The Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos - Think Yourself Happy (LIVE from Yale)

Episode Date: January 20, 2020

Really concentrating on the emotions and physical sensations you are experiencing right now can make you happier. Join Yale mindfulness expert Dr Hedy Kober as she introduces a live audience to guided meditation. She shares her tips on being mindful with Dr Laurie Santos and explains the new scientific research that shows the benefits of this ancient practice.For an even deeper dive into the research we talk about in the show visit happinesslab.fm Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Pushkin. that one filled with show tunes. More of you finding Gemini is because you know you always like them. More of you dating with intention because you know what you want. And you know what? We love that for you. Someone else will too. Be more you this year and find them on Bumble.

If you've listened to other episodes of the Happiness Lab, you'll probably learn that becoming happier often involves changing your behavior. Things like trying to be more social, getting in a bit of cardio, taking time to experience gratitude. The research shows that all of these things will improve your well-being if you do them. The problem is, we actually have to do these things.

And if you're like me, there are a lot of times when you know what you're supposed to do, but you really would rather do something else. You may know it's a good idea to head out of the house and see a friend if you're feeling down, but if it's raining and you're already on the couch, being social feels like a chore. You may swear you're going to get up early to practice guitar or hit the gym in the morning, but when that alarm clock goes off, there are definitely some days you'd rather stay in bed. These kinds of moments, these feelings of desiring something you know isn't consistent with your bigger goals, they come up whenever we're trying to change our behavior for

the better. Building happier habits often means not getting what we want in the moment, and that can feel pretty yucky. It's the reason many of us give up working on the goals we desire most. But what if I told you there was a way to outsmart those little moments of discomfort and simply sail through them? What if there was a strategy, a strategy that's both ancient and backed up by modern science, that allows you to push through positive behaviors when you really want to backslide? And what if using this technique

also had a host of other health benefits, like reducing inflammation, decreasing stress levels, improving concentration, and even making you happier and less anxious. It's also totally free and only involves a couple minutes a day. To learn what the strategy is and how it works, we're going to talk with an expert, my friend and colleague here at Yale, the neuroscientist Dr. Hedy Kober. And to make it even more fun, we'll do all of that in front of a live studio audience here on campus. So welcome to the next installment of the Happiness Lab 2020. So we're going to start off with a question for the audience, a little bit of a quiz. I want you to answer whether in the last two months or so, how many of you have experienced no stress at all, no frustrations, nothing? On the count of three, we're going to clap. Ready?

One, two, three. Not really hearing anything. Okay. All right. So here's the second question. On the count of three, I'm going to ask you to clap if you've experienced a little bit of stress, maybe a few frustrations, but nothing more than that. Ready? One, two, three. Okay. Now I'm going to ask those of you to clap if in the last two months you've experienced a lot of stress to the point that it sometimes made it kind of hard to function. One, two, three. All right. So I'm here in heady. Most people are going with they kind of experience a lot of stress. I know you use this question a lot in your talks. Is this kind of a common answer that you get? Very, very common answer. So I would say that nine times out of 10, the most clapping that I get or the most hands are raised for have you experienced a lot of stress? This is a very, very common thing to report. And so talk about why this is such a bad thing. Because I mean, again, feeling a lot of stress means you're anxious and so on. But stress

really has an incredible impact on our bodies, right? Yeah. So stress is actually known to have a toxic effect on most of our bodily systems. So stress was designed as a physiological response to a real threat in the environment. And since we are actually somewhat ancient species, we were in the savannah, maybe running away from a predator who might eat us, right? So the stress response in our body was really made to mobilize various physiological systems to allow us to run, to allow us to fight. It wasn't really designed to let us prepare for exams or deal with bad teaching reviews. And so when we experience the same kind of physiological response in the context of these everyday experiences that we now have in our modern day and time, and especially when we have them for many, many days in a row, that physiological

response is actually toxic to multiple physiological systems. And it's also really bad for us achieving our goals, right? You know, when you think about we're here around the new year, we want to be achieving our New Year's resolutions, we want to be behaving better. But as things get more stressful, that's even harder, right? It's so much harder. And it's so much harder because in the moment, even if we haven't been stressed for months and we're just stressed in this moment,

stress interferes with our ability to think. So we know that people, when they're really, really stressed, their cognitive performance is actually impaired. It interferes with our ability to control our urges and control our behaviors. And it sometimes even interferes with our ability to control our urges and control our behaviors. And it sometimes even interferes with our bodies functioning in the way that they're supposed to. Because again, all of the blood is going out of your brain and out of your gut and into

your thigh muscles. So you can run away. And that's really not effective. And what we're trying to do is, let's say, study for an exam. And so everyone here is feeling really stressed. Are we doomed? Are we just going to be stuck feeling stress all the time? Or is there another path?

Yeah, so I think that the great news is that there are things that we could all do to reduce our stress. And I think that today we might focus on one of them in particular that I study, which is mindfulness. I mean, if you're mindful, does that just mean you don't have any stress anymore? So mindfulness, we often think about it. And I say we, me, some of my colleagues, people in my lab, we often think about it as a two component process, which is a component of attention, where attention is really oriented to what is happening

right now. So in this moment, it might be the sound of my voice. If you're here in this room, it might be looking at me and Lori sitting here in the front of the room. It might be the sensation of your butt on the chair or your back, or maybe your hands touching each other. Everything that might be happening in this moment and your attention is oriented to it. Instead of thinking about something that happened to you earlier or something that might happen later. You're really right here. And the important second component is really a component of attitude. And that's a particular kind of attitude.

It's an attitude that's really open. It's curious. And it's accepting this moment exactly as it is. And when we think about doing that moment by moment, we might consider that accepting this moment as it is, noticing it, right? Fully acknowledging everything that might be happening, including maybe the fact that you have deadlines and you're stressed about getting into a class or you have some kind of problem at work if you have a job and you're letting everything that's already happened be exactly as it is. You're not fighting

with it. You're not arguing with it. You're not wishing for it to be different. You're just letting it be. And the remarkable thing that happens when you can really be in that state is that it really opens you up to make better decisions about the next moment. And in doing so, we see that people actually experience less stress and also that they make better decisions. And so this is an idea that's been around for a long time. You're not the first person who's come up with it. I am far from the first person who've come up with this. So mindfulness is really rooted in a very ancient Buddhist tradition. So thousands of years ago, as the story goes, the Buddha sat under a tree and became enlightened when he considered all of the human condition. And one of the solutions that he came up with for how we might exit this human condition that is full of

suffering is that we might practice mindfulness. And mindfulness is really a part of a set of practices within the Buddhist tradition. It's not the only one, but it really entails practicing, interacting with our lives in this way that doesn't argue with what is already here. My understanding is that mindfulness comes through a certain set of behaviors, right? You kind of have to practice it. Yeah. So you can bring mindfulness into any particular moment and being able to do that with more ease, being able to do that almost more automatically does require practice. Mindfulness practice is a little bit like going to the gym.

So at this moment, even if you've never gone to the gym before, you can probably lift some weight, right? There's some amount of weight that you could already lift. But if you practice lifting weights, you can suddenly start over time lifting heavier and heavier weights. I think about mindfulness in very much the same way. So you can be mindful in this moment, it just might not be as easy to sustain it over time. And if you want to make it easier for you to bring mindfulness into many moments, especially

difficult moments, stressful moments, you would benefit from practicing it over time. And that form of practice is often considered meditation, this kind of formal practice where you're really trying to be mindful except the present moment. Yeah. So I think that one can practice mindfulness across many moments in the day and a way to really practice, kind of like you can, you know, I'm practicing lifting something right now. To those of you who can't see me, I'm lifting a bottle of water. And so I just practice lifting something much as you would at the gym. And so you can do it moment by moment across the day. And

when you're washing the dishes, just wash the dishes. Notice how it feels. Accept the sensation of water in your hands. And even if you might notice some thoughts about how you don't like washing the dishes, you can notice that as well and continue doing it anyway. And if you actually want to practice really seriously, you go to the gym. You don't just lift the occasional bottle of water. You set some time and you go and you dedicate that time to exercising and you do it with the most intention that you can bring forth. And it's the same with mindfulness practice. So you set a time and you decide how long you're going to do it for. And you, during that time, set your intention to practice it with the most focus that you can bring. And so sometimes when people hear these terms, kind of mindfulness or meditation, it conjures up a kind of hippy-dippy vibe, you know, like a dude with long hair and robes and kind of, you know, like, I mean, but you're not like a dude with long hair and robes.

You look like a reasonable scientist, right? And so talk about how sometimes these concepts get a bit of a bad rap from people. Yeah. First of all, one of the things that are really interesting is that I think that mindfulness gets a bad rap partly because it's often being explained in contexts that are not necessarily here at Yale by scientists. It's often talked about by people who might actually resemble hippy-dippy dudes with long hair and robes. I think that what me and many other people in my field are trying to do is to actually bring some serious inquiry, serious teaching, and serious science

to bear on this ancient Eastern tradition. And what I hope that achieves is the idea that even though something might have been understood first by people who are a little bit hippy-dippy, they might actually be more serious than you might imagine and might benefit you, even though it might not be your natural orientation to engage. So maybe the best way to show people what this experience of mindfulness is like is to try it out. Audience, are you ready to try out a little quick meditation? All right.

Hedy, why don't you walk us through it? All right. So to those of you who are here, I'm going to recommend that you first get comfortable in your chair and close your eyes. If you are listening to this podcast not here, you might even be driving on your commute, please don't close your eyes. It's very important though, to really try to bring a sense of attention to this moment. And again, you can get maybe comfortable in your chair. If you've closed your eyes, you can also notice maybe your facial muscles relax a bit. We often talk in sitting

meditation about kind of carrying a dignified position, having your head higher than your shoulders. Your back should be somewhat erect, maybe almost noticing as if there's a string pulling your head up to the ceiling. And as you are doing this, maybe take one deep breath to prepare. And now move your attention to the physical sensation of the breath wherever you feel it most strongly in the body and again those of you who are listening if you are not able to notice your breath because there's so much going on you can actually use your visual field as your object

of meditation the idea is to just pick some physical element in your experience and just set your intention to focus on that for the next few minutes and as you do that and especially if you're noticing the breath you can just notice the spontaneous movement of the breath everything inside us and outside us is moving all the time experience is constantly shifting moment is moving into moment and we're just using the breath or anything else that we might choose as an anchor as a sample element of our experience to focus on for the next few minutes remember we're just practicing and if you're noticing the movement of the breath don't try to change it in any way just pay attention to it and here's a part. If you notice that your mind is wandering, just notice it. Even see if you can accept it. Ah, my mind wandered. And then firmly,

but gently, bring your attention back to the physical sensation of the breath. And again, if you notice that your mind is wandering, just note it. Mind wandering. You can even ask yourself, can I be okay with this moment where I notice that my mind did something that was not in my intention? And then again, gently and firmly, bring your attention back to your anchor. And when you're ready, you can open your eyes come back welcome so snap your fingers if your mind wandered at least once during this exercise so i'm seeing everybody here snap their fingers. That is really typical. Mind wandering is what minds do. It's the normal state actually of our existence. And the practice,

what we did here is that I asked you to set the intention to notice something else, right? To pay attention to something else. And if you notice that your mind was wandering, then your mind was doing not what you intended for it to do, right? It was kind of going off script. And the practice is to notice that it happens and let that be and let that go, right? It's already done. It's in the past. We can't change that your mind wandered. I can't change that my mind wanders. And I can notice it when it happens. And in that moment, practice noticing, right? That moment is actually the moment we learn from the most. What we would like to do over and over in life is to wake up from mind wandering and pay attention to where we are and to accept the fact that it has wandered and to develop this faculty of attention and the faculty of acceptance, the

skill to let things that have already happened be as they were, to let this moment be as it is and move on to the next. And the idea is that as you develop these skills, you also learn a whole lot of things about yourself. And we might also learn that we're not our thoughts, that our thoughts kind of do their own thing, that we don't really control where they go and that that happens. And in that, we might learn a new way of being, a way in which when things go out of our control, we can just let that be and then focus on what to do in the next moment and then come back to doing what was in our intention to begin with. Whether it's to study when our mind is wandering about something else that we're upset about, whether we're faced with some news that we didn't expect and we need to

figure out what to do next to make our lives go back in the direction that we intended. And so you're talking about all these benefits, in some ways kind of clinically, but these are the kind of benefits that you've seen personally, right? I first meditated many, many years ago, even before college, just a few times because I was invited to do it in the context of a yoga class. And I did it faithfully while I went to that yoga class. And then I moved to go to college at Columbia. And I abandoned the practice completely because it was hard and annoying. And I found it too difficult and overwhelming.

And then I was reintroduced to it a few years later. I found it too difficult and overwhelming. And then I was reintroduced to it a few years later. And what happened then is that I really learned to engage with it in a way that almost immediately I noticed made me better, made my life better, made my experience easier. I was going through a lot of stress at the time. It was a really, really difficult period. And I noticed that when I walked out of my mindfulness practice, I felt calmer and that my day went better if I did it in the morning and that over time, my focus got better and that my ability to deal with things happening outside of my control was really much improved. And a lot of the motivation that I had then, especially in the absence of any evidence or research on mindfulness, I was really motivated by kind of my own first-person science. It worked for me and so I kept doing it.

So you've seen personally the benefits of mindfulness, but we're also learning that this isn't just you. Science is really showing us that mindfulness is doing incredible things for our brains and for our bodies. But we actually have to take a break. So we're going to hear about the science when we come back. The Happiness Lab will We'll see you next time. 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. All right.

Welcome back. We've heard a little bit about the history of mindfulness and meditation and some of the personal benefits, Heidi, that you've seen, but now I want you to take me into the empirical work. What has the science really shown us about how meditation changes the brain and the body? So there's now not only studies, but meta-analyses, which are studies of studies, showing that mindfulness is effective for depression, for anxiety, for substance use disorders, and for some other disorders as well, reducing the suffering of people who on a day-to-day basis really have a life that is full of struggle. And beyond that, and actually some of the first research on mindfulness was on people who didn't have any form of psychopathology, but were just stressed. People with chronic pain,

people who have normal everyday life stressors, experienced tremendous improvements with the practice of mindfulness. And I'm not saying that mindfulness is for everyone or for every single condition out there. And the data are actually quite strong that if you take a mindfulness course or learn how to meditate, that you might experience less stress, more happiness, better well-being, and a reduction in symptoms like depression and anxiety. And so you've shown that one of the reasons mindfulness and meditation in particular can be so powerful is that it's really changing the way our brain functions on autopilot. Right. When we have people sit in a brain scanner, typically a functional magnetic resonance imaging scanner, fMRI, and don't ask them to do anything in particular,

in those moments, two things happen. The first thing that happens is that people's mind wander. We know that. We talked about that. And the second thing that we can see in the brain scan themselves is that there's a network of regions that get recruited in those moments of mind wandering. And we actually have come to call those the default mode network. And that network of regions is really reflective of the default state of the mind, which is to wander and to kind of go in the background, right? We all know that it's almost like a crazy suck puppet sitting on our shoulder, constantly commenting on everything that's going on. Well, we can not only experience

that as humans, there's also a network or a pattern of brain activity that is associated with that kind of default mode of the brain. And that default mode network is significantly affected by the practice of meditation. So in one study in my lab, we recruited individuals who were experienced meditators, people who've meditated for many, many years. We asked them in the scanner to both meditate some of the time and also to just lie there and do nothing in particular. And we also recruited a very well-matched group of control participants who've never meditated before. And we asked them to do the exact same thing. And when we compared brain activity between the two groups, what we found is that those individuals who meditated showed significant reductions in brain activity in that default mode network and also altered connectivity within that network. And that was

significantly different from those very well-matched controls who've never meditated. They also, importantly, reported less mind-wandering. And the thing that's really cool is that those individuals, they've meditated for many, many years, and the average number of hours that they meditated is 10,000 hours. That's a lot of meditation. What's really cool is that other labs have now recruited individuals who've meditated much less. In some cases, people were randomized to meditate for just three days. And again, their brain activity was measured. And what they reported is that the group of individuals who just meditated for three days were starting to show the same changes in brain network connectivity

within the default mode network that we were seeing in the experienced meditators, suggesting that the same pattern that we see in people who've meditated a lot actually starts changing after much, much less practice. Which is pretty cool because it means within a couple days of meditation, you're really changing the amount of concentration that your brain can do kind of naturally, right? Yeah. So I'm really interested in what happens to people right when they start meditating because I realized that while it's really interesting

for everybody to know about these expert meditators, that's a little bit like talking about Olympic athletes, right, who really practice this for a really long time. Most people really wanna know, if I start meditating tomorrow, am I gonna see benefits? And the good news is the answer is absolutely yes. We started looking at what we call like minimal dose, right, the first time that anybody's ever meditated.

After just 10 minutes of meditating for the very, very first time, their cognitive performance got just a little bit better and better than the control group who did another activity during those 10 minutes. A caveat to these data is that, again, across these multiple studies, we also show that people who are the very, very extreme end of neuroticism, self-reported neuroticism, which is kind of the tendency to have negative emotion and judge your experience a lot, those people actually don't benefit from the first 10 minutes of mindfulness. And this is important because one, it just showed us that there's individual differences and not everybody benefits

to the same degree and not everybody benefits immediately. But it also gives us another avenue of research, which we're working on now, to try to understand what is the minimal dose for these people who don't benefit from just 10 minutes. Do they need to meditate twice? Do they start benefiting after three times? We're still working on figuring that out. But the surprising thing about the benefits, I mean, you're talking about these benefits in terms of concentration, right? They're more attentive and so on. There's also emotional benefits as well, right? We get a happiness boost from this kind of mindfulness practice. Yeah, so there's a few different ways to think about the happiness boost. One way to think about the happiness boost is that it actually is directly related to

the degree to which mindfulness practice reduces mind-wandering. So there's research that was done by Matt Killingworth and Dan Gilbert at Harvard some years ago where they asked people to use their smartphone and they cued them a few times a day and asked them to report, amongst other things, what are you doing? What activity are you engaged on? And was your mind wandering when the cue went off? And what they discovered is that people's minds wander a lot. In fact, people's mind were wandering almost 50% of the time that they were being cued. And during almost every single activity, even during sex, which is

pretty remarkable, I think. And what was worse is that they discovered that to the degree that people's mind wandered that was related to being unhappy and that suggests that if we can reduce mind wandering mindfulness might not only make you more mindful but it might also make you happier because your mind is wandering less another way is by reducing stress stress is not a happy experience in fact for most people stress is a very aversive experience and so if over time we can reduce our stress levels that is another way of saying they're becoming happier they're becoming less stressed another way to think about it that happier, they're becoming less stressed.

Another way to think about it that we think about sometimes is that in the moment we've found that when people are mindful of a negative experience, just in the moment when they come into the lab, we might induce a negative experience. We've done this with either very gory images that often make people feel quite negatively, and we've also done this with physical pain. And specifically what we see in the context of pains is that we see reductions in activity in brain regions that are typically associated with pain and that are sensitive to rising temperatures. And that suggests it's not that they're just telling us that they're feeling less negatively or that they're feeling less pain, but we actually see a reduction even in the neural pain signature in terms of their brain activity. And so that really is consistent with the idea that they're actually experiencing less pain. activity. And so that really is consistent with the idea that they're actually experiencing less pain. I find this benefit of meditation so important because when we think about trying

to achieve happiness, when we're thinking about trying to achieve our goal of becoming better people, often the act of doing that involves doing something that makes us feel a little uncomfortable or kind of painful. You know, we're in our New Year's resolution season, so everybody's exercising. You know, getting out of bed in the morning when the bed is all cozy and stuff, that's kind of uncomfortable. And the claim is that through this practice of being mindful of that discomfort, you can kind of magically overcome it or at least kind of be with it. Yeah. I love that you're saying magically because even to me, sometimes the benefits of this practice feel like magic. And I think it's actually not magic at all in the sense that

if you can learn to tolerate the fact that your mind does sometimes things that are unexpected and often aversive over and over and you learn to accept it and you learn to let it go and move on and that action of letting go of something that happened that's unpleasant and moving on is exactly what we need to do what you're describing right to tolerate the fact that it's really not fun to wake up an hour earlier to go running, or it's really not fun to go to the gym and lift these really heavy weights or any kind of practice, right? Not smoking anymore, feeling withdrawal symptoms, all of these things that we might do in our New Year's resolution, they require us to tolerate some discomfort around these new behaviors that we're trying to acquire. And if we learn by

practicing mindfulness to tolerate our discomfort, we can then apply it to all of these other elements in life that we might want to improve. And this is a practice that you and others have called urge surfing. I love this term. So what is urge surfing? So urge surfing is a phrase that's often used in the context of substance use disorders to describe using the mindfulness skill in the presence of urges or craving. And craving is an incredibly common experience, right? So if you've ever experienced craving for anything, please clap your hands. incredibly common experience, right? So if you've ever experienced craving for anything, please clap your hands. We won't ask you what you're craving because that could get us in trouble.

So everybody here was clapping their hands. And this is consistent with very large scale epidemiological studies that show that pretty much 99% of individuals report that they crave something sometimes. Craving is an incredibly common experience. We all know what it feels like. And the idea with the urge surfing exercise is that you just sit there and notice the craving. And actually what you might notice is that craving has an arc like most emotions where it will rise, it will reach a peak, and at some point it will actually start coming down by itself. And that in noticing and accepting the craving as it is, we might notice that over time the craving itself actually comes down. And even in the moment, we might notice that it comes down. And in my lab, we've done these kinds of studies, especially with cigarette smokers and with food, where we ask

people, we actually induce craving. So we, and you guys all know how people might induce craving for food, right? So this is what food ads are all about. We show you a picture of a yummy burger and immediately go, that looks yummy. I want to have that. And then you might actually go and get the burger. And so we do something like that in my lab where we show people pictures of food or we show if they're cigarette smokers, we show them pictures of other people smoking. And we know that this increases people's craving. And then we might ask them to use one of a variety of strategies. One of them might be mindfulness. So we might ask them to notice and accept their experience exactly as it is. And what we see when we do this is that people report less

craving when they're just noticing and accepting the sensation as it is. And we see a reduction in brain activity in regions that are associated with craving, suggesting that even by bringing mindfulness and acceptance to the moment of craving, we might already experience some improvement. I love this phrase of like, can we just notice the experience exactly the way it is and just get through it? I mean, I think that's so useful for everything from the discomfort that you feel when you're trying to do your new goal

or what you experience when you're anxious about A- or anxious about getting into classes, which for listeners at home, this is what my Yale students are going through right now. They're trying to get into classes. They're trying to get into Hedy's class and they're not able to get in. So it's very sad.

But the idea is just, can I sit with this? Yeah, can I just be okay with this feeling? We often encourage our participants who are not trained in mindfulness when they come into these studies to really just ask themselves, can I just be okay with this moment? Can I just be okay with this feeling exactly as it is?

And the idea is that by actually asking yourself if you can be okay with it, you actually open yourself up to doing something more useful in the next moment. So for our listeners and for the folks in the audience here who want to get going with this, what recommendations do you have for folks who want to get started? Try it right now. Take a moment right now and see whether you can practice a little bit of this. And if you want to kick up the intensity of this practice, you might think about something that's currently really upsetting you or some stressor that you have in your life. And see if you can just notice the experience of stress and just let that be.

We're not saying that you're going to let the situation be exactly as it is. We're just asking about the feelings that you already have. Can you just let this feeling be here? And over time, especially as you get more practice, you might notice that as you do this, your sensation of stress about this experience is coming down just a little bit. And over time, it might start coming down quite a bit. The second invitation is to really start making this a daily practice or at least a frequent practice, something that you might allow yourself to do for five minutes or 10 minutes a day for a period. And then if you start noticing changes, maybe, or if you are just really motivated, start doing it for longer. I think that over time, the idea is not that you're necessarily going to meditate an hour

a day for the rest of your life, but that you will do it until you start noticing the benefits that you yourself might be experiencing. And then you will actually feel spontaneously motivated or intrinsically motivated to do it more and more. And I think I've now seen it with students and friends and other people in my life who've tried the practice, maybe found it a little bit annoying at first. and then after a while notice that it's actually been really transformative. It's such a wonderful way to kind of do some like gymnastics with your mind or like bring your mind to the gym. I wanted to end with sort of more of a philosophical question. I feel like

as a society, we're more distracted than ever. And in some ways, we're more kind of cravey than ever for all kinds of things. Do you think understanding the science of this stuff is going to make us happier, like we can claim back the present moment and stop all this craving? I guess my hope is that everybody who might have even a little bit of curiosity will try it at least once and maybe even twice with the hope that even if it will bestow just a little bit of benefit to you, that you would have an opportunity to try it. And of course, my hope is that we all will together make a world that is just a little kinder and a little bit more mindful. Everyone, can you please join me in thanking Dr. Hedy Koper for a fantastic talk.

Thank you. by Evan Viola, and our original music was composed by Zachary Silver. Special thanks to Ben Davis, Mia LaBelle, Julia Barton, Carly Migliori, Heather Fane, Maggie Taylor, Maya Koenig, and Jacob Weisberg. The Happiness Lab is brought to you by Pushkin Industries. We'll see you next time. 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.