Hidden Brain - Where Happiness Hides

Episode Date: September 6, 2021

We all think we know what will make us happy: more money. A better job. Love. But psychologist Sonja Lyubomirsky says happiness doesn't necessarily work like that. This week, we explore why happiness often slips through our fingers, and how to savor — and stretch out — our joys. If you like our work, please consider supporting it! See how you can help at support.hiddenbrain.org. And to learn more about human behavior and ideas that can improve your life, subscribe to our newsletter at news.hiddenbrain.org.

This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedanta. There are some things in life that seem to elude us, no matter how hard we try to hold onto them. Memories can be like that. So can happiness. Contentment often seems tantalizingly close, but recedes as we reach for it. But it's not only a place where you can realize that you're not going to be able to realize that you're not going to realize that you're not going to realize

that you're not going to realize that you're not going to realize that you're not going to realize that you're not going to realize that you're not going to realize that you're not going to realize that you're not going to realize that you're not going to realize that you're not going to realize I think it's my friend. Cleaning outdoors, slowing down, appreciating the small things. One thing that's brought me happiness is my family.

I don't think it's possible to find everlasting happiness, but the thing that has helped me the most is giving up looking for it. This week on Hidden Brain, the psychology of why happiness often slips through our fingers and how to savor and stretch out our joys. We all know what it's like to want something that will make us happy. Maybe it's a dream vacation or getting a great job or meeting a soulmate. But all too often, when we get what we want, reality turns out to be very different than we expected. At the University of California Riverside,

Psychologist Sonia Lopamirski explores the mismatch between what we expect will make us happy and what actually makes us happy. We began by talking about a moment when she felt this mismatch in her own life. She was in her 30s about to get lasex surgery to improve her eyesight. Up until then I had really poor vision, I was almost blind, I hated my glasses, I hated my contact lenses, and so I have this surgery, it takes like 30 seconds and then you go from, you know, being almost blind to 2020 vision. I mean, it's really miraculous,

right? And it was amazing. I could see my toes in the shower when I woke up in the morning, I could see the alarm clock without searching for my glasses. And when I'd walk in the streets, I could read the street signs. That was amazing to me. But it took me about two weeks to get completely used to my new 2020 vision. And then I just started taking it for granted and it became the new normal for me. You know, I've won glasses for many years myself, Sonia. And as you're talking about the wonders of, of, of, Lasik surgery, I, I imagine the moment when I can take off my glasses and be able to see perfectly.

And of course, that's what I focus on when I think about getting surgery like you did. I'm not thinking of what happens two weeks after that. Exactly. And whenever we think about sort of changes in our lives, positive and negative, we often think about that moment. It's that moment that I called a news. When you learn that, oh, my vision is perfect.

Or you get that new job where you win the lottery. But we don't sort of think about what happens, as you say, in the two weeks, two months, two years after that. I'm wondering if the problem is especially acute when it comes to questions involving pain or disability. So for example, in your case, you spent many years not being able to see clearly, you had the sudden moment of transformation, and two weeks later, you got used to it. Is part of the reason this happens, do you think, that we actually have a relatively poor memory for pain or disabilities or shortcomings, once they're in the rearview mirror,

they really vanish from our attention. Yes, a really great point. I had really thought of it that way. You can argue that this evolutionarily adaptive, right, for us to sort of forget the pain or the misery that we experienced before and we move on. Another example I like to use is I have pretty bad allergies and you know that feeling you have, you know, the running nose in your eyes are itchy and your throat is itchy, but then sometimes they just disappear and then I feel great or I feel neutral and I completely forget what it's like to have that allergy feeling again until it comes back. Sonia has noticed the fleeting nature of joy in her professional life as well.

Starting in college, I had this dream about becoming a professor. I remember taking it to the Shakespeare class and watching the professor and I wanted to be her. I wanted to stand at the stage. That was like freshman year, I think. But it was really, really hard, especially grad school, lots of ups and downs. And you know, and I finally got my dream job. Again, you get the news, oh, I have this job where I have my PhD.

Now people can call me doctor, you know, that was very exciting for a couple of days. But it's a little anticlimactic. And I still remember the day I got tenure, my husband came home from work. And I was sitting on you know, on my bed where I work in front of my laptop and he's like, what are you doing? And I'm like, well, I'm working, you know, and he's like, why are you working? You got tenure today. Like,

well, because, yeah, I know that's what I'm doing. But it's funny, my PhD advisor, Lee Ross, who, you know, he's a giant figure in my field of psychology, but in my life and career as well, of course. But he had the saying, he used to say it all the time, he said, there are only two things in life that they're all that they're cracked up to be, and that sex and tenure. And he was wrong. I mean, at least about tenure. And, and you know, the research shows that people get used to tenure. I actually added a third item to the list, which is Paris, you know, you think it's going to be great and you go and it's really just as great as you think it is. But anyway, it's another example that it's one of those domains where you think it's going to be great and it is great. But then you start

focusing on the next thing. You start focusing on the stress or now I have to teach and I have to apply for grants and do the thing that having the job requires. You see the same thing, of course, on different scales and different people's lives. Megan Markle experienced some of this when she joined the British Royal family, as almost everyone knows, of course, she's an American actor who married Prince Harry, one of the heirs to the British throne. Now, that sounds like it's right out of a fairy tale, but here's how she described what life was actually like as a princess. In this clip, Sonja, she uses the inside a term for the royal family. She calls it the firm.

I remember so often people within the firm would say, well, you can't do this because it'll look like that. You can't, so even can I go and have lunch with my friends? No, no, no, you're oversaturated, you're everywhere. And I said, I've left the house twice in four months. I'm everywhere, but I am nowhere. And from that standpoint, I continue to say to people, I know there's an obsession with how things look, but as anyone talked about how it feels? Because right now I could not feel lonely.

Can you talk a moment so near about the mismatch she is describing how something looks, especially from the outside and how it feels on the inside? Yeah, it's a beautiful quote, you know, because again, when we think about like, what would be like to be a princess, you know, or whatever this we want to be, we kind of focused on like the most salient change between, you know, my life today and, you know, the life of the princess. But we don't really think about like what daily life,

you know, as Megan Markle said, what daily life would actually feel like, you know, in some of the hassles, some of the monotony, some of the loneliness, we just sort of think like, again, about the news. It's similar to sort of having money or not. Like, you know, if someone said to me, oh, you're gonna get a million dollars, you know,

but what does it mean once you have it, you know, what is your life gonna be? But then after I get that million dollars or after I learn I'm a princess, then I have to go to the dentist, you know, or then I have to, you know, deal with my kids tantrum, right? So daily life and Dan Gilbert is, you know, talks about this beautifully in a sort of daily life is mostly about all these sort of mundane things, not about that kind of life change that you think is going to, you know, make you forever happy or forever unhappy for that matter.

that you're making forever happy or forever unhappy for that matter. I want to look at one of the domain where our expectations are often confounded by reality. And you talk about this in your book, The Myths of Happiness. And this has to do with love and personal relationships. Now, these mismatches are a staple of many television shows and movies. In the comedy This Is 40, a long time married couple find themselves bickering all the time. We're like business associates. We're like brother and sister. There's no passion there. We're not like brother and sister. You know we're like Simon and Garfunkel. And somehow you turn me into Garfunkel. I don't

even know what that means. Art Garfunkel. What's like Simon and Garfunkel. And somehow you turn me into Garfunkel. I don't even know what that means. Art Garfunkel. What's wrong with Art Garfunkel? He has a beautiful voice. He's got an amazing voice. He could put a harmony to anything. But what I'm saying is that you turned me into him. What the hell are you talking about?

What? Simon controls him. That's because Simon writes the f***ing songs. He's the better one. Of course, this sounds much less funny when it happens to you. Sonya and your book you talk about this mismatch between our expectations and reality

when it comes to love and marriage. Could I ask you what your own experience has been in love and marriage and whether you've seen first hand what your research has shown? I'll tell you, but I hope that my husband is not listening to this episode. So, by the way, I love that movie. So, yeah, what happens is, you know, passionate love

tends to turn to companion love. And companion love is beautiful. You know, you really love and trust your partner. They're your best friend, but passion fades in almost all good relationships. It only doesn't fade in bad relationships, abusive ones. And so, and yeah, that happened to me, I think to a great extent,

it happens to like almost every couple where the first weeks, months are just incredible, right, that honeymoon period, but then you transition to sort of a more kind of best friend period. But when we think about getting married, when we think about love and romance, so many people focus on the wedding.

But really, it's just one day, you know, really, it's really the marriage you should focus on. And so, anyway, so passion, I hate to tell this to your listeners, but, you know, passion doesn't tend to last. This is why many movies and TV shows about love end with couples overcoming hurdles to get together. The story ends with the wedding, because what comes afterwards

is often narratively unsatisfying. I like to go back to sort of evolutionary explanations for things. You know, you could imagine that like if passionate love did not fade, then life would be difficult. There's a line in the movie, I think, as before sunset. Something like if passionate love didn't fade, then we'd never get anything done. Oh, I know.

And God, otherwise we would end up with aneurysm. If we weren't in that form to study of excitement, right? We would end up doing nothing at all with our lives. Do you think you would? You know, we would be, right? You know, remember what it's like when you're first in love and that's all you can think of, right? You can't even really like focus on friendship.

You all always think about it as that new love of yours, right? So maybe it's a good thing that it fades a little bit. [♪ Music playing in background, and then the next one is a new love of yours, right? [♪ Music playing in background, and then the next one is a new love of yours, right? [♪ Music playing in background, and then the next one is a new love of yours, right? [♪ Music playing in background, and then the next one is a new love of yours, right? [♪ Music playing in background, and then the next one is a new love of yours, right? [♪ Music playing in background, and then the next one is a new love of yours, right? [♪ Music playing in background, and then the next one is a new love of yours, right? [♪ Music playing in background, and then the next one is a new love of yours, right? [♪ Music playing in background, and then the next one is a new love of yours, right? [♪ Music playing in background, and then the next one is a new love of yours, right? [♪ Music playing in background, and then the next one is a new love of yours, right? [♪ Music playing in background, and then the next one is a new love of yours, right? [♪ Music playing in background, and then the next one is a new love of yours, right? [♪ Music playing in background, and then the next one is a new love of yours, right? [♪ Music playing in background, and then the next one is a new love of yours, right? [♪ Music playing in background, and then the next one is a new love of yours, right? [♪ Music playing in background, and then the next one is a good night of sleep? You know people don't think about how much sleep contributes to your happiness. And unless you last night I did not have a good night of sleep. We have a heat wave here in where I live in Santa Monica and so it was all too hot for me but but sleep really does contribute to happiness. But in a way that's kind of invisible, you just sort of feel good. And you don't realize it's because you had good sleep. Isn't it interesting, Sonya, that we're often very aware when we don't have a good night of sleep

because we can see the effect that it has in our mood and how things go and how we react to the world. But when we have a good night of sleep, we don't spend a moment to say, I should be grateful for having this good night of sleep because in fact, I feel very, very different. So we notice things when they don't go our way and we ignore things when they do.

Exactly, and this is part of the bad is stronger than good phenomena. We notice bad, again, it's adaptive, it's functional for us to kind of pay attention to bad things, to threats in our environment and, you know, adversities. We tend to take the good for granted. When we come back, the intricate brain psychology that produces these mismatches and how we can trick the machinery in our minds into making ourselves a little happier. You're listening to Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantan.

This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantan. Happiness is a paradox. The things that we expect will make us happy often don't. And many things that do make us happy are often not what we might have predicted. Psychologist Sonia Lobamirski studies these mismatches. She believes that by understanding how these mismatches come about, we can actually do things to increase our happiness and decrease our misery. Sonia, I want to start by unpacking some of the psychological drivers of these mismatches.

And I want to start with perhaps the most important idea of all. Can you tell me what you mean by hedonic adaptation? Yes, hedonic adaptation is basically the phenomenon that human beings are remarkably good at getting used to changes in our lives, both positive changes and negative changes, although hedonic adaptation is faster to positive changes.

And when people sometimes talk about the hedonic treadmill, what do they mean by that phrase? What is the hedonic treadmill? Right, so the hedonic treadmill, so I think of the hedonic treadmill as basically hedonic adaptation in action. So there's really two, I guess, aspects of hed the adaptation that are really important is that what happens is when we, when we get the job that we want, when we get more money, have a new relationship that we really like that what happens after those positive changes is that our first expectations or aspirations change, right? So now, now when we live in the bigger house, you know, that becomes our new normal. And so now we think, well, maybe, you know, an extra bedroom would be even nicer, you know, or a deck would be nicer. I certainly have

friends who are constantly talking about like improving their houses, even though their houses are perfectly beautiful and enormous. And the other thing that matters is our social comparisons change. So when we move into that bigger house than a new neighborhood, suddenly we notice our neighbors have houses that are might be even nicer than ours or drive cars that are nicer than ours. So there are social comparisons change, which also lead us to kind of want even more. So again, sort of the bottom line is, hedonic adaptation leads us to kind of want even more than we have. So we're never quite satisfied. And the idea of the treadmill, of course, is that you're walking, but it feels like you're staying in place. In fact, you've moved up in the world, but it feels emotionally, it feels like, you know,

you are where you're used to be. Right. So they don't have treadmills kind of like, you're getting more stuff, you're getting more goals accomplished, but then you want even more than that. So you don't feel like you're any happier. And again, getting back to sort of evolutionary theory, you could argue that this is really good. This is the depth of the human beings are never quite satisfied. If we didn't have it on a adaptation, maybe we'd just be sort of complacent and we'd just sort of stop pursuing new things and all progress might stop, right? So it's kind of a good thing, but it's sort of not so good for our happiness. The Hedonic Adaptation also plays out at a societal level. As countries get wealthier and people can live in bigger homes and drive better cars,

they often don't end up feeling happier. Because our expectations can grow faster than our bank accounts, we can be much better off than people who lived 75 years ago. But feel worse. I mean, at this sort of specific level, you know, it used to be people would have like one car per household. Now we have two to three cars per household and people lived in smaller houses

and think about our appliances, right? And, you know, I remember actually I grew up in Russia where we had to wash our clothes by hand. And that was a huge pain, but, you know, we didn't really think about it, because we didn't think about the alternative. And then, of course, now I can't imagine going back to not having a washing machine. Right. So, so yes, so we get, you know, our expectations change, and then kind of at a broader level, you know, there's some researches that show that, for example, you know, women are less, a little less satisfied than used to be. And it's likely because, you know, now, you know,

women feel like, you know, they're at least opportunities that they have and maybe they aren't able to sort of achieve all of those opportunities. Maybe they're still kind of have more responsibilities at home. Whereas it used to be their expectations were kind of lower. There wasn't really that alternative. And it's wonderful that we have all these new opportunities, but also means that our expectations keep constantly changing and rising and improving.

You once visited Google, which is the company that famously gives employees fabulous benefits. And you talked with some of the employees at Google about how much they were appreciating the things that they got at the company. What did people tell you? It was really cool. People brought their pets to work and they had game rooms and they had music rooms with guitars and drums and all kinds of snacks everywhere and really great food. And people were like, oh, the crab cakes again.

You know, so they were already had adapted, right? And partly, you know, they don't go visit like other workplaces. And then, you know, one of my sort of advice is like, well, go visit other workplaces so you can kind of see that you have it better than others. But yeah, we just adapt so quickly. It's amazing to me.

So I want to talk about these twin enemies. One is sort of a resentment about what we don't have. And the second is a sense of entitlement about what we do have. And so, for example, when it used to take weeks to basically make a transatlantic journey, and now you can make the journey in seven hours, and now people are like sitting in the airport saying, you know, how come my plane is 20 minutes late? Or why haven't we departed on time? So our capacity to be entitled to take for granted

the things that we have, it's almost infinite. Yeah, it's kind of amazing. Actually, airplanes are a great example. I remember, I don't know when, but the very first time I flew business class in an airplane, it took me like five minutes to get used to the idea that now I'm like, this higher class citizen. And I remember it's looking at those poor souls, right?

Who are like shuffling their way to the back of the airplane and feelings superior to them, right? And it's so easy and it's so fast that we become adapted to things and we feel entitled to them. We've talked a little bit about the role of adaptation in love and marriage, and you've talked a little bit about this in your own life, Sonia. When you were a children, what was your experience having children?

Was it different after you had one child? I mean, did you feel like you adapted very quickly to the idea of having one child and then wanted another? I hate to say it, but there is something really special about that first child, right? Because you could never have that experience again. And the thing is, yeah, yeah, I did adapt to having children. I ended up having four, believe it or not, but not 100%. And partly it's because they're always growing and changing.

And we haven't talked about this, but we tend to adapt to constant stimuli, right? So you buy a car and then it's sort of the same car today as it is, you know, next week and next month, but children aren't the same, you know, in a month. And so we don't kind of adapt to them completely. And I do think there are a few things, like a few activities that we might do that we don't adapt to. And the one thing that I've never adapted to is cuddling with my kids, you know. I am so happy. I feel like I'm high when I'm cuddling with my kids. You know, I am so happy. I feel like I'm high when

I'm cuddling with them. And I have two little ones now. And I've never adapted to that. So I think there are some, some sort of things that maybe to correct my old advisor, Lee Ross, all that they're all that I've cracked up to be, maybe not sex and tenure, but cuddling and Paris. I don't know. I'll have to rethink that about that. but cuddling in Paris. I don't know. I'll have to rethink about that. I want to focus on another area that we touched on a little bit earlier and I had to do with the role that evolution might play in prompting us to feel certain ways about certain things. So certainly when it comes to love, for example, the experience of infatuation, the experience of passionate love, as you point out,

it's designed in some ways where it's designed to experience these very strong emotions. But I'm wondering if you can talk a moment about the fact that when we experience these very strong emotions, they don't feel like they're transient. I think one of the reasons people often feel let down when passionate love retreats from their lives is because they feel when they're experiencing passionate love it feels as if it's going to last forever. Can you talk a little bit about the role that our instincts play and how wise we would be to trust or to mistrust our instincts in telling us what to do and when to be happy? It's an excellent point and it applies to lots of domains,

right? So we're first in love. We can't imagine the passion fading. If I remember, I really should not talk to couples, but there's a couple that I was talking to who are really passionately in love and they're like, Sonya, don't tell us the passion fades and I'm like, well, because you just can't imagine it and maybe that's good, right?

Because you wouldn't really be happy if you're constantly sort of thinking, oh, this is not going to last. Right. But, or like, imagine like when you're really hungry, you're not supposed to go shopping when you're like too hungry, right? Because you just can't sort of imagine like ever not being hungry, right?

And it applies to lots of sort of states and lots of emotions. Or when we're miserable for that matter, when we're depressed, it's really hard to sort of think about like how I'll, you know, they'll come a time when I'm not going to feel this down. Another example, actually, this is one reason I actually started studying happiness is that I'm amazed at how how our mood can affect how we feel about everything, right? Once some days we wake up and we're just happy and everything's up to, and we're so optimistic and we feel good about ourselves, we just feel good about everything. And then other days we wake up and we feel kind of not so good about everything. And it's really hard to remind ourselves

that like, no, I'm not going to feel this way forever. When we try and forecast whether something's going to make us happy or unhappy, you know, we're actually thinking about the thing. We're trying to imagine what would it be like to have perfect vision, or what would it be like to be a prince or a princess, or to get a great job, or to find a soulmate. We're ruminating on it in the present.

Can you talk about the concept of present bias, and how the things that we're thinking about in some ways loom larger in our minds than they actually will in the future. Yeah, exactly. And so when we think about when we're forecasting sort of our future feelings, we're thinking about the change, right? And one of my favorite studies out of the University of Chicago, people got the news that they're going to get a kit guide bar and then they sort of anticipated eating it and then they ate it, consumed it,

and then they would call it. And similar studies have been done with like vacations, right? Imagine being told you're gonna go to Venice, you know, and then now anticipated, now go to Venice, now recall it. And in some of the studies show that the biggest impact on your happiness is during the news part, right? Like when you first learn, oh, you get to go to Venice, I get to have this chocolate bar more than the anticipation also more than the concern of the consumption or the recall the recollection of it. I want to talk about another psychological driver of the mismatch between our expectations and reality and that is we often don't respond with proportion to the annoyances and irritants in daily life. Sonya you had a couple of experiences in close proximity to one another,

one of which you could classify as a minor irritant and the other was much more serious. Can you tell me about these two incidents and what you learned about yourself from them? You know, I actually had these two bad experiences on the same day. I had a long reserve window seat on a really long flight and it was taken away from me.

So then I had to sit in the middle and I was really unhappy about that. But then the same day, I got into a really bad car accident on the freeway. I mean, I wasn't heard, but my car was completely totaled and it was kind of traumatic. And what was incredible is that when I had the car accident, I actually was like really calm and cool headed.

And I sort of knew what I had to do. I didn't panic. And it's kind of amazing to me how sometimes when, you know, really big and bad things happen, we are sort of less upset in the moment. Maybe because, you know, we're kind of mustering all the resources that we have to cope with the situation. Whereas when kind of little hassles happen to us,

we get angry and we get stressed out. I think it's a profound insight that you had here, Sonia, because I feel like all of us have had this experience and you hear this all the time when there are major calamities happening, ordinary people act with great heroism and poise. And yet you also see people reacting with over you know, over the top annoyance and frustration at totally trivial things. And I think there's something here that's not just, you know, in your mind,

but really something that's more generalizable to how human beings think about minor and major irritants. I agree. And I think partly it has to do with the stories that we tell about these events where with the really big thing, we kind of, you thing, we take pains to make sense of it, to look on the bright side, maybe to rationalize it, what we've learned from it. And the little things are really kind of hard to rationalize. So I lost my window seat. And I'm not gonna go convince me with my friends about that,

or they'll be bored, or be like, wow, your life is boring. But then I could get the social support, you know, for the car accident. Right. So we all know people who are simply happy. Bad stuff happens to them, but they bounce back. We also know people who are mostly unhappy. Good things happen to them. And you know, they might have a brief blip of joy, and then they go back to feeling morose about their lives Can you talk about the role of happiness set points as one of the psychological drivers between the mismatch Between our expectations and reality sure, you know Well, we all know that some people are happier than others

This is actually how my research in happiness started in grad school and my advisor and I started talking about like Why are some people happier than others? There's almost a resentful edge to that question, Sonia. Yeah, it sounds like it, right? But again, I'm a pretty happy person, but I'm still interested in that question. There's clearly, you know, there's evidence that the genetic influences on happiness. And anyone who has more than one child can attest, you feel like you're kind of raising them in a similar environment and yet some of your kids are probably a lot happier than others.

You know, they get much more distressed by the same kind of event, you know, one kid more than another. And so that does play a role that happier people are kind of, quote, luckier in a sense that they're kind of naturally, more grateful and optimistic, and more resilient than people who are less happy. So yeah, that's clearly one of the drivers and how we respond to major changes in our lives. But isn't it also a source of the mismatch? Because for example, if my happiness levels

are actually set at a certain level, or in other words, I have some ability to change them up or down, let's say 10%, 15%, 20%, but I don't have the ability to change it by 70%. But I imagine, if I get the relationship that I want, if I get the job that I want, if I can move to the city that I want, I can become a radically different person who is entirely different in terms of happiness. But in fact, if my set point of happiness is fixed at a certain level, this might be why there's a mismatch between my expectations and reality.

Right. Well, first let me state that if you live in a war zone in Syria or you're in an abusive relationship or you're very poor, then absolutely the environment can change in ways to make you a lot happier. But let's say most of the listeners to this program are, you know, maybe have, you know, fairly comfortable lives so that, you know, they're not, you know, very, very poor. They're not in a war zone. So in that situation, yes, they can become happier, but and probably not hugely, hugely happier. But one of my favorite kind of ways to think about this comes from, I think it was dear Abby actually, where someone

wrote a letter to her said, like, oh, I have this job and I don't like it. So then I moved to this other job and I thought that would be better, but I don't like that one either. I hate my boss and I went to the third job and, you know, sort of on and on. And Abby said, you know, it's not the job. It's you, right? You're the same person moving from one job to the other, but that can happen in the positive side as well. Another driver in the mismatch between our happiness and our expectations is not inside our own heads, but in our culture. One of the reasons that became interesting happiness is that when I moved to the US, where I was almost 10 years old, I noticed how different Americans were.

So Americans would walk down the street and they would smile at you and they would say, hi, and Russians don't really do that in the street. On the other hand, I noticed differences that are kind of public versus private, right? So when you go to dinner in a Russian home, this is kind of a stereotype, but it's really true. People are drinking and they're singing and they're laughing and telling jokes. And I remember the first time that I was invited

to dinner at a friend's house in Washington DC where I grew up. And people were just sitting kind of like very seriously around the table kind of like saying, can you pass the salt please, right? And I thought like, wow, they don't seem very happy. And again, this doesn't mean that they're not happy, but I became interested in these sort of these cultural differences.

Yeah. I'm wondering though, is it possible that certain cultural contexts change our standards of what, of what, how happy we should be because there are some cultural contexts that say that happiness is a right. I mean the pursuit of happiness is actually literally enshrined in the US Declaration of Independence. There are very few other countries that whose founding documents say that the pursuit of happiness is a worthwhile goal. And I'm wondering does that change the way we think? On the one hand, it probably prompts people to actually seek happiness in other places

they might be more resigned to wherever they are. But it also potentially makes people more unhappy because you're constantly asking, how can I be happier than what I am right now? Exactly. So I think in the US and in Western culture, there is much more of a kind of a focus or maybe a preoccupation with happiness

that I can actually backfire, right? That can lead to some unhappiness. On the other hand, even in Russia, like it's funny, there's this focus on, you know, in Russia, people talk about the importance of suffering, right? Suffering, you know, is important because it builds character and it might help you gain salvation in the next life. But when I went back actually years ago in the 90s and I asked people, what do you want most for your children?

And Russian parents said, I want my children to be happy. So I do think that happiness is a fairly universal goal, but how we pursue it differs. And I guess how important it is does differ, because there is more of a obsession with happiness in our culture. Our perceptions, predictions, and expectations about happiness are often flawed. A shiny prize is supposed to make us happy, but when it doesn't, we immediately start looking for the next shiny object.

Where we come back, how to break that cycle and use psychology to crack the happiness code? You're listening to Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedanta. This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedanta. We all want to be happy, but finding happiness isn't as straightforward as it looks. Sometimes marrying a prince or getting the riches you desire does not make you happy. And sometimes things you might not have predicted would make you happy bring a big smile to your face. Sonya Lubamirski is a psychologist who has spent years studying these mismatches but also looking for ways to crack the happiness code. these mismatches, but also looking for ways to crack the happiness code. So you and your husband did not live together before you got married.

And much later in your research, you realized that you may have unintentionally done something that was psychologically smart. Now you're not making a puritanical argument here about how people should behave in their private lives, but getting at an important insight about how our minds work. Can you tell me what you found in your personal life and how this was reflected by your research? Absolutely. I mean, we've been talking about how quickly we adapt

to positive changes in our lives. And when we fall in love, I remember falling in love with my husband and I really wanted to spend all my time with him. And I wanted to move in with him before we got married. But he, not for any kind of moral or religious reason, he just thought like, you know, it would be like better if we wait until, you know, we just, we'd be happier if we waited until we got married and we got married, you know, maybe a year later. And then when we did move in together, it was so

wonderful. Then it made getting married so much more special, you know, I hate to admit it, but now of course we have adapted to living together after 23 years and in fact during the pandemic, you know, I would tell him like Pete his name is Peter like can you please leave the house for like Maybe three four five hours like he's he never left the house. I was never alone But you know, we I love him, but I just don't want to see him like 24 hours a day So there are different things you could do to try to kind of stave off that adaptation. Or one of them for us was not moving in together until

after the wedding. So there's an important insight here in some ways, which is that if you have positive experiences, obviously the thing we want to do is to keep those positive experiences going, we never want them to stop, we want to enjoy them more and more. But the paradox is, of course, when we do that, we start to adapt to them, we get used to them, and then they lose their pleasure, they lose the joy that they used to give us. And so one solution, it might seem a little difficult, but in some ways, you came up with this solution inadvertently, I think, before you got married. In some ways, it's to limit how much you're enjoying the thing that is giving you pleasure.

That in some ways, if you could bank your happiness to, sort of, say, this happiness awaits me, but I'm actually going to postpone it by just a little bit, you can draw out the happiness a little longer. Can you talk about this idea, Sonya? Yeah, exactly. It's kind of scarcity and limiting your experience. It's going to make you happier. I guess a really good example is eating out

at your favorite restaurant. You know, listen to your favorite song, right? Like, you just don't want to do that too often because then you'll become more monotonous. It'll become less interesting, less enjoyable. Yeah, and during the pandemic, I think all of us have had this experience of things that would routine to us before the pandemic became extremely rare during the pandemic, going out to a restaurant or meeting with friends or sitting at a coffee shop or giving some

on a hug. And suddenly we realized, oh my God, these things actually are incredibly valuable. And when we saw people meeting each other after a long time or hugging one another or sitting down at a restaurant together, we suddenly were struck by how powerful this was. But of course it took the external force of a pandemic in some ways to induce that scarcity in our lives.

Exactly. And I hate to say it, but I think after it's over, we may very well just go right back to what we were before and take those things for granted. Hopefully we've learned a lesson to try not to take them for granted and to introduce that scarcity into our lives and variety as well. Again, if you do the same thing once a week or every day,

you're not going to get as much pleasure out of it. There is a less painful way to acquire the benefits of scarcity in our lives. Instead of foregoing pleasure or delaying it or having the joys in our lives robbed by disaster or tragedy, you can use your imagination to visualize what it would be like to not have that particular source of happiness in your life. Oh yes, oh my God, yes exactly. Or the counterfactual, what if you didn't have the thing, but I think that idea that life is impermanent, right, that things are not lasting.

That's what gives everything kind of this bittersweet flavor, and also allows us to savor, right? And so one of the most common ways to, I think it try to enjoy something is to think like this is the last time. One of my favorite quotes from the movie Casablanca is like, kiss me, kiss me like it's the last time, right? So that really makes you kind of really enjoy

and savor that kiss in a way that you won't. If you know, you can kiss 100 more times, you know, next week. Yeah, and this goes back to the employees we talked about at companies that give you fancy lunches and do your dry cleaning for you. It might be helpful to spend a day a week or a day a month at another company, which does not give you those kinds of things, so that you can better appreciate what it is that you have. Or that company shouldn't just throw a fire hose of goodies at you every day, but somehow limit them and intermittently sprinkle them. Crab cakes only on special days, not every day. But isn't it ironic, Sonya, that the impulse that we have, you know, when something gives

us pleasure, we want more of it. And in some ways, it's almost counterintuitive to say that we actually want to hold this pleasurable thing at bay to some extent in order to draw out the happiness we can derive from it. Exactly. Another example is a, in a new relationship where you become more and more intimate, like you kind of reveal more and more of yourself to the other person. And it's so pleasurable, right? Because you're like, you get to know them better. And some couples just kind of like, they just do it too fast, you know? They just sort of tell

each other everything in the first, you know, two weeks. And, you know, and then there's like not very much left. So, and so I tell young people to kind of like, go slower, right? Like, allow that intimacy building to last longer. We've looked at ways we can extend happiness and make it last longer. In her book, The Myths of Happiness, Sony has also studied techniques to limit unhappiness, or at least to make it end more quickly. One of them put down negative experiences in a journal. So writing kind of forces you to kind of think about your life of experiences in a kind of a systematic way, like kind of what causes what. And so it helps you process those experiences.

So we have some studies that have shown that it's helpful or it makes people happier when they write about negative experiences, but not positive experiences. So positive experiences, you don't want to kind of like, try to explain or process, right? Or systematically analyze, you wanna just kind of like, let them happen. And so there's sort of this little bit of a symmetry where you kind of wanna write about negative things

to get past them, but not write about, or kind of like sort of not really analyze positive things. Think about your happiest day and you don't want to analyze it. Like, oh, why did that happen? And why do I feel so good? That makes the happiness go away. Can you talk a little bit about the role of social interactions as an important ingredient

for day to day happiness? We talked about sleep earlier on as one of those things where you notice it when you don't have it. But can you talk about the similar role that social interactions play in our day to day well-being? Yeah, social interaction, social connection, I think is what makes life worth living. And I'm doing quite a bit research on that, but basically people are happier when they're interacting with others, interventions that have instructed people

to sort of interact more with others on a daily basis. They show that people become happier when they're more socially engaged. And so connection really is critical, although it can be very different kinds of connection. It could be with your pet. It could be with one person. It could be with your pet. It could be with one person. It could be with many people.

It could be, you know, with close family versus equates as a stranger. So there's different kinds of connection that can make people happy. Hmm. Sonia, modern psychology has found again and again that happiness comes not just from doing the right things but doing them for the right reasons.

I want to play you a bit of a commencement speech at the University of Houston. This is from the actor Matthew McConaughey, who is talking about an important change he made in his priorities. I started enjoying my work and literally being more happy. When I stopped trying to make the daily daily labor a means to a certain end. For example, I need this film to be a box office success. I need my performance to be acknowledged. I need the respect of my peers. All those are reasonable aspirations, but the truth is as soon as the work, the daily making of the movie, the doing of the deed became the reward in itself for me. I got more box office, more accolades, and respect than I ever had before.

Can you talk a moment about this idea, Sonya, the difference between intrinsic motivation and extrinsic motivation and whether it has anything to do with the conversation we're having here about happiness? Yes, I was just going to say intrinsic goals. So when you do something just for the sake of the pleasure of doing it, the satisfaction of doing the fulfillment of doing it, you're going to be more creative, you're going to be more productive, you're going to do better, as opposed to, I'm just doing this to get an A in a class or, you know, to get a certain number of like, widgets sold. And so, so, absolutely, I think the interest of goals are really important. And this also gets back to what we're talking about before about the importance of sort

of the journey of getting there, of pursuing the goal as opposed to sort of the end goal in the state that will be when the goal is accomplished. So now I'm wondering whether you know, psychologists have talked about the importance of what they call a gratitude practice. Is it possible that a gratitude practice in some ways can be a defense against hedonic adaptation? Exactly. I think of gratitude as the perfect antidote to hedonic adaptation. When you think about hedonic adaptation, when you've adapted to something positive in your life, that means that you have essentially taken it for granted. And when you try to be grateful for the things in your life,

whether it's your health or your opportunities or your job or your family, you're basically trying not to take them for granted. You're sort of neutralizing that adaptation. And that could happen lots of different domains, whether it's about your job or your family or about past experiences. I had an experience where I had a really miserable childhood and miserable adolescence. And so when I left home to go to college, it was so amazing. So instead of that negative experience being sort of traumatizing and affecting me negatively, I was so happy and so grateful that it was over. I still

think about that sometimes. I'm still happy that I'm not an adolescent anymore. So I think gratitude can be very powerful. I remember speaking with Dan Gilbert, who has also studied the science of happiness for many years and I remember asking him some years ago whether he was a happier person as a result of doing all this research and and then told me that you know he wasn't a happier person. He said I'm just as unhappy as I used to be. I just know why I'm unhappy. I'm wondering if that's that's true for you as well, Sonia. Have you actually learned from your research to become happier? I love that quote from Dan. And again, I'm a fairly

happy person to begin with, but it doesn't mean that I'm always doing kind of the right things to be happy. My first book is called The Health Happiness, where I talked about 12 different strategies to make people happier. And I still remember that every chapter that I wrote, I kind of became obsessed with sort of that particular practice, whether it's sort of doing acts of kindness. So I was writing that chapter and then I started thinking, like, oh, I should do some acts of kindness for my husband today. Or one of my favorite strategies is savoring. And savoring is basically extracting kind

of the maximum enjoyment out of an experience. And so I was writing that chapter and really thinking a lot about how I could savor the moment. Because sometimes, you know, we're so busy and I'd be with my kids and instead of enjoying my time with the kids, I'm thinking about what I have to do tomorrow, right? My to-do list instead of sort of savoring that time. And so, you know, doing research on happiness essentially is like a daily reminder of the kinds of things that we could be doing to be happy. And sometimes I actually take my own medicine

and I do those things. As we've seen, hedonic adaptation can rob us of happiness. But it can also work in our favor when times are bad. How you feel about a setback that happens to you is rarely how you will feel about it after two weeks, or two months, or two years. It's also the case that sometimes things that appear like disasters are not in fact disasters. Sonia likes a parable about this idea from ancient China. It's a really wonderful little story about an old farmer who lived in a poor little country village, but he owned a horse, so he was sort of luckier than his neighbors, and they thought that he was so lucky.

But one day his beloved horse ran away, and so upon hearing that, his neighbors thought, oh, such bad luck. But then the horse came back and he came back with six wild horses. So suddenly he was lucky again. And his neighbors were jealous of him. But then his son rode one of the wild horses and broke his leg.

And so now this old man was unlucky again because his son had a broken leg. And his neighbors were thinking, oh, poor guy, he's so unlucky. But then there was a war going on and some conscription officers came to the village to draft young men, but his son wasn't drafted because he had a broken leg. And so now the farmer was lucky again. So anyway, it's a lovely story that suggests that sometimes the best thing that has happened to us is actually the same thing as the worst thing that has happened to us. And it reminds me of actually a dinner that I went to once with a bunch of friends on New Year's Eve. And we asked each other the question, what is the best event that happened that year?

And it was the worst thing that happened to us that year. And for most people, the best and the worst event was the same thing. It was like someone got laid off from a job but then they got an even better job or they broke up a relationship but now they're happier or they're in a better relationship. So yeah it really always struck me kind of you know how that that show that kind of the the best thing and the worst thing can be the same thing. I love the line you have in the book from William Blake that describes this so elegantly. Yes, I love William Blake. He has this great line from AGRES of Innocence. Joy and woe are woven fine.

Sonia Lubamirsky is a psychologist at the University of California Riverside. She is the author of the books, The How of Happiness and the Myths of Happiness. Sonia, thank you for joining me today on Hidden Brain. Thank you, Shankar Samaisu. It was wonderful to talk to you. Hidden Brain is produced by Hidden Brain Media. Our production team includes Bridget McCarthy, Laura Correll, Kristen Wong, Ryan Katz, Autumn Barnes,

and Andrew Chadwick. Tara Boyle is our executive producer. I'm Hidden Brain's executive editor. Our unsung hero this week is Katie Baker. Katie is a senior manager of content operations at Stitcher. It's been about a year since we first met Katie and in that year she has helped us with all sorts of things, from big audio projects, to urgent technical questions. She's one of those people who gets things done with skill and

efficiency and makes it look easy, even though a lot of work is happening behind the scenes. Thank you so much Katie. For more Hidden Brain, be sure to subscribe to our weekly newsletter. You'll find Thank you so much Katie. That's N-E-W-S dot hiddenbrain dot org. I'm Shankar Vidantum. See you next week.