How to Build a Stronger Mind & What to Do With Ideas You Hate? with Jonathan Haidt| Podcast Ep 567

foreign this is the 10 happier podcast I'm Dan Harris [Music] hey everybody usually episodes of this show are organized around one big question often it's one pain Point I.E a common problem that people might have anxiety depression fighting too much with the people in your life etc etc sometimes though we book a guest who is just too interesting for one clear Focus or alternatively I'm too undisciplined to pick a subject and stick with it whatever the case my guest today is Jonathan height a renowned social psychologist from New York University's Stern School of Business I've been following his work for years and I had a lot of things I wanted to discuss with him including why it can make you happier to see your own irrationality and hypocrisy the value of interacting with ideas you do not like how to navigate social media sanely how to get ahead at work and stay happy in the process the upside of striving the wisdom of the stoics and more a little bit more about Jonathan he has written many books including the happiness hypothesis finding modern truth and ancient wisdom The Righteous Mind why good people are divided by politics and religion and the coddling of the American mind how good intentions and bad ideas are setting up a generation for failure since 2018 Jonathan has also been studying the contributions of social media to the decline of Teen Mental Health and the rise of political dysfunction he wrote a super viral article about that in the Atlantic not long ago so we talk about that as well and here's a little bit more on what we cover in the interview we talk about Heights elephant and Rider metaphor to explain how our minds operate the rider is our conscious mind the kind of CEO mind of executive function the elephant is our unconscious which is mostly in control how to use different techniques from hypnosis to Buddhist and stoic practices to tame said elephant why we evolved to be Hypocrites and how admitting our flaws can actually help us come out ahead Buddhism as a Counterpoint to our success-oriented culture and the deleterious effects of social media on democracy and young people's Mental Health just to say some people might find Jonathan Heights views to be challenging but that is part of the point if you want to be smarter and stronger you need to learn to engage with ideas you disagree with coming up on Wednesday we're going to hear from a colleague and frequent friendly sparring partner of Jonathan Heights who will take a bit of a different tack her name is Professor Dolly chug she's been on this show before so if you consume these episodes as a pair that might be a a nice way to make it all go down easy one other note before we dive in here just a quick heads up that this conversation includes mentions of self-harm and suicide Jonathan height welcome to the show thank you so much Dan I'm a long time fan so it's great to finally have you on there are so many places I could start but let me just start here in much of your work there's a metaphor that you use that appears to have a lot of importance and it's the elephant and the rider can you tell us what that metaphor is all about and why it's so important to you so it came about as I was writing my first book the happiness hypothesis and I was teaching psych 101 at the time at the University of Virginia and I was trying to explain all of psychology in 24 lectures and so I found that if I use metaphors my students would understand it a lot better and a major theme in Psychology is dual process theories that our brains are doing multiple things at the same time and in some ways the brain is more like a committee that doesn't necessarily get along very well with each other and so as you're looking for a metaphor and the most common metaphor that a lot of cultures have used is a Horse and Rider Plato had this metaphor in the phaedris that the charioteer is our reason and the reason is trying to control these two horses the noble passions and the bass or stupid passions and that's what a person is and if the reason can get control the charity can control then you've got a rational person but at the same time I was dating I was in my 30s at the time and I would just find myself like doing stupid things and like knowing that I was doing something stupid knowing that I was going to make the wrong decision so I wanted something bigger than a horse and so I picked an elephant now I have no idea whether I took the metaphor from Buddha so Buddha said something like a man must or a sage must tame his mind as an elephant trainer trains an elephant something like that and I'd studied Buddhism in college a little bit it was always sort of like just out out of my Consciousness in any case It just fits so well with Buddhism and here's the thing it fits so well with psychotherapists like this is what I find from all the things in that book psychotherapists tell me this is the metaphor that most helps their clients oh so I never said what it is all right anyway so it's the metaphor is that our mind is divided into parts that sometimes conflict and if you think about these parts as being like a small Rider on top of a large elephant and the small Rider is our reason and the large elephant is everything else all the intuitive processes the emotions sometime the last million years we evolve the ability to think in sequence in language and words and logic but we're not that good at it you know so it's weak and if we get tired or drunk we do it badly but the automatic stuff boy that just goes on and on and you can't stop that so that's the metaphor we're like a small Rider saying oh we should go left go right but actually the elephant does what it wants and then it turns out the rider actually spends a lot of time just justifying whatever the elephant ended up doing so why is this useful for people so in the happiness hypothesis what I did was I looked for all of the psychological claims that had been made across multiple Millennia and multiple continents it had to pass those two filters to be considered a great truth and like the first one you find pretty much is the mind is divided into parts that sometimes conflict so Saint Paul the flesh lusteth against the spirit the spirit against the flesh so that ye cannot do the things ye would and I would ask my students you know I'd show them that quote I say well why don't you just do the things that you want to do like what's the problem you know what the right thing is to do just do it but we can't because we're not built that way I shouldn't say we can't what I should say is it's a struggle to do so so that's what I was trying to capture with that metaphor of all the things I've written like that is probably one of the three things that should be recorded because that seems to be the stickiest thing I ever wrote and I believe in the happiness hypothesis you argue that the key to happiness or a key to happiness is training the elephant it's getting the two in harmony so you should not think about it as though the writer is the real you and the Elephant is this like difficult servant and you have to train it and make it do what you want like that's the wrong way to think about things and people like me who are very you know cerebral cognitive rationalistic are prone to thinking that way but that's the wrong way to think a better way to think is that we are multiple we are contradictory inside of ourselves and in our relationships and that what you're striving for is just a better kind of Harmony just getting things working together in a better way what are the modalities for achieving said Harmony so I think introspection is an important tool and of course that's the foundation of Western philosophy you know over the temple at Delphi know thyself and Western Philosophy from Plato and Aristotle on has been very much focused on sort of rational inquiry so I think that's a part of it but you have to have some idea what you're trying to do and then just all these different wisdom Traditions give us different tools so from the Buddhists we get meditation well Hindus before them but especially in America we know much more the Buddhist updates of that so meditation is very much a way of training the elephant the elephant is like an animal you can't lecture it but if you're training a dog it learns by gradual reinforcement and so meditation is a very powerful way to train the elephant gradually but it's very hard and especially for young people I used to assign it in my psych 101 class I have a unit on self-improvement and most people dropped it pretty quickly it's very hard to stick with but it works if you can stick with it self-hypnosis is another way to train the elephant behavioral therapy is an excellent way to basically catch yourself thinking these automatic erroneous thoughts and then correct them so there are a lot of psychological techniques and a lot of the most powerful ones were actually discovered by either the Buddhists or the stoics and the Stokes are my new favorites because I think they really help you deal with the insanity of life in our country today What specifically sticks out to you from the stoics we have the word stoic and many people think to be stoic is like well you know you're being burned at the state but you don't scream or cry you're tough you don't show emotion but that's not what the stoics were about but the Stokes were about was not letting the world trigger you as it were not letting the world set your negative emotions a mature person has control of their perceptions they see the world correctly they don't let their mind run away so one of the most important quotes Epictetus it is not things that disturb us but our appraisals of them so just anything you're hoping for you don't get instead of instantly going down a path of you know damn it I know and why did I do that or why did they you just reappraise things and where you are and you set yourself on a better course if I find that for life in a modern Western Nation I think the stoics are really the best guides I've found to living a life of both Equanimity and engagement of course there's many kinds of Buddhism and some allow you to be very engaged in the world but the stoics I mean like Marcus Aurelius was the emperor of Rome you know Epictetus was a slave you could be at any level in society and you could be engaged in society but yet still learn to manage your emotions and appraisals and live a flourishing life it's very possible that I am not understanding this correctly because that happens a lot but what I heard at least was that you're kind of using the writer to talk to yourself in a rational way that might in some way soothe the elephant yes that's right that's what CBT does so cognitive behavioral therapy is a technique which actually comes straight out of stoic teachings it's a technique where you identify the common patterns of distorted thoughts so binary thinking catastrophizing over generalizing there are things that we habitually do when driven by emotion that are distortions of thought it's easy to see this in others it's easy to see them in your children but CBT is a technique developed by Aaron Beck and a few others the 1960s once you have the names of these thoughts of these distortions there's about 12 to 15 of them and once you have the names of them you can label them very quickly when you see yourself catastrophizing over some little thing and you think oh all these terrible things are going to happen even though they never have before so just being able to label it and you can kind of laugh at yourself and I got a greater interest in this from my friend Greg lucianov my co-author on the calling the American mind because Greg is prone to depression and he had a very serious one in 2007 and learned CPT afterwards so that's kind of how I got into CBT in my 50s I guess it was so how do you use this stoic wisdom slash modern psychotherapeutic approach of CBT in the context of living in what seems at times to be an increasingly insane World in 2022. well so I'll tell you when I started it in 2017 I think it was you know the first year of Donald Trump's presidency and he's making saber-rattling noises about nuclear war with North Korea and my wife is korean-american and she had a trip planned with my son they were going to go with her father to Seoul and see relatives and at the same time I'm thinking oh my God I think Trump actually wants to Nuke North Korea and I literally started reading up on prepping for you know what should we have in iodine tablets you know we live in New York City and if Kim Jong-un could send a missile to New York he'd do it and I really started thinking about nuclear war as I did when I was a child and I would triggered it but I just thought I need to not just jump into my email first thing in the morning I need to like set my mind I didn't know it at the time but that's actually one of the major stoic practices it's just a morning routine or an evening routine read great thinkers read meditations on life start your day off with the proper mental frame and end it with the proper mental thing so I started reading Marcus Aurelius who actually maybe you can tell me first of all how often have you talked about the stoics on your show exactly one time prior to this oh my goodness okay good so listeners of your show this won't just be a 17th repeat but if your show is called 10 happier then I think you should be devoting at least 10 of your shows to the stoics that would be that would be my advice okay in fact you know what hold on a sec I have something for you okay so as I read the stoics I find that actually the stoics warned us about social media like they basically understood human nature human cognition and Human Relationships so well that they have all these amazing quotes so here's from Marcus Aurelius the things you think about determine the quality of your mind your soul takes on the color of your thoughts color it with a run of thoughts like these anywhere you can lead your life you can lead a good one Okay so whatever you sort of immerse yourself in that's what your mind becomes so why would you spend any time on Twitter like it just doesn't make any sense that you're just putting your head in the gutter and you're going to end up with a gutter mind here's an even more incredible one from that petitas he says if your body was turned over to just anyone you would doubtless take exception why aren't you ashamed that you've made your mind vulnerable to anyone who happens to criticize you so that it automatically becomes confused and upset and once again that's social media in particular Twitter why would you put yourself in a place where total strangers who are using a fake name we have no history with who don't matter get to say terrible things about you and that can throw you off so either get to the point of a stoic or Buddhist who just doesn't care if people call you all kinds of names or don't spend your day on Twitter so is your advice no social media if you want to be happy no it depends what you do for a living I mean so you know I'm a professor and a writer and and I follow politics so there are advantages to checking in with Twitter now and then it is an incredible tool to find things to read to see what's going on and because I'm writing about it I have to actually have some sense of what's going on but it really did kind of drive me crazy a couple years ago it really did throw me for a spin and that's also related to you know why I've gotten into the stoics later so social media can be a tool that you use and I think LinkedIn is a good example LinkedIn people use because it's useful very few people are addicted to it it doesn't take over their lives there are very few people who regret that they're on LinkedIn whereas Twitter Instagram you know tick tock's a little different because it's mostly about creativity and humor and dancing but there are now pockets of it that are really much more toxic than anything else out there so I think it depends on who you are it depends on what you do for a living because there are some uses and to the extent that you can use it as a tool to advance your ends it can be quite useful but the subset that are based on a business model where you are generating content for the platform you're not the customer the advertisers are the customers and you are the product that is bringing other people on to be eyeballs for the customers that business model tends to try to hook people so I do think that no one under 16 should be on any form of social media where they post and wait for people to comment that I think and I've got a lot of evidence on this social media particularly Instagram I do believe is the major cause or at least half of the cause of the Teen Mental Health crisis but for adults I'm reluctant to tell adults what to do other than just be careful you wrote a a piece in the Atlantic recently that went massively viral I read it it was fantastic and it is now the basis for a book you're working on and my hope is to have you back on to talk about it in a full way at that time but since we're on the subjects of social media I do want to bring this up your article if memory serves really talks about the pernicious impact of social media on the functioning of democracy and as it itching powder on our divisions and to bring this full circle it really reminds me of the elephant and writer metaphor which you use not only in the happiness hypothesis but also in the Righteous Mind a book you wrote about why good people are divided by politics and religion and so given that many if not all of us will have spent time feeling hatred for the other tribe while glancing at our social media I wonder if you could talk about the utility of the elephant and writer metaphor in this Zone yeah okay so let's start with the main idea of the Atlantic article you know I've been a professor since 1995 and I love being a professor I love universities I love students but all of a sudden something weird just something changing the fabric of the social Universe in 2014 and hit campus first this weird numerality students claiming that they were being harmed by words and organizing to prosecute people because they used a word or they said something or they didn't say something so we couldn't understand what's happening and the demands for safe spaces trigger warnings microaggression like came out of nowhere 2014 wasn't there in 2012 and then weird stuff started happening not just on universities then it spread to many other institutions journalism the Arts politics so our politics is now really weird in ways that I I was struggling to understand I've been struggling since 2014 to understand it and I just been thinking of the Babel story we're divided and when I went back and reread the actual text it's just a very short little story in Genesis the key line is that God says when he sees the humans building this great tower to make a name for themselves and so that we will not be flooded again because this is a little after Noah in the flood and God says let us go down and confound their language so that they may not understand one another and boom like that line I said wow that's what's happened to us so I've been thinking about that for the last couple years and really just it's just been gnawing at me like how did this happen how are we in Babel and if you imagine the descendants of Noah like 10 20 Generations After the flood they build this incredible city with a tower of 50 stories tall or whatever you'd feel such incredible oh I'm proud of doing that and then boom one day one day out of nowhere the tower is knocked down not only that but you literally can't talk to the person next to you like this tragedy has happened and you literally cannot understand the person next to you that's what it's felt like to me in the 2010s it wasn't like this in 2012 but by 2015 it was like this on campus and by 2018 it was like this in journalism of the Arts by 2020 was like this almost everywhere so that's what I was trying to explain and the link to social media that I worked out as a social psychologist is everybody looks at social media and politics in terms of fake news like oh it spreads misinformation okay yeah it does that but I'm not interested I'm a social psychologist I'm interested in how it changes relationships and what I argue in the essay is that the key thing to look at is the democratization of intimidation anyone can harass or intimidate anyone anytime with no accountability anonymously no penalty for false accusations no due process nothing this is why we all suddenly started walking on eggshells you know as a teacher I used to be able to say provocative things and leave my class through difficult ideas I don't dare do that now because if I offend anyone they can report me they could publicize it all kinds of weird stuff happens we have to all be walking on eggshells now not everywhere in the country but in many institutions so what I was focusing on was how is it that our institutions are getting so stupid they keep doing these stupid stupid things even though they're full of smart people and the basic argument was social media gave everybody like a little dart gun you can harass her intimidate you can accuse anyone of anything under a fake name if you want and then the accusation may go nowhere or millions of people could sign on to it so it's like this game of Russian Roulette and everyone's afraid of each other so that's what I was trying to get at how is it that we became afraid of each other to the point where we don't speak up and say what we're thinking we don't challenge each other's ideas at least in many parts of the academy anymore that's what has made us structurally stupid the loss of viewpoint diversity and while I'm rambling a bit here I'm sort of trying to give you like seven different ideas in this 8 000 word article but that's what the Battle of metaphor is all about that social media allowed a small number of people to intimidate a large number of people to such an extent that our basic social institutions don't work anymore that's a great summary of a complex set of arguments you're making in that article and I think why I was bringing in the writer and the Elephant is that we can't understand each other anymore and and that can play out in lots of ways but one of the ways is these tribal divides especially here in America as I read your Atlantic article about the deleterious impacts of social media I started remembering reading the Righteous Mind years before in which you talk about if memory serves that as we can start to understand that we all have our elephants that can create a kind of empathy with other people's elephants I see ice yes okay so the Crux of my own research I love to write about other people's research I love to synthesize Scholars and philosophers research but the extent that I've made a contribution myself in empirical psychology it's from doing research on how morality varies across cultures and coming up with a theory that my colleagues and I call moral foundations Theory where fairness Liberty loyalty Authority and sanctity and it's like taste buds on our tongue we all have the same taste buds but there are different Cuisines around the world and once you understand that you can see like oh you know if you're raised in a different culture you have different likes dislikes around food and you understand why Australians might like Vegemite and if you didn't grow up with it you're not going to like it in the same way if you're either predisposed to be on the left because it's like everything else it's genetically heritable so if you're pretty is supposed to be on the left or if you're raised in Progressive environments you're going to have a hyper developed sense for care and fairness as equality you're very focused on equality and if you look at a lot of the social movements on the left it's about victims and oppression and inequality and all of those are important topics and a sense the left specializes in finding injustices and trying to write them but then you're kind of blind to some other things and if you're on the right if you have a temperament that's predisposed to be conservative and that's heritable and you can tell if someone's going to be conservative because if their room is very neat and they've always been very neat and organized they're on time to meetings they're more likely than average to end up on the right and they value tradition and they value order and they have the same taste buds they certainly can understand care and quality but they think of fairness more as proportionality you know you do the crime you should do the time you should clean up after yourself you should have personal responsibility you should be loyal to your groups you should respect legitimate Authority you should treat your body as a temple not as a playground so these are a whole range of moral intuitions and what I came to see working in India originally but then working across the political divide in America is that there's a real complementarity between right and left if you have a progressive impulse and a conservative impulse in a society that you actually get the best policy you get the best outcomes now unfortunately what's happened and here maybe I can swing around to your question which is really about empathy is in a country in which we used to have an active Center left and they are still the dominant Force the Democratic party and we used to have an active center right and they are no longer the force in the Republican party what social media has done is it is hyper-empowered the extremes but in an unusual way if we look at the parties the Republican party has become the structurally stupid party because they turned on their moderates they've kicked them all out they've persecuted them they've harassed them death threats so most of the moderates have gone from the Republican Party especially at the Congressional level the Democrats that's not true and so people on the left just point to this they say you know look what Donald Trump did look what the Senate Republicans did they're insane they're terrible they're evil we can't have a democracy and they're right they're right about all of that but they can't understand they can't do the reversal which is to say well what if you're on the right what would you say if you're on the right what you see it's not that the Democratic party is insane or structurally stupid what you see is that the cultural left has undergone a similar transformation into structuralist stupidity you see that in universities people are afraid to speak up and challenge the dominant view you see that in any Progressive organization people are so afraid to dissent on anything and so if you're on the right you see you have I mean every day you have 50 examples in your inbox of incredible structural stupidity on the left so my argument is most people are reasonable having a balance between central left center right is a good thing both sides have experienced a super empowerment of their furthest wings but in an asymmetric way that makes it hard to see both sides but if you can see both sides then suddenly you realize whoa It's not that they're the enemy it's that the whole system is so messed up that our democracy is going to collapse our democracy cannot survive this way if we keep going the way we're going we don't have very long to live and by live I don't mean we're going to physically die I just mean to live as a Democratic Republic of the sort that our Founders gave us and of the sort we thought we had so I don't want to be too apocalyptic but maybe it would help to share that I basically never get angry I actually just try to understand what the hell's going on and that gives me I think some empathy for everybody is that luck of the genetic draw for you or is that a skill that the rest of us could cultivate huh um by disposition I'm a center-left kind of person I was always a I've always voted for Democrats so I think anyone sort of with a temperament that's sort of Center left to center right can do this what happened to me was I set out to write the Righteous Mind originally to help the Democrats stop losing this was after George W bush had won twice when I thought he shouldn't have and so I forced myself to be exposed to conservative ideas and writings I read National Review and I discovered hey actually it's a lot of good ideas there especially if we read the best people and I found as a social scientist like wow I'm a much better social scientist if I actually listen to multiple sides of a policy issue so as a researcher and a social scientist it took me years to do this which means that an average person who isn't doing this for a living it might be hard but I've taught a lot of courses and I've worked with a lot of students in the space of one semester like they really get it it actually doesn't take that long to understand that your fellow countrymen see things differently than you because so many of us are good at doing this for other cultures we can be very tolerant of other cultures why can't we be tolerant of our neighbors and it turns out with just a little work you can and so yeah I guess okay everybody should go out and just read The Righteous Mind that actually may be enough and then the other thing is go to openmindplatform.org it's a program that Caroline Mel and I created to actually teach people to do this and to to understand the psychology why it's hard to do it but to use some psychological techniques to be better at it so openmindplatform.org we designed it for use in organizations actually so if you find that your company or your school or your PTA group or anything if you find that things are tense and there's just a lot of fear or fighting or anger if everybody does it you all have a vocabulary in common you all learn how to get along a lot better and you'll be much less structurally stupid because you'll be able to have constructive arguments I wonder if one of the keys here is something you said earlier which is that we're pretty good at seeing irrationality and hypocrisy and others but not so good at seeing our own elephants and just knowing that seems like a great North Star for navigating Babel to use your terminology well it's a starting point I mean basically what you just said is literally chapter four of the happiness hypothesis if you collect quotations around the world you find a lot of this form so here's the familiar one why do you see the spec of your neighbor's eye but you do not notice the log in your own eye so yes we're really good at finding flaws in other people and we're really good at defending ourselves from charges that we're the same here's a similar quote from Buddha it's easy to see The Faults of others but difficult to see one's own faults one shows the faults of others like chaff winnowed in the wind but one conceals one's own faults as a cunning Gambler conceals his dice so wise people in every human society that has writing are on to exactly what you just said that were Hypocrites and in the chapter I go through why we evolved to be hypocrites so we evolved to try to win the game of social reputation and Prestige and so we're always trying to make ourselves look good but here's the paradoxical effect if you admit your flaws and you're honest about it you actually in the long run tend to come out ahead so yeah understanding that we're all hypocrites we're all struggling to figure out what's true it's very difficult to figure out what's true and I think it's much harder now than it was 10 years ago so yeah a little bit of humility about how hard it is to know reality and how hard it is to even know yourself so yeah I think that does help coming up Jonathan height on how we can be happier in our work lives a defense of striving which is often denigrated in the meditation world and the power of having an accountability partner when you're trying to change your habits that's coming up after this this episode of 10 happier is brought to you by New York Times all access always cool when a brand I love wants to advertise on this show I've been an Avid Reader of the New York Times for at least 30 years for the best in news analysis and culture there's only one New York Times and now you can enjoy times level expertise in the areas of games cooking product reviews and sports with the New York Times all access subscription in addition to original reporting from journalists across the world you can unwind with spelling bee Wordle the crossword and more enjoy delicious recipes and daily inspiration from cooking experts explore independent reviews for thousands of products in wire cutter and discover in-depth personalized Sports journalism from the athletic New York Times I'll access everything the times offers all in one subscription to subscribe go to nytimes.com All Access [Music] when you hear the word kombucha you probably think that's uh supposed to be good for me Isn't it and it is but did you know that most kombuchas have something like five tablespoons of added sugar however hum kombucha has zero sugar low sugar and no sugar added options so you always know what you're getting and it's absurdly tasty the good folks from hum recently sent me a case of the stuff I have I and many members of my family tried it and it was very very delicious we sipped everything from strawberry lemonade to peach tea to Blueberry mint if you want to check it out go to humkombucha.com and get 25 off a six or eight pack to try it out that's hum with two M's kombucha.com and use the code happier to get a deal and sip for yourself [Music] how much if any optimism do you have that we can achieve the requisite level of empathy and structural sanity to get through this tumultuous period of time intact in the short term I am an incredible pessimist in the medium term I'm a pessimist in the long term my rider is optimistic that is I believe my friend Steve Pinker that in the long run things are getting better and people have often thought that their world was going to hell and they've almost always been wrong the way to reconcile all this I believe is to understand that there are Cycles in history and they last about 80 years 80 to 100 years and a society comes through a crisis a war a terrible time typically and then they build institutions that create something new this happened with the founding of the country in the 1780s it happened after the Civil War it happened after the Depression of World War II so there are Cycles in history when new institutions and Norms get built and then you get greatness for a couple of generations never four you don't get four generations you get two or three and things Decay and things change and the institutions that were built after the second world war worked great for a little while but we can't just keep slowly updating them there are many theories out there that talk about how every 80 to 100 years things really break you get a crisis and several theories have predicted 2020 2025 as the peak year of Crisis so things are going to get a lot worse I believe we're gonna have a lot more political chaos political violence as we had in the 60s and 70s I don't think that you know five years from now it's not like oh boy wasn't that crazy those early 20s they were crazy but man we're done with that I don't think we're going to be through this in five years but eventually we will get through it and Amazon will always be there for you to get products like it's not like we're gonna starve or die but I think the sense we had of a stable democracy which was the Envy of the world I think that is gone and we're gonna have to rebuild it that's gonna be the great challenge for the next generation is to is to build something anew I know you teach a course called work wisdom and happiness and so I'm interested in talking a little bit about how we can be happier in one of the most anxiety producing spheres of life which is work and in particular I'm interested in the case I believe you make in the happiness hypothesis which is a kind of Defense of striving there is a received wisdom that happiness cannot be the result of external rewards but you take that on can you say more about that yeah so the Buddhist s do generally preach a kind of non-attachment and they lived in Worlds in which they didn't even know what the weather was going to be the next day volcano erupting and everyone's dead like they really couldn't plan on retirement you know until the 20th century nobody could plan on retirement and so they developed philosophies of not attachment and of getting distance and especially the Buddhists had ideas of non-striving I think the stomachs are are more comfortable with striving and so what I was writing the happiness hypothesis I was very taken with Buddhism as I had been since college but I began to see that for different societies there are different philosophies that would be optimal and Americans are parentally attracted to Buddhism because it's a Counterpoint to our more outgoing aggressive achieve do things discover things get stronger get smarter and so we're often looking over our shoulder and saying what isn't there peace and Tranquility over there but that doesn't mean that we should be Buddhists and I've been active in positive psychology since began in 1999 or so and it turns out that there are some things that really do make you happier and it's especially relationships and being embedded in a community it's having good work that uses your strengths so it's not correct that oh just look within and don't try to change the world no the world's never going to conform to what you want and so if you pin your hopes on making the world be just the way you want you'll always be disappointed but at the same time it is worth striving to get your relationships right to find work that uses your strengths to arrange your life so you have a sense of control and efficacy over what you do if you have work that you don't love that doesn't use your strengths or you have little control of what happens to you and you've got demands placed on you randomly and you don't have friends at work like yeah you're going to be unhappy so by the time I finish the book I embraced a kind of a more Western approach like you know Buddhism is fascinating and useful but I think the path to flourishing for most Americans and Western Europeans is going to draw from multiple traditions but it is ultimately going to be for many people to try to make a mark on the World to strive to aim just don't get so carried away that you lose perspective and you let the world control you are mood that's where stoicism in particular I think is so helpful it's interesting because I wouldn't call myself a Buddhist scholar but I certainly have written a couple books about meditation and practiced Buddhist Meditation quite a bit and my understanding of the Buddha's life is he did renounce the worldly but spent a lot of time hanging out with merchants and kings and my understanding of Buddhism is not that you shouldn't strive it's that you should not be attached to the results yeah there's a line in the bhagavad-gita you know Hinduism the roots of it have that too you should be the same in success and failure but let me ask you this is a question I asked I forget which Buddhist scholar I had conversation with many years ago and I said okay let's talk about attachment not attachment if your wife dies is it appropriate to feel pain and loss he couldn't give me a clear answer what do you think so there's no question that if my wife died I would feel an enormous amount of pain and loss but is that a Buddhist reaction or is that just a human reaction that's not consistent with what the Buddhist ideal is so take everything about stay with a grain of salt because I pick things up along the way but the Buddha is memory serves the lost one of his disciples sorry Putra I think and said it was if the moon had fallen from the sky or something to that effect there's also a great story about a Buddhist master who lost his daughter and was seen by his disciples crying and they said I thought Master you said everything's an illusion and he said some Illusions are more painful than others okay as long as there's a recognition of that that general guide you should be looking at your attachments and I just think Life is Richer and better if you have certain kinds of attachment which it will be painful to lose but you can either deal with the grief in ways that resolve it quickly or not if there are any Buddhist Scholars listening to us they're probably holding their hair no they're not getting upset they're actually very thankful about this but so yeah we might move on away from Buddhist scholarship it's interesting on this issue of striving though I had a conversation just yesterday with a long time friend who had a massive positive development in his work life which resulted in a huge financial windfall I've been mind-bending Financial windfall and he said he was no happier the moment that happened then the moment preceding it and in fact was perhaps more anxious and so I relate that to you in light of everything we've just discussed to see what it brings up for you so yeah that's exactly it is how closely do you want to Hitch your moods to what happens in life and one school is go for it Embrace Life grab it all experience everything another is no get some distance step back be almost indifferent to what happens and then a third is how about let's try to maximize the good stuff and minimize the bad stuff and to that I'd actually like to add a fourth consideration which is your age so you know the Buddha lived and then renounced you know if my son is 16 if he were to take a Buddhism next year and devote himself to spiritual growth and separate from the world that would be a tragedy that would be such a loss a young person should live a young person must get his heart broken many times must experience success and failure and then later in midlife maybe you can step back I was a philosophy major undergrad so oh the unexamined life is not worth living as Socrates said but the unlived life is not worth examining that's what I came to the happiness hypothesis was a kind of a western vision of life but just tempered by the psychological understandings of the Buddhists and stoics I think that's the best way to live a life in the west again many people many lives I'm a Jon Stewart Mill liberal we want a society that makes maximum room for people to construct lives that they want but actually you know what if I could get back to a thread that we had a moment ago which we didn't really pick up on enough was this course that I'm teaching at Stern I teach at the business school nyu's turn and I teach a course I've taught it since 2014 called work wisdom and happiness but I've actually retooled it in the last year the theme of the course now is smarter stronger happier and the idea is this it's actually sort of smarter stronger more socially skilled happier so far it's just been for MBA students you know they've been out in the world a few years they're coming back to school and the idea is let's start with stronger how do you get stronger and the key idea there is anti-fragility this is the opening chapter of the coddling of the American mind you know our immune systems are anti-fragile if you protect them from dirt and germs then you weaken them they have to have exposure in order to get strong children are the same way if we protect our kids from negative experiences from teasing from minor injuries then they don't learn how to deal with people or how to deal with the world so we're all anti-fragile and gen Z people born 1996 and later have been so overprotected in all the English-speaking countries it's the same thing in Canada and Britain as it is in America and so I talked with the students about how we're anti-fragile how you have to take risks you have to put yourself out there because that's how you learn that's how you grow the most and once we understand growth how do you get stronger well now we look at how to get smarter we naturally look for evidence that we're right but if you look for evidence that you're wrong you'll get smarter a lot faster if you read things that are contrary to your view if you're on the left read the smartest people on the right vice versa you'll actually get smarter really quickly and what I find is I write a lot of different things and I find that if I seek out people who disagree my work gets better faster than if I seek out people who agree so once you understand how to get stronger not apply to getting smarter and now let's apply that to becoming more sociable because almost everybody wants to be more socially skilled very few people feel that they're very socially skilled and unsatisfied with it most people don't feel they have enough close friends especially young people they're very isolated so how do you become more socially skilled and again you have to take risks you have to put yourself out there you have to deal with a lot of rejection and that will make you stronger and then the conclusion of the class is if you can make yourself stronger smarter and more socially skilled then you will be more successful at work and again this is a an MBA course we're focused on work you will be more successful at work and if you're all those things including successful at work you will be happier so yeah that's what I've been working on in my teaching over the last year what are the practices that you prescribe to your students in this course so I assign the five minute Journal if you just look it up five minute Journal I forget the website name you know the physical book is is very nice and it just sort of guides you through a morning routine or an evening routines that's the first thing and about half the students end up really liking and continuing it half of them drop it I don't force them to stick with any habit but I make them try a few habits over the course of this very short course just six weeks long then I have them read the opening chapter or two of atomic habits which is all about you know it's a very behaviorist view of self-change and you have to set up reinforcements and small steps and I have them identify by the end of the first class what is the change you want to make in yourself and how are you going to do it and that's what the file papers about what did you do how did you pick this how did it go and I don't grade them on whether they were successful I create them on whether they write a good psychology paper were they reflected on who they are on what we know about self-change and they picked some methods it turns out one really powerful practice was having an accountability partner so they used to each be on their own to do this but it turns out if you pair them up in the class and I'm experimenting with it should be a friend or a stranger somebody they don't know but you pair them up with someone and my suggestion is we meet on Monday nights every week how about on Thursdays you check it now you can adjust that but on Thursdays you check in it can be just my textbook how's it going did you do the thing you said you were going to do so you have to be accountable to someone mid-week that seems to speed up their progress otherwise it's too easy to make excuses the rider comes up with you know the elephant doesn't want to do it he doesn't want to get up early in the morning and go running or he doesn't want to put himself out there and take risks and the writer makes excuses for him but if you have to face an accountability partner who's going to ask you so did you do the thing that you promised me you would do so we use all the tricks that we can think of the psychological tricks and the social tricks to help the Rider and the Elephant work together ultimately change the elephant is really what it's about coming up Jonathan height on why we need adversity his theory on the linkage between political correctness and adversity and advice on how to participate cheerfully in turbulent tribalized polarized times after this looking to discover a gem something inspiring or just something you can put on around the house Etsy has it shop outerwear accessories and home pieces made for all budgets by independent sellers new to Etsy use code new to get 10 off your first purchase that's code new maximum discount value of fifty dollars offer ends June 30th 2023 see terms at etsy.com terms Etsy has it shop etsy.com what are you saving up for a vacation a remodel or just because saving is a smart thing to do a CD from Sandy Spring Bank gives you time to grow your savings at a Guaranteed Rate right now you can earn interest at 4.25 annual percentage yield on a 14-month CD or 4.00 apy on a 35-month CD ready to grow your savings let's talk visit sandyspringbank.com CD specials minimum opening deposit is 2500 member FDIC last question for me and this goes to the notion of being stronger and this is a question you look at in the happiness hypothesis is adversity good for us or bad for us um so generally it's good for us but it has to be the right kind of adversity at the right time and with the right lessons because this is also one of those great truths that you find in almost every culture it's really amazing I actually read you a couple of the quotes the best known one of course is from Nietzsche you know what doesn't kill me makes me stronger but you find this in well there's a quote from mentions When Heaven is about to confer a great responsibility on any man it will exercise his mind but suffering subject his seniors and Bones to hard work etc et cetera so anyway we need adversity to grow adversity for two three four-year-olds probably not much real adversity in early childhood can leave real scars there's a lot of research on adverse childhood experiences that can be bad but facing social adversity if it doesn't go on too long if it's not so severe can often be very strengthening so in the 1990s we freaked out we changed the way we raise kids it's quite sudden actually the amount of time that mothers and fathers begin spending with their kids is for some reason it shoots up right around 1995 I can't figure this out so we start over protecting our kids a lot in the 1990s into the present day and this I believe is the other major reason why rates of depression self-harm suicide anxiety have doubled for some subsets since 2012. our teens are in a terrible State very very bad mental health and I believe it's because we vastly overprotected them deprive them of normal adversity while at the same time putting them on social media or giving them phones that they then beginning around 2012 they all got on social media and boom within a year the girls the rate of depression is up 50 within a year or well two years 2012 to 2014 2015. the boys also are not doing well but the data doesn't allow me to connect the boys outcomes to social media but for the girls the connections are pretty clear but if I understand your argument correctly this coddling LED not only to the public health crises around mental health of young people once they go from being coddled to being exposed on social media but also if I'm understanding you correctly to what has been unflatteringly referred to as Wok is a more political correctness because these kids get to college and can't handle opposing views that's right and there's an anomaly that's not widely known it's just discovered a year or two ago which is that it's especially girls on the left they are the ones who most bear the brunt of this girls on the right are not doing nearly as badly we have this long period from I was born in 1963 to 2013 it's 50 years in which we made the most incredible progress on every possible social justice issue the hundred years before I was born very little progress from the Emancipation Proclamation to my birth 1963 Martin Luther King's speech 1963. the next 50 years incredible progress but for some reason young women on the left decide in 2013 that everything is and always was racism sexism oppression gender pay gaps you know this doesn't have much link to reality but girls on the left were immersed in a social media environment Tumblr turns out I didn't know somebody wrote the article Tumblr turns out to be a real petri dish of this concern so that might explain why it's the girls on the left who become depressed first and most and to this day so there's all kinds of twists and turns to this story it's not a one-factor causation it's not just the overprotection it's not just being on social media and it's not just this set of ideas about oppression and victimology it's interesting interactions one other that I just really found in the last few days I was reading Emile durkheim my favorite sociologist who talks about Collective effervescence and communal rituals and this human need to come together physically and we dance together we drink together like cultures all over the world do this they have rituals that bring the group together and it's essential that you move together you have to use your muscles for embodied creatures we have bodies so as I was reading durkheim on this an article that was reviewing durkheim's work and I realized oh my God the metaverse is the absolute opposite of what durkheim said we need when kids are connecting not even synchronously like it's one thing if you're like you and I were talking now like we have at least some back and forth if we were together in person it'd be much better we'd have much more of a bond but at least this is synchronous what the girls are doing is asynchronous so when all the kids got on their screens all day long they all got iPhones around 2012 plus or minus a couple years when they all move their social Labs onto screens the boys went for video games and video games are synchronous so my son would play fortnite with his friends and that was at least they're working together to find and kill other groups of boys and it was great fun and that's actually very healthy so multiplayer video games are not bad for kids they might even be good for them good limits but what did the girls do when they got on they went for Instagram Tumblr and Pinterest they went for the visual platforms which are asynchronous performative self-presentation but what do girls need what are girls games all about girls more than boys are about connection so when you look before all this stuff was happening what do girls do patty cake they have all these rhyme games with clapping girls do all these things to physically synchronize themselves with other girls that's part of growing up as a girl jump rope girls games are not competitive they're about bonding and when everyone moves on to digital platforms the boys are doing okay it's kind of more fun but the girls you know completely starving for communion and connection they're so lonely and they're so insecure as they go through puberty alone so there's a lot of pieces to this story but the main victims have been girls born after 1995. Jonathan I really appreciate you coming on I think you've said a lot of interesting things and a lot of things that will be challenging to our audience which is actually part of your thesis that we should all be challenging ourselves we have referenced to many of your books and you've referenced at least one of the sort of digital platforms you've created open mind is there anything else that's worth mentioning in terms of resources you've put out into the world that people could access yes so I would suggest starting either at thecoddling.com which is the website for the cotton American mind or my main website which is jonathanheit.com my last name is h-a-i-d-t and I've put everything there especially I have a page on social media put all my work on social medias on a single page you can find everything there and I would like to end with actually a quote I really love now because I know sometimes when I talk about democracy and mental health it's pretty dark but there's this quote I found from Joseph Campbell I I hope I can end with here so Joseph Campbell studied mythology in the late 20th century he was the world's greatest expert on myth and he wrote a book called the hero with a thousand faces and he looked at Hero Stories from around the world and you have special on PBS that really moved me when I saw it in the 1990s but he has this quote he says the lesson of the hero is this how do you live in this crazy difficult dangerous world he said quote the lesson is participate joyfully in the Sorrows of the world we cannot cure the world of Sorrows but we can choose to live in joy the Warrior's approach is to say yes to life yay to it all and I think we're in one of those Cycles a lot of things are getting worse at least socially and politically but it's a temporary cycle and we have to figure out how to live it could go on five years it could go on 30 years we don't know but I think Joseph Campbell offers us guidance for how to actually live engaged and reasonably happy lives during this period amen participate joyfully in the Sowers of the world I think that is a pretty solid mantra for these tumultuous times all right well Dan pleasure talking with you likewise thank you very much appreciate it thanks again to Jonathan height thanks to you for listening by the way I have not asked for this in a minute but if you do have time to go into your podcast player and give us a rating and or a review that would really help it only takes a second thank you for that and thanks finally to everybody who works so hard on this show 10 happier is produced by Gabrielle Zuckerman DJ Kashmir Justine Davey Lauren Smith and Tara Anderson our supervising producer is Marissa Schneiderman and Kimmy regler is our managing producer scoring and mixing by Peter Bonaventure of ultraviolet audio and Nick thorburn of the band Islands wrote our theme we'll see you all on Wednesday when our guest will be Dolly chug who as mentioned at the top of this show happens to be a colleague and uh frequent friendly sparring partner of Jonathan height [Music] hey hey Prime members you can listen to 10 happier early and AD free on Amazon music download the Amazon music app today or you can listen early in ad free with onereplus in apple podcasts before you go do us a solid and tell us all about yourself by completing a short survey at onedry.com survey life is short and it's full of a lot of interesting questions what does happiness really mean how do I get the most out of my time here on Earth and what really is the best cereal these are the questions I seek to resolve on my weekly podcast life is short with Justin long if you're looking for the answer to deep philosophical questions like what is the meaning of life I I can't really help you but I do believe that we really enrich our experience here by learning from others and that's why in each episode I like to talk with actors musicians artists sciences and many more types of people about how they get the most out of life we explore how they felt during the highs and sometimes more importantly the lows of their careers we discuss how they've been able to stay happy during some of the harder times but if I'm being honest it's it's mostly just fun chats between friends about the important stuff like if you had a sandwich named after you what would be on it follow life is short wherever you get your podcasts you can also listen ad free on the Amazon music or wonder app Aaron Burr the founding father who fought valiantly in the revolution would later become the highest ranking American official ever charged with treason American history tellers is a podcast from wondery that explores the events and people who shaped our Collective history their newest season looks at the Insurrection of Aaron Burr nearly 200 years after his death Aaron Burr's Legacy remains hotly debated by historians after all he was a hero of the Revolutionary War served as a United States Senator and even vice president however Burr had his fair share of controversy killing Alexander Hamilton in a duel for example and also conspiring to take America's Western Front as his own to rule over like an emperor on American history tellers you will learn more about Burr's desperate power grab how it was thwarted by President Thomas Jefferson and how our fledgling democracy endured its first great stress test I didn't actually know about the whole Western Front thing until I was reading this promo so I'm going to listen to this show follow American history tellers wherever you get your podcast you can listen ad free on the Amazon music or wonder app

Channel: Ten Percent Happier

Views: 3,365

Keywords: #social, #psychology, #mindfulness, #podcast, #stronger, #mind, #elephant, #rider

Id: HfCWOv2d1qo

Length: 58min 53sec (3533 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 08 2023