What makes a good life?
Opublikowano: 21 kwietnia 2016

What makes us happy and helps us get through life healthy? Scientists have found the answer to that question after running the longest study ever performed on humans – The Harvard Study of Adult Development. For 75 years, three generations of scientists studies a group of 724 people from different environments.

Robert J. Waldiger, an American psychiatrist and professor at Harvard Medical School, the fourth person in charge of the study, sums up the answer thus:“Good relationships keep us happier and healthier”. He says that the study taught them three important things.

The first one “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.”

Secondly, to quote Waldiger, “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.”

And the third and final lesson is summed up in the following statement by the professor: “[…] good relationships don’t just protect our bodies, they protect our brains. It turns out 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 people’s memories stay sharper longer.

Tagi: good life, happiness, Harvard, longest study ever, relatinship, Robert Waldiger