ANDREW HUBERMAN: Welcome
to the Huberman Lab podcast, where we discuss science
and science-based tools for everyday life. [MUSIC PLAYING] I'm Andrew Huberman,
and I'm a professor of neurobiology
and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. Today we are
discussing happiness. We're going to discuss
the science of happiness, because indeed, there are
excellent laboratories that have worked for many decades
to try and understand what is this thing
that we call happiness and what brings us happiness
in the short and long term. In fact, we could probably
point to happiness as one of the most sought-after
states or commodities, or emotions. Whatever you want to
call it, happiness is what many people are seeking
in work, in relationships, and in general. And yet most of us can't
really define exactly what happiness is or means for us. We can point to
certain experiences, we can try and describe our
states of mind and body, but most people recognize
the feeling when we have it, and we certainly recognize the
feeling of not being happy. Whether or not that means
simply not being happy as the absence of happiness
or all-out depression. Now one of the key problems in
trying to understand happiness and, indeed, the science
and psychology of happiness is that it does indeed
involve other similar things. Things like joy, and
gratitude, and meaning. And indeed, many scientists
and psychologists have argued for
many, many decades about what happiness really is. Now we can come up with
so-called operational definitions of happiness. Operational definitions are
basically agreed-upon terms or agreed-upon
definitions and conditions that will define something
such as happiness. Much in the same way
that we can all probably come up with an operational
definition of milk. But of course, milk can be
cow's milk, it can be oat milk, it can be soy milk,
et cetera, et cetera. So too, something
like happiness can be micro-divided and sliced
and diced into as many things as we decide. Today we are really going to
focus on three main things. First, we are going to define
happiness as a brain state and as a state of mind and body. We're going to take a look at
what the science says about all of that. Second, we are going to talk
about tools and practices for placing ourselves
into states of happiness. And while for most of
us, we think of happiness as something that only arrives
through the acquisition of some goal or some thing
external to us, and of course, that is true. There is also something
called synthetic happiness or synthesized happiness
which turns out to be at least as powerful and
perhaps even more powerful. Now I'll just say
right off the bat that I'm not going to tell
you that all you have to do is sit in a chair and
imagine being happy in order to feel happy. Synthesize happiness actually
involves some very concrete steps that have been defined by
excellent labs in psychology, so we're going to talk
about synthesize happiness as it relates to what you can
do to obtain happy states more readily or more frequently. And then, third, we're
going to talk about some of the misconceptions or what
I would call the contradictions of happiness research. And what I mean by
that is most of you have probably heard about
the general conditions for obtaining happiness. And they always
seem to circle back to some of the same basic
features of get great sleep, have great social connection,
pursue meaning, don't focus to any overextend on
things like pursuing money because there are indeed
these studies that show that the amount of
money that people make does not necessarily scale
directly with happiness. We'll talk about those studies
in some detail a little bit later. And while all of
that literature is very powerful and
informative, there is what I see as
a contradiction. Which is for instance, that for
many of us, including myself, especially in the
years when I was in graduate school
and a postdoc, there were times in which
pursuing and being involved in work and pursuing
degrees and finding meaning in my vocation
actually separated me from the opportunity
to have quite as many social connections,
or quite as much sleep, or quite as much exercise, or
even quite as much sunshine, for that matter. So all of the things that we're
told that we need in order to access happiness
on a regular basis oftentimes contradict
with the pressures and the requirements
of not just daily life but in building a
life that allows us to have the kind of
resources that we need in order to have things like quality
social connection, and the time and opportunity to get regular
exercise and great nutrition, et cetera, et cetera. So, again, while this
isn't necessarily a complaint with any
of the research out of the fields of
psychology on happiness, it is important
that we acknowledge these contradictions that
exist in the discussion around happiness. In particular, the
popular discussions around the science of happiness. So today, what we are
going to arrive at, what you will
finish this episode, with is a set of tools and a
framework for understanding the pursuit of happiness
in the short and long-term as it relates to the
research from psychology but also the neuroscience. And my goal today is really
to try and place that all into a structured
framework so that you can know where you are in
your journey or the landscape around happiness in your
pursuit of happiness. And what I won't
tell you is that you need to abandon
all goals in terms of pursuing money,
career, et cetera, and simply focus
on relationships. But we will talk
about what constitutes an excellent social bond or
even in excellent conversation. There's excellent research
that points to the fact that even rather shallow
connections, that is, connections between people
that you happen to just see in the hallway on
a regular basis, not even requiring
close bonds of any kind, can be built into close
bonds that can deliver a tremendous amount of feeling
and genuine social connection provided certain
conditions are met. So today, again, it's
really about understanding the science of happiness,
understanding the mechanisms underlying what
we call happiness. And providing you a
framework by which you can pursue and
achieve happiness not just as a long-term goal and not
just as a day-to-day goal of little micro exercises
of gratitude, et cetera, but rather as a way to
think about happiness as a state that you have
control over, at least in terms of your
ability to access what I would call
the algorithms that enable us or open the
opportunity to experience happiness. Now before we begin
today's episode, I'd like to talk about a very
specific tool that applies yes to our pursuit of
happiness but actually to our pursuit of everything,
including quality sleep and ongoing
motivation, et cetera. I've talked many, many
times before on this podcast and on other podcasts,
and on social media about the critical
value of getting regular bright light, ideally
sunlight, in your eyes within the first hour of waking. Or if the sun isn't out when
you wake up in the morning, to turn on a lot of
bright artificial lights and then get
sunlight in your eyes for anywhere from
5 to 20 minutes, depending on how cloudy it is
in the early part of the day. Absolutely outsized
effects mood and focus during the day and
quality of sleep at night. Now there's another
sort of central tenet of getting great sleep
and improving mood and focus throughout the day. And that's to avoid
bright artificial light exposure to your eyes between
the hours of about 10 PM to 4:00 AM. Now leaving shift workers aside,
and we have an entire episode devoted to shift work, most
people are asleep at night and awake during the day. And you would be wise to
avoid exposure of your eyes to bright artificial light
between the hours of 10:00 PM and 4:00 AM. If you're going to use
screens or artificial lights, dim them down as far as you can. Now there are several studies
that point to the fact that one of the major
issues with getting bright light in your eyes
between the hours of 10:00 PM and 4:00 AM is that
it has a negative impact on the so-called dopaminergic or
dopamine circuits of the brain and body, which can
enhance depression. That is lead to ongoing
lower mood and affect. So that's a reason
to dim the lights or avoid bright lights
between 10:00 PM and 4:00 AM. However, I and many others
need to use artificial light and screens sometimes, even
between the hours of 10:00 PM and midnight or even
midnight to 3:00 AM, depending on what's going
on in my life or your life. That may include you as well. Now it turns out that
there are powerful ways to offset some, not all, but
some of the negative effects of viewing artificial lights
between the hours of 10:00 PM and 4:00 AM. And one of the most
powerful ways to do that is to simply adjust
the overall brightness of your artificial
lighting throughout the day and in the evening. So one of the issues nowadays
that we're really facing is that people are simply not
getting enough bright light in their eyes from sunlight
or from other sources during the daytime,
and they're getting far too much bright
light in their eyes largely from artificial sources,
of course, in the evening and at night. Not just from 10 PM
to 4:00 AM, but also in the evening hours from 6 to
10 PM and so on and so forth. So a very simple yet
powerful solution that supported by peer-reviewed
research in humans is to try and make your
indoor working and/or home environment during the
day as bright as possible. Now, if you can achieve that
through direct sunlight, terrific. If you can get outside a lot
during the daytime, terrific. But many people simply cannot. But most people do have some
windows in their environment. I realize some don't
but, most people do. And as a consequence,
most people are using rather dim artificial
lighting indoors during the day and then very bright
artificial lighting indoors in the evening, and
at night, that's a problem. And if you think about
it, logically, you want to do the exact reverse. So it's been shown
that if you simply increase the amount of
bright artificial light that you were exposed to
during the day, and remember this is not an excuse to not get
your morning sunlight viewing, but in addition to that, to make
your indoor artificial lights very bright, bright,
bright, bright, bright throughout the day. And then much dimmer from the
hours of 6:00 PM until bedtime. Or if you can't do
that, then maybe as soon as you get home from about
8:00 PM until bedtime. And then dim them way,
way down between 10:00 PM and 4:00 AM or off entirely. That's going to be
a far better pattern for your sleep-wake
cycles, focus, mood, et cetera than what
most people do, which is to have a few windows
in their indoor working environment during the day and
keep the indoor lights rather dim at a time when they
need more photons, more light energy. And then in the evening,
when they get home because it's dark
outside, they tend to turn the lights
much brighter. You actually want
to do the reverse. Now there's an even
simpler solution, which is to get some bright
sunlight in your eyes right around the time of sunset. It doesn't have to
be exactly at sunset, it could be in the late
afternoon and evening. But it's been shown now
in studies on humans, and I'll provide a
link to at least one of those studies,
that by getting some bright light in your
eyes, ideally from sunlight, in the late afternoon
and evening. And, of course, the timing will
vary depending on time of year and where you are
located on the planet. But facing the
sun around sunset, you don't actually have
to see the sun cross down below the horizon,
but facing the sun around that time for anywhere
from 5 to 10 minutes or even less, even two to
five minutes, can adjust the
sensitivity of neurons in your retina that communicate
light information to the brain and make it such that in
the evening when you use artificial lights, they
aren't going to have as much of a detrimental effect
on your dopamine system and for impairing your sleep. So the idea is as much bright
light, ideally from sunlight but also from artificial
sources, from the time you wake up in the
morning until the evening. Maybe around 6:00 or 7:00. Maybe in the summer
months, a little bit later. And then really try and
get as little bright light in your eyes as you can in the
evening and nighttime hours. And ideally, you would also get
some sunlight exposure right around the time of sunset
or in the late afternoon. Go outside, take
your sunglasses off. Don't try and do this through a
windshield or through a window. It will not work. You have to get outside. If you're under an
overhang, at least try and get some direct sunlight
in your eyes at that time. And that will adjust
the sensitivity of your retina such that
bright artificial lights or artificial lights
of any kind that you're exposed to in the evening and
in the late hours of the night won't have as much of
a detrimental effect. That said, if you
go to the bathroom in the middle of the night,
try and keep the lights dim. Many people have asked
whether or not, for instance, a nightlight or a flashlight
is going to have as much of a negative effect. This is very straightforward. If you think about it, if you
shine a light at something, you can see into
your environment. If you've ever been
camping or you've walked with a flashlight,
you can see things around you that you wouldn't
otherwise, of course. But if you were to shine
that light in your eyes, it would be far brighter. So yes, of course, if you get
up in the middle of the night and you can use your phone
flashlight to illuminate the environment that you're
in so that you can safely go to where you need to
go and then back to bed, that's going to be far better
than turning on the lights or, of course, shining
light in your eyes, right. So the idea is bright,
bright, bright in the morning and throughout the day. And as dim and dark
as possible at night. And that afternoon light
viewing provides, sort of, what I call a Netflix
inoculation that will allow you to adjust
your retinal sensitivity and give you a little bit
more flexibility in terms of allowing some
nighttime light exposure without the detrimental effects. Now I realize today's
episode is about happiness, it's not about
sunlight or dopamine. And yet, as we'll
talk about more in just a moment, if you're
not optimizing your sleep and if you are using or
being exposed to light rather at the wrong times of
the day/night cycle, that is going to make it
very hard for the other sorts of practices that
relate to happiness to have their full impact. So the backdrop, where I would
say the kind of landscape of your chemicals
and your hormones, is powerfully controlled by not
just the brightness of light but the timing of light
and your exposure to light. In particular, your exposure
to light to your eyes is something that you have
a lot of control over. You don't have absolute control,
but you have a lot of control over. And it's been proven that
even these small steps, which are completely cost-free. They require just a
few minutes of time, but no purchase a
product or anything else can allow you to greatly
adjust your neurochemistry and your hormones in the
direction of better mood, better sleep, and happiness. Before we begin, I'd
like to emphasize that this podcast is separate
from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is, however, part
of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to consumer
information about science and science-related tools
for the general public. In keeping with
that theme, I'd like to thank the sponsors
of today's podcast. Our first sponsor is Thesis. Thesis makes custom nootropics. And as I've said many times
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specific neural circuits in the brain or body for
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up to $200 off and two free pillows. Let's talk about happiness. This thing that everybody seems
to want, and yet not everybody can agree on what exactly
it is or how to get it. Now I want to start by quoting
a previous guest on the Huberman Lab podcast. And that is a colleague of mine
at Stanford School of Medicine, Dr. Karl Deisseroth, who's both
a bioengineer and a clinician. That is, he's a psychiatrist
who spends a lot of his time both running a laboratory
and seeing patients, human patients, of course. And I once was at
a meeting where I heard Karl say something
to the extent of we don't know what
other people feel. In fact, most of the
time, we don't even really know how we feel. And while that
statement was meant to report several different
things about the way that the brain
works and emotions, et cetera, one of the things
that he was emphasizing, and I know he was emphasizing
it because he confirmed this for me, was the
fact that language. Things like the word
happiness, or joy, or meaning, or pleasure, or delight,
are actually not very precise when it comes to
describing our brain and body states. So, for instance, if I tell
you I'm feeling pretty happy. I know what that means for
me, at least in this moment, but you don't really
know whether or not it means the same thing as what
pretty happy means for you. If I say I'm extremely
happy and I have a big grin. I have a grin on my face that I
can't seem to wipe off my face. Well, then, you might get a
sense of how much happier I am than pretty happy. But it's still hard to calibrate
my level of internal state or happiness, and the
same is true for you and for everybody else. And it's important for
us to acknowledge this because at this point
in human history, 2022, we don't really
have a measurement like body temperature or
heart rate or heart rate variability or even a way
to measure neurochemicals in the brain and body
that give us anything better than a crude correlate
or an estimate, at best, of what happiness is. So that's really important to
understand and to keep in mind throughout this episode. It doesn't mean that we cannot
have a strong data-driven conversation about happiness
and what brings us to a state of happiness. But it's very important to
understand that language is not an ideal and maybe even
a deficient tool in terms of describing our emotions and
our states of mind and body. Now equally important
is to understand that while we do have
neurotransmitters, that is, the chemicals
that are released between neurons, nerve cells
that allow neurons to communicate, things
like glutamate and gaba, for instance. And we have what are
called modulators. These are chemicals
also released by neurons that impact the
electrical firing and chemical release of other neurons. Things like serotonin, and
dopamine, and acetylcholine, and epinephrine. Neuromodulators and
neurotransmitters are always present in a
cocktail in our brain and body. That is, they are present
in different ratios and at different levels. So we need to completely
discard with the idea that any one neurotransmitter
or any one neuromodulator is solely responsible
for a state of happiness or for a lack of state of
happiness, for that matter. That said, it is true
that for people that tend to have lower baseline
levels of, for instance, dopamine, their
levels of happiness, or we should say their
self-reported levels of happiness, tend to
be lower than for those that have greatly elevated
baseline levels of dopamine. Now, this can be
best appreciated at the extremes
where, for instance, in conditions like
Parkinson's disease or other conditions where
people's levels of dopamine in their brain is
severely depleted. Mind you, we also see this
in drug-addicted individuals that are in a withdrawal state
because they're trying to quit or they don't have access to the
drug that normally stimulates release of dopamine. Think the cocaine addict
who can't get cocaine. Or the methamphetamine
addict that can't or is trying to avoid
taking methamphetamine. Or the Parkinson's patient
who has fewer dopamine neurons because
they degenerated. Those individuals do tend
to be more depressed. They tend to have lower affect. They are less happy. At least, that's how they report
themselves to be emotionally. And that's what we observe when
we look at them behaviorally in terms of the amount of
smiling, the amount of energy they seem to have. At the opposite extreme. And while still focusing
on the kind of pathology of neurotransmitter and
neuromodulator systems, an individual who is in
a manic phase of bipolar will tend to have very
elevated levels of dopamine. And those people will
talk a mile a minute, and they won't require sleep. And at least to them, every
idea is an exciting idea and one that they want to pursue. We did an entire episode about
bipolar depression, A.K.A. Bipolar disorder. So if you'd like to learn
more about that, please check out that episode. That and all other
episodes of the podcast, of course, you can find it
hubermanlab.com in all formats. But the point here is
that very low levels are very high levels of
dopamine are correlated with certain states of,
for instance, low happiness or the absence of happiness. We could even call it
depression in some cases. Or extreme happiness
or even euphoria. Sometimes even
inappropriate euphoria, as is the case with
bipolar depression or sometimes called bipolar
mania or bipolar disorder. Now, of course, there's a range
in between depressed and manic. And most people, fortunately
reside somewhere in that range. And it is indeed a continuum. And I think it's safe to
say that levels of dopamine probably do correlate
with levels of happiness. But there is no
one single chemical nor chemical signature, that is,
no specific recipe of two parts dopamine, to one part
serotonin, to one part acetylcholine that we can
say equates to happiness. Indeed there's now
tremendous controversy as to whether or not,
for instance, having lower levels of
serotonin is actually the cause of depression
or merely correlates with depression or maybe
doesn't even correlate with depression, at all. This became especially
controversial because, in the last year,
the so-called serotonin hypothesis of depression has
been called into question. And indeed, it does seem to be
the case that for individuals that are depressed,
their levels of serotonin can sometimes be normal. However, and this is
an important however, that does not mean that
administering drugs that increase levels of
serotonin in depressed people does not sometimes
and indeed often help ameliorate some
of their symptoms. And I should mention that many
of the selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors. So-called SSRIs such
as Prozac and Zoloft, et cetera, are still
considered excellent treatments for conditions like OCD
and so on and so forth. But what I'm trying to do is
make two important points. First of all, that language
is not a great indicator of internal state. Especially when trying to
understand other people's internal state. And that is especially true
for things like happiness. And that there is
no one chemical signature of happiness. There's no one neural
modulator or combinations of neuromodulators
that we can say is the cocktail for happiness. But, and it's a very
important, but when levels of dopamine
and serotonin tend to be chronically
low for an individual below their typical
baseline, they will, yes, tend to
be lower in affect and have lower mood and less
episodes of happiness per day, per week, per month,
per year, et cetera. Conversely, when an
individual has elevations in dopamine and
serotonin levels, in particular dopamine levels
and the other so-called catecholamines, which include
epinephrine and norepinephrine. So the catecholamines are
dopamine, epinephrine, and norepinephrine. They're all very
similar biochemically. They all lead to states of
elevated motivation, energy, and so on. When those chemicals are
elevated above baseline, people do tend to have elevated
sense of mood and well-being, and in particular
sense of possibility about what they
can do in the world and what the world
can offer them. So we need to acknowledge
those two features of language and neurochemistry as we
wade into the discussion about the psychology
of happiness. And, in particular, about
the controlled experiments that have been done in
excellent laboratories focused on the psychology of happiness
and what brings happiness and what does not. There have been some excellent
studies on happiness. And these come in
two forms generally. One form of these
studies is individuals come into a laboratory. They participate in an
experiment over the course of a day or months. And then, data are
collected analyzed, and the papers are submitted,
and published, and discussed. The other form is so-called
longitudinal study. Where individuals come
into the laboratory, and they are studied over
a very long period of time. Ranging from months to years
and sometimes even decades. And then, the variables of
age, life circumstances, and other factors can be
incorporated into the data. And typically, there
are multiple papers, there's data published
throughout the longitudinal study, or sometimes
it's just one paper at the end of the
longitudinal study. Let's talk about one of
the more famous and perhaps the longest-running
longitudinal study on happiness. This is a study that was
initiated or conceived in 1938 at Harvard University. The so-called Harvard
Happiness Project. Some of you probably
heard about this. It involved Harvard
College sophomores and other individuals who were
incorporated into this study as well. It's a study that initially
had more than a couple of hundred subjects. But because some have
either dropped out and not been able to be contacted and
monitored over time or died, or for whatever reason,
are no longer participating in the study, they're very
few of these individuals left. And yet there's tremendous
power to a study like this. It's such an impressive study,
and we're all so grateful that laboratories
at Harvard decided to initiate and continue
this study because it is one of the few studies,
perhaps the study that has allowed us to understand
happiness in our species over a very long period of time. Like any study,
it's not perfect. It didn't include a
lot of matching by sex or matching by
vocation, or matching by income and background. And back then, there was
also a lot less discussion about trauma and
histories around trauma, as well as positive
episodes in people's lives. Nonetheless, there's a lot of
power in a study like this. And there are some
very basic takeaways, some of which you may have heard
before but some of which may be surprising those
of you who haven't. So one of the key
things about the study is people in the
study, at least those who still have intact memory,
which many of them do, are able to think
back on not just their previous year or week but
10 years ago, 20 years ago, 50 years ago and compare
what makes them happy at one age versus another age. A number of things have
emerged from that conversation. So I just want to discuss
some of the highlight points then we'll get into
a little bit more of the nitty-gritty of the data. First of all, it's been
discussed many, many times that the total amount of
income that an individual makes or has, and again, this
could be income from work, or it could be money
that they inherited, does not seem to directly relate
to their level of happiness. Now a lot of people take
that point and think, oh, money doesn't matter. Other people hear that point
and think to themselves, yeah, right, easy to say
if you have a lot of money. We'll talk about the
interpretation of those data in just a few minutes. But I do want to
earmark that finding. Because I agree that while
money or total resources itself does not predict happiness
in any kind of direct way, that is not the
same thing as saying having very few resources will
make you happier, of course. I don't think anyone
would imagine that. But it also tends to overlook
an important point, which is something that I certainly
have learned to appreciate in my life and something
that I especially appreciated when I was a student
and post-doc, which is the following. People will say money
can't buy happiness. And we'll talk about the buy
aspect of that in a moment. And indeed, that's true. If you look at this
longitudinal study or you look at other
studies that are done on a more short-term basis. Once people get past a
certain level of income relative to their cost of
living, the amount of happiness does not scale with that income. That is, for every
additional $1,000 or $10,000 that they earn,
they don't report being that much happier
on a daily basis. Now that said, I venture the
argument that while money truly cannot buy happiness, it
absolutely can buffer stress. And in particular,
it can buffer stress in the form of the
ability to purchase or pay for goods and services,
and in particular services. You're not going to tell
me that having children doesn't involve some
increase in the demands on your life, less
sleep, and more demands. And it certainly is
the case that if you can hire help to clean. You can hire nannies
if that's your thing. You can hire help to assist
with babysitting or even night nurses if you're having trouble
sleeping that will literally allow you to sleep while
they take care of your child in the middle of the night. Often give excellent care. One hopes excellent care. That that won't offset
some of the stress associated with lack of sleep. So there are a million
different examples one could give of this, but
I certainly experienced this during graduate school. In fact, I experience both
sides of the equation here. I made very little money
as a graduate student. I had essentially no savings
when I started graduate school, and I made very little money. The amount doesn't
matter at this point, but I could just barely
afford rent and my food. I actually opted to live in the
laboratory a lot of the time. And by doing that,
I had more money to spend on other things
that were important to me. Now I did not have a
family at the time, and so I was able to do that. Something that not
everyone can do. But I made very little
money, but at the same time, I was in laboratory
all the time, and that's where I wanted to be. And so my level of
stress was actually pretty low because
I was investing all my time and energy
into the very thing that I knew would eventually
help bring me more resources. When I moved from being a
graduate student to a postdoc, for instance. A postdoc is generally a
three to five-year period. It's sort of like
residency in medicine, where you're no
longer taking courses, but you continue to do research. In fact, entire new
lines of research and prior to getting
a professorship. My income went up slightly,
went up by about 30% to 40%. But because of where I moved
and because of the times, my cost of living went way,
way up and I was extremely stressed. So it wasn't my
absolute income, it was my absolute income
relative to my cost of living. The other thing that
one needs to consider when considering income versus
cost of living is there's also this notion of peer group. And we're going to talk
more about social bonds and connections later. But one thing that
I noticed when I moved from being a
graduate student to a postdoc was I was a graduate student in
a small town where I had access if I chose to participate
in most, if not all, of the social gatherings because
they were all very low cost. People tended to aggregate
at the farmer's market on Saturday. Most people wouldn't even
purchase anything, at least not the graduate students
wouldn't purchase anything. It was just a
place to aggregate. People sometimes play
pickup games of soccer or just hang out
have a cup of coffee. There was a volleyball
game on Fridays. Sometimes people would go
out to eat that evening, which of course, costs
money, et cetera, but it was relatively
low cost of living. And social connections and
peer group interactions were all generated around
the same fairly low-cost activities. When I transitioned to being
a postdoc, I made more money, but cost of living went up. But in addition to
that, my peer group tended to want to engage in
the same kinds of activities that people in that larger
city were engaged in. So peer group has a tremendously
powerful influence on whether or not we gauge
the amount of money that we have as bringing
us happiness or not. And that really speaks to
the critical importance of social interactions
and certain kinds of social interactions,
in particular. Now, if any of that was unclear,
what I'm basically saying is it's not just about being
able to pay your rent. It's also about
being able to access the kinds of social interactions
that you deem are quote-unquote correct for you at
that stage of life and in the place where
you happen to be living. Because if you can meet all
the demands of costs of rent and paying your power
bill and food, et cetera, but you are socially
isolated because your peer group, or those around you
that you want to engage with, are engaging in activities that
you either don't have time for, literally, because
you're doing other things or that you don't have the
financial resources for, then that can actually
severely impact this rating of what we call happiness. Why am I parsing
this so finally? Well, I'm parsing and finally
because I think that most of us have heard the outcome of
this study from Harvard or the more short-term
studies, also many of which are from Harvard. We'll talk about the
just phenomenal work from Dan Gilbert's laboratory
and other laboratories who have focused on issues like these. And I certainly don't
want to take anything away from those results. They're very powerful
and important results that really point over
and over to the fact that people's happiness does not
necessarily scale with income. In fact, it tends not
to past a certain level, and yet I think
we'd be remiss, I think actually it
would be inappropriate for me to say that the amount
of income that one makes is not important. Because if the amount of
money that you happen to have or are making does
not allow you to meet your basic needs of shelter,
health care, et cetera. And/or doesn't
allow you to access the kind of social interactions
that can renew and reset or, I would say,
directly enhance the kind of neurotransmitter
systems and hormones that lead us to feel that
we are happy in our life and we're having quality
social connections, well then that's very stressful. And this brings me back to
the statement I made earlier, which is, indeed, money
cannot buy happiness, but it certainly
can buffer stress. And one of the ways
that it buffers stress is by allowing options
of different kinds of social interactions. Options of different
types of recreation that one can engage in to access
new forms of social interaction and so on and so on. So we need to be a little bit
careful or at least nuanced about this statement that
money can't buy happiness and that the data support
the fact that wealth doesn't determine happiness. I think there is a truth
to that but there's another side to that, I think
is less often acknowledged and that certainly
I've experienced and that I think many of
you out there have probably experienced as well. One other major finding of
the Harvard longitudinal study on happiness, as well
as shorter-term studies on happiness, is
that much as you've heard, perhaps that no
one on their deathbed says they wish they had
worked more, well indeed, the total amount of time
that one spends working does not seem to
determine one's happiness. And yet I also want to earmark
that result as one that we need to parse a bit more carefully. Because work, last
time I checked and certainly for me,
is the way typically that people earn an income. And as we just talked
about a moment ago, income is often a way
that people have access to or provide access
for their family to things like
recreation that opens up the opportunity for more
social connection, right. So we have to be careful with
how we interpret these blanket statements that have become
very popular that money doesn't determine happiness and that
the amount that you work isn't going to
determine happiness. It certainly is the case
that if you earn more money from working more and
that money is devoted to things that bring
more opportunities for social connection
or for buffering stress in other areas of your
life, including health care, care for your children,
care for yourself, recreation, other things
that you enjoy, well then I think it's a little bit naive
to assume that work itself is somehow counter to happiness. Which, of course, it isn't. And it especially isn't if we
combine that feature of work with another important feature
of the human psyche, which is this notion of meaning. Now in the
not-too-distant future, we will do an episode of
this podcast on meaning and what constitutes meaning
in a given endeavor, work or otherwise. But much of the psychology of
the last century, and still today, focuses on this
feature of meaning as a critical one in terms
of what makes us happy and what doesn't make us happy,
certainly in the long term. And I can certainly
say for myself that learning and teaching, and
doing research in my laboratory brings me tremendous feeling
of meaning and happiness. Some people consider
their work simply a way to gain a paycheck,
and other people find that they would do the
very work they do regardless of whether or not they were paid. In fact, many people will do
volunteer work and other forms of work for zero money. So this idea that
money isn't important or that work is not as
important as we deem it to be, that also needs to be
considered from a number of different perspectives. And again, by no
means am I trying to undermine the data of
these impressive studies, both the longitudinal and
short-term studies, but I think we do have to be
cautious in our discussion of results like these
because the internet is replete with conversations
about the big factors that determine happiness. It's going to be social
connection, not income. It's going to be
the amount of time that you are able to have open
thinking and creativity, which I think is an essential feature
of happiness, by the way. Physical health. In particular, one's
ability to stay mobile and to be able to access
the kind of daily activities that one needs to
accomplish unassisted is a strong correlate of
happiness and so on and so on. And, of course, there are
the basic physiology factors. The things that feed back
onto our overall feelings of well-being. And I've talked
about these before, and we'll just put these
quickly into a bin. You can think of this
as a toolkit of things that you and everyone really
should be constantly trying to access, if not optimize, on
a regular basis because they raise the tide or
what I would call the buoyancy of
your overall system, meaning your brain and body. And that would be getting
sufficient deep sleep at least 80% of the nights of your life. And ideally, the remaining
20% you're not getting deep sleep or as much of it
because of positive events. Quality nutrition. Quality social interactions. And we will define that
a little bit better. In fact, we will define that
in a lot of detail later in this episode and
actually how to get better at creating quality
social interactions, even very brief
social interactions. So we have sleep,
we have nutrition, we have social interactions. We have purposeful
work, whether or not it's paid work or non-paid work. And, of course, there
are things like exercise and maybe relationships to
pets and things of that sort. And there are a
few others as well. All of those are known to
increase your overall state of well-being, that
puts you in a position to access more meaning
and happiness, et cetera. But for most
people, I think it's fair to say that
earning a living. And earning a living by working
is the typical way in which we spend most of our time. So I think we need to
put a special bracket around those activities. And it's something we will
return to a little bit later in terms of trying to
understand how periods of life in which there are big
or extensive work demands or extensive family
demands on us are indeed compatible
with states of happiness or frequent states of happiness
and how better to access those. Rather than simply say
money isn't important or the amount of time at
work really isn't important. That's not what people are
going to pay attention to. In fact, I don't know how
I will feel on my deathbed. How could I? Human beings are pretty
good about understanding how they feel in the present. If not describing it, they
are pretty good at feeling it if they have any sense
of internal state. That is interception. And you could have some idea
of how you feel in a moment. We're pretty good about
describing our past feelings, at least in broad
contour, but we are not very good at projecting how
we will feel in the future. And in fact, that's
a theme that's going to come up
again and again today. Nonetheless, what we do know on
the basis of really solid data are that certain aspects
of our well-being tend to change
across our lifespan. Now lifespan is
something that we need to consider from
also a bit of nuance because humans are indeed
living longer and longer. And if we look at
the data on happiness across the lifespan dated maybe
30 or 40 years back or even 20 years ago, it is
consistently described in that literature as a
so-called u-shaped function. Where people in their 20s
report being very, very happy, but as time goes on and they
acquire more responsibility. So typically, getting
married and having children in their mid to late
20s and 30s and into their 40s. Having more work
demands, et cetera, happiness tends to be
rated lower and lower, at least in those
previous studies. And then happiness tended
to increase as people approach their 50s and 60s. And they tended to retire,
and their work demands were shed from
them, and they were able to enjoy the small things
of life despite the fact that, in general, I
would say almost always people's health is not as
vigorous when they're 70 as it is when they're 20. There are exceptions
to that, of course. Of course, you can adjust the
rate of cognitive and physical decline. But in general,
people in their 20s feel more physically
and mentally vigorous than they do in their
60s and 70s, in general. That u-shaped function
that I just described still holds true today,
but of course, there have been some major shifts
to the general life stages and when people undergo
those life stages. For instance, many people are
getting married much later. Many people are opting
to not have children. In fact, if you look at the data
on whether or not people have children or not and how
that relates to happiness, everyone will tell you that
their kids are their greatest source of joy, at least most
people will tell you that and are a tremendous
source of happiness. It's obvious. Kids are delightful, and
raising kids while hard is a wonderful experience. If you look at the
ratings of happiness among people that elected to not
have children versus those that had, most people
who have children report their overall
levels of happiness as lower than that of people
who opt not to have children. Now there are a lot of ways
to interpret those findings. And by no means am I encouraging
people to not have children. That's a issue that you have
to resolve for yourself, of course. But we could imagine,
for instance, that people who opt
not to have children have more income to devote
to things more focused on themselves or their partner
or other aspects of their life. We don't know if that's
the underlying reason. We could perhaps
conclude that people who opt not to have children
are getting more sleep on a regular basis or have
more time for exercise or the other sorts of
things that elevate states of mood and well-being. Again we do not know
what the underlying reasons are for this finding. But it does seem that
despite most every parent reporting that their kids are
their greatest source of joy and quote-unquote
happiness in life that people who opt not to have
children are at least as happy or report being at least
as happy or even happier than those that opt
to have children. And, of course, I
want to be very clear that I'm not trying to
settle any arguments about whether or not people
should have children or not. I happen to find children
and animals delightful. And I'm always happy when
people opt to have children provided they are taking
good care of their children or doing their very best to take
good care of their children. So that's my stance. But of course,
you're all entitled to your own stance on this. There are also the
general arguments that people like to have
about whether or not the population of the Earth will
be sustained or not sustained based on current birth
rates, et cetera. Indeed many areas of the world,
birth rates are going down. It is actually
something that just as a perhaps point
of interest has been studied from the somewhat
unusual but logical perspective of whether or not child diapers
are selling at the same rate as they were some years ago and
whether or not adult diapers for the elderly are being sold
at the same rate or greater. If you think about it is one
indirect measure of whether or not people are living longer
and/or opting to have children. Definitely in discussion
for another time, probably for another
podcast entirely. I'd like to take a quick
break and acknowledge one of our sponsors
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Athletic Greens once or usually twice a day, is that it
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athleticgreens.com/huberman to get the five free travel
packs and the year supply of vitamin D3K2. So this u-shaped function
of people being happier earlier in life
and then reporting feeling far less happy
and then happiness returning to them, that is,
the rising of the u again in their later years, is
something that I do believe should be repeated
in modern times. And repeated in a way that
takes into account that you might be shifted to the right. That is, I am certainly
aware that people are tending to get married later. Many are opting to
not have children. So, for instance, the
question arises whether or not that u-shaped curve
should have a bump down at the bottom of
the u among those that opt not to have children. Because the argument was made in
the discussion of those papers that the reason why
happiness is lower when people are in
their 30s, 40s, and 50s is because they're devoting more
time to raising their children and devoting more time to work. I would hope people
would enjoy their work, but not everybody really
enjoys their work. And many people, even if
they do enjoy their work and they find
meaning in it, still find it stressful,
which certainly can run counter to happiness. Nowadays, you could imagine
that because a number of people are opting perhaps to work
less or to not have children or both, where they
find tremendous meaning from their work
that there would be a bump at the bottom of that
u among those that decided to simply not take on these
additional responsibilities. That would be an
interesting test, I think, of whether or not the
total load of responsibility is really what's correlating
with reported happiness or not. Now one very consistent
finding that has absolutely stood the test of time, and
it's kind of an interesting one. It's a little bit of a
pop psychology finding, but I think it points to
something interesting that we will return to
again and again is that people tend
to report feeling lower levels of happiness,
believe it or not, on their birthday. And the argument for why
this is the following. That typically, we
go through our year not comparing ourselves to
our peers terribly much. We might do that
a little bit more when we're in elementary
school, high school, et cetera. We're sort of age match,
maybe even college as well. But an evaluation of ourselves
to our age-match peers is not typically something
that we do on a daily basis. Whereas on our birthday,
we get a snapshot of where we are in the arc of
time, or at least in our life. And many people report feeling
rather low on their birthday because they use that as
a benchmark or a window into the things that they
have not accomplished. The things that,
despite being age blank, they still haven't accomplished. And so that's interesting
because what it really points to is two things. One the extent to which much
of our feelings of happiness are relative, in particular,
relative to our peers. So there's that
social aspect again. And the fact that
most of the time, we are not very good at
orienting ourselves in the longer arc of time. We're pretty good
at knowing where we are in the arc of a
day, or the arc of a week, or the arc of a month, or even
a year, but that most of us are not very good at
reflecting on where we are in our life arc. And, of course, most
of us don't know how long we will
live anyway, but we do have some general sense. I mean, very few people
live past the age of 100. Many people live to be 70 or 80. And again, life span
is extending as far as we know from year to year. But, in general, people report
that on their birthdays. And I should say these
are for birthdays aged 25 or later, at
least in the studies I was able to access. I don't think that a
lot of three-year-olds sit around comparing themselves
to other three-year-olds and how well they're
doing or 12-year-olds. You can imagine some people
might do that at 18, et cetera. But it's really by the
mid-20s that people start evaluating
themselves to their peers in terms of life progression
and so-called milestones. It's been argued that that's
one of the reasons why people report lower affect,
lower levels of happiness on their birthday. Something that's a little
bit counterintuitive. And, of course, there
are things that are anti-correlated with happiness. I'd be remiss if I didn't
mention a few of these. That's longitudinal study,
the Harvard happiness project has reported, for
instance, that people that are chronic smokers of
nicotine and chronic consumers of alcohol, in
particular alcoholics. That is, people who
suffer from alcoholism or what sometimes is called
alcohol use disorder that is strongly anti-correlated
with happiness. And I should also mention
that the family members, and in particular,
the romantic partners of people who are chronic
smokers and the partners of people who are chronic
alcohol users, often will report lower
levels of happiness. Especially if they
themselves are not chronic smokers or regular
consumers of alcohol. So we've done episodes on
nicotine in particular, and that touched on
smoking, of course. And we've done an
episode on alcohol and the effects of
alcohol on health. Again, you can find
those at hubermanlab.com. This study from the
Harvard happiness project really has strong
data supporting the fact that avoiding
being a nicotine smoker. There are positive health
effects of nicotine that are discussed in
the episode nicotine. But being a-- but smoking
nicotine, in particular, is counterproductive for
people's at least self-reported happiness and certainly
overall health. I think there's zero question
that smoking increases cancers of different kinds. And that alcohol consumption. And in particular, alcohol
consumption beyond two drinks per week. Two drinks being the
typical volume of a beer, a glass of wine or
cocktail, et cetera, is detrimental for
various aspects of health. And, of course, there
are other things that you could imagine would
relate to a lack of happiness. For instance, a major trauma. Physical or emotional trauma. That could include the loss
of a major relationship, a death of a close one. Being the victim of a violent
crime and things of that sort. And yet it's been argued, in
fact, strongly argued that when you look at people's levels
of happiness after a trauma, that if you wait
about a year or so, sometimes is even as
short as three months after a trauma, that
people self-reported levels of happiness are not
significantly lower than they were prior to the trauma. Now I very much want to
highlight, underline, and bold and asterisks that
statement as one that we really need
to explore carefully. Because there are other data
that strongly point to the fact that major life
traumas can severely disrupt one sense of
happiness and well-being. And I think as long as we're
going to have this discussion, we should point to a useful
definition of trauma. And the definition
that I'll paraphrase is one that was supplied by a
former guest on the Huberman Lab podcast, Dr. Paul Conti,
who's a psychiatrist who's written a book called Trauma. I personally think it's the
best book on trauma and tools for alleviating trauma. It's incredibly thorough, easy
to read, and well-informed. And here again,
I'm paraphrasing, but Dr. Conti describes trauma
as something that fundamentally changes the way that our
brain and body function in a way that makes
other aspects of living more challenging. Again, an event, either
emotional or physical, or both, that fundamentally
changes the way that our brain and/or
body, our nervous system, and other organs function
in a way that prevents us from enjoying daily activities. And that could even be
ongoing distraction. Traumas can create
rumination, or they can create obsessive thought,
or they can create dissociation. Any number of different things. Again check out that
episode with Dr. Paul Conti if you'd like to learn
more about trauma and how it manifests. But the idea that's
been put forth by a number of researchers
in the field of happiness that three months after
a major trauma, people aren't reported that they
are feeling any less happy than before the trauma,
that was surprising to me. So I went into this
literature a bit more deeply. One of the basis of that
general line of thinking is a-- what I consider a now
classic and very important and frankly excellent
talk that was given by Professor Dan Gilbert
on the science of happiness. You can find this on YouTube. I say a classic one because
it was done some years ago. It's received millions of views. And one of the points that
he makes in that talk which is grounded in
research carried out by his laboratory and other
laboratories is that-- he poses a question. He says you know,
let's do a quiz. Would you rather be someone
who wins the lottery and he shows a picture
of somebody who just won, I think it was several
hundreds of millions of dollars in the lottery, or was
recently made paraplegic lost use of their legs? And then goes on to
state that one year after people have
won the lottery, this major monetary windfall
versus have become paraplegic is that their self-reported
levels of happiness are the same. Which I think is
incredibly surprising. I heard this, and I immediately
thought of an experience that I've had where I
teach a course at Stanford School of Medicine on
neural regeneration. And it's actually a course
that I attended some years ago when I was a
post-doc at Stanford, so well over a decade ago. And we had-- excuse me. We had an individual
come into the course. This was an older gentleman. So older meaning he
was in his early 70s. And he had become paraplegic
fairly late in life from a cycling accident. And he was and is
an expert in what it is to become a
paraplegic, of course, because he had that experience,
but also because he spends a lot of his time doing
volunteer work with people who have become paraplegic
and have become paraplegic at different ages. And what he described to me
was that the overall outcomes for people that are
rendered paraplegic in terms of their mental health
and their physical well-being and their management
of general life skills scales with how early
they had that injury and how long they had
the use of their limbs. So it's not straightforward. When I heard this result
described by Dr. Dan Gilbert, that winning the lottery
and becoming paraplegic basically don't impact
your levels of happiness to any different degree when
people look back a year later, I was pretty surprised
given my experience of hearing this
lecture at Stanford. So I thought, wow,
from what I understand. Indeed, there are people
who are rendered paraplegic and manage that
transition very easily. It doesn't seem to disrupt
their feelings of well-being, et cetera, but for
other people, it can be severely disrupting
to their sense of well-being and so on and so forth. I went back and
examined these data. And in fact, a
subsequent talk, it's actually a podcast that
was given by Dr. Dan Gilbert some years later. So this would be
just a few years ago. I think in 2019-- there
is a specific date in which it was recorded
but just a few years ago. And indeed, he corrects
himself in that podcast. What he says is that he
misspoke in that earlier talk. That the difference in
self-reported levels of happiness for those that
have been rendered paraplegic for versus those who've won the
lottery is not as great as one would expect. I think most people would expect
that being rendered paraplegic would make people
far less happy. That's the expectation,
I think, anyway. And that people would
win the lottery, at least for some
period of time, would be far happier
than they were prior to winning the lottery. And especially given the
tremendous amount of money. And again, the fact that
money can't buy happiness, but that money does
indeed enable the ability to buffer stress
provided people were responsible with
that money and just didn't blow it or spend
it all right away. That they could start
to afford things that they couldn't afford, not
just in terms of luxury items but also the
ability to hire help that would free up time that
would allow them to do anything from travel that they couldn't
access before to meditate if that was something that they
didn't have time to do before. And so on and so forth. So the result quote
unquote that winners of the lottery and
recent paraplegics have the same levels of
happiness is actually not true. At least according to the
author of the original study. Now what he did not point to is
the degree to which that is not true, but he did point to
the direction of the result. And the fact that people who are
rendered paraplegic, in fact, are reporting
themselves as less happy than they were prior
to their injury. And certainly that their
levels of happiness are lower than those that
simply won the lottery hundreds of millions of
dollars, which I think is the more intuitive result. And so I think it's important
to be aware of that discrepancy because it's something
that was lost in the communication
around those results the first time around. And indeed, Dan Gilbert
is an excellent scientist and was quite good about trying
to correct the narrative. I myself, as a podcaster
who puts information on the internet, know that
the challenges of correcting narratives, especially of things
that came out some time ago, we always attempt to
do this as best we can, but not everyone that
saw that first video will necessarily hear the discussion
that has happened subsequently. So my hope is that Dr. Gilbert
will interpret me communicating this now not as an
attempt to criticize him but rather as an attempt
to praise his willingness to try and correct the
narrative to be more accurate. So to be very clear about what
this study did and didn't show. And here, I'm going to
combine these results with other studies
that I was able to find that explored
similar phenomenon. So major trauma, for instance. Not necessarily becoming
paraplegic but traumas of a different sort,
emotional traumas. When you look at the whole
of those data, at least, my read is that when people win
the lottery or acquire wealth through inheritance, some
form of wealth acquisition that is sudden and that wasn't
preceded by a specific effort to gain that wealth, right. Buying a lottery ticket
is a pretty quick thing. Inheritance is something
that you simply get by virtue of who you are,
not necessarily by effort. Well, that led to increases
in self-reported happiness compared to prior to the
inheritance of the lottery win, but it wasn't as
substantial as you might imagine if
you are approaching the notion of
happiness simply from, well, more money
equals more happiness. And while it is true that people
who are rendered paraplegic or who undergo psychological
traumas or physical traumas of any various kind
are, and frankly, are remarkably
resilient in many cases. They can still manage to
go about life and work and engage in
relationships, et cetera. There is a visible decrease
in overall levels of happiness and well-being,
in particular, if the psychological
and physical trauma renders their nervous system
different in a way that impacts other major areas of
life and enjoyment for them. And that's certainly true
one year out from the trauma. So the point is that
we do need to reframe this idea that whether or
not you win the lottery or become paraplegic or
suffer some major trauma, your levels of
happiness are going to be the same three
months or a year later. I don't think that's accurate. And in fact, Dr. Dan
Gilbert emphasized that that's not accurate
even in that initial study. And I think it's
an important thing to frame because that's
such a popular notion. Or that that idea
combined with the idea that increased earnings
don't make us happy combined with the idea that
we are happy early in life but then as more demands arise
in life, we become less happy, and then we become happy again. And that idea is
we already explored is not necessarily true. Frankly, I knew a lot
of teenagers and people in their early 20s that
are pretty unhappy who then become happier later as
they acquire more resources. Sometimes distance,
let's be honest, sometimes distance from
our family of origin makes us more happy,
sometimes less so. It's highly individual. So I think those general themes
that we've heard over and over, while they have merit and
they certainly stand up in some of the more
powerful longitudinal and short-term studies, there
is nuance, and in some cases, there are now additional
data that are causing us to revise those understandings. Now there is an
important point, or I should say the important
point, that we can really credit Dan Gilbert and others
in the field of psychology with and that we owe them a
great debt of gratitude for is that we do
have far more control over our levels of happiness
than we might think. And many of the
things that reside at that level of control. That is, the things that we can
do and think and say and access don't come from external things. They don't come necessarily
from the acquisition of material goods, but rather
there are things that we can do that can allow
us to so-called synthesize happiness. And I think this is
one of the great gifts of modern psychology is that-- Dan Gilbert and others, the
Harvard happiness project, work at Yale and elsewhere. There are excellent labs working
on happiness all over the US and all over the world, frankly. One of the great gifts
that they've supplied us in the form of data
is that there really are things that we can all
do and think and access to allow ourselves to
so-called synthesize happiness. Now, this notion of
synthesizing happiness, or synthetic happiness
as it's sometimes called, can sometimes ruffle
people's feathers a bit. Because people immediately
flip to the idea that, oh, you're
just going to tell me to be grateful for what
I have or to just navel gaze or just to
imagine that I'm happy. But that's really not
what synthetic happiness is about at all. Synthetic happiness
actually has to do with some really important
larger principles about the way that our emotional
system and the way that the reward systems of
our brain really function. And they point to
important concepts that we're going to now discuss. Things like the hedonic
set point, for instance. Or the dopamine
system of anticipation of rewards versus receiving
words just as a brief insight into that. Our anticipation of
something positive oftentimes leads to
greater increases in the sorts of
neurochemicals that support a state of
happiness and well-being then the actual
acquisition of the thing that we're trying to obtain. And this goes back
to a theme I've discussed a few times
before in this podcast, in particular with my colleague
at Stanford School of Medicine, Dr. Anna Lembke, who wrote the
fabulous book Dopamine Nation. If you're interested in
dopamine and addiction, in particular, that's
a wonderful clear, and extremely informative read. And if you're interested
in dopamine more generally, not just in
the states of addiction but in everyday life and
in pursuit and motivation, The Molecule of More is an
excellent book related to that. And as I mentioned
earlier, we have this episode on dopamine
motivation and drive. The notion of
synthetic happiness is not simply about
imagining happiness, or thinking about happiness
or anticipating happiness. To some extent, it is,
but it relates to a number of other important themes. But it is grounded
very thoroughly in the neurobiology
of dopamine rewards. And I'll talk about some of that
neurobiology in a few moments. But I want to take
a couple of minutes and talk about what
synthetic happiness is and what some of
the conditions are for allowing us to
access the state of so-called
synthetic happiness. And I want to point
out at the outset that synthetic happiness, while
it might sound synthetic A.K.A. false, it's anything but. It actually turns out to be
among the more and perhaps the more potent
form of happiness that we can all access. And this is where themes
related to our control over our own
internal state really become not only valid
but very powerful. So, for instance, Dr.
Dan Gilbert and others have explored how opportunity
and choice, that is, freedom can and can't lead to
states of happiness. And the results of those studies
are very solid and, frankly, very surprising. Until you understand the
results, and once you do, I think you will immediately
see areas of your own life that you can start to
access more happiness, again genuine happiness,
simply by framing certain choices in
a particular way and maybe even by
eliminating choices. Now I'd like to focus
on the research aimed at understanding what increases
our levels of happiness. And I'd like to frame this
under the umbrella of two major themes. The first theme is
so-called natural happiness. Natural happiness is the sort
of happiness that most of us are familiar with. So the kind of
happiness that we expect to have if we, for
instance, complete a degree. Hopefully, a degree in a topic
meaningful and interesting to us but a degree nonetheless. Or we find a mate. Hopefully, a mate that we
enjoy spending time with. Or, for instance, making a
certain income or finding work that we enjoy
on a regular basis. All of those are
forms of happiness that, from a very early
time in development, we are taught exist. For instance, even
when we are very young, we are told that our
birthday is coming and that we are going
to get presents, and those presents
are going to be focused on knowledge of
things that we already enjoy. So if you're a little
kid, and you like trucks, or you're a little kid
and you like dolls, you can sort of expect that
those gifts will bring you some level of joy or happiness. And while that's a
small child example, that general notion
of natural happiness is, of course, one that
persists into adolescence, into young adulthood,
and into adulthood. And we quite understandably
come to associate this feeling of joy or happiness
with the receiving of things or the acquisition of
things, whether by effort, by gift, by inheritance,
or some other form. So that's natural happiness. And yet, as I mentioned
a little bit earlier, there's also this notion
of synthetic happiness. And some of the more interesting
and exciting research in the fields of psychology
and, in fact, neuroscience point to this idea of
synthetic happiness as at least as powerful
a source of happiness as natural happiness. Again, at least as powerful
and perhaps even more powerful. And of course, one has to take a
slightly different view of what happiness is in order to accept
this idea that we can create happiness for ourselves,
but that doesn't mean that the whole notion
of synthetic happiness is merely a passive
one where all we do is sit back and imagine being
happy and then we are happy. For better or for worse,
our nervous systems and our neurochemistry
simply don't work that way. In fact, synthetic
happiness has almost always been understood as
something that we have to put some effort
toward achieving. But, and this is an
important thing to point out, synthetic happiness
also requires that certain situational
or environmental conditions be met. A good example of this is some
of the work by Gillian Mandich, or I should say Dr.
Gillian Mandich, who's done some interesting work on
the conditions for creating happiness within our mind and
in our overall state of being. And she's been involved in a
number of different studies. But one of the ones that I
found particularly interesting is one in which they explored
different types of music and other aspects of
environmental settings. So you bring subjects
to the laboratory play them different
types of music. There are, in fact,
certain aspects of music that can create different
states of mind sadness, happiness, anticipation. In fact, there are
certain patterns of music that can reliably induce
anticipation of the fear and anxiety base type. So, for instance,
think the movie Jaws. If you recall, for those
of you who have seen Jaws, there's this ongoing
theme music any time the shark might be present in
the water or in a given scene. That essentially goes [HUMMING] Now for the musicians
out there, this has basis in things
like tritones and things that are understood
from the mathematics and the musical side. And from the
neuroscience side, are known to create a neural
state of anticipation. Yeah, a neural state
of anticipation and not necessarily
a positive one. And indeed, there are
other patterns of music that involve up tones. Think some of the music
that's typically been used in cartoons of various sorts. There's a long history of this. Indeed there's a
whole literature of psychological and now even
a smaller but still interesting literature on the
neuroscience of how certain patterns
of music can induce a state of joy and joyful
anticipation, in particular. A lot of those patterns
of music are incorporated into so-called happy
cartoons and Disney movies and things of that sort. In any case, Dr. Mandich and
others have explored how music, in particular, but other
features of the environment can or cannot induce
states of happiness. And the basic takeaway
from those studies is that while having a
certain environmental sound, musical tone, or visual feature
to a given space, a room, is necessary for a
state of happiness, it is not alone sufficient. What is required is that
individuals not only be placed into an
environment that contains music or visual items
or a combination of music and visual items that
can induce states of joy or happiness or
positive anticipation, but that they also are given
some sort of instruction or instruction manual as
how to synthesize happiness inside of that environment. This is important
because what this says is that our ability to
create states of happiness is dependent on our environment
but also requires effort from us. That also makes sense as to why
when we are under conditions of deprivation. So it could be
social deprivation or financial deprivation. Or even for people that are
very sensitive to whether. There are a certain number
of individuals, about 30% of people, who report feeling
very, very low under conditions where the sky is overcast. Especially if it's been
overcast for a number of days. The so-called seasonal
affective depression. Those individuals,
by the way, can often receive tremendous
benefits in terms of elevating their mood if they
make an effort to get sunlight. And if they can't get sunlight,
artificial light of the sort that we talked about earlier. But in any case,
there are a number of people that are profoundly
negatively influenced by the lack of positive
visual and auditory cues in their environment. But for most people,
we are in what I would call a
dynamic relationship with our environment. Our environment has
an effect on our mood. But the research
indicates that we also need to make some sort of
effort toward being happy. Now effort toward being
happy is a very vague term. So let's better
define what that is. In the case of Dr.
Mandich's work, this took the form of
doing so-called happiness inventories, right. That can be focusing on things
that one is grateful for, things that they
particularly enjoy. This is somewhat of a
gratitude-type practice but includes some
other features as well that are more focused
on the things that bring you meaning and actually
engaging in the things that bring you meaning. So if you're trying
to think about how to improve your levels
of happiness, what this research essentially
says is that you would be smart to try and adjust
your home environment, adjust your work environment
so that it is cheerful to you. Maybe that means a plant. For me, in my laboratory,
one of the things that was really critical
that I had as a postdoc and in my own laboratory when
I first started my lab was I love aquaria. So I had multiple fish tanks. In fact, people in my laboratory
were always rolling their eyes. Why do we have to have all these
fish tanks with all these-- I like freshwater tanks,
not saltwater tanks, for reasons that
aren't interesting for this discussion. But freshwater tanks with discus
fish, for instance, to me, are just beautiful. They make me happy. I just enjoy them. Music is a complicated
thing in laboratories because it's a shared space. So headphones are the
general requirement. But having either silence
if you love silence. And I happen to like
working in silence or listening to
certain forms of music. I do also use the 40
Hertz binaural beats. Or I particularly like listening
to Glenn Gould while I work or listening to whale
song, believe it or not, while I work because it doesn't
have any structure that I can follow. I don't speak whale,
and so I can't follow. But it sort of fills the space
in a way that I find pleasant. And I've put substantial
amounts of effort into making my laboratory
spaces and my office spaces, my workspaces,
nice places to be. Now I had no
knowledge of this work from Dr. Mandich and others
at the time when I did that. But what I found was
that over the years, I was challenged in maintaining
a kind of elevated mood while working in a laboratory,
not because I didn't thoroughly enjoy the work, I love doing
experiments with my hands, and I loved being in lab, but
at least the labs that I was in as a graduate student
and post-doc there were no windows so I wasn't
getting adequate sunshine. The windows that we
didn't open, so I wasn't getting a lot of fresh
air, and so on and so forth. So I've personally
found it very valuable to create an environment
both at work and at home that I find aesthetically
pleasant, at least in some way or another. And I realize people
have varying levels of control over their
aesthetic environment. Certainly, the
auditory environment can be controlled nowadays
through the use of headphones if you're allowed to use those. So, for instance, using music
or using background sound that you find very
pleasant combined with a concerted
effort on your part to create states of happiness
by hopefully doing work that's meaningful to you or at least is
leading to meaningful outcomes. We'll talk a little
bit more about that. But these happiness
inventories also turn out to be interesting and
important sources of creating so-called synthetic happiness. And we'll also talk
about other ways that one can create elevated
levels of synthetic happiness. And I realize the word
synthetic probably draws up connotations
of false happiness or contrived happiness. I wish instead of calling
it synthetic happiness. They had called it
self-created or self-directed happiness or something of
that sort because then it wouldn't sound as false. Because it's simply not false. It leads to the
same, as far as we know, identical neurochemical
and psychological states of happiness as
natural happiness. And might even be
more persistent than natural happiness. It certainly, is more
under our control. But the key point
is that environment and self-directed work at
being happy are both important, and they interact
with one another. So if you're somebody who
has a hard time synthesizing happiness through
any of the methods that we talk about today, don't
consider yourself deficient. It could very well be that the
environment that you're in, social environment or
physical environment, or auditory environment,
is simply not conducive to
synthesizing happiness. And for that reason,
I think the work of Gillian Mandich and
colleagues and others in the field is tremendously
important because it removes us from this pressure to
just synthesize happiness from within despite
our circumstances. I think many of us have heard
of the incredible stories of people like Viktor
Frankl or Nelson Mandela who were stripped of
their freedom and yet managed to maintain some
sense of positive anticipation or at least some
sense of identity that allowed them to still
access forms of happiness. Those are highly unique
situations, of course. And they speak to the
power of the human psyche for synthesizing happiness
and certainly for synthesizing a sense that there might
be a future and to live into that future. In their cases, incredibly
impressive ways. But I think for most everybody,
the environment that we're in has a powerful
impact on our mood. And some people
more than others. I know people that are perfectly
happy with blank walls. No pictures on the walls. Other people
benefit tremendously from having photos or plants
in their environment and so on. You really have to determine
what's needed for you and do your best
to try and place those things into
your environment, or rather, place yourself
into an environment that is conducive to you
synthesizing your happiness. In fact, the
powerful interaction between our environment
and our own ability to generate certain
kinds of emotions is well established
not just for happiness but for things like gratitude. So, for instance, there's a
classic study from AMES A-M-E-S in 2004 that was
focused on gratitude. And we've had an episode
on gratitude before. The basic takeaway
of that episode is that it turns out
receiving gratitude is a more powerful
stimulus for the release of neurochemicals and activation
of brain areas associated with so-called
prosocial behaviors and feelings of well-being,
including happiness. But also observing stories in
the form of movies or books or other narratives of
other people receiving help is also a very powerful
stimulus for gratitude. Also, giving gratitude
is very powerful but not as powerful as receiving
gratitude, at least that's what the research
says, or observing powerful exchanges of gratitude
between other individuals. What the study
from AMES showed is that gratitude as a state
of mind and as an emotion does not exist in a vacuum. It's not independent
of our surroundings. So, for instance,
just writing down all the things you're
grateful for while it has some positive impact,
the impact of that or receiving gratitude
or observing gratitude is far more potent, right. Bigger increases in
happiness and feelings of well-being and indeed
neurochemicals and activation of brain areas associated
with happiness and well-being when there's a reciprocity. When the person receiving
understands something about the person
that's giving to them and understands that the
person is giving genuinely, for instance. So there's an
environmental interaction. It's not just about
receiving, it's receiving from somebody that you
know genuinely wants to give. And likewise, for the
giver in that equation, the feelings of
well-being are far greater when the person
receiving whatever it is money, food, assistance
in some form or another. Could be physical
assistance, et cetera. When the giver has knowledge
that the person receiving it genuinely needed the thing
that they are receiving. So the important finding within
the research, again and again, is that happiness doesn't
exist in a vacuum. It's partially our
own responsibility to synthesize happiness. You know, I was told that many
times you're like happiness is in your head. Well, yes, indeed,
it's in your head, but it's also dependent
on interactions with your environment. Physical environment and
social environment, and so on. Likewise, gratitude is something
that we can create inside of us right through gratitude
lists and appreciation, or we can give both
powerful sources of evoking neurochemical changes
associated with gratitude and happiness and well-being. But it, too, doesn't
exist in a vacuum. There's a much greater
positive effect when we have knowledge about
why the giver is giving us something or that
the person receiving something is going to benefit
tremendously from receiving it. So I'm highlighting
this because I think that when we hear
about synthetic happiness, there's a kind of automatic
erasing of context that tends to occur. And in fact, if you were to
peruse the various videos online or papers that exist
on PubMed around happiness and synthetic happiness,
in particular, you would come away
with the impression that synthetic happiness
is just something that we're supposed to
snap our fingers in access or perhaps do very
specific things in access. But while that is true,
context really matters. And I think that's
an important point. Much in the same way
that the point needs to be made that while money
doesn't buy happiness, money can buffer stress
and certainly offer opportunities that can
provide opportunities for more happiness. So I think we are starting to
arrive at a general theme here, which is that nothing related
to our mood exists in isolation. And in fact, that leads
me to a discussion of one of the major
scientific findings in the realm of what sorts
of mindsets and behaviors can, in fact, lead to happiness. And this is a paper that
was published in 2008. Even though that might
seem like a while ago, it forms the basis for a
large amount of literature that followed. It's a very
interesting literature. This is work from Elizabeth
Dunn and colleagues and was published in
the Journal Science. Which, again, is one of the sort
of three apex journals, Nature, Science, Cell, I always say
is sort of the Super Bowl, NBA championships, and Stanley
Cup of scientific publishing-- very, very stringent in
terms of the number of papers they let in. Very few, that is. And the title of this
paper makes fairly obvious what the paper is about. The title of the paper
is "spending money on others promotes happiness". And I know a number of you
probably hear that title and think, oh boy, here we go. He's going to tell us that
giving away all our money is going to make us happier
than receiving money. And I promise you, that is not
what I'm going to tell you. But nonetheless, this is
a very interesting study, and it's one that I
think that we really ought to pay attention to. Because what the
study is based on is the fact that income,
provided one's income meets a certain
level of basic needs, indeed has been shown to
have only a weak effect on overall happiness. OK? So quoting from the paper
in the first paragraph, quote "income has a reliable
but surprisingly weak effect on happiness
within nations". Within nations just
mean they looked at this in not just
the United States, but a number of other
places, as well. "Particularly once
basic needs are met." OK, so if that's the
case, then what aspects of money and having money
are related to happiness? Certainly, there are people
who have a lot of money who are very happy. Certainly, there are people
who have very little money who are very happy. And of course, the
reverse is also true. There are plenty of people
who don't have very much money who are unhappy,
and in fact, there are people who have a lot of
money who are very unhappy. A point that whenever
it's made often leads those with less money
to kind of roll their eyes, because the assumption is more
money does increase happiness. And in fact, it doesn't. And later, we'll get back to
this idea of whether or how one acquired their money has
any impact on whether or not that money increases
their happiness or not. Let's kind of earmark
that for later. In the meantime, let's
talk a little bit more about the findings
in this paper. This paper is
interesting, because what it did is it explored something
called prosocial spending. Prosocial spending
is a phenomenon where people are taking
a certain portion of their income, and they
are giving it to others. Often for causes or for
things that they think are important to see
happen in the world or change in the world. That could be a hungry
individual having access to food or medical care. It could be for
environmental causes. It could be for animal wellness. It could be for any number
of different things. It could even be
giving somebody money so that they can buy themselves
a gift or giving somebody money and not having any understanding
or expectation of what they're going to do with the money. Again, one of the central
themes around gratitude is that while
receiving is great, giving is also great in terms of
increasing sense of well-being. And one of the more
important features to that is when we give, either
in the form of words or in the form of
resources, knowledge that the person
receiving benefits from that in some
real way, greatly increases the
chance that there's an increase in happiness for the
giver, as well as the receiver. Again, that's a note
about gratitude, but not an insignificant one
as it relates to the study. So what the study found was
that higher prosocial spending was associated
with significantly greater happiness. This was a very statistically
significant effect. And they found that the
effects of income and prosocial spending were independent
and similar in magnitude. Independent and
similar in magnitude. I'll explain what
that means for those of you that might be confused
by that statement in just a moment. Whereas, quote, "personal
spending remained unrelated to happiness". So what this study
basically found was if people are allotted
a certain amount of money to give away, and one
adjusts for overall income, and this is
important, because you could imagine that for some
individual giving away $2,000 might represent a
significant portion of their yearly
or monthly income. And for another individual it
might represent a tiny fraction of their income. But when you adjust for
income level, what you find is that people who
gave away money benefited tremendously in
terms of their own increase in happiness. In fact, quote, "employees who
devoted more of their bonuses to prosocial spending,
that is giving way more money, experience greater
happiness after receiving the bonus, and the manner in
which they spent that bonus was a more important predictor
of their happiness than the size of
the bonus itself". This was an actual
experiment they ran with real income, real money. I'm going to read
that again just to make sure it hits
home, because I found this to be really impactful. "Employees who devoted a
greater fraction of their bonus to prosocial spending, that is
giving away money to others, experienced greater happiness
after receiving the bonus. And the manner in
which they spent that bonus was a more important
predictor of their happiness than the size of
the bonus itself." So the actual bonus, the
receiving of the money, led to greater increases in
happiness if they gave it away. And the act of giving
it away itself, led to greater
increases in happiness than receiving the bonus. So it's a twofer,
as you might say. So the takeaway from this
study and studies like it, I think is pretty obvious that
to the extent that we can. And again, when I say to
the extent that we can, this means whatever
percentage of our own income that we can afford to give away,
or if we don't have income, the percentage of our effort. I mean this is about money,
but it's also about effort. We can help others, right? You can serve in food kitchens,
you can do community gardening, you can pick up trash, you
can do any number of things. You can assist a
neighbor with child care or you can assist a neighbor
who is physically less able to retrieve their
paper, et cetera, et cetera. The point is that
giving resources, certainly in the form of money,
but also in the form of effort and time, is immensely
beneficial for synthesizing our own happiness. That is for the
giver, us, to increase our levels of happiness. But the degree of increase
in our own happiness is proportional in
some way to the extent to which the person receiving
actually needed that help and registers that help. Excellent research
also points to the fact that another potent
way to synthesize happiness, that is to create
genuine states of happiness in ourselves, is to leverage
the so-called focus system. Or rather, I should say to
de-emphasize the tendency of our minds to wander. There's an excellent paper
on this, also published in the Journal Science. This is now a classic paper. I talked a little bit about it
in the episode on meditation, but for those of you
that did or perhaps didn't hear that episode, I
just want to briefly touch on a few aspects of the paper. And in particular, a few aspects
of the paper that I didn't talk about previously. And the title of
this paper, again, is a very
straightforward in terms of telling you what it's about. And that is, "A wandering
mind is an unhappy mind" by Killingsworth and Gilbert. This paper was published
in Science in 2010, and we will provide
a link to the paper. This is frankly, a
very interesting paper. This paper involved
several subjects, or I should say,
2,250 adult subjects. And what they were
able to do was to contact these
subjects while they were going about living
their daily lives and ask them both
what they were doing and what they were feeling. Some additional questions
that they asked them, but they were able to
establish whether or not people were watching television
or doing housework or working on a home computer or resting or
listening to music, et cetera, in their natural environment. So this is outside
the laboratory. And they were able to
assess to what extent those people were happy
or unhappy or neutral, or had some other
emotional state at the time when they were engaging in any
number of different activities. And they assessed whether or
not those individuals were also focused on or focused away
from whatever activity they were engaging in. And the takeaways from
this study are many, but for sake of today's
discussion, what I think is especially
interesting is that regardless
of whether or not people were engaging in
activities that they enjoyed or not, the tendency for their
mind to wander from an activity predicted lower
levels of happiness than if they tended to be
focused on the activity they were engaged in. Now that itself
should be surprising. I mean, what that says
is that even if somebody was engaged in activity
like cleaning their house or doing homework or reading
something that they weren't enjoying, if they were focused
on what they were doing, they tended to report as happier
than if their mind was drifting elsewhere. Now this also points to the
idea that perhaps our minds drift to unpleasant thoughts
more than pleasant thoughts. But they also addressed
that in the study. Point I'd like to
make here is quote "although people's
minds were more likely to wander
to pleasant topics than to unpleasant topics"
and there the difference is pretty significant. People's minds tended to
wander to pleasant topics about 43% of the time as
opposed to unpleasant topics about 27% of the time. Or to neutral topics and the
remaining 31% of samples. "People were no
happier when thinking about pleasant topics than
about their current activity". Think about that. "People were no
happier than when thinking about pleasant things
then their current activity". In fact, the mere focus
on what they were doing was more powerful
than anything else, even if they didn't enjoy
what they were doing. So they go on here to say, quote
"although negative moods are known to cause mind
wandering, I now see strongly suggested that
mind wandering was generally the cause, the
cause, and not merely the consequence of unhappiness." So there are a lot of
aspects of this study that are worth going into. But the major takeaway, or the
one that perhaps we should all be most concerned with,
is that when we are not focused on what we
are doing, we tend to be far less happy
than when we are focused on what we are doing. Even if what we are
doing is something that we don't deem
very pleasant. And certainly, if we
are engaged in something that we consider very pleasant
and we are very focused on, well then our levels of
happiness are the highest. That's sort of obvious. But what this really speaks
to is the tremendous power of building our ability to
focus on what we're doing. And to stay present
to what we are doing. Now this whole notion
of staying present is one that itself is a
little bit complicated. And in the episode on meditation
I talked a little bit about whether or not it's
beneficial to be present to our
internal state, or that is our inter receptive state. Our feelings of our heart
rate and how full or empty our gut feels or our state of
being from our skin inward, or whether or not
we should focus on being present to things in
our immediate surroundings. Both our versions
of being quote, unquote "present"
as you can imagine. But in the one case,
we're focused internally, in the other we're
focused externally, and of course, most
of the time it's some combination of the two. But what this study
really says is that any practice that can
powerfully impact our ability to remain present in the
activity we are engaged in, could even be a
phone call, could be texting for that matter,
could be social media for that matter, right? We're not placing judgment
on the activity here. In fact, what we're
really talking about is the enormous happiness
increasing value of being present to what
we're doing regardless of what we are doing. And a practice that's known to
be beneficial for increasing our ability to focus
is, among other things, a short meditation practice. In fact, work from Wendy
Suzuki's lab at NYU, again, Wendy's been a
guest on this podcast. Her laboratory has
shown that even a very brief meditation
of about 13 minutes, and this would be the
sort of quote unquote "classic" type of
meditation of eyes closed, focusing
on one's breathing. Even a very brief meditation
of just 13 minutes or so done consistently,
so ideally, every day. But I have to imagine that
even if you skip a day, there are still benefits. That sort of
meditation can greatly enhance one's ability to focus. In her studies,
that was also shown that sort of brief meditation
could also greatly enhance mood and sleep and
various aspects of cognitive performance. And work from my laboratory,
in collaboration with Dr. David Spiegel at Stanford,
department of psychiatry has shown that even briefer
meditations of even just five minutes per day can have fairly
outsized positive effects on a number of different
parameters, as well. Those very brief
types of meditations, because they really are
focusing and more accurately, I should say,
refocusing exercises. When you do that sort of
activity of closing your eyes and forcing yourself
to focus and refocus on your breath and
internal state, that is directing your
perception inward. Or if you choose, you
could deliberately focus your perception
on some external object or sound, for that matter. When one does that, the circuits
of the brain involved in focus dramatically improve. That is they rewire and
increase their ability for you to achieve focus. Many of us have heard about
meditation, many of us think about meditation as
a "mindfulness" exercise. Mindfulness in quotes, because
that itself needs definition. But I prefer to view
meditations of the sort that I just described
as perceptual or focus based training, which is
really what the data point to. Notions around consciousness
and states of mind are very hard to define, but
it's very clear that even a 5 minute a day or ideally,
an up to a 13 minute a day meditation can greatly
increase our ability to focus. And based on the
findings in this paper, "A wandering mind is an unhappy
mind" also make it very clear that the ability to
refocus again and again and again on what we're
doing throughout our day, regardless of what
we're doing, can have a very dramatic, in fact,
a statistically significant increase on our levels
of overall happiness. So what else does
the research tell us we can do to increase our
levels of genuine happiness? Well, it's very clear based
on the longitudinal study from Harvard, as well
as the Yale happiness project and the work of
numerous laboratories in the US and elsewhere, that
quality social connection is extremely powerful
in terms of its ability to increase our
levels of happiness. What is quality
social connection? Quality social connection
falls into a number of different bins. This can be romantic connection,
this can be friendship, this can even be
coworker or just daily superficial
interaction type connections. That's surprising
to a lot of people, because I think a lot of people
hear quality social connection and they think
deep conversation. But it's very clear
from the research that oftentimes our
conversations with people that we are closest to are
actually quite shallow. If you think about it, if you've
been in a romantic relationship or a friendship for a
long period of time, or maybe even a sibling
relationship or other family relationship, much of
what you talk about is fairly superficial
or fairly trivial. In fact, it's often a
sharing of the trivial day to day things between two
people or through groups of people that
leads to the feeling that people are really
connected to one another. In particular, if it's involving
shared experiences of any kind, good or bad. So there's an extensive
literature on social connection and how to build
social connection. This certainly
should be the topic of a full episode
of this podcast in the not too distant future. But because social connection
can have such a powerful impact on our states of happiness
and overall well-being, I want to emphasize a few
features of social connection that I think most people
might not appreciate. Once again, when we hear
quality social connection, I think most of us tend to
think about deep, meaningful conversation or long walks
on the beach or camping trips together or travel together. And while all of those
certainly qualify as wonderful opportunities
for social connection, opportunities for
quality social connection are certainly not limited to
those kinds of interactions. In fact, I can recall times
in my graduate career, so this would be times when I
was living in the laboratory. Because that was a significant
portion of my graduate years. And one of the more important
social connections for me was the staff that worked there
in the wee hours of the night and that came in very
early in the morning. So one of the more regular
social connections I had is I would brush my teeth in
the hallway bathroom. And there was no one else
really around at that time, except for the
janitors that tended to leave early in the morning. They had worked a good
portion of the night. Or that were arriving
very early in the day. And the fact that I would
see them on a regular basis and maybe exchange a few
words about their work or their families or the
holidays, actually for me, became very meaningful. In part, because my social
connections at the time were really limited to
only social connections that I had in the
context of work. Now some people might look
at my schedule at that time and look at my life at
that time and say, well, that was very unhealthy. You were lacking in
certain number of ways. But frankly, looking
back, and at the time, and I know this because
I journaled at the time, I was exceedingly
happy, at least for that stage of my life. At that stage of
my life, I wanted to be focused primarily on
doing experiments and immersing myself in my
scientific training. And for me, the even seemingly
insignificant interactions of talking to the
janitor in the morning or some of the other regular
staff was not insignificant. In fact, for me it
was very significant. And over the holidays when
their hours were reduced, I actually missed
them quite a lot. And even as I talk
about this, I can recall the feelings
of well-being of just seeing familiar faces. And that brings up an
important point, which is there's quite extensive
literature pointing to the fact that when we see faces,
especially faces in the morning and in the late afternoon,
there is a positive impact on the emotional circuitry. Or I should say, the
circuitry of the brain that underlies emotional well-being. And that shouldn't
come as surprising. We as old world primates,
much like other primates, are very dependent on faces
and facial expressions in terms of registering
our own place in life and our emotional state. Now the origins
of this are many. In particular, we
have a brain area, it's actually called
the fusiform face gyrus. This is an area
of the brain that was largely
discovered by a woman by Nancy Kanwisher at MIT. And the Kanwisher lab
has done extensive work showing that this
brain area that's dedicated to the processing
of faces, and not just faces in real life, but faces
on computer screens and elsewhere, are
intimately tied to areas of the brain that are
associated with emotionality. That's actually a work
from another laboratory, Dorsal's laboratory at
Caltech, now at Uc Berkeley, has shown that this
face processing area in the brain in both
non-human primates and primates is directly linked to
the areas of our brain that associate with
anxiety and fear. But also, areas
of the brain that are associated with well-being. So it comes as no
surprise that when we see faces, in
particular, friendly faces, even if we have just brief
interactions with those faces, and even if no
words are exchanged, that creates the
sense of social bond. And it creates a sense
of predictability. And I raise this again because
I think a lot of people think that social
connection always has to come in the form of
close friendships, which of course are wonderful. Or close romantic relationships,
which of course, are wonderful. Or close family relationships,
which of course, are wonderful. But as we'll soon discuss
in our model of happiness, or how to achieve
happiness based on the scientific
literature in a few minutes, social connection can and
should come in various forms. And when I say
various forms, I mean forms of brief interaction,
more superficial interaction, and forms of deeper interaction. All of those are relevant
to our states of happiness. And there's research to
support that daily interactions with somebody at a cafe or
just a brief hello or a smile. Provided that we
are both present, or we make the effort to be
present to those interactions, however brief they are,
can have a positive effect on people's overall well-being. And not just in that
moment, but consistently. Evidenced by the
fact, I think, that when I look back on
those years of working long hours in the laboratory and
essentially restricting myself either to exercising,
sleeping, eating or working. Again, that's what I wanted
at that stage of my life. Certainly, not the way
I live my life now. But that's what I wanted
that stage of my life. That even those
seemingly insignificant social interactions
were important to me and had a potent
impact on increasing my level of happiness. And frankly, still do. And I feel that right now. That said, I think all of us
can appreciate the immense value of social connection that is of
the more long lasting, and for lack of a better
word, richer type, whether or not that is with
siblings or with parents or with friends or
with romantic partners. For that reason, I want
to emphasize a little bit about what
constitutes connection and what constitutes
social connection. There are basically two
forms of social connection that have been studied
and I'll review both, as it relates to increasing
our levels of happiness. And the first one is
presence and eye contact, and the second is
physical contact. So in terms of presence
and eye contact there's been a lot
of studies about whether or not people
exchange direct eye contact during conversation or not,
dictating whether or not each individual in
that interaction feels as if they
had a connection. Now again, keep in mind that
while we think of connection as relating to some deep
or meaningful conversation, and oftentimes that
can be the case. Think for instance, an excellent
therapist patient relationship. Or an excellent
romantic relationship. Or an excellent friendship
where you really feel heard and understood, or
at least to the extent that people are
willing to explore certain topics with you. You're willing to hear
them and listen really carefully for what
they're saying, and they're willing to hear and
listen to what you're saying in an attempt to understand. That certainly can enhance
the sense of social connection leading to what people would
call social bonds leading to increased happiness. But eye contact is also known
to be an important feature. The thing about eye
contact is that most people assume that a lot
of eye contact, and in fact,
ongoing eye contact, is critical to a
sense of connection. And in fact, that's
not the case. There's a recent paper that I
find really interesting that was published in
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2021. The title of this
paper is "Eye contact marks the rise and fall
of shared attention in conversation". I find this paper interesting
for a number of reasons. First of all, my laboratory
works on internal states and vision, so it
relates directly to the work that
my laboratory does. But also, that it
violates what I thought was a general rule of
social connection, which is this idea that two people
needed to be focused on one another, that is
looking at one another directly and fairly consistently
throughout a conversation in order for the feeling
of connection to emerge. But it turns out
that's not the case. And in fact, just to give
you the takeaway and then I'll flesh it out a little bit
with some data, eye contact, or I should say mutual
eye contact, so two people registering the presence of the
other person looking at them. You're looking at me
and I'm looking at you. If you're watching
this on YouTube, then perhaps we are actually
doing this at that moment. And if you're
listening, just know that I'm looking
directly into the camera as I'm saying this
at this moment. If we were to be looking
directly at one another, that, it turns out,
signals the next step, which is that it's very likely
that we will each both look away. And that turns out to
be a way in which we set and reset attention continually
during conversation. So again, I really
like this study because of the high fidelity. The high temporal precision. That is, the precision
over time at which they looked at eye contact and
engagement of attention between individuals. And they did this by looking
at things like pupil size and of course
where the eyes were looking and so on and so forth. The basic takeaway of this
study was the following. And here I'm quoting
from the study. Quote "Rather than
maximizing shared attention, good conversation
may require shifts in and out of shared states
accompanied by eye contact". So what this basically
says is that when two people are
involved in a very, let's call it an
intimate conversation, but the word intimate
should not be misconstrued to mean something about
intimacy or sexual intimacy or physical intimacy. Just a conversation
in which both people feel present to the
conversation and focused on that conversation and that
conversation and its contents only. The tendency is for people
to take turns talking, although sometimes,
depending on the individuals they might interrupt
more or less. Again, interrupting can
be a sign of interest, it doesn't always have
to be rude, by the way. But they're sharing information. Hopefully, about a common
topic or set of topics. They will at some moment
look at one another. That's what the study shows. And that after briefly
gazing directly at one another, attention peaks,
and then they will look away, and attention will get reduced. And then the
conversation consists of a series of focusing back
on one another with their eyes, and then focusing off,
focusing on and focusing off. And those mutual
eye contact moments actually predict the
breaking of attention. So it's this ramping up
of attention and braking of attention. Ramping of attention and
braking of attention. I think these are important
results because they violate this stereotype or assumption
that deep social connection of the sort leading
to happiness always involves ongoing eye
contact or ongoing focus. Just as with meditation, just
as with any activity, frankly, we undergo shifts in
attention and focus. That is focus ramps up and
then it breaks, and then it re-engages. It ramps up it breaks,
and then it re-engages. And that, it turns
out, is the basis of in-depth connected
conversation. So for those of you that
are interested in creating social connection
in any context, and in particular for sake
of increasing happiness, because it's very clear
that social connections, even if they are fairly
superficial social connections, can increase our
sense of happiness. Seeing faces is important. Ideally, faces in person,
although I suppose these days, over Zoom or over other
screen type medium would be a close second. But the point is that if you
want to increase happiness you need to have quality
social connections. And if you want to have
quality social connections you need to be
present and engage in those social connections. And that requires a viewing
of each other's faces, ideally, which is not to say
that a phone call or text exchange can't be meaningful. But that faces are really
the most powerful way to engage in social contact. And that eye contact, not
consistent eye contact, but eye contact of the sort
that builds up and then breaks and builds up and breaks
across the interaction is going to be the best way
that we are aware of to feel that one had a real connection. This should also
remove any pressure that you might feel to
constantly look at somebody or to be completely eyes
open staring at them without blinking or diverting
your attention at any point during a conversation. This also frankly,
is an opportunity where if somebody says, hey,
you're not paying attention because you look away,
that you may actually be engaging in what is
the more typical form of healthy connection. I talked about this long ago
on an episode about focus. It turns out when
we are listening very intently to
somebody and trying to remember the information
they're telling us, we will often close our eyes. And that's not a form of lack
of attention, that's actually a form of attending in. Because we have so much of
our brain devoted to vision. When 40% of our brain
is devoted to vision in some way or another,
when we close our eyes, we can actually devote
more attentional resources to remembering the specifics
of what people are telling us. But again, please don't
go through conversations with your eyes closed
the entire time. I think that would certainly
not be conducive to building social connection. So we know that faces are
important for social connection as it relates to
synthetic happiness. And we know that eye contact is
really important for building social connection. Physical contact
is also important for social connection. And not just romantic or
sexual type connection. In fact, there is a form
of physical connection that is present
in other primates. In fact, it's present as far
as we know, in all mammals. And is also very much a feature
of the human nervous system. And that's something
called allogrooming. I have to imagine that
most people probably haven't heard of allogrooming. The reason I'm
bringing up alogrooming is that it stems from a
fairly extensive literature about the prosocial,
pro happiness effects of pets on humans. In fact, if you want
to read up on this, there is a paper out of Yale
University on this topic that was published in 2018. The title of the paper is
"The influence of interactions with dogs on affect", OK
emotion, "anxety and arousal in children". And it references
some other studies that were performed on humans. And the basic takeaway is
that these so-called AAAs, animal assisted activities,
represent a really potent way to increase people,
including children's feelings of well-being. Now what's interesting
about this to me is that dogs
themselves don't really have to do much except be
present in the room in order for these positive effects, that
is, the reductions in anxiety, increases in happiness,
et cetera, to occur. And in fact, they can
be very, very brief. As they describe in the
paper, "brief unstructured interactions with
an unfamiliar dog", so you don't even
need to know this dog, "after exposure to a moderate
stressor showed higher positive affect relevant to participants
who received a soothing object or waited for the
same amount of time." So just even seeing a dog
for a brief amount of time has been shown to reduce
stress and improve happiness, or I should say,
increase feelings of happiness
overall then a child receiving a soothing object. Which was, at least for me, a
little bit counterintuitive. I would have thought
that children receiving a soothing object
would have been the more powerful stimulus. But in fact, it wasn't, at
least not in this study. The real question I think we
should be asking ourselves is, what is it about
interactions with others and with other animals
that could potentially have this prosocial
happiness enhancing effect? And the reason I
raise this is also because I think many people
are interested in either owning or having interactions with
pets as a way to improve their feelings of well-being. And I say having
interactions with because I myself am a good example
of somebody who wasn't always able to have pets. So when I was a graduate
student in a postdoc, I very much wanted a dog. Very, very, very
much wanted a dog. In fact, there was a rule
in my family at some point that I wasn't allowed to talk
about dogs anymore because I was talking about all
the breeds of dogs. Going to dog breeders,
examining different breeds, going to the pound, et cetera. The point was that I was
obsessed with getting a dog, but I knew I wasn't in a good
position to own a dog yet. I didn't have the finances, I
didn't have the correct living situation and so on. Eventually, I did
own a dog, of course. But at the time I couldn't. So what I would do is every
Sunday I would go to a place where they fostered dogs
and they needed dog walkers. And I would walk their dog. I would also walk
my neighbor's dogs. I didn't charge them for it. In fact, I felt like I was
being paid by getting time with those dogs. And in fact, I put an ad
at that time on Craigslist that I would walk
people's dogs for free, and only a few people
took that seriously. But of the ones that did,
I had a great little cadre of dog owners that would allow
me to take their dogs out and I was super happy. It just made me
very, very happy. And I really enjoyed it. And frankly, it was a
great opportunity for me to also get to the various dog
breeds and the different dog temperaments and to learn a bit
about my ability to interact with dogs in a certain way. I actually got to be a
pretty good dog walker. Unfortunately, later
I got a bulldog. And it turns out
no matter how good a dog walker you are, Bulldogs
just simply don't like to walk. In fact, if you've ever
walked up to a bulldog and you've offered to
scratch or pet that dog, you'll notice that
Bulldogs love that. And I would argue, having
been a bulldog owner, that they like it because it's
an opportunity for them to stop moving. But that's more about
the bulldog than what I'm about to tell
you next, which is this principle of
so-called allogrooming. Allogrooming is a
pattern of behavior that's observed in essentially
all mammals but very strongly in nonhuman primates
and primates, where individuals within a
species touch one another. And this is non-sexual touch. So this would be someone
brushing somebody else's hair or combing their hair or even
using a lint roller on them, for instance. Or someone grooming
somebody else. Now typically, one needs
to have an established relationship with this person. So it could be a professional
type relationship where this is a barber
cutting somebody's hair or a hairdresser cutting
or styling somebody's hair. It could be somebody
giving someone a manicure or a pedicure. Could be somebody doing skin
care or massage for somebody in a professional context. Or it could be two
people who have agreed that it is appropriate
for the context and for the relationship
for one person to be grooming somebody else. Can even, believe it or not
there's literature on this, can even extend into
the realm of people sort of cleaning and
picking off other people. Now when we see
this in primates, it seems like a very cute and
sort of almost understandable behavior. We can see these
pictures online. If you look them up, you can
just look up allogrooming and you'll see vast
number of pictures of for instance, baboons
picking little things out of each other's hair. Or grooming and kind of
perusing one another, to find things,
presumably parasites or like little bits
of plants or something like that they want
to remove from them. Allogrooming is
known to stimulate a certain category of neurons
called the C tactile fibers. These are a particular category
of so-called sensory neurons that innervate our skin. So these are literally like
little endings of neurons, little wires that
end up in the skin, that when they are
touched lightly tend to create a
feeling of well-being in the person that's
being touched. Again, this is
consensual touch that's very context appropriate. But it's known to
increase levels of oxytocin, a kind of hormone
slash neurotransmitter. It's both, really. That is known to evoke
feelings of bond. Or of feeling bonded to
somebody or something. And for many people
we hear about oxytocin and we think about the bond
between parent and child, in particular mother
and infant where it's been most extensively studied. Or between two members
of a romantic couple. But if you look at the
literature on allogrooming, what you find is that when
humans groom one another, the increases in oxytocin
that are experienced are at least on par with and in
fact, more often, more dramatic in response to allogrooming
than in response to other forms of touch. So the point here
is that allogrooming is a prosocial
behavior that tends to associate with
and promote feelings of well-being and happiness. And this is not
a trivial effect. If you look at the brain imaging
data or other forms of data on this, allogrooming
is a very powerful form of bonding between individuals
that's completely nonverbal. In fact, most often it
doesn't involve eye contact. I suppose two people could
be looking at one another grooming one another,
but typically, this is done from the
side or from behind. Why did I bring up
the paper on pets? Well it turns out that
when humans stroke dogs, or brush their
dogs or stroke cats or brush their cats,
et cetera, that is a form of human to
animal allogrooming. And it's one in which
both the pet and the human receive huge
increases in oxytocin and other related neurochemicals
that make us feel bonded. I bring this up because
the Harvard longitudinal study on happiness,
and many, many others, if not hundreds of other
studies on happiness, point to the importance of
quality social connection. You hear this over
and over again. People on their
deathbeds don't say they wish they had worked more. People on their deathbeds
talk about the richness of social connections
or the wish that they had invested
more in social connections. I think a lot of people
think of social connections only in terms of travel with
or conversation with others. But much of what we perceive
as deep social connections also involves physical contact. And that's something
that's deeply rooted in our evolutionary biology. And it's present both in us
and in non-human primates. And it's clear
that we can engage in these kinds of pro-social,
non verbal, non eye contact type behaviors through things
like non-sexual tactile touch, a.k.a. allogrooming. So we've been talking about a
number of the different things that one can do in order to
increase levels of happiness. And certainly,
before we conclude today, I'm going to
touch back into not just synthetic happiness and the
various things we can do, such as prosocial
spending, allogrooming, social connection, et cetera. But also things
related to happiness that involve focus on vocation
and work and pursuit of goals. Because as I mentioned
at the beginning, those are also
critical to increasing our state of happiness,
and certainly our state of security
and the feeling that we can provide for
ourselves and perhaps for others, as well. So we will talk about that. But I think it's also
important to talk about this notion of
choice and choices, and whether or not having
a lot of freedom to choose or limited freedom in choosing
what we do and what we get, and what we are able
to pursue in life, how that relates to
both natural happiness and synthetic happiness. Dan Gilbert and
others have explored this issue of freedom
of choice and how it relates to happiness. And there I must
say, the findings are incredibly counterintuitive. But very, very well supported
by all of their data. I'm going to summarize a large
amount of those studies at once by saying the following. Dan's laboratory and
other laboratories have done experiments
where they give people a series of options. And one of the more
classic examples, they give people the opportunity
to rate a number of different
paintings or pictures in ascending or descending
order of preference. In other words,
they're deciding which ones they like most which
ones they like least. Then what's interesting
is the experimenter will vary the
extent to which they have to stick to that choice. So this could be
sticking to the choice by receiving that
painting to take home. Or in another
experiment, it was having to make a choice
between giving up one photograph that they,
the research subject took, or another photograph
that they took. One of the photographs
was going to go off to a publication, another one
they could keep for themselves. And the conditions
in that experiment were either that you
had to make the decision and it was final, that is,
you could keep one and rate your decision, or
you could keep one and then you had the
opportunity to swap out that picture for the other
one at some later time. In other words, these
experiments really weren't about rating pictures,
they were really about whether or not constraining
your choice, meaning forcing somebody
to make a choice and stick to that choice, led
to greater levels or lesser levels of happiness and
satisfaction with that choice. And what they find
consistently is that when people have an
ongoing set of choices it leads to reduced
levels of happiness. Now that might come as
surprising to many of you, but I want to be clear
about what this means. This is not to say that having a
lot of choices of what you like most leads to lesser happiness. And that having fewer
choices about things you do, or objects you
acquire, et cetera, leads to greater happiness. What this set of
experiments really points to is that when we make a
choice, if we are forced to stick to that
choice we tend to be far happier with that
choice than if we maintain the option to change our mind. The results of these experiments
are extremely informative, I believe, in terms of
understanding our real life happiness. That is, happiness
outside the laboratory. But I think they are
often misunderstood as meaning that if we
have a lot of choices we tend to be less happy than
if we have fewer choices. That is not the case. Having freedom of
choice is terrific. And actually, correlates with
elevated levels of happiness. But once we make
our choice, it's clearly the case that
killing all other choices or having all other
options killed for us increases our
satisfaction with the choice that we've made. Whereas, leaving doors open,
leaving options open greatly diminishes our sense
of satisfaction. This has been exported to any
number of different domains. So this has been exported to
the domain of making choices about what college to go to or
what partner to select in life. In every one of
those instances, we see that our happiness
with our choice is very much related
to that choice being either the only one or
one of very few other options. There are a number of different
ways to interpret this. Through the lens
of neuroscience we might say that the
prefrontal cortex, the area of the brain that's
involved in decision making and evaluating
different options, is an area of the brain
that's vital, frankly, to our evolution as human
beings and to our daily life and to our whole life. It is, of course,
the thing that allows us to evaluate different rule
sets, to change rule sets, to switch contexts and to
create meaning, et cetera. To interpret what's
good what's bad. But it's also a
fairly costly process, meaning it's very
metabolically demanding. And there's an entire
literature related to what's called ego depletion. This is certainly a topic
for a future podcast. But ego depletion essentially
says that if I have you attend very intensely to a
given task, for instance, asking you to count
backwards from 1,000 to 0 in increments of 13. And then have you
switch about halfway through, that's hard
for a lot of people. If I have you do that,
then your ability to suppress impulsive behavior
and to do a hard cognitive or physical task immediately
after that is actually suppressed. This so-called ego depletion. It relates to a number
of different things, but it certainly
relates to engagement of the prefrontal
cortex, which is very metabolically demanding. So evaluating choices and
doing computation of numbers or attending to
things with your mind and forcing yourself
to focus intensely is metabolically demanding. And that's a limited
resource that can be reset by things like
sleep and non sleep deep rest or idle time or letting
your mind wander. In that case a
positive mind wandering to allow your brain to
reset its ability to focus. But the other thing
that it does is it impacts the reward
circuitry of the brain, the so-called dopamine reward
circuitry and other reward circuitry of the brain. And here I'm painting
with a broad brush. But it essentially divides
them such that for instance, if a given choice of
a let's say a partner or maybe buying ourselves
an article of clothing, not that I want to compare
selection of a life partner to selection of an
article of clothing. But just to give
multiple examples. Might give us, and here
it's arbitrary units, x units of dopamine increase. Well, if we buy that
article of clothing or we select that life
partner, and then we emerge from the
store or the wedding and we are focused on what
we purchased for ourselves, our choice, or our life partner
choice, and only that, well then there's a certain amount of
neurochemical reward associated with that. And happiness and well-being. But it's also very
clear that if we leave those choices, the store
or our wedding for instance, or a life with somebody for
a moment, even just mentally, and start thinking
about the other options that we might
entertain as possible. If those are still open to
us in reality or in our mind, well then our reward circuitry
becomes fractured in a way. Not physically fractured,
but less attention is devoted to the reward
circuitry associated with our choice. And as a consequence, instead
of it being x units of dopamine, it's x divided by however
many other choices we might have available to
us in our mind or in reality. So instead of, and again,
these are arbitrary units, but instead of a certain
amount of reward, it's a certain amount
of reward divided by the number of
other options that we might be considering as
alternatives to what we chose. And I think this is a
very important aspect of understanding how limiting
our choices after we've made them is a
vital part of what we call synthetic happiness. In fact, we could
even go so far as to say that focusing on
the choices we've made and really investing in
those choices as good ones, or great ones, and
really trying to limit our thinking to the
choices that we've made once we've
made them is perhaps also important to our
natural happiness. Because it's so inextricably
entwined with what we think of as a good life. And what I mean by that
is if we are constantly in a mode of evaluative
decision making, even after we've
made a decision, we are not neurochemically
nor psychologically able to extract the feelings
of happiness associated with the choice that we made. So we've talked about a
number of different dimensions of happiness, both in synthetic
and natural happiness. And some of the more
counterintuitive aspects of happiness. For instance, that
people tend to adjust their levels of happiness not
regardless but often in spite of their life circumstances. But as we emphasized earlier
in the episode, that is not to say, at least the
research does not directly support the idea that
a major trauma or loss won't impact our happiness. In fact, it tends to. And that's why it's
important that people access resources and work devoted
to overcoming trauma, which certainly exists out there. And of course, there are
the longitudinal studies in short term studies showing
that income level and material things don't necessarily scale
with happiness, and vise versa. And yet, we also acknowledged
early in the episode that while indeed money
can't buy happiness, it can buffer stress. And while work doesn't
necessarily bring happiness, per se, work can bring
a tremendous feeling of meaning and resources
which can then put you into context in which things
like prosocial contact and enhanced bonds and
caretaking of others and of you can be enhanced. So it would be unfair
and in fact, inaccurate, to simply view happiness
through the lens of money doesn't matter, it's all
about social connection. And so on and so forth. Absolutely, social
connection is important, which is why we spent some
minutes talking about some of the ways to enhance
social connection both with other human
beings and other animals, and them with us. I think there's a opportunity
here to take the research on happiness, the research
on the neuroscience of what happiness and gratitude and
prosocial connection tells us, and to combine it into a
bit of a model or a toolkit, if you will. And I think indeed, this
will be a toolkit in one of our future toolkit episodes,
likely merged with the toolkit on gratitude, which
we haven't done yet. And perhaps even we will do an
entire episode on social bonds and how to enhance or
build social bonds. Or at least what the
science tells us about that. If we take a step
back and we look at the concept of happiness,
we can make a couple of absolute statements. That is, statements that I
think very few people, if any, would contest. First of all, there's no
single molecule or chemical associated with happiness,
but that the chemical milieu of the brain and body
is important for setting the stage or the
opportunity for happiness. Hence, why there are treatments
aimed at alleviating depression or mania that target certain
neurochemical systems and hormone systems. Happiness, at least the
way I'm framing it today, has essentially two components. One is meaning. That is, what sort of meaning
do certain types of interactions or behaviors, could be work,
could be social interactions, et cetera, carry for us? And nested in that is this
concept of connection. And we talked a bit about
tools for enhancing connection. Things like eye contact, but
not constant eye contact. Things like being very
present to a conversation or an activity that
you're engaging in. Remember, we talked
about the paper, "A Distracted Mind
is an Unhappy Mind"? The paper published in Science. And we talked about the study,
also published in Science in which giving money, but
also knowing how that money has positively impacted
others, leads to this feeling of pro-social
connection and happiness in the giver and
in the receiver. And I should mention
again that it's not just the giving of money but
also the giving of effort and time and attention that
can have similar effects. So we have meaning
and connection, and a number of different
ways to access those. And then we have
this access that I'm referring to as
performance and resources. And I'm talking about
performance and resources as it relates to
natural happiness, not synthetic happiness,
but natural happiness. Because we would be
wrong, I believe, if we were to say that
income doesn't matter. I think it's fair to say,
based on the research, that income matters. And income that can cover
costs of living plus that includes some buffer. And what do I mean by buffer? I mean buffer to the anxiety
that circumstances might change is important. Now that's going to vary
from person to person. Meaning some people
will be perfectly happy making $1 more than their
absolute cost of living every month. Other people will require
a more substantial buffer in order to protect them against
the negative psychological effects of worrying about
for instance, inflation. Or worrying that they
might lose their job. And this is why I think
most people recommend having, if possible, some
buffer in their bank account that could cover two or
three or maybe even six or maybe even 12 months
of living expenses were they to lose
their job or something catastrophic happened to them. So if we're going to
talk about happiness, I think it's only fair, only
accurate, and frankly, only respectful to talk about
living requirements and cost of living requirements. That includes this
sort of buffer. And that buffer to
anxiety is going to vary depending on how
anxious somebody gets about the possibility
of catastrophic things happening to them, like
losing their job or their rent going up or doubling. And here, I'm talking
about hypotheticals. But I think we all know
people and perhaps ourselves have experienced those
kinds of circumstances. So when we talk about
happiness we absolutely need to think about resources. And we also need to
think about performance. I think we would be completely
inaccurate if we simply said, oh, any work
leading to any outcomes. Any effort, regardless
of whether or not it gets you an A in
school or an F in school isn't going to impact
your happiness. I don't think anyone
would agree with that. And yet if you look at
the major takeaways, at least as they are
communicated typically in the public sphere around
the longitudinal and short term studies of happiness,
the takeaway generally is more focused on
social connection and how money is not important. I don't think anyone that's
saying that actually means that income that can cover
your expenses plus some buffer isn't important. But it's often not stated. So if we were to come up with a
general model of happiness that includes various tools
for how to increase our levels of happiness,
I think it's only fair to include both natural
and synthetic forms of happiness and to pursue both natural
and synthetic happiness. Just to remind you,
natural happiness is the kind of happiness
that we associate with obtaining something,
either by effort or because it was given to us. Although, I definitely want
to highlight the fact that receiving things that don't
require much reward in order to receive them over
time can be detrimental to our dopamine system. That's an important aside. The other form of happiness
is the form of happiness that we call
synthetic happiness. Which is, for instance,
focusing on social connection. And we talked about ways
to do that as a means to enhance your happiness. Again, the language, the
name synthetic happiness implies something
kind of artificial. But frankly, genuine social
connection is genuine. There's nothing
artificial about it or synthetic about it, is
that you can synthesize it through action, through
deliberate action. Likewise, being focused
or encouraging yourself. Working on being focused on
whatever activities you happen to be engaged in,
positive or negative, is known to increase
your levels of happiness. Again, this is a form
of synthetic happiness. You're not obtaining
anything new or additional as a consequence of this. It's entirely internal. There's no external reward. There isn't more
money that arrives with this or a better grade. Although, I would
make the argument that if you are
present to the work you're doing in any context,
physical or mental work, it's very likely
that you are going to perform better at that work. So we have natural happiness
and synthetic happiness. And both of them require
our attention and effort. And in fact, if we
were to draw a link between natural and
synthetic happiness, it really is this
concept of presence, of really being focused
on what we're doing, that's most likely to lead
to the outcomes that we want. Both externally, in terms of
receiving monetary rewards or grades, or
praise, or whatever it is that you happen to
be pursuing out there, resources of some kind. And presence, and
striving to be present when in the pursuit of so-called
synthetic happiness in the form of social connection or in
the form of really focusing on the choice that
you've made and making the best of that choice,
especially since you made that choice in a way that
you deemed best at the time. Well, that also is known to
increase your overall levels of happiness. So if an ability to focus
and attend to things deeply is really what's most important,
and really acts as the greatest lever for both natural
and synthetic happiness, well then, tools like a 5 minute
daily meditation or a 13 minute day meditation, as
well as tools that allow us to get excellent
sleep every night. Which, of course, sets the basis
for attention during the day. If you've ever had a
poor night's sleep then you are very familiar
with how hard it is to focus the following day. At least for long
periods of time. But building our
capacity to focus through a focusing exercise,
which again, is often called meditation, but
is really simply just a focusing and
perceptual exercise. That's going to create
an outsized effect on all the aspects,
all the behaviors that we know feed into
creating natural and synthetic happiness. And so it's really fair
to say that our ability to attend and focus really
equates to happiness. So as is often typical
of this podcast, today we've talked a lot
about the various aspects of the science of happiness,
including the different forms of happiness and tools to
access those different forms of happiness. If you're learning from
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