The Most Important Thing You Can Do to Live Longer
Ever considered that the key to a longer, happier life is not what you eat, how you move, or even how much sleep, but rather... your social circle? In this episode, we speak to Dr. Robert Waldinger, a Harvard professor and director of the longest study ever conducted on human happiness. As the author of The Good Life, Dr. Waldinger revealed the profound impact of relationships on health and longevity. We discuss the surprising connection between well-being and... well... connection. How does the quality of our relationships influence not only our mental health but also our physical health? It turns out that the most important health resolution you make this year is not your new diet or workout plan, but rather that weekly phone call you promised your parents.
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Juna: Welcome back to our last episode in our New Year's Series, 2024. Today we are tackling a topic that we have actually never talked about on the pod.
Eddie: It's a topic we've definitely mentioned in passing many times, you know, but I really can't believe it for years and no episodes about this.
Juna: So today we are talking about something that actually also something you really care about a lot. Personally, I feel like because I do want to bring this up. Yeah, we are talking about relationships and loneliness.
Eddie: Believe it or not, you wanna spend more time with family and friends comes up ding ding ding. Survey says actually one of the most common resolutions.
Speaker 3: And, you know, over the last few decades.
Eddie: The science is catching up. We're really starting to understand that the relationships we have with each other are really crucial to our physical and also to our mental health.
Juna: I remember hearing that the Surgeon General, Vivek Murthy, had declared loneliness like the fastest growing epidemic in the U.S. or something. And I'm being like, what on earth is this man talking about? Like, isn't an epidemic a disease? You know.
Eddie: As we'll hear in this episode, the shocking thing is that loneliness can actually be sometimes even more detrimental for our health than actual diseases.
Juna: Today, we're talking about something that I think we all need to spend a little bit more time on the other people in our lives. So why are relationships so important? Why is it so important to have somebody you can call at 2 a.m.? As we find out in this episode, if you ever need somebody. How do relationships and loneliness affect our lifespan, and what can we do to improve our relationships? I'm Juniata.
Eddie: And I'm Doctor Eddie Phillips, associate professor at Harvard Medical.
Juna: School. And you're listening to Food We Need to Talk, the only podcast that has been scientifically proven to lower your loneliness levels just by listening. Today we are joined by Doctor Robert Waldner from Harvard Medical School, and we are going to be talking about loneliness and relationships. So first of all, Bob, as you have told us, we can call you, can you first describe to us what the study you run in is and how you got involved running the study?
Robert: This is, as far as we know, the longest study of adult life that's ever been done. We are in our 85th year. Wow. It was started in 1938. Actually, it started as two studies that didn't know about each other. Both at Harvard. One started at Harvard Student Health Service, and they selected a group of sophomores, 268 19 year olds, who were thought by their deans to be fine, upstanding young men. And it was meant to be a study of normal development from adolescence into young adulthood. So, of course, if you want to study normal development, you study all white men from Harvard, right? So, you know, we are so we have the most politically incorrect sample you can imagine. And the other study was at Harvard Law School. Sheldon Gluck, who was a law professor, and his wife, Eleanor Gluck, who was a social worker, were interested in juvenile delinquency. Particularly they were interested in how some kids born into really disadvantaged circumstances managed to stay on good developmental paths. So they chose boys from Boston's poorest families. But not just the poorest families, the most troubled families known to five social service agencies, on average, for domestic violence and familial mental illness and physical illness. And again, the question was, how do people thrive in this case, boys who were born into such disadvantaged circumstances? So 724 young men altogether. And now we've studied their wives and their children. The big limitation, as I alluded to, was that we have no people of color, because in 1938, the city of Boston was 97.4% white.
Juna: Wow.
Robert: So if you wanted to start a study. Yeah, if you want to start a study in Boston in 1938, it's white people. But the waves of migration of people of color started coming to Boston after World War two. So we started with these people, and we've stayed with these families because we've followed them year after year after year, over 85 years. That's our unique value. So then you asked, well, how did I become involved? My predecessor, George Valiant, was one of my teachers in med school, and he lectured to our class when I was a first year medical student. And I thought, this is so cool, following these people's lives. And then at one point, much later, he took me out to lunch and said, how would you like to inherit this study? Because he knew that I was a researcher and I had some similar interests. He also is a psychoanalyst, and it's kind of rare to have somebody who is both a psychoanalyst and is a researcher.
Eddie: So I have to ask you, just in part because I'm married to a psychoanalyst. So what's the connection for two of you to go from psychoanalysis into this remarkable study? Or maybe another way of putting it, Bob, is like, how does your training in psychoanalysis inform what you've learned and how you're interpreting the data?
Robert: Oh, it's hugely informative. I was interested in human development, and psychoanalysis takes you on a deep dive into human development. But I was also interested in studying more than one person at a time. And with psychoanalysis, you work with one person at a time. So I wanted to learn the techniques to study a lot of people, the empirical techniques that you use in research and what it has done for me, my psychoanalytic training is made me ask questions that I never would have asked. So we started studying how securely people are attached to their partners in late life. Because I learned about security of attachment in my psychoanalytic training, nobody had ever studied security of attachment in old people. So we've studied it when people were in their 80s.
Eddie: Oh, I love this.
Juna: Wow.
Eddie: I've heard of psychoanalysis going on for some, you know, ten, 11 years, like an old style. But you figured out how to do this for 85 years with by looking at this late life attachment. So. Yeah. Fascinating.
Robert: Well, and we figured out that the warmth of your childhood really is really. Related to how securely attached you are to your partner several years later.
Juna: That's so interesting because there's a lot of TikTok psychologists right now that, like, are obsessed with attachment style. It's a big trend on TikTok. And yeah, there's always a thing in the back of my mind. I'm like, is this real? Like, is this a real thing? I don't know, it.
Robert: Is how it is. So, you know, there was a British analyst named George Bowlby who noticed ducklings imprinting on their mother. And he thought, well, how do human infants imprint on their caregivers? Because human infants are dependent on caregivers for their very survival for years and years. And what he began to see was that there were these patterns that depending on who's taken care of you, when you're little, you develop certain styles of relating to people, and it's become a very empirically verified phenomenon that we now understand is quite powerful in shaping each of us.
Juna: I want to have a whole separate episode on that because I think it's so interesting.
Robert: But okay. Glad to.
Juna: Yeah, yeah, that would be so fun because it's just such a popular topic on TikTok right now. Anyways, so okay, this study is studying people for a really long time, and we're basically looking at their happiness or life satisfaction levels right? Throughout this time. I know the big thing that we talk to you a lot about is relationships. So we'll definitely get to that for the majority of our time together. But I wanted to ask, before we get to that, was there any finding about nutrition, exercise and sleep and stress reduction? Because I feel like we spend most of the time on our podcast talking about those things, and I actually don't think I ever hear you talk about that. So I'm so curious if that was studied in the study and whether or not you guys found anything about it.
Robert: There were a ton of findings about that. Okay. So what happened was that we began to see that how you take care of your health is hugely impactful in not just how long you live, but how long you stay healthy as you get older. So all the things you mentioned exercise, diet, getting the right kind of sleep, getting preventive health care, not smoking, not abusing alcohol or drugs, all of those are hugely important. Now, the reason I haven't talked about it as much is that when I describe those findings, people look at me and say, well, so what else is there in fact, right, that that, you know, the world is filled with studies. Fortunately, that point to the same findings. So we know how true and how robust those findings are. The thing that was somewhat novel about our study, but other studies began to find it, too, was this finding that relationships actually get into your body and keep you healthy?
Eddie: Is it because the relationship modifies these other behaviors? I mean, the happily partnered people tend to not drink as much and maybe go to sleep and, walk in or, you know, maybe exercise together. I'm being this is like a whole panacea I'm trying to play out.
Juna: Yeah, just speaking for myself. When my roommates aren't home. Guys, the apartment just goes to hell. I mean, I stop cooking, I'm just like. Because nobody's there watching them, like, I can do whatever I want. Haha. So maybe it's true that you act healthier if there's one.
Eddie: But let's, let's, let's ask for the evidence, right?
Juna: Right, right.
Robert: But no, but you guys are right that that one of the things they find and we found in our study is that when one partner dies, the other partner is much more likely to die soon. And we know this medically like and certainly it's even more common for men than for women. It's nothing mystical. It's nothing magical. It's that you don't have anybody there reminding you to take your medicines, reminding you to eat, getting you up off the couch and getting you out into the world. Right? It's that we motivate each other to take care of ourselves, and we take care of each other when we are together, when we're not alone. And so there is a real truth to that, finding that being with somebody really does make a difference in your health. That said, there's another mechanism that's pretty clear. That's also related to what you were saying, Eddie, which is that the best hypothesis we have about how relationships protect us is through stress regulation. So, you know, life brings stressors every day. I mean, I just came home from Mass General and I was on the mass pike and the traffic was impossible. And I could feel my heart rate go up and my blood pressure go up. Now I get to complain to the two of you. I can literally I can literally feel my body start to calm down there. What we know is that when we are able to talk to someone, there's enormous relief of stress. They do this wonderful studies of people going through painful procedures and when. And they have someone's hand to hold. Their stress levels are so reduced. It's almost like having a mild anesthetic during the procedure. Oh my God. So all of this is to say that relationships help us regulate emotions, particularly stressful emotions, and that we think that's a big factor in how relationships affect our health.
Juna: That's so cool, I love it.
Eddie: So is it the fact of the other person being there or the relationship? And what I'm thinking of is a doula showing up at the birth of a child, which from several experiences is quite stressful. Yeah. And to have someone waving around lavender and holding your hands and holding the hands of the other woman. Oh, the dual is is this wonderful, magical person who, if you're smart enough, you'll hire to keep your spouse calm while they're birthing your child. Oh, okay. And it's just beautiful. I think their dual is now for for other circumstances, like dying. But I guess the question is, you know, let's I'll create a situation where the dual doesn't speak your language, but they know what's going on, and they are holding your hand, as you say. Is that enough? Or is it more that it's a reciprocal relationship?
Robert: You are asking a question that a psychologist named James Cohen asked, who did a study of people having a procedure, and he put them in the scanner and he had three conditions. One is you're doing it alone. One is you're doing it with someone you haven't met before, but that person is there with you. And one is you're doing it with your intimate partner. And what he found was that there was some benefit just to have somebody there who you didn't know.
Eddie: Okay.
Robert: But the greatest benefit by far was having an intimate partner there.
Juna: Ooh. Okay.
Eddie: So we were still important for me to be there for the deliveries.
Juna: And you get the deliveries at a. You have to go.
Robert: You weren't. You weren't irrelevant.
Eddie: Thank you. Thank you.
Juna: So when we're talking about relationships, I think a big question on a lot of people's mind is does it have to be a spouse or partner, or can a close relationship also be a friend? And I'm specifically asking you about this question that you guys have on the survey about do you have someone you can call up in the middle of the night? Right. Like this whole idea of like, well, how do you define a close relationship?
Robert: That's an important question. No, you do not have to have a spouse. You don't have to live with anybody. It really is the quality of the connection. If you have a close friend, if you have a close sibling, that goes a long way toward providing these benefits that we're talking about, because remember, it's stress regulation. It's the sense that there's somebody there who's got my back who will help when I need help. Right. It's that kind of experience. And so of course partners provide that for each other. Usually. But you can get that from so many different areas of your life. There are people who have friendships at work that are really deep and meaningful and maybe feel like their primary connection in the world.
Juna: And can you describe what that, question on the survey said and what the respondents said to that and what we found about the findings from how they responded?
Robert: Sure. We asked, who could you call in the middle of the night if you were sick or scared? List everybody. Most people could list several people, but some people could not list anybody. And some of those people who couldn't list anybody were married. Wow. So we know that it is not you know, it's no guarantee having somebody there sleeping next to you is not a guarantee of intimacy. Right.
Juna: And what does putting no one in that list. How does that affect health metrics later on their lives. Like did we see any associations.
Robert: Yes. That those are the people who have earlier health decline, not just physical but cognitive health decline. So you're starting out right. You've got a chance to do all this, right?
Juna: Oh, yes. Yes, I and I was just yeah, I was like, I have so many people to put on my list that I was thinking I was actually what I was actually thinking was I wanted to call my parents after this and be like, guys, you know, if you ever needed me at like 2 a.m., you could call me, right? Even if I'm missing, you can me up and call me any time I try and make sure that they know that. Do it.
Eddie: So do it. What? What. It sounds like from having heard you talk and some of the things that you've written, you're talking about social fitness. And I am more oriented to or have more clinical experience with physical fitness. So maybe you can draw some parallels and. How? How can I train to become more socially fit and and how can I show you that I'm getting more socially fit? What? How do we assess and go on from there?
Robert: Well, we made up the term social fitness and the reason we made it up. It's in our book, right. And we made it up because we saw that there was a real analogy to physical fitness, that the people in our study who were the best at this, with the best at relationships, took care of their relationships regularly, like did small actions all the time, making plans with people, inviting people over, being part of groups. Right. So it wasn't some Herculean thing that they did. It was day after day, week after week. And so what we began to think about was the idea that we're not asking people to take on some enormous project. We're really saying just, you know, every day, think about who you'd like to be in touch with and send them a text, or send them an email, or set up a time to have coffee or go take a walk, that these are small actions. But if we do them repeatedly, like going back to the gym, working out, we do them repeatedly. Our relationships are going to be in much better shape, and then we'll be in much better shape.
Juna: And then can we talk about loneliness for a bit? So I think I don't remember when Vivek Murthy declared loneliness an epidemic, or like the fastest growing epidemic in the United States. But I was younger than I am now. And I remember thinking like, what is this man talking about? Like I was like, isn't it an epidemic? Like a disease? I was very confused. And the older I've gotten, the more I'm like, honestly, loneliness to me is worse than a disease. Like, I feel like it's one of the worst emotions you can experience the human. So can we describe what have we found about loneliness? And also has it been rising in the past few decades? I feel like a lot of us feel like because of social media and dating apps and stuff like that, that it can feel more lonely to be a young person or even any person, I guess in 2023.
Robert: Yes. So guess what the loneliest age group is in the United States?
Eddie: It's college kids, right?
Robert: Yeah, it is age 16 to 24. Really, I know I never would have thought that. I would think.
Juna: That.
Robert: You guys are out there living your best lives, and you've got all these people around you. And no, it turns out you are the loneliest age group.
Juna: Wow, that's so sad. I mean, I'm flattered that you think I'm 16 or 24. I'm actually, unfortunately, 28 now, but I am.
Robert: Oh my goodness.
Eddie: Why? Unfortunately.
Juna: Because I would love to be 20 for you guys. I would give anything to be 24. I need to do.
Robert: Well, actually. But no, because there's a lot of insecurity. Yeah, right. Being younger carries with it a whole lot of worries about who am I and do I fit in and all that stuff that that can subside as we get older.
Juna: Yeah, that makes sense. So you don't think though, like it's not because they're not around people. Because when you're in college and high school, you're around people all the time. So it seems like loneliness is not about like physical proximity to other people.
Robert: Exactly, exactly. Now, one of the things we know from the work of Robert Putnam, who's the political scientist who does work on what he calls social capital. Robert. So he wrote a book called Bowling Alone in the 1980s, and it was a study in which he tracked how much we socialize. So how much do we invite people over to our houses. How much do we go to houses of worship. Do we join clubs, do we volunteer? And what he saw was that starting in the 1950s in the US, all these things went downhill. The frequency with which we connected with others much lower, family dinners much lower over time. And then he came back in the early 2000s and asked the same questions again, large representative samples. And what he found was that everything had gotten much worse. So what we see is that it wasn't, you know, everybody says, well, it must be the digital revolution. It must be screens that have caused this. They didn't cause it. They probably have accelerated it. Like we think that it may have begun with the first screen. We all looked at a lot which was television. Right. Wow. That this all started in the 1950s when television was introduced into most American living rooms. But what we find is that these trends toward increasing disconnection are getting greater and greater and greater with the years.
Juna: Do they really think it's TVs, or is it that, like women are also going out into the workforce more and like so everybody has their own thing to do, and then you don't need to get married to like, support yourself, I was thinking was more like a social construct thing.
Robert: Well, you're absolutely right. So it's not any one factor. It's certainly not just TV or TV, right? You know, if you think about it, when women go into the workforce and there are two. Career families. It's even harder to get everybody together to eat dinner at right time, right?
Juna: Right.
Robert: And who has the energy to go out in the evening or on the weekends or, you know, so I think that's right, that as Americans have become more overworked, it's not about women going into the workforce. It's about all of us having less leisure time, making less leisure time. Right. That has something to do with this. And not prioritizing these kinds of things, prioritizing work instead.
Juna: Totally.
Eddie: And we're going to take a quick break and we'll be right back. Welcome back. We're speaking with Doctor Robert Baldinger from Harvard Medical School.
Juna: So how has running this study changed your life? I think that when you do something like this, you're so closely acquainted with the research. I was wondering of whether or not it has made you live your life differently, because you just said earlier that we don't value relationships enough, right? So has it changed the way you value relationships?
Robert: Definitely, definitely. So, you know, I'm a Harvard professor. I've been a workaholic much of my life. I could just work 24 seven, right? There's always another paper to do something, you know. And I realized, especially once my kids were no longer at home and they weren't dragging me off to do things with them, which I love doing. And I would always use that as my way to get away from work. I realized, you know, I could just work nonstop. And so what I've realized is that I need to be more proactive myself in cultivating my friendships. So I have friends. But, you know, I have a friend who we we looked at each other and said, we can't just wait for our wives to arrange dinners for us as a foursome. We need to go out, the two of us and have a meal.
Juna: Yeah.
Robert: And and so we've started doing that. And what we do now, of course, is we at the end of the meal, we both catch up quickly on each other's family lives because that's not what we talk about. But when we go home, our wives are going to want to know, well, how are the kids and everything? You know, and so, so what we realized is that guys do it differently. Do.
Juna: Yes.
Robert: But it has definitely changed my sense of really wanting to be more active, more proactive in my own friendships.
Juna: And is there a gendered component to loneliness, like, do we find that men are lonelier than women? Because I think that from what I've noticed, like, when I talk to my guy friends and video games are so important to them, and I would kind of get annoyed. I'd be like, why are you always wasting your time playing video games? And then I realized video games are the way they bond with their male friends. Oh yeah, it's like the way they like, hang out. And I was like, oh, it's because they don't talk on the phone with each other. They like, play video games. Instead, I was like, that's right.
Robert: That's right, that's right. You know, it's interesting because we thought particularly when we wrote the book, we thought we were going to find big gender differences in relationships because we went back and reviewed the research literature on it, because the the popular lore is that women are much better relationships. Relationships are much more important to women than men. It turns out there are some gender differences, but they're not. They're not that big, to be honest, in terms of the importance that we give to relationships. Men give almost as much importance to relationships as women do, but they do them differently. So men might play video games together, they might play basketball together, women might sit together. And as one globe columnist once said, you know, women are friends once they've shared three loathsome secrets for each other, right? Yeah. And and men don't necessarily do that. Sometimes they do, I think. But you know, so so it's not that men don't care about relationships, it's that they may do them differently.
Eddie: And do men live longer? And you've studied men. And now, of course, they're families. But the old adage used to be that married men live longer than single men. They do. Is it the same case for married women?
Robert: They do. Yeah. So the literature says that men get a longevity boost of 7 to 12 years, and women get a longevity boost when they're married of 5 to 7 years. Well, it's never it's never as good a deal for a women in, in, in any of these parameters.
Juna: So when we're talking about interactions, I know we were talking about marriage, but do interactions that are just out and about with like your grocer or the people at the gym also matter? And does it matter you think that now we have so many apps that take away those small interactions? Like, I'm just thinking of DoorDash and like delivering groceries. I just know personally, I love that I have friends at the gym and at Whole Foods and like seeing them every day is so fun for me. And I've noticed that a lot of people don't talk to the people that they interact with at the gym and Whole Foods, whereas I feel like if you're going somewhere everyday, you should make friends there because then you see your friends every time you go there. But I just don't think other people think of it that way. So I was wondering if those relationships also matter.
Robert: They do matter and you're doing it just right. Yeah, but what we find is that, yeah, really that when people talk to other people in their lives, you know, the person who checks you out at the grocery store, right? The people at the gym, the barista at Starbucks, that those interactions give us little hits of well-being. They make us feel like we belong. They make us feel seen. They give us all those. Little benefits that are different from, you know, our nearest and dearest, but they are important. So I'll give you an example. Like I've started talking to Uber drivers, like whenever I get into a car.
Eddie: And allowed to do that.
Juna: Oh my god. Yeah, I, I.
Eddie: Don't I, I do, I do too.
Robert: It's so fun. And particularly if somebody has an accent, I will ask them where they're from. And then we have usually a discussion about their home country and how it compares to being here. Yeah. And the food. And do they go back and visit. And I learn so much stuff about, different places as I do this. And then we both end the ride feeling better.
Eddie: I love the, construct that you brought up before about social fitness and the parallel with physical fitness. And I just want to test out what I think I'm arriving at, which is that in the world of physical fitness, we like to prescribe a certain amount of 150 minutes of moderate intensity physical activity. And you can do that. And people think, oh, I have to go running, I have to sweat, I have to be out of breath. And then we say, well, actually, you could just do it by accumulating your steps. You could do it in tiny little bouts. Does that. Yeah. The analogy holds with the social fitness.
Robert: Totally, totally. You can accumulate your steps by, you know, if you have a commute to work. Call somebody each day for just a few minutes. Right. You could accumulate those steps. You could just text somebody as you're coming home from, you know, from the gym. There are all these things that you can do. You can create little routines if you want, with a few people who you really want to keep in your life and you really want to keep current with, this does not have to be heavy lifting. It's more that it's frequent lifting.
Eddie: Got it. I'm going to ask you to help us. I'm almost give an assignment to the listeners. I heard you do this on other talks about reaching out right now. Yeah. To someone. And then? And then we'll invite them to write in to us at food. We need to talk.com with the result. But maybe Bob take us through a quick assignment for everyone listening. Okay.
Robert: Here's the assignment. The assignment is think of somebody you miss or somebody you don't see enough, somebody you haven't been in touch with in a little while. Okay. Just think of that person. Then take out your phone right now and just send them a text or an email and just say anything simple like, hi, I was just thinking of you wanted to connect.
Eddie: And they can say, I got this assignment from this professor at Harvard Medical School.
Robert: Right? Right. This professor made me do it.
Eddie: Please help me complete my assignment. Oh, I love that. Exactly. I love that, and we'll invite the listeners to write in to us with the response that you get. And in preparation for this, I tried this. And.
Robert: You know.
Eddie: I'm always, like, wondering, like, oh, I wonder if this person remembers me as I remember them. And you write a few words and they start like gushing back, yes, thank you for writing. And don't you remember the rest of the story? I'm like, actually, I don't, but thank you for reminding me.
Juna: So this is very top of mind for me, because I had my ten year high school reunion last weekend and.
Eddie: A lot going on.
Juna: I know, I know, everybody come in closer, let me spill the tea now. So I literally was like, I don't want to go that far. I feel like I have way more friends in college. I did in high school. So I was like, yeah, whatever. But I had to go because we wrote these letters called Time Capsules, where we wrote a letter to ourselves for our ten years from now, and we had to go to collect them. And also all our friends wrote us letters that we could also put in our time capsule envelope, and we would get to retrieve them ten years later. So I was like, oh God, I have to go get my time capsule. I'll just go, you guys. I was there like, I got there at seven. I was like, I'll leave at eight. I was there till like 1230, like I was there till like after midnight. And I was like, it was a.
Eddie: Long letter you wrote.
Juna: I know it was so fun and everybody was so nice and like, it was just such a pleasant experience. And I connected with so many people that I had totally forgotten about. And I also feel like after, I don't know, there's like it's like what you were saying when we were younger, you're so much more insecure. And so I feel like people were kind of too cool to show enthusiasm or try to be friends with people when they were younger because, you know, they want to have this certain persona or whatever. And now that we're older, I'm like, I just thought people were so much more open and generous and kind because I think a lot of that insecurity wasn't there anymore.
Robert: That's exactly been my experience. And I would say, if you haven't already done so, go to your college reunions. I didn't, yes, for the early reunions. And then when I started going, it was like, oh my gosh, this is so much fun, and I'm connecting with people I didn't even know.
Juna: And yes, yes.
Eddie: So these these are the confessions of an extrovert that I know.
Juna: Seriously. It's so true.
Eddie: Bob, can you, assure the introverts or maybe speak to the idea that. Maybe you don't have to stay till 1230 and still get some of the benefits, or you might not be quite as charged up from hanging out.
Robert: Absolutely. And and you don't even have to go to the reunion if it if it will be too stressful. Right. So, you know, we're all on a continuum between introversion and extroversion. It's temperament, and a lot of it is inborn. There's nothing healthier about being an extrovert than being an introvert. There's nothing. It's just that introverts need more alone time. That's how they get a lot of their refueling. And extroverts get a lot of their energy from other people. So for an introvert like, you know, a wild party is terrifying and is enormously stressful. So those people may just need a couple of good relationships in their lives. And for them, having more and more relationships might actually be hazardous to their health. So each of us really wants to look inward and say, what works for me? Like how many people, you know, how many relationships are right for me?
Juna: I feel like I've also learned a lot from my introverted friends as they have matured in, knowing how you like social situations to be. So, for example, I know a lot of my introverted friends like will feel guilty that they don't like parties or like, oh, I wish that I like socializing and they'll make themselves go to these events. They'll have a terrible time. They'll feel even worse about themselves because, oh my gosh, why aren't I social and this and that. And recently I had a Halloween party. I was going to an introvert friend and she was like, actually, I don't think I want to go because I think it'll make me feel bad. But I invited three friends over to my house for Halloween because I think that's a type situation where I feel really good about myself after it, and I get to talk to people. So I think knowing what type of social situation you thrive in and then like putting yourselves in those situations, is always gonna be better than trying to force yourself to be this person that you're not.
Robert: I couldn't agree more. What you said is exactly what I understand about this. And so, you know, one of the problems is that our culture glorifies extroverts. We glorify, you know, the party animals. And that's a myth. That's just not, you know, that's not an accurate reflection of who many of us are. And we don't need to be extroverts. So you're absolutely right. It's finding out what are the social situations that work for you.
Eddie: Can we talk a little bit about teaching all of this wisdom? And I'm thinking as a parent, the lessons that I can give to my children who are now largely grown but not necessarily out of the house, the, but and then the lessons that I got, my father was, like an old style salesman. He would talk to anyone, and he. And indeed he did, whereas other kids heard, don't talk to that person. They were a stranger. My father flat out said, if you talk to them, they won't be a stranger. Yeah. And and and then famously for, for the younger folks. I'll have to explain that back in the day, you would drive up the highway and have to stop to pay a toll to an individual. Wow. Yeah. And and my dad would start to talk to that person, and the cars would be honking. And I would say, like, dad, you know that person? He goes, like, now I do. I mean, he would, he would. So I guess, you know, that's my reminiscence. But also, you know, what can we teach, you know, what should be going on in the schools?
Robert: Well, we can teach a lot of these skills in schools. And actually they do that. There are curricula. And what we find is that when we teach this to children, they not only are happier and more social in school and get into trouble less, they do better at reading and math and all their academic subjects because they're less anxious and they're more able to concentrate. So it's called social and emotional learning. There are big studies, big meta analyzes that show these tremendous of positive effects, from teaching this to kids.
Juna: I feel like a big, big reason why I learned socializing pretty easily. I don't think I ever, like, had to learn it in school per se, was because I had two sisters. So I feel like I just grew up always interacting with people and sharing things. And like all three of us were in one room until I was like a 12 or something. Like it was insane. So have you found any differences in the people in the study between only children and people with siblings, and how that affects socializing?
Robert: We haven't been able to study that. So there weren't enough only children. Oh, this was a see. This was an era when families were typically larger. You know, often 3 or 4 kids was the norm. Five, six kids wasn't unheard of, especially in the inner city group. Many of them came from good Catholic families where, you know.
Juna: Right.
Robert: They just kept having kids, so we didn't have enough. Only children to have any statistical power to do any kind of systematic study.
Juna: Got it. Do you think that the pandemic changed the way people viewed relationships? I feel like, quarantine made you realize how incredibly important socializing was for your life. I'm wondering if you've noticed that there's been a bigger understanding of the importance of relationships because of Covid.
Robert: I think there has. I think many people have said I don't want to be separated forcibly from the people I care about. And, and, and I take for granted having access to people I care about. I can't take that for granted anymore. I really have to value it more. Yeah. So I think people have begun to realize because it because it was suddenly taken away from them. Yeah. They've begun to realize, oh my gosh, this is something quite valuable. In fact, I think that's one of the reasons why our book has caught on has gotten public attention. Because if you think about it, what I'm talking about is not rocket science. Your grandmother could have told you that relationships are important, right? But I think we're all suddenly so aware of what a resource this is and that it's fragile, that it could be taken away.
Juna: Right.
Eddie: And the book is the good Life. Yes. And your. And your coauthor is Mark Schultz, who also runs the study.
Robert: He's the he's the associate director.
Juna: Yeah, mazing. Okay, so this is a part of our New Year's series. So the reason we want to talk about this is because one of the most common year's resolutions is spend more time with friends and family. And we've talked a lot on this podcast about how making vague New Year's resolutions actually makes you a lot less likely to follow through. So I'm wondering if, first of all, do you make new resolutions? And second of all, what do you think is a good New Year's resolution to make in regards to relationships that is actionable for people that might actually make a difference in their health and happiness for the next year?
Robert: Well, I like what you said about spending more time with friends and family in the way you phrased it. So rather than saying, I'm going to exercise five times a week for 45 minutes, which we all break those resolutions, right? But to set an intention may be less daunting, right? To say, I want to spend more time with friends and family, and here's how I'm going to try to do it. But I'm going to hold that intention even if I don't live up to my expectations, and I'm going to try to keep at it. Intentions allow us. They're kind of like a North Star that we can keep pointing ourselves toward, as opposed to some very specific thing that I'm either going to fail at or succeed at.
Juna: Okay, cool. So I guess we can all have the intention to spend more time. I feel like I need to spend more time, guys, I really do try to call my mom and dad almost every day, but I definitely can do better. I'm doing that. So thank you so much, Bob, for coming on the podcast. This was so fun.
Robert: This was fun. I really enjoyed it.
Juna: And I feel like we all de-stress a little bit during our conversation, right?
Eddie: I feel.
Juna: Good. Yeah, I feel like we all slightly improved our health about this great conversation.
Robert: This was a delightful conversation for me. Thank you both.
Juna: Thank you so much, Professor Baldinger, for coming on today's episode. You can find his book, The Good Life, wherever you get your books, and we will also link to it on our website if you want to hear daily episodes in January. All about exercise. Head to food. We need to talk.com/membership or click the link in our show notes. You can find us at food when you talk on Instagram. You can find me at the official Yuna on Instagram and Yuna Jara on YouTube and TikTok. You can find Eddie.
Eddie: Reaching out to some old friends.
Juna: Reaching out to some old friends. Also, I already heard back from the friend I reached out to in the middle of our episode.
Eddie: Oh no.
Juna: And they said, what number is this? Yes, I'll come to dinner, but who is this? And I was like, it's, you know, oh my God.
Eddie: So when you reach out, be sure to identify yourself.
Juna: Say it's blah blah blah. So they don't go, who? This food we need to talk is produced by me.
Eddie: Our sound engineer is Rebecca Seidel, and we are distributed by PR X.
Juna: Food. We Need to Talk was created by Kerry Goldberg, George Hicks, Eddie Phillips and Me unit.
Eddie: For any personal health questions, please consult your personal health provider. To find out more, go to food. We need to talk.com. Thanks for listening.
Juna: And spending time with us and lowering your stress levels. Hopefully.
