Boost Your Well-being in Less Than 30 Seconds With Eli Susman

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0:59Welcome to Live Happy Now, where we explore the science and stories that help us live with more joy, resilience, and connection. I'm your host, Paula Phelps, and each week we sit down with experts and everyday heroes who show us how happiness grows when we put it into practice. If you want more calm in your life but just can't seem to find the time for practices like meditation, you'll love this episode. I'm sitting down with psychologist Eli Sussman, whose new book, Micropractices, explores how you can reset yourself in as little as 20 seconds and find lasting change. Listen as he shares the science behind these micropractices and tells us where and how to start right now.

1:39Let's dive in. Eli, thank you so much for joining us on Live Happy Now.

1:44Eli Susman:Thank you for having me, Paula. I'm really excited to talk to you. You have a new book coming out. And one thing I found really interesting is that it can actually be tracked back to a study you did in 2024. So let's start by talking about the simple practice that you shared that went viral and started all this. Yeah. So we found in my research that we did this with 135 undergrads at UC Berkeley, that doing just 20 seconds a day of a practice I developed called self-compassionate touch, which basically involves things like placing your hands over your heart and belly paired with a kind inner voice.

2:24Eli Susman:Just doing that for 20 seconds a day relative to a finger tapping control group was associated with greater improvements in self-compassion, stress, and emotional well-being. And what surprised us most wasn't just that it worked, but how much it worked. The effects of the self-compassionate touch exercise, doing that for 20 seconds a day, was comparable to what we see with much more time-intensive interventions. And that's really what led me to coin the term micro-practice, which I define as well-being practices that don't add anything more than 30 seconds to your day. What is it that made you do the study in the first place?

3:03What thought process led to wanting to find out if we could do something in less than 30 seconds that would evoke a change?

3:11Eli Susman:Yeah. So it really, the seed was really planted for it when I was on a meditation retreat. And I went up to a monk and told him that I just meditated for three hours. And he looked at me and said, three hours. And he said something I'll never forget. How about three breaths? That's all you need to tune into the present moment. And I remember thinking, oh, here I was having walked over like I just scaled spiritual Everest. And with one gentle question, you see that I've been measuring the wrong thing entirely. It was humbling, but also really freeing because most of us aren't short on good intentions.

3:56Eli Susman:We're short on time. We mean to meditate and then the meeting runs late, dinner needs making, a notification pops up and suddenly we're five videos deep on Instagram until a goldfish driving a car. And it made me wonder, what if something as quick as three breaths, something that takes just 30 seconds or less could actually make a difference in people's lives? And when I got to Berkeley and was trying to figure out what to study, I came across this study where they split participants into three groups. One group got a 20-second hug. Another group tried what they called self-soothing touch. So this is a little bit different than self-compassionate touch.

4:33Eli Susman:It just involves the touch component. So placing your hands over your heart and belly, maybe you're focusing on the warmth of it. But there's not that self-compassionate thinking piece. And then the control group, they folded paper airplanes. And then came the real test, a brutal mock job interview, bright lights, harsh questions, everything designed to spark stress. And when the results came in, the difference almost made my jaw drop. They found that just one 20 second bout of receiving a hug for 20 seconds was associated with greater reductions in cortisol compared to the paper airplane group.

5:11Eli Susman:But the self-soothing touch group doing that for 20 seconds was associated with at least as much of a drop in cortisol as the hug, possibly more. And that really had me thinking, well, cortisol is one of our primary stress hormones. And when cortisol is chronically high, that's associated with poor mental health. And when cortisol that's chronically high is then reduced, that is associated with the improvement of mental health. So what if people did this not once for 20 seconds, but every day for 20 seconds? And since people are already taking the time to do the touch for 20 seconds, and because it's almost like the embodiment of self-compassion, right?

6:00Eli Susman:Like what if we paired it with this self-compassionate thinking component, right? Because sometimes when we're tired or stressed or overwhelmed, the parts of our brain involved in just like regulating our thinking can be much harder to bring online. And for kids and teens as well, those capacities are still developing. But, you know, touch can prime the brain or bring it into a more regulated state that it can then more effectively engage with those thought oriented practices like self-compassion. then perhaps there could be this synergistic effect between the two. That's really what led me to want to test this as a standalone practice.

6:43And from that, you developed a series of what you call micro practices.

6:50Eli Susman:One of the reasons why I coined that term was because when I looked more closely at the research, I kept seeing the same pattern, which was that it's not about how much time you spend, but how consistent you are that actually predicts the best outcomes, which is such a relief because we tend to think that doing more is always better, but often making a practice shorter is exactly what helps us keep coming back to it. And that consistency is where the real change happens. Let's talk about the science behind a micro practice. Because we're familiar with the science of meditation and some of the longer practices that we do, what's the science behind this?

7:34Eli Susman:Yeah. So one of my favorite studies on this, they had 21 ,000 Headspace members, you know, which is a mindfulness app. And what's so cool about this study was that because it's an app, they're able to objectively track both how often people practice the meditation and how long as well. And they found that more consistent practice was associated with better outcomes, but longer sessions, there was no association. And one potential reason for this could be this phenomenon that psychologists call habituation. And that's when your nervous system adapts to things over time so that things like touch or that might feel soothing at first may start to register less strongly the longer they go on.

8:29Eli Susman:You can think of it kind of like jumping into a swimming pool. That first plunge in the cool water, your whole body lights up. Sharp, electric, alive. But stay in for a minute and what happens? The cold disappears. The water hasn't changed, but you have. That's what your nervous system does. It gets used to what stays the same, which means that the things that help us feel calm, safe, or connected might work best when we keep refreshing the signal. So that might be part of why micro practices work because they're tiny moments that keep resetting the signal again and again. How did you find all these different micro practices?

9:08How did you go about discovering what would work? Yeah.

9:12Eli Susman:So a lot of it was based in what I had seen both in the research and just in my own journey into contemplative and well-being practices, because I used to work in a residential inpatient treatment program before or during and also a little bit after college. And when I first got there, I would facilitate mindfulness things. And I was really struck by how when people could effectively engage with these practices, how much they could benefit. But so many people struggled to get to that point where they could actually engage with a mindfulness practice. So I was like, what are some other ways in that could help people get to that place where they can like focus on that non-judgmental, deliberate presence.

10:05Eli Susman:So I kind of went looking for all these different practices. That's how I decided to do my yoga teacher training and like stumbled into laughter yoga and slow deep breathing practices and improvisational dance, which is in the book, like micro dancing. And just through going on different retreats and looking at what does the science actually say about this? That's what really helped me narrow down for the book. What are these most potent elements of these different well-being practices that can be distilled into something that anyone can do in 30 seconds and can make a difference when repeated over time?

10:53Eli Susman:We'll be right back with more of Live Happy Now.

11:00We're already helping you wrap up your weekend with a smile, so why not let us start your Monday with an encouraging boost too. Wake Up Happy is the newest addition to our mission to make every day happier, and it's a Monday morning lift you don't want to miss. When you sign up, we'll send you one quick, uplifting text every Monday morning to kick those beginning-of-the-week blues to the curb and help you rise and shine a little easier. Think of it as the best wake-up call you'll get all week, delivered right when you need it the most. Sign up, sleep well, and let us help you start your week with a smile.

11:34To get your weekly wake-up happy text, visit livehappy.com and sign up for our Sunday Sillies newsletter. You'll get the option to receive a free wake-up happy text every Monday. And if you're already getting Sunday Sillies, you'll see a prompt asking if you'd like to opt in. So sign up and let us give your Monday mornings a makeover. The other days we'll be so jealous.

11:58Eli Susman:And now let's hear more from Eli Sussman. All of your practices are built around four core elements. Would you mind walking us through those elements? So the book is divided into four different elements, move, touch, breathe, and flow. So move practices, that could be practices like micro dancing, like what I was just mentioning or micro yoga, doing a quick yoga pose between meetings or just every hour, 15 minutes using brief intentional motions to engage the body. Touch practices like self-compassionate touch use physical contact to embody compassion and connection. Breath practices like slow, deep breathing or laughter yoga harness the rhythm of your breath to regulate and center and flow practices that could be just like integrating awareness into what you're already doing.

12:56Eli Susman:And the point is turning daily life itself into practice. So that might mean sending well wishes to the person in front of you in the grocery line, even as they're unloading their entire pantry under the conveyor belt, or even as the person cuts you off in traffic, right? Sending compassion towards that. Maybe they're suffering or they're late for some emergency. or something like that. And the order is intentional too. Like I was saying before, because it can be harder to bring those parts of our brain online to regulate with thinking when we're tired or overwhelmed, the book begins with kind of the most tangible practices first, you know, like movement, touch, and then kind of works up towards more of like the thought oriented practices, we often tend to think of the brain as like the one who's calling all the shots, right?

13:52Eli Susman:And that can be true to some extent, but what's often not talked about as much is that the brain actually receives more information than it gives out. So like the vagus nerve is one example. I'm sure someone on this podcast has talked about the vagus nerve, but... Yeah, but we love talking about it. Yeah, yeah. So, you know, in case someone who's listening is new, like it's one of your cranial nerves. It's the only cranial nerve that actually descends from the brain below the shoulders into like the torso. So it's really like the mind body nerve that is involved in relaxation and social functioning and things like that.

14:32Eli Susman:And the vagus nerve is kind of like a five-lane highway, but only one lane is heading up to the brain. Four of those lanes are heading from the brain to the body. So that's part of why these kind of bottom-up practices, practices that work with all of these nerves that are connected to things like the vagus nerve and then to the brain can really have a powerful effect. And that's one of the reasons why we start with those practices first. And for people who have been kind of schooled in that we need to sit and meditate for a long time, like you for three hours, explain how transformation can happen in such a short time.

15:15Eli Susman:Like Buddhism, where many of these practices come from, or Hinduism or things like that. They are really all about bringing these practices into your daily life. But when they made their way to the West, the kind of implicit message that, you know, I received when I was first getting into these practices was like, to be present in your daily life, you first have to master it with your eyes closed, right? And then at some point, you hope it will follow you out the door. But, you know, what we see in the research is that 20, 30 seconds can really make a difference. You know, We find that slow, deep breathing just for 30 seconds can shift the brain towards more like theta brainwave states that are associated more with relaxed, contemplative mind.

16:08Eli Susman:We see that doing for people who are for sedentary adults, they've done studies of thousands of adults in the U.S. where they, you know, gave them Fitbit type activity trackers. They wore them for seven days and then they tracked them for seven years after that. And the adults who had just five to eight, 10 second bursts of vigorous physical activity, you know, that could be things like jogging to the bus, hauling groceries up the stairs. That cut mortality risk by 44 to 54 % over the next seven years. Really? Yeah. Just from what they found in those seven days, five to eight, 10 second bursts.

17:00That's crazy. So you focus heavily on how to make those practices stick. So how do we go about that?

17:07Eli Susman:Yeah. So this is really what my dissertation was about. And, you know, I dedicate a whole like two chapters in the book to like how to make micro practices into unshakable habits in our daily lives, even when life feels busy or overwhelming or like we don't even have a moment to pause because, you know, here's the thing in that study that I was mentioning on self-compassionate touch. It only worked if people actually did the practice, which, you know, is kind of intuitive, right? Like a practice only works if you practice it. Only 38 % of that sample practice daily. And so, you know, the average person, because they didn't do it often enough, they didn't benefit.

17:55Eli Susman:You know, we still found this pattern of effects where the more people practice, the more they benefited, which is why, you know, we, for my dissertation, I did another study, you We had 497 participants, adults recruited across the United States. We had two groups. One got that same exact self-compassionate touch instructions. And then the other group also got those same instructions. But then they also received, they watched like a nine-minute video of me talking about evidence-based tools for forming habits. And they made a habit plan. And the group that got the habit tools practiced roughly two days more each week over the course of six months.

18:37Eli Susman:And that extra practice, the extent to which it became a habit, accounted for 40 to 80 % of the improvements in self-compassion and emotional well-being six months later. So what are some of those habit tools? Well, you know, I mentioned the habit plan. So the three core ingredients of habit formation are cues, you know, which are things in our environment that tell your brain it's time to act, rewards. So thing, you know, when a behavior feels good, it, you're more likely to want to do it again. And then repetition, you know, the more you do it, that the more your brain is going to associate that cue with the rewards.

19:18Eli Susman:So, you know, it's important to kind of brainstorm and, you know, kind of obstacles or barriers in that and, you know, how you might overcome them. So people in the study, you know, would select a cue. And, you know, in the book, I talk a lot about like, what are the ideal cues? So like, you know, we found in the research that, you know, the more specific the cue is, the more likely you are to do it. So instead of just, I'll do it after I brush my teeth, it's more effective to say, like, I'll do it after I brush my teeth in the bathroom in the morning, or you don't want it to be like, the cue has to become like, has to come before the habit.

19:53Eli Susman:So you don't want the cue to be like before bed, because by the time you get to bed, the opportunity to do the practice has already gone. You've already passed before bed. So then it's like, okay, what am I doing before bed? Am I turning off the light? Am I plugging my phone into a charger? Am I getting into my pajamas? And then, you know, you want to think about, okay, well, what's rewarding about the practice? Why am I doing it? And also there could be ways to make the practice more rewarding. So maybe that's, you know, just savoring, taking a moment to let it land, noticing what comes up after you do the practice can help your brain kind of register the rewards more.

20:31Eli Susman:Another way is to like pair with something you already enjoy doing, you know, like let's say you love walking in nature, you know, maybe it's just feeling the ground beneath your feet or, you know, letting yourself like feel a sense of awe for the nature around you. or, you know, the sunset or things like that. And then, you know, it's like coming up with ways to overcome obstacles. So like, for example, let's say you are planning to do slow, deep breathing at the stoplight, you know, you're driving on your way to work, you do it at the stoplight, but the stoplights shorter, you know, than what you plan.

21:11Eli Susman:Well, you can just do it for 10 seconds instead of 30 seconds. Or, you know, some people like to do micro practice in more of like a private quiet space. So like, let's say you're in public, a moment comes up where you feel like, you know, man, I could really use some self-compassionate touch right now. Maybe you just go to the bathroom, you know, the bathroom stall can just become your sanctuary for a moment. Then you can just put that together, you know, like after I put my pajamas on to go to bed, I'll practice self-compassionate touch. You know, this because, you know, hopefully I feel calm and feels kinder towards myself than just replaying all the mistakes I did that day.

21:51Eli Susman:And I'll, you know, take a moment to really let it land afterwards. If there's like notifications on my phone, tend to like distract me from doing the exercise, then, you know, I'll plug my phone into another room or keep my phone in another room so that, you know, when I'm, it's time to practice, I'm less distracted. And, you know, you can just, visualize that for a moment. And that's kind of basically what a habit plan is. And in the book, there's, you know, I talk about like 25 different habit tools that you can do. So, you know, this is just one small piece of that, but it's definitely an important one.

22:26With the book coming out, what is it that you most wish for it?

22:30Eli Susman:Yeah. One thing that I really hope people will take away from this book and that I hope might shift a little bit in the broader wellness, well-being culture is that well-being doesn't have to be something you step away from life to do. It can be something that you live. And, you know, we see this in the research too, you know, informal mindfulness is one example. Things like enjoying the warmth of the suds, you know, as you wash the dishes or enjoying savoring your meal, the ground beneath your feet as you're walking to work and enjoying that. Studies show that that kind of informal mindfulness, the kind you weave into what you're already doing, is actually more strongly and consistently associated with better outcomes than formal meditation.

23:16Eli Susman:You know, better well-being, more reduced stress, increased mindful awareness, more flexible thinking, even less interference from chronic pain and fewer sleep problems. And, you know, the reason for that is actually pretty intuitive. You know, life isn't lived in 30 minute meditation sessions. It's lived in the other 23 hours and 30 minutes of your day. And that's really where mindfulness, well-being, these practices truly shine, not by pulling us out of life, but by calling us more fully into it. For someone who wants to incorporate these practices into their lives, where can they start today?