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- [00:01]
Phil Agnew
What makes us happy? It's probably the question humans have asked the most, and it's the question that generates wildly different answers. I asked some nudge listeners and they had some fairly different views.
- [00:13]
Gokul
Hi, I'm Gokul and I believe that what leads to a happy life is fulfilling relationships.
- [00:19]
Mark Schultz
Hi, I'm Sylvia. Happy life comes from being brave enough to see things differently.
- [00:24]
Gokul
Hi, my name is Mary and what I feel leads to a happy life is getting older. Growing older has led me to just see more about who I am and also to see how other people's opinions or attitudes reflect back on them, not on me.
- [00:40]
Chris
I'm Chris. Whilst it's not everything, of course, I think money is important to leading a happy life. From things like not having to stress and worry about bills every single month, to being able to go on holidays with my family and do the kind of things I want to do in my personal life, if I didn't have money to do those things, I don't think I'd be as happy.
- [00:59]
Phil Agnew
The variety in these views isn't surprising. In a 2007 survey, millennials were asked about their most important life goals. 76% said that becoming rich was their number one goal. 50% said a major goal was to become famous. More than a decade later, after millennials had spent more time as adults, similar questions were asked to the same people again in a new pair of surveys. Fame was now much lower on the list, but the top goals included things like making money, having a successful career and becoming debt free. But being the behavioural science nerd I am, I've always wondered if there is a real scientific answer to this question. Is there a study that reveals the science behind the good life? Well, yes, there is. It's the longest study on human happiness ever conducted.
- [01:45]
Mark Schultz
Since 1938, the Harvard study of Adult Development has followed more than 1300 volunteers to determine what makes people flourish. It is the longest study ever done on human life.
- [01:56]
Phil Agnew
Today I speak with Mark Schultz. He is the Associate director of the study and he shared the results. What causes a happy life? We'll find out on today's episode of Nudge.
- [02:09]
Natalie Gingrich
The OPS Authority, hosted by Natalie Gingrich, is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. Every week on the OPS Authority, you'll hear transformational stories of powerhouse business owners who value business operations. You can't ignore the back end pieces that have to work together and flow smoothly to build a brand, grow a community or disrupt an industry. If the operations side of your Business is a mess. Putting out fires will always take priority, leaving no room for the behavioral science improvements that I think every business needs to make. So listen to the OPS Authority wherever you get your podcasts.
- [02:50]
Phil Agnew
Hello, you are listening to Nudge with me, Phil Agnew. Today we are asking an important question. What leads to a happy life? To find out, I spoke to the director on the longest study of human happiness ever conducted.
- [03:03]
Mark Schultz
I'm Mark Schultz. I'm the associate director of the Harvard Study of Adult Development, which is the longest study of human happiness that's ever been conducted. I'm also a professor of psychology at Bryn Mawr College.
- [03:14]
Phil Agnew
In the five years I've spent running this podcast, I have never heard of a study quite like this.
- [03:20]
Mark Schultz
Yeah, the Harvard Study of Human Development is really a remarkable study. So it started in the 1930s at an unusual time in history. So it started in the States, and this was a time where folks were coming out of the Depression. It was the eve of World War II, and in the midst of that, two studies started in parallel. The larger part of the sample are 724 participants. In all, two thirds of the participants came from the inner city of Boston, Boston's poorest neighborhood. They were growing up in tenement buildings and very crowded circumstances. This was a group that was facing real challenges, and the goal was to try and understand what might lead them to succeed and that challenging environment. And then across the other side of Boston, just outside Boston and Cambridge, there was a group of Harvard University students that were selected for the same reason, to try and understand the factors that lead to human thriving. Both of those groups have been followed throughout their entire life. So the study is 86 years old and continues to this day. Along the way, in addition to the participants, their wives were invited to participate in the study. Originally, the study was all male. We're now working the last 10 years with the children of the original participants. So we've gone from 724 participants to over 1300 of the children of the original participants.
- [04:42]
Phil Agnew
The study had some notable participants. The US President JFK was part of it, as was Ben Bradley, an editor at the Washington Post. And all of these participants were asked the same questions.
- [04:54]
Mark Schultz
The study started with these very intensive interviews, trying to get a sense of how they experienced their lives, what they were worried about, what they were excited about in their lives, what kinds of challenges that they experienced. There were interviews with the parents, and there were also very close observations, again with the parents and the kids interacting in which we rated certain qualities that have become Important to our research even today. This continued throughout the history of the study. So every two years or so, they filled out extensively. Questionnaires, regular interviews. Early on they were more frequent, but over the course of the study, it's about every five to 10 years. In more modern times, we brought people into our labs to collect blood from them so that we can understand what's going on inside their body. We've scanned their brain so we can again watch which areas of the brain might be active when certain things are happening. We do things in the lab that are difficult sometimes, like we might stress them out with a challenging psychological challenge or a math challenge that's difficult, and watch what happens to them. So I would say they've been poked and prodded extensively, both physically and psychologically, for 86 years, or at least until the end of their lives.
- [06:06]
Phil Agnew
So you're probably all wondering, what was the result? What has Mark and his colleagues found after this epic study on human happiness? Is there a secret behind a happy life? Turns out there is.
- [06:18]
Mark Schultz
Bob Waldinger and I, my colleague, who I wrote the Good Life with, we sat down about six, seven years ago and we said, if we look at the hundreds of findings, the 15, 16 books that the study has produced, is there a signal in there? Is there something consistent across all those studies? In fact, we found the most robust finding across all of the studies conducted across 86 years is that relationships are essential for our psychological well being and our physical well being. So relationships keep us happier and healthier throughout the lifespan. It's as simple as that. And as a scientist, I feel confident in saying that because it's not only true in our study, it's true in thousands of other studies as well.
- [07:02]
Phil Agnew
Relationships are the answers. It's those relationships that create a happy life. It's not your job, your car, the number in your bank account, or the amount of free time you have. It's relationships that drive happiness. But why?
- [07:16]
Mark Schultz
So relationships give us so many things. Some of the obvious parts maybe are clear to people. When we're young, we depend on our parents and others to be nurtured and to be fed and protected. As we grow up, that connection to others is still really important to us for protection, a sense of safety. It gives us an idea of who we are. We learn about our identity through our relationship with others. They help us get places, they do practical things for us. They help us figure out how to problem solve when we have emotional challenges or how to calm ourselves down. So when we really look at it, it turns out that relationships are essential to a broad range of things that we need to do to thrive in the world. The most clear example of that is when we're coping with challenges or stressors. When I experience a challenge, I might go to people that I trust, that I care about someone that I care about at work or that I trust at for their thoughtfulness. My wife or a good friend and I describe the challenge that I'm experiencing and sharing that burden is helpful in itself. That person may also help validate some of the feelings that I'm having or even challenge some of my views. So people help us figure out paths forward and they provide different kinds of support that are so essential for us to thrive, particularly when we experience challenges.
- [08:38]
Phil Agnew
It's not just the Harvard study that shows this. With a cohort of 3,720 black and white adults age aged 35 to 64, the Healthy Ageing in Neighbourhoods of Diversity across the Lifespan study long title I Know found that participants who reported receiving more social support also reported less depression. In Chicago Health, Aging and Social Relations study, a representative sample of Chicago residents found participants who were satisfied in relationships reported higher level of happiness. In the birth cohort study in Dunedin, New Zealand, social connections in adolescents predicted wellbeing in adult better than academic achievement. And in Mark's study, there are hundreds of examples of people who experience profound happiness due to their relationships. Unfortunately, the opposite is visible as well. Hundreds of unhappy people who suffer because they lack relationships. For Mark, there are two men that really stood out in this regard.
- [09:37]
Mark Schultz
One of the stories we tell is about two men that were part of the Harvard study. So one of them, they were both good students at Harvard. They were excellent students growing up. They grew up in relatively privileged circumstances. One became a schoolteacher by kind of circumstance, so went to Harvard interested in writing. World War II broke out. He served in the military. While he was serving, his dad actually died. And at the end of his service, as he was coming back to the States after he kept copious notes about his experiences in the battlefield that he could write about them when he returned, he learned that his mom had Parkinson's disease and he moved back to the small rural area in Vermont where he had grown up and helped care for his mom and helped the family sort of organize, you know, health care for the mom and just to sort of be with her as she was struggling with Parkinson's. And he took a job nearby which was a high school school. A high school teacher was a history teacher and he did that. He ended up doing that for 50 years in his life, became an important part of that community, found the love of his life when he moved back to Vermont, and was widely admired in the community that he lived in for being someone that people could go to, that students loved as a teacher, but never got to pursue, his dream of being a writer. And we contrast him with another individual in the study who was successful at every stage of his life. He was at Harvard during the war as well. And after the war, he went to law school and was at the top of his class in law school and became a highly successful lawyer. So by any conventional standard, at the top of his profession, he taught, he consulted with the government, but very successful at his career. But in his family life, he struggled. He didn't have the same closeness that the other gentleman that I described as the teacher had in his work. He felt somewhat isolated and not well connected to others, even though he was often working with others. And he floundered in many ways through his life with connections to others. So the former person, one of the happiest and the person I just described, was one of the loneliest and least happy in the study. So that animates for us this idea about how critical relationships are to both our health and our happiness.
- [11:51]
Phil Agnew
The Harvard study tracked hundreds of men and women across their entire lifespan. With all this data, Mark could look back and attempt to predict who would lead a happy life and who would not. The study gathered together everything they knew about these participants. At age 50. Mark found that it wasn't middle aged cholesterol levels that predicted how they were going to grow old. It was how satisfied they were in their relationships. The people who were most satisfied in their relationships at age 50 were the healthiest, both mentally and physically, at age 80. As he investigated the connection further, the evidence continued to grow. The most happily partnered men and women reported in their 80s that on days when they had more physical pain, their mood stayed just as happy. But when people in unhappy relationships reported physical pain, their mood dramatically worsened, causing them additional emotional pain as well. It's not just longitudinal studies that highlight the importance of relationships. Some talented researchers have run randomized control trials to prove it.
- [12:53]
Mark Schultz
Yeah, so this is a really interesting study that happened at the University of Chicago. The researchers were named Epley and Schroeder. So they were interested in how well we predict the things that will make us happy. It's what psychologists call affective forecasting. And it turns out, like many things were not particularly rational or good at forecasting the things that will make us happy. So the Way they did the study is they stopped people on their morning commutes in Chicago, which means for most people, there's an elevated train that they take to work or sometimes a bus. And they asked them a series of questions. First, they asked them what they typically do on their commute. And most people said some version of, I sit there by myself and I zone out. Sometimes I listen to music or a podcast, or I read a book, or I try and work. Do you ever talk to people? Oh, no, I wouldn't do that. Why not? Well, it wouldn't be a good experience. People would find me intrusive. I wouldn't be interesting to other people. So because they're psychologists, they do some cruel things. So remember now, people are predicting if they talk to others, they'll be unhappy. So the cruel thing the psychologist did is they randomly assigned some people to talk to strangers on their commute. The other people were told to do as they typically do, or they were told to isolate and not talk to others. And then they caught them at the end of the commute. The first question they asked is, how are you feeling? They asked a bunch of different emotions. And it turned out that despite people's predictions, the people who talked to strangers reported that they were happier, experienced more positive feelings, less negative feelings. And to even top this off, I think this is remarkable, they threw in a question about how productive the commute was. So for the people who are using that commute to work, and the people who talked to strangers said it was more productive, they got more done. So people felt happier, they felt better about what they had done. And this was despite their inclination, which was to avoid those conversations. This is a great study. It's been replicated in other venues, including other cities. It's not just something that's true in the Midwest. And it tells us about how we discount the value of connecting, even with strangers, people that we don't know.
- [15:00]
Phil Agnew
We predict that talking to strangers will be horrible. But the opposite is true. Short, fleeting interactions can provide a surprising amount of joy. But if we build these short relationships into long lasting, intimate relationships, the benefits become even more remarkable.
- [15:17]
Mark Schultz
One study, which I think is really fascinating, this is a handholding study in which they put people in a scanner. They were scanning their brain, and they exposed them to pain while they were in the scanner. And in one condition, they were there alone. In another condition, they were holding the hand of another. So they're in the scanner, their hand is outside the scanner holding the hand of another person. Sometimes that other person was a loved one, sometimes it was just a stranger. And what they found is that the areas of the brain that register pain that we can see when people experience pain, activity in those areas was diminished when people are holding the hands of others, and particularly when they're holding the hands of loved ones. There's also research that our wounds heal quicker when we have more harmonious relationships. So if we're in a marriage that's harmonious and satisfying, we're more likely to heal when we have a wound, a skin wound, for example, than we are if we're in a highly conflictual relationship. And that difference is quite significant. Like, it can take maybe four weeks for a significant wound to fully heal. It can take an extra week if you're in a high conflict relationship or if you have the burden of caring for someone that has a disability or maybe has dementia. The other really clear example of this is if we look at loneliness, which is a national health crisis that's been recognized in the uk, also recognized recently in the United States. It's a health crisis for two reasons. One is that many people feel lonely. Somewhere between 20 and 50% of the adult population in the UK and the United States feels lonely in any given week. That experience has as much of a risk for disease outcomes or for dying as things like obesity or smoking nearly a pack of cigarettes a day. In our study, we find that close relationships are a strong predictor of people's health in late life. So midlife relationships, strong predictor of health in late life, but also how long they live as well. So the quality of their relationship with their intimate partner in particular predicts how long they live.
- [17:19]
Phil Agnew
Holding the hand of a loved one provides the same physical soothing as a mild anaesthetic. Chatting with a stranger on a commute provides a surprising boost to our mood. And deep connections with others helps us live longer, overcome stress faster, and stay happier more than anything else, including health or wealth. So how can all of us cultivate better relationships? What can we do to build more connections? After this quick break, I asked Mark and I head to Boston to put his advice to the test. I'll strike up conversations with random strangers and I'll see if it really does make me happy. Hear all that? After this?
- [18:00]
Natalie Gingrich
Once on holiday, a local asked me to explain what marketing actually is, and I struggled. How do you even begin to describe marketing? You have to generate leads, you have to score leads, you have to contact leads, you have to create content, you have to gather data, and the next day you'll need to do it all. Again and you wonder if it's even working. It's clear that marketers are spread far too thin trying to do so many different things, but HubSpot really can help. With the help of Breeze, HubSpot's collection of AI tools and features like Content Remix can really help. With Content Remix, you can turn one piece of content into a suite of assets. With HubSpot, you can also pinpoint the best prospects with a predictive lead scoring system. And you can level up your campaign's KPIs with a new analytics suite so.
- [18:50]
Phil Agnew
Your day to day becomes less busy.
- [18:52]
Natalie Gingrich
Work and more driving revenue through the roof. Even if all of that won't actually help me explain what marketing is, visit HubSpot.com marketers to learn more.
- [19:05]
Phil Agnew
Welcome back. You're listening to Nudge with me, Phil Agnew. So far we've heard how relationships are key to a happy life. But how can we improve our relationships? And what do our relationships need? I asked Mark.
- [19:17]
Mark Schultz
So one key thing I want to go back to the core finding right relationships keep us happier and healthier throughout the lifespan. When we say relationships, we mean all relationships. So it could be an intimate partner. If you're lucky to be in a good quality long term relationship with someone, that's wonderful. It could be friends, it could be relatives, children, parents, cousins. It could be neighbors, people we work with or that person that serves you coffee. If you develop that relationship that you see every morning, all of those things contribute to our health. So what we do depends in part on those relationships. But we can start with a basic idea that all of us have one simple need. In relationships. We really want to be seen and heard and understood. So when we think about at work misunderstandings that happen often, people don't feel seen or appreciated in some ways. So one of the ways that we can combat that from happening or prevent that from happening is we can be interested and curious about other people.
- [20:18]
Phil Agnew
Mark's run an interesting study to prove this. In 2012, he recruited 156 couples from diverse backgrounds and asked them to share an event in the past month that frustrated, angered or disappointed them. And after a quick break, the couples were played back those recordings so both members of the couples could hear. The participants didn't know this, but Mark was tracking the importance of curiosity and attention. What he wanted to know was this. Is it more important to be accurate in our understanding of our partner's feelings? Or is it more important that our partners see that we're making an effort to try and understand? Turns out it's the latter. He found that empathetic effort is vital. If a person felt their partner was making a good faith effort to understand them, they felt more positively about the interaction and about the relationship, regardless of how accurate the partner was about the problem. Your partner might not understand your troubles at work completely. They might really not understand it at all. But that won't matter as long as they make a real effort to understand. It's that attention and that curiosity that's vital, not the accuracy.
- [21:27]
Mark Schultz
There are lots of questions that we can ask to get to know people and oftentimes we're afraid there's a voice in our head that says, don't ask that question or it's not going to appear interesting or people aren't going to like you. So we got to get outside of our heads and just be curious. So listen, be curious. Try and conjure up. I often will, you know, close my eyes. People find it a little weird when they first get to know me. I'll close my eyes and try and imagine what it may be like, what they're trying to describe to me. And when we make that connection, other people feel understood and appreciated and seen. That feels good to them. And it turns out it gives us a benefit. We feel like we learn something.
- [22:03]
Phil Agnew
But all of us in long term relationships will know that attention and curiosity alone isn't enough. A successful long term relationship requires more work.
- [22:14]
Mark Schultz
One critical thing to start with is that we all have, not just young people, but all of us have a very romanticized view of what long term intimate relationships are about and that they're easy people who are in long term relationships. People are really successful. I'm talking about people who have married for 50 or 60 years and are satisfied with their relationships. They'll be the first to tell you that it's challenging, it requires work, it requires commitment, and it requires putting yourself out there in ways that you'll continue to grow and to learn. So one of the challenges in relationships is when we first meet someone and we think that they're one, we kind of form an idea of what this relationship will be like in the future. And there's almost like there's an implicit contract that we have that this person will be like this and I'll provide this and be like this. But things change. We grow and we change. I'm not the same person I was when I met my wife in my 20s. Thank goodness I've grown and changed since then. But those changes, including the things that I get excited about or the things that are important to me or the things that I worry about create challenges for my wife. She has to adjust to them. So the first idea is that we really have to understand that relationships change and conflict is more the norm than the exception. It's the couples that are able to navigate that conflict. And the challenges are the ones that succeed for the long run.
- [23:35]
Phil Agnew
Mark's run another interesting study. To test this, he brought couples who were married or living together into the lab and videoed them for eight to 10 minutes as they discussed a recent upsetting event in their relationship. Later, the videos were rated for how much each partner expressed specific emotions, for example affection, anger, humour. And then also for how much they displayed behaviours, for example, acknowledging a partner's perspective. Marx specifically asked research assistants who had not had extensive training in psychology to rate the emotions in these videos. He wanted to know if these untrained observers, natural human ability to recognize how others feel, could be useful in predicting stability in relationships. Five years later, Mark checked back with the couples to see how they were doing. Some were still together, some were not. And when he set their relationship status behind the research assistant's rating of their emotions in these earlier interactions, he found that the ratings of the emotions predicted with close to 85% accuracy which couples had stayed together. This really showed that emotions shown between partners are a critical indication of whether an intimate relationship will thrive or fail. Emotions drive relationships and noticing them really matters. But Mark is quick to point out that long term relationships are not everything. A happy life involves a life with many different types of relationships and what Mark calls social fitness.
- [25:05]
Mark Schultz
So one of the things we talk a lot about in the good life is this idea of social fitness. And social fitness is a metaphor. It's like physical fitness. And the key idea here is that if we don't lean into our social fitness, our relationships wither. So when our participants were in their 80s, we asked them if they had any regrets in life. Everyone had regrets. They're very common. Most of the regrets centered on relationships. They were regrets like this. People said, I wish I had spent more time with important people in my family. My wife, my son, my daughter, my father, my cousin. I wish I had been kinder to people. I wish I had been a kinder boss at work. They are always about relationships and they're always about wishing that they had leaned into them more and been kinder in life. There were a number of people that also lost touch with people across the years. So this is an example of relationships withering. They asked us if they were Part of that Harvard sample, they asked us if we knew where their classmates might be. This is after 30 years of not being in touch. Could we connect them? This is before the Internet and all the opportunities we have to find people. So relationships wither if they're not cultivated and attended to.
- [26:22]
Phil Agnew
This social fitness really is a type of fitness. Just like with physical fitness, it keeps us healthy. A large longitudinal study in Australia found that people over 70 with the strongest network of friends were 22% less likely to die during the study period of 10 years than those with the weakest network of friends. A longitudinal study of 2,835 nurses with breast cancer found that women who had 10 or more friends were four times more likely to survive than women who had no close friends. And finally, a longitudinal study of 17,000 men and women between the ages of 29 and 74 in Sweden found that stronger social connections decreased the risk of dying from all causes by almost a fourth over a period of six years. Friends, in short, postpone death.
- [27:10]
Mark Schultz
So it's critical that we lean in. And I would say the one key thing for people out there who are thinking about their relationship health and their health more generally, because relationships are so central to their health. What can I do today to connect with people that are important to me, who do I want to reach out to to let them know that I'm thinking about them, that they're important, to schedule a time to see that person or to talk to that person. And we need to be urgent about this, and we need to think about this just like we think about physical fitness every day, almost every hour, but regularly in our life to evaluate our fitness, social fitness, and to think about ways that we can engage and improve our relationships with others.
- [27:51]
Phil Agnew
Really critical social fitness is crucial to our happiness and our wellbeing. Like Mark says, this could be keeping up with old friends and family, but it can also be engaging with people we don't know. In one fascinating study, in the Good Life, researchers divided a set of coffee shop customers into two groups. One group was instructed to have an interaction with the barista, and the other group was instructed to be as efficient as possible when ordering. Like the Strangers on the Train study, the researchers found that the people who smiled, made eye contact and had a social interaction with the barista. In this case, a complete stranger came away feeling better and with a greater sense of belonging than those who were instructed to be as efficient as possible. Having a friendly moment with a stranger boosts happiness. So to end today's show, I thought I'd test it out by hitting the streets of Boston and living out my worst nightmare, chatting to strangers.
- [28:47]
Well, hello, it is Phil here from Boston. I'm actually not far from the office block where the Harvard study of Adult Development was based. For decades, participants would enter the doors for extensive interviews that revealed these secrets to happiness. But I'm here to put it to the test. Mark's book says how something small like ordering a coffee or going to a.
- [29:11]
Natalie Gingrich
Restaurant can spark joy.
- [29:12]
Phil Agnew
He writes how keeping eye contact, smiling and having a small chat can change our days. So I'm going to test it out. I'm going to actually use some of these tactics here in Boston. Wish me luck. I hate talking to strangers, so I expect to find this pretty miserable. Oh yeah. How are you? Yeah, just a table for one thing. Oh, thank you very much. Cheers. It's just me. Yeah.
- [29:42]
Natalie Gingrich
Awesome.
- [29:45]
Mark Schultz
Water?
- [29:47]
Phil Agnew
No, I'm okay, thank you.
- [29:48]
Server
No water?
- [29:49]
Phil Agnew
No. How's your day going so far?
- [29:51]
Mark Schultz
Oh, good.
- [29:51]
Server
My name is though I'm going to be taking care of you.
- [29:54]
Phil Agnew
Oh, thanks so much. Appreciate it. I think I'm okay for drinks. Anything you'd recommend.
- [30:05]
The menu, it's a special tonight.
- [30:07]
Server
It says this something of this is special means that we don't have it tomorrow.
- [30:14]
Phil Agnew
Okay, cool.
- [30:15]
Well it's my only day here so it doesn't matter either way. But uk, London. Yeah.
- [30:20]
Server
And you're coming here?
- [30:22]
Phil Agnew
I've been here on work. Today is my day off and it's raining all day so I thought I want to make it here. Yeah, yeah. Thank you. Yeah, I'm a marketer and I work and it was a conference, a big conference down in the convention center. So I spent like three days looking in convention wall. Yeah, it was good fun but yeah, intense.
- [30:45]
Server
Are you hanging out in the night?
- [30:47]
Phil Agnew
Yeah, I've got. Well I fly back today but I've had a couple of really nice evenings. I went to Fenway park yesterday. That was lovely. Yeah. Anything you'd recommend to do around here or around here?
- [30:58]
Server
So all this kind of late night party.
- [31:02]
Phil Agnew
Yeah.
- [31:03]
Server
What time is your five?
- [31:04]
Phil Agnew
10 o'clock.
- [31:15]
Server
Give us a sec. Fun things to do.
- [31:17]
Phil Agnew
We are in seor right over there.
- [31:20]
Server
It's a lot of theaters.
- [31:28]
Phil Agnew
Well, that was genuinely lovely. I found it really awkward at the start but I do genuinely feel good now. I've had a really nice chat and yeah, it's really cheered me up. Now this alone won't make my life happier but it backs up Mark's points. It's relationships, whether they're fleeting or lifelong that seem to make us happy.
- [31:53]
That is all for this week, folks. I hope you enjoyed today's episode of Nudge with the fantastic Mark Schultz. If you enjoyed today's show, you will definitely enjoy Mark's book. The Good Life is a cracking read, not just because there's heaps of detail about the study, but also because he's added dozens of real world examples from folks in the study. Reading the individual stories really adds colour to all of the studies and makes the book a real breeze to read. But Mark and I weren't done. We actually recorded one bonus episode where he shared more of the study's findings. On the bonus episode, Mark tells me what factors matter in long term intimate relationships, how knowing your place in the human lifespan can help you find meaning and happiness, and what factors in early childhood shape physical and mental health in later life. To access the bonus episode, all you have to do is click the link in the show notes and enter your email address. Once you do, you'll be sent straight to the bonus episode. If you're already a Nudge newsletter subscriber, then just click the link in the email I sent you for today's episode. You'll be able to get access there. Or if you can't find that, just click the link in the Show Notes, enter your email, you won't be subscribed twice, and then you'll get access to the episode. Okay, I really hope you enjoyed today's show. As always, I'll be back next Monday for another episode of Nudge. Thank you for listening.
- [33:09]
Bye.