If you want to estimate the level of happiness of a person, or even his life expectancy, you are interested in his social relations!
Having a social network and building a bond is so important for the proper development of an individual that it enhances immunity, increases life expectancy and reduces the risk of depression or anxiety disorders.
Robert Waldinger, an American psychiatrist, recently presented the results of the largest and longest study on happiness.
The Harvard University Development Lab team (of which Waldinger has been the 4th director since the beginning of the research), collected a lot of information on 724 people to try to define what could ensure happiness throughout of our life. For 75 years, men belonging to two different social classes have been observed.
The first group in the study is made up of promising students in a major American university. The second group is made up of young people from the most disadvantaged neighborhood of Boston, whose job prospects are unhappy. Every two years, the laboratory collects information on the personal lives of these two groups, and so on for all these years with researchers succeeding each other.
People are interviewed about their professional lives and projects, filmed talking with their wives and children, and they undergo medical exams (such as brain scans or blood tests) that are carefully stored.
In 2015, the data are sufficiently important both qualitatively and quantitatively to lead to conclusions and to answer the question "What makes us happy? ".
According to this study, the secret of happiness lies in the fact:
1 - to be socially surrounded:
the happiest people are those who are most in touch with their family, friends and community. Isolated people see their health decline, as do their cognitive abilities. In the same way, the happiest people in retirement are those who have succeeded in replacing work with social ties.
2 - to favor the quality rather than the quantity of links:
the type of relationship we have with our loved ones is more important than the number of our loved ones. Thus, unhappy couples, lacking affection or exposed to incessant conflicts would be worse off than others. And to choose ... it's better not to be in a relationship than to strive for precarious balance or meaningless relationships. Complicity is necessary for the life of the couple and must be maintained to avoid emotional disorders.
3 - build lasting relationships:
it is important to build relationships that last over time. This study showed that people who feel satisfied with their relationship at age 50 are healthier at age 80. This is how people who have partnered without separating, and without having "serious" problems, have better results in memory tests than others. This is not about avoiding arguments or having a "smooth" relationship, but about building a strong foundation for the relationship.
Compared to the initial hypothesis, the study completely questions the impact of the social milieu on the level of happiness achieved: it is not the environment from which one comes that influences our ability to become happy. For much more than money or professional success, what matters is of a different order: it is about the quality of our social connections. We need interactions and connections with others, we need to give and receive and we need to belong to a group.
I find this sentence of Seneca very pretty: "A person who only looks at herself and considers things only in her own interest can not live happily. If you want to live for you, you have to live for your neighbor.