What The Ultimate Study On Happiness Reveals

This video is about one of the most important questions: what leads to a happy life?

Realistically, money.

Being wealthy is definitely a big aspect of it.

To save a lot of money.

Money.

Money.

Earning money.

It's very important to be rich.

It's easy for people to say they don't care about having money and that money can't buy happiness, but that's really not true.

'Cause I would rather cry on a yacht than in a like a Subaru. (both laugh)

[Derek] Clearly, having a successful career and financial wealth are important to people. Is there a number in mind? Something you wanna get to?

At least a million.

Yeah?

Yeah.

In a survey from 2018 of around a hundred thousand college freshmen, about 55% said they wanted to be successful in their career and 83% reported that they wanted to become rich. But do these accomplishments really increase happiness? Well, that's what I wanna find out in this video. But how do you study what makes people happy? Well, you can ask them. What's gonna make you happy?

Um.

Uh.

Uh.

Uh.

Ooh.

[Derek] But people aren't really good at judging what will make them happy. Winning the lottery seems like it should make you happy.

What!? (sister screams) What!? What!?

[Derek] But numerous studies on lottery winners find that after the initial surge of happiness wears off, many are no happier than the rest of us. Some are, in fact, more miserable than they were beforehand.

'Cause you don't see as many people as you used to see. Obviously, you become slightly isolated, I think in some ways.

Yeah, I agree.

Another problem is that people's memories aren't reliable.

We only detect, encode and store in our brains bits and pieces of the entire experience in front of us. It's called reconstructed memories. It happens to us in all the aspects of our lives all the time.

Most studies on happiness find older people and ask them to recall what made them happy. But as we've just seen, memory is unreliable. So a better way to conduct a study would be to follow people throughout their entire lives, capturing the choices they make and how those affect their happiness. That is really hard to do. But there is one study like this that's been running since 1938.

Now, 85 years is a long time to run a study so it has been passed down from one generation of researchers to the next. It's currently run by its fourth director, Robert Waldinger. What is the claim to fame then of the study?

You know, the claim to fame is that it is, as far as we know, the longest study of human development that's ever been done. The longest study of any depth. These are studies that take deep dives into people's lives and their mental and physical health.

[Derek] The study actually began as two separate studies by two groups of Harvard researchers that didn't know about each other. The first group followed 268 young men from Harvard to find out how they would develop into early adulthood.

So of course, if you wanna study normal young adult development, you study all white guys from Harvard, right? (Derek laughs) You know, it's one of those limitations.

[Derek] The second group studied 456 boys from middle school onwards from Boston's poorest and most disadvantaged families.

So there were these two studies, both meant to be studies of what goes right in development and how we predict who does well as they grow up.

Eventually, the two studies merged into one: The Harvard Study of Adult Development. At the start of the study, the participants were interviewed and received extensive physical examinations. And as they grew, they entered all walks of life. Some of them became bricklayers and doctors and factory workers and lawyers, and one even became president of the United States. (presidential music) Every two years, researchers ask them questions about their lives. Like, "If you could stop working without loss of income, would you, what would you do instead? How often do you feel isolated from others? True or false, life has more pain than pleasure." And other questions about their marriage, career, friendships, and their physical and mental health.

While the study started with just 724 participants, over time, their spouses and children were also included in the study. So how many people are we talking about in total who have been part of the study?

Between 2,500 and 3,000 people altogether in the study.

[Derek] And as technology improved, so did the methods of data collection.

We now draw blood from DNA. You know, DNA wasn't even imagined in 1938. We measure messenger RNA, DNA methylation, we bring people into our laboratory, we deliberately stress them out and then see how quickly they recover from stress. Looking at heart rate variability, for example, looking at cortisol deposited in hair, because that seems to be a long-term measure of circulating cortisol. But all of these new methods are in the service of studying the same big phenomena of human wellbeing.

So what do 85 years of research across entire human lives teach us about a healthy and happy life?

Two huge takeaways really. One is no surprise. It's that if you take care of your physical health, it has huge benefits, not just for your longevity, but for how long you stay healthy. Eating well, getting regular exercise, not abusing alcohol or drugs, not smoking, getting preventive healthcare, exercise is hugely important.

[Derek] A Taiwanese study looked at the medical data of 416,000 healthy people between 1996 and 2008. Eight years later, they followed up with each person to look at the link between exercise and mortality. They found that people who exercised just 15 minutes a day had a 14% reduced risk of dying, and a three year longer life expectancy. Every additional 15 minutes of exercise decreased the risk of dying by an extra 4%. A large meta-analysis from 2008 confirms that people who are physically active have a reduced risk of dying during the timeframes investigated in each study. Exercise also protects our cognitive health. A meta-analysis from 2014 found that participants with higher levels of physical activity had a 35% reduced risk of cognitive decline and a 14% reduced risk of dementia.

And then the big surprising finding is, relationships, not just keeping us happier, but keeping us healthier and helping us live longer.

It's not just the Harvard study. There's now a whole list of studies that show the importance of relationships to human happiness and health. They teach us three main lessons. The first is that relationships are great for our health. In 2010, researchers looked across 148 studies with a total of more than 300,000 participants. They found that, on average, people with stronger social connections had a 50% increased likelihood of survival for any given year. Being married, in particular, has a large impact on how long people live.

There's one study, I think it's pretty well respected, that suggests that married men live 12 years longer on average than unmarried men and married women live seven years longer on average than unmarried women. Marriage is always a better deal for men on all parameters than it is for women. (Derek laughs) And it's not because you have a marriage license, right? It's because people living together in an intimate partnership tend to keep each other healthier. You have somebody who's kind of watching, looking out for you. It's a very real, concrete effect.

If feeling well-connected to others makes us happier, healthier, and extends our lives, then what happens if we feel disconnected?

There's a researcher, Julianne Holt-Lunstad, out of the University of Utah, who did a meta-analysis of a whole slew of studies of the physical effects of loneliness. And her calculation was that being lonely is as dangerous to your health as smoking half a pack of cigarettes a day, or as dangerous as being obese.

[Derek] Feeling disconnected from others also makes you more prone to disease. A large meta-analysis from 2016 found that poor social relationships were associated with a 29% increase in risk of heart disease and a 32% increase in risk of stroke.

So these have real sort of quantifiable consequences when we look at studies of thousands of people.

One caveat is that most studies on the health effects of loneliness focus on people aged 50 and older. (clock ticking) And loneliness is on the rise.

The U.S. Surgeon General today declared a new public health epidemic in America. Loneliness.

We're now finding that one in two adults report measurable levels of loneliness and it turns out that young people are most affected. And here's why this is so concerning. It's because we've realized that loneliness is more than just a bad feeling. It has real consequences for our mental and physical health.

The UK has appointed a minister of loneliness. Many, many countries are concerned about this breakdown in social connection.

A question about loneliness, like, what does that look like? Because, obviously, everyone experiences some periods of loneliness. So you know, when does it become sort of really detrimental and how do we define that?

Well, loneliness is different from being alone, right? So you can be alone and quite content, and many people are, in fact. The ability to be content when you're alone is quite a skill and it's a wonderful ability. Loneliness is that subjective experience of being less connected to people than you wanna be. And that's why, you know, you can be lonely in a crowd. We're all on a spectrum between extroversion, you know, wanting lots of people in our lives, and introversion, actually needing a lot of solitude and not wanting a lot of people, a lot of people are stressful for introverts. And what we know is that neither one is healthier, right? Like introverts are perfectly healthy. They just may need one or two really solid relationships and don't want a lot more people. Nothing wrong with that at all. Whereas extroverts may want lots of people in their lives.

[Derek] So the second lesson is that it's not how many people you know or see, or even whether you're married or not, because a bad marriage can be worse for your health than getting divorced. Instead, it's about the quality of your close relationships that matters.

When we'd followed all the original people out to their 80s we said, "Okay, what data actually are the best predictors at age 50 of who's gonna be happy and healthy at age 80 as opposed to sick or dead?" And we thought we were gonna be looking at blood pressure and cholesterol level at age 50 as the strongest predictors. It was their relationships. It was particularly their satisfaction with their marital relationships that was the strongest predictor.

And relationships don't just keep us happier and physically healthier, they also protect our brains. People who are in secure relationships in their 80s, where they feel that they can rely on the other person, find that their memories stay sharper for longer. And people who feel lonely, well, their memories fade quicker. A study of retired U.S. adults found that the rate of cognitive decline was 20% higher over 10 years for those who felt lonely. A meta-analysis from 2018 further confirms the detrimental effects of loneliness, finding that it also increased the risk of dementia.

But there's still a big open question: what is it about the relationships that makes them particularly healthful or helpful?

The best hypothesis, for which there's some pretty decent research now, is that relationships are emotion regulators. They're stress regulators. So stressful things happen every day to many of us, right? So then what happens? Well, the body goes into fight-or-flight mode, blood pressure goes up, respirations become more rapid, circulating stress hormone levels rise. But then the body is meant to go back to equilibrium after that normal fight-or-flight response when we face a challenge. If I can come home and there's somebody here to talk to, I can literally feel my body calm down. What we are pretty sure happens is that people who are isolated, that they're more likely to stay in a kind of chronic fight-or-flight mode. And that what that means is that they have higher levels of circulating cortisol, higher levels of chronic inflammation, and that those things gradually wear away body systems.

So that's how, for example, chronic stress can predict coronary artery disease, but also arthritis and also type-two diabetes because of this common mechanism that breaks down multiple body systems.

The key to preventing this breakdown is simple. Just spend a little more time with the people you care about. Unfortunately, we seem to be doing the exact opposite.

Before going into why we're doing the exact opposite, this part of the video was sponsored by BetterHelp. There are many things that can negatively impact our happiness. It could be stress or fear or a clinical mental health issue like depression or anxiety. But regardless of which one it is, therapy can help you by giving you the tools to approach your life in a very different way. And that's where BetterHelp comes in. They connect you with an experienced, licensed therapist who is trained to listen and give you helpful, unbiased advice. I know that finding a good therapist is hard, especially when you only have the options in your city. But BetterHelp changes the game on this because it's an online platform. And by filling out a few questions, you'll get matched with a professional therapist. So you can get talking in most cases within 48 hours and then you can have your therapy session as a phone call, as a video chat, or even via messaging if you prefer that. Just whatever's the most comfortable version of therapy for you.

And it's easy to sign up, there's a link in the description. It is betterhelp.com/veritasium. Clicking on that link both helps support this channel and it also gets you 10% off your first month of BetterHelp. So you can try it out and see if it helps you. And if you don't really fit with your first therapist, which is pretty common, you can easily switch to a new one for free without stressing about insurance, who's in your network or anything like that. If you feel like you could benefit from talking to someone, getting feedback, advice, and help for anything that might be affecting your happiness and progress in life, then visit betterhelp.com/veritasium or click that link in the description below.

So I want to thank BetterHelp for sponsoring this part of the video. And now, back to the importance of relationships. There is an alarming trend in our society.

[Newsreader] Social engagement with friends decreased from 60 minutes a day in 2003 to just 20 minutes a day in 2020.

The technology has fundamentally changed how we interact with one another and how we communicate with one another and, unfortunately, has often replaced what used to be rich in-person connections with online connections, which often are of lower quality.

Now, you may say you're an introvert and you don't need to spend much time with people to feel good. And while it's true that introverts and extroverts need different amounts of social stimulation, both need human connection.

In 2015, Holt-Lunstad and her colleagues looked at the data of 70 independent studies with more than 3 million total participants. Similar to other studies, they found that the subjective feeling of loneliness increased the risk of premature death by 26%. But they also looked at the objective measure of social isolation, how much time you're actually spending with other people. And they found that social isolation increased the risk of premature death by 29%. And unfortunately, introverts are more at risk of being socially isolated.

Just like many young people today, many participants from the Harvard study also believed that money and achievement were what they should go after to have a good life. But what this study and plenty of others show is that the people who were the happiest were those that leaned into their relationships with their partner, friends, family, and community.

And when they were in their 80s the researchers asked them, what are you most proud of and what is your biggest regret?

Many people said that they were proudest of something to do with their relationships. So it could be, "I was a good boss, I was a good parent, I was a good friend, I was a good mentor." Nobody said, "I made a fortune," right? Nobody even said, you know, "I won the Nobel Prize," which a few people did. It wasn't about those badges of achievement, right, that we think of as, "Oh, that's what we gotta get to feel like we've had a meaningful life." Everybody looking back mentioned their relationships.

The biggest regret was particularly among the men, 'cause this was the World War II generation. They said, "I wish I hadn't spent so much time at work, I wish I had spent more time with the people I care about."

So what about our original question? Do achievements and money really make us happy? Well, according to the Harvard study, badges of achievement do not necessarily make us happier, but doing meaningful work can.

And what about money? Does that make us happier? Well, there's a famous study from 2010 by Daniel Kahneman and Angus Deaton that found that above an income of around $75,000 a year, there is no improvement whatever in the measures of emotional wellbeing.

But 11 years later, Matthew Killingsworth studied data on 33,000 employed U.S. adults and he found that higher incomes corresponded to higher levels of wellbeing. So he wrote, "There was no evidence for an experienced wellbeing plateau above $75,000 a year, contrary to some influential past research."

In 2022, Kahneman and Killingsworth set out to resolve the conflict with Barbara Mellers as a mediator. When they analyzed Killingsworth's data, they discovered an interesting pattern, depending on how happy people were relative to others, earning more resulted in different increases in happiness.

For each income level, they divided people into groups based on their happiness, low, medium, high, and so on. And they found that below a threshold of roughly a hundred thousand dollars a year, a higher income was associated with more happiness for all groups.

But if you go above that threshold, then for the unhappiest group, a further increase is not associated with more happiness. However, for all the happier groups, higher incomes do seem to lead to more happiness. And the real twist is that those who are the happiest to start with stand to gain the most with increasing income.

Relationships, meaningful work, and money all play a role in our happiness. So why can it be so hard to realize just how important relationships are?

You know, if you think about it, relationships have been there since before we have memory, right? So they're like the air we breathe, we take 'em for granted. So you don't think about that as something you cultivate in order to make yourself happy. We don't think about that at all.

And yet, when we study it scientifically, we find that that turns out to be an enormous predictor of happiness as well as physical health.

What's gonna make you happy?

Um.

Uh.

Uh.

Uh.

Um.

Uh.

Being wealthy is definitely a big aspect of it. But that loving family is kind of like the foundation of it. You know what I mean?

Realistically, money. But like building deep connections with people are what's going to make me happy.

[Derek] That's awesome.

Having like good relationships with other people.

You raise a family.

Have a family and provide.

Friends and family.

Seeing my family happy, that's all I really care about.

Giving back to the community where you came from, the world.

A strong family base just to come home to every night.

Yeah. I wanna get married, have a ton of kids. I want to-

How many is a ton?

Probably like five-ish, six.

That's a-

As many as I can afford. (Derek laughs) So.

In fact, when I interviewed people, I was pleasantly surprised to see how many identified the importance of relationships.

So if you could give people advice on what to start doing today to start being happier, what suggestions would you make?

To think about it as analogous with physical fitness, if you go out today, you don't come home and say, "I'm done. I don't ever have to do that again," right? It's like a practice, right? That the people who were best at relationships were the people who made it a practice day after day, week after week, to stay connected to the people they cared about. You know, to talk on the phone, to go for walks, to have coffee, to do whatever, to play basketball.

The people who took those actions again and again regularly were the people who stayed very connected and stayed happy that way. So what we propose is that this is a practice we can cultivate and that there are tiny actions that people can take.

We have many stories of people who thought that they were no good at relationships, that they were never gonna have happy lives. And then it changed. And many times it changed when they didn't expect it. So like, we have a story about one man who really didn't have a good marriage and was kind of distant from his kids, didn't have any friends. And then when he retired, he joined a gym and he found this group of friends that became, for the first time, a kind of tribe for him.

And that's just one example of how our lives take these twists and turns that we usually can't predict, that we don't expect. And many of those turns are in positive directions.

The message that the science tells us is don't give up on this aspect of your life. 'Cause many things can change at any age. (transition beeps and chimes)