John Lennon once sang “Happiness is a warm gun.”
The results of decades of research suggest Lennon got it wrong, but a leading psychiatrist reckons he was in fact only one word away from getting it right.
Learning how to be happy might sound like an easy challenge. But for many people, the seemingly simple-to-attain goal of happiness has proved to be anything but.
Now, a psychiatrist from Harvard University has shared the lessons he’s learnt from tracking people’s successes and failures across several generations.
Professor Robert Waldinger is director of the Harvard Study of Adult Development (HSAD), a research program that has been going since 1938. That’s an astonishing 85 years.
When it began more than eight decades ago, the study took on board 724 participants. Of those, 268 were undergraduate students at Harvard College. The rest were 14-year-old boys, all of whom had grown up in disadvantaged neighbourhoods in Boston, Massachusetts.
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Now in its ninth decade, the HSAD study cohort has grown in number to include more than 1300 direct descendants of the original volunteers. It has also grown in its breadth.
Having started with a 100 per cent quota of white males, these days more than half of its participants are women. And, says Mr Waldinger: “Our study includes very poor, disadvantaged people and very privileged people.”
So, what has Mr Waldinger’s research taught him about what makes people happy? Before answering that question, defining happiness makes a good starting point. According to Mr Waldinger, there are two types of happiness: ‘hedonic’ and ‘eudaimonic’.
Hedonic happiness is what Mr Waldinger describes as “a moment-to-moment, fluctuating experience. It’s like, am I having fun now?”
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Eudaimonic happiness, in contrast, is a sense of life having meaning and being worthwhile.
“For example, says Mr Waldinger, “you’re reading to your child before bed. You’ve read the same book eight times, but she wants you to read it again. You’re exhausted. Is this fun? No. But is this the most meaningful thing you could imagine doing? Yes.”
With those broad definitions of happiness, Mr Waldinger, when asked what his most important findings from the 85-year-long study, he cites “warm connections”.
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“The big, surprising takeaway is how much having warm connections with other people predicts how long you stay healthy, how long your brain will stay sharp,” Mr Waldinger said.
“Having these good connections makes you less likely to get coronary artery disease. You’re even less likely to get arthritis.”
Warm connections, he says, are created by relationships that feel supportive, whether that be emotional support, advice, financial support or logistical support. Such relationships can even include those with relative strangers, such as the person who sells you your coffee each morning.
These warm connections are only part of the picture, though. It has been estimated that about 50 per cent of our individual levels of happiness are genetically determined. But creating and maintaining warm connections – and these, says Mr Waldinger, don’t have to include having a life partner – will give you a greater chance of attaining happiness, according to the HDSAD study.
It’s pretty hard to argue against 85 years’ worth of research. And that research suggests that what John Lennon should have sung is, “Happiness is a warm connection.”
How do you define happiness? And what helps you achieve it? Why not share your thoughts in the comments section below?
That makes so much sense. I would have come up with something like “warm connections” intuitively so glad to see this backed by research.