The Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos - A Silver Lining

Episode Date: October 1, 2019

Ice skater Michelle Kwan was all set to win Olympic Gold... but in a major sporting upset she came second. Sharing her story with Dr Laurie Santos, Michelle lets us in on a key secret to achieving happiness when you're tempted to feel like a loser.  For an even deeper dive into the research we talk about in the show visit happinesslab.fm Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Pushkin. I want to bring you back to one of my favorite moments in sporting history. One that provides an important message about what you can do to be happier. It's August 5th, 2012. The London Olympics. As the soundtrack to Chariots of Fire fills the stadium, gymnast Michaela Maroney, wearing her Team USA tracksuit, is waiting to accept an Olympic medal.

Finally, her name is called, prompting a huge cheer from the crowd. Finally, her name is called, prompting a huge cheer from the crowd. She waves, steps onto the podium, and takes a deep breath as she bows her head. An official slips the medal over the ponytail, which holds back her hair so fiercely that all her features seem drawn upwards. All except her mouth, that is. Michaela is doing her best to keep a straight face, but she's barely suppressing a frown.

Michaela shakes the official's hand and mouths thank you over the crowd noise. Another official presents the medalist with a bunch of flowers. A flicker of a polite smile crosses Michaela's lips for just an instant and then fades. And then it happens, the face. For just a second in front of thousands of spectators and millions of TV viewers around the world, Michaela's mouth grimaces, contorting sharply to the left.

It's a look that's somewhere between annoyance and downright contempt. So why was Michaela scowling in front of all her fans? It was because of the medal around Michaela's neck. She just won the Olympic silver. In subsequent interviews, Michaela was everything you'd expect from a top-ranking Olympian. She accepted that her unexpected fall

in the vault competition meant she didn't deserve to take gold. She asserted that she was happy with her runner's-up medal. But on that podium in London, just for a second, Michaela's face told another story. But here's an even bigger puzzle.

The Russian gymnast Maria Paseka was also on the podium that day, and she did even worse. She only took the bronze medal. But the weird thing is, Maria looked much, much happier than Michaela did. So how can that be? The answer, it turns out, involves a very common cognitive bias. One that doesn't only plague champion athletes. It's a bias that plagues all of us. And it's one that's impeding our happiness more than we expect. Our minds are constantly telling us what to do to be happy.

But what if our minds are wrong? What if our minds are lying to us, leading us away from what will really make us happy? The good news is that understanding the science of the mind can point us all back in the right direction. You're listening to The Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos. to the Happiness Lab with Dr. Lori Santos. If you were asked to choose which metal you'd want, gold, silver, or bronze, I'm pretty sure I could predict your order of preference. Even in crude monetary terms, the gold-plated metal is more prized than the silver, which in turn is more valuable than the copper alloy one. But what if I were to ask you to rank the medals

in order of which you think would bring you the greatest joy? Would you stick with those choices? I bet you would, which is one of the reasons everyone got so obsessed with Michaela Moroney's scowl. How could she be so upset with a silver medal? Within days of the ceremony, Michaela's second-place grimace became a popular meme. She was photoshopped into great moments in human history. The moon landing, the fall of the Berlin Wall, when Miley Cyrus cut her hair short. In every event, Michaela is there, looking on, and scowling Michaela, as the meme reminded us,

is not impressed. Michaela took her meme-ification with good grace, even when she was asked to make the face in the Oval Office beside President Barack Obama. She also did the rounds on late-night talk shows, fielding questions about the now-infamous expression. Here she is discussing the face with David Letterman. I thought to myself, I know exactly what's going on here. They've caught her at an introspective moment. She's probably not pleased with her performance, would rather have done better instead of silver, would rather have gotten the gold.

And who can blame her? And they've caught her in just a contemplative moment. And now they're making it silly. Am I right about that? It is pretty funny. Can I see it again? Letterman is right. Michaela was the hot favorite to take gold.

Her fall dashed those hopes and momentarily broke her heart. But it turns out, Michaela's silver medal reaction is really common. Hello, my name is Michelle Kwan, Olympic figure skater. It's tough to find Olympians willing to talk about the crushing instant when the highest award in their sport slipped through their fingers. Michelle Kwan, however, didn't hesitate for a single second when I asked her to relive the memories of the biggest upset in her glittering ice skating career, the 1998 Winter Games. I kind of let the waterworks happen. I mean, it was going to happen. And, you know, as a kid, yes, you dream of going to the Olympics, you dream of winning gold, and you don't think of winning silver or bronze.

And so it's a disappointment when you have high hopes and you do everything to make it happen. Just like Michaela, Michelle was predicted, no, expected, to take the gold. I was one of the favorites for sure going into those Olympics. Michelle's performance was one of the most anticipated of the day. She came to the Nagano Olympics, just having won the national championship, where she earned an unprecedented 6.0. Which is a perfect score in figure skating at the time. And Michelle's 1998 Olympic performance did not disappoint.

Wearing a sparkly blue dress, she skated to a harp and string concerto. The entire performance was flawless. I did perform both a clean short program and long program, meaning that I made no mistakes. Michelle looked joyous when she left the ice. She even smiled up at her dad, who was clapping furiously in the stands. I was overwhelmed because I felt like I did it. You know, I did it. I did everything that I had planned.

I did every single jump. I did my job and what I set out to do. And unfortunately, you know, it wasn't the best that night. Michelle's teammate, 15-year-old Tara Lipinski, took to the ice a little later. The odds were against her. No one so young or inexperienced had ever won figure skating gold. But Tara's long performance was stellar. She hit two triple-triple jump combos, and the crowd went wild. It was obvious that an upset was about to occur. And it really happened within minutes.

I knew from the reaction of just the applause that it's going to be close. And so it was sort of nail-biting. But when the scores came out, I already knew. Tara had taken the gold. And just like that, Michelle was bumped to second place. Her gold medal dreams dashed. You didn't even really have a moment. Because then you're walking down the hallway and then there's the press conference.

It was just whatever, you know, like I was ready to answer questions. And I'm very candid and I'm very honest. And I think I might have cried a little bit. And it's a disappointment and it'm very honest and I think I might have cried a little bit and it's a disappointment and it's very raw. I mean, it is of course a bit of a disappointment for an athlete not to get the gold. But what both Michelle and Michaela seem to be missing is the fact that they just won silver medals at the Olympic Games. They've each just proven that they're amongst the very best athletes in the world. But Michelle and Michaela aren't the only ones to be disappointed. I mean, champion British rower Catherine Granger likened getting second place in Beijing

to suffering a bereavement. And Canadian hockey star Jocelyn Laroque was so upset with her silver medal that she refused to wear it. Neither her coach nor her teammates nor even the angry crowd chanting, put your medal on, could change her mind. So what's going on? Well, it turns out all of these incredible competitors are in the throes of a rather common psychological error. We simulate alternative realities,

and we react to events not just in terms of what happened, but what those simulations tell us might have happened, easily could have happened, almost happened. This is Tom Gilovich. He's a sports fanatic, both on the court and off. I looked around, and there weren't that many over 65 basketball players. Tom was still shooting hoops well into his seventh decade. His knees, miraculously,

were still holding up. I go out and play full court basketball a few games, come back to my office, and I was just beat, good for nothing. And I thought, I have a job, I can't do that. That job is as a professor of psychology at Cornell University. Tom is a world expert on the biases that affect our choices and our well-being. Back in 1992, Tom embarked on one of my favorite ever studies in the field of happiness research. It combined his love of sports with his access to high-end consumer electronics. In those days, having a VHS recorder in your house was kind of new and exciting. If you had one, you were on the cutting edge of technology. Tom had been in a seminar discussing why narrowly missing out on an imagined future

torches us so much. He wanted to find a way to figure out what was going on. His sports brain suddenly kicked in. There are a lot of data points out there of some disgruntled-looking silver medalists. And one of the graduate students in the class, Vicky Medvik, said, that sounds interesting. We should test that. To do so, Tom set his VCR to catch the Barcelona Olympics on NBC. So we recorded all of their coverage and then went through it.

We pulled critical moments where swimmers are racing to the finish line and they touch one, two, three, and we just follow the camera. Sometimes, most often, of course, they're focusing on the gold medal winner. Sometimes they'll show the faces of the bronze and silver medal winner. We would edit those and show them to judges and have them score it on an agony to ecstasy scale, borrowing a phrase from an old sports program, The Wide World of Sports. Those judges, Tom's students, had to give each face they saw a score from 1 to 10. If the athlete looked like they were in emotional agony, they got a 1. If the medalist appeared to be in the throes of ecstasy, it was a 10. The bronze medalists scored, on average, a 7.1 out of 10

on that scale. That's pretty high, especially given that they had just gotten third place. especially given that they had just gotten third place. But silver medalists? They scored not a 7, nor a 6, not even a 5. On average, they were at a 4.8. Of all the people on the podium, the silver medalists were clearly the most miserable. And on Tom's scale, a 4.8 is closer to agony than to ecstasy.

Hmm. Does this mean that the silver medalists who's so close to the gold they can almost taste it think of their quite significant achievement not as achievement but as a failure to win the gold, the failure to be the person who can be on the weedy box the following year? Whereas the bronze medalists, they might also, some of them, especially if they were expecting to win, might imagine, oh, if I'd done a little better, I could get the gold medal. But the gold medal is two slots away. One slot away in the opposite direction is not getting a medal at all. And so psychologically, that's a more tempting alternative to reality to construct,

and therefore they have a sense of relief that, well, at least I got a medal. Tom's finding wasn't just true at the Barcelona Olympics. The agony of silver medalists has been confirmed experimentally again and again. During the 2004 Athens Games, Professor David Matsumoto of San Francisco State teamed up with martial arts journalist Bob Willingham. They ran judo medalists from over 30 different countries through a state-of-the-art technique called the facial action coding system. They noted the exact movements of each of the muscles in the athletes' faces. And we're talking

all the muscles here, from the corrugator supercilii to the zygomaticus major. The researchers confirmed what Tom's judges saw and revealed a pattern that was even more striking. The martial artists who won silver weren't just less happy than those in first and third place. They were in a completely different state of mind. Their facial expressions showed distinctly negative emotions, emotions like sadness, anger, and disgust, which is remarkable. I mean, they just got Olympic recognition for their sporting achievements, and their faces said they felt awful. These findings show that the imagined alternative, that of a gold medal, poisons the actually really awesome reality the silver medalists experience. They've just won an Olympic medal. That

should be a thrill. But they end up looking enviously at the one single solitary person on earth who beat them. But this experience isn't just a problem for Olympians. It's part of human nature. It's a bias that's deeply ingrained in all of us. People don't react to the stimuli they confront. They react to the meaning that they attach to those stimuli. Second place is great, except if you've assigned it the meaning of it not being the gold medal. But bronze medalists clearly attach a different meaning to getting third place on the leaderboard. They aren't gazing disappointedly at the champ. They're looking down at all the people who didn't beat them. They're thinking about the possibility of not getting a medal at all. Bronze medalists are framing their experience in a way that is also pretty relatable,

especially if you think back on your own life experiences. Many times people will say that, oh, the happiest moment of my life is, you know, I was having a medical test because there was something to worry about, and it turned out it was nothing. And I'll always remember that day. It's just, you're ecstatic that something bad didn't happen. There's always a worse reference point out there if you look carefully enough. Yes. Problem is we don't often look. Yes. I mean, it's really a psychology

of counting your blessings. Before we take a break, let's play a quick would-you-rather game. Would you rather take A, a job where you earn $50,000 a year, or B, a job where you earn $100,000 a year? Time's up. My guess is that you went with option B. But I didn't tell you what everyone else at the imaginary company was earning. And that makes a bigger difference than you think. The Happiness Lab will be back in a moment.

The Happiness Lab will be back in a moment. show tunes. More of you finding Gemini's because you know you always like them. More of you dating with intention because you know what you want. And you know what? We love that for you. Someone else will too. Be more you this year and find them on Bumble. It's 1981 and England is in the grip of a terrible economic crisis. Jerry Dammers and his ska band The Specials are touring the country,

playing concerts in city after city. And everywhere they go, they see the same thing. Auto plants closing. Shipyards shutting down. Factory gates being locked for good. Nearly 3 million Brits are out of work. And 6,000 more are joining those ranks every single day. Dammer's hit song powerfully evokes the feeling of hard times.

Ghost town. Must be miserable. Ghost town. Must be miserable. But as it turns out, you may be happier living in a ghost town than a boom town if you're unemployed. And to explain why, I need to talk about the power of reference points. You see, our mind is constantly telling us that being absolutely better is what matters. Gold is better than silver, which is better than bronze. Getting an A-plus on your report card is better than an A, which is better than an A-minus. Earning $100,000 is better than $75,000, which is better than $50,000.

But it turns out that being absolutely better doesn't always feel better. It depends on your reference point, that other alternative reality you're paying attention to. Which takes us back to ghost towns. Back in 2003, Andrew Clark, a professor at the Paris School for Economics, studied well-being in the UK across different kinds of labor markets, whether you're in a ghost town like the one in the special song, or a boom town, in which only a small number of people are seeking work. What did he find?

Well, as you might expect, Clark found that not having a job kind of sucks. Overall, unemployed folks were less happy than those with jobs. But how big that effect was depended on where you lived. Being unemployed in a town where lots of folks are unemployed doesn't feel as bad as being unemployed in a town where lots of folks are working. Clark's data showed that we're using the other people around us as a reference point. Misery really does love company. If you heard the last episode, you may recall that lottery winners, millionaires, and other people earning lots and lots of money usually aren't all that much happier than the rest of us. The science of reference points shows why. It's true that millionaires have objectively more money than lots of people on the planet.

But they also hang out with people who make even more money than they do, which means they don't end up feeling all that wealthy. The minds of the super rich naturally compare themselves against the super super rich, and everyone ends up feeling bad. You can always find a better middle out there when it comes to salary. And that kind of envy can bring out our mean streak. Do you remember that would-you-rather question from earlier? It was about picking from two different salaries, one higher and one lower. We'd pretty much all take the bigger paycheck.

But Tom Gilovich explained a twist that can trigger our obsession with reference points. There's a nice old economic study where respondents were asked, which world would you rather live in? One where you make $50,000 a year and other people make $25,000, so you're the richest person on your block. Or would you rather live in a world where you make $100,000 but everybody else makes $200,000? So you're making twice as much, you have twice as much purchasing power, but other people have still more than you. And that turns out to be a hard problem. The respondents are roughly split.

Half of them want just give me more money. I don't care that other people are making more than I am. And other people want to be the top dog. These results are crazy. Almost half of us would be willing to give up a huge part of our salary just to be doing better than other people. But we don't just do this with money. Sarah Solnick and David Hemenway, who ran the original study,

asked a whole list of similar questions about other kinds of achievements. Do you want to be very pretty, in a sea of fashion models? Or kind of plain, but prettier than other people? Do you want to be super smart, or kind of plain but prettier than other people? Do you want to be super smart or just smarter than your peers? Turns out, many people would rather be dumber and uglier, as long as they're superior to those immediately around them. Our desire to compare ourselves with others does make us do some downright dumb stuff in the real world.

And our tendency to envy other people can also leave us open to manipulation. In a typical lottery, like Powerball in the US, you buy a ticket, your number comes up, you win a prize. But in the Netherlands, your fate in the lottery is directly tied to that of your neighbors. Hello? Ik heb goed nieuws. Hallo? Wat tam mee is het kruis? in the lottery is directly tied to that of your neighbors. This is the Dutch Postcode Lottery. It's a charity lottery,

meaning that all proceeds go to a good cause. But this lottery works differently than playing Powerball. The winning number isn't one you pick yourself. It's linked to your zip code. Every Sunday night, one Dutch postcode is picked out. If you live in that area and bought a ticket, you automatically win the weekly street prize of 25,000 euros. That's a massive chunk of the average Dutch salary. But if you didn't buy a ticket, well, you get nothing, which is kind of a bummer. Even more of a bummer than losing a regular lottery.

In Powerball, if you didn't buy a ticket, you don't feel a huge sense of loss when some random number is announced. But if you didn't buy a Dutch Street Prize ticket and your zip code comes up, that feeling of loss cuts deeply. It's not some random number that won. It was your postcode. And you passed up money that should have been yours when you didn't play. That alternative reality where you could have won a lot of money becomes very salient. But the real kicker happens when you look out your window. Because on average, a quarter of your neighbors bought a ticket.

And they're celebrating right now because some celebrity just brought them a huge oversized check. Just like silver medalists can't help but look to gold, the neighbors of Dutch lottery winners can't help but frame themselves as losers with all of the unhappy emotions that this sort of envy brings, even though their situation hasn't changed at all. I mean, think about it. They didn't really lose anything.

They're just as rich as they were yesterday, but now they feel awful. But it gets worse. In 2005, Peter Kuhn, an economist at UC Santa Barbara, teamed up with colleagues to test what one Dutch household winning the prize does to material consumption in the rest of the community. How would seeing your neighbors renovate their house, go on vacation, or park a shiny new ride in the driveway make you feel?

Probably like a loser. And maybe like you deserve something new too, even though you didn't win any money. Kuhn studied the long-term impact of having a lottery winner neighbor. A typical non-ticket buyer has a 14% chance of buying a new car within a given year. But if someone two doors down from you actually wins the lottery, that bumps up your probability of buying a new car to 18%. And if that winner lives right next door to you, your urge to buy a new car jumps from 14% to 21%.

Having a next-door neighbor get rich suddenly pushes you to make purchases you wouldn't normally make. The idea of a postcode lottery is now spreading around the world, which is great, because these lotteries do raise a lot of money for good causes. The Dutch one alone has generated billions of dollars for charity since its inception. But watching the promotional videos for these games made me realize the psychological pull of this particular kind of lottery. It's FOMO 101. It's tapping into our automatic urge to use other people as reference points, often at our own disadvantage. I'm as guilty as anyone of making myself sad

by constantly picking unflattering reference points, both in my professional and in my personal life. It's a trait I worry about and one I confess to Tom. Because if I think about, you know, who's a psychologist that's doing really well, that's publishing a lot, or, you know, who's one of my friends who's like really beautiful, like my mind doesn't go to like, oh, I'll just pick a medium productive, you know, psychologist, or I'll pick a like medium beautiful person. Like we pick the comparison that in some sense is the harshest, right? That's what comes to mind the easiest. And then that means our standard is the worst possible standard against which we could be

comparing ourselves. Yes, exactly. And in some ways, we're goal-striving creatures. We're happiest when we're striving for goals. And that means we're setting our targets upwards. How am I doing compared to what? Well, it's compared to the people who are publishing like mad and getting the great jobs. Those are the things that spring to mind most readily. And that can make a person unhappy. Tom has studied one other area in which many of us do this all the time. When we think of how good our social lives are. Let's try some questions together.

Who goes to more parties, you or other people? Who has more friends, you or other people? Who has a wider social network, you or other people? What were your answers? All three of mine were other people. When it comes to their social lives, the average person thinks they're below average. People think that they're not quite in the center of the social action. They're farther out on the periphery, that there's some inner group that is having all the fun, and they're missing out.

But why do we think everyone is more fun than we are? As usual, it's because there are obvious reference points that are messing us up. The most natural other people to come to mind when you're thinking about how active is my social life are the most actively social people, the life of the party that comes to mind most readily. And of course, if you compare yourself to that person, you feel that your social life isn't that great. Given how important social relations are to human life, if you think that socially you're

not quite up there, it's pretty hard for most people to feel good about themselves. And this is the most insidious part of our reference point bias. We don't just pick arbitrary reference points. We often pick the most extreme reference point out there. The person that's doing the very, very, very best in whatever trait we're thinking of. That's where our minds go. And our bias to seek out these extreme alternatives

might be getting more problematic today, especially with so many upward comparisons on social media to make us envious. It's a very rare person that posts a picture of themselves kind of lonely and miserable. So you get a bias sample from being on any kind of social media. So it's hard to imagine how that couldn't accentuate this tendency. Tom is quick to point out that all these comparisons are a double-edged sword. On the one hand, comparing ourselves against people

who are way better than us can make us feel really bad. But... On the other hand, it can make a person productive. And if we were satisfied all the time, would we have the same level of drive if we were comparing downward? Well, at least I'm not like this person who's never had a single study ever work out. I feel great now. Well, good.

But are you going to work as hard? And so there's this tension between satisfaction and productivity. I don't always find striking that balance easy. But making the show, I found an amazing new role model. striking that balance easy. But making the show, I found an amazing new role model. Someone who never stops striving,

but still doesn't fall into that sad silver medal trap. What I didn't expect, though, was that my new role model would be Michelle Kwan. Coming home with the silver, everyone's like, oh, it's such a bummer. You lost.

And my approach was, no, I didn't lose. I won the silver medal. The Happiness Lab will be right back. Ugh, we're so done with New Year, New You. This year, it's more you on Bumble. More of you shamelessly sending playlists, especially that one filled with show tunes.

More of you finding Gemini's because you know you always like them. More of you dating with intention because you know what you want. And you know what? We love that for you. Someone else will too. Be more you this year and find them on Bumble.

At seven years old, I watched the Calgary 1988 Olympics and watched Brian Boitano win the Olympics. And I think it was at that moment I was like, oh, I want to be a skater. I want to be an Olympic skater, just like Brian Boitano. I'm not even going to try to read out all the championships, titles or medals that Michelle Kwan won during her figure skating career. She may have lost the gold in 1998, but her trophy haul is still greater than that of her hero, Brian Boitano. I don't think about it often. It's weird to hear all the titles. I guess it must be a little surreal to be considered one of the most decorated figure skaters in history, especially when you're as modest as Michelle is.

And that modesty is one of the things that sets Michelle apart. Even though Michelle was disappointed placing second in Nagano, she didn't seem to be in agony. During the medal ceremony, Michelle graciously hugged the teammate who beat her. She smiled genuinely when her name was called in Japanese, waving with ease at her screaming fans. She wasn't as ecstatic as the gold medalist, but Michelle seemed fine. There was no face, no tossing her medal to the side. Even though many of her fans were still in shock, Michelle looked calm and almost joyous on the stand. There's so many ways to look at it, and the way I see it, it's like the glass is half full.

I always had like a very positive outlook. I wanted to figure out how Michelle was able to overcome that envy that plagues the typical silver medalist. How was she able to avoid falling prey to all the negative social comparisons that many of us make all the time? I never put myself against somebody. I didn't want to wish anybody, you know, falls or anything. So I tend to kind of focus on myself. I was not that kind of competitor where it's like, I'm against this person. During our conversation, I realized that Michelle used several of the strategies Tom Gilovich and I had discussed, the ones that research show can help us avoid feeling bad

in the face of those imaginary reference points. The first strategy Mischel used is what researchers call negative visualization. The act of wondering, what would things be like if the good events in our life never happened? Like, what if I didn't manage to earn a medal at all? What if I fell during the triple lunge and came in fifth place? Or what if I never made it to the Olympics at all? That last possibility was really easy for Michelle to imagine, because it almost came true.

I struggled a bit a couple months before because I had a foot fracture in my second metatarsal. Breaking your foot is a catastrophe for an Olympic skater. Michelle had to train like crazy to catch up. She almost didn't make it to Japan. But psychologically, the injury was a gift. It gave Michelle a reference point that made her grateful for that second place prize. Because there was a really obvious imagined future

where she might have been dropped from the Olympic squad altogether. Michelle also had a healthy other reference point to keep her grounded, her big sister Karen. It's fun because we used to skate together and train together. Karen Kwan was an elite skater, one of the very best in the United States. But she never broke into the top flight. She never made it to the podium or got a place in the U.S. squad because she was bested by her little sister at the

national championships in 1996. There were two quans. That was the nationals where I was first and she was fifth. You must have had parents who really instilled in you, you know, for a sister not to be completely jealous of her other sister's fame. She's the most supportive sibling. She's just like, go, Michelle. Michelle looked up to her older sister as an example of how to support other athletes' success gracefully. And she loved sharing the limelight with her sister. Karen didn't feel like a competitor. I had a partner. Working with Karen so closely made Michelle realize that there was a better way to motivate herself than enviously looking to other, better skaters. Comparing myself to somebody

else, it didn't drive me. I have to be internally motivated and passionate about what I was doing. And there's a third reason Michelle was able to avoid those harmful reference points. As I talked with Michelle about her grueling practice schedule, it's like Groundhog's Day every day. I wasn't immediately convinced that hitting the ice for hours each and every day was a great source of happiness. But as it turns out, I thrived. I loved the schedule. Like I was flying and I wish I could bottle that because I don't know what was the inspiration, what was the fire. It was like a rocket that kept going and, going, where my coach was like, can you get off the ice? Because

you're really scaring me right now. And I was flying around the ice. Michelle wasn't just in it for a shot at some far-off championship. She enjoyed the grind. And when her passion for the sport propelled her onto the Olympic team, she was able to see that experience as a journey too. onto the Olympic team, she was able to see that experience as a journey too. Not just as a chance for a medal, but as an opportunity to relish every single amazing moment along the way. It's overwhelming.

It is completely overwhelming. You're so proud to represent the United States. And then you're at the Olympic arena where you skate over the Olympic rings where it's painted on under the ice. And I remember actually crying when I skated over the Olympic rings where it's painted on under the ice. And I remember actually crying when I skated over the Olympic rings. And I was so overwhelmed that I had tears rolling down my face. And then my coach actually pulled me aside. It's like, you need to wake up. Snap out of it. Wake up. You're here. You're at the Olympics. You have a

job to do. 17-year-old Michelle's job wasn't to beat a bunch of competitors she envied. It wasn't even to get the gold medal. I want to escape my best. Before I think about medals, thinking about anything, I want to do my very own best and have no regrets. It really was an awakening of, it's not about the result, it's about the journey. Michelle's awakening fits with what Tom Gilovich has learned in his study of happiness. He thinks Michelle articulated an important lesson for all of us. You know, life is a journey. It's not a destination. Michelle Kwan had these amazing

years of putting herself to the test day in, day out, and that's not an easy thing to do, and she did it, and she can feel great about that. And most of the things in life that are truly sustaining in terms of their ability to provide us happiness has to do with the pursuit of things. We're happiest when we're on the journey, not when the journey is over. Loving the journey gave Michelle a grace that shaped her career and was especially salient during that tough second place moment in Japan. It was a lot for a 17-year-old, but I think my parents' voice of you win some, you lose some, but you realize very quickly that this is not your world. You just happen to be living in it. It's good sportsmanship. It's the reality of the

world. As you'll hear a lot on this podcast, I want to find happy people and look at their behavior, both so I can give you some tips, but also so I can get some new ones myself. During our chat, Michelle revealed so many traits that separate happy people from the rest of us. But the most important one is her ability to put her experiences into context, to think in terms of positive rather than negative reference points, or to count one's blessings, as Tom put it earlier. The happy people, it's almost like they have this talent for framing things in a way that sustains their happiness. If you've experienced some failure, it's easy to, well,

you can recode it as, okay, I didn't achieve this, but look at what I have. Michelle Kwan is the queen of reframing. When you look back, you're like, would a gold medal make me happier? When I look back, it's not the medals themselves. It's the moments. It's hearing the applause and hearing the crowd and hearing the ice when I skated over it.

It's so beautiful. I don't know, just hearing the roar of the audience and having that love. This is why I do what I do. We all fall prey to reference points. We don't experience the good and bad events in our lives in objective terms. We're constantly comparing our own achievements

to somebody else's. That other person's medal, car, salary, and even social life. We've also learned that we suck at picking these reference points. That our minds automatically go to the most salient imaginary reality. And that's often one in which we could be prettier, higher on the podium, a bit more popular, and way more wealthy. And this kind of reference point setting is costly. Here's one factoid I saved until the end.

Silver medalists aren't just sadder on the stand. They're still negatively affected by that gold medal reference point years and years later. In fact, one study has even shown that silver medalists are more likely to die younger than those who win bronze or gold. Bad reference points can cut our lives short. So if you want to be happier, maybe even live longer, you need to find better reference points. You need to look not just for the silver lining, but the bronze lining. The great thing about the human mind is we can do that. We can simulate whatever new reference points we want.

It just takes some effort. And if you're ready to put that work in, I hope you'll return for the next episode of The Happiness Lab with me, Dr. Laurie Santos. If you enjoyed the show, I'd be super grateful if you could spread the word by leaving a rating and a review. It really does help other listeners find us. And don't forget to tell your friends. If you want to learn

more about the science you heard on the show, then check out our website, happinesslab.fm. You can also sign up for our newsletter to get exclusive content. The Happiness Lab is co-written and produced by Ryan Dilley. The show is mixed and mastered by Evan Viola and edited by Julia Barton. Fact-checking by Joseph Fridman. And our original music was composed by Zachary Silver. Special thanks to Mia LaBelle, Carly Migliori, Heather Fane, Maggie Taylor, Maya Koenig, and Jacob Weisberg. The Happiness Lab is brought to you by Pushkin Industries and me, Dr. Laurie Santos.