Doctor behind 80-year happiness study was shocked by the biggest predictor of a long, healthy life

What if the secret to longevity wasn’t in the mind or the gut — but in the heart?Speaking at the inaugural New York Times Well Festival on Wednesday, psychiatrist and researcher Dr.Robert Waldinger announced he and his team were “shocked” by “the biggest predictor of who was going to live long and stay healthy.” Waldinger, the director of the Harvard Study of Adult Development — the longest-running scientific study of adult life — revealed it was “how connected you were to other people and particularly the warmth of your connection to other people.”Apparently, the researchers were floored by these findings.

“How could our relationships actually get into our bodies and actually change our physiology?” Waldinger mused.“The best hypothesis is that it has to do with stress, that in fact relationships — when they’re good — are stress relievers.”After all, how we feel does manifest itself physically — you can feel your pulse begin to race and your breathing quicken when something upsetting or anxiety-inducing happens, and the opposite is true when you calm down, he explained.Having someone to vent to, as it turns out, plays a pretty big role in that.“People who don’t have connections with other people, those people don’t have the same stress regulation mechanisms in their lives that people with good relationships have,” Waldinger said.The secret sauce is recognizing that it’s not enough to have relationships — you need to cultivate them as you would a garden.Most of us don’t expect to be physically fit without putting some work into it — why would relationships be any different? “The people who were best at relationships were the people who were actively involved in staying in touch with people, people who really nurtured their relationships,” he said.

“Most of us take our relationships for granted.”He went so far as to say people who are intentional about keeping in touch and fostering relationships had a “s...