A 75 year study reveals the secret to happiness

There was a study that was done on millennials and they found out that 80% said their life goal is to become rich, 50% of them said that their life goal is to become famous. The reason why people go for rich and famous is that they think that those things will make them happy. We all know, if we're old enough, that those things don't make you happy. In a lot of cases, they do the opposite.

So what is the secret to happiness and how can we start to progress in the way of making ourselves happier?

I watched this Ted Talk a couple of years ago by a Harvard professor over a 75-year study that Harvard did to try to figure out what makes a really good life. This is an incredible story because there has never been a study that's been done like this. It’s the longest study of adult lives that has ever been done. 

They studied teenage boys into their 90’s. Every two years, they’d bring them in and ask them a series of questions. They had 724 teenage boys that they studied from all walks of life, from the richest parts of town, all the way to the poorest parts of town all over Boston.

Some of them became drug addicts, some became successful, some of them became CEOs and one person in this study even became the president of the United States. They decided to continue these studies with their wives, their children and now they’re grandchildren as well. 

These were the biggest three lessons learned. 

Good relationships

Good relationships make us happier and interestingly enough, make us healthier. I saw a study that said, being lonely every single day is the equivalent of having 15 cigarettes. Loneliness kills. 

Make sure that you have deep relationships. You don't have to have tons of relationships, but have deep ones. The people that were the most well connected with their friends, with a significant other, with their children lived longer than those who didn’t.

The people who felt isolated said that they were less happy and their brain function stopped earlier than those who had great relationships. So not only did the people with good relationships feel better, but their brains work better as well.

It’s not in the numbers

It’s not the number of friends that matter, it’s the number of committed relationships and quality relationships and depth that somebody has. They found that people that were in high conflict relationships were worse off than people who got a divorce.

The one thing that was a key indicator is when they studied them at age 50, the thing that predicted future health more than anything else was the quality of the relationships that they were in. The people that had quality relationships at 50 years old were the ones who lived the longest and we the healthiest at 80 years old. 

So look around you. Are they people around you bringing you up, making you feel better, having deep connections, or are they making you feel worse and taking your energy?

Good quality relationships protect our brains and bodies

People who were in good relationships where they feel like they can trust their spouse, friends, and people around them, in their eighties, it protected their brain and their memories stayed sharper.

The people who said that they didn't feel like they could trust the people around them in their eighties, their memory declined significantly. 

So what’s the moral of the story? Good, deep relationships equal better health. 

When you look at all of the people that you're surrounded with, do you feel that you can have quality conversations with them? Do you feel like you can trust them? Do you feel like you could be vulnerable with them? If you don’t maybe you should find people with who you can be open, honest, and vulnerable. 

I've found that people who can't be open, honest, and vulnerable with the people around them, usually can't be vulnerable with themselves. They don't know themselves intimately and when you don't know yourself intimately, you can't share yourself intimately with other people.

And so listening to this, I always like to say that success leaves clues. If you want to live a happy life if you want to live a long life, why don't you look at people who have lived a life before you?

Check out new episodes of The Mindset Mentor podcast every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.

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