The Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos - Advice from The Titans of Happiness on World Mental Health Day

Episode Date: October 10, 2024

The biggest names in wellness podcasting - "The Titans of Happiness" - come together to talk about the greatest mental health challenges facing us in 2024 and the very simple things we can all do to be happier.  Joining Dr Laurie Santos for this World Mental Health Day special are:  Dr Joy Harden Bradford, the clinical psychologist and host of the podcast Therapy for Black Girls. Gretchen Ruben, the best-selling author, host of Happier with Gretchen Rubin and all-round happiness guru at GretchenRubin.com. Dan Harris, the former TV news anchor who now fronts 10% Happier with Dan Harris and the online community at Dan Harris.com.  And since this is an extra special episode, Dr Laurie invited one extra special guest, Sesame Street’s Elmo. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Pushkin. Thank you. The world of podcasting is full of shows with great advice on improving well-being. So a few of us decided to get together and pool our expertise. And today's guest list is pretty impressive. So much so that I've decided to refer to today's crew as the Titans of Happiness. Dr. Joy Harden-Bradford is a clinical psychologist, who you may better know as the host of the podcast Therapy for Black Girls. Gretchen Rubin is the OG of well-being experts. She's written a bunch of best-selling happiness books, most recently Life in Five Senses. She also created a podcast called Happier with Gretchen Rubin.

Titan number three is Dan Harris. Dan was a TV news anchor who, after having a panic attack live on air, began looking into mindfulness meditation practices. having a panic attack live on air, began looking into mindfulness meditation practices. He now devotes himself to his podcast, 10% Happier, and his new listener community, which you should check out at danharris.com. And since I wanted this to be an extra special show, I invited one extra, extra special guest. Earlier this year, he sent out a very simple message on social media, checking in on all of us. How is everybody doing? He asked. 220 million people saw his message, and tens of thousands of them replied, all the way from presidents to Paddington Bear. That post was made by my friend,

Sesame Street's Elmo. Hey, Elmo. Oh, hi, Dr. Norrie. Elmo's so happy to see you again. Aw, seeing you makes me so happy too, Elmo. Elmo, thanks for being one of our Titans of Happiness. Titan? What's a Titan? Elmo's a monster. Well, Titans are kind of like monsters, Elmo. Oh, really?

What, so it's a monster of happiness? So that makes Elmo a happiness monster. Yeah, you totally are. Oh, oh. Oh, are your friends happiness monsters too? Kind of. Elmo, this is Dan. What's up, Elmo? Gretchen. Yeah, you totally are. Oh, are your friends happiness masters too? Kind of. Elmo, this is Dan. What's up, Elmo?

Gretchen. Hello, Elmo. I'm happy to meet you. And Dr. Joy. Hi, Elmo. How are you? Doing great. Nice to meet you.

You too. It's my pleasure. Oh, cool. Cool. All right. So first off, thanks to all my experts who have come on and agreed to be titans of happiness. I'm curious if that label makes you feel uneasy uneasy as I've sometimes felt when I've been referred to as an expert on happiness

because sometimes that feels disingenuous when I feel like I'm working just as hard on my own happiness and trying to figure this out as much as everybody. I don't know if others can relate there. Yeah, I will definitely say that doesn't feel like a term I would give myself. But I think I am also reminded

that to be helpful to other people, you only need to be like a step or two ahead. And so I don't have to be, you know, 12,000 steps ahead to be able to have something to offer. And so I think I am getting more comfortable with the idea that I've gone to school for a very long time to share some things with my community that can be really helpful to them. Exactly. I would say that for me, research is me-search. And I'm always guided in my explorations by trying to figure out what's going to work for me. And along the way, I find, well,

something works really well for some people, but not for me. Like meditation works so well for Dan. I can learn from that. So yeah, I don't think of myself as somebody who's figured it all out, but somebody who's just really interested in exploring it and thinking about it and trying to gather the ideas and make sense of all the research and thought-provoking ideas that are out in the world. Dan, does that resonate to the idea of research as me-search? Totally. One of my little jokes is that, you know,

some experts teach from the mountaintop and I teach from the fetal position. I very much have plenty of issues that I struggle with. And, you know, I think a cornerstone of my work, and I see this in all of your work, which is why I'm grateful to know all of you, is a willingness to be open about my struggles as a way to illustrate that it's okay to have your own stuff and that there are ways to work on it. So you all are here because I like to consider this group the Titans of Happiness, right? Folks that I turn to when I'm looking for great advice on how we can all improve our mental health. And we're here on World Mental Health Day. And I think it's a salient World Mental Health Day here in 2024 because I think a lot of us are struggling when it comes to our mental health.

And the goal for this conversation is to figure out some strategies that we can all use to sort of feel better. And maybe even to do a deep dive into some of the problems with mental health that I think so many of us are facing. And I think a real big one, at least when it comes to what folks like the Surgeon General talk about and so on, is loneliness. This crisis that we're all kind of in need of social connection. Dan, maybe let me start with you. What do I think of it? I think

it's a huge problem. We live in an individualistic society that's to a certain extent healthy, but we have perfected the art of unhealthy individualism. And it shows up over time in increasingly pernicious ways. We're living alone and now with technology, basically everything about modern life militates against actual human to human social interaction. And I believe this is one of the contributing factors to the epidemic of mental health issues we're seeing. Anxiety, suicide, addiction, depression, and loneliness. So what do you do about it? Well, one of the best tips I've heard comes from the Surgeon General himself, Dr. Vivek Murthy, and it's a counterintuitive piece of advice, and in part, that's why I like it so much. It is, if you are feeling lonely, to volunteer. Volunteering

puts you in touch with other people, reminds you of your own self-worth. It's inherently ennobling and kind of, as I like to say, you know, helps you pull your head out of your ass. So that to me is the piece of advice that seems to be among the most powerful. I love that because it, you know, first helps with social connection, obviously, which we know is important for reducing loneliness, but just doing nice stuff for others is also something that we know kind of makes you feel better too. So it's kind of like a twofer if you're sort of volunteering and jumping in. Dr. Joy, in your clinical practice, does this come up? Do you have strategies that you turn to when people are feeling lonely? Yeah, absolutely.

And I just want to build on something that Dan mentioned, because I think the technology that we all use in some ways, I think, tricks us to believe that we are actually connecting with other people. And in some ways that's the case, but I think it is easy to then forget like, oh, I haven't actually seen my best friend in like three months because we just keep up on WhatsApp. Right. And so I think it is really important to pay attention to the amount of time we're spending on our screens. That is one thing that I talk about pretty frequently in my practice and I'm on the podcast is really like auditing our social media and taking account of how much time we actually are spending on our devices, because I think it is giving us the idea that we are way more connected than we actually are. Yes. Yeah. It's kind of I joke with my students. It's like the NutraSuite of social connection, right? Like it feels like we're getting some nutritious value

from the social connection. But if anything, it's like the opposite. If anything, it's often at opportunity cost of the in real life social connection, right? Gretchen, any other thoughts on kind of loneliness and social connection? Well, just to build on what Joy and Dan said, because I completely agree. And I always remind myself that IRL is better than URL. And you've always got to like take those connections from the online version to the in real life version. And volunteering is terrific. I mean, one of the nicest things about human nature is, you know, do good, feel good. It really works. But I think any group, joining any group is also a really good cure for loneliness, like whether that's birdwatching or it's a poker group or it's

a book club or it's your, it's a volunteer group. You're meeting people at the dog walking park at the same time. Because one of the things we know is important for forming relationships is just seeing people consistently. The more we see people, the more we tend to like them. The more we see them, the more we can deepen our relationships with them. And indeed, ancient philosophers and contemporary scientists all agree that a key, maybe the key to a happy life is strong relationships with other people. So when we're thinking about how to spend our precious time, energy and money, you know, building relationships through volunteering, through

groups, through just a face-to-face meetup, just really, really central. I think it's also important that we need to build on the relationships we do have too, right? And we like get so focused on like, oh, let me find new friends. And this gets to something I know that Sesame Workshop has been thinking about a lot is this idea of reaching out. Elmo, you know what checking in with people is, right? Yeah, well, Elmo learned from his daddy that checking in means you ask how people are doing.

And you had a super big moment where you checked in on how a lot of people were doing on the social media site X. Yeah, that's right. What happened with that? Well, you know, when Elmo asked how people were doing with help from his daddy, Elmo was really glad to hear from friends

all around the world. Yeah, they were telling Elmo how they were feeling. It's important to be able to tell a friend how you feel, don't you think? Oh yeah, it's super important to be able to check in on your friends. Yeah, so many friends had big feelings and Elmo was really happy that

they could share them with Elmo. And in addition to Elmo, we also have a visit from Samantha from Sesame Workshop. Hi, Ms. Samantha. Hi. Samantha, do you want to quickly introduce yourself? Hi, I'm Samantha Malton. I'm the Chief Marketing and Brand Officer for Sesame Workshop, the global impact nonprofit behind Sesame Street. And so, Samantha, I'm guessing that Elmo wasn't the only person at the workshop really shocked by the reaction that he got when he was checking in on so many people. Tell me what that was like for folks at the workshop. We could not have anticipated the reaction that we had. It was just incredible. And what it signaled to us is that there has never

been a greater need for the work that we're doing. We ask open-ended questions all the time, Elmo with help from his daddy, but this time, this really touched people. The idea of checking in on them sparked a response that was unlike any other we've ever had at Sesame Workshop. Over 300 million people saw his tweet and millions responded, from world leaders responding to everyday people who check on Elmo every day. And I really believe that it's because of the relationship that they felt towards Elmo. It's such a sense of loneliness and people feeling like they are on their own. And it is so important to be able to check in on a friend, a family member, a loved one. One of the things that Sesame is focused on now, we just launched

our wellbeing report in partnership with the Harris Poll so that we could start to examine this issue at scale. It's just astounding what we're seeing. One in three parents feel that mental health is negatively affecting their family. And it's over half of teens. I think one of the things that I am heartened to see in some of our findings is that people are much more apt to ask for help now. These efforts towards destigmatization of mental health are really paying off, particularly with younger generations. Gen X, millennials feel much more empowered to ask for help than previous generations. I mean, I think we also need to interrupt you. I got excited. There's a great expression I heard, which has really become a life motto for me, and it is never worry alone. It is life advice par excellence. This is wisdom enshrined in, you know, sort of ancient traditions and in modern psychological research. And I love

thinking about, you know, this study at Harvard that I know all of you have heard about, the Harvard study for adult development that has looked at several generations of people in the Boston area to get a sense longitudinally like what contributes to a long and healthy and happy and successful life. And the one thing that comes screaming out of the data most clearly is the quality of your relationships because stress is generally what kills us and quality relationships mitigate stress. So never worry alone. And this is true even for introverts. You may not need as much social interaction as an extrovert like me and perhaps Elmo, but you still need it. I think one of the most interesting things is even something like talking to a sales

clerk or saying to a passerby, oh, what a cute dog, that we get a lift even from these very minor exchanges with other people, which is another reason why being socially isolated is so bad for us. We're social creatures. We're meant to be feeling like we're part of a community. And so sometimes if you're feeling low and lonely, just walking outside and just having these little exchanges with just the people in your neighborhood. That is a good thing to do. I'm going to try that. That itself can be a small but meaningful step to take. It's just interesting. There's so much data. I've interviewed this woman on my podcast. I suspect some of you may have already talked to her, Barbara Fredrickson, who's done all this work on micro interactions and how

these, as Gretchen was describing, talking to the barista or the sales clerk or somebody in the street with a cute dog. This is not trivial stuff. It adds up to real boosts in happiness. I was going to say, I know so much was written during the pandemic and kind of right after about how we lost so many of those micro interactions, right? So talking to the sales clerk, and I think we're still in a pattern of re-establishing that, which is difficult because so many people are continuing to work from home. And so I think we do have to kind of train that muscle again to kind of reconnect to those small ways we connected with other people. But, you know, and I think one of the sort of dangerous things about loneliness is there is a tendency when we become lonely to withdraw. You would think that when someone becomes lonely,

they would become more and more excited to engage, but that doesn't always happen. Sometimes you want to pull back, it feels more and more awkward. And as Joy was saying, kind of the whole COVID period kind of retrained us. And so it might feel more effortful to step out and have those little conversation or big conversations if you've sort of adjusted to not doing it

or just connecting through social media. And so I think there's sort of a feeling that, well, if I'm lonely, of course, I'll jump at the chance to go to a party or I'll jump at the chance to go to a neighborhood barbecue. But maybe that's not how it will feel. Maybe it will feel really hard and you think, oh, you know, it's just not worth it. I'll just stay at home. Like I got plenty to do. And you lose touch with how energizing and important for just like our sense of vitality and wellbeing these big and small interactions are. Yeah, Nick Epley, who we've had on our podcast before,

talks about that we have to get over this sort of speed bump of social connection. Yes, it's a perfect metaphor. Yes. Like a mini friction. It's not too bad. Just like a little speed bump. But it can stop you.

It can stop you. Totally. Just having to get put on real clothes. It's the too bad. Just like a little speed bump. But it can stop you. It can stop you. Totally. Just having to get put on real clothes. It's the beauty of connecting over, you know, like Zoom or the kinds of things we're connecting over now is that you don't have to have real shoes on. It's nice. Well, Dr. Loi and Dr. Joy

and Gretchen and Dan, you know, Emma loves talking to all of you, but it's time for Tango's Walk. So Emma will be back soon. The Titans of Happiness will be right back. One of my own mental health challenges in 2024 is worrying about big global issues. The news seems especially relentless and grim these days.

Many of us seem so divided over what actions to take. Sometimes it feels difficult to think about happier, nicer things closer to home. So I decided to ask my Titans of Happiness about this quandary, starting with Dr. Joy Harden-Bradford. Yeah, so I will go back to paying attention to how much time you're spending on your screen because it is very easy to fall down a rabbit hole of like watching traumatic video after traumatic video. And you look up and it's been four hours and you feel awful. And so I think that it really is important to do that. I'm a huge fan of dance parties and hula hooping in the middle of my kitchen. Getting those endorphins going and physical activity is really, really good. And so, you know, I think people joke about like, oh, go

outside and touch grass. But being grounded and getting engaged in some physical activity can really help to manage some of the stress. And I think that that often feels minute in comparison to all of the tragedies and the stress that's happening in the world. But those little things do add up and can provide a buffer for some of the more difficult experiences we have. Gretchen, any reactions to that one? Well, absolutely. And just building on what Joy said, I think that sometimes people feel like it's kind of selfish to worry about our own happiness or our own well-being.

And we think, well, you know, in a world full of suffering and injustice, it's not appropriate for me morally to think about my own happiness. But what the research shows, and I think we all see this in our own lives, is the people who work on being happier, calmer, they are the people that are most able to think about the problems of the world and to help out when their community or their family member or their neighbor

or their friend needs a hand. And so it isn't selfish to think about our own happiness because that's what helps us to turn outward, to think about the problems of other people and the problems of the world. So, you know, you're saying like, well, yeah, is me doing some hula hooping going to help the world? And you're like, you know, it actually might because that moment of hula hooping or that dance party might be what you need to kind of give yourself the emotional wherewithal to really engage with the bigger problems of the world. You know, when we give more to ourselves, we can ask more from ourselves. But just like on the idea of like

a simple hack, like the hula hooping, I'm a big fan of scheduling time to worry. If you kind of have worry that just kind of, you know, just take over your whole calendar. If I just say like, okay, I'm going to worry about this from three to 330. And I get out my pen and paper and I'm like all day long, I'm like, I'm not going to worry about this now because I've got my time to worry. And then because, you know, often it's really, there's a lot of good that can come from worry, but then it just stays contained and it stays constructive because I'm in a mental state to deal with it. And I've got my pen and my paper, so I can write a to-do list or follow up on things that I need to get done. So it's a much more constructive kind of worry than the kind of rumination or just sort of floating negative

thoughts that are just kind of constantly, you know, flitting around my mind, distracting me and draining me all day long. So maybe it's once a day, maybe it's twice a day, maybe it's once a week. But I think that as funny as it sounds, scheduling time to worry has really proved to be useful for me. I love that it seems like you also do it with a pen and paper in your hand, right? Which might turn that worry into something more like expressive writing or journaling, right? Where you kind of go into problem-solving mode as opposed to kind of ruminative loop mode where you just stay there forever. Exactly.

Where you're just going over and over and over it without, yeah, pinning it down or taking action. Absolutely. And so, Dan, when we think about stress, are there other ways we can hack our body? Joy talked about kind of movement and kind of dance parties and moving our body. I'm thinking of more like direct hacks to the fight or flight mechanism. Anything that you've gotten from your meditation practices of how we can do this better? Well, just a plus one. I'm taking notes here. I love scheduling

time for worry and I am going to invest in a hula hoop. The next time we get together, we'll have a hula hoop contest. And I also, you know, just to totally agree with what you were saying, Gretchen, about how this is not selfish. You really do want to take care of yourself because it makes you a better citizen, a better family member, a better contributor. Yes. But to answer the question you asked, yeah, to me, what's been incredibly helpful to me in terms of burnout, and I'll be honest, I do tend toward burnout. I can be a workaholic. What's been incredibly helpful for me is self-compassion. I suspect all of you are

familiar with the work of Dr. Kristen Neff and her colleague, Dr. Christopher Germer, they actually have a book coming out soon on self-compassion for burnout. And I'll give you a brief description of what self-compassion is, and then one little practical exercise. You can think of self-compassion really as the opposite of our habitual inner critic. Most of us talk to ourselves like a drill sergeant, and we think that's the best way to be effective. However, decades of research into self-compassion has shown that if you can change your inner dialogue to a supportive coach, that makes you more effective, better able to reach your goals and establish habits, et cetera, et cetera. And so for me, as cheesy as I found this at first, it's been transformative. So here is what Dr. Kristen Neff calls a self-compassion break. And it's really three steps. The first thing to do is just to

be mindful of what's happening right now. Like, yeah, this is a moment that sucks. Step number one, not hard. Two, to recognize that whatever you're dealing with right now, you are not alone. There are millions of other people on planet Earth feeling burnt out or depressed or lonely or whatever it is you're dealing with right now. This is a common human condition. Three is to direct some kindness toward yourself. And this is where, for skeptics like me and anti-sentimentalists like me, it can get a little weird. But there's a bunch of data to show that if you do two things simultaneously, one, talk to yourself the way you would talk to a good

friend. So for me, it's like, dude, yes, this sucks right now. And you've got support and you have a plan or whatever it is. I talk to myself the way I would talk to my son or a friend. And to supercharge that, put your hand on your heart, which I mean, I don't do this with anybody watching. But again, there's a lot of data to show that this can activate the mammalian care system. We're very good, many of us, at taking care of our friends and family. Not so good at taking care of ourselves. But you can channel that inner capacity for mentorship and direct it toward yourself.

And to me, that's just incredibly good news. I just want to underscore something that Dan mentioned in passing, which is that this is really good for people who are working on their habits. Because a lot of times when we're trying to be happier or more socially connected, we might be working on a habit that we think will help us achieve that aim. And just like Dan was saying, sometimes people think if they're really tough on themselves, if they are that drill sergeant, that will sort of energize them to do a better job with their habits if they've kind of fallen off the path. But in fact, just as Dan was saying, that people actually are more likely to re-engage and sort of like try again if they say

things to themselves like, well, I learned that lesson the hard way, or I won't make that mistake again, or that wasn't my best day. You know, what did I learn from how that went wrong? And so again, that self-compassion is so important in sort of however we might be coming down hard on ourselves. It feels like it would be productive, but it really isn't. Yeah. I also love this idea of talking to yourself like you'd talk to a friend because I feel like that fights one of the criticisms I often get from my students about self-compassion, which is that they confuse it with self-indulgence, right? They think that means

like you're letting yourself off the hook, even if your habits have been crappy, you're not going to kind of follow up with yourself. If you really think about how you'd talk to a friend, you wouldn't do that, right? If your friend was really messing up, you wouldn't be like, it's fine, like you do you, but you wouldn't scream at them like a drill sergeant either. You'd get like curious, you'd be like, I care about you, what's going on? How can I help? How can we problem solve? And it's kind of bringing that like compassionate, curious problem solving, which is the thing we naturally do with our care system for friends. We just like rarely apply it to ourselves. Yeah. And if you want to get granular about positive self-talk,

there's been some research done by Ethan Cross at the University of Michigan. He wrote a book called Chatter, by the way, that's very good. And he has shown that if you use your own name when you're talking to yourself, it actually provides some distance that is helpful. So Gretchen X and Y reassuring notions. If you just put Gretchen before the reassuring notions, it can help. I often say dude or bro because I'm, you know, like ridiculous. So now we're going to jump into something else that at least for me becomes a problem with my own mental health. So I assume this is the kind of thing the world is facing as well,

which is that it seems like it's harder and harder to just be present. I was talking with a friend the other day who was saying that she just feels like she's always in do mode. And it's just feels really impossible, especially today, just to be in like being mode where she's just kind of like existing in the world without that constant to do list in her head or kind of beating herself up or just feeling like there's more and more to be done. Dan, I know this is something you talk about a lot on the podcast and in your work. Any suggestions for us? Okay, well, I'm kind of known as Mr. Meditation now, but I really try to be very flexible and non-dogmatic in my evangelizing

for this practice because I have a ton of sympathy for people who feel time-starved. I feel that way myself. And so I don't want people to think that if they are interested in experimenting with meditation, that it's going to be some big stressful thing they need to add to their to-do list. As we know, you know, Gretchen really is the expert here in habit formation. But as we know, or at least as I think I know from the data around human behavior change and habit formation, one of the best ways to start is to start small. And so my little mantras or slogans on this score are one minute counts and daily-ish. So what you want is to start inserting these little moments of mindfulness, of calm, of non-doing, of just being into your day in a very gentle way. It's okay if you miss a week.

It's okay if you miss a year. You can always start again. And interestingly, and we can talk a little bit more about the mechanics of meditation if you want, but I'm really focusing in this first answer on the habit formation part of it, the I don't have time for it concern. I think actually that falling off the wagon is a real opportunity. I get people who tell me all the time, I can't be consistent with this. But those times when you are no longer meditating, that is an opportunity to notice the increasing toxicity in your mind and use that to fuel intrinsic motivation to go back to the practice. Because extrinsic motivation, a person like me wagging his finger at you, is way less powerful than intrinsic motivation. And that can

get you back on the cushion. Yeah, I really love this advice that it can be small. Because I think for a lot of us, when we think about developing a meditation practice, it feels like we're about to start running a marathon, right? It's just another thing on my to-do list. I got to do it 20 minutes every day. And the idea that one minute is enough, or even just a deep belly breath. Oh, yeah. Belly breaths. Elmo's really good at those. Oh, can Elmo do one?

Yes, yes. That's great. Okay. Do you want to try, Elmo? Yeah, let's all do it together. Okay. First, you put your hands on your belly like this. Take a slow, deep breath

in through your nose and a slow, deep breath out through your mouth. And if you do that a couple of times, you'll feel really calm. Elmo, do you ever feel sad or angry? Yeah, sometimes. Elmo doesn't like feeling angry or sad though. You know, Elmo wants those feelings to just go right away. So Samantha, I know Sesame Workshop is putting together all kinds of resources to help people with their mental health and emotional well-being. Do you have any strategies you really recommend? Yeah. You know, we notice. Yep. Elmo notices. I feel. Elmo feels. And I can. Elmo can. I notice means start to feel what's going on in your body. Are you getting butterflies in your stomach? Yeah. I feel. Name that emotion. What is that butterfly's feeling? Is it nervousness? Is it excitement? And then I can how to manage through that emotion so we could do some belly breathing, just like Elmo taught us how to do.

Yeah. What do you think? I think that that's such a cool idea and a great way, especially for young people to be able to practice this being grounded in the present moment. And I think, you know, when I think about like my childhood, I don't remember any lessons on like meditation and like slowing down. And so it's so cool that like my kids are talking about that in school and like Sesame is doing this kind of thing because I think going back to our conversation about self-compassion, like I think we get very critical that we can't do this thing that we know will help us, but so many of us have not been taught to do that. And so I think it really is a that we can't do this thing that we know will help us. But so many of us have not been taught to do that. And so I think it really is a very tangible and concrete way to give voice to this thing

that often feels very abstract. So I know, Dan, you've done a lot of work teaching people to meditate, especially teaching folks who've never meditated before or maybe even are scared of meditation or cynical about meditation to meditate. If somebody is listening to this on World Mental Health Day and wants to try out meditation for their first time, what's the first step? The skeptics, the time-starved, the people who think this is not for me,

those are my people. So I am not gonna give you some long treaties on meditation. I'm just gonna give you a very brief description on how one can do beginning mindfulness meditation. There are really only three steps. The first is to find a reasonably comfortable position in a reasonably quiet place, close your eyes. Second step is to bring your full attention

to the feeling of your breath coming in and going out. You don't have to breathe in any special way. Just feel the raw data of the physical sensations of your belly rising and falling or the air entering and exiting your nose. Some people don't like feeling the breath. If that's you, you can just feel the sensations of your full body sitting in the chair, or you can focus on sounds in the environment, really just picking something neutral, something sense based to commit to for a couple of minutes or even just a minute. And then the third step is the most important. For most of us, as soon as we try to do this seemingly easy thing of just like feeling the breath coming in and going out or feeling what it's like to be sitting in a chair, the mind goes into mutiny mode and you start like, you know, what's for lunch?

Do I need a haircut? Where do gerbils run wild? Whatever. All these random thoughts start flitting through the mind. And this is the moment when most people believe they have failed at meditation. In fact, this is the moment that proves that you are succeeding.

Because the whole game in meditation is not to achieve some sort of special state, As I often joke, clearing the mind is impossible unless you're enlightened or you've died. The whole goal in meditation is just to notice when you've become distracted and to start again and again and again. And this beginning again is like a bicep curl for your brain. It shows up on the brain scans of people who meditate. And why it's important is every time you notice how wild your mind is, you get more familiar with the nature of your mind and therefore less owned by every random thought or urge or emotion

that overtakes you. And so this very simple but not easy practice can have radical implications. I got Gretchen to meditate after years of trying. It doesn't work for me. It's not a tool that works for me. I had tried it a couple of times and I tried it twice more because Dan is so persuasive. But I don't, no tool fits every hand. That's true. That's true. But Gretchen, it strikes me that a lot of your sensory work is a lot of your sensory work is a form of meditation, right? Like when you talk about kind of walking around and experiencing the

world and smelling, that's kind of a mindful walk too. Okay. Well, here's the thing. And we may disagree, but Dan, to me, an essential part of meditation is to discipline the mind. You're asking your mind to try to do something. And when I'm doing it, I'm just roaming free. I'm letting my mind off the leash. I'm just the dog following the smells through the forest. I'm not trying to do anything specific. And so to me, those two things feel very different. Wait, wait, I got to respond to that. I got to respond to that. Dan and I have gone over and back and back and forth because he wants to claim that everything is meditation, but there has to be something that is not. No, I don't feel also a mental. I don't feel like everything's meditation. If you're sitting down and making the affirmative

decision to plan lunch, that's not meditation. Like I get it. That's using thought, which is great. That's a beautiful thing. It's, but it's not meditation. What about daydreaming is daydreaming meditation? I'm daydreaming and tuning into central park and I'm just wandering in and out of my own thoughts, the sky, the leaves, my lunch, my calendar, the moss. Is that meditation? Okay. But see, there's a conflation in there. The thoughts, the dayd see, there's a conflation in there. The thoughts, the daydreaming, which I think is a beautiful thing. I'm not anti-thought. I think daydreaming can be amazing. It's where a lot of creativity comes from.

So don't get me wrong. But what you're dropping in there are deliberate attempts to get in touch with your senses. The sights, the sounds, the smells. That is mindfulness. That is dropping below the level of discursive, often repetitive and negative thought and getting in touch with the raw data of your senses. To me, that is definitionally mindfulness. And so I take a lot less militaristic view of meditation where you're sitting in some special position and some Zen monk is smacking you with a stick every time you fall asleep. That's not how I roll. And so just dipping below the level of thinking is a kind of meditation. And your walks through

the park or your daily walks through the museums in New York City, that has meditation elements. the museums in New York City, like that has meditation elements. You're just doing what works for you. And that is perfect. What works for you is always perfect. Okay. All right. And both of those have the feature that I think we're trying to achieve with meditation, right? Which is that we are kind of both non-judgmentally noticing our thoughts and in an ideal world, kind of practicing to control them, like practicing to kind of move non-judgmentally noticing our thoughts and in an ideal world, kind of practicing to control them, like practicing to kind of move them in a direction that feels a little bit healthier. And like functionally, that's very consistent with a lot of therapeutic practices

too, where you're kind of non-judgmentally noticing your thoughts, maybe trying to move your thoughts in another direction. Joy, I see you nodding. Is this kind of the type of thing you do in your practice a bunch? Yeah. Yeah. And I think, you know, really so much of it is about being present, right? And I love that you had this beautiful, I think, disagreement in some ways around like what is meditation and what's not, because I think that that is a part of what has made mindfulness and meditation feel very inaccessible for a lot of people. This idea that it can only look one way when we are having a conversation that lets us know that it can look lots of different ways, right? And so getting in touch with our senses, doing a five-minute breathing exercise, like it can look a lot of

different ways. And so it really is a trial and error of finding the thing that works for you so that you can access it when you feel like you need it. Dr. Joy for the win. Hey, Elmo, can you help us out with an ad break? Of course, Dr. Lori. We're taking another break now, but don't go anywhere. The Titans of Happiness will be back soon. I sometimes ask myself a very simple question. When were you last living in the moment?

Depressingly, my answer is often, I can't remember. I'm usually so busy ruminating about the past or worrying about the future that I forget to enjoy the here and now, which isn't so great for my well-being. But what can I do better? I decided to ask the Titans of Happiness. Gretchen Rubin jumped in first. I'm the kind of person that's constantly up in her head and I'm walking on the beach and I don't see or hear or smell anything because I'm just rewriting a paragraph in my head. So I have to make a very, very deliberate effort to connect with my five senses. But I think this is something that, you know, we don't all have the same five senses, but this is something that's available to us at all times. And just stopping

and saying like, wow, that's a beautiful smell, or that's an unusual smell, or like, oh, wow, I'm in a hardware store. Hardware stores have that hardware store smell, or I'm going to reach out and actually touch the bark of that tree or put my hand on that moss that looks so springy. Does it feel springy and damp? Is it actually dry? I don't know. I'm going to touch it and feel it. There's something about connecting with our bodies that is so energizing and so revitalizing. And it's available to us at all times. For me, that is a really valuable way just to connect with the moment through our bodies. Because the thing with these experiences is we can't bookmark them. We can't save them for later. We can't even really binge them. Like I'm a person who loves the

sense of smell. But one of the things about the sense of smell is even if I want to keep smelling that lilac bush after a few seconds, I'm going to have odor fatigue and I'm not going to be able to smell it. So I have to enjoy it now and then let it go. And different people are more attuned to seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching. So whatever that is for you, thinking about how you could really bring that into your life. Or if there's something that you neglect, is there a way that you can bring that in? Because that's probably where you have more low-hanging fruit. I even have a quiz on my site, GretchenRubin.com slash quiz, where you can take a quiz to find out what's your most neglected sense and what's your most appreciated sense. Because a lot of times we don't even know.

We don't even think about it. But it's something that's available to us at all times. And it ties us to that present moment. And it just refreshes us. Even if they're bad. That's the thing that's funny. I like even bad smells now. I love this point so much because the last time we talked about senses, you had me kind of getting a little bit obsessed with thinking about different colors of different things.

Oh, yeah. And in fact, I wanted to see if we could have Elmo play a game where he notices some colors. Oh, sure. Elmo loves games. Okay, here it goes. Okay. So, Elmo, what are some blue things you saw this week? What were some of your favorite blue things? Blue things. Let's see. Well, Cookie Monster has blue fur. Elmo saw him. And Grover. Grover has blue fur.

Yes. Elmo saw him. And Elmo ate some blueberries for a snack. Those are blue. And Elmo saw a really pretty blue sky on Sesame Street. See? Well, just taking the time to notice those things makes you feel more connected to the world and the people around you. And the monsters around you, too.

Well, thanks for telling Elmo all about it, Gretchen. Thank you. Elmo, you're so good at noticing blue things. Yeah. You know, as we think about how we can use our senses, I feel like it's really powerful to be in your senses because it's yet another way to get away from your phones. But I know this is one that like I struggle with.

So any other great strategies for kind of stepping away from your technology? I have a quick hack. Please. Okay. If you are using your smartphone too much, go into your settings and change it to grayscale, which means that instead of being in full color, your phone will be in black, white, and gray. And it does two things. It makes it much harder to use just from a utilitarian. It's just much harder to navigate. That's one of the reasons we see colors because it helps us navigate the world.

much harder to navigate. That's one of the reasons we see colors because it helps us, you know, navigate the world. And it's also much less enticing because, you know, if you're looking like on ads or even like photos of people you love, they're just, they don't grab your attention in the same way. And so it's so much easier to step away from that phone because it's less appealing and it's also tougher to use. And this takes one second and you can change it back anytime you want. If you get like, get pictures of your baby niece, you can change it back anytime you want. If you get pictures of your baby niece, you can switch it back so you can see in full color and then turn it back to grayscale. But so many people say that this is kind of up there with not having your phone next to you when you go to sleep at night in terms of making it easier to step away from the phone.

I'll add one. This is from Catherine Price, who wrote an excellent book called How to Break Up with Your Phone. And she asks people to just ask themselves a question on the regular when you feel your zombie arm moving out of your control to grab the phone. If you can remember, and it's going to be hard to remember. So if you can just remember, say 10% of the time to ask, what do I need right now? Why am I doing this? And maybe you'll tune into the fact that you're bored or lonely or hungry or tired or whatever it is. And if you can catch that, insert a little pause, you might then be able to make a better decision

about how to use your time. I love this one. One of Catherine's other questions that I like a lot is what else? Like, what else could I be doing right now? Which is for me has been this lovely way to kind of notice the opportunity cost of being on my phone right now. Like, oh, I'm not talking to my husband at dinner. I'm not paying attention to what I'm eating. I'm not like looking out at the world and noticing like all the cool

things I could notice. That one's been super profound for me. I've heard of people who will put their e-reading app, like if there's whatever their social platform is that they use the most, they'll replace it with their e-reader and move the social platform deep into their phone. So when they have the zombie finger going out and hitting that app, the novel pops up and you're like, you know what? I'd really rather have, it's the opportunity cost. I would really rather spend this time reading that novel than scrolling through social media. And if I want to get to the social media, I'm going to have to work harder to get there.

And so maybe that's going to give me that pause to say, what else could I be doing? Joy, I know you mentioned kind of getting off your phone before. I'm curious if you had particular strategies that fit into it. Yeah. So I just want to call attention to how lively this conversation is and how many hacks we're having to develop to like break up with our phone and like break up with technology. And so I think that that is an

important reminder for us that these platforms really are designed to keep us there, right? And so when you're struggling in that way, know that you are not alone because they are made that way by design. So yeah, so in addition to, you know, all the incredible hacks that other people have shared, I've also heard of people kind of moving away from smartphones altogether. And so maybe they still have like a smartphone for like business hours. But in the rest of their day, they use a phone that is just like for emergencies. Right. And so really being able to kind of like put that phone away but still be reachableable, I think can be another strategy if you find everything else is very, very difficult. First of all, I totally agree with Joy.

I mean, this kind of goes back to self-compassion. If you're beating yourself up for being addicted to your phone, recognizing that this is you against some of the most brilliant designers and most powerful supercomputers on earth. Who've been evolving this for decades now. Yes. The odds are stacked against you. I would just put in another plug for meditation in this regard, which is mindfulness meditation, which is very closely linked to what Gretchen was talking about before

in terms of being in touch with your senses, can help you develop more self-awareness so that you might notice, oh, I'm on hour eight of scrolling through Twitter and I'm starting to reply to people in all caps, so maybe I should put this phone down. The self-awareness and interception, the body awareness that we can develop through mindfulness meditation can be a kind of Doppler radar. It can point out when a storm is coming so that you're better equipped to do this very tough battle with the supercomputers. So that was a problem of kind of finding ways to be more present, navigating the technology that's pulling us away from being present most of the time.

But I also think that to deal with the kind of mental health crises that so many of us are facing right now, we need better strategies for being present, even when the present moment isn't awesome. We were just talking about moments of being present when you're missing out on the good things and these beautiful colors of blue that you can see and all the great sensory information around you. But I think we also need to find ways to be present when the present moment is kind of not feeling so awesome, when it's maybe feeling sort of yucky. So I'm curious your go-to strategies for navigating negative emotions and maybe even finding ways to be present with them. Dr. Joy, any good strategies for that? Yeah, I have really found that showers and baths help with that because I do think it is another

opportunity to ground, right? And you are sensing, like Gretchen talked about, like the water around you. And I think especially for showers, there is a way that you can kind of visualize all of the negativity, all of the things that you're worrying about just kind of going down the drain as you are standing there in the shower. And so, again, I think that that is something that feels very tangible, again, for people who struggle with like, what does this mean? And it feels very abstract. I think showers can be a really great way to manage some of those more difficult emotions.

Absolutely. Yeah. I love this washing away because it really does work. And I don't want to say this in a way that it's like every glass is half full and nothing is negative. You just have to think your way to a positive. So I'm not saying that, but I will say that one of the things I work on is to see like negative emotions have value and they're important flashing signs that something needs to change or something's out of whack or out of value. And so when I'm feeling those emotions, like I'm feeling envy or I'm feeling regret or I'm feeling boredom or anger or righteous indignation or just irritation. I really try to step back and think, like, okay, well, what's the information here? Because for me, I often am just trying to sort

of power through emotions and kind of move on to the next thing. And so for me, it really is like, okay, well, I'm having this feeling of envy. What does this person have that I envy? Or out of nowhere, I seem to be overwhelmed with rage. Why might that be? Instead of just ignoring it or trying to be like dismissing it, saying like, well, something set me off. There's information there. But as you say, it's very unpleasant. Like negative emotions are no fun. And to be overwhelmed with feelings of resentment or righteous indignation can be very, very painful, but there is value in them. So I just try to stay with it, let myself experience it

because I'm a person who tends to try to just barrel through. Yeah. And I think, you know, one of the reasons I like using these emotions is information. Sometimes the analogy I use with my students is it's like the dashboard on your car, like the emergency dashboard, like it's like the dashboard on your car, like the emergency dashboard. Like it's your engine light, your tire light. Yes. What a good metaphor. And I like that one because it's because like, I don't know about you, maybe you all deal with your cars very differently than I do.

But like the engine light will go on and I'll be like, got to deal with that at some point. Not right now. I'm not going to pull over and like drive to, you know, like the car mechanic. But like I got to schedule some time on Tuesday to like go back to this and notice it and figure it out. And so I think sometimes when our negative emotions are there, there's like a time for kind of, you know, putting them briefly to the side so that we can kind of, but, but you also have to schedule time to come back to them. I also think there are strategies we can use when we're in the thick of negative emotions to kind of allow them and sort of radically accept them. And Dan, I know this is some of the practices that you've talked about in the work that you've done with meditation of like,

just things we can do to kind of be there with our emotions and sort of allow them. Any good strategies to share with that? Yeah, well, as you know, I come out of a Buddhist context. So what I'm about to say might sound deeply counterintuitive or deeply unpleasant or radical in some way. So I'd be curious once I talk about it to see how it goes down with you. You know, everything in our culture strongly suggests to us that when we feel discomfort, we should self-medicate in some way shop distract ourselves drink gamble but actually that makes it worse and the move the real jujitsu move in many situations this is not always true so for example in trauma situations i think you want to be a little bit more careful than what I'm about to describe. And maybe Joy can step in and give some more subtle instructions. But for, let's just say, the worried well, for most of us, you can dive into whatever you're feeling, not in a wallowing way, but in a curious way. So I'll give you a little slogan that I got from my meditation teacher, Joseph Goldstein, which is, it's okay. This does not mean everything's okay. It means

it's okay to feel whatever I'm feeling right now. And in that process of, okay, yeah, this is anger. Let's see if we can use the microscope of our mind to disambiguate what's actually happening here. Is there buzzing in my chest or my ears turning red? Is there a starburst of self-righteous thoughts? Picking apart what seems like a monolithic force of anger and seeing that actually it has constituent parts, it comes and goes as it constantly influx, can help you move from being totally identified with your anger to recognizing that it's a passing storm. And once you allow it to come and go, then you can respond wisely to the situation on the other side rather than reacting blindly. And to me, this is an incredibly powerful move. Of course, in some cases, you really do want to be careful. And specifically, I'm thinking about trauma. So I'll shut up and see if any of that lands for any of you. Dr. Joy, does this kind of fit with some of the work that you do in clinical practice,

thinking about wise mind and some of those ideas? Absolutely. Yeah. I think we often use the metaphor of like watching waves kind of go up and down and crashing and like emotions are similar to that, right? Like you can see it rise to its peak, but then eventually it does phase out. And so I do appreciate that caveat, Dan, because especially with traumatic experiences, you do want to be careful not to dive right into the middle of that without having some support because you can be flooded and can make you feel more distressed than I think you would if you had some support. But to your point, like, you know, the normal kind of everyday worries and concerns, being able to sit with your emotions as opposed to run away from it can actually be a very helpful activity. You know, if we look around the world at mental health reports, you know, one of the big things that's on the rise in terms of negative emotions is people's anxiety, right? And I think in some ways it's worth saying that that's normative, right?

There's lots of stuff in the world right now to be anxious about, but also anxiety doesn't really feel awesome. And sometimes in some cases it seems to be applied in cases where it's just pre-floating or maybe not appropriate for the situation. Joy, you're nodding. So I'm curious if you have some good strategies for this one. Yeah, I think it's just important to really normalize like how much anxiety everybody is feeling at the time. And, you know, I honestly think a part of what has been missed maybe in this conversation is thinking about the time in history at which we find

ourselves kind of post-pandemic, if that is a thing, because I don't think that there has ever been like a slowing down and a stopping really to say, oh my gosh, what was this thing we all experienced together, right? Like we kind of just ran back into our offices and kind of, you know, trying to assume life as normal when we are not who we were anymore. And so I think that that has led a lot of people to feeling very anxious on top of the anxiety they may have been feeling even before the pandemic happened, right? And so I think it is important to kind of just give credence and give space to the idea that many of us are feeling very anxious about lots of different things right now, and that it is okay to kind of feel that anxiety that you might be experiencing. Just to pick up on what Joy was saying about the

pandemic, you know, I don't think it takes a rocket science to figure out that one of the reasons why the pandemic dramatically boosted our anxiety is that we were cut off from one another. It goes back to our discussion before about social connection and never worrying alone. For me, the maintenance and cultivation of relationships is what, as a very anxious person, so who not only suffers from anxiety, but also panic attacks, never worrying alone, cultivating and maintaining personal relationships is a huge, huge element for me. I would say there are two other things. I think one other source of anxiety for people is a sense of helplessness, especially when you look at the news and you look at what's happening in politics

and climate and armed conflict. And there's an expression that I really love, which is action absorbs anxiety. Take action locally. You can volunteer locally. It doesn't even have to be relevant to the thing you're worried about. So if you're worried about the presidential election, you don't even have to volunteer on a campaign. You can volunteer at an animal shelter, just doing something, just being helpful to your friends and family. I mean, think about the moment when you hold the door open for somebody. What does that feel like? It feels good. And we keep talking about do good, feel good. That feeling is infinitely scalable. And I believe is an anti anxiety medication that is free and non addictive. And then the final thing I'll say about anxiety, and for me in particular, with somebody who really deals with a lot of not only garden variety anxiety, but still panic attacks, is systematically getting yourself more comfortable with discomfort.

I think one of the contributing factors to the modern uptick in anxiety is a pandemic, to be a little cute, of aversion to discomfort. We've created a world where everything is so easy. Information, dates, food, it's all a swipe away. And so there's so much less friction in our lives. And that is contributing to a general unwillingness to tolerate discomfort. And so for me, for example, with claustrophobia, and I have some trouble with elevators, as Gretchen knows, she and I were having dinner at a friend's apartment recently and I had to walk the stairs. But I've gotten very consistent at, okay, I know I'm afraid of elevators. I have claustrophobia. I take every opportunity I can to ride them when I'm feeling well enough to do so or if I've got somebody I trust. And so this is called exposure therapy. And you can knit this into your life with whatever scares you, making little, carefully calibrated experiments to inoculate yourself against stress. Yeah, I love this idea. I was recently talking with a clinician at Yale about, you know, what can we do to kind of promote mental health in young people?

And one of the things she said was, I wish we could get all our young people today to engage in a little bit more distress tolerance, right? Well-intentioned parents who are trying to do great things of like help kids with their homework and help them kind of make things really easy in life and so on. It's meant that like they've just gotten out of practice when it comes to dealing with any form of distress,

even simple things like boredom, right? We just kind of stick a screen in front of a kid who's feeling bored. And so I think kind of developing a personal practice where you engage a little bit more with those tiny negative emotions, right? Like not taking on like some terrible traumatic situation, but just tiny negative moments that you can sort of endure. It sort of gives you practice so that when the big things come up, you feel like, okay, I've readied my muscles. I've kind of like gone to the sort of distress tolerance gym a little bit, just makes it easier later on when the big things come up. You feel like, okay, I've readied my muscles. I've kind of like gone to the sort of distress tolerance gym a little bit. It just makes it easier later on when the big things come up. Funny little story, Lori, that my son, who's nine, came to me recently and said he was bored. And I

said, well, how does that feel in your body? And he said, is this a meditation thing? Because if it is, I don't want to hear it. Well, one strategy that I find very helpful, and this is for more kind of low-level anxiety, not the kind of serious anxiety Dan was just talking about, but maybe more kind of like the jumpiness, the jitteriness, the kind of uneasy feeling that sometimes can creep up on us, is I find that just like physical exercise, maybe it is the hula hoop, maybe it's, you know, walking up and down the stairs, maybe it's going for, and if I go for a walk outside and I'm in the sunshine, that's even better. If I'm walking outside in the sunshine, talking to my neighbor and picking up trash, that's even better. But there's something about just like getting in the body and like using a little bit of energy that's

helpful. And then also if we're exercising, it's easier to sleep at night than with more restful sleep. Then we feel more energized the next day. A lot of times these things build on each other. You don't sleep well, so then that makes you feel more anxious too. Just more and more I'm finding that exercise is often the elixir for a lot of things. It makes a lot of things better. And it's just good for us in so many ways for mood, immune function, memory, focus. At least I find in my own life that if I have that kind of jumpy anxiety where it's kind of racing, running through my body and making it hard for me to sort of like feel calm, I find that I get a lot more calm when I go for a walk. And it's also just a way, you know, to kind of hack your sympathetic nervous system a little bit too, right? I like this idea of hermetic stress, right? too, right? I like this idea of hermetic stress, right? Where you're just kind of like getting your heart rate racing and kind of giving your body a little bit of a different kind of stress

so that it learns, oh, wait, I can calm down. I don't do the racing heartbeat, I gotta confess. I'm doing more like the stroll. I'm doing the walk, walking a dog, you know? But yes, but again, as coming back to what we were saying before, there are many ways to do this right. There's no one right way. It's whatever works for you. For some people, it might be going for a run, going for a bike ride. Another person, it might be ambling through a garden in their neighborhood or something. But whatever works, it's worth thinking about. So as we end this conversation on World Mental Health Day, I'm just curious if you have any final advice for somebody feeling a little hopeless, like, I really want to improve my mental health. What's your kind that just about everybody can do

pretty easily, even if they don't have a lot of time, energy, or money. Dan? This is less a hack and more of a piece of good news. I spent 30 years as a news anchor, and now my job is basically to spread one piece of news, which is extremely good news, which is that the science is showing us that happiness is not an unalterable factory setting. It's a skill that you can practice in many, many ways from meditation to getting out in nature, getting more sleep, exercise, social fitness, as it's sometimes called, you know, boosting your ability to connect with other people. You don't have to boil the ocean and do them all at once. Just pick one or two that seem most attractive to you and start there. But again, the good news is the states of mind that you want are not, as I said before, unalterable factory settings. They're skills.

Dr. Joy, either some good news about mental health or a final suggestion? Yeah, I think I will borrow from the late, great Mr. Rogers, who talked about always looking for the helpers. Because I think when you are feeling hopeless, it is very easy to forget that there are so many people just all around you doing great things. And so looking at who's holding the door open for somebody or who paid for somebody's coffee behind you. So looking for the helpers and also becoming a helper yourself, like we've talked about in this conversation,

doing good for others really can go very far. Well, I want to end with a little bit of gratitude, which might be my tip, right? A kind of quick sense that things are good in life and there are some blessings out there. And I'm very grateful for the fact that all my Titans of Happiness showed up today. Thank you so much, Elmo and Dr. Joy and Gretchen and Dan. This has been super fun. Thank you.

Thank you. It was incredible. Oh, Dr. Lori, is it over so soon? Elmo likes being a Titan of Happiness. Oh, Elmo, you'll always be my Titan of Happiness. That's very kind, Dr. Lori. Bye, everybody. Thanks for listening. Elmo loves you.