Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - 341: The Art and Science of the World’s Gooiest Cliche | Barbara Fredrickson

Episode Date: April 26, 2021

One of our primary missions on this show is to rescue vital ideas that have lapsed into cliches. There are so many important concepts out there that many of us might be tempted to dismiss because they are encrusted with cultural baggage or have been reduced to potentially annoying or sappy slogans. So, for example, we’ve talked a lot on this podcast about things like: hope, gratitude, and “listening to your body.” All of which can sound like the type of empty bromide that your spin instructor yells at you while encouraging you to pedal faster. But, in fact, these are all incredibly important operating principles for a healthy life. And, not for nothing, they are all backed up by hard science. So today we’re going to tackle what may be the oldest and gooieset cliche of them all: love. The word has been ruined, in many ways, by Hollywood and pop songs. For many of us, the mere mention of the word conjures images of Tom Cruise, with tears in his eyes, while the string music swells, declaring, “You complete me.”  But in my view, and in the view of my guest today, love needs to be usefully defined down. In other words, we need to knock love off its plinth, and apply it to a much wider range of human interactions. We also need to think of love not as something magical that requires luck or money or looks, but instead as a trainable skill -- one with profound implications for our health.  Barbara Fredrickson is the Kenan Distinguished Professor in the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She has written two books: one is called Positivity, the other is called Love 2.0. In this interview, we talk about how she defines love, based on her research; how meditation can help build this skill; how taking a few extra minutes to chat with people, even if you feel busy, can have psychological, physiological, and even professional benefits; and how to manage social anxiety as we emerge from our Covid cocoons.  This episode is actually part one of a two-part series running this week on social connection. Coming up on Wednesday, we’ll hear from Marissa King, a professor at Yale who studies how to create social networks, even when it feels uncomfortable. And by social network, I don't mean something like Facebook. I mean actual networks of actual human beings that you see in person. She’s got a lot of practical and actionable advice about how to do that, even within the context of Covid. So be sure to listen in on Wednesday. One more item of business, and it is an invitation for you to participate in this show. In June, we’ll be launching a special series of podcast episodes focusing on anxiety, something I’m sure we’re all too familiar with. In this series, you’ll become intimately familiar with the mechanics of anxiety: how and why it shows up, and what you may be doing to feed it.  And this is where you come in. We’d love to hear from you with your questions about anxiety that experts will answer during our anxiety series on the podcast. So whether you’re struggling with social anxiety, anxiety about re-entering the world post-Covid, or have any other questions about anxiety - we want to hear from you. To submit a question or share a reflection call [phone] and leave us a voicemail with your name and phone number. If you’re outside the United States, you can email us a voice memo file in mp3 format to [e-mail]. The deadline for submissions is Wednesday, May 12th.  And if you don't already have the Ten Percent Happier app, download it for free wherever you get your apps or by clicking here: https://www.tenpercent.com/?_branch_match_id=888540266380716858. Full Shownotes: https://www.tenpercent.com/podcast-episode/barbara-fredrickson-341 See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Before we jump into today's show, many of us want to live healthier lives, but keep bumping our heads up against the same obstacles over and over again. But what if there was a different way to relate to this gap between what you want to do and what you actually do? What if you could find intrinsic motivation for habit change that will make you happier instead of sending you into a shame spiral? Learn how to form healthy habits without kicking your own ass unnecessarily by taking our healthy habits course over on the 10% happier app. It's taught by the Stanford psychologist Kelly McGonical and the Great Meditation Teacher Alexis

Santos to access the course. Just download the 10% happier app wherever you get your apps or by visiting 10% calm. All one word spelled out. Okay on with the show. to Baby, this is Kiki Palmer on Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcast. From ABC, this is the 10% happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hey, hey, one of our primary missions on this show is to rescue vital ideas that have lapsed into cliches. There are so many important concepts out there that many of us might be tempted to dismiss because they're encrusted with cultural baggage or have

been reduced to potentially annoying or sappy slogans. So for example, we've talked a lot on this podcast about things like hope or gratitude or listening to your body, all of which can, to some of us, at least sound like the type of empty bromide that your spin instructor yells at you while encouraging you to pedal faster. But in fact, these are all incredibly important operating principles for a healthy life. And not for nothing, they're all backed up by hard science. So today, we are going to tackle what may be the oldest, goiest cliche of all time. Love.

That word has been ruined in many ways by Hollywood and pop songs. For many of us, the mere mention of the word conjures, images of Tom Cruise with tears in his eyes, well, the string music swells, declaring, you complete me. But in my view, and in the view of my guest today, who has way more standing to make this argument, by the way, love needs to be usefully defined down. In other words, we need to knock love off its plinth

and apply it to a much wider range of human interactions. We also need to think of love not as something magical that requires luck or money or looks, but instead as a trainable skill, one with profound implications for our health. Barbara Fredrickson is the Keenan Distinguished Professor in the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She's written two books, one is called Positivity, the other is called Love 2.0. In this interview, we talk about how she defines love based on her research, how meditation can help build this skill, again, that's something she has researched

extensively, how taking a few extra minutes to chat with people, even if you feel busy, can have psychological, physiological, and even professional benefits, and how to manage social anxiety as we emerge from our COVID cocoons, which is something a lot of you guys have been asking us to address. I should say before we dive in, this is actually part one of a two-part series running this week. Coming up on Wednesday, we're going to drop an episode where we're going to talk to a scientist from Yale. She studies

really how to create social networks, even if that feels uncomfortable. And by social network, I don't mean something like Facebook. I mean actual networks of actual human beings that you see in person. So she's got a lot of practical and actionable advice about how to do that, which again, some of us might feel is a little achy to do with some intentionality. So that's coming up on Wednesday. Before we dive into today's episode, though, I do have one more order of business. If you are a long time listener, you have heard me talk about our companion app many, many times, you might even be a little sick of it. Why do we keep talking about it? If I want to meditate, can I just go to YouTube and search

for a guided meditation for free or sit and silence on my own, or use another app? First of all, yes, you can do all those things. There are many, many ways to learn how to meditate. And if you found one or more that worked for you, that's great. However, I do think there is something special about the relationship between what we're doing here on the podcast, interviewing world renowned experts, getting their take on issues that impact our everyday lives. And then in the app where we share practices specifically chosen to help you apply those lessons into kind of, as I like to say, pound them into your neurons. In a conversation right here on the

podcast a few weeks ago, the meditation teacher, Seven Aselassi, hit on something key about this relationship between the podcast and the app. Here she is talking about that. I'm a big proponent of integrating what I would call integrating study and practice. So combined with our practice, or what we call insights, that's why this tradition is called insight, is these aha moments, and you're so great at articulating that and bringing people on to kind of discuss that, like, what is it that we're learning? And then how do we kind of re-incorporate that back into the practice?

It's a little embarrassing, I'll admit, to play you a sound bite where Seb praises my interviewing skills. And so I do that a little sheepishly, but I think she really does articulate brilliantly why we're so gung ho about the symbiosis between the work we do on the podcast and the work we do in the app. Practice and study work best in concert because you're working several parts of the mind at once. Now that's how I learned from my teachers, sort of engaging my prefrontal cortex through reading books or articles that said likes to send me or talking to my teachers directly, but also then doing the practices which kind of speak to a deeper part of the mind.

And that's really the experience we're trying to bring you at 10% happier writ large. The wisdom of experts explained in a relatable way alongside practices to help you apply what you've learned. So I encourage you to give it a try by downloading the 10% happier app for free, wherever you get your apps. Okay, enough out of me. I'm gonna shut up now and bring in an awesome guess. This is really one of my favorite interviews

in recent memory. Here we go now with Barbara Fredrickson. Professor Fredrickson, thanks for coming on the show. Oh, happy to be here. Please call me Barbara. Okay. Love 2.0. What do you mean by that? My goal is to try to help people see that love, something that we all put up on a pedestal and think is important, makes the world go round, is potentially more than what we typically think of it as. We typically, I think a lot of people think of love as romance and marriage or that inner circle set of people that you interact with.

And my background is as a motion scientist. And so I'm looking at love as an emotion. So those moments when you feel moved by love. And those happen in close relationships. But similar points of connection, positive connection happen with strangers and acquaintances. We just don't like to call that love. And I think that's to our disadvantage that we only envision or imagine love is happening in certain relationships, certain special close relationships and not just sort of part of the social fabric of community. So what I argue that we could all use an upgrade in our view of love to also include those small moments of connection that you have with anybody,

whether you know them well or not, that there's similar properties between when we connect with any other human. Of course, it's a different kind of special when it's your loved ones, but it matters as well in terms of our connections with acquaintances and strangers. And are you talking about the level of the brain here? Not just the brain, but all of our physiology. I define love as co-experienced, positive emotion. So that really opens it up to be, we're both interested together or we're both excited about some new idea at the same time and together and it doesn't necessarily always have like cupid zero involved in it. So as co-experienced emotions go, when we co-experience a positive emotions, our physiology

comes more into synchrony. Our heart rates start mirroring one another's workland activity. There's also research from neuroscientists too to show that there's kind of whole brain coupling across people who are really in close communication and following each other's words well. So, and this happens more so when you're co-experiencing or collaboratively experiencing a positive emotion compared to a negative emotion. Negative emotions kind of pull us more separate

from other people whereas positive emotions. It's kind of like when that positive emotion unfolds, it's unfolding across two brains and bodies in unison. And we, as Western academics, don't tend to think of emotions as being distributed across people. We think of them as belonging to one person or another. And so this view gets us to question that. Let me question. Your thesis just for a second, not from a truly skeptical standpoint, because I actually think we really deeply agree, but just for my own understanding. I love my son. He's six. He hurts himself. I feel anguish because of his anguish.

Isn't that an expression of love, but it's not a positive emotion? Yeah, I think that's an expression of your deep bond with your son, and what we have with our children is that we have compassion for their suffering. I actually think that even though the most obvious emotion in that situation is negative, your son's pain and then you're kind of feeling for that pain, there's also a thread of positivity in any compassion, expression, because when each of us is suffering and somebody else recognizes that, that's a relief that you're not alone, that somebody is meeting you where you're suffering. And when we are able to provide that support

for anybody, but for our loved ones especially, that feels like, wow, I want to be here for this person. And you can feel good about being able to be there, rather than I'm glad I was here to be able to do this. So even though you're connecting over something that's painful or difficult, there's never only one emotion in any situation. There's a lot of blends, and there's some blended positivity in there,

and just compare it to hurting yourself and nobody's around, you know, feeling hurt and being seen in that hurt. You feel recognized, you feel understood, cared for, validated. Those are the hallmarks of what relationships scientists say are the core of intimacy, feeling that other people get you and use that knowledge for your benefit. That all makes complete sense to me. And we've talked a lot on the show about the enobling aspects of compassion. To go back to your primary thesis, your push to sort of upgrade and broaden how we think about love. What is the principle pushback you face on that?

You have people to say, no, love is love. And when I say love, I mean, loving my family, falling in love the way they do in the movies, you're trying to make it into me having a positive interaction with the door man is a twisting of it. Yeah, no, that is a primary pushback. In fact, one of my colleagues, when she first read the theoretical ideas I was

putting together, she's like, oh, that's really good. Keep calling it positivity resonance. Don't call it love. In the scientific literature, I call it positivity resonance. And I make the case, I'm building up the empirical case that that is a form of love. It shows loving, nonverbal behavior that when people are engaged in co-experiencing a positive emotion, they do these things that other scientists have linked to love, which is nodding, leaning in, you know, smiling. And that when people do this, when they co-experience a positive emotion, they do that kind of nonverbal behaviors in synchrony. So there's a togetherness in it. So those are nonverbal behaviors that people show with close others, but they can show up in other kinds of interactions as well. But my colleague didn't want me to call it love because she thought that

would prevent people from hearing the ideas. And I persisted, and I persisted for the main reason of, if you use a jargon phrase, like positivity resonance, people were like, well, why is that important? It doesn't seem very vital. But to say, this is the most elemental building block of love that helps people to more readily see its importance. And also, we all have close relationships

that every once in a while we bring our hands and we say we don't feel as close anymore. This way of looking at shared positive emotion, co-experience positive emotion as the most elemental building block of love gives you a roadmap for how to get closer again. It gives you a roadmap for how to build a sense of commitment and loyalty and trust. And you know, again, those are things you can't just snap your finger and say, okay, now we trust each other. You know, those are things that grow over time through experience.

And this way of looking at love tells you what kinds of experiences help grow those good qualities that we seek. Does it require two sides for love? I mean, if I'm handing out small bills to people on the street who don't have a home and maybe I give some money to somebody who's, you know's really mentally ill and doesn't appear to appreciate it or to understand what's going on. Isn't there still love on my end? Well, I think that you definitely might feel that, and this is where I'm going to geek

out and be a scientist and say, well, that might be what you call love. But if you want to strictly go with positivity resonance, this concept, which really comes out of evolutionary psychology, and this is how mammals interact with one another, it does take two. There's an important mirroring or togetherness. And I'm not saying that feeling you had isn't a good one, isn't important, isn't really deeply connected to who you see yourself as. I'm not saying that that's not a good one, isn't important, isn't really deeply connected to who you see yourself as.

I'm not saying that that's not a good thing. It's just not the same good thing as co-experienced positive emotions. Positive psychology is all about unpacking all these different kinds of good experiences and seeing which ones drive the others and how to put it all together instead of just saying, that's a good thing. I see my job as separating all those good things and seeing how they work together. I support that. I think it's fascinating. So just along those lines, if I do loving kindness meditation, which I do, and it's just me generating or attempting to generate some friendliness, goodwill, etc.,

etc. alone in a chair. I don't sit on a cushion because I'm nearly 50 enough. Very limber. That is not love or positivity resonance as you would describe it. It's good, but not your definition of love. Right, but it sets you up for positivity resonance later in the day when you do interact with others. We found that in our research. The more time people spend in seeded formal meditation, practicing loving kindness,

on a later random work day, they're more likely to share positive feelings with a work colleague. They're more likely to share positive feelings with a work colleague. So, that was a really early study that we had done, and more recently we found that, you know, the amount of time you put into formal practice of either loving kindness or mindfulness meditation, there's a dose response relationship between the minutes that you spend in meditation, and the degree to which you show increases in your own positive emotions, but also in these positive social connections with others. Because you've changed how you arrive at those interactions with people. I see loving kindness meditation as just getting us to retrain ourselves from just total self-absorption in the West to being a little more other focused

and to remind ourselves that the other people are here too. You know, not just me, so wrapped up in one's own agenda or story or needs. And so the more you practice, the more you're able to kind of meet somebody where they are and create this positive connection. On the cushion or on the chair, practicing that's kind of tuning your human instrument to create this more readily when you are in interaction. So it's not at all chop liver. It's preparatory.

I really like what you're saying about loving kind of meditation. So it's not an all-chop liver. It's um, preparatory. I really like what you're saying about loving kind of meditation. It's a little bit like going to the gym to increase your potential for positivity resonance. I've certainly seen that in my own end of one practice coming from a long line of frosty New Englanders as I do, it's been very helpful. I've noticed for interactions big and small and speaking of the small end just to go back to the beginning of the conversation, I maybe you can give us this quote that you that you like to point to from Louis Armstrong that supports your broadening of love or upgrading of love thesis.

Yeah, I don't know if I can sing it, but I see friends shaking hands saying, how do you do? They're really saying, I love you. Yeah. I mean, it's got the nonverbal synchrony in there with the friends shaking hands. I actually just heard a radio interview the other day about whether the handshake will come back post pandemic and apparently previous epidemics and pandemics, everyone thought the handshake would never come back and it did. epidemics and pandemics, everyone thought the handshake would never come back and it did. So it could be because that kind of physical connection where you move together really briefly helps bring you more in the rhythm of the other person. I went to my first dinner party in more than a year the other day and everybody who came had to be just tested or vaccinated.

And there was a lot of people I didn't know and there was so much shaking of hands and hugging. It was really remarkable. Yeah. I think there's a lot of, for the good, a lot of eagerness to reconnect all around. Like we didn't realize how much we need this in terms of just even getting to know new people, not, you know, just having a wide variety of social contacts. I think we'll love each other better, you know, rather than take each other for granted.

I hope. Yeah, well, I mean, I wonder, I, people have asked me, what do you, Dan, think is going to happen as, you know, what good could come out of this? And I try to give the answer you just gave, but the pessimistic part of me always creeps up. Where do you net out in terms of your optimism, pessimism on this? Well, I share your wavering back and forth. I mean, I hope that we've all learned that taking care of ourselves and our mental health is important,. I mean, I hope that we've all learned that taking care of ourselves and our mental health is important, self-care. I hope that we've all learned that connecting with others is something we crave and should cherish, but I also know we've been

out of the habit of connecting. And strangers have been a source of danger. So how do we relearn how to make our communities feel warm and safe and welcoming places when we've spent a year avoiding each other? So I think we might have some habits of distancing to unlearn. So I think, yeah, you could see it go both ways. You know, I was just talking to my son, well, people ride the elevator with a stranger. When will that happen again? And I thought people are probably going to hang back for a while longer than they have to. He didn't think so. He thought people would just rush into the elevator.

What do you recommend for those of us who feel like we've lost the muscle of human interaction? Yeah, just practice. I mean, all these things are ways of training our eye, training our heart, training our priorities. So the good thing of that, the pandemic did is it allowed many of us to slow down a little bit, maybe not always be in high gear, fast speed running from one thing to the next. So that can support connection. So don't speed all the way back up again so that you don't have to speed by all other people. I think the main thing is that the first couple weeks,

months of reconnecting with strangers can feel weird. We're not going to feel so socially adept and just don't take that as the limit. Social skill, our research shows, is kind of a use it or lose it skill. We get better at it the more we interact with others. It actually improves our biological capacity to connect with people. And so, you know, over time,

we get more attuned to others based on our past history of the last few months of interacting. So, having pulled out of those interactions for a year, we're going to feel kind of not so skilled and adept as we did beforehand. You know, it's the same way that our muscles may have atrophied if we haven't been to the gym. You know, it's going to take some time to build it back up. I don't think that's metaphorical. We have a biological capacity for connection that erodes a bit when we don't connect. It is like a has plasticity to it based on how much work is exercising that skill. It was why loneliness can be a really negative spiral because as I understand it, one of

the most pernicious aspects of loneliness is that you become less trusting. And so it becomes, you just dig yourself deeper and deeper. It kind of, I've always thought that WHO, and quote, about we have to love each other or die, was maybe a little dire, but maybe it's true on some level. Oh, I think that is true. I mean, it's said for poetic extremity there, but I think it's the quality of our interpersonal

connections in day-to-day life predicts how long we live. It's one of the strongest predictors. The degree to which we experience positive emotions in a daily life predicts how long we live. What I've been doing is knitting those two separate literatures together and say, well, you know, the positive emotions you feel in connection with others may be that particularly important ingredient, and it seems to. We scientifically test the benefits of this co-experience positive emotions by pitting it against positive emotions in general, you know, to make sure that it's not just

a different way of saying the same thing. So we find that independent of how good you feel in general, the degree to which you have shared good feelings contributes more to health over the next 13 years, contributes more to the quality of your relationships. There's two really foundational precursors or conditions that need to be met for people to feel positivity resonance or these moments of love. And one is perceived safety. And that's what people who are chronically lonely don't have. When they find themselves in a room with somebody, they don't feel safe. And so they hang back.

Other groups that have that are people who are socially anxious, not surprising, people who are depressed, people with different kinds of psychopathologies. So there are ways that those downward spirals get entrenched because people don't see the safety that exists. Most interaction partners aren't out there to harm you,

but your threshold for risk gets exaggerated with certain conditions, psychological and physiological. So how do you dig yourself out of that hole? I mean, you were advising before that we all, or most of us, may be experiencing some atrophy in our social connection muscle, but there are folks who are in truly extreme cases that you just reference social anxiety, depression, loneliness, where psychological and physiological factors have kicked in that make it even harder to reconnect. Are there best practices for people in those

Are there best practices for people in those conditions? Yeah, great question. It is the case that sometimes taking little baby steps in positive psychology ways like being kinder to others or practicing loving kindness or just making it your goal to talk with a stranger acquaintance more often. Those can be small steps in the right direction that can add up. There's some research to show that these are useful approaches for dealing with certain categories of depression or anxiety. It doesn't always work. So it's kind of good to have a lot of tools in your toolkit.

And if you're really miserable, be sure to seek treatment. Sometimes people need medication too to get themselves off the absolute bottom, to be able to experiment in these ways. But I think recognizing that where you find yourself is probably in part being reinforced by the biological aspects of the predicament that you're in, that we shouldn't feel so bad about ourselves if it's hard to get out, you know, that we just need to take a step at a time. Meditation can help, and one of the things that we're finding in our research is that loving kindness isn't always the best for everybody. A lot of people benefit more from mindfulness as a practice to start with.

And they both lead to improvements in positive connection, positive relationships. And so I think the key is finding the practice that feels like it works for you, meaning it doesn't backfire and seems to lead to some positive direction. I mean, we have to kind of pay attention to like, well, how does this practice sit with me and go back to the ones that seem to be helping us go in a right direction, but not assume that it's one size fits all loving kindness or bust, you know, it's works for some, it doesn't work for others, and then non-meditative practices are good for others. And also, I don't think those are person differences set in stone. There are times in our lives where meditation is not going to work for me. I need to do something other than meditation. So, anyway. Well, I like the flexibility you're expressing here and they encouraging us to experiment. And it sounds like if we're in a real hole here, we're looking at a real positivity resonance deficit. We can look at meditation, we can look at medication, we can look at therapy, we can look at small experiments in terms of our daily interactions.

Another recommendation I've heard from the former surgeon general, Vivek Murthy, who wrote a book about loneliness is service as an antidote to loneliness. Yeah, that really fits well with my colleagues, Sonia and Libra Merskis work on acts of kindness. The psychological active ingredient that acts of kindness and service may help to create

are these moments of positive connection. So it's like we're seeing that as a behavior that sets up this psychology that helps us pull out of the hole. And you mentioned you invoked earlier and I didn't get a chance to follow up on it evolution. This positivity resonance that you're describing as a building block, this is primordial stuff. Can you say more about the history here? Yeah, I think that as mammals, we are very socially oriented. The way we live our lives, though, doesn't really necessarily always map onto that. I think of, you know, I have cats. They usually sleep in a pile. And we take baby humans and put

them in another room. And, you know, wonder why they don't sleep so well. So we just have ways of living that put a lot of space between us, the kinds of suburbia neighborhoods that we've built too, also put that distance between people. And in evolutionary history, that's kind of odd. That's a really small, recent blip of time. I'm talking about Western and especially US culture here, because there are lots of cultures that don't have that same of kind of distance and don't have some of the same struggles that we have. So I do think this is deeply ingrained. I think our biology is attuned to

whether we're socially connected. And we see that at cellular levels, we see it in the rhythms of the heart. So these experiences we have of connection or disconnection aren't just like rolling around our minds as feelings. They are embedded and affect our biology in ways that end up being reciprocal, that that biology then reinforces that state. So we get into these entrenched places because there are these reciprocal

causality dynamics, upwards spirals and downwards spirals. That's so funny you mentioned that because I'm writing a book right now that is four square in your camp. The operating thesis is basically everything you've just described. Generally my books are sort of arguments dressed up as memoirs, and the argument here is going to be that we have puffed up love to our detriment, and made it, you know, reduced it to a very small sphere of human behavior, whereas if we broaden it and start getting people to think about love that shows up in all of our interactions that can boost our happiness. And you can make that a practice and that it can boost our happiness. And by the way, impact those relationships we care the most about. I talk about spirals. I have one spiral I call the cheesy upward spiral, which or a gooey upward spiral, where your inner weather gets better,

your relationships get better as a consequence. You can start at either one of those, you can start at improved relationships or inner weather or improved inner weather and then better relationships. And then as a result of one, the other gets better and then it keeps going from there. And then the other spiral,

I stole this from a friend of mine, Evelyn Tribalet, who stole it from Nabokov, is the toilet vortex, where you're beating yourself up as a consequence of that self-loathing, you're crappy to the people around you, and then because we need other people so much, the inner weather gets worse, and there we go into the toilet. Does everything I just rambled about? Does that all sound right to you? Yes. I think it fits the psychology that, you know, I've spent good part of my career studying. There's one difference that I would point out is that upward spirals and downward spirals are not symmetrical. And that's because positive emotions open our awareness and help us see the bigger picture.

of emotions, open our awareness and help us see the bigger picture. And so they are more permeable and tie us more to others, whereas negative emotions tend to pull it, we pull away from other people, we get self-protective, and so it's like it's tighter and narrower. So it's not just up and down, it's like opening closed at the same time. So it's more like a funnel. Well, it's also not just wider. It's more permeable too, because when you're in a positive emotional state, you're more likely to think in terms of we, rather than in terms of just me. And so you're more socially embedded and the way you see yourself is this more part of a network.

And then those other people influence you more. So that's what I mean by it's more open and it's more permeable and it goes up. So there are multiple differences between the upward spiral and the downward spiral. It's kind of a fun thing to think about scientifically too, because it's like, wow, how does it, you know, it wasn't until we scientists started thinking about dynamics over time that we began to really see these spirals, you know, as opposed to just thinking, oh, this causes

this. And if one thing causes something in one direction, then that's the only direction of causality. You know, we had to get out of that framework to be able to see that reciprocal causality because that's where spirals come from. Much more of my conversation with Barbara Fredrickson right after this. Celebrity feuds are high stakes. You never know if you're just going to end up on page six or Du Moir or in court. I'm Matt Bellesai And I'm Sydney battle and we're the host of Wonder E's new podcast Disantel where each episode we unpack a different iconic celebrity feud from the buildup why it happened and the repercussions What does our obsession with these feuds say about us the first season is packed with some pretty messy pop culture drama

But none is drawn out in personal as Brittany and Jamie Lynn Spears. When Brittany's fans formed the free Brittany movement dedicated to fraying her from the infamous conservatorship, Jamie Lynn's lack of public support, it angered some fans, a lot of them. It's a story of two young women who had their choices taken away from them by their controlling parents, but took their anger out on each other. And it's about a movement to save a superstar, which set its sights upon anyone who failed to fight for Brittany. Follow Disenthal wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen ad-free on Amazon Music or the Wondery app. Let me tell you a story and see what this, if anything, provokes for you. One of the criticisms that I have faced over the years is being, I use this phrase, frosty

New Englander. It being, you know, like a little kind of knot, just stuck in my own head and so busy and that it can lead to a insularity. And so that's something I've really spent some time working on through love and kindness meditation and just through just kind of just trying to be a less of a jerk generally. And, or putting in emphasis,

I think what you would call micro moments or micro interactions. And I was talking to my friend Josh last night about how we just moved houses and we have a ton of people sort of coming through this new house doing work. And the old version of me I would have ignored everybody and just heads down on my own work. Not, I wouldn't think I would have been mean, I just would have not paid at any attention. I've actually just tried to do a better job of chitchatting with folks or

bearing people water and whatever, just getting to know the people who are occupying the same space, breathing the same air through masks. And sometimes it goes on longer than I want and maybe it's not as productive as I would like to be, but overall, it's very, very positive and I've met a lot of really nice people. And I was saying this to my friend Josh

and he was saying, I see this as a fruition of your practice in many ways, but I could see how many people would also say, I just don't have time for this. If I want to be a successful person in the world, I can't do what you're describing Dan. And I disagree with him, but I want to hear if you disagree and why.

Yeah, I definitely disagree. I think it's funny though, I use the Frosty New Englander, I think of myself as the crusty Midwesterners. I was kind of the same. I resonate with it, but I have my own regional label for it. But yeah, it took me a long time to,

as an adult, realize these are cool opportunities all around me every day in terms of connecting with others. One of the things that is potentially quite hopeful about just taking this different orientation towards your interactions with others is it doesn't necessarily have to take more time. You might be engaged in a transaction with a person anyway and you could either do it in that, you know, I don't care about you way. Let's just get through this or in a warm, caring way. So, yeah, sometimes you do want to linger and stay there and take it further and kind of be organic about the duration, but that's not always required.

So, you know, I think it's more a matter of realizing that there's something important there and prioritizing it rather than prioritizing your to-do list. I think we are such a strong achievement culture. I only got to where I am because of that strong achievement culture. So I'm not going to knock it too much. But it's easy to think that accomplishing something

is the most important thing in your day as opposed to feeling or connecting. Now, non-US cultures get this. There's work that's done on cross-cultural business relationships and a lot of Latin cultures will start a meeting. It's all about connection. And the Americans are like, let's get to work.

So I try to bring that into my teaching and running a research team, even though I'm tempted to always start with work work to instead start with finding something out about what's going on in your life this week. Even if it's really quick when I'm teaching on Zoom, I just have everybody rename themselves with their first name so I don't lose that cool anchor that Zoom gives you not to forget someone's name, but also the thing they're grateful for today. So very quickly, you can find out what people are caring about and then you can use that to form a connection with different people in the class.

Even, you know, so there's ways to do this that are, that are, aren't going to be time sinks. So I think that's an excuse we use a lot. It's like, I don't have time for that. The investment pays dividends and all different aspects, not just your own well-being. The work I'm really excited about this year is we found that the affective quality, it's positivity residents, the affective quality that you have with others in your daily life, predicts public health, predicts the degree to which you care about wearing a mask washing your hands getting vaccinated and so

The more of these warm caring connections we have with people the more we tend to be pro-social oriented towards taking care of community and that translates into the effort we put into following public health practices. And that's been super important in our country because there's been no clear mandate how people should behave and when, that we rely on people's own motivation to take care of the health of others because we Americans don't like to be told what to do. So we should care about the things that make people motivated.

These positive connections in community end up being a good predictor of whether we'll take care of each other. So you would advise we make this a practice? Yeah. Yeah. And actually we do studies exactly of this where we randomly assign people to like learn about this idea of positive moments of connection just through like a very short, you know, like watch a video on this idea and then remind them every day, hey, go have

more of those positive connections with others. It makes a difference, especially when people are told, you know, it will really make a difference if you have more of those connections with others, it makes a difference, especially when people are told, you know, it will really make a difference if you have more of those connections with strangers and acquaintances. People who get that instruction every day over a month tend to show more growth in these pro-social tendencies or other oriented virtues. And the benefit happens at a community level as well, not just at an individual happiness level. I think we could all resonate with feeling like we need kinder communities right now.

So this could be an answer to polarization, do you think? Could be. Seeing people face to face is key. Because we share each other's emotions so much more when we're face to face, because of the important vehicle of eye contact, to the extent that we make eye contact with someone we're more likely to mimic their facial expressions, which comes with the whole neural mimicry, which comes with a whole biological synchrony, and so we're more likely to feel emotions together and in synchrony and in resonance if we're face-to-face. We get a

little bit of this through this, you know, video conferencing thing, Zoom world, but it's harder. It's definitely harder. We have data to show that very clearly people feel more positivity resonance when they're face-to- face. So if we step out of just reading about people or seeing their written tweets or whatever and interacting face to face with you know respect and interest we have a chance to find our common ground and common humanity more. But that requires feeling safe and And there are a lot of contexts where we don't feel safe. And we just need to widen the pools where we do feel safe

in public and try to shrink the areas that we don't feel safe. I believe I've heard some data or at least some anecdotes from prior guests on the show at least some anecdotes from prior guests on the show, that one thing that's been shown to help with polarization is get reds and blues together, and don't get them talking about stuff, although there appear to be some pretty thoughtful ways to get them talking about stuff, but get them doing something together

that would create the positivity resonance, and then you've transcended some of the issue disagreements. Yeah. I think it's just remembering what you have in common. So doing something together is one way to do that. And whether people are talking about their kids or their pets, they're safer, common ground. So to build up to it slowly, rather than just jump into the thing

that we disagree on. So I think that's a great example. build up to it slowly rather than just jump into the thing that we disagree on. So I think that's a great example. And I would hypothesize that if we measured perceived positivity resonance either objectively or through people's perceptions of it, we have measures both that that would be a driving mechanism. I want to just loop back to something we were talking about before this achievement culture versus connection, um, you know, the idea of placing emphasis on connection.

Is it possibly a false dichotomy? In other words, if, you know, yes, maybe I lost some productive time on the day I spent, you know, 30 minutes looking at pictures of the day I spent 30 minutes looking at pictures of the painter's kids playing soccer. But is it impossible that that created a more constructive mindset that impacted my creative work later in the day and also my other interactions such that it was probably the better investment to look at those pictures rather than ignore them and, you know, focus heads down on my work. Oh, for sure. I don't think there's any question about that because it changes how you bring yourself to the next situation. You might have more openness and creativity in your work. Positive

emotions in that, in that some of my early work shows how they broaden our awareness, make us more creative, make us more resilient. Those are all qualities that are also going to help our work. So yes, you're right, it is a bit of a false dichotomy, but where it is more of a trade-off we've found is in terms of the activities people prioritize in their day. One of my former doctoral students, Lana Cadlino, has developed a measure of how people differ from one another. It's not a personality trait, but it's, she calls it prioritizing positivity. Do you put yourself in situations interacting with others or engaging in your favorite hobby

that are more about how you might feel rather than what you might accomplish? And we found as we were developing this scale, everybody, if you ask people, do you value positive emotions? Everybody says yes, who wouldn't? But where people differ from one another is whether they will put that into action within their day, and how they choose to spend their time. And sometimes it takes effort, like that dinner party that you were mentioning, it didn't just happen when someone snapped their finger, somebody put a lot of thought and effort and work into it and created a context that would be enjoyable for everybody.

So people who prioritize positivity are willing to put in the work in advance to create a good moment later, or willing to set aside a cheap, a cheap, a cheap, in order to feel. And I think of it as, you know, why I write books for a general audience is that I would like people to see the value of prioritizing situations that help us to connect more, to feel more positive emotions and not think of them as the vegan version of chop liver. But what makes it so exciting, or one of the things that makes it so exciting, at least for me, is that if you're still focused on achievement, doing this could actually help you with that? Exactly. It's not a zero sum.

You create more capacity. You create more capacity in yourself. You create more capacity within your social network. So it's one route to creating more capacity to be able to accomplish things. And in terms of teamwork, it really makes a big difference if teams have this capacity to connect with one another in positive ways.

The teams function better. And we know that the workplace has really reoriented itself, the modern workplace, around teams. You referenced before, I don't think you used the full term, but you can't close using the full term, but I'm now going to use the full term and get you to say more about it if you're open to it. Broaden and build. Yes, the major early contribution I made in my career was to chart out a theory for why humans have positive emotions in the first place. When I started my career, scientists were just beginning to rediscover

emotions. Freud talked about emotions, but then behaviorism took hold and scientists got scared of studying emotions. They decided they were just lights on the machine. They weren't interesting or worthy of study because they're just too fleeting and how you're gonna measure that that's not real science so that really put a bucket of cold water on emotion science for about a hundred years and in the late 1980s early 1990s is when emotion science kind of woke up again and I happened to be a postdoc around that time and I noticed that all this waking up and paying attention to emotions, it's all about negative emotions. There was like

no good scientific theory for positive emotions. And they post all these puzzles that made it seem like, well, how are they related to survival? Smiling doesn't help you survive. And a simple approach that some people took was like, well, negative emotions are about survival, positive emotions are about reproduction. That's how positive emotions are important. They help you find a mate. But that just didn't ring true to me

because we have experienced positive emotions in many, many different contexts, not just in mate selection and mate preserving whatever childbearing. So I was curious as to how positive emotions would have also evolved through natural selection. And had some detours along the way, but eventually decided that the thing to test would be whether positive emotions, instead of narrowing our ideas about a specific action like fight or flight, whether positive emotions broaden our awareness in ways that help us see,

oh, I could do this or I could do that, or maybe I should do this, you know, I'm kind of open up our sense of possibilities. And both of those being different from feeling neutral. So I compare positive emotions to neutral states, not positive emotions to negative emotions, because there's scientific reasons why you need to keep that neutral in there. The benefit of those positive emotions are very

fleeting, that broadened, opened mindset is also very fleeting, but the more moments you have of that opened mindset, build enduring resources that make you more capable help you become a better version of yourselves, make you more resilient, more socially connected, physically healthier. And those are resources that makes it easier to face what life gives you, gives you more tools in your toolkit. And so our ancestors who had more tools in their toolkit which they built through moments of positive emotion were more likely to survive and become part of our family tree, ancestral family tree.

So that's the doorway through which positive emotions were likely shaped as part of natural selection, our capacity to experience positive emotions. So this broadened and build theory has just been a kind of a blueprint for my research over my career. It's fascinating, I think incredibly useful. I'm having this memory of an article I read in, I think the New York Times

and New York Times magazine maybe more than a decade ago about some of the evolutionary purposes of depression. And that actually depression might help you in problem solving. Am I restating that correctly? And if I am, does it in any way contradict, Broughton and Build? Not necessarily. I think all emotions have some value in certain contexts. One view of sadness and depression is that it helps us disengage from goals that we're not making any progress on. When we have a goal and we're really not getting anywhere with it, being sad about it can

help us detach from that goal and then maybe in another emotional state we'll find a different goal. All emotions are valuable when they fit the circumstances that were in. Negative emotions get a bad rep because we often hang on to them beyond the situation for which they're useful. So you know if we see an injustice or experience an injustice, it's appropriate and helpful to get angry about it and say, hey, I or we should be treated differently and to articulate how you want things to change.

The hard part is that emotions are short lived in that they're supposed to be connected to the ever-changing circumstances we find ourselves in, but like depression can be characterized by either a presence of sadness or an absence of positive emotions, even when you're in situations that would normally raise positive emotions or not be a producing sadness. So negative emotions get to be problematic when we hang onto them for too long. They're not problematic in and of themselves.

So sadness had some early work linked sadness to critical thinking, being able to find the catch logical errors and kind of not have an inappropriate rosy glow or expectations. When people are reasonably mentally healthy, their default emotional state is mild positivity. And there's whole theories as to why it is that mental health is associated with waking up in the morning with mild positivity, because that'll get you out of bed. If you don't feel that little bit of positivity, it's hard to get out of bed and do anything.

And so to have this optimistic bias is what keeps people moving forward. And one way to understand depression is that, that positivity offset or optimistic bias kind of recedes and then it makes it hard to get motivated. you know, positivity offset or optimistic bias kind of recedes. And then it makes it hard to get motivated. There's some interesting asymmetries between positive and negative emotions. And one of them is the bad is stronger than good.

Negative things really hit you on the head with a hammer and positive things kind of whisper. And another is this, you know, positive emotions are actually more frequent. They're just subtler and they're more frequent in order to keep us moving. Casing them, you mean? Not chasing them. Positive emotions give us energy to pursue things, not necessarily because we're chasing happiness, but that just energize, give you energy and interest in other people and build from there. And I believe you have a ratio of positive to negative that we should be shooting for

throughout our day. Well, like I mentioned, these asymmetries, that negative things grab our attention more quickly and rivet our attention more than positive things. This is sort of behind the, if it bleeds, it leads kind of way the media grabs our attention. I will not have you speaking hail of the media. Just kidding. You can speak hail as much as you want.

But that capitalizes on the fact that we are riveted by negative information for good reason, because if there's a danger nearby, we need to understand it. Because of that asymmetry, if you want to balance out your positive and negative emotions, you're going to need more positive emotions to counteract the negative emotions. Now, I used to think there was like this tipping point ratio. I don't think that anymore, but I do think the evidence is really clear that a balanced life isn't to have one-to-one negative and positive emotions. Success, mental health, good teams, good relationships have three to one, four to one, five to one. teams, good relationships, have three to one, four to one, five to one, we need to have

that many positive emotions in order to counterweight our experiences of negative emotions. So learning how to self-generate and cultivate positive emotions in daily life helps us deal with, manage the difficult things that we face. You get to that positivity ratio by understanding the asymmetries between feeling good and feeling bad, and you can also get there empirically by looking at people who have flourishing mental health and see, how is it that they differ? Turns out people of sort of typical mental health, kind of just getting by, tend to have ratios that are like two to one. So much more positive than negative, but not enough to put them in the same spheres, people who are really flourishing, or ourselves when we're really flourishing.

You know, it's not just like certain people flourishing, certain people don't. We all have moments and eras where we're flourishing and moments and eras where we're not. But it sounds like there are interventions, things we can do deliberately to up the ratio to be better at spotting and lingering in those subtle positive emotions, such as forms of meditation that would either help you spot it, like mindfulness or love and kindness meditation, which would boost the capacity to experience it. And then also making

these micro connections a practice. There are interventions that are available to us to help us with these ratio. Exactly. Yeah. There is this greeting card I came across a long time ago. That was something like life gives us the negativity all on its own. It's our job to create the positivity. You're not going to raise your ratio by preventing yourself from ever feeling bad. So the better approach is to just increase those moments of good so that you're more equipped and capable of addressing the bad. That's just inevitable. It's just part of life.

We're all going to lose things. And there's a way in which the bad, this takes us back to the beginning of the discussion, the bad. That's just inevitable. It's just part of life. We're all going to lose things. And there's a way in which the bad and this takes us back to the beginning of the discussion, the blend, they're in the bad. There can be good. So that compassion does have this very strong, enobling, empowering aspect to it, even though you're in a quote unquote bad situation. Exactly. Yeah. Life is so much more textured and complex than we typically give a credit for. So I really appreciate that you're reminding listeners that there are multiple routes to increasing positive emotions in daily life, whether it's meditation, multiple meditation practices, or just learning how to prioritize connecting or acts of kindness and service.

And there's so many routes to this. It's just having that orientation that, oh, this is worth my time, is probably the most important key, not which way you approach it. Well, as I say all the time on the show, the one of the original translations of the word Sati, which we translate as mindfulness, but one of the original translations of the word sati, which we translate as mindfulness,

but one of the original translations of that ancient Buddhist term is remembering. And so it's like remembering to do this thing, but you can get better at remembering through these practices. One thing it occurs to me to ask, as we head toward the close here, though, is the unfairness in society, you know, like you want to have this three to one, four to one ratio of positive to negative, but if you're born into an abusive family or if society is inclined to mistreat you based on your pigmentation or your gender, it seems like you're going to be operating from a deficit here.

Yeah, there are lots of barriers to forging these positive connections. Let me just give you an example from one of my current students, worked Taylor West has gotten interested in the intersection of low income and high income inequality. And what we're finding is that low income individuals only in contexts where there's a big income inequality in their zip code don't feel very many of these positivity resonance positive connection moments in public in their community. High income people, whether there's income, whether they're in context of really high

relative deprivation. They see a lot of wealthier people around them. It's that functions as a barrier to feeling positive connection within your community. And so, yeah, there are ways in which there are obstacles. And yet, there's some really early lessons within positive psychology. It's like we tend to think people who don't have the good things that we have in our lives can't feel good in the same way that we do. And actually, there's equal opportunities

sometimes for positive connection in extreme poverty or people who are homeless or people who are homeless, or people who are, you know, in structurally bad situations, not every moment is defined by that structurally bad situation. You just think about how important, you know, the family connections and family positivity is in a lot of lower income countries. They got so much richness in their social and emotional lives that we in the richer, industrialized countries are lacking. People have a lot of resources aren't always doing better on these metrics. Put it that way. You mentioned one prerequisite for positivity residents,

safety. What's the other? The other I would I just grab is real time sensory connection. Now that's the jargonny phrase that pretty much captures being face to face. But I do think that shared voice over the phone or this video chat gives you some channels to it. But that's we're much more likely to feel positivity resonance if we have the temporal dynamics of somebody else's emotions as information. So if you were typing out your questions to me and I was typing them back to you, you know, we might each smile individually, but we wouldn't have any jointly experienced

positive emotions. So that's why connecting in real time makes a difference. And, you know, that wouldn't be so noticeable except we've created a culture where we don't connect in real time. We connect through words written on a screen and so on. So real time sensory connection and perceived safety are two conditions that set us up to experience love or positivity resonance more often. So for these reasons I sometimes say love is not unconditional that these

conditions need to be met. And actually that's useful because we know if we're not feeling these things maybe we should look at the safety people feel or the do more face to face rather than all through text and email. Final question for me, I've just curious to you reference a little bit, but what impact has your research had on your life? Are you less crusty or you, you know, less passiturn, are you, you know, what's the difference between barb 2.0 and the old version? I think I got really, really lucky to be studying what I study because when I kind of hit the wall of being too much on the high achieving index of like favoring career over everything else.

When I was hitting the wall and starting to have like back problems and relationship problems, all the answers were like piling up on my desk. You know, so I was lucky to have the recipes for how to rebuild a better life in the articles that I was writing. I just wasn't paying attention at the very start, which I actually have a good friend who told me, Barb, you study emotions because you have not. And she was right.

She was right. That was me in my 20s. And then I just slowly learned how to really cherish being human and cherish cherish connecting with other humans in ways that I never would have predicted from that earlier crustier version of me. So I've been saved by the ability to read and think and study cool pathways out of crustiness or Frostiness. I really relate to what you just said because it's so much of what I'm learning in the writing of my second like full proper book is is That I wasn't doing the stuff I wrote about in the first book And so it's like you with those research papers piling up on your desk Right, you can know this stuff intellectually and it's different from really

Right. You can know this stuff intellectually and it's different from really practicing. I mean, that's, you know, people always say that about meditation, you know, you can't just talk about it, you have to practice it, but same with all of this. I mean, it's, we can get really egghead and about it as opposed to really grounded and, you know, living the path. So it's cool. I look forward to your next book. I look forward to being done with it. Well, it was a pleasure, Professor, to connect with you. I know we've been working on this for a long time to make the timing work and it was well worth the wait. I really, really, really got a lot out of this. And so thank you. Well, I appreciate your interest and I love that you're interested in, you know, not the sound bite versions, but the, you know, this is how I think about it version. So it's

a great context to be able to talk about these things. So thank you for creating it. Thanks again to Barbara Fredrickson, great to talk to her. And don't forget, we're going to do part two of this series on social connection, coming up on Wednesday. We've got this incredible professor from Yale, her name is Marissa King. And she's going to talk a lot about the sort of practicality of creating a personal and professional networks, which again, as I mentioned at the top of the show, and she cops to this. So some of us feel like it's a little icky to be intentionally or purposely trying to make friends or trying to network. But she's got really good research on the benefits of networking and the best way to do

it. And again, of course, we're going to talk about this within the context of COVID where everything just seems harder. So that's coming up on Wednesday. Also some exciting news before I let you go. This podcast has been nominated for two webby awards for the uninitiated. The webbies have been celebrating the best of the internet for the last 25 years. And this year, the 10% happier podcast has been nominated in two categories. Best interview

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We've put direct links within the show notes of today's episode. Thank you for your support. One more item of business, and it is an invitation for you to participate in this show. In June, we're going to be launching a special series of podcast episodes focusing on anxiety, something I'm sure many of us are way too familiar with. In this series, you'll become intimately familiar with the mechanics of anxiety, how and why it shows up, and what you may be doing to feed it unconsciously. We're going to teach you how to have a realistic view of your anxiety and to increase your ability

to cope with challenging situations. You're going to learn tools for examining and overcoming your own particular anxiety feedback loops while building the skills of mindfulness compassion and bravery along the way. And this is where you come in. We'd love to hear from you with your questions about anxiety that experts will answer during our series on the podcast. So whether you're struggling with social anxiety, anxiety about sort of re-entering the world

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