The Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos - How to Handle Change

Episode Date: September 22, 2021

Change is the only certainty in life. We may desperately want to change ourselves and our surroundings, or we may fear the disruption and distress some changes bring. Dr Laurie Santos talks to change expert Dr Maya Shankar (host of A Slight Change of Plans) about how we can put change in perspective and learn to fear it less; and also how we can bring about far greater changes in ourselves than we ever thought possible.Laurie and Maya also take a few listener questions. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Pushkin. and over again, especially right now, is about happiness and change. Things like how can we make changes that actually stick? Or how can we stay happy through hard life changes that come our way? Or how can we deal with the collective happiness changes that are happening in this transformative time that we're all going through in the midst of this pandemic? And so with all these questions, I thought it would be best if I called in an expert on change for this special bonus episode. And so I'm super excited to welcome back behavior change expert extraordinaire, host of one of my favorite new podcasts, A Slight Change of Plans, and my former student, Maya Shunker.

It's so much fun to be here, Laurie. Great to see you. So you were back on the Happiness Lab a bit ago before. And the last time you were here on the Happiness Lab, we talked briefly about how you got interested in the psychology of change. And so I wonder if you'd quickly share that story again for me. I think it'll help listeners really understand how you got interested in the kind of like studying behavior change and how it's really affected you personally. So yeah. So how did you get interested in change? Yeah, I definitely had a very formative experience with change. When I was six years old, I started playing the violin and I became so passionate about the instrument. And it very quickly became my goal to become a professional violinist. And so when I was

nine years old, I started studying at the Juilliard School of Music in New York. And when I was in high school, Itzhak Perlman, who's considered, you know, one of the greatest violinists of our time, asked me to be his private violin student. And so I was on the speed train, Laurie, to becoming hopefully a professional violinist. And I would say all of my eggs were in that basket. I felt like my identity was first and foremost a violinist. And then when I was 15, I experienced a sudden hand injury that fully derailed my career and basically ended it overnight. And I was forced to reassess who I was. Up until that point, I had only seen myself as a violinist. If you had asked

me who I was at that point, I would have said first that I was a violinist and second that I was Maya. And I just didn't know where to go from there because it felt like such a fixed part of who I was. And there's interesting research in cognitive science that talks about this phenomenon. It's called identity foreclosure. And it refers to the idea that in adolescence, certainly, but it can carry through into adulthood, we can get very settled in a very specific identity. And the consequence of that is it prevents us from having an exploratory frame of mind, from allowing ourselves to inhabit other spaces, other identities, other roles,

and to pursue other passions. And I absolutely fell prey to identity foreclosure. It felt like I fully lost myself in the process. And, you know, we can talk more about how my psychology has changed over this whole period of time. But the biggest lesson that I learned from that whole experience is that I had to see my identity as more malleable, as extending beyond any specific pursuit. And so this is so important. One of the reasons I love your story of change so much. I mean, one reason I love your story of change is that it brought you to me, it brought you to my lab and that's how we got to know each other. But it also shows just so many of these misconceptions that we have about identity and change and change and happiness, right? You know, all of my happiness

lab listeners know that I'm constantly talking about the ways that our minds lie to us in terms of the kinds of things that make us happy. And I think the kind of misconception you're talking about is important. This idea that our identity is fixed, it fits with what psychologist Dan Gilbert talks about with an illusion known as the end of history illusion. The deal is if you ask people, hey, how much do you think you're going to change in the next 10 years? Most people say, well, you know, not so much, right? Like my core identity is sort of fixed. My history has kind of ended. well, you know, not so much, right? Like my core identity is sort of fixed. My history has kind of ended. But if you ask people, how much have you changed, like, as of the last 10 years, like in the last decade, how much have you changed? People usually say

a lot. And so the funny thing is we tend not to notice our own changes. We tend to have this belief that we're like stuck. Definitely. But the research really shows that we're that we're kind of more malleable than we think. And the other reason I love this story is it shows a different misconception about the mind that I think is incredibly powerful, which is this idea about the the nature of identity change, like how it works. Right. You know, there's this sense that people think you have to have this like crazy brain altering experience to experience some change that will change your identity. I know on your podcast, you've talked to people who've looked at these changes in the context of like psychedelic experiences. That's right. Yeah. Absolutely.

Yeah. I mean, first of all, on the point of the end of history illusion. Absolutely. I think we can all relate to the experience of hearing a clip of you talking when you're a teenager or when you're in your 20s or seeing a picture and thinking, oh, my God, how is that me? I don't even relate to this person. And then you suddenly realize, am I going to think this way about myself right now in 10 years? And that inevitably is the case, right? We can feel so much distance between our current selves and our past selves. But like you said, in real time, we always underestimate how much change and how much growth will happen in the years ahead. And you're absolutely right on the topic of psychedelics.

I mean, I think what's so interesting is that as humans, we are both averse to change. We're scared by it. But then we also seek it out in these really profound ways, which is why we've seen, you know, a surge in interest in doing psychedelics. And, you know, there's a lot of medical research going on and how psychedelics can help people. I think the reassuring thing for those of us who don't want to do psychedelics, myself included, is that you can achieve profound change through other means in your life. I mean, the first way is that you can understand that it is absolutely a misconception that our personality stopped changing after the age of 30. This is a finding that's just floating around out there, but it's since been disproven through

large studies. And what they find is that personality traits, they continue to change gradually and systematically throughout the course of your life. And that things like conscientiousness and agreeableness and other key personality traits increase as you get older. Traits like neuroticism decrease as you get older, which is wonderful, which is great. And it can signal that their maturity is increasing. And I always have found it so promising that naturally, we might become better versions of ourselves just through the natural aging process. That's already very reassuring, I think. And then we also know, and you can talk more about this, but

transformative experiences can alter us in ways that rival the best version of a psychedelic experience. And we can actually grow profoundly even from traumatic experiences. Yeah, I want to kind of talk more about this idea of transformative experiences because I find it so profound, right? You know, the personality changes you were just talking about are really gradual, you know, the kind of thing we might not even notice unless we were carefully sampling, you know, what happened to our agreeableness or neuroticism. But transformative experiences is a concept that was developed by one of my colleagues here at Yale, Lori Paul, the philosopher. She talks about these moments where you have profound and transformative change in so many aspects of your identity, like what you think of as your identity, your preferences, what you want

out of life, what you consider important in life. And they happen at these kind of like moments that are big, but also pretty regular, pretty mundane. Right. So going to college, you know, as you know, probably my I watch you like you have this transformative experience, right? You're a different person after you go to college than not. Right. Getting married, having a baby, switching a job. Right. All of these things are cases where you just like kind of change your preferences. And one of the things that Lori Paul talks about, which is I think pretty cool, is that, you know, before you make the change, you might not know what those preferences are. Right. If I ask like violin playing Maya, you know, like, do you

like cognitive science? Like, you know, do you want to run experiments? Do you want to have a podcast? Like it might not even those questions might not even have made sense to you. Right. You know, the same thing, like before you get married, you know, what will you think of about other people? You know, what your preferences for what you do on a weekend look like. Right. You just can't expect what's going to happen afterwards. But then after this life change, preferences are different. Your biases are different. You're just a different person. The crazy thing is these transformative experiences happen to us all the time. And it's the kind of thing you've seen on your show a bunch, right? Absolutely. And I would add to that, in addition to going to college, marriage, those sorts of things constituting these big moments, negative experiences, too, can lead to the same results. And so I would say to listeners of this, even if it's a negative change, even if you're perceiving as a negative change, you can still emerge with some of these profound changes.

And to your point, Laurie, absolutely. I mean, I think you and I both studying this field know all the time that our mind plays tricks on us and we never have a full understanding of who we are at any given moment in time. Right. Because in the face of a change, I'm predicting how I'm going to respond based on only the data points I have about myself up until that point in time, right? I don't know all these other parts of my personality that I might not have tapped into or all these other aspects of my resilience that I might not have tapped into until that moment appeared. I think that's why in part we're bad cognitive forecasters because we're working with limited data on ourselves. And sometimes these change moments can really help us appreciate the full range of reactions and emotions that we can

experience in the face of a change. With respect to a slight change of plans, I have found reliably that people don't know actually what to expect in the face of a change. And in advance of this podcast, I think if someone came to me and said, Maya, what would you what would advice would you give to someone who's going through a change? I would have said, well, I would give different advice to someone based on whether it was a wanted or unwanted change, right? A willed or unwilled change. And I realized by making a slight change of plans that that framework was totally off. And the reason for that is there are so many unexpected consequences of a change that occur

that we can't possibly anticipate. You know, we like to think of change happening in the vacuum, right? I'm going to be exactly Maya. It's just that this one thing about me is going to change. But that's just not how the human experience works, right? We are these intricate ecosystems where change in one area of our lives has these profound spillovers into other parts of our lives. And we just can't anticipate, like I said before, all the ways in which it might impact

us. So a good example of this is I interviewed a guy named Scott. He's in his early 30s. He's a cancer researcher, and he got a stage four cancer diagnosis during quarantine. And this was his worst nightmare come true, because unlike you and me, Laurie, he was a health nut. And this was his worst nightmare come true because unlike you and me, Laurie, he was a health nut. And he was doing high intensity interval training, intermittent fasting. I don't even know what that is. I can't do that. He was adding turmeric to his food, eating chia seeds by the handful. This guy was super into preserving his body, right? And reducing what he calls diminishment. And then he gets this stage four cancer diagnosis and it's his worst fear come true. And yet when I interviewed

him and I talked to him, he said, you know, I think I'm actually a better person. And that the emotional thermostat has persevered, which is so profound, right? He violated his own expectations. He thought for sure that this would be the absolute worst thing that happened to me. But I'm sitting here, you know, six months into my chemotherapy treatments, having had multiple surgeries, including amputating my leg. And I'm sitting here feeling gratitude for the fact that I feel more or less as happy as I did before. I mean, it's so incredible, right? You know, I mean, it's something that's been documented, obviously, by psychological research. You know, on the Happiness Lab, we've talked about this idea of what's called the psychological immune system, right? Like, just like we have an immune system that will fight disease, you know, physical diseases, viruses, and so on, so too do we have a psychological immune system that will fight when bad things come up, right? It'll fight the bad consequences. We'll rationalize our decision or we'll see some meaning in it or we'll seek out resources, seek out social support. You know, the psychological immune system means that bad things aren't as bad as we think.

But it still feels like the worst possible thing you imagine happening, happening would be bad and it would suck and you wouldn't react with gratitude. But the amazing thing about our minds is that that's just not the case. It's just yet another spot where we're forecasting that change is going to feel awful. But like, it's not always as bad as we think. It's so profound. It is profound. Another trait that I've seen emerge in almost all of my guests and I've seen kick in for me psychologically in the face of an unwanted change is to irresistibly want to build stories out of our experiences, to build narratives

and find ways to make sense of the things that have happened to us. And this is true, irrespective of religious beliefs, spiritual beliefs, right? I find this across the board, you know, believers and non-believers alike. And, you know, in talking with Scott, he was saying, you know, I don't happen to believe things happen for a reason. I don't happen to have any, you know, in talking with Scott, he was saying, you know, I don't happen to believe things happen for a reason. I don't happen to have any, you know, spiritual beliefs to guide me through this process. But in my mind, I almost need to justify this, right? I need to make sense of what is otherwise a fully random system. way, at least my personality needs to become better. And so he worked really hard at becoming a more empathetic person, becoming a better listener, showing more compassion towards himself and others. And I just find, and again, I hope this is reassuring to listeners that we just irresistibly as humans write narratives about our lives and our stories. And that can bring you comfort in those moments, because no matter what happens to you, you will try to find

some meaning or purpose in it. And this is, you know, again, you know, right out of the research playbook, right? You know, it comes from some fantastic work by researchers like Jamie Pennebaker and his colleagues, right? Where he just finds that if you're going through something really difficult, especially if, you know, right now a listener is in the midst of a change, you know, sit down and actually journal it. If that process of sense-making and meaning-making and narrative-making isn't happening naturally, you can engage it, right? Just sit down and actually journal it. If that process of sensemaking and meaning making and narrative making isn't happening naturally, you can engage it. Right. Just sit down and start journaling about it. And you'd be surprised how quickly this sensemaking kind of takes the fore. It's one way if you're having trouble going through a change that you really can kind of fast forward some of that sensemaking process. process. But your stories about all these kinds of cases, you know, tell me a lot of things, right? It tells me like change is happening, like whether we want it or not, you know, especially right now in the midst of everything that's going on. It sometimes happens without us

realizing it, right? You know, we can accidentally step into a transformative experience without knowing it. And that means that I think we need some like advice for how to deal with changes, right? Like how do we deal with this? And from a happiness perspective, how do we best use these moments of change to improve our wellbeing? And one piece of advice that I know you've given before and that you've taken on through your own changes in your own life is that you need to recognize that you shouldn't get wedded to one particular pursuit

or how you're framing the things that you really enjoy in life. You might be able to think about a little bit flexibly. And so talk about how this played out in the context of your violin playing when that change happened. You know, how did you kind of come to terms with the pursuit you were really going after that you didn't realize? Yeah. So going back to, you know, the age of 15, as I mentioned, I was absolutely devastated in the face of this loss. And I didn't really know how to pick up the pieces because I was thinking to myself, I literally lost the thing that I'm completely in love with. And I think in hindsight, what I've learned is that it can be really helpful to try to identify the features of the pursuit that you

really enjoyed rather than focusing too much on the thing itself. So I think if you had asked me as a young kid, what do you love about the violin? I would have said to you, oh, Laurie, I love how it sounds and how it feels. And I think in hindsight, what I've learned is that actually what really got me to tick when it came to the violin was forging an emotional connection with people. You know, as a young kid, you go on stage, there's thousands of strangers in the audience, right? No one's met anyone. And within a moment, based on what you're playing, you can make people feel something that they've never felt before. And that is an incredibly empowering, intoxicating feeling, right? To have that kind of emotional connection with people.

And so what I learned from that is, oh, it's actually human connection that gets me moving. Like violin was an instrument towards that. Oh gosh, me with the puns. They're all unintended. Okay. Violin was a vehicle for me to achieve that desire for human connection. But I found the through line over the course of my career, which might seem very disparate and not connected, is that I've been searching for human connection throughout. And I did this by studying cognitive science under your tutelage in undergrad and beyond, where I was studying the human mind and understanding how it is we even

develop relationships with people and make decisions and move about in this world and connect with one another. And then through my podcast, A Slight Change of Plans, right? It is the ultimate excuse where you can go in your room with a person you've never met. And within minutes, you're talking about, you know, deeply personal parts of your life and asking questions about how it is that they've gone through things. And you are connecting on a really deep level. So for those who have lost something in their lives, right? And I know that 2020 was filled with so much loss across the board. I think it could be a really valuable exercise to take a step back and

say, what are the traits, what are the features of the different things in my life that bring me joy? And let me see if I can construct that in other areas, in other ways. And again, you know, this is something that we know from a lot of the research on the kinds of things that make us happier, right? You know, there's so much fantastic work by Marty Seligman and his colleagues on this idea of character strengths, you know, these kinds of like values that you have, strengths that you have, you know, the kinds of things, as you said, Maya, that kind of bring you joy. And there are things like,

as you expressed, like connecting with people, you know, they could be things like a love of learning, a sense of bravery, right? You know, the idea that you're really pursuing creative pursuits, even things like, you know, emotions like transcendence or spirituality, right? Like we all have these things that are the things that get us going. And Seligman finds that if you apply those things more in your life, whether that's in your career, in your relationships, you will just get more joy out of it. It matters less the specific job that you have or the specific activity you're engaging in and more that you kind of bring these traits out. And he has these two examples I'd love to share of this. One is an exercise that I have my students do in class, which Seligman calls a strengths date.

I love that. Where you pick a friend, your spouse, a friend, and you find these strengths that you really like. So for you, it'd be like connecting with other people, right? Like how can you engage in some sort of fun date night activity that lets you connect more with other people? The idea is like you're not picking a specific activity, you're just building this thing that's based on the strengths and the values that you love. Another wonderful exercise is to figure out how you can build these strengths

more into your career, right? Like you might have some particular job description, but can you shape your job description more in the direction of the things you enjoy? Right. You know, and I think this is one of the reasons your podcast is so fantastic is that it's obvious how much you enjoy connecting with your guests and connecting with your listeners. It's obvious that's a strength of yours. And it's so obvious that it brings you joy. But we can all even if you're not a podcaster, like you can figure out ways to build in strengths in your own life, which I find just so profound. I love that so much. And I think, you know, a lot of times when you are looking for a job or you're getting hired for a job, your hiring manager might not even know

that they have so much to benefit from these untapped into skills, right? You know, you've been in my life several times where I've written job descriptions from scratch for jobs that didn't exist that I wanted to see happen. And it can be extremely profound to say, in addition to the core traits you've articulated, here are my superpowers and here's what I plan to bring to the job. Here's what I think could benefit the role, you know? So that's kind of piece of advice. Number one, I think is like, you know, bringing in these values, not necessarily wedding your identity to one thing, but recognizing that your identity is really based on these core kinds of strengths, these core kinds of values. You know, a second piece of advice that I think comes from

your experience with change is this idea that, you know, we forget how resilient we are in the face of change. You know, we just talked about all these examples where people go through these awful, awful events and they're fine or maybe better off for it. But the sad thing is that we forget that bad change can be good. We forget we're resilient enough to get through it. And that means we don't like take on changes that might be really beneficial to us because we're kind of scared about how we're going to react to them. I think that's right. I mean, I think so many of us face a change aversion of some kind, right? Because, you know Because we have things like the status quo bias. It's very comfortable to allow inertia to move us forward. But by and large, every guest I've had on a slight change of plans has been grateful in some way for having had a big change happen to them or having a change that they inspired. change that they inspired. And it's not because it always turned out perfectly or even made them happier in the short term. It's because it allowed them to grow in some way and help them better

understand who they are and what they're capable of and what their full potential is. And I find that to be an empowering lesson because I think one of the reasons why we can always forget our own resilience is that there's this cognitive fallacy that I feel we all have where when we're confronted with a big change, we latch on to how novel the specifics of that change feel. So in 2020, for example, with COVID, it was like, oh my gosh, this is such an unprecedented thing to happen to all of us. None of us know how to deal with this big change. This is awful. But what helped me during 2020 was realizing that while the specifics of what 2020 threw our way was unprecedented, our human ability to navigate change is not unprecedented. We've done this rodeo so many times before, but the content has been different, right?

Or we didn't maybe experience it as a collective glow, but we've all had changes in our personal lives that we've had to navigate and we've come out the other side. And so I think just reminding yourself in the face of a change that is, you know, a surprise to you and you're like, I don't know how to deal with this specific change. Remember that in many ways, our psychologies are built for change. And this is a universal set of features we all share as human beings. And I think that recognizing that we're built for change can help alleviate, you know, some of the anxiety that comes with these big changes that might be coming up or changes that we might fear. But I think recognizing that we're built for change gets to kind of the last piece of advice that I wanted to focus on, which is this idea that like we can change, right? You know,

so if you're kind of stuck in a rut in terms of your well-being or engaging in habits that you're maybe not proud of or if you feel like you're not flourishing enough i think we can sometimes feel like well that's it like you know this is how i am i'm just stuck here but the fact of the matter is that the entire like scientific literature shows that change is possible especially change towards experiences of more joy, more happiness, more flourishing. Like we can actually change more than we think, even though we don't realize it, right? Absolutely. Like you said, all of the research in psychology can help support this. There's also research in neuroscience showing just how plastic the brain remains over the course

of our lives. And what I love about the Happiness Lab and what I love about happiness research is that it gives us so many tactical recommendations of how we can introduce this kind of positive change into our lives. My husband and I had a really challenging personal experience the other day. And I remember going to bed thinking, oh, this is such a shitty day. I hate this day. And my husband, Jimmy said, we're going to write gratitude lists. And I was like, I don't want to, you know, you're, you're so begrudging in that moment, right? The last thing you want to do when you're in the throes of a, of a bad change or whatnot is to commit to a gratitude list. But oh my gosh, you soften, you know, by number three on that list,

you start to frame your life differently. You start to frame the change event differently. that list, you start to frame your life differently. You start to frame the change event differently. You start to have perspective to take some distance from it. And I found it to be such a therapeutic exercise. And again, I think, you know, some of these recommendations from our field can seem like common sense, right? Oh, yeah, just write down your gratitude thoughts. But I think what the research shows us is what a huge impact it can have on well-being, which we might not appreciate. Right. And it can lead you to actually commit to doing those things, even in hard moments. think, you know, that's one of the intuitions that I think we get wrong or that can kind of lead us astray, right? Which is like, it's not going to work, right? You know, I'm fixed. I'm not going to change. But, you know, you, I think, identify a lot of a different kind of mindset that we can take to some of these changes, you know, which researchers call this idea of a growth

mindset, you know? So what's this idea of a growth mindset and how can we apply it better? Yeah, the growth mindset refers to the idea that we should see our brains in the same way that we see our muscles, right? So we always, we believe if we run around the track a certain number of times, our calf muscles will get stronger. We should see our minds in the same way, right? If you do enough exercises, if you commit to that mindfulness meditation practice for five minutes a day, you will build that mental strength. for five minutes a day, you will build that mental strength. And I think we've always had a disconnect in our minds about how our bodies grow, but that our minds somehow don't have that same potential. And there's a lot of really compelling research about how, in fact, it does. I mean, you and I might not want to run around the track eight times, so maybe it's a bad analogy,

but in theory, if we were to, our calves would get stronger. And the beauty is, the thing I find most fascinating about the growth mindset research is that it's our mindset, right? Our beliefs about the extent to which we can change, in fact, affect the degree to which we change. I mean, in part, just because it affects what we do, right? If you believe you can't change, you're not going to start running around the track. You're not going to engage in a gratitude practice. You're not going to start running around the track. You're not going to engage in a gratitude practice. You're not going to start meditating every day. You have to kind of believe it's going to work to see the effects of these changes. But the good news is that we can change

those beliefs. And I think the science helps, as you said, like just knowing the brain is incredibly plastic, that it basically works like a calf muscle can help you see like this is worth it. I should put time into it. I should try these practices. Yeah, it can change the way that you act. But like you said, just a simple mindset shift can affect performance. And so this is one of the reasons I was so excited you agreed to this bonus episode, because, you know, do you really think that understanding the science of change better can be kind of a path to improving our flourishing overall? Absolutely. I mean, I think my goal with making this podcast was that I felt like I didn't have all the answers to change, right? And I thought it would be such

a fascinating experience to try to marry what the science tells us about happiness with people's real life stories and real life narratives. And I feel like that blending of, you know, wisdom, like mining people's stories for their wisdom, but then also mining the research literature to try to figure out strategies for better managing change. It certainly made me a better and more resilient person, and I'm hoping that it's had the same impact on listeners. And speaking of listeners, we had promised that this would also involve some listener questions. And so I have a few of them that listeners submitted through Facebook earlier. And so, Maya, if you wouldn't mind, I'd love to get your take on some of these questions. And so I have a few of them that listeners submitted through Facebook earlier. And so, Maya, if you wouldn't mind, I'd love to get your take on some of these questions.

The first question is, how do you gauge if a life change will actually make you happier? You know, the reader goes on to ask, is the grass always greener on the other side? You know, how do you know if you turn down an opportunity that that will ultimately be a good thing? I wish I had the answer to that question at large, because it would mean that, you know, I could forecast everyone's future, but I don't. That'd be much more financially lucrative than running a podcast, right? Yeah, definitely. But I can say this, which is people reliably, they get it wrong often, how a change is going to affect them. And, you know, we talked

a little bit before, Laurie, about how change doesn't happen in a vacuum. And so there have been guests on my show who have come on thinking that they were willing what was going to be a positive change. They were absolutely certain that this change they were going to introduce into their lives was going to make them happier and better off. And what they found afterwards is that that wasn't the case. So a good example of this is I had a woman named Elna on my show, and her lifelong goal was to become thin. And she did it. In five months, she very unhealthily lost over 100 pounds. And for a short time, she thought that she was living a worse person. She was buying into standards of beauty that she didn't want to buy into. She was becoming more superficial. She was losing the boldness and irreverence that she had had prior. And what she learned from that experience is it's not like a magic trick where you just get to walk through a mirror and you're exactly the same Elna with all the same psychology

and all the same mindsets and you're just thin, right? That's not how it works. Because as we talked about, we are these complicated ecosystems. And so what her story taught me is that we need to audit our change experiences, right? We cannot go in with too much confidence about it either being positive or negative, because there will inevitably be aspects of the change experience that surprise you in some way. And so I think it's so important to approach change with a profound amount of humility, to go through the change thinking, okay, I'm trying to, you know, I'm taking on this new job or I'm investing in a new friendship. Let me just have, you know, a mind to how other parts of me might be interacting with this change. And I think through those auditing experiences, you can eventually build some intuitions about yourself and whether a change is likely to end up being positive or negative or somewhere in the middle, which is often how life works.

All the happiness research shows that these what we believe to be on the other side. But if you ask someone who's been through it, they can tell you, you know, that I can say, you know, being someone who say, for example, became a head of college and taught a happiness class, what are the pros and cons of that sort of thing? That no one who had done that would like know what that was. So, you know, the other thing I've also learned how universal the psychologies we can recruit are in the face of very diverse changes. That's another thing I've learned from this experience, which is if you're a cancer patient, you might actually find the most resonance with the person on my show who was going through a divorce because in both cases, the loss felt similar and the way in which their psychologies were recruited felt similar. And they might feel less resonance in an episode that was specifically about going through an illness. And I find that really profound because it means that when listeners are going through a big change, if they can't find someone who has had, you know, that exact experience.

And I know that many of us can feel this way, like no one will understand what I'm going through. No one's been through this specific thing. Like fear not, because you can find someone who has more of a mind meld with you and may have gone through a vastly different change experience, but can still share wisdom and insights about how they managed it. Love it. And this idea of kind of the sharedness that we get out of change, this idea of going through collective change, gets to the next question that someone submitted through Facebook, which is, these times are filled with both uncertainty and change, two things I find extremely stressful. What are some strategies to deal with both of these kinds of things? So uncertainty and change, What are some strategies, you know, you've used to deal with kind of these things? stressful. One of the tactics that I use, one of the strategies is something you alluded to earlier, which is that we reliably underestimate our psychological immune system, right? We

reliably underestimate just how resilient we will be in the face of a change. And in the moment, it can be very hard to get your emotions to appreciate that. I think it's easy to intellectualize in the moment. I know I'm this resilient, but I sure as hell don't feel that way. Right. But I think, you know, if you think it enough times, over time, your emotions will catch up to that intellectual feeling. And I found that to be true in my own life, which is in the moment I'll tell myself, OK, Maya, you are a cognitive scientist. You do know what all the research says. I know you don't believe it right now because the emotions feel so raw and you feel so vulnerable. But just remember that we do actually have this incredible immune system. And I have found that over time, these changes have started to feel slightly less volatile

as a result of cultivating that mindset. What strategies have you used, Laurie? Yeah, well, I think one of the things I've really used, especially recently to deal with the uncertainty part of this equation, is really taking time to like notice and experience what that does to me, right? I mean, I think part of the reason uncertainty and change are scary is because we think, well, it might make us sad, or it might make us fearful, or it might make us anxious. And we feel like we just can't deal with those emotions. We want to run away from those emotions. But, you know, the research shows that if you just take time to accept those emotions, like hang out with them for a while, you know, maybe really just like ride the wave. On our podcast, we talk a lot about urge surfing. So I'm just going to sit with

this sadness, you know, for a couple minutes, or I'm just going to sit with this anxiety for a couple minutes. It's not going to feel great, but the, you know, the research tends to show that emotions work like a wave. It'll crest and kind of go up, but then it'll subside and go down and you'll get through it. And so counterintuitively, one of the ways I deal with the negative emotions that come with uncertainty and change is to really sit with them. You know, and I've been, you know, you were talking about, you know, personal issues that you're going through. I have a really close friend who's going through a really scary health diagnosis right now that's come with a lot of uncertainty, a lot of fear for me.

And I've really just done some like quick meditations where I just sit with that and notice how it feels and kind of let it ride out. And oddly enough, you can get through negative emotions and kind of sitting with them makes you realize like, actually, I'm strong enough to hang out with some sadness for a little bit, like I I'll be okay. And that, for me, has been incredibly powerful. Yeah, I love hearing that. And I'm so sorry about your friend. I absolutely think that's right. And the more you sit in negative emotions, the more they lose power over you. And that's the most powerful part of it all. I interviewed a guy named Ramsey for a slight change. And this guy, when he was 20, woke up with profound tinnitus. So a high pitch,

high frequency ringing in his ear that has been permanent ever since. It is a permanent fixture of his life that every waking moment of every single day, he hears a blaring siren in his left ear. And he thought initially the antidote to this is a medical solution, right? How do I fix this? How do I fix this? And over time, he actually put what you've just said into practice, which is, let me be at peace with this sound. Let me embrace it.

Let me reinterpret this sound as not an enemy that I'm trying to swing a baseball bat at, but as just a presence in my life that I acknowledge and I accept it. Sometimes I don't love it, but I don't hate it either. And that was actually his cure. His cure to his tinnitus did not have medical tones to it. It was a psychological shift in how he perceived this intrusive thing that had happened in his brain. and he said today, you know, it just doesn't have power over him in the way that it did before. It doesn't bother him, doesn't irk him in the way. He said, even now, you know, I can close my eyes and it's there and I hear it. Hasn't changed in its intensity at all over the years, but my relationship with it has changed. And I thought to myself, if he can get, if he can make peace with the blaring siren in his head, like I can deal with these feelings of sadness, you know? And I think it's so powerful and it might be a great way to sort of end with this idea of allowing.

You know, I think once you get to the point where you can allow some change in your life, even if it's unwanted change, what you often find is that it leads to more growth, more resilience, more positives than you really expect. And so, Maya, thank you so much for coming on this podcast with me and talking with me about the science of change. Listeners, I hope it's changed your mind about change to listen to this. Very meta. Yeah, very meta. And that you've gotten some tips that you can use to feel a little bit happier. Well, as you know, Laurie, I love any excuse to chat with you. So thank you so much for having me on. Awesome. Thanks so much. Thanks, everyone.

We'll see you soon. Thank you. The Happiness Lab is brought to you by Pushkin Industries and me, Dr. Laurie Santos.