Moment 163: Happiness Expert Reveals The One Type Of Person You Should NEVER Date

0:00This episode is brought to you by Me Undies. While Me Undies can't totally help your love life this Valentine's Day, they can offer you insanely comfy undies and loungewear to buy or gift. Me Undies has so many awesome Valentine's Day prints and styles. Plus, you can match with your partner, friends, or even your pets. This Valentine's Day, give the gift that'll keep them thinking of you and score huge sight -wide savings at meundies .com slash Spotify. That's meundies .com slash Spotify. Me Undies. Comfort from the outside in. Q1 is often when businesses start implementing new systems and processes in hopes of creating efficiencies for the year ahead.

0:36And over the course of my career, I've learnt just how crucial having the right systems in places, one which has helped me across many of my investments is NetSuite. They're also a sponsor of this podcast. NetSuite is the number one cloud financial system through their streamlined platform. You'll find all of your accounting financial management inventory and HR in one place. Their technology has been a real game changer, especially for my team at Flight Studio. As over the last year, we've moved out of startup mode and into scale at mode. We no longer have to juggle multiple systems and having everything together has reduced the number of manual tasks and errors.

1:11Over 41 ,000 businesses have chosen to future -proof their business with NetSuite. So if you'd like to learn how it can help your business, head to netsuite .com slash Bartlett. And free download the CFO's guide to AI and machine learning. That's netsuite .com slash Bartlett.

1:29The biggest mistake that people make in dating markets is they look for their, they're, they're, they're, they're doppelganger. They look for their clone. You shouldn't look for your clone. You should look for your compliment. Why? Because you'll be happier when you complete each other. That's when people who complete each other, you find that very happy marriages often happen between an introvert and an extrovert. If they learn to appreciate each other. So it's not, you know, hammer in tongues all the time for the differences. But when people, for example, one of the reasons that dating apps are so unsuccessful for giving people, you know, satisfactory dating experiences, people have more and more and more choice.

2:02But they're more likely to say they're not satisfied with the people that are dating and not attracted to the people that they're dating. It's because they'll set up a dating profile saying, I vote this way. I like this music. I live here. I like these things. I want somebody with these preferences and they get somebody who's their sibling, which is as my adult children or mine, me as not hard. Yeah. Yeah. Difference is hot. It's so true because I never would have said I want someone that is spiritual, that is really involved in spirituality and believes in things that you just can't see. My girlfriend believes in all the chakras and these energies and she'll read it and she just believes in it all.

2:37And it's funny because I never would have said that's what I wanted. But I absolutely love it. Yeah. And that means that she's actually pulled me into her world. She's made me more spiritual. She's made me believe in things I never would have believed before. And she's completing me in that regard. It's really great. It's really great. You crack the code in that way. And finding all the ways that you're different and celebrating those particular differences is really key to a good relationship. And not wishing the person were more like you. This is very important that this is a relationship killer.

3:05Is that wishing that your partner were more like you is just a form of egotism. Everyone tries to change that part. They didn't they? Yeah. Well, I mean it's interesting. I think there's the old axiom that women are frustrated because they thought they could change their husbands and they can't and and husbands are frustrated because they thought they're wives would never change and they do. I don't know. There is truth in that. Relationships and love. How important is this as a subject for happiness? It's the number one area of interest of my students. Really? My every student is 28 years old.

3:37So they're MBA students or master students. They've all gone through college. They've gone to work and they've come back to the Harvard Business School. You have to have some business experience to get the business master's degree. And this is the number one thing they want to talk about. They want to learn about it scientifically. They want to learn about the neurochemical cascade of what's actually happening in your brain. And at what point you can't control it anymore. We have a lot of case studies at the business school about you know CEOs who are dismissed for inappropriate relationships with subordinates.

4:03It's a classic theme. You know, it's I and the last line of the case study is how was the CEO looking out the window of the train after being dismissed going, I don't know what happened. And so we look at brain scans and say this is what happened. And you can see it in the brain. Kind of. I mean that somebody who's really in love has your brain activity that looks an awful lot like a methamphetamine out of brain scan. I mean your brain is if you're at a certain point in the following process your brain is captured. So I mean at the beginning when people meet there's a there's a hormonal reaction with testosterone and estrogen which are you know sex hormones obviously.

4:38And you know when people see somebody who's really attractive that's why they they want to look attractive because that's the that's the ignition mechanism that typically happens. After that you see a big increase in in noradrenaline aka nor epinephrine and dopamine level. So you have anticipation of reward and euphoria. That's sort of the second line of things that tend to happen in this chemical cascade that's going on when you're falling in love. After that you see a dip in serotonin which is really interesting. So serotonin we think about as the as the neuromodulator of of peace and happiness which is what a lot of the psychiatric drugs are trying to manipulate when they feel it's an imbalance.

5:17So people who are clinically depressed will often get selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors meaning that you maintain a higher level of serotonin. And that's all really controversial still I mean because we don't really understand that very well. But we do know that when people are falling in love that they're more likely to be ruminative and infatuated. Remember that part of the brain the ventral lateral prefrontal cortex that does rumination it'll be more active when serotonin is low. And so serotonin will be low so you start ruminating on the other person. That's when the infatuation part of the relationship really kicks in.

5:47And then you get to the point of attachment which is which is which involves oxytocin which is a neuropeptide that functions as a hormone that makes you attach to the other person very profoundly attached to the other person as intensely pleasurable. So it's like, and the longer you let it go the harder it is for your brain not to be really really captured. You wouldn't go to a methamphetamine addict and say, why did you buy methamphetamine? That's illegal. They'll be like, I'm an addict. I'm a junkie. It's the same thing is when somebody's sleeping with a subordinate. Are people that are in love in relationships happier statistically?

6:25No, on the contrary because being in love especially in the early stages of being in love is not associated with what we would associate with actual happiness. Because it has jealousy, tons of jealousy which is the rumination part when your serotonin levels are really low. It's hard for you to say, I feel so great. You feel euphoric and you like it in its own way. But if you kept that, if you stayed in that stage you'd go out of your mind and you'd be miserable. Because there's jealousy, there's surveillance behaviors are really common. Nobody would say that when I'm surveilling my intimate partner, that's when I'm happiest.

7:01Nobody likes that. But people tend to do that because a lot of your brain is basically saying, I'm trying to figure out if this is somebody who's going to betray me back to evolution. Is this somebody who's going to wander off and raise somebody else's kids? Is this somebody who's going to be when I don't know it carrying somebody else's baby? Which is how men and women actually, they tend to express their sexual jealousy. And those two, interesting is a guy at University of Texas at Austin that studies jealousy. The most jealousy provoking thing for men is an image of their intimate partner having sex with somebody else.

7:34For women, it's an image of their intimate partner saying, I love you to somebody else. And the reason is because traditionally or evolutionarily, women have to be worried that their partner is going to take care of somebody else's children. And men have to be worried that they're not the actual father of the children. Which, according to some estimates, is 15 % of paternity, which is misattributed worldwide. Makes sense. That's a lot. Yeah, it makes sense. So, partially my kids look like me. I've won this adopted, she doesn't look like me. This idea in chapter four of your book of focusing less on yourself leads to happiness.

8:12How can you prove that's the case? So, there's a lot of experimental tests that actually show this using human subjects. And so, one of the classic experiments, there's these guys at Northwestern, there's a fabulous social psychologist named Adam Wates. I don't know if you've had them on your show before. He's a really impressive and innovative social psychologist. He did an experiment where he took the undergraduate students. He always used the undergraduate pool at your university because they'll do literally anything for 20 bucks. And he put them into three groups. One had to do moral deeds.

8:41They did it random acts of kindness. One had to do moral thoughts. They'd sit and think beautiful thoughts about other people. And one had to do self -folk sort of self -care things. Go do something that really makes you feel good. And they looked at their happiness over, you know, a series of weeks with his interventions. And they found that moral deeds were happier than moral thoughts. And moral thoughts were happier than self -care. That's what they found. In other words, and again, this is basically showing the same thing that, you know, I did research for years and years and years about happiness and share what we're doing.

9:13If you're lonely, the most important thing you can do is volunteer. Just this. If you give money away statistically, you're more likely to make more money next year. Incredible investment strategy. The reason is because you see yourself as an agent of positive change. You're empowered when you're helping other people. When you give love, you get love. That's the bottom line is what it comes down to. And so all of these experiments find kind of the same thing. If you put two groups randomly selected of people, one group is playing board games and the others helping sixth graders with their math.

9:46The ones helping sixth graders with their math will have a mood boost for days afterward. I mean, this is just helping other people. Helps you not focus on the psychodrama inside Steve's head. And it makes it so that life actually has a transcendent aspect to it. You get perspective, you get peace, and furthermore, you get empirical confirmation that you are that person that you want to be.

10:14Q1 is often when businesses start implementing new systems and processes in hopes of creating efficiencies for the year ahead. And over the course of my career, I've learnt just how crucial having the right systems in places. One which has helped me across many of my investments is NetSuite. They're also a sponsor of this podcast. NetSuite is the number one cloud financial system through their streamlined platform. You'll find all of your accounting financial management inventory and HR in one place. Their technology has been a real game changer, especially for my team at Flight Studio. As over the last year, we've moved out of startup mode and into scale at mode.

10:49We no longer have to juggle multiple systems and having everything together has reduced the number of manual tasks and errors. Over 41 ,000 businesses have chosen to future -proof their business with NetSuite. So if you'd like to learn how it can help your business, head to netsuite .com slash Bartlett. And free download the CFO's guide to AI and machine learning. That's netsuite .com slash Bartlett.