Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee - #255 BITESIZE | The Surprising Truth About Happiness | Professor Laurie Santos

Starting point is 00:00:00 Today's Bite Size episode is brought to you by AG1, a science-driven daily health drink with over 70 essential nutrients to support your overall health. It includes vitamin C and zinc, which helps support a healthy immune system, something that is really important at this time of year. It also contains prebiotics and digestive enzymes that help support your gut health. It's really tasty and has been in my own life for over five years. Until the end of January, AG1 are giving a limited time offer. Usually they offer my listeners a one-year supply of vitamin D and K2 and five free travel packs with their first order. But until the end of January, they are doubling the five free travel packs to

Starting point is 00:00:51 10. And these packs are perfect for keeping in your backpack, office, or car. If you want to take advantage of this limited time offer, all you have to do is go to drinkag1.com forward slash live more. Welcome to Feel Better Live More Bite Size, your weekly dose of positivity and optimism to get you ready for the weekend. Today's clip is from episode 151 of the podcast with Laurie Santos, episode 151 of the podcast with Laurie Santos, professor of psychology at Yale University. In this clip, she explains why our happiness is so important for our health, our well-being, and our longevity, and shares the results of some surprising research that could help us live a happier life. be alive. 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

Starting point is 00:01:57 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. 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 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

Starting point is 00:02:33 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. Many of us think, oh, if I could just get that beach house or that new car or even just 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 a split second. 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,

Starting point is 00:03:09 though, is there's all these different interventions we can do to boost our happiness. Are there some universal practices that really you can say without knowing an individual's circumstances, you can say with a high degree of certainty that if you do this, you are likely to improve your well-being score and your happiness. Yeah, I mean, we know this now. We know lots of these practices 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 if you engage with them the right way.

Starting point is 00:03:39 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. 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.

Starting point is 00:04:01 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. 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,

Starting point is 00:04:40 even 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. 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 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

Starting point is 00:05:18 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 where he found some subjects who are about to do their daily commute on a train. 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

Starting point is 00:05:57 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

Starting point is 00:06:37 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 in 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. 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 even those weak ties, the research show, matter for happiness. 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. We think about health as doctors, but actually a lot of it's to do

Starting point is 00:07:32 with happiness as well. So if people don't have that feeling of happiness or wellbeing 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 where 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 it was like a penny dropping moment for me where 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-

Starting point is 00:08:20 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 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. 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

Starting point is 00:08:56 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. 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 some like comfort food or whatever. But it's really affecting it.

Starting point is 00:09:47 There's also evidence suggesting that your happiness levels really affect longevity. This is another very famous study that tried to figure out 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 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 that had 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.

Starting point is 00:11:02 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. What does the science tell us about gratitude and our happiness? Yeah, this is another spot yet again where we get it wrong. 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.

Starting point is 00:11:43 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? just the opposite. Happy people tend to be more grateful and grateful people tend to be happier. Happy people tend to spontaneously count their blessings. They tend to spontaneously notice all the good things, not the bad things in life. And research shows that if you just engage in practices of gratitude, you know, 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

Starting point is 00:12:38 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, 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,

Starting point is 00:13:16 right? I'm not like scrolling Instagram anymore. We're like having a conversation. But also 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 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,

Starting point is 00:14:04 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, 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. I mean, what strikes me, Laurie, is that a lot of the things you're talking about are very simple. I always love to lead my listeners with some practical tips, things that they can think about applying immediately into their life to improve their

Starting point is 00:14:43 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 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

Starting point is 00:15:22 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. That will be a way to boost up your well-being in this really evidence-based way. Really hope you enjoyed that bite-sized clip. I hope you have a wonderful weekend and I'll be back next week with my long-form conversational Wednesday and the latest episode of Bite Science next Friday.

Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee - #255 BITESIZE | The Surprising Truth About Happiness | Professor Laurie Santos

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