The Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos - PJ and Alex Love to Gripe

Episode Date: May 4, 2020

Reply All hosts PJ and Alex love to trade gripes. Their complaints about the minor annoyances of modern life make for great audio, but are the podcasters making a classic mistake?We all like to complain - thinking that venting does us good - but Dr Laurie Santos explains to PJ and Alex that they should gripe less if they want to be happier, and sets them a task to say something nice.For an even deeper dive into the research we talk about in the show visit happinesslab.fm Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Pushkin. Actually, that one filled with show tunes. More of you finding Gemini is 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. So did he tell you what we're doing today? No.

I did tell you more than I usually do. You told me a bit. You didn't tell me much. Grapes. Something about grapes. Yeah, something. That's what I remember. Something about grapes.

I'm chatting with PJ Vogt and Alex Goldman, the co-hosts of the podcast Reply All. It's really hard to describe. We do all sorts of crazy stories about things that sound untrue but are true. It's a wonderful podcast. PJ's right. You should listen to Reply All.

It's about the internet, modern life, and how to survive it. Plus, PJ and Alex are a great pair. They're clever, funny, and not above using the occasional curse word, as you'll probably hear in the next half hour. But a real highlight of Reply All for me is when Alex gets going on his favorite topic,

griping. There's like this pink mystery scuff on our floor, and I'm like, what is that? Why can't I get it off? It's making me so mad. And like, no sane person should care about it. I'm glad I'm work married to you and not life married to you. I feel like we wouldn't live together well. Alex is particularly into griping. It's a way that he likes to bond with his listeners. Because if we're being honest, griping feels kind of fun. I mean, I like to gripe. My best friends like to gripe.

My family likes to gripe. It's funny. And griping lets us connect with the people around us. I once dated somebody where the first thing we were like, we hate all the same things. And most of the time, venting our frustration seems to make us feel better. Or does it? Is griping really all it's cracked up to be? Or is this yet another spot where our mind is leading us astray?

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.

Gripes became a regular part of Reply All by necessity. One of the show's early sponsors was a website hosting company. And PJ and Alex had to deal with a problem that many podcasters face. How to make an ad for a company like that that sounds fun to listen to and not super cheesy. And then at some point we realized Alex is a habitual griper. And I think I was saying that you should have a website where it's just you're complaining.

Then it went from just Alex's gripes to taking like listener gripes. And the listener gripes are great because they're almost like a picture of what the world is like in a given moment. Like there's like a real feeling to like summer gripes. And like when world events are really anxiety producing, everyone seems to be like griping in the same direction. The way the website works is people just submit gripes and they end up on a spreadsheet that I can go through whenever I choose. As it happens, Alex has his laptop open in his studio. The spreadsheet is huge. Alex has his laptop open in his studio.

The spreadsheet is huge. I certainly didn't expect it to become what it is, because we do one of the ads every three, four months, but I would say probably 20 to 25 people leave gripes on there a day. Really? Maybe more. I didn't realize it was that much. There are over 30,000 gripes on my spreadsheet.

I didn't know. I like to check the reply all recently submitted gripes, because they're pretty funny. And one recent complaint really spoke to me. Stickers on fruit. Oh, that's a good gripe. Yeah, that is annoying. Because a gripe isn't just a complaint.

Like a gripe is a specific kind of complaint. And some complaints don't make good gripes. Like a gripe has certain qualities. Talk to me. Alex, how would you put it? I would describe it as something that is annoying enough to complain about, but mostly not annoying enough to do something about. Yes.

Yeah. Yeah. And it's nice if they're like sort of good fiction. They should be highly specific and also universal at the same time. Like sticker on fruit is really good. Here's a gripe we got today at 11.58 a.m. This is like a perfect example of one. Washing my hands after cracking eggs and then having hands that are too wet to pinch and sprinkle salt on your eggs. That's a good gripe. It's really good. Yeah. PJ, you said that Alex

is into griping. So why do you like the griping so much? I think that probably the strength I have is that I don't hold anything in. I'm just like a constant pressure release valve. It's just like a way to get it out of my head. And so that the, you know, a head of steam doesn't build up and I don't become like miserable. It's interesting that you say that. Because I think sometimes that's how it works. Other times, as a longtime Alex Goldman observer and expert, sometimes I feel like there's a type of complaining you'll do where it gets out of your system and it's gone.

There's a type of complaining you do where it's actually just like a chorus to a song where every time you sing it, you sing it like slightly louder. But it's not like PJ only has to hear Alex's louder gripes. There's also the internet, which PJ describes as a complaint box for things that don't have complaint boxes. We complain on Twitter. We complain on Reddit. We complain on WhatsApp. Any site or service that allows us to post a comment seems to attract gripes like moths to a flame.

But that raises a question. Why do we choose to share our gripes or willingly read the gripes of total strangers? I think one thing is just like you don't feel alone in the world. You're like, everyone's encountering this. Like I have this theory that when you like love somebody, you're like, oh, they're so nice. They're so great. And people describe the people they love very vaguely. And when you dislike somebody, you're like, he's got this weird little walk.

He thinks he's the Prince of Tennessee and blah, blah, blah. And what I like about griping and complaining is you are noticing the world. You know what I mean? Griping makes you present. It makes you very, very present. And like I can deal with anybody complaining as long as they're funny about it. And it's like you're taking the shit of the world and turning it at least into like an observable moment or something. Gripes are a guilty pleasure.

They're like sugary candy. We know we shouldn't really indulge too much, but we just can't resist. And just like eating too much candy, it's pretty clear griping too much has a downside. Well, everyone thinks I'm a cranky asshole. Yeah. I don't think everyone thinks you're a cranky asshole. Sarah has several friends who just call me grumps. Oh, okay.

Yeah, everybody thinks I'm a cranky asshole. Yeah, I think it can make you unpleasant company. In the last season of The Happiness Lab, we talked about the need to curate our emotional lives to make sure we're controlling those feelings that we're exposed to. Flirting with gripes can demonstrate how witty and cool we are, but recreational complaining can sometimes turn into a habit, which means we're constantly surrounded by negative feelings. We used to work with somebody who was like a high-level constant griper.

And it wasn't like stickers on fruit. It was like, everything sucks. And I remember reaching a point where I was like, I can't talk to this person anymore because either I have to argue with them all the time or I have to see things the way they see them. And if I see things the way they see them, I won't like my life anymore. I'm dying to know who you're talking about. Oh, okay. Yeah.

But literally, it was like, I can't talk to you anymore. Like, I can't. I don't even want to make small talk, which I've never. That's the sociopathic thing to do. I've never done that before. And it was a small office. Yeah, it was a thing where you'd be like, hey, it's a beautiful day out. And then they'd be like, yeah, well, the sun was burning the back of my neck.

I was like, yeah, man, even relative to me, this is wild. That was another level. We all have relationships that center around swapping gripes and grievances. I mean, there are definitely certain people in my life who I know I'll kvetch with as soon as I see them. And if I'm being honest about how I end up feeling during and after those gripe sessions, it's usually not great. It often ups my stress levels. But the biggest downside to all this kvetching, at least according to science, is what our minds can't see. It turns out there is an opportunity cost to griping. There's something else we could be doing instead that allows for better social

bonding and a lot more happiness. The Happiness Lab will be back in a moment. especially that one filled with show tunes. More of you finding Gemini is 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.

Certainly there's that social commiseration component to it, right? There's a bonding that goes on when we share complaints. I'm talking with Dr. Robert Emmons, a professor of psychology at UC Davis. We're chatting about the upsides of griping. There's some social benefits. Certainly it can help connect us together, kind of a shared collective grievance, and that can feel good. There's also the physiology. I think it feels good to express the emotion, at least temporarily. But in the long run, it actually doesn't serve us very well. Robert worries that the benefits of griping depend a lot on the kind of kvetching we're engaging in. Some are more detrimental to well-being than others, and some are perhaps a little bit more facilitative or actually can be adaptive if it results in problem solving or insight. It turns out that griping for the sake of griping doesn't make us feel good. But when we express our

frustrations in order to process a bad situation, to make sense of it and find a solution, that can have a more positive effect. When people write about a negative event that happened to them and they express their emotions about it, that's not as beneficial as getting some insight for why the event happened in the first place or now what a person can do about it. So you could say that starts with a complaint, certainly noticing what's going wrong. But the goal is always to move beyond that. The problem is, we don't always take our griping to that next level. In fact, if you recall, that was pretty much how PJ and Alex defined gripes earlier. Something that is annoying enough to complain about, but mostly not annoying enough to do something about.

But not doing anything about our gripes isn't even the worst part of our urge to complain. The biggest issue is that we get the benefits of griping all wrong. Our minds lie to us about how good it will make us feel. Studies have shown complaining or listening to people complain has an effect both on the listener as well as the complainer. It's another case where we do things which are bad for us, but we don't realize that. Robert examined this in a classic study back in 2003. He had college students fill out a weekly survey for a couple months.

He asked a bunch of questions about the subject's well-being, their overall mood, how grateful they were feeling, and even whether they engaged in healthy habits, like exercise. Some students were then asked to list five mundane events that had happened during the week. But other students were asked to complain. Not about the big things in life, mind you. Just the small stuff. The stickers on fruit-level problems.

They had the typical everyday, you know, garden-variety types of hassles related to roommates and finances and parking problems and professors. Not me, of course, but some of the other ones. Uh, of course, Robert. But did giving students the chance to complain about these little annoyances improve their mood over the 10 weeks? The answer was striking. Griping didn't help at all. If

anything, people who talked about their hassles had a worse time. For example, the griping group wound up exercising almost 45 minutes less than those in the control group. But Robert included one additional group of participants in this study. Subjects in this third condition showed improved well-being relative to the hassles condition, and even higher levels of gratitude, more frequent exercise, and fewer physical symptoms like headaches and stomach problems. What were the people in this well-being supercharged group asked to do? They were told to think back over the past week and write down up to five things that they were thankful for.

They were asked to do the opposite of griping. Refocus on things you're grateful for. Robert called this... The blessings condition. In this and lots of other studies, Robert has found that counting your blessings leads to a host of positive outcomes. I used to be able to keep track of all the findings,

but now it seems like almost every day and in every way we're learning more and more ways in which gratitude works, that it drives good outcomes in people's lives. So whether you're talking about emotional health, relational satisfaction, physical well-being, you see that gratitude matters. The stats that Robert cites in his book, The Little Book of Gratitude, are pretty incredible. The stats that Robert cites in his book, The Little Book of Gratitude, are pretty incredible. People who count their blessings show 23% lower levels of stress hormones like cortisol. They reduce their dietary fat intake by as much as 25%. People suffering from chronic pain show a 10% improvement in sleep quality and depression levels that are 19% lower.

Science shows that gratitude also increases our resilience. In contrast to griping, focusing on the good things in life seems to be a strategy that allows you to take action in order to fix the bad things. We know from the studies that gratitude helps us recover from loss and trauma. It helps us deal with the slow drip of everyday stress, as well as the massive personal upheavals in the face of suffering and pain and loss and trials and tribulations. Gratitude is absolutely essential. It's part of our psychological immune system. But the biggest benefit of counting your blessings, according to Robert, is that it connects us with other people.

Yes, that one good thing that griping gives us. We can get that kind of relationship boost from gratitude too, right? Absolutely. I mean, one of the benefits of gratitude is that it connects us so deeply with other people. A colleague of mine, social psychologist at Chapel Hill, North Carolina, Sarah Algo, talks about gratitude as basically the interpersonal emotion. It is the find, remind, and bind emotion. Sarah and her colleagues have found that practicing gratitude can completely shift people's mindset about a personal relationship. Taking time to think gratefully about a friend or partner makes you spontaneously notice more positive qualities about that person. It makes it easier to remember happier memories with that

person and drives us to spend more time with them. And all of these little mindset shifts wind up making us feel more connected. Sarah calls gratitude a booster shot for our relationships. The positive evidence for focusing on the good things in life are pretty clear, but it's still not something that comes naturally to many of us. If you're going to express sentiment online, being like, I ate a nice sandwich. I'm really grateful to be alive today is like, it sentiment online, being like, I ate a nice sandwich. I'm really grateful to be alive today is like, it comes across, I think, as a little dopey. I think the problem with niceness and goodness and happiness as expressed online is like, it can feel like you're bragging. It can feel like...

It can feel insincere. It can feel insincere. Yeah, yeah, yeah. PJ and Alex kind of nailed it here. Gratitude does feel a little dopey. Yeah, yeah, yeah. PJ and Alex kind of nailed it here. Gratitude does feel a little dopey.

Robert knows that if he's going to get us all signed up to that blessings condition, he's going to have to change that attitude. I like to say that gratitude really is an old-fashioned idea, but the science makes it brand new. In fact, we know now from the science that gratitude actually does deliver on its promise and on its potential. To paraphrase Robert, gratitude seems dopey, but it works. Getting past the cheese takes effort, but it's definitely effort worth doing. Part of why I do this, you know, part of why I study gratitude

and try to convey to people that gratitude is the best approach to life is just to convince myself, is to remind myself that every day I need to practice gratitude. Even though Robert's an expert on this, it didn't always come easy. I was always, you know, planning ahead. I was always, you know, the person who said, okay, well, I'll be happy when such and such happens. When I, you know, get into college, when I get into graduate school, when I get tenure, when I get, I was always delaying or putting off happiness.

And I think it was because I wasn't grateful enough for my current situation that I had everything I needed perfectly to be happy and to be grateful and to be content in the moment. But I was always looking for something bigger and better and brighter, you know, down the road. Doing these sorts of, you know, interviews, writing the books, doing the research, giving the talks is just really almost like a personal journey for me to become more grateful. So for people who are kind of in the complaining camp, like, you know, think that focusing on the hassles is where it is, any last-minute advice for them to get on the gratitude bandwagon?

So I think a really good thing to do is just take one daily hassle, some area that you struggle with, and try to view that through a lens of gratitude. Take the bad thing that you are most likely by default to complain about and see if you can extract at least one benefit from that bad thing. That's something that anyone can do, whether or not we complain by nature or by practice. I think, you know, once we start doing that, we can see that can shift us. The hassle's not going to go away. We're always going to have those, but at least we'll have a backdrop by which we can view those with some degree of hope

and trust in the future and positivity. After the break, we're going to take Robert's advice to the next level because science shows that there's one way to experience gratitude that doesn't just boost your well-being in the moment. It can make you happier for a long, long time. Like, for over a month. I wanted to try out these bold scientific claims directly. And I knew just the subjects. You guys don't mind being guinea pigs? No. The Happiness Lab will be right back. We'll see you next time. 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. This exercise, allegedly, according to science, can boost your mood not just for the rest of the day, but for over a whole month. Really? Yeah. In 2005, psychologist Marty Seligman and his colleagues recruited over 500 people to try a bunch of different happiness interventions. Simple behaviors designed to quickly boost well-being. But Seligman also wanted to test whether these interventions caused sustained improvements in happiness and mood,

like ones that lasted for weeks and weeks. One of these interventions was called a gratitude visit. Here's how it works. You think of someone you care about a lot, someone you're really grateful for, but also someone you've never really thanked. Then you sit down and write that person a genuine heartfelt letter. You explain why that person has had such a meaningful impact on your life. And when you're done, rather than mailing the letter or sending a quick email, you ask to meet them in person. And so, when I went to interview PJ and Alex, I just happened to bring along some Happiness Lab notepaper. We have a little project for you all. Are we doing like gratitude journals? You are!

Oh my god! Here's your prompt. I want you to each write a quick letter of thanks to each other. You want to express your thanks in a way of something you've not expressed to each other. And so you're just going to scribble some stuff down. Okay. While PJ and Alex are working on their letters, I wanted to dig a bit more into the science of how this intervention works. And why, like PJ and Alex, many of us seem to dread openly expressing gratitude. I'm Nicholas Epley. You can call me Nick.

I'm a professor of behavioral science at the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business. I study mind reading for a living. I study how people think about each other's thoughts and beliefs and attitudes and mostly how people screw that up and misunderstand each other a lot. Nick does lots of experiments in which he forces people to do stuff they think is going to feel really awkward, but winds up making them feel happier than they expect. If you listen to season one, you might remember the guy who forced people to talk to strangers on a train. That was Nick. You could give somebody else a compliment on a

given day. You could sit down and write a gratitude letter to somebody else. And so what's of interest for me as a psychologist is why aren't we doing those things? Writing gratitude letters we know makes people feel happier. Most people who are listening to your podcast today didn't do that today. The question is why not? Why didn't you do that if that makes you feel good? The answer is that we just get the consequences of expressing gratitude all wrong. When participants hear they need to sincerely convey their thanks to someone's face, they usually have a pretty strong reaction. They're thinking, oh my god, this is going to feel cheesy. One of the things that we find here, like we do in so many other contexts, is that people just underestimate the positive impact that their social engagement will have on other people,

and therefore it makes them reluctant to do it, which causes them to miss out on opportunities that would make them feel good too. Nick did an experiment asking subjects to do a gratitude letter. But before they started, he asked them to make some predictions. How happy will the recipient be about getting the letter? How surprised will they be? And how awkward will they feel? I asked BJ and Alex the same thing. Actually, talk through what it's feeling like as you're trying to write it. Stressful. And I can hear Alex writing, so more stressful. I just wrote, oh, I've got this, Dear Alex.

How are you feeling, Alex? Weird, because I feel like I'm going to have to read it. Am I right about that? There's some possibility, yeah. Do people say nice things to me? It actually shuts my brain down. I can't respond. I don't know how to respond.

Just like public expressions of gratitude and kindness, they just make me feel nervous. They make me feel vulnerable. How do you think PJ is going to react to the letter? PJ's going to do this thing that he always does, which is his eyes will get wide, and he'll say, oh, that's really nice, thank you. That's fucked up.

I got you pegged, son. On a scale of one, not really that impressed, to ten, he's really touched. Where is he going to be? Probably an eight. PJ, on a scale of one to ten, how do you think Alex is going to feel after this? I think also probably around an eight, right?

Probably. Higher? No, probably about an eight. Yeah. I can't newlyweds game him as well as he can do me. Like, I don't know what his... Maybe I'll say thanks, bud. I wouldn't say bud. You say bud a lot of times when you're touched. So those are PJ and Alex's predictions,

but Nick's experimental data suggests they'll both be wrong. We found that the letter writers consistently underestimate how positive the recipients are going to feel. That the letter writers underestimate how surprised the recipient will be about the content, underestimate how happy the recipient will feel. They predict recipients will be happy. Recip underestimate how happy the recipient will feel. They predict recipients will be happy. Recipients are even happier than that. They're basically at the ceiling of our measure. And they overestimate how awkward the recipient is going to feel.

When we think about sincerely expressing thanks to someone, we assume it's going to feel weird for everyone involved. But that's totally wrong. People love hearing our gratitude. Just put yourself in the shoes of a recipient for a minute. You've got somebody who has valued something that you did for years and hasn't told you about this. And, you know, the more it matters to them, the more depth they go into. How does it feel to receive something like that? Really, really, really good. Right. And

every professor I know somewhere in their office has a collection of gratitude letters that they've received from students. Everybody, mine is right next to my office chair. Yeah. Mine's in my bedroom drawer, actually. There you go. Yeah. Everybody keeps those. I promise you. So why are we so bad at this? Like even I, as a psychologist, just don't get the intuition when I think about it, that it's going to be as meaningful. I think it's going to be awkward. Like where does this misconception come from? It's crazy. It's not crazy. It's psychology. It's perspective. So that's the big problem here. So in all of these social interactions, you've got two minds going on.

You've got the mind of the agent, the mind of the actor, the person who's starting the interaction, person who's writing the letter or whatever it is. And then you've got the mind of the person receiving the act. And if we know anything in psychology, it's that bridging those two minds is super hard. There's a gap there. And the gap is between me writing it and you reading it. Now, what's my perspective when I'm writing it? So I'm having to come up with all the words and I'm revealing all this personal stuff and I'm having to get the words just right. And I'm,

you know, I'm worried. Am I saying this sentence? Am I really expressing what I feel? Am I articulating it just right? Does that sound weird weird i'm focused on all the words that i'm saying right i'm focused on my competence how good of a letter writer am i the sort of competence focus is definitely what was playing out with the reply all guys with a dash of mild competitiveness thrown into the mix writing a fucking novel over there come Come on, man. Wow. It does kind of feel like a competition of who's writing the most right now. I won't lie. Yeah, it feels awful. Done.

Being done first doesn't mean you did better. I don't think so. You're like the kid who finishes the test right away and walks out cartwheeling. And then gets a D. I'm saying such nice shit, man. All you need is like two sentences. According to Nick, PJ and Alex need to relax. Their letters aren't going to be graded like some AP English exam.

Actors attend to the words they're saying to their competence, and so they're worried about it being awkward and weird and all of that stuff. The recipients couldn't care less about that or don't care very much about that. They care about the meaning of what you're saying, the warmth that you're conveying, that you're reaching out to them and expressing gratitude. And that is just super powerful. Oh, my God.

It's time. So the guys exchange their letters. Can you read my handwriting? Yeah, I'm sure I can. It's pretty bad. the guys exchange their letters. Can you even read my handwriting? Yeah, I'm sure I can. It's pretty bad. Mine's pretty bad. Okay. PJ.

Thank you for fielding all the annoying HR stuff lately and for being sensitive to my mental health struggles. I love working with you even though I... Even though you vape too much. Even though you vape too much. Even though I vape too much. And it looks like it's signed by Baba. It says, Alex, that was supposed to be a heart.

Oh, that's really nice. Oh, fuck. Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha. That's the way that we deal with each other's kindness by laughing at it and mocking it. Jesus Christ. All right, here we go. Dear Alex's kindness, by laughing at it and mocking it. Jesus Christ.

All right, here we go. Dear Alex, thank you for being a friend and collaborator and weirdo partner in crime for the past decade. You make me laugh more than anybody, and I can't imagine going through the ups and downs of this decade without you as my partner. Love you, buddy. Thanks, bud. All right, quick, scale of one to ten. How are you feeling? Like eight or nine?

Yeah, more like nine. Yeah. PJ and Alex performed exactly like Nick's subjects. They knew the letters were going to feel good, but they underestimated just how good. And I thought they definitely seemed happier after the activity. Yeah, it's nice. Aw.

Now in theory, if I came back like a month later, you'd still be like slightly more above baseline than you were. That's what the data suggests. Really? Yeah. Which is crazy. That's crazy. How much of a boost? When Marty Seligman made his test subjects read their gratitude letters, they showed a significant bump in well-being.

They gained about five points on a 100-point happiness survey known as the Steen Happiness Index. But what's most impressive is that participants stayed boosted by at least a few points on that test for an entire month, which is kind of crazy. A whole month

just by reading a short little letter. Yeah, it's like it just gave you anti-depression medication, like performance-enhancing drug for the podcast. We both need it. I'm not sure if these letters are going to have a huge bump in their apply-all mood for weeks to come. But they definitely made PJ and Alex a little happier during that interview. And despite all their initial predictions, PJ and Alex ended up leaving the experiment feeling more positive.

We're good. That was awesome, you guys. Thank you. That was fun. We're good. That was awesome, you guys. That was great. Thank you. That was fun. Our mind tells us that openly celebrating our blessings or sincerely expressing our thanks to people

will feel awkward and weird. We think it'd be better to bond with the people we care about in other ways, like having a constant gripe fest. But that intuition is wrong, even for expert-level gripers, the ones like Alex, who can make us really laugh when they complain. I had the DVD from him for like four months. You had it for like alevel gripers. The ones like Alex, who can make us really laugh when they complain. I had the DVD from him

for like four months. You had it for like a year. Yeah. That's a grape right there. The science shows that the cost of our constant griping is bigger than we think. We're getting ourselves

and others all worked up without really addressing the problems we face. But we're also missing out on better ways to bond with the people around us because we don't realize how good expressing our thanks will make us feel. And so I, for one, am going to try to take this evidence to heart.

The next time I'm at dinner with a friend, I'm going to resist the urge to talk only about the annoying stuff in life. And I'm going to scale back some of my online gripe posting too. Instead, I'm going to take a bit more time to focus on the blessings, starting with the fact that you listen to my podcast. So thanks, podcast listener. I'm really proud that you're here. And I hope that you'll join me for the next episode of The Happiness Lab is co-written and produced by Ryan Dilley, with the help of Pete Naughton. Our original music was composed by Zachary Silver, with additional scoring, mixing, and mastering by Evan Viola. The show was edited by Sophie McKibben and fact-checked by Joseph Fridman.

The show was edited by Sophie McKibben and fact-checked by Joseph Fridman. Special thanks to Mia LaBelle, Carly Migliore, Heather Fane, Julia Barton, Maggie Taylor, Maya Koenig, Jacob Weisberg, and my agent, Ben Davis. The Happiness Lab is brought to you by Pushkin Industries and by me, Dr. Laurie Santos. 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.