No one wants to be unhappy or unhealthy at any age. But as we get older, health and happiness arguably play an outsized role in our quality of life. Sketchy health habits we may have gotten away with when we were younger catch up to us later in life. And what once made us feel happy may no longer be an option as we age.

So how do we stay both happy and healthy throughout our lives?

Dr. Arthur C. Brooks, a social scientist at Harvard University and a leading researcher on happiness, has studied this question. Thanks largely to the 85-year-long Harvard Study of Adult Development, the longest-running study on happiness, we can better understand which qualities and habits are associated with being both happy and healthy as people age.

Measuring health and happiness basically separates people into four quadrants. In an interview with Dr. Rhonda Patrick, Brooks shared that people who fall into the happy-healthy (or happy-well) quadrant tend to share seven habits in common.

The 4 physical habits behind happiness

The first four have to do with our physical health and are ones that most of us might guess.

“Diet, exercise, smoking, and drinking,” Brooks said, adding that happy-well people are “very moderate” when it comes to substance use. “None of them were addicts, or if they had trouble with it, they........

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