The Pursuit of Sustainable Happiness - Todd Kashdan

[Music] good evening everyone and welcome to the marion miner cook uh virtual athenaeum my name is chris agard and i'm one of your three ath fellows how do you define happiness do you consider yourself happy what makes you happy how do you stay happy i'm sure every single person in the audience will answer each of these questions differently but i think it's fair to say that in one way or another we are all in the pursuit of happiness it turns out there are ways to make this pursuit more attainable psychology offers a great deal of information and insight to help us understand happiness and ways in which we can sustain the cessation and maintain a happy state of mind today's speaker is a leader in this realm of psychology that focuses specifically on well-being curiosity psychological flexibility and resilience professor todd cashton is a professor of psychology and director of the well-being laboratory at george mason university in fairfax virginia whose research includes a focus on happiness from the psychological perspective the author the author of several books professor cashton has published over 200 peer-reviewed articles and his work has been cited over 30 000 times his research is featured regularly in a broad range of media outlets such as the atlantic harvard business review new york times npr and time magazine he is a keynote speaker and consultant for organizations as diverse as microsoft mercedes-benz prudential general mills and the united states department of defense in 2013 professor castro received the american psychological association award for distinguished scientific early career contributions to psychology professor cashton's athenaeum talk is part of a three-part series on interdisciplinary perspectives on happiness co-sponsored by the berger institute at cmc using the q a function we will accept questions throughout the program to be posed towards the end of the event preference will go to students so when you send in a question please state your affiliation with the college student faculty parent alumni or friend as always i must remind you that audio and visual recording are strictly prohibited please join me in welcoming professor todd cashton to the athenaeum thank you for having me thanks chris for the introduction thanks for inviting me um i i wish i could see the other two talks of the perspectives on happiness i think this is a really useful useful approach which is there's economic approaches philosophical approaches sociological approaches and you're going to see a great deal of overlap as i as i offer a psychological approach and i should probably say from from the get-go that i'm going to be synthesizing a body of work of a lot of my colleagues and possibly none of this is my own work i just chose the the best work that's out there which i did not believe was mine um i'm gonna share my screen and i'm gonna answer everything you could ever wanna know about happiness for your entire livelihood in 30 to 40 minutes because that's easy a psychological lens for understanding happiness what i want to do in less than 40 minutes is tell you about what science has to say about what happiness is about what are the barriers to get in the way of accomplishing happiness and then how do we overcome those barriers and actually acquire not just happiness because that's actually pretty easy the hard thing is how do we um increase our level of happiness and sustain it at a high level so i should probably tell you and i just looked this up literally an hour ago at my daughter's soccer practice but the self-help happiness industry literally nine billion dollars right now and here's just a sampling of some of my colleagues books on happiness if i had to tell you one of these books to pick up i would probably say jonathan heights happiness hypothesis but don't tell the other authors because they're all friends of mine um i do want to draw your attention to the horrendous book at the bottom right which is you can be the wife of a happy husband um sold over millions of copies this sexist trope um and still exists on amazon today and the reason that i want to kind of begin with just a few holdings of these large treaties on happiness is that there's something wrong here if you've got a nine billion dollar industry on happiness if you've got all these books that are coming out in the 70s the 80s the 90s up to today and you're still trying to tell people what are the secrets that science has to offer about happiness clearly they haven't figured it out properly yet and there needs to be a little bit more intellectual humility in terms of what we know what we think we know and what we don't know now as this 9 billion dollar industry happens let's look at some data that's been collected from the 50s to 2000s so every single year the national opinion research center at the university of chicago collects data from thousands of people and they're able to actually ascertain over the course of time how his income changed in the past 50 60 years and controlling for inflation now by the way don't get scared by the y-axis here this is in in dollars in 1995. so accounting for inflation the average person salary united states has increased substantially now the question is as our country focuses on gross domestic product as we every single day there's a dow jones index and every day people think about how much wealth they have the question is as we become more of an affluent society which is not for everyone but on average we're becoming more affluent over time what's happening to the percentage of people who say they're very happy and what you find with this nine billion dollar self-help industry on happiness is we're not seeing much change and part of the reason is is that we go with our gut instincts intuitively about how we think we can achieve happiness in our lives and what i'm going to offer you are some of the psychological biases and obstructions that are getting in the way that you might not even be aware of and by just just by being knowledgeable about these psychological obstructions that exist in all of us you can get better at achieving this thing called happiness but we should probably start with the definition so this is a very contentious area people spend their entire careers uh just debating how we should define happiness so this is from sonia leah bermierski laura king ken sheldon ed diener um you know many of us have just kind of felt like this we can get we can keep this simple they're basically the most commonly accepted definition of happiness is three parts one is that you have frequent experiences of pause emotions you have infrequent experiences of negative emotions like anxiety envy guilt shame fear and you have this cognitive element of happiness where you kind of give a thumbs up that life is satisfying that life is close to your ideal that when you think about the ideal ideal way that your life could be lived you're kind of getting close to that aspirational vision of what life is like it's a mental judgment and you put these three things together and with this thing that we call happiness now the most important thing and i hope you bombard me with the questions in the q a because honestly i've got i have teflon coated skin i can handle as many detractors and is i love hostile audiences so bring any question you want i'm going to make a controversial statement here in the field of science which is happiness should be studied subjectively what that means is i can put you in an fmri chamber and see what parts of your brain is activated when i show you pictures of your of your family your best friends of your loved ones pictures of the career that you want to acquire if you want to be a veterinarian you get some cute puppies and some cute ponies and i can see basically is the the left pre-frontal cortex of your brain activated when you expose these pictures i would say that's the wrong level of analysis it would light up in the left side of your brain your prefrontal cortex compared to your right but who cares what matters is do you believe your life is satisfying and you have an emotional life that is comfortable to you subjective with this definition we can ask ourselves well what do you get if you if you win the cortical lottery and you are a happy person what do happy people gain there's been about i don't know 45 years of research on this topic we're just getting started but we're learning a lot here i'm gonna tantalize you with a couple of facts one thing we know is that happy people when they are in the workforce clients like them better they're more likely to buy from them bosses like them better they're more likely to promote them when when happy people kind of bring themselves to the workplace they're more likely to throw themselves into their work they're more engaged they're more attentive they're more productive they're more creative they experience more of these moments of flow where they actually experience a moment in time where the activity they're doing is perfectly manicured to their skills just it's just a little bit out of reach the challenge that they're facing so they're fully engrossed they're immersed and they're not thinking about the past and they're not thinking about the future and in those moments they experience joy experience engagement and they experience a feeling of vitality of their life now i put an asterisk next to creative because literature and creativity of happiness is a little bit more convoluted and nuanced the positive emotions you experience as a happy person makes you more likely to broaden your repertoire of attention you bring in more ideas you can synthesize them you could play with them you can uncover them you could flip them over poke them probe them and that leads to more divergent thought you make unusual combinations and you're more likely to be creative but you also need some negative emotions that actually help make you come become creative and that you're more likely to persevere and sell those ideas and try to influence people with a little bit of anxiety as well this is called the the dual process model of creativity that positive and negative emotions operate differently in terms of being a creative accomplisher now happy people make more money but that's complicated as well the data up to date 2021 shows that after you make about 75 000 in a family household you don't see much incremental gains and happiness of course this differs in terms of where you live if you live in san francisco versus live in boise idaho 75 000 goes a long way we also know thanks to work by elizabeth dunn at university of british columbia that how you spend your money can make you more likely to experience happiness if you spend it on experiences traveling as opposed to buying you know the latest clothes for your wardrobe that's going to increase the propensity to be happy if you spend it on if you if you spend money as rewards for accomplishing your goals that will increase your propensity to be happy and if you spend money on other people versus yourself despite the pain you think that might have spending money on others especially if you care about seeing them pleased by this makes you a happier person but that's not all the benefits you get there's more happy people the biggest strongest finding out there is happy people can be distinguished from unhappy people by one single variable they have closer significant meaningful lasting relationships it is the single greatest distinguisher between unhappy and happy more likely to marry when they're married they're fulfilled just because you're married doesn't mean you're going to be happy you're less likely to get divorced you have more friends you experience more intimacy with those friends by sharing information about yourself you're more likely to trust people and you draw in social support because of that so you've got people there to grab your back during difficult times you're more likely to be pro-social as a happy person kind compassionate spend your money on other people which i just mentioned only serves to increase your happiness further and sets up this nice cyclical loop you're happy you're kinder you also spend money on other people which makes you happier and kinder to me the most interesting findings about happiness is that you have a stronger immunological system you actually are more resistant to the common cold when you're exposed to viruses i bet i would put my money down that people that are happier are more likely to when they get exposed to the covid virus they are less likely to have symptoms and have weaker symptoms compared to people that are less happy has not been studied yet the data are still out in terms of the jury but what we found is that sheldon cohen at university of pittsburgh paid people 300 to live two weeks in a biosphere with a bunch of strangers it sounds like a reality tv show for nerds and what he wanted to do was ask answer the question what makes people susceptible to disease and infamy and mortality and morbidity and what he found was was that happier people are less likely despite being exposed to the rhinovirus to develop a cold how he measured this is pretty disgusting in one case he just asked about people's symptoms but he also had people had research assistants go into garbage pails pick up the tissues out of the garbage pails and weigh the mucus in those tissues so you have an objective physical measure of symptoms the actual weight of your mucus and the subjective feeling of the symptoms that you report and happier people are less likely to experience both 28 years later happier people are less likely to die from every type of possible illness or disease 11 years later people happier are less likely to be in a car accident and less likely to die in a car accident and one of the reasons is they're more likely to wear their seat belts pretty good it's good to be happy it's not just something that feels good it leads to healthy outcomes so this leads to the big huge quandary which is why we have this multi-billion dollar self-help industry it's easy to have happy moments now i can't see you in the crowd but i suspect your list has overlaps with mine in terms of what are the reliable sources of happiness for you maybe it's lobster maybe it's unani rolls maybe it's surfing in the ocean maybe it's seeing the sunrise the sunset maybe it's holding hands with someone that you love maybe it's a nice warm hug from someone you actually want to hug from italian rainbow cookies we have we have things that we know can bring us happiness in a moment what's difficult for us as human beings is staying happy staying at a high level that's pretty invariant to the vicissitudes and stressors of daily life why can't we stay happy i'm going to give you a few of the mechanisms but they really fall down into two categories is that we adapt to events habituate to events is another way of saying it and i'm going to call the other thing perverted emotional time travel is that we make decisions in the future based on how we think we're going to feel and we are horrendous at this so let me walk you through these these psychological barriers to staying happy so the first is what we'll call hedonic adaptation which is just a jargony term to say that when we experience changes in our lives they only produce a temporary impact and we get accustomed to their experiences rather quickly and the way to think about this i went to kuwait before kobit um the the niece of the ruler they don't have a president it's the ruler of kuwait inviting me to give a talk on happiness and while i was with them they ended up having a huge arsenal of sports cars no i've never drive driven a lamborghini before and most kids want to drive a lamborghini so the question would be how long can you ride a lamborghini before you are so accustomed to the joy of the experience that you don't care anymore and you're ready to get out of the car and do something else the answer is not too long lamborghini is amazing it is it 0-60 in only a few seconds is a powerful machine but after two hours of driving a lamborghini you have to ask yourself how much do you really just love driving on roads especially when there's traffic you acclimate to the situation it's joyful it's intense it's exciting it's stimulating it's interesting it's intriguing it's awe-inspiring but it doesn't last that long how long does it take when you get a dog before you realize that there are so many responsibilities that you under you underestimated um how much the pain is exists having a dog in relation to the rewards of having a dog how long does it take you at an all-you-can-eat buffet well you're really hungry to start or all of a sudden you wish that you never ate something in the first place when we get exposed to novelty we get a flush of positive experiences and often some anxiety that actually only amplifies uh the pleasure of the experience hot foods horror movies roller coasters but it's temporary we adapt quickly to things this is good because if we experience loss stress strain difficulty we want to be able to adapt to get back into the mode of being able to think clearly make sure we can complete our everyday routines and get back to work of doing things so in germany they've got this lifespan study of tens of thousands of people and in this group of tens of thousands they basically fact picked out those people that lost their romantic partner who died in the course of the study let me kind of think about this for a second you spend your whole life dating people are interacting with people in hopes of finding the person you want to spend your life with you find this person you pair up you share resources you live a great life together and then they die it's one of the worst things that could happen to somebody the question is how long does it take for you to bounce back to your normal psychological functioning so in this sample of tens of thousands of people in germany everyone it took the year that people's romantic part partner died and made that year zero on the x-axis and what you see here is amazing adaptation skills for men it took about on the left it took about four to five years in the aftermath of losing their primary romantic partner to bounce back and return to the normal psychological functioning for women half that time only about two and a half years and they're right back to where they were where they were now that's another talk another day but women have coping skills when it comes to loss that is superior to men the term that's been used it's by shelly taylor at ucla she calls it tendon befriend everybody has a fight flight and freeze response to terror to major stressors but women have this additional bonus of a high level of tending and caring for people when they're straight when they're stressed or experienced trauma and befriending and making friends despite the presence of trauma loss and adversity and because of those extra coping skills it's one of the reasons that women even adapt quicker than men to social loss but it's not just losing a romantic partner that we're able to adapt so quickly unemployment in the past year there's been a large a large number of people in the united states that lost their jobs and the research shows that it takes about two to seven years to return back to your baseline psychological functioning after you lose your job and one of the reasons for that it tends to be worse for men and one of the reasons for that is you now know that your financial and your social stability your safety net is much much more precarious and tenuous than you ever thought and you don't you don't ever return to that in the same way for two to seven years later to actually recover but you do recover from it but it's a little bit difficult what happens there but we do adapt to things these are the extremes but even these extreme events we adapt and because of that it's hard for positive changes in our lives to have a lasting impact on us there's another barrier to happiness and the truth potato i don't know if you're familiar with this with this website um they capture it best there will always be people prettier and uglier than you we do this really bizarre thing when good things happen to us let's say you get a salary boost let's say you get into the grad school of your dream of your dreams let's say you meet the perfect person that you want to date let's say you develop the perfect body from exercise nutrition and good sleep hygiene we do something is that we don't revel in our accomplishments we don't enjoy and savor the good things that happen to us we raise our standards and so we're on this hedonic treadmill every time something good happens to us we change our benchmark of what we compare ourselves to and who we compare ourselves to so as we develop a more physically capable body and we get stronger and faster and wiser and more intelligent we change the reference group that we compare ourselves to so we our happiness never improves because we're constantly changing who we can we increase the intensity of who we compare ourselves to so this treadmill prevents us from ever staying at a high level of happiness it gets in the way and the reason is that we have we have a baseline level of happiness that we oscillate around every one of us has a certain level of happiness that is pretty stable month to month and year to year the stability is impressive it's about 80 stability over the course of a three year time span which means that on average no matter what happens to people their happiness is very close to where it is year to year and most of it is due to genetic variance at the population level it's our baseline level of happiness that determines where we start from before something happens before we approach our goals before we fail at something before we make mistakes before we get rewards in our lives before we go find dining before we go surfing we have a baseline level of happiness and this is just the cortical lottery some people win it and they get all those benefits i mentioned before and some people lose it and they start at a depressogenic level an unhappy level a pessimistic level and it's good to know where your baseline is because it gives you a starting point in terms of comparing yourself to older versions of yourself and thinking about how you want to change and how you'd like to act differently how you'd like to live differently in the future you can't get away from your baselines one more barrier so i can put you guys into a downward spiral and that is perverted emotional time travel basically we are horrendous at predicting how we're going to feel in the future and we base almost all of our big decisions on how we're going to feel in the future it is a quandary that we need to escape if we're going to be happier at a high level and sustain that high level so let me give you two examples of this one is called psychological immunity neglect it's actually a really cool term we neglect how resilient we actually are and how good we are at dealing with setbacks there was a study of people who have who had unprotected sex in the 80s and 90s or were exposed to viruses during a blood transfusion and were at high risk for hiv and aids and the question was what was your willingness to go get tested a positive test would mean that you had hiv and then what would happen if you found out the results were positive and you have this disease or if it's negative and you could take the sigh of relief that you don't have it so when i ask people if this test is positive what's going to happen to you people say they're going to be depressed they're going to be suicidal they're going to hate themselves they're going to have regrets that they ever did a blood transfusion that they ever had unprotected sex and they expect their entire life to be one of despair and despondent suit and they ask people what if it ends up being negative they say oh if it's negative i i am going to be the most religious person the most spiritual person i'm going to go to church synagogues and mosques on a weekly basis i'm going to be the kindest person i'm going to give 10 of my salary to charities i will i will i will protect people from bullies i will never be a bystander if bad things happen i will be the next mahatma gandhi and then you see what actually happens and when you actually see how do people respond when the tests the hiv test is positive what you find is they get a dip their psychological well-being takes a hit more depression more anxiety more loneliness more sense of isolation but only two weeks later they start crawling back up to their baseline level of happiness not at all what they predicted the speed to which they recover the psychological immunity they underestimate their powers to bounce back and for those people that have a negative test that said they're going to be the next martin luther king the next mahatma gandhi doesn't really happen they feel really good sense of relief and equanimity for a couple weeks and they get right back to where they were before they're mean they yell at their dog they scream at their kids they get into unnecessary fights with people on the road they have road rage and they're just like they were before a few weeks later we underestimate this how this psychological immunity um occurs in our lives but we make decisions based on how we think we're going to feel organ donors so when you ask people listen would you like to meet the person that gave you a kidney that gave you a heart transplant it's the reason that you're alive do you want to meet the family that helped you avoid death now invariably most people if i remember correctly it's about 80 of people say absolutely they're gonna walk through the door we're gonna hug we're gonna cry they're gonna be my new best friends we're gonna get a necklace where half of the heart will be on my necklace and half the heart will be on their necklace we'll spend every thanksgiving together i'm going to call them all the time and then you observe what actually happens for those people that never meet their organ donor and people that do meet their organ donor this is the pleasures of uncertainty people think that certainty will give them the most pleasure meeting that person that changed their life and what you find is it's a great moment it's a kodak moment it's the kind of thing you watch at the end of the nightly news these are good things in the world there's a big hug and there are a lot of tears but after a few months you realize you go back to your busy life your social calendar and normally that new person can't fit in there and you go back to the way you work but the people that never met the person that saved their lives gave them a bladder kidney a lung a heart transplant you ask yourself what kind of freaking crazy benevolent world do i live in the people don't even want to get credit they don't even they're going to stay anonymous they don't even want to meet me they don't want points like social points for this don't they want to like burn off karma and have like a good afterlife you don't adapt to that the pleasures of not knowing who donated an organ change you dramatically we see this economists and study people they can't get over and they become kinder more generous people we make this mistake all the time of choosing certainty and in positive events often uncertainty leads to more intense positive experiences that have a greater and more enduring impact on our lives but because of perverted emotional time travel we underestimate this and forget to do this this is a barrier to us experience happiness so we adapt to events easily to change and that's why we don't get happier we have a perverted emotional time travel we make decisions based on how we're going to feel in the future but we're not good at making those decisions because we neglect how resilient we are and we neglect the pleasures of uncertainty and we have this hedonic treadmill when good things happen to us we just raise the bar in the standards so we stay in place in terms of our happiness so how can we break through these psychological barriers and become happier we've discovered how two of the most effective interventions for increasing happiness is gratitude interventions and kindness interventions for one of the gratitude interventions is on a daily basis or just you journaling you journal the things that you're appreciative of people that benefacted you and provided positive experiences in your life you attribute the good events the good experiences to other people and the question is if you did this every day kept a journal will this increase your happiness and it's a very interesting finding so compared to a bunch of college students who don't do anything so the average college student over the course of a semester their happiness goes down and you can see this with the control condition those people that three times a week journal right in their journal who are they grateful to what are they grateful for talk about the positive things that happen to you three times a week their happiness goes down but if they only do it once a week they experience a high level of happiness you would think that if something works well if you do it more often it would increase your habits but it's not it's not the case the reason is is that when you journal three times a week four times a week five times a week in a gratitude journal you run out of people defect and you start thanking the same people my mom my best friend my mentor next day my mom my mentor my best friend and as you end up having running out of people to thank and running out of positive events to write in that are that are varied and novel you start to think huh there's not that much in my life there's not that many people to thank but when it's once a week it's a day of variety it's a disruption in your routine gratitude day or this is the day i'm going to pay thanks to all the benefactors in my life and if you do it too much it becomes a homework assignment you need the variety the variety busts through the barriers of hedonic adaptation and the hedonic treadmill we find the same thing for kindness interventions if you're asked on a daily basis to be a kind person it depends how much variety there is in terms of whether it will increase your happiness so there's a low variety condition where basically people are given a list of 15 kind things they could do holding the door for people writing a thank you note writing um writing a note of appreciation to people in your life whether it's a barista or a waiter or waitress when you were told pick three things on this list of kind acts and do them daily you experience no better increase in your happiness than doing nothing in the high variety condition your said basically here's a list of 15 kind acts choose whatever you want to do every day like put your own combination together when you're given that autonomy and that variety those people who are acting more kindly on purpose experience more happiness without the variety increasing your acts of kindness does nothing to improve your happiness there's also effort i mean this is obvious for anyone who goes to the gym or who has attempted to diet or made any kind of behavioral change in our lives if you don't devote consistent effort to actually try to think of people like dig deep like are there people in your childhood that you haven't properly thanked before in a gratitude intervention in terms of optimism and thinking about expectancies for for future positive events think carefully put a lot of deliberate effort into domains of life in leisure in work in friendships in romantic relationships the more effort you put into these activities the more likely to increase your happiness if you don't put effort into these happiness interventions what you see here is you don't even show an increase in happiness it actually declines a little bit it's it's one of these things that aristotle calls uncommon common knowledge we know this and yet so many people buy self-help books on happiness and try to or apps on their phone to meditate and be mindful but if they don't put consistent effort in they're not going to get happy just by glancing and devoting just a small bit of attentional space you got to go full throttle one more way of crushing through this hedonic treadmill and and this hedonic adaptation is you need fit these activities happiness inducing activities have to match you they should be personalized so when you read scientific studies and happiness you think how do i apply this to my life your particular personality your goals your lifestyle and what we find is is that after taking a personality test people that have an activity that matches their personality optimistic people doing an optimistic intervention people that are tend to savor positive experiences with photographs and journaling doing a gratitude intervention they get the more benefits from it if you're a highly sociable person you probably do better for happiness doing an intervention that involved increasing the positivity of your social interactions fit is important and this is something that scientists aren't going to know you have to match the science to your personality so let me take you into one space as i bring this home and i think this is this is kind of the the most tantalizing part of this talk is thinking about the psychology of time which i think gets ignored way too often when we think about happiness we've been stuck trapped in our houses with the same roommates the same family members and friends for a year and a lot of us are really excited to go do something if you're like me one of my big interests is traveling i don't really like cruise ships but some of my family members do like cruise ships there are three phases of every positive event in our life and i want you to think really carefully about this they all have different influences on our happiness there's the anticipatory phase which is you are imagining what it's going to be like to do the thing that you're planning to do there's the online moments where you're actually in the midst of the activity you're on the cruise ship you're in the pool you're drinking the margarita you're meeting some strangers you're meeting some cool people people are giving you compliments and then there's the post-mortem after it happens you look at the photographs you tell stories you create a narrative about the event what we find is that the the moments during a positive activity in the being in the moment have less of an influence on your general happiness than your post-mortem the narrative that you weave about events the stories you tell yourself this is why you should be taking photographs keeping journal entries and describing your life because it helps you hold on to these experiences so it actually has an influence on who you are and what you're going to become and we should also be careful thinking about the anticipatory period it's one reason i don't do surprise parties for any one of my friends or family is because i want them to know that in three weeks or a few months from now there's gonna be a party and they can enjoy and relish imagining what it's gonna be like thinking about it relishing it you deprive people of that joyous moment of those moments if you don't give them the anticipatory period now there's another element of this i've been thinking a lot about which is as we seek variety in our lives so many challenge channels of television so many streaming stations so many people we could socialize with people now use dating apps they have an infinite paralyzed number of possible partners there's something that's lost we'll never have another johnny carson who is the late night talk show host before my generation will never have another seinfeld which is the biggest show when i was in college that millions of people are watching at the exact same time we'll never have another dan rather than connie chung where almost the majority of the nation was watching the news at the same time seven o'clock every day as we now have an infinite number of websites and channels as we seek variety in our lives and have as much uniqueness we become lonelier because we don't have these shared experiences that bridge people together across moral divides liberals conservatives different races different sexes different genders there were time periods where with the lack of variety everybody was getting the same cultural moments together and we're losing that so again the psychology of time of everyone not being it having the same experience experiences across millions of people it does something to affect the fiber of society that's worth thinking about in terms of being happy people and a happy society in the nature of time i'm going to skip this so pretend this didn't happen everything i'm talking about the nature of happiness the barriers of happiness how to overcome these barriers it all starts with an intention of what is the smallest unit of change you can engage in now to improve your happiness if you want to get fit it starts with one push-up if you want to increase your physical health it's dental floss one tooth if you want to be happier it's having that singular interaction just reaching out purposely calling someone on the phone and telling them that you missed them purposely writing a text saying you had a really good time when you hung out with them yesterday telling people what you like about them small units of behavior are the building blocks that create this foundation foundational thing that we call happiness so that is the psychology of happiness in a nutshell and i am looking forward to your questions your criticisms any connections and thoughts you have and here is you will be the first group ever to be exposed this is my brand new book that will be coming out this august so thank you for uh letting me spend 40 minutes look forward to talking to you guys in the q a thank you so much for your talk and for uh letting us see your book cover that's really exciting uh we're going to dedicate the rest of the time to some questions from our audience so if you're out there as an attendee listening please feel free to use the q a button at the bottom of your screen our first question though comes in from a student who asks in relation to your surprise party example is it possible that the postmortem of the party not living out their expectations would trump the happiness gains they get from knowing about it beforehand wouldn't it only be better for the party not to be a surprise if the party itself does end up being a success that is such a good nuanced question i'm so glad you asked it and i love the pushback so the quick answer is yes that's right like this everything that i've spoken about today is very contextually driven and we can kind of we can we can dive in in greater details of of how this fits in an exact situation so if we could if we could make reasonable predictions about how that part is going to turn out knowing their social life knowing their cast of characters maybe they have people maybe they have friends that often get drunk and when they get drunk they get unruly and reckless and aggressive um maybe maybe they're you know they've got like a bunch of ex-girlfriends and boyfriends you imagine them being there at the party at the same time in that case the greater predictive power you have you can make an informed decision do i do i front load this in terms of having a surprise or do i backload this in terms of letting them have the full anticipatory experience knowing that i think this is going to be a killer kick-ass party that happens there and this is this is a perfect example of here's what the science says on average and now let's adapt it based on our understanding of ourselves in other people fantastic question next question comes from a student who asks what's the most mis what is most missing in the study of happiness well there's a lot um and i'm glad i'm glad you're going for the gaps that tells me you should be going to grad school if you're not for grad school already because this is this is what you really want to be searching for you know you get caught in i speak for 40 minutes and you get caught in with all these new concepts and terms and things you'll buy in but you actually want to step back as well and say huh where are the gaps one of the big gaps is cross-cultural knowledge um everything i said i you know is it it's an implicit assumption i'm talking about the world but the thing is you know i've i've spent months in sri lanka i spent months in vietnam and in cambodia and i've spent months living in in iceland and i can tell you that when you're in these different different parts of the world that the things that i just spoke about are going to have some differences and we need to explore that much more for example we know that people that live in asian countries particularly east asian countries like korea and taiwan and japan their most pleasurable experiences are low energy on average contentment equanimity tranquility stillness just walking through a field of grass and feeling feeling the breeze against your body whereas in the united states and in israel and in canada and new zealand in these countries people's most preferred emotional state is high energy uh states of intrigue states of us uh states of being inspired and so just there we know culturally the emotional states that are preferred differ and then you can ask yourself what are the downstream effects in terms of how to construct a workplace how to construct a classroom knowing that certain people prefer these low emotional states that certain people prefer these high pleasant emotional states so this cross-cultural work is definitely where there's a huge gap our next question comes in uh from another student who's asking about your mention of the cortical lottery or genetic baseline of happiness they want to know to what extent is this actually genetic versus based on early life experiences and in any case what can be done to shift that baseline good question i'm glad someone tackled this because talking about genetics is always a little bit controversial so um we have enough twin studies i mean we have we have hundreds of thousands of people that have been studied for twins to separate genetics and shared life environments and and and people's individualized life trajectories that is different from your twin i mean i have twins and i am a twin and i can tell you is that you have a lot of shared experiences but there's also the unique things that you pursue that your twin is not there whoever is your best friend has a huge impact from age 13 onward in terms of your social network your peer group in terms of taking you to a path of potential delinquency a path of pursuing high achievement outcomes and everything in between happens there um but because we have this data on twins we can say uh very confidently that at the population level um the greatest influence of the three bins um unique experiences shared environment in your household and genetics genetics is the big driver of happiness but genetics is not destiny and one of the things that we've learned over the past 30 or 40 years is epigenetics which is that certain life experiences turn off and on certain genes so you might have a genetic predisposition for being for having major depressive episodes but perhaps with a sufficient living in a place with sufficient sunlight with your genome that that that you know being exposed to the sun and having that vitamin d enter your system turns off those genes and actually makes you less likely to be depressed but if you were living in minnesota or in alaska or in norway that you would be you have the genetic predisposition to have a major depressive episode more often so we're still learning about this how environments and genes interact together and with that knowledge is that despite having a strong genetic predisposition just even some of the psychological skills that i was mentioning in this talk that we can override our genetic code you should feel like a sense of agency despite the fact that happiness is highly genetic that's a good question so towards the end of your presentation you um talked about how there are fewer fewer commonalities amongst all people talking about how there will no longer be a seinfeld or by johnny carson do you see anything emerging in the near future that bridges the cultural slash moral divide that's widening damn chris um you're hitting my so um right now i got a one and a half million dollars we're studying how to bridge the moral divides between the races uh between reds and blues and just you know uh just just kind of try to fix this cultural um drift that's happening right now in society um i have i've mixed feelings i've mixed thoughts about this you know part of me feels is that there's there is a big loss of we have we we did we we're losing a broader cultural umbrella that binds us all together at a national level and this goes not just our country but other countries as well um at the same time there is such beauty and precious value that like everyone is finding their peoples right online and kind of in the world where you can find your niches you know you can you can find people that have harry potter tattoos in a small group and you find that hundreds of people are in there you can find people that you know basically love the smell of carcasses and you'll find them there'll be hundreds of people online and the fact is if it ends up being that you like to be awake and moving around the world at night time even though you don't work during the day like in the night is when you're alive you'll find your peoples and i think there's something beauty about there's never been a greater time in history for diverse niches of people to find their partners in crime so these two things the two cultural strings are happening simultaneously we're losing these broad shared experiences but everyone was getting these great opportunities for the sense of belonging and the sense where they can be their unique personalized selves so i don't know how to put those into a formula what to say about society i would say i have a hopeful view of society i do believe that one of the things that i i hope we're moving towards is less obsessiveness of likability that social media is pulling us to do now right in terms of seeking likes seeking kind of social attractiveness points presenting ourselves in a way to get the most positive feedback and to be simultaneously very niche oriented and very other orient in terms of expanding our circles to include people that don't think like us or look like us and i think it's gonna there's i think there's gonna be some tweaking and technology that's gonna allow you to bounce back between bounce between these two these two windows of interacting with other human beings another question from a clermont mckenna student is whether there's any correlation between the number of social connections that one has and their level of happiness as opposed to just the qualitative factors of those relationships um good question so there's there's definitely a tipping point here um in general the quick answer is the quality of your social ties are much more important than the quantity and yet society really pushes for quantity so if there's if that is the only thing you take away from anything i've said um it's an important one we know that you only need two to three close friends and only only one best friend and you can be maxed out in happiness very easily this isn't like a small minority of people you only need two to three close friends and i think that's really an honest hopeful message for people to have in a world where um you know people have i mean you know i can just once i leave here i have couch i have numbers that tell me how many connections i have and it could feel lonely knowing that you only actually understand the lives of 10 of 4 000 people that you interact with online and so i think the i think it's it's really useful to to recalibrate your thinking about social relationships too that who are the two to three people in your inner circle i call them my wise counsel the people that i can share anything with i want they can tell me anything and i'll take it to the grave and then knowing that they're out there i don't need to walk around trying to win people's affections and there's a real empowerment of walking around knowing that i don't need to make friends and i can just be who i am and i wish the same of everyone who's listening right now so before we conclude do you have any final remarks the thing i would say well first of all thank you so much for listening i know there's a million things to do there is something cool and special about having things happen live because something can go horribly horribly wrong while i'm talking so there's some thank you for sticking this out um i would just say just take your take managing your psychology very seriously i think we spend a lot more effort about our physical fitness we put a lot more effort into how we present ourselves socially and we don't put sufficient effort of how we manage our psychology and i hope that some of these terms and concepts will be sticky for you and that you realize that you don't get to acquire a fulfilling life in an instant it's these small little building blocks that you kind of that you invest in over the course of time and just take it easy take it small steps and and uh you know reach out to me anytime you now that you have actually heard me talk feel free to reach out and i hope to see you guys sometime soon in person well on behalf of claremont mckenna college and the athenaeum thank you all for joining us tonight a special thanks to professor cashton and to all those who sent in questions don't forget to join us for our next virtual ath event which will be a week from today on tuesday april 13th at 5 pm pacific documentary filmmakers and cmc class of 2012 alums zach and gracie and chris temple will discuss their film the undocumented lawyer and the role of documentary filmmaking to provide perspective into the u.s immigration crisis thank you and have a good evening you

Channel: Claremont McKenna College

Views: 322

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: CMC, Claremont McKenna College, Claremont McKenna

Id: YeMBbgejatU

Length: 57min 30sec (3450 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 09 2021