Positive Psychology: The Science of Happiness | Tal Ben-Shahar

good evening and welcome to the Museum of Science I'm Lisa Monroe's the producer of brainiacs here at the Museum tonight is the second program in the Brainiac series sound body sound mind during which we are investigating the mysteries of the mind body spirit connection the next program in the series features Jon kabat-zinn a preeminent figure in the field of meditation who will lead us on an evening of mind-body exploration and adventuring that's on Friday November 3rd and we hope you'll join us for that tonight our focus is on happiness the American poet James Oppenheim once said the foolish man seeks happiness in the distance the wise grows it under his feet who of us can't use tools to grow it underfoot last year twice a week some 1,400 students at Harvard University learned how by attending Tao ben-shahar s class on what he calls how to get happy that's more students in one semester than any other professor in Harvard's history it's pretty impressive it's thrilling for us to be able to offer you a program on positive psychology with a man who has happiness down to a science so here to offer us a precious gift some insight into the secrets to happiness is dr. Tao ben-shahar I thank you welcome you can tell him to come to ya you know it's a it's a little bit of an irony that last semester when I was teaching the class on unhappiness actually wasn't that happy because I've taught this class before and the first time I taught it was a set as a seminar I had eight students to dropped out so I was left with six and but that I think is the right number to teach happiness you know especially when you talk about very intimate topics we talk about relationships talk about self-esteem you talk about passions so it's much more conducive to much more conducive to have a small class and then you know the following year when I taught it I said well since only two dropped out it means that possibly more people want to take it so I taught it as a lecture class but I lost the I don't know the the connection to the students that I had but there was last semester tonight this feels much more comfortable and I'm glad we have this intimate setting to to discuss the topic of happiness and what we're going to do today is actually this is going to be to some extent an experiential workshop not just me lecturing and talking about the science of happiness I'll start by introducing you to positive psychology what it is white came about and then the main part of this lecture will be about six lessons that positive psychology or the area in psychology that focuses on life flourishing can offer I'm only going to be touching literally the tip of the iceberg of the research that's available in this area unfortunately we don't have a lot of time Lisa told me she wants you all out of here by midnight so I'll be brief so let me begin with how positive psychology came about it came about in as an independent by now it's already a movement an independent body of research in 1998 with Marty Seligman Marty Seligman was then the American Psychological Association president preeminent psychologist and he said there is a need for it and what he saw was the landscape in the field of psychology David Myers and other preeminent psychologists looked at psychological abstracts research in the field of psychology as a whole and created a an overview of the field and here is what he found between 1967 in the year 2000 these are the number of articles about anger close to 6,000 these are the number of articles about anxiety makes you anxious just looking at it right but now if you really want to get depressed in contrast to these numbers you have the focus on fun things like joy 415 articles happiness much better over 1,700 articles and life satisfaction 2582 studies the ratio 21 to 1 in favor of the negative so Seligman and other psychologists looked at this and said we want to shift the pendulum a little bit we want to change that ratio the question though is why after all we do see that levels of depression are on the rise levels of anxiety are on the rise so maybe we should have that kind of ratio but here is the justification for having focused line of research on the positive first why isn't not enough just to focus on depression and anxiety because happiness is not the negation of unhappiness in other words if we get rid of depression or anxiety that doesn't make us automatically happy similarly just like when we have in digestion getting rid of in digestion doesn't mean that we enjoy a gourmet meal what psychology has focused primarily on throughout the years and that's over the last one over a hundred years since William James is mostly on the negative on getting people from the negative to the zero point to be okay not to be sick but then as Henry Thoreau once said most men David Henry Thoreau said most men live lives of quiet desperation so quite desperation is not necessarily depressed it's not necessarily anxious but it's not happy and we are not fulfilling our potential if we don't focus on things that go beyond the zero so positive psychology came to rectify that you take us from the zero to the positive but there's another reason why positive psychology is important and that is that what psychologists have found is that not only does it get us from the zero to the positive but it also strengthens our immune system ie makes us more resilient when dealing with the negative let me read you an excerpt from Marquis Seligman and here is what he writes summarizing a lot of research that has been done in this field he says we have discovered that there are human strength that act as buffers against mental illness courage future mindedness optimism interpersonal skill faith work ethic hope honesty perseverance the capacity for flowing insight to name several we've shown that learning optimism prevents prevents depression and anxiety in children and adults roughly having their incidents over the next years similarly I believe that if we wish to prevent drug abuse in teenagers who grow up in neighborhood that puts them at risk but the effective prevention is not remedial rather it consists of identifying and amplifying the strength that these teens already have again focusing on the positive focusing on what works as opposed to what doesn't work in these teens and it applies to everyone it strengthens our immune system now a strong immune system doesn't mean we don't get sick it simply means we get sick less often when we do get sick will recover more promptly this is what strengthening optimism hope relationships self-esteem does acts as a buffer so not just getting us from the zero to the positive but also more promptly from the negative to the zero and ultimately to enjoy a gourmet meal the aim of positive psychology is merely to shift the pendulum it is not saying I'm certainly not saying let's stop the extensive research on anxiety and on depression absolutely need to do that it's important it's critical the aim of positive psychology is to catalyze a change in psychology from a preoccupation only with repairing the worse things in life to also building the best qualities in lives it focuses on strength rather than deficiencies on what works accentuating it rather than on what doesn't work in merely trying to eliminate it there's another thing that's unique about positive psychology as a field of study again started in 1998 you see until very recently the realm of life flourishing of enhancing the quality of our lives has been dominated by pop psychology now you go to the bookstore and the self-help section huge expanding literally by the second thousands hundreds of thousands of books on the topic you open these books and what you see very interesting carries charismatic riders good riders but often not always but often very little substance when you go to academia you enter a library you open the academic journals what you see there a lot of rigor strong empirical foundation science but on the other hand not accessible most people don't read academic journals in fact there is one of my colleagues ran a study estimating that the average journal article is read by seven people and no there's more sorry there's more I haven't gone into the punchline yet just be patient that includes the author's mother so and that's a shame it's a shame because there's a lot of good stuff there's a lot of good stuff out there you an academic a lot of good stuff out there that needs to be read what positive psychology does is create a bridge between the ivory tower and Main Street bringing the rigor the empirical foundation linking it to the accessibility making it accessible to students in college to the general public Alfred North Whitehead the careful shielding of a university from the activities of the world around us is the best way to chill interest and to defeat progress celibacy does not suit a university it must mate itself with action and the same applies to the outside world it must mate itself with the university bridging ivory tower in Main Street bringing rigor as well as accessibility the question that positive psychology asked the science of happiness is what I see as the question of happiness how can we help ourselves and others individuals communities and society become happier now note the question the question is not how can we help them become happy but rather how can we help them become happier you know many people ask me have been asking me since I started teaching this course so are you happy and I actually don't really know how to answer that question well I mean what does it mean is there a certain point where before that you are unhappy now suddenly you are happy is it a binary thing I don't think so 0 1 also how do I even measure it is it compared to my friend my wife my kid I mean compared to whom am i happy or unhappy but one thing which I can answer is I am happier today then I was 10 years ago and I certainly hope to be happier 10 years from now than I am today so rather than asking am I happy or unhappy the binary 0 1 question it's better to answer how can I become happier and this is the question that positive psychology attempts to answer there are no quick fixes in positive psychology there are no like many of the self-help books offer five steps to happiness 3 steps to abundance of self-esteem one step to finding your perfect lover it just doesn't work that way in reality case it hasn't worked that way for me and research suggests that it doesn't for most people but what positive psychology does is provide a few lessons and an expanding body of lessons because there's a lot of research being done in this field that provides some lessons that have been tested that actually work I'm going to share with you 6 today all back and I'm gonna also discuss some of the studies that were done that hopefully you can apply to your lives you may resonate to some more than others see what you can get out the most important thing is then to go out and apply them and we're going to talk about application later on so let me begin with the first lesson you know when I taught the class for the first time at that time I was a tutor in one of the undergraduate houses and one of my students came to me and said oh you know I heard he wasn't taking the class I heard you're teaching a class on happiness I said yeah he said yeah you know my my roommates I are are taking it no implying that they need it and he doesn't of course but and then he said to me so you need to watch out though and I said why he said because if I see you in the dining hall hall unhappy I'm gonna tell them okay so you're gonna be telling them a lot I thought to myself and I told my class about this exchange at the day-after and I said you know the last thing I want you to think is that you're gonna come out of this class and be happy or that I'm always happy see there is a real misconception about what happiness means today happiness is not a constant hi there are ups and downs the problem today is that there is lack of acceptance toward negative emotions because people think that if we experience a negative emotion such as fear anxiety depression anger being upset or being sad that there must be something wrong with us when in fact the exact opposite is the case there are two kinds of people who don't experience sadness anxiety anger feeling down depressed at times there are two kinds of people who don't experience these negative emotions psychopaths and dead people so you know what if you experience these emotions it's a good sign and I'm glad you're here one of the main concepts coming out of psychology one of the things that I repeat over and over again in my class and to myself the idea of the permission to be human the permission to be human we all experience these emotions the problem is when we don't give ourselves the permission to be human what we experience is the strengthening of these emotions what we his frustration imagine waking up every morning you know we're in the Science Museum let's talk science imagine waking up every morning and saying to yourself today I'm not I refuse to absolutely refuse to accept the fact that I cannot fly law of gravity I don't like it I mean what kind of life would you lead it's exactly the same thing with these emotions they're as natural as real as the law of gravity is giving ourselves the permission to be human now there was a teaser it was planned you know as as kids we know that we accept the fact that we have the ups and downs we accept our emotions and therefore we develop cognitive and emotional flexibility we lose that flexibility later on when we suppress the emotions because we say I shouldn't be feeling this we don't give ourselves the permission to be human and we pay a price let's look at an excerpt off of a baby and I want you to notice the cognitive and emotional flexibility fortunately the baby doesn't make it too subtle so I think we can all get it you know so so as kids as babies it comes natural to us we have an emotion we experience it as adults we suppress it and we pay a price a very high price for it what we need when it comes to our emotions and I want to elaborate on this a little bit based on research what we need is unconditional acceptance or unconditional self regard when it comes to our emotion the best advice that I got regarding child rearing from the psychological perspective was from dr. Todd Shapiro who was our our doctor here in Beth Israel and he came to see us he didn't delivery came to see us the morning after the delivery to make sure that everything was okay and as he was leaving the house after checking the baby checking us he he looked back and he said talking to to both of us well maybe to the three of us he said over the next few months you're going to be experiencing every single kind of emotion to the extreme and it's okay it's natural there was the best advice that I got and he said because you're going to be experiencing envy and anger and joy and ecstasy and he was right on because for example suddenly I wasn't the only one in my wife's life there was someone else and at times I experienced envy but then how would I felt if five minutes later and it very often happened five minutes later I would have experienced this incredible joy happiness and love toward my baby would've felt like a hypocrite had I not given myself the permission to be human it's natural it's normal we all have these ups and downs part of being human and in fact when we allow ourselves to experience these emotions the paradox is that we experience less of it so this study was done by Daniel Wagner showing that when we try to suppress things they actually simply strengthen and we all know this intuitively so let's do a quick quick experiment for the next 10 seconds for the next 10 seconds this is an easy one so but I still need you to focus for the next 10 seconds I don't want you to think don't think of a pink elephant for the next 10 second okay one Dumbo with the big ears flapping and do not think of a pink elephant you only have five seconds not to think of that pink elephant good now what if you set yourself don't be anxious don't be anxious don't be anxious or why are you angry why are you angry you get anxious you get angry ironic processing the exact opposite when we allow these emotions to be present when we experience them that's when we are better able to get over them the problem as I mentioned earlier in our culture today is that there is a negative stereotype assigned to negative emotions so when people ask so how are you doing so fine just great when more appropriate would be a tear or well actually not good and we learn to suppress them and you know what the problem is the problem is that everyone does it and when people ask us so how are you how are we we don't say oh terrible we don't be the party pooper everyone's doing great what I'm going to be the only one who is depressed here so we say great and then we contribute to the great deception and this great deception is one of the most significant contributors to our great depression to the rising levels of depression in our culture and their rising now I'm not saying wearing our heart on our sleeves oh how am I you know thank you for asking well it all started 35 years ago no but what I am saying is you know be honest be open and it very least with you know one or two intimate friends when it's not fine say it's not fine when you feel like crying cry when you feel like laughing laugh permission to be human which is not the same as resigning to negative emotions there is a distinct difference here the difference is that what I'm talking when I when I talk about acceptance when the literature talks about acceptance is an active kind of acceptance distinguishing between emotion and behavior so for instance I can feel anxiety or nervousness when I stand in front of an audience which I very often do but then I have a choice of whether to act in accordance to this emotion or not to speak in front of an audience or not I can experience Envy toward my best friend who has just succeeded and that's natural that's human we all experience this emotion but then I can choose whether to put my friend down or to end the relationship or on the other hand to continue to act generously and benevolently toward him or her active acceptance I accept the emotion and the anxiety fear they're all natural and then I choose how to behave how to act active acceptance summarize best by posture nibor god grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change the courage to change the things I can change and the wisdom to know the difference again we've heard again it's became the mantra for the a a movement and a very effective very powerful message first lesson permission to be human you know what I'm doing just giving the tip of the iceburg some of the studies on each topic second one a very important one simplifying in our rat race culture we try and do more and more things in less and less time and we pay a high price for it we pay a very high price for it so I want to take some time now aside away from this rat race and do an exercise feel free to participate in this exercise or not if you want to close your eyes while doing it you can as I said I want to make this experiential this is the first thing that I recommend introducing to your lives after you have simplified slightly this is an exercise that combines the first two lessons together so we're going to do a guided meditation and I'm going to talk about meditation later you have a whole talk about meditation on November 3rd with the preeminent scholar in the field Jon kabat-zinn whose research I'm gonna be talking about briefly let's do an experiential exercise so if we can just have the lights dimmed a little bit feel free to do it or not so sit comfortably in your chair and what I want to do now is for you to experience the space of unconditional acceptance the space of giving yourself the permission to be human so with your eyes closed take a deep breath into your stomach the deep breath all the way down to your stomach and breathe out slowly gently calmly take another breath feel the space in your stomach your belly and then breathe out slowly calmly continue a few breaths deep breaths slow breaths slow quiet calm exhale Asian now look inside yourself with your eyes closed and ask yourself how you're feeling are you feeling calm or anxious confused happy and whatever you're feeling just allow that emotion to be inside you just observe it give yourself the permission to experience whatever it is that you're experiencing it's okay it's fine it's human continue breathing deeply into that emotion now imagine yourself in your mind's eye leaving this room later going outside and maintaining this unconditional acceptance this permission to be human see yourself going out to the world going home and remaining with this full acceptance whatever the emotion is fear anxiety sadness happiness joy well-being and whatever it is it's okay it's fine experience what it feels like to accept your emotions unconditionally not having to put on a facade not having to put on a show just being simply being a human being and stay with that emotion for a few deep breaths giving yourself the permission to be human now slowly as you exhale open your eyes especially if you're asleep this was about I don't know three minutes four minutes long meditating regularly and we'll talk about the research later can literally transform your life bring yourself to this space in this case it was unconditional acceptance you can focus on gratitude which we'll also talk about later takes you elsewhere makes you recognize appreciate the good things in your life but in order in order to bring this exercise the first important thing we need to do is exercise why because we're living in a red rice world we're running at or flying at 600 miles an hour we have no time and we need to simplify we need to take time out if we're concerned about our well-being one of the main reasons for the increase in the levels of depression around the world today is stress richard Caterson who is the head of mental health services at harvard university it's done a lot of research on anxiety depression research 13,000 or surveyed 13,000 college students throughout the country so not just at harvard where he is but all over the country nationwide this was his finding in a recent national survey of over 13,000 college students nearly 45 percent reported being so depressed that they had difficulty functioning and 94 percent reported feeling overwhelmed by everything they had to do 45% in he's not just talking about you know the ups and downs you know the ones that we have 10 off a day he's talking about deep depression to the point of not functioning 45% and these are the best four years of our life right levels of depression are 10 times higher today than they were in 1960 mean age for depression in 1960 was just over 29 today it's under 15 now granted today the measurements are better there is higher levels of there's more focus on it but still depression objectively is is on the rise one of the main reasons because of stress because the way it works is we have too much to do and I bet you at least 94 percent of us in this room feel that we have too much to do as a result we feel overwhelmed we're stressed and that is highly associated and predictive of depression so if we want to reverse this or end reverse the trend of depression we need to end feeling stressed and overwhelmed and we need to do less one of my favorite psychologists is the woman whom you'll see in a minute and here she is talking or describing what is going on today in our culture we need to simplify we have to simplify we need to do less rather than more so even though today I'm going to be talking about some practices if there's one thing that you do is actually do less and then if you have some time introduce these practices arguably be number one cause of stress and as a result of the rising levels of depression because quantity does affect quality so even if we look at our lives and we say yeah I like doing what I'm doing here and here and here and I really want to do that too there is such a thing as too much of a good thing no it's like chocolate chocolate is great but you don't want to have too much of it so we need to reduce we need to very often say no to things because often when we say no to certain things to certain people we're saying yes to ourselves researchers the Hendrix love and sex are affected negatively by stress if we can help people to simplify their lives thus reducing the stress level it is very likely that people's relationships would be enriched greatly moreover the positive aspects of their lives would be enriched accordingly they've done research for years the Hendrix on their psychologists on love and relationships and this is what they found simplifying our lives doing less rather than more has a positive effect on relationships the physical and the spiritual element of a relationship and also on life in general not just on relationships simplify doing less saying no at times now the thing about simplifying and doing less is that it doesn't just make us happier it also once again paradoxically makes us more successful now if I was telling my students you know do less you know go to a mountain in Tibet and and meditate at the expense of being successful very few of them would listen to it probably no one would listen to it but it's not just about being happier it's also about being more successful taking time off has a positive effect JP Morgan founder of the Morgan Empire said I can do the work a year's work in 9 months but not in 12 he recognized the importance of taking time off there's a lot of research on it both in organizational behavior in the study of leadership that you actually enhance your bottom line levels of productivity and levels of creativity when you take time off work it's not a coincidence that we come up with our best ideas in the bath or in the car or actually the car it used to be right now we're on the cellphone right so we don't even have time to reflect while driving no coincidence that the best ideas come in places where we're doing nothing where we're simply doing nothing again a lot of research in organizations individuals you actually learn more you grow more you become happier and more successful I want to show you an interview a brief interview or an excerpt from an interview when Nelson Mandela visited Oprah if you want great lessons about leadership this is probably the most dense 1-hour on leadership you would ever find this specific interview but I want to focus on one part what Nelson Mandela or how he perceives the him the importance of reflection of taking time aside of simplifying what Mandela is recognizing there is the importance of time aside for reflection for growth back in 1840 Thoreau simplicity simplicity simplicity I say let your affairs be as two or three and not a hundred or a thousand instead of a million count half a dozen in the midst of this chopping sea of civilized life such are the clouds and storms in quicksands and the thousand and one items to be allowed for that a man has to live if he would not found her and go to the bottom and not make his port at all by dead reckoning and he must be a great calculator indeed who succeeds simplify simplify things haven't been getting less busy since 1840 it's even more applicable today do less rather than more let me move on to lesson number three the importance of finding meaning and pleasure in our lives ideally in the same activity I define happiness as the experience of both meaning and pleasure at the intersection between the two there are experiences that are meaningful there are experiences that are pleasurable ones that have both that's where happiness resides for example from from my life politics extremely meaningful to me I think it's important very high sense of purpose but I don't enjoy it it's not pleasurable to me lying on the beach the Mediterranean Sea beautiful very pleasurable to me but not that meaningful you know certainly not after three years of doing it daily you cannot sustain happiness only with pleasure nor can you sustain it only with meaning when we want to find is the combination that same applies to a workplace how do we identify a workplace it provides us both meaning and pleasure and in relationships how do I find a relationship where I enjoy spending time with my partner and it's a meaningful deep relationship and we'll talk more about relationships a little bit later on the psychological term for goals that are both meaningful and pleasurable is self concordant goals and again a lot of research on this topic what self concordant goals are our goals that are aligned with personal interests and values goals that we want to achieve as opposed to have to do the one two versus they have to quickly scan your life and think about it how many things in your day-to-day do you do because you want or because you feel that you want you know there are certain things in life that we have to you know I have to feed my kid but it's also something that inside I really want to do so what things do you feel inside that you want to versus have to because that makes a lot of difference to sustain long-term happiness whether it's in relationships whether it's at work we have to shift our lives more and more toward the one-twos to find both meaning and pleasure Freud talks about the pleasure principle the will to pleasure Viktor Frankl men search for meaning highly recommended book talks about the will to meaning happiness is at the intersection taking these two theories and combining them just pleasure is not enough for sustained happiness just meaning is not enough for sustained happiness personally for me happiness comes when teaching very pleasurable to me I enjoy it and it's very meaningful to me provides me a sense of purpose that's where happiness resides there are many benefits to having self concordant goals people have self concordant goals who do things that they want to do with their lives in the long term or more successful obviously they're happier and physically healthier so their actual physiological changes when we do things that we enjoy when we're engaged in an activity when we think about it it's important to think about both on the macro level our life as a whole how can identify goals in my life a profession a career a relationship that is both meaningful and pleasurable and also on the micro level the little things why because it's not always possible to make macro changes and even when we have micro changes there are parts in everyone's lives that are not both meaningful and pleasurable you know I enjoy teaching but I do I don't enjoy grading especially in a seminar with so many students but overall the question is how can we lead the most meaningful and pleasure pleasurable life that we can many people don't have the luxury to do something that is both meaningful and pleasurable I started teaching this job two-and-a-half years ago until then I was doing I was getting my PhD which wasn't always was meaningful but it wasn't always pleasurable to me but I knew that I wanted to teach you know and I have to go through it also think about what about a single mom who doesn't have the luxury of choosing a profession what does she do does she say well I simply can't be happy or what about a kid just coming out of college wants to go into business but thinks that the best experience is through Investment Banking which is very often the case she that could not go to Investment Banking for two years or three years or how about 50 year-old woman who is very successful at work making a lot of money and she doesn't want to give up the lifestyle that she has even though her work is not entirely pleasurable and painting would be more pleasurable as well as meaningful does that mean that we're on the unhappiness side not necessarily because what we can have in our lives are on the micro level happiness boosters these are activities anywhere from 30 minutes to five-hour activities there are both meaningful and pleasurable it could be spending time in there working very hard during the week and not really liking my job spending two hours over the weekend with the kids or working very hard in as an investment banker and spending time with our friends twice a week or engaging in a hobby or joining a not-for-profit organisation aboard of a not-for-profit organization and really finding that meaningful and pleasurable even though my life as a whole doesn't change drastically these little changes these happiness boosters have a trickle effect again it's been shown by research by Sheldon and others how these activities that we introduce can have an impact on everything that we do in one of their studies they say those people who can identify sets of goals that will represent their implicit interests and values are indeed able to function more efficiently flexibly and integrative lis across all areas of their lives why because their activity the two are over the weekend the two evenings whatever it is has a push pushing people after it because they enjoyed and a pool it motivates them to get through the days more pleasantly with more fun it actually has an impact beyond just the activity itself so it's not either/or it's not all or nothing either I leave everything behind and transform my life completely or do nothing at all introducing thirty minutes an hour two hours four hours a week can make a significant difference to our entire experience lesson number four the number one generator of happiness relationships and here I'm not just talking about romantic relationships though I'm gonna focus primarily on that that includes intimate relationships in general soul mates close friends family members the number one predictor of well-being some of you may have come across a book that recently came out stumbling on happiness by Daniel Gilbert he talks there explicitly about relationships if you were asked for one thing that would make us happier focus on your relationships so let me talk a little bit about about relationships again just the tip again the tip of the iceberg only and I'm going to talk about long-term romantic relationships but many of these things that why to other real other relationships as well first of all if we look at the picture today the state of affairs things don't look great when it comes to long-term relationships divorce 40 percent level that doesn't mean that the other 60 percent who stay together aren't necessarily happy many people stay together out of a sense of duty or out of a sense of just well we've been together for so long habit so the state of affairs is not great and one of the reasons why it's not great is because part of us whether the god-given or evolution given part is not always conducive to long term relationships what do I mean by that a lot of research and we don't need research for that you know we all know that is that novelty produces heightened level of arousal and you see it with kids as well you know something knew immediately they would look to it something natural something that's innate and that also applies to relationships so for example you know I did this study in my 8th person and then sixth person seminar where I asked them to pick the most beautiful man and woman in the world and they did and the man was you want to venture a guess Brad Pitt yeah and yeah these are you know deep thinking as the and the woman was northern not not his wife or girlfriend I mean are they married was Halle Berry so most beautiful man most beautiful women in the world again scientific study you can't argue with that so an N of a tour of six I don't know now imagine if you were with your Brad Pitt or your Halle Berry whatever that may be for you and not only were they drop-dead gorgeous but they were also extremely intelligence intelligent sensitive nice unconditionally accepting helping you to simplify your life so imagine that partner ideal partner and that person came to you one day actually just walked in through the door here or back when before you were you were married and said I love you and only you forever and you get married and you live lustily ever after right not exactly because initially you know the lust is there you can you can't wait for you know Brad Pitt you come back from Troy or from Halle Berry to get out of her cat suit and it's amazing ecstasy but then what happens after say five years now Hali walks in through the door or Brad walks in through the door and you have all these electrodes through your through your body and they measure your level of arousal and then a stranger walks in through the door and that stranger is semi-attractive you know not Halle Berry or Brad Pitt but okay how would you react to these two sides in terms of pure physical level of arousal you would react much more to the new person why because over time we adapt we get used to things and sometimes it's good serial monogamist or serial polygamists is that in our nature not necessarily because what we do see what we do see is that for some people sex does improve over time love does grow over time and it happens it's documented we know people maybe we experience it ourselves and the fact that it does happen means that the question is no longer is it possible to sustain long term successful growing happy relationship it's not is it possible but rather how is it possible and that's one positive we're positive psychology or psychology as a whole comes in it's not whether it's possible it's how it's possible David snark who has done a lot of research on the topic in fact shows illustrates through research through his work and other people's work that the best sex lovemaking that people have is usually later on in life and here is what he says cellulite and sexual potential are highly now note what he's saying he's talking about potential most people most relationships don't realize the potential that lies in a relationship so how do we realize that potential I want to draw on again just very little bit on two researchers in the topic the first is John Gottman highly recommended book on relationships he's he's it's Washington st. Louis and here are some of the things that he talks about first he says that the main thing when he looks at successful relationships long-term relationships these are not relationships where everything is just smooth and great their ups and downs and in fact he found a ratio between positivity and negativity that for every five positive experiences there is one negative experience so for example for every five you know hugs or compliments or wonderful things that we do together there is perhaps an argument a disagreement not everything is smooth in highly successful relationship don't eliminate the negative now that doesn't mean that there has to be screams people disagree in different ways in different relationships and he actually goes through these different ways in his book so it can be acquired disagreement but some negativity why because disagreement provides a growth opportunity a learning opportunity to learn about the other person and about ourselves there is no partner who is perfect we can all learn and improve we're all human and it's an opportunity the second thing is that conflict immunizes think about it just like in the physic on the physical level when we get ill or about to get ill our immune system actually strengthens as a result if we overcome this and we overcome the negative experience if we have the very least five times as many positive experiences now this is a an aggregated generalization it doesn't mean if you have you know ten it's better if you have three two one it's bad this is an aggregate a five to one ratio and the key is to accentuate the positive how do we do that one show interest create what Jonathan calls love map of your partner those research and during the Great Depression nineteen late 20s early 30s on relationships and what they found was that relationships where the partners knew one another way they had the love maps of one another actually came out stronger from the depression partners who didn't know each other well didn't study each other came out weaker as a couple another way of accentuating the positive pay compliments Mark Twain says I can live over good compliment for two weeks pay common don't take it for granted especially once you're in a relationship for a long time my father-in-law and mother-in-law have been married for many years and one day they they went to a party to official function together and my mother-in-law was wearing a beautiful beautiful evening gown really looked stunning and she was walking around and was getting compliments throughout the evening and they came back home after the lovely function and she said to to ah me her husband I me you know throughout the evening I received many compliments you know everyone was telling me how how beautiful I looked except for you now just to give you a bit of very important background on my father-in-law he's a lawyer he thinks on his feet so he said to her ah hell Rachel do you remember that a month ago I told you how how beautiful you are so she said yes I do he said well until further notice you're beautiful now wait wait wait wait now a little bit of important background about Rachel my mother-in-law she's also a lawyer so the dog wasn't sleeping alone that night don't take these things for granted say it again and again and again we need nurturing we need emotion or chewing more than anything from the people who are most close to put aside time for love for a date especially in today's world you know ideally it would all be spontaneous we see each other and say okay let's go to a movie okay let's make love but in today's world with the RET race when we were so busy if we don't put time aside would in most situations if we don't make it a ritual and we'll talk about rituals later on if we don't make it a ritual it's not going to happen we're not going to spend time together other things are gonna you know it's like the law of gases I guess will always fill up the room no matter how little of it there is same with time if we don't put time aside especially in today's world it will fill up all of our time and we won't have time to spend you a soup have a date day in a week where you have a date with your partner two days with your time with the family put these times aside explicitly and love is in the details yeah it's important to have you know the 25th anniversary ring and the cruise around the world 50th anniversary very important things but ultimately it's the little things whether it's the flowers the little touch it's the smile these are the positive things but make relationships work in the long run that make passion grow in the long run the most important work done in this area of passionate relationship was done by David snork his book passionate no that's not him on the on the Left that's that's his book on the right what he talks about is the importance within a relationship of being known rather than being validated off differentiating oneself of being one fully oneself in a relationship and when both partners become themselves over time they become more and more intimate which is why we can have better relationships better lovemaking after 20 years then after a year because we get to know one another now this also has implications for many other areas think about going through life wanting to be known rather than being validated how much pressure would it take off us how much pressure would he take off the relationship and I'm not there to always get the nod from the other partner but I really want to be known by the other partner and in the long run these are the most successful relationships where we open up where we share where we reveal ourselves and that's not always easy because it's not just about putting a facade and looking great all the time it's about also exposing our fears our insecurities it's about saying what we want it's about being assertive in there respectful in positive way it's not always easy in the short term in the long term this is what will lead to sustained and growing passion it's about expressing being ourselves rather than constantly trying to impress now it's natural to try to impress on the first date or even the first year but over time to create and sustain a passionate meaningful relationship we need to be known we need to open up even though it is sometimes difficult second last lesson lesson number five about the mind-body connection I'm gonna focus here just on two things I'm gonna focus on extras physical exercise and meditation other things that are important here asleep highly correlated with well-being very much connected to the idea of simplifying of having less rather than more to do it's also the importance of touch were were in the words of Tiffany fields who does research on touch we're a touch deprived culture we have lost touch with touch and we pay a price for it I want to focus on two things on exercise and meditation research done by professors at Duke Medical School has been replicated many times since on the importance of exercise what the researchers did was take one hundred and fifty six major depressives the these are people some of them suicidal lack of desire to go on no motivation to try anything major depressives and they divided them into three groups an exercise group a medicine and exercise group psychiatric medicine and only medicine three groups three intervention the medication was dollop the second most popular antidepressant after Prozac the exercise intervention was 30 minutes of aerobic exercise three times a week either brisk walking jogging cycling swimming whatever whatever does it for them they did this and they followed them for four months and here is what they found in these four months major depressives the first group medicine only 67% got over at the second group 66% the third group also 67% all three groups improved significantly not everyone but most people in all three groups one difference the group that did exercise only took longer to overcome the depression instead of two weeks it took them it took them four weeks but once they got over it they sustained it all three groups improved equally now the interesting thing about this study I mean this is interesting in and of itself but it had the same impact as an anti-diva antidepressant the interesting thing is was after six months so 10 months after the beginning of the study what they were interested in was relapse rates this is always the interesting thing one of the interesting components of the studies those who were medication on medication only 38 percent relapse 38 percent 10 months later had major depression again out of the 67% that got over it relapse times exercise 31% relapse exercise only 9% now this study is not saying let's give up medication just exercise no because if you look at the full population of major depressive or not just major depressive and let's say sixty percent of the people are helped by medication you have a subgroup and sixty percent are helped by exercise it's not the same group so there are people who will not be helped just by the exercise but who will be helped by the medication there is an overlap and there are people who could be helped by both for sure by definition given that it's more than 50% in each group but there are many people who will only benefit from it so I'm not saying not to take medication if that is what the doctor prescribed and they found that this is what works but in many cases exercise can do the job and in many cases where medication cannot do the work effectively exercise can also form ah for less severe depression dysthymia exercise helps it works exercise also helps in terms of cognitive functioning self-esteem physical health of course strengthening of the immune system many ways it's the wonder drug when I thought about the study and various other studies in this area I thought wow so exercising is like taking an antidepressant effective it's powerful and after reflecting on it I said to myself not it's not exercising is not like taking an antidepressant it's the other way around not exercising is like taking a depressant there is a distinct difference here because if you think about it we weren't made to be sedentary we weren't made to sit down in front of our computer and write or read books all day or talk to people all day what we were born to do and by God a revolution work out in the fields you know to chase the antelope to run away from the lion to collect the berries for dessert now this is what we were made to do our body has a need for physical exercise and if we frustrate a need whether it's a vitamin or water or oxygen we pay a price physical as well as a psychological price the same with exercise if we don't exercise we pay a psychological emotional physical price so if our base level of happiness is here if we don't exercise we go below our base level of happiness and with exercise we simply go back up to our natural state then we can do things to increase that naturals to increase on that natural state such as cultivating deeper relationships being known rather than being validated such as simplifying our lives but to get to that base level if we don't exercise or below it not exercising is like taking a depressant again let's look at the interpretation of the psychologist dr. DeGeneres on our state of affairs today when it comes to exercising the unsung hero Harvard Medical School psychiatrist in a way exercise can be thought of as a psychiatrist dream treatment it works on anxiety on panic disorder and on stress in general which has a lot to do with depression and it generates the release of neurotransmitters norepinephrine serotonin and dopamine that are very similar to our most important psychiatric medicines having a bout of exercise is like taking a little bit of Prozac and a little bit of Ritalin right where it is supposed to go and I will add without the side effects or rather with positive side effects because there are so many other things that exercise benefits I'm gonna briefly talk about mindful meditation about the research of Jon kabat-zinn this is just a teaser to encourage you to come to his to his workshop on November 3rd he's done a lot of fascinating work showing how meditation is not just something that one does and you have 30 years to spend in the mountain in Tibet but that it can actually impact the person who is very busy in our stressful modern world and by putting time aside just very slight just a little bit of time what he showed was that a tweak of a meditation program on average meditating 45 minutes a day a tweak of a program leads to a significant decrease in anxiety mood change much more positive emotions as a result of this workshop compared to a control group which was on a waiting list waiting for a meditation course so same profile population one group has gone through the course the other hasn't many of these things were criticizing the past a lot of these results because they are subjective so mood is evaluated through questionnaires but cupboards in alongside with Richie Davidson went a step further and they took physiological measures such as for instance fMRI and what they found was that the left side of the prefrontal cortex after an eight-week meditation program actually change and became more active relative to the right side now this is significant because we know through research that the left side of the prefrontal cortex is associated with positive moods with higher levels of resilience so enhancing that actually make people more susceptible to positive emotions and more resilient in the face of negative emotions after an 8-week meditate and it's not even an 8 week retreat where you're a full-time meditating people are working during the day meditating in the evening or early mornings it actually changes the way our brain functions until 1998 people believed that our brain was basically static that we were born with a certain brain maybe some early experiences till the age of three were still changing it but after that the brain didn't change since 1998 we know that it's different we know that the brain changes until the day we die in one of the ways to change it in a positive direction is mindfulness meditation personally I do yoga I'm a little bit a DD so it's difficult for me to just sit down in a place and meditate but it's a form of meditation and that has literally transformed my life physically healthy but also changes the way we think in the way we look at the world also our immune system strengthens so what kabat-zinn did was inject people with called bacteria people who have been through the meditation workshop responded to it better or more effectively they generated more antibodies based on a meditation experience doesn't take a long time Herbert Benson Harvard Medical School talks about 10 to 15 minutes a day of meditation of what he calls the relaxation response it's making a significant difference in our lives a little bit time aside know when I was when I was studying meditation for the first time I I started him you know was all gung-ho about it and did it and then you know after the honeymoon phase went went back and didn't do it and I went back to my meditation teacher and he asked me so how is it going I said it's going overall fine I haven't been meditating as much and he said why and I said well you know I'm so busy I was working at the time and he said um did you brush your teeth this morning and I said said why why why and I said yes yeah of course and did you did you shower this morning I said yeah I did and he said why I said well because you know for hygienic reasons I want I want to be clean he said well meditation is about mental hygiene and it really is about mental hygiene and this is the way I think about it now every day even when I don't feel like meditating and just and I'm so busy I sit down just like I would brush my teeth and shower I do that finally one of the important findings in the area of positive psychologist psychology in general is that happiness is largely contingent on our state of mind rather than on our status or the state of our bank account it depends largely on our state of mind I'm not talking about extreme circumstances of dire poverty yes of course extra money will help but once we have the basics additional money additional prestige doesn't really make a difference in the long run there may be a spike in our well-being after a raise but very quickly we go back to our base level the things that make a difference to the base level to the normal vicissitudes the ups and downs is the experience off for example intimate relationships and also learning to focus on the positive so for example do we see failure which is inevitable as a stumbling block is a catastrophe or as a stepping stone is a learning opportunity one of the sentences I repeat over and over again in my class I repeated over and over again so people remember it it's learn to fail or fail to learn there is no other way to grow looking at failures as a an opportunity for growth as a stepping stone we wouldn't have learned how to walk had we not fallen many times we wouldn't have learned how to draw a circle if we hadn't failed many times as kids same with relationships that's why one of the reasons why some failure within relationship is important remember the ratio of the 5 to 1 it's about learning to focus on the positive and we talked earlier about adapting and writing we adapt to negative things such as loss which is good but we also adapt to positive things which is not so good we begin to take the good things in our lives for granted so often we need something to go wrong in order to appreciate the wonderful things that we have in our lives Earvin yalom professor at Stanford researchers people who have who have terminal diseases who have less than six months to live and he reports that many of these people say independently this is the first time in my life when I'm alive because they begin to focus on the things that they can appreciate whether it's the sun shining there in California whether it's family friends focusing on the little things which are really the big things the details so the question that psychologists asked is how do we overcome this inclination to adapt to positive things how do we not take our lives for granted and there is a long line of research on gratitude because when we say thank you for something we no longer take it for granted now in religion it's implicit it's in it we pray but in our modern secular to some extent world many people no longer do it and many people who do pray already take the prayer for granted and don't really focus on the words so here is the research they did on gratitude what they did Emmons in McAuliffe from California they divided students into four groups one group gratitude group every night before going to bed writing at least four things for which they're grateful second group every night before going to bed writing five hassles in their lives things that don't go well third group five things to which they are better than others at and fourth group control group anything that happened to you during the day the gratitude group big things or little things it could be a meal that you had it could be family it could be God some little things and the biggest of things they can repeat themselves the key is to do it mindfully to focus on it and to reacts perience the emotion that goes along with the thing for which you're grateful they followed them for six months and up to a year and what they found along a few dimensions first physical health how often did they visit the doctor during that period there was their dependent measure second measure how optimistic they were third how happy they were fourth how generous and benevolent they were toward other people and finally how likely were they to achieve their goals these were the five dependent measures that they looked at and what they found the group that performed the worse do you want to guess the hassles group then there were two groups in the middle equal for second in third place the group that performed the best happiest most optimistic most likely to achieve their goals ie most successful most generous most benevolent toward other people and physically healthier than the other three groups is the gratitude group with a simple intervention what it takes three minutes to write and think about the things for which you're grateful every night but that made all the difference both psychological as well as health benefits by expressing gratitude by not taking the good things in our lives for granted because that three minutes at night what it does what it does is it creates a new schema in the minds that we don't ignore good things during the day and something happens like tasty meal and you say oh that's something I'm gonna write about tonight or playing with my kid oh I'm definitely writing about that and learning to focus more on the positive rather than take things for granted and it's an antidote it's an antidote to what's going on today in our culture where the focus is so much on the negative it's not just a 21 to 1 ratio when it comes to psychological abstracts to the research there is at least a 21 to 1 ratio between good news and bad news on TV in the media there is a real media bias today and I'm not talking about bias off you know CNN on the left and you know Fox on the right I'm talking about media bias toward the negative we're focusing on things that don't work and it's important to highlight these things so that we change it but at the same time it creates a schema in our mind and we begin to focus on the negative and we begin to believe that most life is negative is bad so we all know about what happened in worldcom or what happened in Enron or Martha Stewart we know about the business frauds but do the newspapers report on their millions and billions of honest transactions taking place every single day you know we hear we read about Wars and terrorism but do we read about all the volunteering and the acts of goodness that are taking place every single minute and because of that media bias toward the negative that is reflected in our internal bias we absorb that schema from the outside and we whether we like it or not we're impacted by it television influence and not just our kids us as well and what this exercise this is an antidote to the negativity that's out there make is making us more realistic shifting the pendulum in our perception of the world the physiological benefits is a very good book out called transforming anxiety that talks about how the experience of gratitude transforming anxiety is the name of the book by McRae he is one of the authors how focusing on things for which we're grateful actually leads to what what he calls heart coherence a much healthier state of existence and if we do it regularly it becomes more than norm as opposed to the fight or flight which is the norm today the chaos the anxiety and the key here as I said earlier is to be mindful about it so when we do the gratitude if we do it after a month not to take for granted even if we're running about our family for the 30th time I do this exercise every day I write it in my notebook every day things I'm grateful and then I have a file that I put it into the file I have gratitude journal every single day since the 19th of September 1999 I've been doing it religiously since actually long before this study came out and I even knew about it I first learned about or thought about it on Oprah on Oprah she told yeah yeah so now you see where I get my sources from right yeah but it was good to see that the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology which the preeminent leading journal in our field published this the study but we know it works the key is to do it regularly as a ritual so for instance you know last third of October there was last night I think God visiting Harvard I I'm living in Israel now and I came to visit it was great you see the place again Sean Jessica and Jeff my friends I had dinner with them my family tomash my wife David my son Kripalu experience I went and did some yoga and Kripalu Grafton Street I had dinner there and salmon I had salmon for dinner there mm-hmm if you must know again little things and big things I have three things four things that I write every day that's God family that's my extended family Tom oh Sh and and David my son and then in addition I write things that are different every day the key to remain mindful and to do it regularly why don't we do it now just for a couple of minutes think about things again you don't need to do it obviously you know I'm not grading you so you don't have to do it think about things for which you're grateful if you have a place to write it down write it down if not just think about it in your mind's eye big things little things take 30 seconds to do it to appreciate the wonderful things in your life okay now if you feel like it you don't have to turn to the person next to you or to the two people next to you and share with them some of the things that you feel comfortable sharing things for which you're grateful little or big things okay okay we don't to shift the pendulum too far so I'm gonna stop you here now there hasn't been a study about this but I bet you that you'll find very significant results when it comes to kids because I've seen this my kid is a bit too young to do this but I've seen it with families were before going to bed the kids and the parents together do this exercise and they tell each other I do it with my wife it makes a difference why because we shift the pendulum we overcome the negativity bias and we be simply become more realistic it's not becoming detached Pollyannish optimist it's becoming more realistic to reflect our day to reflect our life I want to end with a story about Helen Keller a woman who can remind us who can teach us to appreciate and not take the good things in our lives for granted in her biography she talks about a friend who visited her and the friend went out for a walk in the woods and when she came back Helen Keller asked her so how was it what did you observe to which her friend responded nothing in particular and here is what Helen Keller writes about that experience I wondered how it was possible to walk for an hour through the woods and see nothing of note I who cannot see find hundreds of things the delicate symmetry of a leaf the smooth skin of a Silver Birch the rough shaggy bark of a spine I who am blind can give one hint to those who see use your eyes as if tomorrow you will have been stricken blind here are the music of voices the songs of a bird the mighty strains of an orchestra as if you would be stricken deaf tomorrow touch each object as if tomorrow your tactile sense would fail smell the perfume of flowers taste with relish each morsel as if tomorrow you could never taste or smell again make the most of every sense glory in all the facets and pleasures and beauty which the world reveals to you yes there are difficulties in the world yes their negative emotions there is fear there is anger there is stress especially in our modern world there are all those things yes there are difficult experiences in relationships in every single relationship but there are also wonderful things in every relationship there are also wonderful things in every person and in every life and the key is to learn to appreciate it because when we appreciate something we don't just express gratitude for it we also appreciate it in the other sense just like money appreciates we make it grow and when we focus on the positive and we express gratitude and appreciate the good things in our life we bring more good things to our lives and what Helen Keller is reminding us is to on a regular basis say thank you thank you for our given world thank you for the gifts that we get from others so thank you thank you thank you thank you we'd like to open this up for a short while for questions and give you all a chance to say what's on your mind questions or comments I want to share a comment I thought I had early in your talk when you were talking about defining happiness I lived for 11 years in Prague in the Czech Republic and they use a word there I don't know if there's anybody checked here spoke yne which when it's translated they don't use the word happy as nearly as much as we do what spoke ANR Spokeo anna means is contentment satisfaction and it seems to fit in much more with you know kind of what you're talking about and they save happy for things like happy birthday or happy new year or something you know very finite yeah this cultural use of the word happiness is interesting so if you the wording in English happiness comes from the same root as the word HAP happenstance same Latin root which basically means luck so if you're lucky you'll have good things happen if you're unlucky bad things happen I didn't know about the Czech word but in Hebrew the word for happiness is or she also means it just comes from the same root geological root as the word for approval or authenticity so if I live a life that I prove off an authentic life that's when I'll be happy and it's interesting to look at different languages too and and and learn but what what happiness means again ultimately we all define happiness for ourselves the definition that I chose was a meaningful pleasurable life as opposed to a lucky life this question appears unserious at first but it's I think it's a useful question and the question basically is is happiness important the there's a book I thought this opinion was dead but there was a book appeared about 10 years ago about educating gifted kids and they looked at them years later and they'd become fairly content adults but they weren't geniuses and striving and they said well maybe they were too happy as kids you know maybe the education didn't frustrate them enough and we always have this picture of the frustrated genius the artist and so forth who had to suffer so that's the question good yeah it's and it's a very important question that that people are asking and for good reasons so do we pay a price for being happy and the price being in terms of progress for instance or as John Stuart Mill said you know I would rather be a miserable Socrates than a happy pig yeah he had a way with words and and it's a real question so it is a serious question and the answer is there's a lot of research being done a lot of it being done by Barbara Fredrickson she was at Michigan now she's at an O in North Carolina on positive emotions and what these do and what she found was that positive emotions lead to what she has come to call broaden and build but when we experience negative emotions we narrow and constrict so if we are you know anxious or depressed all we're thinking about is our current experience what we're going through now or is when we're happy and and it makes sense because you know if there is a line in front of us we don't want to start thinking about you know the celebration you know the birth our son's birthday or about what we're gonna have for dinner because we're gonna be dinner if if we don't think about so it's good that we narrow and constrict in our modern world because we experience the fight-or-flight response so often we very often air on constrict on the other hand positive emotions do the opposite they broaden and build which means they help us see expansively they help us become more creative so not only are we happier we're also thinking more broadly and are able to make better connections now what is genius genius in many ways is the ability to connect between things that haven't been connected or you know Einstein's theory of relativity the you know the simplest one taking ideas from geometry and connecting them to physics all right not that simple right but that's part of of genius of creativity in other words positive emotions can actually contribute and if you look at a lot of the genius many of them were or some of them some famous ones were manic-depressives it was often in the romantic state that they were most creative because when they were depressed they didn't want to write they didn't want to compose they you know they just wanted to be left alone or very often just wanted to die so the positive emotions are what leads to to broaden and build now that doesn't mean that we need to be manic in order to be to be highly creative but controlling for other factors positive emotions actually contributes to growth now it seems almost unreal it's like eating the cake and leaving it whole why because we live on with the basic premise that no pain no gain right that's something that's repeated over and over again but it turns out not to be so that doesn't mean the depressives cannot be creative and cannot be a genius but it's not necessary and more than that controlling for other factors positive emotions or happiness actually contributes to to creativity and productivity in organizations for example very much enjoyed the lecture as I listened though I began to think about how we as Americans have to deal with this new world is flat construct right and I'm asking myself you know are people in China and India viewing this notion of happiness as you've just described it so I'm just curious as to how your framework of happiness fits for us you know in a world that is very different yeah and if it if it still applies yeah so let me answer this on two levels the first level is there is a lot of research that shows that there isn't that much of a difference among cultures in terms of levels of happiness once basic needs are covered or met there is no difference a person who is living in dire poverty whether it's in the United States or in India certainly doesn't experience as much well-being as a person who has their basic needs met however once the basic needs are met we experience equal levels of well-being except for under cultures where there is political oppression so places for example where women are oppressed they obviously are not going to experience the same levels of well-being or potential for the same levels of well-being as in a free country in terms of the the kind of happiness that people experience there is a difference here so there are certain cultures where family is more of a central issue were being part of the of the clan of the tribe so to speak is more it is a more important part of of happiness however there are also more universals than differences the Dalai Lama spoke at a in another wonderful book to read his by Daniel Goleman called destructive emotions and it's about a meeting that the Dalai Lama had and some of his group had with leading scientists from around the world and the Dalai Lama came out with claim that really took the participants back because he said happiness is universal study and cultural difference is important but it's more important to study the universal now coming from the dalai lama who is certainly sensitive to different cultures there was very surprising to people but scientists have been thinking about this concept and what they realized there is were much more alike then then we were different much much more alike you know it's not even close Abraham Maslow psychologists in many ways can be seen as the grandfather of the positive psychology movement said looking down into the depth of our own mind we look into the depth of all Minds basically getting to the point of the universality of of human nature and as part of human nature of happiness as well I'm hoping you will mention a little bit about gross national happiness and what the chances are of that actually happening either in the United States or any of the nations so gross national happiness I see some people are leaving so let me just say one thing before I respond to this the important thing about all these ideas and increasing one's personal levels of happiness is implementation change cannot happen in a vacuum change cannot happen as a result of the workshop you cannot increase your personal gross level of happiness by just hearing someone talking about it it's about implementation it's about creating a ritual and new habit whether it's exercising whether it's taking time aside to spend with your family whether it's simplifying one's life whether it's meditating whether it's doing the gratitude exercise regularly the key is action so I just wanted to say that before more of you leave but back to your question the Gross National Happiness gross national happiness was a phrase coined by the country or the king of Bhutan she's a small country between China and India and the amount high up in the mountains and what they decided was that they weren't going to measure the well-being of their country were using the gross national product how much money they make but rather gross national happiness how happy their citizens are it's been implemented some success actually some of my students did research their travel to Bhutan to to research the culture it's a very unique culture Buddhist culture with very dominant values very different from our culture and the question that many people have asked and actually they're very interesting they are asking this in in England more than any other country in the today there's a lot of work being done in politicians talking about we need another measure not just cross national product but also Gross National Happiness Edie dinner who's a psychologist in Illinois is is pursuing it and he's measuring levels of happiness and getting him met and through the Gallup Organization also they're getting measures of happiness of countries and they want to make it an important indicator so to measure levels of happiness was the politicians successful or not well let's see what people were like at the beginning and then at the end and after four years after eight years and that he wants people to look at it as as an important indicator to be honest I don't see it happening anytime soon in in in the West in general not just in this country but I think eventually people are going to start look at it more seriously when levels of the well it has to get worse before it gets better and people are realizing now that even though we're making much more money that we were much wealthier as a society we're getting more depressed and the more they realize the more they're going to understand that it's important to also measure the non the less quantifiable things such as happiness but I think it's going to take a while positive psychology is certainly attempting to be a trigger and and bring that about I have a question about implementation in the beginning you talked about the separation between psychology and science and self-help but you yourself mentioned that you did the journal years before the research was like would you have told other people to do that the journal after you started doing it not only would I tell I did tell people to do it but I wouldn't tell them that there is scientific evidence and I certainly wouldn't teach it in my class so while I do it and it worked for me you know I i I've I've done meditation or yoga for a long time even before I knew about this before I became a psychologist and it helped me now recommended my friends you know just like you know you eating a good restaurant you don't eat scientific evidence to recommend it to friends but at the same time I wouldn't I wouldn't teach it in the class so I only bring up Ellen DeGeneres or or Oprah when I can back it up then with with scientific evidence Oh commendation by all means teach it in a scientific class I know absolutely like it thank you one last question yeah I'm gonna hang out here till really till midnight so you can you can come up and ask after this - I echo the sentiments of the man back there thank you for a marvelous talk I was interested in your comments on stress in Physiology I'm a physiologist so you need stress for your body parts work properly but if you go beyond a certain threshold it now becomes detrimental to function now I can see all kinds of parallels between the physiology and the psychology so can you define for us how we can recognize the borderline between you stress and distress yeah no that's a very good question so how do you distinguish your being positive stress which is necessary some level of tension because without any tension there'd be boredom there'd be no action so we need some tension but how do we have this tension as for example excitement rather than anxiety unfortunately unlike in on the physiological level when you actually measure where you can get precise measurements and say okay so this is good for us and you know beyond this level of stress it's not good for us a lot of it here is introspection so asking what's up hi my feeling and the distinction that I make when I talk about the three three levels first level is being comfort level where you know I've done this a lot of time it's even boring you know sitting in front of the TV and vegetating that's comfortable no pressure no stress beyond that there is the stretch level where I'm getting out of my comfort zone I'm growing I'm learning I'm doing new things I'm developing I'm coping with issues but then which is a good place this is the healthy stress the stretch zone you have the comfort zone the stretch zone above the stretch zone you have the panic zone that's unhealthy so for example public speaking you know by rated by USA Today you know hardly an academic journal but this was a study that USA Today ran as the second greatest fear after can't remember if one was spiders or death was one of the two but anyway I know that a public speaking was second so public speaking there is a state where no we just can't speak we're so nervous and we were tight there is a stage also though where we're nervous just at the right amount there is a stage where we were bored I was giving one day before my I started teaching which was to my own class Richard Hackman who's my teacher at Harvard and great teacher came to my office and said so how are you feeling and I said I'm extremely nervous and he said oh yeah so am i and I don't you know he's he's been teaching for thirty five years phenomenal teacher I said you still get nervous today and he said yeah all good teachers do and this was an important you know talk about permission to be human this is a healthy level because we're not bored we're not the level of being too comfortable but we're at a level of just the right size but you're the only one who can say this is too much this is panic now I want to say one more thing about this stretch zone there's been a lot of talk recently because of the book that came out stumbling on happiness and other research that basically we have our base level of happiness and the base level of happiness is what we were born with our genetic predisposition in fact there was research done in 1996 that on twins rear apart identical twins reared apart monozygotic twins same genetic makeup but they were split at birth and what they found was very high correlation in personality even if one was raised in Iowa and the other was raised in New York City and different entirely different families of course still high correlation and what the psychologists the the they talked about what called the stochastic happiness is a stochastic phenomenon and what they said trying to change your happiness level is like trying to change your height this this was the the final sentence of their published article now this was very disturbing obviously for many people and you know later they retracted and they said you know we did it more for effect but it had and it did have an effect so it worked the thing is what they showed is that it accounts the genetics accounts for some of the variants in terms of our levels of well-being and and what that means it's that yes some people are born predisposed to X the system some are pre are born predisposed to being grumpy now a grump person born grumpy perhaps cannot be Pollyanna but what our genetics define is a range and this is the key thing it defines a range rather than a set point where you are along this range depends on you you know always say to my class I'm the right person to teach positive psychology why because I wasn't born happy-go-lucky I wasn't born Pollyannish I was born you know usually looking on the dark side of life I was usually making lemon out of lemonade you know I was that there was my natural predisposition and I've been working on it I'm still working on it as I said ten years from now I hope to be happier than I am today and positive psychology has the tools that we can use to work on it now getting back to your question so the question is how do you get the base level of happiness up and we talked about a few of these things we talked about experience or express gratitude regularly simplify exercise and exercise actually it's to get to your base level meditation spend more time with family and friends and Dan Gilbert talks about this in his book cultivate intimate relationship be known rather than be validated and deal with activities or challenges that take you to your stretch zone because it's when we are at that right level of stress the healthy stress or the excitement that's when we grow it's like muscles you know if we lift air nothing we hardly develop the muscles if we lift too much weights we carry the muscle the keys to identify the right amount of stress for the muscle you

Channel: Museum of Science

Views: 178,079

Keywords: Museum of Science, Boston, Science Museum, Boston Science, museum, Tal Ben-Shahar, psychology of happiness

Id: wBWejfL0xOA

Length: 115min 6sec (6906 seconds)

Published: Wed May 09 2018