How To Live the Good Life - Lessons From The Longest Study On Happiness | Dr. Robert Waldinger
Finding Mastery with Dr. Michael Gervais
Dr. Michael Gervais
4.7 • 1.7K Ratings
🗓️ 26 November 2025
⏱️ 80 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
What if the most powerful thing you can do for your health isn’t diet or exercise — but investing in the people you love?
Today’s episode is from the Finding Mastery Vault — a timeless conversation with Dr. Robert Waldinger, psychiatrist, Harvard professor, Zen master, and Director of the world’s longest-running scientific study on happiness.
In this conversation, we explore the science of connection — how relationships literally get into our bodies, lower stress, improve our health, and expand our capacity to live well. We also discuss why loneliness can be as dangerous as smoking, and how small acts of social fitness, paired with the courage to be vulnerable, can change the trajectory of your life.
You’ll learn:
- How to build “social fitness” and maintain meaningful relationships over time
- Why relationships get into our bodies and improve long-term health
- The science behind loneliness, stress, and emotional regulation
- What it means to live a psychologically rich and purposeful life
- How leaders can foster connection and belonging at work
This episode is timeless — and a powerful reminder: no one does it alone.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Finding Mastery is brought to you by LinkedIn Jobs. |
| 0:02.7 | If you're trying to grow your business, which I think most of us are, your work is about more than just running the day to day. It's about building something with intention, shaping culture, growing a team, setting the stage for what comes next. And when it comes time to hire, you want a partner that matches that same level of clarity and care. That's where LinkedIn jobs comes in. |
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| 0:35.9 | alignment. With deep candidate insights, LinkedIn helps you feel confident that you're bringing in someone who's the right hire is more than just skills. It's about alignment. With deep candidate insights, LinkedIn helps you feel confident that you're bringing in someone who's the right fit, both for the role and for your company's values. And we can speak from personal experience here. At Finding Mastery, we've used LinkedIn jobs to find our last several hires. If you follow Finding Masterry on LinkedIn, you would have seen these posts. And as an aside, if you don't follow us, please do. We post content there that you can't get anywhere else. It's how we found our recent project managers, Janelle and Taylor. And it's how we found our lead producer, Emma. We love what LinkedIn has created. And it's been such a great service for us as we've grown. If you're looking to grow your team with intention, this is a great |
| 1:11.5 | place to start. Post your job for free at LinkedIn.com slash finding mastery. That's LinkedIn.com |
| 1:17.8 | slash finding mastery to post your job for free. Terms and conditions apply. We understand how good |
| 1:23.8 | relationships can make you happier, but how could they get into your body and make it less |
| 1:28.4 | likely that you'd get coronary artery disease or type 2 diabetes? Like, how is that even possible? |
| 1:33.9 | What if the most powerful thing you can do for your health isn't diet or exercise, but it's |
| 1:38.0 | investing in the people that you love? What I'm going to tell you is from a treasure trope of data. |
| 1:43.6 | Basically, what we find, you know, when we look at these 85 years of studying the same people all the way through their lives, we find two big things. |
| 1:52.9 | Welcome back or welcome to the Finding Mastery podcast, where we dive into the minds of the world's greatest thinkers and doers. |
| 1:58.7 | I'm your host, Dr. Michael Jerva, by trade and training |
| 2:01.2 | a high-performance psychologist. The idea behind these conversations is simple. It's to sit with the |
| 2:06.0 | extraordinarily and to learn, to really learn how they work from the inside out. Today's |
| 2:10.8 | episode is from the Finding Mastery Vault with Dr. Robert Waldinger. He's a psychiatrist, Harvard |
| 2:16.2 | Professor, Zen Master, and director of the |
| 2:18.4 | world's longest running scientific study on happiness. What we found was that the people who |
| 2:23.4 | had the warmest connections with others and maintained those connections as they went through |
| 2:29.1 | life, not just were happier, but stayed healthier and they lived longer. Now, in this conversation, |
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