It's the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm Dan Harris.

Hey everybody, how we doing? You are about to hear the conversation where I first receive what I consider to be one of the best and most powerful pieces of life advice I've ever heard. Never worry alone. Let me say that again. Never worry alone. In an individualistic, capitalistic society where technology is increasingly isolating

and dividing us, you might be tempted to think that you need to suck it up and shoulder

your own burdens. But as social animals, we are designed to work together, to worry together.

That's how we got to the top of the food chain. You've heard my spiel on this before.

It's incredibly important to have good relationships. Today, we're going to talk to the guy in

charge of the world's longest scientific study of happiness. The Harvard study of adult development

has been running since 1938, and it has shed an enormous amount of light onto what actually works when it comes to human flourishing.

And the headline that comes screaming out of these decades of data is that if you want to have a happy and healthy and successful life, there's one variable that matters more than any other.

And that's the quality of your relationships.

Why? Because stress is what kills most of us in the end and quality relationships help regulate stress.

So if you're an optimizer and you're, you know, tracking your sleep and counting your steps and,

you know, striving for ketosis or whatever, if you're really focused on being healthy,

and you're leaving out the relationships piece of it, you are missing something huge.

And the guy you're going to hear from today has played a huge role in getting this news out to the world.

Robert Waldinger is the director of the Harvard study of adult development at Massachusetts General Hospital.

He's also a professor of psychiatry at the Harvard Medical School and the co-founder of the Lifespan Research Foundation.

He's also a Zen master and teaches meditation all over the world.

His TED Talk is one of the most viewed of all time with over 43 million views.

And his most recent book, which came out

a couple years ago and which he co-authored with Mark Schultz, is called The Good Life. In this

conversation, we talk about what the Harvard study of adult development is and how it got started,

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