How to live happily: what the research says, and where kava fits in

2023-05-24 · 5 min read

By the kava.fyi editorial team · Last updated: 24 May 2023

The longest study of adult life

The Harvard Study of Adult Development began in 1938 and has followed its participants ever since, making it one of the longest longitudinal studies in the history of the social sciences. It covered two groups: a little over two hundred and fifty Harvard College sophomores, among them the future US president John F. Kennedy and the long-serving Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee, and several hundred boys from Boston's poorest neighbourhoods, chosen precisely because they were growing up in difficult, unstable families, some of them in tenements with no running water. Both groups went through regular interviews, medical examinations, blood tests and brain scans, and at a certain point the participants' wives and more than two thousand of their children joined the study too. The researchers do not stop at questionnaires: they visit participants at home, gather medical records, draw blood, run brain scans and talk to their children, which gives a far fuller picture of each life than typical studies relying solely on memories, which inevitably distort over time.

The conclusion nobody expected

The study's fourth director, the psychiatrist Robert Waldinger, summed up decades of collected data in a TED talk later watched tens of millions of times. His conclusion is surprisingly simple: it is not wealth, fame or gruelling work that translates into a happy, healthy life, but the quality of relationships with other people. Yet, as Waldinger points out, in a survey of millennials more than eighty per cent named getting rich as their main life goal, and half of respondents also listed becoming famous, which shows how wide a gap separates common ideas about the good life from what actually delivers it. People more strongly connected to family, friends and community are happier, physically healthier and live longer than those with weaker ties, and loneliness proved in the study to be just as harmful as other well-known health risk factors.

Not the number of friends, but the quality of closeness

The researchers stress that it is not about the number of friends, or simply being in a relationship. Marriages full of conflict but lacking closeness proved in the study to be just as damaging to health as divorce, while warm, supportive relationships were protective even when partners argued, as long as they felt they could rely on each other in difficult moments. People most satisfied with their relationships at fifty turned out to be the healthiest physically at eighty, and secure, trust-based relationships also protected memory and cognitive sharpness in old age, while people who felt they could not rely on a partner in need experienced earlier memory decline, even when they reported no other symptoms at the time. The researchers note that these good relationships did not need to be perfect or free of conflict: what mattered above all was the sense that you could count on someone in a difficult moment.

Where kava fits into this story

This study has nothing to do with kava, but its conclusion, that regular, unforced contact with other people is one of the strongest factors in a good life, describes exactly what kava has served for centuries in the Pacific islands. Drinking together from a single vessel, in a circle, in a set order, has for generations given Oceanic cultures a reason to sit together, welcome a guest, settle a dispute or simply talk. A large comparative study published in 2026 in the journal PNAS, covering 83 Austronesian-speaking communities, did not confirm that drinking kava on its own drove the development of more complex social structures, but it does not undermine its role as an everyday ritual that builds bonds on a smaller scale, within families, groups of friends or neighbourhoods. The same logic lies behind the popularity of nakamals, traditional meeting places outside any formal ceremony, and of modern kava bars, which reproduce the same pattern, a shared vessel, a circle, conversation, in entirely different settings from the villages described by the first ethnographers of the Pacific.

Does the plant itself change anything

It is worth being honest here: it is the ritual of drinking together, not the pharmacology of kava, that seems key to the effect described by the Harvard researchers. Kavalactones, in laboratory studies, potentiate GABA A receptors, which is linked to general calming of the nervous system, so they might in theory make it a little easier to relax in company, especially for people who feel more tension in social situations. That, though, is a side effect, not a substitute for the relationship itself, which has to be built through regular presence, not a drink. In other words, it is the circle of people gathered around a shared vessel that builds the bond, and kava in this scenario is more a pretext than an active ingredient of the closeness itself.

What you can do with this

Waldinger ends his talk very practically: instead of screen time, it is worth giving time to a living person, reviving a neglected relationship with something shared, such as a long walk, or getting in touch with a family member you have not spoken to in a long while. None of this needs special conditions or rituals, though brewing and drinking kava together, described in the article on how to prepare kava, can be one of many occasions to do it. What matters, in the end, is setting aside time and space in which conversation can unfold freely, not the particular substance you happen to be drinking at the time.

If you reach for kava precisely to relax in company, remember that it acts on the central nervous system, and it is not worth combining it with alcohol or with medicines metabolised in the liver, which we cover in more detail in the article on kava and medicines. You can also read more about the tradition of drinking kava as a communal ritual in the piece on Tony Robbins's account.