The happiest and healthiest people are those who have warm connections with others, says psychiatrist Robert Waldinger, who leads the Harvard Study of Adult Development -- one of the longest-running studies of adult life ever conducted. Exploring the crucial link between social bonds and quality of life, he shares wisdom and insights into how to identify and strengthen the relationships that impact your well-being most. When it comes to the people in your inner circle, "Turn toward the voices that make you feel more open and more inclusive," he says. (This conversation, hosted by TED current affairs curator Whitney Pennington Rodgers, was part of an exclusive TED Membership event. Visit ted.com/membership to become a TED Member.)

I am delighted to be here and grateful to all of you for joining us for this discussion.

In 2015, I gave a TEDx talk in a little elementary school auditorium, and much to my surprise, the talk became 1 of the 10 most viewed talks in the history of TED.

And in that talk, I conveyed 1 simple scientific finding.

The finding that when we study hundreds of people over their entire adult lives, the people who turn out to be the happiest and the healthiest are those who have good warm connections to others.

So today I want to take you deeper into this whole subject by exploring how relationships matter in our lives, how they affect our health, what kinds of relationships give us this big benefit in happiness, and which tools you can start using today to make your relationship stronger.

So I do direct this Harvard Study of Adult Development.

It's, as far as we know, the longest study of the same people that's ever been done, following people since 1938, from adolescence all the way through old age, and now following all their children, thousands of lives.

And we began to find, about 30 years ago, this startling connection between warm relationships and how good our lives feel to us, our well-being, and also the fact that warm relationships seemed to keep people both physically stronger and kept their brains sharper as they grew older.

We thought, how could this be that relationships actually get into our bodies and shape our health?

But then other studies began to find the same thing.

We found that people had less depression.

They were less likely to get diabetes and heart disease, that they recovered faster from illness when they had better connections with other people.

So then the question is, how could this work?

How do relationships shape our happiness and our physical health?

Well, 1 of the best theories for which there's now some pretty good evidence is based on the idea of stress.

That, as we know, stress is an inevitable part of all of our lives.

And what we find is that good relationships turn out to be stress regulators.

Let's say that I have something upsetting happen to me during the day and I find myself like ruminating about it and really thinking about it and unhappy.

I can feel my body go into what we call fight-or-flight response, where literally my heart rate goes up and I might start sweating a little bit and I'm just not feeling as well.

Now, what we're meant to do is to come back to equilibrium when a stressor goes away.

That's the way the body is supposed to work.

But what happens if I go home at the end of my upsetting day and I have somebody to talk to?

Either I can call someone on the phone or it's somebody I live with.

I can feel that fight or flight response subside.

But what if I don't have anybody to go home to?

What we find is that people who are isolated, are lonely, don't have those stress regulators that we get from good relationships, and that we stay in chronic fight or flight mode, that our bodies have this chronic stress, chronic levels of inflammation and circulating stress hormones that wear away our happiness and break down different body systems.

Well, what kinds of relationships seem essential to well-being?

We asked people who were our original participants in our study, we asked them, who could you call in the middle of the night if you were sick or scared?

And many of our people could list several other people they could call if they were in trouble.

There wasn't a person on the planet who they could turn to if they were sick or scared.

And what we find is that having at least 1 person in your life who you feel really has your back, who you could go to if you were in trouble, that's essential for maintaining our happiness and our health.

When we asked these same people, when they got to be in their 80s, to look back on their lives and to tell us what they were proudest of, almost everybody said something about their relationships.

They didn't say, I made a lot of money, or I won some big awards.

And so what we find is that what seems to mean the most to people when they get to the end of their lives is the strength and the warmth of their connections to others.

So then the question comes up, well, which types of relationships support our well-being?

Some people have asked, do I need to be in an intimate relationship to get this benefit?

All types of relationships support our well-being.

So friendships, relatives, work colleagues, casual contacts, the person who gets you your coffee every morning at Starbucks or Dunkin' Donuts, the person who checks you out in the grocery store, who you see maybe every week.

Even talking to strangers has that benefit.

So they did an experiment where they assigned some people who were about to go on the subway the task of talking to a stranger, while other people were assigned the task of just doing their usual thing of being on their phones or listening to music or reading.

It turned out that the people who were assigned to talk to strangers didn't think they were gonna like it, but they turned out to be much happier at the end of the task than the people who just rode the subway keeping to themselves.

So even talking to strangers gives us that little hit of well-being from relationships.

So the question comes up, how can we strengthen our connections with other people?

And this is where we've come to think about it as a kind of social fitness.

If we think about physical fitness, you know, we think, okay, I'll go to the gym, I'll work out, I'll take a long walk, I'll do something to keep myself strong and fit.

But then we come home and we don't say, I'm done, I don't ever have to do that again.

We have the sense that physical fitness is a practice that we need to maintain over time.

It turns out that social fitness is the same.

That in fact, our friendships, our relationships don't just take care of themselves.

That even good relationships need tending to.

They need returning to them over and over again.

So what are some ways that we can strengthen our relationships?

Well, 1 way is to be proactive, to take the initiative.

So to reach out to a friend and ask her to take a walk instead of spending 2 more hours on your laptop this weekend on Saturday afternoon.

Establish some routines with the people who are most important to you.

A regular phone call or a coffee every Saturday with someone you really want to be sure you see regularly.

Or meeting somebody at the gym or having lunch with a co-worker.

The other thing we can do is liven up those longstanding relationships, particularly like the people we live with, people we can come to take for granted by proposing to do something new, going out on a date, just taking a walk if that's not your usual routine.

The other thing that we know works to help people, particularly who aren't as connected to others as they want to be, is to connect around shared interests.

So volunteer in the community to do something that you care about.

But to do something that you care about because then you're with other people who care about the same thing.

And that's a natural place to start conversations that can lead to ongoing relationships.

And finally, get more comfortable striking up casual conversations.

That's something we can learn to be more comfortable with, almost like exercising a muscle.

So now, I would like to ask you to do 1 of these things, to make 1 of these choices that we can make every day.

I'd like you to make that choice right now.

Think about someone you miss that you just haven't seen in a while or you haven't had contact with and you'd like to make contact.

You don't even have to have a particular reason.

Now I want you to take out your phone or whatever device you use right now and send that person just a little note.

It could say, I'm just thinking of you and wanted to connect.

Or You could say something more personal to you and to your relationship.

And while we're here, we might even have time to share with each other some of the responses that people get when they do this.

So think of someone and make contact right now.

The point of this simple exercise is to remind us that even small actions can have ripple effects that build our well-being, and that these are things you can do every day in the moment.

You mentioned at the top of the conversation, the top of your talk, rather, that you run the Harvard Study of Adult Development and gave us sort of a snippet of what that is.

But could you tell us a little bit more about the study?

And it started with 2 groups, a group of Harvard College undergrads.

And it started with a group of inner city boys who were in elementary school or middle school from really disadvantaged troubled families.

And each study was trying to look at how people can take healthy developmental paths.

And so the idea was not to study what goes wrong in our lives, but what goes right in our lives, and some of the factors that contribute to helping things go well in human development.

Needless to say, we started out with boys, all males, but we've added women.

We have more than half women now, and we've added the second generation.

Now we have over 2, 000 people in our study, and we're still collecting data today.

And I know in the book, you talk about how the advice you offer, the wisdom you offer, is not just drawn from your own study because of some of what you suggested, that you're just now starting to bring women and different generations.

And I guess, could you talk about some of the other gaps and why it's been important to also think about some of the other studies out there on life and happiness?

Yes, that's a really good point, because particularly in this kind of research, no single study is proof of anything.

That what we want is for different studies of different populations.

So different ethnic groups, different cultural groups, different geographies, right?

We want different studies to point in the same direction.

And that's why I'm here and I can tell you with confidence, many studies point to all these same benefits of relationships.

And I know you touched on the health element in your talk and shared that there is data that reveals that we have that there's a strong connection between happiness and health.

And what have you specifically found related to happiness and health outcomes?

What we find is that happiness turns out to make us age more slowly and keep us able longer.

So the diseases of aging that happen to all of us happen later.

Sometimes they don't happen at all in people who are happier, have a greater sense of well-being.

And it's because of what I spoke about a few minutes ago, this kind of decrease in chronic inflammation and chronic stress.

And so what we find is that we can't guarantee that any 1 person is going to stay happier or live longer if they have better relationships, but we find that there are these ingredients, just like taking care of your health.

Not smoking, not abusing alcohol or drugs, exercising regularly, getting regular health care, having access to health care, all of those things really matter for our health.

You say, if you had to make 1 life choice right now to set yourself on the path to future health and happiness, what would it be?

And from hearing your talk today, we know that the right answer to that question is to build more warm connections.

But I want to ask you about the use of the word choice there.

And understanding more about whether or not having warm connections is a choice that we make?

Or to put it another way, are there qualities that each of us have that maybe make us more social people and that these are just baked into our personalities?

Can we decide to be a person who makes connections?

That's a really important point because we differ.

We are all different in how much connection we want and benefit from.

That's perfectly normal and introverts don't want a lot of connections.

In fact, being with a lot of people is exhausting for introverts.

And so some people just need 1 or 2 good relationships.

Everybody needs a little bit of connection, but some people actually don't need a lot.

And so what we want to do is try to figure out for ourselves what's right for me.

And that involves really just tuning in and saying, OK, I'm energized by being with a lot of people, so I'm going to do that.

Or no, I'm exhausted by being with a lot of people.

For me, a quiet conversation with 1 person is the most energizing thing I can do in the interpersonal realm.

And so it's really a matter of discerning what's right for each person.

And What factors have you found contribute to that?

Maybe things from early in life or childhood that might actually shape our ability to make these connections later in life?

So many of our social skills we learn when we're growing up, We learn it in our families, we learn it at school and on the playground.

They can be learned and they can be improved as we get into adulthood.

They're not set in stone once we're done with childhood.

So it's really important to see the ways that, just like some of the suggestions I made, ways that you can practice getting better at this because it really pays off.

But some people are not so good at this and they can have perfectly wonderful, happy, healthy lives without being social butterflies and extroverts.

And I just want to name that so that people don't go away thinking, gosh, if I'm not an extrovert, I'm out of luck.

Many of our happiest people had quieter lives.

And I guess to the tips that you offered in the talk, you talked about how we can build warm connections, steps that we can take, and this idea of social fitness.

And so I'm curious, how can we actually assess our social fitness?

And as you said, just understand what is right for us in terms of how many friends to have.

And is it possible to sustain warm relationships if you aren't really intentional in thinking about your social fitness?

That question of how do we assess our social fitness, it's really checking in and saying am I as connected as I would like to be to other people?

So not all relationships provide us with the same stuff.

Some Relationships are relationships we have because they're fun.

You know, and so they're the people I like to go out and party with.

Some relationships are the relationships that help me when I'm scared or hurting or worried about something and I need someone to talk things over with.

Some relationships are the people who, you know, loan me tools when I need to fix something and I don't have the right tool, or give me a ride to the doctor.

So part of it is checking in about what am I missing, and then seeing what might be possible in terms of developing more of the relationships that give us the things we want more of.

And along those same lines, Ted member Tiana wants to know, how do we define if a relationship is actually meaningful or not?

I mean, it sounds like understanding what these voices are saying, but are there other things we should pay attention to to know if it's valuable, if this is a warm connection?

1 way to think about it is not whether the relationship is smooth all the time, but whether we feel that we can be authentic, we can be ourselves in a relationship.

And Obviously we won't be the same selves in a work relationship that we might be with our beloved sister.

But still, can I be myself in the most essential ways?

And can the other person express themselves?

Because I think that's where what we really want is to feel known and to feel seen and not to feel like we are having to maintain a facade that hides who we are.

And so the best relationships are those where we feel we can be ourselves.

And you talked about how really it's romantic relationships, friendships, acquaintances.

I mean, all of these relationships matter.

But do you find that 1 of these is maybe more significant than the other?

I look at it in terms of the secure attachment we think about.

Attachment is a word for being warmly, securely connected.

It's the who can you call in the middle of the night if you're sick or scared.

So I think of it in those terms, not necessarily the person's role, defined role in our life, like romantic partner or boss, but it's the, does this person have my back?

And so that's, I think, the defining element that we want to find somewhere in our world.

So we have so many member questions coming in, Bob, and I'm going to kind of go through a little a few more of them.

So TED member Nancy wants to know if you think it's possible for an endemically unhappy person at some point in life to obtain happiness.

Yes, and thank you for asking that question.

So we have a couple of life stories in our book.

The book contains real stories of real people.

The names are disguised to protect confidentiality.

But some of those stories are of people who have big turnarounds late in life, people who were isolated and less happy and in their 60s found a whole community.

1 man found a community at a gym that he never dreamed he would find.

And so the message that we get from studying these thousands of lives is it is never too late.

And so don't assume that it's too late for you, even if you feel like you've not had good luck with this in the past.

Well, Bob, we're getting some questions about you.

And I'm curious how running this study has changed the way you approach life and your own pursuit of happiness.

Well, 1 of the things it's helped me with is the idea that everybody has struggles in their life.

That has been so meaningful to me because I can also look at the world and say, gee, other people seem to have lives that have it all figured out and perfect lives.

It is so helpful to know that there isn't a person on the planet who doesn't have struggles.

And it makes me feel less alone when I can recognize that.

And that's 1 of the reasons why I want to keep getting these messages out after having studied thousands of lives.

And I think the other thing that it's changed is my own priorities.

So I realized, okay, I can sit here this afternoon and edit another paper or do more work, or I can see my friend who I haven't seen in a month.

And so I've become more active in taking care of my relationships.

So I would say that those are the 2 big things for me that directing this study has changed about my life.

Well, we have a question from TED member Nisa.

They ask, as a mother of 2 very young children, what advice do you have for parents to build strong, healthy relationships now through adulthood?

It's really helping your children to pay attention to how they feel and to learn to use their feelings with more choice.

So learning to love what they love and hang on to what they love, even if it's not so popular.

You know, I had a mother talk to me about how her child really loved doing improv comedy.

And he's only 12, and his friends don't like that.

And so we talked about how do you help your child feel supported in loving what he loves and taking an improv class, right?

So helping your kids learn that it's OK to love something that's not the same as all the other kids in their group and keep loving what they love and helping kids learn that it's okay to be unhappy and that that will pass, that feelings come and go, that it's okay to disagree.

Families can model, Parents can model for kids.

We can work it out and hold on to these good relationships, even through disagreements.

Those are some of the biggest lessons we can help our children with about how to use their feelings rather than kind of be buffeted by their feelings and ruled by their feelings.

I'm curious just where you see the study going from here.

Even as we speak, we are collecting more information from the children.

Almost all the original participants have passed away, but their children are all baby boomers on average.

And So we're collecting information, including about what life was like during the pandemic, also collecting information about how they use social media, which is something we've all been talking about a bit here.

And I think in terms of the future, we see ourselves as wanting to make our data available to more and more researchers.

So we want to collaborate, and we do collaborate with other research groups.

We say, come in and use our data, and ask new questions that we don't even think to ask, because we have this treasure trove of information about thousands of lives.

And then we're going to make it publicly available on public websites, because much of our work has been funded by the federal government, by NIH with taxpayer money.

And so we feel a responsibility to make this information available to other researchers who want to ask their own questions about our data.

Well, Bob, you've shared so many great things with us.

I feel like if people were listening and trying to absorb all of it, and at the very end of this conversation, want just 1 nugget of information that if you miss everything, what is the 1 thing that you want everyone to walk away from at the end of this conversation?

That If you want to make 1 choice today that will make you healthier and happier, it is to pay attention to improving your connections with other people.

That is such a good investment, and it will pay off for years to come.

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