The Rich Roll Podcast - The How of Happiness: Psychologist Sonja Lyubomirsky On Connection, Gratitude, Kindness, MDMA, & Other Tools For Greater Joy

Episode Date: September 23, 2024

Dr. Sonja Lyubomirsky is a pioneering happiness researcher, bestselling author, and Distinguished Professor of Psychology at UC Riverside. This conversation explores the cutting-edge science of happiness, debunking common myths and uncovering evidence-based strategies for a more fulfilling life. We discuss her groundbreaking research on social connection, gratitude, and the surprising impact of psychedelics on well-being. Sonja’s work is transformative. This conversation challenges conventional wisdom about happiness and offers practical insights for living a more satisfying life. Enjoy! Show notes + MORE Watch on YouTube Newsletter Sign-Up Today’s Sponsors:  Bon Charge: Use code RICHROLL to save 15% OFF 👉boncharge.com  Squarespace: Use the offer code RichRoll to save 10% off  👉Squarespace.com/RichRoll  Peak Design: Get 20% OFF sleek carry solutions 👉PeakDesign.com/RICHROLL Seed: Use code RICHROLL25 for 25% OFF your first order 👉seed.com/RichRoll  This episode is brought to you by Better Help: Get 10% off your first month 👉 BetterHelp.com/RICHROLL Check out all of the amazing discounts from our Sponsors 👉 richroll.com/sponsors Find out more about Voicing Change Media at voicingchange.media and follow us @voicingchange

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They have stronger relationships. They eat healthier. Happiness diet or whatever you call it, like it's for the rest of your life. There's so much hand-wringing and talk these days about happiness. What it is, what it isn't, how to get it, how to enjoy it, how to pursue it, how to think about it. And the many ways in which our innate instincts about happiness often lead us astray. People who are asked to do acts of kindness for others show changes in their RNA gene expression. If you want to make yourself happier and healthier, you need to try to make someone else happier. It's also a topic I've explored numerous times on this show, this topic of happiness. you want to make yourself happier and healthier, you need to try to make someone else happier. It's also a topic I've explored numerous times on this show, this topic of happiness,

in what is sort of an ongoing conversation that I don't think could be considered complete without including the insights of today's guest, Dr. Sonja Liubomirsky, who is one of the world's leading researchers on this slippery subject, whose work dismantles our many misconceptions about the nature of happiness, while also providing evidence-based strategies for increasing it in our daily lives, which is basically what's on tap for today's conversation and more deeply explored in Sonia's best-selling books, The How of Happiness and The Myths of Happiness. Positive emotions can neutralize negative emotions. There's hundreds of things you can do to be happy. Really, hundreds.

Great to see you. Thank you for doing this today. Last time I saw you, we were in Dharamsala, India. That's right. Yeah, and you had kind of a harrowing experience trying to get out of that part of the world, didn't you? That's right. We had a near plane crash. It was crazy. You know, I actually had been a little anxious more recently about turbulence. I fly all the time and just, I don't know why I've been a little bit more anxious. So every time there's

turbulence, I think like, okay, I have to remind myself like it's okay. And I look around and I look, everyone else seems to be like reading their Kindle. So they're fine. But this time it's this tiny little plane called Spice Jet. And there was this lurch and we're flying over the Himalayas. And I'm thinking to myself, it's okay. It's just, it's okay. It's just turbulence, just turbulence. And the pilot immediately makes an announcement and he says, I regret to inform you that we are experiencing the flight, the plane is experiencing a technical malfunction and we need to land immediately. We were all like, oh my God. It really was very scary because we're flying over mountains and I'm looking at the

ground and it's pretty far away. And I think it took 15 minutes to land and that was like a pretty harrowing 15 minutes. I even was thinking, I mean, it got to the point where I thought I should just in case I should text my kids and tell them I love them. But my hands were kind of shaking. So there's no way I could have opened the phone. But I guess the way I describe it is usually when you're about to land, you're like, you know, basically 100% certain it's going to be fine or like 99.99. And this was maybe like 80% certain, right? So it's still like, but even that 20%, right? That's a big number. And it turned out it was a twin plane engine, twin engine. And one of the engines, like literally a piece of it fell out of the sky because it was in the newspapers later. And so we lost an engine and

I didn't know that you could fly, you could land easily. In fact, they test you, right? They give you a certificate to make sure you land on one engine. I wish I'd known that it would have been a less harrowing experience. But there is some kind of cosmic joke built into the fact that you were sitting right next to Arthur Brooks. These two happiness experts who have just spent time with the Dalai Lama, making their way home. And then, you know, faced with this threat to life where you're like grabbing his knee. And I'm like, oh, there's something hilarious about that. I definitely held his hand and he was so confident.

He was like, I think he's like, this is not Sonia. This is nothing. It's just probably just a protocol. And then later on, after we landed, he said to me, he's like, Sonia, the situation was much worse than I thought. But he was very confident. And there was a monk also on the flight. And I remember looking at the monk, he seemed very serene. And so that somehow helped me. He's walking his talk. Absolutely. That's good to know. There's something reassuring about that.

Oh, totally. Totally. The monk was very serene, so. I'm curious about your reflections on that experience. I mean, for me, it was certainly a very heightened experience. I've never done anything like that before. This opportunity that we both shared to spend two days in the presence of His Holiness, the Dalai Lama, in this structured environment in which Arthur kind of administered, you know, or sort of lorded over a series of questions and answers on the subject of love and happiness and transcendence. But this is your field. So what are your thoughts on that

experience? Like, how did that land for you? It was lovely. I used to be a completely non-spiritual person. And I even have it in one of my books. I have a line that says, I don't have a spiritual bone in my body. I think as I've gotten older, I've become more spiritual, whatever that means, you know, in a very broad way, or sort of just more open to, I don't know, like the universe. I feel like this was an important part of, I guess, kind of my journey. One of my memories, a couple of memories actually, is Arthur said to us, you might remember the night before we all met with His Holiness, and he said, you know, many of you are probably here sort of seeking some kind of message or like some kind of question that you want to ask His Holiness. And he said, throw that out. That's not how it's going to happen, but the message is going to find you. You're just going to be sitting there and suddenly the message is going to find you. And so that happened to me twice. The first time it was just with me and Arthur and Lisa Miller, another participant.

We were meeting with him and he said in English, and he usually speaks in Tibetan, but it's much more, you know, of course, much more direct and powerful when it's in English. But it's much more, you know, of course, much more direct and powerful when it's in English. It seemed like he looked right at me and he said, the most important thing is a mother's love. And I had just spent like a month or more thinking about my own mom and how the source of my power and strength and happiness is all from her. And I had been telling Lisa Miller about it. And she said later, she's like, do you see that Sonia? Like she looked right at you and he said what you had just been thinking about. So that was very powerful. And the second one, if I might jump to that, at one point he said, and it was one, you know, we weren't allowed to bring like a laptop

or a phone, but we had our, you know, paper and pencil. He said, love is not a feeling, phone, but we had our, you know, paper and pencil. He said, love is not a feeling. Love is a decision. And that really hit me. And I wrote it down as sort of in capital letters. So, and I'm writing a book about feeling loved. So, I think it's relevant to my personal life, it's relevant to research. So. It's interesting how, you know, love is sort of the primary theme in his message, whether it's about happiness or anything else. Like he always kind of returns to that as the core. But in kind of canvassing your work and your research and studies and books on the subject of happiness, I would say that love is not a centerpiece of that. You talk about connection, but you don't necessarily hit the bullseye of love in a direct sense. And I think I haven't before, but I'm doing it now. I am calling it connection. I think, let's just say, every time I say connection, just replace that with love, because it really is love. And I think often people are hesitant to use that term.

It just seems so big and grand and fuzzy and kind of hokey. Less scientific, although there's research on love, you know, lots of research on love. But I'm now less hesitant to use that word because I think it's really all about love. And when I say social connection is the key to happiness, which I'm sure we'll talk about that today, you can change that to love is the key to happiness. So when the Dalai Lama talks about the mother's love, how do you interpret that? You know, very broadly, although to me, my personal experience was I actually been thinking about my own mother. But what I love is he talked about, I assume this is a Tibetan Buddhism idea that we are all each other's mothers.

So, Rich, I'm your mother and you are my mother. And he talked about that. And that was such a beautiful concept. His Holiness said, how can you ever harm someone when they're your mother and you're their mother? And so this idea that we're all connected, that we all are interdependent, we all, we have love for each other. And you can define it very, very broadly, right? Sometimes it could be love for a colleague or a friend or a neighbor or a romantic partner. To your point about how Arthur made that declaration around, like, you're going to get what you're going to get, you know, what you're meant to get.

And you're not in charge of what that might look like. meant to get and you're not in charge of what that might look like. The mother's love thing, you know, is definitely, you know, something that landed with me as well, but it landed a little bit more with a thud because of course you immediately reflect on your own relationship with your mother and mine happens to be somewhat fraught and complicated. So that declaration was very confronting for me, which of course is an opportunity for me to look at something and heal something and hopefully transcend. But it was challenging to hear that because my reflex isn't to immediately feel an experience of unconditional, you know, kind of like compassion. It's one of resentment and anger and all these like kind of darker emotions, you know. As you say, right, that's an opportunity,

right? Process something. One of my friends said to me just yesterday, I think, that we're all messengers. We're all each other's messengers. So we're all here to sort of help each other process something. But again, I would interpret that as much more broader than your own mother. Everybody is your mother. There's a message of interconnectedness and, you know, kind of pulling the veil on the illusion of separation that's built into that. So beautiful. And when you think about like intergroup conflict, when you think about racism, think about that, like we're all each other's mothers, like very powerful. The moment when I was like, oh, she's got to come on the podcast is when the day after we had those sessions with the Dalai Lama, there was this panel.

And it sort of pitted the social scientists on one side with the Tibetan Buddhist monks on the other side to have a quote unquote, like debate on the subject of happiness. And Arthur, you know, sort of went on one of his monologues and you, and again, I don't remember exactly what you said, but you took issue with what he had to say and sort of not in a confrontational way, but you disagreed with his statement. And I was like, oh man, there's juice there. Like, I want to know how Sonia thinks about happiness and where that overlaps and differs with Arthur's perspective on happiness. I remember what I said. I said something like, Arthur, you're very eloquent, but you're full of shit. Yeah. I take back what I said about not being

confrontational. That was directly confrontational. But I said it in an affectionate way. In the way that a mother loves a child. Exactly, like the uncle at your Thanksgiving dinner. But what's hilarious is, and maybe I shouldn't say this on air, but so many of his staff and team members like approached me later. They're like, we love that you said that, you know, about Arthur.

So I don't remember specifically what it was, but I do remember thinking, well, Arthur is very good at performing an autopsy on like what we just heard, right? So the Dalai Lama will answer a series of questions. And then at the end, Arthur will say, here's what we learned today. And he'll, you know, sui sponte, just embark upon an incredible monologue that captures the essence of that message. But there were moments where I thought, is that what he said? I'm not so sure really that that's what he said because I had

a different interpretation of it. Actually, I have very good notes from those meetings, so I can look it up. He was talking about some studies or some research supporting something and I felt that it was really not evidence-based, that the studies really weren't, either weren't there or were just not rigorous enough. So I was sort of disagreeing with the research. And again, I'm a scientist, so I'm always kind of looking for that. Like, is there really research support for that statement? Right. So Arthur's definition of happiness is lengthy and at times complex, but it really boils down to this idea that happiness is love and love is a

decision, right? And that there are three macronutrients to happiness, which are enjoyment, satisfaction, and purpose. So what is your definition of happiness and where does it digress from that? Okay, it's actually very similar. So I define happiness the way that a lot of researchers define happiness. And it starts with Ed Diener, who is kind of the father of the science of happiness. Lovely human being. He passed away a couple of years ago. So he always defined happiness as having two components. And the first component is the experience of positive emotions.

And so that could be, I guess, enjoyment. I'm trying to think about how that relates to Arthur's. So what I mean by positive emotions, it's anything. It could be joy, curiosity, pride, serenity, calm, enthusiasm. So some are called high arousal, like the enthusiasm, joy, low arousal, like serenity, calm. People vary in their experience of positive emotions. So people who are happy frequently experience positive emotions. Not all the time, of course, but more frequently than people who are unhappy.

Negative emotions, as an aside, are very important. They're evolutionary signals to us. So they're important to experience as well and to process. It's only when negative emotions are really chronic or acute, right, then they become dysfunctional and unhealthy. So one component is positive emotions, but that's not enough. The second component is having a sense that your life is good, that you're progressing towards your life goals in a sort of good way, a sufficiently, you know, fast way that you're satisfied with your life. And I like to think about these two components as being happy in your life and being happy with your life. Draw a distinction between those two.

So in your life, meaning like you're every day, you're kind of having, like I'm experiencing some happiness right now and a little bit pride right this moment and sort of they're about moments. In the micro and in the macro. And then as opposed to, I review my life in general. How do I feel? So I might be really unhappy this week

because I'm working on some project that's really, you know, whatever, challenging. But I know it's a project that's important to me, which gets me to sort of purpose and meaning. So purpose and meaning isn't happiness. It's a correlate of happiness. It's a cause of happiness. It's a consequence of happiness. And so people who are happier have more meaning and purpose. It almost always goes together. That's so interesting. I would have thought it to be the other way around, that when you are pursuing purpose and meaning, or you have purpose and meaning in your life, that that will kind of foment happiness. And that is true. The causal direction kind of goes both ways. Interesting. Yeah. Before we get any further into this, like how did you first become

interested in this field? It was kind of serendipitous. So I went, I got my PhD in social psychology from Stanford. And on the very first day I met with my advisor, you know, you apply to work with someone and his name is Lee Ross and he's a brilliant guy. And he was the world's expert on conflict and negotiation. And he was studying sort of, this is a long time ago, you know, how to sort of reduce conflict between Palestinians and Israelis. Like this was, and this was 35 years ago, 1989. So I get there and the first day we take a walk around campus and we were just talking about psychology. And he brings me to the Rodin Sculpture Garden, which is beautiful. And I still remember he's talking about how a great sculpture is like a great psychology experiment. look at it, you learn something new from it, you see something different in it, you have different ideas. So same thing with experiments. And then at one point, somebody asked, one of us asked, what is the secret to happiness? And it was probably him. I mean, I don't remember who

asked that question. And then we sort of start talking about happiness and why are some people happier than others? Now you have to understand this is 1989, which is very different from today. Now you have to understand, this is 1989, which is very different from today. Ed Diener, who I already mentioned, was doing research on what some, he didn't even call it happiness, he called it subjective well-being. Because he told me at some point that he didn't think he was going to get tenure. He was a professor at the University of Illinois, and he was looking at correlations between well-being and income and education level. Really, that was it. There was no research on happiness other than Ed Diener. And it was considered to be a totally like unscientific, fuzzy topic to study.

And we decided to study it. So what was the current definition or understanding, like the psychological underpinnings of happiness at that time? Well, Ed had already presented this sort of idea that there's these two components, but there was almost no understanding at that time. I mean, there's lots of wisdom, you know, you could look at like philosophers and poets, right? But scientifically, all we knew at that time was that if you ask someone how happy they are or how satisfied they are with their life, that's correlated with how much money they make. And that's not really correlated with their like age or ethnicity or education level. That's really all we knew is with some correlations. And certainly no one had done like happiness interventions to

see what could make people happier. That was already, I started doing that like 10 years later. What was the state of what we would call like the positive psychology movement at that point? Sure. Well, it hadn't started yet. So positive psychology was 10 years later. That was 99 that it started, 98, 99. So this is 10 years before positive psychology. So you're the OG. You're patient zero for this. I hope so. Or scientist zero, right? At the very beginning, you know, pioneering. I mean, certainly Ed Diener was, and then I was so insecure. So I met this, you know, first rate psychology department and Lee Ross, you know, is a brilliant

guy. And his best friend is Amos Tversky, you know, who, you know, started, he and Danny Kahneman, you know, the field of judgment decision making. And so that's what the department was like. And there's lots of other superstars there. Al Banderra was there. And I remember my colleagues, you know, my other, the other students, they're doing these like really fancy experiments and they're testing mechanisms and they're doing research that's way farther ahead than mine. And I'm basically starting with descriptive research because when you don't really know anything about a topic, you have to start from scratch. And what do you start with is like, well, what are happy people like and what are unhappy people like? So literally the very first study we

did is we had students at Stanford nominate people that they knew who were particularly happy or particularly unhappy without telling them that that's what they're doing. And then we called those students in that were nominated and we interviewed them. That's literally where we were. That was the first experiment. And what did that reveal? It wasn't an experiment, you know, obviously it was just an interview. Well, we had some ideas that we wanted to test, not really test, but just to kind of explore. One of them was we thought that happy people, when you compare yourself to other people,

that happy people compare down and unhappy people compare up, right? The idea is that if you're unhappy, you're like, oh, look at all those people who are richer and smarter and more attractive than me. And if you're happy, you look at like, oh, I'm richer and smarter than other people. And so we asked people, who do you compare yourself with? And that was actually really fascinating. So I'm a first year grad student, is that when we asked that to the unhappy subjects, they were like, oh, they told us all these stories. Oh, yeah, yeah. Who they compare themselves with. And the happy subjects, students, they almost like didn't understand our question. They're like, what do you mean? And I mean, they understood, yeah, you can see someone else's better off or worse off, but they clearly did not spend much of their time dwelling on social comparison.

So that was our first insight that maybe happy people just don't care that much about social comparison. And then I ended up actually five years later doing my dissertation on this. And I did find that happier people just, I mean, it's not that they don't compare, but they just don't let the comparison sort of affect their self-esteem. Thus proving the axiom that comparison is the thief of joy. And also perhaps a symptom of the extent to which some degree of self-obsession can move us away from happiness. Exactly. And in fact, His Holiness said, excessive self-focus is the, something like, is the door to misery. I wrote that down too. But yeah, absolutely. And there's lots of research. And in fact, I ended up spending 10 years doing research on rumination, which is basically kind

of focusing on yourself and going in circles, not problem solving, kind of going in circles. So yeah, absolutely. That was our first insight. Yeah. And that focus on self or that rumination, that invites in comparison because when you're reflecting on yourself, you're obviously doing a comparison with how you measure up to other people. And if you obsess on that, you're definitely not going to be happy. Exactly. So at that time, in those early days, how was this kind of like nascent field received by your peers and the professors? Like, were you sort of treated with some level of dismissal for being interested in this? I think so.

I mean, again, my memory is, and again, I was sort of like this insecure grad student. My memory is I thought like people thought it was kind of crazy what we're doing, like, or not crazy, but just like, you know, why don't you do something serious and do actual experiments, you know, studying psychological processes. And also they thought that maybe this is the realm of personality psychology, you know,

that we're looking at sort of trait happiness. Some people are happier than others. And I didn't consider myself a personality psychologist, the whole story about what that even means. But suffice it to say, I mean, people didn't really come to my face and say like, oh, what are you doing is stupid. But I definitely felt insecure about it. And it took a really long time. But now more confidence. People can't get enough of it. Exactly. It's like, you guys are like rock stars. You know, everybody wants, you know, to know these secrets.

I'm sure your classes are oversubscribed and everybody wants to be in your class just as they do, you know, with Arthur. And I think you told me in India that at your college reunion, you were the person who was most requested for a dinner date or something like that, like the most popular. Well, that's embarrassing. Like the most popular? Well, that's embarrassing. I think this was at the 25th, there was a survey about like, if you want to have dinner with someone in your class.

And I actually, I voted for my classmate who's one of the co-authors of Freakonomics. I thought that'd be fun. Oh, Dumpner? The other one, Steven Levitt. Oh, Levitt. Is a classmate. I don't think he came to the reunion. Now happiness is a huge field. I don't think he came to the reunion. Now, happiness is a huge

field. So actually, Chip Heath, who actually has lots of great books, who was a classmate at Stanford at the time, he's now a business school professor. But he said, he's like, oh, Sonia, you know, and it was actually really sweet to hear. He was like, I now see, like, I'm really impressed with what you were doing when you were a grad student. Because when we were grad students, like we weren't kind of aware. I don't know. I don't think I was like, I had such courage. It was just, I don't know, we hit upon this really interesting topic and I stuck with it. I didn't publish anything on happiness in grad school. I didn't get my first job from that. I think my first publication was,

let's see, 97. So that was, you know, eight years after that first conversation. Eight years. Was there a sense that there was momentum building or was there a tipping point in which it kind of spilled over into mainstream awareness in terms of just everyone's interest in happiness. So I guess maybe to backtrack, while I was still in grad school, I started getting calls from reporters, usually from like women's magazines. And they would say, oh, I'm not sure how they found out about it, maybe from talks that I gave at conferences, because those are public. And then they would ask me questions and they wanted to write an article about my research. So for example, the social comparison, they would say, oh, so you found that happy people, you know, don't compare themselves as much to others.

So what should we tell our readers? Should we tell our readers that they should try not to compare themselves to others? Right? So there was that interest. And I would always say, I don't know. And they hate that, right? They hate talking to scientists. They hate talking to scientists who say, well, it depends. I don't know.

You go on the do not call list after that. Exactly. But the reason I said, I don't know, is I would tell them it's because it's a correlation. It's a correlation between happiness and social comparison. Just because it's a correlation doesn't mean that if you, Rich, started comparing yourself less with others, you would get happier. Same thing with anything else. Like if we find that happier people are more grateful, it doesn't mean that if I started being more grateful, I'd be happier.

For that, we need to do randomized controlled experiments. And so at the time I thought, I don't know the answer to that question. And I don't think it's a very interesting question. It's an applied question. And I'm a basic scientist. And it took me a while to realize that actually that question, it really came from reporters. Why I do what I do.

That is a very interesting and important question. And in order to answer it, you have to figure out or configure a randomized control trial that will eliminate those variables. Exactly. And identify causality. That's why I thought, I need to do experiments. That's why I thought, I need to do experiments. And that's also a very interesting basic science question. How does happiness shift over time? Can we make people happier?

And that's where it started. So that was like late 90s, about 10 years later, I thought, oh, I'm gonna start doing experiments. This, I don't know if I should call it an obsession, but perhaps at times unhealthy preoccupation with our own happiness feels very postmodern and very American in many, well, post-postmodern, I should say. It's a very American thing.

We're obsessed with our happiness. We can't get enough when it comes to reading articles and books on the subject. Is that your sense as well? Absolutely. And I always thought from the beginning, because even though there's very little research on science on happiness, there was lots of people talking about it. Back then it was sort of magazine articles, and now it's videos. And so I always thought that america it's not just america it's sort of america it's like u.s and like western europe and you know australia you know that we have the luxury to worry about our happiness right if your basic needs aren't being met or if you're living with a lot of uncertainty and

stability you don't have as much time sort of in your day to be like thinking like oh am i happy and what should i do to be happier i think that's the source which is sort of in your day to be like thinking like, oh, am I happy? And what should I do to be happier? I think that's the source, which is good and bad. Right. Good in the sense that we're, we've scaled up Maslow's hierarchy to the point where we can even entertain that idea. Bad in the sense that it drives a level of self-obsession that puts distance between us and the happiness that we, that eludes us, right? Exactly. There's some really beautiful work by June Gruber and Iris Maus, where they really lay out like here are situations in which like you could be too obsessed with happiness. And you can sort of imagine that if you're constantly like, like monitoring your happiness, am I happy yet? Am I happy yet? Am I happy yet? Just kind of like, if you weighed yourself all the time,

if you check the stock market all the time, right? That would not be good. So self-monitoring too much makes people unhappy. If you're sort of too focused on the goal rather than the journey to get there, just kind of like a cliche, but it's true. If you're focused on happiness, then you're gonna have this sort of criterion. And if you don't hit it, then you might actually get even less happy.

Right, yeah, it becomes like a Rubik's Cube or some kind of Zen Koan in that regard, right? Like you can read all the books. Here are the pillars. Here are the practices that cultivate these emotions that lead you towards happiness. But if you're doing it with a goal-directed focus, you're kind of missing the point, right? So it's almost like a trick. Yeah. It's like you have to trick yourself,

focus on the, like if I, like let's say gratitude, you know, so there's now lots of research showing that gratitude makes people happier. Focus on the gratitude rather than like, I'm doing this so I can be happier. Right, does your motivation matter? Have you studied that?

Like if your motivation is self-serving, like I'm gonna be practicing gratefulness and gratitude for the purpose of getting this thing. Yeah, I think motivation matters in lots of different ways. Well, first of all, if you have no motivation, right, that nothing's going to work. Just like if you don't want to, whatever, not motivated to go to the gym, you're not going to go to the gym. So you need to have some motivation to just sort of practice these things, but not too

much. And I'm a big believer in sort of this Aristotelian, like golden mean and like everything in moderation. You want to want to be happy, but maybe just a little, not too much. But you were talking about even something even more subtle, which is sort of like, what's the motivation about? Is it about being happy or is about being a better person, right? Or being a more positive person. And I also should, the caveat is, I don't think everyone should be pursuing happiness. Lots of people are happy enough, or whatever, they don't want to be happier, or they think that there's a cost to the pursuit

that they're not willing to pay. Because there's this sort of misconception that people who study happiness think everyone should be happy, and I absolutely don't believe that. Yeah. Some people are fine the way they are. Right. That's a bit of a hot take. Clip that one. Oh, is that, is that right? No, it is because it's sort of counterintuitive on one level, right? Like not everybody wants to be happy and you just said like, maybe they shouldn't be. Well, it's so funny. Like, I mean, haven't you met people who are just like, they're sort of happy enough? Sure. Sure. Well, it gets into this idea of set

points that you talk about, right? And whether or not people have a sort of predetermined baseline when it comes to happiness and how much we can, you know, kind of nudge ourselves off of that. That's true. And we can talk about that. But the other thing, if I could get back to my advisor, you know, Lee Ross, who I started doing this research with, he used to be, he used to say that some people want to be happy and some people want to be right. And so there's that, there's like some people, I know some of them who like, they think that happy people see the world through rose-colored glasses, but the world is actually a terrible place. And they would rather kind of be quote,

right about their perception of the world, even at the cost of happiness. I can say a lot about that, including how the world is both a marvelous and a terrible place at the same time, right? So both of those things are true. And what matters is what you direct your attention to. Right. I guess there's a spectrum when it comes to how much people value happiness in their lives, right? It's not for anybody to say it should be different for you than it is. If it's not as important to you, then it's not incumbent upon you, Sonia, to tell that person otherwise. And by the way, we can get into philosophical arguments because you could also kind of in a circular way, some people sort of define happiness as whatever it is you're pursuing. So like if you like to, I don't know, listen to sad music and cry, I could also imagine saying, well, clearly that's what makes you, quote, happy.

Because you're doing it. Yeah, because you're doing it. That's an added layer of, yeah, happy. Because you're doing it. Yeah, because you're doing it. That's an added layer of, yeah, philosophical. We're going to wrap ourselves into a knot we can't untie here if we're not careful. Exactly. Let's not do that. So Danny Kahneman, who won a Nobel Prize for behavioral economics, also went into sort of what he called hedonic psychology towards the latter part of his career. And he once said something at a conference that I wrote down and I thought it was brilliant. And it's one of my most favorite definitions, another kind of definition of happiness,

which is I'm happy when I want to continue doing what I'm doing. That's a pretty good rule. Yeah. And so you can imagine the person who's, whatever, crying at sad songs, but they want to continue doing that. And of course, there's exceptions with like addiction. Sure. Yeah, just immediately my mind turns to, you know, the alcoholic or myself.

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Well, let's get into what we do know or what you know or you have discovered that drives happiness. You mentioned connection earlier, and that's sort of now becoming a conversation around love. But what are some of the other things that we know move us in the direction of happiness? So there's hundreds of things you can do to be happy, really hundreds. And I can give you a long list and it's going to depend on the person. So actually that's very important to think about is that this idea of fit, right? You need to sort of find what fits your personality. So it could be meditation. It could be going to the gym. It could be being a more forgiving person. It could be following some

kind of goal that's important to you. What my lab focuses on is really three things. So we do gratitude interventions, right? So different ways of expressing gratitude. Does that make people happier and more connected and some other things? We haven't really talked about how doing these practices can lead people to have success in other areas of life, not just happiness. So gratitude interventions is one. Kindness interventions is the second. So we do quite a lot of studies where we ask people to do acts of kindness on a regular basis, see what happens. and more recent is just being more social. Just act more social, just talk to strangers or talk to your friends, be more extroverted. We realized that what almost all happiness interventions have in common is that they work

by making people feel more connected. So basically anything you can do to make you feel more connected to others, or it could be to God or to your pets, it doesn't have to be humans, kind of work to make people happier. With respect to connection, how does that work when there's a difference between extroverts and introverts? So when the message to an introvert is, you know, reach out and strike

up a conversation with a stranger, what are the differences in the findings between those two groups? Great question. So we did a study where we asked people for one week to act more extroverted for one week. So imagine you're in the study, right? So next week, act more extroverted than you normally act. Then the week after, act more introverted than you normally act, or we kind of counterbalance. We don't actually, we didn't actually use those words because they have connotations in our culture, right? So in American culture, extroversion is more highly valued. And so for extroversion, basically we ask people to act more like energetic and social,

talkative, assertive. For introversion, sort of more kind of quiet, deliberate. And we found it was actually the biggest effect sizes we've ever found in our studies. During the extroversion week, people felt so much happier, more positive affect, more happiness, more flow. Introversion week, difference in the variable, felt a little bit less happy, actually. And that was true. That was the biggest surprise. It was true for both introverts and extroverts. And we were like, wow, because we had, you know, I had read Susan Cain's book, Quiet. Yeah, I'm thinking of Susan having a panic attack hearing this. Great book. But I suspect that there might be an acclimation period, right, that one has to go through before there's some kind of settling to a new baseline. So that hearing this. Great book. But I suspect that there might be an acclimation period, right?

That one has to go through before there's some kind of settling to a new baseline. So that could be, okay. So she argues that, you know, extroverts are energized by social behavior, right? And introverts are exhausted by it. There's actually very little empirical research to show that. I mean, although it makes so much sense. So one is we need some studies to actually show that. There was really almost nothing. Two, we ask people to sort of to choose how to act extroverted, introverted. So if you're an introvert and ask you, can you act more extroverted this week? Maybe you just choose to like, and we actually gave some examples like at lunch with friends. Maybe you sort of say, you know, say a little bit more than you normally do.

Or maybe you call up your friend. So you don't have to be the life of the party, right? So you're not really changing your personality. And it was only a week too. So maybe they would be exhausted. Maybe the introverts would be exhausted by this if it was more than a week. Yeah. I'm thinking about an experience I had just last week, getting on a plane and having an

encounter with a very chatty person in line. And I'm an introvert who can be temporarily extroverted, but it does take an energy toll on me. I have to kind of retreat and recharge the battery. And my worst nightmare is being seated next to an incredibly extroverted person who wants to talk on a very long flight. to an incredibly extroverted person who wants to talk on a very long flight. Like there's a difference between an appreciation of solitude and loneliness. Like I don't think I'm a lonely person, but I really like being on a long plane and enjoying that quiet to do. It's such a rare thing, right? I want to have the experience I want to have. And any kind of like person sitting next to me who intrudes upon that is

like a threat, right? Like I'm just not the person who wants to. And then I feel guilty about it, like, oh, I'm a bad person, you know, because I don't want to do that. But, you know, I would suspect that this is a common experience among introverts and there's nothing really bad or negative about that inclination. Not at all. And interesting. So I'm an extrovert. Although I used to be an introvert, long story, but I'm the same way. Like I want to do what I want to do on an airplane. And I'm also very assertive. So when they keep chatting, I will give them lots of clues. Right. It's kind of amazing to me, right? That people just don't pick up on many clues. Like I'm looking at my laptop, you know, and once in a while I'll even

say like, I'm really sorry, but I really need to get this I'm looking at my laptop, you know, and once in a while I'll even say like, I'm really sorry, but I really need to get this, you know, work done, you know, and then stop talking. But it turns out, so Nick Epley, who's a professor at Booth University of Chicago Business School, has done all this research showing with colleagues that actually talking to strangers on an airplane or on a train makes people happier on average. So by the way, science is all about averages, right? So it's all an average effect. It doesn't mean that it's going to be true for you or true for every circumstance. I actually argue with him. I'm like, Nick, I saw him at a conference

not that long ago. And I'm like, I really don't want to chat with the person sitting next to me. And he always does. But once in a while I do, and it does make me happier. So on average, again, sometimes that could be the person who's annoying, but anyway, we should not feel guilty about this. The idea that connection in all contexts is a panacea for happiness. Of course, of course. When I say social connection is the key to happiness, from all these studies, that's kind of what I've kind of landed on this cliche, or love is the key to happiness, right? It doesn't mean like in every circumstance and all the time, like everyone, the idea of fit is really important to me, right?

Do what fits your personality, your lifestyle, your values. So maybe for you, social connection is with your romantic partner or it's with, you know, certain friends or, you know, like, like really intimate conversation. And for other people, it's chatting with lots of people. Yeah. It's going to depend on the person. With respect to self-obsession and how that not only leads us towards the negative implications of comparing ourselves to others, it also cuts us off from connection because we're just obsessively thinking about ourselves. An antidote to this, I'm a long time person in recovery, an antidote to this is service, right? To cure yourself of that self-obsession, you turn your attention and invest in the needs of another person. And it's pretty reliable. It works really well. And I'm curious about whether there are any studies on this specifically.

Well, great question. And I can start with my own studies because exactly what we find, and that's exactly the conclusion that we make, which is that anything you can do to take your mind off of yourself and direct it onto something else. And usually what we call acts of kindness for others, but that's service. By the way, it could be work or a hobby, right? Redirect your attention from yourself to something outside of yourself. The paradigm that we use is we ask people for a month to do three acts of kindness every week for a month, right? So usually on the same day. So let's say every Monday, so let's say starting next week, every Monday, do three acts of kindness for others. And those could be large or small or

medium. And then a comparison condition is do three acts of kindness for yourself, which is a really great comparison because it's also positive. And by the way, it could be self-care. It could be kind of indulging in something, you know, like take a nap, have a piece of chocolate, whatever, enjoy the sun, get a massage, right? And we find that even though it might feel good in the moment to do the acts of kindness for yourself, the acts of kindness for others is what is more long lasting, right? It sort of, that makes people happier, more connected, and it also gets under the skin. So we've also done studies where we collect blood before and after this very same kind of paradigm. And we send it to, so I have a collaborator, also another friend from Stanford

days, who we trained as an immunologist, and he founded a field called social genomics. His name is Steve Cole. So his lab analyzes the blood. And what we have found is that people who are asked to do acts of kindness for others show changes in their RNA gene expression. Whoa. Okay. RNA gene expression associated with a healthier immune profile. These are immune cells. And so what that means is less pro-inflammatory gene expression.

So think more inflammation is bad, right? So you want less reduced pro-inflammatory gene expression. And so we find that we've actually already replicated that. So we have two studies that have shown this. So the people who do acts of kindness for others relative to those who do acts of kindness for themselves. That's wild. So in other words, it's an epigenetic thing.

When you perform acts of kindness, you are literally activating your DNA to reduce inflammatory markers and in turn become healthy. I'm not a biologist, right? I'm not a biologist, so I don't want to, right? I'm not the best person to explain. And I do want to stress this RNA gene expression. It's not health, it's just a marker of health. But we're hoping that- And is this the result of a shift in neurotransmitters? Like, is there something there? Like, what drives that? You don't know the mechanism of that? Yeah, I cannot answer that question.

Yeah. But there has to be changes in your neurochemistry and in those neurotransmitters specifically with these various different types of behavior. Right, I mean, certainly, yeah, our behaviors are, you know, in mind over body too, right? Our behaviors are changing what's happening in our bodies. So it's just very cool to sort of see that very systematically in experiments. But that was sort of to answer that question that doing, you know, sort of directing your attention by helping others. It's sort of a little bit

ironic. If you want to make yourself happier and healthier, you need to try to make someone else happier. Right. It's interesting how it's wired that way, isn't it? And it's evolutionarily adaptive, right? That people who, if we help others, they're going to help us. They're going to reciprocate.

We're going to have a tribe, a community. We're going to find mates, right? I mean, you know, when you look at those lists of who are people attracted to, kindness is always at the top of those lists. So it makes sense that it's a desirable quality to have. Speaking of DNA, what do we know or not know about the inheritability or the genetic component that comes into play in terms of our baseline happiness? So I would say basically every human trait has a genetic component, everything. And happiness is no different. There's research in the field called behavioral genetics with twins. So identical twins share 100% of their DNA. Fraternal twins share 50%. That's actually very rough. It's not

really true, but it's roughly true. So what researchers find is that identical twins are much more similar in their happiness levels than our fraternal twins. So it's really about similarity. And that suggests that there's a genetic component to happiness. So, we can talk about what that means, but it doesn't mean that you're fated, right, to be happy and unhappy. But clearly, when we look around us, or any of those of us who have more than one child know, some are just happier than others. Right. And with that, what is the scope of mutability? Like, how much range does the average person have in either becoming more or less happy off of that like genetic preset? I mean, it's hard to answer that question precisely. I like to think of not of a happiness set point, but a happiness set range. Is that some people set ranges sort of here, like from say two to five, and for others, it might be five to eight or, you know, three to six. And that it's easy for us to remain in that range. So we have sort of our life's ups and downs get us sort of, and sometimes we even go like

higher, lower than the range, but then we tend to go back after the ups and downs, we get back into that range. But I can't really tell you like how wide that range is. It's a guess. Right. But there's something that makes us sort of regress to the mean. To our own kind of mean, right? So exactly, exactly. And we kind of know this, right, that you can imagine people you know in your life who, let's say someone who's sort of typically

kind of not a very happy person, but they experienced some successes and so they seem to be happier, but then kind of eventually they sort of go back. More often it's the other way, right? That people, humans are very resilient. So, you know, we have adversities, trauma sometimes, and people, it's a positive thing. They tend to revert back to their range. How important is struggle, whether it's welcome or otherwise, in terms of driving happiness or unhappiness? You know, I'm thinking, of course, about the empty experience of receiving something when you didn't actually have to work for it, you know, and with struggle and meeting obstacles and, you know, getting to the other side of them, of course, we build a certain level of resilience that kind of enhances our self-esteem, etc. So,

level of resilience that kind of enhances our self-esteem, et cetera. So what does your research say about this aspect of the human condition? I think there's a couple of ways to answer that question. One is there's research on the pursuit of significant goals. Happy people always are pursuing something. There's always something around the corner. And so you can think of struggle as part of that, right? Almost any kind of major life goal, whether it's to raise healthy, happy children or career goals or even like losing weight for a lot of people, you know, that's a lot of struggle. So that pursuit it talks about really three basic sort of something that we all want, which is a sense of competence, a sense of connection or connectedness, and a sense of autonomy or control. And I would put struggle as part of that sort of sense of competence and autonomy, right? That you, when you're struggling and overcoming, right? It makes you just feel like you have agency and control and a sense of like, right, that you're accomplishing, that you're competent, that you're efficacious. The sense of agency, I would imagine is pretty

important. I think there's a lot of people who feel like they don't have a lot of agency in their lives and it doesn't really matter what they do or don't do, that they're sort of in a situation that's static. And with that, a sense of powerlessness. Yeah. Sense of control, so important. In fact, when we think about like people who are living in poverty or just certain circumstances, certain kinds of relationships, abusive relationships, like, or children for that matter, right? That they just have the sense of like helplessness, right? That they can't control the situation. And those of us who have control over our daily lives, like we kind of, we really take it for granted. A couple of my students looked at some data that have already been collected

on like thousands of people. And they wanted to see like, what predicts happiness? If you sort of, let's say you take like lots of people and you measure everything about them and then you kind of throw it all in to some analyses and then over time also, and then sort of how happy are they? And one of the big findings is that sense of control was like a huge, like, you know, one of the biggest factors. And that was not surprising. One of Arthur's core tenets or pillars in his recipe for happiness is the key importance of cultivating, developing, and having a relationship with the transcendent. In other words, to nourish oneself with a spiritual life. What say you, Sonia? Well, I'm saying—

This is the new frontier. Yeah, exactly. Well, again, I'm exploring it myself in my personal life, but no, I mean, it makes a lot of sense. Well, first of all, there's research on meaning and purpose, right? So we can put this in that category that people who feel like they have meaning, like there's something bigger than themselves, right? It's really about that's what meaning is.

It's like you feel like your life is not just about like this thing I'm doing right this moment, but it's something bigger than me, defining it whatever way you want. And so we know that to be true. And then I also really like research on awe, you know, because when you said transcendence, I immediately went to awe. And Dr. Keltner and others have, you know, doing research on this. And that's associated with lots of positive things. So this, again, this idea that when you feel awe, it's like the world is, yeah, it's like, yeah, it's bigger. It's bigger than yourself. And some people are scared by it. Because I remember giving, one of my students gave a talk on awe, because we do a little bit of research on awe and humility too, actually. Turns out that, yeah, humility can lead to awe and awe can lead to humility.

And one of my colleagues said, this is so scary. Like, I'm scared by this. You know, I don't want to feel small. It makes me feel small and that really scares me. So it could also be scary. Well, this is the flip side of control, right? When you reflect on somebody who lacks agency in their life and feels like they have no control, obviously that's an unhappy picture. But the other side of that is the person who insists on control and is under from connecting with awe and anything transcendent. And again, it goes into self-obsession when you think you're the center of the universe and you're the movie star in this movie and everybody else is like, you know, an extra. This is not only going to make you unhappy, but make it impossible to, you know, appreciate the magnificence of the universe and the many questions we don't have answers to. Beautifully said.

Beautifully said. There's a great quote, and it's something like that we're all like protagonists in our own little tawdry dramas, right? Why are our instincts around happiness so often wrong and lead us astray? That's a very interesting question because I've thought about what they are, like sort of what these myths are, these instincts are,

but why do we have them despite evidence, sort of despite contrary evidence? So I guess a good example is, well, maybe because they're sometimes true. Maybe that's a good answer because they're part true. So let's take money. Everyone thinks that if they raise their salary 10%, they'd be happier. It's kind of a funny finding. Just 10%, no matter what it is, 10% would be great. But it turns out we adapt and then we just want more. So why don't we learn the lesson? Why don't we know, like we know it's not going to make us happier. And partly it's because money does make you happy, you know, that at least for a while and also depending on how you spend it, you actually could spend it in ways like on connection and contribution.

And also it's contextual. Like if you're in poverty and 10% lifts you out of poverty, it makes your life a lot easier and you are going to be happier. Absolutely. But what's funny is that finding is also true for people who have a lot more than that. So I guess these misconceptions, like with a lot of kind of like old wives tales or sort of these myths that they're partly true or they're sometimes true or they're true to an extent, we don't appreciate the power of hedonic adaptation, which is that we basically get used to almost anything uh and there's lots of research on this like we know that when we buy that new tesla

that it'll make us happy for a while then we'll kind of get it get used to it but we don't really yeah it's like we don't we still want it we still think that yeah it's it's going to do the trick no matter how much evidence over the course of our lives have told us otherwise. And so again, and so another answer to your question, it's all about evolutionary psychology, right? So it's evolutionarily adaptive for us to always want more. With like with the Tesla, we're focused on the change, not having it, having it, as opposed to having it like every day.

It's evolutionarily adaptive for us to always notice changes in the environment, right? Because a change can be a source of food. It could be a new mate. It could be a threat. Our attention is directed to changes, to novelty, but things that are the same, we kind of don't notice anymore. And that makes sense, right? Because like that rock is always there, so we're not going to worry about it. And so it's evolutionarily adaptive, but at the cost of some happiness. And you could also argue if human beings did not experience adaptation and always wanted more, then we would not make much progress, right? Because we'd achieve a goal and we'd be like, we'd reach that rock and we'd like plant that whatever, those seeds. And we're like happy.

Okay, that's it. We're satisfied. We're not going to try to like, you know, get a plant more seeds, reach another goal. And so we wouldn't make progress. We'd stagnate. On some level, I suppose, from an evolutionary adaptive perspective, does it really matter whether these things actually make us happy or just propel us under the delusion of it delivering happiness? Because ultimately, all we have to do is mature to the age of reproduction, reproduce, and then it doesn't matter. So, is happiness even really relevant in the context of evolutionary science? It's a great question. I think it is

relevant because surviving and reproducing still takes quite a lot of time. And I guess making sure that our children and grandchildren survive and reproduce too a lot of time. And I guess making sure that our children and grandchildren survive and reproduce too is pretty important too. So it's not like we're done after we have offspring. I mean, happier people, and we haven't really talked about this, sort of like what good is happiness, right? It feels good, but happier people are more successful. So happier people persevere more. They have stronger relationships. They make more money. They're healthier, physically healthier. They live longer.

They make better leaders and negotiators. They eat healthier. And so that's all very, very useful when you're trying to survive or when you're trying to find mates. So we are more attracted to people who are happier. And in fact, research shows that happier people are more likely to find someone who wants to marry them. There's something funny about thinking about happiness in the context of utility in that way, right? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. But because we think like, oh, happiness is great. It feels good. Like it seems so like, how would I say it? It's aspirational. It's an aspirational state, right? Rather than a tool. Oh, right, right, right, right. And yet it is, but I like to talk

about that because some people think that happiness is a luxury or it's just about pleasure. But this research shows that it's actually a good thing for your family members, your neighbors, your coworkers to be happy in companies, right? So lots is being done and said about like making employees, making sure that they're happier. They're gonna be better employees. They're not gonna be sick so often. They're gonna be better leaders.

They're gonna make more money for your company. That is helpful. I find myself at times thinking, I don't know if happiness is really all that important to me. Like, I'm fulfilled in what I'm doing and I'm very driven and I know that this work has meaning for other people and I'm providing for my family. It just gets a little more deprioritized than it should be as a result. And that not only creates unnecessary suffering for myself, it of course spills out into the people I care about most in ways that, you know, it's kind of sometimes unnoticeable, but when you do look, it's hard to see. So, okay, interesting.

And I'm not a therapist, but this is really fun to talk about. So first of all, one thing I would say is like, if your work is fulfilling, then in some ways you are quote happy, even if you don't use that term. Let's say you know that there's certain things you could do in your life to make you happier, like in terms of more positive emotions, you know, on a daily level, right? More joy or calm or enthusiasm or curiosity or affection, like your work will probably be better, even better. And as you say, like your relationships will be better, right? Because you, you know, our children, our partners, our friends benefit when we're happier. Sure. You do it just not, not just for yourself, but kind of for your community.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah. In terms of our instincts around or our intuition around happiness, this idea that finances or career achievement, Arthur calls it the striver's dilemma, that these things will deliver happiness or relationships seeking happiness in another human being. Yes, I think there are these evolutionary kind of underpinnings to them, but at the same time, these myths are stories that are reinforced by a culture that

really wants us locked into them, right? We live in a capitalist society. Everywhere we look, we're just inundated with messaging that either directly or impliedly is telling us that the happiness we lack lives on the other side of this thing we don't have. Okay. Yes. And it could be toxic, but I also want to push back in the sense of like, this was this idea, you know, like this idea that like, oh, no one in their deathbed is going to say, I wish I worked harder, right? Some of that striving accomplishment is really wonderful, right? Like what you're doing, like, or certain kinds of jobs, like you're having an impact, it's fulfilling, you're changing people's lives. And yes, there's an ego involved too. In fact, it was Arthur Brooks, actually, who

helped me think about this better, because as academics, we often ask ourselves questions like, would I do this job for free? And he said, no, that's the wrong question. He said, the question we should ask ourselves is, would I do this job if my name were not on it, if my name was not on the books or the articles? And that's a really great and hard question, right? And so if your podcast went out in the world, but like your name was not on it, you know, hard to imagine. But, you know, that that's the idea. So there's an ego involved, but there's also lots of like incredible positive things that come out of all of us doing work and striving. And I'm thinking I had dinner last night with a friend who's this incredible and incredibly successful labor lawyer.

And she represents, you know, thousands of people in some lawsuits that you've heard about. She gets a kick out of it. Like she's super successful and I'm sure there's ego involved, but like she's doing what incredible stuff, you know, like the world, she's changing the world. She's changing people's lives. So, so we, I don't want to like demean that, you know, derogate that part of it. I mean, if you're only doing something for the ego or for the money, then that probably. Yeah. I mean, I think it's all in your relationship to it, right? And that can be healthy or unhealthy. Striving in and of itself isn't necessarily a negative trait or disposition, but it can become so when you're reliant upon external validation or material reward as this delusionary path to happiness.

And that's your goal. So in fact, another way to think about it is extrinsic goals are basically goals like I want to be more beautiful, richer, have more power, be more famous, be famous. So fame, power, beauty, wealth. And people who strive for those things are less happy than those who don't. But people, this is the clincher, but people who have those things are not are less happy than those who don't but people this is the the clincher but people who have those things are happier than people who don't yeah it's the striving right right but if you're if i just if i'm a materialist but if you get it

without striving then you're or but it yeah it's a little bit of a paradox yeah but yeah people people who are just gifted with that it's hard to imagine they're happy because there isn't that sense of having earned those things. You mentioned that before, right? But if you won the lottery, so there's some mixed data about whether winning lotteries makes people happier because some say no and some say yes. But again, if you spend your money on personal growth, on taking your nephew to on a trip to Paris, you know, on philanthropy like that will make you happy, even though you didn't actually work for that money. But all of our instincts and intuitions kick in and that money gets spent on mansions and sports cars. And then, you know, I mean, the cliche, but it's actually the evidence for this is that you lose your friends. Right. So people now look at you as a, you know, as a.

You become disconnected. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And then you don't. Yeah. You don't trust those people who have always been in your life. Exactly.

Life. What are some of the other things that erode happiness? Gore Vidal said for true happiness, it is not enough to be successful oneself. One's friends must fail. It's a great quote. This is not the equation be successful oneself. One's friends must fail. It's a great quote. This is not the equation for being a happy person. Exactly. And that's what we started back in 1989 with that, I thought. This show is sponsored by BetterHelp.

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at voicingchange.media. One thing that I'm interested in is regret, like what you've learned about regret and the difference between that regret being around having taken an action versus inaction. Right, right. So you know about that research, right? We are more likely to regret things that we haven't done, partly because there's a whole story that we can tell about that. story that we can tell about that. Like the girl that got away or that we could have spent that summer, you know, abroad that we didn't take taking that job was things that we did, even when they're negative. Again, we tell a story about that, like maybe we learned a lot from that. And we're now, you know, more resilient. Yeah, it's interesting. I've actually been asking friends recently this question. I, I really like I hate small talk, so I really like deep questions.

Because another way to be happier is to have real meaningful conversations with people rather than like this idea that we all have these walls around us. But so one question I've been asking my friends is, do you have any major life regrets? This is a really good question. And people will sometimes say like kind of surprising things there's not much research on this but half your people are less likely to say they have major life regrets like i honestly don't have major life regrets i might regret little things or i regret i said that thing to someone that hurt them that feels mutable though, because regret is the product of a relationship with something that happened. And that thing is neutral until you layer on top of it a perspective.

Regret is a negative perspective on that. I wish I had done this thing. Otherwise, maybe you feel guilt or shame around that, a sense of loss, et cetera. But I do think, and this is another recovery thing, like we shall not regret the past nor wish to shut the door on it. There is work that you can do to, you know, reframe your relationship with that past so that you can overcome that sense of regret. And a lot of that comes with sort of, you know, owning it. Like you do an inventory and you can kind of own that. It doesn't hold power over you anymore.

But there's this idea that I know you've written about and have studied. I forget what it's called, but it has to do with like a multiverse perspective. Like there are these other possibilities that your life could have taken had you made a different choice. And like, that's a rumination thing too,

when you're ruminating and like what might have been had you made this other choice. Counter like, that's a rumination thing too, when you're ruminating and like what might have been had you made this other choice. Counterfactuals, I think. Yeah. And by the way, you're talking about choices, right? Or behaviors that you have done, not like someone who was traumatized, but that was out of their control, right?

That's, you don't regret that. Right, when there's some agency. And that can be action or inaction. You didn't make that choice. Right, exactly. What are some of the other myths? Maybe we could talk about aging. Aging.

And how happiness, you know, changes as we grow older, what that looks like. It depends how you study it. And I like to sort of look at raw data, like just how happy are people on average at different ages. And ideally, you want to look at longitudinal studies where the same people are followed across time. at different ages. And ideally, you want to look at longitudinal studies where the same people are followed across time. Because if you look at cross-sectional studies with different slices of people, then it could be what are called cohort effects, right? That generation could just be less or more happy. But generally, what studies show is that the least happy people are ages 14 to 28. And I kind of love that finding because you're like, oh, I wish I were 28. No,

you don't wish you were 28. And for obvious obvious reasons you know people when you're young right a lot of insecurity and you haven't found your life partner or your job and your identity yet and then happiness gets and it grows depending on the study sometimes there's a u-shaped function that it sort of gets better as people get older and And that at some point, like I looked at three studies and the high point was like age 67, 71, 73. And then again, these are all averages. Remember, they're all averages. So it's not going to be true for you necessarily for obvious reasons at the end, you know, towards the end of life, people get less happy and less healthy. Interesting, right? So actually, I was

the same friend I had dinner with last night. She said she and her family member, one of her 21-year-old son asked everyone at the dinner table, what was your favorite decade? And that was about age, like your 20s. And the adults were like their 50s. And she said, I never would have thought that the 50s would be the best. And I said, yeah, me too, except for the fact that you're closer to death, right? Except for the fact that it means if I could just stay in my 50s, that'd be awesome. Yeah, because you're not so far along yet

where everything is in the rear view. There's still possibility and you still have your vitality and all of these things. I mean, I would agree, like this is my favorite decade. It's been fantastic. But yeah, at some point you reach that threshold where you feel like your life is something that lives in the past and there isn't a lot of like interesting opportunity ahead of you. And that probably begins to degrade that. Well, I hope that we can have some agency with that, but I mean, we're all going to die.

But you're increasingly or less and less, you know, taking things seriously and there's benefits to having some erosion to your ambition and just sort of chilling out and realizing relationships are really the thing. And in terms of connection though, so Laura Carstensen, who's a professor at Stanford, has a theory called socio-emotional selectivity theory and lots of support for it. And basically she shows that as people get older, they reduce their social connections. They prune their social connections. When you're young, the idea is that you want to meet as many people as possible, because who knows, that could be your future business partner or future mate. And as you're older, you don't need to do that anymore. And it's true. It hasn't been true for me or a lot of my friends where we're

actually increasing our connections as we get older. That's sort of a fact about older people. So they'll, so if you look at someone who's a lot older, they might, they kind of know what makes them happy and, and they spend time with people that make them happy. So it could be your sister and your best friend. But you also become resistant to doing anything new, which becomes a barrier to potential happiness. I agree. And yet older people are happier.

And there's lots of reasons for that, including there might be some actually reasons, some things have, there's some research on the brain that literally that become more positive positive. Also people treat you, even though we say we live in a culture where we don't respect old people, but actually the truth is that we do treat older people more positively than younger people. So certainly strangers or family members. And so that's, that comes into play also. Yeah. What do you say to the person who says, you can't really appreciate the full extent of your ability to be happy until you have children? Well, you could say, like with a lot of things, right?

Children can be the source of your greatest joys and your greatest sorrows. And there's that, you know, there's a saying that a Jewish mother is only as happy as her least happy child. And broaden it to, you know, a parent is only as happy. So it could also make you

very, very unhappy. So, but I don't know if I would agree with that because you could imagine a romantic relationship that gives you as high of a high that you could have having a child. Yeah, I guess I'm just throwing it out as you can replace child with mate, partner, you know,

if you're single, you can't be happy if you don't have kids, you know, all these sort of, I mean, these play into all of these myths that you've deconstructed. I totally agree. I mean, and you also asked about struggle before, right? So, there's a lot of struggle, whether it's in romantic relationships or friendships too, and certainly having children, but it's worth it, right? Because the highs are so high. I mean, I have four children, so I know where I speak. forming, you know, a kind of silent inventory on their own happiness right now listening to this. I think it would be cool to give that person some general guidance on how their happiness quotient might be reliably increased. If it's one answer, if there's anything, if someone is not feeling as happy as they want to be, if there's anything they can do to strengthen their relationships, I think that would make

the biggest difference sort of in their happiness, whether it's maybe you have a relationship that needs, you know, needs improving or making new connections or somehow reinforcing, amplifying. So I think that would be, that would be my first piece of advice. My second is maybe a little bit, That would be my first piece of advice. My second is maybe a little bit, maybe you wouldn't expect this, is that in terms of the biggest value added, it's really getting rid of the negatives in your life. That even though I don't study this, that's going to be actually, it's going to make the most difference, right? So like if you're in a bad relationship, like it's going to make the most difference, right? Or if your job is terrible. In fact, in terms of the population level, Felicia Huppert, who's a researcher at Cambridge, argues that if you want to make the world happier, we should put all our resources into the really unhappy people, like the really depressed people, right? Because that's going to make the biggest difference than trying to make

already happy people a little bit happier. So yeah, so somehow dealing with the negatives, increasing social connection, and then after that, figuring out what it is that you enjoy doing. If something that you enjoy doing, it feels meaningful to you, feels natural to you, whether it's try to savor more your positive experiences or meditate or exercise or practice forgiveness and gratitude and kindness. or practice forgiveness and gratitude and kindness. Another way to think about it is, this also comes from self-determination theory. I mentioned this earlier. This is one of my favorite theories, that there's really three kind of buckets that work best in terms of making people happier.

And we already talked about all of them, but it's kind of a nice summary. So the first bucket is connection. So anything you can do to connect with others. The second bucket is basically contribution, helping, contributing to society, the world, your neighborhood. And the third is personal growth. So focusing somehow on learning something, growing as a person, evolving. But first, if the house is on fire, you got to deal with the negative stuff first, right?

That can wait. Let's put out the fire. Exactly. Well, that would make the biggest difference. I mean, you can do it at the same time. So I don't want to say like, some people think, oh, you have to put out the fire for, obviously if it's a fire, it's like taking over your life.

But you can have negatives and you can still practice the positives at the same time. And Bart Fredrickson, who's a positive psychologist at UNC Chapel Hill, she has a theory of positive emotion. And she shows with lots of data that positive emotions can neutralize negative emotions. And so let's say you have some bad stuff in your life over here, but you also say practice gratitude and you practice, I don't know, whatever else you practice that makes you happier. Those positive emotions today could actually be an antidote to some of that anxiety or anger or sadness

that you feel. So it could help with that. So you don't necessarily have to wait. Have you studied forgiveness specifically? I have it myself. That's one of the hardest. Why is it so hard? Just people report it's the hardest.

Why is it? I mean, I feel like it's hard because... The hardest to do or the hardest to study? The hardest to do. Yeah. Yeah. You know, and I actually, I give a lecture on forgiveness

in my Science of Happiness class. And I talk about how, well, first of all, maybe some acts or people shouldn't be forgiven. So I don't think that everything should be. But research shows that, yeah, it's kind of a cliche again, that it's really about yourself, right? Like you're forgiving.

By not forgiving, you're probably hurting yourself more than anyone else. But it's really hard to do. If there's a major transgression in your life by someone, it's very hard to do. Yeah. Yeah. Is there a relationship with happiness such that when you can practice that or that when you do it, that there is a cascade of events that alleviate suffering and lead you towards happiness? Yes, I would say yes. Let's see.

I mean, certainly research shows that it reduces like stress, anxiety, like even sort of health wise, like cortisol levels, you know, like your body literally, yeah, is more like calm when you're forgiven. And then you connect better, you know, with whether it's that person or other people in your life. So, and again, connections that get happiness. So, love, right? So, if you can bring more love into your life and less vengeance or, you know, grudges, you're going to be happier. What about forgiveness of the self? Is there any research into the distinction between those two forms of forgiveness? Yeah, I mean, I don't usually use that term, although everyone understands what that means.

You may know there's research on something called self-compassion, which is basically forgiving yourself. It's having compassion for yourself, like realizing that we're human, that we all have sort of common humanity, like we all, you know, we all have flaws. You know, we're all many things, including bad and good things. So, yeah, I think having compassion for yourself is essentially equivalent to what you're talking about. What is the most counterintuitive finding that you've discovered on this, you know, multi-decade journey into happiness? Like, what surprised you the most?

Well, first I want to say, I kind of hate this question, partly because this is just a psychological process that once you've discovered something, it's no longer, you know, surprising or counterintuitive. And like, there's hindsight bias, and we convince ourselves we knew it all along. So it's a little bit hard to answer because I have to kind of remember what was surprising. Sometimes it's just the strength of effects.

It turns out just acting extroverted makes people so much happier than we thought. More recently, the most surprising finding we had was just having a conversation with a stranger on Zoom, on average, made people hugely happier. I would not have expected that. I would not want to have a conversation with a stranger on Zoom today. But it's that connection, right? It's that human connection. And again, it's an average. Maybe some of the conversations were boring or frustrating.

That is really interesting to me that like having, yeah, having meaningful conversations turns out to be really, really important. You know, we had a whole line of research on whether kids make people happier. We were kind of reacting, there's a lot of media attention to like, parents are miserable. And again, as a parent of many kids, I thought, well, that doesn't seem, I mean, yes, of course there's hardship, but it just didn't seem right to me that parents are like a lot more miserable than people who don't have children. And so we did a bunch of research on that or we have a paper that basically says the answer is it depends. It depends. But I mean, but we lay it out, right?

It depends. Like, like if you're a young parent or an older parent, if your kids are younger. What is the timeline here? Of course, you know, are your kids problematic? So that some of that was some of that was not surprising. That was a surprise. So it turns out fathers are happier than men without children, but mothers are about the same. And you can think about reasons why.

Maybe mothers tend to do more of like the child like the boring child care as opposed to playing playing but it turned out that the group that explained it is uh men without children are particularly unhappy because and this comes from like big kind of surveys i don't know you tell me i'm not a man you're the research scientist i'm not a man. You're the research scientist. I'm not a man without children, I don't know. We just emerged from a multi-year situation, lockdown, pandemic, all the like. And it would seem that this created a set of circumstances that are perfect for a social scientist to study and draw conclusions from. So have you looked at that?

What do we know about that experience and those that were able to navigate it with a certain quotient of happiness and others who were unable to do that? Yeah, a perfect natural experiment. Lots of studies. I remember, you know, we did a bunch of studies during the pandemic. And I remember thinking like everyone in there, every professor like in their cousin or like doing research on COVID. But so interesting. So I mentioned connections.

So we found, for example, that on average, people's sense of connection increased during COVID. Again, I said average. So it really turns out it's like a rule of thirds. So 30% did very badly, right?

And we know this overall kind of in the world, you know, or maybe we'll just say the US. 30% really suffered and are still suffering. 30%, you know, are okay, right? Like there were some ups and downs. And then 30%, and again, I'm kind of just estimating, actually like did well. And in fact, we probably all know people who are like, I hate to say this, but like, I love the pandemic, right? You know, my grown kids moved back in with me, my marriage really,

you know, flourished. So, but on average, sense of connection went up, you know, this idea of the COVID divorce, but there were, and that definitely happened, but there are also, you know, more COVID marriages and COVID weddings and also COVID just stronger connections. Yeah. It's been over a decade since your last most recent book. What have you changed your mind about when it comes to happiness? Yeah, it's really interesting because my first book, The Health Happiness, I'm supposedly revising, updating. So it's a really good question because I've been thinking about this, that there's nothing that I would really change in it other than there's a lot more research for each chapter.

You know, that book was about, every chapter was on a different happiness practice, like gratitude or kindness or following significant life goals. And there's some new ones. And so, for example, I guess the thing that, how I would answer that question is that there, sometimes the pursuit of happiness can backfire. And I don't just mean what we were talking about before, like, you don't want to be too focused on happiness. I mean, the certain strategies might actually make you feel worse. One of the examples is with gratitude. And you think like, well, how could gratitude make you feel worse? Well, it turns out that people who are severely depressed

feel like that they're a burden on others. And feeling like you're a burden is a risk factor for suicide, right? Because you feel like, yeah, I'm just too much of a burden. We still haven't done the research. It's going to be very difficult to do. But I talked to a colleague who works with suicidal inpatients in Canada that we don't want to ask them to write gratitude letters, right? That they might imagine, right? You're already suicide. You already feel like you're a burden. And we're saying, oh, why don't you think about all the different ways your mom supported you, right? Your best friend helped you. And so here's one way that gratitude can backfire. Now, gratitude can be unpleasant at times because it can make you feel indebted or maybe even embarrassed or ashamed.

That's not necessarily a bad thing. That's not necessarily a backfiring effect because it could lead you to reciprocate. We have a line of research that shows that when people are asked to express gratitude, they feel like they want to pay back. You know, like if you're truly grateful to your mom, right, for taking that second job and paying for your music lessons, right, you want to do well in school, right? Or your math teacher who stayed after school. So that's a positive thing. So feeling indebted might feel unpleasant, but it's a positive thing. Interesting. Yeah. And then with kindness, I have some other example with kindness. I mean, have you ever had the experience where you help someone and it, right, it backfires? And it could be, maybe it's just not effective. It could be that maybe you're kind of patronizing. And so there's this really interesting work on

what's called invisible versus visible social support or kindness. And so visible kindness would be like you're visiting your elderly parents or grandparents and you're like, oh, mom and dad, I'll go to the grocery store and I'll buy you, you know, I'll do this for you. I'll do this for you in making them feel like they can't, right? Making them feel like weak and vulnerable. And so that has negative effects. But if you do it in an invisible way, which is just like, you just happen to drop by the store, right, as you're walking in, that's beautiful. I would imagine motivation might come into play as well, right? Like if you make a big pronouncement about how you're going to the grocery store because you want, you know, whether you're aware of it or not, you want to be, you know, validated for that.

Like that's not great. And in the event that they tell you to fuck off, basically, it begs the question of motivation, right? Like, if you're just, like, if you're doing it out of pureness of heart, it shouldn't matter, right? Like, but if you're doing it for that validation, you're going to feel this affront. Isn't that interesting? That's a theme that we're coming back to, sort of this, the people who are doing things for, like, social approval, you know, for that extrinsic goal, right? Remember, power, influence, fame, which is part of all of that, just like you just want to be important or viewed positively, that's associated with unhappiness. Where does a sense of authenticity or inauthenticity come into play? Because

when you're asking somebody who isn't sort of predisposed to acts of kindness or a practice of gratitude, there is a sort of imposter syndrome that can descend and you feel like you're not really being true to your core self. Yeah, exactly. I'm a big fan of authenticity. This is why we measure what we call fit, which is how natural does this feel to you? Let's say it's meditation. Like, and actually I try meditation. I just can't do it. Yes, you can. Go ahead. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. We can talk about this. I am trying, but it doesn't feel natural to me. Okay. So how natural

does it feel? How enjoyable is it? Right. Do you enjoy it? And then how meaningful is it? And those three things are actually kind of different. And sometimes things don't feel natural or authentic at the beginning, just like someone, I don't know, who wants to start to be more healthy, you know, and have a more healthy lifestyle. But over time, they can feel more natural, right? Just like with almost anything. So I guess I would say don't not do something because it doesn't feel authentic or natural necessarily. Because sometimes, especially if you have a motivation to change and it's something that's meaningful to you, because over time it can feel more natural. Within limits, though, if you're telling an introvert that they should just go out and be extroverted, they're not going to convert into an extroverted person.

But again, remember that study, they could define that whatever way they want, right? So they could just do just a little bit more, just be a little bit more social in the way that makes them feel comfortable, right? It doesn't have to be, again, being the life of the party. But this is true in like so many domains of life. Imagine like, remember when you first became a parent, right?

You bring home a baby and you feel like a total imposter. You're like, I have no idea what to do with this baby. And I don't feel like a father or mother. And then you grow into that role. So most things we do, we grow into those roles and they feel inauthentic at first. And that's part of the resilience piece as well, right? Yes, yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. What is the current kind of frontier of happiness research? Like where, where is, you know, the focus now in terms of like pushing this understanding forward? Maybe that starts with the question of what do we still not know and understand? Um, that maybe that's a better question. Yeah. Because the first question is like, it's sort of,

there's all these proverbs about like anyone who tries to predict the future, right? Is it idiot or a fool? So I don't want to predict the future, right, is an idiot or a fool. So I don't want to predict the future. Well, there's so much about, say, the biology of happiness, the genetics of happiness, the neuroscience of happiness that we don't know about yet. Just because more research needs to be done, not because it's not possible to do. We really don't know about how to sustain and maintain happiness, right? about how to sustain and maintain happiness, right? So once you start feeling more connected or being more kind, expressing gratitude, right?

How do you maintain that over the course of your life? Because we know it's a lifelong process, right? Just like if you want to lose weight, you don't go on a diet for a month and then you're done forever, right? You're basically on a diet for the rest of your life. And so the sort of happiness diet or whatever you call it, like it's for the rest of your life. And there's lots of work on habits and how we can create new habits. So, but we need like lots of, you know, very long term,

longitudinal studies. And I'm involved in a project right now where we're, which is kind of called a mini labs project where we're trying to do these interventions at scale right so like many many people many countries cultural differences another frontier we already know quite a bit about cultural differences but lots more needs to be done because right people define happiness differently in different cultures they pursue it differently maybe in some cultures people might be harmed by a technique that, you know, Americans, you know, enjoy and benefit from. Do you agree with the kind of conventional wisdom around the sort of blue zones of happiness,

places like Finland that are, you know, people seem to be happier than we are here? To some extent, I know Dan Buettner, who writes about Blue Zones, and yes, yes in the sense that, I mean, the World Happiness Report, you know, collects or reports surveys of happiness across the world. And so these are just, these are findings. I mean, I would say they're sort of factual.

You know, some countries just on average score higher than other countries. What I always complain about is, you know, when Finland is reported, what is it, like the last three or so years as the happiest country, it could be like a difference between like 4.72 and 4.71, right? So it's not really significantly different. I actually was just in, for some reason, I was thinking that you were there, but I was just at a conference in Copenhagen and I was being interviewed by Neil Strauss, who was sort of my moderator. And there were questions that were, they had this technology where you could see the audience's questions on a big board behind you. And I wasn't really looking at the board mostly,

but at one point I turned the board and again, this is Copenhagen. And it kept saying, ask the Finland question, ask the Finland question. Like people kept asking, what? Because I guess, because Denmark used to be. Finland supplanted Denmark? Exactly. Oh, right. Denmark for many years. It's a competition or something.

But Denmark for many years was the happiest country. But again, it's like the different, they're not statistically significant differences, right? Yeah. But there are sort of, you know, shared sort of communal aspects to those places from which we can extract certain truths. I mean, a sort of safety, a social safety net. Everybody's out, they're riding bikes, they prioritize, you know, being communal in their relationships. Like that's much higher up the scale in terms of how they think about the way they pursue their lives. And then there's this article I read a long time ago that showed that Danish people have lower expectations. So maybe that's the key to their happiness.

This is the key. Just like lower your expectations. No, there's a lot of truth to that. And then, of course, when you look at all the countries, there's huge differences, you know, and it makes a lot of sense, right? So like at the bottom, our countries where there's, you know, very, very, you know, where there's poverty, where there's war, where there's political instability, you understand why they're unhappy. Right, but the United States doesn't fare well in that survey. Well, it just dropped out of the top 20. And you and I just got back from India. So we were, you know, exposed to many people living in, you know, various states of

poverty who nonetheless seem to be quite happy. And it could be about expectations. And it's partly, it is about expectations, but also about, because we always want, remember, we always want more. We always want, you know, but also about connection and community and collectivist, you know, these are, India is a collectivist society and we're an individualist society. So we're more of a focus on whether I'm happy and my sense of agency as opposed to group harmony and collective well-being. that you have around happiness, what moves us towards us, what pushes us away from it. Has this been a positive or a negative in your own personal relationship with happiness? Yeah, I think I would say positive, certainly not negative. People are always asking me like, are you a happy person? And I certainly, you know, as I explained at the beginning,

like it was serendipitous how I got into this field. It wasn't like, I was like, oh, I'm not happy. So I want to study happiness. And in fact, sometimes students apply to work for my lab and they tell me like, I want to work with you because I'm not happy or I'm depressed. I mean, maybe they're great scholars, so I don't necessarily say no to that, but I'm a little suspicious of that, right? Like, and also I think scientists should try to be as unbiased as possible, right? So if I have this huge bias, like I'm a huge believer in gratitude, then I might, you know, my studies, it's like a big pharma company, right? Wanting that drug to work. So this is part of your reluctance to embrace meditation, because if you do, and it has tremendous benefits in your life, then you're biased in how you report back those findings. I would say no, but I'm trying to meditate.

I'm really working on it. Yeah, I'm working on it. So I'll report back later. Okay. But where are your personal challenges with happiness? Like, where do you fail to take your own counsel? Sure, sure, sure, sure, sure. Yeah, so I'm a generally happy person.

I think, yeah, like rumination. Yeah. So I'm a generally happy person. I think, yeah, like rumination. Yeah. Like I definitely ruminate sometimes. I think that's one of my, I'm really into connection, certainly gratitude. I think I'm a very grateful person. I'm an immigrant and I feel like immigrants are more grateful. I don't know if that's really true. Maybe someone should look at that. Like, I'm like, oh my God. You immigrated from Russia. How old were you when you came to the States? I was nine and a half. Nine and a half. Yeah. Still a slight twang of accent there, but not very much. Well, thank you for noticing. Most people, yeah, you must have a good ear because most people don't notice it. And you grew up in Washington, DC. Yeah. From age like

10 to 18. So did I. I think we graduated high school the same year. I think we talked about this. Yeah, both grew up in, I'm from Bethesda. Yeah. And I also grew up in Bethesda. Oh, you went to Walt Whitman? The Landon School. Yeah.

And I went to Moray. Yeah. Oh, you went to Moray. Oh, wow. We have a whole other conversation we can have later. So if we were the same gender, we would have played sports together against each other. That's true. Yeah. That's true. Yeah.

That's wild. Yeah, that's wild. But being an immigrant, how does that inform, you know, your... I'm a lot more grateful. I just remember being in college and just being like, oh, my God. And people, yeah, I'm a lot more grateful. And I'm still, of course, critical of the U.S., but I think, oh, my God, you guys, like, there's a lot worse countries out there. We're so lucky. I mean, you could be grateful and also try to do something to fix problems at the

same time. But yeah, I guess rumination is sometimes a problem for me and anxiety. I have this sort of pet theory, which is totally not scientific. You know, like there's three major negative emotions, anxiety, anger, and sadness. And that everyone has kind of like their preferred negative emotion. And mine is anxiety. So I definitely have like sort of more anxiety than maybe the average person, although it's not like clinical.

And I actually kind of prefer that to the other two. So, but we all have that. I guess we all have, you know, and negative emotions again are, they serve a function. So we all experience them, but we all have that. I guess we all have, you know, and negative emotions again are, they serve a function. So we all experience them, but we all have kind of like a preference.

If it was me, I'm trying to imagine myself as a happiness expert, having to confront my own struggles with happiness. For me, that would set in motion, like a domino effect, like this cascade of then self-flagellation because you know better and you know what the solution is, and yet you keep, like, sort of tripping yourself

up on these things. Interesting. Kind of like a doctor who, say, smokes something and says, oh, I know. Yeah, the dissonance. Yeah, the dissonance, yeah. I don't think that happens to me. It's more like, like I find that it's useful to remind myself certain things.

I don't know. I think maybe I'm pretty good at self-compassion because I think like I know like I ruminate, but I know lots of people ruminate. So I don't really like kick myself for that. Well, it's healthy to not hold yourself to a different standard of happiness simply because you understand it and study it. Yeah. Yeah. I don't think I do. What is the study of your dreams? Like if

you could basically craft the ultimate, you know, randomized control trial or population study that, that controlled for all variables that would answer all of your questions, what would that look like? Do you know, this is like a job interview question. Is it, do people ask you that all the time? Well, not me. Like if you're, if I was interviewing for a professor job, like literally they say, what's your, if I gave you so much money, like they usually put a number on it. Like I gave you, you know, whatever, $3 million to do it. I mean, I like the idea of like sort of the mini labs. So, so I would do the interventions that I'm doing. And by the way, now we're studying beyond kindness and gratitude. Like we're studying listening, curiosity, and, you know, sort of having conversations, sort of having like making

those studies really big and ideally across cultures and then being able to measure lots of things. So like while people are engaged in a conversation and they're showing curiosity to the other person, or they're showing what are called high quality listening behaviors, they're really listening. Maybe they're in a scanner so you can see what's happening in their brain. And maybe we're also hooking them up, their body, so we can see what's happening in their bodies. And then we have all these codes of their facial expressions and behaviors and sort of having a team, be able to really pay a team of people to do all these things because one person can't do it. So, yeah, to me, it's really more doing bigger studies with a lot more different kinds of measures that are because they're all expensive and take a lot of time.

And then also follow people up across, you know, years. Many, many years. Many, many years. How many years? Decades, right? Decades. Decades. Many, many years.

How many years? Decades, right? Decades, decades. What do we know or not know about the impact or the efficacy of psychedelics on happiness? There seems to be a lot of excitement and research happening at the moment. And we're beginning to understand the potential for these powerful compounds to alleviate anxiety

or PTSD, et cetera. So I just, I'm curious around your stance. Yeah. Well, I actually was going to mention psychedelics. I thought, is this cool to mention this on your show? I guess it is. So before COVID, I became obsessed with MDMA, you know, which is otherwise known as molly or ecstasy. It's actually not technically a psychedelic, but it has some psychedelic properties. And the reason was that I was studying connection. And I was also becoming interested in how to induce in the lab a feeling, making people feel understood, loved, and appreciated. And I have a colleague who's also my sort of co-author on a book. His name is Harry

Reese. And he has a theory that's, I sort of co-author on a book. His name is Harry Reese. And he has a theory that's, I think, actually like the best theory in psychology, which is the key to relationships is for both partners to feel understood, cared for, loved, and valued or appreciated. And then I realized that this molecule makes people feel incredibly understood, loved, and valued. So I went into like this rabbit hole, again, this is like before COVID, reading everything I could find about it. And it turned out that there were some experiments where people are like, say, given molly versus some comparison drug or placebo. And then they sit at a computer and they ask questions like,

how friendly do you feel? And how loving do you feel? And then there's sort of and then there's the clinical trials that are still going on for PTSD. But there's really no research that that actually has people like in the lab talking to each other and, you know, and taking molly versus other compounds anyway. paper where I'm kind of encouraging other scholars to start a new field that I am calling psychedelic social psychology, where we're studying these psychoactive substances for different reasons. One is to sort of to try to understand the psychological mechanisms or processes better or the brain pathway. So like if you have someone in the lab, they're on Molly and they're feeling really, really loved. And you could look inside there. You could look to see what's happening in their brains. You know, like what are the brain pathways that underlie that feeling, that deep feeling of being loved or gratitude or empathy? Because it's also associated with lots of like positive things.

But also you can help people. You can improve people's lives by lots of people, you know, lack social skills or they have all kinds of various social deficits or they're lonely. And maybe with one one time administration of this of certain drugs or substances or maybe some boosters, you can actually help people have better social lives, feel less lonely. So so Molly is just a great example because so related to what I'm studying, social connection. But you can think about psilocybin, you know, other substances that you can use in psychology to sort of really uncover, like, important processes, like, well, like, what is the nature of the self? Or like, can we reduce prejudice with these substances? So yeah, I mean, I could talk for hours about it. It's a very, very exciting frontier. Yeah, you're seeing this as promising in many ways. But very, very exciting frontier.

Yeah. You're seeing this as promising in many ways. Yes. Now, so when I started doing this research, it was still, I should say, just the reading. It was still like, consider like, are you crazy? Like, I remember giving a talk in my department on Zoom, actually, because then COVID hit. And yeah, I definitely got like, are you crazy doing this? Like, why are you doing this? Oh, there was on Facebook, I now when I published my first paper on the topic, one of the comments was, there goes a brilliant career. So that was 2020, about 2021. But so much has happened in like three, four years, where it's really in the zeitgeist. And yeah, it's really having the psychedelics are really having a moment and it's becoming a lot more acceptable. So much so that there's worry. I'd say I would worry that is becoming like too much of a fad. I think we need to be cautious. Yeah. I mean, I've said this many times on the show before, but the risk of repeating myself,

there is, you know, certainly something to be said for, you know, the benefits that we're seeing and the science that's emerging. And I have personal friends who I think have benefited in many ways from this. But it does concern me the way in which it's being mainstreamed. I mean, there's just like ketamine clinics like all over town here, you know, and it's sort of just you can just book an appointment and go in and do it. And so there's a certain cavalierness about this whole thing that I think is not great. Yeah, and I agree. I think there needs to be a lot more. And there are people who are just being so thoughtful about how to roll out.

So like once MDMA is rescheduled to schedule three, like ketamine, as opposed to schedule one, where it is now, there will be also MDMA clinics. And I don't know what the numbers are. Like, I don't think the numbers are so high of people who go to these clinics. But I do think the potential is great. But just like with anything new, there's a lot of enthusiasm, excitement at the beginning. There might be some big placebo effects, right? Just kind of like a new educational intervention, right?

Happens and then like everyone's super excited about it. And then once it's scaled, suddenly you don't see any big effects, right? Just kind of like a new educational intervention, right? Happens and then like everyone's super excited about it. And then once it's scaled, suddenly you don't see any big effects, right? Because there was a lot of it was because of the enthusiasm of the first practitioners. The neuroscience research on psychedelics and some of the other randomized controlled studies are like really, really promising, like really powerful.

So I'm an optimist. Yeah, and are you an experienced practitioner yourself or is this an academic intrigue? I'll answer that question in two ways. One is, Mike, I have a collaborator on who's been studying psychoactive substances for decades. And I actually asked her, I said, what do you do when people ask you, do you actually do these substances? And she says, you're screwed either way. Because if you say you do, people say, well, you're biased. That means you're biased.

And if you say you don't, they say, you don't know what you're talking about. I have tried them. And actually, I can't imagine someone who studies something for decades has never actually tried it. Although there are certainly people who study substances that are toxic. Yeah, yeah, yeah. All right. What did we learn here today, Sonia? We learned that there are many myths when it comes to happiness and how our intuition or instincts around happiness can lead us astray. We understand that connection, love, kindness, gratitude, these are things that can reliably, when practiced, increase our quotient of happiness. Everything, of course, is couched in the context of, quote unquote, it depends. It's very context and individual dependent.

We learned that you struggle with meditation, but you are going to now embrace it wholeheartedly. with meditation, but you are going to now embrace it wholeheartedly. And I also see you as ascending, you know, our friend Scott Barry Kaufman's pyramid of Maslow's hierarchy of needs, at the top of which, of course, is this relationship with the transcendent that Arthur talks about. And this is the mountain that you are about to summit, my friend. Is this true? Have I summarized this accurately? I have to say, you said that Arthur Brooks is a sort of a prodigy at summarizing things, but I think you got that talent there too. So thank you for that lovely summary. Yeah, cool.

Yeah, I agree. I'd say a hundred percent with what you just said. And maybe we can just end it with a few kind of closing thoughts to the happiness seeker in our midst. Oh, you mean like just kind of takeaways? Like, hey, maybe, you know, you've made it this far. You know, here's a few little nuggets, you know, a couple little happiness chewables. Oh, interesting.

Okay, okay. Take away into your day. Maybe some things we haven't even talked about, huh? Yeah, you've made it this far. So now you have a little bonus for making this far. Social connection, right? Key to happiness. That's the big nugget.

Anything you can do to strengthen relationships. Chat with your barista when you get your coffee tomorrow morning. It'll make you happier on average. I guess the little nugget I would add that we haven't really talked about is don't be so closed off, right? So we all, I kind of alluded to this earlier. We all walk around kind of with a wall, with a shell around us.

One reason I study MDMA is because it kind of takes that shell off. It turns out that we feel much more connected to others when we show a little bit more of ourselves to others. So we don't just show like that shiny positive part of us to impress, but maybe some more vulnerable, it doesn't have to be super negative or like your deep secrets. That's how we forge a connection is by, yeah, having a little bit of a deeper conversation. So I, I often say like, I'm

done with small talk. That's it. I'm not engaging in small talk. Are you successful? Well, well i mean obviously like when you first meet someone like there's some people and many people need a little small talk kind of like it's like at the very beginning but i just find it so boring um yeah like life is too short like when you're in your 50s you know life is short and it gets shorter every year so uh you know i want to have meaningful conversations so and i that makes people feel much more connected. And I would predict it'll make you happier. It'll make you flourish more if you have deeper connections with people. I mean, deeper conversations with people.

I love it. That's fantastic. So hopefully if I ever find myself on a flight that is having issues with its engine, you'll be sitting right next to me. That's beautiful. Make me feel more comfortable, all right? That was great. Thank you, Sonia. I really appreciate the work that you do.

It's important work and you're changing and improving lives all over the world. Thank you. Pleasure to talk to you. Great questions. You are to be recognized for that, my friend. Thank you.

Thank you. You too. Cool. Peace. slash richroll. Use code richroll at checkout for 15% off their entire range of wellness tools. That's it for today. Thank you for listening. I truly hope you enjoyed the conversation. To learn more about today's guest, including links and resources related to everything discussed today, visit the episode page at richroll.com, where you can find the entire podcast archive, as well as podcast merch, my books,

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