Robert Waldinger

Lessons on the Good Life

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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

“That was so cool!” The Transformative Power of Human Kindness

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Huffington Post11/03/2017 03:29 pm ET
David Mochel, Contributor
Well-being Coach and Consultant. CEO at Applied Attention

Earlier this week I was getting my haircut at my favorite barbershop in Santa Barbara – Willies. It is no frills and I love going there for three reasons:
  1. They are in no hurry. This means that sometimes I wait and it also means that they give me their attention when it is my turn.
  2. They take their craft seriously. They give a good haircut for sure. More importantly, they talk to me. They ask me what’s going on in my life. They listen, and they tell me about what is going on in their lives.
  3. They are kind – really kind. They allow one person who is without a home to have her mail delivered there so she has a place to pick it up. On more than one occasion I have seen them give a haircut without charging for it. They warmly greet whomever pokes their head in the shop – whether that person is wearing a suit and tie or tattered clothes and no shoes.

On this particular day, a man with a long beard and no shoes poked his head in to say hello. My barber gave him a warm hello and asked him how he was doing. They chatted and the man asked if he could sit on the chair on the sidewalk just outside the door of the shop. “Of course, but it may cost you a sip of your drink.” They both chuckled.

human kindness

Then, I watched as a sheriff’s deputy came by and started talking to the man sitting outside the door. I felt some tension in my body as I anticipated some kind of confrontation. Soon they were sitting next to each other laughing as if they were old friends. Then, they stood up, the officer put his arm around the man, and took several selfies of the two of them.

READ MORE: The Transformative Power of Human Kindness/Huff Post

Harvard’s longest study of adult life reveals how you can be happier and more successful

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CNBC logoIf you have ever wondered what the key to living a long, successful and happy life is, Harvard researchers may just have your answer. “Good relationships keep us happier and healthier,” Dr. Robert Waldinger, a psychiatrist and director of the Harvard Study of Adult Development, said in a viral “TED Talk“ released in 2015.

The ongoing Harvard study is considered one of the world’s longest studies of adult life, having started in 1938 during the Great Depression.

If you have ever wondered what the key to living a long, successful and happy life is, Harvard researchers may just have your answer.

“Good relationships keep us happier and healthier,” Dr. Robert Waldinger, a psychiatrist and director of the Harvard Study of Adult Development, said in a viral “TED Talk“ released in 2015.

The ongoing Harvard study is considered one of the world’s longest studies of adult life, having started in 1938 during the Great Depression.

“Our study has shown that the people who fared the best were the people who leaned into relationships, with family, with friends, with community,” Waldinger said.

The study aims to shed light on how “psychosocial variables and biological processes from earlier in life predict health and well-being in late life (80’s and 90’s), what aspects of childhood and adult experience predict the quality of intimate relationships in late life and how late-life marriage is linked with health and well-being,” according to the study’s website.

Waldinger is the fourth director of the study since its inception.

“Most of what we know about human life, we know from asking people to remember the past, and as we know, hindsight is anything but 20/20,” Waldinger said. “We forget vast amounts of what happens to us in life and sometimes memory is downright creative.”

Read More: Harvard’s Longest Study of Adult Life Reveals How You Can Be Happier and More Successful/CNBC

Love — It’s What Really Makes Us Happy

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BY Andrea Miller , Sept. 13, 2017

About Andrea Miller:  Andrea Miller is a deputy editor of Lion’s Roar magazine and the editor of three anthologies, most recently, All the Rage: Buddhist Wisdom on Anger and Acceptance.  In 2018, Wisdom Publications will release her first children’s book, The Day the Buddha Woke Up.

 

Robert Waldinger is a Zen Priest and leader of the longest-running study of human happiness.  As Andrea Miller tells us, he’s found that science and Buddhism agree on what makes life happy and meaningful.

Robert Waldinger TED talk
Waldinger’s viral TED talk entitled “The Good Life” sparked widespread interest in the Harvard Study of Adult Development.

What makes life worth living? What really makes us happy? As a Zen priest and leader of the one of the most important studies of human happiness ever undertaken, Robert Waldinger has sought the answers to these questions.

What he’s discovered is that science and Buddhism arrive at the same basic answer. They both conclude, he says, that “moving beyond the small self is a huge source of both meaning and contentment.”

Waldinger is a clinical professor of psychiatry at Harvard University and director of the famed Harvard Study of Adult Development. It’s perhaps the longest-running study of adult life ever conducted. For seventy-five continuous years, it has tracked the lives of 724 men in order to understand what makes for a healthy, happy life. Now it’s following the next generation, as it tracks the lives of the original subjects’ children and their families.

The study is one of the most important longitudinal research projects ever undertaken. Over the decades, the scientific community has followed the Study of Adult Development with interest, but the public was largely unaware of it and its findings about what really makes people happy and healthy. Then Robert Waldinger became an internet star.

Read More:  Love- It’s What Really Makes Us Happy/Lion’s Roar

This Is the One Secret You Need to Live a Fulfilling Life

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Hint: It has nothing to do with the health of your bank account.    

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Fulfilling Life

In this day and age, many fall into the trap of defining their self-worth by 401(k) plans and followers on social media—and you could be one of them. But science just offered the perfect reminder that the most important things in life aren’t exactly material.

A 75-year Harvard study analyzed the physical and mental health of two groups of participants, including 456 low-income men in Boston from 1939 to 2014 and 268 male graduates from Harvard’s classes of 1939 to 1944. The researchers spent decades evaluating blood samples, brain scans, self-reported surveys, and personal interactions to determine what made these men feel the most fulfilled.

Their results couldn’t be clearer. “Good relationships keep us happier and healthier. Period,” said Robert Waldinger, director of the Harvard Study of Adult Development.

Having strong, happy relationships in your life relaxes your nervous system, keeps your brain healthy, and reduces both emotional and physical pain, researchers say. (Check out even more scientific benefits of having friends.) They also found that lonely people are more likely to experience an earlier decline in physical health and die younger.

Read more: This is the One Secret You Need to Live a Fulfilling Life/Reader’s Digest