Leading a Happy, Healthy Life

The Harvard Study of Adult Development has run for over 78 years. It began in 1938 as the W.T.Grant Study. Independently the Glueck study began the following year.

The W.T.Grant study of 268 elite men from Harvard, was intended to confirm the best ways of selecting managers for business or officers for the military. Both business and the military chose senior staff based on many desirable characteristics. In the course of fifty years the study proved that NONE of those characteristics have any predictive value. The list desirable characteristics in new leaders, still used today in most situations, are misleading. We usually choose the wrong people.

The Glueck Study, was of 456 young men from inner city Boston, men from the wrong side of the tracks mostly.

These two studies have become the Harvard Study of Adult Development — a study that has tracked the lives of 724 men, and is one of the longest studies of adult life ever done. Investigators surveyed the group every two years about their physical and mental health, their professional lives, their friendships, their marriages — and also subjected them to periodic in-person interviews, medical exams, blood tests and brain scans.

Eighty years ago people believed that once one became "adult" that development ceased. That's not so, we continue to develop and grow throughout out lives. The previous director of the Harvard Study of Adult Development, was Dr George Vaillant. His most recent book is "Triumphs of Experience." Vaillant tells us that when he was 30, he became the director of the study. The men were 55-56 and Vaillant assumed that these men were already at the peak of their careers, and that their lives were already beginning to wind down. He admits that the next 30 years were to prove that he knew very little.

The present director of the study, is psychiatrist Robert J. Waldinger. He shared some of the major lessons in a popular TED Talk (What makes a good life? Lessons from the longest study on happiness). He says, "the government has invested millions of dollars in the research, but few people know anything about it."

The big takeaways from that talk: Good relationships keep us happier and healthier, and loneliness kills.

1. A happy childhood has very, very long-lasting effects.

Having warm relationships with parents in childhood was a good predictor that you'll have warmer and more secure relationships with those closest to you when you're an adult. Happy childhoods had the power to extend across decades to predict more secure relationships that people had with their spouses in their 80s, as well as better physical health in adulthood all the way into old age.

It took fifty years to show that the only predictive characteristic of effective leaders is very simple. As a child, did he have a strong loving relationship with his mother? It took even longer to expose the abuse of alcohol as the leading cause of divorces and professional or business failures.

And it's not just parental bonds that matter: Having a close relationship with at least one sibling in childhood predicted which people were less likely to become depressed by age 50.

2. But … people with difficult childhoods can make up for them in midlife.

People who grow up in challenging environments — with chaotic families or economic uncertainty, for instance — grew old less happily than those who had more fortunate childhoods. But by the time people reached middle age (defined as ages 50–65), those who engaged in what psychologists call "generativity," or an interest in establishing and guiding the next generation, were happier and better adjusted than those who didn't.

An unhappy childhood is a big barrier. But it's possible by choosing the right life partner, and by learning to love through your children, to heal the wounds of the past.

Continued in the next Blog entry.

John Stephen Veitch