The Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos - You Can’t Always Want What You Like

Episode Date: September 13, 2021

We might love gruelling hikes, trips to see far-flung relatives or super hard crossword puzzles, but often we lack the motivation needed to embark on these fun things. How can that be? They make us happy, right?Dr Laurie Santos explores why our brains don't encourage us to do things that we know we'll enjoy, and presents some strategies to help us do more of the activities that will result in happier and healthier lives. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Pushkin. Every weekday at 6.30am, my alarm goes off. My first morning moments aren't filled with joy at waking up for an exciting new day. Quite the opposite. I'm feeling irritated. I don't want to get up and work out like day. Quite the opposite. I'm feeling irritated. I don't want to get up and work out like I planned to the day before. And that's when my brain, despite its utter grogginess, transforms into the slickest negotiator ever.

My mind comes up with reason after reason that I should really just stay in bed. I got to bed pretty late last night. I need my sleep. I can exercise in the afternoon. Or tomorrow. Or just skip it altogether. It's only one workout. What's that in the scheme of things? Plus, I don't need this kind of pressure in my life.

I'm busy. I don't really have 45 minutes to waste on a workout. Best to sleep in just this once. On the good days, I manage to shut up all the mental back and forth and drag myself out of bed. I try to make my morning workout both fun and frictionless by using all the scientific tips I've told you about in past episodes. Like having exercise equipment in my house and laying out gym clothes the night before. And I follow my colleague Katie Milkman's advice about bundling my morning exercise with a second fun and somewhat tempting experience. I watch my favorite 90s TV show, Buffy the Vampire Slayer. And on those mornings when I do manage to get myself up to exercise, the same thing happens.

Long before my Buffy episode ends, I realized that all my brain's earlier predictions were wrong. I love working out. I step off the elliptical feeling great. My body is awake and lighter. I'm thinking more clearly, and I'm in a better mood. Exercising in the morning was a fantastic idea, one that has had a clear and measurably positive impact on my happiness. clear and measurably positive impact on my happiness. But exactly 23 hours later... Get up? Are you kidding? Workouts suck. Better to sleep in. Just this once. Why can't my in-bed brain remember all the positive rewards that my exercising brain has directly experienced? Why can't my mind get motivated to hit the elliptical when it's totally clear that a morning workout makes me happier?

The answer, as we'll see in this episode, involves a bug in the design of our reward circuitry, one that leads to some of our biggest happiness mistakes. We'll see that, with all due respect to the Rolling Stones, the problem isn't that you can't always get what you want. It's that you can't always want what you like. Our minds are constantly telling us what to do to be happy. But what if our minds are wrong? What if our minds are lying to us, leading us away from what will really make us happy?

The good news is that understanding the science of the mind can point us all back in the right direction. You're listening to The Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos. I run sometimes. I'm trying to get back into running and I don't enjoy it while I'm doing it, but I enjoy the fact that I am doing it

and that's type two fun. This is my friend and former colleague, Paul Bloom, who recently became a professor at the University of Toronto. Paul and I are chatting about a concept that's become a common topic of conversation with my college students, the so-called fun scale. The fun scale attempts to differentiate between different types of fun. Type 1 fun is fun which is simply fun. Type 1 fun involves basically no effort or pain whatsoever. It's fun that just feels nice.

Think hot fudge sundaes, drinking margaritas, jumping into a pool on a warm day, a low-effort stroll in the sun, gossiping with your close friends, a nice orgasm. These things are sort of Darwinian no-brainers. Animals that have these desires reproduce more than those that don't. But then there's type 2 fun. Type 2 fun is a form of fun that doesn't immediately feel fun when we first start the activity. Pursuits like my morning elliptical workout, a really frustrating puzzle, a super, super hot bath that's almost painful to step into,

a terrifying horror movie, pushing through a really hard writing project. Activities like these don't actually feel good when we first get started, but we often really like them anyway. I want to be clear here. This distinction between type 1 and type 2 fun isn't a scientific one. As far as I can tell, the concept started as an internet meme that circulated in outdoor adventure and athletic blogs. But it's catchy for psychologists like Paul and me because it highlights an aspect of human nature that's a bit of a paradox. Why is it that some of the best things in life just don't feel good when you start doing them? Paul has long been fascinated and sort

of puzzled by these kinds of type 2 rewards. As he explains in detail in his new book, The Sweet Spot, The Pleasures of Suffering in the Search for Meaning, pleasures that hurt and feel sucky don't make sense from the view that many scholars have about human nature, that we're built to seek out pleasure and avoid pain. And it's not entirely wrong. Anybody who said that we don't like pleasures is just crazy. But it's incomplete. It's incomplete because we often pursue all sorts of difficult and painful activities. I want to have a good time, but I also want to do good in the world. I want to make the world a better place. And that often involves suffering and difficulty. I want to have a good time, but I also want to engage in meaningful and purposeful

activities. I want to be able, you know, I want to run a marathon. I want to raise my children. I want to write a book. None of those are fun in the simple sense. It's not, you know, orgasms and hot foot Sundays, but it offers sort of a deeper satisfaction. Paul's book argues that what we like is complicated. Take hard work, for example. You know, for the most part, humans and other animals avoid effort. If I have to walk to the refrigerator, I'll walk straight to the refrigerator. I won't walk around it 20 times. Effort is difficult. It takes up calories, takes up energy, takes up time. But the paradox is sometimes we seek it out.

That said, Paul is quick to point out that adversity and discomfort only feel pleasurable when we willingly decide to engage in them, something Paul refers to as chosen suffering. It's critical that you choose to do it. These things, in the absence of choice, are just terrible. They're tortured, they're misery, and there's nothing good to be said about them. So that degree of choice of control is critical. But what's weird about humans is that we often do choose to engage in time-consuming, effortful, and even painful activities. Paul's book describes lots of surprising cases of seemingly objectively terrible activities

that many people really enjoy doing. One of his favorite extreme examples comes from a famous paper by the economist George Lowenstein about the challenges of mountaineering. From the standpoint of type 1 frontal pleasure, it's terrible. People describe constant physical pain. These are high altitude climbs, you have a headache throughout.

Sometimes you're stuck in a tent for a day going mad with boredom. There's real terror because often people are killed or maimed in these things. And so Lowenstein says why in the world do people do this? Lowenstein came up with in the world do people do this? Lowenstein came up with a few answers, ones that help to explain not just truly dire activities like mountaineering,

but also the less extreme, more routine cases of type 2 rewards that many of us seek out all the time. His first answer is that we sometimes choose suffering-filled activities because they help to bolster our identity. I'm doing that to tell the world and maybe to tell myself, look how tough I am. Look at my skills. Look at my endurance. But a second and maybe even more important reason that we enjoy a good hard pursuit is because it gives us a sense of meaning. It is a purpose-driven activity that involves tremendous difficulty. And so it gives you great satisfaction. But this raises an even bigger question. Why does effort and suffering wind up feeling good?

Paul argues that hard work and pain feel good because they take up a lot of mental bandwidth. I think dogs and monkeys and cats, they probably just go for the pleasure. People are complicated. And one thing is we have the burden of our consciousness, where we're conscious of our bodies, we're burden of our consciousness, where we're conscious of our bodies, we're conscious of our histories, of our futures. We worry a lot, and it weighs on us, and it's nice to be relieved from it. And this is one function of pain. And painful experience, intense exercises, is that it pulls us out of ourselves. This psychological state, where we get so involved in an activity

that nothing else seems to matter, is what famed positive psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi called flow. You know you're in flow if hours go by and you don't even, this time's gone by, you forget to eat,

you forget to do things. And I wish I was in that state more often. Csikszentmihalyi first discovered flow in an experiment with teenagers. He gave his subjects beepers, which went off at different times of the day, and subjects had to report what they were doing and how they felt. Much of the time, the teens reported feeling bored or unhappy. But there were a few moments of the day when they felt a lot happier.

Not when they were watching TV or eating something delicious, but when they were going for harder type 2 rewards, especially ones that required a combination of skill and effort. Csikszentmihalyi also found that there's a sweet spot to the skill and effort needed for flow-inducing activities. They aren't so easy that they're boring. They're not so incredibly difficult that you're freaking out, you're stressed. You just find yourself in the middle, and if you do it right, time just flies by. Paul's work on the pleasures of suffering has convinced him that we'd all be a lot happier

if we skipped a lot of the easy type 1 rewards and tried to get a bit more flow in our lives. You read Cheek's semi-high subscription that people's lives are full of flow, and at least if you may feel envy, I find it tough. I try every morning to engage in flow activities where you really fully engage. But the world makes it tough. I try every morning to engage in flow activities. We really fully engage. But the world makes it tough. As I do this, I have my Twitter in the background. I have my email dinging and I have texts. And if I'm a good person, I shut that all down. If I'm the way I normally am, like this morning, the distractions are just too much fun. Like Paul, I've seen firsthand that flow-inducing type 2 rewards have a real startup cost.

That's the reason I struggle so much to hit the elliptical in the morning. It's often too hard to forego the easy type 1 reward of staying in bed in order to reap the type 2 reward that my hard workout eventually provides. But the problem isn't just with my morning exercise routine. I'm lucky enough to have a profession that requires doing lots of effortful, flow-inducing stuff. But I also spend a lot of my day doing easy things. Stuff that doesn't require any effort. Checking my email.

Scrolling to the next screen on Reddit. Watching some mind-numbing reality TV show. And spending my time doing all this easy stuff has an enormous opportunity cost. There are so many hard but rewarding projects I want to engage with. I want to write a book. I want to learn Italian. I want to watch that important but kind of intense movie that's been stuck in my Netflix queue for months.

I want to build up to do a crow pose in my yoga practice. All of these activities would give me a real sense of satisfaction and a lot of joy. But achieving those things are hard. And so a lot of time, I just end up not doing them. And research has found I'm not alone. They do these surveys where you ask people about flow experiences in their life. A lot of people never experience it. A lot of people just do easy things.

And I think that's the bad way to live a life, but I understand it because getting from no effort to effort is tough. So what is keeping us on the sofa? It all comes down to an incredibly dumb design feature of our brains. A surprising gap between wanting and liking. We'll explore this strange glitch in our neural design when the Happiness Lab returns in a moment Hi, I'm Kent Berridge I'm at the University of Michigan and I study how the brain likes and wants things

I decided to tag in an expert to figure out why I can't choose harder type 2 rewards. And I was so thrilled when Kent agreed to chat with me about my dilemma. Kent is one of my scientific heroes. I've been reading his papers since I was a sophomore in college. He's a world expert on the neuroscience of reward and has done some of the best empirical work to date on the odd ways our brains are hooked up when it comes to making decisions that give us pleasure. One of my favorite of his many famous neuroscientific discoveries is about how we experience type 1 rewards,

specifically the really straightforward sensory pleasures. Things like eating a hot fudge sundae or having an orgasm. Kent's research goal was to find the brain's hedonic hotspots, the neural regions that cause us to experience a sense of liking. Kent's goal was to figure out where these hedonic hotspots were. He planned to stimulate a part of the brain known as the mesolimbic reward circuit to see which parts of that circuit actually produce the experience of sensory pleasure. But there was a bit of a problem.

Kent was studying liking not in humans, but in the usual neuroscience subjects, rats. And you can't just ask a rodent, hey, on a scale of 1 to 10, how much did your liking increase after that injection? There were lots of existing methods that scientists could use to ask a rat what it wanted. How much would you work for this reward? How eagerly would you approach it? How much would you consume? But at least for this study, Kent wasn't interested in what the rats wanted. His goal was to find the areas that

registered what rats liked, the brain regions that actually experienced pleasure. So Kent capitalized on a technique that human parents have used to test their baby's experience of liking for centuries. He put a small amount of sweet food on a rat's tongue and measured how it reacted. When infants get something that they like, they kind of show it with sort of relaxed mouth movements and sometimes a licking of the lips. If they get something they don't like, like bitterness, they shake their heads, they move from side to side. It's very clear what they like and what they don't like. Rats, it turns out, do the same thing. Kent placed sweet food in his rats' mouths and measured their reactions.

He then repeated that same measurement while micro-injecting stimulating drugs into different parts of the rats' brains. If rats licked the exact same food more vigorously after the injections, then they must have derived even more pleasure from it. And if that was the case, then it probably also meant

that the brain region Kent had stimulated was probably a hedonic hotspot. Kent's experiment was a huge success. In some cases, he was able to triple the rat's liking responses. But Kent was also in for a bit of a surprise. He was expecting to find hotspots all over the reward areas of the brain.

And that's not quite what happened. We sort of plotted them on the brain, you know, where were the pleasure ones? And they were all clustered together. Natural selection, it seems, did not build in a lot of neural real estate for experiencing type 1 sensory pleasure. Just a few surprisingly small clusters. If anybody had asked us how we'd like our brains to be designed, we'd ask for maybe lots of pleasure mechanisms. We'd live a life of hedonic contentment.

Evolution had other purposes in a sense. I mean, it was aiming for survival and it doesn't perhaps care quite so much about the quality of life during the survival and the propagation of genes. Liking, in a sense, is a luxury. Liking, in a sense, is a luxury. But even though liking might be an evolutionary luxury, there was a second function that natural selection decided was definitely non-negotiable. Wanting. While the liking parts of our brain cause an experience of pleasure,

wanting regions cause an experience of craving. Wanting regions compel us to take action and to go after stuff that feels good. And despite being relatively stingy with liking regions, natural selection seems to have really invested in wanting. Wanting regions are much bigger than liking regions, and they have connections that project all over the brain. The brain even has an entire neurotransmitter called dopamine that's largely devoted to motivating us to go after stuff. Now, you may have heard of

dopamine before, often because it's thought to be associated with a feeling of reward or pleasure. The notion that dopamine is a pleasure mechanism, this is a neuroscience meme that is tremendously potent, and it once seemed tremendously true. I believed it absolutely when I started out in the field. But over time, Kent's work started to chip away at the idea that dopamine equals pleasure. Study after study began to show that dopamine isn't about liking rewards. It's about wanting them. Kent figured this out initially in a set of clever studies.

He found a special neurotoxin that selectively killed off dopamine neurons while leaving the rest of the brain intact. collectively killed off dopamine neurons while leaving the rest of the brain intact. He then injected this toxin into rats' reward circuits and tested whether doing so affected the rats' liking, as measured by their licking behaviors. To his surprise, the toxin didn't seem to do anything. In terms of the levels of pleasure they experienced from sweet food, the rats without any dopamine were totally normal. So they had normal likes and they

had normal learning of new likes and dislikes, but they didn't seem to want any of these things that they liked in life. They don't eat at all voluntarily. They don't drink at all voluntarily. We have to nurse them the way you and I would be nursed in intensive care in a hospital, artificially fed three times a day. They would voluntarily sit there and starve to death unless they were nursed. Kent's dopamine-lesioned rats liked sweet food, but they had no motivation to seek these foods out. They had no sense of wanting. This study and others helped Kent discover that dopamine was the key to wanting, not liking. Dopamine is a mechanism by which we get motivated to go after the good

sensory rewards of life. But as Kent dug more into the way this dopamine system worked, he realized that our experience of wanting might not be as uniform as most theories of human nature predict. I think there's sort of multiple kinds of wanting, you know, that we may not distinguish really clearly in consciousness or in human language, but psychologically and from the brain's point of view, there's a difference. When people ask us what we want in our everyday life, like where we want to go for dinner, or which podcast we want to listen to, or what we want to be when we grow up,

we're usually thinking of a conscious desire for a particular outcome or goal. This everyday experience of wanting, what Ken calls cognitive wanting, is the one we tend to notice, mostly because it's a conscious, accessible feeling. But this wasn't the form of wanting that Kent observed in his reward regions. Kent's dopamine work had tapped into a completely different kind of wanting altogether, one that he and others refer to as incentive salience. You know, if you're hungry and you smell food, that's that kind of want.

You're walking down the street and you see in the window, shop window, something that really gets your attention that you'd really love to have. It's that kind of want. Incentive salience doesn't feel like the normal sort of cognitive wanting because it happens too automatically. It's like all of a sudden we're compelled to go after some goal we weren't even thinking about a moment before. And unlike cognitive wanting,

which sometimes requires some planning and work to act on, incentive salience is often directly linked to the action we need to perform to get the reward we want. Which is why incentive salience can exert such a powerful effect on our behavior. We end up moving toward a thing before we've even had a chance to ask whether it's something we should have cognitively wanted in the first place. That's why I confined myself five cookies in to the very box of Girl Scout cookies that my cognitive system had sworn off that very morning. I think ordinarily in humans, this

incentive salience wanting in quotation mark, it usually comes on together with a cognitive desire, a cognitive want. They go hand in hand. But sometimes these kinds of wanting can come apart. The incentive salience want in quotation marks can go in a different direction than your cognitive desire. And this is what's so problematic about being a creature that has two different systems for wanting stuff. We sometimes experience an automatic and incredibly strong incentive salience want for stuff that we don't cognitively want at all. It's a disconnect that's obvious for anyone who's known people who are suffering from drug addiction and who, at least cognitively, really, really want to quit. at least cognitively, really, really want to quit. They would rather not take the drugs ever again,

but if they encounter these drug cues, especially in drug-related contexts, and especially in moments of stress, you get a massive sensitized dopamine reaction that could give this intense urge, this excessive urge of wanting to take the drug again. The disconnect between cognitive wanting and incentive salience is particularly problematic in people with substance addictions, but it's an issue for the rest of us too. All those mornings I cognitively wanted to get up and work out, but my urge to stay in bed was too strong. All those Girl Scout cookies I intended to leave in the box, but ate anyway. All those times I swore I'd work on this podcast, but ended up scrolling through Twitter for hours. I swore I'd work on this podcast, but ended up scrolling through Twitter for hours. There are so,

so many type 1 fun activities that I regularly intend not to give into, ones that I have really good reasons for avoiding, but I end up doing them anyway. That is incentive salience at its worst. It doesn't have reasons, this kind of wanting. It has mechanisms. So that's the first big problem with the way our brains process rewards. There's a disconnect between the liking brain parts and the wanting brain parts, which can sometimes cause a powerful and even unconscious urge to go after type 1 rewards that we don't even cognitively want. And that means we get caught up in easy pleasures more often than we might intend to. But so far, we've only been talking about sensory rewards, like sweet foods. What about more complicated pleasures?

If you would ask me 20 years ago, I would have said, well, sensory rewards, yes. But, you know, human cognitive pleasures or cultural, artistic music pleasures, human social pleasures? No, no, no, no. Recent work, though, has shown that the mesolimbic hedonic hotspots Kent studied in rats also light up when people experience more abstract rewards, like beautiful music and art. So the hotspots aren't just for evolved pleasures like food and sex. The same hotspots we see for food and rodents also seem to respond to more complex pleasures in humans. I would never have expected that 20 years ago.

But what about the more effortful type 2 rewards that I want more of in life? Finishing a hard puzzle, writing my happiness book, getting to the top of a mountain, my morning post-elliptical glow. Well, you know, it would be marvelous to have a human fMRI study of this post-exercise satisfaction. I would love to know, is it the same hedonic hotspots that are coming out for that? I would love to know, is it the same hedonic hotspots that are coming up for that? The honest answer is that neuroscientists haven't looked for type 2 liking in the mesolimbic reward system all that much yet. And the reason is pretty obvious when you think about it. Type 1 pleasures are easy to study experimentally. You can feed a rat something sweet or have a human listen to music in an MRI scanner. But it's hard to brain scan a mountain

climber that's just descended to the top of a peak, or to stick a brain electrode in an MRI scanner. But it's hard to brain scan a mountain climber that's just descended to the top of a peak, or to stick a brain electrode in an academic that's just finished writing a challenging grant. So that means we don't yet fully know whether the same mesolimbic reward regions that Kent studies code for type 2 pleasures. But there is one thing that is empirically obvious about type 2 liking. Remember that super powerful incentive salience wanting that goes with type 1 pleasures? The pull we get so automatically for the simple rewards in life? It doesn't seem to be there for type 2 pleasures. Although we often have a cognitive wanting for effortful rewards like my post-workout glow, we rarely get an incentive salience craving along with it. Sometimes I've been asked by people who study exercise in kinesiology departments and such,

why can we create an incentive salience want to exercise? That would be supers. And, you know, there may be a few very lucky individuals out there who have this kind of urge to go out jogging that really, you know, I think it can happen. But for most of us, for me too, I exercised this morning, but it's certainly, I didn't jump into it with joy. And things like say world peace, we'd all want world peace, but it doesn't trigger our mesolimbic system. And we might prefer that the incentive salience want follow those cognitive desires to give the same urgency to make us want to go and jump on the exercise machines. But that's not how we are constructed. Yes, that's right. Our dumb brains have no automatic method for going after all the

effortful, flow-inducing pleasures in life. The ones that, as Paul Bloom pointed out, often make life worth living. We do experience a cognitive wanting for type 2 pleasures. But they aren't mesolimbic wants that are triggering the incentive salience system that make us have this urge to do it. We kind of sometimes have to make ourselves do it. And herein lies the second big problem with the way our brains process rewards. Even though natural selection was kind enough to give us a powerful and very automatic urge to go for sensory type 1 pleasures, even ones we sometimes don't

intend to go after, we have no such automatic craving for type 2 rewards. For type 2 pleasures, as Kent put it, we just gotta make ourselves do it. Which, if you ask me, is a really, really stupid way to design a brain. And so, we've figured out the neural answer to the puzzle of why I can't get up to hit the elliptical, even though I have concrete evidence that it'll bring me joy. Our brains are designed to crave type 1 rewards, even in cases where we don't like them all that much. But our brains are not designed to experience an automatic wanting for the type 2 rewards, the ones we really will enjoy. As I noted at the start of our episode, the problem with our brains isn't that you can't always get what you want. It's that you can't always want what you like.

But if you try sometimes, can you fix that? I mean, could there be a way to get our brains to actually crave type 2 rewards? When we get back from the break, we'll hear from a scientist who's found that there may be a way for our minds to get what we need. you'll hear from a scientist who's found that there may be a way for our minds to get what we need. She'll share some new research hinting that there may be a workaround for our not-so-optimally-designed reward circuits, ones that you can start putting into effect today. The Happiness Lab will be right back. I actually really don't like running, and lo and behold, I do run. This is my good friend and colleague, Hedy Kober,

a professor of psychiatry, psychology, and neuroscience here at Yale. I admire Hedy a lot, not just because she's an amazing scientist, but because she's really, really good at motivating herself to go after effortful but pleasure-inducing type 2 rewards. The hard workouts that I struggle with every morning, Hedy has strategies to hit them up with ease. When she's in bed contemplating hitting that snooze button, she brings to mind the final bit of her daily jog. She imagines the joy she'll feel on those few steps leading up to her front door. That walk, right? A minute of bliss of just like, I rock. I'm amazing. I just did this thing. It's really was good for me. It's

consistent with my values of being healthy and being a runner. When I think about that, like even right now, I'm like, oh, maybe I'll go running later. Hedy is constantly doing the sorts of type two activities that I aspire to engage with more often. She's the yoga buddy who always wants to do the hardest intensity class, the ones with all the handstands. She's the academic colleague who's always happily staying up super late to finish a big grant. Hedy engages in hard, flow-inducing stuff all the time, and she seems to do so without any motivational struggle. But Hedy also excels at the flip side. She's always avoiding those type 1 pleasures that might not be so good for her.

Someone brought some cookies to my house over the weekend and I definitely know that they are in the kitchen and I'm aware of that a lot of the time. Those cookies would already be long gone if they were under my roof. Hedy admits that she too finds the box kind of tempting. I think about how tasty it would be and how yummy it would be and how sweet it would be.

And like the texture of it has like a little bit of a lemon icing on it. Despite the strong incentive salience Hedy seems to experience for that box of cookies, she's able to resist the temptation. She experiences her reasons not to eat the cookies just as vividly as her desire to go after them. Well, if I have the cookie now, I can't have another one later. And that's a cost to me because I'm definitely going to want one after lunch. And, you know, it's not consistent with my values. I'm actually trying to not eat sweets. It's not healthy for me when I eat a lot of sugar, I break out.

I really don't like that. So that's a cost for me. These examples might make you think that Hedy is some superhuman self-regulator, the kind of person who's born with an innate knack for controlling her dopamine system. But since Hedy is one of my closest friends, I know that's not really the case. We often say all research is research. In my case, that's absolutely accurate. I study craving, at least in part, because I noticed craving run my life and have noticed it even more in the past, run my life

in ways that very often have actually interfered with what I wanted. And I really wanted to understand both what craving is and also how I might learn to work with it in a way that would be helpful for my life. Hedy's scientific interest in the neural basis of why we want what we want started back in graduate school when she was trying to rake a very bad habit. Back then, Hedy was a cigarette smoker. She tried to quit a few times, always unsuccessfully. She realized that to break her nicotine addiction, she'd need a strategy for dealing with all the wanting and incentive salience that she automatically experienced for cigarettes. The solution she found then, and one that she has now become a scientific expert on, is a strategy that we've talked about before on the Happiness Lab. Mindfulness. In this case, the practice of intentionally and

non-judgmentally paying attention to the present moment through a process called urge surfing. During urge surfing, you allow a sense of wanting just to be there without acting on it. Let's say there's some type 1 reward that you're really drawn to. That box of cookies in the kitchen, or a pack of cigarettes on your desk if you're a smoker like Hedy was. Rather than giving in to that sense of wanting, or even trying to fight it, you simply say to yourself, hey, I'm having a craving right now. I'm mindfully noticing that my dopamine system is really freaking out. But this feeling is not going to last forever, and I can deal with it for a little while. but this feeling is not going to last forever, and I can deal with it for a little while.

And the science shows it really only will last a little while. Research has found that urges are a lot like an ocean wave. Cravings tend to start off small and then go up a bit, but they eventually crest and soon come back down, usually in as little as 15 to 20 minutes. Mindfulness to manage cravings is one just knowing that this is a temporary experience, that you have the ability to just notice it as it is, right? Again, that noticing, paying attention in the moment.

This strategy of mindful acceptance not only allowed Hedy to surf her cigarette urges for long enough to finally kick the habit, it also gave her a treatment idea for the addicted participants she worked with in her lab. In one study, she and her colleagues found a group of hardcore smokers, people who smoked on average an entire pack a day, who said they wanted to quit. Hedy and her colleagues then assigned the smokers either to a four-week

urge-surfing intervention or the standard four-week program used by the American Lung Association. The results were striking. Subjects who had learned to urge surf were five times more likely to abstain from smoking three months after treatment. Researchers have now seen that urge surfing shows similar positive effects in the context of opiate addiction, binge drinking, and even healthy eating. I often think of mindfulness as like the set of skills that can allow all of the other skills to come online more easily. Because before you even figure out which strategy should I use in the moment, you need to know what this moment is like. And mindfulness in a fundamental way

allows you to connect with this moment. Mindfully connecting with the present moment also gave Hedy a second tactic for successfully fighting her overactive incentive salience. One that I noticed her use earlier when she talked about whether or not to eat those cookies. You may remember just how eloquently Hedy described what her cookie craving felt like, the yummy taste she expected and how lemony the icing seemed and so on.

That act of so carefully and vividly paying attention gave Hedy the mental bandwidth to notice that she was focused entirely on the good aspects of cookie eating. The long-term consequences of downing the entire box, the fact that she'd break out or that she was trying to eat healthier, those things were completely absent from the feeling of wanting that Hedy experienced. Mindfully noticing just how salient

the good parts of eating were allowed Hedy to realize that her dopamine system wasn't giving her the whole story. Hedy hypothesized that mindfully noticing the bad stuff about a type 1 reward might help her nicotine-dependent patients reduce their cravings too. She was right. Simply asking smokers to intentionally focus on the long-term consequences of cigarette use helped them reduce their urge to take a puff. This result suggests that somewhat surprisingly, that mindfully thinking about the downside of a reward can help our brains turn down how much we want that reward.

Mindfulness can help us stop wanting what we don't really like. But Hedy has also discovered that mindfully noticing the present moment can help us with the brain's second problem too, that we can't always want what we like. As Kent Barrage explained, our dopamine wanting circuit doesn't seem to fire as much for type two rewards, my morning workout or a flow-inducing writing project or a steep mountain climb, the kinds of pleasures that Paul Bloom thought

made life worth living. But Hedy has figured out a way to deal with this. Her new research shows we can use mindfulness to start wanting type two rewards in a more automatic incentive saliency way. It starts with the process of mindfully attending to the benefits of an effortful but rewarding activity through a process she calls savoring. Like really trying to actively think about those positive aspects of the experience that we have in mind in order to make ourselves want it more. aspects of the experience that we have in mind in order to make ourselves want it more.

Hedy has found that savoring is a powerful way to achieve more type 2 pleasures because it helps us overcome the main barrier to flow-inducing activities, all the effort. One of the reasons that we avoid things that are difficult is because what's really salient about them is what is difficult and not all of the other aspects around it. Again, if I use the running example, what is really salient to me is that it around it. Again, if I use the running example, what is really salient to me is that it's really hot out. And if I go running later, I'm going to sweat and it's going to be annoying. In a moment of mindfulness, I know that the difficulty is just one part of the entire experience. And especially mindfulness in the context of our values. My value is actually really important to me. My value of being healthy, my value of being someone who engages in behaviors to increase my health, like running. If I am able to be mindful in a moment,

even though the thought about difficulty is so salient and so strong, I can bring on board really the full view of the situation, which is, yes, it is difficult and also really consistent with my values, really rewarding. And I think we can apply that to almost everything. consistent with my values really rewarding. And I think we can apply that to almost everything. Hedy has used this sort of mindful savoring a lot in her own life. She's gotten good at intentionally noticing the deeper rewards and meaning that she gets from lots of hard type two pleasures. That satisfaction she gets after writing a big grant, or the pride she feels after eating healthy, or the five seconds of bliss she gets at the end of her morning run. When I really can reflect on that positive aspect, right, I'm more likely to do it.

And this is the key to the power of savoring. Mindfully focusing on the benefits of a hard activity doesn't just boost your cognitive wanting for that activity, it makes your automatic incentive salience wanting go up too. One of my favorite of Hedy's recent empirical examples of this is a study testing whether savoring can get people to eat more vegetables. If we bring people in and we ask them to actually think about how crunchy broccoli is, how healthy it is for them, how they might feel really good about themselves when they're done eating

this broccoli, lo and behold, people not only report more of that craving for broccoli, they're also willing to pay more for it. Studies like this show that savoring may be the magical elixir I've needed all along. Mindfully noticing the good parts of a flow-inducing event might be the key to getting the reward circuits of our brain to finally start wanting all the stuff we actually like so that we can finally start getting in all the type 2 pleasure we need in life. Hedy credits strategies like these and mindfulness practices more generally

with making her life a lot happier and a lot more meaningful. I think that all else being equal, I would be a cigarette smoker. My brain really loves nicotine. I probably would be a regular user of a bunch of other substances if I were not making such excellent decisions. Now I would say that I live my life in a way that's really consistent with my values. So I exercise regularly and I eat really healthily most of the time,

random cookie notwithstanding. And I think in that way that mindfulness practice has allowed me to be the kind of person that I want to be in most moments of most days. Talking with Hedy has given me hope that I can get my brain to want what I actually like. Hedy's research has encouraged me that at least with practice, there are ways to get my dopamine system to work for me rather than against me. The science shows that mindful acceptance can help me serve the cravings that tend to lead me astray, that urge to hit the box of cookies I'm saving for later, or to check my Twitter feed when I should be finishing this podcast script. And I'm trying to intentionally remember the downside of these short-term rewards

and the opportunity cost they pose for the hard projects I want to finish. But mindfulness can also help us explicitly notice and savor the good parts of type 2 pursuits. Over the past few mornings, I've tried to more intentionally notice all the rewards I get from my morning workout. I've started to mindfully pay attention to how light I feel halfway through that morning elliptical and how cool it is that time totally flies by when I'm watching a Buffy episode. I now try to savor that moment of bliss when I finally step off the machine, feeling like a total badass for doing something I value and that boosts my health and happiness. And I've already detected a bit of an emotional shift. That craving to sleep in hasn't fully gone away, but I am starting to automatically become a bit more excited to get my blood pumping when that alarm goes off. I hope this episode has also given you some strategies for achieving more

pleasure and to pursue a life with more meaning and type 2 rewards. And I hope at least one of those meaningful pleasures will involve coming back here to listen to the next episode of The Happiness Lab with me, Dr. Laurie Santos. The Happiness Lab is co-written and produced by Ryan Dilley. Our original music was composed by Zachary Silver, with additional scoring, mixing, and mastering by Evan Viola. Joseph Rydman checked our facts. Sophie Crane McKibben edited our scripts. Marilyn Rust offered additional production support. Special thanks to Mia LaBelle, Carly Migliore, Heather Fane, Maggie Taylor, Daniela Lucarn, Maya Koenig, Nicole Morano, Eric Sandler, Royston Besserve, Jacob Weisberg, and my agent, Ben Davis. The Happiness Lab is brought to you by Pushkin Industries and me,

Dr. Laurie Santos.