The Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos - Don't Think of the White Bear

Episode Date: October 22, 2019

Once a thought is in our heads, we can't suppress it and trying to only causes us misery. Dr Laurie Santos explains why our brains work in this way and hears from real people who have confronted and overcome disruptive thoughts and bad memories and found happiness in the process. For an even deeper dive into the research we talk about in the show visit happinesslab.fm Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Pushkin. Back in 1863, the Russian novelist Dostoevsky gave his readers a challenge. One which I'm going to argue has a huge impact on happiness. Try to pose for yourself this task, he wrote, not to think of a polar bear. So for the next few seconds, let's do it. Let's not think of a white bear. Ready? Go. How'd you do? My guess is that even though you were trying not to think of a white bear, your mind immediately went to thoughts of a white bear. That's what Dostoevsky realized. He warned that when you try not to think of something, you will see that cursed thing come

to mind every minute. The Harvard psychologist Dan Wegner was interested in these effects, which he referred to as ironic processes. Cases where our minds, ironically enough, go to the exact place where we don't want them to go. Wettner created a version of Dostoevsky's polar bear challenge as an experiment with college students. He asked them to speak their stream of consciousness for five minutes. Living with my boyfriend right now, so I didn't have to... That sunburn, and I didn't want to be out in the sun.

Being quiet in his hair, which freaks me out a little bit. Next, he asks them to repeat the task, but explicitly tells them not to think of a white bear. If the bear does pop into their minds while babbling, you have to ring the bell. I asked my students to repeat the experiment. Here's how they did. Of course.

All right, and now, because I was told not to think about it, I'm thinking about it. I'm not thinking about it right now. I'm thinking about my class rate and how I'm nervous I get. Think about it. Thinking about it. Oh man, it's trickier than I thought. It's funny to hear so many bells ringing, but everyone does this. On average, people in Wegner's original study ended up ringing the bell about once per minute.

Things that we don't want in our heads seem to come up all the time. Just think of that song, You Can't Stop Humming. song you can't stop humming. But sometimes the thoughts we don't want to think about are a lot more serious than a catchy song or a polar bear image. Our dumb minds also spontaneously go to lots of yucky thoughts. That fight with our spouse a few weeks back, or that mean comment from a co-worker you can't shake. Even really traumatic memories have a knack for popping into our heads when we least want them there. Which raises an important question. Why can't we simply get rid of all these unwanted thoughts? What strategies should we be using not to think of white bears, earworm tunes, and those awful memories that

hinder our happiness. Our minds are constantly telling us what to do to be happy. But what if our minds are wrong? What if our minds are lying to us, leading us away from what will really make us happy? The good news is that understanding the science of the mind can point us all back in the right direction. You're listening to The Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos. So golfers would never use the word.

Wouldn't even, wouldn't acknowledge it. But there's no question, it's well known. You know, some of the greatest players in the history of the game get it. Colin Sheehan played for the Yale golf team back in the 90s. He's now the head coach. Colin's a friend of mine, which is the only reason he's willing to talk to me about a topic that's usually verboten for golfers to speak of. The yips. The yips is like where you're putting and then your hands just twitch and you're in a position where you're no longer in control of the club. It flicks. It twists.

You aren't in control of your hands. And then there you are, left broken. The yips happen when golfers totally psych themselves out. When they think so much about not making a certain type of mistake that they end up making exactly that mistake all the time. And it's not just a one-time thing. The yips can return at any moment. And that fear plagues golfers. The idea of it sort of happening or that it might happen has always been a thing for professional golfers. And so you kind of lived in a constant dread

of this idea, like, is today going to be one of those days? Are we going to have a bad yips day? Or is it going to, are we going to be fairly easy or, and then you get on the course and it may not even be on the first hole and then it can come at any moment. And it's a, it's an unnerving aspect. It's an, it's an embarrassing aspect. It's, it's, it's humiliating. It's, it's dreadful. Think about what happens when you hit a golf ball. Making a putt involves not only thinking about where you want the ball to go, but also where you want the ball not to go. This act of thinking of the unwanted action, whatever you do, don't hit it to the left,

seems to make that unwanted action more likely, not less. It's like if you're carrying a glass of wine over someone's new white carpet and you think, whatever I do, I shouldn't spill this. And then, of course... Recent research shows how common this phenomenon is. College students told not to think about a particular person before bed end up dreaming about that person more often. And soccer players told not to shoot a penalty kick to a specific location tend to look at that exact forbidden spot,

which is a problem since players tend to aim where they look. Dan Wegner, who devised the White Bear experiment, also studied these ironic effects on the golf course. He had his students putt a ball towards a target. Some subjects took the putt normally, but others were told, whatever you do, don't overshoot. What happens? People then do exactly what they're told not to. They overshoot the ball by about 20 centimeters.

Wegner's experiment had found a way to induce the yips, and it wasn't that hard. Just have golfers tell themselves what not to do, and you have a recipe for disaster. Golf is a lovely game, and it's a cruel game. When it's going poorly, it can be devastating. But the most devastating thing about the Yips is that they tend to stick around. One bad shot follows another. A hole ruined becomes a round ruined. A bad week stretches out into a bad year. Colin explained that this decline without end was famously summed up in a classic article by Henry Longhurst, the great British golf essayist. It's called, Once you've had him, you've got him. Because there's almost like the idea is there's

not a cure, or maybe someday there will be. Be great to take a pill. It was at this point in the interview that Colin suddenly turned a bit quiet. He was wrestling with something. He stammered for a while and began talking about his glory days. I played probably my best golf of my life from the time I was about 25 to 40. I had about a decade of my life where I was a plus one handicap and I loved playing well and I did it without practicing much. And then in the last five years or so, my game started to struggle, and it went from being just a little bit of a tail-off to almost a precipitous decline. I recently told someone, if you wanted to read about my golf game, it's over in the obituary section. One of my Yale students had told me that Colin was an expert on the yips.

I assumed his expertise came from coaching so many amazing young golfers. But as Colin continued, I realized the truth. Colin knew about the yips because he had them. And once you've had them, well... The crazy thing was that Colin was now confessing all this to me in front of a live mic. You get to a point where you wonder wonder like, why me? What did I do? I thought I was a good person. What did the golfing gods, why did they pick me? And I didn't

grow up Catholic. No, it was like a confessional. I have the yips. Everybody out there, it's true. Colin hadn't really spoken about his struggle with the yips to anyone but his wife. And that's common for golfers. Because when you've got them, you also want to hide them, which with the yips to anyone but his wife. And that's common for golfers, because when you've got them, you also want to hide them, which makes the yips a form of thought suppression overload. Not only are you trying to suppress your thoughts about what not to do on the golf course, which is bad cognitively, but you're also trying to hide that you have this shameful condition from everyone around you. You don't want people to learn your dirty secret. Colin even admitted that his wife had pulled him aside before he came to

the interview. She asked him if he was sure that he wanted to talk about the awful Y word on my podcast, whether he wanted to admit it so publicly. Would his career suffer if everyone knew about it? In the end, Colin decided it was finally time to confess. And maybe there needs to be an opportunity for golfers to come out about it. I guess I'm doing it right now. Well, it's always been sort of part of the stress that I've had is that if we're being honest, I feel like this is a great place to do it. In some ways, it should just be like on the first tee, I should just introduce myself and be like, all right, just let me preface this by saying you might see some horrendously bad shots out of me.

And maybe that might help. I can't stress enough how big a sporting taboo Colin has broken by talking so openly about suffering from the yips. In the golfing world, bringing up the subject, it just isn't done. One way that yips are perceived is that it's because you're mentally weak. Players often think the yips can be overcome by just working harder to suppress them. Just tell yourself more sternly not to lose control of your grip on the club. Mentally, keep telling yourself not to make a bad shot. Golfers don't take kindly to the suggestion that all this mental pressure won't help them beat the yips.

So everyone ends up suffering and keeping it a huge secret, which makes the next story Colin told me all the more unexpected. You see, back when he was a young golfer, Colin had a chance to meet his hero. I was working for the Golfer Magazine. Just six months in, my very first assignment to interview a pro was Bernard Langer, the Rye Hilton. And I'm 22 years old and there's Bernard Langer, like two-time Masters champion waiting for me in the lobby. And I left an hour early and I was still late. And of course he's on time. And he was gracious to me. And we sat down and we start the interview and it's going wonderfully. And he's cranking out

answers and I'm sliding follow-ups and it's going wonderful. That was when Colin made a huge faux pas in front of the greatest player on the planet. I felt like I sort of had a moment where I could ask him about his yips. A typical golfer might have walked out of the interview right there. But Colin's hero wasn't the usual golfer. And he just goes into this answer in 1979. I had my first bout of the yips and then in 1982. And he just goes into this answer in 1979. I had my first bout to the Ips and then in 1982. And he did it. He did it perfectly. And so I realize now in hindsight,

there he was doing the opposite of trying to obscure the fact that he had it. And it only paid dividends for him throughout his life. He was 43 at the time and he just continued a meteoric rise. Just by disclosing to some 22-year-old kid. It can't hurt. It can't hurt. He clearly didn't have a problem acknowledging it, admitting it. And I think perhaps there's a lesson there. Colin's right. There is a lesson here. One that's really important scientifically.

Langer was one of the few golfers who was willing to speak openly about his yips. And that meant that his mind didn't have to harbor a shameful secret. It didn't have to work really hard to keep the dreaded Y word, hush hush. And that meant that Langer's mind could relax a bit. His brain didn't have to put so much effort into keeping all those unwanted thoughts concealed because his yips cat was finally out of the golf bag, so to speak. And what was the result? Langer had a lot more mental energy left for doing what professional golfers need to do, namely play golf. Langer was able to develop new techniques to improve his game because he had finally freed his mind. He had let go of all those ironic processes, and his golf game skyrocketed yet again. Coming up, we'll hear just how powerful that release can be,

not just for bad golf games, but for life-changing events. Here was this big secret they've been keeping their whole lives, and here was this opportunity for them to organize the experience and to put it into words in a way that they've never done before. 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. Criminal case 41, attorney general against Adolf, the son of Adolf Karl Eichmann, aged 54. Historians argue that it took the world nearly 20 years to appreciate the true horror of the Holocaust.

It's April 11, 1961, and Adolf Eichmann has just entered his bulletproof dock at a special tribunal in Jerusalem. Eichmann was facing 15 indictments for his role in sending millions of Jews to their bulletproof dock at a special tribunal in Jerusalem. Eichmann was facing 15 indictments for his role in sending millions of Jews to their deaths. Nazi war criminals had been publicly tried before, but this time was different. This time, television cameras were beaming the story to every corner of the globe. And this time, Jews who had seen and survived the genocide were ready to take the stand. President of court, please quiet in the courtroom. Do you speak Hebrew, sir? Yes. Please place the skullcap on your head.

Many of the witnesses had never spoken publicly about the horrific cruelty they'd endured. There was my younger sister, and she wanted to live. She prayed with a German. Police interrogator Michael Goldman-Gallad had helped build the case against Eichmann. His own parents and sister had been murdered by the Nazis. But like other Holocaust survivors at that time, Michael had never spoken of his ordeal, assuming no one would trust his account. It was impossible to believe, he had said, because it was so horrible.

She asked to run naked. She went up to the German with one of her friends. They were embracing each other and she asked to be spared. Standing there naked, he looked into her eyes and shot the two of them. Michael had bottled up his experiences for 20 years. After listening to hour after hour of awful memories pouring from his fellow survivors, he realized that the trial had become a watershed historical moment. The Eichmann trial, he said, opened our mouths again. But unlike those who'd taken a stand against Eichmann, many Holocaust survivors still felt

they had no acceptable way to share their stories. You know, it's hard to talk to your neighbor saying, oh, did I tell you all about my Holocaust experiences? They learned nobody wanted to hear about it because it was just too threatening. Jamie Pennybaker is a professor of psychology at UT Austin and an expert on the power of expressing our emotions. By the mid-1980s, many Holocaust victims had kept silent about their experiences for four whole decades. Jamie wondered what toll this had taken on them and what benefits they might receive by sharing their stories

instead of suppressing them. He joined a project that invited survivors to give videotaped testimony of what they had endured at the hands of the Nazis. And here was this opportunity for them to organize the experience and to put it into words in a way that they'd never done before. And they came in, they were interviewed on camera, and the average interview was about an hour, hour and a half. The films of the interviews Jamie conducted are kept in a university archive here at Yale. I arranged to see some of them. It was tougher to hear than even I expected.

Okay, to begin with, could you tell us your name, your maiden name, where you're from? My name is Rosalie Schiff. I was born in Krakow, Poland, and I am a Holocaust survivor. Jamie asks Rosalie about the appalling things she endured, first in the ghetto and then in the camp. I'm struck time and again by just how determined Rosalie has been to suppress the details. I tried so hard to push the memories away. Do you think you're pretty successful at putting it away out of your mind? Telling you the truth, I'm fighting with myself. It's not good to store something like this and not to bring it out.

For nearly two hours, Rosalie patiently answers question after question, occasionally wiping away tears. Having suppressed her memories for decades, she finally opens up to recount horrors which seem almost unimaginable to me. We were covered with lice. We were beaten. We had to stay in the camp undressed completely like animals. And they shoot every minute somebody else.

It was an incredibly hard video to watch. Every act of violence perpetrated by the Nazis is more depraved and distressing than the last. At one point, Rosalie describes watching the SS slaughter an entire orphanage of Jewish children in a frenzied massacre that left the street outside awash with blood. It was very hard to talk about it. You've done an outstanding job. I'm really proud of you. I won't play you the worst parts of Rosalie's testimony.

I had to stop the tape several times and just get up and go for a walk. But Jamie had to listen in real time. It was the most moving experience of my life. It's hard to put into words. I'm not a clinical psychologist. And hearing these stories was really hard on me. And it was almost as though it was a traumatic experience for me. And just seeing the depth of the horrors that these people had endured. I had nightmares. I was now all of a sudden a victim of my own research. But completing the interviews was only the first part

of Jamie's work. Jamie wanted to know if the process of sharing memories would have an impact on the survivors whose lifelong mental strategy had been to tamp down those thoughts and lock them away. What we found was the experience had this profound effect on them. A lot of them were self-reports in terms of kind of a greater sense of well-being and happiness. And also we had some health markers that showed improvements as well. Immediately after telling these awful stories, survivors felt better. And survivors who shared the most traumatic memories were the ones who reported feeling the best. They had the lowest heart rates and the lowest levels of emotional anguish. Talking about the worst possible things they'd

ever experienced made survivors feel calmer and happier. But Jamie's results were even more amazing than that. One year after the interviews, Jamie contacted survivors. He asked, how are you feeling? And have you been to the doctor recently? He found that survivors who disclosed lots of details in their interviews were healthier. People who evaded talking deeply about their traumas went to the doctor almost twice as often. It seemed that getting those awful secrets out in the open made survivors less sick, even a full 12 months later. It was hard to do a really controlled experiment because we didn't have another group of Holocaust survivors who did not come into the studio. did not come into the studio. So as a control study, it wasn't that impressive. But as a case study, it was a profound, really was a profound experience. I've become intrigued with this notion that if you have something that's bad and you don't want to talk about it, you probably should

think about talking about it or at least writing about it. After his own tough experience with Holocaust survivors, Jamie set out on paper how upsetting and unsettling he'd found the interviews. He found the writing process so helpful, he decided to test the effects of sharing bad memories in a more controlled way. So I thought, well, we just get random college students who are taking introductory psychology, bring them into the lab. They either wrote about superficial topics or about traumatic experiences for four consecutive days. And those people who wrote about these traumatic experiences, it was a profound

experience. And they wrote about things that anybody would agree was a traumatic experience. They weren't kind of the classic thing. Some were these huge humiliations. Some were things that sounded superficial, death of a person's dog. I remember every night I would go and read all of these stories, and they blew me away. Both sets of students, the ones who'd written the stories that had so moved Jamie, and the group who'd just set down more mundane thoughts, granted permission for their medical records to be tracked for six months. And those in the experimental group, those who wrote about traumas, ended up going to the doctor at about half the rate as people in the controlled conditions.

When people were asked to write about a deeply troubling traumatic experience or upsetting experience that they hadn't talked to other people about, it was associated with better physical health. People went to the doctor less. Their immune system got better. Something that has always stuck with me, I remember in the months afterwards, this happened at least a couple of times, a student would come up and said, you don't know me, but I was in your experiment on writing, and it changed my life. Since Jamie's initial research back in the 1980s, many scientists have seen the same effects of setting traumatic memories down on paper. There are easily 1,000 or 2,000 studies that have been done since then.

Across these studies, it's been associated with reductions in symptoms of depression and post-traumatic stress disorder. It's been associated with people performing better on creative tasks, doing better on standardized tests like SATs or MCATs. They're mentally healthier, and the biological markers have been quite impressive in terms of changes, in terms of improvements in symptoms of arthritis and immune disorders and cardiovascular changes and so forth. We often tell ourselves not to think about events in our lives that are painful. We think dwelling on that stuff is not good. And so we squash those bad memories down. But the science of ironic processes shows why that's a bad idea.

It takes work for us to repress those bad thoughts. And that cognitive work winds up affecting things like sleep and blood pressure and how well we can concentrate on a standardized test. Letting those bad thoughts out and getting them down on paper finally lets our tired brains relax. It's like opening our little mental pressure cookers to let out some suppressed steam. But there's a second reason that writing down our bad memories makes us happier. Writing stuff down helps us make sense of things.

Our brains finally get to process and work through some really bad stuff. I've always been fascinated how people naturally deal with upsetting experience. You know, you're almost in a car wreck. You come home, you tell your spouse or your friend, oh my God, we're not going to believe what happened. By putting an upsetting experience into words, it forces structure. It forces an organization. There's a beginning, middle, and an end. It's not blowing off steam.

It's not some kind of venting or the way many people think about catharsis. Instead, you are coming to understand the event and also yourself better. Writing about your painful emotions can help you organize those experiences. You finally have a chance to make sense of them because they're not bottled up anymore. And once you make sense of upsetting experiences, you finally get enough perspective to grow from them. And this is something that I find interesting about adversity. Very often adversity, having the thing that's negative certainly sucks. But by the same token, it has the potential to be healing and to make us rethink ourselves and rethink our lives. Having watched that film of Rosalie Schiff breaking her decades-long silence about the Holocaust, I found it hard to put her out of my mind.

I decided to track her down. It turns out she passed away just a couple of years ago at age 91. But as I read her many obituaries, I was struck by something. Rosalie devoted her final years to telling and retelling her terrible story. She even helped to write a book about her experiences. She and her husband told reporters, quote, we have to talk about it. Rosalie had tapped into an important psychological truth.

Putting painful memories into words can give us the perspective we need to grow from those events, whether those events happened yesterday or even 50 years ago. But what if there was a way to process those painful events while they were actually happening? What if we didn't have to shove the tough stuff into some mental memory bank and marshal the courage to deal with it all later? What if we didn't have to shove the tough stuff into some mental memory bank and marshal the courage to deal with it all later? What if we could just work through the pain immediately? Just feel all those bad emotions in the moment and accept them. This might sound like some Zen Jedi master stuff, but research shows this radical approach to negative emotions is possible for every one of us.

The Dalai Lama simply said to us, if we can all sustain a calm mind, any emotion can arise and fall and not be destructive or hurtful. The Happiness Lab will be right back. We'll see you next time. 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. I'm never going to get rid of emotions, but I think I've gotten better at my recovery. Can I return back to a calm mind a little quicker? I would say yes. Eve Ekman is the Director of Training at the Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley. She's an expert on how people feel their emotions in the moment and can tackle them head on.

I remember very well a friend and colleague of mine in the UK, and her mother said to me, it sounds quite interesting what you do, but why? Aren't emotions just better if we don't talk about them? I think most people believe that, but would never say it to me. And with that stiff upper lip that we associate with people in the UK, I think there is an assumption that the more we meddle into our emotions, the more trouble we're making. So can't we just leave them as they are and hopefully they'll just go away on their own? Many people would rather just shut their negative emotions off before they happen. But science suggests that might not be possible. I think the million-dollar question that everybody wants the answer to is, how do I stop right in the middle

of my emotion? And to date, I have not found anyone who's able to do that. And Eve has even studied the best emotional regulators around. Even in my work with His Holiness the Dalai Lama, he describes the difficulty of feeling angry and responding to anger. And he is able to have anger come and go, but not to stop it right in the middle. None of us can shut off what we're feeling midstream, not even the Dalai Lama. The problem is most of us don't get that. We don't realize it's impossible, and so we try really hard to shut off any bad feelings we're having in the moment.

And what does all that suppression do? You guessed it. Ironic processes kick in and make all those unpleasant feelings even worse. I think what we know from research is when we are suppressing our emotions or trying to clamp down on them, they actually have a rebound that's even stronger at a physiological level, meaning it feels more intensely in our body when we're trying to not show what we're experiencing and trying to not feel what we're experiencing and trying to not feel what we're experiencing. Let's take a closer look at the science of this rebound effect, an effect that researchers have found clever, though sometimes disturbing, ways to induce in laboratory settings. The Stanford neuroscientist James Gross showed his poor test subject's graphic

medical footage of a patient's arm being amputated. Some viewers were told to suppress what they were feeling and not show any outward signs of emotion as the horrific film played. What did Gross find? The individuals that tried to follow this command were less likely to scrunch up their faces in disgust when watching the videos. But Gross also found that they showed much larger internal emotional responses than the ones who just watched the video normally.

Their heart rates spiked, they sweated more, and they even showed signs of their blood vessels constricting. The act of trying to shut off our feelings on the outside makes our internal arousal levels shoot through the roof. Researchers see similar rebound effects when people try to suppress physically painful experiences. In one study, subjects were asked to stick their arms in very, very cold water for as long as they could take, and then rate the experience on a scale from zero, no pain at all,

to 10, maximum agony. One group of subjects was told to ignore their pain. What happened? One group of subjects was told to ignore their pain. What happened? They pulled their hands out of the freezing water almost a minute before subjects who were just experiencing the pain normally. It'd be one thing if these rebound effects happened only in weird psych studies that involve creepy videos and painful tasks. But researchers have also shown the power of these emotional rebounds in everyday situations, like in our family life. Say you have a stressful day at work and you come home to your family still feeling a little worked up.

Our minds often tell us it'd be good to shut those feelings down to make sure your spouse and your kids don't know what you're feeling. But as researcher Wendy Berry Mendez and her colleagues have found out, that's pretty much the worst thing we can do. Mendez brought moms, dads, and their kids into the lab and had parents simulate a typical stressful

work event. They had to pitch an idea to their boss, who immediately crushes them with some withering criticism. The bruised parents were then asked to play Legos with their kids. Half of the parents were told, try to behave in such a way that your child doesn't know that you're feeling stressed. What happened? Those parents inadvertently took it out on their kids. They were angrier and more upset. They were less responsive to their kids, gave them less guidance, and behaved less warmly. Overall, their bad mood deteriorated even further when they played with their kids. But what's worse, perhaps not surprisingly, is that Mendez found the parents' rebound effect also took a toll on

their kids. These kids had less fun and did worse on the task, just because their parents were trying to hide what they were feeling. So at the end of a day in which we've been suppressing the entire day, we feel emotionally exhausted, drained and depleted. We've been efforting our way away from these emotions. Eve thinks that if we just felt the emotions rather than trying to suppress them, we might not be as burnt out. After all, emotional responses aren't in themselves bad. From the psychological point of view, we would not want to get rid of emotions. That would be a very unsafe world for us to live in.

We wouldn't have the signal of fear or feel the motivation of frustration to change things. Some of our more difficult emotions we'd rather avoid can sometimes be, of course, our greatest teachers, if we're willing to look at them and if we have the tools to manage them. And a first step to managing them seems to be to deal with negative emotions as they arise. So let's say, for example, yesterday I go into the office and I find that my office is actually occupied with a meeting. And my first experience is a little bit of frustration. But I try to avoid that feeling. And I instead am looking for other places to sit and do my work, but I'm doing so in this kind of pinched, aggravated, tight way.

And so later on that day, when I find that maybe the public transportation on my way home is late, and I become very upset. I can't believe that this train is late and what's wrong with the city. And then I questioned to myself, why am I so upset about this? And maybe I can trace back to not having really been with a low level of frustration that happened earlier in the day. If I could just accept the fact that it wasn't the way I wanted it, the rest of my day would have felt better. And I could have done the exact same thing, which is find somewhere else to work,

but without this kind of heaviness or without this kind of ongoing residue. The process Eve's describing here, the act of responding rather than reacting to our emotions, is one that scholars have been preaching for thousands of years, way before modern neuroscience was around. Take Buddhism, for example. Buddhist teachers have long argued that we're not going to be able to get rid of all the bad stuff in life. The stress, the pain, the occasional negative event. The Buddha himself realized that these are not going away. In fact, the continued existence of pain, or what the

Buddhists call dukkha, is so important that it's considered the first of the four noble truths. But Buddhists also realized that our reaction to the pain is something that can go away. That's something we can control. To illustrate this concept, the Buddha told his famous parable of the second arrow. In the story, Buddha explains that when something bad happens in life, say we get stuck in traffic or get yelled at at work, it's like getting hit with an arrow. It sucks. But when we respond to negative events, we also get hit with what he called a second

arrow – our reactions. We automatically get really upset, and then we hate what we're feeling, so we try to suppress it, which makes things even worse. In life, we can't always control that first arrow, but the pain from the second arrow is totally under our control. Whether we freak out or try to suppress what we're feeling, that second arrow is optional. It's on us. Eve's gotten really good at avoiding second arrows. She even hadn't won off before we started our interview. So actually before this call, I received a pretty confronting email this morning, one that made me feel kind of frustrated and annoyed. And I knew we were going to talk and

I wanted to feel more clear and less kind of triggered emotionally. So I did a short meditation for myself. And in this meditation, I focused on not the story of why I'm right, and clearly this person is wrong. But I focused on just the felt sensation of what it was like to be triggered into feeling frustration and anger. So I think if we can start managing and working with our emotions, the opportunities are boundless. Our mind thinks that the right way to deal with all the unwanted stuff is just to push it out. Just don't do it, don't think it, don't feel it. But science shows us that's just not how minds work.

Avoiding our thoughts and emotions causes them to come back with an ironic vengeance. The most effective way to deal with the pain of life, all those first arrows, is just to let them sting. I decided to meet again with Colin Sheehan, my friend, the golf coach, who confessed earlier that his golf game had gone to pieces. The science says his frank admission about the yips could only have been beneficial. But did Colin's golfing form improve? But did Colin's golfing form improve? I wouldn't go so far as to say smashing, but definitely I've improved. I can pretend to look like a two or three handicap now.

By confessing he had the yips, by putting it into words and getting it out of his head, Colin was able to golf better than he had in years. Maybe I should get a bumper sticker. I had the yips. Would it catch on? Would it help people's game? I think you could have a nice cottage industry of having golfers with the yips come and pay you $500 to sit down for half an hour and spill their guts. My little podcast recording booth golf confessional. Well, if the podcast doesn't go anywhere, I know I have another career. Nice.

I'm kind of hoping that I don't have to make a living counseling golfers, but if you've enjoyed the show and found it useful, I'd appreciate you spreading the word. Tell your family and friends and even total strangers. And if you're not keen to share, well, maybe this is one time where suppressing your thoughts might be okay. So whatever you do, don't think about listening to the next episode of The Happiness Lab with me, Dr. Laurie Santos.

The Happiness Lab is co-written and produced by Ryan Dilley. The show is mixed and mastered by Evan Viola and edited by Julia Barton. Fact-checking by Joseph Fridman. And our original music was composed by Zachary Silver. Special thanks to Mia LaBelle, Carly Migliore, Heather Fane, Maggie Taylor, Maya Koenig, and Jacob Weisberg. The Happiness Lab is brought to you by Pushkin Industries and me, Dr. Laurie Santos.