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 still 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. Many of the inner city Boston men ask us, "Why do you keep wanting to study me? My life just isn't that interesting. To get the clearest picture of these lives, we don't just send them questionnaires.
We interview them in their living rooms. We get their medical records from their doctors. We draw their blood, we scan their brains, we talk to their children. We videotape 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, it's about time. So what have we learned? What are the lessons that come from the tens of thousands of pages of information that we've generated on these lives?
Well, the lessons aren't about wealth or fame or working harder and harder. The clearest message that we get from this year study is this: Good relationships keep us happier and healthier. We've learned three 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 community, are happier, they're physically healthier, and they live longer than people who are less 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 that they are less happy, their health declines earlier in midlife, their brain functioning declines sooner and they live shorter lives than people who are not lonely.
And the sad fact is that at any given time, more than one in five Americans will report that they're lonely. 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 it's not just the number of friends you have, and it's not whether or not you're in a committed relationship, but it's 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, perhaps worse than getting divorced.
And living in the midst of good, warm relationships is protective. 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 who wasn't.
And when we gathered together everything we knew about them at age 50, it wasn't 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 were the healthiest at age And good, close relationships seem to buffer us from some of the slings and arrows of getting old.
Our most happily partnered men and women reported, in their 80s, that on the days when they had more physical pain, their mood stayed just as happy. We can know a lot about how satisfied we are with life and still have no idea how happily we live it. In fact, the correlation between the two is only about 0. When thinking about happiness, we must carefully consider both types of happiness and focus on different things depending on which happiness we want to improve.
We begin with the statistical fact that happiness in society does not increase with wealth once we rise above the poverty line. Over the last century economic growth has not really enhanced human morale. So what does facilitate happiness? Perhaps creative individuals like artists and scientists have something to offer.
As Csikszentmihalyi began his research of creatives he began to find a common theme. This state is we now know as flow. Flow is an alternate reality that we step into outside of our normal routines. Every culture has locations or methodologies for entering this space.
This pattern emerges wherever creativity is found: science, art, business, etc. The flow pattern is comprised of eight elements. We have a sense of being outside of everyday reality 2.
We have inner clarity 3 and the skills to complete the task 4. We have a sense of serenity 5 , a sense of timelessness 6 , and an intrinsic motivation 7. Finally, our thought and action merge 8.
Optimal experience occurs when we strike a balance between challenge and skill, anxiety and control, thought and action. This experience is known as flow. Martin Seligman is the former president of the American Psychological Association and is regarded as the founder of positive psychology.
Psychology also forgot about normal people and improving normal lives. Finally, under the disease model psychologists sought to repair damage and never thought about preemptive interventions to make people happier. Positive psychologists contend that we should be just as concerned with strength as with weakness, with building as repairing, and with nurturing high talent in the lives of normal people as with helping diseased people.
We can answer this question in terms of three happy lives: the pleasant life positive emotions maximized , the engaged life lots of flow , and the meaningful life serving a greater cause.
The pleasant life consists of as much positive emotion as we can get and learning the skills to amplify positive emotion. The engaged life is different from the pleasant life. Rather, we merge with our activity in the moment and experience a sensation of selfless immersion. We also have the meaningful life, which is traditionally the most venerable. We know our greatest strengths and use them to serve something larger.
These lives must come together to create a truly satisfying life. Michael Norton is a professor at Harvard Business School and author of multiple books that explore money and happiness. It turns out that when people win the lottery it typically ruins their lives. Data shows that they end up with more debt and worse friendships. But we have a hard time using data-driven facts to overcome our intuitions — especially when it comes to happiness and money.
The truth is money can — not always — but can make us selfish and antisocial. Researchers designed an experiment. They gave a student an envelope of money.
Some were told to spend the money on themselves and others to spend the money on others. At the beginning and end researchers asked each student how happy he or she felt.
What happened? People who spent money on others were happier. Those who spent it on themselves showed no change. In Uganda researchers did the same study.
Again, we see human universals. Those who spent on others were happier while those who spent it on themselves were about the same. Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly, speaker. A fun, uplifting challenge: For the next 10 days, watch one TED Talk from this list to shift yourself into a life of positive thinking. A collection of studies and photography series that showcase the intrigue, beauty and diversity of human life. Everyone wants to be happy. But how, exactly, does one go about it?
Here, psychologists, journalists, Buddhist monks and more gives answers that may surprise. Here are some thoughtful ways to keep older generations rooted in our lives and society at large.
Some simple and honestly sort of scary ways we can potentially prolong the human life. Are schools killing creativity? What makes a great leader?
How can I find happiness? These 25 talks are the ones that you and your fellow TED fans just can't stop sharing. TEDx events unleash fresh ideas from local communities. Close to 50, talks have been given at 10, events since the program launched in Below, the 10 most-watched TEDx talks posted to our homepage. These talks can help guide you in nurturing close, meaningful bonds with a long-distance partner, family, a new acquaintance or anyone in between.
Need an introduction to TED? Enjoy a mixture of some of our most well-known, hard-hitting and and perspective-shifting talks. Turn on subtitles to access translations. These are some of the TED Talks that had you looking at the world differently by the time the credits rolled in no specific order.
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