The Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos - Laurie Gets a Fun-tervention (Part Two: Beach Party)

Episode Date: October 11, 2021

Dr Laurie Santos doesn't have so much fun these days - which is really bad for her health and wellbeing. So Catherine Price (author of The Power of Fun: How to Feel Alive Again at http://howtohavefun.com/) is staging an emergency fun-tervention which will take Laurie to the beach and totally out of her comfort zone. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Pushkin. she's become my new guru. I need a guru because I'm on a mission. A mission to have fun. As a kid, I used to have fun all the time. I spent all day playing with friends, goofing around, and just doing lots of random activities that I enjoyed. But as an adult, not so much. That's why I've turned to Catherine. You see, Catherine is the author of a new book called The Power of Fun, How to Feel Alive Again. And I've asked her to use her expertise to give me an emergency fun intervention, or funtervention for short. So far, Catherine's taught me that fun, by definition, requires a combination of playful connected flow, and that those three parts of an experience are wrecked when you're feeling distracted. So my homework was to train my brain to focus better by finding

delights, those funny, beautiful, delightful things that are out there all the time, but we tend not to notice. But today, I'll be tackling a different problem. Embarrassingly enough, even when I have time to focus and be present, I often just can't think of anything fun to do. I've sort of forgotten the kinds of things I like and enjoy. Plus, I'm often so exhausted these days that a lot of the time I kind of just want to veg on the couch. So today I'll be rediscovering what feels fun and learning, as Catherine puts it, to feel alive again. But even though that's the goal, I'm worried there's a decent chance that my attempts at finding fun might actually kill me. What's the worst that can happen?

Well, I guess you could get eaten by something. No, no, I think like getting concussed or dying, but breaking your neck. Well, that's true. No, but yeah. Or at the very least, might kill my voice. Straight to the heart, and you're to blame. You give love a bad name. Bad name. Break from my heart, and you play your...

So with those slight spoilers out there, welcome to Dr. Laurie Santos' Extreme Funtervention, Part 2. Our minds are constantly telling us what to do to be happy. But what if our minds are wrong? What if our minds are lying to us, leading us away from what will really make us happy? The good news is that understanding the science of the mind can point us all back in the right direction. You're listening to The Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos.

I live in Philadelphia, relatively close to the Schuylkill River, which is a famous rowing river. And I had a neighbor who had been telling me how she'd been taking rowing lessons and there were baby turtles in the river. And I'm like, well, that sounds interesting. So a couple of years ago, I decided to try to learn to row. In her quest to have fun, Catherine joined guitar classes, drum practices and swing dancing workshops. She's an expert on pushing her boundaries in order to experience more fun. And getting out on the water was her most recent attempt. So I spent a summer biking up to Boathouse Row every Thursday morning

and taking lessons from this guy named Brian, who was this very funny rowing coach, very playfully sarcastic. Those mornings out on the water were full of playfulness and connection, with Coach Brian constantly joking with her through a ridiculous megaphone. Something about the megaphone, like, I just loved it. Rowing also gave Catherine lots of flow. She was consistently present on the water, paying attention to her movements so she didn't tip over. With these three elements of playfulness, connection, and flow in place, rowing was fun.

But don't be fooled. Fun isn't always about bright skies and perfect sailing. Consider, for example, the time Catherine went ahead with a row despite the dark clouds forming. Which was a dumb move. There was nobody else on this river. A torrential downpour started. But Catherine kept heading over to the spot where her beloved baby turtles hung out. But there were no turtles that day because they're not idiots. Her oars were extra slippery that day. And all of a sudden, she tipped over.

One of those things where you know it's happening and you cannot do anything about it. And I was like, I am going into the Schuylkill. Which, side note, is like not a river you really want to swim in. The occasional body fished out of this thing is not ideal. you really want to swim in. The occasional body fished out of this thing is not ideal. Taking a front somersault, fully clothed, into very cold, filthy water, in the middle of a huge storm, sounds like my absolute nightmare. But the thing was, I actually was having fun. Like, in retrospect, I'm like, I was just giddy when we got back to the dock, and I started announcing to everyone that I had

fallen into the river. As I cringed at the idea of looking stupid in front of complete strangers, Catherine got to the moral of her story. There's a lot of moments in life where if you can embrace the absurdity of the objectively unpleasant situation, it's actually pretty fun. For the next step of my funtervention, Catherine wanted me to follow her lead

and try out a new hobby, ideally one that I'd be reasonably bad at in order to ensure that I experience those juicy moments of absurd unpleasantness. And I reacted to this suggestion with terror. As a busy adult, I haven't tried out something completely new and challenging in a very, very long time. And I'm guessing I'm not alone here, but I also tend to beat myself up when I'm not

immediately good at something. Turns out this combination of terror and self-criticism is yet another fun killer. I mean, if you're self-conscious, you can't let yourself go, and you can't really be playful, and it's harder to be connected. But the biggest way our self-judgment can impede fun is by reducing our flow. Negative self-talk clogs up our brain's inner monologues with all those rapid-fire thoughts of, oh my god, I suck so badly at this.

That's going to not make it possible for you to be present. And again, if you're not present, you can't be in flow. And if you're not in flow, you can't have fun. I did want to have more fun. So I reluctantly agreed to Catherine's challenge. But I needed a way to overcome all my angst about starting a new hobby from scratch. So I decided to tag in a different kind of expert, someone who's a pro at being a beginner. This frightening email comes over from the elementary school.

We're having a parent talent day. You know, can you come in and do something? One fateful day, journalist Tom Vanderbilt got a request that changed his whole approach to life. What unique talent could he show off to a room of 25 first graders at his daughter's school? He was a best-selling author. But I couldn't really go in and write a paragraph in front of a bunch of kids in a class. We all have our job resumes, but if you step away from just your career achievements, as important as they are, you know, what else are you doing in your life?

And mine felt a little bit bit a little bit sparse. Tom had the painful realization that he hadn't learned anything new in a long time, which was ironic since Tom spent a lot of his time chauffeuring his daughter from chess class to swim practice and then piano lessons. While she was off having fun and building new skills, Tom sat there waiting for her class to finish, feeling bored and mostly screwing around on his laptop. Here I was taking her to all these sorts of lessons, instilling in her, you know, how important it was, I thought, to learn new things, to be as wide ranging as you can. And in my own life, I had kind of frozen in terms of learning these ambitious new skills,

you know, sometime many decades ago, you know, sort of too late, why bother? I'm never going to be that great. Sort of felt like it was a bit hypocritical of me to be telling her this and not doing it myself. Tom realized that, like many of us, he was suffering from what Harvard psychologist Dan Gilbert calls the end-of-history illusion. I think people often think they are the finished person they are going to be at any moment. Gilbert and his colleagues found that if you ask people, hey, how much do you think your personality, your preferences and your core values are going to change in the next 10 years? Most people say they're not going to change all that much. They assume all these really core things about their identity are fixed, that their history, in a sense, has ended.

But if you ask the same people, hey, if you look back at yourself 10 years ago, how much have your values, personality, and preferences changed? People usually admit that they're really different than they were a decade ago, that they've changed a lot. This is the end of history illusion. We don't think we're going to change and grow much, but we're wrong. I don't have to be stuck as this person that doesn't know how to do X, Y, and Z. I can start to try to do those things even though I'm middle-aged. That's why Tom decided to devote the next few years to becoming a professional beginner, to picking up all the tricky new skills he never got around to learning before.

It's also why he's going to try to convince me that face-planting into the water over and over again might just be the thing I need for the next step of my funtervention. Surfing is one of those great things where even the wipeouts are quite fun. The Happiness Lab will be right back. I used the example of the movie The Queen's Gambit, which I thought was a great film, very popular film on Netflix. It seems like everyone saw that. Tom Vanderbilt finds it a bit sad that people devoted hours and hours to watching a drama about someone who learns to play chess. Instead of watching The Queen's Gambit, if you tried to take five or six hours of chess instruction,

you could actually pick up a fair amount of the game. After years on the sidelines, watching his daughter learn stuff, he decided to get involved too. I signed up a coach of all things to try to teach her to play chess, and then I jumped on, which was a bit strange. You had these two beginners

that were separated by, you know, four decades. Tom didn't stop there. He learned how to sing, how to draw, how to deep water swim, how to juggle, how to surf, and since he ended up losing his wedding ring while surfing, how to make jewelry. He chronicled all this in a book called Beginners, the Joy and Transformative Power of Lifelong Learning. Tom says it's less of a how-to book and more of a why-to book. And the why has a lot to do with the fact that learning can make

us feel way more present. Being a beginner is almost by definition mindful because you go into an activity really knowing nothing. You know, you're lost, you're sort of clueless. And that demands, you know, almost total attention. And that also felt very powerful to me because, you know, this idea, especially in contemporary society of being so endlessly distracted, you know, I would draw for three hours and it felt like 10 minutes. And just that having that sense of deep engagement was also really refreshing. Being an amateur also brought Tom the excitement that comes from novelty. He had to learn about ocean waves and musical scales and the bendable properties of metals.

The freshness of all these new topics made it really easy to focus. I equate it in the book to sort of falling in love. Fittingly, the word amateur comes from the Italian amatore, to love. And even that more pejorative sounding term for a beginner, dilettante, comes from the Latin, delictare, to delight. And if you listened to my last episode, you know experiencing delight is pretty good for your happiness. You're just plunging into this new world with new lingo, new equipment. You're moving your body in new ways.

You're thinking in new ways. And I feel like your brain is sort of on fire. And the science shows that firing up your brain in this way is probably a good thing. Research by the psychologist Denise Park has found that learning new skills may help prevent the usual cognitive decline that comes as we age. She had groups of adults learn a skill collectively in a class, and she had other groups of adults get together and just socialize. The older adults who took a class on photography or quilting

did significantly better on tests of memory and processing speed than adults who merely got together. I find these results really striking. I mean, you wouldn't think that learning a specific skill, like how to stitch or when to adjust a shutter speed, would have a big effect on more important general cognitive abilities. We mostly just start new things because we think they'll be fun. But becoming a beginner in a random activity seems to give us a bigger cognitive leg up than we realize. But hobbies like these don't just boost our brains.

Tom found that his new pursuits also had a surprisingly positive effect on his sense of personal identity. There's this interesting thing that happens when you take up these skills, that in the beginning you're thinking of them purely as a verb. I'm trying to surf, I'm trying to do this. But then at some point, feel comfortable to shift to the noun phase. And you say, you know, I'm a singer. I'm a surfer. I've expanded instantly the sensation of who I am. And the science shows that this self-expansion can enhance something else that's known to boost our happiness, our relationships. Couples who participate in novel, challenging

activities together experience boosts in relationship satisfaction. The fun that comes from being a beginner seems to be contagious. But the biggest benefit of becoming a beginner was something I really needed for my own fundervention. Learning a new skill is a great way to fight all our self-judgment and perfectionism. I like to quote the writer G.K. Chesterton who said, you know, anything worth doing is worth doing badly. Tom's book chronicles lots of cases when we learn best when we're doing activities that teeter just on the edge of what we find impossible. He saw this firsthand when he started hanging out with a population that finds lots of things impossible. A group you might consider to be the ultimate beginners. Babies. I spent some time with Dr. Karen Adolph at NYU studying, you know, how infants learn to walk and to move. And one of

the keys to this learning process is failure. I mean, they fail a lot. Kids have been photographed falling up to 70 times an hour. So we should just embrace failure. The problem, of course, is that failure doesn't really feel good, which is why Tom practices self-compassion, that act of recognizing that you're human and talking to yourself compassionately instead of like a critical drill sergeant. Larger than the physical obstacle is that mental obstacle.

I think positive self-talk is a key strategy in all this. As I heard Tom talk more about cultivating positive self-talk and the benefits that come from embracing failure, I decided to choose a hobby for my funtervention that, at least for me, really felt like it was on the edge of impossible. Something I thought I definitely have no possible way of being good at. And since it was summertime, I also liked the idea of an activity that involved hitting the beach. And so I decided that I, a middle-aged, mostly out of shape, ivory tower dwelling professor with bad knees and no coordination, was going to try surfing. I announced my decision to Tom, explaining how sure I was that I would absolutely suck at the sport.

Have you ever actually tried to surf before? Like, so no. Like, so no. Like, so no. So this raises an interesting point that you're saying you know you're going to be bad at it, which is already that negative self-talk coming up. All right, touche. I was already admitting defeat in my head before I'd even gotten started. You really don't know how you're going to be because you don't know what that thing is, but you may actually try it and discover that you're actually adept at it or that you take to it more than you thought you could. Maybe Tom was right. Maybe I would be better at

this than I expected. Maybe I'd be so good at surfing that I'd drop the whole podcasting thing and just become a full-time beach bunny. Maybe I'd be a total natural on the board. That's probably how it's going to go. Right, Tom? I wasn't able to get up on the board on my first afternoon out. I spent a lot of time on my knees, you know, sort of almost standing. I spent a lot of time falling. Surfing is a very difficult activity. The ocean is a very dynamic place. You are probably going to fail. That wasn't the rounding endorsement I was expecting. I'm not going to lie.

I'm not going to sugarcoat it. You're going to look foolish. You might get hurt. But we have the ability to get back up and move on. Apparently, I'd picked an activity that really would test my ability to be self-compassionate in the face of sucking badly. But Tom still thought I should go for it. Because sucking badly was kind of the

point. What do you have to lose? In fact, you have to gain quite a bit, I would argue. Surfing badly is still a very fun activity that will bring you joy. You don't have to be amazing at it. Immediately after my chat with Tom, fate seemed to intervene. My college friend Lucy texted me. with Tom. Fate seemed to intervene. My college friend Lucy texted me. Her family was headed to a nearby beach house. Beach, of course, meant waves. And waves were just the thing I needed for the next step of my funtervention. I asked Lucy if she'd join me for a surf lesson. Let me think about it. That was her noncommittal response. Actually, she followed up, my husband says I have to do this, so I'm in. Before she could change her mind, I went online and found the Little Compton Surf Shop,

a small family-run place. What I liked most about this particular surf shop was the huge quote on their webpage that read, The best surfer out there is the one that's having the most fun. I was ready to be just that best surfer. I booked a lesson for two. Operation Funtervention Surfing Safari was on. And you'll get to hear just how it went when the Happiness Lab returns in a moment. The waves aren't too big, which is fun. Yeah, they're pretty good to get our waves to get.

One warm August morning, I headed to Rhode Island with my good friend from college, Lucy Bisignano. Armed with her social support, a beach towel, a wetsuit, and the strongest hairband I own, I was ready to become the embodiment of the immortal words of George Bernard Shaw, that man progresses in all things by making a fool of himself. Hey, I'm Lori. Lori? Yes.

Truck. This is Lucy. Hello. This is our producer. She's recording. Oh, no way! How's the wind? It's not, it's like really bad, actually. We met our surf instructors for the day, and I handed my recording gear off to Lucy's daughter, Alice, who agreed to act as my guest producer. Or at least to try to. The wind wasn't really helping us all that much. After some safety instructions, warm-up jumping jacks, and practice pop-ups on the shore,

we grabbed our boards and paddled out into the sea. Oh my gosh, we got so close! Oh my gosh, we got so close! Yeah! So close! Okay. My lesson was amazing. Not because I caught a bunch of killer waves.

Like Tom Vanderbilt, I didn't really figure out how to stand up on the board during that first lesson. I also wiped out pretty badly trying. I got more salt water up my nose in that hour and a half lesson than I have in my entire life. These things should have felt unpleasant, but they didn't. The whole experience was so fun. Unlike with most other activities I've done, I was able to focus not on the product, being able to catch a huge wave, but on the process, how it felt to be lying on the board, how I was balancing better and better as the waves rolled by, how fun it was to chat with my surf instructor, and just how nice it felt to be in the sun and the waves on a perfect summer day.

I expected my arms and legs to be sore afterwards. And they were. For days, actually. But the thing that hurt the most after my lesson was my face. From smiling and laughing so much. I was excited to tell my guru, Catherine Price, about my funtervention's surfing success. That I did something that I was really bad at, and that at times was absurdly unpleasant, but that it wound up being one of the most fun things I've done in a long time. But Catherine

didn't want me to rest on my laurels. She thought it was now time to move on to the final step of my funtervention, discovering ways to find more everyday fun. My first surfing lesson was a total blast. But as a busy professor, I probably couldn't spend every day driving across state lines to hit the waves, which raised a question. How could I start finding more fun each and every day? So the universal definition of fun, I would argue, is that it's a state of playful connected flow. But each of us find that state through different things. And something that you find fun, I might not find fun at all and vice versa. That is the purpose of what Catherine

calls the fun audit, examining your own personal fun history. Catherine recommends getting a notebook and journaling about past times in which you experienced true fun. What were those so fun moments that you treasure? List them out and analyze them in detail. Who was there? What was the setting? What were you doing? Dig into them like a private investigator. And once you have that, once you have a sense of the people and the activities and the settings that often are associated with fun for you, you can go to the next level, which is what I call figuring out your fun factors. And those are the characteristics of those people or those settings or those activities that are in some way responsible for the fun. Doing my own personal fun audit with Catherine was, perhaps not surprisingly, kind of fun.

I told her about goofy Halloween parties that I had with my grad school roommates, trips to a boardwalk video arcade with my husband, the time my producer Ryan and I were unexpectedly given a rental sports car and got to drive around San Francisco listening to Duran Duran on repeat. And one of my most treasured SoFun memories, which happened when I traveled to Texas for a conference a few years ago. So there's this movie theater in Austin called the Alamo Drafthouse. They have a whole set of things called 80s sing-alongs where they play music videos from the 80s that they've edited to have the text. So it's kind of like karaoke where you can see what the lyrics are, but you're supposed to sing over the music videos. where you can see what the lyrics are, but you're supposed to sing over the music videos. And they give you like 80s gear and glow sticks and like inflatable microphones and all these things.

And this is like the most fun I've had in my life. So these are just like... Oh my gosh, she's got pictures. Some images. Oh wow, there's costumes. So these are my grad students. You can see the costumes, inflatable mics and things like that. This is me.

You see... There's a green inflatable guitar and a pink like that. This is me. You see. There's a green inflatable guitar and a pink hair bow. Yes. That looks amazing. Analyzing the common features of all these events, looking for what Catherine calls the fun factors, I noticed a few important commonalities. All these fun times were social, and most of them had an active element, like dancing or moving my body. There was also a lot of spontaneity involved, like trying something new or traveling to a new place. My soul-fun activities also involved a healthy dose of absurdity.

Think inflatable microphones, or getting a ridiculous sports car, or the crazy costumes I had at my 80s sing-along. But there was one specific fun factor that really surprised me. It seems like one of my fun factors that I wouldn't have expected, actually, is music, which is surprising because I'm not musically inclined at all. I don't play an instrument. I don't think of myself as a good singer. But when I think to moments of peak fun, they have this element of music. Finding surprises like these is just the sort of insight a fun audit can bring. And everyone's audit's going to look different. You might detest music and costumes, but might really love being physical, or being out in nature, or taking risks. The key is to figure out the specific fun factors that

make up your own personal recipe for fun. But Catherine's found that we also need to analyze our anti-fun factors. There are characteristics that if those characteristics are present in an experience, you're probably not going to have fun. And I think it's very important to put some attention into identifying them because in a lot of cases, other people might find them fun and you might find yourself getting dragged along to these experiences and then wondering why you never had fun. Thinking about my own experiences,

I realized that one of my key anti-fun factors is competition. If there are games that we're playing that are cooperative or that are just about the absurdity of the game or something, I'm really into it. But when a game has like obvious winners and losers, it's like less fun for me. Just as with fun factors, your own anti-fun factors are going to be really personal.

You might love competition, but to test the beach, or getting dirty, or any activities that involve a lot of preparation or equipment, there are lots of things that could be an anti-fun factor. And that's why it's so important to put time into thinking about what you liked and didn't like in the past. Because the better you understand these things, the easier it will be for you to spend your time wisely, frankly. And if you can understand that, then you can make different choices about how you're going to spend your leisure time, which while we do have, I think, more available to us than we realize because we're wasting a lot of it right now, it is limited. I thought back to how I often spend my own free time when I get a break.

I tend to do something passive, like plopping down on the couch and watching Netflix or reading a book. Leisure activities like that are relaxing, but they're definitely not fun in the playful, connected, flow-inducing sense. And they usually don't involve almost any of the fun factors I just identified. My fun audit revealed that to get more everyday fun, I need to be doing more stuff that involves music or having friends around

or taking part in activities that feel a bit more physical or spontaneous. I also need to find ways to recreate that sing-along from my Texas trip, which was a fun factor that Catherine supported more than I had expected. You and I clearly share a lot of fun factors, like a lot of them, because that looks like my dream fun. I want to be there right now. And that's when Catherine got the idea for the final step in my funtervention. right now. And that's when Catherine got the idea for the final step in my funtervention.

Since 80s sing-alongs seemed to be the magical confluence of all my fun factors at once, Catherine thought it would be good, purely for scientific purposes of course, to experience that true fun moment right there in my house. Luckily, I just happened to have some old inflatable microphones from that trip lying around. I just want to be with you. We were both a little rusty, but our impromptu sing-along was awesome. But since you've been gone... Our spur-of-the-moment sing-along only lasted an hour or so. But having that moment of true fun right in the middle of my day wound up making me feel totally alive.

For days. Oddly enough, taking a short break to privately croon like a rock star made me feel even more productive through the rest of my work week. Realizing my love of sing-alongs also took me right back to where the story began. As a kid, I was obsessed with singing songs from the Peter Pan musical. Back then, I thought I'd never grow up. I believed I'd never turn my back on fun. I never thought adult me would prioritize work and productivity over the delights of goofing around.

Turns out that that wise, fun-loving kid wasn't entirely lost. She was just hidden below the surface. All it took was a funtervention and an inflatable microphone to set her free. I hope hearing about the power of fun inspires you to figure out some ways that you can increase playfulness, connection, and flow. Why don't you take some time to think about

the moments you remember as so fun? Do your own fun audit and make sure you also pay attention to activities that currently pass for fun in your life, but don't actually feel all that good. By taking time to identify your own personal fun factors, no matter how surprising, you can better understand what they are and proactively seek them out in your daily life. You can even find some new hobbies that make you feel a little bit more alive. And the science shows that getting more fun in your life isn't just going to be fun.

It can also increase your productivity. And as I saw firsthand during my surf lesson, making more time for fun can also help you be a little bit more compassionate with yourself, which is something we all need these days. And so that's a wrap for season three of the Happiness Lab. But we'll be back in a few months with more science-based tips that you can use to feel better. In the meantime, I'll be setting aside my podcast mic to get in some quality time with my inflatable mic instead. Katherine, let's do this. Thanks to you. Thanks to you.

Now I can. Now I can. I can fly to the world. I'm free for the first time. I'm so moving on. Yeah, yeah. Thanks to you. Thanks to you.

Now I get what I know. You should know. Now I get what I want. The Happiness Lab is co-written and produced by Ryan Dilley. Our original music was composed by Zachary Silver, with additional scoring, mixing, and mastering by Evan Viola. Joseph Fridman checked our facts. Sophie Crane McKibben edited our scripts.

Emily Ann Vaughn offered additional production support. Special thanks to Mia LaBelle, Carly Migliore, Heather Fane, Maggie Taylor, Daniela Lucarn, Maya Koenig, Nicole Morano, Eric Zandler, Royston Berserve, Jacob Weisberg, and my agent, Ben Davis. The Happiness Lab is brought to you by Pushkin Industries and me, Dr. Laurie Santos.