The Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos - Get Over Yourself

Episode Date: January 13, 2025

As children we think we're at the center of the world - but as adults we need to learn to see the perspectives and problems of other people. It helps us connect with those people, but also makes us realise that our own problems aren't unique or especially awful. In short, to be happy you need to know ... How to Get Over Yourself.  Dr Laurie hears how to stop being egocentric and start being allocentric from Bruce Hood - a professor at the University of Bristol and the author of The Science of Happiness: Seven Lessons for Living Well. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Pushkin If you're hoping to make big changes to your life in 2025, you're probably viewing those goals through a lens that's very much focused on yourself. I want to achieve this, or I want to become like that. The whole idea of self-improvement involves centering ourselves, putting our own hopes and worries in the spotlight. But if you're feeling this self-improvement bug in the new year, you may need to get over yourself. And I mean that in the nicest way possible, because the science shows that checking your ego may be a faster path to happiness than you think. But how can you get over yourself?

And what are some strategies for taking yourself out of the spotlight? Today we'll get some tips from Bruce Hood. Bruce is a professor at the University of Bristol in England and the author of The Science of Happiness, Seven Lessons for Living Well. Like me, Bruce turned to happiness science after seeing the mental health crisis that his students were going through. But Bruce and I share a bond that goes beyond our shared study of wellbeing. You know, I've reached 25 years at Bristol University here and I've just been applying

for a teaching fellowship where they asked you to reflect upon your career and how you felt you've made an impact. I always say I talk about this new recent kind of change into the work on happiness and I attribute that to you, Laurie, and I make a big point of saying that this is an interesting situation where the student is now mentoring the tutor. Because we met when I was visiting MIT and you were coming from Harvard

as this kind of fiery young undergraduate working in comparative psychology at the time. And then I applied for a job at Harvard and ended up being one of the professors there. And I don't know if you remember this, Laurie, but you were an undergraduate at the time, but I let you take my graduate course. And the reason I did is I told people later on

that Laurie had a much better way of explaining difficult concepts than I did. But six years ago is when things really changed, I think is when that was a terrible time at Bristol University. It was 2018 and we had a spate of tragic suicides. And I realized that we needed to do something to help these students and I looked around and by coincidence

you had put on this amazing course at Yale, Psychology and the Good Life and so I contacted you and in your typical generous and selfless way you shared all your notes and I put together my version of the course but with my perspective on it and I called it the Science of Happiness and I've never looked back ever since then it's like your course has become very impactful, influential, and really, really loved by the students. So I've now kind of dedicated my remaining time to trying to become an advocate and promote a change in higher education, actually, not just the general public, but trying to change the way we educate students because I think there's a lot to be done for them. So funny that you bring up that graduate class that I took with you because I definitely

remember that. Not only do I remember that, but I was cleaning out my Yale office recently and I still had the binder of all the readings that we did for that course that was still in my office 27, 28 years later. So I definitely remember it and made a big impact. And we published a lot of papers together as well. We did some really cool work, really fondly remembered. And so that gets to my next question, because you and I both share this kind of strange

career path where we were studying something else and got interested in happiness. And one of the things that I recall you studying and you've been wrote your one of your early books about was this idea of the self. What got you interested in the idea of the self and kind of why is it so important? Yeah. So in one of my first books, I wrote about the way that we as adults have these misconceptions that really emerge early in childhood. And I had a throwaway statement in this first book about there being no self and And an editor picked up on this and said, what do you mean by that? And it never occurred to me that this was an issue

in question because I'd been trained in neurophysiology and the whole neuroscience approach and cognitive science where we talk constantly about there being subsystems and generated experiences. So the self is a constructed notion in neuroscience. And that's something that no one really argues. There's no little you inside your head as such. Rather it's the story that our brain weaves that pulls together all the various components which make up our experience. And so that got me thinking

that maybe a book about the self illusion would be valuable. I really had trouble convincing people that this was going to be a worthwhile book but it's been one of those slow burners which which has done really, really well over the years. It's actually my most successful book. And I think it's because it just gets you to kind of think differently about our common day experience because we never question ourselves. We feel we're the same person from day to day. But of course we're constantly changing. And that's something I know you've mentioned in your podcast, but the reality is, yeah, we were rewriting ourselves every day andew, which is slightly worrying, but also, I think, deliberating because it means you can change

and you can become a different person if you recognize that you're not cast in stone. But I think it was this idea that you had that the self is an illusion and that we need to pay attention to the self to really understand human cognition and human behavior that really allowed you to have a different take on kind of what was going wrong when we think about happiness. Because you've really argued that the self really needs to kind of come into the fore when we try to figure out how to become happier and how to engage with our well-being better. What do you mean there? I think it's generally a true statement to say that children are born very self-centered

and this is something that Piaget, the great Swiss developmental psychologist acknowledged. He described the world of the child as being egocentric. In other words, they couldn't really conceive of an external reality and they had to discover that through their interactions. And that also includes discovering other people. And so this is generally true in the sense when you do research studies with very young children, they do seem to have a very self-centered view of the world. They think other people think the same things they do, see the world the same way exactly as they do.

And there's lots of these funny demonstrations. I love the one about hide and seek. You play hide and seek with a preschooler. Don't be surprised if they run over to the corner of the room, pick up the waste paper baskets, stick it over their head and stand there because they think if they can't see you, you can't see them. So I think that's a beautiful demonstration

of kind of the self-centered view of the world. But in order to become a functioning, contributing member of society, you've got to relinquish that self-centeredness and learn to become more cooperative and more social. Now there are buds of this early in infancy and early childhood and clearly children are sociable but they still have a very self-centered view of the world and I think that's the default position. And like many aspects of development, we change over time, but many of the residual things stay with us. And I think that's the default mode of thinking. We see everything from the first

person perspective, from our own stream of consciousness. And whilst we can understand that someone might have a different point of view, it takes effort sometimes to think about that and consider their perspective on things. Now the reason that's important for happiness is that if you are so self-centered that you can only see your own situation, well first of all that lacks perspective. So there's a tendency to blow your own problems out of proportion. And secondly, if you're very self-centered and somewhat self-absorbed, then you're not really going to be able to integrate with those and share the social support that they can give you. If somebody in their group is so self-centered they never contribute, we're

less inclined to help them out in many ways. So I think we're doing ourselves a disservice by focusing only on our own problems because we're blowing them out of context and actually not really engaging in a cooperative social interaction with those around us. And also when you start to see that other people have problems in their lives, which are insurmountable compared to ours, it really helps to calibrate things. So I think happiness is all about learning

to become less egocentric. We're never gonna abandon it, but just learning to kind of become more connected with others around us. Once you realize that this path to self-improvement requires you to become less self-centered, you'll be surprised how quickly you can feel happier and more connected. It just takes a little reframing.

But more on that after the break. If I had to pick one popular phrase that makes my eyes roll, it's the phrase, self-care. Now, don't get me wrong, I'm all for folks treating themselves with kindness and compassion, but I do worry that combining the words self and care often gets us turning inwards. Phrases like self-care seem to imply that a long spa day will give you a bigger well-being boost than volunteering for a cause you care about. But happiness expert Bruce Hood says, we have that vision of self-care all wrong. Bruce Hood If we can recognize that we can be kind to

ourselves, and I've heard you use that phrase, it sort of suggests that we can kind of reflect upon ourselves and consider ourselves from a different perspective. That kind of self-care is fine. But if you're taking self-care to be a case of, well, I must really only look after myself and I must treat myself and have a bit of retail therapy and really just focus on my own immediate gratification. Well, that's misguided. That will produce obviously, you know, some joy if you're buying yourself something or treating yourself to something. But that joy is short lived in comparison because first of all, it's not a surprise because

you've instigated it, you've decided to spend money on yourself, so it's hardly a surprise. Moreover, you're kind of fully aware when it ceases to provide any sort of satisfaction because well, you know when you've had enough to eat and you know when something's dull and no longer interesting. But if you were to turn all that effort and energy into enriching the lives of others around you, then you get a much better sustained authentic sense of happiness and joy because first of all, they're generally surprised and they're really delighted and that's tangible and moreover, they can kind of reflect upon what a good person you are and you never really truly know whether they like it or not, but

you can bask in the reflected glory that at least they feel very grateful that you've done something for them. So I think they both generate aspects of happiness, but one is very short-lived and the other I think is more authentic and sustained and enriches the lives of others, which ultimately is what we should be doing. And I think this is something that we get wrong so much. You know, we can think about happiness as self-care, but I think if we really wanted to kind of give a definition to happiness that was more accurate based on the data, we might instead be talking about other care or being more allocentric. How do you define being allocentric? And walk me through some of the ways that

we can do that a little bit better. Well, allocentric is simply taking stock and being mindful of other people's perspectives. As I said, it's something that we have to learn. We call it developing a theory of mind, but that's really the capacity to understand that maybe someone has a different opinion than yours, different beliefs and attitudes. So I think that's really the capacity to understand that maybe someone has a different opinion than yours, different beliefs and attitudes. So I think that's the first thing to do. If you want to have a constructive interaction and conversation, the first thing to do is to listen, which is something that we tend not to do.

So listening, I think, is one of the important things to sort of forge that initial connection to other people. But when you start to listen to other people's lives, you soon discover that the things that preoccupied you are in no way as bad as they generally seem when you start to hear other people's stories. And I think that's one of the reason podcasts are so successful and why people want to hear stories. We are a social animal and this is how we evolved. We're a narrative animal. We tell stories and that's why we like stories because we relate them to our own lives. And if you are so self-centered that you generally don't pay attention to what's going around in other people's lives, then I think you're missing out on a really important component

of psychology as it were. So allocentrics can be sort of indirect, just kind of listening to others, but then you can actually put the effort into changing other people's lives. You can volunteer, you can donate, you can help. You know, one of the surprising things is that people feel awkward. And this is a well-known phenomenon that when offered the opportunity to engage with other people, most people shy away from that because they think it will be a really negative experience. But all the data is very clear is that it's

an incredibly positive experience, both for the person helping and the person being helped. So again, this just demonstrates that our intuitions can sometimes be, you know, off center when it comes to what's really good for us. So yeah, you can actually practically help other people out and to do it in a selfless way which is not expecting reciprocity or something in return, I think is really important because then it loses its genuineness. It becomes obviously a transaction, which is not a recipe for happiness. All of these things, helping, donating, volunteering, just paying attention, listening to other

people, are all the sorts of things I'm talking about when I say becoming more allocentric. Another thing you've talked about is just to become more social in general. Explain some of the studies that show just kind of being around other people and just connecting with them generally can be good for our happiness. Well, there's a bunch of highlight in the book, and some of these are kind of being around other people and just connecting with them generally can be good for our happiness. Well, there's a bunch of highlight in the book and some of these are kind of familiar like, you know, obviously joining a club. Other ones are a little bit more surprising. Choirs turned out to be incredibly strong, powerful social situations where literally

the sum exceeds the component parts. Now, anyone who's ever sung in a musical, sung in a choir will know that moment where there's a perfect harmony between things. It just sounds magnificent. But literally what's going on in the brain is quite remarkable. There's a whole lot of synchronization going on between brain activations,

the emotional systems are coming into sync. And I think that's a good example where both the mind and the brain are really kind of coming together in a really wonderful experience. So that's one example of social interactions. Anything done as a team is going to be a situation where you really have to coordinate and pay attention to what other people are doing.

So again, I think team sports are a good example, but also sharing spaces together. And that's something that I know you've talked about on your show and a number of people commented on the lack of the third places that were. I think that's a really important development that we just disappearing and that's partly to do with the success of technology and social media, which is stealing our opportunities to have real life interaction. It seems like it's social, but in many ways it's anti-social because we're not really having that sustained formative experience with the people. And you've argued that that in real life social connection can actually explain some of the

differences we see across countries when it comes to happiness. I'm thinking of things like the Nordic countries doing really well. Oh yeah. You know, maybe how much of that do we think is actually kind of this sort of becoming a little bit more allocentric? Well the Nordic countries are a fascinating case and they've really confounded and really intrigued researchers for some decades now. And indeed the whole geopolitical distribution of happiness is something of great interest.

But I'm coming down to the belief that Robert Putman and the other economists are right, that it comes down to the issue of trust. I recently gave a talk in Portugal and the Finnish ambassador was there and that time I came out as the top country. And I said, that isn't amazing. And she said, well, people don't go around with big smiles on their faces. It's not like they're deliriously grinning all the time. And I said, but they keep coming up tops on the happiness. And it really comes down to the fact that they feel secure. They don't feel as competitive against each other. There's certain unwritten rules about what is

considered etiquette, not to show off too much, not to brag too much, not to try and draw attention to the differences of people, but really to support each other. And of course, they have a very strong social support system for various members of society. And they trust their politicians and they trust their authorities. In the UK, we have a very poor level of trust, certainly for the past 16 years, it's been very bad. And I think that's contributed to our kind of low levels of happiness. And I think that that trust sort of gets built up by the sort of usual interactions with people in real life. So this kind of disconnect that we're seeing in terms of our social fabric in terms of some of these third places that you're mentioning, that's probably why we're

not seeing the same trust levels that we saw before. Yes. And not, you know, during the various election campaigns and during anything where there are these partisan positions, it seems to fractionate. And that's one of the reasons that they're often associated with levels of being unhappy and fearful and concerned. And we had that situation in the UK with a vote about whether we should stay in Europe.

And it was one of the most divisive campaigns I've ever seen. It really turned families against each other. And it was really just because of the lack of trust and lack of communication. And unfortunately, that's a mechanism that many politicians use to, you know, further their position. And that's one of the unfortunate aspects of modern technologies as well. So interesting is last year, we had a few folks, political scientists on the show who were talking about kind of what we can do to build up civics. And they were arguing that one of the things you can do as an individual

to fight kind of authoritarian politics is to actually just make friends, to volunteer, is to join a choir because those simple actions allow you to make the connections that build the trust that can kind of fight against some of those authoritarian regimes. Yeah. But it is important not to join an echo chamber. I think technology these days allows us to create these very siloed groups. I call them echo chambers for an obvious reason because you keep hearing the same message back upon yourselves. And that I don't think is healthy. Rather, you need to have a broadened view, which is why on Twitter I, or X is it now

called, I actually make a point of following different viewpoints just to see. And it's remarkable how different the opinions can be. So yeah, I think everything really about your own personal happiness comes down to trying to see your connectedness to others. And another point I make, and this gets into my hobbies, is really seeing yourself in the big picture. And what I mean by that is the big picture in terms of

how insignificant we really all are when it comes to the size of the universe and how long our lives last, but also appreciating the magnificent contributions of humanity, the longevity of civilizations over durations of time that we never really truly think about. And that's why one of the recommendations I say is that people should definitely go out, look at the world around them and start ask why questions, ask why is anything what it is. And when you approach life like that, you become more mindful of it, but you also, you

get a sense, a profound sense of being connected to a species that have been on this planet for a very long time. And I think that that gets to the idea that in addition to becoming a little bit more allocentric, this idea that we need to connect with people, maybe do nice things for other people and so on, we also at the same time need to become a little bit less egocentric, right? We need to kind of squish our own idea that we're sort of at the center of the universe

and kind of getting experiences of awe, as you've talked about, can be really important. But in the book, you talk about another way that we can do this, kind of make ourselves seem maybe less significant, and that can be through the practice of meditation. How does meditation sort of fight some of these egocentric biases? Yeah, you would imagine that meditation would make you focus on yourself.

But actually, it doesn't because most meditative processes train you to control your attentional spotlight. So, our attention is a little bit like, I use the metaphor of a spotlight, you can shine it onto different information and it seems more distinct and stronger or you can direct it elsewhere and something else will pop into your mind. What meditations generally do is they take you out of a floating sense of attention because when you're not focused on a task, as you well know, Laurie, there's a mode, a network in the brain called the default mode network, which is the default mode of thinking when you're not task focused now Mind wandering is all very well and it happens a lot and sometimes it's mind wandering into pleasant things

But we know from various studies that when you're not focused on a task and you're not thinking about something pleasant The tendency is to think about negative things our brain has evolved to solve problems So it spends a lot of its offline time running simulations of past encounters and future possibilities. And very often it's in an attempt to avoid any negative situation, which is why we focus on negative information and negative news more so than anything positive. What meditation does is it trains you to direct that attentional spotlight away from the internal thought processes. And in, for example, mindfulness meditation, you're asked to concentrate on, for example,

physical sensations or your breathing, or you might recite a mantra. All of these are strategies to divert your attention away from the internal dialogue that you're having with yourself and your mind. What's remarkable is that if you do that over a long period of time, then you can soon develop a habit of not defaulting to the default mode network, as it were. And indeed, the activation in that network is subdued in those who are very experienced at meditation. The other thing about meditation is it trains you not to put too much emphasis on particular thoughts. So I don't know if you've ever had that issue when you've been thinking about something,

and you say, I've got to stop thinking about it. You know, you're tossing and turning in bed at night, I gotta stop thinking about the interview with Laurie Santos tomorrow morning. And a really terrible stressor. A real stressor. But the more you try to stop yourself doing it, the more profound and important that thought becomes. This is called ironic thought suppression. The reason that happens is because in the effort of trying to stop a thought, you're actually paradoxically making it stronger and that's why it pops into your head. So meditation teaches you not to ascribe any intention or purpose or any weight to any thoughts in particular,

just to accept them, allow them to flow in and flow out and thereby avoid the problem of ironic thought suppression. So there's a number of things going on. It controls your breathing. So obviously you're moving from a kind of more aroused state into one which is more placid. And all these things I think are conducive to more positive thinking. And forgetting yourself kind of outside your own thoughts, it sounds like. Yeah, absolutely. So that's another aspect. I mean, many of these, not just meditation, but flow, of course, I know a lot of you listeners

will have heard about, Mahali Chik Senthmihai, is the point where you are, you're working on a task which is just enough taxing to your ability, so you feel that sort of compression of time, you don't notice things, and you lose your sense of self. So again, flow moments, and if you're wealthy enough to go out into space on a spacecraft and look back at the the earth Universe these overview effects they all have a form of ego dissolution this sort of sense of loss of self and I Ascribed that exactly as mechanism talking about becoming less self-focused You've also talked about yet another way that we can become a little bit less self-focused Maybe have some ego dissolution and this one may be a little bit more controversial. You've argued that this

might be a benefit that we can get from psychedelics, having psychedelic experiences. Explain how psychedelics can kind of make us a little bit less egocentric. Okay, well, I first caveat by saying I'm not advocating that everyone should take psychedelics and I would only recommend this from the clinical evidence of those individuals who have intractable depression because the evidence, in my opinion, is quite clear that this is really a potential game changer. These are people who have not responded to either their psychopharmacology

or intensive clinical practice. In these situations, there is not enough studies, but the studies that have been done show that they can experience a profound shift in their sense of self and that also produces benefits to their depressive symptomology. Now the reason that happens, there's a number of reasons. First of all psychedelics operate on the serotonin system, which is the system which is part of the default mode network.

So my hunch is that what's going is you're altering this automatic fixation on the sense of self. Certainly anyone who has taken psychedelics, and I have certainly done so myself, will attest that there is a complete distortion of reality. You do feel that you are no longer that kind of ego person. And there's a strange profound sense of connectedness with the cosmos. The important point is after that psychedelic experience or trip has disappeared, months afterwards, people are still seeing the benefits of that early experience. So I'm not suggesting that this should be an ongoing course of treatment

for people, but for some, it does seem to have a long and lasting effect. So the other thing I would just finally say is that anyone considering that really does need to seek out advice on this because there are certain personality characteristics who should not be dabbling with something like a psychedelic because in that situation you can get ego dissolution but in a very negative way this is when you can experience depersonalization where you don't feel anything is ever going to be real again and that I think is an equally disturbing mindset. So yes they're controversial but more and more research is being conducted. And even in the UK, we are starting to relinquish some of our concerns

over it. I foresee it being a way of the future. But we don't necessarily need to go to drugs to get these sort of moments of ego dissolution. You alluded to your hobby a little bit earlier, you didn't actually say what it was. And I think that this is actually not the psychedelic hobby, the other kinds of hobbies. You have an international audience. So I'm sure some people will have watched the BBC show, The Detectorists. And if they have an opportunity to watch it, I strongly recommend it. It's very empowering view of a very peculiar hobby, typically conducted by very strange

individuals. We call them nerds. But basically, it's metal detecting. I live in a country which has had thousands of years of continuous occupation and history. I'm very fortunate to be living in the countryside. And around me, I'm surrounded by fields which were occupied by Romans and Celts and all the sorts of history that Hollywood brings to the screen. I actually live in the lands where that happened. And so I go out with my metal detector and I spend hours just scanning the fields. It's a little bit like fishing on land, I call it, listening for that signal. And you dig a lot of holes and there's a lot of junk, but every so often you find something

which is quite remarkable and precious. Precious is in a sense rare, not necessary. Sometimes it is precious actually. Sometimes people find gold and silver and all these things. But in the book I talk about a particular episode which coincidentally was on my birthday and this is a true story. I was digging in a field and I uncovered a coin from the second century of Marcus Aurelius. Now I'm a big fan of the stoic philosophers who teach that you can't really change life, but you can change the way you think about life to get things into

perspective. So I dug out this coin. It's nearly 1800 years old and it's got Marcus Aurelius. I recognized his portrait immediately and I thought, isn't that amazing? And who dropped this coin was a Roman centurion. Who was that person? So that goes back to what I was saying earlier on, kind of making that feeling of connectedness with humanity over the over the centuries. And you know, what would they make of us in 2000 years from now? You know, people going around with sticks trying to find coins under the ground. What are coins? I mean, it strikes me I love this story. It strikes me that it's showing a couple of different features that are relevant for happiness, right? One is this idea of connectedness,

right? You're connecting not just to Marcus Aurelius and these old ideas with these people that walked on your land outside your barn thousands of years ago. It also seems though that like you get tremendous amount of flow from walking around listening to these beeps. Is that really the case? Like is it kind of like your own walking meditation? It is, it is like walking meditation. So I So, and you know, if I suddenly have a train of thought, it'll soon be interrupted immediately by a signal going off. So you're constantly, you can't spend your time,

you know, contemplating your own problems. So it's, as I say, it's a little bit like fishing on land. Fishermen also experience the same thing. And there is a study out of Denmark, it's only one study, but has shown that metal detectorists experience much elevated levels of happiness and it's really good for PTSD as well. So it seems to be a hobby which is absorbing and it achieves that flow. And certainly I have been out for literally six hours and forgotten that time has passed

and I get a call saying I better come home. So yeah, it's one of those things I really enjoy. Writing is the other thing I really enjoy as well and it's actually one of my recommended activities for people who have the ability to write. I think it's really important to do. As Bruce says, writing can be a flow boosting activity. I often lose myself when I'm working on one of these podcast scripts or digging into an academic paper. But if writing isn't something that comes naturally to you, there is one form of composition that you really ought to try out. I'll let you in on that tip for getting over yourself after the break.

This new how-to season of the Happiness Lab is all about condensing the wisdom my guests provide into a series of practical bite-sized tips. So what are some practical bite-sized strategies for how to get over yourself? Professor Bruce Hood's first tip is to start a journal. I teach a course based on your course called the Science of Happiness and the course is unique in that there's no graded examination but they have to engage with the course so one of the requirements is they first of all they have to come to

my lectures and they have to come to the seminars, but they also have to keep a journal over the 10 week period. And the reason I asked them to do that is because keeping a diary or writing a journal is a very powerful way to take stock of situations and to process them much more effectively rather than trying to deal with something inside your head. I recommend that you buy, you know, literally one of those old paper and pencil ones and get a pen and do it by hand. Don't do it on your phone because that's just not the same level of processing. And what you do is when you keep a journal, write down whatever is in your mind and what's concerning you. And if it's a problem,

articulate it in as much detail as possible, how it makes you feel and so on. And in doing that, that actually helps to process it. If it's a bad event, writing it down makes it much more objective. So I think it's a really good way of dealing with it. Moreover, you now have a record of an event. And what I find very valuable is asking people to go back and look at their old diaries and their old journals. And you soon discover that the things at the time, which were the most paramount possible situations that you thought you'd never get over, suddenly you realize, actually, I got over that and things move on.

So it's really a tangible evidence that life does move on and get better. I love that last point, especially because I too have had these sort of moments where I'm dealing with something that feels intractable and then my brain will just suddenly go to like, oh wait, there was a thing that was intractable like two weeks ago that you felt like you couldn't do it.

And like just remembering that can give you some grace to remember, hey, the perspective is bigger than you. Like you've been through this before, right? And so I think that's super powerful. Any great insights that you've gotten from your students, like when they've done their journals or kind of good stories from them? Well, we also keep track of the journals just as a precaution for anyone who might be experiencing some trauma or some issues. So we also use it as a way of preventive, you know, because these students

are first year students, they're often arriving and they're kind of anxious and they don't know what they're doing. So we monitor their journals to see if there's any evidence that maybe we should be stepping in and offering a helping hand. And I don't read the journals, it's done by one of our clinical people, but that means that they don't reach a crisis point. As to insights, yeah, I mean, I still get emails from students who graduated some years after the course and they tell me they're still keeping the journal. It's not for everyone, it requires effort.

But again, a lot of the benefits of post-psychology are all about creating routines and creating structure. It's when you don't feel there's a structure, it's when you feel you're spiraling out of control that I think things seem worse than they really are. So journals by their nature and committing to doing on a regular basis provide a structure which is valuable. I mean, I've certainly discovered things in my journals from decades ago, which just, I don't even seem to be the same person, but that goes back to what we were talking about

earlier on. Everyone can remember they were different, but doesn't imagine they're going to change in the future. But of course, we're constantly changing. So strategy number two for getting things into perspective is that we need to find a little bit of gratitude. How can gratitude get us to be less egocentric and more allocentric? Well, gratitude, Cicero, the Roman essayist described gratitude as a father of all virtues. And what he meant was that the act of showing gratitude engenders so many positive aspects first of all, it gets you to recognize that

Your situation is not necessarily as bad as other people's situation. So you're forced to focus on what's going well So you're drawing the relative comparisons in the right direction looking at other people who are not as fortunate as you It's all too easy these days to compare ourselves upwards because of the way social media works. We see all these highly successful people with these unbelievable lives. Anyone would feel inadequate by comparison. But when you express gratitude,

you're acknowledging that you are in a good place and a good situation generally. And very often that gratitude involves other people as well. So again, it's forging a less egocentric view and recognizing that you're in your situation today because other people have helped you out. I know Marty Seligman has the graduate letter and that's a very profound exercise. That's where you write a letter and you thank someone specifically and deliver it to them. I haven't done that yet.

I think that's quite challenging, but I certainly in my emails, as much as possible, I try to express my gratitude towards other people. So it allows you to get perspective and allows you to acknowledge the way that others have helped you and in turn that forges, I think, more positive bonds. So that's tip number two. Now we're turning to tip number three that can help us get perspective. And this one is like literally getting perspective. It's trying to find ways to, in your self-talk, engage in more perspective so you can coach yourself through a crisis.

Yeah. What are some practical ways we can do this? So this is my this is my party trick that I do during one of my talks where I get people to imagine a situation, a real situation, a dilemma for them, which is upsetting them. And it has to be a personal thing, not a world problem. And I get them to talk about it in the first person saying I am worried about whatever it is and this upsets me. And then I get them to imagine a scale of zero to ten and where they think they score in that. And then I repeat the process and I say okay I want you to talk about this problem but use the third person use your name, I use pronouns like he, him, she, her, and talk about as if you were talking to yourself like a friend. Do exactly the same thing and again, how does that make you feel on the 0 to 10 scale?

And invariably, you find, almost over 90% of people find that the process of talking about yourself from the third person attenuates those negative feelings. But it's all the idea that if you can step out of yourself by using language, then you can get a more objective viewpoint. Because we never talk about ourselves in the first person, unless we're royalty in this country. One does not say that normally. But when you use language, it forces you to take a third person perspective.

It's as if you were looking back at yourself. And that seems to attenuate negative responses. It can also be used to strengthen positive ones. You can say, hey, Bruce, that interview you gave with Laurie is amazing. You're doing really well. So you can use it both ways to bolster or attenuate the experiences.

I love this tip because it's literally using language to become less egocentric. We're literally making ourselves a different person and using that to kind of gain the perspective that matters. And of course, we've had Ethan on the show a bunch and you know, Yeah. Although I would suggest you don't talk about yourself in the third person all the time because then people start to look weird. Yeah. It's either like royalty or like Macho Man Randy Savage or something very strange. So that was tip number three. We can kind of reframe our perspective by using our language, switching to third person language. Tip number

four is that we need to reframe setbacks with a more positive attributional style. What do you mean there? Yes. So this comes again from the work of Marty Seligman and his colleagues when they were looking at the way that optimists differ from pessimists, and they realized that there was a characteristic attributional style which tended to treat problems as permanent, pervasive, in other words, generalizing to other situations, and personal, feeling responsible for your setbacks. Whereas optimists tend to not think about these things as being permanent, they're transitory, and they're not pervasive, they're transitory,

and they're not pervasive, they're specific to a situation, and they're not taking personal responsibility saying it wasn't my fault really. Now I'm not suggesting you should be overly optimistic, I think it's important to pay attention to when you are responsible for things, but you can think about your problems by reframing them towards a more optimistic view by adopting the more positive attributional style. So again, going back to the journaling situation, if you've had a situation or an event which has upset you, you should detail it in as much detail, evidence as possible, and then

examine your beliefs and what you think is going to happen. And then switch gear and then challenge each point that you've made by becoming almost like a barrister or a lawyer or a defense lawyer saying, Bruce, you know, you thought that was a terrible interview you gave to Laurie, but actually she was smiling. And actually you made some really good points and she didn't notice that you stumbled over a few words. You know, you're not so bad. So you basically just become this kind of cheerleader for yourself. And in doing so over time, you eventually start to become a little bit more optimistic when these things occur.

This is a fabulous suggestion, in part because I think rather than being our own defense lawyers, we often spend a lot of time being our own prosecutors, right? Looking for the evidence that we kind of screwed up. And so kind of taking that tactic and sort of flipping it on its head and actively going for a more positive attributional style, actively going, sorry, to look for the spots where we did better. Yeah. It can where we did better. Yeah. It can kind of help better.

The thing that the amazing thing is if you put enough effort and you're a little creative, you can take any really bad setback and reframe it in a much more every cloud has a silver lining literally. So that's what you do. You kind of ignore the cloud and you go for the silver lining and then you focus on that. Okay, so that was tip number four, so switch our attributional style. Now we get to your final tip, which I totally thought was going to be metal detecting, metal detecting all day, all the time.

But in fact, it's to find other structural ways to connect with others. What are some ideas that you think people can put into practice here? Well, I suspect a lot of listeners are maybe already doing this, but something I took up just very recently is I joined Supporters Club for Bath rugby team. Now I live in Bath in England and they're actually a really good rugby team. They're enjoying quite a successful period at the moment. So you don't have to join a successful team.

I think any local team is good. And I've been an academic for all of my adult life and I generally have not taken part in these sorts of activities because I was stuck in my books and I didn't go to matches and things like that. But there's something very automatic and profound when you are in a crowd that erupts in applause and emotions.

It's very contagious and you suddenly feel like you're part of something a bit bigger than yourself. So any activity which is kind of hopefully arranged around something positive like sports or something like that, I think is a very simple way to enjoy the kind of connection and feeling of purpose, but everything which is against loneliness thing, which I think is obviously the big problem of our current era. Getting off your phones, going out and physically being present, an event, a rally or a game. These are the sorts of things which can create automatic feelings of allocentrism and connection.

That's a strategy too because often for many of the kinds of things that we're fans of or that we enjoy, we're engaging with them anyway. We're just not doing it in a social way. You know, here in the US, you know, fan of the Celtics basketball team, you can just like sit at your house and watch the Celtics game, or you can join a group that's doing that kind of connect with friends to do that better. And it's like, in some ways, it's not adding more to our time, right? Sometimes we're kind of what you might be watching those rugby things anyway. It's just like if you join a supporters club, or join something where you're connecting with other people. Now, all of a sudden, you're doing

it in a way that's getting you social, and you're part of something much bigger than yourselves. It's kind of not, it's doing the same thing you're already going to do, but doing it a little bit more social. Well, Emily Pernan did some wonderful stuff years ago showing that when people think they're watching a recorded match as to when they think they're watching it live, have a totally different experience.

Of course, perception is exactly the same thing, but there's something about feeling that you are in the moment live that generates a completely different psychological experience. And that's why when you go to a live match or you go to a live concert, even though the sound may not be that good and you might not get the best view, there's something about being immersed in that environment, which is really something that cannot be captured by VR or any technology. That goes back to our origins as a social animal that grew up really interacting. And just to say, if you're not really that into sports, of course, there are other ways

you can do this kind of thing too. We talked to concerts, choirs, even things like book clubs for the nerdy academics like us who like we can kind of do not enjoy books privately, but kind of get together and do that. Well, I think getting out of your comfort zone, we tend to migrate to those areas and we don't challenge ourselves. I never used to imagine myself at a rugby match, but now, you know, I look forward to it. And so I think that life is full of opportunities and new experiences to try and just give it

a go. So one of my favorite things about these five tips and just your work in general is that you really have put these tips into effect in your life. For so many of these tips you said, well, I journal, you know, I go to these rugby matches now, I now talk to myself, you know, in the third person. How do you think this has changed your own psychology? Has all this made you happier? Has it caused you to get perspective?

Yeah, I've been asked that a number of times. And it's very difficult to be objective about your own mental state because you are the purveyor of your own mind. But I've asked people around me and they say, hi, I've definitely changed from what I was six years ago. I'm more engaged now. I'm more committed now to my students. I'm coming to the final years of my time at Bristol University, but I want to use that time really to try and change the educational experience of my students. I feel that the new generations are so preoccupied by themselves, they're so worried about performance, they're not enjoying it. If

you're a student who doesn't enjoy what you're studying, then you're never going to learn anything. And so I am trying to get the universities and the systems to recognize the importance of having content, happy, or resilient students because then they're much easier to teach, they're more inspirational, they're just generally having a better time, and that impacts on the faculty as much as the students. So I think we really need to embed this in society. This is true also of workforces. Happier workforces are more productive and so on.

So I think we've got to kind of really make this a cultural change and find ways to make it recognized, not as a kind of a last-minute thought, but something which is central to the way that we conduct our lives. As usual, I agree with Bruce on this one. I'd also love for the lessons of positive psychology to become more embedded in our daily lives. Happiness should be just as much a part of college life as, say, test scores, and just as important to bosses as quarterly reports. But what are some steps we can all take to become a bit more aloe-centric? college life as, say, test scores, and just as important to bosses as quarterly reports.

But what are some steps we can all take to become a bit more alocentric? Let's recap Bruce's main points. Tip number one, keep a journal. Old-fashioned pen and paper is best, but however you get your thoughts down, try to be as detailed as possible. Tip number two, become more grateful. Think about all the great things in your life, and remember to thank the people who've helped you along the way.

Tip number three, alter your self-talk to get some distance. Discuss your worries and triumphs in the third person. Laurie's feeling underprepared to give this talk. Well done, Laurie. That talk went great. Tip number four is to become more optimistic. Remember that most of your problems aren't permanent, and even if you messed up once, it doesn't mean you'll mess up again.

And Bruce's final tip for becoming less self-centered? Get your club on. Join a choir, attend a concert, stand in the bleachers at a football game, or wherever they sit during those British rugby matches. Putting our problems in perspective is a major part of getting over ourselves, but I know firsthand that putting big feelings aside can sometimes feel really tough. So that's the how-to topic we'll tackle in the next episode, how can we hack our negative emotions?

All that next time on the Happiness Lab with me, Dr. Lorie Santos.