Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - What Science Says About Money and Happiness | Dr. Elizabeth Dunn

Episode Date: November 6, 2023

How to spend your money in ways that will really boost your happiness and a look at the state of happiness research. Dr. Elizabeth Dunn is a professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of British Columbia. Dr. Dunn conducts experimental research examining how time, money, and technology shape human happiness. She is the co-author of “Happy Money: The Science of Happier Spending” with Dr. Michael Norton. Her research has been featured in The New York Times, Time, CNN, and more.Sign up for Dan’s weekly newsletter hereFollow Dan on social: Instagram, TikTokTen Percent Happier online bookstoreSubscribe to our YouTube ChannelOur favorite playlists on: Anxiety, Sleep, Relationships, Most Popular EpisodesSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

It's the 10% happier podcast. I'm your host, Dan Harris. Hello, everybody. It is, of course, received wisdom that money cannot buy you love or happiness, but there's actually some really interesting research that suggests that if you're smart about how you use your money, it actually can boost your happiness. Today, we're going to talk to a researcher who wrote a whole book on this subject. Her name is Elizabeth Dunn. Dr. Elizabeth Dunn is a professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of British Columbia. She conducts experimental research examining how time, money, and tech shape human happiness. She's also the co-author of a book called Happy Money, the Science of Happier Spending with Dr. Michael Norton as her co-author there.

Heads up that before we get into Elizabeth's work on money as it relates to happiness. We're going to start with some more recent work she's done that has looked at some problems in the world of happiness research more generally. Her work raises some real questions about the quality of these studies, including, I hate to say it, the studies that look at the relationship between meditation and happiness. Before you get too worried, at the end of the discussion, I will weigh in with a little bit of context and reaction from some meditation scientists who I spoke to after the fact. Anyway, fascinating discussion.

I think you're going to love it. All right, time for BSP, blatant self-promotion. If you happen to be listening to this podcast while you're doing something else, I think you might love our seven-day on-the-go meditation challenge launching November 13th over on the 10% happier app. You'll get daily videos and guided meditations from me and the great teacher Alexis Santos with mindfulness practices for everything from brushing your teeth to waiting in line. You can join the challenge right now for free. Download the 10% happier app

wherever you get your apps. On November 14th, I'm doing something that will be available both in person and online. It's an interview with the great meditation teacher, Leslie Booker. It's a benefit for the New York Insight Meditation Center. You can find a link for that in the show notes as well. When you find something you love, you stick with it, like this podcast, and like working out with Peloton, and with up to $950 off-palaton purchases this holiday,

bring home a Peloton bike, bike plus or tread, and work out like nobody's watching. Unleash yourself. Ride, run, box, or freak the hit out. It's your workout, your rules. I always find myself looking forward to my next ride with Peloton. For Peloton's best offers of the season, now extended through December 5th, head to www.1pelitan.ca slash offers. All access membership separate, terms apply.

Everyone leaves a legacy. I like Mr Gorbachev. We can do business together. For some, the shadow falls across decades, even centuries. It is unacceptable to have figures like Roads glorified. But it also changes. Reputations are reexamined by new generations who may not like what they find. Picasso is undeniably a genius, but also a less than perfect human. From Wundering and Goldhanger podcasts, I'm AfroHersh.

I'm Peter Frankertpern. And this is Legacy. A brand new show exploring the lives of some of the biggest characters in history. To find out what their past tells us about our present. Venus Amone was constantly told to sit down and shed up your the angry black woman. The name of Napoleon still rings out in the pattern of the guides who thrive on the tourist trade. rings out in the pattern of the guides who thrive on the tourist trade. Search and follow Legacy to listen to the full trailer. Dr. Elizabeth Dunn, welcome to the show. Thanks so much for having me.

I'm curious. I like to ask people in your position this question. You're a happiness researcher. Why? What happened in your life that landed you in this position this question, you're a happiness researcher. Why? What happened in your life that landed you in this position? Yeah, so when I was an undergrad at Harvard, I was lucky enough to kind of stumble into the research lab of a professor named Dan Gilbert, who is one of the sort of pioneering people who led the field of happiness research. And so I was just in this thrilling intellectual environment where I was surrounded by all these grad students

as well as Dan doing this fascinating work. And I got to be involved with it as a little tiny 20 year old. And so that was amazing. And then I did go on to study some other things like I have a paper on terrorism. I've done research on all kinds of different topics through my career,

but the one thing that I always come back to is happiness because I think ultimately, that's what most people really want. If people are chasing money or fame or other things, to some extent, I think it's because they have an underlying belief that it might make them happier. And so to me, figuring out what makes people happy is one of the most exciting puzzles we could possibly get to play with.

And that's what I get to do in my daily work life, which is, you know, a pretty awesome job, in my opinion. But a lot of that is kind of external, meaning like you're interested in other people's desire for happiness, how they get there, how you can study it. But is there, I don't know, is there something in your life that impelled you in this direction? Well, I think the specific topics that I've chosen to study as I've gone along have definitely been spurred by experiences that I was having. So in particular, when I was 27, I got my first real job, like up to that point, I had just been a graduate student earning almost

no money. I taught water skiing lessons as my summer job. Well, like my, you know, Harvard friends were going off and being, you know, working in investment banks and stuff. And so I had never earned more money than I needed to stay alive. And so suddenly when I got just like an actual job in my late 20s, I was really wrestling with how to use this disposable income that I never had had any experience with. And so that spurred me to start studying the relationship

between money and happiness and how we can use our money in happier ways. And then later on when I became a parent, I got really interested in parenting and happiness. And so the specific topics that I've chosen to study have very much been inspired by experiences that I've had. But I think my interest in happiness is more just like one of fundamental curiosity. Right. And maybe happen stance in that you've always been fundamentally curious. You ended up

in Daniel Gilbert's lab. He, by the way, is the guy who wrote Stumbling Upon Happiness. His big deal. He's also in a lot of insurance ads or somewhat randomly. And you end up in this lab. It's invigorating, and then off you go. That's right, and it's funny, because if you ask my college friends to tell you the story of how I became a happiness researcher, they would weave this very beautiful narrative about how I always meant to do this,

and I chose it, and I sought it out. But to some extent, it really is true that a lot of it was chanced. Like I wandered into this lab, and it was amazing. And here I am 20 years later, still doing happiness research. Okay, so on the subject of happiness research and we're going to talk about money and other aspects of happiness, but one of the newest things you've put out into the world is kind of a critique of

your own profession that a lot of the received wisdom that's often cloaked in evidence-based research. The evidence actually may not be that strong. Can you please say more? Yeah, so I was standing in an airport when I got a phone call from a journalist I knew who was at the Atlantic at the time. And he asked me about the evidence for some strategies for promoting happiness that you always see in the media. So things like spending time in nature, meditation and mindfulness, exercise, topics that I hadn't really worked on myself. He wanted to know, you know, how good is the evidence

behind these strategies? And at the time, I actually really didn't know. And that bothered me, really provoked my curiosity. But actually trying to figure out how good that research was was not an easy task because there's so much work on these topics. If you do a quick Google search, you'll find zillions of research studies that purport to support the value of spending time in nature or engaging in meditation and mindfulness or what have you.

What we decided to do was to really dig into these studies and check out the quality of the studies. See how good the evidence really was. This was important in part because the field of behavioral science has undergone a true revolution over the past decade where the standards of what constitute good evidence have fundamentally shifted. So, at this point, I think it's crucially important that we kind of go back and re-examine the received wisdom to see how good some of these happiness promoting strategies really look when we examine them through the lens of sort of what

we know now about how to do good science. So what did you find? Well, so we looked at the five strategies that were most commonly recommended in the media for promoting happiness. And those five strategies were practicing gratitude, social interaction, meditation, mindfulness, exercise, and nature, spending time in nature. And so I kind of put these into a couple different buckets. So the first bucket, gratitude and social interaction, the evidence there wasn't perfect, but it was decent. Like there was reasonably strong evidence

for the value of these strategies. In contrast, we found really, to my mind, stunningly weak evidence for the value of mindfulness and meditation, for exercise and for nature, in terms of promoting happiness. Now, really importantly, we're talking about non-clinical populations. So we're not talking about exercise being prescribed

for cancer patients or meditation and mindfulness being prescribed for folks suffering from anxiety. We're just talking about can these strategies make the typical person a bit happier? And that's where we're seeing the evidence really falling short. Now, again, just to be clear, it doesn't mean that these strategies could never work,

that they definitely don't work. It's just that what we thought was a pretty strong wall of evidence for these strategies turns out basically to be a pile of pebbles. Okay. But is it a pile of pebbles specifically vis-a-vis happiness or full stop? In other words, because there's a lot of research that I've seen on meditation, for example, that talks about immune response, blood pressure, certain aspects of the brain associated with self-awareness, compassion, stress. Is it all junk or just as it pertains to happiness

whatever that means? Yeah, so happiness is my sandbox. That's where I play. And so that's where we looked. So we were looking specifically at research on happiness, even if the focus of the study wasn't specifically on happiness. We included the study as long as the study had some measure of happiness. However, this does not put other research off the hook

in my mind because the scientific revolution that has reshaped behavioral science has also reshaped other fields of science. So in particular cancer research has been heavily affected by the replication crisis. And so these other fields, I think, may also have some sort of underlying weaknesses. And so, you know, in particular, neuroscience has a lot of problems. And so in these areas, I would love to see experts in those areas go re-examine the evidence. Now, I'm not a neuroscientist. I'm not a, you know, medical doctor, but I would love to see the people who are go apply the same kind of lens of methodological rigor that we did to those areas and see, hey, actually do these studies really hold up.

Danny Goldman and Richard Davidson did that, I believe, vis-a-vis the meditation neuroscience a couple of years ago. We interviewed them on the show and I'll post a link in the show notes. I don't know, because Richie Davidson, one of the co-authors of that book, is himself a primary investigator on many of the neuroscientific papers on the impact of meditation on the brain. Maybe that raises questions about, you know, how hard he was looking, I don't know, but at least I know that that has been done in this one sphere. Yeah, and I would would say too there's a lot of ways to think about methodological rigor and we were specifically looking at a few key factors. So one is the use of experiments. So people are now I think thanks to you know COVID vaccines people are pretty familiar

with this idea of the randomized controlled trial as the gold standard in science where you randomly assign people to you to take a particular pill or try a particular kind of treatment or not, and that is what allows us to draw causal conclusions. So we were looking specifically at experiments, as one kind of aspect of rigor, we were also looking at the size of those experiments because researchers in the past have tended to rely on pretty small sample sizes in establishing effects. And it turns out that when you use small samples,

you can end up with a lot of false positives, where you think you've made a discovery, but you've actually discovered something that doesn't really exist. And finally, we looked at something called pre-registration. So pre-registration is something that's probably not super familiar to most people outside of the academic science world, but it's increasingly super important. I think everybody should know about it. So pre-registration is where you, as a researcher, say exactly what you're going to do and what you expect to find before you do

it. You say how you're going to do the analyses. And this is really important because if we don't pre-register our studies, we can essentially throw a bunch of darts at a wall and then draw the bull's eye on afterward and say, you know, bingo. And so with pre-registration, we have to draw our bull's eye on first, take our shot and be really honest and transparent about whether it hits. And this is really a critical practice and eliminating this massive problem of false positives,

which has turned out to be a real weak spot in not only behavioral science, but also in medical science as well. And that's what you mean by the replication crisis that people do these studies and then other scientists try to reproduce it and they don't find the same result. Yes, so about a little over 10 years ago now, a paper was published that demonstrated that with sort of simple statistical practices that were in widespread use across many fields of science, back when I was in grad school, practices that you might call massaging the data. Where, you know, you look at the data and you go, oh, you know, meditation works for people over 70, but not for people ages 65 to 69.

Let's really just focus on the people over 70 because you can imagine maybe older people are benefited more by mindfulness and meditation, right? And then you draw the conclusion that, look, our intervention worked, we just threw out the people that were under 70. And that might sound to a regular person kind of crazy, but this was actually very commonplace in science.

The scientists would look at their data a person kind of crazy, but this was actually very commonplace in science. The scientists would look at their data and then kind of try to chip away at the noise, like a sort of archeologist trying to chip away the stone to get at the fossil, the real remains that she's truly there. And so that's kind of what we thought we were doing by kind of carefully analyzing our data in all kinds of different ways.

It turns out what we were doing though was being more like sculptors, creating an image where none existed out of sheer stone. And so that's the sort of core problem that I think led to this so-called replication crisis where we discovered that many critical findings, very well-known findings, in behavioral science and cancer research and in other fields simply weren't replicable. So what should a listener make of all of this? Anybody who's listened to this show for any length of time knows that we're constantly telling you that we talk about gratitude and social connection a lot and the data seem to be reasonably strong there, but we talk a lot about meditation

exercise and access to nature as things that are good for you and you should do your best to, you know, do more of it, but should we throw out all those episodes? Should people listening to this feel like other off the hook? They don't have to do that shit anymore? Y'all are off the hook. No, I would say, you know, I have also said this to the media like in the past when journalists have asked me, you know, what are some good, good things for happiness? Like I've listed off meditation journalists have asked me, you know, what are some good good things for happiness? Like I've listed off meditation, mindfulness, exercise, I mean, these were things that were so well known and widely accepted.

And there are huge bodies of research that seem to support them. It's just that again, because we've all lived through this revolution and science, so we now recognize that a lot of that evidence is so weak. So you know, if you are somebody who meditates every day and it works great for you, it leaves you feeling, you know, calm and in a better mood, by all means, continue. Our review certainly doesn't suggest that these strategies never work, that they can't work, that they don't work for anybody. Instead, all we're saying is gosh, the evidence isn't really there.

And so I also think one of the key things that has to be true is that there's person activity fit where some activities work well for some people and not for others. Unfortunately, we as scientists don't know who those people are. And so we have to be really careful, I think, about providing blanket recommendations. So, you know, and I think this can be helpful in the sense

that, for example, I was in Australia with some happiness researchers, some of whom had actually published on the value of meditation, and it turned out none of us actually meditated. We're like, oh, that's interesting, none of us do this. And I'd actually tried doing it. The first time I ever meditated, I actually threw up.

It turned out there was a stomach bug going around, it was just random chance. It kind of turned me off to meditation for about 10 years. But then when I tried it again after reading some of the happiness research, I just found it didn't do anything for me. And so for people who have maybe like, listen to this show and tried some of these things

and found felt like, meh, you know, this might be a little bit of a vindication, I guess, but for others who are finding it's working for them, you know, by all means continue. And again, I just really, really want to emphasize that we're not talking about people who suffer from serious clinical disorders, you know, if a therapist is prescribed a certain kind of intervention

for you, whether it be exercise or meditation or anything else, by all means continue. So I have a million questions about this. So one thing to say is that I have, and this, I think, will accelerate this change in me. I have evolved away from being pretty, I think, unwisely dogmatic about meditation to really seeing the wisdom of what you're saying about person practice fit, that it's not for everybody. Having said that, there are specific benefits of meditation, one of which is mindfulness, a kind of metacognition and a self-awareness that allows you not to be owned by whatever

neurotic impulses flitting through your mind, that I'm not sure there are other ways, maybe there are other ways, but maybe not as effective, and I'm not even sure what they are, frankly, to develop that metacognition outside of formal or informal mindfulness practices, including meditation. Does that make sense? Yeah, I mean, that's a great reason why meditation should be helpful for happiness, right? So we should see this and so I hope that you know the good rigorous Experiments will get done because I am a true believer in science like I really think science can make a big difference Can help us live better lives and so I think you know

It's really on us as scientists to kind of step up and do better work to figure out how well these kinds of strategies work. Are there particular ingredients maybe that are essential to include in these practices so that they're effective? Who are the people that they really work for? I mean, the surprising thing is that some studies

don't even show that meditation really increases mindfulness. So it's not clear that meditation is effective in increasing mindfulness for everybody across the board, no matter how you do it. So we really need to understand this whole area, I think, a lot better. I want to go back to something we talked about before. We talk about the posity or lack of evidence that nature, exercise, and meditation have on happiness specifically. And I know I nodded it this earlier, but I think it's worth to be a little douchey here, double clicking on it. There are a lot of other data to suggest other benefits from these practices, physiological benefits from exercise, nature, meditation, neurological benefits. I know you're studied and look at that, but those seem to be assuming there's some level

of quality in there, those seem to be compelling points of evidence to exercise, get outside and meditate. Maybe. Fair enough, fair enough. Yeah, that sounds like a great answer. I think we need to again re-examine a lot of evidence, because I honestly thought before going into this, that we were going to find much stronger evidence for the benefits of mindfulness and meditation on happiness specifically,

because it's not like there's a shortage of studies. There are nearly 200 experiments that have been conducted testing the benefits of mindfulness and meditation for happiness. So that makes me think we really need to go back or I hope experts in these areas go back to these studies. And in some cases, there are foundational studies that are cited all the time. And when you go back and read these studies, they would never get published in a self-respecting scientific journal today. And the same true for exercise in nature?

Well, so there's a lot less research on nature. So yeah, that would be another interesting one to look at. I mean, exercise, exercise is different, I think, in the sense that there's such good physiological reasons. Why it should be beneficial? And certainly, there is some larger larger scale medical research that I think may be better, but there's someone listening who does this kind of work. I would really challenge them to go back and look at it with the same, again, the same sort of lens of modern

rigor that we've applied because this is not just about happiness. It's not that happiness research is the problem. I think, in fact, like happiness is relatively easy to measure. It's not that happiness research is the problem. I think in fact, like happiness is relatively easy to measure. It can be reliably measured in contrast. You know, sometimes people see studies on things like cortisol, you know, which is a hormone. It seems like, oh, that's like biological. That's hard science. Having done research on cortisol, it is much harder to measure and much flakier as a measure than happiness. So I would really, I would really love to see people go back to these literature. And again, it's not that people who said, you know, in years past, people who published

these studies that they were doing something bad or that people who reported on them were doing something wrong, it's that the field has changed. The standards for evidence have fundamentally changed over the past decade. The studies that we run in my lab now are in order of magnitude larger than the studies that we would have run a decade ago. Things have changed, and that means we've got to go back and reevaluate these areas of literature. Coming up Elizabeth Dunn talks about how she defines happiness in her work and why she is still hopeful about the future of happiness research. First, just to say I did reach out to a couple of neuroscientists who look at the relationship

between meditation and human health generally. Both admit there is certainly room for improvement in the meditation research generally. One of them did, however, point out that Dunn's paper may have omitted some important studies and pointed me to at least one high quality study that shows significant effects on well-being outcomes from meditation. The other scientists pointed out that while the research on meditation and happiness specifically may be limited, there is significant evidence that meditation has many other health benefits, including reducing blood pressure, boosting attention, and improving sleep. Bottom line on all of this, and I'm no scientist, but the bottom line from my point of view is that science is by its very nature, a messy and imperfect process.

I think of it as an argument taking place in public. In my view, it can be very interesting and informative to follow, but I think you should just do these practices, meditation, getting exercise, exposing yourself to nature, whatever. Do the practices and see what the benefits are in your own life. Okay, after the very happiness and money. We can't see tomorrow, but we can hear it. And it sounds like a renewable natural gas bus replacing conventional fleets. We're bridging to a sustainable energy future, working today to ensure tomorrow is on. Enbridge, life takes energy.

Hello, I'm Hannah. And I'm Sirete. And we are the hosts of a Red Handed, a weekly true crime podcast. Every week on Red Handed, we get stuck into the most talked about cases. But we also dig into those you might not have heard of. Like the Nephiles Royal Massacre, and the Nithory Child Sacrifices. Whatever the case, we want to know what pushes people to the extremes of human behavior. Find, download, and binge-read-handed wherever you listen to your podcasts. Quick reminder, don't miss the On-the-Go Challenge, a seven-day meditation challenge. Designed to help you bring mindfulness into your daily life.

It kicks off on November 13th, but you can join now, download the 10% happier app today wherever you get your apps and get started for free. I'm curious, how do you define happiness? So happiness is typically defined by scientists as subjective well-being. So subjective well-being is kind of the jargon-y technical term for what we mean by happiness. And it includes two core components. On the one hand, there's sort of an emotional component, which involves having more positive emotions than negative emotions.

Now negative emotions are healthy. They are normal. They are part of life. But a typical kind of happy person is going to experience a lot more positive emotion, the negative emotion, on a typical day. On the other hand, we also have a more sort of cognitive of a value of component.

Like, when you look at your life, when you reflect on your life, are you living the kind of life that you want to lead? So a happy person is somebody who experiences more positive than negative emotion on a typical day and feels satisfied with their life. Feels like they've got the kind of life that they want. Now in any given study, we're not necessarily measuring all of these different components, but in our work, we were looking at studies that included any of them that measured life satisfaction or positive emotions or

negative emotions or some combination of those. That's really helpful. And after having done this big take down, which I'm sure makes you super popular at the Happiness Conference as you attend. So popular. How she's nodding her head or whatever, moving her head in ways that suggest, I've put my finger on a source, but after you've done this,

how much hope do you have about the future of happiness research? I have a huge amount of hope about that future of happiness research because we've definitely gotten some haters in response to this paper for sure, but for the most part, the reaction to it among happiness scientists have been overwhelmingly positive because the great thing is that this is a disease for which we have a great cure. We know how to fix these problems. Thanks to the replication crisis, we know exactly how to do better research, and many of us are already doing it. And so we've identified the weaknesses in some of the foundations, but we have an opportunity, I think, to build a much stronger tower. And it's exciting to be part of that.

It's already happening. We've just published a new paper in which we review all the pre-registered experiments conducted so far on happiness. And there's a lot of them. So I think we're at a really exciting time in happiness research. And I'm just hoping other areas of work from neuroscience to medicine will kind of join us. Let's talk about some of your new work. You launched something called the mystery experiment.

What's that? So one day I got a call from Chris Anderson, who's the head of TED, and he was familiar with my work on generosity and happiness. And he said, you know, Liz, I've got this opportunity that might intrigue you. He explained there was a wealthy couple in the Ted community that was interested in donating a million dollars. And specifically, they wanted to give away 10,000 US dollars to 100 different people around the world. And Chris was like, you know, would you be

interested in studying this list? And I was like, hell yeah, of course I would, you know, in our research were often, in our research on money and happiness we often give people a small amount of money and study what happens. But usually we're talking about $5 or $20 something like that. So the chance to study this situation where people were receiving $10,000 was amazing. Now, as Chris and I got to talking, it became clear that it would be nice to have a couple of different versions, you know, give a bunch of people $10,000, but vary the instructions that they received about it. And so Chris said, well, maybe we should have two groups of 50 people each get $10,000. And that's when I explained about statistical power and how it's really important to have big samples. And he was like, okay, okay, I hear you. Like 50 people per group isn't enough. We need more.

And I said, also, we really need a control group of people that doesn't receive any money. So he's like, all right, like, let me put the phone down, let me get back to you. Let's see what we can do. So in the end, long story short, the couple very generously donated $2 million. So we were able to give $10,000 US dollars to each of 200 people in seven countries around the world. Meanwhile, a hundred other people chosen at random did not receive any money. And we were able to study everything that happened from there.

Don't leave us hanging, what happened from there? Well, one of the things we wanted to know was, you know, how much happier would people get as a result of receiving this money? So there's a growing idea across sort of social science that giving people money may be a pretty effective way to both raise them out of poverty and increase their overall subjective well-being,

their happiness. And so this idea has actually been tested by giving cash transfers to people, particularly in developing countries, often in, you know, especially poverty-stricken corners of the world. But in this experiment, we wanted to see more broadly how effective cash transfers might be with a more socioeconomically diverse population. So we recruited people who really ran the gamut in terms of their socioeconomic status. So everybody from, you know, fairly wealthy people

in the US to really poor people over in Kenya, we had a whole mix of people from Kenya, Indonesia, Brazil, the US, the UK, Canada, and Australia. And so what we found first off, it was that people became significantly happier as a result of receiving this money in the months after they received it. And even after it was all gone, they still continued to show this benefit in terms of happiness, which I guess perhaps isn't too surprising.

Like, you know, $10,000 makes you happier. It doesn't seem like a shocking finding. But what the thing that's neat about this is that we were able to quantify who got the most happiness from this windfall. And one of the things that we saw was that people in lower income countries got about three times as much happiness as people in higher income countries. So one implication of that is that if you have some disposable income that you could give away to others, sending it further away for those of us living in North America, for example, to folks in poorer countries is a way to really get more happiness bang for your buck.

You can literally have a triple the impact of each dollar in terms of happiness by sending it to lower income countries. Now, another way we can think about these findings is that we kind of, in essence, we're taking $2 million for one wealthy couple and redistributing it across 200 people. Now we don't know how this loss of $2 million affected the wealthy couple. In fact, we to this day do not know who they are. They remain anonymous to us. But we can guess from prior research

with high-network individuals that at most, they would have missed out on about two-tenths of a point of life satisfaction. Because we know that even if you're super rich, having $2 million more of net worth is worth about two-tenths of a point in terms of life satisfaction. And now from our sample of 200 people though, we can see that

each one of them, even though they got just a little sliver of this larger pie, they actually got twice as much happiness from their own little sliver of the pie, then we would expect the high net worth individuals to have gotten from the whole entire pie. So giving this money away really multiplied its happiness producing effects. And in fact, we could calculate, in the word least, estimate, that by giving this money away, this wealthy couple created 225 times more happiness than they could have gotten

by keeping the money for themselves. So that was one of the key findings. We can tell more to that. I can talk about one of the other ones as well. Dealers choice. Go can delve more to that. I can talk about one of the other ones as well. Dealers choice. Go where you want to go. So we were also very interested in how people spent the money. So one of the neat things about this study is that we were able to track how people spent every dollar that they received.

And one of the things that we discovered is that this gift had major ripple effects in that recipients spent the majority of the money that they received in ways that actually benefited others. So they spent over $6,400 of this $10,000 gift in ways that benefited people other than just themselves. Now, we had a pretty broad definition here of spending on others. It could include everything from making a donation to charity, to taking your friend out to dinner, to buying shoes for your kid or something like that. So even when we use our narrowest definition of pro-social spending as just encompassing donations to charity, we still see that people gave away about 17% of the money that they had received. And this was particularly striking because many of the participants in our sample were quite

disadvantaged themselves. And yet having received this generous gift, they themselves spent it in ways that were generous, that benefited others, and rippled out beyond this couple's initial gift. I say that links very nicely to a book that you co-authored called Happy Money in which you have these five key principles. One of them is investing in others. This might be a good segue to that book. However, I don't want to go there too quickly if there's more to say about the mystery experiment that I haven't given you a chance to say. Maybe I'll mention one other thing. So as part of the mystery experiment, we actually asked half the sample to tweet about their experiences,

to share their experiences on the platform formerly known as Twitter. And we looked at whether having to publicly share this experience, that you got in $10,000 and you had to make decisions about how to spend it, whether having to publicly share this experience affected how much money people spent on others. Now our thinking was that compared to people in our private condition who were told, hey, just keep this a secret. Don't tell anybody that you got this money except, you know, people really close to who you like have to tell, but certainly don't publicly share this.

So the idea here is that on the one hand, people might choose to give a lot to others because doing so is intrinsically rewarding as I've argued in some of my work. But there's an alternative perspective that I think is very compelling that actually, yeah, sure, people are really generous, but it's because they want to look good to others. It's all about their reputational concerns.

And so if that's the case, then having to publicly share the decisions you're making about this $10,000 windfall publicly on Twitter should really amp up the amount of money that you're spending generously. That's what we thought we would find. I mean, that's a pretty compelling theory, but we pre-registered that prediction and we did not find evidence for it. So we found in fact that people who were told to just keep the news of this windfall as

secret as possible spent just as much money on others compared to people who were told to just keep the news of this windfall as secret as possible, spent just as much money on others compared to people who had to publicly share it. So, you know, this is pretty surprising, but actually dovetails with some of the arguments I've made in the past that spending money on others is really intrinsically rewarding, something that we do because it's joyful

and we wanna do it rather than just because we're trying to look good to others. Yeah, I think the public recognition can actually up the X factor. It makes me recall something I remember learning in Hebrew school, or at least I think I remember learning in Hebrew school, that there was something in the Talmud or somewhere or the Torah about the fact that, A, you should be charitable and B, you should keep your mouth shut about it and that this recommendation is the best thing for everybody. That's right.

And so, you know, one of my former students, Lair Ackman, is Jewish. And so she caught me up on my Hebrew school learnings that I missed out on through my own sort of wasp background. And so, you know, one possibility from that sort of nugget of wisdom is that actually maybe keeping this news to yourself would make you get more joy from generosity because you're not questioning your own motives. But we didn't find that either. So it's like regardless of whether you're sharing this publicly or keeping it to yourself, people spend a lot of money on others and enjoy it. And it didn't seem to

matter too much whether we were amping up their reputational concerns. Coming up, we're going to talk to Elizabeth about her research into the link between money and happiness. Go Sunreal. At least, as a journalist, that's what I've always believed. Sure, odd things happened in my childhood bedroom, but ultimately, I shrugged it all off. That is, until a couple of years ago, when I discovered that every subsequent argument of that house is convinced they've experienced something inexplicable too, including the most recent inhabitant who says she was visited at night by the ghost of a faceless woman. And it gets even stranger.

It just so happens that the alleged ghost haunted my childhood room might just be my wife's great grandmother. It was murdered in the house next door by two gunshots to the face. From wandering in Pineapple Street Studios comes ghost story, a podcast about family secrets, overwhelming coincidence, and the things that come back to haunt us. Follow Go Story on the Wondry app wherever you get your podcasts. You can binge all episodes at free right now by joining Wondry Plus. I'm Rob Briden and welcome to my podcast, Briden and we are now in our third series. Among those still to come is some Michael Pailin,

the comedy duo Egg and Robbie Williams. The list goes on, so do sit back and enjoy. Brighten and on Amazon Music, Wondery Plus or wherever you get your podcasts. Okay, so like I said, this really does link quite nicely back to a book you co-wrote a while ago called Happy Money. And as I said, you have these five key principles for boosting your happiness as it pertains to your relationship to money. And one of them is investing in others.

Is there more to say about investing in others and how it relates to money and happiness? Well, so this is one of the ideas that's very near and dear to my heart when I first started earning some disposable income as a 27-year-old with my first real job. This strategy was actually the first thing that I wanted to test was, you know, what if we use our money to benefit other people rather than ourselves. And back then, doing studies with, you know, very small samples, we found some initial evidence for this idea that using money to benefit others is good for our happiness. And but since then, we've gone back and we've actually replicated this early work with much larger samples and more rigorous methods. And I'm happy to say this is one of those findings that really has survived the replication crisis. And it does seem to be robustly the case that using money to benefit others can promote happiness. Now, that does not mean that like every time you use money in a way that benefits others,

that you're definitely going to feel happier, It does seem to matter how you do it. And in particular, spending money on others seems to be more emotionally beneficial when you can really see or envision the impact that your generosity is having. And I think that's an important lesson because some of the charitable giving opportunities that were based with these days really don't give us

any window whatsoever into how our dollars are making a difference. And so I think in some ways, while many of those charities are certainly admirable in their missions, they're not maybe capitalizing on this opportunity to deliver the like emotional boost to donors that would like make those donors hungry to give more. And so I think there's sort of a an underutilized opportunity there. Interesting. So as I'm looking around for opportunities to give, I might want to keep in mind that if I can see the benefits directly, it's likely to make that giving a more satisfying experience for me personally. That's right.

And a few years ago, I was kind of going through a little bit of like an existential crisis where I was like, huh, you know, I've done all of this research showing that spending money on others promotes happiness, but when I donate to charity, I feel nothing. And so I kind of wondered why that was. And then I thought about the charitable donations that I was making. And they were typically to like large organizations where I was going online and making this donation

and just having no idea where like the money was going or how you know, it was actually shaping people's lives. And then as I discussed in the talk that I gave at TED a few years back, I got this amazing opportunity with a group of friends to sponsor a family of refugees to move to our city of Vancouver. And this was just at the other end of the spectrum

where, you know, instead of having no idea where our money was going, we literally, you know, raised the money, did a whole bunch of work to make it all happen and then got to meet the family at the airport. And I still get chills when I think about that day, when we first saw this family. And I was just texting with them a couple nights ago

and learned that the oldest son in the family who at the time was this sort of like tiny underfed kid when he first got off the plane, is so good at soccer now that he's playing in Europe against some of the best teams in the world. Okay, a bunch of questions about this. It's liberating for me to hear you say, and I suspect this will be true for other people, that when you go online and just give to the, sorry, to pick on the Red Cross,

but the Red Cross or whatever, it's some big, huge organization that you don't feel much. And I have found that when I give closer to home, in particular to people that I know, that it can really boost my happiness. But two questions. One, aren't there potential negative societal ramifications if we take your advice too seriously and aren't giving to things like the Red Cross because they do perform such vital functions? And second, how do you do such up close charity work, like in your case, the family that you

help bring here, without like slipping into a kind of superiority or no bless oblige? Yeah, I mean, those are tough questions, and I don't think there's a sort of simple answer to either of them. But I would say one thing is to think about diversifying your giving portfolio. So maybe you give to some charities just because you think, like, oh, they do a good job. I have no idea what they're doing exactly or where this money is going,

but I have confidence in this organization. And then maybe you reserve some of your giving for those opportunities where you really get to see the impact that it's having, maybe on some smaller local organization. And I would argue that sometimes, you know, small local organizations in our communities don't get as much money as they need and don't have the sort of marketing wings that some of the larger organizations do. So we're not necessarily doing it to service to the world by focusing some of our giving on those organizations.

You know, turning to the noblesse oblige point, it's a real challenge. I mean, I think that the biggest thing is that when we really are giving in a genuine way to people that we care about and develop relationships with, it's just a fundamentally different zone than, you know, something about sort of superiority. It's something it becomes embedded in these networks of like deep human relationships where I think you know the magic of humanity exists and where our worries about sort of status differentials and stuff become less sharp than they are when we're kind of thinking in this more abstract zone removed from human relationships. Very good answers I think. Four more of these key principles that we haven't touched on yet that I'd love to touch on one of them. And again, just as a reminder, people listening, these are key principles for happy money. In other words, boosting your happiness as it relates to your money.

Another one of them we've just covered, investing others, but another one of them is by experiences. Can you unpack that one? Yeah, so the idea here is that people get more happiness from buying experiences like trips, concerts, special meals, then from buying material things like couches, new gadgets, fancy shoes, and so forth. And this is a really like pretty reliable principle that just pops out, study after study, you know, the exact kind of experiences that benefit people can vary from one individual to the next, but I think it's a pretty good guiding principle. And I would say that the

experiences overall that seem to be the most beneficial are those that connect us with other people that we care about, those that, you know, feel unique or special, and those that contribute to our sense of who we are as a person. So these kinds of experiences, I think, are really worth investing in. And it's why, you know, some of the weird amounts of money that I spent on things can be explained by, like, my genuine faith in this principle that buying experiences is deeply worthwhile. And the interesting thing is that some of these benefits and some research that we've done actually, we find that initially, if you get a material thing

or you get an experience for Christmas, for example, we did a study where we like stalked people beginning Christmas morning and followed them for weeks basically and measured their happiness from different gifts that they received. And what we saw is that initially material gifts and experiential gifts were pretty similar in terms of the happiness benefits that they received. And what we saw is that initially material gifts and experiential gifts were pretty similar in terms of the happiness benefits that they delivered. But over time,

the experiences actually made people happier than the material things, which was kind of surprising in the sense that the material things stick around. Well, the experiences were often over, but people felt really satisfied with them. Perhaps in part because the experiences get to live in our minds Well, you know material things often get relegated to the backshelves of our closets I'm pretty sure you know I was not gonna let this reference to the weird amount of money you've spent on things go by unremarked upon or un interrogated But what are you referring to there? Oh, why this is gonna embarrassing Well, that's the stuff I like.

So I had a real case of post-pandemic, suppressed desire to travel that came roaring out in the form of a massive trip to Thailand over the holidays. You know, everyone says Thailand is like a cheap place to travel. Let me tell you, going to Thailand over Christmas is not a cheap vacation as I discovered to like my husband's growing horror, but it was amazing. And it still gives us like these incredible memories.

We as a family talk about it all the time. It was very socially connecting and that we went with our 10 year old son as well as with another family that we're really close to. You know, nicknames came out of it, you know, treasured memories that we still laugh about. And so although it was like kind of ungodly expensive, I don't regret it at all. That's not embarrassing. I mean, if you saw the visa bill, you might think it was embarrassing.

Oh, got it, got it, got it, got it. Another of the key principles for happy money is make it a treat. What's that about? So the idea of make it a treat is that we, as humans, struggle with this fundamental tendency to get used to the things that we enjoy. So I think perhaps the most depressing finding to come out of happiness research is that no

matter what we have or experience, the more we sort of repeat that pleasure, the less of an impact it has on our happiness. So this is, you know, for example, encapsulated in a small study that I did way back in the day where we brought students into the lab and asked them to eat some chocolate. We then had one group of them give up chocolate for a week. Another group, we didn't give any special chocolate related instructions. And finally, a third group, we actually

set home with a big bag of chocolate and told them to eat as much as they comfortably could over the ensuing week. Now, you might think the people that left our lab with this free bag of chocolate were the lucky ones. But in fact, that's not what we found. So looking across the sample as a whole, what we see is that when we brought people back

the second week, the sort of group as a whole, as the sample as a whole, enjoyed chocolate less the second week than they had the first. And this is like just a very simple illustration of this principle of hedonic adaptation, where the first time you come into the lab and eat some chocolate, you're like, this is awesome.

Second time you have to come back to the lab, it feels more like a chore, like sure, give me the chocolate. Yeah, I was fine. I don't enjoy it quite as much. But we found an important exception, which is that the people who are asked to give up chocolate for a week, enjoyed it the second time just as much as they had the first time. So this suggests that when we take our favorite things that we just sort of regularly consume without even thinking about them and turn them back into treats, by, for example, giving them up for a period of time,

we may actually be able to renew our capacity for enjoyment. Have you tried this with anything specifically in your life? Well, I'm obsessed with trying all the things that I recommend to other people. So, one of the things that I've tried this with is Whole Foods has this kale smoothie, which of course is like very healthy, but it's like, you know, $11 for a smoothie or something, right? It's like kind of an obscene amount of money to spend on what is basically juice. And so I started drinking these initially, and I like really enjoyed them.

And then I got in this habit where I would just buy them all the time, and I would just suck them down on my way to work without even noticing them. And so I did take a substantial break from these smoothies. I now I get them less often and now I do so really thoughtfully like, oh, I am going to get this smoothie. I am going to sit in the sunshine. I'm going to drink my smoothie and enjoy it and appreciate it. And so now I actually feel like I'm getting my $11 worth out of this smoothie

in terms of happiness. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Two more key principles. The penultimate is by time. So one of the interesting findings from happiness research is that as people make more money, they tend to feel more pressed for time. And this is partly because when you're making more money, you may just have a lot of commitments, a lot of work expectations and so forth. But there also seems to be just the psychological component

where as people's time becomes worse more money, they feel like they have less of it. But fortunately, it is possible to kind of combat this tendency by actually turning things around and using our money to buy time. And this is an idea that I really put into practice a lot in my own life. So that means, you know, for example, thinking about the tasks that you least enjoy, the tasks that like, you know, not only are

unpleasant when you're doing them, but actually kind of fill you with dread just thinking about having to do them. So for me, you know, cleaning my house is just my least favorite possible way to use my time. So even though I am now going on sabbatical and will be earning 60% of my normal salary for the coming year, I still plan to have our weekly cleaners come because they give me back the least enjoyable hours of my week. And what we see in our research is that people who use money to buy themselves time, to buy their way out of dreaded tasks, are happier than those who don't. And you know, that seems again, like not rocket scientists, we really need all of this research to tell

us this. But interestingly, what we see in our work is that people often don't use money to buy time. So even millionaires that we've studied in some of our work often don't use money to buy time. So even millionaires that we've studied in some of our work often don't use money in a typical month in order to buy their way out of these tasks they hate doing. They just kind of keep doing them. And in the mystery experiment, for example, where we gave people $10,000, we were surprised by how few people really use money in a way

that obviously bought them time. And I would argue, we have a limited number of weeks on this planet. If we can buy ourselves into better time, what better use of money could there possibly be? You know, just to get back to your point about this being obvious or anything being obvious and therefore why would you study it,

I think it's because we often overlook obvious things because we forget the obvious wisdom of it because there's so many other things to remember. We're barred with so much other information or maybe we're operating on another imperative, which is to save money. And that's where I think research, one of the best aspects of research, is to remind us to do something that we may otherwise forget even if it's obvious. I think that's exactly right. And I think there's two real obstacles to buying time. One is that most things that we could

pay somebody else to help us with, we could also just do ourselves. There's even for people who can afford it, I think often a natural sense of guilt about paying somebody else to do something that you are capable of doing yourself. But just because you can do it yourself, doesn't mean you should do it yourself.

I think re-evaluating the way we're spending our time is, you know, a really good sort of first step in getting more happiness out of our money. Final key principle is pay now consume later. Yeah. So the idea here is that, you know, pretty much everything about modern society pushes us to consume right away and often pay for it much later. So we can get same day delivery on Amazon, pop it on our credit card and not pay for it for quite a while.

But in fact, psychological research suggests that we should actually do the complete opposite. So we should pay right away. And when possible, actually delay consumption. So for example, when I got married in Mexico, we had this destination wedding. We really encouraged our guests to pay for it up front, like months before the wedding. And so, you know, I knew this strategy had worked when I heard my friend Derek sitting

by the pool drinking a mojito and saying, this mojito is so tasty because it's free. Now, the mojito was not really free. He had paid for his stay at this all-inclusive resort. It's just that he'd paid for a month in advance, so he could enjoy it as though it were free. So it kind of helps to take away the pain of paying from the pleasure of consumption. Of course, we can also separate the pain of paying from the pleasure of consumption

by consuming right away and then paying for later. But of course, that can create all sorts of problems in terms of debt. And so one of the great things about paying up front is it can also help to restrain our spending. It can help keep us from spending too much. And one of the guiding sort of ideas that we try to think about in considering principles of happy money is, you know, how can we help people get more happiness out of their money,

even if they don't have a lot of money, right? So some of the things that we can do, whether it's consuming our favorite foods a little bit less often, or hanging up front and consuming later, can actually give us more happiness while also helping us spend a little bit less. Money is such a complex, I'm not just saying anything new here,

but money is such as this complex factor in our lives that can be the source of obsessive greed, social comparison and vjellacy, insufficiency. How for you has studying money impacted your relationship to it and maybe as you look up the, you know, at your family lineage and do you think you've broken any cycles vis-a-vis money as a consequence of really, you know, marinating in the best practices? Yeah, I mean, I certainly probably overthink financial choices because I've done so much work on this topic.

But I think it's also really freed me to be willing to spend more money than I might have been comfortable with otherwise when I really believe that it will enhance my happiness. So, for example, in addition to, you know, spending a lot of money on the experience of going to Thailand, when I first had my son, he was a terrible sleeper. I was up, you know, between the hours of 3 a.m. to 6 a.m. pretty much every night. And so I learned about this magical service of night dulyse, these wonderful, wonderful angels that will come to your house and take care of your baby while you sleep. Now when I googled the price of this, I was horrified, as a fairly young professor at the time.

This was a pretty intense expenditure. But I think my research kind of gave me the freedom, gave me the permission to say, you know what, this is going to change the way I spend my time. I'm going to take back the hours of 3 a.m. to 6 a.m. and spend them asleep. And all the rest of my time is going to feel better too as a result. And so I did that. And, you know, it revolutionized the way I felt during the first year of my son's life. And so I think as somebody who grew up, you know, not mostly in like a super wealthy background and also just having spent my 20s living pretty close to the poverty line as a graduate student. I struggle a little bit with spending money. I do ski and I was skiing with a friend of mine after starting my job. And she said, are those like the skis you had when you were a kid? And I was like, well, yeah, I mean, they're the ones

my dad got me when I was 14, but they're still fine. She's like, you know, we have jobs. You could buy something else. And so that's sort of been my default approach to spending money as like, well, if I don't absolutely need something, why would I buy it? And so, you know, I still think that can be a useful mantra and kind of restraining over spending. But I also think sometimes it's important to give ourselves permission to spend a little bit of money on something that can really make a difference for our happiness. Yeah, it's like your research helps us understand when to splurge, when to save, not from necessarily from a best financial practices perspective, but from a best life perspective.

That's right. And when I think it's so interesting is that often financial planning services are really focused on just getting more money. You know, how do you help people get more money? But ultimately, I think the question is, how do we get more happiness? And so, approaching our whole financial ecosystem in a way that puts happiness first is a really exciting kind of approach to me and something that I've spent a lot of time working on. Back to your story about the Knight Nurse. It just reminds me of, and this is not going to amount to a question, so just heads up. It's just an anecdote you could respond to or not.

Both my parents are super frugal and therefore bears were to, you know, lots of like immigrant depression, great depression stuff conditioning in there. But I'm naturally inclined to, you know, spend and part because I hated that my parents were so cheap and in my 30s I got this big job at ABC News and I was making a, you know, shit ton of money for a single young guy and My inclination was like biceps dope, you know apartment in the West Village and my father intervened and was like, look, I want you to think about this like it's a pro football contract that it's just you might only get this one contract. And so I wouldn't buy this apartment. And I actually listened to him in my 20s. If I had had this, this windfall, I probably wouldn't have listened to him.

But in my 30s, I was willing to listen to him. And so I lived well below my means for a long time, a long time. And then, you know, 10, 15 years later, my wife and I had our first and only child. And he sent me an email, it was like, now spend it. And he was right. You know, we got a nightmares and it made a massive difference in our marriage and our relationship to the child because we had the means to make that process much easier. That's awesome. And I love this idea of thinking about, for example, buying a big house to the default choice, maybe.

Like the thing that sort of springs to my eye, I have a lot of money now I should buy a big home. And interestingly though, some research suggests that buying bigger, better houses doesn't make much of a difference for people's happiness. And I would say, you know, maybe the one question I would kind of leave people with to ask themselves when they're considering a purchase is, will this affect how I spend my time on an average Tuesday? And if the answer is no, it will have no impact whatsoever, then maybe give it a minute. Maybe wait and see and think about getting it later. In contrast, even if you're a little bit reluctant to spend the money, if it's going to make

a real difference for what your Tuesday is like, for whether you can spend time with your son or have quality time with your wife or get to do the kind of, you know, writing or work that you love, then it's probably a good use of money. It's interesting. We're talking about houses because I have a complex relationship to that very question. I did, you know, my wife and I and before that me on my own, I lived, I slash we lived way, way below. I mean, we just really

did not spend the money. And then during the pandemic, we bought a house that we love that I'm sitting in right now. And it has had a significant impact on my happiness in that we live in a very, very beautiful environment with a lot of nature. And I'm way more access to nature than I've ever had, and I work from home, and so being in this incredible environment does affect my Tuesday and my Wednesday, all the days. And I sometimes feel like I'm a prisoner to my burn rate, that I wonder whether I, this hasn't happened yet,

but I wonder whether I might end up making decisions about how I spend my time professionally so that I can pay this mortgage. It's not crazy, but it's not crazy for us. And yet, that possibility is there. And I hear this from a lot of my friends who are successful people that they feel maybe a little hemmed in by their lifestyles.

Yeah, what's the phrase golden handcuffs that having nice things can actually take you prisoner. But I think it is interesting. I think the research on housing and happiness was conducted prior to the pandemic. I do think it's possible that the pandemic may have shifted people's relationships with their homes in terms of, you know, if you're spending a lot more time in your house, for example, then the conditions of your house are going to potentially have a bigger impact on your time, right? So if you are surrounded by a forest or in my case, you know, I'm super lucky to live in Vancouver

right by the beach. And so it's easy for me on a busy day to pop over to the beach with my dog and just taking the beauty and spend some time with her. And that really does make a difference for my Tuesday. And so that's why I think rather than saying, you know, buy this not bad or telling people exactly what to do, it's helpful to provide these more kind of thought-provoking questions of like, okay, let's ask if it will change the way you spend your time. And for the good and for the bad, right?

So a purchase can both do the thing it's supposed to do in terms of, you know, if you get a swimming pool, for example, okay, great. Now we can spend Saturdays lying by the pool, but it might also mean that you're spending time waiting for the pool guy and trying to figure out how to fix the filter and all of these things. And so thinking about both the obvious and the not obvious ways in which a purchase might change how we spend our time, I think is critically important to assessing whether it's a good investment in our happiness.

Before I let you go, anything that I should have asked, but fail to ask? Maybe just a closing statement that I'll make is that although we have cast doubt on some of the most widely known strategies for promoting happiness. There are good, rigorous experiments on happiness out there. And I'm very excited about how these studies can potentially provide people with some guidance about how to live better lives. Great.

Final question is, can you just shamelessly plug anything that you wanna plug? Sure. So for anyone who's interested in principles about how to use your money and happy your ways, I invite you to check out my book Happy Money, co-authored with Mike Norton at Harvard Business School, and if you're curious to think more about how to get the most joy out of giving, I'd invite you to check out my TED Talk. We'll put links in the show notes. Dr. Don, thank you. My pleasure. Thanks so much for having me. I appreciate you covering this, even though it might be

a little bit confronting to talk about this critical review. Yeah, I'm always happy to flush my career down the toilet. It's great. That's what I'm here for. Anytime you start feeling like things are going really well, just give me a buzz and... I'm telling you, because I have no more money in a year, so... Yeah. Thanks again to Elizabeth Dunn. Thanks to you for listening. Go give us a rating or a review.

If you've got a second, that really helps us with the algorithms. Thank you most of all to everybody who works so hard on this show. 10% happier is produced by Justiney, Gabriel Zuckerman, Lauren Smith and Tara Anderson. DJ Cashmere is our senior producer, Marissa Schneiderman is our senior editor and Kimmy Reggler is our executive producer, scoring and mixing by Peter Bonnaventure of Ultravalet Audio and Nick Thorburn of the Great Band Islands wrote our theme. If you liked 10% happier, I hope you do.

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