Modern life is leaving many of us feeling depleted, but simply making time to relax with family and friends can help recharge our wellbeing batteries. By Marc Wilson.
I have been privileged to spend time on sabbatical. On both occasions, I was hosted as a visiting professor by my intellectual grandpappy, who worked at Harvard University. As an intellectually indigenous product of Victoria University of Wellington, where I arrived as a youngster, then worked my way up to a permanent job, I haven’t been employed anywhere else. So, I don’t have a lot of people to lean on who can host me for these kinds of things. But, fortunately, the one person I could lean on was in the world’s No 1 psychology department.
I mention this because, as well as having a free coffee machine on every floor of its psychology department, Harvard also hosts the world’s longest-running longitudinal study: the Harvard Study of Adult Development.
Here in New Zealand, we have some world-leading longitudinal studies that are the envy of the world. The New Zealand Attitudes and Values Study, now into its 14th year, has shown how our personalities change over time, and how Covid has affected this, among other things.
There’s the Christchurch Health and Development Study, started in 1977, which has shown us that single-sex education is better and that smacking for punishment is bad for kids. And, of course, we have the world-renowned Dunedin Multidisciplinary Health and Development Study, which has given us insights too numerous to mention.
The Harvard study has been running for 85 years, and started by following a cohort of Harvard students. I was reminded of this study by some headlines about opinion from another American ivy-league university, Yale.
In a column in Psychology Today, psychiatrist Mark Rego talks about how modern life is leaving us “depleted”. The pace of our existence means we’re always busy and lacking the time to recharge our wellbeing batteries. We have lost our “equilibrium”, or balance. The answer, according to Rego, isn’t to wander into the forest for some peace, but to seek out unstructured time with friends and family. Wow, something we didn’t know.
For me, one of the joys of psychology and other social sciences is to hold a mirror up to what we think we know, and to either confirm it or not. For example, US social psychologist Leon Festinger showed that if you pay someone to convince others a boring task isn’t boring, they come to believe it’s less boring than it actually is, because what kind of nice person would lie about a boring task?
In Rego’s case, there’s reason to think it’s good advice, courtesy of the Harvard longitudinal study. In his book The Good Life: Lessons from the world’s longest scientific study of happiness, study director Robert Waldinger boils the recipe for happiness down to two things: staying healthy and having meaningful relationships. Importantly, having meaningful relationships lays part of the foundation for positive physical health.
As I’m a psychological researcher, my next question would be: “How do relationships affect physical health?” Part of the answer is that stress is bad for us, but if we have friends and family around us on whom we can rely, we can relax a little. Our heart rate drops, so we’re less chronically amped up.
So far, so common sense. But how, in our busy lives, do we make time for this? Waldinger has a simple suggestion. Take a moment in your day to drop an email or text to someone who might have a meaningful but perhaps nascent connection to you to say you’re thinking of them. They’ll almost always respond appreciatively and, next thing you know, you might be organising a coffee catch-up with them.
So, here’s my prescription for happiness: reach out and connect with someone. If Waldinger is right, it will lay a foundation for more happiness and it might just save your life.
