Heroic Interview: The Happiness Hypothesis with Jonathan Haidt

you're listening to the happiness hypothesis an optimal living interview with Jonathan Hite and Brian Johnson hi this is Brian welcome back to the optimal living interview series today I'm thrilled to be chatting with Jonathan Hite one of the leading positive psychology researchers and academic professors about his great book the happiness hypothesis it's one of my favorite positive psychology books and favorite books in general really smart really grounded in practical Jonathan's now at NYU he's an editor of the positive psychology journal flourishing and just excited to be chatting today thanks for taking the time John my pleasure Brian good to be here so their happiness hypothesis you basically framed a couple different hypotheses and then you present your hypothesis about happiness can you give us the high-level overview of that sure so the book started out because I was teaching introductory psychology at the University of Virginia and I would try to illustrate psychological ideas by having quotes from the ancients and for a while it looked like I might not get tenure right my publication was going slowly and I thought well if I don't get tenure at UVA I don't want to transfer down to a down to a third-rate university I think I will just leave the academic world and try my hand at writing popular books on psychology and and what wouldn't it be fun to collect all those quotes I've been using for psych 101 and collect them all together and then write chapters on whether they're true or not so that was the origin of the book it was really just a kind of a an escape path from the Academy if I fail to get tenure and it was originally gonna be called 12 great truths insights into mind and heart from modern from ancient cultures and modern psychology and because after I I so I started well I did get tenure just barely but I did get it and I decided to write the book anyway and so I started reading all these ancient texts you know east and west you know the the the bhagavad-gita and Confucius and the Quran and the the old and new Testament and I would just collect all the psychological claims and I put them into clusters and I thought maybe there are 12 main ones that I wanted to write about and then I submitted the first manuscript idea for the book and I started working on it with basic books and I started running out of time and so I had actually write faster and I decided to change the title to ten great truths insights it's in mind at heart so that's a that's a you know Mel Brooks joke of anyone's history of the world part two but so I didn't think it was a book about happiness originally I thought it was a book about ancient ideas and basic books the the publisher that the title is a marketing decision the title is not up to the author the title is up to the publisher and they come up with this title the happiness hypothesis and at first I didn't really like it and part because you know the book I mean happiness is a big theme at the book but it's about a lot of stuff it's about virtue and hypocrisy and all sorts of things that the ancients talked about um but by the time I finished the revisions I realized that actually there are three hypotheses about happiness and so I thought the tale actually works pretty well so the first hypothesis about happiness is that happiness comes from getting what you want and that might be why we try to get so much stuff and we work so hard for things we think it'll make us happy but the book covers all the research on why it is that the happiness of attaining your goals is very short-lived people are often surprised you can work for years for something and when you succeed you're happy that day maybe the day after but it doesn't usually last more than a day or two we quickly reset our expectations and we're on to the next thing so a more sophisticated version of the happiness hypothesis is that happiness can never come from making the world meet your demands happiness comes from changing yourself it comes from within and the Buddhists and the Stoics certainly said that many ancient wise people said that and that's a better one and that's the one that I thought was the right one when I started writing the book but by the time I finished writing the book I decided that that might be a good approach for people who lived in the ancient world where terrible things could happen to you without warning the next des disease Raiders from the next tribe warfare all kinds of you know starvation all kinds of bad things can happen to you but today it's not like that um today it actually is worth striving it really is worth striving to get certain things right and that's the final version of the happiness hypothesis is that happiness comes from between from getting the right relationship between yourself and others yourself and your work and yourself and something larger than yourself if you work and you can work to get those three relationships better you will then be about as happy as you can be hmm amazing wonderfully encapsulated and thanks for the historical journey which in itself is a lesson right okay yeah the auto back right that's right life throws you all kinds of curves you don't know what's gonna happen but it's a still a lot a not much danger of death these days that's the key thing so good well what's I want to look at some of my favorite big ideas and at the top of my West is the frame you use to describe the Freud's relationship between the ego the super-ego in the it'd you call it the writer and the elephant can you talk to us about that sure so something I I realized in teaching is that you can't just lay out facts and then give evidence it's really hard to pay attention to that you need to tell stories and use metaphors because our minds are story processors little kids have no trouble tuning in if you put something in in in the form of a story but if you try to explain something factually even to eighteen year old kids in psych 101 it's hard for them to pay attention so I like to use a lot of metaphors and stories and you know one thing I saw in reading all these ancient works is that lots of lots of cultures have conceptualized the mind as being divided into parts that sometimes conflict that actually was great truth number one in my psych 101 class the mind is divided into parts that sometimes conflict and of course Freud was the master at observing observing these splits and explaining them and we all have this experience of what he called intra psychic conflict and how do you control your mind how do you make it do what you want how do you how do you make yourself get up at the time you want to or not eat the dessert that you want to and so we've all had this experience and the most obvious metaphor is as a horse and rider and Plato used that metaphor Plato gave us the idea in the Phaedrus I think it was that the mind is divided over the soul is like a charioteer of guiding two horses and the horses there are the emotions there's the dumb emotions and the dumb passions and the good passions but the charioteer is reason so I thought about that metaphor and and I openly decided now I honestly don't know if I stole this from Buddha or if I thought of it independently but I started thinking of it as though well you know a horse is kind of I want something much bigger and smarter because now we know the unconscious I mean Freud's unconscious was pretty smart but in a devious sort of way now we know that almost everything that goes on reminds his unconscious so the more modern view of the unconscious is that it's wise it's very good at certain processes and it's gigantic compared to the conscious so I decided to have it be a rider in an elephant I thought that was better than a much better horse and rider and then as I was writing I realized that Buddha says a man must tame his mind as an elephant trainer tames an elephant and I'd read Buddha at various points in my life so odds are I just got it from him I don't know but unconscious working it yeah that's right but at least here I you know I certainly give him credit in the book and so that is the metaphor so when I when I die if I'm remembered for one thing it'll probably be that metaphor because it seems to be very sticky metaphor psychotherapists love it lots of people write to me and tell me that it really helps them it's just the basic idea that your your conscious mind what you're aware of is like a little boy purchased perched on the back of an elephant and you maybe you can kind of kick him or pull his ears or something and you can try to make him go to the right or the left and if he's not doing anything he'll do it but if the elephant decides that he wants to go to the left he's really strong and you really can't stop him and so once you see that you are not the rider you are the whole thing you are the rider is the conscious part the elephant is the intuitive automatic part and maturity human surety is understanding how you work and getting those two parts to work in greater harmony and immaturity you know we all know people friends who are just you know it's really messed up there they're always making bad decisions they you know they might know what the right thing is to do but you know they're not going to do it because they have no self-control those are people have not gotten the right relationship between the rider and their elephant that's great so what are some some practical tips to get a better relationship so for one thing is to first of all to respect the elephant to not treat it as stupid or something to be completely dominated and so for example like the way I write or the way I make decisions is I try to to go through all the relevant stuff all the relevant factors and I'll even schedule that I'll put on my schedule like think about X and I'll kind of Mull it over or maybe I'll make some notes but then I wait a day or two because you have to most off the elephant is really good at mulling stuff and then you'll just see things that you didn't see when you you thought you were laying out all the facts so consulted respect that that's one thing another is train it train it as you would train any animal and so so for example you know if you most of most most of your listeners will have trained a dog at some point in their lives and with a dog you cannot train the dog by saying okay look Rover if you roll over I am gonna make you a steak dinner tonight okay it's not just he doesn't understand English if you give him a really big reward ten minutes after a behavior he will never ever learn never dogs can't learn that way the reward has to come very very quickly like within seconds of a behavior so gradual tuning up gradual training is the way to change the elephant you know most of us that this is the problem of New Year's resolutions it's the problems with so much as we think that if you get the rider to say something we're like an ethics pledge or an honor of code those sorts of things in the rider can say anything he wants but he's not really in charge and if you want to cultivate better behavior be it health behavior or moral behavior the two ways you really have to go about it are train the elephant gradual or change the path and this is actually an insight from chip and Dan Heath they had this wonderful book called switch they called me up I know chip chip Heath has a fellow social psychologist he called me up a number of years ago and said John we really like your metaphor is it okay if we use it in the book and I said take my metaphor please you know no need to pay me royalties just use it you write best-selling books so they use it and because of that people buy my book too but they add this thing it's so obvious and so powerful there's the rider and the elephant but the elephant is on a path and as we know in social psychology training somebody is really hard and the results are usually small but making a tiny change to the environment can have a huge impact on behavior and so just a nice example is if you want to suppose you want to make yourself go running every morning you want to exercise more and you resolve to do it but you know as Jerry Seinfeld says you know morning guy and evening guy are not the same person an evening guy can resolve to go run in the morning but morning guy says now I'm too tired but if you if you understand that you understand how this all works then you would do things like say okay I'm gonna first I'm gonna hang my running shoes and my running clothes like right on the handle of the bathroom door so that even to go to the bathroom I have to touch it and that's gonna make me more likely to get dressed in it and my run is gonna be to a donut shop I'm gonna run to a donut shop and have a delicious donut two miles away because even if on net you might gain weight from that if you do it for a few weeks you'll cultivate the habit and once you cultivate the habit then it's easy to maintain it it's the first up to 10 it better 11 weeks is the research has 10 to 12 weeks after that I have is really gonna stick and if you know if you develop a good habit for life it's worth eating a couple dozen donuts to get there hmm I love it and it this is great so that the incremental gains and then the small but significant environmental shifts and then weeds to it another one of my favorite big ideas from your book the idea that epiphanies don't become lasting change until we do basically the things you just right well they become yeah Tiffany's are so interesting I got really interested in them because you know I'm interested in in morality I study morality it's really what I do now happiness is a kind of a sideline my main academic research is on morality and I've always been interested you know I thought originally in grad school I would develop some method of teaching morality or training adolescents but it gradually I came to see no that's that really didn't work I mean if you're you know if you're the parent you can control the environment you have a little control but not that much you know if you're the US military or and you have people at a military academy you can control them for 24 hours a day for 4 years you can leave a little bit of a lasting impact it's not huge and so it's really hard to change the elephant with even with years of experience but there are all these cases of religious conversion experiences cases where somebody changed and it's always a moral changement someone has with these spontaneous peak experiences that Abe Maslow described and there's a wonderful book called quantum change by Miller is the first author so people have these experiences and they always come out of them resolving to be more loving or generous to you know they they don't become more materialistic they it's a real ethical transformation well William James of course is the classic in the varieties of religious experience he has two chapters on spontaneous conversion experiences so they're super interesting because you can get real moral change in the space of a few minutes and it lasts lasts weeks or months but here's the kicker it doesn't last years unless you support it we all you know we there's a kind of a sometimes you might think of it as a set point like for happiness or other things if you can have whatever epiphany you want and you feel that you're a different person but once you go back to your job and your friends and and your routine you'll go back to your old self over time and so it's very important if you have an epiphany you want to support it to develop some additional friendships or new friendships to change your environment the Buddha understood this very well that's why Buddhists talk about the Eightfold noble path to enlightenment snot just meditating and achieving insights you know you have to get the right community to support it so good and then to create that lasting change out of that I love it and then you just mentioned meditation so let's go there meditation you have my absolute favorite passage on the power of meditation which I've shared I don't know how many I say okay you say I'll read this right now you say suppose you read about a pill that you could take once a day to reduce anxiety to increase your contentment would you take it suppose further that the pill has a great variety of side effects all of them good increase to self esteem empathy and Trust it even improves memory suppose finally that the pill is all-natural and costs nothing now would you take it the pill exists it's called meditation yeah when you do the research on it I mean so the research of meditation is a little tricky because it's an area that has so many true believers and people who love it and desperately want it to be good so some of the research at least when I reviewed it back in 2004-2005 a lot of research was very sloppy but I reviewed what I could and the best research did seem to show that it really does have all these good effects and there's not a single negative side effect we know where's with Prozac and those pills you know they work I've tried them but you know they they mess with your body you know you feel I felt as though they were like workmen banging around in my brain when I when I was on those and at times in my life especially when I'm emotionally you know when there's just a lot going on and I'm anxious I've done meditation and within a couple weeks it really really helps and what what it helps is you know you you come to see you get practiced that letting go of things that letting go of thoughts and seeing thoughts just floating on past like foam on a on a stream or like clouds passing you in the air and so you just you train it I'd say you train the elephant and you're training your mental habits to let go of things rather than perseverate one of my favorite psychological quotes from The Simpsons is a scene where Homer Homer says shut up brain or I'll stab you with a q-tip and you know that's the way it often feels you have these repetitive thoughts I know you know whenever I have an argument with my wife or you know I am repetitively going over my side of the story and like I know what I'm doing I recognize that these are cognitive distortions from cognitive therapy this is bad thinking and I say stop it stop it but it's hard but meditation really helps you stop it it really helps you gain control it helps you get a harmonious relation between the rider and the elephant and that's of course why Buddha talked about the mind that way and that's why Buddha was such an advocate of meditation and when I say Buddha I really should say the whole Hindu tradition out of which Buddhism grows I mean Buddhism is was drawing from a very ancient Hindu tradition of meditation but you know this is the whole book is about the wisdom of the Ancients and what I found is you know the ancients knew nothing about chemistry and physics I mean they were just horrible but when it comes to consciousness you know they they were as good as anything we have today it's amazing so let's go to what we have today in you referenced it just a moment ago cognitive therapy so talk to us about why you're such a fan why it works what it's about etc so cognitive therapy is done is the the most widely used form of therapy now there's a couple of real conundrums with psychotherapy one that's been known about since the 60s or 70s is that when you compare psychotherapy to placebo for most conditions it's better than a placebo but every form of psychotherapy works about as well as every other and it's very hard to identify exactly why any form works so this is a long-standing puzzle and if that's true then you should just pick the kind that is easiest and has the best success rate in terms of people sticking with it so for example this is why I mean meditation is actually kind of hard a lot of people drop out takes a lot of perseverance and skill practice that practice I should say cognitive therapy is really easy you can just buy the book feeling good by david burns and it's a pop psych book it's incredibly easy to read and he reports a study in the beginning that shows that people who read an earlier version of the book if you just read the book you actually get symptom relief better than placebo what I love about is that you learn the names of these distortions and once you have names like the fortune teller error you know people say oh I can't go to the party if I go to the party you know looking like this with this blemish on my face everyone's gonna laugh at me and then they'll you know they'll think this of me I mean you know we predict the future in a ridiculous way or we is one or catastrophizing you know if I do something wrong then a terrible thing will happen I'll get fired from my job emotional reasoning you know if I'm feeling threatened then he was threatening me so once you once you have names for these distortions you kind of laugh at them you say oh there I go again there's that fortune teller and you learn a technique for writing down on paper what your repetitive thought is what feelings that's giving you what the actual facts of the situation are what another interpretation of those facts are which is more conducive to equanimity and then more conducive to more in tune with reality and then once you once you reframe it you feel relief you actually feel the anxiety decrease and you feel it drifting away and so I've just described you the process of of CBT but now let me actually so chapter 2 of the righteous mind I'm sorry of the happiness hypothesis opens each chapter in the book opens with quotes from the ancients that illustrates a psychological truth and here are the two that open chapter two changing your mind quote the whole universe is change and life itself is but what you deem it that's from Marcus Aurelius and the same idea from Buddha quote what we are today comes from our thoughts of yesterday and our present thoughts build our life of tomorrow our life is the creation of our mind later in the chapter I cite the quote from Shakespeare's Hamlet let's see but there's nothing oh yes there's nothing good or bad but thinking makes it so so this is a great truth of psychology and CBT is the focus technique for taking advantage of it life itself is but what you deem it so let's look carefully let's come up with another appraisal and voila I reinterpret the I reinterpret what happened at the party last night and suddenly my anxiety is gone hmm it's amazing and practice it again and again and again incremental changes the elephant gets trained exactly that's right it's a training that's right and so you don't need to talk about your childhood with a psychotherapist with a you know a Freudian analyst you don't even I mean look often people do have real problems in their relationships they have to so you know a general purpose psychotherapist is a wonderful thing and many people do need it but for people of habitual if their chronic problem is anxiety or depression CBT is the most effective non therapy I mean sorry non drug technique others will work as well overall but CBT is so easy to do the people really stick with it and get very lasting results so good a couple other things I want to shout about vertical coherence talk to us about vertical coherence as it relates to our goal-setting and striving all that good stuff yeah this is probably the most subtle concept in the book and I think you are the first person ever to ask me about it it's one of my favorite concepts but it's not when there's got a lot of a lot of pickup in chapter 10 of the book which is the one on meaning in life it's the one that kind of brings everything together and presents the idea that happiness comes from between I talked about this really great idea that I got from Mike Csikszentmihalyi on well who studies flow and and he and gene Nakamura developed this interesting concept called vital engagement so vital engagement isn't just you know like oh I like horror films or you know I collect model airplanes vital engagement me see I have a definition here let's see they was okay they studied the end state of this deepening process and called it vital engagement which they define as quote a relationship to the world that is characterized both by experience experiences of flow which has enjoyed absorption and by meaning which is subjective significance okay to unpack that now the example I give is when I tried to teach this concept in my flourishing class at the University of Virginia there was a woman there stood in the class who had been very quiet all semester and but I knew from testing some things she'd said that she loved horses she was really into riding and horses and so I asked her about it and you know she and like what do you do and she told us a little bit about it and then she stopped but then I asked her how did you get involved in riding and that's really started her talking about her early experiences and I asked her if she knew the names of ten horses from previous centuries and she did the point is no normal person would know that but if horses become your life and your friends are all horse people and you read about the history of horses you'll know that stuff now it might sound you know if you're not into him I don't like what is still a thing to know but imagine a life in which you have deep passions that you share with other people and a skill that you practice you know she was on the equestrian team at UVA and a life with one or two of those is a much richer life than the life that has no deep engagement with something like that you know for a lot of us it's our work I mean I really really love psychology I have like I have no hobbies whatsoever because I you know I just I love psychology and the social sciences and I just love you know reading about and learning new things so that for me this is my vital engagement another one of my favorite ideas perhaps the favorite idea because I still resonate with the idea of Applied virtue or itay can you talk to us about what virtue in that sense means we're not talking about the the kind of traditional sense of morality but the sense of really expressing the highest version of ourselves can you tell us about that I'm sure so virtues of an interesting word it has a connotation of sort of prudish 19th century Victorian ism and or before that Ben Franklin talked about talked about the virtues and a funny thing happened in in Western philosophy about morality is we dropped that old virtue based approach and we've come to think that morality is about either protecting people from harm if your utilitarian you want to reduce harm or it's about justice and rights if you're a deontologist or a follower of Immanuel Kant you'll think that morality is about justice and rights and the philosophers those two schools of philosophy battle it out but I think both of them are kind of at odds with human nature human nature is not really utilitarian work you know we're self-centered we care about our groups we're not very good at really caring about maximizing utility overall all sentient beings and we're not very good at really respecting rights in the abstract we're very biased about a lot of things and and I think a conception of virtue or a conception of morality that says that well actually you know cultivating morality isn't being a saint it's not devoting your life to saving others its cultivating your own excellences and many of these excellence is the virtues that people have talked about for thousands of years are really skills that make you a fit partner for social interaction for people to trust you work with you hire you and so Ben Franklin let me see if I can find his list of virtues here Ben Franklin's autobiography is just a wonderful wonderful book he he developed this program he wrote down all the things he wanted to improve about himself and they were I think 12 or 13 of them and and he would go through each day he would devote himself to one of them but you know he was one of the most effective people in American history I mean he convinced France to join us in fighting Britain when France had very little to gain and in fact it bankrupted them and led to indirectly that a French Revolution I mean you know boy and had they had he not succeeded we would have lost he was an incredibly effective politician diplomat he was good with the ladies I mean he was just an incredible person and you know anyway so it's a wonderful book I recommend to all your readers to read the autobiography of Ben Franklin if they haven't but I think this is a good way to think about improvement it's really like gardening it's like cultivating over time cultivating habits and skills meditation can help you for example loving-kindness meditation can help make you more loving cultivating habits of self-discipline honesty or honor I mean there all sorts of habits that you can cultivate I think this is a much more human and humane way to think about morality moral development growth of self-improvement and I think there's not quite enough guidance for us in our modern culture but you know we took a wrong turn in the 19th century if you go back to the the victor the late night to go back to the Victorian era the Revolutionary era this is the way people thought about it and this is what people try to do with their children and so the modern character education movement is is I guess as an example so there are people who who are talking about this but this is I think the right way to think about self-improvement yeah I say that if there's one word to summarize my entire approach it's arte it's can we train ourselves to express the highest version of ourselves in whatever context moment to moment a moment which is obviously a lifetime endeavor but it's those little those little opportunities of shaping our consciousness and training that elephant amazing so I'd like to wrap up these chats with two questions one on your practices so the things that you do on a daily or weekly basis that help you live the way that you aspire to live here you open to sharing some of those things you don't sure sure well you know first I can say that when I when I first had the idea for the book in I was I guess or in my early 30s I was single I was completely overworked working all the time at the University of Virginia trying to publish to get tenure and and then all at the same time I got tenure met my wife began to get some academic success and so the conditions so I if you if my formula here is that happiness comes from between from getting the right relationship between yourself and others yourself and your work and yourself and something larger than yourself I didn't have that for a while in my life and I was anxious and unhappy and then over the course of a couple years I got all of that and so my betweens have been very good since then and my mental health has been very good since then not always I mean I sometimes go through periods of anxiety but they're mostly about like I can't I can't do everything I have to I'm you know I have to rush I can't give anyone the time I can't do anything right you know and I know consciously that this is my life that my life is objectively extremely good I it's you know it's better than I ever could have hoped it was gonna work out and so I got to stop thinking that I'm someday gonna catch up I've gotta just accept that this is what life is it's just too much stuff all the time and and there's a lot of stress in just in terms of that you can't do it all you have to disappoint some people and so what I've begun doing recently is I've actually begun meditating again and actually pick this up because the so I had a there was a wonderful young man named Brian Turner who was the I'd hired him as the director of my project ethical systems org and he was as devoted to self-improvement as possible and he he listened to every book on tape he tried out all the advice he ever read oh I should have hooked him up with the philosophers notes he would have read them all of us make sure we do that um well he he was a BASE jumper of parachute and he died and in writing his eulogy and in learning more about his life and thinking about his life I realized that his devotion to these simple practices and self-improvement is something that I should be doing that everybody should do but it's only because of Brian that I started meditating again and it's just been wonderful I can feel the results of it during my day you know if something goes wrong something bad happens it's easier to let go of and so you know sometimes it takes you know it takes a shock it takes an exemplar to you know kick us in the constructs as it were and and make us change our ways but I guess I would I want to leave your listeners with is the idea that the tools are out there to make yourself a better happier and more effective person and many of the tools are very very easy to use they just require generally they require daily use there's nothing you can do that's gonna solve your problems or change you in five or ten minutes but five or ten minutes a day yes so think about ways to train the elephant get better harmony between the elephant and the rider I would also include some exercise getting regular exercise doesn't have to be much you know keep your body and mind healthy and in harmony so there are some simple things you can do to make yourself much happier so good let me let me just end the last thing that piece of advice is if readers go to if listeners go to happiness hypothesis calm they're on the homepage I have a link it says using the happiness hypothesis to increase your happiness and I go through five steps you can take today to begin increasing your happiness awesome well that might be that's one final thing that I'm excited to share with people and we'll put a link to that below this this chat as well if you could share one thing the final question I'd like to ask is if you could share just one thing with someone aspiring to optimize their lives what would that one thing be I think I was saying not one but two things that are paired the first is diagnosed yourself know whether you are a person who is on the bottom half of the happiness distribution or on the top half and what you should do is can be very different depending on where you are and there are tools in positive psychology if you go to authentic happiness org you can take a variety of tests and understand your strengths and weaknesses your happiness level and then especially if you're on the bottom half then there are things you can do to improve your mental hygiene and I would recommend most especially either meditation or cognitive behavioral therapy so okay that's not one step but it's a kind of diagnosis and response this is fantastic and I just appreciate you and your wisdom and also your humanity and your willingness to share so much of what you're up to so thank you for your great work thanks for taking the time and I'm really excited to share this with our community my pleasure Brian I really enjoyed reading your philosophers notes and I've enjoyed a conversation thank you awesome thanks John we hope you enjoyed this optimal living interview please visit brian johnson m-e for more

Channel: Brian Johnson

Views: 34,644

Keywords: Jonathan Haidt, The Happiness Hypothesis, Brian Johnson, PhilosophersNotes, Optimal Living 101

Id: BAmo-Eq0Dc0

Length: 36min 24sec (2184 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 06 2015