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If you’ve spent any time reading about the science of happiness and longevity, you’ve probably run across the Harvard Grant Study — the 88-year research project that has followed the lives of hundreds of men beginning in 1938, including future President John F. Kennedy and Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee.
The clearest message from all those decades of data, according to Dr. Robert Waldinger, the Harvard psychiatrist who has been running the study since 2003: “Good relationships keep us happier and healthier. Period.”
Waldinger was specific about what loneliness does to the brain.
People who are more isolated than they want to be, he said, find that their health declines earlier in midlife, their brain functioning declines sooner, and they live shorter lives.
His TED talk on the subject has now been viewed nearly 28 million times on YouTube alone — which tells you something about how many people are thinking about this question.
Now a new study — a large one, tracking more than 10,000 people across Europe for seven years — has added a wrinkle to that story.
10,217 adults
Researchers tracked 10,217 adults between the ages of 65 and 94 across 12 European countries for seven yearsusing data from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe — one of the largest long-running studies of older adults on the continent.
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