Thomas Hübl:
Welcome to point of relation. My name is Thomas Rebel. This is my podcast and I’m so happy to be sitting here with Bob Waldinger. Bob, a warm, welcome to our podcast here. I’m very happy to be speaking to you. I’m very curious. I have lots of questions. So one, welcome.
Robert Waldinger:
Well, thank you. I’m really glad to be here.
Thomas Hübl:
So it seems like one of your passions besides psychiatry, human development, adult development is happiness obviously, and studying happiness. Maybe you can first share what’s attractive for you right now in your work. What makes you happy in doing what you’re doing? And then maybe lead that a bit into the research that you do and how the research, what’s exciting for you, what’s interesting for you, what’s surprising for you all that we’ll unpack this together, but that’s a little bit like for our audience to get to know you a bit deeper and then we unfold there. Sure.
Robert Waldinger:
Well, those were several questions, so if I forget some just prompt me. But so what excites me about this work? I have been interested in observing life probably most of my life. I’m not sure why. I think I am a voyeur at heart and I have always been interested in what makes people tick, including what makes me tick. And so I think of what I do is using three different lenses to try to look at life. One is, as you say, this lifespan research, studying the same people over their entire lifespans, which I’ve had the privilege of doing. I’m also as a psychiatrist, my specialty is psychotherapy. So I get to really immerse myself deeply into people’s lives, which again is quite a privilege to do. And zen, I practice zen, which is a lot of sitting on a cushion, meditating every day. I now teach Zen as well. And all three research, psychotherapy and zen are all ways of looking at what it means to be alive. So that’s what excites me and that’s what seems to be motivating me still to do the work that I do.
Thomas Hübl:
That’s beautiful. Can you, because all of the three may be in different ways than you do, it excite me too. And I’m wondering, can you give me a little, the difference between the various lenses? So what does research introduce you to? What does meditation give you access to? How do you see this? Are these similar modalities, are the different modalities? Do they open different gateways into what makes us tick? How would you describe these three different access gates to life?
Robert Waldinger:
They’re pretty different. So research involves studying, in my case, hundreds, up to thousands of people and asking them a lot of questions, taking measurements, drawing blood, putting them into MRI scanners and then putting numbers to their experience and then crunching those numbers and trying to get at the signals, the truths that are there to be unearthed if we do it well. And so it involves a lot of very nitpicky kind of detail oriented, future oriented work. Deferred gratification is the name of the game, especially when you do long-term longitudinal research. I mean, imagine waiting 30 years to be able to look back across a span of time and see how life proceeds or 50 years or 80 years, which we do.
So that’s the research. Psychotherapy is talking with one person repeatedly over time, often months, years, and getting to know their life and their take on life. And then getting to see change as they change, as life changes, as we change together. And it’s getting to observe another person, participate with another person as they think about their life. Zen is really different in that zen is looking at first my own life as I sit on a cushion. But zen really focuses on the nonverbal, the experiential Zen is not about the thinking mind. The thinking mind is okay, but mostly we try to leave it to one side and basically pay attention to experience. And so zen is a wonderful compliment to these kind of left brain more verbal things that I do as a psychotherapist and as a researcher.
Thomas Hübl:
Yeah, that’s beautiful. It’s lovely to hear you describe this three different gateways to understanding or deepening our understanding of life, but that’s beautiful. I’ll come back to the send meditation. I’m really curious to hear more about it. But let’s start with the research. So of course I think many people, and most probably many of our listeners have heard about the longitudinal study that you and your colleagues do. So maybe you can describe a little bit anyway, for people that don’t know the background, there’s a long-term study. What are you studying and what is the basis or what are the basic findings that you the foundational to the study?
Robert Waldinger:
The study is about human thriving. It’s about what predicts who’s going to be healthy and happy as they go through their lives. So most of the research that we do on human beings is about what goes wrong. It’s about disease, about psychopathology. And these studies were begun in 1938, both of them, two different studies as studies of what goes right. One was a group of Harvard College undergraduate students. We thought by their deans to be fine, upstanding young man. And it was meant to be a study of normal development from adolescents to young adulthood. And of course now we think, well, if you want to study normal development, would you study all white men from Harvard? No, you wouldn’t. But at that time they thought that was a good idea. And the other study was begun as a study of juvenile delinquency by two faculty members at Harvard Law School. And they were particularly interested in children born into terrible circumstances, families plagued by domestic violence, by parental mental and physical illness, by extreme poverty. And they were interested in how some of those children managed to stay on good developmental paths despite having so many predictors that they would not do well again, they were interested in thriving at a time when that was a very rare thing to study.
So that’s how we got to these two studies, which then got combined as two very different groups of people, one very privileged group and one very underprivileged group. And we’ve followed them now and their spouses and their children for 86 years.
Thomas Hübl:
Wow. Wow. That’s impressive. So what did you see in 86 years? So what does it say, say about the two different groups and what are the main learnings that you derive from then?
Robert Waldinger:
Well, we’ve published hundreds of papers. This is our 11th book, the Good Life. And we found two big domains of findings, two big findings. One will not surprise you or any of your listeners, it’s that if we take care of our health, it really matters for how long we live, but also how healthy we remain as we go through life, as we age. So that means good diet, regular exercise, not smoking, not abusing alcohol or drugs. I think I mentioned regular exercise, good nutrition, preventive healthcare, all those things matter enormously. They matter in years of disability free life. And we’re of course not the first study to show this, but it really showed up dramatically in our findings.
So that was not the surprise. The surprise was that we found that the people who stayed the healthiest physically were the people who were more connected to other people and had the warmest connections to other people that we were not surprised that people were happier if they had more connections to others and happier relationships that made sense. But how could having good relationships make it less likely that you’ll get coronary artery disease or type two diabetes or arthritis? Like, how is that possible? At first, we didn’t believe our own findings, and then many other research groups have found the same thing. So we know that this is a very robust finding. And for the last 10 years we’ve been devoting our time in our laboratory to trying to understand the mechanisms by which relationships actually get into the body and shape our health.
Thomas Hübl:
It does us know what are the findings of how relationship supports health? Because you mentioned a few parameters of our health. So how does good relationship influence our physical body, like the state of our physical body?
Robert Waldinger:
Yeah, the best hypothesis is about stress. That what we think, we know that stress is normal in life. I mean, if I have something stressful happen to me an hour from now, I’m going to have all kinds of physical changes. My blood pressure will go up, my breathing will get faster, all that stuff. It’s the fight or flight response and it’s normal. It’s good for us, but it’s also good for us if we go back to an equilibrium when the stress is removed, what we think happens is that good relationships help us regulate stress. That if something upsetting happens to me, I can complain to my wife tonight over dinner about this, and I can literally feel my body calm down when I do that. Or if there’s someone you can call or just some person to connect with to tell about your experience, particularly stressful or unhappy experiences. And that what seems to happen is that people who are isolated, lonely or have difficult relationships, they seem to stay in a low level fight or flight mode. They never quite go back to equilibrium. So they have higher levels of circulating stress hormones like cortisol, they have higher levels of inflammation, they have poorer functioning immune systems. And these are well-documented in many studies now. And that seems to be how chronic stress shapes our health and makes us less healthy over time.
Thomas Hübl:
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense to me. Just when I listen to you organically, it feels like it makes a lot of sense. And how does stress affect aging when how we become older or physically older, not just older in years, but older in our physical constitution? Maybe you can speak a little bit to that.
Robert Waldinger:
Well, stress, as I said, it breaks down body systems and aging involves a kind of gradual decline of many body systems. And so stress may accelerate the aging of a lot of body systems. So the cardiovascular system, the brain, many other body systems decline slowly and they become less resilient. They become less able to recover from insults. And we think that chronic stress makes all of that happen sooner and makes us less resilient.
Thomas Hübl:
Yeah. So what I understand very much is that co-regulation, having healthy relationships is something that downregulates or co-regulate stress. This makes a lot of sense to me. And is there healthy relationship means both ways, means that I have people that listen to me. It means that I also am very much available for other people. Is there a difference in, sometimes it can be that I have a great supportive network, but I’m not so supportive or I’m supportive and people support me. It’s a two-way street can maybe speak a bit to that.
Robert Waldinger:
Well, what we know is that mutuality, what you’re talking about, the real give and take supports better relationships, that relationships are more stable. If there’s that kind of give and take as opposed to situations where one person does all the giving and one person does all the taking, those are much more frustrating for the giver. And often relationships fall apart when one person just isn’t getting enough of what they need. So that kind of mutuality is something we hope to teach our children, for example, that it’s a skill rather than everything just being all about me. And we know that actually people are happier when they have opportunities to give to others to be generous. So this does seem to matter for happiness as well as for health.
Thomas Hübl:
Yeah. That brings me to the next question. What about agency? So one is that I’m embedded in a healthy ecosystem of relationships. What about my sense of purpose in the world? Many people would say, I feel happier when I know that I’m giving or doing something that’s meaningful. I’m giving back to society. I have a job that is meaningful versus I’m not fully clear about what’s actually my purpose in this life or what’s that. I don’t feel I have agency to co-create the world. That makes sense to me. How does that relate to the study when people feel like a sense of agency in their life?
Robert Waldinger:
We didn’t study it systematically. So many people would tell us about purpose in life, they’d tell us and they would feel like they had a lot of agency, they could really do a lot in the world. And other people felt more like victims, more like they were passively waiting around for life to happen to ’em. But there has been more systematic research lately. So for example, the Human Flourishing Project at Harvard has done research on purpose and they find that people certainly are happier but also are healthier, live longer when they have a sense of, there’s also a study called the Health and Retirement Survey out of the University of Michigan that finds that older people particularly are much happier and healthier if they have a sense of purpose, if they feel like they matter if you will. Because one of the big questions that people have, particularly when they retire from a career, is that they’re not sure that they matter in the world anymore.
Thomas Hübl:
Yeah, exactly. Exactly. That’s why I’m happy to hear a bit about the different studies that address agency, because it seems to me that at least that’s what I hear from people seems to be a very important quality as well. So relatedness belonging agency. And so your findings in this, you started off with two different groups that then have been combined. And was there any difference in these two different groups that set off to compose this study together or the two groups, one from Harvard and another group outside. So how did that develop? Was there a similar development? Were there differences? What were the differences after more challenged or underprivileged group that started?
Robert Waldinger:
Well, there were differences. One of the striking things was they were not different in their levels of happiness, which is important because there’s this fantasy that if we get rich, we’ll be happy. If we are really privileged, we’re happy. Not necessarily, although certainly having our needs met does matter a lot. But wealth, privilege and the way we describe it doesn’t necessarily make you happy at all. But the inner city men died on average 10 years sooner than the Harvard men. And we think that has a lot to do with privilege, with a lot to do with access to good healthcare education because when they were aging in the seventies, eighties, nineties, there was a lot more information about the importance of a healthy lifestyle, about the dangers of smoking and alcohol abuse and all of that. And it seemed that the more educated group got those messages sooner. They’ve more fully permeated the culture now, at least for example, in the United States. But these messages seemed to sink in sooner for people who had had more education, who perhaps read more, followed the news. And so that was a big difference, that longevity and that level of health Among the two groups, obviously the inner city men had much lower income over time than the Harvard men, much less education.
But other than that, in terms of life satisfaction, in terms of work satisfaction, not so different.
Thomas Hübl:
And also the relational dimension was pretty similar in these two groups, like how they experienced the relational support system, the co-regulation in relationships.
Robert Waldinger:
Yes, yes. And that there was tremendous variability in each group. So there were people who had very healthy, strong relationship networks in both groups, and there were people who were very isolated, lonely, miserable in both groups.
Thomas Hübl:
Yeah, it makes sense, obviously. Right. And so is there anything else? So we talked about agency, we talked about relationship, we talked about taking care of a healthy lifestyle. How about self-awareness? So a capacity of being more aware, as you said a little bit, and we will talk about meditation in a moment, but a practice of self-awareness, which can be any kind of more conscious lifestyle with yourself, any kind of therapeutic process, any kind of contemplative process. So when people generate the different skill of having a different level of interior awareness, how has that been studied at all? And so what’s the impact of that?
Robert Waldinger:
We didn’t systematically study that, but we may have accidentally contributed to it. One of the things that happens when you do a longitudinal study is you check in with people. We did it every two years and we asked them lots of questions about their lives as well as measuring their health and many other things. But what we did then at one point was we asked people, how do you think participating in this study has affected you? And some people said, hasn’t affected me. Some people said, your questions are a nuisance, but many people said, your questions made me think about how I’m living my life, and I’m sure I lived my life differently because I knew that you were going to be asking me about it every couple of years. And so it’s that phenomenon where when you observe something, you affect the thing you observe, particularly when we’re talking about observing human beings. So I think that even though we didn’t systematically study self-awareness, we contributed for some people to a lot more self-awareness than they might have had.
Thomas Hübl:
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And it’s lovely what you said. I think it’s the impact of a witnessing environment that studies you or witnesses, your progress has an impact on the system that it studies. So I
Robert Waldinger:
Think
Thomas Hübl:
That’s very powerful. Of course, that makes a lot of sense. And so of course, but in their own inner, let’s say, people like yourself, I mean, it seems like you invested a lot of time into understanding psychotherapy deeper, which also impacted, of course, your own self investigation or self-research and also your meditation practice. So there’s something like in yourself, and I’m sure in many people who are listening, there is a drive to, I don’t know, explore as you said, how we tick. And I’m curious first about the people in the study, if that was in any way quantified or researched beyond what you just said, that this kind of drive to be more aware of yourself, whatever that is, and whatever initiates it in people. We
Robert Waldinger:
Did not explicitly study that. I mean, sometimes as a psychiatrist, I think of it in terms of how psychologically minded someone is, whether they think about thinking, whether they think about other minds. And people vary as we know tremendously. Some people just don’t have a clue and don’t care about other people’s minds or what makes them tick. I chose to become a psychiatrist, so I’m on the opposite end of the spectrum. But we did not systematically study that. We did study coping mechanisms, the maturity of coping mechanisms in my field, they’re often called defense mechanisms, but they’re the habitual ways of dealing with stress and challenge. So we studied the maturity of defense mechanisms and coping, but that’s different from what you are talking about, which is self-awareness and the drive to self-awareness. We really didn’t study that.
Thomas Hübl:
And so let’s stay a little bit with the defense mechanisms. So the maturity of defense mechanisms. What did you learn about that? What did you see?
Robert Waldinger:
Well, defense mechanisms is a psychoanalytic concept. And in the research world, psychoanalysis is considered unscientific, not supportable, not testable, all that. But what we did was we found a way to take the vignettes that people told us about challenging experiences and to rate them in terms of what their coping mechanisms were, and to get good reliability from different raters who could look at the same story and come up with the same coping style. And what we found was that those people who had more mature coping mechanisms were so much more successful in their lives, in their personal lives, but also in their work lives than the people who had less mature coping mechanisms. Which makes total sense from my point of view. And I expect from yours too, but many people would say those concepts are outdated. Well, it turns out they’re much more useful predictors than many of the kind of established questionnaires that are used all the time in psychology. So it turns out that defense mechanisms are a really powerful predictor of who’s going to thrive in life.
Thomas Hübl:
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense, as you said, and I think it’s very interesting. I mean also how we rate maturity of coping mechanisms and what that means. So that in itself is a great conversation. But given our time, I would like to, I’m sure you have been asked many times about, okay, so the study was focused primarily on men. So where are the women in this study? And then maybe we can take this a step further and see what are ways to expand that study with a much higher level of diversity. So to understand the cultural happiness and diversity, I think is an important question here in this process.
Robert Waldinger:
So we have a lot of women in our study. We expanded the study to all the spouses, and in that generation, the World War II generation, almost everybody got married. So we expanded it to all the spouses and then to the children, more than half of whom are female. So we have a lot of diversity in that regard. But everybody in our study is white. We have no diversity, we have no people of color. The question is why? Well, in 1938, when the study was begun, the city of Boston was 97.4% white. So if you want to start a study in Boston in 1938, you study white people. And so we’re constantly having to explain to the National Institutes of Health why they should continue to fund us. But we’re the only study like this that in existence, we many times thought seriously about expanding our sample to people of color to more diverse samples.
But our value is in having this treasure trove of life histories. And if we bring in new people, we won’t have that, or at least not for many, many years. And so with our scientific advisors at NIH, we decided that our value was to keep studying this group, but then to make sure that if we present our findings, that they have been corroborated by studies of more diverse samples. So when I tell you about these findings from our study, it’s because we’ve found the same kinds of things in studies of black people and Hispanics and other people, some around the world, although there’s much more research, as you know, on white males than on anybody else. And actually, there’s more research on college students than anybody else because they are a captive audience for psychology professors who need to do research. So unfortunately, a lot of what we know about human life, we know from college students. But all that said, it’s really important that we are now expanding. The research world in general is now expanding to making sure that the populations we study reflect the way the world is
Thomas Hübl:
Exactly right. But it’s great to hear from you how it originated and why it is that way. I think that makes it very transparent. And so one more question about the study, and then I would like to talk a little bit about the obviously mutual passion we have, which is meditation. When you said, okay, then you began to study spouses and family members. So is there any difference you have seen between male and female participants in the study? Was there any difference, like gender difference or anything that was significant that showed up that you would say, oh, here we found something that was interesting, surprising, new, or maybe not, I dunno.
Robert Waldinger:
Well, certainly there are gender differences, but what’s interesting is that the gender differences weren’t as great as we thought they would be.
For example, in relationships and in how connected people were and how important relationships were, we thought there’d be huge differences that women would be much more connected and value relationships much more highly than men. They did somewhat more, but it wasn’t huge. The differences weren’t that great. They seemed to be really important to men as well. Relationships, obviously, women live longer. What else? Some of this is more generational really, that the World War II generation, most of those women stayed at home. They were homemakers and they volunteered in their communities, and they did a whole, they were very active, but very few of them were in the working world, unlike the second generation where many, most of the women were in the working world. So the differences, I would say, between men and women were more dramatic in the first generation than in the second generation.
Thomas Hübl:
And that brings me to another question. I will be immediately curious what actually changed for women. When you said the first generation was more at home, the second generation was more out in the world working, what kind of difference did that make?
Robert Waldinger:
What kind of difference? You mean
Thomas Hübl:
In the research? What changed? Which parameters changed through women being much more engaged in working life and being more out in the world than at home?
Robert Waldinger:
Well, we don’t know because I would think that there may have been some physiologic measures that changed. I mean, I think people who stay at home can have very stressful lives as well. It’s enormous work to raise a family to do community work, whatever. But it would be interesting to see there are more women as we know, who have heart disease, particularly after menopause, than was originally thought. And I believe that is increasing in more recent generations than it was earlier. But I’m not sure about that. So I guess the bottom line is I can’t say for sure because a lot of our comparisons we studied, we drew blood for inflammatory markers in the second generation, but inflammatory markers weren’t even understood in the first generation. So some of the things we can’t compare across generations.
Thomas Hübl:
Yeah. Yeah, it makes sense. Of course. Yeah. Anyway, I feel excited when I listen to you. I have so many more questions because it’s exciting to learn more through such a rich whole storyline of research that over such a long period of time. That’s really exciting. So first of all, thank you for the work that you and your team and other people are doing on this. I think that’s fantastic work. And if you spend a little bit of time on coming back to mindfulness meditations and meditation, I’m curious first, personally, when you look at your, I don’t know how long you practice meditation for, but when you look at the changes that you would describe in your own life from the moment you started your meditation practice until today, if you share a little bit also for our listeners and maybe for sure, people did meditate for many, many years, and maybe some people start right now and then are interested in it. What changes in? So what changed in you?
Robert Waldinger:
Well, I’ve been practicing regularly for about 20 years. And I think one of the biggest things that’s changed is that I don’t worry as much about things that really don’t matter. I do still, but I think I recognize it sooner and I can let it go a little bit sooner. And I think I can calm myself down sooner. So for example, we’re having an election in the United States tomorrow. I have a lot of strong feelings about how I would like that election to go, but except for voting, I have no control over what’s going to happen tomorrow. Zen helps me keep a lot of things in perspective, and it helps me take a bigger view than just the view I normally have in my little skull sized kingdom as David Foster Wallace says. So I think those are two of the bigger changes. My wife would say that when I come back from a Zen retreat, I listen better. I pay attention better.
Thomas Hübl:
Right, right. It’s beautiful. So what I hear is that there’s less worry, that there’s more awareness when it kicks in and how to calm it down. And maybe it improves qualities like listening capacities. And it gives a different perspective when you, because we started our conversation of with different modalities how to, in a way get deeper into life and how we life takes. And on the cushion, what would you say maybe one or two insights or something that the contemplative practice gives you access to or insight into that is different than exploring things through FMRI scans and blood samples? So what’s the process of insight that happens in meditation? Maybe you can speak a little bit to, if you meditate 20 years almost, probably there were some moments like, ah.
Robert Waldinger:
Well, yeah, I mean, I think that two big insights, one is everything is always changing the truth of impermanence. And yes, we know that, but at the same time, when you sit and watch all of the things that come and go in your own mind and body, as you sit and meditate, you really understand impermanence. You really understand things that you think are always going to stay and be there, and then they go away and things that you don’t want to go away and then they go away. And so I think impermanence has been a huge one, and understanding that the more I fight change, the more I suffer. So that’s helpful. On the one hand, it sounds obvious, but I think seeing it over and over again, there’s a kind of knowing in your bones that’s different from just intellectually knowing it. And the other thing has for me, been really understanding how not separate I am from everything else, that our sense is that we are these isolated beings walking around autonomous from each other. And a meditative practice really leads to, again, knowing in your bones that separateness is an illusion and that a lot of things flow from that. And that this idea that life is in any way, a zero sum game dissolves.
And so those are probably the two biggest ones. Impermanence and not being separate from everything else.
Thomas Hübl:
To me, this touches me because I hear, when I listen to you, I hear some things. I think that the non-separation, that’s such an important aspect when we look at our society, the fragmentation, the polarization. I think in many ways that sense of separation contributes to that a lot. And so it seems like that that kind of different insight. And then I heard you say something that attracts my attention because I think that there is a lot to that sentence when you know it in your bones. And I’m curious, maybe you can speak a few sentences about what’s the difference about knowing or knowing something in your bones. What’s the difference between these two forms of knowing?
Robert Waldinger:
Well, I know a lot of things intellectually. I mean, I’m a Harvard professor, that’s what I do. I do intellectual stuff, but our cognition is just one tiny sliver of life. And that what meditation does is it helps me expand my awareness of everything else. That’s not my thinking mind. The thinking mind is great, and I still use it and value it. But meditation opens up experience, physical experience, emotional experience. And that’s the knowing in your bones, the kind of when I know something at a level that can’t be put into words because much of experience can’t be described. So in fact, I do koan study and now I teach Koans. And Koans are these fragments of texts and these stories that are meant to show us that we can’t figure everything out with our logical minds. That there’s no way to answer a koan by puzzling it out. The only way is through the experiences you have in meditation. And that’s a really useful thing for somebody who’s lived in his left brain most of his life.
Thomas Hübl:
Right. That’s a lovely, first of all, I want to be mindful of your time. I know you have to leave, and I want to say thank you, first of all, for of course sharing with us all this deep body of research that you are part of and that you support, but also the last part that you shared. I think that’s very experiential, that’s very, you transmit your meditation experience, you speak about it. And I really love that there is a value in knowing things intellectually, but there is a value to knowing things in our bones. And I think especially for humanity today, like embodiment and to know something deeper and experientially is very, very important when there’s anyway, such a tendency to get disembodied. So this is very beautiful. Is there anything that you want to leave our listeners with that seems important that we didn’t touch?
Robert Waldinger:
Oh, really, just that these truths kind of come up in many ways. You don’t have to be a meditator. You certainly don’t have to be a researcher. You don’t have to be a psychotherapist. But that all of these truths emerge when we do some kind of exploration of this kind. But it doesn’t have to be in the ways that I’ve done it. There are many paths to doing this kind of thing.
Thomas Hübl:
Yeah, that’s very important. So thank you, Bob. This is beautiful. I’m very happy I had this conversation with you, and I’m very happy that you shared about your meditation experience as well. So thank you very much for your time.
Robert Waldinger:
Yeah, I really enjoyed it. It was a lovely discussion
Thomas Hübl:
For me too. For me too. And I feel a lot of resonance, but that’s not for now. But yeah, thank you very much. Maybe for later. For later. Exactly. For later. So thank you.
Robert Waldinger:
Okay. All right. Good to see you.
