How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos

welcome to the huberman Lab podcast where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday [Music] life I'm Andrew huberman and I'm a professor of neurobiology and Opthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine my guest today is Dr Lori Santos Dr Lori Santos is a professor of cognitive science and psychology at Yale University she is a world expert in happiness and in the science of emotions generally today we talk about true happiness not in any kind of loose and aspirational way but instead what the research really tells us about how to create lasting happiness for ourselves we talk about relationships and happiness that is relationships of all kinds between friends between romantic Partners between family members and of course with ourselves we talk about all of that in the context of what to do what not to do and how to frame your whole notion of What happiness is and how to attain it in the context of daily Tod do for instance most all of us by now have heard about the power of gratitude and gratitude practices in fact I've done an entire episode about gratitude and the science of gratitude but Dr Lori Santos today explains that by shifting our orientation toward gratitude toward something more aligned with what Delights us we are able to better tap into the mechanisms that enable us to feel happier in a more pervasive way we also discuss topics such as hedonic adaptation that is how our pursuit of things and our whole experience experience of pleasure sets the stage for what's going to feel like a meaningful Pursuit and pleasureful in the days and weeks to follow this is very important for everyone to hear especially in this Modern Age of so-called dopamine hits easy to achieve dopamine highly processed foods and the various things that you can find online and speaking of online we also discuss the role that smartphones and social media play not just in our happiness but in our cognition you'll be shocked indeed I was shocked to learn that just having your phone in the room where you are trying to learn something significantly diminishes your performance on things like mathematics and the learning of other topics we get into all of that today the interrelated parts and I promise that it's all made extremely clear and actionable thanks to Dr Lori Santos's incredible expertise and she is an incredible teacher in fact the course that she has taught at Yale University entitled psychology and the good life is the most popular course ever taught at Yale over the course of 300 years and that popularity will not come as a surprise as you now get to learn from Dr lorri Santos directly this was a remarkable episode I must say I learned so much and I'll just highlight one big takeaway that I've implemented in my own life and that you can frame in the back of your mind as you listen to today's episode is the difference between being happy with one's life as opposed to in one's life and indeed how to achieve both before we begin I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford it is however part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to Consumer information about science and science related tools to the general public in keeping with that theme I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast our first sponsor is eight sleep eight sleep makes Smart mattress covers with cooling Heating and sleep tracking capacity I've spoken many times before on this podcast about the critical need for us to get adequate amounts of quality sleep each night that's truly the foundation of all mental health physical health and performance and one of the best ways to ensure that you get a great night's sleep is to control the temperature of your sleeping environment and that's because in order to fall and stay deeply asleep your body temperature actually has to drop by about 1 to 3° and in order to wake up feeling refreshed and energized your body temperature actually has to increase 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virtual private Network that keeps your data secure and private it does that by routing your internet activity through their servers and encrypting it so that no one can see or sell your data now I'm familiar with the effects of not securing my data well enough several years ago I had one of my bank accounts hacked and it was a terrible amount of work to have that reversed and for the account to be secured when that happened I talked to my friends in the tech community and what they told me was that even though you think you're in interet connection may be secure often times it's not especially if you're using Wi-Fi networks such as those on planes in hotels at coffee shops and other public places surprisingly even at home your data might not be as secure as you think to make sure that what I described before would never happen to me again I started using expressvpn the great thing about expressvpn is that I don't even notice that it's running since the connection it provides is so fast I have it on my computer and on my phone and I keep it on whenever I'm connected to the internet with expressvpn I know everything is secure my web browsing all my passwords all my data and of course anything that's behind an account wall like a bank account it can't be tracked and no one can access or steal your data which is terrific if you'd like to start protecting your internet activity using expressvpn you can go to expressvpn.com huberman and you can get an extra 3 months free again that's expressvpn.com slh huberman to get an extra 3 months free and now for my discussion with Dr Lori s Santos Dr Lori Santos welcome thanks so so much for having me on the show I want to talk about this thing that everyone seems to want but most everyone has trouble keeping themselves in a state of Happiness which raises the question of whether or not we should even be seeking to constantly be in a state of happiness but just to sit back from that question for a moment how should we think about the relationship between emotions and this thing that we call cognition because I think a lot of where we're going today is to distinguish between feelings thoughts and behaviors and as neuroscientists psychologists Etc we have to understand the difference between emotions and cognition and maybe where they overlap so if you could educate us a bit on that I think that will uh set the stage nicely for understanding happiness yeah well I'm glad you started there actually because you know the very definition of happiness I think as social scientists tend to think about it includes both of these parts right so I think social scientists tend to think about happiness as being happy in your life and being happy with your life so being happy in your life is sort of the emotion side right I have decent number of positive emotions maybe slightly less negative emotions like you existing in your life feels good that's kind of an emotional part right um but then there's also kind of how you think your life is going do you have purpose are you kind of happy with how things are going it's how you think about your life which is sort of a cognitive thing and so even the earliest social scientists who started thinking about happiness at the time they call it subjective wellbeing so I think psychologists were like happiness TS sounds too wooy like we'll call it something else but it means exactly the same thing it means subjective wellbeing right when they started thinking about subjective well-being they divided it into this sort of affective emotional part which is like how you feel in your life but also this cognitive part how you think your life is going so that basic dichotomy has been there since the very beginning of folks studying happiness scientifically I'm already struck by this distinction between how things are going in your life versus with your life um one requires a a kind of firstperson experiencing of life in your life you know do you wake up feeling good are you um feeling good with your inside of your friendships and other relationships family romantic relationships school work the other um involves a bit of a third personing of self yep of looking at one's um CV either actual CV or um reflected CV uh through the lens of other people and kind of getting a sense like am I doing well am I not doing well um I think this is a really important distinction um because it seems like ultimately the goal if I may is to be happy in your life regardless of the third personing provided that you're not doing damage to somebody else's happiness in life yeah well I think ideally it'd be nice to do both right and I think there are moments when these things dissociate right so you know you interact with lots of interesting rich people out here in California I think a lot of them have kind of in their life feels pretty good right they have lots of hedonic Pleasures they're drinking nice wine hanging out Beach you be amazed at how much how much I'm how much suffering they report oh that's interesting how much suffering they report so this is the question is is is this sort of cognitive part the like third person part or is it the reporting part and I think when the psychologists are thinking about it they really think about it as the reporting part right and and this gets tricky right because you know I see folks having their nice glass of wine on the beach and I'm thinking like that's coming with lots of positive emotion like I bet if I tested them and could have a direct look at their sensory experience and probably be pretty positive it's only when they reflect on their life and they're asking well how's it going that they say oh you know I don't know my stocks went down or like when I hear about um lack of Happiness let me think of some of the kind of bullet point ones that seem to come up repetitively are they are indeed not related to lack of resources I don't hear that what I've heard and this is also true for where I spend part of my time in where I grew up which is in cicon Valley which is also not everyone but there are people there who have accured tremendous amount of wealth the mean has shifted very high at and hence the cost of living um but it's often concerns about um their kids yeah or their mother is ill their child is struggling in a particular way um very often that's what it is they're concerned about the lack of well-being in their kids Rel related to mental health or physical health or other relatives mental health physical health or they're upset about something politically yeah but we won't go there we won't go there yeah no I think this is true right you know so much of our happiness is made up of the happiness of other people right um both kind of how they're doing and how we think they're doing cognitively but literally just emotionally right you know if you've ever been around a family member or a spouse who was incredibly pissed off really sad it's it's incredibly hard not to catch those emotions yourself and we as psychologists know how these processes work right these process are emotional contagion where you're literally catching the emotions of other people and so oftentimes the things that you most worry about to be happy yourself is focusing on the happiness of the people around you because that literally becomes your happiness at a very fundamental level now I'm pausing just to think about this a little bit more as we grow up um and I realize it varies by place and lots of circumstances but as we grow up we are taught to pay attention to how our life is going a bit from the outside we yeah gain evaluations starting really young little stars on our pictures or good job or nowadays they say great effort in drawing this whole thing the growth mindset language um but I don't know that in the United States we are taught to um think about being happy in our life yeah right as as kids kids I think all kids all all mammals seem to gravitate towards um joyful experiences for them playing is almost always an innate um joyful experience but then as the evaluations start coming in we we get better and better at assessing our performance and where we are um relative to the sort of standard goals of the third grade the fifth grade the 12th grade um but at the same time I don't think anyone ever sat me down and said um how are you going to evaluate if you're feeling good in your life like that you're savoring your soccer game that you're savoring your time with friends that was never never taught to me yeah and I think there's a real danger of these kind of extrinsic rewards as you might call them all the stuff outside the grades you know the performance measures and so on literally stealing your intrinsic rewards um there's this funny phenomenon on psychology where if you have something that's intrinsically rewarding so let's say exercise right like I want to go out you know and like you to run like a bunch right I love running I get this intrinsic reward from running now I get some sort of tool whether it's my watch or something I'm scribbling down in a phone app and I have to like log my running now it becomes a sort of extrinsic reward it's not just like the feeling of running but it sort of takes on this extrinsic idea and then what happens is sometimes we end up going for that reward anyway um the fiction writer David sideras has this wonderful uh article called the Fitbit life where he talks about how he wanted to get fit it's in intrinsic reward of you know exercising more and he got the Fitbit and then it was all about the Fitbit he would set the level higher and set the level higher and he himself was miserable and no longer enjoying running to the point that like at some point he just would walk around you know shaking his arm just to get up to those final steps right that's a really terrible case where your extrinsic reward winds up taking over but so many of the cases you just talked about are ones in our real life where that comes up much more insidiously than like a Fitbit or something like that you talked about play in mammals the easiest thing that little kid animals do all over over the place little kid humans don't do that as much anymore because even from really young ages they're you know in toddler you know University where they're kind of learning things to get into the next grade and get the perfect grade so they can get into institutions like ours right it all becomes about extrinsic rewards and so I think you're really right we're kind of extrinsic sizing all the rewards to the point that we're not getting to internal happiness it was hard already to pay attention to that stuff because I think we'll probably talk about this it's hard to be mindful about your emotion you really have to pay attention to what's going on but I think it's gotten even harder because we have these metrics they're all over the place in our culture but they're just not the intrinsic thing there's some extrinsic marker that could make the intrinsic thing even less fun for people that um grow up or live in areas where well let's just say that that have less um disposable wealth um is there there must be data on sort of um relationship to Intrinsic versus extrinsic um forces on happiness I mean I can make up all sorts of stories in my head about how people starting out from very different circumstances would be more or less happy but what do the data say yeah so these effects of kind of resources on happiness are really interesting and they're nuanced right so if you look at the lower end of the kind of income Spectrum you would obviously say that money affects happiness right if you can't put food on the table if you can't put a roof over your head definitely getting a little bit more is going to affect your happiness in a positive way and the data sort of bear this out um this very there's a very famous study by the uh Nobel prize winning Economist Danny conoman rip um back in 2010 he did this cool study where he looked at the correlation between income and happiness as reported in how much stress you have um how much positive emotion you experience and so on at the low end of the income scales it just goes up and up and up right more money just almost linearly gives you more happiness but what Danny found and is the second part of this nuanced picture is that that slope kind of levels off and it levels off in $210 at around $75,000 what does that mean that means if you get more than $75,000 um you're not going to feel any less stressed you're not going to experience any more positive emotion even if I double or triple or quadruple your income on those metrics you're not going to see any increase then those are um pre-tax 2010 yeah they didn't get into like the real CU you're like oh my god well I live in California like if you live in Iowa maybe it's not so bad but like and those numbers will change but the upshot is there's probably some number in like 20 25 2024 numbers that might be like you know maybe $1,000 $120,000 whatever it is the point is that there's some number at which getting more is not going to increase your happiness at the same slope now there's been nuanced fights about this as there is a lot in kind of real research about well is that really true does the slope really ever go up and now the picture seems to be well the slope might go up a teeny tiny like negligible bit but it doesn't go up as as much as say getting extra 10 minutes of exercise in or another 20 minutes of sleep or scribbling the things you're grateful for all those things will impact your happiness much more than like quintupling your income and so do do your resources affect happiness yeah if you ain't got any resources you definitely will feel happier if you can get them but if you have a lot getting more really isn't going to help sorry to interrupt but lately I've been um saying on the basis of those findings about this than 75 yeah K per year probably now like you said 100 to 125k let's just say something like that um would be the equivalent amount uh that money indeed cannot buy happiness but it can buffer stress do you think that's true you're making me rethink that statement maybe it doesn't buffer stress past a certain amount yeah I mean I think in in the original e conoman data he found that it doesn't right I mean how much stress you report on a daily basis was literally one of the measures they were using for happiness but I think you're right it can the risk around it can buffer it right I think if you're at a certain set of means you know that like you know if a bad thing happens you're going to be okay so it can allow you to make riskier decisions that can allow you to do things that you might not do if you're right at that boundary where losing some money it might pop you back down I think the problem is that one of the ways we evaluate our financial situation but pretty much every situation I think this goes back to the nurse science is that we don't do it objectively we do it relative and when you think about your relative financial status there's lots of other folks around to whom you're comparing yourself I think one of the reasons that rich folks don't necessarily think they're less stressed when they have very high levels of wealth and so on is because they're looking around and everyone's doing much better than them like and this is just a fundamental feature of the way we evaluate stuff right is that we don't evaluate in objective terms we evaluate relative to these reference points and honestly as you get you're kind of going up this sort of logarithmic scale where their reference points are getting even further away from you and I think that that can have a huge hit on people's perception of their own happiness and their perception of their stress levels right because they're working towards a goal that's probably not going to make them that much happier but they haven't kind of abandon this intuition that more money will make me happy um on my podcast the happiness lab I had this guy Klay cockroll who is really fun he's a a a wealth psychologist so he's a mental health professional that only works with the 0.00001% and already we should say well if if wealth made you happy he should be out of a job but no he's lots of clients lots of I guess very well-paying clients he looked like he was doing well for himself um but he talks about how those folks haven't abandoned this notion that more money will make them happy they set some standard like oh as soon as I become as soon as I get 50 million I'll be happy or as soon as I become a billionaire but then they get to that point they're not feeling any more positive emotion they're not feeling less stressed and rather than saying well hang on maybe that hypothesis was wrong more money doesn't work they say ah the hypothesis it's all right more money will make me happy I just got a it wasn't 50 million now it's 100 million or whatever it is and so I think that that's a lot due to the fact that folks are comparing their wealth levels against others and our our comparison system sucks because we constantly compare ourselves against others but we never pick people that are doing worse than us we always pick people who are doing better than us I know a fair number of very happy wealthy people I know a fair number of very miserable wealthy people I know a fair number of um happy uh non-wealthy people and a fair number of miserable inside they report feeling miserable um un unwealthy people well it fits completely with what you know a lot of the happiness research suggests right which is that it's much less about our circumstances than we think when it comes to who's happy and who's not right you know we often think you know if I could get more money or if I could get more accolades at work or if I could get a new partner if I could move somewhere I'd be happier but exactly what you're saying if you look at people with all those different life circumstances both the good version and the bad version find some happy folks and some not so happy folks and now what researchers are starting to think is that it actually doesn't involve our circumstances as much as we think again I like with bracket it unless those circumstances are really dire circumstances don't matter as much as we think it tends to be the kind of stuff that's much more under our control than our circumstances right it tends to be how we behave what are what thought patterns we use the emotions we seek out the social connection we experience those things matter much more and so I think you know your experience with the happy and not so happy Rich folks and the happy and not so happy poor folks kind of bear out what we think it's like it's just not your circumstances that doesn't matter as much as you assume let's talk about this relationship between feelings thought patterns and behaviors in the context of happiness I think anyone listening to this or watching this probably wants to be happy as much as possible I mean I suppose there are few songwriters poets and I've got some friends in in uh in those uh domains of life and they do seem to derive a lot of um insight and inspiration and have done amazing things um through the kind of depths of uh unhappy human emotion um we can get back to that later because I do think there's something about the contrast of moving from these more painful emotions to happiness that's very different than moving from a state of immense happiness to slightly less but we can get back to that but most people would like to be happy as much as possible I certainly would who wouldn't and one of course can ask well should I work on my feelings like think about my feelings try and shift my feelings let my feelings move through me in a cathartic way um should I work on the thought patterns should I work on the behaviors I'm a big believer from from my own experience that behaviors are powerful in setting the general trajectory of thought patterns and feelings but I've also experienced it going the other way too so what does the research say about this and what what can we do cuz everyone wants to be happier yeah well we just talked about the thing you're not supposed to do you don't have to change your circumstances and that's great because like quintupling your income is tricky you know moving is tricky you know switching your life around all over the place is hard right the good news is design shows you don't have to do that that doesn't work as well as you think but you can hack your behaviors and your thought patterns and your feelings to get some good results right let's let's take behaviors right one of the biggest behavioral changes you can make to feel happier is just to get a little bit more social connection like psychologists do these fun studies where they look at people's like daily usage pattern so how much time are you spending sleeping or exercising or at work or whatever and the two things that predict whether or not you're happy or not so happy is how much time you spend with friends and family members and how much time you're just physically around other people like the more of that you do the happier you're going to be um and you know that's just a correlation right so your Savvy listeners are thinking right now like well is it that hanging around with other people causes you to be happy or do you tend to like hang out with other people more if you are happy like which direction does the causal Arrow go and here we have these lovely Studies by psychologists who do these kind of funny experiments where they offer people like a $10 Starbucks gift card to just talk to somebody um usually talk to a stranger like that they don't know on the train it's some lovely work by Nick Epley and others have done this becauseas you force people to get Social and what people predict especially with strangers is like oo that's going to feel awkward and kind of weird but what you find across the board and this includes in introverts and extroverts is that talking to somebody actually feels good it increases your positive emotion it gives you a sense that your life is going better you feel less lonely it just has these positive outcomes that we don't expect I love social connection the problem I have with social connection is that if I drop in with somebody for you know 30 minutes or a couple of hours when that's done I usually have so much that I need to tend to that I end up staying up later than I need to in order to complete that diminishing my sleep and then I feel like there's a underlying kind of like sinking ship sense to my physiology and then I have to recover my sleep so it you know everything's a trade-off yeah um what's interesting about the study you just mentioned is that it's just a brief coffee presumably so maybe one doesn't need to spend quite as much time um with people but I think uh you know I think like even years ago actually he's dead now but there was a I guess it's okay to say even though he's dead he was a somewhat excentric professor at UC Berkeley I took a class from him when I was a graduate student there named Seth Roberts he's known for some kind of bizarre theories about eating and if people want to look this up like really really kind of different stuff but I I applaud his bravery and just you know being out there but he was an accentric guy and he told us in this class when I was there that that it was very important to see faces um at least once a day real faces not on a screen this was before social media but um and that it was important at some point to leave your apartment and and like see the Barista and say hello and thank you and say see people on the street and um and now knowing what we know about these dedicated areas of the brain like the fusor face gyrus and Nancy kwish work and about about these brain areas like we are hardwired for seeing faces and recognizing faces now that alone doesn't mean that faces is a requirement for being happy on a consistent basis but I think they were on to something I think Seth was on to something even though he had some also just like completely crazy ideas this idea doesn't seem crazy this has been my experience even though I spent a lot of time alone if I go a few days without seeing a face MH something happens inside that that shifts the way my internal kind of um set point for well-being and then you see somebody and it's like it's like delightful even if it's just a hello kind of thing I think you know the reason why social connection matters so much is it's building off this basic neural circuitry right for seeing faces and so on I think that gives us real insight into the kinds of social connections that work best right which has been characterized in the field of sort of in real time social connection right which we're kind of moving away from so what do I mean by in real time you know you and I are sitting in a studio right now chatting and we're kind of chatting in real time I can see your face we're live but we might have been able to do this like over some sort of video chat wouldn't be as good you know but but it's pretty good and the reason it seems to be pretty good is we're doing it in real time right our auditory system our visual system all these systems that are used to as primates processing things with other folks around you it works reasonably well what doesn't work so well is how we often communicate which is like overs slack over text I text you few minutes later it comes back like our primate brains just like that that's just not the way communication is set to work and so I think sometimes when I bring up Social connection people think like oh got to see people in person and my friends going to live far away and I'm like at work all day it's like no no no you can connect not necessarily live and in person but as much as possible try to do it in real time and I think that's in part and if possible try to do it with video I think for the reason that you were just talking about is it faces activate us but you know we're primates that are also really good at language and paying attention to the voice I think it's one of the reasons that like an old school phone conversation no video chat with your friend can be some of the most emotional connective conversations sometimes is better than in person because when we're in person we're pulling out our phones and checking and paying attention to other stuff but but we got to get back towards in real time the other stuff just doesn't have the same psychological oomph is there any evidence that texting actually drives more of a desire for more social connection and thus leaves us feeling less well than prior to a text exchange I I I realize it's very hard to separate out the variables about what's the nature of the text exchange um you how often do you see this person in um in real life Etc but I could imagine that texting the I don't do the sound effect as well as you do I I like that uh but that texting could be the equivalent of getting crumbs of nourishment not full nourishment I could also imagine that it's like putting nourishment just Out Of Reach yeah and and I'm asking this really at a neurological level do we know does is the reward circuitry that's triggered by in real life social connection triggered but to a lesser degree by text exchange or by Zoom exchange this would be an important study to do I think yeah there's not great evidence for it but my intuition is that the way it works is almost like it's a texting sort of The neutr Suite of social connection right I was feeling his motivation for social connection and I did it and and I got something that was sort of social I got some information but like psychologically I'm missing the like nutritious part of it right so it kind of fakes you out into thinking that it's social connection but it kind kind of doesn't really work and I worry that that's what we're all getting a lot of right now right it's just so much easier to participate in the nutric version of social connection because as political scientists and sociologists and others have pointed out it's harder to meet with people in real life we don't have these so-called third spaces where we can get together easily anymore right there's so many draws of just being on your screen being alone inside um I think we're kind of missing out and so so a lot of us are kind of starving nutritionally when it comes to social connection we're going for the wrong stuff so schedule some if possible in real Lifetime with somebody or in real time right you know call that friend that you haven't talked to um and recognize because this is clear from the psychological research that your brain is not telling you to do that probably even when you're listening right now you're like yeah I guess that would be helpful for me but you're not kind of having a craving to talk to your friend and I think this is the problem with a lot of the behaviors that map on to happiness is that if you think of The evolutionary pressures for those behaviors natural selection never had to build in like the goal of feeling Social cuz we were just like in these small bands it was really easy right natural selection had to build in a kind of craving for sweet fatty food because those were hard to find didn't have to build in the craving for like you know a bunch of greens because they were everywhere I think the same thing is true with social connection we just don't have a strong motivation to seek people out because it was just kind of there and so I think our motivation our reward systems don't cause us to kind of crave it but in the modern day where there's so many substitutes and we're kind of more isolated I think many of us are kind of experiencing the negative effects of loneliness but then when we think well what could I do to get out of it there's not this like I'm starving for connection we don't have this sort of motivational goal to go out and get it and so what that can lead to is people making the prediction in their head of like you I just heard lri say that this is a good idea but like I don't know probably not for me or maybe not as important I think we just don't have systems that tell us to go out and get this stuff so even if your brain is saying it's not that important try it do your own personal experiment and get a little bit more in real time social connection and just take a moment to notice immediately after how it made you feel and I bet it'll be like you know all the kind of Fitness hacks and nutrition hacks that you talk about on the show where you're like oh my God that made me feel so much better than I really expected it to I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge our sponsor ag1 ag1 is a vitamin mineral probiotic drink that also includes prebiotics and adaptogens ag1 is designed to cover all of your 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between the gut microbiome and the brain that when I regularly take ag1 which for me means a serving in the morning or midm morning and again later in the afternoon or evening that I have more mental Clarity and more mental energy if you'd like to try ag1 you can go to drink a1.com huberman to claim a special offer right now they're giving away five free travel packs and a year supply of vitamin D3 K2 again that's drink a1.com huberman to claim that special offer if seeing faces and I don't have evidence for this but if Seth Roberts was right and what we're talking about here is clearly um based on existing data if seeing faces somehow triggers the reward system in a healthy way that reinforces the social connection thing like fills the vessel that like we're connected because we no longer live in small small village and tribe type formats most of us don't anyway that if we plop down onto the couch and kind of like assume the classic C c-shaped position of somebody who's about to go on their phone and and you can scroll and see faces you talked about that as a bit of like an artificial sweetener giving the illusion of some sort of nourishment and then you know you see some stuff you respond to stuff you can see someone kind of dunk on somebody maybe hear a joke maybe make a joke and then go into your DMs and like read a few check a you and then um you basically got no real social connection correct um you didn't have to move to do it um and in a lot of ways this has parallels to the ease of um highly processed foods or something like that and I think we're starting to understand this a bit through Jonathan height work and other people's work uh including your own but I don't know that it's anything but really dangerous and bad I don't want to sound alarmist but I I am really concerned that um certainly for the younger generation but that if we don't have an intrinsic drive to go do something we stop doing it we stop doing it and then the brain is pretty plastic throughout the entire life especially for these low-g grade like many times repeated behaviors I mean we can just slowly that you know it's like a dri there's drift and then we wonder why we don't feel so good yeah I mean you know how the dopamine system works right like it has these mechanisms to Crave stuff that's quick quick hits right our instant you know when we go on Reddit or go on Instagram and scroll through a feed we're getting these kind of quick hits another thing that is rewarding is new information you know you're Stanford College J zaki's done these lovely Neuroscience studies that just finding out some interesting social information feels rewarding and kind of for the first time we've been able to separate the reward value that comes from interacting with live Human people and faces and social rewarding information that comes at us quickly at this dopamine Hit That We crave a lot but we don't have the craving mechanisms for the in real life connection and yeah I think that's causing a lot of problems and it means we're kind of building more tools to do just that uh I had the musician David burn on on my podcast um Talking Heads David who cares a lot about these issues he wrote this really cool article in um called eliminating the human where he made the claim that pretty much every technological invention of the last 20 years has been you know dealing with actual people is kind of friction so let's just get rid of them right we'll you know have Uber or Lyft or a car company where I don't have to talk to the driver I just plug it into the phone we don't have to have a conversation we go away right we have music streaming mechanisms I don't know you're and Andrew you're like as my age so you probably remember that you used to have to go into a record store to flip through CDs or tapes even if you're old really old school to figure out music and often when you do that you'd run into humans or talk to the cashier guy or somebody would see you flicking through like oh you like Talking Heads I like Talking Heads now we just go to an algorithm right from food delivery apps to kind of education right I have a online course where students don't have to sit in a real classroom with other students they could watch it directly so many of our technological innovations are assuming that what we want to get rid of is the friction part that's what we're kind of motivated to get rid of but ultimately we're getting rid of like the human in these interactions and our primate brains are left you know with the like little nutrite dribbles of connection when what we really need is something in real life and in real time it's interesting because I think just but 10 15 years ago our knowledge of most all humans was based on in real life experience except for I guess famous humans and then it was not in real life now most people's knowledge about most humans is based on not in real life interactions which means that most people's knowledge about humans generally is kind of acing through non in real life electronic experiences and so that has to change our entire schema of like what human experience is I'm not trying to you know like ratchet up to something too abstract here but um I think it's a it's a powerful notion that what burn is saying that we're dehumanizing ourselves um through you know getting essentially fragments of of in real life experience maybe a and video is so captivating as you know as somebody who's was a vision scientist for a long time I mean if if a picture is worth a thousand words a video is worth 10 billion yeah pictures it's just like and the number of videos that you can access in in an Instagram feed or even on an X feed is just astonishing and then of course the high emotional Salient stuff is going to be the the stuff that you you hover on and then the algorithm knows your dwell time as it's called and then your your basic feed and Discovery is set by that and and you know I don't think it there's anything really inherently diabolical about it I don't take that stance it's just they figured out some good Neuroscience based on behavioral foraging yeah I mean the Diabolical part is is having a real consequence for our happiness certainly having a real consequence for loneliness you look at rates of loneliness in young people who've grown up with these Technologies and you see things like you know young people today report being lonely at rates of like 70 75% right more people are lonely extremely lonely than not right now how do we rate loneliness I'm not I'm not dismissing what they're saying but since they grew up that way I'm this sounds very this sounds very cross generational judgment but like how do they know they're lonely I mean your point is well taken right if anything they grow up lonely so if they're self-reporting being lonely now it might be even worse then it might be kind of getting worse over time yeah and so I mean it's all self-report data right so people you know on a scale of 1 to 10 how lonely are you feeling but the fact that 75% of people are saying yeah I feel extremely lonely that's sad I mean our Prime ancestors if they could look at us would be like what have you these wonderful social bra they were probably like I want to go hide behind that rock for a little bit get a little bit of space I'll never forget years ago when I uh uh there was this time when I worked with ferrets I don't miss it and and uh they would have these huge litters and there were these in these um pens they the um the the mom could climb up and get up on top there and so she'd have these huge litters and she'd kick the litter off at some point she'd go up there and sleep and um and you'd go in there to take to take out the moms and um and uh they did not that was the only time when they didn't want to be bothered right because they they love they love to be held and things like that but they did not want to be bothered because they just needed some peace cuz they had like 16 fit kits you know so I think that nowadays right if if there's if there's a lot of loneliness um and people that are growing up in these electronic formats report feeling lonely and I believe them then what it speaks to is a yearning and to me a yearning is a neurological Drive the same way that a room that's too warm you want to get to a cooler space it's too cold you want to get to heat so that loneliness speaks to an underlying yearning for something that they're not getting I'm just stating the obvious but it says that we're or they are doing something that's inherently against the grain of their healthy neurology the problem is I think what loneliness is a recognition of is you know you kind of don't like this state but I'm not sure that loneliness is causing people to seek out more social connection or if it is you're seeking out the thing that is the easiest fastest social connection you can get this is just like food which we talked about is the nut you're not craving vegetables because they were in presumably in abundance at one time in our evolutionary history as opposed to meat or sweets or things like that fruit and meat and I think this is a problem with social connection but I think it's a problem generally with the kinds of things that make us happier because like we just don't have mechanisms to seek those things out they just kind of don't code in our reward system in the same way as you know the neutr sweey stuff of the world so what is the the term if there is one um or could you come up with one I don't want to put you on the spot for a um a fundamental um desire that healthy for us that we are not driven to pursue a a resolution to like for everything else you know there's like the hypothalamic circuits for the desire to mate to seek warmth when it's cold cold when it's you know when it's too warm um you know we know what hunger is right um but there must be something about the I don't want to get too technical here for for those that are are tracking this what or not tracking this what I'm trying to say is you know for so many of the um reward punishment Pathways in the human brain it's you you're trying to avoid the feelings of pain and move toward a feeling of either neutrality or pleasure but here you're talking about being in a in a sort of place of low-level pain being able to meet that pain with a truly low-level pleasure that then it doesn't mask the pain but it it fills the vessel just enough that then you drive yourself into a place of essentially more pain but I think that this is the kind of thing that happens when you have easy outs for all these Cravings right I mean take process food right you you probably have a a craving for certain nutritional requirements right you want to get vitamins or healthy stuff but that stuff's easy it's frictionless right you know I run to McDonald's and that's much faster than cooking up a really healthy vegetable filled meal I think the same thing happens with social connection right like you're lonely person at your house sitting on the couch you have this negative bodily state of you feel lonely maybe it kind of manifests as a craving but what's the fastest thing for you to do I'm going to scroll through my friend's Instagram feeds um or I'm going to get a kind of little mini hit of social connection that's not as nutritious honestly I mean not to diss our respective Fields but I actually think this is one reason that people love podcasts so much right it's a frictionless way to feel like you're part of this interesting conversation but ultimately it doesn't work as well as picking up the phone and calling a friend connecting with someone in real life I think we have too many outlets for things that kind of feel socially but don't give us social nutrition and it's true I mean we should be honest like really connecting with actual people in real life takes more friction than pulling out your phone and scrolling through your Instagram feed it just the Instagram feed doesn't work as well ultimately when it comes to what's really going to end up being rewarding and I think this is true for just like a lot of the way the reward system works the things that we have craving for that we seek out that like we have really strong mechanisms to go after sometimes those things don't work to get us towards real likability um you know drugs of addiction are a real obvious answer to this right you know if you have a a kind of heroin problem you're going to really seek out that drug But ultimately it's not bringing you towards something I mean it will maybe feel good in the moment but it's you know no you're not neutr sweee but it's not getting you towards something that evolutionarily would be really awesome for your survival and reproductive success well I try my best not to speak in tweets which I guess they now call expost but um I've been saying a lot and I'll say it again now that I think one everyone should beware any dopamine that is not preceded by effort in order to achieve it uh in other words any fast High inflection of dopamine that does not require effort to achieve it is going to put you in a trough and on a you know a metaphorical lever pressing cycle that will drive your trough deeper and deeper over time and that Peak will just never go as high as it did or could again unless you take a period of abstinence from that behavior or substance and then introduce effort prior to a adaptive Behavior to get the dopamine the other thing is I've um thought I like to think of addiction as a progressive narrowing of the things that bring you pleasure mhm um and I don't speak to Enlightenment but happiness or Enlightenment seems like a progressive um broadening of the things that bring you pleasure and I'm glad we're talking about reward circuitry because we know how to reset that reward circuitry and it doesn't require these dopamine fasts although that's one approach and that makes sense why people do it but I think this notion of having to spend effort to engage in what we know as a hardwired source of reward not just dopamine but other neurochemicals as well of course in the form of social connection so this higher friction thing of having to call somebody or drive someplace or deal with traffic deal with traffic on the way home yeah well worth it if it was a good social interaction but maybe it wasn't a me social interaction in which case you're like that was that was a lot of driving today now all this other stuff to do other times a great social interaction can set you in an amazing uh tional plane for days if not weeks yeah so you know I think um what you're bringing up is really important how how do we um introduce these behaviors not asking you to put it into a standardized protocol too much but since we started with this issue of behaviors being a path to more happiness and social connection being the uh in real life social connection or by phone in real time as you said being one of the main paths to behavioral happiness behaviorally derived happiness excuse me then what are the data on sort of the frequency of this does it vary for introverts versus extroverts this question is getting very long but maybe we could Define introverts and extroverts and then if you would if you could give us some sense of you know how often should people seek out an in real life interaction yeah probably way more than you think you should right we have good data on what people predict which is that people predict social interactions just not going to be that fun um it's not going to be worth it right this seems to be a spot where our predictions about how good something's going to be don't necessarily match how good it ultimately will going to be right and I I put it in the context of like other the the reverse of something like processed food where I think for a lot of people you predict this is going to be amazing and you taste you're like now I feel kind of gross processed food processed food right that's a case where your prediction is like oh this is going to be awesome but your actual likeability is like H I feel kind of yucky where social connection I think we predict be all right but maybe not that good but when we get it we feel really great um the the the University of Chicago psychologist Nick Epley has this term he uses UND sociality where he thinks we just kind of don't get the right reward benefit of social connection a RIT large right he talks about examples of you know expressing gratitude to people giving somebody a compliment even things like asking for help right all these domains where we can kind of connect with another person we sort of was like yeah it may be net good if I was rating it on some scale but it winds up being way better than we predict in all these contexts um he does these studies where he has people you know pred how good something will be you know giving a gift to somebody brings he's in Chicago right so he's like here's a hot chocolate how how good will it feel to like you know give that guy over there a stranger the hot chocolate and people say you know I don't know three out of 10 but then they do it and then they feel oh it's like more like a six out of 10 it was much more rewarding for me the giver than I thought same thing with compliments expressing gratitude calling a friend you haven't talked to in a long time reaching out to somebody that you care about but you haven't connected with all these spots are ones where our predictions are off it's not the veilance that's off we know it'll be good but we just don't realize how good and his argument is that if we don't realize how good then we never seek it out so it's kind of the opposite of what you might think of as the processed food problem where our prediction is like oh my God that cupcake is going to be so good we have all these mechanisms that are like Go Get It Go Get it but then we actually get it we're like that wasn't as good as we thought I think that the problem is that we have all these things that work like the processed food that interfere with social connection going on the Reddit feed you know plopping down and watching Netflix just kind of being by yourself right there's all these alternative behaviors that we're predicting are going to feel nice but then we get there they feel kind of yucky they just um yeah this is a problem in the happiness space where I know you talk a lot about the reward system but the happiness space is one where the re the Cravings we have the rewards we seek out the predictions we're making about what feels good we're often just really wrong with them you know my podcast we talk a lot about like our mind lies to us when it comes for happiness you know we go for more money we go for accolades you know we go for the quick dopamine hits without any work but really it's more like social connection it's all these things that we kind of don't expect are going to feel good and so I actually don't know what that means evolutionarily like my theory is like you didn't need to build in craving mechanisms because the things that really matter for our happiness we just kind of got for free in The evolutionary environment but it means it's hard to go after them you mentioned introverts and extroverts and just to get back to your longer question this is something that's been studied in them so so introverts versus extroverts is typically thought of as a personality distinction often thought of as sort of something that's built in although there's lots of evidence that over time you can sort of change these things around you could become a little bit more extroverted if you're introverted um but introverts tend to Value deeper close conversations one-on-one kinds of things and a lot of alone time they get a lot of benefit from alone time whereas extroverts tend to be more energized by being around other people especially bigger crowds of people um and so introverts tend to be a little bit more deliberate a little bit more thoughtful a little bit more kind of want to have my own personal chill time whereas extroverts tend to like people and so you might think that everything I've just said applies to extroverts but not to introverts folks have gone out and tested this and what they find is there is a big difference between introverts and extroverts but it's in that prediction error you know extroverts predict ah social connection be all right not that great introverts predict it's going to be terrible it's going to be awkward I'm going to hate it but when you actually force people as in these studies where you say hey $10 Starbucks gift card you got to talk to somebody when you force the introverts to be social what they wind up doing is self-reporting you know a level of Happiness that's like better than they expected so the problem seems to be that introverts have a prediction error I'm going to say this you're going to where I promise you because I've said this on my podcast tons of hate mail lots of the comments will be like not me not this introvert or maybe they don't they don't quite understand so I want to make sure that um it's Crystal Clear for people introverts anticipate a less than great or even eh um interaction maybe even a negative interaction usually negative usually Negative they anticipate a negative interaction um you so it's like saying we're going to go to a restaurant and the food here Terri sucks they go in they have a decent to maybe a great interaction so introverts are are um positioned to derive more more pleasure from social interactions than ex extroverts who enter social situations thinking it's going to be great their their dissipation is high and therefore they require a much bigger dopamine inflection um in order to come away from that interaction saying it was great although the one kind of update to the framework that you just presented I'd add is that you said you know well if you don't you go to the restaurant you predict it's going to be not that good and you go and you're like oh it's all right I think the problem with introverts is they so predict that social connection is going to be awkward that they don't engage in it and now this becomes a learning cycle right you predicted it was going to be crappy you never got any evidence oh maybe I was wrong and so you keep doing that over time and so I think that this can lead to cycles of loneliness in introverts um and there these lovely accounts of like introverts who try to become a little bit more extroverted I had this lovely woman Jessica pan on the show is this book called sorry I'm late I didn't want to come uh colon I I love that I'm actually pretty social but I'm late to everything CU I'm an academic noon means noon 10 which means starting at 12:15 which means at 1:15 when this when the lecture was supposed to end at 1 you're still going and half the room is full this is not just like she had a reason any academic knows what I'm talking about yeah I know I'm with you I'm with you but dude sorry I'm late I didn't want to come colon an introvert's guide to extrovert so she did this year where as a super hardcore introvert she talked to people joined an improv comedy group like went to these social networking kind of busy nasty social connection events just did all this stuff and what she found was two things one is that she actually did enjoy it a lot more than she thought at the end of the year she was much happier than she expected but she also watched her habits changing too and and this is a thing I think that we also get wrong about introverts and extroverts as we assume I'm born that way you know never going to change and it is true that there are predispositions towards this stuff but the data suggests that if you can maybe like update your reward value of this you as an introvert try a little social connection don't go to like the hugest party ever or jump in improv comedy just try call a friend that you haven't talked to in a while right notice how that felt like oh I was I was a prediction error right I actually felt better than I expected then you might update your prediction and get and so you can kind of update your introversion in part by trying things out and noticing the reward value you get I think the thing that is different for introverts is like you definitely need your alone time right so you want to balance any social connection you get with a little bit of time by yourself but but the research really shows that if you're predicting right now like I just don't like the social connection you might actually like it more than your prediction is suggesting I don't want to micro disect social interactions to the point of becoming artificial but I'm fairly introverted I love New York City and I love London I love busy cities um so I don't mind being surrounded by people but one byproduct of being surrounded by people in a big city is you're not interacting with everybody you're seeing lots of faces so is it the case that introverts are really uncomfortable in big social interactions or you know to me um the most mentally demanding social interaction would be one where I go to a party where I know there's going to be like 20 people everyone's going to have to go around the room and introduce themselves goodness yeah um clearly I don't have a problem with public speaking but that to me just like spikes my cortisol immediately um and then there's sort of an expectation of of like real connection the the expectation of real connection often sometimes undermines real connection sometimes it serves it yeah but is it the case that introverts want to avoid people or they want to avoid um the requirement to really engage in a in a deep way and I like engaging in a deep way one to one or maybe with two or three people you know maybe a few more but I'm I don't know that it's the number of people that becomes overwhelming or daunting or the punishing feature it's more you know the sort of requirement to like be pulled out of oneself yeah I think it might be all of the above I mean I think what we know about introverts is that they often self-report being better in these sort of one-on-one kind of things so as an introvert it's like you're going to have a coffee date with your friend that often doesn't cause as much Social Anxiety as like you know the dinner party with a bunch of people right and so that's the claim it's not like well jump into the dinner party with a bunch of people or join improv promd group or talk to everyone on the street it's like just a one-on-one little mini conversation can be great um and much or not just like great but much better than you expect and we'll kind of have this happiness benefit that kind of sustains you over time um Nick Epley who does all this work talks about your happiness the best metaphor for happiness is that it's kind of like a leaky Tire like it sort of goes out a little bit and each one of these little conversations whether it's chatting with the Barista calling a friend giving someone a compliment whatever kind of fills up the tire and then it kind of goes down so you can sort of use these little mini micro does of social connection to boost your happiness Tire I'd like to take a quick break and thank one of our sponsors function I recently became a function member after searching for the most comprehensive approach to lab testing while I've long been a fan of blood testing I really wanted to find a more in-depth program for analyzing blood urine and saliva to get a full picture of my heart health my hormone status my immune system regulation my metabolic function my vitamin and mineral status and other critical areas of my overall health and vitality function not only provides testing of over 100 biomarkers key to physical and mental health but it also analyzes these results and provides insights from talk doctors on your results for 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claim a free element sample pack with the purchase of any element drink mix again that's drink element.com huberman to claim a free sample pack so you're talking about engaging in Social Connection in real time and perhaps even in in real life um yes in real life as well with some effort to engage in it which might just be built into modern living now as one of the primary drivers for Behavioral approaches to improve what we're calling happiness so could we say and I know we don't want to set up strict protocols around this you know make the effort to schedule in real time over the phone or Zoom or in real life interaction with somebody maybe once a week yeah minimum I think more than you're doing now if you're not feeling so happy add some in and and again as you mentioned before these are all kind of trade-offs right you don't want to add so much in them now you're not sleeping or exercising or all that other stuff but like one more interaction than you're getting now and check how it feels over time given how busy people are and given that we've established that some effort that's required to engage socially is going to be beneficial toward the the reward and all this and we're not trying to hack the dopamine system here folks we're just trying to figure out what is going to be rewarding given that everyone has constraints on their time and everyone seems to have a device in their pocket that allows them to get the um the illusion of nourishment that leads to either same levels or less happiness overall um you know what's going to be most effective and it seems to me I was thinking about this sure in one of your answers I was paying attention but I was thinking about this that my memory of Prior social interactions as really great is a useful tool so for instance one of my best memories of time with my girlfriend was driving back from her grandmother's house with the dog in the car and we had no phone reception so we couldn't be interrupted by our devices she actually had some work to do so she was doing some work on her computer at one point she may have taken a nap at one point and the dog kept jumping back and forth between our laps and that to me was like one of the best days ever MH MH just ever it was just an awesome day um that memory occurred to me now and I think could serve me well and thinking okay so like going on a road trip with somebody but it was the it was the lack of um kind of structure around it it was just imposed on us we had a drive to complete was a dog in the car there was some work to do there was no phone reception and of you know we've had many great interactions but that would be the one that I'd highlight as like that was an awesome interaction for whatever reason yeah and so can one use memories of great social interaction as kind of a um as a compass for how to construct these um these social plans yeah um because I think it can be a little bit um mystifying to people like oh how do I get this thing called Happiness by meeting up with a friend we enjoy hiking or something like that but maybe that's not accessible and I don't want people to underthink or overthink it yeah but to me it seems like okay like road trips everyday things we needed to go up there there was some things to tend to so like tending to life things yeah life requirements together yeah I mean if you want to ask yourself a question that can high good memories I recommend the one that uh the journalist Katherine price uses a lot she does a lot of studies on fun ask yourself the question what what three times that you just had the most fun the last three times you would describe as oh my God that was the most fun right and this is a helpful question because usually the answer my guess is at least two out of three probably all three will have someone else in it like they'll be you'll have like another person involved or a dog Sometimes some other agentive being right it wasn't you by yourself it probably didn't involve a screen right and so that's kind of and and that actually gets back to your your road trip you know talked about I think the the social part was really important but but it seems like that road trip also tapped into a sort of thought pattern that we know is really good for happiness which is presence right just being kind of mindful you're paying attention to the dog flopping on you you're seeing the scenery right you're not in a rush to do something so your mind could kind of be on that drive and how it felt um and we know so much about how kind of these moments of mindfulness really paying attention to your sensory experience how that how much that matters for happiness and one of the biggest tasks you can use to get more presence is to do exactly what you accidentally did driving through these parts of the world that where you don't get phone receptions which is to get rid of our phones um you know our phones are just like the biggest attention Stealers ever and it makes a lot of sense because what grabs our attention um things that are really interesting and provide a little lots of quick dopamine hits right or just kind of scream at us with information and announcements and so on this is what our phones do really well and our brains aren't stupid our brains know that on the other side of our phone is like such rewarding content and it becomes you know really distracting um my my colleague Liz Dunn uh has this kind of analogy she uses like you know imagine you know instead of this kind of conversation we're having right here maybe I'll do with my husband at a dinner party where I'm sitting my husband at dinner and we're chatting and I have my phone out and my husband's a philosopher he's a very smart guy we have great conversations but I know on the other end of that phone is like really interesting stuff and let said imagine the comparison is instead of having your phone there I had this big wheelbarrow next to me and my husband at our dinner table and in the wheelbarrow was photo albums of every photo I've taken since 2016 physical printouts of my emails and news articles and stuff that I could get you know like videotapes of cat videos and porn and everything just like piled up really high in this wheelbarrow if we were trying to have a conversation that wheelbarrow was there I'd be like oh I just want to take a quick look at the photo or do something it'd be so distracting it'd be so interesting your brain's not stupid your brain knows even though your phone is much tinier than that wheelbarrow that all that interesting dopamine Rich exciting stuff is on it and it makes it hard to pay attention to my husband again an interesting philosopher we have great conversations and so there's lots of evidence showing that even the act of having your phone out is subtly stealing your attention from other people from the tasks that you're doing one of the biggest pieces of advice I give my college students is to study without your phone near you because Princeton Studies have looked at this where you have somebody do say a math test or a studying test with your phone there versus the phone in the other room and you see like double digit increases in performance just to have your phone away and you might ask like well why would that be it's like well part of your frontal Lo is like no no no don't look at the phone don't look at the phone don't look at that big wheelbarrow of delicious interesting stuff stay on task and that's this kind of constant moment of multitasking where we're kind of yanking our brain back onto task and so a big hat if you want to be more present is to find ways to do activities without your phone I guess if we go back to that fun question if I said you know those three times you're having most fun you weren't in the middle of it pulling out your phone to like look at your Instagram feed you were just there and what you just described was a dramatic performance enhancement on mathematics by not having this opportunity for distraction in the room which is incredible yeah I mean that when you look when you dive deep into the effects of having your phone around you they're striking especially getting back to social connection especially social connection Liz Dunn has this paper where she um puts two people in a room just kind of a waiting room together and you either have your phone or you don't you're not allowed to look at it it's just present and she finds that there's 30% less smiling at the other people in the waiting room when your phones are present 30% less um I mean I actually think of this when I think of the you know the loneliness crisis you know I walk I was a head of college on campus which is a faculty member at Yale meant that I lived on campus with students and you'd walk through the courtyard and everybody's walking through the courtyard but they're not looking at you they're looking down at their phone right um there these like subtle interactions that we're missing because our phone is stealing us that's the social case but I think there's a real performance case too right if you want to pay attention and learn something if part of your brain is inhibiting that urge to look at all the interesting stuff on your phone which we don't notice um then it's going to be affecting your performance has good benefits too there's this lovely um finding that people are buying less gum and less candy in checkout aisles now um the like the national worldwide sale of gum has gone down and it's gone down on the same slope as the iPhones have gone up so as number of iPhones in Pockets goes up sales of gum and checkout lines has gone down and you can see why that is you're not looking around as you're not looking like o that you know like double mitt looks really good you're staring at your phone and looking your Instagram soon the ads are going to pop up on uh they'll know you're in the aisle cuz they can know you have proximity to a lot of devices I have a friend who a very accomplished songwriter and musician um and someone does his Instagram and other social media for him he he's not on there and we met for dinner the other day uh with a couple other people and I got there and I started telling him about something I had seen uh online and he said um I won't use it I usually will do his voice but I won't do his voice because I don't want to give it away uh people might know who he is um but he said I don't want to talk about what's on Instagram in fact I don't want to talk on about what's on the internet let's just have dinner and I was and at first I was like dude that was like kind of and I thought great like he's exactly right like it's not just having the phone there it's not just being on the device it's also that you're talking about things that you saw in the world um some of which are very interesting and important um at times but what he was saying was I don't want to talk about things that that you experienced about somebody else's experience that wasn't really an experience that you had today that's an experience of an someone else's experience that you had today it wasn't about a news article or something so we're playing the telephone Bucket Brigade game of social connection many many degrees away from the the actual interactions that we were kind of hardwired to experience ourselves yeah and those are the ones that really influ uence our our happiness in the world right you know one of the great ways to increase your presence in addition to kind of getting rid of your phone is to just go back to your sensus right what are you what are you looking at right now what do you see right now I'm in this room there's like really nice kind of cool black lighting and I'm sitting there I'm hearing your voice there's like a subtle hum in the room that I hope the podcast is not picking up that I hear in the audio right it's a little cool that grounding I can watch my breath completely change around it's like a quick way to just kind of be embodied and I think so often we're just not doing that as much you know in our discourse but but definitely like even when we're by ourselves you know we just wind up distracting ourselves from the very sensory experience that like literally is the experience that we have of the world just not noticing it as much now I will say that um a memory of a really terrific time I had alone was around this time of year actually around the holidays typically I would be in my office um organizing papers deal some end end of year stuff is it for academics you know my life's a lot different now with the podcast even though I still teach at Stanford but the but end of year is the time when you kind of get your office organized everyone every academic knows this and um over the holidays I tended to have a lot of time in my office alone it was a great time to come in like parking was everywhere you go in and and I used to listen to Ted Talks or I would listen to podcast and these days I'm trying to do more physical things not just exercise but um working on some like lighting stuff in my house and and I like to listen to podcasts or books y sometimes music but podcasts or books while I do that and I I do feel that when when we're alone sometimes it's nice to have other voices in the room that are not just the voices in our head yeah and it could be music podcasts books movies Etc that people seem to find that soothing I certainly do and that doesn't feel like it's diminishing from my experience of being present in fact it allows me to just really tend to what I'm doing mechanically M um and I have some plans to do some more like craft drawing type projects in the new year and I look forward to being able to hear those conversations but not have to participate in them yeah yeah yeah so is this would you consider that sort of healthy or um am I diminishing my experience and of the depth of my uh my crafts yeah well I think it you know there's there's some Nuance there right you're talking about your craft in a very embodied way even as you're talking to me you're describing how your hands are moving in these motorways as you're doing it you're talking about kind of what it felt like it felt like you your senses were activated for the physical stuff you were doing um but you also mentioned that your mind was wandering and maybe you're ruminating and stuff like that so it sounds like what you did was have a really nice emotion regulation strategy of like you could kind of fill your head with something so that you can work on the physical stuff but it didn't impede your experience of the physical stuff the way you described it shows that you were there you were present when you were doing it I think the problem was is when it impedes our presence doing it and I think it kind of depends on activity we're doing right um you know take driving probably some of you who are listening right now or sitting in your car as you're driving doing this other interesting motoric activity and that's one where it's like you're not missing out on that much on the drive by like listening to us it's probably a positive kind of experience that you're having learning something and so on but you know you wouldn't want to listen to podcasts in some physical situations right um we can kind of come you wouldn't you know if you're were ballroom dancing for example you wouldn't want to necessarily be listening to a podcast then right um you know if you're really experiencing art and sort of engaging with art in an art gallery you wouldn't want to also be listening to a podcast at the same time and so I think the thing to think is are you listening to this in a way that you're missing something in the real world that your presence of it would matter make you feel really good um or are you kind of just like you know killing some other free time and maybe using this as a nice emotion regulation strategy to stop what would otherwise be a really ruminative drive now you get to listen to me and Andrew and that's probably better but but there's Nuance there I think our tendency is to move away from the rumination is to run away from it and I think if you find yourself kind of avoiding your thought patterns alt together that probably might be the pendulum swinging a little too far in the other direction noted noted so we've got in real time Andor in real life well in real life is always in real time but uh in real life Andor in uh real time social interaction and if it requires some effort to plan or get to yeah organize all the better you stand to gain more from those interactions so that's really key presence obviously try and get the phone out of the room at least off and put away but ideally out of out of sight out of sight love that um and shared experience presumably you know actually maybe doing something but it could even just be talking I guess it depends on what people enjoy doing right yeah yeah so these are powerful levers for shifting one level of Happiness up uh using Behavior what about leading with thought patterns or feelings seems like it's a a more challenging but um certainly tractable entry point yeah and I think it's it's important here to remember like what are our natural evolutionary patterns towards thought patterns um because some of them aren't necessarily built for our happiness you know to take what's a kind of common evolutionary thought pattern which is a negativity bias right we're just built to notice all the scary stuff all the bad stuff all the potentially risky stuff our brains instantly go there and that makes fabulous evolutionary sense like if there's a possibility that there's a tiger that's going to jump out or some sort of risky thing you want your brain to lock onto it not as evolutionary beneficial to notice all the blessings in life just all the good things it doesn't really give you that much of a survival benefit to notice hey there's the absence of a tiger we don't really know there's no Tigers around right in fact it it probably helps Drive um more motivation to go pursue resources I mean you could imagine an Adaptive feature to um lacking satisfaction I mean you can gain more resources and at a time where resources were presumably shared more in these small village formats I don't know do monkey troops share resources uh depends on the monkey depends on the monkey just like humans depends on the depends on the monkey but but I think you're you're making a really critical point right which is like if we're noticing the negative if we're noticing the bad stuff we tend to fix it but also if we're craving if we're wanting if we're kind of constantly in search of something we get off our butts and go do stuff I mean Steve Jobs and his parting words were stay hungry stay foolish or maybe it was stay foolish stay hungry but stay hungry was definitely in there and I realize he's not going to represent the epitome of what to strive for for everybody but he certainly held up as somebody who uh changed the world um through the development of certain Technologies so we rever these people that are um that are hungry for more yeah right um and it makes great evolutionary sense doesn't make as good happiness sense right what's one of the best ways to be happy to just appreciate what you have to notice and appreciate the blessings out there but it we got to push against this natural negativity bias to do this so how do we do that well it turns out that this is a spot where harnessing attention in the way we were just talking about can be really helpful just taking time to notice the blessings notice kind of all the good stuff um it's often talked about in terms of a gratitude practice although gratitude sounds kind of cheesy I don't know um my uh friend Katherine price who I mentioned earlier she has this practice that calls a delight practice where you just notice Delights in the world I love the word delight you know I walked in your studio you had a picture of your bulldog and I was like that's a delight that's so cute just like thank for delighting in him I Delight in him too even though he's dead several years now um Delight is a wonderful word yeah and we can train our brain to notice them right you can literally have a practice where you know put in your notes app on your phone like a list of delights or even better pick a friend like I have with Katherine where you can just like text them Delight you know at the end of this I'll you know text like saw a really cute dog Delight or heard this really funny song Delight then you get the social connection and the Gratitude but what that does is if you have this practice where you got to write down the Delights your brain starts to automatically be on the lookout for them it becomes rewarding because you get to write this thing down now all of a sudden it can be a practice that you're sort of Shifting your negativity bias to notice more of the good things that are out there um and there's so much evidence suggesting that people who naturally notice the blessings in the world are happier um if you do one of these kind of gratitude or Delight practices you wind up happier son your Luber Mercy has this lovely study where if you scribble down three to five things you're grateful for three to five Delights in as little as two weeks you significantly improve your overall satisfaction with life right I love that super free so much so that I and because I accidentally interrupted the comments always tell me I interrupt too much it's out of interest it's out of Interest I promise if I could interrupt myself I would um and I probably do from time to time could you repeat what the it's three to five things yeah three to five things you're grateful for I'm not sure if the number really matters but it's committing to kind of noticing the good things in life and really trying to take a moment to notice how they felt right you know so if I look at I do Delight practices sometimes or gratitude practices and it's things like my husband you know these big things in life but then sometimes it's like my morning coffee or like probably you know seeing your cute dog like it's funny to see the picture for folks that don't know Andrew Studio it's a picture of his dog on a microphone it's just very funny it's a giant high quality photograph he was actually standing on the table that I do my solo podcast from with the at the microphone and his tag just happened to rotate a few deg toward the camera just at that moment um so you could see his name Costello you know and I invite listeners to pause right now and notice what's happening to their face as you hear Andrew say that probably you're just smiling right you didn't even see this really cute photo uh but you're also smiling That's The Power of delights right not just noticing them yourself but potentially sharing them too and so this is another thought pattern practice that we can engage in which is like just train your brain to find these things and what you'll find is that you know there's a there's a limited ratio of the stuff we can focus our attention on if we start shifting towards the Delights from the hassles and the yucky stuff in life now we're just kind of filling our brain with stuff that gives us a little more positive emotion what I love about this conversation about gratitude is I must say I do like the word delight more than gratitude gratitude sounds cheesy it sounds a little hippie dippy I got to say yeah well I'm from Northern California so I'm cool with hippie dippy even though I'm not a hippie punk rocker not a Hipp you're Berkeley rud c yeah I know I'm from the other end of the B the peninsula I love I love the anyway this is getting but the point is um it's not that the word feels soft I need to think about this a little bit more it's that um maybe it's just that Delight is such a powerful unselfish word MH like it's not taking anything from anybody it's not requiring a a shift away from one's sort of um intrinsic self I feel like gratitude requires this like okay I'm going to now be grateful it's like kind of like pulling if if you're not already in a state of gratitude I feel like there's more effort involved and we've been saying effort that precedes reward is good but with delight it feels like it's just very much um in concert with almost like who one is yeah you know and and like I Delight in Costello I don't expect everyone to Delight in Costello people who did I delighted in their Delight so it was just you know amplifying all the Delight but the thing that really strikes me about Delight is that every example you gave it's very rapid time scale M like you you know like I will say I I normally drink yamate during these things which I Delight in but today I decided I haven't had coffee in a while took a little break from it for no particular reason and I had a single shot of espresso and I I was thinking to myself this is really so this is a this is a fast time skill maybe it was the fact I haven't had it in a little while um and it's just really fast no one suffers it's all game and so it runs a little bit countercurrent to we were talking about before which is the requirement for effort to precede the reward Delight feels like a like a very smooth Road um to a reward that's all net positive and as you said these these Delights are available throughout the day and it doesn't it requires just noticing something inside and outside whereas I feel like with gratitude I love gratitude practices the data are incredible it is is anything but but but squishy it was like real power tool for shifting one's one's state of mind that's clear from the literature but the Gratitude thing I I feel like requires an almost like a a formalization like okay I'm going to be grateful now whereas Delight you're just kind of on the lookout for things that spark you and make you um reflexively smile and and and few things are better than that yeah and I think it's really sensory you know in the way we were talking about before right it gets you back into being present most of these Delights are something you taste or you experience or you see that's funny um there's a really lovely book by the author Ross gay called The Book of delights and and he used a delight practice where every day he not only had to find a delight but write a short essay about it because he's an author and it's just hilarious it's like one of my favorite books and you just kind of go and it's really strange things it's like when ises he you know notice the flower as he notices lilacs and he has this whole idea of one delay is purple flowers why are there so many purple flowers there's purple flowers everywhere he also has a delight in music he really likes the' 8s band El dear you know from the be of the r familiar he talks about his love of De and you can kind of have this connection with other people's Delights and and it's silly they're just silly things but the fact that we've notice them I mean again as a listener is probably experiencing right now if you pay attention little bit of positive emotion right if you're driving around your car feeling a little stressed out in traffic you can kind of take a breath and so that's the power of the practice you're you're shifting your emotions because you're noticing these good things you're noticing the good things which is great you're sort of training your attention to get there and you're sort of forming this habit to shift that negativity bias that's sort of built in but isn't really making you as happy as you could be I'd like to take a quick break and thank one of our sponsors David David makes a protein bar unlike any other it has 28 gram of protein only 150 calories and0 gram of sugar that's right 28 gram of protein and 75% of its calories come from protein These Bars from David also taste amazing my favorite flavor is chocolate chip cookie dough but then again I also 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interested in shifting one's emotions and when that feels good when it is good and when it doesn't feel good um I asked our friend Ethan cross about this too um I'm not going to compare your answers as a as a template for who's right who's wrong I think there there are a lot a lot of differing opinions on this but um I know from the time we are young kids we don't like to be shifted like we don't like people to impose an emotional requirement on us in fact my niece when she was little I was telling her this she's 18 now she was not amused um which which delighted me that she was not amused but when she was little she was um a pretty healthily stubborn kid and um you'd ask her to do anything like hey let's go downstairs for a walk and she loved going outside for walks and she'd say no push me and then she would get her stuff and then you'd go for a walk but I loved her like no push me I love this it was also Costello was like a don't push me you couldn't um so there was this like immediate vocalization from the time she could speak really was like no I'm going to decide how I feel such a healthy thing too such a healthy thing you're not going to shift me I like we're going out for a walk it's going to be fun and she's like no push me and then she'd go for the walk most of the times it was a fun walk but I think that we we don't like to be shifted MH and in some ways we don't really like to shift ourselves like when we're in a given emotion MH uh when people are feeling upset like they don't want to be told they should feel happy yeah um and yet no one really wants to be upset although there's this do you know this result I don't want to um spin off into it a long discussion about this but Robert Heath a very controversial neurosurgeon from the um like 70s and 80s did these experiments of stimulating in different parts of the brain allowing people to self-stimulate different parts of their brain and all there were only three subjects because it's a yeah inv Vivo human neuros stimulation experiment all three subjects by far their favorite area to uh stimulate was this midline Central nucleus midline midline thalamic nucleus rather all three of them reported that the The Sensation that they would lever pressed the most for was frustration and Mild anger mhm humans like that excuse my language Nega look the horror movie industry would not exist if we didn't like fear right the the honestly like Twitter X whatever we're calling it now would not exist if we didn't like outrage right these are kind of complicated negative emotions that have have some positive benefit to us and I think that this is something that people get wrong when they hear my line of research you know I tell people like oh I teach this class about happiness at Yale and people will say like oh you just want everybody to be happy you sort of embrace this toxic positivity and I'm like no no no toxic positivity toxic positivity yeah it's this idea I mean you kind of see it in our culture right now it's the sort of Good Vibes only right it's this idea that anything that feels you know mildly frustrating or like hard to do it's like oh no no do that it's like Good Vibes only right and there's this idea that if you're experiencing negative emotions if you feel sad or you feel a little lonely or you feel a little upset at politics whatever it is that something's wrong or you got to take a pill or you got to do something to fix it right and I think that's a really dangerous idea right because it's getting rid of this signal that we've been built to experience evolutionarily that's really important right if you're experiencing outrage that's telling you something super crucial if you're experiencing kind of frustration overwhelm is a big one if you're kind of feeling oh I'm so overwhelmed at work and I'm burned out that's a really useful signal about behavioral changes you should make um in class I often tell my students that negative emotions are like that that dashboard on your car you know you go in your car and you're like you know sometimes you're driving the tire light comes on or the engine light comes on and and that's a pain in the ass honestly because you're like well I got to deal with it but so it's not fun when these lights come on but it's super useful information that if you actively ignore it for months and months is going to cause a much bigger your problem later on and I think this is how all of our negative emotions work you know if you're feeling that you know negative emotion of loneliness means you need more social connection if you're feeling overwhelmed it means probably got to take something off your plate before you burn out or get sick if you're feeling sad like that's probably because of some you know stimulus that matters that it's like you're not there anymore if you're feeling grief and so on I think too often we just like want to get rid of those we don't like them so we want to suppress those emotions um but that but suppressing our emotions is giv up useful evolutionary information that probably means we can take action to to fix and feel better Americans might be surprised to hear this but um I learned this from my father who's from South America he's from Argentina went to British schools when he was young and he told me when I was probably 10 or 12 I can't remember exactly how old he said you know in um in the British formal school system if you act too happy people accuse you of being stupid mhm you to be to be gleeful or happy yeah um and I said now I would say Well they're perfectly fine being happy when they're drinking I will say that the afterwork um alcohol culture in lond 514 p.m. crowd they drink like I don't know if it's still the case but they drink a lot and then they get very like outwardly happy but there's this idea um and and this was true when I came into Academia um that if somebody wasn't super serious that they might be stupid um and I think in the United States now we tend to celebrate more expressions of Glee um but that's usually in the context of like celebrity and wealth yeah like these people getting on their private planes or something but I think there's still some elements to this that that we internalize that um if you're happy that you're not worrying about something if you're not worrying about something then you're ignoring the woes of the world maybe even the your the threats that are all around you and so we're some in some ways we are conditioned to always want to be happy that does seem to be one message but then we also get the conflicting message that to be happy is to be ignorant of what's really happening if not to you then to other people and therefore you're not fulfilling your role in society so who are you to be happy all the time there's a lot of judgment written into this thing around happiness I'm realizing yeah totally and and I think you're you're bringing up something that I actually worry about a lot right which is is that hypothesis correct is it the case that if you're feeling happy you just ignore the woes and all the terrible stuff in the world because then I'm creating like you know a whole generation of Yale students who are going to not fix the bad problems of life and so it turns out there's a researcher at Georgetown Constantine Kush who's tested this he actually asked the question you know is it the case that people who are experiencing more positive emotion more satisfaction with life do they ignore the problems of the world and not act or are they the ones kind of going out and doing stuff and so he did this in a couple different contexts he looked for social justice causes I'll tell the the climate version so he looked at how many people are taking climate action so do you go to a protest do you put solar panels on are you donating money to climate causes and he finds that the people who are really climate anxious they tend to have less positive emotions you're really worried about climate change you tend to be more on the depressed anxious side but if you're doing stuff about it then you tend to have more positive emotion um I think he assumes that Cal arrow goes in the other way that like if you're happier if you're experiencing lots of delights and positive emotion you kind of have the bandwidth to do stuff right you can go to that protest where if you're super depressed you're just going to like lie in bed with your duvet you don't have the bandwidth to do this stuff and so this old called kind of like poly enish hypo is about happiness it makes complete intuitive sense but if you look at the data it's actually the opposite which is a good thing because I think it gives us a mandate not to stay depressed about everything in the world pissed off about what's happening yes those negative emotions are good to to notice and experience and act on but like we can take care of ourselves and it's okay it doesn't mean we're going to stop doing good stuff in the world I have a family member she's wonderful she saves animals constantly um and she knows that she has an excessive number of animals um but she's from the East Coast from New Jersey and the other day she told me she goes you know I like your podcast but you know sometimes you have these guests on that are clearly from the west coast and you guys get into this real like West Coast California squishy stuff and I just can't listen to those and I said I won't say her name but um for sake of privacy but uh she said but you know I really like it when um even if the topic is about um something kind of uh squishy if the person's from the East Coast then like you know like I believe what they're saying and said and she goes yeah you know out there you're into this and that and I said well out there in New Jersey you know language is kind of a weapon she goes it's absolutely a weapon you know so I do think there are these even local cultural things like people from the Midwest to me I don't want to you know stereotype but they there's a every time I go to the the Midwest I must say there's a there's an etiquette people are just so polite and kind so the the level of of sort of mean level of decency is much higher than it is say in California in California there's some other things that are wonderful that are lacking elsewhere on the east coast and so forth but yeah I I think one can overgeneralize but I think that the reason I raised this is that maybe we all need to pay a little bit of attention to the messages that we internalized in our family and our culture growing up and ask ourselves whether or not our degree of happiness or lack thereof is you know by some programming yeah literally social programming that we've internalized cuz I I grew up in a home where um cynical humor was rewarded uhhuh and I've learned over the years in part um through discussions with Jim Zaki and and others like um I'm working on it uh not all my humor cynical but I don't like cynicism it bums me out it doesn't feel good and I realize it doesn't feel good I love Delight yeah but I don't like cynicism that's just me and for the cynics out there like cool do you do you but um I think we have to pay attention to kind of like where our set point is with this stuff cuz some people are like sitting real in the no push me and they want to be unhappy yeah right we're heading up on the holidays here so like Scrooge MH right and other people they're not feeling good they want to be happy and then other people really are just like no worries I mean down in Australia it's all no worries and what do they say in um Costa Rica I always oh uh Pur yeah which means it's like like the you good life you know chill life everyone was just telling each other like how great life should be all day long yeah yeah I mean I think you're getting at a really important issue right which is like do we have a happiness set point and kind of if we do where does it come from right in your example you know of kind of growing up cynically and having these kind of cynical messages it could be that that was some sort of you know maybe epigenetic thing right you're around all these people that are cynical and you learn how to do it right but it it could be more of the like genetic side maybe there's some pre-programmed you know sense of your negativity bias or something you know we don't have great answers to those things but it's definitely true that our place really shapes kind of a lot of our tendencies that matter for happiness um we know this from some of the like local kind of place things that you said I think you my my in-laws are from the Midwest and like yeah I toally they're just like great decent kind happy people they listening right now like I don't know you I'm trying to train to be like you they're wonderful um but but we also know from like even more macro level right so for now for decades the world happiness report in collaboration with the Gallup survey has been surveying happiness of people across the world right and they come up with these like really consistent country level differences in happiness um the US for a very wealthy country is like not very happy we're pretty low on the scale and in fact in the most recent World happiness report we dipped like below like the top 10 like we kind of had this major kind of dive for the first time who the happiest uh Scandinavians so it's usually Denmark I love going to Denmark yeah they're very very very happy so they tend to be happy and so we can ask the question what's the difference maybe it's you know the great Scandinavian genes probably not it's actually a lot of their cultural practices which build on the sorts of things talking about you know take social connection right there's um a lot less work hours so people can go home and hang out with their family there's a huge culture of clubs for example in Denmark where people go off and do sporting things a lot of Fitness right um and the structure is to kind of get that Fitness right like nobody expects you to be at work so you can go you know ski or work out or hang out I will say they're very effective when they work they're very proficient I mean I struck by the like average level of um operational and intellectual intelligence of somebody like the person your waiter in Denmark is an awesome waiter yeah like and often times has very interesting things to say like the level of proficiency and the level of focus when they are working is immensely high so they're not just like kicking back all day no and I and I think in part it's a different attitude towards work that there's a time for work but you don't let your work e kind of like leak into other things um there's this woman Helen Russell uh who wrote a book about the happiness in Denmark or the Danish path of happiness I think is the name of the book um and she had this quote of like she was talking to people in Denmark um and there's often a thing that will happen where your manager has to talk to you at work and give you feedback and it's in part because you're not leaving work on time you're there over time and they want to have a conversation with you like what's your problem why can't you finish your work in the aot at hours which again to American years is like what your manager would never say that I love it I love it but that's that's the social thing but but country level uh happiness is also affected by some of the thought patterns we talked about like the you know the Scandinavians even though like cold and dark and nothing like it's here in California with you right now they take joy in these tiny moments this idea of Huga right h y gge Hugo where you notice the warmth of your coffee or have these candles or things it's a it's a society that's really focused on presence in a really rich way I love that my like I said my father's Latin he's from Argentina and he married a Danish woman and and I would say much of their life is about um cherishing and delighting in these these these small things yeah um the everyday things yeah um I think that's dare I say I think that's one of their major points of convergence I know I'm sure there are others but that's a major point of convergence I think you know growing up in the United States I sort of internalized this idea that you know you're supposed to figure out who you know who you are and go do big things you know like um that was the message that I internalized part of that was the high school I went to a super competitive high school and um kind of people like tended to surround myself by but um yeah I think for some of us the effort is in trying to learn to appreciate the little things having a dog and I'm we have to talk about dogs because you you've actually studied dogs um extensively dogs non-human primates in in a natural setting and um and the other uh Old World primates humans um you know people talk about how dogs are just present they're not thinking about the past they're not thinking about the future I'd like to challenge that just for a second is theic in me this is the scientist in me and I'm genuinely curious how do we know that dogs aren't thinking a little bit about the past or the walk they're going to take later that afternoon do do we know I mean they have a prefrontal cortex that can anticipate things they have a memory system they have a hippocampus and a cortex that can remember things so how do we know that our dog isn't sitting there you know yes trying to glean as much Sunshine as they can on their belly through the through the uh through the window but maybe they're thinking like gosh like when are they going to finish doing what whatever it is they're doing so we can go outside and play ball yeah it's such a hard question it's such a hard question and I mean I think it's one that every dog owner has really wondered about right um I mean I've thought about this question actually more in the monkeys right who you know we can fight about dog neurobiology and they've got some of the stuff but like they're kind of distinct like tiny you know Walnut brains rather than like Prim dogs have I let's just say that well first of all dogs have as far as I know one of the most dramatic ranges in body size within a given uh species of animal so Chihuahua Great Dane I think it's the dosing of igf1 that regulates body size and dogs it's a beautiful cover of Science magazine that we can put a link to with a chahua and a Great Dane and it's just like whoa same species um but they have relatively small brains relative to their body weight size regardless and if you look at the what the brain's doing a lot of it is sensory I mean a lot of it's all Factory right it's not the ruminative thinking about stuff that we kind of have like expanded a lot in the primate brain you know not a lot of front prefrontal Cort lot of prefrontal stuff right before behind your forehead folks is this is the part that allows um you to say sh to your impulses to quiet your impulse suppress them and also um context dependent learning and planning so what to do what to say what not to do what not to say in a given environment there's a lot in your brain about that that is you know controlled by so-called executive function the sort of conductor of the whole thing and you're saying dogs dogs have a pretty limited real estate they're limited and if you think about what that real estate does you know it can kind of do that shush you know it can take you out of the moment but they're kind of related parts of you know kind of Cortex close by that's doing a lot of the work of thinking about past episodes thinking about what other people are thinking thinking about counterfactuals like not this is what humans are doing this is what humans are doing like the human big version of this right um and this is the kind of stuff that gets us into trouble when it comes to presents I think the dogs walking around it's like you know I don't know what it's sniffing like hydrant hydrant do you know like dog dog person person and I think it's there because it doesn't have as much circuitry to be like well this hydrant is not exactly as good as the other hydrant I smelled before like what would you know Bob the other dog be thinking of this hydrant right now I think or they're still laughing at so and so from the dog park incident two weeks ago right so much of human um negative interaction is like um humans exchanging good and bad information about other humans oh totally it's like kind of the basis of not all but a lot of social media yeah and a lot of our rumination is US thinking about the other information that people have about us right you know kind of we have no idea what exactly yeah and so you know I often think about this so in Buddhist circles um there's this discussion of the monkey Mind by which they mean the part of your mind that when you're trying to be present and focus on the moment especially in practices like meditation kind of runs off somewhere that's your monkey mind running off and you to kind of yank it back by the tail or something and I've always thought that was a real kind of unnecessary dis to monkeys because my sense is at least at least the Reese's monkeys which is the species I worked with they seem a lot more like dogs than humans you know I I work with this group of monkeys on a a field in a field site called Kaio Santiago it's this island off the coast of Puerto Rico and it's home to a thousand Freer ranging reesus monkey so we can do our studies and just kind of walk around with these monkeys who are kind of living freely and you see them and they just you know I'll sometimes sit near a monkey who's like sitting there looking out into the ocean and just sitting there and I'm like I bet what's going on in his head is not that human Buddhist version of the monkey mind where he's like what about this ocean when do I have to go home I have to cook something oh what did my husband say to me it's not that I think the monkeyy version is just like ocean ocean like it's just it's just there or even or even better like Costello I used to look at him and and think what's going on in that brain of his and then I realized it's probably and this is a neurophys I wouldn't consider myself a neurophysiologist but I've done some certainly a fair number of recordings from the the live brain and I'm guessing most of what was in there is what we call Hash not the drug back that's the sound on the Audio Monitor when's no clean signal toise I'm guessing just hash like I I wonder if the term monkey mind well here I'll just come clean I always thought that monkey mind was this image of a little monkey swinging from tree to tree and that it's the um adjective uh uh sort of superimposed on the human brain so excuse me it's the it's the verb of the of the moving monkey um transformed into an adjective um judgment about the human brain so so sad if you're a monkey like I think if monkeys had frontal cortex and talk to us would be like don't blame us for your like it's the human brain part of the brain that brain yeah exactly you know somebody who really appreciates Raptors and um diving birds think about the computations diving birds have to do they have to adjust for the refractory index of the water so where they see the fish is not where the fish is and um you know so when people say bird brain I'm like get me started on forid cognition those guys are the smartest yeah smartest guys so monkeys but but you're making me realize I always thought Reese's Maxs which are Old World primates like us or we're like them that they had a fair amount of prefrontal real estate in their brain such that they could think and strategize and plan I mean if one just watches one episode of that Netflix special which I love um which is chimp Empire mhm there's all this stuffff about who's in power and then they're going to team up and then they're going to wait a few days until that one's injured and then they're not going to groom the other one and boom there's an over I mean like very complicated it's chess not Checkers for for Old World primates yeah I think there could be a big distinction between what chimpanzees are doing I mean they're our closest you know tied with bonobo is our closest living relative you know that was what like 30 million you know like wasn't so long right whereas rees's monkeys are pretty far off right I think there could be a lot of things that happened um in between and and we know that not necessarily from the neurobiology because it's hard to ask kind of functional neurobiology questions with animals you can't kind of put them in fmri where they're doing Behavior as easily as you can with a human um but we know it from cognition studies that look at things like you know how good are say reesus monkeys at perspective taking at kind of taking on someone else's beliefs knowing oh somebody's thinking something theory of mind yeah thinking something different that I'm thinking um and they're not so hot at it they really use their own perspective to make judgments pretty well same thing when we look at cases of like counterfactual thinking you know do do you have regret over an outcome that you didn't get right something that reesus monkeys find kind of hard right so it seems like they're very good at sophisticatedly planning in the present moment right you know you and I are talking here right now if you're watching the video you can see I have a cup like I might be planning to pick up the cup right but the cups here everything I'm not simulating what if this was a lovely martini right that that's the kind of thing that probably a human can do really well but a monkey can't so they can kind of plan and take Next Step actions when there's around the world that they experience but they can't simulate worlds that are totally different and that includes the kind of complicated stuff going on in somebody else's head so they're good at short-term strategy this fits with um what a friend of mine who studies behavior in macx told me which is that you can set up a really nice complicated onp paper perfect experiment where the monkey is going to inform you about some important feature of how the brain works in terms of Behavioral economics or something but then what you realize is or what the monkey realizes even if it doesn't consciously realize is that no matter what they're going to get reward 50% of the time on average and they'll just hit the lever or give an answer as fast as they can so they get that day's ration of reward and just that's the end of the day and so they're not cheating they're just like why would I work any harder than this to actually do the experiment you want me to do and so what many primate behavioral researchers end up becoming are monkey trainers oh yeah I mean the bane of every animal researcher existence this is whether you test dogs monkeys rodents whatever is what are called side biases what's a side bias it's you're giving an animal a choice between A and B one A's on the left B's on the right and rather than think through these complicated things you want them to Think Through they're just like whatever hey left I'll go left left left left left left and you're like no I know you get rewarded 50% of the time but I had this really creative question I wanted you to pay attention and they just don't care they don't care well they're or or or they're getting rewarded enough at 50% that you have to do something like what what researchers in the FI I mean now we're getting really in the trenches called breaking a side bias we're like no I'm going to give more reward at B if you're only going to left then I'm going to give more reward at right we move them and stuff but it does often seem to be the case that the monkeys are training us more than we trading the monkeys so I Delight in that a little bit I confess just a little bit just a tiny bit um I mean I I'll I'll share one story that that kind of gets it you know this sort of perspective taking how good they are that they are good when it's kind of what's in the here and now right um we were doing these studies um on the island which involved was showing monkeys some food and we had these these eggplants in a box that we were making the monkeys look at for various reasons we couldn't find a monkey to test on this island you have to kind of hike around until you find a monkey who's kind of chilled out and whatever and we had hiked around the whole Mount the whole island it was taking forever we get back to our starting location and there's there's an eggplant that's sitting there we're like where' that where' that eggplant come from and we're like and it's got like bite marks out of it we're like how did that and it was like wait a minute somebody must have stolen my eggplant and we're like well how did that happen like we were like we were paying attention to the monkeys the whole time we realized like no no no they must have stolen it when we were like we probably put it down for a second and like they took it like we didn't drop it it was like and so it was like we iiz like oh not only are they good at stealing but they can tell like if we're looking at it but looking is something that you know all animals pay attention to gaze like you know this is the kind of thing that even you know insects pay attention to right that's why they have these kind of markings that look like eyes so that birds won't eat them and stuff gaze following is really robust but that's different than that monkey thinking I bet that person's not looking it's probably like no eyes I can grab it right but if you look kind of more sophisticatedly they're not good at it but this was another case of realizing like oh the monkeys are actually a lot smarter than than we give them credit for and maybe us too yeah so what we're talking about is they are good at um figuring out the basic rules MH maybe even up to the level of what you call in computer programming and Gates if this and that are happening then I go right if that and that are not happening then I don't do anything and if that and a third option are happening well then I go left yeah um and if all three are happening it doesn't matter like they can probably figure out you know two or three levels of and Gates but what they can do is simulate all these various situations I mean the amazing thing about being a human is I could you know I could imagine any scenario imagine like 700 podcast listeners jumped on this table right now you know imagine if the table was orange like imagine if you were I don't know another podcaster you're Malcolm Gladwell or whatever like I more hair true I mean I can simulate all these infinite different things to try to program that so hard but it comes to us as humans in seconds it's so fast and it's the kind of thing that we use all the time honestly it's it's the basis of a lot of our happiness look at you know the fiction that we engage in right you we're constantly paying deep and close attention to fictional worlds I've cared more about some fictional worlds than I've cared about my own family members sorry family members but it's true right like you're reading a novel and you're like I'm crying I'm balling I'm cheering for these people that I know are completely made up because our brains just kind of dive into into these sort of fake worlds these alternative worlds so easily and so quickly so powerfully I definitely want to continue along the dimension of how we construct our happiness but I just want to make sure that I ask again about dogs um and and you know let's let's just do this because you know I know it's so politically dangerous but let's talk about the dog versus cat thing yeah you know my sister loves cats I don't dislike cats but that doesn't mean I like them I once rented a place where there was a big cat I think it was one of these manun cats his name was Baloo they're basically do he's basically a dog and Costello had certain cat-like qualities like he just wanted to Lounge all day he could really move like a dog but most of the time he was kind of like a cat at home and it was frustrating for me but I mean what do what do you think it is you know you have these feline people and you have dog people and I'm definitely in the dog camp but one of the reasons I love dogs is I assume they're in the Pres but mostly it's the unconditional love but what do you think it is this dog cat thing I mean cats are presumably in the present as well yeah um they don't make long-term plans and if they do they don't actualize those plans so why is it that some people feel that cats are like nasty animals that are plotting against them and some people Delight in cats yeah they don't have great data on it but my sense is it gets back to the unconditional love idea the cat like if you're the kind of person who craves the unconditional love you wind up being more of a dog person yes but if you like the what was it that your your uh was it your niece yeah my niece yeah what was it your niece said this like no push meat she used to hold her finger up yeah like say going cats are a lot more no push me unless we said we were going for ice cream it was no push me and I remember and I still Delight in it thinking like awesome she had just I mean like she had such a strong Spirit from the time she you might like cats cuz cats are a lot like no push me and I think I think this is that I don't want a cat well I think I think the like removal of the sort of no push me might be one of the last stages of evolution and domestication of dogs and I know this because in my dog work we also did some very fun work with dingos which are the Australian wild dogs and we don't fully know their history our sense is like those dogs kind of like got pretty close to humans pretty tolerant of humans but didn't go like all the way to Costello in terms of the bond um and one of the amazing things we get interacted with this group at a sanctuary for dingo out in Australia um one of the only sets of genetic pure dingos in the world with this wonderful privilege to work with but we kind of had to like do our keep at these field stations so we kind of went in and you know helped cleaned up with the dingo and so on and uh every morning you'd go out and you'd give the dingo their food which are these big kind of chickens um and they would just I mean they just kind of raw chickens not live chickens but they'd just like Chomp it in one gulp just like bones and all and you're like whoa and then right after that they'd want to be kind of oh come on nudge me be nice it was like a cat in its best move but then at a certain point they were just like like no like I'll stop they just had like such their own will in this really amazing way and it just felt incredibly catlike I'm like you look like a dog but your behavior is so much more cat-like so so I don't know no great studies on this it'd be great to kind of figure it out but my sense is distinction between dog people and Cat people might be the unconditional love no push me ratio of what people like so interesting and um I like to think did not take us too far off course in our discussion about happiness because we clearly Delight in this and y people do too is that we think about the different the different brain architectures and the different capabilities the different brain architectures have across species um and the fact that we live in such close proximity to some of these species is wild when I was growing up not everyone had a dog unless they had the space for it now I feel like dogs are everywhere yeah I mean it's like such an enormous billion dollar industry to have dogs and it raises a question that kind of gets us back to some of the happiness work like which is is that a good idea right all these people are investing their time their energy their space and dogs you know you could ask the question do they make us happier and I know you they do yeah don't I'm not going to break everybody's heart we've killed the cat people and the dog no pet dogs in particular but pets in general um wind up making us happier pet owners are statistically happier um and I think it's for a couple of reasons based on the stuff we just talked about you know take the behavioral pattern that matters social connection for sure dogs provide that social connection themselves you know we just talked about they tap into your caregiving system and so on but as you talked about in your interactions with like you know Bulldog pleading you know like Bulldog you know what was the phrase you used when you see a bulldog and you say Bulldog something oh I when I see somebody with a bulldog I just say um excuse me there's a bulldog tax and then I and then I pet their Bulldog good let me go if you're going to meet a bulldog just understand they're they're shaped like a beer keg so they can't scratch themselves on their on their hind quarters so if you give them a scratch there they're like thank you because it's got to be a just awful it's like having that scratch in the middle of your back and you can't reach it so you do you you do the Bulldog text and you have this nice social connection with the Bulldog but my guess is and because you're using verbal language you also connected with the person you probably say oh my gosh what's his name oh when did you get him blah blah blah that's chatting with the briest at the coffee shop right that's doing the you know Nick ebl experiments we just talked about before pets wind up bringing us social connection um and one of the pieces of advice if you're feeling lonely is get an animal not just so that the animal will give you some comfort but you know it's particularly with a dog you got to walk that animal and then people talk to you it's much easier to connect with people when you have dogs so social connection is huge um second thing is you know particularly again for dogs um what are people doing they're getting out and walking right so we're getting some people who never had a lot of physical exercise before are at least getting the kind of walks they need to do in for the dog and even if they won't choose to do it for themselves they often choose to do it for their dog so you get you know exercise in which is good for physical health and we haven't talked about but is enormously good for happiness meta analyses showing you know half hour of cardio exercise exercise a day is as good as a anti-depression medication for reducing symptoms of depression so just that walk with your dog is great but beyond that I think they help our thought patterns right and this is true for dogs I think and cats right where you know as you're were saying we're wondering what they're doing sometimes if they're sitting there and we're just petting them what we're doing is we're sitting there and we're petting them so they give us these wonderful sensory experiences and I think they cause us to be a little bit more present especially when we're kind of interacting with them you know we're interacting with our dogs unless you're taking the Instagram pictures of the dog but usually when you're playing with the dog or what ever it's you're just there you're not on your phone you're just kind of mindfully experiencing life with your dog kind of like when you talked about your road trip you know part of what probably brought you into the present moment especially if your girlfriend was working was like that the dog was interacting with you so the dogs help us not because they're inherently kind of Happiness inducing they help us take these boxes of better behaviors for happiness better thought patterns for happiness and they're kind of a delight so they kind of give us some positive emotion too I love all of that I just want to um double click uh if it were on this idea that they can be a bridge for social connection that's really powerful a friend of mine who used to smoke cigarettes who doesn't any longer um in fact I remember when I was a postto at Stanford that like the mostly the foreign post talks but they used to gather outside and have Cigar cigarette breaks all the time now you're not allowed to smoke on the medical school campus and I think probably on the main campus too most places you're not allowed to smoke out right because of secondhand smoke any any in any case but um but he said to me you know it used to be that um before people either knew or fully internalized how bad smoking was is that asking for a cigarette or sharing a cigarette side by side with somebody was a way that people engaged in casual interaction not just outside of bars not just to meet potential mates Etc but it was just it was a bridge you know you can walk up to somebody and say you know like we call it like buming a smoke like you ask for a cigarette or you if someone was smoking you could go stand by them and also smoke yeah and so is this terribly Health diminishing habit but it served as a lot of social lubricant yeah it also it also gives you another behavior that we know is really important for happiness which is time um there's a lot of social science research on this phenomena that's called time affluence which is a sort of subjective sense that you feel wealthy in time you kind of just have a break right you get a like a smoking break is one of these right you get a break and often people you know back in the day when smoking was allowed one of the ways that you got your breakes often in not so great workplaces was like you could ask for a smoke break my mom talks about this she was a a teacher educator for a super long time where you don't get a lot of breaks but you know back in the 70s if you're a smoker they'd let you go outside for 10 minutes and that was a sort of break right so I think this other unhealthy habit kind of gave us the opportunity to take breaks which we know are great for happiness and so great for happiness that if you don't have any of this so-called time affluence is sense that you have some free time if you experience what researchers called time famine where you feel like almost starving for time it's a huge hit on your well-being if you self-report these surveys being time famished so I don't have time to meet up with my friends I never have time for the stuff I want to do that's as big a hit on your well-being as if you self-report being unemployed you know listeners if you lost you have a job and you lost it tomorrow you'd probably think of that as a big hit in your happiness just not having any time for the little breaks in life is as bad wow and this gets back to our earlier discussion about money and happiness which is researcher Ashley willins at Harvard Business School has kind of pushed the idea that what's going on with these you know low income folks who have a real hit on happiness right not having a high income hurt your happiness her theory is a lot of that actually has to do with time because if you have a really low income you don't have a car to get to work so you're taking the bus and it's taking you forever you're working multiple jobs right that a lot of the reason that money affects happiness and not having money affects happiness is that it co-varies with not having time and the real hit on our happiness is just the time part more so than the money part so we need to be in pursuit of things we need to work um but we also need some free time we can't have too much free time or too much work basically and The Sweet Spot is often hard to maintain or even know what what that sweet spot is yeah I think this this term kind of time affence and what researchers mean by is helpful here right it's the subjective sense that you have some free time it's not I objectively go into your calendar and you show me how many open blocks there are it's your sense that you have a break and this provides an interesting hack that we can use to get more of it right which is that we can kind of just frame things as is having more time um you know cuz sometimes when you get a break that you don't expect it can feel like a lot um I teach this uh class about happiness on y's campus and I talk about time affluence it's one of the topics in my class and I always felt that was really ironic because our young people today especially at you know Elite College institutions are so time famished they're running from thing to thing and have a million extracurriculars and so on so I feel will like I'm going to lecture them for an hour on time affluence and tell them all these studies and so what I did was uh they in the syllabus as said there's a lecture on time affluence and they come to class and I have my teaching assistants that are handing out little Flyers that say today's you know like lectures about time affluence and to teach you what that is I'm going to give you some no class today so you didn't know you walked to class now you got a free hour and a half and it just happened to be one of these unusually warm you know like California esque days in New Haven where it was like sunny out so kids you know got a bubble tea with their friend or some of them went on a hike near the like local you know State Park and one of the students I remember burst in a tear is when she got this this form and she said uh this is the first free hour and a half I've had for like the last three months you know wow um that stress they're that stress but what I find interesting about this is like I didn't give them a month off vacation right I gave them an hour back unexpectedly and it felt like it was huge and Andrew I don't know your schedule but sometimes my schedule can be so overwhelmed and so packed that you know there's a half hour meeting that gets canceled I'm just like and like their relief I feel like I could learn a new language I could you know like you just feel like but it's a half hour right and I think this is a hack we can use for ourselves right you know listeners right now go on your calendar a few months from now and just like you know take like you know months months away pick an hour period and just write in like huberman lab time affluence and just don't put anything in that and my guess is when you get to that hour that you've scheduled months later you'll be like oh my gosh this feels great we can kind of gift ourselves these little Windows of time um another hack we can do is to make good use of the free time we do have and this is kind of a puzzle is something that I found unexpected when I saw the data on this which is that turns out we actually have more free time now than we did like 10 15 years ago if you add it up not just kind of postco but in general we've been getting more free time however the free time we have is cut up differently it's in smaller chunks it's like five minutes when that Zoom meeting ends a little earlier 10 minutes if your kid falls asleep early or whatever it is and we don't think it's that much so we just kind of blow it but if you add it up it winds up more than people in past decades have had and probably like good time that we could use for stuff and so these little chunks of time are what the journalist Bridget schul calls time confetti which I think is such a great image of it it's this little you know five minutes here and there but you can do a lot with those minutes if you add them up um we just have to use them a little bit more intentionally right and that could be you know for some of the stuff you talk about in this podcast a lot like use that t you do the seven minute New York Times workout you know do do the kinds of things we're talking about you know that's the time you text your friend and have a delay or get some sunlight get some sunlight outside right walk in sunlight huge problem is what do we do when we get the time confetti or I mean what do I do when I'm in a bad moment pull out our phone check our email scroll through it's like again this sort of neutr sweet dopamine hit that's not being effective so if you feel really overwhelmed and you objectively don't have a lot of time remember that the time confetti that you already have it's already sitting there can be really valuable if you use it well super important um because I think the filling of those spaces with what I love the analogy to neutr or artificial sweeteners is it's going to taste like it's providing some sort of nourishment but it's um probably just creating a more sense of craving and want at some level would really like to talk about reward circuitry just thematically um listeners of this podcast and even if they've never heard one of these podcasts before um probably familiar with the word dopamine we've talked about it a bit and as we were talking about earlier everything about the dopamine reward circuitry which of course includes other chemicals too is based on prior experience relative to current experience relative to anticipated outcom what sometimes referred to as reward prediction error think something Great's going to happen something great happens great think something Great's going to happen something less than great happens sucks way more Yep than you would anticipate think that something not so great is going to happen something so so great happens huge reward not novelty surprise brings the positive novelty and and surprise brings the biggest rewards and this is what I would like to kind of paint as the backdrop think about it as a conceptual mural behind us as I asked the question maybe just maybe we're not supposed to be happy all the time or maybe even all that often mhm and when we're feeling not so great or even lousy ided it's not dangerous levels of depression maybe we should frame that as the backdrop for the greater happiness that will come when we start to emerge from that lousy State yeah now some people could say well now you're just kind of using neurobiology to you know twist around what would otherwise be a lousy experience and tell me that it's good for me no uh what I'm trying to say is you know people want to be happy I think we'd all love to be happy all the time but we're not wired to be happy all the time and maybe the feelings of Happiness can't exist unless they have contrast with these neutral or negative emotion states that we call I don't know feeling lousy feeling anxious Etc and just I realize I can pose long questions but I just want to provide a little bit more context for the moment which is that every circuit in the brain our ability to see light literally depends on the contrast with the so-called off circuitry which is the circuitry in our visual system that perceives dark we need contrast to be able to see light mhm everything's Push Pull hunger satiety cold heat perception um go no go it's all Push Pull circuitry in there why wouldn't happiness have a pushpull relationship with unhappiness or at least neutral affect yeah well I think it does I mean you're giving a neurobiological explanation for what psychologists in this field of positive psychology have referred to is what's called hedonic adaptation is a fancy way of saying we get used to stuff um you know you like grab the you know delicious ice cream cone I know we Hub we do a delicious salad really healthy but it's tasty healthy tasty salad right start eating it first bite is like this is awesome I'm so into it it's great bite number two a little bit less awesome little bit less by the 10th bite it's not because you're full or you're like you know feeling disgusted it's just like that sensory experience you've gotten used to it right it's just no longer as interesting walk into a bakery yeah exactly it smells amazing spend 5 minutes in the bakery 10 minutes in the bakery you attenuate you habituate which is great I mean you wouldn't maybe want to be firing your your neurons would get all exhausted and stuff but it's in in one way terrible for happiness in another way very good for happiness but in a major way terrible for happiness which is the following every good thing in life if it sticks around becomes kind of boring over time you just kind of used to it um I use the example sometimes of you know the last time the first time your partner said I love you or if you had a kid the first time your kid said mommy or daddy that feels amazing right but like you know last week my husband said I love you it's like whatever I'm just used to it right you know last week when your kid was like I love you mom like you know Mommy like you don't care right the most amazing thing in life if it gets repeated just becomes boring and that sucks because you know you like the most amazing things in life to kind of keep being awesome it's pretty sad that we don't have it right this has a lip side though which is very good for happiness hedonic adaptation which is the most terrible thing in life can happen and over time you get used to that too you know so your partner breaks up with you um you find out you have a chronic disease right just something like really bad happens day one when you find out that piece of information it is awful but day two yeah still awful but that's just your life and then over time it kind of gets better um a very famous study in the field of Happiness science that tried to look at this with um people who experienced a really great event in theory uh winning the lottery um and people who experienced really bad events real events in life um becoming paraplegic so you used to be able to walk and now you've lost the use of your legs you survey happiness um in people who haven't had these experiences and you ask predict how bad it would be to have this and people say you know a day one of winning the lottery would be really great and you know a year from now a year from that point winning lottery would still be just as great it'd be awesome same thing with paraplegic you know you're you know moment you become paraplegic that day is a really crappy Thursday but a year from then is still just as crappy and what you find is people you know on the day you become paraplegic or the day you win your lottery like that a big shift in your contrast right you know the day you win the lottery is an awesome Thursday day you become paraplegic is terrible but a year from then it turns out your happiness is no different from baseline from the day before that event happened right statistically um and that is shocking right like I know these results I can quote the paper but like if you told me today laori you you know you walk out of Studio you get hit by a car your paraplegic how would you feel in 2026 I'd be like my life is still really crummy um but statistically that's just not going to happen what does that mean that's kind of good news about hedonic adaptation for happiness that means the worst thing possible could happen to you and you have all these processes that are just going to get used to it over time and it's going to be okay and I think this is an important aspect of our psychology that we forget I think sometimes we have opportunities to do things in life that are a little risky something we might try out that we might screw up or fail at or that we'll be bad at at first and we don't do it because we're scared we're making a prediction like oh well if I failed or if I screwed that up you know I'd just be unhappy but actually all these mechanisms that we have of hedonic adaptation means those things aren't going to affect you for as long as you think so I think the contrast hypothesis about happiness is real um good things don't stay good things over time um but the bad things don't either and so but we still want the good things to stay good over time and so that raises a question of of how we can do that um and Liz Dunn whose work I've mentioned before she likes to use this phrase that scarcity Engineers happiness right um one thing we can do is space out the good things in life you know so if I was having that really delicious healthy salad with the avocado whatever if I had that every day it would stop being good um but if I had it very very infrequently it would still be good every time I come back to it and so some some sometimes oddly the way we make ourselves happier is to kind of remove positive experiences especially extreme positive experiences um kind of space them out so we can kind of come back to them over time I definitely agree with that I also and forgive me folks but I think I understand why um dogs are so awesome they don't attenuate to reward MH you tell them they're going to get this little piece of amazing whatever beef jerky or something and they like yes then second trial yes third trial yes I mean presumably at some point they reached satiety or fatigue but there's something about their reward Pathways that they don't seem to attenuate much and there's a if there's feedback to us on that it's like okay okay you know it's great that they'll keep um delighting in the simple little things it seems like almost as much as the the first time yeah we are not like that it's interesting no to my knowledge people haven't studied honic adaptation in dogs but it's a really good question but but we are not like that for most things um and this is this this sucks right I mean it's also the case that in addition to kind of getting used to stuff over time um it's also showing a different feature which is sort more particular contrast feature you're talking about so we over time we kind of habituate that's one sort of neural mechanism but another is the one that you mentioned which is about the contrast right and that's what you see kind of you see both of them say in the light perception right if I show you the same light over time you're going to habituate that's Hedon literally for folks listening uh it literally disappears yes if I set up the right experiment um Russ and Karen dallo at Berkeley years ago did these beautiful experiments you you look at like a grading of light projected onto a wall and if you can stabilize the eyes so that they're not moving around the it literally will disappear and same thing with an odor same thing with touch right like I wasn't thinking about my contact happiness my delicious habituation attenuation these These are technical terms when you really get down into it and the push pull antagonism between um light and dark this smell yes no on off push all of it Go noo every single aspect of the nervous system functions this way flexor flexor extensor in the muscle skeletal system but that gets to maybe what I would think of as different so hedonic adaptation is the same stimulus over time like almost like habituation there's a different thing that happens when you get what you might call a contrast um and there's all kinds of visual illusions that sort of function on this if you've ever seen the one where it's like you is it the same color over here over here we throw this on your show page to show people and it's like oh it looks different it's like no no no that's because of the the kind of contrast between the two things you see something that's really bright over here it makes something else look a little darker right um that's a different negative effect on our happiness a lot of the time this is the comparison effect right this is like you know my $50 million seems kind of crappy because I hang out with people who you know have hundred million doar objectively have a tremendous amount of money but I feel bad because I'm kind of comparing against something else and so often time when we're evaluating different rewards we're kind of comparing them against what other people had or what we've had in the past and that means that being in an objectively good situation might feel really crappy if you just have somebody else that has a slightly better objectively good situation my favorite example of this actually comes from the Sports World um so researchers asked this interesting question like how happy are you when you win an Olympic medal right you're on the stand you won an Olympic medal and also who's happiest so gold medalist is up there best in the world you might assume they're the happiest right and they are they're smiling reseearch is anal this by looking at facial expressions and kind of code the muscles and so on but turns out they're not the happiest right who's the happiest well let's look at the silver Metalist are they happiest No in fact actually if you code their facial muscles they're showing expressions like contempt deep sadness is the same expression you'd make like if your parent died or like you know a real terrible grief moment this is the I don't adhere to this but this is the quote unquote second placees first loser yeah kind of mindset because the idea is like you know who's your major comparison point if you're in silver you know 2 seconds or something you would have gotten gold and you're not feeling objectively like you're the second best on the planet you beat you know but all but one of a billions of people on the planet no you just feel terrible so that's silver medalist what's going on with the bronze medalist right there's another person on this stand what's their comparison point it's not gold they were multiple people multiple seconds away their Salient comparison is like by the grace of God like I'm up here at all I almost like you know two seconds the other direction I would have never gotten up here and when you analyze the bronze medalist facial expressions they're sometimes even happier than the gold medalist definitely happier than the silver who's objectively better but sometimes even happier than the gold medalist because they're like oh relative to my comparison point I'm doing amazing and the gold medalist is expected to get gold the next year or else it's pure reward prediction error um especially if they internalize the expectations of the audience the The Spectators excuse me um because if they come back the next year and they're second or third on the podium or not on the podium it's seen as falling from a higher place exactly this is a point that I make with my IV League students who've been perfect in their grades and perfect at everything to get into a place like Yale which is like turns out that's a terrible recipe for happiness The Only Way Forward is stay stay there down or create a new stay there you don't notice right because you're habituated to it just like the pattern down feels really bad like that's a terrible comparison um I often play my students that DJ College song All I do is win all I do is win win win and I was like all you do is win win win would be a Terri terrible way to experience success in life because you just stop noticing it over time if you won and that's messed up because it means when you get when you finally hit the success that you were striving for if you just stay at that level just stops being good which sucks and so that raises a different question which is like what is a hack that we can do to get away from that um one is to not look for the Silver Lining but to look for the bronze lining which is you know you kind of think of reference points that are lower than your I love a good conceptual F especially when it's framed in an experiment so thank you for that yeah like science experiment yes so look for the bronze linting which means find a reference point that's not as good and for most of the things you're comparing whether that's your looks your Fitness level your finances you can look and find somebody that's doing worse than you um another great hack for this and this is more one that's a kind of a hack for honic adaptation getting used to stuff um actually comes from the ancient Traditions I you talk a lot about you know smart you know folks back in the day who came up with this stuff right this is one from the stoic tradition a practice called negative visualization so stoics like Marcus are really a thought when you wake up in the morning you should have the following thought pattern you should think today I will lose my success I will be exiled I'll lose my partner I will lose my health I won't be able to walk he doesn't say ruminate on that for forever but just like a little and then stop and say h I'm not exiled I still have my success I still have my partner and so on this is a technique called negative visualization um where you just imagine you don't have to live it in real life you just imagine you lose something um if you've ever lost something you're hedonically adapted to you know how quickly you recognize the value of it this happens to me with my phone all the time I'm a chronic phone loser and I'm like you know and I'm like oh my God my phone is gone I left it in the airport all my contacts are there and then I'm like oh it's in the car you have this I love my phone like it's so line in pul fiction where he says like um what is it it's like it's um finding at some point I think it was Travolta says something someone will know it where you know uh finding finding it almost made uh losing it worth it exactly like because you you appreciate it in a way that you didn't before because it was taken away from you and that sucks to really lose your phone sometimes in my case you really lost the phone right but negative visualization you don't have to do that you just use your imagination right and so uh if you're listening right now and you have a kid um let's do this negative visualization the last time you saw your kid was the last time you ever saw them never going to see them again no didn't happen you don't have to room about it but my guess is the next time you hug your kid you'll hug just just that two seconds of thinking about what things would be like without it can break through hedonic adaptation so one of my favorite hacks for hedonic adaptation you can use scarcity really space things out but for the things you can't space out you can't like have a kid and get rid of a kid for two weeks and come back to your kid right you can use your imagination and it doesn't take much to start to realize what you have and appreciate it more so I love this one mostly because I I think most people including myself really U we want to avoid thinking negative stuff especially on purpose but what you're telling us is that it provides a a wonderful contrast point to kind of trampoline off into the reality that is our current reality Which is far better than the these horrible scenarios and I think this gets to you know another domain in which I see kind of toxic positivity playing out a lot which is kind of in this sort of doain of like you know how do we do this stuff better right like how do we you know kind of get good things in life and there's a lot of talk in some circles about this idea of like manifesting right I'll just think about you know I'm feeling lonely I'll just think about what it's like to have friends or I'm not fit right now just imagine you know my FIT future and fantasize about what it's like to you know run marathons and things like that um turns out this can have like a this can be a case where you're using imagination in a bad way because what happens when you really deeply imagine say the rewards of like being super fit you start to get like your brain's like firing the reward cylinders for like what it feels like to be super fit and there's evidence from Gabrielle Ting's Lab at NYU that like you actually get less motivated to do stuff she does this in the context of Fitness she is people who you know want to run a 5k or want to lose some weight for example they talk about like you know imagine how great it would be to do this and they're less motivated to put on their running shoes in practice because they've already imagined the fantasy future turns out instead of manifesting a better technique if you have some habit that you want to engage in is to imagine the obstacles the bad stuff that's coming up right so oh I want to get out and run this 5K what's the obstacle to that I'm going to be in bed alarm's going to go off what's going to happen like oh I'm going to be you know too warm like maybe I put my running clothes on or oh like I'm not going to want to it's going to be cold out like oh I should get a nice you know fuzzy hat to be able to do this this O's work shows that if you actually imagine the negative things again not ruminating about him freaking out but imagine particularly the obstacles for a habit you want to engage in um you kind of naturally come up with solutions to those obstacles which makes it easier so sometimes times thinking about the bad stuff can be helpful we just have to regulate when we do it I have a friend who's a cardiologist from UCSF and he says you know the danger of telling people that you're going to write a book or that you're going to start a podcast or that you're going to start a company is that if you have very supportive friends and if you tend to be a pretty high agency person you'll get a lot of praise and a lot of reward and there's a lower probability that you'll actually do the thing because you've derived some of the reward whereas if people tell you you know yeah that seems kind of unlikely given that this and that you know it feels um doesn't feel so good and obviously we we want to encourage each other this is the complicated thing it's you know it's a it's a it's a very narrow beam to walk on you want to encourage people but you don't want to give them so much reward that then it undercuts their their motivation and you certainly don't want to discourage them to the point where they give up on themselves prior to even trying that's right but you know at least in the United States probably in other countries too goodness do we love a story about somebody who was told like they couldn't do it and they did it you know I think about the about the enormous popularity of David goggin it was you know had a truly difficult childhood and internalized all these messages of how terrible he was and um and then used those voices other people's and his own in his head to push himself to do tremendously difficult things and then to continue to do tremendously difficult things and to self-publish one of the most you know popular self-published books of all time and then to go off and become a a medic and now he's effectively doing the training of somebody going to medical school for his new train like he just refuses to stop um and it's according to him sat in that very chair and said it's fueled by an internal voice of you of you can't do it and then he fights back against that voice which is Oho different than manifesting this image of success exactly and and and there's again this is a case where there's Nuance you have to believe it's possible Right those negative voices can't tell you it's impossible because something else we know about motivation is that believing something is possible um which requires lots of effort but it is possible is quite helpful for you um the best example of this comes from another sort of sporting case uh I don't if you know the case of Roger banister who's the first guy to run the for minute mile break the four break the 4 minute mile um and before he did that people thought it was like physiologically impossible like the human body cannot do this and he was like no if human body can do this everyone was like Roger you're crazy whatever but then he you know trained and trained and probably to overcome his obstacles he ran it and then within like two months somebody else broke the 4minute mile like it had not been broken in all of human history but as soon as people had evidence of like oh people can do that like now everybody does it and now I don't know I mean I'm as you can see not a fit person but like lots of people run four minute miles it's not like the huge thing high schoolers run it yeah which is crazy I mean but the point is that they're falling they're probably helped out by this thing called the banister effect like they know it's possible right so like if you train if you run into obstacles if you don't get that time you're like well I guess it's you know physiologically I just can't do it you can kind of do it and so so there there's this idea with the banister effect you kind of have to be optimistic enough to think that it's doable but when you think that it's doable it's really helpful to ask the question okay what are the things that are going to come in the way of my doing it you imagine them really kind of vividly so you get a sense um it can super help it one of the things that contrasts a country like Denmark for instance um compared to the United States um and I know this from discussions with my stepmothers that you know in this country we have this notion because we have a lot of examples of people that went from absolutely nothing to these uh tremendously quote unquote high places financially reputationally Etc performance in whatever domain um sometimes overnight um you know this last year I would say uh two events stick out in my mind as like whoa like wow um the first was seeing um the SpaceX um rocket get get captured by the quote unquote Chopsticks that was just a rocket Landing of all things as it was so cool everybody regardless of what else was going on with you know people's opinions of of uh SpaceX or Elon or whatever we're just like whoa that was just an awesome feat of engineering just undeniably awesome feat of engineering so it sets a um an up a bigger upper ceiling on what we thought was possible we're seeing something that we hadn't seen before um at least not like that not at that scale resolution so that changes what one conceptualize about what's possible at in different aspects of life and um and I think that's important it lifts the ceiling the other was um very different example was the overnight um the Haka girl right who nobody knew of right made a comment in a passing um you know video on the street you know one of these like whatever spontaneous interview things and then now has a quite successful podcast it was ranked one of the highest um new podcast of the year um has a as far as I understand has a a staff and a thriving business now and like you know took you know this is a very American thing right to go from an unknown to one or two quick comments to all of a sudden um being a famous and presumably famous and somewhat wealthy person as well and um you know wish her nothing but luck and in evolving that her show yeah good good luck yeah sure like I I I love to see people win you know like okay it it was an unusual trajectory but but not so unusual for the United States in some sense because we also have the people who you know climb the staircase or the people that climb the staircase fell then came back you know we we love and we um cherish these stories um in this country and I think it I think it frames the the young mind in an interesting way it sets this anything is possible often times it takes clearly a ton of hard work often times at the expense of other aspects of one's mental or or life you know um Life Enrichment Family Etc but it's a very American thing for people to be like anything's possible yeah what do you think that does to our level of Happiness if we're somebody that you know is looking for happiness wants a good life wants resources but doesn't um like she maybe they feel a little guilty that they're not as quote unquote ambitious as everybody else but then you contrast that with a country like Denmark where people are very happy they're certainly Ambi ambitious Danes but they're actually I was told that the word ambition has is a little little bit of a pejorative little bit because you're not supposed to you know it's a very um you're not supposed to get that far ahead of anybody without acknowledging that you're still part of the pack um forgive me Danes but um they're nice people so they'll likely go easy on me and I have Danish relatives so like how do we how do we take what's out and around us address who we are and reconcile those things so that we're we're good with what we've got and know that we are good with what we've got yeah yeah I mean I think this is a spot where you know culture plays a big role I think you're exactly right about Denmark in fact the Dan have this idea of Jon's law I'm probably pronouncing this poorly but JN te's law which is idea is like you're aren't really supposed to be better than anybody else or like kind of showing off or like pushing yourself or thinking you're better even kind of maybe striving specific not to be you can strive to be better but to strive to be better than other people it's kind of it's like a no no it's sort of culturally frowned upon um in this way that I think is completely the opposite in the US right now where like that's seen as an awesome thing um I think the problem is that these kind of rags to Rich's stories um you know you you've given cases of like ones that there's like a moment right in SpaceX they do this wonderful thing you're like yeah they kind of got there and you know Haku is still doing her thing but there was this moment of like oh my gosh she kind of achieved this success there's this idea that we kind of think that there's a end destination for something um you know I'm going to you know get $50 million I'm going to get married or I'm going to get that promotion at work right my for my students I'm going to get into like a really Elite college or something like that um we don't put our emphasis on the Journey part we put our emphasis on the destination part and we assume that the destination is going to come with a lot of Happiness um this is a bias that researchers have called the arrival fallacy I'll be happy when you know it's almost like the happily ever after I'll be happily ever after if I get that promotion or happily ever after when I meet that person and what we know from hedonic adaptation is that thing that's awesome in the moment when you arrive there quickly becomes the other thing um you mentioned briefly the gold medalists who have this moment where it's like they won the gold medal and that's awesome but now everything else is downhill or I just got to do it again right we we arrive at the best possible place we could have fantasized and instantly it's like I just have to start chasing the next carrot so sometimes when we find ourselves I think as Americans you know chasing after the thing I think it's important to remember that first of all that chase is going to involve lots of ups and downs it's not going to be a lineary path it's not going to be overnight even the ones you mentioned maybe except with the exception of UA girl really extreme case um required some kind of work and ups and downs and these kinds of things right um we don't see those but more the happiness that we're going to get it's better off if we're going not for the end result that arrival and falling pray at arrival fallacy it's better if we can see some happiness um in the journey um this is often been called this idea of sort of finding a journey mindset which is sort of what can you take from the process of getting there right so you you want to run your 5K but like what can you do to try to enjoy the process of you know those runs that go along the way and noticing the kind of ups and downs and sort of paying attention to the journey it's one way to kind of break out of falling prey to this arrival fallacy requires a serious frame shift totally and I think one that you know is not culturally accepted in the US um and I think this causes a lot of you know it causes a happiness hit not just because like sometimes we don't get there sometimes there's reason you know you set your Heights super high you know you want to be Roger banister or whatever like not all of us are going to get there whether it's a four-minute mile or success at work or $50 million or whatever it is so sometimes if you set your sights too high you just don't get there and so that's a happiness hit um but a bigger Happ and sometimes when you do get there it's a happiness hit because you get there and there's the happiness for a moment but then you know that that hit doesn't keep coming um I think we also just lose out on something when we're not in that Journey mindset because there's a lot of cool stuff along the way if we can kind of pay attention but yeah I think it's a big cult shift from the way Americans usually think but if it's one that if we can achieve that we'll start feeling a lot better and it means even the failures in life are kind of good because you were enjoying yourself along the way from my podcast I did an episode about these sort of Olympic medals where I talked about um that that you know the bronze lining effect and things um and I had Michelle Quan um who you know Olympic medalist we all remember her but mostly just one silver and I talked to her about you know what that felt like and she said didn't matter to me the things I loved about being Olympics wasn't the metal stand it was when she first she talked about putting her skates on and seeing the Rings in the ice and recognizing as soon as I tie these laces I'm going to get to skate over those and I fantasize that's the journey mindset right you're not looking at the thing at the end you're paying enough attention to the stuff along the way even some of the stuff that's a pain in the butt that you kind of get some Joy um on the ride I certainly have learned to Relish in the failures as well as the successes and um you know I think some of that also just comes with age I've always wanted to say that it's true though it kind of comes you're old enough now Andrew you can you can jump into it yeah you crew enough experiences good and bad and neutral and you kind of go like the other day I was I'm like in this kind of weird state of mind I was like wait I've been here before MH like this shifts like no worries like this shifts and then sure enough it shifted you know like I think the first time we find ours in a place or we find oursel back in a place and we forget we've been there before um for whatever reason or we try and pretend we haven't been there before it's like and then you you go through enough of those Cycles like okay this is part of a larger trajectory this an amazing thing about the brain I never understood I still don't which is that when we're feeling happy we don't tend to think gosh this feeling is going to go away sometimes a little bit of that but when we're feeling lousy it does seem to do something to our sense of time our time perception that makes it seem especially in the real lows in the real trenches that it's going to go on forever we can't imagine feeling differently this two shall pass is very hard to internalize when we're in those States totally but it can make you feel a lot if you can get that distance from your current state this is kind of you know you had Ethan cross on the show that he talks a lot a lot if you can kind of get that distance of well how's this going to feel in five years how's this going to feel in 10 years you can sometimes feel a lot better interestingly even when the happy stuff if we can get some sense that like this isn't going to last forever that can sometimes boost the happiness cuz we're kind of almost doing like a negative visualization in the forward direction right um so a scarce experience if you're having it it's useful to remember like you know this is limited right this is temporary I should enjoy this now while it's happening um the most extreme version of this of course is with our own lives right contemplating our mortality um there's this idea of uh momento Mori which is a common phrase actually of my my ring has momento Mori on it um which is morbid right I'm going to die I'm not going to be here but when you recognize that you know the old school folks thought and I think it's true like you realize like I can't take any of this stuff for granted I have to pay attention now this is not you know the kind of thing that's going to last forever and so I think moments like that for positive experiences can feel like that you know if you're tasting a delicious glass of Pino Noir sitting yesterday I was you know while I'm here I you know took a walk on Santa Monica beach and was like you know my brain was like oh I have to interview Andrew coming out I was like no no I'm going to like fly back to cold you know East Coast tomorrow I need to pay attention right so thinking that this is finite can actually help you there's a very funny study on this with um college students where they did this sort of funny framing technique where they brought senior college students into lab um you know kind of halfway through you know the spring semester and told them you know you either have this many hours less of your time which Mak is a big number you know it makes it seem like thousands of hours or you have only this many days left before you graduate just like just a reminder what they found was the one that get the days manipulation where it felt kind of short they wound up doing doing more things like kind of getting in those things that they thought oh I'll get around to it eventually um and wound up kind of feeling happier so recognizing that things are short sometimes uh has a benefit um maybe both for negative emotions like this this two shall pass but also the positive stuff like this two shall pass so I got to enjoy it while it's while it's around it's so interesting because it's kind of counterintuitive that realizing that something positive is also fleeting allows us to savor it more because from a informed perspective one could imagine okay so you're you're at a great meal with people you love and it's been let's let's even say it's been a a rough month before and you're like really in it and someone says well you know like this too is going to pass you're like that sounds like kind of a downer right but then if it allows you to savor it more yeah that's key so yeah there does seem to be this inverse relationship between sad States and happy states where when we are in sad States we feel like it will go on forever and we'll do almost anything to get out of unless they've completely collapsed us in our happy States we don't want to be reminded that it will pass and this is why I think in part not the only reason why people will take um mood altering drugs I'm talking about this in the recreational sense like to to sort of forget everything else and forget that whatever they're experiencing is going to wear off yeah yeah and I think you know it it's not nice to think that these good states are going to pass I think it is helpful because it forces us to pay attention Jud to them I'm having this a little bit now where you know we're coming up on the holidays the time you and I are having this conversation and um you know I'm getting ready to do the holidays with the in-laws who you know which there's lots of positive but some like oh God I don't want to but because my my in-laws my my mom is getting up there I'm kind of like oh recognizing that there's not infinite holidays left with these people that I care about that it's kind of more finite and maybe more finite than it's been um it's causing me to be more excited about it than I would have been and so and that's morbid thought right momento Mor is meant to be a really Bittersweet emotion right that we we are finite right but it can kind of give you this appreciation it can cause you to savor in a special way so sometimes the morbid is good a little bit a little bit morbid it's the contrast again yeah yeah it's the contrast maybe it's why people watch horror movies I'm not into horror movies but so that you know maybe you feel safer I don't know that stuff always made me feel terrified if I was you know watch some of that late at night High amigdala reaction me too me too I hate horror movies but it's worth noting that like you know a lot of people like them you know huge industry um and even if you don't like horror movies you might like you know maybe a spicy food that feels kind not not even good it feels awful in the moment or super hot bath or you know cold like really cold plunge right I like getting out of the cold plunge for exactly the reason we're talking about yeah or even you know honestly for me like I'm not a super fan of exercise but like a really really hard workout that feels miserable when you finally stop it feels I do a lot of yoga and my favorite thing is at the end when they're like and now you can do shasa Shas is always good if you've worked the worst you're just really like ha you know we it's helpful to kind of have these moments to like have this contrast and so building the contrast in where you kind of give yourself some negative emotion you know whether it's a kind of imagin negative emotion like negative visualization or a fictional one a lot of our favorite fictional experiences are pretty terrible like a novel is really boring if the protagonist like has nothing bad happen just going to coast along and things are just mildly positive no we want them to go through some terrible stuff even when we really associate with them and sort of see them as ourselves and so yeah these like fictional worlds where we can play with negative emotions a little bit um are super interesting psychologically because like why would we do that but you know as you're saying even when you get you know these like neural stimulation we kind of want some of the negative stuff so um there there's a an interesting paper about what's the right ratio of positive to negative emotions um and it's not 100% positive for hedonic adaptation and so on but I think really the recipe for a rich life is is varied for these contrast reasons we've been talking about so what's the ideal ratio they don't know yeah they didn't fig they it was like like boom it's like exactly 6040 positive negative yeah here obviously anticipating a number uh and I think it's also worth remembering that um you know we're talking as though they're negative emotions and positive emotions you know a lot of the most interesting emotions are more complex than that you talked about this you know SpaceX kind of Chopsticks moment my guess is the emotion you're experiencing there is one that researchers like daker Kelner and colleagues would call a right this sense of oh my gosh that is amazing there's something bigger than me that like is able to do this thing and one of the reasons a is such an interesting emotion is it's usually destabilizing right they're like things that are better than I ever expected you know humankind is so masterful space is so big nature is so vast right it kind of feels a little destabilizing when you experience a but we also see it as positive and so I think kind of if you're feeling a little B in your emotional life trying to find moments where you can get these emotions that are not so obviously positive or negative but are a little bit of both can be um really inspiring it's one of the reasons you know you talk a lot about sort of psychedelics and these sort of altered experiences um those experiences tend to be thought of as being really consistent with moments of awe but they again are not universally positive but they kind of expand you and take you a little further I can attest that they're not universally positive sometimes they're terrifying um even in their clinical application the thing I appreciated about the rocket Landing was that indeed I I feel awe looking up at the stars at night or just thinking about how we're having this conversation in a room and well and then expanding out to like we're a little little object floating in the universe and that can be a bit overwhelming what's I think incredible is that through the harnessing of engineering and physics SpaceX was able to create something that was so U well controlled at a scale that we I'm normally accustomed to thinking about things sure I've seen planes and we landed on the moon Etc some people will debate that but we were on the moon I wasn't but somebody was to see control and harnessing of physics and Engineering at a scale that is certainly not at the scale of the entire galaxies but it's starting to approach outer space and Back Again clearly and in such a um I think it was the slowing of of that enormously large object yeah um and the capture that that felt so gratifying I also think and this um can explain a fair amount of human technological evolution is that the human brain either Delights in or at least um Marvels in creating action at a distance I mean think about what went into creating that amount of action in an in an object with that much mass at a distance right and um and then you can layer through all the things where we're looking at on our phones on our screens I mean all that technology is relatively recent and to think that us human beings as opposed to CAC monkeys could do that like we are the primate species that is so far ahead in terms of technological development compared to every other species on the planet yeah the only other species of of life that might be besting us and we don't know is I I've heard this Theory it's it's rather entertaining which is that all these trillions of microorganisms that live in our gut microbiome what if we're just vehicles for them to get around and pass to one another um and they're just they have a a sort of a uh Consciousness that is is all about just propagating and that we think that we're doing all this stuff for some Evolution but it's just to keep the microbiota going I don't really believe that finally we could get to space where we could really evolve the microbiota and they just want more microbiota so you know that that we're being hijacked I don't I I chuckle at that theory I don't actually think that's there there we talked about too few studies of dog and primate cognition way too few studies of microbiotic cognition unfortunately uh this is probably the right time to say that we are a storytelling species this is what we're doing right now we're creating story around these things that we can't quite explain and during the course of today's conversation I I realized that this thing that we call happiness um has at least three levels or layers that we filter it through when we ask ourselves are we happy how do I be happier um this element of contrast with negative experiences seems to be a repeating theme momentto Mori being a negative sort of dark cloud from which we're supposed to see the light and and act in the light this exists in religious narratives philosophical narratives um and scientific reality I could imagine three layers the first is sensory experience the reason to take a cold shower folks in addition to the fact they'll save you on your heating B bill is that the warm shower that follows in fact that's how I do it feels so good 10 times better than it would if you had just gotten into the warm shower I promise same thing about getting out of the cold plunge you know there's a lot of debate about these things but this is just pure sensory experience and contrast of the sort that we're talking about today hunger and then eating a delicious piece of food or eating a not so delicious piece of food but you're hungry and so it's that much more delicious okay million examples we could spiral her so there's sensory experience there's raw sensory perception and experience from which the contrast creates this thing that we like feel better MH AKA happiness sort of then there's story like God last year was a tough year this year was better there's also and I've seen this before like we were killing it for two years and then this year was kind of a me year this is not the case by the way but I'm very fortunate that podcast has continue to grow and expand but for some people they they're not as happy with their whatever salary this year because even though it's spectacular by somebody else's standards by their standard it's down from previous years so there's the story that we create that has it's not sensory experience it's perception based on dope of mean and its perception based on reward and Punishment Etc and then there's this third layer which is meaning MH like you said yeah you know spending time with in-laws like okay every moment of it might not be as awesome as you might like but there's meaning in spending time with people that are extended family especially when elders and very and younger are in the same room there's something really it's it's a it it layers on story to create this sort of um uh other level that we call meaning and so what I'm realizing in is that these are three time scales yeah so we have the immediate time scale of Happiness we have the kind of intermediate one where we introduce a story and then we have meaning which is kind of like this whole picture yeah so it seems to me that we need to approach happiness from all three levels that it's not enough to just be like a dog yeah which are in the sensory experience presumably of of Happiness if they tell stories they don't tell them to us and if they have meaning I don't know but they they seem to like nailed the first level yeah so and they're probably they probably don't have the capacity to do the other two so it's not like they're not doing it and kind of missing out they kind of have brains that don't let them notice they're missing out but we unfortunately have brains that would feel like we were really missing out if we just had the sensory experiences you know without the good stories I think you're sort of pointing to this idea that sort of being happy in your life and being happy with your life the withy life part has the kind of medium time scale stories but also they're really big ones right you know is my life am I doing anything really meaning with my life am I finding purpose and so on um the funny thing though is to get to that big time scale to find a sense of purpose and stuff like that sometimes it pays to do stuff at the local level at the medium and shorter term time scale um and one of the things researchers have found is that if you're engaging in activities at the short-term time scales that kind of fit with your values or what these positive psychologists have often called your strengths um that can be a way to sort of achieve purpose so so what are strengths so researchers do this thing where they want to look at like all the valuable things people can do out in the world right so what are the things that you value um and folks like Chris Peterson and colleagues have come up with this list of what they call different character strengths and there are things that like you know you can actually if you Google online character strengths you'll get the big list often people talk about they're being 24 but they're just universally good things like being brave be you know citizenship humor like you know social intelligence love of learning right you know kind of empathy fairness right these kind of sets of values that we have people differ and how much they value one or the other you know so I could ask you Andrew like what's better like bravery or humor probably both pretty high for you I would imagine but like about Prudence versus love of learning I have a guess yeah I mean if I had to pick between bravery and humor I I think bravery is probably more important to me I'm more humor yeah I mean I love humor but if I had to pick it's sort of like you know steak and coffee I'm going steak Yeah the point is we there are individual differences in this um and there are formal tests you can do online if you Google the IIA character strengths test you'll see these 24 and you can do one of these very systematic you know kind of tests to do it but really just kind to think about like what are the values that you value um and the ones that come to mind as being particularly about you the ones that you resonate with are what somebody like Chris Peterson would call your signature strengths they're the ones that when you execute them you kind of feel like things are meaningful and purposeful and so on and so the idea is that a one recipe for a person a purposeful life at the local level um is trying to engage in behaviors that allow you to use more of these values or strengths um and one of my favorite pieces of research that looks at both the power of this and how even though if it seems like that those are hard things to bring in like you should bring them in more um is some work by this woman Amy rinsky who's a professor at the University of Pennsylvania and she does these studies on what she calls job crafting um which is a practice where you take your normal job description is whatever your job is and figure out ways that you can Infuse your signature strengths into to them you know so you as a podcaster if your signature sank with bravery you could bring in guests that made me feel a little bit intimidating to you probably like me I imagine but but or like you could take on topics that are a little bit harder right that kind of push you a little bit right if your signature strength was humor you'd add more company or make more jokes if it was love of learning you'd pick topics that like you didn't know anything about but you kind of dive in right you take whatever your normal job description is and you find a way to build in your strengths and the reason I love Amy's work so much is that she studies signature strengths not in academics like us who have very flexible jobs or podcasters she studies signature strengths in hospital janitorial staff workers um who are you know these are people who are cleaning the linen in a hospital room or mopping the floors and stuff not a job where you think there's lots of flexibility or you could build in things like you know humor and love of learning and this stuff but she finds interestingly that like around a quarter to a third of these janitorial staff workers say that their job is a calling they love it they get a lot of purpose from it and and they're the ones that are naturally building in their signature strengths and she tells in her story in her work she tells these lovely stories there a story of a janitorial staff worker who worked uh in a chemotherapy Ward and if you've been unlucky enough to have cancer and had to have chemotherapy or know someone who did you know that people tend to get really sick because the medicine makes people really nauseous so a big part of this guy's job was like cleaning up vomit basically but he said you know my job isn't to clean my vomit my strengths are like humor and social intelligence and what I do is I make a joke this is somebody a really crappy day and I'm going to do something that's going to make them laugh and if I do that then I W it's not my paycheck and I guess he had a standard joke which is like oh my god look like a big pile of vit over time like for me and like you know you're laughing listeners probably laughing he's like that's my job um he talked to another worker who worked in a coma Ward so this um individual couldn't talk to the patients because they're in comas but her strength was creativity and so every day she like moved the artwork and the plants around you know just kind of created some changes and she thought maybe that would pop people out of their com I don't know if that's medically plausible probably not but it doesn't matter to her she felt like she was executing her creativity and so the moral of this job crafting work is no matter what your job is there's probably some room to build in some more purpose if you take some time to think about like what are the strengths what are the things that get you going if you need a tip you can kind of Google these things but then how could I Infuse that into my normal job description and there's probably a lot more flexibility than you think you don't need to quit your job and become a podcaster to like get this flexibility probably whatever you do there's some window where you can build that in that's awesome those are awesome stories um I also was just thinking about the chander cleaning up the vomit like to like like restore some dignity to these people that ex clearly know they're making a mess and like you know humor being the ultimate bridge and um and uh darn it why' you make me have to choose between humor and the other thing but CU humor thinking my answer it's very brave to clean up V well I think right yeah and to and to bring humor to a place where you know some people might presume humor is not allowed but goodness um the signature strengths and the and the list of you said 24 of them where can people learn more about these signature strengths I think this would be a really powerful exercise and uh we can always find the link and put it in the show note captions but is there like a place that people can find this stuff the values and action is viia character strengths. org um so I can share the link and you can stick it in your show notes but yeah people can go on there for free and do one of these kind of you know formal psychometric tests where you measure your strengths see what they are and it's a fun website too because you get to kind of they give you some suggestions because some of these you know values are like Prudence is one of them like how do I exercise prudence and they'll have you know these are different things um they also make the suggestion and this is a a homework assignment I give in my happiness class of suggesting you do this with a good friend or a romantic partner have each of you do this and find strengths that you share together um and then you can go on what what researchers call a strength state where you know if you both have bravery then that means you guys should do the I don't know the obstacle course or do some really scary hike if you both have humor now you go to a comedy show if you both love learning now you go to a museum or something so you find the thing that's like your convergent strengths and you do something that exercises them so that means you can use your strengths to get purpose not just in your work but in your leisure too and I think this is another spot where we get stuff wrong I think a lot of us have work that tends to use our strengths we tend to gravitate towards careers many of us where we can use our strengths a lot of folks aren't that lucky but in our leisure time we don't often do that so much right often our leisure time is like plop down you know watch Netflix for a lot of folks like if you think about how you can build your strengths into your leisure time it gets even more exciting so you know you're talking about working with your hands and doing all this stuff like you know build the bravery and the humor into that somehow and now you get your leisure time doing double duty for giving you a sense of purpose and meaning too I love doing stuff with my hands and I also love doing things that are useful to other people and years ago I used to go set up fish tanks for people at their homes and I I don't know why when I just kept setting up all these fish tanks for all these people I delighted in it and um it makes me realize that I think for everybody certainly not just me that we get tremendous pleasure from being useful to others in ways that really resonate with kind of who who we feel we are and these strengths I think that's kind of the ultimate situation really and if we're getting paid for it also great but you're saying work it into um your recreational time as as well yeah and I'm glad you brought up this idea of doing for others because we haven't talked about that but this is another behavioral hack that's huge for happiness and I think one that we get wrong as a culture in the US but kind of broadly there's all this talk about self-care or treat yourself if you look at any kind of article about happiness maybe not so evidence-based talking about self self self self if you look at happy people though happy people don't spend a lot of time on the themselves they tend to be very other oriented so controlled for income happier people donate more money to charity than not so happy people um for the amount of free time people have happy people tend to volunteer for others broadly construed whether it's you know helping formally or kind of donating time like they tend to help more than not so happy people um that again correlation it could be happy doing nice stuff for others helps you become happy it could be that if you're happy you do nice stuff for others and for sure that link is true there is this thing called the feel good do good effect um but lots of experiments have sort of forced people to do nice stuff for others and found that it winds up making them happier one study uh by Lara aknan and colleagues did this study where they walk up to people on the street and hand them 20 bucks it's awesome study to be if you're some undergrad walking around on campus like oh cool 20 bucks but then you'll be told how to spend it you either have to spend the 20 bucks to treat yourself do something nice for yourself or spend the 20 bucks on someone else do something nice for other people and people at the end of the day and even kind of a later time scales report being happier when they spend the exact same amount of money on someone else versus themselves and I think this has a big message because sometimes I don't know if you're in I don't know if you like you but if you're having a bad day it's like I'm going to treat myself for something I might buy something or spend some money on myself by myself a kind of cool experience but if you gifted that experience to your brother or your good friend your cooworker your spouse it might actually make you happier than having that experience yourself which is really counterintuitive but it's what the data show I've discovered this in recent years I love love love giving gifts it just um it's the best feeling it's the best feeling here's here's another hack you can do to help to kind of help others oddly is to ask for help which is something thing we forget is quite powerful um think about the last time somebody asked you for advice advice that you could give probably felt pretty good it probably made you feel a little competent or whatever um probably liked helping that person you get the happiness Boost from helping that person we forget that asking other people for help especially when we know they can kind of do it um can be a way to sort of give them a little B gift and make them happy um this is one that can be hard for me because I like to you know think about my competence all the time and I don't want to be a burden on people I don't vulnerable yes self um but it turns out especially if you're a particularly self-sufficient person when you ask people for help it can be really useful so um so that's another one you know because I know some folks listening right now might not have the financial means to be donating money or the you know time affluence and wherewithal to be doing gifts and these things but remember that asking for help can be a gift to someone else and it's a little social connection too that's awesome I will also say your suggestion that people um fill out the signature strengths site and then use that as a first date incentive I look forward to the day when a comment comes through on YouTube that uh people were married as a consequence of a first date TI's going out of business if we start doing these strength dates like that so yeah every once in a while someone will um contact me and say that they um watched the fertility episode and uh did a male and female fertility episode and um that they now have uh a child on the way um I don't ask questions about when the child was conceived like what the relationship to the fertility episode was was I'm assuming it was the information in the fertility episode but the um but I always I'm like wow that's wild so I I bet you that at some point in the future I'm creating a little bit of a time capsule here um you'll get contacted or something will um legitimately fall into the comments about people deciding to spend their life together as a consequence of having done the signature strength first date you heard it here first from Dr lri Santos and in all seriousness um Lori Dr Santos I just want to say thank you so much for doing the work you do it's awesome awesome work I mean what's more important than our emotional state and to strive to be happy but to understand happiness so that we're not pursuing something that either doesn't exist or that um is an illusion that's been created for us like really I think one of the amazing things about what you do is you realistically frame happiness as attainable but you frame it in the science of how to actually get it it um and what it means and as people could probably detect I love love love that you've studied this thing that we call happiness and other aspects of of emotion and social cognition in the context of not just humans but our non-human friends cats and dogs and use that knowledge like building up from basic understanding of how neural circuits and psychology work to a place that humans can really act on and you've given us a tremendous number of actionable tools today I mean too need to list off here all at once we'll put them in the time stamps as as tools so that people can get right to them and review them but the social connection piece obviously the understanding of the contrast with difficult things to arrive at better States um and different time scales and doing for others and and just so much there's too much here for me to to list off without adding another 30 minutes to this uh podcast and no one wants to hear me um speak anymore um so I'm just going to say thank you for the research that you have done and continued to do thank you for doing your podcast I'm going to start listening to your podcast I love these issues and I think they're super super uh timely and important uh for everybody and thanks for taking time out of your schedule to come here and educate us today thanks so much it was a blast let's do it again definitely thank you for joining me for today's discussion with Dr Lori Santos to learn more about her laboratory's work her teachings and to find a link to her excellent podcast please see the show note captions if you're learning from Andor enjoying this podcast please subscribe to our YouTube channel that's a terrific zeroc cost way to support us please also click follow for the podcast on both Spotify and apple and on both Spotify and apple you can leave us up to a five-star review please also check out the sponsors mentioned at the beginning and throughout today's episode that's the best way to support this podcast if you have questions for me or comments about the podcast or topics or guests that you'd like me to consider for the hubman Lab podcast please put those in the comment section on YouTube I do read all the comments and if you're not already following me on social media I am huberman on all social media platforms so that's Instagram X formerly known as Twitter Facebook threads and Linkedin and on all those platforms I discuss science and science related tools some of which overlaps with the content of the hubman Lab podcast but much of which is distinct from the content on the huberman Lab podcast again that's hubman lab on all social media platforms for those of you that haven't heard I have a new book coming out it's my very first book it's entitled protocols an operating manual for the human body this is a book that I've been working on for more than 5 years years and that's based on more than 30 years of research and experience and it covers protocols for everything from sleep to exercise to Stress Control protocols related to focus and motivation and of course I provide the scientific substantiation for the protocols that are included the book is now available by pre-sale at protocols book.com there you can find links to various vendors you can pick the one that you like best again the book is called protocols an operating manual for the human body and if you haven't already subscribed to our neural network newsletter the neural network newsletter is a zeroc cost monthly newsletter that includes everything from podcast summaries to what we call protocols in the form of brief 1 to three page PDFs that cover things like how to optimize your sleep how to regulate your dopamine we also have protocols related to deliberate cold exposure get a lot of questions about that deliberate heat exposure and on and on again all available at completely zero cost you simply go to huberman lab.com go to the menu tab in the top right corner scroll down to newsletter and enter your email and I should mention that we do not share your email with anybody thank you once again for joining me for today's discussion with Dr Lori Santos and last but certainly not least thank you for your interest in science [Music]