Why We Want Things We Don’t Actually Like – Dr. Laurie Santos (#62)

0:00:00 “Happiness is a massive topic. Where do you even begin?”
0:00:05 “Oficial podcasts, more than 35 million downloads. Why are our young people so unhappy?”
0:00:10 If you look at very happy people, what are they doing differently?
0:00:13 What you find is they spend a lot of time with other people.
0:00:15 They don’t spend a long time on screens.
0:00:17 They spend more time disproportionately in real life,
0:00:20 whether that’s being present, walking around outside or something.
0:00:23 “Touching grass.”
0:00:23 Yeah, all negative emotions really have a good evolutionary purpose.
0:00:27 Boredom is our cue that like, “Oh, I should go out and do something stimulating.
0:00:31 I should find something meaningful.”
0:00:32 Whereas when we can kind of slap the screen band-aid on our boredom,
0:00:35 we never have to feel it long enough to find what we really want to do.
0:00:39 Happiness tends to have to sort of U-shaped curve.
0:00:41 It starts off good when you’re young and you’re a kid.
0:00:43 You tend to be pretty happy and then you get to mid-life and it kind of sucks.
0:00:46 There’s lots of research showing that perfectionism is going up since the 80s to now.
0:00:50 There are like 30 to 40% increases.
0:00:53 This level of depression right now nationally is more than 40% of students’ report being too depressed to function most days.
0:00:58 And that number has doubled in the last eight to nine years.
0:01:01 Similar things for anxiety right now. Anxieties at like…
0:01:04 So it’s happened again.
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0:03:47 Lori, thank you so much for being on the show.
0:03:48 Yeah, thanks so much for having me.
0:03:50 Happiness is a massive topic.
0:03:53 Where do you even begin when you approach this?
0:03:57 If someone comes up to you at a party
0:03:59 and you say, “Hey, I study happiness,”
0:04:01 how do you even start to talk about this topic?
0:04:06 You go way back, right?
0:04:07 I mean, Aristotle was talking about this step.
0:04:08 It’s in the Declaration of Independence.
0:04:10 So it’s not like a new thing when people are pursuing this stuff.
0:04:13 But you usually start with the story
0:04:14 of how I get interested in this stuff.
0:04:16 Yeah, let me hear that.
0:04:17 I was a nerdy professor who studied animals for a long time.
0:04:20 And then switched and made this pivot
0:04:22 to studying happiness and mental health,
0:04:24 because I was seeing the mental health crisis in my students.
0:04:27 I took on this weird role at Yale,
0:04:29 which is called the head of college.
0:04:30 So you’re faculty who live on campus with students.
0:04:33 And I expected college life to be what it was like
0:04:35 when I was there in the ’90s.
0:04:36 There was stress and stuff, but it was mostly fun.
0:04:38 And that just was not what I was seeing in my community.
0:04:42 I was just seeing so much anxiety and depression
0:04:44 and students who were suicidal.
0:04:46 And it was just like jarring that the mental health crisis was so bad.
0:04:49 That took place over the course of a decade or so, that change, that shift?
0:04:53 Yeah, well, what’s interesting is you look at the data.
0:04:55 These things are skyrocketing, right?
0:04:56 So the level of depression right now nationally
0:04:58 is more than 40% of students’ report
0:05:00 being too depressed to function most days.
0:05:03 And that number has doubled in the last eight to nine years.
0:05:06 Similar things for anxiety right now.
0:05:07 I think anxiety is at like 67% of students
0:05:09 say they’re overwhelmingly anxious most days,
0:05:12 college students nationally.
0:05:13 Those rates just were not there.
0:05:15 My colleague who runs the mental health and counseling at Yale
0:05:18 is fond of saying the rates are skyrocketing enough
0:05:20 that we know they’ll level off,
0:05:22 but that’s just because like 100% of people
0:05:24 clinical care on college campuses.
0:05:27 And it was just in my community.
0:05:28 I was just seeing these students who are really struggling
0:05:30 and realizing, hang on, my field has some strategies we can use
0:05:34 to do better, to feel better, to feel less depressed and anxious.
0:05:37 And so I developed this class to like teach students
0:05:39 these strategies retrained in the science of happiness
0:05:43 and put together the class.
0:05:44 And that was when everything changed for me
0:05:45 because the class went totally viral on campus.
0:05:49 We had a quarter of the entire Yale student body
0:05:52 signed up to take the class.
0:05:53 Well, and you did a Coursera thing too, right?
0:05:54 And then we put four million downloads or something.
0:05:56 Yeah, every time we put out content, people flock to it.
0:05:59 I think it’s because people want to be happy,
0:06:01 but also people are struggling right now.
0:06:03 There’s legit things in 2024
0:06:05 that are making us all feel overwhelmed and burned out
0:06:09 and scared.
0:06:10 And what’s the root?
0:06:11 Obviously, there’s band-aids and then there’s the root cause.
0:06:14 When you did your research, where did you begin
0:06:17 and how did you start to assess out what’s causing all this
0:06:20 and why now?
0:06:20 I wish there was like a silver bullet
0:06:23 because it would make it so easy
0:06:24 because we could just get rid of whatever that thing was
0:06:26 and make everybody.
0:06:27 Even the iPhone?
0:06:27 Yeah, the iPhone, right, yeah.
0:06:29 Technology is probably part of the answer here.
0:06:32 And I should say, it’s not just…
0:06:34 I think everybody points a finger at social media.
0:06:36 I actually think it’s deeper than that.
0:06:37 I think it’s these devices that we have
0:06:39 that often steal our attention away from real-world things.
0:06:43 And if you plot those rates of depression,
0:06:45 I was just mentioning,
0:06:46 and you plot a number of iPhones in teen pockets,
0:06:49 like the one where they look perfectly…
0:06:51 Oh my God.
0:06:52 Correlation doesn’t equal causation, obviously,
0:06:54 but it looks pretty bad, right?
0:06:55 Yeah.
0:06:56 One of the things technology promised us,
0:06:58 especially phones in our pockets,
0:07:00 was connecting with other people,
0:07:02 being social in real life.
0:07:03 Right.
0:07:04 And I think what’s shocking is that how much we use it
0:07:06 to not be social in real life.
0:07:08 We’re here having this conversation
0:07:09 in Austin by Southwest.
0:07:11 And if you walk around this conference
0:07:13 where there’s so many interesting things to see and do,
0:07:15 you’ll see a bunch of people sitting around
0:07:17 scrolling like this on there.
0:07:17 Oh, 100%.
0:07:18 They pay to come interact with these amazing people.
0:07:20 And there’s this opportunity cost
0:07:22 where we’re hanging out on this tiny screen all the time.
0:07:25 And that, I think, has real psychological consequences.
0:07:29 Liz Dunn, who’s a professor at UBC,
0:07:30 does these studies where she just checks
0:07:33 what happens to people’s social interactions
0:07:34 when they have their phones with them versus not with them.
0:07:37 She measures these subtle things like how often
0:07:39 people smile at one another.
0:07:41 She finds that smiling decreases like 30%
0:07:43 when your phone’s around.
0:07:45 Because you’re not even looking at the people around you.
0:07:47 You’re just locked into your phone.
0:07:49 What’s causing that, though?
0:07:50 What do you think the phone provides?
0:07:52 Because if you’re having a real intimate friend conversation,
0:07:56 someone’s struggling, you’re sitting down with them,
0:07:58 you’re grabbing a beer or something, that’s meaningful to me.
0:08:02 It feels much deeper than a chat.
0:08:04 But what is it that’s pulling people–
0:08:06 South by, for example, they have the ability to go and connect
0:08:11 and laugh, have fun, hang out.
0:08:13 But yet they’re choosing the device over the humans,
0:08:16 which, in theory, the human connection
0:08:19 should be more powerful.
0:08:20 But yet the phone is winning.
0:08:22 Why?
0:08:23 So I think the phone wins for two reasons.
0:08:25 One is it’s just easier.
0:08:27 If I’m at South by and I have to talk to someone,
0:08:29 you’re standing up and be like, hey, how did you come to South by?
0:08:32 What are you doing?
0:08:32 There’s this teeny friction.
0:08:34 Whereas my phone, there’s no friction.
0:08:35 I just pull it out and there’ll be something interesting.
0:08:37 And I think we’re worse at the friction than we have been,
0:08:40 because we’re out of practice at it.
0:08:41 I think older folks like us, because of COVID,
0:08:43 I think our young people just never do it in the same way
0:08:46 that we grew up doing it.
0:08:47 If they go to pick their friend up at their house,
0:08:49 they don’t go knock on the door and have to talk to mom.
0:08:51 I’m like, where’s Joey?
0:08:52 They just text, like, I’m outside, come.
0:08:54 I think younger individuals have less practice with that friction.
0:08:58 So I think friction is one thing.
0:08:59 But I think we just forget how interesting our phones are,
0:09:02 like how much cool crap is on it.
0:09:04 But your brain doesn’t forget.
0:09:05 Your brain knows.
0:09:06 Liz Dunn, who I just mentioned, she’s this analogy.
0:09:08 She uses, like, imagine to this conversation
0:09:10 instead of bring my cell phone, which is in my pocket right now.
0:09:12 I brought this big wheelbarrow.
0:09:14 And in the wheelbarrow is printouts of every email I’ve had
0:09:17 since 2005, like big DVDs with everything that’s on YouTube,
0:09:22 from cat videos to porn, printouts of everything Donald Trump
0:09:25 and Biden has said in the last week.
0:09:27 CDs of every song that’s on Spotify.
0:09:29 And this big wheelbarrow that went up into the sky.
0:09:31 You and I would want to have a conversation,
0:09:33 but you’re going to be like, oh, let me–
0:09:34 I just want to take a real quick pick at that cat video or whatever.
0:09:37 Your brain’s not stupid.
0:09:38 Your brain knows that full wheelbarrow.
0:09:40 And much, much more that I don’t have time to say
0:09:43 is on the other side of that phone.
0:09:45 You’re super interesting.
0:09:46 It’s fun, but I don’t know.
0:09:46 Are you as interesting as every cat video out there, right?
0:09:49 Yeah.
0:09:49 And so I think we’ve created this enormous temptation
0:09:53 for our attention that’s in the pockets
0:09:56 of billions of people around the world.
0:09:57 And we don’t know psychologically what that’s doing to us.
0:09:59 One question I have for you, Instagram, our TikTok Reels.
0:10:03 Reels to me are the most addicted thing,
0:10:05 because as the algorithm fine-tunes itself,
0:10:08 it’s fine in the dumb stuff that I lack my ass off at.
0:10:11 Back in the day, I’m old enough now to remember before pre-cell phone.
0:10:14 Pre-cell phone, you would have one of these moments
0:10:17 once a week with your friends where someone
0:10:19 would fall out of a chair, something hilarious would happen,
0:10:22 and you would laugh your ass off.
0:10:24 And it was like, that was so awesome that we all experienced that.
0:10:27 And you laugh about it for years to come.
0:10:28 Now I’m having that moment every 30 seconds.
0:10:32 So the reward that I’m getting every 30 seconds
0:10:35 is like those rewards that I used to get once a week.
0:10:38 And it’s just like non-stop.
0:10:41 And so here I am being entertained to the nth level
0:10:44 like that I absolutely love.
0:10:46 And then when I don’t have that any longer,
0:10:49 now I have to sit with my feelings and my emotions and everything else.
0:10:53 And the things that I don’t like,
0:10:54 is that part of the issue, do you think?
0:10:56 There’s some evidence that things like boredom,
0:10:59 proneness is going up, that when we have this moment
0:11:02 where we can’t whip out our phones and look at our Reels,
0:11:04 we feel this intense, terrible boredom.
0:11:07 But also the stakes get higher
0:11:09 because we have this being hit on the funniness stuff every 30 seconds.
0:11:13 And these algorithms are making that even more frequent
0:11:15 and even more powerful a dopamine hit.
0:11:18 It means that like real life just hasn’t kind of caught up.
0:11:21 My husband’s a philosopher.
0:11:22 We have great dinner party conversations,
0:11:24 but he doesn’t have an algorithm in his brain
0:11:26 that’s tracking what I find funny and super interesting
0:11:28 and updating every 30 seconds to give me content that I like.
0:11:32 And I think that means that temptation-wise,
0:11:34 we’re really pulled to the screen world, the TikTok world.
0:11:37 If you think of like our psychological nutrition,
0:11:39 actual psychological joy we get out of it,
0:11:42 we get this sort of quick dopamine hit from the TikTok.
0:11:45 But as soon as you put it down, you feel gross and lonely
0:11:48 and maybe overwhelmed and a little dizzy or whatever.
0:11:51 Whereas you don’t get that from talking to people.
0:11:53 I think this is something that’s just neuroscientifically
0:11:55 like just like super fascinating, which is our reward systems are weird.
0:11:58 And we don’t necessarily go for and crave the rewards
0:12:02 that are going to make us feel the best in life.
0:12:04 There’s this interesting neuroscientific disconnect
0:12:07 between systems that code for wanting versus liking.
0:12:11 So if I had this long dinner with my husband,
0:12:13 we had this intense conversation, I’ll like that.
0:12:14 I’ll feel really connected to him afterwards.
0:12:16 That will feel really pleasurable for me.
0:12:18 But I don’t actually want that or crave that
0:12:21 in the same way I might for the next reel
0:12:22 in like a TikTok series, right?
0:12:24 Like that I crave, I really want.
0:12:26 But if you were to kind of measure in my pleasure centers
0:12:28 whether or not I liked it,
0:12:30 I might get that like quick hit off of liking it.
0:12:32 But it’s not a deeper liking.
0:12:34 And it turns out that this is just a feature of the brain
0:12:36 that these circuits that code for wanting and craving
0:12:39 and going after stuff are just different than liking.
0:12:42 And that means there’s all this stuff we crave
0:12:44 that we’ll spend money on.
0:12:46 We don’t end up liking in the end.
0:12:47 It also means there’s all this stuff we really
0:12:49 probably will like that we don’t have craving for.
0:12:52 Like deep social connection or a contemplative time
0:12:55 where you’re just kind of present
0:12:56 or even to a certain extent exercise and moving your body.
0:13:00 I think some people get the craving for exercise,
0:13:02 but like I’m just not one of those.
0:13:03 I have to work at it and force myself to do it all the time.
0:13:06 – And then you get into it.
0:13:07 – So I feel like if we could just line up the brain systems
0:13:10 for wanting and liking, we’d be better off.
0:13:12 But what makes companies money is algorithms
0:13:14 that just tap into the wanting.
0:13:15 They don’t really care about the liking.
0:13:17 – In my mind, it’s not any one thing.
0:13:19 I have to feel it has to be a composition
0:13:22 of different aspects of life and interactions
0:13:26 and things that we do to create the perfect stew of happiness.
0:13:31 Is that accurate to say?
0:13:33 TikTok’s not gonna make me happy.
0:13:34 Deep conversations with my wife aren’t gonna check
0:13:37 every single box that I have.
0:13:39 What does that composition look like
0:13:40 and how do you actually teach that to people?
0:13:42 – Part of it’s just overcoming the misconceptions
0:13:44 we have about the stuff that we think
0:13:46 is gonna make us happy, but isn’t gonna work, right?
0:13:48 So in our young people today,
0:13:49 they think the main thing in that big composition pile
0:13:51 is money.
0:13:51 If I could have money and fame, then I would be fine.
0:13:54 And it is true that if you don’t have any money,
0:13:56 then getting some money is important.
0:13:58 You get your basic needs sorted.
0:13:59 But the evidence suggests that once you do that,
0:14:01 more and more infinitely,
0:14:03 it doesn’t have a kind of infinite slope on your happiness.
0:14:05 – Kerry talks about this a lot.
0:14:06 – Yeah.
0:14:07 – It’s fantastic.
0:14:07 – And that’s like the kind of money and fame, right?
0:14:10 ‘Cause I think we all put that up there.
0:14:11 So that’s one that I think we kind of get wrong.
0:14:13 I think even like selfish material pursuits,
0:14:16 we think happiness is about me.
0:14:18 The evidence seems to suggest if you look at happy people,
0:14:21 are much more other oriented.
0:14:22 They do nice stuff for other people.
0:14:24 They’re really focused on other people’s happiness.
0:14:26 It seems like that’s kind of a path to doing it better.
0:14:29 And so a lot of what we do when we try to teach the composition
0:14:31 is that you think this works, but it’s not that.
0:14:34 And then come around to like, what is it really?
0:14:37 And it seems to be really based in other people.
0:14:39 – Like a path of service?
0:14:40 – A path of service, but just being around other people.
0:14:43 If you look at very happy people,
0:14:45 and the way people do this is we do these happiness surveys
0:14:48 on these like well-validated psychometric measures.
0:14:51 So you can say like, okay, these subjects
0:14:52 are self-report being very happy.
0:14:55 What are they doing differently?
0:14:56 And what you find is they spend a lot of time
0:14:58 with other people.
0:14:59 Their actions tend to be focused on other people.
0:15:02 So they’re kind of thinking about other people a lot.
0:15:04 They don’t spend a lot of time on screens.
0:15:06 They spend more time just proportionately in real life,
0:15:09 whether that’s being present, walking around outside
0:15:11 or something. – Touching grass, yeah.
0:15:13 – Yeah, touching grass, moving around.
0:15:14 And they tend to have paths of purpose, right?
0:15:17 So they have a set of values that they’re moving towards.
0:15:19 So their actions when they’re not towards other people,
0:15:21 if they’re like at work or volunteer or whatever,
0:15:24 they’re really trying to do something
0:15:26 that fits with their values that’s meaningful.
0:15:28 – That’s a tough one because so many people,
0:15:31 they’re stuck in a job that they don’t enjoy.
0:15:33 – And this is, I think, of course,
0:15:34 we need to take into account.
0:15:36 There’s real inequalities when it comes
0:15:37 to the pursuit of happiness.
0:15:38 It’s way easier for some people than others
0:15:40 to do things they find meaningful
0:15:42 and go after their values.
0:15:44 But one of the reasons I like the actual research
0:15:45 on pursuing your values is that it shows
0:15:47 that many of us can get crafty about how we think
0:15:51 of doing things that match our values
0:15:55 in all kinds of different jobs.
0:15:57 So one of my favorite lines of work on this
0:15:58 is this professor, Amy Rizninski,
0:16:00 who’s at the University of Pennsylvania.
0:16:02 She does all this work on what she calls job crafting,
0:16:04 which is you take your regular job description
0:16:07 and you infuse whatever your values and strengths are,
0:16:09 whether that’s creativity or bravery
0:16:11 or their social connection or persistence or learning
0:16:15 or whatever it is, she does most of her work
0:16:17 in hospital janitorial staff workers.
0:16:20 So these are people who are cleaning up
0:16:22 the linen in a hospital room.
0:16:24 And what she finds is that between 20 to 30% of them
0:16:27 say that their job is a calling.
0:16:28 They don’t hate their job, they love it.
0:16:30 They wouldn’t change it for anything.
0:16:32 And when she digs into what they’re doing,
0:16:34 they’re taking their normal job description
0:16:36 and finding a way to add this meaningful thing in.
0:16:38 – Is it a calling then or is it in addition
0:16:41 of something that creates a calling?
0:16:43 – One example she has is this guy who worked
0:16:46 in a chemotherapy ward and this crappy thing.
0:16:49 But having cancer and having to get chemo as you get sick,
0:16:51 his main job was like cleaning up vomit
0:16:53 because people throw up on the floor.
0:16:54 And he said, yeah, I have to do that.
0:16:56 But like my main thing is I like humor
0:16:58 and I like making people laugh.
0:16:59 These people have like such a crappy life right now.
0:17:02 – If you can see the cracked smile, that’s his day.
0:17:03 – And he had like his whole standard.
0:17:04 So his standard joke, I guess was like,
0:17:06 he makes fun of, oh, you vomit it again.
0:17:08 I’m going to get overtime.
0:17:08 You keep throwing up this week.
0:17:10 Let’s work it out.
0:17:11 But then the person last, he’s like, that’s my job.
0:17:13 She talks about another staff member
0:17:16 who worked in a coma ward.
0:17:17 She couldn’t talk to the patients
0:17:19 because the patients all are in comas.
0:17:20 But she would move the art around
0:17:22 or plants like this little plant that were sitting near here.
0:17:24 She’d like move the succulents around the room
0:17:26 to get creative.
0:17:27 That was how she found meaning in her work.
0:17:29 And so, Riznicki’s stuff basically says,
0:17:31 look, even in the kind of narrowest, perhaps crappiest job,
0:17:36 you can find ways to bring in your values.
0:17:38 And what’s cool about her work
0:17:39 is you might assume if you were a manager of these people,
0:17:41 you’d be mad at the chemo guys.
0:17:42 You know, chat with the people and not cleaning up.
0:17:45 But what she finds is that managers self report
0:17:47 that these workers are doing the best job
0:17:49 at their real job description because they love their job.
0:17:52 They’re like in a good mood.
0:17:53 They’re not slacking off and trying to go to the break room.
0:17:55 They want to engage because they’ve figured out a way.
0:17:58 And that’s why I love her work.
0:17:59 It really suggests to look any of us good job craft.
0:18:01 We just have to get creative about ways to fit stuff in.
0:18:05 All right, it’s time to talk about Notion.
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0:18:58 that’s Notion.com/KevinRose.
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0:20:05 One question about that.
0:20:06 How much shaming comes from employment?
0:20:11 Like I’ll give you an example.
0:20:12 When I traveled to Japan,
0:20:14 I always seek out small little artisans
0:20:16 that are the best at their craft.
0:20:18 And I met this guy one time in Tokyo
0:20:21 that is known for aging coffee beans.
0:20:24 And so he has coffee beans that are 10, 15 years old.
0:20:27 It takes him about 20 minutes to make a single cup of coffee
0:20:30 because he does this insanely slow, poor process
0:20:34 that just takes forever.
0:20:35 So he can probably do, I would say,
0:20:38 maybe 20, 25 of them a day.
0:20:40 And you have to be lucky enough to get in.
0:20:42 And the price is about seven US dollars.
0:20:46 Was it good?
0:20:46 It was fantastic.
0:20:48 And he wears a bow tie and he dresses up
0:20:50 and he’s dressed to the nines.
0:20:52 And there is so much pride in what he does.
0:20:57 And not only pride in what he does,
0:21:00 but pride from the community as well
0:21:03 and a respect for someone that just hones their craft.
0:21:08 I don’t think we have that here.
0:21:11 Yeah, capitalism isn’t awesome
0:21:13 about respecting those kinds of things.
0:21:15 She’s like, oh my god, well, if we could train other people
0:21:18 to do it and then make a machine
0:21:20 that would get really great and stuff.
0:21:21 We’ll scale it.
0:21:22 So I think a couple of things.
0:21:23 One is I think Riznensky’s work shows
0:21:25 that within the scope of people’s typical job descriptions,
0:21:29 you don’t have to have a job like that guy to find meaning.
0:21:31 But if you are that guy and you have a craft
0:21:33 that allows you to get meaning,
0:21:35 it is the case that adding these extrinsic rewards on top of it
0:21:39 winds up screwing up your feelings towards it.
0:21:41 And I think we don’t need to be a guy
0:21:42 with that kind of level of talent and specific skill.
0:21:46 Take the normal enjoyable pursuits we have like running.
0:21:49 You get a Fitbit and now all of a sudden,
0:21:51 you get obsessive about it.
0:21:52 It’s no longer the kind of internal reward
0:21:54 you got from the running.
0:21:55 I watch this in my students who want to say like,
0:21:57 oh, I’ll have my side hustle.
0:21:59 At first the side hustle was just like,
0:22:01 you did some art or you designed it because it was fun.
0:22:03 And now you have a due date at Thursday at 7 p.m.
0:22:06 and you hate it because you’ve got to rush to do it.
0:22:08 All the joy has been stolen from it.
0:22:10 So I think it is the case that as we add these extrinsic rewards
0:22:14 onto the stuff we care about, all of a sudden it feels yucky.
0:22:18 And I think this is one of the reasons
0:22:19 we’re seeing so many increases in depression and anxiety,
0:22:22 particularly among our teens and our young people.
0:22:25 Because we’ve taken a lot of the fun stuff that kids did
0:22:27 and turned it into like a LinkedIn resume building
0:22:30 or college application building process.
0:22:32 Kids used to just play soccer,
0:22:33 but now it’s like, well, you got to be on the soccer team.
0:22:35 Oh, it’s extracurricular.
0:22:37 Well, that’ll look good for–
0:22:38 – So you think that’s a big piece of it.
0:22:38 – Totally.
0:22:39 I think part is that they don’t have any time anymore.
0:22:41 This is another thing as we talk about the recipe
0:22:44 for a happy life, free time and what social scientists
0:22:47 these days are calling time affluence,
0:22:49 the sort of fact that you’re wealthy in time,
0:22:51 you seem like you have a lot of time,
0:22:53 such an important part of our well-being.
0:22:55 And that, you know, I mean, younger kids,
0:22:57 like the kids are just so busy.
0:22:58 They have a played date that has to happen at one o’clock
0:23:00 and we got to drive in traffic to get there.
0:23:02 And so we’re kind of changing around what used to count
0:23:06 as intrinsic rewards and was just fun.
0:23:08 And we’re kind of turning it more extrinsic and more scheduled.
0:23:12 And those features make it less enjoyable.
0:23:14 – Have you seen any old Mr. Rogers quotes
0:23:17 when he’s interviewed by Charlie Rose?
0:23:20 He says one of the greatest gifts that he’s received
0:23:23 is the gift of silence where he has that decompression time.
0:23:27 And he’s very well known for I studied Mr. Rogers quite a bit
0:23:30 because I love that guy.
0:23:31 And I think he was enlightened.
0:23:32 I think he just didn’t know it.
0:23:33 – Totally, yeah.
0:23:34 – And he used to swim every single morning.
0:23:36 And that was like his time, his silence.
0:23:39 And he didn’t miss a beat.
0:23:40 He would go and swim for an hour.
0:23:42 I wonder how do we reintroduce silence into our everyday life?
0:23:48 My youngest, who’s five now, when I let her watch Daniel Tiger
0:23:53 ’cause it’s based on Mr. Rogers, which is a great show.
0:23:56 And so we do get them some iPad time, not for games,
0:23:59 but more so for educational content.
0:24:02 She loves elephants.
0:24:02 So she watches elephants, like actual elephant documentaries
0:24:05 and stuff.
0:24:06 One got attacked by a tiger the other day.
0:24:08 And I was freaking out.
0:24:08 I was like…
0:24:09 – Danny Tiger is going to be destroyed.
0:24:10 – Yeah, well this is a real elephant getting attacked by a hyena.
0:24:13 And I told my wife, “Did you check the rating on this
0:24:14 before we put this on?”
0:24:16 But anyway, when she is not doing something,
0:24:19 a common thing that comes out of her mouth is, what do I do?
0:24:22 The show’s over, what do I do?
0:24:24 Like, how do you handle that?
0:24:27 – I mean, I think we’ve all, including our kids,
0:24:29 including five-year-olds, have gotten bad at being bored, right?
0:24:33 There’s like a real irony to that,
0:24:34 given that you can handle a device with every
0:24:37 your kid’s TV show in the history of the world on it.
0:24:40 I think we should have thought when we got all these technologies
0:24:42 that what would happen is boredom would be a thing in the past.
0:24:45 You’ll hear this term “bored.”
0:24:46 Our kids should be like, “What is boredom, dad?
0:24:48 What is that?”
0:24:48 – Right, it’s like an ancient technology.
0:24:50 – This is an ancient thing.
0:24:50 We used to sit silently and didn’t know what it felt like.
0:24:53 But I think if anything, our kids are more bored than ever,
0:24:56 as soon as the stimulation stops.
0:24:58 And that’s, I think, the irony of it.
0:25:00 I grew up like bad ’70s TV watching Mr. Rogers.
0:25:03 If you watch Mr. Rogers for the half hours on TV in the late ’70s…
0:25:07 – Well, my kids can’t watch it.
0:25:08 – So they need it to be faster.
0:25:09 They need it to be infinite.
0:25:11 And I think we’ve kind of developed this world
0:25:12 where we never have to be bored.
0:25:14 But what boredom is is…
0:25:16 So all negative emotions really have a good evolutionary purpose.
0:25:20 Natural selection wouldn’t build this stuff in.
0:25:21 Boredom, sadness, loneliness, if it wasn’t for something.
0:25:25 And so I think boredom is our cue that like,
0:25:27 “Oh, I should go out and do something stimulating.
0:25:30 I should find something meaningful.
0:25:31 I should find purpose.”
0:25:32 Whereas when we can kind of slap the screen band-aid on our boredom,
0:25:36 it means we never have to feel it long enough to find
0:25:39 what we really want to do.
0:25:40 And I worry about this in kids.
0:25:42 I worry about this in adults too.
0:25:43 I’ll watch myself when I have those spare moments.
0:25:46 And I’ll grab my phone.
0:25:47 Mine is in Instagram reels.
0:25:48 It’s actually just scrolling through Reddit, embarrassing.
0:25:50 – You read it, huh?
0:25:51 – Yeah, just like, you know, there’s always a next page
0:25:53 and there might be something cool on it.
0:25:54 But that means I never have these moments where I sit quietly
0:25:58 and have ideas or think about things or have insights or…
0:26:02 – The best insights actually, those shower moments are real.
0:26:05 – So the advice, actually, you mentioned Mr. Rogers and swimming.
0:26:08 The advice I get from a lot of these kind of experts
0:26:10 on sort of finding silence is actually to swim, to take a bath,
0:26:14 take a shower.
0:26:15 Because when you’re in water, whenever I have phones,
0:26:16 I’m terrified that like our phone technology
0:26:18 is going to figure out how to be in the shower.
0:26:21 – It was funny.
0:26:22 I just got one of those cool plunges from my house,
0:26:23 which I absolutely love in terms of like just giving you a hit
0:26:27 of just energy and peace.
0:26:29 Fantastic.
0:26:30 Mine came with an iPhone adapter on the side.
0:26:31 I was like, “Oh, shit, it’s everywhere.”
0:26:34 – Well, I remember, I mean, again, I’m old enough to remember
0:26:37 when we had the internet and we had like a little Wi-Fi,
0:26:39 but it wasn’t phones, it wasn’t everywhere.
0:26:41 I remember being on trains before trains had Wi-Fi.
0:26:44 And it was such a good concentrated work time and thinking time
0:26:49 and you just watch the world go by.
0:26:51 Now the Amtrak has Wi-Fi.
0:26:52 It’s great in the sense that I get work done
0:26:54 and I can connect with things and not be bored on the train.
0:26:57 But you’ve lost something important.
0:26:59 – You’ve lost looking at the window and seeing all the beauty.
0:27:02 – Exactly.
0:27:03 We don’t notice how much of that time we’ve lost in the last 10 years.
0:27:06 One of my favorite indicators of how little time we spend
0:27:09 not looking at our screens is apparently in the last 10 years,
0:27:12 sales of gum, like grocery store sales of chewing gum have gone down.
0:27:17 I forget what it is, but it’s like 200 or 300% and you’re like,
0:27:19 “Why does that matter?”
0:27:21 When do you usually buy chewing gum?
0:27:22 You’re in the line, you’re bored, you’re looking around,
0:27:25 you’re like, “Oh, chewing gum, I’ll grab it and buy it.”
0:27:27 Impulse purchases of that form have gone down
0:27:30 because we’re not noticing this stuff anymore
0:27:31 because our heads are very dense.
0:27:33 – I don’t even pay attention to what’s around.
0:27:34 Checking out, you don’t even look anymore.
0:27:36 – Again, I’m old enough to remember lines long,
0:27:38 you grab the magazine, flip through the magazine,
0:27:40 you’re like, “Oh, maybe I got a little candy or whatever.”
0:27:42 But that doesn’t exist anymore.
0:27:45 What else are we missing?
0:27:46 That’s also the time when I might smile at my neighbor in the line
0:27:49 or have a quick chat with someone.
0:27:50 A lot of the evidence suggests those little tiny things
0:27:53 of little noticing.
0:27:54 I’ll notice the girls in line with,
0:27:56 “Oh, she’s got such a cute dress.”
0:27:57 These little hits of delight and joy in the real world
0:28:01 are psychologically much more nutritious than whatever hit
0:28:04 I’m going to get in that line in 40 seconds
0:28:06 scrolling through Reddit.
0:28:07 – What are your thoughts on perfection or perfect moments?
0:28:10 One of the things that drives me a little crazy
0:28:13 is I see these Google ads that talk about
0:28:16 their camera capabilities with AI.
0:28:17 And it’s like, “Hey, if you don’t like that person
0:28:21 that was behind the camera,
0:28:22 use the magic eraser and circle them.”
0:28:24 And they disappear.
0:28:26 And in my mind, I’m never going to do that
0:28:28 because that wasn’t real.
0:28:29 That literally didn’t happen.
0:28:32 There was a person standing there.
0:28:34 He literally wiped out someone’s existence.
0:28:36 If you’re old enough to have old film like photographs
0:28:39 when you were a kid and you flip through them,
0:28:42 some of the most interesting things for me
0:28:43 are always like, “What was on my desk?”
0:28:45 I have a couple of photos of me when I was younger
0:28:47 messing around with computers
0:28:48 and I have some CD-ROM sitting on there.
0:28:49 I was like, “Ooh, what did they have on there?
0:28:51 Oh, there was a little smudge here.
0:28:53 Let me remove that.
0:28:54 Is that having a negative impact on us?”
0:28:56 Because it seems like there’s this projection
0:28:59 of perfection, luxury, money
0:29:03 that is just everywhere we look
0:29:06 and it creates these expectations
0:29:08 that in order to be happy,
0:29:09 I have to have that lifestyle or look that way.
0:29:13 The quick scrolling of just random funny cat videos.
0:29:16 Yeah, maybe worse, right?
0:29:18 For all kinds of reasons.
0:29:19 One metric that those kinds of technologies
0:29:22 are fueling perfectionism
0:29:24 is lots of research showing that perfectionism is going up.
0:29:27 If you look since the ’80s to now,
0:29:29 there are like 30 to 40% increases
0:29:31 in the amount of perfectionism
0:29:32 our young people experience.
0:29:34 But it’s not all forms of perfectionism.
0:29:36 So there’s like kind of three kinds of perfectionism.
0:29:39 One is, I expect myself to be perfect.
0:29:40 So it’s my standards applied to myself.
0:29:42 There’s a kind of other focus, perfectionism,
0:29:45 which is I expect you to be perfect.
0:29:46 Think of the jerk boss who forces their employees.
0:29:48 Your kids, right?
0:29:49 They’re all going up.
0:29:50 But the one that’s going up most
0:29:51 is what’s called socially prescribed perfectionism,
0:29:54 which is I think everyone else wants me to be perfect.
0:29:58 I think everyone else wants me to be rich
0:30:00 and have the perfect body.
0:30:01 And never be off in a photo.
0:30:03 We kind of think the world is watching us
0:30:06 and the world has expectations on us.
0:30:08 And it turns out that’s a form of perfectionism
0:30:10 that’s most insidious
0:30:11 because it makes us feel like my worth depends on my looks
0:30:16 and my job and my wallet and all these things.
0:30:18 And I’m sure that’s even amplified when you’re younger
0:30:21 and you’re identifying who you are,
0:30:23 what your belief systems are.
0:30:26 And then this is being shoved in your face
0:30:29 as being like, hey, this could be a value.
0:30:30 I remember again, aging myself and all these domains,
0:30:33 but I remember flipping through Seventeen Magazine.
0:30:35 And I was like, wow, this is what teen girls like me
0:30:37 are supposed to look like.
0:30:38 They’re supposed to have this body and this amount of stuff.
0:30:40 But I closed the magazine and went out with my friends.
0:30:43 I didn’t have a thing ding in my pocket
0:30:44 that was telling me these things.
0:30:46 And even the Photoshop tools
0:30:47 that those Seventeen Magazine people had back in the day
0:30:50 are nothing like the tools that we have today.
0:30:53 And those tools are in the pockets
0:30:54 of all my mean girl middle school friends
0:30:56 who are posting their pictures online.
0:30:58 And so I think the perfection that we see in the world
0:31:01 has started to become embodied.
0:31:03 And the perfectionism, we think the world expects of us.
0:31:06 And then the data are kind of bearing this out.
0:31:08 I also think it’s just messing with our memories, right?
0:31:11 I think we want the perfect shot of what things looked like.
0:31:14 But then those becomes the metrics
0:31:16 by which we measure ourselves later on.
0:31:19 We’re having this conversation at South by,
0:31:20 and I did the thing where you pose
0:31:22 in front of the South by mural with my friends.
0:31:24 Somebody else took the picture for us.
0:31:26 It wasn’t a selfie.
0:31:26 And I looked at it and I was like, oh, kind of,
0:31:28 I don’t like the hair.
0:31:29 I was going to do it.
0:31:29 But I was like, wait a minute.
0:31:30 Like, that’s what I look like here.
0:31:32 If I perfect this photo, it’s just
0:31:33 going to make me misremember what was happening.
0:31:36 And it’s going to make me feel like crap
0:31:37 whenever I look at that photo.
0:31:38 Normally, my hair is not going to be distribution,
0:31:41 like two sigma perfect hair every day.
0:31:43 There’s going to be other kinds of hair.
0:31:44 I think that’s part of the reason
0:31:45 why when you see people with selfie sticks
0:31:48 and you run into an influencer from afar
0:31:50 and you watch them take the same photo like 30 times.
0:31:53 And you’re like, whoa, something is driving them to say,
0:31:57 this has to be absolutely perfect, which is insane.
0:32:00 This seems exhausting to me.
0:32:02 Totally.
0:32:03 They also look like a jerk, right?
0:32:04 Look at all these videos of the inflator.
0:32:06 I’m the main character.
0:32:07 Those are so funny, by the way.
0:32:08 These are accounts dedicated to people
0:32:09 taking photos of themselves, which in a horrible way,
0:32:12 I think it’s hilarious.
0:32:13 But it is a sign that we can’t just accept ourselves
0:32:16 on photo number one.
0:32:18 We have to make it perfect.
0:32:19 But when we do that, we’re really
0:32:20 missing out on the memories and what these things are
0:32:23 going to look like later.
0:32:24 Absolutely.
0:32:25 I want to take it two directions, one with kids
0:32:27 and one with adults.
0:32:28 When an adult comes to you and says, I’m having a hard time,
0:32:33 I don’t know what my future is.
0:32:34 Maybe I’m midlife crisis mode.
0:32:36 I’m having these issues.
0:32:38 I’m trying to find happiness.
0:32:39 What are your strategies?
0:32:42 If you were a therapist, how do you unpack where they are
0:32:45 and how do you get them to a better place?
0:32:48 Well, one is just to normalize it.
0:32:49 Just to be like, yes, you and literally everybody else.
0:32:52 One thing, especially for folks like us in midlife,
0:32:54 to remember is that happiness tends
0:32:56 to have this sort of U-shape curve.
0:32:58 So it starts off good when you’re young and you’re a kid.
0:33:00 You tend to be pretty happy.
0:33:02 And then you get to midlife and it kind of sucks.
0:33:04 I think the nadir varies depending on the study.
0:33:06 But the best estimate I’ve seen is 48.6.
0:33:09 So where’s you’re going to be?
0:33:10 48.6?
0:33:11 Oh, she’s not quite there yet.
0:33:13 I know.
0:33:13 I just passed it after 49.
0:33:15 But then the good news is it gets better
0:33:16 as you get into older adulthood.
0:33:18 So I think one thing is just to be like,
0:33:20 that’s just what happens.
0:33:21 It’s just how this goes.
0:33:22 I think the second thing is with the sciences
0:33:24 is lots of strategies you can engage in to feel better.
0:33:27 Oftentimes, one of the reasons midlife is so unhappy
0:33:31 is that people are really busy.
0:33:33 You might just need to focus on feeling less time-famished
0:33:36 and find some time affluence.
0:33:37 Take stuff off your plate.
0:33:39 Try to take time to just rest and be–
0:33:41 What are strategies for that, though?
0:33:42 For someone that says, hey, I have these conversations
0:33:45 with my wife all the time around this idea of work-life balance
0:33:49 or being able to do things that they teach our kids
0:33:51 at school, the things that fill your bucket.
0:33:53 How do you get people to make that change?
0:33:55 Well, one is to just get more time.
0:33:57 If you have some discretionary income,
0:33:59 you can spend the money to get back time.
0:34:01 Research by Ashley Willens at Harvard Business School.
0:34:03 She’s fabulous.
0:34:04 This whole book called “Time Smart”
0:34:05 on all these strategies to get more time.
0:34:07 Her work shows that the more you spend money
0:34:10 to get back time, the happier you are.
0:34:12 Like hire a cleaning service.
0:34:13 Or you pay the neighbor’s kid to mow the lawn.
0:34:16 Or you get takeout.
0:34:17 We go to restaurants and get food a lot of the time.
0:34:19 But we don’t realize.
0:34:20 We don’t think of it in terms of time savings.
0:34:22 You go get pad thai that’s noodles.
0:34:24 You have to chop up and look at the recipe or whatever.
0:34:26 That’s an hour and a half.
0:34:27 What did you do with that?
0:34:28 Let me push back on that for a second, because I’m curious.
0:34:31 Thich Nhat Hanh, Buddhist monk.
0:34:33 Are you familiar with his work?
0:34:34 One of the things that he says is to wash the dishes.
0:34:36 Is to wash the dishes.
0:34:38 That sounds weird to people.
0:34:39 But what it actually means is,
0:34:41 rather than have your mind be in 1,000 other places,
0:34:44 you are dedicated fully in your being to being okay with being
0:34:50 in this present moment and spending your time washing the dishes.
0:34:54 And how peaceful that is.
0:34:56 But it becomes peaceful if you feel time-athlete enough
0:34:58 to wash the dishes.
0:34:59 The problem is most people are not doing that.
0:35:01 They’re washing the dishes while they’re taking a conference call.
0:35:04 Yeah.
0:35:04 Or they see it as a task that is just beneath them or something.
0:35:07 So the key is like, with the time saving,
0:35:09 what you want to do is get rid of your unwanted task.
0:35:11 The Buddhist monks are right.
0:35:12 We could take any task and make it one that is mindful
0:35:15 that we can enjoy and see the beauty in.
0:35:17 But when you are so overwhelmed,
0:35:19 you look at your calendar and there’s a day like that,
0:35:21 you’re not even going to brush your teeth with that kind of moment of presence.
0:35:24 Everything’s like, “Wah!”
0:35:25 And so the key is if you can get some of that off your plate,
0:35:28 especially the stuff that you really genuinely don’t like to do.
0:35:31 Like I like cooking.
0:35:32 I wouldn’t want to offload.
0:35:33 I mean, I don’t have money to hire a private chef or whatever,
0:35:35 but I wouldn’t want to offload that even if I could.
0:35:37 But I freaking hate the dishes.
0:35:38 If I could get somebody to unload the dishwasher, that’s great.
0:35:41 It’s not to get rid of all these tasks where you could be in the moment,
0:35:44 but if your schedule is so frantic that you can’t do that
0:35:47 and you’re lucky enough to have some discretionary income to do that,
0:35:50 you can offload those tasks.
0:35:52 Actually, research is cool because she actually does it at different income levels
0:35:55 and she finds if you have any discretionary income,
0:35:58 however you spend that to save time,
0:36:00 whether it’s like hire the neighbor’s kid to clean up the yard or something,
0:36:03 that can actually be helpful.
0:36:04 An even better one though is to make good use of what’s called time confetti.
0:36:08 So journalist Bridget Schultz has this term time confetti,
0:36:11 which is like the five minutes in the grocery store at line
0:36:14 or the 10 minutes when your kid falls asleep early
0:36:17 and you’ve got a little extra.
0:36:18 She suggests that you need to use that well.
0:36:20 The problem is we blow it off.
0:36:21 We look at TikTok.
0:36:22 Whereas if I use that to take a breath, text a friend, get my bearings.
0:36:28 A call a friend.
0:36:29 A call a friend.
0:36:29 Moving your body is a huge thing for happiness exercise.
0:36:32 You might do the seven minute in your time to work out if you get seven minutes.
0:36:35 This way of using our time confetti well.
0:36:39 That’s what I was going to ask you because it’s one thing to say,
0:36:41 okay, I’m going to hire someone to mow the lawn.
0:36:44 But if you just then go and sit down and do TikTok.
0:36:46 Exactly.
0:36:47 There’s no upside there.
0:36:48 If someone says, hey, and we can take this to students as well,
0:36:51 they’re like, hey, I’m depressed.
0:36:52 I’m having a hard time here.
0:36:54 Obviously, depression is something to take very seriously.
0:36:57 So I mean, you want to seek out professional help ASAP.
0:37:01 But aside from that, in terms of tangible things that people can do,
0:37:05 if you had to stack rank them, maybe this is an impossible thing for you to do.
0:37:10 But like, would you say walks outdoors?
0:37:13 Social connection will be really high on the list.
0:37:15 How about nature?
0:37:16 Doing something for all that nature, nature bathing is a thing,
0:37:19 not as much in this country, but in other countries.
0:37:21 Forest bathing in Japan is huge.
0:37:23 Move your body exercise.
0:37:25 Honestly, for most young people, sleep.
0:37:27 I actually think we could solve most of the young people mental health crisis
0:37:29 if we could just get them to sleep a little bit more.
0:37:31 So those are all behaviors.
0:37:33 In terms of mindset, we can do a lot of hacks.
0:37:35 So scribble in a gratitude journal.
0:37:37 Take some time to be a little bit more present.
0:37:39 Screen away and just like, what does this room look like?
0:37:41 We’re in this beautiful space.
0:37:43 We have these black walls.
0:37:44 I could look at them.
0:37:45 Just that moment of I’m present, I’m embodied, and I’m here can be a lot.
0:37:49 Are you a meditator?
0:37:50 I’m supposed to be a meditator.
0:37:52 I do meditate sometimes.
0:37:54 I don’t meditate enough as I should.
0:37:55 I take a lot of walks.
0:37:57 I walk to work.
0:37:58 And even though I’m a podcast or a web podcast,
0:38:00 I try not to listen to podcasts.
0:38:02 I try to have no music and just be present on my walks,
0:38:05 which isn’t meditation per se,
0:38:07 but it’s my form of being present and being with my thoughts and noticing.
0:38:11 But meditation is a huge one.
0:38:12 And again, one that is worked by Hedy Cooper and others is showing
0:38:15 that you don’t have to do it Buddhist monk style like hours a day.
0:38:19 Five minutes can have these huge benefits,
0:38:22 especially even to novice meditators who’ve never done it before.
0:38:25 I have a friend, I would say she’s addicted to information,
0:38:29 whereas like when she goes on a walk, she has to listen to audiobooks.
0:38:33 It’s almost always audiobooks where it’s like 10 a month, perfecting things.
0:38:37 Is that a thing as well?
0:38:39 Is that a bad habit?
0:38:40 They’re all opportunity costs.
0:38:41 Far be it from me.
0:38:42 I mean, they’re probably people listening right now walking around.
0:38:44 Yeah, yeah, yeah.
0:38:45 Keep the podcast going.
0:38:46 Keep the podcast going.
0:38:47 At least this one.
0:38:47 That means you might not be noticing what’s on your walk
0:38:50 or having free time to kind of let your mind wander.
0:38:53 I think it becomes a problem when there’s anxiety and you can’t not have it.
0:38:57 I watched this happen.
0:38:58 We’re having this conversation a few weeks ago.
0:39:00 I remember there’s like this AT&T crash where the cell phone tower went out
0:39:03 and none of the Wi-Fi was working.
0:39:04 You couldn’t get on your email.
0:39:06 You couldn’t get on anything.
0:39:07 And I was just watching people like the heroin Jones, man,
0:39:10 where they were like tapping of like, why is my iPhone not working?
0:39:13 Maybe I got to get on the network.
0:39:14 You couldn’t do the walk without some information.
0:39:17 It’s not so much that this stuff is bad.
0:39:19 It’s when this stuff becomes the only way you can interact.
0:39:23 And it’s important to ask yourself, what else?
0:39:26 What am I missing out on because I’m doing this?
0:39:28 How much do hobbies play a role in happiness?
0:39:32 I took a pottery class one time.
0:39:34 Beautiful.
0:39:34 Yeah, I’m really present.
0:39:36 You’re kind of in it.
0:39:36 Super present.
0:39:37 You have to pay constantly paying attention to what’s going on,
0:39:40 especially if you’re using a wheel.
0:39:41 Are there habits that you see?
0:39:43 I mean, obviously we talked about exercise and running.
0:39:45 That’s the huge one.
0:39:46 Are there other habits that people pick up that tend to lead to good outcomes?
0:39:51 One of the reasons the pottery is so powerful is that the presence part.
0:39:54 You’re there.
0:39:54 You’re not using your phone.
0:39:55 It’s forcing you to be mindful.
0:39:57 Another is that you’re learning.
0:39:58 You’re sort of bad at it.
0:39:59 So your growth curve is kind of high.
0:40:01 And that puts you in a state of what researchers like Mihai Cheeks at Mihai
0:40:05 call flow, where the challenge is kind of high,
0:40:08 but you’re getting skills that can do it.
0:40:10 And you have to fully pay attention.
0:40:12 And flow states wind up being incredible states for our well-being.
0:40:15 You don’t initially have to get it through pottery.
0:40:17 You can get it through making bread or skiing.
0:40:20 Or the key is that you’re doing something that like it’s hard.
0:40:23 You have to have your attention, but you kind of are building skills of the same time to do it.
0:40:28 Those flow states feel great.
0:40:29 But I think another thing about the pottery is my guess is you weren’t doing it as like a side hustle
0:40:33 to sell your pots or something.
0:40:35 It was purely for the entertainment of it.
0:40:37 And I think these days it’s hard for us to find these things that we do purely for the entertainment of it.
0:40:43 It’s really easy to get competitive about it or to stick a number on it
0:40:47 or to want to monetize it somehow.
0:40:49 And every time we stick those extrinsic rewards on something,
0:40:53 it makes it less intrinsically enjoyable.
0:40:55 There’s this large psychological phenomenon that extrinsic rewards crowd out intrinsic rewards.
0:41:01 So if you like give somebody a grade for something or you’re going to get paid for your pottery
0:41:05 or I’m going to rank it or rate it, all of a sudden you’re not doing it
0:41:09 because it was fun and you had flow and you’re enjoying it.
0:41:11 Especially when it comes to bringing friends into tasks.
0:41:15 Like if you offer to pay a friend to help you move versus actually can you talk about that a bit?
0:41:21 Yeah. So we kind of don’t understand how rewards work.
0:41:24 It’s kind of the general feature of psychology.
0:41:26 We’re just like there’s so much stuff we have misconceptions about that we stick our feet in it.
0:41:29 When do we get it wrong?
0:41:30 And so you’d assume that like adding a reward to something would make it good.
0:41:34 If you like doing pottery, I’m like, let me pay you to do pottery.
0:41:36 Then you get the liking of the doing pottery plus you’re getting paid.
0:41:39 You’re your friend’s going to help you move.
0:41:41 They’re going to help me move and I’ll pay them and it’ll make it better.
0:41:43 But it turns out these extrinsic rewards undermine it.
0:41:46 Like your friend, if you tried to pay them, like how much was that worth your time?
0:41:49 What’s your hourly rate? Oh, I’ll give you $450 or whatever it is.
0:41:52 They’d be like, nah, I was doing it for love.
0:41:55 For what I wanted to do it for love.
0:41:57 And so these backfire effects are kind of clever.
0:41:59 There’s a very famous one of a daycare center that had the problem where parents were kind of
0:42:03 showing up a little late and the parents would feel guilty, but it sucked for the daycare center.
0:42:07 And they’re like, you know what we’re going to do?
0:42:08 We’re going to charge parents every time parents come in late.
0:42:10 Like $10 or something.
0:42:11 $10.
0:42:12 A hundred percent of the parents that come in late.
0:42:13 Because now they’re like, okay, I get it. I can just pay.
0:42:15 So we’re in the transactional mode as opposed to you’re just helping me and it’s out of your
0:42:19 guilt and your enjoyability.
0:42:20 We have this interesting internalized capitalism and how we think motivation works.
0:42:24 We think, oh, I’ll pay people more or I’ll give someone a reward.
0:42:27 And what that does is it makes people’s normal reasons for doing something kind of go away.
0:42:32 I think this is part and parcel of why we’re having all these discussions about things like
0:42:36 quiet quitting and so on and why there’s sort of a disconnect sometimes between
0:42:40 the way young people think about work and old people.
0:42:43 Whereas we’ve gotten so involved in thinking about the value of our work as a monetary thing.
0:42:48 We’ve sort of missed out that sometimes the value of our work is like
0:42:51 a deep intrinsic reward thing or like the value we get out of doing a good job and so on.
0:42:56 But that goes away when you’re so focused on the monetary side of it.
0:43:00 We see this, I think, in our young people with grades where
0:43:02 I think there was a time when school was about learning.
0:43:05 You know, it’s fun and because learning is fun, right?
0:43:07 We kind of like doing these things.
0:43:08 You slap a grade on something all of a sudden it becomes not enjoyable.
0:43:12 It was really old work in the 70s by the psychologist Susan Harder
0:43:15 had kids doing these like anagrams and puzzles.
0:43:18 So they’re doing these kind of fun puzzles.
0:43:20 But then she has some kids get grades for them.
0:43:22 And what she finds is that when kids start getting graded for them,
0:43:24 they don’t enjoy them anymore.
0:43:26 Before the grade, they’re smiling and having fun and they’re enjoying it.
0:43:29 Now with the grade, they think it sucks.
0:43:31 And when you give them choices of which puzzles to pick,
0:43:33 the ones who are getting graded pick the easiest ones.
0:43:36 Because they’re like, well, my god, I’m just trying to get the best grade.
0:43:38 Whereas if you don’t have grades, you pick the hardest ones that you can do
0:43:41 because you’re like, I’m only doing it because it’s fun.
0:43:43 Yeah, it’s challenging.
0:43:44 And if you don’t win, who cares?
0:43:46 It was just like a good challenge.
0:43:47 Yeah.
0:43:48 And so I think our mistaken theories of motivation sometimes
0:43:51 wind up meaning that we take something that’s fun
0:43:54 and we give it something like a ding, a cost, a grade, a payment,
0:44:00 a Christmas bonus or whatever.
0:44:02 And then we just make it less enjoyable.
0:44:04 And you make people perform worse
0:44:06 because they’re just trying to do it the fastest possible to get the grade.
0:44:09 What do you think about, I had heard this term a while ago
0:44:12 and I don’t know how it applies to your research,
0:44:14 but there was this idea floated of experience stretching.
0:44:17 The frame to me was that you go out and you’re in Hawaii,
0:44:22 you’re in a beautiful place and you see this amazing sunset
0:44:25 and you’re like, God, that was just a beautiful sunset.
0:44:27 Next day, same thing happens.
0:44:29 This time somebody hands you a Mai Tai at the same time.
0:44:32 You’re like, oh, damn, this Mai Tai is good.
0:44:34 This sunset’s great.
0:44:36 This is an even better experience.
0:44:37 And the next day you can level up from there.
0:44:39 Someone hands you a cigar, whatever your poison is,
0:44:42 or doesn’t even have to be a poison,
0:44:43 but they add to the experience.
0:44:45 And then all of a sudden, the next time you’re presented
0:44:48 with just a simple sunset, you go back to, well, it was better
0:44:52 if I only had those two extra, three extra things.
0:44:55 You stretch that out.
0:44:57 Once you’re stretched, how do you pull that back in?
0:45:00 And is that a real thing?
0:45:01 Totally.
0:45:02 This is what psychologists call hedonic adaptation.
0:45:04 You’re sort of on this hedonic treadmill
0:45:06 and you just get used to stuff.
0:45:08 Hedonic, like hedonism?
0:45:10 Like hedonism, right?
0:45:11 I mean, it’s a fancy way of saying we get used to stuff.
0:45:13 You see the sunset the first time, that’s great.
0:45:15 You see it the next time, it’s okay,
0:45:17 but it’s not maybe as good as the first time.
0:45:19 You experience stress, you know, just get sunset,
0:45:21 but you get sunset in Mai Tai.
0:45:23 Or if you just have a Mai Tai, you’re like,
0:45:24 where’s Mai Tai?
0:45:24 Where’s Mai Tai with it?
0:45:26 And so this is the sad thing about great experiences in life
0:45:29 because we get used to them and they become the new standard.
0:45:32 Once you have an amazing experience,
0:45:34 it like kind of ruins experiences for you for the rest.
0:45:38 So you can, and one of my favorite strategies is
0:45:40 it actually goes back to the ancient Stoics.
0:45:42 They had this idea they called negative visualization
0:45:45 where they thought every morning
0:45:46 you should just take five minutes of the meditation
0:45:48 to think that all these terrible things are going to happen.
0:45:51 My wife is going to leave me.
0:45:52 I’m going to lose my job.
0:45:53 I’m going to not be able to walk.
0:45:55 My car is going to get hit.
0:45:56 This isn’t like hours and hours of ruminating about.
0:45:58 This is just one moment about it.
0:46:00 My favorite one, the one that’s most effective,
0:46:01 I use this in talks sometime is you mentioned you have kids.
0:46:04 Imagine right now, last time you saw your kids,
0:46:07 it’s the last time you’re going to see them.
0:46:08 They’re gone.
0:46:09 That some terrible things happened.
0:46:11 Oh, Jesus, why you got to do this to me?
0:46:12 But I bet the next time you see them, you’re going to go back.
0:46:16 It seems like that’s an evil practice.
0:46:17 No, it causes you to notice all the good things.
0:46:20 The kid one is all terrible, right?
0:46:21 But like, let’s take my phone.
0:46:23 I lost it, right?
0:46:23 Did I leave it in the car?
0:46:24 Did I leave it at the restaurant?
0:46:25 Where is it?
0:46:26 Found it in 10 minutes.
0:46:26 I’m like, oh my God, all my photos are in there.
0:46:29 Have I backed them up?
0:46:30 All my passwords are going to be such a pain in the ass.
0:46:32 And I get my phone back.
0:46:32 I’m like, oh, I wasn’t appreciating my phone at all.
0:46:35 I had no gratitude for my phone before I lost it.
0:46:38 But then you lose it.
0:46:39 And the negative visualization is good
0:46:40 because you don’t actually have to lose it.
0:46:42 You just have this moment of like, what is this?
0:46:44 What would this be like?
0:46:45 Do you think travel helps with that?
0:46:47 Travel to the countries where we don’t have as much?
0:46:49 Totally.
0:46:50 If you’re in a kind of luxury situation a lot,
0:46:53 resetting the experience is good.
0:46:55 Sometimes for talks and things like fly first class.
0:46:58 I don’t want to always fly first class
0:46:59 because then you get used to it.
0:47:00 You got to go back and coach every once in a while
0:47:02 because it makes you can’t do anything.
0:47:04 You should try it.
0:47:05 It’ll suck that time.
0:47:06 But you stopped experiencing the benefit.
0:47:08 I know.
0:47:09 No, but this–
0:47:10 I’m allowed one thing.
0:47:11 You got to give me one thing.
0:47:12 Yeah, you can’t.
0:47:12 First class for me is like, if it’s a short flight, fine.
0:47:16 But long flights, I can’t do it.
0:47:18 No, it’s good.
0:47:19 The next time you go back, though, you’re like, oh,
0:47:21 I forgot.
0:47:22 They bring the stuff in the glass, not the plastic.
0:47:24 You don’t notice any of that now.
0:47:26 If it’s too hard, you could do the negative visualization.
0:47:29 Next flight, I want to be in coach and really think about it,
0:47:31 like, oh, it’s a plastic glass and it’s really small.
0:47:34 And then when you get like, oh, this is great.
0:47:36 Yeah, we can use imagination to kind of break out
0:47:38 of hedonic adaptation.
0:47:39 Another one that I find–
0:47:41 and this is, I think, why we get happiness so wrong.
0:47:42 We assume if I had all these pleasurable experiences,
0:47:45 it would continue to be pleasurable.
0:47:47 But because we get used to stuff, the sunset with the Mai Tai,
0:47:50 that experience stretch, feels good the one time it’s stretched.
0:47:53 But we can’t.
0:47:54 It’s unlikely that you’re going to be
0:47:55 able to have the privilege of stretching infinitely.
0:47:58 Yeah, a lot more times.
0:47:58 Sometimes these extraordinary experiences
0:48:01 make you feel worse.
0:48:02 Also, these extraordinary experiences sometimes
0:48:04 make you unable to connect with other people.
0:48:07 I just had this at South Bye at my podcast company
0:48:10 at this really cool private concert with folks
0:48:12 for just like 30 people.
0:48:13 And I got to see this amazing band
0:48:15 that last played at Madison Square Garden privately,
0:48:18 just standing there.
0:48:20 I both had a wonderful experience.
0:48:21 And then when I left, I was kind of like,
0:48:22 this is going to literally ruin concert.
0:48:24 I’m never going to be able to go back and be like,
0:48:26 oh, you’re in row 20 now.
0:48:28 You’re like, meh, it’s not as good.
0:48:30 The other thing is, well, I’m going to go home.
0:48:31 And people are going to be like, how is South Bye?
0:48:32 I’m like, oh my god, I had this amazing.
0:48:34 Then I feel like an asshole because they
0:48:36 don’t have that experience.
0:48:36 Well, that’s tough.
0:48:37 And some people don’t have that filter.
0:48:39 And if you just drop that on a friend,
0:48:40 it’s like, that’s not a very thoughtful thing
0:48:43 that can crush somebody else.
0:48:44 There’s this evidence from Dan Gilbert and Matt Killingsworth
0:48:48 that these so-called extraordinary experiences,
0:48:50 like, do you get to fly to the moon
0:48:52 or like go in space or have some amazing concert
0:48:54 or Coachella private backstage?
0:48:57 You think it’s going to be amazing,
0:48:59 but actually it winds up doing two things.
0:49:00 It winds up ruining all the other experiences you have
0:49:03 because not everything’s going to be like Coachella backstage.
0:49:05 And then it winds up making you feel kind of lonely
0:49:08 because you can’t really share these experiences
0:49:10 with other people.
0:49:10 You feel sort of isolated.
0:49:12 And this is the thing that happens
0:49:14 to people who get these quick wealth windfalls,
0:49:17 to people who win the lottery, wind up feeling incredibly lonely
0:49:21 because it’s like nobody can share these experiences.
0:49:24 In one of my podcast episodes of my podcast, The Happiness Lab,
0:49:27 I interviewed this guy, Clay Cockrell,
0:49:29 who’s a mental health professional
0:49:30 who works with the .0001%.
0:49:33 So he’s like super wealthy people.
0:49:35 And they complain about things like,
0:49:36 they can’t make any friends.
0:49:38 One of them joined that kind of like regular guy,
0:49:40 not super wealthy gym.
0:49:42 And he was chatting with the guy like,
0:49:43 oh, would you do this weekend?
0:49:44 And the guy was like, oh, I tried out this new Mexican restaurant.
0:49:46 What did you do?
0:49:47 And he couldn’t admit like, I flew with my wife
0:49:49 and applied her plane to Paris to try this new champagne.
0:49:52 And here’s like a very similar experience.
0:49:54 They both tried something, but he like felt like,
0:49:56 I can’t tell somebody that.
0:49:57 And so one thing we don’t predict about becoming extremely famous
0:50:01 or extremely wealthy is like, you just can’t share that.
0:50:04 Not that many people can come along with you on the ride.
0:50:06 And so you feel so lonely.
0:50:08 One thing that I do, I love that I have you here
0:50:10 because I can throw out some curveballs your way
0:50:12 that I’m personally struggling with.
0:50:14 We can do just Kevin therapy.
0:50:16 Thank you.
0:50:16 I would love that.
0:50:17 If you can get like something I can climb in
0:50:20 and we can just do a full therapy session.
0:50:21 I suck at a lot of things.
0:50:22 But one thing that I’m pretty good at
0:50:25 is seeing something and being grateful
0:50:28 that I’m having that experience.
0:50:29 I have this thing where when something bad happens
0:50:32 in our household and it’s really not that big a deal,
0:50:35 I’ll say to my wife, well, at least we have warm running water.
0:50:39 And she hates that.
0:50:41 She’s like, that’s not helping the situation.
0:50:45 And I’m like, we live better than kings.
0:50:47 Kings and queens did not have warm running water.
0:50:50 Sometimes if you can frame it back to those times,
0:50:54 you can just be like, yeah, I missed my FedEx package
0:50:58 that I was hoping to get because it was going to be
0:51:00 my weekend project, whatever.
0:51:01 But I have warm water.
0:51:03 It’s clean.
0:51:04 There are people who are dying.
0:51:05 Does that help or am I just being an asshole?
0:51:07 So it helps, but you have to be ready for it.
0:51:10 So I guess two things.
0:51:11 One is what we don’t want to get into
0:51:13 is the kind of toxic positivity.
0:51:14 There are the FedEx packages that don’t come in.
0:51:16 There are bad days.
0:51:17 Why is that crappy?
0:51:18 So it goes.
0:51:19 I think you both want to have a moment
0:51:21 to acknowledge that crappy, but then reframe it.
0:51:24 I think we don’t want to get in a knee jerk
0:51:25 of any negative emotion is bad
0:51:27 because sometimes the negative emotions are normative.
0:51:29 Maybe not about the FedEx package.
0:51:31 That might not be it.
0:51:32 Sometimes my wife, my child, a friend, a colleague
0:51:35 will be having a negative emotion where I look at that.
0:51:37 I’m just like, you’re just being ridiculous here.
0:51:40 The world is not going to end because
0:51:41 of what you’re saying right now.
0:51:43 And I can’t relate.
0:51:45 And so I should have some empathy
0:51:47 for how they are feeling.
0:51:48 And is that the way to do it?
0:51:49 First of all, it’s part of the human condition.
0:51:51 Sometimes we’re going to be frustrated.
0:51:52 And actually, there’s some evidence
0:51:53 that one of the things we want for this recipe
0:51:55 of the happiest life is all the emotions.
0:51:58 We want what researchers call psychologically rich life.
0:52:00 You wouldn’t want a life where you didn’t have the home
0:52:01 of like a damn FedEx.
0:52:03 Sometimes our negative emotions are useful signals.
0:52:05 If you’re frustrated with the FedEx,
0:52:06 that might mean you need to like switch to a different company.
0:52:09 Again, that’s a kind of narrow example.
0:52:10 But if you’re looking at the news
0:52:12 and you’re feeling really anxious,
0:52:13 that’s telling you something about
0:52:15 how you might want to get involved in the future.
0:52:16 If you’re kind of feeling lonely
0:52:18 or you’re feeling really overwhelmed is a huge one.
0:52:20 You come home and you use the example
0:52:22 of you talking to your wife.
0:52:23 She’s slamming things around and feeling really stressed out.
0:52:26 That’s not like, oh, we have running water.
0:52:27 That’s like, oh, this is a useful signal
0:52:29 that something’s off and we might need to rethink things.
0:52:31 I say the running water thing and it does not land.
0:52:33 I think compassion for the human condition
0:52:35 and the question of what is this negative emotion
0:52:37 trying to tell us.
0:52:38 And sometimes she’s not trying to tell me anything.
0:52:39 I could just reframe it and be fine.
0:52:41 This is actually helpful to sort of pay attention to.
0:52:44 Again, the ancients were so on top of this.
0:52:46 The Stoics got it where you can update your negative emotions.
0:52:49 But first take a quick look to see,
0:52:51 is it telling you something interesting?
0:52:53 Because I also watch the people who suppress every emotion
0:52:56 or just rewrite everything.
0:52:57 And that kind of gets you into toxic positivity landed.
0:53:00 Yeah, that actually is my downfall as well.
0:53:03 Because sometimes if I’m feeling something like that,
0:53:06 I’ll say, well, I have running water,
0:53:08 but I’m really just pushing it down a little bit.
0:53:11 And then later, it manifests.
0:53:13 When in aggregate, they all add up.
0:53:15 And I’m like, oh, shit, I didn’t actually
0:53:17 let that go the way I thought I was letting it go.
0:53:20 That’s a challenging thing.
0:53:21 Sometimes you have to look at the emotion to figure out what.
0:53:24 The Buddhists had this lovely analogy for this.
0:53:27 It comes with this parable that Buddha used to tell.
0:53:28 So the parable is Buddha’s telling to his followers.
0:53:31 He says, hey, if you’re walking down the street
0:53:32 and you get shot by an arrow, is that bad?
0:53:34 And the follower is like, yeah, it’s terrible.
0:53:36 On Buddhist day, you just get shot by arrows or anything.
0:53:38 But he’s like, well, if you’re walking down the street,
0:53:40 you don’t get shot just by one arrow,
0:53:41 but you also get shot by a second arrow.
0:53:43 Is that worse?
0:53:44 And the follower is like, yeah, it’s much worse
0:53:46 to get shot by two than one.
0:53:48 So Buddha says, the first arrow is life.
0:53:50 We can’t control it.
0:53:51 That’s the FedEx package that doesn’t show up.
0:53:53 That’s the bad thing.
0:53:54 But the second arrow is on us.
0:53:56 It’s how we react to it.
0:53:58 We control that second arrow.
0:53:59 The key is that sometimes the way you don’t stab yourself
0:54:02 with the second arrow is you regulate the emotion.
0:54:04 You think of a thing you’re grateful for.
0:54:06 You take a couple of deep breaths.
0:54:07 You reframe it.
0:54:08 But sometimes the way you don’t hit yourself
0:54:10 with the second arrow is you don’t squish it down
0:54:12 and let it ruminate.
0:54:13 And it flies out later as many arrows
0:54:15 that are going to hit everybody around you.
0:54:17 A lot of your work has the word happiness in it.
0:54:20 But would you say, in reality, that’s not the goal?
0:54:24 Oh, totally.
0:54:25 You’ve got to define happiness to figure out what I mean.
0:54:27 I’m thinking of happiness as someone like Aristotle talked
0:54:30 about you dying in the air.
0:54:31 The good life, the meaningful life, the purposeful life.
0:54:34 A life well lived.
0:54:34 A life well lived.
0:54:35 And for that moment, you might need to feel anxious
0:54:38 or frustrated or challenged or stressed.
0:54:41 There’s no such thing as normal.
0:54:42 But real happy, joyous life would be the roller coaster.
0:54:47 And in my mind, it would be the adaptability
0:54:51 of the individual to survive the ups and downs
0:54:55 rather than just be stuck totally down or way up.
0:54:57 Because neither of those things are where you really
0:55:00 want to be long term.
0:55:01 Totally.
0:55:02 Always joke with my students.
0:55:03 You know that DJ Khaled song, All I Do Is Win.
0:55:05 And I was like, that would be a terrible life.
0:55:07 All you did is win.
0:55:08 You just wouldn’t notice the goodness of the wins anymore.
0:55:10 Well, then there’s no more winning.
0:55:11 And there’s no more winning.
0:55:12 And like you’d be absolutely anxious that you could maybe
0:55:15 just lose by one point or something.
0:55:17 Well, and if everything was winning,
0:55:18 there’s no such thing as winning.
0:55:20 Because that’s just normal.
0:55:20 This is what we forget.
0:55:22 This is Hedonic adaptation.
0:55:23 If everything is luxury jets, then it’s not luxury jet
0:55:26 anymore because that’s just how you transport.
0:55:27 If everything is perfect champagne, perfect cigars,
0:55:30 you don’t notice anymore.
0:55:31 We need the ups and downs.
0:55:33 And you can give you a thrill.
0:55:34 So it’s ups and downs.
0:55:35 You go back to coach.
0:55:36 You can negatively visualize what it’s like.
0:55:39 You can really try to remember and reframe other people’s
0:55:42 lives and things.
0:55:43 That’s the insidious thing about the good stuff in life
0:55:46 as we get used to it.
0:55:46 But it has a corollary, which is like,
0:55:48 that’s also true for the bad stuff.
0:55:50 Remember COVID when it was like that first week?
0:55:52 And we’re like, we can’t do this.
0:55:53 But then April, May, we were just making some bread.
0:55:55 We were like sorting it out.
0:55:56 My wine consumption went up a lot.
0:55:58 At first I was like, OK, I’m not going to drink
0:56:00 because I want my immune system to be as healthy as possible.
0:56:03 And then I’m like, well, you know what?
0:56:04 I’m going to die.
0:56:05 Yeah, I’m going to drink.
0:56:08 I remember thinking in March 15,
0:56:09 like this doesn’t go away in like a week.
0:56:11 I was wiping down my egg cartons with like Clorex shit.
0:56:16 Were you doing that too?
0:56:17 I remember going to the store and putting
0:56:18 out all the like fruit and like with gloves on.
0:56:21 Like washing all the eggs.
0:56:23 That was so scary.
0:56:24 Yeah.
0:56:24 But one of the things that the psychology work teaches us,
0:56:27 the worst possible thing that you think
0:56:29 could happen in your life could happen.
0:56:30 And it would be terrible, but you’d still be OK.
0:56:34 And it would still have good parts.
0:56:35 In my podcast, I talked to Dan Gilbert,
0:56:37 who’s done work with people, for example,
0:56:38 who’ve lost their kids, like a parent who’s a kid.
0:56:40 Can you imagine the more terrible thing?
0:56:42 I can’t even imagine.
0:56:42 And he says, obviously, it was the most terrible thing,
0:56:45 but I learned from it.
0:56:47 I learned what matters.
0:56:48 I’ve learned not to take things for granted.
0:56:49 Even the worst possible thing is not like,
0:56:52 oh, it comes with a silver lining.
0:56:53 It makes you stronger.
0:56:54 It kind of gives you this resilience.
0:56:56 The downs teach us something, right?
0:56:58 The downs allow us to get stronger.
0:57:00 And I do worry that sometimes we think
0:57:02 that a good life, a happy life.
0:57:04 I think parents think this for kids is like no downs,
0:57:06 no stress, no failure.
0:57:08 Those things are important.
0:57:10 It’s challenging.
0:57:10 Some parents try to prevent failure in a way
0:57:14 that they’re just trying to help the kid not hurt themselves
0:57:18 or something.
0:57:19 And in my mind, I’m like, on a one to 10,
0:57:21 how bad are we talking here?
0:57:22 Because if it’s anything over a four,
0:57:25 I want to protect a little bit.
0:57:26 But if it’s going to be a little scuff knee
0:57:28 because you messed up in a way that every other kid
0:57:31 has messed up, and it cements that learning,
0:57:35 that to me is very important to try and get that perfection
0:57:38 and just try and take out all the failure from a child,
0:57:41 I think is a bad thing to do.
0:57:43 Would you agree with that?
0:57:44 Yeah, totally, totally.
0:57:45 There’s this lovely book by Julie Lithcott Hames called
0:57:48 How to Raise an Adult where she walks through these strategies
0:57:50 and she says, parents are sometimes
0:57:52 trying to parent for the like right now.
0:57:54 You left your lunchbox at home.
0:57:55 I’m just going to bring it to you.
0:57:56 Or we got to get out the door and you haven’t
0:57:58 totally learned to tie your shoes.
0:57:59 I’m just going to tie them for you.
0:58:01 No diss to parents.
0:58:02 Like parenting is freaking hard.
0:58:03 The modern day doesn’t make it easy.
0:58:05 Sometimes you do have to parent for right now,
0:58:07 but often we’re missing out on learning opportunities
0:58:10 for our kids.
0:58:10 Like you don’t bring them their lunch.
0:58:12 They don’t have their lunch that day.
0:58:13 So maybe they do spend six hours hungry,
0:58:14 but they’re going to freaking remember their lunch the next time.
0:58:18 And every time you fast tie their shoes for them
0:58:20 because you got to get out the door,
0:58:21 those are the learning opportunities.
0:58:23 And so you might be five minutes late.
0:58:25 That’s not great, but parenting for right now
0:58:27 and just like solving in the moment,
0:58:29 we’re not allowing our kids to screw up and learn.
0:58:32 I think also sometimes two parents
0:58:33 have to reasonably regulate their own distress about that.
0:58:36 You see the lunchbox on the table and you’re like,
0:58:38 I could intervene.
0:58:39 Ultimately, the learning you’re going to miss out if you do that.
0:58:43 It’s so hard for parents.
0:58:44 It’s so hard to watch your kids suffer,
0:58:46 but that’s part of being a good parent.
0:58:48 They’re not going to die.
0:58:49 Yeah.
0:58:49 We’re coming up on time,
0:58:50 but I did want to ask you a couple more questions.
0:58:52 With the title of this podcast,
0:58:54 it’ll have something in happiness in the title.
0:58:57 There has to be a handful of people
0:59:00 out there that are tuning in and they’re saying,
0:59:01 I’m struggling right now.
0:59:02 I’m at that down point and I’ve been there for a while.
0:59:04 I know there’s the no-brainers.
0:59:07 If it’s an emergency,
0:59:08 there are hotlines to call if you’re suicidal.
0:59:10 There’s things of that nature.
0:59:12 But what are some tactics, some go-tos that said,
0:59:14 I’m having more bad days than good days.
0:59:17 How can I get myself out of this rut?
0:59:19 If it’s really extreme, you got to go get a professional help.
0:59:23 I think of a lot of the strategies we’ve been talking about here
0:59:25 more as like preventative medicine.
0:59:27 The analogy I use, if you walk into your doctor’s office,
0:59:29 you’re like, I’ve got some high blood pressure.
0:59:31 I’m not doing so.
0:59:31 Well, your doctor might be like, hop on the treadmill
0:59:33 or eat this thing or whatever.
0:59:35 But if you walk into your doctor’s office clutching your heart
0:59:37 saying, I’m having an acute heart attack right now,
0:59:39 your doctor’s going to be like, well, hop on the treadmill.
0:59:41 And do you need–
0:59:42 And so if someone’s struggling,
0:59:44 if you’re feeling acutely suicidal,
0:59:46 definitely reach out to somebody.
0:59:48 Even though your brain can’t see hope
0:59:49 because that’s what depression does,
0:59:50 it puts on these reverse rosy goggles
0:59:52 that everything looks terrible.
0:59:54 You will feel differently,
0:59:55 even if you don’t feel that way.
0:59:57 Like reach out and get help.
0:59:59 But if you’re just–
1:00:00 I’m feeling overwhelmed.
1:00:01 I’m feeling more burned out.
1:00:02 I don’t have a lot of pleasure in my life.
1:00:04 I think the first thing to know is what the science shows
1:00:06 is it doesn’t have to be that way.
1:00:08 There are things you can do to do better,
1:00:10 even if it doesn’t feel like it.
1:00:12 I think the first thing is even if you don’t feel like it,
1:00:14 reach out to a friend.
1:00:15 Just go through your phone and find someone.
1:00:17 Or if you don’t have anybody in your phone,
1:00:19 no judgment, just like go to a coffee shop,
1:00:21 get out in the world,
1:00:23 and just try to have a conversation with a stranger.
1:00:25 Even though it feels frictionny.
1:00:27 Get off your phone.
1:00:27 You can literally walk into a Catholic church
1:00:29 and sit in a booth if you really needed to,
1:00:31 even if you’re not Catholic.
1:00:32 There’s so much work by researchers like Nick Epley
1:00:34 and others that we assume people don’t want to talk to us,
1:00:36 but people actually are fine to talk to us,
1:00:38 much more than we think.
1:00:39 And it’s much more enjoyable for them than we predict.
1:00:42 His data suggests that even if you’re an introvert,
1:00:44 the act of just having a calm conversation
1:00:46 with a stranger is going to be better than you predict.
1:00:49 There was this taboo around mental health,
1:00:51 and then there still is.
1:00:52 I’m uncomfortable with it
1:00:53 because I’ve finally broken down those walls
1:00:55 over a decade of therapy.
1:00:57 And so I can call a friend and say,
1:00:58 “Hey, I’m having a bad day.”
1:00:59 How do you encourage someone that may say,
1:01:02 “I don’t want to show that vulnerability.
1:01:04 I don’t want to show that weakness.”
1:01:06 Don’t start with that.
1:01:06 That’s not how you lead.
1:01:08 I would lead with asking other people questions.
1:01:10 Ask how their day is going.
1:01:12 How are your kids?
1:01:12 I was just thinking about you
1:01:14 and thinking about our old times.
1:01:15 So you start by just making a connection.
1:01:18 And my guess is so many things will happen physiologically.
1:01:20 Your body will just kind of calm down.
1:01:22 You’ll go into sort of more less fight or flight
1:01:25 and more rest and digest mode.
1:01:26 You’ll kind of get the conversation going.
1:01:28 You’ll overcome that speed hump,
1:01:29 bump up the first part of the talk
1:01:30 where it kind of feels a little awkward.
1:01:32 And then you get things going.
1:01:33 And then you ask other people to be vulnerable first.
1:01:36 Just like how are things, whatever,
1:01:38 pick up on their questions.
1:01:39 And then you can insert your stuff,
1:01:41 researched by their surgeon general,
1:01:42 Vick Murthy and others has found is one thing
1:01:44 with loneliness is we don’t realize
1:01:46 that we can reach out to other people.
1:01:47 We can ask them how they’re going.
1:01:49 We can give advice to them.
1:01:51 And that makes us feel so much better.
1:01:52 It’s not about me saying like,
1:01:55 hey, I need some help right now.
1:01:56 That’s not the call.
1:01:58 It’s just starting the connection.
1:01:59 And there probably is going to be a question about like,
1:02:00 hey, well, what’s up with you?
1:02:02 And you’re like, actually, I’m having a hard time.
1:02:03 Yeah, exactly.
1:02:05 Or you’ll just wind up feeling better
1:02:07 if you’re helping somebody else
1:02:08 and reaching out to other people.
1:02:10 And honestly, we’re all struggling right now.
1:02:11 It’s 2024, everything’s falling apart.
1:02:13 Probably if you reach out to a friend,
1:02:14 they’re going to want to check in with you.
1:02:16 Everybody’s got their shit.
1:02:17 Right. Yeah, exactly.
1:02:18 So that would be thing number one.
1:02:20 I think thing number two is just get out of the house,
1:02:22 move your body.
1:02:23 There’s never a time when I haven’t left the house
1:02:26 that I haven’t felt a little bit better
1:02:28 than like being my PJs on a screen, right?
1:02:30 So get out and move your body.
1:02:32 And the move your body doesn’t have to be run a marathon.
1:02:34 It can just be like, just take a walk, just be outside.
1:02:38 And if possible, even if it’s for 10, 15 minutes,
1:02:41 just get away from your phone.
1:02:42 Just be present in the world out there.
1:02:44 All of a sudden, things will start feeling a little bit better.
1:02:47 Those are some of my emergency go-tos.
1:02:50 Get social, do for others, move your body.
1:02:52 Those can be powerful.
1:02:53 That’s fantastic.
1:02:55 You have a podcast, is it weekly?
1:02:57 What’s your cadence on that?
1:02:58 We’re like trying to get close to weekly,
1:03:00 but we’re not perfectly weekly.
1:03:01 Tell us about that and what people can expect
1:03:03 when they tune in.
1:03:04 Yeah, it’s called the happiness lab.
1:03:05 It’s all about strategies we can use to feel better.
1:03:08 Is that the name of your actual lab?
1:03:09 Is it happiness lab or no?
1:03:10 Kind of, but we haven’t like patented it.
1:03:12 But yeah, it’s happiness lab.
1:03:14 Yeah, and we talk about all these things.
1:03:15 We just finished a season on how to navigate,
1:03:18 communicating better and love and with other people.
1:03:20 We have a season coming up that’s about my happiness challenges
1:03:23 that are like the stuff I struggle with.
1:03:25 So things like stress and dealing with my time better,
1:03:28 perfectionism, which we spoke about is going to be on there.
1:03:31 It’s really just evidence-based approaches
1:03:33 to handle all the stuff that comes up in life.
1:03:35 Do you have a dedicated website where people can go and subscribe?
1:03:37 Or just anywhere.
1:03:38 Yeah, you can subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.
1:03:40 Yeah, just turn the happiness lab.
1:03:42 Amazing.
1:03:43 I love that.
1:03:43 Thank you so much for being on the show.
1:03:44 Yeah, thanks for having me.
1:03:45 This is fun.
1:03:46 Yeah, this is absolutely fun.
1:03:47 And it is the right time to be having these conversations.
1:03:50 I’m so glad you have a podcast around it.
1:03:51 We should mention your Coursera course.
1:03:54 Four million people, is that right?
1:03:56 Have you taken it?
1:03:57 Yeah, the Science of Well-Being on Coursera.org.
1:03:59 It’s kind of like a very short free version
1:04:02 of the Yale class I teach.
1:04:03 And because we’ve seen that a lot of young people need this stuff,
1:04:06 we also have a new one called the Science of Well-Being for teens,
1:04:08 which is for middle school and high school students.
1:04:10 Is that something that’s publicly available
1:04:12 or do you have to be going to Yale to actually get that?
1:04:14 The Yale One Live, you go to enroll in Yale
1:04:16 and pay the Yale money and stuff.
1:04:17 But you get the free version on Coursera.
1:04:19 It’s a shorter, not like 26-week version,
1:04:22 but it covers all the relevant content,
1:04:24 and you’ll learn exactly what the Yale students are.
1:04:26 Any books in your future?
1:04:27 I like the podcast because it’s so much of the happiness stuff,
1:04:30 these tips that we’ve been talking about,
1:04:32 with these short little narrative, short quick strategies.
1:04:35 That’s what I like.
1:04:35 I feel like that’s what people need in the moment.
1:04:37 It’s like, I’m feeling frustrated.
1:04:39 I’m feeling overwhelmed.
1:04:40 I don’t have any time.
1:04:41 You’re getting it out now versus waiting a year and a half
1:04:43 – Exactly, exactly. – Yeah, amazing.
1:04:46 Well, thank you for being on the show.
1:04:47 – Thanks so much for having me.