5 Ways To Be Happier | Dr. Laurie Santos EP 756

0:00Hi, my name is Lewis Howes and welcome to the Daily Motivation Show.

0:11All the research suggests that happy people are really social. They tend to talk to random strangers, they tend to be around other people, and they really make time for the people that they care about in their life. How can you just be reaching out to people more often? This is one of these things where we kind of know it, but we don't often put it into practice. If you found out you were on your deathbed this week and you knew you had a week to live, you might not like go to work. Like you, you'd probably like want to focus on those people you care about in your life. Like whoever they are, you would see your friends, you would hang out with your family that you care about.

0:44You know, you put time into your romantic relationship, whatever, that's what you do. But if you look at how we tend to spend our time, it's, you know, we're caught up in work. Sometimes we're not even present with our family members when we're around them, you know, cause we're like, you know, let me put the phone down kind of thing, but, but happy people don't do that. They're prioritizing right now. And so whatever you can do to shift to being a little more social and a little more kind of social and connected with the people you care about. Our instinct when things are good and when things are bad is that it's funny to kind of gripe about stuff, right?

1:16You know, like it's funny to kind of complain. You probably even have people in your life that whenever you see them, you just start like the complaining fest like happens, but that's not what happy people do. Happy people are spontaneously counting their blessings. And this is a spot where I think popular culture has gotten onto something with things like gratitude lists or gratitude journals, like just taking time to count your blessings, even if it's like 30 seconds at night. You can see statistical boosts in happiness within about two weeks of that practice. So you can gripe about like everything's terrible, everything's terrible, and therefore I'm going to problem solve by doing X, Y, and Z.

1:52If you do that where you're kind of griping to problem solve, then that can be really powerful because it can be kind of identifying problems and then fixing them. But if you're griping just to like gripe, gripe, gripe, gripe, gripe, and there's no like forward motion on it. There's no solutions. Exactly. That's not really helpful. And it comes at an opportunity cost. You could be spending that time talking about what you're grateful for. And so try to move it towards problem solving or try to do exactly what you said, which is like, you know, you can fill up your frustration bucket. but kind of match it with a bucket that's equally filled with blessings.

2:26But it's also just like paying attention to your body and where you are with things. I mean, we mentioned this a little bit when you're thinking about the griping of like, afterwards, after that gripe fest session, I'm like, I feel kind of yucky. You know, maybe after you like do something nice and give somebody something at Starbucks, you have a presence and notice like, I feel kind of good. Like my heart feels warmed. I'm breathing in a different way and so on. And so I think, you know, we constantly have these theories about what we should be doing with our time. But if we actually pay attention to how our bodies feel and be present during it, we can see whether we're going in the right direction.

3:00I have this intuition of like, oh, I'm like bored or feeling a little anxious. Like, I'm going to just do a quick Twitter check. I'm just going to hop on Facebook just for a second. And if you notice, if I notice how I feel right afterwards, I'm like, I feel either apathetic or bored or my anxiety has spiked. or I feel kind of inadequate and sort of yucky about myself. Like I want to buy something. Like none of those are good feelings that I wanted. But if you're not present and you don't notice them, then you just act on those urges. I'm kind of buying something because I feel inadequate. I know.

3:30So imagine you come in, I'm a doctor and you come into my office and you say, hey doctor, I have high blood pressure and I'm a little overweight. I'd be like, you need to hit the treadmill, hit the treadmill every day for half hour. But if you walk into my office and you're like clutching your heart and you're like, I'm in acute cardiac arrest. Doctor, what do I do? I'm not going to say, hey, get on the treadmill because you need to hop on the treadmill today. You need something different. And I think if your listeners are feeling acutely suicidal, like you're in the midst of a panic attack, I'm not going to say, hey, write a little gratitude list right now.

4:02You're going to need a different kind of care. You're going to need something that deals with something much more acute. And I think medications in those cases, professional therapy, those are tools we know empirically tend to work. And there's lots of individual differences of who it works better for and so on. But like, those are tools that are there for acute cases. I think if you're just kind of feeling like, you know, I'm a little depressed and I'm not flourishing right now, or I'm feeling really anxious in the current situation. You know, that's when you're in the kind of crisis where a lot of these long-term tools can really help.

4:31These tools that like build on themselves over time, you start with baby steps and then these things become habits that you're doing all the time that are protecting your mental health. Yeah, it's possible to rewire our habits, just like it's possible to like become healthier in terms of our physical fitness or lose a bunch of weight or something like that. Right. You can do it, but it's not like you do, you go to the gym once and then you're good and then you pack up your gym bag and that's it. Like you actually have to put in constant effort. And so the research suggests that it's for sure possible to change your levels of happiness.

5:03Every single one of your listeners could achieve higher levels of statistical well-being. it's not going to be perfect all the time it's not going to change but everybody can get better but to do that it takes work you know it takes like you know sleep and exercise every day it takes being social even when you don't feel like it it takes being other oriented when you're kind of in selfish mode like you have to do those habits over time the good news is as you do them more and more and i think as you see the benefits kind of like as you said in your own story it becomes a little easier to do it both because it's kind of like a habit that you're used to but also you've seen the reward so when you're kind of not feeling it you're like okay i you know i'm really craving this ice cream right now but like you know maybe it's better for me to just like you know hit my yoga mat instead right yeah kind of know a little bit what's going to work better one of the challenging things about this work is that just knowing the science doesn't change my intuitions right like i know all the things i'm supposed to be doing but that doesn't instantly mean that I'm doing them.

6:02In class, we talk about this other fallacy that kind of gets back to 80s culture. It's called the G.I. Joe fallacy. I don't know if you know G.I. Joe. G.I. Joe was this 80s cartoon. Army dudes had this famous saying at the end that like knowing is half the battle. It turns out that this idea that knowing is half the battle is a fallacy. Like, what do you think? Once I know what I'm supposed to do, you know, I read this management book. I read the self-help book. Now I know what I'm supposed to do. That is not, it's not half the battle. It's probably like not even 10 % of the battle. It's most of the battle is putting it into effect in your own life.

6:34And so there are lots of times when I slack off and I'm not putting it into effect in my own life. I'm acutely aware of what I'm supposed to do. I acutely know what I'm supposed to do, but I'm aware that I'm not doing it. I think honestly, that's one of the reasons people like the class and the podcast is that they see that I'm kind of a screw up too. Like I'm an honest indication that like this stuff takes work and we're not going to be perfect. and it takes baby steps. And that's what you need to kind of feel better.

7:09I am so excited for you to finish the rest of your day strong. If you enjoyed this episode, make sure to click the link in the description and it'll take you to the full episode of my other show, The School of Greatness. Make sure to come back tomorrow for another episode of the Daily Motivation Show.