Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - Three Lessons from Happiness Research | Emma Seppälä

Episode Date: March 29, 2021

People in the mindfulness meditation world often note that what we’re teaching is not a breathing exercise; the goal is to just feel the breath as it naturally occurs (if you’ve chosen the breath as the thing you want to focus on). However -- and this is something we haven’t spent much time exploring on the show -- there is a ton of evidence to suggest that actual breathing exercises can also have powerful benefits, physiologically and psychologically. That’s one of the things we’re going to talk about today with Emma Seppälä, who is a Lecturer at the Yale School of Management and Faculty Director of the Yale School of Management’s Women’s Leadership Program. She is also the Science Director of Stanford University’s Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education, and the author of a book called The Happiness Track: How to Apply the Science of Happiness to Accelerate Your Success. As the title of today’s episode suggests, we’re going to talk about three big takeaways from happiness research. One has to do with breathing exercises. The second has to do with the power of nature to impact your mind. And the third has to do with social connection, something many of us are badly missing in this pandemic.  Full Shownotes: https://www.tenpercent.com/podcast-episode/emma-seppala-334 See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Wondery Plus subscribers can listen to 10% Happier early and ad-free right now. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. From ABC, this is the 10% Happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hello, hello. You may have noticed that people in the mindfulness meditation world are often at pains to point out that what we're teaching is not a breathing exercise. The goal is just to feel the breath as it naturally occurs, if you've chosen the breath as the thing you want to focus on. However, and this is not something we've spent much time exploring on this show, there is a ton of evidence to suggest that actual breathing exercises can have powerful benefits physiologically and psychologically. That is one of the things we're going to talk about today with Emma Seppala, who is a lecturer at the Yale School of Management

and faculty director of the Yale School of Management's Women's Leadership Program. She's also the science director of Stanford University's Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education. And she's the author of a book called The Happiness Track, How to Apply the Science of Happiness to Accelerate Your Success. As the title of today's episode suggests, we're going to talk about three big takeaways from happiness research. One has to do with the aforementioned breathing exercises. The other has to do with the power of nature to impact your mind. And the third has to do with social connections, something many of us are sorely lacking in this pandemic. during this recording, my regular mic decided to crap out on me. So we had to call in a backup recording file. So the audio on my sound may not be as rich and baritone as normal, but it's totally fine. But just wanted to call that out before we get to it. So here we go now with Emma Seppala.

Emma, great to see you. Thanks for coming on. Thank you, Dan. It's nice to talk to you again. I know. I haven't seen you in a minute, so it's nice to see you thanks for coming on thank you dan it's nice to talk to you again i know i haven't seen you in a minute so it's nice to see you so so many topics we're going to cover in this interview you suggested we start and i i'm i'm always happy to take your guidance since i know you and trust you you suggested we start with what science is telling us about emotion regulation and resilience. Yeah. So what do we know?

Well, I think it's been a big topic on a lot of people's minds this year, just given the amount of stressful stimuli that have been sent our way during the pandemic and beyond. And what's really interesting is, you know, no matter who you talk to from whatever country, you sort of ask, like, what have you been taught to do with like your big, bad, negative emotions? Inevitably, people will say, well, bottle them up, stuff them down, suppress them, you know, that's kind of the general message that we've received in school, growing up in the workplace, like you're not supposed to let your emotions out. And you know, there's good reason not to always let your emotions out, obviously, you don't want to let your rage out in the workplace or something like that. But

if you look at the research on suppression, which is what most people tend to do, you see that actually it makes things worse. So for example, if you're feeling angry, it already plays a number on your system, like heart rate increases, blood pressure increases, inflammation increases in your body, your stress response is activated. When you suppress, all of those systems actually increase in intensity. So anger already plays a number on your body, but when you suppress it, its negative impact becomes even worse. It's like shaking up a soda bottle.

Does that make sense? It does, but you just said we don't want to let your rage out of the office. So what's the move other than to suppress it? Right. So it's really interesting. You know, another interesting thing about depression, just before I talk about that, so let's say, why do people suppress? Because they're trying to maintain their relationships with other people, right?

It's like, I'm not going to let my rage out. I'm just going to bottle it up so that I can maintain sort of a semblance of civility with this person that I'm talking to. But the problem is that, let's say I were suppressing rage right now and trying not to show it, your heart rate would increase. And you might not intellectually understand why, but you would start to feel uncomfortable around me. Our physiological empathic intelligence is far more rapid than our intellect can understand. So, what happened there is that you would register the inauthenticity physiologically, and we register inauthenticity as

threat. Do you see that? So, it's so ironic, right? So, we suppress our emotions to maintain our relationships, but when we suppress, the other person feels uncomfortable. I mean, I think we've all had that where you're around someone and you don't know why, but you feel uncomfortable. Like, I can't explain it. I just want to back away from this person. Chances are they're being inauthentic. You're registering as a threat.

You want to back away. And if you look at the research on suppression and relationships, people who tend to suppress a lot, their relationships are negatively impacted over time. So what to do? I mean, I think you probably have heard about this a lot, Dan, the psychological research on reappraisal and sort of cognitive reframing of a situation. Looking at things from a different perspective is what most of the research has been conducted on, you know, sort of like you get the parking ticket and then you think, oh, well, I'm just going to

consider this a donation to the city because I kind of like the city. So a lot of the research shows that really helps. It decreases activation in the emotion centers of the brain. It helps you calm down, all of that good stuff. It's basically applying wisdom to the situation. But, and this is something I kept bringing up because I was in an emotion regulation lab in grad school with an emotion regulation scholar who's one of the top scholars in the field. And I kept bringing up, what about when you're having really intense emotion?

I think we've all been there. Have you ever tried to talk your way out of a really strong emotion? It doesn't really work, right? No, I mean, talking can be really helpful, but it doesn't make it go away per se, if it's really strong, in my experience. You and I both have six-year-olds, and we can see too,

when they're in the middle of a tantrum, like it's not a good time to sort of have a logical discussion about what's going on with them, right? It's like their emotion's so strong. So what happens at the level of the brain is when you can use reappraisal successfully, you're using your prefrontal cortex to kind of down talk the emotion centers and calm down your

body. But if the emotion is super strong or you're super stressed, then the emotion centers sort of are highly activated. What happens? You have less access to the reasoning capacities of your prefrontal cortex. It doesn't deactivate it, but it lowers your ability to use it. And that's why we can't talk ourselves out of like big rage, big anxiety, big fear, big sadness, big grief. In those moments, it doesn't help. And you know what's even worse? Have you ever had someone come up to you and say like, oh, just calm down. You're right. It's the worst. It doesn't work. So that's the big question, right? So then what the heck do we do at that moment? And so any ideas? Suppress. Is that the right answer? Yeah. So, you know, this has been really interesting to me because I was, I've always thought,

well, there's got to be a different way because it doesn't work. We can't use our intellect all the time. And like psychologists are so top down, like they just want to, you know, you should be able to think your way out of everything. Like I think therefore I am and all that. It's like, well, it doesn't always work, right? So that's one of the reasons that I spent so much of my research career looking at breathing. Is what we've found is that when you can actually change your breath and calm your physiology, then you regain access to your ability to think.

And that helps a lot. One of the stories that always comes to mind around this is that my husband walked into the room about seven years ago. I turned, I looked at his face, and I was like, was like what's wrong and he said Jake was in an IED and Jake is one of his best friends who was a Marine Corps officer in charge of a Humvee the last Humvee of convoy going across Afghanistan and it all the vehicles passed safely except his it drove over an improvised explosive device instead of in that moment shock, you know, when sort of the dust settled and he could see and he looked down, his legs were almost completely severed underneath his knees. And I don't think we can even imagine what that feels like. Not just the excruciating pain, but like the shock, the pain, the noise, everything.

But anyway, in that moment, he remembered something he'd read about in a book for officers about what to do in times of wartime crisis. And it had a very short and simple breathing exercise. And somehow, by some miracle, he remembered it. He started to engage in that breathing exercise. the ability to think clearly, to do his first active duty is to check on the other service members, which he did. And then his second active duty was just to give orders to call for help. But it even gave him sort of that presence of mind to tourniquet his own legs and to think of prepping them up. Then he fell unconscious, but he was later told he would have bled to death and died if he had not done that. And he's alive and well in the US today. He has prosthetics on both his legs because he lost both of his lower legs. But that example is so profound to me. And one of the reasons I've been so inspired to do more research on that. So what does your research show around the value of deep breathing? So, I mean, just looking at first at the basic research on breathing. So when you breathe in, your heart rate increases and your blood pressure as well.

When you breathe out, it decreases. So does your blood pressure. And actually, if you do a simple exercise where you're lengthening your exhales, like making them twice as long as your inhales, you're going to start to noticeably, if you were wearing a blood pressure cuff, you would see that your blood pressure starts to slow down. So what we're seeing is just at the physiological level, it is one of the most immediate, effective techniques that we can use to calm our body. And when you calm your body, you can again regain that

ability to think clearly, which is our struggle when we have emotions, right? Because when we have those strong emotions, we can't always think clearly. Let's take anxiety, for example, or fear, which has just been so prevalent this year. If you're a lot in sort of a stress mode is that you perceive everything through the lens of fear, which can save your life in certain circumstances. But in other circumstances, it really restricts your vision, your perspective on what's possible, just your perspective in general, because we know that stress makes us very narrow in our perspective. The other thing is there's a study that looks at the impact of breathing on emotions. And so you've probably noticed this.

I mean, you've probably noticed that your emotions change your breathing. I have noticed that. And I have noticed the opposite, that there was a recent guest we had on the show who mentioned something called straw breathing to me, just taking a deep breath in and then making sure the exhale is twice as long. And as you exhale, blow out as if you're blowing into a straw. And I actually now start every meditation session with that because I noticed that my chest is usually tight. I'm breathing in a shallow way. And if I can just start and I'll sometimes just do it through the

day. I'll just try to do it surreptitiously. I may do it during this interview in a way that people can't see because I just notice it changes my emotional state and it changes the way the body feels as well. It's so true. It makes so much sense to do before meditation too. One of my favorite studies looked at breathing and emotion. So I had people come into the lab

and they made them feel different emotions and they looked at the breathing pattern. And they saw for each of the emotions they evoked, the breathing was different. So you could think of examples, you know, like fear and anxiety or breath is faster. You know, if you think of little kids running in the sprinklers in the summer and they're deep breathing through their bellies, like joyful breathing, you know, sobbing, laughing, those are other examples of breath changes with emotion. So that's what they found, right? For each emotion, there was a different breathing. But I think the second part is the coolest part of the study. They had different people come in and they gave them the breathing instructions that corresponded to the emotion as seen in part one of the study.

So they basically said, breathe it away. That would mimic how you might breathe if you were angry. Yeah, except they didn't tell them that. So they saw that like the anger breathing was like short and shallow and whatever the details were. So then they would bring the second group in and they had them breathe in that way. And then they asked them, how do you feel? Do you see? Yes.

So what do you think they found? That you can change your breath and experience the emotion that is associated classically with that breathing style. Exactly. Yeah. I think this is a revolutionary study for me experience the emotion that is associated classically with that breathing stuff. Exactly. Yeah. I think this is a revolutionary study for me because, you know, it's so hard to change our emotions and it's so hard to talk our way out of our emotions when they're very overwhelming. But with our breath, we can. We live in a time and age when we want things to be fast, efficient, like tools that work. And this is probably one of the most efficient ways to change your physiology

and thereby change the state of your mind and make you more resilient. So how do we do it? I mean, I described straw breathing. I hope I described it correctly. If we want to do some breathing exercises because we're sold, and I'm hard- hard pressed to imagine there are people who aren't sold. What do we do? Yeah, I mean, there's different ways. So I mean, the breathing exercise you described is a nice one. But really, the simplest thing,

if someone were just to take one thing away from this, the simplest thing is just to breathe out for twice as long as you breathe in, right, wherever you are. But ideally, you do it with eyes closed. And the other thing, I mean, it's nice to learn a longer breathing practice too, that you could just sort of do every day. A couple of research studies that we've run with a breathing protocol is for the first one was with veterans. And this is a number of years ago, but veterans with trauma who, for whom therapy and pharmaceuticals hadn't worked very well for their post-traumatic stress. And many of them were living in their basement, drinking, smoking pot just to get to sleep at night. Sometimes I'd ask them, how's your sleep at night? And they would just laugh.

They're just like, I just lie on the sofa, wait for the morning to come. It's just really intense. We were trying to figure out what kind of practice can we teach them to calm them down. We were thinking of doing a mindfulness practice, but then the VA we were collaborating with, they said, we're getting a lot of dropouts. People aren't sticking to the practice. So we thought maybe we should try a different approach that goes right into the physiology. And that's where we decided on a breathing protocol. So we did it one week, breathing protocol, called sky breath meditation, which is that they learn different forms of breathing and over the course of a week. And then we wanted to see what's the impact. And so what we saw was that

the group that went through the class, as opposed to the control group, their anxiety normalized. And we even saw it physiologically, because we had, we measured their startle response. And we saw that the more they said that their anxiety normalized, the more we actually saw it physiologically. So they weren't just saying it to make us feel good. They were physiologically responding with less of a startle response, which is usually very elevated for people with trauma. And the surprising thing, though, was the one month and one year later, those results were maintained. So we weren't expecting that at all. But it's as if that breathing protocol had this sort of acute healing impact really on their trauma.

We still don't really know how that works. But one thing we know is that memory is really malleable. And we know that anxiety and trauma in particular, it's like the memory of the past is still living in front of you, you know, and so you're not able to move forward, kind of like when you start a new relationship, but you're haunted by the old one. So when you engage in sort of breathing practices that relax you so deeply, sometimes those memories will come up. It did in the case of some of these veterans of memory would come up while they were in this very deeply relaxed state, but thereby the relationship to the memory changes. Because usually if that memory comes up, they would be in an anxious state, sweating back in the moment, right?

But now it came up in a moment when they were in this deeply settled place. And we think that changes the relationship to the memory. And so that's what they would say a lot where they'd say, you know, I remember everything that happened, but I feel like I move on now. So yeah, and then we ran a similar study this last couple of years at Yale with stressed undergrads, a different form of, a different population of anxious sort of, or prone to anxiety students. And we looked also at different wellbeing interventions. And the one that had the strongest impacts was the sky breath meditation, the breathing practice. Again, we think because it goes that physiological level and thereby brings about that calming response in the body, in the mind as well.

and thereby brings about that calming response in the body, in the mind as well. So you found that sky breathing was more successful in reducing anxiety than traditional meditation? Yeah. So we looked at three different interventions. We had an emotional intelligence intervention, which is, it was just mostly a cognitive intervention. So, and the other one was a traditional mindfulness-based stress reduction program. And the third was sky breath meditation. If you looked at just the numbers, all of them benefit the students in some way for sure.

But when we looked at each group compared to the control group, the one that had way more results was the breathing. We can only hypothesize as to why, but we think it's because there's something about going right into the physiology and triggering that calming response, triggering the parasympathetic nervous system, the rest and digest that has a sort of profound psychological effect on stress resilience. Colleagues at Harvard also ran a similar study with a cognitive intervention and the sky breathing intervention. And they found that physiologically when placed in a situation of stress,

people had done the breathing, responded with less of a stress response to what was about to happen, as opposed to the other group. So it's interesting. It's sort of a different approach. You know, I think the traditional psychological approach is to go top down from the head and then regulate the body. And here we're looking at a different sort of paradigm about going through the body and then calming the mind. It's really interesting. Can you say a little bit about what sky breathing is? Sure. Sky breathing was taught for like 40 years or something like that. This is through the Vedic tradition, more yoga-based tradition. It was originally taught by Sri Sri Ravi Shankar. And it's a series of breathing practices. So it includes some traditional pranayama, but also includes sort of the sky

part, which is its rhythmic breathing practice that you can learn over like two or three days. I can just speak really from the scientific perspective is that it seems to have this really powerful impact, especially for anxiety. And also there's some research on depression for it as well. So sky breathing is a breathing protocol, a skill that you have to acquire over a couple of days, as opposed to what you described earlier, which is anybody could do with no training, which is sit, close your eyes, and then just try to breathe in deeply and make sure the exhale is twice as long as the deep in breath. Exactly. So what I would recommend is that everyone sort of remember that they have this tool, breathing, in their back pocket that they can use anytime.

And lengthening their exhale is going to help, especially if they close their eyes, do it for five minutes, 15 minutes, going to start to really notice the settling in the system. And then if you want to go deeper or have, you know, struggle a lot with anxiety or sleep problems or trauma, things like that. And, you know, learning a breathing protocol is a really great next step. I find the notion of going right to the physiology to be really compelling, but I know you've studied Buddhism. I'm curious, you know, I would imagine the Buddhist critique would be, yes, that's all incredibly important, which is why some schools of Buddhism do incorporate deep breathing as a way to

calm the body and by extension, the mind down. However, if you really want freedom, you need to develop mindfulness and compassion and wisdom. You need to be able to see that everything is impermanent, that there's no solid self, and that often that those insights give rise to a natural, uncontrived compassion for everybody who's suffering. Do you think that's a legitimate critique? Well, I don't think it necessarily would be a critique. I think it's a compliment, right? I think it's essential. You know, you can have all the breathing and mindfulness practices in the world, but if you don't engage with wisdom in some way, you won't have a way to frame your life, right? It's so critical. And we also know that the compassion aspect is so essential for well-being. There's just so much research showing that it's so essential, but it's also a natural byproduct of having a more settled state of mind. You are going to be more heartful when you are more mindful. I mean, we know that also from studies. I'm thinking of that one study that you probably have heard of where there were different meditations at practices that were

compared to one another and to look at who is going to get up and help the person who's got, who's on crutches. Do you know the study I'm talking about? Yeah. And it didn't matter what kind of meditation they'd practice. Those who had practiced meditation were more likely to be compassionate. So really, I feel like compassion is a natural result of you being at your best self, which you are when you're in this more settled, mindful place. And I think the breathing practices are maybe a slightly different path to the same place. Like I know that for our study, mindfulness was one of the outcomes we measured. It was a strong outcome that we studied with the Yale students. One of our outcomes was mindfulness and it was highly significant. So it was a result. And then also, you know, sometimes people feel like, I've tried this type of meditation, it didn't work for me. So I guess meditation doesn't work

for me. And it's like, no, no, no, no. Like find the shoe that fits you. So I personally love meditation. I've been meditating for 15 years and I'm just so grateful for the practice. But one of the reasons I got interested in breathing to begin with is that I was in New York during 9-11. You were probably as well, right? Right after on the day of 9-11, I was in Fort Wayne, Indiana, covering a story. And I did drove directly to where flight 93 went down in a field in Pennsylvania. So, oh my gosh. Okay. And then I went to New York. Yeah. So I'm glad you weren't there on the day. I had moved to New York two days prior. So. Yeah. And I didn't understand why every single morning at 8.30 after that, I had like such strong anxiety that I just didn't know what was happening to my body, honestly. And I found that breathing was what really helped.

I tried so many things, including going to Bikram yoga like every day. I tried to sit and meditate, but I was too anxious. And so it was after learning to breathing that I noticed a real impact. And then I didn't think about it for many years until I started wanting to do research with veterans with trauma. But that's why I always tell people, find the shoe that fits for you, but don't stop looking, if that makes sense, in terms of the contemplative practice that's going to help you most. I completely agree with the find the shoe that works for you. Don't stop looking do something and I

strongly believe even as somebody who hasn't done sky breathing or any breathing protocol that if That's all you do and you're a better person a happier person because of it great. The world is benefiting Just going back to this. I called it a critique from the buddhists and Again, i'm not picking aside here personally, although maybe a little. I just, you said it's the same way. It's a different way to get to the same thing. And I'm just wondering, like, could you from deep breathing get to the insights into emptiness and impermanence that is advertised in the Buddhist tradition?

It's interesting. I mean, I've actually had this conversation with a couple of monks, one of whom is Geshe Damdol. I don't know if you know him. He's one of the Dalai Lama's translators. And I was asking him and I was like, okay, what's the difference between the Vedic and the Buddhist tradition? And he said, it's so minute, it's almost non-existent.

And I was like, okay. And he had actually tried this guy breath meditation I'd asked him about it and he said it takes you to the space of clarity he says and he was saying it takes you to a deep space of meditation and I was sort of surprised he had learned that because I thought I mean he's a professional monk he's a geishi I mean why would he learn a different practice but he said he had been curious and i was very open and childlike about it yeah i think openness and the right meaning of the term child like not like our six-year-olds at their worst um childlike but yeah the positive

aspects of being a child i aspire to both both of those. So consider me open. Just going back to the top of this discussion, we were talking about emotion regulation and cognitive reframing can work. But for really powerful ones, breathing can be a way to short circuit the cognitive capacities that might be degraded by the limbic or amygdala activation that can come from a powerful emotion. That's super well said, Dan. And also, you know, you were talking about wisdom. And I think of reappraisal is like trying to apply wisdom, right? And so in those moments when you can't apply wisdom, because you are freaking out, or you're really triggered, you

really been pushed your buttons, or you're completely out of your comfort zone, how do you apply wisdom? You know, sometimes you can feel like, oh gosh, I'm so like, I've learned all these things. I've read all these things. I've heard all this wisdom and look at me now. I have no better than my six-year-old, you know, those moments trying to go into, you know, calming your physiology so that you could try and regain access to that wisdom. That's how I can think of it yeah i think that's great and i like thinking of it that way and i just again my limited exploration of this straw breathing and both formally for a few minutes before i start practice and just you know in a free range way throughout the day has been really nice much more of my conversation with with Emma Seppala right after this. Maybe you've stayed in an Airbnb before and thought to yourself,

this actually seems pretty doable. Maybe my place could be an Airbnb. It could be as simple as starting with a spare room or your whole place. When you're away, you could be sitting on an Airbnb and not even know it. I personally love Airbnbs. My friend Glenn and I just rented an Airbnb in Fort Lauderdale. We're going to bring our families down to see Inter-Miami play some soccer. Glenn and I both have boys. Our boys really want to see Messi play. So anyway, I'm really looking forward to all staying in the same place instead of being in hotels where we, you know, maybe run into each other once in a while. I love the intimacy of all being in the same house. It's really cool. Maybe you're planning a ski getaway this winter

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talent. Check out Audible Canadian Originals, including The Downloaded, a sci-fi adventure featuring Brendan Fraser and Luke Kirby. A first listen is waiting for you when you start your free trial at audible.ca. Where I was going by going back to the top of the conversation is there was a word that had also come up when we were talking about emotion regulation, which I'm wondering if it's the same concept or a different concept, which is resiliency. Is resiliency the same thing as being able to ride your emotions without being swamped by them? Or is that a different skill? That's such a wonderful question. I think emotion regulation is part of it. But resilience is also

from physiological point of view is how quickly and also probably from a wisdom perspective, how quickly can you bounce back from whatever just happened to you? So things are going to happen to all of us. They happen to us all the time. They're going to continue happening to us. How quickly do we come back? How quickly do we get out of the, maybe the drama in our own minds, all of the moods and whatnot? And I think that's where contemplative practices can be so powerful. But it has a physiological component, it has a psychological component, and it has an intellectual or wisdom component, I would say.

So training and resilience can include but is not limited to emotion regulation. not limited to emotion regulation. Yeah, I think meditation, breathing, yoga, and any, really, any activity that brings you back trains your parasympathetic nervous system. So I think that we're so used to training our sympathetic nervous system in our society, in our culture, we complain about stress, and we worship at the temple of stress. I can't be productive unless I pump my adrenaline up. I drink more coffee. I do the overschedule myself. I wait till the last minute to get things done. It's sort of this misconception that's out there that productivity equals being in this high adrenaline rush. And it's the reason people are so burnt out.

50% of people are burnt out across industries. In the workplace, 75% of people are disengaged, disengaged. We're facing a real problem. But the question is why? We are constantly in this sort of love-hate relationship with stress. And it's not serving us, right? So there's a stress researcher at Stanford called Bob Sapolsky. Have you heard of him? I have. Did he write Why Zebras Don't Get Depressed or something like that? Don't Get Ulcers. Okay, yeah. It's such a great title, right?

So, you know, I remember him saying once, you're supposed to feel stressed five minutes in your life right before you die. That's it. Sort of the idea that, you know, you're being chased by a predator and you're about to die. And in that moment, your stress response kicks in to save your life, right? To blood to your muscles, to pump your immune system, to get you really sharp cognitively so you can save your life. And then you either die or if your life is saved, you go right back to grazing like nothing happened to you. Very relaxed. Why? Because in that parasympathetic, extremely relaxed state is where you rebuild yourself.

You regain your resources. It's so powerfully restorative for your body. And yet, we're overly trained in activating our sympathetic nervous system. We're not trained in the parasympathetic, which is like, you know, and then there's a reliance on alcohol or other ways to just sort of bring yourself back down. And yet that then comes with other problems. So I would say, you know, that's a really interesting phenomenon that's happening. And I think that may be one of the reasons meditation has become so popular. We live in a time of extreme sort of stress and extreme activity. And so we need an extreme activity to balance that, which is doing nothing. I'm so glad to have you here because there's so much ground we can cover when it comes to, as you said before, bringing yourself down, but in a good way, bring yourself

out of your head, out of the dysregulation. And I know you've spent some time looking at the research around a modality that we haven't yet discussed, which is access to and exposure to nature. What have you learned in that zone? Thanks for bringing it up. One of my favorite topics of all time. I mean, I think, you know, if you think about our ancestors, we lived in nature with nature constantly. It has an enormous amount of benefits for us. So any exposure to nature benefits your psychological health. It also benefits your cognitive abilities of attention and focus.

It benefits your compassion and empathy toward others. It also benefits your ability to innovate. toward others. It also benefits your ability to innovate. Now, if you look at across countries, across industries, what's the number one trait that leaders look for? It's in incoming employees, it's the ability to be creative. And we all have that. If you go out into nature for three days, unplugged, you come back with 50% more creativity, 50%. Just think about how creative are, you know, with all the problems we're dealing with in our world. Wow. If everyone had access to 50% more of their creativity, there would be a lot more solutions coming up for us.

Right. By the way, when we worship at that temple of stress, when you're in a stress state, you don't activate your innovative potential. By the way, because if you look at the brain's ability to come up with aha solutions or creative, innovative solutions for problems, when does that happen? Just for you, Dan, if you think about it, when do you come up with your best ideas? Well, I've only recently seen the wisdom in what you're saying, which is because I've long believed that in particular for writing, I needed to just nose to the grindstone, hammer away at it, hammer away at it, I needed to just, you know, nose to the grindstone, hammer away at it, hammer away at it, completely ignoring the fact that my best ideas always come on meditation retreat or, you know, in the shower or some relaxed moment. And so I'm in the process now of retraining the way I work and putting in a lot more meditation sessions and, you know, playing with a cat or my kid in

the middle of work because the work is better. I'm less miserable. It's so true, right? And if you look at the research on this, neuroscientists looked at when do people come up with these aha moments, like you were saying, like in the shower or playing with your cat or taking a walk. And what they found was that those innovative ideas come when your brain is in alpha wave mode. So that means it's not intensely focused and it's not so, so, so, you know, relaxed that it's almost asleep. It's in that in-between mode, which you could think of as a meditative state of mind. And that's when we get our aha moments.

And that's why people will get them in the shower. That's why people get them while they're jogging or while they're out or while they're not intensely focused on anything. It's interesting again, right? We live in this society where if you're not being productive every moment of the day, you're wasting your time, right? That is an idea that's out there. People, even when they're not at work, they're thinking about work. I should be doing this. I should be doing that. But when you are taking time off to be idle, to be relaxed, your brain is in active problem-solving mode. So I hope everyone can remember that. Next time they take a day off or take a vacation, your brain's in active problem-solving mode. Give yourself a break already.

This is a fascinating thing about nature, is that some people are like, well, I live in a city and it's a pandemic. What am I supposed to do? I can't go anywhere. It doesn't matter. If you can go to your little city park, it has similar impact. You can't go to city park. There's no park near you. Okay. Well, if you have, you know, like a plant on your desk, it has an impact. And let's say you have no windows, no plants. Okay. So even if you have a picture of nature on your wall or on your screensaver, it has an impact. And that's just how profoundly connected we are to nature, even though many of us have sort of lost that connection. But it has that profound of a psychological, physiological impact on you to be exposed in any manner whatsoever.

Just say you live in the city and you're in an area where there's not a lot of parks. Just walking outside, I would imagine, I've noticed that walking, the moment I walked out of ABC News, back when I used to go to the office, I always felt better. That's not a knock on ABC News. It just means it's sitting in doors all day. I've become hyper focused on my issues. Soon as I hit the outdoors, and it wasn't nature outdoors, it was 67th street in Manhattan. I felt better. Yeah, no, absolutely. Having visited you a couple of times in those studios, there were also not many windows if any, right? So that as well, you know, being able to just get outside and being

exposed to natural light and so forth has a huge impact. You said before that spending three days in nature had a 50% increase on creativity. Does that mean you need to literally be sleeping in a tent or can you just be in a place where you're outdoors much of the day? the whole time, right? So that's not the idea. They were literally unplugged. And so your mind can become so much more expanded and access so much more of your creativity that when it's narrowly focused through sort of intense concentration that we do, even when people have time off, right? They're on their phones, scrolling through social media, that's still intense concentration. You're still not allowing your mind to access other parts of its consciousness, other parts of its abilities to capture ideas in novel ways. I mean, I have been bowled over by the amount of creativity that comes unsummoned, unbidden, often unwanted while on meditation retreat. Just, you know, because I have a ton of time in nature,

I'm letting my mind, you know, there's a certain amount of training of the mind that's going on. But at some point, you get to the top of the hill, and you're just kind of rolling down, and you're not working as hard. And that's when really interesting things happen. I have had the experience of coming home from retreat and looking at my notes, and it's complete nonsense. But more often than not, actually my best ideas have come in that context. I don't know if you know the story of the Beatles and how they, the creativity. Yeah. Tell it. I've heard this story, but that they asked, uh, the Beatles were, you know, meditating with Maharishi in India and they asked him, Hey, like all these song lyrics

are, I don't remember which, who asked it, but all these song lyrics are coming while I'm meditating. What do I do? And he said, you open your eyes, you write down the lyrics, you close your eyes, keep meditating. And so now I don't feel bad when I did. Sometimes I do that too. Cause I'm just like you, like I get so many ideas. Sometimes whole articles will come to me while I'm meditating. I'm like, I'm not going to sit down and write it. I'm meditating. But my book, The Happiness Track, I just, it was on the hills of San Clemente where I was living. I was hiking every day and the whole chapter would just come to me and I'd go back home and write it. I think we've, you know, probably everyone has had that experience of just, you know,

how am I going to get my kid to eat vegetables? Aha! You know, while you're jogging or whatever, you just realize I'm going to make this recipe or i'm going to do this i have other things i want to ask you about but before we leave nature is are there other areas to explore here that i've failed to guide us to there's some really interesting books i would recommend um there's a book by florence williams which is more recent called the nature fix where she talks she summarizes the research quite nicely richard lou wrote a book called the last child in the woods which is a bit of The Nature Fix, where she talks, she summarizes the research quite nicely. Richard Louv wrote a book called The Last Child in the Woods, which is a bit of a classic. It's sort of a sad title, but really reminds us of like, how are our kids growing up? Are they being exposed to nature? Like, what is their world? Is it just always concrete? Is it always a screen?

Like, what could we do for our children? If we were to bring them into nature? What would we do for our family if we spent time in nature? So there's some really great books out there to explore. And I think especially in the last couple of years, some wonderful new books on nature that I really highly recommend reading. I've found that when I read them, it's very relaxing just to read about it. The reason I'm recommending this is that you're not going to read about this that much in the public sort of spheres and sort of popular journalism. And the reason is that there's no PR agent out there pushing nature research on people because no one's going to make money off of it. So no

one's paying a PR agent to do this. You're not going to see the articles, right? But do it for your own sake, explore that topic for your own sake, I would say, because it is so profoundly healing for humans to be in nature. Again, this does not require, you know, buying new boots or, you know, getting on a plane. It can be just going to the local park, taking a walk in your neighborhood. Plants in your house. So I don't know if you've gone to a plant store recently, but when you go, when I've gone out, they're just like, oh, we're constantly getting sold out because of the pandemic and people staying home. They're turning their apartment into a little jungle. Why not? I love it. Okay, so the next area to discuss in terms of what the science is telling us about

human flourishing is social connection. What are you seeing there that's of interest right now? Obviously, we're at a time where I don't think it's a we've run this global unregulated experiment on ourselves. What happens when you reduce social connection in a pandemic? And I do not think it is a coincidence that we see spiking anxiety, depression, addiction and suicide. So clearly this is a pressing issue right now. And perhaps and this is somewhat optimistic. I hope we take this lesson away from the pandemic that we need each other. But what's interesting to you in this realm these days? Well, we've known for many decades that social connections are greatest need after food and shelter, like period.

It is our greatest need for psychological health, physical health, for longevity. We've known that for decades. And we've also known even pre-pandemic that there's a loneliness epidemic that has been going around the world. In the UK, they even have a ministry for loneliness. There's even some scientists looking into developing a pharmaceutical intervention for loneliness. I mean, that was pre-pandemic. And so here we are. And like you said, global unregulated experiment. I think a lot of people have suffered obviously from this. So here's the good news, I guess, from a research perspective, is that when you look at the research that shows, you know, all of the negative impacts of loneliness, which are actually quite severe, loneliness is worse for your health outcomes than smoking, obesity, and high blood pressure.

And when you look at the research on social connection and all of its enormous benefits for psychological health, physical health, immunity, recovery from disease, longevity and so forth. If you look at what about it, what about the connection leads to those benefits or what about the feeling of disconnection leads to the negative impact? It actually has nothing to do with how many people you are around every day. That's the good news. It has everything to do with how connected you feel on the inside. What predicts all of the things that the research has shown is your subjective feeling of connection. And this, to me, goes back to meditation and so forth, because I think we've all been there where we've been in a crowd and felt lonely. Like maybe you've been even at a Thanksgiving dinner with family and you feel alone. You don't feel connected. Or you are alone in your apartment and you just

did a loving kindness meditation or something and you're feeling connected to the whole world. Or for some reason you feel that sense of belonging. So if you look back on that, like what is it that makes us feel connected or disconnected from other people, regardless of circumstance, it has also a lot to do with stress. If you're very stressed, if you have any negative emotions, stress, anxiety, depression, they're connected to feelings of self-focus. We know that from research. When we are in a negative state, we are more self-focused, probably for good reason, right? Because at its origin, stress is supposed to save your life. So when you're stressed, it's probably better that you're focused on yourself rather than spacing out.

So you can save your life. But if you're stressed chronically, you're focused on yourself, you're less likely to connect with others. And when you do connect, less likely to connect successfully because you're focused on yourself, if that makes sense. So that's why practices, you know, like any of the practices that really help trigger your parasympathetic nervous system, your rest and digest, your calming response. Those are the ones that put you back in that place where you're your best self, where you're your true self. And in that place, when your cup is full at that place, that is when you feel a greater

sense of connection. You know, it's on those days when we're feeling in a really good mood, you know, the sun is shining, something nice happened. It's also when you notice, oh, you know, I'm just going to hold that door open for another few seconds. Let that person through. Oh, that person dropped their groceries. Let me just go help them. You know, let me just take some time and help this person.

So, again, it goes back, I think, in part. I mean, I can't say universally, but for sure, the ability to manage our stress impacts the state of our mind. And the state of our mind is what we're talking about here in terms of the benefits of connection. Yeah, it's so interesting. The paradox, the seeming paradox here that self-care, self-love, even self-compassion, these that one could assume on some level could lead to massive spikes in solipsism and self-centeredness actually make you more available. Yeah, I know. Isn't that so interesting?

You know, oftentimes people think, oh, well, I don't want to do all that. That's selfish. Or meditation is somehow selfish and self-absorbed. It's like, actually, chances are it's going to make you a better person. It's actually an act of service for others. Because when you show up having taken care of your stress levels, you show up available. You show up at your best self. So what do you recommend for people out there who are listening to this and saying, well, I can't see my grandchildren or I can't see my colleagues. I can't see my friends. What do I do about social connection, Emma? I mean, I know the science,

but that just makes me feel even more disempowered. Right. You know, every time I think, poor me, or I think, you know, I remind me, wait a sec, what can I do for someone else? What can I do for others? What can I do for my grandchildren? Maybe I can send them a package. Maybe I can do something for, you know, at that moment, shifting the perspective.

Because you know what? that moment, shifting the perspective, because you know what loneliness hurts like hell. Like we know on the level of the brain that loneliness is the parts of the brain that are activated in loneliness overlap with the parts of the brain that are active during physical pain. Like we know it hurts like hell, but because it hurts like hell, that is an opportunity, you know, when you can, you feel you have the strength, but it also often gives you strengths to turn that pain into what can I do for someone else? How can I use this painful experience to understand that others have also have this pain and what can I do for them? Okay, I'm having this pain. I'm alone in my apartment.

But you know what? I know that the person next door is alone in their apartment. They're feeling the same pain. And you know what? I think I'm just going to drop off some chocolates at their door anonymously or some other, you know what I mean? Like it doesn't matter what it is, but I have to say, I mean, personally, I've had this experience too. For me, I'm a writer. So things come out in writing. I remember that, you know, I was feeling a real strong loneliness. This was not during the pandemic, pre-pandemic at one point. And then I wrote an article on loneliness and I just wrote it and I wrote about different aspects. And then I had people thanking me for writing that article.

So I think we all have an opportunity in whatever way works for us to try and also understand and learn from the pain and help us come up with solutions for how we can help others. And in that moment, the pain transforms as well. It's counterintuitive, but and compelling that um one of the best answers to loneliness is service yeah and i don't want to reduce it to that either obviously everybody is in their own situation there's one thing that can help i should say yeah yes i think that's fair there we're not pitching silver bullets on the show but but it it is a thing that can help if it's

available to you as a modality. Yeah. I mean, I've been looking at the science of happiness for a couple of decades now. If I were to reduce it to one sentence, I would say the happiest people who are fulfilled over the long-term, not just short-term, you know, highs, long-term, are the people who balance a life that is characterized by compassion and altruism balanced with self-compassion and the self-care piece you know that those are the people that are resilient over the long term and also most fulfilled and healthy and so i mean i've only recently come to understand this because i i somehow thought that the fact that I had self-interest made me a monster, you know, like Cloven Hooves, retractable jaw monster, because I was ambitious, am ambitious. But actually, as I believe it was Bill Gates once said, there are two great and peacefully

cohabiting human drives. And they are to follow your own interests and advance your own interests and to help other people. And actually these can be mutually reinforcing. Yeah, definitely. And, you know, because of your ambition, Dan, you have made a difference in a lot of people's lives.

And so, you know, sometimes you can also think, well, where does that self-interest come? It was placed within me for a purpose. Yeah. And, you know, Dan, you have such a big heart, you know, that it's hard to distinguish, you know, what is motivating you? Is it wanting to help others or self-interest? I would say it's a very, very big dose of wanting to help others there. If you're not fully employed by Yale at this point, I can also employ you as my PR agent.

That would be great. Let me ask about one last area of the science of happiness that I know you've spent a lot of time thinking about and talking about and helping other people with, which is building organizations that function sanely and humanely. What are the headlines here from what you've seen and studied? Well, it's interesting. I mean, the way that organizations, companies have been run over decades is, again, this idea of self-interest, of motivating people with money and benefits and things like that. How do you gain loyalty? Just pay more money. Well, that's not real loyalty, right? If you were to think right now, who are the people you're truly loyal to? My guess would be that there are people who are there for you unconditionally at different points in your life, right? Yes, there's a people that you never forgot their acts of

kindness and support toward you. And so that is where, you know, loyalty truly comes from is those human interactions. And so if you ask people, do you prefer to work in a workplace where you make more money to a place where you're happier? People say happier. And then if you go deeper and you're like, well, what does that happiness at work mean? It means positive social relationships. So most people spend more time at work than at home. I mean, although these days it may be at home, but they're still working. But anyway, you get my drift. But the point is our need for positive social connection is so profound. It doesn't matter if you're at work or not. For example, your boss has a direct impact on your heart health, blood pressure, risk of heart disease and heart attack. We're so

physiologically connected in our relationships, doesn't matter if they're professional or not. And so a relatively new field of research called positive organizational scholarship that looks at this, and they are finding that those organizations characterized by compassionate leaders, positive interactions, cultures that are characterized by forgiveness, by trust, by integrity, by humility, do way, way, way better than traditional organizations it's really the workplaces of the future not many people know about this research yet but they will and over time organizations will become better and happier places that then have employees that are happier

and therefore families that are happier and healthier so it's really a wonderful field of research that is what's needed it It's really what's needed right now. It's funny how what you just said actually rhymes quite powerfully with what we were talking about right before it, that there's this overlap between self-interest and other interests. It will be in the self-interest of companies to run humane organizations because it will impact the bottom line. And that's so true. And it goes back to what we said earlier too, about remember when,

if you hide your anger, the other person's heart rate increases, it has to be authentic because we register an authenticity as threat, which is where leaders are going to have to do their work. They're gonna have to do their internal work. They're gonna have to show up and look at themselves in the face and do their meditation and, and know themselves in order to show up as a positive leader authentically.

Man, I can tell you though, it ain't easy. It ain't always fun because I've done some of this work and let's not sugarcoat it. Right? It's hard. And yet it's inevitable right now. I mean, what's the alternative, right? What's the alternative of facing your own self of getting acquainted with your own mind? The alternative is living a life where you're not truly engaging with your own self, right? I mean, you're maybe filling your life with a lot of other things, but not really and truly seeing, you know, what your full potential is. When you say doing your own work, which is important for leaders to do. And by the way, I think we should define leadership broadly, because it doesn't mean you're at the CEO, although that's great. But it can mean you're running any team or you're even a team member, you're still leadership, I think, as a holistically understood would include almost everybody, if not actually everybody. When you say doing your own work, what does that look like to you? Well, going back to the emotion thing, it looks like not running away from yourself,

first of all, I mean, I think it's just really easy for, you know, not to want to face the discomfort of whatever happens within you and just to mask it with, you know, alcohol, shopping, whatever. You know, name your favorite activity to sort of escape from the realities of your own mind, right? So knowing yourself and healing yourself, you know, you have traumas, you have anxieties, healing yourself, going through that. And it is challenging to do. And yet when you've done it, you're free. Every time you've become more and more free from those shackles that have been holding you back. What's the area, in your opinion, of happiness research where there are the most unanswered questions? I would say spirituality, probably, because scientists do not want to go there because it's not scientific. And so they don't want to ask those questions. And yet,

human beings, a large percentage of human beings engage in some spiritual practices, are interested in spiritual practices. And yet, because it's within the realm of science, scientists feel like they can't study that. So you're missing a huge, important piece of human civilization. I think that is a part that has not been studied well, because of that sort of scientific bias against looking at that, which is too bad, really, so far anyway. I remember, this is nearly 20 years ago, maybe 15 years ago, I met the guy who wrote Bowling Alone, which is about the sort of social atomization, loneliness, the fact that American culture and global culture and Western culture, let's's just say the community has really fallen apart and that

includes organized religion and he also had some data i met him at a conference and i was talking to him he had some data that showed that friendships made in church or in any sort of spiritual context were supercharged friendships and that i, I've just seen in my own life from my friendships through meditation and Buddhism. I don't know if it counts as church or what his research parameters were there, but those friendships are different. Yeah. Well, that makes sense. And that ties back to the positive organizational research too, because in those sort of more spiritually oriented organizations, they're based on fundamental virtues of, you know, honesty, authenticity, trust, integrity, because that's

sort of many of the principles that are taught in those contexts. And so when you start a friendship from that place, you're immediately starting it from a place of authenticity, as opposed to maybe a friendship that you start at work where you're a little guarded, where you don't know what they're thinking, you don't understand the politics, you don't know how much you can disclose, you know, whereas I feel like oftentimes in a spiritual context, you're going to, you're already meeting in a place where you're sharing sort of deeper private parts of yourself, which is your spiritual life. That's such an interesting idea, because I can see at a time when organized religion, it doesn't have as powerful a draw for many people as it used to,

where, you know, in some ways work could become church if done right, where you share a common purpose, you're deriving meaning from the same things, you're on the same mission. And if the atmosphere is properly orchestrated, that you feel like you can truly be yourself. Exactly. I mean, that is if you can create a sense of belonging and family, in any organization, you're going to create that same breeding ground for authentic relationships and, and trust, which, by the way, ties into the ability to be innovative too. So employees who feel trusted, like trust in their environments, and they feel like they belong and they're valued, they're going to be way more innovative because they're going to trust that they can go out there on a limb, that they can share some

crazy idea that it won't get shut down or punished, but that will be celebrated, even if it's a little wacky and won't work. But as a consequence, you get also that innovation, which leads to human flourishing, you know. Something I've learned the hard way as somebody who has a penchant for being dismissive is that when you squash what's called psychological safety, the freedom that people feel, the comfort that people feel to speak up, then you hurt not only the other people, but you hurt yourself and the output from the team. Okay, so before we go, everybody who wants to learn more about you, how do they do so? I have a website, which is myname.com, and I have a book called The Happiness Track, And I'm on social media, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn.

Thank you so much for doing this. It was a pleasure. Thank you, Dan. It was really fun. Thanks again to Emma. By the way, the name I couldn't remember during the interview was Robert Putnam, author of Bowling Alone. Robert, if you want to come on the show, let me know. Speaking of this show, it is made by Samuel Johns, DJ Kashmir, Kim Baikama, Maria Wartell, and Jen Point with audio engineering by Ultraviolet Audio.

And as always, a shout out to Ryan Kessler and Josh Kohan from ABC News. We'll see you all on Wednesday for a brand new episode with the meditation teacher Bart Van Mellick. We're going to talk about how to use meditation while you're talking to other people. If you like 10% Happier, and I hope you do, you can listen early and ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. Prime members can listen ad-free on Amazon Music. Before you go, tell us about yourself by filling out a short survey at wondery.com slash survey. I'm hiring, but where can I find potential candidates? Hundreds of thousands of Canadians with disabilities are ready and eager to work.

Help create an inclusive workplace that benefits everyone. Find the tools and resources to help you hire persons with disabilities at Canada.ca slash right here. A message from the Government of Canada. When I say the word history, what do you think about? Horses and buggies and dust and a bunch of white dudes riding their horses and buggies in the dust? Facts. Definitely not enough melanin on all those history books. But we are about to flip the script on all of that. From Wondery, this is Black History for Real.

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