- This video is about one of
the most important questions: what leads to a happy life? - Realistically, money. - Being wealthy is definitely
a big aspect of it. - To save a lot of money. - Money.
- Money. - Earning money. - It's very important to be rich. - It's easy for people to say they don't care about having money and that money can't buy happiness, but that's really not true. - 'Cause I would rather cry on a yacht than in a like a Subaru. (both laugh) - [Derek] Clearly, having
a successful career and financial wealth
are important to people. Is there a number in mind?
Something you wanna get to? - At least a million. - Yeah?
- Yeah. - In a survey from 2018 of around a hundred
thousand college freshmen, about 55% said they wanted to
be successful in their career and 83% reported that they
wanted to become rich. But do these accomplishments
really increase happiness? Well, that's what I wanna
find out in this video. But how do you study
what makes people happy? Well, you can ask them. What's gonna make you happy? - Um.
- Uh. - Uh.
- Uh. - Ooh. - [Derek] But people aren't really good at judging what will make them happy. Winning the lottery seems
like it should make you happy. - What!?
(sister screams) What!? What!? - [Derek] But numerous
studies on lottery winners find that after the initial
surge of happiness wears off, many are no happier than the rest of us. Some are, in fact, more miserable
than they were beforehand. - 'Cause you don't see as many
people as you used to see. Obviously, you become slightly isolated, I think in some ways. - Yeah, I agree. - Another problem is that
people's memories aren't reliable. - We only detect, encode
and store in our brains bits and pieces of the entire
experience in front of us. It's called reconstructed memories. It happens to us in all the aspects of
our lives all the time. - Most studies on
happiness find older people and ask them to recall
what made them happy. But as we've just seen,
memory is unreliable. So a better way to conduct a study would be to follow people
throughout their entire lives, capturing the choices they make and how those affect their happiness. That is really hard to do. But there is one study like this that's been running since 1938. Now, 85 years is a long
time to run a study so it has been passed down from one generation of
researchers to the next. It's currently run by its fourth
director, Robert Waldinger. What is the claim to
fame then of the study? - You know, the claim
to fame is that it is, as far as we know, the longest
study of human development that's ever been done. The longest study of any depth. These are studies that take
deep dives into people's lives and their mental and physical health. - [Derek] The study actually
began as two separate studies by two groups of Harvard researchers that didn't know about each other. The first group followed
268 young men from Harvard to find out how they would
develop into early adulthood. - So of course, if you wanna study normal
young adult development, you study all white guys
from Harvard, right? (Derek laughs) You know, it's one of those limitations. - [Derek] The second
group studied 456 boys from middle school onwards from Boston's poorest and
most disadvantaged families. - So there were these two studies, both meant to be studies of
what goes right in development and how we predict who
does well as they grow up. - Eventually, the two
studies merged into one: The Harvard Study of Adult Development. At the start of the study, the
participants were interviewed and received extensive
physical examinations. And as they grew, they
entered all walks of life. Some of them became
bricklayers and doctors and factory workers and lawyers, and one even became president
of the United States. (presidential music) Every two years, researchers
ask them questions about their lives. Like, "If you could stop
working without loss of income, would you, what would you do instead? How often do you feel
isolated from others? True or false, life has
more pain than pleasure." And other questions about their marriage, career, friendships, and their
physical and mental health. While the study started
with just 724 participants, over time, their spouses and children were also included in the study. So how many people are
we talking about in total who have been part of the study? - Between 2,500 and 3,000
people altogether in the study. - [Derek] And as technology improved, so did the methods of data collection. - We now draw blood from DNA. You know, DNA wasn't
even imagined in 1938. We measure messenger RNA, DNA methylation, we bring people into our laboratory, we deliberately stress them out and then see how quickly
they recover from stress. Looking at heart rate
variability, for example, looking at cortisol deposited in hair, because that seems to
be a long-term measure of circulating cortisol. But all of these new
methods are in the service of studying the same big phenomena of human wellbeing. - So what do 85 years of research across entire human lives teach us about a healthy and happy life? - Two huge takeaways really. One is no surprise. It's that if you take care
of your physical health, it has huge benefits, not
just for your longevity, but for how long you stay healthy. Eating well, getting regular exercise, not abusing alcohol or drugs, not smoking, getting preventive healthcare, exercise is hugely important. - [Derek] A Taiwanese study
looked at the medical data of 416,000 healthy people
between 1996 and 2008. Eight years later, they
followed up with each person to look at the link between
exercise and mortality. They found that people who
exercised just 15 minutes a day had a 14% reduced risk of dying, and a three year longer life expectancy. Every additional 15 minutes of exercise decreased the risk of
dying by an extra 4%. A large meta-analysis from 2008 confirms that people who are physically active have a reduced risk of dying during the timeframes
investigated in each study. Exercise also protects
our cognitive health. A meta-analysis from 2014 found that participants with higher
levels of physical activity had a 35% reduced risk
of cognitive decline and a 14% reduced risk of dementia. - And then the big surprising
finding is, relationships, not just keeping us happier, but keeping us healthier
and helping us live longer. - It's not just the Harvard study. There's now a whole list of studies that show the importance of relationships to human happiness and health. They teach us three main lessons. The first is that relationships
are great for our health. In 2010, researchers
looked across 148 studies with a total of more than
300,000 participants. They found that, on average, people with stronger social connections had a 50% increased likelihood of survival for any given year. Being married, in particular, has a large impact on
how long people live. - There's one study, I think
it's pretty well respected, that suggests that married men live 12 years longer on
average than unmarried men and married women live seven
years longer on average than unmarried women. Marriage is always a better
deal for men on all parameters than it is for women.
(Derek laughs) And it's not because you have
a marriage license, right? It's because people living together in an intimate partnership tend to keep each other healthier. You have somebody who's kind of watching, looking out for you. It's a very real, concrete effect. - If feeling well-connected to others makes us happier, healthier,
and extends our lives, then what happens if we feel disconnected? - There's a researcher,
Julianne Holt-Lunstad, out of the University of Utah, who did a meta-analysis
of a whole slew of studies of the physical effects of loneliness. And her calculation was that being lonely is as dangerous to your health as smoking half a pack
of cigarettes a day, or as dangerous as being obese. - [Derek] Feeling disconnected from others also makes you more prone to disease. A large meta-analysis from 2016 found that poor social relationships were associated with a 29%
increase in risk of heart disease and a 32% increase in risk of stroke. - So these have real sort
of quantifiable consequences when we look at studies
of thousands of people. - One caveat is that most studies on the health effects of loneliness focus on people aged 50 and older. (clock ticking) And loneliness is on the rise. - The U.S. Surgeon General today declared a new public
health epidemic in America. Loneliness. - We're now finding that one in two adults report measurable levels of loneliness and it turns out that young
people are most affected. And here's why this is so concerning. It's because we've realized that loneliness is more
than just a bad feeling. It has real consequences for our mental and physical health. - The UK has appointed a
minister of loneliness. Many, many countries are concerned about this breakdown in social connection. - A question about loneliness, like, what does that look like? Because, obviously, everyone experiences some periods of loneliness. So you know, when does it become
sort of really detrimental and how do we define that? - Well, loneliness is different
from being alone, right? So you can be alone and quite content, and many people are, in fact. The ability to be
content when you're alone is quite a skill and
it's a wonderful ability. Loneliness is that subjective experience of being less connected to
people than you wanna be. And that's why, you know,
you can be lonely in a crowd. We're all on a spectrum
between extroversion, you know, wanting lots
of people in our lives, and introversion, actually
needing a lot of solitude and not wanting a lot of people, a lot of people are
stressful for introverts. And what we know is that
neither one is healthier, right? Like introverts are perfectly healthy. They just may need one or two
really solid relationships and don't want a lot more people. Nothing wrong with that at all. Whereas extroverts may want
lots of people in their lives. - [Derek] So the second lesson is that it's not how many
people you know or see, or even whether you're married or not, because a bad marriage can be worse for your health than getting divorced. Instead, it's about the quality of your close relationships that matters. - When we'd followed
all the original people out to their 80s we said, "Okay, what data actually
are the best predictors at age 50 of who's gonna be happy and healthy at age 80 as
opposed to sick or dead?" And we thought we were gonna be looking at blood pressure and
cholesterol level at age 50 as the strongest predictors. It was their relationships. It was particularly their satisfaction with their marital relationships that was the strongest predictor. - And relationships don't
just keep us happier and physically healthier, they also protect our brains. People who are in secure
relationships in their 80s, where they feel that they
can rely on the other person, find that their memories
stay sharper for longer. And people who feel lonely, well, their memories fade quicker. A study of retired U.S. adults found that the rate of cognitive decline was 20% higher over 10 years
for those who felt lonely. A meta-analysis from 2018 further confirms the detrimental effects of loneliness, finding that it also increased
the risk of dementia. But there's still a big open question: what is it about the relationships that makes them particularly
healthful or helpful? - The best hypothesis, for which there's some
pretty decent research now, is that relationships
are emotion regulators. They're stress regulators. So stressful things happen every day to many of us, right? So then what happens? Well, the body goes into
fight-or-flight mode, blood pressure goes up, respirations become more rapid, circulating stress hormone levels rise. But then the body is meant
to go back to equilibrium after that normal fight-or-flight response when we face a challenge. If I can come home and there's
somebody here to talk to, I can literally feel my body calm down. What we are pretty sure happens is that people who are isolated,
that they're more likely to stay in a kind of chronic
fight-or-flight mode. And that what that means is that they have higher levels
of circulating cortisol, higher levels of chronic inflammation, and that those things gradually
wear away body systems. So that's how, for example, chronic stress can predict
coronary artery disease, but also arthritis and
also type-two diabetes because of this common mechanism that breaks down multiple body systems. - The key to preventing
this breakdown is simple. Just spend a little more time with the people you care about. Unfortunately, we seem to
be doing the exact opposite. Before going into why we're
doing the exact opposite, this part of the video was
sponsored by BetterHelp. There are many things that can negatively impact our happiness. It could be stress or fear or
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a link in the description. It is betterhelp.com/veritasium. Clicking on that link both
helps support this channel and it also gets you 10% off
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with your first therapist, which is pretty common, you can easily switch
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benefit from talking to someone, getting feedback, advice,
and help for anything that might be affecting your
happiness and progress in life, then visit betterhelp.com/veritasium or click that link in
the description below. So I want to thank BetterHelp for sponsoring this part of the video. And now, back to the
importance of relationships. There is an alarming trend in our society. - [Newsreader] Social engagement
with friends decreased from 60 minutes a day in 2003 to just 20 minutes a day in 2020. - The technology has fundamentally changed how we interact with one another and how we communicate with one another and, unfortunately, has often replaced what used to be rich in-person connections with online connections, which
often are of lower quality. - Now, you may say you're an introvert and you don't need to
spend much time with people to feel good. And while it's true that
introverts and extroverts need different amounts
of social stimulation, both need human connection. In 2015, Holt-Lunstad and her colleagues looked at the data of
70 independent studies with more than 3 million
total participants. Similar to other studies, they found that the subjective
feeling of loneliness increased the risk of
premature death by 26%. But they also looked at the objective measure of social isolation, how much time you're actually
spending with other people. And they found that social isolation increased the risk of
premature death by 29%. And unfortunately,
introverts are more at risk of being socially isolated. Just like many young people today, many participants from the Harvard study also believed that money and achievement were what they should go
after to have a good life. But what this study and
plenty of others show is that the people who were the happiest were those that leaned
into their relationships with their partner, friends,
family, and community. And when they were in their 80s the researchers asked them,
what are you most proud of and what is your biggest regret? - Many people said that they were proudest of something to do with
their relationships. So it could be, "I was a good
boss, I was a good parent, I was a good friend, I was a good mentor." Nobody said, "I made a fortune," right? Nobody even said, you know,
"I won the Nobel Prize," which a few people did. It wasn't about those badges
of achievement, right, that we think of as, "Oh,
that's what we gotta get to feel like we've had a meaningful life." Everybody looking back
mentioned their relationships. The biggest regret was
particularly among the men, 'cause this was the
World War II generation. They said, "I wish I hadn't
spent so much time at work, I wish I had spent more time
with the people I care about." - So what about our original question? Do achievements and money
really make us happy? Well, according to the Harvard study, badges of achievement do not
necessarily make us happier, but doing meaningful work can. And what about money?
Does that make us happier? Well, there's a famous study from 2010 by Daniel Kahneman and Angus Deaton that found that above an income
of around $75,000 a year, there is no improvement whatever in the measures of emotional wellbeing. But 11 years later, Matthew Killingsworth studied data on 33,000 employed U.S. adults and he found that higher incomes corresponded to higher
levels of wellbeing. So he wrote, "There was no evidence for an experienced wellbeing
plateau above $75,000 a year, contrary to some
influential past research." In 2022, Kahneman and
Killingsworth set out to resolve the conflict with
Barbara Mellers as a mediator. When they analyzed Killingsworth's data, they discovered an interesting pattern, depending on how happy people
were relative to others, earning more resulted in
different increases in happiness. For each income level, they divided people into groups
based on their happiness, low, medium, high, and so on. And they found that below a threshold of roughly a hundred
thousand dollars a year, a higher income was associated with more happiness for all groups. But if you go above that threshold, then for the unhappiest group, a further increase is not
associated with more happiness. However, for all the happier groups, higher incomes do seem to
lead to more happiness. And the real twist is that those who are the
happiest to start with stand to gain the most
with increasing income. Relationships, meaningful work, and money all play a
role in our happiness. So why can it be so hard to realize just how
important relationships are? - You know, if you think about it, relationships have been there since before we have memory, right? So they're like the air we breathe, we take 'em for granted. So you don't think about that
as something you cultivate in order to make yourself happy. We don't think about that at all. And yet, when we study it scientifically, we find that that turns out
to be an enormous predictor of happiness as well as physical health. - What's gonna make you happy? - Um.
- Uh. - Uh.
- Uh. - Um.
- Uh. - Being wealthy is definitely
a big aspect of it. But that loving family is kind
of like the foundation of it. You know what I mean?
- Realistically, money. But like building deep connections with people are what's going to make me happy.
- [Derek] That's awesome. - Having like good
relationships with other people. - You raise a family. - Have a family and provide. - Friends and family. - Seeing my family happy,
that's all I really care about. - Giving back to the community where you came from, the world. - A strong family base just
to come home to every night. - Yeah. I wanna get
married, have a ton of kids. I want to-
- How many is a ton? - Probably like five-ish, six. - That's a-
- As many as I can afford. (Derek laughs)
So. - In fact, when I interviewed people, I was pleasantly surprised to see how many identified the
importance of relationships. So if you could give people advice on what to start doing today
to start being happier, what suggestions would you make? - To think about it as
analogous with physical fitness, if you go out today, you don't come home and say, "I'm done. I don't ever have to
do that again," right? It's like a practice, right? That the people who were
best at relationships were the people who made it a practice day after day, week after week, to stay connected to the
people they cared about. You know, to talk on the
phone, to go for walks, to have coffee, to do
whatever, to play basketball. The people who took those
actions again and again regularly were the people who stayed very connected and stayed happy that way. So what we propose is that this is a practice we can cultivate and that there are tiny
actions that people can take. We have many stories of people who thought that they were
no good at relationships, that they were never
gonna have happy lives. And then it changed. And many times it changed
when they didn't expect it. So like, we have a story about one man who really didn't have a good marriage and was kind of distant from his kids, didn't have any friends. And then when he retired, he joined a gym and he
found this group of friends that became, for the first
time, a kind of tribe for him. And that's just one example of how our lives take
these twists and turns that we usually can't predict, that we don't expect. And many of those turns
are in positive directions. The message that the science tells us is don't give up on this
aspect of your life. 'cause many things can change at any age. (transition beeps and chimes)
