Harvard Research Reveals The #1 Key To Living Longer And Happier—Wishing all a Happy 2024!

 Friends,

Happy New Year! May all have a wondrous, happy, and healthy year.  This report on this longitudinal study on happiness out of Harvard University strikes me as positive and helpful. It would be great if K-12 schools could be happy places, too, where youth experience an array of enriching, encouraging friendships and experiences.

Still, it's noteworthy that while happiness is often elusive to achieve, finding it can be as simple as it is profound. 

Many of you know of our work in the East Austin community (see earlier post) involving Academia Cuauhtli. It clearly requires of us all a significant amount of work and commitment by very busy people and mostly on a volunteer basis. 

We work closely with mostly elementary school youth and parents from 6 AISD schools involving numerous tasks ranging from weekly organizing meetings, developing curriculum, fundraising, data gathering, report writing, community and professional presentations, organizing breakfasts, field trips, bus transportation, advocacy, relationship building, strengthening our community partnerships, building new ones, and the like. It's a bit dizzying to ponder. 

Academia Cuauhtli is also our research site with several dissertations and a growing number of research publications emanating from this work, with several studies currently in process (see list of publications from our website). It is a fount of intellectual and theoretical ideas that blurs the lines between so-called "service" and "research," which amount to a false dichotomy that can ironically keep faculty members like myself from ever engaging in community-based research.

Hands down, the payback is personal, professional, and organizational growth and development, especially when facing challenges. This mix amounts to a deep sense of happiness and well-being born out of doing the right thing in and with our community that gives us all back as much as we give them. Throughout, our relationships have deepened. This is not only gratifying but also energizing and life-extending. 

The only thing I might add is that all relationships require work, some more than others. Still, there aren't any shortcuts as all of this takes time and investment. The proof is in the love, respect, and admiration that we hold toward one another, the beauty we make, and the stories and memories that we share, particularly of the children in our care.

Here's wishing everyone a Happy 2024!

-Angela Valenzuela

Harvard Research Reveals The #1 Key To Living Longer And Happier

by Adrian Gostic, Forbes, Aug. 15, 2023

The top insight from the Harvard study is that close relationships and social connections are ... [+]

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The longest study ever conducted on human happiness has revealed some fascinating insights about what really leads to health and fulfillment over a lifetime. I had the opportunity to find out more from the director of the 80-year Harvard Study of Adult Development, Dr. Robert Waldinger, as Chester Elton and I interviewed Bob on the Anxiety at Work podcast.

Dr. Waldinger is professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and author of the important new book “The Good Life.” For more than 80 years, researchers like Bob have tracked the lives of people as part of this study. The project has followed participants from adolescence into old age, collecting data on their physical and mental health, jobs, relationships, and more.

Here’s what Dr. Waldinger says are foundational elements leading to happiness and a good, long life:

Relationships are Key to Health and Happiness

The #1 insight from the Harvard study is that close relationships and social connections are crucial for our well-being as we age. Having supportive and nurturing relationships is a buffer against life’s stresses and protects overall health. According to Dr. Waldinger, good relationships "keep us healthier and happier." People with more robust social connections showed lower rates of diabetes, arthritis, cognitive decline, and other chronic conditions. The researchers hypothesize that close relationships act as "stress regulators"—they help our bodies calm down and return to equilibrium after being revved up by challenging events.

Don't Just Let Friendships Happen, Be Proactive

More than 40 percent of adults say they feel lonely some or all of the time. The participants who actively cultivated relationships over their lifetimes reaped rewards. But they didn’t just let things happen. They made plans with friends, reached out to people, and joined community and social groups. These folks weren’t just posting online and hoping for “likes”; as Dr. Waldinger observed, "The people who were most successful at this didn’t just leave it to chance." He noted that they intentionally nurtured their in-person social connections.

Marriage Has Its Ups and Downs But Provides Lifelong Support

The study found that marital satisfaction was important to long-term happiness but does often follow a U-shaped curve over time. People are happiest when first getting together, and then satisfaction declines when children come along, rebounds when kids leave home, and drops again if adult children return to live at home. Overall, though, having a supportive spouse through life’s journey provided tangible mental and physical health benefits. Marriage offers partners emotional support through stressful events and can help build resilience.

Take Care of Your Body for the Long Haul

The Harvard study found that participants who exercised regularly and maintained their physical health throughout their lives were more able to thrive well into old age. One of the centenarians profiled in the research offered this advice: "Take care of your body like you're going to need it for 100 years."

Other researchers have come to similar conclusions about the essential role relationships play in wellbeing. Social neuroscientist John Cacioppo found that loneliness activates the body’s stress response and can lead to chronic inflammation. His research highlights the balancing role relationships play in regulating our nervous system. Likewise, behavioral economist Arthur Brooks has studied the intersection of happiness, relationships, and purpose. He validates the Harvard study’s finding that "taking care of our relationships" is critical, and that "our connections with others are nourishment for body, mind and soul."

As a practicing Zen Master, Dr. Waldinger brings a unique perspective on the role relationships play in wellbeing. He noted that his Zen training, which focuses on studying the self and seeking enlightenment, offers a complementary window into human experience alongside his Harvard research that has examined the lives of others. He summarizes his findings in this way: "Loneliness kills. Social connections are as important to our long-term health as diet and exercise."

While many ingredients go into a fulfilling life, the Harvard study clarifies that relationships are foundational. So, who have you connected with today?

Follow me on LinkedIn. Check out my website. 

This piece makes making happiness in school seem easy.  Sometimes the most elusive things in life are the most simple with many dedicating entire lifetimes to realizing that happiness comes in the little things in life like love, relationships, and simple courtesies—which aren't actually really "little" after all...  

It's what makes life worth the hassle.

Peace/ paz,

-Angela

After the recession hit in 2013, it was evident that something was off at Mashburn Elementary School (part of Forsyth County Schools in Georgia). I watched teachers being laid off, and it was draining to witness. We had bigger class numbers than ever before, and our school culture and employee morale were at an all-time low. For us to pull our way out of this difficult time, we first had to take a closer look at building strong relationships between staff and students. We started by asking what it means to be happy in the classroom.

Happy schools start with happy teachers

As educators, one of the biggest challenges we face is learning how to put our health and happiness first. My first thought was that I needed to put the students’ well-being first, but I discovered that I needed to start with my staff instead. If we didn’t find out what educators are passionate about and connect them back into this building, we knew they would quickly burn out.

Inspired by the house system in the Harry Potter books and the Ron Clark model, we held house meetings once a month that focused on one of the 7 Mindsets. These mindsets come from Scott Shickler and Jeff Waller’s book The 7 Mindsets to Live Your Ultimate Life, and include affirmations such as “everything is possible” and “the time is now.”

The mindsets helped us develop a mental health strategy. We created a Positive Learning Environment (PLE) committee consisting of one person from each grade level to focus on one mindset a month and decide how were going to roll that out to the whole school. For example, during spring break this year, every teacher wrote inspirational messages for the students. We posted their messages on the walls so that when the kids came back from spring break, they all saw a special note to them on the wall of the school, written by their teacher. It was really cool.

Happiness is a conversation

We talk a lot about what happiness looks like and how to get there. I ask teachers questions like, “What do you want the school to look like?” or, “If you could change something—anything—about where you work, what would it be?”

We have one faculty meeting a month, and they’re all about team-building. The nuts and bolts of scheduling go in a newsletter that I send out every week. Even there, I’ll include inspirational videos or something that touched my heart and I think will touch theirs. I keep the conversation going by asking, “If you do this with your kids, let me know their responses.”

Every faculty meeting is organized around our mindset of the month. The PLE team comes up with a team-building activity that does three things:

1. Connects with their hearts
2. Connects them to the mindset
3. Is simple to take back into their classroom with pretty much no thought.

When they’re having an issue in the classroom, we want them to remember and say, “This is the perfect moment for us to do what we did in the faculty meeting, where we took a fear, wrote it on a piece of paper, then wadded it up and threw it in the trashcan.”

If you connect with their hearts…

Around the school, we do everything from painting hallways and offices crazy colors to having staff surprises. (You can see what I mean in this video.) If there’s a heaviness in the air, we’ll get chicken biscuits or Krispy Kreme donuts and surprise the staff. During flu season, we pass out Bath and Body Works hand sanitizers. The key to that isn’t sending out a staff email saying there’s hand sanitizer in the work room; we hand-deliver these little treats as much as possible. That way, our teachers can say to themselves, “It’s important enough to my administration that they put this in my hand.” Those are all deposits in the heart that help them feel appreciated, valued, and cared about.

To us, happiness is about taking the time to understand what each educator is passionate about and how they can become a positive influence on others. For example, one of my special ed teachers has a passion for art. She and I were talking one day, and I suggested that she create a segment in her day where she could pull kids in and do art projects. So she did an art therapy class where students got to choose from sculpting, water colors, or just coloring, and it was a huge success.

…Their minds will follow

According to a recent Harvard study, happiness positively affects students’ GPAs, and John Hattie’s research says that a successful social-emotional learning program can add as much as a year’s growth per year.

We’ve seen a direct correlation between talking about growth mindset and higher test scores, but to me, the clearest sign that the mindsets lessons are reaching our students is that we’ve seen a big decrease in Monday tardies. Our tardy bell rings at 7:40, and now kids want to be here, because our mindset lessons start at 7:40. They don’t want to miss them, because they love them.

Our schoolwide theme for next year is “We Are Connected.” Our PLE committee is considering ideas like adopting another school, but they’re not making the final decision—and I’m not making the final decision, either. They’ll take ideas to their grade levels and we’ll figure it out as a school, because we’re all happiest when we’re working together.