EP 144: Harvard Study: Human Thriving | Dr. Robert Waldinger

Welcome to Radical Responsibility, the podcast dedicated to ridding the world of blame and shame, where we explore the issues you care about from a unique perspective. 100% ownership for each and every circumstance we face in life, day in and day out. Hi. Welcome to the Radical Responsibility podcast. This is your host, Fleet Maul. In this episode, I had a great conversation with Dr. Robert Waldinger, who's a Harvard Medical School professor, the current director of the law longest running longitudinal study of adult development, very famous study at Harvard University. He also happens to be a Zen priest, and we had that in common. So we talked about what this study had discovered following a cohort of men. They started with two cohorts, one Harvard underclassmen and the other some young men from very poor neighborhoods in Boston some 85, 88 years ago. And what they've discovered about the importance of relationships to our longevity, well being, overall life satisfaction and happiness. So the Harvard Longitudinal Study of Adult Development, really fascinating. And Robert Waldinger, the director of that study.

I'm here today with Dr. Robert Waldinger and my name is Fleet Mahl, your co host for this day focused on health and wellbeing. Welcome, Dr. Waldinger.

Thank you.

Great to be here with you today and to learn all about your upcoming book and this fascinating study of adult development at Harvard that's been going on for more than 80 years now, I guess. And of course you haven't been involved with it the whole time, but I understand you're the third researcher to be kind of managing directing it over the course of that study.

I'm actually the fourth director.

Oh, the fourth director.

Wow.

The fourth director. So I'm going to share a bit of your bio to familiarize our audience with you and your work and then we'll jump right into the conversation.

Okay, great.

Dr. Robert Waldinger is a psychiatrist, psychoanalyst and Zen priest. He is a professor of psychiatry part time at Harvard Medical School and directs the Harvard Study of Adult Development, one of the longest running studies of adult life ever done. The study tracked the lives of 724 men over 80 years and now studies their baby boomer children to understand the ingredients of human thriving. He is founding director of the Lifespan Research foundation, dedicated to bringing the insights of lifespan research to the general public. He teaches Zen throughout New England.

It's a very interesting combination there being a psychiatrist, researcher and a Zen priest and teacher. So I'm going to actually want to talk to you a little bit about that.

And so we are going to talk about your book and about this Harvard study. But I think first I would like to, if you would, invite you to share a little bit about your background of how this kind of unfolded, that you became a physician, a psychiatrist, a healer, a. A research scientist, and, and a Zen priest, a Zen teacher. How did all that kind of come together?

Well, it.

It came together in unlikely ways, as our lives do.

Right. I grew up in Iowa.

I had never met a psychiatrist or a psychoanalyst.

I had certainly never met anybody who practiced then.

I was raised Jewish, and if my parents knew that I had become a Zen priest, they would be completely flabbergasted. So all of this seemed pretty unlikely.

But I.

Went to medical school, wanted.

To be a doctor, found that I.

Love psychiatry, and was really interested in.

What made people tick and what the.

Experience of being human was like from.

The lens of a psychoanalyst.

And so that's how I started.

Then I went back to school, actually in my 40s to get grounding in.

Research methods because I wanted to study.

More about lifespan development.

And that's when my predecessor asked me.

To take over the leadership of the Harvard Study of Adult Development.

And my becoming a Zen practitioner and then a priest and then a teacher was by accident. I stumbled into a Zen group through the Unitarian Church a five minute walk from my house, met a teacher there, a man named James Ford, who is a Zen master, a Roshi, really enjoyed.

His teaching and learning with him and sitting in meditation with him.

And from there it developed into a.

Deeper and deeper involvement in Zen.

So all of it seemed to be.

Disparate threads, but they've really come together as my life has gone on, so.

That I feel like each thing infuses.

The other at this point.

Wow. Well, I know James A Small World and actually used to sometimes when I lived in Providence, Rhode Island, a little while back, I used to sometimes go to his services at the Unitarian Church there. Yeah, beautiful services that he led there on the Unitarian side. I actually never went to a Zen group, but I know he's a really well known Zen teacher as well. So you kind of answered my second question, but anything else? I mean, it was just your, your predecessor at Harvard who was the third director, I guess, of the study. Anything more to the story of how we selected you or recruited you to be the director of this landmark study?

Well, he and I were both psychoanalytically.

Trained and we both got NIH research grants. And that's a very strange combination to do both.

Most people are either psychoanalytically oriented clinicians.

Or they get research grants and they do research. So my predecessor, George Valiant, was looking.

For somebody who might be able to.

Carry on his tradition of studying lives.

Both with some empirical rigor, but also.

Listening to stories and extracting the themes from stories. And of course, that was a passion of mine.

And so it seemed like a really good fit.

And George took me out to lunch one day and said, how would you like to inherit the study of adult development?

And I nearly dropped my fork and.

At first said, I don't know anything.

About old people, because the men were by then pretty elderly.

And I studied couples. And so George's first reaction was, well, let's do a study of older couples. And our first NIH grant together was.

A study of late life, marriage and health, in which that's what we did.

We studied the connections between intimate relationships.

And physical health, as well as emotional well being.

Well, I know that's a big part of the findings from the Harvard Adult Development Study. And so my understanding is that originally in, I think in 1938, they recruited a group of Harvard sophomores and then also a group of, I guess, teenagers from some very poor neighborhoods in Boston. Right. Kind of disparate groups. And then they followed that group throughout their lifespan.

Exactly.

There were two, actually two separate studies.

They didn't know about each other.

So one study was a group of.

Harvard College undergrads collected by their deans.

Nominated by their deans as fine specimen.

Destined to grow up into healthy young men. And it was a study of healthy young adult development.

And of course, if you wanted to.

Study healthy, normal adult development, you would study all white males from Harvard. Right.

I mean, it, 1938 for sure.

It is the most politically incorrect example.

You could possibly have now.

But then it seemed radical to study.

Health instead of illness.

And in addition, a Harvard Law School professor, Sheldon Gluck, and his wife, a social worker, Eleanor Gluck, were interested in.

Why some children from really difficult backgrounds managed to stay out of trouble and lead normal lives.

And so they studied a group of.

Children from very troubled families, not just poor families, but families beset by mental illness, physical illness and domestic violence, and studied those children who had not gotten into trouble at all. And those are the people we followed now all the way into their 90s.

Are any of them still alive?

Yes, about 60 are still alive.

About 10 from the Harvard study, because.

They were on average nine years older and about 50 from the inner city study.

Wow. And now you're studying their children. Right, who are mostly baby boomers at this point.

Exactly. 1300 of them.

Wow.

So I know in terms of the original sample, the men being followed, in watching your TED Talk, I think from 2015, you did a TED Talk about this study and you saw there was quite a marked shift in their values, their reported values, when they were young, beginning the study, what they thought was important in life and what they discovered was really important in life later on. I wonder if you could talk about that.

What we found was that when people were starting out in adult life, they wanted to make a contribution to society.

I mean, this was the World War.

II generation, so they cared very much about that, but they were very much concerned with what young adults are still concerned with, which is, can I make.

A life for myself? Can I make my way in a career? Can I make my way finding an intimate partner? Will I have a reasonable set of friends?

All of that was the concern.

As people got older, new concerns arose.

And it actually, Erik Erickson, the developmental.

Psychologist, thought a lot about this, about.

The stages of adult development. So as people got to midlife, they began to realize, ooh, death is real. Life really is short. What's going to happen to me for.

The rest of my life?

And people began to ask, is this.

The path I want to stay on.

Given that time is short?

Is this what I want to do in the world? And many people began to be more concerned with what Erik Erickson called generativity. What do I want to live on in the world after I'm gone?

And so it became concerns certainly about fostering the next generation of children, but.

Also, who among my workers do I want to mentor? Who. Who in the world do I want to see grow and thrive?

So those were more the concerns of midlife.

And then as people got to late life into their 70s and 80s, it was more about their legacy. What do I want to continue in the world once I'm gone? What do I really care about? What are the things I most value and want to preserve and pass on?

And also more, am I having fun now?

They actually, older adults get happier because they get more concerned with their well being and less concerned with long term goals.

And that turns out to make us.

Happier rather than making us more depressed.

Well, I want to talk about the happiness part in just a moment. I'm curious though, if your data showed evidence of what's often called the midlife crisis that people go through, maybe prior to people shifting into that generative stage, do they go through some kind of crisis of meaning or recognizing their mortality or wanting to recapture their youth in some way. Was there any evidence of that?

The shorter answer is no.

No.

Midlife is not by definition a crisis. Some people do have crises, but some people have crises when they have their first child.

Some people have crises when they retire. So it really varies.

We encounter life transitions very differently, depending.

On who we are, depending on our backgrounds, our karma, if you will.

And so midlife in and of itself isn't necessarily a crisis. It can be a transition. And the transition often occurs because of.

That increasing awareness of the reality of death and the finiteness of life, which.

Calls a lot of things into question.

In addition, it can be an empty nest event where children leave home and we look at our lives and say, okay, what now? So there are a variety of things.

That can trigger a re evaluation of.

Life, but those triggers can happen at almost any life stage.

So.

Sometimes I think I've heard, and maybe it's in the popular press or in the news, this study being referred to as the happiness study. And what is the title of your book going to be?

Well, the book will be out in.

The fall of 2022, so it's really not until after the summit and it's going to be published by Simon and Schuster and it's called the Good Life. And the subtitle may be Lessons from.

The Longest Study of Happiness. But really the book is about the.

Role of relationships in our lives, how relationships foster both our emotional well being.

And our physical well being, our health. And so it's all about the power of relationships.

And all of it comes from our research findings.

From listening to your TED talk and other sources. I've read that really the bottom line results from this Harvard study is really that the thing most correlated with longevity, health and well being and so forth and happiness is being in relationship and the quality of our relationship. So today, our day, today is focused on health and wellbeing. So maybe you could talk about what did you learn? What has the study learned in terms of adult development over this period of time? What really contributes to our health and well being, our longevity and our happiness overall?

Sure.

Well, we learned one thing that will not surprise anyone. It's that if you take good care.

Of your body, you live longer and you stay healthier longer.

What does that mean?

Well, all the things we know about.

It means getting enough rest, it means regular exercise, it means eating well, it.

Means not abusing alcohol or drugs, not using tobacco, many ways that we can take care of care of ourselves. And what we find are dramatic effects.

That it turns out that alcohol abuse is devastating for Our health as well as our relationships.

That drug abuse, similarly, that lack of.

Exercise, obesity, really do take a toll.

On our physical abilities as we get older and they shorten our lives.

So all that's true, but all that.

Your grandmother could have told you.

So the thing that surprised us and that I talked about in the TED talk is the finding that the quality of our relationships actually makes a difference.

In how long we stay healthy and in how long we live. The question really was, well, yeah, we know relationships are important, but how can they actually get into your body and change your physiology to the point that it makes a difference in when you die? And that's what we've been working on.

Actually in the last five to eight.

Years, studying the mechanisms by which that happens.

But the basic finding, and other studies.

Many other studies have corroborated, is that the people who have more connections with others just day to day, and the.

People who have warmer relationships are the people who reap these benefits of greater.

Health as well as emotional well being.

The other thing I will say, you.

Know, we got characterized as studying happiness. I don't think of us as studying happiness.

Happiness, as we know is a kind.

Of moment to moment event. It comes and goes, it's transient. And that nobody is happy all the time. And it's easy to give the impression that, well, if you're not happy all the time, you're not doing the right.

Things in your life. That is just not the truth. There is no life I've ever seen.

In my research or in my clinical work, or in my personal life. There's no life that's, that's happy all the time, that's not filled with hard times and suffering. That's, that's just the reality.

So what we really like to talk.

About is well being. And that well being is something that we can build.

We can't guarantee being happy all the time.

In fact, we can pretty much guarantee that we won't be happy all the time.

But building well being, building, taking care.

Of ourselves, physically taking care of our relationships with each other.

Taking care of.

Our spiritual lives for those of us.

Who have spiritual longings, that all of those build a bedrock of well being, that make the difficult times easier to weather.

And so I just want to make that distinction because this happiness craze that.

I think we see in the culture is something of a myth.

Well, just along those lines, I'm curious in your study if you make a distinction between what's sometimes called hedonic well being and ayodynamic well, being the first being more associated what we think of as happiness and being a little more relative to what's going on in our life. And the latter aiodonic well being, being connected more with sometimes called psychological. Well, being connected with a sense of self efficacy, a sense of self competency, a of sense and others and just overall confidence about our life that we can handle our lives, that we can live our lives. And we have a. And I think a lot of it does have to do with the quality of our relationships because if we develop emotional intelligence, we're skillful in our relationships. It gives us just an overall sense of confidence in our life.

Yes, yes. And just to elaborate, hedonic well being just really refers to that moment to moment happiness that, that I talked about.

You know, am I having fun now?

Am I going to go to a good party tonight? That's hedonic.

Right.

The eudaimonic refers to what you said.

About kind of do I feel effective.

Do I feel competent? But also, does my life have worth?

Does my life have meaning?

So the best example I can use is you're a parent and you're reading to your small child to help them get to sleep, and they want you.

To read their book for the eighth.

Time and you're exhausted and you're ready to fall asleep and you're not having.

Fun reading this book for the eighth time. But there could be nothing more meaningful, more purposeful, more important than reading to your child.

So the idea is that that's eudaimonic.

Will being, that's not hedonic. There's another form of well being that people have begun to study, which is called the psychologically rich life that some people, some people value mostly hidden hedonism. Some people value this sense of purpose and competence.

Some people value having rich experiences so new exposure to new people to travel, to interesting art, to learning a new.

Sport, and that they're less worried about purpose and they're less worried about moment.

To moment fun than they are about psychological richness. So there are these different flavors and.

All of us probably want some of all of those, but we vary in.

The extent to which they're important to us.

Well, that last one you mentioned is really, really interesting. And I'm curious if you not only in this study were able to identify changes in these individuals and whatever kind of average changes in the sample of people going through the study over time, but if this was reflective of cultural changes that this cohort was moving through and the culture was changing.

And one of the Things that I know there's a lot of concern about right now associated with really sort of the advance of really technologically driven society, very materialistic society, and now the challenges of the pandemic, that culture is not being funded sufficiently and we're in danger of having a paucity of those experiences which provide that richness to people, that psychological richness here. So I'm curious if you actually were able to identify kind of waves of cultural change or the impact of culture change on these people as they went through this period of time.

There were big cultural events, as we know. So World War II, the Depression actually.

Was a big cultural event that shaped the lives of all of these men.

They were born, most of them, either.

Right before or during the Depression. So when they were growing up, it.

Was a depression era mentality that they grew up in that their parents.

Were dealing with.

Then there was World War II, there was the unrest of the 1960s and 70s. And that, you know, we asked many of our men, what do you think of these hippies? And they had all kinds of reactions to that.

There was the glorification of wealth that came in the 1980s with the wall street heroes and, you know, so many different trends. And again, of course, then the advent.

Of the digital age, technology.

All of that shapes us.

And so what we find is that.

We'Re studying the same big domains of.

Life, but that they are all shaped by current global events.

The pandemic, of course, is having a.

Huge effect on all of us who are alive now.

And each, each of us will have.

Our own, each generation will have its own resonance with the effects of the pandemic.

So I think it was in your TED Talk, I remember you quoting some research that some studies showed as many as 1 in 5 people, I guess it was in the US suffer from loneliness. And you talked about the danger of loneliness and, you know, being more isolated from others than you choose to be and that, that can be very toxic and damaging literally to our physical health and well being and our longevity. And I suspect, I mean, one in five sounded low to me in terms of our current world. I wouldn't be surprised if it's higher today. And.

Because just in my work, I mean, it's somewhat anecdotal, but I'm pretty connected out in the world doing all kinds of work in all kinds of sectors. And it just seems like loneliness is really everywhere for a lot of people and even more so perhaps now during the pandemic. So I'm wondering if you could talk about that both in terms of its dangers, but also in a way that I'm sure there are people in our audience here who perhaps are living alone or are retired or maybe have been isolated because of the pandemic. And it's not like we want them to panic about the risk they're in, but maybe things that any of us can do from wherever we are in terms of our level of social connectedness, to improve on that situation. So I wonder if you could talk about both sides that a little bit.

Sure.

We do know that loneliness is a stressor.

What that means is that without the.

Capacity to be connected to other people.

We don't have the same capacity to deal with difficult emotions, to deal with difficult situations.

If you think about it, if you.

Have a hard day, something upsetting happens. If you can talk to a friend.

Or a loved one, you can often literally feel your body calm down so.

That there are physiologic changes that you.

Can feel right away that calming down.

Is what the body is supposed to do when a stressor is removed.

What we believe, and there's some evidence.

To corroborate this, is that people who don't have anyone they can talk to.

Don'T have that buffer, don't have that person to help them manage.

They're upset, they're stressed, and so they.

May be more in chronic fight or flight mode, where the body is slightly revved up. And what that means is that there are higher levels of stress hormones circulating in the body.

There are inflammatory responses from the body that are normal during fight or flight, but are supposed to subside and go back to baseline when the stress is removed. But if you are too isolated and.

You are chronically stressed, the theory is.

That your body may be in a.

State of chronic inflammation and that that can break down many body systems, the.

Cardiovascular system, the joints, so many ways.

That stress can break down the body.

So then you're asking the question, well.

What do we do about it?

And one of the things that we find is that.

There are ways to.

Break out of isolation.

Some people.

Believe that relationships just take care of themselves. Either you have good relationships or you don't.

And that if you have good relationships, they'll just always be there. What we find is that relationships are like everything else we think of as self care.

They need constant attention.

So what we've found is that relationship fitness is more like physical fitness, that.

We need to keep attending to it.

And that can be even our closest.

Relationships, like our intimate partners, it can be our friends, you know, all those.

Friends of mine from elementary school or.

From college, they're always going to be there. But actually know that without some tending.

Without some contact, they wither away.

Not even because there are problems, but just because our lives drift apart. So what we talk about and try to help people with is ways to strengthen their relationships, ways to develop new relationships. We've actually developed a program in our.

Lifespan Research foundation to help people with some of this. The idea being that relationship fitness can.

Really enhance people's lives and that there.

Are certain skills that we can learn.

To make it easier and to combat loneliness.

So I think, safe to say, across the lifespan, wherever anyone is, like investing in our relationship chips is a really.

Good investment, really big investment.

Much more important, say, than making that extra million dollars.

Right.

Which doesn't tend to make us happier. It doesn't tend to make us more.

Connected to people, but we imagine it's going to get us to some better place.

I'm curious if you saw differences with those of us who tend more to the extrovert side, more to the introvert side, and that may affect our level of social connections and. And those of us more introverted. I don't know. It's always true. But there could be a tendency to maybe have greater access to imagination or things like that that may also provide some of the same richness that our relationships might. I'm just curious about whether you saw anything around that.

Yes, and it's a really good point. So what we know is that temperamentally human beings are on a spectrum from the most extroverted.

People who love lots of contact with people, want lots of friends, and people who are quite introverted people who don't want very many contacts in a given day and might only need one or.

Two friends to feel totally connected.

Neither of those extremes is a problem. Being introverted is not a problem. And so what we find is that even each person needs to learn what actually is energizing and refueling. For you, it might be having just one.

One or two friends. It might be having a lot of alone time, and it might be that.

Solitude refuels you, that's healthy for you other.

For other people that would be too lonely.

And so each person needs to be.

Their own judge of. And you can feel it.

You can feel what's energizing for you and what's draining.

And you can judge where you are.

On that spectrum of how much socialization you need.

Well, that comes back also to the quality of our relationships and that, you know, relationships can be energizing. But they can also be draining, right?

Yeah, absolutely. You know, and that's part of. Part of the.

Judgment call is when are relationships so draining and even toxic.

That we need to step away from them?

And we know there are some abusive relationships where the most useful thing is for both parties to separate.

We also know that there are many.

Relationships that don't require separation at all.

But just require work.

Learning to work out differences.

Because there are differences in all relationships, that's not a problem.

Learning to work out those differences can.

Actually be quite healing, quite bonding.

That often it's the people I work out, my. My difficulties with that I end up feeling closest to.

So it's a matter, again, of discernment.

Which relationships are hurtful and so difficult.

That they can't be healed, and which relationships can be worked on quite productively.

As you track these men into their later life. The older we live, the more we begin losing friends and loved ones. And I'm curious how that impacted people's lives in terms of having their. You know, maybe they had a pretty good set of relationships, but then they're losing them one after another through loss. And so what did you see in terms of the impact of that?

It had a powerful impact.

So the first loss for many of our men having traditional careers was retirement. They would work in these traditional jobs.

Where they were with a company for 40 years, they retired, they went home, and suddenly they didn't see anybody all day long.

That still happens.

Many people are shocked at how they miss the office. They miss the colleagues that they used to see every day. In fact, we're seeing this now in.

The pandemic as people are working from home.

And so what we found when we.

Studied who was happy during retirement and who was not happy was that the.

People who were the happiest replaced their.

Colleagues at work with new playmates. It could be around a gardening club. It could be around.

A community activism group for social justice or for climate change work, or, you know, there's so.

Many ways you can.

Could be church activities, any number of.

Things you can do with other people.

Because one of the things we find.

Is that being with other people around.

Shared activities is the surest way to build new relationships. And so what we know is that when we start losing relationships in our.

Lives, through retirement, through death, through people moving away, we need to find ways to build new connections.

So I'm wondering if this discussion has been informed by Dan Siegel's work and others with the emerging field of interpersonal neurobiology and similar types of research. That we're not really these skin encapsulated beings. That we exist, you know, even our sense of self. It really exists within a nested set of social relationships. And of course, our most important relationships primarily, which is why loss can be so destabilizing. Because literally, it takes a while for our sense of self to reweave itself into its wholeness. And I'm sure your work is a psychoanalysis. You're very familiar with that. So even coming back to the idea of psychological richness, so it would seem like that quality of that we feel situated in a nested set of social connections really enriches our life and our sense of self.

And that when we don't recognize that, we suffer terribly. So think about the fantasy that we're all independent beings and what Covid has done to that.

And think about the suffering of people.

Who don't pay attention to that, who.

Don'T take the public health measures that.

They can to protect each other and themselves. And think about how much needless suffering has occurred. And part of that is this fantasy myth of independent self. You know, as you know, as I know from my Zen practice, the self is a fiction.

It's a helpful fiction.

It's a construction. But this, this person I call Bob.

It'S not the Bob who.

The same Bob who was three years.

Old in Des Moines, Iowa.

It's not, you know, it's not the.

Bob who was here an hour ago.

Before we started talking together.

Sleep.

So to hold this idea of self.

Lightly is really important. And to pay more attention to our interconnectedness is essential.

And that when we don't pay attention.

To that, we suffer greatly.

Well, I would like to circle back to this intersection between your career and vocation as a psychoanalyst and a psychiatrist and a researcher and. And being a Zen practitioner, Zen priest and Zen teacher, you know, you could say Zen. I mean, Zen certainly deals with the big questions of life, and it certainly looks at the causes of suffering, the causes of happiness. And so I'm wondering if there's been some insights and some maybe wisdom arising from the intersection of these vocations for you, your work. And I'm also curious about, you know, whether. I don't know whether you actually have people on the couch in your office as a psychoanalyst, but if you do that kind of traditional work or doing, you know, what's called dokasan as a Zen teacher, where you're doing meditation interviews, and I would. There's got to be some similarities there. So I'm Curious if you could talk about all that.

There are. There are similarities. And in fact, as a Zen teacher, I've had to learn the difference between doing a Zen interview, Duxan, and doing psychotherapy. And it's been a wonderful.

Source of development for me trying to learn to do each one.

But there's a lot of overlap.

And really, the overlap is our essential.

Humanness is the fundamentals of being human.

Which are the same regardless of whether we're sitting on a meditation cushion, whether we're talking to a meditation teacher, or whether we're talking to a therapist or whether we're talking to our friend.

I mean, and a lot of what we find is helpful and healing for people is sharing their humanness with each other.

Oh, you're going through that too, or you worry about that? I also worry about that. We so often get lost in this.

Idea that we're the only one who.

Feels uncertain, who doesn't know what to do in various situations, that who, you know, who has troubles because everybody else looks fine. Everybody else. We present our game faces to each other, right?

Because we go around in the world trying to look like we're okay.

And so when we share our humanness, which we do in Zen and we do in our longitudinal study, people share.

Their humanness, and people share it with me in my psychotherapy office, that all.

Of those situations are places where we get to really acknowledge.

This amazing experience.

Of having a life and all the different ways we show up in the world that we have in common.

So I'm curious, in terms of your personal experience, obviously, both as a Zen teacher and as a clinician doing psychotherapy or psychoanalysis, you need to have certain clear boundaries in terms of your sense of self. You need to be aware of things like transference and countertransference and not get caught in the shadowy aspects of those. So you're clear about all that. But as well as you getting the witness on all this humanity.

In your clients, your patients, and the Zen students, I'm curious as how this is a journey of recognizing your own humanity and seeing this mirrored back to yourself.

Yeah, totally. Totally.

I mean, it's funny, because some of my colleagues have this saying that my research colleagues have a saying, research is knee search, that we often end up studying the things we most care about and that teach us the most. And so for me, it's been about this human experience. And what I've found, for example, is that the research has shown me personally how important it is for me to pay attention to my relationships and what.

That literally means is, do I spend.

Three hours on a Saturday afternoon catching.

Up on my email, reviewing an article that somebody wanted me to critique for them, or do I call my friend and take a walk? And I've really learned that I need to do the latter. I need to connect with people, and that the rest of it will take care of itself or it won't.

And so I've had to learn that, especially, you know, I've spent my whole.

Life at Harvard, my whole adult career.

And Harvard is, if nothing else, it's.

A place that values accomplishment and awards and accolades and titles.

And I've really had to work on that in myself. To say no, that stuff really doesn't.

Mean much at all, finally, that what.

Really means something is these connections with people. And so the research has been one.

Way and Zen has been another way, but I keep coming back to what.

Really matters for me. And if I didn't have those things.

I could get lost in this world of achievement and shiny objects to go after.

Yeah, I'm sure that would be easy to do in academia altogether and certainly at Harvard.

So I'm going to ask you for some final words in a moment, but I want to circle back to something that you kind of alluded to earlier and which I think is worth talking about a little bit. So this study was started back in 1938, an era where we were pretty myopic around gender and race and things like that. And so.

It seems like many of the discoveries in this research would seem pretty generalizable and pretty universal. I mean, a lot of it comes down to basic physiology and neurobiology, neurophysiology, but still, there's a risk there of generalizing to women, generalizing to people of color. And I'm curious if there's been other studies done or if there's been any discussion about this or any analysis of this or any thought gone into, you know, not being careful about assumptions and how what we can generalize and what we need to learn more about.

There has been a lot of discussion about this. We think about it all day, every day in our study.

First of all, as you know, we've.

Included now all the women, more than half women in the second generation, and.

We included the spouses in the first generation. But still.

We started out with all.

Men, and almost all of our groups.

Are still all Caucasian, all white. Now, they were a diverse group in 1938. They came from.

Over half were from immigrant families, really.

Poor immigrant families in the city of Boston. But still.

What was diverse in 1938.

Is no longer diverse.

And what's diverse now will not be diverse 50 years from now. It will be another set of parameters.

So we are always having to be careful about this.

So, for example, the things that we present in our Roadmaps for Life Transitions.

Program, this program we've, we've developed for people to, to think about and reflect on their lives.

That program, we only present findings that.

Are relevant to women, to people of.

Color from studies that have been done.

All over the world. And similarly, in the book that we wrote, we spent a lot of time.

Bringing in other studies so that what we take care not to do is present findings that really are just relevant.

To white men of a certain generation. That our litmus test for what we're going to bring out to the world.

Is what has shown up in many other groups across the world and across time.

Yeah, that makes sense. So I would like to give you the opportunity to.

I don't know whether it's, you know, share what might be for you some of the most meaningful insights or to summarize a bit, but you know, for our audience, you know, just what advice you have on what can we really, what's. Obviously, I know you're, you're going to mention our relationships, but you know, just kind of where to invest our energy for our overall health and well being, longevity and, you know, whatever we think of as happiness or life satisfaction at a deeper level.

Yeah.

Perhaps also from your Zen training as well.

Yeah.

And I think, you know, Zen training really helps with this. I suppose it is really doing what we can to expand our sphere of.

Caring beyond the self and even beyond my nuclear family.

But that what we find is that.

The people who have the greatest sense of well being are the people who care about more than themselves. And that the more we can do that and the more we can feel.

What other people feel and help try to make the world better in various.

Ways, the more fulfilling we find our.

Lives over the longer term.

And so I would say that is.

Probably one of the biggest pointers. The other pointer is just to keep checking in with ourselves about what brings.

Us energy and what feels depleting because that's different for each of us.

And that, that's something that we can.

Keep, we can keep pointing ourselves toward.

The things that we particularly find energizing.

There's a, there's a great quote by.

Joseph Campbell, you know, who wrote the Power of Myth.

He once said, if the path before.

You is clear, you're probably on somebody else's path.

The idea being that we each are finding our way, that there is no.

Way one way and that that we can each keep discerning what our paths are and they're going to keep developing over time, but that there are ways to keep checking in about that as we go through life.

I hear the spirit of not knowing coming from your Zen background.

Oh yeah.

Well, thank you very much. It's been incredibly rich and really look forward to your book coming out. And so Dr. Robert Waldinger, director of the Harvard Study of Adult Development and founding Director of the Lifespan Research Center. It's a joy to be with you today and thank you very much for joining us.

It was a pleasure. I really enjoyed it.

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