Harvard and Oxford and the secret of eternal youth.
A few weeks ago, what has been called “the longest study on happiness in history” was presented, produced by Harvard University. At the same time, from the University of Oxford the anthropologist Robin Durban is presenting the summary of a lifetime investigating how human relationships affect individuals. And, surprise, the results are forceful and coincident: love and community are one of the two determining elements of well-being, both mental and physical.
“It was not a surprise that people who had warmer relationships were happier. That makes sense. The surprise was that people who had warmer relationships stayed physically healthier as they got older.”
this counted Robert Waldinger, professor of psychiatry at Harvard University, to the BBC during the presentation of the study of adult development. This professor is the fourth director of this study on well-being, which has been carried out over 85 years with a sampling that has included adolescent individuals in 1936 and their descendants, and has monitored the entire lives of some of them, until his death.
The research team cross-referenced the results they had obtained with other complementary studies and the conclusions leave no room for doubt: loving, constructive and disinterested participation in the community is the greatest generator of well-being that exists, above any other factor such as sport or healthy eating. Although be careful, health is the other key factor, and within it, the essential advice is not to smoke.
Waldinger also explains that what is important is the quality of relationships. It is about being able to share feelings and aspirations, socialize problems to make them less important and work together on solutions to feel like a common good.
Very similar is the discourse that maintains Robin Durban in his recently published ‘Friends’ (Paidós), in which this Oxford anthropologist assures that the quality of our friendships influences “our health and can even reduce the risk of mortality more than anything else, except quitting smoking”.
Both studies also coincide in referencing a huge number of complementary scientific studies from disciplines as disparate as psychology, anthropology, neuroscience or biochemistry, to name a few. And there is no doubt, we are beings of love and community, even if they try to make us believe otherwise.
Lately there are more and more voices demanding another model of individual and collective management that allows us to be better mentally and physically. On the one hand, because some data on mental health is alarming and saddening. Suicide rates in Spain or youth mental health data are appalling. But we have also had many years of consecutive crises that show that the current system is failed and although we do not know how to break with it, we do know that the individualism that they sold us does not provide us with the well-being that they promised us.
We are more manageable if we are alone and we have even reached the point of exploiting ourselves for our own good. But the last global crises have been very intense and very close, and our resilience is helping us to see the light. We are stronger if we are diverse. In recent years we have once again seen narratives flourish and with them policies designed to protect “homogeneity”, as is happening now in Denmark, forgetting that it happened last time, in the 1930s. But at the same time we mix in struggles such as the Essentials campaign led by RegularizaciónYa, in which more than 800 organizations from all over the country participated.
Within this framework, as progressed in 2020 in our essay on the Narratives of Love (Fundación porCausa), we are innately launching ourselves into music, dance, affection and community. The system twists us to make us believe that all these tools are banal acts of not very serious people. But Harvard and Oxford help us to continue explaining that this is not the case.
The discourse of love is more and more the present and, without a doubt, the future of Humanity and the basis of eternal youth.
LUCILA RODRIGUEZ-ALARCÓN
Director General de porCausa Foundation
Published in: PUBLIC
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