Whatmakesagoodlife

1、goal /wasin orderget. MostWhat makes a good life? Lessons from the longest study on happi ness What kee ps us /healthy and happy as we go through life? If you were going to inv est now/ in your future best self, where would you put your time /and your en ergy? There was a rece nt survey of mille nni

2、 als /ask ing them what their most imp orta nt life goals were, and over 80 p erce nt said /that a major life goal for them was to get rich. And another 50 percent of those same young adults /said that another major life to bee famous.00:49 (Laughter) 00:51 And were con sta ntly told to lea n in to

3、work, to p ush harder /a nd achieve more. Were given the impression that these are the things that we need to go after to have a good life. Pictures of en tire lives, of the choices that people make and/ how those choices work out for them, those pictures are almost impossible to of what we know abo

4、ut huma n life/ we know from ask ing people to remember the p ast, and as we know, hindsight is anything but 20/20. Weforget vast amounts of what happens to us in life, and sometimes memory is dow nright creative.01:35 But /what if we could watch entire lives as they unfold through time? What if we

5、could study people /from the time that they were tee nagers all the way into old age/ to see what really kee ps people happy and healthy?01:54 We did that. The Harvard Study of Adult Develo pment may be/ the Ion gest study of adult life thats ever been done. For 75 years, weve tracked the lives of 7

6、24 men, year after year, asking about their work, their homelives, their health, and of course ask ing all along the way without knowing how their life stories were going to turn out.02:24 Studies like this are exceed in gly rare. Almost all p rojects of this kind fall apart withi n a decade because

7、 too many people drop out of the study, or funding for the research dries up, or the researchers get distracted, or they die, and nobody moves the ball further dow n the field. But through a bin atio n of luck and the p ersiste nee of several gen erati ons of researchers, this study has survived. Ab

8、out 60 of our origi nal 724 men are still alive, still p artic ip at ing in the study, most of them in their 90s. And we are now begi nning to study the more tha n 2,000 childre n of these men. And rm the fourth director of the study.03:14 Si nee 1938, weve tracked the lives of two gro ups of men. T

9、he first group started in the study whe n they were sop homores at Harvard College. They all fini shed college duri ng World War II, and the n most went off to serve in the war. And the sec ond group that weve followed was a gro up of boys from Bost ons poo rest n eighborhoods, boys who were chosen

10、for the study specificallybecause they were from someof the most troubledand disadva ntaged families in the Bost on of the 1930s. Most lived in ten eme nts, many without hot and cold running water.03:53 Whe n they en tered the study, all of these tee nagers were in terviewed. They were give n medica

11、l exams.Wewe nt to their homes and we in terviewed their paren ts. And the n these teenagers grew up into adultswho entered all walks of life. They becamefactory workers and lawyers and bricklayers and doctors,one President of the United States. Some developed alcoholism. A few developed schizophren

12、ia. Some climbed the social ladder from the bottom all the way to the very top, and some made that journey in the opposite direction.04:34 The founders of this study would never in their wildest dreams have imagined that I would be standing here today, 75 years later, telling you that the study stil

13、l continues. Every two years, our patient and dedicated research staff calls up our men and asks them if we can send them yet one more set of questions about their lives.04:59 Many of the inner city Boston men ask us, Why do you keep wanting to study me? My life just isnt that interesting. The Harva

14、rd men never ask that question.05:10 (Laughter)05:19 To get the clearest picture of these lives, we dont just send them questionnaires. Weinterview them in their living rooms. Weget their medical records from their doctors. We draw their blood, we scan their brains, we talk to their children. We vid

15、eotape them talking with their wives about their deepest concerns. And when, about a decade ago, we finally asked the wives if they would join us as members of the study, many of the women said, You know, its about time.05:49 (Laughter)05:50 So what have we learned? What are the lessons that e from

16、the tens of thousands of pages of information that weve generated on these lives? Well, the lessons arent about wealth or fame or working harder and harder. The clearest message that we get from this 75-year study is this: Good relationships keep us happier and healthier.Period.06:22 Weve learned th

17、ree big lessons about relationships. The first is that social connections are really good for us, and that loneliness kills. It turns out that people who are more socially connected to family, to friends, to munity, are happier, theyre physically healthier, and they live longer than people who are l

18、ess well connected.And the experience of loneliness turns out to be toxic. People who are more isolated than they want to be from others find thatthey are less happy, their health declinesearlier in midlife, their brain functioning declines sooner and they live shorter lives than people who are not

19、lonely. And the sad fact is that at any given time, more than one in five Americans will report that theyre lonely.07:18 And we know that you can be lonely in a crowd and you can be lonely in a marriage, so the second big lesson that we learned is that its not just the number of friends you have, an

20、d its not whether or not youre in a mitted relationship, but its the quality of your close relationships that matters. It turns out that living in the midst of conflict is really bad for our health. High-conflict marriages, for example, without much affection, turn out to be very bad for our health,

21、 perhaps worse than getting divorced. And living in the midst of good, warm relationships is protective.07:56 Once we had followed our men all the way into their 80s, we wanted to look back at them at midlife and to see if we could predict who was going to grow into a happy,healthy octogenarian and

22、who wasnt.And when we gathered together everythingwe knewabout them at age 50, it wasnt their middle age cholesterol levels that predicted how they were going to grow old. It was how satisfied they were in their relationships. The people who were the most satisfied in their relationships at age 50 w

23、ere the healthiest at age 80. And good, close relationships seem to buffer us from some of the slings and arrows of getting old. Our most happily partnered menand womenreported, in their 80s, that on the days when they had more physical pain, their mood stayed just as happy. But the people who were

24、in unhappy relationships, on the days whenthey reported more physical pain, it was magnified by more emotional pain.felt that09:03 And the third big lesson that we learned about relationships and our health is that good relationships dont just protect our bodies, they protect our brains. It turns ou

25、t that being in a securely attached relationship to another person in your 80s is protective, that the people who are in relationships where they really feel they can count on the other person in times of need, those peoples memories stay sharper longer. Andthe people in relationships where they fee

26、l they really cant count on the other one,those are the people who experience earlier memorydecline. And those good relationships, they dont have to be smooth all the time. Someof our octogenarian couples could bicker with each other day in and day out, but as long as they they could really count on

27、 the other when the going got tough,those arguments didnt take a toll on their memories.something are messy not sexy10:00 So this message, that good, close relationships are good for our health and well-being, this is wisdom thats as old as the hills. Why is this so hard to get and so easy to ignore

28、? Well, were human. What wed really like is a quick fix, we can get thatll makeour lives good and keep them that way.Relationships and theyre plicated and the hard work of tending to family and friends, its or glamorous. Its also lifelong. It never ends. The people in our 75-year study who were the

29、happiest in retirement were the people who had actively worked to replace workmates with new playmates. Just like the millennials in that recent survey, many of our men when they were starting out as young adults really believed that fame and wealth and high achievement were what they needed to go after to have a good life. But over and over, over these 75 years, our study has shown that the people who fared the best were the