Ted Audio Collective.
HBR presents. Hi everyone.
You're listening to After Hours.
I'm Yang Mi. I'm Felix.
And we are here with Mike Norton.
If you read about happiness, if you read about consumer behavior, you probably came across his name.
We're super happy you're here with us.
Hi Mike. Hi Yang Mi.
Hi Felix. So Mike, as a social scientist, when suddenly a pandemic happens and the world locks down, do you immediately go into observation mode?
It's like the world is a laboratory.
I think like everybody, social scientists also go into panic mode for some period of time.
And then as we start to vaguely surface from that, yeah, I do think that social scientists do start to look at things to see what's been lost often.
And then sometimes we also try to see what's been gained by big changes in either people's individual lives or society at large.
We're sort of trying to take a broad view of when things happen to the humans, what ends up happening to them as a result of that.
Well this is precisely why we wanted to have you on the podcast.
We want to talk to you about some of the things you've observed from this very tumultuous year.
Sound good? Sounds great.
So Mike, what are some of the big themes you've been paying attention to over the past year?
I'm a social psychologist by training, which means my heart always goes toward relationships and groups and how people are functioning in those.
And there are certainly negative versions, of course, about what's been disrupted in our lives.
But there's also been the sense that people have been very creative in coming up with new social groupings and also with new rituals to kind of cement those new social groupings.
Oh, interesting. So what's an example?
For example, you could have lived in the same apartment building or the same house for like a hundred years and never have spoken to your neighbors, ever.
You may have grudgingly nodded at them once or twice in a decade or something, but you never had occasion of any kind to talk to anybody because you could go and do your regular social network, right?
So you didn't need your neighbor because your friend lived close by, something like that.
And now we just see all these stories of people sort of within buildings, within communities creating new social networks.
So you heard about people taking care of their older neighbors by bringing them groceries and things like that.
No, that doesn't happen to everybody.
But I love the idea that even in the moment when everything's disrupted, we still find a way to create real connection with us and other people.
Yeah. So interesting.
I remember early in the pandemic when everybody clapped at seven at night.
Oh, yeah. You would be on the balcony, you'd be outside, and there was this pretty amazing feeling of community, you and all your neighbors.
And you're exactly right.
Many faces I had never noticed, I had never seen on the street, but it felt like we were sort of together in this.
Sometimes I think about social sciences if you were an alien observing the people doing things.
So for thousands of years at 7 p .m., nobody ever went out and everybody clapped.
You know what I mean?
Like it never happened in human history in any culture ever, to my knowledge.
It's so true. And suddenly, literally one day, thousands of people spontaneously decided to go out and clap and yell and sing on the balcony.
And it shows you in a way how bizarre that behavior is.
And yet, as you said, Felix, so deeply meaningful to not only do it once, but keep doing it, to build it into a ritual that we all know we're going to keep doing as one positive thing in all of this tragedy that's around us.
But I think this is one of the reasons why the early weeks, the early months of the pandemic were so emotionally complicated for many people.
Because on the one hand, there was a sense of loss.
But at the same time, discovering that there were these moments that you didn't know could organically just spring up and create connections that were previously never there before.
I think people both realized they could do new things that they hadn't thought they could do, but many people realized that they'd been taking for granted some of the things that they could do, very simple, simple things.
And suddenly you realize, wow, the ability to just go and knock on someone's door and say, hi, is an amazing gift that we had.
And then we lost it.
And only after we lost it did we say, my God, wasn't it so amazing when we could just do something that simple.
And then even, say, gyms, clothes, and so all of a sudden you have this extra hour that you think, oh, so now what?
Just to rethink how you spend your day is something really that I can't really remember I ever had to do in my life.
I think it's such an interesting observation that pre -COVID we live in a world where so much of the structure of our daily lives was imposed on us.
You know, the office opens at a certain hour.
People tend to go home at a certain hour.
Things just sort of happen around you.
And so you conform your day to fit into that structure.
And then once that disappeared, I don't know about you guys, but the early days of the pandemic, my days were just this amorphous blob.
And it was only over time I realized the importance of proactively imposing my own structure on the day.
Because before that, it was just kind of a flat line from the time I woke up to the time I went to bed.
I think I'm sharing too much.
That was really dark.
It got really dark out of nowhere.
One of the things I always think about is like the aliens looking at us.
And the other thing I always think about with humans is what we do with our kids that we think is good for them.
Like, so we know with our kids they need routine.
We build it in. We're like, yeah, if they're going to sleep well, we better start right after dinner with the bath and the book.
You know what I mean?
We do it. We get them regular sleep.
We schedule the stuff for them.
Because we know if they don't have it, they can get really dysregulated.
And they're not really sure what they're doing.
But then once we turn, I don't know, 18 or something, we think, I don't need that.
I don't need that anymore.
I'm a grown -up now.
I just go to sleep whenever and do whatever I want.
And it's not so great often.
We do need some of that routine and regularity.
But I think, to your point, Youngme, we often accept a regularity that's kind of given to us, rather than think, yes, I have to work because I have a job.
But around the edges of that, am I making decisions that are consistent with my values or my happiness or any other metric we might care about?
So from your work, Mike, do you have advice for us now that we're hopefully at the end of the pandemic?
There is this moment where you think, oh, I could go back to my old rituals or I could maintain some of the rituals that I've developed.
Is there science into what makes us happiest, what promotes our wellbeing?
Do we know anything?
So one really common thing that so many people did was, very early on in the pandemic, they tried to schedule a weekly get -together with their family, their extended family, which is a very common thing that people did.
And because of that, they spent more time with their extended family in a month than they had in the previous 50 years.
Ever, yes. It was just like an explosion of aunt and uncle time that probably was not needed at the same time.
It's amazing actually to spend time with your extended family, especially for kids, you know, they get this sense of being embedded in a family that they didn't have.
It would be a real shame if we went back to regular life and just said, let's never see them again.
So when you think about the good things that happened as a function of this, the things that changed in our lives, some of them, of course, are devastating.
Some of them, though, I hope we do bring forward because they actually are better for us in the longer term to be connected with people who really care about us and who we have a deep connection in history with.
I think that's the ideal scenario, right, where we're able to cherry pick the parts of the new routines we discovered during the pandemic and then combine them by cherry picking the stuff that we really treasured pre -pandemic and combine them to create something new.
Along those lines, I'm struck by your use of the term ritual.
I love that word, by the way.
So when I think of a ritual, my mind immediately goes to a routinized behavior that could be regarded as a habit, but because we imbue so much meaning into it, its significance grows for us.
So I guess my question is, why do you use that word and why are rituals part of the way you think about our mental health, our happiness, and all the other things you study?
Most rituals are, one of the definitions is the behaviors you're engaged in are not instrumental, meaning you're not actually getting anything done with the thing that you're doing.
So when you sit and stand and kneel in church, you're not exercising at that moment.
You're using those motions to mean something else.
But if you look at the motions themselves, you could say, isn't that interesting that people are standing and sitting and kneeling at these different times?
So in a way, it means that even the deepest rituals, the behaviors themselves that underlie them, you can think of them a little bit sometimes as random, that we start to do some things and then we imbue them with meaning and then they become like really meaningful to us.
So the good news is, I think that even meaningless behaviors that are random, we can build them into rituals in our lives now.
We don't only have to use the 5 ,000 -year -old ones, do you know what I mean?
Or even the 100 -year -old ones.
We can come up with our own that are meaningful, like going on the balcony and clapping.
We can decide we're going to do that now and it's going to be incredibly meaningful for all of us to do that.
We didn't need permission from the ancient past to do that.
So that's really nice.
But I think the, you know I love this question, which is in the morning when you get ready for work or whatever in the morning, do you shower first and then brush your teeth or brush your teeth and then shower?
Shower first and brush your teeth, of course.
Of course. Of course.
How could you? It's obvious.
Give me a harder question.
So in the world, despite your strong beliefs about the rectitude of the behavior, it's basically 50 -50.
So about half of people shower and then brush their teeth.
I always suspected half of humanity was just idiots.
Idiots. And both sides think like there's something wrong with the other side.
Except we are right.
But then the second question is, if I asked you to do it the other way, tomorrow morning, whatever way you do it, shower first then brush teeth, let's say, if I said tomorrow will you do a brush and then shower, would it bug you or is it fine?
You were talking about how one of the differences between a ritual and something you do is that it's not a purely instrumental act.
And I think for a lot of people, you are in the shower for much longer than is required to actually cleanse yourself.
You're in the shower for however long it takes to be ready to emerge into the world.
And so for people like that, I think reversing the order is non -trivial.
And it turns out about half of people, it bothers them to change the order and half of people say, I don't understand why that even matters.
So this is the difference between a habit and a ritual then?
Exactly. So a habit is the things itself, like I need to brush my teeth and shower and I have a habit or running or I have a habit of doing that.
The ritual part is the other stuff, like the order matters or exactly when I do it matters.
When you add the other elements that aren't technically necessary to accomplish the goal of cleaning your teeth and washing your body, that's when you start moving it a little bit more toward a ritual.
When it matters to you emotionally that you do it in a certain way.
And I don't mean ritual like people in robes chanting, I just mean on the continuum of ritual.
Now you're closer with your morning ritual than it is just kind of like a morning routine or habit.
It's related to this idea of mindfulness, right?
I mean the extent to which you're trying to create meaning even out of mundane behaviors in your daily life.
I think there's a richness that goes along with that.
Yeah, I always hope there's so many books on how to develop better habits.
And we need them. I don't mean we don't need them.
We all definitely need to have better habits.
And a habit is successful when it's become automatic.
So like you don't even think about brushing your teeth in the morning, you just do it and then the dentist have won.
You know what I mean?
Like they built it into a habit for us.
Well, they lost as a business but they won the moral.
The hygienist have won?
Not sure. The big toothpaste won.
I guess, that's who won that battle.
But I think we want more than, you know, would we consider it a win as a human if our whole day became automated with healthy habits?
I don't think so. To your point, Youngmea, I think we want something richer and deeper than just automatically doing good rational things.
I think we need like emotions and emotional experience and emotional variety.
And we can get it in all kinds of ways.
But I do think rituals are one way that we sort of bind ourselves to having richer, deeper, different, more interesting experiences.
That's an interesting point about emotional variety because we live with the same number of people for such a long time during the pandemic in pretty close quarters.
That also has just a dramatic impact on the kinds of emotions and the kind of emotional variety that you experience.
Now you're really admitting a lot about yourself.
We might want to edit that out.
Yeah, turns out it's really good to have breaks from people so that you can start to miss them.
You know what I mean?
It means you really care about someone enough that when you're not with them for a while, you really wish you could be with them.
However, that does not mean that you want or need to be with them all the time.
This was one of the emotional paradoxes of the pandemic.
On the one hand, it made you appreciate your loved ones more than ever, right?
When you just look at the loss around the world and what coronavirus was doing to families.
So it made you appreciate them more than ever.
On the other hand, you're with them all the time in the same apartment or in the same house.
It just made me think about like, what is your absolute favorite food in the world that you love more than any other food?
And then eat that every day all day for a year.
You're not going to be so into it after all that time.
Yeah, and Felix, what is your favorite food?
Apples. Oh, my God, it's a lot of apples.
That's a lot of apples.
Don't apples have a substance that starts to upset your stomach?
We're going to take a break.
Yeah, we're going to take a break.
Yeah, a break is good before it definitely deteriorates.
Mike, how well did we do in combining work and our personal lives over the past year?
What grade would you give us as a society in handling that transition where suddenly we had to merge these two previously parallel lanes?
The first thing that came to mind was what was our grade before the pandemic, managing work -life balance.
It was like an F -minus, so I don't know if you can go lower than that.
Yeah, it has been for many people a struggle.
So some people who continue to work outside the home had to deal with the stress of interacting with customers and taking on health risk, which is obviously an enormous amount of stress.
Other people who were in a sense lucky enough to be able to just stay home and work from home, although that is lucky, it still comes with its own challenges.
You know, if you think of a couple with two kids, let's say, now suddenly we lost all any possibility of everyone going their separate ways and we're all in the house all the time.
That's number one. Number two is we're also trying to work even as we're all stuck in our house.
And the blurring of those lines got very, very difficult for a lot of people, because we used to be able to, you know, if you had a commute, you could leave your house in the morning and maybe you're on the train and you read or you took a bus and you listened to music that you liked or you drove, you
know, you have this time where you could switch from, like, dad's self to work self, whatever that might mean to you.
And then at the end of the day, too, you could do the reverse thing as well.
So by the time you got home, you were back to home self and you left work self behind.
And a lot of research shows, actually, that those transitions are really important for helping us move from being one person to the other person.
So if you think of high -stress jobs like correctional officers, it turns out correctional officers are really, really likely to have rituals before and after work.
Much more likely than people in lower -stress jobs.
And you can see exactly why, which is their job is incredibly, incredibly stressful.
That's a silly word.
Stressful doesn't even begin to describe their job.
They need to do things on their way between work and home to kind of leave work behind.
In the new COVID world, you're doing work facing one way in the room and then work is over and you shift 90 degrees to the left and now you're ready to be your other self.
Do you remember a few years ago, BBC Dad, remember BBC Dad was on that Zoom and he was being interviewed and then his kids came into the room and that video that went viral and it was hilarious.
And you fast forward a few years and we are all living that life, all the time now.
And that moment that was so hilarious back then is just because of routine for all of it.
And it was because we're so good at separating work and home.
So when one intrudes on the other, it's remarkable.
You know, like that video was remarkable at the time because it's like, oh my God, the sanctum has been penetrated by the other life.
You know what I mean?
Like shocking that that would ever happen.
Which shows how much we keep them separate.
Like sometimes if you go to some work function and then your spouse sees you chatting with colleagues and they're like, who are you?
You know what I mean?
You act like that at work and you get all this insight into your partner.
But now we got it 24 seven all day because you see your partner or your spouse, your roommates, whoever at work four feet from you and you get a whole new sense of what they're like.
It'll be really interesting to see if the design of apartments and homes changes over the longer term.
You know how say an open kitchen and as few walls and barriers as possible.
That was sort of a desirable way to think about the best place to live in.
And then all of a sudden you go, oh no, I need much more separation.
I need walls. I need a room where I don't hear anyone else.
Like a crawl space would be so wonderful.
So peaceful. The number of times I have been in the past year on a Zoom with people and I'm looking at them and I realize they're in a closet.
Yeah. So true. But I would imagine that there's a part of this that's also kind of cool though.
Right. This idea that we don't have to be so buttoned up in our presentation to the world and that it's okay to give our colleagues a little window into our larger context.
That's got to be a positive development.
Right. I think for sure if you think about the pressure to never let anything from your real life interfere with your work is just an incredibly foolish thing that we all decided was the way to do things at some point in human history.
And it's obviously not good for anybody's well -being or anybody's performance at work to say just whatever is going on at home, just leave it behind and come to work and be like perfect person.
It's just not how we work.
So for sure there's benefits of kind of opening and blurring the boundaries.
I think some people still experience the tension of they want to be fully one and then fully the other.
So I want to be professor person for this amount of time and then not at all for the next amount of time.
Or I want to be dad for the entire time, just fully dad.
Right. And so I'm torn between what I want to be doing right now and what the other thing is.
That's where I think it can be costly when we can't insert the barriers when we want them.
But I think it can be very beneficial when we say, look, humans do not work that way and we should help people be okay with that because it's much better for their mental health.
You know, you started us off by giving us a really poor grade as a society.
And I know you were half joking about that.
But I do think that at the end of the day when we come through this as we look back on this year, many people will view this as having been a lost year.
Yeah, I think there is a tendency that people have post trauma to kind of try to compartmentalize the trauma and to sort of box it in there as a lost year is sort of a classic case of that.
Typically, that's not incredibly effective because you're not figuring out what happened and what the impact was on you.
So the hope is that people won't just kind of write it off because there is learning about yourself, about your relationships, about what you love and what you hate in the world that you can take forward with you.
I think the second thing is that, you know, compared to which year, I mean, all of us have things that happen in our lives that are incredibly difficult.
And those years we don't typically write off.
You know, if a family member is ill, there's all sorts of things that happen to us.
There, I think we do try to get meaning and cope and deal with it and seek social support and all the other things that are good for us.
So my hope is that people will do more of that and less of the like, let's burn the calendar.
Actually, that might feel good.
It's okay. We can all burn our calendars.
I take that back, but only burn them and not like try to wipe it from our memory and never think about it because suppressing thoughts is not typically a great way to deal with anything that's happened to you.
So I was in quarantine for a while during the pandemic and, you know, spending 10 days in the same room without contact with basically anyone is definitely not an experience that I want to have back tomorrow.
But is it likely that I think back maybe a few years from now and think, oh my God, I never knew what that would be like if you're confined in that same space and that my memory of it would not be of a nice experience, but sort of maybe grateful that I experienced something like that?
Two things that come to mind.
One is absolutely negative things over time can become in a healthy way things that we learn from.
So like the teacher that you hated the most, sometimes later in life, you think, you know, he or she was really the teacher that got me to focus and got me to, you know, so there are these cases, but I don't mean to equate a harsh teacher with a pandemic, obviously.
But you can just think even at a local scale, negative things later, we can come to think, I'm glad actually I had that very difficult experience because it made me who I am today.
But the other thing that happens with not necessarily extremely negative experiences, but let's say ordinary negative experiences is that the mind is built to kind of forget the negative parts and remember the positive parts.
So like the word nostalgia exists because we're like, oh, you know what was amazing 15 years ago.
There's a great study on honeymoons actually where they ask people during their honeymoon, like, how well is it going?
And then they asked them a week later, how good was your honeymoon?
But then they asked them like a year later, how good was your honeymoon?
Five years later, 10 years later, how good was your honeymoon?
It keeps getting better and better.
Yeah. So on the honeymoon, people were like, the hotel isn't as nice as we thought and I just learned about an ex that I hadn't heard about.
You know, all kinds of stuff happens a week later, same.
Yeah. Yeah, it was okay.
But a year, five years, 10 years, 20 years later, oh my God, our honeymoon was so beautiful, the sunsets, the dolphins jumping in the ocean and things like that.
And this is one thing that annoys young people about old people so much, right?
It's like, oh, treasure those years.
And when you're that age yourself, you're like, why?
It's hard. What treasure?
Yeah. I've got a lot of stress.
I love this conversation.
This idea that there will come a time when we'll look back and we'll begin to appreciate some of what we went through, even as challenging as it might have been.
And then the good parts are going to seem even better many years down the road, hopefully.
That's such a great note to end on.
Thanks, Mike. Thank you.
Okay, picks. I am going to go first because I want to recommend an app.
The app is called Peak, Mike.
This is your app. Yes, you created an app.
So I want to recommend this app called Peak.
It's spelled P -I -Q -U -E.
It's a self -improvement app.
I don't know a lot of people who can say, hey, that's my app, but you created an app.
Wait, don't you teach MBA students?
Literally every single one of them says, hey, that's my app.
This is my app. That was true.
But having said that, you need to talk about this app, Mike.
So Peak, the idea of the app came from, this is something we developed with Beck Weeks, who was a Harvard MBA student, and Sendyl Molyonathan, who's an economist at the University of Chicago.
The initial idea was just that people are not very curious about the world.
And it's not their fault.
It's because we're not good at designing things that prompt curiosity.
We're good at designing things that you can listen to or watch passively that are super interesting, like, for example, podcasts and things like that.
And they're great because they do spark thoughts and learning in us.
Oh, especially this one.
Especially, not this episode, but this podcast in general is unbelievable.
Just press skip to one of the next guest.
And that's all we wanted to do, is just design things to make people curious again about things.
And the idea honestly came from with little kids, if you have been a parent or ever hung out with little kids, they find a stick.
And four hours later, they're still just fascinated with all the things you can do with a single stick.
So they have this amazing ability to get so deeply curious about things and test them and play with them and try different things.
And we never do that.
Grownups, we just never ever have that mindset.
So that was the goal, is to design things for people that you can do quickly, but a little bit get you back in that mindset of curiosity.
It's super cool. Does it make people more curious?
From reports, I think it does.
For example, super simple one is you are having lunch with your spouse or partner, let's say.
And what we ask you is we pop up bubbles with emotion words in them.
Like angry, bored, happy, all sorts of emotions.
And all we do is we say, guess how your partner is feeling right now.
And they do it for you and then you also just press how you are feeling.
Oh, okay, so you can compare.
And then you just turn your phone right away.
It's like, really? I didn't know you were feeling whatever.
So things like that, we're just trying to get you to think a little bit like, I wonder how that person is actually feeling, am I right or wrong about it?
That's the kind of things we just wanted people to kind of.
Yeah, so the app is called Peak.
Everybody check it out.
That's my recommendation.
Felix, what'd you bring?
When I speak with friends about what their plans are post pandemic, GOSI Sports is way up on the list.
Everybody is dying to be back in the stadium and see some live sports events.
And in that context, I came across a really interesting episode of this podcast called The Uncertain Hour.
The episode is called Inside Baseball and it talks about baseball careers, how that actually happens, how particular antitrust exemptions for baseball then have profound implications, how the sport is organized, who makes money, what these careers look like.
It was a real eye opener.
Wow, I haven't heard that particular episode, but I think you mentioned that podcast in general before.
So I listened to a few, they're really interesting.
They have a knack for thinking of jobs and professions.
You know they exist.
You know someone does that work, but you have no idea what it's like.
You have no idea what the experience is like with that work.
The one I listened to went deep into the office cleaning industry.
Oh my God, that was the one you recommended.
Great, great recommendation.
There was a study a few years ago where they asked people to list all the jobs.
Just like that's the question.
What are the jobs? What percent of all the jobs are we aware of?
You just have no idea what the jobs are at all.
Podcasts are a job.
It's more like a vocation.
It's a hobby, it's a ritual.
For me it's a ritual, guys.
A deeply meaningful.
Okay, Mike, did you bring a recommendation?
I did. My friend and colleague Katie Milkman has a book that's called How to Change, and it is amazing.
So among the cool things that Katie studies, I'll just say one of them.
She came up with this idea of temptation bundling.
And the way that it works is like if you want to go exercise at the gym, you leave your iPad there with the trashy shows that you really want to watch, and then you can only watch the trashy shows when you're at the gym.
Yeah, so she has this idea that you bundle a temptation with the thing you're supposed to do, and with her research she showed that actually can help you follow through.
But she just is such a genius on understanding humans and then designing in ways that actually impact us emotionally and can get us to change our behavior.
So pre -pandemic, whenever I knew I had a long haul flight coming up, I would reserve something I really, really, really wanted to watch for that long haul flight.
And it made it better.
It made it to the point where I almost looked forward to having a long haul flight where I could really dig into a show that I hadn't been able to see or something.
So there's something to it.
Okay, so the book is called How to Change?
How to Change. Okay, so Mike, thank you so much for coming on the show.
This was fun, right?
I did think both of you had fun, yeah.
Yeah, okay. It was fun, thank you.
Okay, all right. So thanks everyone for listening.
Shout out to our audio engineer, Peter Linane.
This is After Hours from the HBR Podcast Network.
And we'll see you next time.
