The study spanning 85 years has found that good relationships are the biggest determining factor of human happiness.
Last year in August I had a major emotional breakdown. I needed help and I called my best friend, who dropped everything she was doing to come to my aid. With her emotional as well as physical support, I was able to vault out of a difficult situation and chart a new path for myself.
Furthermore, my sister who lives in the USA and with whom I share an intimate bond, called me every day just to listen and hold space for me. I feel short of words to describe how healing and cathartic this simple act of hers was. It revived me. Or else who knows I could have developed a major health issue or gone into depression.
No matter how strong and independent we are, we can never discount the value of good relationships in our lives. They keep us emotionally secure, stable, supported, and happy. According to the findings of a long-term study started by Harvard University in 1938, it’s not career achievement, money, exercise, or diet but positive relationships that keep us happier, and healthier, and help us live longer.
The Harvard Study
The researchers gathered health records from over 700 young participants. By now, the Harvard Study of Adult Development has expanded to three generations and more than 1,300 descendants of the original subject. It is by far the most in-depth study of human happiness. The researchers questioned the subjects every few years to study their health trajectories and their broader lives, including their triumphs and failures in careers and marriage, and the findings have produced startling lessons.
From all the data, what has clearly emerged is that strong relationships are what make for a happy life. More than bank balance, IQ, or social class, it’s the robustness of our bonds that determines our happiness and well-being.
Good relationships generate positive thoughts and feelings, making people feel wanted, appreciated, relevant, valued, and loved. That boosts confidence, and self-esteem, and builds immunity as well as the will to fight and overcome challenges.
Loneliness, on the other hand, can lead to diseases such as high blood pressure, heart disease, obesity, a weakened immune system, anxiety, depression, cognitive decline, and Alzheimer’s, even death.
Before the mobile and internet era, people confidently visited families without informing them in advance only to be greeted with joy and warmth. Instead of having 300 friends on Facebook, people enjoyed 30 solid and reliable connections which often lasted a lifetime.
Not a day goes by in the life of my mother, 70, who lives in a suburban township in India when she does not have visitors to entertain. This is because she goes out of her way to forge friendships and is extremely sweet in her treatment of people.
In 2021 when my mother contracted COVID, she was supported by the entire neighborhood. They sent cooked food every day and ran errands for her, helping her recover fast. Even today she is loath to move to the national capital to live with me simply because of the convivial society she has created for herself back home.
Loneliness afflicts people in old age especially. In such times if you have the company of loving and caring people around you, you are likely to be fitter and live longer.
Connection with health and longevity
Strong relationships have a robust link with good mental as well as physical health. In his seminal work, Outliers: The Story of Success, author Malcolm Gladwell shares the fascinating story of Roseto, a town in Pennsylvania in America whose residents came from the village of Roseto Valfortore in Italy. Intrigued by the extremely low incidence of disease in Roseto, including no coronary artery disease in anyone below 55 years of age, medical researchers started studying this phenomenon in the 1960s. The results shocked them. The Rosetans did not follow a healthy diet, smoked heavily, rarely exercised, and were largely overweight. It did not matter. In contrast, their relatives living elsewhere had a high incidence of disease, busting the genetic explanation. Nearby towns with the same climate and environmental influences had an incidence of heart disease three times more than their Rosetan neighbors.
With the medical research team failing to offer an explanation, social scientists were called in. They described a unique feature that defined the town’s social structure. They discovered a feeling of trust and security among Rosetans who always had someone they knew and whom they could turn to for support. These researchers concluded that the extraordinary health of this unique population could only be explained in terms of ‘extended family’ and ‘community’.
The importance of being ‘socially fit’
In a new book, The Good Life: Lessons From the World’s Longest Scientific Study of Happiness, Dr Bob Waldinger, professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and fourth director of the aforementioned study, and Marc Schulz, associate director of the study, and a psychology professor at Bryn Mawr College, have distilled the study’s insights.
They have coined the term ‘social fitness’.
“It’s just as crucial as physical fitness,” writes Dr Waldinger. “Our social life is a living system, and it needs exercise. It’s a choice you make to invest in, week by week, year by year — one that has huge benefits.”
The importance of this observation cannot be emphasized enough.
In our overly busy lives these days, one of the biggest casualties is relationships. Unlike the olden days when people freely mingled with others, today in the era of gated societies and apartment complexes, people live like strangers even with next-door neighbors.
In Japan, this problem has become alarming.
According to www.nippon.com, the high number of socially isolated people in Japan corresponds to its high levels of suicide. In 2015, the country ranked eighteenth highest among 183 countries in the number of suicides per 100,000 population.
In February 2021, the Japanese government appointed its first cabinet minister in charge of policy on loneliness and isolation and established an office responsible to tackle this burgeoning problem. Their report revealed that Japan has a high proportion of people with nobody they could rely upon, except for cohabiting family members, indicating a high level of social isolation.
Shyness, inability to break the ice, overthinking, feeling unwanted, social awkwardness, or a strong sense of protecting personal freedom can lead to social isolation as well as loneliness. Therefore, it is important to learn social skills and form groups and societies where people can come together at regular intervals to fight this malaise.
Happy family
Positive relationships include not just friends, community, and extended family, but the immediate family as well.
Toxic family environments, dysfunctional or abusive families can affect our long-term health and happiness in a big way. Often the inability to form healthy connections outside stems from the fear, hurts, and damage caused by the birth family.
Unhealed minds develop trust issues, preventing people from coming closer to others for fear of getting hurt or manipulated. Though one cannot do much about the family one is born into, the onus is on us to heal our minds and replace self-sabotaging beliefs with positive, self-affirming beliefs.
Secondly, keeping the ego aside, a willingness to work on issues, developing a healthy, solution-oriented style of communication, cultivating the ability to listen, and spending quality time with family members go a long way in creating mentally and physically healthy individuals.
Positive relations are the biggest determinant of human happiness. By default this also means that it is the area we need to be most vigilant about. There is much we can learn about ourselves, people, and the world if we begin to focus on ‘social fitness’.
More at www.adultdevelopmentstudy.org/
Photos courtesy Pexels and Dr Waldinger
