- I'm Robert Waldinger.
I am a psychiatrist,
and I'm professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School.
I direct the Harvard Study of Adult Development
at Massachusetts General Hospital.
- [Narrator] Chapter one.
The 85-year quest to understand happiness.
- I became interested in psychiatry unexpectedly.
I had never known a psychiatrist growing up.
But when I was in medical school,
I found that the way people's minds worked
was the most fascinating thing I could possibly study.
So, I eventually found
that there was really nothing else for me in medicine,
but doing psychiatry.
I started out as an intern in pediatrics,
and I would see one ear infection after another.
And the kids were adorable.
But one ear infection is pretty much the same
as every other.
Whereas when you talk to people about their lives,
it's never the same,
and I knew that that would keep me interested
for my whole career, which it has.
I am the fourth director
of the Harvard Study of Adult Development,
and it is the longest study of adult life
that's ever been done.
We're in our 85th year.
It started in 1938 as two studies
that weren't even aware of each other.
One study started at Harvard Student Health Service
with 19-year-old sophomores who were thought by their deans
to be fine, upstanding young men.
And the other study was a study of juvenile delinquency
and it selected boys, middle school age,
from Boston's poorest families,
but also the most troubled families,
families beset by problems like domestic violence
and parental mental illness and physical illness.
This study set out to understand
what makes people thrive as they grow and develop.
And that was unusual
because most research that's been done
is done on what goes wrong in human development
so that we can help people.
But this was a study of what goes right.
So, it was, how do kids from disadvantaged families stay
on good paths and develop well?
And then of course, the very privileged Harvard group
was meant to be a study of normal young adult development.
We now know that if you want
to study normal young adult development,
you don't just study white men from Harvard.
But at that time, that's what they did.
We study wellbeing as people go through life,
and our big question is,
if you could make one choice today
to make it likely that you would stay happy
and stay healthy throughout your life,
what single choice would you make?
And most of us think it's something to do with getting rich
or achieving a lot,
and some people even think they need to become famous
to have a happy, healthy life.
But our study and many other studies show
that the single choice we can make
that's most likely to keep us on a good path of wellbeing is
to invest in our relationships with other people.
The people in our study
who had the happiest, warmest relationships were the people
who stayed healthy longest and who lived the longest.
The Harvard study started in 1938.
And it has followed the same people
throughout their entire lives,
from the time they were teenagers all the way into old age.
The study began with 724 young men
and then we brought in most of their wives,
and eventually most of their children,
so that now there are over 2,000 people
in these 724 families who we have followed
through their entire adult lives.
We started collecting information by giving these young men
elaborate psychological examinations,
also medical examinations.
Then we went to their homes, we talked to their parents,
and sometimes even their grandparents.
And the workers made elaborate notes
about what was being served for dinner
and what the discipline style was in the family
and even what the curtains looked like.
And then eventually,
as new methods of studying human life came on board,
we adopted those methods.
So, audiotaping, videotaping.
We now draw blood for DNA,
and DNA wasn't even imagined in 1938 when the study began.
We've put many of our people into an MRI scanner
and watched how their brains light up
as we show them different visual images.
We bring them into our laboratory
and we deliberately stress them out,
and then we watch how they recover from stress
as one more way of understanding wellbeing.
One of the things that is more common now
but was unusual when we started it
was combining biological measures and psychological measures
and seeing how our biology is influenced
by our mental states and vice versa.
So, it's this combining of mind and body measurement
that was relatively new in the last 20 years.
The question comes up,
how much of our happiness is under our control?
And they've actually done some scientific analysis of this.
Psychologist named Sonja Lyubomirsky did an analysis
in which she estimates that about 50% of our happiness
is a kind of biological set point,
probably determined by our genes
that has to do with inborn temperament.
We all know people who are kind of naturally gloomy
and other people who are naturally chipper
no matter what's going on.
So, about half of our happiness is that inborn temperament.
Then about 10%, she finds,
is based on our current life circumstances,
and then the last 40% is under our control.
We can move the needle.
We can make ourselves more likely to be happy
by building a life that includes the conditions
that make for happiness.
- [Narrator] Chapter two, the relationship advantage.
- The questions that we might ask ourselves
about our relationships are kind of simple.
One is, do I have enough connection in my life
or do I even have too much connection
if I'm a shyer person
and don't need as many people in my life?
So, do I have what I need?
And each person can check in with themselves about that.
Then the question is,
do I have relationships that are warm and supportive?
And there again, each of us needs to ask that question.
Do I have people who have my back, who I feel I could call
and would be there in an emergency?
Because hard times are always coming our way.
And then the question is also,
what am I getting from relationships?
Do I have enough people to have fun with?
Do I have enough people who will loan me their tools
when I need to fix something in my house
or who will drive me to the doctor when I need a ride?
Do I have those kinds of friends?
One of the things we know about life is
that we all have worries.
We all have concerns that come along,
worries about children, worries about health,
worries about finances.
And one of the best teachings I got in my training
as a psychiatrist was from one of my mentors who said,
"Never worry alone."
And this teacher meant that about being worried
about a patient who I was treating.
But what I've come to understand
that it's really good advice
for just about everything in life,
that if I'm really worried about something
and I share it with somebody I trust,
it makes all the difference in how much better I feel
and how much less alone I feel with my worry.
There are so many different things we get from relationships
and so each of us can check in
with ourselves about what we have
and what we would like a little more of.
So, we've learned several big lessons about relationships,
about good relationships,
and one of them is
that childhood experience really does matter.
What happens to us in childhood sets the stage
for what we come to expect from the world,
and that's often a good thing if we are raised
by people who are warm and caring and reliable.
Some people don't have that luck
and are raised in environments
where they feel like the people who are supposed
to take care of them aren't trustworthy,
can't be relied upon.
And so, many of those people come into adulthood
with the expectation that the world is not a safe place
and that people can't be relied on.
The other thing we've learned is that...
adult experience can correct for some
of those unfortunate lessons that people learn in childhood.
Becoming connected with a good partner,
with good friends who you can count on can go a long way
to change those gloomy expectations about the world
and about relationships, and allow us to realize that,
yes, we can find people who are good,
reliable partners in our relational world.
So, another lesson that we learn is that all relationships
that are important have some disagreements
or some difficulties.
And that actually facing those difficulties
goes a long way to strengthen relationships much of the time
so that if we can work on relationships,
that turns out to have great payoff
in terms of keeping our connections stronger.
What that means is that it's normal to have disagreements,
it's normal to have difficulties,
and that the more skill we can develop in working
through difficulties, the better our social worlds are.
One of the biggest lessons we learned from our study is
that our connections with other people
help us weather the hard times of life
and hard times are there in every life.
So, our original participants were born
during the Great Depression
and many of the Harvard undergraduates were of an age to go
and serve in World War II.
And when we asked them,
how did you get through these really difficult times?
All of them to a person talked about their relationships.
Our neighbors shared what little we had
during the depression.
My fellow soldiers in the trenches were the people
who kept me going.
The letters that came to me from back home
while I was overseas in the war were what sustained me.
And so, what we find is that these connections turn out
to be the best protection against the difficult times
that are always coming our way.
We are pretty sure that we human beings evolved
to be social animals,
that in fact staying together in groups made it more likely
that we would survive the dangers
that are out there in the world
and passed on our genes, which is the goal of evolution.
So, we evolved to find being together secure and safe
and to find being alone a stressor.
And what we find is that that is still the case,
that people who are more isolated
than they want to be are stressed.
Loneliness is a big stressor
and we think that that is biologically based,
as well as emotionally based.
The best hypothesis about how relationships get
into our bodies and affect our physical health
is through stress,
that we are having stressful experiences
often all day long and that's normal.
And that when we're stressed, the body is meant
to go into what we call fight or flight mode
where essentially heart rate goes up,
it might start to sweat, a variety of changes happen.
But then when the stressor is removed,
the body is meant to return to equilibrium.
What we think happens is that,
if I have something stressful happen during the day
and I can go home and talk to a friend or call someone,
I can literally feel my body calm down.
If I don't have anyone I can talk to about something
that happens in my life that's stressful,
we believe what happens is we stay
in a kind of low level chronic fight or flight mode.
And what that means is that we have higher levels
of circulating stress hormones like cortisol.
We have higher levels of inflammation going on
in the body all the time,
and that these changes gradually wear away
different body systems,
which is how stress and loneliness could make it more likely
that we would get coronary artery disease
and more likely that we would get type two diabetes
or arthritis, could affect multiple body systems
through this common denominator of chronic stress.
Our understanding is that good relationships actually
are emotion regulators,
that what happens is that good relationships
involve the exchange of positive emotion
that helps our bodies stay in equilibrium.
So, in fact, they've put people in MRI scanners
and washed what happens to them
when they go through a stressful medical procedure.
and they find that if they're holding someone's hand,
even a stranger, but certainly someone they know,
their bodies stay much closer to equilibrium
than if they're alone undergoing the same medical procedure.
And so, what it shows us is that being connected
to another person makes us feel safer
and keeps our bodies at a kind of physiologic equilibrium
that promotes health.
A toxic relationship is one
where we can't get beyond difficulties, unhappiness, anger.
we can't ever come out the other side to a place
where we're okay again with each other.
And so, a toxic relationship involves unhappiness
even if you're quiet about it, chronic resentment,
often withdrawal, and then active arguing.
On the other hand, couples argue all the time
without having these detrimental effects.
What we've found from our research
is that couples can argue often and quite vocally,
but if there is a bedrock of affection and respect,
those relationships continue to be positive and stable.
Research shows us that loneliness is certainly a stressor
and that we have increased levels of stress hormones,
increased levels of chronic inflammation,
but research also shows us that
ongoing acrimony in a relationship,
constant arguing and unhappiness is also hazardous
to our health for just the same reasons.
So, there was in fact a study that suggested that staying
in a really toxic intimate relationship may be worse
than splitting up for that reason
because a really difficult acrimonious relationship is
that source of chronic stress that keeps us
in fight or flight mode most of the time
and breaks down our body systems.
The research shows that people
who have a secure connection
with a partner in late life have slower brain decline.
In addition, the research shows that people
who are lonely in late life have more rapid brain decline.
So, we know that this same process of increased stress
or decreased stress affects how our brains age.
- [Narrator] Chapter three, strengthening your connections.
- When we looked at all these lives
and how they played out over time,
we found that the people who were the happiest
and the healthiest paid attention constantly
to their relationships.
They were inviting people over, they were joining clubs,
they were maintaining connections with family
and friends and in community.
And we began to think of this as a kind of fitness,
a social fitness, analogous to physical fitness.
So, if you think about it, you don't go to the gym today
and then you come home and say, "I'm done.
I never have to work out again."
We know that maintaining our physical fitness
is an ongoing practice,
and what we found was that our happiest,
healthiest people did the same with their relationships.
And so, what we've come to understand
is that each of us can do that through small actions
that we repeat over and over again, reaching out to friends,
to family, through little texts or emails or phone calls,
day in, day out, certainly weekly,
making sure that we see people in person
who we wanna stay current with
and who we want to keep in our lives,
that these actions paying attention
to how often we're seeing people,
how often we're in touch with people pay off.
They build over time into social networks that are vibrant
and make us happier and keep us healthier.
So, the question comes up, "How do I know how I'm doing?
Am I socially fit?"
And really, it's in the eye of the beholder
that you can check in with yourself and say,
"Do I have the kinds of relationships that I would like?
Do I have as many relationships as I would like?"
You could even do a little exercise
where you map out your relationships,
draw a set of concentric circles,
and then see who's at the center of your life,
and then who's farther out.
Who are your more peripheral relationships?
And see how well populated your world is
and whether that feels like the right amount for you.
And if it doesn't feel like the right amount,
there are things you can do
to make things the way you would like them to be.
One way to map your social universe is
to think of it as four quadrants,
that, on the horizontal axis,
it's "How frequently do I see this person?"
from infrequently to frequently.
And on the vertical axis, it could be,
"How energizing is this relationship?"
Up at the top, it could be very energizing.
Down at the bottom, it could be depleting.
And then see where each important person in your life
fits on this grid.
You might find that there are some people you see frequently
who are quite depleting, who drain your energy.
You might see that there are other people
who you don't see very often,
but are so energizing when you're with them.
And that can give you some pointers
in terms of changes you might like to make
in your relationships.
When we think about relationships that are energizing,
check in with yourself
and think about whether you feel more positive,
whether you feel more physical energy,
whether you feel more open and more optimistic.
And then in terms of depleting relationships,
think about when you feel drained of energy,
when you feel more gloomy, when you feel more closed off.
And you can think about that with each voice you listen to
in your social world.
You can even think about it in your social media world.
You can think about it in our political life.
Who makes you feel more open?
Who makes you feel more closed off and afraid?
And what we can do is turn more
toward those people that allow us to feel more open,
more hopeful, more energized.
I think we can learn again to pay attention
to what's energizing and depleting.
I think we do that as kids.
You will notice kids are just very open
about being energized, excited, or down and unhappy.
And we're taught to squash all of those signals
and not to pay so much attention.
I think as we get older and we have to sit still
and we have to behave
and we have to do all the things we should do,
and so it's something we can learn to cultivate again,
that inner sense of being able
to read our own energy levels.
They're always there.
It's just a matter of whether we're tuning into them.
One thing we wonder about is,
what do I do with a relationship with somebody
where I see this person frequently
and I feel really drained when I'm with them?
Well, couple possibilities.
One is, could you see them a little less often?
Another possibility is see them with the same frequency,
but have the kind of interaction
where you don't feel as drained.
Perhaps you don't talk about the most draining subjects
or you don't do the activities that deplete you of energy.
Try to alter the way your encounters proceed
to see if you can emerge feeling less drained
when you're with that person.
Sometimes, we don't have control
over how often we see those people who make us feel drained,
but what we can do is change our approach
to think about this other person
and what they struggle with.
Actually, one of my favorite quotes comes
from a 19th century minister who told his flock,
"Be kind for everyone you meet is fighting a great battle."
So, with those difficult people in your life,
you might try to remember that each of us is struggling
to live the best way we can
and we're all doing what we can to keep going.
In a difficult world,
people often ask many good friends do I need?
And one size does not fit all.
People vary a lot in the number of friends they need
and whether they need a lot of close friends
or a lot of peripheral friends
that we're all on a continuum from shyness to extroversion.
Shy people may need just a few others in their life.
And actually, shy people get a lot of their energy
from solitude, from alone time.
Whereas extroverts get their energy from people
and they may want a lot of people in their lives.
So, each of us needs to check in with ourselves,
what's right for me,
and to really work on our social world
based on what we know works for us,
whether it's a lot of people or a small number of people
or something in between.
So, how do we keep a relationship healthy?
We've learned some things about that.
First of all, paying attention really matters.
One of my zen teachers use the phrase,
"Attention is the most basic form of love."
And if you think about it,
our undivided attention is the most valuable thing
we have to offer another person.
But we rarely do that these days.
We are constantly distracted by our wonderful screens
that are always grabbing our attention
and drawing us away from each other.
So, really paying attention.
When your longtime friend
or your partner who you've been with for 20 years wants
to tell you about their day, really turn to them,
give them your full undivided attention.
That goes a long way
toward strengthening relationships.
Another thing is to
really be curious about the people you're with,
particularly the people you think you know so well.
There was a study of couples
and how well they understood each other,
how well they knew each other's feelings.
And the couples who were most tuned into each other
were couples who had just started dating,
and the couples who were least tuned into each other
were couples who'd been together a long time.
And if you think about it, it makes sense
because the couples who just start dating
are really concerned,
"How into me is this other person?" right?
Whereas the couples who've been together
for 20 years can assume,
"Oh, I know exactly what this person's gonna say."
So, what we suggest is
that bringing curiosity to relationships
that you might take for granted,
that bringing that curiosity can be so powerful
and so enlivening.
Again, one of my zen teachers once gave me the assignment
to look and say to myself,
"What's here right now that I have not noticed before?"
And if you think about sitting down to dinner
with your longtime friend who you think you know so well,
what if you ask yourself that question.
What's here right now that I've never noticed before?
And that kind of curiosity can get you to notice new things,
can get you to talk about new things
in a relationship that seems old and maybe a little stale.
And finally,
we know that working on difficulties
in relationships really matters,
that finding ways to work out disagreements,
so that you both feel okay,
so that you get to the other side
and nobody feels like one person has won
and the other person has lost.
That when you can do that
kind of working out of difficulties,
relationships get stronger and deeper.
When we watch these thousands of lives play out over time,
what we see is that the good life is an ongoing process,
and it's a process of continual change,
which is different from what we all wish for,
which is that we would finally get to a place
where everything's good and it's gonna stay that way.
That's not the truth of anybody's life.
That there are always challenges,
there are always unexpected things happening,
and that the good life involves a practice
of ongoing care for each other, for our relationships,
care for ourselves,
and weathering all the unexpected challenges
that come along day after day, week after week.
My hope for what people will take away from these ideas
is the truth that nobody's happy all the time.
And that if you're not happy all the time,
that doesn't mean you're doing something wrong,
that we can sometimes imagine
that other people have it all figured out,
and we're the only one who has ups and downs in our life.
Let me tell you, from having studied thousands of people
over eight decades, that everybody has ups and downs.
We never figure it out ultimately,
and that that's perfectly normal.
And actually, it's what makes life rich and interesting.
- [Narrator] Chapter four,
mindfulness, zen, and the good life.
I am a zen practitioner
and I'm an ordained zen priest, and I'm a zen teacher.
I'm actually a roshi, a zen master.
And so, I meditate every day.
I teach meditation here in the United States
and actually internationally.
It's a big part of my life.
And what I find is that it is an enormous benefit
in terms of how I think about my own life,
other people's lives,
how I think about my research,
how I think about working with patients.
Zen emphasizes community.
It's called Sangha, it the Buddhist language.
And it's really the idea
that we practice learning about ourselves
and each other by being in relationships with each other,
both during meditation sessions and out there in the world.
So, we practice with whatever comes up for us.
So, if I get annoyed at my friend, I practice with that.
I notice the annoyance, I feel what it feels like in my body
and in my brain, and I notice what I do with annoyance.
And then I notice how my friend reacts
to me when I'm annoyed.
All these things are part of this
kind of deep dive into what is my experience like
of being in a relationship.
What's joy like in a relationship?
One of the principles of meditation is
that if we really look at our own lives,
our minds are messy and chaotic,
and we're not always proud of what we feel or what we think.
And we come to accept all of that
as just part of being human.
And then what we realize is that everybody
is having the same experience.
Everybody's minds are messy and chaotic,
and everybody has thoughts they're not proud of
and impulses they don't like.
And when we realize that we come
to have a lot more compassion for ourselves
and for other people, there's a lot more acceptance.
The idea is that we move from a place of wanting the world
to conform to what we like and don't like.
We move from that place to not needing other people
to be different from who they are,
realizing that each of us is just showing up
in the world as we are,
and that's something to be celebrated and accepted.
Well, the main explicit goal of zen is nothing.
Zen is a practice.
Now, the side effect of practice is waking up.
Waking up really means understanding more deeply the truth
of what it means to be alive, the truth, for example,
that everything is constantly changing, including me,
that even the things that look like they are fixed
and stable are always in a process of continual change.
That's really helpful
because often we try to fix things,
we try to hold onto things and make them stay the same,
and we suffer a lot when we do that.
So, learning about the truth of what we call impermanence
relieves a lot of suffering that we inflict on ourselves.
I would rate the concept of impermanence as number one,
as the greatest hit of Zen Buddhism.
Basically, the idea of everything constantly changing means
that Bob has no fixed self or identity.
Bob is always fluid.
I am always in the process of change,
and I'm always connected with other people
and other things in the world that are themselves changing.
And so, there's nothing fixed.
There's nothing to hold onto in the deepest sense.
And that on the one hand, that can be scary.
On the other hand, it can be an enormous relief
because we tell ourselves so many stories about who we are
and who we're supposed to be
and how the world is supposed to be.
And when we really know the truth of impermanence,
we let a lot of that go.
One of the things that impermanence helps us understand is
the ebb and flow of all of our experience.
So, when we really get that everything arises
and then passes away,
that means that my annoyance at this other person
is only temporary.
It's not going to stay the same no matter what.
All you have to do is watch an emotion for long enough
and you'll see that it changes.
That's helpful when we're caught in the middle
of some unhappy relationship, some unhappy argument,
or something going on in with another person where we can
fall back on that awareness
that it is not gonna feel this way forever.
In fact, it's probably not gonna feel this way
an hour from now,
certainly not a day from now or a week from now.
And keeping that long-term perspective
of impermanence can go a long way
to make us feel more accepting of the ups and downs
of a relationship in any given moment.
The four noble truths
are perhaps the most iconic teachings of the Buddha.
They're translated in many different ways,
but they start with the Buddhist statement
that life is suffering,
or better translated, I think, "Life is unsatisfactory,"
that there are always aspects to life that we don't like
and that that's an inevitable part of being alive.
And then the second teaching is that the source
of suffering is known,
that it is greed and aversion or hatred and ignorance.
That suffering can be relieved. That's the third truth.
And the fourth truth is that there is a way of life
that the Buddha called the eightfold path
that can help relieve all this suffering in life.
It's often said that the Buddha was teaching
that you could get to a point
where you never suffer anymore.
Zen does not teach that.
Zen does not teach that anybody finally arrives at a place
where we don't ever feel pain,
where we don't ever feel worry or unhappiness.
Rather, what we can do is learn to be
with what's unsatisfactory in life,
learn to be with unhappiness,
even be with pain in a way that makes it more bearable,
in a way that doesn't layer on optional suffering.
The optional suffering being the stories we tell about
how unfair it all is, for example, that I have back pain
or how unfair it is that I've got a cold today,
that all of these things are workable.
But zen teaches
that unsatisfactoriness is always there in life,
and that we do have preferences that we're never going
to completely give up our preferences,
but that what we can do is learn to clinging less tightly
to our preferences.
In other words, to insist less
that the world be a certain way.
I mean, think about in relationships how much we try
to insist that someone else be a certain way
that we want them to be,
and how much less we suffer if we let that go.
And just assume that that person is allowed
to show up in the world as they are,
and we are allowed to show up in the world as we are.
So, this idea of relieving suffering is in zen.
The idea of being able to face towards suffering,
looking at it and living with it in a way that hurts less.
Buddhism talks about the idea of attachment.
And it doesn't mean attachment
in the way we normally think of it,
like just being connected to somebody or something.
It's really about holding on tightly
to a fixed view of something.
So, I'm attached to the idea that there's one true religion
or one true political party, or one true anything.
There's a wonderful teaching in zen about beginner's mind.
Beginner's mind being the idea that we let go
of all the stories we tell ourselves that we're so sure of,
that, you know, we become an expert in life
and an expert in ourself.
Shunryu Suzuki was a zen master
who had a saying that I love.
He said,
"In the beginner's mind, there are many possibilities.
In the expert's mind, there are few."
And what he meant by that is when we can remain open
to many possibilities rather than narrowing everything down
and being so sure that we know what's what,
that we become open to surprise, open to new ways
of experiencing ourselves and the world
that make us suffer a great deal less
than when we are so-called experts.
And the older I get
and the more people call me an expert,
the more aware I am of how little I know.
Having a beginner's mind really helps in relationships
because it allows us to be curious.
It allows us to say, "Okay.
There's so much I don't know about this person.
Let me watch closely.
Let me notice what I haven't seen before about this person.
Let me find new ways to interact with this person,"
and that brings a kind of freshness
and openness to relationships
that can otherwise easily get stale.
The best definition I know of mindfulness is simple.
It's paying attention in the present moment
without judgment.
So, it's really just paying attention to whatever's here.
So, right now, for me, that's talking with you.
That's the feel of the chair on my back.
It's the feel of the air on my skin.
It's the sound of my voice
kind of reverberating in my head, all of those things.
And simply being open to all the experiences
that are here right now,
not just the little thoughts going on in my head.
And so, mindfulness asks us to be more expansive,
to open our awareness beyond thinking
to everything going on in the world.
You can work on it right now.
You can work on your mindfulness right this moment
by simply paying attention
to whatever stimuli are reaching you.
It might be your heartbeat. It might be your breath.
It might be the sound of the fan in the room,
the traffic outside, anything.
And simply letting yourself be open
and receive whatever is here right now.
And you can do that in any moment.
You can do that when you're sitting in a meeting.
You can do that when you're waiting
for an airplane at the airport.
You can do that when you're driving your car.
In fact, being mindful could be really useful
when you're driving your car.
When we really know what it feels like to suffer,
to be in pain, to be unhappy, to be scared,
we're better at knowing what's coming from inside from me
and what's coming from outside.
Many times we mistake those two.
I come home
and I don't realize that actually my knee hurts
and I find myself more irritated at my partner.
And so, one of the things that
being really mindful about my own experience does
is it makes me a little less likely to blame other people
for what's going on in me.
And that can be hugely helpful when we talk about harmony
in relationships.
The other way that being mindful about my suffering can help
in my relationships is it helps me realize,
"Oh, everybody suffers in this way.
If I'm more irritable when I'm not feeling well,
that must mean that everybody's more irritable,
or most people are when they're not feeling well."
And it allows me to remember
to cut people's slack when they're not feeling well, right?
Instead of just being annoyed
that they're a little short with me.
So, there are these ways that knowing
about my own discomfort
and what I do with it can be a huge help
in being empathic toward other people.
There's a concept of metta loving-kindness in Buddhism,
and there are a couple of different ways
that it's talked about.
One is an explicit skill that we can cultivate.
You can do a loving-kindness meditation
where you think about another person
and you meditate on that other person
and you say to yourself, "May you be peaceful.
May you be happy. May you be at peace."
And you do that over and over again,
and you come to feel differently about the other person,
including about people you don't like very much
or you're angry at.
So, there's that way of actively cultivating a skill.
There's another way, which is simply by becoming more
and more aware of your own pain,
your own anxious, angry thoughts, your own difficulties.
Because what happens when we become more aware of that
through meditation, for example, is
that we become much more empathic toward other people.
And naturally, that kind of loving-kindness arises
where we see an angry person and say,
"Oh, I wonder if that person is having a terrible day,"
rather than immediately reacting with our own anger.
That's a different way to cultivate loving-kindness.
But it happens pretty reliably through meditation.
There's a lot of talk about enlightenment.
It's a concept that's very old in Buddhism,
but also in other spiritual traditions.
And it can mean so many different things.
But in my zen tradition,
it really refers to waking up to the truth of what life is
and to some of the surprising aspects
of life that we don't normally see.
Most specifically, the interconnectedness of everything,
the essential oneness of everything.
That yes, on one level, everything exists separately.
I exist separately from you,
and this chair exists separately from me.
And at the deepest level, none of it is separate.
All of it is completely interconnected and always changing.
That is awakening to the truth of life.
Now, enlightenment is often held out
as a thing that we can get.
And in fact, you can read accounts
of people sitting in long periods of meditation,
sometimes on retreats,
where they essentially have these amazing experiences.
Sometimes they feel like out of body experiences
and they can write elaborate descriptions
of what these are like.
And sometimes people feel like,
"Well, if I just have those experiences,
then I'm enlightened.
And if I had those experiences once, I want them back.
So, I want to try to get them back again."
What we teach in zen is that that's actually dangerous,
that nobody lives in a kind
of unusual altered state all the time.
Most of us never do.
And if we have unusual experiences, it's very brief.
an experience of, for example, complete interconnectedness
and oneness cannot last.
In fact, one zen teacher did a set of interviews with people
who had had enlightenment experiences,
and he put them into a book.
And the title of the book was
"After the Ecstasy, the Laundry."
And what he meant by that was that no matter what kind
of unusual experience we might have of waking up,
of enlightenment, we always go back to needing
to do the laundry and needing to brush our teeth
and needing to go to work.
That that is just how life is.
So, although most of us, myself included,
wish that there were a way to get enlightened
and stay that way,
to get to a place where it's always blissful
and we never suffer,
I have never met a human being on this earth
who gets to that place.
And zen teaching is that that's not possible.
That in fact, we move in and out of states
of being more awakened or less awakened.
That no matter how evolved you are
as a spiritual practitioner,
you're gonna have times when you're just all upset
about stupid stuff, when you're just deluded, as we say.
And then you move back into periods
where you see life more clearly.
That's important for me
because if you meet people who hold themselves out
as an ultimately enlightened person,
be very suspicious of that.
Be very suspicious of anybody
who claims to be a perfectly evolved,
enlightened human being.
Shunryu Suzuki,
a very important zen teacher in the United States
in the 20th century, was famous for saying
that there's no such thing as an enlightened person.
There is only enlightened activity.
And what he meant by that was
that no person is finally, fully, and forever enlightened.
There is only this moment's activity.
So, if I do something that is kind,
that pays attention to my interconnectedness with everyone
and everything, that is enlightened activity.
If I do something that's selfish,
if I do something that destroys the planet,
that is unenlightened activity.
And so, the idea of pursuing enlightenment
really is not pursuing a self-improvement project.
It's pursuing a way to be as compassionate
as I can in each moment,
to pursue enlightened activity in as many moments
as I can string together in my life.
That's the goal.
One fact about enlightenment is
that it can't be permanent.
If we really know the truth of impermanence,
then why would enlightenment be permanent
when everything else is not?
So, clearly, enlightenment has to come and go
just like everything else.
Striving for enlightenment is a self-improvement project.
And what we talk about in my zen tradition is
that we don't want to embark on a self-improvement project.
We want to strive for greater kindness
and harmony in the world
rather than being lost in the delusion
of an isolated permanent self.
And so, really what we wanna strive for
is enlightened activity in the world.
- [Narrator] Chapter five. What to do about loneliness?
- Loneliness is absolutely an epidemic in our society,
but it's been growing for decades.
There are so many factors that are responsible
for this loneliness epidemic.
They did not just begin with the digital revolution,
that in fact, loneliness was on the rise, as we know,
at least from the 1950s.
In part because of social dislocation,
we become a much more mobile society
where the networks of family and friends
that people would live in their entire lives
more frequently get disrupted as people move for jobs
and other kinds of opportunities like education.
And that all of that is good on the one hand,
but that it tears us away from the fabric of belonging
that many of us are born into
and spend much of our lives creating.
There's that. There is the world of screen.
So, when television came into the American home,
there was a decline in investing in our communities.
People went out less. They joined clubs less often.
They went to houses of worship less often.
They invited people over less often.
All of that seems to contribute
to our increasing disconnection
and our increasing levels of loneliness.
That was made worse
as the digital revolution gave us more
and more screens to look at
and software that was designed specifically
to grab our attention, hold our attention,
and therefore keep it away from the people we care about.
Since we first started asking people if they were lonely,
we know that people have been more and more isolated,
less and less invested in other people,
starting in the 1950s
and going all the way through to today.
So, that now when you ask people, in some studies,
as many as 60% of people will say
that they feel lonely much of the time.
Certainly, the lowest estimates are 30% to 40% of people
say they feel lonely much of the time.
We know, for example, that young adults
are the loneliest age group.
Age 16 to 24 has the highest rates
of people responding that they feel lonely.
And then again, among older adults,
there is an increase in loneliness,
particularly as people lose friends, lose partners.
But loneliness is pervasive across the world,
across all age groups, all income groups, all demographics.
Loneliness is the sense that I am less connected
to other people than I want to be.
It's a very subjective experience.
No one can tell you whether you're lonely or not.
Only you can tell if you're lonely.
And the fact is, you can be lonely in a crowd.
You can be lonely in a marriage.
You can also be very content
and not lonely alone on a mountaintop.
So, it's very much a subjective experience,
and that makes it different too from isolation.
So, I can deliberately isolate myself
and feel great about that.
And in fact, yearn for solitude.
You know, artists, writers sometimes want nothing more than
to go off to a cabin in the woods and create,
and they're thrilled to have that space and time.
Not a problem.
So, it's different. Social isolation may include loneliness,
or it may not include loneliness.
We know that loneliness
and social isolation are stressors,
that when people feel too isolated, too alone,
their bodies are in a kind of chronic
low level fight or flight mode,
meaning they have higher levels
of circulating stress hormones like cortisol,
they have higher levels of inflammation,
and that these things break down body systems.
They break down our coronary arteries.
They break down our joints.
All kinds of body systems suffer
when we are in fight or flight mode.
We think that stress is one of the main causes
of physical health breakdown that comes from loneliness.
But there are probably other causes as well.
And many research groups are trying to understand this now.
There's good work by Julianne Holt-Lunstad,
who is a researcher who studies loneliness.
And what she finds in reviewing many studies is
that loneliness is as dangerous to our health as smoking,
in her estimate, half a pack of cigarettes a day,
as dangerous as being obese.
When we think about what we need
and want in relationships,
most of it boils down to feeling like we belong in the world
with some people, feeling like we matter to some people.
In fact, often,
the experience that marginalized people will have
at a workplace, for example, is that they don't matter,
that their comments aren't heard in meetings.
And we feel that with friends, we feel it with family.
And so, often it's just that experience
that when we show up, people appreciate that we're there.
When we have an idea to offer, people listen
and they reflect back that they heard us.
The mattering that comes
with people acknowledging you in a friendly way.
So, the person who makes our coffee
in the morning at the coffee shop,
who exchanges some friendly words,
makes us feel like we belong
and like we're seen in a little way.
And that all of that gives us these small hits
of wellbeing that say to us, "You belong.
You matter. You're connected."
One of the things we find in research is
that it's not just our closest relationships that matter
and make us feel like we belong and make us feel connected.
It's all kinds of relationships.
It's the person who delivers the mail
if we have a friendly little chat.
It's the cashier who checks us out at the grocery store.
It's all these casual encounters.
If we make pleasant encounters of those meetings,
what we find is that we get these hits of wellbeing.
We get a sense of connection.
One minister said that her new procedure, her new practice,
is to look at people's name tags as she interacts with them,
and to call them by name and to look them in the eye
and to say hello and ask about their day.
So, when she goes through the TSA line,
the security line at the airport,
she looks at the worker's name tag
and says, "Hi, Joyce. How's your day going?"
and she said people are amazed.
They feel noticed, they feel seen
instead of like these anonymous people
who are just passing you on through.
So, all of these ways of making it
a little bit more personal do a lot
to make other people feel like they belong
and they make us feel more like we belong.
One of the things we know about relationships
is that they often start when we're in a situation
where we encounter the same people casually
over and over again.
That's why the water cooler at work has become iconic,
you know, or it could be the coffee machine at work.
But someplace where you come together with people at random
who you see and might see again and again.
What that tells us is that one way to make new relationships
if you are feeling too isolated is
to do something you care about alongside other people.
So, it might be volunteering for a political cause.
It might be volunteering at a soup kitchen
or a food pantry.
It might be joining a gardening club or a bowling league.
Go to a place and do something
with other people that you enjoy.
What it does is it puts you in contact
with the same people over and over again.
You have something in common
'cause you're doing something you both care about,
and it gives you an immediate place to start conversations.
Those are some of the best ways to make it more likely
that you're gonna make new relationships.
Another way to make new relationships
is to find ways to be of service.
All of us have things we can do
that other people will be grateful for.
You know, as I said, it could be volunteering
at a soup kitchen.
It could be reading to a child who wants to be read to
or tutoring someone in school
or teaching English as a second language.
There are always things we know how to do
that other people would be grateful to learn from us.
Many people who are lonely feel
that others don't want to be with them.
And what we know is that lonely people can sometimes
give off the message that they don't want to be approached
because they're afraid of others.
They're afraid of the world.
And so, it may be that lonely people can learn more
about making gestures and giving off signals that say,
"I would like to connect
even when they're a little bit afraid to do so."
And so, they've actually developed forms
of cognitive behavior therapy
where people are taught these social skills
and taught how to revise their assumptions
about not being wanted by other people.
My recommendation if you're feeling lonely
and a little bit afraid is find a place
where you are comfortable if there is one.
Find a setting,
find an activity where you are comfortable,
and let yourself do it around other people
and see what develops.
- [Narrator] Wanna support the channel?
Join the Big Think members community
where you get access to videos early, ad-free.
Chrome Extension