The Science Of Happiness: Dr. Laurie Santos Shares Evidence-Based Tools For Genuine Joy, Why We Chase The Wrong Things & What Actually Creates Well-Being | The Rich Roll Podcast

We, as a species, have always been obsessed with happiness.

The cultural apparatus that we surround ourselves with is telling us all the wrong things to do, right?

Go for money, go for status, just buy something, change your circumstances, you'll feel happier.

And what we know is, like, those are wrong.

We go after those things at the expense of social connection, time for rest. We kind of forego those great things in the service of stuff that's not going to make us feel good.

I think of these strategies as almost like preventative mental health.

So, you can have your little a la carte snack list of different strategies you use to feel happier.

And if you can manage to turn them into habits to put them into effect, you'll wind up reaping the benefits.

Hey, everybody. Welcome to the podcast. Today's version of which is focused entirely on happiness.

My guest for this very broad and somewhat elusive subject matter is Dr. Lori Santos, Santos, who is a professor of psychology and the head of Silliman College at Yale University, where she teaches psychology and the good life, which is one of, if not the most popular courses at Yale.

And we're going to get right into it in a sec.

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so what is happiness exactly well this is not new terrain for this show avid listeners will remember sonja liba murski's appearance a while back as well as multiple episodes with dr arthur brooks but i think this conversation goes to some pretty interesting new and important places when when it comes to the many ways in which we misunderstand happiness and why we so often behave in ways at cross purposes with getting it.

We discuss what gets in our way specifically.

And of course, the many things that we can do, actionable tools, Lori calls rewireables to engender more happiness in our lives more often.

You can read up on her online at drlorisantos .com where you will also find her fabulous podcast, The Happiness Lab, as well as a variety of courses, courses for kids, for parents, courses for everyone.

And there's even one for teachers interested in teaching happiness, which is pretty cool.

So with that, let's do the thing.

This is me and Dr. Lori Santos.

I want to, you know, start with some real basic stuff.

We can't talk about happiness without having a working understanding of what it actually is.

So what is your thesis?

I'm sure people ask you all the time, you teach happiness, so tell me what it is.

Yeah. I use a very limited definition that lots of psychologists use.

This comes from Sonia Lubomirsky and her colleagues, right?

The idea is you think about being happy in your life and with your life.

These are two parts of happiness.

So being happy in your life is the fact that you experience lots of positive emotion or a decent ratio of positive emotions to negative emotions.

You have contentment and laughter and joy and these things.

And you have a nice ratio of those with the normal negative stuff, you know, anger, sadness, anxiety, overwhelm, whatever.

The key there is you're not getting fully rid of negative emotions, but you want the ratio to be decent.

That's kind of being happy in your life.

But being happy with your life is the fact that you think your life is going well.

These are what's often called the kind of affective and the cognitive parts happiness, how your life feels and how you think it's going.

But how you think your life is going is the answer to the question, all things considered, how satisfied am I with my life?

Do I have purpose? Do I have a sense of meaning?

Does it feel like something to be here?

And the strategies that I talk about in my course and on my podcast, really what they're trying to do is boost both of those.

If you're kind of feeling good in your life and you sort of think your life is going well, then by and large, I'd be saying that you're happy.

be. You know, I'm curious around how you got interested in this field to begin with.

Was there a catalyst or what ignited your passion around this subject of happiness?

Yeah, well, I've been a nerdy psychologist basically forever.

Like since I was a kid, I was interested in people and psychology, but spent most of my career studying animals, all kinds of different stuff.

And then my interest in happiness started when I took on this new role at Yale.

I became this thing called the head of college, which is like strange EL speak for a faculty member who lives on campus with students.

Like I moved into this big mansion in the middle of this dorm and thought I was going to be around lots of college students like partying and having this amazing time.

And really what I just saw was the college student mental health crisis, right?

Most of my day was like students who were experiencing acute anxiety, suicidality, panic attacks.

And I was like, this is like not okay.

How long ago was that?

this was uh in 2017 was when i first started up pre -pandemic like we're in a different world now i think things have gotten worse you know but but what i was seeing on the ground was just shocking and it wasn't what i remember from college and it wasn't what you kind of hear in the media of a bunch of snowflakes these were these were students having like acute crises and so i got interested in the happiness work because i was like somebody needs to do something to help these students it started with me being again like a nerdy professor thinking well i'll make make a new class, right?

I'll develop a class where I teach students these strategies.

And I didn't realize how much that would go viral, not just on campus, but lots of folks need these strategies.

I remember. It was national news.

You were all over the place, like the most popular oversubscribed class at Yale.

And I think, you know, it was a couple of things.

One is like, whenever Yale does anything, it makes the New York Times and national news and stuff.

But I think it was striking for people to see that these students who are 19 at one of the best universities universities in the world, the whole lives ahead of them, were suffering in the way that they were suffering.

Like not just at Yale, but right now nationally, more than 60 % of students report being so anxious that they can't function most days.

More than 40 % say they're depressed.

More than one in 10 has seriously considered suicide in the last few months.

And that was what I was kind of seeing.

So I think it was a striking story for people to see like, wow, young people are struggling way more than we thought.

And by being head of college and cohabitating with all of them, You're the door that is, you know, getting knocked on, right?

So you're on the receiving end of a lot of these stories and tales of woe.

No, I spent numerous weekends visiting students in psychiatric hospitals.

I had lots of knocks on the door late at night where my husband was like, wear my glasses.

I walked downstairs to see what's going on.

Dr. Santos, you don't understand.

in? Honestly, it was less the emergencies and more just the like low grade painful hustle in ways that just like weren't making students happy.

The kind of like deep anxiety about the future, just like mortgaging the fun and the sleep and the social connection they could have in college.

It just felt like a really unhealthy situation.

And again, it wasn't just Yale.

The more I dug into it, I was like, this is just college student lives generally.

That was my my question because it takes a lot to get into Yale.

So, by the time they arrive there, you know, they're well into their striver trajectory, right?

Like they've been grinding for a long time.

Yeah. And I think, you know, there's aspects of being at Ivy League school that might be worse because they're kind of been in that grinding mode for so long.

But I just think this is a generational thing and the data really bear it out, right?

You're starting to see seeds of this stuff in high school, even in middle school with rates of depression and anxiety skyrocketing.

And i just think we have so many people who are off track prior to creating the course what were you teaching like i take it that you weren't like happiness wasn't an area of expertise or specificity for you yeah i was really interested in kind of how humans got to be the weird species that we are both the strange smart things that humans do but also the strange dumb things that humans do i know you and i both are fans of bob sapolsky at stanford this primate researcher researcher, and I'm a fan in part because I was a primate researcher.

I studied this group of monkeys off the coast of Puerto Rico and tried to see how they made sense of the world.

So now it's your gambit to create this course, and you got to figure it out, right?

So how do you piece that together and start to make sense of this very elusive topic?

Yeah, well, one of the things I did was stand on the shoulder of giants, right?

There were lots of other faculty who maybe hadn't seen the same crisis in the same way I did, but were really really interested in the science of happiness and had pulled together classes.

You know, I get a lot of mileage because I did this at Yale, but folks like Tal Ben -Jahir had offered a similar course at Harvard. There were courses all around the country that were looking at this.

So I kind of pulled different folk syllabus and kind of looked at the stuff I liked.

I think the unique thing that I added in though, is that I was also really worried about not just what we should do to be happy, but how we put that stuff into practice.

Because I know, you know, from the show that like, there's all these strategies and tips we can can do to be more fit, to be healthier, to be happier, to strive more, whatever it is.

But you can know all those things and not do any of that stuff.

You can do all that stuff and lay on the couch every morning.

Yeah. There's a big gap between self -awareness and action.

Yes. When it comes to this stuff.

I take it from me as somebody who's sat across from many a happiness expert.

They walk out of the room, you're like, do I actually then go do these things?

This is a lingering question.

Yeah, the nerds in social science like to call this bias the G .I.

Joe fallacy. You're my age, so you probably remember G .I.

Joe, the cartoon, G .I.

Joe. They used to end the cartoon with this public service announcement where G .I.

Joe would teach kids things like, don't talk to strangers or look both ways when you cross the street, the quaint problems of the 80s that you needed to teach kids about.

But then at the end, the kid would say, Thank you, G .I.

Joe. Now I know. And G .I.

Joe would say, And knowing is half the battle.

Go, G .I. Joe. There's tons of things I know that I don't put into effect and that you won't put into effect unless you have social support and the right habits and like a real commitment to these things.

And so I think that's where my course is different.

Everyone talks about it being a course about happiness.

But the whole second half of the course is about, OK, now you know this stuff, but how do you put it into practice?

How do you form the right habits?

Right. The difference between knowing something and then acting on it is just like you said, like what got you interested in psychology?

Like why do our brains lead us astray?

It's like we know better and yet we do these things and we get into these loops and these patterns that we can't escape from.

I mean, that is central to happiness, but central to all facets of like trying to better ourselves.

themselves. Yeah. This was the thing that the folks who were first interested in psychology, who weren't psychologists, right?

The philosophers, the ancients, all the folks who thought about the human condition, this was the thing they were really worried about, right?

Self -regulation. How do you get folks to do what they really want to do?

Yeah. So, this gap has been following us around for a long time.

Is there science on, because there are people like, oh, I read that and now I'm doing it.

You know, it's not a leap, but for most people, it is a leap.

Like, is there are some understanding around what differentiates those two archetypes, like the person who can just kind of pivot right into action?

Honestly, not great work.

I mean, there are people who talk about it a lot.

I know Gretchen Rubin, for example, and others, journalist, happiness expert, she talks about what she calls the lightning phenomena, which is like a lot of times behavior change is really hard. But then sometimes there's just this moment where you see some statistic or you hear something bad or you have a health diagnosis and you're like boom that's it I'm changing my behavior and then like a lightning bolt everything has changed sadly most behavioral change doesn't work that way and I think we as social scientists we really haven't figured out how to engineer the lightning bolt if we did you

know podcasts like this might be a good job well pain is a pretty good reliable uh you know motivator yeah if you're in enough pain maybe for a while you develop you develop a capacity for willingness that you know know, you can't conjure willingness.

Yeah. So how you get folks to be motivated, how you turn something into a habit.

I mean, honestly, the best strategies we have now were the same ones that folks like Aristotle back in the day came up with, right?

You do it repeatedly.

So you become a person who does these kinds of things.

You kind of fake it till you make it.

You get social support, right?

The best strategies we have in social science for getting people to do stuff are the ones that the philosophers thought of thousands of years ago.

Yeah. Are there not different types of happiness?

I mean, there's hedonic happiness, there's eudaimonic happiness.

Is hedonic happiness actually happiness or is that something different?

Like, how do you think about that?

Yeah, there's so many different definitions of happiness.

I try to squish them into this definition that social scientists use.

So often the way I think about more hedonic happiness, that's the kind of in your life happiness, right?

That's like things are going well, I'm experiencing joy, I'm savoring stuff, right?

I think it's not the pure way that hedonist thought about it because if you just had like deep pleasure, pleasure, pleasure all the time, it would stop being good, right?

Well, you wouldn't be happy in your life ultimately.

Correct, yes. Or with your life.

I can't, what is the distinction?

Both. I think, you know, if I was just going for pure hedonic pleasure, you know, like fudge Sundays and sex and, you know, days on the beach or whatever, and that was it, eventually I would get bored with that, right?

This is a phenomenon of getting used to stuff, what's called hedonic adaptation.

Even the best things in life over and over stop being so good.

So it wouldn't really make me happy in my life.

And it probably wouldn't make me happy with my life.

You know, you and I, because we do what we do, tend to run in these circles where you to meet lots of rich folks, lots of folks who have the privilege and the money to have every hedonic pleasure.

By and large, my experience with those folks is they are not happy with their life.

Well, this is the world capital of that.

This is Los Angeles.

Plenty of those people cruising around here.

So I'm very familiar with that.

But I think part of what leads them to that place is a fundamental misunderstanding of happiness it goes back to the self -awareness thing like we know and we've read in so many books and heard so many people say that the things that drive happiness are human connection and having a having a purpose and you know having some sense of meaning in how you show up in your life and you know all these things that you talk about that we're going to get to.

And yet, we still delude ourselves into thinking that the happiness that eludes us is just around the bend of the promotion or the new car or when you get the new house or just name whatever your poison is.

And for some reason, we believe that we are the sole exception to the rule.

And no matter, it's like in AA they say, the persistence of this delusion is astonishing.

It's so resilient, this idea that the things that we chase in modern society will purchase happiness for us, even though time and time and time again, they don't and we don't learn our lesson.

What is going on with that?

Human minds are stupid, man.

I mean, human minds are stupid.

My mind is stupid, right?

I know all this research where I can quote you this specific paper in the journal that these findings are in.

But for me, it's like, oh, you know, the cool new opportunity.

Maybe I'll make some money.

It's like, oh, how sexy.

Or like, let me just get some emails done rather than like chat with my husband over dinner.

Like we just have these biases to go after stuff that we strongly believe, at least intuitively, like our deep intuitions are that this will make us feel good.

This will make us happy.

This will make life better.

And it just doesn't.

The specific things that we go after, what a lot of folks call the arrival fallacy.

One of the big ones that we mess up is if I could just get to this thing, if I could just get to the promotion, just earn a million dollars, just find the right partner.

When I arrive there, I'll be happy.

But this is the arrival fallacy.

It's like the happily ever after fallacy.

And that's one thing we get wrong, right?

There's never a moment where you're like, okay, one and done.

I can be happy now and just exist in happiness.

My colleague Dan Gilbert at Harvard is fond of saying that happily ever after only works if you have three more minutes to live.

It's just not how happiness works.

But we often And we often really think that the stuff like money, fame, all these things, we think that that's going to get us there.

And we go after those things at the expense of all the stuff you just listed, social connection, time for rest, hard problems that give us meaning, but that we might not get to in the end, right?

These are the things that are really ultimately going to make life worth living.

But we kind of forego those great things in the service of stuff that's not going to make us feel good.

I'm curious or I wonder whether what we think of as happiness when we chase these things is in point of fact the alleviation of fear or doubt.

out. It's not that we're imagining some blissful permanent state of well -being if we achieve these things or get to these certain places, but that we won't have to worry about stuff that we worry about now, that we will eradicate some level of uncertainty and we no longer need to be afraid and we won't have to work as hard. I bang on about this all the time, so I apologize to the audience, But I had this psychiatrist, Phil Stutz.

Do you know who Phil Stutz is on the show?

He's a wonderful man.

And he has this working idea, this working theory, because he treats all these people in Hollywood who are like rich and powerful and just, you know, miserable, right?

And he said, this sort of shared strain between all of these people is that they are in denial of three fundamental truths of life, which are pain, uncertainty, and the need for constant work.

And in the context of happiness, on some level, it seems resonant.

Like, we're chasing these things because we don't like these ideas of pain uncertainty and having to continually work on things.

And if we just get to this place, then we can take a breath.

Yeah. And we associate that with happiness.

And I guess there's some veneer of happiness with that, but it's a little bit of a different thing.

think. Yeah. And I think we're really bad at making effective, accurate predictions about how much pain we're going to have in different situations, right?

Take money. I think this is one that people get wrong all the time, right?

Just walk in when the Powerball gets high and people are like, oh my gosh, when I win this $800 million, everything's going to be great.

And I think if you talk to someone with $800 million, they'll be like, oh man, no, you got to worry about the taxes and everyone comes out of the woodwork to get money from you.

And where are you going to park your yacht?

It's a huge pain in the butt to figure out where you're going to put your yacht, et cetera, et cetera.

It's like when we simulate these positive futures, we just get it wrong, right?

We kind of miss out on the stuff that's really going to matter.

That's true for the good things in life.

Interestingly, it's also true for the bad things in life, right?

One of the most famous studies on this that folks did like back, you know, decades ago now had people predict, you know, if we were to walk out of the studio and you and I both get hit by a car and we were both paraplegic, how would that affect our lives?

and we say oh my gosh we would just be so unhappy our lives would be ruined but you look at people who've actually gone through a terrible accident like that who've become paraplegic and what you find is that within six months their happiness levels are statistically indistinguishable from what they were before it's statistically indistinguishable from folks who you know walked out of the studio and didn't get hit that is absolutely not what we predict but what happens like you know life goes on there's still reruns on tv and like you chat with your friends and and something funny happens on the internet.

That's what's changing your day -to -day, but we absolutely don't think that a terrible thing could happen to us and we'd be fine.

These are prediction problems. When we simulate the wonderful thing, the awesome thing that we're going for, we don't simulate all the problems that go with it.

When we simulate the terrible things, we don't simulate all the day -to -day stuff that's going to affect our happiness much more than we expect with this terrible thing happening.

We're just bad forecasters, And that's a lot of what we get wrong.

One of your so -called rewireables around this, which are basically actionable tools, right?

It's very counterintuitive.

We're all taught to like visualize success and, you know, imagine what will happen and, you know, believe in yourself and all of that.

And your counsel is basically like, visualize the opposite, like imagine the obstacles, like forget it, which is a very process versus destination mindset.

And I think it's really cool.

I'd never heard anyone talk about this before, the idea that what you should be visualizing are all the problems you're going to face on the road to getting the thing.

And when you visualize on the destination, that's when you succumb to the arrival fallacy, right?

Because when you get there, it's like, all right, well, I already imagined this and maybe it's not as good as I imagined or it wears off very quickly.

Yeah. There's also lots of evidence that when we imagine these positive futures, like, oh my gosh, you know, I'm going to run ultra marathon. It's going to be so great.

great, I'm going to be so cool, everyone's going to think I'm great, whatever.

The more you imagine the positive future, your imagination kind of works like real brain cognition, like real brain thinking.

You get some of the reward from that when I'm thinking, oh, my God, everyone will think I'm so cool.

I kind of get a little bit of the everyone thinking I'm cool already.

And it actually makes people less likely to take action towards those goals.

This is the lovely work of this woman, Gabrielle Otingan, who's at NYU.

She does these studies where she has students positively fantasize about getting good grades.

And she finds that the ones who have the most vivid fantasies are the ones that put the least work into studying because it's kind of like that already happened to you.

Right, I've already had the experience of succeeding.

Meanwhile, you're not putting the work into things you really need your cognitive help with, which is like, okay, how am I gonna actually get to the library or how am I gonna go to office hours or how am I gonna do the million things you need to do to achieve that goal?

And so when you envision the obstacles, now all of a sudden you're putting your cognitive brain power towards practicing and thinking through the things that are really gonna mess you up when you try to go for that goal.

But you do need some self -belief that you can achieve the goal, right?

So you have to balance that against, on some level, you know, there is value in seeing yourself cross the finish line or getting the report card or whatever to anchor you in the journey.

Yeah, it's so nuanced.

It's more than you ruminate on it, right?

Right. It's so nuanced.

In fact, this was the thing that I just finished teaching my happiness class this semester.

You're talking to me.

I submitted grades right before I flew here to LA.

So I'm feeling really good.

But the one thing my students kind of thought about and complained the most about was this, because right now in the popular culture, this idea of positive fantasies is big, right?

My students love manifesting.

They hear about it on TikTok a lot.

And so they're like, you're telling me manifesting is bad.

I thought thinking about your positive future and thinking you were the kind of person that could do this is great.

And the subtle distinction is you want to think that you're the kind of person who can do it, but you're not that person yet.

Like, you haven't done it already yet, right?

So you want to be like, I'm the kind of person who can put in the work needed to become a good student.

I'm the kind of person who can put in the work needed to become ultra marathon or get fit or whatever it is, right?

You want to think you're the kind of person who can do it, but you also want to know the things that you actually have to do to do it.

Because most big goals have some work that you need to to put in and when you get the reward without the work that's when you get into trouble yeah so by focusing on the obstacles with some anchor of self -belief that you are going to be able to solve the problems and like navigate through the minefield is very valuable but it's distinct from maybe what some people misunderstand it to be which would be like an attitude of dread around Oh, yeah.

Or a victim meant everything's terrible.

There's all these problems. It's going to take forever.

I'm never going to make it.

And why even try? Like those are two different things.

Yeah. And the best thing in Gabrielle Oettingen's work is not just imagine the obstacles, but imagine the if then plan you would take to get through the obstacles.

I talk about this on my podcast, this sort of idea of kind of getting through the obstacles.

And I interviewed Michael Phelps, the swimmer's coach, because Michael Phelps was a great, great, great guy and can talk so articulately about what Michael was doing.

And one of the things he did a lot was he used a lot of visualization, right?

Visualized the perfect swim.

But Michael was so good at this, he got bored with it.

And so he started visualizing what would happen if terrible things went wrong.

His goggles came off, he slapped his foot against the thing, just stupid stuff went wrong, right?

And what he did in doing that was that he kind of just played out the scenario, right?

He's like, well, if my goggles fall off, then I know I can just count my strokes and that'll be fine.

Turns out this wound up being incredibly helpful.

I think it was the Beijing Olympics when his goggles actually came off.

He kind of had practiced what to do and therefore he was fine and he ended up winning a gold, even though, you know, the horrible event that he was saying, well, this would be so terrible actually happened.

And I think this is what we want to do.

You want to ask the question, okay, like I'm trying to study more.

What's the horrible thing?

Well, there's a party this weekend.

Well, how would I navigate that?

Well, I'd, you know, set time to go to the party and I'd set my alarm clock early and get up, right?

You know, I want to go running a little bit more this weekend.

I want to pick up my more miles or whatever.

Like, well, what should I do?

Well, I have to, I might have to cancel this thing and schedule a little bit more time.

Oh, it's going to be raining.

I got to get myself to the gym because I will want to do on the treadmill.

But you're just going through the scenarios and coming up with a plan.

So it's not this victim mindset.

It's not like, oh, it's just going to be so hard. You're like, oh, there's an obstacle, but I can overcome that obstacle.

And I've already thought through how to do it.

I've kind of given myself some practice.

The distinctive quality in that is resilience.

Is it not like the ability to adapt when things aren't going your way without getting completely derailed by it?

Right. So in the athletic context, when you visualize the perfect race and something slightly is amiss or doesn't go as you imagined it, you collapse and fall apart.

Yeah. Versus being able to roll with whatever life throws at you.

Yeah. And it's also the practice that we can do inside our heads.

I mean, this is a wonderful feature of the human mind, right?

Is that we can just experience things happening to us in our head, right?

I don't have to go through the morning where my alarm clock goes off and I don't want to run because like, oh, I can practice that in my head and I can walk through like, oh, here's what I will do to do that better.

There's just some amazing cognitive science work on the power of mental practice.

One of my favorite studies that I tell my students about nerdily is, I think this is a work by Kerry Morwedge at Boston University.

he does this study where he either has people imagine eating M &Ms one by one slowly or slowly putting quarters like into a vending machine over and over again.

And at the end of imagining this, you just give people a big bowl of M &Ms. What do you find?

The people who imagined eating the M &Ms, they're like, oh God, I don't want any more M &Ms. Like, I'm good.

I don't need anymore.

Whereas the people who imagine the quarters, it's like, oh, M &Ms, I'll have some, right?

When we practice something in our heads, there's something in our brain that's a little bit bit confused about whether that's happened already.

And when we get to mental practice in the fitness domain or in the health domain or in the happiness strategy domain, what it means is when you practice it in your head, you're building that habit up even though you haven't had to do that in real life yet.

And that can be great.

That means your time stuck in traffic on your commute to work, the rumination that you have in bed at night of, oh, am I going to be able to get through this?

You can harness that for good.

You can practice the thing that you're You're worried it's going to be hard, and you'll get the benefit of that practice, you know, when you wake up or in real life later on.

That's the positive side of the coin.

You know, if you flip it over, the other version, the negative version of that is the person who talks all the time about the thing they're going to do and then never ends up doing it because their brain has already been satisfied by whatever it's seeking, right?

Right. So what's going on in the brain, like dopaminergically or neurologically that like what is the signaling that's occurring?

I think the key is like if you just sit there with the reward and that's it and you stop there, right?

You kind of, oh, it'd be so great if I did this.

I'd be so proud of myself.

You know, you kind of dust it off and you're done.

That means you get the reward without doing the practice, without kind of getting the information.

When you start to simulate and ask, okay, well, what would I need to do to do that?

What are the obstacles that are going to come up?

Oh, I like to sleep in or it's going to be cold out or whatever, you know, strategy you need to think of, whatever obstacle that's there.

Now all of a sudden your brain goes into planning mode rather than just sitting with your reward areas firing.

Be like, oh my gosh, this would be so awesome.

Now you're kicking into the planning parts of your brain.

Your frontal lobes kicking in is trying to think through different scenarios and like come up with these answers for you.

And that means you get the answers before you have to be in the situation that's doing it.

And so I think you switched from just kind of like sitting there and enjoying what you already accomplished, which you didn't accomplish yet, to turning on those planning parts of your mind and your brain that can actually help you get through in a much more successful way later on.

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that words struggle to capture, but what really resonated was how people everywhere seek connection and understanding and how stepping outside familiar environments brings clarity to what truly matters.

What I've been considering lately is this idea that home is where you find yourself.

And therefore, when we travel, our living spaces can actually serve this purpose for others.

That's where Airbnb comes in, offering this really cool and practical approach to share your space when it makes sense for your situation.

The extra income from hosting can help fund these perspective -shifting journeys and your home just might be worth more than you think.

Find out how much at airbnb .com slash host. While we're on the topic of misconceptions around happiness, another one that occurs What occurs to me is the way in which we're wired to believe that comfort and convenience and expediency and all of these things, luxury are essential in this equation happiness, when we know that actually it's discomfort and getting out of your comfort zone and pushing yourself and getting up when you set the alarm or whatever habit or practice it is is that as uncomfortable and as miserable as they feel when we're doing them leads to that resilience and ultimately

a sense of greater self -esteem.

Like these are like seedlings that blossom into a more lasting and low -grade, maybe, but sense of well -being that has to be part of happiness, yes?

Yeah, for sure. And I think we get it wrong in two ways, right?

Right. One is we assume that, you know, if we get to the comforts, that those comforts are going to last. Right.

And what we forget is that we get used to stuff that, again, the best thing in life could happen to you.

And it's awesome when it first happens, but it gets boring over time.

I think this is one of the reasons that people with just enormous privilege, you know, the rich folks that were living around here, you know, hanging out here in L .A.

with us, that they don't kind of enjoy the great things that are happening to them because they're used to it.

You know, you fly in first class the first time.

You're like, oh, my God, I get a free drink.

The seat's so nice, whatever.

You fly in first class for the 15th time, the 50th time.

It's just how you fly, right?

The comforts that we bring to ourselves stop being comforting the more we have them over time.

time. In contrast, the hard work we have to put in, the little bit of struggle, it does two things, right?

One is that we kind of don't get hurt by it as much as we think, because we get used to that too, right?

When you're starting a new fitness program, my husband talks about this.

He was a college swimmer and he remembers like, you know, when the swimming season started and you do the first workout and you're so tired and you're like, I cannot do this every day for the next semester.

Then two weeks into it, you're like, oh yeah, yeah, that's just a workout, right?

We forget that we're going to get used to the hard stuff too, right?

So we start off being really scared by the hard stuff.

We start off being really scared about getting out of our comfort zone.

But then once you jump into it, it's just like it becomes easier over time.

And so this idea that we get used to stuff, this kind of concept of hedonic adaptation, we kind of adapt to stuff in the world.

We forget that it causes us not to get as much happiness out of the comfort stuff because we're going to get used to the good stuff, it'll stop being as good over time.

And the bad stuff won't be as bad over time because we'll sort of get used to it, right?

The non -hedonic adaptation, is there a term for that?

Well, it's like researchers call this kind of their affective forecasting bias is one of the things we call it.

It's often called the impact bias, that the impact of whatever it is, both in terms of its kind of magnitude of how good or how bad something is, and also its duration, it just doesn't impact us as much as we think.

A tangent of this hedonic adaptation, I'm just imagining the super wealthy guy driving around LA in the fancy car, is that person's attention or my attention, I'll speak for myself, I'm not immune from this, immediately goes towards comparison because there's always somebody who's more successful, more powerful, more wealthy, better looking, fitter, you name it, right?

Why do our brains deal with hedonic adaptation by immediately going there?

Yeah. Yeah. Well, this is just a really remarkably common feature of our brain, right?

You and I are talking in this studio.

You've got these great lights.

There's a podcaster I'm so jealous of.

But when we walk out of this really bright space into the rest of the studio, we'll be like, oh, man, I didn't even realize when I was sitting talking to Rich that it was really bright.

But when I walk out, everything will look kind of dark, right?

Our brains are always processing things in this relative way.

I'm not processing how much objective light is here.

I just kind of of get used to the amount of light here.

And then when I walk outside, now all of a sudden it's brighter, it's darker or something like that.

That's our visual system getting used to stuff.

But the fact that we get used to stuff that we think in terms of these relative things over time rather than like what objectively is going on, that's just a general feature of how our mind works for everything.

So nobody thinks of their salary as being objectively good or objectively bad.

If you think of how your salary is going, you just think immediately in terms of like, like, well, what is the guy next to me in the office making?

And that comparison is very much a function of proximity.

Oh, yeah. And what's terrible about the comparison is that it never goes in the good way, right?

There might be tons of people sitting next to you that aren't making as much money, that aren't as hot as you, that didn't have as good a vacation as you, that doesn't have a nice car view, and you just don't notice those people.

This is what happens in LA, right?

I mean, even driving here, and again, I fall prey to this stuff too.

Driving here, I was driving right next to this super souped up white Porsche, And I was like, oh, that's such a cool white Porsche, right?

I'm noticing the car that's crappier than my rental car, but I didn't notice the hundreds, maybe thousands of other cars on the streets of LA that like just were unremarkable.

Yeah, it's fun and easy to, you know, poke at the billionaire who's all bent out of shape because there's another guy at the cocktail party that has, you know, a billion more than him.

Like, how could you possibly, you know, think that?

But it's just an extreme version of what we all do.

do. And the data on this is just so funny.

There's one really funny study.

It was in Europe where they do lotteries a little bit differently.

So here, the lottery in the US is like you go buy a Powerball ticket and if your number comes up, you win.

The way they do them in Europe is often they do what's called a postcode lottery.

So I'm in zip code 06511 and they're going to pull a lottery ticket that's just going to say my postcode.

And if I played, then in my postcode, my whole postcode will win.

If I didn't play, I don't get it.

What's the consequence of this type of lottery system?

If your postcode is called and you didn't play, you're going to have a bunch of people around you who won something.

That's like the worst case scenario for you.

It's really good, but it's great.

It's great for the lottery because a lot of people want to play lottery and regret insurance, right?

But one of these lotteries was a lottery that gave people a new car, right?

And so people in the postcode, if their lottery number came up, they got a new new car what they found is that sales of lottery cars of the non -winners went up when people won of course because like you're like i want to be the only one in my town you're not even left out you're gonna get you know uh booted out of the tribe and and this is true you know in the context of material goods it's definitely true for my poor students in the context of grades it's true in the context of looks and our brains are just bad at it we're just good at finding people who are better than us and sometimes that's

us right i think in the context of fitness in the context of looks right all of us are getting older over time like we're moving towards a reference point that's going to make us feel crappy about ourself if not now 10 years 20 years right and so yeah minds are built to not be objective they're built to pay attention to stuff in this relative fashion and they seek out reference points that make us feel crappy i did this uh consulting with a basketball team where i was talking about social comparison a professional basketball team and that's something that comes up all the time you know who's doing

better than you who was making more money.

And I was asking, well, you know, who's the reference point for, you know, salary?

And at the time it was like Steph Curry.

I was like, okay, Steph Curry.

Like, who's the reference point for like three point shots?

And like, oh, Steph Curry.

I was like, who's the reference point for the best height in the NBA?

And they're like, taco fails.

Like, wait, why is it not Steph Curry anymore?

Steph Curry was the reference point for everything else.

But in the one domain where you're like doing better than him, now he's not the reference point anymore.

And like, that's just how our minds work.

We just pick the one thing that that makes us feel crappy about ourselves.

And yet when we see those individuals who somehow have immunized themself against this compulsion that's so human and stand proudly as themselves without concern for whatever anybody thinks about what they're doing and they're not comparing themselves to anyone else and they're just doing their thing, these are happy people and there's a magnetism to that.

like, when you see those people, it's inspirational.

You're like, wow, like, how can I be more like that?

And then we go right back to comparing ourselves.

You know what I mean?

I was thinking about this because yesterday I had Bob Roth on here who runs the David Lynch Foundation, and we were talking about David Lynch. And I'm obsessed with this guy.

And he's like, why?

Like, what is it about him, you know, that captures you?

And I said that very thing.

It's It's like he's so thoroughly himself, and that's very attractive quality.

Yeah, and I think it's a really hard quality to go after because our minds are really built to be paying attention to what other individuals do.

And I think that was bad enough back in the evolutionary day when we were part of bands of people who were 100, 200 strong.

It's a threat to your membership.

Yeah, but it's so much worse when that membership is everybody on TikTok or everybody on Instagram, right?

Right. I think this is something that comes up a lot.

I see my college students talk about this, where, you know, when I was in college, you could have these like dorky hobbies.

You could be like, you know, I don't know, like solve Rubik's cubes really fast or like be like in a cool band.

Right. You played bass really well.

Now I feel like our poor college students can never feel like they do anything really well because they immediately go on the Internet.

However fast you solve the Rubik's cube, there's somebody who's doing it blindfolded and much faster than you.

But maybe they're learning that lesson earlier.

I don't think so. I think they're just much more paralyzed by it.

But you can also, I mean, I know you have a lot to say about the digital landscape and, you know, how social media is driving a lot of the malevolence here.

But there are millions of sub communities now for every, you know, bizarre interest. interest. And that lonely kid who is the only person he or she knows that's into, name your weird hobby, can go on Reddit or one of these places and find like -minded individuals and have some sense of connection and community there.

Totally. So it's not a black and white thing.

No. And I think this is one of the tricks with social media and really all of our technology, right?

It has such good aspects when it comes to our happiness.

There's such real potential to use this in positive ways to increase social connection, to get a better sense of purpose, you know, honestly, to see reference points that should make you feel really good about yourself, right?

But like, I'm just like the fact that you are, anyone listening to this right now is privileged, right?

You have a technology that you can use to access this.

You have hearing, right?

That like is working, right?

You know, probably eyes are working if you're watching this on YouTube, right?

Those are incredible privileges that we can look to other people to feel good about to remember like, oh, that wasn't a given in life, right?

And so the point is that we can use technology in all these positive ways when it comes to our happiness.

The problem is that we tend not to use it in those positive ways.

And I think sometimes the technologies themselves are set up with algorithms that are set up to kind of lead us towards the not -so -good ways of using technologies.

You have a rewirable around this as well, though, like the idea, the solution to this comparison problem in terms of actions that you can take is to use this, what do you call it, the bronze?

Yeah, the bronze medalist, yeah.

Which the joke is we always, you have this idea of look for the silver lining and and the joke is you look for the bronze lining and this actually comes from a sports domain too one of the most famous studies of social comparison in the field of psychology was a study of olympic medalists looking at the emotions they show on the stand and what you find is that gold medalists you know best best in their you know sport are showing like really strong positive emotions but the silver medalists aren't just showing slightly less positive emotions they're showing incredibly negative emotions.

Their facial expressions show things like contempt, deep sadness, anger, and these kinds of things.

And that's because of social comparison, right?

You were so close to being the best in the world and you're not.

And rather than feeling like you beat billions of people in your sport, which you did, you find very salient.

You're haunted. You're haunted by the one person, right?

That's a silver medalist. And the reason why it's the kind of bronze lining that matters is that if you look at the bronze medalist, you might think that they're even more contemptuous, more angry than the silver medalists, but no, because the bronze medalists reference point isn't gold.

They were multiple seconds or multiple, whatever it was in their sport away from that.

Their salient reference point is like, oh, if I was just like a teeny tiny bit slower, I wouldn't be up here.

I'd be going home empty handed.

And so it turns out that the bronze medalists in some cases in these studies are actually happier than the gold medalists.

Like they're showing like incredible elation because they're like, oh my gosh.

And this is why I like finding the bronze lining instead of the silver lining.

Because again, for any trait you care about, there are people who are doing a lot worse than you, right?

And if they're not doing a lot worse than you on that particular trait you're looking at, just broaden your horizon a little bit to be like, again, if you're watching this or listening to this right now, you have hearing in a way that not everybody on the planet has.

You have the privilege of owning this technology, which not everybody has.

You have your phone that didn't break 10 minutes ago, right?

Which which it could have done, right?

Like when we kind of take a broader perspective, we can use our social comparison to realize we're actually doing pretty good.

How do you give more than lip service to that though?

Cause it's like, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, I can hear, I can see fine.

Like I know what you're saying, but the but.

The but, the but, yeah.

Well, like all things, you gotta do the strategy, but here's the strategy that I love.

And it comes both from what we were talking about before in terms of using our imagination in positive ways.

And it gets back to the ancients.

This was a technique that the ancient Stoics talked about.

They called it negative visualization.

But here's how it goes.

When I leave the studio right now, I'm going to get hit by a car.

I'm going to lose the use of my legs.

My phone's going to be dead and I'm not going to be able to find my next appointment because I don't have a phone anymore.

Something terrible is going to happen to my husband and I'm going to get a horrible phone call like knock on wood that that's not going to happen.

That took me like, what, 30 seconds?

Instantly, I'm much more grateful for my phone, much more grateful for my legs.

I'm going to call my husband when I get out of this and be like, I didn't go through something terrible.

It didn't happen to you, right, honey?

Are you okay? That's negative visualization.

The Stoics thought that you should start every morning being like, I was exiled.

I will lose my health.

I will lose my house.

I will lose my money.

And you take a deep breath and you say, hey, that didn't happen.

Now, all of a sudden, you're a little bit more grateful for those things.

I do this negative visualization exercise in my talks lately.

I've been doing a lot of work on parenting and talking to parents about happiness.

And I say, let's do a quick negative visualization.

fantasization. The last time you saw your kids, that was the last time you're ever going to see them.

They're gone. You're never going to see them again.

My guess is the next time, even people listening, see their kids or hug them, you're going to hug them a little bit.

That's the power of imagination.

It doesn't take us long to get to a reference point of we don't have the good things that we have in our lives.

You just have to take a practice to do that, to recognize that a little bit more.

We all know people in our lives, though, that see the world through a very negative lens.

Like nothing's ever gonna work out.

Like I'm worthless.

It's only a matter of time before I get fired and then I'm gonna be homeless and like I'm gonna be starving on the street and I'm just gonna die.

You know, like I know a lot of these people.

Yeah. So what you just shared isn't quite like, it's a different thing, but like to share that tool for those people.

Notice the Stoics didn't say you do this like all day into the evening, two o 'clock in the morning.

They said, just do it really quickly and realize you can shut it off.

I get that for the normal person, but what is the antidote for somebody who's really caught up in this looping negative pattern of the mind that then translates into how they show up in the world?

And then they do manifest negative outcomes in their life because they're walking through life, staring at their feet and expecting everything to go terribly wrong.

And kind of on some level, are co -creating that real -world experience?

Well, I think there's two strategies.

One is a strategy just to shift your attention to the positive stuff.

And this is what comes out of a gratitude practice.

I feel like this is kind of in the common ether about people talking about the power of gratitude, right?

Just taking a moment to notice the good stuff, even the little good stuff.

The reason this is powerful is that it trains our attention to do the opposite of what we naturally do.

We're naturally built to have this negativity bias where we're noticing, saying, well, my car's not good enough or that bad thing happened.

There's so much traffic today.

The weather's so crummy in LA today, which by the way, rather is kind of - It's been terrible.

It's been really crummy.

Believe me, I'm all upset about it, but keep going.

Rather than like the temperature's actually quite pleasant.

It's not like - It's been raining and we need rain and it's beautiful and the hills are alive and green.

Exactly. Yeah, no, just so beautiful out.

But this is where our brain normally goes, negativity bias.

Oh, the weather's so crummy.

Rather than, my God, we needed rain.

This is is great this is going to protect la from all the yucky stuff that happens here right and so this this is the practice of gratitude right you're training your attention which normally just gloms on to the bad stuff to find the good things sometimes when i talk to people they find gratitude to be like hard or you really have to be grateful or it feels cheesy another practice i which comes from the the novelist ross gay who has this book called the book of delights he says rather than going for things that you're grateful for which kind of feels like i don't know high fluten or hard just

noticed the lights on the way here um I was at the airport coming into LAX and there's just like one like restroom in the ladies room that has like this orchid there and I was like who's the staff member who put an orchid there just like a delight we're like driving here there was somebody like blasting like Cypress Hill out of his car like in a low rider and just like really savoring and being into Cypress Hill and I was like that's a little delight LA is so cool right I'm not taking extra work to like find these things that I'm so grateful for whatever I'm just noticing, like, the world has these

good, funny things that are amusing, that are beautiful, that are nice.

You just, like, train your brain to find one.

Ross Gay, in his book, The Book of Delights, he wrote an essay about one delight every day.

And what that did was it made him, he had to find a delight because he had to write the essay about it, right?

And so, I find that writing these things down or finding someone you can share delights with, I have some friends that I, like, will just text a delight to, you know, like, oh my God, dude, look into Cypress Hill and his lowrider, delight.

You know, like, what you're doing there is you're training your mind that would normally be looking for all the yucky stuff to find a few of the good things.

That's how to train your attention.

But the thing you brought up, the sort of ruminating, I think needs another strategy, which is like, you need to find ways to harness more positive self -talk or at least nip the bad self -talk in the bud.

And one of the great ways for doing that, I know you had Ethan Cross on the show recently, is a lot of the strategies he talks about for distant self -talk, like literally talk to yourself in the second and third person, not like, oh my my God, this is so terrible.

Me, me, me. You just say, all right, it's going to be fine.

You've gone through stuff like this before.

Like, you just switch the pronouns that you use to talk to yourself.

And what that does is it puts you in good friend mode.

It puts you in mentor mode.

It puts you in problem -solving mode rather than ruminate all the time.

That's a hack. One of Ethan's hacks that I use all the time, and it's been a game changer for me.

Because you just automatically switch the narrative in your head when you're getting real with yourself.

off dude it's not that bad come on like and you can it also allows you to be a bit of an objective observer like you're disidentifying with the problem and you're bifurcating your identity like oh there's me and then there's like that other voice that is saying all these things that now needs to sit in the back seat and be quiet for a little while yeah i mean it helps you realize your thoughts are your thoughts which is one of the biggest innovations the human mind has come up with to realize that, like, wait, that's not the truth.

That's just, like, the little dialogue that's going on in my brain.

I could put a little stopgap there and it'll work better.

Human beings are storytelling and story -receiving animals.

And as you were sharing about the person who is in a negative thought pattern loop, so much of that is anchored in in whatever story they're telling themselves about who they are, what they're capable of, and probably a very age old story that maybe they inherited or was impressed upon them, but nonetheless become cemented in such a way that we rarely question it.

And for the person who's waking up every day and saying, it's going to go terrible and this bad thing is going to happen, I believe we have the power to sort of change that narrative.

And the practice that that seems like it would be effective is to kind of do an inventory at the end of the day or in the morning and say, okay, here's what actually happened and reaffirming where the bad thing didn't happen, like in something good happened instead.

And like, you know, kind of starting to attune your attention to all of those things as a way of kind of creating a new neural pathway.

Does that make sense?

Is there science behind that or?

Yeah, totally. I think it's partly using that negative visualization.

Like it could have gone bad, but it didn't kind of thing, which is powerful.

But it also fits with what a lot of the science shows is the power of practices like journaling, right?

Which often is the kind of thing people do towards the end of the day, right?

right? Journaling practices are really powerful because when we're writing down, we kind of just assume that writing is supposed to like have a narrative arc, right?

And you're kind of got this in like, you know, middle school and high school, right?

Where it's like, it's got to start and it's going to have a conflict and then you kind of solve the conflict, right?

It's very hard in your journaling just to be like, this sucks, this is terrible, I'm terrible, I'm terrible.

When you're writing, your kind of brain just automatically goes into like, okay, but how can I make sense of this, right?

We go into sense -making, we go into problem -solving It's kind of similar to some of Ethan's stuff.

When you talk like you're a friend, if you take that other perspective, you instantly go into coach mode or mentor mode.

When you're writing, you go into sense -making mode, into storytelling mode.

And there's lots of evidence that expressive writing, about whatever the thing is that you're scared about or that you're worried about, you wind up coming up with better problem -solving strategies.

There's some lovely work by Jamie Pennebaker who looked at the power of expressive writing, even in domains where people went through terrible trauma.

He did some famous work looking at the narratives of Holocaust survivors and found that the people that got content onto paper that were able to talk about their stories, whether in writing or whether with an interviewer, like they wound up kind of going into sensemaking.

And it had not just a huge effect on how they process that horrible trauma, but also on their health later on.

So those individuals live longer.

They had less heart attacks and so on because it's like you're not like holding in the body all this stuff.

And so, I think this practice of expressing, if you get kind of get stuck in this negative thought pattern and nothing works, give yourself an hour to just like get stuff on paper.

And don't try to have an agenda, just kind of let it go down and your brain will go into the normal mode it goes into to try to make sense of some stuff.

I find that to be very effective in my life.

It's something I've been doing for a long time.

And I've learned that when I start to resist, like I've done enough, like I need to stop.

Like you need to have a certain number of pages that you commit to because something happens, you know.

Yeah. That's why I said an hour, not three minutes.

If you push through that resistance, yeah, like then you're like suddenly you're writing all this crazy stuff that your unconscious mind gets activated and things start to spill out and, you know, more will be revealed.

Yeah. And I think just remember that, you know, one of the reasons the human mind is cool is there's so many different parts and processes, right?

We have so many different kind of narrators coming online and there's a narrator in there that wants to understand things and wants to make sense of things.

You just kind of give them space to kind of come out.

All those voices just wanting to be loved and heard. Wanting to help.

All the voices want us to be happy, I think.

Another way in which our intuition leads us astray with this idea of happiness is that it is very much rooted in circumstance.

So talk a little bit about that.

Yeah. I think we assume, you know, if we were putting together a big ingredient list of what we need for a happy life, we would assume maybe like, you know, some genetics, you want some like genes to be happier, but you would also want to have great circumstances.

You wouldn't want a life with a lot of conflict, a lot of kind of problems. You'd want life with perfect circumstances.

You get into the perfect college if you're like, you know, the students I work with, lots of money or great things happen to you.

Everything goes your way.

Your flight never never gets canceled.

There's no traffic.

You just want the circumstances to be perfect.

But it turns out that circumstances have much less of an effect on our happiness than we think for a couple reasons.

One, when you have good circumstances over and over again, you don't keep noticing that they're good.

You just get used to them.

The other is if you have bad circumstances.

You become paraplegic.

You have a horrible accident.

Quickly, you get used to that bad thing too and it doesn't continue to affect you as much as you think.

And so oftentimes, times we're much better off not trying to change our circumstances, getting richer, changing where we live, you know, but then changing our behaviors and our mindsets because those things are going to matter more, right?

Getting more social connection, getting out and moving your body, stopping that negative self -talk, finding the delights.

Those kinds of things are just intervention -wise going to have a much bigger impact on your happiness than changing your circumstances.

It's also the case that changing your circumstances for a lot of circumstances is like hard, right?

Like you I mean, you could do it, it often takes, you know, you can earn more money, but that's like much more of a pain than engaging in a journaling practice every night or like writing down a few delights every week.

It is a difficult thing though, because if you're somebody who came up from very difficult circumstances or your life is one in which it's difficult just by dint of, you know, where you find yourself, it's hard to claw out of that.

it's like you don't want to be dismissive of that if somebody's like you know who's unhappy but they're caught in something let's be clear right out of the circumstances i'm talking about are not like you're in a refugee situation or you've been put in an el salvadorian prison or although bracketed what we know is people who are in those horrible situations sometimes find a lot of purpose a lot of social connection a lot of happiness right but if those are the circumstances that you're listening right now and you're like that's the situation i'm in that's not what I mean.

What I mean is for the person who has food on the table, who has a roof over their head, who's not in a terrible war zone or terrible trauma.

I'm talking about the person who's like, oh, if I could only make $10 ,000 more a year, I'd be so much happier.

I just need to move to a better neighborhood.

I need a better phone or car.

Those are the circumstantial changes I'm talking about.

And the sad thing is changing those things are just not going to impact your happiness in the way you think.

This is similar when we were talking about money and happiness before.

And we said, oh, money doesn't buy happiness.

That's not entirely true.

Money does buy happiness if you don't have any.

You can't put a move over your head.

You don't have food on the table.

Yes, getting more money will allow you the basic needs you need to be a little bit happier.

It's just that after a certain point, once you get those basic needs, more money doesn't impact your happiness like you think.

What are the questions that you ask the person who comes to you, Lori, and says, I've done everything right.

I checked all the boxes.

I went to the schools.

I got the job. I worked hard. I got married.

I had the two kids and I've done everything and I succeeded.

I kind of have it all.

And I'm not necessarily unhappy, but I can't say that I'm happy either.

either. I know that there is a greater happiness available to me.

I just don't know what to do or how to get it.

Yeah. Well, first I would start by asking questions about their behaviors.

You have this perfect job and all this stuff.

What's your social connection?

Maybe not perfect, but like good.

Reasonable. Yeah. What's your social connection like, right?

Are you putting time into the connections that matter?

Are you putting time into doing good in the world?

One of the things we know is that treating ourselves just doesn't make us as happy as treating other people, right?

I might ask about simple physical habits.

Are you moving your body?

Are you getting sleep?

Or is all that at the expense of doing this other stuff that you talked about?

And then I would ask about how you think about emotions.

Are you trying to get positive emotion?

Do you get positive emotions we don't often think about?

A sense of wonder, a sense of awe, humor, those kinds of things.

And I might even ask, how are you engaging with your strengths?

What are the things that you find purpose in and value in?

Are you doing that stuff?

I'd really ask in detail about people's thought patterns and their behaviors because often that's the trick.

That's what people aren't investing in.

and I see this even in you know again into my Yale students right of every privilege I think they fall a lot into the category you're talking about like I got into the perfect school I'm you know young and healthy and all that my future is so bright why am I so miserable and it's often because those are the same students who are mortgaging their social connection filled with thought patterns of just like such anxiety about the future not sleeping right you know they're kind of doing the stuff that we know kind of will negatively affect your happiness in the service are trying to go after this stuff that probably

won't impact their happiness as much as they think.

Yeah. I think in addition to that, for those students or the person who has climbed the mountain, there's a sense of betrayal because they've played the game and followed all the rules and implicit in the game is this idea that, you know, happiness is the reward, right?

When you arrive there, you'll be happily ever after.

You're supposed to...

This is a fantastic lie that has, you know, persevered within this narrative.

And I wonder if it's more acute in America because this notion of the American dream and, you know, kind of pull yourself up by your bootstraps.

And, you know, these stories, back to stories, it's like this is the story of what it means to live here and how to go from where you are to where you want to be.

Yeah. One of the stories I watch in my Yale students is that there's this phenomenon on the internet called admissions videos.

So when students are about to find out if they're going to go to college, you know, they've got a camera, TikTok's watching, you know, and they hear.

And so in my class, I show students these admission videos when students find out they get into Yale, which is like a big hurrah.

They click on this little website and it plays this yell theme song.

It goes bulldog, bulldog, bow, bow, wow.

It says you got into Yale.

Students scream and they cry and their parents are in these videos screaming and crying.

And the students will watch these videos and have a moment of sadness because they're like, I remember that moment.

And that moment was a good moment.

But like 30 seconds later, I was like, now I just have to do the same thing to get into medicine.

It never ends. The carrot just moved, right?

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So we're kind of dancing around the edges here, but there are well -identified, scientifically evidence -backed pillars to happiness.

There is relationships like connection with other people, like how social are you in your community?

And the low -hanging fruit like sleep and nutrition and physical exercise and being in nature, these are relatively easy to identify and also easy to fix.

But there are other pillars that are a little bit more elusive.

Like when you talk about purpose and meaning, like these are kind of big scary words words that, uh, I think are hard to get our heads around.

Like, what does that mean?

Like, if I, do I have purpose in my life?

Is there meaning is what I'm doing meaningful?

Is it meaningful to me?

Is there some, you know, greater animating force that's propelling me forward?

That is a value, like how to identify that.

And if it's missing, how do you fix it?

Because I think when you say to somebody like, well, you just need more purpose or you need meaning, you know, it's like what are you supposed to do with that you know i think it's paralyzing and i think it leads to people feeling guilty if not ashamed totally totally and i think two things there one is i think when we think about purpose you know in our brains i think we image like the capital p purpose like it's so big um some of the folks i've talked to on my podcast have talked about small p purpose like you know little lowercase p and i think when you think about it like that you you say,

oh, it's like the conversation I have with the barista at the coffee shop, or it's that I help my nephew with his homework, or it's that I really care about this hobby that I engage in.

I find it fun. I like, I like moving up, right?

Like I get a sense of purpose for like running marathons, whatever it is, right?

If you're not thinking like you have to like, you know, become Steve Jobs or solve cancer or whatever, like when you realize it's like, oh, that's the thing that just kind of, I feel better about myself when I'm doing that thing.

I feel more authentically myself when I'm doing that.

That's the kind of little little P purpose.

And I think you just want to build more of that in.

I also use a technique with my students that get them to think about kind of more in an abstract way what some of those things are.

The little P purpose exercise is trying to figure out what are you already doing that does that.

But a different exercise you can use is to try to figure out what researchers call your signature strengths, right?

Researchers like Chris Peterson and Marty Seligman have done this work where they've kind of gone cross -culturally and tried to figure out like what are the strengths, what are the values that different people can have, like the good traits that you can have in the world.

And they've come up with a list of 24 of these things they call character strengths.

They're things like bravery and love of learning, a zest for life, curiosity, right?

Like helping people, social intelligence and stuff.

And what they find is that all of these are good.

Like all those things I just listed are great, but some of them you resonate with more than others.

You can actually go online if you Google character strengths, there's a website site called the Values in Action Character Strengths, where you can take a psychometric quiz and look at this.

You can just look at the big list of these.

And I find just looking at them, you go through, you're like, oh yeah, bravery is good, but oh, humor, that's me, or love of learning, that's me, or whatever it is.

Those, the idea would be are your signature strengths.

And what research by Seligman and his colleagues has found is that the more you use your signature strength in your daily life, the happier you feel, the more purpose you have, like the more like you love whatever you're doing.

In your workplace, for example, if you you use your signature strengths, you can turn whatever job you have into a calling.

And the reason I like the work on the signature strengths is that some of it's been done not in jobs like our job.

You know, we have this wonderful podcaster job or professor where I could build in all these things, right?

A lot of the most creative work on signature strengths is done in domains where folks have jobs that are like very constrained.

This woman, Amy Rezensky, who's at the University of Pennsylvania, looks at strengths in hospital janitorial staff workers.

So, these are people who are like, like, you know, washing the linen for people who are sick or, you know, mopping the floors.

Like, you don't think they could bring in, like, bravery or curiosity or prudence or whatever it is, right?

But what she finds is that between, like, a quarter to a third of janitorial staff workers say they love their job.

They're, you know, they have to work, you know, to earn an income, but they would, like, they would do it even if they hit the lottery because they love what they do.

And those are the ones who are naturally infusing their strengths into their job.

job she tells in my podcast she told these lovely stories she had a story of a janitorial staff worker who worked in a chemotherapy ward and so if you're listening right now and you hadn't had you know therapy or know someone who does you know people get sick right so a bad thing about this treatment is people tend to vomit so a lot of this dude's job was cleaning up vomit but he said that's not my job my job is like my strengths are humor and social intelligence my job is to make that person laugh the person's having a crummy day and I see it as my duty to like make make them laugh before I walk

out of there. And he had, I guess he'd like a standard joke where he said like, Oh, there's a lot of vomits over time today.

Like keep it coming.

You know, you know, it's stupid joke, but the person would laugh and he's like, that's, that's my job.

She talked about another janitorial staff worker who worked in a coma ward. So this was a staff worker who couldn't interact with the patients because the patients were all in a coma and unconscious.

But every day she would like walk around and move, move the artwork in the room.

Her strength was creativity, right?

Like I guess she thought like Like maybe the patients will notice or wake up, probably not medically accurate, but it gave her some purpose going to work.

These are the ways we can infuse purpose into our work.

And I love the janitor work because again, not all of us have jobs where we can switch things around and do some intellectual switch, right?

But everybody has a job where you can bring some of these things in a little bit, right?

And if you can't do it at work, bring it in in your leisure and stuff.

So if you're not sure what those are, I think Google character strengths, just look at the a big list or take one of these formal tests or just kind of have a sense of like, you know, when I feel most authentically myself, what am I engaging in?

And just try to do more of that.

There's something wonderfully counterintuitive about that though, because I would have thought that that inventory would be an attempt to identify the things that bring you joy or remembering when the last time, you know, you felt like really happy, what were you doing?

to like set it in the context of strengths as opposed to activities where you really feel yourself i mean you mentioned authenticity so that's part of this but why isn't it my version of that yeah like why is it strengths versus like activities that make me feel happy i think i think ultimately they're one in the same for you it's just that the ones that might work most for you might not be the ones that work for somebody else right like there's people that like you know their signature strength is humor, right?

I love working on my weaknesses.

Your strength is...

That could be something like...

I don't know who those people are, but...

There are strengths that are bravery, for example, which I think depending on how you think of those weaknesses, it could be part of that.

There are strengths that are self -regulation, right?

That what I'm going to do is really try hard to kind of regulate my deepest emotions.

Strengths of things like prudence, right?

Where it's like, I want to just very carefully work on these things, right?

So the set of strengths when you look at the big list is pretty broad.

And a lot of times the thing that feels most authentic to you when you look at the list, you'll be like, oh, that's kind of on there for me.

You have artists who have strengths of things like appreciation of beauty or zest for life.

A lot of folks who have strengths that are related to social intelligence like kindness or forgiveness or social intelligence, kind of empathy and understanding people.

When you look at the big list, usually folks have some that that fit with that and often if you're using those things it can be can be powerful how do you parse the difference between purpose and meaning is it that meaning is this emergent property of finding some purpose even if it's a small p purpose by investing in your strengths yeah these definitions always get so complicated it becomes like a mind bender and i just like i think of meaning all these words are like the same but they're not the same and are like does one come from the other like i But I'm still – after having a million conversations

about this, I still don't – I'm still not sure I really get it.

The way I think about it – and again, I think we use many of these terms interchangeably, and it gets so much more complicated when we look cross -culturally.

There's a set of researchers at Harvard who are doing a project of trying to catalog emotional words that exist in one language or one culture but that don't translate to other languages and cultures.

cultures, and it's a really fascinating list to go through, because me as a monolingual English speaking American, just see all these words of like, wait, I kind of know that emotion, but I never had a word for it.

One of my favorite ones, maybe might not translate as well in LA, it translates a lot on the East Coast where I live in the Northeast, is the feeling that you get on the first spring day where you can sit outside and have a beer, like the outdoors, that emotion, I'm like, oh man, I know that, but I don't have a word for it.

Yeah, I mean, listen, I'm from the East Coast. I lived in Ithaca, so - But this is the point.

If you look in Asian cultures, you have lots of different words that are hard to translate for an American that mean different aspects of contemplation or peacefulness or kind of attention to what's going on in the world, acceptance, right?

So, the point is, it's hard cross -culturally.

It's hard even for these terms that we all use in English together.

I think of meaning as the experience.

I get a sense of meaning from engaging in the purpose, which is kind of the activity or the kind of thing you're doing.

It matters less how you define those things than the actions that you're taking.

Like you're very action -based.

You're like, here are these things that you should do, get into action, journaling, identify your strengths, like all of these, you know, sort of snackable, you know, what do you call them again?

Rewireables, right?

Yeah, yeah. That are there to counter program all the intuitions and instincts that lead us astray when we're on autopilot.

And I think this is the thing I didn't say that I would say to the person who's like, I feel like I'm doing everything right or I feel like I'm really struggling.

I have this rumination.

I think that the thing that really gives me hope about all this stuff is like there's like hundreds and hundreds, if not thousands of studies on these things, these little snackable activities or mindset shifts.

and they all work. They all work in a striking way, right?

They don't take your happiness from zero to a hundred, but they give small, reliable, significant increases in your happiness.

I know Dan Harris on the show recently, he talks about 10 % happier and that's a great name for a podcast and a title for anything because that's kind of the range that you're going up and all these little meaningful changes I'm suggesting.

You get a little social connection, you'll go go from a seven on a 10 -point happiness scale to an eight.

You get some exercise in, a half hour of cardio every day, you'll move from a six to a seven, right?

That's about the magnitude of increase, but that increase is available for all the different things we've talked about, right?

So you can have your little a la carte snack list of different strategies you use to feel happier, and if you can manage to turn them into habits to put them into effect, you'll wind up reaping the benefits.

Another important pillar here is contribution to others.

service, basically, which as a 12 -step person, I know well and had to learn the hard way that this is the most reliable and truest antidote to self -obsession.

And I think self -obsession is sort of at the root of a lot of unhappiness out there.

We're just constantly thinking about ourselves all day long, whether positively or negatively.

And if we can get out of that, and invest ourselves in somebody else, I mean, this is a big part of the community piece too, like be with other people.

You have to get out of your own narrative and immerse yourself in the world.

But when you invest yourself in somebody else's welfare, even in the smallest way, it's incredible how that can shift your mood, your energy, and your perspective.

Yeah. And I think this is something that culture gets wrong.

we talked about culture getting manifesting wrong i think that's number one thing we get wrong on tick tock but number two thing we get wrong about happiness on tick tock is this if you look anywhere on tick tock it's all about self -care treat yourself self self self like you look at the studies of happy people and happy people are not focused on themselves happy people are very other oriented they're doing nice stuff for other people right controlled for income happier people tend to donate more money to charity than not so happy people right it's just these like subtle subtle correlations between doing

nice stuff for others and feeling better.

But then you have all these experiments where you kind of force participants to do nice stuff for other people.

One of my favorite is by Elizabeth Dunn and her colleagues, where they walk up to folks on the street, hand them 20 bucks and say either, hey, spend this 20 bucks to do something nice to treat yourself, right?

Or, hey, spend this 20 bucks to do something nice for somebody else.

You could donate it to a homeless shelter.

You could buy a friend, you know, something nice, like, but has to go to someone else.

When they call people at the end of the day, or even at the end of the week, they find that people are happier when they treated someone else rather than when they treated themselves.

Right. In giving that money to the other person, if you qualify it, it then becomes a burden for them, as opposed to an enriching experience where you felt like, oh, I did something nice for somebody.

Yeah. And this is a spot where even in my own life, if I'm not careful with it, there's just a terrible opportunity cost because all the money you spend on yourself to feel better, buying yourself a massage or buying yourself that new gadget or treating yourself to a nice glass of wine.

It's making it worse.

Well, it's just the same money that you could have spent on someone else.

I often joke that every time my brain is like, I'm going to get a manicure.

I'm going to do something nice for myself.

I'm like, wait, can I give my sister -in -law a manicure?

Can I buy that massage for someone in my workplace?

It genuinely is one of these things that even violates my intuitions, even saying it now.

I'm like, dude, I would like the massage better than my sister -in -law or whatever.

But you're cultivating abundance and abundance mindset, right?

right? Instead of lack, like you have to hoard it because you're afraid it'll run out or you'll run out.

And the benefits is like when you do nice things for other people, like what you get back in the social connection is huge, right?

My producer and co -writer for my podcast, Ryan Dilley, tells this story of he was walking into a coffee shop and someone was walking out with this cookie they were very excited about and then dropped it like on the threshold of the doors they were walking out.

It seemed sad. And he ran into the coffee shop and brought this person a a cookie and like gave them the cookie and the person was really happy.

And he's like, months later, I'm still telling that story.

Like I don't ever tell the story at the time I walked to the coffee shop and just got myself the cookie.

Like now it's, you know, millions of people in your show are hearing it.

Right. And so these moments of good deeds that we do for others, they, they percolate, they percolate in our own memory.

They percolate in our social conversations, even, you know, just hearing Brian's story, probably all your people have this little boost in happiness that we get.

And so we forget that our, our actions and our things we do to feel happy at the moment, some of them live on better than others.

And the things we do for other people live on in special ways.

Is there any science to establish, I want to call it a placebo effect, but it's not quite that.

What I'm getting at is the intention behind it.

Like, does it matter if you give of yourself from a place of, you know, openheartedness and generosity or you're doing it selfishly because lori santos said if i do this it makes me happy and and i know just based on my anecdotal personal experience that it actually doesn't matter like if i just even if i don't want to do the thing like i know that it will make me happier And so to be selfless from a selfish perspective, it still ends up creating a shift. Yeah.

And I think that's true for all the – like we get the benefit from the behavior in a lot of the cases.

I think, again, with all these things, there's a little bit of nuance.

Laura Aknen has this work that if you feel forced to do nice things for others, like you don't have any choice, you don't have any agency in it, that can be not good.

This is one of the reasons we see things like caregiver burnout and so on.

You have no choice.

You have to be doing these nice things.

That's not great. But if you come at it from like, all right, I don't really feel like doing this behavior.

I'll try it. It kind of works.

And look, that's true in all these domains.

I respect so many people that get the wonderful emotional hit that have the craving for working out.

I never have that. It's always a slog for me.

I've hoped that doing it more and more, I'll get into it.

Never is. But every time I do it, when I'm done, I'm like, oh, that was great.

Why did I hate doing that?

What's my my problem, right?

And I think the same thing can be true for doing nice things for others.

For me, that's also true for like talking to people.

I know that talking to strangers from all my studies, again, I can like tell you the journal article name, right?

That it makes you happier, but I'm just like, don't really feel like talking to people.

But then inevitably when I do it, I'm like, okay, I should really do it.

I wind up feeling better.

You know, even on the plane over here today, I was sitting next to someone who kind of plopped down and this individual sort sort of disabled and like had a tough time getting in and was sort of seemingly sort of frustrated and I had this moment of like all I want to do is look at my phone and check my email that's all my craving and motivation is telling me to do but I know happiness wise I should like try to brighten this person's day and so I did it and we had a little chat and then I felt a little bit brighter you know the first 10 minutes into the flight and feel like I made you know his version of that flight

a little bit better than if I was just kind of on my own how does this break down between introverts and extroverts because that type of behavior comes a little bit more naturally to the extroverted person and so it would follow that extroverts are happier because they're more social or they like to be around a lot of people and you know it's an easier lift for them to you know kind of engage with people out in the world whereas an introvert is like afraid of those situations or is avoiding those and isolating so is there science around those two archetypes?

Yeah, yeah. Well, first, is there a difference in the happiness of introverts and extroverts?

And the answer seems to be yes, where extroverts are happier, probably, presumably, because they're socially connecting more often and more easily.

They can be more self -obsessed, though.

They might be more self -obsessed, yeah.

That's going against them.

There's a lot of nuance, as I said, for a lot of these.

But there's a different question, right, which is if introverts engaged in more social connection, If they kind of pushed against their natural tendency not to do it but tried it out more, would they wind up being happier?

And this is something that's been studied by lots of folks.

My favorite experiments on this are by Nick Epley at the University of Chicago where he does these studies where he forces people to talk to strangers.

That situation I was in talking to the person on the plane, he basically makes people do that on commuter trains in Chicago.

He says you'll get a $10 Starbucks gift card if you spend the train ride talking to someone.

And everyone hates to do it, but they do it because of the promise of the $10 Starbucks gift card and social science.

Amazing. Amazing what a gift card will do.

Yes, yes. But people predict that this is going to be terrible, talking to a stranger on the train.

And introverts predict that it's going to be like more.

I think the scale doesn't go low enough for them to say how terrible it will be.

But both introverts and extroverts get a positive emotion boost from talking to the stranger, which is not what people expect.

Is the boost higher for the introvert because there seems to be more to be gained?

Like there's a bigger gap there?

So the test that they did is the difference between your prediction and what the outcome was.

They didn't compare introverts and extroverts.

But what you find is the prediction error, right?

What you think is going to happen versus what really happens, that difference is much bigger for the introverts.

But everybody overall gets a positive boost. this is the thing I'll tell you because you're going to look at the comment section of this show that we're going to get the most hate mail about because when I did a podcast about introverts try it out and get a little bit more social we got tons and tons of hate mail I had this fantastic guest on um Jessica Pan who wrote this book called uh sorry I'm late I didn't want to come colon an introvert's guide to extroverting and she was this like incredibly hardcore introvert like would go to parties and have to go cry in the bathroom because she hated

being social so much and read the work on extroverts being happier.

And she's like, I'm just going to try it for a year.

And she did one of these experiments that journalists do where they do the thing that will make them happy for a whole year.

And she did improv comedy.

She went to networking events.

She talked to people on the train.

She worked with Nick Epley about this.

And at the end of the year, she was way happier.

And at the end of the year, she found something interesting, which is like, it's hard at first because your prediction is wrong, right?

And if you think about that prediction error I just talked about, you see where it gets hard. You're an introvert.

You're like, I predict calling my friend.

That's going to be yucky.

You're talking to the barista at the coffee shop.

Oh, that's going to be yucky.

You never do it. You don't notice it feel good and you keep not doing it, right?

It's like when we get in bad cycles of whatever, you know, I see this sometimes in my own like fitness journey of like, I don't feel like exercise and I don't do it.

And then I forget, oh my God, it feels amazing.

And then it's harder for me to to do it next time because I didn't do it before and so on.

And so folks like Nick Epley think that this is kind of one of the things that happens to introverts is that you predict it's going to be crappy.

You're behaving based on your predictions.

You don't engage in social connection.

And then it's harder next time and it's harder and it's harder.

And so his advice would be baby steps.

This is not like going to a party or doing improv comedy or like, you know, going out with 300 of your best friends.

This is just like text a good friend and say, hey, can we connect for coffee?

or set a time to call someone you haven't talked to in a long time.

It's not doing that all the time.

It's just getting a little bit more of that in.

I didn't try to notice if it makes you feel better.

Well, let me try to inhabit the voice of Susan Cain right now and speak to the introvert thing.

I think there is a distinction between the introvert who's just predisposed to a little bit more solitude and quiet and tends to thrive in those types of environments or is more suited to smaller gatherings, let's say, than the introvert who has this fear or this terror of these, and it has like this negative predictive, you know, kind of brain around what happens when they're in those, you know, more crowded environments.

And I think on top of that, I would imagine that part of the pushback that, you know, get for this is that beneath it all, there's this perspective that it's better to be an extrovert and that if you're an introvert, you should be more extroverted or there's something wrong with you.

And some people are more wired to be...

Many, many people are more wired to be more introverted than extroverted.

I happen to be one of them.

And it's very comforting to hear Susan talk about this and say, there's nothing wrong with you.

You know what I mean?

And that's not to say that what you're sharing is incorrect either.

It's that, you know, if you are isolating and cutting yourself off from life because of this predisposition that you have, that there is greater happiness that you can find if you get out of your comfort zone and, you know, put yourself in those uncomfortable positions.

It doesn't mean that you have to become an extrovert or that there's an expectation around that.

Is that, do you think that's a fair?

That's exactly right.

That's exactly. I think when I, you know, talk about the work in social connection, some people hear me saying like, like, don't be an introvert.

That's wrong. Everybody should be extroverts.

Not true. I think there's a lot of happiness boost that comes from certain aspects of introversion, like contemplation, right?

Time in a sense of kind of like being with yourself, understanding your own intentions, right?

I think there's forms of happiness that come from solitude that you can't get from social connection.

That said, what we know is for better or for worse, one of the ways that we boost our mood and improve our overall happiness and life satisfaction is to have rich connections with other people, not to like go to the hugest party and like whatever, but like make sure you're maintaining your social connection, even with weak ties, like the barista at the coffee shop or the stranger on the train.

And what it means is if you're an extrovert, if you're an introvert that's not doing any of that, you're leaving opportunities for happiness on the table.

And I think one thing to remember is there's so much of the advice about happiness that at least for some personality types or or people with certain backgrounds, feels like a little bit of a stretch. You know, like I think sometimes like, you know, some people might listen to this podcast because like eating super healthy, like eating plant -based and getting away from processed foods feels like a stretch for people given some backgrounds.

Even, you know, if you're the kid who was picked on in gym class, like they, you know, moving your body every day might feel like a little bit of a stretch. I think social cognition is one that's just like that too, right?

It's a little bit of a stretch for people, but if you engage in it, it doesn't necessarily mean it's better or worse, but there's an opportunity for you on the table that if you engage with that a a little bit more, you might wind up feeling happier.

Yeah, you don't have to break the rubber band, but you can, you know, extend it a little bit.

Exactly. And take a moment to notice, because I think one of the interesting things about so many things in this happiness space is that our predictions are wrong, right?

We predict this thing is not going to work.

We do it, oh, actually, I feel a little bit better.

We predict this thing, oh, definitely going to work, more money, you know, status, whatever.

I still got to go after more of it, right?

And so, So one of the reasons I like being a nerdy scientist in this space is I want people to test their predictions, right?

Try it out. Maybe it won't work for you.

Maybe it will. But you can do your own experiments on yourself and see what works.

And those experiments require a little bit of discomfort.

Yes. Right? I mean, that's the piece, right?

So it's that Susan David thing.

Like, discomfort is the price of admission for a meaningful life.

Yes. So you have to be willing to step outside yourself, even if just a little bit, to reap the benefits of any of these things that you're talking about.

out and this gets to something that we haven't really talked about right which is negative emotions right senses of you know this kind of pushing yourself feeling uncomfortable right i think that not only is discomfort the price of a meaningful life but so are all negative emotions right anxiety stress overwhelm anger all these things are prices for a meaningful life and that means that we need to not run away from negative emotions i think sometimes people hear about my class and assume it's this terrible Ivy League toxic positivity thing where I'm teaching people to be in, you know, happy emoji

all the time. And I think that's not true at all.

I think what we want to do is find ways to notice, accept, embrace, learn from our negative emotions, but also find good ways to regulate them.

Do you get criticism for the class?

Oh, yeah. Is there skepticism that you're treating this subject matter in kind of a reductive way?

Or what is the nature of the critique?

Yeah. Part of the critique is these snowflakes that need a class on happiness, right?

And I think those are people who just honestly haven't seen the data of just how bad this mental health crisis is.

I think there are also folks who think we're treating it from a scientific perspective and therefore we're missing out on other ways to kind of come to these truths, right?

Which is one of the reasons I always like to bring in the wisdom of the ancients and philosophers, often sometimes even spiritual traditions, right?

Because I like to see the science in part because often our intuitions are wrong.

So, it helps me to see the data of like, oh, actually talking to somebody does make you feel good.

But so many of the ancient traditions figured this stuff out and had deep insights even in the absence of these psychological and neural data on these questions.

What is your most controversial or contrarian opinion about happiness?

happiness honestly introversion like introverts could actually get a little bit more social connection it won't be so bad that's when i get attacked on manifesting doesn't work in the way you think when i get attacked on money doesn't make you happy i always know what's contrary you're like yeah you're just whatever is going against the grain of tiktok trends it might be honestly it really is like if i could tweak the algorithm we'd all i'd get much less hate mail I mean, I think another big one really is just this idea that being happy is ultimately good if what you want to do is face challenges

and push yourself. A different attack I get is kind of look at the world right now.

It is falling apart, you know, like from the economy to the climate to whatever, like it's just like a crappy place with many big structural problems, right?

You're going around telling everybody to like be happy and accept the things in life and find your purpose, right?

right? Like people need to not be happy.

People need to be out there pissed off.

You know, if you're not angry, you're not paying attention kind of thing.

And this is a pushback I actually get from a lot of my students.

I think a lot of the young people I work with are, you're really inclined to worry about the big problems and fix them and think that the way you face those big problems is not to like be happy in the face of them or to kind of be happy in ways that like ignore the structural problems, right?

I think sometimes people hear, for example, like, you know, more money doesn't make you happy.

That what I'm doing is like justifying like like really terrible practices where billionaires get richer.

It's like, no, no, no. I think what we need to remember is two things.

One is that we can have individual change and individual strategies for feeling happier that work alongside the structural changes for making you happier, right?

You can write in your gratitude journal and do expressive writing if you're in a terrible job situation while working to change that terrible job situation, right?

And those things should go together, right?

It's not like, well, just expressive writing and then you can put up with these, you know, terrible bad practices.

But I think the other thing is that researchers have gone out and asked the question, like, what is this set of psychology and the set of emotions that you need to be the kind of person that's fighting these big structural problems?

This work by Konstantin Kushlev at Georgetown.

And what he finds is that, like, it's actually the who are experiencing the most positive emotion who are the ones who have the bandwidth to go out and fight this stuff.

He looks at folks who are interested in, for example, in things like climate justice and asks, like, who are the ones who aren't just like anxious about climate change, but really, you know, putting on solar panels, going to a protest, donating money, and he finds that it's the folks who experience the most positive emotion who are taking the actions.

It's kind of like, you know, putting your own oxygen mask on first. And so this is something that I really push is that when people are like, well, if you're not angry, you're not paying attention.

It's like, yes, but a little bit of self -care to protect yourself, kind of protecting your own bandwidth is going to make you the kind of person who has the resilience to kind of fight the big fights.

And so... Whatever you're pursuing, whether it's some strain of activism or you have an ambition, what I'm hearing is that happiness on some level is actually strategic in achieving those goals because otherwise you're on an unsustainable fuel source and you'll burn out.

Right. So if you're fulfilled and finding meaning and purpose and all of these aspects of what it means to be happy in the pursuit of these difficult things, then you're going to stay in the game.

Otherwise, like if you're just fueled by anger and outrage and this has to change, you know, when you're young, it's like, you know, of course you think that you'll be able to do that forever.

Right. But you're not going to last like you're not You're not going to be able to stay in it for all four quarters of the game.

Yeah. And I love your idea that it's fuel, right?

Because I think it really is, you know, and I think this is a spot where we get the metaphor is all wrong, right?

Another thing we hear on TikTok all the time is like work -life balance, right?

Which I think in our brains, we picture like a scale, like, well, when work is going up, when I'm performing really hard, like, you know, life is going down.

And I think a much more accurate way of thinking about it, which we get from the science, is the sense of work -life harmony, right?

Where if you're prioritizing life, by which I mean kind of happiness and mental health and so on, you're going to work better.

You're going to perform better.

You're going to have more bandwidth to do the stuff you care about.

And this is the kind of thing we see in study after study.

You give people a hard problem at work.

One of these was done with medical doctors where it's like you have to kind of, you get some tough problem.

You have to figure out like, what's the diagnosis?

It's really tricky.

You need true innovative, out of the box thinking.

You put some set of doctors in a good mood first. They just watch silly cat videos on youtube ahead of time they're the ones that come up with the innovative solution right you have to go through something really uncomfortable at work whether that's you know a terrible time like covet or just like pushing yourself on a hard workout but you go into that listening to happy upbeat music versus like you know drown down or your music and like you're gonna push through better if you're just like you know and so it seems so simple but i think we get it wrong right we're like well i you know i have this ambition that i

really care about and i'm I'm just going to like make myself super miserable.

I'm not going to see my friends.

I'm not going to sleep.

I'm going to just like, you know, but then I'll get to the success and I'll feel happy.

And we get it wrong in two ways.

One that we've talked about, like the success that arrival isn't going to make us as happy as we think.

But second, if what you really want to do is perform well, you're not doing that as well.

If you're not taking care of yourself, if you're not giving yourself that sort of happiness fuel that we know performance, like true, exceptional, optimal performance really requires.

I think that's a really important point.

I know what it's like to be laser focused on something and lose myself in the pursuit of a name or a goal, and there is something dopamine inducing about that.

There's like a euphoria of I'm all in, man, and I don't have time for anything else.

That in and of itself is a form of self -obsession where you begin to believe, or I should say, I have been lured into places where where I would think, is happiness, like, is it really all that important?

Like, it feels like an indulgence and also something I can live without because I have this purpose and it's fulfilling and it's giving me meaning and it's driving me forward and I have this aim and I'm gonna get there.

And so not only is, or are all of the things that you need to do to engender happiness inconvenient, they just feel indulgent and like a distraction.

And that is part and parcel of like the striver's dilemma.

We had this woman in here the other day, Dr. Judith Joseph, who talks about high -functioning depression.

And I'm like reading this book and I'm like, oh my God.

Yeah, they changed the name, right?

I'm like seeing God, anyway.

But I can also imagine the person who has a very challenging life, like the single mom with two jobs and kids and has to take the bus to work.

And life is just hard. And for that person, that person as well, I would imagine is in a position where they could develop the perspective that like this happiness thing is an indulgence and I can't take my eyes off the ball because people need me and I need to provide.

And so make the argument for the self -care at least at a base level to cultivate some degree of happiness from that sustainability perspective.

Yeah. Like you just can't sustain that for very long.

And, and again, we, we know this in other domains.

I remember one thing from you reading your book that I loved in your story was, you know, even when you're training to be as fast as possible, you didn't want to run as fast as possible.

You like actually want to be at, I don't know, I'm not a fitness person, but it's 80 % conservation and efficiency and active rest, right?

Active rest. We understand that in other high performance fields.

We forget that when it comes to just performing at our jobs in our life.

And I think of active rest as the kind of fuel that we need to do it better, right?

That sometimes what we need is a break.

Sometimes what we need is like a moment to notice that stupid delight in the world to like, you know, have a gab fest with our, you know, good girlfriends, right?

Like we just kind of need this time to boost our overall mood and to feel good in life and to feel good with life.

And ultimately, if we're doing that, it just makes it easier to achieve the bigger aims that we have for ourselves.

You mentioned curiosity earlier.

Clearly, having a growth mindset or being interested in the world or wanting to learn things and seeking out new experiences are crucial to being a happy person.

But at baseline, foundational to that is your relationship with your own curiosity.

curiosity. So talk a little bit about that.

Curiosity is something that is part of being human, but also lives on a spectrum.

Yeah. And I think there's so much we can do with curiosity to feel happier.

One is that sometimes curiosity can be that little motivating force that gets us to positive emotions we don't expect.

One of the positive emotions I think about a lot is the experience of awe, this sense of wonder, the sense that stuff is bigger than you.

We've talked a lot lot about being self -obsessed, but like when you look at, you know, the skyline here in the canyon, or when you look at, you know, something bigger than you, or even just like people doing amazing moral good in the world, like you're just like, wow, there's things that are bigger than myself.

It's so inconvenient though.

Oh, well, there's so much. It's hard. Like on gratitude.

Go with the lights, go with the light.

I mean, sometimes these words get so big.

Is that why you consciously use the word delights?

I think so. Cause sometimes it feels like, you know, was I grateful that the guy i was listening to like cypress hill in the car and the low rider not really but was that delightful did you know talking about it now does it make me smile with it yeah it does right and i think all like if all feels too much like maybe go with like badass like when you see something really like that was just badass like that was a badass sunset or like you know the james wood space telescope where you just see all these worlds that is badass or like someone doing an amazing you know thing in fit list is like i'm

like you know simone biles is just like she was badass badass, that badass allows you to think of something that's bigger than yourself.

It allows you to see achievement.

Like it just kind of feels like a good positive emotion.

And so I think curiosity can often get us to things that are badass and that's helpful.

But I think a bigger way that curiosity is so important for our positive emotions is that we can use curiosity to allow and deal with our negative emotions.

I think the kinds of, you know, type A folks that you talk to a lot on this podcast and listen to this podcast are like perform, perform all the time.

And that sense of overwhelm or that fear, the anxiety or that yucky feel like that, that is really inconvenient.

So I'm just going to squish that down.

But in doing that, we lose the opportunity to learn from our emotions, to learn from our discomfort, something that Susan Cain talks about a lot.

And I think curiosity can be a way in, especially if you're kind of uncomfortable with those negative emotions and your mood is like, squish them away.

I don't feel that. Get curious, like, huh, I don't want to do this workout today.

What's going on? Like, oh, I'm feeling a little overwhelmed at work or, huh, I'm feeling like a little bit pissed off, right?

I'm like extra pissed off in this traffic right now.

Curiosity, what's going on?

Where is this coming from?

Like, oh, I'm actually feeling kind of lonely, right?

Often when we get a little bit curious about our emotions, it's a way to engage with them in a way that doesn't like amplify them, but kind of has some common humanity, like makes sense.

I'm feeling this. Let me try to understand it.

then we can use emotions, what they're for, what they're really for evolutionarily, which is, I think of them as like our like internal signaling unit.

Like I like to see our negative emotions as like the dashboard on your car.

It's like tire light, engine light, you know, that comes on in your car.

If it came on in my rental car today, like it'd be really inconvenient, like crap, I had to deal with this tire situation.

And I think our negative emotions are kind of like that.

It's like ding, ding, overwhelmed, like ding, ding, anxiety.

It's like, oh, this is stupid.

But if you don't deal with it, you know, you're going to break down on the highway.

And I I think the same is true for negative emotions, right?

We usually get curious, like, huh, I wonder what's going on.

Why is that sense of overwhelm there?

Like, oh, I'm too busy at work or I need to take a break.

Often there's something in there that you can change your mindset or change your behavior about to fix it.

But if you suppress it, you're just not going to notice what that signal is telling you.

Yeah, it's another way of disidentifying, like detaching yourself a little bit from those emotions.

It's not me, it's a little indicator light.

Because negative emotions can be intoxicating.

And when they flare up, then there's a kind of instinct to indulge them, right?

And you're not even consciously thinking about it.

It just takes over.

And then in the aftermath of that, we self -flagellate like, oh, I can't believe, why did I do that?

And you feel guilty and shame, you just go down in the spiral, right?

But to be able to look at it as if you're watching it on television, as opposed to something that's happening to you, is a really powerful technique.

And using curiosity as the way in is a really cool idea.

Some people are naturally very curious.

Some people are extremely incurious.

You know, I've asked this question to other people on the show, and everyone seems to agree that curiosity is something that you can learn and get better at and train.

But you have to be curious about your own curiosity.

Yeah. I think with all of these things, they're going to be some of these sort of happiness hacks, happiness strategies that come really easy, right?

You know, you might be listening to this, you're a super extrovert.

Oh yeah. Social connection tick.

Or, oh yeah. Like watching what I eat or moving my body.

Great. But then there's some that like, oh, there's some that like curiosity is a little harder.

I actually think those are the domains where you can have the most impact, right?

You know, we, we mentioned this idea of being 10 % happier.

You're not going going to go from zero to 100 so it's helpful to find the spots where you're as close to baseline as close to not doing it all as possible because if you intervene on that even a little baby step will kind of give you a big boost and so if yours is curiosity i think just use the opportunity to kind of notice a little bit right rather than call it curiosity just call it noticing just noticing what's happening in my body i'm noticing what's going on expressive writing is a really great tool for this in part because when you go into sense making mode you have to ask questions right

And so just by the act of writing about whatever's going on, you can often go into question -asking mode, which is sort of one of the fastest ways to get to curiosity.

On the topic of noticing, isn't attention sort of the whole ballgame here?

Totally. Like it really is a function of the extent to which you're mindful about where you're placing your attention.

That's like the whole thing.

So whether it's curiosity or your interactions with people out in the world or your ability to notice something that could give you that moment of delight, it's all about being present with your own attention and not allowing it to randomly go where it's sort of impulse to go, but commandeering it in a conscious way.

Yeah. And that's hard, right?

Because we know that attention is very, we know that attention is like basically built to go where it's going to go, right?

If someone screamed fire right now in the studio, no matter how interesting a conversation we were having, it would steal our attention.

attention and that kind of mode of commandeering attention is the thing we've built into all the devices that are around us all the time like there's so much built out there to steal our attention like it was already bad just having a human brain that would just kind of get commandeered really easily but now we have all these things around us that are trying to commandeer our attention often for bad right because negativity is what makes algorithms lots of money and so lots of folks around us are trying to commandeer our attention towards the anti -delights or the the anti -grateful things.

But yeah, if you can develop the agency to harness your attention, and so much work in the field of psychology suggests that you can do that just through training, right?

Just through practice and trying to notice certain things more through your intention for your attention, you can kind of gain agency over that and feel a lot better.

What do you make of the mainstreaming or the degree of attention and interest there is now in the subject of happiness like this is sort of unprecedented in the history of humanity and to me it's sort of like you can look at it through two different lenses on the one hand you can say well this is just a byproduct of our metastasizing self -obsession right like you know we're so caught up in our own selves and obsessed with our own degree of happiness and this in and of itself is some form of disease, right?

Or you can look at it as a symptom of the real disease, which is that we are suffering this epidemic of unhappiness and loneliness and disconnection and the like.

And this is us raising our hand or asking to be rescued.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I guess a couple of things there.

One is that I think we are obsessed with happiness now, but we as a species have always been obsessed with happiness.

We've been obsessed with happiness since we were a species that could think about happiness.

I mean, look at the ancients.

That was all they talked about was trying to live the good life in Eudaimonia and how do we get there and create the right habits.

You look at the founders of the country, which, you know, even in the Declaration of Independence could have written like, you know, here's what we want, like life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

They were living like longevity.

Right in the document, in the parchment.

And there's actually a really interesting history.

If you look at the original document, they went through different versions it was like life liberty and then they decided on happiness which is sort of interesting and it's all right but the point is that like what was it was it was there something in in happiness it's like it's hard to know but I think it was like do we want that in there it was an interesting debate about putting that in there so it was interesting but point is like even old school they were thinking about this so I think we've always cared about it however I do think we're more off track than ever right I mean I think we have cultural

patterns that are actively leading us in the wrong way.

You know, we were joking about TikTok and being a little facetious, but I think, you know, we mean something.

The culture apparatus that we surround ourselves with that's easily stealing our attention is telling us all the wrong things to do, right?

Go for money, go for status, just buy something, change your circumstances, you'll feel happier.

And what we know is like, those are wrong.

And so I think the interest we have now is in part because we're kind of raising our hands and saying, help, we're doing it wrong.

But I think it's also because we, How could we not be doing it wrong when there's so many other influences that are pushing us in the wrong direction?

Our digital devices are proxies for social connection.

And we believe that it is making us closer to all these people.

And we're not really conscious of the extent to which it's actually isolating us more and more and more.

Like it's very effective in convincing us that we're in touch with all these people and we know what they're doing and it feels like one big community even if we're prone to comparison and we're a victim of the algorithm and the like.

Short of turn your phone off, do a digital detox, don't bring it in, like all the sort of stuff we know, right?

right? Like, what is the counsel that you give to your students and talk about more broadly with respect to how we navigate our digital age in a healthier way?

Yeah. I mean, I think it's worth noting that technology is just a tool, right?

It's a tool that we could use in positive ways, right?

Which I think we all saw during the pandemic, right?

I don't know about you, like Zoom Thanksgiving, like, you know, Pilates classes with friends of mine, right?

Like, we can use this to really get connection, especially when we're feeling feeling isolated, you know, communities that, you know, you're the one person who cares about this thing.

And now you can connect with others who care about that same thing and have that sense of a little bit purpose.

I think there's lots of things we can do positively with technology, but you're right.

A lot of things we actually do with technology is like leading us astray.

It's leading us away from social connection, but we don't want to get rid of it, right?

Because it does have these positives.

And so the strategy I suggest to my students is this strategy of of attending, noticing, getting curious again, right?

What are the parts of this that are feeling good?

And what are the parts of this that are maybe leading me astray?

And I like shortcuts to do this because it's hard to do this in the abstract.

And one of the ones I share with my students comes from the journalist, Catherine Price, who has this lovely book called How to Break Up With Your Phone, where she argues that you don't really need to break up with your phone, but you need to take it to like couples counseling so you can develop like maybe like a hell of a relationship with it and she has this acronym she uses called www which is funny because you know world wide web but in her case www stands for what for why now and what else she argues that whenever you find yourself kind of engaging with technology you should ask this question what for was i

picking my phone up for maybe i was checking my email looking at the weather maybe i don't even know what it like i'm just in some reddit rabbit hole and i have no idea how i got here or you're just standing in line at the grocery store and you don't want to have to be be alone with your thoughts for an instant.

Exactly. And then that gets to the second question.

Why now, right? What was the trigger?

I was feeling lonely.

I was feeling anxious.

I was feeling socially avoidant, right?

Like what, what was your being curious about?

What was the trigger?

Often an emotional trigger or situational trigger that caused you to go on it.

And the final question, what else, what else could you be doing right now?

Maybe in that grocery line, you could talk to a friend in the grocery line or text someone and check in.

Maybe you could do just a couple deep breaths, right?

Notice the world around you.

Notice that guy who's playing the Cypress Hill or whatever.

What's the opportunity cost of being on your phone right now?

I like this WWW technique, what for, why now, what else?

Because it doesn't say digital detox, get off your phone.

It just causes you to notice your own patterns.

Like, oh, whenever I'm being socially avoidant at a party, I look at my phone.

Or I go to this whenever I'm anxious.

Or what what else? I haven't noticed that it's springtime out because I've just been staring at my phone the whole time, right?

It allows you to get curious about the things you're using your phone for and when you're using it and what's the cost. And you can ask, are those things worth it for me?

Right. It's a way of plying your curiosity.

But you're certainly not going to find moments of delight, awe and wonder if you're looking at your phone.

Sometimes you do. I mean, I mean, there's a lot of like bad -ass - But it's like on this, yeah, I get that.

I understand what you're saying, but like - The analogy I like to use and it gets back to the nutrition stuff is like I think oftentimes we get the sort of nutritious way of social connection online, right, where it's like, it feels like I connected because I scrolled through my Instagram feed and saw what everyone's doing.

It's not really nutritious social connection.

So it's kind of like drinking a Diet Coke, like it satisfies the sugar tooth, but like it doesn't.

And it has these kind of downstream consequences because it's not nutritious.

I think the same thing is true for our kind of social connection psychology.

It overcomes a little social friction, like we kind of get to it easier than like maybe talking to a friend or texting someone.

But I think that ease is, we kind of mistake it for something that's going to feel really good ultimately psychologically and it sort of doesn't.

happiness is a byproduct of welcoming into your life all of these things that we've been talking about it is not the aim it's not something you chase right it's a consequence of doing all of these things where we place our attention what is our curiosity like are we going out of our way to be connected to the people we care about are we meeting new people all the like but do you think I think that there are still many, many people out there who are pursuing happiness in a wrongheaded way such that this pursuit becomes a barrier to happiness.

Because it is such a mainstream phenomenon and there's so many books and so many experts like yourself and we're talking about it and you're on the Today Show.

show. And in our collective consciousness, happiness is something we're thinking a lot about and we're trying to get more of.

But if we're chasing it, we're getting in the way of it, I guess, is what I'm getting at.

Yeah. I think for whatever reason we engage with these habits, many of them will work.

If I'm engaging in social connection, not because I really want to connect with this person because I'm like, I'll get my little happiness boost. I might still get the happiness boost, right?

The same with doing nice things for others.

I might do it because Cause like, well, Laurie says to do it and then you'll feel happier, but you still, as you noticed yourself, you still get the benefit.

I think where we go wrong is that when we go after pursuing happiness, we do it in a very perfectionist, very self -critical way.

We're like, I must get happy right now.

And I'm going to not do normal baby steps and, you know, take a little, you know, day by day, I'm going to do it all right now.

And then we wind up disappointing ourselves.

We wind up feeling crappy about it.

It winds up becoming a chore.

It's another thing on the to -do list. It makes us feel overwhelmed.

right and i think that's not helping anyone right there are a lot of good things that we could do for ourselves from you know eating healthier to fitness to whatever pursuit you want to engage in that like will feel good if you do it in a self -compassionate kind reasonable way and will feel really terrible if you do it in like a perfectionist self -critical has to be perfect kind of way and i think one of the problems with pursuing happiness is people get into that mindset um i'll often get a uh the question after a talk is like well you mentioned all these things what's what's the thing I can do

right now to do it?

Like, I just want to do the one thing.

It's like, okay, we're already like off the wrong path here.

Maybe we want to do a little bit of something.

But it's in the Declaration of Independence.

Pursue it. The pursuit.

But it's the how of the pursuit.

You know, there's things we can pursue for the journey of it, for the growth of it, for noticing that stuff.

And there's things that we can pursue where like, if I don't get this right by Thursday, I'm like a loser.

And we just get out of the loser mindset, right we need to recognize that a way to motivate ourselves for anything whether it's pursuing happiness or any of your pursuits a healthier way to do that is through self -compassion right kind of noticing this is a challenge this is tough recognizing your common humanity I'm just human and talking to yourself in a kind way those are the paths to achieving so much of the stuff we want to achieve I think where we get happiness wrong isn't that we're going after it because I think again it's just built in we're going to want to go out we're going to want

to have a flourishing life, most of us.

But like, if we go after that flourishing life in this like, way, it doesn't work.

The person who's clutching onto it and who's like, tell me the thing and I need to have it now.

It's sort of like asking a fish, how's the water, right?

That's the problem.

That's sort of the barrier, right?

You have to emerge out of that, like, mindset and that bubble and find a different way.

Yeah. And I think, you know, when you really tackle the principles and understand the principles better, that comes a little bit more naturally, right?

You learn these strategies for self -talk that are a little bit healthier.

You learn to be more other -oriented, right?

So you get out of this individual pursuit, and you kind of develop these notions of wanting to do nice things for others for the sake of doing nice things for others.

I think what's interesting is if you start going after this stuff, you find it rewarding, and it gets easier to do it not in a like grippy, half -do way, but in a kind of more measured, self -compassionate way.

Are you a happier person now than when you started lecturing on this?

Oh, for sure. I mean, I'm a nerd. I take data.

You know, I do my little psychometric happiness tests all the time.

It would be so tragic if you weren't.

Yeah. Well, I'll say - Or if you had to lie about it.

Yeah, I'm so much happier.

No, no, I, you know, true to this idea of 10 % happier, I'm about a point to a point and a half happier on a standard happiness test than I was when I started this.

But I will say something interesting, which is with the interesting meaning and purpose and amazing privilege of being able to do this, comes a lot more happiness challenges, right?

If I'm not careful, I can have, you know, so many guest appearances like this, opportunities for travel that will take away my social connection, that'll take away my sleep, that'll take me from my movement routine if I'm not careful.

So I have to push against that.

I get to see a lot more unhappy people.

That gives me some challenges with negative emotions, right?

When you know about this stuff, you're put in situations where people need this stuff and you really see the full gamut of human emotion.

And that can be really tough.

And so I think even though I have these strategies I can use to feel better, it's also brought with it, like many good things in life, lots of challenges.

And so it means that I have to practice what I preach maybe even more now than I was before I was doing this work.

Being really clear on your no's and your yes's.

Yeah. When to say yes and more importantly when to say no. and how to have clear boundaries.

What was like the biggest epiphany or shift that you made as a result of this experience in the research and everything that you've learned that made the biggest difference in your life?

Yeah. Well, a big one is maybe a happiness strategy we haven't mentioned yet, which is this idea of time affluence, that one of the things we need to feel happier is to be wealthy, not with money and our finances, but to be wealthy in time.

I have none of this, Laurie.

I know, yes, I get it.

Most of us self -report being time famished, which is like literally starving for time.

And the physiology of this when you look is very similar to being time, you know, it's inflammation, it's stress, it's all this stuff.

This is work by Ashley Williams at Harvard Business School.

If you self -report being time famished a lot, that's as bad for your well -being as if you self -report being unemployed.

You know, you probably would be sad if you lost your job tomorrow.

Your listeners would be sad if they lost their job.

Just not having any time is this bad.

This work was an epiphany for me, both because as a professor, a podcaster, as a human in the modern age, I'm busier than I should be.

But especially because this new found path that I'm on had given me so many opportunities where if I don't set really hard boundaries, ones that I like hate, I'm never going to be able to have any time affluence.

Does that come up because you have a history of being a people pleaser?

Oh, yeah. Okay. Just confirming.

Yeah, yeah. And I think because the hardest times to set time affluence are when there's really good opportunities.

And I think for a lot of the interesting people with interesting jobs, interesting opportunities that are listening to this, you're going to have to say no not just to the stuff you don't want to do that feels kind of crappy.

You're going to have to say no to the stuff you really do want to do to leave space for the stuff that really matters.

Which are kind of the fruits of your labor.

Like, you work so hard and now you're in this position where you get invited to do really cool stuff with cool people.

And after all of that work to get to this place, you have to say no. Yeah, yeah.

Cry me a river, but, you know, it is like a, it's tough to do that.

I think it's tough.

And it's tough to realize that that open space, that open time is going to be more valuable than whatever you could get out of these things.

I think for most people - But that's being clear on those values and what's important, right?

Exactly. And not falling prey to all the biases we just talked about, right?

I think a big kind of trade -off that people have to make is time and money, right?

I could spend a little bit more time at work.

Maybe I don't take my vacation time and I get that promotion or I get some overtime.

I get these things.

And again, if you have enough money to put a roof over your your head.

If you're in this threshold where more money is not going to make you happy, more time really will make you happy.

Ashley Willans finds that one thing you can do to improve your time affluence is to spend any discretionary income you have on getting time back.

Get the chopped up vegetables, get the healthy takeout, hire the neighbor's kid to mow the lawn, whatever it is to free up time.

That actually makes you happier than spending your discretionary income on stuff or even in some cases, experiences.

experiences. There's a piece within this subject of time affluence that has to do with deferred happiness.

Like I don't have a lot of time affluence right now, but it's because I'm in this phase of life and I need to do these things and I am going to defer my happiness and all these things that I know because I pay attention to Lori and everything that she says and I get it and I agree, but it's just going to sit over here for a while and I will indulge it at the appropriate time.

So, you hold it in abeyance versus like the time is now and your life is happening now.

And I fall into that.

So, how do you disabuse people of that mindset?

Yeah. I think having the terms for some of these things can be so helpful.

I think often we worry about what researchers call myopia, right?

Which is like, you know, eat unhealthy now, you know because like you'll do you'll start your workout tomorrow kind of thing we kind of are indulging now because we're myopic we're like not taking care of our future self that does happen of course but i worry much more about the opposite which is what folks call hyperopia which is like i'll i'll have my rewards in the future i'll just work really hard right now and they're like social connection i'll do that later or you know enjoying the thing that i really care about i'll get to that later and you know the sad thing is that later is not guaranteed

you know so many of us have had the experience of like this thing that we were you know waiting to do like runs out you know the cliche is like you know they buy the nice bottle of wine that you're saving for a good occasion and when the good occasion finally comes around you open it and it's like it's toast and it's dead or you save your frequent flyer miles or you know for the people like me like to chicky self -care you know you buy that one nice candle that you're gonna use or like that one bath bomb that you're gonna save and by the time you get to it's like oh it's smelly and it's just you

know I think we're doing that so much with the big opportunities in life that we're assuming that they're going to be available tomorrow and they might not.

I just did this episode with my colleague DJ Dedana, who's a sabbatical expert who talks about the benefits of taking extended time off now.

And he finds that people are like, well, I'll do it someday or I'll do it when I retire.

And he shared this statistic that I think I'm going to get right, which is that if you're in a couple, the possibility that both individuals in your couple, you and your spouse, will make healthy to retirement age and like be able to do stuff is actually only 50 % that both of you will make it and be healthy enough to travel or do whatever you're fantasizing.

And retirement's not really a thing anymore.

I know. Yeah. This is, you're lucky enough to take retirement, but his point is like, don't be hyperopic.

Like see if you can get that time affluence now.

And so I think, I think we need to kind of think too often we worry about myopia, right?

I think like capitalist culture gets us to do this.

I'm like, you know, put out, don't put off till tomorrow, what you can do today.

But then we end up doing everything today, assuming there's going to be a healthy, happy tomorrow.

And given that that's not guaranteed, we can have a healthy medium where we put in some fun times from enjoyable stuff now.

And I think our mistaken assumption is like, well, I can't do that because I won't be as productive.

But everything you've just heard showed you that that's a misconception.

You'll actually be more productive if you have that that break.

Now, if you engage in that social connection, if you engage in rest, active rest, now you'll be able to perform better in the future.

It's so much of this is about short -term versus long -term also.

What makes us happy in the short term doesn't make us happy in the long -term.

And these uncomfortable things that are important for the long -term feel like tremendous inconveniences.

They do. And easy to dismiss, you know, because we can just say, I am going to do it.

It is important to me, just not right now.

So, of course, there's a conflict between the short -term and the long -term, right?

This is, again, the thing the ancient thinkers talked about.

But more often than we think, the thing that's good for us in the short -term is also good for us in the long -term.

We just are predicting wrong, right?

Take exercise. A good workout might seem inconvenient, but you do it, and you actually feel good pretty soon into it, right?

And that's good for the short -term and good for the long -term.

Social connection, right?

right? That's the kind of thing that like, I might feel like, oh, it's going to take up time.

I should be checking my email, but let me talk to this person on the train.

It's actually going to feel good for you.

And the experience, like the research shows that like you won't actually get a ding in your productivity.

If anything, you'll be more productive later on.

Right? And so I think there are cases where obviously there's this kind of disconnect between our short -term and long -term happiness, but a lot of the things that really work for happiness do both.

It's just our mistaken minds that think they're going to be in conflict.

In practice, they're not actually as much in conflict as we think.

Is there anything that you've changed your mind about because of emergent science or some new idea that cropped up that challenged your preconceived idea about happiness?

Yeah. I mean, I think I've changed my mind a lot about the time stuff, right?

I would have set no boundaries.

People, please put in every opportunity, push, push, push.

And I think I've really seen the signs of it like, no, no, that's not going to work.

I I need to build in rest. I need to build in breaks.

I need to build in that stuff.

I wouldn't have thought that before, and it goes against all my intuitions, but I think that it's been so essential for me.

You mentioned Martin Seligman earlier and Sonja Libomirsky, who's been on the show.

In the pantheon of people who study and teach happiness, Arthur Brooks comes to mind.

divine where do you and your colleagues divert like is there daylight in your perspectives like i imagine you don't match up perfectly with sonia or arthur you have a different lens so where is that daylight what are the kind of points of departure and why yeah i mean i think so many of us are are swayed by the data that to the extent that the data all agree i think we we kind of mostly agree on these things.

I think if there's a spot where not so much we disagree, but our emphases are different, I think my emphasis has really been on this idea that our minds are biased, that our minds are lying to us.

And then unless we kind of like approach those things as lies, as misconceptions, we're kind of not gonna get it right.

And so I think that's a difference of focus that like, if you look at my course, for example, I'm so focused on like, what are the misconceptions?

Because we have to understand what we're getting wrong before we can figure out what we need to do better.

I feel like Arthur puts a lot of emphasis on faith, cultivating a relationship with the divine.

And I don't know that you disagree with that, but it doesn't seem to be as top of mind or as big as a priority.

I mean, Arthur, you know, very devout Catholic.

How do you think about that aspect of it?

Well, I think, you know, in terms of the research, Arthur is right on this, right?

I mean, many studies have looked at what makes people happy.

And a big predictor is if you have some participation in religious faith.

What's interesting, though, is if you kind of break down what does that mean?

Like, what are the components of being a person of faith that allows you to feel happier?

It seems like it's actually not so much your beliefs as opposed to your behaviors and what you do.

What do I mean by that?

Let's say you're, you know, I don't know, a devout Catholic who like really believes in God.

You kind of really buy into the whole worldview, all the metaphysics you agree with, but you never get to church. You don't have time to pray.

You're very busy. Versus you are someone who goes to church a lot.

You pray a lot. You do the pro -social acts, like you donate to the spaghetti suppers and so on.

But inside, you're not there with some of the metaphysics.

You're like, is it really the body of Christ?

I don't know. I have some questions, right?

Turns out that the person that will get the most happiness benefits is the latter person, is the person who doesn't necessarily believe in the faith stuff, but actually engages in the behaviors.

And if you look at the behaviors that matter, it's all the stuff we've been talking about.

It's social connection and community.

It's doing nice acts for others.

It's taking time for presence and contemplation.

It's turning your attention to the good things in life, right?

It's often taking time for rest. Most active religions and faiths have time for like a Sabbath or like taking time off, right?

It's doing a lot of the behaviors that you would do that we've just talked about that matter for happiness, but you're doing it in the context of a cultural and a religious tradition that brings it all together for you.

And in a community of people that are doing it together, which is one of the biggest hacks we know matter for happiness.

So I actually think that the reason that faith, among many reasons that faith is really good for boosting happiness, is that it kind of forces you to do a lot of the behaviors and the mindset things that we know matter a lot.

It drives you towards all of those behaviors naturally as a a result of the culture around it exactly to quote the big lebowski uh yeah thousand years from bozo to stanley kovacs you know it's like yeah no i think uh yeah i think arthur would say and i would probably agree with arthur on this that there is something distinct from what you're talking about um with respect to believing in and appreciating that there is a power greater than yourself and that that power is ineffable.

And as a result of that, it doesn't have to take any dogmatic or particular strain of thought or faith, but that alone is a way of disabusing yourself of your self -obsession.

And it's ultimately humbling.

And it also makes place place for awe and wonder and the mystery of it all that I think is, you know, I think that is a big piece.

Totally. And that's one of the other, you know, I think the behavior of finding more awe in your life is another thing that, of course, religion gives you writ large.

And I think this idea of having a sense of purpose that comes from religion and being a person of faith is really powerful.

And often it's in part kind of something that's bigger than yourself, but it's also Also, most faiths are about not being about you, right?

It's about other people.

It's about connecting.

It's about doing good things for others.

And so I think having those in like one packed up tradition that's culturally relevant that you're doing with other folks is really important.

It's not the only way to do it, right?

There's work by folks like Caspar Turquile who studies ritual and cultures and these kind of strange cultures that find, you can actually get a lot of it, not everything for sure, but some aspects of it from other kinds of cultural traditions.

He actually looks at people that are really into CrossFit, for example, where he finds that people push themselves, they have a ritual that they go to, they have a sense of community.

You know, if somebody gets sick, they all work together to help that person, right?

They're all in this kind of shared experience together.

Not all the benefits, but you get some of them.

And so, I think that faith traditions are one way to get at it, but for those folks who are atheist, agnostic, questioning, maybe just didn't grow up in a faith tradition that was really obvious to them, there might be other ways to get some of those things, too.

Obviously, a big piece in the declining quotient of happiness, at least in America, has to do with the decline of faith -based institutions and community after -school programs. Like, CrossFit is a great example, but 30, 40 years ago, we would have been talking about the after -school programs or YMCA or any number of things that kids used to do or young people used to do.

And so many of those have gone away.

And people have to kind of find their footing in all of these subcultures, which thank God they exist. And I think they serve a really important function.

But the infrastructure upon which we used to create so much of that seems to be no longer.

Yeah. And this is something that researchers have focused on a lot, especially researchers who've looked at, say, increases in loneliness and declines in social connection across time um there's a very famous sociologist robert putnam the political scientist sociologist who talked about what he called third places and so there's a there's a place that's not work or not home where you can get together with other people um he had this very famous book called bowling alone it's called soho house yeah exactly yeah exactly right um but but no but robert talked about how you know in the 1950s people

joined bowling leagues right and you would have this league he's really talked about big lebowski but um you have these leagues where you bowl with other other people you see them every week it would be cross sections of people from different wealth categories different political backgrounds and so on nowadays you don't get bowling leagues people are bowling alone or maybe this was his book in the late 90s early 2000s nowadays I think we have bowling on we are bowling on like yeah on like playstation or something and people don't even go to work anymore I mean everyone's at home on zoom and that gets

back to the digital aspect of it but having these places where you don't have to spend money where people know your name where you have cross sections of society, these things are going away.

And he kind of charts from the 1950s today, kind of changes in this.

When he wrote his book in the 2000s, it was just the dawn of the internet.

So he kind of talked about how maybe television was causing this.

I think if you look at kind of the way we engage with TV and all the media that you and I create and the things that we get online now, it's easier to stay home and entertain yourself than it was back in the day.

The reason I love Robert's work though, is that this could be just like a really depressing conclusion about bowling alone, like from the 1950s to today, everything's going to crap and social connections going down and third places have gone away.

But he actually looked at the history before the 1950s.

And what you find is that from the beginning of the century, from the late 1800s to the 1950s, people were actually creating these institutions that we were really atomized society, really individualist society, really polarized society, and a society society a really unequal wealth distribution where it was the robber barons who controlled everything and so on and people kind of got together and created these local in real life in -person communities and it really changed the structure of society and probably changed the structure of happiness and so his what might seem like a depressing conclusion has a positive

upswing um in fact that's why he has a new book called the upswing that he talks about this which is like we were at a yucky place in terms of social connection and community before we fixed And with the right structures, we could have the intent to rebuild those kind of structures today, too.

Life finds a way and the pendulum has to swing back because we need it, right?

And even if we're not conscious of what we're lacking, we will intuitively start to build those things because deep down we know that this is important to living a meaningful life.

Yeah. I think that's true.

If we can get over our misconceptions, I think we can build structures for ourselves that make us a lot happier.

But I think we can also build a world filled with structures that would make everyone happier too.

I have this question and I find myself reluctant to even ask it because I'm not sure that there's even an answer to it.

And if there is, it's probably a four -hour podcast, you know, to answer it.

But I guess I'm curious, maybe just on a top level, how you think about all of these tools and ways to engender happiness in one's life for the person who is suffering from maybe something a little bit less than a mild mental health disorder.

I mean, as a psychologist, what do you say to the person who, because of childhood trauma or because of a certain particular type of upbringing when they were young, is caught in a mindset pattern or a behavioral pattern that makes it very difficult to see their lives clearly and make these decisions effectively that can change their behavior and influence their lives.

turn their relationship with happiness.

Yeah. I'm glad you asked this because I think this is an important question because when we talk about these kind of rewireables or rewirements, we can assume that they're the whole answer.

And I think it depends on the degree of problem that we're experiencing.

Again, sometimes I use a physical analogy when we're talking about mental health.

So let's say I go into my doctor and I say, hey, doctor, I'm experiencing a little bit of inflammation, some high blood pressure.

What should I do? The doctor will be like, well, well, eat right, get on the treadmill, do this thing.

If I walk into my doctor and clutching my chest the same, I'm having an acute cardiac arrest right now.

The doctor wouldn't be like, well, eat right.

They would like clear and do all the things, right?

There would be an urgent medical intervention for an urgent situation.

I think the same is true for our mental health, right?

If you're feeling a little bit of languishing, things are going right, but I'm not as happy as I could be, all these rewireables are for you, right?

They're the the thing you can do.

If you're acutely suicidal, if you're actively in the middle of a panic attack, I'm not going to be like, well, go out and find the delights in the world.

You need a more urgent medical intervention for that.

But just like in the physical health case, hopefully my walking into the doctor, acute cardiac arrest, I get through it and I'm on the other side.

At that point, the doctor might say, now that you're in recovery, I think you need to look at your eating patterns.

You need to get a little bit more exercise and so on.

I think the same is true true for our mental health, right?

Once you're through an acute crisis, once you're working on something that's maybe a longstanding issue for which you need professional help or a very acute issue which you need treatment for, once you're on the other side of it, I think all these strategies then come into play.

I think of these strategies as almost like preventative mental health, right?

Like almost like the project to make sure you can kind of get back to equilibrium.

But they might not be the best immediate intervention if what you need is urgent care or really serious kind kind of mental health support?

I guess I'm imagining a situation in which it's not necessarily urgent, but there's an underlying wound.

And that wound is the reason you're behaving the way that you behave. And you can do all of the rewirements and rewireables and try to improve your behaviors.

yours and that may move you in a forward direction but ultimately if you don't heal that underlying wound like you're still dealing with symptoms i guess and so at some point you have to look inward and kind of contend with that if you truly want to make the magic leap to the happiness that eludes you yeah and i think again the physical analogy there would be you know maybe you have like a heart an underlying heart condition or just some genetic thing that right like even if if you're doing already.

Or just you have like, you got a calcium scan and the score wasn't so good.

You're not going to die of a heart attack tomorrow, but there's a situation looming on the horizon for you.

I think sometimes when we talk about these strategies, we think, well, that's the only thing Lori thinks you should do.

I think these things can work in conjunction with going to therapeutic practice, right?

A lot of the strategies we're talking about are basically CBT, cognitive behavioral therapy, where you're changing your thought patterns to change your behavior and your mindset.

And sometimes that's hard to do on your own, especially if there's deep -seated stuff.

Like there's a reason that some of these therapeutic practices work, but ultimately what they are is being curious, right?

Being curious with the help of some supportive person who can maybe help you see in if seeing it is hard. But then once you get curious, you're going to have homework where you try to change your thought patterns.

You're going to change your behaviors in the face of this.

And so if you're struggling to do it yourself, it might be that what you need is some therapeutic help in part, because like that can kind of get get you closer to some of the answers.

It can maybe make it the curiosity part easier if what you have to be curious about is not some low grade thing, but some deep like Sherlock Holmes mystery of what's going on with your mental health.

Yeah. This has been great.

Thank you. Thanks so much for having me on the show.

I'm not done yet though.

I got one last one for you, Lori.

We're going to get you to Santa Barbara.

I think it would be great to just round this out with one message about happiness or a concrete thought or action that you would like everyone to hear?

Yeah. I think when things are feeling the most unhappy, the most frustrating, just remember that all the science shows you have agency over it.

There are concrete things you can do to change your behavior, change your mindset, to regulate your negative emotions that that you can learn the skills to do.

And so even when it feels bad, remember there are strategies you can use to feel happier.

Beautiful, I love it.

I'm happier now than I was at the beginning of the podcast. I should've given you the scale before and after.

How do you feel? You feel good?

I'm out here. Sorry, good.

This was great. It was a long time coming like we said at the outset, but I feel like we did the thing.

That's it for today.

Thank you for listening.

I truly hope you enjoyed the conversation.

To learn more about today's guests, including links and resources related to everything discussed today, visit the episode page at richroll .com, where you can find the entire podcast archive, my books, Finding Ultra, Voicing Change, and The Plant Power Way.

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Peace. Plants. Namaste.

[The Science of Happiness: Rewiring Your Brain for a Meaningful Life]-[The Science Of Happiness: Dr. Laurie Santos Shares Evidence-Based Tools For Genuine Joy, Why We Chase The Wrong Things & What Actually Creates Well-Being]

📋 Summary

The Science of Happiness: Rewiring Your Brain for a Meaningful Life

The Happiness Misconception

Why Our Minds Lead Us Astray

Actionable Tools: The "Rewireables"

The Role of Service and Connection

Happiness as Fuel for Change

Conclusion

🎯Key Sentences

📝Key Phrases

📖 Transcript