How To Genuinely Connect With Others & Supercharge Longevity, From An MD

According to Robert Waldinger, M.D., quality relationships are the foundation of a longer, happier, healthier life. And he would know: The psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, Zen practitioner, and author of The Good Life currently runs the longest study of adult life that's ever been done. Yes, you read that right. Waldinger is the director of the 85-year-long Harvard Study of Adult Development, where he investigates over 2,000 participants to answer the question, What makes a good life? (It turns out, your relationships play a pretty powerful role.)

Yes, deep relationships matter when it comes to your health—but those casual, everyday experiences may matter just as much. "We didn't think they did, but people have begun to study this very systematically1," Waldinger explains. "The people you might see every day but don't really know that well or the people you might see once a week—[like] the cashier at the supermarket… When you exchange pleasant words with those people, you get little hits of happiness that turn out to be important for your sense that life is good." 

You hear it all the time: If you want to make friends, just put yourself out there! Waldinger encourages this literally: "If you put yourself in situations where you encounter the same people repeatedly, you're more likely to strike up a conversation, and you're more likely to continue those conversations or deepen them," he says. Perhaps that's another reason why community-based wellness centers have become so popular over the last year.

Online connection is better than no connection at all—you just have to figure out how to truly deepen those online relationships. See, technology allows you to be impersonal (it's easy to pretend you're just a floating head in cyberspace talking to another floating head on-screen). "Many of us have to figure out how to engineer a personal connection that would naturally happen [for example] in the office around the coffee machine," says Waldinger. 

"We take for granted that relationships will just take care of themselves," Waldinger adds. Make no mistake: Even the deepest, longest relationships require some maintenance. "It turns out, friendships wither and die not because there's anything wrong with the relationships, but just because they get neglected," he adds.