The only gift is a portion of thyself.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Harvard Study Second Generation Questionnaire, 2015
It seems I am “running on automatic” without much awareness of what I’m doing.
Never Occasionally Sometimes Often Always
I rush through activities without being really attentive to them.
Never Occasionally Sometimes Often Always
I pay attention to physical experiences, such as the wind in my hair or the sun on my face.
Never Occasionally Sometimes Often Always
Imagine you began your life with all the money you’ll ever have. The instant you were born you were given one account, and anytime you’ve had to pay for something, it’s come out of that account.
You don’t need to work, but everything you do costs money. Food, water, housing, and consumer goods are as expensive as ever, but now even sending an email requires some of your precious funds. Sitting quietly in a chair doing nothing costs money. Sleep costs money. Everything you encounter requires you to spend money.
But the problem is this: you don’t know how much money is in the account, and when it runs dry, your life is over.
If you found yourself in this circumstance, would you live in the same way? Would you do anything differently?
This is a fantasy, but change one key element and it’s not far from our actual situation as human beings. Only instead of money, our one account has a limited amount of time—and we don’t know how much.
It is an everyday sort of question—How should we spend our time?—but because of the brevity and uncertainty of life, it is also a profound question, and has major implications for our health and happiness.
There is a Buddhist mantra that monks are taught to use in meditation. It goes like this: “If only death is certain, and the time of death is uncertain, then what should I do?”
When you are confronted with an unavoidable awareness of the end of your own life, it imbues the world with a new perspective, and different things become important.
When we conducted our eight-day survey of Harvard Study couples in their 80s, at the end of each daily interview we asked them a different question about their perspectives on the life they’d lived so far. The value of time was often central to their answers:
DAY 7: As you look back on your life, what do you wish you had done less of? Had done more of?
Edith, age 80: Less getting upset about silly things. When you put them into perspective, they weren’t all that important. Less worrying about those things. More time with my children, husband, mother, father.
Neil, age 83: Wish I’d spent more time with my wife. She died just as I’d begun to taper down with work.
These are only two of many similar responses. Nearly all Study participants were concerned about how they’d spent their time, and many felt that they hadn’t given enough thought to what they paid attention to. It’s an extremely common feeling. The flow of days has a way of whisking us away, so that we feel life is merely happening to us, that we are subjected to it, instead of actively shaping it. Like many people, some of our Study participants reached the late stages of their lives and looked back and had thoughts like, I didn’t see my friends enough… I didn’t pay enough attention to my kids… So much of my time was spent doing things that weren’t important to me.
Note those verbs that we can’t escape: We “spend” time, we “pay” attention.
Language—and perhaps English in particular—is so saturated with economic jargon that these words seem natural, they seem to make sense, but our time and attention are much, much more precious than these words suggest. Time and attention are not something we can replenish. They are what our life is. When we offer our time and attention, we are not merely spending and paying. We are giving our lives.
As the philosopher Simone Weil once wrote, “Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.”
That’s because attention—time—is the most valuable thing we possess.
Many decades after Simone Weil, the Zen master John Tarrant gave her insight a new dimension in his book The Light Inside the Dark. “Attention,” he wrote, “is the most basic form of love.”
We are pointing here to a truth that is difficult to put into words; like love, attention is a gift that flows both ways. When we give our attention, we are giving life, but we are also feeling more alive in the process.
Time and attention are the essential materials of happiness. They are the reservoir from which our lives flow. This is more accurate than any financial metaphor. Just as the water from a reservoir can be directed to, and enrich, particular areas of a landscape, the flow of our attention can enliven and enrich particular areas of our lives. So it never hurts to take a look at where our attention has been flowing, and ask if it’s going into places that benefit both the people we love and ourselves (these two things usually go together). Are we thriving? Are the activities and pursuits that make us feel most alive getting their due share? Who are the people most important to us, and are those relationships, challenges and all, getting the attention they deserve?
We are using the word “attention” in two different ways.
The first meaning of the word is really that of priority and time spent. This relates to the frequency dimension of the social universe chart from Chapter Four. Are we prioritizing the things that are most important to us, moving them to the front of the list when we apportion our time?
That’s easy to say, you might be thinking, but you obviously haven’t seen my life. I can’t just magically put more hours into the day. I’m investing my time in work so that my loved ones can eat and my kids have clothes to wear to school. I’m already stretched to the maximum, so how can I devote time that I don’t have?
It’s a good question. So let’s talk for a moment about time.
We often have two contradictory feelings about the time we have available to us. On one hand we sense a time famine and feel that there’s just not enough time in the day to do everything that we need to do, let alone that we want to do. On the other hand, we tend to think that in some unspecified future we will have a time surplus, as if we’ll get to a place in our lives where the kinds of things capturing our time right now will cease to consume us. That overdue visit to parents, that call to an old friend—anything we tend to imagine happening later—often gets the same treatment. “There’ll be plenty of time later,” we think, “for that.”
It’s true that large numbers of people report feeling too busy and overwhelmed with responsibilities and obligations. As the twenty-first century steamrolls ahead, it feels as if we have less and less time available, and those of us who feel time-poor are more stressed and less healthy. The most time-poor people in every society must be working longer and longer hours, right?
Not exactly. Globally, average work hours have declined significantly since the middle of the last century. Americans on average are working 10 percent less than they did in 1950, and in some countries like the Netherlands and Germany, working hours have been reduced by as much as 40 percent.
These are averages, and there are some caveats about who is working more, who is working less. For example, working mothers have the least leisure time, people with more education tend to work more and have less leisure time, and those with less education tend to have the most leisure time. So the picture isn’t simple. But the data are clear: even considering the caveats, people are less busy with work than in recent generations, and yet we still feel that our time is stretched to the max. Why?
The answer to this question may lie in the second meaning of the word “attention,” which is about how we spend time, and specifically, about what our mind is doing at any given moment.
The two of us, Bob and Marc, have lived several hundred miles from each other for more than two decades. In order to work on projects together we have had to meet up by phone or video call. We’re old friends but we have to set strict appointments, otherwise we’d never make it happen. When the appointment finally comes, at least once a week, we both see it like a scheduled respite in a hectic workweek. We relax a little bit and let down our guard. And sometimes, after being so focused all day or all week, when we’re finally talking with each other, our attention wanders.
You know the feeling. Life is crazy, and there are always a million things to do. When you sit down with a friend, or with your kids, and you have a moment, your comfort and confidence in the relationship means you don’t really need to pay full attention. These are the people you know. You have a routine together, the interaction is familiar, and maybe there’s nothing particularly novel going on, so your mind kind of floats away. And even when our lives aren’t flooded with worries and to-dos, there’s always the vast flow of information on the internet calling to us. One moment of downtime in our day, and out comes the phone.
Even as we were working on this chapter, literally discussing the act of paying attention, Marc began to sense a familiar silence on the phone. Bob had spaced out.
“Bob,” he said.
“Yes?”
“I’ve lost you.”
It happens to everybody. In a 2010 study, Matthew Killingsworth and Daniel Gilbert turned one of the modern culprits of distraction—the smartphone—against itself, and used it to conduct a massive study of how we spend our waking moments, both physically and mentally. First they designed an app that contacted participants on their smartphones at random times throughout the day and presented them with questions about what they were doing, thinking, and feeling, recording their answers. The database collected millions of samples from more than five thousand people of all ages in eighty-three countries and across eighty-six occupational categories. Their findings showed that close to half of our waking moments are spent thinking about something other than what we are doing. Close to half! As the authors of the study point out, this is not just an unfortunate mental quirk, but a distinctly human evolutionary adaptation.
Thinking about the past and the future lets us plan, anticipate, and make creative connections among different ideas and experiences. But the modern environment, with all of its stimulation, may hold our minds in this state of distraction far beyond the point of diminishing returns. Our minds are not anticipating and making creative connections so much as wandering in the weeds. And the study by Killingsworth and Gilbert clearly showed what we are all dimly aware of—that a wandering mind is connected to unhappiness.
“The ability to think about what is not happening,” they wrote, “is a cognitive achievement that comes at an emotional cost.”
This cognitive ability to remember the past and anticipate the future is one reason some of us feel so busy—not because of the number of tasks we have to complete in the day, but because of the sheer number of things competing for our attention. What is commonly called “distraction” is probably better understood as overstimulation.
Recent findings in neuroscience have shown that our conscious minds cannot do more than one thing at a time. It may feel like you are able to multitask and think about two (or more) things at once, but really your mind is switching between them. This is a costly process neurologically speaking. Switching from one task to another takes energy and a measurable amount of time. Then, when we switch back, it takes another period of time to really wrap our minds around the original object of attention. And it’s not only about the time cost; it’s about the quality of our attention. If we are always switching from one thing to another, then we are never able to truly focus and experience the pleasure and effectiveness of a focused mind. Instead we live in a state of constant recalibration, or what the writer Linda Stone perceptively calls “continuous partial attention.”
Human awareness is not the speedy, nimble creature some of us believe it to be. Our brains have evolved to be more like owls than hummingbirds: we notice something, turn our attention to it, and focus in. It is in this state of intense, solitary focus that we are in possession of our most uniquely human and powerful mental faculties. When we focus on one thing, we are at our most thoughtful, creative, and productive.
But in the screen-heavy environment of the twenty-first century, our mind-owls, large and unwieldy, are treated like hummingbirds, and they end up flopping ineffectively from one thing to the next. Doing this day in and day out accommodates us to what is actually an unnatural, anxiety-producing mode in which the mind struggles to find nourishment.
Which owl is going to feel busier, the one focusing on the sound of a mouse in the snow, or the one trying to draw tiny bits of nectar from a thousand flowers? And which owl is going to be, in the end, better nourished?
Knowing that your attention is valuable is one thing, but what does attention look like in our relationships over the course of a lifetime?
For some real-world context, let’s take a look at Leo DeMarco, our high school teacher from Chapter Two, who was generally considered to be one of the Harvard Study’s happiest men, and how he managed his time and attention.
Leo was incredibly busy as a high school teacher and his time was stretched to the maximum. He was deeply involved with his students. More involved than most teachers, according to those who knew him. He always felt there was more to do, and never hesitated to help a student who was having a hard time or to meet with a concerned parent. He was also involved in extracurricular activities and so was not always available to his own children after school or on the weekends. His family enjoyed his company—he was a good listener, and always ready with a well-timed joke—so they noticed when he wasn’t around and sometimes wondered if he valued his work more than his family.
It’s true that his work was important to him. It gave his life meaning, and he told the Study more than once that it made him feel like a valuable member of the community, like he meant something to the people he worked with and especially to his students. This kind of purpose is important to our happiness and well-being (more on that in Chapter Nine), and it’s not uncommon that it comes into conflict with other priorities, like family time. This competition for our attention is a tricky challenge that a lot of us find ourselves grappling with. But it’s not insurmountable.
Leo’s family was not afraid to share their feelings about this. His wife, Grace, mentioned it to him, and his two daughters and son mentioned it also.
In 1986 his oldest daughter, Katherine, was asked about the strongest memories she had of Leo, and she talked with great feeling about their fishing trips. Every summer, when he was not teaching, Leo would take one child at a time for a week to different camping spots and fishing holes. During these trips she remembered him being attentive to her, not just fishing, and asking about her life and what she thought of things. Unable to turn off the teacher in himself, he showed them how to tie on the hooks and bobbers, where the fish liked to hide out, how to build a fire, and how to identify constellations in the night sky. He made sure they would all be able to camp and fish on their own, so they could handle themselves in the wilderness and continue the tradition with their own kids, should they ever have them.
Leo gave his children his focused attention, and he offered it to his wife, Grace, as well. In his early 80s, when Leo was asked what kinds of activities they did together as a couple, he said:
We’ll garden together or I’ll just walk along with her and we just talk about the landscape. I mean, yesterday we went for a three- or four-mile hike. Bundled up, deep in the woods, and we kept stopping and watching the ducks fly out of the creek that we were crossing over. There’s a lot of that in my life. These are things that we share. Or when I read a book, I know what kinds of things appeal to her so I can suggest that she take a look at something. And she does the same for me.
These are small things, small moments in the days of Leo and Grace’s life, but taken together over a lifetime, these small moments add up. “Attention is the most basic form of love.” It’s not a coincidence that Leo is both one of the more attentive, present members of the Study and one of its happiest.
To Leo and other First Generation Harvard Study participants who were raising their kids in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, the online life we know in the twenty-first century would have sounded like science fiction. Back then, they didn’t have to contend with the omnipresence of smartphones, the pervasive nature of social media, or the overwhelming glut of information and stimuli. But their struggles with relationships might have more in common with the struggles of today than it first appears.
In 1946, a young Stanley Kubrick published a photo in Look magazine that would be very familiar today: a subway car full of New York City commuters, heads bowed, nearly every single one of them absorbed in… their newspapers. And many original Harvard Study families talked about having the same feelings many of us have today—they struggled to give their families the attention they deserved, work was overwhelming, the world seemed to be going crazy, and they were worried for their children’s future. Remember, 89 percent of the Study’s college men served in World War II—a catastrophic conflict the outcome of which, at the time, was entirely uncertain—and then raised children amidst the Cold War and pervasive fears of nuclear disaster. Inside the home, instead of the internet, parents were worried about what television was doing to their kids, and to society in general. So while their challenges might have been different in nature and scale, and the speed of cultural change may have been, at least in some ways, less extreme than what we experience, 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.
Technologies like the smartphone and social media now play a role in shaping some of the most intimate parts of our lives. Quite often, when we connect with another person, there is a device and a piece of software between us.
This is a vulnerable situation; an incredible amount of emotion and life flow through these media. The kindling of romance, breakups, news of births and deaths, the basic conduct of friendships, and all kinds of other intimate interactions are now filtered through devices and software whose design subtly—and sometimes not-so-subtly—shapes each interaction. How is this affecting our relationships? Our happiness? Are these new forms of communication deepening or inhibiting our ability to meaningfully connect to each other?
Definitive answers to these questions are not easy to come by. Every individual uses these technologies differently, and as with any period of social transformation, the true nature of change is hard to see until we have some distance to look back on it. But one thing we do know is that social media and online life are complicated. There are reasons to be hopeful, and reasons to worry.
On the positive side, when social media is used to sustain relationships with friends and family, it can enhance feelings of connectedness and belonging. Old friends and colleagues that we may have lost touch with in the past are now only a few clicks away, and new communities emerge every day around interests and challenges. Someone with a rare disease like cystic fibrosis can find support and comfort online, and someone who has been marginalized because of their sexual orientation, gender identity, or the way they look can find a community beyond their physical location. For anyone who is isolated and in an unusual situation, the internet is a true blessing.
But there are important questions to ask, and the answers may have implications for our personal well-being and for society. Among the most urgent is how these online spaces affect the way children and adolescents develop. As data from our own Harvard Study (and many others) have shown, early social experiences matter. A person’s style of relating to others later in their life is linked to how they developed as children. We call them the formative years for a reason (more on this in Chapter Eight). What impact does more online interaction have on young people’s ability to read social cues and recognize emotions in real life? Or on their ability to give meaningful conversational cues and emotional signals? A great deal of in-person communication has nothing to do with language. Do these nonverbal abilities atrophy in virtual contexts in ways that affect in-person interactions?
This is a rich and developing area of research, some of which we are conducting ourselves. The results so far are not conclusive; much more research must be done. But what’s clear at this point is that we can’t assume that online spaces are the same as physical spaces, and we especially can’t assume that the social skills kids develop by being together in person are skills they can also develop online.
In 2020 the world was rocked by the Covid-19 pandemic. The rapid spread of a microscopic virus drastically changed much of the world’s way of life, separating us from our friends, neighbors, and families, and taxing our individual psychological fortitude to the extreme. Quarantines drove people into their homes, and social distancing rules prevented most forms of socializing. Restaurants shut down. Workplaces closed. Almost overnight, online video calls and social media became many people’s only connection to the outside world. It was like a massive global experiment in both social isolation and the nature of life online.
As weeks of lockdown stretched into months, online tools began to fill the void left by a lack of real-world interaction. Remote meetings kept many businesses afloat and allowed schools and universities to keep their (virtual) doors open. Religious services were held online. Even weddings and funerals were conducted virtually.
But for those who lacked internet access, the situation was more dire. Faced with total isolation or the risk of infection, many people chose to risk infection. In nursing homes where social media and video calling were rare, the only thing worse than the virus was the social isolation, which was so damaging to residents’ health that it became an official cause of death.
Without social media and video calling, it’s likely that the health effects of the lockdown would have been much more severe.
But it soon became clear that these virtual tools were far from sufficient. Something was missing in the feeling of these online meetings, in their sensory experience and emotional content.
Communication is not only an exchange of information. Human touch and physical proximity have emotional, psychological, and even biological effects. Boxed in by the capabilities of software, the experience of social interaction online is different and often more constrained. Whereas in normal times the limitations of online connection are offset by regular in-person interactions, during the pandemic these limitations were placed into stark relief. Despite our virtual connectedness, diseases of despair, depression, and anxiety increased in the first year of pandemic, and feelings of loneliness worsened in some communities. Even among those most well-connected online, many began to experience “skin hunger,” a longing driven by the deprivation of human touch. In the face of intense isolation, social media was at least something. But it wasn’t enough.
This massive global experiment in isolation made one thing very clear: the physical presence of another human being cannot be duplicated by a machine. There is no substitute for being together.
Social media and virtual interaction are here to stay, and they are likely to evolve in unpredictable ways. As we watch the way societies all over the world cope with these technological changes, is there anything we can do in our own lives to magnify the good and mitigate the bad?
Thankfully, we do have some data on this. How an individual uses these platforms matters, and we have a couple of very basic recommendations that you can implement today:
First, engage with others.
One influential study showed that those who use Facebook passively, just reading and scrolling, feel worse than those who engage actively by contacting others and commenting on posts. A similar conclusion was reached in a study in Norway, one of the “happiest” countries on the planet. Norwegians use Facebook at high rates, children especially, and one study found that the kids who used Facebook primarily to communicate experienced more positive feelings. The kids who used it primarily to observe experienced more negative feelings. These findings are not that surprising: we now know that those who compare themselves to others more frequently are less happy.
As we said earlier, we are always comparing our insides to other people’s outsides, always comparing our own experiences of ups and downs, good days and bad days, feelings of confidence and insecurity, with the curated version of life that others show us. This happens most starkly on social media, where we’re quick to post photos of a good time at a restaurant or beach vacation, but rarely balance those out with the reality of dinner table arguments or bad hangovers. This imbalance means that when we compare our lives with the pictures that others show us on social media, it’s easy to feel like the good life is something that only other people are enjoying.
Second, take your temperature when using social media.
When it comes to social media, one size does not fit all. What’s good for someone else may not be good for you. So when you’re thinking about your own habits online, how you feel really matters. When you spend half an hour on Facebook, do you come away feeling energized? Do you feel depleted after a long click-hole journey around the internet? Taking a moment to notice the changes in your mood and outlook after a period of time on Facebook or Twitter can point you in the right direction. Next time you find yourself pinned to your chair by a screen, just take a second and check in with yourself; how do you feel?
Third, check in with how your social media use is seen by people who are important to you. Ask your partner how they feel about the way you use your phone. Are your online habits affecting them? Are there certain times or certain activities—at breakfast, after dinner, in the car—during which they miss your full attention and presence? What about your kids? Older people tend to assume that it’s primarily kids that are glued to screens, but it’s not uncommon at all for kids to complain about their parents’ obsession with their smartphones. This isn’t something that you can always perceive yourself; you might need to ask.
Finally, take tech holidays. These will vary depending on your life, but making a point to clear technology out of your life for small periods of time can reveal how it is affecting you. In science, we use a control group to stand in relief against the treatment group so any effect can be clearly seen. In your life, you might need a control period. What does it feel like to refrain from looking at social media for four hours? If your phone is unavailable, are you more attentive to the people you love? After a day free of social media, do you feel less overwhelmed, less scattered?
Anytime we pick up a smartphone or go online, we are increasing our potential reach and opening ourselves to vulnerabilities. The best that each of us can do is to try to understand how both sides of this equation map onto our own lives, and strive to maximize the good and mitigate the bad.
To that end, we have one crucial advantage over all of the tech giants: the war for our attention is being fought on our home turf; quite literally, in our minds. And it can be won there.
The present moment is the only time over which we have dominion.
Thich Nhat Hanh
These dilemmas of attention may seem unique to the modern moment, but at their core they are very old, millennia older than the internet, and they have very old solutions.
In 1979, Jon Kabat-Zinn adapted ancient Buddhist meditation practices into an eight-session course designed to help terminally ill patients and those with chronic pain reduce feelings of stress. He called the course “Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction,” or MBSR, and its therapeutic success led to the word “mindfulness” becoming the almost ubiquitous term it is today. A great deal of research now supports its effectiveness, and a large number of medical schools now offer mindfulness training.
At its core the practice of mindfulness is about alertness and attention. Kabat-Zinn often defines mindfulness in this way: “the awareness that emerges through paying attention on purpose, in the present moment, and non-judgmentally to things as they are.” By making a conscious effort to pay attention to the sensations of our bodies and what is happening around us, and doing it without the abstraction and filter of judgment, our thinking and experience are brought into sync with where we are right now. The human mind has a tendency to run away; the goal of mindfulness is to keep bringing it back home, to the present moment.
Over the years, elements of mindfulness have permeated the broader culture, and efforts to commercialize it have led some to distrust mindfulness practices. But its core concepts have been around for centuries and are part of many cultural traditions. The goal is simply an everyday sort of attentiveness. Even the U.S. military is invested in mindfulness and learning how to keep human beings focused, because being alert to the moment, for a soldier, is a matter of life and death.
The same can be said for the rest of us. 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.
By learning to pay attention to what’s happening in front of us, we gain more than the sensations of life; we also increase our ability to act. We’re not thinking about what’s already happened, about what might happen, about what we have to do later; we are alert to the moment, which is where any action must take place. If our intention is to connect with other people, being present is what makes that possible.
A moment of mindfulness needn’t be a strenuous act of meditation. We need only to stop, pay attention, and notice things as they are. An amazing amount of information is available in every fleeting moment of our lives. You can take a moment right now, in the place you are. You can notice the weight of this book in your hand, the feel of the page (or of the device you are using to read or listen to it), the movement of the air across your skin, or the play of light on the floor of the room. Or you can try asking yourself this lovely question, which is useful in any situation, at any time: What’s here that I’ve never noticed before?
The word “mindfulness” is unfortunate in a way, because its meaning may not be evident to some people. The word seems to suggest that the practice is about thinking the right things, that if we are mindful it means our mind is “full” of the right thoughts.
But mindfulness is simpler than that.
As the Gilbert and Killingsworth study showed, more often than not, most people’s minds are already full of thought—about ourselves, the future, and the past. This kind of thinking pulls our minds into a narrow tunnel made of thought and worry, cut off from immediate experience. It can be dark and claustrophobic there.
The present moment is large and spacious, if we allow it to be. Even when it contains sad or scary experiences, this moment includes so much more than the content of our minds. The sense of being truly alive comes with giving our attention only to what is happening right in front of us, to grab hold of sensations—the feelings of our bodies, the things we see and hear, the presence of the people who are with us—and use them to make a hard left out of thinking about other things and places, and to emerge from the tunnel of our own minds into the vastness of the present, the only place anything, or anyone, really exists.
As the spiritualist Ram Dass simply put it, the idea is to “be here now.”
That same question—What’s here that I’m not noticing?—can be extraordinarily powerful when we apply it to people: What about this person have I not noticed before? Or: What is this person feeling that I’ve been missing? This is part of that radical curiosity we talked about in Chapter Four.
More often than not, when we are in the presence of other people, we are missing a lot about their experience. In any interaction, and in any relationship (even our closest), there is an enormous amount of feeling and information that goes right over our heads. But in the end, which matters more: How right we are about what another person is experiencing, or how curious we are about their experience in the first place?
In 2012 the two of us designed a study to help work this out. If you’ve ever had a difficult conversation with a romantic partner, you know how fraught that can be, and how much misunderstanding can go on. So we recruited 156 couples from diverse backgrounds, and asked each partner to record a one- or two-sentence summary about a relationship event in the past month that frustrated, angered, or disappointed them (for example, the partner did not follow through on something they had promised, did not share information about an important event, did not do a household task that was theirs to do). Then we played each partner’s recording for the couple to initiate a discussion, and we instructed them to try to come to a better understanding of what occurred.
The participants didn’t know this, but we were tracking the importance of empathy. What we wanted to know was this: Is it more important to be accurate in our understanding of our partner’s feelings, or is it more important that our partners see that we are making an effort to understand?
After their interaction, we asked them about both their own and their partner’s feelings during these conversations. We also asked a series of questions about their partner’s intentions and motivations, including the degree to which they felt their partner was trying to understand them.
We expected that empathic accuracy—getting the right answer about what your partner was feeling—would correlate with a stronger sense of relationship satisfaction. This correlation was certainly there—understanding how your partner is feeling is a good thing.
But more important than that, especially for women, was the empathic effort involved. If a person felt their partner was making a good-faith effort to understand them, they felt more positively about the interaction and about the relationship, regardless of their partner’s accuracy.
To put it simply, understanding another person is great, but just trying to understand goes a long way in building connection.
Some people do this automatically, but efforts to understand others can also be deliberate, intentional behaviors. It needn’t come naturally to you at first, but the more you try, the easier it will get. The next time you have the opportunity, try asking yourself:
How is this person feeling?
What is this person thinking?
Am I missing something here?
How might I feel if I were in this person’s shoes?
And when you can, let them know that you’re curious and trying to understand—a small effort that can have an enormous impact.
Leo may not have been the Study member who spent the most time with his family, but over the years he made a conscious attempt to improve in that area, and when he did spend time with them, he made it count. That doesn’t mean that he took them on spectacular adventures or international trips, or that he crammed the maximum amount of excitement into every moment of family time. No. He paid attention to his children and his wife and he did so relatively consistently. He was available to them, in the moment. He listened, he asked questions, and he made a point to help whenever he could.
We asked him what had appealed to him about his wife when they first met in high school, and he listed a number of things: her intelligence, her ease of manner, and something mysterious that he couldn’t put his finger on—“just something that I liked about her. I liked her right from the start.” But when we asked him what he thought she liked about him, the question startled him.
“Well I’ve never thought about that, to be honest,” he said. He was so interested in Grace that he hadn’t thought about how he appeared to her.
This focus on the world outside of himself is a theme in Leo’s life. When his family all got together, he said he enjoyed being a fly on the wall. Their relationships with each other were fun for him to watch, to see them in their natural states, how they were different with each other than with him. Their relationships infused the household with energy. “It makes life wonderful,” he said.
Leo was lucky. His curiosity, attention to others, and lack of self-consciousness were natural for him. These do not come as naturally to everyone. Some of us have to make a more deliberate effort and learn to be attentive in this way. Even Leo, who remained attentive to his wife throughout his life, didn’t keep up his proactive approach to connecting with his children. He talked with them less and less after they left home, and in general was less attentive. When she was in her mid-30s, his youngest daughter, Rachel, wrote an unprompted note on her Second Generation questionnaire:
Adore both parents. Just realized this year that I have to carve time out to be with them, especially to get my father to talk. He has always let my mother do the necessary communicating. Now I initiate great late-night conversations, and feel much closer to him.
This comment is very revealing. The DeMarco family was close to each other, it’s true, but sometimes that’s not enough. After Rachel became an adult, she lost some of that closeness with her parents in a way that didn’t feel good to her. She had to become more active in making time for them, and in nurturing her relationship with her father. As a family, they already had the ability to communicate and to be close, and yet effort and planning were still necessary. Closeness didn’t just happen on its own. Life is busy. So many things get in the way, and it’s easy to become passive and just go with the flow. Rachel made a choice to move against the flow of her life and reconnect.
Rachel’s choice didn’t come out of nowhere. Leo may not have known it when he was a young father, but he was sowing the seeds of connection that would come back and nourish him (and his kids) later in life. Rachel and his other children learned that this kind of connection with their father felt good and gave their lives a special feeling they couldn’t easily get from anyone else. They knew this because of Leo’s earlier efforts.
At the very end of her questionnaire, Rachel made a final note to Study researchers:
p.s. Sorry this is late, I live in the deep woods on a mountain, no H2O, electricity, etc. A bit cut-off!
… so it seems more than one lesson from their camping trips took hold.
A close look at the DeMarco family reveals what research also shows are some of the natural outgrowths of focused attention: reciprocal love and consideration, a sense of belonging, and positive feeling about human relationships in general—which then leads to more positive relationships, and better health. In the case of Leo and the DeMarco family, their close attention to each other seems to have had a major impact on all of their lives.
We’ve already asked you to consider the relationships in your life that could use some more time. Now we’re going to ask you to consider a deeper question: Of the people in your life who are already receiving your time, who among them is receiving your full attention?
This question may be more difficult to answer than you think. We often believe that we are giving our full attention, but our automatic actions and reactions make it hard to know for sure. You might have to make an effort to observe yourself and to consider if you really are offering the people who are most important to you the fullness of your attention.
How you do this will be particular to your own life, but here are a few simple ways to begin.
First, think of one or two relationships that enrich your life, and consider devoting some extra attention to them. If you made a social universe chart in Chapter Four, you might take a look at it and ask yourself, What action could I take today to give attention and appreciation to someone who deserves it?
Second, consider some changes to your day. Is it practical to create some time or activities that are distraction-free, particularly when you are with the people you care most about? For example, no phones at the dinner table? Are there set times in the week or in the month that you can dedicate to a certain person? Can a change in your daily schedule lead to a regular time for coffee or a walk with a loved one or a new friend? Can you arrange a few pieces of furniture to facilitate conversation rather than facilitate screen time?
Finally, you might continue the practice we began in Chapter Four, and bring some curiosity to each moment you have with the people in your life, especially those you know well and perhaps take for granted. This takes practice, but it’s not hard to get better at it. “How was your day?”—“Fine” needn’t be the end of a conversation. It is your sincere interest that will motivate folks to respond. You might follow up with something a little more playful like, “What was the most fun thing that happened today?” Or, “Did anything surprising happen today?” And when someone makes a casual reply you can dig deeper: “Can I ask you more about that… I’m so curious and not sure I really understand it fully…” Try to put yourself in this person’s place and imagine what they have experienced. Engaging conversations often come from this perspective-taking alone, and curiosity can be contagious. You might find that the more interested you are in others, the more interested they become in you, and you might also be surprised how fun this process can be.
Life is always at risk of slipping by unnoticed. If the days and months and years feel as if they are moving too quickly, focused attention might be one remedy. Giving something your undivided attention is a way of bringing it to life and assuring that you don’t float through time on automatic pilot. Noticing someone is a way of respecting them, paying tribute to the person they are in that exact moment. And noticing yourself, checking in about how you move through the world, about where you are now and where you would like to be, can help you identify which people and pursuits most need your attention. Attention is your most precious asset, and deciding how to invest it is one of the most important decisions you can make. The good news is you can make that decision now, in this moment, and in each moment of your life.