The Jordan Harbinger Show - 554: Laurie Santos | Practical Lessons from The Happiness Lab

Episode Date: August 31, 2021

Laurie Santos (@lauriesantos) is a professor of psychology at Yale University, instructor of Coursera's The Science of Well-Being course (adapted from her popular Psychology and the Good Life course at Yale), and host of The Happiness Lab podcast. What We Discuss with Laurie Santos: Happiness is actually a set of skills we can learn and master as opposed to some ideal state of being. While there's no denying that genetics and circumstances play a role in happiness, the good news is that we're in control of developing the mindset and behavior to mobilize it. The mechanisms by which people become happy (or miserable), and some tools we can use to to hack our own happiness. The bad news: we outgrow the rush of the happiest days of our lives; the good news: we outgrow the anguish from the worst days of our lives. Why Olympic bronze medalists are often happier than silver medalists. And much more... Full show notes and resources can be found here: jordanharbinger.com/554 Sign up for Six-Minute Networking -- our free networking and relationship development mini course -- at jordanharbinger.com/course! Like this show? Please leave us a review here -- even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter handle so we can thank you personally!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This episode is sponsored in part by Conspiruality Podcast. You know how I'm always talking about critical thinking and spotting manipulation? Well, there's a podcast that's all about dismantling new age cults, wellness grifters, and conspiracy mad yogis, basically the wild overlap of spirituality and misinformation. It's called the Conspiruality Podcast. The hosts, a journalist, cult researcher, and a philosophical skeptic, dive deep into how this stuff spreads, from Project 2025 and the Heritage Foundation's dystopian vision of the future to how former leftists get pulled into far-right conspiracies.

An interesting episode to check out is called Speaking Truth to Goop, where Jen Gunter breaks down the pseudoscience behind the wellness industry in a way that is super entertaining and eye-opening. It's sharp, funny, and makes you a lot harder to fool, which, if you listen to this show, you know I'm all about that. From exploring cults to analyzing our cultural and political landscape, the Conspiratuality Podcast will help you stay informed against misinformation and resist fear tactics.

Find Conspirality on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and wherever you get your podcasts. Coming up next on the Jordan Harbinger show. It's not that circumstances matter zero. If you're in truly traumatic circumstances, yeah, changing your circumstances is probably going to help a lot. But for most of us, we're not in those dire circumstances, right? You know, like not being able to get the newest PlayStation is not like, you know,

like the Yemeni, like, you know, trauma you're talking about, right? And so I think we want to be careful. It's not that circumstances don't matter at all. It's that 99.99% of the people listening to this podcast right now are probably in circumstances where changing them drastically isn't going to matter for their happiness as much as they think. Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. On the Jordan Harbinger show, we decode the stories, secrets and skills of the world's most fascinating people. We have in-depth conversations with people at the top of their game, spies and psychologists, astronauts and entrepreneurs, even the occasional former jihadi rocket scientist or extreme athlete, and each episode turns our guest's wisdom into practical advice that you can use to build a deeper understanding of how the world works and become a better critical thinker. If you're new to the show or you're looking for a way to tell your friends about it, we have episode starter packs.

Now, these are collections of your favorite episodes organized by popular topics, and that'll help new listeners get a taste of everything that we do here on the show. Just visit jordanharbinger.com slash start to get started or to help somebody else get started. and I always appreciate it when you share the show with others. That's what keeps the lights on, keeps my kid in fresh diapers. Today, Dr. Lori Santos, professor of psychology at Yale University, her expertise is human cognition and the cognitive biases that impede better choices. So right up our alley for the show here. She's best known for her course, Psychology and the Good Life,

which teaches students what science says about how to make wiser choices and live a life that is more fulfilling. It's actually Yale's most popular course in over 300 years, which kind of makes me wonder what the last most popular course was. It's probably like bloodletting or something like that. Anyway, she's also the host of the Happiness Lab. Many of you also listen to that from what I understand. Today we'll learn that happiness is actually a set of skills

as opposed to some ideal state of being. We'll explore the mechanisms by which people become happy or miserable and gain some tools to hack our own happiness. Of course, I also wanted to challenge some of the feel-good crap that we constantly hear about when it comes to happiness, how to become and stay happy, so you can expect some of that in here as well. Nobody getting too happy on my watch.

And if you're wondering how I managed to book these great authors, thinkers, creators, teachers every single week, it is because of my network and I'm teaching you how to build your network for free, and, by the way, being social and having a wide range of social connections, helps make you happier, just saying, the course is free. It's at jordanharbinger.com slash course,

and most of the guests on the show they subscribe to the course and contribute to the course. So come join us. You'll be in smart company where you belong. Now, here's Dr. Lori Santos. You teach a course on happiness at Yale. And the first thing that comes to mind is, is it actually possible to teach happiness? Because it sounds to many, and I sort of put myself in that camp a few years ago, it sounds so many like this is something you are or you're not. It's not a skill set, right? Yeah, I mean, this is something that so many people think. In fact, so many people think this that people had to do research on this, right? You know, is it just the case that some people are just genetically predetermined as happy or unhappy? And it turns out that if you ask whether happiness is heritable, in other words, there's some part of your genes that's coding for it. The answer seems to be both yes and no. Yes, there is some part of happiness that's heritable, you know, so that people, you know, if you came from parents who were super happy and grandparents who are super happy, you're more likely to be a little bit happier. But it's not as hered. as most traits. You know, it's probably less heritable than something like your height or even

your weight. And we know that that has obviously a huge influence based on while you're eating and stuff. And that's really good news, right? Because it would suck if happiness was just built in and you knew you were kind of screwed. Well, yeah. So that's kind of one piece of good news. The other piece of good news is that it doesn't seem like happiness also comes from our circumstances, right? Because, you know, maybe you might have some flexibility in terms of your genes, but you're born into poverty or you're born into some yucky circumstance, right? And so the good news is that happiness doesn't, It doesn't seem to be just in our genes, and it doesn't seem to be just in our circumstances. There seems to be a lot of wiggle room based on our behavior and our mindset. And that's great because it means we can teach it. We can get better.

It's good news. Right. It means if we don't have it, then we can change it, which is great, especially, look, my heritage is Jewish. Nobody and my family's happy. Even the happy ones aren't happy, right? Okay? Like my grandma and grandpa, if you're happy, they're like, hey, don't do that.

You got to knock it off. Like, that's part of our culture. Don't get too happy because something's going to go wrong. It's a joke, but it's also kind of not a joke because when your whole family kind of like, hey, don't celebrate now. It's like you learn, I feel like, especially in a lot of these old families, not just Jewish people, but like old sort of old world families, they kind of, I don't know what your heritage is, I can sort of assume, but there's something with older folks that come from Europe and other places like that. They're kind of like, hey, calm down.

That's like the whole vibe when you're a kid is like, calm down. You never know what's going to happen. And Asians have the same thing. There are Chinese proverbs that are like, a man fell off his horse and broke his leg. And they said, oh, it's so terrible. Your son. broke his leg and it's like not yet and then the army comes by and is recruiting so it's like all these chinese proverbs are like don't get happy about anything but also don't get sad about anything just stay as vanilla as you can yeah well i grew up i grew up catholic and they built in the guilt you're you're feeling happy like now it's a guilt you're going to hell you're happy well you're screwed now yeah it's from the devil you also think like look it's achievements very apropos the olympics that

are just wrapping up here the achievements that people has in life can make you happy right i remember when I was young, I was like, if I just had a girlfriend, I'd be so much happier. And if, you know, when you're broke and you're unemployed, you're like, I just need this job. I need this raise. I need this promotion. And the Olympics, right? The gold medal, you see these, and you mentioned this in your work, we'll get to it in a bit. But like the silver medalist, they're just crushed their life is over, even though they're the second best in the entire world by one-tenth of a second in whatever they've been training for their whole lives for. And they're just like, my life is done. I hate it. Yeah. The achievement thing is weird, because it's like, you should get

happy from that, and then you don't. You win the lottery and you're depressed. Yeah, it's pretty messed up, right? I mean, this is the weird thing about happiness. It's not that we don't like have any theories about how it works. We definitely think there are things that could happen in our lives that would make us really happy, right? If I, you know, think if I won the lottery today and I, you know, had $800 billion, definitely be happier. Maybe if I was a gold medalist, definitely be happier, right? It turns out if you go out and you study people who have had those good things happen, right? We can bring lottery winners into the laboratory and test their happiness. We could study different Olympic medalists. What you find is that the happiness

that you predict you're going to get is never as high as you think. But also, more importantly, you're never as happy for as long as you think. I mean, this is a big misconception. We think happiness is like happily ever after. You know, I'll get a girlfriend and I'll be happy forever. Or I'll win the lottery and be happy forever. And most of the time, people just go back to their baseline after circumstantial changes. So you win the lottery. The Tuesday you win the lottery is a friggin' awesome day, right? You know, when you win $150 million on that Tuesday, that day is an awesome day. But it turns out, the research has studied this, if you go back six months later to people who've had that happen, a year later, their happiness is basically back at baseline.

Like, it goes back really much more quickly than you think. That's kind of the bad news, but the good news is that the same thing happens for bad stuff. You know, you might predict, find out I had, you know, lung cancer. Like, that would suck. If I lost my job, that would suck. If I lost my relationship, but that would suck. But it turns out when you study people for whom those bad events really happen, what you find is that they too go back to baseline. It might suck, you know, the afternoon you find out you have lung cancer. That's a crappy afternoon. But then, you know, six months later, one year later, you're often happier than you think. And sometimes, the crazy thing with the bad events is that sometimes those bad events really convince you

what's meaningful in your life, what your purpose is. I mean, I think some of us are going through this in the pandemic where we're thinking, I've learned something. I've learned something. I mean, I think, something about what I want out of life. I've learned something about how much I really want to be spending time commuting or things like that. You know, people are making these changes that ultimately will make their life better. But those changes came out of something that we all would describe as traumatic that we wouldn't wish on this society. I got to be honest, my lessons from the pandemic are probably pretty pedestrian. Like, I'm never taking travel for granted again. But also, I am going to enjoy the shit out of the next trip that I'm able to take. That is fact. Totally. And I think

every time I'm on my way to the airport for the next 20 years, I'm going to be like, remember when we just couldn't do this? I'll be stuck at a gate or on the tarmac and I'll be like, you can't pee for 10 hours. And I'll be like, I'm going on a trip, right? I'm going to be so ready for that. Of course, I'll also, what is it, hedonically adapt and go back to baseline and be like, this food sucks on the airplane. But still, I'd like to think that I'm just going to be so ready to get the hell out of my

kitchen after all this that I'm never going to forget it. And I think that this is, you know, I feel the same way about, concerts and movies, right? You know, the next movie I can go to without worrying that I'm like breathing in some sort of horrible thing that's going to kill me. Like, that's going to feel amazing. And I think, you know, this is the power of something that really can change our happiness, not the circumstance. It's not that you're getting this new event where you're going on a trip or you're kind of being in a movie theater. What's changing is the fact that you're experiencing a different mindset about that event. You are grateful for it in a way that you never ever were

before. And I think that that's another strange thing the pandemic's going to do. The first definitely at least the first time we get these things, we're going to experience so much more joy than we ever had before. You know, even during the process of this pandemic, you know, as you get like to a point where things are feeling safer or people are vaccinated in things like the first time I gave my mom a hug. You know, I could see her in person and give her a hug. That felt amazing. The first time I went back to my coffee shop that I love so much and just like walked in. I mean, I'd gotten there thousands of times and taken it for granted, but that first time back felt so good. And there are techniques we can use to do that more often, right? One technique that's actually an ancient technique, the ancient Stoics used to suggest that we do this.

They're trending right now, funnily enough. Yeah, they're big, they're big, yeah. And they're smart, right? They suggested this process called a negative visualization. I mean, this is what the Thoics thought you should do. When you wake up in the morning, you should think, you know, my partner is going to leave me. I'm going to lose my job. I'm going to lose my house.

I'm going to like break, you know, some part of my body that I really need. You know, I'm going to get, you know, isolated and kicked out of all of society. And then you open your eyes and you're like, wait, that hasn't happened. Like, that's amazing, right? And so the idea of negative visualization is like, maybe we don't need to go through an 18-month global pandemic to like appreciate going to the airport and going to the movies. Yeah. You can kind of imagine it and simulate it and just remember what you really miss in life.

You know, just kind of remember what you should be grateful for, but sometimes aren't as much as you should be. Now we know where the Catholics and the Jews and all the other folks got their visualization techniques right there, their self-talk from the Stoics. Let's talk about the silver medalists, right? I kind of touched on this before. I thought this was really interesting that silver medalists are extremely on the hold, extremely unhappy that they didn't get gold, but bronze medalists

seem to be super happy. And that silver medalists years later, they even die younger, which is so sad somehow, right? Like, usually you're not totally wrecked by getting a silver. You're behind by like a fraction of it. You slipped slightly when you were diving into the pool. and that was the end of it. You never had a chance, but you've beaten that time

a million other times during practice, right? You're basically number one. You just weren't that one particular day. The entire trajectory of your life is totally screwed from then on. Yeah, and surprisingly, that is what the science shows. It's really depressing when you really look at silver medalists. And again, you know, you think of what got them there, right?

You know, they had this moment where, like, they're getting into the Olympics. They're going to represent their country. You know, maybe they're part of a big team. Now you're going to actually play at the Olympics. You beat, like, pretty much everybody, every other country, you know, except one, and you can't enjoy it. And the reason behind that is that, you know, we don't tend to think of the good things in our lives objectively. Like, you might think, I want to be,

you know, objectively at a certain wealth or objectively at a certain performance level. But our brain just can't hold on to things objectively. Our brain has to use what's called a reference point. Like, you know, who can I compare myself to and see how I'm doing with my income, with my looks, or in this case, with my performance in the Olympics. And, you know, if you're a silver medalist, there's a very salient other reference point out there, which is the gold. Like, you almost, almost got there if it weren't for that one other person. And rather than feel at the top, when you compare yourself against the one person who's better than you, you feel like crap. You know, you feel awful.

And that's why when you look at you, the scientists have done these things where they look at videotapes of silver medalists on the stand and kind of analyze facial expressions. And it's not just so much that they're not happy. they're actually showing emotions like contempt, disgust, deep sadness, anger, right? You know, they're miserable. But what's shocking and what it shows you the power of these reference points is that you might predict, given how sad the silver medalists are, if you look at the bronze medalists, that they'd be even more miserable after, you know, they were many seconds from winning, right? Yeah, like, bro, you weren't even close, right?

You weren't even close. But it turns out not so. In fact, in some of the analyses, the bronze medalists look even happier than the gold medalists. And the reason there again gets back to reference points. Like, what's the bronze medalist reference points? It's not silver or gold. You know, gold was really far. It's forgotten into obscurity forever slash, you know, like never even. Yeah, it's like, you know, like two seconds away and I'd be going home empty handed. My whole life was moving up to this moment. And I could have walked away with literally nothing. So they are stoked, right? Their reference point, you know,

is telling them that everything's great. And this is such a powerful message, I think, for all of us, right? Because, you know, if you're comparing yourself, you know, money wise against Jeff Bezos, If you're comparing yourself looks wise against like Beyonce, if you're picking this reference point that's going to make you feel like crap, you're going to feel like crap. But there are also lots of other reference points out there that you could be using to feel good about yourself. And it's powerful because there's all these cases in which we're objectively doing great. You know, so many people listening to this podcast are objectively probably pretty healthy, objectively doing okay, you know, roof over your head and these kinds of things. But we don't tend to compare ourselves to people who are, you know, doing worse than that. We don't tend to recognize it. And that means we're missing out on the happiness that our actual objective circumstances could be giving us, but are not. I want to get back to comparisons in a second, although I will say I do have a better jawline than Beyonce. But what does happy even mean? Maybe we should back up for a second because I think people are going, cool scientist who studies this thing that you can't even measure. Nice try. You're just trying to make me feel better.

So how do we, I mean, obviously you've gone through painstaking measures to figure out how to measure this or the whole thing is for not, right? Yeah, yeah. And, you know, I wish, honestly, I mean, this is like a real problem with the field, right? Like, I wish we had some sort of thermometer for happiness and I could stick it in your mouth and be like, boop, boop, like you're 98.6 on happiness, right? The honest answer is we don't, but we do have great techniques that researchers have come up with that seem to be pretty valid. In other words, they're like measuring something that we think is real. And they also seem to be pretty reliable. In other words, if I give you different ones of these, I get kind of the same answer, right?

If you put your thermometer in your mouth and every time you measured it was a different temperature, you'd be like, this thing's broken. Right. The happiness instruments, we have these self-report instruments, like, they actually give us the same answer, which is really telling. But what this, you know, really, you know, important experimental technique is, is just to ask people if they're happy. It's to ask people two things about happiness.

One is kind of, are you happy with your life? You know, all things considered are you satisfied with your life? That's kind of one of the sort of questions people use. The other thing they ask you is if you're happy in your life. And that's kind of the emotions you experience. I literally give you a list of emotions. happy, sad, angry, sad, whatever. And then you say, you know, on a scale of one to seven, you know, how often do you

experience those? And that can feel like a silly BuzzFeed quiz, you know, when I explained it. Yeah, totally. Like a cosmopolitan. Yeah, exactly. But, you know, there's tons of research showing that, you know, your answer to that will predict something like if I measure your stress hormones or if I do like a detailed, like, text analysis of your journals or your tweets or something like that.

Or if I do like super, super detailed interviews with your family members and ask them how you're doing. these things that sound like silly quizzes are actually real scientific instruments. And when we use them, you know, we see what kind of moves the needle on those measures. So happy people tend to experience more positive emotions, obviously, right? And do we know what these emotions are? Is it like a specific subset or is it just overarching happiness? Yeah, well, I think those two parts of happiness, this idea of being happy in your life and with your life, it's important to realize they're different constructs, right? You can be high on one and low on the other, right? You know, my,

academic dean who lives with me here in the college where I live at Yale. You know, she and her wife just had a new baby. And she's really happy, you know, with her life. Oh my gosh, she's a new mom. So it's amazing. But in her life, it sucks. Like, you know, the kid's screaming and there's poopy diapers and like, you know, it's just not good, right? So you can get that dissociation. I think you also, you know, go on Instagram and see the other dissociation, right? People who are, you know, really happy in their life, you know, they're on planes and, you know, have all the luxuries. But with their life, they're feeling really empty. And so what scientists are trying to do is maximize both. And the way you get to both is to kind of focus on what you're mentioning, which is these positive emotions,

you know, just things like, you know, laughter, joy, delight, you know, these kinds of things, you know, like even things like kind of contentment, right, just kind of like chiller emotions. Those are all good. But I think another mistake we make about happiness is that we assume that we have to have those emotions in the absence of the negative stuff. It's not boost up the positive. It's like get rid of the anger and the sadness and the frustration. And what the research really shows is that that's not necessarily a path to happiness. A full happy life where you're sort of satisfied with your life actually comes with some negative emotions. They can teach us things there. Many of our negative emotions are really problem-solving emotions. Like when you get sad, it's not just something your

body does to like torture you. It's often telling you you're like missing something in your life. You know, like you're maybe missing a person in your life or you're not happy with your job. And maybe you should do something to change it. And so, again, we think of these emotions as just we're stuck with them and they're torturing us. But they're almost like a little notification on our phones that's telling us like, hey, something's amiss. Like, you got to do something about this. That makes sense. I love the distinction between being happy in your life and being happy with your life. Like right now, I'm happy with my life. My wife's pregnant. I've got a two-year-old. Everyone's healthy. They're super cute. But in my day-to-day, I get up. I've slept okay because there's a baby crying.

not great. You know, I drink and eat a lot of the same stuff. I'm in the same kitchen. I'm in my studio. I can't go on a trip to Greece or anything like I've been overdue for for five freaking years. You know what I mean? Like there's, and it sounds so trite. So I don't even complain about it, especially not in public on this show usually, because people are like, so I lost my job and my grandma died of COVID and you're whining about not being able to take a cruise to Greece. Like, go eff yourself, Jordan, right? So I don't say that stuff publicly, but I know a lot of people are feeling it. You know, they're sick of looking at their refrigerator and their laptop. That can, as trite as it is, it's still a problem for a lot of people. But like, with my path,

you know, look, set for retirement, business going great, family going great, not a lot to complain about, but a hell of a lack of variety in my day to day. And I won't say I'm unhappy, but I'm certainly not like waking up bright eyed and bushytailed and ready to attack the day. I need a freaking vacation. And I think you're not alone, right? We can quibble and try to compare our levels of misery during COVID. Right. You know, but this hasn't been a unicorn ride for pretty much most people, right? Even, you know, if your circumstances are ostensibly good, often your routine has changed, you know, like your ability to go out and do things you enjoyed before has changed. Your social connections probably decreased because you haven't seen people

care about and so long, you know. And so these are real hits to our happiness. It's not to say that, you know, things would be worse, obviously, if you lost a family member to COVID, definitely. But, you know, that sucks. And I think one thing we need to do in that, the pandemic and we often haven't allowed ourselves to do is to like feel the fact that it sucks, right? You know, take some time to give yourself some self-compassion of like, you know, I just lived through like a worldwide global pandemic, maybe not even lived through because we're still kind of getting through it, you know, at the time you and I are talking. Yeah, I was going to say, where are you in the timeline? Yeah. And so like, that's crappy,

you know, and giving yourself a little bit of grace about it being crappy, recognizing you're human and that those things are going to feel nasty, not running away from the nasty feeling, kind of sitting with them and sort of allowing them to be there. Like those are processes that can help you get through the negative emotions. And then there are other strategies you can use to say, all right, I can't go on my vacation right now. But how can I build, you know, a little bit more fun into my life, given the health constraints that the pandemic poses?

And they're kind of active things you can do to feel better to. A lot of people really are down in the dumps or clinically depressed and not just because of the pandemic, just generally, right? So they think that being happy is actually really far away from them. And from the emails that I get in my feedback Friday inbox, which is like an advice show that we do, a lot of people, they assume, so let's say you stub your toe, you're unhappy in the moment, kind of, or like you've been having a bad week or you got, you didn't get a promotion you wanted. You're sort of like a quick turn to happiness, right, in most people's mind.

But if you're clinically depressed and you can't get out of bed, you view that turn to happiness, that is miles through this unknown maze of uncharted waters for you. But it seems like the research shows that's not necessarily true, right? it seems like you're not really any further away from making yourself happy or getting the skills to become happy or putting yourself in a happy place, along with treatment, of course, if you're in psychological distress. It just sort of seems like you're at the bottom of a well when really you're maybe about as far away as anyone else.

Is that true to your observation? Yeah, I mean, I think a couple of things with that. You know, one is it is the case that some people are in acute mental health distress, right? And we need to recognize that, right? You know, often people will, you know, ask me, you know, about these kinds of things who are, you know, feeling acutely suicidal or in the middle of a panic attack, right? And the analogy often use, you know, if you go to your doctor and you say, hey, doctor, I have high blood pressure, what should I do? The doctor might say, hey, hop on the treadmill, you know, eat healthy. If you walk into your doctor's office, you know, like, I'm in acute cardiac arrest, your doctor's not going to be like, hey, hop on the treadmill. You know, they're going to bring out the big guns and whatever. And so I think for some levels of mental health distress, the sort of treatment requires the big guns. you know, and for those people who are suffering, you know, we could talk about what those treatments look like you really do need a sort of professional treatment. But for many of us, what we should be focused on is like, you know, the high blood pressure part. So we don't get to that acute level, right? What is the preventative medicine to kind of protect our mental health? And, you know, many of us like think in terms of, you know, preventative medicine for our physical health, we're trying to eat healthier and get more exercise and things. I think we have to be just as proactive about our mental health, especially in such a nasty time, like the time we're living in right now. where we're not naturally getting the doses of social connection and the kinds of good feelings that we would normally be getting

through vacations and the like. You kind of have to put more work in, just like you'd put work into your diet and exercise, you get to put work into your mental health too. Let's go back to lottery winners, because this is so interesting, I think, for a lot of people, none of us probably who are listening have won, well, you know, I'm sure actually I take it back.

I think somebody who's listening to this has for sure won the lottery and maybe experienced this, but the bulk of us haven't. Lottery winners are often unhappy because, as you phrased it in the happiness lap, the episode about the lottery, people only think about what they have gained or what they will gain, not what they will lose. And that was pretty insightful because of course when I'm thinking about the lottery, and I consider myself like a pretty, I try to mitigate bias. I would never

think, what am I going to lose if I end up with $160 million? Right. That would never even enter my mind at all. And if I did, it would be like, oh, I'm going to lose all of the annoying bills that I have to worry about every month. Car payment. Yeah, car payment. I'm going to lose. some of my neighbors that I really don't like that much when I move to Bel Air, right? Like, come on. But it turns out you lose a lot more than that. It's unforeseen. And that seems like one of the major reasons these people end up unhappy. I'd love for you to speak to that a little bit. Yeah. I mean, when you talk to real lottery winner is what happened. The first thing you lose often is like the normalcy of your social connection, right? You know, the easiest way to get

a lot of weirdos to come out of the woodwork, you know, from your, you know, Facebook friends you don't want to talk to is to win the lottery. People show up and say, hey, I had this legitimate problem. How are you going to help me? Right. And you're like, crap. Like, I'm Who do I decide to help? How do I decide to help and I enabling people? Like, how do I make those decisions? How do I hurt people by sometimes saying no, right? You forget, you can't hang out with your buds anymore in the same way. You know, like that, like, you know, your favorite bar, coffee shop you used to go to with your friends. You split the tab, you know, with the chicken wings. Like, you know, they're looking at you. You're looking at them, right? Right. They're making

$400. They're like, you made $160 million. I am not paying for these fucking chicken wings, man. These are your chicken wings. And you'll have more opportunities come up, right? You'll you'd probably want to move to a better place, right, than the crappy apartment you live in. But now you're far from your friends and they come over and they feel like crap because they're, you know, their car, their furniture, their whatever is not as good as yours. And so you kind of lose this connection. And then you also have these kind of moments where you lose time, right? You know, now you got to hire a financial analyst and make sure you're investing it right and so on.

I mean, these things don't sound like big losses, but if you look empirically, you find that a lot are lottery winners, if you come back a year later are miserable or at least just as happy as they were before, right? It doesn't make them happier. But you also find a lot of them that have committed suicide, right? Because things go so bad. You know, your marriage breaks down because it's had so many changes. You know, your kids are upset. And so we sometimes it's going to like know what you want to wish for or be careful what you wish for. I think the lottery is one of those. But the same is true for these awful events. You know, my podcast, I interview people who've been in accidents and you've been burned over three quarters of their body or that guy was amazing I got to get that guy's email address at the end of the show he

was really something yeah but I mean and one of the studies is on people who've been in an accident and become paraplegic you know so if you're listening to this podcast in your car you know imagine you know something bad happens you're a horrible accident and now you lose your legs right what does that do to your happiness again in the moment it's going to suck like if this happened today this again be a pretty crappy afternoon but when you go back to people for whom that's really happened six months later one year later, they say their happiness is as good as it was before, and sometimes they say it's the best thing that ever happened to them. You know, J.R. Martinez, the guy you're mentioning in my podcast, who I interviewed, who is, you know, in war and, like, he, like, had a Humvee blow up. So he's burned

over three quarters of his body. He lost his military career. He lost his looks. He was kind of as good-looking guy before. You know, just his whole life was changed. And I said, you know, would you change anything? Would you go back and make that Humphie not blow up? And he was like, no, I'm blessed. Like, this has given me so many gifts that I wouldn't have imagined. And like, you don't think, you know, getting in a horrible car accident and becoming perilegic, terminal cancer diagnosis, all these things, you don't think those are going to change your life for the positive. But the people who've actually experienced those things in a lot of cases will say, yeah, more good than bad came of that, which is shocking.

You're listening to the Jordan Harbinger show with our guest, Lori Santos. We'll be right back. Now back to Dr. Lori Santos on the Jordan Harbinger show. People's prediction of what's going to happen when they win the lottery or when a bad thing happens is off. So it happens both when we predict positive outcomes and when we predict negative outcomes from the sound of it, we think it's going to be greater. We think it's going to be horrible. And it turns out to not necessarily really be either of those things. But the disparity between what we think and hope will happen in the case of a good thing and what actually happens,

is that what's triggering the sadness and desperation? Like if I win the gold medal and it's still me, but now there's more expectations, but I'm still, like, I'm not rich and famous anymore because it's been a year since the Olympics and nobody remembers my awesome ski jump, except for me, right, and my coach. That seems like what it would trigger it. That seems like you really are placing too much pressure on this random singular event and it just doesn't work. Yeah, it's a bias that, like, researchers call focalism, right? Like when you're thinking about winning the lot of you're like, oh my God, I'm going to be rich. You're not thinking, I'm still going to have to, like, you know, pay my taxes. I'm still going to, you know, my knee's still going to hurt.

Like, you know, like, they're just stuff in life that's kind of a pain in the butt. You know, same thing. If you're paraplegic, they're still going to be laughter. You know, spring's still going to come around. Pizza's still going to taste awesome, right? Like, you just forget that there's still going to be good thing. So focalism means you focus on this one thing you think is going to matter so much. But really, the rest of life is going to be the rest of life.

In my podcast, I do one episode on my Yale students. You know, Yale is one of these places that, you know, students would. you know, give their arm to be able to get into, you know, like this is a school, except so few people. My students work so hard to get here. And I show these little videos because now students these days post videos of themselves, you know, doing embarrassing or sad moments. So students will videotape, you know, when they click on the link, did I get into Yale or not? And then they'll post that on YouTube. And sometimes it's sad and sometimes it's really happy. And so I show these videos of these students who like find out they get into yell and completely freak out and are screaming.

And my students will say, you know, yeah, I freaked out. That was an awesome moment. But about like 10 minutes later, I was like, and now what? Like, you know, I was lonely. I lost all of sleep. I got into this place and like, now I just have to be awesome there and get into medical. You know, so I think we place our accomplishments, you know, as this like, this is going to happen and I'm happily ever after. You know, I'll just be happy forever. But that's just not how life works.

Dan Gilbert, the psychologist who I interview, is fond of saying, happily ever after, it only works if you have 10 minutes to live, you know? Yeah, which is a little dark, Dan. A little dark. Yeah. What about impact bias? This is another sort of along with hedonic adaptation where we get used to stuff and return to baseline. Impact bias is another sort of useful term. Is this, tell me about that. Yeah. Impact bias is kind of the idea that it's not so much that we're bad at predicting what we're going to feel when good and bad events happen. You know, I predict watery is going to probably feel good for a little while. Becoming care of play jigs, probably going to feel bad for a little while, right? We kind of get the valence, right? But we get the amount of that valence and the of that valence wrong. So what do I mean? Let's say, you know, you win the lottery. You predict positive valence. It's going to feel positive. But it doesn't feel as good as you predict. You know, you get into, you find out you get into Yale. You predict positive valence, but it's not as good as you thought. And the impact doesn't last for as long as you thought. You know, you thought it was going to be by the rest of my life. You know,

it was for, you know, a couple weeks when you get to brag to people, you're going to Ivy League school, right? And then it kind of go old. So impact bias is this idea that we think the impact is going to be huge and last for a really long duration. And it's never as huge or for as long as we think. And again, that sucks in the positive direction. It means the lot of theries and the getting into Ivy League schools of life don't feel great. But the same is true in the negative direction. It means the breakups and the losing the jobs and the getting awful medical diagnoses. Those aren't going to hurt for as long as we think either or as bad as we think. It takes some life experience to understand this though, right? Because I remember going through things when I was like 1819 and being like, no, you don't understand. I'm never going to

get over this. And now I'm like, what was that thing again? and even a few years later when someone like stole from me and it was like a close friend I was so pissed I helped him move I gave him money and then he like ended up stealing from me and I'm like I'm never going to be not mad at this person and what's funny is like a few years later he texted me and it was like hey man I want to catch up with you and I thought I would be so livid but instead I was like I don't even care about this guy like I didn't even bother blocking his number I was just like what a loser next like I probably like went back to eating my lunch it just didn't even register and a lot of the things that have made me the most angry or upset in my whole life, even just a few short years later,

I'm like, well, that wasn't such a big deal. That actually worked out really well for me. But the older I get, the easier it is for me to get there, because my timeline is stretched out. Whereas if I'm 12 and my mom won't buy me Nintendo, I'm like, my life is definitely going to take a different turn now that I don't have Nintendo, right? And now it's like I can lose a job and a business and a relationship and I'm like, I will probably be fine in a couple of years. Yeah, I think we get better at it. The part because we have experience with it, right? You know, you break up with someone, you're like, I'm never going to feel good again.

And then, you know, two years later, you're fine. And then the next breakup happens, you can kind of look back to the other breakup and think, well, I guess with, you know, with Joe, it got, you know, better faster than I thought. So you get little hints, but, you know, for many of us, even that insight doesn't generalize really fully. Like, what it really means is, like, you're going to be the worst possible thing that you could imagine could happen to you. And it's actually not going to be as bad as you think. Many of us don't make that strong a generalization. And there's real evidence that even people who have the same thing happen again don't generalize as much as they think. One of my favorite funny studies of this, because you have to find these moments where bad things happen to people that are not so bad that you can kind of experimentally study. And one study looked at people who failed their driver's test multiple times. So people's going in for the driver's test and you're going to get license. Like, how happy will you feel if you get it? How sad will you feel if you don't get it? And then, you know, go through the stop sign. You fail. And then you say, well, how bad was it?

People say, that wasn't as bad as I think. But those people who failed are probably going to go back a second time. So researchers will be like, okay, second time, how bad are you going to predict you're going to feel if you fail? And they update a little bit. You know, they're like, yeah, it won't be, you know, but they're still not realizing how much resilience they have. And so what you find is that even people who fail several times in a row, they update a tad, but not that much. We keep forgetting how resilient we are. We're what's called, this is something that the psychologist Dan Gilbert calls immunocles,

He says, you know, we kind of have like this psychological immune system, right? When bad things happen, we have all these things that come in and fight it and say, well, she wasn't good for you anyway or screw it. I never really wanted a license or, you know, paraplegic, I didn't need my legs. Like, we have these mechanisms to come in and convince ourselves. It's not that bad. But we have immune neglect. We don't realize the psychological immune system is as powerful as it is. We neglect that we're going to do all this stuff to feel better. And that means that we're not taking risks that we could take. You know, you might be scared, like, well, if I break up this person, you know, I'll never get over the pain of it. Like, nah, you'll just be fine, you know? Maybe you want to leave that job or take a risk in your

business and you think, oh, it's, if the bad outcome happens, I just won't be able to handle it. And the science suggests you will, you just don't realize it. Going back to the idea that it's a little bit of a myth, and we touched on this before, that one change ahead is going to make us happier. We know that that's not true. What about when your circumstances are truly horrible? I assume there's the exceptions to this. Like, if I'm born in Yemen to a, to a mother who's a teenager and we're hiding in an abandoned building because of a war, that's a bad environment, right? A change to a secure environment's going to make us all happier, I assume. Yeah, that's definitely true. And I'm glad you brought that up. We often say, oh, you know, for example,

like money doesn't matter as much as you think for happiness. But again, like, if you can't put food on your table, if you can't put a roof over your head, if you're living in dire poverty, yeah, getting some more money is going to give you the creature comforts you need for happiness. And so it's not that circumstances matter zero. If you're in truly traumatic circumstances, yeah, changing your circumstances is probably going to help a lot. But for most of us, we're not in those dire circumstances. Right. Right. You know, like not being able to get the newest PlayStation is not like, you know, like the Yemeni, like, you know, trauma you're talking about, right? And so I think we want to be careful. It's not that circumstances don't matter at all. It's that most of the, you know, 99.99.99% of the people listening to this podcast right now. are probably in circumstances where changing them drastically isn't going to matter for their happiness as much as they think. As far as the dramatically poor environments are concerned,

okay, the Yemen thing, obvious example, what about like an abusive relationship or a bad job, which candidly can have a lot of commonalities with an abusive relationship in many ways, depending on the job, like if you're bullied at work or you have a terrible boss? Like, where does it sort of stop? You mentioned, yes, the newest PlayStation,

but I assume there's common examples of people in bad environments where you're like, okay, this is a common environment that could be changed. because like you said, 99.9% of the people plus listening are not in a Yemeni war zone. But a lot of people are in crappy relationships and crappy jobs. Yeah. And I think, you know, one thing you need to think about is I think this is where

the psychological immune system can be so powerful. You know, we often have a sense of like, I'm just kind of not happy with it versus there's something really wrong. You know, I'm getting physically hurt in this situation. I'm getting actually psychologically abused, right? All of those cases are ones in which changing things will be good. But if you're kind of just like run-of-the-mill not excited about stuff, then there's lots of mechanisms you can use to kind of get a little bit better. One of my favorite ones in the context of jobs is what researcher Amy Resniewski at Yale caused job crafting. She does these great studies where she interviews people in a job that you might not think of as like the most glamorous career path. So she interviews hospital janitorial workers,

right? I mean, these are people who are like cleaning up vomit or, you know, taking people's linens away and stuff, like not great. But what she finds is is a certain subset of them. You know, she asked, do you like your job? Do you feel like your job is a calling? They'll say, yeah, my job is a calling. I could not imagine doing anything better in my life. I love it so much. Wow. And you're like, what is going on with these people? And what you find is that they're finding ways, even though their job is to be a janitor to infuse in what they find valuable. You know, so one janitor, for example, talked about how he uses his job to try to make sick patients feel better. So his job was like cleaning up the vomit in a like chemotherapy word like not great. But he'd come in and he'd like, you know, just like laugh around and joke around with the person. He'd be like, you know what? Don't feel bad about vomiting on the floor because that's why I have this job. Like I got a car payment to make. And then the person laughs and he laughs. He's like, my job isn't, you know, to clean up the sick. Like my job is to like make this person laugh. That's what I get value from. Then you could have all kinds of different values. You know, his was really about doing something nice for people being social. It could be a love of learning. It could be doing something brave. It could be taking risk.

It could be exercising your creativity. You know, she claims that, like, if janitorial staff can infuse this stuff into their daily life, most of us in most professions could do that. She's another example of a woman who, a janitorial staff member who worked on a coma ward. And the staff member every day would slightly move the, like, paintings and the pots in the room. And she thought, like, maybe I think it might be helping these coma patients a little bit just to, like notice some changes. Like, I don't know if medically that's a thing, but she, like, had this sense that she was. helping, right? She had the sense that she was doing something that she'd come up with that was

creative that was sort of helping her. And so Amy thinks that there are ways we can job craft in every profession. Now, does that mean, you know, I don't know if you, like, have some office job that you're like, my job craft is, I'm just going to play guitar every day. You know, like, you have to do what's in your job description. But there are lots of ways to infuse some creative crafting into that. Yeah. She has lots of suggestions on her website, you know, a little survey to brainstorm how you can do this. I know tax planners and accountants that they sort of play a game, how much money can I save my client on taxes? Because they know if they go, I saved you $89,000 on taxes, the person's going to be like, dang.

And then if they beat that next year, it's like, look, they made more money last year, which is why they were able to save more on tax. But that's beside the point. The point is, you were going to give this to Uncle Sam to spend on toilet seats, and now you can spend it on your retirement or your kids' college education or whatever it is. So that kind of thing is, I guess, probably how he does that. He didn't use that term, obviously, but it totally makes sense that every job has that somewhere, even if it's not obvious. And you just have to kind of get creative with it. I mean, one thing, you know, we often don't really think a lot about our values, you know, what really gives us joy. You know, is it social connection? Is it doing something creative? Is it learning something? Is it being brave? Is it, you know,

think about the values that you have, the kind of character strengths that you really believe are like, you know, something when you exercise them, you feel good. And then, and figure out ways to bring that into more of our life. You know, our job is one example, but, you know, another thing you can do is to infuse that more into your relationships. You know, you mentioned people who are, again, if you're in a terrible abusive relationship, get out of that. That's not great. But, you know, many of us are just in relationships that feel a little stale because we're not putting work into it. But doing this thing where you think about each other's values, you know, what's one of those things that I just mentioned that you both like, you know, can you kind of

build that up together? If you both like learning, go to like look at a new documentary or go on some museum website or go to a real museum, you know, if the COVID thing is going down, right? You know, if you're really like doing things that are brave, you know, take a trip to like some hiking spot that's kind of hard and like push yourself a little bit, right? We forget that we can engage our values in an active way and that can make us feel really good. We mentioned before that having our material needs met makes us happy. And I've seen this number batted around a lot, but above, let's say, this material needs money, making more money does not necessarily make us more happy. What is the number? Because, you know,

we've all seen this study where it's like above X, your marginal happiness doesn't get any bigger. But every time I hear this quoted, the freaking number is different. Well, I mean, you know, that number, you know, if you looked at a study that was done in like 1920, like that number probably. $12,000 a year is what you need. And so the one I often like to quote was a study that was done in 2009, you know, so a tintsy bit, you know, out of date already. But the number in that famous paper was around $75,000.

The idea is that, you know, past $75,000. you're not going to get happier. And that's starting with striking. Again, we could adjust the, you know, for inflation, we could figure out what the number is. But what striking is, in the 2009 data, it wasn't just that you don't get happier with more money. Like, you could look at people with quadruple that salary and they have no difference in their life satisfaction. Right. And that is just not what we think.

Most of the people listening right now, if I said, I'm going to like quadruple or quintuple your salary, you'd be like, stoke. You'd be like, my life will be demonstrably better. I'll be way satisfied with my life. And that simply is not what's pulled out of the data. And so you might get a little happier. You know, you might be able to buy a few more things, but like, it's not going to have as much of an impact on your happiness as say if you boosted your social connection or if you jobcrafted at work or honestly, if you just gave yourself a little bit more free time. You know, so it's not so much that money has zero effect on happiness. It's like the effect on happiness isn't that big and that amount of work you have to put into it if you put that amount

of work into pretty much any of these other happiness hacks, did work so much better. By the way, that's $95,000 in today's money, $75,000 in 2009. So, for example, if you're making $40,000 a year, you get a bump to $70K, you feel less stress, maybe that makes you more happy. So we strive for those increments, which makes sense, right? But unfortunately, and you've mentioned this in your work, what that teaches us is, hey, every time I get an incremental salary bump, I'm incrementally happier.

but then if it tops off at $95,000 in today's money, when I was a lawyer on Wall Street, I think I started off at $160,000 a year, and you know, you get a bonus. Nobody was happy with that after the first. Like if you didn't get a raise and then your bonus wasn't out, you would sit there, I know investment bankers back when I worked there,

that would be making like, I don't know, $400,000 a year and they were so pissed off that somebody else got a bonus that was bigger or that their bonus wasn't as big as they expected because of the 2008. people were just in pieces about this. So the problem is people keep chasing cash well after there's not really any marginal gain and happiness. Like a drug addict who's like, wait a minute, the first time I tried this, it was awesome. Let me take more. That's exactly right. And, you know, one of my favorite

surveys that looked at this was looking at, you know, because we could ask ourselves, like what, what is an annual salary that after that's annual salary about you wouldn't need anymore, right? You could all guess, like, you know, if I got that amount, I'd just be good, right? And so they do this with people at different income levels. So they bring people in at the time during the survey, they brought people in earning $30,000 a year. And they say, you know, what would be your amounts? Did people say, well, not $30,000? But if I got $50,000 a year, I would never need a penny more. But then the same survey looked at people who are earning $100,000 a year. And they said, you know, are you good? And in theory, based on what other people said, these people should be like, yeah,

it's piling up in my kitchen. I don't need it, right? But these folks who are earning $100,000 say they need $250,000 a year to be happy. And so if you do the math on this, you get things. One is like, you never get to the goal, but what's worth, the goal gets further away as you get more money. You know, so, you know, you're only $20,000 off if you're at 30K, but now you're $150,000 off if you're earning $100K. Like, it doesn't make sense. But again, our brains can't be objective, right? You know, when you're earning $100,000 year, you're hanging out with people who are earning more. You know, all your investment bankers you were talking about, they just know people who are getting more than them. And that makes them feel bad. But, you know, unless, again, like, unless you're literally Jeff Baiso's

listening to this right now, probably somebody who's earning more than you. You know, like, we're all silver medalists in the salary game, except for one person on this planet. And so we shouldn't let other people salary affect us. We should be objectively happy with what we have, but we're kind of not. Right. This goes back to reference points, right? Happiness can be relative. It's better to be, this is interesting. It's better to be richer than your poor neighbors versus, or at least than your neighbors in general, versus being rich with other rich people. And that completely checks out. Like the most miserable people, know are not people that work to jobs and are struggling to feed their kids. I mean, those people

are stressed out. But the most absolutely negative self-talk can't even be around them type of people are people that have like $14 million instead of 50. They are insufferable and annoying and just terrible. Gen. Like, you can't even be in the room with them because everything is about how somebody else's plane is bigger or something. It's really gross. On the Happiness Lab podcast for my episode on this, I interviewed this guy, Clay Cockrell, who is amazing. So he's a wealth psychologist, a mental health professional that only works with the point 0.001%, which is like, you know, bracketed like such a good gig. Like, why didn't I know? Anyway, I should have thought of that. But, you know, first shock, he has clients, right? All our theories are like if we had that much money, we'd be fine. We wouldn't need to be paying somebody to like, you know, counsel us. But what's shocking, if you look at the things that they're upset about, it is like the stuff that you're like, really, you know, like, I can't figure out a place to park my yacht. It's too big. There's no port nearby. Or like, I'm only in the 100 millions. I can't get it to a billion.

If only I could get it to be a billionaire, right, instead of 900 million, you know. And so they're not happy, right? Like, they're struggling with this stuff. And so we assume if we got there, that wouldn't be us. But the same kind of stuff creeps in, you know. And so it affects our happiness more than we think. No, I can speak to that a little bit because I remember when I was younger thinking, I just need to make the equivalent of 100 grand a year.

And I thought that when I worked for like $5.25 at a movie theater. and then I got my job on Wall Street, and I was like, 160,000, this is great. And then two years later, I was like, so when do we get a raise and how much is it? And like, what is our bonus check going to be? And then I started my own business, and it was like, I just want to get back to a regular level of income. It doesn't have to be what I earned on Wall Street. And then I got past the Wall Street thing or got to the Wall Street thing.

And I was like, well, okay, now I want this. And then every time I hit the goal, it's like, you know, it would be great if I had a slightly rounder number or another comma in there would be good. Or like, what if we got from this to that, then do fancy math, inflation calculator, investment compound interest, this, that, and the other thing, we could buy this house. Or like, but I don't even care about the home or the money. It doesn't affect me. It's almost like an idle.

It's like my brain is almost doing it. But my wife and I routinely talk about how much we actually spend, which is barely any of our, like we live well below our means. So it's not I need a Ferrari. It's just like my brain torturing itself with math. Yeah. And I think, you know, this is something is that we have these theories about what's going to make us happy. And one of the things we like to do is to like work towards things that are measurable, right? You know, if I ask like, you know, how grateful are you today, you know, this year versus last year? Hard to know, but, you know, what's your annual salary this year versus last year? It's so easy for us to know that number, right? And so that means we end up prioritizing the things we can measure over the things that probably matter more like, you know, how socially connected are you? How grateful are you? How present are you? You know, how much do you feel like you're have a lot of free time and you're really wealthy in terms of time. Those are the things that probably

matter more, but it's not like, you know, we have a score in our bank account that's telling us those things. So it's not as easy for us to think about maximizing them or put work towards maximizing them because we don't as easily notice the rewards as we do when we're like fight for a raise and get it, even though it doesn't have an effect on our happiness. This is the Jordan Harbinger show with our guest, Dr. Lori Santos. We'll be right back. Thanks so much for listening to the show. I hope you get a lot out of it. put all of those URLs and codes you need for all the sponsors in one easy place. And we've recently remade this whole page to make it easier to navigate on your phone and on your computer.

Jordan Harbinger.com slash deals is where you'll find it. I would love it if you would check the page out. Make sure it works for you. Give us some feedback on it. And ideally, you help support those who make this show possible as well. You know, you're looking for a mattress, maybe a little ring, something like that, some probiotics. We got all that. And it's at Jordan Harbinger.com slash deals. Don't forget, we also have worksheets for many episodes if you want some of the drills and exercises talked about during the show all in one easy place, that link is in the show notes at Jordan Harbinger.com slash podcast. Now, for the rest of my conversation with Dr. Lori Santos. The comparison thing seems like it could just get so toxic, though, right? We'd rather be superior

to others, even if we sacrifice money or looks, right? So it really is all about those reference points. But to your point, we set the target upward because we're productive achievers, like you mentioned, right? So we set them very high, right? I'm not thinking about friends of mine that have some money. I'm thinking about like my richest friend, right, who's just obviously an outlier, okay? And then, or my like best looking friend. Who is literally a European fashion model? Okay. So what are you, like, are you kidding me? Why would you do that to yourself? And it doesn't make any sense. Yeah. So it's always an extreme alternative, which never wins, right? Because if you think about this from like a, almost like a philosophical angle, who's more socially active? You or like, air quotes,

other people or who's richer, you or someone else, like anyone. The answer is always not you in every category, generally. And it's amazing how our brains will like seek out exactly the reference point that makes us feel worst about ourselves. Sure. I was doing some consulting with it, like, I cannot be named NBA team. And I was talking about these things. And I was like putting up like, okay, who are your reference points for this? Like, who's your reference points for free throw? And they all scream out like, Steph Curry. Who's your reference points for height? It was like Taco Fiat, like, who's your reference points for having awesome cars, like LeBron James? I'm like, well, why isn't it just, why don't you pick just like one awesome NBA player and feel

bad? No, you specifically pick the one that's going to make you feel the worst, you know? Like, no one thinks of height when they're thinking of Steph Curry and they're like, well, I'm taller than Steph. Like, I don't care, right? They're specifically picking the people that make them feel worse. And that's like, you know, one case of professional athletes who are all pretty good at all those things that I've just talking about, but we all just kind of do this, you know, we pick the person that's, you know, like, most attractive if we're thinking about our attractiveness, you know, we pick the person with the most money if we're thinking about money. If we think about like, oh, I wish I had a good

relationship. We just like scroll through and find someone we think is like in a happy marriage. Like, we constantly pick the thing that makes us feel the worse. And we're surrounded by structures that make that even harder. It was one thing back in the day when we probably had brains that did this when we were hunter-gatherers, you know, walking around the planes and we could see like, you know, 18 other people. Right. You know, now we just have the internet that's filled with people curating, you know, what these things feel like to them and curating how awesome their lives are. And that just can make us feel so crappy to see that stuff. This sort of manufactured bullshit, right? The alternatives are always on social media. I neglect my Instagram

generally. I only post it like twice a year, but I always answer my DMs. And I'll get a DM from somebody with like the blue check mark and I'll go, oh, I wonder what this person does. And they're a war photographer. So they've got all these cool folks. And I'll get a DMs. And I'll get a DMs. and I'm like, your life is so exciting. Where are you right now? Oh, I'm outside Syria and I'm downloading a few episodes of your show because I finally have internet.

I'm like, ah, it's so cool. And then somebody else is like, my favorite hotel in the Swiss Alps is this one. Here's a bunch of photos of me in an awesome dress with my husband just like drinking handcrafted cocktails on a balcony. And I'm like, I'm in my kitchen and I feel kind of fat because I eat freedoms.

Like, you know, like that's where I'm at. So the alternatives are just even worse now because of social media. Like, anytime you're feeling, and good about yourself, don't worry, crack open Instagram and look at how shit your life actually is compared to somebody else. But if you talk to these people, the war photographer is like, I need to figure out how I'm going to make money because I made like $300 this month from one photo and like, I'm spending way more just to exist in this environment. My hotel costs more than that because

there's only one in the whole country that's open has electricity. And then the influencer person in the amazing hotel is like, yeah, I kind of have to shill listerine and mattresses like nonstop, because I'd stay at these places for free, but I don't have any money. You know, how am I going to retire? This is my business, and I'm just getting started. And look how many followers this other person has. So we're all on the treadmill, but we're all pretending like we're not on the treadmill. Yeah, and this is one of my favorite studies that I tell my students about just makes this point so well, right?

So they bring college students in and they ask, you know, how often do these good and bad events happen to you? So good events, you've got a better grade than you expected or, you know, someone you liked, asked you out, went to a cool party. or these bad events, right? You know, got a crappy grade, felt lonely, felt really homesick, you know, like really embarrassed, like some embarrassing things, whatever. So you tick off how often it happens to you. And then you say, how often do these events happen to the average college student? So you get this prediction, how often it happens to an individual person and how often they predict. But of course, if you ask every individual person, you can get the accurate percentage of how often it's happening in general. And so you look at these and what you find is that people's predictions are

completely wrong. So for the positive events, people think these are happening all the time. Everybody's going a cool party. Everybody's getting grades better than they expect. Everybody's getting asked out. And the fact is like, that's not really happening to that many people. But that effect of being wrong is even stronger in the negative direction. You predict zero people are feeling homesick like I am. Zero people are feeling fat like I am. Zero people got worse grades. And though like the effects are huge. Like people are off by like 30 percentage points of what they think. And so this is kind of bad, right? It means not just that we're comparing ourselves against other people, but we're creating this imaginary awesome person who has only good

things happen and no negative things. There's some quote I'm not forgetting, you know, I'm like bad at names. I'll tell you right now where you, I know exactly where you're going. We compare our blooper reel to everybody else's highlight reel. Is that it? Exactly. Exactly. You know, and, you know, it'd be one thing if we were comparing ourselves against real people and feeling bad, but we always feel worse because we imagine people to be richer and more beautiful than they really are. And so, Right. But one thing that the study also showed is that if you ask people, hey, all those good things and bad things that you just talked about, do you try to boost them on social media? Really, do you try to make the good things seem better and make the bad themes seem less true?

And people say, yeah, I definitely try to hide the bad things. I definitely try to show off the good things. Yeah. And that's bad. We're like all participating in this collective culture of making our own reference point seem better in a way that makes other people around us feel crappy. Yeah, it's kind of a shame, but I also totally understand it because even, I've talked about this before, even some of the people that you see on social media who say like, no, I'm going to post all the real stuff. Even that stuff is, I mean, it's fake, right? Like, they're doing a video and

they're a cute couple and they accidentally cut each other off. No, you go, no, you go. They planned that shit. I know it because you know someone who works for them or whatever and they're like, yeah, that's in the script. Like, it's totally, the whole thing is BS. Or like, oh, we fought to but we thought about who loves each other more. And it's like, shut up. Like, the whole thing is nonsense. But yeah, we're all doing this to one another. That's one of the reasons I opted out as social media

because I was just like, you know what, this is just making other people feel FOMO, and I hate when I feel that. So why am I going to do that to other people? What am I trying to do? It's a manipulation tactic. And I'm like, do I need to do that in my life? I don't really want to do that.

I don't like it when other people do it to me. So I just stopped. I post now when, like, I have a real big life event, but it's just a normal life event. Like I had a birthday, not like, oh, I'm on a yacht. You know, I just don't share that stuff. No one cares, first of all, and it never makes anyone feel good. It only makes other people feel bad.

So I kind of encourage people to just, you know, stop looking at Instagram, unless they're looking at meme accounts. Those are funny. Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, it's worth noticing that, you know, what you're taking in kind of matters. One of the kind of tips I give my students is I tell them to hack their feeds, right? You know, if there's somebody who's making you feel bad, about yourself, like get rid of that, or maybe kind of fill in the stuff that's, like,

not as good, right? You know, again, you know, we will feel bad about our income if we're comparing ourselves against rich influencers. But if you put in your feed that, like, hey, there are people starving right now in all these countries and X number of people lost their job in the middle of COVID. And you're like, oh, okay, like, that's good, you know? If you're constantly an Instagram feed that's making you feel bad about your bodies, like put in some realistic bodies into that feed, right? You know, we, in some ways we forget that we can, you know, can control and curate that. You know, it might not be as fun to look at the like

not rich influencers all the time, but you have to recognize what that's doing to your psychology and recognize that you can kind of control your own reference points. You get some control over that. Once you see it, you can't control it. You might not think it's influencing you, but it is. If it gets in there, if it gets past your eyes, it's gonna influence you in a negative way,

but you have some control over what you choose to look at. Now, what are some favorite daily rituals habits besides feed hacking that you've found increased happiness? aren't maybe like a huge time sucker commitment. Yeah, one of my favorite ones, which sounds so cheesy, I mean, it's worth saying at the outset, like, none of these happiness tips had a great, like, marketing team. Right. They all sound like kind of hippy, dipty, like platitudey grandmothery stuff.

Yeah. But every single one I'm going to tell you about is backed by, like, some of the latest science. So one of my favorite ones, again, sounds cheesy, but works, is this idea of gratitude, like, you know, counting your blessings. Sure. Like, so cheesy, right? But it totally works. Turns out that the simple act of scribbling down three to five things you're grateful for at the end of the day can significantly improve your well-being in as little as two weeks. But it doesn't just do that. It allows you to be kind of happy in your life. Gratitude is a sort of pro-social emotion. And so it causes you to want to give back. So grateful people are more likely to do nice stuff for other people. It makes you a better person. But it also makes you a more productive person because one of the people gratitude makes you want to give back to is your future self. So it turns out, grateful people are more likely to eat healthier. They're more likely to save more for retirement

easily. They're more likely to exercise. It makes it easier to do the thing that, like, you know, future you would benefit from, but it kind of sucks right now to do. Grateful people do that easily, right? And so, like, it's kind of a win-win. It, like, feels awesome and it's going to cause you to feel more productive to get to your goal, right? I mean, it sounds like gratitude, but like, no, it's like, you know, it's like productivity hacks. It's like really what it is, right? I'm down with that one. I thought it was cheesy for years, never did it, didn't even allow people to mention it on the show because I thought it was so stupid. And then a friend of mine, we shared a room on a hiking trip. And he was like, all right, every day me and my wife do the three amazing things about today. And I was like, I don't have anything. He's like, no, the idea is you have to stretch and find it. And I was like, well, I got a haircut this morning. He's like, great. I was like, well, I mean, we're flying to the Himalayas tomorrow to go hiking. He's like, yes, that's an obvious one. What else? And so you start thinking about all these things that you really just weren't even thinking about because you never, like, why would you bother, right? That's tomorrow. This is a thing I did today earlier. I'm not thinking about it anymore. So it forces you to then think

about all these things. We call it three amazing things. And it can be like, oh, our kid was so cute. He was jumping on the couch and he said like, daddy's coming or something like that. And he's never said that before. And then, you know, my wife will go, oh, he said another thing that was really funny today too. And it turns into this conversation that's not about like, hey, did you take out the garbage. Oh, we're out of milk. Why didn't you do that thing I told you to do the other day that you forgot twice in a row, right? It just changes the whole vibe and it makes a really interesting and fun conversation. So I can see that that actually is a real thing that works and not just a bunch of BS, because it does sound like influencer Instagram e BS candidly. I mean, yeah,

I think it's, you know, I agree that it sounds this way, but I mean, the studies that are on it are just like really powerful. And they're people who tend to just be more grateful, you know, have these benefits. But then you just for it. people to be more grateful. Like, can you force yourself to pay attention to these things? And it helps. If gratitude sounds too cheesy, and another one that I've heard, which can be also quite powerful, is just basically what you're doing is you're training your brain towards the positive. Our brains naturally have this sort of negativity bias where we notice, you know, all the tigers in the world that are going to come jump out and get us. Like, that's what evolutionarily made sense is to notice

the risks and the bad stuff and whatever. But that means that we're missing out naturally on attending to a lot of the things that feel good. And so if gratitude feels too, you know, cheesy, you can try a different technique that we were talking about in our upcoming season of the podcast, which is to pay attention to delights. I interview this author, Ross Gay, who has this book called The Book of Delights, and he decided that every day for a whole year, he'd write a new essay on something that delighted him. So you had to find these delights every single day. And they're kind of funny. There are things like, you know, lilacs are a delight. And he has one that's like, trust on planes. Like, why don't people steal people stuff on trains? Like, that's kind of a delight,

you know, the sort of odd high fives that strangers give you sometimes, you know, El DeBarge, like the band, like every day he just comes up with something. And what he talks about is that, you know, throughout the course of this thing, he just now is training his brain to notice this stuff. And then he's sharing it with people, right? So now people know he's doing this so they tell him their delights. And that's kind of delightful when you hear like funny and, you know, good things that are happening to other people. And then you get these kind of meta delights where you notice like, you know, the series of things make other people delighted. You know, and so it was just a wonderful. exercise for him. So that for some people feels better than gratitude, which feels cheesy, but just like noticing things that are like awesome, like your own personal awesome list can be quite powerful. So for the podcast, I've been doing this, I've been noticing things. And like, you know, some of my recent things this week that earlier this week I had gone to the beach, just like a local beach. And there was this lady there who had a cat on a leash. Like she brought her cat like to the beach. And that was just kind of like delight, you know. Another one was, you know, I was walking through this. We have this park in New Haven.

It's not like the nicest park. Like it's not the kind of place that people kind of tend to hang out. But there was this guy there who had like this big suitcase and backpack. And he was sitting there with this huge science fiction book, like right on the last few pages. And I knew what had happened, which is like he'd probably been like traveling. Maybe he was on a train or maybe he was like at a coffee shop there was closing or something. And he hadn't finished the book. And he so wanted to finish the book that he just like plopped down in the seat to like read it.

And I was like, oh, it's so, you know, like delight. You know, coffee, delight. Yeah. So it's so silly. but it just trains your brain. Like now you're not thinking about like, oh, taxes, like, oh, a long for the pandemic.

Oh, like our time is finite. Our attention is finite. And if we can train it on stuff that's going to make us feel good, then that's, A, going to make us feel good, but it's going to give us the resilience and the bandwidth to get through the crap of life.

I think that's amazing. It's a good place to leave it because we do have some practical exercises and stuff like that from your show. And, of course, we'll link to some of this in the show notes and in the worksheet. So I know we're just scratching the surface here.

Norie, thank you so much for coming on the show. Really appreciate it. Thank you so much for having me. If you're looking for another episode of the Jordan Harbinger Show to sink your teeth into, here's a preview trailer of our interview with Angel Investor Jason Kalakannis. If you're a founder or interested in business or ideas, you're going to want to hear this.

Check out episode 100 right here on the Jordan Harbinger Show. I built Weblogs, Inc. And 18 months after we were growing it, we were at about 150K in total revenue. And AOL came and offered us $30 million. bucks for it. I was negative 10,000 in my bank account. And I was walking my old dog Toro, rest in peace, and smoking a cigar with my wife. And we were sitting there in Santa Monica. We had a $2,000 a month apartment. And I said, they offered us $30 million. I can't keep up with our credit card bills. I'm going to take it. And she's like, this is going to be crazy. Like, we're going to have

over $10 million in our bank account. I was like, yep. I sat there and I just had to have this like really long look on, like, deep moment because I had a very complicated relationship with money and being poor because you grew up. Yeah, they were wanting to be rich. Exactly. And I wanted to be powerful and rich when I was a kid. And looking back on it, the reason I wanted to be powerful and rich is because I was poor and I had no power. My wife remembers a story, and I remember the story like it was yesterday. I was sitting there refreshing my Bank of America account, the corporate account and nothing, nothing, nothing. And then boom, 27 million bucks. And I start crying. And remember.

my life is why you crying to? I spent the majority of my life broke. I don't have to worry about money ever again. Ever. For more with Jason Calacanis, including what venture capitalists are looking for in startup founders and how to make yourself more marketable, whether you're a founder or an angel investor yourself, check out episode 100 right here on the Jordan Harbinger show. I love this. Who doesn't want to know more about happiness and at least get some practical tips so we can move in the right direction, right? I thought it was interesting that we think we feel happy because we have money and friends and a sense of purpose, but actually, the causal arrow goes the other way. We have friends and we get money because we have a sense of purpose and because we are happy. We're more likely

to get married. We're more likely to get called for a job. Happier kids actually make more money later in life. There's science behind this now. It's something like 10% more. Talking about negative experiences or writing about them also has a massive therapeutic effect. Talk therapy, one of our sponsors, of course, BetterHelp.com slash Jordan. This type of therapy is shown to be very good for your happiness level, even if all you do is get things off your chest. But what is talking about things we're trying to suppress due for us? It opens up that mental pressure cooker, relieves a little bit of steam, helps us make sense of some things and also forces structure. When we put things into language and we're forced to articulate things, it gives us a lot of perspective

that we can use to grow, and it's different than mere catharsis. So there's actually a lot more to this than I previously thought. And, of course, don't forget there's a new season of the Happiness Lab coming up wherever you get your podcasts. We'll link to that in the show notes. Links to all things Lori Santos will be linked on our website at Jordan Harbinger.com. Please use our website links. If you buy anything from our guests, that helps support the show.

Worksheets for the episodes are in the show notes. Transcripts are in the show notes. And there's a video of this interview going up on our YouTube at jordanharbinger.com slash YouTube. Our Clips channel, which is brand new, has cuts that don't make it anywhere else, is also on YouTube at Jordan Harbinger.com slash clips. That's where you can find it. And you can find me at Jordan Harbinger on both Twitter and Instagram, or you can hit me on LinkedIn. I'm teaching you how to connect with great people and manage relationships using systems and tiny habits. And of course, as you'll recall from this episode, having more social connections is good for the old happiness meter.

And our six-minute networking course is free. That should make you happy. It's over at Jordan Harbinger.com slash course. Dig the well before you get thirsty. Most of the guests on the show, they subscribe to the course. Come join us. You'll be in smart company where you belong. This show is created an association with podcast one. My team is Jen Harbinger, Jay Sanderson, Robert Fogart, Millie Ocampo, Ian Baird, Josh Ballard, and Gabriel Mizrahi. Remember, we rise by lifting others. The fee for this show is that you share it with friends when you find something useful or interesting. If you know people who are into psychology, the study of happiness, or maybe they need a couple tips on becoming happy. You know, COVID's been rough on a lot of us these days. Then please

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