For 84 years, the Harvard Study of Adult Development has tracked the lives of hundreds of Americans. Now its director, Robert Waldinger, is explaining what it has taught him about health and fulfilment
n the 1980s, when data from the world’s longest-running study on happiness started to show that good relationships kept us healthier and happier, the researchers didn’t really believe it. “We know there’s a mind-body connection and we all pay lip service to it,” says Dr Robert Waldinger, the director of the Harvard Study of Adult Development, which has been running for 84 years.
“I’m sort of a voyeur,” says Waldinger, beaming through my screen when we talk on a video call. “I’ve followed all these lives – you can take someone’s folder, thousands of pages, and you can flip through a life. Yes, we do a lot of sophisticated number crunching, but being able to read a life is pretty amazing.”
Waldinger subscribes to the theory that happiness falls into two categories. Hedonic wellbeing can be summed up as “am I having a good time right now?” he says. Then there is the Aristotelian idea of eudaimonic wellbeing: “That sense of life being meaningful and basically good.” How aware was Waldinger of antisemitism as a child? “A bit,” he says. “We were not significantly discriminated against, but it was there.” It was under the surface, but in day-to-day life, he says, people were basically decent to each other. “That’s one of the things that’s so hard now, because the right wing in the US and around the world is taking the lid off some of these prejudices – racism, antisemitism – and that’s what I find so disheartening.
Happiness “happens” to us, he says . “But there are things we can put in place in our lives that make us more likely to feel happiness more of the time.” Taking care of your health, diet, sleep and exercise are big ones: “If you are in better health, you are more likely to be happy.” But so is taking care of your relationships. “That’s partly because they help us with the flip side: they don’t just make us happy; they also help us weather the unhappy times, the challenges.
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