The Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos - How Getting Active Can Make You Happier

Episode Date: January 15, 2024

Busy scientist Adam Aron had too much on his plate to think deeply about climate change - until he read a scary report about what lay in store for the planet if no one acted to cut greenhouse gases.  So Adam did more and more to fight climate change, until activism became his full time occupation. And the move made him happier and more content. We can't all give up our normal lives to stop global heating - but even making small contributions to the cause can make us feel more connected, more fulfilled and happier. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Pushkin. I've never thought of myself really as a deep naturalist. I'm not the kind of person who studies bees and bugs and lizards. I'm not a studier of nature, but I love it. This is Adam Aaron. I think a lot of that had to do with my growing up in a rural place and having just nature spilling into the garden. Adam grew up in Swaziland in southern Africa.

There were monkeys jumping in the trees and birds and all sorts of things, and it was just so proximal to me. But Adam left the monkeys behind and moved to UC San Diego to start a neuroscience lab. As a world expert on the neurobiology of movement, he spent a lot of time thinking about things like Parkinson's disease, and that meant that other big issues took a back seat. I didn't know, of course, that we had an ecological crisis. I knew, of course, about what was called global warming then, and now we refer to it usually as global heating. And I think even in the 1990s, I remember being quite worried about it. But I was just so busy kind of building my career and doing things I loved and enjoyed

and being a parent and writing papers and doing experiments with my lab that I was just so consumed with that that I didn't have any space or bandwidth. I'm guessing you might relate to this. Like Adam, you've probably heard of global heating and seen all the extreme weather events that result from it. The wildfires, the droughts, the storms. It might really worry you, but you still feel like you don't have the bandwidth in your daily life to do much about it.

Yeah, you might switch to driving a hybrid or change your light bulbs, but doing anything more feels like it'll be a major pain. A continued overload on your already hectic schedule. Sound familiar? Well, as we'll see in this episode, Adam decided to throw himself fully into the fight against climate change. And far from making him miserable, this choice set him on an unexpected path to purpose, connection, and even more happiness. You're part of something very beautiful, and it's extremely gratifying to me and makes me feel better, honestly. You're listening to The Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos. and makes me feel better, honestly.

You're listening to The Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos. Tales of our gradually warming planet have been a background hum for decades. Neuroscientist Adam Aaron certainly wasn't relaxed about the buildup of greenhouse gases, but it wasn't at the front of his mind either. And I think, frankly, I also didn't realize how serious it was until about 2018. 2018 was the year of a famous report by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. It outlined what would happen if the world left temperatures to keep rising. The report explained that if we acted quickly and kept the heat bump to only 1.5 degrees Celsius, things would be very bad. But allowing a far more likely jump of 2 degrees Celsius

would be catastrophic. For example, the difference between 1.5 Celsius and 2 Celsius is like 70% of coral reefs being completely destroyed versus 99%. So if you want to keep the coral reefs and all the marine life that depends on them, we need to keep heating to 2 Celsius or beneath 2 Celsius. And coral reefs won't be the only casualties of unchecked warming.

Ice caps would disappear and sea levels would drastically rise. So say goodbye to coastal cities and small island nations. The report's list of catastrophes went on and on. And I just thought, oh my God, you know, this is dramatic stuff. If you haven't really sobbed and cried

and really sat down and had your body racked by sort of thinking about how grave this is and the threat our little planet is under here, then you haven't really seen it. And I think a lot of people haven't really seen it. Our planet, that IPCC report said, will be totally devastated unless we enact rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society. When it dawned on me how serious this is and how fast this is moving and what the threat is, this triggered considerable anxiety in myself that much of what I hold dear, the plants, the animals, the whole biosphere is under threat. And that,

of course, is also a trigger for me to get much more engaged. But what forms should this engagement take? Adam was already doing the sorts of things that many of us do, like driving an electric car and eating a bit more sustainably. What else could he fit around a full-time job? I was a well-regarded world expert. I had a sort of 20-year career doing this. Adam was in a quandary. The dire warnings demanded that he act

to help save the planet. But how could he abandon his life's work, his students, and his lab? It was then that he came across the activist phrase, find your own frontline. Find your frontline is a lovely idea. You look around and you say, what are the frontlines? What are the places of society or the institutes I live in where I actually can make a difference? Adam's frontline was his university and its students. His neuroscience class was packed

with 18 to 20-year-olds. So Adam nervously approached his boss with an idea. Can I teach a class on the psychology of climate change? He said, okay. Things started slowly. The first class only had a dozen students. But Adam's concise global heating message cut through. It is absolutely essential that we all strive right now to avert any increase.

Every fraction of a degree is very significant. Pretty soon the class swelled to more than 100 students. And inspired by Adam's example, many went off to find their own front lines, joining demonstrations to push for local climate action. And it's extremely gratifying to me and quite exciting to see students taking the trolley downtown and getting in front of the city council and railing against the city councils to do something better for the climate and getting their sense of civic engagement and recovering their voices. But Adam didn't just wave his students off on their protest marches and then return quietly to his lab. He wanted to recover his voice too. He wanted his climate concerns heard by both his

bosses and his peers. So if you're a university professor, your front lines are the academic senate, the faculty governance, the administration, your ability to influence your colleagues, your ability to influence the institutions you're part of, like the Society for Neuroscience, 30,000 people jump on planes every year and fly to a yearly meeting, which is preposterous, frankly. And so part of your front line is trying to do something about that, make the meeting half as big or make the meeting every two years. Thousands of students showed up to join the climate movement. What do we want? Climate justice! years. Thousands of students showed up to join the climate movement. Less than a year after his environmental awakening, Adam took a lead in one of the biggest climate strikes his university

had ever seen. As part of a global day of action, he joined hundreds of UCSD students, faculty, and staff who left their desks and took to the streets to push for change. By joining other concerned citizens and demanding action on climate change, Adam found a vital ingredient for happiness, a practice we talk a lot about on this show, social connection. Adam began to feel a deep sense of belonging with his fellow activists. He was part of a group and couldn't let them down by skipping protests. I feel I need to go. I need to be there. I need to turn up.

I feel that the group won't do so well without me. I'm the first to admit that global heating is really scary. It's terrifying to doom scroll on social media and see starving polar bears and burning forests. The anxiety that comes from confronting climate change can feel paralyzing. When Adam first read that brutal IPCC report, he too admits to being scared.

But facing the problem directly with like-minded friends has helped him overcome that fear. You get together with five or six or eight people and you talk about it, you immediately feel better. You have agency together. We're going to do something about it. We're hearing each other. Adam's activism gave him a ton of satisfaction. The same satisfaction he used to get from his neuroscience research. Organizing against climate change gave him a new community, but also a sense of purpose, which is vital to our well-being. But all this rewarding green activism began demanding more and more of his time and attention.

I think there was a gradual process of getting more and more concerned about this. So sort of a gradual letting go of one kind of career and shifting to something else. Adam made the difficult decision to close his neuroscience lab, turning his back on decades of hard work and dedication. Activism became his new full-time occupation. Even though it's been challenging for me to make this shift and to kind of jettison my core career, I do feel a strong sense of purpose

and I feel what I'm doing is very meaningful. I find Adam's story inspiring. But realistically, most of us aren't going to emulate him. People running around putting food on the table or, you know, taking their kids to soccer practice and just barely struggling to get them in and out of school and feed them, they're not going to have time to do this. I'm guessing most of you listening right now can't realistically quit your jobs to join the climate fight.

But what can we learn from Adam's journey? Are there smaller ways we can each find our own front lines and reap the joy and purpose that Adam did? The Happiness Lab will be right back. We are like a little boat going down the river right now, humanity, okay? And we can get to the side of the river, we can get to the bank. Climate activist Adam Aaron reckons we still have time to avert total disaster if we collectively agree to start paddling very hard in the right direction,

rather than letting the rapids sweep us away. Now the problem is if we keep dilly-dallying, then we're going to hit the waterfall and we will incur these very large geophysical tipping points. We could set in motion things that are so enormous that there may become a sense then, in that time frame, in 10 years from now, we'd be like, whoops. Adam's new book, The Climate Crisis, explains the sorts of actions that can save us from that fate. Things like a switch to wind and solar power, and the rapid electrification of our homes and transportation. And Adam says such actions aren't the stuff of science fiction.

All these positive steps are totally doable. It's just that there's not enough people coming out saying, we want you to do that. And if they did in their droves, we'd get it. So why aren't citizens taking to the streets to push for this green revolution? Sure, there are some people who refuse to accept the science. They don't believe global heating is happening. They don't believe it's human caused. to push for this green revolution. Sure, there are some people who refuse to accept the science. They don't believe global heating is happening. They don't believe it's human caused.

They don't believe the impacts will be grave or are grave. And that characterizes sort of one set of people. But Adam says there's also a second kind of climate skeptic, one that he worries about even more. This is people around me here in California, probably people around you where you are, who definitely believe we have a problem. They may know quite a bit about it. They may feel threatened by it.

They've got young kids, but they're just not going to act. And so they are skeptical about response. Response skeptics know a crisis is looming, but assume their individual actions won't matter all that much. These skeptics might think that only people with money or power can make a real difference, and that ordinary people are wasting their time and energy trying to do something meaningful. Did you ever go through periods of response skepticism yourself when you started? Like just that it's too big or my actions

don't matter? Well, I go through that all the time, little micro moments. And, you know, sometimes, frankly, I recognize the speed and scale of what is needed is so enormous and the time scale is so short that I have my doubts. And so I think it is a fluctuation between feeling at moments hopeful and seeing a way forward and seeing policy wins and seeing a sense that, yes, we have the technology we need. Yes, we pretty much have everything we need. Yes, we could do these things in principle. And sometimes I see evidence is happening. And then other moments in the day, it's like, oh, this is overwhelming. It is easy to lose hope. But whenever Adam feels his optimism weakening, he looks to all the campaigners of the past. Abolitionists, suffragettes, civil rights activists.

You have to kind of be acquainted somehow with the history of social movements, the history of how political and social change is made by groups of people advocating locally. But we have lots of fantastic examples to look at. I mean, you think about the same-sex marriage struggle. You know, in 2015, the Supreme Court rules, boom, it's law of the land. Now that's preceded by decades of town by town, city by city. In fact, conversation by conversation. If you look at the suffragettes fighting for women's rights, I mean, people forget that until 1975, a woman in the United States was the property of her husband. That wasn't so long ago, right? We've made enormous changes. You know, a really nice example of how local leads to national change is, of course,

the Nixon era. Nixon was a deeply conniving politician and certainly no environmentalist, and yet he brought the most far-reaching environmental legislation probably the world's ever seen, certainly the United States has ever seen, in the early 1970s. Now, what happened was that town by town, city by city, people came out and started confronting polluters and pollution and clamoring to the point where it became so onerous on the corporations that the corporations required the federal government to create standards. Now, I mean, that's a very nice history to look at. And movements that start in your own backyard can truly be felt around the world. History shows social change doesn't tend to stop at national borders. You know, in one sense, obviously, the struggle to arrest or prevent

really bad global heating is a global struggle, right? And it needs to happen everywhere. But particularly in the United States, because we have our hands on a big lever here. And if we get policy wins locally, we trigger change nationally. And what the United States does influences the whole world. A sober analysis of much of the great legislation, much of the great social change made in the United States and many other countries starts with a recognition that it often starts locally by local actors and groups of people pushing for something. The reason individuals can have such a huge impact comes down to something psychologists call behavioral contagion. Let's say you switch to an EV, put solar panels on your roof, and go to a climate march. Research shows these activities can serve as honest signals to the

people around you. When we see people behave in certain ways, we implicitly assume that those behaviors are the accepted community norms. And once certain actions are seen as the norm, more and more people adopt them. Adam says the climate fight has seen lots of great examples of behavioral contagion. Basically, five or six people in Massachusetts about 15 years ago got together and brought this policy idea. And the policy idea was that when you pay

some of your electricity bill, let's make sure that some proportion of electricity bill go to a not-for-profit that tries to make sure that that money is actually used to procure renewables. And that's called community choice aggregation. Now, there are now 120 million Americans that have community choice aggregation. It jumped all around the countries of policy issue.

Now, that's a nice example of contagion. Of course, no matter how passionate and persuasive you are, you can't win them all. But Adam says the struggle itself can still make a difference. Sometimes we fight for things and often we lose legislatively and we don't get the transactional win or it may not come for years. But in the process of struggling, we have an enormous impact on people's consciousness. And that is incredibly important and valuable. If you started this episode as one of those response skeptics, if you accepted that climate change was happening but didn't think you could do anything about it,

I hope you now feel empowered by Adam's story and ready to make at least some small changes. I don't expect everyone needs to do something that dramatic, you know? I don't think everyone should drop everything they're doing and become climate activists immediately. I mean, look, activists are always going to be small in number. Right now, I'm estimating that we're about one in a thousand here in San Diego, and I hope we can get to five in a thousand, but we can't expect that ever perhaps to be too big. And I don't expect everyone needs to do something that dramatic. And people can, of course, get engaged at night or on the weekends or in little bits during the day on this stuff while keeping their key careers going.

And I think, by the way, it's important to do what you love, you know. I don't think everyone should drop everything they're doing and become climate activists immediately. I mean, during World War II, when people were fighting the Nazis, we wanted people to develop radar and develop techniques. But we also wanted the people to keep studying 16th century Renaissance literature. And no matter what happens on planet Earth and how bad this gets, we want the best of humanity to flourish. And of course, that is creative, wonderful things that people study and do because they're curious about it.

So I certainly don't feel that everyone should drop what they're doing. Not everyone's going to be an activist. But if not an activist, then what? Well, just as he did back when he was a college professor, Adam suggests that you too look for your frontline. Just about everybody in their profession or in their space has got frontlines on this. I mean, if you're a teacher, you can teach.

If you're an architect, you can absolutely be part of a revolution in new building design. But if you're in a different situation in society, you might, for example, work for a nonprofit or you might be a retired person. example, work for a non-profit or you might be a retired person. Almost everybody has the capacity to identify front lines professionally or in their personal life where they can actually be a communicator on the climate crisis. Climate scientists have done an excellent job explaining the devastating consequences of our collective inaction. As I researched this series, I was terrified by all the predictions. Things right now are very bad for our planet and could get a lot worse if we don't act quickly. But Adam says there are hopeful stories for our planet and could get a lot worse if we don't act quickly. But Adam says there are hopeful stories for what our future could look like if we put in the work. He thinks we all need to become more positive climate communicators and to share these optimistic visions of what society could be like if we changed our ways.

There are ways of our living with much less carbon intensity, with much more kind of sharing and common purpose that actually would be very healthy for people. And I think this is a really important topic to explore. And, you know, World War II is perhaps a good example of that in the United States. People were prepared to tolerate rationing, you know, air conditioners, metallic devices were requisitioned for the war effort. Shoes and clothes were made from four or five items on standard production lines specified by the government. There was no pleasure driving of cars.

You had to have four people in a vehicle with a proper purpose. And to prevent price gouging, there was rationing of all sorts of kerosene and food. And people not only tolerated it, to some extent they thrived. And of course, that's an exceptional situation. It was an emergency with a common sense of purpose. But people rally, and we see that over and over again. It's comforting to think that our grandparents and great-grandparents faced a similar existential threat and made exactly the kind of lifestyle changes we need to accept today. Many older folks look back on those war years fondly as a time of unity and

cooperation. It just goes to show that being an engaged citizen has a ton of happiness benefits. When you fight for a good cause, you'll inevitably form bonds with fellow activists. You'll get a sense of belonging and a powerful feeling of purpose. You'll experience the reward of doing good for your fellow humans. Just ask Adam. He may have given up his comfortable former life and thrown himself into the scariest threat facing humanity. But he's happier.

Sometimes I have losses and sometimes I have wins and sometimes I'm encouraged and sometimes I'm discouraged. But generally speaking, I have a strong sense now of purpose and it makes me feel better, honestly. So even if only for your own well-being, it might be worth making 2024 the year to do a little more for the planet. You can find your own front line. Maybe that's going to a climate march

or pushing your local government to electrify new buildings or becoming a green trendsetter in your neighborhood or just sharing the special happiness lab series on climate hope with the people you know. The actions you pick might be big or small, but the science shows it's likely

they'll be more contagious than you think. And above all, Adam says, you need to drop that response skepticism. Just commit to getting involved without worrying if little old you can really make a difference. I think of Wendell Berry, who says, you know, we don't have any right to ask whether we're going to succeed or not. The only right we have is to ask what's the right thing to do on planet Earth? What's the right thing to do to keep living on Mother Earth? It's not a question of being hopeful. It's a question of being the right thing to do to keep living on Mother Earth? It's not a question of being hopeful. It's a question of being the right thing to do and having dignity.

That's the end of this short season about how we can navigate the climate challenge a little happier. To be sure, global heating is a difficult and depressing topic. But I hope you found some hope and optimism in these episodes. And if you've learned nothing else from the guests I've spoken to, it's that even in dark times, we need to remember the happiness essentials of social connection, a sense of purpose, and doing good for others. The Happiness Lab will be back soon, and we're shifting gears. In store for February, the month of St. Valentine's Day, we'll be looking at love.

I think on our second date, John said, you know, I was in another relationship, but I've told her I'm not going to see her anymore. I immediately had a panic attack. I was like, really? Already? But five months later, he proposed. So make a date and listen again to The Happiness Lab with me, Dr. Laurie Santos.