BITESIZE | The # 1 Lesson From The World’s Longest Scientific Study of Happiness | Robert Waldinger and Marc Schulz #603
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Welcome to Feel Better, Live More Bite Size, your weekly dose of positivity and optimism to get you ready for the weekend. Today's clip is from episode 364 of the podcast with co-authors of The Good Life, Professors Robert Wardinger and Mark Schulz. Robert and Mark are directors of the Harvard Study of Adult Development, an extraordinary research project that started all the way back in 1938 and has followed participants for more than eight decades. In this clip, they explain why nurturing high-quality relationships
maybe one of the most powerful things we can do to support both our long-term health and our happiness. You are both, I guess, guardians of one of the most important studies on human happiness. I think there's so much that you've learnt, there's so much that we can all learn from your findings. But I thought a really interesting place to start would be with something you've written about in your book, that there are two major predictors of our happiness, our health, maybe even our longevity, and that's the frequency and the quality. of our contact with other people.
Why are those two things so important? Well frequency has to do with this observation that when we don't keep current with each other, with the really important people in our lives, that perfectly good relationships can simply wither away from neglect. And the quality has a lot to do with what actually is restorative and energizing about relationships, which is the sense of relationships being stress reducers, the sense of relationships being energizers, affirmers of our identity, so many different things that we get in a positive way from good quality relationships. So it is, it's frequency and quality.
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