Many clients have heard me state over the years that my approach to managing a portfolio has far more to do with understanding and responding to each person’s emotional and psychological relationship with money, than pretty much anything else. In my experience, the defining contributor to successful wealth-building over many decades is the overall feelings of well-being an individual brings to the table.

Back in January, a book entitled, “The Good Life: Lessons from the World’s Longest Scientific Study of Happiness” was published. One of the authors (Robert Waldinger) is an American psychiatrist, psychoanalyst & Zen priest (my first time hearing that occupation). He is a part-time Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and directs the longest in-depth longitudinal study on human life.

Since 1938, this Harvard study has been examining what makes people thrive. The study began with 724 participants – young men from underprivileged/troubled families in Boston, as well as Harvard undergrads. It then went on to include the spouses of the original men, and more recently more than 1,300 descendants of that initial group. What they found is simple - good relationships lead to health and happiness. But, the most important factor is, those relationships must be nurtured.

During a Ted Talk in 2016 (link here), Robert Waldinger spoke about what makes a “good life”. He referenced a survey of millennials, asking what their most important life goals were. Over 80 percent said it was to get rich. Another 50 percent said a life goal was to become famous. While this may not come as a surprise given the onset of social media (over-hyped comparative culture), I was surprised to learn that even 80+ years ago, many of those individuals just starting out also believed fame, wealth, and high achievement were the keys to a good life. What the study shows, however (over these 80+ years), is that people fared best when they had significant relationships, not just with family, but with friends and their surrounding community.

Here are a few excerpts from the TED Talk, that sum up the study findings, “We’ve learned three big lessons about relationships. The first is that social connections are really good for us and that loneliness kills… Once we had followed our men all the way into their 80s, we wanted to look back at them at midlife and see if we could predict who was going to grow into a happy, healthy octogenarian and who wasn’t. And when we gathered together everything we knew about them at age 50, it wasn’t their middle-age cholesterol levels that predicted how they were going to grow old. It was how satisfied they were in their relationships. The people who were the most satisfied at age 50 were the healthiest at age 80. And good, close relationships seem to buffer us from some of the slings and arrows of getting old.

And we know that you can be lonely in a crowd and lonely in a marriage, so it’s not just the number of friends you have, and it’s not whether you’re in a committed relationship that matters. It turns out that living in the midst of conflict is really bad for our health…

And the third big lesson we learned about relationships and our health is that good relationships don’t just protect our bodies, they protect our brains.”

Many of the findings in this (ongoing) study might seem obvious, but I do think it’s a valuable exercise to be reminded of these simple truths.

Wishing you a lovely warm spring weekend!

Libby

 

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