SOLVED with Mark Manson - Sex, Drugs, and Money Might Actually Make You Happier (ft. Sonja Lyubomirsky)

Episode Date: January 24, 2024

Imagine if you could sit down with one of the world’s leading happiness researchers and ask her, one by one, what actually makes people happier and what doesn’t? Well, that’s basically what I did. In this episode, Sonja and I get deep into the subject of happiness. One by one, we conclude which of life’s simple and not-so-simple pleasures are underrated or overrated. Some of the answers will definitely surprise you. Do yourself a favor—watch, like, and share the happiness. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey guys, before we get into it, if you listen to the show, you probably consume a lot of personal growth content. The books, the podcasts, YouTube videos, all of it. And you've probably noticed the gap between knowing what to do and then actually going out and doing it. You've got the insights, but what you don't have is something that connects them to your actual life. That's why I built purpose. It's a personal development AI that learns you, your patterns, your blind spots, all the stuff that you keep circling back to over and over again. Instead of handing you another framework, it gives you specific personalized direction.

So check it out. You can try it for free for seven days. Go to purpose.app. That is purpose.com. You are one of the leading researchers on happiness. You've been studying happiness for decades now. So for the majority of this podcast, what I'd actually like to do is play a game. The game's called overrated, underrated.

And what I have is a stack of cards here. And on each card is something in life. And you're going to tell me, is it overrated as it relates to happy? or is it underrated? And it's overrated in the sense of a random person on the street likely thinks it's too important or not important enough. I like this game. Yeah.

Already. I thought you would. I thought you would. The podcast that's saving the world, one fewer fuck at a time. It's the subtle art of not giving a fuck podcast with your host, Mark Manson. Before we start, I think it might be useful to get a definition of happiness. And is your definition of happiness different than a random person on the street would define it? So I define happiness the way that happiness scientists define happiness,

which is that happiness has two components. The first component is basically the experience of positive emotions. So people are happy frequently or fairly frequently experience joy, tranquility, pride, affection, curiosity. Of course, happy people experience negative emotions because they're also adaptive. When you see injustice in the world, you need to be angry so you can do something about it and anxiety is adaptive and so is sadness. But when negative emotions are chronic or intense, then they become dysfunctional. Then they're just suffering. So one important part of happiness is the fairly frequent experience of positive emotions, less frequent experience of negative emotions.

And then the second component is basically having a sense that your life is good, that you're satisfied with your life, that you're progressing towards your life goals in a reasonable, a reasonable pace. So I like to think about these two components of happiness as being happy in your life and being happy with your life. So both are important. Okay. Cool. So first one is a classic, which is money, overrated or underrated, as it relates to happiness. Okay. It's a complicated one. I know. See, the thing about scientists that say, well, it depends. It depends. Yeah. The obvious answer is it's overrated, but I want to qualify that by saying that absolutely money matters to happiness. People who have more money are happier. And that is true at every level.

certainly not surprising that when money keeps you from being poor, then it really matters, but it even matters at the highest levels, although we don't have as much data at the very highest levels. And why is that? You know, some obvious reasons. If you have money, you're able to spend time with people that you like, doing things you like. It buffers you from adversity and, you know, gives you luxuries and conveniences. There's lots of caveats. Another really important caveat is that money is related to happiness, but the pursuit of money is related to unhappiness. So having money is great, but being materialistic, being someone who really cares about money, not great. And that's true for a lot of things. It's like wealth, power, beauty, fame.

Those are those goals that are called extrinsic goals. And then we kind of know, at least hopefully we know our grandparents tell us that they don't make us, they don't make us happy. It turns out people who are beautiful and have power and money are happier. But if you pursue beauty, you pursue, you really care so much about beauty, power, money, then you're probably less happy than the average person. Why do you think that is? So the kind of person who cares about money, like the materialistic person, or you might think like a narcissist, they tend to be less happy.

But if you have it, the other kind of cliche and research supports this is that money makes you happy when you spend it on the right things. So if you spend money on philanthropy, on your family, on sort of pursuing your passion, great. But if you're spending money on, again, like buying brands. Impressing people. Yeah, impressing people, right? I'm sure you, or many of your listeners know about research on possessions versus experiences, right?

That makes us happier if you spend our money on experiences, like dinner with friends or travel than possessions, like something that you put in your closet or in your shelf. But even that could, you know, could make you happy, right? So if you have you, if you're an art collector and you love art or you love wine, you could really enjoy those things, you know. and you could share it with your friends and family. So it's nuanced. Interesting.

So coming back to this idea of like being the type of person, as I understand it, the recent research on money and happiness finds that money increases happiness for most people, but the people it levels off for are the people who are already unhappy. And you've read the very, very latest research which showed that. Well, it's ironic because it's like if you're happy without money, then you're going to be happier with money, but if you're not happy without money, then it's not going to help Eddie. It's probably true for everything, right? Actually, it reminds me of this Dear Abby column from a long time ago where someone wrote in

and this woman says, you know, oh, I hate my job and my boss is terrible. And then, you know, I hated my previous job and, you know, all the jobs that she's ever had. And Abby says, like, I think the problem is not the job. The problem is you. So it's the only thing all of your jobs having come. Exactly. The common denominator or your relationships. Totally, totally.

All right. Next one. Marriage. Marriage. Okay. Wow. marriage. Overrated or under? Ooh, that's a hard one. I feel like people are pretty like pretty accurate. You could say properly. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. I'm like pretty accurate because

I would, I'd rather than you'd not say marriage, but relationships. Okay, let's say relationships. Yeah, romantic relationships. Yeah, romantic relationships are really important to happiness, but I, against so many caveats, you don't have to have romantic relationship. It's really relationships. So there are people who are very happy who don't have romantic relationships. Yes. But they have really wonderful friends and maybe they have kids or they have family members they're very close to. So I don't want to say like, oh, it has to be romantic. Sure.

But on the other hand, I think nine out of ten people or more in the world have romantic relationships and they matter to them very much. So romantic relationships, yeah, if anything, I would say, are even underrated because they are so important to happiness. Is there any research, as far as you know, that looks at the quality of the romantic relationship? Because I imagine a bad relationship makes you. Absolutely. Right. So when we say relationships are the source of our greatest joys and the greatest suffering. Right. So we're like, you know, that SART quote, hell is other people. Exactly.

L'Enfer, it's other people. So yeah, so other people are both the source of our greatest joys and our greatest sorrows. And so yes, of course. And so there's tons of research. It's good quality, high quality romantic relationships, committed relationships that, that matter. But I guess, how do I say this? Sort of all things being equal, they're going to be more positives than negatives. I hope for most people. Well, and I think one of the thing you talk about in your books is that the actual events of

marriage and divorce slash breakup are maybe overrated. Like, they're very temporary. Like there's a high, a temporary high or temporary low, but we adapt pretty quickly back to baseline. Exactly. So hedonic adaptation is very powerful, this idea that, right, human beings adapt or get accustomed to almost any change in our lives, especially positive changes. And so, yeah, so whenever you talk about specific events, people are like, oh, I want to have that wedding. I want to get married or win the lottery or even, or negative events too. It's, yeah, we adapt to that one point in time event, but events have consequences, right? So for example, diagnosis of illness is an event. people do adapt to the diagnosis, but then that can have many consequences, right? That can affect your life in many ways. So marriage, it's like a diagnosis.

You're diagnosed with marriage. Yeah, you're diagnosed with marriage. I've never thought of it that way. You're married. Getting married has so many consequences. I remember when I, you know, fell in love with my husband and I was talking to a friend who had just gotten married and he said, this is the beginning of so many wonderful things, right?

So it's like it's not just getting married. Yeah. It's all those things that it leads to. Yeah. Next one. Occupation. Hmm. Maybe even underrated.

Underrated. Interesting. I mean, I calculated it once. How many hours of the average person's life? Let's just say in the U.S., we spend working. And it's incredible number. Yeah. If you don't like your work, right?

It seems consequential. And it's, you also, occasionally you see those surveys of, like, most miserable professions, you know? And it's always lawyers, police officers. doctors, there has to be some sort of correlation, I imagine. Yeah, no, you spend so many hours working. And if it's something, you know, that's not your passion, it's something that you don't, if you think it doesn't matter to the world, because that, that, even if you don't love doing it, if you think it, you're helping people, you're making the world a better place,

that's really important. It's interesting to think about that. In the past, I had a couple friends who were cops. And I remember talking to them about it. And they said the problem with being a police officer is, like, it does feel meaningful and impactful, but he said that you are literally just being exposed to the worst aspects of humanity day after day after day. And I could see how that could drain somebody. Absolutely. And what we pay our attention to really matter. So one of my favorite quotes of all time is from William James.

And he said, experience is what I agree to attend to. So basically, if I'm attending to it, it matters. It is affecting my happiness. Sure. And if I'm not attested. to it. It's like as though it's almost not happening. And I like the word agree because there's like this subtle acknowledgement of you are choosing what to attend to or what to pay attention to in each moment. I'm a big William James fan. Oh, great. This is a good one.

Age. Age, okay. Overrated, underrated. Because there's the famous U curve with how good. Oh, yeah, yeah. Oh, don't give me a start on that. I'm not a fan of that. Yeah, yeah, not a fan of that.

Okay. Well, because most of that work is controlling for like everything. And they're trying to figure out, economists try to figure out, what is the pure effect, like a pure age? I don't even know what pure age means because age comes with things. Sure.

Okay, so let's get back to overrated. So I would say overrated, but there's some caveats. So for example, most of us, well, most of the media, social media, especially, kind of like adore youth. Turns out the least happy people are age 14 to 28. And you think, oh, great,

I want to be 20. again. No, you don't want to be 28 again or 20 again for lots of obvious reasons, right? Like, so when you're young, you don't have your identity set yet. Maybe you don't haven't found your passion. You haven't had, you haven't found your person yet. And so people get happier as they age. And the happiest, if you look at raw data, a lot of surveys show the happiest are pretty old. There was one study that 67 was kind of the 71. Yeah. And then for, again, lots of obvious reasons, happiness drops off. Yeah. When you're, you know, getting much older than that. Which would make sense because that's when you, the physical health starts to

deteriorate. And then, you know, people are, people die. You know, your friends and family. So, yeah, so we, we sort of think that younger is better. And we, and really, even I, like, I'm like, oh, I'd like to be 39 again. I remember, so when I turned 30, I posted, uh, basically a survey to, to, to my blog followers at the time. This was 2014. So you're 39. I'm, I'm 309. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I'm a fan. I'm a fan. I'm a fan. I'm a fan. of 39. So I asked all my blog followers, you know, if you're over 40, what advice would you give to a 30 year old? Or what advice would you give to somebody entering their 30s? I got hundreds and hundreds of responses. And one of the things that struck me was that everybody from 40 into 50, 60, 70, every single person said, don't be afraid of aging. It gets better.

Like, don't listen to anybody who claims about midlife crisis or anything like that. Every single person was like, 40 was better than 30, 50 was better than 40. I can see why. Like you said, you really establish your life. You establish your identity. You understand what sort of people you want to be around, how to relate to those people. You're confident in yourself. It does make sense. I totally agree.

And so Laura Carstesson, who's a professor at Stanford, was one of my professors when I was there in a PhD program a long time ago, has a theory called socio-emotional-selectivity theory. Nice. Socio-emotional-selectivity theory. Very catchy. Yeah. Right.

But basically, I guess the way I would summarize it is that people become emotionally wiser as they get older. So when you're older, you kind of know what people in your life make you happy and you're more than to spend time with people in your life. Intuitively, that makes so much sense because when I look back at my 20 year old self, my 20 year old self was still really smart intellectually, but emotionally was a complete idiot. I had no idea what he was doing. And she talks about how it makes sense you take a more real. risks when you're younger. And so because you, you never know that person you might meet could be your new partner or your business

partner. But yeah, I would agree. So, so yeah, the older you are, yeah, kind of the wiser you are.

It just would be nice to, I don't know, still like look like your, I mean, there's just certain things that would be nice to have. Yeah, like still look like you're 39. Or have the,

the energy and the recovery. Yeah, the physical health of a 22 year. So you can run us fast, all that, like that. But apparently, what is it?

Reaction times peaks at age. 19 so it's downhill from there. I'm a big fan of that saying that youth is wasted on the young, which youth and psychedelics are wasted on. Yes. That's the famous Michael Pollan's quote. That's awesome. All right. Next one. We already mentioned this briefly, but friendships. This is something, I guess, anecdotally from my audience. I think people overestimate romantic relationships a little bit, particularly if they don't have one and they underestimate friendships. Yeah. So it's funny because I just today, I have these two really good female friends. we send each other WhatsApp messages.

And I had said, friendship is what makes life worth living, more than even romantic. Sure. And I said, kids too, you know, it's hard to compare. I mean, we'll leave that out. Yeah, exactly. Can't leave that out. And I just got a message for one of them. And she said, oh, you're so right.

Friendship is what makes life worth living. And again, I mean, to me, I guess I would just say connection, feeling loved. You know, my co-author Harry, Reese and I are writing a book called How to Feel Loved. And so this is very much on our minds and sort of feeling loved and by friends. I don't know. Friends is who you can really, I guess, count on in some ways. Yeah. Maybe even more than your kids or your family members or romantic partners.

And also there are your chosen family. I would even say within a long-term romantic relationship, because as you pointed out, the romance, it eventually fizzles and then for the rest of the relationship, it comes and goes in waves. But if there's a solid bedrock of friendship there, like, I actually feel like that's where most of the long-term value probably is, is having that companionship and that closeness with a with a person who's with you every day. Exactly.

And then, but because they're your romantic partner, right, they really are with you every day and you can count on them, which is we didn't really touch on this. But even your closest friends, you know, you don't want to kind of like, quote, bother them with everything. Sure. you, you know, but it's great to have like one person in your life who you can call for everything. And the way I see it is like when the really good thing happens to you and a bad thing happens to you, like who do you call? So there's, you know, theory about love, that there's two kinds

of love, passionate love and companionate love. And the idea that for most couples, the passionate love turns into companionate love. And companionate love is what you're talking about. Yeah. That sense of warmth and trust and like I, you know, this is a person that I admire and I, I want to be with and they're my role model. Yeah. And they support me and I support them. The Madamy Holmes Bike for Brain Health supporting Baycrest returns on May 31st for its fifth anniversary with a new start and finish at the Aga Khan Museum.

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Yeah, yeah. It's, um, yeah, overrated. Oh, yeah, we'll go overrated on romance, underrated on friendship, I think. Right. And both within the committed relationship, but also. You know, romantic love, right, falling in love is this dopamine. It really is, you know, I think scientists have really basically showed it. It's basically cocaine.

Yeah, yeah. Or heroin or whatever. Yeah. It's, you're on drugs. You're, it's the same kind of feeling. Sure. And so that is, yeah, a rush. And it's beautiful.

But that, yeah, that kind of feeling, it just can't last. And I think also similar to maybe cocaine or an opiate, it can cover and mask damaging or painful dynamics. So you can romantically fall in love with somebody who's actually really terrible for you and subtly hurting you or you're hurting them in various social and emotional ways.

But you're so in love, you don't realize it and you're just jumping in head first. Absolutely. Yeah. I think we've all made that mistake at some point. Actually, I was just talking to a friend about this yesterday who was saying, he's like,

you know, I think my problem is is when I fall in love, I want to like accommodate myself to the other person. So if they say like, I want to move to this other city, even if they never want to live there. They're like, and I said,

you know, I think most people do that. Yeah. You're willing to make sacrifices that you're like, I can't believe I was a way to do that. Yeah, why do I do that? Yeah, yeah.

So yeah, it's not, yeah, I don't want to say it's, It sounds like it's not healthy. Sure. But again, like this idea that it stems from, you know, sort of romanticism, you know, and it's actually a pretty new, quote, new concept. This idea that it's this wonderful thing and that we all have a, there's a soulmate out there for us. Yeah.

There's an amazing book by Stephanie Kuntz called Marriage, a History. And that was mind-blowing because she shows that basically through most of human history, romance was diagnosable to bring back the old joke but basically romance was looked at with skepticism it was seen as a sickness it was seen as something to be avoided at all cost

parents used to be very preoccupied and anxious that their 15 year old was going to romantically fall in love with the neighbor next door and do something really stupid and run off somewhere and so it was romance was actually something that was socially guarded against by the community and it wasn't until

the 1800s with a lot of romantic literature and everything that it started to be celebrated. Like most people, I think I read Romeo and Juliet when I was like eighth or ninth grade. And when you're young and naive, you read it as this like incredible love story and like, oh my God, they're so in love. And, you know, there's movies made about it that kind of take the same angle. And in that book, she talked about like, no, Romeo and Juliet, it's a cautionary tale. It's a tragedy. And it's tragedy in a literal sense of look what happens when you let two teenagers get away from their, parents and act on their own devices. They make stupid, horrible decisions because they fell in love. And we can't let them do that. Fascinating. So fascinating. Kindness. Or acts of kindness.

I guess I would say underrated for happiness because we think of we're kind to others, you know, because it's the right thing to do. It's sort of a moral duty, you know, if you're religious, especially. And then we benefit the other person. And of course, we do benefit the other person. But it turns out that we benefit ourselves as much or even more. So my lab has done quite a few studies where we randomized controlled experiments, where we randomly assign some people to do acts of kindness on a regular basis, maybe three X of kindness once a week for a month. And then we follow them across time and then compare them to control groups that don't do that or do other kinds or do acts of kindness for themselves. It's kind of a nice comparison. And we find that people who do acts of kindness for others, they feel happier, they feel more connected.

and we even find genomic effects. So basically, effects on the body. So here's an example of a study we've done. So we asked people to do acts of kindness either for others or for themselves or control groups over the course of a month. And we take their blood before and after. And then we send it to the lab.

And what we have found is that only the group that does acts of kindness for others shows changes in their RNA gene expression that are associated with basically a stronger immune profile. Really? A healthier immune profile. Wow.

That is really cool. We actually, we were shocked when we got that at first. We were hoping that would happen. That's nuts. That's how great kindness is. Not only does it make you happier, be more connected,

but also changes something in the body as well. What's interesting about that, hearing you talk about those experiments, there's a very large movement on social media these days, like hashtag self-care. Like self-care is celebrated,

and I think to a certain extent rightly so, but it's interesting that acts of kindness towards others would outperform acts of kindness towards yourself. Yes, absolutely. And we designed this self-kindness condition, you know, sort of for a reason because we thought, like, well, that's also important. It's also positive and it should make you feel good. And so like, you know, whatever, to take a walk or get a massage or have a piece of chocolate. So these are really just things. They're not all self-care. Some of them are kind of like self-indulgent acts to something that makes you feel good. Well, the line between those two things is very blur. Right, right, exactly.

Exactly. But we're not talking about doing something like really, you know, dysfunctional. And so the idea is that it makes you feel good at the moment. And that's actually very important. So research shows that even like a fleeting positive motion can neutralize negative motions, can make it eat like, so I could, and it can lead to what are called upward spiral. So if I feel good, I have a piece of chocolate, right? I'm not saying we should eat chocolate all the time, but you know, once in a while.

Chocolate solves everything. Exactly right. I'm a huge believer that we should do everything in moderation. Yes. Including moderation. Including moderation. Sometimes we should do things to excess, right? So I have a piece of chocolate and it makes you feel good in the moment.

What happens when you have a positive emotion? I might smile and, you know, you react more positively to me. Or I make a new friend. Someone approaches me. I'm kind. People are more creative when they're positive. So even a short-term fleeting positive emotion can lead you to have a new idea. Yeah.

And so those are all things that have come. consequences. So I don't want to like denigrate positive, you know, fleeting positive emotions. So it's important too. So so, and then of course self-care is really important when you're like depressed. When you're not doing so well, that's really, really critical. But I think what's happening in our studies is that those, that self-kindness is just, it's just flea, it's too fleeting. And so like a week later, a month later, we don't see, we don't see an effect. Yeah. So maybe in the moment, you're, you're feeling good. But a month later, we don't see the effect. But, but kindness to others is not as fleeting. First of all, can the pursuit of happiness turn toxic at some point

and start backfiring? And if so, where is that point exactly? Yes, yes, yes. And again, this is really interesting because we were talking about how like money and beauty are associated with happiness, but the pursuit of those things are associated with unhappy. So it's a little bit similar with happiness, right? So if you pursue happiness too, to kind of deliberately and obsessively especially again everything in moderation sure that's associated with unhappiness so there's research showing that people who who kind of like agree with statements like you know uh how happy a person is says a lot about that person or sort of uh sort of happiness really tells them sort of how worthwhile they are and they really are really kind of obsessed with happiness like that's not good so that's associated

with unhappiness and so that's not surprising and this is kind of a cliche right that you should enjoy the journey to get there and so but if you're too focused on like I want to be happy I want be happy. You're measuring it all the time. Just like you don't want to weigh yourself or look at the stock market every minute, right? You don't want to be asking yourself, am I happy yet? Am I happy yet? That kind of focus on how happy you are can definitely detract from it. Yeah, the act of questioning itself removes you from it, which kind of gets into like a very Buddhist type of attachment thing. But it's interesting because at the beginning of the conversation, you mentioned how every negative emotion is ultimately adaptive. And I think what gets missed a lot is,

is that happiness is also adaptive. It's not adaptive to be happy at a funeral. It's not, you know, you don't want to be happy if a school burns down. Of course. And it's like, it's a time, you can think about as sort of like the time, place, context, dosage.

I'm a big believer in sort of looking at dosage. Like what's the optimal dosage of happiness? Can you be too happy? And it turns out in some, it turns out in relationships, well, at least one study showed. You can't be too happy in relationships. We all like to be with happy partners.

But at work, you can be definitely too happy. So we don't want people who are too happy at work. Partly maybe because you're maybe distracted and you can't be as productive. Also, we don't like people who are too happy because, you know, we think, hey, right? If they're inappropriately happy. Yeah. Yeah, we don't like people who are too happy. We like people who are kind of like happy but not too happy.

So there's sort of an optimal point. Yes, there's just so many nuances there. And just like, as you said, with negative emotions, there's a, there's a dosage. of negative emotions. If you're angry all the time, right? If you're too sad, you know, everyone agrees. That is not functional. But sometimes people who study happiness are interpreted as like,

oh, we want people to be happy all the time. We don't believe in negative. And of course, that's ridiculous. Negative. And there's the contrast, right? How can you be happy if you've never known anything else? Yeah. I think you run into that more in my space,

the self-help industry. You sometimes see promises of that. and even some people kind of pushing that message a little bit, which I've just, I mean, I've made my bones just telling people how unrealistic that is and ridiculous it is. But I wonder, like, so does anyone really believe that you should be sort of positive all the time? I've run into some, you know, in this space. And I do think it is, I think maladaptive is the proper word for it. Because life will inevitably throw you curveballs.

Something's going to get fucked up at some point. And if you are in a mindset of having to always maintain a positive effect, no matter what, you essentially have to become delusional and detach from reality to maintain that when things go wrong. And that's just maladaptive. It's not helpful. It's funny because sometimes it just seems so obvious to me. Maybe it's not obvious to everyone. I mean, positive thinking is very important.

And optimism is very important. It's very powerful. But there's a time in place and dosage. And time, timing, man. So when something bad happens, that's why when you give advice to people right after a negative event, we want to sort of make them feel better and we want to give them kind of a reappraisal, right? Yeah. Oh, but, you know, this you will grow from this experience or and and but if it's too soon, it's it's really offensive. Yeah. Because they want to be validated in their negative emotion and the suffering. You're supposed to be sad at a funeral, you know, you're supposed to be upset when an injustice happens. I have been. surprised over the years how many readers and emails I've gotten where my response is essentially simply been, it's okay to be angry, it's okay to be sad, it's okay to be anxious. Like, this is an

anxious moment in your life. That's fine. I think there's a weird, at least in our culture, there's a weird tendency to judge certain emotions and to judge them as appropriate or inappropriate or as reflections of our character, which I think is just incredibly unhealthy. So interesting, but it was so hard is that balance. So at what point or how long do you stay sad or angry when you have kids and they are, say, very anxious about something,

they're anxious and anxious and you want to validate them. Yeah. But then at some point you're like, okay, you want to also try to help them reframe. Sure. It's very difficult. And I guess maybe that's what therapists are for to try to figure out that balance. We haven't really talked about the baseline happiness or like the set point of happiness.

But there's people probably have different set points for other emotions. You know, some people are just naturally more anxious than others. Some people are naturally more angry than others. And I think the same way we tend to return to the same happiness level naturally. We probably have similar dynamics with other emotions as well. Next one. meditation meditation well it's been depending who you talked to I would say underrated but um you know like the people I know are all like really into meditation yeah out here in Santa Monica

California might be overrated exactly it's so funny because I feel like I just can't meditate I've tried and tried and actually I saw talk somewhere that showed actually meditation has effects that are like bimodal so that for some people it really doesn't do anything yeah for others it does a lot But it also depends how you define meditation, right? It's just about a way of learning how to kind of focus your mind and redirect your attention. Back to that William James quote, experiences what I agree to attend to. So if you teach yourself how to kind of redirect attention, you know, and that's really important. So I would say it's underrated.

And tons and tons of research shows that meditation has benefits and all kinds of domains. So I'm not an expert, but whether in research or personally. I think the important point there is it can help a lot of people, but it doesn't necessarily help everybody. I think it definitely got overhyped maybe 10 years ago, and there was a sense of like everybody needs to be meditating and if it's not helping, you're not doing it right. I think now the research seems to have gotten a little bit more nuance, and they found that even in a small percentage of people, it actually seems to make things worse for them.

I've kind of downgraded it in my toolbox to kind of like a try. it and if it helps keep doing it and if it doesn't try something else. Yeah, I totally agree. Yeah. So it makes me feel better because all these years I'm like, I don't, I don't know. What am I doing wrong? It's not working. And like, is there something wrong with me?

But I get, I would also generalize, kind of broadened what you just said to like almost everything, right? So actually my my first book, The How of Happiness talked about 12 different strategies, 12 different strategies that people can use to be happier. And that's fairly. arbitrary that it's 12 and there's really like 100 and it's really what there was research on at the time and now actually I'm I'm trying to update the book because it's it's all the same advice is just this more research but one of the themes of that book was the theme of fit is that you have to

choose or find what fits your personality what fits your lifestyle what fits your values which fits your strength and weaknesses and it was in response to and back then there weren't as many really there's really there were really no science-based happiness books before that book But the books kind of all said, like, do this. Like, do this. Like, count your blessings. And my advice based on research is that, well, it depends. Right.

So some of you, counting your blessings would be like the perfect practice for you. And then for other people, like I, another example, like I find counting blessings just kind of trite and hokey. Yeah. It doesn't work for me. I mean, gratitude, I think, is a very powerful practice. But we might choose to practice it in a way that works for us. So anyway, the point being,

meditation, whether it's meditation or gratitude or exercise even, positive thinking, that some of these fit some of us better than others and we sort of choose what to focus on. Yeah, excellent. Drugs and alcohol. Well, again, it depends on who your audience is because the right answer is like, well, it's sort of overrated, right? We shouldn't use drugs and alcohol to be happy. But I have a more nuanced response to that.

And by the way, addiction, terrible, terrible, right? Leads to so much suffering. But if you don't have an addictive personality, I think drugs and alcohol can sort of amplify, can kind of be a supplement, can be like a bonus to your life. Just like anything, just like chocolate, right? Just like having a massage or going to Paris, you know. Wait, let me write that. So chocolate and drugs.

Yeah, right. Well, again, everything in moderation. Yeah. that when you think about what makes you happy and also does not lead to unhealthy behavior, is not dysfunctional in moderation, I think that could be on the menu if you don't have an addictive personality.

And you're not a child. But I'm a little unusual in arguing that because most people would say, well, of course, no, that's terrible. You know, Carl Hart, who's a neuroscientist at Columbia, he wrote a book called Drug Use for Grownups. And he makes a great book. He makes a pretty strong argument that we could even, we could do heroin.

If we do it responsibly and we don't have addictive personality and we make sure it's not tainted. I mean, he kind of takes that strong argument for a reason. I don't need or want to argue that. I'm just saying that almost anything positive in life can be in that toolbox to sort of amplify your life. You know, there's that fascinating story. I don't know if you've heard about heroin use in the Vietnam War. So apparently in the Vietnam War, heroin was abundantly available to all the soldiers over there. And heroin use was just sky high for understandable reasons.

It was something like, I forget the amount, but it was like 25, 35% of the U.S. soldiers were using heroin in Vietnam. And so among the military, there was a lot of discussion and talks with the U.S. government of like, hey, when all these guys come home, we're going to have a public health crisis. And when all the soldiers did come home, it's like 99% of them stopped using. And they all went back and had normal lives. And so it's a really fascinating anecdote of how so much of addiction and substance abuse is driven by context and environment. If you're stuck in a quagmire of a war, heroin use might actually be the rational thing to do. Absolutely.

Yeah, it's such an interesting story. One of my friends, George Bonanno, wrote a book called The End of Trauma. And he argues that the best kind of coping, he calls flexible coping. And so, right, it depends. It really depends on the situation. It's not like, again, kind of like the half happiness, right? It's not the one thing you need to do. But there's a concept that he discusses that I've never heard before, which he calls

ugly coping. And ugly coping is that sometimes the only thing you can do maybe to survive that moment is to do something that might be considered really unhealthy and dysfunctional. It could be getting really angry. It could be getting really drunk. It could be like driving very, you know, unsafely. And he's like, sometimes like, you need to do that.

Like, people do that. And maybe if you didn't do that, you would sort of, yeah. You'd go really downhill. So ugly coping sometimes as necessary. Amazon presents Jeff versus Taco Truck Salsa, whether it's Verde, Roja, or the orange one. For Jeff, trying any salsa is like playing Russian roulette with a flamethrower. Luckily, Jeff saved with Amazon and stocked up on antacids,

ginger tea and milk. Habaniero, more like Habinier, yes. Save the everyday with Amazon. She knows. How? Did you blouse? No. The devil wears Prada, too.

He's the movie event 20 years in the making. Honestly, can't with the secrets anymore, so I think we just should tell her. Will you two please spit it out already? This Friday, be the first to experience it only in theaters. In light of the recent scandal, I'm here to restore your credibility. Oh, because we're a team now.

That's a nice story. The Devil wears Prada 2 in Theatis Friday. What about psychedelics? It's becoming very trendy right now, especially out here in California. And my personal observation or my trepidation with it, and I've said this a few times to my audience, is that the research that's happening in psychedelics right now is that it can be incredibly transformative. It takes somebody with PTSD or chronic depression, and it can be absolutely life.

changing. But if you go to a party out in Venice, you know, all the people microdosing and taking mushrooms and MDMA all the time, you know, it's like startup founders and tech nerds and Jim Bros. So what are your thoughts on that? I can talk for hours about this. So a couple of things. One is, so before COVID, I kind of got obsessed with research at MDMA. And the reason was that I was studying happiness. And I realized that all the interventions that my lab and I have ever done that work to make people happy work because they make people feel more connected. Like you write a letter of gratitude, it makes you feel more connected to your mom or whoever. You do acts of kindness. It makes you feel more connected. And then MDMA, of course, by the way, it's not a

psychedelic, but I can, I'll just, I'm just going to include it in sort of a, that space. It makes people feel really connected, really warm, really loving, understood. And there's research on this. And so I got into this area. And so I actually am doing research now on MDMA. And I do believe that it can really help people who have social challenges and who don't really feel connected, maybe who are lonely. It could really help people feel like, wow, like maybe for some people for the first time in their life, they feel like really, really close to someone. And it can really can improve relationships. And so, you know, back in the 60s, you know, there's sort of these underground therapists that used MDMA for like couples counseling.

And now, you know, hopefully, you know, it's going to be a schedule three by the end of 2020 for PTSD. Yeah. But probably then it'll be used for other reasons too. So like couples counseling, it could really be transformative. And again, this is kind of, Francis of what you're saying, for people who kind of need it. For sure. I had an next-door neighbor in Santa Monica who told me that he used MDMA with his ex-wife to work on their divorce. divorce settlement under the divorce agreement with a therapist.

And I thought that is just brilliant, right? That's incredible. Right? Because it makes you feel not defensive. Yes. So I can imagine like really amazing uses for it. So I could talk about that forever. And then of course there's research on the other other drugs and how helpful they could be for

depression, for substance use disorder, for, you know, for death anxiety. Lots and lots of lots of things, as you say. And there's clinical trials on all of these going on right now. So it's really beautiful. the resurgence of psychedelic science and psychedelic medicine that I'm lucky to be a part of. Okay, so I started doing this before COVID and then a lot has changed. I remember giving a talk in my department in 2020 on Zoom because that was like the first time we certainly went to Zoom and being really, you know, really nervous about it.

Like I was going to talk about this drug, you know, in this academic setting. And now like no one cares, right? Well, at least in those settings. Like a lot has changed in three, four years. But now I see so many people. doing these journeys, but they do them so often. So like if something is so transformative, right, it's going to change your life,

why do you, why would you do it like once a month? Yeah, a month later. And at some way, I can understand why, because you have these epiphanies and you want to kind of build on them. I mean, I had the life coach actually who said,

all these epiphanies are completely useless unless you act on them. Yes. Right. I guess it's true for anything, right? True. And so unless these individuals are really acting, on it. And by way, I'm, I've never done one of these journeys, but I actually am really interested.

I'd like to. I'm not once a month, but maybe, you know, maybe I'm only once or maybe once a year. So I do think that in this research on neuroscience that is showing how the brain can change and sort of creating kind of more connections and kind of more entropy. So there's really something there. You know, it's not just in people's minds, but I do agree that it's kind of becoming like a little too trendy. It makes me uneasy. And As somebody who did a lot of psychedelics when he was younger and benefited a lot from it, and had a fucking great time, but also had some epiphanies, some realizations that were pretty profound. One thing I've noticed out here in California that's very interesting to me is that most of the

people who are really into it, it's actually a very, it's subtly a very social thing for them. So I'll get invited to a party out in Malibu. And in the invitation, it will say, by the way, if you want to join us with shaman guru, so-and-so, for a journey pre-party come at three o'clock, otherwise the party starts at seven. And a lot of people show up early and they do the whole journey and then they're on the psychedelic during the party. And it made me realize to kind of come back to your point that ultimately so much of happiness is driven by a sense of connection.

Maybe a lot of the journey is really just almost like an excuse to get that connection. You know, it's like, well, it gets me in a room with a bunch of other people who are experiencing the same thing at a same time. and it's a very intense experience, and we feel very together. The drug removes a lot of your inhibitions. If you're a socially anxious person or self-conscious, you know, it gets rid of a lot of that. And so it opens you up to all these other people. And then that is very powerful.

And the people are just mistaking the power of that for the drug itself. Absolutely. And of course, like alcohol has always been that drug. Booze does the same thing. Yeah. And by way, there's research on how alcohol makes people more social. Yeah. Of course it does.

You know, and alcohol is also fairly toxic, you know, in terms of you look at harms. It's, it's, it's underestimated sort of how toxic it is. So is, is, is, is our psychedelics, the new, the new booze? But it is more powerful, of course. The psychedelics are much more powerful. But yeah, I will once again say, yeah, connection is the key to happiness. Taking kind of the big picture perspective, there's this toolbox that has lots of things in it, right? including psychedelics, including booze, in moderation, in the right time and place dosage,

that can really enhance your life. Yeah. All right. Moving on. Goals. Super important. Yeah. I guess I would say underrated.

I have a line in the health happiness is something like a happy person has always something that will look forward to. And a goal is something that you pursue that could matter. Mattering is really important. I mean, we already touched on goals. But I guess to say it again. that pursuit of significant life goals hugely correlated with happiness. I think most people assume that the value of goals is achieving the goal itself.

And I've always kind of felt like most of the value of having goals is, like we talked about earlier, that experience of progress and incremental improvement and being able like legibly measure yourself against something, like knowing that I am slightly better today than I was a week ago and I'm going to be better next week than I am today. like that just seems to have so much psychological significance for us. Absolutely. And again, it sounds like cliche. We need to enjoy the journey. We're just talking about journeys.

Another kind of journey. Another journey to get there as opposed to the end goal. Because because human beings, because of hedonic adaptation, once we achieve the goal, we don't stop for very long. And now we have a new goal, which is probably, which is a good thing. It's fine. Otherwise we'd all kind of stagnate and just, you know, be passive. But goals are, pursuit of goals are, yeah, really.

important. Okay. Next one's a big one. And as far as I know, a little bit controversial in your field, parenting or children. My students and I have a paper that I think kind of addresses the controversy. It started with a lot of media articles saying kids make parents unhappy. Yes. Classic example of how journalists like just ruin science.

But also it gets attention, right? People are like, oh, yeah. Parents are miserable. And so we have all these headlines. And so one of my students, Katie Nelson and I were like, that just can't be, does that really true? Yeah. So we wrote a paper published in sex science, one of the top journals, where we had three

different studies that basically showed that's not true in different ways. Like if you just look at parents overall, if you look at parents, if you just look at people with and without children, if you look at people who are spending time with kids versus spending time doing other things. So then we thought, well, really the answer is it depends. Like anything. And so we have this paper on the effects of parenthood on happiness and the, The answer is it depends.

It depends on the age of the child. Do you have a baby or do you have a 25-year-old? It depends on your age. It depends on your kids have problems. It depends how much money you have. So it depends on lots of things. So, but it's not the case that parents are less happy than not parents. Now, the problem is you can't ever do the experiment.

But we did find that the least happy people were men without children. Really? Yes. Just in general. In general. Just like if you do it. the representative sample, sort of men, women with children without children, the least happy were men without children. Now, and then women with children were a little less happy than women

without children. And you could kind of argue about why that may be. And men with children were the happiest. My recollection of those old studies that were publicized a bunch, I think it was about 10 years ago, was that they showed a pretty significant dip after the birth of the child, and then it slowly recovered as the child got older. And my thought was that, Of course they're less happy. They're not sleeping. So sleep, overrated, underrated. Well, first of all, yeah, yeah, when you look at, it's actually kind of funny.

When you look at happiness, birth of child, it's, you're the happiest when you're pregnant. Yeah. You're like, oh, yay. This is going to be amazing. And often, like, you're newly married. So you're also your relationship is happy. Yeah. And then the biggest dip comes at year two.

And why do you think that is? Terrible twos. That's what most people think. I don't think that's what it is. Okay. I think you have child number two. On average, two years later. And that's really bad.

And as someone who's been through that twice, yeah, that's the hardest. You can attest. The first child is, yeah, hard, but it says anyway, so sleep. Yeah. Absolutely incredibly important, I would say, yeah, underrated. Even those of us who think like, oh, yeah, it's so, so important. And then Danny Kahneman is a Nobel Prize winner and his colleagues have done studies where they're looking at kind of daily happiness.

Sure. And it might have even been the number one sort of factor. And so how happy you are today is how much sleep you had last night. Sleep is the number one factor. Well, just like right now, that's momentary. Yeah, I believe that. I mean, if I don't sleep at least six hours, I am a horrible person. Genetics.

Yeah, huge. Overrated, underrated. Underrated. Now it's almost like politically incorrect to talk about the power of genetics. Yeah. But they're very powerful. And so all of us are influenced by our genes, I would say like our happiness range is sort of influence. It doesn't mean that we're faded to be a certain level of happiness.

It's just it's an influence. There's like a center of gravity. Yeah, exactly. Just like with weight. Some people just have a hard time keeping their weight down. But any human trait is influenced by genetics. Your blood pressure, your sister, your disability of depression, you know, everything, including happiness. It's not surprising.

So we've been talking about the hedonic adaptation and how humans tend to always return to this kind of set level of baseline happiness. As I recall, you talked, I think you said roughly 40% of that baseline level is genetically determined. So I've stopped using those numbers because they're just so commonly, they're so much misinterpreted. I just say, forget those numbers. And I have a paper that talks about what the numbers really mean. Yeah, I've kind of regret ever using the numbers.

Just think of it as like there are three buckets that determine your happiness level. Or your happiness kind of baseline. Sure. One is genetics. Yep. And that's important. One is your life circumstances. Generally, they're not as important as we think they are unless they're very bad.

Okay. So if you live in a war zone or if you're poor or if you're an abusive relationship, absolutely. It's going to be a huge difference in your happiness. And then the other bucket is sort of what we do and how we think, like our actual behavior that we choose to enact. Okay. This is the third bucket. Yep. That's the next one.

Mindset, attitude. So that's huge, I imagine. Exactly. Part of that, how we choose to think and how we choose to behave in our daily lives, profoundly affects our happiness. By the way, part of that is positive thinking. Part of that is having sense of control or being grateful. I can define that, divide that into how we think and then how we behave. So that's mindset attitude, just how we think. Three buckets. I like that. Yeah. That makes sense. Yeah. All right. Last one. Sex. The exciting one. Oh, good question. I can answer for you for,

For men under 30, overrated. Because men under 30 make it the most important thing in the world. That's so funny. Because again, as a scientist, I'm just like, what do you mean by under rate or rate? Oh, my God. Because in some ways, I'm like, one of the greatest things in life is sex.

But we also adapt, having sex with a single partner. We know passion decreases in almost all relationships. This is not scientific, but I can speak from personal experience. It's sex with multiple partners or many partners in succession. That also gets old. Yes. There's a hedonic adaptation to that.

It's like number eight is exciting when you get to like 28. You're like, oh, it's Saturday, you know. Exactly. So we adapt. So we can adapt. Sex with love can be the greatest thing in the world. Amazing. Yes.

Right? Especially when you're falling in love. Yes. So, yeah, so it's just really hard to answer that question. Because in some ways, like at the right time, with the right person one of the greatest experiences in life?

Yes. But can you sustain that? Very difficult to sustain, whether it's with one person or with several. It's kind of like parties. We were talking about parties before we started recording.

You know, 90% of the parties you go to in your life are kind of meh. Like they're okay, maybe a little disappointing. And then there's maybe 10% that are just incredible, some of the best nights of your life.

Yeah. But you never know when that night's going to be. I feel like the same is with sex, too. Like it's most sex is just like, okay, that was fun. But every once in a while you get. Right. Transcended, right? Yes.

Incredible. So, but that's also true with like conversations, right? Once in a while you have a conversation that's incredible, right? Or vacations. Or vacations. Or seeing a work of art or music. Yeah. I wanted to include that in there because I'm followed by a lot of young men and one of the

consistent themes that I see when I talk to my young male followers is, and I get it. I was the same when I was an 18-year-old guy, so it's like, calm down, boys. You're going to be fine. But getting back, though, to that study by Danny Kahneman where they asked people to kind of write down what they did yesterday and what kind of determined their happiness today. And so, you know, bad sleep was one of the worst things. and then also like commuting was bad, but sex was like one of the most, if not the most positive. We're not talking about like transcendent experience.

We're just talking about kind of like your mood right now. Yeah. It was depended on like if you had pretty good sex yesterday. So it didn't have to be transcendent. So it does, of course. It is important for happiness. Yeah. And it's correlated with good things like a happy relationship often.

Yeah. Or maybe you're a socially skilled, charismatic, attractive person who has lots of friends and partners or possibilities. Yeah. So that person is often happier than someone. So like if you have opportunities to have sex, you're probably better off in other ways too. So maybe a sneaky underrated.

In a way like it's a signal. Yeah. Like it's a signal of other things. True. That also are good in your life. So maybe not be the sex, but what it comes, what's correlated with, right? Like having a happy relationship. Yes.

Or as I said, like someone who has opportunities. Yes. It's probably someone who. Attracting. attractive partners, yeah. Right. And happy people attract, right. If you're an unhappy person, people don't want to have sex with you, right?

Yeah. Like if you're really unhappy and depressive, right? Right. So there you go. That's the conclusion of this. All right, Sonia. It's been a pleasure. Let me show off your books to the audience.

Both yellow. Yes, both yellow. The How of Happiness, the Myths of Happiness. And you're currently working on a new one. Yes. called How to Feel Loved. And really, feeling loved, connection is the key to happiness.

So it's a perfect third book with a collaborator, Harry Reese. Cool. So we'll have to have you back when that comes out. We'd love to. Thank you. Thanks for coming on.