Wellbeing Skills - with Professor Richard Davidson

a very warm welcome to another action for happiness event happy new year this is our first event of 2022 and it's just fantastic to see thousands of you joining us again live to share in this lovely community experience and i'm particularly excited to welcome professor richard davidson who's joining us a special guest this evening richie lovely to see you again thank you so much for having me mark and thank you for all you're doing i think the last time we were together was the event with his holiness in london back in 2005 which seems a long time ago and now but as always we've been following your fantastic work i'm sure many in the audience will be familiar with the great work that you do but you are of course a professor of psychology and psychiatry founder and director of the center for healthy minds and you've been doing leading work on the newer science of happiness and well-being for many years and it's fantastic to have you with us just to let everyone know who's joining us today we will be having a conversation together covering a wide range of topics to do with the theme of today's event uh well-being skills and i'm happy to say that richie will be sharing with us some practical things that we can try out during our time together and they'll also be time for you to ask questions yourself so please do use the q a function and uh we have a an ability for you to vote up your favorite questions as well so we won't get to all of them but richie's very kindly agreed to answer as many of your questions as we can fit in so uh without further ado uh which maybe you could start by saying a little bit about your background and experience and the sort of work you've been doing that contributes to this thing certainly happy to do that i'm a neuroscientist by training and i began my career with a really simple question why is it that some people are more vulnerable to life's challenges and others more resilient and in the early part of my career i focused a lot on the adversity side of the equation i studied the brain mechanisms that conferred vulnerability to anxiety and depression and stress uh and then my life changed quite dramatically in 1992 when i first met his holiness the dalai lama and the dalai lama challenged me on that day in 1992 and he said very innocently why can't you use the same tools of modern neuroscience that you've been using to study anxiety and depression and fear and stress and study kindness study compassion study happiness and it was a wake-up call for me and i didn't have a very good answer for him on that day other than that it's hard but you know when we first began to study anxiety that was hard too and i think most scientists would agree that the field has made some progress and so i made a commitment to his holiness the dalai lama on that day that i was going to begin to orient more toward that and then a few years later i saw him again and he was more direct and he said i want you to take the practices from our traditions turn them into a form that are more secular that anyone would feel comfortable practicing investigate them with the tools of modern science and if you find them to be valuable disseminate them wildly and that is really why i'm on the planet today and the reason i'm here and the reason we do the work that we do what a wonderful journey and and again great validation of the importance of this work and it strikes me that here we are in you know what remains quite difficult times for many people around the world um all kinds of challenges both socially and around us in society and also of course in the challenges of our everyday lives whatever they may be and yet it feels to me what you bring is a message of hope in many ways which you from the work that you do and some of that seems to me to link back to what i've heard you talking about with the plasticity of our brains can you say a bit more about why we might have some hope in this area absolutely i think this is really an important message our brains are built to change in response to experience and in response to training scientists have given the label neuroplasticity to describe this our brains are constantly being shaped wittingly or unwittingly and most of the time our brains are being shaped unwittingly most of the time we are unaware of the forces around us that are shaping our brains and we certainly have very little control of those forces and so the one thing we do have control over is our own mind and so what we know from now uh quite a bit of scientific research really hard no scientific evidence is that when we cultivate healthy habits of mind it actually changes our brain and it changes our brain in ways that support the enduring qualities of well-being that's the kind of amazing fact and uh uh it it really does i think give us hope that we're not stuck where we are we're all facing lots of challenges it is indeed objectively a difficult time for the vast majority of people on the planet today but we can actually improve our circumstances at least to some extent by uh simple mental exercises and one of the important messages that i'd like to leave with you all today is that it doesn't take much to get this going you don't have to be a meditator doing thousands of hours of practice a few minutes a day make a really important difference that's really inspiring to hear and it also very much chimes with the ethos of action for happiness where we're trying to encourage people all around the world to take small actions every day because together these things really do add up i wondered if we could maybe actually begin with a little practical example i know you've got some some work you've been doing around appreciation i'd love it maybe if you could share a bit more about that with the community yes absolutely so uh just to back up a little uh our work that uh we're we're doing these days is informed by a framework for understanding the plasticity of well-being it's a scientifically based framework and it has four pillars key pillars of well-being one of these pillars we call connection and connection is about qualities that are important for healthy social relationships and one of those qualities which is really so accessible is appreciation uh and uh we often take this for granted and yet spending just a few minutes each day uh intentionally cultivating appreciation can be an elixir for the soul it really can help tremendously in changing the quality the demeanor of interaction so let me give you a specific example one thing that we can do is if we are going into an important meeting uh we can bring the individuals that we're going to be meeting with into our mind and into our heart and simply notice something positive about them uh and appreciate the positive qualities we can notice or recollect uh something that they have done to be helpful to the organization in which you might be working or it could be a family member a helpful act that one of the family members did to contribute to the overall well-being of the family whatever it might be but just simply recollecting um this positive quality can be so incredibly important and one of the things that i uh do i try to do this several times a day uh and we were sharing about this earlier uh we all every human being eats we all have to eat to live uh and um we need food on the table and there are many many people who contribute to us being able to eat a meal there are farmers who might grow vegetables there are delivery people there are people in groceries that might be selling the food there might be individuals who contributed to making our utensils so many people contribute and of course the person who cooks spending just 30 seconds before we take a bite and appreciating even if we don't know who these people are but appreciating that all these people have contributed in a very helpful way to enabling us to eat and to to live um this is something that's so simple and we can pair it with this activity of daily living and through that means it can become a regular habit thank you i love well i love both the idea of expressing that appreciation but also the idea of linking it to habit something we might explore a bit later on in more detail but can we maybe try this out with the community right now how can we invite people to to bring some appreciation is it maybe to think to bring to mind someone they're grateful to how would you suggest we do this now well we can i can i'll be happy to lead us in a formal practice uh maybe really short maybe one or two minutes um if uh if that would be good yeah that would be great or or yes that sounds perfect let's do that okay so um let's all begin by simply closing our eyes because we're all in front of screens and uh it can be helpful to simply close our eyes if that's uncomfortable it's fine to keep the eyes open and simply softly gazing downward and let's start by bringing awareness into our bodies and simply settling the mind and the body for just a few moments and now let's bring someone into our mind and our heart who has been helpful to us during this time of the pandemic it could be a family member it might be a health care provider it might be a teacher it might be a person who works in your local grocery store whoever it might be bringing one person into your mind and your heart who's been very helpful to you during this challenging time and let's reflect on how they have been helpful and allow this sense of appreciation for who they are and for what they have done to emerge in our awareness and maybe even reflecting on what we might say to this person the next time we see them to express our appreciation in words so let's open our eyes now and re-engage and see if we can allow this quality that whatever quality may have emerged to continue and permeate the rest of our conversation thank you that was really uh really thought-provoking and moving for me actually i'd love to invite the community who i know always like to contribute as well in these events maybe if you'd like to share just very briefly who it was that you brought to mind and maybe what it was you're grateful for feel free to share that in the chat and we'll maybe see a few um a few examples so um someone said focus was my wife who made me laugh my husband the neighbor my daughter an eye doctor my best friend my mom a work colleague delivery drivers my phd supervisor my boss child minder yoga teacher boyfriend postman my dog and there were so many hundreds flying past cat i see as well it's hard to see so many but what a lovely sense of appreciation i'm getting from the chat there are you seeing that richie yes i am it's wonderful i love the diversity thank you folks for sharing that it's nice to have that sense of seeing the good around us at a time when it's often easier to focus on what's wrong you mentioned these four pillars that are part of your work and we talked about this appreciation being perhaps part of that that connection that social aspect what would you like to say a bit more about some of the other pillars sure so the first pillar we call awareness and awareness is not typically part of schemes of well-being and yet we think of this as foundational and the reason we do uh is because when we are distracted it exacts a toll on our happiness and well-being there's a very famous scientific paper that was published about a decade ago and the title of the paper was a wandering mind is an unhappy mind when we are distracted uh it is really toxic and research shows that the average adult spends 47 of her or his waking life not paying attention to what they're doing and i have the conviction that we can do better and when we're not paying attention to what we're doing we're less happy so awareness is a big piece i've already talked a little bit about connection other qualities associated with connection besides of appreciation include kindness and compassion and gratitude all of those are are part of that constellation and again these are qualities that we know can be strengthened with practice the third pillar of well-being we call insight an insight is a about a curiosity driven investigation of this narrative about ourselves that we all carry around everyone has a narrative about who they are and this is what human minds do it's it's perfectly normal to have a narrative and uh one of the key elements of well-being is not so much changing the narrative but it is changing our relationship to the narrative the narrative literally filters our reality it defines what we tend to how we perceive the world and if we can have insight into the fact that this narrative is operating in the way that it does it's enormously liberating in freeing us from being completely constrained by the narrative uh and so changing our relationship to the narrative is really important and finally before we go on to the final pillar i think that's so well insightful you talking about the the insight there and one thing we've observed consistently in this work with actual happiness perhaps with an expectation that we might feel that part of our mission would be to sort of cultivate more kindness towards others and how important that compassion is what we're so often almost shocked to see is how unkind so many of us are to ourselves that that narrative that sort of story we have about ourselves can be incredibly destructive and toxic and maybe it's playing out on our heads and we're not aware that maybe others are experiencing that as well i was really shocked when i first worked with kristin neff to discover that the way i would speak to a loved one and the way i would speak to myself was really different that i had this sort of really harsh way of speaking to myself i wonder if there's anything you could offer us around shifting our narrative in our heads if it's one that's unhelpful yeah you're um you know i think you are uh raising such an important issue mark um and uh you know i think the first step is uh uh is really ex accepting our narrative uh and um uh and part of accepting the narrative is is not being harsh on ourselves it is what it is and if we can uh cultivate some acceptance of it and uh uh and and change a relationship to it the narrative itself will begin to change on its own uh and so in our view it's important not to expect people to sort of fight with their mind that typically doesn't work so well and so by accepting the narrative we can approach ourselves in a much more gentle way rather than beating ourselves up for the narrative uh we can uh uh just accept it for what it is which is really a bunch of thoughts and when we can see it as a bunch of thoughts we won't get so upset at ourselves for it because it's just thoughts and in in cognitive therapy this is called decentering and it's a very important skill that uh is one of the critical pathways in cultivating well-being would it be true to say that sometimes when we're trying to push away the difficult thoughts and emotions we in fact actually almost give them more power and yet when we perhaps accept them and notice them for what they are some of that sort of hold over us is is what calms down a bit is that a fair observation absolutely absolutely and you know it's the classic example of uh the instruction to not think about a white elephant in the next 30 seconds do everything you can but think about anything else but don't think about a white elephant and um and and uh it has the same flavor so i interrupted you about to go on to your fourth pillar yeah so the fourth pillar is purpose and purpose is about identifying our sense of direction in life and particularly clarifying the values that are associated with that uh and it's not so much about finding something more purposeful to do but rather how can we find meaning and purpose in that which we are already doing including in seemingly pedestrian kinds of activities that we all have to do on a on a regular basis uh so can washing the dishes or cleaning your house or taking out the garbage all be part of your sense of purpose uh uh and there are simple practices to connect what we do to our larger sense of purpose so that more and more of what we do and literally um eventually embracing everything we do as part of our sense of purpose well i i think this is really helpful because often when you think about this idea of cultivating meaning and purpose in life it sounds very daunting and very large in scope and so how would somebody who was you know feeling a bit purposeless or dealing with a job that they didn't find very meaningful how could even in those situations how can we cultivate a little sense of that purpose you're talking about well i so the example you give is a really good and helpful one take a person who um feels that his or her job is not very meaningful and is feeling quite purposeless we can have a person ask themselves well why why do why am i working well you know a person might say well i need to earn some money um well why do you need to earn money well i need to support my family um well why do you need to support your family well they're important to me i love them uh i mean so very quickly we can connect whatever we're doing to some larger effort that goes beyond ourselves some larger purpose and it doesn't take many of these questions to very quickly identify um something really meaningful one of the things that we found during covid we um as i was we were discussing earlier uh one of the large research efforts that we've done is with public school teachers here in the united states these are individuals who are really stressed and particularly during the time when they had to teach virtually many of these individuals had their own young children at home and it was a very stressful time and one of the things that they reported is they they completely were disconnected from their sense of purpose they all chose to become teachers because of their passion for kids and for um for uh uh watching them on their uh their life and and uh uh and and those were the the the core um motivations for their choice of profession in the first place and one of the things that we found from the teachers with this training and well-being is that they said that they connected to their purpose in becoming teachers for the first time since the pandemic began reconnected with it and it gave them a sense of vitality to engage in that they hadn't had before so richie you've you've walked us through those pillars of awareness that sort of foundational skill of sort of mindfulness the connection and we practiced a bit of appreciation the insight and thinking about the narratives and and now the purpose and sort of seeing how what we do matters even at a tiny scale and you've already reminded us that small actions can make a big difference that's really empowering but we know that it's hard to change our habits people set new year's resolutions and have very often failed in the middle of january to live up to that how how can we use the science of habit formation and behavior to to not just try these things as a one-off but actually make them something that lasts yeah it's a crucial question and thank you for asking it um i think that there are several things to say one is uh it's really important when we begin this journey to begin very modestly with really small steps and to choose one of the things we do for example for a person expresses an interest in beginning meditation rather than having a goal of 45 minutes a day which almost no one is able to follow through with initially what we say to a person is please you pick an amount of time each day that you think you can make an unswerving commitment to do every single day and do it for 30 days even if it's just one minute one minute is perfectly fine and one of the things that i remind people is i'm sure that every single person who is attending this webinar brushes their teeth every day virtually every person on the planet brushes their teeth this is not part of our genome we've all learned to do this this is something that is important for our personal physical hygiene and i think most people attending this webinar would also agree that their minds are even more important than their teeth and yet many of us don't even spend the amount of time we spend brushing our teeth nurturing our mind and so if we can make a commitment to spend even the short amount of time that we spend brushing our teeth and you can do this while you're brushing your teeth so you don't even have to take extra time and uh this is really what it takes is just to begin very very modestly but to do it regularly and i think the regularity is important so what we say to a person is pick an amount of time that you feel you can make a commitment to and do it for 30 days consecutively even if it's just for one minute and even if it's during when you're brushing your teeth and piggybacking it onto an activity of daily living is very helpful because we do all brush our teeth every day we know we do so if we pair it with that we're more likely to follow through yeah so i find that pairing really helpful and you gave the example earlier of linking it to eating which we do multiple times a day and i have a practice that i link to eating i have one that i link to when i get into bed at night about being grateful and so on um but they're brushing the teeth things fantastic if we could give the same priority to mental health as we do to dental health then the world would be a happier place exactly and the world would really be different if if we spent even that short of time if everyone did that so in a moment i'd love us to move on to the great questions that are coming up from the audience but i feel it would be remiss of us not to talk specifically about challenging situations because there are people for whom life is not easy right now or need at any point in time they may be dealing with loss they may be dealing with illness they might be dealing with severe mental health challenges what have we learned from your work about the ways in which we can cultivate perhaps more resilience in those difficult situations yeah um resilience we believe is an outcome of all four of the pillars of well-being so there is not any unique pillar that is specifically tied to resilience but there's actually good hard-nosed scientific research to suggest that each one of the pillars can help to improve resilience and from a scientific perspective one way we can think about resilience is that resilience is the repetiti with which you recover from adversity so if you recover quickly you are more resilient and it turns out that that will contribute to your well-being uh and so one of the things that we've learned is again uh any one of these four pillars can help to promote resilience and which of the four pillars are most important for a given person at any given point in her or his life is something that we still don't definitively know from a scientific perspective that's one of the really important unanswered and practical questions in this area of research but um what i would encourage people to do even in the most challenging of circumstances is to to explore on their own these simple practices that can be helpful in cultivating resilience and in navigating these really challenging times and we know uh and we've done some scientific research in fact we've just published a paper with teenage girls in the country of colombia who have been horrifically abused and their adverse childhood experiences are 5 and above on the a scales very very challenged all from very low income backgrounds and we did an intensive intervention uh that was provided of course freely to these kids um and found you know some dramatic benefit uh and so uh the point of me bringing this up is simply to underscore the fact that even in uh populations that are really dramatically uh challenged with very significant diversity of many different types um there is change that can happen yes and it's really empowering to hear that um and i know you have a healthy minds program and i believe you have an app as well is that right they have some of these sort of um tools and skills that people can learn do you like to say a little bit more about that yes um thank you again for asking it's called a healthy minds program and it is an app that is totally freely available there's absolutely no paywall it is completely free and it is we can make it freely available through the generosity of donors and foundations that contribute to the nonprofit that um we established to to create this app um and you can download it from uh wherever you get apps uh it's available on both um apple uh ios and android devices uh and the new york times just had a review of uh the best meditation apps in 2021 uh and they named three and i'm super happy to uh tell you that ours was one of the three despite the fact that we've put literally zero dollars into advertising so um uh and and the fact that it's free allows me um without any um conflict of interest to uh to advertise it um because i'm not paid a penny um from this and so i encourage you to please explore it and um if you find that it's valuable um uh that will make us happy what a lovely gift to the world which we'll make sure we include links back to that and some of your other great work in the follow-up email now i'd love to come to the questions but before we do that you did talk about awareness this foundation skill of mindfulness and we had a little taste of it with that awareness exercise but i wondered if i might invite you just to help us experience maybe another minute or so of of mindful awareness together in whatever way feels most natural to you sure happy to do that um so let's again find an upright posture and the reason we like to sit in an upright posture is really to be awake uh but not too tight not too loose but feeling ourselves grounded and again please close our eyes if that's comfortable for you and if not you can simply gaze downward and let's bring our awareness into our bodies and take one or two deep breaths and the invitation here is not to change anything not to fix anything but simply to shift from a mode of doing to a mode of being and simply notice whatever is coming up for you in your body you might notice the sensations at your feet that may be touching the floor or your shoulders if you've been sitting watching a computer screen for a long time then the sensations may be unpleasant they may be pleasant they may be neutral it doesn't matter and this is an opportunity to use the body as an anchor for our awareness and it's also an opportunity to cultivate a really important aspect of awareness and that aspect is to know that we are aware now that may seem strange to some of you but i'm sure that many of us have had the experience of for example reading a book where we might be reading each word on a page and going along from page to page and after a few moments we realize we have no idea what we've just read that's an example of not knowing that we are aware the moment we recognize that it is a moment of what scientists call meta awareness so as we are sitting here bringing awareness to the body if your mind begins to wander and you notice that your mind has wandered that's a beautiful moment it's a moment of meta awareness and we can simply bring our minds gently back to the present moment another element which is important is to recognize that calming our mind and opening our hearts is beneficial not only for ourselves but can be beneficial for all of those that we touch directly or indirectly so let's also spend a moment or two simply reflecting on this and see if we can find within ourselves this altruistic motive for cultivating mindfulness and finally as we re-engage and open our eyes let's see if we can take whatever insight whatever benefit we may have gleaned from this very short period of practice and let's spend a moment reflecting on how we can bring this out into the world to be of benefit not only to ourselves but to all the others that we connect with as well so with that let's all open our eyes and re-engage and uh thank you all for practicing together thank you richie i i love that feeling of there being thousands of people doing that all together all around the world i think we normally have people from 50 different countries so that was very special and i'd love to invite you all quickly in the community if you would like to share one or two words about what what came to your awareness in that exercise we're talking about awareness and let's just see some of the the um the things that came into people's minds we're seeing a lot of thanks for you uh but also stillness love and peace the shift from doing to being calmness common humanity appreciation beautiful active hope kept drifting off neck pain bliss gratitude relief um expansiveness appreciation acceptance time to slow down so you know a mixture of great positive emotions but also just awareness of how things are even if that involves pain and difficulty thank you so much everyone for showing that it's really um again very moving to see that you know that real range of human experience that we are all dealing with right now let's come to these questions which has been fantastic to learn from you but i'd love to respond to some things people are asking so john has said what simple steps can a person take to improve their anxiety well uh so thank you for asking that anxiety is often about the future we typically are anxious about impending events threats that we perceive in the future sometimes we're anxious about things that may have happened in the past but they typically remind us of things that may occur in the future and one of the best ways of decreasing anxiety is to learn to live more in the present moment and uh and if you find that your mind is filled with anxious thoughts you can simply become aware of the thoughts as thoughts and see them as thoughts rather than whatever it is that those thoughts might represent so this requires practice though it won't come instantaneously and um please don't be frustrated uh if it doesn't change just like that because it typically won't um but it's just gradual work with the mind more and more every day uh small times small steps uh and uh gradually things will change so this is what the science teaches us i've got two um related questions which i think i'm going to bring together here shaney has asked how can we respond to support a loved one with anxiety and julia has asked um professor how can we help people from our family who are dealing with depression to develop more well-being so i guess both coming back to that sense that you cultivated for us at the end of that exercise about bringing a sense of compassion for others how can we help our others around us develop these well-being skills yeah it's a great um question and i think that the simple answer is although it's not so simple is that the thing that we can do that i think is most helpful is to cultivate those qualities in ourselves uh and then to be with the person in question and embody those qualities so it's not telling them what to do it's simply being being not doing but being uh fully present caring kind uh uh and uh um really uh you know the one of the people that i've been fortunate enough to get to know quite well uh over the last few years is a person who serves as the chief public health officer in the united states today the title is the surgeon general of the united states uh his name is vivek murti and he talks about the epic struggle between fear and love um and so what i would say is that the most important thing to to to do with an anxious family member is love them just unconditionally and that can be enormously helpful love that um shift from fear to love i think that's incredibly powerful and it certainly has been something i've tried to do with family members dealing with anxiety um but i also hear you know what's behind the question which is it's really hard to um to support people around us and actually we can't change others we can only ever really change our response to them in the way in which we help them to feel susan's asked can natural solutions like exercise meditation and nutrition and so on replace anti-depressive medication when you're struggling with a clinical mental health challenge like depression well um that's an important question and i am not someone who is anti-medication uh i believe that um in certain cases the judicious use of antidepressant medication can be helpful but i also believe that it is over prescribed in the west and i was shown data not too long ago of the amount of money that our local public school system spends on antidepressant medication for the teachers it's crazy and i'm convinced that we can actually improve the situation and decrease the use of medication at the same time so it's not that i'm anti-medication but i do think it's over prescribed and i think that uh some at least of the challenges that people are experiencing can be addressed without um pharmacological intervention and the kinds of strategies that we're talking about here have many fewer side effects compared to antidepressant medication and they're free yes and again i encourage people to check out the resources of yours that we will share following this event uh for practical examples of how to do that beyond the ones we've talked about today um anam has asked or said i work with university students to help promote well-being can you suggest anything i can do to help them improve their well-being yeah this is a huge issue of great importance we're doing a lot of work with university students today and we have organized an initiative in the u.s called the student flourishing initiative that is bringing together a consortium of universities that is interested in exactly this question we are using a version of our app the healthy minds program with university students very successfully both here in the u.s as well as we have a big project going on now collaboratively in mexico with one of the largest private universities in mexico and we've translated part of the healthy minds program into spanish and we are disseminating it there with great success uh we also have designed a course for university students called the art and science of human flourishing and you can go on our website and learn more about the details of that course but that's another strategy and this is a regular college course that students receive credit for uh and it has intellectual content but it also has um practices uh they have a laboratory where they they learn to cultivate their own well-being and we're actually doing scientific research to look at the impact of this and we actually have a publication that's coming out soon on the impact of this course as we follow the kids through college and it has great benefit in helping them navigate the challenges that they confront as college students so please check out the materials on our website there are a lot of resources that we provide and um we would love to see this disseminated more widely um well it's it's a really important question because there are so many people in a student context who are struggling but i know you've also done work around children of much younger ages as well and how there are skills around mindfulness and so on that can be really life-changing so i think it's you know what we're really talking about here are skills for life that we'd love to see in our curriculums in our family lives in our organization throughout society so um thank you for the way in which you're promoting that in multiple different ways stephanie's got a question about trauma which i think links back to what we were talking about earlier with challenging situations but obviously there are many people dealing with trauma trying to recover from some major event that's happened in their lives and she's asked are there daily routines that someone can do to establish more trust and safety when trying to overcome the challenges of trauma yeah i um it's a really important question and as i indicated earlier when we were talking about plasticity plasticity happens willingly or unwittingly and trauma hijacks the mechanisms of plasticity if you will to encode suffering in the mind and the brain and the body and so uh this is one of the ways that trauma exerts enduring effects is through its changes in the brain and in order to reverse the effects of trauma we need to engage those same mechanisms of neuroplasticity for the good um and again this is something that requires step-by-step practice uh you know if if you've been um uh not doing physical exercises for a long time and you're totally out of shape you can't expect to go to the gym for a couple of days and um and really uh be back in good shape uh immediately it takes time it's step by step and in the same way dealing with trauma i think requires that as well and it may even require much more intensive kind of intervention depending on the magnitude of the trauma this study that i was mentioning that was done in the country of colombia with um traumatized teenagers had a very intensive intervention uh where they we there was a summer camp that they attended for an intensive week and they're basically getting the intervention every waking minute which is really part of the design and it may take that kind of intensive intervention to counteract the effects of trauma let me also mention one other thing about trauma there's a lot of talk these days about the intergenerational transmission of trauma and there's some hard no scientific evidence on how that may occur in part through biological and specifically epigenetic mechanisms which is quite interesting the same is true on the positive side i've been calling attention to the possibility of the intergenerational transmission of happiness the intergenerational transmission of awakening through the very same mechanisms that are being used or being hijacked for the intergenerational transmission of trauma and we're actually doing studies now in pregnant women where we're teaching them practices of well-being and looking at the outcome not on the women themselves but on their fetus on the baby once the baby is born and the first few years of life wow that's amazing i mean we always talk about how as members of this community we have a sort of ripple effect on those around us through our behaviors and intention and uh but you're actually talking about uh a sort of uh generation to generation passing on of positive emotional attributes and and mind states i think that's incredible um it sort of links uh in the connected nature to a question here from one of my action happiness colleagues who says this pillar of connection seems particularly crucial do you professor richard feel there's a a bigger disconnect between people right now because of the the pandemic and they've observed that they've noticed a change in friends becoming more insular and people perhaps connecting less frequently than they used to it feels to me that there's an urgent need to reconnect to re-galvanize some of those that togetherness actually um what can we do i totally agree mark i think that's really important and i think it's consistent with my observations i think early on in the pandemic our public health officials landed on an unfortunate phrase of physical of social distancing and um you know i wrote about this very early on in the pandemic uh i think you know what we're being asked to do is to physically distance not to socially distance it's possible to be physically distant and socially connected at the same time but this has been a real challenge during the pandemic and i think that these kind of simple appreciation practices where we bring our loved ones as well as people we don't even know very well into our mind and our heart and allow this sense of appreciation for positive things that they're doing that can really be helpful so that when we do have the opportunity to connect in person it is a warm-hearted uh fulfilling kind of connection well said yes and i'm uh on the subject of appreciation which we've talked about a lot in this event is i have a huge appreciation for everyone who's in this community either with us live on this event right now or indeed uh in any other way in which they're helping to spread the message behind action of happiness that links so closely with your fantastic work and particularly here we are at the start of a new year um some of you i'm sure will be familiar with the um the action calendars that we uh share all year round here's happier january with a little tiny action each day that we can do and indeed many many thousands are sharing online and sharing via our action for happiness app which has 200 000 um active users and and it's linking really so much of what you've talked about today little kind acts little things to be more self-aware encouraging gratitude encouraging connection encouraging um physical activity a sense of meaning and purpose so thank you to everyone who has come along here and made a donation to support action for happiness which many have done to help make this work possible and particularly for spreading those action ideas spreading basically your core message richie which i see as we can change through the small daily actions that we cultivate it really i find that so motivating is that a fair summary would you say absolutely absolutely uh and um it's uh it's something that i think is really accessible to all of us and uh i love the fact that this community is part of this movement and uh we're all on this journey together so thank you so much for having me yeah well thank you everyone for being here for all the great questions for all that you've shared on the chat for all the the thanks i'm seeing here coming up for you right now richie um it's been an absolute pleasure being with you very grateful for what all the wisdom you've shared and we will send um follow-up links to your work and the the program and so on to everyone uh tomorrow but before we leave um is there any sort of final summary or message you'd like to leave us with to sort of bring all this together well i think that um the final message is is this um we are clearly living in very challenging times and uh the trajectory that humanity was on before the pandemic was not a particularly healthy or sustainable one and it is becoming even more challenging with the pandemic but the good news is that simple acts that we can engage in on a daily basis that really don't require a lot of time can change our minds and our brains in ways that will really change the world and i think that the very future of humanity as we know it depends on this and so please all of you join us on this journey encourage all the people that you know to participate because uh our collective futures is hanging in balance very well said and what a lovely note to end on thank you so much for all of your time today and also particularly the work you're doing and keep up the great work it really is making a massive difference thank you so much mark and uh thank you for all you're doing and please keep up your work which is super important thanks everyone see you again soon

Channel: Action for Happiness

Views: 27,350

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Id: P_IFGbEnJ6w

Length: 57min 17sec (3437 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 13 2022