In this episode, Dr. Robert Waldinger explores why good relationships are the key to living a long and happy life. Drawing from more than 85 years of research, Robert shares why deep, supportive relationships are stronger predictors of health and happiness than wealth, success, or status. He also explains how relationships regulate stress, why loneliness can be as harmful as smoking, and how we can proactively cultivate social fitness. Listeners will walk away with practical ways to strengthen existing relationships, build new ones, and approach connection as an essential practice for well-being.
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Key Takeaways:
- The significance of relationships for health and happiness.
- Insights from the Harvard Study of Adult Development on what constitutes a good life.
- The complexities and challenges of living well despite societal pressures.
- The impact of loneliness and social isolation on physical and mental health.
- The critique of cultural messages equating happiness with material success.
- The importance of self-acceptance and acknowledging both positive and negative aspects of oneself.
- Strategies for nurturing and maintaining meaningful relationships.
- The role of curiosity in enhancing social connections and overcoming discomfort.
- The intersection of scientific research and Zen practice in understanding human well-being.
- The concept of “social fitness” and the ongoing effort required to cultivate relationships.
Robert Waldinger is a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, director of the Harvard Study of Adult Development at Massachusetts General Hospital, and cofounder of the Lifespan Research Foundation. Dr. Waldinger received his AB from Harvard College and his MD from Harvard Medical School. He is a practicing psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, and he directs a psychotherapy teaching program for Harvard psychiatry residents. He is also a Zen master (Roshi) and teaches meditation in New England and around the world. Robert is the co-author of the book The Good Life: Lessons From the World’s Longest Scientific Study on Happiness
Connect with Robert Waldinger: Website | Instagram | Twitter | Facebook | Ted Talk
If you enjoyed this conversation with Robert Waldinger, check out these other episodes:
The Midlife Makeover: Redefining Success and Happiness After 40 with Chip Conley
The Happiness Formula: Using Your Body to Transform Your Mind with Janice Kaplan
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Episode Transcript:
Eric Zimmer 01:59
Hi Bob, welcome to the show. Thank
Robert Waldinger 02:00
you. Great to be here.
Eric Zimmer 02:02
I’m really excited to have you on. We’re going to be discussing your book, The Good Life lessons from the world’s longest scientific study of happiness. And we also might discuss Zen practice, because you are a Zen teacher, and we’ll see where this goes. But let’s start like we always do with the parable. In the parable, there’s a grandparent who’s talking with her grandchild, and they say, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. The grandchild stops. They think about it for a second. They look up at their grandparent. They say, Well, which one wins? And the grandparent says, the one you feed. So I’d like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. It’s
Robert Waldinger 02:48
so resonant for me, because we notice, I notice that I could feed either wolf at any moment, right? There are all these choices all day, every day. You know the choice to be kind or the choice to give in to my nastier nature, right? And so that idea that we’re constantly choosing which wolf to feed just seems right on target for my day to day life. The other thing I know for myself, but also often for the people I work with in psychotherapy, is that you know that nasty wolf isn’t the one you want to parade around to the world, right? You don’t want to say, Gee, I’ve got this nasty wolf inside of me. And it’s very tempting to tell ourselves that we don’t have that. No, I’m not that way. I don’t have that in me. That’s also dangerous. I find that I don’t want to feed that wolf, but I want to really remember that the wolf is there, right and acknowledge it, not try to bury it, not try to push it away. Just say, Oh yeah, that’s there. That’s a possibility. Because the more I try to push anything away, as you know from Zen practice, the more you try to push it away the stronger it gets. So I don’t want to feed that wolf, but I don’t want to pretend it isn’t there either. Yeah,
Eric Zimmer 04:07
there’s sections later in the book where you talk about avoidance, you know, you talk about how people who avoid difficult things in midlife turn out to be less happy later in life. And so that’s speaking to a little bit of what you’re saying is, if we’re going to be talking about relationships, which is a lot of what we’re going to talk about here today, avoiding problems or trying to push them away and pretend they don’t exist, is not a helpful or a skillful relationship strategy or a life strategy,
Robert Waldinger 04:35
right? Exactly. I think that difficulty is when we say, No, I can’t be having this problem, or this can’t be part of who I am, right? Yeah, so that the gradual greater and greater acceptance that comes sometimes with just the wisdom of getting older, sometimes it’s the wisdom that comes from sitting on a cushion meditating. But their variety. Wisdom practices that usually include a lot of self acceptance. So
Eric Zimmer 05:06
before we get into the results of the study, just give us a couple minute overview of what is this study that you have been the director of, and that research informed so much of this book. Sure,
Robert Waldinger 05:20
this study is called the Harvard study of adult development. As far as we know, it’s the longest study of human life that’s ever been done, the longest study of the same people, the same families. It started as two studies 85 years ago, and at first the studies didn’t even know about each other. One was started at the Harvard Student Health Service, and it was a group of college sophomores, 19 year old young men who were thought by their deans to be fine, upstanding specimens. And so they were going to be part of a study of healthy development from adolescents into young adulthood, you know. And now that makes us smile, because, you know, of course, if you want to study normal development, you study all white males from Harvard. No, you don’t, but at that time, that’s what they thought would be a good group of people to study for this also, though, on the other side of the Harvard campus, at Harvard Law School, there was a law professor and his partner, a social worker, who were interested in juvenile delinquency, and they were particularly interested in how some children born into really difficult circumstances managed to thrive. So they chose 456 boys, average age 12, from Boston’s poorest neighborhoods and most troubled families, and their question was, how did these boys stay out of trouble? How is it How’s it possible that they stay out of trouble? What are the things in their home lives that would predict them not getting into trouble. So that’s what they studied. And then eventually my predecessor, I’m the fourth director, my predecessor, brought the two studies together, and we’ve studied them as contrasting groups, very underprivileged, very privileged. We’ve brought in their spouses, we’ve brought in their children, more than half of whom are women. So we have good gender balance. Now I
Eric Zimmer 07:24
know you’ve brought in their children, you’ve brought in their spouses. Have you brought in more men that were not part of this original cohort? Or is everybody that’s part of the study somehow related to that original cohort?
Robert Waldinger 07:37
Everybody is related to the original people. And the reason why we did that, we thought, you know, particularly because everybody’s all white in our study, because in Boston in 1938 the city was more than 97% white. Wow. So if you want to start a study in 1938 in Boston, that’s what you’d get. But yeah, but we thought, Well, should we bring in more diverse groups of people? But the real value of our study is that we have these long family histories and that you can’t manufacture anew if we bring in people now. And so we said, Okay, other studies are looking at people of color, people from more diverse backgrounds. We’re going to just be the study we are of this group of people and these families over time, so over 85 years, these are the people we’ve got.
Eric Zimmer 08:27
However, in working on the book, you certainly looked at lots of other research that was far outside your study to come up with a sense of like the conclusions I’m coming to here to these hold up as I look at more diverse groups,
Robert Waldinger 08:43
they do, and we’re really careful to present only the findings that are applicable that have been found in more diverse groups, because we don’t want to present as facts, findings from our study that are only specific to a group of white people, you know, of the World War Two generation. We don’t want to do that, yeah, so we’ve made sure that our findings are corroborated, are replicated by other studies.
Eric Zimmer 09:11
So before we get to the main conclusion of the study, I want to start with a basic idea that you say very early on. And you say the good life is complicated for everybody. So let’s talk about why is the good life so complicated? I mean, you and I were talking before we started. We got all these ancient wisdom traditions, 1000s of years and 1000s of years of philosophers and all kinds of modern psychology, and why is it still hard to live
Robert Waldinger 09:44
a good life? Well, I think the ancient wisdom is there because we need correctives over and over again, because these wonderful minds and bodies that we’ve evolved have terrific advantages for our survival. But they also lead us astray over and over again. So in many ways, we keep practicing spiritual traditions and religious traditions to try to bring us back to feeding the Good Wolf, the kind, compassionate Wolf, because that other Wolf is there, and we evolved to have that other wolf in us too. And I think that that’s one of the big drivers of life being so complicated for all of us, we’re always, you know, fighting against parts of our nature.
Eric Zimmer 10:28
Yeah, yeah. You go on to say in that section that there are couple of common reasons why we have a hard time finding this happiness and satisfaction. And one is, you say the good life may be central concern for most people, but it’s not the central concern of most modern societies. And the second, and you sort of alluded to this, our brains, the most sophisticated and mysterious system in the known universe, often mislead us in our quest for lasting pleasure and satisfaction. So our culture tells us certain things are really important, and our brains go, oh yeah, those things are really important. And it turns out that when we look at the research, those things don’t tend to lead to the lasting happiness in the same way that some of the things we’re going to talk about do.
Robert Waldinger 11:11
That’s right, that’s right. We get these messages all day long, if you think about it, you know from advertising, certainly from social media, subliminal messages on TV and in films everywhere about what ought to make us happy. You know, if you buy this car, you’re going to be happier if you serve this brand of pasta to your family, your family dinners are going to be blissful, right? You know, it’s all these ideas that if you consume the right things, if you purchase the right things, if you look the right way, you’re going to be happy. We know that that’s not true, and yet, the feeling we get when we look at all that is, gee, that’s not my life. I’m missing out. I need to get those things.
Eric Zimmer 11:53
Yeah, you say that money, achievement and status, part of the problem is they’re not complete mirages. And I’ve often talked about this on the show like we all know that getting a new car isn’t the answer to happiness, and if the new car gave us no enjoyment and pleasure, it would be an easy thing to see through, right? But it does, actually, for a little while, it’s just not lasting. And so we chase these short term things that actually we know will increase our pleasure temporarily, versus this unknown sort of longer term fear ephemera. Can’t say that word yes, thank you. Certain words just seem to be unpronounceable by me in my my 50s, I don’t know, but these other things are easier to see, so they’d be easier to see through if there was nothing there. Well, right?
Robert Waldinger 12:41
The other thing is that they’re measurable. So if I have a certain amount of money, I can measure that, I can show that to you, and I can compare it to how much money you have, right? Yep, if I’ve achieved a certain amount, and I win this award, or I have this title, I’ve got that, I can show that to other people. You know, think about the likes and the number of followers. I mean, it’s a whole new way of creating, essentially false measures of achievement and popularity. But, boy, they’re there, and they can be measured. And the thing we’re going to talk about, which is relationships, you can’t measure that, and they are complicated, and they’re always changing, and so you can’t point to it and say, I am the greatest at relationships. I’ve won the Nobel Prize in friendship that doesn’t exist.
Eric Zimmer 13:27
So let’s not bury the lead any further here. I mean, you say relationships are significant enough that if we had to take all 84 years of the study and boil it down to a single principle for living one investment that’s supported by similar findings across a wide variety of other studies, it would be this good relationships keep us healthier and happier. Period, yep,
Robert Waldinger 13:48
and that’s what we didn’t believe at first. You know, we figured, okay, we know so much about people that if we want to look at what predicts who’s going to live longer and stay healthier, it’s going to be blood pressure, it’s going to be cholesterol, it’s going to be those things. And what we began to find was that the strongest predictors were how satisfied we feel in our relationships with other people. We didn’t believe it at first, because we said, All right, relationships keep us happier. That makes sense, if we have good ones. But how could they make a difference in whether or not you get coronary artery disease or type two diabetes? How could that even be a thing? And then other research groups began to find the same thing. Now we know that warm social connections and more social connection are related to physical health across many, many studies. It’s a very robust scientific fact, but at first we didn’t believe it, and so we’ve spent the last decade or more trying to figure out how it works. How could relationships get into our body and shape our physic. Theology. It’s
Eric Zimmer 15:00
interesting. I’ve said this about the show, you know, I’m I don’t know how many episodes in now, 600 maybe I don’t know somewhere around there. And when I started, if you’d asked me, like, what’s most important about living a good life or being happy, I would have said it had something to do with going inside and knowing ourselves. I was a Zen practitioner, I had the sense that it was about that it was about quiet and solitude and going inside and and while all that is beneficial, the thing that I have been surprised by, I shouldn’t be surprised, because within the first year, the pattern was fairly clearly emerging that like, well, that’s not the whole story, because it’s our connection to others that really matters. I want to ask you a question about relationship, though, because, like many things in life, these things can cut both ways right, like I was in a 12 year bad marriage that nearly destroyed me, right? It was just so difficult. And no matter what we tried to do we just were the wrong fit for each other. We met when I had started drinking again. Anyway, there’s a bunch of reasons why it wasn’t the right thing. We could never really get it working well, and so in that case, I feel like that took 10 years off my life versus adding to my life. So let’s talk about what it is in a relationship that is important in our well being, happiness and longevity. What are the characteristics and knowing that most relationships are going to be a blend, right? No close relationship is without its stresses and its moments. So how do we know if the relationship is one that is actually contributing to our well being?
Robert Waldinger 16:39
Yeah, and you know, there have been some studies that show that really stressful marriages may be worse for your health than getting divorced. Probably are worse. So I think, and, yeah, and really, it’s stress. Stress seems to be the operative word here, that the best hypothesis we have about how relationships work is that they are stress regulators, that they can either ramp up our stress, or they can help us regulate and relieve stress and manage negative feelings. If you think about it, we’re having stressors. You know, sometimes all day long, but certainly many times a week, something stressful happens, and the body goes into fight or flight mode. So heart rate goes up, blood pressure goes up, higher levels of circulating stress hormones, higher levels of inflammation, right? That’s normal, because we want the body to go into a mode where it can react to challenge, but then when the challenge is removed, we want the body to go back to equilibrium. And what we think happens with good relationships, and we can demonstrate this with experiments, is that when I’m going through something stressful and my partner takes my hand or says something kind literally, my blood pressure goes down, my heart rate goes down, right? What we think happens is that people who don’t have anybody who they can talk to about what’s troubling them, or the person they live with as a source of stress chronically, all day long, we think what happens is that the body stays in a kind of fight or flight mode, and what that means is that there’s a low level constant increase in circulating cortisol and other stress hormones in low level inflammation that can break down multiple body systems. So that’s how, for example, a very stressful relationship or social isolation could make you more prone both to arthritis and to coronary artery disease, because it works throughout the body. So
Eric Zimmer 18:48
there’s a statement that’s running its way kind of all around the culture these days. It relates to loneliness. And it says, you know that being lonely is the equivalent of smoking half a pack of cigarettes a day or a whole I don’t know what the number? Yeah, right. And whether that’s an exactly true statement or not, it points directionally at what the same thing you’re saying, which is that relationships are important. Let’s take that loneliness for an example. So I can see where, if I’m having a stressful situation, having somebody in my life who can help me regulate that is valuable. I can also see how our relationships can ramp up that stress. In the case of loneliness, it’s not that they have a bad relationship, not that the relationships are causing them stress. There’s just very little there. Yeah, right. Are we saying that the danger there? To your point, we think, is the same thing. It’s just harder to regulate our stress response alone, yes, versus other people. And other people are an extraordinarily useful and adaptive way of regulating that stress response.
Robert Waldinger 19:49
Yes, what we think, and again, this is speculative, is that we evolved to be social animals, that you know, evolution is about having the greatest. Chance of passing on your genes. So evolution probably moved in the direction of us being social, because when we were banded together, we were safer. We could ward off threats more easily if we were together, right? So what happens then is that isolation is a stressor. The body perceives it. The brain perceives it as a stressor. We don’t sleep as well when we’re alone as when we sleep with someone we feel safe with, right? So what we think happened is that we evolved to be social animals, and then, as society has made many of us more isolated, the natural stress response ramps up that’s built into our DNA. I’m
Eric Zimmer 20:45
reading a fascinating book right now called the goodness paradox, and I don’t remember the name Wrangham. Maybe he wrote a book previously called Chasing fire. I think he’s an evolutionary biologist, perhaps by training. There’s a lot of really interesting things in it, but one of the things that many people believe is that human beings are domesticated animals, and that we self domesticated ourselves, which is a fascinating idea, but it speaks to I’ve got two domesticated animals behind me here right now, and they get extraordinarily unhappy when I’m not around. Yeah, like they are domesticated to me, and so they don’t like it. You know, one of them may start whining any minute here, like, Hey, would you sit on the couch with me and stop this stupid conversation? But, yeah, yeah, yeah. Anyway, that’s off topic, but it’s a concept I’d never thought of before. Let
Robert Waldinger 21:36
me just throw out one other idea from Yuval Harari, who wrote about, he thinks that the wheat plant domesticated humans that, oh,
Eric Zimmer 21:46
you know what I kind of vaguely remember, yeah, which
Robert Waldinger 21:48
is really cool, a really cool idea that essentially, from the from the evolutionary point of view of the wheat stock, you know, they domesticated us to cultivate them, so that Wheat now he’s a very successful species on the planet. Yeah,
Eric Zimmer 22:03
yeah, it’s extraordinarily successful. You know, corn is giving it a run for its money. But, yeah,
Eric Zimmer 22:20
yeah. So one of the things that I think is difficult about this sort of research around relationships and loneliness makes me think a little bit about the last five years of sleep research, right? What I think happens is that we hear loneliness is really bad for you. Not sleeping is really bad for you. And yet we have people who are extremely lonely and who can’t sleep, and I sometimes worry that what we’ve done now is basically ratcheted the stress response up another notch by saying, well, not only are you lonely, but you’re gonna die from it faster. Not only are you having trouble sleeping, and that’s a pain in the ass and it’s uncomfortable. And your day to day life is bad. Now you know what dementia is in your near future like so, so how do we take this sort of stuff, yeah, and then turn it into something that is useful for us and not something that further pushes us down? That’s
Robert Waldinger 23:19
such a good question, because if you think about it, we do this with obesity. Yep. We do this with smoking. Not that I’m a fan of smoking, but there are people who just can’t stop or don’t want to stop, right? Yep. So how do we name the things that keep us healthy without shaming or making more anxious to people who can’t or don’t want to do those things, and I think that’s a really important question. The other side to that is that some people don’t want more relationships. You know, there are many people who want a quieter, less social life, and they’re content, actually healthier, less stressed when they have a lot of solitude, a lot of alone time. So the one thing I know from having followed these 1000s of people across their lives is one size never fits all. One prescription never fits all. So I guess my hope is that people get this message so that when they can and want to, they choose connection. Yeah, you know, it’s like the one you feed that they feed connection when connection is an option for them and seems desirable. But that doesn’t mean you have to. That doesn’t mean you’re doomed if you don’t do that.
Eric Zimmer 24:34
Yep, that’s a great way of looking at it. So let’s go into type of relationships a little bit. So if we say, you know, the evidence from your study and many others is that good relationships if you’re going to invest in one thing, that’s the thing you could invest in, what type of relationships are we talking about here? And how many do I need? Do they need to be varied? Do I need to eat from all the four. Food groups. I mean, like, what are we talking about here? Yeah,
Robert Waldinger 25:02
yeah. Well, you’ve asked a lot of questions. So, so, yes, no, that’s just help me remember the different ones because you raised, yeah, they’re really important points that you just raised. And there are several of them. So one is easy, how many friends? There’s no set number. And again, one size doesn’t fit all for some people, it’s like one or two trusted people, and that’s all they need. That’s all they want. For some people, it’s lots of people, because we’re all on a spectrum from being introverts to being extroverts, and there’s nothing better about being an extrovert than being an introvert, even though our culture tends to glorify the party folks, so no set number of friends. It’s a felt need for more or less, and each person needs to check in with themselves about that. And then which types of relationships? One of the things we know is that almost all types of connections can give us what I sometimes call hits of well being. So for example, like, yes, absolutely, having a romantic partner can be a great thing, but you don’t need a romantic partner to get these benefits. Could be friendships, could be family. Relationships could be workmates. The other thing we know is that casual relationships often make us feel good. So for example, the cashier at the grocery store, the barista at the coffee shop, having a nice, friendly interaction with someone like that day to day again, makes us feel good. It makes us feel we belong. It helps us feel seen. So all kinds of relationships can have this benefit. And then I think you asked something else. Well,
Eric Zimmer 26:45
I think the last part of it, you kind of hit there, which is that, you know, different types of relationships can be beneficial, but we don’t necessarily need all the different types, right? Right? Right?
Robert Waldinger 26:56
Again, it is a subjective experience. It’s how I feel. If I feel like I would like more connection, then the question is, well, what kind of connection do I want more people to have fun with? Do I want more people to confide in? Do I want someone to drive me to doctor’s appointments when I need it? You know, there are so many things that relationships do for us, so each one of us can check in and say, Do I want more? And if so, what do I want more of? And then how could I build that? Yep,
Eric Zimmer 27:31
I think it’s interesting to think about how these forces that we talked about earlier for money or status or prestige can corrupt our connection seeking. So for example, there’s a phrase that has become famous in self help circles, which is, you’re the average of the five people you spend the most time around. I didn’t know that. You’ve never heard that one, huh? No, you’re the average of the five people you spend the most time around. And I actually think, like anything, there’s some truth in there for sure, right? The challenge, particularly in the achiever space, is that people start going, Okay, well, I’m gonna jettison those relationships for these other relationships, because I want to be successful, so I’m gonna surround myself with these successful people. Or CS Lewis used to talk about the inner ring. Everybody believes there’s an inner ring out there of special people, and if they were just in that, yeah, yeah, right. So all of a sudden, these desires to be more successful, to have more money, to have more prestige, start driving the type of connection that we can seek out, yeah, and that we can look for. And I wanted to name that because as I was reading your book, I was sort of reflecting on those ideas, you know, and the sense that good relationships, there’s a give and a take, there’s a giving and there’s a receiving kind of thing to it. Oh,
Robert Waldinger 28:47
absolutely, absolutely, you know, that point about reciprocity is really key, that one of the things that characterizes good relationships of any consequence is that there is that give and take, that that I don’t just take and I don’t just give because it doesn’t feel okay for it to be really lopsided most of the time. Yeah, now, in fairness, with young children, yeah, we give a lot more, but we get other things. But you know, if you think about it, the person who who simply needs us to listen and to give, give, give that person eventually makes us feel kind of more alone and kind of depleted. Right? Similarly, if we don’t ask for help, if we don’t allow ourselves to be helped by other people, which I personally have had a hard time, I’ve had to learn more about that
Eric Zimmer 29:39
me too. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And
Robert Waldinger 29:41
you know that that again, makes things feel lopsided. So I think reciprocity is really important when we think about the quality of our relationships.
Eric Zimmer 29:51
Yeah. I think those of us who are in a helping profession or a teaching profession tend to slide into those roles really, really naturally and easily. Absolutely, and yeah, at least for me, they’re not the right role to be in. In a lot of my friendships, it’s the wrong place to go, or, you know, I need to slide out, but it’s a conscious choice. I have to go up there. I’m doing it again, exactly, out of that mode, into a relationship. You know, that is not that sort of hierarchy. But you kind of get a sense of what I mean one person’s helping. It’s one of the insights that I love so much about 12 step programs, where, you know the fundamental insight of Alcoholics Anonymous was that when one alcoholic talked to another, there was a reciprocal benefit relationship. So I could be 15 years sober talking to somebody who’s two days sober, and it looks like I’m helping the person who has two days sober, but that relationship is actually completely reciprocal. Yep, right? That’s a deep insight. You know, is that, for me, the more I recognize that, the better I’m able to sort of be in those situations skillfully, yeah, yeah.
Robert Waldinger 31:03
Really important, really important. I’m a shrink, right? And I’m a psychotherapist. I work with people every day in therapy, and it’s really easy then in my personal life, as you were saying, to slip into that mode of, well, I’m just gonna listen and let other people, you know. And then I realized, oh my gosh, here I am doing it again, you know. And then, rather than realizing, no, this, this needs to be a two way street,
Eric Zimmer 31:31
that’s a great point. Yeah, me too. I’ll just sit back and listen, yeah, yeah. I’m like, Well, you know, I kind of need to move out of interrogation mode. And, you know, talk about myself a little bit. You know, interviewing people for a living doesn’t right? Yeah, all these things we just do what comes easy to us and comes natural. You know, it seems to me that depending on where you are in your life and in your relationships, there are different skills you might really need. So for example, you may be a person who has a significant other, a couple family members and several good friends, but there’s tension throughout many of those relationships, and so the skill that’s needed is probably to learn to improve those relationships and feel connected within them, etc. And then there are other people, and this is more the loneliness epidemic we’re talking about who don’t have relationships. Like I know a woman, she’s been part of our spiritual habits program before, where, in rapid succession, she lost several family members, several friends. I mean, went from somebody who had a relatively connected life to completely isolated, right? And so now all of a sudden, her challenge is, how do I rebuild that from nothing, you know, and not everybody’s gonna be that extreme, but it does seem that there’s these couple of skills that we need some ability to do, both of which is, how do I improve the relationships I’m in and connect with them more? How do I learn to cultivate new ones. Yeah. So I thought maybe as we move forward and talk about some different ways of doing this, we could sort of think about them in those two buckets. Yeah,
Robert Waldinger 33:09
those are great buckets. Okay, so let’s start with, how do I improve the relationships that I’m in? Yeah? So one thing we find in studying so many lives is that being proactive in taking care of your relationships matters a lot. So when I was in my 20s, I used to think, well, I got my friends, you know, from grade school, high school, college, you know, they’ll always be my friends. But what we would see is that people would let totally good relationships just wither away and die from neglect because they wouldn’t do anything about them. And there’s so many pressures, work and family and so many things to do, but that what we found was that the people who were good at this, at maintaining the relationships and strengthening the relationships they already have, is by being active, reaching out. So I’ve had to learn this. So, you know, I’m a professor, I could work a non stop, 24/7, and at times I did that. What I find is that, because of my research, that if I don’t reach out to my friends, I don’t see them, they kind of drift away. So now I make sure that I go for walks with friends every week, that usually I have dinner with somebody once a week, and I’ll make it a point to reach out. And usually they will reach out to me as well. It’s reciprocal, yeah. So I’m more active than I used to be, and I think that each of us can do that. It can be tiny actions. Could be just sending a little text, saying hi. I was just thinking of you want to say hello. So that’s one thing.
Eric Zimmer 34:42
Can we pause there for a second? Yeah, you gave a talk to not a TED talk, but a talk to the smaller TED audience, or Ted members. Yeah, I don’t quite know what it was, but you had them do something in there that I thought we could just have listeners do right now. You gave them a challenge. Do you remember what. That challenge was, Well, I
Robert Waldinger 35:01
think it might have been the what I just said, which was, so I could do that. Now, do you want to do it? Yeah, let’s do it. So the challenge is this, think of somebody in your life who you don’t see as much as you want to, who you just you know, you miss them. Or, gee, you think to yourself, we should get together more, or I should be in touch more. Think of that person. Hold them in your mind. Now, take out your phone and just send them a text or an email, just saying, Hi, I was thinking of you. Wanted to connect. That’s all you have to do. Just do that now. So
Eric Zimmer 35:37
listeners, you can hit pause on this and do it. And I really recommend that, like, that little strategy is one that I’ve incorporated over the years of just occasionally sitting down and scrolling through all my old text messages. I mean, like, God, it’s been six months since you know, and so listeners, that’s your challenge. Pause for a second. Hit pause, send a message to somebody in the way that Bob just described, you
Robert Waldinger 36:03
know, and then they could let you know I do have, I don’t know if there’s a place where people can leave you comments, but you can leave comments like, what happened with it? So sometimes, when I when I do this, yep, sometimes I’ve done it where I’m talking to a live audience, and I’ll do this, and then during the question and answer, I’ll say, did anybody get anything back from that text you just sent? And all these hands go up and people will say, oh, this person was so glad I reached out, because they just had surgery and they really wanted connection, or somebody just made a dinner date with me for next week. You’ll be amazed at what comes back to you. Yeah.
Eric Zimmer 36:38
All right, so listeners, if you want to do that, we’ve been spending more time on Instagram where it won. Underscore you, underscore feed. Those are all spelled out. Love to have you just share if you did this challenge. Kind of how’d it go? What happened? That actually wasn’t a planned promotion, but Bobby teed it up. Too good. I couldn’t resist. Okay, I couldn’t resist. So that’s one is to be proactive. You know, along those lines, you said something else in there that I think is a really great idea and a really important idea, which is to establish routines with people. Yeah, like the constant decision making of having to decide things again and again and again is difficult. So if we can decide something once and have it more or less be the rule, exactly, right? Like Saturday morning, I go to my Zen group to sit, and I go out to eat with them afterwards. That’s the standing rule, right? And do I do it every Saturday? No, like things come up, but I don’t have to keep re deciding, or I’m gonna see my friend and we’re gonna walk Thursday afternoon. That’s the rule, and it’s just planned. We don’t have to keep rethinking it. So establishing these routines can make it easier to keep these connections going. Exactly.
Robert Waldinger 37:50
My co author, Mark Schultz, is a friend and a research collaborator, every Friday at noon, we have a call for 90 minutes, and it’s just in the calendar. And you know, of course, we talk about our research and our writing, but we also talk about our lives, and we have to cancel that, otherwise it’s just a given, yeah, that it’s gonna happen. When my kids were little, someone told my wife and me to have a date night, and so we hired a babysitter to come every Thursday night at six o’clock, and so we had to cancel her if we weren’t gonna go out. So it meant that we just went out, even if we just went to the mall and bought underwear. I mean, we just, you know, and it was so great, yeah, because, as you say, we didn’t have to choose every single time. We could just do it. So if you have one or two people who you want to make sure you’re with every week or even every month. Set it up regularly you
Speaker 1 38:59
music.
Eric Zimmer 39:07
We’ve given our Instagram account a new look, and we’re sharing content there that we don’t share anywhere else, encouraging positive posts with wisdom that support you in feeding your good wolf, as well as some behind the scenes video of the show and some of Ginny and I’s day to day life, which I’m kind of still amazed that anybody would be interested in. It’s also a great place for you to give us feedback on the episodes that you like or concepts that you’ve learned that you think are helpful, or any other feedback you’d like to give us. If you’re on Instagram, follow us at at one underscore. You underscore feed, and those words are all spelled out one underscore you underscore feed to add some nourishing content to your daily scrolling. See you there. Let’s get one more idea from you about, you know, sort of the cultivation of the existing relationships, or even in some cases, the. Moving that balance in that relationship from one of I feel like I’m getting more stress out of this than I am. You’re a couples counselor, so I’m sure you could give us 20 hours of stuff like this, but if we wanted to give people just a couple of small ideas, one
Robert Waldinger 40:14
idea that I find really works is just bring curiosity to a relationship, particularly a relationship with someone who you think you know so well, one of my Zen teachers once gave us an assignment on the meditation cushion. So here we were. We’d meditated, you know, 1000s of times, but he said that the meditation today is going to be to ask yourself, What’s here right now that I have never noticed before, and if you do that with another person. So if I have dinner with my wife tonight, and I’ve had 1000s of dinners with my wife 37 years, if I have dinner and I ask myself that question, like it might be something about her hair, it might be some expression she uses in conversation. It might be anything, but just to notice, just to actively be more curious, and then ideally, to notice it with the other person. People feel so valued when we see them, when we’re curious about them. Everybody loves to have someone notice them. And so what I would say is see if you can bring curiosity to those relationships that might be getting a little old and stale.
Eric Zimmer 41:27
That’s a beautiful one. Curiosity seems to be one of those all purpose tools that is helpful in nearly any scenario you find yourself in, with the possible exception of like, there’s a lion chasing me. You may not right, be curious about the lion or but for most things, all right, so let’s talk about for people who find themselves in the situation where it’s like, I don’t have many relationships, I want more, but I’m 55 years old, and it feels either too late or too hard, or I just don’t know What to do?
Robert Waldinger 42:00
Yeah, well, first of all, it’s never too late. We have a chapter in our book titled it’s never too late, because when we follow all these people, we find that many of them have these surprising events in their lives where they find relationships or they find love when they least expect it. So what can you do if you think I’m not good at this or it’s never going to happen for me? Well, they’ve actually done research on this, and they find that one of the best ways to make new relationships is to do something with other people over and over again with the same people. So what do I mean? So it could be that you join a gardening club, or you join a biking club, or you join a church group, or you volunteer to work for a political cause or to prevent climate change, whatever it might be, but you do something that you’re interested in, and you do it alongside the same people week after week who are also interested in that. It gives you a natural conversation starter, because you’re both interested in something similar, and you’re more likely first to start new conversations and then to have those conversations deepen when you see those people again and again. So that’s one thing. Find things you’re interested in, do it with other people.
Eric Zimmer 43:27
I want to echo something you said there that I think is really important, and I’m speaking from experience with this one, which is that, okay, I want to develop more community. Of course, I’m going to go find people who have shared interests and show up and volunteer or show up at the meditation group. My trap has been I haven’t done the second part of what you said, which is to do it again and again and again. I show up and then I immediately am in judgment mode, because that’s what many of us do when we’re a new group. We either judging ourselves or judging others because we’re uncomfortable, and it takes me a while to feel at all comfortable in a new group of people. And so after a time or two, I conclude the connection I wanted isn’t here. And so I quit, and I’ve done this a lot of times in life, right? And I finally on to myself years later, you know? And after I started to see a lot of the research out there that talks about how long it takes to actually build a friendship as an adult, like it just takes time. So it’s this matter of kind of what you said, which is to continue. Yeah, you know to continue. Now that’s not to say that, like, if you’re in the wrong community, that you just go forever, but it just takes time to feel like you’re at all part of it. Yeah, at least for me, some people may jump in faster and feel more comfortable faster, but I don’t Well, I’m
Robert Waldinger 44:50
really glad you’ve named that, because the other thing we need to put out there is that it’s not gonna succeed every time. So let’s say. So let’s say you just did the little challenge, and you sent somebody a text, not everybody’s going to answer you back, right? Or you go volunteer for something, or you go, you know, do a church group, or you do something, and you’re going to feel uncomfortable. So I think the first thing to do is expect that you’re not going to hit a home run every time that it’s going to take going again and again, getting up to bat, trying again and again. Sometimes you’re going to strike out and you try some place different, and sometimes it’s just trying it again and again until you succeed. But don’t expect it to succeed every time
Eric Zimmer 45:38
or right away. I mean, I do this thing called Food Rescue. I’m part of a national organization, and basically what we do is we go and we take food from places they’re gonna throw it away, and we deliver it to places that need it. Yeah, and it’s kind of a solitary thing, like I just pick up a route and I go grab food from one place, take it to the other. One of the reasons I like it is because I can just grab a route randomly, and I’m very busy, but there was a period of time a couple summers ago where every weekend a huge semi of food would arrive, all fresh produce. I believe it was some national initiative. And so we had to kind of take it all off, unload it, package it back up in different ways. So I was around these food rescue people every Saturday for, I don’t know, maybe 10 weeks. I feel like, the first three weeks, I just felt like I was on the outside looking in. But about the fourth or fifth week, all of a sudden I was like, well, now I’m starting to strike up a couple more conversations. Now I’m starting, you know, and by the end of it, I was like, well, wow, really. Like all these people, this is a great group, and so I share that story only to say, like, it just can take a while depending on your personality type, right? And that’s right. We talked earlier about self acceptance, right? Like, how important self acceptance can be, or maybe that was in our pre show conversation. I don’t know. It doesn’t matter, but this self acceptance, for me, that’s a self acceptance thing, just going, that’s who I am. Yeah, instead of feeling like I should be more extroverted. Instead of feeling like, right, I should do it faster. I’m just gonna do it the way I do it exactly, and know that about myself, and just be okay with that for a while. Exactly
Robert Waldinger 47:13
that self acceptance is so key, because then you’re out of judging mode, right? Yep. You’re not saying, I’m not doing this, right? You just say, Okay, I’m just gonna keep showing up, just putting one foot in front of the other, and see what happened. Yep,
Eric Zimmer 47:25
you used a term. I don’t know if you used it in the book or it got used in the TED thing that I listened to, but it was the idea of social fitness. Yeah, I love that idea. And in that talk, you say, you know, if we think about it like we would normal fitness, we would realize that you don’t go to the gym once. You have to keep going and that idea of social fitness, same thing, we have to keep nurturing relationships. The other part of that analogy that I really liked is it made me think about those of us who are out of practice, or, let’s say you’re lonely and you need to build new skills or whatever. When we start back to an exercise routine after having been off of it for a while, it’s extraordinarily difficult in the beginning, yeah, right, it feels hard. I’m like, I don’t remember it being this hard, and I don’t like it. And then over time, we sort of catch our stride and it becomes sort of easier. And as I was thinking about social fitness, I was thinking about that analogy too, which kind of ties to what we were just saying. Yeah, when you show up in a place for the first time, it may take a while. In the same way, it takes a while of going to the gym till you’re kind of back in the groove of it
Robert Waldinger 48:33
exactly. And the other analogy is that you build muscles. So if my muscles are out of shape, it takes a while, and then you realize, oh, it all gets easier, because I’ve built up right, the ability to do it better. I’ll give you an example. I never used to talk to Uber drivers, Lyft drivers, taxi drivers. I just didn’t do that. I wanted to sit and do my phone thing and everything, and then I started taking my own medicine. I said, Okay, I’m just gonna strike up a conversation. And many of these drivers are people from other countries, so I just started asking, Where are you from? And they would start to tell me, and it would be so interesting. I mean, I got to hear so many stories about so many parts of the world, why people came here. What’s it been like to come here? What’s it like to go back home? I mean, it’s like my muscles got stronger, and so now, yeah, if I can, I want to talk to a driver, because more often than not, it’s going to be really interesting. It’s going to make the ride go a lot faster.
Eric Zimmer 49:36
You share a study in the book about people on a subway? Yeah, will you share that? Because it ties to what you just said,
Robert Waldinger 49:43
yeah, exactly. This was done in Chicago, where there are a lot of commuters taking the train, and the researchers assigned people to do one of two things when they were about to take their daily commute. One was, do what you normally do, read the newspaper, stay on your phone, listen to music. Okay, and the other people were assigned to talk to a stranger. And they asked people, before they took the trip, they said, How much do you think you’re going to like this? Well, the people who were assigned to talk to strangers thought, I am not going to like this. After they completed their assignment and they got off the train, they asked him again, how do you feel now, and how much did you enjoy it? The people who talked to strangers were way happier, on average, than the people who did what they normally do. And it’s taken as one example of how we’re often not so good at predicting what’s going to make us happy. Because when you stop and think, do I want to talk to a stranger, it’s like, no, that’s probably going to be awkward. I’m not going to
Eric Zimmer 50:40
do that. Yeah. I think that study is fascinating because, yeah, it shows what you just said, which is, we don’t know what will make us happy. I think, if I recall other wording from that, there was this sense that people thought like, this could be kind of messy and, you know, it could be awkward, and it usually wasn’t as much, yeah, and, you know, I think the caveat there right being what you said earlier, you’re not always going to hit a home run. You may sit down on the subway and start a conversation with somebody that you’re three minutes in and be like, Okay, maybe, right, maybe I wish I didn’t do this, right, yeah, but more often than not, particularly, if we can bring curiosity, yeah, you know. But I’m completely that way. Put me in a public situation, and I just, I want shields up. Give me a book, let me read, let me do my processing, let me do you know. And yet, those are not the memorable times I’ve spent doing stuff like that. The memorable times are when I’ve interacted with somebody, right,
Robert Waldinger 51:36
exactly. So it’s just another way to rethink what your routines are. I’ll give you another example that I learned from a woman who’s in the clergy, and she said, what she has started doing, she travels, and when she goes through security lines, she looks at the security workers, name tag, looks them in the eye, calls them by name and say, How are you doing, Joe, how’s your day going? And people love it. They love being seen. They love being called by name, because usually they’re seen as these functionaries, these automatons, or just to be passed by, you know, gotten by. You know. Again, this idea that if we really notice each other. So much good stuff can happen.
Eric Zimmer 52:23
Yep, there was another part in the book, and this is off tangent a little bit, but you were talking, I believe, about social media and how we can connect with social media in ways that are helpful and not helpful. But you shared a little bit about a photograph from 1946 you shared that in 1946 a young Stanley Kubrick published a photo and Look magazine that would be very familiar today, a subway car of New York commuters, heads bowed, nearly every single one of them absorbed in their newspapers, their newspapers, right? And I just thought that was interesting, because I’m not saying that we don’t need to be very conscious of how we use our digital devices. But I love that analogy because it shows we’re always predicting, like these huge problems with what technology is. You know, I’m sure there were people in 1946 being like, Why aren’t these people talking to each other? But I think the point in the book was further that this fracturing of our attention is not a new thing. That’s
Robert Waldinger 53:21
right, it isn’t a new thing. And we can use media to take us away from each other. So it’s perfectly good to read the newspaper or perhaps to use social media, but what function does it serve? And if it serves the function of keeping us from each other, then we’re in trouble. Example, my wife and I come down to the kitchen in the morning, and sometimes I realize she’s on her email, I’m looking at the news feed, and we haven’t even looked at each other. We’ve hardly said good morning, right? Can we be more intentional and more deliberate about not letting these media take us away from each other when we need to be with each other. Yeah,
Eric Zimmer 54:07
I think it’s so interesting. I was in a restaurant the other night with my mother, and she was looking at the table over and she was like, those two people have not talked to each other at all. They’ve been on their phone the whole time. The initial judgment was like, Oh, that’s terrible. And then I thought, well, you know, sometimes that’s what Ginny and I do. Like, you know, when we’re traveling in Europe and we’ve been together for 18 straight days, 24 hours a day, it’s like, well, you know what? Maybe this. We don’t need every single moment of connection. So it’s kind of like you said, no one size fits all, but I do think that’s a really interesting thing, and to be conscious of, for example, Ginny and I like to watch certain TV series, right? I think, like, we’re in a golden age of, like, art being, yeah, we
Robert Waldinger 54:47
do too.
Eric Zimmer 54:48
My original reaction is, TV’s bad. Don’t do it right, right? You should be reading instead. But what I’ve realized is that reading doesn’t always have to be but in our case, is a solo activity. Yeah? The. Watching TV together is a group activity. However, too much of it does pull us away from each other exactly right where some of it feels like it brings us together. Too much of it feels like, okay, that’s taking up the special time we have together. And then trying to think about ways of like. Can we talk about what we saw? Can we talk about what we watched like, can I use it as a tool to engender future connection in a way? And I just think there are ways to approach all of these things, to use a Buddhist term skillfully, or less skillfully, right? Yeah,
Robert Waldinger 55:32
yeah. And to see everything as focusing on the right processes. So the process of connection is what you’re trying to focus on. That doesn’t mean you have to connect every moment, and it doesn’t mean that TV is good or bad. It means am I using TV or the newspaper or other things in my life in a way that at least doesn’t detract from my connections with what’s most important to me and maybe enhances what’s most important to me. So, you know, using TV as a way to talk to each other about something could be a great thing in terms of your relationship. So again, it’s really looking at, what do I most care about, what do I most value? And does this further that is it skillful in that way?
Eric Zimmer 56:19
Yep, yep. So we’re nearing the end of our time, and we haven’t gotten to talk about Zen, which we probably could do for the next three hours. I hope we get a chance to do it at some point. But I’m wondering if I were to sort of give you a pop quiz here, which would be like, talk to me about how the work on the Harvard study and the work that you’ve done as a Zen teacher, as a Zen student all these years. Where’s a commonality here, or where are some things that they might inform each other? They do
Robert Waldinger 56:48
inform each other. So Zen is about the big questions of life and death. What does it mean to be alive? What does it mean to be a human being in the world? And the Harvard study is about human life. It’s about what does it mean to have a whole life and to be able to look at entire lives? And for me, that’s such a privilege. And so I get to ask questions, informed by my Zen practice. I get to ask questions in research, like as you look back on your life, what are you proud of stuff as you look back on your life? What do you regret the most? I wouldn’t have asked those questions if I weren’t a Zen practitioner and focusing all the time on my own life and what it means to have this moment and this day. Yeah,
Eric Zimmer 57:36
you write beautifully in the book also about attention, which is, to me, is a core Zen idea, which is, you know, where is my attention, and how can I sharpen that attention, and how can I notice, as you said earlier, something I haven’t noticed before. And so I saw a great overlap there, too. As you were writing about that, I was like, This sounds like a guy who’s had some contemplative practice in his background. Oh, yeah.
Robert Waldinger 57:59
And you know, my dharma great grandfather, so he was my teacher’s teacher’s teacher. John Tarrant, he said attention is the most basic form of love. And I love that quote because it is so true when I think about, you know, what I give to other people, that’s what other people really want.
Eric Zimmer 58:23
Yeah. I think he also said something around like to learn to attend is the path to learn to attend more and more deeply, is the rest of the path. I’m not getting it right, yeah, but John tarran has talked about attention in a number of different ways. Well, Bob, thank you so much. I’ve really enjoyed having you on I really enjoyed the book, and I really enjoyed the prompts that it will give me in my own life, and I hope others to get out there and make relationships and connection really important.
Robert Waldinger 58:49
Well, this was a delightful conversation. Thank you for having me.
Eric Zimmer 58:53
You’re welcome. You
Chris Forbes 59:10
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