there's a way to actually, you know, shift our set point in happiness. How do we do that?

Well, I think through these practices that we're talking about. So meditation can do that, but also meditation-like experiences. Yoga, for some people, it's through music. Where you really get beyond the self and just get absorbed in what you're doing. For some people, it's gardening. There are just a whole lot of ways that you can be very present in the moment and time just flies when you are. And that finding those ways, not everybody needs to meditate. You know, one size doesn't fit all, but finding a practice that really connects you with the present moment and with the world is one way to help change your happiness set point and also taking care of yourself. So, you know, much of your work is about taking care of the body, of building health, right? And one of the things we know is that when you take care of your body, we suffer less, our mood is better, our well-being is greater. And so these are ways that we can influence that set point that we all have.

Yeah, I think it's true. I think we sort of alluded to it before, but the mind, body, body, mind is sort of an artificial distinction. the brain function also determines your mind's function, the disorder or order of your neurons and then your neuroplasticity and the level of inflammation and level of toxins and the hormones and the microbiome. All this stuff that we talk about in functional medicine has a profound impact on the brain function, which has an effect on your mind's function. I always say it's a lot easier to get enlightened if you're not mercury poisoned, your thyroid's working and you're not B12 deficient. efficient, you know, like it's a lot easier. So I want to kind of loop back to this whole concept of social fitness because I think I understand in the general concept, which is, you know, the, the, the social fitness is really the, the metric of how much and how good and how well your relationships function and, and the quality of those relationships. But the, the question is, you know, I know how to get my body in Fitness, but how do I, how do I keep in good shape? from the perspective of my social fitness.

Well, a couple of things. One is to not be plagued by grudges, to not be plagued by feuds. If you think about it, we can invest so much energy in an angry division from the people in our lives. especially in families. Oh boy, there are so many family feuds and they take such a toll on us. And so one of the things that we can do is first of all to recognize that conflicts are inevitable in any relationship where people care about each other. You're not always going to agree. There are going to be arguments. But then to notice, okay, how much is this taking a toll on me. How much space is it occupying in my mind? And could I go back and try to ease that? Could I try to work out my differences with somebody in my life who's really preoccupying me? And so to do that can go a long way to freeing up energy that we've been wasting on feuds often that are not about meaningful things. you know, take that, you know, that hundred years from now Criterion and say, is it really gonna matter?

Yeah.

If he didn't invite me to Thanksgiving 12 years ago. Right.

And.

And so there's that now, again, it's also true that we need to step away from abusive relationships. So I'm not saying every relationship can be healed. That's clear. But many relationships are. are just chronically unhappy and acrimonious. And what I would say is if you can invest the time in healing and working out differences, it's a great investment.

Yeah. That's an incredible piece of advice. That's a great piece of advice. So I just said before you go to the next bit of advice, it reminds me of the saying that resentment is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die.

Exactly.

You know?

Exactly. that's exactly it. And so to really first know that, to know how much it hurts, right? It's like, I think the Buddha likened it to picking up a hot coal. And then, you know, when you realize what it's doing to you, how much it hurts, you let it go. So it's forgiveness, right?

Forgiveness, compassion, understanding the other person's perspective, you know, just trying to get them without necessarily having to be right or wrong, but understanding what led to that behavior or that action or that whatever.

Exactly. And in Zen, we talk a lot about the mind of right and wrong. And is there a way to step beyond the mind of right and wrong where it's not important to be right or wrong in so many instances?

Yeah, so true. I had a great business coach once who said, Do you want to be right or do you want to be in relationship? I was like, that is good. That is good.

Exactly. that's exactly it. And so it's really key to think about that and to try to bring more kind of compassion and acceptance to the fact that we're all going to be different and we're not going to please each other all the time. And these things can be worked with and often mended.

So, see, you're going to talk about some other things. I don't know if it connects to this model you have in the book called the Wiser Model, W-I-S-E-R, of reaction to really emotionally challenging situations. Why it's so helpful? Because, you know, it's, you know, you know, when you're talking about social fitness, you sort of talk about forgiveness and compassion, trying to understand this perspective and letting go. And there's more to this. So take us through this model that you have of what actually creates social fitness. Cause I'm imagining that's what this is, right?

Sure. Well, the Wiser Model, actually it was developed initially by a psychologist named Ken Dodge who was trying to look at how kids can get better at social relationships like in the schoolyard, for example. And what he developed was this system that now we've kind of dubbed the Wiser Model, which is really a way of slowing down your processing of a difficult situation or a challenging situation. So let's say something ambiguous happens, somebody gives you a look, and you don't understand it. Or they send you a note saying, I need to talk to you right away, and you don't know why. So there's a big blank screen. Well, think about all the ways our minds can fill in the blank screen and say, oh my gosh, he wants to talk to me because he's mad at me. He wants to talk to me because I'm going to be fired. He wants to talk to, you know, you can just do that.

Or I'm getting a raise, or I'm so great. It was not coming out great. I am right. Yeah, you can do the same thing. Yeah.

Or something happens at a family gathering, right? And you don't understand why the person did what they did. So the wiser model is a way of simply slowing down your response. And so it starts with, it's an acronym. The W is really just an acronym. It's a way of saying watch. So first of all, watch what's happened. Watch. So see, okay, what just happened? So this person said, I need to talk to you right away. And they had a serious look on their face. And watch what your mind does with it. Okay, so I'm saying, oh my gosh, they're mad at me. They're going to call me on the carpet for something.

Right?

And then think about, okay, what are some of the other possibilities? maybe this person needs to talk to me right away because their kid's in trouble and they want some advice. Or maybe they just got a health scare. Or maybe, you know, just think about all the other possibilities rather than going into that meeting, that talk saying, oh my God, they're going to call me on the carpet. Okay, so first watch and then think about, okay, interpret. What could this mean? So, well, it could mean a whole bunch of different things that this person wants to talk to me right away. And so keep all those possibilities in mind. And then you think, okay, how do I respond? So let's say you get this message saying, I want to talk to you right away. What are some of the possibilities? I could say, I'm sorry, I can't talk to you right away because I'm scared. You could say, what's wrong or I didn't do anything or there are all kinds of ways you could respond. So the select is you select, well, what would be a good response in this case? So it might just be, sure, happy to talk to you when's a good time, right? Rather than getting all defensive or all worried about something that may not exist. And then you engage. So then you choose your response like a friendly, Yes, happy to talk. Let's make a time right away. You engage and then you see what happens. You see what the meeting is like and you reflect back and say, oh, actually it wasn't what I thought it was going to be. It was something different. Or when that person looked like they were mad at me, actually they weren't. They were just upset about something happening in their own life.

Right?

And so what this is, the Wiser Model, is just a way to get us to slow down, really pay attention, really choose how we're going to respond rather than doing the first knee-jerk thing.

Then react, respond rather than react.

Respond rather than react. And then to look back and say, how did that work? How did that work out so that we learn from it? Because sometimes, you know, I do send that angry email response and then it's like, oh my gosh, so the important thing is when you screw up, which I do sometimes, to reflect back and say, okay, that didn't work. I'm not gonna do that again. I'm gonna do something different because we want to keep learning from our experiences, and we're not going to get it right all the time. No.

You know, it's so true. I mean, I. I think, you know, my experience is that, you know, your thought creates. a feeling or emotion that creates an action. And there's multiple steps in there and they often are just collapsed, right? They just are in a nanosecond and we think they're all one thing. But you're talking about slowing that whole process down. It sort of reminds me of Viktor Frankl and Man's Search for Meaning where he said, you know, between stimulus and response, there's a choice. And in that choice lies your freedom. You know, so we have an opportunity to kind check in and just stop that automatic reactivity that is our limbic brain, our reptile brain just creating this fear response, fear, fight, flight, freeze, whatever it is, you know, I think those, those things are, are, are fixable. And so the question I would have for you is, for people listening, is how do you, how do you slow down? Like, how do you, do you take a breath? Do you, do you like, you know, kind of have a rubber band, you snap on your wrist to remember. Like what do you do? It's kind of in that moment to just kind of reset.

Right. So in that moment, first of all, it depends. Sometimes we just have to respond, right? You see a challenge and you just have to, you know, like someone pulls out in front of you and you have to step on the brake. I mean, you don't stop and think, well, how could I respond to this? No, you don't do that. So sometimes you just respond and then you, and you look at it later. But sometimes if you can buy time, buy time, and that might mean, don't, you know, the temptation is to respond right away with the email when someone puts you on the defensive. So stop and or to immediately say, okay, I gotta do this. If you can buy time, would it matter if I slept on this? and if I responded tomorrow morning, if you can do that, sleep on it. It really makes a difference because the world can look very different 12 hours later, 24 hours later. And if you can do that, and often we can, take time. If you can't take time, and sometimes even with a person, so let's say you're in a conversation and I say something upsetting to you, you might be able to say, you know, I don't really know how I feel right now about that. I don't know how to respond. Can we talk about this again tomorrow? Or can I just have a few minutes or an hour to think about this? Just to ask for time. And most of the time, people will give you that time. You know, most often they will. And because what you're saying, the Victor Frankl observation is so important that you want to give yourself the time to have choice. To first of all see, okay, there are options and here's the option that I think might be the best.

And in the study you did, the Harvard study of adult development, it's 80 or that you're doing, and then we'll be done for another 80 years. You're still doing it. Did you find that that the people who are able to do that better naturally ended up having happier, longer lives and also better relationships. Did you measure for that or look for that at all?

Yes, we did it indirectly. We didn't ask them, how often do you use the wiser model?

No, no, no, I understand. I understand.

But the people who could reflect and say, well, I think this person may have done this because of that, because they were struggling with this, or the people who can really really try to put themselves in someone else's shoes, try to entertain multiple possibilities that those were the people. This is what comes under the rubric of under the umbrella of emotional intelligence. If we think about Dan Goleman's whole big category of emotional intelligence, it's these kinds of skills that we're talking about with the wiser model and other skills as well. and the people who had those skills were the most successful in their work lives too, as well as at home and in the community.

Yeah, so true. You mentioned something earlier on our conversation about relationships and marriages and how being even in a relationship, if it's not one that's nourishing or loving, or connected, if it's toxic or abusive or just unhappy, how that can be actually more of a detriment to your health than actually being alone. And, and so the question I have is, you know, from these studies that you did in the study that you're doing, how, how do you find that people had healthy romantic relationships? How do we nourish romantic relationships? Because those are often the most challenging for us, the, the most difficult to navigate and where our old traumas and our old beliefs and our old woundings as children often emerge and come out in, you know, technicolor. So how do we, how do we navigate that? And how do these people navigate that?

So the, so that, that's such a, such an important question. So how do we navigate relationships? One of the things that I think is most useful is the concept. no relationship is going to serve all our needs. There's a colleague of mine, Eli Finkel, who's written a book called the All or Nothing Marriage. And what he talks about is this ideal, especially in the West, in the 20th and 21st centuries, where we have this romantic ideal that we're going to find the partner who does everything for us, who supplies us with all our needs, needs for sex and fun and companionship and intellectual stimulation. And what we know is that no one relationship can provide all those needs. That's highly unlikely. And so I think first recognizing that there's nothing wrong with needing to have other relationships that provide us with some of what we need. That if we don't go in with the expectation of why can't you be more of this for me, that that can go a long way to easing some of the pressure we feel and some of the worry we feel that, well, this isn't a good enough relationship. And so the expectation could be, I'm going to get much of what I need from this intimate relationship, but not all of what and we're each going to find things elsewhere. And then two other concepts. One is conflict is inevitable, inevitable. And so it's not a matter of do we argue, do we disagree. The real question is can we develop ways of navigating disagreements so that we both come out feeling okay? so that neither of us feels like we've lost, neither of us feels shamed, that we both come out feeling like we're okay with each other and with ourselves.

There was another thing you were going to say.

And there was, oh gosh. So one was that conflict is inevitable and oh, and the other thing is we change. So, right, so my field is adult development. And if you think about it, think about how much you've changed since you were in your 20s. I mean, there are many ways in which you are quite different and what you care about is quite different. So remember that you're going to change over time and your partner is going to change over time. So the question is how can you grow both separately and together? rather than assuming, well, you have to stay, you have to be exactly the same person you were when we got together, because that can't happen. So expecting change, expecting conflicts and finding ways to work them out, and expecting that you're going to get some of your needs met in other relationships.

And is that what you found in this study, that people had a diverse array social connections and it wasn't just like one person, but they had, you know, a community that supported them to feel this social network that helped them live a long time.

Absolutely. Absolutely. That, that, you know, one of the things we know from our study and others is that all kinds of relationships contribute to our well-being you don't have to be in an intimate partnership to get these benefits that I'm talking about. So friendships, family relationships, also casual relationships. We've started studying... You don't mean an.

Affair, you mean like... No, no, I don't mean like someone at the grocery store.

Exactly, someone at the grocery store who checks you out and you see over and over again the person who you get your coffee from at Dunkin Donuts or Starbucks, right? The barista. Those little hits of positive energy that we get from saying hi to each other, from asking, how's your day going? And really wanting to know that those little hits of affirmation make a difference. And so we don't want to downplay the importance of those casual connections that we have. Even talking to strangers makes us happier.

Here. Yeah, it's true. You know, I always, when I was younger, I just, I love kind of going up to random people and just, like, digging in and finding, who are you? And what's your story?

And, like, yeah.

And it's just fascinating, whether it's a homeless person or whether it's, you know, someone on a train or a bus or, you know, there's always a moment where, you know, we sort of live in these little bubbles, and even we're in public or we're sort of contracted into our phones these days, and, and it's, it's. you know, it just. It's just like, I try to sort of make an effort of just kind of having this. These. Just juicy little interactions where our common Humanity is recognized and where we feel like a little bit of a sense of connection to another human in the greater human family. It's like a very powerful, like, medicine. I would say. I would say medicine. Yeah, I I worked a lot with Rick Warren. community-based faith-based wellness program. We did it in groups, in a church, and the basic message was community is medicine, right? Food is medicine, but community is also medicine. And that's what I found when I went to Sardinia and Icaria and some of the Blue Zones, that these deep social connections and relationships they've had are so determinant of their quality of happiness. And I see it even for myself. I've talked about this before in the podcast, but during COVID we were all kind of isolated. I realized I had a whole group of men friends that I would see periodically and often not together, but most of them knew each other. Friends were also really close friends. And we've been friends for between 45 and, you know, anywhere from 45 to 25 years when the group. And, you know, we decided to meet every week for a couple hours on Zoom. And it's been the most amazing thing because it's like, I don't know, it's like Touchstone, where every week we get to check in and we to see each other, we celebrate each other's wins, we cry with each other, we challenge each other to look at our crap and shit together, you know? And it's such a beautiful therapeutic experience. And it's not like therapy, but it's just the ability to actually be with people who see you and love you and know you and get you. It's so simple. And it's such a neglected thing in our society today. And this book, the Good Life: Lessons from the World's Longest Scientific Study happiness is kind of a reminder that this is sort of the neglected medicine that we have available to us that can help us both live healthier and longer lives and happier lives, right? So, I mean, it's all connected. Health, happiness, longevity. And it's so important and it's an important reminder of how to live this good life.

You know what we know, Mark? It's such an important point because what we know, for example, is that when you are more connected to other people, you take better care of your health. That it matters to you more because staying healthy for someone else matters. When they did a study of people in retirement, what they found was they did this set of public service announcements trying to get older people to exercise, and particularly older women who were retired. And when they told them about all the dangers of not exercising, it didn't move the needle at all. Nobody exercised more. But when they showed pictures of grandmothers holding babies and said, Be there for the people who matter to you, exercise rates went up. And so what we find is that when you're more connected and you're more aware of those connections, you take better care of yourself.

Yeah, that's amazing. Yeah, I think it's true. I think it's really true. And, you know, I think you're, when I say you're, you're only as, you know, the reflection of the five closest people in your life in terms of your health, your habits and happiness. And, you know, if you're, all your friends are, you know, just, you know, eating at McDonald's and watching soap operas all day, then, you know, you're likely not going to be as healthy. But if all your friends are, you know, going to yoga and meditating and, you know, eating healthy food and hiking and you're going to be, you know, drawn into that. And I think it's really, it's really, really true that we sort of, we're not chameleons per se as human beings, but we like to belong and we all have a longing to belong and longing to connect. And so, you know, find, find that, like you said, find those places and people in the community that where you have something in common with, where you shared interests, where you're active. It's, it's a, it's really an active process to build relationships, get out there, do stuff. and I think it's kind of hard because when you're lonely and isolated and depressed, it's hard to actually come out of that to go do something. And it's sometimes challenging for people, especially in this world, it's so divisive and the disconnection is getting even worse and worse. And it troubles me. And I think this book is such a good reminder of what we have to do to actually live fulfilled and happy lives.

You know what? I'm really disturbed by the divisiveness as you are, I mean a lot. And one of the things I've come to realize is that there are people I can listen to who make me feel more open to the world and there are other people I listen to who make me feel more shut down. And if we can keep turning our attention, giving our attention to the people who help us feel more open to the world and to possibility and to others, that that's the place to offer the most precious thing we have, which is attention, right? And to turn away from those voices that make us feel more frightened, more closed off.

Yeah. I think you just hit on something so profound, which is the quality of our attention to others, the quality of our attention to ourselves, the ability to be curious and interested in others and not self-absorbed. is actually what creates happiness, right?

Yeah. One of my Zen teachers has this quote that I love. He said, Attention is the most basic form of love. Yeah. It's John Tarrant. And what he, man, if you think about it, what do we have that's more precious than our undivided attention? And also, these days, is more and more rare to give somebody our undivided attention.

Yeah, it's so important. It's so important. And that's a quality of listening. There's actually a skill to listen, listening to someone without judgment, with curiosity, with openness, without having your narrative running in your head about what you're gonna say or what you want about your stuff or whatever it is. And I'm guilty of that as anybody else. But the more I learned to sort of drop myself and just really, because I, I mean, I don't even talk about myself. I know myself. I know what I, I know what's in my head, but, like, I, I have such a deeper, richer experience when I, you know, like, I inquire, like I said, you know, at dinner with these friends the other night, I have this, you know, just a deeper sense of this human being. And I felt enriched by his story and, and her story and, and other, you know, things they shared about their, their spiritual growth and their development and how they're navigating. and it's like it adds so much to me by actually being present and curious. And I recently had a kind of a rude reminder of the habits that I can fall into, which is sort of writing this book and recording the audiobook and running my PBS show. It's like being super busy. I kind of depleted myself and I couldn't be present for the people in my life. And they reflected that back to me. and they were right. And I'm like, you know, if I was out of, if I was running on fumes, I couldn't show up. So part of actually having high quality relationships is self-care is actually rest, is actually nourishing yourself so you can show up and be whole when you meet somebody and connect with somebody.

Exactly. Exactly. It's so important, you know, and one of the reasons why I have never let my Zen practice go is because it's one of those places I keep coming back to that grounds me, that reminds me, oh, attention is so important. Being present for my life and for people is so important. And if there are ways you can find to remind yourself of that, it doesn't have to be meditation. It could be other things. But that's such a key reminder so that you stay on a path that's going to keep you healthy and present. for the people you love.

What other sort of insightful lessons were there in the study of adult development that you did at Harvard and it's been going on for 80 years? What were the other nuggets you may want to share?

Okay, this is one I really like. When our original folks were in their 80s, we asked them to look back over their lives and we asked them, what are you proudest of? And what do you regret the most? and there were really consistent themes. And these were hundreds of people, right? And the consistent theme for what they were proudest of was about relationships. People invariably said, I was a good parent. I mentored people at work, and it really mattered to me. I was a good friend. They never said, you know, I won this prize or I rose to this position or I made this amount of money.

Nobody- I answered all my emails. My outbox is empty.

My outbox is always empty.

My inbox is empty. My inbox is empty. Whatever it is.

Nobody, nobody did that. And the most common regret was about emptying your inbox. It was, you know, many people said, I wish I hadn't spent so much time at work and I wish I had spent more time with the people I love and care about. And there was one more regret and this was more common for women than for men. The regret was I wish I hadn't spent so much time worrying about what other people thought.

Yeah, yeah.

That's kind of about being more true to oneself. yeah.

Living a more authentic life. Right?

Yeah.

Oh, beautiful. Well, I think this is such a. An important message at this time where I think there's increasing unhappiness, increasing depression in the world, this connection, and that, you know, the answer in many ways, despite what's happening in the world, despite the challenges we're having, despite the. The sort of increasing divisiveness in the world, is that, you know, focusing on just cultivating a few relationships. It doesn't have to be many, you know, just a few good relationships and investing time in those relationships is such an important part of well-being and of health and of longevity. And it's just often very neglected. If you love that last video, you're gonna love the next one. Check it out here. Loneliness is an independent risk factor for getting ill faster and for dying of illness faster. you know, and it's probably as significant as smoking 15 cigarettes.