The Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos - How Talking to a Friend Helps (Live at The International Festival of Arts and Ideas)

Episode Date: July 19, 2024

Making shows about her own happiness challenges was both fun and instructive for Dr Laurie, but it also took guts to be so vulnerable and open. She later spoke to her close friend at Yale Dr Tamar Gendler about the experience. This private chat threw up lots of interesting insights, so when the duo were asked to speak at the 2024 International Festival of Arts and Ideas... they decided to share parts of that private conversation with the public.  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Pushkin. I've learned a lot from making that series, but I gotta admit, at times, it was pretty hard. I know it's healthy to be vulnerable and talk about your problems, but it's often easier said than done. Which is exactly what I'll be discussing on this week's episode with my dear colleague, the Yale philosopher and cognitive scientist, Tamar Gendler. I'm guessing you've probably heard Tamar in the Happiness Lab before. In the past, we've talked about what famous philosophers like Socrates and Aristotle said about happiness. But as my close friend, Tamar also had lots of interesting ideas about the problems I decided to tackle in the last season. So when Tamar and I were invited to give a joint talk at the 2024 International Festival of Arts and Ideas in New Haven, Connecticut, we thought, why not reflect on what we've both learned from these personal shows? The Festival of Arts and Ideas kindly allowed us to share our conversation.

So now you can listen too. I hope you enjoy it. Thank you so much to all of you who are joining us here. It really feels like we are among friends. But one of the things you may or may not know is that in addition to being professional colleagues who've done a lot of work together, Lori and I are actually very close friends. And in fact, we're such close friends that we often finish one another's sentences. So what we want to do today is actually have a conversation with you that's much more intimate and personal than we have ever done before in a public setting. Everything that we say to one another is going to be informed by the academic research that we do. But our goal in speaking before you today is really to give some autobiographical information about our own experiences, our own struggles, and our own

challenges. And Lori has set the tone for doing this with her recent podcast. The Happiness Lab is my podcast where I talk about so many things in the science of happiness. We focused on lots of different topics, but just this summer, we started a new season. It's a whole season about the happiness challenges that I face personally. And this is a spot where you might be saying like, wait a minute, hang on. Like I signed up really early for this event to talk to a happiness expert. How is the happiness expert so messed up when it comes to happiness challenges? Like, you know, did I not train?

Like, what's going on? And it turns out that that's in part because I'm human, right? And we all struggle with happiness challenges. But it also comes about due to a kind of funny puzzle that comes up in cognitive science. It's actually a puzzle that Tamar and I have written about. I believe it was, in fact. I think it was, in fact. I think it was our first paper that we ever wrote together, and it was basically about how it is possible to have theoretical knowledge and lack practical knowledge.

So there's a great tradition in ancient Greek philosophy of distinguishing between knowledge of abstract things, a kind of theoretical wisdom which goes by various names, and knowledge of practical things, of how to flourish, of how to live, which is in certain parts of the Greek tradition called phronesis, practical wisdom. And what's interesting about practical wisdom is that it comes about through different sorts of activities than theoretical wisdom does. And so Lori and I were at the late, great L.A. Fitness, who belonged to La Fitness in Hamden, right near the Stop and Shop. So we were at L.A. or La Fitness, engaging in bodily exercise. And I was talking to Lori about this ancient philosophical tradition and basically telling her how in ancient Greek philosophy,

there's a distinction roughly between book smarts and street smarts. And Laurie said, oh, my God, did you know there's also an 80s television show about that? And, of course, I did not know there was an 80s television show because I grew up with parents who bought a TV to watch Nixon resign and then put it away. resign and then put it away. But it was that 80s television show, which Lori will describe, that gave us the idea for the first joint paper that we wrote, which is about why Lori, even though she's the world's happiness expert, is still having trouble making it work in her life. Anybody want to guess, take a guess what the 80s TV show was? It was actually G.I. Joe. It was an 80s cartoon, to be fair. Why is the G.I. Joe television show about this disconnect between kind of head knowledge and street knowledge? If you remember the G.I. Joe, how many of you have actually seen the G.I. Joe

TV show? Okay, we're seeing some hands. Some of you are a little older than 80s TV shows. That's cool. Some of you are a little younger. They're like, oh, yeah. So G.I. Joe is the show with a bunch of like army guys who did kind of army guy heroic things. But it's most famous for how each cartoon episode ended. It ended with this public service announcement, which taught kids really important things in the 80s, like don't talk to strangers or look both ways when you cross your street. It was really basic stuff.

But G.I. Joe would explain this big public service message to the kids, and the kids would say, thank you, G.I. Joe, now I know. And then G.I. Joe would say, and knowing is half the battle, and go, G.I. Joe. Now it's always like, oh, now I remember. But this was the catchphrase. Knowing is half the battle. When you know something, you're most of the way there. And what Tamar and I wrote in our, you know, now pretty well-known, I think, paper is the idea that that statement, knowing is half the battle, is a fallacy. One that we've christened the G.I. Joe fallacy. Knowing is not half the battle, right? You know, take my fitness. I know what I should be eating. I know I should get to the gym all the time. That doesn't mean I do it, right? We know so many things about the stuff that we

should be doing, but that doesn't translate into the practical doing those things. And this is what I feel like I'm struggling with a little bit when it comes to the happiness science. Obviously, I know about this stuff, right? I teach at an Ivy League institution, all these tips and strategies that we should be using to feel better and protect our mental health and so on. But it's still really hard to put those strategies into practice. And so this is what we wanted to get intimate about today. Does that sound good? Everybody's into it?

That's it. All right. So one of the really cool things about the G.I. Joe fallacy is that it's self-referential. It applies to itself. So I traced it through the entire Western philosophical tradition, all the places where somebody had noticed this. The G.I. Joe fallacy is true of itself. The fact that we know that knowing is less than half the battle doesn't mean that we thereby assimilate that knowledge into our behavior. And the key challenge of flourishing

in the ancient philosophical tradition of the West in Greece and Rome, and I would say the key challenge of flourishing and happiness in contemporary cognitive science discourse is the question of how you speak, how you train, how you control the aspects of yourself that are not subject to rational control. It's really easy to understand the G.I. Joe fallacy. It's really easy to listen to Laurie's podcast. It's really easy to read a bunch of neuroscience articles. And doing that is less than half

the battle. So a lot of ancient wisdom tradition work in Western philosophy, things like Plato and Aristotle, are actually about how you make things stick in a way that you have them present at the moment that matters. In lots of ways, the challenge of understanding in a practical sense is the challenge of having the thought that you want to have, the reaction that you want to have, the reaction that you want to have, ready to hand at the moment that you need it. You can do all the rehearsing you want of staying calm in the face of things that enrage you. And if that skill is not ready to hand at the moment where you are in a conversation with a loved one

who says something painful to you, it has not properly served you. So the very first explicitly self-help book was actually called the Ready to Hand Book. It's a little book by a philosopher named Epictetus. It was written about 2,000 years ago. It was called in Greek the Enchiridion. What that means is handbook, ready-to-handbook. It was meant to give you a bunch of skills that would be available to you at the moment that you needed them. And what Lori has been working on in the most recent

aspect of her podcast is really a set of reflections on making things ready to hand. She's been focusing on five topics. And what we want to try to do today is to get through at least three of them. We may make it to four. We may even, we'll see, not if I keep going on like this, make it to five. But let me just let you know what they are so that you have a sense of the issues that we want to discuss today. So the first is the topic of perfectionism and how we deal with expectations that we have for ourselves that are hard to meet. The second is the question about the relation between your present and future self. How do we rightly decide what we do now that will help us later, what we do now that will harm us later? How do we balance our self across time?

our self across time. Third is the issue of stress and how we represent it to ourselves and manage it. The fourth is the issue of busyness and how we manage in a world where we may feel overcommitted. And the fifth, because this is arts and ideas and we don't want to shy away from the biggest ones, is the question of how we think about our own mortality and the ways in which reflecting on our own mortality can help us to live each moment of our non-mortality as well as we can. So I want to start by asking Laurie to say a few words about perfectionism. How many folks in the audience think of themselves as a little perfectionist? A show of hands? Oh, I'm seeing a lot of hands. Okay, yeah. I mean, I don't need to even explain, right? Like, I'm a type A Ivy League professor who cares about a lot, and I set really high standards for myself.

That's the way I say it in a kind way. Oh, I set high standards for myself. It sounds like the kind of thing you say in an interview when someone asks, what's your worst trait? And you say, oh, I'm a perfectionist. That sounds good. But the reality of it inside is much different. The reality of it inside is that I'm incredibly self-critical. It's really hard to figure out anything I do that feels like it's above bar, right? Everything I do is like, well, I could have done that better, you know, et cetera, et cetera. And that causes me to do a couple of things that I don't like. One is it causes me to shy away from anything where I feel like I might screw up, right? There's always like new hobbies or new cool things I want to try. I'm like, oh, I'm not going to be good at that. And I kind of run away.

It also means that I constantly feel kind of yucky because my internal monologue is a sort of terrible, mean drill sergeant who's kind of yelling at me all the time. And so even though it's kind of in some ways something that we get a little bit proud of, the person I interview for my episode, Thomas Curran, says it's our society's favorite flaw, perfectionism. Like it's actually something that makes me feel kind of crappy on a regular basis and something that I've wanted to fix. So I had a wonderful example of perfectionism hit me today. So I actually have to be in Denver tonight. And so right after this event, I'm going to go down to LaGuardia Airport and fly out. So while I am away, I have a house sitter who is a student who's probably going to listen to this podcast and hear this story. So I'm incredibly anxious that my house

be super clean and organized. And I can't bear for her to open my fridge and not see the shelves perfectly polished. And for some reason, I got obsessed this morning with the fact that I had an extra head of radicchio in the fridge, which I had purchased. It had been very expensive. I bought it at Nika's and I hadn't eaten it. And I literally called Lori and said, could you come over before our arts and ideas talk to take the radicchio so that I don't

let it go to waste in my fridge in a way that is visible to this undergraduate research assistant who's going to be house sitting. Now, what's funny about that story is that both my anxiety and my instinctive reaction were due to a particular deep fact about human beings, which is what other people think of us matters to us. The philosopher Plato spoke of our soul as having three parts. He called them reason, spirit, and appetite. Reason is the part of you that responds to rational concerns and information and facts. Appetite is the part of you that basically responds to your need to keep going. That's roughly food and procreation. And spirit is the part of you that responds to the social world around you. So Plato recognized that a deep segment of our motivation as human beings

results from our desire to be judged affirmatively by others. And what's really cool is that just as that led to detriment this morning, as I was anxiously polishing the coffee filter, polishing the coffee filter, because I was sure that this lovely 19-year-old young woman must come from a home with a polished coffee filter, not with a dirty coffee-ridden coffee filter. She actually had, like, coffee filters in her hair when I showed up, and I'm like, fix this before we go on stage. But anyway, go ahead. Gaze of Another, that I lost track of a lesson that Plato's student Aristotle puts forward, which is the idea that a friend can serve as a second self. Aristotle says, a friend is a second self. It magnifies our joy and cuts in half our sorrow. So I want to let Lori give you a sense of the

science behind why the right thing for me to do when I was anxious about my radicchio was to reach out to someone else and say the shameful words, I bought a hat of radicchio at Nika's that I did not eat. The most sad thing was that because we were prepping, we actually didn't end up eating radicchio. Still in the fridge, but we're working on the grace that comes with that. No, I mean, I think, you know, Tamar pointed out that this issue of being worried about what other people think is part of human nature. But one of the things we also learned in the science is that this particular aspect of our perfectionism

is getting worse over time. Dr. Curran, who I had on the show, did this very famous paper where he's a professor in the UK. He deals with students just in the way that Tamar and I do. And he started having this sense that like the modern college student is like a little bit more perfectionist

than they were five years ago, 10 years ago, and so on. And he said, well, could that really be? I wonder if there's survey data about that. And so he went all the way back to the 80s and looked at every paper that gave college students a survey about perfectionism and just like titrated up over time. And what he's found is that since the 1980s, since G.I. Joe was on the air, overall perfectionism has gone up in young people about 30%, which is pretty intense. But he also found that there's one part of perfectionism that's going up the most. We have different parts of perfectionism. It's like, I have these high standards for myself, right? Or perhaps I hold high standards for other people. We often talk about like a perfectionist boss who like expects you to do too much. But the part that's most going up in young people today is the opposite of that. I assume that other

people expect a lot of me, right? If my students coming over my house, they're going to judge me for what my coffee pot looks like and so on. That's the part that's gone up the most since the 1980s, which is a problem. It means not only do we have the kind of human nature that is really worried about what other people are thinking, our misconception about that has gotten worse over time. And you can probably make guesses about why that is. Things like being on social media all the time and having the gaze of others on you in a very special way. But the way you solve this, of course, is to try to harness not some like general kind of misconceived idea of the other who's really being judgy of you,

you bring to mind a real second friend, right? Tamara could think about, well, what's Lori going to really think about the radicchio? If it was her staying in my house, would she really judge me? And she'd be like, actually, I actually don't have any tools in my fridge right now, so I definitely wouldn't be judgy. But yeah, she'd be like, oh, when I think about myself and my own achievements from the perspective of a friend, now all of a sudden I can give myself grace. And it turns out that this is the practice that you bring to mind if you want to fight your perfectionism. You actually think, you know, this terrible voice, this inner drill sergeant in your head is kind of yelling at you. You give them a voice like, okay, you know, harsh drill sergeant voice.

I'm going to summon the Tamar voice. Like what would Tamar tell me, right? And just the instant of doing that is a really key way to fight your inner critic and bring in somebody who cares about you. And I love this idea of kind of using self-talk as though you're hearing from a friend because that kind of self-talk isn't coddling, right? Tamar wouldn't judge me for having a radicchio in my fridge, but if I was truly messing something up, Tamar would want to talk to me about it. She wouldn't scream at me like a drill sergeant

in the way I often do with my perfectionist voice, but she'd get curious. She'd be like, what is going on? We need to address this. Let's talk about it. And so harnessing that friend voice allows you to do something really important. You're shutting off the like drill sergeant,

perfectionist voice that's demanding too much of you, but you have a curious voice there that's wise, that really is going to push you if you need it. And so it's this perfect balance between kind of over coddling, but kind of being too drill sergeant-y on the other hand. This ability to adopt a different persona in order to talk to yourself is an important skill. It's also one that can improve your happiness. But I'll let Tamar explain more when the Happiness Lab returns in a moment. So far in our talk at the International Festival of Arts and Ideas, my friend Tamar Gendler and I have discussed why talking to yourself like a compassionate friend can help you fight perfectionism.

But Tamar thinks this technique can apply in lots of other situations too. It's actually the most important general skill that we can acquire because it's roughly a skill of perspective taking. that we can acquire because it's roughly a skill of perspective taking. We spend our entire lives viewing the world from inside our own heads, from the perspective of the world that is unique to us. And when we're young children, infants, we're so certain that the world is in accord with our perception of it, that when we cover our own eyes, we think we're invisible. The moment of coming to be a social being is the moment of recognizing that in addition to your own eyes, there are eyes of others. And the capacity to have ready to hand the eyes and voices of others, the other perspectives that might be taken, at both the instance when you

are being too easy on yourself and the instance of when you are being too hard on yourself, and the instance of when you are being too hard on yourself is perhaps the deepest way to take advantage of our ability to perspective take. Notice that even as perfectionists are super strict with the self whose viewpoint they are sitting in, all of us, including perfectionists, are remarkably able to make exceptions for ourselves, to recognize that something that objectively speaking would be wrong or problematic or unfair is in our particular case being done for this enormous set of reasons to which only we have access. So the observation that the way we deal in a very practical sense with perfectionism is to have ready to hand at all times the voice of another, right? It's like wearing a bracelet that says, what would Lori say? Or if you were a member of a faith tradition, what would the figure who represents goodness and

truth and understanding in my faith tradition do or say? That capacity to use the perspective of another, the very practical advice, think about what your friend would say, is part of the general skill of being able to recognize that there are multiple perspectives in the world. Now, one of the interesting ways that this plays out is actually with regard to the second dilemma that Laurie has been confronting, which is that in addition to being friends with other people, that is beings who exist at the same moment we do but aren't us, we're kind of also

stuck forever being friends with, or at least being affected by, our past selves and our future selves. Roughly speaking, most of the stuff that our past self does redounds on our present self. And most of the things that our present self does is going to determine what happens to our future self. And the question of how to think of selves across time is the second fundamental issue that Lori's been addressing in her podcast. And when I started thinking about this issue, I realized that even though I'm very kind to other people, you know, I'm not judgy about Tamar, about what she has in fridge and so on, there's actually like one person out there that I'm really mean to, future Lori. I assume future Lori loves going to

the gym. She's not going to mind taking on that terrible task that I agreed to over email because I just want to get the person over email. Like, she's happy to do this, like, really big work project. She is moral and not so busy and really excited to do all the stuff that present Laurie doesn't want to do at all. But of course, you know, true perspective taking

would lead to the suspect that that Laurie doesn't want to deal with this stuff either. And so what happens is that it's kind of like the Laurie's are all at this like negotiation table, but I, present Laurie, am the only one with a voice. I'm like, oh yeah, a future Laurie would love to do that. And somewhere she's off in some like other dimension. And so the episode was an attempt to deal with like my myopia, right? The fact that I'm really nearsighted. I'm thinking about me right now. And how can I get nicer to my future self?

But what I wound up realizing in this episode is that I was focused on all these cases of myopia, right? Like present Laurie is like kind of really messing with future Laurie. But as I did the episode, I started to think about other cases where I'm not being myopic, but I might instead be being hyperopic, very farsighted. All those evenings where I'm trying to send one more email off, but present Laurie could be hanging out with her husband. All those cases where I got something nice, a nice bottle of wine or like a new dress, but I feel like, oh, it's not the right time right now to enjoy that. I'll wait for future Laurie to enjoy that. There's all these times where I'm kind of assuming

future Laurie will get to enjoy this thing. That means I'm kind of missing out on the present. And so the episode is an interesting one because it helped me realize I messed up both ways. I assumed it was mostly present Laurie being unkind to future Laurie. But sometimes present Laurie is being unkind to herself on behalf of future Laurie. But if I could justkind to future Laurie. But sometimes present Laurie is being unkind to herself on behalf of future Laurie. But if I could just talk to future Laurie, she'd be like, don't do that on behalf of me either. And so we in the episode talk about some solutions, but Tamara, first I want to hear about,

you know, what did the ancients say about this? Did they have some insight? Yeah, so the ancients are really interested in actually developing habits that allow your past self, your present self, and your future self to kind of equally divide both the costs and the benefits of the things that are going to be of long-term value to you. So eating healthy food, being deeply connected to those around you, being an individual who exhibits character virtues like braveness or honesty or justice. What the ancient philosopher Aristotle says to do is to act like you already were the thing that you wish to become.

Fake it till you make it, as the contemporary version calls it. But notice that that is about creating intertemporal fairness across selves. There is a set of activities that may be locally unpleasant. The local activity of engaging in exercise until your muscle hurts, the local activity of holding back your desire to indulge in a particular way, the local activity of tamping your emotion. If you practice doing that now, it becomes natural to you. It becomes part of who you are, and it solves some of the intertemporal problem. Notice that as with self-regulation, so with self-care. Both Lori and I laughed when Lori said, whenever I buy a bath bomb, I think, well, but I can't use that now.

How many of you have beside your bathtub? Yes, Shelly Keala, my next door neighbor, has beside her bathtub many, many bath balls. What Aristotle would tell you to do is to create a ritual. On Thursdays, I take a warm bath with my bath ball. I'm not going to use them up too fast. I'm not going to use them up too slowly. I've made them part of a routine. I've made them part of a ritual. I've made them part of a habit. When you are trying to distribute things across, as Lori points out, individuals, only one

of whom is at the table at that given moment. Only present you is there. The best way for present you to relate both to past you and to future you is to engage in these processes where the world causes you to split the resources across time. You can use ritual, you can use habit, you can use routine. And so I think that those are the kind of things that we talk about in that episode. I actually tried a different hack that was probably not available to Aristotle at the time, or at least not in the way I tried it. But it does get back to one of his insights.

It goes back to the importance of perspective taking, right? If I could really bring future Laurie to the negotiating table and like talk to her and really see what she wanted, maybe I would do better. And a technology that wasn't available at Aristotle's time, even though he kind of realized this whole second self thing, was to go on, say, Snapchat and use a future filter where he could look at himself, Aristotle, young Aristotle, and fast forward to what he looks like when he's 70. Aristotle obviously didn't have iPhones, but I did. And so I could go on there and use these. How many of you in the audience have used these kind of aging filters and looked at you if you're older? There's like three college students and they're like I had never done this either but I

did this I encourage you to kind of try it out if you've never done this you basically are looking at a little video of yourself as a selfie and you become like 30 or 40 years older like through these aging filters and I honestly had a very interesting reaction which is like you know I'm looking at this picture of future Laurie as though I would be looking at a FaceTime call with Tamar. Like she's there, she's my friend and she has preferences. And so this is actually some lovely work by Hal Hirschfield, who's done this in experimental context. He shows people older versions of themselves and he finds that they wind up solving the same kinds of like temporal choice problems that Aristotle was so concerned with. They wind up saving more for retirement.

In one experiment for the next month after they've done this, they wind up eating healthier and so on. And so this was maybe like the high-tech version of the ritualistic thing that Aristotle wanted us all to do. But given that it's available on all of your smartphones,

worth trying out. And one of the crazy things that that brings out is how powerful how we represent the world as being is to how we experience the world, right? It wasn't a fact already that 30 years from now, Lori's going to be 30 years older. But bringing that vividly before your mind,

bringing that into active awareness causes it to play a role in your thinking. is the work of a contemporary psychologist helps show how powerful how we represent an experience as being can be on how that experience affects us. Do you want to talk about some of the Alia Crum work on stress? Yeah. And first, maybe this is one I don't need to set up, right? I was going to tell you, like, I'm really stressed out, but I'm guessing a lot of you are about to laugh right now. Anybody out there feeling a little stressed out right now? Yeah, okay. That's what I thought, right? Like, stress, it affects us all. And I think one of the reasons that you're all laughing is, like, it affects us all, but we don't think of it as this wonderful experience, right? It's not like we think of being stressed out as our body's reaction to protect us against the bad things and pump

glucose into our blood when we need it the most. Like it's not a specially designed evolved system to give us the energy we need when we really need to push it to the metal. That's not how we think about stress. But if you were a biologist looking at the autonomic nervous system, you might say exactly that about stress. We think of stress as debilitating, right? We think it's there to kind of mess us up and it's going to destroy us. And that's in part because if you don't regulate your stress, it does, right? Chronic stress is really terrible for so many aspects of our biology. But it turns out that the act of thinking about stress as bad might be one of the reasons that chronic stress is so bad. This was an insight by the

Stanford psychologist, Alia Crum, who incidentally was a student here back in the day. She actually worked with, you know, this unknown psychologist, Peter Saladay, who is right now president of Yale. But Alia had this insight, you know, there's so many ways that our mind, if we think about something in a certain way as good or bad, in some ways that thinking makes it so. I wonder if that works the same way for stress. And so she brought students into the lab, gave them some like stressful situation. Often this is what's called the stress test. It means you bring a student into the lab and like, great, you're going to give an impromptu speech with no preparation. There's going to be a really mean panel of judges that watches you. Go for it.

And what happens is that immediate stress reaction, you know, stress hormones like cortisol kick in. It's really scary. Some students got the primer that tells them, reminds them, and remember how stress usually feels. It's pretty debilitating, right? It's usually bad. Your heart's going to race. It's not great. The second group of students got a different way to think about stress. They said, you know, you might feel stressed out right now, but that's actually great. That means your stress hormones are really pumping energy into your blood. Like literally, there's going to be more glucose in your blood, which will get more kind of energy up to your brain. It'll make you think a little bit better. It'll help you out, right? Stress can be enhancing. What she then looked at is students' performance. They wind up performing better, but more,

they wind up having not the same reaction as the folks in the other condition whose chronic stress kind of kept them going. They performed badly, but then they showed these harsh effects kind of days on when you look at them later. Those students who thought that stress was good, all of a sudden, they experienced the stress, they do better, and they shut the stress off. One of the reasons that our chronic stress is there is we might be thinking about it in a way that it's going to really harm us. One of the researchers that our chronic stress is there is we might be thinking about it in a way that it's gonna really harm us. One of the researchers I interviewed for the podcast,

David Yeager, who's at UT Austin, he took this in a different direction. He said, well, that's true. Maybe with these messages about the fact that stress isn't actually that bad when you look at it biologically, maybe we can actually stop chronic stress in a population that we know

experiences a lot of stress. He actually worked with low-income high school students from marginalized identities, right? So these are students who are just experiencing all kinds of stresses, financial, social, and these kinds of things in high school. He started by giving them this primer that said, hey, you know, stress can be really good when you experience it, and it's good. Over time, you'll kind of get better at dealing with it, a little bit of a growth mindset too. And what he finds is that those high school students, when they give journal entries later about the things that are going on in their life, they wind up saying on days where their journal says, I was experiencing something really stressful today, something that was really hard,

they say, but it's going to be all right. I'll deal with it. They also show lower cortisol, which is a stress hormone throughout the semester, right? So just this reframing of how we think about stress can affect whether or not a truly objectively stressful situation, right? Like growing up as a low-income high school student in a tough neighborhood, whether or not that's really kind of stressing you out. And so this was really powerful for me because it brought up exactly the same thing that the ancients were kind of thinking about, that like, in some sense, thinking does make you so. So that brings us, and I believe we are actually going to make it through all five.

All right, okay. All right. We are going to make it through all five because I allowed myself to succumb to both the benefits and the costs of the fourth of Lori's topics, which is the topic of being busy, of putting too much into a limited period of time. Lori Santos, take it away. Yes. I mean, I think we're all subject to being a little bit busy these days. And I think busy, and especially the way that Tamar just said, which is putting too much into a limited period of time. In the episode, I talk with the journalist Oliver Berkman, who has a fantastic book,

which if you haven't read it, you should check it out. It's called 4,000 Weeks, Time Management for Mortals. And his idea was that, you know, when you really come to terms with the fact that you are finite, it really changes the amount of stuff that you feel like you can reasonably put on your plate, right? Like really true time management is recognizing there's just never going to be enough time for stuff. There's never going to be enough time for stuff this summer. There's never going to be enough time for stuff in this life, right?

Which is scary. But the question is like, given that, how do we decide what to put on our plate, right? How do we navigate, like how to be the most productive? And this is another spot where the scholars haven't really helped us out because there were historically, not as far back in history as Tamar was thinking about, but there were historically like good ideas about what counted as productivity, right? Back in the day when we had agriculture, we could easily figure out how we should be spending our time, right? How much should we plant? How much should we work to deal with the crops, right? You know,

you count bushels of corn that you get per your time, you know, okay, however I maximize that, I'm doing good. Or imagine you work on an assembly line. How many little widgets should you build? Well, it's like we can figure out the amount of work that goes into making the maximum number of them. So many of us these days don't work in agriculture. Many of us don't work on an assembly line. Many of us do the kind of thing that Tamara and I do, which you might call knowledge work. I'm a podcaster. I'm a professor. I come up with lectures. We're both academics. We come up with ideas and books. But it's not like Tamar and I, at the end of our day, have like a big pile of widgets, like academic paper widgets that we

produce. Papers take different amounts of time. You have to think about the ideas. You have to work on it. You have to noodle it for a little bit. Sometimes we get more intense periods and so on. And this is an insight that one of my podcast guests, Cal Newport, comes up with. He's like, the problem is that we don't have great ideas of productivity right now. He thinks that we came up with one though, because of course we want a kind of assembly line model for everything we do. And his argument is that we've come up with what's known as pseudo productivity. Basically, instead of counting widgets, we count the visible activity that it looks like we're engaged in. So you answered that Slack message. You replied to that

email. You're at work, you know, typing away. And that's what we use. Because figuring out, like, what means to be productive on the big stuff, like how many good podcast episodes come out, or how many academic articles, or the number of good ideas your doctors come up with when he's trying to heal you, those are too hard, right? So we use visible productivity. But then what happens? Then you're trying to maximize that metric. You're answering all these emails. You're being at all those standing meetings. You're looking at those Slack messages. But what does that do to the actual amount of time you have free to work on the big projects? It goes away. He actually has this lovely phrase that he uses where he says that those kind of

little tasks become what he calls productivity termites that eat away at your schedule. You know, so you look at your calendar and it's just like this crumbling building of the schedule because you don't have time to do any of the big stuff. And so the podcast is an attempt to say, okay, how do we do this? How do we kind of answer to the fact that we have the wrong metric when it comes to what it means to be productive? And what's fascinating is that when Laurie and I were talking about this, I realized that in many ways this touches on the most fundamental philosophical distinction that Plato makes, which is the distinction between what is and what seems to be. What is actual and what we use as its surrogate representation. What is most fundamental and deep and what is on the surface. And the entire warning of Plato's philosophical work is an attempt to warn us against taking seriously what Plato calls the shadows in the cave,

rather than what it is that the shadows in the cave are reflections of. That is, Plato's warning is a warning against falling for surface rather than deep features, for the smoke, which is a typical indicator of the fire, rather than the fire itself. And in a lot of ways, we are subject to teaching to the test for ourselves. Right? We get this measure. The measure is how many things did I get taken off my checklist today? And we use that surface feature, the platonic shadow, rather than focusing on the fundamental object, which is how deeply did I come to understand something about the world? Notice that, as in Plato's Republic, what's true of the individual is true of the society and vice versa. There are so many structures in society. Teaching to the test is a literal example of it, whereby we have something we care about, we have a mechanism by which we measure it, and then we devote our attention and effort to the mechanism rather than to that which the mechanism is meant to be an indicator of. I want to point out that that general structure is the

fundamental philosophical distinction between being, that is the way things really are, and seeming, that is the perfectly reasonable superficial features that you make use of most of the time to make sense of the world. And when you are in a situation where you can trust the world, seeming and being coincide. You're in your own house, and if the cereal box says Cheerios, unless you're someone who moves around your cereal, you can assume that inside that box is a set of Cheerios, right? You set up your world in such a way that the surface features indicate the deep features that you care about. where you can't count on surface and deep features aligning, it's actually one of the most disruptive experiences that we can have. And what this work on busyness shows is that we've been put into a situation where we have to be distrustful of our own sense of accomplishment.

Because even though it says Cheerios on the outside, right, it says accomplishments. When you open it up inside, it's just full of all of these tiny bits that are eating up our time. And so I was really struck when Laurie and I were talking about these data that have been observed by this empirical scientist at how deep a question they are getting at. But in many ways, there's no deeper question than the question we have come to twice already. One, when Laurie pointed out that thinking about herself 30 years later altered the relation between her present and future self. And the second, when she pointed out that the subtitle of the book, 4,000 Weeks Thriving for Mortals.

So, Maureen, let's talk about mortality. I'm really spooked by death. I don't like it. I don't like when anything ends. I don't like when a nice meal ends or a vacation ends. When I was a little kid, there's this very famous video of me when I'm three years old, and my family is watching a really nice fireworks display. And I used to get really upset when fireworks end, especially because you only see them on July 4th. And there's this nice fireworks display, and it ends. You see my dad really trying to distract me, like, oh, look at this guy's balloon. Look at the lights. And you hear this little Laurie voice goes,

Daddy, are the fireworks all done? Are the fireworks all done? And then eventually he admits to it and goes, screaming. That scream is the scream I want to give every time I think that, you know, 80, 90 years from now, I won't be here, right? I won't be here in the year 2100, right? Probably, maybe medical technology being what it is, we'll see. But that really spooks me. And that means that I kind of ignore the fact that I'm finite. But what the research shows is that that might not be such a hot thing. Because recognizing that things are final make you appreciate them more. One of my favorite studies on this worked with college students that got college students not to think about their own death, which was really far away, but the fact

that college was going to end. They brought seniors in and reminded them, oh, hey, you only have this many weeks left, versus another condition where they kind of made it seem like, oh, it's a really long stretch of time. And what they found is that by the end of the semester, those seniors who'd been reminded of how short the time they had was, the sort of temporal scarcity is the word they use for it, they wound up happier at the end of the year. But that was in part because if you measured the number of kind of cool activities they did, they wound up doing more because they felt like it's so short, I got to get them in, right? And so temporal scarcity, when we think about our own lives, seems to do the same thing.

We wind up making time for the things that really matter, the people that really matter, the stuff we really want to get to. If we think the time horizon is too long, we just kind of put it off, right? We talked about these temporal biases before. But recognizing that things are scarce, as existentially scary as it might be, kind of makes us do a little bit better. And speaking of temporal scarcity, we have 53, 2, 1 seconds left. The philosopher John Stuart Mill developed a moral theory that basically said the most important feature of happiness is that the joy of others brings joy to you. And thereby the conflict between individual happiness and communal happiness collapses because what brings individual happiness is the capacity to take joy in the experience of others. And I will say this hour has been an opportunity for me and I believe for my second self, Laurie, to feel exactly that. Thank you for being present with us as we thought and talked together. Thank you for being a group of people to whom we felt connected and ready to feel vulnerable in front of.

to feel vulnerable in front of. Huge thanks to my friend Tamar Gendler and the amazing staff and sponsors of the International Festival of Arts and Ideas. If you're in New Haven, Connecticut next summer, you should definitely check out the festival. I know I'm not the sportiest of podcast hosts, but next week I'll be bringing out my inner athlete because The Happiness Lab and other Pushkin shows

will be going to the Olympics. We'll meet a track and field athlete who fell out of love with running. We'll learn how she hung up her shoes only to explode back into the sport years later as one of the fastest women in the world. I just genuinely go into races so excited. You know, I could be in an office right now,

but I'm sad I'm going into this massive race with huge athletes. Like, how cool is that? That's all next time on The Happiness Lab with me, Dr. Laurie Santos.