The Secret to Happiness: Connection to Others

Following the last piece where we asked the question, “How is my tech health and how is technology use affecting my wellness?”, let’s look at a related question this week.

What can we invest in this year to become a happier person??

Spoiler alert – it isn’t found at the Apple store or on your favorite streaming service. And it’s not traded on the stock market.

NPR did a piece on this very question, using the Harvard Study of Adult Development that has tracked individuals over the last 85 years. The study’s director, Robert Waldinger has looked at the data and has a simple answer as to what we should invest in for happiness.

“They should invest in their relationships with other people. We found that the strongest predictors of who not just stayed happy but who was healthy as they went through life - the strongest predictors were the warmth and the quality of their relationships with other people.”

He goes on to talk about our relationships as protection against stress and all of the ways it manifests in our bodies, affecting mental, spiritual and physical health. This against the backdrop of society where loneliness is an epidemic, with 1 of every 2 Americans reporting that they do not have a single person in their life they feel they can confide in. It reflects that we, on a societal level, are not investing in relationships with those around us. (U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy has made the loneliness epidemic a point of emphasis over the last years.)

And here is where considering our relationship to technology is important – in a given moment, we often have the option to talk to our screen or talk to a live human next to us. If we want to find ourselves happy throughout this year and our lifetime, investing our energy in the live human is the right answer.

In fact, as everyone hits the gym for the January fitness rush, we can work on something coined by Waldinger as “social fitness” as well. He defines this as “tending to our relationships just like we take care of our physical health, just like we take care of physical fitness.”

Let’s get fit y’all. Socially fit, that is.

A few questions to ask yourself:

1)    How would I describe my social fitness at this moment?

2)    What are the relationships I am doing really well at, investing time and energy toward them?

3)    What are the relationships that are in need of more investment.

4)    Finally, based on the above, think of a few action steps for this week. Maybe a high school friend who you will write a letter to, a former work colleague who you will call, a family member who you schedule a coffee date with, etc.

p.s Click here to listen to the NPR piece on happiness