Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee - #151 The Surprising Truth About Happiness with Professor Laurie Santos

Episode Date: January 27, 2021

What is happiness? And can we learn to be happier than we already are? Today’s guest believes we can. Laurie Santos is a professor of psychology at Yale University and host of The Happiness Lab podcast. Her ‘Science of Wellbeing’ course became the most popular in the university’s history and has developed into a global phenomenon, with over three million people signing up to study Laurie’s evidence-based strategies for happiness. In this conversation, Laurie shares exactly what those happiness boosting strategies actually are. She also explains how being happy with your life, differs from being happy in your life and how balancing the two is key to overall happiness. We also cover the relationship between money and happiness and discuss the unfortunate reality that when it comes to happiness, our intuition is often wrong. We discuss maximising social connections, being thankful, being present, exercising and sleeping more – things we know are good for us but often lack the motivation to seek out.  We also talk about how technology can both help and hinder social connections, how helping others is preferable to helping ourselves, and the incredible benefits of a daily gratitude practice.  This is a wide-ranging and uplifting chat that really breaks down the psychology of happiness and Laurie’s suggestions will help you start working towards greater contentment starting today. The best news is that the tools to our happiness are simple and free. Show notes available at drchatterjee.com/151 Follow me on instagram.com/drchatterjee/ Follow me on facebook.com/DrChatterjee/ Follow me on twitter.com/drchatterjeeuk DISCLAIMER: The content in the podcast and on this webpage is not intended to constitute or be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your doctor or other qualified health care provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition. Never disregard professional medical advice or delay in seeking it because of something you have heard on the podcast or on my website. 

It'd just be nice if our brain was like pointing us towards the things that were really going to make us happy, if we went after the stuff that we were really going to like. But the data suggests that that's just not the case. I sometimes joke with my students that our minds lie to us about happiness. We're systematically going after stuff to improve our happiness that's not going to work. You know, it'd be one thing if we just weren't working at it, if we're just like, oh, I'll just see what happens, maybe I'll get happy. The problem is like, we're putting a ton of energy and effort into becoming happier. We're just doing it wrong. Hi, my name is Rangan Chatterjee. Welcome to Feel Better, Live More. Today's conversation is all about happiness. What is happiness really? And can we learn to be happier

than we currently are? Well, today's guest certainly believes that we can. Laurie Santos is a professor of psychology at Yale University, and she's host of the Happiness Lab podcast. Her science of wellbeing course became the most popular in Yale's history and has developed into a global phenomenon with over 3 million people all over the globe starting up to study and learn evidence-based strategies for happiness. In our conversation today, Laurie shares exactly what those happiness boosting strategies actually are. She also explains how being happy with your life differs from being happy in your life and how balancing the two is key to overall happiness.

We also cover the relationship between money and happiness and discuss the unfortunate reality that when it comes to happiness, our intuition is often wrong. We discuss maximizing social connections, being thankful, being present, exercising, sleeping more, things that we know are good for us, but often lack the motivation to seek out. So we also talk about how technology can both help and hinder our social connections, how helping others is preferable to helping ourselves, and the incredible benefits of a daily gratitude practice. This is a wide-ranging and uplifting conversation that really breaks down the psychology of happiness, and Laurie's suggestions will help you start working towards greater contentment starting today. The best news is that the tools

to our happiness are simple and free. And now my conversation with the wonderful Laurie Santos. It's really interesting because your course that you put together for Yale students has made media headlines around the world. It is, I think, one of the or the most popular course in Yale's history. What is going on with that course? Why has it proved so popular and why are we talking about it all around the world, do you think? Yeah, well, I think it's worth noting how the course started because I think that sort of shows a little bit about its popularity. So, you know, I've been teaching at Yale for over a decade,

but just in the last couple of years, I took on this new role on campus where I became a head of college. In the UK, this is a little bit more familiar because you're used to kind of Oxford, Cambridge, but for folks that don't know, head of college is kind of like where you're like a faculty who lives in Hogwarts with students. You know, you're kind of a faculty member who's assigned to sort of Gryffindor or Slytherin. Right. And that means that I really live on campus with students. And I started seeing students in a totally different way. I was seeing them in the dining hall and in the coffee shop. I was watching their daily life.

And honestly, I didn't really like what I was seeing. Like I was seeing the kind of real mental health problems that college students today go through, where my students were reporting just being, you know, too depressed to function many days, just like so anxious they were having panic attacks. And also just kind of like fast forwarding through their life. You know, I'd ask like, oh, how it's going? How's it going? And they'd say, oh, well, you know, we're almost at spring break or I'm almost to the weekend. And it just felt like they weren't enjoying their daily lives. And so the class came out of an attempt to try to give the students some strategies so they could do better. You know, I'm a practicing psychologist. I know there's lots of different evidence-based

kind of approaches we can take to feel better, right, to kind of improve our well-being, to feel less depressed, to feel less stressed and so on. And so I kind of, you know, slapped the class together. You know, it was a new class on campus. I assumed like 40 students would take it. And so you can imagine my surprise when I walked into a classroom that had over a thousand students. It wasn't even a classroom, actually. It was a concert hall because that was the only spot where we could fit so many students. And I think that the fact that students on campus just like flock to this class really tells us something. It tells us that, you know, the students were voting with their feet, right? Like they don't like this culture of feeling stressed and anxious, and they wanted

to do something about it. But I think the class went viral, not just on campus, but kind of around the world, in part because we have some misconceptions when it comes to what it means to be happy. I think people were kind of shocked to hear that these Yale students, you know, Ivy League students who are 19, who had their whole lives ahead of them, were experiencing so much depression and anxiety that they, you know, dropped their pre-med courses and dropped their computer science courses and signed up for a class on happiness. I think everybody around the world kind of asked, well, if Yale students really need this,

you know, we also, we also really need this content. And so people just, I think, were really taken with this story of, you know, so many Ivy League students who are so depressed and anxious that they needed a class on happiness. But also that, you know, people around the world wanted those tips, too, you know, and that's kind of when the class, you know, really kind of blew up. you know, really kind of blew up. It's really a sign of the times, isn't it? Because what you're describing was in pre-pandemic times, right? So if people were struggling around the world with stress and anxiety and, you know, about as far away from happiness as you could be, what I wonder is the state of the world today. We'll definitely get into that in the conversation, but I think it's a beautiful thought that you were delivering a happiness course in a concert hall, like the modern rock gig is

the happiness gig, which I think is, yeah, it is quite something. Laurie, I think at the start of this conversation, I wonder if you'd mind defining what is happiness or certainly the way you teach about it and you talk about it, because I think happiness means different things to different people. way you said how I define it and how I teach about it, because I think we could have as many definitions of happiness as there are people in the world, right? The way I teach about it is to really use the social scientist definition of happiness, which admittedly is a pretty narrow one. It's a kind of definition of happiness that works for scientists because we can measure it. But social scientists tend to think about happiness as sort of being happy in your life and being happy with your life. So being happy in your life is just how many positive emotions you have. You know, you're feeling joy, you're feeling laughter, you're feeling socially supported. You know, are you not experiencing as many negative emotions like anger, frustration, sadness, anxiety, whatever? whatever. You know, so if that ratio is pretty good of the positive emotions to like negative emotions, I can say you're pretty happy in your life. But there's also this component of being happy with your life, which is kind of a bigger question. It's sort of the answer to the question,

all things considered, how are you feeling with your life right now? Are you satisfied with your life right now? Does your life have meaning and purpose and so on? And it's worth noting that those two parts of happiness, the in your life and with your life, can dissociate. This is salient to me right now on campus. I live on campus, but I also have a dean who lives on campus, and she and her wife just had a new baby. And they're, you know, really happy with their life. They have this, you know, new child and this new creature they're taking care of, you know, that they brought into this world. But then they're pretty unhappy in their life.

You know, there's a lot of dirty diapers and less sleep, you know. So it's worth noting that these things don't always hang together. And scientists tend to be able to measure both of these pretty well. The way they measure them, which is, you know, can feel unscientific, but actually is quite rigorous, is we simply just ask people, you know, I ask people, you know, list your positive and negative emotions, you know, give me a sense of how often these are happening in your life, or I kind of give you a survey little app on your phone that pings you and says, okay, go through these emotions, which are you experiencing right now? And then same thing with measuring happiness kind of with your life, I can just ask you the question, scale of one to

10, all things considered, how satisfied are you with your life right now? And the goal of a lot of these social science approaches is just to try to maximize both of these, right? You know, if I can give you some practices that make you experience more joy, less negative emotions, and kind of make you feel like you have more meaning in your life and your life is more satisfying, then I can kind of tick off the list that, you know, those happiness interventions are working. You're kind of happier overall. kind of tick off the list that, you know, those happiness interventions are working, you're kind of happier overall. Is there a potential flaw when we're asking people about happiness? And I love the happiness research. So I guess I'm just trying to, I'm just trying to sort of work it through in my head that a lot of us are living on a treadmill day to day. We never pause, we never stop, we never reflect on actually what we're doing, how we're doing it, why we're doing it. And so I imagine being

asked a question by a researcher where you reflect on your life in some ways may give a slight bias. I don't know, positive or negative, because you're actually taking a bit of time to maybe stop and think. Is that something that you found or something you all try and be aware of and sort of measure for? Yeah. I mean, I think this is something that worries happiness researchers a lot. In fact, this is something that I really struggled with as I got into this field. My day job is studying animals and animal behavior, right? Where we're used to these really rigorous behavioral methods, right? And now I come to this field of positive psychology and the measure of choice is like,

oh, you just ask somebody and it feels like, wait, wait, wait, where's the science here? But the good news is folks who use these kinds of surveys have worried about this exact problem. And they've done some good stuff to make sure that these measures are really valid, that they're tapping into these real constructs. One thing that they've done is to try to make sure that these measures of just asking somebody, that they correlate with all the stuff that's harder to get information, but that you'd really want it to correlate with. Such as, for example, if I run, you know, text analyses on your tweets, where I kind of pull your journals and I run some text analysis on the words you use. Does, you know, the emotions that you tell me that you're experiencing day to day, do they correlate with the sort of private thing that you weren't sort of giving the experimenter?

Another is in cases where we have good access to like hormonal measures, things like cortisol, which is a stress hormone. Do those kinds of things, the things you say on the self-reports, do those link up to those stress measures? And the answer seems to be yes. So, you know, when folks have kind of looked rigorously at these kind of quick and dirty methods, they do tend to correlate with the stuff that's harder for researchers to get on a big scale. And so that makes me think that, yeah, you know, we are kind of tapping into something that's real. But another way I've come around to these measures is just more philosophically. It's just like, what am I trying to maximize, say, in my students? You know, when I taught the class, what did I want? And ultimately what I wanted was like, you know, if I asked them, hey, are you

happier right now? Their students are like, yeah. You know, are you feeling more positive emotions right now? They're like, yeah. You know, are you more satisfied with your life? They're like, yeah. In some ways, if they're telling me that, then I'm kind of achieving, you know, what I wanted to achieve anyway. Yeah. I mean, I love that because ultimately it is a subjective experience, right? The same experience I can feel happiness after experiencing it, you may not feel happy after it. So ultimately, what better way is there than actually asking us how we feel? Your definition was really, really lovely, this idea of happiness with your life. And was it in your life? Yeah, kind of like, you know, just the day-to-day

sorts of happiness. Often, you know, you're just hedonic emotions, right? You know, are you feeling lots of laughter and, you know, joy and things like that? And are you kind of not as much experiencing things like frustration and anger and so on? I think I always use the not as much because I don't think it would be a happy life if we just experienced joy all the time. You know, these are why my colleagues in California who are at Stanford, you know, they don't appreciate the weather because it's like perfect weather all the time. You know, they don't notice on a sunny day. Right. And so you actually do want some variance to kind of feel good and having some negative emotions allows you to notice the good ones. And so I think that part's important, too. So it's good to know there are some negatives of living in California. So we can spread that out to the world that it's not all it's cracked up to be. There is that conflict, as you said, with your dean friends who lives on campus. And I was thinking that a set of experiences that we feel happy about may change during our life.

So for example, in our 20s, let's say, we're out drinking and gambling, whatever we might want to do that gives us a short burst of happiness, because people feel good when they're doing it, right? So in terms of that hedonistic measurement, it's like, yeah, I feel good, but there may not be happiness with their life. There may just be happiness in their life. And for me, that's quite an interesting conflict. I mean, how would you think about that? Yeah. I mean, my sense is that if possible, you want to maximize both. The advice from my dean would be like, yeah, I mean, how would you think about that? or, you know, making some social connections so you're not feeling so lonely, right? You know, you kind of want to maximize both. And I think that's especially true for people who are really working on the kind of hedonic parts of happiness, the people who are really happy in their life,

but then when they look at their life and ask if they're satisfied with it, they're just simply not. And this is something we see in the literature all over the place. You know, some of the people with the most modern conveniences, you know, who can fly anywhere to any beautiful vacation location on a dime, you know, who can afford the best food and the best wine, sometimes they feel like their life is really empty. You know, if you ask them, are you satisfied with your life? They'll answer no, right? You know, this is one of the reasons why wealth doesn't necessarily predict happiness in the way we think, especially at high wealth levels. You assume that multi-millionaires,

the 1%, they're going to be pretty happy. But in fact, they're actually pretty miserable, in part because sometimes wealth and all the conveniences and all the good positive emotions that might come with the stuff you can buy in your life, that doesn't necessarily translate to being happy with your life. Ultimately, you kind of need more meaning and purpose and bigger things to get there. I'd love to understand more about the relationship between money and happiness. But just to comment on what you just said about the super rich, it's really interesting. I wonder why that is that people in that salary bracket are so unhappy. And I'm sure a contributory factor, well, I would imagine is how we define success in society. The fact that we think it's about money and a better holiday and

a better car and a bigger house. And a lot of the way we live, whether it's schools, universities, they keep driving you towards that. And then for those who actually do get there and get that money, often, I guess there must be that realization that, oh, well, it's kind of that it. Because actually, if money is your aspiration, then I guess until you get to Jeff Bezos, there's always someone who's got more than you, right? So, you know, what is that relationship between money and happiness? Yeah, well, I think you hit the nail on the head of why more money doesn't necessarily bring us more happiness. And it's because of Jeff Bezos, basically, or Elon Musk, or whoever happens to be, you know, they're

like neck and neck, you know, right now for the richest person in the world. But what I mean by that is that it's so easy to compare your salary with somebody else's, right? And this is a feature of our mind that really impedes our happiness. Our mind doesn't think in terms of objectives pretty much at all, you know, whether that's salary or our looks or any feature of our life, we tend to think relative to some reference point, some social comparison. And our minds have a knack of picking social comparisons that make us look less rich, less attractive, less productive, less whatever than we're kind of going for. You know, if we're kind of looking at wealth, we look at, you know, Elon Musk or maybe Jeff Bezos. If you're looking at who's the most attractive, well, I don't think of Jeff Bezos anymore.

Now I'm thinking of like, I don't know, Denzel Washington or like, we tend to pick comparison points that make us feel the worst. And that means that we could objectively be doing great, but feel bad about how we're doing. And we see this, you know, on my podcast, The Happiness Lab, I actually interviewed this guy, Clay Cockrell, who's a wealth psychologist. He's a mental health professional who only deals with the 0.001%. And he has lots of clients, in part because they tend to be pretty miserable. You know, as soon as you make a million, you're like, well, that's just a million. I got to get to, you know, the 10 millions. And once you're in the 100 millions, he finds clients who are like, if only I could get to a billion, if I could just have that B in front of my name, like the

billionaire instead of millionaire, that's where I'd get there. If only I could buy this $500,000 painting, I'm not there yet. And I think it comes from this idea that, you know, we've been sold this line, again, as you mentioned, like, you know, since college that like money and success and all these accolades are going to make us happy. These rich folks get those and they look at their life and they're like, well, how satisfied am I with my life? And they're like, I'm not. And rather than thinking, wait a minute, maybe that was bunk, maybe money and success and all this stuff didn't bring happiness. Instead, they say, ah, I just must not be rich enough. If only I could get a little bit more, that's when I'll really kind of get that happiness payoff. And so what you find is that the rich, you know, tend to be relatively unhappy. They tend to find

relatively less meaning in their life, in part because they're chasing after some comparison point that they're never going to get to. What does the research say about lower income levels? Because it's one thing when you've got all the money to buy shelter, food, anything that you could possibly want. But there's obviously another end to that scale where money might be influential in terms of our happiness levels. Yeah, that's really important because in general, overall, the message from the work on happiness is that your circumstances don't matter as much as we often think, whether that's your wealth level, your job or your relationship status and so on. But if those circumstances are pretty bad,

then yes, improving your circumstances will really improve your happiness. And so let's take the case of money. Right. I'm saying, you know, being a multimillionaire doesn't necessarily make you happy. But what if we get to the other end? And researchers have tried to look at this. In fact, there's a famous paper by the economist Danny Kahneman and Angus Deaton who looked at this back in, I think, 2009. at this back in, I think, 2009. And what they did was they tried to look at a bunch of different measures of people's well-being and correlate that with people's salary. And what they find, if you look at the lowest levels of people's salary, is that happiness and well-being tend to go up for a while. And then all those well-being curves level off at a certain salary level. And when they did this back in 2009, that was a salary level in the U.S. of $75,000, $75,000 U.S. dollars. That means that if you're earning under $75,000, then, yeah, getting more money is probably going to improve your happiness. That might be the spot where you stop really worrying about bills or, you know, you can get that gym membership or you can get a little you can buy yourself a little time, make sure you know there's food on the table and so on. But after $75,000, doubling, tripling, quadrupling your salary, it seems to have no effect on measures of well-being, things like positive emotion, how many negative emotions you have,

your sense of stress and so on. Now, this is not what we think. I bet most people in the U.S. right now who are earning $75,000 think if I tripled their salary, that would make them happier. But the data, when you really dig into it, suggests that's not the case. If you're earning under that, yeah, definitely improving your salary would help. And so, you know, there's this interesting kind of reaction that you could have to research like this, which is like, well, maybe we should support a universal basic income. And maybe we figured out like a little bit where that

basic income would be at, right? You know, if we gave everybody that, then giving them more wouldn't necessarily help happiness. You mentioned that what we think often isn't played out by the research. And I've heard you speak a couple of times before, Laurie. and I've heard you speak a couple of times before Laurie and this is a theme which I've heard you speak about before that our intuitions over what makes us happy are often wrong I wonder if you'd mind expanding on a few examples yeah I mean this is the I think one of the dumbest features of the human mind right like it'd just be nice if our brain was like pointing us towards the things that were really going to make us happy if we went after the stuff that we were really going to like. But the data suggests that that's just not the case. There are all these domains where we think if I could only get X, then I would be happy.

But then we get that X and it just doesn't work. And so, you know, we just talked about money as an example. Material possessions are another one. You know, many of us think, oh, if I could just get that beach house or that new car or even just, you know, at a local level, I'm just going to buy these new shoes, it'll make me happy. The data suggests that, yeah, it makes you happy for like, you know, a split second, but then it doesn't really, it's not really a happiness that seems to last. It doesn't kind of give you lasting happiness. It doesn't even give you happiness that lasts for as long as we think. And so there's all these ways where we think that changing our circumstances is going to boost happiness, but in fact, it just doesn't work. The flip side, though, is there's all these

different interventions we can do to boost our happiness. I imagine we'll talk more about them, but simple things like taking time for social connection, like experiencing more gratitude, like being present, you know, exercising, sleeping more, like those things have a huge impact on our happiness, but we just don't have motivations to seek them out, right? Like it's not, we tend not to realize, hey, that's the thing you need to go for. At least we don't realize it as much as we go for the money and the success and the accolades and those things. And those should be the things that we're focused on. So this is a problem I sometimes joke with my students that our minds lie to us about happiness.

And I think it's almost like the way our minds lie in these other contexts. Like if you're looking at, you know, one of these visual illusions that go around on the internet, right? You see it one way and it's really strong intuition you have, but actually the way that what will really matter for your happiness might look like the opposite, might look like just something that doesn't fit with your intuitions. And that's bad because it means we're systematically going after stuff to improve our happiness that's not going to work. You know, it'd be one thing if we just weren't working at it, if we're just like, oh, I'll just see what happens. Maybe I'll get happy. The problem is like, we're putting a ton of energy and effort into becoming happier. We're just doing it wrong. So, so fascinating. And definitely we're going to

get into what are these interventions? What are the practical things we can do to increase that feeling of happiness inside all of us? Before we do that, though, I'm really interested on a personal note that, as you said, you study animals and you came across this predicament of unhappy students that you felt that you wanted to help them. And so you turn your attention to this course. What was the name of the course again? On campus, we called it Psychology and the Good Life, mostly because I kind of wanted it to like pop from the course catalog, like, oh, the good life, you know, like students to notice. What's it called? Because it's gone out on Coursera now, hasn't it? That anyone around

the world can access it. Yeah, yeah. The one on Coursera is known as the science of well-being. I'm not totally sure why we switched the names, but I think we wanted to just get well-being in the title so people would kind of know more what it was about. Yeah. And just, I mean, there's some incredible number of people who've done that course now, I think from last thing I read. Yeah. It's been a little surreal to be honest. You know, when we first put the class online, hundreds of thousands of people signed up pretty quickly, which was sort of shocking. But then when the pandemic rolled around, like right around March of 2020, we had this enormous increase in the number of people who signed up. So just a couple, the first couple months of the pandemic, over 3 million people signed up to take the class, which was incredible. But again, I think it shows, it kind of made me, you know, as a scientist sort of feel really kind of excited about my fellow man, right? I mean, I think it was like people wanted to figure out how

to really get through these tough times and they didn't want platitudes. They wanted some evidence based approaches, you know, approaches that come from science. And I think, you know, maybe that was sort of part and parcel of the pandemic. You know, as we are dealing with COVID-19, I think people wanted real solutions, right? Like what's really an evidence-based way I can protect myself against this virus? Like wash my hands, wear masks and so on. I think people wanted to do the same thing, not just to protect their physical health during this time, but to protect their mental health. And I think people didn't have obvious strategies to do so. And I think they saw the classes providing those. And that's why so many people flock to it, you know, once times

got tough. On a personal level, as someone who is sought after around the world now to speak about happiness, I'm interested in your own happiness levels and the sort of things that you learned as you were teaching that maybe you weren't applying, but that through teaching, through accumulating the evidence you've started to bring into your life. Yeah. Well, so, so many things. I mean, you know, I admit that, you know, I was very worried about my students when I just thought about designing the class, you know, seeing their depression and their anxiety and stuff. But one of the things is I was also seeing myself a little bit in them. You know, I was watching, you know, like, how's the week going? Like, oh, I can't wait to get to Friday. Like,

I could experience that that was a bad sentiment, that there was something deeply sad about that. But I also resonated with it. Like, yeah, me too, if I could only get to Friday, you know, or even just things like feeling anxious and depressed, right? You know, I wasn't necessarily clinically depressed or clinically anxious, but, you know, I saw all that stuff in myself too. All the bad strategies I watched my students doing, every error I saw my students making when it came to their happiness, I could see seeds of that in myself too. And so one of the reasons I was excited to teach the class was to figure out those strategies for myself too. I also realized that if I was going to be this happiness professor, I had to practice what I preached, right? You know,

it's like, if you're a medical doctor, you can't go off and be unhealthy and eat cheeseburgers all the time and stuff like that. You got to kind of toe the line so that people know that that expertise is real, that you're kind of not selling snake oil. And so what it meant was that now I really needed to kind of follow the things I was telling my students. And again, the research shows if you engage in these practices, you get happier. I use the kind of standard empirical survey measures of happiness on every single one. My happiness has gone up at least one to two points on a 10 point scale. And it's not like magic. It's just because I'm doing the stuff now that really does improve happiness.

magic. It's just because I'm doing the stuff now that really does improve happiness. Well, let's go through what really matters when it comes to happiness. Are there some universal practices that really you can say without knowing an individual circumstances, you can say with a high degree of certainty that if you do this, you are likely to improve your wellbeing score and your happiness. Yeah, I mean, we know this now. We know lots of these practices for exactly that, with the idea that these are things that won't just help a few people, but that really pretty much universally are going to help

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forward slash live more. And it's worth noting kind of where we get this evidence from. I mean, the evidence starts because positive psychologists go out and they really study happy people. You know, you find them, like they're out there, you know, in the UK and London and New Haven, like, you know, you can find these folks. And then researchers try to ask, like, what are these folks doing differently? Like, how do they behave differently? Do they spend their time differently? And then you get some hints about behaviors that might be working for improving happiness. And then the next step

is that you do an intervention. You bring in the not so happy folks. You make them do the behavior that the happy people are doing. And then you measure whether happiness goes up. And in lots of cases, we have examples of, you know, kinds of behaviors that we know really, really works. And so one of the biggest behaviors that works super well for improving well-being is social connection. One of the most famous papers in positive psychology by the psychologists Marty Seligman and Ed Diener say that social connection and feeling socially connected is a necessary condition for very high happiness. You just simply don't find highly happy people who don't also feel socially connected. But we also know from the intervention work that improving your social connection, making new social connections, even talking to strangers like on a train and sort of pre-COVID days, like talking to strangers on

your commute can actually boost up your well-being in ways we really, really don't expect. And these types of effects hold across personality variables. You know, so you get the same sorts of boosts of happiness for social connection for introverts and for extroverts. It seems to work in ways we don't expect. And I think this is one of the reasons we're all struggling so much during COVID is that, you know, insidiously, one of the problems of COVID is that we have to socially distance. And that means that some of us aren't engaging in social connection in the way we used to. You know, even in subtle ways, you know, many of us are working from home, so we don't get the kind of office cooler, you

know, chat that we get with our co-workers. But we also don't see people like in simple ways. You know, many of us are doing a curbside pickup where we go to a restaurant, just grab something, you know, off the side of the curb or get our groceries dropped off at our door. Like the simple kinds of interactions we have with, you know, the grocery store teller or the person who works at the coffee shop, like we're reducing those kind of simple connections too. And even those weak ties, the research show, matter for happiness. I think one of the reasons we're all kind of feeling it right now is that we need to build in a lot of that social connection that we've lost. And we need to do it more intentionally because it's not happening as naturally as it used to. Yeah, one of the striking things that

I've heard from patients and people who I interact with on social media is how many people regarded themselves as introverts. And they thought, you know, I like being by myself. But a few weeks into these physical distancing measures, they realized, oh, you know, I do like being by myself, but I sometimes like to sit in a coffee shop with my laptop and my headphones in, and I kind of know there's other humans around, or I might just pick up a coffee. And a lot of introverts or people who would regard themselves as introverts think, I'm really, really missing that, you know, the background buzz of other humans, which I think really speaks to what you were just saying there, that all these little, you know, these small interactions that we possibly took for granted, either getting the

train to work, saying hi to the ticket office attendants, showing your ticket to the conductor on the train and all those little things. As we get stuck in our homes, on our screens, that's a huge part of how we've evolved as humans for thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of years that has frankly just been removed from us. And the impact, I think is pretty worrying. Yeah. I mean, I think, you know, if you look at the statistics of things like depression, anxiety, loneliness during COVID, you know, many of these are skyrocketing. And I think, you know, one of the culprits is just that we're losing out on these simple, you know, weak tie social interactions, the chat with the barista at the coffee shop. Those things we forget really kind of build up our happiness.

I think this is another big misconception we have about happiness is we think of happiness as sort of a destination. You know, you get there and you're sort of happily ever after. But that's not the right metaphor for happiness. Happiness is more like a leaky tire. Right. You know, it's going to kind of go flat a little bit. But then, you know, you chat with the barista at the coffee shop and that, you know, kind of makes you feel a little good. And then, you know, go about your day and chat with someone else or have another joyous moment. You know, we kind of can use these moments of joy to sort of boost up our happiness over time. And a lot of those moments were social moments, and we're missing them now. What does the research say about talking to strangers and talking to people we don't know? Because I think there's some quite nice research there, isn't there, showing us just how impactful those interactions are? Yeah, and just how wrong we get, just how wrong we are about those interactions. You know,

this is another domain where at least my intuition is that, yeah, maybe it'll make me feel okay, but like, you know, it's not a major force in our happiness. In fact, if you, you know, plop me on a train, you know, going to work in the morning, you know, maybe I'd talk to somebody, but usually I'd put my headphones on and listen to a podcast or, you know, get some work done or try to get through some email. And it turns out that this is a mistake when it comes to maximizing your happiness. There's some lovely work by the University of Chicago psychologist Nick Epley, who did direct studies on this. This is, again, back pre-COVID times, where he found some subjects who were about to do their daily commute on a train.

He did this on the L trains in Chicago. And he said, OK, you know, you want to be in a study, you'll get a Starbucks gift card and people all sign up because Starbucks gift cards are the engine of all social science research. He's like, oh, my God, Starbucks gift card. And so what he tells subjects is either for the rest of the train ride, don't talk to anybody. Please try to enjoy your solitude. Or for the rest of the train ride, just do what you normally do. It's kind of the control condition. Or for the rest of the train ride, I want you to try to make a meaningful social connection with somebody. Like talk to someone and don't just talk about the weather. Like really try to get to know them. What do people predict? Because he has one group of subjects predict ahead of time, which is going to make people feel happy. And people

predict that the enjoy your solitude condition is going to feel awesome, right? They predict that that's going to maximize their happiness. And they don't just predict that the social connection condition is going to feel neutral. They predict that it's going to actively suck. It's going to take them down from baseline. And what Nick finds is just the opposite. It's that solitude condition that feels yucky. The social connection condition makes you feel great. And I think this is a problem, right? This is another domain where we have these bad intuitions about what makes us happy. And what's worse is it doesn't just affect our behavior. It changes the structures that we create. You know, I'm sure, you know, in the UK, they have, you know, quiet cars on trains and things like that. You know, Nick's evidence suggests that that's not necessarily a way to maximize passenger

experience, right? We would maybe be better off with like a chatty car where you go on the car and everyone's like talking and interacting and getting to know one another. But you know, those are not the systems we build in because we have these incorrect theories about what's going to make us feel good. Yeah, I mean, it's incredible how much we're influenced by the people around us. Because as you were describing that on the L trains, I think in Chicago, you said, it made me think about a few years ago. So I live in the north of England. I don't know how much time you spent in the UK, but there are certain typical kind of sayings about people in the north compared to people in the South. They're not all completely accurate. They're just going to lay that out there straight at the top of this.

But a few years ago, I started going down to London quite regularly for work. And I'm sure you've been to London before. I remember one of the first times where I went on the tube, it's just a few years back and, you know, I'd get on the undergrounds and I can't remember it exactly, but the guy sitting next to me, I was just like, Hey mate, how you doing? How's things going? And the guy looked at me as though, I don't know, like I was about to attack him or I was a freak, like really. And I very quickly learned that, oh, you don't do that on the tube. On the tube, you get on, you mind your own business, you put your headphones on, you stay out of everyone's way. And within a few visits of going down to London, my behavior started to change to the point where I would just go on,

put my headphones on. And I guess I'm naturally very extroverted, so I will always chat to people. But it's quite interesting that, isn't it, how we're saying that that makes us happier, yet often things around us in society, and I wonder how much technology plays in here, because now we can put our headphones on and we can have all these incredible podcasts and playlists in our pockets, which are probably more attractive to us in the short term than chatting to any other human being. So, yeah, just a few sort of thoughts there in terms of our environment. And that's something I guess you must see in the research as well, that our environment influences our happiness and how we behave. Definitely. And I think, you know, a lot of the things in our environment, we assume are designed to make us happier. You know, we assume all these technologies are there, you know, to make us happy. And I mean, we both have podcasts

where happy podcast technology exists, and people can listen to us. I hope my podcast is making people happy. But it's also worth recognizing that there's an opportunity cost, right? You know, if you're listening to your podcast, instead of talking to your family at dinner, you know, that might not be necessarily the best way to boost your well-being. And this is the kind of thing I see all the time with technology, with my students. One of the most striking things for me kind of taking this job where I'm a head of college on campus was sort of seeing how students interact with each other in their kind of natural environment. You know, the one I think about the most is like the dining hall, right? Like when I went to college, I remember the dining hall as being like the loudest place on the planet, you know, because everybody's eating and talking.

And it's just like, you know, like just tons and tons of voices and stories being shared and laughter and things. What was striking when I took on this new role is if you go to a college dining hall right now, I mean, there's some talking and things, but it's much quieter than I remember it. And it's much quieter than I remember it because everyone's sitting around the dining hall with these, you know, headphones that you and I are wearing to talk to each other around with a screen out, either their phone and so on. And the students think they're being social, you know, they're probably scrolling through their Instagram feed or like, you know, like, you know, using one of these weird new social media apps to kind of talk

to one another. But they're not physically talking to one another in the way that primates are used to. And I think it's in part because, you know, the technology is easier. You know, I remember what it was like to be a new college student and to walk to the dining hall for the first time with your tray and you have to like talk to somebody. There's like an awkward startup cost with that. And I think technology just gives us an easy way to kind of do something else, right? You know, not going to avoid that anxiety, but it means because we don't ever get over the startup costs, we never develop these, you know, kind of weak ties with people where we just chat and get that little enjoyment. It means my college students are less likely to make these close friendships. And it's one of the reasons

that nationally in the U.S. right now, 60% of college students report being very lonely most of the time. And I think it's in part because the easiest thing to do is to flop on your headphones and not talk to someone. But that means you're missing out on all these good moments where you can experience joy through social connection. Technology worries me, if I'm honest. Me too. Me too a lot. Technology worries me, if I'm honest.

Me too, a lot. I think particularly as my kids now are 10 and 8, and I feel that my ability to influence, particularly my son, is probably starts to become less and less. And again, I'm not trying to control him or anything. You know, I'm just conscious of what is normal now in society. I'm also aware of how these apps, how technology is designed. And I think there's an illusion of choice that we think. I talk to a lot of teachers say, oh, you know, we believe in giving kids choice. But I don't think it is choice.

I don't think it's this real... I think it's the illusion of choice. I don't think many adults can resist. I certainly don't think kids can resist. And I really feel that we are sleepwalking into major, major problems. And it's really hard because you end up sounding a bit like a Luddite and not sort of moving on with the world. But I don't think it's like all technology is bad. I just feel that we don't intentionally use technology. We're using it to do everything rather than thinking, well, what's good about technology? Like this conversation, brilliant. I can see you. It's not the same as being in the room, but it's a pretty close, you know, comparison. But I just feel, I worry. I mean,

what do you think about technology? And is there any research to support what I guess we're both trying to say? Yeah, no, definitely. I mean, it's something I worry about a lot, both in my own life and kind of watching my own behavior and reaction to technology and all the notifications and cues and the little dopamine reward hits that we get from technology. Also from watching my students, right, who I know are lonelier than they've ever been in college history, right? And I think a lot of that has to do with, ironically, has to do with technology, right? Like these devices that they're using to connect are actually leading them to not form connections in real life. And so I think this is something that we really need to understand better, right? And it's hard to do great science on this because all of us have technology, right?

It's hard to get a control condition with somebody who's never like had a smartphone or social media because they might not be neurotypical, like, you know, in the way you would want a controlled group to be. But I think it's important to recognize that part of the problem of technology isn't the thing we normally think, right? When we have these worries about technology, we instantly point to social media, like social media is the bad guy. But actually, it's just the technology and its excitement in and of itself that might be a problem. On my podcast, The Happiness Lab, I interview my colleague Liz Dunn, who's a professor at UBC and studies the impact that technology has on happiness. And she kind of has this wonderful metaphor. She says, imagine if instead of like, you know, to a restaurant at dinner, instead of bringing my cell phone, I brought this big wheelbarrow.

And in the wheelbarrow, I had a printout of every email I've ever had since 1997, you know, like photo albums on top of photo albums of me and my vacations, my husband and like stuff I've eaten. You know, I had videos like all these DVDs of like cats and porn and like, and a printout of every tweet that every, you know, US president has sent in the last couple weeks, you know, piles and piles of newspapers that go back many, many years. Right. Like recipes. Like if I brought a wheelbarrow filled with like DVDs and printouts and photos and all that stuff, it'd be really hard to sit at dinner and just have a normal conversation with my husband at that restaurant because I'd want to be peeking through like, oh, let's look at this cat video, honey. You know, like, oh,

porn. Like that seems interesting. Right. Like it'd be really hard to ignore that. And the idea is that like your brain knows that on the other side of your phone is all that stuff. Like your brain's not stupid. It recognizes where there's rewarding stuff. And it means that every kind of normal conversation we want to have in real life is in some sense competing with those other stimuli. We have that wheelbarrow and it's in our pocket all the time. It's in our kids' pockets all the time as they go to school, as they try to have dinner with us and so on. And I think we haven't, even when we're not using our phones, we don't necessarily recognize the hit that they're taking on our attention and on our motivation. And that's the

kind of thing that Liz Dunn studies. She looks not necessarily at how much you're not paying attention when you're using your phone, but also the mere act of having your phone around. What does that do to your attention and your social connection? She does this lovely study where she has people sitting in a waiting room and they can either have their phones out with them or not, right? Their phones are away in another room. And what she finds is that people smile 30% less when they just have their phones present. And I think, you know, this makes sense, right? Like if you've got your phone there, you're just going to be tempted to look at it. It's kind of drawing your attention. You're just naturally less inclined to look at

the people around you. And if you multiply that 30% effect by, you know, say walking around on the tube in London or just like walking around any major city and everyone has these phones, you know, what is that doing to our social connection? I think we simply don't understand the magnitude that we're kind of getting our attention stolen by these devices. Yeah, it's insidious. And I think it's an experiment that I don't think any one of us has consciously signed up for. You know, I feel sometimes when I talk about these things that you're literally, you're going up in the face of the direction that society is going, you know, and I think that makes it really challenging. I know you talk about when the phone's not there. Some of my

happiest moments recently are when I've lost my phone or it's been in my car. I left it at my mum's house and I thought, oh, screw it. I'll get it tomorrow. And just, there's this lightness around because. Yeah. You're noticing you're like trees, like the sun, you know, or just like people, I smile at people. No, it's really profound. I think, you know, one of the ways to deal with it, because it's not going away, right? You know, this stuff is going to stick around. We just need better strategies to engage with our technology in more intentional ways. And one of my favorite piece of advice comes from the journalist Catherine Price. She has this lovely book called How to Break Up with Your Phone, where she doesn't really advise you to break up your phone, but just to develop a more mindful relationship with it. And she has this acronym that she uses called WWW. Whenever you pick up your phone, think WWW, which stands for what for, why now, and what else, right?

What did I pick this up for? Was I going to do something with it? I was going to check my email or I was going to look at, you know, look at the weather? Or was I just like bored or anxious or, you know, like something, like what was happening, right? And then why now, right? Like what was the emotion that caused you to do it? Was it just like, you know, wrote and you're just kind of anxiously picking it up? Or was it really like to do something at that moment, you know, or is there something else you could be doing at that moment? And that gets to the sort of what else, which is like, what's the opportunity cost? You know, even if you're bored and you're going to pick up your phone to like, you know, play a game or check your email, like, what else could you be doing during that time that might make you happier? And the what else is often a social what else, you know, when I'm picking up my phone, it's often like I could, you know, go into the room to talk to my husband and check in how he's doing, right? You know, I could look up at the sky, I could take

a mindful breath, right? You know, what are you missing out on by using your phone? And that has kind of caused me and using that sort of WWW strategy myself, it's made me realize a lot, like, why I pick up my phone, which is often out of, like, boredom and anxiety. But also sometimes when it's, like, useful, you know, there's times I need to check my email, like, look at the weather or something. It's when it's kind of not mindful or not intentional, and it's just kind of yanking my attention. And when there's a real opportunity cost on other sorts of social interactions, even with the weather app,

sometimes I've been like, I could just walk to the window and take a little walk around the block and look at the clouds and get a sense of probably what's going to happen, right? It's funny you say those little micro moments where you could look up at the sky or have a little conversation

with one of your flatmates or one of your family. I bet that time adds up. In that moment, we might think, oh, there's just a couple of minutes there, a couple of minutes there. But if you look at your phone, and some of the stats on how many times we look at our phone is really quite worrying. But let's say you look at your phone 40 times in the day. And let's say each time that's two minutes that you could have been doing something else, well, that's 80 minutes potentially. That's nearly an hour and a half of your time. And again, I think the question, as you say, is intentionality. If it's there for a good reason

that you've actually thought about, then fine. The worrying thing for me, I guess, and the sort of idea I've been playing with for about six or nine months now, I spoke to Arianna Huffington about it recently when she came on the podcast. And I guess it's quite similar to what your friend Liz was saying. It's that I don't think another human being can compete with our device. I think it is decimating so many of our relationships with our children, with our partners. And I don't think we realize just... I know what it's like. If I've got my phone and my wife's got a phone in the evening, we could easily be satisfied ourselves in our own little customized world. And these algorithms know exactly what I want to see, how many times my eye has stared at it, how long I've stayed on for it, and it will keep feeding me things. Oh yeah,

this looks interesting. This looks interesting. So one step is to try and make some rules around it. I think another nice approach, which I'm playing around with is, which apps do I really want on my phone? So when you take off the social media apps and actually just only use them on my laptop, my usage goes dramatically down. And, you know, do you have any more strategies around that that you think or you've seen can help people with respect to their happiness? Yeah, I think, you know, these kinds of strategies are like classic ones, right? I mean, what you described about taking your apps off is something behavioral scientists call situation modification, right? You change the situation so it's a little bit harder to access your apps or even to access your phone. You know, I know Ariana has like talked about, you know, having a little phone bed that she uses that, you know, I actually got into my bedroom.

I have an Ariana phone bed. So I put my phone to bed before I go to bed. And then that means, you know, it's just on the other side of the room, right? It's not there to kind of pick up whenever I have this moment of like, oh, I'm bored or I can't fall asleep or something. So kind of getting rid of the technology in your phone, like the apps that are definitely like you don't have a great relationship with, like those go off the phone and just like use them on your laptop. Get the physical structure of the phone away so it becomes a little bit harder. And then I think these rules that you develop with your family are really important. I think

one of the crises that we have with this technology is it came around so fast, we didn't have time to develop norms about it. You know, we have norms about, you know, like when you talk and when you don't talk and like who you can interact with. And we have these kinds of social norms that help us navigate, you know, things that would be tempting to do, but that would be, you know, kind of a little bit gauche, right? You know, like if dinner comes, you know, you wait for everybody to get theirs before you start. You might be tempted to eat it right then, but we kind of have this norm. I think we need the same thing with our phones. We just haven't had time as a society to develop those. You know,

our norms around tempting things like food have come about over thousands of years of cultural evolution. You know, the phone in its most tempting form, which I think of as a sort of, you know, iPhone smartphone, that's new, right? Like that's like, what, 2007, 2009? Like that's when everybody started getting these things. It's like, you know, barely a decade old, right? And so I think that we just kind of need new norms to kind of help us figure out how to navigate this stuff. And so I think you can, you know, it's hard to do that for society, but you can definitely do that in your own families. You can do that in your own flats. You can do that with your friend group, you know, so make some explicit norms like, you know, at dinner, like who pulls their phone out. I've had friends who have a thing of like the first

person to pull their phone out at a friend dinner at a restaurant, you know, you have to pick up the tab, right? You know, like, you know, if you're the one who's like, oh, let me check on the, you know, Google or something, like you have to pick up the tab because you're kind of ruining the moment as soon as you pull your phone out, everyone else wants to. So I think these kinds of strategies are really helpful. But an internal strategy you could use is just to kind of pay attention to how your phone makes you feel. You know, when you go on that social media binge or that like, you know, gaming binge where you're kind of pay attention to how your phone makes you feel. You know, when you go on that social media binge or that, like, you know, gaming binge where you're kind of playing that silly, like, you know, app game or whatever, like, how do you feel afterwards?

You know, even set yourself up a timer so it dings and ask, did that feel good? Are you feeling apathetic? Are you feeling connected? And often when you notice, like, actually, I kind of feel crappy. Like, what did I just do with that hour? That noticing can really help you sort of update your own preferences. And this actually gets to another, you know, we talked about how your mind lies to you. And this is like one of the dumb features of the mind.

Another dumb feature of the mind, specifically a dumb feature of the brain, is that we have these systems that control what we want in life, what we go after, what we crave, what we're motivated to do. And you would like to think that those systems are hooked up to what we actually life, what we go after, what we crave, what we're motivated to do. And you would like to think that those systems are hooked up to what we actually like, what we actually find rewarding and enjoy when we get it. But it turns out those systems aren't really hooked up, right? In fact, if you look in the brain, they're actually separate circuits. And they're separate circuits, which means that you can like want all this stuff, you can kind of crave it and have a motivation for it and all this stuff. But then when you get it, you don't really like it very much. You know, the classic

case of this is a case of addiction, right? You know, if you're a heroin addict, you know, you will have incredible craving for the drug, you know, you'll steal from your family, you'll do everything you can to get it. But then when you finally get a hit, your reward areas aren't firing as much as they would for a non addict, because you're habituated to the drug, you don't even like it very much, right. And I think that we see these little signs of that phenomena of addiction in so many of our behaviors. There's so many times when I'm tempted to go on Reddit and just scroll through. My brain's like, one more page, there'll be something cool on the next page. And a half hour goes by. And if I ask myself, did I like that? I was so motivated to do it. And it sucked. Like, I didn't like it at

all. I felt kind of yucky and apathetic. And then there's the flip side of all these things I actually really do like, you know, when I get a great yoga session in, that feels awesome. When I put the time into like, you know, set up a schedule to talk to a friend on the phone, and we have this really great connection, that feels great. But I don't have the same like motivation and craving I do to like pick up my phone and check my email. Right. And so this disconnect between wanting and liking, I think, is a huge problem. It means we're going to naturally have these motivations to go after stuff with like incredible force and incredible automaticity. And when we get when we do it, it's not going to affect our liking. And it means we don't have brain systems that are telling us to go after the stuff that really will feel good. We have to do that kind of for ourselves intentionally. It takes work. Yeah, it's motivation, but I guess in some ways it's also easier to pick up that phone, right?

To talk to your friends and have that meaningful, raw, authentic interaction. You're going to get more out of it, but you probably have to put a bit more in as well to get that reward. And it's just easier to pick that up and get this kind of pseudo connection online. And I think that's what often happens. I've been thinking a lot about,

well, I've been thinking a lot about happiness for the last few years because I've really been thinking about as a medical doctor, I always think about why is this person coming? Yes, they've got a symptom, but what's really been going on? What has been going on in their life that's meant on this particular day they've ended up in front of me? And we think about health as doctors, but actually a lot of it's to do with happiness as well.

So if people don't have that feeling of happiness or well-being in their life, whether it's a lack of social connection, whether it's that they haven't had any interaction with any other human beings, whether they haven't slept enough, whatever it is, then they start to engage in other behaviors that start to affect their health, like their physical health. And it's quite obvious when we say it like this, but it was like a penny dropping moment for me when I thought, actually, if society was happier, then there'd be less patience for me to see because they'd be engaging in different ways and they'd have less harmful physical habits that end up in front of me. Do you know what I mean? I mean, it's... Yeah. And in fact, there's lovely data on this. I mean, I think this is another spot where we get happiness wrong. We

assume, you know, if all our circumstances go well, if we're healthy, for example, you know, healthy in terms of our like diet and this stuff, then we'll be happier. But actually, the data suggests that the causal arrow might go the other way. If you look at people's cheerfulness levels, if you look at their positivity, if you look at their happiness, you actually see effects on people's health and on people's longevity. So one famous study actually looked at whether or not people who are happier had like stronger immune function. So the way the study worked is they bring subjects into the lab and they either kind of do some intervention where they're kind of feeling happier or not. They can do these simple things by just like asking people or you tend to be

positive or they can even kind of give people like a positivity kind of intervention where you watch some funny movie or something like that. But in one study, they just measured people's positivity in general, like, are you a positive person or not so much? And then they shot people's nostrils up with rhinoviruses. You know, these days, we're all talking about coronaviruses, rhinoviruses are the viruses that cause the common cold. And so everybody's exposed. Question is, who gets sick? And what they find is that three times the number of people get sick in the kind of not so positive mood category is in the positive mood category, which is kind of striking, right? That like just your general mood state is probably affecting your happiness. It's probably not

mood directly. It's probably through all the behaviors you suggest, which is like if you're in a bad mood, you don't get out and get social. Maybe you don't exercise. Like you probably eat, you know, eat some like comfort food or whatever. like, but it's really affecting it. There's also evidence suggesting that your happiness levels really affect longevity. This is another very famous study that tried to figure out if they, if researchers could find a population that was sort of like had the same sort of health risks, basically, that kind of lived a sort of very similar lifestyle. And they, they converged on studying nuns, in part because nuns, you know, they're not off like bungee jumping or doing, you know, really, you know, risky things like

driving motorcycles and stuff. They tend to eat the same sorts of things and so on. And so these researchers went back and looked at nuns' diaries when they're in their 20s. I guess in some nunneries, when nuns kind of begin their profession for the church, they're asked to kind of journal a lot and sort of talk about their experiences and why they wanted to do it. And so researchers went back to these and just coded how many positive words were there, right? You know, do some machine analysis on how many positive words you see. Then they look at these nuns who are now quite old and look at how long each of the nuns are living. And what they find is that statistically more nuns who had more happy words live into their 70s, statistically more nuns who had more happy words live into their 70s. Statistically

more nuns that had the happy words live into their 80s. And statistically more nuns that had the happy words live into their 90s. And what's striking about this is this wasn't their happiness at the time. This was their happiness in their 20s, which is predicting their longevity in their 90s. And so I think this is another spot where we get happiness wrong. We can kind of think of happiness as like, oh, it's this ephemeral thing. Like we'll worry about that once we sort out, you know, people's high blood pressure and people's, you know, whatever, like cancer risk. But it could be that we have the model backwards, right? That if you're just experiencing a lot of positive emotion in your life, if you're satisfied with your life, it might make it easier to make choices

that allow you to protect your health in a way that can make you healthier and allow you to even live longer. Yeah, I mean, thanks for sharing that. That's definitely my feeling that it's happiness comes first. But I'd be interested to see how that research plays out over a number of years. I mean, we've mentioned so far, Laurie, we mentioned social relationships and how important they are. We mentioned the problems that technology can give us, but also how we can navigate that. And I guess we should also touch when we're talking about technology about how valuable it has been in this pandemic at keeping those social connections alive. I don't necessarily mean scrolling on Instagram for three hours. I mean, you know, I don't know, how would you think about the sort of connection we can get

over Zoom or FaceTime versus a phone call versus text messaging? You know, are these different qualities of connection? And how do those different qualities relate to our happiness? Before we get back to this week's episode, I just wanted to let you know that I am doing my very first national UK theatre tour. I am planning a really special evening where I share how you can break free from the habits that are holding you back and make meaningful changes in your life that truly last. It is called the Thrive Tour, be the architect of your health and happiness. So many people tell me that health feels really complicated, but it really doesn't need to be. In my live event, I'm going to simplify health and together we're going to learn the skill of

happiness, the secrets to optimal health, how to break free from the habits that are holding you back in your life, and I'm going to teach you how to make changes that actually last. Sound good? All you have to do is go to drchatterjee.com forward slash tour and I can't wait to see you there. I can't wait to see you there. improve sleep, lead to better decision making and reduce symptoms of anxiety and depression. It's also been shown to decrease emotional stress, make it easier to turn new behaviours into long-term habits and improve our relationships. There are of course many different ways to journal and as with most things it's important that you find the method that works best for you. One method that you may want to consider is the one that I outline in the three question journal. In it, you will find a

really simple and structured way of answering the three most impactful questions I believe that we can all ask ourselves every morning and every evening. Answering these questions will take you less than five minutes, but the practice of answering them regularly will be transformative. Since the journal was published in January, I have received hundreds of messages from people telling me how much it has helped them and how much more in control of their lives they now feel. Now, if you already have a journal or you don't actually want to buy a journal, that is completely fine. I go through in detail all of the questions within the three-question

journal completely free on episode 413 of this podcast. But if you are keen to check it out, all you have to do is go to drchatterjee.com forward slash journal or click on the link in your podcast app. Yeah, well, this is, you know, where I kind of go back to my, you know, work with animals. You know, I used to study monkeys and I think it's worth remembering that, you know, ultimately we are social primates, right? You know, we were built for in real life, social connection, you know, maybe grooming one another, but definitely as humans, like talking to one another in real life, right? That's going to be the thing that gives us the biggest hit of happiness, right? The question is like, how can we best approximate that when getting together physically is tricky? And I think the kind of thing that you and I are doing right

now, you know, we're talking live in real time over Zoom. I can see your emotional expressions. You know, the timing is mostly good with Zoom, although the audio is a little off, right? Like I can see you and see how you're reacting, hear the intonation in your voice. That's pretty good. Again, it's not as good as like, you know, maybe giving you a hug or shaking your hand after this, but it's pretty good. Where it gets dicey is when we move out of in real time together. You know, if I text you like something, ha, ha, ha emoji, and then you write back to me later. You know, if we were sending videos back and forth, if we kind of can't interact in real time but we're kind of not getting anything nutritious out of the social connection. I often use the terms that like, you know, medical doctors use when I'm talking about things that matter for happiness. I talk about nutritious social connection. Right.

in some ways, like, you know, the Instagram, like, you know, looking at people's feeds and stuff like that, like, that's kind of the NutraSuite of social connection. It, like, feels like you're getting something out of it. But ultimately, when you, like, shut the app off, you're like, wait, I feel kind of gross. I didn't really get any, anything nutritious out of it. And I think that's a good, this idea of thinking about the nutrition. It's also a good way to think about what kind of social interaction you want to build in, especially during COVID. Because, you know, what we need is going to change. You know, there are great things about interacting over screens, but, you know, it's also the idea of Zoom fatigue is a real thing, right? You know, the idea of being on screens too much is a real thing. And so one piece of advice I give my students is to mindfully pay attention to how you felt after something. You know, after, you know,

this conversation, I could think, you know, when I, you know, close After this conversation, I could think, when I close the Zoom window, I could think, how did that feel? I hope this was a fun conversation. We had a nice time. If I had just been on eight other Zoom calls before this, I might feel a little exhausted. I might need to go talk to my husband. That's the form of social connection I need. Or I might need to pick up a phone and call a friend and go for a walk around town that's away from a screen. And so I think the things we do on screens can be great, but it's important to pay attention to what you need. And this has been kind of, this idea has been a bit of a game changer for me. You know, when the pandemic hit, I was like, I'm building in all these like spa nights

with friends and, you know, like Zoom dinners with my family. And it was like, screen, screen, screen, you know, like I took all the like meetings my lab had and put them online. And only after I was like, I thought I was following the happiness advice because I was building in all that social connection. But I was like screen exhausted by then. And then I realized like, ah, it wasn't nutritious. Even if you're eating a thousand salads, that's not nutritious. You're going to feel gross afterwards if you kind of pound a thousand salads. And I think the same can be true for, you know, Zoom and social connection online. So my advice is be mindful afterwards. Really take time to notice, did that feel good or not?

And that can help you build in more of the stuff that feels good and maybe less of the stuff that doesn't. For me, I'm realizing it's, you know, Zoom windows with small numbers of people. Zoom windows with small numbers of people. It's cases where I'm socially interacting, where I'm not necessarily like sitting in one spot in a Zoom screen with like a curated background. I'm like, you know, talking to my mom as I'm walking around the room and doing chores and we're hearing each other, but it's not like I'm sitting there kind of watching it. And so I've tried to build in a lot more Zooms that feel more informal and less like a kind of work webinar call. That sort of works for me too. formal and less like a kind of work webinar call. That sort of works for me too.

Yeah, I think, as you say, these screen connections can be pretty good. You know, one thing I've noticed as a podcast host, and just a shout out to your podcast, by the way, which is brilliant. So people haven't heard it, I'd strongly recommend you check it out. It's really well produced, really, really interesting topics each week. Before the pandemic, I wouldn't do remote conversations. They were always face-to-face in my studio. And of course, I had to adapt like everyone else. And what I noticed is that, yes, I could have some really great conversations over Zoom. yes, I could have some really great conversations over Zoom. But afterwards, I don't have the same sense that I really know that person, that I could send them a text and meet up for coffee with them in the same way that when someone's been here, and we've hung out for

a little bit before the chat and after the chat, it's just different. And again, I'm not complaining. This is great. I hope we do get to meet one day face to face, right? But this is still, it's better than not doing it. But there are these different levels of social connection out there. And I guess we're trying to get the most nutritious one that we can in terms of what we're allowed to do, or certainly what society is allowing at that moment in time. In terms of other things that can influence our happiness, a lot of spiritual practices, a lot of religions talk about doing things for other people. And there's a lot of research on that, isn't there? Yeah, this is yet another spot where our minds lead us astray. I

think especially right now in the tough time we're facing, it's easy to find all these articles that talk about like self-care or treat yourself. This is a big mantra in the US right now. People have t-shirts that are like, treat yourself. But the data suggests that that might not be the most effective way to bump up your well-being. In fact, the data suggests you should be, we should have all these t-shirts that say, treat other people. And we know this because, again, you know, first move in happiness research is to look at the happy people. Look at the happy people. What are they doing? Happy people are disproportionately other-oriented.

They, like, matched for a salary level give more of their money to charities than people who are not so happy. They give more of their time. They volunteer, right? They just tend to be more focused on helping other people than in kind of doing selfish pursuits. And the research shows that then if you go and do an intervention where you force people to do nice stuff for others, that will actually improve people's well-being more than they think. This is actually a study by Liz Dunn, who we mentioned earlier. She goes up to people on the street and hands them some money

and says, OK, you just got this money. Here's how you have to spend it. One group is told you have to spend this on yourself. Do something nice. Treat yourself. Another group is told, well, the way I want you to spend this money is to do something nice for someone else, right? Then she has subjects agree that they can be called later in the day or later that week. And what she finds is that the subjects who tend to spend the money, subjects who spend the money on other people tend to be significantly happier than those who spend the money on themselves. Now, this is not, again, what we think, right? But it's what the data show. And again, you know, I teach this class, but I get this intuition wrong.

If I'm having a crappy day, you know, pre-COVID, if I was having a really crappy day, I'd be like, I'm going to go out and get myself a latte or I'm going to get a manicure, right? I don't think like I'm going to go buy my coworker a latte right now or I'm going to like get a little gift card for my going to get a manicure, right? I don't think like I'm going to go buy my co-worker a latte right now or I'm going to like, you know, get a little gift card for my friend to get a manicure. Like I think me, me, me. But the data suggests that like just sort of switching gears, spending our money and our time on other people is a way to bump up our happiness. Again, it violates the intuitions, but it's a powerful way to do that. And I think this is something we can all embrace during COVID, right? Because many of us have these little new windfalls of money and time in different ways, right? You know, some of us are working remotely, which means we're not spending our time commuting, you know, like all the Londoners who are listening to this podcast, maybe aren't on the tube as much, you know, that could be 45 minutes during the day that you're

saving. You know, what are you doing with those 45 minutes? Could you, you know, volunteer for a charity or make calls to it for an organization that you care about? Or just like, pick up the phone and call somebody who's struggling, right? And check in on how they're doing not to help yourself, but just to really check in with someone else, right? You know, some of us have these like mini windfalls of money, not all of us. But you know, if you're maybe you're saving, you know, that, you know, tube fare that you're not spending every day or maybe you're saving gas on your commute. Right. Like, could you use that money for a good cause? You know, even if even if you're just saving on that latte, you know, that latte that I'm not buying myself every morning when I head off to work, that four bucks like I could actually spend on something better. Right. You know, even if it's just four bucks that I donate to a charity that morning, that research suggests that that would really boost our well-being. And I think,

so I think we can, you know, maybe take these little mini windfalls of time and money that we weren't even noticing and use them for a good cause if we're not using them in some other way already. It's a theme in what you're talking about is noticing things. So notice the time that you're no longer spending on your commute. Notice the money that you used to spend on a haircut every four weeks or on a coffee every day from Starbucks. Notice how you feel after you've been on Zoom for a while, or on Instagram for a while. And I guess the art of noticing really is what mindfulness is all about. And so I wonder, what does the research say about mindfulness and happiness? And then what does mindfulness really mean? Because, again, that's a term that can mean

so many different things to different people. Yeah, I mean, I think one thing we know from the research is just as being social and doing nice things for others improves our wellbeing, taking time to be mindful, taking time to sort of be in the present moment in a very particular way, which is with a particular kind of attitude, an attitude of sort of non-judgment.

So you're not kind of in the present moment moment noticing this sucks and I'm judging it the whole time, but in the present moment, allowing it to be just as it is. The research suggests that that kind of practice can really improve our well-being. And it seems to improve our well-being for a particular reason, which is the opposite of being present when we're kind of, you know, not in the present moment, we're kind of mind you know, not in the present moment, we're kind of mind-wandering and thinking about the future and worrying about things and ruminating, that has a really negative hit on our happiness, right? And so just the act of being present where you sort of shut off that kind of mind-wandering to yucky other things can really make us feel better. Now, it too is the kind of thing that requires some work. This is being present is not the natural state of the

human mind, which I actually kind of find funny because if you talk to folks who practice meditation, they often talk about the sort of mind-wandering, ruminative mind as the monkey mind, you know, the mind that's sort of going off all over the place. But having studied monkeys, you know, they're much more likely to be present when they're sitting there, you know, just like sitting, they seem like they're just kind of not worrying about the future or what they're going to eat later tonight, or they're just kind of present. You know, so I think the monkey mind is a bit of a, you know, it's humans sort of touting their own awesomeness when we're actually not as awesome as other animals. But yeah, but the research really suggests that practices that allow us to improve our mindfulness, to improve

our presence, can really improve our well-being. So practices like meditation, even more spiritual practices like prayer and so on, you know, even just the act of like taking three deep belly breaths where you're kind of noticing what it feels like. All of these kinds of things really can allow us to be a little bit more present. And just the act of being present means we notice, you know, we were talking before about, you know, one reason that technology is messing with us is that, you know, we miss the like, you know, looking at the trees or looking at our partner's smile or seeing the sunshine. Being present means we're there to notice the stuff that really matters. And so it really can allow us to have these little,

you know, filling our leaky happiness tire moments of joy that we otherwise would have missed because our minds were kind of going off in all these directions. What about religion? Because I've seen quite a bit of research suggesting that belonging to a religion or engaging in certain practices can be really beneficial for our happiness. And I remember this case, this patient who came to see me a few years ago at a practice in Alder. And what was really interesting, this was a family who were part of the Islamic faith. And this couple had lost their baby boy. I can't remember how old, but their baby had just died. And, you know, I was a lot younger then, so I was probably a lot immature than I am now. It's not an

easy thing to be talking about with a patient. But they were really, really accepting. They were very religious and they said something like, it's Allah's will, something to that effect. And I always remember that because I would reflect upon that. I think that's really interesting by having this faith where they felt they were just part of something much bigger and much greater than them. They were very accepting of their baby child dying. And for me, that was really quite striking. So yeah, I don't know if you can unpick any of that for me in terms of the happiness research. Yeah, I mean, one of the things we know from studying happy people is that religious people, people who practice religion, tend to be a lot happier than those that don't. You know, I say this as an agnostic slash atheist myself, right? And when you dig into that, that could be for lots of reasons, right?

That could be because, you know, having a belief in a higher power kind of makes you happier. It could be for all kinds of reasons. When you dig into what's really going on, what you often find is that people who are engaged in religious practices, they tend to be doing a lot of the stuff that the happiness research shows is important for achieving high happiness, right? And I think that's one of the important things. It's not just people who have strong religious beliefs. It's people who engage in religious practices. They go to services. They pray a lot, right? They're really doing these kinds of things. And if you dig in, you know, what are religious practices? Well, one is like, you know, going to a shared community experience together, right? You know, like social connection,

you know, back I grew up Catholic and, you know, when you go to church afterwards, you chat with everybody and you see all these people and so on. Religious practices often require doing acts of charity for other people, right? You know, thinking of people who are not yourself. They often involve, you know, situations of prayer that are moments to be mindful and be at peace and not have your mind wandering, right? And they involve a sense that there's something, you know, bigger than yourself, right? This sort of sense of meaning too, which also helps. And so it seems like the reason that religion promotes happiness are that things that religious people do tend to be the things that improve happiness over time. And so, you know, so if you yourself are religious and you've strayed away from going from practicing, you know,

going to church or or whatever that means, like, you know, going to services like go back to that because those are the things that are really doing the work. And if you're not necessarily a religious person, if you don't necessarily believe in a higher power, that means it's all the more important to build those happiness practices back into your life in some other form, because you won't naturally get them, you know, every Saturday when you go to services or every Sunday when you go to services. Yeah, I love that. They've almost got happiness built into the framework, no matter what that religion is. And if you don't subscribe to that religion, why not just take the framework and apply that into your life. And I think there

is something powerful about these congregations where people get together and interact, because you said, you know, that's one of the top things for our happiness is those social relationships. And so even whether you're being dragged to church by your parents or the temple or the mosque or whatever it is, when you get there, I guess, you're going to be mingling with other kids, other adults, other people and playing and just doing what humans have always done, right? And I think this is worth you know i think one thing we think is that you know and i think we can have a little bit of hubris about this as sort of modern sometimes secular folks right is it like oh you know when i learned about these happiness studies you know

we're coming up with these strategies that we've figured out for the first time right like not so if you look at ancient practices most of the ancient practices are building in lots of rituals that we know are great for well-being. They're like cultural forces that are designed to kind of make us happy. And this is true from religions. It's due to like longstanding cultural practices. You know, think, you know, taking, you know, taking a siesta, taking a Sabbath, right? Like taking time to rest.

Like these things are really, you know, having dinner together, right? Where you sort of have like dinner over the table. One thing we haven't talked about, you know, giving thanks, sharing gratitude before you eat a meal, right? All these things are like the practices that positive psychologists are coming up with. And they've been around for thousands of years in many cases. So I think, you know, we can often turn to what the ancients have told us, like, hey, do these things and that will boost your happiness. And it turns out like they were right. Maybe not surprise, surprise, you know, like, I mean, that applies to so many things, even in health, there are so many things that physicians or proponents of traditional Chinese medicine or

Ayurvedic medicine have been talking about for years that now modern science is starting to back up. And there is this kind of, I don't know if it's an arrogance within humans, but we sort of feel that, you know, we're the most enlightened generation and actually we're coming up with all this cool stuff on how to live. And you're like, oh, people have been doing this for a long time. You know, it's really quite humbling actually, isn't it? And I mean, you mentioned gratitude, which is, frankly, in most religions as a practice of some sort. What does the science tell us about gratitude and our happiness? Yeah, this is another spot, yet again, where we get it wrong, right? I mean, if I had my

intuitions, and you asked me gratitude, I'm like, that kind of sounds cheesy, I would go with griping, right? You know, you and I hop on a zoom call. We say, oh, you know, 2021, it's been so crappy. How is all this stuff happening? Blah, blah, blah. My intuition is that is what would make me feel better, right? You know, kind of complaining about things, you know, having common ground over the bad stuff, you know, getting it off my chest, right? Data suggests just the opposite. Happy people tend to be more grateful and grateful people tend to be happier. Happy people tend to spontaneously count their blessings. They tend to spontaneously notice all the good things, not the bad things in life. And research shows that if you just engage in practices of gratitude,

just the simple act of at night scribbling down three to five things that you're grateful for, research shows that that can start significantly boosting your well-being in as little as two weeks. Just the simple act of sort of experiencing gratitude. And if you want to supercharge it, you can kind of combine gratitude with some of the other things we've just been talking about, things like social connection and doing nice things for others. You know, one of the things, if I look at my own gratitude list, one of the things I'm often really grateful for is other people. You know, my husband, you know, the fact that my students did this nice thing for me, or, you know, the fact that someone at work, you know, stepped up and like, you know, helped out so that, you know, took something off my plate. We often experience thankfulness for the things that other people do, including just

existing, but we rarely tell the other people around us that, which is kind of sad because the act of saying, you know, hey, like, honey, I really appreciate what you did, or I just appreciate you. You're just, it's such a gift that you're in my life. Like, you know, I feel that, which is kind of sad because the act of saying, you know, hey, like, honey, I really appreciate what you did or I just appreciate you. You're just such a gift that you're in my life. Like, you know, I feel that, but I rarely express that, say, to my husband. But if I were to express it to him, that is a way that I'm like now I'm talking to my husband. Right. I'm not like scrolling Instagram anymore. We're like having a conversation. But also it's it's a way of being nice to my husband, because knowing that someone thinks you're a gift and that you've done something great, like that feels really good. And so there's evidence suggesting that the act of expressing our gratitude to other people can be incredibly important for boosting our happiness. One study by Marty Seligman and his colleagues had people write a gratitude letter.

So write a letter to somebody that you really should have thanked a long time ago, but you haven't had a chance to. And then, you know, in pre-COVID times, you show up and like read that letter to the person, like meet with them in person and read it. And what he finds is not only that the act of doing this boosts up happiness for the person who writes the letter, he finds in his one study that you can see signatures of boosted well-being for over a month after people do this gratitude visit, right? Like even like a month later, you're on a survey, you're saying you're a happier person, which to me feels crazy. You know, if I knew there was an intervention I could do to like boost my well-being that would

keep me for over a month, you know, you and I are talking right now in January, you know, I'm clear past Valentine's Day, maybe when the light's getting better, you know, things are getting warmer. I'd be like, yeah, sign me up. That's the power of gratitude. Gratitude in this context of really expressing it and sort of doing something nice for other people. What strikes me, Laurie, is that a lot of the things you're talking about are very simple. Most of them, I think, are free of charge from recollection, yet we're just not doing them. And there's all these kind of options that we're giving people throughout this conversation.

I'm really interested, have some of the interventions risen to the top in your experience of delivering the course to millions around the world, or even that experience of delivering it to the Yale students, there's research on all of them, but are a couple of them rising to the top where people keep saying, hey, Professor Santos, when I do these things, or when I do that one thing, I feel like a different person. I didn't realize how impactful that one thing could be, you know, and if so, what are those things? Yeah, I get this question a lot, in part because my, you know, very type A Yale students are like, you gave me a big list of things, but give me the one thing, like the CliffsNotes version, right? And my answer is always, it kind of depends. It sort of depends

on what you're doing naturally, right? You know, you mentioned that you're naturally a very social person, like you talk to people, maybe during COVID know, you mentioned that you're naturally a very social person. Like you talk to people, maybe during COVID, that's not happening as much. But if I came to you in kind of non-pandemic times and I told you like, hey, you know, increase your social connection, that might not benefit your happiness very much

because you're probably like at ceiling. You're kind of doing it already. But maybe you're not as present. You know, maybe you need to experience a little bit more gratitude. I don't know, right? And so I tell students, you know, as you're or I tell your listeners of this podcast, you know, as you're listening, you might think certain things like, oh, yeah, I do that.

I do that. Then you're good. Don't don't worry about that if you're feeling like, oh, yeah, I already do that. But the one thing I said where you're like, oh, yeah, it's not really me. That might be the spot where you really try to put a little bit of work in, like take some baby steps to improve that. And that's probably going to give you the kind of biggest happiness impact for the time you put in. Yeah.

I think the biggest thing that's impacted my own happiness over the past few years is this real understanding that I get to choose how I frame any particular situation in life. And I feel that for a lot of my life, this broken record play that it would all be framed the same way. A lot of it came down to how I saw my parents react to things. And so I learned that as that's the way you deal with things. But just that understanding that, oh, right, this situation can happen. And there's three ways that I can actually report that story to myself, create the story. That's really quite empowering. And I wonder what the research suggests when it comes to that, how we frame our experiences. I guess a lot of people say, well, there's no choice.

our experiences. I guess a lot of people say, well, there's no choice, but I think even really harsh and situations and experiences that we don't want, we still do have a choice how we frame that. And that absolutely, I'm sure, plays a huge impact on how we feel about ourselves, but also how we feel about our lives. Yeah, I think this is a really important feature, right? That in one of the reasons that our circumstances don't affect our happiness as much as we think, right? You know, before we were talking about kind of positive circumstances, being rich and so on. But we also have to deal with the negative circumstances, right? Like we're living through a pandemic, like you might get sick, you know, you might spill the milk, right? Like, you know, things

come up that are kind of a pain in the butt. And in all those cases, we actually have a choice about how we frame that and how we react to things, not like the immediate reaction, but we can kind of choose what happens after that. And this is another spot where I think the ancients had it right. In this case, there's a wonderful parable that comes from the Buddhist tradition about Buddha's story of the second arrow. And so the way the parable goes is, Buddha's talking with his followers and he asks followers, you know, if you're walking down the street and somebody shoots you with an arrow, you know, is that bad? You know, is that a problem? You know, followers say, yeah, that kind of sucks to get shot with an arrow if you're walking down the

street. And Buddha says, okay, if you're walking down the street and you first get shot with one arrow, but then you get shot with a second arrow, would that be worse? And everyone says like, yeah, much worse to get hit with the second arrow. You know, now you're hurt in two spots and so on. So Buddha goes on to say the circumstances in life, the suffering in life, you know, that we can't control. That's the first arrow. That's going to come or it's not going to come. You know, that's whether you're happy to be living in a pandemic or you spill the milk or something bad happens. But Buddha says the second arrow is our reaction to that bad thing that happens. And that's a thing that we can always control. Like we are responsible for kind of stabbing ourselves with the second arrow. So, you know, if you spill the milk and you freak out, I'm like, oh, my God, I spilled the milk. This sucks. And then I kick the dog. And then I, you know, like try to, you know, like clean it up. And then, you know, it was like even worse. And then I'm mad at my husband later. And I don't, you know, call my friend because I'm in a pissy mood. Like, yeah, the milk, that wasn't my fault, maybe. But everything else was mine. You know, the same thing with this pandemic, right? Like it sucks to be living in

a pandemic. Like people are losing their jobs. We're afraid for our lives. All our routines are messed up. That's a first arrow. But we have a reaction to that pandemic. We can choose to frame it in a certain way, right? We can engage in practices that make ourselves feel better. We can try to find joy and gratitude, even in the midst of this bad time. All those other things are up to us. You know, when we don't engage it, we're kind of stabbing ourselves with the second arrow. And so this parable and kind of thinking that I can reframe things myself and that I have some control over my reactions to things, this has also been a real game changer for me. And this is the problem when you, you know, you're the happiness person who talks about this stuff,

you know, because I, you know, I'm prone to stab myself with the second arrow a lot. And my wonderful producer who works on my podcast, my good friend Ryan, will be prone to like, when I'm complaining about something or like, you know, like my assistant did something dumb, and I was like, so mad. And, you know, you know, half hour later, I'm still complaining about it. my assistant did something dumb and I was like so mad. And, you know, half hour later, I'm still complaining about it. He'll sometimes text me the emoji of two little arrow emojis together just to remind me like, yeah, you know, maybe this is on you. And so the framing thing is huge.

That's a good use of tech. That's a good use of technology. Yeah, yeah. One text, two arrows, like, okay, you know, move on. And the research backs that up as well? Yeah, and what we know is that, I mean, first of all, I think one thing the research backs up is that we can control our reactions to things, right? You sometimes think like, oh, you know, if something happens, I'm just going to get pissed off or I'm just going to be sad. And

I have no control over that. But the research really shows that, you know, one problem with negative emotions is that we try to like run away from them or we hate them so much that we just don't allow them. You know, there are techniques you can do, meditation techniques, where when you experience something, you take time to kind of recognize that emotion to allow it to be there and then go into like nerdy scientist mode and investigate it where you kind of really try to look at what it feels like in your body. And, you know, take this spilled milk example. Like, you know, I do this, you know, I drop something, you know, I like something. I smash a glass. And I'm like, wait a minute, recognize I'm having this aversive reaction. I'm getting pissed off. I'm tensing up. I'm about to keep moving in ways that are sort of throwing things and dropping things. It's like, okay, let's allow this. That sucks. The glass fell. You notice how this feels. And what do I do to kind of nurture that, right? So taking a pause and taking a break, no matter what negative emotion you're experiencing,

whether that's fear or frustration or just kind of uncertainty is something we experience a lot during COVID, you can take time to notice what that feels like. And just the simple act of noticing, distancing yourself from it, allows you to get some handle on those emotions. So you can react without kind of like reactions happen kind of naturally, but you can kind of react a little bit more strategically. You can kind of decide, you know, maybe the right thing in the moment is to be sad and to cry or to get mad or kind of react negatively. But it isn't always. You get some control over your reactions. react negatively, but it isn't always. You get some control over your reactions. Yeah. And reframing is something that we can train and practice and get better at.

One, you know, you work on this stuff and that it's nice to experience something really tangible in your life where you go, oh, I would have reacted differently. And that happened to me in the summer when I was finishing off the manuscript for my last book. I'd spent a few days working on an idea in a chapter and it just went. I lost it. And I don't know what was going on in my life at the moment at that time, but I felt really calm and I was like, okay, well, here's an opportunity to write it even better. You've gone through the process of getting those ideas together. Now with a fresh plate, you can actually make this even better than it was yesterday. And I thought that didn't happen on my previous books. If that happened and it had happened previously, it was a real sense of frustration and a real sense of, oh man, why didn't I press save? I

could just press save. Why didn't I check? And again, I'm not saying either one is right or wrong. I'm simply trying to empower people listening to go, you can work on this and get better at it. And so someone might go, yeah, but that is annoying. I get it. But I really like this idea that you can choose the story that makes you happier, right? Why choose the one that makes you sad and frustrated and full of resentment? Why don't you choose the one that makes you happy? And you take that to a real extreme. A few weeks ago, I released, I think, the most powerful conversation I've had on the podcast to date. I spoke to someone called Dr. Edith Eger. She was in Auschwitz. She was a survivor. She's 93 years old. And she said so many powerful things in that conversation.

But one of the things she said was that I've been in Auschwitz, but I can tell you that the greatest prison you'll ever be in is the prison you create inside your own mind. And she was telling the story how when she was in the concentration camp, she started to view the prison guards as the prisoners. She was saying, they're not free. I'm the one who's free in my mind. And I think when someone who's been to those kinds of extremes and can tell you that you can reframe any experience you want, I think it's really quite powerful, isn't it? Yeah, and I think one thing we forget is that it sometimes is those awful experiences that allows us to do that sort of reframing

because in some sense we don't have any other choice. And in fact, this is a new thing that's kind of coming up in the field of positive psychology research, the sort of concept of what's called post-traumatic growth. You know, we all know about post-traumatic stress, this idea that you go through an awful situation and you wound up, you know, like kind of stressed afterwards and anxious and so on. But there are a number of individuals who go through awful traumatic events and wound up stronger and happier afterwards. And this is the phenomenon of post-traumatic growth. Sometimes we go through something awful and it makes us more resilient.

You know, it gives us like a time when it's like, you know, we better reframe this or like, you know, we're not going to get through it. And the idea is that traumatic times can sometimes give us strategies for reframing. Often they can give us resilience because, you know, when you get out of a terrible event, everything else is going to feel, you know, like I bet, you know, like your podcast guest, the Auschwitz survivor, like when she spills the milk, it's not that bad because she has something else bad to compare it to, right? And often these kinds of traumatic events can sometimes show you what really matters in life, what you really want out of it. It's only when you kind of ponder that loss of your life or your freedom or things like that, that you really realize that you need to use it well. And so there's a lot of evidence coming out that sometimes traumatic events in and of themselves can actually give us the sort of grace to do better. And this is yet another reason why our

circumstances don't work. You know, we assume circumstances have to go well, circumstances have to go perfectly for us to feel happier. But what the research shows is that sometimes it's the most negative circumstances that can actually make us the happiest. On my podcast, I interview individuals who've gone through awful circumstances. One individual, J.R. Martinez, who actually was a U.S. soldier who was burned in Iraq, burned over like three quarters of his body. And, you know, he was a really good looking guy. You know, now he wanted to be a soldier. Now he couldn't do any of that. And the whole incident allowed him to recognize what really mattered. What did he really want to do? Now he has his life back again. He turned into an actor. He went on to be on Dancing with the Stars, you know, and he credits that

awful event with being a positive thing in his life. And this is what the research seems to show. Researcher Dan Gilbert, who studies really closely people's forecasts about good and bad events, will note that even people who've experienced something that's truly awful, you know, say people who've lost a child, which is probably, you know, one of the most awful things if you're a parent you could imagine happening, you know, people won't say they wanted that event to happen, but they'll often note that, you know, a decent number of good things came from that event too. Like that there's aspects of that awful event that they're still grateful for. And that's something I think we can all take heart. And the most awful thing we could imagine happens to us.

And we're likely to say that more good things than bad came from that event. You know, that is striking. And it means that we all have this kind of resilience that we often forget that can kind of come out in bad times. And really that's my hope for COVID now, right? I hope that we're all going to see my friends without this sort of secret thing in the background, be like, oh gosh, we're going to get sick. What's going to happen, right? Like that's going to feel amazing. So many things, so many of those things I just took for, I didn't realize that I should have incredible joy walking into the coffee shop and getting that latte before, you know, but now when I experience again, I think I really will have that joy. I'll appreciate it in a way that I didn't appreciate it before, but it's because I lost it. Yeah, I mean, truly cause for optimism that something good can come out of what we're all living through.

And hopefully we will have lived through at some point in the near future. Just to sort of finish off, Laurie, philosophically, when I think about happiness, I think about these phrases that are there in the vernacular, the pursuit of happiness, the things you can do to create happiness. And then I came across this quote by Krishnamurti, which I've got here, which says, happiness is strange. It comes when you are not seeking it, when you are not making an effort to be happy, then unexpectedly, mysteriously, happiness is there. And that really speaks to this wider point that is what I sort of feel, that happiness is already there inside us. You see this in a child when

they're just playing with their Lego. They're just happy, calm, content with life. And my feeling is that a lot of these practices, they're not necessarily creating happiness. I feel society has moved us away from our innate happiness. And all these practices are doing are helping to turn that ship around and just return us back to the happiness that already naturally exists within us. I wonder what your view is on that. Yeah, I mean, I think you're right. I mean, I think one thing that we know about happiness is that when we try to pursue it, we get it wrong, right? You know, when we try to pursue it, we go after the money and the fame and the accolades and we end up, you know, spinning our wheels because those are not the kinds of things that will allow us to feel happy. What will let us feel happy is kind of in some

ways going back to our natural state, right? Being present, you know, being challenged by a particular activity, right? Being social, having fun. You know, you mentioned kids running around and doing things like, you know, those are kind of being in the present moment. Those are cases where you're being social, right? I think that's right, that our natural state is doing the kinds of things that would make us happy. But the modern world tends to lead us away from that, right? It's hard to get back to that natural state in a lot of ways. And I think, you know, for all the reasons we've talked about, from technology to busyness to the wrong theories about the sorts of things that will make us happy. And that's why I think right now there is a way to pursue happiness. What we need to pursue is getting back to that natural state. You know, it's not going to take the form we're used to,

where we're like buying ourselves something or trying to get that next, you know, accolade on our CV. But it's about kind of putting into effect intentional practices that let us go back to the more natural state. So you know, if we were in a different environment, if we were plopped on a desert island, and there were no smartphones and no things to do for work and no emails, we might naturally get back to that state of, you know, playing around and being present and enjoying ourselves. But in the modern world, I think we have to kind of fight against the tendencies that are natural. And those that are natural are not kind of evolutionarily natural. You know, there's the kind of cultural tides that might be taking us in the wrong direction.

So I do think right now it works like a pursuit because you do have to put a little bit of work in. But what that work is doing is kind of getting us back to the natural state that we should have been in anyway. In the spirit of this conversation, Laurie, I want to acknowledge you. I want to say what a gift you are to the world, what you've done for your Yale students, what you're doing with this course. Sharing these principles of happiness all around the world, I think is incredible. So I want to say thank you to you for what you're doing, frankly, for humanity, because I think it really is that important what you're doing. And just to finish off, this podcast is called Feel Better, Live More. When we feel better in ourselves, we get more out of life.

You've touched on so many different things throughout this conversation today. I always love to lead my listeners or the people watching on YouTube with some practical tips, things that they can think about applying immediately into their life to improve their happiness level. So I wonder if you could leave my listeners with some of your top tips. Yeah. So the first would be to get social, right? Right now, set up a time that you can talk, like really talk with someone, whether that's somebody who lives in your flat, who you would connect with by phone, who you have to set up a Zoom call with, like set it up and try to be present. And when you are

there, you know, shut off all the other, you know, screens that are open, put your phone away, really try to connect. Second thing is, what can you do right now to help someone else? You know, could you donate some money? Could you text a friend who might need to connect with you? You know, could you just do something nice for someone in your flat? Like, how can you get more other oriented? The third is that you should just take a little bit of time for gratitude. Like, what's the one thing right now that you feel grateful for, right? Think of it right now, that thing you feel grateful for, and kind of take a moment to notice it. And then if that felt good, maybe just stay in that present moment of noticing a little bit longer. Do that right now and maybe even engage in some practices

where you can really be a bit more present and mindful. Everything I just said might be, you know, 20 minutes more of work in your day, you know, like connecting with that friend, doing something nice or whatever. But that simple 20 minutes will be a way to boost up your wellbeing in this really evidence-based way.

Yeah, fantastic. Laurie, for people who want to check out more of your work, where can they find you? Yeah, so you should check out the Happiness Lab podcasts and download it wherever you get your podcasts. You know, quick little half-hour interventions that you can use to feel better. And if you want to take that famous course

that all the Yalies took, it's free and available online. You can check it out on Coursera.org. The name is the science of well-being but if you just google yell happiness class you'll probably find it too yeah we'll put all those links in the show notes for people as well to make it super easy for them to find lori i really appreciate the time you've given me today my listeners today i very much hope at some point we can do this again in person, face to face, either on your side of the ocean or on this side, but I'm sure that will happen at some point. But in the meantime, stay well, stay happy, and we'll do this again soon.

Hope you enjoyed that conversation. As always, try and commit to one thing that you can take away and apply into your own life immediately and in the spirit of one of lori's final suggestions doing something for somebody else want to take a moment right now and share this podcast with a few people in your network who you feel would enjoy listening. You could text them a link to this episode right now, along with a personal note. It's going to make your friend feel good, and it's also going to make you happier. It's a win-win all round. To see links to Laurie's course, her podcast, and other interesting articles about her, you can visit the show notes page for this episode on my website. And if you're looking for practical ways to improve your health and happiness,

you can check out one of my first four books. Now, I love spreading helpful, positive health information. I try and do that on this podcast, but I also try to do that on social media. Although the truth is that only a tiny percentage of social media followers actually end up seeing the posts because of the way the algorithms are. So I've decided to put more energy and time into creating a weekly newsletter that really brings you value. It's called Friday Five. It contains five short doses of positivity.

This could be articles or books that I'm reading, quotes that I'm reflecting on, exciting research I may have come across, basically anything that I feel would be helpful. It's only been going for three weeks. Feedback has been incredible so far. So if you like my podcast and you like the content that I put out,

I think you're really going to enjoy it. If you're interested in signing up, you can do so at drchastity.com forward slash Friday five. And by signing up, I'll also send you some videos that I've made on sleep. A big thank you to my wife, Vedanta Chastity for producing this week's podcast and to Richard Hughes for audio engineering.

Have a wonderful week. Make sure you have pressed subscribe and I'll be back in one week's time with my latest conversation. Remember, you are the architects of your own health. Making lifestyle changes always worth it because when you feel better, you live more.