DR ROBERT WALDINGER: This Is How You Make 2026 The Happiest Year of Your Life

0:00Coming up in this episode of Great Company. Okay, if we started afresh tomorrow and made happiness our number one priority, what are the key things we should be focusing on? I mean, I'm going to give you the simplest answer. I would say it's... Hi, I'm Bob Waldinger and I'm in great company. Dr. Robert Waldinger. Director of the world's longest running study of happiness. I'm the fourth director of the longest study of human life that's ever been done. It started in the year 1938 with 724 teenagers. Now in our 87th year, we want to know what helps people thrive. What are the predictors of who's going to be happy and healthy as they go through their lives?

0:42That just hadn't been done. What did the results show in the end? They showed two big things. The culture gives us this message, oh, if you get really rich, then you're going to be happy. And it's not true. Is loneliness dangerous for us? What is stress doing to the brain? Are we meant to be in relationships with one person? What makes a good life? What is it? Oh, just a little question. There's research that showed that staying in a really terrible relationship is literally worse for your health. Depletes your health. Yeah, oh yeah. We studied these people their whole lives, and when they got to be in their 80s, we asked them, looking back on your life, what are you proudest of?

1:21Nobody mentioned their accomplishments. Get out of here. Everybody. They talked about their relationships with people. They said, you know, I was a good partner. I was a good dad. Why do you think that is?

1:35Hello, everyone. My name is Jamie Lang, and this is Great Company.

1:42Your TED Talk has 28 million views. 51 million. Sorry, my mistake. I don't know. Who's counting over here? Not really, who's counting? It's like, I'm so embarrassed that I even know that number. Except when it passed 50 million, they got all excited. Why do you think it's had so many views? Well, so when I gave it, I thought I gave it at a little elementary school auditorium in suburban Boston. It was a TEDx talk. And I thought people were going to laugh me off the stage because I was talking about something that I thought was so obvious. And instead it went viral. And I think it's because people are really concerned about growing social disconnection, how disconnected we are from everybody, how isolated we are.

2:32And I think that my kind of shining a light on it was something that got people's attention in a way that I didn't expect it to. Why do you think you'd be laughed off the stage? Well, because I thought it was so obvious. I mean, do you ever have things where you know them, so don't you think everybody also knows them? All the time. Yeah, yeah. I have that with my wife a lot. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Why don't you know what I'm thinking? Exactly, yes.

3:04In your book, The Good Life, the first chapter in the book is what makes a good life. Yeah. So if I was going to ask you what makes a good life, what is it? oh just just a little question um i have long lock the doors everyone because i'm ready yeah yeah i mean i'm going to give you the simplest answer i would say it's being engaged in things you care about and being with people you care about it's the activities you care about and the people you care about and if you've got those you've got a lot a lot of what you need for happiness. But that's talking also about purpose, right? Yeah. But a lot of us struggle to find our purpose because we have to, you know, we have to go and find out what we want to do.

3:57And when I was a kid saying, what do you want to do? I said, well, I want to be a stuntman, right? That's what I want to do. But I don't know how to become a stuntman. That's not, it's a dream. It's a pipe dream. So How do we find our purpose? Well, I think one thing we can do is we can learn to pay attention to the signals we get about what energizes us, what lights us up, and what drains us of energy. Because, you know, we spend so much time being told what we're supposed to want to do and what we're supposed to appreciate, right? And think about all the time you sit in school and you have to suppress every little feeling because you have to sit still and behave and all that.

4:36So we're taught to kind of squash those signals we're getting all the time about what we like and what we want to do and what we don't want to do. and so i think a lot of what i've had to do as a grown-up is to just tune in again to pay more attention oh i really don't like doing that and everybody else thinks it's great and i don't like doing it so i have to turn away from it wow and and that i don't know if you've had anything like that where you people have told you you should really like this thing you should really do this thing and you don't like it yeah and i've had that a lot i think yeah and and you always do it because you do it because it makes you fit in.

5:16Yeah. It makes you fit in and you say, well, everybody else thinks it's great. It must be great. Are we meant to be in relationships with one person? I'm not going to go there. Okay. Come on, Robert, give it to me. Well, okay. So my wife and I are going to celebrate our 40th anniversary in May. Congratulations. And yeah. And that's been a really good thing for me. But I know that people, you know, there are a lot of people who believe that monogamy is outdated, right? I think monogamy has worked for a variety of reasons throughout history. For what reasons? Because? Well, because you can build from monogamy.

6:04If you're both committed, so like let's say you're going through hard times, but you're sure you're going to stay through the hard time, then you can build a family, right? And think about the people who have to raise kids on their own or even two separated people who are raising their kids separately, in essence. First of all, it's economically often very disastrous to the family, and it's much harder. So if you can be in a relationship where you can build things, then you can achieve more of the goals that you want to achieve as a family. On the other hand, to stay in a relationship that's absolutely miserable and acrimonious, there's research that showed that staying in a really terrible relationship is probably worse for you than going your separate ways.

6:56And when we say worse for you, what does that mean? Well, actually, literally worse for your health and certainly for your happiness. But that's different. To please your health. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Because one of the things, you know. Isn't that mad? It depletes your health. Oh, yeah. The happiness for your health. So it's stress, right? What we find, why do relationships improve our, good relationships improve our health? We think a lot of it has to do with there being stress reducers. There being what we call in my world, emotion regulators. So if you think about it, something really frustrating or angering happens to you today, hopefully you go home and you can talk about it, right?

7:37And often when we talk about it, you can literally feel your body start to calm down. 100%. Yeah, from the fight or flight response. What we think happens is that people who are isolated or don't have anyone they can really trust to talk to, that they stay in a kind of low-level fight or flight response. So chronic inflammation, poor immune functioning, you know all of these things that that the fight-or-flight response is meant to change in our bodies but then we're meant to go back to baseline when the threat is gone or the frustration is gone and if we can't do that then we think that gradually the body breaks down that is mad that it actually what it does is it really if you so in these relationships or leading these lives which are incredibly stressful can actually lead to illnesses.

8:31Yeah. Can they cause cancers? We don't know. I mean, there's some ideas that they can. There's some studies that suggest that stress is implicated in cancer. They haven't, I can't say that they've really made definitive links, but there's a lot of sense that higher stress means. For example, there's a study I just read that showed that if you're having financial problems and you're undergoing treatment for cancer, your survival rate is lower than if you're not having financial problems. I'm not sure about this study. I have to read it further. But that's the idea of a stressor, right? And how a stressor might make your body less able to fight off illness.

9:20And we do know that some of that is true. What is stress doing to the brain? Well, yeah, it's not good for your brain that stress sets up chronic inflammation, and chronic inflammation makes the brain deteriorate sooner. So what we know, so for example, we're trying to figure out how do you stave off dementia and cognitive decline, and we don't know nearly enough about that yet. But one of the things that does seem true is that chronic inflammation, besides breaking down other body systems, gets to your brain and may contribute to cognitive decline, even Alzheimer's, although they're not sure about that.

10:07What are, I mean, it seems like an easy question, but what are unhealthy traits in a relationship? And what are things that we should look out for that maybe we don't realize or don't know? So unhealthy traits. Yeah, unhealthy traits. I think when it's not very reciprocal, when one person is doing much more of the giving and one person is doing much more of the taking, one person does much more of the listening and doing the emotional care. Women have begun to talk about, I don't want to be the emotional caretaker of my partner exclusively. And again, these are gender stereotypes. Sometimes it's very much the opposite.

10:52But if it's lopsided, if one person feels they're giving way more, then eventually it becomes so wearing that it's not sustainable. um i think the other thing is that if people stop being curious about each other you know because one of the things that happens you know you're with somebody and you just feel like you you know what they're going to say you know you know and and so actually one of my zen teachers gave me an assignment once he said you know go have dinner with jennifer my wife and he said your your task is to ask yourself, what am I seeing here that I've never noticed before? And this was when Jennifer and I'd been together for 20 years.

11:42And it was such an interesting assignment because I had to like really look. And I realized, actually, she's kind of changed her hair and I never noticed that. And I just started being much more curious about, we were just having an ordinary dinner table conversation right so i think when we lose curiosity that's something that's possible to cultivate again right with somebody who we take for granted but it's so important to stay curious in life yeah we kind of got to stay curious the whole time that's what drives us forward well some people know some people like predictability a lot you know they they don't want any change you you seem to be a person who likes yeah yeah yeah i i don't know what i i i don't not knowing what's going to happen tomorrow yeah is like the most exciting thing for me yeah and for some people that's the most terrifying thing right so what about non-romantic relationships that are unhealthy um can that cause your your brain your body to also deplete if you're if your friends with toxic people or your family can be toxic.

12:55Yes, absolutely. I think a lot of it is the balance. If you have a couple of toxic friends and you don't see them very often, probably not too bad, right? But if you are surrounded by people who make you really agitated, upset, unhappy, that could be family, it could be friends. If that's what you're swimming in, then that's the recipe for breaking down your health. Then how do you change it? well you can step away but that's so hard well you can curate the relationship I mean I know for example that if I talk politics with certain people in my family now especially now it's going to go really badly and so I structure my contact with them so that we're not likely to talk politics we don't do that and that so it's not that I want to cut off the relationships I don't, but I want to put guardrails around the things that get us into trouble.

13:57What about making new relationships? Because could we go throughout our lives making new relationships? Or is it that having those old relationships are more important than new ones? No, they're both important. Because first of all, we're going to lose our old relationships eventually. Well, people die. True. I forgot. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And people move away. I mean, I've lost, you know, my dearest friend in the world died of dementia 10 years ago, and it was just heartbreaking. And, you know, it's like, now what? So we do need to keep those skills up of making new relationships. and what you see is people doing it at all stages of life, including when they get to be very old.

14:43And there are ways to do it, right? You know, they've actually, sociologists have studied what the easiest ways are to make new relationships. Which are what? Well, it's doing something you care about or you enjoy alongside the same other people again and again. So for example, like you join a club, What do we tell our kids when they go to a new school? We say, join a club, right? So you find something you like to do, and it's not necessarily even for the thing they're doing. It's so that you meet other kids in a place where you have something in common. And we can do the same. Volunteer for political activities.

15:22Volunteer to help prevent climate change. Join a football club. I don't know. you know and if you go back again and again and you see the same people you're more likely to strike up some conversations do you know the more i talk to people like yourselves who are sort of um who've studied throughout their lives the more i realized that what our parents tried to teach us as kids was what we should be doing and reflecting ourselves as adults yeah eating healthy yeah get off screens go to clubs yeah play go on adventures yeah you know do all of those things do that's what we tell our kids to do but we don't put it in ourselves yeah yeah isn't that mad it's like that we had it right when we were two three four five right and there's a reason why these things become you know wisdom that's handed down even though we as the children don't want to don't want to listen there's a reason why they keep saying it right because they've been tried and true methods of being happy and staying well.

16:26Is loneliness dangerous for us? Yeah. Yeah. It breaks down our health. It's a stressor the way that, you know, we talked about how stress breaks down the body. They've done all these studies of people being alone versus being with other people. They know, for example, that if you are alone in your house or your apartment, you sleep less soundly than if you're with other people. And we think it's evolutionary. We think that we evolve to be social creatures because it's safer to be in numbers, right? Like if the goal of evolution is to pass on your genes, then you're probably more likely to pass on your genes if you huddle together in groups to ward off what's coming at you, right?

17:17And so we think probably that the people who were more social were the ones who essentially survived and that that's how we evolved to be more social creatures. Okay, so if someone is struggling, they feel lonely, and they're listening to this right now, but the idea of going to a club is terrifying. Is there a mini step they can take? Absolutely, absolutely. Right, because clubs are terrifying to me. I mean, they are to me. It's really hard. It's really hard for me to walk into a cocktail party not knowing anybody. I just don't like it. I mean, I'll end up talking with people and it'll be okay.

17:58Some people love it. I bet you like it. I bet you're good. I'm okay. I quite like it. It's just different temperament, right? Yeah, but I don't like other things. Other people are like, how can you not like that? That's why we're all different. Exactly. exactly so wait now i lost the question what is the mini step someone can take mini steps yeah so again like one of the things would be to um to join an activity where you could do it alongside other people you know so let's say there is something you really love to do uh it doesn't have to be a raucous activity it could be a quiet activity it could be knitting but you know it you You find people to interact with in a low-key way where you have something in common and an interest.

18:45And so that's one way. Another thing is to see if you can sort of slowly develop a more trusting relationship with somebody who's a casual person in your life. Sometimes that can happen at work. You know, often only 30 % of workers say they have a friend at work when they do these huge surveys all over the world. Only 3 in 10 say they have a friend. And most don't, right? But there are ways to begin to see who could I explore a little bit of personal contact with, right? Who could I start chatting with about something they have displayed on their desk? Or who could I have lunch with once in a while and begin to strike up a relationship?

19:37So even if you're temperamentally a quieter person, you could see if there might be one or two people you could try to get to know a little better through very slow steps, small steps. But it's also exposure, right? Yeah. That's the hardest thing because what's, you know, with the heroin addict, right? It's much easier to keep taking the heroin than to stop doing it because it's easy, right? That's why you keep taking it because it feeds you, it makes you feel better. with people who are in those situations much easier to sit at home alone not connecting not doing that that's counterproductive to your health to your well-being to everything and taking that first step is the hardest part absolutely to actually go and do that to speak to someone to connect say hey let's go for a coffee absolutely that is the hardest part right yeah okay if we started a fresh tomorrow and made happiness our number one priority what are the key things we should be focusing on?

20:33Well, I would say, and it's not just me saying it, it's the research that shows that social connection is the biggest driver of well-being, of happiness, right? And it also buffers us against the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. When bad things come along, social relationships help ease that pain. So I would say, if you're going to make only one On investment, invest in friendships and family relationships. It's the easiest answer. Yeah.

21:10Happiness is one of those things I think we're all striving for, really. You know, if a genie came to you and said, what would you want your wish to be? Probably would say, well, I want to be happy. Yeah. Or I want to be content. Yeah. You know, something around those. and I've been a huge fan of yours for a long time. I recently just wrote a book called Boys Don't Cry. And in it, I cite you. I write about the test that you did before I even knew you were going to come on the show. So for anyone who is listening and doesn't know your work or who you are, could you describe to them who you are and what you're best known for?

21:48Okay. I'm the fourth director of the longest study of human life that's ever been done, as far as we know. that it started in the year 1938 with 724 teenagers and has followed them and their spouses and their kids now in our 87th year. And the purpose of the study, you know, most research on human beings is about what goes wrong so we can figure out how to fix it, right? And this study in 1938 was radical because they said, we want to know what helps people thrive. What are the predictors of who's going to be happy and healthy as they go through their lives? That just hadn't been done. So that's what we've done for 87 years.

22:38It started in 1938? Yeah. What was happening around then for people to start considering happiness? Well, we had finished the Great War, which we thought was the war to end all wars, World War I, and it wasn't going to be, right? In the U.S., we were in the midst of a Great Depression, a terrible depression. And I think people were getting more pessimistic about this kind of ever-expanding vision of life and the economy and all that. And so they began to want to know what actually turns out to be important in human beings having good lives. the research was measuring like all kinds of things as people went through life so we got their medical records we asked them about how they thought about work and relationships and family and all that and and it was 728 people 724 and then we expanded to spouses and then we expanded to children all of whom now are mostly baby boomers so now it's about 2500 people and we've known their whole families and we actually went back and talked to the original people guys parents and grandparents um and we have these wonderful notes about like what was being served for dinner in these homes in 1938 i mean it's just amazing and so um so what we did was we followed these people all the way through their lives with um interviews and questionnaires and medical records.

24:14And then eventually, as new methods came along, we started drawing blood for DNA and messenger RNA, which is so cool to me because DNA wasn't even imagined in 1938. And we started putting people in the MRI scanner and watching how their brains lit up differently when we showed them different kinds of pictures. We bring them into our lab and we deliberately at least stress them out. And then we watch how they recover from stress as a way. All these are ways of trying to get at this big amorphous thing we're calling well-being. And what was interesting about the 724 different people, out of it, John F.

24:55Kennedy, which is insane. Yeah. The president of the United States. Yeah. He wasn't then. He wasn't then, but he was in the test. You've had alcoholics. You've had people with schizophrenia. You've had businessmen. It was just a whole wide range of different people. Yeah. We had a serial murderer. We just discovered that recently. Get out of here. Yeah, in the inner city group. We had a serial murderer. What? I know. But most people weren't infamous or famous or anything. They were just people living their lives. And it was every sort of two to four years you just check in and you would do everything, check with family, friends, check their finances, check their job.

25:36And typically with a social experiment like this, it kind of dies out, doesn't it? Funding stops, people get bored, people change countries. They're not part of it, but this one just kept on going and going and going. Yeah, yeah. And nothing has continued this long. This is unheard of. Too many people usually drop out even after five years of a longitudinal study. And then it becomes, it's no longer valuable because we don't know what happens to the people who drop out. So in our study, out of all these 2 ,500 plus people, we've had a 22 % dropout rate over 87 years, which is tiny compared to what you would expect.

26:16And part of the way it happened is we created a sense of community, actually. What we did was we had one person, usually it was a woman, a very maternal woman, who was like the study secretary. And she was like mission control. so the people in our study became attached to her and her name was louise gregory and they would she would write them thank you notes when they would return a questionnaire she would send them birthday cards well condolence cards and they would write to her about their lives because they would feel connected so in order so then they would feel be able to share yeah because it wasn't just feel it didn't feel robotic no it didn't feel robotic now what it means is we were not your typical hands-off study, right?

27:04You're supposed to not have anything to do with your study members because you don't want to influence them. We weren't that way because people weren't thinking that way in 1938. And also what we realized was that this is how you keep people engaged in a study. You help them feel like they're part of a community and you help them feel like they're giving a gift to science. So we kept telling them about what we were doing and what we were finding. We sent them newsletters, all that stuff. What did the results show in the end? Well, they showed two big things. One is if you take care of your health, it really matters for longevity and for staying well.

27:47So, I mean, it sounds trivial, but literally if you exercise regularly, if you eat well, if you don't become obese, if you don't abuse alcohol or drugs, if you get preventive health care. If you do all those things, you can live easily 10 years longer than you would have because we were able to compare the people who didn't take care of their health with the people who did. And that wasn't such a surprise because other studies had begun to find that as well. Yeah, and that makes sense. It makes total sense. That makes sense. I get that, right? A lot of sense. What didn't make sense to us at first was when we found that the people who stayed the healthiest and lived the longest were the people who had more social relationships and warmer relationships.

28:35People who were more socially connected, stayed healthy longer, and they lived longer. And the thing is, we didn't believe it because how could the quality of your relationships get into your body and make it more or less likely that you'll get heart disease yeah or diabetes right or arthritis how could that be a thing so we've been unpacking that in our lab we've been trying to understand how it works would try not to unpack that for me because that in my head it it doesn't make as much sense either what you're saying is so what you're saying is is that the people who had better connections with family the friend and friends the ones who lived a better healthier fuller happier life yep but that's not what we're all driving towards really in life it feels like what we're striving towards is finding a purpose being part of a business making money all these things yeah yeah well the making money i mean obviously we need to make money to get our basic needs met and and nobody's happy if they don't have those needs met you know for housing and food and and educate their children, all that.

29:48But once you get beyond that, making a lot of money doesn't make you happy. And we all know there are people who are miserable, who are really wealthy, that it's not the same. Some wealthy people are quite happy and some are quite unhappy. But the culture gives us this message, oh, if you get really rich, then you're going to be happy. right? And you see this in films, on the internet, you see it everywhere, this subliminal message. And it's not true. So being physically healthier and being more connected with people makes us live these fuller lives. But then we, I suppose at the moment we have this problem with disconnection.

30:32Because we're all staring at our phones the whole time. We're all facetiming rather than meeting up we're scrolling and liking social media rather than liking ourselves right yeah and that is causing a huge disconnection but if we have the study and we know that what causes and creates happiness is bringing people together because meant to be tried like sort of live in a tribe why are we doing the opposite it's such a good question it's such a question. So, I mean, I think one of the things that's true about money, for example, and fame, a lot of people go for fame, money, awards, is that there are things you can point to.

31:12Like what? They're like badges of achievement. Like I have this amount of wealth or I have this many followers. I'm an internet influencer, right? You can point to that. You can say, this is what I've achieved, right how do you do that with relationships you don't and it's kind of amorphous it's like you don't i mean you more quietly would pride yourself oh i have i have some good friends right i have a good partner i have good relationships with my kids but you don't really shout that from the rooftops you don't put it on your resume when you're applying for a job right it's not a badge of achievement so it's not a badge of achievement that's not we're striving to get these badge of achievements to almost be validated yeah i mean actually one of my zen colleagues who's a zen teacher says that in fact all this striving for badges of achievement is really trying to make ourselves feel more real when the idea of a separate independent self is just a fiction because i think if i'm being honest about myself i think i probably fall into that trap right yeah me too you know that it's i i you know i like linkedin because i can post stuff about what i've achieved yeah right exactly and i don't know who that's really for apart from myself exactly which is kind of a narcissistic weird trait but we all do it and i think one argument is it's because deep down we're all kind of afraid that there isn't much to us.

32:49And I don't mean that we're bad or we're inadequate. It means that we're not quite real because this is a Zen thing now. But Zen teaches that there's no such thing as a separate, isolated self that's unchanging and goes through time. Explain that more to me. Okay. The idea is that we are completely interconnected. I mean, everything from, you know, you have more bacteria cells in your body than you have your own body cells. You are constantly exchanging air with the environment. You are constantly receiving signals from other people and having emotional resonance with other human beings all day long.

33:27You are constantly being influenced by and shaped by everything around you. And as opposed to this fantasy of a me that's separate and goes through time, and I'm the same me who I was 20 years ago. I'm not the same me who I was when we started this conversation. So, but the idea, one idea, and this is just a theory, is that that scares us in some deep way. And so, but if you say, well, I've got this many followers, I've got this many views on my TED talk, that must mean I'm a real person, right? With your study, where did you see kind of is the unhappiest part of people's lives what age there was there was no particular age i do think that um typically when when we are the sandwich generation and you know the sandwich generation is where you've got kids you're taking care of you may have older parents who you're taking care of you have a lot of demands on you, you're a demanding job.

34:31If you're in that midlife place, often that's a time of enormous stress. So I would say that that's one common refrain we hear from people in midlife. I've just got so much that I have to take care of and attend to right now, and I can't manage it all um but you know hard times can come at any time um i will say that uh we get happier as we get older do you know about this no but i that makes me that makes fills me with just happiness because i'm i'm 37 yeah i find this part of my life about to have my first kid ah yeah wow and so this part and by the time this comes i would have had my first kid right when when's the baby due uh soon like three weeks oh my gosh yeah yeah so it's literally about to about to um arrive but i find that this part of my life being at 37 is is not the unhappiest at all in any way i'm very i am i feel very happy yeah but it's hard yeah it's hard it's hard because you have responsibilities and especially when you have even more responsibilities and you have diapers to change you have diapers to change and stresses and and you also don't feel i don't feel as agile yeah as i did before yeah and so this is probably that sort of thing what we're talking about here which is this period of life is tricky it feels like yeah it's trickier um yeah and and one of the reasons why we get happier as we get older if we still have our health is that the pressures ease.

36:13You know, if we have kids who are grown and launched, you know, we're no longer taking care of aging parents, perhaps, that we no longer have so much pressure in our jobs, maybe we're retired, or we have more control over our work life, because we're more senior in our jobs, that those things then ease that pressure, and we have, we can take care of ourselves a lot more easily.

36:48Can we be born unhappy? Or are we born everyone the same in a way and life changes us? It's the former. We can be born unhappy or really, more technically, we all have certain inborn temperaments. What? Yeah. I mean, did you read Winnie the Pooh? Yes, loved it. There's Eeyore and there's Tigger. And some people are born Eeyores. They're always kind of down about things, even when they're good. And then there are Tiggers who are just bouncy all the time, even when the worst is happening. And we think that has to do with biological factors. There's inborn temperament. And we're all kind of on a continuum that we don't understand that well.

37:38A great deal of it's genetically determined. But then, of course, there's so much environmental determination of happiness and of just mood in general. So you can take the happiest person and traumatize them and make them depressed and withdrawn. You can take someone who's very withdrawn and unhappy and move the needle some toward greater happiness. so it's always a mix of biology and and the environment so can you change from being an eel if you are an eel that's a great question i don't know i i don't know well there's a psychologist sonja lubomirsky who did a big analysis of how much of our happiness is under our control she took a lot of studies and her estimate is that about 50 % of our happiness is genetics.

38:36It's genetically based. And about 10 % is based on our current life circumstances. If I'm having a bad time right now in my life, but only 10%. And about 40 % is under our control. We can move the needle by things we do and don't do which is which could either sound like a lot or a little but to me it sounds like a lot so if we're so if we are feeling if we have control over the way that we're feeling some way because that 10 right yeah sure fine i get it but you know i've definitely had moments in my life where i have felt anxious or down or or low mood or whatever it is and i sort of think well it's it's life it's this it's that perhaps it's my own way of looking at things well it probably does have to do with your way of looking at things but it's also i think that that kind of inborn low mood would be something that that's there all the time so in other words i think of mood as kind of ups and downs most of us have ups and downs of mood i think everybody does sure yeah but that some of us have started a different baseline at a lower baseline where i when i'm down i'm really down and then i go up but i never get that happy and then i go back down really far other people it's the reverse they never get too far down even on their worst days right yeah so again it's this it's it's both but i if i look at me right for example i i'm a big lover of life right i love it more than anything and i have a high energy always have as a kid you know high energy always that way and so whenever i then started changing whenever i did feel any dips i I hate it.

40:19I was scared of it because I hate that feeling of feeling anything that's not up here. Yeah. Yes. And so I became fearful of feeling anxious or fearful of feeling down. Yeah. Because I didn't want that feeling because that's not my natural state. I don't like it. Yeah. And so then when you get stuck in that state, it's hard to get yourself out of it because you're like, oh, I'm going to be like this forever. Yeah. Yeah. Well, one of the things that, you know, we can teach kids is about that. We can teach kids not to be afraid that sadness is okay and it's not going to last, right? That's a big message because kids don't know that, especially when you're in the midst of a sad time or really angry time.

40:57It feels like forever. And so to be able to teach kids about what feelings are like and how they work, it's actually, you know, that's why I'm in London now for the Royal Foundation for this thing. They have a Shaping Us initiative. they're trying to call attention to the fact that we can teach the kind of thing you just talked about we can teach kids not to be afraid of feelings and to use their feelings rather than let their feelings you know run away with them but okay but let me discuss this you know when i when i was younger right i got sent to boarding school eight years old okay and i remember lying you guys do that and it was crazy i know it's mad i don't get it either i don't get it but i when I was eight years old, I remember lying in bed and I got a lump in my throat, right?

41:44Because I was lying in bed in this new dormitory full of 12 different people and I was scared. And if someone had said to me then, oh, by the way, that's anxiety. I would have then become experienced that I would have known what that is, but I didn't tell anyone, didn't understand it. So next day when the lump had gone, I forgot about it. I didn't think about it. Right. And there's something about being naive. Right. We, we, we now we label things, emotions, right? That's anxiety. That's OCD. that's depression, that's insomnia. And when you label something, in my experience, it becomes scarier, it becomes something, you become experienced in it, right?

42:19And there's something about that naivety that makes us still be free. That's interesting, you know, because I know it does work that way for some people at some times. For other people, it works in the reverse, that some people say you're struggling with OCD, and you have these behaviors, you don't know why you have to keep checking whether the door is locked or the stove is turned off and it's driving you crazy and it's driving everybody around you crazy and then someone finally says here's what it is and here's and you can see the relief that somebody gets when you say oh this is a thing it's called ocd and we know what it is we know what to do about it and it's so organizing because otherwise you're just left with that feeling of i am crazy i'm and and i don't know what to do right that makes total sense do you get fulfilled from helping others because if we go back to you know there's this and you speak of as if you go back to socrates right yeah socrates talks about two levels of happiness yes he talks about the lower level right which is you know this far better than me but the lower level which is you know fame and wealth and power and all the things we think we want to achieve and eating great sweets and eating delicious sweets really but the high level is helping people yeah did you talk about socrates which is you know just a completely different time but they they sort of had it right they understood what created this happiness what created a fulfilled life and somehow along the way we've lost it yeah well you know the research on happiness talks about the two the two kinds of happiness you mentioned one is the am i having fun right now happiness and then the other is is life basically good Even when I'm having a bad day, is life basically good?

44:07That's eudaimonic happiness. And the other one's hedonic. And really, I think what the research finds is we all want some of both. Like, you know, I love good sweets. Like, I'm really looking forward to you giving me some sweets. But that wouldn't be enough for me. Like, I really prioritize. So, for example, it matters to me that you and I are having this conversation. and these ideas are going to get heard by some people because it feels meaningful to me that I can share some of this stuff that I know that might be helpful to people. So that's the kind of eudaimonic happiness. That's the life is meaningful happiness.

44:52And there are so many ways to find meaning in life. Do you think we're focusing too much more on short-term happiness rather than long-term happiness? I think it depends on who you are. Some people are very much party animals and that's what they want to focus on. But that's not true deep happiness. That's more a dopamine hit, right? Well, I don't know. For some people, that's all they really care about. And who's to say? I mean, it might be in the eye of the beholder. For me, it wouldn't be deep happiness. But I can argue it, right? Because how could that be? So if all your happiness, right, is based around parties or that sort of hedonistic style right like so you said going out partying and dating whatever it may be surely like with anything you're gonna keep needing more of it more of it more of it more of it to become content yeah so actually then you're you're constantly chasing whatever this is and you think you're happy but are you truly happy it's you know it's the the eye of the beholder i think and you know you're right people get on a kind of treadmill where they're chasing after more and more hits of well-being of yeah you know and uh and it is sad i mean zen teaches a lot about that all the meditative practices talk about sitting still so you watch like the urges for you know some hit some fix of something You watch the urges come up and you watch them pass away, right?

46:25And that a lot of meditative practice is helping you not be kind of corralled by your impulses, but giving you more choice at how to respond to them. And that means you're probably less likely to keep chasing, you know, the great parties. It doesn't mean you don't still like parties, but it may mean that you don't have to have that as much as you used to. okay Robert if someone's listening right now right and they are really struggling with being quiet and still and they're chasing and they they don't want to stop but and they can't find that quietness they're so what do you say to them yeah well I would say first of all not everybody should meditate like maybe most people shouldn't like my wife has no interest in meditation she loves that I meditate she thinks it makes me a much better listener right but she's no interest but she's a passionate pianist so she sits and gets lost playing the piano and time just drifts by right and i think that you know they they write about these states are that they call flow where it's where you're so absorbed in something you could be this in sport you could be it in gardening you could be it in anything but where you're just kind of lost in an activity and that time just kind of, you don't even, you're not aware of time and you're just in it.

47:48And I think that that flow state we can find in many different ways and that that has the opportunity to help us see the difference between, oh, there's this way of being. And then there's the constant chasing of the next fix. But that's hard. If you have a hobby like that, if you love reading or looking at art or playing music or whatever it may be, that's kind of, you can get yourself into a state where you can feel calm. But I worry about, you know, especially if I look at my younger brother, 21 years old, right? Yeah. It feels like to me a lot of their excitement and their kind of flow state is scrolling TikTok.

48:29Yeah. And that is a sort of distraction in a way, and you can be distracted. You know, as humans, we've become distracted, but not in a good way, I don't think. Well, the distraction of the digital world is a big problem. And the dangers we can say, okay, the digital world is bad. And first of all, where's that going to lead us? The digital devices we're so addicted to aren't going anywhere. So the digital world is here. but I think what we what we're not learning to do is figure out how to use it in a way that helps us and how to use it in a way that depletes us and the problem with the scrolling particularly scrolling other people's feeds about their lives is that it leaves you feeling like you're missing out I mean we post these kind of curated lives for each other you know like I don't post the photos in the mornings when I'm hung over or feeling depressed.

49:30I post the photos when I'm on a vacation at a beautiful place. But what it can do is it can give you the impression, oh, everybody else is having a great life except me. I'm having a life with ups and downs. And so I think that that problem of the digital world is one that we really need to get on top of like we need to teach kids the difference between the real world and those curated lives because otherwise they end up feeling like oh my god you know i'm inadequate compared to these people yeah but i the thing that i have with that whole scrolling of social media is that we all keep saying this is bad for us we need to stop this we need to change it that's what we keep saying but no one's giving the answers yeah it's true and even you and i sit here and go we know it's bad right but but what do we do to stop it i know because it's only getting more it's only getting places these big corporations only making more money yeah they're only only working up better algorithms to suck us in more and more that's the problem that the the algorithms are scientifically based they they're really good at figuring out what captures and holds attention um they're they're working with the ways our brains react to stimuli right and that's a problem i mean And that's begun to be uncovered.

50:48There were a bunch of hearings in our Congress about that, about how Meta and some of these companies are doing this. What we haven't figured out yet is what to do about that because there's so much money involved. There's so much money that's being made by capturing and holding our attention. And it's amoral. They don't care what they capture and hold it with, right? They just want to capture it. what did your study show when we hit the digital age well we haven't shown much yet because our generations were the um the world war ii generation and they're still trying to figure out how to turn on their phones right i mean they really are they we joke with them they they joke with us like we we wanted to do an online survey with them and they said we can't do that and then then the really yeah they just said no we're not going to do that send us another paper questionnaire And then the baby boomers, the second generation.

51:46Which is how old? They're 60s, right? So those are often people too who find computers hard to work with. Very different from digital natives. We have not studied digital natives. So I can't say from my research what that shows.

52:09Are you optimistic about the future?

52:15Oh, God. I mean, I live in the United States, right? So, yes. I don't know what to say. I mean, okay, I'm just going to tell you this. In my world, I'm very optimistic about the future. In the world of the people I work with, the people I care about, the things I'm involved in, I'm really optimistic. when i look at what is falling apart and i am really scared right and they're the problem is that they're going out in my country they're going after everything that i hold dear so they're going after being kind to people they're they're like grabbing people off the street and doing horrible things right they're going after science which i've devoted my life to right and saying it doesn't science doesn't matter and right they're going after health care and spreading misinformation so these are these are so there's such big things in my life that to watch these under attack has made me despair until i get up out of my chair and i go do something about it so i'm going to protests wow and i'm signing oh yeah well i'm signing petitions and oh yeah uh because the the um the goal is to not cooperate with things that we see that are wrong and it's such a big example there of we expect others to do it for us yeah but we have to do it ourselves yeah because because we you know myself included everybody i know is we're sort of deer in the headlights initially and then we have to stop being deer in the headlights and we have to go do something about it Robert this has been honestly truly amazing I really like honestly appreciate absolutely everything of this as I said I was a huge fan this is really fun oh it was it trust me for me it was the greatest yeah um we like to end the conversation with eight quick questions eight okay everyone says that but it can be quick fire if you want are you ready for this okay what's the saying or phrase that you'd want people to come away with from this interview oh from this interview or okay can i add a new one okay it's from one of my zen teachers he said attention is the most basic form of love

54:42that's what i'd like people to take away i had a quote recently um which was i'm going to murder but it's something like embarrassment is an emotion that we never explore. Go and make a fool of yourself. Yeah. Yes. I love that. I love that. Yeah. We don't explore it. It's very good. Best compliment anyone's ever given you for your work.

55:08Oh, that it changed the way they're living their life. I mean, that was like, whoa, because people, people have talked about how they've started treating their relationships differently. I do it now. That's why I, the reason I do what I do in terms of connect with my friends and speak to them differently is because of your TED talk. I'm not even kidding you. Wow. Because I knew that it's the easiest answer. Go and speak, go and connect. You know, and the reason I gave the TED talk is because I, it began to dawn on me that we were publishing these findings in journals that nobody reads. Nobody.

55:46Yeah. And so we had all this information and we were hiding it. And so it seemed to me imperative that we take all this information and bring it to people who could use it. So important. And, you know, this is what's so good in the book. You say to the families we were born into and the families we've helped create, right? Yeah. Which is kind of an amazing. Yeah. I just love it. Right. Number three, what scares you most about your work? That people will stop doing it. uh not my work but that people will stop studying uh sort of the general arc of human life and what helps people thrive because it it's big and messy it's hard to study it's expensive um but i really want people to do it because we learn things that that can matter so much for so important thriving yeah it's so important when was the last time you cried oh i got tearful last night i went to see an amazing performance do you know the actor matthew reese yes yeah yeah yeah he did the americans do you know he did did you watch the series the americans his face but i know that name he's he's a prominent he's a welsh actor but he's been in lots of stuff so he did a one person show called playing burton about his idol who was richard burton and it was a it was an astonishing show about richard burton exploring his life and and it was just it was the most magnificent piece of acting and it was so moving because it was about you know all the ups and terrible downs of richard burton's life uh and so anyway that was last night do you know what is amazing is that when you look especially what you'll find is that in life we all have our boulders we all have our ups and downs everyone has it and no one has a sort of stream and some are worse than others for sure but we all have those moments in our life oh yeah oh yeah makes us feel more connected that we're not all perfect well exactly i think when when we realize that other people are struggling too it it's a relief completely what's something you can't let go of oh i think my need for achievement like i see how you know doesn't make us happy it doesn't make us happy and yet i i find myself just looking to you know the next thing and i'm trying to manage it and i think my zen practice helps that but it doesn't go away manage it i can't that's my big because even it's even when you achieve something yeah it's fleeting well it is because then there's the next thing you have to keep relearning it like that's the one thing i know that that these these lessons i think I've learned I have to keep relearning.

58:32But I think, you know, so what I do now is I'm much more intentional about, you know, if there's a choice between doing something with family and doing some achieving thing, I'm really clear now. It's just, you know, I get much clearer than I used to be. And you're going to have to make a lot of choices now that you have this little one coming into your life, you know, and so you'll be making choices all the time. Choices to achieve rather than see the family. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. What's your guilty pleasure? Chocolate. Delicious. Dark, milk, white? Dark. White chocolate. White chocolate is an abomination.

59:09I love white chocolate. Are you kidding me? I hate it. Do you go 90%, 80 % dark chocolate? No, really, I'm kind of more like 60, 70. Oh, okay. Sorry. I know. Not as hardcore as me. I'm up there towards that. Wow. 90%. What's your biggest turn off?

59:27Arrogance. What's your biggest turn on? humility and curiosity it's like people who who are really wanting to constantly learn and not resting on what they already know there's an amazing guy called alan de botan and he oh yeah yeah he's incredible and he said his biggest turn on is when someone says oh interesting oh maybe oh that's good yeah yeah and aren't certain yes zen emphasizes what they call not knowing and beginner's mind, meaning bringing a kind of fresh mind even to the things you think you're absolutely sure of. Last question. Out of all your studies, what is the most interesting thing you've ever found?

1:00:13Well, the most interesting thing is how many ways there are to have a good life. Like there are people who've had lives which I would hate in my study, right? I read about them and they just, They make choices that I think are just terrible, and they're on paths that I would never take, and they love their lives. And that has been the best thing for me, right? So not one size fits all. No, one size never fits all. And my size for a life doesn't fit all by any means. Thank you so much. This has been brilliant in every single way. I really appreciate you coming on the show. Thank you so much. It's been amazing.

1:00:49This was fun.

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