Welcome to the huberman Lab podcast, where we discuss science and science based tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew huberman. And I'm a professor of neurobiology and Ophthalmology at Stanford school of
medicine. Today we are discussing
happiness. We're going to discuss the science of happiness because indeed
there are excellent
Laboratories that have
worked for many decades to try and understand what is this thing
that we call happiness and what brings us happiness in the
Short. And long-term fact, we could probably point to happiness as one of
the most sought-after States or Commodities, or emotions, whatever you want to call it. Happiness is
what many people are seeking in work in
relationships, and in general. And yet, most of us can't really Define exactly what happiness is
or means for us. We can
point to certain experiences, we can try and describe our
states of mind and body but most
people recognize the feeling when we
have it.
And we certainly recognize the
feeling of not being happy whether or not that means, simply not being happy as the absence of happiness or all out depression.
One of the key
problems in trying to understand happiness and indeed the science and psychology of happiness
is that it does indeed involve other similar
things. Things like joy and gratitude and meaning and
indeed many scientists and psychologists
have argued. For many, many decades about what happened
This really is,
we can come up with so called operational, definitions of Happiness. Operational definitions, are basically agreed upon terms, were agreed upon definitions and conditions. That will define
something such as happiness,
much in the same way that we
can all probably come up with an operational definition of milk. But of course, milk can be cow's milk. It can be oat milk, it can be soy. Milk etc, etc.
So to Something like, Happiness can be micro divided and sliced and diced
into as many things as we
I'd today we are really going to focus on three main things. First, we are going to define
happiness as a brain State and as a state of mind and body, we're going to take a look at what the science says about all of
that. Second, we are going to talk about tools and practices for placing ourselves in
two states of happiness. And while, for most of us, we think of Happiness as something
that only arrives through the acquisition of
some goal or something, external
to us. And, of course, that is true. There is
Is also something called
synthetic happiness or synthesized happiness, which turns out to be at least as powerful and perhaps even more powerful,
I'll just say right off the bat that I'm not going to tell you that. All you have to do is sit in a chair
and imagine being happy in order to feel happy
synthesize happiness. Actually involves some very concrete steps that have been defined by
excellent labs in Psychology. So we're going to talk about synthesize happiness as it relates to, what you can do to obtain happy States, more readily, or more frequently,
and then
Third, we're going to talk about some of the misconceptions or what I would call the
contradictions of Happiness research.
And what I mean by that is most of you have probably heard about the general conditions for obtaining happiness
and they always seem to circle back to some of the same basic features of get great sleep.i have great social
connection. Pursue meaning, don't Focus to any over extent on things like pursuing money because there are indeed
these studies that show that the amount of money that people make.
It does not necessarily scale directly with happiness. Talk about those studies in some detail a little bit later. And
while all of that literature is very
powerful and
informative. There is what I see as a contradiction, which is for instance, that for many of
us, including myself, especially in the years when I was in graduate school and a postdoc,
there were times in which pursuing and being involved in work and pursuing degrees and finding meaning in my vocation.
He
separated me from the opportunity to have quite as many social connections, or quite as much sleep, or quite as much exercise, or
even quite as much Sunshine for that matter. So, all of the things that we're told that we need in order to access happiness on a regular basis, oftentimes contradict with the
pressures and the requirements of not just daily life. But in building a life that allows us to have the kind of resources that we need in order to have things like Quality Social connection and the time and opportunity to get regular exercise.
Exercise and great nutrition, etc, etc.
So, again, while this isn't necessarily a complaint with any of the research
out of the fields of psychology on happiness,
it is important that
we acknowledge these contradictions that exist in the discussion around happiness. In
particular, the popular discussions around the science of Happiness. So today what we are going to arrive
at what you will finish this episode with is a set of
tools and a framework for understanding the pursuit of happiness in the short and long term.
As it relates to the research from psychology. But also the
neuroscience and my goal today is really to try and place that all into a structured framework so that you can know where you are in your journey or the
landscape around happiness in your Pursuit of Happiness. And what I won't tell you is that you need to abandon all goals in terms of pursuing money, career Etc, and simply focus on
relationships. But we will talk about what
constitutes an, excellent social.
Or even an excellent conversation. There's excellent
research that points to the fact that even rather shallow connections, that is connections between people that you happen to just see in the
hallway on a regular basis.
Not even requiring, close bonds of any kind, can be built into close bonds, that can deliver a tremendous amount of feeling and genuine social connection. Provided certain conditions are met. So today again, is really about understanding the science of happiness.
Understanding the mechanisms, underlying, what we call, happiness,
and providing you a framework by which you can pursue and Achieve happiness, not just as a long-term goal and not just as a day-to-day goal of little
micro exercises of gratitude etcetera. But
rather as a way to think, about happiness, as a state, that you have
control over at least in terms of your ability to access what I would call the algorithms, that enable us at work open the opportunity to experience
happiness. Now before we begin today's episode
I'd like to talk about a very specific tool that applies. Yes
to our pursuit of happiness, but actually, to our pursuit of everything, including quality sleep and ongoing motivation,
etcetera, I've talked many many times before on this podcast and on other podcasts and on social media about the critical value of getting regular bright
light, ideally sunlight in your eyes within the first hour of waking, or if the sun isn't out, when you wake up in the morning to turn on a lot of bright artificial lights and then get sunlight in your eyes for anywhere from
To 20 minutes depending on how cloudy it is in the early part of the day. Absolutely outsized effects on mood and focus during the day and quality of sleep at night.
Now, there's another sort of central tenets of getting great sleep and improving mood and focus throughout the day and that's to avoid
bright artificial light exposure to your eyes between the hours of about 10 p.m. to 4 a.m. now leaving shift workers aside and we have an entire episode devoted to shift work. Most people are asleep at night and awake during the day and you would be wise to
to
avoid exposure of your eyes, too bright artificial
light between the hours of 10 p.m. and 4 a.m. If you're going to
use screens, artificial lights, dim them
down, as far as you can. Now, there are several studies that point to the fact that
one of the major issues with getting bright light, in your eyes
between the hours of 10 p.m. and 4 a.m. is that it has a negative
impact on the so-called dopaminergic or dopamine circuits of
the brain and body, which can enhance depression that is lead to ongoing lower mood and affect. So that's a
Dim the lights or avoid Bright Lights between 10 p.m. and 4 a.m. however, I and many others need to use artificial light in screens sometimes, even between the hours of 10:00 p.m. and midnight, or even midnight to 3:00, a.m.
depending on what's going
on in my life or your life, that may include you as well.
Now, it turns out that there are powerful ways to offset some, not all, but some of the negative effects of Ewing, artificial
lights, between the hours of 10 p.m. and 4 a.m. And one of the most powerful ways to do that is to
Simply adjust the overall brightness of your artificial lighting throughout the day and in the evening. So one of the issues
nowadays that we're really facing is that people are simply not getting enough bright light in their eyes from sunlight or from other
sources during the daytime and
they're getting far too
much bright light in their eyes largely from artificial sources of course in the evening. And at night
not just from 10 p.m. to 4 a.m. but also in the
evening hours from 6:00 to 10:00 p.m. and so on and so
forth. So a very simple yet powerful solution that supported by
Peer reviewed research in humans is to try and make your indoor working and or home environment during the day as bright as possible.
Now, if you can achieve that through direct sunlight terrific, if you can get outside a
lot during the daytime terrific, but many people simply cannot, but most people do have some windows in their environment. I realize some don't, but most people do. And as a consequence, most people are using rather, dim
artificial lighting indoors during the day and then very bright. Artificial lighting.
Indoors in the evening and at night. That's a problem. And if you think about it, logically you want to do the exact reverse.
So it's been shown that if you simply increase the amount of bright artificial light
that you were exposed to during the day,
and remember this is not an excuse to not get
your morning, sunlight viewing. But in addition to that, to make
your indoor, artificial lights, very bright bright, bright, bright, bright
throughout the day, and then much
dimmer from the hours
of 6:00 p.m. until bedtime. Or if you can't do that, then maybe.
As soon as you get home from about 8 p.m. until bedtime and then dim them way way down between 10
p.m. and 4 a.m. or off
entirely. That's going to be a far better pattern for your
sleep-wake Cycles, Focus mood Etc. Then what most people do,
which is to have a few windows and their indoor working environment during
the day, and keep the
indoor lights rather, dim at a time, when they need more photons, more light energy. And then in the evening, when they get home,
because it's dark outside, they tend to turn the lights, much brighter. You actually want to do the reverse,
Now, there's an even simpler solution which is to get some bright sunlight in your eyes right around the time
of sunset. It doesn't have to be exactly at Sunset. It could be in the late afternoon and evening
but it's been shown now in studies on humans and I'll provide a link to at least one of those studies that by getting some
bright light in your eyes, ideally from sunlight in the late afternoon, and evening. And, of course, the timing will vary Depending on time of year and where you are
located on the planet but facing the sun around sunset.
You don't actually have to see The Sun Cross down below the
Horizon but facing the sun around that time for anywhere from 5 to 10 minutes or even less even to 25 minutes, can adjust the sensitivity of neurons in your
retina that communicate light
information to the brain and make it such that in the evening when you use
artificial lights, they aren't going
to have as much of a
detrimental effect on your dopamine system and for impairing your
sleep. Okay? So the idea is as much bright light, ideally, from sunlight, but also from artificial sources from the time,
You wake up in the morning
until the evening, maybe around 6:00, or 7:00, maybe in the
summer months a little bit later and then really try and get as little bright light in your eyes
as you can in the evening and nighttime hours. And ideally you would also get some sunlight exposure right around the time of sunset or in the late afternoon. Go outside, take your sunglasses off. Don't try and do this Through a Windshield or through window. It will not work. You have to get outside if you're under an overhang, at least try and get some direct sunlight.
In your eyes at that time, and that will adjust the sensitivity of your retina. Such that bright artificial lights or artificial lights of any kind that you're exposed to in the evening and in the late hours of the night won't have as much of a detrimental effect. That said, if you go to the bathroom in the middle of the
night try and keep the lights, dim, many people have asked whether or not for instance a nightlight or a flashlight is going to have it as much of a negative effect. This is very straightforward if you think about it if you shine a light at something you can see into
your environment if you ever been.
I'm camping, you've walked with a flashlight, you can see things around you that you wouldn't otherwise, of course, but if you were to shine that light in your eyes, it would be far brighter. So yes, of course
if you get up in the middle of the night and you can use your phone
flashlight to illuminate the environment that you're in. So you can safely go to where you need to go.
And then back to bed, that's going to be
far better than turning on the lights or of course shining light in your eyes, right? So the idea is
bright, bright, bright in the morning and throughout the day and
is dim and dark as possible at
night and that afternoon light View.
Provide sort of what I call a Netflix inoculation that will
allow you to adjust your retinol sensitivity and give you
a little bit more flexibility in terms of allowing some nighttime light exposure, without the detrimental effects. Now, I realize today's episode is about happiness, it's not about sunlight or dopamine and yet as we'll talk about more in
just a moment. If you're not optimizing your sleep, and if you are using or being exposed to light, rather at the wrong times of the day night cycle,
Well, that is going to make it very hard for the other sorts
of practices that relate to happiness, to have their full impact. So, the backdrop where I would say the kind of landscape of your chemicals and your
hormones is powerfully
controlled by, not just the brightness of light. But the timing of light and your exposure to light, in particular, your exposure to light, to your eyes, is something that you have a lot of control over.
You don't have absolute
control but you have a lot of control over
and it's been proven that even these small steps which are completely cost
They require just a few minutes of time but no purchase a product or anything
else can allow you to greatly, adjust your
neurochemistry and your hormones in the direction of better, mood, better sleep, and happiness. Before we begin,
I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is
separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford.
It is however, a part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to Consumer information
about science and science related tools for the general public
in keeping with that theme. I'd like to thank the
sponsors of today's
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let's talk about
happiness. This thing that everybody seems to
want and yet, not everybody can agree
upon what exactly it is.
Or how to get it.
Now, I want to start by quoting a previous guest on the
huberman Lab podcast. And that is a colleague of mine at Stanford School of Medicine. Dr. Karl deisseroth, who's both a
bioengineer and a
clinician that is. He's a
psychiatrist. Who spends a lot of his time. Both running a laboratory and seeing patients, human patients, of course and I once was at a meeting where I heard Carl say something to the extent of we
Don't know what other people feel, in fact, most of the time, we don't even really know how we feel. And while that statement was meant to report, several different things about the way that the brain works and emotions, Etc. One of the things that he was
emphasizing and I know he was emphasizing it because he confirmed this for me
was the fact that language
things like the word happiness, or
Joy, or meaning, or pleasure or Delight are
actually not very precise when it
comes to describing our brain and body States. So for instance, if I tell you, I'm feeling pretty happy, I know what that means for me at least in this moment but you don't really know whether or not it means the same thing as what pretty happy means for you. If I say I'm extremely happy and I have a big grin, I have a grin on my face that I can't seem to
Wipe off my face. Well then you might get a sense of how much happier I am than pretty happy
but it's still hard to calibrate my level of internal state or happiness. And the same is true for you and for everybody else and
it's important for us to acknowledge this because at this point in human history 2022, we don't really have a measurement like body
temperature or heart rate, or heart rate
variability or even a way to measure neuro
chemicals in the brain.
Embody that give us anything better than a crude
correlate or an estimate at Best of What happiness is. So
that's really important to understand. And to keep in mind throughout this episode, it doesn't mean that we
cannot have a
strong
data-driven conversation about happiness, and what brings us to a state of happiness. But
it's very important to understand that language is not an ideal and maybe even a
deficient tool in terms of describing our emotions and our states of mind and body.
He now equally important is to understand that. While we do have neurotransmitters,
that is the chemicals that are released between neurons nerve cells. That allow neurons
to communicate
things like glutamate and Gaba for instance and we
have what are called. Neuromodulators These are
chemicals also released by neurons that impact the electrical firing and chemical release of other neurons things like serotonin and dopamine and acetylcholine and that
Epinephrine neuromodulators and neurotransmitters are always present in a cocktail in our brain and body. That is, they are present in different ratios in the different levels. So we need to completely discard with the idea that anyone neurotransmitter, or anyone
neuromodulator is solely responsible for a state of happiness, or for a lack of state of happiness. For that matter, that
said, it is true that for people that tend to
Lower Baseline levels of, for instance, dopamine their levels of
happiness, where we should say their self-reported levels of happiness,
tend to be lower. Then for those that have greatly
elevated Baseline levels of dopamine. Now
this can be best appreciated at the extremes where, for instance in conditions like Parkinson's disease or other conditions, where
people's levels of dopamine in the brain is severely depleted mind you. We also see this in drug
Addicted individuals that are in a withdrawal State because they're trying to quit or they don't have access to the drug that normally stimulates release of dopamine. Think the cocaine addict who can't get cocaine or the methamphetamine addict. The can't we're trying to avoid taking methamphetamine where the Parkinson's patient, who has fewer dopamine neurons because they degenerated
those individuals do tend to be
more depressed. They tend to have lower effects, they are less happy. At least that's how they
report themselves to be emotionally and
that's what we
When we look at them behaviorally in terms of the amount of smiling, the amount of energy, they seem to have at the opposite extreme and while still focusing on the kind of pathology of neurotransmitter and neuromodulator systems
an individual who is in a manic phase of
bipolar
will tend to have very
elevated levels of dopamine
and those people will talk a mile a minute and they won't require sleep and at least to them, every idea is an
exciting idea and one that they want to pursue, we did an entire episode.
About bipolar depression, make a bipolar disorder. So if you'd like to learn more about that, please check out that episode that in all other episodes of the podcast, of course you can find it huberman lab.com and all formats.
But the point here is that very low levels are very high levels of dopamine are correlated with certain
states of, for instance, low happiness, or the absence of Happiness, we could even call it depression in some cases, or
extreme happiness, or even Euphoria, sometimes even inappropriate you
As is the case with bipolar depression, or is it some kind of sometimes called? Bipolar Mania, or bipolar disorder.
Now, of course, there's a range in between depressed and Manic. And most people, fortunately reside, somewhere in that
range and it is indeed a
Continuum. And I think it's safe to say that levels of dopamine, probably do
correlate with levels of happiness,
but there is no one single chemical nor chemical signature.
That is no specific recipe
of two
parts. Dopamine to one part serotonin to one part acetylcholine that we can say equates to happiness Andy. There's now tremendous
controversy as to, whether or not for instance,
having lower levels of Serotonin is actually the cause of
depression, or merely correlates with depression, or maybe doesn't even correlate with depression at all this became, especially
controversial because in the last year so called serotonin,
hypothesis of depression has been called into question.
Ian and indeed it
does seem to be the case. That for individuals that are depressed, their levels of Serotonin can sometimes be normal. However, and this is an important, however, that does not mean that administering drugs that increase levels of
serotonin in depressed. People does not sometimes and indeed often help ameliorate some of their symptoms. Now, she mentioned that many of the selective serotonin reuptake Inhibitors so called ssris such as Prozac and Zoloft. It's Etc, are still considered excellent treatments for
Conditions like OCD and so on and so
forth. But what I'm trying to do is make two important points. First of all, that language is
not a great indicator of internal State, especially when
trying to
understand other people's internal State and that is especially true for things like
happiness and that there is no one chemical signature of happiness.
There's no one neuromodulator or combinations of neuromodulators that we can say is the cocktail for happiness, but, and it's
a very important.
But
when levels of dopamine and serotonin tend to be chronically low for an individual below, their typical Baseline, they will yes. Tend to be
lower in effect and have lower mood and less episodes of Happiness per day per week per month per year, Etc. Conversely,
when an individual
has
Ins in dopamine and serotonin levels in particular, dopamine levels and the other so-called catecholamines, which include epinephrine and norepinephrine. So the catecholamines, our dopamine epinephrine and norepinephrine they're all very similar. Biochemically they all lead to states of elevated. Motivation energy and so on, when those chemicals are elevated above Baseline, people do tend to have elevated sense of mood and well-being and in particular sense of possibility about what they can do in the world and what the world
Old can offer them.
So we need to
acknowledge those two features of language and neurochemistry as we wade into the discussion about the psychology of happiness and in particular about the
controlled experiments that have been done in excellent, Laboratories
focused on the psychology of happiness and what brings happiness and what does
not there. Have been some excellent studies
on happiness and these come in
two forms. Generally, one form of these studies is individuals, come into a
laboratory,
They participate in an experiment over the course of a day or months and then data are collected, analyzed and the papers are submitted and published and discussed.
The other form is so called longitudinal study where individuals come into the
laboratory and they are studied over a very long period of time, ranging from months to years and sometimes even decades and then
the variables
of age life circumstances
and other factors.
Can be incorporated into the data. And typically, there are multiple
papers there's data published throughout the longitudinal study, or sometimes it's just one paper at the end of the longitudinal study.
Let's talk about one of the more
famous and perhaps the longest running longitudinal study on happiness. This is a study that was initiated or conceived in 1938 at Harvard University, the so-called Harvard Happiness Project, some of you probably heard about this, it involves
The Harvard college
sophomores and other individuals were Incorporated in this study
as well. It's a study that initially had more than a couple
of hundred subjects,
but because some have either dropped out and not been able to be contacted and monitored over time or died
or for whatever reason are no longer participating in the study. The very few of these individuals left. And yet, there's tremendous, power
to a study, like this is such an impressive study and we're also grateful that
Laboratories at Harvard decided to initiate and continue this study
because it is one of the few studies. Perhaps these study that is allowed us to
understand happiness, in our species over a very long period of time. Like any study, it's not
perfect. It didn't
include a lot of matching by sex or matching by vocation or matching by income and
background and back, then, there was also a lot less
discussion about trauma and histories around trauma,
as well as positive episodes in people's lives. None.
Unless there's a lot of
power in a study like
this and there's some very basic takeaways, some of which you may have heard before. But some of which may be surprising
those of you who
haven't. So one of the key things about the study is people in the study. At least those who still have intact
memory, which many of them do
are able to think back on, not
just their previous year or week, but
10 years ago, 20 years ago, 50 years ago and compare what makes them
Happy at one age versus another
age, a number of things have
emerged from that conversation, so I just want to discuss some of the Highlight points and we'll get into a little bit more of the nitty-gritty of the
data. First of all, it's been discussed many, many times that the total amount of income that an individual
makes or has, and again, this could be
income from work, or it could be money that they inherited, does not seem
to directly relate to their level of Happiness. Now, a lot of people
People take that point and think money. Doesn't matter. Other people here that point and think to themselves. Yeah, right. Easy to say, if you have a lot of money,
we'll talk about the interpretation of those data in just a few minutes. But I do want to earmark that finding because I agree that, while money, or total resources itself, does not predict happiness in any kind of direct way, that is not the same thing as saying,
Having very few resources will make you happier. Of course, I don't think anyone would imagine that, but it also
tends to overlook an important point, which is something that I certainly have learned to appreciate in my
life and something that I especially appreciated when I was a student and postdoc, which is the following people will say money, can't buy happiness and we'll talk about the by aspect of that in a
moment. And indeed that's true. If you look at this longitudinal study, or you look at other studies that are done in a more short-term basis,
Us once people get past a certain level of income relative to their cost of living, the amount of happiness does not scale with that income. That is for every additional thousand dollars or ten thousand dollars that they earn. They don't
report being that much happier on a daily basis. Now that said,
I Venture the argument
that while money truly cannot buy happiness, it absolutely can buffer stress. And in particular, it can buffer stress in the
Form of the ability to purchase or pay for goods and services and in particular Services,
you're not going to tell me that having children
doesn't involve some increase in
the demands on your life, less sleep and more demands. And it certainly is the case that if you can hire help to clean, you can hire nannies. If that's your your thing, you can hire help to assist with babysitting or even night nurses. If you're having trouble sleeping that will last literally allow you to sleep while they take care of your child.
Child in the middle, the night often. Give excellent care, one, hopes, excellent care
that that won't offset. Some of the stress
associated, with lack of sleep.
So there are a million different examples. One could give of this, but I certainly experienced this
during graduate school. In fact, I experienced both sides of the equation here. I made very little money as a graduate student, I had essentially no savings. When I started graduate school, and I made very little money. The amount doesn't matter at this point, but I could just
barely afford rent
in my food actually opted to
live in the
A lot of the time. And by doing that, I had more money to spend on other things that were important to me. Now, I did not have a family at the time and so I was able to do that. Something that not everyone can do,
but I made very little money, but at the same time, I was in laboratory all the time and that's where I wanted to be. And so my level of stress was actually pretty low because I was investing all my time and energy into the very thing that I knew would eventually
help bring me more resources
when I moved from being a graduate.
Student to a postdoc. For instance, a postdoc is a generally of three to five-year period. So, like, residency in medicine where you're no longer taking courses, but you continue to do research in fact, entire new lines of research. And prior to getting a professorship,
my income went up
slightly went up by about thirty to forty percent, but
because of where I moved and because of the
times, my cost of living went way, way up, and I was extremely stressed.
So it wasn't my
Absolute income. It was my absolute income
relative to my cost of
living. The other thing that one needs to consider when considering income versus cost of living is there's also this notion of peer group, and we're going to talk more about social bonds and connections later. But one thing that I noticed, when I moved from being a
graduate student to a postdoc was,
I was a graduate student in a small town where I had access if I chose to participate in most, if not all of the
social Gatherings because they were all very low
as people tended to aggregate
at the Farmers Market on Saturday.
Most people won't even purchase anything at least not The Graduate students wouldn't purchase anything. It was just a place to aggregate. People sometimes play Pick-up Games of soccer or just hang out. Have a cup of coffee. There was a volleyball game on Fridays. Sometimes people would go out to eat that evening,
which, of course, cost money Etc. But it was relatively low cost of living and social connections, and
peer group interactions were
all generated around the same, fairly
low-cost
activities when I
Addition to being a postdoc. I made more money, but Cost of Living went up. But in addition to that, my peer group
tended to want to engage in the same kinds of activities that people in that larger city were engaged in.
So, peer group has a tremendously powerful influence on whether or not. We gauge the amount of money that we
have as bringing us, happiness or not, and
that really speaks to the
critical importance of social interactions, and certain kinds of social interactions.
In particular. Now,
if any of that was unclear, what I'm basically saying is it's not just about being able to pay your rent. It's also about being able to access the kinds of social interactions that you deem are quote unquote. Correct for you at
that stage of life, and in the place where you happen to be living because if you
can meet all the demands
of costs of rent and paying your power bill and food
Etc, but you are socially isolated,
because your peer group,
or those around you that you
Engage with are engaging in
activities that you either don't have time for literally because you're doing other things, or
that you don't have the financial resources for then that can actually severely impact this
rating of what we call happiness.
Why am I parsing the? So, finally one parsing and finally, because I think that most of us have heard the outcome of this study from Harvard or the more short-term studies, also many of which are from Harvard will talk about the just
Nominal work from Dan, Gilbert's laboratory and other
Laboratories who have focused on issues like these. And I
certainly don't want to take anything away
from those results. They're very powerful
and important results. It really point over and over to the fact that people's happiness does not necessarily
scale with income. In fact, it tends not to past a certain level, and yet, I think we'd be remiss, I think actually would be inappropriate for me to say that the amount of income that one makes is not important because if the amount of money that you happen to have,
Or are making does not allow you to meet your basic needs of shelter, Health Care,
Etc, and or doesn't allow you to access the kind of social interactions that can renew and
reset, or I would say, directly
enhance the kind of neurotransmitter systems and hormones that lead us to feel
that we are happy in our life and we're having Quality Social connections.
Well, then that's very stressful. And this brings me back to the statement I made earlier which is in
Need money,
cannot buy happiness, but it certainly can buffer stress. And one of the ways that it buffers stress is by allowing
options of different,
kinds of social interactions
options of different types of
recreation that one can engage in to access new forms of social interaction and so on and so on.
So we need to be a little bit careful or at least
nuanced about this statement. That money can't buy happiness and that the data support, the fact that wealth doesn't determine happiness, I think there is a truth to that
but there's another side to
At that, I think is less often acknowledged. And that certainly I've experienced, and that I think many of you out there have probably experienced as well.
One other major finding of the Harvard
longitudinal study on happiness, as well. As shorter term studies on happiness, is that much as you've heard, perhaps that no one on their deathbed says, they wish they had worked
more well, indeed, the total amount of time that one spends working does not seem to
determine one's happiness. And yet, I also
Oh, want to
earmark that result as one that we need to parse a bit more carefully? Because
work last time
I checked and certainly for me is the way typically that
people earn an income and
as we just talked about a moment ago income is often a way that people have access to or provide access for their family. To things like
Recreation that opens up the opportunity for more social connection.
Alright. So there we have to be careful with how we interpret these
blanket statements
Instead of become very popular that you know, money doesn't determine
happiness and that the
amount that you work isn't going to determine happiness. It certainly is the case that if you earn more money from working more
and that money is devoted to things that
bring more opportunities for social connection or for buffering
stress, and other areas of your
life, including health care care for your children, care for yourself, Recreation, other things that you enjoy.
Well, then I think it's a little bit naive.
To assume that work itself, is
somehow counter to happiness, which of course it isn't. And it, especially isn't if we
combine that feature of work, with another important feature of
the human psyche which is this notion of meaning. Now in the
not-too-distant future, we will do an episode of this podcast
on meaning and what constitutes meaning
in a given Endeavor work or otherwise. But
much of the psychology of the last century
and still today, focuses on.
Feature of meaning as a critical one in terms of what
makes us happy and what doesn't make us, happy certainly in the long-term and I can certainly say for myself that learning and teaching and doing
research in my laboratory, brings me tremendous feeling of meaning and happiness. Some people consider their work, simply
a way to gain a paycheck
and other people find that they would do the very work. They do, regardless of whether or not they were paid. In fact, many people will do volunteer work.
In other forms of work, 40 money. So this idea that money isn't important or that work is not as important as we deem it
to be. That
also needs to be considered from a number of different
perspectives. And again, by no means, am I trying to undermine the data of these impressive studies. Both the longitudinal and short-term studies.
But I think we do have to be cautious in our discussion of
results like these Because the Internet is replete with conversations about the big factors that
determine happiness. It's going to be social connection, not income. It's going to be the amount
of time that you are able to have open thinking, and creativity, which I think is an essential feature of Happiness. By the way, physical health, in particular, one's ability to stay mobile and to be able to access the kind of daily activities that one needs to accomplish unassisted is a strong correlative happiness and so on and so on.
And, of course, there are the basic
physiology factors, the things that feedback on to our overall feelings of well-being and talked about these before. And we'll just put
these quickly into a bin. You can think of this as a toolkit of things that
you and everyone really should be constantly trying to access if not optimized on a regular basis because
they raise the tide or what I would call the buoyancy
of your overall system in your brain and body. And that would be getting sufficient, deep sleep, at least 80% of the nights of your life.
Life. And ideally the remaining 20%, you're not getting deep sleep or as much of it because of positive events
quality nutrition, quality social interactions and we will Define that a little bit better. In
fact, we will Define that in a lot of detail later in this episode and actually how to get better at creating quality social interactions even very brief, social interactions. So we have sleep, we have nutrition, we have social interactions. We have
purposeful work, whether or
not it's paid work or non-paid
work.
And of
course, there are
like exercise and maybe relationships to pets and things of that sort, and there are a few others as well. All of, those
are known to increase your overall
state of well-being that
puts you in a position
to access more, meaning and happiness, Etc. But for
most people, I think it's fair to say that earning a living
and earning a living by working is the typical way in which we spend most of our time.
So I think we need to put a
special bracket around those
activities and it
something will return to a little bit later in terms of trying to understand how periods of life in which there are big, or extensive work demands or extensive family demands on us,
are indeed compatible with states of happiness, or frequent states of happiness and how better to access those rather
than simply say
money isn't important or the amount of time at work, really isn't important. That's not what people are going to pay attention to. In fact, I don't know how, I will
feel my death bed, how
could I human beings are pretty good?
About understanding how they feel in the present. If not describing it, they were pretty good at feeling. It if they have any sense of internal state that is interoception and give some idea of how you feel in a moment,
We're pretty good about describing our
past feelings, at least in Broad Contour, but we are not very good at projecting, how we will feel in the future. And in fact, that's a theme that's going to come up again. And again today,
nonetheless, what we do know, on the basis of really
solid data, or
that certain aspects of our well-being, tend to change
across our lifespan. Now,
lifespan is something that we need to consider from
also a bit of nuance.
Has humans are indeed living longer and longer. And if we look at the data on
happiness across the lifespan dated, maybe 30 or 40 years back or even 20 years ago,
it is consistently described in that literature as
a so called u-shaped
function where people in their 20s report. Being very, very happy but as time goes on and they acquire more
responsibility, so typically getting married and having children and their
20s and 30s and into their 40s, having more work demands, Etc. Happiness is
tends to be rated lower and lower at least in those previous studies.
And then happiness, tended to increase as people
approach their 50s and 60s and they tended to retire in their work demands were Shed from them and they were able to enjoy the small things of Life. Despite the fact that in general, I would say almost always People's Health is not as vigorous when they're 70 as it is when they're when they're 20 there exceptions to that, of course, but
But and of course, you can adjust the rate of cognitive and physical decline. But in general, people in their 20s feel more physically and mentally vigorous than they do in their 60s and 70s in general, that u-shaped function that I just described still
holds true today. But of course, there have been some major shifts to
the general life stages. And when people undergo those life stages, for instance, many people are getting married much later. Many people are opting to, not have children. In fact, if you look at the data
on
Whether or not people have children or not and how that relates to happiness, everyone will tell you that their kids are their greatest source of Joy least. Most people will tell you that and are a tremendous source of Happiness, it's obvious kids are delightful and raising kids. While hard is a wonderful
experience. If you look at the ratings of
Happiness, among people, that elected elected to not have children versus those that
had most people who have children report their overall
levels of happiness
such as lower than that of people who opt not to have children. Now, there
are a lot of ways to interpret those findings and by no means am I
encouraging people to not have children? That's a issue that you have to resolve for yourself, of course. But
we could imagine, for instance, that people
who opt not to have children have more income to devote two things more focused on themselves or their partner or other aspects of their life, we don't know if that's the, underlying reason we.
Could perhaps conclude that people who opt
not to have children are getting more sleep on a regular basis
or have more time for exercise or the other sorts of things that elevate states of mood and well-being. Again, we do not know what the underlying reasons are for this finding,
but it does seem that despite
most every parent reporting that their kids are their greatest source of joy and quote-unquote happiness in life that people who opt not to have. Children are at least as happy or report being at least as happy
or
even happier than those
that opt to have children. And, of course, I'm I want to be very clear that I'm not trying to settle any arguments about whether or not people should have children or not. I happen to find children and animals delightful. And I'm always happy when people opt to have children provided, they are taking good care of their children or doing their very best to take good care of their children. So that's my stance. But of course, you're all entitled to your own stance, on this. They're also that General arguments, that people.
Have about whether or not the population of the Earth will be sustained or not sustain, based on current birth rates Etc. Indeed many areas of the world birth rates are going down, is actually something that just as a perhaps point of Interest has been studied from the
somewhat unusual, but logical perspective of whether or not child
diapers are selling at the same rate as they were some years ago and whether or not adult diapers for the elderly are being sold at the same rate, or or greater than
That if you think about it, is one indirect measure of whether or not people are living longer and or opting to have children. Definitely a discussion for another time probably for another podcast entirely. I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge one of our sponsors. Athletic greens, athletic
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So this u shaped function of people being happy earlier in life.
And then reporting feeling far less happy and then happiness returning to them. That is the rising of the you again, in their later years is something that I do believe should be repeated in
Modern Times.
And repeated, in a way that takes into account, that, that you might be shifted to the right. That is,
I'm certainly aware that people are tending to get married later. Many are opting to not
have children. So, for instance, the the question arises whether or not that U-shaped curve, should
have a bump down.
Down at the bottom of the you among
those, a top not have children because the argument was made in the discussion of
those papers. That the reason why
happiness is lower, when people are in their 30s 40s and 50s is because they're
devoting more time to raising their children and devoting more time to work. I would hope people would enjoy their work. But not everybody really enjoys their work in many people even if they do enjoy their work and they find meaning in it, still find it stressful which certainly can run counter to happiness.
Nowadays, you could imagine that because a number of people are opting
perhaps to work less, or to not have children or both
where they find tremendous meaning from their work.
That there would be a bump at the bottom of that. You among those that decided to simply not take on these additional
responsibilities. That would be an interesting test. I think of whether or not the total load of responsibility is really what's correlating
with reported happiness, or
not. Now, one very consistent. Finding that has
Absolutely stood the test of time. It's kind of an interesting one. It's a little bit of a pop
psychology finding, but I think it points to something interesting that will return to again. And again, is that
people tend to report feeling lower levels of
happiness, believe you're not on their birthday and
the argument for why this is, is the following that typically we go through our, you're not comparing ourselves to our peers, terribly much. We might do that a
little bit more when we return.
In elementary school, high school, Etc. We're sort of age match, maybe even College as well.
But in evaluation of ourselves to our age match
peers is not typically something that we do on a daily
basis. Whereas on our birthday we get a snapshot
of where we are in the Arc of time or at least in our life and
many people report, feeling rather low on their
birthday because they use that
as a benchmark or a
window into the things that they have not accomplished the things that despite being a
Blank, they still haven't
accomplished and that's interesting because it what it really points to is two things. One the extent to which much of
our feelings of Happiness are relative in particular relative to our peers.
So there's that social aspect again, and the fact that most of the time, we are not very good at orienting ourselves in the longer Arc
of time, we're pretty good at knowing where we are in the Arc of a day or the Arc of a week or the Arc of a month or even a year,
but that most of us are not very good at
reflecting on where we are.
We are in our life Arc and of course most of us don't know how long we will live anyway but we do have
some general sense.
Very few people live past the age of 100, many people live to be 70 or 80 and again, lifespan is
extending as far as we know your two year but in general people report that on their birthdays and I should say, these are for
birthdays, aged 25, or later at least in the studies. I was able to access, right. I don't think that
A lot of three-year-old, sit around comparing themselves to other three-year-olds and how well they're doing or 12 year
olds. You can imagine. Some people might do that at 18 at cetera but it's really about the
mid-twenties that people start evaluating themselves to their peers in terms of Life progression and so-called Milestones. It's been argued that that's one of the reasons why people report lower affect lower levels of happiness, on their birthday. Something that's a little bit counterintuitive. And of
course, there are things that are anti-correlated with
happiness, and I'd be remiss if I didn't mention a few of these
that's longitudinal.
See the Harvard Happiness Project has reported, for instance, that
people that are chronic smokers
of nicotine and chronic consumers of alcohol in particular,
alcoholics. That is people who suffer from alcoholism or what's sometimes called, alcohol? Use disorder
that is strongly anti
correlated with happiness and I should also mention that the family members and in particular, the Romantic partners of people who are chronic smokers and the partners of people who are chronic alcohol users,
Often will report lower levels of happiness, especially if they themselves, are not chronic smokers or regular consumers of alcohol. So we've done episodes on nicotine in particular and that touched on smoking, of course, and we an episode on alcohol and the effects of alcohol on health. Again, you can find those at huberman labs.com,
this study from the Harvard Happiness Project, really has strong data
supporting the fact that avoiding being a nicotine smoker.
Right there are positive health effects of nicotine that are discussed in the episode nicotine, but being a but smoking. Nicotine in particular is counterproductive for people's at least self-reported, happiness. And certainly overall health. I think there's zero question that smoking increases cancers of different kinds and that alcohol consumption in particular alcohol consumption Beyond two drinks per week. Two drinks, being the typical volume of, you know, a beer glass of wine or a cocktail
etcetera, is detrimental for
various
Ex of health. And of course there are other things that you could imagine would relate to a lack of happiness. For instance, a major trauma physical or emotional trauma. That could include the loss of a major relationship, a death of a close to one being the victim of a violent crime and things of that sort. And yet, it's
been argued, in fact, strongly argued that when you look at people's levels of happiness, after a trauma, that
If you wait about a year or so sometimes it's even a short as three
months after a trauma that people
self-reported levels of happiness are not
significantly lower than they were prior to the trauma. Now, I
very much want to highlight underline and bold
and asterisks that statement as one that we really need to explore carefully because
there are other data that strongly point to the fact that major life traumas can severely
disrupt one sense of happiness,
Happiness and well-being. And I think, as long as we're going to have this discussion, we should point to a useful definition of trauma. And the definition that I'll paraphrase is one that was supplied by a former guest on the human Lab podcast dr. Paul Conti, who's a psychiatrist? Who's written a book called trauma? I personally think it's the best book on trauma and tools for alleviating trauma. It's incredibly thorough easy to read and well-informed.
And here again, I'm paraphrasing, but dr. Conte describes
Was something that fundamentally changes,
the way that our brain and body function in a way that makes other aspects of living more challenging. Again, an
event either emotional or physical, or both. That fundamentally
changes the way that our brain and or body is our nervous system and other organs function
in a way that prevents us from an enjoying day daily activities, and that could even be
ongoing distraction, right traumas? Can create rumination or they can create obsessive.
Or they can create dissociation, any number of different things. Again, check out that episode, dr. Paul Conte. If you'd like to learn more about trauma and how it manifests.
But the idea that's been put forth by a number of researchers in the field of happiness that three months
after a major trauma and people aren't reporting that they are feeling any less happy than before the trauma
that was surprising to me. So I went into this literature a bit more deeply, one of the basis of that General line of thinking is a what
I
Are now classic and very important and frankly. Excellent talk. That was given by Professor Dan Gilbert on the science of happiness, you can find this on YouTube. I say a classic one because it was, it was
done some years ago. It's
received millions of views
and one of the points that he makes in that talk which is grounded in research carried out by his laboratory and other Laboratories is that
he poses a question. He says, you know,
let's do a quiz. Would you rather be someone who wins the
Lottery and he shows a
picture of somebody who just won. I think it was several hundreds of millions of dollars in a lottery or was recently made paraplegic lost the use of their legs and
then goes on to state that one year after people have won the lottery.
This major, you know
monetary windfall versus a become paraplegic is that their self-reported levels of happiness are the same which I think is incredibly
surprising. Now
I heard this and I immediately
thought of an experience that I've had
Add where I teach a course at Stanford school of medicine on neural regeneration.
And it's actually a course that I attended some years ago when I was a
postdoc at Stanford. So, well over a decade ago and we
hat, excuse me, we had an individual come into the course. This was a an older gentleman.
So older meaning it was in his early 70s and he had become
paraplegic
fairly late in life from a cycling accident,
and he was in is
an
Spurt in
what it is to become a paraplegic, of course, because he had that experience. But also because he spends a lot of his time doing volunteer work with people who have become
paraplegic and have become paraplegic at different ages. And what he
described to me was that the overall
outcomes for people that are rendered paraplegic in terms of their mental health and their physical well-being.
There are sort of management of General life skills scales with how
early they had that injury and how long
They had the use of their limbs, so it's not
straightforward.
When I heard this result described by
dr. Dan Gilbert, that winning the
lottery and becoming paraplegic. Basically
don't impact your levels of happiness, to any different degree. When you know, people look back a year later,
I was pretty surprised given my experience of hearing this this lecture at Stanford. So, I thought, wow, from what I understand, indeed, there are people who are rendered
paraplegic and manage that transition very easily. It doesn't seem to disrupt their feelings of well-being.
Being at cetera, but for other people it can be severely disrupting to their sense of well-being and so on and so
forth. I went back and examined these data. And in fact, a subsequent talk, it's actually a
podcast that was given by dr. Dan Gilbert, some years later. So this would be just a few years ago. I think in 2019 is it is a specific date in which it was recorded but just a few years ago
and indeed he corrects himself in
that podcast what he says is that he
Oak in that earlier, talk that
the difference in self-reported levels of happiness for those that have been rendered paraplegic for
versus those who have won. The lottery is not as great as one would expect. You know, I think most people would expect that being rendered paraplegic would make people far, less happy. That's the expectation. I think anyway and that
people would win the lottery at least for some period of
time would be far happier than they were prior to winning the lottery and especially
Given the tremendous amount of money. And again, the fact that money can't buy happiness, but that money does indeed enable the ability to buffer stress. Provided people were responsible with that money and just didn't blow it or spend it all right. Away, that they could start to afford things that they couldn't afford not just in terms of luxury items, but also the ability to hire help that would free up time that would allow them to do anything from
travel that they couldn't access before to
meditate. If that was something that they didn't have time to do before and so on and so forth.
So,
The result quote-unquote that winners of the lottery and recent paraplegics
have the same levels of happiness is actually not true. At least according to the author of the original study. Now, what
he did, not point to is the degree to, which that is not
true, but he did point to the direction of the result, and the fact that people who are rendered paraplegic, in fact, are reporting themselves as less happy than they were prior to their injury. And
certainly that their levels of happiness are lower than those that simply
won the lottery hundreds of millions of dollars, which I think is the more intuitive result. And so, I think it's
important to be aware of that discrepancy because it's something that was
lost in the communication, or around those results. The first time around, and indeed, Dan Gilbert is an excellent scientist and was quite good about trying to correct the narrative, I myself as a podcaster who puts information on the internet know that the challenges of correcting narratives, especially if things that came out some time ago, we always attempt to do this as best. We
And, but not everyone that saw that first video will necessarily hear the discussion that has happened subsequently. So, my hope is that dr. Gilbert were will interpret me communicating this now not as an attempt to
criticize him, but rather, as an attempt
to praise His willingness to try and correct the narrative to be more accurate.
So to be very clear about what this study didn't show. And here, I'm going to combine these results with other studies that I was able to find that explored similar phenomenon, so
major trauma.
Or instance, not necessarily becoming paraplegic but traumas have a different sort, emotional, traumas.
When you look at the whole of those data, at least my read is that when people win the lottery or acquire wealth, through inheritance, some form of wealth acquisition. That is sudden and that wasn't preceded by a specific
effort to gain that wealth. Right? Buying a lottery ticket. Is pretty quick. Thing. Inheritance is something that you simply get by virtue of who you are, not necessarily by effort.
That led to increases in self-reported happiness compared to prior to the inheritance of the lottery win, but it wasn't as substantial as you might imagine, if you're approaching the notion of Happiness simply from,
well more money equals more happiness. And
while it is true, that people who are rendered paraplegic, who or who
undergo psychological traumas, or physical, traumas of any various kind are and
frankly are
remarkably resilient in many
cases. They can still manage to go about life and and work and engage in relationships. Etc.
There is a visible
decrease in overall levels of happiness and well-being.
In particular, if the psychological and physical trauma renders, their nervous system different in a way that impacts other major
areas of life, and enjoyment for them. And
that's certainly true. One year out from the trauma.
So the point is that we do need to reframe this idea that whether or not you win the lottery or become paraplegic or suffer some major trauma. Your
levels of happiness are going to be the same three months or a year later, I don't think that's accurate. And in fact, dr. Dan Gilbert emphasize that that's not accurate. Even in that initial study. And
I think it's an important thing to frame because that's such a popular notion or that that idea combined with the idea that increased earnings, don't make us happy combined with the idea that you
You know, we are happy early in
life but then as more demands arise in life, we become less happy. And then we become happy
again. And, and that idea is we already explored is not necessarily true.
Frankly, I knew a lot of teenagers and people in their, their early twenties are pretty unhappy who then become happier later as they acquire more resources. Sometimes distance, let's be honest, sometimes distance from our family of origin makes us more happy sometimes less so it's highly
individual. So I think those General themes that we've heard over and over while they have Merit and
Certainly stand up in some of the more powerful longitudinal. And short-term studies, there is nuanced and in some cases, there are now additional data that are causing us to revise those understandings. Now there is an important point
or I should say the important point that we can really credit Dan Gilbert and others in the field of psychology with and that we owe them. A great debt of gratitude for
is that we do have far more control over our levels of
happiness, than we
might think
And many of the things that reside at that level of control, that is the things that we can do. And think and say, and access don't come from external things, right? They don't
come necessarily from the acquisition of material Goods.
But rather there are things that we can do, that can allow us to so-called synthesize happiness. And I think this is one of the great gifts of modern psychology. Is that Dan Gilbert and others? The ha
Offered Happiness Project work at Yale and elsewhere right there, excellent Labs,
working on happiness, all over the US end and all over the world,
frankly, one of the great gifts that they've supplied Us in the form of data, is that there really are things that we can all do and think and access to allow ourselves to so-called
synthesize happiness. Now, this notion of synthesizing happiness or synthetic happiness? As it's sometimes called can sometimes ruffle people's feathers a bit because
People immediately flipped to the idea that oh, you're just going to tell me to be grateful for what I have or to just navel gaze or just
to imagine that I'm happy
but that's really not What
synthetic happiness is about. At. All
synthetic happiness actually has to do with some really important larger principles about the way that our emotional system and the way that the reward
systems of our brain really function. And they
point to important Concepts that we're going to now discuss things like
hedonic set point, for instance, or
the dopamine system of
anticipation of rewards versus receiving words, just as a brief insight into
that our anticipation of something
positive, oftentimes leads to
Greater increases in the sorts of neurochemicals that
support a state of happiness and well-being than the actual acquisition of the thing that we're trying to
obtain. And this goes back to a theme, I've discussed a few times before in this
podcast in particular, with my colleague at Stanford,
Medicine, doctor, Anna Lemke. Who wrote The Fabulous book?
Dopamine Nation. If you're interested in, dopamine and addiction in particular, that's a wonderful clear and extremely informative read. And if you're interested in dopamine, more generally, just not
just in the states of addiction, but in everyday life, and in Pursuit and motivation, the molecule of more is an excellent book or related to that. And as I mentioned earlier, we have this episode on dopamine motivation and drive the,
the notion of synthetic happiness,
Is
not simply about imagining happiness or thinking about happiness, or anticipating happiness
to some extent. It is, but it relates to a number of other important themes, but it is grounded very thoroughly in the
neurobiology of dopamine rewards and I'll talk about some of that neurobiology in a few moments.
But I wanted to take a couple of minutes and talk about what synthetic happiness is and what some of the conditions are for allowing
us to access the state of so-called synthetic happiness.
And I want
A point out at the outset that synthetic happiness, while
it might sound synthetic AKA false. It's anything. But it actually turns out to be
among the more, and perhaps the more potent form of
happiness, that we can all access.
And this is where themes and related to our control over our own
internal State, really become not only valid, but very powerful. So, for instance,
Dr. Dan Gilbert and others have explored how opportunity and choice that is freedom can and can't
lead to states of happiness. And
the results of those studies are very solid and frankly, very
surprising until you understand the results. And
once you do, I think you will immediately see areas of your own life that you can start to access
more happiness. Again genuine happiness,
simply by Framing certain choices in a particular way and maybe even by eliminating child.
Choices. Now, I'd like to focus on the research aimed at understanding what
increases our levels of happiness. And
I'd like to frame this under the umbrella of two major themes. The First theme is so-called natural happiness, natural happiness is the sort of happiness that most of us are familiar with. So the kind of happiness that we expect to
have. If we, for instance, complete a degree. Hopefully, a degree in a topic meaningful and interesting to us, but a degree nonetheless, or we find a mate. Hopefully, a
That we enjoy spending time with
or for instance making a certain income or finding work
that we enjoy on a regular basis. All of those
are forms of happiness that from a very early time in development. We are taught exist, for instance, even when we are very young. We are told that our birthday is coming and that we are going to get presents and those presents are going to be focused on knowledge of things that we already
enjoy. So if you're a little kid and you like trucks, or you're a little kid and you like dolls,
you can sort of expect that those gifts will bring you some
level of Joy or
happiness. And while that's a small child example,
that General notion of natural happiness
is, of course, one that persists into, adolescence into young adulthood, and into adulthood and we quite understandably, come to associate this feeling of Joy or happiness, with the receiving of things or the acquisition of things, whether by effort by gift by inheritance or some other form. Okay? So that's natural happiness. And yet, as I mentioned a little bit earlier,
There's also this notion of synthetic happiness and some of the more interesting and exciting research in the fields of psychology and in fact, Neuroscience point to this idea of synthetic happiness. As at
least, as powerful, a source of Happiness As Natural happiness. Again, at
least as powerful and perhaps even more powerful. And of course, one has to take a slightly different view
of What happiness is in order to accept this idea that we can create happiness for ourselves,
but that
it doesn't mean that the whole notion of synthetic happiness is,
merely a passive one. Where all we do is sit back and imagine being happy. And then we are happy
for better for worse, our nervous systems, and our
neurochemistry simply don't work that
way. In fact, synthetic happiness has almost always been understood as something that we have to put some effort
toward achieving. But, and this is an important thing to point
out. Synthetic happiness also requires that certain situational or environmental
conditions.
The Met
good example of this is some of the work by Gillian mandich
or I should say dr. Gillian mandich, who's done some interesting work
on the conditions for creating happiness, within our mind and in our
overall state of being, and she's been
involved in a number of different studies, but one of the ones that I found particularly interesting is one in which they explored different types of music and other aspects of environmental
settings. So you bring subjects to the laboratory, play them different types of
Music. There are, in fact, certain aspects of
music that can create different states of Mind. Sadness, happiness, anticipation. In fact, there are certain patterns of music that can reliably induce anticipation of the fear and anxiety based type. So, for instance, think the movie, Jaws, if you recall, for those videos, seen Jaws, there's this ongoing theme music. Any time. The shark might be present in the water or in a given scene that essentially goes donut.
Now for the
musicians out there this has basis in things like
tritones and things that are understood from the mathematics and the and the musical
side and from the Neuroscience side are known to
create a
neural state of anticipation. Yeah. A neural state of anticipation and not necessarily A positive one. And indeed there are other patterns
of music that involve
up tones. Think
some of the music that's typically been used in
Means of various sorts. There's a long history of this. Indie, there's a
whole literature of psychological, and now,
even a smaller, but still interesting literature on the Neuroscience of how certain patterns of Music can induce a state of joy and joyful anticipation in particular. A lot of those patterns of Music are
incorporated into
so-called happy cartoons and Disney movies and things of that sort in any case. Dr. Mann ditch and others have explored how music in particular, but other features of the environment.
And can or cannot induce states of happiness and the basic takeaway from those studies is that while having a certain
environmental sound musical, tone, or visual feature to a given space, a room
is necessary
for a state of happiness.
It is not alone. Sufficient. What is required is that individuals not only be placed into an environment that contains
music or visual items.
Or a combination of music and visual items that can induce states of Joy or happiness, or positive
anticipation. But they also are given some sort of instruction
or instruction manual as to how to synthesize happiness inside of that
environment. This is important because what this says, is that our ability to create states of happiness is dependent on our
environment, but also requires effort from us.
That also makes sense as to why when we are.
Under conditions of deprivation.
So I can be social deprivation, or financial deprevation,
or even for people that are very sensitive to,
whether, you know, there are a certain number of
individuals about 30% of people who report feeling very, very
low under conditions, where the sky is overcast, especially if it's been overcast for a number of days. So called seasonal affective
depression, those individuals, by the way, can often receive tremendous benefits in terms of elevating their mood, if they
make an effort to get sunlight if they can't get sunlight,
Light artificial, light of the sort that we talked about
earlier, but in any case, there are a number of people that are profoundly
negatively influenced by the lack of
positive Visual and auditory cues in their environment. But for most people, we are in a, what I would call a dynamic
relationship with our environment. Our environment has an
effect on our mood, but the Research indicates that we also need to make some sort of
effort toward being happy now
f,
To toward being happy is a very vague term. So, let's better Define what that is in the case of dr. Mandich is work. This took the form of doing so-called happiness, inventories, right?
Can be focusing on things that one is grateful for
things that they particularly enjoy. This is somewhat of a gratitude type practice but includes some other features as well that are more focused on the things that bring you
meaning and actually engaging in the things that bring you meaning. So if
you're trying to think about how to improve
Of your levels of happiness. What this research essentially says, is that you would be smart to try and adjust your
home environment. Adjust your work environment, so that it is cheerful to you. Maybe that means a plant
for me in my laboratory. One of the things that was really critical that I had as a postdoc and in my own laboratory. When I first started, my
lab was, I love Aquaria. So, I had multiple fish tanks. In fact, people my laboratory were always rolling their eyes. Why do we have to have all these fish tanks with all these? I like fresh water tanks. Not true.
Saltwater tanks
for reasons that aren't interesting for this discussion, but
fresh water tanks with discus fish. For instance, to me are just
beautiful, they make me happy, I just enjoy them. Music is a complicated thing in Laboratories because it's a shared space. So headphones are the general
requirement but having either silence, if you love
silence and I happen to like working in silence or listening to certain forms of music. I do also use the 40 Hertz, binaural beats, or I particularly like listening to Glenn Gould.
While I work or listening to whale
song, Believe It or Not. Well I work because it doesn't have any structure that I can follow. I don't speak whale and so I can't follow. But
it sort of fills the space in a way that I find Pleasant and I've put
substantial amounts of effort into making my laboratory spaces in my office spaces. My work spaces, nice, places to be. Now
I had no knowledge of this work from dr. Mandich and others at the time when I did that but what I found was that over the years, I was challenged in maintaining a kind of elevated mood
While working in a laboratory not because I didn't thoroughly enjoy the work. I love doing
experiments with my hands and I loved being in lab, but at least the labs that I was in as a graduate student, and postdoc, there were no windows. So I wasn't getting adequate Sunshine. The windows that we didn't have didn't open, so I wasn't
getting a lot of fresh air and so on and so forth. So, I've personally found it very valuable
to create an environment, both at
work, and at home that I find aesthetically
Pleasant at least in some way or another and I realize people have varying levels of control.
Over there. Static
environment. Certainly the auditory
environment can be controlled nowadays through the use of headphones if you're allowed to use
those. So, for instance, using music, or using
background sound that you find very
pleasant. Combined, with a concerted effort, on your part to create
states of Happiness
by hopefully doing work. That's meaningful
to you or at least is leading to meaningful outcomes. Will talk a little bit more about that but
these happiness inventory is also turn out to be interesting and important.
Sources of creating so-called synthetic happiness. And we also talked about other ways that one can create elevated levels of synthetic happiness. And I realized the word synthetic probably draws up
connotations of false, happiness, or contrived happiness. I
wish instead of calling it synthetic happiness, they had called it
self-created or self-directed happiness, or something of that sort. Because
then, it wouldn't sound
as false because it's simply not false. It leads to the
same. As far as we know, identical neurochemical and
psychological States of
this is natural happiness and might even be more persistent than natural happiness. It certainly is more under our
control, but the key point is that environment and self-directed work at being happy
are both important and they interact with one another. So, if you're
somebody who has a hard time synthesizing,
happiness, through any of the methods that we talked about today,
Don't consider yourself deficient. It could very well be that the environment that you're in social environment or physical environment are
auditory environment is simply not conducive to synthesizing happiness. And
for that reason, I think the work of
chilling mandich and colleagues and
others in the field is tremendously important because it removes us from this pressure to just synthesize happiness from within despite our
circumstances. I think many of us have heard of the incredible stories of people like Viktor Frankl or Nelson Mandela.
Who were stripped of their freedom. And yet managed to maintain some sense of positive anticipation or at least some sense of
identity that allow them to still access forms of Happiness.
Those are highly unique situations of course and they speak to the the power
of the of the human psyche for synthesizing happiness and certainly for synthesizing a sense that there might be a future and to live into that future in their cases, incredibly impressive ways.
But I think for most everybody, the environment that we're in has a powerful
impact.
Act on our mood
and some people more than others. You know, I know people that are perfectly happy with blank walls, no pictures on the walls. Other people benefit tremendously from having photos or
plants in their environment and so on you really have to
determine what's needed
for you and do your best to try and place those things into
your environment or rather Place yourself into an environment that is conducive to you
synthesizing your happiness. In fact, the powerful interaction between our environment and our own ability to generate certain kinds of emotions.
Is well-established, not just for happiness but for things like gratitude. So for instance there's a classic study from Ames a Mes in 2004
that was focused on gratitude. And we've had an episode on gratitude before
the basic takeaway of that episode is that it turns out receiving gratitude is a more
powerful stimulus for the release of neurochemicals and
activation of brain areas associated with so-called pro-social behaviors and feelings of well-being, including happiness.
But also observing stories in the form of movies or books or other narratives of other people.
Receiving help is also a very powerful stimulus for gratitude. Also giving gratitude is very powerful, but not as powerful as receiving gratitude least that's what the research says, or observing powerful exchanges of gratitude between other individuals. What the
study from Ames showed is that gratitude as a state of mind, as an emotion, does not exist in a vacuum. It's not independent.
Aunt of our surrounding. So, for instance, just writing down all the things you're grateful for while it has some positive impact, the impact of that or receiving gratitude or observing gratitude is far more potent, right bigger
increases in happiness and feelings of well-being, and indeed, neurochemicals and
activation of brain areas associated with happiness, and well-being. When
there's a reciprocity, when the person
receiving is
understand something about the person that's giving to them. And understands that the person is giving genuinely,
for instance,
There's an environmental interaction. It's not just about receiving its receiving from somebody that, you know, genuinely
wants to give and likewise for The Giver in that
equation. The feelings of well-being are far greater when the the person receiving whatever it
is money food assistance in some form or another could be, you know, physical assistance etcetera.
When The Giver has knowledge that the person receiving it, genuinely needed the thing that they are receiving. So the important finding within the research again and again, is that
Happiness doesn't exist in a vacuum. It's partially our own responsibility to synthesize happiness. And I was told that many times you like, happiness is in your head. Well, yes, indeed, it's in your head, but it's
also dependent on interactions with your environment, physical environment, and social environment, and so on
likewise gratitude is something that we can create inside
of us right through gratitude list and
appreciation, or we can give both powerful
sources of evoking.
Neurochemical changes associated with gratitude and happiness and well-being, but it to doesn't exist in a vacuum. There's a much greater positive effect when we have knowledge about why the giver is giving us something or that the person receiving something is going to benefit tremendously from receiving it. So, I'm highlighting this because I think that when we hear about synthetic happiness, there's a kind of automatic erasing of context that tends to occur. And in fact, if you
Were to peruse the various videos online or papers that exists on PubMed around, happiness and synthetic happiness. In particular, you would come away with the impression that synthetic happiness is just something that we're supposed to
snap our fingers and access
or perhaps do very specific things in Access. But while that is true context, really matters and I think that's an important Point much in the same way that the point needs to be made that while money doesn't buy happiness, money can buffer stress
And certainly offer opportunities
that can provide opportunities for more happiness. So I think we are starting to arrive at a general theme here which
is that nothing related to our mood
exists. In isolation
and in fact that leads me to a discussion of one of the major scientific findings in the realm of what sorts of mindsets and behaviors can in fact lead to happiness and this is a paper that was published in 2008 even though that might seem like a while ago, it forms the basis for a large amount of literature that followed
It's a very interesting literature. This is work from Elizabeth done and colleagues and was published in the journal science which again is one of
the sort of three Apex journals nature science cell. I always say is sort of the Super
Bowl NBA championships in Stanley Cup of scientific publishing.
Very, very stringent in terms of the
number of papers they let in very few that is and the title of this paper makes fairly
obvious. What the paper is
about, the title of the paper is spending money on others, promotes happiness,
And I know a number of you probably hear that title and think, oh boy, here we go. He's going to tell us that giving away. All our money is going to
make us happier than receiving money and I promise you, that is not what I'm going to tell you.
But nonetheless, this is a very interesting study and it's one that I think that we really ought to pay attention to. Because what the study is based on is the fact that income provided ones income meets a certain level of basic needs indeed has been shown to have only a weak
effect.
On overall happiness.
Okay, so quoting from the paper in the first paragraph, quote income has a reliable but surprisingly weak effect on happiness within
nations with the nation's just being they looked at this in not just the United States but a number of other places as well,
particularly once basic needs are met. Okay. So if that's the case, then what aspects of
money and having money are related to happiness. Certainly, there are people who have a lot of money who are very happy certainly. There are people who have very little money who
are very happy
The and of course, the reverse is also true. There are plenty of people who don't
have very much money who are
unhappy. And in fact, there are
people who have a lot of money who are very unhappy a point that whenever it's made often leaps those with less
money to kind of roll their eyes because the assumption is more money does
increase happiness. And in fact, it doesn't. And
later we'll get back to this idea of whether or how one
acquire their money has any
Packed on whether or not that money increases their happiness or not. Okay, let's kind of earmark that for
later in the meantime, let's talk a little bit more about the findings in this paper. This paper is interesting because what it did is it explored something called pro-social spending Pro. So spending is a phenomenon where people are taking a certain portion of their income and they are giving it
to others often for
causes or four things that they think are important
to see happen.
In the world or change in the world that could be, you know,
a hungry individual having access to food or medical care.
It could be for environmental causes. It could be
for Animal Wellness could be for any number of different things. It could even be giving somebody money so that they can buy themselves a gift or giving somebody money and not having onion any scuse me understanding, or expectation of what they're going to do with the money, okay? Again, one of the central themes around gratitude is that while receiving is great, giving is also
So great, in terms of increasing sense of well-being. And one of the more important features to that is when we give either in the form of words or in the form of resources,
Knowledge. That the person receiving benefits from that, in some real way, greatly increases the chance that there's an
increase in happiness for The Giver as well as the receiver. Again, that's a note about gratitude but not an insignificant one as it relates to this
study. So what the study found was that higher pro-social spending was associated with
significantly. Greater happiness is was a very statistically significant
effect and they found that the effects of income and pro-social spending
Were independent and similar in magnitude, okay, independent and similar magnitude. I'll explain what that means. For those of
you that might be confused by that statement in just a moment,
whereas quote, personal spending remained, unrelated to happiness. So what this study basically found was if people are allotted a certain amount of money to give away and one adjust for overall
income, right? And this is important, because you can imagine that for some
Individual giving
away two thousand dollars might represent a significant portion of their yearly or monthly income and for another individual, it might represent a tiny fraction of their income but when
you adjust for income level, what you find is that people who gave away money benefited tremendously in terms of their own
increase in happiness.
In fact, quote employees who devoted more of their bonuses to pro-social spending that is giving way
A more money experience greater happiness after receiving the bonus and the manner, which they spent that bonus was a more important predictor of their
happiness than the size of the bonus itself. This was an
actual experiment, they ran with
real income, real money.
I'm going to read that again. Just to make sure it hits home because I found this
to be really impactful
employees who devoted a greater fraction of their bonus to pro-social spending that is giving away money to others, experience greater happiness.
- after receiving the bonus and the manner in which they spent that bonus was a more important predictor of
their happiness than the size of the bonus itself.
So the actual bonus, the receiving of the money led to Greater
increases in happiness. If they gave it away
and the act of giving it away itself, led to Greater increases in happiness than receiving the bonus.
So, it's a twofer, as you might say.
So the takeaway from this study and studies like it, I think is pretty obvious.
That to the extent that we can. And again when I say to the extent that we can, this means whatever percentage of our own income that we can afford to give away or if we don't have income the percentage of our effort,
right? I mean this was about money, but it's also about effort we can help others, right? You can serve in food kitchens, you can do community gardening, you can pick up
trash, you can do any number of things, you can assist a neighbor with childcare or, you know, Sister neighbor. Who is
Likely less able to retrieve their paper etc. Etc. It the point is that giving resources certainly in the form of money, but also in the
form of effort and time
is immensely beneficial for synthesizing,
our own happiness, that is for the giver us to increase our levels of happiness,
but the degree of an
increase in our own happiness, is
proportional in some way to the extent to which the person
receiving a
actually needed that help and registers that help. Excellent research. Also
points to the fact that another potent, way to synthesize happiness, that is to create genuine states of happiness, in
ourselves is to
leverage, the so-called Focus system or rather, I should say, 2D emphasize the
tendency of our minds to wander. There's an
excellent paper on this also published in the journal science. This is now a classic paper. I talked a little bit about it in the episode on meditation, but for those of you that did or perhaps,
Didn't hear that episode. I just want to briefly touch on a few aspects of the paper and in particular a few aspects of the paper that I didn't talk about previously and the title of this paper. Again is a very straightforward in terms of telling you what it's about and that is a Wandering mind is an unhappy Mine by Killingsworth and
Gilbert. This paper was published in science in 2010 and we will provide a link to the paper. This is frankly, a very interesting
paper. This paper involved several thousand subjects or I should say
2250 adult subjects
and what they were able to do was to contact these subjects. While they were going about living their daily
lives, and
ask them both what they were doing and what they were feeling for some additional questions that they ask them but we're able to establish whether or not people were
watching television or doing housework or working on a home computer
or arresting or listening to music Etc in their
natural environment. So this is outside the laboratory
and they were able to assess
To what extent those people were happy or unhappy or neutral or had some other emotional state at the time
when they were engaging in any number of different activities
and they assess. Whether or not, those individuals were also focused on, or focused away from whatever activity they were engaging in and the takeaways from this study are many. But for sake of today's discussion,
what I think is especially interesting, is that
regardless of whether or not people
were engaging in activities that they enjoyed or
not.
The tendency for their mind to wander
from an activity predicted
lower levels of happiness, than if they tended to be focused
on the activity, they were engaged in. Now
that itself should be surprising. I mean, what that says, is that even if somebody was engaged in activity, like cleaning their house, or doing homework or reading something that they weren't enjoying, if they were focused on what they were doing, they tended to report as happier than if their mind was drifting elsewhere. Now there's also
Points to the idea that perhaps our minds drift to unpleasant thoughts more than pleasant thoughts, but they also address that in the study point. I'd like to make here is quote, although people's minds were more likely to wander too.
Pleasant topics. Okay.
Then to unpleasant topics and their that the difference is pretty significant. People's minds tended to wander too Pleasant. Topics about 43 percent of the time as opposed to unpleasant
topics about 27% of the time or to neutral Topics in the remaining 31 percent of samples.
People were no happier when thinking about Pleasant topics than about their current activity.
Think about that, people were no happier than when thinking about Pleasant things than their current activity. In fact, the mirror focus on what they were doing was more powerful than anything else even if they didn't enjoy what they were doing. So they go on here to say, quote, although negative moods are known to cause mind-wandering analyses strongly suggested that mind wandering was generally the cause the cause and not merely the
consequence of unhappiness.
And so, there are a lot of aspects of this study that are worth.
Going into but the major takeaway or the one that perhaps we should all be most concerned with is that when we are not focused on what we are doing, we tend to be far less happy than when we are focused on what we were doing. Even if what we're doing is something that we don't deem very
pleasant and certainly if we are engaged in something that we
consider very pleasant and we are very focused
on. Well, then our levels of happiness. Are the highest that sort of obvious.
But what this really speaks to is the tremendous power of building our ability.
To focus on what we're doing
and to stay present to what we are
doing now. This whole notion of staying present is one that itself is a
little bit complicated. And in the
episode on meditation, I talked a little bit about whether or not it's beneficial to be present to our internal
state or that is our interoceptive state, you know, our feelings of our heart rate and how full or
empty our gut feels or this. Our state of being from our skin inward or whether or not, we should focus on being present to things in our immediate surroundings. Both are versions of
Quote unquote
present as you can imagine but
in the one case we're focused internally in the other we're focused externally.
And of course, most of the time, it's some combination of the two.
But what this study really says, is that any
practice that can powerfully impact, our ability to
remain present in the
activity? We are engaged in? So I could even be a phone call could be texting for that matter, could be social media for that matter, right? We're
not placing judgment on the activity here. In fact, what we're really talking about is the enormous happiness.
This increasing value of
being present to what we're doing, regardless of what we are doing
and the practice that's known to be
beneficial for increasing. Our ability to focus
is among other things, a short meditation practice, in fact, work from when he Suzuki's Lab at NYU. Again, when he's been a guest on this podcast, her laboratory is shown that, even a very
brief meditation of about 13 minutes and this would be the quote-unquote classic type of meditation
of eyes closed focusing on ones.
Breathing, even a very brief meditation of just 13 minutes or so done. Consistently,
so ideally every day, but you have to imagine that even if you skip a day, there are still benefits that
sort of meditation can greatly
enhance, one's ability to focus and her studies, that was also shown that sort of brief meditation could also greatly enhance, mood and sleep, and various aspects of cognitive
performance and work for my laboratory in collaboration with dr. David Spiegel, at Stanford
I meant of Psychiatry has shown that even briefer.
Meditations of even just five minutes per day. Can have fairly outsize positive effects on a number of different parameters as well. Those very brief
types of meditations because they really are
focusing and more accurately I should say
refocusing exercises. When you do that, sort of activity of closing your eyes and forcing yourself to focus and refocus on your breath and internal state. That is directing your perception in word, or if you choose, you could
deliberately
Focus your perception on some external object or sound for that matter.
When one does that the circuits of the brain involved in Focus dramatically improve that is they rewire and
increase their ability for you to achieve Focus.
Many of us have heard about meditation. Many of us think about meditation as
a mindfulness exercise mindfulness in quotes because that itself needs definition. But I
prefer to view meditations of the sort that I just
bribed as
perceptual or Focus Based
training, which is really what the data point to
Notions of our own Consciousness. And states of Mind are very hard to Define, but it's very clear that even a 5 minutes a day or ideally and up to a 13 minute a day meditation, can greatly increase our ability to focus and based on the findings, in this paper, a Wandering mind is unhappy mind. Also make it very clear that the ability to refocus again and again, and again on what we're doing.
Throughout our day, regardless of what we're doing can have a very
dramatic. In fact, a statistically significant increase on our levels of overall happiness. So what else does the research? Tell us, we can do to increase our levels of genuine happiness. Well, it's very clear based on The Logical study from Harvard, as well as the
Yale Happiness
Project and the work of numerous Laboratories in the US and elsewhere that Quality Social connection is
I'm Lee powerful in terms of its ability to increase our levels of happiness, what is Quality Social
connection Quality Social connection
falls into a number of different
bins. As can be romantic connection, this can be friendship, this can even be co-worker or just
daily superficial interaction type connections.
That's surprising to a lot of people because I think a lot of people here, Quality Social connection and
they think deep conversation but
it's very clear from the research that off.
Times our conversations with people that we are closest to are actually quite
shallow. If you think about it, if
you've been in a romantic relationship or a friendship for
a long period of time or maybe even a
sibling relationship or other family relationship, much of what you talked about is fairly superficial or fairly trivial. In fact, it's often a sharing of the trivial day-to-day things between two people, or through groups of people that leads to the feeling that people are really
connected to one another,
Other in particular if it's involving shared experiences of any kind, good or bad.
So there's an extensive literature on
social connection and how to build social connection.
This certainly should be the topic of a full episode of this
podcast in the, not too distant future, but
because social connection can have such a
powerful impact on our state's of happiness and overall
well-being, I want to emphasize a few features of social connection that I
think most people might not
appreciate once again, when we hear Quality Social connection.
I think most of us tend to think about deep meaningful, conversation
or long, walks on the beach, or camping trips together or travel together. And while all of those certainly qualify as wonderful
opportunities for social connection opportunities for Quality, Social connection are certainly
not limited to those kinds of interactions. In fact, I can recall times in my graduate career so this would be times when I was living in the laboratory because that was a significant portion of my graduate years
and one of the more important social
Ins for me, was the staff that worked there
in the wee hours of the night and that came in very early in the morning.
So one of the more regular social connections I had is I would
brush my teeth in the hallway.
Bathroom. And there was no one else really round at that time except for the
janitors that tended to leave early in the morning, they'd worked a good portion of the night or that were arriving very early in the day. And the fact that I would see them
on a regular basis and may be exchanged a few words about their work or their families for the holidays. Actually, for me became
Very meaningful in part because my social connections at the time we're really limited
to only social connections that I had in the context of work. Now,
some people might look at
my schedule at that time and look at my life at that time and say, well, that was very unhealthy, you know, you were lacking in certain number of ways, but
frankly looking back and at the
time and I know this because I journaled at the time I was exceedingly, happy at least for that stage of my life at that stage in my life, I wanted to be focused, primarily on doing experiments and
Immersing myself in my scientific
training. And for me, the even seemingly insignificant interactions of talking to the janitor in the morning or some of the other regular staff was not
insignificant. In fact, for me, it was very significant and over the holidays when their hours were reduced actually missed them quite a lot. And even as I talk about this, I can recall the feelings of well-being of just seeing familiar faces and that
brings up an important point, which is, there's a quite extensive literature pointing to the fact that
When we see faces, especially faces in the morning and in the late afternoon, there is a positive impact on the
emotional circuitry where I should say the circuitry of the brain that underlies emotional well-being, and that shouldn't come as surprising. We As Old World primates much like other primates
are very dependent on faces and facial expressions. In terms of registering our own and place in life and our emotional state. Now, the origins of this
This are many in particular, we have a brain
area, it's called actually called the fusiform face gyrus. This is an area of the brain that was largely discovered by women by Nancy kanwisher at MIT
and the kanwisher lab has done extensive work showing that this brain area. That's dedicated to the
processing of faces and not just faces in real life, but faces on computer screens and elsewhere are intimately tied to areas of the brain that are associated with emotionality. That's actually
From another laboratory door cells laboratory Caltech. Now at UC, Berkeley has
shown that this face processing area in the brain and both non-human primates and primates
is directly linked to the areas of our brain. That associate with anxiety and
fear but also areas of the brain that are
associated with
well-being. So it comes as no surprise that when we see faces in particular friendly faces, even if we have, just brief
interactions with those faces.
And even if no words are exchanged that creates this,
Sense of
social Bond and it creates a sense of predictability. And I raise this
again, because I think a lot of people think that social connection always has to come in the form of close friendships, which of course are wonderful or close romantic
relationships which of course, our wonderful or close family relationships, which of course are wonderful.
But as will soon discuss in a in our model of happiness or
how to achieve happiness based on the scientific literature and a few minutes
social connection can and should come in various forms. And when I
Various forms. I mean,
forms of brief interaction, more superficial
interaction, and forms
of deeper interaction. All of those are relevant to our state's of happiness, and
there's research to support that daily interactions with somebody at
a cafe, or just a brief.
Hello. Or a smile, provided that we are both present where we make the effort to be present to those interactions. However, brief they are, can have a positive effect on people's overall well-being and not just in that moment, but consistently
Evidenced by the fact, I think that, when I look
back on those years of working long hours in the laboratory and essentially restricting myself either to exercising sleeping eating or working again. That's what I wanted at that stage of my life. Certainly not the way I live my life now but that's what I wanted. That stage of my life
that even those seemingly insignificant social
interactions were important to me and had a potent impact on increasing my level of happiness and frankly still do and I feel that right now
That said, I think all of us can appreciate the immense value
of social connection that is of the more long-lasting. And for lack of a better word richer type, whether or not that is with siblings, or with parents, or with friends, or with romantic partners
for that reason. I wanted to emphasize a little bit about what constitutes connection and what constitutes social connection. There are basically two forms of social connection that have been studied and I'll review both as it relates to
increasing our levels of happiness and the
One is
presence and eye contact and the second is physical contact. So in terms of presence and eye contact, there's been a lot of studies about whether or not people exchanged direct eye contact during conversation or not dictating whether or not each individual in that interaction feels as if they had a connection. Now again, keep in mind that while we think of connection as relating to some
deep or meaningful conversation. And often times that can be the case. Think, for instance,
Excellent therapist, patient relationship or an excellent romantic relationship, or an excellent friendship, where you really feel heard and understood or at least to the extent that people are willing to
explore certain topics with you, you're willing to hear
them. And listen really carefully for what they're saying and they're willing to hear and listen to what you're
saying in an attempt to understand that
certainly can enhance the sense of social connection leading to what people would
call social bonds leading to increased happiness.
But eye contact is also known to be an important.
Portent feature. The thing about eye contact is that most people assume that a lot of eye contact. And in fact,
ongoing eye contact is critical to a sense of connection. And in fact that's not the
case. There's a recent paper that I find really interesting that was published in proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2021. The title of this paper is eye, contact marks. The rise and fall of
shared attention in conversation.
I find this paper interesting for a number of reasons. First of all, my laboratory works,
On
internal States and vision. So it relates directly to the work that my laboratory
does. But also that it violates what I thought was a general rule of social connection which is this idea that two people need to be focused on
one another. That is looking at one another directly and fairly consistently throughout a conversation in order for the feeling of connection to emerge
but it turns out that's not the
case. And in fact, just to give you the takeaway and then I'll flush it out a little bit with some data
eye contact.
Or I should say Mutual eye, contacts are two
people registering the presence of the other person. Looking at them, you're looking at me. And I'm looking at you. If you're watching this on YouTube and
perhaps we are actually doing this at that moment and if you're listening, just know that I'm looking
directly into the camera as I'm saying this at this moment. If we were to be looking directly at one another that it turns out signals The Next Step which is that, it's very likely that we will each both look
away. And that turns out to be
Be a way in which we set and reset attention continually during conversation. So,
again, I really like this study because of the High Fidelity, the high temporal Precision, that is the Precision overtime. It which they looked at eye contact and engagement of
attention between individuals and they did this by looking at things like people
size and of course, where the eyes were looking and so on and so forth. The basic takeaway of this study
was the following here. I'm quoting from the study
quote rather than maximizing shared
Tension.
Good conversation may require shifts in and out of shared States
accompanied by eye
contact. So what this basically says is that when two people are involved in a very what's called an intimate conversation, but the word intimate should not be misconstrued to mean something about intimacy or sexual intimacy, or physical intimacy, just a conversation in which both people feel present to the conversation and
focused on that conversation in that conversation and its contents.
Only the tendency is, for people to take turns
talking, although sometimes depending on the individuals, they might interrupt more or less. Again, interrupting can be a sign of Interest. It doesn't always have to be rude by the way,
but they're sharing
information. Hopefully about a common topic or set of
topics. They will, at some moment, look at one another, it's with the study shows, and that after briefly gazing directly at one, another attention Peaks, and then, they will look away and
Attention will get reduced and then the conversation consists of a series of focusing back on one another, with their eyes and then focusing off focusing on in focusing off and those Mutual eye contact moments actually predict the breaking of attention. So it's this ramping up of attention and breaking of attention, ramping of attention and breaking of attention. I think these are important results because they violate this stereotype or assumption that deep social connection of the sort leading to happiness.
Always involves
ongoing eye contact or ongoing Focus
just as with meditation. Just as with any activity, frankly, we undergo shifts in
attention and focus, that is focused ramps up, and then it breaks, and then it re-engages it, ramps up, it breaks, and then it re-engages. And that it turns out is the basis of in-depth connected
conversation. So, for those of you that are interested in creating social Connection
in,
Any context
and in particular, for the sake of increasing happiness, because
it's very clear that social connections, even
if they are fairly
superficial, social connections can increase. Our sense of
Happiness, seeing faces is important, ideally faces in person, although I suppose these days over
Zoom or over other screen, type medium would be a close second. But the point is that, if you want to increase happiness, you need to have Quality Social connections. And if you want to have Quality Social connections, you need
Be present and engage in those social connections and that requires a viewing of each other's faces ideally, which is not to say that a phone call or text change can't be meaningful,
but that faces are really the most powerful
way to engage in Social contact and that eye contact, not consistent eye contact, but I content of the sort that builds up and then breaks and builds up and breaks across. The interaction is going to be the
best way that we are aware of to
feel that.
One had a real
connection, this should also remove any pressure that you might feel to constantly. Look at somebody or to be completely eyes open staring at them without blinking or diverting your attention at any point during our conversation. This also, frankly is an opportunity where if somebody says, hey, you're not paying attention because you look away that you may actually
be engaging in what is the more typical form of healthy connection. I talked about
this long ago on an episode about focus and turns out when we are listening very intently to somebody
And trying to remember the information, they're telling us, we will often close our eyes and that's
not a form of lack of attention. That's actually a form of attending in because we have so much
of our brain devoted to Vision. 40 percent of our brain is
devoted to Vision in some way or another, when we
close our eyes, we can actually devote more attentional resources to member, remembering the
specifics of what people are telling us. But again, please don't go through conversations with your eyes closed. The entire time, I think that would certainly not be conducive to building social
connection. So, we know that faces,
Are
important for social connection, as it relates to synthetic happiness. And we know that eye contact is really important for building social connection.
Physical contact is also important for social connection
and not just romantic or
sexual type Connection. In
fact, there is a form of physical connection that is present in other
primates. In fact, it's present as far as we know in all mammals and is
also very much, a
feature of the human nervous system
and that's something called a low
grooming have to imagine that most people probably haven't heard of a low grooming. The
reason I'm bringing up a low grooming is that it stems from
A fairly extensive literature about the pro-social pro happiness,
effects of pets, on humans. In fact,
if you want to read up on this there is a paper out of Yale University on this topic that was published in 2018, the title of the paper is the influence of interactions with dogs on
affect. Okay. Emotion,
anxiety, and arousal and children and it references. Some other studies that were performed on humans and the basic takeaway is that the so-called AAS animal-assisted activities,
Represent a really potent way to increase people, including children's feelings of well-being. Now, what's interesting about this to me is that dogs themselves, don't really
have to do much except be present in the room in order for these positive effects that is the reductions and anxiety increases in happiness Etc to occur. And in fact, they can be very, very brief
as they described in the paper brief unstructured, interactions with an unfamiliar dogs. You don't even need to need to know this.
Dog after exposure to a moderate stressor showed higher positive effect relevant participants received, a soothing object or waited for the same amount of time. So just even seeing a dog for a brief amount of time, has been shown to reduce stress and improve
happiness, or I should say increase feelings of
Happiness. Overall, then a child, receiving a soothing object, which
it was for, at least for me a little bit counterintuitive, I would have thought that children receiving a soothing object would have been the more powerful.
Stimulus. But in fact, it wasn't at least not in this study. The real question I think we should be asking ourselves is what is it about interactions with others? And with other animals that could potentially have this pro-social happiness enhancing effect.
And the reason I raise this is also because I think many people are interested in either owning or having
interactions with pets as a way to improve their feelings of well-being. And I
say having interactions with, because
I myself,
A good example of somebody who wasn't always able to have pets. So when I was a graduate student in a postdoc, I very much wanted a dog, very very very much wanted. A dog. In fact, there was a rule in my family at some point that I wasn't allowed to talk about dogs anymore because I was talking about all the breeds of dogs going to
dog breeders examining different breeds, going to the pound etcetera, but the point was that I was obsessed with getting a dog, but I knew I wasn't in a
good position to own a dog yet. I didn't have the finances. I didn't have the correct living situation.
And so on, eventually I did own a dog, of course.
But at the time, I couldn't. So what I would do is every Sunday, I would go to a place where
they Foster dogs and they need a dog walkers and I would walk their dog. I would also walk my neighbor's dogs, I didn't charge them for it. In fact, I felt like I was getting paid by getting time with those dogs. And in fact, I put an ad at that time on Craigslist, that I would walk people's dogs for free. And only a few people took that
seriously, but of the ones that did, I had a great little Cadre of dog owners that
would allow me to take their dogs out.
I was super happy. It just made me very very happy and I really enjoyed it. I'm frankly, it was a great opportunity for me to also get to know the various dog breeds and the different dog temperaments and to learn a little bit about my ability to interact with dogs in it, in a certain way. Actually got to be a pretty good dog walker. Unfortunately, later I got a bulldog and it turns out, no matter how good a dog walker you are. Bulldogs just simply don't like to walk. In fact, if you've ever walked up to a bulldog and you've offered to scratch or pet that dog, you'll notice that Bulldogs, love that and
I would argue having been a bull dog owner that they like it because it's an opportunity for them to stop moving. But that's more about the Bulldog than what I'm about to tell you
next, which is this principle of so-called a low grooming. A low grooming, is a pattern of behavior
that's observed. In essentially, all mammals
but very strongly in non-human primates and primates where individuals within a species touch one another and this is
non-sexual touch. So this would be
if someone brushing somebody else's hair or combing their hair or even using a lint roller on them for instance or
someone grooming. Somebody else not
typically, one needs to have an established relationship with this person. So it could be a
professional type relationship
where this is a barber cutting, somebody's hair or hair dresser cutting, some or styling somebody's hair. It could be, somebody giving someone a
manicure a pedicure could be somebody doing skincare or massage for
somebody in a professional context, or it
could.
Two people who have agreed that is appropriate for the context and for the relationship for one person to be grooming. Somebody
else, it's can even believe it or not. There's literature on
this. This can even extend into the realm of people
sort of cleaning, and picking off other people. Now,
when we see this in primates, it
seems like a very cute and sort of almost understandable Behavior. We can see these pictures online, if you look them up, you can just look up a low grooming and you'll see vast number of pictures of, for instance,
Baboons picking little things out of each other's hair or grooming and kind of
perusing. One another to find things, presumably
parasites or like little bits of plants or something like that that they want to remove from them. A low grooming is
known to stimulate a certain category of neurons called the C
tactile fibers.
These are a particular category of so called sensory neurons that innervate our skin so these are literally like little endings of neurons little wires that end up in the skin.
That when they are touched lightly tend to create a feeling of well-being in the
person that's being touched again, this
is consensual touch, that's very context appropriate but it's known to increase levels of oxytocin, a kind of hormone / neurotransmitter, it's both really. That is known to evoke feelings
of Bob of bond or a feeling bonded to somebody or
something. And for many people we hear about oxytocin and we think
about the bond between
ween parent and child in particular, mother and infant where it's been most extensively studied or between two members of a romantic couple. But if you look at the literature on a
low grooming what you find is that when humans groom one another, the increases in oxytocin that are experienced are at least on par with and in fact more often more dramatic in response to a low grooming than in response to other forms of touch. So the point here is that a low grooming is a pro-social
Sure, that tends to associate with n promote feelings of
well-being and happiness. And this is not a
trivial effect. If you look at the brain Imaging data or other forms of data on this Alle grooming is a very powerful form of bonding between individuals, that's
completely nonverbal. In fact, most often, it doesn't involve eye contact. I suppose two people could be looking at one, another grooming one another but typically, this is done from the side or from behind.
Why did I bring up the paper on
pets? Well, it turns out that when humans stroke dogs
or brush their dogs or stroke cats or brush, their cats Etc,
that is a form of human to animal a low grooming and it's one in which both the pet and the human receive huge
increases in oxytocin and other related, neurochemicals that make us feel bonded. I bring this up because the Harvard longitudinal study on Happy,
Enos and many
many others. If not hundreds of other studies on happiness, point to the importance of Quality Social connection. Right? You hear this over and over again, people on their Death Beds, don't say they wish. They had worked more people on their deathbeds, talk about the richness of social
connections, or the wish that they had invested more in Social connections.
I think a lot of people think of social connections, only in terms of travel with
or
conversation with others but much of what we perceive as deep social
connections.
So involves physical contact. And that's something that's deeper deeply rooted. Scuse me in our evolutionary
biology and its present both in us and in non-human primates. And it's clear that we can engage in these kinds of pro-social. Nonverbal
non eye contact, type behaviors through things, like non-sexual tactile touch AKA Alla grooming.
So, we've been talking about a number of the different things that one can do in order to
increase levels of happiness
and certainly before we conclude
Include. Today I'm going to touch back into not just synthetic happiness and the various things we can do. Such as pro-social spending, a low grooming, social connection Etc. But also things related to happiness that involve focus on vocation and work and pursuit of goals. Because as I mentioned at the beginning, those are also critical to increasing our state of happiness and certainly our state of security and the feeling that we can
provide for ourselves and perhaps, for others.
Well, we will talk about that,
but I think it's also important to talk about this notion of choice and choice is and whether or not having a lot of
freedom to choose or limited freedom, in choosing, what we do and what we get and what we are able to pursue in
life, how that relates to both natural happiness and synthetic happiness, Dan Gilbert and others have explored this issue of
freedom of choice and how it relates to happiness.
And
And there I must say the findings
are incredibly counterintuitive
but very, very well supported
by all of their data.
I'm going to summarize a large amount of the studies at once by saying
the following
Dan's laboratory and other Laboratories have done experiments
where they give people a series of options.
In one of the more classic examples. They give people the opportunity to rate a number of different paintings or pictures in ascending or descending order.
Of preference other words, they're deciding, which ones they like most, which ones they like
least then, what's interesting is, the experimenter will vary the extent to, which they have to stick to that
choice. So, this could be sticking to the
choice by receiving that painting to take home or in another experiment, it was having to make a choice between giving up one photograph that they the the research
subject took
or another photograph that they took, one of the photographs was going to go off to a publication, another one they could keep for themselves.
And the conditions in that experiment were either that you had to make the decision and it was Final.
That is, you could keep one
and rate your decision or you could keep one. And then you had the opportunity to swap
out that picture for the other one at some later
time. In other words, these experiments really weren't about rating pictures. They were really about whether or not constraining your choice, meaning forcing somebody to make a choice and stick to that choice, led to Greater levels or lesser
levels.
Of happiness and satisfaction with that choice
and what they find consistently is that when people have an ongoing set of
choices, it leads to reduced levels of happiness,
now that might come a surprising to many of you, but I want to be clear about what this means. This is not to say that having a lot of
choices of what you like, most leads to lesser happiness and that having fewer choices about things you do or objects you.
Our Etc leads to
Greater happiness. What this set of experiments really points to is that when we make a choice, if we are forced to stick to that choice, We tend to be far happier with that choice. Then if we maintain the option to change our mind, the results of these experiments are extremely informative. I believe, in terms of understanding, our real life, happiness, that is happiness outside the laboratory but I think they are often misunderstood
As meaning that if we have a lot of choices, we tend to be less
happy than if we have
fewer choices. That is not the case. Having freedom of choice is terrific and actually
correlates with elevated levels of happiness. But once we make our
choice it's clearly the case that killing
all other choices or having all other
options killed for us increases our satisfaction
with the choice that we've made
whereas leaving doors open leaving options. Open greatly diminishes.
Our sense of
Of satisfaction,
this has been exported to any number of different domains. So this has been exported to the domain of
making choices about what college to go to
or what partner to select in life.
In every one of those instances, we see that, our happiness, with our choice is very much related to that choice being either. The only one or one of very few other options. There are number of different ways to interpret this. Through the lens of Neuroscience, we might say that the prefrontal cortex, the area of the brain
that's involved in decision, making and evaluating different options is
an area of the brain. That's vital, frankly to our
evolution
When beings into our daily life into our whole life. It is of course, the thing that allows us to evaluate
different rule sets to change, rule sets to switch context and to create meaning, Etc, to interpret. What's good, what's bad? But it's also a fairly
costly process meaning. It's very metabolically demanding,
and there's an entire literature related to what's called ego
depletion. This is certainly a topic for a future podcast. But ego, depletion essentially says
that if I have you attend very intensely to a given,
In task,
for instance asking you to count backwards from a thousand 20 in increments of 13 and then have you switch about halfway through? That's hard for a lot
of people. If I have, you do that, then your ability to suppress impulsive behavior and to do
a hard cognitive or physical task immediately after that is actually suppress the so-called ego. Depletion it relates to a number of different things but
it certainly relates to engagement of the
prefrontal cortex, which is very metabolically demanding.
So evaluating choices and doing
computation of numbers or attending to
things with your mind and forcing yourself to focus, intensely is metabolically demanding and
that's a limited resource that can be reset by things like sleep and on sleep deep rest or idle time or letting your mind wander in that case. A positive mind wandering to allow your brain to reset its ability to focus.
But the other thing that it does is it impacts the reward circuitry of the brain the so called dopamine reward.
It's circuitry and other reward, circuitry is of the brain
and
and here I'm painting with a broad brush, but it essentially divides them such that for instance, if a given choice of
a let's say a partner or maybe you're buying ourselves, an article of clothing. Not that I want to compare, you know,
selection of a life partner to selection of an
article clothing, but just to give multiple examples
might give us and here it's arbitrary units, you know, X units of dopamine increase. Well, if we buy that
Or clothing or we select that life partner. And then we emerged from the store or the wedding and we are focused on what we purchased for ourselves our choice or our life partner choice. And only that well then there's a certain amount of neurochemical reward associated with that and happiness and well-being. But it's also very clear that if we
Leave those choices the store or our wedding, for
instance, or a life with somebody for a
moment, even just mentally and start thinking about the other
options that we might entertain as possible. If those are still open to us in reality or in our mind. Well,
then a reward circuitry becomes fractured in a
way, not physically
fractured, but less attention is devoted to the reward. Circuitry of associated with our choice, and as a consequence instead of it being X units of dopamine,
In its x divided by however many other
choices. We might have available to us in our mind or in reality. Okay. So instead of an again, these are arbitrary units. But instead of a
certain amount of reward, it's a certain amount of reward divided by the number of other
options that we might be considering as alternatives to what we chose. And I think this is a
very important aspect of understanding how limiting, our choices after we've made them is a
Part of what we call synthetic happiness. In fact, we could even go
so far as to say that focusing on the
choices we've made and really investing in those choices.
As good ones were great ones and really trying to limit our thinking
to the choices that we've made once we've made them is
perhaps also important to our natural
happiness because
it's so
inextricably entwined
with what we think of
as a good life.
And what I mean by that is if we are
Constantly in a mode of a valued of decision-making. Even after we've made a decision, we are not neurochemically. Nor
psychologically able to extract the feelings of Happiness associated with the choice that we made.
So we've talked about a number of different
dimensions of Happiness, both in synthetic and natural happiness, and some of the more counterintuitive aspects of happiness, for instance, that people tend to adjust their levels of
happiness,
not regardless but often in
spite of their life circumstances. But as we emphasized earlier in
the episode, that is not to
say, at least the research does not directly support the idea that a major trauma or loss won't impact our happiness. In fact, it tends to and that's why it's important that people access resources and work devoted to overcoming trauma which certainly exists out there. And of course, there are the longitudinal studies and short-term studies,
Knowing that income level and material things don't
necessarily scale with happiness and vice
versa. And yet we also acknowledge early in the episode that while indeed, money can't buy happiness, it can
buffer stress. And while work doesn't necessarily bring happiness
per se work, can bring a tremendous feeling of meaning and
resources which can then put you into context in which things like Pro social contact and enhanced bonds and
Caretaking of others and their of you can be enhanced.
So it would be unfair. And in fact,
inaccurate to Simply view, happiness, through the lens of money. Doesn't matter. It's all about social connection and so on and so forth. Absolutely social connection is important, which is why we spent some minutes talking about some of the ways to enhance social connection, both with other human beings and other animals and them with
us. I think there is a opportunity here to
Take the research on happiness, the research on the Neuroscience of What. Happiness and gratitude, and pro-social connection tells us and to combine it into a bit of a model, or a tool kit, if you will. And I think, indeed, this will be a tool kit.
In one of our future toolkit episodes, likely merge with the toolkit on gratitude, which we haven't done
yet. And perhaps even we will do an entire episode on social
bonds and how to enhance, or build social bonds or least with the science tells us.
About that.
If we take a step back and we look at the concept of Happiness, we can make a couple of absolute statements that is statements. That I think very few people, if any would contest. First of all, there's no single molecule or chemical associate with happiness but that the chemical milieu of the brain and body is important for setting the
stage or the opportunity for happiness. Hence, why there are treatments aimed at alleviating depression or Mania that Target, certain neurochemical
And hormone systems
happiness. At least the wave. I'm framing it today has essentially two components. One is meaning that is what sort of meaning do certain types of
interactions or behaviors could be work. Could be social interactions, Etc,
carry for us and nested in that is this
concept of connection and we talked a bit about tools for enhancing connection things. Like eye contact, but not constant eye contact things like
being
Be present to a conversation or an activity that you're engaging in. Remember, we talked about the
paper, a distracted mind is an unhappy mind, the paper published in science. And we talked about the study also published in science, in which giving
money but also knowing how that money has
positively impacted, others leads to this feeling of pro-social connection and happiness in The Giver, and in the receiver. And
I should mention again that it's not just the giving of money, but also the giving of
And time and attention that can have similar effects.
So we have meaning and
connection and a number of different ways to access those.
And then we have this access that I'm referring to as performance and resources and I'm talking about performance and resources as it relates to Natural happiness.
Not synthetic happiness. But natural happiness because
we would be
wrong. I believe we were to say that income
doesn't matter. I think it's fair to say,
based on the research that income matters and income that can cover costs of living plus, that includes some buffer.
And what do I mean by buffer? I mean buffer to the anxiety that circumstances might change is important. Now, that's going to vary from person to person. Meaning some people will be perfectly happy making $1 more than
their absolute cost of living every month.
Other people will require a more substantial buffer in order to protect them against the negative
psychological effects of worrying about for instance inflation.
During that they might lose their job. And this is why I think most people recommend having if possible some buffer in their bank account, that could cover
two or three, or maybe even six, or maybe in 12 months of living
expenses, where they to lose their job or something catastrophic happened to
them. So, if we're going to talk about happiness, I think it's only fair only accurate and frankly, only respectful to talk about living requirements and cost of living requirements.
That includes this
sort of buffer and that that buffer tank
xiety is going to vary. Depending on how
anxious somebody gets about the possibility of catastrophic things happening to them, like losing their job or their rent, going up or doubling.
And here I'm talking about hypotheticals, but I think we all know people and
perhaps ourselves have
experienced those kinds of circumstances. So when we talk about happiness, we absolutely need to think about resources. And we also need to think about performance, I think we would be completely inaccurate if we simply said, oh, you know, any
Work leading to any outcomes. You know
any effort regardless of whether or not it gets you in a in school or an F in school isn't going to impact your happiness. I don't think anyone would agree with that and yet, if you look at the major takeaways, at least as they are
communicated, typically in the
public sphere around the
longitudinal and short-term studies of
Happiness, the takeaway generally is more focused on social
connection and how money is not.
Not
important. I don't think anyone that saying
that actually means that income that can cover your expenses. Plus some buffer isn't important, but it's often not stated.
So if we were to come up with a general model of happiness, that includes various tools,
for how to increase our levels of happiness, I think it's only fair to include
both natural and synthetic forms of happiness, and to pursue both
natural and synthetic
happiness. Just to remind you natural happiness, is the kind of happiness that we associate with.
Obtaining something either by effort or because it was given to us. Although I definitely want to highlight the fact that receiving things that don't require much reward in order to receive them over time, can be detrimental to our dopamine system, that's an important aside. The other form of happiness is the form of happiness, that we call synthetic happiness, which is, for instance, focusing on social connection. And
we talked about ways to do that as a means
to enhance your happiness, right? Again, the
Language the name synthetic happiness, imply something,
kind of artificial. But
frankly, genuine social connection
is genuine. There's nothing artificial about it or synthetic about it is that you can synthesize it through action, through deliberate action,
likewise being focused or encouraging yourself working on being focused on whatever
activities, you happen to be engaged in positive or negative is
known to increase your levels of happiness. Again, this is a form of synthetic happiness. You're not obtaining anything new or
Or additional as a consequence of this it's entirely internal right? There's no external reward there isn't more money. That arrives with this or a better grade although I would make the argument that if you are present to the work, you're doing in any context, physical or mental work, it's very likely that you are going to perform better at that work. So we have natural happiness, and synthetic happiness, and both of them, require our attention and effort. And in fact, if we were to
Draw a link between natural and synthetic happiness.
It really. Is this concept of presence of really being focused on what we're doing.
That's most likely to lead to the outcomes that we want both externally. In
terms of receiving monetary rewards are grades, or praise or whatever. It is that you happen to be pursuing out
there resources of
some kind and presence and striving to be present when in the pursuit of so-called
synthetic happiness in the form of social
connection, or in the form of
I'm really focusing on the choice that
you've made and making the best of that choice especially since you made that choice in a way that you deemed best at the time. Well, that also is known to increase your
overall levels of happiness. So if inability to focus and attend to things, deeply
is really what's most important and really acts as the greatest lever for both natural and synthetic
happiness, will then tools like a 5-minute daily meditation or a 13-minute day meditation, as well as tools.
That allow us to get excellent sleep every night, which of course, sets the basis for attention during the day. If you've ever had a poor night's sleep than you are very familiar with how hard it is to focus the following day, at least for long periods of time.
But building our capacity to focus through a focusing exercise which again is often called meditation. But is really simply just a focusing and
perceptual exercise
that's going to create an outsize effect on all the aspects,
all the
Saviors that we know feed into creating natural and synthetic happiness.
And so, it's really fair to say that our ability to attend and focus really equates to happiness. So, as is often typical this podcast today, we've talked a lot about the various aspects of the science of Happiness, including the different forms of happiness, and tools to access
those different forms of Happiness.
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