The Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos - Ask Us Anything! Laurie and Gretchen Take Your Questions (Live from Toronto)

Episode Date: May 29, 2023

What do you do when you enter "survival mode"? How can you become better at forging social connections? Can you be happy in a sad world? Happiness experts Dr Laurie Santos and Gretchen Rubin came together at Toronto's Hot Docs Festival to answer these and other questions from a live audience. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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.

Pushkin. Good afternoon, folks. Thank yes. Thank you so much for coming out to the podcast. If you've listened to the last few episodes of the Happiness Lab, you know that I've been trying to get out of my tiny apartment podcast closet and into the real world so that I can meet listeners just like you. And to do that, I've been hosting a series of Happiness Lab live shows recorded in front of live audiences.

Today's episode comes from the 30th anniversary Hot Docs Festival in Toronto. At the event, I got to chat with someone you've met on the show before, best-selling author and fellow podcaster, Gretchen Rubin. Hello. Hello, hello, hello. We're so happy to be here. Of course. Gretchen recently joined me on the Happiness Lab for a special double episode about her new book,

Life in Five Senses, how exploring the senses got me out of my head and into the world. At the Hot Docs event, Gretchen and I spoke more about how to awaken our senses and followed up on what we'd both learned since we last talked. It almost became unmanageable

because I was like, anything I was thinking of, I would immediately start thinking of new things to try. You can hear our full and very fun conversation if you're a Pushkin Plus subscriber or by signing up at pushkin.fm forward slash join Pushkin. But what you'll hear right now is what happened after Gretchen and I finished our initial chat because our event didn't end there. Gretchen and I both wanted to hear what fans just like you wanted to know about happiness and how we could better use our five senses to improve our well-being. So we put out a call to the Hot Docs audience for all their burning questions, and the folks in Toronto really stepped up. As you'll hear, it turned into one of the most engaging live Q&A sessions that I've had a chance to take part in in years. And Lori, I think the first, I'm going to give you the first one yeah okay for someone going through a

really tough time right now who describes themselves in survival mode what is the one thing or the first thing you would suggest they do to preserve well-being good question how many people not did you ask this question but feel like that could have been their question they feel you feel like you're in survival mode right now show So yeah, clap, clap, clap, show of hands. Yeah. So it seems like about a quarter of the audience is clapping. And this gets to one of the strategies I would suggest, which is what the psychologist Kristen Neff calls

kind of feeling your common humanity, right? It's a sort of strategy you can use for self-compassion. Because like, I think a lot of us feel like we're struggling right now and we're in survival mode. And in some ways that's like normative, right? The economy is falling apart. Like climate change is scary. Political polarization is scary. We've just kind of maybe gotten out of a three-year pandemic, but maybe not. I don't know if it's really safe to be in this big, you know, but like there's a lot of stuff that's making us feel uncertain and overwhelmed and scared and tired And that's for folks who are just like at the regular baseline if you in that climate go through something really tough

You're definitely going to feel like you're struggling and you're in survival mode. It's normative And so that's kind of strategy number one is to remember you're not failing. You're not screwing up That's what emotions you're supposed to be feeling right now. I think this is a problem is that sometimes, you know, and I worry sometimes that podcasts like ours contribute to this, right? There's so much talk about happiness and positive emotions. And you can sometimes feel like you're, if you're in survival mode, you're doing something wrong, right? But it's worth remembering that negative emotions are normative. We're supposed to feel frustrated and angry and scared and anxious at a lot of different times. And so first of all, don't beat yourself up. Your body and your mind is doing something that it's supposed to be doing. And

it's doing something that a lot of us are going through right now. So that would be kind of strategy number one for common humanity. But then strategy number two would be like allowing yourself to experience those emotions, which is something that I think people tend not to like to do. I mean, I know I don't like to do it, right? If I'm feeling those things, it's kind of like, oh, it both feels like something's wrong, but it also feels like something I should just like suppress and run away from. But practices where you find ways to allow those emotions.

On the podcast, we shared one by the meditation teacher Tara Brock, which is this meditation practice called RAIN, which stands for Recognize, Allow, Investigate, and Nurture. So you recognize, I'm feeling like I'm in survival mode right now. But then you sit and you say, OK, step number two, allow. I'm going to just allow that feeling. And you investigate. You notice, what is my body doing when I'm in survival mode? I am tense.

My neck is tense. Or maybe I have all these cravings. I want to eat something. Like I am tense. My neck is tense. I'm, you know, or maybe I like have all these cravings. I want to eat something. I want to check my email, whatever. Notice and pay attention, like five, 10 minutes, just sit and watch. And the sitting and watching works because sometimes when you actually pay attention to these negative emotions, they can kind of subside a bit. But you don't end there. The last step of Tara Brach's meditation practice is this N, nurture, where you kind of do something nice for yourself.

What can you take off your plate? Can you call a friend? Can you make a connection? Can you dive into your five senses? Maybe this is a time when you want to curate a particular sense that you really like, a nice candle or something, right? Practices like that, research suggests, can really reduce negative emotions in fields like palliative care workers and so on.

So it's a powerful strategy. So those would be my two things. One is like, you are not alone. What you're experiencing is normal. Everyone goes through this, but then give yourself a strategy not to suppress and ignore that emotion, but to kind of hang out with it enough that you can get through it. Here's a funny one too, for stress is to schedule time to worry so that you put aside time and like maybe it's once a week you're going to worry or maybe it's every day you're going to worry but it's like don't do it right before you go to sleep and if you start to worry outside that time it's like well don't worry about that right now because you've got your time to worry and what it does is it lets you be feel

free during the time when you're not scheduled to worry and then when you do because it is useful like anxiety, worry, anger, frustration, these are all have positive roles to play. But it's like, you're sitting down, you're like, now is the time when I worry and like, you can get out your pad of paper and make a list of things to do. Or you can just, you know, think it through. But I just think that's so funny that you just put it on your calendar, like a dentist appointment, scheduled time to worry. Okay. And this one is related. So I'm going to kick it off to you too how do you overcome negative thoughts and patterns of overthinking so rumination yeah rumination one of the biggest things i think comes up for my students in my class right you know these negative

thought patterns that you can kind of get into and the overall hack there is to try to get out of these sort of self-focused thoughts a lot of of our rumination is about me, me, me. It's really about, oh my gosh, I'm struggling. I'm not doing enough. Really self-critical. I screwed up. I screwed up, right? But it's also about you. And there's lots of evidence that if you can just perspective take a little bit, right? Make it not about me, me, me, but even like third person, like Laurie, you're going through a tough time, for example, that can actually take some of the pain of that overthinking away.

It sounds really silly just changing the pronouns that you use to talk to yourself, but there's evidence that speaking in the first person, I'm messing up, I'm doing, et cetera, versus like, hey, Laurie, you've got a tough thing going on, right? Third person, second person. If you think about it, when you hear you refer to yourself and you hear your name, it's usually somebody else saying it, right? It's often a mentor or a friend, right? And your brain doesn't know the difference. Your brain is like, oh, a wise counsel is, you know, someone who really cares about me is explaining to me what I should do. And it means that when you use that

third person to talk to somebody else, you know, if I was talking to my husband, Mark, and I said, Mark, blah, blah, blah, Like I'm often in wise counsel mode. I'm often in the mode of comforting, right? And so just the act of switching your pronouns. I think another way to say this is we're much better at giving advice to other people than taking it ourselves. And so it's a way to talk to yourself.

Fake yourself out. Yeah, it's a way to fake yourself out so that you talk to yourself like a friend, which we don't normally do. And if you really want to up the ante, you can use the favorite strategy that I love from Ethan Cross, who's a professor who talks we don't normally do. And if you really want to up the ante, you can use the favorite strategy that I love from Ethan Cross, who's a professor who talks a lot about overthinking. If you want a great book on overthinking, check out his book, Chatter. He often uses the sort of,

what would so-and-so do? There's a very famous study with kids where you ask kids, what would Batman do? You don't have to use Batman, but you can but you can use, you know, what would Beyonce do? What would my mom do? What would, you know, like a wise, pick the wise person in your life and use that phrase. And so getting out of the self, self, self by using your name in third person, or if that's not working, jump to a different, very wise third person. Lots of evidence that that helps a lot. Yeah, that's great. be will inspire people to take this issue more seriously. And so just bracketed for folks that don't know, our Surgeon General Vivek Murthy just issued this huge report on his new priority right now, which is fighting loneliness and social disconnection. And he wants to do that both with sort of individual strategies and sort of changing public infrastructure to make people less lonely. It's kind of his big push, which is kind of cool, right? That like on the yields of a pandemic, the push that the Surgeon General is going for is not, you know, fighting future disease and so on. He's really focused on loneliness, which is pretty cool. But Gretchen, I wanted to ask you this question because I think when you heard it, you kind of disagreed with the premise a little bit,

if I recall. Yeah, I think people have been very focused on loneliness for a while. Like, I think it's wonderful that he's shining a spotlight on it in particular right now. But I do think it's something that because it is a spotlight on it in particular right now but I do think it's something that because it is so well established how important human connection is to us that I think even pre-pandemic people were people were very aware that that we needed to think about people who were isolated think about people who were drifting away people who had no friends or few friends, the role of relationships to the workplace, like when they do studies of people at work who are happy. Often those are people who say they have a friend at work, not just like an acquaintance, but a friend,

like somebody that they could confide an important secret to or that they feel like has their back, or like the person they directly report to, does that person really care about them and want to see them succeed in their own aims for themselves so I think there was a lot of awareness there was a lot of research and I think there was a lot of popular awareness of it um but I think you almost can't focus on it too much because it is kind of the centerpiece for a happy life and so anything that helps us either broaden our connections or deepen our connections or improve the quality of our connections is something that is going to be good for the individual

and good for society. Yeah, and I think it's worth saying good for the individual, both in terms of your mental health, but also in terms of your physical health. Yeah, that is astonishing, the physical consequences of loneliness. Yeah, I mean, two of my favorite stats, one that you might've heard on the podcast before is that saying that you're lonely

is the equivalent health effect on your longevity of smoking 15 cigarettes a day. And it has twice to three times the negative effect that saying you're obese has, right? So these are like truly public health issues that we're dealing with. I think on the podcast when I talked about it, I said it should, if we, loneliness should have one of those health warnings like on those like, you know, pharmaceutical ads where

it's like may cause like premature death and cancer and all these things like and like lack of sleep and so on. It's because really it's actually a health issue. So in some ways it makes sense that the Surgeon General's focused on it because loneliness might actually be killing more people than some of the other things. Well, and I think the new workplace is something that we're only starting to grapple with now, how it's going to trickle down and affect people's relationship. And I think for some people, it's going to be very positive. And then for some people, it could be quite negative and it could

increase loneliness and isolation. And so again, I think it's something that we really need to think through and how, as we confront new issues, how they're going to affect loneliness for better or for worse. And just a little advertisement. Our next season that we haven't announced yet is on what we're calling fighting under sociality. Under sociality is our instinct. Oh, I cannot wait to listen. It's our instinct that, you know, when we're having a tough day, we definitely don't want to hang out with a friend. We want to like go plopped out and look at a screen by ourselves. So how can we, you know, fight our urge to not be social when

we most need to be social? Oh my gosh, I cannot wait to listen. That is, that's, well, you heard it here first. We got a little. No, well, okay. Okay. Let's take a minute and talk about this. This is something I want you to talk about on your podcast, because I think on the one hand, people know, yeah, I'm happier when I get out there. A lot of times I don't want to go, but then when I show up, I'm glad that I went. Yes. But on the other hand, I think now more than ever, people are saying, hey, be kind to yourself. Don't push yourself. If you need to take it easy, take it easy. But sometimes that means that we're staying home in our sweats instead of like gearing up to go out, even though in the end,

probably the going out would make us happier. How do we know the difference between like healthy attention to our own, you know, sense of energy and when we need to push ourselves to engage with others because that is such a source of happiness. Yeah, I'm so glad you asked this question

because it's one of the episodes that I'm most excited about in this under sociality series. We interview this wonderful woman, Jessica Pan, who's a self-proclaimed introvert. And she has this lovely book called Sorry, I'm late. I didn't want to come. Colon. I've seen the T-shirt. An introvert's guide to saying yes. And so Jessica's story is that she moved with, she's American, she moved with her partner to the UK and realized she just didn't have friends. And she just was like, I have to go out and make friends. I'm an introvert. I hate social, I hate being social, but like,

I need to do something. And so she, in a very Gretchen kind of, you know, all or nothing way, was like, all right, I'm going to go full extrovert. I'm going to like give speeches. She went to the Edinburgh Comedy Festival and did standup. She just went like full extreme extrovert. And what she found was that as she did it more and more, it, it worked easier. Like she had very strong predictions that this was going to be terrible in all these forms, even like talking to a stranger or talking to someone at a networking event. And what she found was it was always better than she expected. And this is completely consistent with the research. Researchers like Nick Epley at the University of Chicago and others

have found that we mispredict social connection. He's the one, if you remember the Happiness Lab episode, that forced people to talk on trains. You're taking your commuter train home, and Nick comes up to you with a $10 Starbucks gift card and says, hey, do you want to be in the study? You get this gift card and you say, yes, because $10 Starbucks gift cards are the engine of all of social science research. We'd get nothing done if it wasn't for that. But you say, yeah. And Nick says, hey, for the rest of the train ride, I want you to

make a connection with someone. Or for the rest of the train ride, I want you to enjoy your solitude. He has you predict whether you're going to enjoy that. Everybody across the personality spectrum says the talking is going to be awkward and weird. Introverts say it's going to be extremely awkward and weird. I think the scale doesn't go low enough for what they want to rate it. But everyone gets a happiness benefit from it. And this was what Jessica saw time and time again, is that even these scary things that she thought were going to feel awful,

when you really are connecting with another person, it feels better than you expect. And so her advice is to really notice that you have this misprediction, right? You might totally have had a tough day at work and you might really have exactly the prediction you were saying, Gretchen, which is like, I just want self-care. I need to know my energy levels, blah, blah, blah. But recognize that your own calibration of that is off. And if you could just push yourself like 15% more, you might end up happier. Hedonic prediction, right? We're not very good at predicting what's going to make us happier, which is too bad. Okay, so here is a question for you, Lori. I've been listening to

your podcast now for three years. I assume you have been teaching your course for at least that long. Have you noticed whether your student body has noticeably changed in terms of level of happiness? I realize the pandemic has impacted a lot of us mentally and students in particular. Yeah. And so the first time I taught my class was back in 2018, when it was probably a little prescient to be thinking about mental health and happiness, because I think in the three years that have transpired since then, it's been sort of a dumpster fire for happiness. Right? And so the right comparison isn't like, you know, have things gotten better in the whole student population because of these kind of external factors. But one thing we have

been looking at is whether or not the Coursera class online, it's called Science of Wellbeing. We have a new one called Science of Wellbeing for Teens. So make sure you get your teenagers to take it. That's a spot where we've been able to carefully calibrate whether or not people are feeling happier from before to after. And in studies in collaboration with another researcher, Bruce Hood, who's at the University of Bristol, who's been doing it, and his students, he's actually been able to look longitudinally at students who take a version of the happiness class that he teaches at Bristol. And what we're finding is that it kind of works. It at least works, you know, from before to after. You either get a small but significant boost in happiness. Usually it's on like, imagine like a 10 point happiness survey, usually go up about a point.

That's a small but significant. And that those effects seem to last at least three to six months out, which is the longest we've kind of looked. It's really hard to do these longitudinal studies because you've got to track people over time. And so the answer seems to be if you teach people these things and you give them homework and you kind of train them up to put it into practice, it can stick with them.

For how long? We don't know. As Gretchen said, that you can change, but to have changes that stick is really tricky. So it does seem like we're getting these small but significant effects. We've got to head to a quick break. But worry not, because Gretchen and I will be answering even more audience questions when we return.

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. Welcome back to the special live Q&A that I hosted at the Hot Docs Festival alongside podcaster and bestselling author Gretchen Rubin. So far, the Toronto fans have probed us on how

to feel happier when you're in survival mode and how to engage in happier social connection. But our curious audience wasn't done there. In fact, their next question went much bigger, asking how the fight for our individual happiness can help heal our ailing world. How can happiness also be turned into creating a more equitable, socially just world when we are living in a time of great polarities, greed, and lack of democracy? Yeah, I'm so glad whoever asked this, I don't know who you are, but thank you whoever asked this question, because I think this comes up, this comes up a lot in my work and in Gretchen's work, right? Like a lot of the strategies we're talking about are at the individual level, right? Individually, you can engage with your senses more. Individually, you can make

a little bit more social connection. And doing so, you know, the data seem to suggest can give you a small but significant boost in happiness. And I think folks really worry about that, right? Folks say like, okay, that's great for that one individual, but have you just made that person, you know, more Pollyannish? Are those people, you know, happier and they're good with their lives, but that means they're not going to engage with all the problems of the world. Like in some ways it's like reinforcing people's individual happiness sort of at odds with the structural changes that I think we all know we need to make to make ourselves happier and a happier society. And this is a spot where researchers are starting to look in a little bit more detail, right? The kind of asking

that question, if you become happier yourself, does that mean you do less good stuff for other people in the world and so on? And the answer so far seems to be no, just the opposite. Like when you are feeling happier, usually measured if you're in a more positive mood, you wind up doing more nice stuff for other people. There's this thing called the feel good, do good effect, where it's like if you're in a good mood, you kind of do nicer stuff for other people. But there's evidence from folks like Konstantin Kuchlev at Georgetown that this actually impacts the world too. So he looks at things like who's taking action towards climate change by like, you know, installing solar panels or going to a climate protest, who's engaging in Black Lives Matter movement, not just saying they're worried about social justice stuff, but actually doing

things. And what he finds is that the people who self-report having the highest positive mood, right? And we kind of get it, right? You know, if you're feeling down in the dumps, if you're in that struggle mode, if you have no bandwidth yourself, you can't face on head on the problems of the world. And so that means that in some ways, my hope is that these individual solutions are at least kind of can be used in conjunction with a lot of these structural changes that it'll make it easier for people to engage in some of the stuff that we all need to engage with to fix the stuff that we know is wrong with the world. And I especially love that for my Yale students.

You know, I look at the stats right now nationally for college students where 40 percent of college students report being too depressed to function most days. Almost 70 percent say that they're overwhelmingly anxious. More than one in 10 has seriously considered suicide in the last six months. And I look to this generation, I'm thinking, you're the ones that have to fix all this stuff that my generation messed up. Like they're not going to be able to do that unless they have some way to kind of deal with a lot of that negative emotion, a lot of those mental health issues. And so I love this question because it shows we can create a more equitable, just society if we all start putting our own oxygen masks on too.

Leave it at that. Ditto. That's enough. Okay, good. That's enough. Yeah, good. Moving on. Let her drop, Mike. How do we be real and honest with our emotions? Let's say we're grieving or truly sad from a major life event, yet be truly present in our lives and see the beauty. How can we actually do that? Like experience happiness in the moment of these kind of times of grief. How can we be real with what we're going through? Well, I think that, again, I think that so many aims within happiness, there's a way to think about it through the five senses. And I think the five senses is a great, might be a great solace here. Because even when, let's say you're experiencing some kind of deep grief, of course, you wouldn't wish that away. I mean, negative, I think sometimes

people think that a happy life is a life with no negative emotions. And that's not possible. And it wouldn't even be a good life. So you want it, you don't want to deny your grief or or wave it aside or or cover it you know pretend that it's not there but i think that through the five senses it can give you solace and comfort and you know certainly one way many people experience this is through nature because there is something so timeless and so impersonal about like the great patterns of nature and the and the great cycles of nature that a lot, you know, this is a classic thing that people will think about is trying to put grief into the context of the natural world. And the more that you can see, hear, smell, taste, touch it, really try to, it can take you out of yourself. And I experienced this at the Met because, I mean,

when they talk about happiness, one thing that clearly makes people happier is sort of moments of transcendence and awe. And I really experienced that at the Met and a sense of timelessness because it put everything in such a sense of perspective. Like we were going through the pandemic, but there was all this art from hundreds of years ago, thousands of years ago, that was people dealing with the plague. Like, this is not a new thing. I mean, back to this idea of identifying with other people. You know, and just to see this is all,

this is just the deep patterns of time. And so I think through the five senses, you can find the transcendence and the awe that can help give you a respite from your own, you know, the pain in your own life. Not to deny it, but to get out of it. And I think another kind of way that you do that with the five senses is you kind of get tiny.

I feel like I experienced this a lot in the pandemic when everything else felt so overwhelming. It was like, oh, the taste of my morning coffee mug. It's warm, right? The little pleasures, the little sensations. And those are even in the midst of the worst grief. Those are always there if you can kind of train your intention to look. Yeah, like the feel of a hot shower or yeah, no, absolutely.

Okay, here's a good one because I don't actually know the answer to this question. It's for Gretchen. What's some of the most fascinating research that you looked at or you conducted that you weren't able to include in your book? Well, I tried ayahuasca. That was pretty weird. I thought, okay, this is going to be like five senses psychedelic experience. I almost thought like, oh, is this going to be cheating? Because, you know, it's artificially amplified. And it was a whole thing, which I wrote about. But so what actually happened was,

so I'm a real morning person, and this was all happening very, very, very late at night. It was a whole journey. Very late at night, so I took the ayahuasca, immediately threw up three times fell asleep and woke up totally normal so as a like a five senses experience it was a complete bust so I wrote this whole thing in my for my book like this happened then that happened and then this other thing happened and my editor was like but you in the end, really nothing did happen. Let's leave it out. And so it

was a huge experience for me. And it was definitely a huge, if one of the things that makes us happier, it's realizing that we can push ourselves out of our comfort zone and that we could truly surprise ourselves and do something that we did not think that we could do. I definitely did do that. So it was a huge happiness booster in that respect. But from a five senses perspective, nothing. Here's another piece of fascinating research that I just moved around. I kept trying to stick it into the book. This my agent calls this no note card left behind, which is when you just want to get every fact into a book. So we're our senses are more sensitive at the low level than at the high level. Like you're much better at judging the sweetness of crackers than the sweetness of cinnamon buns. And you're much better at gauging the weight of a

mixing bowl than of a bowling ball. How does this fit in? No, it does not. I was fascinated by this. I don't know why. It's just interesting. It doesn't appear in the book because I just, as much as I tried to jam it in there, I could not make it relevant. But it does suggest that your taste party, more crackers, less cinnamon. That's right. That's right. That's right. We tried apples, not chocolate chip ice cream. Yeah. And your ayahuasca experience came out of it. So I challenge you to consider placebo effect with all the new research on psychedelics. Yeah, and some of the negative effects too, because it turns out, I didn't know this statistic, but even in these very controlled clinical settings, there's a lot of clinical folks who are using psychedelics now potentially as treatments. Between 10 to 20% have a really

awful trip and awful experience. Did you read Ann Patchett's essay? Yeah, yeah. So it's like, it's higher than people think. So anyway, we're winding down and we both liked the following question as a final question. So I'll ask it to Gretchen first and then she can ask it to me. What do people get wrong about happiness?

I think that one thing people get wrong about happiness is that they think that there's one right way and they think there's one best way. And they think that research shows that this is the way that you should do it. And I'm right and you're wrong, or maybe you're right and I'm wrong. And what I find is that there is no one right way.

It's only what works for the individual. And that each of us has to have, create our own happiness project for ourselves, taking into account our own nature, our own interests, our own interests, our own values, our own idiosyncrasies, our own five senses. And that if somebody says to you things like, well, you know, if something's important to you, you should get up and do it first thing before you start your day, because that's when you're going to be at your freshest. So if something's

important to you, you should do it first thing. It's like, well, that's good advice if you're a morning person. But it's terrible advice if you're a night person, because you're most creative and productive and energetic later in the day. Or maybe people will say, well, you know, if you want to concentrate, you really need to have silence. You don't have any business listening to music if you're trying to do high mental work. And it's like, well, that's just not true. Some people like silence. Some people like a busy hum, like a coffee shop. Some people like music with words. Some people like music without words. Some people like white noise, brown noise, pink noise, green noise. It all depends on what works for you. I did this with my daughters. I would say to them, if you're going to work, you have to be at a desk. I would have a desk in the bathroom.

I have to have a desk. And they didn't. They would sit on the floor. They'd sit on their bed. And then I realized a lot of people just don't use a desk there's nothing magic about a desk this is why it's fun to have Gretchen and I up here because I think in many we both study happiness and know the research and stuff but in many respects I think personally we have very different preferences I need incredible noise you do absolutely can't what kind of music din Din? Anything. When I took my exams in college, which is in Boston, I actually went to the T station and sat against a dirty wall and just did my work there because I needed that much noise. Sometimes at Yale, when I had to write a very important grant,

I would go to the Mohegan Sun Casino and not gamble. Oh my gosh! I would just sit in the loudness in the corner with my laptop and write a grant. So the more I have to concentrate concentrate the more crazy noise i need no desk either just sitting kind of curled up in a corner but you can see how this becomes a problem like with somebody in an office because if i'm the boss and i'm like a cluttered desk means a cluttered mind everybody's got to have a clean desk and silence is how people concentrate so let's bring the noise down i mean who's to say and like i could show you

research showing 60 of people need silence but it doesn't matter at data point of one most important data point data point of you um and so i think that a lot of times people have this search for the best way or the right way and i think sometimes they turn to science or they justify it with science saying well this is what science shows but in the end it's like but what's your experience when have you succeeded in the past what works works for you? What appeals to you? What helps you do what you want to do? And what matters to you? Because people have such different things that matter to them. So I feel like that's the part that people often overlook, is that we've all got to figure it out for ourselves. So how about you? What do you think people get wrong

about happiness? So my answer winds up with the same, I think, like final answer, which is that we've all got to figure it out for ourselves. So how about you? What do you think people get wrong about happiness? So my answer winds up with the same, I think, like final answer, which is that we've kind of got to figure it out for ourselves, that doing our own experiment is important. But I think what people get wrong about happiness is so many things. I mean, I think the thing,

we just have our minds lie to us, right? This is the whole premise of the happiness lab. And I think our minds lie to us about so much, right? We just talked about social connection. Our minds think, oh, just plopping down and looking at the screen is going to feel great when going out and talking to somebody would feel better. Like that's just the tip of the misconception iceberg. There's like, there's a billion, you know, changing my circumstances. If I want to be happier, I need a new job. I need to change these things when in fact, subtle changes to our behavior and our mindset matter more. And so for me, this is the big one, right? It's that we're walking around with these brains that have all these misconceptions that are telling us, motivating us,

hey, go out and do these things and you'll feel happier. And by and large, a lot of those intuitions are wrong. Like some of the intuitions we get wrong because the science or these like kind of these sort of platitudes and things, but some are just our own intuitions about this is going to feel good and it just doesn't i have a great example for you the peep a lot of people say i've trained myself to get by on five hours of sleep oh yes but talk to my undergrads about that one where on average on average all those horrible mental health statistics i just mentioned to you about college students i actually think we could solve most of them if students got more sleep and they weren't sleeping five hours. It's true for adults too, though. It's true for adults too. Yeah, no, people say that they've trained themselves to get by on very little, on like four or five hours. And then

research shows that people are actually very, very significantly impacted and you don't adjust to it and you can't get by without it. And so your mind is saying, oh, everything's fine. All I need is my cup of coffee, but you really are off your game. And so that's a good example. And so this is where I do think the science and some of these averages can help is that you sometimes hear like, oh, the science isn't talking to somebody on the screen feels good or that five hours of sleep isn't good for anyone, right? And then it can cause you to just try and change your behavior

a little bit. You know, we mentioned Jessica Pan before, and you know, she just like tried to change her behavior a little bit. And what she discovered was really striking. And I think that's the big thing that I've learned most from this sort of enterprise of studying happiness is that even my intuitions are wrong a lot of the time. And recognizing that they're wrong can mean you just tweak things a little bit, and you can start to notice yourself, do the experiment yourself to notice, actually, that didn't feel as bad as I thought, or that's a great hack for when things are really tricky, right? And that can be really, really powerful. Recognizing that your mind isn't telling you the right way to go can help you come up with more creative solutions about what might really be

the right way to go. Well, and that's what we try to do with on the Happier podcast is just suggest idea after idea after idea for people because some stick and some don't and some feel right and some aren't relevant. But it's like sometimes just having these concrete ideas and knowing that they've worked for somebody can help you get ideas for the kinds of things that you would try for yourself and that can make you happier.

And so I hope you all are leaving with lots of ideas for things that you can do to promote your happiness, both with your five senses and beyond. Can we give it up for Gretchen Rubin? And Laurie Santos. The Happiness Lab will be on a brief summer break, but we'll be back in July with a whole new series on listener stories, sharing how they put the science of happiness into practice. I hope you'll be back to join us then. 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