Making Sense with Sam Harris - #196 — The Science of Happiness

Episode Date: April 10, 2020

Sam Harris speaks with Laurie Santos about the scientific study of happiness. They discuss people’s expectations about happiness, the experiencing self vs the remembered self, framing effects, the importance of social connections, the effect of focusing on the happiness of others, introversion and extroversion, the influence of technology on social life, our relationship to time, the connection between happiness and ethics, hedonic adaptation, the power of mindfulness, resilience, the often illusory significance of reaching goals, and other topics. If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe.  

Thank you. If you'd like access to full episodes, you'll need to subscribe at SamHarris.org. There you'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcatcher, along with other subscriber-only content. And as always, I never want money to be the reason why someone can't listen to the podcast. So if you can't afford a subscription, there's an option at SamHarris.org to request a free account. And we grant 100% of those requests. No questions asked. Today I'm speaking with Lori Santos. Lori is a professor of psychology at Yale University, and she hosts the very popular podcast, The Happiness Lab, and she teaches the most popular course at Yale, which is on the scientific understanding of happiness. She also runs

the Comparative Cognition Laboratory and the Canine Cognition Center at Yale. And here we get into what we know, or at least have good reason to believe, scientifically about the causes and conditions of happiness at this point. We talk about the role of expectations and the experiencing self versus the remembered self. We talk about framing effects and the importance of social connections, the effect of focusing on the happiness of others as opposed to one's own, introversion versus extroversion, the influence of technology on our social lives, our relationship to time, the connection between happiness and ethics, hedonic adaptation, the power of mindfulness, resilience, the often illusory significance of reaching one's goals, and other topics. Anyway, I really enjoyed this. I hope you

find it useful. I now bring you Laurie Santos. I hope you find it useful. I now bring you Lori Santos. I am here with Lori Santos. Lori, thanks for joining me. Thanks for having me on the show. So this was a long time coming. Many people wanted to hear from you. How do you describe what it is you do academically and intellectually? Yeah, so I am a professor of psychology here at Yale University. My day job as a psychologist is involved in studying what makes the human mind special.

And I do that by studying non-human primates and domesticated dogs. But most of my time these days is taken up with a different scientific pursuit in psychology. I became super interested in the scientific basis of happiness and well-being. And you have a podcast titled The Happiness Lab, where you go into these issues in depth. And the course you teach at Yale, am I right in thinking this is the most popular course at the university? Yeah. So in 2018, I taught a new class on this topic called Psychology and the Good Life. And the first time I taught it, it did become Yale's largest class ever, just under like 1,200 students enrolled, which was about one out of every four students at Yale. Since then, we put the class online on Coursera.org, and it's now one of Coursera's biggest classes. And just in the last

month, we've had over a million learners enroll. enroll. Well, that's great. Happiness really is a paramount concern for everyone, whether they think about it in those terms or not. Let's just focus on the word for a second because happiness, at least in English, is a somewhat insubstantial concept. People will often say something like, there's much more to life than happiness. Mere happiness sounds like a somewhat effete goal or primary value. It seems to grade into something like hedonism or pleasure. Then people will tend to try to balance that in their And then people will tend to try to balance that in their talk about the goals to which human life could tend with concepts like meaning and virtue. And then many of us find ourselves using a word like flourishing, which is strangely stilted, although not as stilted as using the Greek eudaimonia.

And then I tend to talk about well-being a lot. And you actually just use that term. So how do you think about the concept? I mean, mostly, I just think I wish we had better terms than everyone agreed on them. So I didn't spend a lot of my time kind of fighting about them. I use the term happiness because I think that's what a lot of people think of when they're thinking about concepts like well-being and flourishing. I agree that happiness is a much more loaded thing because some people think it's about hedonism and really basic kinds of forms of happiness. But I think people kind of get this concept of happiness. We know it from the Declaration of Independence, right? Life,

liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, right? But scientifically speaking, I think social scientists mean a particular thing when they use the term happiness or well-being. And this is the definition that I end up using in the course, which is that you can basically say you're happy if you have a lot of well-being in your life and for your life. And what we mean by that is that kind of happiness in your life is the sort of, you know, almost hedonistic kind of positive emotion type stuff, right? You're happy in your life if you have lots of, you know, positive emotions and laughter and so on and not many negative emotions. Like, relatively speaking, there's not a tremendous amount of sadness and anger, although we can

debate about how much of that you want. But that's kind of being happy in your life. But there's another feature, I think, that the social scientists really care about, and that's that you're happy with your life. And so that's basically your answer to the question, all things considered, how satisfied are you with your life right now? And so I think there are these interesting moments where those dissociate, right? I have my academic dean here in my residential college, you know, just had a newborn baby. And, you know, I think she's very satisfied with her life. But in her life right now, there's a lot of negative emotions of like, you know, cleaning dirty diapers and not sleeping and these kinds of things. And I think, you know, I see a lot,

you know, when I go to different talks and things of people, you know, who are really happy in their life. You know, they have a lot of hedonistic pleasure, but really at their core, they're really dissatisfied with their life. And so I think I think if you're if in my view, if you're able to maximize both of those things, you know, that winds up encompassing things like flourishing and meeting and all these kind of lesser concepts. I think you're happy in your life and with your life. You're doing pretty well. and all these kind of lesser concepts. I think if you're happy in your life and with your life, you're doing pretty well. Right.

Was it that distinction, happy in your life and happy with your life, to my ear, that is more or less identical to Danny Kahneman's distinction between the experiencing and remembering self. Is there any daylight between these concepts for you or is that the same division? I think there's a little dissociation there. I think you can have happiness in your life and with your life in the experienced self, right? And so just as an example, right now I'm experiencing lots of positive emotions just

from daily things I do and daily activities, but I also have a lot of meaning from this happiness work. And that feels like it right now. I don't have to think back on it. You know, it's not my future self kind of looking back and thinking like, oh, you know, that was the kind of thing I really wanted to enjoy. I can experience that life satisfaction in the moment. And so I think you can actually have both in the experienced self rather than the remembered self. what you're doing is something I do naturally, and this is a point of disagreement between me and Danny. I really do think the remembering self is simply the experiencing self in one of its modes. It feels like something to have these moments of retrospection when asked, what story can you tell about your life? How satisfied are you? The fact that, you know, in his paradigm, he's able to show that there's a mismatch rather often between who you're talking to when you're asking about a retrospective judgment and who you're talking to when you're asking for a moment-to-moment accounting of just what it's like to be you. Still, there really is just a single timeline of life experience. And as you say, the global assessment of one's life

is what I'm doing today actually meaningful? Is it bringing value to the world? Are the sacrifices that I'm making or the stress I'm under now, is it aimed at some purpose that I feel inspired by and that others feel inspired by? I mean, all of that is, that's where this remembering self and the experiencing self just, in my experience, they become indistinguishable. And so I wonder if you're just taking, however inadvertently, my side of the argument against Danny here, that really, if we become very fine-grained about what we mean by the experiencing self, it just swallows the remembering self.

Yeah, I mean, I think you're right on this one. And I don't know, I think, I mean, I haven't pushed Danny on this directly, but my sense is that we don't have what the timeline is for the remembered self, right? You know, if any form of meta-analysis of it is the remembered self, as soon as you ask me like, hey, how's things going? How satisfied are you? If I ever have to take a global view, it's possible that that kind of, it's using the mechanisms that I use for the remembered self to some interesting extent, right? I don't think Danny's really specified how far back we have to do the remembering,

but it might be that any point where we're kind of going meta and thinking about our own happiness might be partly the remembered self. And I think this actually brings up a bigger issue with a lot of the happiness research, right, is that we want to get at what happiness feels like in the moment. But the only way we can do that is to ask people. And it's very possible that between the experiencing and the asking in any form, we're kind of getting some interesting mismatches there. Like it could be that just having you reflect on your own positive emotions, it's going to change that, right? That might be different than kind of what I was noticing and what I was experiencing and the sum total of that throughout my day, which sucks for happiness researchers, right? Because we have to ask people somehow,

you know, I wish there was a thermometer where we could get at happiness or well-being accurately without asking people, but we don't really have that. And it's hard for us to ever know if the act of reporting on your happiness is changing it, whether that be what you're experiencing, what you're remembering in whatever form. Yeah. I have another question here, which relates to this, which is the role that expectation plays in determining a person's sense of well-being. And with expectation, I'm thinking it can also be retrospective, right? So, you know, I'm having a certain experience. It has a certain emotional valence, which could be negative, right? It could be stressful. But because of my expectations,

or because of how I can even retrospectively reconceive the stress I was just under or I'm currently under, this kind of framing effect can seem to, in part or fully, determine whether an experience gets scored as pure suffering or one of the highlights of my life. Let's say you're climbing Everest, right? And, you know, obviously the physical experience is just more or less a pure ordeal. But if you get to the top and you get back down without dying and you don't destroy your ethical code by passing somebody's near corpse on the way down, we've all heard those horrible stories. So you can have something that if you were sampling each time point along the way just looks like torture. And yet retrospectively and for real, you know, for the rest of one's life, it's going to seem like one of the best things you've ever done. How do you think about those framing effects?

Oh, I think those framing effects are huge. I mean, I almost think that the way you're framing an experience, and I mean that in a variety of ways, how you're categorizing it, how you frame it retrospectively, the expectations you have about it going into it. I think that those expectations and those categorizations are more powerful in some cases than the actual experience itself for what we go through. I mean, there's so many kinds of cases like this. So take really classic work in the history of psychology where you give people a particular physiological response and then give them different kinds of frames for how they make sense of it. You know, so this was back in the day, kind of before ethics and social psychology, but you basically unknowingly pump subjects full of like adrenaline, basically. You basically give them speed without them realizing it. And then you set a frame for

what they could be experiencing. They're either in a room with other subjects who are acting really aggressively, who are really angry, or who are kind of partying. You know, they think the experiment's super fun and they're enjoying it. And what you find is that the subject's entire experience of that event depends on the frame of the other people around them. You know, if they're in a room of people who are partying and they're experiencing these physical sensations that are kind of a little bit, you know, agitated, they think it's really fun. Whereas if they're around other angry people, they find it incredibly negative and they see it as angering. And so what this shows us is the basic physiology of what we're experiencing,

how we actually feel about it, whether that's positive or negatively valenced, or whether it's something that might lead to happiness or lead to sadness or anger. It's completely based on what our expectations are about that moment. In some cases, the social contagion of other people's expectations about that moment. I mean, that's the basic physiology. And the example you're getting into is even more complicated. You know, it's not just a single physiological experience in a moment. It's integrating across a whole host of physiological experiences and then looking back on it. And so we might have some frame about those, you know, experiences, say, before we start on Mount Everest, maybe it's a dream of ours and something we've trained for and so on. You know, that's going to cause us in the moment to see those actual experiences, you know,

tiredness and physiological stress and, you know, fight or flight response, all that stuff. Like we're going to see those differently and then see them differently retrospectively. So I think it's kind of a mess. But in some ways, I think that's really powerful, though, right? That means that we actually have the chance to reframe things in our life in these powerful ways, right? And I think the ancient traditions figured that out. And then, you know, the Kahneman and Tversky's of the world figured that out in modern times. And that's exciting because it means we can use these framing techniques to change around our experience. We don't actually have to change our physiology to change whether or not some experience makes us happy or sad.

Right. And we actually don't even have to change the past or have avoided certain negative experiences in the past if we can reframe them in the future. And this is the one thing that I pulled from existentialism, apart from an appreciation for how much of it didn't make sense. It's just the sense that you are always free to tell yourself a new story about the past. So if this humiliating failure that has bothered you up until yesterday can be reframed as the thing that caused you to get the tools that are now integral to your success or whatever it is. You can actually just change your relationship to something that used to be a source of suffering for you. And in that sense, reach into the past and put it to some order. Yeah. And the most amazing thing about the human

mind is that we can do that prospectively too. You know, there's lovely work by social psychologists like Ethan Cross that talk about the power of psychological distancing, basically trying to think about an event as your future self would think about the event. You know, so I'm about to go through, you know, I don't know, like a really, I'm going to have a really stressful interview with Sam Harris, right? Before I start that, I could think, well, how would future Lori want to think about this interview? I'd want to think, you know, we had this great discussion and we, you know, dealt with these hard hitting issues and, you know, this is this is going to be awesome. And that when I if I were to think that way, even before I started the interview, it would frame how the conversation

was going. You know, if I kind of get stressed out in the middle of it, you know, I think like, oh, this is the hard hitting part that I really wanted to experience, you know, it would kind of feel better later. And so, you know, what Ethan's shown is that we don't have to just wait till we get to the future to think back retrospectively in this positive way. We can use that as a frame in the present to shape experiences over time too. And he's shown that you can do that simply by, you know, having a narrative in your own head that uses your future self in the third person. You know, Lori in the future will want to think this way about, you know, X, Y, and Z experience that can shape it in time, in real time as you experience the event. Well, lucky for you, you're speaking to future Sam, who's a real pushover.

So no problem there. So let's start from some kind of ground zero for people psychologically. So let's imagine someone comes to you, you're a happiness expert, and they come to you and they say that they are profoundly unhappy in their life. What generic advice would you give to a person that really is generic, that you think is more or less a good idea for virtually anyone, you know, barring some strange contraindication. What do you recommend to people as a first pass for turning the various dials within reach to improve their sense of well-being? Well, I think the first piece of advice is just that the science

suggests you can intervene, right? I mean, I think a lot of people who are not happy at a given time think that there's something about them that's messed up. Right. You know, genetically, they're just predispositioned to be unhappy or they're kind of built to be that way. And I think, you know, the first thing to tell people is just that, you know, that might be the case to a certain extent. You know, there's some heritability to most well-being measures, but there's a lot you can do to intervene on them. And so I think that's kind of message number one is, look, you can take some action and fix this. In terms of the specific actions, I would suggest, you know, if you look at the positive psychology literature, one of the hugest effects on our own happiness is our social connection. You know, there's a famous paper by Marty Seligman and

Ed Diener that suggests that social relationships and strong social relationships are necessary for happiness. They're not sufficient for happiness, but you can't find happy people that don't have them. And so that really suggests that if you want to be like happy people, you should focus on your social relationships. And that means, you know, taking a hard look at your priorities to figure out if those social relationships are falling by the wayside. And I think in the modern day where we prioritize work and the things that go with work and for my students, you know, their academic performance, often that's coming at the opportunity cost of the time you'd spend on your social relationships. And so that's kind of hit number one is, are you making time for the people that you really care about in life? And a lot of that work also comes from some lovely

studies by Robert Waldinger and his colleagues. He's part of this long running Harvard happiness study that it's super cool. It's been studying men from Harvard, and they were men because the study started back in the 1930s. So men from Harvard and also men from lower income Boston neighborhoods, and they've been tracking them over time. And so now their original cohort is in their 90s. And they've been able to look at all kinds of features about their health, you know, their immune function and whether they get heart disease and diabetes and so on. And what's remarkable is that a major predictor, not just of mental health, like happiness, but also physical health, is the nature of these men's social relationships. health is the nature of these men's social relationships. They're actually predicting longevity now so that the men who are still alive in this cohort study are the ones that seem to have tended to have the best social relationships. And so, again, kind of doubling down on social

relationships is great because it's like doing double duty. It's not just good for your mental health. It's great for your physical health, too. Right. Yeah. So let's run through the list of things that come to mind and then I'll come back to some of them because I do want to talk about relationships more. that volunteers your time, that is focused on other people generally, seems to be a big one for your happiness and your health. One that sounds silly is what I tell my students are just healthy habits. And by that, I mean, you know, the stuff that we know is good for physical health, like making sure you're getting enough sleep, making sure you're getting enough exercise, making sure you're eating right. Those physical things seem to have a huge impact on people's mental health much more than we think. And then I think there's a whole set of things that are more in your wheelhouse, I know,

the act of being a little bit more present, being mindful, and then changing your mindset towards things like having a mindset that's a little bit more grateful and a little bit more compassionate generally. And these are mindsets that often come from ancient practices like different forms of meditation and so on. So those would be my top hits. We can get into the lesser top hits too, like being religious, it turns out, is actually pretty good for your happiness. Or at least, I should clarify, not necessarily believing in religious doctrine, but actually taking part in religious practices, it turns out, is correlated with happiness. And yeah, we can go way down the list, but we'll see which ones you want to pick up on. Yeah. Okay. Well, let's go

back to relationships. And I think, you know, knowing something about your work, it's not just one's close relationships. It's also one's orientation toward strangers. I mean, whether you will just talk to people in public on an airplane or in line or something you've covered in at least one of your podcasts. So this would suggest, however, that extroverts could be at some kind of advantage here and that shyness could be a real impediment to self-actualization of some kind. How do you think about that? Let's leave aside close relationships. Let's put someone out in public among strangers. How do you think about the variables that determine a person's social experience? Yeah, this one was a shocking one for me when I first started reading the literature,

mostly because I'm not a very social person when it comes to strangers. You know, I'm the kind of person that when I hop on a plane, I put my huge headphones on in the hopes that no one will speak to me. That's what I used to do, at least. But yeah, so there's so much work by folks like Nick Epley and Liz Dunn and others that show that the simple, like fleeting connections that we have with strangers can be really powerful for our well-being. And in this sense, I really mean the sort of happy in your life kind of well-being. It really seems to bump up our positive emotions. And so these are things like, you know, the simple conversation you have with the barista at the coffee shop or, you know,

chatting up your Uber driver while you're on your ride. These kinds of simple social connections seem to bump up our mood and the absence of them can seem to kind of decrease our mood in some interesting ways. And so what's striking about that intervention, though, is that people really don't think that's the case. This is work by Nick Epley. He finds that people make incredibly strong predictions that talking to strangers is going to be weird or awkward or just not very fun. And what he finds is that because of that misprediction, people tend not to talk to strangers when they have the opportunity to do so. And that's true of introverts and extroverts.

I think the bigger issue for introverts is that that prediction in introverts is even stronger. So if extroverts predict, it'll be a little awkward to talk with my Uber driver for the whole ride. Introverts end up predicting it's going to be actively awful to talk to my Uber driver for the whole ride. It's going to make me completely miserable. But both extroverts and introverts, Nick finds, actually get a big bump in well-being from having that conversation with the stranger. And so this actually is a theme that's worth investigating further because I think this is part of a lot of the stuff we see in the positive psychology work, which is that there are these things that we can do to bump up our well-being seem to be wrong, which is pretty frustrating because it means that like rational people aren't doing the things that they should be doing to improve their happiness because they have misconceptions about the stuff that's going to work. Right. So by theories, you don't mean the scientific theories in the literature. You

mean each person's personal idea about what they should do to become happier. Yeah. Not even in that rich of an explicit sense, right? You know, if I'm standing in line at Starbucks to get a latte, you know, I have some intuitions about what's going to make me happy. I probably think the latte is going to, you know, bump up my mood or bump up my productivity. If I decide to talk to somebody, it's because at least implicitly, I thought that would be a good idea. It would kind of feel nice or feel good in that situation.

And so we constantly have these very low level automatic intuitions about the stuff that feels good. And that controls how we act in the world. What's scary is that what the scientific theory suggests is that those intuitions are often wrong. In other words, we're systematically not doing the stuff that could make us happiest. Yeah. Yeah. So how do you think about shyness in this context? Because that obviously is the wall through which many people never push, and it keeps them isolated in a social circumstance where even if they accepted your thesis that they would be more or less guaranteed to be happier if they could get to the other side of that wall, it feels bad to

even attempt it. Yeah, I mean, I think what the science suggests you should try if you're an introvert and in that situation is just see if you could try it out. Like, you know, just, you know, take baby steps into having conversations with strangers and then be mindful about how it feels. And what Nick's data really suggests is that it's probably going to feel better than you expect. The problem is that there's a real startup cost to having those conversations because we have this strong intuition that it's going to go really badly. But if we can get over that startup cost, the benefits that we experience can be really powerful. And that's when I resonate with myself. I mean, I don't necessarily consider myself an introvert, but I'm definitely not the kind of person who just like typically strike up a conversation with a complete stranger.

Actually, my producer on my podcast, Ryan, he's a journalist by nature. And every time we go out, he's always talking to people. And I'm like, how do you do that? But the science suggests that I'm totally wrong. I need to kind of bust through that initial awkwardness and try it out. And you get much more benefit than you'd expect. than you'd expect. So I'm like you in that respect. And it's always amazing to be with a friend who is the exact opposite and just see how different their life is in situations like that. I mean, I know people who can walk into a crowded elevator and strike up a conversation with zero awkwardness. And it is a kind of superpower, which I notice I entirely lack, you just realize in those moments that there are people who are walking through the world having a completely different experience, because everywhere they're going, they're just talking to people and having a self-reinforcing and, by and large, entirely pleasant encounter with the world, whereas, I don't know if you have any sense of the percentages here, but I would imagine increasingly so. We can talk about how certain changes in our society

technologically have ramified this default setting of kind of eyes down isolation, but I would imagine most people at this point are walking through cities more or less ignoring everyone most of the time, at least to the limit of what's possible. And the people who aren't doing that at all are really, they're living a very different parallel track of human experience. Yeah. And the data suggests it's like a happier track. Yeah. It's nice to see, it's nice to know the researchers who study this stuff because they often live it. I remember going out to dinner with Nick Epley recently. We were in Aspen, Colorado together.

And, you know, we, you know, went out to dinner and he will just strike up a conversation with everyone. You know, the waitress is trying to come, you know, just take our order. And he'll end up chatting with her for like 15 minutes to the point that she's kind of having a good time. Like, oh, sorry, I have to go, you know, put your order in or the person next to you. And, you know, it's it's foreign. Even though I know these data, it's foreign to me. It's not the thing that I would normally do. But I can resonate with them like, wow, that was so much more of a fun dinner. It went by so much faster because we were having all these interesting conversations. And, you know,

the people around you are filled with interesting stories, interesting ideas like we're social primates. We're going to get a lot out of that. But the message is that what we have to do is to violate our intuitions. And I think this is so fundamental, and I think it doesn't get talked about enough. It really challenges our rational approach to improving our own well-being and to getting to eudaimonia. If we have all these incorrect theories, again, incorrect intuitions about the sorts of things that we need to do to be happy, that means we could be rationally following what our intuitions tell us, but actively moving against our what would be best for us in terms of our well-being,

which is so striking. And that's why I find the science so important. It's because it doesn't totally cause you to update your intuitions. You know, I'm not immediately a social person who's talking to the barista all the time, but I can kind of put some work in to overcome those. And it does make your life better if you can fight some of these bad intuitions. Okay. So we're having this conversation in the first week in April, 2020, in a context where for, I would say at least a decade, maybe a decade and a half, we've witnessed a variety of social and technological changes, which again have made people in some ways less isolated, but in a face-to-face sense, more isolated. So the introduction of the smartphone is probably the biggest one. You go into public and people tend to close down any opportunity for spontaneous interaction with strangers

because they're virtually always looking at their phones whenever they get a chance. And I guess on some level, they're socializing with somebody else often by doing that, but it's not face-to-face. And it's a very different experience for social primates. And I don't think I'm the only person to feel that we've all been inducted into a psychological experiment to which more or less no one has really consented. And we're just rolling the dice with human psychology and seeing what comes of all this. And now this is, in the context of this conversation, especially ramified by the COVID-19 pandemic, where you have

people truly isolated for reasons of epidemiology and isolated under conditions of significant stress, if not health stress, then economic stress. So I guess let's take both of those pieces. How do you see the trade-off between some of the time. And then let's jump to the current circumstance of the pandemic. Yeah, I mean, I worry a lot about what technology is doing to our social connection. You know, if you get back to that barista in the coffee shop scenario, you know, one of the reasons I don't talk to the barista is, you know, I'm not totally sure it'll be that fun. But also, I don't even notice the barista in the coffee shop scenario, you know, one of the reasons I don't talk to the barista is, you know, I'm not totally sure it'll be that fun. But also, I don't even notice the barista, right? Because I'm staring down at my phone and checking my email or scrolling through my Instagram feed or something. And most of us are doing that. And I think you're right. We've put

these devices in the pockets of, you know, 6 billion people around the planet, and we don't really know their cost. There's now some good data coming out about the specific ways that cell phones in general and technology in general might be affecting our social relationships. And they're all striking and really scary. So Liz Dunn, who's a professor at the University of British Columbia, has been doing some of this work. And she just does these really simple experiments where she has, say, subjects sit together in a waiting room, either with their cell phones or without their cell phones. And they're instructed to just have the cell phone out. So they're not even necessarily using the cell phone. It's just basically present. And what she finds is that the

presence of a cell phone ends up decreasing the smiling between those subjects who are in the waiting room by about 30 percent, like just having it out. And we see the same thing when we look at all kinds of different social activities. Right. She's another study where she has families going around, like, say, like a science museum together. And she either lets the parents have their cell phones with them or not. And what she finds is way less enjoyment on the part of the parents in the science museum when they have their cell phones out with their kids, way less feeling like they bonded with their kids. But also the kids feel that way, too, right? The kids are feeling less bonded with the parents too. And again, this is just the mere presence of our cell phone. And I think, you know, we often think, you know, when we talk about technology, there's always like,

oh, social media and Facebook, you know, they're so evil and they destroy connection. Like for me, just as a basic scientist, I actually worry more just about what our attentional resources are doing when we're around cell phones, right? Because in some ways, like our brain isn't stupid. Our brain knows what's on the other side of these devices. And there's some pretty good, interesting, you know, panic inducing, like exciting stuff on the other side of these things. And now those devices are competing with the basic social interactions we have. Like, you know, yeah, I could have a conversation with my husband over the dinner table. But if I have my phone there, I know that on the other side of that phone

is, you know, every political discussion that's happened, you know, every cat video in the universe. Liz Dunn, I interviewed her for an upcoming season two episode of my podcast, and she had this wonderful analogy. She said, you know, when you go to a dinner with your husband, imagine instead of bringing your phone, you brought this big wheelbarrow. And in the wheelbarrow is like printout of every book that's ever been written, printouts of every one of your emails since 1992, big stacks of photo albums of all your family pictures, DVD of every cat video in the universe, every museum archive of every print that's ever been made in every art gallery all over the world. You know, porn like, you know, big DVD pile of porn. He's like, if you were sitting next to that wheelbarrow during dinner, you'd be distracted. Like you wouldn't want to talk to your husband because you'd want to like flip through the DVDs and see what cat videos were there. Right. And what she says is like your brain knows that on the other end of that device is all that

stuff. That wheelbarrow is there. And even if you're paying attention to your conversation with your husband at dinner, there's a part of your mind that's distracted, that you have to keep reeling back from that big wheelbarrow of cat videos. And we've put that distraction, as I said, in six billion pockets around the world. And we don't know what it's doing to our attentional resources. We don't know what it's doing to our social resources. All we know is that it's a huge opportunity cost. We haven't been able to measure that cost yet, but I think it's huge for our social relationships. And also, given what we know about meditation and mind wandering, I think it's huge for our well-being too. We're kind of constantly pulling our attention back from these devices in a way that didn't exist 10 years ago. We just didn't

have that attentional cost 10 years ago. And so I find it really scary, but not for the reasons people typically think of. I just think there's just an attention suck that exists now that never existed before in human history. And we have no idea what it's doing to our minds and our relationships. Okay, actually, let's linger here before we get to the pandemic circumstance.

There's another variable here, which is related to what technology is doing to us and how we're essentially addicted to smartphones in particular. And that's our relationship to time and the sense that we have to use it wisely, that basically everything is an opportunity cost, that we're constantly triaging with respect to what we could be paying attention to. And for many of us, certainly anyone who's a kind of knowledge worker, there really is no boundary between the moments where you could profitably get things done and any other

moment in life, wherever you happen to be. If I'm Laurie Santos in a Starbucks in line, there are many reasons not to look at the barista, but one is you can catch up on the emails that you know you're going to have to answer at some point, and if you answer a few now, that's a few fewer you have to answer later in the day when you get home. There's just this fundamental erosion of the boundary between the imperative of getting stuff done and all of these other moments in life. And it creates a background level of stress for many of us. And there's something about our relationship to time that gets changed there. I don't know if you have any thoughts on

that. Yeah, I think that's really important. You know, so one of the other things we know is super important for well-being is our perception of time. There's some lovely work coming out of Ashley Willen's lab at Harvard Business School focused on this concept of time affluence, which is the subjective feeling that you have a lot of free time. The opposite is time famine, where you feel kind of famished for time, hungry for time. And Ashley's work has been showing that physiologically, time famine works a lot like hunger famine, where you're kind of triaging, it sort of pumps up your stress hormones and so on. Ashley's also shown that, so what's odd about what we, what's odd about our sense of time right now is that we assume we have less free time. But actually,

if you look at people's calendars, they actually have more free time all told, which is kind of surprising. We feel like we're so time famished right now. The problem is that our time right now is broken up into what she's called time confetti. So we have free time, but it's in these like tiny snippets. And I think that the form of those tiny snippets has the features of exactly what you're saying, which is that it's hard to use those in a way that promotes our well-being. You know, it's hard to like, you know, have a deep conversation with our spouse when we have like five minutes here and there.

Like it's like, well, let me just get a few emails off the cuff, you know, if I have this little bit of free time. And so even when we have these moments of free time confetti, we end up using them kind of for work stuff or for stuff that's really fast, right? Sometimes when I'm doing kind of exactly what you're saying, I'm in line. I could get a few emails down, but that's anxiety provoking. I'll just do a quick panic scroll through my social media feed or look up that news article and so on. And so we end up, because the time is so cut up and in these tiny bits, we end up using it for what feels like the easiest thing, right? Things that have a little bit of a startup cost or things that, you know, take a little bit of time to get

going, we tend not to prioritize. And that means we're not prioritizing a lot of deep social connection with people because, you know, that has this kind of startup cost and takes a little time. It often means we're not even prioritizing like good leisure either. You know, the time confetti means we don't want to, you know, learn a new instrument or learn a new language or even, you know, dive into like a deep novel, you know, all those existential novels you were talking about before. Like I'm not, you know, picking up a good like, you know, search novel because it feels too much. Like I'm just going to scroll through the New York Times or I'm just going to like pick up my Twitter feed. Like we kind of only have time for, you know, like a few characters because the time

is so broken up. And so I think this time confetti has lots of consequences for our happiness. And I think you're right that the fact that these technologies are breaking up our time in these ways is having a negative effect. But the technologies also have a negative effect on time in a completely different way, which is that unlike the other important things in our life, be it, you know, social relationships or sleep, those things don't nag us as much as our devices do. Right. You know, my husband doesn't have a notification ding that comes up, you know, in my window when I'm checking my email too long. You know, but my email does when I'm talking to my husband. Right. Right. And so I think, you know, the fact of the matter is, is that most parts of our technology, most apps and these things, you know, get get revenue and get money from having eyeballs on them. And so, you know, your iPhone wants to kind of remind you to be using your iPhone and all the apps on your iPhone want to be reminding you to use those apps.

And that means that they've kind of start bugging you in a way that the other important things in life don't. And it's really hard to ignore those things, you know, because they're built on the latest neuroscience of what grabs your attention, of what kind of gives you a little dopamine hit, so you feel like it'll be rewarding to jump on that phone. And real life doesn't do that. You know, real life doesn't have teams of designers trying to like mess with our attention and mess with our dopamine. And that's problematic because it means that the technology kind of grabs our attention easier. And when you add to that the normal time confetti that all of us have, where we're kind of just going to go with the easy thing, it's kind of a recipe for not prioritizing the right stuff in our lives. Right. Yeah, the technology has changed the way we initiate social contact, even with people who are our closest friends. It used to be that you would just pick

up the phone and call someone, and that wasn't a surprising intrusion into their solitude, which it is now. I mean, I feel like a cold call, even from someone I'm close to, with a few exceptions. My wife is an exception, and there's a couple of other people in my life who I still expect a call from. But virtually every other call, the default now is to set it up by email or by text. And just a cold call is almost analogous to 20 years ago, how it would have felt if someone just showed up at your house unannounced and rang the doorbell. And, you know, I don't know if you have noticed this in your life, but there's been a migration from email to text now. And, you know, it's very short form, punctate communication. I mean, now, you know, text rather often is a surrogate for maintaining the relationship in the old way, which is actually seeing or speaking with

each other. Yeah. And we know that, I mean, obviously it means those are shorter communications, right? Because you're not kind of having long lingering conversations, but it's also missing all the stuff that we're built as primates to pay attention to, right? You don't get the right emotion through text as you do through changes to my vocal intonation or subtle changes to my facial expression. We haven't as a species gotten good at using text to do that stuff yet. Long text, right? You know, if you read, you know, again, a fantastic novel, you can see pathos in there, you can see the emotion, but you don't really get that, you know, in a short text, you know, about dinner and when dinner is ready kind of thing. And so I think we're, we're, we don't realize what we're missing out on in those interactions. And I think, you know, again, it's just crazy that we've had this experiment on human psychology and put, you know, basically changed around 6 billion social relationships without people's permission and not knowing really how it's going to have long-term effects. But I think we're starting to see the long-term

effects. I mean, this is the mental health crisis that we've been seeing exploding in all generations, but particularly in young people who've, for the most part, only ever known these forms of communication. You know, this is the explosion of loneliness that we've seen. You know, loneliness has been increasing by double-digit numbers in the last decade. And, you know, in some ways it's ironic because these technologies were supposed to be linking us up, but in practice they could be failing to allow us to connect in the ways that our primate minds are used to connecting. And that can have all kinds of consequences we don't realize. So how have you been thinking about the COVID-19 experience we're all having in really, for most of us, in genuine isolation, albeit in many cases with our families. And many of us are

experiencing a silver lining there where we're having more enforced quality time with our families. But it is a, generally speaking, a surreal upheaval in, it's a psychological experiment of a different order now, and we've all been inducted into it. Yeah, I think it's, I mean, I mean, first of all, it's just surreal and crazy. You know, this is what it must have felt like to live through other major natural disasters for our species. You know, I feel like we're dinosaurs watching the meteor hit in some ways. But I mean, I think the biggest upheaval, as you said, is in our social relationships and our social lives. And I think, you know, if you look at what happens

when people are going through a tough, stressful time, what our species does is we try to hook up with other people. Like we try to hang out with our friends. You know, we go to our mom's house and get a hug if that's possible. Like we just try to connect as much as we possibly can. And in terms of our physical health, that's impossible right now. Like to flatten the curve, we just can't do that. There's an additional feature that's bad for social relationships too, which is that if you think about what the threat is in the COVID-19 crisis, it's other people. You know, it's that guy that touched my doorknob before I walked out of my house. You know, it's the person who's panic buying the toilet paper that I need. Like in addition to not being able to connect with people,

which is our natural response during a crisis, other people are part of the crisis. You know, they're kind of making the crisis worse. And I think those two things together are making this an incredibly challenging time, is making an otherwise incredibly challenging time even more challenging. The good news, though, is I think this is the time when we can start to harness some of those technologies for social connection in even better ways. And what I mean by that is that it's not just a matter of like, hey, go on Zoom and, you know, talk to some friend over Zoom. It's trying to find ways to use these technologies to get the informal social connections that we're

missing out on so much. You know, it's, you know, many of us, as you said, you know, some people are living in isolation. And I think for them, you know, it's a completely different matter. But, you know, some of us have family members and so on for them, you know, it's a completely different matter. But, you know, some of us have family members and so on. But, you know, we're missing the chat with our coworkers at the water cooler. You know, we're missing that quick conversation with the barista at the coffee shop or just the smiles that we give to people when we walk down the street. You know, those have gone away a little bit over time, but they're still there. And I think a lot of us are facing the need, the craving that we're getting from not having that stuff. are facing the need, the craving that we're getting from not having that stuff. There's a new really cool paper by Rebecca Sachs, who's a neuroscientist at MIT, who'd actually started

this work a long time ago, but it just got published during COVID, showing that if you put people in social isolation, the areas of their brain that would normally show craving for things like food and so on, start craving social connection. So basically the kind of hunger craving that we get for, say, sugary foods when we stop eating those. So basically the kind of hunger craving that we get for, say, sugary foods when we stop eating those, that's the kind of thing that we get for social connection after a really short period of social isolation. And so I think a lot of us are going to be going through that right now. But again, the good news is that there are these mechanisms of connecting with other people. I think we just have to use them to replicate the informal social

connections, too. Like those are the ones we kind of need. Like so for example, I made a Zoom meeting to hang out with a friend of mine who's in New York while I was just chopping vegetables, you know, for dinner. And I was like, hey, you know, just like be there while I'm chopping vegetables. And her, you know, face was on the screen and I'm chopping vegetables and we're chatting. But in that you have a couple of things. I can see her facial expressions. You know, she can hear me laughing. We can hear each other's intonation in our voices. I can see her in real time. It's not face to face, but it's pretty good for what our primate beings are sucking up, or at least it's much better than scrolling an Instagram feed or looking at a text thread. We just have to kind of build that in. But the problem, you know, as we talked about is, right, we have to get over that thing that we have kind of built in through these technologies of like, I got to call somebody and that feels awkward. And it's kind of the startup cost. But I think, you know, remarkably, our norms change really fast. I mean, even just for me personally, it felt, you know,

those first Zoom calls are like, we're going to play trivia over Zoom, friends, you know, felt a little like, oh, this is kind of weird. But, you know, within three weeks of doing it, that's just kind of how we connect now. Like it becomes normal surprisingly quickly to use these technologies in these informal social ways. I want to recall something you just said about being other oriented and the payoffs of that. I mean, this is a very Buddhist concept. I mean, this is a very Buddhist concept. If you want to be happier, help somebody else, essentially the algorithm, or even just intend to help somebody else, think positively about somebody else's well-being, and you'll find you're gladdening your own mind. How do you think about that and the larger framework in which people pursue that, so we can think about ethics and having some kind of actual conscious conception of the type of person one wants to be, the kinds

of virtues one wants to actually live out in one's life. This is where so-called self-sacrifice becomes the wiser form of selfishness. If you really just want to be happy, if that's your goal, one fairly wide doorway into that is to be very rigorous about using your energy in a consciously pro-social way to improve the lives of others. So what do we know about all of that? Yeah, well, what we know is, I mean, the science suggests that, you know, as usual, the Buddhists were right. You know, all these ancient traditions wound up being confirmed by modern social science and neuroscience. But yeah, I mean, the happiest folks tend to be, on average, the folks that give more to charity, even equated for income. The happiest folks tend to be the ones that, on average, volunteer more of their time and are just kind of, you know, as you said, kind of ethically oriented to kind of thinking about other people first. But I think this is another spot where our intuitions get it all wrong. You know, if you look at, you know, any like self-help magazine or any article these days, especially

during COVID-19, it's all about self-help, you know, self-help, you know, self-care, treat yourself. You know, this is Parks and Rec slogan that we need to be treating ourselves. I think we think that when push comes to shove, the way to get out of a stressful situation is to become more inward oriented, like focus on what we ourselves think we need hedonistically or in terms of our, you know, like meaning and life and leisure and stuff like that. And the science suggests that that, again, is an intuition that's just incredibly wrong. You know, there's some work by Liz Dunn and her colleagues that shows that spending money on yourself actually makes you less happy than spending money on other people. You know, she does these lovely studies where she

just walks up to somebody on a street and hands them money and tells the subjects how to spend it. And so some half of the subjects are told, spend the money on other people by the end of the day. And some of them are told, spend the money on yourself by the end of the day. And what she finds is that the people who spend money on other people at the end of the day and even later on, like at the end of the week, are happier, self-reported, are happier than those who spent the money on themselves. And I think that, you know, and she also, like Nick Epley does work showing that that's not people's intuitions. You know, she asks a different group of subjects, which of these conditions would make you happier? And the subjects are in pretty strong agreement that they want the money for themselves. That's the kind of thing that would make them happier. And so, you know, I think it's one of

these things that like ethically and in terms of our religious commitments, those of us who are religious, like people kind of get that you're supposed to do nice stuff for others. But often people think about that in a like, well, that's to be a good person. It doesn't necessarily make me in the moment happier to do something nice for somebody else. You know, it's kind of a sacrifice. Right. But in practice, what the science suggests is that that's wrong.

Like if I'm having a really bad day at work, I shouldn't go off and buy myself a manicure. I should just like get a gift card to give one of my coworkers a manicure. And that intuition feels just wrong to me. You know, maybe it's the right thing to do or a noble thing to do or, you know, a very ethical thing to do. Like philosophers would be really proud of me. But I don't think that like Laurie's own dopamine system is going to respond better to gifting that manicure than getting it myself. But that's actually what the data suggest. Yeah, this is where mindfulness can be very helpful because you can notice the hedonic bump when you do that sort of thing, and it can become

more and more vivid. And also you can notice the ways in which giving what in real terms is even more, I mean, just like writing a check to an organization. There are ways to do that where you get very little hedonic reinforcement, and there are ways to do that where you get much more. And it's interesting, the variables there, but it'd be great if there were a truly linear connection between doing good things in the world and moment-to-moment gratification. But there's definitely a connection, but it's just, it requires some intelligent steering of your own attention to extract the reward that is there to be extracted. This circumstance of being in economic lockdown offers some unique opportunities to experience this. So, you know, I've noticed that anyone who is fairly well off in this situation, who's,

fairly well off in this situation, who hasn't experienced an implosion economically, and who can continue working. Really, the low-hanging fruit here, ethically, is to continue to support the people in one's life who you know are just being cratered by this change in the economy. So take somebody in a service role. The first person to come to mind for me was the woman who cuts my hair. I get a haircut, you know, I don't know, once every six weeks or so. And I had to know that her business was more or less going to zero under these conditions. So very early on, I had the thought, well, I'll just buy imaginary haircuts. There's no reason why, you know, she should suffer the fact that I can't physically get those haircuts. And just doing that and a few things like that, I mean, it wasn't a list of a hundred

people like that in my life, but taking care of those people when I was truly sacrificing nothing to do it, that's some of the most pleasant experience I've had all month, just being able to do that. And I would just argue it's a good thing to do. It's good for you, and it's good for the world. Yeah, totally. I mean, I want to pick up on two points here. One is just, I think you've kind of completely hit the nail on the head right there. I think this is, COVID-19 is a time where we really feel like we don't have that agency. Right. I mean, the maximally frustrating thing is, do you want to help? Just stay home and don't do anything. Like, just stay home. Like, don't do anything. And, you know, humans don't like that.

We like to be causally effective in the world. And I think one way to be causally effective is just to be helping financially. If, again, you're in the privileged position to do that, all the people you would have normally helped financially anyway. And in some ways, as you said, there's no cost to it. Like that money was already spent. And I think that's an important framing for this time is that many of us are getting financial windfalls that we're not paying attention to. I'm not spending four bucks on a latte every morning, which was my normal practice. You know, some of us are not paying, you know, the subway fare or the gas fare for our commutes. These are all tiny windfalls that lots of us are getting in so many domains during COVID-19, but we can pay those windfalls back to the people that need it right now. And even folks who are in

not great financial positions, because probably a lot of your listeners aren't in the same privileged position that you are, you know, to know that they still have a job. Some of them, you know, are working less hours or maybe even have lost their jobs and so on. Even those folks have a different windfall. They have a temporal windfall. You know, they have time that they might not have had before. And again, the best use of time in terms of your well-being is time spent on other people. You know, so you can be making those calls to advocate for, say, more PPE for health care workers. You know, so you can be making those calls to advocate for, say, more PPE for health care workers. You know, you can make a call to an elderly neighbor to

kind of check on how they are. And those kinds of ways of spending our money and our time during this crisis can have a huge impact on our well-being personally. But then also they're just like good for the world because we're like doing good stuff to protect the economy and protect the vulnerable folks during this crisis. But I also want to pick up on a second thing, which is this idea, you know, you mentioned that to notice the effect that your good actions have on your own psyche, you kind of have to be a little bit mindful. And I think this is really powerful. This is something that I think neuroscience is just beginning to understand, which is how we can use mindfulness to hack these bad intuitions

that we have about stuff. You know, throughout this conversation, I've been saying, you know, we should be more social, but we don't realize that, and therefore we don't do it. We should be nicer to other people, be more focused on other people, but we don't notice it, so we don't realize we should do it. Mindfulness, the research is starting to suggest, is one way to hack those things so that you can start to notice, hang on, when I actually do this, it feels nice. And that while it doesn't immediately change your intuitions, it can kind of change your reinforcement structure such that you start to realize what these things really look like. And this comes from some lovely work coming out of Hedy Kober's lab. She's a neuroscientist

at Yale who uses mindfulness techniques to do all kinds of different therapeutic things, including working with addicts on their craving and so on. And it's a powerful technique because even in domains like an addict who has craving for, say, nicotine or heroin or something like that, the act of noticing what it's like afterwards can update these circuits that are getting the wanting wrong. One of the worst things about the mind, this was like one of the most shocking things I ever read in my early psychology training, was that there's this interesting disconnect

in the brain between circuits that are involved in wanting and sort of craving and circuits that are involved in liking. And so the circuit that tells your body, hey, go out and crave this thing, go get it no matter what cost, work, work, work really hard to get it. That's completely different from the circuit that's actually going to like the thing once you get it. And you can see these crazy dissociations where, like in the case of addiction,

where we can have incredible craving for something, you know, work really hard to get it, you know, take the heroin addict who's addicted to heroin. But then when you finally get that reward, you don't actually like it that much. It's actually even that rewarding you know the heroin to an addicted heroin addict is just bringing you to baseline it's not even that good anymore yeah and this this i feel like you know is true in addictions but it's so true in so many aspects of my life before i kind of started practicing meditation and mindfulness where it's like there's all these things that my body wants me to go after all the time that i think is going to be really great because my craving is super high for it. But then when I get it, I'm kind of like, if you actually notice, you're like, well, that wasn't that good. Like that kind of sucked or like that didn't make me

feel what I thought it was going to make me feel. And then there's stuff like we're talking about, about doing nice things for others, where at least for me, I don't necessarily have the craving for it. You know, as I said, on a bad day, I'm not thinking, let me give a gift card, you know, for the manicure to my coworker. I'm thinking, let me get the manicure myself. But then actually, if you're mindful and you pay attention afterwards, you could notice, even though the craving, the wanting wasn't that high, the liking is pretty good and it can cause you to start shifting your behaviors. And so Hedy's starting to do some real work on the actual neuroscience of this. Like, what is it about this act of mindfully noticing that can then feed back on your behaviors? So you're kind of updating what

desires you really do want to have over time. Yeah, yeah, that's fascinating. Mindfulness also can show you that desire doesn't have to be gratified to disappear, right? If you just become interested in desire itself as an object of consciousness, right? If you just become interested in desire itself as an object of consciousness, right, and you just become committed to witnessing it arise and persist for a time and then pass away, it will in fact pass away. And in many cases, I mean, obviously you can resurrect it again by focusing on the wanted object yet again, but you can sensitize yourself to this full time course of desires arising and subsiding and realize that there's nothing you have to do about it. It's almost like the abandoned shopping cart of the mind. We've all had this experience that you

go to Zappos or whatever and you pick out a pair of shoes, but then you think better of it and then those shoes follow you around for the rest of your life online. But you can abandon the shopping cart, and it really can just disappear. Then one wonders, okay, well, then what is the significance of gratifying any specific desire? And then on the other side, as you say, you can become more mindful of what it's like to gratify a desire and want something. If you'd like to continue listening to this podcast, you'll need to subscribe at SamHarris.org. You'll get access to all full-length episodes of the Making Sense podcast and to other subscriber-only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad-free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now at SamHarris.org.