Reality Upgrade

What makes us happy? Not happy in the I-just-got-some-chocolate temporary way, but really, truly happy in the long term. The kind of happy where you die at 87, with your great-grandchildren around you and think, “I had a good life, and wound not change anything.”

Is there some formula, some magic mix of psychology, upbringing, career, and love that lead to a good life?

For 72 years, researchers at Harvard have been trying to find out.

The Study

Called the Grant Study, it was started in 1937 by physician named Arlie Bock and initially funded by W.T. Grant. The study chose 268 students from the 1942, ‘43, and ‘44 classes at Harvard, boys who could, as Bock said “paddle their own canoe.” The purpose of the study, he said, was to “attempt to analyze the forces that have produced normal young men”, normal being defined as “that combination of sentiments and physiological factors which in toto is commonly interpreted as successful living.”

The study started by measuring the students in every way it could, physically and mentally, and with every tool available at the time. It was exhaustive, and included everything from handwriting analysis and Rorschach blot interpretation to major organ function and the hanging length of the scrotum to the boys’ histories - when they stopped wetting the bed, when they learned about sex, etc.

The study started strong, but funding from Grant lasted only until the mid 1950’s, by which time the study was barely limping along. Surveys dwindled to once every two years, then less as other funding became harder and harder to find.

But long-term studies, like wine, improve with age. Many of the so called “Grant Men” achieved dramatic success as they entered middle age - their 40’s were during the 1960’s. Four members of the group ran for the U.S. Senate, one served on a presidential Cabinet, and one was President John F. Kennedy, and there was even a best selling novelist.

But there was some darkness in there as well. By age 50, nearly 1 in 3 of the Grant Men, at one time or another, had met the studies criteria for mental illness.

George Vaillant took over the study in 1967, at age 33. He would spend the rest of his career, and likely the rest of his life, studying these men. In the Grant Study, George Vaillant found his life’s work, and in Vaillant, the study found its storyteller.

Adaptation

Vaillant’s central question in looking at the study is not how much trouble these men met, but how they dealt with the trouble when it happened, and what the result was of how they dealt with it. Vaillant calls the way people deal with problem - everything from a stubbed toe to the death of a loved one - “adaptation,” or unconscious responses to pain, conflict, or uncertainty. These defense mechanisms are thoughts and behaviors (unconscious) that shape a person’s reality.

These adaptations are natural, and usually healthy, like the way blood clots when your are cut. In the same way, when we face an emotional challenge, our emotional defense mechanisms help us to get through the challenge. But just like a blood clot can either save us from bleeding to death or plug an artery and cause a heart attack, emotional defenses can cause either our redemption or our ruin.

Vaillant ranks the adaptations in four categories, from worst to best:

• Psychotic adaptations - things like paranoia, hallucination, or megalomania. They can make reality tolerable for the person with the adaptation, but seem crazy to everyone else.
• Immature adaptations - things like acting out, passive aggression, hypochondria, projection, or fantasy. These are not as isolating as psychotic adaptations, but impede intimacy.
• Neurotic adaptions - these are common in “normal” people, including:
  • intellectualization - mutation the primal stuff of life into objects of formal thought
  • dissociation - intense, often brief, removal from one’s feelings
  • repression - seemingly inexplicable naivete, memory lapse, failure to acknowledge input from a selected sensory organ
• Mature adaptations - altruism, humor, anticipation (looking ahead and planning for future discomfort), suppression (a conscious decision to postpone attention to an impulse or conflict, to be addressed in good time), sublimation (finding outlets for feelings, like putting aggression into sports, or lust into courtship)

“Much of what is labeled mental illness,” Vaillant writes, “simply reflects our ‘unwise’ deployment of defense mechanisms. If we use defenses well, we are deemed mentally healthy, conscientious, funny, creative, and altruistic. If we use them badly, the psychiatrist diagnoses us ill, our neighbors label us unpleasant, and society brands us immoral.”

But there is more to it than that. Some people start out using mature defenses, and slip backwards, while others start out using immature defenses and stay there.

More broadly, pessimists suffer physically compared with optimists, possibly because they are less likely to connect with others or care for themselves.

So what allows us to work and love and live well as we grow old?

The 7 Factors

Vaillant says there are actually seven major factors that predict healthy aging, both physically and psychologically.

1. Mature Adaptations
2. Education
3. Stable Marriage
4. Not Smoking
5. Not Abusing Alcohol
6. Some Exercise
7. Healthy Weight

This may list may not come as a surprise to many of you, but it is certainly validating to have it stated like that in a study.

What does not matter? Here are some surprises. Cholesterol levels at age 50 have nothing to do with health in old age. Childhood temperament matters somewhat early on, but the significance diminishes with age.

Some more surprises: Regular exercise in college predicted late-life mental health better than it did physical health. Conversely, depression was a huge drain on physical health - of men the men diagnosed with depression at age 50, more than 70% had died or were chronically ill by 63.

More

There is a lot more to this, and I will write about the rest of it soon, but in the mean time if you are interested in the article where I am getting this information, check it out at:

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200906/happiness

Be warned, it is about 18 pages, and took me over an hour an a half to read. But it is a GREAT read, and has little stories about the lives of some of the men in the study. Awesome.