The Good Life

The Good Life: Robert Waldinger & Marc Schulz

1: What Makes a Good Life?

“Spoiler alert: The good life is a complicated life. For everybody. The good life is joyful... and challenging. Full of love, but also pain. And it never strictly happens; instead, the good life unfolds, through time. It is a process. It includes turmoil, calm, lightness, burdens, struggles, achievements, setbacks, leaps forward, and terrible falls. And of course, the good life always ends in death.

A cheery sales pitch, we know. But let’s not mince words. Life, even when it’s good, is not easy. There is simply no way to make life perfect, and if there were, then it wouldn’t be good.

Why? Because a rich life—a good life—is forged from precisely the things that make it hard.

The more time that passes, the more details we forget, and research shows that the act of recalling an event can actually change our memory of it. In short, as a tool for studying past events, the human memory is at its best imprecise, and at its worst, inventive.

Good relationships.

In fact, good relationships are significant enough that if we had to take all eighty-four years of the Harvard Study and boil it down to a single principle for living, one life investment that is supported by similar findings across a wide variety of other studies, it would be this:

Good relationships keep us healthier and happier. Period. So if you’re going to make that one choice, that single decision that could best ensure your own health and happiness, science tells us that your choice should be to cultivate warm relationships.

In the spirit of the time, but well ahead of his contemporaries in the medical community, Arlie Bock, Harvard’s new professor of hygiene and chief of Student Health Services, wanted to move away from a research focus on what made people sick to a focus on what made people healthy.

The second was a group of 456 inner-city Boston boys like Henry Keane, selected for a different reason: they were children who grew up in some of Boston’s most troubled families and most disadvantaged neighborhoods, but who, at age 14, had mostly succeeded in avoiding the paths to juvenile delinquency that some of their peers were following. More than 60 percent of these adolescents had at least one parent who immigrated to the U.S., most from poor areas of Eastern and Western Europe and areas in or near the Middle East, such as Greater Syria and Turkey. Their modest roots and immigrant status made them doubly marginalized. Sheldon and Eleanor Glueck, a lawyer and a social worker, respectively, initiated this study in an attempt to understand which life factors prevented delinquency, and these boys had succeeded on that front.

More than two thousand years ago Aristotle used a term that is still in wide use in psychology today: eudaimonia. It refers to a state of deep wellbeing in which a person feels that their life has meaning and purpose. It is often contrasted with hedonia (the origin of the word hedonism), which refers to the fleeting happiness of various pleasures. To put it another way, if hedonic happiness is what you mean when you say you’re having a good

time, then eudaimonic happiness is what we mean when we say life is good. It is a sense that, outside of this moment, regardless of how pleasurable or miserable it is, your life is worth something, and valuable to you. It is the kind of well-being that can endure through both the ups and the downs.

Some psychologists object to the word “happiness” because it can mean anything from a temporary pleasure to an almost mythical sense of eudaimonic purpose that few in reality manage to reach. So in lieu of happiness, more nuanced terms like “well-being,” “wellness,” “thriving,” and “flourishing” have become common in the popular psychological literature. We use those terms in this book. Marc is particularly fond of the terms thriving and flourishing because they refer to an active and constant state of becoming, rather than just a mood. But we still use “happiness” at times for the simple reason that this is how people talk about their lives. Nobody says, “How’s your human flourishing?” We say, “Are you happy?” And it’s how, in casual conversation, we both find ourselves talking about our research as well.

All of these studies, as well as our own Harvard Study, bear witness to the importance of human connections. They show that people who are more connected to family, to friends, and to community, are happier and physically healthier than people who are less well connected. People who are more isolated than they want to be find their health declining sooner than people who feel connected to others. Lonely people also live shorter lives. Sadly, this sense of disconnection from others is growing across the world. About one in four Americans report feeling lonely—more than sixty million people. In China, loneliness among older adults has markedly increased in recent years, and Great Britain has appointed a minister of loneliness to address what has become a major public health challenge.

Instead, it is the quality of your relationships that matters. Simply put, living in the midst of warm relationships is protective of both mind and body.

This is an important concept, the concept of protection. Life is hard, and sometimes it comes at you in full attack mode. Warm, connected relationships protect against the slings and arrows of life and of getting old.

Once we had followed the people in the Harvard Study all the way into their 80s, we wanted to look back at them at midlife to see if we could predict who was going to grow into a happy, healthy octogenarian and who wasn’t.

When Lao Tzu said more than twenty-four centuries ago “The more you give to others, the greater your abundance” he was noting a paradox that is still with us.

We discuss the massively important concept of social fitness and why it’s just as crucial as physical fitness. We explore how curiosity and attention can improve relationships and well-being; and offer some strategies for how to deal with the fact that relationships also pose some of our greatest challenges.

2: Why Relationships Matter

“These feelings, big and small, are connected to biological processes. Just as our brain responds to the presence of food in our bellies by rewarding us with pleasure sensations, so does it respond to positive contact with others. The brain effectively says to us: Yes, more of this, please. Positive interaction tells our bodies that we are safe, reducing our physical arousal and increasing our sense of well-being. By contrast, negative experiences and interactions create a sense that we are in danger and stimulate us to produce stress hormones like adrenaline and cortisol. These hormones are part of a cascade of physical reactions that raise alertness and help us respond to situations of critical importance—the “fight or flight” response. They are a big part of what gives us that feeling of stress.

Loneliness is more pervasive than ever before, and our ancient brains, designed to seek the safety of groups, experience those negative feelings as life-threatening, which leads to stress and sickness.

To say that human beings require warm relationships is no touchy-feely idea. It is a hard fact. Scientific studies have told us again and again: human beings need nutrition, we need exercise, we need purpose, and we need each other.

Throughout this book, we’ll be addressing some of the common reasons why people have a hard time finding happiness and satisfaction in life, but there are a couple of general truths that should be acknowledged right off the bat.

The first is this: the good life may be a central concern for most people, but it is not the central concern of most modern societies. Life today is a haze of competing social, political, and cultural priorities, some of which have very little to do with improving people’s lives. The modern world prioritizes many things ahead of the lived experience of human beings.

The second reason is related and even more fundamental: our brains, the most sophisticated and mysterious system in the known universe, often mislead us in our quest for lasting pleasure and satisfaction. We may be capable of extraordinary feats of intellect and creativity, we may have mapped the human genome and walked on the moon, but when it comes to making decisions about our lives, we humans are often bad at knowing what is good for us. Common sense in this area of life is not so sensible. It’s very difficult to figure out what really matters.

These two things—the haze of culture and the mistakes we make in forecasting what will make us happy—are woven together and play a role in our lives every single day. Over the course of a life, they exert significant influence. The culture we live in leads us in particular directions, sometimes without our even noticing, and we follow along, outwardly pretending that we know what we’re doing, but inwardly in a state of low-grade confusion.

John Marsden, one of the more professionally successful members of the Study, was also one of the least happy. Like Leo DeMarco he wanted to be close to people, as this last answer shows, and he loved his family, but he consistently reported feelings of disconnection and sadness throughout his life. He struggled in his first marriage and alienated his children. When John remarried at the age of 62, he quickly began to refer to that new relationship as “loveless,” though it would last to the end of his life. Later we’ll talk more about John’s path to despair, and some of the factors that likely shaped his suffering, but there is one particular feature of John’s life that concerns us right now: while John tried hard to make himself happy, he was preoccupied at every stage of his life with himself, and what he referred to as his “inner drives.” He began his career hoping to make life better for others, but over time associated his achievements less with helping people and more with professional success. Convinced that his career and his accomplishments would bring him happiness, he was never able to find a path to joy.

In his commencement address to Kenyon College in 2005, the writer David Foster Wallace used a parable to point out an indelible truth:

There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, “What the hell is water?”

Every culture—from the broad culture of a nation down to the culture inside a family—is at least partially invisible to its participants. There are important assumptions, value judgments, and practices that create the water we swim in without our noticing or agreeing to them. We simply find ourselves in this world, and we move forward. These features of culture affect just about everything in our lives, often in positive ways, connecting us to each other and creating identities and meaning. But there is a flip side. Sometimes cultural messages and practices point us in directions away from well-being and happiness.

But money, achievement, and status all have a tendency to overtake other priorities. This, too, is a function of our ancient brains: we focus on what is most visible, and most immediate. The value of relationships is ephemeral and hard to quantify, but money can be counted.

In 2010 Angus Deaton and Daniel Kahneman at Princeton University tried to quantify the relationship of money to happiness using a year-long Gallup survey that resulted in a massive dataset of 450,000 daily responses from a nationally representative sample of one thousand people.

Deaton and Kahneman showed that in the United States, $75,000 seemed to be a kind of magic number at that time. Once a household income was more than $75,000 per year, which was close to the average family income in the U.S. at the time of the study, the amount of money that people earned showed no clear relationship to daily reports of enjoyment and laughter, which were used as indicators of emotional well-being.

As Deaton and Kahneman wrote in their study, “More money does not necessarily buy more happiness, but less money is associated with emotional pain.”

At lower levels of income, money brings tangible benefits that are necessary for survival, safety, and a sense of control. But at slightly higher levels of income (and this needn’t be $75,000) the meaning of money starts to become somewhat more abstract and becomes about other things, like status and pride.

Happiness and freedom begin with a clear understanding of one principle. Some things are within your control. And some things are not.

Epictetus, Discourses

This analysis echoes the findings of the study highlighted in the article in Science: across all age groups, genders, and ethnicities, strong social connections were associated with increased odds of living longer. In fact, Holt-Lunstad and her colleagues quantified the association: incredibly, social connection increased the likelihood of surviving in any given year by more than 50 percent. Across all of these studies, the mortality rate of individuals with the fewest ties was between 2.3 (men) and 2.8 (women) times higher than that of individuals with the most ties. These are very large associations, comparable to the effect of smoking on getting cancer. And smoking, in the United States, is considered the leading cause of preventable death.

Our actions and the choices we make account for about 40 percent of our happiness. That’s a sizable chunk that is still within our control.

The engine of a good life is not the self, as John Marsden believed, but rather our connection to others, as Leo DeMarco’s life demonstrates. The movements of the engine are those feelings inside us that our ancestors passed down, from the biggest heartbreaks to the subtle sensations of camaraderie to the sadness of loss to the exhilarations of romantic love; or as Jon Kabat-Zinn called it, borrowing a line from Zorba the Greek, “the full catastrophe.” It’s there that the good life happens, in the real-time, momentary experience of connection.

You might be thinking right now, Okay, sure, but how? How do I change my relationships for the better? I can’t just snap my fingers. What would change even look like? Where do I start?

Changing your life—especially your habits of daily living—can be challenging. Many of us start out with the best of intentions to improve our lives, only to be overwhelmed by the force of our well-worn mental habits and the momentum of the culture we live in. It’s tempting when confronting the complexity of life to say, I’ve tried, but I just cannot figure this out. I’ll just go with the flow.

3: Relationships on the Winding Road of Life

“Our destiny is frequently met in the very paths we take to avoid it.

Jean de La Fontaine

These impressions point to areas of our lives that are important to us, and they can be turned into something helpful using a simple but powerful exercise we developed for our Lifespan Research Foundation (www.lifespanresearch.org). This involves a bit of personal research, but if you’re game, come play along.

A good life requires growth and change. This change is not an automatic process that occurs as we age. What we experience, what we endure, and what we do all affect the trajectory of growth.

In psychology, expanding our concerns and efforts beyond our own lives is called “generativity” and it’s a key to unlocking the vibrancy and excitement of midlife. Among Harvard Study participants, the happiest and most satisfied adults were those who managed to turn the question “What can I do for myself?” into “What can I do for the world beyond me?” John F. Kennedy—himself a Harvard Study participant—came to understand this well in his own midlife. He offered not just political, but emotional and developmental guidance when, as president, he said, famously, “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.” When asked at the end of their lives, “What do you wish you’d done less of? What do you wish you’d done more of?” our Study participants, male and female, often referenced their middle years, and regretted having spent so much time worrying and so little time acting in a way that made them feel alive.

An individual life is an improvisation in which circumstances and chance help determine the trajectory. While there are common patterns in life, it would be impossible for any person to make it from the beginning to the end of life without an unplanned event sending them in a new direction. There is even some research that suggests that it’s these unexpected turns, and not any plan, that most define a person’s life and can lead to periods of growth. One wrench thrown into the machine can be more significant than all the gears of planned action combined.

4: Social Fitness

“A sad soul can kill you quicker, far quicker, than a germ.

John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley

The same is true for social fitness.

It’s not easy to take care of our relationships today, and in fact, we tend to think that once we establish friendships and intimate relationships, they will take care of themselves. But like muscles, neglected relationships atrophy. Our social life is a living system. And it needs exercise. You don’t have to examine scientific findings to recognize that relationships affect you physically. All you have to do is notice the invigoration you feel when you believe someone has really understood you during a good conversation, or notice the tension and distress after an argument, or the lack of sleep during a period of romantic strife.

When you’re lonely, it hurts. And we don’t mean that metaphorically. It has a physical effect on the body. Loneliness is associated with being more sensitive to pain, suppression of the immune system, diminished brain function, and less effective sleep, making an already lonely person even more tired and irritable. Recent research has shown that for older people loneliness is twice as unhealthy as obesity, and chronic loneliness increases a person’s odds of death in any given year by 26 percent. A study in the U.K., the Environmental Risk (E-Risk) Longitudinal Twin Study, recently reported on the connections between loneliness and poorer health and selfcare in young adults. This ongoing study includes more than 2,200 people born in England and Wales in 1994 and 1995. When they were 18, the researchers asked them how lonely they were. Those who reported being lonelier were more likely to experience mental health problems, to engage in risky physical health behaviors, and to use more negative strategies to cope with stress. Add to this the fact that a tide of loneliness is flooding through modern societies, and we have a serious problem. Recent stats should make us take notice.

Our basic relationship needs are not complicated. We need love, connection, and a feeling of belonging. But we now live in complicated social environments, so how we meet those needs is the challenge.

This might all sound quite intuitive, but there is a very powerful yet simple message nestled in these findings: the frequency and the quality of our contact with other people are two major predictors of happiness.

So where do we start? How can we come closer to seeing the reality of our own social universe?

It’s good to start simple. First, ask: Who is in my life?

It’s a question that most of us, amazingly, never bother to ask ourselves. Even making a basic list of the ten people who populate the center of your social universe can be illuminating. Try it below; you might be surprised at who comes to mind and who doesn’t.

Once you’ve got a good set of people, it’s time to ask: What is the character of these relationships?

(Waldinger & Schulz, “The Good Life”, p.99)

In general, an energizing relationship enlivens and invigorates you, and it gives you a sense of connection and belonging that remains after the two of you part ways. It makes you feel better than you would feel if you were alone.

A depleting relationship induces tension, frustration, or anxiety, and makes you feel worried, or even demoralized. In some ways, it makes you feel lesser or more disconnected than you would feel if you were alone.

This doesn’t mean that an energizing relationship will make you feel good all the time or that a depleting relationship will make you feel bad all the time.

In truth, almost all relationships contain opportunities; we just have to identify them. Examples include important relationships from our past, positive relationships we have been neglecting, and difficult relationships that may contain the seeds of a better connection.

Safety and Security

Who would you call if you woke up scared in the middle of the night?

Who would you turn to in a moment of crisis?

Learning and Growth

Who encourages you to try new things, to take chances, to pursue your life’s goals?

Emotional Closeness and Confiding

Who knows everything (or most things) about you?

Who can you call on when you’re feeling low and be honest with them about how you’re feeling?

Who can you ask for advice (and trust what they say)?

Identity Affirmation and Shared Experience

Is there someone in your life who has shared many experiences with you and who helps strengthen your sense of who you are and where you’ve come from?

Help—Both Informational and Practical

Who do you turn to if you need some expertise or help solving a practical problem (e.g., you need to plant a tree, fix your WiFi connection, apply for health insurance)?

Fun and Relaxation

Who makes you laugh?

Who do you call to see a movie or go on a road trip?

Who makes you feel relaxed, connected, at ease?

(Waldinger & Schulz, “The Good Life”, p.107)

In fact, we’ve already applied some of it in this chapter: one of the things this research shows is that a key to motivating change is recognizing the difference between where we are and where we would like to be. Defining these two states creates a kind of potential energy that helps us to take that first difficult step. This is what you have started to do with these relational tools. You’ve mapped your social universe and the quality of your relationships, and you’ve reflected on what you might like to change. From here, the process of actually doing it can be messy—particularly for challenging relationships—but the potential rewards are great. We’ll get into that process more in coming chapters, but there are a few things you can do immediately, and some useful principles to keep in mind.

Focus first on what’s working well. This is the easiest place to begin. Take a look at the relationships on the energizing side of your social universe and consider how you might solidify or encourage what’s great about them. Tell (and show!) those people how much you appreciate them, and why. It never hurts to double down on what’s already bringing energy and vitality into your life. These relationships are already rolling, but there are usually one or two that have slowed down and need a little push to get up and running at full tilt again. Even good relationships tend to repeat the same routines over and over. It might be time to try some new things with them.

Suggestion #1: The Power of Generosity…

Research clearly shows that he’s right: helping others benefits the one who helps. There is both a neural and a practical link between generosity and happiness. Being generous is a way to prime your brain for good feelings, and those good feelings in turn make us more likely to help others in the future. Generosity is an upward spiral…

Suggestion #2: Learning New Dance Steps

We get better at what we practice, and without realizing it we can become very talented at doing things that are not in our interest. Sterling Ainsley, for example, had gotten better and better at avoiding closeness and connection. He had good reason; even though he had his sister, Rosalie, there with him during the first years of his life, she couldn’t stop his father’s abuse, and his family of origin was pulled apart when his father committed his mother to the sanitarium. When Sterling moved to the farm, he could no longer see Rosalie on a regular basis, and this was painful to him. So he carried his fears of close relationships far into his adult life. With the exception of his adoptive mother, he never established that crucial sense of safety and security with another person, let alone with multiple people. Without necessarily articulating it to himself, he lived his life assuming that he would be happier, or at least safer, without close contacts. Being close to others, he believed, was a risk.

Suggestion #3: Radical Curiosity…

It can be a real joy to lose ourselves in the experience of another person. It can also feel strange at first, if you’re not used to it, and it might take some effort. Curiosity—real, deep curiosity about what others are experiencing—goes a long way in important relationships. It opens up avenues of conversation and knowledge that we never knew were there. It helps others feel understood and appreciated. It’s important even in less significant relationships, where it can set a precedent of caring and increase the strength of new, fragile bonds…

The crucial point is that being curious helps us connect to others, and this connection makes us more engaged with life. Genuine curiosity invites people to share more of themselves with us, and this in turn helps us understand them. This process enlivens everyone involved. The “strangers on a train” experiment points to these cascading benefits, which we’ll discuss much more in Chapter Ten. Even a small interest in another person, a brief word, can create new excitements, new avenues of connection, and new pathways for life to flow.

Like generosity, curiosity is an upward spiral.

This is a crucial step in connecting with others through curiosity: communicating your new understanding back to them. This is where a lot of the magic happens, where the connection between people becomes solid, visible, and meaningful. Hearing an accurate understanding of our own experience coming from another person, articulated in their words, can be thrilling, especially when we’re feeling alienated in a social setting. Suddenly someone is seeing us as we are, and that experience momentarily breaches the barrier that we feel between us and the world. To be seen is an amazing thing.

If we accept the wisdom—and more recently the scientific evidence—that our relationships really are among our most valuable tools for sustaining health and happiness, then choosing to invest time and energy in them becomes vitally important. And an investment in our social fitness isn’t only an investment in our lives as they are now. It is an investment that will affect everything about how we live in the future.

5: Attention to Relationships

“The only gift is a portion of thyself.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

There is a Buddhist mantra that monks are taught to use in meditation. It goes like this: “If only death is certain, and the time of death is uncertain, then what should I do?

DAY 7: As you look back on your life, what do you wish you had done less of? Had done more of?

Edith, age 80: Less getting upset about silly things. When you put them into perspective, they weren’t all that important. Less worrying about those things. More time with my children,

husband, mother, father.

Neil, age 83: Wish I’d spent more time with my wife. She died just as I’d begun to taper down with work.

Time and attention are not something we can replenish. They are what our life is. When we offer our time and attention, we are not merely spending and paying. We are giving our lives.

As the philosopher Simone Weil once wrote, “Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.

We are pointing here to a truth that is difficult to put into words; like love, attention is a gift that flows both ways. When we give our attention, we are giving life, but we are also feeling more alive in the process.

We often have two contradictory feelings about the time we have available to us. On one hand we sense a time famine and feel that there’s just not enough time in the day to do everything that we need to do, let alone that we want to do. On the other hand, we tend to think that in some unspecified future we will have a time surplus, as if we’ll get to a place in our lives where the kinds of things capturing our time right now will cease to consume us.

And the study by Killingsworth and Gilbert clearly showed what we are all dimly aware of—that a wandering mind is connected to unhappiness.

This cognitive ability to remember the past and anticipate the future is one reason some of us feel so busy—not because of the number of tasks we have to complete in the day, but because of the sheer number of things competing for our attention. What is commonly called “distraction” is probably better understood as overstimulation.

Recent findings in neuroscience have shown that our conscious minds cannot do more than one thing at a time. It may feel like you are able to multitask and think about two (or more) things at once, but really your mind is switching between them. This is a costly process neurologically speaking. Switching from one task to another takes energy and a measurable amount of time. Then, when we switch back, it takes another period of time to really wrap our minds around the original object of attention. And it’s not only about the time cost; it’s about the quality of our attention. If we are always switching from one thing to another, then we are never able to truly focus and experience the pleasure and effectiveness of a focused mind. Instead we live in a state of constant recalibration, or what the writer Linda Stone perceptively calls “continuous partial attention.”

Human awareness is not the speedy, nimble creature some of us believe it to be. Our brains have evolved to be more like owls than hummingbirds: we notice something, turn our attention to it, and focus in. It is in this state of intense, solitary focus that we are in possession of our most uniquely human and powerful mental faculties. When we focus on one thing, we are at our most thoughtful, creative, and productive.

But in the screen-heavy environment of the twenty-first century, our mind-owls, large and unwieldy, are treated like hummingbirds, and they end up flopping ineffectively from one thing to the next. Doing this day in and day out accommodates us to what is actually an unnatural, anxiety-producing mode in which the mind struggles to find nourishment.

Which owl is going to feel busier, the one focusing on the sound of a mouse in the snow, or the one trying to draw tiny bits of nectar from a thousand flowers? And which owl is going to be, in the end, better nourished?

The present moment is the only time over which we have dominion.

Thich Nhat Hanh

By learning to pay attention to what’s happening in front of us, we gain more than the sensations of life; we also increase our ability to act. We’re not thinking about what’s already happened, about what might happen, about what we have to do later; we are alert to the moment, which is where any action must take place. If our intention is to connect with other people, being present is what makes that possible.

That same question—What’s here that I’m not noticing?—can be extraordinarily powerful when we apply it to people: What about this person have I not noticed before? Or: What is this person feeling that I’ve been missing? This is part of that radical curiosity we talked about in Chapter Four.

More often than not, when we are in the presence of other people, we are missing a lot about their experience. In any interaction, and in any relationship (even our closest), there is an enormous amount of feeling and information that goes right over our heads. But in the end, which matters more: How right we are about what another person is experiencing, or how curious we are about their experience in the first place?

We expected that empathic accuracy—getting the right answer about what your partner was feeling—would correlate with a stronger sense of relationship satisfaction. This correlation was certainly there—understanding how your partner is feeling is a good thing.

But more important than that, especially for women, was the empathic effort involved. If a person felt their partner was making a good-faith effort to understand them, they felt more positively about the interaction and about the relationship, regardless of their partner’s accuracy.

To put it simply, understanding another person is great, but just trying to understand goes a long way in building connection.

Some people do this automatically, but efforts to understand others can also be deliberate, intentional behaviors. It needn’t come naturally to you at first, but the more you try, the easier it will get. The next time you have the opportunity, try asking yourself:

How is this person feeling?

What is this person thinking?

Am I missing something here?

How might I feel if I were in this person’s shoes?

And when you can, let them know that you’re curious and trying to understand—a small effort that can have an enormous impact.

Life is always at risk of slipping by unnoticed. If the days and months and years feel as if they are moving too quickly, focused attention might be one remedy. Giving something your undivided attention is a way of bringing it to life and assuring that you don’t float through time on automatic pilot. Noticing someone is a way of respecting them, paying tribute to the person they are in that exact moment. And noticing yourself, checking in about how you move through the world, about where you are now and where you would like to be, can help you identify which people and pursuits most need your attention. Attention is your most precious asset, and deciding how to invest it is one of the most important decisions you can make. The good news is you can make that decision now, in this moment, and in each moment of your life.

6: Facing the Music

“George Vaillant summed this point up well when he wrote: “There are two pillars of happiness revealed by the [Harvard Study].... One is love. The other is finding a way of coping with life that does not push love away.

It’s one of the great ironies of life—and the subject of millions of songs, films, and great works of literature—that the people who make us feel the most alive and who know us best are also the people able to hurt us most. This doesn’t mean that the people who hurt us are malicious, or that we are acting maliciously when we hurt others. Sometimes there is no fault. As we travel on our own unique paths, we can hurt each other without intending

to.

This is the conundrum we find ourselves in as human beings, and how we deal with challenges often defines the course of our lives. Do we face the music? Or do we bury our heads in the sand?

Many difficulties in relationships stem from old habits. We develop automatic, reflexive behaviors over the course of our lives that become so intimately woven into our days that we don’t even see them. In some cases, we become used to avoiding certain feelings and turning away, while in other cases we might be so overcome by emotion that we act on our feelings before we realize it.

Abigail and Lucia were both responding to an incredible stressor in ways that were natural for them. We all do this. Our habitual responses—patterns of both thinking and behaving—that arise when stressful events occur are what psychologists call coping styles. Our coping styles affect the way we deal with every challenge that comes our way, from a minor disagreement to major catastrophe, and a key part of every coping style is how we use our relationships. Do we seek help? Do we accept help? Do we turn inward and face challenges in silence? Whatever coping style we use has an impact on those around us.

Each of us has cultivated certain coping strategies through our lives, and they can become set in stone. This kind of “strength” can actually make us more fragile.

THE W.I.S.E.R. MODEL OF REACTING TO EMOTIONALLY CHALLENGING

SITUATIONS AND RELATIONSHIP EVENTS

Stage One: Watch (Curiosity Cures the Cat)

There’s an old adage in psychiatry: Don’t just do something, sit there. Our initial impressions of a situation are powerful, but they are rarely complete. We tend to focus on the familiar, and this narrow view risks excluding potentially important information. Regardless of how much you can observe initially, there is almost always more to see. Whenever you encounter a stressor and you feel the emotion brewing, a bit of purposeful curiosity right away is useful. Thoughtful observation can round out our initial impressions, expand our view of a situation, and press the pause button to prevent a potentially harmful reflexive response…

Watch refers to the entire situation: the environment, the person you’re interacting with, and you. Is the situation unusual or common? What typically happens next? What have I not considered that might be an important part of what is unfolding?...

Context is incredibly valuable. It never hurts to take in as much information as possible, beyond what you notice right away.

The curiosity that we muster during the watch phase also includes curiosity about your own emerging reactions—how you’re feeling, and why. You might notice what’s happening in your body, that your heart is beating faster, that you’re pursing your lips or gritting your teeth (signs of anger). You might notice an impulse to lash out or to hide yourself because you feel ashamed. Becoming more conscious of how you react and what you might be about to do can help you ride that wave of emotion rather than having it crash over you.

Stage Two: Interpret (Naming the Stakes)...

If you want to understand a situation as clearly as possible, you first need to make sense of what’s at stake for you. Emotion is usually a sign that there is something important going on for you; if there wasn’t, you wouldn’t be feeling anything. An emotion could be related to an important goal in your life, a particular insecurity, or a relationship you cherish. Asking the question, Why am I getting emotional? is a good way to figure out what’s at stake for you. If you see the stakes clearly, you may be able to interpret the situation more skillfully…

The important thing in the interpret stage is to expand our understanding beyond our initial automatic perception. To consider more perspectives, even if those perspectives are uncomfortable. To ask, What might I be overlooking here?

Again, this is a place where some attention to our own emotions can be helpful. When you feel a pulse of fear, a pulse of anger, or a sinking feeling in your stomach, think of it as a signal to inject some healthy curiosity into the situation, to ponder not only the stressor itself, but also your own emotional reality: Why am I feeling this way? Where are these emotions coming from? What is really at stake? What is so challenging for me about this situation?

Stage Three: Select (Choosing from the Options)...

When we are under stress, we sometimes find ourselves reacting before we have considered our options, or even considered that we might have any options. Slowing down can allow us to consider possibilities and think about the likelihood of success for those possibilities: Given what’s at stake and the resources at my disposal, what can I do in this situation? What would be a good outcome here? And what is the likelihood that things will go well if I respond this way instead of that way? It’s in the select stage that we clarify what our goals are and what resources we have at our disposal. What do I want to accomplish? How best can I accomplish that goal? Do I have strengths that can help me (e.g., humor and an ability to take the edge off heated conversations), or weaknesses that could hurt me (e.g., a tendency to snap when criticized)?

Stage Four: Engage (Implementing With Care)

Stage Five: Reflect (Monday Morning Quarterbacking)

How did that work out? Did I make things better or worse? Have I learned something new about the challenge I’m facing and about the best response?

Reflecting on our response to a challenge can yield dividends for the future. It’s in learning from experience that we truly grow wiser. We can do this not only for something that just happened, but for events both big and small that have happened in the past and linger in our memories. Take a look at the worksheet below and consider using it to reflect on an incident or situation that’s troubling you.

As the modern Buddhist teacher Shohaku Okumura writes, “The world we live in is the world we create.

No two relationships are the same, but one person will often get stuck in similar places in different relationships.

At their core, feelings of stuckness come from patterns in our lives. Some patterns help us navigate life efficiently and quickly, but others may lead us to respond in ways that don’t serve us well. These patterns may include spending time with the wrong people—the wrong friends, and even the wrong partners. Far from being random, these patterns often reflect areas of preoccupation and struggles from our past, which in a way feel like home. They are like a set of familiar dance steps that we fall into. A familiar sensation, even if it’s negative, is activated in a conversation with someone, and there is a kind of comfort in that familiarity. Oh here it is again, I know this dance.

Getting honest perspectives on your life from people you trust can be very illuminating in your effort to become unstuck. Such trusted observers will almost certainly see things that you can’t.

You may also be able to do something like this yourself by asking, If someone else was telling me this story, what would I think? What would I tell them? This kind of self-distanced reflection can shed new light on old stories.

7: The Person Behind You

“When we were children, we used to think that when we were grown-up we would no longer be vulnerable. But to grow up is to accept vulnerability.... To be alive is to be vulnerable.

Madeleine L’Engle

She was honest with him about how much this concerned her, and Joseph was well aware of her concern, telling the Study on several occasions that Olivia often told him how difficult he was to truly know. “I’m self-sufficient,” he said. “My biggest weakness is not leaning on anybody. I’m just made that way.” Joseph was tuned in enough to other people that he could see and articulate their difficulty with him, but he could never get past a core, deeply rooted fear that is not uncommon: he didn’t want to be a burden, or to feel anything but fully independent. Though he attended Harvard, Joseph came from humble beginnings, and told the Study that he learned the value of self-sufficiency as a child on his family farm, where he spent days on end operating a horse-drawn plow alone.

Joseph had decided as a young man that in his relationships, two things were more important than anything else: keeping the peace, and being self-sufficient. It was important to him that his life and his family’s life be stable above all else.

Many of us have someone like this in our lives; we should remember it’s not necessarily a sign that they don’t care. But Olivia, at least, felt a sense of incompleteness, because the keystone of intimacy is the feeling of knowing someone and of being known. In fact, the word intimacy comes from the Latin intimare: to make known. Intimate knowledge of another person is a feature of romantic love, but it’s also more than that. It’s a quintessential piece of the human experience, and it begins long before our first kiss, long before we consider marriage, in the very earliest days of life.

We investigated the link between emotion and relationship stability in one of our earliest joint research studies. We brought couples who were married or living together into the lab and videotaped them for eight to ten minutes as they discussed a recent upsetting incident in their relationship.

We specifically asked research assistants who did not have extensive training in psychology to rate the emotions in these videos. Would these untrained observers’ natural human ability to recognize how others are feeling be useful in predicting stability in relationships?

Five years later, we checked back with the couples to see how they were doing. Some were still together, some were not. When we set their relationship status beside our research assistants’ ratings of emotions in their earlier interactions, we found that the ratings predicted with close to 85 percent accuracy which couples had stayed together. This is consistent with many other studies showing that emotions between partners are a critical indicator of whether intimate relationships thrive or fail. The fact that raters with no special knowledge of psychology could accurately predict relationship strength was significant because it showed that most adults have a facility to accurately read emotions. Most of the raters had not yet experienced deep, longer-term relationships, yet when they looked closely, they could sense important, sometimes subtle emotions and behaviors in the couples. Emotions drive relationships, and noticing them matters.

These findings, along with our findings about the importance of empathic effort (discussed in Chapter 5), point to an important idea about intimate relationships: if a couple can cultivate a bedrock of affection and empathy (meaning curiosity and the willingness to listen), their bond will be more stable and enduring.

Love seems the swiftest, but it is the slowest of all growths. No man or woman really knows what perfect love is until they have been married a quarter of a century.

Mark Twain

Recall for a moment the Coan handholding study and the Kiecolt-Glaser wound-healing study, which are among the many studies that have shown two crucial findings: First, that the presence of a trusted, intimate partner decreases stress, and second, that stress can affect the healing ability of our bodies.

To put it simply: couples who are able to face stresses together reap benefits in health, well-being, and relationship satisfaction.

How do our close relationships get weighted down with so much expectation? Sometimes the reason has less to do with the relationship and more to do with waning connections in other parts of our lives. If we’re no longer having the kind of fun we can only have with a group of friends or family members who know us well, or we’ve stopped pursuing our personal interests, hobbies, and passions, we might turn to our partner to fill those needs. The intimate relationship becomes like a sponge, soaking up whatever failed expectation happens to be lying around. Suddenly we’re finding fault with the person beside us when it’s the rest of our lives and our other relationships that need attention. These expectations can take a toll.

The research is clear: intimate relationships can be an incredible source of sustenance for our minds and bodies. But there are limits to what they can do. If we want to give a relationship the best chance of success, we have to support it by sustaining other parts of our lives. Our partners may in fact be our better halves, but they can’t, by themselves, make us whole.

There is no remedy for love but to love more.

Henry David Thoreau

“Catch” your partner being kind. What was the last thing your partner did that you felt grateful for? A dinner he made? A backrub she gave you? Or maybe there was a moment you were impatient with your partner, but he didn’t hold it against you, and you appreciated that. Take note of that small act. Research points to the benefits of keeping a gratitude diary to record and solidify the things we feel grateful for, but even simply noticing and calling to mind the good, little things your partner does can have a positive impact. This is a simple but powerful way for us to “catch” our partners being kind rather than falling into the common trap of giving more attention to disappointments.

Step out of old routines. As we go about the business of life, our relationships can begin to feel like they are stuck in repetitive cycles that are not exciting.

Try something different! Make a plan to surprise your partner with breakfast in bed. Maybe you haven’t walked around your neighborhood together in years—after dinner instead of falling into the grooves of your usual routine, take a stroll and see what’s out there. Plan a weekly date night and take turns choosing what you will do (and maybe surprise your partner with a new activity if a surprise would be welcome).

We all fall into habits and routines. That’s normal. But often they become so rote that we cease to really notice our partners as we cruise through the day. Breaking these routines alerts our minds to novelty, and this helps us recognize and appreciate our partners in new ways. It also signals to our partners that they are important to us.

So when you bump up against something about your partner that bothers you, before reacting, pause to watch, and take note of your reactions and what you are thinking.

Then interpret your feelings and try to make sense of what’s going on.

Ask: Why is this issue important to me? What exactly is my view? Where does it come from? Is this something I learned from my family growing up? Something I learned from previous relationships? Something that was emphasized in my religious training?

Then, the harder part: try to step into your partner’s shoes. Why is my partner having such a strong reaction, behaving in this particular way, thinking this particular thing? Why might it be important to my partner and where might my partner have learned this? Where is it coming from?

First, listen without commenting.

Then, try to communicate what you’ve heard your partner say without judgment (this is the hard part). You might begin with something like: What I’m hearing you say is ___. Is that right?

A second technique that is helpful in its own right and can make reflective listening even more valuable is to offer some understanding of your partner’s reasons for a feeling or behavior. The goal is not to point out your brilliance and ability to see things your partner cannot, but to let your partner know that you see them. You want to communicate that it makes sense that she feels this way or that he is behaving in that way, and to nurture that bedrock of empathy and affection that research has shown to be valuable. For example, you might say, It makes sense that you feel so strongly about this... and then continue with something like: since you care so much about being kind. Or: ... since this was the way you’ve described things happening in your family growing up.

A third useful practice is to try to step back a bit from the conversation, a practice that psychologists call “self-distancing,” and look at your experience as if you are watching someone else. You might notice the thoughts that this person (i.e., you) is having, and recognize them as fleeting thoughts that may shift. This is a technique that shares much in common with mindfulness approaches, and the psychologists Ethan Kross and Ozlem Ayduk have done a lot of research showing its utility. Together these practices may help you to get started with challenging conversations and hang in there emotionally when things get tough, to slow down, and to show your partner that you’re trying to understand.

8: Family Matters

“Our parents are the first human beings we see when we arrive in the world, the first people to hold and nurture us, and much of what we learn to expect from close relationships comes from them. Our siblings, if we have them, are among our first contemporaries, who show us how to behave and also how to get into trouble. Our extended family often defines how we understand the meaning of community. But whatever the makeup of our family, it is more than a group of relationships; it is, in a very real way, part of who we are. So these relationships come with some very high stakes. Their character can have a dramatic effect on our well-being.

Our most important experiences, both good and bad, are not just memories. They are emotional events that leave tangible impressions on us, and these influences can shape our lives for a very long time.

Those children who had a complicated illness at birth, who had poor experiences with their caretakers, and who suffered abuse were more likely to have mental health problems and to develop learning disabilities. Their childhood experience really mattered.

But Werner also found reasons for hope. One third of all children who had adverse childhoods still managed to develop into attentive, kind, and emotionally well-adjusted adults. These kids overcame their difficult childhoods, and Werner was able to point to some of the reasons.

There were protective factors at work for some children that countered the effects of their difficult childhoods. One of the major sources of protection was the consistent presence of at least one caring adult. Even one person who is concerned, available, and emotionally invested in a child’s well-being can positively affect that child’s development and future relationships. Some of the children who thrived despite adversity seemed particularly able to elicit this kind of caring support.

Here is where Emmy Werner’s research, our own Harvard Study research, and many other pieces of research from across cultures and populations converge to show that a critical link between childhood experience and positive adult social connections is our ability to process

emotions.

It is from our relationships as children—especially our relationships with our family—that we first learn what to expect from others. This is when we begin to develop the emotional habits, so to speak, that will be with us for the rest of our lives. These habits often define the way we connect to others and our ability to engage others in mutually supportive ways.

A crucial point here is that our ability to process emotions is malleable. In fact, managing emotions is one of the things we actually get better at as we grow old. And there is strong evidence that we don’t have to wait until late in our lives for this to happen. With the right guidance and some practice, we can learn to be better at managing our feelings at any age.

But there is a middle way. We’ve been advocating a strategy of facing toward problems, rather than avoiding them, but facing a problem is not always the same as fixing it. Sometimes facing-in to our families means learning how to sit with uncomfortable situations and emotions, and allowing ourselves to feel and express the emotions that many of us try to avoid. Sometimes the best thing we can do is respond in a way that is less absolute and more flexible, as Neal and Gail managed to do.

Neal and Gail were at a crossroad: Should they try their best to engage with Lucy and her challenges? Or should they back off a bit and give Lucy more room to either flounder or thrive on her own? While they struggled with these questions, their response was most often to face toward Lucy’s difficulty rather than minimizing it or pretending there was not a problem. When Lucy pushed them away, they didn’t throw their hands up and cut her

off. Instead, they gave her room, and waited for another opportunity. Lucy’s siblings also gave needed support to their parents and to Lucy. All through the experience, even in times of shouting and fighting, the family’s love for each other would eventually surface. They remained flexible, though none of them was perfect. Sometimes they had to step back, sometimes they had to step in. But they never turned away.”

Corrective experiences aren’t just a matter of luck, either. Opportunities to shift our view of the world are arriving all the time—most of them simply pass us by. We are often too tunneled into our own expectations and personal opinions to allow the subtle realities of these opportunities to penetrate. But there are a couple of simple (though difficult!) things we can do to encourage our ability to see what’s really happening, and thus be more likely to reap the benefits of corrective experience.

First, we can tune in to difficult feelings rather than try to ignore them. Part of leaning in to challenges involves seeing our emotional reactions as useful information rather than as something to be pushed away.

Second, we can notice when we are having experiences that are more positive than we expected. Maybe in the middle of that family reunion you were dreading for months, you can pause and realize that, against all odds, you’re having a pretty good time.

Third, we can try to “catch” other people when they are behaving well, just as we suggested you might do with a partner. Most of us are very good at noticing when people are behaving badly, but we’re not so skilled at noticing when people are behaving well. On the road, good drivers fade into the background, but bad drivers stand out. We learn to expect bad driving,

so that we’re prepared for it when it happens. The same is true in life. Occasionally, try to notice the good drivers, the good people.

The final and most powerful approach is simply to remain open to the possibility of people behaving differently than we expect. The more ready we are to be surprised by people, the more likely we are to notice when they do something that doesn’t match our expectation. This kind of noticing is especially important within our families.

This is what we call the “You Always / You Never” trap. Our experience with our family members starts so early in life that our expectations about relationships become deeply imprinted, and anything that happens, no matter how subtle, often gets pressed into that old imprint.

In Chapter Five we mentioned a meditation instruction that’s useful in enhancing our everyday ability to notice and pay attention to the world, and this meditation is equally useful when we interact with our families. It is to ask ourselves the question: What’s here that I’ve never noticed before?

It can be asked about a relationship just as easily as it can be asked about an environment. What is there about my relationship with this person that I’ve never noticed before? What have I been missing?

One thing we can be sure of—nobody we encounter in life can ever be fully known. There is always more to discover. Making those discoveries, and taking them to heart, can sometimes correct biases that have been stifling our relationships with the people we’ve known the longest—our families.

The complex emotional lattice of every family is unique in important ways, and our families affect us in ways that other relationships do not. Families share history, experience, and blood as no other relationships can. We can’t replace a person we’ve known for our entire lives. More importantly, we can’t replace a person who’s known us for our entire lives. Nurturing and enriching these relationships despite challenges, persevering, and appreciating the positive things we get from them is worth the trouble. Bob thinks of a moment when, as a young man, he was going through a time in which he was incredibly angry at his parents, and an uncle took him aside. I know you’re mad, his uncle said. But just remember: nobody is ever going to care about you this much ever again.

First, start with yourself. What kinds of automatic reactions do you have to your family members? Are you passing judgment based on past experiences, and foreclosing the opportunity for something different to happen?

One simple thing we can all do is to notice when we find ourselves wanting someone to be different than they are. We can ask ourselves, What if I just let this person be themselves without passing judgment? How would this moment be different? Recognizing another person for who they are and meeting them where they are can go a long way toward deepening a connection.

Second, routines are important. We mentioned in Chapter Seven that one way to enliven intimate relationships is to step out of routines. While breaking up routines can also be great for families who find themselves stuck in the doldrums, the fact is that family relationships are often defined by their regular contact. This is true for families that live under the same roof together, and it’s especially true for families that are living apart. Regular get-togethers, dinners, phone calls, and text messages all serve, in combination, to glue a family together. As life changes and becomes more complicated, finding new rituals can help keep family connections alive when they would otherwise wither. Regular contact used to happen more often through religious events like baptisms, Ramadan, and bar/bat mitzvahs. These still occur of course, but as the world becomes more secular, some families struggle to find replacements.

9: The Good Life at Work

“Harvard Study Questionnaire, 1979:

Q: If you could stop working without loss of income, would you? What would you do instead?

There are many participants in the Harvard Study who held “dream jobs”—from medical

researchers to successful authors to wealthy Wall Street brokers—who were nonetheless unhappy at work. And there are inner-city participants who held “unimportant” or difficult jobs and yet derived much satisfaction and meaning from them. Why? What is the missing piece? In this chapter we focus on one important aspect of work that many of us, regardless of what we do for a living, often overlook: the impact that our relationships at work have on our life. Not only because these relationships are important to our well-being, as we’ve discussed, but also because they’re aspects of our work lives that we have some control over, and that have the potential to improve our daily experience immediately. We may not always get to choose what we do for a living, but making work work for us may be more possible than we think.

But are we missing something here? Is the separation we perceive between work and life helping or hindering us in our quest for the good life? What if the value of work—even work we dislike—lies not just in getting paid, but also in the moment-to-moment sensations of being alive in the workplace, and the feeling of vitality we get from being connected to others? What if even the most ordinary workday presents real opportunities for improving our lives and our sense of being connected to the broader world?

Achievement is most meaningful when it is relational. When what we do matters to other people, it matters more to us.

Our time at work affects our time at home, our time at home affects our time at work, and it is our relationships in both places that form the foundation of that interplay. When there is an imbalance, the source can sometimes be found in the way we have been attending to our relationships on one side or the other.

It’s no coincidence that many of the least satisfying jobs are also some of the loneliest. In the recent past, truck driving, night security, and certain kinds of overnight shift work have been some of the more isolating jobs. Now isolating jobs are also common in emergent, tech-driven industries. People who work for package- and food-delivery services, and other businesses in the gig economy for example, often have no coworkers at all. Online retailing is now a vast industry with millions of workers, but even packing and sorting in a fulfillment warehouse, where there are plenty of coworkers, can be lonely.

If we feel disconnected from others at work, that means we feel lonely for the majority of our waking hours. This is a health concern. As we’ve mentioned elsewhere, loneliness increases our risk of death as much as smoking or obesity. If we find ourselves feeling lonely at work, it may be up to us to create opportunities for social connection to the extent that we can. For parents raising their kids at home, play dates or visits to a local park (which are often as much for the parents as for the kids) can be restorative. For warehouse workers, there may be opportunities to connect with people directly before a shift, or directly after.

The satisfaction that comes from being generative makes the good life at work more possible.

As we progress through the stages of our lives there are transitions that will occur in our work as well, whether it be when we receive promotions, get laid off, move into new jobs, or have kids. With each major transition it never hurts to step back and reassess our new lives from a bird’s-eye view: How are my relationships in the work world and beyond being affected by the current change? Are there choices I can make to maintain connections with people who are important to me? Are there new opportunities for connection here that I’m missing?”

Henry’s realization about wanting to be around people also teaches us an important lesson—not about retirement, but about work itself: the people we work with matter. It’s important to look around our workplaces and appreciate those coworkers who add value to our lives. Since work is often so shrouded in financial concerns, in stress and worry, the relationships we develop there sometimes don’t get their due. We often don’t notice how significant our work relationships really are until they’re gone.

Advances in communication technologies are making remote work much more common for jobs in business, media, education, and other industries, and an always-on mentality threatens to make workers’ home lives into an extension of the work sphere. To say the least, a consideration of how these changes have affected our social fitness has not been a top priority. And yet the state of our relationships is among the most important factors in our health and well-being.

If we want to take full advantage of the hours of our lives—many of which are spent at work—we must remember that work is a major source of socializing and connection. Change the nature of work, and you change the nature of life.

Our brains, tuned for novelty and danger, catch fire when stimulated by the wonders of new technology and the stresses of the workplace. Compared to those two things, the subtle currents of our positive relationships, so important to our well-being, are likely to be overshadowed. If our relationships—both at work and at home—are going to thrive in this new work environment, we have to elevate and care for them. We are the only ones who can. If we don’t, and if the Harvard Study still exists in eighty years, then when today’s youngest generation reaches their 80s and the interviewers ask if there was anything they regret about their lives, they might look back, as some of our First Generation participants did in their comments quoted earlier in this chapter, and realize that something crucial has been lost.

So tomorrow when you get up and go to work, consider a few questions:

• Who are the people I most enjoy and value at work, and what is it about them that is valuable? Am I appreciating them?

• Who is different from me in some way (who thinks differently, comes from a different background, has different expertise), and what can I learn from that person?

• If I’m having a conflict with another worker, what can I do to alleviate it? Would the W.I.S.E.R. model be useful?

• What kinds of connections am I missing at work that I might want more of? Could I imagine a way to make these connections more likely, or richer?

• Do I really know my workmates? Is there someone I’d like to know better? How can I reach out to them? You might even pick that person with whom you seem to have the least in common, and make a point to be curious and ask about something that they’ve displayed, like pictures of family or pets or a T-shirt they wear at work.

Every workday is an important personal experience, and to the extent we can enrich each one with relationships, we benefit. Work, too, is life.

10: All Friends Have Benefits

“Ananda, one of the Buddha’s disciples, said to the Buddha one day,

“I’ve realized that half of the path to the holy life is made of good friendships.”

“No, Ananda,” the Buddha said. “Friends are not half of the holy life. They are all of the holy life.”

Upaddha Suta

Harvard Study Questionnaire, 1989:

Q: Consider your 10 best friends (excluding family and close relatives). How many of them would you place in each of the following categories?

(1) Intimate; we share most of our joys and sorrows;

(2) Companionship; we have frequent interactions arising out of shared interests;

(3) Casual; we don’t seek each other out.

All of this is natural. But along with the natural ebb and flow of life, each of us has a habitual approach to friendships. Often this approach is less than conscious, close to automatic. We give our friendships whatever feels natural to give them, rather than considering what they need. As we get older and life becomes busier, we have to make decisions about the limited time we have, and our friends often come last.

The power of friendship isn’t just the stuff of anecdotes or philosophical observation; science has clearly shown this effect. Friends diminish our perception of hardship—making us perceive adverse events as less stressful than we might otherwise see them—and even when we do experience extreme stress, friends can diminish its impact and duration. We feel the stress, but with the help of friends we’re better able to manage it. Less stress and better stress management lead to less wear and tear on our bodies.

Friends, in short, keep us healthier.

In Chapter Two we discussed a 2010 review conducted by Julianne Holt-Lunstad and others that brought together 148 studies and a vast amount of data to analyze the effect that social connections have on health and longevity. Among those 148 studies were a number that focused specifically on friendship. Here are a few that make the point:

• A large longitudinal study in Australia found that people over 70 with the strongest network of friends were 22 percent less likely to die during the study period (ten years) than those with the weakest network of friends

• A longitudinal study of 2,835 nurses with breast cancer found that women who had ten or more friends were four times more likely to survive than women who had no close friends.

• A longitudinal study of over 17,000 men and women between the ages of 29 and 74 in Sweden found that stronger social connections decreased the risk of dying from all causes by almost a fourth over a period of six years.

What role did friendships play amid these challenges? Do their experiences have any lessons for us?

They do. Using participants’ firsthand accounts of their combat experiences and their connections to fellow servicemen, we found that those men who had more positive friendships with their fellow servicemen, and who served in combat units that were more cohesive and connected, were less likely to experience symptoms of PTSD after the war. Their friendships, in other words, were like a kind of protective armor. Having good and trusted friends buffered these men during some of the most difficult events of their lives.

In one fascinating study, researchers divided a set of participants (who wanted a coffee) into two groups: one group was instructed to have an interaction with the barista, and the other to be as efficient as possible. Like the “strangers on a train” study that we mentioned in Chapter Two, the researchers found that people who smiled, made eye contact, and had a social interaction with the barista—in this case, a complete stranger—came away feeling better, and with a greater sense of belonging, than those who were instructed to be as efficient as possible. In short, having a friendly moment with a stranger was uplifting.

Small moments can provide an uplift for our mood and they can help balance out some of the stress we feel. An annoying commute can be softened by a short conversation with the security guard at work. A sense of disconnection can be alleviated when we say hello to our mail carrier. These kinds of minute interactions can affect our mood and energy throughout the day. If we get in the habit of seeking out and noticing opportunities for these daily uplifts, over time they can have far-reaching effects. Not only for us, but for our social networks as a whole; repeated casual contact has been shown to foster the formation of closer friendships. And sometimes even the most casual contact can open us up to whole new realms of experience.

The sociologist Mark Granovetter has done important research showing the crucial significance of these casual ties. People we know only peripherally, Granovetter has argued, create important bridges to new social networks.

Conclusion: It's Never Too Late to be Happy

“Recall the wisdom of the Zen master Shunryu Suzuki: “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s mind there are few.

If you want to keep track of our latest efforts, they can be found at the Lifespan Research Foundation (www.Lifespanresearch.org).

The primary challenge of happiness research comes in the application of insight to actual lives, each of which is highly individual and does not fit neatly into any group template. The findings and ideas we’ve presented in this book are based on research, but science can’t know the turmoil or contradictions you feel in your heart. It can’t quantify the stir that you experience when a certain friend calls. It can’t know what keeps you up at night, or what you regret, or how you express your love. Science can’t say whether you’re calling your kids too much or too little, or whether you should reconnect with a particular family member. It can’t say if it would be better for you to have a heart-to-heart over a cup of coffee or play a game of basketball or go for a walk with a friend. Those answers can only come through reflection, and figuring out what works for you. For anything in this book to be useful, you will need to tune in to your unique life experience and make its lessons your own.

But here’s what science can tell you:

Good relationships keep us happier, healthier, and help us live longer.

This is true across the lifespan, and across cultures and contexts, which means it is almost certainly true for you, and for nearly every human being who has ever lived.

Thousands of stories from the Harvard Study show us that the good life is not found by providing ourselves with leisure and ease. Rather, it arises from the act of facing inevitable challenges, and from fully inhabiting the moments of our lives. It appears, quietly, as we learn how to love and how to open ourselves to being loved, as we grow from our experiences, and as we stand in solidarity with others through the inevitable string of joys and adversities in every human life.

How do you move further along on your own path toward a good life? First, by recognizing that the good life is not a destination. It is the path itself, and the people who are walking it with you. As you walk, second by second you can decide to whom and to what you give your attention. Week by week you can prioritize your relationships and choose to be with the people who matter. Year by year you can find purpose and meaning through the lives that you enrich and the relationships that you cultivate. By developing your curiosity and reaching out to others—family, loved ones, coworkers, friends, acquaintances, even strangers—with one thoughtful question at a time, one moment of devoted, authentic attention at a time, you strengthen the foundation of a good life.