Confidence Classic: What 80+ Years Of Research Says About Happiness with Dr. Marc Schulz

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In our study, when folks were in their 80s, we asked them, as they look back on their lives, are there regrets that they have? And almost everyone had regrets. And almost all the regrets were about one thing. I should have spent more time with people that I cared about. I should have been kinder to people that were important to me. So they were about those important connections.

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Hi and welcome back. I'm so glad for you to meet our guest this week. Mark Schultz is the Associate Director of the Harvard Study of Adult Development and the Sue Cardus PhD 1971 Chair in Psychology at Bryn Mawr College. He also directs the Data Science program and previously chaired the Psychology Department and Clinical Development Psychology PhD program at Bryn Mawr. Dr. Schultz received his BA from Amherst College and his PhD in clinical psychology from the University of California at Berkeley. He is a practicing therapist with postdoctoral training in health and clinical psychology at Harvard Medical School. Mark, thank you so much for being here with us today.

Oh, thank you. It's a pleasure to be with you, Heather.

Oh my gosh. We were just talking off air about your new book, The Good Life, and that it's such an interesting time right now in our world where there's so much unhappiness, so much negativity coming at us from all over the world, from media, from everywhere. Is this part of the reason why you got involved in the work that you're doing?

Yes and no. So when we started to write the book, it was pre-pandemic and pre-some of the challenges that we have now. And we actually wrote up a proposal for the book just before the pandemic started, and then the pandemic hit, and we shopped the book to publishers, and we had these really interesting conversations about how a book like this that talks about the importance of connections, that this is a good time for it. But there was a lot of fear of course, at the beginning. This was March 2020, but it feels like a really good time for the book to be released. We're all thirsting for connections that we've missed over the last several years, and the book talks about connections at every level. So it also talks about the connections across the kinds of divides, political divides, cultural divides that we're also struggling with in the United States, for sure.

Well, some of the points that, that you highlight and bring out with the book are really interesting. Loneliness increasing your risk of death as much as smoking or obesity. That talking to me.

Yeah, so in the UK, they've realized that this is such a major public health challenge that they've appointed someone as a Minister of Loneliness to try and address these problems. And it's a— it's an eminently correctable challenge, right? It's one that I think we can— we can live up to. But what we find in national surveys in the United States and other countries is that large numbers of people are lonely. They report feeling socially isolated. So the numbers vary from study to study, but 20% to as much as 40% to 50% in in some studies. And loneliness isn't only among the populations that we might expect it to be. It's, it's very prevalent or epidemic among young people. So college students feel lonely at a rate that's extraordinary considering the circumstances that they live in. So this is not only a serious challenge because it has consequences for our health, how long we live and how healthy we are, but it's a serious problem because of the prevalence of the problem.

It is incredible how surprising it is. In recent news, we've seen people take their lives that looked on the outside as if they were so engaged, definitely didn't seem isolated. You know, some very high-profile people surrounded by celebrities, they look like they're living their best life. Is there any way to glean into who actually is feeling really lonely?

Yeah, so you're making a really important point, Heather, that it's hard to tell sometimes from the outside. So I'll go back to college students who are surrounded by thousands of people that are similar to them in some ways. They're doing similar activities that we would expect them to be among the most connected people, and yet they report incredibly incredibly high rates of loneliness. So loneliness is really a kind of subjective state. It's a perception that you're not as connected with people as you would like. So we have— when we ask people about loneliness, we say, are there people you can count on in your life? Are there people you can talk to when you have challenges in your life? Are there people who care about you? And there are unfortunately a number of people whose answer to those questions is no. It's a very sad state. It's a really important challenge that I think we need to figure out what to do about it. And certainly the last few years with the pandemic has increased people's sense of loneliness. And I think also really importantly, it's sort of gotten us out of practice for how we move through our connections with others, how we be with others. We're kind of relearning that as maybe we're coming out of the pandemic finally, although maybe not, hard to know, right? This is a longstanding challenge that I think has been exacerbated by the presence of the pandemic.

You made some interesting points in your book. One that really stuck with me was it can even be impactful just having a relationship with a colleague at work can really be helpful. Can you tell us why that is?

Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, we want to start by backing up a little bit and recognize that we're social creatures. We survived— if we think about our kind of evolutionary pressures, we survived because we came together with other people that helped protect us, that provided shelter for us from things that would make our lives dangerous, help provide food for us. So we are social creatures, and when we're not feeling connected to others, it's a stress. It's a stress on our mental health and it's a stress on our physical health. So we need to figure out ways to address that. This. And there are a number of relationships that can address it. So in the book, The Good Life, we talk about relationships at all levels being valuable. So of course, an intimate connection to someone that you spend a lot of time with, important in your life. But I think we also underestimate some of the weaker ties that we have. So people that we might see on the bus when we're commuting to work, or people who serve us our coffee when we go and get coffee in the morning, that those are connections that when we engage with them, when we exchange even what feels like pleasantries, we kind of connect in a way that gives us a little jolt of connection, which I think is really important to us. And for me, at least, if I learn something about a person I didn't know about— so a stranger I meet on a plane— for me, it's exciting, and it connects me to their experience in a way that reminds me that we're all human in a way. So those little connections can turn out to be very important. I think some people are really good at taking advantage of them, and a lot of us sort of shy away from them because we either don't think that they're important, or we imagine in our heads— our heads get in the way a lot— that, you know, people aren't interested in talking us, that they're not likely to be intrigued or gentle or kind to us when we approach them in some way.

I love that example of someone that you're purchasing coffee from because I recently moved after 17 years and I remember one of the things I was not looking forward to was leaving my local Starbucks because I love the two baristas that are there that I would, I know I'd see at least one of them and they'd known me since I was pregnant. And my son's 15 years old, right? And so they were a part of my journey and I was a part of theirs. And I would honestly look forward to, you know, getting their eyes in line and knowing they're making my drink. And I'm excited to say, how's your day going? And it did put a spring in my step. And I guess that partially is because I really felt connected to them and I knew they were connected to me.

Yeah, there's, there's that jolt that we get that's extraordinary. Part of it is from familiarity and part of it is just by sharing some basic kind of humanity and experience with each other. So, you know, I didn't know you were a fan of some from, you know, a particular song or performer of some kind, that that enlarges what you know about people. It's shared experience that you have. If we think about what's important about our friends, there's so many things that, you know, friends bring to the table that can help us in terms of our psychological well-being and our physical well-being. But one of them is this familiarity and the sense that we're connected through time. And what you're describing with your barista, I love it. Just, you know, having someone that you see on a daily basis, hearing them call out your name when your coffee's ready, it's a kind of familiarity that I think makes makes us feel kind of connected. It's almost a part of our identity that kind of reinforces that. And I think that that's often something that we experience as a kind of pleasure and something that's quite welcome. Yeah. But I also want to emphasize the other part, which is the unknown people, those strangers and the people that we don't necessarily know. So I work at a university. There are literally hundreds and hundreds of people that work at that university. A lot of them I might know by face, but maybe I haven't had a conversation with. But I have the opportunity because we're in an elevator together, or I was just in yesterday, it's the So the students aren't there, so there aren't as many people around. And I said, you know, you and I have never really talked to each other. You know, I'm curious about what you do. We run into each other, but, you know, it's a quiet time. Tell me a little bit about, you know, where you're from, what you do at the college. So these are opportunities to kind of increase our connections, both the number of them and also the depth of them as well. And just to recognize people, right? To kind of say that you see them and that they're people. They're not just objects in your world.

I'm going to liken that to the norm at Cheers. Remember that TV show Cheers? Yes. Everyone would go crazy when you walk in. Who wouldn't love that feeling?

Exactly. What a great feeling. Exactly. Yes.

So what is the first step someone can take if they want to live a good life?

So I'm the associate director of a study that's been going on for over 8 decades. It's the Harvard Study of Adult Development. This is a unique study. I'm happy to say more about it, but one of the things we've done is we follow people very closely across time, across their whole lives, starting in adolescence. And we have been able to see some of the factors that help them thrive, some of the ways that they overcome challenges. And we've also gone beyond our study because any one study is limited to look at— in the book that we wrote— to look at the existing scientific evidence that tells us what kinds of things people can do to thrive. So the big finding in our book is that it's relationships that keep us healthy and happy through our lifetime. And we were surprised in some ways that the physical consequences of relationships— I think when we first started finding some of the, the outcomes of our research 20 years ago, they were surprising to us and maybe to colleagues. But what's happened in science is that we paid more attention to relationships and the ways that they can literally get under our skin and affect our bodies. That jolt of well-being that I'm talking about, we experience internally. It has some physiological benefits for us. So we're beginning to learn more more about the ways in which relationships help us with our, again, our mood and our physical wellbeing. So I think you asked about specific things that people can do. And the first step is really sort of taking stock of your social universe, if you will, sort of thinking about what are the connections that you have? What do you value about those connections? What people in your world are important to you? And what do you value again about the interactions that you have with them and the connections? Are there things that you can do to maximize the benefits of those connections?. So are there friends that you just love to be with, but maybe you haven't seen for a while? Could you reach out to those friends? We want to encourage people to start on the positive end and to think about things that are working well and how perhaps maybe to leverage those more to maximize those connections so that they're even more important and more helpful in your life. The reciprocal part is important too. What are you doing for those people in your life? Are you doing things for them that are important and helpful for them? If you have particular skills, are you offering bringing them to people in ways that might help them grow or might help them navigate a challenge. Uh, relationships are really important in helping us through challenges and stress. And then the other side of your social universe is thinking about the relationships that aren't going so well, that maybe are feeling like they're depleting rather than energizing, and thinking about what it is about those relationships that's hard for you, whether it's a little bit of reflection and looking in the mirror for yourself. Are there things that you've had trouble with before in relationships that are coming out and having an impact on this relationship? Is this person important to you? Do you want to try and do something about the relationship? So maybe it's a sibling or a friend that you've lost contact with or don't talk to as much and you wanna get back into your life. Could you reach out, let them know, first step, let them know how important they are to you? And could you find a regular time to be together? It might be a walk if you can do that, if you're close enough, or it might be a Zoom call or a phone call. The various ways that we have to communicate all work. Work. But the first step is really reflecting on where you're at and making a commitment, an intention to do better in the, in the relationships that you want to do better.

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When you mentioned reaching out to, you know, relationships that you want to do better, how can we advise everyone listening right now? For some of my listeners, maybe they put themselves last and they're always going back to someone who isn't treating them very well, but in their heart they want to repair that. And of course there's something that you're longing for, like feeling that void. How do they know when they've tried enough and they shouldn't be trying anymore?

Yeah, this is a question we, we get a lot when we talk about the research and we offer up some of the advice. And that's really a hard decision to, to make about someone that's been in your life that's been important to you and you're thinking about how challenging it's been and, and maybe the things that you're not getting out of that relationship. That's a very personal decision, but part of it might be based on the idea of how energizing that relationship is, how connected you feel, when you're with that person and what the history is. So if it's, if it's a relative that you really want to make the relationship work or an old friend that you haven't really been connecting with or haven't been doing well with, then I think there are things that you can do. So one of the benefits of running a study that's followed people for 80 years is that we see that people change. It's quite remarkable the amount of change that we see. So this is one of the first studies that followed people into adulthood through their entire adult life. And one of the constants we find is really that people change in their adult life. So people who are stuck for various reasons in relationships, they find ways to make things better at any age. So we tell one story in the book of a— this is to me a really inspiring story of someone who struggled through much of his adult life, was in a marriage that wasn't very rewarding for him, had to retire. Work was really all that was important to him and all that was rewarding to him. And he thought, felt pretty miserable and very alone. He was one of the most lonely people in our study, and he decided to go to a gym mainly for physical health reasons. But one of the byproducts of going to the gym daily is he started seeing people on a regular basis. Initially, in that sort of casual way, he'd nod to people and say hello. But over time, he realized that some of these people had real connections to the kinds of things that he was interested in. So one of them was old movies, and he would start to go to old movies with folks or have them over to his house to watch old old movies. So this was a man who went from being extraordinarily lonely to seeing people that were important to him on a daily basis at the gym, and also having a much more active social life. He did this in his late 60s or early 70s, right? So it's never too late. But this challenge that you're raising about figuring out whether a relationship is worth putting effort into, really important. I think there's another piece to it too, which is we also need to think hard about our own roles in relationships. Do we have a hard time asking for help? Do we have a hard time asserting around certain needs that we have? Is it hard for us to listen sometimes because we're so distracted? Is that part of what's going on in this relationship? Is maybe the other person doesn't feel heard because when we talk, you're often on the phone, or I'm getting a call and I can't really spend all the time that I should be spending? So part of this look at our social universe also is a hard look at ourselves, just like we do when we do physical fitness, is trying to figure out what we're good at, what we need to get better at, what we need to I love that.

Thank you. I know that you mentioned it's so interesting, the work you do, because you've been able to follow people all through their lives, which sounds— I'm so interested in this. What did you find about childhood impacting people later in life?

Yeah, great question. So the study started, you know, 80 years, a long period of time. We're actually going on the 85th year of the study. It started in the 1930s, and it started with two two very different groups of people. So almost two-thirds of the original 724 participants were young boys who were growing up in some of the worst or poorest neighborhoods of Boston. They were really facing lots of social disadvantage. Most of them had come from immigrant families. They lived in tenement buildings without running water at that time. And then the remaining one-third came from Harvard University, so literally down the block from these poor neighborhoods. But these were young men also who had a very different outlook in their life at that time. And we followed them through their entire life, and now we're following the daughters and sons of the original participants, right? So we're following the second generation. So you asked about the, the impact of early experience, and what we found is there are connections. So again, one of the few studies that can really trace these connections— we didn't ask people about what they remember about their childhood. We knew because from the time they started the study, went to visit their homes, and we interviewed their parents, and we watched what it was like in their home when they were interacting with their parents. And the warmth, consistency structure of childhood has an impact on the relationships that people have late in their life. So across 6 decades, you can see that connection. So that's kind of extraordinary that it can have that longer reach. But what I want to say, because it's so important for listeners who are thinking about, you know, I didn't have such a good childhood and my parents weren't always there for me, this connection was present, but it was small. So early experience is important. It gives you a up on people that don't have that positive early family environment. But it's not destiny at all. In fact, we think that part of the connection between that early family experience and later relationship functioning has to do with the way in which a family and parents can help teach us skills for dealing with adversity, for dealing with our emotions when we're challenged. We have evidence that that's the kind of mechanism that links that early experience to late life, relationship functioning. And we can all learn at any age these skills that help us manage our emotions and help us lean into challenges in ways that can be effective. So there is a link, surprising, across 6 decades. We think it's pretty extraordinary. But I think it's also important to temper that with saying that that link has a small effect on your relationships as you age.

I was just thinking of my own family when you were talking about that. There's 4 children in my family, and And while some of us might be similar, some of us are nothing alike in our relationships at all.

Exactly. Yep. So that's one of the ways that we know that environment doesn't do it all. Genes are important. The way we each construct our experiences. I have 3 siblings, and sometimes I think we grew up in a different world. It doesn't sound like the world that I felt I experienced as a child. So it's interesting both to look at the objective world, what we could see in the 1930s about their world, but it's also interesting to look at how they recall it to recollect their experience. And that's one of the things we're doing with the second-generation study. So the children of the original participants, we followed them as they were born into their parents' life. We asked the parents about what home life was like and what their kids were like. And now as they're adults, the second generation, we're asking them about their recollections of what it was like growing up in their house. And one of the things we're finding, Heather, is exactly what you're describing. Not everyone that grows up in the same house experiences the same kinds family rearing environment. There are differences, and those differences are really interesting. Absolutely.

What has surprised you the most by this work that you're doing with your findings?

I think there are two things that have been really surprising. So the first one I began to allude to before, we were surprised by the depth, the amount of influence that it looks like relationship experiences have on our bodies. So I'll give you one example. Our research, this is research that we're doing now, and the research of others shows pretty clearly that relationship experiences, the experience of loneliness or the experience of close connections to others, has an impact on the way our genes are expressed. And it's a particular set of genes that are really important. So it's genes that have an influence on inflammatory patterns in the body, which we know are not good for our physical health. Those experiences also influence our antibacterial and antiviral experiences. So they may have an effect, for example, on our, how we respond to exposure to COVID, for example. So very powerful indications that experiences that are based in relationships, that are based in our connections, really affect our body in important ways and even affect our brain health as well. We have some evidence that people who are able to maintain close and what we call secure relationships late in life— so security means being able to trust your partner, being able to depend on them, and a reciprocal piece, being able to provide help for your partner— really important as we get older. Because physically we may really need assistance, that people who are in those close and secure relationships show less cognitive decline 3.5 years later. So there are links with physical health, there are links with cognitive health, and I think that was really surprising to us. The other piece I think I also alluded to, which is the amount of change that people have. I, I think, you know, when I went to graduate school, I studied developmental theories, I studied a little bit about what we knew about adult development and lifespan development, but there really wasn't a lot of research yet. And this 84-year-old study was one of the first studies that really tracked the ways that people changed in adulthood. And we do change in adulthood. One of the things that happens, for example, from middle age to late life is that people typically get happier. There's a kind of boost in happiness over time. So the more we look at adult life, the more we recognize that of course there's some theme for people, that we don't lose the core of who we are, but there's also important variation that happens as we age, as we encounter new relationships, as we grow because of experiences, as we meet challenges in our life and figure out ways to move forward. We tend to grow, acquire new skills, and we change. And to me, that's a very optimistic thing that we have the capacity to change right up into the very end of our life. Our lives.

Okay, on the flip side of this optimism, because I just got a little taken aback, so I'm sure some of my listeners did— I'm single right now, and hearing how healthy it is and how great it is to be in a fruitful, strong relationship, literally for your life, it's making someone like me feel discouraged. Awesome. What do you see as someone like me?

So when I say in connection with others, in relationships with others, I mean all kinds of relationships. So we started by talking about your barista, for example. Now, of course, your that is going to have only a limited impact on your well-being, but your friends, your relatives. It doesn't have to be an intimate relationship. There are benefits to intimate relationships, and those people who are in good ones reap some of those benefits. But relationships of all kinds give us benefits. So all we have to do— any listener can be— can think about a recent challenge that they experienced and the likelihood that at some point they shared some of that challenge with a friend or a relative of a confidant of some kind, that relationships turned out to be really good stress busters. People help us calm down when we need to calm down. They challenge us when we're not thinking about things in a way that can be productive. They provide expertise that we might not have. So the colleague that I wrote the book "The Good Life" with is a few years older than me. And my wife, when we had our first child, we had a big pregnancy crisis. And he was there when our first son was born. And he's a medical doctor, so he had expertise that kind of helped us through some of it, but he was also there as a kind of emotional confidant as well. So I don't just mean relationships with an intimate partner or long-term relationships. I'm talking about friends, I'm talking about colleagues at work that you see every day and may become important in your life, and certainly talking about other relatives other than an intimate partner.

Okay, thank you for giving us that hall pass. All right, so Mark, you just mentioned challenges, and I'm interested to hear what you've learned from this work on how challenges impact people?

Yeah, so again, like, I like to start by just thinking historically to give us some perspective. So this pandemic has been extraordinary, you know, in many ways. I think we'll have to look back at it after decades to really think about its impact. But one of the things that you learn by studying people's lives across time is that there have been other major societal challenges. So they're always there, and challenges in our life are inevitable in everyone's life. So these participants grew up in the '20s and '30s in the throes of the Depression. The men at Harvard, 91% of them, I think, fought in World War II, which is a major challenge for them. They went through the Korean War, the upheaval of the '60s and the challenges that we faced there. So if we look historically, there are always challenges. And I think that's another important lesson that we have an idea that our life would be better if we can avoid challenges, if we could stay out of trouble, if we do the right thing, we won't have stress in our life. And I think instead the message is that stuff finds us, that, that stress is inevitable. The real trick is how we engage with stress, how we engage with challenges. And one of the big findings from the study is that the people overall— flexibility engaging with stress is a good thing. If you have more than one coping skill in your kind of toolbox, that's a good thing, because one may not work in this particular challenge. They may have to use That's another tool. But in general, people who lean into challenges as opposed to avoid them or make believe they don't avoid the challenges or make believe that they don't exist, that folks who can lean into challenge are able to acknowledge to themselves and equally important, acknowledge to people in their social world that they're experiencing a challenge and they may need help. We find that those people who do that are able to engage others, engage the power of support, that big stress buster from others, and able to move forward. So a lot of challenges we can learn from if we have the right resources and the right support. And that's another important lesson from this study. Okay.

I feel like my stock is rising again. Thank you very much for that. Good, good.

You're good at responding to challenges.

Yes, I lean into them.

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I ask you to try to find your passion. You've shared that loneliness is one of the biggest deterrents from finding happiness. What's another big finding that you really want to share with our listeners today?

I think this is again sort of big picture thinking about it. There's so many distractions connections in our world today. So there are lots of messages that what's most important in life is finding fame or making lots of money or achievement at work. If I just achieve at this level, then I'll be happy. And what we found, partly from studying people with very different prospects in life, right, people who grew up dirt poor and people who were at least privileged enough, they were at Harvard in their early, late teens, early 20s, is that your lot in life isn't what shapes your happiness. It's really your connections to others. It's your sense of purpose and a sense that you have something important in your life that's probably more important than just yourself. And that's part of the idea of connection. So I think really important that it's not just the circumstances that we live in that lead us to be happy. So money can get us distracted, and then distractions have another meaning which is separate from that. Those are kind of social messages that distract us from the things that we know deep down are really important. But distractions also mean that our attention is often given to things that maybe aren't as important to us as they should be. So if we think about what's most important in life, many people will talk about their connections to others, their family, the people they care about. But a lot of us spend an awful lot of time on screens. There was some recent research that in the United States, people are spending over 10 hours a day on screens, including social media and their phones. If you think about the precious time that you have with those people you really care about, those distractions take away from those relationships in important ways. So I think that's another challenge. It's a modern challenge. The folks that we studied growing up, they had television entered their lives, telephones entered their lives. There have been distractions like this before, intrusions on our kind of personal space, but we're at a level of technological change that these intrusions now are really hard to ignore and hard to put away in that box. So what do I mean by that? The time we spend with our kids, are we really present? Are we there for them? When we talk to our partners, if we're lucky enough to have a partner, do we give them our attention and our presence? Do we remember what they said to us? Are we interested in what they said? So those are the kinds of lessons about leaning into relationships as well as challenges. Really important. Important.

Thank you for that. Did you have any insight or findings around faith, religion, or an idea that there's something greater than ourselves out there?

I've been working with the study now for about 20 years, and the previous director was a man named George Vaillant who was really interested in this question. And George thought that one of the keys to health, particularly late in life, was getting engaged in activities that that sort of broaden our perspective beyond ourself, that really connected us with something beyond our individual self. There are a number of ways that you can do that. So George was interested in the role of religion and spirituality and thought that that could have a positive benefit for folks. And there's research that suggests that that's true as well. But he was also interested in the ways, for example, that we might mentor young people or grandparents might connect with a grandchild, that these ways of going beyond our own experience help us think that our legacy is broader than ourselves. And they become particularly important as we age, it turns out. So we get a lot of meaning and sense of purpose as we move into our later life by doing things that help the world beyond ourself. Could be volunteer work, could be teaching, something that I get to do, incredibly rewarding, working with young people and helping them learn about things that they really care about. That helps keep me vital, which is really important. Important.

No one's ever going to feel worse when you're out there help— doing good and helping others. You inevitably will feel better. Tell me, what is some of the most common misconceptions about happiness that you found?

Yeah, so I started to talk about one, which is this idea that money is critical for happiness. And what we find, and the data I think is fairly consistent here, although there's still research going on to try and clarify pieces of this, is that beyond a kind of subsistence level of living, wherever, whatever that might be in the world that you live in, that happiness is virtually unrelated to the amount of money that you make. So if you think about maybe middle-class incomes in the United States, there might be a link as you get up to that middle-class income with people's happiness and their satisfaction with life. And that probably has to do with control over circumstances and access to things like healthcare and things like that. But once we get beyond that sort of middle average income, the relationship between happiness and income is almost nonexistent. There's some studies that suggest there's a small relationship, but most studies suggest that it's not a significant relationship. So I think that's important because a lot of us, again, are very career-oriented. One of the things that marks our success in career for many people is the amount of money that we make, right? We tend to keep track of things that are easy to count. Money is easy to count. The number of— in my work, the number of publications you might have are easy to count, or the number of friends we have social media. We tend to count things that are easily quantifiable, and I think we get distracted. So that's a, a kind of an illusion and a kind of myth that I think a lot of people have gotten caught up with. In our study, when folks were in their 80s, we asked them, as they look back on their lives, are there regrets that they have? And almost everyone had regrets, and almost all the regrets were about one thing: I should have spent more time with people that I care I should have been kinder to people that were important to me. So they were about those important connections, and I think that's really important. So that's the stuff that gets in the way there, and it's often career, it's often worries about money. And I'm not suggesting money's not important, right? In our society in particular, in the US, money buys certain privileges. It allows you a certain amount of freedom and control. But people have this idea that more and more money will get you us more control and more happiness. And the data is just not there. There are lots of unhappy, really wealthy people.

So how much of our actual happiness is within our control?

Yeah, so lots of researchers have been trying to figure that out, and the estimates vary a lot. So the, the one that's the most common estimate, people say about 50% is within our control. And by that they mean the other 50% probably has something to do with genes or early experience. So that's a lot on some level, but it's one of those glass half empty, half full, or flip side of a coin. To me, when 50% of our happiness is under our control, that's a huge opportunity. So what kinds of things affect that? It's the kinds of things we do on a daily basis. It's our activities. And for us, it's very clearly the connection that we have with others and the ways that we do that. So if you go through a Just think about it. And for, you know, the pandemic, it was almost like a natural experiment to see what this was like. If you live alone and you're socially isolating and you go through an entire day in which the only sound you hear is something coming from your phone or your TV and not another human person, that's an aversive experience for most of us. And it's aversive for people even who talk about being introverted or shy. So that means, like, introversion could mean that maybe I'm not gonna get my social connections at a big party where it's loud and there are lots of people. People, but all of us need social connection. So think about that happening day after day, the lack of connection with other people. It's incredibly aversive. And we've just been through this incredibly trying time in which many people experienced that. And even people who were socially isolated with other people, it was a different kind of experience, right? You had partners that were home together that had never spent that much time together, introduced new challenges into their life. And I think the, the ways in which the day was less structured at time blended in some ways in which our connections, the time that we often spent with our partners or our children or with friends after work, that that special time got lost for a lot of people. I think there are a bunch of people that figured that out during the pandemic, right? They figured out how to get that special social time. Some people did it over, you know, Zoom meetings with friends or, you know, cocktail hours with friends or game nights with friends. And I love those very clever solutions. And I think as the world is becoming a little more normal, as the pandemic is ebbing, really important to figure out ways to continue those kinds of efforts. Big idea here is that things wane just like physical fitness. Our social engagement or social fitness wanes if we don't give it the attention it needs.

Oh, so true. Tell me, who did you write the book The Good Life for?

Yeah, good question. So we wrote it for a lot of people, really. So my colleague Bob Waldinger and I are the two authors, and we've been working together in research for years. A little while ago, I think 6 or 7 years ago, Bob did a TED Talk in which he talked for the first time in a kind of public way about some of the intricate findings, but tried to talk about them in a way that might be more helpful for people. And that TED Talk went viral. That's the 9th most watched TED Talk of all time. And it made us both realize— I was the first person to hear that talk before it was publicly done. And I said to Bob, I said, I think this could work. I think people might be interested. That was the worst prediction of all time. People are really interested. They're really thirsting for this. So we So we decided that we should spend some of our time not doing more research, although we continue to do that research, but to devote part of our time to figuring out how to take these findings and to put them out there in a way that would be accessible and helpful to people. And what we've been finding, the book has been, it officially comes out a week from the time we're doing this interview, but people have been reading about it in various venues. We've been doing other interviews and people are really responding well to the ideas in the book and some of the actions. So it feels great to have this impact. Impact on people's lives. Some of it is common sense that many of us know, but the advantage that we have is we have the, the research findings from our study and also the research that's out there beyond our study. So this is science-based kind of, uh, wisdom, um, that aligns with a lot of what we know but we don't necessarily do in our life.

So we wrote it for really everyone out there. For everyone listening right now, when you hear this episode, the book is live, The Good Life. Where can people go buy buy it today. The Good Life is available everywhere.

It's online. It should be at your local bookstores. The early reception has been tremendous. So we're really excited about people trying to take advantage of the book and what we know.

Thank you so much for the work you're doing. It is so needed. And for everyone listening, get the book The Good Life. Make your life happier and send someone you're thinking about a text or a call and start taking these teachings that Dr. Schultz is giving us and put them into emotion. Dr. Schultz, thank you so much for the work you're doing.

Such a pleasure to be here. Thank you, Heather, for having me. It was fun talking to you.

Until next week, keep creating your confidence. I'm going to make it my own again. I decided to change that dynamic. How do you like them apples? I couldn't be more excited for what you're going to hear.

Start learning and growing. Inevitably, something will happen.

No one succeeds alone.

You don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.

Come on this journey with me.