The Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos - How to Thrive at Work

Episode Date: October 21, 2024

We can spend a lot of time working - and it gives us fulfillment, social interaction and fun - but still one in five of us say our workplaces are "toxic". And even the best jobs can sometimes be stressful and draining. So how do we set ourselves up to thrive at work?    Former news anchor Dan Harris (of 10% Happier with Dan Harris and DanHarris.com) joins Dr Laurie Santos to explore strategies to be a happier employee and a better employer. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Pushkin. If you have a job, it's entirely possible that you spend more waking hours at work than doing anything else in your life. More time than you spend with your family, or enjoying your hobbies, or kicking back and relaxing. Work is a big part of our lives. But aside from just paying the bills, our job can give us purpose, fulfillment, and a sense of belonging. and a sense of belonging. One survey by the American Psychological Association found that 92% of us think that our workplaces should actively support our emotional well-being. But that same survey found that one in five of us describe our workplace as being toxic. And what makes a job toxic? According to that survey, it was things like bullying, overwork, discrimination, and even loneliness. It's therefore no surprise

that this year's World Mental Health Day was devoted to the idea of wellness in the workplace. And so in the last of our special World Mental Health Day shows, we're going to look at some recommendations to improve our happiness at work. Joining me again is Dan Harris. You probably already know Dan from his podcast, 10% Happier, but you should also check out the fabulous new community he's developing at danharris.com. Aside from being a titan of happiness, Dan also has lots of workplace experiences to draw from for our conversation today.

I hope you enjoy it as much as I did. One of the reasons I wanted to talk to you is that it seems like work is just going to be hard necessarily. There's like some situations at work that are just naturally going to be hard. And one of the techniques I know I've learned a lot from your work on mindfulness is just this idea of like not fleeing from the hard, or maybe a better way to put it is sort of radically accepting the hard. And so what is radical acceptance and why can it be so helpful when we're experiencing stress at work? Yeah, just to say in an overarching sense that for me, one of the biggest sources of stress

and anxiety and suffering has been work. Not to be overly gloomy about this. I mean, work has also been the source of so much purpose and meaning and joy and connection. And so it's complicated. But to answer the question you actually asked me, it's so counterintuitive because stress is unpleasant. So, you know, you want to self medicate with food or gambling or TikTok or whatever it is, you want to push it away. But that doesn't really work. It can work a little bit. You know, obviously we need stress relief. But honestly, one of the great mechanisms or one of the great ways to think about this is that the only way out is through, to feel the difficult feelings instead of letting them own you. And there are lots of ways to do

this. For me, mindfulness meditation is a great way. I'll just briefly describe it. There are really only three steps for beginning mindfulness meditation. The first is to sit comfortably and close your eyes. I sit on a chair. You don't have to get into the lotus position. The second step is to bring your full attention to something neutral. Often it's your breath coming in and going out. Some people don't like the breath, so you can just pick the feeling of your body sitting in the chair or sounds in the environment. Just picking something based in one of your senses that gets you out of the spinning thoughts in your head and into some sense-based object of meditation. That's a technical term. Basically, it's the thing

you're focusing on, your object. And then the third step is the most important, which is very quickly, as soon as you try to feel your breath coming in and going out, you're likely to get distracted a lot. And this is the moment when many people tell themselves a story that they're failed meditators. But actually actually my job on the planet is to reframe this moment as success. The whole point of meditation is not to feel some specific way or to stop thinking, to clear your mind. The point is to become familiar with how wild the mind is so that the chaos and cacophony doesn't own you as much. So that's what the practice is. To sit, try to focus on one thing, very quickly you'll get carried away, and you start again and again and again. It's like a

bicep curl for your brain, and it really changes the structure of the brain. It's so interesting that this is something that is available to us. It's such a radical notion that we can have a different relationship to our thoughts and emotions. And so to me, this simple but not easy practice is a great way to learn how to get comfortable with our inner meteorology, you know, our inner storms so that they don't own us as much. And so let's say your inner storm is really kind of feeling like it's owning you because your stress at work has just gone like through the roof. I was just talking to a friend of mine that's having a really difficult time at work. And she talked about how, you know, I'm working out as much as I possibly can. I'm trying to engage in, you know, the best sleep hygiene, although I think we'll talk later about

strategies we can use to do that better. But like, I just am simmering when I leave the office. I'm just like hating work so she's going to sit down and she's going to meditate what does she do with all those simmering feelings what's the advice there well just to say this is very common i've had this feeling many times i remember uh in my 21 years at working of working at abc news i would have this experience often of leaving there was a there was a Our office was in the Upper West Side of Manhattan. There was a main entrance on 66th Street and a back entrance on 67th. And I used to take that exit. And it's a very leafy Upper West Side Street. I used to take that exit and walk to

the apartment that I shared with my now wife. And I remember having this thought every time I left and walked down this beautiful street. What was I so upset about? Why did I spend this whole day in agony? What is going on? And so I really relate to this experience your friend is having. And I don't want to say that meditation is some sort of panacea. I'm not a meditation bully. I think it's one of many options. And we'll talk about a bunch of options. But how it can work if you feel like

doing it is that, well, first of all, I find it such a relief because it's this dedicated period of time and it doesn't have to be long. It'd be a minute, two minutes. I tend to do a little bit longer, 20, 30, 40 minutes, but I'm like a semi-professional. But it's this one concentrated period of time where you don't have to take your thoughts that seriously. And that is such a relief. Over and over and over, you're sitting, trying to focus on something, like the feeling of your breath coming in and going out, and then you're ambushed by all the simmering. But you know your job is to eventually wake up. You might get carried away for a minute, two minutes, three minutes, the whole session, but eventually it's

going to end and you're going to wake up and realize, oh, this is just a set of thoughts with accompanying physical sensations that I can get increasingly familiar with, but they aren't facts. One of the great expressions that my meditation teacher Joseph Goldstein has is, pretend your thoughts are coming from the guy next to you, or from somebody, you know, in the apartment across the way, or from the cat in the corner, whatever. These thoughts, which have so much control over us us are actually, as Joseph says, little more than nothing. Unexamined, they blot out the sun. We believe them as facts, but examined for what they are, they have way less power. And so that's how sitting, for me, at least in my life, that's how sitting with the simmering can work.

It doesn't fix the objective facts of the situation. It can change your relationship to those facts. And by the way, the facts may not be so factual. Yeah. And I think sometimes we can see that through practices like meditation. I think for folks who struggle with meditation, there are also other techniques we can use to do that. I'm really taken by this idea of cognitive diffusion, which are all these funny ways to kind of see your thoughts as separate. I've heard a recent one, which is to take the most annoying pop song that gets stuck in your head, and then sing your thoughts to that song, which is, or to watch your thoughts,

I'm a big Star Wars fan, watch your thoughts, kind of scrolling up like the text of Star Wars, so it's kind of going away. I mean, it seems like those techniques are doing exactly the kind of thing you're talking about with meditation, right? Which is that you get some distance from them, you can sort of see them as thoughts. But another kind of way that meditation in particular, maybe even more so than cognitive diffusion can be helpful, I think, is to give some space to the simmering part that has to do less with the thoughts and more with the emotions, right? I know my friend from dealing with these job struggles has a whole host of sets of frustration and a shed of shame that she's kind of so pissed off at her job and like a kind of uncertainty,

right? This sort of scarcity mindset that you and I talked about in the last episode. There's just a whole host of yucky emotions that come when you're experiencing some troubles at work. How can the practice of sitting with these emotions be really helpful? Because in your investigation of the emotion, in other words, so you sit and you try to feel your breath and then you get overtaken by this blast of anger or regret or shame or whatever it is. And then in that moment, the move is, instead of going back to the breath, just take a look at like, what's happening? What is this thing I'm calling anger? So it's a bunch of thoughts, but it's also maybe a burning in my

chest, some heat in my ears, heaviness in my forehead. You're kind of taking with a seemingly solid monolithic thing called anger and putting it through a cheese grater because you're picking it apart. You're disambiguating the constituent parts of the anger. And in this way, it doesn't have as much power. You can actually see, and now I'm going to get a little bit mystical with you here, but you can see that to call it your anger is, in the words of one great Buddhist monk, a misappropriation of public property. It isn't your anger. Another way to think about this, and this comes again from the aforementioned Joseph Goldstein, a little linguistic trick you can run is, instead of of saying I'm angry, you can say there is anger.

You don't own any anger. Look, close your eyes and look for anything you own in there. There's nothing you own. You are just a process. Right. And so anger is a passing storm and you don't have to identify so deeply with it. You can see it as a, again, a meteorological phenomenon that is playing out internally. And please tell me if this is making any sense, but this is how I relate to all of it.

Yeah, and I think you're pointing out two ways that sort of sitting with our emotions can be really helpful, right? One is kind of getting distance from the fact that they're you. They're just something that exists. But the second part is this idea of it as a process, right, that it is changing. In times when I've kind of really tried to sit with certain emotions of mine, I did this recently with something I was experiencing a lot of sadness about. And I'm like, as much as I really deeply don't want to sit with this sadness, we just like sit with the sadness. And when you start, it can feel so intense,

you feel like this is always going to feel this bad and this intense and this painful. And then like within four minutes of meditation, my mind is wandering off to other stuff. And I quickly come back and notice like, oh, wait, I'm not experiencing the sadness as I said anymore. My brain is like in its stream moved on to something equally stupid and maybe ruminative, but it's not the sadness anymore. And then I have this moment of sort of shock like, well, that's weird. Like a few seconds ago, I thought this was going to stick around forever. And so I think that's the kind of thing that I often get out of it is less the kind of making sure the anger is sadness or whatever is not me because I struggle

with that to kind of see that it's not part of me that maybe I should use this technique of there is sadness as opposed to I'm super sad right now. But what I do often is experience is like, oh, this was not nearly as permanent as I assumed this would be. This was not nearly as intractable as I assumed it would be. And that part's been really helpful for me. That makes complete sense. And just to say, I think something that you and I have in common is we'll just throw lots of tools out there at people. And as I often say, like, view it as a menu, not a to-do list. Take what resonates with you and abandon what doesn't. And just to emphasize what you were saying, that a less esoteric or mystical way to see the benefits

of tuning into your difficult emotions is that they will pass. And there's a lot of relief on the other side of that. Can I jump into another tool in the toolkit that I know you've talked about? A technique that I know you've talked about in terms of knowing your motivation, which I think can be especially helpful when things on the job seem just like overwhelming. You're not even sure why you work there anymore. So what is knowing your motivation and what are some ways that we can engage in that technique? To me, this is huge and I'm very interested after I say a few words to hear what, if any, science there is on this and i'll just say from the beginning like under the idea of like having an intention always struck me as pretty

treacly or saccharine or just didn't speak to me and yet you know it's a i'm very deeply deeply influenced by the buddhist tradition or the many buddhist. And there's a lot about setting an intention in your mind, getting clear on what your motivations are, like what matters most to you as a North Star that can keep you going through the inevitable ups and downs of life. And so I've spent a decent amount of time in recent years thinking about, so like, what's my job? So when I wake up in the morning, I do this thing that if you told me 15 years ago I was going to do this thing, I would have coughed my beer up through my nose. But I have this little thing I say to myself, which is my job is to make awesome shit that helps people do their lives better and to work on the relationships in my life, including my relationship with myself. Those are my jobs.

in my life, including my relationship with myself. Those are my jobs. And to try to remind myself as much as possible that that's the goal. So if my latest Instagram post didn't perform, or if my podcast numbers are dropping off, or, you know, I gave a talk and it didn't go that well, or somebody I feel competitive with is kicking ass or whatever, I can maybe not be so stuck in that stuff. And instead, remember, like, what matters really? The hardest part of this, even harder than figuring out what matters to you, is to remember what matters to you and sort of not get so stuck in it. And so to have ways to remind yourself. And one of the things that I've done that's rather extreme is to get a tattoo on my wrist right next to my watch so that I'm looking down at my wrist all the time and I'm seeing these letters, F-T-B-O-A-B, which is pretty off brand for me in its earnestness. But it stands for, and this is a Buddhist phrase, for the benefit of all beings. That's my job.

This is a Buddhist phrase for the benefit of all beings. That's my job. Everything I do, every time I brush my teeth, every time I take a nap, every time I meditate, every time I do a podcast like this, like, yeah, I have all sorts of craving motivations that are absolutely still in there. But one of, but I, I, I, as, as much in my life as I've told myself a story about how I'm like inherently rotten, even I have altruism in me, and I want to nurture that aspect of my inner repertoire. And so to remind myself over and over and over again, it really helps me through the ups and downs of work. So is anything I'm

saying like based in actual evidence? Oh, yeah, tons of it. I mean, first is this idea that you're turning to your purpose, like a greater purpose, right? And there, yeah, tons of it. I mean, first is this idea that you're turning to your purpose, like a greater purpose, right? And there's just been tons of work in positive psychology about the power of having a purpose, having a life purpose, having that kind of bigger intention. And in some ways, like, it doesn't fully matter what the purpose is. It's just that you kind of see it as having one. It also seems like you build in various kinds of rituals and practices to remember this, because I thought you were going to say the hardest part is sort of, you know, kind of remembering to do it every day. Right. Where you have to kind of do it every morning. You've kind of put together these sort of tattoos that allow you to remember to do it every time you see it.

You're like, oh, yeah, purpose. I thought it was just my Instagram numbers. But nope, it was actually, you know, for the benefit of all beings. That's why I was doing it. So I think like the fact that you have this purpose is really important and meaningful. The fact that you remember to engage with it. But the fact that yours really is an other oriented purpose, I think, gives it kind of special power and special weight. You know, there's just lots of evidence that the typical way we think about what makes us happy, which is doing for ourselves or treating yourself or self-care, it just doesn't do the work that we think. Like the real kind of bang for your energy and your buck in terms of like what's going to boost your well-being is taking time to do stuff for other people.

I know on both of our podcasts, we've talked a lot about the feel good, do good effect, right? Where it's just like if you do stuff for others, you're going to wind up feeling better. And so making that sense of purpose, not about you, winds up making it easier to kind of engage with these things. Because then the parts that feel like it's about you have like, oh, your particular podcast numbers go down, or your talk didn't go well. It's like, it's not about you, right? If that talk resonated with one person in the big audience, then check, you know, you've done your work for the day, you can kind of feel good about it. And so yeah, so yet again, the science is taking off all the all the great advice you're giving us here. What do you think about the overlap between self interest and altruism? Because it feels like there's no bright line here. They're,

they're really inter woven in some profound ways. ways yeah I think this is a like deeply mistaken theory we have just in general about happiness and well-being like there's some pot out there of like you know the goodness that can happen in the world or the happiness that we can all achieve and I think our mistaken theory is often like well if I do something nice for somebody else then there's like less overall happiness in the pot. Like that happiness went to that person. And then there's like less for me. But that is just like all studies show that that's just not how happiness works.

It's like a growing pie. The more nice stuff we do for other people, they wind up feeling great. We wind up feeling great. That gives us more both of us more bandwidth to do nice stuff for other people. And I think we don't have this great growing the pie model of happiness, but that's sort of how it works. I think the key though, is that we have to kind of, it's helpful to remember that the motivation isn't about us. I think when we get in the headspace of like, I'm going to do nice things for other people and I'm going to do things for the benefit of all creatures because I

personally want to be happy, it sort of loses something. So I think really holding on to the motivation that like, it's not about you can be a profound step for ultimately in a very ironic way, it becoming absolutely about you and your well-being and your happiness. And I think this is so true at work, right? I mean, most of our workplaces offer lots of opportunities to do nice stuff for other people, right? Even if you're in the kind of worst capitalist sort of system, maybe you're creating a product that maybe somebody will enjoy, or at least you're making the shareholder some money, they'll be happy, right? I think we often don't frame kind of our success in business as being about other people. But so often, it really is whether that's, you know, just for the guy who works next to you on your team, and kind of making his life and his job a little bit easier. I think that can be really powerful because often in many jobs,

there are these cases where like, there are not a lot of wins or things are going bad, but you can also often do the one nice thing for somebody next to you. You can often make their lives a little bit easier and that can have profound effects on our own well-being. When everything kind of feels like it's going bad, turning to doing one nice thing for somebody else and making their lives a little bit easier, that can often be a remedy that we don't often think about, but can be super effective at making us feel a little bit better. Yeah, that all lands for me. I'm thinking a little bit about an expression that I heard from the Dalai Lama, and it goes

to this really interesting relationship between altruism and self-interest. And his expression is wise selfishness. And I like putting a positive spin on selfishness because it gets such a bad rap. But his point is that we're all selfish, like nature designed us that way. But if you want to do selfishness right, you will be altruistic because it is what will lead to your greatest happiness. And I just think that's so interesting. Like there's so much pessimism abroad in the land right now about the state of humanity, cynicism really about the state of humanity and the state of the world. And I don't think that's all baseless at all. I mean, I see the problems, climate change, polarization, war,

I mean, I see the problems, climate change, polarization, war, they're real. And there's so many bugs in the human design and they're on the news all the time. But there's this feature, which is do good, feel good, right? That we as social creatures feel good when we are useful to other people. And that's a huge deal that we can harness in our own lives and in our sense of optimism to the extent we can get there about the species. It's also just like the cure for so many other ills that plague us, right? Like so many people these days are talking about the loneliness crisis, which we experience all the time, but especially at work, right? People are reporting being lonelier at work than ever. And lots of research shows that when you self-report being lonely at work, you tend to be pretty unhappy at work.

But what's an incredible remedy for loneliness? Trying to reach out to other people, trying to cure loneliness in somebody else. If you take the action of doing that, now all of a sudden you wind up feeling less lonely. Doing nice for other people is kind of like this cure-all that we can just sort of employ. It should be kind of your go-to move whenever you're feeling bad about anything, honestly. Yes, service as an antidote to whatever ails us. Dan, you mentioned something really interesting that I'm sad to say plagues a lot of my work on happiness, which is this idea of kind of comparing yourself to other people. And the really sad thing when other people in your organization or in you know similar

organizations that are doing related work do really well sadly my instinct often isn't to be like that's so great that the total happiness of the world is going up my instinct is to be like this makes me feel really crappy about myself and and i know this is something that you've tackled and i know this is something that you have a specific meditation practice that can be really powerful for fixing over time so So tell me a little bit about that. I'm just laughing because it's hilarious, you know, and it's so useful to hear you just say it out loud that you're that you deal with it, because I think other people will feel like validated because it's so normal. And I've dealt with it a ton. You know, I worked in

television news for 30 years and saw so many people who were like, you know, coming up in the newsroom at the same time as me. And then this just absolutely kicked my ass and are so much better compensated and better known than than I ever got. And, you know, I really wrestle with it drove me nuts. And now, you know, I am like you kind of in the wellness influencer space. I don't even know what the right description it is for what we do. But, you know, it is very common that I'll look at somebody who maybe I have mixed feelings about who's kicking ass and and I can, you know, feel badly about myself or feel angry at them or feel like the world is unfair. And, you know, over time, I've I've really started to laugh at this. You know, over time, I've really started to laugh at this.

It really is just an ancient program inside of me that is trying to protect me. It's trying to help me be more effective, but it's not the right way to be effective. So I kind of laugh at it, say thank you to it, but try not to let it own me. And in Buddhism, there's a specific practice for dealing with this. It's called mudita, M-U-D-I-T-A. And it's an actual meditation practice for which I believe there's been a non-trivial amount of research. And the practice is you sit or lie down, begin the practice, maybe with a couple of deep breaths, and then start by envisioning one person who is experiencing success right now. And then you send them a set of phrases like, may your happiness increase, may your health improve,

may your success expand. It's the opposite of schadenfreude. You're just wishing for them to get increasingly happy. And then you move to somebody else and do it for somebody else. And then you move to another person and do it for another person. And it is so counterintuitive. It is said in the Buddhist tradition to be one of the hardest practices, because, you know, I'm sure we've all seen the t-shirts, you know, every time a friend of mine succeeds, a little part of me dies. It is so natural to be jealous, but there's a way to counteract that. And there's great joy in getting good at mudita. What you want is to become the type of person who people love to call with good news. That's who you want to be.

That's who I want to be. I want to be the type of person who I love. Like, I love people I can call when something good has happened to me, and that's who I want to be in the latter half of my life. And just one last thing to say about this. And I take this from the great meditation teacher, Sharon Salzberg, who's been really instrumental in promoting practices like Mudita in the West and then getting them studied in the labs. She says there's often a misunderstanding at the heart of jealousy, which is that whatever accolade or achievement has arrived at the doorstep of your enemy was somehow headed to you, but they intercepted it. But it's almost never true. And so just leaning into that reality and just laughing at the whole system

and working on developing the opposite intuition can be very helpful. I think there's also a different misconception that I talk to my students about, too, which is that that whatever you're feeling jealous of is inherently a really genuinely good thing with no downsides. Right. You know, the human mind sucks in part because we're constantly comparing our insides to other people's outsides. And that means we don't see the internal conflict that's going on like in all the time with them. But particularly during moments of these so-called successes, you know, last time you and I were talking about your so-called career earthquake and all the stresses that you were under when you're promoting 10% happier. I have to say, as another person in your field on the outside, I didn't see any of that. If anything, I was looking like, oh, man, Dan's got this cool company. It's going really well. Maybe I should have started a company. Why was I sitting on it? You know, he's doing so much better than me. Meanwhile, inside, you're not sleeping, your hair's going gray, everything's going badly. And I think that this is something that the research bears out, which is that when we try to do these social comparisons, we inevitably are doing them wrong. One of my favorite studies that I told my college students about brings college students into the lab and has them guess how many good and bad

things are happening to other people. So how many freshmen are going to a cool party or getting a really good grade or going out on a date with somebody they found really hot or whatever. And then they also ask the students, how many times did this happen to you? And what you find is that the students are constantly fantasizing that all these great things are happening to other people, when in fact, because we asked them how many times they're happening to them, we have the actual objective data on how much this is happening. And basically, everybody's simulating it wrong. We're assuming that like maybe 20 to 30% more great things are happening to people than are really happening to them. And the same thing with the bad things. We assume no bad things are happening to people. Nobody's

getting a bad grade or getting dissed by somebody they thought was really hot, but who didn't want to go on a date with them, et cetera, et cetera. But that effect is even bigger. We're completely getting wrong the number of bad events that others are going through. We assume that nobody's going through the bad stuff that we're going through. But yet again, everybody is. And so I think this is the second misconception. It's not just that those great things that were floating around somehow missed you. It's also that those things that seem great on the outside might not be so great if you were in them yourself anyway. Yeah. So it's like, would you call that a kind of cognitive reappraisal or reframing

to see that there's so many mistakes in our perception of other people? Yeah, I think so. And I think it can just, you can ask yourself the question, like, would this actually be really good? Or are there things that I'm missing there? This is something I know we talked a lot about the Buddhist ancient traditions, but this is a spot where the Stoics, I think, got it right, where they said, you know, look at the gifts that come to other people and look at the work that goes into those gifts and sort of ask yourself, would you want to be the one that put in that work? And that's actually something that I come back to a lot when I'm feeling, you know, really jealous of somebody, you know, or sort of, you know, I was feeling

this at the gym the other day where I was watching, you know, a colleague of mine who started going to the gym and they got fit super fast. And I was like, oh, man, I'm feeling so jealous. And I was like, wait a minute, wait a minute. How many times did they go to the gym? Like they're running this 10K. I don't want to run a 10K. It was like, okay, they can have their gift because I'm not willing to put in the work that I would need to do to get that gift. And I think, you know, that can be the kind of thing that we see on the job all the time, right? People are kind of getting these accolades at work, but we might want to ask ourselves the question, is that worth my work-life balance, right? Is it worth kind of putting in that much

time and energy and kind of emotional drama to kind of get the same thing that other people are getting? And when you ask yourself that question, sometimes the balance might suggest that that accolade just isn't really worth it, or it's not really you in the same way that you might have expected when you were just kind of fantasizing with the usual version of social comparison. I love that. I mean, just to say anecdotally on my side that in the three years since I left the news business, every once in a while, maybe like every two or three months, I'll hear that there's a job maybe coming free or something like that in the news business. And I'll go back to my wife and say, should I like put my hat in the ring? She's like, do you, do you really want to do,

like think about what would that, what would your life be like? And then I run through that exercise and I'm like, no, I don't. If you handed me that on a silver platter right now, I wouldn't, even though it would probably come with a shitload of money, what that would do to my life is not worth it.

And I think doing that calculation, realizing the grass isn't as green as we fantasize that it is, can be super important, right? I think especially in this day and age, I see so much of my college students where, you know, it used to be the case that people worked for very long periods of time at one company and in one organization. I think these days, it's much easier to hop on LinkedIn and just, you know, jump ship whenever things aren't feeling good. And that's not to say some people are in bad situations at work. And I think we'll talk about this moving forward that you really probably should be thinking about leaving and so on.

But if the leaving is just about this sort of fantasy life about this, like, you know, the grass is going to be greener at this other place, it might not actually be worth it, right? And so I think kind of trying to fight that cognitive bias and really do the hard work of simulating more accurately what things are like. I think that can help you not make the mistake of sort of jumping ship when that wasn't really what was necessary. Can I ask you about a kind of resentment that I think might be justified? Please. Which is, I believe, and you probably have the evidence closer to hand than I do, but I believe there are just all sorts of unearned benefits that people who look like me get in the workplace. And it seems to me like the frustration

that the folks who are in marginalized communities might feel, that seems pretty legit and seems like in a different category from some of the envy and jealousy and FOMO that you and I are talking about. Yeah, for sure. I mean, I think these are real structural inequities that exist out there, you know, just in terms of things like emotional labor that people have to do or kind of work that's not seen or kind of opportunities missed out on, you know, they're like, you know, sociological study after sociological study pretty much shows that people from marginalized communities experience that more. The question is kind of how to deal with that, right? And I think that there are many ways to do this. One is to make the structural

changes so that those differences don't exist and that those inequities go away. But until those structural changes are there, I think there's also lots of things that individuals can do to kind of handle this stuff. And I say that with care, because sometimes when I say that, people assume I mean, well, do that instead of fixing the structural inequities. No, we got to fix the structural inequities first. But a lot of the research shows that finding good individual ways to cope with those inequities wind up making it easier for you to have the bandwidth to fight the good fights and kind of make workplaces more fair and so on. But in terms of the individual strategies, I think they get back to some of the things that we were talking about before, right? Like it sucks to realize you're taking on this emotional labor. It's like feels

frustrating. It should make you angry. It should make you kind of sad that that's the state of the world. These are negative emotions that we might want to find ways to allow individuals to sit with. And I think to give yourself the grace to recognize that those negative emotions are there and that they're going to necessarily affect your performance, right? To give yourself the grace that you need to be compassionate with yourself to kind of fight these sort of things. We talked in the last episode a bit about some of Kristen Neff's work on self-compassion. More recently, she's just put out this new book on what she calls fierce self-compassion

which is this idea that like if we're going to fight all those inequities you and i were just talking about what we might need to do is to be kind to ourselves first that this treating ourself like a friend which might sign kind of wimpy or sort of not embracing you know the kind of real real kind of inequities we face with the appropriate anger that's normative in those situations what kristen neff would say is like, no, by treating yourself with kindness first, it can give you the sort of fierceness that you need, the kind of bandwidth that allows for that fierceness to sort of fight some of these problems. And so, yeah, I think those things are legitimate. We need to fix some of those, but we also might need at the same time, some individual strategies

to cope with the negative emotions that come from that nasty stuff so that we have the bandwidth to fix it down the line. That's really well said. And just to jump on it, I think a lot of people, when they think about self-care or self-compassion, any of it, and I hear this sense that it's self-indulgent to take care of yourself, but that's really not true. Like, if you care about your colleagues, and also managing work, and balancing that with your home life, if you care about all of that, like, it's hard to do that if you're a mess. You know, so you need to schedule and prioritize whatever self care it is that, you know, recharges your battery. That's not self-indulgent. That's mission critical.

One of those mission critical self-care practices happens outside of work time. It's sleep. Yes. really stressful time at work to make sure you're protecting your sleep. So first, maybe we walked through this a little bit last time, but can you share kind of what happened to your sleep during some of your recent career crises? Yeah. As I mentioned in the last episode, I went through a very painful, nearly three-year-long separation process from my co-founders at a meditation app that I was part of. It used to be called 10% Happier, and now the company's called Happier. The company's still going, and it's run by very

cool people. And I recommend everybody go check it out. So there's no ill will there. But the separation process was very hard, for me at least. And in that process, I dealt with a lot of anger and fear that led to insomnia, which of course made all of the anger and fear worse. I developed a few techniques that were helpful for me. Basic sleep hygiene, I think a lot of people know. It's helpful if the room is cold. It's helpful if you're not looking at blue light through your device in the hours leading up to going to bed. It can be helpful if you get direct sunlight early in the day. Exercise is very helpful in terms of tiring you out. So there are lots of tools that I think a lot of people are aware of. But can I jump in on that? Because this strikes me as a big, at least for me personally, this strikes me as a big case where there's cultural wisdom, but not cultural practice, right? Like I know all those things. Yeah. I mean, I make the room cold and I know I'm not supposed to look at my phone before bed, but I'm trying to get into bed. I'm ruminating about something that happened at work and I'm using the scrolling through whatever I'm scrolling through. Often it's Reddit, which is probably the worst possible thing to be scrolling through.

my ruminative mind shut off. And of course, it's really bad because Reddit's filled with all kinds of stuff that's going to make me even more anxious. Plus, I'm looking at this blue light. Plus, I'm sort of hyping myself up. So that's my technique. What do you actually do instead when the urge to kind of look at your digital devices

sort of wins out against this sort of cultural wisdom? Well, your point is very well taken. And I screw this up all the time too. So I don't want to present myself as some sort of avatar of sleep hygiene perfection. However, I think for me, what's been very helpful in like getting my shit together in this regard is tuning into the pain of not sleeping. I mean, it's just terrible. If I can just get in touch with how awful that is, it is a very good motivator for me to do some of the basic sleep hygiene and more. So the two things that were very helpful for me, one is walking meditation. I often talk about seated meditation, and I've described some practices where you can sit down or lie down and do meditation. But a lot of people either don't feel like they have time for this, or if you have ADHD,

you feel like you're crawling out of your skin. And so there is this very rich multi-millennia tradition of walking meditation, which I will describe very briefly. And there are lots of ways to do this, but the way I do it is I sort of stake out a patch of land in my house, maybe, you know, 10 yards. You can do this inside or outside, but, you know, it's nighttime and often in the winter, so I'm doing it inside. And I'm just walking back and forth. It's a long trip to nowhere. I'm walking back and forth very slowly. Now there's a way you can do this. That's really, really slow. That actually looks a little bit like paranormal activity or something like this, but I don't do that. I walk sort of zombie move? Yes, yes. Which is a venerable ancient tradition.

But I kind of walk somewhere between that and a normal pace. Slow walk. And I'm bringing my full attention to the feeling of my body moving. And then I'm getting distracted a million times and starting again and again and again. And one thing that can help you stay focused on the sensations of your body moving is to use soft little mental notes like lifting, like lifting your foot, moving, placing, thinking, planning. Just these little mental notes that a lot of people think, well, I shouldn't be thinking in meditation. But thinking is inevitable. You can harness the thinking process to get you closer to your direct sensory experience.

And that's what these little mental notes do. You'll get distracted and you start again and start again. The reason why walking meditation really helps, side benefit is that, you know, if you're tracking your steps, it will add to your steps. Um, for me is that my anxiety and anger often manifests as an overwhelming physical restlessness. So I'm tossing and turning in bed. And that's the worst thing you can do. Because if you stay in bed and toss and turn, you're teaching the brain that the bed is a place to struggle as opposed to a place to sleep.

So I will often do 5, 10, 15 minutes of walking meditation before bed. And if I get into bed and I'm tossing and turning, I'll get up and do more, even though it's totally, and I keep using this word counterintuitive, it's not what I actually want to do, but I know that it works. Second piece of advice is much quicker. And it goes back to this self-talk refrain that keeps coming up. I noticed that if I'm having trouble sleeping, I go into this catastrophizing, like tomorrow's going to suck, and oh my God, I have to get up at six, and I can't sleep. Just making these phantasmagoric movies about what's going to happen. Now I'm like, no, dude, you've been through this a million times. Even if you get no sleep tonight, you will be fine.

You have dealt with sleeplessness before. You've always survived. It will be annoying, but you're good. So get out of bed and do your walking meditation or get out of bed and watch TV. That actually is one of the pieces of advice. If you're struggling in bed, get up and do something fun. Read a book. Sometimes I'll even just like get some work done that I was worried about I wasn't going to get done tomorrow. When I'm totally exhausted, I get into bed and honestly, it is not uncommon that I get into bed and I start worrying I'm not going to fall asleep. And I do need to prioritize sleep hygiene is we know how terribly crappy it is when we don't get sleep. And we care about it so much. And so I can get into this terrible, the same ruminative cycle

where I'm like, oh, gosh, it's taking forever. You know, I'm going to get up and go out, but then I'm going to have even less time. And I'm running through my head of like all these terrible scenarios that are going to come up. But this act of just being like, it's going to be fine. It's okay. You've dealt with it before. Laura, you'll deal with it again. It's just so powerful, but very counterintuitive to just give yourself grace for this something that it feels like you're actively screwing up. But also recognize that your body just like sleep is this mysterious thing that comes when it comes and like, you don't have any control over it. That's not your fault. And so just like letting that be the way it is can be also a powerful strategy. Yeah, it's like creativity or looking for an idea. It's like

the muse will visit, but you have to create the conditions. Same with this mysterious sleep thing. Just create the conditions. And part of that is this relaxation that can be arrived at in a counterintuitive, there's that word again, way of giving yourself permission for it to suck and for you not to sleep. Very interestingly, as a brief digression, many people deal with sleepiness during meditation. And so I actually think giving yourself permission to fall asleep, yeah, like I might fall asleep and I'm not going to struggle with it. Once there's no struggle, things can happen. Once there are no expectations, things can unfurl. The mind is so poorly organized. Sometimes it's just like my evolutionary head. I'm just like, things can happen. Once there are no expectations, things can unfurl.

The mind is so poorly organized. Sometimes it's just like my evolutionary head. I'm just like, why does the mind built on resistance for things? Like we get mad at ourselves and that makes it worse. It just like would be so much easier if we came with reasonable operating instructions. I just hope the next version of the mind doesn't have all these features. But the thing is, yeah, I agree with you all the way. And the good news is that for millennia, really smart people have been thinking about how to deal with this quirky mind that natural selection has bequeathed us. So my job and your job really is to curate and present in compelling, sticky ways all of these techniques that come out of ancient wisdom and modern science. And so that is actually really good news. Well, speaking of kind of figuring

out compelling ways to explain dumb things about the mind, one of the things that World Mental Health Day folks pointed out is that, you know, these individual strategies, you know, they're great, but that might not be the most effective kind of intervention for promoting happiness at work. We can empower people to make the best of a bad situation. But if we can make the bad situation better, that would make most things better. And for this reason, employers and managers have this big role in mental health. So says the folks who came up with World Mental Health Day. And so I'm curious about your ideas for better training managers at work to support mental health.

And in addition to just being kind of a general good well-being mindfulness guru, I know this is something that you've thought a lot about in the organizations that you've run about how you can be sort of the best, most compassionate boss that you can be. And so tell me a little bit about how you've been thinking about that and any techniques that you've brought in to do that better. Well, I want to hear your thoughts on the techniques as more of like a mental health authority. I'm definitely an authority on my own experience. So I'll talk about that in terms of

having screwed this up a lot as a manager and I have made a lot of mistakes. Part of this by way of context is that I spent the vast bulk of my career as an anchorman where I didn't have any direct reports. I never had any direct reports. And then I co-founded this company, but I was not the CEO. I was a co-founder, but somebody else was running the company and had all the direct reports.

Now I have my own company and I have a lot of direct reports and I've made a lot of mistakes and I've spent a lot of time thinking about how to be part of the solution rather than part of the problem. And just in case anybody who works for me is listening, I know that I'm not perfect and I'm still making a lot of mistakes, but I have done a lot of work on this score. One thing I think about a lot is this term psychological safety, which is yet another of these terms that can sound kind of vague or gauzy or soft. But it really is a ton of hard data to show that this is the secret sauce. There was one big study done internally at Google that I'm sure you're aware of where they were trying to figure out, like, what is the common denominator among the best performing teams in this huge corporation? And for a long time, they could not figure it out. And they finally arrived on this mysterious ingredient, which is

psychological safety, which is the comfort that even the most junior person feels on any given team to speak up. And so I have spent a lot of time and continue to really struggle with this with somebody who, has my employees have pointed out has a very pronounced resting bitch face and can be kind of scary but really thinking hard about how can i in meetings call on the junior people in a warm and welcoming way make everybody feel included reward people who say the hard thing to me reward people who tell me when i'm screwing up. And I try to encourage my direct reports to tell me the truth. And then if they do, especially if they do it

publicly, to call them out in a positive way and say, so-and-so said, did this very brave thing. And they told me that I was not expressing much gratitude to the team recently. And I really heard that. And I'm grateful to that person. And I'm sorry and here's why I wasn't doing it. And so really trying to go hard at psychological safety is a big thing that I've thought about. And another thing is working on my communication skills. This is very much related. I have spent the last six years working with these two incredible people. They're a married couple. Their names are Mudita Nisgar and Dan Klerman. And they wrote a book called Let's Talk. And they developed a very simple, comprehensible and comprehensive framework for communication skills in the workplace and otherwise. They've come on my show a bunch. And I also just have a phone call with them every month

for six years. And I've really internalized their system. And one technique that's really been helpful in my marriage and in my work life is called reflective listening. And I'm sure you know what this is, Lord, but I'll say it for the listeners. It's essentially when somebody says something to you, you listen very carefully. Instead of planning what you're going to say next, you listen very carefully and then repeat back to them in your own words, very briefly, the bones of their message to you. And this does two things. One, it gives people, it gives your interlocutor what every human being wants desperately, although they may not know it, which is to be seen and heard. And the second thing is, it's a circuit breaker on your own reflexive, reactive response. You can't pop off because you have this assignment of reflecting. And so I have found that when I can do this with my colleagues,

especially the junior colleagues, it really helps people relax, feel seen and valued. Even if I deeply disagree, once I reflect them into submission, and I say that with tongue slightly in cheek, I can then say the hard things that they otherwise wouldn't be able to hear. Okay, so I just threw a lot at you. How does all that go down with you? No, no, I think it's really powerful. I think reflective listening is so powerful in part because not only does it make you not pop off, it stops that circuit breaker, but it can stop a kind of different circuit, which is this kind of misunderstanding circuit. Because sometimes someone tells us something, we hear something completely different, and we're reacting and popping off not to what they meant, but what we heard. And so I've heard a kind of addition to this technique, which is an addition to kind of having you sort of sum up in your own words as succinctly as possible what they just said. You sometimes follow that with, did I get that right? Or did I miss anything? And that allows this sort of cyclical activity, which is like making sure we kind of understand each other. Because sometimes with a junior

colleague, if you do that, it's like, oh, did I get that right? Or am I missing anything? They'll be like, well, yeah, you're actually missing this other part, which is da-da-da-da. And the second thing winds up being even more relevant, or it really changes your view. It's a reason you didn't think about before and so on. And so, yeah, so I think this iterative process of making sure you come to true understanding and true listening can be so powerful. And just having like kind of a really quick hack to do that is important because especially in busy situations, especially in sometimes high emotion situations or kind of high fear of failure situations, like the kind of thing we find at work. I think having one of these kind of quick go-to hacks of like, oh, no, no, my assignment right now is to do the reflective listening thing. Let me make sure I did it right.

It can just be the kind of go-to that I think eases everybody's minds. Game changer. I mean, think about it. Like, we're all our own cosmos, as Walt Whitman said. Right. We have this incredibly rich and complex inner life that we're not even fully aware of, that is influenced by all our ancestors and by the culture and by what happened this morning in our conversations with our spouses. on an individual mind in a workplace. And then you are trying to communicate from your cosmos through this unbridgeable divide of somebody else's cranium and cosmos. And to just honor how difficult this is and use tools that up the odds of success. I think it is such a winning recipe, especially for people of power in organizations, because the way I think about it, I've really tried to train myself that if there's a problem on my team, it's going to come from me ultimately. The fish is always going to rot from the head. to develop the reflex of taking the full responsibility for whatever's going wrong

on the team. Hopefully not to take it too far because sometimes things won't be my fault, but generally speaking, given how power works, that it is mostly going to be coming from me. Just a great little phrase to throw at you and for your listeners, especially listeners with power, to contemplate. This comes from a great executive coach named Jerry Colonna, with whom I've also little phrase to throw at you and for your listeners, especially listeners with power to contemplate. This comes from a great executive coach named Jerry Colonna, with whom I've also worked intensely for the last six years. This is a question to ask yourself once in a while. How am I complicit in the conditions I say I don't want? And as a manager, it's such an inconvenient question to ask yourself, but it really helps.

That's huge. And I think that's huge in part because when you're, I mean, what the psychological research shows is that when you're in positions of power, you sometimes can't see that complicitness. Like there's a sense in which privilege blinds you to all this kind of stuff. There's a really great book by the social psychologist Vanessa Bonds called You Have More Influence Than You Think. And she just talks about how we're just blind to the fact that our mild suggestions come off as like incredibly strong demands that people are in tears about in the bathroom because we don't, as a manager, maybe realize that we've said anything that like had that hold over people.

And so I think that that question of really doing the reflection of, could I see this from somebody else's perspective? Could I ask the question of, even if I don't realize it, what am I doing that might be contributing to the situation? It gives you a little bit of a lens into that influence that you might be having, a lens into that complicitness that if you didn't take the time to do that reflection, you otherwise wouldn't have. Yeah. Vanessa's great. And I had her on my show and she had to be a little cute, a lot of influence on me through her work.

But just to throw this back at you, like when the people behind World Mental Health Day talk about how, especially in a workplace, it's great to give people individual coping mechanisms. We do want to take a look at what the structure is like you with it being so steeped in the in the research. What do you think the answers are there? with it being so steeped in the research? What do you think the answers are there? Well, I think part of it is like this sort of managerial training to become better listeners, become better communicators. I think what you mentioned about psychological safety is huge. I often hear this framed both in terms of psychological safety, but also in terms of finding ways to create belonging at work, which just allows a sense of safety, a sense of trust more broadly. And so some of their recommendations are kind of a sense of safety, a sense of trust more broadly.

And so some of their recommendations are kind of about that of like, what can you do to sort of focus on thriving and belonging at work? And I think a big one beyond just sort of communicating is just finding ways to allow people to kind of connect on the job in ways that we don't expect. One of my favorite studies looking at the power of belonging comes out of Yad Emanuel Denev's work at Oxford University. He did this big study where he partnered up with Indeed and got job data on 15 million workers

at over 5,000 different companies to look at what promoted happiness at work. And what he found overall was that it wasn't people's salary. It wasn't having a good manager. It wasn't work-life balance. Those things mattered. But the biggest thing that mattered the most is your sense of belonging at work, which was defined in sort of two ways. One is your sense of kind of meaning at work, like what I do matters to

somebody, which ultimately is a question of like social connection and kind of mattering. But another one, which I didn't expect was the answer to the question, do you have a best friend at work? If you said yes to that, you're much more likely to say that you're happy at work. And I think this gets us to just a thing that we forget is important for thriving at work, which is the kind of connection that we bring to our jobs. You know, you and I in our podcast have both talked about the importance of social connection, but we forget that like, we're spending like half of our waking lives, a third of our actual lives, if not more, at work. And so if we're not finding ways to build those big connections at work, then we're probably missing out on a lot of the possible opportunities for social connection that oftentimes people aren't getting elsewhere.

is something that managers could do better, but also something that would help everyone thrive, because a lot of Jan-Emmanuel Deneuve's work suggested like, when you can allow for social connection at work as a manager, you wind up improving everybody's performance, and actually ultimately making the company more money. He actually has data from this Indeed survey that connects having a best friend at work to the stock performance of different companies. So companies that allow for more best friendships at work make the most money. And so I think this is another situation where it's kind of counterintuitive. You wouldn't think that that mattered so much for performance, but ultimately, it's the kind of thing that you do that improves performance, but also makes everybody feel better when they're on the job too. That's so compelling. But so what would I, what do I, for example,

my company, I have about 10 people between working on the podcast and working on my sub stack. And there's about 10 people all told everybody's remote. How would I foster an environment where somebody could even come close to making a best friend in that environment? Yeah, well, one thing that folks suggest is to like try to turn the virtual world into as much like the office situation like in real life as possible. And one of the things that I think we do badly in virtual situations is like we lose out on what would the normal social connection that would happen in a meeting type situation. Right. So if you're in a physical office and you show up for a meeting and everybody sits around at the desks, nobody is just like silently staring forward like you might do on a Teams meeting or at a Zoom meeting. You're kind of chit-chatting like, oh, that's a nice shirt. Like, oh, how was your weekend? Blah, blah, blah. I think we do that a little bit less in virtual environments because it's

kind of just a sort of strange environment. I think it's not as psychologically rich to have these kind of connections or the things you'd naturally talk about. But a lot of workplace psychologists who focus on social connection recommend, start your meeting with 10 minutes of that. It might feel like you're losing out on time and you're missing out on these important opportunities to do the work of the day. But the data on best friends at work suggests that if you make those social connections, you'll wind up kind of reaping the performance benefits that come with it. A second thing that promotes mattering is to really just kind of call out those moments where somebody does something great, or somebody does

something that you really appreciate. And this is especially true for the boss. So you talked about kind of being grateful when people, you know, make the hard point or say something that's really vulnerable. I think expressing that really openly, especially a point about gratitude is doing that in a way with reasons of why you appreciated it so much can be really powerful. So I just want to say that I really appreciated when you brought that up. It made me think a little bit differently because of X, Y, and Z reasons. And now it's actually going to cause me to do something different. And so thank you so much for bringing that up. That is just a subtle way of teaching people that what they did matters, that their performance

did something, it mattered to somebody else at the company. Another way to show mattering is just to kind of take into account people's day to days in ways that you might not expect. I was at a kind of corporate talk recently where I ran into a CEO who said that she uses a strategy as a really much bigger organization than yours. It wasn't 10 people, it was like 200 people of writing down everybody's birthday and spending the first 10 minutes of the day wishing whoever's birthday it was a happy birthday via email. And in addition to just saying like happy birthday, one thing about what they've done, you know, I just want to say, hey, happy birthday. You know, I noticed that you did well on the Q2 report. You know,

it's great that you guys are putting in so much work. Thanks so much. And what she said was that, yeah, it's 10 minutes of the day that she could have started diving into the normal work stuff. But she'd get back an email from each of those people that got that birthday email that said, oh my God, you made my day. Thanks so much. This person's shocked that the CEO of this big company knows her birthday and is saying something nice.

Those are the simple kind of psychological techniques that make people feel like it mattered that I showed up at work today. Like my behaviors on the job are making a difference for somebody. Maybe not like making a profit, but like people are paying attention. And I think those kinds of expressions can seem silly or they seem like they don't really matter or they're superfluous and they take away from the real work that we have to do on the job. But psychologically, they're really important. They contribute to mattering and they make people kind of feel like the work they do is kind of critical that there's psych to show up to work. I'm humbled as I listen to all this because I'm realizing that even with my 10 person team that I can fall short quite severely on this. And so it's really helpful for me personally to listen to everything

you've said. And I'm just remembering a story, very brief story of when my son was born almost 10 years ago. And Bob Iger, the CEO of Disney, sent me an email. And I was like a C-level anchorman at a very small part of Disney, at know, at ABC News, which is a tiny, tiny part of what Disney does. He sent me an email and I replied and he replied and I replied. We he actually took, you know, a non-trivial amount of his time as the CEO of one of the biggest corporations on Earth to really correspond with me about the birth of my child. And then I extrapolate from that to how often I fail to do that on my tiny team.

And it's really a good learning for me. Yeah, I think it's tricky, right? Because as managers, you're often, you know, you're stressed out, you're time famished, you're like, you know, kind of running around doing all this stuff that feels like it has to get done. And I think we just need to frame the social connection mattering parts as stuff that has to get done, too. And the kicker, though, is that ultimately, you know, that felt great for you that Bob sent you this email. I bet his day was made better. Right.

There are these kind of win wins that we're missing out on on the job because we're not focused on this stuff. But ultimately, we get kind of a kickback of that happiness boost as a manager by kind of doing more of this kind stuff and the sort of inclusive stuff for our employees too. You're a very convincing case, Laurie Santos. Well, Dan, thank you so much. I'm so grateful that you took the time to chat with me. I learned something new every single time I talked to you and I did this time as well. And so just huge gratitude. Thanks so much for coming on the show. Likewise. I send that gratitude right back at you and I learn a ton listening to you, especially in these last five to seven minutes. So thank you.