Top 22 Robert J. Waldinger Quotes

It’s not just the number of friends you have, and it’s not whether or not you’re in a committed relationship. It’s the quality of your close relationships that matters.

Our kind of research might be one of the first projects to go. Our work is not urgent; it’s not the cure for cancer or Alzheimer‘s. But we have a way of understanding human life that you can’t get anywhere else, and it lays the foundation for important, actionable things.

People who are more isolated than they want to be from others find that they are less happy, their health declines earlier in midlife, their brain functioning declines sooner, and they live shorter lives than people who are not lonely.

Insurance companies, government agencies, and the pharmaceutical industry all push for mental health care that is brief, intermittent, and focused on quick fixes, despite the fact that many people struggle with emotional difficulties that can only be addressed over time using special psychodynamic skills.

Being human means there’s a wall-builder in each of us. Our minds naturally divide the world into me and not-me, us and them. For thousands of years, our sages have taught that we’re all one, yet we still divide wherever we look.

It’s the quality of your relationships that matters.

Poor parenting may be reflected in poor sibling relationships.

Pictures of entire lives, of the choices that people make and how those choices work out for them, those pictures are almost impossible to get.

It turns out that people who are more socially connected to family, to friends, to community, are happier, they’re physically healthier, and they live longer than people who are less well connected.

The good life is built with good relationships.

Marriage is actually one of the things that keeps you happy.

As we grow up, we’re constantly defining ourselves. In my case: Caucasian, male, born in Iowa, live in Boston, Zen Buddhist, good at learning languages. With countless labels, I build up this creation I call my self.

Most of what we know about human life we know from asking people to remember the past, and as we know, hindsight is anything but 20/20. We forget vast amounts of what happens to us in life, and sometimes memory is downright creative.

We make artificial divisions everywhere: Democrats and Republicans, black and white, millennials and baby boomers. Even those of us who are against building walls find ourselves pointing accusing fingers at those wall-builders.

An essential question regarding treatment is whether psychodynamic therapy is effective for specific disorders.

Far from the stereotype that psychodynamic treatments are appropriate only for the ‘worried well,’ a growing body of evidence points to their efficacy in dealing with the most pressing mental health problems of our time.

Putting labels on entire groups of people makes things much simpler. If all New Yorkers are pushy, or all politicians are dishonest, we don’t have to do the hard work of figuring out who’s who.

In medicine, we spend billions each year on doing and a fraction of that amount on listening and reflecting.

Sibling relationships have been underemphasised in learning about child development.

It seems older people maximize their well-being more – they start to realize that life is short.

When it comes to health care policy, we keep failing to take seriously the value of human relationships. The cost of this oversight is staggering.

A troubled marriage can be as hazardous to physical health as cigarette smoking.