Relationships can be messy and complicated. It may be time to take stock of your relationships:. Relationships need to be nurtured. Reach out and take a baby step. Do your friends bring out the best in you? Do you need to create some new and exciting activities with your spouse or partner?
Going back to the original question in the Harvard study:. If you were going to invest in your future self—right now —where would you put your time and energy? Linda Arnold, M. Reader comments are welcome at linda lindaarnold. Sections U.
Science Technology Business U. Research goals Consider the questions posed by the original researchers: What if we could follow people throughout life and document what makes them happy as they go along?
Connect with the definitive source for global and local news. The Associated Press. All rights reserved. The principal investigators at Harvard Chan School plan to develop a comprehensive assessment that considers physical health, emotional health, purpose, character strengths, social connectedness, and financial security.
Implementing this assessment in a large cohort of participants across a multi-year timeline could, they say, transform the field of well-being research. It will also inform how institutions and companies can best help their employees to thrive. Through the participation of thousands of Aetna employees and members and the sharing of de-identified data with Harvard, the study is expected over time to generate a unique and valuable trove of longitudinal data. The well-being assessment will be closely related to a conceptualization of flourishing put forward in a paper by Prof.
As adolescents, the Grant Study men were twice as likely to use immature defenses as mature ones, but in middle life they were four times as likely to use mature defenses—and the progress continued into old age.
When they were between 50 and 75, Vaillant found, altruism and humor grew more prevalent, while all the immature defenses grew more rare. This means that a glimpse of any one moment in a life can be deeply misleading. A man at 20 who appears the model of altruism may turn out to be a kind of emotional prodigy—or he may be ducking the kind of engagement with reality that his peers are both moving toward and defending against.
And, on the other extreme, a man at 20 who appears impossibly wounded may turn out to be gestating toward maturity. For Camille, such detached neutrality seemed to herald progress.
At 35, he spent 14 months in a hospital for an infection and had what he described as a spiritual awakening. Afterward, he bloomed as a psychiatrist, channeling his own needs into service. As a child, he had fantasized about being a minister or physician. In several vignettes in the book, Vaillant presents Merton as an exemplar of how mature adaptations are a real-life alchemy, a way of turning the dross of emotional crises, pain, and deprivation into the gold of human connection, accomplishment, and creativity.
At ages 55 and 60, Merton had severe depressions. In the first instance he was hospitalized. An attractive, amiable boy from a working-class background, you struck the study staff as happy, stable, and sociable.
After college, you got an advanced degree and began to climb the rungs in your profession. You married a terrific girl, and you two played piano together for fun. You eventually had five kids.
I know what real work is like. Heath noted after a visit from you in But you had no complaints. After interviewing you at your 25th reunion, Dr. Two years later, at 49, you were running a major institution. The strain showed immediately. Any duck will do. Three years after you started the job, you resigned before you could be fired.
You were 52, and you never worked again. Seven years later, Dr. Vaillant wrote. But you called yourself happy. Would you give an example of a bit of wisdom you acquired and how you came by it? Never expect you will fail. What allows people to work, and love, as they grow old?
By the time the Grant Study men had entered retirement, Vaillant, who had then been following them for a quarter century, had identified seven major factors that predict healthy aging, both physically and psychologically. Employing mature adaptations was one.
The others were education, stable marriage, not smoking, not abusing alcohol, some exercise, and healthy weight. Even if they had been in adequate physical shape at 50, the men who had three or fewer protective factors were three times as likely to be dead at 80 as those with four or more factors.
Vaillant identified some surprises. Cholesterol levels at age 50 have nothing to do with health in old age. While social ease correlates highly with good psychosocial adjustment in college and early adulthood, its significance diminishes over time.
There is an age to watch your cholesterol and an age to ignore it. The study has yielded some additional subtle surprises. Regular exercise in college predicted late-life mental health better than it did physical health. And depression turned out to be a major drain on physical health: of the men who were diagnosed with depression by age 50, more than 70 percent had died or were chronically ill by The men who survived heavy fighting developed more chronic physical illnesses and died sooner than those who saw little or no combat, he found.
Again and again, Vaillant has returned to his major preoccupations. One is alcoholism, which he found is probably the horse, and not the cart, of pathology.
Good sibling relationships seem especially powerful: 93 percent of the men who were thriving at age 65 had been close to a brother or sister when younger. The authority of these findings stems in large part from the rarity of the source. Few longitudinal studies survive in good health for whole lifetimes, because funding runs dry and the participants drift away.
Vaillant managed, drawing on federal grants and private gifts, to finance surveys every two years, physicals every five years, and interviews every 15 years. The Grant Study men saw themselves as part of an elite club. Vaillant also dramatically expanded his scope by taking over a defunct study of juvenile delinquents in inner-city Boston, run by the criminologists Sheldon and Eleanor Glueck.
Launched in , the study had a control group of nondelinquent boys who grew up in similar circumstances—children of poor, mostly foreign-born parents, about half of whom lived in a home without a tub or a shower. In contrast to the Grant data, the Glueck study data suggested that industriousness in childhood—as indicated by such things as whether the boys had part-time jobs, took on chores, or joined school clubs or sports teams—predicted adult mental health better than any other factor, including family cohesion and warm maternal relationships.
Interestingly, while the Glueck men were 50 percent more likely to become dependent on alcohol than the Harvard men, the ones who did were more than twice as likely to eventually get sober. But Vaillant has largely played down the distinctions among the samples. For example, while he allows that, in mortality rates, the inner-city men at age 68 to 70 resembled the Terman and Harvard cohorts at 78 to 80, he says that most of the difference can be explained by less education, more obesity, and greater abuse of alcohol and cigarettes.
But only 29 Glueck men did finish college—about 6 percent of the sample. Charles McArthur, who picked up the study in the mids, was principally interested in matching people to suitable careers through psychological testing—perfect for the Man in the Gray Flannel Suit era.
Driven by a savvy, brilliant psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania named Martin Seligman , the movement to create a scientific study of the good life has spread wildly through academia and popular culture dozens of books, a cover story in Time , attention from Oprah, etc. Vaillant became a kind of godfather to the field, and a champion of its message that psychology can improve ordinary lives, not just treat disease.
But in many ways, his role in the movement is as provocateur. In fact, Vaillant went on, positive emotions make us more vulnerable than negative ones. Fear and sadness have immediate payoffs—protecting us from attack or attracting resources at times of distress.
Gratitude and joy, over time, will yield better health and deeper connections—but in the short term actually put us at risk. And she put them in a lovely presentation box covered with Thai silk, and gave it to him. Vaillant brings a healthy dose of subtlety to a field that sometimes seems to glide past it. The bookstore shelves are lined with titles that have an almost messianic tone, as in Happier: Learn the Secrets to Daily Joy and Lasting Fulfillment.
But what does it mean, really, to be happier? For 30 years, Denmark has topped international happiness surveys. But Danes are hardly a sanguine bunch. Circumstances account for 10 percent, and the other 40 percent is within our control. But why do countries with the highest self-reports of subjective well-being also yield the most suicides?
The questions are unresolved, in large part because of method. The psychologist Ed Diener, at the University of Illinois, has helped lay the empirical foundation for positive psychology, drawing most recently on data from the Gallup World Poll, which interviewed a representative sample of , people from countries.
People who go to church report more joy. Yet he has deep data, and he brings so many things together at once. George is the poet of this movement. Now he articulates the dark side of pleasure and connection—or, at least, the way that our most profound yearnings can arise from our most basic fears.
In Dr. Is it your steely resolve? After a major accident in college, you returned to campus in a back brace, but you looked healthy. You had a kind of emotional steel, too. And though your parents reunited two years later, a pall of disquiet hung over your three-room apartment when the social worker came for her visit.
After the war—during which you worked on a major weapons system—and graduate school, you married, and your bond with your wife only deepened over time. Indeed, while your mother remains a haunting presence in your surveys—eventually diagnosed with manic depression, she was often hospitalized and received many courses of shock therapy—the warmth of your relationship with your wife and kids, and fond memories of your maternal grandfather, seemed to sustain you.
Yet your file shows a quiet, but persistent, questioning about a path not taken. In fact, you said, your father had urged you to do it, to avoid the Army. There is something unreachable in your file. How can even you know? According to Dr. When we start pulling at this thread, an awfully big spool of thoughts and questions begins to unravel onto the floor. You never seemed to pull the thread. From the first pages of your file, you practically explode with personality.
You ducked the war, as a conscientious objector. If people have adjusted to a society that seems hell-bent on destroying itself in the next couple of decades, just what does that prove about the people? You got married young, and did odd jobs—including a stint as a guinea pig in a hospital study on shipwreck survival.
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