I listened to a TEDX talk by Robert Waldinger, a psychiatrist at Massachusetts General Hospital and a professor of Psychiatry at Harvard medical school, where he discussed the findings of what is now known as the world’s longest study on happiness – the Harvard Study of Adult Development.
This study has spanned 8 decades and is still ongoing. In 1938, scientists started tracking the lives of 268 Harvard university students to discover what leads to healthy and happy lives. They collected data on their physical and mental health including running blood tests and carrying out MRI scans of their brains, and conducted one-on-one interviews to decipher the major factors that contributed to a long and healthy life. President John F. Kennedy was one of them. A few of them are still alive, now in their 90s.
Over the years the study expanded to include their children (1300 of them, now in their 50s and 60s) and a control group, 456 residents of slums in Boston. They studied their health trajectories, family life, career, marriages etcetera.
The findings of the study were profound. It can be summarized as follows: the key to living a long and fulfilled life is by keeping healthy relationships. Put another way, the quality of relationships we keep determines how long and how well we will live. They found that those who were satisfied in their relationships at age 50, were the healthiest at age 80. Loneliness, they found, kills as much as smoking and alcoholism. Instructively, their findings were similar across both groups of participants, the college students (representing affluence) and the slum dwellers.
In their report, they stated that good relationships, more than money or fame, kept people happier and made them live longer. It delays the feeling of discontent, low mood, depression, and mental and physical decline. Good relationship was shown to be a better predictor of a long and fulfilled life than social class, IQ, genetic composition, or even blood cholesterol level!
I agree with the findings of the study. I recall when I used to be very excited about visiting Enugu. That was around the time I graduated from university (the good old Sullivan years). Then after a while I got very bored whenever I visited. The same bars and clubs were there, the same delicacies that made Enugu a very pleasurable place were still there. The city was still secure and the roads were well lit at night. The fun activities were there but I now found the city very boring. Why? Because my friends had left!
The importance of relationships and friendships is underestimated. They are actually the oxygen that keeps up alive. I think man was created to be communal. We need each other not just to be happy, but to survive. Maybe because I grew up in closely knit communities (family and school), most of my leisure now depends on being around people. And that is why I will choose spending time relaxing and ‘gisting’ under the udara tree in my village with my family and friends, than spending a week alone in Las Vegas. Community is everything.
One last thing to note (according to the study) is that not every relationship leads to long life. According to Waldinger, you can be married or dating and still be lonely. Toxic relationships kill, even faster than loneliness. Squabbles and quarrels take their toll on us over time and we die slowly and painfully, after living a life full of regrets.
The conclusion is that each one everyone of us must make efforts to build strong, healthy relationships. In another article, I will try to argue why despite being over 6 billion people on earth, and with the advent of ICT and social media, building these relationships is difficult.