The Science of Happiness

[Music] so I'm gonna start tonight with the story about five years ago I was asked to do a version of this talk at a big financial services conference in Orlando where people had the opportunity to go in hear different speakers at the same time in a series of breakout sessions so a woman came to my talk on the science of happiness and at the end she came up and said I'm really glad I came you know you were great you know I really enjoyed it and I have to be honest I nearly skipped your presentation because I just really figured that I would hate you and I said well thank you for that unusual compliment and may I ask why you assumed you would hate me she said I just figured anyone who talked about happiness would be all about like kittens and rainbows and you just be really irritating and by the end of the hour I would want to strangle you and I don't so thank you so much and I start this talk with that story to illustrate something really important there are people in the world and people in the room who are the kittens and rainbows people who can always find that silver lining and always do really feel pretty happy and if you're one of those people congratulations and this talk is gonna be a wonderful affirmation of all of the things that you're doing very well in your life already but then there are other people and I'm one of the other people um who don't naturally and easily find happiness so I'm going to be talking today about the science of happiness but in my final 10 minutes or so I'm going to talk about strategies that we can all use to increase our happiness no matter where we fall on that natural happiness continuum and none of these are gonna be things like sell all your belongings and move to Aruba they're all gonna be things that you can actually do an implement moving forward but before I talk about the science of happiness I want to talk about some errors that we make because the reality is one of the challenges in thinking about happiness is that many people probably even most people go through life looking for happiness in the wrong places they're expecting certain things to make them happy they pursue them but those things aren't the secret to happiness so I want to start by talking about some of these myths that we have I'm so guess what the number one mistake people make is in terms of thinking something will make them happy but in reality it doesn't that mistake is about what money good that's good periodically a person will call out marriage and it's like it's so awkward if they're with their spouse you know it's really anyway so money is the right answer good overwhelmingly people think if I just had some more money surely I would be happier this is a picture of Tiger Woods's house or maybe now Tiger Woods is ex-wife's house and people think gosh if I lived in a house like that wouldn't I be happy every single minute of every single day but the reality is no we actually adapt very quickly to newfound wealth initially we're excited and then we adjust to that new standard of living and we think I just had a little bit more and that power of adaptation means that looking for happiness and money is really misguided and I wouldn't give you a really simple example most people in this room are old enough that this will work for you who remembers the excitement about getting your very first cell phone what could it do look at that phone to make a call maybe right maybe right depending on where you are maybe you recognize it in that picture on but it was very exciting because you might be able to call someone from the car it was incredible um but if I took your current phone and I gave you your first phone you'd feel very sad um because we now expect that our phones will let us shoot a movie buy a dress read a book do all these things not just call someone from the car and that's the challenge of adaptation and some people have known this for a long time as Benjamin Franklin said money has never made man happy nor will it there is nothing in its nature to produce happiness the more of it one has the more one once that's the challenge now before I go on I want to say something really important for people who are living below the poverty line for people who are worried are my kids can have enough food to eat tomorrow are we gonna have heat this winter do I have a safe place to sleep tonight for people who are worried about survival more money absolutely does increase happiness but once you're not worried about survival it's a never-ending game of pursuing more and more and more so what else do we think will make us happy but really doesn't climb it overwhelmingly people think if I just lived in a warmer prettier climate surely I would be happier if you do large-scale surveys of Americans and you ask them would you be happier if you lived in California or North Dakota guess what pretty much everyone says California very consistent binding in this finding actually forms the basis of a joke that I tell students so here's the joke patient goes to a doctor and the doctor says I have terrible news you have six months to live the patient says well that is terrible news and what do you suggest I do and the doctor says you should immediately move to North Dakota and the patient says absolutely I'll do that right away and and if I move to North Dakota will I live longer and the doctor says no but it'll feel like forever people from North Dakota like super don't like that joke I found that out three times but here's the reality this is also wrong Gallup poll a few years ago North Dakota is one of the top five happiest states California is not um so people in North Dakota aren't that very happy we don't know why but they are in fact very happy what else life events overwhelmingly we think when this life event happens then I'll be happy now that life event changes depending on your age when I graduate from college when I get a job when I get a promotion when I buy a house when I retire whatever it is when this thing happens then I'll be happy forever so let's take the example of a promotion that you're certain is gonna make you happy see you work harder and harder and harder you get that promotion all of a sudden it turns out you have to do what you have that job as it turns out and that job has pressure and deadlines and colleagues and the permanent happiness you thought was yours just isn't there you adapt just like you adapt to climate more money but there is one kind of life event that's a little bit interesting on because this life event does consistently make some people happy and that's the life event of marriage um so what the data on the science of happiness in marriage tells us is that marriage does consistently make some people happy and those people are called men [Laughter] married men are happier than single men they're healthier than single men they live longer than single men they're less likely to be hospitalized for psychiatric disorders and here's what's even better for the men it doesn't matter who they're married to anyone anyone is gone so how about for women for women it's more complicated because for women good marriage is good happily married women are in fact happier and healthier than single women but unhappily married women are less happy and less healthy than single women so for women good marriage is good but bad marriage is really bad for men it's all good and so the key takeaway from that is that men should find someone but women need to be picky women need to find the right someone and what I like about that finding is that by all accounts this set up then it's probably better for William than for Kate Williams going to be happy Kate we hope so but it's probably too early to tell and William's mom married to a prince but not that happy one more example of something that overwhelmingly we anticipate will be associated with happiness the life event of having children on becoming a parent this is a little bit of an outdated picture of my three kids yeah and in the picture they seemed really quiet like clean and angelic well-behaved and here's the challenge that in the abstract and the picture having children seems like a really good thing to do but the reality day in and day out of parenthood is what hard it's really hard I gave this talk once in a giant hotel ballroom like 800 people and I said the reality dating it out and a woman right in the front row yells out hell I don't like echoes bye hell hell you know to the ballroom now in fairness a two-year-old at home but the reality day energy out of parenthood is really hard it's playing lots of boring games with absolutely no strategy it's doing huge amounts of laundry it's literally touching somebody else's poop and as Annie Lamott said having a baby is like suddenly getting the world's worst roommate so here's the challenge if you look at the science of happiness and Parenthood parents do have more joy than non parents there's the joy of the homemade Mother's Day card or your kid hitting a home run in Little League or learning to swim or ride a bike and these wonderfully special tender moments are in fact bigger Peaks than non parents experience but those highs are absolutely coupled with lows of worry and stress and heartache and those lows are lower than non parents experience so what the state it shows us is that parents have more highs and parents have more lows and Nan parents have a much more even keel existence now sometimes I'll give one of these talks and a person will come up afterwards and they'll say but Katherine you have to remember if you have children you might get grand children and grandchildren make me very happy and what I say to that is I'm really hoping that's true not like imminently but eventually all right so I've talked about what doesn't make us happy but that's not why you're here I now want to turn and talk about what does make us happy and the good news is there are lots of things that in fact the scientific research tell us increase our happiness I'm so 1 there are a variety of behaviors that we can do in our lives very low-level behaviors that in fact are empirically shown to increase happiness so eating is one of those but it's not just the act of like chewing and swallowing it's actually eating particular kinds of foods what kinds of foods make us happy chocolate sugars fats there's absolutely no evidence for happiness and like celery for example now fortunately there's also strong data looking at the link between I'm happiness and exercise who here has already heard about the link between happiness endorphins and exercise who's heard about that great great - lots of you know that data are ready um when you're exercising a chemical endorphin and your body is elevated that actually is empirically shown to increase your feelings of happiness plus one of the best feelings we can have is the feeling of having exercised right and unfortunately the only way to get the having exercise feeling you have to exercise first it's too bad all right now in what won't be the most shocking thing I tell you tonight lots of data suggest that shopping makes us happy but it's more interesting than you might think who here has ever experienced a wonderful feeling of happiness because you were shopping and found the perfect gift for someone you care about that feeling is actually higher than when you shop for yourself so it's not about shopping getting things it's actually about shopping relationship building is where you get the biggest benefits nature lots of data suggests that spending time in nature is tremendously beneficial in terms of happiness and what's particularly remarkable is that spending time in nature is also good for our physical health in a really simple illustration of this researchers compared recovery rates for patients who had had a routine scheduled surgery at a hospital in Pennsylvania the way this surgery the hospital is set up one of the wings of the hospital overlooked a parking lot so people assigned to that wing saw cars and asphalt and traffic the other wing of the hospital overlooked a park so people assigned to this wing saw trees flowers and grass so they compared rates of recovery for patients who have the exact same surgery that had been assigned to one of these two wings and what they found was that compared to patients who'd been assigned to the wing overlooking the parking lot people whose room overlooked the park got out of bed faster needed lower levels of pain medication had better reports from the nurses and got discharged faster from the hospital so every dimension they studied simply looking at nature through a window sped up your recovery from surgery in a very recent study to try to understand what's going on researchers brought in people and they put them in an MRI machine to measure brain activation then they showed them different pictures I'm going to show you now two actual pictures that were used in this study so one of the pictures was of a very pretty urban City skyline so there's a range of colors they're sky there's clouds it's not that the picture is showing you no smog or traffic you know etc it's a visually appealing picture then they also showed them pictures of rural nature scenes such as that one again visually appealing picture range of colors sky clouds so these pictures are both visually appealing and yet patterns of brain activation were remarkably different people who are looking at the urban City skyline showed lots of brain activation their brain was active it was firing people who were looking at the rural nature scene showed relaxed calm brain waves like they were meditating or sleeping and so this finding suggests that just looking at nature may in fact be physiologically relaxing to the brain and that may help us to vote more of the body's resources to recovering from surgery I started today's talk by describing the role of personality and I said some people are the kittens and rainbows people and some people are not and the reality is personality exerts a very strong influence on our happiness and that's why some things like getting a raise better climate you know so on don't bring us consistent happiness as Martha Washington said I am still determined to be cheerful and happy in whatever situation I may be for I've also learned from experience that the greater part of our happiness or misery depends upon our dispositions and not upon our circumstances so what is it about personality that really matters and research points to three distinct variables one of those is extraversion people are extroverted outgoing they like to meet new people do new things and so on they probably find it easier to maintain and form a social network so extraversion is one another is high self esteem they feel pretty good about themselves overall here's a cartoon that shows the opposite dear diary sorry to bother you again but the real way that self-esteem seems to help us is that people who feel good about themselves are very good at finding the silver lining no matter what happens I'm gonna tell you now about a little bit of a complicated study so this is a time to pay attention because otherwise some people will laugh and you'll be like what happened so in this study they brought in dating couples college student dating couples people who are dating each other and they said you're going to fill out the exact same questionnaire as your dating partner so you come into the study and they see you across the table from your partner so one person turns at the first page of their questionnaire and it says where did you meet how long you been dating and their partners sitting just right across from them they turn to their first page and it says where'd you meet how long have you been dating that's not the complicated part then this person turns to the second page of their questionnaire and their questionnaire says please list everything you hate about your dating partner so you start writing you know kind of messy kind of stubborn a little stingy you know whatever it it so you're writing some stuff their partner turns of the second page of their questionnaire and their questionnaire size please list absolutely every single item in your dorm room so you start writing I got my books I got my futon I got my pillows think about my shoes about my computer I got my posters whatever and you're writing and writing and writing this person is looking at you and they're going like why are they using the back light and everyone turns to the third page the third page says how do you feel about your relationship now here's what's remarkable people who are high in self-esteem who have sat there and watched what appears to be their partner getting a hand cramp frantically writing 500 things they hate about them they say I love my partner so much they hate 500 things about me and we're still together so this is a wonderful turn of event this is like my soulmate this is like faith they will never leave me the love is so strong and that's the power of high self-esteem that you take what should be a relationship damning experience and you find that silver lining one more personality trait that operates in much the same way of the personality trait of optimism people who are optimistic again have this ability to find the silver lining no matter what Freud told the story about a couple who came to see him in therapy and at one point during the course of the therapy session the husband turned to the wife and said if one of us were to die I think I would go live in Paris you know cuz if it was one of us it'd be it'd be you you know I have this Paris plan um my oldest son has a remarkable ability to do this kind of optimistic thinking Andrew was in public school from kindergarten through eighth grade in ninth grade he moved to this elite prep school that he was woefully underprepared for and he struggled mightily in every possible academic discipline but he struggled especially in Spanish and he struggled enough in Spanish that midway through his first trimester he received a warning grade of a 50 this is the school that uses the traditional one to a hundred grading scale so 50 was really not good so in November Andrew calls me at the end of November and goes mom you know got my grades first trimester good news about Spanish and I said oh thank goodness because I was so worried you know what with the 50 and he's like yes it's good news I said great what'd you get and he goes I got a 58 and I said that is not good news and he goes it's 8 points higher than I had in October and I said you got an F you got an F in Spanish and he goes mom it's really an F plus and I said I'm a professor like that's not an option like there's never a plus after the F it's like not even a choice and he goes well you know at the rate I'm going I'm gonna have a 66 in January and I think you know that's a deed like that's also bad but here really is the good news about Andrew and Andrews life is that by all accounts you know someday he's gonna end up in prison and and hopefully not a spanish-speaking prison anyway um but he's gonna be fine because he's gonna call home and be like mom I got this bunk bed I got a roommate there's this exercise yard they bring in the meals through the door it's so relaxing because anyone who can call home with the good news about the f+ it's gonna be fine I mean he's gonna be poor and living in my basement but he's gonna be happy and this ability to find the silver lining no matter what is tremendously important I'm gonna share with you now one of my favorite quotes that perfectly illustrates this and it's by Nelson Mandela I am fundamentally an optimist whether that comes from nature and nurture I cannot say part of being optimistic is keeping one's head pointed toward the Sun one's feet moving forward there were many dark moments when my faith in humanity was sorely tested but I would not and could not give myself up to despair that way please defeat and death so this ability to find the silver lining no matter what is tremendously predictive and the good news for all of us is that our ability to do that seems to increase with age we actually get better at finding some kind of silver lining with some age with some adversity and I want to turn now to talk about the really important role of age as a predictor of happiness I'm going to show you some data that was collected within the United States of hundreds of thousands of people a big Gallup poll and it was collected on adults ages 18 to 85 so I'm gonna show you the data and we'll talk about what it means but what's most important is that this shape of the data curve looks exactly the same in every single country that they've studied so this is not a uniquely American finding it actually appears to be a universal truism so here's the data and what you can see here on the far left is that people who are ages 18 to 21 are very happy and again what the hell is there not to be happy about when you're 18 to 21 then in what is bad news for some people here including bae i'm happiness drops like a stone right up until around age 50 and that of course corresponds with what we think about in our society is a midlife crisis it's also perhaps coincidentally an age at which many people have teenagers living in their home but then in what is good news for every single person here happiness increases in your 60s and your 70s and again they study people up to age 85 and what you see in this chart is that it around 70 you hit the happiness you had at 18 to 21 and then you get happier still um and so this is really a remarkable and very cross culturally consistent finding so to examine what explains this um finding that people in their 70s and 80s are experiencing higher levels of happiness researchers have done qualitative interviews about how people structure and spend their time and here's what they find younger people are very focused on having big social networks what I like to call Facebook friends lots and lots of people but you're not particularly close or connected to many of them what people do in their 60s and 70s and 80s they get rid of the riffraff and they focus on high quality relationships so they're basically making a choice of having high quality relationships with fewer people as opposed to lots of relationships and this finding is perfectly illustrated in the following peanuts cartoon as we grow up we realize it is less important to have lots of friends and more important to have real ones really that's amazing that's so great I love that yeah yeah no that's that's well that's wonderful there's a positive a Facebook and and so this is a very very consistent finding that when we talk about what predicts happiness the single best predictor is in fact the quality of our relationships now I've talked about relationships before marriage if you're man children for no one but the good news is relationships do make us happy they just don't have to have specific labels you can have happiness from having good friends from being close with family members from being close with dating partners that you're not married to what matters isn't the label on the relationship what matters is the quality of the relationship but here's the challenge that we're all facing the way we have good relationships is by having intimate real authentic conversations and there's lots of evidence now that that's getting harder for one very key reason who here has ever been somewhere a restaurant a park you know Airport would ever seen two people together in which each of them are on their cell phone who's ever seen that happens all the time there you go that's right that's right you're too busy yes that's right you never looked up really simple study illustrated the hazards of cell phones on our ability to have these relationships they brought in people who wanted to have a get-to-know-you conversation with a stranger they paired them up in private rooms half the people just had this 15 20 minute conversation with a stranger the other half the people before the conversation started the researcher took her cell phone she turned it off she then put it on the table right in between the two people so the cell phone is turned off it's not gonna ring it's not gonna vibrate cell phone house belongs to the researcher doesn't belong to the two people having the conversation and yet what they found was the presence of that phone turned off on the table led to a lower quality of conversation less intimate less meaningful less vulnerable and that's a phone that's turned off and doesn't belong to either people in the conversation so that's a remarkable finding and it really illustrates the hazards of the presence of cell phones in terms of their ability to distract us from paying attention to precisely the people that we should be building these good relationships with I want to turn now to some overall conclusions from the field of positive psychology I started today's talk by describing individual differences the power of genetics the kittens and rainbows people and the other people and the reality is about 50% of our happiness is determined by our genes and that's probably driven largely through things like extraversion self-esteem optimism those personality traits as I described earlier as this cartoon says I could cry when I think of the years I wasted accumulating money only to learn that my cheerful disposition is genetic so yeah the reality is for some people happiness really is far easier to find but here's the cake this also means that 50% of our happiness is not genetic and that's the part I care about because that's the part that we can all do something about no matter where we fall on that happiness genetic lottery I've talked from the very beginning today about the power of our capacity to adapt and what I've said again and again is this is really a bad thing because all these good things happen you get a raise you have better climate you get a promotion you have more money you win the lottery whatever it is you just adapt and adapt in adapt so all these good things don't really pay off but here's what's really important about our capacity to adapt it works both ways that we also have an ability to adapt to bad events and this is a really important finding I'm now going to tell you about a really difficult story and given where this talk is occurring this will probably be familiar to many people in this room and it's the story of the family of dr. William Pettit so as you may remember this was a family living in a small town in Connecticut a few years ago husband wife two daughters one night two men who'd recently been released from jail broke into their home they tied up them dad in the basement they tied the mom and the two girls to their beds and proceeded to sexually assault all three of them the girls were ages 11 and 17 then to hide evidence of the crimes the mints at the house on fire the dad was able to escape from the basement at a head injury but he lived but the mom and both daughters died of smoke inhalation so most of us hear that story and think how could he ever find happiness again he's lost his wife he's lost both of his kids and he hasn't just lost them he's lost them in about the most horrific set of circumstances that we can wrap our minds around and for most of us it seems impossible to imagine moving forward after experiencing that depth of loss and tragedy and yet here's a picture of William Pettit from a couple of years ago um he met a woman who volunteered as a photographer for the foundation he established to honor his family's memory over time they became friends they fell in love his first wife's family attended their wedding and said we're so happy that you have found someone to share your life with again and a couple of December's ago they welcomed a little boy so that doesn't mean that he's the same happy and it doesn't mean that the tragedy doesn't change and shape and influence him in fundamental ways and always will but what this story speaks to is the power of the human spirit that all of us no matter what have the ability to find happiness again even following loss and tragedy and the reality is for most of us happiness involves the power of effort we have to decide that we want to be happy we have to decide that we deserve to be happy and we have to be willing to structure our lives in ways that bring us that happiness as Elizabeth Gilbert says happiness is the consequence of personal effort you fight for it strive for it insist upon it and sometimes even travel around the world looking for it you have to participate relentlessly in the manifestations of your own blessings and once you have achieved a state of happiness you must never become lacks about maintaining it you must make a mighty effort to keep swimming upward into that happiness forever to stay afloat on top of it and I'm now gonna turn as promised two strategies that we can all use because here's my hope and giving this talk I hope you've learned something I've hoped you've laughed some but mostly I hope that every single person here and and watching it will decide to do something differently in their lives moving forward to increase their own happiness and I give you 10 because I'm hoping that I will touch everyone who hears it with one of these 10 that you will find something that speaks to you I also want to say that my very last slide will be my email address and if anybody would like a copy for free of this entire presentation you can just send me an email and I'll just send it right out to you so if you'd like to have it back to reflect on that's absolutely fine and again as promised none of these things are sell all your belongings move to Aruba they're all things you can do one change your behavior there are lots of low-level things that we can do to increase our happiness who either gets enough sleep raise your hand alright so that's pretty good maybe they'll buy half of you that's good some more of you could adopt this one who here makes a point of exercising regularly raise your hands so that's more hands and here's what God sleeping is easier than exercising spend time outside who makes a point of spending time outside good give him where you all live you should be doing this what a beautiful part of the country does anybody here meditate great great I see a number of hands on if you don't do that one already lots of evidence is now suggesting the benefits of meditation for psychological well-being also for physical health so if you don't do this one already this one's pretty cheap it's pretty easy and it's a great thing to start as a New Year's solution to find your match professionally and personally and this means find what you're good at find what you love this could be in your career it could be in your community it could be in your religious organization could be in your family and it could be anything it could be gardening it could be writing it can be tutoring it doesn't matter what it is figure out what you're good at and find opportunities to put those skills to good use as Steve Jobs said the only way to do great work is to love what you do but it's also really important to find this match at a personal level there's a scale in psychology and it's called the sensation-seeking scale and what the scale measures is the extent to which you feel happy under conditions of high physiological arousal heart beating fast rapid muscle tension you know pit in your stomach etc some people love that feeling some people hate that feeling doesn't matter which one you are this isn't like IQ or high is good but what matters is that you figure out which one you are because different situations make different people happy so I'm going to give you a quick quiz they give you two choices and you have to raise your hand for whichever one best describes you so you get a sense of where you might fall on this dimension some people would like to parachute out of an airplane some people would like to never a parachute out of an airplane raise your hand if you're one of the parachute jumpers all right put your hands down raise your hand if you're one of the smart people all right that's one um to some people when they go into a pool go toe knee ankle thigh some people when they going to a pool dive cannonball right in who are the tawny ankle five people and who are the dive Canabalt people three some people when they go on vacation like the excitement and adventure of camping outdoors some people when they go on vacation like the warmth and comfort of a luxury hotel who are the campers raise your hands in or the luxury I tell people yeah I say to my husband you're camping wife is your second wife but again it doesn't matter who you are what matters is that you figure out who you are because different situations make different people happy 3 read a book you love and how wonderful to do that in this space um who you remembers reading a book that you didn't want to end it's a wonderful feeling of happiness right and it doesn't matter what the book is it just has to be a book that speaks to you this is my husband's favorite book people who've read are like oh my word um but he loved the father-son story he loves the writing it absolutely speaks to him so it doesn't matter what the book is find books that you love pour yourself into those it's a wonderful way of finding more happiness for keep a gratitude journal who here goes to sleep at night thinking about their to-do lists and the problems that they're facing so this is like a different idea so this idea is to only go to sleep at night after writing down two or three things that you are grateful for in your life right now and the right now part is important it can't be things I'll be grateful for once I retire once I win the lottery you know once I whatever things you're grateful for right now um as Dale Carnegie said one of the most tragic things I know about human nature is that all of us tend to put off living we are all dreaming of some magical rose garden over the horizon instead of enjoying the roses that are blooming outside our windows today five make a gratitude visit this is one of my favorites this idea came from a professor of psychology Marty Seligman who works at Penn and what he has people do is to think about a person who changed and shaped their life in some fundamental way could be a boss could be a teacher could be a mentor but somebody who had a major impact on who you became then you write that personal letter you travel to them you stand in front of them and read the letter aloud as a tremendously impactful experience for the person of course is reading letter and of course for the person who's hearing the letter and here's the challenge in our society guess when we typically express what someone meant to us funeral during the eulogy so this idea is to not wait for the eulogy this idea is to tell the person while you still can so when I think about the person who played this role in my own life it was my seventh and eighth grade English teacher mr. Doherty mr. Doherty had been a marine in World War two and he had lost his right arm on picking up a grenade so he had a stump on his right arm and he had this like giant metal hook that strapped around his body and then he had this like claw on the end of it and he would write like on the chalkboard with this claw I went to public school he also smoked throughout the entire day and sometimes he would blow it outside but also like sometimes not um so he was terrifying he had this claw and this stump and the smoke and he was big and red and terrifying um but every paper that I did for mr. Doherty he covered in red unpack organized details structure and mr. Geordi taught me how to write and I am talking to you tonight because I know how to write um I have an undergraduate degree from Stanford I have a doctoral degree from Princeton that's not why I'm here I'm here because of mr. Doherty in 7th and 8th grade that's why I have the career that I have and when I learned that he had died I wrote his widow a letter and I told her that so if you have someone in your life who played that role write the letter six smile even when you aren't happy so this is the like fake it to make it idea we often think that we smile if we're happy but the reality is just smiling can actually make you feel happier as philosopher technolon says sometimes your joy is the source of your smile but sometimes your smile can be the source of your joy and what is particularly remarkable is that the mere act of smiling seems to change our body's physiological reaction to pain in a very clever study they've brought in people and they had them hold chopsticks in their teeth in one of three facial expressions a neutral expression a mild smile or a big beaming smile then while you were holding this facial expression you had to put your hands in a bucket of freezing cold ice water and they said keep it there as long as you can and when you can't stand it anymore pull your hand out and what they found was that people holding the big beaming smile kept their hand in the water significantly longer the mere act of smiling changed how their body responded to pain 7 perform random acts of kindness now you've already heard about this one but this is a remarkably important one because basically anything counts people who volunteer in their community higher levels of happiness people who donate to charity higher levels of happiness I'm going to show you next to math of the world every country that's colored green positive correlation between charitable giving and happiness what you can see it's a universal phenomenon very consistent finding give a gift to anyone in a remarkable series of studies they've brought in people they put them in an MRI machine to measure patterns of brain activation they've had to think about giving a gift to a friend if you just think about giving a gift to a friend a part of the brain is activated that is the same part of the brain that is activated when you process rewarding experiences the exact same part of the brain that is activated when you eat chocolate also when you use cocaine but that's like a less good example um eight spend money on the right things I started today by saying yeah yeah there's no association between money and happiness but the reality is you can spend money in better and worse ways what's good spending money on experiences so that could be tickets to the big game or a Broadway show or travel or a concert spending money on experiences lets you anticipate them experience them and reflect back on them where do you not get such a big bang for your buck spending money on belongings expensive you know watch purse car whatever initially it's exciting and then it's just your watch as no one says on their deathbed I should have bought more crap no one is thinking that and as philosopher Roger Corliss says trying to be happy by accumulating possessions is like trying to satisfy hunger by taping sandwiches all over your body just doesn't work avoid comparisons and this I think is a really tricky one in that many people actually feel totally happy right up until they start comparing themselves to other people and then they feel worse this cartoon says I do count my blessings but then I end up counting those of others who have more and better blessings and that pisses me off or as Teddy Roosevelt said comparison is the thief of joy and one of the things that makes this one so hard these days is the presence of what I like to call fake book in which people write mostly about what the good stuff my kid is valedictorian I just ran the Boston Marathon in under three hours again our whole family went to Tahiti for two weeks and loved each other the whole time and so when I'm on social media I try to write things like all of my kids have lice which I am telling you more often than not really seems like it's been my existence um but but here's the wonderful thing about comparisons we actually get to choose the nature of the comparisons that we make we can make comparisons and make us feel better we can make comparisons that make us feel worse um when my son the spanish scholar was on the verge of being tossed from his prep school i had a cousin who at the same time had a son with leukemia and everyday I said to myself Sara my cousin wishes Parker her son were failing Spanish in high school instead of having chemotherapy and that was true I was lucky and that's the key about comparisons that we all have the opportunity to shape the nature and direction of comparisons that we make and we can do so in ways that make us feel better or ways that make us feel worse it's actually up to us 10 build and maintain close relationships now this is the last one it's the last one for a reason it's the most important it's the single best predictor of our happiness but here's the reality relationships are hard they require conflict and compromise and vulnerability and time and energy and effort they don't happen by magic they happen because we're willing to invest in them and I use this picture as a metaphor the dancer on point if you look at a dancer on point in the distance looks magical looks easy beautiful the reality of dancing on point is that your toes are bruised and calloused and bloodied and it hurts and it's only to look at it from a distance that looks easy and my final quote for you today speaks to this and it's by Tolstoy but on entering upon family life he saw at every step that it was utterly different from what he had imagined at every step he experienced what a man would experience who after admiring the smooth happy course of a little boat on the lake should get himself into that little boat he saw that it was not all sitting still floating smoothly that one had to think too not for an instant to forget where one was floating and that there was water under one and that one must row and that his unaccustomed hands would be sore and that it was only to look at it that was easy but that doing it though very delightful was very difficult and that's the reality close relationships are the single best predictor of our happiness but we don't get those relationships without investing time and energy and effort and my final slide for you today is a picture of my lovely dog and I use this picture for a reason to illustrate a fundamental point pets bring us what kind of love unconditional and that's why for many people pets are a great source of happiness they don't actually require the same conflict and compromise and time and energy I gave this talk a few years ago in Dallas and a man came up at the end and he goes I have the perfect illustration imagine that you come home from work one night and you put your wife and your dog in the trunk of a car and then you drive around for an hour at the end of the hour when you open up the trunk guess who's still happy to see you then that man told me he was divorced and I'm like really I can't imagine so my husband and I have been married for 26 years we have the three kids you saw the picture earlier we have a lovely dog we have the following deal one of us leaves the other one the one who leaves takes the three kids and the other one gets this lovely dog and that has kept our relationship very strong and very committed because no one can leave so you all have been a lovely audience we are gonna take questions but before we do that I just want to give you my email address and I'll keep this up here sometimes a person has a question they don't really want to ask in this forum and so it's 100 percent fine for you to email me your question and I will respond to you and that's absolutely fine so my email is up there if you would also like a copy for free of this entire presentation just shoot me an email and I will send out the presentation to you as well you can watch a video of this talk on my website which is sanderson speaking i'm on instagram talking lots about happiness and if anyone is really interested i have a book out the positive shift that examines this all of what I've talked about in much more detail if you want to really sort of learn more about this topic I'm so I'm delighted to turn on for questions you all have been a lovely audience and I hope you've gotten something you can use moving forward [Applause] [Music] you [Music]

Channel: Media Factory

Views: 655

Rating: 3.909091 out of 5

Keywords: RETNVT, RETN, Brownell Library, Vermont Humanities Council, Catherine Sanderson, First Wednesdays, positive psychology, psychological well-being

Id: sg8t6pS3x68

Length: 52min 43sec (3163 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 15 2020