The Surprising Truth About Happiness with Professor Laurie Santos | Feel Better Live More Podcast

it'd just be nice if our brain was like pointing us towards the things that were really going to make us happy if we went after the stuff that we were really going to like but the data suggests that that's just not the case i sometimes joke with my students that our minds lie to us about happiness and i think we're systematically going after stuff to improve our happiness that's not going to work you know it'd be one thing if we just weren't working at it if we're just like i'll just see what happens maybe i'll get happy the problem is like we're putting a ton of energy and effort into becoming happier we're just doing it wrong [Music] it's really interesting because your course that you put together for yale students has made media headlines around the world um it is i think one of the or the most popular course in yale's history what is going on with that course why has it proved so popular and why are we talking about it all around the world do you think yeah well i think it's worth noting how the course started because i think that sort of shows a little bit about its popularity so i've been teaching at yale for over a decade but just in the last couple years i took on this new role on campus where i became a head of college in the uk this is a little bit more familiar because you're used to kind of oxford cambridge but for folks that don't know uh head of college is kind of like where you're like a faculty who lives in hogwarts with students you know you're kind of a faculty member who's assigned to sort of gryffindor or slytherin right and that means that i really live on campus with students and and i started seeing students in a totally different way i was seeing them in the dining hall and in the coffee shop i was watching their daily life and honestly i didn't really like what i was seeing like i was seeing the kind of real mental health problems that college students today go through where my students were reporting just being you know too depressed to function many days just like so anxious they were having panic attacks and also just kind of like fast forwarding through their life you know i'd ask like oh how it's going how's it going and they'd say oh well you know we're almost at spring break or i'm almost to the weekend and it just felt like they weren't enjoying their daily lives and so the class came out of an attempt to try to give the students some strategies so they could do better you know i'm a practicing psychologist i know there's lots of different evidence-based kind of approaches we can take to feel better right to kind of improve our well-being to feel less depressed to feel less stressed and so on and so i kind of you know slapped the class together you know it was a new class on campus i assumed like 40 students would take it and so you can imagine my surprise when i walked into a classroom that had over a thousand students it wasn't even a classroom actually it was a concert hall because that was the only spot where we could fit so many students and i think that the fact that students on campus just like flock to this class really tells us something it tells us that you know the students were voting with their feet right like they don't like this culture of feeling stressed and anxious and they wanted to do something about it but i think the class went viral not just on campus but kind of around the world in part because we have some misconceptions when it comes to what it means to be happy i think people were kind of shocked to hear that these yale students you know ivy league students who were 19 who had their whole lives ahead of them were experiencing so much depression and anxiety that they you know dropped their pre-med courses and dropped their computer science courses and signed up for a class on happiness i think everybody around the world kind of asked well if yale students really need this you know we also like really need this content and so people just i think we're really taken with this story of you know so many ivy league students who are so depressed and anxious that they needed a class on happiness but also that you know people around the world wanted those tips too you know and that's kind of when the class you know really kind of blew up it's really a sign of the times isn't it because what you're describing was in pre-pandemic times right so if people were struggling around the world with stress and anxiety and you know as about as far away from happiness as you could be what i wonder is the state of the world today we'll definitely get into that in the conversation but i think it's a beautiful um thought that you were delivering a happiness course in a concert hall like a you know the modern rock gig is the happiness gig which i think is uh yeah it is quite something um laurie i think at the start of this conversation i wonder if you'd mind defining what is happiness or certainly the way you teach about it and you talk about it because i think happiness means different things to different people yeah totally and i love the way you you said how i define it and how i teach about it because i think we could have as many definitions of happiness as there are people in the world right um the way i teach about it is to really use the social scientist definition of happiness which admittedly is a pretty narrow one it's it's a kind of definition of happiness that works for scientists because we can measure it um but social scientists tend to think about happiness as sort of being happy in your life and being happy with your life so being happy in your life is just how many positive emotions you have you know you're feeling joy you're feeling laughter are you feeling socially supported you know are you not experiencing as many negative emotions like anger frustration sadness anxiety whatever um you know so if that ratio is pretty good of the positive emotions to like negative emotions i can say you're pretty happy in your life but there's also this component of being happy with your life which is kind of a bigger question it's sort of the answer to the the question all things considered how are you feeling with your life right now are you satisfied with your life right now does your life have meaning and purpose and so on and it's worth noting that those two parts of happiness that in your life and with your life can dissociate this is sailing it to me right now on campus i i live on campus but i also have a dean who lives on campus and she and her wife just had a new baby and they're you know really happy with their life they have this you know new child and this new creature they're taken care of you know that they've brought into this world but then they're pretty unhappy in their life you know there's a lot of dirty diapers and less sleep you know so it's it's it's worth noting that these things don't always hang together and scientists tend to be able to measure both of these pretty well um the way they measure them which is you know can feel unscientific but actually is quite rigorous is we simply just ask people you know i ask people you know list your positive and negative emotions you know give me a sense of how often these are happening in your life or i kind of give you a survey little app on your phone that pings you and says okay go through these emotions which are you experiencing right now and then same thing with measuring happiness kind of with your life i can just ask you the question scale of one to ten all things considered how satisfied are you with your life right now and the goal of a lot of these social science approaches is just to try to maximize both of these right you know if i can give you some practices that make you experience more joy less negative emotions and kind of make you feel like you have more meaning in your life and your life is more satisfying then i can kind of tick off the list that you know those happiness interventions are working you're kind of happier overall is there a potential flaw when we're asking people about happiness and i love the happiness reset so i guess i'm just trying to i'm just trying to sort of work it through in my head that a lot of us are living on a treadmill day-to-day we never pause we never stop we never reflect on actually what we're doing how we're doing it why we're doing it and so i imagine being asked a question by a researcher where you reflect on your life in some ways may give a slight bias i don't know positive or negative because you're actually taking a bit of time to maybe stop and think is that something that you found or something you're you know you you all try and be aware of and sort of measure for yeah i mean i think this is something that worries happiness researchers a lot in fact this is something that i really struggled with as i got into this field you know my day job is studying animals and animal behavior right where we're used to these really rigorous behavioral methods right and now i come to this field of positive psychology and the measure of choice is like oh you just ask somebody and it feels like wait wait look where's the where's the science here but the good news is folks who use these kinds of surveys have worried about this exact problem and they've done some good stuff to make sure that these measures are really valid that they're tapping into these real constructs one thing that they've done is to try to make sure that these measures of just asking somebody that they correlate with all the stuff that's harder to get information but that you'd really want it to correlate with such as for example if i run you know text analyses on your tweets where i kind of pull your journals and i run some text analysis on the words you use does you know the the emotions that you tell me that you're experiencing day to day do they correlate with the sort of private thing that you weren't sort of giving the experimenter um another is in cases where we have good access to like hormonal measures things like cortisol which is a stress hormone do those kinds of things the things you say on the self reports do those link up to those stress measures and the answer seems to be yes so you know when folks have kind of looked rigorously at these kind of quick and dirty methods they do tend to correlate with the stuff that's harder for researchers to get on a big scale and so that makes me think that yeah you know we are kind of tapping into something that's real but but another way i've come around to these measures is just more philosophically just like what am i trying to maximize say in my students you know when i taught the class what did i want and ultimately what i wanted was like you know if i ask them hey are you happier right now their students are like yeah you know are you feeling more positive emotions right now they're like yeah you know you're more satisfied with your life they're like yeah in some ways if they're telling me that then i'm kind of achieving you know what i wanted to achieve anyway yeah i mean i love that because ultimately it is a subjective experience right the same experience i can feel happiness after experiencing it you may not feel happy after it so ultimately what better way is that than actually asking us how we feel um that this your definition was really really lovely this idea of happiness with your life and was it in your life yeah kind of like you know just the day-to-day sorts of happiness often you know you're just hedonic emotions right you know you're feeling lots of laughter and you know joy and things like that and are you kind of not as much experiencing things like frustration and anger and so on i think i always use the not as much because i don't think it would be a happy life if we just experience joy all the time you know these are why my colleagues in california who are at stanford you know they don't appreciate the weather because it's like perfect weather all the time you know they don't notice on a sunny day right and so you actually do want some variants to kind of feel good and having some negative emotions allows you to notice the good ones and so i think that part's important too so it's good to know there are some negatives of living in california so that's a we could spread that out to the world but it's not all it's cracked up to be um there is that conflict as you said with your dean friends who lives on campus and i was thinking that you know happiness i guess must some a set of experiences that we feel happy about may change during our lives so for example in our 20s let's say we're out drinking and gambling so whatever we might want to do that gives us a short burst of happiness because people feel good when they're doing it right so in terms of that hedonistic measurement it's like yeah i feel good but there may not be happiness with their life there may just be happiness in their life and for me that's quite an interesting conflict um i mean how would you think about that yeah i mean my sense is that if possible you want to maximize both you know the advice for my dean would be you know like you know yeah you're feeling great and happy you know with your life right now but it'd be good to feel happy in your life too like you know maybe we should work on you know getting a little bit of sleep or building back in those healthy habits or you know making some social connections so you're not feeling so lonely right you know you kind of want to maximize both and i think that's especially true for people who are really working on the kind of hedonic parts of happiness the people who are really happy in their life but then when they look at their life and ask if they're satisfied with it they're just simply not and this is something we see in the literature all over the place you know some of the people with the most modern conveniences you know who can fly anywhere to any beautiful vacation location on a dime you know who can afford the best food and the best wine sometimes they feel like their life is really empty you know if you ask them are they are you satisfied with your life they'll answer no right um you know this is one of the reasons why wealth doesn't necessarily predict happiness in the way we think especially at high wealth levels you know we assume that like you know multi-millionaires the one percent they're gonna be pretty happy but in fact they're actually pretty miserable in part because sometimes you know wealth and all the conveniences and all the good positive emotions that might come with you know the stuff you can buy in your life that doesn't necessarily translate to being happy with your life ultimately you kind of need more meaning and purpose and bigger things to get there i'd love to understand more about the relationship between money and happiness but just sort of to comment on what you've just said about the super rich it's really interesting i wonder why that is that people in that salary bracket are so unhappy and i'm sure a contributory factor well i would imagine is how we define success in society the fact that we think it's about money and a better holiday in a better car and a bigger house and a lot of the way we live whether it's schools universities they keep driving you towards that and then for those who actually do get there and get that money often i guess there must be that realization realization that oh well it's kind of about it because actually if money is your um your aspiration but i guess until you get to jeff bezos there's always someone who's got more than you right so you know what is that relationship between money and happiness yeah well i think you hit the nail on the head of why more money doesn't necessarily bring us more happiness and it's because of jeff pesos basically our elon musk or whoever happens to be you know they're like neck and neck you know right now for the richest person in the world but what i mean by that is that it's so easy to compare your salary with somebody else's right and this is a feature of our mind that really impedes our happiness our mind doesn't think in terms of objectives pretty much at all you know whether that's salary or our looks or any feature of our life we tend to think relative to some reference point some social comparison and our minds have a knack of picking social comparisons that make us look less rich less attractive less productive less whatever than we're kind of going for you know if we're kind of looking at wealth we look at you know elon musk or maybe jeff bezos if you're looking at who's the most attractive well i don't think of just pesos anymore now i'm thinking of like i don't know denzel washington or like we tend to pick comparison points that make us feel the worst and that means that we could objectively be doing great but feel bad about how we're doing and we see this you know on my my podcast the happiness lab i actually interviewed this guy clay cockrell who's a wealth psychologist he's a he's a mental health professional who only deals with the .001 percent and he has lots of clients in part because they tend to be pretty miserable you know as soon as you make a million you're like well that's just a million i gotta get to you know the 10 millions and once you're in the hundred millions he finds clients for like if only i could get to a billion if i could just have that be in front of my name like a billionaire instead of millionaire that's where i'd get there if only i could buy this 500 000 painting i'm not there yet um and i think it comes from this idea that you know we've been we've been sold this line again as you mentioned like you know since college that like money and success and all these accolades are going to make us happy these rich folks get those and they look at their life and they're like well how satisfied am i with my life and they're like i'm not and rather than thinking wait a minute maybe that was bunk maybe money and success and all this stuff didn't bring happiness instead they say ah i just must not be rich enough if only i could get a little bit more that's when i'll really kind of get that happiness payoff and so what you find is that the rich you know tend to be relatively unhappy they tend to find relatively less meaning in their life in part because they're chasing after some comparison point that that they're never going to get to and what does the research say about lower income levels because it's one thing when you've got all the money to buy shelter food you know anything that you could possibly want but there's obviously another end to that scale where money might be influential in terms of happiness levels yeah that's really important because in general overall the message from the work on happiness is that your circumstances don't matter as much as we often think whether that's your wealth level your job or your relationship status and so on but if those circumstances are pretty bad then yes improving your circumstances will really improve your happiness and so let's take the case of money right i'm saying you know being a multi-millionaire doesn't necessarily make you happy but what if we get to the other end and researchers have tried to look at this in fact there's a famous paper by the economist danny kahneman and angus deaton who looked at this back in i think in 2009 and what they did was they tried to look at a bunch of different measures of people's well-being and correlate that with people's salary and what they find if you look at the lowest levels of people's salary is that happiness and well-being tend to go up for a while and then all those well-being curves level off at a certain salary level and when they did this back in 2009 that was a salary level in the us of 75 000 75 000 us dollars that means that if you're earning under 75 000 then yeah getting more money is probably gonna improve your happiness that might be the spot where you stop really worrying about bills or you know you can get that gym membership or you can get a little you can buy yourself a little time make sure you know there's food on the table and so on but after seventy five thousand dollars doubling tripling quadrupling your salary it seems to have no effect on their on measures of well-being things like positive emotion um you know how many negative emotions you have your sense of stress and so on now this is not what we think i best most people in the us right now are earning 75 000 think if i tripled their salary that would make them happier but the data seem when you really dig into it so just that's not the case if you're earning under that yeah definitely improving your salary would help and so there's this interesting kind of uh reaction that you could have to research like this which is like well maybe we should support a universal basic income and maybe we figured out like a little bit where that basic income would be at right you know if we gave everybody that then giving them more wouldn't necessarily help happiness you mentioned that what we think often isn't played out by the research and i've heard you speak a couple of times before laurie and this is a theme which i've heard you speak about before that our intuitions over what makes us happy are often wrong i wonder if you'd mind expanding on a few examples yeah i mean this is the i think one of the dumbest features of the human mind right like it'd just be nice if our brain was like pointing us towards the things that were really gonna make us happy if we went after the stuff that we were really going to like but the data suggests that that's just not the case they're all these domains where we think if i could only get x then i would be happy but then we get that x and it just doesn't work and so you know we just talked about money as an example material possessions are another one you know many of us think oh if i could just get that beach house or that new car or even just you know at a local level i'm just gonna buy these new shoes they'll make me happy the data suggests that yeah it makes you happy for like you know a split second but then it doesn't really it's not really a happiness that seems to last it doesn't kind of give you lasting happiness it doesn't even give you happiness that lasts for as long as we think um and so there's all these ways where we think that changing our circumstances is going to boost happiness but in fact it just doesn't work the flip side though is there's all these different interventions we can do to boost our happiness i imagine we'll talk more about them but simple things like taking time for social connection like experiencing more gratitude like being present you know exercising sleeping more like those things have a huge impact on our happiness but we just don't have motivations to seek them out right like it's not we tend not to realize hey that's the thing you need to go for at least we don't realize it as much as we go for the money and the success and the accolades and those things um and those should be the things that we're focused on so this is a problem i sometimes joke with my students that our minds lie to us about happiness and i think it's almost like the way our minds lie in these other contexts like if you're looking at you know one of these visual illusions that go around on the internet right you see it one way and it's really strong intuition you have but actually the way that what will really matter for your happiness might look like the opposite might look like just something that doesn't fit with your intuitions and that's bad because it means we're systematically going after stuff to improve our happiness that's not going to work you know it'd be one thing if we just weren't working at it if we're just like i'll just see what happens maybe i'll get happy the problem is like we're putting a ton of energy and effort into becoming happier we're just doing it wrong it's so so fascinating and definitely we're going to get into what are these interventions what are the practical things we can do to increase that feeling of happiness inside all of us before we do that though i'm really interested on a personal note that as you said you you study animals and um you came across this predicament of unhappy students that you know you felt that you wanted to help them and so you turned your attention to this course what was the the name of the course again uh on campus we called it psychology and the good life mostly because i kind of wanted it to like pop from the course catalog like oh the good life you know like yeah what's it called because it's gone out on coursera now hasn't it that anyone around the world can access it yeah yeah the one on coursera is known as the science of well-being i'm not totally sure why we switched the names but i think we wanted to just get well-being in the title so people would kind of know more what it was about yeah and just i mean there's some incredible number of people who've done that course now i think from last last thing i read yeah it's been a little surreal to be honest you know when we first put the class online hundreds of thousands of people signed up pretty quickly which was sort of shocking um but then when the pandemic rolled around like right around march of 2020 we had this enormous increase in the number of people who signed up so just a couple the first couple months of the pandemic over three million people signed up to take the class which was incredible but again i think it shows it kind of made me you know as a scientist sort of feel i feel really kind of excited about my fellow man right i mean i think it was like people did wanted to figure out how to really get through these tough times and they didn't want platitudes they wanted some evidence-based approaches you know approaches that come from science and i think maybe that was sort of part and parcel of the pandemic you know as we are dealing with covet 19 i think people wanted real solutions right like what's really an evidence-based way i can protect myself against this virus like i wash my hands wear masks and so on i think people wanted to do the same thing not just to protect their physical health during this time but to protect their mental health and i think people didn't have obvious strategies to do so and i think they saw the classes providing those and that's why so many people flock to it you know once once times got tough on a personal level um as someone who is sought after around the world now to speak about happiness i'm interested in your own happiness levels and and the sort of things that you learnt as you were teaching that maybe you weren't applying but that through teaching through accumulating the evidence you've started to bring into your life yeah well so so many things i mean you know i admit that you know i was very worried about my students when i just thought about designing the classroom i was seeing their depression and their anxiety and stuff but one of the things is i was also seeing myself a little bit in them you know i was watching you know like how's the week going like oh i can't wait to get to friday like i could i could experience that that was a bad sentiment that there was something deeply sad about that but i also resonated with it like yeah me too if i could only get to friday you know or even just things like feeling anxious and depressed right you know i i wasn't necessarily clinically depressed or clinically anxious but you know i saw all that stuff in myself too all the bad strategies i watch my students doing every error i saw my students making when it came to their happiness i could see seeds of that in myself too and so one of the reasons i was excited to teach the class was to figure out those strategies for myself too i also realized that if i was going to be this happiness professor i had to practice what i preached right you know it's like if you're a medical doctor you can't go off and be unhealthy and you choose burgers all the time and stuff like you gotta kind of toe the line so that people know that that expertise is real that you're kind of not selling snake oil and so what it meant was that now i really needed to kind of follow the things i was telling my students and again the research shows if you engage in these practices you get happier like on i use the kind of standard empirical survey measures of happiness on every single one my happiness has gone up you know at least one to two points on a ten point scale and it's not like magic it's just because i'm doing the stuff now that really does improve happiness well let's go through what really matters when it comes to happiness are there some universal practices that really you can say without knowing in individual circumstances you can say with a high degree of certainty that if you do this you are likely to improve your well-being score and your happiness yeah i mean we know this now we know lots of these practices before exactly that for the idea that these are things that won't just help a few people but that really pretty much universally are going to help if you engage with them the right way and it's worth noting kind of where we get this evidence from i mean the evidence starts because positive psychologists go out and they really study happy people you know you find them like they're out there you know in the uk and london and new haven like you know you can find these folks and then researchers try to ask like what are these folks doing differently like how do they behave differently do they spend their time differently and then you get some hints about behaviors that might be working for improving happiness and then the next step is that you do an intervention you bring in the not so happy folks you make them do the behavior that the happy people are doing and then you measure whether happiness goes up and in lots of cases we have examples of you know kinds of behaviors that we know really really works and so one of the biggest behaviors that works super well for improving well-being uh is social connection um one of the most famous papers in positive psychology by the psychologist marty seligman and ed diener say that social connection and feeling socially connected is a necessary condition for very high happiness you just simply don't find highly happy people who don't also feel socially connected but we also know from the intervention work that improving your social connection making new social connections even talking to strangers like on a train and sort of pre-covered days like talking to strangers on your commute can actually boost up your well-being in ways we really really don't expect and these types of effects hold across personality variables you know so you get the same sorts of boosts of happiness for social connection for introverts and for extroverts it seems to work in ways we don't expect and i think this is one of the reasons we're all struggling so much during covid is that you know insidiously one of the problems of covet is that we have to socially distance and that means that some of us aren't engaging in social connection in the way we used to you know even in subtle ways you know many of us are working from home so we don't get the kind of office cooler you know chat that we get with our co-workers but we also don't see people like in simple ways you know many of us are you know doing a curbside pickup where we go to restaurants grab something you know off the side of the curb or get our groceries dropped off at our door like the simple kinds of interactions we have with you know the grocery store teller or the the person who works at the coffee shop like we're reducing those kind of simple connections too and even those weak ties the research show matter for happiness i think one of the reasons we're all kind of feeling it right now is that we need to build in a lot of that social connection that we've lost and we need to do it more intentionally because it's not happening as naturally as it used to yeah one of one of the striking things that i've heard from patients and people who i interact with on social media is how many people regarded themselves as introverts and they thought you know i like being by myself but a few weeks into these physical distancing measures they realize oh you know i do like to be married but sometimes i like to sit in a coffee shop with my laptop and my headphones and i i kind of know there's other humans around or i might just pick up a coffee and a lot of introverts or or people who would regard themselves as intuit saying i'm really really missing that you know the background buzz of other humans which i think really speaks to what you were just saying there that all these little you know these small interactions that we possibly took for granted either getting the train to work saying hi to their ticket office attendance uh showing your ticket to the conductor on the train and all those little things as we get stuck in our homes on our screens that's a huge part of how we've evolved as humans for thousands tens of thousands hundreds of thousands of years that has frankly just been removed from us and the impact i think it's pretty worrying yeah i mean i think you know if you look at the statistics of things like depression anxiety loneliness during covid you know many of these are skyrocketing and i think you know one of the culprits is is just that we're losing out on these simple you know weak tie social interactions the chat with the barista at the coffee shop those things we forget really kind of build up our happiness i think this is another big misconception we have about happiness is we think of happiness as sort of a destination you know you get there and you're sort of happily ever after but that's not the right metaphor for happiness happiness is more like a leaky tire right you know it's gonna kind of go flat a little bit but then you know you chat with the barista at the coffee shop and that you know kind of makes you feel a little good and then you you know go about your day and you know chat with someone else or have another joyous moment um you know we kind of can use these moments of joy to sort of boost up our happiness over time and a lot of those moments were social moments and we're missing them now what does the research say about talking to strangers and talking to people we don't know because i think there's some quite nice research there isn't there showing us just how impactful those interactions are yeah and just how wrong we we get just how wrong we are about those interactions you know this is another domain where at least my intuition is that yeah maybe it'll make me feel okay but like you know it's not a major force in our happiness in fact if you you know plot me on a train you know going to work in the morning you know maybe i'd talk to somebody but usually i'd put my headphones on and listen to a podcast or you know get some work done or try to get through some email um and it turns out that this is a mistake when it comes to maximizing your happiness there's some lovely work by the university of chicago psychologist nick eppley um who who did direct studies on this where he this again back pre-covered times where he uh found some subjects who were about to do their daily commute on a train he did this on the l trains in chicago and he said okay you know you want to be in a study you'll get a starbucks gift card and people all sign up because starbucks gift cards are the engine of all social science research she's like oh my god star wars gift card um and so what he tells subjects is either for the rest of the train ride don't talk to some anybody please try to enjoy your solitude or for the rest of the train ride just do what you normally do it's kind of the control condition or for the rest of the train ride i want you to try to make a meaningful social connection with somebody like talk to someone and don't just talk about the weather like really try to get to know them um what do people predict because he has one group of subjects predict ahead of time which is going to make people feel happy and people predict that they enjoy your solitude condition is going to feel awesome right they predict that that's going to maximize their happiness and they don't just predict that the social connection condition is going to feel neutral they predict that it's going to actively suck that it's going to take them down from baseline and what nick finds is just the opposite it's that solitude condition that feels yucky the social connection condition makes you feel great and i think this is a problem right this is another domain where we have these bad intuitions about what makes us happy and what's worse is it doesn't just affect our behavior it changes the structures that we create you know i'm sure you know in the uk they have you know quiet cars on trains and things like that you know nick's evidence suggests that that's not necessarily a way to maximize passenger experience right we would maybe be better off with like a chatty car where you go on the car and everyone's like talking and interacting and getting to know one another but you know those are not the systems we build in because we have these incorrect theories about what's going to make us feel good it's incredible how much we're influenced by the people around us um because as you were describing that on the l trains i think in chicago you said um it made me think about a few years ago so i live in the north of england i don't know how much time you spent in the uk but there are certain typical kind of sayings about people in the north compared to people in the south they're not all completely accurate they're just going to lay that out there straight at the top of this but a few years ago i started to have i started going down to london quite regularly for work and you know i'm i'm sure you've been to london before um i remember one of the first times where i went on the tube it's just a few years back and you know i'd get on the undergrounds and i'd i can't remember it exactly but the guy sitting next to me i was just like hey mate how you doing how's things going and the guy looks at me as though i don't know like i was about to attack him more i was a freak like really and i i very quickly learned that oh you don't do that on the tube on the tube you get on you mind your own business you put your headphones on you stay out of everyone's way and within a few visits of going down to london my behavior started to change to the point where i would just go on put my headphones on and i guess i'm naturally very extroverted so i will always chat to people um but it's quite interesting that isn't it how we're saying that that makes us happier yet often things around us in society and i wonder how much technology plays in here because now we can put our headphones on and we can have all these incredible podcasts and playlists in our pockets which are probably more attractive to us in the short term than chatting to any other human being so yeah i just a few few sort of thoughts there in terms of our environments and that's something i guess you must see in the research as well that our environment influences our happiness and how we behave definitely and i think you know a lot of the things in our environment we assume are designed to make us happier you know we assume all these technologies are there you know to make us happy and i mean we both have podcasts where happy podcast technology exists and people can listen to us i hope my podcast is making people happy but it's also worth recognizing that there's an opportunity cost right you know if you're listening to your podcast instead of talking to your family at dinner you know that might not be even necessarily the best way to boost your well-being and this is the kind of thing i see all the time with technology with my students one of the most striking things for me kind of taking this job where i'm ahead of college on campus was sort of seeing how students interact with each other in their kind of natural environment you know the one i think about the most is like the dining hall right like when i went to college i remember the dining hall as being like the loudest place on the planet you know because i'm just eating and talking and it's just like you know like just tons and tons of voices and stories being shared and laughter and things what was striking when i took on this new role is if you go to a college dining hall right now i mean there's some talking and things but it's much quieter than i remember it and it's much quieter than i remember it because everyone's sitting around the dining hall with these you know headphones that you and i are wearing to talk to each other around with a screen out either their phone and so on and the students think they're being social you know they're probably scrolling through their instagram feed or like you know like you know using one of these weird new social media apps to kind of talk to one another but they're not physically talking to one another in a way that primates are used to and i think it's in part because you know the technology is easier you know i remember what it was like to be a new college student and to walk to the dining hall for the first time with your train you have to like talk to somebody there's like an awkward startup cost with that and i think technology just gives us an easy way to kind of do something else right you know not going to avoid that anxiety but it means because we don't ever get over the startup costs we never develop these you know kind of weak ties with people we just chat and get that little enjoyment it means my college students are less likely to make their cl these close friendships it's one of the reasons that nationally in the us right now college students 60 of college students report being very lonely most of the time you know and i think it's in part because you know the easiest thing to do is to flop on your headphones and not talk to someone but that means you're missing out on all these good moments where you can experience joy through social connection technology worries me if i'm honest as hey you feel like it's i think particularly as my kids now are ten and eight and i feel that my ability to influence particularly my son um is probably started to become less and less and again i'm not trying to control him or anything you know i'm just i'm just conscious of what is normal now in society i'm also aware of how these apps how technology is designed and i think there's an illusion of choice that we think i talk to a lot of teachers say oh you know we believe in giving kids choice but i don't think it is choice i don't think it's it's this real i think it's the illusion of choice i don't think many adults can resist i certainly don't think kids can resist and and i really feel that we are sleep walking into major major problems and it's really hard because you end up sounding a bit like a luddites and not sort of moving on with the world but i don't think it's like all technology is bad i just feel that we don't intentionally use technology we're using it to do everything rather than thinking well what's good about technology like this conversation brilliant i can see you it's not the same as being in the room but it's a pretty close you know comparison um but i just i i worry i mean what what do you think about technology and is there any research to support what i guess we're both trying to say yeah no definitely i mean it's something i worry about a lot both in my own life and kind of watching my own behavior and reaction to technology and all the notifications and cues and little dopamine reward hits that we get from technology also from watching my students right who i know are lonelier than they've ever been in college history right and i think a lot of that has to do with ironically has to do with technology right like these devices that they're using to connect are actually leading them to not form connections in real life and so i think this is something that we really need to understand better right and it's hard to do great science on this because all of us have technology right it's hard to get a control condition with somebody who's never like had a smartphone or social media because they might not be neurotypical like you know in in the way you would want to control the group to be but i think it's important to recognize that part of the problem of technology isn't the thing we normally think right when we we have these worries about technology we instantly point to social media like social media is the bad guy but actually it's just the technology and its excitement in and of itself that might be a problem on my podcast the happiness lab i interview uh my colleague liz dunn who's a professor at ubc and studies the impact that technology has on happiness and and she she kind of has this wonderful metaphor she says imagine if instead of like you know to a restaurant at dinner instead of bringing my cell phone i brought this big wheelbarrow and in the wheelbarrow i had a printout of every email i've ever had since 1997. you know like like four photo albums on top of photo albums of me and my vacations my husband and like stuff i've eaten you know i had videos like all these dvds of like cats and porn and like and a printout of every tweet that every you know us president has sent in the last couple weeks you know paid piles and piles of newspapers that go back many many years right like recipes like if i brought a wheelbarrow filled with like dvds and printouts and photos and all that stuff it'd be really hard to sit at dinner and just have a normal conversation with my husband at that restaurant because i'd want to be peeking through like oh let's look at this cat video honey you're like you know like oh porn like that seems interesting right like it'd be really hard to ignore that and the idea is that like your brain knows that on the other side of your phone is all that stuff like your brain's not stupid it recognizes where there's rewarding stuff and it means that every kind of normal conversation we want to have in real life is in some sense competing with those other stimuli we have that wheelbarrow and it's in our pocket all the time it's in our kids pockets all the time as they go to school as they try to have dinner with us and so on and i think we haven't even when we're not using our phones we don't necessarily recognize the hit that they're taking on our attention and on our motivation and that's the kind of thing that liz dunn studies she looks not necessarily at how much you're not paying attention when you're using your phone but also the mere act of having your phone around what does that do to your attention and your social connection she's this lovely study where she has people uh sitting in a waiting room and they can either have their phones out with them or or not right their phones are away in another room and what she finds is that people smile 30 less when they just have their phones present um and i think you know this makes sense right like if you've got your phone there you're just going to be tempted to look at it it's kind of drawing your attention you're just naturally less inclined to look at the people around you and if you multiply that 30 effect by you know say walking around on the tube in london or just like walking around any major city and everyone has these phones you know what is that doing to our social connection i think we simply don't understand the magnitude that we're kind of getting our attention stolen by these devices yeah it's insidious and i think it's an experiment that i don't think any one of us has consciously signed up for you know i feel sometimes when i talk about these things that you're literally you're going up in the face of um [Music] the direction that society is going you know and i think that makes it really challenging i know you talk about when the phone's not there some of my happiest moments recently when i've lost my phone or it's been in my car i left it on my mum's house and i thought ah screw it i'll get it tomorrow i'm just there's this lightness around because yeah you're noticing you're like trees like the sun you know like gorgeous like people i smile like people no it's really profound i think you know one of the ways to deal with it because it's not going away right you know this stuff is going to stick around we just need better strategies to engage with our technology in more intentional ways and one of my favorite pieces of advice comes from the journalist catherine price she has this lovely book called how to break up with your phone um where she doesn't really advise you to break up your phone but just to develop a more mindful relationship with it and she has this acronym that she uses called www whenever you pick up your phone think www which stands for what for why now and what else right what did i pick this up for was i going to do something with i was going to check my email or i was going to look at you know look at the weather or was i just like bored or anxious or you know like something like what was happening right and then why now right like what was the emotion that caused you to do it was it just like you know wrote and you're just kind of anxiously picking it up was it really like to do something at that moment you know or is there something else you could be doing at that moment and that gets to the sort of what else which is like what's the opportunity cost you know even if you're bored and you're going to pick up your phone to like you know play a game or check your email like what's what else could you be doing during that time that might make you happier and the what else is often a social what else you know when i'm picking up my phone it's often like i could you know go into the room to talk to my husband and check in how he's doing right you know i could look up at the sky i could take a mindful breath right you know what are you missing out on by using your phone and that has kind of caused me using that sort of www strategy myself it's made me realize a lot like why i pick up my phone it's often out of like boredom and anxiety but also sometimes when it's like useful you know there's times i need to check my email like look at the weather or something it's when it's kind of not mindful or not intentional it's just kind of yanking my attention and when there's a real opportunity cost on other sorts of social interactions even with the weather app sometimes i've been like i could just walk to the window and take a little walk around the block and look at the clouds and get a sense of probably what's going to happen right it's funny you say those little micro moments where you could look up at the sky or have a little conversation with one of your flatmates or one of your family i bet that time adds up in that in that moment we might think oh there's just a couple of minutes say a couple of minutes there but if you look at your phone and some of the stats on how many times we look at our phone is really quite worrying but let's say you look at your phone 40 times in the day and let's say each time that's two minutes that you could have been doing something else well that's 80 minutes potentially that's nearly an hour and a half of your time and again i think the question as you say is intentionality it's if it's there for a good reason that you've actually thought about then fine the the worrying thing for me i guess and the the sort of idea i've been playing with for about six or nine months now i spoke to arianna huffington about it recently when she came on the podcast and it i guess it's quite similar to what your friend liz was saying [Music] it's that i don't think another human being can compete with our device i think it is decimating so many of our relationships with our children with our partners and i don't think we we realize just it you know i know what it's like if i've got my phone and my wife's got a phone in the evening we could easily be satisfied ourselves in our own little customized world and these algorithms know exactly what i want to see how many times my eye has stared at it how long i've stayed on for and it will keep feeding me things oh yeah this looks interesting this looks interesting so you know one step is to to try and make some rules around it i think another nice approach which i'm playing around with is which apps do i really want on my phone so when you take off the social media apps and actually just only use them on my laptop my usage goes dramatically down and you know how do you have any more strategies around that that you think or you've seen can help people with respect to their happiness yeah i think you know you know these these kinds of strategies are like classic ones right i mean what you described about taking your apps off is something behavioral scientists call situation modification right you change the situation so it's a little bit harder to access your apps or even access your phone you know i know ariana has like talked about you know having a little phone bed that she uses that you know actually got havoc into my bedroom i have an ariana phone bed so i put my phone to bed before i go to bed and then that means you know it's just on the other side of the room right it's not there to kind of pick up whenever i have this moment of like i'm bored or i can't fall asleep or something um so kind of getting rid of the technology in your phone like the apps that are definitely like you don't have a great relationship with like like those go off the phone and just like use them on your laptop uh get the physical structure of the phone away so it becomes a little bit harder and then i think these rules that you develop with your family are really important i think one of the crises that we have with this technology is it came up it came around so fast we didn't have time to develop norms about it you know we have norms about you know like when you talk and when you don't talk and like who you can interact with and and we have these kinds of social norms that help us navigate you know things that would be tempting to do but that would be you know kind of a little bit ghost right you know like if dinner comes you know you wait for everybody to get theirs before you start you might be tempted to eat it right then but we kind of have this norm i think we need the same thing with our phones we just haven't had time as a society to develop those you know our gnomes around attempting things like food have come about over thousands of years of cultural evolution you know the phone and it's in its most tempting forum which i think of as a sort of you know iphone smartphone that's new right like that's like what 2007 2009 like that's when everybody started getting these things it's like you know barely a decade old right and so i think that we just kind of need new norms to kind of help us figure out how to navigate this stuff and so i think you can you know it's hard to do that for society but you can definitely do that in your own families you can do that in your own flats you can do that with your friend group you know so make some explicit norms like you know at dinner like who pulls their phone i've had friends who have to think of like the first person to pull their phone out at a friend dinner at a restaurant um you know you have to pick up the tab right you know like you know if you're the one who's like oh let me check on the you know google or something like you have to pick up the tab because you're kind of ruining the moment as soon as you pull your phone out everyone else wants to so i think these kinds of strategies are really helpful but an internal strategy you could use is just to kind of pay attention to how your phone makes you feel you know when you go on that social media binge or that like you know gaming binge where you're kind of playing that silly like you know app game or whatever like how do you feel afterwards you know even set yourself up a timer so it dings and ask did that feel good are you feeling apathetic are you feeling connected and often when you notice like actually i kind of feel crappy like what did i just do with that hour that noticing can really help you sort of update your own preferences and this actually gets to another you know we talked about how your mind lies to you and this is like one of the dumb features of the mind another dumb feature of the mind specifically a dumb feature of the brain is that we have these systems that control what we want in life what we go after what we crave what we're motivated to do and you would like to think that those systems are hooked up to what we actually like what we actually find rewarding and enjoy when we get it but it turns out those systems aren't really hooked up right in fact if you look in the brain they're actually separate circuits and they're separate circuits which means that you can like want all this stuff you can kind of crave it and have a motivation for it and all this stuff but then when you get it you don't really like it very much you know the classic case of this is a case of addiction right you know if you're a heroin addict you know you will have incredible craving for the drug you know you'll steal from your family you'll do everything you can to get it but then when you finally get a hit your reward areas aren't firing as much as they would for a non-addict because you're habituated to the drug you don't even like it very much it's right and i think that we see these little signs of that phenomena of addiction in so many of our behaviors there's so many times when i'm tempted to go on reddit and just scroll through my brain's like one more page there'll be something cool on the next page and a half hour goes by and if i ask myself did i like that i was so motivated to do it and it it sucked like i didn't like it at all i felt kind of yucky and apathetic and then there's the flip side of all these things i actually really do like you know when i get a great yoga session in that feels awesome when i put the time into like you know set up a schedule to talk to a friend on the phone and we have this really great connection that feels great but i don't have the same like motivation and craving i do to like pick up my phone and check my email right and so this disconnect between wanting and liking i think is a huge problem it means we're going to naturally have these motivations to go after stuff with like incredible force and incredible automaticity and when we get when we do it it's not gonna affect our liking and it means we don't have brain systems that are telling us to go after the stuff that really will feel good we have to do that kind of for ourselves intentionally it takes work yeah it's motivation but i guess in some ways it's also easier to pick up that phone right to talk to your friends and have that meaningful raw authentic interaction you're going to get more out of it but you probably have to put a bit more in as well to get that rewards and it's just easier to pick that up and get this kind of pseudo connection online and i think that's what often happens i've been thinking a lot about what we think a lot about happiness for the last few years because i've really been thinking about as a medical doctor i always think about what why is this person coming yes they've got a symptom but what's really been going on what has been going on in their life that's meant on this particular day they've ended up in front of me and we think about health as doctors but actually a lot of history with happiness as well so if people don't have that feeling of happiness or well-being in their life whether it's a lack of social connection um whether it's that they haven't had any interaction with any other human beings where they have slightest enough whatever it is then they start to engage in other behaviors that start to affect their health like their physical health and it's quite obvious when we say it like this but it was it was like a penny dropping moment for me but i thought actually if society was happier then there'd be less patience for me to see because they'd be engaging in different ways and they'd have less harmful physical habits that end up in front of me do you know what i mean i mean it's in fact there's there's lovely data on this really i mean i think this is another spot where we get happiness wrong we assume you know if all our circumstances go well if we're healthy for example you know healthy in terms of our like diet and this stuff then we'll be happier but actually the data suggests that the causal arrow might go the other way if you look at people's cheerfulness levels if you look at their positivity if you look at their happiness you actually see effects on people's health and on people's longevity um so one famous study actually looked at whether or not people who are happier had like stronger immune function so the way the study worked is they bring subjects into the lab and they either kind of do some intervention where they're kind of feeling happier or not they can do these simple things by just like asking people or you tend to be positive or they can even kind of give people like a positivity kind of intervention where you watch some funny movie or something like that but i want to say they just measured people's positivity in general like are you positive person or not so much and then they shot people's nostrils up with rhinoviruses these days we're all talking about coronaviruses rhinoviruses are the viruses that cause the common cold and so everybody's exposed question is who gets sick and what they find is that three times the number of people get sick in the kind of not so positive mood category is in the positive mood category which is kind of striking right that like just your general mood state is probably affecting your happiness it's probably not mood directly it's probably through all the behaviors you suggest which is like if you're in a bad mood you don't get out and get social maybe you don't exercise like you probably eat you know eat some like comfort food or whatever like but it's really affecting it there's also evidence suggesting that your happiness levels really affect longevity this is another very famous study um that tried to figure out if they if researchers could find a population that was sort of like had the same sort of health risks basically they kind of lived a sort of very similar lifestyle and they they converged on studying nuns in part because nuns you know they're not off like bungee jumping or doing you know really you know risky things like driving motorcycles and stuff they tend to eat the same sorts of things and so on and so these researchers went back and looked at nuns diaries when they're in their 20s i guess in in some nunneries when nuns kind of begin their profession for the church they're asked to kind of journal a lot and sort of talk about their experiences and why they wanted to do it and so researchers went back to these and just coded how many positive words were there right you do some machine analysis and how many positive words you see then they look at these nuns who are now quite old and look at how long each of the nuns are living and what they find is that statistically more nuns who had more happy words live into their 70s statistically more nuns that had the happy words live into their 80s and statistically more nuns that had the happy words live into their 90s and what's striking about this is this wasn't their happiness at the time this was their happiness in their 20s which is predicting their longevity in their 90s and so i think this is another spot where we get happiness wrong we can kind of think of happiness as like oh is this the femoral thing like we'll worry about that once we sort out you know people's high blood pressure and people's you know whatever like cancer risk but it could be that we have the model backwards right that if you're just experiencing a lot of positive emotion in your life if you're satisfied with your life it might make it easier to make choices that allow you to protect your health in a way that can make you healthier and allow you to even live longer yeah i mean thanks for sharing that that's definitely my feeling that it's happiness comes first um but i'd be interested to see how that research plays out over a number of years i mean we've mentioned so far laurie we mentioned social relationships and how important they are we mentioned the problems that technology can give us but also how we can navigate that and i guess we should also touch when we're talking about technology about how valuable it has been in this pandemic at keeping those social connections alive i don't necessarily mean scrolling on instagram for three hours i mean you know what i i don't know how would you think about the sort of connection we can get over zoom or facetime versus a phone call versus text messaging you know are these different qualities of connection and how do those different qualities relate to our happiness yeah well this is you know where i kind of go back to my you know work with animals you know i used to study monkeys and i think it's worth remembering that you know ultimately we are social primates right you know we were built for in real life social connection you know maybe grooming one another but definitely as humans like talking to one another in real life right that's gonna be the thing that gives us the biggest hit of happiness right the question is like how can we best approximate that when getting together physically is tricky and i think the kind of thing that you and i are doing right now you know we're talking live in real time over zoom i can see your emotional expressions you know the timing is mostly good with zoom although the audio is a little off right like i can see you and see how you're reacting hear the intonation in your voice that's pretty good again it's not as good as like you know maybe giving you a hug or shaking your hand after this but it's pretty good um where it gets dicey is when we move out of in real time together you know if i text you like something hahaha emoji and then you write back to me later you know who are sending videos back and forth if we kind of can't interact in real time we're starting to lose some of the signals we've evolved to really pick up that that really influence our happiness i think it gets even worse when we get into the domain of things where our wanting system really likes it where there's like a really low startup cost but we're kind of not getting anything nutritious out of the social connection i often use the terms that like you know medical doctors use when i'm talking about things that matter for happiness i talk about nutritious social connection right um and i think that you know in some ways like you know the instagram like you know looking at people's feeds and stuff like that like that's kind of the neutral suite of social connection it like feels like you're getting something out of it but ultimately when you like shut the app off you're like wait i feel kind of gross i didn't really get any anything nutritious out of it and i think that's a good this idea of thinking about the nutrition it's also a good way to think about what kind of social interaction you want to build in especially during covid because you know what we need is going to change you know there are great things about interacting over screens but you know it's also the the idea of zoom fatigue is a real thing right you know the idea of being on screens too much is a real thing and so one piece of advice i give my students is to mindfully pay attention to how you felt after something you know after you know this conversation i could think you know when i you know close the zoom window i can think how did that feel you know it was a fun conversation we had a nice time you know if i had just been on eight other zoom calls before this i might feel a little exhausted i might you know i might need to go talk to my husband that's the form of social connection i need i might need to pick up a call and call pick up a phone and call a friend and go for a walk around town that's away from a screen you know and so i think the things we do on screens can be great but it's important to pay attention to what you need and this has been kind of this idea has been a bit of a game changer for me you know when the pandemic hit i was like i'm building in all these like spa nights with friends and you know like zoom dinners with my family and it was like screen screen screens you know like i took all the like meetings my lab had and put them online and only after i was like i thought i was following the happiness advice because i was building in all that social connection but i was like screen exhausted by then then i realized like ah it wasn't nutritious even if you're eating a thousand salads like that's not nutritious you're gonna feel gross afterwards if you kind of pound a thousand salads and i think the same can be true for you know zoom and social connection online so my advice is be mindful afterwards really take time to notice did that feel good or not and that can help you build in more of the stuff that feels good and maybe less of the stuff that doesn't for me i'm realizing it's you know zoom windows with small numbers of people it's cases where i'm socially interacting where i'm not necessarily like sitting in one spot in a zoom screen with like a curated background i'm like you know talking to my mom as i'm walking around the room and doing chores and we're hearing each other but it's not like i'm sitting there kind of watching it so i've tried to build in a lot more zooms that feel more informal and less like a kind of work webinar call that sort of works for me too yeah i think as you say these screen connections can be pretty good um you know one thing i've noticed as a podcast host and just a shout out to your podcast by the way which is brilliant so people haven't heard it i'd strongly recommend you check it out it is it's really well produced really really interesting topics each week before the pandemic i wouldn't do remote conversations they were always face to face in my studio and of course i had to adapt like everyone else and what i noticed is that yes i could have some really great conversations over soon but afterwards i don't have the same sense that i really know that person that i could send them a text and meet up for coffee with them in the same way that when someone's been here and we've hung out for a little bit before the chat and after the chats it's just different and and again i'm not complaining this is great you know i hope we do get some meet one day face to face right but this is still it's better than not doing it but you know there are these different levels of social connection aren't there and i guess we're trying to get the most nutritious one that we can in terms of what we're allowed to do or certainly what society is allowing at that moment in time um in terms of other things that can influence our happiness a lot of spiritual practices a lot of religions talk about doing things for other people and there's a lot of research on that isn't there yeah and this is yet another spot where our minds lead us astray i think especially right now in the tough time we're facing it's easy to find all these articles that talk about like self-care or treat yourself this big mantra in the u.s right now people have t-shirts that are like treat yourself but the data suggests that that might not be the most effective way to bump up your well-being in fact the data suggests you should be we should have all these t-shirts that say treat other people and we know this because again you know first first move in happiness research is to look at the happy people look at the happy people what are they doing happy people are disproportionately other oriented they like matched first salary level give more of their money to charities than people who are not so happy they um give more of their time they volunteer right they just tend to be more focused on helping other people and then in kind of doing selfish pursuits um and the research shows that then if you go and do an intervention where you force people to do nice stuff for others um that will actually improve people's well-being more than they think this is actually a study by liz dunn who we mentioned earlier she goes up to people on the street and hands them some money and says okay you just got this money here's how you have to spend it one group is told you have to spend this on yourself do something nice treat yourself another group is told well the way i want you to spend this money is to do something nice for someone else right um then she has subjects agree that they can be called later in the day or later that week and what she finds is that the subjects who tend to spend the money subject to spend the money on other people tend to be significantly happier than those who spend the money on themselves now this is not again what we think right but it's what the data show and again you know i teach this class but i get this intuition wrong if i'm having a crappy day you know pre-code if i was having a really crappy day i'd be like i'm gonna go out and get myself a latte or i'm gonna get a manicure right i don't think like i'm gonna go buy my co-worker a latte right now or i'm gonna like you know do a get a little gift card for my friend to get a manicure like i think me me me but the data suggests that like just sort of switching gears spending our money and our time on other people is a way to bump up our happiness again it violates the intuitions but it's a powerful way to do that and i think this is something we can all embrace during covid right because many of us have these little new windfalls of money and time in different ways right you know some of us are working remotely which means we're not spending our time commuting you know like all the londoners sort of listen to this podcast maybe aren't on the tube as much you know that could be 45 minutes during the day that you're saving you know what are you doing with those 45 minutes could you you know volunteer for a charity or make calls for an organization that you care about or just like pick up the phone and call somebody who's struggling right and check in on how they're doing not to help yourself but just to really check in with someone else right you know some of us have these like mini windfalls of money not all of us but you know if you're maybe you're saving you know that you know tube fare that you're not spending every day or maybe you're saving gas on your commute right like could you use that money for a good cause you know even if even if you're just saving on that latte you know that latte that i'm not buying myself every morning when i head off to work that four bucks like i could actually spend on something better right you know even if it's just four bucks that i donate to a charity that morning that research suggests that that would really boost our well-being and i think it so i think we can you know maybe take these little mini windfalls of time and money that we weren't even noticing and use them for a good cause if we're not using them in some other way already it's a theme in what you're talking about is noticing things so notice the time that you're no longer spending on your commute notice the money that you used to spend on a haircut every four weeks or on a coffee every day from starbucks um notice how you feel after you've been on zoom for a while uh or on instagram for a while and i guess the art of noticing really is what mindfulness is all about and so i wonder what does the research say about mindfulness and happiness and then what does mindfulness really mean because again that's a term that can mean so many different things to different people yeah i mean i think one thing we know from the research is you know just as being social and doing nice things for others improves our well-being taking time to be mindful taking time to sort of be in the present moment in a very particular way which is with a particular kind of attitude and attitude to sort of non-judgment so you're not going to in the present moment noticing this sucks and i'm judging it the whole time but in the present moment allowing it to be just as it is the research suggests that that kind of practice can really improve our well-being and it seems to improve our well-being for a particular reason which is that the opposite of being present when we're kind of you know not in the present moment we're kind of mind-wandering and thinking about the future and worrying about things and ruminating that has a really negative hit on our happiness right and so just the act of being present when you sort of shut off that kind of mind wandering to yucky other things can really make us feel better now it too is the kind of thing that requires some work this is being present is not the natural state of the human mind which i actually kind of find funny because if you talk to uh folks who practice meditation they often talk about the sort of mind-wandering ruminative mind as the monkey mind you know the mind that's sort of going off all over the place but having studied monkeys you know they're much more likely to be present when they're sitting there you know just like sitting they seem like they're just kind of not worrying about the future or what they're going to eat later tonight or they're just kind of present you know so i think the monkey mind is a bit of a you know humans sort of touting their own awesomeness when we're actually not as awesome as other animals but um but yeah but the research really suggests that practices that allow us to improve our mindfulness to improve our presence can really improve our well-being so practices like meditation even more spiritual practices like prayer and so on you know even just the act of like taking three deep belly breaths where you're kind of noticing what it feels like all of these kinds of things really can allow us to be a little bit more present and just the act of being present means we notice you know we were talking before about you know one reason that technology is messing with us is that you know we miss the like you know looking at the trees or looking at our partner's smile or seeing the sunshine being present means we're there to notice the stuff that really matters and so it really can allow us to have these little you know filling our leaky happiness tire moments of joy that we otherwise would have missed because our minds were kind of going off in all these directions what about religion because i've seen quite a bit of research suggesting that belonging to a religion or engaging in certain practices can be really beneficial for our happiness and i remember this case this patient who came to see me a few years ago at a practice in order and what was really interesting this was a family who were part of the islamic faith and this couple had lost their baby boy i can't remember how old but their baby had just died and um you know i was a lot younger then so i was probably a lot immature than i am now it's not an easy thing to be talking about with a patient but they were really really accepting they were they were very religious and they said something like it's allah's will something to that effect and i always remember that because i would reflect upon that i think that's really interesting by having this um faith where they felt they were just part of something much bigger and much greater than them they were very accepting of their baby child dying and for me that was really quite striking um so yeah i don't know if you can unpick any of that for me in terms of the happiness research yeah i mean one of the one of the things we know from studying happy people is that uh religious people people who practice religion tend to be a lot happier than those that don't um you know i say this as a agnostic slash atheist myself right and when you dig into that that could be for lots of reasons right that could be because you know having a belief in a higher power kind of makes you happier it could be all for all kinds of reasons when you dig into what's really going on what you often find is that people who are engaged in religious practices they tend to be doing a lot of the stuff that the happiness research shows is important for achieving high happiness right and i think that's one of the the important things it's not just people who have strong religious beliefs it's people who engage in religious practices they go to services they pray a lot right they're really doing these kinds of things if you dig in you know what what are religious practices well one is like you know going to a shared community experience together right you know like social connection you know back i grew up catholic and you know when you go to church afterwards you chat with everybody and you see all these people and so on um religious practices often require doing acts of charity for other people right you know thinking of people who are not yourself they often involve you know situations of prayer that are moments to be mindful and be at peace and not be have your mind wandering right um and they involve a sense that there's something you know bigger than yourself right this sort of sense of meaning too which also helps and so it seems like the reason that religion promotes happiness are the things that religious people do tend to be the things that improve happiness over time and so uh you know so if you yourself are religious and you've strayed away from going from practicing you know going to church or or whatever that means like you know going to services like go back to that because those are the things that are really doing the work and if you're not necessarily a religious person if you don't necessarily believe in a higher power that means it's all the more important to build those happiness practices back into your life in some other form because you won't naturally get them you know every saturday when you go to services or every sunday when you go to services yeah i love that they've almost got happiness built into the framework no matter what that religion is and if you don't subscribe to that religion why not just take the framework and and apply that into your life and i think there is something powerful about these congregations where people get together and interact because you said you know that's one of the top things for our happiness is those social relationships and so even even whether you're being dragged to church by your parents or or the temple or the mosque or whatever it is when you get there i guess you're going to be mingling with other kids the adults other people and playing and just doing what humans have always done right so i think this is it's worth remembering you know i think one thing we think is that you know and i think we can have a little bit of hubris about this as sort of modern sometimes secular folks right is it like oh you know when i learned about these happiness studies you know we're coming up with these strategies that we've figured out for the first time right like not so if you look at ancient practices most of the ancient practices are building in lots of rituals that we know are great for well-being they're like cultural forces that are designed to kind of make us happy and this is true from religions it's due to like long-standing cultural practices you know think you know taking you know taking a siesta taking a sabbath right like taking time to rest like these things are really you know having dinner together right where you sort of have like dinner over the table um one thing we haven't talked about you know giving thanks sharing gratitude before you eat a meal right all these things are like the practices that positive psychologists are coming up with and they have been around for thousands of years in many cases so i think you know we can often turn to what the ancients have told us like hey do these things and that will boost your happiness and it turns out like they were right maybe not surprise surprise you know i mean that applies to so many things even in health there are so many things that uh physicians or or proponents of traditional chinese medicine or ayurvedic medicine have been talking about for years and now modern science are starting to back up and there is this kind of i think if it's an arrogance within humans or but we sort of feel that you know we're the most enlightened generation and actually we're coming up with all this cool stuff on how to live and you're like oh people have been doing this for a long time you know it's it's really quite humbling actually isn't this and i mean you mentioned gratitude which is frankly in most religions as a practice of some sort what does the science tell us about gratitude and our happiness yeah this is another spot yet again where we get it wrong right i mean if i had my intuitions and you asked me gratitude i'm like that kind of sounds cheesy i would go with griping right you know you and i hop on a zoom call we say oh you know 2021 it's been so crappy how is all this stuff happening blah blah blah my intuition is that is what would make me feel better right you know kind of complaining about things you know having common ground over the bad stuff you know getting it off my chest right data suggests just the opposite happy people tend to be more grateful and grateful people tend to be happier happy people tend to spontaneously count their blessings they tend to spontaneously notice all the good things not the bad things in life and research shows that if you just engage in practices of gratitude you're just the simple act of at night scribbling down three to five things that you're grateful for research shows that that can start significantly boosting your well-being in as little as two weeks just the simple act of sort of experiencing gratitude and if you want to supercharge it you can kind of combine gratitude with some of the other things we've just been talking about things like social connection and doing nice things for others you know one of the things if i look at my own gratitude list one of the things i'm often really grateful for is other people you know my husband you know the fact that my students did this nice thing for me or you know the fact that someone at work you know stepped up and like you know helped out so that you took something off my plate um we often experience thankfulness for the things that other people do including just existing but we rarely tell the other people around us that which is kind of sad because the act of saying you know hey like honey i really appreciate what you did or i just appreciate you you're just it's such a gift that you're in my life like you know i feel that but i rarely express that say to my husband but if i were to express it to him that is the way that i'm like now i'm talking to my husband right i'm not like scrolling instagram anymore we're like having a conversation but also it's it's a way of being nice to my husband because knowing that someone thinks you're a gift and that you've done something great like that feels really good and so there's evidence suggesting that the act of expressing our gratitude to other people can be incredibly important for boosting our happiness one study by marty seligman and his colleagues uh had people write a gratitude letter so write a letter to somebody that you really should have thanked a long time ago but you haven't had a chance to and then you know and then in pre-covert times to show up and like read that letter to the person like meet with them in person and read it and what he finds is not only that the act of doing this boosts up happiness for the person who writes the letter he finds in his one study that you can see signatures of boosted well-being for over a month after people do this gratitude visit right like even like a month later you're on a survey you're saying you're a happier person which to me feels crazy you know if i knew there was an intervention i could do to like boost my well-being that would keep me for over a month you know you and i are talking right now in january you know i'm clear past valentine's day maybe when the light's getting better you know things are getting warmer i'd be like yeah sign me up that's the power of gratitude gratitude in this context of really expressing it and sort of doing something nice for other people what strikes me laurie is that a lot of the things you're talking about are very simple most of them i think are free of charge from recollection yet we're just not doing them and there's all these kind of options that we're giving people throughout this conversation i've really interested have some of the interventions risen to the top in your experience of delivering the course to millions around the world or even that experience of delivering it to the yale students there's research on all of them but are a couple of them rising to the top where people keep saying hey professor santos when i do these things or when i do that one thing i feel like a different person i didn't realize how impactful that one thing could be you know and if so what are those things yeah i get this question a lot in part because my you know very type a yell students are like you gave me a big list of things but give me the one thing like the cliff notes version right um and my answer is always it kind of depends it sort of depends on what you're doing naturally right you know you mentioned that you're naturally a very social person like you talk to people maybe during covid that's not happening as much but if i came to you in kind of non-pandemic times and i told you like hey you know you know increase your social connection that might not benefit your happiness very much because you're probably like at ceiling you're kind of doing it already but maybe you're not as present you know maybe you need to experience a little bit more gratitude i don't know right and so i tell students you know as you're or i you know tell your listeners of this podcast as you're listening you might think certain things like oh yeah i do that i do that then you're good don't don't worry about that if you're feeling like oh yeah i already do that but the one thing i said where you're like oh yeah it's not really me that might be the spot where you really try to put a little bit of work in like take some baby steps to improve that and that's probably going to give you the kind of biggest happiness impact for the time you put in yeah i think the biggest thing that's impacted my own happiness over the past few years is this real understanding that i get to choose how i frame any particular situation in life and i feel that for a lot of my life this broken record play that it would all be framed the same way a lot of it came down to how i saw my parents react to things and so i learned that as that's the way you deal with things but just that understanding that oh right this situation can happen and there's three ways that i can actually report that story to myself create the story that's really quite empowering and i wonder what the research suggests when it comes to that it's that how we frame our experiences i guess a lot of people say well there's no choice but i think even really harsh and situations and experiences that we don't want we still do have a choice how we frame that and that absolutely i'm sure plays a huge impact on how we feel about ourselves but also how we feel about our lives yeah i think this is a really important feature right that and one of the reasons that our circumstances don't affect our happiness as much as we think right you know before we were talking about kind of positive circumstances being rich and so on we also have to deal with the negative circumstances right like we're living through a pandemic like you might get sick you know you might spill the milk right like you know things come up that are kind of a pain in the butt and in all those cases we actually have a choice about how we frame that and how we react to things not like the immediate reaction but we can kind of choose what happens after that and this is another spot where i think the ancients had it right in this case there's a wonderful parable that comes from the buddhist tradition um about buddha's story of the second arrow and so the way the parable goes is you know buddha is talking with his followers and he asks followers you know if you're walking down the street and somebody shoots you with an arrow you know is that bad you know is that a problem you know followers say yeah that kind of sucks to get shot with an arrow if you're walking down the street and buddha says okay if you're walking down the street and you first get shot with one arrow but then you get shot with a second arrow would that be worse and everyone says like yeah much worse to get hit with the second arrow you know now you're hurt in two spots and so on so buddha goes on to say the circumstances in life the suffering in life you know that we can't control that's the first arrow that's going to come or it's not going to come you know that's whether you're happy to be living in a pandemic or you spill the milk or something bad happens but buddha says the second arrow is our reaction to that bad thing that happens and that's a thing that we can always control like we are responsible for kind of stabbing ourselves with the second arrow so you know if you spill the milk and you freak out i'm like oh my god i spilled the milk this sucks and i kicked the dog and then i you know like try to you know like clean it up and then you know you know i was like even worse and then i'm mad at my husband later and i don't you know call my friend because i'm in a pissy mood like yeah the milk that wasn't my fault maybe but everything else was mine you know the same thing with this pandemic right like it sucks to be living in a pandemic like people are losing their jobs we're afraid for our lives all our routines are messed up that's a first arrow but we have a reaction to that pandemic we can choose to frame it in a certain way right we can engage in practices that make ourselves feel better we can try to find joy and gratitude even in the midst of this bad time all those other things are up to us you know when we don't engage it we're kind of stabbing ourselves with the second arrow and so this parable and kind of thinking that i can reframe things myself and that i have some control over my reactions to things this has also been a real game changer for me and this is the problem when you you know you're the happiness person who talks about this stuff you know because i you know i'm prone to stab myself with the second arrow a lot and uh my wonderful producer who works on my podcast my good friend ryan will be prone to like when i'm complaining about something or like you know like my assistant did something dumb and i was like so mad and you know you know half hour later i'm still complaining about it he'll sometimes text me the emoji of two little arrow emojis together just to remind me like yeah you know that you know maybe this is on you and so uh they're free that's a good use of tech that's a good use of technology yeah one text two arrows like okay you know move on so and the research backs that up as well yeah and what we know is that i mean first of all i think one thing the research backs up is that we can control our reactions to things right you sometimes think like oh you know if something happens i'm just gonna get pissed off or i'm just gonna be sad and i have no control over that but the research really shows that you know one problem with negative emotions is that we try to like run away from them or we hate them so much that we just don't allow them you know there are techniques you can do meditation techniques where when you experience something you take time to kind of recognize that emotion to allow it to be there and then go into like nerdy scientist mode and investigate it where you kind of really try to look at what it feels like in your body and you know take this filled milk example like you know i do this you know i dropped something you know i like smash a glass like ah and i ca and like wait a minute recognize like i'm super i'm having this aversive reaction i'm getting pissed off like i'm about i'm tensing up right like i'm about to like you know keep moving in ways that are sort of throwing things and dropping things right it's like okay let's allow this that sucks the glass you know fell you notice how this feels and what do i do to kind of nurture that right so taking a like pause and taking a break no matter what negative emotion you're experiencing whether that's fear or frustration or just kind of uncertainty or something you know experience a lot during covid you can take time to notice what that feels like and just the simple act of noticing distancing yourself from it allows you to get some handle on those emotions so you can react without kind of like reactions happen kind of naturally but you can kind of react a little bit more strategically right you can kind of decide you know maybe the right thing in the moment is to be sad and to cry or to you know get mad or kind of react negatively but it isn't always you get some control over your reactions yeah and reframing is something that we can train and practice and get better at um one you know you work on this stuff and that it's nice to experience something really tangible in your life where you go oh i would have reacted differently and that happened to me in the summer when i was finishing off the manuscript for my last book um i lost i spent a few days working on an idea and a chapter and it just went i lost it and i don't know what was going on in my life at the moment at that time but i felt really calm and i was like okay well here's an opportunity to write it even better you've gone through the process of getting those ideas together now with a fresh plate you can actually make this even better than it was yesterday and i thought that didn't happen on my previous books if that happened and it had happened previously it was a real sense of frustration and a real sense of um oh man why didn't i press save i could just press say why wouldn't i check and again i'm not saying either one is right or wrong i'm simply trying to empower people listening to go you can work on this and get better at it and so someone might go yeah but that is annoying i get it but i i really like this idea that you can choose the story that makes you happier right why why choose the one that makes you sad and frustrated and full of resentment why not choose the one that makes you happy and you take that to a real extreme a few weeks ago i released i think the most powerful conversation i've had on the podcast to date i spoke to someone called dr edith iger she was in auschwitz uh she was a survivor she's 93 years old and she said so many powerful things in that conversation but one of the things she said was that i've been in auschwitz but i can tell you that the greatest prison you'll ever be in is the prison you create inside your own minds and she was telling the story how when she was in the concentration camp she started to view the prison guards as the prisoners she was saying they're not free i'm the one who's free in my mind and you know i think when someone who's been to those kind of extremes and can tell you that you can reframe any experience you want i think it's really quite powerful isn't it yeah and i think one thing we forget is that it sometimes is those awful experiences that allows us to do that sort of reframing because in some sense we don't have any other choice and in fact you know this is a a new thing that's kind of coming up in the field of positive psychology research the sort of concept of what's called post-traumatic growth you know we all know about post-traumatic stress this idea that you go through awful situation and you wound up you know like kind of stressed afterwards and anxious and so on but there are a number of individuals who go through awful traumatic events and wind up stronger and happier afterwards and this is the phenomena of post-traumatic growth sometimes we go through something awful and it makes us more resilient you know it gives us like a time when it's like you know we better reframe this or like you know we're not going to get through it and the idea is that dramatic times can sometimes give us strategies for reframing um often they can give us resilience because you know when you get out of a terrible event everything else is going to you know like i bet you know like your podcast guess that auschwitz survivor like when she spills the milk it's not that bad because she has something else bad to compare it to right um and often these kinds of traumatic events can sometimes show you what really matters in life what you really want out of it it's only when you kind of ponder that loss of your life or your freedom or things like that that you really realize that you need to use it well and so there's a lot of evidence coming out that sometimes traumatic events in and of themselves can actually give us the sort of grace to do better and this is yet another reason why our circumstances don't work you know we assume circumstances have to go well circumstances have to go perfectly for us to feel happier but what the research shows is that sometimes it's the most negative circumstances that can actually make us the happiest on my podcast i interview individuals who've gone through awful circumstances one individual uh j.r martinez who actually was a he was a u.s soldier who was burned in iraq burned over like three quarters of his body and you know he was a really good looking guy you know now he wanted to be a soldier now he couldn't do any of that and the whole incident allowed him to recognize what really mattered what did he really want to do now he has his life back again he turned into an actor he went on to be on dancing with the stars you know and he credits that awful event with being a positive thing in his life and this is what the research seems to show researcher dan gilbert who studies uh really closely people's forecasts about good and bad events will know that even people who have experienced something that's truly awful you know say people who've lost a child which is probably you know one of the most awful things if you're a parent you could imagine happening you know people won't say they wanted that event to happen but they'll often note that you know a decent number of good things came from that event too like that there's aspects of that awful event that they're still grateful for and that's something i think we can all take heart and the most awful thing we could imagine happens to us and we're likely to say that more good things than bad came from that event you know that is striking and it means that we all have this kind of resilience that we often forget that can kind of come out in bad times and really that's my hope for covid now right i hope that we're all going to get out of this crisis and and have a little boost in happiness right appreciate more the kinds of things that we were taking for granted i know i have you know when i finally can go back to my favorite coffee shop and get that latte or go to a grocery store without a mask or you know like hug my mom without you know or see my friends without this sort of secret thing in the background be like oh gosh we're gonna get sick what's gonna happen right like that's gonna feel amazing so many things so many of those things i just took for i didn't realize that i should have incredible joy walking into the coffee shop and getting that latte before you know but now when i experience again i think i really will have that joy i'll appreciate it in a way that i didn't appreciate it before but it's because i lost it yeah i mean through the cause for optimism that something good can come out of what we're all living through and hopefully we will have lived through at some point in the near future uh just to sort of finish off laurie um philosophically when i think about happiness i think about these phrases that are there in the vernacular the pursuit of happiness the things you can do to create happiness and then i came across this quote by krishnamurti which i've got here which says happiness is strange it comes when you are not seeking it when you are not making an effort to be happy then unexpectedly mysteriously happiness is there and that really speaks to this wider point that is what i sort of feel that happiness is already there inside us you see this in a child when they're just playing with their lego they're they're they're just happy calm content with life and my feeling is that a lot of these practices they're not necessarily creating happiness i feel society has moved us away from our innate happiness and all these practices are doing are helping to turn that ship around and just return us back to the happiness that already naturally exists within us i wonder what your view is on that yeah i mean i think you're right i mean i think one thing that we know about happiness is that when we try to pursue it we get it wrong right you know when we try to try to pursue it we go after the money and the fame and accolades and we end up you know spinning our wheels because those are not the kinds of things that will allow us to feel happy what will let us feel happy is kind of in some ways going not back to our natural state right being present you know being challenged by particular activity right being social having fun you know you mentioned kids running around and doing things like you know those are kind of being in the present moment those are cases where you're being social right i think that's right that our natural state is doing the kinds of things that would make us happy but the modern world tends to lead us away from that right it's hard to get back to that natural state in a lot of ways and i think you know for all the reasons we've talked about from technology to busyness to the wrong theories about the sorts of things that will make us happy and that's why i think right now there is a way to pursue happiness what we need to pursue is getting back to that natural state you know it's not going to take the form we're used to where we're like buying ourselves something or trying to get that next you know accolade on our cv but it's about kind of putting into effect intentional practices that let us go back to the more natural states so you know if we were in a different environment if we were plopped on a desert island and there were no smartphones and no things to do for work and no emails we might naturally get back to that state of you know playing around and being present and enjoying ourselves but in the modern world i think we have to kind of fight against the tendencies that are natural and those that are natural are not kind of evolutionarily natural you know they're the kind of cultural tides that might be taking us in the wrong direction so i do think right now it works like a pursuit because you do have to put a little bit of work in but what that work is doing is kind of getting us back to the natural state that we should have been in anyway in the spirit of this conversation laurie i want to acknowledge you i want to say what a gift you are to the world what you've done for your yale students what you're doing with this course you know sharing these principles of happiness all around the world i think is incredible so i want to say thank you to you for what you're doing frankly for humanity because i think it really is that important what you're doing and just to finish off this podcast is called feel better live more when we feel better in ourselves we get more out of life you've touched on so many different things throughout this conversation today i always love to lead my listeners or the people watching on youtube with some practical tips things that they can think about applying immediately into their life to improve their happiness level so i wonder if you could leave my listeners with some of your top tips yeah so the first would be to get social right right now set up a time that you can talk like really talk with someone whether that's somebody who lives in your flat who you would connect with by phone who you have to set up a zoom call with like set it up and try to be present and when you are there you know shut off all the other you know screens that are open put your phone away really try to connect second thing is what can you do right now to help someone else you know could you donate some money could you text a friend who might need to connect with you you know could you just do something nice for someone in your flat like how can you get more other oriented the third is that you should just take a little bit of time for gratitude like what's the one thing right now that you feel grateful for right think of it right now that thing you feel grateful for and kind of take a moment to notice it and then if that felt good maybe just stay in that present moment of noticing a little bit longer do that right now and maybe even engage in some practices where you can really be a bit more present and mindful everything i just said might be you know 20 minutes more of work in your day you know like connecting with that friend doing something nice or whatever but that simple 20 minutes will be a way to boost up your well-being in this really evidence-based way yeah fantastic lori for people who want to check out more of your work where can they find you yes you should check out the happiness lab podcasts and download it wherever you get your podcasts you know quick little half hour interventions that you can use to feel better and if you want to take that famous course that all the yalies took it's free and available online you can check it out on coursera.org the name is the science of well-being but if you just google yell happiness class you'll probably find it too yeah we'll put all those links in the show notes for people as well to make it super easy for them to find lori i really appreciate the time you've given me today my listeners today i very much hope at some point we can do this again in person face to face either on your side uh off the ocean or on this side but i'm sure that will happen at some point but in the meantime stay well stay happy and we'll do this again soon really hope you enjoyed that conversation please do think about one thing that you can take and apply into your life inspiration is not enough you need to take action if you did enjoy that please do press subscribe hit that notification bell and why not check out this conversation that i picked out that acts as the perfect follow-up

Channel: Dr Rangan Chatterjee

Views: 61,818

Keywords: the4pillarplan, thestresssolution, feelbetterin5, wellness, drchatterjee, feelbetterlivemore, ranganchatterjee, 4pillars, drchatterjee podcast

Id: dthI6xZ_CrM

Length: 99min 39sec (5979 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 27 2021