The Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos - The Man Who Invented Happiness Science: Marty Seligman

Episode Date: May 1, 2023

When Marty Seligman started his long scientific career, psychologists concentrated on studying "misery and suffering" and what made people sad. But Marty wanted to discover what made happy people, well, happy. His research laid the foundations of "positive psychology" and the happiness science you hear week after week in this podcast.  Dr Laurie Santos talks to Professor Seligman about his decades of research; the power of optimism; and how he became less of a "grouch" to improve his own personal happiness.   Marty's latest book, TOMORROWMIND: Thriving At Work – Now and in an Uncertain Future, is OUT NOW. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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

Pushkin. I always try to book guests for this show that I know you'll love. People who I think really have something to say about the science of happiness. Some guests have important lived experiences, giving them valuable well-being insights to share. Other guests are leading researchers in my field. People who've gathered exciting data about what actually does make us feel happier. Let's go with Zoom. I think the Zoom is sounding fine, so I think we should be all set. Okay.

But the guest you're about to hear from today is kind of in a different league. Thank you so much for taking the time to do this. We've wanted to have you on the podcast for a long time. So we're very excited. I'm happy to do it. And saying he's in a different league, honestly, still sort of undersells his stature. Because this scientist didn't just play the happiness scientist game. He kind of invented it. I kind of just wanted to introduce all the listeners of the podcast to your story and what it's been like to have this legacy of creating positive psychology

over these years. So we're going to kind of go pretty broad if you're cool with that. Okay. Are we ready? Yep. We're ready to go. Are you ready? Ready to meet the scientist without whom the happiness lab probably wouldn't exist? Hello, I'm Marty Seligman. I'm professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. And about 25 years ago, when I was president of the American Psychological Association, I had to look around and ask, what did psychology need? And that was the origin story of positive psychology. Psychology had been all about misery and suffering.

And what it was missing was the possibility that people could have a good life. Marty Seligman's academic career stretches back decades. And he did do plenty of important research into misery and suffering. He's the researcher behind a famous experiment that we've talked about before in the Happiness Lab. In his study, a group of dogs were given mild electric shocks. Some of the dogs could press a button to end their pain, but others could do nothing to halt the shocks. When that unlucky second group was finally given an easy way to escape new shocks, they never learned how to improve their situation. They simply gave up and took the pain.

Humans, it turns out, act just the same. It was an intriguing pattern of results that Seligman famously christened learned helplessness. This research alone would be achievement enough for most scientists, but Marty took his work in a unique direction. He didn't just concentrate on what could break our spirits and cause us misery. He wanted to unlock the opposite. What could allow

us to become more resilient and flourish? In doing so he laid the foundation for the scientific study of happiness and the whole field of research that we cover on this podcast. A field known as positive psychology and since Marty's the guy who invented positive psychology, I thought it'd be fitting to let him explain what it is. I'm not big on definitions, but the way I think about the subject matter is with the acronym PERMA, P-E-R-M-A. These are the five things that I think positive psychologists measure and build. So P is positive emotion, subjective well-being, happiness, rapture, contentment. E is engagement, flow, when time stops for you, when you're one with the music, when you're completely engaged. R is good relationships. M, I've changed

my mind about recently. M is usually construed as meaning, where meaning is something like belonging to and serving something you think is bigger than you are. But I've come to believe that there's a different M called mattering, which is more at the heart of well-being. How much do you matter? What would happen if you vanished? How much would you be missed? How much would your family suffer if you vanished? How much would your work suffer? And A is accomplishment, mastery, competence, achievement. So for me, the definition of positive psychology, while open-ended, revolves around measuring and building perma. So in some ways, it's kind of odd, one might think, looking at the big history to realize that you're focused on all these things that built perma.

Because at least at the beginning of your career, you were known for studying something completely different. You were known for studying maybe the opposite of PERMA, right? Which is the sense of helplessness in animals. And so going way back, I'm kind of curious how you got involved in that. Like what started off your interest in kind of studying learned helplessness and depression in animals? Where did that come from? Well, in fact, I think in retrospect, what I always wanted to study was well-being and happiness. But in the 1960s, when I entered psychology before you were born, Laurie, the only game in town that was even close to it was misery and suffering in clinical psychology. And so when I entered psychology as an undergraduate, I wanted to do rigorous work, scientifically replicable. And the only thing around was to work on misery. And so

I was fortunate enough to be part of a group in the early 1960s that discovered a phenomenon called learned helplessness. We found that animals and then people who experienced events that they couldn't do anything about collapsed and showed a set of deficits very much like depression. And that's where I began. And I worked on that for about 15 years until it became an established field. So that was the first 15 years of my 55 year academic career. 15 years of my 55-year academic career. And so in some ways, I've heard you talk before about how you would have studied well-being if it was a career. Were you sort of a happy kid and did that continue into your professor years or did you resonate more with some of those, you know, helpless animals that you're looking at? Oh, I was a pretty unhappy, miserable kid. That didn't make me want to study misery. It actually made me want to study

happiness. But no one was working on happiness. And the way learned helplessness gave way to happiness and positive psychology. And it was when we did helplessness experiments with people, we found that only two-thirds of the people and two-thirds of the animals who got bad events they couldn't do anything about collapsed and showed helplessness. But really interestingly, one-third of the people I worked with I could not make helpless. And finally, after about 10 to 15 years, I said, these are really interesting people. What is it about them that makes them immune from helplessness. And that led to the next 15 years of my work, which basically found that it was optimistic people. Optimism and pessimism, in my way of thinking, means the following. Pessimistic people are people who, when bad events strike them,

believe it's permanent, it's going to last forever, it's pervasive, it's going to ruin your whole life, and it's uncontrollable. Nothing you can do about it. And optimistic people, when they're hit with bad events, believe temporary, just this one situation, and I can overcome it. Those were the people who never became helpless. So that takes me 30 years into my career. And then I began to realize that I wasn't working on pessimism. I was working on the opposite, optimism. And that coincided with being elected president of the American Psychological Association in 1996. And presidents are supposed to have themes, initiatives, and I didn't know what mine was going to be. And I had an epiphany, which really led to positive psychology.

And so talk a little bit, if this is the epiphany I'm thinking of that I've heard you talk about before, I think it involves your daughter, the famous garden story. And so walk me through what happened, you know, what she told you and where that epiphany came from. Well, it's a beautiful day in the garden. And Nikki, who had just turned five years old, and I were weeding. I was sweating away and weeding. And Nikki, damn it, was having a great time. She was throwing weeds in the air and dancing and singing.

And I shouted at her, I said, get to work, Nikki. and dancing and singing. And I shouted at her, I said, get to work, Nikki. And she walked away and she came back and she said, this is literally what happened. Daddy, can I talk to you? I said, yeah, what is it, Nikki? And she said, well, Daddy, do you remember before my fifth birthday that had occurred about two weeks before that I was a whiner, that I whined all the time. I said, yeah, Nikki, you're a little horror. And she said, well, daddy, have you noticed since my fifth birthday, I haven't whined once? I said, oh, yeah. I said, well, daddy, on my fifth birthday, I decided I wasn't going to whine anymore. And that was the hardest thing I've ever done. And if I can stop whining, you can stop being such a grouch. That hit me like a brick. And it caused me to rethink

in almost an instant, three different things. The first one was that she was absolutely right, that I was a grouch. And worse than that, I was proud of being a grouch because I thought that anything that produced success in my life because I could see what was wrong with everything. And then it occurred to me for the very first time that maybe that got in the way and maybe any success I had in life was because I could see what was right in things. So I resolved to change. And indeed, I'm no longer a grouch. Nikki, by the way, is still a whiner. How old is she now? She's a clinical psychologist.

She's 30 years old and a very good therapist. But at any rate, the first thing I realized that I was a grouch and I decided to change. The second thing I realized is that my theory of teaching and child development was all wrong. My theory was remedial. It was somehow if you corrected all the errors that your children made, you'd get an exemplary child. And I realized how foolish that is and that the job of a teacher and a parent is not remedial. It's to find out what the child is really good at and to bring that out and to help her lead her life around it. And Nikki was really good at talking to adults and understanding what was going on in the world. And indeed, it's what makes her a good clinical psychologist now.

She's run with that skill. But the third thing was the reason you and I are talking, Laurie, and that was that psychology was half-baked. It was all baked about misery and suffering, and we'd done okay with that far from perfectly, but our medications and our therapies were all about the alleviation of suffering. But what we didn't touch was a question of what's above zero. Could we be happy? Could we have a good life? So my theme became psychologists should be not only interested in what cripples life and how to get rid of it, but rather what enhances life and to try to build more of it. It really was a momentary epiphany, changed my life both personally and professionally, and is the founding legend of positive psychology.

And so when you introduced the idea at this American Psychological Association meeting, when you took on the presidency, what was the reaction? Because the field was pretty entrenched in abnormal psychology and kind of the negative aspects of human nature and fixing those. How did people react early on? Well, it was pretty bimodal. On the positive side, when I started to speak about this, I noticed that people in the audience were often weeping and would come up to me afterwards and say, you know, this is what I always wanted to do, to work on happiness. But the only game in town was misery. So I became a clinical psychologist. On the other hand, dyed-in-the-wool clinical psychologists who saw the world through a pathology lens

were and are threatened by it. But Marty wasn't deterred by all those naysayers. He used his new role as president to embark on a new and important phase of his career. He wanted to work out exactly how we could all live better, more fulfilling, happier lives. And we'll hear more from Marty about what he learned when the Happiness Lab returns in a moment. Ugh, we're so done with New Year, New You. We'll see you next time. More of you dating with intention because you know what you want. And you know what? We love that for you. Someone else will too. Be more you this year and find them on Bumble. I'd probably need an entire season of shows to go through all of legendary psychologist

Marty Seligman's ideas and discoveries. But one of his most influential notions is the importance of what he calls flourishing. Marty has argued that this is the key to leading a better life. In his view, we need to do more than just seek out what we usually think of as happiness. For me, happiness is one-fifth of positive psychology. So, PERMA, P-E-R-M-A, P is positive emotion. And by and large, the notion of subjective well-being, happiness captures it. But the smiley face and being merry is not even close to what positive psychology is about. Positive psychology is about what non-suffering free people choose. And indeed, one of the things they choose is to feel good, but they also choose to be

engaged. They choose to have good relationships. They choose to matter and mean in the world. And very importantly, they choose to accomplish things. So positive psychology is not just about subjective well-being and happiness, but very often about how you're doing in the world. And it's also you've argued about the traits that get you there. And this connects to a lot of your work on character strengths. So I'm curious what got you first interested in this idea of character and how we could develop it more. Well, when I was doing clinical psychology, DSM, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, was very important. These were all the traits that were impeding life. to think about positive psychology, it seemed to me we needed a manual of the sanities,

not just the insanities, the sanities being the traits that built the good life. That led to a field. Chris Peterson was a central person in that field. When we started to work on a manual of the sanities, I called Chris. It happened to be his 50th birthday. He's a head of the clinical program at Michigan at the time. And I said, what are you going to do for the rest of your life, Chris? And he said, well, I don't know. I said, well, what I'd like you to do is take a three year sabbatical, come to Penn and write a manual of the Sanities. And indeed he did, because I raised the money for it. He put my name on it. And it began a field of positive character traits. And so very important in positive psychology is measuring what your highest strengths are

and learning how to use those positive traits more in life. And so give me a sense of what you mean by strengths. What are some of the common character strengths that people could find across the globe agreed on. And so what do you find people who use their character strengths? What are some of the things that we see them experiencing in their day to day life? Well, in general, we find that when people use their highest strengths more, life goes better. when people use their highest strengths more, life goes better. And so one of the positive psychology exercises is to, and everyone listening right now, I want to do this with you. Close your eyes. Laura, your eyes are open. I know, I'm closing them right now.

All right. Think of something that you have to do at work that you don't like doing. Now, open your eyes. Now, almost everyone can think of things like that. And now your task is to take the VIA, the 24 Character Strengths Test. It's free. About 4 million people have taken it. It's at authentichappiness, one word, dot org. And this tells you what your five highest strengths are. So your exercise is now to take that thing you don't like doing at work and do it with your highest strength. For example, one of my students studied in the library at Penn until midnight. And then the worst part of his day came about, the thing he really didn't like. And that is he had to take an hour-long walk through dangerous West Philadelphia at one in the morning to get home.

So he took the signature strengths test, and his highest strength was humor and playfulness. So his assignment was to take that walk home using humor and playfulness. Here's what he did. He bought a pair of rollerblades and a stopwatch and he declared it an Olympic event and timed it every night until he set the record. And then he would take longer routes. And this became the best part of his day. So the importance of this is the stuff you're good at, the stuff you like, can be used to accompany and overcome the stuff you don't like. And when that happens, happiness goes up and work gets better.

We have a culture in which we focus on traits that are wrong, ways in which we screw up. And it's important to correct your weaknesses. But even more important is to recognize the strengths you do have and then to use them more. What I love about the character strengths, especially when I've used exercises like this with my students, is that you also need to know what your strengths are. I think we kind of implicitly know it, but when we start to focus on it of like, you know, I really like humor or I really love learning.

You know, whenever I take the VIA test, my top two are humor and love of learning. And I feel like that's helped me in shaping this podcast. You know, I got to do goofy things for the podcast or I got to take on new topics where I get to learn something. And so I'm curious, what are your signature strengths? My own highest strengths are creativity, appreciation of beauty, and leadership. And indeed, I take my own medicine. And indeed, I try to lead my life around creativity, appreciation of beauty and leadership. It helped me to know what my strengths were to actually say to myself, hey, how can I use

creativity in the conversation that Lori and I are having now? And I think this is a thing we forget is that, you know, we can use these in so many different contexts, right? We can use these at work. If you're one of my college students, they can use these when they're studying. Another domain in which I know you've talked about using these is that we can use these to build up relationships. One of the homework exercises I use with students in my happiness class at Yale is I make them go on a strengths date where they have to figure out their strengths, you know, pick a friend or a romantic partner, figure out that person's strengths, and then find some activity that you can do together that maximizes both. There's like creativity and love of learning.

You have to, you know, go to some new museum where you do something creative together. Or one of the ones I loved was a pair of my students came up with bravery and they did one of these ropes courses together. And they all say like, that was so much more fun than what we would normally do, which is probably walk down and watch TV together and not do anything that used your strengths. In addition to using your strengths more, what you've just said about sharing them with someone else, virtually everything that we like doing goes better when we share with someone else. And so I think that's a really basic principle of well-being. Another thing that you've talked about a lot in your work is this idea of resilience. So talk about what resilience is and how you think of

it from a positive psychology lens. I think resilience for me, different people define it differently, is coming back from defeat, coming back to normal functioning from a bad event. So in many ways, resilience for me is a word out of psychology as usual. It's not about being super normal or better than you were. And so for me, things like post-traumatic growth are more interesting than resilience. And indeed, if you look at people like soldiers who experience bad events like combat, which is one of the worst things we can experience, the response to very bad events is bell-shaped. And on the left-hand side of the bell is post-traumatic stress disorder, people who collapse and become

helpless. But in the middle is resilience. And their resilience means you may have a tough time in combat, but within three months, you're back where you were. And then on the right-hand side of the bell is people who often go through post-traumatic stress disorder, but a year later are physically and mentally stronger than they were to begin with. So I guess I would want to contrast the notion of growth to resilience. So these days, I'm more interested in growth than I am in resilience. I'm curious how you got started on that in the first place. How did that work begin?

Yeah, it was in the middle of the Iraq war. General George Casey, the chief of staff of the army, called me to the Pentagon to a meeting of the general staff. And I looked around and sitting at the table were all copies of my books and things like that. General Casey said, well, Seligman, Professor Seligman, I called him sir. I went to military school. I know about calling generals sir. He said, post-traumatic stress disorder, suicide, General, sir. He said, post-traumatic stress disorder, suicide, drug abuse, panic, divorce. What does positive psychology say about that? And I went through the bell shape and I said, I think the aim of what we can do in positive psychology is to move the whole distribution toward post-traumatic growth. Whereupon General Casey did two things.

He said, first, he said, my legacy to the United States Army is going to be to create a army that is as mentally fit as it is physically fit. And I'm going to allocate $140 million to doing that. And so I said, well, how are you going to do it? And he said, well, we've read your work in schools and we see you teach teachers the skills of positive psychology and resilience and the teachers teach the students. Well, we have 40,000 teachers in the army. I said, really? He said, yeah, the drill sergeants. And so your job, Dr. Seligman, will be to train all 40,000 drill sergeants in positive psychology and resilience, and they will train the 1.1 million soldiers. And so that's how our work with the military started.

And I guess I should tell you two outcomes of it that your audience probably doesn't know about. They're new. We created a psychometric test called the GAT, the G-A-T, that every soldier takes the first day of joining the army. And these are psychological tests with the good and bad stuff. Then we follow people through the army, and we just completed two major studies. I should say both of these studies are not samples. This is everybody in the army. So the first thing we asked was, could you predict post-traumatic stress disorder? And so we took everyone who was deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan, 77,000 people, and we asked who got post-traumatic stress disorder.70% more likely to come down with post-traumatic stress disorder. The same exaggeration of post-traumatic stress disorder is true at every level of combat.

So one finding that came out of this, we could predict who is really vulnerable. The second finding is the reverse and much closer to my interest. It's about success. It's about who's going to do really well in the army. This is now 990,000 soldiers followed for five years. Day one, they take the GATT, the psychological test. And over the next five years, 12% of them win a heroism medal or an exemplary work medal. And the question is, could we predict who's going to really succeed in the army by heroism and exemplary work? And again, the answer was we could robustly predict it. There were three psychological factors. First, optimistic people. Second, people with more positive emotion. And third, people with low negative emotion are more likely. We've been able to predict post-traumatic stress disorder by being a catastrophizer and who's going to do really well in the Army by high positive emotion, high optimism, and low negative emotion.

Even the most rigorous researchers struggle to amass data sets like this. I mean, lots of psychology experiments are run using dozens or maybe a few hundred test subjects. Marty's work looked at the lives of tens of thousands of people, literally a whole army. And his findings speak to the power of optimism to improve our lives, which is something we'll explore in a whole lot more detail when the Happiness Lab returns after this short break. Ugh, we're so done with New Year, New You.

This year, it's more you on Bumble. More of you shamelessly sending playlists, especially that one filled with show tunes. More of you finding Gemini's because you know you always like them. More of you dating with intention because you know what you want. And you know what?

We love that for you. Someone else will too. Be more you this year and find them on Bumble. Research shows that being a hopeful, optimistic person is a great indicator that you'll flourish in life. Even when things go wrong or you find yourself in awful situations. Like, for example, military combat. Marty Seligman's massive research project with the U.S. Army made this clear. But what exactly is the power of optimism? How does it work?

And is it something that all of us can learn? First and most importantly, optimists try harder. They don't give up. They're more persistent. Secondly, when bad events hit them, they're half as likely to get depressed. They're more likely to come back and be resilient. Third, people like them better. So while misery loves company, company does not like misery. is not like misery. In the workplace, in sports, they come back from defeat better. So optimistic pitchers in close games, in the major leagues, in the last three innings, their earned run average gets better. Optimistic hitters in the last three innings in close games, their batting average goes up. The pessimists go down in close games and do worse. But at any rate, optimism, because it produces more trying, by and large, seems to be

a very big advantage in life. And in some ways, the most surprising thing of all is that optimists live on average between six and eight years longer than pessimists. And there are now about 20 good studies of this controlling for all the major risk factors, particularly for cardiovascular disease. Pessimism is probably between smoking two and three packs of cigarettes a day as a risk factor. And optimism seems to give between six and eight years of extra life, probably about twice as important as exercise. I mean, all of those are amazing findings. But if you don't know the literature on optimism and hope, you might find them kind of depressing because I think many lay people have this notion that you're either

born an optimist or born a pessimist. So it's all well and good if you're born an optimist, then you're going to live longer and, you know, get through these tough games faster. But if you're not, tough for you. But this seems to be something that your work has shown too, which is that it's not just that there's optimism and pessimism, but that there's learned optimism. It's almost kind of coming full circle from your original work on learned helplessness. So talk about how optimism can be learned and what we've figured out about how we can kind of bring it into our lives if that's not our natural tendency. Well, first we should confirm the unlearned part. So in Twinsburg, Ohio, every year there's a twins convention.

10,000 twins show up. One year we went to Twinsburg and we gave them optimism, pessimism questionnaire. Half of them are fraternal twins and half are identical twins. And we measured concordance. And it turns out identical twins are much more concordant than fraternal twins for optimism or pessimism. It's about 50% heritable. Okay. So people are partly right. Optimism is partly inherited. But it turns out if you're a pessimist like I am, you can learn optimism. And the basic skill comes straight out of cognitive therapy. First, you want to be able to recognize the most catastrophic thoughts you say to yourself. And then you want to realistically

dispute them. I'm 80 years old now. And before I got on this call with you, I said, oh my God, can I really survive an hour of a story? I'm really too old to be doing this kind of thing. And I recognized that thought. Maybe I should just give up and turn it over to the young people. Then when we started, I could recognize the thought and I treated it as if it was said by someone who a third person whose mission in life was to make me miserable. And I disputed it with realistic evidence. So you're not only a good interviewer, but you smile and laugh, and you show real responses when I'm doing something that really makes sense. So I said, well, look, Laurie really gets it. This is going really well. So what you do is you realistically

dispute your most catastrophic thoughts. And I've become quite skilled at that. I'm a born your most catastrophic thoughts. And I've become quite skilled at that. I'm a born pessimist and a born depressive. And I still hear the voices all the time that tell me I'm a reject, I'm a loser, but I know how to dispute them now. And that's the basic skill of learned optimism. And if you learn optimism in that way, do you get, is there evidence that you get as many benefits as somebody who might come about it naturally? I don't think anyone has ever tested that. That's a really interesting thing. And the difference in many ways is I think the people who get it heritably don't hear

the voices all the time telling them what a failure they are. And the people who learn it really have to work. So learned optimism is work, doesn't become naturally. And I think this is in some ways a message in a lot of positive psychology, right? Which is that we can go above baseline, we can flourish more, but sometimes it actually does take some work. You need to put work in, you need to be following your strengths and paying attention to them. You need to, you know, fight those tendencies to talk badly to yourself. If you're a natural pessimist, you know, you can experience

hope and optimism and all these positive rewards, but sometimes you got to put a little bit of work into, even if you are the father of positive psychology himself, Marty Seligman, you have to put this work in. You know, I think at the heart of why the positive stuff has to be learned is that we inherited from our ancestors a bad weather brain. The most recent geological epoch was the ice ages. And those of your ancestors who thought, oh, it's a beautiful day in New Haven today, I'll bet it'll be beautiful tomorrow, got crushed by the ice. And it was your ancestors who said, things look okay, but famine is coming and ice is coming and one tragedy or another is coming. They survived because they were right. And we got their brain. Unfortunately, if prosperity continues, and it is a nice day

in New Haven tomorrow, it'll be ruined if all you can think of is how miserable everything is going to be. So now in a world which is much more prosperous by almost every measure we have than the world used to be, the pessimistic brain does not serve you very well. And an optimistic brain allows you to take advantage of prosperity. And so as you think about prosperity in this field, what are the things that make you optimistic about where positive psychology is going to be in the next 50 years? What are your predictions about how positive psychology will flourish in the future? Well, I've been mapping, as people like Steve Pinker have, progress over the last 200 years. And essentially, you have to be blinded by ideology

not to see how much better the world is now than it was 200 years ago. 200 years ago, 44% of your children died before the age of five. Now, 1% of children die before the age of five. 200 years ago, the mean human life expectancy was about 35 years. Life expectancy across the entire world has doubled in the last 200 years. It's not just these material things that have changed. If you measure women's rights and racism, not perfect, but it's a lot better than it was 200 years ago when we had slavery and women couldn't vote. So by almost every material and spiritual dimension, life has gotten better over the last 200 years. And now the question is, will it continue? And this is a very

important question. I mean, we need to overcome all sorts of stuff, avoid economic collapse. We need to avoid nuclear war. We need to avoid climate collapse. But if we do all of those things, then there's good reason to believe that human innovation and prosperity will continue. If that is so, we need a psychology that goes along with it. A psychology that tells us that everything is wrong and all we can talk about is reducing misery is not really conducive to producing more and more prosperity and more and more innovation. So I think it is vouchsafed to positive psychologists not just to witness increased prosperity over the next 50 years, but to actually help more and more prosperity to occur. When we look at the work in positive psychology, there's so many tips and so many changes that people can make to kind of improve their sense of flourishing.

If you had to boil it down to your three favorite tips or the three ones that have worked best for you, what would some of those tips be? Well, my very favorite, which I'm often asked by depressed people is what's the number one thing I can do if I'm depressed right now? And the answer is to turn off this seminar, go out and find someone who needs help and help them. Turns out our hedonic system is built to turn on when we help others. So that's my number one. My number two, I think, is that learning optimism and cultivating optimism will produce more success in the workplace, less depression, and longer life. And my third is anything you like doing, do it with someone else. It'll enhance it. Those are some fantastic go-tos, easy things that people can latch onto to go from there. And in addition to all this fantastic work, you also have a new book out right now,

Tomorrow Mind. So talk to me about Tomorrow Mind and tell me what it teaches. Well, with Gabriela Kellerman, we've asked the question, what skills do workers today need in a whitewater world in which their skills get outmoded every six months? And Tomorrow Mind talks about five skills. The acronym is PRISM, P-R-I-S-M, where P is prospection, future-mindedness, making people better prospectors of a future. R is resilience and optimism. I is innovation and creativity. S is social skills, particularly rapid rapport. And M is mattering and meaning at work. And so these are all skills that I think matter at work, but they're kind of building on, you know,

the models of flourishing that you've talked about generally. They're the kinds of things that can help us succeed at work. But if we master all the things in this PRISM acronym, it's also kind of the techniques that will make us happier generally. Indeed. And Gabriella Kellerman is both a psychiatrist and comes from the world of work and trying to make work a happier place. So it's been a particular privilege for me to be second author with Gabriella on how work can be happier than it is today. Well, all my gratitude for starting this field off that can help all of the slightly younger guns to make that happen and to share all this great science with everybody out there.

We've already kept you over time, which is exactly what I expected would happen. So we should let you go. But this is really awesome. It's meant a lot to be able to share this work generally. And I feel like telling your story is something I've wanted to do for a long time. So I'm so happy we could let you go. But this is really awesome. It's meant a lot to be able to share this work generally. And I feel like telling your story has been something I've wanted to do for a long time. So I'm so happy we could make it happen. Good. Well, thank you.

It's wonderful to see you. Ditto, ditto. Thank you so much. I hope you enjoyed this chat with Marty Seligman as much as I did. Hearing Marty's story reminds me that it's an honor to live in the time we do right now, when we've learned so much about the kinds of things we can do to live a more flourishing life.

So why not commit to the practices you just heard that you know will make you feel better? You could start discovering your character strengths. As Marty mentioned, you can head to his free website, AuthenticHappiness.org, and take the VIA Character Strengths Survey. Once you learn what your strengths are, you can find ways to put them into practice this week. Thank you. mind, thriving at work with resilience, creativity, and connection now and in an uncertain future. The Happiness Lab will be back soon with an extra special treat. Not just the usual shows recorded inside my beloved podcast closet, but two new episodes that we recorded live in front of a real studio audience of fans just like you. So I hope you'll join me back again soon for the next episode of The Happiness Lab with me, Dr. Laurie Santos.

The Happiness Lab is co-written by Ryan Dilley and is produced by Ryan Dilley, Jess Shane, and Brittany Brown. The show was mastered by Evan Viola, and our original music was composed by Zachary Silver. Special thanks to Greta Cohn, Eric Sandler, Carly Migliore, Morgan Ratner, Jacob Weisberg, my agent, Ben Davis, and the rest of the Pushkin team. The Happiness Lab is brought to you by Pushkin Industries and by me, Dr. Laurie Santos. Ugh, we're so done with New Year, New You.

This year, it's more you on Bumble. More of you shamelessly sending playlists, especially that one filled with show tunes. More of you finding Gemini's because you know you always like them. More of you dating with intention because you know what you want. And you know what? We love that for you. Someone else will too.

Be more you this year and find them on Bumble.