The amazing Harvard Study of Adult Development

Abstract: During a live Q&A session at the 2025 New York Times Well Festival held in early May in Brooklyn, Dr. Robert Waldinger, a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and the current director of the Harvard Study of Adult Development, explained the inner workings of a fascinating research initiative that will hit the century mark in 13 years time. What it takes to live long and stay healthy may surprise you.

Anyone hoping to determine the best way to find happiness and well being should look no further than the Harvard Study of Adult Development, an initiative launched 87 years ago that literally may not ever end.

As a research project, it is both intriguing and fascinating and it began in 1938 with the following of 268 Harvard graduates from the classes of 1939-1955 and 457 males who were clearly less fortunate and lived in poor neighborhoods located in inner-city Boston.

At the 2025 New York Times Well Festival held in early May in Brooklyn, Dr. Robert Waldinger, a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and the study’s current director, explained the inner workings of a research initiative that will hit the century mark in 13 years time during a live Q&A session with Susan Dominus, a staff writer at the New York Times Magazine.

According to Waldinger, it is “the longest study of the same people that’s ever been done, following people through their whole lives. It started in 1938 with a group of Harvard College undergraduates and a group of boys from Boston’s poorest neighborhoods, and eventually we brought in spouses, and then we brought in children, most of whom are baby boomers. We’ve studied 724 families for 87 years.”

He added that “you have to be willing to defer a lot of gratification to study something that long, but also that when we actually follow people over time, we get to learn how lives turn out without asking people to remember back, we get to follow them forward.”

When asked by Dominus what have some of the most meaningful results been when looking back all of those years, he replied, “the first will not surprise anybody. It’s that if you take care of your body, it really (determines) how long you live, how long you stay healthy.

“But what we were shocked by was that the biggest predictor of who was going to live long and stay healthy was how connected you were to other people, and particularly the warmth of your connections with other people.”

At first, said, Waldinger, he and other researchers on the project, “did not believe it because, we knew that the mind and the body were connected. But how could our relationships actually get into our bodies and change our physiology so that good relationships would predict that we’d be less likely to get Type two diabetes or arthritis or coronary artery disease?

“How could that possibly be real, and then many other studies began to find the same thing. For the last 10 years, in our lab, we have been working to understand how exactly this works, how relationships shape our health.”

The follow-up question from Dominus was this: Is there an easy way to understand how relationships can shape a person’s health?

The best hypothesis, he replied, is that “it has to do with stress that, in fact, relationships, when they’re good, are stress relievers. If you think about it, if you have something annoying or upsetting happen an hour from now, you’ll feel your heart rate go up, and you’ll start to breathe faster and all those physical changes.

“But if you have somebody you can call and complain to, or someone you can go home and have a sympathetic ear to listen to, you literally feel your body calm down. What we understand is that the body is meant to go into a fight-or-flight response to meet challenges, but then we’re meant to go back to baseline, to an equilibrium when the challenge is removed.”

“And what we think happens is that people who don’t have connections with other people, or people who have really acrimonious connections, those people don’t have that same stress regulation mechanism in their lives that people with good relationships have.”