Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - 480: What is Sadness Good For? | Susan Cain

Episode Date: August 1, 2022

Many of us may have a reflexive reaction when we notice we’re feeling down: we want it to go away. Maybe we think something is wrong with us and we automatically self medicate in any number of ways. But how do we square this with the fact that many of us may also really like sad movies and music? And making things even more complex, how do we compute the fact that the universe is constantly handing us opportunities to feel awe, gratitude, and joy, often at the exact same moment that sadness arises?What’s going on with this complex and conflicted relationship we have with a perfectly normal human emotion?Our guest today Susan Cain has written a whole book about this called Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole. In this book, she explores how the capacity to tune in to the inherent joy and sadness of the human situation can be a superpower for connection.In this episode we talk about:Whether bittersweetness is a skill you can honeThe relationship between bittersweetness and the Buddhist concept of impermanenceWhy we feel embarrassed about discussing sorrow and longing How sadness can be transmuted into creativity, and how that creativity can lead us out of sadnessAnd how America, a country founded on so much heartache, turned into, in her words, “a culture of normative smiles”Full Shownotes: https://www.tenpercent.com/podcast-episode/susan-cain-480See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This is the 10% happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hey gang, this conversation got me thinking in a whole new way about sadness. Maybe it's just me, but I think many of us have a reflexive reaction when we notice we're feeling down. We want it to go away. Maybe we think something's wrong with us, maybe we automatically self-medicate in any number of ways. But generally, I think many of us just don't like it.

However, how do we square this with the fact that many of us may also really like sad movies or sad music? What's going on with this complex and conflicted relationship we seem to have with a perfectly normal human emotion. Making things even more complex, how do we compute the fact that the universe is constantly handing us opportunities, often at the exact same moment, to feel things like, oh, gratitude and joy. Susan Cain has a lot to say about this. She's written a whole book about it, In fact, it's called Bittersweet. Susan is perhaps best known for her first book, Quiet, a monster

bestseller about introverts. I have to say I'm slightly surprised in a little bit sheepish about the fact that I haven't had Susan on the show before. This may reflect a bit of a blind spot for me because I think I'm probably pretty clearly at extrovert, although I may have some introverted tendencies and any event better late than never. There's actually quite a bit of overlap between her first book and this one. She argues that both introversion and bitter sweetness, the capacity to tune into the inherent joy and sadness of the human situation, she argues that both of these are hidden human superpowers. In this conversation, she makes, in my opinion, a very compelling case about the upside of sadness.

If you can't be okay with your own sadness, it can be difficult for you to be okay with the suffering of other people. And that capacity for compassion and connection is a key ingredient. We know this from the science, a key ingredient for human flourishing. Susan makes the point that since men are often not socialized to be in touch with our emotions in this way, that cuts us off from a key source of psychological well-being. She also makes some rather astute observations about how our cultures generalized discomfort with sadness can fuel the noxious dysfunction that we see in our polarized public discourse.

We also talk about whether bittersweetness is a skill you can hone, the relationship between bittersweetness and the Buddhist emphasis on impermanence, why we feel embarrassed many of us about discussing sorrow and longing, how sadness can be transmuted into creativity and how that creativity can in turn lead us out of sadness, and how America, a country founded on a whole lot of heartache, turned into, in her words, a culture of normative smiles. 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%.com, all one word spelled out. Okay, on with the show. questions that are in my head. Like, it's only fans only bad, where the memes come from. And where's Tom from MySpace? Listen to Baby, this is Kiki Palmer on Amazon Music, or wherever you get your podcast. I'm still a slightly surprised slash embarrassed that we haven't had you on earlier, but here we are. Let's start with a very obvious question, which is, what is bitter sweetness? Well, it's a good question because we think

of bitter sweetness as being about specific moments in time, like when you're walking a child down the aisle or high school graduation or something like that. But I also talk about bittersweetness as a way of being in the world, a kind of recognition of the way that joy and sorrow are forever paired, and that everyone and everything we love most in this world is not going to be here forever. But that somehow the more you become attuned

to these truths, to these realities, the more dialed in you become to a kind of joy at the beauty of the world. So it's about all of that. It's about the joy in the sorrow and I'm kind of living fully in both those spaces. Would it be safe to sum that up at least in part as having a sort of a keen eye for impermanence? Yeah, I would say that's a big, big part of it, but it's not the only part of it

because it's also about having a keen eye just for the sorrows of the world along with the joys. And it's funny, I find myself emphasizing sorrows more when I talk about this and even in the subtitle of the world along with the joys. And it's funny, you know, I find myself emphasizing Saro's more when I talk about this and even in the subtitle of the book, I talk about Saro and longing. But the really, the only reason I'm emphasizing that is just because our culture is so averse to talking about those things. But it's equally about joy and beauty. It's really about the way that these things coexist forever and always. the way that these things coexist forever and always. So I can think of two use cases at least for the concept of bittersweetness. One would be anytime I look at my child, I know you have children too, and you think about

how this was a completely different human six months ago. And of course that pace of change is going to continue. Another might be, well, I'm having a great day, but I'm also aware that there's a war raging in Ukraine right now. Yeah, those are such brilliant examples that you just chose because I think they get at the full gamut of this experience, you know, with the first one being how it shows up in our every day, most personal lives. And then with the second example that you gave about the war in Ukraine alongside your great day, being about just like how to make sense of what

it's like to live in a world where these things coexist all the time. And at any given moment, you know, you could find yourself on the joy or the sorrow end of the spectrum, but they're always co-existent for humans in general, somewhere. So those are fantastic examples. And then in the book, I also have a quiz that I developed. It's on my website too for people who just want to kind of take it quickly. It takes like one or two minutes. But it basically asks you questions that help you determine kind of how prone you are to this bittersweet state of existence. And it's questions like, do you draw comfort or inspiration from a rainy day? Do you find yourself reacting very intensely to the beauty of music or art or nature? Do you tear

up from a touching TV commercial? And these kinds of questions, like the more you tend to answer yes to them, the more you tend to be attuned to this kind of bittersweet view of the world. So I developed this quiz along with the psychologists, Scott Barry Kaufman and David Yaden at Johns Hopkins. And we did all kinds of measurements and found that people who score high on the bittersweet quiz also tend to score high on states of awe and wonder and transcendence and on a trait called high sensitivity that was a trait that was discovered by the psychologist, Elaine Aaron, which kind of measures just how sensitive you are in general. So highly sensitive people just react very intensely to the good and

the bad of life. So that's really correlated with this tendency. And then the other high correlation was with creativity, which was really interesting. So are you arguing that there's something missing in our lives if we are not prone to the bittersweet A and then B is bittersweetness a skill or a tendency that we can tune up and train? I would say that some people are kind of sort of enter the world predisposed to this bittersweet state, and I'm guessing that's about 15 to 20% of people, and I say that because that's the number of people who are born with a highly sensitive temperament, and then there's some unknown number of people who get there after experiencing all of life's different trials and triumphs. So there's a lot of people

like who've been writing me letters since the book came out saying, you know, I wasn't necessarily bittersweet in the first place, but you know, in my 40s, 50s, 60s, I've had a whole number of life experiences and that's really shifted my perspective. But I'm not arguing that someone who scores zero is broken in any way, not at all. It's more that this way of being is a kind of superpower that our culture doesn't tend to foster that for those who are oriented this way, they have access to a kind of gateway to creativity and

to human connection that they're probably not aware of. It's not like that's the only gateway. It's just that this is a really potent one that you can trace in our literary and artistic and wisdom traditions for going back thousands of years and across the globe. So it's one potent way of being that we tend not to pay enough attention to. That's really what I would say. And do you think it's a potent way of being that is something we can get better at and should get better at?

Yeah, absolutely. It is a skill that you can get better at partly through just living more and acquiring all kinds of life experiences. But it's also through becoming more attuned to the impermanence of life, to experiences of beauty everywhere you find them, to the sorrows that surround us, you know, even things like listening to certain kinds of music can really take you to that space. So yes, it's absolutely something that people can, if you think of it as a spectrum,

people can move farther along that spectrum, for sure. I don't know why this is coming up from me, but I'll just try it on you. I had dinner last night with some friends to guys, and we were doing like, it was just like traditional, you know, male shit talking, and I really like this thesis you're exploring in the book, and I'm just wondering like,

could I have talked about this with them? And I guess it's leading me to a question around how you think traditional masculinity for all of its positive and noxious ingredients interacts with what you're describing here vis-a-vis bittersweetness. Oh, wow. That's such an interesting question. And I get why you're asking it because I would say, if you look at the spectrum of high sensitivity that we were just talking about a minute ago, there are plenty of men who

are highly sensitive. And it's more complicated, I believe, in our culture to be a highly sensitive male than a highly sensitive female. And I think the same is true for similar reasons, you know, of this concept of bitter sweetness, you know, to talk about really loving to be with a rainy day or really loving minor key music or that kind of thing. It's just a little more complicated alongside traditional ideas of masculinity. Having said that, I have heard from so many men since the book came out, especially creative men, like men and creative fields really, really resonate with it. I mean, of course, when they

write me a letter, they're talking only to me. They're not saying this, you know, dinner with their buddies, but I had the feeling from the way they were talking that the way I've heard from don't feel is complicated about expressing these things, because they see it as part of their creative selves. So there's probably different lanes that men travel down where these kinds of ideas are more or less acceptable to talk about publicly. Yeah, I mean, I would talk about it. I'm a grown-ass man.

I'm almost 51 years old, and you know, I might take some shit from my friends for talking about liking rainy days But I don't really care. I think it might be harder for a teenage boy or somebody in their 20s to bring this up when you know Their buddies would rather talk about video games or whatever and yet I think and this is a subject that we've Delved into many times here on the show This armor that many men don cuts us off from really valuable parts of the human experience. Oh my gosh, absolutely. You know, it's not only true for men. I mean, I felt this even as the person writing this book, there was like a big sense of

embarrassment about writing about the subject of sorrow and longing. It's just like, you know, there's something almost distasteful about it, I would say, in our culture to talk about these things too much. So women feel it also, but one of the big arguments that I'm making is exactly what you just said, which is when we can't talk about these things, it cuts us off, it cuts us off from our feelings, but it also cuts us off from each other because we're not telling the truth to each other about what our life experiences actually are, which is a constant interplay of good things and bad things and joyful moments and sorrowful moments and all the rest. And one of the main gateways that we have as humans for connecting is to share sorrows with each other.

I mean, it's kind of what we do. And you know this, if you look at the music that we listen to, why do we listen to so many sad songs? It's like the artist is telling us, oh, that way that you felt, I felt that way too. And so have all the other people listening. And you're kind of united around that for that moment. But we need to open that up so that there are spaces for doing that that are not just when you're in the concert hall listening to the song.

You've talked about yourself there a little bit and you've also invoked music. So let me just go into your biography just for a second and get you to talk a little bit about why and how you got interested in the subject and as I understand it, at least in part it's related to your interest in music. So yeah, I have loved music all my life and I love all kinds of music, you know, dance music, upbeat music, but I have been especially always drawn to minor key sad music.

And I had this one experience when I was in law school, I was in my 20s, and some friends came by my dorm to pick me up for class. We were all gonna go to class together and they found me blasting out some sad music on my stereo and they thought that was hilarious. And we're joking around about why I was listening to this funeral music.

And at the time, I just kind of laughed and went off to class. And that was the end of that. Except I couldn't stop thinking about, well, number one, why it was that that was such a fitting subject for a joke in our culture. But more, what it is about the music itself that I love so much. And I started researching it and found, of course, that I'm not alone in this, many, many people love sad music. And the people whose favorite songs are their happiest

listen to their favorites about 175 times on their playlist. But the people who love sad songs listen about 800 times. And they tell researchers exactly what I've been experiencing, that the music makes them feel like connected, other people connected to the sublime, connected to humanity. There's this sense of joy and transcendence and love that comes from listening to it. So it was like this whole constellation of experiences that didn't seem to add up to just the word sad, that's in sad music. And that's really what got me on this whole quest in the first place of figuring out what is that all about.

And if there's so much more to sad music than what meets the eye, there are more to these emotions and to these states of being than we usually let ourselves see. Use the phrase connected to the sublime. And I, you know, I like sad songs too, and I like all kinds of music, but I do like sad songs. I actually recently for a guest because of that,

I've made a playlist of my favorite sort of downbeat songs. So I get it, but I get it on some level. I don't know that I would say my enjoyment was related to being connected to the sublime, it's just that they sound good. But this may be another, as if we needed any example of my obtuseness, but please explain why you go all the way to the sublime. Well, before I do this question, I'm just gonna say like one of the reasons I've been listening to your show for such a long time and really appreciate it is I'm kind of by nature, a skeptic like you and I'm very deeply agnostic by nature and yet I

Started to realize that the experience that I have when I listen to this kind of music is I think akin to what many people are talking about when they describe God. And as I started to like look through this tradition, what I realized is that the mystical side of almost all religions is kind of expressing a deeply human desire for a more perfect and beautiful world than the one in which we live now. And you see this like in all the different religions, there's the longing for Mecca, the longing for Zion, the longing for the Garden of Eden, the Sufis call it the longing for the beloved of the soul. And in religious terms, that of course is talking about the longing for union with the divine. But I think we can understand

it in non-religious terms too, that there's a kind of just longing for everything that is truth and beauty and goodness and love to a degree that doesn't exist in this world. And you see all the secular manifestations of it too, right? Like there's in the Wizard of Oz, you have Dorothy, who's longing for somewhere over the rainbow. In children's literature, the protagonist are orphans, right? So Harry Potter enters the scene at the exact moment that he becomes an orphan, and he's now in the state of longing for these parents who he'll never be able to remember. And what all of these different traditions teach, all these wisdom traditions is that the more tuned in you are to this longing, call it for the divine or for these other

manifestations, the more tuned in you are to this longing, the closer you are to attaining that which you long for. So like, you know, Rumi, the 12th century Sufi poet, so many of his poems are about like instructing the reader to have longing, you know, be thirsty, he says. So I think that's what I personally am sensing when I listen to music and talk about the sublime. I think it's tuning for me and for many listeners of sad music. It's tuning into that fundamentally human state of longing for this other place. But I think we all have different gateways for getting to that. And so one of the things I ask people to do in the book is kind of start noticing all those different gateways and which ones speak to them,

because those are some of the greatest experiences we have in this life. And do you think longing for a more peaceful world, a better relationship with the people you love? Do you think, and have you seen that this longing actually gets you closer to that for which you are longing? Yeah, so I'm not talking about like longing for you know material things or in the Buddha sense you would say you shouldn't be craving, you shouldn't be longing, but I'm not talking about longing for you know sort of everyday things.

I'm talking more about longing for the ultimate states to which humans most aspire, which is probably love at the end of the day. And yeah, I do think there's something about leaning into that and understanding that that's what matters most to you that is going to help us make the adjustments we need to make in our lives, to get to a place of more love,

let's say, you're reminding yourself of how much you value it, and you're kind of living in that plane. Yeah, I'm just thinking about loving kindness meditation, which many people myself included don't like, at least initially, because it feels a little forced or saccharin, but you're deliberately attempting to train the brain and the mind really attempting to train the brain and the mind to inhabit these states of well-wishing benefits, etc. love. And I'm wondering whether there's a connection between the longing you experience in music or maybe in nature, etc., etc.

This tuning into bitter sweetness is there some sort of connection point with traditional forms of meditation that are designed to make us more loving, friendly or cooler people, cooler, by which I don't mean like you're wearing like nice clothes. I mean cooler, like easier to be around. So it's funny you asked that question because I actually went to study loving kindness meditation

with Sharon Salzberg as part of my exploration in this book. And one of the things that really struck me is that the phrases that she first taught me to say were phrases like, may I be safe, may I be happy, may I be healthy, may I live with ease, you know, and then to wish all those things for other people too. But then she told me that those were not actually the original phrases that she had learned in Burma, where she first learned this. The phrases there were kind of more in the negative. They were more like, may I be free from danger, may I be free from mental suffering, May I be free from physical suffering?"

And she said when she first came and taught that in California, students were lining up to complain that they didn't want to be thinking about negative things like danger and mental suffering. So she actually flipped it around for the more American sensibility. But I do think there's something in those original terms that kind of locks in with that state of explicit longing for you know a better more perfect more beautiful world that Meta loving kindness meditation helps us access You've said that you were an agnostic going into this book and that something has changed in doing this writing and reporting.

What exactly has changed? Yeah, you know, it's hard to put it into words because I'm just as much of an agnostic now, as I was before in terms of, you know, actual sort of intellectual beliefs. But the best way I can think of to describe it is, it was one parable that I came across that I wrote about in the book. But the best way I can think of to describe it is it was one parable that I came across that I wrote about in the book. It's a chastity parable and it talks about this rabbi who has in his congregation an old man

who seems very indifferent to his talk of God and like very bored by the undismasth of the whole thing. And then the rabbi hums for this man a tune of yearning and the man listens to it. And he says, oh, you know, now I understand what you were trying to teach all this time because I feel this intense longing to be united with God. And I guess what I would say is that going on this whole journey has just made me very aware of that experience and how often it comes to me. And I have stepped aside at least for now from the question of labeling exactly what that experience means other than to say,

it's one of the most meaningful things that happens to me and I believe to many other people. So I'm just much more attuned to that and kind of aware of that dimension of experience. And it's funny because the writer, CS Lewis, talked about this throughout his whole career. He was like consumed by the state that he called the inconsolable longing for, we know not what. And he ended up like later in his life coming to the conclusion that he said something like, if you can be hungry, it means there's such a thing as food. And if we're thirsty, it's because there's such a thing as water. So if I have this intense

longing for another world, it means that that other world exists and that the forms of beauty that we see in this world, like music and literature and things like that, that those are only symbols of that other world as opposed to the thing in and of itself. So he reached this explicitly religious end point from following this state of longing that so many artists and writers have been talking about for thousands of years. He reached that place. I don't.

To me, I think of religion and these other manifestations as being one and the same. And I just, I don't really know what they mean. And that's kind of as far as I've gotten right now. But just to put a fine point on it, and maybe you don't want to put a fine point on it, which is fine. But you're an agnostic who yearns for oneness with a God that you're not sure exists. Let me say it this way. The Sufis use the word Allah for God, but they also have this formulation of the beloved of the soul. And that feels much more descriptive to me of what

my experience is because it can coexist with my agnosticism, if that makes sense. I don't think it has to make sense fully, but if I were to try to put some words on it, it will be clumsy. I guess I'm interpolating back to an experience I often get on retreats, silent meditation retreats, which is that I experienced this intense homesickness, which recalls how I felt when I was at summer camp as a kid where I would get really intense homesickness.

I'm just wondering if there's something in that, and the CS Lewis quote about the inconsolable longing for we know not what, it's like, I don't know, I wouldn't describe it as a unity with the divine, I would say, maybe it's like some sort of full beyond words, connection, comfort, belonging, something in that zone. Yeah, absolutely. I think at the end of the day, it's like a longing for,

as you said, like a full connection and full love. And it's like, you could explain that in psychoanalytic terms of it being like a longing for the womb or a longing for the love one experiences as an infant in the mother's arms, or you could give it a religious explanation. But at the end of the day, I believe that all humans have that kind of deep homesickness and yearning to move forward to a greater state of belonging. I mean, even in the Odyssey, Homer's Odyssey, it starts with you, Lizzie's full of homesickness, the way you described a summer camp. He's homesick for Ithaca, his home

that he isn't seeing, I think in like 17 years. And he's seized by what the ancient Greeks called Potos, P-O-T-H-O-S, which means kind of longing for that, which is unattainable, you know, everything true and beautiful, that's unattainable. And it's understood that it's that homesickness that propels him on the epic adventure. And so I think that's really the story of our emotional and spiritual lives, that there's a kind of homesickness with which we are born into this world

that propels us on the adventure of what we're most seeking. And maybe we all have our own answers for what we're most seeking, but I think they all look pretty similar at the end of the day. And it's funny, by the way, that you go back to summer camp because I do that too. Like when I think about this state, I keep having memories of summer camp and that kind of homesickness.

I think there's something very primal about that experience that really taps into this human essence. I think that's true. For those of us who've been lucky or unlucky enough to go to summer camp. And so we've kind of skipped ahead in what I was thinking we would do in the order of operations here, which is totally fine. But we've landed on some of the at least one of the conclusions that you land on in the book. When you list the sort of teachings of bitter sweetness or the bitter sweet teachings, number one is follow your longing

where it's telling you to go, which I didn't understand when I first laid eyes on it, but I'm thinking that maybe I now do given what you just said about Ulysses, which is that perhaps this nameless longing, or even maybe even specific longings in some cases, can be that sand in the shell of an oyster and might be sending us off in fruitful, maybe even beautiful directions. And as they say, that's why all the protagonists of the children's stories are always orphans. You know, it's like there's some universal truth there about you start in a state of longing and incompleteness, and that's what propels you on the journey. In the book, I tell a story of a time

when I was seized by that kind of longing at one particular stage of my life and the effect that it had on me. And this was a situation where I had been on, well, I'd wanted to be a writer since I was like four, but I ended up becoming a corporate lawyer for all these years and I was on partner track and I really wanted to make partner. And then this day came when a senior partner in my firm came into my office and basically sat down and said, you know, we're not putting you up for a partner. And I received those words as if it was a big catastrophe.

Like I was really upset about it, but I left the firm right after that. And then I ended up a few weeks after leaving the firm, also leaving a seven year relationship that I had been in that had always felt wrong. And so I was like floating around in the state of free fall with no love and no career and no place to live because I had moved out of the apartment where I'd been living. And I fell into this relationship with a guy who I became really quite obsessed with. He was a very lit up kind of person. He was a lyricist and a musician. And it was one of those obsessions that you just can't unlock from. I like there was nothing I could do to escape from it. Until one day I was talking to a friend of mine and regaling her with the hundredth story about this guy. And she said to me, she's like, if you're

this obsessed with someone, it's because he represents something that you're longing for. So what are you longing for? And just that simple question unlocked everything, because it was so clear suddenly, I realized that this guy represented my longing for the world of art and being a writer and all these things that I had always wanted from the very start. And it sounds almost too cinematic to believe, but the obsession kind of instantly melted away once I saw that and I started writing for real and that was that. So that was just one, that was kind of one way station in my life where really kind of being seized by such a deep and uncomfortable longing, but then really facing it brought me closer to that direction of belonging or being where you should be or whatever name you want to give to it. Coming up Susan Kane on how to train yourself to be more bittersweet and the line between bit between bitter sweetness and depression after this.

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I know it sounds like many of us develop this trade just through living and the inevitable collisions with impermanence. But if people are compelled by what you've said about bitter sweetness being a secret superpower and are interested in training it. What do you recommend as modalities? So I recommend tuning into beauty in a very proactive way, and starting your day with beauty. Rumi actually has a poem about this. I don't remember the exact words, but it's basically about the way he says every day we wake up empty and frightened, he says. But instead of going straight

to our study and beginning work, his version is we should pull down a musical instrument. And he says, let the beauty we love be what we do. And I have really taken those words to heart. So the whole time I was writing this book, I started following art feeds on social media and every morning I would start my workday by picking a favorite piece of art and posting it on social media together with a poem or something like that that I love that went along with the art and that ended up attracting this whole community of people who love beauty and art and are dialed into it the way I want to be and That has been such a grounding experience. And I think it's something that we can all do.

And by the way, we also know from the research that you don't have to actually create art, just consuming art, like looking at a painting or listening to music you love or whatever it is, activates the reward centers and our brains, activates the feeling of being in love. It's like a deeply, deep and positive experience. So I would suggest starting the day that way and really being attuned to it. And throughout the day, just to kind of be attuned to how miraculous everything around

us is, you know, whether it's the trees outside your window or whatever it is for you, but to really pay attention to those miracles. And then I would say to look for those places of a kind of higher longing wherever you find them. And I guarantee if you start listening to music now, after thinking with this framework, you're not going to only be dividing music into like, you know, upbeat music versus sad music. You'll see that so much of music is expressing this nameless longing. Like probably 75% of it is doing that.

So tuning into that, and then I'll give you one other practice, which is something called expressive writing, and that comes from the work of James Pena Baker, who's a psychologist at UT Austin. And he has found that the simple act of writing down things that bother us is incredibly liberating. He did one experiment, for example, where he took a group of 50-something engineers who had been laid off from their jobs, and they were quite depressed about it. He had half of them start their day by just spending two or three minutes just writing down whatever was in their minds. They don't have to write it well, you could just write it out and rip

it up. And then the other half were the control group, and they just wrote down what they were wearing that morning or something. And he found that the group who wrote down what they were truly feeling, and especially the things that bothered them, they were vastly more likely to have found new work several months later. They had lower blood pressure, they had a greater sense of well-being, just improved markers all the way across the board. And he's done study after study like this. So, this is to say that these cultural precepts that we get of like don't

think too much about the stuff that's bothering you, you don't want to wallow, you don't want to be sucked in, it's not always good advice. I mean, it's true that we don't want to wallow, but that doesn't mean turning away from it completely. It more means not being afraid to engage with it. And this is one really easy practice that people can do without being afraid of wallowing because the whole thing is done in like three minutes. I want to come back to wallowing and where the line is between bitter sweetness

and depression in a minute, but just a comment and then a question. The comment is, I think similar to this expressive writing, I was texting this morning with one of the guys I was having dinner with last night and I know I kind of unfairly characterized this guy's dinner last night as you know barbarians, but at dinner we did talk about mental health issues and I was texting with one of the guys this morning because I knew that he had an appointment with a psychiatrist that I had introduced him to and I was reminding him to let it all out,

like say all the ugliest stuff to this shrink because he can't help you unless he hears it all, which was warmly received. The text was, I don't know about the ugliness, how that was received by the aforementioned shrink pipe. I'm assuming warmly as well. Anyway, does any of that land for you based on what you just said about expressive writing? Absolutely. Because there's really no way to work through whatever issues are bothering us if you can't actually name what they are. The naming is the first step. But then it's not only the naming, it's kind of like being able to actually accept them and engage with them and know that sometimes

it's going to feel overwhelming. There's this particular branch of therapy that's really intriguing called acceptance and commitment therapy. It was coined by a guy named Stephen Hayes. He talks about the need to accept negative feelings and accept whatever's happened to us that's bothering us and know that sometimes it's going to feel like altogether too much. But then the next stage beyond that, it's not only accepting it. It's also the part that he calls commitment. And commitment means that you take the things that are bothering you as signposts of what actually matters most to you. So if you're really upset,

let's say, about a breakup, that's telling you how much love matters to you. And it's a kind of sign to lean into that area of your life. And I think we see people doing this unconsciously in so many different ways. You know, like if you look after 9-11, suddenly lots of people in the states who are signing up to become firefighters and teachers. And in the wake of the pandemic, you have lots of people applying to medical school and nursing school. So I think there's something in us that naturally really wants to kind of take stock

of what has been hurtful and then turn in the direction of meaning with it, and kind of do something with it and turn it into something else. I think that makes a lot of sense. So that was the comment, which I turned into a question, but I actually had another question, which was as it pertains to the development of bittersweetness as skill, and you talked about music and expressive writing.

And so I'm going to describe something now that I see happening in my own mind and see if you think I'm making an appropriate connection here, a couple of years ago I was introduced to a kind of different way to meditate than the way in which I had been practicing for a long time. Joseph Goldstein is one of my main teachers, and often you start with just watching the breath and then every time you get distracted, you start again. And then once you've got a little bit of a base of concentration, you might open up into what's called open awareness where you're noting whatever comes up through your mind, sensation, pain, anger, thinking, planning, whatever. So I did that for a long time and then I took a retreat with the guy named Alexis Santos

who's been on the show before a couple of times. His teacher is a Burmese guy named Sidad Tajanía. Tajanía's got a style that's way simpler. He basically has you repeat these three phrases in the mind. One is, are you aware, just using that as a way to wake you up to are you taking in whatever's happening right now? The second is, what's the attitude in the mind right now, which is basically a way to get you to think about or tune into whether you're relating to whatever you're aware of with a version or desire.

Are you trying to push it away or grab more of it? Or are you numbing out completely? That's the third would be sort of delusion. And then, and this is where I'm going with this, the third phrase is, this is nature, which is very deep observation. Whatever's happening in your mind right now isn't some bespoke handmade creation of yours. It's just nature. This is the universe knowing itself. Also part of nature is relentless change. And the more I've practiced with that phrase, the more I,

and I think just this comes with meditation generally and it comes with age, I am just seeing how, it really just throws you up against your own finitude, your own mortality and realizing that the pregame is over, that this is, you know, at 51 almost, and my time is limited, especially watching my parents get older and decline. And so this is nature. I feel when I'm watching my son play in the pool

or watching what may be one of my, you know, final 20 or 30, I hope summers come and go that it simultaneously gives a lot of vitality to what's happening right now, but there's a lot of fear and sadness that also comes up with it at the same time. Okay, so I just said a lot of words there, but does any of that land for you? Oh, yeah, absolutely. What I hear with it, this is nature is, I think this is what you're saying. You can tell me if you agree with this, that it's giving you permission to accept that everything that you're

feeling and everything that you have experienced and will experience is part of nature. So it's not to be resisted. It's just, this is what life is. This is who we are. This is what nature is. Is that part of what you're feeling, like a kind of allowance, a kind of permission to go there? Yeah.

It gets a couple of things. It's not only not to resist it, it's also not to take it personally, to see that this isn't yours. Nothing is yours, really. You can't claim any thought that's come up. You can't claim your sense of being you. You can't claim your anger. There's nothing to hold on to. And the holding on is just going to be a source of pain. And there's that. And then there's also seeing that, to. And the holding on is just going to be a source of pain. And there's that, and then there's also seeing that, of course, everything in nature is dying and being reborn all the time.

And you're not exempt from that. And just being aware of, especially the latter, throws me into a space of what I would consider bitter sweetness of. Wow, it's sweet that I'm awake and aware, not taking whatever I'm experiencing for granted, but it's also kind of bitter that time is passing quickly. Yeah, yeah. And do you feel that the more you get into that kind of state of mind, the more acceptance

that you have of it? I guess I feel like when I'm able to get to those states, I feel less of the bitterness of things like time passing quickly, you know, or days being numbered or that kind of thing. Because I don't know, I think I get much more into a state of, well, this is just the way that it is.

So therefore it feels less upsetting. Yes, although I think you're more evolved human than me, but I still do resist it But I think for me the upside is not so much acceptance although there is some of that But it is also just much more ferocity in my dedication to being awake to whatever's happening right now Yeah, I you know, I had an experience like that or really an ongoing set of experiences like that as I was like that, or really an ongoing set of experiences like that, as I was writing this book and thinking about all these things, and I mean, I know you're aware of the stoic idea of memento Mori, which is basically the same thing, you know, to remember death and to remember that everything is constantly changing and impermanent and our days are numbered. And I started really doing that in an active way.

And I started really doing that in an active way. And it immediately had all kinds of impacts on my life, like really positive impacts, like at the time my kids were still quite young. And we had this very elaborate bedtime ritual that we were doing, which I loved and which they loved. And it was the time of day that they were most likely to, you know, really open up about whatever was on their minds at that moment. And yet, before I was doing this practice, I would bring my cell phone with me to those bed times. And I would sometimes look and check my email while I was there. And when I started doing this, and it wasn't like a whole elaborate practice, it was more like just saying things to myself like, you know, you may not be here tomorrow or they may not be here tomorrow

We have no idea. Just that one thought. It didn't upset me. It just shifted my perspective Like I put the cell phone down immediately and no longer felt any pull to it Like it was just the cell phone was completely beside the point One things have been framed that way and I think that was just one example of the way in which that kind of mind shift can be so transformative to the way we live. You know, it just sort of happened instantly. Yes, it goes back to what I was saying before

about the molecular understanding that the pregame is over, like this is what you've got. So you can either bluff and distract your way through bedtime or you can be there for it, but you are not getting it back but you're not getting it back. You're not getting it back, yeah. And it may not be like, you know, 20 more of them or hundreds more. It might be one more. You just don't know. And there's something about that that like, if you're not looking at that from the perspective of a spiritual tradition and you're just looking at it from the

perspective of American culture, I don't know about you, but I immediately feel this thing of like, oh gosh, you're not supposed to say that. It sounds so morbid. And it's not morbid. It's really just a neutral perspective shift. But it can get morbid. There's a way in which you can take bitter sweetness and run it right into the morass of depression. So where do you draw the line and how do you walk the line? Yeah, and I'm glad you asked that because we know we were talking at the beginning about the bittersweet quiz that we did and all the different correlations that we found with creativity and awe and wonder and all these good things. We also did find not a strong correlation, but a mild one with anxiety and depression. And I think that's not so

surprising really, it's kind of embedded in your question, right, that like you could kind of take it too far, or like wait into sorrow and longing and not come out again. And I think that the answer is, as I said at the beginning, like what bittersweetness is really about, it's not only about sorrow and longing, it's also about sort of being fiercely connected to joy and to beauty and human connection. So to really focus on that, even as you are giving yourself the allowance to feel the difficult things that you feel.

One of the things that I'm really hoping might happen in the field of psychology is to start distinguishing between these states of like a kind of happy melancholy, you know, a bittersweetness on the one hand and depression on the other hand, because right now, there's no language for doing that. If you look up melancholy, let's say, in the psychology databases, it just takes you straight to clinical depression. So this whole state that we've been talking about, and that I've been trying to describe, is nowhere documented explicitly in the psychological literature.

You find it in the wisdom traditions and you find it in art and literature and poetry. You don't find it really in psychology. And that needs to change. And there are people who are starting to work on that change. You see it kind of bubbling up in the field of positive psychology. There are people who are calling for a kind of 2.0 version that makes space for the dark and the light of life to go together. But that's a distinction we really need to be working on.

Because right now it's like, it's either depression on the one hand or optimistic gratitude at all times on the other hand. And there's a vast state that's in between that that we need to be making space for. That makes a ton of sense. In your life, how do you walk the line, though, between these two states, the healthy sadness and the quagmire sadness of depression?

I don't know. I guess I've been lucky so far. It's not something I've had to struggle with. If I had to describe myself, I'm like a happy melancholic. That's what I've always been. So I've always had this tendency in a melancholy, and I've always been sort of fundamentally happy or happy sad, you could say. And I guess when things do feel really difficult and I've been through

stuff like everybody else, I think I always turn in the direction of connection. When I go to automatically, when you ask this question, is that EM Forster quote, only connect, he says, that's the whole quote, only connect. And I really do believe that that's the answer. And that connection takes a lot of different forms. So it could be kind of the obvious thing of, you know, hey, call your best friend and talk with her or something. But it's also the connection that you feel when you read someone's writing that you really connect with and maybe they lived 2000 years ago.

So they're not even alive anymore. But the fact that that person has had the exact same experience that you've had 2000 years ago, I find to be so incredibly comforting and uplifting. So that's one way in which it works. But I guess I would say to each person to be really thinking about what are your places where you feel that deepest sense of connection? Coming up Susan talks about toxic positivity and sadness as a secret gateway to creativity, connectivity, and maybe even, and this is her word, transcendence. That's right after this.

I should have asked this question earlier and we might want to call, name this episode after this question that you posed very early in your book. You might have already answered it, but I want to just pose it and see if you have more to say on it because it's such a provocative question. What is sadness good for? I believe the reason we have sadness, like the reason we've evolved to have it in the first place is because it connects us. And you can see this in the way we've evolved.

We've evolved to be acutely attuned to the cries of our vulnerable infants. And from that ability radiates outward, the ability to notice the cries or the distress signals or whatever it is of other beings as well. When we talk about Darwin, everybody talks about survival of the fittest, but the psychologist, Dachr Keltner, makes the point that survival of the kindest

would be equally appropriate because Darwin was this very gentle, melancholic type of person. He was extremely horrified by how cruel and violent nature could be. So he was not blind to any of that. He was totally aware of it. But at the same time, he wrote, I think it was in the Descent of Man, he made the observation that in mammals, the deepest, most instinctive impulse seems to be the feeling of distress upon seeing another being also in distress.

And so then, 150 years later, Jack or Keltner comes along, and he starts tracing how this all plays out in our physiologies. And so, for example, he discovers that the vagus nerve, which is the biggest bundle of nerves in our bodies, it's a very ancient part of us. It controls our breathing and our digestion. And also, when you see somebody in distress, your vagus nerve becomes activated. So it was kind of impulse to notice other people's distress and to want to do something about it.

It's not just like a Sunday school bromide. It's actually like a deep part of who we are. And the whole phrase compassion It doesn't just mean being nice. I mean literally the etymology of it means to suffer with someone and That's what we do naturally So when we ask the question, what is sadness good for? That's what it's for That's why everybody's been complaining. I think about toxic positivity for the last couple of years, because I think we know instinctively that if we're too much hiding behind a perpetually positive face, that it's cutting us off from each other. I want to touch on toxic positivity in a second.

Let me just first go back to a subject we were talking about earlier, which is masculinity, or some people call it toxic masculinity. I have mixed feelings about that phrase because I think there's a lot that's good about masculinity, too. But in any event, just taking us back to masculinity, if what sadness is good for is that it leads you to compassion and connection. I mean, one of the problems with masculinity is if you can't feel or express your sadness, then you limit your capacity for connection and compassion.

And given that connection and compassion are probably the most important ingredients in human happiness, then you are hurting yourself. Am I making appropriate connections here? Yes, extremely appropriate connections. I don't know if tragedy is too big a word to use, but anyway, the tragedy of the limitations that we put on men in this culture, I think it's very difficult. If you're never supposed to express anything of what you really feel, then you can't connect with yourself and you can't connect with others as readily.

That's why we see all these kinds of statistics of like, let's say the situation where a man's wife dies and he finds himself unable to find many connections to replace it Whereas women don't have that problem when they become widows There's so many different manifestations of it But I think we have to get to a place where you can be Strong and tough and masculine and all those things and just tell the truth about what you're feeling like it It's no big deal. That's really the place you're feeling. Like, it's no big deal. That's really the place we should be getting to.

And it's no big deal because this is what humans have always experienced. Which is why, you know, Elyse is like the great cunning warrior hero was crying on a beach for his home and his wife and his son. It's natural. It's nature, for sure. Let's wind down now with going back to toxic positivity. I'm curious, that is something that you sort of invade against in your book. You have a question that leads off chapter five.

How did a nation founded on so much heartache turn into a culture of normative smiles? And so yeah, I hear you when you talk about toxic positivity and I immediately go to everybody's, you know, carefully manicured Instagram pages. But at the same time, like I see a lot of toxic negativity as well. I mean, people are doing an awful lot of sniping and trash talking on social media and cable television and elsewhere these days. But I guess I assume you come down on both of these being a problem. Oh, totally. Yeah, I'm not calling for like negativity of all kinds. I actually think all the sniping and the trash talking comes from the fact that we don't really have a way to just express our sorrows.

And I thought what we really need to do is figure out a forum for the expression of that that's not attached to any kind of policy prescriptions or any kind of politics or anything, but just a place for sharing sorrows in and of themselves. So not outrage, nothing else. I think the sniping is a reflection of our toxic positivity. Hmm. Because the energy doesn't have, That's how you can discharge it. But perhaps the healthiest, almost certainly the healthier alternative would be for all of us to talk about

the stuff that's making us sad because then we could start feeling compassion for one another across tribal gender, racial, and whatever else lines. Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. I think part of the, I mean, obviously all the sniping and the trash talking has many, many different causes. But one of them is that anger and outrage is one of the only socially acceptable fora that we have, especially for men, but I think in general, one of the only socially acceptable

fora that we have for expressing what bothers us. And so it's all coming out through that one narrow channel, but it really wants to come out through a completely different channel. Just finally and closing here, can you please give your book a good plug and anything else you're putting out into the world that you think people might want to access. Oh, sure. Thank you. So I guess I'd say again that the book is about the way in which a bittersweet and even melancholic way of being is a kind of secret gateway to creativity and to connection and even transcendence. And for people who are interested in more of that

and more of everything that I'm doing, I would invite you to come to my website, which is susancane.net. And there's a newsletter there that you can sign up for. And I'm also on LinkedIn and Twitter and Instagram and Facebook. And I'm going to be starting a podcast, which probably launched in about sometime early in 2023, I would say. Nice. Congratulations. Welcome to the weird world of podcast. Thank you. Oh, and I'll say one other thing for people who are

interested in bittersweetness and in quiet, I have new courses that I've developed, which go straight to your phone to your SMS or WhatsApp. So you basically wake up every morning with a text from me where you get a little audio message and written messages with a kind of thought and practice for the day. We didn't get to talk about quiet and there are some pretty profound connections between introversion and bittersweetness and the two books across my mind in the course of doing this interview and this would be a little bit ask backwards but it might be interesting at some point to have you come on and just talk about quiet at

some point. Oh, I would love to do that. Absolutely. Because yeah, that could be a whole hour and a half in and of itself. I'd be happy to do it. In the meantime, Susan Kane. Thank you very much for coming on. Thank you so much, Dan, for having me.

Thank you again to Susan Kane. Thank you as well to everybody who works so hard on this show. Gabrielle Zuckerman, DJ Cashmere, Justine Davy, Lauren Smith, Samuel Johns, and Jen Poient. Also a hearty shout out and salute to the good folks over at Ultraviolet Audio, who do our audio engineering. We'll see you all on Wednesday for a fresh, a brand new episode from the Great Meditation Teacher, Carol Wilson. Hey, hey prime members. You can listen to 10% happier early and ad free on Amazon Music. Download the Amazon Music app today. Or you can listen early and ad free with 1-3-plus in Apple Podcasts.

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