The news in this month of June confirms what we already know: it really doesn’t take that much to be healthy and happy; as a matter of fact, we all know how. Read on.
The story, “What Makes Us Happy,” featured in this month’s Atlantic, reports on the Grant study, a 72-year analysis of 268 people (male Harvard grads). Framed with the insights of its longtime director, George Valliant, and his seven major predictors of healthy aging, the article is a social-anthropological gem as well as deeply touching, personal portrait of the human condition.
Six of the seven factors of good health are indeed plain common sense, however, it is both relieving and reassuring to get them thus academically and empirically affirmed.
Six of the major predictors of health and happiness are:
education
stable marriage
not smoking
not abusing alcohol
some exercise
healthy weight
No surprises there. Interestingly, there was a noteworthy difference between having four versus only meeting three of these basic criteria. The article reports that, “Men who had three or fewer of these seven health factors were three times as likely to be dead at eighty than those with four or more factors.”
What is the seventh, you ask? Dr. Valliant (you’ve got to love the name) has identified a personal skill or aptitude he calls “employing mature adaptions.” His theory starts out with a commonly accepted assumption: life means trouble, but it’s not the kind trouble you have that determines your degree of happiness, it is how you respond to the trouble you get.
This line of thinking led Dr. Valliant to begin to examine the defenses we humans employ as our response to what we are hit with in our lives. He distinguishes between four levels of adaptions, which he defines as unconscious responses to pain, conflict, or uncertainty. Formalized by Anna Freud (Sigmund’s daughter) adaptions are defense mechanisms that shape (or distort) your reality. The thought is that these defenses are designed by our human psychological make-up to make our own reality more bearable for us.
At the bottom of the four levels are defenses like paranoia, hallucinations or megalomania. The third level includes immature responses such as acting out, passive aggression, hypochondria, fantasy and projection. One level up, on the second level, are defenses that are more mature but impede intimacy, such as neurotic behaviors (I’m afraid many of us employ day-to-day) like intellectualization, dissociation and repression, which, the article reports, can involve “seemingly inexplicable naïveté, memory-lapse, or failure to acknowledge input from selective sense organs.”
The healthiest and most mature defense mechanisms are what Dr. Valliant calls the mature adaptions. They include altruism, humor and anticipation (being prepared for/not surprised when trouble hits, because after all, trouble is, in part, the stuff of life); also included on this healthy level is the popular defense mechanism of suppression which is defined here as ”a conscious decision to postpone attention to an impulse or conflict,” and respond with a healthy delay. Finally, the healthiest category of human defence mechanisms also includes the quality of sublimation: finding healthy, responsible outlets for feelings such as aggression and lust.
In other words: the key to healthy aging is being mature. But there is another vital factor: healthy relationships. So, while youth may be wasted on the young, maturity is the gift of the aged, but a good circle of friends is the key to happiness as well as good health.
The article goes on to describe positive power of relationships, but many of the case studies also, sadly, remind us of the negative power of alcoholism. The story (which is very long) is a fascinating read as it contains both wise and all too human excerpts from the files of the interviews conducted every two years over the course of seven decades of living.
In reading the story, I was reminded that perhaps the biggest damage of our daily-grind of troubles, large and small, is not how it drains our energy, our life force, but how it disconnects us from it. The study, as well as the story of its current director, teach us that for human beings, life is not just a journey but a force: it is a force that we mostly underestimate and take for granted.
The article concludes that it is “social aptitude, not intellectual brilliance or parental social class, that leads to successful aging.”
To summarize:
Open your Heart.
Seek the Noble.
Dare to Dream.
Find a Quest.
A bird does not sing because it has an answer.
A bird sings because it has a song.
Chinese proverb.
Have a beautiful summer.
~ Marit.
I’ll see you in September. The Muse is on the move and a change is on the way.
