How successful would you say you've been in your career? How many work days a year, on average, do you miss because of illness? If given an opportunity to change your present occupation without loss of income, would you do it?

Okay, I want you to be honest here. Are these questions that you're hearing easy to answer? What about these?

What type of house did you live in? How neat and tidy was your home? What are some of the social service agencies that have supported you and your family growing up?

Here's the deal. These are some of the survey questions asked in Harvard's study on Adult Development. It is the longest scientific study of human happiness, and one of the only ones in history to track the same people from their adolescence into their 90s. The man you hear talking, he's in charge of it. That's Dr. Robert Wauwdinger. He's a psychiatrist, a professor, and a Zen master.

No study has lasted 86 years. That's just unheard of. So to be able to follow entire lives for that many decades gives us a view that we've never had before of human life.

Now, when the study began in 1938, it had just over 700 participants. All of them were white men. Some of them were students at Harvard University. Others were adolescents living in different neighborhoods around Boston. Nearly seven decades later, in 2003, Bob took over the study, and he expanded it to include the spouses and the descendants of the original group. Now, he says asking the participants these and other questions every couple of years has helped him and other researchers understand what it truly takes to live a happy life: physical and mental health, career, marital quality, much more. Bob has shared his findings in his latest book called The Good Life: Lessons from the longest scientific study of happiness.

What we found was that no life is good all the time. Moment to moment, happiness changes. And that's important to remember because we can imagine that I just have to do everything right, and then I'll be happy all the time. And that's not true for anybody.

Now, that really resonated with me. You see, I've been thinking about this all season. I consider myself to be a pretty happy guy, but obviously, I'm not happy all the time. And that's okay. If I've learned anything from talking with happiness experts this season, it's that being able to get through uncertainty and to be able to get through the hard in life. That's just as important as being able to experience bliss. Sure, there are lots of sources of joy to tap into, both internal and external, but you've got to be able to weather the hard times. So I wanted to hear more about Bob's findings from the Harvard study and also ask him how we should define a good life, especially if nobody is happy all the time. What relationships actually help us maintain happiness? And what should What we do in those moments where we have setbacks and things that don't work out? I'm Dr. Sanjay Gupta, CNN's Chief Medical Correspondent, and this is Chasing Life.

I've had the chance to spend a little bit of time with you in person. Obviously, I know your work. I've read your book. I've read your research. One of the takeaways that people will have is just the importance of cultivating connection. I don't know. I feel like you and I are both doctors. I think maybe in part it's because of the rigors of med school, and then I did seven years of training, you start to live a pretty insular life, I think. I felt to be social always felt like a luxury. It wasn't that I didn't want to be social. It's just that I usually had other things to do. And when I could be social, it seemed like I was luxuriating in it opposed to it feeling like a necessity. Is it a necessity or is it a luxury?

Well, what we've learned is that it's a necessity. Now, what we found was that the important thing was to stay actively connected to at least a few people because we all need a sense of connection to somebody as we go through life. The people who were connected to other people lived longer and stayed physically healthy healthier than the people who were more isolated. That was the surprise in our study, not that people were happier, but that they lived longer.

If I might, because, again, we're both doctors, what is the mechanism? Do you think about this in a mechanistic way? Yes.

And we've been spending the last 10 years in our lab trying to understand that. The best data that we have and other studies have has to do with stress and relief of stress. If I have something When upsetting happen today, I can literally feel my body rev up into fight or flight mode. Heart rate goes up, respirations increase, circulating stress hormones go up. That's not a problem. That's normal, the fight or flight response. But what we're meant to do is go back to equilibrium when the stress is removed. If I can go home and complain to my wife or call up a friend, I can literally feel my body calm down. What we think happens is that people who are isolated, people who are lonely, who don't feel connected, stay in a low-level fight or flight mode. Instead of coming back to equilibrium, they have higher levels of circulating stress hormones. They have immune systems that don't function as well, so they get infections more easily. And that chronic inflammation breaks down body systems. So it's how, For example, if you're lonely or isolated, you might be more likely to get heart disease, you might be more likely to get type 2 diabetes or arthritis, because all of those body systems could be worn away slowly by chronic inflammation.

How good would you characterize the data around this? When we look at studies, there's so many factors and variables you have to control for. Someone who's living an isolated life, maybe they're not caring for themselves as well. How good is the data?

It's such an important question because in this research, we can't set up controlled experiments where we assign you to be lonely and have chronic inflammation, and we assign me to be well connected. We can't do that. So we are doing what we think of as correlational studies. What that means is that while we can't prove that one thing causes another, when many different studies of many different groups point to the same thing, we develop more confidence that these ideas are likely to be true. And as far as we know, the best hypothesis we have about social connection is that it helps relieve stress and reduce chronic inflammation.

I think there are things that intuitively make sense. So it's not like you're saying something that is wildly surprising. We've known this, but now you have data, correlational, but large amounts of correlational data to show this. I have three teenagers, Bob. Talk about stress. Well, I got to say, I have a lot of respect for parents, more so after I became a parent myself. But it is the best thing in my life. It really is. They're 19, 17, and 15 now. I said this to my wife last night. We We had a family dinner, and then, as often happens at our house, a bunch of other kids show up in our house. We're feeding a neighborhood of kids, and it's wonderful. It's just like I love the energy. But let me ask you It's nice, though. And they're social kids, but they're growing up in a different world than you and I grew up with, primarily with devices and social media. It's social, but on media, on screens, on digital devices.

Does that count?

How much of the connection has to be in person?

Well, we're all wondering about this. We're all concerned about it, right? And I think that some of the research suggests that there's no single effect of social media, that a lot depends on how we use social media. So I believe it was Jean Twenge, whose work suggests that if my-Igene.

I-gen.

Yeah.

I've spoken to Jean Twangi, and interestingly, she She had made the decision not to give her kids smartphones until they graduated from high school, which was a big point of discussion that we had. And of course, I had my kids listen to Twangi's comments about this.

Now, I want to pause here for a moment to emphasize Bob's point about social media and quality connections. Also, to mention where Jean fits into all this. She's a psychology professor at San Diego State University, and she's author of iGen, why today's super connected kids are growing up less rebellious, more tolerant, less happy, and completely unprepared for adulthood, and what that means for the rest of us. That's the title of her book. I've read that book, and I spoke to her on an earlier episode. She had a lot of concerns that today's digital world is making our kids more lonely, more depressed, and that it's negatively affecting their mental health. Now, Bob argues that her work also shows that the way we to use social media does matter. It's not so binary to use it or not use it, but rather how you actually use it. Using it as a tool to meet new people or connecting with friends and family, that could help. But doomscrolling and Measuring yourself against others, that, of course, is not likely to make you happy.

You know, one of the mechanisms they find that makes this difficult for our mental health is comparison. That when we scroll, it just pulls for comparison. And they've done really good research where they will ping people all day long and ask them, How much in the last hour have you compared yourself to someone else? The people who do less comparing all day long are happy easier by far than the people who naturally compare themselves to others. So if you're on a social media platform that just begs you to compare yourself to other people, you're going to end up less happy.

After the break, I'm going to ask Professor Wauwinger about the Harvard study of Adult Development. What makes men and women happy, really? And why Bob is confident the findings are more relevant now than ever.

I'm wondering if you can just give us an overview of the Harvard study of Adult Development. Yeah. That's the study. When did it start? And what was the goal, as best you can describe it, at the time it started? Yes.

The study started in 1938. Actually, it was two studies at Harvard University, but the studies didn't know about each other. One was a study of undergraduate students, college sophomores, 19 years old, chosen by their deans as fine, outstanding young men. And it was meant to be a study of normal development from adolescence to young adulthood. So of course, if you want to study normal development, you study all white guys from Harvard, right? I mean, we don't do that anymore. But at that time, that's what they chose. The other study was started at Harvard Law School by Sheldon Gluck and Eleanor Gluck, and they were interested in juvenile delinquencies, and particularly how some children from really difficult backgrounds managed to stay on good developmental paths in spite of their difficulties at home. And so we followed both the children who didn't get into trouble from those difficult backgrounds in Boston and the Harvard students. They were both meant to be studies of human thriving, which was pretty unusual in the 1930s and '40s, because most of the research we do is on what goes wrong in human development because we want to see how to make things better.

But this was radical because it was, well, what goes right for people?

There was, I think, just over 700 participants. Is that right?

Yes. And then we brought in wives and we brought in children, and more than half the children are women. So we have gender balance now in the study.

So it was all white men initially, and I think anybody would hear that and say, Well, that's not going to be representative. But once you started to bring in wives, but also different socioeconomic backgrounds, everything, did it change a lot? I guess what I'm asking, are there some universalities to the findings?

Yeah, that's really important. In fact, it is still all a Caucasian sample because in 1938, the city of Boston was 97.4% white. The migration of people of color into the city of Boston didn't happen until after World War II. What that means is we still have a group of people we study who are almost all Caucasian. So what we do is we make sure that when we present a finding, that it is corroborated by studies of more diverse samples. So in our book, for example, we don't present findings that seem idiosyncratic to white people, or people from Boston, or people from Harvard.

I'm Indian background. My wife is Scandinavian. She's Swedish. Would it be fair to say that the same things that make my people, Indians, have a good life, have happiness, are the same things in Sweden?

I would say yes, because our biology is so similar, almost identical. The genetic differences that distinguish among us who are from different parts of the world are tiny compared with how much we have in common biologically. That's important. Now, of course, we live in different cultures which shape us tremendously. We also live in different parts of the world. Scandinavia has a whole different climate, different sunlight patterns than South Asia. So there are real differences, but that what we find is that what we have in common is so much more extensive than the differences that exist among people.

You mentioned the mechanism now, and you gave your own example that if you're having a stressful day, you go home and have someone to talk to, in this case, your wife. But if you go back and look at way back in human evolution, was the value of being social survival at that point, or what was the value then?

That's what we think. Now, of course, we can't know because we weren't there, but it seems pretty clear that there was great survival value in being in groups. And so what we know, for example, now is that people who are alone are slightly more stressed. And in fact, people who sleep alone sleep slightly less soundly than people who are not alone. And that's probably because biologically, we got selected out to be in groups, that the people who were in groups survived and therefore passed on their genes more frequently than the people who were more isolated.

The study started in 1938. You've talked about the scope and the methodology. When you took it on, what did you want to do with it?

Well, the first thing I wanted to do was bring in more women. I said, We just have to do this. And many of the wives said, It's about time you brought us in. We've been watching our husbands fill out these questionnaires and go for exams for years. I wanted to bring in new methods. So people had never been videotaped. They'd certainly never been scanned. We put people into MRI scanners and watched their brains light up when we showed them different images. We drew blood for DNA and messenger RNA. And what I love about that is that DNA wasn't even imagined in 1938. Here we were using it in the 2000s.

Did marriage matter versus just having lots of social connections?

Marriage mattered, but almost all of our folks got married, and that's probably because they were in the World War II generation, where the patterns were so consistently about partnering. Over 90% of our folks got married. That's not the case now, as we know. But what we do know from studies now is that People who are partnered live longer. For men, it's 7-17 years longer. For women, it's 5-12 years longer. Men always have a better deal in marriage, but it's also probably because women are more socially connected elsewhere, and men tend to be more connected to partners, to wives, and to let their wives manage the social life. Whereas women tend to have more independent social connections.

The mechanism, again, I keep coming back to this. When I first started thinking about your work, I thought, Okay, I'm going to live longer if I'm married because someone Someone's looking out for me. They're making sure I don't eat junk food all the time. They go to the doctor's visits. How much do you think is that?

That's exactly right. We actually looked into that a bit. What made some people die quickly after their spouses passed away, men more commonly than women? It was that they stopped taking their medicine. It was that they didn't eat right. They didn't get off the couch and move. And one of the things we know is that when you have a partner, they get you going. They get you moving. They keep you behaving in healthier ways. That all has tremendous benefit. The other thing we know is that social connection that we have with our partners, for example, stimulates our brains, keeps our moods better, and it also keeps us sharper. And so all of that, all of that could be substituted by other relationships. You don't have to have a partner to do that, but you need that engagement and stimulation to keep life going as you get older.

As you get older. Do we become happier as we get older?

We do. There's an investigator, a psychologist named Laura Carstensen at Stanford, and she was the first to discover that human beings get happier as we get older, our moods get elevated on average. And her work suggests that this has to do with the awareness that life is short. Long about middle age, where you can literally track it from about age 45, the awareness of our mortality grows. You would think that would It makes us more depressed, right? But in fact, it has the opposite effect. That what it does is it makes us savor life more. It makes us stop and smell the roses. It makes us actually trim our social worlds a bit. So we stop Stop. We stop hanging out with those people who we really haven't enjoyed in a long time. We stop going to those meetings or doing those activities that we no longer care about. We begin to say no to the things that don't energize us, and that has the effect of making us happier.

The interesting thing about a study like this is you get, obviously, the prospective data, but then you get a chance for people to reflect, I guess, on their lives as well. As they get older. I wonder if there were any differences between men and women in terms of what they wish they had done more of or less of later in life. Yes.

We asked people when they were around the age of 80, what do you regret the most? What are you proudest of? What everybody was proudest of had something to do with relationships. So some of these people had won big prizes, made fortunes. Nobody talked about that. What What they talked about was, I was a good parent. I was a good friend. I was a good partner. Everybody talked about other people. The regrets, the men, and again, remember, this was the World War II generation, our first generation. The men pretty commonly said, I wish I hadn't spent so much time at work, and I wish I had spent more time with the people I care about. The women didn't say that as much, but they I said, I wish I hadn't spent so much time worrying about what other people thought. And there's that theme of authenticity. I wish I could be myself more. And I think as we get older, I've certainly felt this in my own life. I feel freer just to be me. And I'll give you an example. I'm a Zen practitioner, and I kept that quiet. I thought, Well, that's really separate from my life as a researcher and a psychiatrist, and I didn't talk about it.

And then at a certain point, I said, I'm just going to be open about this. And I put up a big picture of the Buddha in my office at Massachusetts General Hospital. And when people would ask me what I did over the weekend, if I had been there, I'd said I went to a silent meditation retreat. I just started being more myself in that way, and it was liberating.

We'll be right back.

You write in the book that broader social networks, more social activity, resulted in later onset and even slower rates of cognitive decline. Yes. What does a broad social network mean? How would you define that?

It depends on whether you're more introverted or extroverted, but let's just take an average. Let's say that a broad social network includes close friends and family, but it also includes work colleagues, some of whom you're not close to, but you say hello to every day. Some of it includes the person in the coffee shop who you see each day and who gives you your coffee. It includes the person in the checkout line, the cashier. These what are sometimes called weak ties in the research literature, but they're really casual ties that they matter. They turn out to give us little hits of well-being and belonging longing. And so you probably know there's some research on how talking to strangers actually makes us happier and feel more energized, even though we think we're not going to like it.

Yeah, it's really interesting. I feel like I get a greater return, if you will, when I reach out to other people or just have that longer conversation with the barista or whoever it might be. And I also feel good when I do something nice for other people, which is interesting because I think what we seem to learn from a very young age is that there's this survival of the fittest notion that I need to survive. And it's rugged individualism, not reciprocal altruism. Yeah. Evolutionarily, that is what we think happens to humans and to other species as well.

The individualism?

Yeah. The idea that fundamentally, you survive. And I realized Darwin did not say, Survival of the Fittest, but that was how it was interpreted, right? And fit could mean a lot of different things, but fundamentally, it meant, I need to get what's mine versus being altruistic. And yet it feels so good to be altruistic.

Well, right. And there's a lot of wisdom that points us in the opposite direction. There's an African proverb I really like, If you want to go quickly, go alone. If you want to go far, go with other people. And there's a quote from the Dalai Lama. He says, The wise, selfish person takes care of other people. And what he meant by that is that when you actually give to others, You feel better. A lot of the giving ends up coming back to you directly or indirectly. In fact, the survival of the fittest model doesn't work very well because we really can't do it alone. We can't do life alone. And I think that not just ancient teachers, but modern science tells us that we are a whole lot stronger when we give to other people and when they give back to us.

Is there a way to measure the strength of a relationship? I've heard things like, Is this a person you could call in the middle of the night with a problem? Is this someone you could be vulnerable around? How do you think of the strength of a social connection?

I think those are really good measures. Like, will this person have my back? If I'm in trouble, would this person be there for me? Can I be myself with this person? But there are other kinds of relationships that do different things for us. I have a neighbor who has every tool you could ever need. And when I need to fix something in my house, I go to him and loans me tools. He's not my nearest and dearest, but that's not what our relationship is. We help each other out with material things. And so what I think is important is to think about each relationship playing its own unique role and hoping that you can both give and receive in that relationship in certain ways that are useful, nourishing, helpful in your life.

I think for a lot of my life, the idea of material success was really celebrated. There was movies like Wall Street, so Greed is Good, and that thing. The idea of social connection being the aspiration. I think, again, we intuitively know that, but it's not represented, I think, in popular culture. It is in your book, which is great, and everyone should read it. But the idea that that we aspire to collect more and more material goods, and that is this badge of success. And if we haven't done that, then we haven't done everything we could in this life. It's a strong force to contend with, I think. I think about this again with my own kids. If you poll young children nowadays or young people, I should say, 80 % say that they want to get rich.

Yes.

That's what they say. Yes. So despite the fact that we know these things, they are intuitive, I think, in many ways, still, 80% of young people, that's what they say they want to do.

If you think about the images we see all day long, it's of wealth, it's of material goods, and happy people with They buy certain brands of automobiles or brands of pasta or whatever. The subliminal message is, if you have these things, these possessions, you're going to be happier. We post these curated images images of our lives for each other, and you'd think we were always on wonderful vacations or at great parties. I think that the images we get of what life is like are not the real image, not the truth of what life is like for most people. That's why actually we wrote this book, and that's why I'm spending a lot of my time now talking about these ideas. And thank you for helping me bring these ideas to more people, because I I feel like it's a counterpoint to all these images we get of wealth and Fame and high achievement all day long.

Bob, is a good life a happy life?

It's partly happy. Every life has ups and downs. A good life is where we feel that we can meet, most of the time, the challenges that come our way because challenges are always coming our way. And And a good life is a life where we feel like we are able to be in the world in ways that matter, matter to us and matter to other people, because I think all of us want to feel like we matter.

How can listeners live a good life? What would you tell them?

I guess two big things. One is, try to be involved in activities that you care about that means something to you. And try to be involved with people who you care about and who care about you.

Sounds doable.

Sounds doable. They're big projects. Each of them is a big lifelong project, but doable.

It's not a destination.

No, it's a practice.

It takes work. It should take work. For something as important as living a good life, it probably shouldn't be totally easy, but it should be achievable.

Yeah. Yeah. And constant work in progress. Lord knows my life is a work in progress every day.

I could talk to Professor Wauwdinger all day.

It is nice to be reminded sometimes that sources of happiness and kindness exist in expected places, but also unexpected places, from interactions with close friends and colleagues to these quick encounters with neighbors or the barista down the street. I'd encourage everyone to read his book, The Good Life. After I read it, I had some really thoughtful conversations with colleagues, friends, and family. And maybe it goes without saying, but talking to experts all season long about happiness has really shifted my own headspace. It's been really wonderful for me. It's inspired me to reflect on all the different experiences and habits that bring me joy, making me more intentional about those things. External things, traveling, eating great food, to internal things, just doing nice things for the people I love in unexpected ways, moving and exercising and really savoring every moment that I do, or just practicing gratitude. All season long, I've wanted to know what brings you joy and how you chase life.

Hey, Sanjay. My name is Jamie Lim. Chasing life to me is chasing my family. And the Irish have a saying, My family, my heart, and I can tell you something, I live by this. So for 30 years, my husband and my three kids supported me while I chased a very high profile, stressful but gratifying career. On January first, 2021, I retired. Now I have the opportunity to coach and cheerlead three grandsons, and I also knit. That gives me serious the best time to figure out strategies for chasing life more effectively.

That is so lovely. Thank you, Jamie. Now, coming up next week.

If you're sitting out in the sun and you've put sunscreen on your body, you want to know that it's doing the job.

My colleague Meg Tarrell will break down all you need to know about sunscreen. She's going to talk to sunscreen experts who will share what works, but also what doesn't, and what you need to do to stay safe when out in the sun. That's next week. Thanks for listening. Chasing Life is a production of CNN Audio. Our podcast is produced by Erin Matheison, Jennifer Lye, Grace Walker, and Jessie Remedios. Our Senior Producer and Showrunner is Felicia Patinkin. Andrea Cain is our medical writer, Dan Dizula is our Technical Director, and the executive producer of CNN Audio is Steve Ligtai. With support from Jamis Andrest, John Dianora, Haley Thomas, Alex Manasari, Robert Mathers, Lanie Steinhart, Nicole Pessereau, and Lisa Namarot. Special thanks to Ben Tinker, Amanda Sealy, and Nadia Konang,ang of CNN Health, and Katie Hinman.