How to Feel Loved: The 5 Mindsets That Change Everything | | Sonja Lyubomirsky & Harry Reis – EP 730

26:25You don't know. You don't know if you're appreciated. Everyone would miss you if there's no hot water. All of a sudden, you know, that calls for a major remediation. But while the water's there, people act like you're unimportant. And that makes you feel like you don't matter. But it also makes you feel like you're not being seen. And you don't get to experience the idea of being loved. Yeah. And in that relationship, I found that after a while, when I was trying to express myself, the other person just kept just not caring. And so after a while, I became less and less vulnerable with them because it just didn't seem to make any sense to share.

27:10And one of the big ideas from your book is the importance of being vulnerable and sharing the real self, I think, allows love to land where it's most important. What does your research show about this? Well, our research shows that when the parts of yourself that feel vulnerable are hidden, you begin to worry about what would happen if those parts came out. If I am not letting you know what I think my weaknesses are, and I would begin to start worrying, well, what's going to happen when that comes out? Are you going to reject me when you found out this terrible thing that I did when I was 18 years old?

27:52Are you going to reject me because I'm actually no good at certain things? And so you begin to worry about acceptance simply because you don't know how the other person is going to respond to that information as it will surely come out. There's the interesting story that was in the news recently about the man who had committed several murders and he never talked to his family about that, never told his wife about it, but he left her a note for her to read after he died in which he confessed all these things. Now, the interesting thing, so obviously he wanted to tell her these things, but at the same time, he was afraid of how she would respond while he was still there if she had known these things.

28:41So the need to be known is a very powerful one, but sometimes it just keeps us hidden within ourselves. And that has consequences. And you wonder if he ever really felt loved by his wife, if he truly ever felt loved, because he probably always wondered, well, she loves me now, but she doesn't love me unconditionally because she doesn't know about this past behavior. I also want to add a caveat you had mentioned with your relationship, not feeling appreciated, even when you did reveal how you felt. And once in a while, that is going to happen. And once in a while, you're going to try everything that we talk about in the book.

29:17You show curiosity, you listen, you share, you show warmth and acceptance, and the other person is just not going to respond. We've had some early readers of the book actually break up with their partners, realizing the person is not sharing and they're not curious and whatever they've tried is not working. Once in a while, maybe you need to accept that or pause or maybe even walk away. So that will happen. Sonia, maybe a follow-on to that would be in that relationship, there's a hidden cost when we stay safe in a relationship. How does that deplete our overall capacity for happiness? Yeah, yeah.

29:55Well, I'll just say one thing. One of our friends and colleagues, Mike Slepian, studies secrets, and he wrote a great book called The Secret Life of Secrets. You might know about it. I interviewed him. It was great. I figured you interviewed him. But anyway, he talks about the toll that keeping secrets takes on our mental health, but also our physical health even. And so like when we're not revealing all of ourselves and a secret could be defined, I think, very broadly, something that we just don't want people to know about. And so, yeah, that's one way that I could cost our happiness. But a lot of people, we all have walls around us, right?

30:27We all have walls around us. They're there to protect us. When you realize that you really see it everywhere, people walking around with these walls. And so they're functional, but a lot of people just feel they keep things so close to the vest. They really are so private. They don't reveal much at all. And I actually worry for people who are too private because I think it's going to be hard for them to ever really feel loved as we argue in our book. All right. Yeah. Harry, I spoke to Richard Ryan about 18 months ago, and we were talking about self-determination theory. but we were really talking about the equality of the three components of it.

31:06Woody, could you explain self-determination theory maybe through the lens of your book and specifically what happens when our autonomy comes to cross with the relatedness aspect of it? That's such a wonderful question. And it's one, Rich Ryan and I go way back. So it's something I've been thinking about for a long time. I don't think they're incompatible at all. And I would say that when they do come into conflict with each other, it's really a barrier to relatedness rather than choose one or the other. The notion of autonomy is, of course, the idea that we want to do behaviors that feel authentic and real and personally meaningful to us.

31:52But the idea of Relatedness is that we want to be connected to other people, but it's that real self that we want to be connected. So I think of relatedness in its pure form as being what we want our autonomy to do. That is what we want our autonomy to be the stimulus for. When we're not behaving autonomously, so for example, one of the non-autonomous things people do is pursue extrinsic goals. So people will pursue the goals of being famous, of making a lot of money, of being the most beautiful person on the planet, that sort of thing. When you pursue those extrinsic goals and other people admire you for that, it isn't experienced as the real self.

32:41You can never have enough money because there's always somebody who makes more money. There's a wonderful study that showed that something like two-thirds of the millionaires in America feel like they don't make enough money. Because there's always someone more beautiful. There's always someone more powerful. There's always someone with higher status. There's always someone who's won more awards than you. And so when you're pursuing those more and more, it's not the real self that's coming through. And Rich and I have actually done research together that shows that when people feel like their autonomy is being respected and valued by other people, that's when people really start to feel happy and really, truly satisfied in a genuine way.

33:26Yeah, I just want to add something to that. I used to be a senior executive at a well-known technology company and our CEO. At the time, I think his Forbes had his net worth at about 19 billion. And I would hear him complain sometimes that it was going down. And then he bought another technology company and restored it back to 30 billion. And it just makes me wonder sometimes with what you were just saying, how that plays out. Like when is enough sometimes? One of the problems with pursuing extrinsic goals is that we're never quite satisfied. We keep moving the finish line. I have this sort of image of the finish line.

34:03It just keeps moving farther. And you can argue that's evolutionarily adaptive, right? For humans to never quite be satisfied when they reach a certain goal, like whether it's 19 billion or writing a book or getting married. And yet, if we were always just satisfied with our goals, like we reach the top of the mountain and then we just stay there, we would never make progress. We wouldn't make advances. We would stagnate, right? So it's adaptive for us to keep wanting more, but there's a cost to our happiness. Right. And to riff on a popular metaphor, nobody on their deathbed ever said I should have made more money.

34:39I don't agree with that, actually, because not having much money can actually really harm your happiness. Yeah. Yeah. But it's, well, another thing, this is a little bit of a, what's the word of a little bit of a paradox is that research shows that if you pursue money or you pursue extrinsic goals, you're not happy, right? So that's associated with unhappiness. But actually having achieved those things is associated with happiness. So richer people are happier. More beautiful people are happier. People who are more popular are happier. But pursuing those things is associated with unhappiness. But having them is good.

35:14Since we're talking about money, I'll bring William James into this for a second. What is, and I'll let you both answer this, what is the cash value of a relationship where both people feel they truly matter inside of? Thank you. Priceless. Yeah, I would totally agree. Yeah. Yet, why, if that is the case, is it absent in so many? That's what really drives me crazy. When you think of how many divorces and breakups and everything else that there are, when the opposite side of this has such high value for both people. All right. Well, I'll start. Or Harry, do you want to start? No, go ahead. Go ahead.

35:57Well, there's lots of reasons for that. Sometimes we choose poorly, right? We don't choose the right person for us. Sometimes it's attachment style that can get in the way. And we use this metaphor of like a cup of love. This is our cup of love. And the other person, we're in a relationship, maybe they're a good person and we chose well, and they're pouring love into the cup. But if you're anxiously attached, it's like you have a leak and the love is leaking out. If you're avoidant dismissive, it's as though there's like a very small opening in the top. And so it's not really getting in. That's one reason that people don't feel loved.

36:27Or they're doing the wrong things to feel more loved. They think that to feel more loved, they need to make themselves more lovable and pursue those extrinsic goals, right? If I were more successful, if I were more beautiful, if I had more money, right, I'd feel more loved. If I hid my shortcomings, kept those secrets, I would feel more loved. It turns out that those are not the right way to pursue feeling loved. It actually might actually backfire. So those are some of the reasons why we have an epidemic of not feeling loved enough. and I would totally endorse everything Sonia just said and I would add to it the idea that our culture is teaching us to value all those extrinsic things and not teaching us to value our relationships.

37:10There are parts of the world where people are taught from an early age to value their relationships to a much greater extent and interestingly enough those are the parts of the world where when you look at world happiness surveys, people are actually happier. And instead, we do things to, I don't know if I would say that we discourage it, but we certainly don't encourage it. And as a result, people simply don't pay enough time and attention to it. One of the examples I like to use of this is the homeschooling movement. Now, homeschooling is wonderful and I understand that people have good reasons why they may do it.

37:49But what do you lose when you do homeschooling? You lose the socialization with peers who you didn't initially know and learning to get along with groups and work with groups of people that have different beliefs and different opinions of you. That's a major part of what school is all about and a major part of preparing people to become adults in our society. You know, it's really interesting. I was just at this dinner last night with a number of people who are really deep in the AI world. And you guys probably have heard this idea, this thought that college education is going to really change.

38:25That's one of the predictions is going to change from being about learning and information, which is something that you could get with a really good AI chatbot, but about community and connection, right? You go to college basically to make those connections, to network, to learn how to work in teams. We still have that, but that would be really the focus. So it's not interesting. That's the opposite of what the homeschoolers are doing. I mean, when I think about that, I remember less from my undergraduate and more when I was pursuing my MBA, how important those group studies were. In fact, so many of the projects we did throughout the MBA was working in small teams and having huge debates and things like that, that really, for me, strengthened the whole academic experience because you were challenging each other and learning and growing.

39:12And I feel when you use AI repeatedly, I feel like I don't challenge myself as much. And I love to write. And so one of the things I try to do outside of AI is to write because I think the more you rely on something to do it, you lose, as we were talking about earlier, some of that curiosity and creativity. So I, yes, I know it's like putting your brain like in a wheelchair and let's say we're all, we all use the wheelchair, even though we didn't need it, our muscles are going to atrophy. And that's basically what we're doing is we're putting our brain in a wheelchair. Anyway, it will hold a different topic of conversation, but it is relevant.

39:49By the way, we have a whole section about AI chatbots and how they might influence how people feel loved. And so something we've been thinking about. So that relationship I was in that I mentioned where I felt like I was the utility in my marriage now, it's the complete opposite. I feel very much loved all the time and supported. And for me, that feeling of being loved has created a safety net or a safe haven that I feel like now it gives me the strength to go out and live a more adventurous, complex life. Is that what you all have found as well? Totally. And safe haven is a well-chosen phrase.

40:33Sonia mentioned attachment theory before. And in attachment theory, one of the primary functions of a secure base is that it allows you to go out and explore the world. If you're unsure about how loved you are, you've got to always be watching your behavior, making sure, I hope I don't screw up. I don't do something to offend other people. If you feel genuinely loved for who you are as a person, you can be confident that if I screw up, I might have to apologize, but it'll be okay. And it allows you to go out, to be creative, to be experimental, in attachment theory terms, to explore the environment is what it allows you to do.

41:16I agree 100 % with what Harry just said. I just want to add that a feeling of not feeling loved, and by the way, we talk about them in terms of moments, right? So it's not like it's a trait or a characteristic or part of your identity. So sometimes we have moments we don't feel loved or we feel lonely. It's a really important evolutionary signal, right? That something is off, that we need to repair a bond, that we are lacking something in our relationships, which back then in our ancestral times could have meant death, right? So actually that's why it's so aversive to feel lonely, not to feel loved because it almost feels like a death because sort of our genes, quote, remember how dangerous it could be.

41:55So it's an adaptive signal. It's a healthy signal for us to go do something about it. And so our book is actually about what people can really do, like starting today to feel more loved in their relationships. If you're a person and they're in a relationship where it's not where they want it to be. There's this idea of doing remaking conversations. Like how much does a single deep perspective shifting conversation help to move a relationship? That's a tricky question to answer because I would say sometimes it moves a relationship enormously and sometimes it doesn't move a relationship at all. Those kinds of conversations at the right moment, on the right topic with the right person can literally be life-defining and life-creating for that matter.

42:47On the other hand, we often have those conversations and they feel great when you're having them. And later on, it's just another nice conversation that I had. So it's going to vary tremendously. And I think there's no good way to know that in advance. I think you You have to have those conversations and you have to enjoy them in the moment. The spontaneity of enjoying these kinds of interactions in the moment is really important. If you're thinking about them more in terms of ultimate goals, that may actually be something that keeps you from getting involved deeply in the conversation. So that might actually interfere with it long term.

43:27It's the involvement in the other person that's really important. Right, the responsiveness. If I might just reframe that question a little bit, and this is really a take home message of our book. It's about conversations. You can think about a relationship as a series of conversations. All right. Even when we're not talking. And one of the take home messages of our book is that if you want to feel more loved, you don't have to change yourself. It's always good to work on yourself, but it's not about changing yourself. You don't have to change the other person. You have to just change the conversations that you're having.

43:57And so when you change your approach to conversations, when you're, again, showing curiosity, listening, sharing, asking questions, showing warmth, showing acceptance of people's flaws and weaknesses, those are ways that can really move the relationship forward and make you feel more loved. And all the other conversations could be fun and fulfilling and enjoyable. Don't necessarily move it forward. Right. So, Harry, I want to go back to extrinsic goals for a second. In the book, you guys write, one reason that striving for extrinsic goals doesn't always lead to feeling loved is that people want to be loved for who they are rather than what they have.

44:36And Sonia, one of the things that you brought up earlier was, and I remember going on a first date one time years ago where it became like a competition that we were having when we were sharing. And it almost got to the point for me that she was being so competitive that it became like intimidation. And it was like pushing me away. So you go into the book discussing attributional ambiguity. And I was hoping maybe you could talk about this because it's probably something that a lot of social psychologists don't really understand. Well, attributional ambiguity is the idea of not knowing why somebody likes you or appreciates you.

45:27The classic study of this area is a study that was done by our colleague Brenda Major, who at the time was at the University of Buffalo. And she did this wonderful little study where attractive women would hand in an essay to an instructor and then they would get feedback on the essay. and the instructor would tell them, this is a great essay, this is really wonderful. And the interesting thing that happened is that if the instructor could see them, the women didn't feel that the feedback was genuine. But if the instructor couldn't see them, then they felt that the feedback was genuine. So the message, of course, is that what attractive women are concluding is that the positive feedback they're getting is because they're good-looking.

46:16It's very nice to be good looking. It's very nice to know that people think you're good looking, but it's not as nice as knowing that people think you're smart. And I want to know, I want people to believe that I'm smart, that I'm a good person, that I'm a kind person, that I'm a virtuous person, all these kinds of intrinsic characteristics. It's perfectly fine to want other people to like you for your extrinsic characteristics. No one's saying that's a bad thing. But it doesn't produce the warm glow of being valued, of being loved, that knowing that other people appreciate your intrinsic qualities.

46:55Right. For being seen for who you are. And again, we've mentioned this before, right? To feel loved, you really need to be known. And so when you believe that the other person sees who you are, and there's not really a true self, like some of those layers of the onion, and they still love you and they appreciate you and they value you and they understand you and you feel understood, that is incredibly powerful. Right. Yeah. I've heard you guys both talk about this whole idea of small talk in previous episodes that I've listened to where you've talked independently. And in the book, one of my favorite quotes was an Albert Einstein one.

47:32The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existence. When I think about love, love has many different forms. There's the deep intimate type of love, but there's also love for your friends, et cetera. And I find that as I've gotten older, more and more of the deeper types of conversations I'm having with friends seems to be changing. And a lot more of it tends to be around small talk rather than asking questions to simplify it. Why does this whole practice of asking questions matter so much? Well, I'm going to start with a beautiful set of studies by Nick Epley from the University of Chicago, where he shows that people are afraid to ask deep questions that we think it's going to be uncomfortable to run average.

48:19We think the other person will think that we're nosy and prying and maybe being too personal. And yet on average, people want to be asked, right? We want to be seen. We want to be heard. We want to be witnessed. Of course, not, maybe not ask at the right pace, right? Maybe not ask the most personal question right away. And so that's actually a lesson for all of us. It's interesting. As I get older, I feel like my friends and I are actually sharing more. And we say to each other, life is too short for small talk. Like I'm done with small talk. Like, honestly, I'm done with small talk. I understand sometimes it's a good social lubricant to get started.

48:55And but anyway, I think it's a great lesson is to remember, like when you don't ask that deeper question, to think the other person actually might want you to ask. Yeah, I'll take a slightly different view than what Sonia said. I think small talk has its place. It's certainly a social lubricant, but it's also a way of beginning a conversation. It's also a way of connecting with other people about, so, you know, what's new in your life? When small talk is all that you do, that's when you start to feel the holes that that Sonya was describing. We're okay with small talk, but we want the deeper conversations.

49:35When all you do is small talk, it's superficial. It's not much of a relationship. You could just as well not have had the conversation. Two days later, you won't remember it. It won't mean anything to you. So when it's a substitute for deeper conversations, that's when we get into trouble. I can't do a conversation with the two of you and not ask you what your experience was like with his holiness, the Dalai Lama. How did that experience lead to what you have in the book is an open heart mindset? Okay. Well, can I start? We weren't allowed to bring, so this was, we went to India and Dharamsala to meet with the Dalai Lama in a small group led by Arthur Brooks.

50:17And we weren't allowed to bring phones or anything like any devices into the meeting. So we could just have a pencil and notebook. And so looking back on my I know this is really interesting because there's two quotes that really resonated with me. And the night before, Arthur Brooks gave this talk and he said, you guys are probably looking for some kind of answer that he's going to deliver, right? And he's not going to do that. But there's going to be a moment where it's just going to come to you while you're here. And you're going to realize it. And so that happened to me at one point where he was talking about love, his holiness.

50:50this. And he was talking about this beautiful idea that he said, I'm your mother and you're my mother. We're all each other's mothers. He said, how can we ever hurt each other when we're each other's mothers? This is Buddhist concept. I actually mention this all the time. And I'll say to my kids, I'm your mother, but you're also my mother. And I wrote in big letters in my notes and I wrote, I said, love is the answer. That's our book, Feeling Loved. Yeah. I'll add to that. I'm one who tends to be skeptical about the great person idea. And so I went into this with curiosity, with intense curiosity, but also with a little bit of skepticism.

51:31And I have to tell you that when I was in his presence listening to him, I totally lost that feeling. I felt an aura that this was a person who was totally loving, totally present in the moment. and he's elderly and having physical difficulties at his age. And yet he was still able to communicate all that. And the idea that Sonia mentioned, when he talked about we are all each other's mothers, it really resonated to me. He said, we should always think about the people that we're interacting with as if they were our mother. And how would you treat someone differently if they were your mother? and that idea has really stuck with me and I've been using it.

52:18Well, one of my favorite parts of the book was where you wrote, if his holiness, the Dalai Lama is right, that love is a decision, then the best way to begin cultivating the open heart mindset is by deciding to act with love starting today. If he's right about the power of cherishing others' wellbeing, then the best place to begin is by deciding to nurture, I love this, the happiness of the people around you. So my last question for you is, someone hears that, how do they begin to have an open heart mindset? I would give a very simple answer to that. You do it. Yeah. Showing warmth. Yeah, you do.

52:57You start by just doing, you show, showing warmth, believing in the other person. And we also talk about something called the Michelangelo phenomenon, the Michelangelo effect, this idea that you see something in the other person that they're trying to achieve. So maybe they want to be a writer or they want to be a marine biologist or they want to be a track runner. And you believe in them and you help them realize their dreams. And that's a big part of the open heart mindset. You want them to be happy. You want them to be well. It's actually a common like meditation, loving kindness meditation technique, right?

53:28You walk around and I've tried this actually on people I don't like. I'll say to myself, I want them to be happy. I want her to be happy. I want him to be happy. And I do, I want them to be happy. Because in fact, often the reasons that I'm not liking someone is that they're behaving in a way that's probably rooted in unhappiness or not feeling loved, right? So if the world, if everyone was happier, the world would be a better place, right, Harry? And one of the things His Holiness, the Dalai Lama said to us was to think about the person who you most dislike and send loving thoughts their way.

54:02And admittedly, that was very difficult, but many Buddhists will pray on sending loving kindness towards other people and practicing it towards the person you most dislike is one of the challenges of that meditation. Wow. Well, last question and almost a lightning round for you. If the reader takes one small step today to ensure that their partner feels that they matter, what should it be? Have a conversation with another person. At least 15 minutes, make it deep. And when you're talking to that person, really listen to them. Gather the facts, help them explore. Don't think about what your response is going to be.

54:49Think about what they're telling you and what it tells you about them as a person. Awesome. Well, thank you so much, both of you for coming on. It was such an honor. I followed both of your work for so many years. So it truly was a career highlight for me to not only have one of you, but both of you in a conversation. So thank you so much. Thank you, John. And I love your questions. You asked questions that we've never been asked before. Maybe you never will be asked again. Thank you for that. Yeah, we really appreciate talking to you. I'm happy to hear that because you don't want a person to come to a podcast and have it'd be the same podcast that they've heard.

55:27They were very nuanced, informed questions. But I was like, I don't know. There was one that Harry answered. I was like, I did not know how to answer that question. I'm really glad you took that one. Thank you very much. That brings us to a close of today's conversation. If this episode stayed with you, it's likely because it's named something familiar. The exhaustion of being useful without feeling known and the quiet ache of being loved without feeling felt. Here are three reflections to carry forward. First, feeling loved is a lived experience. It forms when a person sees that their presence changes the relationship.

56:03Second, responsiveness is the proof of mattering. When our signals are noticed and responded to with care, we experience ourselves as having weight. Third, relationships thrive through circulation. Energy returns when people act as a source, not a resource. Sonia and Harry reminded us that love becomes real, where attention, curiosity, and care move back and forth, restoring the relationship seesaw and allowing people to inhabit the space fully. If this conversation resonated, consider sharing it with someone who may feel invisible in a relationship, or leave a five-star review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

56:39It's one of the most meaningful ways to support the show. You can watch full conversations on our YouTube channels at John R. Miles or Passion Start Clips and explore intention-driven apparel at StartMattering.com. On Thursday, we continue the You Matter series with psychologist Paul Eastwick, where we'll explore attraction, dating, and how early impressions shape who gets a second chance to matter. I think it's easy to underestimate how important support is in a relationship. That is often one of the central things that people look for in a relationship partner and one of the central things that relationships provide.

57:19It's not like this even exchange of goods and services. Thinking about relationships is like, I don't know, a trade-off between sex and money. these are bad metaphors good metaphors are about support this is the key thing that differentiates happy relationships from unhappy relationships until then remember you matter when your presence is felt you matter when your signals land and love grows where attention circulates with care i'm john miles and you've been passion struck

58:02Thank you.