In my own work. I tend to use the social scientist definition, which is thinking about happiness, as a sense of being happy in your life and with your life. So being happy in your life is just having, you know, lots of positive emotions like Joy, contentment. Ah, you know, like those kinds of things. The second part is being happy with your life and and that sort of the answer to the question. All things considered, how satisfied are you with your life? And these are what social scientists call, the kind of affective component of happiness or the emotional component?
Point of Happiness. That's the kind of happy in your life and the kind of cognitive component of happiness. You think your life is pretty good, best case scenario is we maximize both of those for me that that's kind of the experience of a happy life.
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Laurie Santos. Joins me today. Lori is a professor of psychology and head of Stillman College at Yale, Santa's is known as yells happiness. Professor, she began teaching a class called psychology in the good life in 2018 which is become. I think the most popular class at Yale I felt like this was a good episode to follow Luke Burgess and mimetic desire because Lori and I also talked about how our minds lie to us. You'll walk away from this episode with a better.
Understanding of why happiness is so elusive, why you're probably feeling burnt out and emotionally drained. And importantly, what specifically you can do that's backed by science to feel better. We'll also talk about an underappreciated aspect of Happiness. Protecting yourself from unhappy people. It's time to listen and learn
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Fundamental data head to kennel, s.com knowledge to try them out, that's c-a-n-n-a ly st.com, knowledge and tell them Shane sent you. We put a ton of effort and energy into being happy and yet so few of us actually seem happy. Why not like, what misconceptions do we have about happiness?
I mean, I think it's important to start with this idea that we put so much effort in, right? Because I think you could sometimes think about happiness of like, oh we're all not feeling.
So happy and that's because we're not we're not trying like we need to try more and I think that's not the problem. I think people are putting tremendous energy into the kinds of things that they think are going to make them feel good, feel successful, you know, would lead to a meaningful life. But then, even though we're putting in as much effort, we're kind of not getting anywhere. And I think the issue is that our minds that what the way I like to talk about on the podcast, is that our minds lie to us about the kinds of things that make us happy. We have these strong intuitions that, you know, if this would happen, I would be happily ever
After all right, you know it's like I have the perfect job or if I get a higher salary or if I get a certain Accolade at work if I become partner or from my students. If I get you know, perfect grades like people think of those things happen that they'll feel happier. And you know, there's studies that look at people who get those wonderful things. And yeah, you get a little happiness boost for a little while, but it doesn't seem to last lasting happiness comes from something else. And so yeah. So the problem isn't that we're not working it, it's that we have these misconceptions about the
Kinds of things that are really going to make us feel better. But you know, we really need we need some like work to figure out the right sorts of things that will make us feel good.
So, the way that I think of people like this, I call them happy, if, or happy, when people, because they're not happy in the moment, they're happy. When something, at when I get a promotion, when I get a relationship, when I get a new car, when I get a new house, I'll be happy then. And then why is it that we never seem to be happy when that happens.
Yeah, well this, this is a bias that researchers called the arrival fallacy.
I really like the happily-ever-after a fallacy like when this happens I'll be happy. And you know, it's not like we're Miss predicting, you know, you get a new house and like, yeah, that feels good but it doesn't feel as good as you're going to think and it doesn't feel good for as long as you're going to think these are errors in what we call affective forecasting, your forecasting that you're going to be way happier, but we're off about the intensity is not as good as we predict usually, and we're off about the duration. It doesn't feel good for as long as we tend to predict.
Act and that means we're setting ourselves up for some disappointment. Right? And I think this is the kind of thing that happens for the. Like, I'll be happy when kind of people, right? You know. It's like, I'll be happy when I get a promotion and then you get the promotion you're like, well that didn't work, I guess I need, I need another promotion. This happens a lot with salary, right? Like I'll be happy if I get a raise, I'll be happy if I give this amount of money and you get there and you don't get as happy as you thought and you don't think. Well, I was wrong. It wasn't salary. I should go for something else. You think I wasn't enough money if I get the next
The next promotion. And, you know, it's one thing to think this, you know, if you're earning like an average American Income, but what's funny is, even if you look at incredibly wealthy people, they have the same mistake in intuitions about money, my podcast, the happiness lab. I interviewed this great guy clay, Cockerel who's a wealth psychologist. He's a like mental health. Professional that works with the Rich and Famous and you know, first first of all shocking is that he has a job right now based on our misconceptions, it's like, you know, the incredibly wealthy should have no Mental Health.
Alms, but they have a ton in. One of the biggest ones he sees is, is exactly this. Like these wealthy folks. Thought like when I become a millionaire, you know, then I'll be happy and then that didn't work, you're like, well maybe I need, I need in the tens of millions. I need to be able to buy your multiple vacation houses or four people. He works with in the hundred millions it's like, well I guess I have to become a billionaire. Once I can say I'm a billionaire then I'll really be happy. And at no point do they they go through these steps and think like, wait a minute, you know, the last the last 5 carats, you know, like I put for myself when I
To the carrot, it didn't work in the way that I thought, you know, maybe I'm wrong. And so yeah. So this is, this is this is our bias of affective forecasting. We kind of, we get wrong, not the direction, we kind of know, good things are going to make us feel good, but we definitely get wrong the intensity and the duration that that boost in happiness is going to
last. Is it because our reference group changes. So, like if you're, you get a promotion, all the sudden you're comparing yourself against your new colleagues instead of your old
colleague? Yeah. There
There's kind of two by sees. One is this reference group bias, right? Which is that, you know, our brains are just not built to pay attention to anything objectively, right? We just pay attention relative to stuff. So, hey, how much money should you earn? You don't have like an objective number. You have like, you know, I'm I'm a professor at an Ivy League institution. I'm like, well, I should earn about as much as other, you know, professors at Ivy League, institutions, like you're a podcast or you're probably thinking, I know how much should you earn like? Oh, you know, what is the average pot or what is a good podcaster? And I kind of want to earn that, right? Yo. So we never think in objective terms.
Always thinking relative to something and that what we think of as our reference point changes pretty quickly. You know, as soon as you become a you know a millionaire now your reference point isn't you know you know what, I was earning a grad school. Like now your reference point is like other Millionaires and you might not be as rich as other millionaires, right? They might have a better yacht, then you are a better vacation house than you and what's a dumb thing about our minds is that we never look to reference points that make us feel good. We always look to reference points that make us feel. They make us feel crappy, you know.
I was doing some Consulting with with a basketball team, and I was going through, you know, hey, what's your reference point for, you know, what's a good basketball player salary and they're thinking like, you know, Steph Curry, who's like, you know, highest paid, you know, I'm like, what's your reference point for height? You know? Now, it's not Steph Curry anymore because he sure it's like, you know, Taco fail, who's like, you know, seven-foot, you know, player for the Celtics and it's like, you instant your brain instantly goes to the one reference point. That would make you feel bad about yourself, you know, so what kind of body you have might not be the
Same reference point as who's successful in your industry versus who's making a lot of money versus who's a really good spouse, right? The comparison point you pick is always somebody that's going to make you feel like crap and that makes sense, you know, we want to have something to shoot for but it means we never feel good with what we have. We're always finding reference points that make us feel bad. That's kind of bias number one about why we never get there. But there's a second bias that's just this dumb feature of our mind which is that we get used to stuff. You know you start earning a million dollars and you get
All the stuff that comes with it, you know, and week one when you got a nice house with a nice shower and a nice car that feels good. But you know, by week two or three, that's just your shower has sure car. It's just your house. You've stopped noticing all the great things about it and this is like, you know, a bad feature of human psychology for all the Fantastic things in life. Even the best things in life we will wind up. Getting used to. Yeah. Dan Gilbert who's a psychologist at Harvard. Who writes about this stuff uses the example of like you know the first time your child says mommy or daddy.
First time your spouse, you're totally in love with says I love you. You know, that was a, that was a moment like that was, you know, you wrote about it on social media or in your Journal, that was. But, you know, last Thursday, when your kids said, you know, mommy or daddy or, you know, like, like running out the door, when your spouse said I love you, it doesn't it lacks the same oomph. So, even these best moments in life, if they repeat over time, kind of get boring. And, and this is what researchers call hedonic adaptation. It's the reason why even when we get the good things, even if they stick
Around. We stopped appreciating them as much because we kind of just get used to them and these two things together, this kind of reference point, comparisons and hedonic adaptation. It means even if your life is going as well as you could have possibly expected, you'll stop noticing that it's going so well over time.
How would you define
happiness? Yeah, I mean there's a billion different, you know, we could have a very, very long podcast episode if we're discussing all the ways we could think about happiness in my own work, I tend to
The social scientist definition, which is thinking about happiness, as a sense of being happy in your life and with your life. So being happy in your life is just having, you know, lots of positive emotions like Joy contentment. Ah, you know, like those kinds of things and at least relatively speaking less, negative emotions, not no negative emotions because a, you know, full and fulfilling Human Experience, probably has some sadness and anger and frustration and fear, like you wouldn't be human if you didn't have that. But on me,
Mass, it feels pretty good to be in your life and that means you have lots of positive emotions. The second part is being happy with your life and and that sort of the answer to the question. All things considered, how satisfied are you with your life? You know, you happy do you have like do a purpose and meaning in this sort of broad sense and these are what social scientists call. The kind of affective component of happiness or the emotional component of Happiness, that's the kind of happy in your life and the kind of cognitive component of happiness, you think your life is pretty good. And most of the strategies I talk
Out my podcast. And on my course, it's like we're trying to maximize both of those at once. They won't always be the same, my Residential College dean who I live with, she and her wife, just had a new baby. And like, I think that's the moment where, like, you happy with your life. Oh, my gosh, you have a new baby. Like the newborn. This is great. So much meaning itself. But in your life, there's like new dirty. Diapers you not sleeping, you know, like so there's these moments where they dissociate and I think they dissociate in the other direction to I think there are lots of cases.
Of those rich people. We were just talking about who feel, you know, in their life they have every luxury and flying first class, and all these things. But with their life, they still feel like there's some emptiness and something real that's missing. So, best case scenario is we maximize both of those for me, that that's kind of the experience of a happy life.
We tend to think that amplifying things, you mentioned the word intensity. So we seek to sort of amplifier. Happiness, should we do that?
I think. Yes, I know. I mean, yes, in the sense.
That I think we, you know, happiness takes effort, right? Like I had happiness takes work. Like all good things. You got to put in some work to get there and part of that work is understanding the misconceptions, but part of that work is like. We don't often have the best instincts about what will make us happy. The things that we kind of want to do in life, are not necessarily. The things we're really going to enjoy or like or that will give us a meaningful life. So I think we have to fight our misconceptions and we have to sometimes violate our intuitions about what to do to to live.
A healthy life. You know, I think for me this works a lot like, you know, Fitness and healthy eating, right? You know, like the things I crave and I'm drawn to, you know, maybe there's some people out there who craves salad and like a well-balanced protein, but for me, I crave like, you know, like the, you know, candy and chocolate fried and greasy things, right? Like eventually I'll get sick of that, but my instinct is to like, go for that stuff, right? But that's not really, you know, what a well-balanced, healthy diet looks like right, you know, you kind of have to overcome those grieving, urges and intuitions
Go for something that's a little bit more well-balanced. I think happiness kind of works like that. Like you gotta put some effort in to overcome the natural intuitions, which might not be leading you towards the stuff that matters the problem though is and I think where we go astray when we're seeking out happiness, is that again we have these misconceptions, right? We think happiness is about achieving these accolades. It's not we often think happiness is about self-care and treating ourselves and giving ourselves these luxuries. It's not in fact if anything it's about doing nice things for
Others, that gives you more of a kind of Happiness, bang for your buck than, like spending time on yourself. And I think it's about this notion of Happiness, that's only positive emotions all the time. I think we each have this kind of misconception, that's a little on the like toxic positivity Spectrum, where we're like, if I'm feeling sad or I'm feeling angry or I'm feeling scared, you know, something's gone horribly wrong and I haven't done it right when in fact, you know, there are times when it's normative to feel sad or frustrated or scared, or something like that. And so,
We do need to work towards happiness. We can become much happier if we work towards it, but often the conception we have of how to do that isn't right? And that means we go about it wrong. And, you know, and that that can be problematic in and of itself and part. Because you're like, I said, I'm seeking happiness. I'm seeking happiness and that makes you not present. It might make you a little selfish. I mean that in and of itself feels very anxiety-provoking and is causing negative emotions and so Doing It Wrong. Messes. You up and kind of winds up. Ironically
Leading you away from
happiness. Let's explore that a little bit because we're where do we get the idea that like a boat or a yacht or a house is going to? Because happier in the first
place, I mean part of it is that we're going part of it is that we pick up on whatever reference points we see right? And you know a capitalist Society where we see stuff on social media and on the news is going to show us what it looks like to have high status. What it looks like to have happiness. And I think there are a lot of advertisers out there, who could do a good job of convincing us, like, you know,
Copy. Everything would be if you had X product that we're trying to sell you. And so I think part of its our culture shows us these kind of representations and those just naturally become reference points that our brain soaks up and tries to go after I think also where evolved to go after the wrong stuff. You know, you know, we are products of natural selection which is a blind process that you know, if you kind of intentional eyes, it's kind of going for anything that will get you to survive and reproduce in to the Next Generation. So not just elections like
Like double down on all the resources, all the accolades, all the status, all that stuff just in case, right? Because we really want to, you know, make sure our genes get out there and that's that it doesn't care about you being happy. Like it really wants you to be a craving. Striving always pushing for more genes in the Next Generation individual. And so, I think we're, you know, we're built with a mind, that's not necessarily geared, towards making us happy like that wasn't Natural Selections and 10 if that came along for the ride, great, but natural selection, more wants us to like, get all the stuff out there.
If our society tells us Yachts are a thing like, brains, like, right yacht, that's what we need like, why don't we have one of these, what's going wrong? So all these mechanisms aren't they're not built for us to feel nice. They're built for us to go after
stuff. It's simultaneously. Pushes us to do more than we probably, otherwise would, but makes his miserable in the
process. Yeah, you know, I mean it again, you know, it has different goals, right? I mean, if I was building a mind, I'd build it in very different ways, but, you know, that was its goal was to kind of get us into the Next Generation and you know, it's not
Not entirely clear, going purely for happiness, would wind up doing that? As much as you know, the built-in mechanisms for striving and going after
stuff, you mentioned the course iel. You teach, see you teach the happiness course, at Yale, which is the most popular course there, how did that get started? And what can you learn from the fact that so many people signed up for?
Yeah, well, the origin of the class was, you know, I'd taught psychology at Yale for over a decade, but for most of that time, I was kind of like a professor at the front of the classroom kind of thing.
You know, so I saw a student life at college and at Yale but not super closely. And and then I took on this new role where I became a head of college on campus. So yells one of these funny schools, like Hogwarts and Harry Potter, where there's like, these, like schools within a school or these, like, dorms have different names, and communities and things. I'm head of Silliman college, and that means I live on campus with over 400 students who are part of my college part of my community. And in that, I mean the role was amazing, right? You get to create this community for all these, you know, intelligent amazing.
Stood students, but it allowed me to see their life up close and personal and and I really wasn't expecting the level of mental health. Dysfunction. I was seeing right with so many students reporting feeling, you know, depressed and anxious, you know, cases of suicidality and stuff. You know. First, I was like, well, how is this Yale as a something about the ivy league. But know, when you look at the national statistics, like we are dealing with an enormous Mental Health crisis, among our young people like National statistics report that nowadays,
Over 40 percent of college students report being too depressed to function. Most days over 60% say that they're overwhelmingly anxious. Another over sixty percent report feeling lonely. Extremely lonely, most of the time over 80% say that they're overwhelmed most days by all that they have to do. And more than one in ten, his seriously, considered suicide, at least once in the last year, right? Like, these are National statistics and, you know, for as I started realizing this, I was like, wow, like we as universities
Cities are kind of failing in our mission, right? Like these students aren't learning, you know, the Canterbury Tales or like are not computer science, compiler program, like all this stuff, we think we're teaching them, like they're just not encoding it. If 40% of them are too depressed to function, most days and they're, they're so anxious that they can barely get to class. And so, you know, that I kind of both in in an attempt to kind of do something for this community that I really grew to care about but also like, you know, fulfill it yells, educational mission to really get students to learn. I thought
We got to find ways to give students some of these strategies. And so it was really at that point, that I sort of re trained in this field of positive, psychology and behavior changes to try to think. OK, what strategies most does, my field really have about how we can do how we can give our students better strategies and what we as individuals can do a little bit better. And so I kind of put together the class, you know, it was a new class on campus. I thought, you know, 30 or so students would take it, which would be typical for like a new social science class. I was little surprised
Used when we broke the registration. Forms are normally the registration forms that you'll go up to 100 students, which is kind of a large class on campus, but they actually did change the axis on mine because we had over 1,000 students shopping the class. So they took like bump bump the whole mechanism up by like an order of magnitude. And in the end, the only room that where we could fit the class on campus was in the concert hall and so over a thousand students enrolled. The first time it was taught and you know, you asked what did that? Tell me. I mean you're telling
My students are voting with their feet, they don't like this culture feeling stressed and anxious, like they realize that this is toxic and that this is like not sustainable. And I think, you know, they really wanted some evidence-based strategies to deal with this, which I think is cool. You know, the students today they really respond to this more scientific approach. They don't want a bunch of platitudes about how they should live their life. They're like, okay, what does the science say? How can I Implement these evidence-based tips and that was really cool
which house is
Slytherin. We joked, you know, because
Ominous sounds a lot like Slytherin, but I think Slytherin is Jonathan Edwards, which is a different Residential College than mine
and with with the kids and without all its maybe. But I mean, you're getting hands-on experience with the kids are you seeing a notable difference during covid as well as we come sort of like, out of covid and how that's affecting people, what are you what are you seeing?
Yeah, I mean you know I think I think college students were at the breaking point when I first taught this class in 2018, all those statistics I
Telling you where before covid, you know, and many of them have just gotten worse. Like, you know, this pandemic is a sweet spot of destroying. Our social connection through flinging us into a period of extreme anxiety. You know, breaking of all of our rituals and routines and is just uncertain. We have no idea when it's going to end, we keep you. Like, alright, we're out of it, but are we really? And, you know, that's tough and and that's happening to our young people at a time when, you know, those important rituals that you'll never get back again or happening.
Ang at a clip, right? You know, there is like there's prom, there's first-year formal, there's like, you know, like your sophomore dance, or whatever. And in their missing, in many cases, where students were missing out on a lot of these at least during the depths of the pandemic. And, you know, that stuff, these are things are never going to get back again. I think also these for our students are really formative years, of practice socializing, right? You know, where are we now at? Yale are realizing that our first year. Students are coming in and the class of 2020 6, which will be our next caller.
Class that's coming in. You know, it was around their sophomore year that they got booted from school during covid and many of them. Haven't really even had a full semester back in class, you know, like imagine what you'd be like in college if you'd made it, you know, through your freshman year and then like a booted sophomore year. I like so many formative experiences, they've just missed. And I don't even mean academic. Formative experiences, I mean, you know, the normal stuff that you learn going to high school and kind of having those social experiences. I think we haven't really seen.
The full cost of this pandemic yet. All that said, I think there were a few funny parts of the pandemic that wound up being better for my students mental health than I expected. And this was particularly true during the first year back on campus. So the way you yelled it in 2020 is that we had students back on campus, but they were taking a lot of their classes on Zoom. A lot of like, Athletics were cancelled. A lot of extracurriculars were canceled. They were kind of doing classes, but that's it. And I was so worried.
How this was going to go. But two interesting things happened, one just not having as much stuff to do. Wound up making students feel less fomo, less anxious, lest, I'm famished, you know, students would tell me it feels weird. This semester, I finally have time to like, read a novel or like read a book or just like have some bandwidth, which is kind of interesting. The other thing we saw was that in part because, you know, students were kind of in lockdown together. They really did have this shared social experience, I think being on
Things like Zoom classes all the time, made the in-person time. They did have much more precious. And so you're after a day of Zoom classes, students didn't wanna like, hop on a bunch of video games and look at screens and do nothing. Yeah. Or just like, you know, spend time just like, you know, listening to music by themselves. I think students came to Crave this social connection more and so it meant that they naturally like craved and built-in more in real life social connection time. And so even in the depths of the pandemic, I think there were these moments.
Where we saw like huh these interesting things emerge like these strategies came out that might help us live a little bit better which is kind of ironic, right? Because I think yell doesn't want to say. Let's cancel all activities and all Athletics and all parties, because that will make our students happier. We don't think that I think we got a glimpse of overloading our students with too many choices and too many things that might not be the best strategy either, right? And so yeah so I think the pandemic has been this this difficult tough time but it's given us these
Little glimmers of things to pay attention to, you know, to make the way we run our daily lives, a little bit
better to other rabbit holes. I sort of want to go down there based on what you said, you mentioned, rituals and routines. Can you expand on the importance of that when it comes to happiness?
Yeah, there's there's just lots of evidence that I mean, obviously, we're just like creatures of habit, right? You know, we do certain things but but habits really help our minds compartmentalize stuff. Right? You know, you're home with your kids in the morning eating breakfast and then you know back Perico
It everyone, you know, hopped on the subway, drove in their car to work and then you show up at work, you see different people. You see it in a different spot. It kind of allows you to compartmentalize that, you know, the identity you have is a as a parent as a family member is it's a spouse and identity. You have at work when you're doing work from your kitchen table and your kids are sitting next to you trying to do school, that can feel really jumbled, right. There's there's no division anymore between these things and that's bad for two reasons. One, is that, you know, we need those divisions.
Has to keep these things separate. We kind of feel a little bit more cognitively overwhelmed when we're like juggling. All these things at once and a lot of us lost that, but the second thing is that rituals are really powerful ways of kind of connecting with other people and like, putting our mind in the right mindset, lots of lovely work from the psychologist. Mike Norton and his colleague Francesca Gino about the power of using rituals, for example, to reduce anxiety. You know, something as simple as like, you know, you take the commute to work can
Get you to work and feel like you're ready to go. Whereas when you just like log on on Zoom, you kind of don't have that in the same way, rituals are wonderful things when you do them together for creating social connection, and things like that, even though like teamwork meeting where you all sit at the, you know, counter together and get coffee. Like it doesn't have to be a ritual qua like a wedding ritual. I can give you these tiny things that allow us to feel a little bit more bonded with the people around us and I feel like both the big versions of that, you know, the graduations and the funerals and the
Weddings, like and the tiny versions of that the like, you know, on Tuesdays, we used to walk to Starbucks together, whatever a lot of that fell, by the wayside in the pandemic and that's a hit on our well-being. One that's often invisible, but one that I think we feel the psychological toll of
is there an element of community in that and feeling like, I feel like we have this psychological need to feel a part of something larger than ourselves and whether it's a sports team or you,
It's even sharing a connection with a friend and that's become harder in some ways. Drink covid.
Definitely. I mean, if I, you know, and I list out tips for how to feel happier often. The first one is improve your social connection, every available, study of happy people suggest that happy people are more social. They prioritize time with their friends and family members. But they're also just like a round other people more often like they, and we forget that, right? I think our instinct is like, oh, you know,
No, I'll hang out with other people. When I'm feeling social or I'm in a better mood, you know, when I'm kind of feeling in a bad mood, I want to plop down privately and like, watch Netflix or something. But there's so many studies showing that if you intervene and force people to be a little bit more social, they wind up feeling happier, even with strangers, is there some lovely work by Nick, Eppley and his colleagues showing that? If you force somebody to talk to a stranger on the train on their commute, to work, for example, they wind up in a happier mood, they predict it's going to suck like they predict it's gonna be awkward and I
I want to talk to somebody, I'm going to feel anxious because I didn't get as much work done, but in practice, it just puts you in a better mood that sets you up for the day. And I feel like all those little tiny weak ties social connections. We had, you know, the accident, I'll talk with somebody on a train even if you don't really strike up a conversation, you probably smile at people or, you know, say hi to the person. When you're turning the ticket in, you know, talking to the Barista at the coffee shop, you know the Chit Chat that you get in the office on the way to the elevator wherever you're going. All those little moments got taken away at the highwomen.
Height of the pandemic and for many of us, get taken away when we're still working from home. And I think we again, these are indivisible little, like, hits on our well-being, that we don't often see. But yeah, social connection is a big one and when you when you add to that, the reduction of these rituals, you know, that makes it even worse over
time. How do you think about the role of religion and happiness? Than because it strikes me as you're talking, that religion,
I had a ritual around most of these things, right? You would go to church every Sunday. You would see people, you would connect with them, you'd see different people than you, you would get a different perspective on life, talk to me about that.
Yeah, well, there's lots of work that specifically looked at religion and happiness and an overall, what that work finds is that religious individuals, tend to be happier on average, but you can imagine that's for two reasons. One, is that, you know, many religions come with a whole host of, you know, spiritual beliefs about
You know, the afterlife about, you know, a God. And whether there's someone taking care of you, you know, power bigger than you and so on, these religions will also involve the thing that I think you're getting out which is all these rituals are like they force you to be a little bit more social, you like hang out with everybody on Sunday or on the Sabbath or something like that, often. They involve doing nice things for other people and being present in prayer and so on. And so, when scientists really try to dig into that, which is tricky, you have to separate. You know, people who are very religious, you know, then they have really strong beliefs,
Then don't go to Services as much and so on versus people who are kind of like, you know, I say I'm Catholic but I'm kind of agnostic. But like, you know, I go every Sunday and I go to the Spaghetti suppers and so on right when you really do that work, what you find is that the effect of the correlation between religion and happiness, seems to be pretty fully mediated by those religious behaviors. So, going to church doing nice things for other people, you know, taking part in altruistic acts, it seems like it's actually religious behaviors that
They are making us happy not religious beliefs. What does that mean? That means that any kind of cultural institution that gets us to do the stuff, we were just talking about that makes you happier, you know, social connection doing nice things for others, being a little bit more present. We haven't talked about that yet but things like prayer and meditation are, you know, great mechanisms for being in the present moment, any institution that gets you to do that. It's probably going to make you happier. It's awesome to do that in the convent in the context of like religious institutions. Because like man, those are like, set up with
Oh, Polly structure around why you have to do that stuff? Often they're like thousands of years old, forgetting that quote from Big Lebowski. But it's like, you know, I think while this is, you know, like you know, thousands of years of tradition from, you know, Moses to Stanley Kovacs kind of thing about the Jewish faith and I think it was the same thing about so many religions. It's not just like some ritual, I made up and I'm trying to get my family to do. It's, you know, one that's thousands of years old and has a lot of tradition behind it. And so yeah, these are powerful institutions for helping.
Us put into practice these kinds of behaviors, that will improve happiness, but it's worth noting that it doesn't have to be just religion. The Divinity scholar Casper ter, Kyle has been studying, you know, other kinds of Institutions that are starting to do that. He's I'm thinking of things like, you know, you're a CrossFit group, right? You know, this really intense CrossFit group that you meet with every week and if somebody gets sick or gets, you know, breast cancer or something, they do all these events for your present with them in a different way. You feel like you have this holistic identity,
Turns out that does a lot of the same work, right? So you need something with like, sticking power and religions have special sticking power and part, because they shape our identities in our belief systems. But if you can find other things, that work that can work to you, don't necessarily it did the the the benefits don't seem to come from the beliefs as much from the
behaviors. I like how you distinguish between the behaviors and the beliefs and the the sounds like the organization. Then of religion is just a way to get the behaviors.
And it comes with a set of beliefs but you don't need the set of beliefs in order to acquire the behaviors. But it does seem to help because it's this cohesive package all in
one. Yeah. And I think, you know, and and of course we know there's a lot about having shared beliefs with other people that, you know, allows you to feel a closer identity with them and so on and so yeah. I mean, I think, you know, we were talking earlier about kind of natural selection shaping our intuitions. I think there's a lot of cultural Evolution that shaped these cultural institutions. And I think there's a reason that institutions
Have are thousands of years old, they've kind of beat out other sorts of practices because they're this sweet spot of bringing together. Lots of mechanisms that help us change our behavior in ways that might promote at least a sense of shared identity. And in many ways, an improved well-being and it's worth noting that a lot of those institutions are kind of, you know, not going away but I think we're becoming Much More individualized Much More secular. These kinds of cultural institutions. Don't often have the same force that they did. You know many
Hundreds or thousands of years ago. And I think that's telling for the kind of increased rates we're seeing of mental health
issues, and speaking of behaviors that people engage in, I mean, everybody thinks that social media is sort of good for us and some ways. And we all engage in this at one point or another. And yet it seems like it's having a negative effect especially on kids and to me, maybe you can talk just broadly about the effect of social media on adults specifically what you're seeing when it
Leads to University Edge kids and then how we can think about this as participants in this world where maybe we're not opting out, but how do we put guard rails around it?
Yeah, I mean social media is an interesting one because ultimately, it's like a tool, right? It's a technological tool that we could use in all kinds of ways. And you could imagine a world where we use this tool for all the stuff that could promote happiness, right? Like I could use Facebook live to connect with my
We members and really have social connection with people that might be tricky without that technological tool to connect with. I could use, you know, Instagram to be really present with my food and like, you know, mindfully notice it and really be there. I could participate in charity appeals that are happening on these sites and things I could use them to set better reference points. So I saw, you know what people in Ukraine are going through or like really kind of figured out the Privileges I had and looked at reference points that made me feel good in theory we could do all
And practice. We basically do none of it. I can practice. These tools are often used oddly, even though they're called social media to reduce social Connection in real life. You know, if you think about the study, that we mentioned about Nick, uh, play with, you know, people chatting on the train, like, why don't people talk to other people on their commute? It's because their head is stuffed in, you know, piece of technology, maybe not on social media but, you know, they're in their email or they're just looking at something, right? And it's a way that you're not connecting in real life because you have these other tools.
It's really not great for reference points and I think this is one of the factors that people find when you're looking both at adult and teen effects like over the effects of social media on adult well-being and teen well-being is that the more you're susceptible to social comparison. You know the more being on social media wind up negatively affecting your well-being. You know we just see the vacation photos and the bikini shots and the nice stuff that's happening to other people. And even though it's well, intentioned it can kind of make us feel.
Be you know, this is the week for academics when all our PhD students are finding out about certain fellowships whether you got like a National Science Foundation Award or so on. And my entire Twitter feed is congrats to my students so and so who got a National Science Foundation Award and that's, that's great. It's nice to celebrate that. But I know there's probably, you know, the 80% of other graduate students in the world, who didn't get that social media were door. Looking at that tweet and feeling like crap this morning, you know, and and we can't help it, right? You can't, you can't look at these reference points and not feel bad.
And so we get a lot of that. But then there's these just subtle things that I think social media is doing right. You know, how many times do I pull out my phone when I'm walking down the street and could be paying attention to, you know, the daffodils that are popping out this week because you and I are having this conversation in the midst of spring or the other people who might be smiling at me, you know, how often does my phone, you know, just sitting close by my bedside because it's my alarm clock and when I wake up in the middle of the night, I'm tempted to look at it and that's it on my sleep, you know.
Of the physical processes that we know are necessary critical for wellbeing lots of evidence that you see sleep disturbances and thirteen-year-olds 15 year olds in part because they looking at their phones. And so, you know, I think we could be using these technological tools for lots of good, but they're doing lots of bad. And then the question is, all right? Like how do we, you know? You as you mentioned we're willing participants in this Relic with this is us giving away. You know, these are behaviors that are like not making us feel good. How
Can we do a little bit better? And and one of my favorite pieces of advice that I share with my students comes from the journalist, Catherine price, who is this lovely book called, How to break up with your phone where she argues, you don't have to break up with your phone, but if to, like take it to couples counseling basically like renegotiate their relationship. And she has this lovely acronym that she uses called www which stands for what for why now and what else it shows? He argues like whenever you find yourself on your phone because some again sometimes it's social media but you
For me sometimes it's email or like looking at my text thread or looking at something else that's doing all those same things that stealing my attention preventing me from connecting with people in real life and so on. And so you know, you find yourself with your phone in your hand think www-what for what? What did I pick up this phone for? Was there a purpose? You know, I was checking the weather, I had a specific text that I was looking at or again just like wind up you know, like am I just down some rabbit hole of some stuff? I was looking at my phone? That's different why? Now right. Like what was the trigger? Maybe again.
Then there was like some specific goal or it, maybe I was feeling anxious or I was feeling bored or it's just become this habit that I you know, I pull it out when I'm walking, right? Like you know, why are you really on there now? And then, the critical question is like what else? That's the sort of opportunity cost questions. Like, what are you missing out on, being on your phone? Maybe it's noticing the daffodils, maybe it's talking to your spouse at dinner, right? Maybe, you know, it could be a million different things, but like, when you mindfully and intentionally pay attention what?
Could be be doing and she argues that a strategy like that might help us because it's not like these Technologies are awful again. They could be used for all kinds of useful stuff and even kind of Hardcore folks who've done the experiment to get rid of their smartphones. You know, you often find that you come back to them, Nick. Eppley who's the researcher, who does all the lovely work about talking to people on trains was feeling like his smartphone was making him, do that less. So you got rid of it, he got a stupid paid a lot of money to get a stupid phone because nowadays, it's like really hard to get like a stupid phone.
And what he found was like he had to get rid of it, you know, not because of the social media because like, you know he needed it to like call it ruber a lift or like you know to he needed like to look at the map. You know, when he was traveling for conferences and things like there are things with these devices are doing that are really helpful for us that I don't want to go back on but we need some way to renegotiate. The relationship and trying to mindfully, notice what your patterns are and then specific, you know, changing them if they're not good, can be a strategy towards using these devices. But in a way that's
Little bit more intentional,
how much of our happiness is directed by, where we place our attention.
I mean, so so much, you know, one of the full lectures, I give in my classes on, what I call attentional Hygiene, which is, you know, making sure you're paying attention to how your attention is being allocated. There's some really stupid features of human attention, which is like we kind of can't control where it's deployed, right? You know, if someone screams fire in a crowded theater, your attention is going to get deployed.
Whether you want to or not, but the same thing is true. If you're, you know, if you see, you know, great vacation shots on Instagram, your attention is just going to get deployed to like how crappy your life is. You know, if there's banging and things like your attention is going to get deployed to that. You know, if you get a notification or something even if you're having a nice conversation with your spouse, right? And so we put these devices in that are stealing our attention at kind of critical moments. And and that's bad enough when our attention should be on something that could be improving our well-being. Like, you know, it's nice.
Social conversation, I'm having with my spouse or being present in paying attention to the daffodils or just kind of feeling like you know you had some time like sometimes these notifications just break up our time in a way that can make us feel a little bit more time famished a little bit more. Like we just kind of don't have any free time to be present, you know we like again we willingly do that really we could shut off the notifications but we kind of don't but part of Happiness, really is about being present. You know, there's so much evidence that when we're mind
during when we're not fully present that that's a time when we're also not very happy, it's one of the reasons that techniques like meditation which are primarily techniques for, you know, intentionally paying attention to the present moment often with a certain kind of attitude like a non judgement kind of attitude. Those kinds of practices make us happier in part because the non judgment but in part just because like where there were pressing it were paying attention to life and just the act of paying attention even if it doesn't feel good. Like, even if you're kind of pay attention to
Being boring like that presence. Can wind up improving our well-being overtime. So finding ways to control the things that are stealing our attention and preventing us from being present, can be really good ways to boost our happiness overall.
And how do we measure happiness? Like how do we even come to a, some sort of quantitative approach to this?
I wish there was better ways to measure, you know, as a scientist. I wish there was like a little, like, happiness thermometer that I could put in your mouth. I was like, dude, like you're 80, you know?
Eighty point, one, happy or something. We don't have that and we don't have that for good reason, which is, you know, happiness is subjective, right? Like the best person to tell me whether or not you're happy, is you. And so the way psychologists often measure it is that we just ask people which sounds not very scientific. It sounds, when you would you tell people out of this work is based on self reports. I think they think those self reports are like some crap, like, you know, quiz that you get like on BuzzFeed or something, and, you know, you can have self report.
Scales that are true, scientific instruments that have been really well validated. We know that they're measuring something that is like a true construct in the world. We know that these self-report measures correlate with things. Like if I were to do, like a detailed hormonal analysis Corps, you know, like detailed interviews with your friends and family members or certain physiological markers. Like we know those things correlate but you know, the best way to ask you, you know? Hey, are you satisfied with your life scale? One to ten is I ask you and you tell me you're the best way to get a
Are you happy in your life is to ask you, you know? Hey have you experienced these positive emotions in the last week and you tell me and, you know, again, on the one hand, it feels not scientific, but it sort of is and it's probably the thing I want to maximize, right, when we're doing all these interventions to try to improve your happiness. If I do these interventions on your hormones change but you're like I'm not any more satisfied with my life. You have probably failed, right? But if I do these interventions and you tell me, hey, I'm experiencing more joy in my life and I feel like my life is more meaningful than like check. We've sort of see
Seated with our interventions.
What's the relationship between long-term? You mentioned sort of maximizing happiness. What's the relationship between long-term happiness and short-term happiness? And how should we think about that when it comes to you maximizing
happiness? Yeah, I mean I think this question comes up a lot especially in my you know, very type, A Yale student. So I feel like are often thinking that they're like, you know, studying and killing themselves now and not sleeping because eventually, you know, they'll be happily. I don't get this job, that'll make them happily ever after they'll get into medical school and so on.
So I bring up that example is like an extreme case because I think we often think there's this conflict between happy now and happy in the future. Like, what we should sacrifice now to like be happy later? Or you know if we invest in the stuff that's fun. Now will you know screw up our lives and we'll never get the accolades we want. But I think a lot of that sense that you know these things are in competition really comes from these misconceptions. We have like you know yeah you might not get the perfect Accolade in the future if you
Don't devote time now. But you know, but that's because you're wrong about how much that Accolade in the future is going to make you happy. If you look at the kinds of practices were talking about that really work, social connection doing nice things for others being present. There's not a, you know, there's not this much of a like fight between will do I want to do that? Now what's a consequence is going to have 4 in the future if you invest in those things now they'll feel good in the moment and they'll feel pretty good in the future too. And so it's not to say that there's not, you know, our present
His riches, our future selves. And then there's no kind of trade-offs there. There always will be, but a lot of the stuff that really works for maximizing happiness. It's not a like, well, do I get the benefit now our leader. The kind of benefit both and so it's a way to sort of overcome that the typical thing we think of with happiness, which is like, well, you know, whose happiness in my investing in, if you do it right, you often, you know, can overcome that that kind of trade off in ways we don't
predict and, and are there. Cultural differences in terms of what makes us human.
Happy. We're going to dive into the evidence-based approaches here in a second, but I'm wondering how much of what we know about happiness is Western versus Eastern and how much of it correlates across all cultures?
Yeah, I think no, I mean, many of these studies are done in Western populations. You know, the psychologist, Joe Hinrich, often talks about how psychology has a weird problem and he uses the acronym, weird for what western educated, industrialized rich and Democratic most
Jackson Every published psychology study, our Western educated, industrialized rich, and Democratic like and they kind of come from those things. And that leaves out a whole host of different populations with different kinds of identities and backgrounds. So that is true of the work that we talked about. That said, you know, for a lot of the practices I'm mentioning. When you look cross-culturally, what you find is that these things work, everywhere you go, you know, take the case of you know, pro-social Behavior doing nice, things for others.
Which is one that I think has been best studied worldwide, Laura Ackman, has done some fantastic work on this stuff. Well, she looks at the correlation for example, between volunteering or donating money and happiness worldwide and and she's able to do that because you have some nice, you know, big Gallup, surveys. That look at these kinds of things and she finds his pretty much true in like every single country you study, right? Like the idea is it's probably a cultural Universal and my guest is for most of these things we're talking about.
Cultural Universal's, and that's in part because the data we have, but in part because, you know, again, if you looked like religious traditions and what they're telling us to prioritize, like these people were on top of this stuff, you know, like Buddhists, you know who lives in. You know, different countries with like different kind of attitudes towards collectivism and so on thousands of years ago they were like, hey, be present, stop your craving. Yo, focus on others. Like these are kind of edicts that are coming down that have been true across countries across time and so on. And so,
While I wish we had better data as an empirical scientist. I always wish we had better data that weren't mostly focused on, you know, Western subjects his like often. When we look, you see surprising consistency. And if I had to guess not having the data in front of me, my guess. Is that a lot of the specific things we've been talking about our Universal? How they play out in the nuances of how they play out across countries are going to look different, but at their core, you know, being social being nice to others being present, you know, moving your body and appropriate ways like, you know,
On judgmentally, interacting with your negative emotions, my guess is that those are going to work wherever you grub.
And it's interesting, as you say, that what stands out to me, is they also probably not only do they stand the test of time and they cross cultures, but they probably are the same. No matter what age. We are to
there's some lovely, especially actually Lara act in whose work I just mentioned. She in collaboration with Kylie, Hamlin and Liz done and others have done. These developmental studies of little kids who, you know,
You might think of is like, pure selfish beings like are pure hedonist and what you find is like, they wind up happier, if they're doing nice things for others, they wind up happier, if they donate some of their Goldfish crackers to some other kid, right? And so these kinds of practices that were talking about in adults are probably not just kind of universal in terms of like all across all people everywhere but my guess is universal in terms of age. You know, these are you know time-worn strategies but time-worn even you know, across human
And things too. And I think that's one of the reasons that, you know, lots of historic patterns that we've seen and happiness across ages. Are changing a little bit, right? You know, used to be the case that, you know, older individuals wind up being the happiest, something we don't expect. But something that's, you know, good to look forward to as you get older. Right. And then there's not a lot of fantastic things to look forward to as you get super old. But one is that like overall your well-being tends to go up? Not down. Elderly individuals tend to be happier but a little bit less. So recently and I think that's in part because
Loneliness has is up in those populations, you know, same with my college students. You know, I think college, you know, when I was there in the 90s used to be a time when people, you know, we're really social felt like they had a lot of friendships, you know. But these days again, as I was saying around two-thirds of college students, report being very lonely, most of the time. And so I think there were these historic age related patterns that were related to well-being, but those patterns weren't just like, oh you're just happier when you're older. You tend to do the stuff that promotes happiness, more when you're older, it's easy.
Either easier to, or more culturally accepted to or it kind of happens more naturally. But as those behaviors change across ages, you're seeing corresponding hits that come to well-being and flourishing to
what's Your Gut. Tell you about why we're feeling more lonely now than than before?
I think, again, it's lots of things. I think, I think the technology really is a hit on this stuff. I mean, I noticed this myself, you know, I teach this stuff and I try to be really careful about this stuff, but they're definitely
Definitely opportunities that I've lost out on for in real life social connection because of my phone, right? You know I am embarrassed about the number of times I'm like huh and my husband was talking to me about something and I was looking at something, my phone but it wasn't like some important. Like, you know, do-or-die email is probably like the weather or like, you know, I did. I was look here real estate prices. There's this is like some stupid incredible thing, Catherine price has this harrowing story that she told on my podcast, that the woman who wrote this, how to break up with your phone book,
She had just had a new baby and she was nursing and she realizes, she was nursing that her baby was looking up at her into her eyes and she wasn't making eye contact, because she was looking at her phone to buy new door knobs. She's like, I need new doorknobs, I'm doing this kitchen renovation, and she was like, oh my God, this, you know, like millions of years old, evolutionary moment of a parent, looking at a nursing baby and I'm not even present there because like, I'm looking at friggin door, knobs, you know, and I think we've all
Had these moments. And so, you know, I think we really need to pay more attention to our Technologies but also not beat ourselves up. And mean one thing that you realize if you to start taking attention, seriously is like it makes sense that were drawn to our phones rather than the people. In real life Liz, Liz done, who's a psychologist University of British Columbia, who studies a lot of the social effects of Technology use. She has some really scary data. She does these studies were, she has people sit in a waiting room as though.
Waiting for the study. But really, the waiting room, is this study and she has you either have access to your phones or not. And she measures really simple things like how much you smile at the other people who are sitting in the waiting room? Not even how much you talk but just how much you like have basic human social interactions like smiling other people and she finds things like we smile 30% less when we have our phone near us even if you're not using your phone, right? And, you know, all these teeny tiny basic social interactions are going away, but she points out like it makes sense, right? You know, even if my phone is off,
Off on my desk, my brains, not stupid. My brain knows that on the other side of that phone is my entire inbox for the last 15 years and, you know, every weather statistic and music and podcasts. And, and she likened to do my podcast, you know, like like imagine, you know, in going to out to dinner with my husband and instead of bringing my phone, I bring this big wheelbarrow full of interesting stuff. And it's got like DVDs and a TV of every movie out there every music video. It's got photo albums that printed out my photos for the
Ten years, it's got like, you know, printed binders of all my e-mails and like, you know, like videos of porn like anything. If that wheelbarrow, is there, you would not pay attention to conversation. You would be like, oh honey, let's like look at the pictures from our wedding that I like and she's like your brains, not stupid, your brain, knows that that full wheelbarrow and way, way more is on the other side of your phone. So like, you know, I have a very interesting husband, he's a philosopher, I know we've lots of good conversations but like if his conversation always is good, is that
Pleat wheelbarrow, like maybe not, you know. And you know, my brains not stupid. It's like constantly checking, right to go back to it. And so, I think we've created these devices that have rewarding content that will always be more rewarding than in real life. Social interaction in the short term in the little quick dopamine heads. But ultimately, that means we're missing out on in real life. Social connection that really is better
and drives long-term happiness,
and really drives our long-term happiness. Yeah,
let's talk about the evidence a
It approaches to feel better?
Yeah, I mean, I think one awesome thing about the modern day is that, you know, I think we have all these intuitions about what makes us happy. But you know with positive psychology and empirical psychology, we can test these. You know, we can take not-so-happy people and make them engage in Social connection or do nice. Things for others and measure whether happiness, improves happiness, as measured by self-report on how your positive emotions feel after doing that or your sense of satisfaction with life and so on. And when we do this, we find
and the things that make us, happy are pretty straightforward, right? We want to increase our social connection. We're happier when we do nice things for others, we're happier when we are focused on, are are healthier habits like things like, improving our sleep and getting more exercise, we can really see the effects of this stuff and and, and often quite profound effects. One of my favorite most profound effects is the effect of taking a little time for gratitude. You know, the simple Act of counting your blessings. There's a
It's the in, as little as two weeks, the simple Act of writing, three to five things you're grateful for down on a piece of paper. I can improve your well-being. Like significantly improve your well-being. There's also evidence that expressing gratitude to other people like writing a, you know, detailed, thank you note to someone that you've always wanted to thank but never got a chance to the act of doing that. At least in Marty Seligman and others data can improve your well-being. Not just significantly immediately but can give you an a an improved well-being effect that last for over a month.
Right? Which is crazy. You know, if I was like, you know, there's like this pill that you can take, that will improve your well-being significantly for over a month. You take one pill in months later. You're feeling good. You be like, man, I'm gonna do that. Like, the simple Act of writing a thank-you letter can do that. And so I think we need the evidence because the evidence is sometimes shocking. Even for me, that knows it. I'm like, I would not have predicted that like, but then when you see it, I think you can say. All right, I'll commit to that. I think this is one of the powers of doing this class with my students. As like, I show them the
Some like, do you want to join to be here on the graph for here? Like if you want to be here? That's, that's doing some. Thank you letters. That's writing down. Things you're grateful for and I think when you see how much you can really improve, I think that's what gets people to commit and actually make the behavioral changes that takes some work to really engage with the
stuff. How much of that is really changing our frame into our own life. So it's not that we've actually changed anything. It's we're changing where we place our attention and by doing that, we're giving ourselves
Us more perspective in terms of the world. And I say this coming out this when I catch myself having a bad day, and, you know, beating myself up. I always try to remind myself that there are like seven billion people in the world that would instantly change. All like, trade, all of their problems for all of my problems and that all that, that phrasing, and just that way of thinking about it, tends to get me into a broader perspective.
Div and then gets me seeing things a lot differently.
Yeah. I think, I think there's so much that we can change by changing our mindset, by changing our attitude, by changing the things, we attend to, you know, you're talking about, resetting your reference points, right? Like your reference point could be like, there's millions of other people, that would be so happy with this right. Another change that's related to that is, is it a technique that we know from positive psychology? But it's also an ancient one. It's one that the ancient stoics talked
a lot which is what's called - visualization. So the so stoic saw that you should start every day. Visualizing just for a second that everything you thought was great in life is gone. So they said you should wake up and be like you know my spouse left me. I've lost my job. I'm Layman my legs. You know, like I'm about to be ostracized, you know. I don't have my community more. You do that for five minutes. You're like but that's not true. It didn't happen. It's kind of like It's a Wonderful Life and you run the movie really fast in your head and, and ideas like just by
Healing what? It might feel like to have something - happen. It resets your reference point. It also kind of like stops your hedonic adaptation for a second where you're like, oh my gosh, like there are good things about having my spouse. And so on one technique, I use, which always freaks out my audiences when I'm giving a talk about hedonic adaptation and - visualization is I have people say, you know if you're a parent imagine like the last time you talked to your kid, that's the last time you're ever going to talk to him. Like we don't have to figure out what
Herbal things going to happen but they're gone, it's done right instantly. You get this sense of like the next time you see your kid, you're going to hug them a little bit closer, right? And all it took was like a two second - visualization about what if what if they weren't here, right. You know, we have the capacity to really appreciate this stuff but we need to bring our attention to what you know what matters and why these things are great in our lives. And that takes a little bit of work but it's really a possible. We can have a richer life and savory things a lot more by
Reference points.
Let's talk about kids for a second. Can we adjust our kids sort of like Baseline level of Happiness based on our own modeling of behavior? Or is it all sort of genetic and? Is there a Magic Window? Where we can influence their happiness? Set point sort of easier.
Yeah, I mean suit, when you look at happiness in genetics, you kind of get, you know, two kinds of messages. One is that there's, there's lots of evidence that happiness is heritable. So some of the variants we see in,
The population about you know, happy people and not so happy people that variance is probably due to somebody's genetic history, right? However, that doesn't mean that genetics is Destiny. Even the heritability of happiness is, is lower than you might expect, you know, estimates kind of vary, but it's probably around you 40% 30%. Like it's not, it's not that all the variants and happy people that you see out there, in the world is like, what some people are genetically happy and some people aren't, that's just simply not.
The case. And that means that there's a lot of room for, you know, the environment and epigenetic effects to take hold and usually when I mean environment, I remember like you and your behavior of what you're doing to promote your happiness and so that's a story about happiness in genetics and I think you know as a parent as you think about conveying these things to kids. I think it's about kind of building in these right strategies early on, you know, I focused on college students. I wish my college students got a lot of these techniques and learned about these evidence-based.
Roaches much earlier. And so we, you know, with my team here at Yale, we're sir trying to think about ways that we can get these strategies out to younger and younger kids, but I think there are lots of ways that parents can promote this stuff. You, I think parents do a great job of worrying about, you know, whether kids are getting good grades and, you know, being academically successful. I think we really need to think about conveying some of these skills for boosting, happiness, over time to.
Do you see any parenting techniques or approaches?
That perhaps are well-intentioned but over time lead to discontent or unhappiness and children.
Yeah, I think we've seen, especially just over the last ten years, a lot of changes in how much parents intervene and help their kids. You know, there's been a lot of talk about obviously like helicopter parenting and so on. Now it's often said that we're in the domain of what's called lawn. Mower, parents or Steamroller parents not like your swooping in to help your kid which is the helicopter model. It's like you're mowing the
A lawn or flattening the path completely. So there's like no bumps or you know, a little things for kids to navigate kind of doing that preemptively and I think it's incredibly well intentioned, right? Like no one wants your kids to go through anything hard. I think there's a real stike sense that the stakes are high like you know, you want your kid to like learn, but there's also like performance and you want them, you know, you want your kids to learn and to take their bumps, but you don't want to do that on the SAT because that's going to like really matter for whether they get into college. But I think more and more like everything feels like the
Sot. There's no point where it kind of is, okay, for them to, like, screw up and learn and that's really problematic, because we know a couple of things about how kids learn one is that, like, you got to fail to learn. And in addition, you gotta fail to develop anxiety that you can do. You gotta, you gotta fail in order not to develop the sort of anxiety, that whatever task you're doing is going to be impossible for you. And what I worry about a lot is that parents? Who kind of In This Very well-intentioned way, try to solve problems for kids, take
Away the opportunity that kids get from solving those problems themselves. And then might not seem bad except that, that there's lots of evidence that that contributes to kids beliefs about, whether they can solve those problems themselves. My colleague here at Yale Julia, Leonard studies. The way that kids develops beliefs about their own competence and she does this in like really little kids. Like so think Toddlers and her task work, something like this. So she brings a toddler and she gives them a tough puzzle to figure out. And she either has parents
Try to help by, you know, doing like giving some sort of strategies of like hey what color is this? Like a kind of teaching thing where you're not solving it for them but in you're not giving like, hey I'm going to give you a hint, you're just like, hey, you know, pay let me like Justin let you pay attention to the right stuff versus the thing that parents tend to do which is here's how you do it. I'm just going to give you the solution or even worse you know you and I get it like you know as a person who's like dealt frustrated we would kids before his like let me just do that for you. Like you do know how to do it, it's really hard like let me just do it.
What she finds is that when you give kids a very different puzzle later on, kids who've had that taking over condition where the parents give the answer, give up much more quickly. And if you find ways to survey them about what they believe, they believe like, they probably don't have the ability to do that stuff. And it makes sense. Like, you know, if the kids like while my mom's taking over for me, this must be really hard. This must be really scary, right? You want my mom's getting anxious about my grades? That must mean that the grades matter really a lot, right? And so, I think what parents don't realize is
At that, you know, quick solution of like, I'm just, I'm just going to take care of it, either out of their own anxiety or out of a real. You no idea that this is helping it winds up, ironically, doing just the opposite and winds up kind of making kids feel like they themselves are less efficient and less capable than they could be. And it winds up contributing to a lot of anxiety. And in my experience, as a college professor, I see this more and more among parents, more and more parents checking in, you know, my roommates having a room in conflict. And I'm like, why are you why
Are you talking to me, like, like, why aren't they, you know, you can give them some advice about him handle it, but it's their room in conflict or parents calling, professors about a student, getting a bad grade. And again, I think it's well intentioned, the goal is to help, but ultimately it's not achieving the goal that parents think they're
achieving. Well, in a way you're not practicing sort of the muscles, the resilience muscles that you'll need later in life, and you're not getting a chance to exercise them, and then when something happens and you're called upon to use them, you just don't have
Yeah, I mean, I think that's right. And I think this is one of the reasons we're seeing so much more anxiety in our college students today, right? Is that they've never they've never had a chance to, to mess up. They've never had a chance to do it on their own. And so, when they finally have to do is seems really scary and they really have these beliefs that they're not capable, the the author and former Stanford teen. Julia lift got hymns, has whole books about helicopter parenting and she talks a lot about how today's teens
Our failure deprived like they haven't had a chance to fail, and this has these consequences not just that like when they finally do fail, it's like really terrifying but even to try something where they might fail feels, you know, way scarier than it would have if they'd had tinier failings along the way.
What else comes to mind? When you think of it, sort of parenting techniques that are well-intentioned but you're seeing in college kids that backfired?
Yeah, I think another one is, you know, I think a lot of parents are
Worried about their kids well-being. And I think that that's, you know, good obviously want parents to care about how their kids are doing, but it tends to be, you know, in my experience, you're very anxious parents that are worried about their very anxious kids. You know, when I meet the parents and I hear their anxieties about the kids grades, I'm like, well, no wonder your kids are interested about crazy cuz you're embodying all these kind of anxieties. And so, I think one thing that's useful for parents to remember is about the science of
Contagion that like you know we naturally catch other people's emotions if you're embodying calm and this is going to be fine and everything's okay. Then kids are going to follow that. If you're embodying anxiety and like, oh my gosh, this is so, you know, important, like kids are naturally going to catch that too. And I think that, that that's tricky to remember, you know, I often get parents saying, oh, what can I do to make my child feel happier? And I'm like, well, your view focused on your own happiness. Like, how are you doing? It's like, well, no, no, I want to, I want to focus on
I mean it's like, you know, you got to put your own oxygen mask on first, right? Not just because you know, they're paying attention to the strategies you're using. They're paying attention to your priorities. Those are implicitly getting transmitted but literally your own emotions are getting transmitted. And so, I often say that if you're really worried about your kids happiness, like do some work to focus on your own because, you know, if you're feeling less anxious, if you're a feeling in a better Zone, if you're expressing gratitude, all these things are going to naturally come to your kids more easily too.
You mentioned the term, emotional contagion. I like that. How do we protect ourselves from unhappy people? Whether they're sort of like, that, friend, we sort of can't let go of or a co-worker or, you know, the sort of miserable Surly person that's in everybody's lives family member or something. What can we do to put a firewall between us and them
almost? Well, when I think one thing is to recognize, you know,
Like explicitly that they are having that effect. I think we all know that implicitly when you interact with the, you know, one co-worker who's like that Surly person, you leave that alike and you know and then you take the surliness out with you. You know. It's worth remembering though that emotional contagion is a two-way street that we have power to, you know, just as that Surly person is affecting us. If we walk into that meeting, expressing, optimism, feeling good. And so on, they're going to catch that too. And I think we forget that we can see
The kinds of emotions that we want to see. That's true. In our interpersonal interactions. It's also true in our social media feeds. Sometimes I feel like you hop on Instagram or Twitter and it's just bad news, bad news, bad news people complaining people complaining and then you kind of catch that but it's worth remembering like you can see the opposite, right? Like you can post something different and so taking control over yourself and your own emotions is a way to to do that. I think another strategy is making sure you notice what's happened in those interactions. So that
The emotions you caught don't automatically wind up affecting your behavior. This is another kind of misconception. I think we have. I think we have this misconceived notion of how emotions work. I think. We think like there's a situation, it triggers emotions and now like we had those emotions, we will act on them like our co-worker made us angry. So like now we will inevitably slam the dishwasher around or doing things and like be a little short with our kids is just like we have to. But, you know, there is this idea that between feeling the emotion and acting on it there.
There's a whole host of strategies. We can use to regulate those emotions notice them but not act on them. And I think this is important because when we look at the misery that's caused by our negative emotions, it's not often the situation that caused it. It's like the extra bad steps that came with how we reacted to those emotions. You know, that my favorite kind of way of thinking about this comes from a story from the ancient Buddhist tradition, that's known as the second arrow. And so,
Stories that Buddha is talking to his followers. And he's telling his followers this Parable and he says, hey if you're walking down the street and you get someone shoot you with an arrow, you know it does that feel bad and people like oh yeah it's terrible to get shot with an arrow and Buddha says, okay well imagine you're walking down the street and you get shot with not just one Arrow. But two arrows is that is that second Arrow were so people say yeah, you know, sucks even more it against, you know, shot with a second Arrow. It's a Buddha goes on to explain that. We don't often get to control the first Arrow, that's the situation. That's you know you walk in and it's this early.
Coworker or you get some bad Health news or just something bad like the world throws this at us, right? That's the first Arrow but he says are the second arrow is our reaction to those situations and that's under our control, right? You know that's if you like you have this early co-worker and you don't like take time to do a couple breaths and then you take that home to your kids or you react to the health news by like you know freaking out and making bad decisions. And like in what Buddha points out is like we are responsible for the second arrow and sometimes
Really make it worse. And, you know, Buddha does it say this but I'd say like, you know, sometimes not just one second Arrow. It's like an entire quiver of arrows. I'm like, you know, I had a bad day at work and then I, you know, like you know, have an extra too much glasses of wine and then I don't sleep. And then I am short with my husband, and then it's like, boom, boom, boom. You know, so we need to realize that those second arrows are on us, but also that we have strategies, we can use to control those secondary emotions that come from it. There really is things we can do.
To kind of control the things that we come
up. What are some of those things that we can do? Because, in that moment, what's happening is we're reacting and we're not reasoning, right? So we're thinking, we're just in automatic mode and how can we get out of that automatic mode? How can we put a clutch in or just a slow down, just a kind of change a gear? How do we create that pause? Where we can move from reacting to reasoning?
Yeah, I mean, one is when is Finding ways to be more present and allowing yourself to notice what those emotions are, right?
When you're eating, you're in that meeting with the Surly colleague. If you can develop these practices in mindfulness, you can be like I'm watching my blood pressure rise, like that thing with my jaws happening. Like this is a signal that I like I'm feeling pissed like, okay, like it's okay to be pissed but then now I have strategies to kind of deal with that, you know, another is to kind of watch your reactions and that the kind of timing of things, you know, this is where I often catch it where it's like, you know, I'll have some interaction with a
Go work, or I'm really annoyed. But then, like three hours later I'm talking to my podcast producer and texting about, like, can you believe she in red? And he actually is, you know, he we know the second Arrow stuff, so, he'll text me back to Arrow emojis. And I know I'm like, you know, it's four hours later, like, she has nothing to do with this, right? This is me, you know, keeping this going and so a little bit of mindfulness can really go a long way here of like once. Because once you have this moment of noticing, you realize, like I don't have to be my thoughts. I don't have to be my emotions, right? I can kind of
I can hit pause and I can react to this differently.
So, back to that co-worker. Just for a second, what role, broadly speaking do, boundaries play, if anything in sort of our own internal happiness, whether its boundaries from other people that we're setting and or boundaries from work or sort of like having a work home divided. How do you think about the role of boundaries and happiness?
Yeah, I think I think boundaries are really important. They are in some ways you could think of them based on the kinds of things. We've talked about before.
For is kind of control mechanisms that we use to deal with our attention, right? Like if you know it's going to like be a situation that causes you to feel anxious or you know, pissy if you deal with this early colleague then like you can limit them out, you deal with this early colleague, right emotion regulation and finding ways to control your emotions or sometimes about, you experience that emotion, you've got to control it and regulate it in the moment. But you can also be smart enough about like, trying not to get yourself into that situation in the first place.
Which is often, you know, like emotion researchers call these things complicate things but it's like situation selection like, don't select situations that are going to put you in this horrible, emotional place, like kind of give yourself, you know, a little gift so that your hot self is not kind of put in these awful situations in the first place. And ultimately, I think boundary setting is a lot like that. You know, you're really kind of mindfully paying attention to things, and making decisions about your well-being based on whether this is a good situation to go into are not and, you know, sometimes that can involve hard
Decisions. I mean it's very similar to the phone ultimately, you know, the thing we were talking about with technology and kind of regulating its effects on us is setting some boundaries with how you use your phone. Maybe you don't use it in bed because it's going to affect your sleep or maybe you know you commit to like having it notify you and you have this moment of like I was that for a good thing or something like you're functionally setting, boundaries with how you use that. And I think we need to do that with so many of the things that affect our well-being and life. Whether that's other people, certain situations ways that we spend our time. I think we need
Intentionally in mindfully, notice what it's really doing for us and then make some informed decisions about whether we want to keep experiencing.
That is the lack of boundaries. One of the reasons they were experiencing so much burnout. Like talk to me a little bit about burnout and how we can avoid
it. Yeah, sober. Now it's worth. I mean, there's so many kind of lay Notions of burnout. I think it's important to just start with how scientists really think about burnout. And so when you look at how scientists like Maz lack and others have thought about burnout, they usually
We think of it as having these three parts and so part. Number one of burnout, which is kind of what we commonly think. Is this idea of emotional exhaustion, right? You're just dead right? You know, like you have a good night sleep and two hours into your work day. You're done or I like you just, you know, that's emotional exhaustion but there are other parts of burnout to. And so another one is this idea of personal ineffectiveness. You just feel like ultimately the things you're doing, have no meaning, right? And I think, you know, that that that I think is coming up more and more
The present day, maybe more and more with covid, but like, even if you're doing your job perfectly, it doesn't matter. It's not helping people, it's not kind of doing the right thing. I think there's just a problem where a lot of jobs are structured to kind of feel like that, you know, the late journalist. David graeber talked about this idea of bullshit bullshit jobs where it's like, you know, like like if you're if your job went away not, it wouldn't really affect, you know, like the fate of the world in any way like, it doesn't matter, right? So this is this idea of personal and Effectiveness you just feel like what you're doing.
Doing doesn't have meaning. But the third part of burnout is, is it interpersonal kind of burn out. It's what Maz lack and others called depersonalization is functionally just like a terrible cynicism and lack of compassion, right? You're just getting a little bit of a short fuse with the people around. You, like someone asks, you a completely reasonable thing for your job description and you're like, you know what, screw you like, screw you for asking for me, like, you know, how dare you your intentions are bad and so,
These are the features of burnout. There's this lovely maslach has a kind of patented burnout. Inventory of burnout. Scale one of these self-report scales you can take, I encourage people to do, you know, Google it and like you know grab a grab a free copy and take one of these things. You can find it on the internet but you can get a sense of how high you are on some of these things. And when that number starts creeping up, this is yet another one of these cases where emotions are really good signals for us. They're telling us some important information. If you're
And seeing those symptoms, it means you have to make some changes like you're an often times. It's not because your work, you didn't care about your work or your work is boring or. It's not often times, it's because you got so involved in your work, your work is really your identity right now, and it means that you got to kind of make some big changes, you know. Recently, I announced that I'm taking a year off from my role at Yale as ahead of college and taking a year off from yell and it was in part because I was noticing the seeds of some of these
Things right? You know, do feeling a little bit more personally ineffective due to covid-19 a lot of that was covid. But a lot of that was like, yeah, I'm like throwing my, you know, I'm trying to do all these cool events for students. We can't do anything because we, you know, they can't be in person or we can't throw these kinds of things. I was like, feeling that more and more, but definitely feeling the kind of depersonalization. And that's the one I was most worried about, you know, a student would ask me like a reason, you know. Can I see my great on the midterm and see how I didn't be like, oh, you want to schedule a meeting with me? Like, do you know how packed my
There is, you know, and I was like, wait a minute is completely reasonable for a student one of you with me. Yeah, and so it's like, it's those things that are kind of creeping in when you're kind of like just annoyed with people and you've got this short fuse and it's like it doesn't feel good. But again it's like if you think of emotions as these like regulatory signals their these like beak, you know, there's the alert systems like on your car where you're like gas gauge goes on like these symptoms are your emotional gas gauge for Burnout and if you don't act on them you know you're going to really run out of fuel or
Like, you know, like you either get scared and I like a catastrophic problem and you got to kind of take action on an action, you know, looks different. Sometimes. It's real rest, like, real rest, like taking some real time off, sometimes it's renegotiating your own identity and relationship with your job. You know, often, you know, in a tricky way, it's like structural changes. Like, maybe we need to rethink, you know how we're thinking about work, more broadly as a society, but, but it's important and I think it's these are powerful.
Signals that we need to listen to a lot
more. A lot of people when they find themselves in this situation seemed to seek Solitude is that the the right approach? And if not why not?
Well I mean Solitude, I think when you're experiencing this the depersonalization which is like Rich cynicism, you know, I get it's like I don't want to deal with people anymore, but ultimately that's allowing us. That's forcing us to lose out on this one. Mechanism for kind of filling up, our happiness, tanks as it were because
People really do make us feel better. And I think this is the problem when we're, when we're in the fix of something like burnout, we often go towards the wrong stuff, right? Like we're often not like, let me pick up an engaging hobby that will like build my identity but it's kind of hard like you're emotionally exhausted. You're like I'm not doing a hard, I'm doing like plop on the couch and watch Netflix but actually kind of what you need is hard, what you need is to engage in a little bit of a little bit of flow, the the psychologist Adam
Aunt had a very viral article in the New York Times during during covid on the phenomena of languishing, which isn't so much a burnout. It's just kind of a this sort of deep feeling of like me or blah, right? You know, if you hit like full depression, this depression can feel like an intense sadness feeling, but languishing is kind of like neither here. Nor there, you got nothing and you know the science is, the way out of languishing is to get into flow at this active state, where you feel engaged and energized and challenged,
And it can be hard to go for flow when you're feeling emotionally exhausted. This is one interesting thing. I teach my students about is where were really bad when it comes to picking Leisure. That will feel good though. These cute studies where, you know, you ping people at different times of the day and you pink people when they're at work. And you ask, how are you feeling? And, you know, not for every job. But for a lot of jobs people feel in flow and a little bit challenge is hard but you're working and, you know, you feel engaged and you feel active and things when you ping people, when they're at their Leisure. Because
We pick Leisure that's like, you know, plopped on the couch, you know, like scrolling through what shows, you know, I've been watching the show, you're scrolling through. Now shows you could watch. People say, they feel kind of apathetic like they're, they're not really that challenge. They're not in flow, but you ask people. Hey, you're at work. Would you rather be at work? Would you rather be at leisure people like? Oh, definitely rather be at leisure. You ask people at leisure it like, would you rather be at leisure like you are right now? Would you rather be at work? We like I'd rather be at leisure so it's like we don't want to be at work but we forget in some ways the like good.
Things that work does for our psychology, which is it sometimes kind of puts us in challenge mode puts us into flow and I think that the answer is that we kind of all need, we need Leisure. That's a little bit more challenging. That's a little bit more flow inducing. You know, we kind of pick incorrectly when works are picking these things and that leads us to not get the benefits out of leisure that we could get. And I think this gets exacerbated and burnout because of the emotional exhaustion issue, you're like I don't want to learn a new language or, you know, figure out some new thing I just want to play.
Because I had the the only energy I think I have is to plot but by staying in that local minimum, your sort of missing out on opportunities for the kind of Engagement that could pop you out of those emotional
states. It's interesting. Is you're saying that I'm thinking the types of leisure activities that I most enjoy our all-encompassing, right? So they're sort of like, cooking their paddle boarding, their these sort of things where you have to pay attention, and you can't really, I mean, your mind can wander, but I can't go very far and they're, they're Karthik in that
That way rather than the channel surfing.
Yeah. And I think you know, when we think about what we really want out of our Leisure, I think it's flow inducing activities, and it might also be activities that you you want to call fun and you know people that there's actually not that much empirical work on fun but Catherine price. So I mentioned before, who does this work on technology and phones is also has a new book called The Power of fun. Great book. If you kind of want, you know, like the if you're struggling with your leisure and you want some good ideas but but she
Is the first ingredient of fun is that is flow. It is engagement. You can't have fun if you're just kind of flopped around but she argues that fun kind of adds a little bit more to flow where it also has an element of being really social. So it's hard to have like truly like if you think of the times in your head simulate a time that you think of as like most fun like that thing I was doing that was the most fun ever, usually it's social. Yeah. Even if sometimes social what I got dog or like whatever, but it's usually social, it also has a certain kind of
attitude and it's like an attitude of play. Like you're not, you're not doing a side hustle, you're not doing something to make money or to perform in a specific way. You're just kind of messing around with a sort of childlike attitude, a sort of playful attitude and so so so she'd argue that, you know, if you really want to prioritize like the best Leisure possible, you want the flow that active engaged, but you'd also want to add elements of being social and you'd also want to add elements of like playfulness and I think again a lot of these get harder.
Burn out your cynical. If you don't want to be around other people, you don't have the energy to engage in flow and I think because of this personal ineffectiveness, your kind of. So, constantly beating yourself up that, you know, it's hard, it's hard to kind of give yourself the benefit of the doubt and like, yeah, I'm not going to be judgy about this. I'm not going to be trying to be perfect about this. I'm just going to be like letting myself, you know, do it for enjoyment sake. And you know, all those things become harder which compounds the problem
Switching, gears a little bit. What do we know about what makes for?
A happy relationship
mme not happy relationships are, you know, relationships are happiest when you're in a relationship with other happy people. And so I think you know, one thing to make sure is that you're helping your partner achieve. Some of this stuff that we're talking about to and again you know I think the number one question I get is how do I make my kids happier? But I think the second question I get you know it's like how do I make my my spouse happier my partner happier. And so I think finding ways to engage in these sorts of things can be really powerful.
I think we forget the power of attention to make our relationships better. You know, if you look to some of the work on relationships and what what kinds of factors can signal that, you know, your relationship is not going. Well, there's some work suggesting that it has to do a little bit with attention, you know, often in relationships, we make these kinds of bids, you know, I show my like, oh honey, like look at this stupid thing on the internet or oh, I, you know, like how did your day go or something we're doing ask of
someone and they're kind of two ways, our partners can react, they can kind of attend to that bid and, you know, show you attention and respond back or they could kind of like ignore it or blow it off or, you know, they're not even paying attention because they're looking at their phone and there's some evidence that you can make predictions about how our relationship is going is going based on just the number of those so-called bids that a partner responds to positively like when you're asked for attention, you kind of attend back, you know, in these
I've been talked about in the domains of relationship science about you know like couples and blah blah blah but I think it's functionally about attention like you know, when your kind of reaching out for the attention of your spouse, do you kind of give it back and you know, I think this is one of the challenges, you know, in the ways we were talking about is like there's competing things for our attention and there are companies that are making, you know, millions and millions of dollars winning that war, you know, my, my spouse doesn't have like an entire team of like, you know, Google Engineers making his bids for my attention more.
Ding, you know, but Instagram does. And so we need to kind of pay attention to how we are attending to our spouse and how we're devoting time. And some ways that those are the biggest gifts and I think if you start solving those, you go a long way to the other stuff that comes with it. When you're being more present, you can be more grateful. When you're being more present, you can find more time for fun and play you know. So but but the attention in the presence kind of comes first and that really leads to another big thing. We know is so important for happiness which is having
A little bit of free time. You know, why don't we attend to our spouses? You know, it's probably the technology, but it's partly because we're busy and we just don't have time. Lots of evidence that, you know, one of the key ingredients for happiness, that we often forget, is, what's known as time affluence. This just subjective sense that we have some free time. Time affluence is the opposite of what? What's often called, time famine, where you have the subjective sense that you're starving for time. And we know, psychologically that time famine feels a lot like, like, real.
It has the same physiological effects where your triaging stuff. It doesn't feel good. Activate, your fight or flight and it's awful for your well-being. In fact, some work by Ashley willens shows that if you self-report being time famished, that's as big, a hit on your well-being is if you self report being unemployed, you know, we know unemployment's awful for your happiness, just feeling like you don't have any time is bad too. And I think one of the reasons it's bad is when we feel more time, famish, it's harder for us to connect, right? I mean, we're just like rushing or you're rushing. You do you have time to connect, but you just kind of
I have this triaging since you don't have time for social connection, don't have time for that like quick conversation with my husband. It's like you know. Boom boom. Boom. And so giving yourself the subjective sense that you have a little bit more. Free time can open up Windows for social connection, including the kind of social connection that you get with your partner in your
relationship. And when you're feeling rushed, you're always thinking about the next thing you have to be doing, right? So if you have a short meeting with no gap between the next one, you're always just anticipating that is so your, it's harder to even be in the moment.
And so part of Happiness, then is sort of like doing less to have more free time.
Yeah, I think that's the irony. Is that we'd all be a lot happier. If we gave ourselves some free time, he was a real irony for my college students who have so, you know, bazillion extracurriculars and they're always feeling full Mo that they don't even doing enough, despite having such a filled plate, but, you know, it's the irony that we all experience. One of the Ashley Williams has done some really lovely work on time affluence, broadly, she has this great book called time smart. That talks a lot about this.
And she argues in her work that, you know, one way that you can spend your money to feel happier is to use your money to buy back time. You know, you we all have, you know, any of us that have a little bit of discretionary income can choose how to spend it. But one way we can spend it is like, on time-saving purchases. You know, you buy the cut-up veggies at the grocery store to cook or you get curbside pickup or, you know, take out you hire the neighbor's kid to mow the lawn right things that you're doing to like, get back a little bit more free time. And if you
Make those purchases you're happier, but if you reframe the purchases, you're already making as time-saving. It can make you happier. You know, probably many of the people listening to this, at some point of order, like takeout. But did you, when you order the takeout calculate how much time you saved? You know, I went, I went to the Thai place and I got pad time like, dude if I try to make chicken Pad Thai that would take you know like my kitchen would be a wreck. I have to clean it after. Look it up, you know, I got two and a half hours out of that pad, thai order. And what did I do with that two and a half hours? Just
The act of saying that for me feels like oh like oh gosh, I you know, I saved all that time. What did I do with it?
There's a quote that somewhat controversial, but it goes something like the rich invest in time and the poor invest in money. And I think there's a lot of Truth to that,
although what Ashley finds is that you'd think that was true but in practice what she finds is that the rich are often not as much investing in time as you expect in part because there's this idea that like time is money, like you'd think you'd
You get to a certain wealth level, you'd be like, all right. I can shut off and stop learning this income, you know, like, you know, I like take more vacation time and so on. But what she finds is like, now time is really money, right? You know, so you know, if you're earning if you're earning minimum wage your time to, you know, like, like if I don't go to work for an hour, you know, I don't get my, you know, ideally 20 bucks but, you know, in some places, 15 bucks, whatever. You know, if you're learning what Elon Musk does and you don't go to work for an hour, you know, when you think
About that like, oh my God, I just lost. I mean, I don't know how much she earns per hour, but like it's probably a lot more than minimum wage. And that can be really hard right now. That trade off, because we prioritize money so much and assume that it's the thing that makes us happy. It's really hard to back off and she argues, as your income goes up, it can get harder to back off because it's like almost a status symbol because you're making more money. So, I think that used to be true, like, the Leisure Class has used to. I think like, you know, if you look at the Leisure classes and like the 1920s and thinking like, you know, old, you know,
Graham, you know, movies like Philadelphia Story. Like the, you know, the privileged classes enjoying their privileges in one privilege was time, but even though privileged people could be investing in time or, you know, they don't always, but there's a flip side to this which is that the privileged classes could do this. But they're not actually talks a lot about the fact that you know, a lot of the unhappiness hit that comes with poverty isn't necessarily A not having money hits a not.
Having time hit, you know. So she argues that time famine comes with you know being low income and it's actually the time famine that's a real hit on well-being more so than the money famine.
Well it's interesting because we often think of discretionary we talk about percentage of discretionary income, that goes to like groceries and sort of goes to gas and all of this stuff. Especially now as inflation is rearing, its head but we never think about like the percentage of time that people have to spend on certain activities and how that correlates across
Different socio-economic, statuses and, and to your point about sort of having people who once they're earning money. Well, now it's loss aversion, right? So, you get two things. Two powerful forces working for you. One is loss aversion. I don't want to lose the salary that I've worked so hard to get and all of these forces that drove me to get to this place in the story that I'm telling myself about why I'm here, doesn't just turn off like a light switch. Now that you've sort of reach some Tipping
Point. Exactly. Plus all these other forces telling,
You you know what, you should be spending your money on which isn't time. It's like a new Gadget or another material possession and so on.
So I want to sum up some of the things that we talked about today in terms of evidence-based approaches people can use writing down what you're grateful for writing down and expressing gratitude doing things for other people - visualization and sort of creating more free time and then being conscious about how you're spending that time to and what activities that you're engaging in what AM
A saying. And what else do you want to add to that
list? You covered a lot of stuff. I think the one last thing I'd add is just the importance of remembering that, you know, your brain and your happiness are like tied to your body. Yeah, I think we think there were these like, you know, mines that are floating off and nowhere. And we forget that if that mind is attached to a body, that's not getting any sleep, that's not moving. That's like constantly like you know flaring up its fight or flight system. Like we forget that those
Kinds of things matter a lot. And so, one of the things I try to emphasize with my students is like, these basic healthy habits. And it's funny as we get, as we get busier, as we get more frantic as we're feeling more depressed, you can watch these things Fall by the wayside. You know, like when I'm having a particularly frantic week where I'm feeling really time famished often the, my instinct of the first things that should go should be, you know, my morning elliptical it's like I can still at our back but like that morning, elliptical
You know, there's evidence that gliding like a half hour of cardio exercise a day is like significantly reducing symptoms of depression and anxiety. Like we forget how powerful it is that's exercise and let's not even get into sleep, right? Which is you know, another one of the first things to go as like, oh I'll sleep less, but then that winds up having these cascading effects on our mental health during the day. But even things like our concentration, our ability, the ease with, which were present and so on. And so, if you're really trying to prioritize your happiness,
You also kind of have to prioritize taking care of your body, particularly exercise and sleep for improving your mental
health.
Total I want to end with a question that comes from one of my friends kids actually. And she asks, is there a difficult point in your life that you could share where the message the methods that you're teaching helped? You get to a better
place? Yeah. I mean, honestly so many tiny little ones it's like hard to pick a single one. I mean, you know, if I'm being honest you know what I became ahead of college and took on this new role, you know, and saw the kind of mental health stuff that my students were going through, you know, part of it was the
Really extreme mental health cases your but part of it was like the little stuff I'd run into students, you know, in the courtyard and be like how's it going? Like off I could if I could just get through midterms and get to Friday, you know, it's I was watching them kind of just like Fast Forward their life, you know, just like out of stress and these little things and not being present and not noticing stuff, you know, it hurt me because I'm like I don't want them to do that but it also struck a chord because like I was doing that stuff to if they ask me how my week was going to be like, oh my God, if I could just get through eternity, it's Friday,
right?
It's easier to see another
people, totally and so. So what what seeing the this store these stresses and the stuff through my students eyes taught me as like, oh man, like I have to start doing this stuff. I have to be a better example for them and in so many domains like, you know, in part, because I'm a human in part, because I think my instincts are worse even than the average humans. Like, I don't have any of the intuitions do this stuff like, well, you know, I'm having a bad day, like every molecule in my body is screaming. Like,
Don't talk to anyone plop and watch Netflix definitely don't you know do a hard yoga class like and I know like that's just wrong and I'm like brain shut up like and so you know for me having these techniques at the ready, a really, really powerful and honestly I think have, you know, really were so essential and getting me through pandemic in one piece, you know, I'm a nerd. So I take a lot of these self-report surveys over time and I found that, you know, on average, since teaching this class my well-being has gone up.
You know, in a small, but significant way probably about a single point on like a 10-point happiness, scale, but that's a lot. You know, I'd much rather be an eight than a seven and when times are tough, I'd much rather be a six than a five, you know? And that's kind of the power of these approaches. They're not going to turn everything, you know, Sonny and roses and unicorns all the time but they'll give you that Competitive Edge when things are feeling pretty tricky. And so, yes, I don't know if I have a specific one but in just so many different ways,
These techniques have saved me and I watch myself, forcibly, put them into effect, even when I don't feel like it because I know the science and I know like, you know, I want my, my students to see that I'm doing the right thing too.
Thank you so much for taking the time today. Lori. I appreciate our conversation.
Yeah, thanks so much for having me on the show.
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