The Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos - Rising to a Challenge

Episode Date: March 23, 2020

We always face problems and setbacks - but the coronavirus has dramatically upended many of our lives in a few short weeks. Allowing sadness, anger or fear to dominate us does little to help. We should instead learn from the Greek Stoics - philosophers who embraced challenges with humor, grace and perspective.Bill Irvine (author of The Stoic Challenge: A Philosopher's Guide to Becoming Tougher, Calmer, and More Resilient) explains some simple ways that you can train yourself to reduce negative emotions and put on your "game face" when you find obstacles in your path. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Pushkin. 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. Welcome to a special set of episodes of The Happiness Lab. The now global spread of coronavirus is affecting all of us. This disease has brought a host of medical, economic, and political problems. But it's also given us a ton of uncertainty and anxiety, which are beginning to have an enormous negative impact on our collective well-being. But whenever I'm confused or fearful, I remember that looking for answers in evidence-based science is always the best way to go.

And that's where I'm hoping this podcast can help. When we think about the weeks, maybe months ahead, we'd be forgiven for surrendering to despair. Some of us are already losing our jobs or seeing our businesses shuttered for who knows how long at a time when many people's investments have tanked. is shuttered for who knows how long, at a time when many people's investments have tanked. We may already be feeling ill, or fearing for our own safety, or that of vulnerable relatives. Some have even experienced bereavements already as a result of this outbreak. And everyone has seen changes in their daily lives, like not being able to eat at your favorite restaurant, or attend your weekly yoga class. I've even had several friends who've had to postpone their

weddings. We might feel scared, frustrated, or even really angry about all this. But such emotions are draining. They end up making us feel even worse. A better way to react to all these setbacks might be to see them a little differently. Say, as challenges to take on and overcome. To look at the trials ahead and confidently say, game on. Because as remarkable as that sounds, that's how Bill Irvine has reacted to the current COVID-19 crisis. Bill is a philosopher at Wright State University and one of my resilience heroes. He's someone I've wanted to chat with for a long time, and that's because I absolutely adored his recent book, The Stoic Challenge, a philosopher's guide to becoming tougher, calmer, and more resilient.

In fact, Bill's new book really helped me through a huge setback I experienced recently. About a week before the holidays, I fell on the ice and fractured my kneecap. We're talking lots of pain, tons of canceled plans, and being stuck on my couch, unable to walk for a long time. Despite being a happiness expert, I was in a very, very bad place when I first got injured. But Bill's book and his overall approach made me realize there was another way I could look at things. Rather than being all woe is me, I could take a more ancient approach. The Stoics have been around since Zeno of Citium in about 300 BC, cobbled together some other schools of philosophy. It's sort of like

martial arts teachers, you know, who blend other kinds of martial arts to come up with a new kind. He did that with stoicism. When most people colloquially think about the term stoic, I think many people think of people who show no emotions at all or people who are trying to cut off all their emotions altogether. But that's not exactly who the Stoics were, right? That is the perception, though, that the Stoics were anti-emotion. The Stoics were anti-negative emotion. They wanted to reduce or eliminate the amount of anger or envy that they experienced. But they had nothing against positive emotions, including that most wonderful but innocent of positive emotions, that is feelings of delight.

And you can cobble many of them together and then you experience what we call joy. So they had nothing against the positive emotions, but they very skillfully came up with strategies for avoiding experiencing negative emotions that are very easy to learn, very easy to put into practice in your own life. And my experience has been that they're very effective in judging from the emails I get. They've made a substantial difference in the lives of many people. So one stoic piece of wisdom that's made a huge difference in my life is this idea that we have more control over our emotional reactions than we think. My first entry point into stoicism was with Epictetus. So talk to us about this idea

of Epictetus, about the things we can control and the things we can't control. Yeah, Epictetus said, you know, there are things in your life that you can control and things that you can't. And if you spend your time worrying about the things you can't control, it's a waste of your time and a waste of your life. You're going to be anxious and not be able to do anything to resolve the anxiety. So what you have to do is focus on the things you can control. And that includes your character, for example. So develop your character. But to a considerable extent, it also includes your emotions. We humans are unfortunate in that we have divided minds. We have this higher rational brain function. But on the way to developing it, we didn't lose the old inner brain, the old primitive

brain. And a lot of the anger comes from that old portion of the brain. And then the higher portion of the brain is left to try to deal with it. So am I, as a practicing Stoic, capable of getting angry? Yes, I am. Just watch me stub my toes sometime. And I might utter something that my mother would not have appreciated me uttering. But what I've discovered is that there's that reflexive anger. But other than that, your attitude toward whatever negative thing happened can have a profound impact on whether anger arises in you when something bad happens to you. You have about five seconds in which to decide how you're going to frame it. And not only will you not get angry, but you might also find yourself laughing in response to it. So that was

an important stoic insight is that through this process of framing, we actually have considerable control over our emotions. And the Stoics seem to have had profound psychological insights, like I say, in the third century BC. And there are ways in which we're only catching up to them in modern psychology in the last few decades. So walk me through the epiphany that you had in your own life about exerting this type of control on your own emotions.

Yeah. So I went to see a doctor and I knew this doctor had a habit of being slow to see patients. So I brought along reading material and I happened to bring along Seneca. He's a Roman Stoic philosopher, lived in the first century AD. I brought along his essay on anger. I kept looking at the clock and the doctor was by the end an hour late. And I realized I couldn't get mad. I couldn't get angry.

I wanted to be angry. And I know I should be angry. And I know I had every right to be angry, but I just couldn't bring myself to do it because the higher reasoning portion of my brain was fully engaged. angry. And I knew I had every right to be angry, but I just couldn't bring myself to do it because the higher reasoning portion of my brain was fully engaged. And that portion of the brain was saying, you know what, if you get angry, you're just taking a bad situation and making it worse. You'd be the biggest fool on the planet if you got angry at this point. That was an interesting insight because I would have sworn, no, if somebody does something

wrong to you, you get angry, that's just how things work. But it doesn't need to be that case. And, you know, there is this whole device of putting things into a frame, and the frame has a huge impact on your emotional response. And you, in the book, you talk about a couple different kinds of frames. The typical frame that we often go through is either the angry frame, or I think, you know, these days with COVID, it can be a kind of woe is me sort of frame. But we can take more positive frames. You talk about comedic frames, or even my favorite frame that you talk about is this future storytelling frame. So walk through the future storytelling frame for our listeners. You are right now experiencing a number of obstacles that you've

never had to experience before in your life. And the question is, how do you respond to them? One thing I like to do is use the comedic frame when possible, when something unexpected, when something negative happens, try to tell a joke about it, try to turn it into a joke. It's very, very difficult to get angry when you're laughing. And my own experience is you get good at it. You get good at finding the comic element of what happens. The other frame is this storytelling frame. So another thing you can do as you go about your days is imagine yourself in the future. If you survive this particular pandemic, as you probably will, very high chance that you will, but there will come a time in your life when you're

going to be telling somebody else about what it was like. It could be a grandchild, could be somebody else. And so right now you can think in terms of the story you're going to be telling in the future about this. Now, for this to be effective, you can't just make stuff up. It can't be a fiction story. It has to be a nonfiction story. So you live your life so that your story told truthfully makes you, instead of somebody who simply was miserable and frustrated, into somebody who kind of cleverly addressed the challenges, smiled their way through those challenges, found workarounds for those challenges. It not only makes for a great story in the future, but it makes today so much more acceptable because it's a frame and you're going to be

thinking, okay, I've got a challenge in front of me. How am I going to respond to it? That said, the Stoics were not big fans of going around and boasting about how well you handled situations, so you don't want to take away that aspect of it, but it's a device, a mental device. of it, but it's a device, a mental device. Act as if you were someday going to tell the truthful story of how you handled the pandemic and do your best in your daily actions to make it a really great story. I love exactly that advice. But actually, my favorite frame that you talk about is the idea of the stoic challenge frame. So talk to me about what the stoic challenge is and how we can embrace it. Okay, so life presents you with setbacks. Your listeners will have experienced many very interesting, unusual, unexpected setbacks in recent days. The interesting question is, when setback, how do you handle it? I think if you think about most of the setbacks you've experienced in your

life, if they've done you harm, the biggest harm they've done you is emotional harm. You've gotten angry in response to setbacks. You've gotten frustrated in response to setbacks. So it isn't being setback itself that hurts you. It's your response to the setback. Suppose a pipe in your house springs a leak. It isn't the pipe bursting. It isn't the pipe breaking that's the problem. The problem is all the water going where you don't want it. That's the real damage. And the same is true if you experience a setback and allow your emotions to flood your life. So the trick is, I imagine that there are these stoic gods. Now, I don't actually believe in them, but they're a very useful psychological device. So they spend their time trying to think of ways, trying to think of setbacks that they can

expose you to. And it's like a game between you and them. You have a different frame of mind because then when you're set back, you think in terms of, oh, it's a test. They're testing me again. And let's see how I respond to that test. But here's the thing. If you're going to use that strategy, you have to act quick because otherwise, once your emotions are aroused, they're very difficult to tamp back down. So as soon as you realize you've been set back, you think of it as a test of you, of your character, of your ingenuity by the Stoic gods who actually have your best interest in mind in testing you. And then the goal is to find a workaround for that setback and stay calm and collected as you do. reasons. I mean, one was it just gave me a completely new frame that I didn't have before.

But the second was that I love this idea that if the Stoic gods are giving you something truly awful, it's in some sense because they trust you. Like, you know, they think you're kind of an elite athlete and they want to give you the best challenger possible. So it's kind of like you get a little pride of like, you know, the Stoic gods didn't just give me a little sprained ankle. No, I broke my kneecap. Like That's what they think I'm capable of. So I kind of just love this idea that harder challenges are in some ways like a compliment in some weird sense. Yeah. The Stoic gods, they're trying to prepare you for even more difficult challenges that lie ahead. The ultimate challenge, of course, is our own death. And there's going to be any number of challenges we encounter, any number of setbacks

before that. So if you want to have a good life, you have to learn how to handle those setbacks well and handle them with a great deal of grace. If you're being tested, it's like you have this coach. You can use a kind of an athletic analogy. It's like you have this coach who feels that you're up to pitch in the big game. You're good enough to do that. And it's going to be difficult. You're going to feel challenged, and there's going to be setbacks, but that you're capable of doing it. Whereas in the book, I also describe what I call setups. And those are those periods in your life when everything is just going your way. And I've learned from experience

that when one of those periods hit, that's when you've got to be careful because it's actually, once again, if you take this line of thinking, it's actually the stoics at work. What they're doing is fattening you up because then they are going to test you. Periods without setbacks should make you a little bit nervous. I expect a certain number of setbacks. I reach this strange stage where when one comes, I perk up a little bit, thinking, well, this is an uninteresting setback to work on. Bill's as much at the mercy of the Stoic gods as any of us, of course. He admitted to me that he likes to play the stock market

and had been lulled into believing that share prices would keep rising, only for this pandemic to decimate his pension fund and teach him a lesson. Boy, I fell for this one. Never again, though. Stoicism relies on learning these lessons, both from our own life and from the experiences of others. And we'll turn to exactly those lessons when the Happiness Lab returns in a moment. 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. When I first broke my knee last December, I was pretty much confined to the couch. Lots of things I'd been looking forward to got canceled, including spending Christmas with my family. Everyday activities became nearly impossible, and the doctors couldn't even tell me when I would heal. I was bummed, to say the least. But Bill's book provided me with some fantastic examples of human resilience during a time when I needed them most. His book let me compare my predicament with those who'd overcome far worse accidents and illnesses. Some of the more interesting ones are cases like Jean-Dominique Bauby, who was a French publisher, editor of a magazine, and he had a stroke in his lower brainstem that left him completely immobile. Two exceptions. He could blink one eye and he could slowly turn his head. And other than that,

he was powerless. Now, his brain was above the brainstem, so his brain was unaffected. He could still think like usual. It's just that he couldn't do all of these things that he used to be able to do. What's amazing about him is he coped. He coped quite well. In fact, he wrote a book. How did he do that? You might wonder.

Well, he did it by blinking, By blinking the one eye he had open, the other eye, they had to sew shut because otherwise it would dry out and ulcerate and bad things would happen. So he communicated with the world with the one eye that he had that wasn't sewn shut. Through a system he developed with some transcribers, they would say the alphabet until they came to the letter he wanted. He would blink and they would write it down. I have friends and neighbors who tell me about the current pandemic as being this major setback. And that gets me started because what I want to tell them is, are you kidding? This is nothing. This is nothing to how bad a setback can be. And this is nothing compared to past pandemics that

the world has experienced. We regard it as a major setback only because we're so incredibly pampered. We're living the dream world of our great, great grandparents. They would be astonished. What? You have indoor plumbing. What? You have drinkable water. What? You have air conditioning.

And I haven't even gotten to the internet yet, right? It's a miracle. In my pocket, in my cell phone, I have more computing power than the University of Michigan had on its entire campus when I set foot there in 1970. That's just incredible. But we take it all for granted. Part of the Stoic advice is learning how not to take your life for granted so you can truly appreciate that life,

so you can savor the little things that populate that life and truly savor friendships and have a fuller life as a result. But this is the power of this stoic technique, which is known as negative visualization. So I want to give me a definition of negative visualization and kind of just walk through how these examples work. Okay. To practice negative visualization, what you do is you go about your day, pause in what you're doing, and you think about what your life would be like if you lost something that you value. So for instance, you know, a loved one could pass away. You could lose your job. You could lose your cell phone. You can

go through a whole bunch of possible setbacks. You don't dwell on these things because that would be a recipe for a miserable existence. What you do is you allow yourself to have a flickering thought about these sorts of things. And then you go about your business again. Now, if you imagine for that flickering moment, the death of a spouse, watch what happens the next time you encounter that spouse. You will be likely, this is the case, there are probably some exceptions, you will feel in yourself a rush of appreciation of the continued existence of that being in the middle of the afternoon, I might walk up to her and give her a hug and say, thanks for existing. Because I've just gone through that mental process myself and come to realize how much I value her existence in my life and the realization that it will someday come to an end. Because unfortunately, one of us will have to pass away, hopefully in the distant future. My job, same thing.

Just before I started this interview, I got a call from a family member who informed me that she had just lost her job. There are a bunch of other people in that same boat. I still have mine. I'm a very, very lucky individual. So negative visualization, think about how things could be worse, because then things will seem better than they did before. And I think that even in a time where things are bad, there are almost always negative visualizations that are worse. I mean, you came up with a few before, like we could be living through the pandemic without plumbing. We could be living

through the pandemic without Netflix, right? I mean, there's so many things to be grateful for. Yeah. And we take our lives mostly utterly for granted, which is unfortunate because we live remarkable lives. I know a lot of people who are just complainers, whatever happens, they find the dark side of it. They find the bad side of it. They imagine how things could be better. They're miserable people. And I feel sad about that because it's self-inflicted. Life is tough, but life is beautiful at the same time. And you can emphasize the beautiful component or you can emphasize the part that you don't like. The choice is yours. So in some sense, we could see this challenging time with COVID-19 as in some sense,

a gift, right? Like you're not, all of us are doing our stoic training on a daily basis and the universe, the stoic gods have made it such that we all have to do that. We all have to live off what's in our pantry. We can't go to our favorite restaurant or gym. We get, you know, a certain set of months where we're forced to do what's going to make us feel happier in the long run. You know, what is negative visualization? That's imagining that you've lost something that you value. Well, okay, left and right, people are losing things that they value. So they don't have to imagine it.

It's actually happening. When the pandemic is over, as it someday surely will be, and they go back to their favorite restaurant, assuming that it still exists. They will have this rush, this blissful rush of, it's still here. I can still do this. One bright side of the pandemic is people will come out of it, those who survive it again, there's no guarantee, but most people will, will come out much more appreciative. They'll realize how good they had it. And they'll love life. They'll savor life in a way they previously probably didn't. And then the interesting challenge is give them enough time living the old life. And once again, they'll take it for granted unless they do the Stoic practice, unless they do use the techniques that the Stoics teach in order to make sure that they are keeping

that attitude toward life. Yeah, I'm experiencing this myself right now. My mom, who lives in Massachusetts, I'm in Connecticut, she's getting up there, but she also has COPD. And so she's in a really dangerous category where she to get the virus. And so my consistent negative visualization is like, what if something happens to her? What if something happens to her? And what it's done is it's caused me to reach out to her more often. I know the next time I see her, once this is all over, it's going to be, you know, an endless hug when I finally get to, you know, give her a huge hug. But that kind of reconnection, that kind of savoring, I guess it's not to be taken for granted, you know?

Yeah. And another, throwing in another stoic meditation here, it's the last time, call it the last time meditation. For everything you do in life, there will be a last time you do it. There's already a bunch of things that you've already done for the last time, probably. When's the last time you dialed a rotary telephone? When's the last time you played hopscotch? There will be a last time for absolutely everything. So one of the things that the pandemic does is it makes you think about last times. We were talking about being cut off from your favorite restaurant. And one of the thoughts that people are having is, you know what, that last time I went to my favorite restaurant might be the last time ever. And it's a meditation. When you see

friends, when you see loved ones, this voice in the back of your mind, and you don't want to make a big deal out of this, but you can do it privately. A voice in the back of your mind should say, you know what? It's conceivable that this is the last time. So I'm going to make the most out of this encounter with this person. Because you never know. Life throws curveballs. The interesting thing is I found when I do that, then the next time I encounter that same person, it is like this emotional rush of they're still here. They still exist. You know, I still get to enjoy this relationship. So stoicism, you know, instead of Stoics being these grim, determined

individuals, stoicism can actually put spice in your life. It can give a kind of an intensity to your living that, in the case of most people, simply is lacking. And I think if you learn that lesson, the pandemic can actually be one of the great teachers of your life. You know, it could even be that by the time you're old and wise, you might look back and you might thank your lucky stars that you were around for that pandemic. I know that sounds crazy now, but give it some time and those thoughts could change. And so dear podcast listeners, I hope you're all ready to face this crisis with your game faces on. Remember, this is your opportunity to show

your stoic stuff, to write your own setback story in a way that future you will be proud of. After talking to Bill, I'm more confident that I'm up for that challenge. And I hope you are too. And I also hope that you'll be back for the next special episode of The Happiness Lab with me, Dr. Laurie Santos. The Happiness Lab is a Pushkin podcast. It's co-written and produced by Ryan Dilley and mastered by Evan Viola. Our original music is written by Zachary Silver. Special thanks to Ben Davis, Heather Fane,

Carly Migliore, Julia Barton, Mia LaBelle, Jacob Weisberg, and the rest of the Pushkin crew. 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.