AI transcript
“Happiness is a massive topic. Where do you even begin?”
“A popular podcast with more than 35 million downloads. Why are our young people so unhappy?”
If you look at very happy people, what are they doing differently?
What you find is they spend a lot of time with other people.
They don’t spend a long time on screens.
They spend more time just proportionally in real life,
whether that’s being present, walking around outside or something.
“Touching grass.”
Yeah, all negative emotions really have a good evolutionary purpose.
Boredom is our cue that, like, “Oh, I should go out and do something.”
Stimulating, “I should find something meaningful.”
Whereas when we can kind of slap the screen band-aid on our boredom,
we never have to feel it long enough to find what we really want to do.
Happiness tends to have to sort of U-shaped curve.
Starts off good when you’re young, and you’re a kid, you tend to be pretty happy,
and then you get to mid-life, and it kind of sucks.
There’s lots of research showing that perfectionism is going up since the 80s to now.
There are, like, 30 to 40% increases.
This level of depression right now nationally is more than 40% of students’ report being too depressed to function most days,
and that number has doubled in the last eight to nine years.
Similar things for anxiety right now, anxieties at like…
So it’s happened again.
Last week, I got a notice in the mail, another data breach.
This time it was with my healthcare provider.
I’m sure you’ve been here.
Sadly, this problem is not going away.
Obviously, they tell you to go and lock down your credit reports,
but there’s so much more at stake here.
From the second your data is breached, it’s being resold by companies called data brokers.
Now, the good news is that as evil as these companies are, they’re also companies,
so that means that if you take your time to monitor, to find your data,
and then you hire a lawyer to send them takedowns, you can have some success.
Now, obviously, your time is more valuable than that,
so I want to tell you about a service that I use, and it’s today’s sponsor.
It’s called DeleteMe.
They use a power of attorney to work on your behalf to find and methodically remove your data from these data brokers.
And they are continuously monitoring these sites.
There’s over 750 of them out there.
And they keep removing your data as it shows up, which unfortunately, it constantly does.
And recently, DeleteMe has expanded their core service,
which is the ability to easily extend protection and peace of mind
to anyone that you wish to include in your DeleteMe account.
They have a new area, it’s called the Family Account Management,
which creates this unified hub for your entire family privacy protection.
And right now, you get 20% off all plans with the code “KevinRose”.
Head to joindeleteme.com/KevinRose.
This week’s episode is brought to you by DRAM.
You’ve probably heard me mention that way back in the day, back in 2000, when I was a wee lad,
I gave up soda absolutely cold turkey.
That means nothing with corn syrup, aspartame, sugar, or any other crap,
but I still really love sparkling beverages.
That’s why I’m excited to tell you about DRAM.
DRAM is unlike anything you’ve ever had.
It’s packed full of real functional ingredients made from plants.
Imagine a drink that’s zero calories, zero sugar,
and it’s made with steamed, distilled, organic ingredients.
They have this citrus flavor that has orange blossom, hibiscus, lemon salt,
rind from a grapefruit.
It’s fantastic.
And my favorite, though, is their cola.
It tastes just like classic cola,
but it’s made with adaptogenic mushrooms, such as chaga,
lion’s mane, shiitake, and cordyceps.
But you don’t even taste the mushrooms.
It tastes just like cola.
Lastly, I love that their cans are BPA free
and that their water is free from those harmful.
They call them these forever chemicals.
They’re really bad for you.
None of that in their water.
It’s just absolutely fantastic stuff.
You’ve got to give it a try.
If you head on over to KevinRose.com/DRAM,
you’ll get my three favorite flavors as a bundle pack.
And you’ll also get 20% off everything at the store.
So use the code KevinRose.
That’s KevinRose.com/DRAM and the code KevinRose.
And thank you, Dram, for sponsoring the show.
Laurie, thank you so much for being on the show.
Yeah, thanks so much for having me.
Happiness is a massive topic.
Where do you even begin when you approach this?
If someone comes up to you at a party
and you say, hey, I study happiness,
how do you even start to talk about this topic?
You go way back, right?
I mean, Aristotle was talking about this step.
It’s in the Declaration of Independence.
So it’s not like a new thing when people are pursuing this stuff.
But usually start with the story of how I get interested in this stuff.
Yeah, let me hear that.
I was like a nerdy professor who studied animals for a long time.
And then switched and made this pivot
to studying happiness and mental health
because I was seeing the mental health crisis in my students.
I took on this weird role at Yale, which is called the head of college.
So you’re faculty who live on campus with students.
And I expected college life to be what it was like
when I was there in the 90s.
There was stress and stuff, but it was mostly fun.
And that was not what I was seeing in my community.
I was just seeing so much anxiety and depression
and students who were suicidal.
And it was just like jarring that the mental health crisis was so bad.
That took place over the course of a decade or so, that change, that shift?
Yeah, well, what’s interesting is you look at the data.
These things are skyrocketing, right?
So the level of depression right now nationally
is more than 40% of students report being too depressed to function most days.
And that number has doubled in the last eight to nine years.
Similar things for anxiety right now.
I think anxieties at like 67% of students
say they’re overwhelmingly anxious most days.
College students nationally.
Those rates just were not there.
My colleague who runs the mental health and counseling at Yale
was fond of saying the rates are skyrocketing enough
that we know they’ll level off, but that’s just because like 100% of people
need clinical care on college campuses.
And it was just in my community.
I was just seeing these students who are really struggling and realizing,
hang on, my field has some strategies we can use to do better,
to feel better, to feel less depressed and anxious.
And so I developed this class to like teach students these strategies,
retrained in the science of happiness and put together the class.
And that was when everything changed for me because the class went totally viral.
On campus, we had a quarter of the entire Yale student body signed up to take the class.
Well, and you did a Coursera thing too, right?
And then we put four million downloads or something?
Yeah, every time we put out content, people flock to it.
I think it’s because people want to be happy,
but also people are struggling right now.
There’s legit things in 2024 that are making us all feel overwhelmed
and burned out and scared.
And what’s the root?
Obviously, there’s band-aids and then there’s the root cause.
When you did your research, where did you begin?
And how did you start to assess out what’s causing all this and why now?
I wish there was like a silver bullet because it would make it so easy
because we could just get rid of whatever that thing was and make it.
Yeah, technology is probably part of the answer here.
And I should say it’s not just I think everybody points a finger at social media.
I actually think it’s deeper than that.
I think it’s these devices that we have that often steal our attention
away from real world things.
And if you plot those rates of depression, I was just mentioning,
and you plot a number of iPhones in teen pockets, like the line, they look perfectly.
I mean, correlation doesn’t equal causation, obviously, but it looks pretty bad.
Right? Yeah.
One of the things technology promised us, especially phones in our pockets,
was connecting with other people, being social in real life.
And I think what’s shocking is that how much we use it to not be social in real life.
We’re here having this conversation in Austin, it’s out by Southwest.
And if you walk around this conference where there’s so many interesting things to see and do,
you’ll see a bunch of people sitting around, scrolling like this on there.
They pay to come interact with these amazing people.
And like there’s this opportunity cost where we’re hanging out on this tiny screen all the time.
And that, I think, has real psychological consequences.
Liz Dunn, who’s a professor at UBC, does these studies where she just checks what happens
to people’s social interactions when they have their phones with them versus not with them.
She measures these subtle things like how often people smile at one another.
She finds that smiling decreases like 30 percent when your phone’s around,
because you’re not even looking at the people around you.
You’re just locked into your phone.
What’s causing that, though?
What do you think the phone provides?
Because if you’re having a real intimate friend conversation, someone’s struggling,
you’re sitting down with them, you’re grabbing a beer or something.
That’s meaningful to me.
It feels much deeper than a chat.
But what is it that’s pulling people south by, for example,
they have the ability to go and connect and laugh, have fun, hang out.
But yet they’re choosing the device over the humans, which in theory,
the human connection should be more powerful, but yet the phone is winning.
Yeah. Why?
So I think the phone wins for two reasons.
One is it’s just easier.
Right. If I’m at South by and I have to talk to someone, you’re standing up
and be like, Hey, how did you come to South by?
What are you doing? There’s like this teeny friction.
Whereas my phone, there’s no friction.
I just pull it out and there’ll be something interesting.
And I think we’re worse at the friction than we have been
because we’re out of practice at it.
I think older folks like us because of COVID, I think our young people
just never do it in the same way that we grew up doing it.
Right. If they go to pick their friend up at their house,
they don’t like go knock on the door and have to talk to mom.
I’m like, where’s Joey? They just text like, I’m outside, come.
I think younger individuals have less practice with that friction.
So I think friction is one thing, but I think we just forget how interesting
our phones are, like how much cool craps on it.
But your brain doesn’t forget your brain knows Liz Dunn, who I just mentioned.
She’s this analogy she uses, like imagine to this conversation
instead of bring my cell phone, which is in my pocket right now.
I brought this big wheelbarrow and in the wheelbarrow is printouts
of every email I’ve had since 2005, like big DVDs with everything
that’s on YouTube from cat videos to porn printouts of everything.
Donald Trump and Biden has said in the last week, CDs of every song
that’s on Spotify as big wheelbarrow that went up into the sky.
You and I would want to have a conversation,
but you’re going to be like, oh, I just want to take a real quick
pick at that cat video or whatever. Your brain’s not stupid.
Your brain knows that full wheelbarrow and much, much more
that I don’t have time to say is on the other side of that phone.
You’re super interesting. It’s fun.
But I don’t know, you as interesting as every cat video out there, right?
And so I think we’ve created this enormous temptation for our attention
that’s in the pockets of billions of people around the world.
And we don’t know psychologically what that’s doing to us.
One question I have for you, Instagram, our TikTok Reels.
Reels, to me, are the most addicted thing because as the algorithm
fine tunes itself, it’s fine in the dumb stuff that I lack my ass off at.
Back in the day, I’m old enough now to remember before pre cell phone.
Pre cell phone, you would have one of these moments
once a week with your friends where someone would fall out of the chair,
something hilarious would happen and you would laugh your ass off.
And it was like, that was so awesome that we all experienced that.
And you laugh about it for years to come.
Now I’m having that moment every 30 seconds.
So the reward that I’m getting every 30 seconds is like those rewards
that I used to get once a week, and it’s just like nonstop.
And so here I am being entertained to the nth level like that I absolutely love.
And then when I don’t have that any longer,
now I’m I have to sit with my feelings and my emotions and everything else.
And the things that I don’t like, is that part of the issue?
Do you think there’s some evidence that things like boredom,
proneness is going up that when we have this moment where we can’t
whip out our phones and look at our reels, we feel this intense terrible boredom.
But also the stakes get higher because we have this being hit
on the funniness stuff every 30 seconds.
And these algorithms are making that even more frequent
and even more powerful a dopamine hit.
It means that like real life just hasn’t kind of caught up.
My husband’s a philosopher.
We have great dinner party conversations, but he doesn’t have an algorithm
in his brain that’s tracking what I find funny and super interesting
and updating every 30 seconds to give me content that I like.
And I think that means that temptation wise, we’re really pulled
to the screen world, the tick tock world.
If you think of like our psychological nutrition, actual psychological joy,
we get out of it, we get the sort of quick dopamine hit from the tick tock.
But as soon as you put it down, you feel gross and lonely
and maybe overwhelmed and a little dizzy or whatever.
Whereas you don’t get that from talking to people.
I think this is something that’s just neuroscientifically
like super fascinating, which is our reward systems are weird
and we don’t necessarily go for and crave the rewards
that are going to make us feel the best in life.
There’s this interesting neuroscientific disconnect between systems
that code for wanting versus liking.
So if it’s long dinner with my husband, we have this intense conversation.
I’ll like that. I’ll feel really connected to him afterwards.
That will feel really pleasurable for me.
But I don’t actually want that or crave that in the same way
I might for the next reel in like a tick tock series, right?
Like I crave, I really want.
But if you were to kind of measure in my pleasure centers,
whether or not I liked it, I might get that like quick hit off of liking it.
But it’s not a deeper liking.
And it turns out that this is just a feature of the brain that these circuits
that code for wanting and craving and going after stuff are just different than liking.
And I mean, there’s all this stuff we crave that we’ll spend money on.
We don’t end up liking in the end.
It also means there’s all this stuff we really probably will like
that we don’t have craving for, like deep social connection or a contemplative time
where you’re just kind of present or even to a certain extent exercise and moving your body.
I think some people get the craving for exercise, but like I’m just not one of those.
I have to work at it and force myself to do it all the time.
Yeah, yeah. So I feel like if we could just line up the brain systems
for wanting and liking, we’d be better off.
But what makes companies money is algorithms that just tap into the wanting.
They don’t really care about the liking.
In my mind, it’s not any one thing.
If I have to feel it has to be a composition of different aspects of life
and interactions and things that we do to create the perfect stew of happiness.
Is that accurate to say?
TikTok is not going to make me happy.
Deep conversations with my wife aren’t going to check every single box that I have.
What is that composition look like?
And how do you actually teach that to people?
Part of it’s just overcoming the misconceptions we have about the stuff
that we think is going to make us happy, but isn’t going to work, right?
So in our young people today, they think the main thing in that big composition pile is money.
If I get a money in fame, then I would be fine.
And it is true that if you don’t have any money, then getting some money is important.
You get your basic needs sorted.
But the evidence suggests that once you do that more and more infinitely,
it doesn’t have a kind of infinite slope on your happiness.
Kerry talks about this a lot. Yeah.
Fantastic. And that’s like the kind of money and fame, right?
Because I think we all put that up there.
And so that’s one that I think we kind of get wrong.
I think just even like selfish material pursuits, we think happiness is about me.
The evidence seems to suggest if you look at happy people are much more other oriented.
They do nice stuff for other people.
They’re really focused on other people’s happiness.
It seems like that’s kind of a path to doing it better.
And so a lot of what we do when we try to teach the composition is that you think this works,
but it’s not that and then come around to like, what is it really?
And it seems to be really based in other people like a path of service,
a path of service, but just being around other people.
If you look at very happy people and the way people do this is, you know,
we do these happiness surveys on these like well validated psychometric measures.
So you can say, OK, these subjects are self report being very happy.
What are they doing differently?
And what you find is they spend a lot of time with other people.
Their actions tend to be focused on other people.
So they’re kind of thinking about other people a lot.
They don’t spend a lot of time on screens.
They spend more time just proportionately in real life,
whether that’s being present, walking around outside or something.
Touching grass. Yeah, touching grass, moving around.
And they tend to have paths of purpose, right?
So they have a set of values that they’re moving towards.
So their actions when they’re not towards other people,
if they’re like at work or volunteer or whatever,
they’re really trying to do something that fits with their values that’s meaningful.
That’s a tough one because so many people
they’re stuck in a job that they don’t enjoy.
And this is, I think, of course, we need to take into account.
There’s real inequalities when it comes to the pursuit of happiness.
It’s way easier for some people than others to do things they find meaningful
and go after their values.
But one of the reasons I like the actual research on pursuing your values
is that it shows that many of us can get crafty about how we think of
doing things that match our values in all kinds of different jobs.
So one of my favorite lines of work on this is this Professor Amy Rizninski,
who’s at the University of Pennsylvania.
She does all this work on what she calls job crafting,
which is like you take your regular job description and you infuse
whatever your values and strengths are, whether that’s creativity or bravery
or their social connection or your persistence or learning or whatever it is.
She does most of her work in hospital janitorial staff workers.
So these are people who are like cleaning up the linen in a hospital room.
And what she finds is that between 20 to 30 percent of them say that their job is a calling.
They don’t hate their job. They love it.
They wouldn’t change it for anything.
And when she digs into what they’re doing,
they’re taking their normal job description and finding a way to add this meaningful thing in.
Is it a calling then or is it in addition of something that creates a calling?
One example she has is this guy who worked in a chemotherapy ward
and crappy thing about having cancer and having to get chemo as you get sick.
His main job was like cleaning up vomit because people throw up on the floor
and he said, yeah, I have to do that.
But like my main thing is I like humor and I like making people laugh.
These people have like such a crappy life right now.
And he had like his whole standard.
So his standard joke, I guess, was like, he makes fun of, oh, you vomit it again.
I’m going to get overtime. You keep throwing up this week.
Let’s work it out.
But then the person last, he’s like, that’s my job.
She talks about another staff member who worked in a coma ward.
She couldn’t talk to the patients because the patients are all in comas,
but she would move the art around or plants like this little plant
that were sitting near here.
She’d like move the succulents around the room to get creative.
That was how she found meaning in her work.
And so Rosnicki’s stuff basically says, look, even in the kind of
narrowest, perhaps crappiest job, you can find ways to bring in your values.
And what’s cool about her work is you might assume if you were a manager
of these people, you’d be mad at the chemo guys, you know, chat with the people
and not cleaning up.
But what she finds is that managers self report that these workers
are doing the best job at their real job description because they love their job.
They’re like in a good mood.
They’re not slacking off and trying to go to the break room.
They want to engage because they’ve figured out a way.
And that’s why I love her work.
It really suggests that, like, look, any of us could jobcraft.
We just have to get creative about ways to fit stuff in.
All right, it’s time to talk about Notion.
I am always on the hunt and always playing with the latest and greatest
productivity software.
Notion is one that I’ve used for many, many years now.
So I’m stoked to have them on as a sponsor.
Notion has been a tool that’s been taking my productivity
absolutely to the next level.
I love the way you can build it out to suit your specific needs.
Notion combines your notes, your docs and your projects all into one space
that’s simple and beautifully designed.
And they have this new fully integrated Notion AI, which helps you work faster,
write better and think bigger tasks that normally took hours.
You can now do in seconds.
You don’t have to go to some external provider or any other AI product.
It’s all built right inside of Notion.
If you haven’t tried Notion yet, obviously, you’ve heard about it.
If you haven’t tried it yet, you should definitely give it a shot.
You could try it for free when you go to Notion.com/KevinRose.
And when you use our link, you’ll be supporting the show that’s Notion.com/KevinRose.
Today’s sponsor is NordVPN.
Stay secure and anonymous online with NordVPN, which has been my trusted VPN for years now.
I like it because you can access to a lot of content from anywhere.
So I’m in Japan or Mexico at least a couple of times a year.
And I want to watch my favorite shows.
And this comes in really handy to bypass all of that geofencing.
And it needs to be fast.
This is another essential thing for a VPN.
And Nord is lightning fast because they have thousands of servers.
So if you want to stream and game without lag, it’s great.
And then equally as important is privacy.
They have a great policy, no logs, nothing to store, nothing to see, nothing to share,
which is pretty much as good as it gets.
And their apps are just really lightweight.
So it’s not bogging down your system the entire time.
And they have it for desktop and mobile.
Don’t miss this incredible deal, which is two years at a huge discount
plus four free months.
If you use my link, Nord VPN dot com slash Kevin Rose.
That’s Nord VPN dot com slash Kevin Rose, and it’s risk free.
There’s a 30 day money back guarantee, which makes this a no brainer.
One question about that, how much shaming comes from employment?
Like I’ll give you an example.
When I travel to Japan, I always seek out small little artisans
that are the best at their craft.
And I met this guy one time in Tokyo that is known for aging coffee beans.
And so he has coffee beans that are 10, 15 years old.
It takes him about 20 minutes to make a single cup of coffee
because he does this insanely slow, poor process that just takes forever.
So he can probably do, I would say, maybe 20, 25 of them a day.
And you have to be lucky enough to get in.
And the price is about seven US dollars.
Was it good when he was fantastic.
And he wears a bow tie and he dresses up and he’s dressed to the nines.
And there is so much pride in what he does.
And not only pride in what he does, but pride from the community as well
and a respect for someone that just hones their craft.
I don’t think we have that here.
Yeah. Capitalism isn’t awesome about respecting those kinds of things.
She’s like, oh, my God, well, if we could train other people to do it
and then make a machine that we get really great and stuff will scale it.
So I think a couple of things.
One is I think Riznensky’s work shows that within the scope
of people’s typical job descriptions, you don’t have to have a job
like that guy to find meaning.
But if you are that guy and you have a craft that allows you to get meaning,
it is the case that adding these extrinsic rewards on top of it
winds up screwing up your feelings towards it.
And I think we don’t need to be a guy with that kind of level of talent
and specific skill to take the normal, enjoyable pursuits we have like running.
You get a Fitbit and now all of a sudden you get obsessive about it.
No longer the kind of internal reward you got from the running.
I watch this in my students who want to say like, oh, I’ll have my side hustle.
At first, the side hustle was just like you did some art or you designed it
because it was fun.
And now you have a due date at Thursday at 7 p.m.
and you hate it because you’ve got to rush to do it.
All the joy has been stolen from it.
So I think it is the case that as we add these extrinsic rewards
onto the stuff we care about, all of a sudden it feels yucky.
And I think this is one of the reasons we’re seeing so many increases
in depression and anxiety, particularly among our teens and our young people.
Because we’ve taken a lot of the fun stuff that kids did and turned it
into like a LinkedIn resume building or college application building process.
Kids usually just play soccer, but now it’s like, well, you got to be on the soccer team.
Oh, it’s an extracurricular.
Well, that’ll look good for a piece of it.
Totally. I think part is that they don’t have any time anymore.
This is another thing as we talk about the recipe for a happy life.
Free time and what the social scientists these days are calling time
affluence, the sort of fact that you’re wealthy in time.
You seem like you have a lot of time, such an important part of our wellbeing.
And that, you know, I mean, you younger kids, like the kids are just so busy.
They have a play date that has to happen at one o’clock
and we’ve got to drive in traffic to get there.
And so we’re kind of changing around what used to count as intrinsic rewards.
And it was just fun and we’re kind of turning it more extrinsic and more scheduled.
And those features make it less enjoyable.
Have you seen any old Mr.
Rogers quotes when he’s interviewed by Charlie Rose?
He says, one of the greatest gifts that he’s received is the gift of silence
where he has that decompression time.
And he’s very well known for I studied Mr.
Rogers quite a bit because I love a guy.
And I think he was enlightened.
I think he just did. Totally. Yeah.
And he used to swim every single morning.
And that was like his time, his silence, and he didn’t miss a beat.
He would go and swim for an hour.
I wonder how do we reintroduce silence into our everyday life?
My youngest, who’s five now, when I let her watch Daniel Tiger,
because it’s based on Mr. Rogers, which is a great show.
And so we do give them some iPad time, not for games, but more so for educational content.
She loves elephants.
So she watches elephants, like actual elephant documentaries and stuff.
One got attacked by a tiger the other day, and I was freaking out.
I was like, Danny Tiger is going to be destroyed.
Yeah. Well, this is a real elephant getting attacked by the hyena.
And I told my wife, did you check the rating on this before we put this on?
But anyway, when she is not doing something,
a common thing that comes out of her mouth is, what do I do?
The shows of her, what do I do?
Like, how do you handle that?
I mean, I think we’ve all, including our kids, including five year olds,
have gotten bad at being bored.
Right. There’s like a real irony to that,
given that you can handle a device with every year kids TV show
in the history of the world on it.
I think we should have thought when we got all these technologies
that what would happen is like boredom would be a thing in the past.
You hear this term bored, our kids should be like, what is boredom?
Dad, what is that like an ancient technology?
This ancient thing we used to sit silently and didn’t know what it felt like.
I think if anything, our kids are more bored than ever as soon as the stimulation stops.
And that’s, I think, the irony of it.
I grew up like bad 70s TV watching Mr. Rogers.
If you watch Mr. Rogers for the half hours on TV in the late 70s.
My kids can’t watch it.
Yeah, they need it to be faster.
They need it to be infinite.
And I think we’ve kind of developed this world where we never have to be bored.
But what boredom is, is so all negative emotions really have a good evolutionary purpose.
Natural selection when build this stuff in boredom, sadness, loneliness,
if it wasn’t for something.
And so I think boredom is our cue that like, oh, I should go out and do something
stimulating. I should find something meaningful.
I should find purpose.
Whereas when we can kind of slap the screen band aid on our boredom,
it means we never have to feel it long enough to find what we really want to do.
And I worry about this in kids.
I worry about this in adults, too.
I’ll watch myself when I have those spare moments and I’ll grab my phone.
Mine is an Instagram reel.
It’s actually just scrolling through Reddit, embarrassingly.
Yeah, just like, you know, there’s always a next page
and there might be something cool on it.
But that means I never have these moments where I sit quietly and have ideas
or think about things or have insights or the best.
Insights actually, those shower moments are real.
So the advice, actually, you mentioned Mr.
Rogers and swimming, the advice I get from a lot of these kind of experts
on sort of finding silence is actually to swim, to take a bath, take a shower.
Because when you’re in water, when I have my phones,
I’m terrified that like our phone technology is going to figure out
how to be in the shower. And then it’s funny.
I just got one of those cool plunges from my house, which I absolutely love
in terms of like just giving you a hit of just energy and peace.
Fantastic. Mine came with an iPhone adapter on the side.
I was like, oh, shit, it’s everywhere.
Well, I remember, I mean, again, I’m old enough to remember when we had the internet
and we had like a little Wi-Fi, but it wasn’t phones.
It wasn’t everywhere.
I remember being on trains before trains had Wi-Fi.
And it was such a good concentrated work time and thinking time.
And you just watch the world go by.
Now the Amtrak has Wi-Fi.
It’s great in the sense that I get work done
and I can connect with things and not be bored on the train.
But you’ve lost something important.
You’ve lost looking at the window and seeing all the beauty.
Exactly. We don’t notice how much of that time we’ve lost in the last 10 years.
One of my favorite indicators of how little time we spend not looking at our screens
is that apparently in the last 10 years, sales of gum, like grocery stores,
sales of chewing gum have gone down.
I forget what it is, but it’s like 200 or 300 percent.
And you’re like, why does that matter?
When do you usually buy chewing gum?
You’re in the line, you’re bored, you’re around, you’re like, oh, chewing gum.
I’ll grab it and buy it.
Impulse purchases of that form have gone down
because we’re not noticing this stuff anymore because our heads are very…
I don’t even pay attention to what’s around.
Checking out, you don’t even look anymore.
Like, again, I’m old enough to remember lines long.
You grab the magazine and kind of flip through the magazine.
Maybe I got like a little candy or whatever.
But like, that doesn’t exist anymore.
What else are we missing?
That’s also the time when I might smile at my neighbor in the line
or have a quick chat with someone.
A lot of the evidence suggests those little tiny things of little noticing.
I’ll notice the girls in line with, oh, she’s got such a cute dress.
These little hits of delight and joy in the real world
are psychologically much more nutritious than whatever hit I’m going to get
in that line in 40 seconds growing through Reddit.
What are your thoughts on perfection or perfect moments?
One of the things that drives me a little crazy is I see these Google ads
that talk about their camera capabilities with AI.
And it’s like, hey, if you don’t like that person that was behind the camera,
you use the magic eraser and circle them and they disappear.
And in my mind, I’m never going to do that because that wasn’t real.
That literally didn’t happen.
There was a person standing there.
You literally wiped out someone’s existence.
If you’re old enough to have old film like photographs when you were a kid
and you flip through them, some of the most interesting things for me
are always like, what was on my desk?
I have a couple of photos of me when I was younger, messing around with computers.
I have some CD ROM sitting on there. I was like, oh, what do they have on there?
Oh, there was a little smudge here. Let me remove that.
Is that having a negative impact on us?
Because it seems like there’s this projection of perfection, luxury, money.
That is just it’s everywhere we look and it creates these expectations
that in order to be happy, I have to have that lifestyle or look that way.
The quick scrolling of just random funny cat videos.
Yeah, maybe worse, right?
For all kinds of reasons, one metric that those kinds of technologies
are fueling perfectionism is lots of research showing that perfectionism is going up.
If you look since the 80s to now, there are like 30 to 40 percent increases
in the amount of perfectionism our young people experience.
But it’s not all forms of perfectionism.
So there’s like kind of three kinds of perfectionism.
One is I expect myself to be perfect.
So my standards apply to myself.
There’s a kind of other focus, perfectionism, which is I expect you to be perfect.
Think of the jerk boss who forces your kids, right?
They’re all going up.
But the one that’s going up most is what’s called socially prescribed
prescriptionism, which is I think everyone else wants me to be perfect.
I think everyone else wants me to be rich and have the perfect body
and never be off in a photo.
We kind of think the world is watching us and the world has expectations on us.
And it turns out that’s a form of perfectionism that’s most insidious
because it makes us feel like my worth depends on my looks and my job
and my wallet and all these things.
And I’m sure that’s even amplified when you’re younger
and you’re identifying who you are, what your belief systems are.
And then this is being shoved in your face as being like, hey, this could be value.
I remember again, like aging myself and all these domains.
But I remember like flipping through Seventeen Magazine.
I was like, wow, this is what teen girls like me are supposed to look like.
They should have this body and this amount of stuff.
But I like close a magazine and went out with my friends.
I didn’t have a thing in my pocket that was telling me these things.
And even the Photoshop tools that those Seventeen Magazine people had back in the day
are nothing like the tools that we have today.
And those tools are in the pockets of all my mean girl middle school friends
who are posting their pictures online.
And so I think the perfection that we see in the world has started to become embodied
in the perfectionism we think the world expects of us.
And then the data are kind of bearing this out.
I also think it’s just messing with our memories, right?
I think we want the perfect shot of what things look like.
But then those becomes the metrics by which we measure ourselves later on.
We’re having this conversation at South by and, you know, I did the thing
where you pose in front of the South by mural with my friends.
Somebody else took the picture for us who wasn’t a selfie.
And I looked at it and I was like, oh, kind of I don’t like the hair.
I was going to do it, but I was like, wait a minute, like that’s what I look like here.
If I perfect this photo, it’s just going to make me misremember what was happening.
And it’s going to make me feel like crap whenever I look at that photo.
Normally, my hair is not going to be, you know, distribution,
like two sigma perfect hair every day.
There’s going to be other kinds of hair.
I think that’s part of the reason why when you see people with selfie sticks
and you run into an influencer from afar and you watch them take the same photo
like 30 times and you’re like, whoa, something is dry of them to say,
this has to be absolutely perfect, which is insane.
This seems exhausting to me.
Totally. They also look like a jerk, right?
You’re looking at all these videos of the inflator.
I’m the main character.
They’re funny, by the way.
These are accounts dedicated to people taking photos of themselves,
which in a horrible way, I think it’s hilarious.
Yeah, but it is a sign that like we can’t just accept ourselves on like photo.
Number one, we have to make it perfect.
But when we do that, we’re really missing out on the memories
and what these things are going to look like later.
Absolutely.
I want to take it two directions, one with kids and one with adults.
When an adult comes to you and says, I’m having a hard time.
I don’t know what my future is.
Maybe I’m midlife crisis mode.
I’m having these issues.
I’m trying to find happiness.
What are your strategies if you were a therapist?
How do you unpack where they are and how do you get them to a better place?
Well, one is just to normalize it.
Just to be like, yes, you and literally everybody else.
One thing, especially for folks like us in midlife,
to remember is that happiness tends to have to serve U shaped curve.
So it’s like starts off good when you’re young and you’re a kid.
You tend to be pretty happy and then you get to midlife and it kind of sucks.
I think the nadir varies depending on the study.
But the best estimate I’ve seen is 48.6.
So where’s you’re going to be?
And then 48.6.
Yeah, that’s like I know I just passed it.
But then the good news is like it gets better as you get into older adulthood.
So I think one thing is just to be like, that’s just what happens.
It’s just how this goes.
I think the second thing is with the sciences is lots of strategies
you can engage in to feel better.
Oftentimes one of the reasons midlife is so unhappy is that people are really busy.
You might just need to focus on feeling less time
famished and find some time affluence, take stuff off your plate,
try to take time to just rest and be.
What are strategies for that, though?
For someone that says, hey, I have these conversations with my wife all the time
around this idea of work life balance or being able to do things
that they teach our kids this in school, that the things that fill your bucket.
Well, how do you get people to make that change?
One is to just get more time.
If you have some discretionary income, you can spend the money to get back time.
Research by Ashley Williams at Harvard Business School.
She’s fabulous.
This whole book called Time Smart on all these strategies to get more time.
Her work shows that the more you spend money to get back time, the happier you are.
Like hire a cleaning service or you pay the neighbor’s kid to mow the lawn
or you get takeout.
We go to restaurants and get food a lot of the time, but we don’t realize.
We don’t think of it in terms of the time savings.
You go get Pad Thai that’s noodles.
You have to chop up and look at the recipe or whatever.
That’s an hour and a half.
What did you do with that?
But let me push back on that for a second, because I’m curious.
Thich Nhat Hanh, Buddhist monk, are you familiar with his work?
One of the things that he says is to wash the dishes is to wash the dishes.
That sounds weird to people.
But what it actually means is rather than have your mind be in a thousand other places,
you are dedicated fully in your being to being OK with being in this present moment
and spending your time washing the dishes and how peaceful that is.
But it becomes peaceful if you feel time affluent enough to wash the dishes.
The problem is most people are not doing that.
They’re washing the dishes while they’re taking a conference call.
Or the seat is a task that is just beneath them.
So the key is like with the time saving.
What you want to do is get rid of your unwanted tasks.
The Buddhist monks are right.
We could take any task and make it one that is mindful that we can enjoy and see the beauty in.
But when you are so overwhelmed, you look at your calendar and there’s a day like that.
You’re not even going to brush your teeth with that kind of moment of presence.
Everything’s like, ah.
And so the key is if you can get some of that off your plate,
especially the stuff that you really genuinely don’t like to do, like I like cooking.
I wouldn’t want to offer money to hire like a private chef or whatever.
But I wouldn’t want to offload that even if I could.
But I freaking hate the dishes.
If I could get somebody to unload the dishwasher, that’s great.
It’s not to get rid of all these tasks where you could be in the moment.
But if your schedule is so frantic that you can’t do that and you’re lucky enough
to have some discretionary income to do that, you can offload those tasks.
Actually, research is cool because she actually does it at different income levels.
And she finds if you have any discretionary income, however you spend
that to save time, whether it’s like hire the neighbor’s kid to clean up the yard
or something, that can actually be helpful.
An even better one, though, is to make good use of what’s called time confetti.
So journalist Bridget Schultz has this term time confetti, which is like
the five minutes in the grocery store at line or the 10 minutes
when your kid falls asleep early and you’ve got a little extra.
She suggests that you need to use that well.
The problem is we blow it off.
We look at TikTok, whereas if I use that to take a breath,
like text a friend, get my bearings, call a friend, call a friend.
Moving your body is a huge thing for happiness exercise.
You really do the seven minute in your time to work out.
If you get seven minutes, this way of using our time confetti well.
That’s what I was going to ask you, because it’s one thing to say, OK,
I’m going to hire someone to mow the lawn.
But if you just then go and sit down and do TikTok, exactly, there’s no upside there.
If someone says, hey, and we can take this to students as well.
They’re like, hey, I’m depressed.
I’m having a hard time here.
Obviously, depression is something to take very seriously.
So I mean, you want to seek out professional help ASAP.
But aside from that, in terms of tangible things that people can do,
if you had to stack rank them, maybe this is an impossible thing for you to do.
But like, would you say walks outdoors, social connection would be really high on the list.
How about nature, something for all that?
Nature, nature bathing is a thing not as much in this country,
but in other countries, forest bathing.
Yes, move your body exercise.
Honestly, for most young people, sleep.
I actually think we could solve most of the young people mental health crisis
if we could just get them to sleep a little bit more.
So those are all behaviors.
In terms of mindset, we can do a lot of hacks.
So scribble in a gratitude journal, take some time to be a little bit more present.
Screen away and just like, what does this room look like?
We’re in this beautiful space with these black walls.
I could look at them just that moment of I’m present.
I’m embodied and I’m here can be a lot.
Are you a meditator?
I’m supposed to be a meditator.
I do meditate sometimes.
I don’t meditate enough as I should.
I take a lot of walks.
I walk to work.
And even though I’m a podcast or a web podcast, I try not to listen to podcasts.
I try to have no music and just be present on my walks, which isn’t meditation per se,
but it’s my form of like being present and being with my thoughts and noticing.
But meditation is a huge one.
And again, one that is more by Hedy Cobra and others is showing that like,
you don’t have to do it Buddhist monk style like hours a day.
Five minutes can have these huge benefits,
especially even to novice meditators who’ve never done it before.
I have a friend, I would say she’s addicted to information.
Whereas like when she goes on a walk, she has to listen to audiobooks.
It’s almost always audiobooks where it’s like 10 a month, perfecting things.
Is that a thing as well?
Is that a bad habit?
They’re all opportunity cost, far be it from me.
I mean, there are probably people listening right now walking around.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Keep the podcast going.
Keep the podcast going.
At least this one.
That means you might not be noticing what’s on your walk
or having free time to kind of let your mind wander.
I think it becomes a problem when there’s anxiety and you can’t not have it.
I watched this happen.
We’re having this conversation a few weeks ago.
I remember there’s like this AT&T crash where the cell phone tower went out
and none of the Wi-Fi was working.
You couldn’t get on your in email.
You couldn’t get on anything.
And I was just watching people like the heroin Jones, man,
where they were like tapping of like, why is my iPhone not working?
Maybe I got to get on the network.
You couldn’t do the walk without some information.
It’s not so much that this stuff is bad.
It’s when this stuff becomes the only way you can interact.
And it’s important to ask yourself sort of, what else?
What am I missing out on because I’m doing this?
How much do hobbies play a role in happiness?
You know, I took a pottery class one time.
Beautiful.
Yeah, really present.
You’re kind of in it.
You have to pay a constantly paying attention to what’s going on,
especially if you’re using a wheel.
Are there habits that you see?
I mean, obviously, we talked about exercise and running.
That’s the huge one.
Are there other habits that people pick up that tend to lead to good outcomes?
One of the reasons the pottery is so powerful is that the presence part.
You’re there.
You’re not using your phone.
It’s forcing you to be mindful.
Another is that you’re learning.
You’re sort of bad at it.
So your growth curve is kind of high.
And that puts you in a state of what researchers like Mihai Cheeks at Mihai
call flow, right, where the challenge is kind of high,
but you’re getting skills that can do it and you have to fully pay attention.
And flow states wind up being incredible states for our well-being.
You don’t initially have to get it through pottery.
You can get it through making bread or skiing.
Or the key is that you’re doing something that like it’s hard, right?
You have to have your attention, but you kind of are building skills of the same
time to do it.
Those flow states feel great.
But I think another thing about the pottery is my guess is you aren’t doing it
as like a side hustle to sell your pots or something.
It was purely for the entertainment of it.
And I think these days, it’s hard for us to find these things that we do purely
for the entertainment of it.
It’s really easy to get competitive about it or to stick a number on it
or to want to monetize it somehow.
And every time we stick those extrinsic rewards on something,
it makes it less intrinsically enjoyable.
There’s this large psychological phenomenon that extrinsic rewards
crowd out intrinsic rewards.
So if you like give somebody a grade for something or you’re going to get paid
for your pottery or I’m going to rank it or rate it all of a sudden,
you’re not doing it because it was fun and you had flow and you’re enjoying it.
Especially when it comes to bringing friends into tasks,
like if you offer to pay a friend to help you move versus, you know,
actually, can you talk about that event?
Yeah, so we kind of don’t understand how rewards work.
It’s kind of the general feature of psychology.
We’re just like, there’s so much stuff we have misconceptions about
that we stick our feet in it.
When do we get it wrong?
And so you’d assume that like adding a reward to something would make it good.
If you like doing pottery, I’m like, let me pay you to do pottery.
Then you get the liking of the doing pottery plus you’re getting paid.
You know, your friend’s going to help you move.
They’re going to help me move and I’ll pay them and it’ll make it better.
But it turns out these extrinsic rewards undermine it.
Like your friend, if you tried to pay them like how much was that worth your time?
What’s your hourly rate?
Oh, I’ll give you $450 or whatever it is.
They’d be like, nah, I was doing it for what I wanted to do it for love.
And so these backfire effects are kind of clever.
There’s a very famous one of a daycare center that had the problem
where parents were kind of showing up a little late and the parents would feel
guilty, but it sucked for the daycare center.
And they’re like, you know what we’re going to do?
We’re going to charge parents.
Every time parents come in late, like $10 or something a hundred percent of the
parents are like, okay, I get it.
I can just pay.
So we’re in the transactional mode as opposed to you’re just helping me
and it’s out of your guilt and your enjoyability.
We have this interesting internalized capitalism and how we think motivation
works. We think, oh, I’ll pay people more or I’ll give someone a reward.
And what that does is it makes people’s normal reasons for doing something kind of go away.
I think this is part and parcel of why we’re having all these discussions
about things like quiet quitting and so on and why they’re sort of a
disconnect sometimes between the way young people think about work and old
people, whereas we’ve gotten so involved in thinking about the value of our
work as a monetary thing.
We’ve sort of missed out that sometimes the value of our work is like a
deep intrinsic reward thing or like the value we get out of doing a good job and
so on. But that goes away when you’re so focused on the monetary side of it.
We see this, I think, in our young people with grades where I think there was a time
when school was about learning, you know, it’s fun and because learning is fun,
right? We kind of like doing these things. You slap a grade on something all of a
sudden it becomes not enjoyable.
It was really old work in the 70s by the psychologist Susan Harder had kids doing
these like anagrams and puzzles. So they’re doing these kind of fun puzzles.
But then she has some kids get grades for them.
And what she finds is that when kids start getting graded for them, they don’t
enjoy them anymore. Before the grade, they’re smiling and having fun and
they’re enjoying it. Now with the grade, they think it sucks.
And when you give them choices of which puzzles to pick, the ones who are
getting graded pick the easiest ones because they’re like, Oh my God, I’m
just trying to get the best grade. Whereas if you don’t have grades, you pick
the hardest ones that you can do because you’re like, I’m only doing it because
it’s fun. Yeah, it’s challenging. And if you don’t win, who cares?
It was just like a good challenge. Yeah. And so I think our mistaken theories
of motivation sometimes wind up meaning that we take something that’s fun and
we give it something like a ding, a cost, a grade, a payment, a Christmas
bonus or whatever. And then we just make it less enjoyable and you make people
perform worse because they’re just trying to like do it the fastest possible
to get the grade. What do you think about I had heard this term a while ago
and I don’t know how it applies to your research, but there was this idea floated
of experience stretching. The frame to me was that you go out and you’re in
Hawaii, you’re in a beautiful place and you see this amazing sunset and you’re
like, God, that was just a beautiful sunset. Next day, same thing happens.
This time, somebody hands you a Mai Tai at the same time.
You’re like, oh, damn, this Mai Tai is good. The sunset’s great.
This is an even better experience. And the next day you can level up from there.
Someone hands you a cigar, whatever your poison is or doesn’t even have to be
a poison, but they add to the experience. And then all of a sudden, the next time
you’re presented with just a simple sunset, you go back to, well, it was better
if I only had those two extra, three extra things. You stretch that out.
Once you’re stretched, how do you pull that back in?
And is that a real thing?
Totally. This is what psychologists call hedonic adaptation.
You’re sort of on this hedonic treadmill and you just get used to stuff.
Hedonic, like hedonism?
Like hedonism, right? I mean, it’s a fancy way of saying we get used to stuff.
You see the sunset the first time, that’s great. You see it the next time.
It’s OK, but it’s not maybe as good as the first time.
You experience stress, you know, just get sunset.
You get sunset and Mai Tai.
Or if you just have a Mai Tai, you’re like, where’s my sunset?
And so this is the sad thing about great experiences in life
because we get used to them and they become the new standard.
Once you have an amazing experience, it like kind of ruins
experiences for you. So you can.
One of my favorite strategies is actually goes back to the ancient Stoics.
They had this idea they called negative visualization where they thought
every morning you should just take five minutes of the meditation
to think that all these terrible things are going to happen.
My wife is going to leave me. I’m going to lose my job.
I’m going to not be able to walk.
My car is going to get hit.
This isn’t like hours and hours of ruminating about.
This is just one moment about it.
My favorite one, the one that’s most effective.
I use this in talks sometime is you mentioned your kids.
Imagine right now, last time you saw your kids,
it’s the last time you’re going to see them.
Yeah, they’re gone.
That some terrible things happened.
She’s why you got to do this to me.
But I bet the next time you see them, you’re going to.
It seems like that’s an evil practice.
No, it causes you to notice all the good things.
The kids one is all terrible.
But like, let’s take my phone. I lost it, right?
Did I leave it in the car? Did I leave it at the restaurant?
Where is it? Found it in 10 minutes, 10 minutes.
I’m like, oh, my God, all my photos are in there.
Have I backed them up?
All my passwords are going to be such a pain in the ass.
And I get my phone back.
I’m like, oh, I wasn’t appreciating my phone at all.
I had no gratitude for my phone before I lost it.
But then you lose it.
And the negative visualization is good
because you don’t actually have to lose it.
You just have this moment of like, what is this?
What would this be like?
Do you think travel helps with that?
Travel to the countries where we don’t have as much?
Totally. If you’re in a kind of luxury situation a lot,
resetting the experience is good.
Sometimes for talks and things like fly first class.
I don’t want to always fly first class
because then you get used to it.
You got to go back and coach every once in a while
because it makes you can’t do anything.
You should try it. It’ll suck that time.
But you stopped experiencing the benefits of that.
No, but this…
I’m allowed one thing. You got to give me one thing.
Yeah, you can’t. First class for me is like…
They are small.
If it’s a short flight, fine.
But long flights, I can’t do it.
No, it’s good. The next time you go back, though,
you’re like, “Oh, I forgot they bring the stuff in the glass,
not the plastic. You don’t notice any of that now.”
If it’s too hard, you could do the negative visualization.
Then the next flight, I want to be in coach
and really think about it like, “Oh, it’s a plastic glass
and it’s really small.”
And then when you get like, “Oh, this is great.”
Yeah, we can use imagination
to kind of break out of Hedonic adaptation.
Another one that I find…
And this is, I think, why we get happiness so wrong.
We assume if I had all these pleasurable experiences,
it would continue to be pleasurable.
But because we get used to stuff,
the sunset with the Mai Tai, that experience stretch,
feels good the one time it’s stretched.
But we can’t. It’s unlikely that you’re going to be able
to have the privilege of stretching infinitely.
Sometimes these extraordinary experiences
make you feel worse.
Also, these extraordinary experiences
sometimes make you unable to connect with other people.
I just had this at South By in my podcast company
at this really cool private concert with folks
for just like 30 people.
And I got to see this amazing band
that last played at Madison Square Garden
privately, just standing there.
I both had a wonderful experience.
And then when I left, I was kind of like,
“This is going to literally ruin concert.
I’m never going to be able to go back.”
And be like, “Oh, you’re in row 20 now.”
You’re like, “Meh, it’s not as good.”
The other thing is, well, I’m going to go home
and people are going to be like, “How is South By?”
I’m like, “Oh, my God, I had this amazing.”
Then I feel like an asshole
because they don’t have that experience.
Well, that’s tough. And some people don’t have that filter.
And if you just drop that on a friend,
it’s like, that’s not a very thoughtful thing
that can crush somebody else.
There’s this evidence from Dan Gilbert and Matt Killingsworth
that these so-called extraordinary experiences,
like you get to fly to the moon or like go in space
or have some amazing concert or Coachella private backstage.
You think it’s going to be amazing,
but actually it winds up doing two things.
It winds up ruining all the other experiences you have
because not everything’s going to be like Coachella backstage.
And then it winds up making you feel kind of lonely
because you can’t really share these experiences
with other people. You feel sort of isolated.
And this is the thing that happens to people
who get these quick, wealth windfalls,
to people who win the lottery, wind up feeling incredibly lonely
because it’s like nobody can share these experiences.
In one of my podcast episodes of my podcast, The Happiness Lab,
I interviewed this guy, Clay Cockrell,
who’s a mental health professional
who works with the .0001%
so these like super wealthy people.
And they complain about things like they can’t make any friends.
One of them joined that kind of like regular guide,
not super wealthy gym.
And he was like chatting with the guy, like,
“Oh, what’d you do this weekend?”
And the guy was like, “Oh, I tried out this new Mexican restaurant.
What did you do?”
And he couldn’t admit like,
“I flew with my wife and applied her plane to Paris
to try this new champagne.”
And here is like a very similar experience.
They both tried something, but he felt like,
“I can’t tell somebody that.”
And so one thing we don’t predict about becoming extremely famous
or extremely wealthy is like, you just can’t share that.
Not that many people can come along with you on the ride.
And so you feel so lonely.
One thing that I do, I love that I have you here
because I can throw out some curveballs your way
that I’m personally struggling with.
– We can do just Kevin therapy. – Thank you.
I would love that if you can get like a,
something I can really climb in
and we can just do a full therapy session.
I suck at a lot of things,
but one thing that I’m pretty good at
is seeing something and being grateful
that I’m having that experience.
I have this thing where
when something bad happens in our household
and it’s really not that big a deal,
I’ll say to my wife, “Well, at least we have warm running water.”
And she hates that.
She’s like, “That’s not helping the situation.”
And I’m like, “We live better than kings.”
Kings and queens did not have warm running water.
Sometimes if you can frame it back to those times,
you can just be like,
“Yeah, I missed my FedEx package that I was hoping to get
“because it was gonna be my weekend project, whatever,
“but I have warm water and it’s clean.”
– And I can drink it. – There are people who are dying.
– Does that help or am I just being an asshole?
– So it helps, but you have to be ready for it.
So I guess two things.
One is what we don’t wanna get into
is the kind of toxic positivity.
There are the FedEx packages that don’t come in.
There are bad days.
– But why is that crappy?
So it goes.
– I think you both wanna have a moment
to acknowledge that crappy, but then reframe it.
I think we don’t wanna get in a knee jerk
of any negative emotion is bad
because sometimes the negative emotions are normative.
Maybe not about the FedEx package.
That might not be it.
Sometimes my wife, my child, a friend, a colleague
will be having a negative emotion where I look at that
and I’m just like, “You’re just being ridiculous here.”
The world is not going to end
because of what you’re saying right now.
And I can’t relate.
And so I should have some empathy for how they are feeling.
Is that the way to do it?
– First of all, it’s part of the human condition.
Sometimes we’re gonna be frustrated.
And actually there’s some evidence
that one of the things we want for this recipe
of the happiest life is all the emotions.
We want what researchers call psychologically rich life.
You wouldn’t want a life
where you didn’t have the home of like a damn FedEx.
Sometimes our negative emotions are useful signals.
If you’re frustrated with the FedEx,
that might mean you need to like switch to a different company.
Again, that’s a kind of narrow example.
But if you’re looking at the news
and you’re feeling really anxious,
that’s telling you something
about how you might wanna get involved in the future.
If you’re kind of feeling lonely
or you’re feeling really overwhelmed is a huge one.
You come home and you use the example
of you talking to your wife,
she’s slamming things around and feeling really stressed out.
That’s not like, oh, we have running water.
That’s like, oh, this is a useful signal
that something’s off and we might need to rethink things.
– I say the running water thing and it does not land.
– I think compassion for the human condition
and the question of what is this negative emotion
trying to tell us?
And sometimes it’s not trying to tell me anything.
I could just reframe it and be fine.
This is actually helpful to sort of pay attention to.
Again, the ancients were so on top of this,
the Stoics got it where you can update
your negative emotions,
but first take a quick look to see
is it telling you something interesting?
‘Cause I also watch the people who suppress every emotion
or just rewrite everything
and that gonna get you into toxic positivity landed.
– Yeah, that actually is my downfall as well.
‘Cause sometimes if I’m feeling something like that,
I’ll say, well, I have running water,
but I’m really just pushing it down a little bit.
And then later it manifests when in aggregate,
they all add up and I’m like,
oh, shit, I didn’t actually let that go
the way I thought I was letting it go.
That’s a challenging thing.
– Sometimes you have to look at the emotion to figure out
what the Buddhist had this lovely analogy for this.
It comes with this parable that Buddha used to tell.
So the parable is Buddha’s telling to his followers,
he says, hey, if you’re walking down the street
and you get shot by an arrow, is that bad?
And the follower is like, yeah, it’s terrible.
On Buddha’s Day, you just get shot by arrows, you know what I mean?
But he’s like, well, if you’re walking down the street,
you don’t get shot just by one arrow,
but you also get shot by a second arrow.
Is that worse?
And the follower’s like, yeah,
much worse to get shot by two than one.
So Buddha says, the first arrow is life.
We can’t control it.
That’s the FedEx package that doesn’t show up.
That’s the bad thing.
But the second arrow is on us.
It’s how we react to it.
We control that second arrow.
The key is that sometimes the way you don’t stab yourself
with the second arrow is you regulate the emotion,
you think of a thing you’re grateful for,
you take a couple of deep breaths, you reframe it.
But sometimes the way you don’t hit yourself
with the second arrow is you don’t squish it down
and let it ruminate and like it flies out later
as many arrows that are gonna hit everybody around you.
– A lot of your work has the word happiness in it,
but would you say in reality, that’s not the goal?
– Oh, totally.
You gotta define happiness to figure out what I mean.
I’m thinking of happiness as someone like Aristotle
talked about you dying in the air, right?
The good life, the meaningful life, the purposeful life.
– A life well lived.
– A life well lived.
And for that moment, you might need to feel anxious
or frustrated or challenged or stressed.
– There’s no such thing as normal,
but like real happy, joyous life would be the roller coaster.
And in my mind, it would be the adaptability
of the individual to survive the ups and downs
rather than just be stuck totally down or way up
because neither of those things
are where you really wanna be long-term.
– Totally, I would always joke with my students,
you know that DJ Khaled song, all I do is win.
And I was like, that would be a terrible life.
If all you did is win, you just,
you wouldn’t notice the goodness of the wins anymore.
– Well, then there’s no more winning.
– And there’s no more winning.
And like you’d be absolutely anxious
that you could maybe just lose by one point or something.
– Well, and if everything was winning,
there’s no such thing as winning
because that’s just normal.
– This is what we forget is this is hedonic adaptation.
If everything is luxury jets,
then it’s not a luxury jet anymore
’cause that’s just how you transport.
If everything is perfect champagne, perfect cigars,
you don’t notice anymore.
We need the ups and downs
and you can give you a thilse those ups and downs,
like you go back to coach,
you can negatively visualize what it’s like.
You can really try to remember
and reframe other people’s lives and things.
That’s the insidious thing about the good stuff in life
as we get used to it.
But it has a corollary, which is like,
that’s also true for the bad stuff.
Remember COVID when it was like that first week
and we’re like, we can’t do this,
we’ve done April, May, we’re just making some bread
and we’re like sorting it out.
– My wine consumption went up a lot.
At first I was like, okay, I’m not gonna drink
’cause I want my immune system to be as healthy as possible.
And then I’m like, well, you know what, I’m gonna die.
– God, I don’t know what else to do.
– Yeah, I don’t know what else to do, I’m gonna drink, so.
– I remember thinking in March 15,
like this doesn’t go away in like a week.
– I was wiping down my egg cartons with like Clorex shit.
Were you doing that too?
– I remember going to the store
and putting all the like fruit with gloves on,
and like washing all the eggs.
– That was so scary.
– Yeah, but one of the things that the psychology work
teaches us, the worst possible thing
that you think could happen in your life could happen.
And it would be terrible, but you’d still be okay.
And it would still have good parts.
In my podcast, I talked to Dan Gilbert,
who’s done work with people, for example,
who’ve lost their kids, like a parent who’s a kid.
Can you imagine the more terrible thing?
– I can’t even imagine.
– And he says, obviously it was the most terrible thing,
but I learned from it.
I learned what matters.
I’ve learned not to take things for granted.
Even the worst possible thing,
it’s not like, oh, it comes with a silver lining.
It makes you stronger.
It kind of gives you this resilience.
The downs teach us something, right?
The downs allow us to get stronger.
And I do worry that sometimes we think that a good life,
a happy life, I think parents think this for kids is like,
no downs, no stress, no failure.
Those things are important.
– It’s challenging.
Some parents try to prevent failure
in a way that they’re just trying to help the kid
not hurt themselves or something.
And in my mind, I’m like,
on a one to 10, how bad are we talking here?
Because if it’s anything over a four,
I want to protect a little bit.
But if it’s going to be a little scuff knee
because you messed up in a way
that every other kid has messed up
and it cements that learning,
that to me is very important.
To try and get that perfection
and just try and take out all the failure from a child,
I think is a bad thing to do.
Would you agree with that?
– Yeah, totally, totally.
There’s this lovely book by Julie Lithcott-Hames
called “How to Raise an Adult”
where she walks through these strategies
and she says, parents are sometimes trying to parent
for the like, right now.
You left your lunchbox at home,
I’m just going to bring it to you.
Or we got to get out the door
and you haven’t totally learned to tie your shoes.
I’m just going to tie them for you.
No diss to parents.
Like parenting is freaking hard.
The modern day doesn’t make it easy.
Sometimes you do have to parent for right now.
But often we’re missing out
on learning opportunities for our kids.
Like you don’t bring them their lunch.
They don’t have their lunch that day.
So maybe they do spend six hours hungry,
but they’re going to freaking remember their lunch
the next time and every time you fast tie their shoes
for them ’cause you got to get out the door.
Those are the learning opportunities.
And so you might be five minutes late.
That’s not great, but parenting for right now
and just like solving in the moment,
we’re not allowing our kids to screw up and learn.
I think also sometimes too, parents have to reasonably
regulate their own distress about that.
You see the lunchbox on the table
and you’re like, I could intervene.
Ultimately the learning, you’re going to miss out
if you do that.
It’s so hard for parents.
It’s so hard to watch your kids suffer.
But that’s part of being a good parent.
– They’re not gonna die.
We’re coming up on time,
but I did want to ask you a couple more questions.
With the title of this podcast,
it’ll have something in happiness in the title.
There has to be a handful of people out there
that are tuning in and they’re saying,
I’m struggling right now.
I’m at that down point and I’ve been there for a while.
I know there’s the no-brainers.
If it’s an emergency, there are hotlines to call
if you’re suicidal.
There’s things of that nature.
But what are some tactics, some go-tos that said,
I’m having more bad days than good days.
How can I get myself out of this rut?
– If it’s really extreme,
you gotta go get a professional help.
I think of a lot of the strategies
we’ve been talking about here more
as like preventative medicine.
The analogy I use, if you walk into your doctor’s office
and you’re like, I’ve got some high blood pressure.
I’m not doing so well.
Your doctor might be like, hop on the treadmill
or eat this thing or whatever.
But if you walk into your doctor’s office clutching your heart
saying, I’m having an acute heart attack right now,
your doctor’s gonna be like, well, hop on the treadmill
and do, you know, like you need.
And so if someone’s struggling,
if you’re feeling acutely suicidal,
definitely reach out to somebody.
Even though your brain can’t see hope,
’cause that’s what depression does.
It puts on these reverse rosy goggles
that everything looks terrible.
You will feel differently,
even if you don’t feel that way,
like reach out and get help.
But if you’re just, I’m feeling overwhelmed.
I’m feeling more burned out.
I don’t have a lot of pleasure in my life.
I think the first thing to know
is what the science shows
is it doesn’t have to be that way.
There are things you can do to do better
even if it doesn’t feel like it.
I think the first thing is even if you don’t feel like it,
reach out to a friend.
Just go through your phone and find someone.
Or if you don’t have anybody in your phone, no judgment,
just like go to a coffee shop, get out in the world,
and just try to have a conversation with a stranger,
even though it feels friction-y.
Get off your phone.
– I mean, you can literally walk into a Catholic church
and sit in a booth if you really needed to,
even if you’re not Catholic.
– There’s so much work by researchers like Nick Epley
and others that we assume people don’t wanna talk to us,
but people actually are fine to talk to us
much more than we think.
And it’s much more enjoyable for them than we predict.
– His data suggests that even if you’re an introvert,
the act of just having a calm conversation
with a stranger is gonna be better than you predict.
– There was this taboo around mental health,
and then there still is.
I’m uncomfortable with it ’cause I’ve finally broken down
those walls over a decade of therapy.
And so I can call a friend and say,
hey, I’m having a bad day.
How do you encourage someone that may say,
I don’t wanna show that vulnerability.
I don’t wanna show that weakness.
– Don’t start with that.
That’s not how you lead.
I would lead with asking other people questions.
Ask how their day is going.
How are your kids?
I was just thinking about you
and thinking about our old times.
So you start by just making a connection.
And my guess is so many things will happen physiologically.
Your body will just kind of calm down.
You’ll go and take sort of more less fight or flight
and more rest and digest mode.
You’ll kind of get the conversation going.
You’ll overcome that speed hump,
bump up the first part of the talk
where it kind of feels a little awkward.
And then you get things going
and then you ask other people to be vulnerable first.
Just like, how are things,
whatever, pick up on their questions.
And then you can insert your stuff,
research by their surgeon general,
Vick Murthy and others has found is,
one thing with loneliness is,
we don’t realize that we can reach out to other people.
We can ask them how they’re going.
We can give advice to them.
And that makes us feel so much better.
– It’s not about me saying like,
hey, I need some help right now.
That’s not the call.
It’s just starting the connection.
And there probably is gonna be a question about like,
hey, well, what’s up with you?
– And you’re like, I’m having a hard time.
– Yeah, exactly.
– Or you’ll just wind up feeling better
if you’re helping somebody else
and aging out to other people.
Honestly, we’re all struggling right now.
It’s 2024, everything’s falling apart.
Probably if you reach out to a friend,
they’re gonna wanna check in with you.
– Everybody’s got their shit.
– Right, yeah, exactly.
So that would be thing number one.
I think thing number two is just get out of the house,
move your body.
There’s never a time when I haven’t left the house
that I haven’t felt a little bit better
than like being my PJs on a screen, right?
So get out and move your body.
And the move your body doesn’t have to be run a marathon.
It can just be like, just take a walk, just be outside.
And if possible, even if it’s for 10, 15 minutes,
just get away from your phone.
Just be present in the world out there.
All of a sudden, things will start feeling
a little bit better.
Those are some of my emergency go-tos.
Get social, do for others, move your body.
Those can be powerful.
– That’s fantastic.
You have a podcast.
Is it weekly?
What’s your cadence on that?
– We’re like trying to get close to weekly,
but we’re not perfectly weekly.
– Tell us about that and what people can expect
when they tune in.
– Yeah, it’s called the Happiness Lab.
It’s all about strategies we can use to feel better.
– Is that the name of your actual lab?
Is it Happiness Lab or no?
– Kind of, but we haven’t like patented it,
but yeah, it’s Happiness Lab.
Yeah, and we talk about all these things.
We just finished a season on how to navigate
communicating better and love and with other people.
We have a season coming up that’s about
my happiness challenges that are like
the stuff I struggle with.
So things like stress and dealing with my time better,
perfectionism, which we spoke about is gonna be on there.
It’s really just evidence-based approaches
to handle all the stuff that comes up in life.
– Do you have a dedicated website
where people can go and subscribe?
– Or just anywhere.
Yeah, you can subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.
Happiness Lab. – Yeah, just trying
to have this lab.
Amazing.
I love that.
Thank you so much for being on the show.
– Yeah, thanks for having me.
This was fun.
– Yeah, this is absolutely fun.
It is the right time to be having these conversations.
I’m so glad you have a podcast around it.
We should mention your Coursera course.
Four million people, is that right?
Have you taken it?
– Yeah, the Science of Well-Being on Coursera.org.
It’s kind of like a very short, free version
of the Yale class I teach.
And because we’ve seen that a lot of young people
need this stuff, we also have a new one
called the Science of Well-Being for teens,
which is for middle school and high school students.
– Is that something that’s publicly available,
or do you have to be going to Yale
to actually get that?
– The Yale One Live, you go to enroll in Yale
and pay the Yale money and stuff.
But you get the free version on Coursera.
It’s a shorter, not like 26 week version,
but it covers all the relevant content
and you’ll learn exactly what the Yale students are.
– Any books in your future?
– I like the podcast because it’s so much
of the happiness stuff.
These tips that we’ve been talking about,
these short little narrative, short quick strategies,
that’s what I like.
That’s what people need in the moment.
It’s like, I’m feeling frustrated,
I’m feeling overwhelmed, I don’t have any time.
– You’re getting it out now
versus waiting a year and a half to publish something.
– Exactly, exactly.
– Amazing, well thank you for being on the show.
– Thanks so much for having me.
“A popular podcast with more than 35 million downloads. Why are our young people so unhappy?”
If you look at very happy people, what are they doing differently?
What you find is they spend a lot of time with other people.
They don’t spend a long time on screens.
They spend more time just proportionally in real life,
whether that’s being present, walking around outside or something.
“Touching grass.”
Yeah, all negative emotions really have a good evolutionary purpose.
Boredom is our cue that, like, “Oh, I should go out and do something.”
Stimulating, “I should find something meaningful.”
Whereas when we can kind of slap the screen band-aid on our boredom,
we never have to feel it long enough to find what we really want to do.
Happiness tends to have to sort of U-shaped curve.
Starts off good when you’re young, and you’re a kid, you tend to be pretty happy,
and then you get to mid-life, and it kind of sucks.
There’s lots of research showing that perfectionism is going up since the 80s to now.
There are, like, 30 to 40% increases.
This level of depression right now nationally is more than 40% of students’ report being too depressed to function most days,
and that number has doubled in the last eight to nine years.
Similar things for anxiety right now, anxieties at like…
So it’s happened again.
Last week, I got a notice in the mail, another data breach.
This time it was with my healthcare provider.
I’m sure you’ve been here.
Sadly, this problem is not going away.
Obviously, they tell you to go and lock down your credit reports,
but there’s so much more at stake here.
From the second your data is breached, it’s being resold by companies called data brokers.
Now, the good news is that as evil as these companies are, they’re also companies,
so that means that if you take your time to monitor, to find your data,
and then you hire a lawyer to send them takedowns, you can have some success.
Now, obviously, your time is more valuable than that,
so I want to tell you about a service that I use, and it’s today’s sponsor.
It’s called DeleteMe.
They use a power of attorney to work on your behalf to find and methodically remove your data from these data brokers.
And they are continuously monitoring these sites.
There’s over 750 of them out there.
And they keep removing your data as it shows up, which unfortunately, it constantly does.
And recently, DeleteMe has expanded their core service,
which is the ability to easily extend protection and peace of mind
to anyone that you wish to include in your DeleteMe account.
They have a new area, it’s called the Family Account Management,
which creates this unified hub for your entire family privacy protection.
And right now, you get 20% off all plans with the code “KevinRose”.
Head to joindeleteme.com/KevinRose.
This week’s episode is brought to you by DRAM.
You’ve probably heard me mention that way back in the day, back in 2000, when I was a wee lad,
I gave up soda absolutely cold turkey.
That means nothing with corn syrup, aspartame, sugar, or any other crap,
but I still really love sparkling beverages.
That’s why I’m excited to tell you about DRAM.
DRAM is unlike anything you’ve ever had.
It’s packed full of real functional ingredients made from plants.
Imagine a drink that’s zero calories, zero sugar,
and it’s made with steamed, distilled, organic ingredients.
They have this citrus flavor that has orange blossom, hibiscus, lemon salt,
rind from a grapefruit.
It’s fantastic.
And my favorite, though, is their cola.
It tastes just like classic cola,
but it’s made with adaptogenic mushrooms, such as chaga,
lion’s mane, shiitake, and cordyceps.
But you don’t even taste the mushrooms.
It tastes just like cola.
Lastly, I love that their cans are BPA free
and that their water is free from those harmful.
They call them these forever chemicals.
They’re really bad for you.
None of that in their water.
It’s just absolutely fantastic stuff.
You’ve got to give it a try.
If you head on over to KevinRose.com/DRAM,
you’ll get my three favorite flavors as a bundle pack.
And you’ll also get 20% off everything at the store.
So use the code KevinRose.
That’s KevinRose.com/DRAM and the code KevinRose.
And thank you, Dram, for sponsoring the show.
Laurie, thank you so much for being on the show.
Yeah, thanks so much for having me.
Happiness is a massive topic.
Where do you even begin when you approach this?
If someone comes up to you at a party
and you say, hey, I study happiness,
how do you even start to talk about this topic?
You go way back, right?
I mean, Aristotle was talking about this step.
It’s in the Declaration of Independence.
So it’s not like a new thing when people are pursuing this stuff.
But usually start with the story of how I get interested in this stuff.
Yeah, let me hear that.
I was like a nerdy professor who studied animals for a long time.
And then switched and made this pivot
to studying happiness and mental health
because I was seeing the mental health crisis in my students.
I took on this weird role at Yale, which is called the head of college.
So you’re faculty who live on campus with students.
And I expected college life to be what it was like
when I was there in the 90s.
There was stress and stuff, but it was mostly fun.
And that was not what I was seeing in my community.
I was just seeing so much anxiety and depression
and students who were suicidal.
And it was just like jarring that the mental health crisis was so bad.
That took place over the course of a decade or so, that change, that shift?
Yeah, well, what’s interesting is you look at the data.
These things are skyrocketing, right?
So the level of depression right now nationally
is more than 40% of students report being too depressed to function most days.
And that number has doubled in the last eight to nine years.
Similar things for anxiety right now.
I think anxieties at like 67% of students
say they’re overwhelmingly anxious most days.
College students nationally.
Those rates just were not there.
My colleague who runs the mental health and counseling at Yale
was fond of saying the rates are skyrocketing enough
that we know they’ll level off, but that’s just because like 100% of people
need clinical care on college campuses.
And it was just in my community.
I was just seeing these students who are really struggling and realizing,
hang on, my field has some strategies we can use to do better,
to feel better, to feel less depressed and anxious.
And so I developed this class to like teach students these strategies,
retrained in the science of happiness and put together the class.
And that was when everything changed for me because the class went totally viral.
On campus, we had a quarter of the entire Yale student body signed up to take the class.
Well, and you did a Coursera thing too, right?
And then we put four million downloads or something?
Yeah, every time we put out content, people flock to it.
I think it’s because people want to be happy,
but also people are struggling right now.
There’s legit things in 2024 that are making us all feel overwhelmed
and burned out and scared.
And what’s the root?
Obviously, there’s band-aids and then there’s the root cause.
When you did your research, where did you begin?
And how did you start to assess out what’s causing all this and why now?
I wish there was like a silver bullet because it would make it so easy
because we could just get rid of whatever that thing was and make it.
Yeah, technology is probably part of the answer here.
And I should say it’s not just I think everybody points a finger at social media.
I actually think it’s deeper than that.
I think it’s these devices that we have that often steal our attention
away from real world things.
And if you plot those rates of depression, I was just mentioning,
and you plot a number of iPhones in teen pockets, like the line, they look perfectly.
I mean, correlation doesn’t equal causation, obviously, but it looks pretty bad.
Right? Yeah.
One of the things technology promised us, especially phones in our pockets,
was connecting with other people, being social in real life.
And I think what’s shocking is that how much we use it to not be social in real life.
We’re here having this conversation in Austin, it’s out by Southwest.
And if you walk around this conference where there’s so many interesting things to see and do,
you’ll see a bunch of people sitting around, scrolling like this on there.
They pay to come interact with these amazing people.
And like there’s this opportunity cost where we’re hanging out on this tiny screen all the time.
And that, I think, has real psychological consequences.
Liz Dunn, who’s a professor at UBC, does these studies where she just checks what happens
to people’s social interactions when they have their phones with them versus not with them.
She measures these subtle things like how often people smile at one another.
She finds that smiling decreases like 30 percent when your phone’s around,
because you’re not even looking at the people around you.
You’re just locked into your phone.
What’s causing that, though?
What do you think the phone provides?
Because if you’re having a real intimate friend conversation, someone’s struggling,
you’re sitting down with them, you’re grabbing a beer or something.
That’s meaningful to me.
It feels much deeper than a chat.
But what is it that’s pulling people south by, for example,
they have the ability to go and connect and laugh, have fun, hang out.
But yet they’re choosing the device over the humans, which in theory,
the human connection should be more powerful, but yet the phone is winning.
Yeah. Why?
So I think the phone wins for two reasons.
One is it’s just easier.
Right. If I’m at South by and I have to talk to someone, you’re standing up
and be like, Hey, how did you come to South by?
What are you doing? There’s like this teeny friction.
Whereas my phone, there’s no friction.
I just pull it out and there’ll be something interesting.
And I think we’re worse at the friction than we have been
because we’re out of practice at it.
I think older folks like us because of COVID, I think our young people
just never do it in the same way that we grew up doing it.
Right. If they go to pick their friend up at their house,
they don’t like go knock on the door and have to talk to mom.
I’m like, where’s Joey? They just text like, I’m outside, come.
I think younger individuals have less practice with that friction.
So I think friction is one thing, but I think we just forget how interesting
our phones are, like how much cool craps on it.
But your brain doesn’t forget your brain knows Liz Dunn, who I just mentioned.
She’s this analogy she uses, like imagine to this conversation
instead of bring my cell phone, which is in my pocket right now.
I brought this big wheelbarrow and in the wheelbarrow is printouts
of every email I’ve had since 2005, like big DVDs with everything
that’s on YouTube from cat videos to porn printouts of everything.
Donald Trump and Biden has said in the last week, CDs of every song
that’s on Spotify as big wheelbarrow that went up into the sky.
You and I would want to have a conversation,
but you’re going to be like, oh, I just want to take a real quick
pick at that cat video or whatever. Your brain’s not stupid.
Your brain knows that full wheelbarrow and much, much more
that I don’t have time to say is on the other side of that phone.
You’re super interesting. It’s fun.
But I don’t know, you as interesting as every cat video out there, right?
And so I think we’ve created this enormous temptation for our attention
that’s in the pockets of billions of people around the world.
And we don’t know psychologically what that’s doing to us.
One question I have for you, Instagram, our TikTok Reels.
Reels, to me, are the most addicted thing because as the algorithm
fine tunes itself, it’s fine in the dumb stuff that I lack my ass off at.
Back in the day, I’m old enough now to remember before pre cell phone.
Pre cell phone, you would have one of these moments
once a week with your friends where someone would fall out of the chair,
something hilarious would happen and you would laugh your ass off.
And it was like, that was so awesome that we all experienced that.
And you laugh about it for years to come.
Now I’m having that moment every 30 seconds.
So the reward that I’m getting every 30 seconds is like those rewards
that I used to get once a week, and it’s just like nonstop.
And so here I am being entertained to the nth level like that I absolutely love.
And then when I don’t have that any longer,
now I’m I have to sit with my feelings and my emotions and everything else.
And the things that I don’t like, is that part of the issue?
Do you think there’s some evidence that things like boredom,
proneness is going up that when we have this moment where we can’t
whip out our phones and look at our reels, we feel this intense terrible boredom.
But also the stakes get higher because we have this being hit
on the funniness stuff every 30 seconds.
And these algorithms are making that even more frequent
and even more powerful a dopamine hit.
It means that like real life just hasn’t kind of caught up.
My husband’s a philosopher.
We have great dinner party conversations, but he doesn’t have an algorithm
in his brain that’s tracking what I find funny and super interesting
and updating every 30 seconds to give me content that I like.
And I think that means that temptation wise, we’re really pulled
to the screen world, the tick tock world.
If you think of like our psychological nutrition, actual psychological joy,
we get out of it, we get the sort of quick dopamine hit from the tick tock.
But as soon as you put it down, you feel gross and lonely
and maybe overwhelmed and a little dizzy or whatever.
Whereas you don’t get that from talking to people.
I think this is something that’s just neuroscientifically
like super fascinating, which is our reward systems are weird
and we don’t necessarily go for and crave the rewards
that are going to make us feel the best in life.
There’s this interesting neuroscientific disconnect between systems
that code for wanting versus liking.
So if it’s long dinner with my husband, we have this intense conversation.
I’ll like that. I’ll feel really connected to him afterwards.
That will feel really pleasurable for me.
But I don’t actually want that or crave that in the same way
I might for the next reel in like a tick tock series, right?
Like I crave, I really want.
But if you were to kind of measure in my pleasure centers,
whether or not I liked it, I might get that like quick hit off of liking it.
But it’s not a deeper liking.
And it turns out that this is just a feature of the brain that these circuits
that code for wanting and craving and going after stuff are just different than liking.
And I mean, there’s all this stuff we crave that we’ll spend money on.
We don’t end up liking in the end.
It also means there’s all this stuff we really probably will like
that we don’t have craving for, like deep social connection or a contemplative time
where you’re just kind of present or even to a certain extent exercise and moving your body.
I think some people get the craving for exercise, but like I’m just not one of those.
I have to work at it and force myself to do it all the time.
Yeah, yeah. So I feel like if we could just line up the brain systems
for wanting and liking, we’d be better off.
But what makes companies money is algorithms that just tap into the wanting.
They don’t really care about the liking.
In my mind, it’s not any one thing.
If I have to feel it has to be a composition of different aspects of life
and interactions and things that we do to create the perfect stew of happiness.
Is that accurate to say?
TikTok is not going to make me happy.
Deep conversations with my wife aren’t going to check every single box that I have.
What is that composition look like?
And how do you actually teach that to people?
Part of it’s just overcoming the misconceptions we have about the stuff
that we think is going to make us happy, but isn’t going to work, right?
So in our young people today, they think the main thing in that big composition pile is money.
If I get a money in fame, then I would be fine.
And it is true that if you don’t have any money, then getting some money is important.
You get your basic needs sorted.
But the evidence suggests that once you do that more and more infinitely,
it doesn’t have a kind of infinite slope on your happiness.
Kerry talks about this a lot. Yeah.
Fantastic. And that’s like the kind of money and fame, right?
Because I think we all put that up there.
And so that’s one that I think we kind of get wrong.
I think just even like selfish material pursuits, we think happiness is about me.
The evidence seems to suggest if you look at happy people are much more other oriented.
They do nice stuff for other people.
They’re really focused on other people’s happiness.
It seems like that’s kind of a path to doing it better.
And so a lot of what we do when we try to teach the composition is that you think this works,
but it’s not that and then come around to like, what is it really?
And it seems to be really based in other people like a path of service,
a path of service, but just being around other people.
If you look at very happy people and the way people do this is, you know,
we do these happiness surveys on these like well validated psychometric measures.
So you can say, OK, these subjects are self report being very happy.
What are they doing differently?
And what you find is they spend a lot of time with other people.
Their actions tend to be focused on other people.
So they’re kind of thinking about other people a lot.
They don’t spend a lot of time on screens.
They spend more time just proportionately in real life,
whether that’s being present, walking around outside or something.
Touching grass. Yeah, touching grass, moving around.
And they tend to have paths of purpose, right?
So they have a set of values that they’re moving towards.
So their actions when they’re not towards other people,
if they’re like at work or volunteer or whatever,
they’re really trying to do something that fits with their values that’s meaningful.
That’s a tough one because so many people
they’re stuck in a job that they don’t enjoy.
And this is, I think, of course, we need to take into account.
There’s real inequalities when it comes to the pursuit of happiness.
It’s way easier for some people than others to do things they find meaningful
and go after their values.
But one of the reasons I like the actual research on pursuing your values
is that it shows that many of us can get crafty about how we think of
doing things that match our values in all kinds of different jobs.
So one of my favorite lines of work on this is this Professor Amy Rizninski,
who’s at the University of Pennsylvania.
She does all this work on what she calls job crafting,
which is like you take your regular job description and you infuse
whatever your values and strengths are, whether that’s creativity or bravery
or their social connection or your persistence or learning or whatever it is.
She does most of her work in hospital janitorial staff workers.
So these are people who are like cleaning up the linen in a hospital room.
And what she finds is that between 20 to 30 percent of them say that their job is a calling.
They don’t hate their job. They love it.
They wouldn’t change it for anything.
And when she digs into what they’re doing,
they’re taking their normal job description and finding a way to add this meaningful thing in.
Is it a calling then or is it in addition of something that creates a calling?
One example she has is this guy who worked in a chemotherapy ward
and crappy thing about having cancer and having to get chemo as you get sick.
His main job was like cleaning up vomit because people throw up on the floor
and he said, yeah, I have to do that.
But like my main thing is I like humor and I like making people laugh.
These people have like such a crappy life right now.
And he had like his whole standard.
So his standard joke, I guess, was like, he makes fun of, oh, you vomit it again.
I’m going to get overtime. You keep throwing up this week.
Let’s work it out.
But then the person last, he’s like, that’s my job.
She talks about another staff member who worked in a coma ward.
She couldn’t talk to the patients because the patients are all in comas,
but she would move the art around or plants like this little plant
that were sitting near here.
She’d like move the succulents around the room to get creative.
That was how she found meaning in her work.
And so Rosnicki’s stuff basically says, look, even in the kind of
narrowest, perhaps crappiest job, you can find ways to bring in your values.
And what’s cool about her work is you might assume if you were a manager
of these people, you’d be mad at the chemo guys, you know, chat with the people
and not cleaning up.
But what she finds is that managers self report that these workers
are doing the best job at their real job description because they love their job.
They’re like in a good mood.
They’re not slacking off and trying to go to the break room.
They want to engage because they’ve figured out a way.
And that’s why I love her work.
It really suggests that, like, look, any of us could jobcraft.
We just have to get creative about ways to fit stuff in.
All right, it’s time to talk about Notion.
I am always on the hunt and always playing with the latest and greatest
productivity software.
Notion is one that I’ve used for many, many years now.
So I’m stoked to have them on as a sponsor.
Notion has been a tool that’s been taking my productivity
absolutely to the next level.
I love the way you can build it out to suit your specific needs.
Notion combines your notes, your docs and your projects all into one space
that’s simple and beautifully designed.
And they have this new fully integrated Notion AI, which helps you work faster,
write better and think bigger tasks that normally took hours.
You can now do in seconds.
You don’t have to go to some external provider or any other AI product.
It’s all built right inside of Notion.
If you haven’t tried Notion yet, obviously, you’ve heard about it.
If you haven’t tried it yet, you should definitely give it a shot.
You could try it for free when you go to Notion.com/KevinRose.
And when you use our link, you’ll be supporting the show that’s Notion.com/KevinRose.
Today’s sponsor is NordVPN.
Stay secure and anonymous online with NordVPN, which has been my trusted VPN for years now.
I like it because you can access to a lot of content from anywhere.
So I’m in Japan or Mexico at least a couple of times a year.
And I want to watch my favorite shows.
And this comes in really handy to bypass all of that geofencing.
And it needs to be fast.
This is another essential thing for a VPN.
And Nord is lightning fast because they have thousands of servers.
So if you want to stream and game without lag, it’s great.
And then equally as important is privacy.
They have a great policy, no logs, nothing to store, nothing to see, nothing to share,
which is pretty much as good as it gets.
And their apps are just really lightweight.
So it’s not bogging down your system the entire time.
And they have it for desktop and mobile.
Don’t miss this incredible deal, which is two years at a huge discount
plus four free months.
If you use my link, Nord VPN dot com slash Kevin Rose.
That’s Nord VPN dot com slash Kevin Rose, and it’s risk free.
There’s a 30 day money back guarantee, which makes this a no brainer.
One question about that, how much shaming comes from employment?
Like I’ll give you an example.
When I travel to Japan, I always seek out small little artisans
that are the best at their craft.
And I met this guy one time in Tokyo that is known for aging coffee beans.
And so he has coffee beans that are 10, 15 years old.
It takes him about 20 minutes to make a single cup of coffee
because he does this insanely slow, poor process that just takes forever.
So he can probably do, I would say, maybe 20, 25 of them a day.
And you have to be lucky enough to get in.
And the price is about seven US dollars.
Was it good when he was fantastic.
And he wears a bow tie and he dresses up and he’s dressed to the nines.
And there is so much pride in what he does.
And not only pride in what he does, but pride from the community as well
and a respect for someone that just hones their craft.
I don’t think we have that here.
Yeah. Capitalism isn’t awesome about respecting those kinds of things.
She’s like, oh, my God, well, if we could train other people to do it
and then make a machine that we get really great and stuff will scale it.
So I think a couple of things.
One is I think Riznensky’s work shows that within the scope
of people’s typical job descriptions, you don’t have to have a job
like that guy to find meaning.
But if you are that guy and you have a craft that allows you to get meaning,
it is the case that adding these extrinsic rewards on top of it
winds up screwing up your feelings towards it.
And I think we don’t need to be a guy with that kind of level of talent
and specific skill to take the normal, enjoyable pursuits we have like running.
You get a Fitbit and now all of a sudden you get obsessive about it.
No longer the kind of internal reward you got from the running.
I watch this in my students who want to say like, oh, I’ll have my side hustle.
At first, the side hustle was just like you did some art or you designed it
because it was fun.
And now you have a due date at Thursday at 7 p.m.
and you hate it because you’ve got to rush to do it.
All the joy has been stolen from it.
So I think it is the case that as we add these extrinsic rewards
onto the stuff we care about, all of a sudden it feels yucky.
And I think this is one of the reasons we’re seeing so many increases
in depression and anxiety, particularly among our teens and our young people.
Because we’ve taken a lot of the fun stuff that kids did and turned it
into like a LinkedIn resume building or college application building process.
Kids usually just play soccer, but now it’s like, well, you got to be on the soccer team.
Oh, it’s an extracurricular.
Well, that’ll look good for a piece of it.
Totally. I think part is that they don’t have any time anymore.
This is another thing as we talk about the recipe for a happy life.
Free time and what the social scientists these days are calling time
affluence, the sort of fact that you’re wealthy in time.
You seem like you have a lot of time, such an important part of our wellbeing.
And that, you know, I mean, you younger kids, like the kids are just so busy.
They have a play date that has to happen at one o’clock
and we’ve got to drive in traffic to get there.
And so we’re kind of changing around what used to count as intrinsic rewards.
And it was just fun and we’re kind of turning it more extrinsic and more scheduled.
And those features make it less enjoyable.
Have you seen any old Mr.
Rogers quotes when he’s interviewed by Charlie Rose?
He says, one of the greatest gifts that he’s received is the gift of silence
where he has that decompression time.
And he’s very well known for I studied Mr.
Rogers quite a bit because I love a guy.
And I think he was enlightened.
I think he just did. Totally. Yeah.
And he used to swim every single morning.
And that was like his time, his silence, and he didn’t miss a beat.
He would go and swim for an hour.
I wonder how do we reintroduce silence into our everyday life?
My youngest, who’s five now, when I let her watch Daniel Tiger,
because it’s based on Mr. Rogers, which is a great show.
And so we do give them some iPad time, not for games, but more so for educational content.
She loves elephants.
So she watches elephants, like actual elephant documentaries and stuff.
One got attacked by a tiger the other day, and I was freaking out.
I was like, Danny Tiger is going to be destroyed.
Yeah. Well, this is a real elephant getting attacked by the hyena.
And I told my wife, did you check the rating on this before we put this on?
But anyway, when she is not doing something,
a common thing that comes out of her mouth is, what do I do?
The shows of her, what do I do?
Like, how do you handle that?
I mean, I think we’ve all, including our kids, including five year olds,
have gotten bad at being bored.
Right. There’s like a real irony to that,
given that you can handle a device with every year kids TV show
in the history of the world on it.
I think we should have thought when we got all these technologies
that what would happen is like boredom would be a thing in the past.
You hear this term bored, our kids should be like, what is boredom?
Dad, what is that like an ancient technology?
This ancient thing we used to sit silently and didn’t know what it felt like.
I think if anything, our kids are more bored than ever as soon as the stimulation stops.
And that’s, I think, the irony of it.
I grew up like bad 70s TV watching Mr. Rogers.
If you watch Mr. Rogers for the half hours on TV in the late 70s.
My kids can’t watch it.
Yeah, they need it to be faster.
They need it to be infinite.
And I think we’ve kind of developed this world where we never have to be bored.
But what boredom is, is so all negative emotions really have a good evolutionary purpose.
Natural selection when build this stuff in boredom, sadness, loneliness,
if it wasn’t for something.
And so I think boredom is our cue that like, oh, I should go out and do something
stimulating. I should find something meaningful.
I should find purpose.
Whereas when we can kind of slap the screen band aid on our boredom,
it means we never have to feel it long enough to find what we really want to do.
And I worry about this in kids.
I worry about this in adults, too.
I’ll watch myself when I have those spare moments and I’ll grab my phone.
Mine is an Instagram reel.
It’s actually just scrolling through Reddit, embarrassingly.
Yeah, just like, you know, there’s always a next page
and there might be something cool on it.
But that means I never have these moments where I sit quietly and have ideas
or think about things or have insights or the best.
Insights actually, those shower moments are real.
So the advice, actually, you mentioned Mr.
Rogers and swimming, the advice I get from a lot of these kind of experts
on sort of finding silence is actually to swim, to take a bath, take a shower.
Because when you’re in water, when I have my phones,
I’m terrified that like our phone technology is going to figure out
how to be in the shower. And then it’s funny.
I just got one of those cool plunges from my house, which I absolutely love
in terms of like just giving you a hit of just energy and peace.
Fantastic. Mine came with an iPhone adapter on the side.
I was like, oh, shit, it’s everywhere.
Well, I remember, I mean, again, I’m old enough to remember when we had the internet
and we had like a little Wi-Fi, but it wasn’t phones.
It wasn’t everywhere.
I remember being on trains before trains had Wi-Fi.
And it was such a good concentrated work time and thinking time.
And you just watch the world go by.
Now the Amtrak has Wi-Fi.
It’s great in the sense that I get work done
and I can connect with things and not be bored on the train.
But you’ve lost something important.
You’ve lost looking at the window and seeing all the beauty.
Exactly. We don’t notice how much of that time we’ve lost in the last 10 years.
One of my favorite indicators of how little time we spend not looking at our screens
is that apparently in the last 10 years, sales of gum, like grocery stores,
sales of chewing gum have gone down.
I forget what it is, but it’s like 200 or 300 percent.
And you’re like, why does that matter?
When do you usually buy chewing gum?
You’re in the line, you’re bored, you’re around, you’re like, oh, chewing gum.
I’ll grab it and buy it.
Impulse purchases of that form have gone down
because we’re not noticing this stuff anymore because our heads are very…
I don’t even pay attention to what’s around.
Checking out, you don’t even look anymore.
Like, again, I’m old enough to remember lines long.
You grab the magazine and kind of flip through the magazine.
Maybe I got like a little candy or whatever.
But like, that doesn’t exist anymore.
What else are we missing?
That’s also the time when I might smile at my neighbor in the line
or have a quick chat with someone.
A lot of the evidence suggests those little tiny things of little noticing.
I’ll notice the girls in line with, oh, she’s got such a cute dress.
These little hits of delight and joy in the real world
are psychologically much more nutritious than whatever hit I’m going to get
in that line in 40 seconds growing through Reddit.
What are your thoughts on perfection or perfect moments?
One of the things that drives me a little crazy is I see these Google ads
that talk about their camera capabilities with AI.
And it’s like, hey, if you don’t like that person that was behind the camera,
you use the magic eraser and circle them and they disappear.
And in my mind, I’m never going to do that because that wasn’t real.
That literally didn’t happen.
There was a person standing there.
You literally wiped out someone’s existence.
If you’re old enough to have old film like photographs when you were a kid
and you flip through them, some of the most interesting things for me
are always like, what was on my desk?
I have a couple of photos of me when I was younger, messing around with computers.
I have some CD ROM sitting on there. I was like, oh, what do they have on there?
Oh, there was a little smudge here. Let me remove that.
Is that having a negative impact on us?
Because it seems like there’s this projection of perfection, luxury, money.
That is just it’s everywhere we look and it creates these expectations
that in order to be happy, I have to have that lifestyle or look that way.
The quick scrolling of just random funny cat videos.
Yeah, maybe worse, right?
For all kinds of reasons, one metric that those kinds of technologies
are fueling perfectionism is lots of research showing that perfectionism is going up.
If you look since the 80s to now, there are like 30 to 40 percent increases
in the amount of perfectionism our young people experience.
But it’s not all forms of perfectionism.
So there’s like kind of three kinds of perfectionism.
One is I expect myself to be perfect.
So my standards apply to myself.
There’s a kind of other focus, perfectionism, which is I expect you to be perfect.
Think of the jerk boss who forces your kids, right?
They’re all going up.
But the one that’s going up most is what’s called socially prescribed
prescriptionism, which is I think everyone else wants me to be perfect.
I think everyone else wants me to be rich and have the perfect body
and never be off in a photo.
We kind of think the world is watching us and the world has expectations on us.
And it turns out that’s a form of perfectionism that’s most insidious
because it makes us feel like my worth depends on my looks and my job
and my wallet and all these things.
And I’m sure that’s even amplified when you’re younger
and you’re identifying who you are, what your belief systems are.
And then this is being shoved in your face as being like, hey, this could be value.
I remember again, like aging myself and all these domains.
But I remember like flipping through Seventeen Magazine.
I was like, wow, this is what teen girls like me are supposed to look like.
They should have this body and this amount of stuff.
But I like close a magazine and went out with my friends.
I didn’t have a thing in my pocket that was telling me these things.
And even the Photoshop tools that those Seventeen Magazine people had back in the day
are nothing like the tools that we have today.
And those tools are in the pockets of all my mean girl middle school friends
who are posting their pictures online.
And so I think the perfection that we see in the world has started to become embodied
in the perfectionism we think the world expects of us.
And then the data are kind of bearing this out.
I also think it’s just messing with our memories, right?
I think we want the perfect shot of what things look like.
But then those becomes the metrics by which we measure ourselves later on.
We’re having this conversation at South by and, you know, I did the thing
where you pose in front of the South by mural with my friends.
Somebody else took the picture for us who wasn’t a selfie.
And I looked at it and I was like, oh, kind of I don’t like the hair.
I was going to do it, but I was like, wait a minute, like that’s what I look like here.
If I perfect this photo, it’s just going to make me misremember what was happening.
And it’s going to make me feel like crap whenever I look at that photo.
Normally, my hair is not going to be, you know, distribution,
like two sigma perfect hair every day.
There’s going to be other kinds of hair.
I think that’s part of the reason why when you see people with selfie sticks
and you run into an influencer from afar and you watch them take the same photo
like 30 times and you’re like, whoa, something is dry of them to say,
this has to be absolutely perfect, which is insane.
This seems exhausting to me.
Totally. They also look like a jerk, right?
You’re looking at all these videos of the inflator.
I’m the main character.
They’re funny, by the way.
These are accounts dedicated to people taking photos of themselves,
which in a horrible way, I think it’s hilarious.
Yeah, but it is a sign that like we can’t just accept ourselves on like photo.
Number one, we have to make it perfect.
But when we do that, we’re really missing out on the memories
and what these things are going to look like later.
Absolutely.
I want to take it two directions, one with kids and one with adults.
When an adult comes to you and says, I’m having a hard time.
I don’t know what my future is.
Maybe I’m midlife crisis mode.
I’m having these issues.
I’m trying to find happiness.
What are your strategies if you were a therapist?
How do you unpack where they are and how do you get them to a better place?
Well, one is just to normalize it.
Just to be like, yes, you and literally everybody else.
One thing, especially for folks like us in midlife,
to remember is that happiness tends to have to serve U shaped curve.
So it’s like starts off good when you’re young and you’re a kid.
You tend to be pretty happy and then you get to midlife and it kind of sucks.
I think the nadir varies depending on the study.
But the best estimate I’ve seen is 48.6.
So where’s you’re going to be?
And then 48.6.
Yeah, that’s like I know I just passed it.
But then the good news is like it gets better as you get into older adulthood.
So I think one thing is just to be like, that’s just what happens.
It’s just how this goes.
I think the second thing is with the sciences is lots of strategies
you can engage in to feel better.
Oftentimes one of the reasons midlife is so unhappy is that people are really busy.
You might just need to focus on feeling less time
famished and find some time affluence, take stuff off your plate,
try to take time to just rest and be.
What are strategies for that, though?
For someone that says, hey, I have these conversations with my wife all the time
around this idea of work life balance or being able to do things
that they teach our kids this in school, that the things that fill your bucket.
Well, how do you get people to make that change?
One is to just get more time.
If you have some discretionary income, you can spend the money to get back time.
Research by Ashley Williams at Harvard Business School.
She’s fabulous.
This whole book called Time Smart on all these strategies to get more time.
Her work shows that the more you spend money to get back time, the happier you are.
Like hire a cleaning service or you pay the neighbor’s kid to mow the lawn
or you get takeout.
We go to restaurants and get food a lot of the time, but we don’t realize.
We don’t think of it in terms of the time savings.
You go get Pad Thai that’s noodles.
You have to chop up and look at the recipe or whatever.
That’s an hour and a half.
What did you do with that?
But let me push back on that for a second, because I’m curious.
Thich Nhat Hanh, Buddhist monk, are you familiar with his work?
One of the things that he says is to wash the dishes is to wash the dishes.
That sounds weird to people.
But what it actually means is rather than have your mind be in a thousand other places,
you are dedicated fully in your being to being OK with being in this present moment
and spending your time washing the dishes and how peaceful that is.
But it becomes peaceful if you feel time affluent enough to wash the dishes.
The problem is most people are not doing that.
They’re washing the dishes while they’re taking a conference call.
Or the seat is a task that is just beneath them.
So the key is like with the time saving.
What you want to do is get rid of your unwanted tasks.
The Buddhist monks are right.
We could take any task and make it one that is mindful that we can enjoy and see the beauty in.
But when you are so overwhelmed, you look at your calendar and there’s a day like that.
You’re not even going to brush your teeth with that kind of moment of presence.
Everything’s like, ah.
And so the key is if you can get some of that off your plate,
especially the stuff that you really genuinely don’t like to do, like I like cooking.
I wouldn’t want to offer money to hire like a private chef or whatever.
But I wouldn’t want to offload that even if I could.
But I freaking hate the dishes.
If I could get somebody to unload the dishwasher, that’s great.
It’s not to get rid of all these tasks where you could be in the moment.
But if your schedule is so frantic that you can’t do that and you’re lucky enough
to have some discretionary income to do that, you can offload those tasks.
Actually, research is cool because she actually does it at different income levels.
And she finds if you have any discretionary income, however you spend
that to save time, whether it’s like hire the neighbor’s kid to clean up the yard
or something, that can actually be helpful.
An even better one, though, is to make good use of what’s called time confetti.
So journalist Bridget Schultz has this term time confetti, which is like
the five minutes in the grocery store at line or the 10 minutes
when your kid falls asleep early and you’ve got a little extra.
She suggests that you need to use that well.
The problem is we blow it off.
We look at TikTok, whereas if I use that to take a breath,
like text a friend, get my bearings, call a friend, call a friend.
Moving your body is a huge thing for happiness exercise.
You really do the seven minute in your time to work out.
If you get seven minutes, this way of using our time confetti well.
That’s what I was going to ask you, because it’s one thing to say, OK,
I’m going to hire someone to mow the lawn.
But if you just then go and sit down and do TikTok, exactly, there’s no upside there.
If someone says, hey, and we can take this to students as well.
They’re like, hey, I’m depressed.
I’m having a hard time here.
Obviously, depression is something to take very seriously.
So I mean, you want to seek out professional help ASAP.
But aside from that, in terms of tangible things that people can do,
if you had to stack rank them, maybe this is an impossible thing for you to do.
But like, would you say walks outdoors, social connection would be really high on the list.
How about nature, something for all that?
Nature, nature bathing is a thing not as much in this country,
but in other countries, forest bathing.
Yes, move your body exercise.
Honestly, for most young people, sleep.
I actually think we could solve most of the young people mental health crisis
if we could just get them to sleep a little bit more.
So those are all behaviors.
In terms of mindset, we can do a lot of hacks.
So scribble in a gratitude journal, take some time to be a little bit more present.
Screen away and just like, what does this room look like?
We’re in this beautiful space with these black walls.
I could look at them just that moment of I’m present.
I’m embodied and I’m here can be a lot.
Are you a meditator?
I’m supposed to be a meditator.
I do meditate sometimes.
I don’t meditate enough as I should.
I take a lot of walks.
I walk to work.
And even though I’m a podcast or a web podcast, I try not to listen to podcasts.
I try to have no music and just be present on my walks, which isn’t meditation per se,
but it’s my form of like being present and being with my thoughts and noticing.
But meditation is a huge one.
And again, one that is more by Hedy Cobra and others is showing that like,
you don’t have to do it Buddhist monk style like hours a day.
Five minutes can have these huge benefits,
especially even to novice meditators who’ve never done it before.
I have a friend, I would say she’s addicted to information.
Whereas like when she goes on a walk, she has to listen to audiobooks.
It’s almost always audiobooks where it’s like 10 a month, perfecting things.
Is that a thing as well?
Is that a bad habit?
They’re all opportunity cost, far be it from me.
I mean, there are probably people listening right now walking around.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Keep the podcast going.
Keep the podcast going.
At least this one.
That means you might not be noticing what’s on your walk
or having free time to kind of let your mind wander.
I think it becomes a problem when there’s anxiety and you can’t not have it.
I watched this happen.
We’re having this conversation a few weeks ago.
I remember there’s like this AT&T crash where the cell phone tower went out
and none of the Wi-Fi was working.
You couldn’t get on your in email.
You couldn’t get on anything.
And I was just watching people like the heroin Jones, man,
where they were like tapping of like, why is my iPhone not working?
Maybe I got to get on the network.
You couldn’t do the walk without some information.
It’s not so much that this stuff is bad.
It’s when this stuff becomes the only way you can interact.
And it’s important to ask yourself sort of, what else?
What am I missing out on because I’m doing this?
How much do hobbies play a role in happiness?
You know, I took a pottery class one time.
Beautiful.
Yeah, really present.
You’re kind of in it.
You have to pay a constantly paying attention to what’s going on,
especially if you’re using a wheel.
Are there habits that you see?
I mean, obviously, we talked about exercise and running.
That’s the huge one.
Are there other habits that people pick up that tend to lead to good outcomes?
One of the reasons the pottery is so powerful is that the presence part.
You’re there.
You’re not using your phone.
It’s forcing you to be mindful.
Another is that you’re learning.
You’re sort of bad at it.
So your growth curve is kind of high.
And that puts you in a state of what researchers like Mihai Cheeks at Mihai
call flow, right, where the challenge is kind of high,
but you’re getting skills that can do it and you have to fully pay attention.
And flow states wind up being incredible states for our well-being.
You don’t initially have to get it through pottery.
You can get it through making bread or skiing.
Or the key is that you’re doing something that like it’s hard, right?
You have to have your attention, but you kind of are building skills of the same
time to do it.
Those flow states feel great.
But I think another thing about the pottery is my guess is you aren’t doing it
as like a side hustle to sell your pots or something.
It was purely for the entertainment of it.
And I think these days, it’s hard for us to find these things that we do purely
for the entertainment of it.
It’s really easy to get competitive about it or to stick a number on it
or to want to monetize it somehow.
And every time we stick those extrinsic rewards on something,
it makes it less intrinsically enjoyable.
There’s this large psychological phenomenon that extrinsic rewards
crowd out intrinsic rewards.
So if you like give somebody a grade for something or you’re going to get paid
for your pottery or I’m going to rank it or rate it all of a sudden,
you’re not doing it because it was fun and you had flow and you’re enjoying it.
Especially when it comes to bringing friends into tasks,
like if you offer to pay a friend to help you move versus, you know,
actually, can you talk about that event?
Yeah, so we kind of don’t understand how rewards work.
It’s kind of the general feature of psychology.
We’re just like, there’s so much stuff we have misconceptions about
that we stick our feet in it.
When do we get it wrong?
And so you’d assume that like adding a reward to something would make it good.
If you like doing pottery, I’m like, let me pay you to do pottery.
Then you get the liking of the doing pottery plus you’re getting paid.
You know, your friend’s going to help you move.
They’re going to help me move and I’ll pay them and it’ll make it better.
But it turns out these extrinsic rewards undermine it.
Like your friend, if you tried to pay them like how much was that worth your time?
What’s your hourly rate?
Oh, I’ll give you $450 or whatever it is.
They’d be like, nah, I was doing it for what I wanted to do it for love.
And so these backfire effects are kind of clever.
There’s a very famous one of a daycare center that had the problem
where parents were kind of showing up a little late and the parents would feel
guilty, but it sucked for the daycare center.
And they’re like, you know what we’re going to do?
We’re going to charge parents.
Every time parents come in late, like $10 or something a hundred percent of the
parents are like, okay, I get it.
I can just pay.
So we’re in the transactional mode as opposed to you’re just helping me
and it’s out of your guilt and your enjoyability.
We have this interesting internalized capitalism and how we think motivation
works. We think, oh, I’ll pay people more or I’ll give someone a reward.
And what that does is it makes people’s normal reasons for doing something kind of go away.
I think this is part and parcel of why we’re having all these discussions
about things like quiet quitting and so on and why they’re sort of a
disconnect sometimes between the way young people think about work and old
people, whereas we’ve gotten so involved in thinking about the value of our
work as a monetary thing.
We’ve sort of missed out that sometimes the value of our work is like a
deep intrinsic reward thing or like the value we get out of doing a good job and
so on. But that goes away when you’re so focused on the monetary side of it.
We see this, I think, in our young people with grades where I think there was a time
when school was about learning, you know, it’s fun and because learning is fun,
right? We kind of like doing these things. You slap a grade on something all of a
sudden it becomes not enjoyable.
It was really old work in the 70s by the psychologist Susan Harder had kids doing
these like anagrams and puzzles. So they’re doing these kind of fun puzzles.
But then she has some kids get grades for them.
And what she finds is that when kids start getting graded for them, they don’t
enjoy them anymore. Before the grade, they’re smiling and having fun and
they’re enjoying it. Now with the grade, they think it sucks.
And when you give them choices of which puzzles to pick, the ones who are
getting graded pick the easiest ones because they’re like, Oh my God, I’m
just trying to get the best grade. Whereas if you don’t have grades, you pick
the hardest ones that you can do because you’re like, I’m only doing it because
it’s fun. Yeah, it’s challenging. And if you don’t win, who cares?
It was just like a good challenge. Yeah. And so I think our mistaken theories
of motivation sometimes wind up meaning that we take something that’s fun and
we give it something like a ding, a cost, a grade, a payment, a Christmas
bonus or whatever. And then we just make it less enjoyable and you make people
perform worse because they’re just trying to like do it the fastest possible
to get the grade. What do you think about I had heard this term a while ago
and I don’t know how it applies to your research, but there was this idea floated
of experience stretching. The frame to me was that you go out and you’re in
Hawaii, you’re in a beautiful place and you see this amazing sunset and you’re
like, God, that was just a beautiful sunset. Next day, same thing happens.
This time, somebody hands you a Mai Tai at the same time.
You’re like, oh, damn, this Mai Tai is good. The sunset’s great.
This is an even better experience. And the next day you can level up from there.
Someone hands you a cigar, whatever your poison is or doesn’t even have to be
a poison, but they add to the experience. And then all of a sudden, the next time
you’re presented with just a simple sunset, you go back to, well, it was better
if I only had those two extra, three extra things. You stretch that out.
Once you’re stretched, how do you pull that back in?
And is that a real thing?
Totally. This is what psychologists call hedonic adaptation.
You’re sort of on this hedonic treadmill and you just get used to stuff.
Hedonic, like hedonism?
Like hedonism, right? I mean, it’s a fancy way of saying we get used to stuff.
You see the sunset the first time, that’s great. You see it the next time.
It’s OK, but it’s not maybe as good as the first time.
You experience stress, you know, just get sunset.
You get sunset and Mai Tai.
Or if you just have a Mai Tai, you’re like, where’s my sunset?
And so this is the sad thing about great experiences in life
because we get used to them and they become the new standard.
Once you have an amazing experience, it like kind of ruins
experiences for you. So you can.
One of my favorite strategies is actually goes back to the ancient Stoics.
They had this idea they called negative visualization where they thought
every morning you should just take five minutes of the meditation
to think that all these terrible things are going to happen.
My wife is going to leave me. I’m going to lose my job.
I’m going to not be able to walk.
My car is going to get hit.
This isn’t like hours and hours of ruminating about.
This is just one moment about it.
My favorite one, the one that’s most effective.
I use this in talks sometime is you mentioned your kids.
Imagine right now, last time you saw your kids,
it’s the last time you’re going to see them.
Yeah, they’re gone.
That some terrible things happened.
She’s why you got to do this to me.
But I bet the next time you see them, you’re going to.
It seems like that’s an evil practice.
No, it causes you to notice all the good things.
The kids one is all terrible.
But like, let’s take my phone. I lost it, right?
Did I leave it in the car? Did I leave it at the restaurant?
Where is it? Found it in 10 minutes, 10 minutes.
I’m like, oh, my God, all my photos are in there.
Have I backed them up?
All my passwords are going to be such a pain in the ass.
And I get my phone back.
I’m like, oh, I wasn’t appreciating my phone at all.
I had no gratitude for my phone before I lost it.
But then you lose it.
And the negative visualization is good
because you don’t actually have to lose it.
You just have this moment of like, what is this?
What would this be like?
Do you think travel helps with that?
Travel to the countries where we don’t have as much?
Totally. If you’re in a kind of luxury situation a lot,
resetting the experience is good.
Sometimes for talks and things like fly first class.
I don’t want to always fly first class
because then you get used to it.
You got to go back and coach every once in a while
because it makes you can’t do anything.
You should try it. It’ll suck that time.
But you stopped experiencing the benefits of that.
No, but this…
I’m allowed one thing. You got to give me one thing.
Yeah, you can’t. First class for me is like…
They are small.
If it’s a short flight, fine.
But long flights, I can’t do it.
No, it’s good. The next time you go back, though,
you’re like, “Oh, I forgot they bring the stuff in the glass,
not the plastic. You don’t notice any of that now.”
If it’s too hard, you could do the negative visualization.
Then the next flight, I want to be in coach
and really think about it like, “Oh, it’s a plastic glass
and it’s really small.”
And then when you get like, “Oh, this is great.”
Yeah, we can use imagination
to kind of break out of Hedonic adaptation.
Another one that I find…
And this is, I think, why we get happiness so wrong.
We assume if I had all these pleasurable experiences,
it would continue to be pleasurable.
But because we get used to stuff,
the sunset with the Mai Tai, that experience stretch,
feels good the one time it’s stretched.
But we can’t. It’s unlikely that you’re going to be able
to have the privilege of stretching infinitely.
Sometimes these extraordinary experiences
make you feel worse.
Also, these extraordinary experiences
sometimes make you unable to connect with other people.
I just had this at South By in my podcast company
at this really cool private concert with folks
for just like 30 people.
And I got to see this amazing band
that last played at Madison Square Garden
privately, just standing there.
I both had a wonderful experience.
And then when I left, I was kind of like,
“This is going to literally ruin concert.
I’m never going to be able to go back.”
And be like, “Oh, you’re in row 20 now.”
You’re like, “Meh, it’s not as good.”
The other thing is, well, I’m going to go home
and people are going to be like, “How is South By?”
I’m like, “Oh, my God, I had this amazing.”
Then I feel like an asshole
because they don’t have that experience.
Well, that’s tough. And some people don’t have that filter.
And if you just drop that on a friend,
it’s like, that’s not a very thoughtful thing
that can crush somebody else.
There’s this evidence from Dan Gilbert and Matt Killingsworth
that these so-called extraordinary experiences,
like you get to fly to the moon or like go in space
or have some amazing concert or Coachella private backstage.
You think it’s going to be amazing,
but actually it winds up doing two things.
It winds up ruining all the other experiences you have
because not everything’s going to be like Coachella backstage.
And then it winds up making you feel kind of lonely
because you can’t really share these experiences
with other people. You feel sort of isolated.
And this is the thing that happens to people
who get these quick, wealth windfalls,
to people who win the lottery, wind up feeling incredibly lonely
because it’s like nobody can share these experiences.
In one of my podcast episodes of my podcast, The Happiness Lab,
I interviewed this guy, Clay Cockrell,
who’s a mental health professional
who works with the .0001%
so these like super wealthy people.
And they complain about things like they can’t make any friends.
One of them joined that kind of like regular guide,
not super wealthy gym.
And he was like chatting with the guy, like,
“Oh, what’d you do this weekend?”
And the guy was like, “Oh, I tried out this new Mexican restaurant.
What did you do?”
And he couldn’t admit like,
“I flew with my wife and applied her plane to Paris
to try this new champagne.”
And here is like a very similar experience.
They both tried something, but he felt like,
“I can’t tell somebody that.”
And so one thing we don’t predict about becoming extremely famous
or extremely wealthy is like, you just can’t share that.
Not that many people can come along with you on the ride.
And so you feel so lonely.
One thing that I do, I love that I have you here
because I can throw out some curveballs your way
that I’m personally struggling with.
– We can do just Kevin therapy. – Thank you.
I would love that if you can get like a,
something I can really climb in
and we can just do a full therapy session.
I suck at a lot of things,
but one thing that I’m pretty good at
is seeing something and being grateful
that I’m having that experience.
I have this thing where
when something bad happens in our household
and it’s really not that big a deal,
I’ll say to my wife, “Well, at least we have warm running water.”
And she hates that.
She’s like, “That’s not helping the situation.”
And I’m like, “We live better than kings.”
Kings and queens did not have warm running water.
Sometimes if you can frame it back to those times,
you can just be like,
“Yeah, I missed my FedEx package that I was hoping to get
“because it was gonna be my weekend project, whatever,
“but I have warm water and it’s clean.”
– And I can drink it. – There are people who are dying.
– Does that help or am I just being an asshole?
– So it helps, but you have to be ready for it.
So I guess two things.
One is what we don’t wanna get into
is the kind of toxic positivity.
There are the FedEx packages that don’t come in.
There are bad days.
– But why is that crappy?
So it goes.
– I think you both wanna have a moment
to acknowledge that crappy, but then reframe it.
I think we don’t wanna get in a knee jerk
of any negative emotion is bad
because sometimes the negative emotions are normative.
Maybe not about the FedEx package.
That might not be it.
Sometimes my wife, my child, a friend, a colleague
will be having a negative emotion where I look at that
and I’m just like, “You’re just being ridiculous here.”
The world is not going to end
because of what you’re saying right now.
And I can’t relate.
And so I should have some empathy for how they are feeling.
Is that the way to do it?
– First of all, it’s part of the human condition.
Sometimes we’re gonna be frustrated.
And actually there’s some evidence
that one of the things we want for this recipe
of the happiest life is all the emotions.
We want what researchers call psychologically rich life.
You wouldn’t want a life
where you didn’t have the home of like a damn FedEx.
Sometimes our negative emotions are useful signals.
If you’re frustrated with the FedEx,
that might mean you need to like switch to a different company.
Again, that’s a kind of narrow example.
But if you’re looking at the news
and you’re feeling really anxious,
that’s telling you something
about how you might wanna get involved in the future.
If you’re kind of feeling lonely
or you’re feeling really overwhelmed is a huge one.
You come home and you use the example
of you talking to your wife,
she’s slamming things around and feeling really stressed out.
That’s not like, oh, we have running water.
That’s like, oh, this is a useful signal
that something’s off and we might need to rethink things.
– I say the running water thing and it does not land.
– I think compassion for the human condition
and the question of what is this negative emotion
trying to tell us?
And sometimes it’s not trying to tell me anything.
I could just reframe it and be fine.
This is actually helpful to sort of pay attention to.
Again, the ancients were so on top of this,
the Stoics got it where you can update
your negative emotions,
but first take a quick look to see
is it telling you something interesting?
‘Cause I also watch the people who suppress every emotion
or just rewrite everything
and that gonna get you into toxic positivity landed.
– Yeah, that actually is my downfall as well.
‘Cause sometimes if I’m feeling something like that,
I’ll say, well, I have running water,
but I’m really just pushing it down a little bit.
And then later it manifests when in aggregate,
they all add up and I’m like,
oh, shit, I didn’t actually let that go
the way I thought I was letting it go.
That’s a challenging thing.
– Sometimes you have to look at the emotion to figure out
what the Buddhist had this lovely analogy for this.
It comes with this parable that Buddha used to tell.
So the parable is Buddha’s telling to his followers,
he says, hey, if you’re walking down the street
and you get shot by an arrow, is that bad?
And the follower is like, yeah, it’s terrible.
On Buddha’s Day, you just get shot by arrows, you know what I mean?
But he’s like, well, if you’re walking down the street,
you don’t get shot just by one arrow,
but you also get shot by a second arrow.
Is that worse?
And the follower’s like, yeah,
much worse to get shot by two than one.
So Buddha says, the first arrow is life.
We can’t control it.
That’s the FedEx package that doesn’t show up.
That’s the bad thing.
But the second arrow is on us.
It’s how we react to it.
We control that second arrow.
The key is that sometimes the way you don’t stab yourself
with the second arrow is you regulate the emotion,
you think of a thing you’re grateful for,
you take a couple of deep breaths, you reframe it.
But sometimes the way you don’t hit yourself
with the second arrow is you don’t squish it down
and let it ruminate and like it flies out later
as many arrows that are gonna hit everybody around you.
– A lot of your work has the word happiness in it,
but would you say in reality, that’s not the goal?
– Oh, totally.
You gotta define happiness to figure out what I mean.
I’m thinking of happiness as someone like Aristotle
talked about you dying in the air, right?
The good life, the meaningful life, the purposeful life.
– A life well lived.
– A life well lived.
And for that moment, you might need to feel anxious
or frustrated or challenged or stressed.
– There’s no such thing as normal,
but like real happy, joyous life would be the roller coaster.
And in my mind, it would be the adaptability
of the individual to survive the ups and downs
rather than just be stuck totally down or way up
because neither of those things
are where you really wanna be long-term.
– Totally, I would always joke with my students,
you know that DJ Khaled song, all I do is win.
And I was like, that would be a terrible life.
If all you did is win, you just,
you wouldn’t notice the goodness of the wins anymore.
– Well, then there’s no more winning.
– And there’s no more winning.
And like you’d be absolutely anxious
that you could maybe just lose by one point or something.
– Well, and if everything was winning,
there’s no such thing as winning
because that’s just normal.
– This is what we forget is this is hedonic adaptation.
If everything is luxury jets,
then it’s not a luxury jet anymore
’cause that’s just how you transport.
If everything is perfect champagne, perfect cigars,
you don’t notice anymore.
We need the ups and downs
and you can give you a thilse those ups and downs,
like you go back to coach,
you can negatively visualize what it’s like.
You can really try to remember
and reframe other people’s lives and things.
That’s the insidious thing about the good stuff in life
as we get used to it.
But it has a corollary, which is like,
that’s also true for the bad stuff.
Remember COVID when it was like that first week
and we’re like, we can’t do this,
we’ve done April, May, we’re just making some bread
and we’re like sorting it out.
– My wine consumption went up a lot.
At first I was like, okay, I’m not gonna drink
’cause I want my immune system to be as healthy as possible.
And then I’m like, well, you know what, I’m gonna die.
– God, I don’t know what else to do.
– Yeah, I don’t know what else to do, I’m gonna drink, so.
– I remember thinking in March 15,
like this doesn’t go away in like a week.
– I was wiping down my egg cartons with like Clorex shit.
Were you doing that too?
– I remember going to the store
and putting all the like fruit with gloves on,
and like washing all the eggs.
– That was so scary.
– Yeah, but one of the things that the psychology work
teaches us, the worst possible thing
that you think could happen in your life could happen.
And it would be terrible, but you’d still be okay.
And it would still have good parts.
In my podcast, I talked to Dan Gilbert,
who’s done work with people, for example,
who’ve lost their kids, like a parent who’s a kid.
Can you imagine the more terrible thing?
– I can’t even imagine.
– And he says, obviously it was the most terrible thing,
but I learned from it.
I learned what matters.
I’ve learned not to take things for granted.
Even the worst possible thing,
it’s not like, oh, it comes with a silver lining.
It makes you stronger.
It kind of gives you this resilience.
The downs teach us something, right?
The downs allow us to get stronger.
And I do worry that sometimes we think that a good life,
a happy life, I think parents think this for kids is like,
no downs, no stress, no failure.
Those things are important.
– It’s challenging.
Some parents try to prevent failure
in a way that they’re just trying to help the kid
not hurt themselves or something.
And in my mind, I’m like,
on a one to 10, how bad are we talking here?
Because if it’s anything over a four,
I want to protect a little bit.
But if it’s going to be a little scuff knee
because you messed up in a way
that every other kid has messed up
and it cements that learning,
that to me is very important.
To try and get that perfection
and just try and take out all the failure from a child,
I think is a bad thing to do.
Would you agree with that?
– Yeah, totally, totally.
There’s this lovely book by Julie Lithcott-Hames
called “How to Raise an Adult”
where she walks through these strategies
and she says, parents are sometimes trying to parent
for the like, right now.
You left your lunchbox at home,
I’m just going to bring it to you.
Or we got to get out the door
and you haven’t totally learned to tie your shoes.
I’m just going to tie them for you.
No diss to parents.
Like parenting is freaking hard.
The modern day doesn’t make it easy.
Sometimes you do have to parent for right now.
But often we’re missing out
on learning opportunities for our kids.
Like you don’t bring them their lunch.
They don’t have their lunch that day.
So maybe they do spend six hours hungry,
but they’re going to freaking remember their lunch
the next time and every time you fast tie their shoes
for them ’cause you got to get out the door.
Those are the learning opportunities.
And so you might be five minutes late.
That’s not great, but parenting for right now
and just like solving in the moment,
we’re not allowing our kids to screw up and learn.
I think also sometimes too, parents have to reasonably
regulate their own distress about that.
You see the lunchbox on the table
and you’re like, I could intervene.
Ultimately the learning, you’re going to miss out
if you do that.
It’s so hard for parents.
It’s so hard to watch your kids suffer.
But that’s part of being a good parent.
– They’re not gonna die.
We’re coming up on time,
but I did want to ask you a couple more questions.
With the title of this podcast,
it’ll have something in happiness in the title.
There has to be a handful of people out there
that are tuning in and they’re saying,
I’m struggling right now.
I’m at that down point and I’ve been there for a while.
I know there’s the no-brainers.
If it’s an emergency, there are hotlines to call
if you’re suicidal.
There’s things of that nature.
But what are some tactics, some go-tos that said,
I’m having more bad days than good days.
How can I get myself out of this rut?
– If it’s really extreme,
you gotta go get a professional help.
I think of a lot of the strategies
we’ve been talking about here more
as like preventative medicine.
The analogy I use, if you walk into your doctor’s office
and you’re like, I’ve got some high blood pressure.
I’m not doing so well.
Your doctor might be like, hop on the treadmill
or eat this thing or whatever.
But if you walk into your doctor’s office clutching your heart
saying, I’m having an acute heart attack right now,
your doctor’s gonna be like, well, hop on the treadmill
and do, you know, like you need.
And so if someone’s struggling,
if you’re feeling acutely suicidal,
definitely reach out to somebody.
Even though your brain can’t see hope,
’cause that’s what depression does.
It puts on these reverse rosy goggles
that everything looks terrible.
You will feel differently,
even if you don’t feel that way,
like reach out and get help.
But if you’re just, I’m feeling overwhelmed.
I’m feeling more burned out.
I don’t have a lot of pleasure in my life.
I think the first thing to know
is what the science shows
is it doesn’t have to be that way.
There are things you can do to do better
even if it doesn’t feel like it.
I think the first thing is even if you don’t feel like it,
reach out to a friend.
Just go through your phone and find someone.
Or if you don’t have anybody in your phone, no judgment,
just like go to a coffee shop, get out in the world,
and just try to have a conversation with a stranger,
even though it feels friction-y.
Get off your phone.
– I mean, you can literally walk into a Catholic church
and sit in a booth if you really needed to,
even if you’re not Catholic.
– There’s so much work by researchers like Nick Epley
and others that we assume people don’t wanna talk to us,
but people actually are fine to talk to us
much more than we think.
And it’s much more enjoyable for them than we predict.
– His data suggests that even if you’re an introvert,
the act of just having a calm conversation
with a stranger is gonna be better than you predict.
– There was this taboo around mental health,
and then there still is.
I’m uncomfortable with it ’cause I’ve finally broken down
those walls over a decade of therapy.
And so I can call a friend and say,
hey, I’m having a bad day.
How do you encourage someone that may say,
I don’t wanna show that vulnerability.
I don’t wanna show that weakness.
– Don’t start with that.
That’s not how you lead.
I would lead with asking other people questions.
Ask how their day is going.
How are your kids?
I was just thinking about you
and thinking about our old times.
So you start by just making a connection.
And my guess is so many things will happen physiologically.
Your body will just kind of calm down.
You’ll go and take sort of more less fight or flight
and more rest and digest mode.
You’ll kind of get the conversation going.
You’ll overcome that speed hump,
bump up the first part of the talk
where it kind of feels a little awkward.
And then you get things going
and then you ask other people to be vulnerable first.
Just like, how are things,
whatever, pick up on their questions.
And then you can insert your stuff,
research by their surgeon general,
Vick Murthy and others has found is,
one thing with loneliness is,
we don’t realize that we can reach out to other people.
We can ask them how they’re going.
We can give advice to them.
And that makes us feel so much better.
– It’s not about me saying like,
hey, I need some help right now.
That’s not the call.
It’s just starting the connection.
And there probably is gonna be a question about like,
hey, well, what’s up with you?
– And you’re like, I’m having a hard time.
– Yeah, exactly.
– Or you’ll just wind up feeling better
if you’re helping somebody else
and aging out to other people.
Honestly, we’re all struggling right now.
It’s 2024, everything’s falling apart.
Probably if you reach out to a friend,
they’re gonna wanna check in with you.
– Everybody’s got their shit.
– Right, yeah, exactly.
So that would be thing number one.
I think thing number two is just get out of the house,
move your body.
There’s never a time when I haven’t left the house
that I haven’t felt a little bit better
than like being my PJs on a screen, right?
So get out and move your body.
And the move your body doesn’t have to be run a marathon.
It can just be like, just take a walk, just be outside.
And if possible, even if it’s for 10, 15 minutes,
just get away from your phone.
Just be present in the world out there.
All of a sudden, things will start feeling
a little bit better.
Those are some of my emergency go-tos.
Get social, do for others, move your body.
Those can be powerful.
– That’s fantastic.
You have a podcast.
Is it weekly?
What’s your cadence on that?
– We’re like trying to get close to weekly,
but we’re not perfectly weekly.
– Tell us about that and what people can expect
when they tune in.
– Yeah, it’s called the Happiness Lab.
It’s all about strategies we can use to feel better.
– Is that the name of your actual lab?
Is it Happiness Lab or no?
– Kind of, but we haven’t like patented it,
but yeah, it’s Happiness Lab.
Yeah, and we talk about all these things.
We just finished a season on how to navigate
communicating better and love and with other people.
We have a season coming up that’s about
my happiness challenges that are like
the stuff I struggle with.
So things like stress and dealing with my time better,
perfectionism, which we spoke about is gonna be on there.
It’s really just evidence-based approaches
to handle all the stuff that comes up in life.
– Do you have a dedicated website
where people can go and subscribe?
– Or just anywhere.
Yeah, you can subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.
Happiness Lab. – Yeah, just trying
to have this lab.
Amazing.
I love that.
Thank you so much for being on the show.
– Yeah, thanks for having me.
This was fun.
– Yeah, this is absolutely fun.
It is the right time to be having these conversations.
I’m so glad you have a podcast around it.
We should mention your Coursera course.
Four million people, is that right?
Have you taken it?
– Yeah, the Science of Well-Being on Coursera.org.
It’s kind of like a very short, free version
of the Yale class I teach.
And because we’ve seen that a lot of young people
need this stuff, we also have a new one
called the Science of Well-Being for teens,
which is for middle school and high school students.
– Is that something that’s publicly available,
or do you have to be going to Yale
to actually get that?
– The Yale One Live, you go to enroll in Yale
and pay the Yale money and stuff.
But you get the free version on Coursera.
It’s a shorter, not like 26 week version,
but it covers all the relevant content
and you’ll learn exactly what the Yale students are.
– Any books in your future?
– I like the podcast because it’s so much
of the happiness stuff.
These tips that we’ve been talking about,
these short little narrative, short quick strategies,
that’s what I like.
That’s what people need in the moment.
It’s like, I’m feeling frustrated,
I’m feeling overwhelmed, I don’t have any time.
– You’re getting it out now
versus waiting a year and a half to publish something.
– Exactly, exactly.
– Amazing, well thank you for being on the show.
– Thanks so much for having me.
In this episode, we explore the language of relationships, polarity, energy management, difficult conversations, finding peace and patience, the importance of self-compassion, the search for palatable decaf coffee, panic-selling, serving the moment, and much more!
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.kevinrose.com/subscribe
Leave a Reply