Robert Waldinger

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Robert Waldinger

A Look Into Your Future

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I joined bestselling author and Harvard professor Arthur Brooks on Sept. 1 for an episode of “The Art of Happiness” podcast. In it, we talked about the Harvard Study on Adult Development, the origins of the project and the enduring lessons on happiness, aging, and relationships that it has revealed. Have a listen.

A Look into Your Future

36 Questions To Help You Live Longer

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DIANA RAU

CONTRIBUTOR

COFOUNDER, CXO AT TWINE

2020 marks the 82nd year that researchers at Harvard University began following 724 college age men as part of the longest running study in history on human development. Their objective? To determine what factors lead to healthy and happy lives. Key results suggest that happiness and health do not result from fame and fortune. Instead, as the Director of the Harvard Study of Adult Development Robert Waldinger put it, the clearest message to emerge is, “Good relationships keep us happier and healthier. Period.” 

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Based on converging findings from this study along with several others reporting related results, we designed 36 questions to spark conversations to help you deepen your present relationships and build meaningful new ones — which in turn may help you live a happier, healthier, and longer life!  

Build Strong Relationships

“Close relationships…are better predictors of long and happy lives than social class, IQ, or even genes.” – Harvard study on adult development. Our first set of questions is dedicated to sparking conversations that may help you strengthen your relationships. 

1. How many close friends do you have that you could turn to in a crisis? 

2. Is there anyone you would like to have a closer relationship with? How might you create a closer relationship with them?

Read more: https://www.forbes.com/sites/dianatsai/2020/07/13/36-questions-to-help-you-live-longer/#6fd0f5542fb3

Are Friends the Key to Happiness?

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By David Levine, Contributor

July 27, 2018

IN THE WORLD OF science, a longitudinal study is a research method in which the same group of subjects is observed and measured over a period of time. If there is one study that really puts the “long” in longitudinal, it’s the Harvard Study of Adult Development. It has been providing data on the same group of men since 1938. There were 268 of them then – fewer than 20 are still alive – all Harvard sophomores, including future President John F. Kennedy and future Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee. The goal of the study was to find out what factors lead to healthy and happy lives. And perhaps the biggest key to well-being, it has revealed, is having friends.

Dr. Robert Waldinger, a psychiatrist at Massachusetts General Hospital and professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School…

Read more: https://health.usnews.com/health-care/patient-advice/articles/2018-07-27/are-friends-the-key-to-happiness

6th World Government Summit: What Are the Keys to Global Happiness?

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written by Rachel Weil  Feb 8, 2018

WASHINGTON, February 8, 2017:  In his 2015 TEDx talk, psychiatrist Dr. Robert Waldinger shared some of the findings from a 75-year study of 724 adult men that began in 1938. As the current Director of the Harvard Study of Adult Development, which continues to this day, Dr. Waldinger asked, “What have we learned?”

Simply stated, the answer is that “people are happier who are more connected to others.” The talk went viral with over 19,000,000 views, and a year later he found himself in Dubai speaking to an international audience at the inaugural Global Dialogue for Happiness, an adjunct of the World Government Summit.

2018 World Government Summit

This year’s Summit, from February 11-13, 2018, includes a diversity of topics from “The Importance of Hope,” to “Cryptocurrencies and the Future of Financial Markets.” The event features an impressive array of internationally-renown speakers. Attendees will be able to hear from Arianna Huffington and Deepak Chopra, to International Monetary Fund Managing Director Christine Lagarde.

Read More: 6th World Government Summit: What Are the Keys to Global Happiness?

Give Yourself the Gift of a Good Life

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Advice from Harvard’s top happiness researcher

AARPby Kathleen Fifield, December 2017/January 2018

Dr. Robert Waldinger
ROSE LINCOLN © 2016 THE PRESIDENT AND FELLOWS OF HARVARD COLLEGE

As he’s shared in things like his hugely popular TED talk, “What Makes a Good Life? Lessons From the Longest Study on Happiness,” Robert Waldinger knows well the surest, and most scientifically measurable, path to personal well-being. (It’s relationships, stupid, though he hails from Iowa and would never speak to anyone like that.)

Waldinger, a psychiatrist, heads the Harvard Study of Adult Development, which has tracked, in great depth, the lives of more than 700 Harvard and inner-city Boston men for 80 years, and more recently analyzed the DNA, health habits and life satisfaction surveys of their wives and children, too. The unusually vast longitudinal study gives its fourth director a unique vantage point on how lives — be they WASP-y or working class, Depression-era or 21st century, John F. Kennedy’s or Ben Bradlee’s — can unspool into contentment or veer into bitterness, chug along on course or be upended without warning. It also provides tidy answers to questions like whether the strength of your relationships at 50 or your cholesterol is a better indicator of your health at 80 (it’s the former, though you probably guessed that by now).

But if it’s interesting that, say, 80-year-olds with healthy marriages tolerate physical pain better than those in unhealthy ones, Waldinger, who happens to be a Zen priest, doesn’t understate the human complexity behind the data-driven takeaways. Those octogenarians in the most protective of marriages, he notes, can still “bicker like crazy,” and all those health-sustaining relationships, he wants you to know, take work, “really, a lot of work.”

Read More: Give Yourself the Gift of a Good Life

5 Ways Loneliness Can Hurt Your Health

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Time Health

By Jeffrey Kluger

November 13, 2017
TIME Health
For more, visit TIME Health.

There’s nothing wrong with living alone, and there’s surely nothing wrong with enjoying solitude. Being lonely, however, is a whole different matter. Not only does it feel terrible, it can also harm your health. Here are five ways loneliness can be dangerous.

—Elevated cortisol: Loneliness can cause stress, which your body interprets as danger. In response, it releases the hormone cortisol, explains Julianne Holt-Lunstad, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Brigham Young University. In occasional bursts, cortisol gins up your cardiovascular and immune systems, up-regulates your metabolism and more. That’s fine intermittently, but chronically elevated cortisol can dysregulate those same systems, contributing to heart disease, diabetes, cancer and more.

—Chronic inflammation: We tend think of inflammation as the overheated, reddened skin around a bite or a wound. That’s part of the inflammatory process, but so is a more systemic release of blood proteins that prep the immune system to deal with danger or injury. As with cortisol, loneliness-related stress can cause inflammation to become chronic, says Dr. Robert Waldinger, director of Harvard University’s Adult Development Survey. And as with elevated cortisol, that can lead to a host of diseases.

READ MORE: 5 Ways Loneliness Can Hurt Your Health/Time Health