Stop Caring What Other People Think About You | Bruce Hood

25:38So that's why it's really not the best place to spend your time. I think people are kind of wising up to it. But, you know, I look around, I walk around a metropolis, so you go through a city, everyone is staring at their phones. They're taking away what were the basic niceties of exchanging information, like asking for directions or whatever, all those sorts of things which required us to have those little, subtle communications that disappeared. And that's why I think we're becoming increasingly isolated, as you say. It's counterintuitive because you would think the best way to get happy is to focus on yourself.

26:10And yet that's only partly true. Yeah. And I think there is a generational thing here. I mean, this whole identity thing, which was driving a lot of the younger generations, focusing on the self-prioritizing self, self-care. I mean, yeah, sure. You should look after yourself, but not to the exclusion of others around you. And I think it's getting the balance right. What I'm not suggesting, by the way, I should just say, is not that you become selfless. I think that's equally bad. You need to get the balance right because it's the interconnection of things which is the importance. I think we talk about that in a later chapter, which we're not there yet.

26:44Yeah, just to put a button on this first lesson, I have a little tattoo that says for the benefit of all beings. And that is not a call for calamitous altruism because all beings includes me. So it really does speak to a balance. You did use the word isolation and that does bring us to lesson number two, which is to avoid isolation. Can you say more about that? It stems from this well-established finding that of all the things which contribute to our earlier deaths, it turns out that isolation and loneliness seems to play one of the most important factors, which I think was really striking when this data started to emerge.

27:25It's not just our physical, but it's our mental health. It depends on our social connections, and that's why we're so sensitive to any potential threat of being isolated or ostracized or rejected. That's why we feel it emotionally. Emotions have the same word as motivation. They come from the Latin meaning to move. So emotions drive us to do things. They move us to do things. And one of the things we're driven to do is avoid being isolated because it's so critically important to us in our evolution. Not all people, by the way. I mean, I would say whenever I've said this, people say, well, I kind of like my isolation.

28:00So I would say, of course, there are moments of solitude which can be very beneficial. But in general, most of our behavior is driven towards our social interactions. Yeah, look, there's a spectrum, introversion, extroversion spectrum. And if you're further along the introversion spectrum, you don't need as many social interactions or close friends, but you do need some. And also there's a question of agency. Are you isolated because you've chosen in a healthy way to get some alone time? or are you isolating because you've chosen in an unhealthy, anger - or fear-based way, or because you've been shunned or excommunicated by your own personal tribe?

28:42That agency factor matters a lot. Yeah. Nelson Mandela wrote about it in his autobiography, The Long Walk to Freedom. He talked about his time on Robin Island when he was put into solitary confinement, and he said it was the worst. People would prefer to be physically tortured rather than isolated. so that just speaks to the the power of that as for people who require that you have some data in the book about the impact of social isolation on pain tolerance and reaction to stress can you say a little bit more about that yes this is not my work directly i'm referring to a series of actually there's a bunch of researchers doing this there's work which is epidemiology work looking at morbidity risks famously loneliness has a morbidity risk which is equivalent to 15 smoking 15 cigarettes a day, I think is the famous bite line.

29:30But then there's more experimental studies looking at inducing pain. So for example, you can give people electric shocks and people tolerate much higher levels of pain if they're with somebody, whether with a partner, all of these sort of speak to the beneficial effects of having the support around you. I know you were speaking to Robert Waldinger. I think there's evidence from the Harvard study showing again, that social isolation is a really major contributing factor to earlier death. So I think these are all pointing along the same lines that there is a real benefit to having good, strong social relationships.

30:06And then, of course, social support provides a lot of practical things as well. You know, just looking after your health, having someone tell you, you know, maybe you shouldn't be doing this, maybe you shouldn't be doing that. So I think there's lots of benefits. Yeah, Waldinger's work has been very influential in mine. And for those who don't know him, he's the latest director of the Harvard Study for Adult Development. It's one of the longest running studies in the history of science and following many generations of families in the Boston area, trying to get a sense of what are the variables that lead to a long and healthy life.

30:36And the most important variable is the quality of your relationships. And I often, you know, wag my finger at people and say, look, we're in an era of optimization. Everybody's tracking their steps, tracking their sleep, trying to achieve ketosis, whatever it is. But this is the thing to optimize. And very few people are talking about this on social media. So let me put it to you. If lesson number two in your book is to avoid isolation, what are the practical steps we can do to get there? Well, I think reaching out to people in a way that doesn't necessarily involve technology. I mean, a phone, of course, is a good way to connect.

31:11But basically reconnect with people in a way which is meaningful rather than just sending a text or something which is cursory. people generally don't do that because they're kind of fearful that maybe it'll be awkward maybe they don't want to impose but um i think i talk about this in a later chapter it turns out and this is nick epley's work from chicago that actually people really enjoy the spontaneous connections other things i've talked about in the book are all about joining a choir finding the third place which is disappearing it used to be the sort of opportunities just to spontaneously meet other people.

31:45So, you know, get a dog, go for a walk with the park with a dog, and you soon start talking to other dog owners. There's this phenomenon that, you know, when you've got a shared interest, then you can start interacting with other humans. So I think it's just recognizing every opportunity you can to forge those social connections and take it in speaking. Exchanging a compliment with a barista or whoever is serving, you know, very often their days are very mundane and people are not talking to them, but make the effort just to reach out to others because they will probably enjoy it more than you imagine.

32:17Barbara Fredrickson, who's been on this show, has done a lot of good work around what are called micro interactions, talking to the barista, the mailman, people you're passing in the hallway on the street. And that's like an under tapped, overlooked source of happiness in your daily life. But just want to go back to something you said about third places. Can you define that for people? Well, the third places were basically not work and not home. And it used to be the bars or the clubs or all those social gatherings that where people could meet that didn't necessarily have to be their spouse or their work colleagues.

32:49It was other people where they could talk about things that they wouldn't necessarily talk about with their spouse or with their work colleagues. And I think that is rapidly disappearing. The bowling alley culture, I can't remember who it's a... Robert Putnam, bowling alone. That's right. Yeah. I think he coined that term. It's this, what's fast disappearing in a world lot of technology where you can immerse yourself entirely in virtual worlds. And so a lot of third spaces are disappearing. I mean, they're disappearing in the UK. We used to have youth halls and places where the kids were hanging out and doing things, but now that seems to be rapidly evaporating.

33:23So yeah, it's those places which facilitate communications with people who aren't necessarily your immediate family or your work colleagues. Yeah. The Surgeon General, or now former Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, his recommendation here is volunteer. So, you know, if there's no bowling league near you, just volunteer at a soup kitchen or a pet adoption agency or whatever. It is a great way to meet other people. And also it's ennobling. Yeah. My wife does that now. She was a physician and she retired several years back. For the past year now, she's been volunteering with a soup kitchen. It's one of her most enjoyable experiences.

34:00And she just loves to talk to people anyway. So it's a real opportunity to kind of connect. So yeah, it's surprisingly rewarding.

34:10Coming up, Bruce Hood talks about how to control your attention and reject negative comparisons, the challenge of optimism and how to overcome that challenge, finding a flow state through meditation, and much more.

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36:04I'm so happy that our son is now back from summer camp. He went away for three and a half weeks to make his reentry smooth. and Joyce, we bought him a few gifts, one of which was a floating basketball net for our little pool in the backyard, and he is very happy about it. And we bought said basketball net from Wayfair, one of our sponsors today. You can find quality materials on Wayfair that stand up to real life. They've got this vast selection, all of it, really high quality. And you can shop with Wayfair verified your shortcut to durable pieces, hand vetted by product specialists using a 10-point quality inspection, testing things like the quality of the materials, functionality and features, and even how long it takes to build.

36:50You can join Wayfair Rewards today to get 5 % back on every purchase and start saving on your next home upgrade. Head to wayfair.com to shop all things home. That's W-A-Y-F-A-I-R.com. Wayfair, every style, every home. lesson number three is reject negative comparisons yeah well this is because we have a brain which has really evolved to pay special attention to negative information and the argument is along the lines that it's much better from an adaptive evolutionary point of view to sort of attend to things which may potentially eliminate you from the gene pool so that's why you pay more attention to bad news or threats than sitting on your laurels and just thinking life is going fine because it only takes one really bad thing to take you out of the equation.

37:39So this is a line of work which fits with a series of really quite different studies showing that we seem to focus more on negative information. So if you're listening to stories or you're reading the paper, there's one great study where they got people to, they thought they were actually doing a study of reading papers, but they were looking at the eye movements and they were noticing that people were focusing on all the negative information. So there is this sort of bias in our brains to really pay attention to that. Visually, we spot people's frowning more than we spot smiling, and the screams are more attentive.

38:13So everything is wired from a very sensory basic level to pay attention to negative information. And then, of course, at a more cognitive thought process level, we tend to ruminate and fixate on things when they've gone wrong more than when they're going right. And as a writer, I assure you, I can't stop myself looking at that negative review, despite the fact that everyone thinks it's a great book, apart from that one person. And that will just niggle and eat away at me. And I've got to really use that third person distancing. Please stop yourself. That's just silly. But yeah, that's part of the reason we seem to be especially attentive.

38:45Also, we form impressions are stronger when we hear negative information. And it's really difficult to overcome something when we've heard something bad about somebody. So being balanced is quite a challenge. so what can we do about this well being a mindful of it is good as i said and also trying to deliberately avoid well see off social media i think is also i think a recipe for or it's at least a solution to some extent especially if you are sensitive to criticism just be mindful of what's going right in your life and focus on that i think that's what i would suggest and i really should probably mention this earlier but the act of writing things down i think is an incredibly powerful exercise.

39:25And one of the things we recommend is actually writing down things which have gone well for you. So this is the writing the three good things. Now, I don't know, it's probably Sonia Lubomirsky or one of these other guys who've done this as well, but the three good things, Marty Seligman will undoubtedly have done work on this. But it's the proactive behavior of writing things down in a journal. And the reason that's very powerful is, first of all, it gets you off your phone. And secondly, it allows you to keep a record. And I think that's a very important device. Keeping a diary, keeping a journal is a very tangible bit of evidence or data to see and review when you, in a month's time, you can review your life and you can see how things are actually going a lot better than you often imagine.

40:07So I do it for recommending writing down three good things, but also for processing when things are not going right for you. And I It takes it out of your mental space, as it were, and it makes it a kind of piece of evidence that you can review. And it gives you a real context that you often lose if you're just trying to remember how things were all the time. I love that. Lesson four, become more optimistic. Well, that is a challenge these days, isn't it? Especially given the fact that we tend to focus on negative information. Optimism can be partially tweaked, like happiness. I think there are dispositions to being optimistic or pessimistic.

40:50But I would also point out that, you know, you can be optimistic in one facet of your life and pessimistic in another. So it's not as if it's kind of just generically you're one or the other, glass half full or half empty. That said, I think there are ways in which you can start to be more balanced because, you know, going back to lesson three about the focusing on the negative, if you start to try to deliberately reappraise your life in a more positive way over time, and this is Marty Seligman's work, over time, this will tend you to be a lot more flexible in the way you're processing negative information rather than going to the worst case scenario.

41:25If you actually spend the time processing it in a way which is more balanced, or indeed looking for the silver lining on every cloud, then over time, you will eventually sort of, that will become the default way of thinking rather than always going to the worst case scenario. So the evidence suggests that that actually will change. And again, I would go back to recommending journaling, writing a situation down of if you're having a terrible day or something's gone really wrong rather than being pessimistic about the consequences of that try and review it in a way which looks for the best possible outcome that will be a way of actually sort of shifting the needle away from pessimism to a more optimistic view so if you've just been laid off just to take an example and you're having trouble summoning any optimism writing about it while deliberately trying to consider a more optimistic view can nudge you in that direction.

42:19Yeah. So in the ceiling wind technique, it's called ABCDE. There are two parts to ABC and then D and E. ABC stands for adversity, belief, and consequences. So in that first phase, you write down what happened. So you've just been laid off at work. What do you believe that reflects? You might think, oh, that means I'm not good at my job. And what do you think the consequences well i'm not going to have any money and i might lose my house and so you write down everything and you articulate every worst case scenario and the reason you do that is because you're laying out on the table if you like every scenario possible having exhausted that all right you then switch gear and go to the dispute of dne is dispute or defend and energize and so what you're supposed to do in this phase is you're supposed to look at this and say look okay look You're not the only one who was laid off.

43:06It's not you alone. You've been in the situation before. This might be an opportunity to reskill. It might be an opportunity to look at. So in other words, you step out of yourself. You become like an attorney or a defense lawyer and say, okay, you say this. But actually, another way of looking at it is X, Y, and Z. And with a lot of creativity and imagination, you can start to find some glimmers of positive outcome, even in the worst case scenarios. And then having done that, this leads you to be energized, to realize that something that was really obsessing you and compelling you for 15 minutes ago that you were so concerned about, you should feel a bit better about it.

43:42So it shows that you can change in the space of 15 minutes just by reviewing the situation and thinking about it more positively. It's a case of trying to process information in a much more adaptive way rather than just resorting to the worst case. What is the WOOP technique? Looping. It stands for wish outcomes, obstacles, processes. it's Gabrielle Autogen's work, her research. I mean, most of us would like to lead better lives, we'd like to develop better habits, we'd like to do things better, but very often we don't actually follow through with it. And part of the reason is, is because just wishing for something to be better isn't good enough.

44:17You actually have to make a plan. And that's what this technique's all about. It's called mental contrasting. And so what you do is, if you want to change your lifestyle, if you want to develop a healthier lifestyle or eat more healthily or give up smoking or drinking, whatever, you have to have that wish at the beginning to motivate you so that you imagine the best case scenario saying, okay, I'm going to be a healthier person if I do exercise. Okay. Having done that, that's not enough. You then have to consider what are going to be the obstacles. So you got your wish, what you want, what is the outcome you're hoping for, but then what are the obstacles that get in the way of that?

44:50So it might be, well, I kind of eat at McDonald's all the time and it's really convenient and that sort of thing. Well, then you have to sort of make a contingency plan and say, well, if that comes to mind, then what you do is you get rid of your loyalty card from mcdonald's i'm not sure if they have one by the way but you avoid the circumstances which lead to that sort of behavior so you make a contingency plan to overcome or bypass the obstacles getting your way so that is a combination of kind of wishful thinking positive energy to drive you towards a goal but then actually what do you need to do in order to achieve it so that's what's meant by whoop wish outcome obstacles and plan.

45:26Just one last question on optimism. Is it possible that we can take it too far? Yeah, that's when you become reckless. So there are three dimensions by which optimism and pessimism differ. Okay. So one is the extent to which you think situations are never going to change, the tendency to overgeneralize and the tendency to internalize. So for example, if you fail an exam, you might sort of say, I failed an exam. I'm never going to be able to pass. So that's where you think things can ever change. And then if you overgeneralize that, you say, I failed an exam. I'm bad at everything I do. That's where you generalize, extrapolate.

46:01And you might internalize that and say, I failed an exam. It's my fault. An optimist would say, okay, I failed one exam, but I'll get better next time. Or they then might say, oh, I failed one exam, but I'm good at other things. Or they might sort of externalize and say, I failed an exam, but it wasn't me. It's that professor Hood. He thinks he's a great lecturer. wasn't my fault, it was his fault. So you can see how you can deviate and how you make attributions to the situation. But if you never take responsibility, if you never actually appreciate that maybe the exam's really quite important, maybe you do need to pay attention, you do need to change, then you're never going to actually adapt or pass your exams.

46:38So you can become reckless if you don't actually take into consideration reality. So being overly optimist that can turn into unrealistic expectations and reckless behavior. Okay, so lesson number five is to control your attention. Please say more. To me, I think this has been one of the most remarkable areas of research that I've become incredibly interested in. And this is the reality that we spend a lot of the time not actually being aware of our circumstances. Our minds are wandering remarkably a lot of the time. This comes from a former colleague of mine, Dan Gilbert. Killingsworth and Gilbert did this study where they just randomly contacted people at different points of the day using an app.

47:23And so what are you thinking about what you're doing? Are you happy now? And what they discovered is that people were mind-wandering actually 50 % of the time, effectively. So they weren't thinking about what they were doing. Their minds were off. And what was remarkable about this finding was that a lot of the time, even though they were just thinking neutral thoughts, they were relatively unhappy. And so that was kind of surprising. So when we're mind wandering, you might think it's pleasant daydreaming, but actually a lot of the time we're kind of ruminating over things, you know, we're worrying about unresolved conflicts or thinking about problems up and coming.

47:58We just recently ran a study of our students and we found mind wandering 60 % of the time. So it's happening a lot. And actually just like Killingsworth and Gilbert, we found that when their minds were wandering, they were generally relatively unhappy compared to when they were fixated and focused on a task. So our default appears to be drifting all the time. Paying attention is really tough. And I think that's one of the reasons that social media is so pernicious and so powerful because it captures our attention. And that's why you can be sucked into this sort of vortex of information overload.

48:33And we tend not to be very mindful of the things we're doing. And that's unfortunate because when you do draw your attention or you do focus your attention on a task or a task is so engrossing that it really requires you to pay attention, then you get those moments of flow, which is this very positive state where time appears to elapse and you just, you feel very content as you're kind of drawing your attention and your resources onto the task. So yeah, control your attention because otherwise it's going to be captured. We've talked about flow a million times on this show, and I always find it a little bit maddeningly elusive because I don't know how often I get into flow personally or what I could do to make that happen more frequently.

49:16It's probably most likely in those circumstances are activities which match your skill set. So this is the kind of definition that if there's something that you're pretty good at doing and you're in a situation where you have to really deploy that expertise, that will then become absorbing. So for me, it's writing. I'm a relatively a good writer and I can write for hours and hours and I forget sometimes to, you know, I've wasted, or not wasted, I've spent so much time writing. Sports athletes can find moments of flow when the challenge is sufficiently good that it gets them into it. Lots of hobbies, I would argue, could be inducing that sense of flow.

49:53It's really tapping into competence and matching your ability with the circumstances or the requirements of the situation. if you are overwhelmed by a challenge then it could be anxiety inducing if it's not challenging then it's boring the equation is really to find those situations which really stimulate your ability to address them yeah i'm just trying to think of my own life like i write a lot but i hate it i exercise a lot i don't hate it but it's i'm rarely in flow i think except for maybe when i'm exercising with a big group of people and we're all kind of moving through yeah maybe there a few moments there but the one place where i realized maybe i'm in flow is i like i give a lot of speeches and i don't like the beginning part of it where i have to do 5 10 15 20 sometimes 30 minutes of a rehearsed speech but the q a is almost always i think a flow state for me yeah i know what you're talking about i i love lecturing as well uh and when it's going really well that time just disappears evaporates it seems very fluid and that is that you're thinking on your feet you literally are having to use your brain in a way uh that you wouldn't normally be doing so i think i would call that flow yeah yeah so my friend george mumford who teaches meditation to elite athletes he worked with michael jordan kobe to this day is working with professional athletes he often describes meditation as a way to get you flow ready yeah would you agree with that i would indeed.

51:23And one of the things I didn't mention earlier, I should address this, is that we now know that when you're not focused on a task, there's a state of the mind called the default mode network, which kicks into action. This is discovered by chance, by the way. It was a network in the brain they discovered when they started the first imaging studies, where you measure blood flow in the brain using magnetic resonance imaging, fMRI. And they asked the various participants, just lie in the scanner and don't move, because we need to get some baseline measures before we get you to do anything. And so they assumed that basically the brain would shut down or go into a steady state.

51:56Paradoxically, what they found was actually an increase of activation in the front of the back of the brain as a network. And that's why they call it default mode network. That's the default when you're not actually doing something. Now, the reason that's relevant is that when your mind is wandering, your default mode network is actually active. And also the default mode network is related to being relatively unhappy. And I think the linking explanation and going back to what I said that I love explanations and mechanism, is that when you're not engaged in a task or in flow, and you're just simply, your mind's wandering, your default mode network is kicking in.

52:29And that is sort of, I think, rumination. And by the way, there are studies by Brewer showing that if you meditate meditators, you put them in a scanner, they don't have activation of the default mode network, or at least it's not as much. So I think what's going on in the meditation is it's turning off that internal story that we're telling ourselves or that criticism that we're telling ourselves. So that's how I see it as a kind of, it's a mechanism of explanation here. Yeah. Dr. Judson Brewer is a friend and frequent flyer on the show. And it's really interesting. My understanding of his work is that the untrained mind has a default mode network that can be quite unpleasant.

53:10You're comparing yourself to other people, ruminating about your past mistakes, worrying about things that might happen in the future. Whereas if you've got some meditation under your belt, you have a new default mode, which is being awake and aware in the present moment. Yeah, exactly. So the network is also associated in representation of self in relation to others. So that ties it back into this kind of rumination about how you're measuring up and what's going on in your comparisons. Yeah.

53:43coming up bruce talks about the role of nature how to enhance your social connections where quote-unquote true authentic happiness comes from and much more

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55:20One of the other ways you list to control your attention, so we've talked about getting into flow states, doing things that are engrossing. That's one way to control your attention. Another is to meditate, which can redound positively toward your capacity to get into flow. And then another thing you mentioned is nature. This is an interesting, slightly controversial one, because I think the data on it is a bit mixed, but I'm a convert too. I think it's definitely something too. I live in the countryside and I certainly really enjoy the countryside, but not as much as people who've never seen the countryside when they come out to visit me, they really do, they do love it and i think probably why it works is that our environments and i haven't got the data yet to prove it but my hypothesis is urban environments are very much the same they're organized they're structured and you can navigate them on autopilot you literally can just kind of go through your daily commute and very often you know you don't even remember how you got where you are because we're so used to the the routine of travel and commuting when you're in nature unless you live there all the time, you follow the same path, it's much more unpredictable.

56:28It's also aesthetically more pleasing because it's full of, you know, very interesting sites and so on. But I think what it forces you to do is actually be mindful of where you're stepping and where you're walking and just really engaging with the environment. So that would be my understanding of what's going on in nature. And of course, there are some studies showing that if you look at brain imaging, looking at the default moon network, it's subdued when you're out in nature compared to going around the urban environment. So I suspect that urban environments, because they're very predictable and they're structured in such a way, is that you literally go on autopilot when you're navigating them.

57:02Also, you're surrounded by advertisement, which is inducing toxic comparison. Yeah. So lesson six is connect with others. And I'm just wondering, lesson two is avoid isolation. Is this the same thing said differently? Yeah, I guess so. So what I was trying to do in Lesson 6 is really kind of talk about some of the really fascinating research, talking about synchronicity, talking about the studies which are revealing our brains literally do become synchronized, whether we're doing group activities. Also, I try to emphasize how to enhance your social connection, talking about active listening, and just really kind of learning to trust others.

57:40So this is a chapter which goes back to work by a bunch of people, what Nick Epley comes to mind. showing that we tend not to engage in social connection because we think it will be awkward. We misjudge it in many ways, and we underestimate how important and how satisfying it will be for not just ourselves, but other people as well. So it's really a call to action to try and get people to go out there and start to actively engage with others in a way which is beneficial. It's the flip side of avoiding loneliness, but with much more kind of focused activities on what you can do to actually stimulate those sorts of positive interactions.

58:19What is synchronicity? Well, synchronicity is just the natural timing of brain waves. You can now do imaging studies where you actually get two people experiencing the same thing. It could be listening to a story or some other. And you can find out that the brains start to synchronize as if they're resonating in the same frequency as it were. So it sounds a bit spooky and supernatural. I don't think it's anything like that, but it does fit with the findings that we are kind of, we're biological computers in many ways. And so when we're processing things in unison, it tends to amplify the experience.

58:50So people who like each other tend to walk in step. Conversations are extremely synchronized. We're having a synchronized activity now. I'm talking and then you're responding. If we were both talking at the same time, that wouldn't work well. And I think you know when you're getting on with somebody, you feel that natural rapport, that synchronicity reflects their ease of conversation, which is this sort of give and take. So I think that's what I mean by synchronicity. You also mentioned active listening. What is that? So active listening is paying attention to what someone is saying and then asking them questions relative to what they've just said, rather than just nodding away and kind of, you know, looking at them.

59:29I mean, you can listen to someone but not really pay attention. Active listening is really processing what they're saying, then coming up with something which reflects the fact that you've actually understood what they've said. And when people have that, they really enjoy that. It creates a really strong bond between the recipient. If they're having someone who's clearly been listening to what they're saying, it's very satisfying when you're talking to someone who really clearly understands what you're talking about. Yeah, it's a benevolent manipulation technique. It is, yeah. And very good politicians and interviewers will know how to do it very effortlessly.

1:00:05You also mentioned learning to trust other people. What are you pointing at there? Well, I actually, in one of the lectures, I make a virtue of talking about failure. To me, failure is a really important thing to disclose. Vulnerability. we're fearful sometimes of being judged negatively by others and so we always want to put on a very impressive best face as it were but actually when people disclose information which reveals that they're human in many ways and they also have vulnerabilities we like them more we can appreciate them more we can identify with them more because i think it shows a level of trust and trust is really important going back to robert putton's work looking at those nations which seem to have really good levels of happiness, if you like, or social connectedness, what they really have is trust.

1:00:50They trust each other. They have community systems which are much more open to interconnectedness. So the Nordic countries typically have higher social trust than more individualistic societies like the UK and the US, where we tend to be a little bit more fearful and aware or frightened of others. Whereas those countries which have good social trust tend to have overall general better happiness, as it were. So you're saying we should take some risks, trust people, and be willing to fail? I think all those things are good. I think failure is, and this is something which is very obvious in the younger generation, certainly my students, they are really risk adverse.

1:01:28They will take the easiest path. They won't challenge themselves, and they get overly upset if things don't go according to plan. They tend not to put themselves in situations where they could actually advance by challenging themselves more. And I think that's unfortunate when it comes to education, because that's really what we need. We need people who are willing to take risks. And so I think failure is something that we should disclose. They look at me and they think, oh, you've never failed. You're a successful professor and so on. But what they don't realize, of course, I have a history, as we all do, of setbacks and failures.

1:02:01And I think when you learn about that, and you'll know this, Dan, you've talked about your startup. But I think when people hear about that, I think it makes you much more personable. It makes people much more real. When you're presented with someone who seems never to have had any setbacks, then I don't particularly trust someone like that. So that's why I think trust enamors ourselves to other people. What is the liking gap? It's basically a misjudgment about how we're perceived. When you ask people to have conversations and then you ask them afterwards, how much do you think this person liked you?

1:02:34people will typically underestimate the degree to which the other person likes them. So again, it's one of the reasons why people are reluctant to enter into conversations because they think they're not going to be liked or they think it would be awkward. And so again, it's a miscalculation based on an assumption that interactions are not going to be as pleasant as they generally turn out to be. And I think that's got worse, possibly because of technology and we've lost the art of conversation. We've lost the opportunities for interacting on a much more regular basis. And I think that all of that comes with practice.

1:03:05And once you start to become more comfortable with those interactions, then you're probably a bit more accurate about how they're going to go. What is the spotlight effect? Okay, the spotlight effect is the assumption that everyone notices your weaknesses and flaws. And so we all think because we're so egocentric, we've got this kind of obvious gaping flaw in our personality or how we look and whatever. So we assume everyone notices our weaknesses and flaws. But in fact, people generally don't. They don't know when we're screwing up. We think we're doing worse than we really are in conversations, but actually it's going a lot better than you imagine.

1:03:40So again, it's a bias to assume everyone thinks worse of you than they really do. Helpful to name this. Lesson seven, get out of your own head. Yeah. Well, that's the kind of ultimate chapter in the book. It's all a story about becoming less egocentric. I talk about some of the recent work where you literally are experiencing altered states of consciousness. And this is a work on Duke and University College London on hallucinogenics, which I've found out to be actually reasonably good for people who have intractable depression. Now, I'm not advocating everyone breaks the law or starts taking hallucinogenics.

1:04:16But what is interesting about them is they impact directly on the default mode network, their serotonergic activities. And for people who've never had an altered state of consciousness like that, one of the things they commonly report is their sense of self is deconstructed. You don't have to do something like that to have an altered sense of self. You can get that from all sorts of experiences, from communal experiences, awe experiences. One of the most powerful things you can do is, if you're wealthy enough, I don't know about you, Dan, but if you can go out into outer space and look back at the earth, people often kind of report that their sense of self is, it's not diminished.

1:04:53It's more a sense of connectivity with humanity, a sense of belonging. And that's what I mean by getting out of your head. It's becoming interconnected with those around you in a way which is meaningful. Because the happiness that you experience is more authentic when it's directed towards others and derived from others than the happiness that you try to turn in on yourself. You could treat yourself to, I don't know, you could go on a shopping spree and have some retail therapy and that'd make you a little bit happy. But that happiness isn't authentic and it will soon dissipate. Whereas if you use your energies to enrich the lives of others around you, well, you'll benefit from the fact that they'll like you a lot more.

1:05:33but also it's more authentic and it's going to last a lot longer because the reason is if you're the insta-gay or purveyor and recipient of your own acts of kindness well you know when they cease to you know give you any benefit whereas if you direct it towards others you never know when they get fed up of it so you can always kind of reflect on the fact that yeah that guy bruce is a really good guy he just bought a whole round of coffees what a nice guy he is and then you can walk away thinking they think well of me one of my little rants that i've gone on before on this show many times and will go on many times in the future but i say this with some sheepishness or apologeticness if that's even a word to the frequent listeners who've heard me say this before but as you point out in the book making other people happy makes you happy and in my view i'm like 51 49 optimistic about the future of the species.

1:06:27So not like overwhelmingly optimistic, but slightly more optimistic than pessimistic. And that optimism is based on this design feature in the human operating system, that doing good makes you feel good. Yeah. And I think that's a lesson that we learned too late in life. Once you've kind of satisfied the initial drives for success and wealth and whatever, and you've got spare capacity, then you realize, actually, why was I wasting all that? Especially when you're reaching the end of your life and you realize you haven't got much more in front of you. Then people suddenly have this epiphany that actually, wow, I wish I'd spent more time with other people and making their lives better.

1:07:08So this is eudaimonia, the old concept from Aristotle and the Greek philosophers. But really, the value of the worth of life is the extent to which you enrich the lives of others around you. I've definitely learned it later in life and in my late 40s and 50s. But I actually am of the view that I would have been more successful earlier if I had had this insight. I think that's true. And that goes back to what I was saying is that when you do take the time and effort to enrich the lives of other people around you, that makes you liked. And that has a feed forward or an amplifying effect on your success because people like to be around people who are like that.

1:07:46nobody really wants to be around someone who's so narcissistic and selfish and self-focused because they're just drawing all the energy. You need people who are ebullient and effervescent and full of energy and positive. That's who we like to be around. And that's generally directed towards others. Yes. Joseph Goldstein, to quote him again, in Buddhism, there's this concept of enlightenment, which can be controversial in many ways. Joseph says that one way to think about enlightenment is lightening up. And lightening up meaning you're taking yourself less seriously. And we like to be around people who are allocentric in that way.

1:08:29I agree. Okay. So we've gone through the seven lessons. My understanding is you've done some research on the students to whom you've taught these seven lessons. And I'd be curious, what did you find? What we found is really the title of your work, 10 % Happier. That's roughly what we find when they've done our course. They're 10 to 15 % happier, depending on which measure. As part of the course, and I think this course is fairly unique in that as part of their engagement, first of all, there's no exams in our courses, but they have to undertake all the sorts of activities and they have to document it and they have to keep a journal and they have to meet in small groups.

1:09:04so we practice what we preach okay they literally have to do all these positive activities and if they do that for 10 weeks on average they're about 10 to 15 percent happier we use different measures but that's very reliable we find that every year we've run it and there's good and bad news that's the good news the bad news is after about six months a lot of them have gone back down to baseline again the good news is that if you follow them up up to two years those who have kept up with the activities maintain their elevated levels of happiness so it's like physical well-being mental well-being requires consistent effort has to become a habit there's no silver bullet there's no simple thing you can do and then you're happier forever after it's a state of mind it's an approach to life it's a way of dealing with things as i said earlier i think that explains why some people are just happier because they process things more effectively whereas the ones who go back down to baseline i think they resort back to their kind of all the biases that we've been describing yeah so i take from that that happiness is a skill and that you need to practice in order to hone that skill.

1:10:05And if you ignore these lessons, you'll stay at baseline and good luck with that. I'm wondering, would you agree with me? You may not agree with me, but my view, having made up this 10 % happier number completely, you know, as a joke or partially as a joke, I now argue that the 10 % compounds annually, which is also somewhat tongue in cheek, But that if you keep practicing these skills, actually you will over time be significantly more than 10 % happier at the point of origination. Right. Well, compound interest at 10 % annually would be exponential rise as an economist. But yeah, I certainly think it does strengthen over time.

1:10:46And I think the mechanism is not only addressing all your own setbacks, and we all face things over the course of our life. But as you become a more settled person, I think then you start to carve a path through life which is less difficult. And it also means that you're someone that people navigate or migrate towards because you seem to be comfortable. There's a number of ways in which it can work, but I would agree with you. I think that it can accumulate. And I would call that practical wisdom. Some of us get it indirectly. It used to come through the church. It used to come through a lot of our spiritual leaders.

1:11:19but in a world which is increasingly becoming fractionated because of technologies, we've got to keep working on it. We've got to keep trying it. Bruce, this has been a pleasure. Let me ask you my two habitual closing questions. One is, is there something you were hoping we would get to that we failed to get to? No, I think we covered most of the territory pretty adequately. I'm good. Can you remind everybody of the name of your new book and your older books, your website, your social media handles, et cetera, et cetera? The book I'm promoting is The Science of Happiness, Seven Lessons for Living Well.

1:11:52And my previous books are The Supersense, which is all about supernatural thinking. The Self-Illusion, which is a very Buddhist-inspired book about the illusion of self. Then I wrote a book called The Domesticated Brain, which is about the evolution of sociality in humans. And then my second last book was Possessed, Why We Want More Than We Need, which is all about relentless consumerism and the psychology of ownership. and do you have a website uh yeah you i've got brucehood.com i managed to get that so i've got a very egocentric kind of tag which is kind of ironic given what i've been promoting yeah well i have danharris.com in my email and that of everybody who works for me is you know fill in the blank at danharris.com so it's egocentric um i think we're going to change that eventually um bruce great to meet you thank you so much i appreciate it thank you dan

1:12:48Thank you to Bruce. Great to talk to him. As you may remember, we talked about the problem of overthinking, with which I am deeply familiar. We've got a guided meditation designed specifically for you to use after you listen to this conversation to help you deal with overthinking. It comes from our Teacher of the Month, Don Mauricio. We're now in this mode where we're releasing guided meditations with all of our full-length Monday-Wednesday episodes. As I said earlier, you know, it's all about helping you to take the great stuff you hear on the show and actually get it into your mind in an abiding way.

1:13:20So if you want that meditation, head on over to danharris.com and check it out. If you're a subscriber, you get lots of benefits, including live guided meditations on video with me and the ad free version of the show and much more. Before I let you go, I just want to thank everybody who worked so hard to make this show. Our producers are Tara Anderson, Caroline Keenan, and Eleanor Vasili. Our recording and engineering is handled by the great folks over at Pod People. Lauren Smith is our managing producer. Marissa Schneiderman is our senior producer. DJ Kashmir is our executive producer. And Nick Thorburn of the band Islands wrote our theme.

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