The Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos - Laurie Has Fun... Part 1 ICYMI

Episode Date: August 7, 2023

Listener Natalie Robinson was worried she and her fellow running club members weren't having enough fun - life was just getting in the way. But what could she and her friends do? They found inspiration in the two episodes of The Happiness Lab dedicated to Dr Laurie Santos's own quest to regain the fun and playfulness of her youth.  So here's another opportunity to listen to part one of that story again.   See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Ugh, we're so done with New Year, New You. This year, it's more you on Bumble. More of you shamelessly sending playlists, especially that one filled with show tunes. More of you finding Gemini's because you know you always like them. More of you dating with intention because you know what you want. And you know what? We love that for you. Someone else will too. Be more you this year and find them on Bumble.

Pushkin. Oh, Hannah Montana. Oh, Miley Cyrus. I recently had a fun afternoon in the studio with members of a Massachusetts running club. Oh, hot. So cute. Ryan Gosling. I don't often have this much fun during a recording session,

but having fun was actually the topic we'd all gathered to discuss. You see, even though they started out as a running club, the members have started to meet for some very different activities, inspired by something I talked about on the Happiness Lab. I remember in your podcast you were saying, like, I'm a fun person, but I don't really have that much fun. This is Natalie Robinson, and she could totally relate to the lack of fun I was experiencing in my life. When the kids were little, it was so easy to have fun. Like, you take them to the zoo, you take them to the water park. And then when they get older, there's less things to do that are that pure fun. And so when we heard your podcast, we were like, yeah, are we fun? Like, do we even have fun anymore? Like, let's have more fun. Natalie told the rest of her running club about what she'd heard on the Happiness Lab,

that you could inject playfulness and fun back into life with a little bit of deliberate effort. And so they got together and planned fun interventions, or what I called in the podcast, funterventions. Scavenger hunt was definitely a lot of playfulness, like because we engaged with the public. Like we had to like, I remember like one of them was like pretending you're a duck and you have to cluck around people that was the most playful the runners of Franklin Massachusetts are a great group of friends and they're having an absolute blast with their funterventions if you want to hear their tips for having more fun go back and check out our last episode right now though I want to give you an opportunity to hear the episodes that inspired Natalie and her running friends. It's a two-part show and a very personal

story of how I realized I'd let the fun drain out of my life and vowed to regain some of the playfulness of my childhood. But I should warn you now, the podcast does contain my attempts at singing. I hope you still enjoy it anyway. I'm about to watch a VHS tape that I haven't seen for more than 35 years. It's the dress rehearsal of a play I took part in when I was 10 years old, the 1985 New Bedford High School Drama Club's performance of Peter Pan, the Musical. My mom somehow finagled a way for me to audition, even though I was only in fourth grade, and I didn't really know how to act or sing or dance.

But I got to star as the rabbit. If you've seen the play and don't remember a rabbit being involved, that is because, as far as I can tell, the rabbit is not an actual role in Peter Pan the musical. I think the directors just made it up. not an actual role in Peter Pan the musical. I think the directors just made it up. My entire part involved hanging out on the back of the stage silently, pretty much blending into the Neverland background. Why would any self-respecting high school drama teacher go to all that trouble for a talentless 10-year-old kid? I think it's because after meeting me, they couldn't really say no. You see, back then, I was obsessed with Peter Pan. My family had the album, which I had worn out by listening to it over and over and over again.

Our home movies are filled with me forcing my older cousins to take part in impromptu performances, always with me playing Peter Pan. Marvel! Peter Pan! Pan. When I was four, my mom left my newborn brother at home in Massachusetts to take me to Broadway to see the play. My mom says that when I got back to the hotel, I spent the entire night jumping between the room's two beds, claiming that I was flying to Neverland so that I could have fun and stay a kid forever, just like Peter Pan. I distinctly remember my mom's reaction that night.

As I was jumping from mattress to mattress, she couldn't hold back tears. When I was a kid, I never really understood why. But re-watching the musical as an adult, I finally got what made my mom sob. If you haven't seen the musical, the plot involves Peter Pan taking Wendy to Neverland to have a bunch of adventures. Think pirates, lost boys, all that stuff. But eventually, Wendy wants to go back to her normal life. So Peter takes her back to London and promises he'll come get her for more adventures soon. But when Peter finally returns at the end of the play, he's devastated. Even though Wendy

promised she'd never get older, she accidentally grew up. And Peter can't believe it. He tells middle-aged Wendy that she's not allowed to go back to Neverland and have fun ever again, because she's too grown up. to Neverland and have fun ever again, because she's too grown up. Watching the play in my 40s wasn't as fun as doing so as a kid. In a turn of events that would surely be mind-blowing to my 10-year-old self, I have gotten old. Like middle-aged Wendy, I now have a job and a mortgage and responsibilities to worry about. Even though I clearly planned to prioritize having fun forever, that didn't really happen. These days, I don't have time to jump around on mattresses or lead fake musical sing-alongs with my cousins. Most of my

days are so busy, it doesn't feel like I have time for any fun at all. And that realization is pretty depressing. And kind of ironic. Because I used to pride myself on being fun. My grad school roommates and I threw goofy theme parties several times a year. My husband and I won our engagement ring playing skee-ball in a cheesy beach arcade that was literally called the Fun-O-Rama. I used to have a lot of fun, but lately, not so much. I haven't thrown a ridiculous party in some time, and I haven't been back to that beach arcade

in years. In fact, full disclosure, the last time my husband and I did visit, I secretly hid outside while he was wrapped up in some pinball game and answered my work emails. So, what happened? Am I as doomed as middle-aged Wendy was in that musical? Are we all destined to miss out on fun as an inevitable part of getting older? Or are there ways to prioritize a childlike sense of goofiness and adventure well into our later years? In this first-ever double episode of the Happiness Lab, we'll learn that it is possible to rediscover how to have fun.

And our evidence will come not just from the scientific literature, but from a much more personal experiment. Because over the next two shows, I will become the subject of a fun intervention, or funtervention for short. And my unorthodox attempt at finding more fun, which, spoiler, is going to involve inflatable microphones, cats on leashes, tomatoes on planes, and a New England surfing safari,

will wind up having a much bigger effect on my and other people's happiness than I ever, ever expected. 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 Sanders. Lab with Dr. Laurie Sanders. The idea for my funtervention came one summer morning when I was engaged in a not very fun, one might even say soul-sucking activity. I was checking and then immediately rechecking my email. Refreshing your inbox when you know there's probably nothing new

is kind of like when you look in the fridge over and over, pathetically hoping there'll be something else to eat. Embarrassingly, I often find myself doing this whenever I'm bored or avoiding some writing project that feels hard. And that's when it happened. A new email did appear. One with an innocuous subject line. Will you help me with my next book? I promise it will be fun. It was a newsletter from one of my favorite past podcast guests, the journalist Katherine Price. Katherine's the author of How to Break Up with Your Phone. In the book, she argues

that we'll only find true happiness if we put some work into developing a better screen life balance. Katherine would definitely not be a fan of the fact that I was sitting there refreshing my inbox. So I was already feeling a little called out when I received her message. But as I read on, that feeling got even worse. Dear friends, I'm at work on a new book and I'm writing to ask for your help. The book is about fun. More specifically, I'm writing about how far from being frivolous, having fun is

absolutely essential to a joyful and meaningful life. The book Catherine was working on seemed to be tapping into the very thing that I and so many other people were missing out on in adult life. I'm hoping you can help me out. I'm recruiting a global group of people that I'm calling the Fun Squad. My hope is that in addition to helping me with the book, you'll also get to experience some of the benefits of fun for yourselves. I knew I needed it, so sheepishly, I signed up, which, hot tip, you can too by visiting howtohavefun.com. It did feel a little pathetic to reveal that I, a supposed happiness expert, was struggling to have fun. But I figured it was just some anonymous form. It wasn't like

Catherine herself was going to be looking at which people signed up. Oh, no. Hi, Lori. First of all, I am so psyched to see that you signed up for the Fun Squad. It's been such a pleasure to follow your work and get to be a guest on the podcast. I love your tone and approach, and I feel like we're very kindred spirits, which is part of the reason I'm so especially excited to have you as part of the fun squad. Crap. Well, the first step is admitting you have a problem, I guess. So I wrote back and tried to be honest. Hey, Catherine, your fun squad is coming at a time in which I'm personally taking a hard look at what leisure looks like in my life.

I'm embarrassed at how little time I spend taking part in fun. So it's something I'm embarrassed at how little time I spend taking part in fun, so it's something I'm thinking about a lot. I hit send and then worried that Catherine would immediately revoke my fun squad privileges. But when we chatted over Zoom soon after that, I was shocked at how well she understood the difficulty I was having. Turns out that Catherine had gone through the same sort of existential crisis that I was experiencing. When I was writing How to Break Up With Your Phone, I was doing this practice where my husband and I were taking these 24-hour breaks from our screens. And there was this one day where I was totally alone in the house, and I had this hour in front of me to do whatever I wanted to

with. But without my phone or any screen to spend time on, I realized I actually could not think of a single thing I wanted to do. And I freaked out because in my head, I thought to myself, oh, wow, I'm just sitting here waiting for dinner, which really means I'm just waiting to die. The realization that she didn't have anything she wanted to do shook Catherine to the core. She realized that she was going through what author Viktor Frankl referred to as the Sunday neurosis. It's something like when the internal void within us becomes manifest. And I was like, oh, well, it was Saturday, but yes, that's what happened. But Catherine decided to do something about the existential void she was

feeling. She asked herself, what's one thing you say you want to do, but you supposedly don't have time for? Her answer was that she always wanted to learn how to play guitar. She remembered seeing a flyer in her neighborhood for a music school with adult classes and immediately signed up. That decision would change her life. It was magical.

And I was having this kind of euphoria and this sense of freedom and this sense of joy. And part of it was that I was learning a new skill. That was great. But I started to realize that that was not all that was happening. There was something much bigger happening. I was having fun with these people. And that really got me started on this investigation into what is fun? What is this feeling? And then most importantly, how can I have more of it? Because I wanted more of that feeling. Four years later, Catherine is now an expert on the science of fun.

She's just written a new book called The Power of Fun, How to Feel Alive Again. I cannot tell you how much joy I have found through this pursuit of fun. Realizing the value of fun and defining it more concretely for myself has completely changed the way I think about how I spend my time. I don't think I had any idea how many benefits there would be to pursuing fun. I just thought it would be fun, you know? And so I've been shocked, pleasantly shocked, to recognize the changes it's made in these other areas of my life. One of those areas, ironically enough,

involved improving her productivity at work. I started to realize that my brain could only think and produce creative thoughts for a certain number of hours a day, which what I was doing with the other time was churning. I was answering my email. I was just doing stuff to make myself feel busy. What I found is that if I take a break, if I deliberately take breaks to do one of these other activities that fall much more into this fun category for me,

I return to whatever my task had been much more refreshed with more ideas and without this sense of burnout. So what I found counterintuitively is actually carving out space for this supposedly frivolous pursuit of fun actually ended up not just making me happier, but made me more productive. Research shows that fun also has physical health benefits. For example, it can lower cortisol, a bodily stress hormone. Again, we just think it's frivolous. So if I said to you, like, fun might lower your risk of a heart attack, you'd look at me like I was crazy.

But if you think about what physiological state we're in when we are having fun, it is a low stress state. We are not stressed out and we are fully present. And there is plenty of research showing that that is very good for our health. So I personally think it's fascinating to consider that the pursuit of fun over the long run may actually be affecting the hormonal balance in our bodies in a way that is enormously beneficial for our long-term physical health, in addition to making us feel really good when we do it. Committing to pursuing more fun has also given Catherine a sense of meaning.

I don't want to end up at my deathbed feeling like I never lived. And I think that, and I know that for me, fun is the path that is making me feel that although death is inevitable, at least I am living. Hearing Catherine talk about the vast benefits of fun was making me feel really jealous. I wanted to feel alive again too. It felt like a rock bottom moment. I was in total fun crisis. So I asked Catherine if she'd help me out. Luckily, she was up for the challenge. So I'm not a lost cause. You are not a lost cause. I would dare say I'm even having fun right now. Me too. We're already achieving it, right? Exactly. Give yourself a gold star already.

My funtervention will shift into high gear when the Happiness Lab returns in a moment. Ugh, we're so done with New Year, New You. This year, it's more you on Bumble. More of you shamelessly sending playlists, especially that one filled with show tunes. More of you finding Gemini's because you know you always like them. More of you dating with intention because you know what you want. And you know what? We love that for you. Someone else will too. Be more you this year and find them on Bumble. I absolutely love swing dancing. I've always loved swing dancing. I think it is so fun. And if you watch people swing dancing, like that's fun.

Author and fun expert, Katherine Price, began my funtervention with some tips about what not to do, recalling one of her more unfortunate swing dance partners. This poor guy was so stiff and I just heard him talking to himself and he was just going, I'm having fun because this is fun, because this is fun, because we're having fun over and over again to himself. And needless to say, I don't think he was having fun. You don't want that. That's not our goal here. The good news is that Catherine's funtervention would not involve me gritting my teeth and strong arming my brain into trying to enjoy something I totally hated. But there was also bad news. Finding more fun in my life was going to take some time,

effort, and soul-searching. Are there things that you should do and try if you want to reorient towards fun? Yes, you're going to have to put some effort into this, but it doesn't have to be effort that feels unfun. If it starts to feel like work at any time, then you're on the wrong path. Like you don't want this to feel like work, but you do want it to feel like, oh, this is interesting. I'm curious about this. I'm enjoying this process. That's what our goal is. Part of that curiosity involves overcoming the misconceptions that so many of us have about what actually feels fun. As we chatted, I realized I often use the term fun when I don't really mean it. Like, what a fun dinner party,

when in reality, I couldn't wait to get home. I've even wielded the words, that was so fun, to describe an at best, meh, Zoom meeting. We use fun very casually and sloppily, and that leaves us vulnerable to being manipulated by anyone who tells us their product or service is fun. We will say, oh yeah, I'll do that because it's for fun, because we just think anything we don't do for work or leisure time, it must be fun. But if you actually think about the things that you're doing for fun and

then investigate how it's making you feel emotionally and physically, you may realize that it's not actually making you feel that good. When Catherine began the research for her Power of Fun book, her first task was to define this elusive concept. We don't have a good working definition of what fun is. And as a result, we don't take it seriously. There is very little scholarly work that's been done or academic work or scientific research into fun because, I mean, it makes sense. How are you going to study something if you don't have a definition for it? I did my own literature search and Catherine's right.

There's lots of scientific work on happiness, but there are surprisingly few papers on fun. If you do the standard scientific database search for the word fun, one of the top hits is a paper entitled Putting the Fun in Fungi, Toenail Onchomycosis. Not fun, not fun at all. And so to develop her own definition of fun, Catherine called upon her fun squad, that group of a thousand or so people like me who'd signed up to help out with her new book. Catherine asked the fun squad to describe their own experiences with fun. I think I had a very technical way of phrasing the question, which was basically like, tell me about three times that you would describe as so fun. She got back hundreds of examples.

People talked about memories of squishing mud through their toes, or playing drums with their grandkids, or church dances, or playing fetch with a particularly cute dog, or summer days on the lake laughing with friends. Catherine was surprised by how varied the experiences were, but also that these very different examples seemed to touch on the same three themes over and over again. What I call true fun is the confluence of playfulness, connection, and flow. Playfulness, connection, and flow. Let's look first at playfulness, which Catherine describes as a feeling of being out of the normal responsibilities of life. You don't have to actually be playing in the way of like playing a board game or playing with a child, but a playful spirit.

You don't care too much about the outcome. You're carefree. You're doing it just for the sake of doing it, and it's very intrinsically motivating. But you can bring a playful spirit to things that you wouldn't think are play. You can have a playful spirit and engage in play at work, for example. So we shouldn't be so strict about what we consider potentially playful. We should, however, be strict about making sure we find ways to get more playfulness in our lives, especially if we care about our mental and physical health. Because the science shows that play not only feels nice, it's also good for our bodies and our brains. Studies find that people who play more often are less susceptible to chronic conditions like dementia and heart

disease. There's also evidence that playfulness is linked with increases in what's known as brain-derived neurotrophic factor, a protein that's linked to nerve growth. This connection between play and brain development is one of the reasons that many animals seem to play so much in childhood, the very time in which we grow the most new neural tissue. The second component of fun is something we talk about a lot on the Happiness Lab. Connection. That feeling of social togetherness and a sense that we're sharing experiences with those around us. When Catherine surveyed her fun squad, she found that nearly all of their examples of true fun involved activities done with other people. And that was true even for introverts. A number of people actually said they were surprised because they were a self-described introvert. And yet the experiences they described to me all had other people.

Connection is one of the big reasons that fun feels so good. Study after study shows that being around other people increases our positive mood and improves our mental health. One famous well-being study even concluded that spending time with others was a necessary condition for high happiness. Fun definitely helps us tap into our shared humanity, which is something we do not prioritize, but which is enormously important. And I think we all know that intuitively, even if we haven't thought about it, because that's the drive that causes us to do things like spend a lot of time on social media. And that gets us to the third component of true fun, flow. Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the guy who first studied flow, defined it as that state of true immersion that comes when we engage in a challenging activity. Flow is the feeling you get when you're so present and passionately

involved in something that time just starts flying by. But not all time flying by is a good thing. Catherine argues that it's important to distinguish between true, honest-to-goodness flow and what Csikszentmihalyi called junk flow. The easiest way to think about it is the difference between being engaged and being hypnotized. So anytime you find your eyes glazing over and 45 minutes passing and you haven't taken a deep breath, you haven't moved and you're just staring at a screen, chances are you're in junk flow. And it's very easy to get sucked into that and think,

oh, I'm looking at Instagram or I'm looking at social media for fun. And I'm in a flow state, but then you don't really feel very good. That's not what true fun is about at all, because true fun by definition is an active state. It's not about zoning out. If you're zoned out and you're not fully present, you're not what true fun is about at all, because true fun, by definition, is an active state. It's not about zoning out. If you're zoned out and you're not fully present, you're not having true fun. That requirement of presence is another reason true fun feels so good. The presence we get from fun pursuits also protects us from the urge to spend time on devices that tend to steal our attention and drain our happiness. If you're having fun, you're not going to want to be on your phone. Like, it's just not appealing. You don't have to use willpower. You just don't want to do it

because it's less fun than whatever else you're doing. So playfulness, connection, and flow. Those are the three ingredients of fun that I'll be shooting for. If you can have a life that has more playfulness or connection or flow, you're probably going to be on the right track and in a better place than you are now. If you have two of those states at once, even better. And if you have all three of them at once, I think of it as really being like hitting the bullseye and you will have a moment that I would consider to be true fun. The first step of my funtervention would require figuring out all the factors that were preventing me from finding that bullseye combination of playfulness, connection, and flow. Ah yes, my phone. Distraction is like kryptonite to fun. And I can assure you that you

are certainly not the only person for whom distraction is probably the biggest fun killer in your life. Because we all have smartphones, and they all have notifications that go off all the time. And we've been conditioned to want to check them all the time, even if they're not notifying us. And anytime you do that, you're pulling yourself out of your present experience and mentally checking out for a second. Catherine noted that distraction was probably also contributing to another problem I've discussed before on this podcast, that I often feel too time famished to do stuff I really enjoy. It's all tied together because the distraction that we're all encountering all the time is making us feel like we don't have much time, which is making us stressed out, which is making us more distractible, which is making us feel like we have no time.

Catherine decided that addressing this would be funtervention action item number one. I had to find ways to train my brain to be a little less distracted. But since this is a fun intervention, Catherine thought I should limit my distractions in a way that boosted my playfulness and connection. So rather than focus on avoiding the stuff I shouldn't be paying attention to, my email and notifications and so on, Catherine decided that I should try to focus on more attractive stuff, things that naturally make me feel good. She suggested trying out a practice that she does with a few of her friends, looking for what she calls delights.

I asked her what she meant by a delight. Delight is something that makes you feel delighted, Lori. Her version of the practice started when a friend recommended a book by the poet Ross Gay entitled The Book of Delights. And he wrote an essay every day for a year about something that delighted him. Catherine copied the idea and found it to be, well, delightful.

Savoring like good things in the same way that we ruminate about bad things. And I find it's a great way to attract more fun into your life. It did sound like fun to swish a bunch of delightful things around in my brain all day. But I also worried

that Catherine didn't fully realize the level of mind distraction her pupil was dealing with. I realized I might need some remedial help before jumping into the delight deep end. So I decided to talk to the poet who inspired Catherine, the guy who literally wrote the book on delights. When we get back from the break, we'll hear all the amazing lessons he shared. We'll see how fun it can be to start noticing all the great stuff in the world. Spring flowers, smiling faces on public transport, the 80s band El DeBarge, and even tomato plants. Where's my tomato? How's my tomato? You didn't lose my tomato, did you? The Happiness Lab will be right back.

Ugh, we're so done with New Year, New You. This year, it's more you on Bumble. More of you shamelessly sending playlists, especially that one filled with show tunes. More of you finding Gemini's because you know you always like them. More of you dating with intention because you know what you want. And you know what? We love that for you. Someone else will too. Be more you this year and find them on Bumble. I knew finding more delights was going to be tough for someone who's as distracted and overworked as I am.

So I decided to talk to the man who invented the practice, the poet Ross Gay. What you don't know until you carry a tomato seedling through the airport and onto a plane is that carrying a tomato seedling through the airport and onto a plane will make people smile at you almost like you're carrying a baby. Ross is reading from his essay entitled, Tomato on Board. I did not know this until today, carrying my little tomato about three or four inches high in its four-inch plastic starter pot, which my friend Michael gave to me, smirking about how I was going to get it home.

Ross decided to stick the plant in his open carry-on bag and send it through the TSA machine. When the security guy saw it was a tomato, he smiled and said, I don't know how to check that. Have a good day. But as Ross tried to stick the tomato plant back into his bag, he realized that one of its stems had broken. So I decided I better just carry it out in the open. And the shower of love began. Before boarding the final leg of my flight, one of the workers said,

nice tomato, which I don't think was a come on. And the flight attendant asked about the tomato at least five times, not an exaggeration, every time calling it my tomato. Where's my tomato? How's my tomato? You didn't lose my tomato, did you? She even directed me to an open seat in the exit row. Why don't you guys go sit there and stretch out? When I got my water, I poured some into the little guy's soil. When we got bumpy, I put my hand on the little guy's container, careful not to snap another arm off. And when we landed and the pilot put the brakes on hard, my arm reflexively went across the

seat, holding the little guy in place, the way my dad's arm would when he had to brake hard in that car without seatbelts to speak of. And one of my very favorite gestures in the Encyclopedia of Human Gestures. Tomato on Board is just one of the many joy-inducing essays in Ross's Book of Delights, an entire book filled with his personal stories of feeling delighted. The idea for the book came when Ross was in Italy, walking on a lovely path and noticing all the wildflowers. He recognized how present he felt when experiencing delight. That feeling of deep pleasure we get when we notice something beautiful or funny or just, well, delightful.

Ross wanted to experience that feeling more often and to document it. The thought was, no, you should write an essay every day for a year about something that delights you and see what you learn. He gave himself three rules for his new delight project. And they were to do it every day, to write by hand, and to write them quickly. So I drafted them all in 30 minutes. Ross began noticing new delights all the time. And every time he saw one, he'd stick his finger in the air and announce, delight. The practice immediately connected him

to a lot more joy than he was expecting, which was evident in the sheer number of times Ross laughed out loud as he fidgeted through our interview. But the practice also connected Ross to a host of wonderful, often very specific things that he normally wouldn't have time to notice because of the usual life distractions. Wonderful things like praying mantises and fireflies things that he normally wouldn't have time to notice because of the usual life distractions.

Wonderful things like praying mantises and fireflies and the first lilacs of the year, which Ross eloquently refers to as the purple cornets of spring. And the fact that spring not only has lots of lovely flowers like lilacs, but oddly, lots of lovely purple flowers. Hyacinths, bellflowers, irises, those circular puff things I don't really know the name of. It is indeed kind of delightful that they are all purple. The abundance of the purple things, like what kind of miracle is that, you know? What kind of miracle is that? Ross also found delight in the dumb things our bodies do. Ross also found delight in the dumb things our bodies do, like the laughing snort, that sound we make when we guffaw so hard that we wind up sounding like a pig.

Which is this really beautiful experience of like, oh, my body did something I didn't mean it to do, but it did it out of a kind of, you know, delight. Ross also started to take delight in the weird things humans do all the time, like giving a high five to a total stranger and the do-over, when we make a mistake and quickly yell out, do-over, and just somehow get to pretend that whatever we just did didn't happen. Ross also finds a lot of delight in music.

One essay called Love Me in a Special Way chronicles his appreciation for one of my favorite 80s bands, El DeBarge. Think, to the beat of the rhythm of the night. The essay ends with him hearing El DeBarge playing in the security line at the Philadelphia airport. And then noticing an older man working there scream out to no one in particular, Hey, is that El DeBarge? That that record was made and I get to listen to it.

It's astonishing. As I shared my own delight in listening to El DeBarge with Ross, he explained that conversations like ours soon became one of the best parts of his project. Like the fact that you just shared that with me, it just makes my eyes bigger for that. And it makes my heart bigger too. Ross's eyes are still constantly focused on the wonders of the world. He even shared a delight that he'd heard that very morning.

I never noticed it before, but the way that sometimes we will make a sound to another person. Maybe you grow blueberries. I might make a sound to indicate they're delicious. Mmm, mmm. And like, good job. and like, good job. By training himself to notice delights, Ross has made his days more playful,

that first marker of true fun. But he's also embraced that sense of connection that comes from sharing your own delights with others. Oh, this delights you, this delights me. Oh, we're kindred in this way. Probably among other ways. A year of focusing on delightful things also made Ross more present. Seeking out delights gives him flow. I found that as I was practicing this, my eyes were on for delight. That's it. My eyes were on for delight. But noticing delights

has had other benefits for Ross beyond just being fun. It's given Ross an unexpected dose of resilience, even though his book is ostensibly about delights. His essays also tackle issues like structural racism and grief following the death of a loved one, and many of the parts of life that are downright ugly. But training his brain to notice positive things has allowed him to keep noticing blessings even in the worst of times. In the midst of profound sorrow, there's like eight purple things that bloom in May. It's ridiculous. As I chatted with Ross, I was struck by how much happiness he exuded. He's one of the most joyful people I've spoken with in a really long time.

Ross explained that he constantly feels an emotion that's scientifically known to boost well-being. A deep sense of gratitude. Ross claims that his gratitude for the universe often feels so profound these days that it sometimes moves him to tears. No, it is. It's like, man, that's, thank you. You know, it's like that. Seeing the joy that Ross experienced got me really excited to do my funtervention delight homework. So I bought a crappy notebook and got ready to catalog. Like Ross, I worried that I wouldn't be able to come up with something truly delightful every single day. I also feared that I'd constantly feel like I didn't have time to be focused on sleuthing out all these good things, especially on busier days.

But I adapted the rules Ross used to make things easier. I just had to find one delight a day. And I promised myself that I'd take no more than a few seconds to scribble something about that delight down on paper. And if I was feeling really overwhelmed on a particular day, I didn't even have to write anything. Just notice, finger in the air, delight. So what happened? Well, I quickly realized how easily delights start finding you when you just take time to notice. Instead of walking around town with my phone out to check my email, I spent my days feeling kind of curious, looking around trying to find that hidden delight for the

day. And when you train your attention to look for good stuff, it works. Often pretty fast. In fact, locating all those hidden delights took way less time than I thought. It quickly felt like they were finding me, rather than me finding them. I was very excited to report back about all my successes to my funtervention instructor. So I was at this beach house. There was this beautiful beach house looking out at the ocean. And this mockingbird flew and came onto the fence right near there. And I was like, oh, a mockingbird.

And then he just took a dump and flew away. And that was like delight. Delight. A finger in the air. Same beach. I went for. Finger in the air. Same beach. I went for a walk on the beach and there was this woman, you know, who was on a beach blanket just hanging out on the beach. And I noticed that she had a leash, but on the leash wasn't a dog. It was a cat.

Like she brought her cat to the beach and the cat was just like sitting there chilling on the beach. That's delightful. It was wonderful. The cat was on the beach. It was so good. Sitting there chilling on the beach. That's delightful. It was wonderful.

The cats on the beach were so good. As Catherine and I connected and playfully laughed at the delights I'd been present enough to start noticing, I realized I was on the path to feeling less distracted and actually experiencing this thing called fun. But there was still more funtervention to be done. I was getting better at paying attention, but I still needed to discover what really felt fun. And to do that, I needed to find ways to experience a bit more self-compassion when trying new things. And so unfortunately, I need to leave you with a bit of a cliffhanger this week. But I promise that part two of my funtervention will be even more... That was super fun. I was really scared, but that was super fun.

It was awesome. Fun. So if you want to hear about the final steps in my funtervention, then don't miss the next sure-to-be-fun episode of The Happiness Lab with me, Dr. Laurie Santos. 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 Bessert, The Happiness Lab is brought to you by Pushkin Industries and me, Dr. Laurie Santos. Ugh, we're so done with New Year, New You. We'll see you next time. you dating with intention because you know what you want and you know what we love that for you someone else will too be more you this year and find them on bumble