The Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos - Stop Caring What Other People Think of You (Bruce Hood on 10% Happier with Dan Harris)

Episode Date: August 25, 2025

Bruce Hood was a mentor of Dr Laurie early in her academic career and now teaches a course on happiness based on her famous Yale class. Hear him discuss his top tips on 10% Happier with Dan Harris.   Find out more about Dan Harris and 10% Happier at https://www.danharris.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an IHeart podcast. Why are TSA rules so confusing? You got a hood of you. I'll take it off. I'm Manny. I'm Noah. This is Devin. And we're best friends and journalists with a new podcast called No Such Thing, where we get to the bottom of questions like that.

Why are you screaming? I can't expect what to do. Now, if the rule was the same, go off on me. I deserve it. You know, lock him up. Listen to No Such Thing on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. No such thing.

Pushkin. The Happiness Lab's summer break is almost over. After Labor Day, we'll be bringing you a new season with a back-to-school reading list featuring some of my favorite psychology books of the year. As usual, this new season will be. be packed with happiness tips that I'm sure you'll love, and our list includes some of my personal heroes. So get ready for your favorite podcast host to be nerding out of it. But before all that, I want to share a conversation between two longtime friends at the

Happiness Lab. Today you'll get to hear a recent episode of the 10% Happier Podcast, where the amazing Dan Harris interviews my former mentor, Professor Bruce Hood. Bruce teaches the same happiness class I teach at Yale to his own students at the University of Bristol in England. If you like the episode, and really, why wouldn't you? Be sure to add 10% happier with Dan Harris to your podcast rotation. Hey, hey, everybody, how we doing? Today, we're going to talk to one of the world's leading happiness experts about how to boost your levels of okayness and optimism

while turning down the volume on distraction, egocentrism, self-consciousness, and toxic comparisons. Pretty good recipe. Bruce Hood has been the professor of developmental psychology in society at Bristol University since 1999. He got a Ph.D. in neuroscience at Cambridge, followed by appointments at University College London, MIT, and a faculty professorship at Harvard. He researches child development, origins of superstition, self-identity, and ownership. For the past five years, however, he's really been concentrating on how to make his students happier. As you'll hear him say here, he noticed a steep decline in happiness levels among his students, which tracks with the overall data on this front. And so he's written a book, I don't want to call it new, but it's his latest book, and it's called The Science of Happiness, Seven Lessons for Living Well.

In this conversation, we talk about how do you define happiness? It's a pretty slippery term, actually. How to be happy when you're in the middle of a shit show. How to shift from being egocentric or self-focused to alocentric, meaning essentially, interconnected, the impacts of social isolation and how to avoid that, the challenge of optimism and how to overcome it and actually boost your optimism quotient, finding a flow state through meditation, how to enhance your social connections, where quote-unquote true authentic happiness comes from, controlling your attention and rejecting negative comparisons, the role

of nature, and much more. By the way, if you want to learn how to reduce your overthinking specifically, which is a big problem for many of us, myself included. If you want to learn how to turn down the volume on that, we have a custom guided meditation for you, specifically tailored to this episode. It comes from our teacher of the month, Don Maricio. Throughout this entire month, we're offering these meditations only to paid subscribers who sign up at Dan Harris.com. The analogy we like to use is that you can think of this podcast as the lecture, like

when you were in school, and the guided meditations are like the lab where you pound the wisdom of the conversation. into your neurons. You can get all of the meditations plus add free versions of this podcast and access to my live video sessions where I guide meditation. You can get all of that and much more

over at Danharris.com. Join the party. Professor Bruce Hood, welcome to the show. Hello, Don. I'd love to get a little backstory on this book on happiness. I understand it, and you'll correct me if I run afoul of the facts here,

but you spend much of your career as a neuroscientist studying childhood development and also teaching. And you started to notice a change in your college students, which prompted you to pivot into looking at happiness. Am I roughly in the zone here? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I've had a long and varied career, and I have a bit of a magpie.

I'm really interested in anything which stimulates my curiosity. And I've always been fascinated by the human mind and how it develops. So that was my interest in the neuroscience of child development. And I've studied everything, babies as young as 23 minutes, up in the maturity hospital, all the way up into adulthood. But about 2018, we had a tragic set of events at Bristol University with a loss of several students. And this was really the peak of a rising tide in student mental health. issues. And I was feeling kind of desperate with all these unhappy young adults, because for me, university should be the best time of your life, the most rewarding. And yet they were so preoccupied

with their mental health and their performance that they were becoming almost impossible to teach because they were really so distressed. And by coincidence, I was looking around and discovered that a former student of mine, Laurie Santos, who I believe is a good friend of yours, Yes. Lorry had encountered a very similar problem at Yale. And this led me to think, well, it wasn't Bristol per se. It's actually a sector-wide issue. A whole generation of students are increasingly unhappy. And she put together a course, I think it was called Psychology in the Good Life. And I contacted Laurie. So this sounds really, really great. And Laurie being typically generous as she is, sent me in her notes and some slides. And I put together my version, I called The Science of Happiness. I really just did it on the chance that might make some difference. It wasn't a credit-bearing course. It was just offered. And I was at lunchtime. I remember it vividly. 600 turned up. And I didn't even have to advertise it so clearly there was a demand for this sort of information. So that's how it started. And then the university were so delighted by the response. They said, look, can you turn this into a credit

bearing course? And that became the unit that I now teach since 2019. And it's like Laurie's course, is very popular. And now a book. And now a book. I mean, I've written a number of books. And as I say, my interests are really in the human mind. I'm fascinated by aspects of human thought that at first glance doesn't seem unsurprising. And then when you drill down into it, it can be really interesting. And I'm really fascinated by the theory behind the mechanisms. So there's more than enough happiness books out there, but I thought I could contribute something from my

perspective, which is more about why, more about the mechanisms of what generates or gets in the way of achieving happiness. And that's what I felt was the contribution to the literature. Do you have a definition of happiness? It's a question I'm often asked. For me, I just simply say it's a sense of things being comfortable. I mean that in a very general term, it's emotionally comfortable, a sense of fear, being comfortable, just that sense of not complacency, but comfort. Things are okay, and that's what I mean by happiness, though, of course, people use it in different ways.

Sometimes they're referring to your mood and your relation or your joy. Sometimes it's people are referring to success, they're content, but for me it's comfort. Comfort, or would you say okayness would be a synonym? Okayness, yeah. If that was a word, yeah, it would be okayness. Things are just going okay. Yeah. Can you have okayness and happiness and comfort even in the midst of life's inevitable ups and down? Well, that's the interesting thing, isn't it? I mean, in many ways, it could have been the size of unhappiness, because that's more or less the default. Our lives are full of challenges, and it's the extent to which we can address these challenges and rebound back from them, I think is really what Mark the difference between someone who regards their life as being relatively happy compared to someone

who feels unhappy. Someone who's unhappy tends to feel that they're not progressing, they're uncomfortable, they're feeling stressed, they're not enjoying many aspects of it. And very often it's because they're unable to address whatever obstacles that are happening to them, and we all face them. And on the course, that's what we kind of teach. It's really how to process those negative events, how to deal with them, how to resolve them, how to build resilience. And I think That's really what we're trying to achieve. In the Dharma and Buddhism, by which I'm deeply influenced, the word that's coming to mind is equanimity,

which I think of as like an okayness in the face of life's catastrophes. Yeah, I think that captures it very well. And the other thing, of course, is that there's no such thing as permanent happiness. That would be a very awkward and weird state of mind. In many ways, you have to experience the negative in order to appreciate when things are going well for you. But again, it's this ability to overcome this and the speed at which you can do that. It's when you're wallowing in misery and wallowing in those negative thoughts.

That's generally what unhappiness is, to me at least. Yeah, I'm just thinking in my own life. I've been very public about this. I went through a three-plus year divorce from my former co-founders of a meditation app that I co-founded. And it was very traumatic for me. That's not to cast dispersions at my former co-founders. It took two to tango in this separation, but the amount of anger and anxiety that I felt in those years was intense, probably the most difficult thing I've gone through as an adult.

And yet I was generally happy during the whole thing. My relationship's really good and my outlook was reasonably positive. And there were challenges in my life, insomnia, anger, anxiety. And also, there were great years in my life. Yeah, and I think it reflects the effort you put into that business and the personal attachment to it. And those are exactly the sorts of situations where you can feel really, you know, not so much desperate, but it really can impact on you more than you would imagine. I've done a startup in the past.

And it's your little child. It's your baby. You know, you want it to grow and you want it to thrive. And you're very protective of it. And, of course, when it starts to be threatened or taken away from you, it's a separation anxiety, a separation loss. So I totally get it. Yes. My point was less about the loss and more about the fact that you can be happy. If you're working on the skills that we're going to talk about that you describe in your book, one can be happy in the midst of a shit show. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, I agree with that as well. I mean, we all have facets of our life and sometimes it's not always working perfectly. But in general, going back to that opening statement, it's a general sense that things are okay, as it were, on balance.

Yes. The book is structured around seven lessons. Let's walk through them. I don't know if we'll get through all of them, but they're really interesting. Lesson one is alter your ego, which I really like as a phrase. What do you mean by that? So one of the problems, I think, is that most of us live inside our heads. What I mean by that is our conscious awareness and our feelings and emotions are the contents of our minds. And so we start off as a very egocentric individual. As children, we literally have difficulty conceiving other people's minds and imagining what other

people are thinking about. And that's actually one of the major developmental processes over childhood is learning to appreciate that other people have different thoughts and have different feelings and reading other people and then learning to cooperate and communicate and interact with them in a way. But we never lose the egocentric bias or dominance. So we still tend to see things from our own perspective. That can be okay unless you start to turn in on yourself and start to become your own worst critic. And I think this is the point. Because children are, very egocentric. They think they're the fastest runners and they're the, you know, they're always kind of trying to show up to their parents. But as they start to become inculturated and

mix with the children, then a lot of the anxieties and social statuses start to enter into that kind of those thought processes. So they start to develop aspects which are threatening self-esteem and we start to become more aware of our status and our standing and hypersensitive to criticism. And that's why adolescence is very much typified by a sense of wanting to belong, wanting to be accepted, and why rejection is so painful because we're such a social animal. And I know you've talked about this on previous podcast. That is absolutely the imperative to kind of get on with everyone because the worst thing you could do is isolate or ostracize. So when I say alter your ego, I think you should shift from a kind of very self-ward,

inward-looking sense of self to considering and integrating other people. So I call it a shift from egocentric to alacentric thinking. And the reason that really helps is I think it reduces the pain or the pressure that you feel when you see things in context because you can start to see other people have things going on in their lives. And when you become more appreciative of other people's lives, then I think it puts yours into perspective. And of course, you get the benefits of social connection and all the support that others can give you. If you're just dealing with your own shit show, as you say, then it can be incredibly isolating and amplified. And that's why I think we need to become more integrated. And all the evidence

is totally in support of the notion of social connection. So how does one move from egocentrism to allocentrism? Well, many of the positive psychology interventions that people typically do are effectively doing that. So if you think of expressing gratitude or acts of kindness, where you're actually forcefully taking into consideration other people's circumstances, if you're doing an act of kindness, you're literally reaching out to other people and trying to help them, so you kind of have to be a bit mindful of what their thoughts are about. If you're writing gratitude, you're starting to see your,

yourself in the context of not only how lucky you are, but the way that other people have helped you along the way, and therefore you're sort of expressing that connectedness with others around you. So those are two simple ways you can do that. One of the techniques I like, and I use it often in my public lectures, is Ethan Cross's work on psychological distancing, where you use language literally to get out of your head. So most of us think in the first person, you know, I, me, and so on. But if you start talking about yourself in the third person, like Bruce is having this conversation, conversation with Dan, that linguistic shift tricks the mind of this egocentric perspective. And one of the benefits of that is it reduces sort of the impact of negative thoughts. But we never, unless we're royalty, we never talk about ourselves in the third person. It's a very unusual thing to do. So it's a kind of neat little party trick that I used to show that if you think about a problem and I say, okay, imagine something that's gone really terribly wrong for you at the moment, and talk about it using I and express your feelings using I and me.

people will then feel pretty rubbish, but if I say, and I'll repeat that, but talk about as Bruce is having this discussion and he thinks it's not going so well and he's worried about when you distance yourself using language, then somehow it doesn't seem to affect you as much. So that's another kind of simple trick you can do. But yeah, a lot of the things that we do, our social interactions by their very nature, take us out of this very inwardly looking way in order to kind of interact and communicate with other people. hard to do in an era of increasing isolation driven by, you know, rampant individualism and

technology. I want to pick up on and elaborate upon, you had three suggestions when it comes from moving from ecocentrism to allocentrism. And I want to just expand on two of them. The list was acts of kindness, expressing gratitude, and psychological distancing. So in terms of acts of kindness, one little hack within a hack comes from my meditation teacher, Joseph Goldstein, who I quote all the time to the point of closing in on plagiarism, except for I do give him credit. One of his little techniques is, if you have a thought to do something generous, these thoughts come to us all day long, but mostly we squelch them, ah, they may not want it, or I don't have time to do that, or actually that's too expensive, but we have these thoughts.

If you can try to make a practice of tuning into the thoughts and not getting suckered by the second thoughts so when you have a thought to give do the thing josephs have been practicing this for many many years and i'm more recently started i don't always follow through but when i do follow through it's incredibly useful like walking down the street in new york city and i see somebody asking for money but like uh you know my spare changes in my backpack and i'm in a rush and then like i'll get 10 feet down the street like you know what fuck it let me just get the money out and go back and do it and it always feels good. Yeah.

And then the other thing to pick up on on psychological distancing, Ethan Cross has been on the show several times. I've deeply influenced by this notion of psychological distancing, especially in moments of suffering, where, you know, you can use your own name or I'll say, dude. Like, dude, yeah, this is a brutal situation. I use it a lot with insomnia. You're likely to get two hours of sleep tonight,

and you are likely to be reasonably unhappy most of tomorrow, but you have been through this a million times, you will be fine, and the next night you know you will get sleep. So you're good, you're good. And it's enormously powerful. Yeah, I agree entirely. And it's like, rather than being a critic, it's like being your coach. Yes.

And hearing that support from someone else, is it just what you need sometimes to get perspective? But left to our own devices, we have this kind of tendency to spiral inward and blow everything out of proportion. So that's really what that kind of chapter is trying to unpick. And also the whole sense of self is something that's fascinating me. If you're a Buddhist, then you'll be fairly aware of the kind of controversy of the whole issue, what is the self.

And for me, I love the idea it's constructed, which means it can change. And so I really embrace the Buddhist approach on that, which is to see ourselves as a story unfolding and a story which can be rewritten and change over time, which means that nothing is inevitable. And I think that's a hopeful message. Because very often when you speak to people who are in the depths of despair, one of the things they think is that things can ever change. but they do change. Yes, I think that is enormously powerful, enormously powerful. Just on a definitional tip, I should have asked this earlier,

but can you define alocentric versus egocentric? I'm guessing that egocentric is that your sense of self really is based in your own ego and alicentric is based in a sense of all. Yeah, so if you imagine, we call them sociograms, if you imagine yourself at the center, and then all the people around you in your sphere, as it were, and you represent that as a series of arrows and how you're connected to people. Someone who's overly egocentric will, first of all, represent themselves as big and large, and everyone else is more sort of diminutive, and it's all going in one direction.

It's all about me. We call them narcissists, and sometimes are very successful in rise to positions of power. But, you know, we're not going to go there. That's all very well, but unfortunately, we can't all be narcissists. because if that was the case, then nothing would ever get done. You need, as a social animal, we need to interact with each other. Alicentric, again, you can represent that as a sociogram, but now you can see the connections between the people outside of your circle.

You start to see that it's all reciprocal, and it all requires give and take, and you see yourself as more interconnected with all those around you. So it's really that kind of distinction between yourself at the center of your own universe, and anyone with a kind of a young child would know what they're like. They can be incredibly egocentric. Shifting from that kind of natural developmental tendency to one where you're starting to take into consideration the impact you have on others and also reciprocally interact with them. And I think that's what I mean by al-o. It means other.

Other focus are aloecentric. So yeah, that's the kind of general story that I think is. But we never lose the egocentric view is what I'm saying. We've got to keep fighting that. We've got to keep working on that. And that's why I think a lot of the positive psychology interventions work, even something like meditation. You know, that works because it tries to quell the disturbed mind, as you well know. If you're focusing on your breath, you're shifting it away from the internal dialogue.

You're monitoring either your breathing or you're monitoring external sources. So you're shifting the attentional focus away from the inner monologue is what I'm saying. Yeah, just a slight tweak. It's not so much quelling the disturbing mind. It's accepting the disturbing mind, which then leads to a kind of, calming or dissipation because you're seeing that it consists of fluxing constituent parts. That's right. The former colleague in mind, Dan Wegner, used to talk about this ironic thought suppression.

So if you try to stop your thoughts or you try to suppress them, then you get a stronger rebound effect because the act of trying to stop yourself having a thought makes it paradoxically stronger. So that's why the acceptance is a better way of dealing with it rather than drawing attention towards them. I want to go back to your social graph. Was that what you were calling it? Sociogram.

So, Diane, if you were to draw a sociogram, it would include, obviously, your nearest and dearest, and you'd have the strength of your relationship there, and then there'll be people on the sort of further away from you in your circle of friends, and then there'd be the people that you encounter on a daily basis. So you can represent these as interconnections, and you can represent the strength of that as the thickness of the line, if you like. But it's the extent to which you feel that you're reciprocating. So you might feel there's a very strong reciprocal relationship with your spouse, hopefully, or you're a nearest and dearest.

But then if it's others, outside of that, you can see as being weak or stronger, more reciprocal or not. So it's really how you kind of visualize our interactions. It's used by psychologists and sociologists to represent our map out the networks that we engage in. The reason why I went back to it is that I like thinking in visual analogies, and I'll run one by you. the self in the era of social media seems to exist in a hall of mirrors where everything reflects back upon you if you're looking at other people you're comparing yourself to them and if you're posting things you're waiting for people to like it it really reinforces and i think a quite insidious way egocentrism whereas in the dharma the analogy they use is indra's net where you are

a node in a vast web, and at each node of that web, there is a mirror that reflects all the other nodes. So basically, your head is pulled out of your ass. You're not stuck in solipsism. You are embedded in a larger universe, and that view is really soothing. Yes, I agree with that entirely. I think your comments about social media are spot on. In many ways, it's antisocial because it's a sort of compare and despair phenomenon that we keep hearing about, that people are only validating themselves or seeking validation the entire time, which is like a very needy child. So I go back to this sort of ecocentric bias that a lot of us are born with, well, we are all born with it. It's the extent to which we can relinquish it and let go of that and see ourselves as more interconnected is

really the path to becoming a happier person. Because otherwise, you're always going to to be comparing and you're always going to feel inadequate. And it doesn't matter on whatever dimension you're thinking about. There's always someone who's doing better than you. And if you succumb to social media and try to measure up to all these unrealistic measures of success, you're just never going to really do this. So that's why it's really not the best place to spend your time. I think people are kind of wising up to it. But, you know, I look around, walk around a metropolis, so you go through a city, everyone is staring at their phones. They're taking away what were the basic niceties of exchanging information, like asking for directions

or whatever, all the sorts of things which required us to have those little, subtle communications have disappeared. And that's why I think we're becoming increasingly isolated, as you say. It's counterintuitive because you would think the best way to get happy is to focus on yourself. And yet, that's only partly true. Yeah. And I think there is a generational thing here. I mean, this whole identity thing, which was driving a lot of the younger generation focusing on the self, prioritizing self, self care. I mean, yeah, sure, you should look after yourself, but not to the exclusion of others around you.

And I think it's getting the balance right. What I'm not suggesting, by the way, I should just say, is not that you become self-less. I think that's equally bad. You need to get the balance right, because it's the interconnection of things, which is the importance. I think we talk about that in a later chapter,

which we're not there yet. Yeah, just to put a button on this first lesson, I have a little tattoo that says, for the benefit of all beings. And that is not a call for calamitous altruism because all beings includes me. So it really does speak to a balance. You did use the word isolation,

and that does bring us to lesson number two, which is to avoid isolation. Can you say more about that? It stems from this well-established finding that of all the things which contribute to our earlier deaths, it turns out that isolation and loneliness seems to play one of the most important factors, which I think was really striking when this data started to merge. It's not just our physical, but it's our mental health. It depends on our social

connections. And that's why we're so sensitive to any potential threat of being isolated or ostracized or rejected. It's why we feel it emotionally. Emotions have the same word as motivation. They come from the Latin meaning to move. So emotions drive us to do things. They move us to do things. And one of the things we're driven to do is avoid being isolated because it's so critically important to us in our evolution. Not all people, by the way. I mean, I would say, whenever I've said this, people say, well, I kind of like my isolation. So I would say, of course, there are moments of solitude which can be very beneficial. But in general, most of our behavior is driven towards our social interactions. Yeah, look, there's a spectrum, introversion, extroversion,

spectrum, and if you're further along the introversion spectrum, you don't need as many social interactions or close friends, but you do need some. And also, there's a question of agency. Are you isolated because you've chosen in a healthy way to get some alone time, or are you isolating because you've chosen in an unhealthy anger or fear-based way or because you've been shunned or excommunicated by your own personal tribe? That agency factors matter. a lot. Yeah. Nelson Mandela wrote about it in his autobiography, The Long Walk to Freedom. He talked about his time on Robben Island when he was put into solitary confinement, and he said it was the worst. People would prefer to be physically tortured rather than isolated. So that just

speaks to the power of that is for people who require that. You have some data in the book about the impact of social isolation on pain tolerance and reaction to stress. Can you say a little bit more about that? Yeah. This is not my work directly. I'm referring to a series. Actually, there's a bunch of researchers doing this work, which is epidemiology work, looking at morbidity risks. Famously, loneliness has a morbidity risk, which is equivalent to smoking 15 cigarettes a day, I think it's a famous bite line. But then there's more experimental studies looking at inducing pain. So, for example, you can give people electric shocks and people who tolerate much higher levels of pain if they're with somebody with a partner. all of these sort of speak to the beneficial effects of having the support around you.

I know you were speaking to Robert Woldinger. I think there's evidence from the Harvard study showing, again, that social isolation is a really major contributing factor to earlier death. So I think these are all pointing along the same lines that there is a real benefit to having good, strong social relationships. And then, of course, social support provides a lot of practical things as well. you know, just looking after your health, having someone tell you, you know, maybe you shouldn't be doing this, maybe you shouldn't be doing that. So I think there's lots of benefits. Yeah, Waldinger's work has been very influential in mine. For those who don't know, him, he's the latest director of the Harvard study for adult development. It's one of the longest running

studies in the history of science and following many generations of families in the Boston area, trying to get a sense of what are the variables that lead to a long and healthy life. And the most important variable is the quality of your relationship. And I often, you know, wag my finger at people and say, look, we're in an era of optimization. Everybody's tracking their steps, tracking their sleep, trying to achieve ketosis, whatever it is. But this is the thing to optimize. And very few people are talking about this on social media. So let me put it to you.

If lesson number two in your book is to avoid isolation, what are the practical steps we can do to get there? Well, I think reaching out to people in a way that doesn't necessarily involve technology, I mean a foe, of course, is a good way to connect. But basically reconnect with people in a way which is meaningful rather than just sending a text or something which is cursory. People generally don't do that because they're kind of fearful that maybe it'll be awkward, maybe they don't want to impose. But I think I talk about this in the later chapter,

it turns out, and this is Nick Epley's work from Chicago, that actually people really enjoy the spontaneous connections. Other things I've talked about in the book are all about joining a choir, finding the third place, which is disappearing. It used to be the sort of opportunities just to spontaneously meet other people. So, you know, get a dog.

Go for a walk in the park with a dog, and you soon start talking to other dog owners. There's this phenomenon that, you know, when you've got a shared interest, then you can start interacting with other humans. So I think it's just recognizing every opportunity you can to forge those social connections

and take it and speaking. Exchangeing a compliment with a barista or whoever is serving, you know, very often their days are very mundane and people are not talking to them, but make the effort just to reach out to others because they will probably enjoy it more than you imagine. Barbara Fredrickson, who's been on this show, has done a lot of good work around what are called micro interactions, talking to the barista, the mailman, people you're passing in the

hallway on the street. And that's like an undertapped, overlooked source of happiness in your daily life. But just want to go back to something you said about third places. Can you define that for people? Well, the third places were basically not work and not home. And it used to be the bars or the clubs or all those social gatherings that were people could meet. They didn't necessarily have to be their spouse or their work colleagues.

It was other people where they could talk about things that they wouldn't necessarily talk about with their spouse or were their work colleagues. And I think that is rapidly disappearing. The Bowling Alley culture. I can't remember who it's Robert Putnam, Bowling Alone. That's right. Yeah, I think he coined that term. it's this what's fast disappearing in a world of technology

where you can immerse yourself entirely in virtual worlds. And so a lot of the third spaces are disappearing. I mean, they're disappearing in the UK. We used to have youth holes and places where the kids were hanging out and doing things. But now that seems to be rapidly evaporating. So, yeah, it's those places which facilitate communications with people who aren't necessarily your immediate family

or your work colleagues. Yeah, the Surgeon General, or now former surgeon general, Vivek Murthy, his recommendation here is volunteer. So, you know, if there's no bowling league near you, just volunteer at a soup kitchen or a pet adoption agency or whatever. It is a great way to meet other people and also it's ennobling. Yeah, my wife does that now. She was a physician and she retired several years back.

For the past year now, she's been volunteering with a soup kitchen. It's one of her most enjoyable experiences. And she just loves to talk to people anyway. so it's a real opportunity to kind of connect. So, yeah, it's surprisingly rewarding. Coming up, Bruce Hood talks about how to control your attention and reject negative comparisons. The challenge of optimism and how to overcome that challenge,

finding a flow state through meditation, and much more. Imagine that you're on an airplane, and all of a sudden you hear this. Attention passengers. The pilot is having an emergency and we need someone, anyone, to land this plane. Think you could do it? It turns out that nearly 50% of men

think that they could land the plane with the help of air traffic control. And they're saying like, okay, pull this, do this, pull that, turn this. It's just... I can do my eyes close. I'm Manny. I'm Noah. This is Devin. And on our new show, no such thing.

we get to the bottom of questions like these. Join us as we talk to the leading expert on overconfidence. Those who lack expertise lack the expertise they need to recognize that they lack expertise. And then, as we try the whole thing out for real. Wait, what? Oh, that's the run right.

I'm looking at this thing. See? Listen to no such thing on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Number three is reject negative comparisons. Yeah. Well, this is because we have a brain which has really evolved to pay special attention to negative information. And the argument is along the lines that it's much better from an adaptive evolutionary point of view to sort of attend to things which may potentially

eliminate you from the gene pool. So that's why you pay more attention to bad news or threats than sitting on your laurels and just thinking life is going fine. Because it only takes one really bad thing to take you out of the equation. So this is a line of work which fits with a series of really quite different studies showing that we seem to focus more on negative information. So if you're listening to stories or you're reading the paper, there's one great study where they got people to, they thought they were actually doing a study of reading papers, but they were looking at the eye movements and they were noticing that people were focusing all in all the negative information. So there is this sort of bias in our brains to really

pay attention to that. Visually, we spot people's frowning more than we spot smiling and screens are more attentive than... So everything is wired from a very sensory basic level to pay attention to negative information. And then, of course,

at a more cognitive thought process level, we tend to ruminate and fixate on things when they've gone wrong more than when they're going right. And as a writer, I assure you, you know, I can't stop myself, you know, looking at that negative review despite the fact that everyone thinks

it's a great book, apart from that one person. And that will just niggle and eat away at me. And I've got to really use that third person, distance, say, please stop yourself. That's just silly. But yeah, that's part of the reason we seem to be especially attentive. Also, we form impressions are stronger when we hear negative information.

And it's really difficult to overcome something when we've heard something bad about somebody. So being balanced is quite a challenge. So what can we do about this? Well, being mindful of it is good, as I've said, and also trying to deliberately avoid, well, see off social media. I think is also, I think, a recipe for, or it's at least a solution to some extent, especially if you are sensitive to criticism, just be mindful of what's going right in your life and focus on that. I think that's what I would suggest. And I really should probably

mention this earlier, but the act of writing things down, I think, is an incredibly powerful exercise. And one of the things we recommend is actually writing down things which have gone well for you. So this is the writing the three good things. Now, I don't know, it's probably Sonia Lubomerski or one of these other guys who have. done this as well, but the three good things, Marty Sivigman will undoubtedly have done work on this. But it's the proactive behavior of writing things down in a journal. And the reason that's very powerful is, first of all, it gets you off your phone. And secondly, it allows you to keep a record. And I think that's a very important device. Keeping a diary, keeping a journal, is a very tangible

bit of evidence or data to see and review when you, in a month's time, you can review your life and you can see how things are actually going a lot better than you often imagine. So I do it for recommending writing down three good things, but also for processing when things are not going right for you. And I think keeping that external journal takes it out of your mental space, as it were, and it makes it a kind of piece of evidence that you can review. And it gives you a real context that you often lose. You're just trying to remember how things were all the time.

I love that. Lesson four, become more optimistic. Well, that is a challenge these days, isn't it? Especially given the fact that we tend to focus on negative information. Optimism can be partially tweet, like happiness. I think there are dispositions to being optimistic or pessimistic. But I would also point out that, you know, you can be optimistic in one facet of your life and pessimistic in another.

So it's not as if it's kind of just generically you're one or the other, glass half full or half empty. That said, I think there are ways in which you can start to be, more balanced because, you know, going back to lesson three about the focusing on the negative, if you start to try to deliberately reappraise your life in a more positive way, over time, and this is Marty Siligman's work, over time, this will tend you to be a lot more flexible in the way you processing negative information rather than going to the worst-case scenario. If you actually spend the time processing it in a way which is more balanced,

or indeed looking for the silver lining on every cloud, then over time you will, eventually sort of that will become the default way of thinking rather than always going to the worst case scenario. So the evidence suggests that that actually will change. And again, I would go back to recommending journaling, writing a situation down if you're having a terrible day or something's gone really wrong, rather than being pessimistic about the consequences of that, try and review it in a way which looks for the best possible outcome. That will be a way of actually sort of shifting the needle away from pessimism to a more optimistic view. So if you've just been laid off, just to take an example, and you're having trouble summoning any optimism, writing about it,

while deliberately trying to consider a more optimistic view, can nudge you in that direction? Yeah. So in the sealing wind technique, it's called ABC DE. There are two parts to ABC and then D&E. ABC stands for adversity, belief, and consequences. So in that first phase, you write down what happened. So you've just been laid off at work. What do you believe that reflects?

You might think, oh, that means I'm not good at my job. And what do you think of the consequences? Well, I'm not going to have any money, and I might lose my house. And so you write on everything, and you articulate every worst-case scenario. And the reason you do that is because you're laying out on the table, if you like, every scenario possible. Having exhausted that, all right, you then switch gear and go to the dispute. D&E is dispute or defend and energize. And so what you're supposed to do in this phase,

It's supposed to look at this and say, look, okay, look, you're not the only one who was laid off. It's not you alone. You've been in the situation before. This might be an opportunity to reskill. It might be an opportunity to look at. So in other words, you step out of yourself. You've become like an attorney or a defense lawyer and say, okay, you say this. But actually, another way you're looking at is X, Y, Z.

And with a lot of creativity and imagination, you can start to find some glimmers of positive outcome, even in the worst case scenarios. And then having done that, this leads to you. to be energized, to realize that something that was really obsessing you and compelling you for, you know, 15 minutes ago that you were so concerned about, you should feel a bit better about so it shows that you can change in the space of 15 minutes just by reviewing the situation and thinking about it more positively. It's a case of trying to process information in a much more adaptive way rather than just resorting to the worst case. What is the WOOP technique? Looping. It stands for wish outcomes, obstacles, processes. It's Gabrielle.

Autogens work, her research. I mean, most of us would like to lead better lives, we'd like to develop better habits. We'd like to do things better, but very often we don't actually follow through with it. And part of the reason is because just wishing for something to be better isn't good enough. You actually have to make a plan. And that's what this technique's all about. It's called mental contrasting. And so what you do is if you want to change your lifestyle, if you want to develop a healthier lifestyle or eat more healthy or give up smoking or drinking, whatever, you have to have that wish at the beginning to motivate you. So that you imagine the best case scenario saying, okay, I'm going to be a healthier person

if I do exercise. Okay, having done that, that's not enough. You then have to consider what are going to be the obstacles. So you've got your wish, what you want, what is the outcome you're hoping for? But then what are the obstacles that get in the way of that? So it might be, well, I kind of eat at McDonald's all the time and it's really convenient and that sort of thing. Well, then you have to sort of make a contingency plan and say, well, if that comes to mind,

then what you do is you get rid of your loyalty car from McDonald's. I'm not sure if they have one, by the way. But you avoid the circumstances which lead to that sort of behavior. So you make a contingency plan to overcome or bypass the obstacles getting your way. So that is a combination of kind of wishful thinking, positive energy to drive you towards a goal. But then actually, what do you need to do in order to achieve it? So that's what's meant by whoop. Wish outcome, obstacles, and plan.

Just one last question on optimism. Is it possible that we can take it too far? Yeah, that's when you become reckless. So there are three dimensions by which optimism and pessimism differ. So one is the extent to which you think situations are never going to change, the tendency to overgeneralize and the tendency to internalize. So, for example, if you fail an exam, you might sort of say, I failed an exam, I'm never going to be able to pass.

So that's where you think things can ever change. And then if you overgeneralize that, you say, I failed an exam. I'm bad at everything I do. That's where you generalize, extrapolate. And you might internalize that and say, I failed an exam, it's my fault. An optimist would say, okay, I failed one exam, but I'll get better next time.

Or they then might say, oh, I failed one exam, but I'm good at other things. Or they might sort of externalize it and say, I failed an exam, but it wasn't me. It's that professor hood. He thinks he's a great lecture. It wasn't my fault. It's his fault.

So you can see how you can deviate and how you make attributions to the situation. But if you never take responsibility, if you never actually appreciate that maybe the exam is really quite important, and maybe you do need to pay attention, you do need to change, then you're never going to actually adapt or pass your exams. So you can become reckless if you don't actually take into consideration reality. So being overly optimists that can turn into unrealistic expectations and reckless behavior. Okay, so lesson number five is to control your attention. and please say more. To me, I think this has been one of the most remarkable areas of research

that I've become incredibly interested in. And this is the reality that we spend a lot of the time not actually being aware of our circumstances. Our minds are wandering remarkably a lot of the time. This comes from a former colleague in mine, Dan Gilbert, Kimingsworth and Gilbert, did this study where they just randomly contacted people at different points of the day using an app.

and so what are you thinking about what you're doing? Are you happy now? And what they discovered that people were mind wandering actually 50% of the time effectively. So they weren't thinking about what they were doing. Their minds were off. And what was remarkable about this finding was that a lot of the time, even though they were just thinking neutral thoughts, they were relatively unhappy. And so that was kind of surprising. So when we're mind wandering, you might think it's pleasant daydreaming. But actually a lot of the time were kind of ruminating over things. you know, we're worrying about unresolved conflicts or thinking about problems up and coming. We just recently ran a study of our students and we found mind wandering 60% of the time.

So it's happening a lot. And actually, just like Killingsworth and Gilbert, we found that when their minds were wandering, they were generally relatively unhappy compared to when they were fixated and focused on a task. So our default appears to be drifting all the time. Paying attention is really tough. and I think that's one of the reasons that social media is so pernicious and so powerful because it captures our attention and that's why you can be sucked into this sort of vortex of information overload and we tend not to be very mindful of the things that we're doing

and that's unfortunate because when you do draw your attention or you do focus your attention on a task or a task is so engrossing that it really requires you to pay attention then you get those moments of flow which is this very positive state where time appears to elapse and you just, you feel very content as you're kind of drawing your attention and your resources onto the task. So yeah, control your attention because otherwise it's going to be captured. We've talked about flow a million times on this show and I always find it a little bit maddeningly elusive because I don't know how often I get into flow personally or what I could do to make that happen more frequently. It's probably most likely in those circumstances, our

activities which match your skill set. So this is the kind of definition that if there's something that you're pretty good at doing and you're in a situation where you have to really deploy that expertise, that will then become absorbing. So for me, it's writing. I'm a relatively good writer and I can write for hours and hours. And I forget sometimes to, you know, I've wasted, or not wasted, spent so much time writing. Sports athletes can find moments of flow when the challenge is sufficiently good that gets

them into it. Lots of hobbies, I would argue, could be inducing that sense of flow. It's really tapping into competence and matching your ability with the circumstances or the requirements of the situation. If you are overwhelmed by a challenge, then it could be anxiety-adducing. If it's not challenging, then it's boring. The equation is really to find those situations which really stimulate your ability to address them. Yeah, I'm just trying to think of my own life.

Like, I write a lot, but I hate it. I exercise a lot. I don't hate it, but I'm rarely in flow, I think, except for maybe when I'm exercising with a big group of people and we're all kind of moving through, yeah, maybe there are a few moments there. But the one place where I realize maybe I'm in flow is I like, I give a lot of speeches,

and I don't like the beginning part of it where I have to do 5, 10, 15, 20, sometimes 30 minutes of a rehearsed speech. But the Q&A is almost always, I think, a flow state for me. Yeah. I know what you're talking about. I love lecturing as well. And when it's going really well, the time just disappears, evaporates. It seems very fluid. And that is that you're thinking on your feet. You literally are having to use your brain in a way that you wouldn't normally be doing. So I think I would call that flow. Yeah. Yeah. So my friend George Mumford, who teaches meditation to elite athletes, he worked with Michael Jordan. Kobe, to this day, is working with professional athletes. He often describes meditation as a way to get you. flow ready. Yeah. Would you agree with that?

I would indeed. And one of the things I didn't mention earlier, I should address this, is that we now know that when you're not focused on a task, there's a state of the mind called the default mode network, which kicks into action. This is discovered by chance, by the way. It was a network in the brain. They discovered when they started the first imaging studies where you measure blood flow in the brain using magnetic resonance imaging, fMRI.

And they ask the various participants, just lie in the scanner and don't move because we need to get some baseline measures before we get you to do anything. And so they assume that basically the brain would shut down or go into a steady state. Paradoxly, what they found was actually an increase of activation in the front of the back, the brain, as a network. And that's why they call it default mode network. That's the default when you're not actually doing something. Now, the reason that's relevant is that when your mind is wandering, your default mode

network is actually active. And also, the default mode network is related to being relatively unhappy. And I think the linking explanation, and going back to what I said, that I love explanations and mechanism, is that when you're not engaged in the task or in flow, and you're just simply your mind's wandering, your default mode network is kicking in, and that is sort of, I think, rumination. And by the way, there are studies by Brewer showing that if you meditate, meditators, you put them in a scanner, they don't have activation of the default moon network, or at least it's not as much. So I think what's going on in the meditation is it's turning off.

that internal story that we're telling ourselves or that criticism that we're telling ourselves. So that's how I see it as a kind of, it's a mechanism of explanation here. Yeah, Dr. Judson Brew is a friend and frequent flyer on the show. And it's really interesting. My understanding of his work is that the untrained mind has a default mode network that can be quite unpleasant. You're comparing yourself to other people, ruminating about your past mistakes, worrying about things that might happen in the future. Yeah. Whereas if you've got some meditation under your belt, you have a new default mode,

which is being awake and aware in the present moment. Yeah, exactly. So the network is also associated a representation of self in relation to others. So that ties it back into this kind of rumination about how you're measuring up and what's going on in your comparisons. Yeah. Coming up, Bruce talks about the role of nature, how to enhance your social connections, where, quote-unquote, true authentic happiness comes from, and much more.

Imagine that you're on an airplane, and all of a sudden you hear this. Attention passengers. The pilot is having an emergency, and we need someone, anyone, to land this plane. Think you could do it? It turns out that nearly 50% of men think that they could land the plane with the help of air traffic control. And they're saying like, okay, pull this, until this. Pull that. Turn this. It's just, I can do my eyes close. I'm Mani. I'm Noah. This is Devin. And on our new show, no such thing. We get to the bottom of questions like these.

Join us as we talk to the leading expert on overconfidence. Those who lack expertise lack the expertise they need to recognize that they lack expertise. And then as we try the whole thing out for real. Wait, what? Oh, that's the run right. I'm looking at this thing. Listen to no such thing on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. One of the other ways you list to control your attention. So we've talked about getting into flow states, you know, doing things that are engrossing. That's one way to control your attention. Another is to meditate. which can redound positively toward your capacity to get into flow.

And then another thing you mentioned is nature. This is an interesting, slightly controversial one, because I think the data on it is a bit mixed. But I'm a convert to. I think it's definitely something to it. I live in the countryside, and I certainly really enjoy the countryside, but not as much as people who've never seen the countryside when they come out to visit me.

They really do love it. And I think probably why it works is that, Our environments, and I haven't got the data yet to prove it, but my hypothesis is urban environments are very much the same. They're organized, they're structured, and you can navigate them on autopilot. You literally can just kind of go through your daily commute. And very often you don't even remember how you got where you are because we're so used to the routine of travel and commuting. When you're in nature, unless you live there all the time, you follow the same path, it's much more unpredictable. It's also aesthetically more pleasing because it's full of, you know, very interesting sites and so on. But I think think what it forces you to do is actually be mindful of where you're stepping and where you're walking and just really engaging with the environment. So that would be my understanding what's going on in nature. And of course, there are some studies showing that if you look at brain imaging, looking at the default moon network, it's subdued when you're out of nature compared to going around the urban environment. So I suspect that urban environments, because

they're very predictable and they're structured in such a way, is that you literally go on autopilot when you're navigating them. Also, you're surrounded by advertisement, which is inducing toxic comparison. Yeah. So lesson six is connect with others. And I'm just wondering, lesson two is avoid isolation. Is this the same thing said differently? Yeah, I guess so.

What I was trying to do in lesson six is really kind of talk about some of the really fascinating research, talking about synchronicity, talking about the studies which were revealing our brains literally do become synchronized, whether we're doing group activities. Also, I try to emphasize how to enhance your social connection, talking about active listening, and just really kind of learning to trust others. So this is a chapter, which is, it goes back to work by a bunch of people, what Nick Eppley comes to mind, showing that we tend not to engage in social connection because we think it will be awkward. We misjudge it in many ways, and we underestimate how important and how satisfying it will be for not just ourselves, but other people as well. So it's really a call to action to try and get people to go out there and start to actively engage with others in a way which is beneficial. It's a flip side of avoiding

loneliness, but with much more kind of focused activities on what you can do to actually stimulate those sorts of positive interactions. What is synchronicity? Well, synchronicity is just the natural timing of brain waves. You can now do imaging studies where you actually get two people experiencing the same thing. It could be listening to a story or some other. And you can find out that the brains start to synchronize as if they're resonating in the same frequency as it were. So it sounds a bit spooky and supernatural. I don't think it's anything like that. But it does fit with the findings that we are kind of, we're biological computers in many ways. And so when we're processing things in unison, it tends to amplify the experience. So people who like each other

tend to walk and step. Conversations are extremely synchronized. We're having a synchronized activity now. I'm talking and then you're responding. If we were both talking at the same time, that wouldn't work well. And I think you know when you're getting on with somebody, you feel that natural rapport. That synchronicity reflects the ease of conversation, which is this sort of give and take. So I think that's what I mean by synchronicity. You also mentioned active listening. What is that? So active listening is paying attention to what someone is saying and then asking them questions relative to what they've just said, rather than just nodding away. and kind of, you know, looking at them.

I mean, you can listen to someone but not really pay attention. Active listening is really processing what they're saying, then coming up with something which reflects the fact that you've actually understood what they've said. And when people have that, they really enjoy that. It creates a really strong bond between the recipient. If they're having someone who's clearly been listening to what they're saying, it's very satisfying when you're talking to someone

who really clearly understands what you're talking about. Yeah, it's a benevolent manipulation technique. It is, yeah. And very good politicians and interviewers will know how to do it very effortlessly. You also mentioned learning to trust other people. What are you pointing at there? Well, I actually, in one of the lectures, I make a virtue of talking about failure. To me, failure is a really important thing to disclose vulnerability.

We're fearful sometimes of being judged negatively by others. And so we always want to put on a very impressive best face, as it were. But actually, when people disclose information, which reveals that they're human in many ways, and they also have vulnerabilities, we like them more. We can appreciate them more. We can identify with them more because I think it shows a level of trust. And trust is really important. Going back to Rock Button's work, looking at those nations which seem to have really good levels of happiness, if you like, or social connectedness, what they really have is trust. They trust each other.

They have community systems which are much more open to interconnectedness. So the Nordic countries typically have higher social trust than more individualistic societies like the UK and the US, where we tend to be a little bit more fearful and aware or frightened of others, whereas those countries which have good social trust tend to have overall general better happiness, as it were. So you're saying we should take some risks, trust people and be willing to fail? I think all those things are good. I think failure is, and this is something which is very obvious in the younger generation. certainly my students, they are really risk adverse. They will take the easiest path. They won't challenge themselves, and they get overly upset if things don't go

according to plan. They tend not to put themselves in situations where they could actually advance by challenging themselves more. And I think that's unfortunate when it comes to education, because that's really what we need. We need people who are willing to take risks. And so I think failure is something that we should disclose. They look at me and they think, oh, you've never failed.

You're a successful professor and so on. But what they don't realize, of course, I have a history, as we all do, of setbacks and failures. And I think when you learn about that, and you'll know this, Dan, you've talked about your startup. I think when people hear about that, I think it makes you much more personable. It makes people much more real. When you're presented with someone who seems never to have had any setbacks, then I don't particularly trust someone like that. So that's why I think trusts and enamors ourselves to other people. What is the liking gap?

It's basically, it's a misjudgment about how we're perceived. When you ask people to have conversations and then you ask them afterwards, how much do you think this person liked you, people will typically underestimate the degree to which the other person likes them. So again, it's one of the reasons why people are reluctant to enter into conversations because they think they're not going to be liked or they think it'll be awkward. And so, again, it's a miscalculation based on an assumption that interactions are not going to be as pleasant as they generally turn out to be.

And I think that's got worse, possibly because of technology. And we've lost the art of conversation. We've lost the opportunities for interacting on a much more regular basis. And I think that all of that comes with practice. And once you start to become more comfortable with those interactions, then you're probably a bit more accurate about how they're going to go. What is the spotlight effect? Okay.

The spotlight effect is the assumption that everyone notices your weaknesses and flaws. And so we all think, because we're so egocentric, We've got this kind of obvious gaping flaw in our personality or how we look and whatever. So we assume everyone notices our weaknesses and flaws. But in fact, people generally don't. They don't know when we're screwing up. We think we're doing worse than we really are in conversations. But actually, it's going a lot better than you imagine.

So again, it's a bias to assume everyone thinks worse of you than they really do. Helpful to name this. Lesson 7. Get out of your own head. Yeah. Well, that's the kind of ultimate. chapter in the book. It's all a story about becoming less egocentric. I talk about some of the recent work where you literally are experiencing altered states of consciousness, and this is a work

on Duke and University College of London, on hallucinogenics, which have found out to be actually reasonably good for people who have intractable depression. Now, I'm not advocating everyone breaks the law or starts going taking hallucinics. Well, what is interesting about them is they impact directly on the default mode network. They're serotonergic activity. And for people who've never had an altered state of consciousness like that, one of the things they commonly report is their sense of self is deconstructed. You don't have to do something like that to have an altered sense of self. You can get that from all sorts of experiences, from communal experiences, awe experiences. If they're one of the most powerful things you can do is if you're wealthy enough, I don't know about you down, but if you can go out into outer space and look back of the earth, people often kind of report that their sense of self is, it's not,

diminished. It's more a sense of connectivity with humanity, a sense of belonging. And that's what I mean by getting out of your head. It's becoming interconnected with those around you in a way, which is meaningful. Because the happiness that you experience is more authentic when it's directed towards others and derived from others than the happiness that you try to turn in on yourself. You could treat yourself to, I know, you could go on a shopping spray and, you know, have some retail therapy. And that would make you a little bit happy. But that has a little bit happy. But that happiness isn't authentic and it will soon dissipate. Whereas if you use your energies to enrich the lives of others around you,

well, you'll benefit from the fact that they'll like you a lot more, but also it's more authentic and it's going to last a lot longer. Because the reason is if you're the instigare, purveyor, and recipient of your own acts of kindness, well, you know, when they cease to, you know, give you any benefit. Whereas if you direct it towards others, you never know when they get fed up of it.

So you can always kind of reflect on the fact that, yeah, that guy, Bruce, is a really good guy. he just bought a whole round of coffee is what nice guy is and then you can walk away thinking they think well of me one of my little rants that I've gone on before on this show many times and we'll go on many times in the futures but I say this with some sheepishness

or apologeticness if that's even a word to the frequent listeners who've heard me say this before but as you point out in the book making other people happy makes you happy And in my view, I'm like 51, 49% optimistic about the future of the species. So not like overwhelmingly optimistic, but slightly more optimistic than pessimistic. And that optimism is based on this design feature in the human operating system, that doing good makes you feel good. Yeah.

And I think that's a lesson that we learn too late in life. you know, once you've kind of satisfied the initial drives for success and wealth and whatever and you've got spare capacity, then you realize, actually, why was I wasting all that, especially when you're reaching the end of your life and you realize you haven't got much more in front of you, then people suddenly have this epiphany that actually, wow, you know, I wish I'd spent more time with other people and making their lives better. So this is, you know, eudamonia, the old concept from Aristotle and the Greek philosophers. But really, the value of the worth of life is the extent to which you enrich the lives of

others around you. I've definitely learned it later in life in my late 40s and 50s. But I actually am of the view that I would have been more successful earlier if I had had this insight. I think that's true. And that goes back to what I was saying is that when you do take the time and effort to enrich the lives of other people around you, that makes you liked and that has a feed forward or an amplifying effect on your success because people like to be around people who are like that. Nobody really wants to be around someone who's so narcissistic and selfish and self-focused because they're just drawing all the energy. You need people who are bullient and effervescent and, you know, full of energy and positive. That's who we like to be around. And that's generally

directed towards others. Yes. Joseph Goldstein, to quote him again, in Buddhism, there's this concept of enlightenment, which can be controversial in many ways. Joseph says that one way to think about enlightenment is lightening up. Yeah. And lightening up, meaning you're taking yourself less seriously. And we like to be around people who are alicentric in that way. I agree. Okay, so we've gone through the seven lessons.

Yeah. My understanding is you've done some research on the students to whom you've taught these seven lessons. And I'd be curious, what did you find? What we found is really the title of your work, 10% happier. That's roughly what we find when they've done our course. They're 10 to 15% happier, depending on which measure. As part of the course, and I think this course is fairly unique in that as part of their engagement,

first of all, there's no exams in our courses, but they have to undertake all the sorts of activities, and they have to document it, and they have to keep a journal, and they have to meet in small groups. So we practice what we preach, okay? They literally have to do all these positive activities. And if they do that for 10 weeks, on average, they're about 10 to 15% happier. We use different measures. but that's very reliable. We find that every year we've run it.

And there's good and bad news. That's the good news. The bad news is after about six months, a lot of them have gone back down to baseline again. The good news is that if you follow them up up to two years, those who have kept up with the activities maintain their elevated levels of happiness. So it's like physical well-being,

mental well-being requires consistent effort. It has to become a habit. There's no silver bullet. There's no simple thing you can do and then you're happier forever after. It's a state of mind. It's an approach to life. It's a way of dealing with things, as I said earlier.

I think that explains why some people are just happier because they process things more effectively. Whereas the ones that go back down to baseline, I think they resort back to their kind of all the biases that we've been describing. Yeah, so I take from that that happiness is a skill and that you need to practice in order to hone that skill. And if you ignore these lessons, you'll stay at baseline and good luck with that. I'm wondering, would you agree with me, you may not agree with me, but my view, having made up this 10% happier number completely, you know, as a joke or partially as a joke, I now argue that the 10% compounds annually, which is also somewhat tongue in cheek, but that if you keep practicing these skills, actually you will over time be significantly more than 10% happier at the point of origination. Right. Well, compound interest at 10% annually would be exponential. rise as an economist. But yeah, I certainly think it does strengthen over time. And I think the mechanism is not only addressing all your own setbacks and they all face things over the course of

our life. But as you become a more settled person, I think then you start to carve a path through life which is less difficult. And it also means that you're someone that people navigate or migrate towards because you seem to be comfortable. There's a number of ways in which it can work. But I would agree with you, I think that it can accumulate. And I would call that practical wisdom. Some of us get it indirectly. It used to come through the church. It used to come through a lot of our spiritual leaders. But in a world which is increasingly becoming fractionated because of technologies, we've got to keep working on it. We've got to keep trying it. Bruce, this has been a pleasure. Let me ask you my two habitual closing questions. One is,

is there something you were hoping we would get to that we failed to get to? No, I think we covered most of the territory pretty adequately. I'm good. Can you remind everybody of the name of your new book and your older books, your website, your social media handles, et cetera, et cetera? The book I'm promoting is The Size of Happiness, Seven Lessons for Living Well. And my previous books are The Supresense, which is all about supernatural thinking, the self illusion, which is a very Buddhist-inspired book about the illusion of self. Then I wrote a book called The Domesticated Brain, which is about the evolution of sociality in humans. And then my second last book was possessed, why we want more than we need, which is all about relentless consumerism and the psychology of ownership. And do you have a website?

Yeah, I've got Brucehood.com. I managed to get that. So I've got a very egocentric kind of tag, which is kind of ironic, given what I've been promoting. Yeah, well, I have Dan Harris.com in my email and that of everybody who works from me is, you know, fill in the blank at Danharris.com. so it's pretty egocentric. I think we're going to change that eventually. Bruce, great to meet you. Thank you so much.

I appreciate it. Thank you, Don. Thank you, Bruce. Great to talk to him. As you may remember, we talked about the problem of overthinking, with which I am deeply familiar. We've got a guided meditation designed specifically for you to use after you listen to this conversation to help you deal with overthinking.

It comes from our teacher of the month, Don Maricio. We're now in this mode where we're releasing guided meditations with all of our full-length Monday-Wednesday episodes. As I said earlier, you know, it's all about helping you to take the great stuff you hear on the show and actually get it into your mind in an abiding way. So if you want that meditation, head on over to Dan Harris.com and check it out. If you're a subscriber, you get lots of benefits, including live guided meditations on video with me and the ad-free version of the show and much more. Before I let you go, I just want to thank everybody who works so hard to make this show. Our producers are Tara Anderson, Caroline Keenan, and Eleanor Vassili. Our recording and engineering is handled by the great folks over at Pod People.

Lauren Smith is our managing producer. Marissa Schneiderman is our senior producer. DJ Kashmir is our executive producer. And Nick Thorburn of the band Islands wrote our theme. Why are TSA rules so confusing? You got a hood of you. I'll take it all! I'm Manny. I'm Noah. This is Devin.

And we're best friends and journalists with a new podcast called No Such Thing, where we get to the bottom of questions like that. Why are you screaming at me? I can't expect what to do. Now, if the rule was the same, go off on me. I deserve it. You know, lock him up. Listen to No Such Thing on the IHeart Radio app,

Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. No Such thing. This is an IHeart podcast.