Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - Listen to TED's How to Be a Better Human

Episode Date: June 30, 2023

Check out our friends at How to Be a Better Human podcast, as we take a look within and beyond ourselves.How to Be a Better Human isn’t your average self-improvement podcast. It’s a show that understands that being a human is hard -- because no one tells you how to do it well! Join comedian Chris Duffy as he has conversations with the kind of brilliant experts you see giving TED Talks. Listen as they share how anyone can put big ideas into practice in their own lives, and make them a little less terrible. Because although we do our best to figure out life on our own, we can always use some help. Find How to Be a Better Human wherever you get your podcasts.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Here's the thing about being human. No one tells you how to do it. How to get it right, how to do it better. No one is more knowing how to be a good partner, not terrible parent, a somewhat functional adult. These are all things that we are trying to figure out every single day, and if you're like me, you could probably use a little help. That's where our podcast comes in.

I'm Chris Duffy, host of the Ted Podcasts How to Be a Better Human. How to be a Better Human is a show where we talk to all kinds of leading experts, literally the kind of people who give Ted Docs, and then we ask them how regular people like me can put those big ideas into practice in our lives. So, in the spirit of trying to be a better human, here are four conversations that I think have made me a little less terrible. First up, couples therapist Dr. Orna Garalnik. Despite helping couples in the most challenging parts of their relationships,

Dr. Orna still really believes that love is worth believing in. And she reminded me why she thinks that. Love is kind of one of those things. It's like health, It's like curiosity. It's something that if things are not getting in our way, it's a natural thing that flows out of us. We want to connect. We want to attach.

We want to love. We want to transcend ourselves and care for others. And I do generally, despite everything that we could say to the contrary, I do believe that love prevails. If you are anything like me, and you might be given that you are listening to a podcast about how to be a couple of percentage points happier, you probably don't love sitting with your negative emotions.

I know that I hate this. I am so uncomfortable doing it. But Yale's Dr. Laurie Santos told me that those negative feelings, those tough emotions might actually be the key to happiness. Toxic positivity is real. And I think it honestly, I think it stems from yet another myth that we have about happiness, which is that a good life means being happy all the time, right? If I'm feeling sad or frustrated or angry or anxious or whatever, I've done something wrong, right?

And I need to fix it. And I think this is a myth, right? Emotions are these signals that are telling our body what we should be doing in the future and how we should behave in the future. And negative emotions aren't incredibly important signal, right? Your sadness is telling you that there's something amiss. Your loneliness is telling you that you might need to seek out social connection. Your anger is telling you that something is wrong.

There's an injustice out there that you need to fix. Speaking of negative emotions, one that I struggle with personally a lot is self-doubt. I'm a comedian. I mean, it's practically in the job description. Self-doubt is a prerequisite in many ways, but one of my biggest takeaways from hosting how to be a better human has been that even the world's brightest thinkers, these incredibly successful people, they all doubt themselves sometimes too. They have moments where they're very human. Gloria Chanpacker in our

conversation challenged me to think about self-worth in different way. We get taught in many aspects of our society. Actually, we don't get taught at all how to define our self-worth. I think that's just something that is very nebulous. Where we subliminalally get taught to define our self-worth is through our work and through our job. That's the only language we have for it. It's the only place we focus. And so for many of us who don't have tools or education around mental health or emotional health,

we don't have any other sense of self-worth besides what we do for a living. And so yeah, I think so many people relate to that, myself included Chris, where it's like, I don't even know how to tell you about myself without talking about my work. I've also learned some really practical things from doing this show. Like how to clean my house with Casey Davis.

Casey reminded me that even though we all have limited energy, there are small things that you can do every day to make your life easier. You talk about closing duties. What are closing duties? Can you define that for us? Yes, closing duties is a list of one, two, five things that I can do in under 25 minutes, that I can do every night that makes a functional space for me in the morning. And it comes from the restaurant world, it comes from like the working in customer service, right? There's always the things you got to do before you close up. So this is, you apply that to your mom. Yeah, and typically they're not things that benefit you. Like, I'm not cutting lemons at midnight for my shift.

Like, I'm cutting it for the next shift. And so it's that idea of what can I do as a kindness to mourning me to set her up for success. So if you want to be a better partner or a better person, if you want to dig deep into your self-worth or your own emotions, but you don't know where to start, or if you just need someone to whisper in your ear, hey, it's okay. Leave the mess until tomorrow.

We are here to help. Check out how to be a better human wherever you get your podcasts.