Zoë’s Reviews > The Good Life: Lessons from the World's Longest Scientific Study of Happiness > Status Update

The Harvard Longitudinal Study is so fascinating, and I wish this book focused more on sharing its data and stories. Instead there are a couple of pages about one of the study participants, followed by a few pages about attachment styles and the Strange Situation, which I'm already familiar with. Earlier they talked about how we had to be deliberate about keeping in touch during COVID, which again is not new to me.

"Three years after Maryanne's death, [he was] still so grief-stricken that he couldn't manage to say her name.... Asked about his current love life, he said that... while he wasn't currently in a relationship, he hadn't given up on the possibility: 'I suppose eventually someone will come along and touch my heart.'"

The book suggested a series of questions to reflect on situations that were troubling us, and it seems helpful in the abstract, but really it just put me in a mad mood when I tried doing it.

Stage 3: Select (Choosing from the Options)

"The key is to try to slow things down where you can, zoom in, and move from a fully automatic response to a more considered and purposeful response that aligns with who you are and what you are seeking to accomplish."

Stage 2 of dealing with emotionally challenging situations: interpret.

Ask yourself, Why am I getting emotional? What is it I'm assuming here? What is really at stake? What is so challenging for me about this situation?

"Many studies have shown that when we avoid confronting challenges in a relationship, not only does the problem not go away, but it can get worse. The original problem keeps burrowing down into the relationship and can lead to a variety of other problems.

"Those people whose typical responses were to avoid or ignore difficulties had poorer memory and were less satisfied with their lives in late life...."

"the happiest and healthiest participants were those with the best relationships. But when we examine the lowest moments in our participants' lives, a great deal of them *also* involve relationships. ...the people who... know us best are also the people able to hurt us most.

how we deal with challenges often defines the course of our lives. Do we face the music? Or do we bury our heads in the sand?"

"Being alert is the feeling of actually living. Accumulated moments of autopilot (for example, a mindless daily commute plus hours of surfing the internet plus the automatic routines around waking and going to sleep) contribute to the feeling that life is racing by and that we're missing it as it happens."

"So while their challenges might have been different... the effective *solutions* for nourishing relationships—devoting time and attention in the present moment—were the same as they are today. Attention is the actual stuff of life, and it's equally valuable no matter what era a person lives in."