The Hidden Beliefs That Shape Your Happiness with Shawn Achor

23:54And also I was at the Divinity School, so I was challenging a lot of my fundamental core constructs about the world. But what happened in the midst of depression, especially at the bottom of it, is you stop believing that any change is possible. Like I will always be depressed. Like I don't even remember how I got into the swamp, but there's no way I'm getting back out. And then why would it matter if I journal about a positive experience or write down things I'm grateful for or write a two minute positive email to someone else? I don't believe my behavior matters because there's nothing I can do.

24:23And we see this not just with depression. We see it when somebody tries to diet multiple times and they've tried different fad diets and they've tried different scientific diets and they didn't work. So then they just stopped. There's nothing I could do. This is my genes. Now I eat whatever I want. And so what happens in that moment is when we believe our behavior doesn't matter, you don't get any forward action and it causes a paralysis. It's actually, to me, one of the biggest differences between optimism and pessimism. A lot of optimism is based not just upon thinking good things will happen, but also that if you see a problem, the pessimist believes that it's permanent pervasive, right?

25:01this problem will continue to exist. There's nothing I can do. My behavior doesn't matter. On the other side of it is optimists. Now, irrational optimists don't even see the problems, so they don't change. We're talking about more rational optimism, where they see a problem, but they believe that eventually my behavior will matter if linked to the right people within a system. So on the one hand, if you have this belief that my behavior doesn't matter, you get paralysis because it makes sense. There's nothing you can do. And that's what I think we feel oftentimes when we watch the news. I mean, every news alert we get is a reminder, hey, this terrible thing happened.

25:34Also, you couldn't stop this. I'll text you in a little bit with a new news alert, right? I'll just remind you again that your behavior doesn't matter. And of course, our behavior didn't matter there. We have to be rational about where it does matter, but it starts to bleed over into other aspects of our life. And when someone believes that their behavior doesn't matter, they don't take the forward steps. So actually one of the core, I think, tenets of this book is that if change is going to be possible, if we're going to move from the status quo to a better place, we need to find a way of actually believing that our behavior matters and recognizing that it doesn't in most places.

26:06So we need to actually identify those places where it has mattered in the past, identify the places where it does matter, and then focus our attentional resources there. If you have the same world, but a different belief, you'll get a different outcome. The next belief you recommend is one that we talk a lot about on the Happiness Lab. It's the importance of gratitude, noticing all the blessings in life. How can gratitude give us a competitive advantage? So there is so much research on this, right? When someone feels positive, it seems to increase their long-term outcomes, business outcomes, and educational outcomes.

26:38And one of the greatest ways of being able to do that is to shift our lenses away from, here's what I'm missing out on to, here's what I'm grateful for in the present. And I think at the base of FOMO, the fear of missing out, is the belief that I would be grateful if I was somewhere else. If I could just get that New York Times bestseller, just get that spouse, or just have that incredible vacation, or just have a crypto billionaire portfolio, then life would be great. And what happens is it denigrates our experience to the present because our brain is focused on what we're missing out on. And what we're really missing out on is what we're grateful for in the present.

27:13So when our brain is grateful for what we have in the present, it doesn't mean that we're grateful for if someone's going through domestic abuse. or they're grateful for a trauma they experience, right? It doesn't mean that they're grateful for a sickness that they have. They might be grateful for the benefits. Like I've worked with the breast cancer support group. This woman stood up at the beginning of, I'll always remember, she got up and she said, I wish I didn't have cancer, but because of this cancer, I have the deepest social connection that I've ever had. It was identifying that, yes, that there's inherently negative things in our life, inequality, discrimination, racism, trauma.

27:46But in the midst of that, if we don't see anything we're grateful for, there's no meaning or joy that can accelerate our brain out of that situation. And when you pair those two together, the belief that our behavior matters and that there are some things I'm grateful for, the gratitude becomes the fuel for then taking that next step forward. And another next step forward we can take is to cultivate a sense that we matter. We need to develop a sense of self-worth. Why is mattering such a powerful fuel for our action? So if you call into a national suicide hotline, that's the very first thing that they try to make you feel is that you matter.

28:24They immediately say, thank you so much for calling. This was such a brave step. You are not alone in the midst of this. And I'm here with you, right? I had this moment. I think everyone experiences it, this feeling of that they don't matter for some reason. And I'm going to give an example that makes me sound not great. But I think it's important because it reveals something interesting about the way that we look at the world. So eight years ago, when my last book came out called Big Potential, that week, my wife, Michelle Geelan, got rushed to the hospital. Her water had broke three months early.

28:56So we were supposed to have a daughter in April. My book came out the first week of February. And three days later, after being rushed to the hospital, they rushed her into emergency surgery. And we almost lost my daughter three times in a two-day period of time. She kept sparking back to life. Her name is Zoe Sparks Acor. She just turned eight, and she's amazing. But instead of going on this book tour, I decided to take a step back and just be there as a father for my kids, which at first seemed great. But then I just started to disappear a little bit. And I watched all these opportunities go by that I wanted.

29:29I had this moment where I was out giving a talk at Target headquarters, and I read these two news alerts. It was about two of our contemporaries. One got a New York Times bestseller, number one. and then another one who's now at Harvard got to write a book with Oprah. And I used to be at Harvard and I was doing work with Oprah and I got replaced. And I thought to myself, you know what? I don't matter as much. And I remember getting in the car, going to that talk and I just stared out the window and I felt that the world was passing me by. And obnoxious and nonsensical and self-indulgent as those feelings were, I felt like it was true.

30:09And you know what I was blind to? The reason I stopped doing the work and the good that I had done, I couldn't see any of that. All I felt like was, that's it. I don't really matter to the world. So the driver took me to the wrong location. And I called the target people and they said, okay, just stay right there. We'll send somebody. And this guy who had blue hair, that's all I remember about him because it happened so fast, walked up next to me. He said, are you Sean Acor? I was like, yes. I thought he was the escort to take me to the event. and he shook my hand and he said, I just want to let you know that your book saved my life.

30:42That moment, I felt like it was this message of not only hope, but that you matter. And when that happened, suddenly I could see the meaning in my talk. I felt like my lens was less cloudy. I still felt replaced in this world. I still felt envious of other opportunities, but I took a step back intentionally because of my family and I mattered to them. So once I saw that, my mood, my outcome, the way I did the talk changed dramatically. But in that moment, I needed to see that I mattered. And I think that what happens so often is when we're on social media and we see that all these other people are important or better than us at different things, we start to not just feel envious, we start to feel like I don't matter.

31:23And that actually changes the actions we take next and predicts our long-term future. And when people believe that they matter, they live longer, they do better at work, And their experience of the present improves so they can see why they matter because they're a parent or a good friend or a good teammate or a good author, whatever it is that causes them to feel like they matter. So that's belief number three. We should cultivate our own mattering. The next belief you recommend is to shift from a taking mindset to a giving one. It's this belief that you have something to give. Why is generosity a strategy for resilience?

31:58So this is the belief that I have something to give versus I have nothing. Immediately, people start thinking about money, right? They're like, oh, I don't have money to give. But what I'm really talking about is actually time and attention. So what happens oftentimes is we feel like I'm too busy. I'm swamped right now. I've got so much going on. So I don't have time to be nice to this random person on the bus. I don't have time to be nice to the subordinate who I'm telling to do this job. Just do the job and get this done so I can go home. Or I don't have time to, you know, volunteer. Like, I barely have time for myself.

32:30What happens in those moments is that when people feel like they don't have time or money or resources or attention, it changes how they're acting to other people. It changes the social relations that are occurring, but also the choices that we make. This is something that we know from really old social psychology studies, the so-called Good Samaritan study. Tell me about that one. Yes. So this is one of my favorite studies. Basically, they had people at a divinity school, these seminary students, who were asked to give a sermon across campus on a story from the Bible about how there was an injured person on the side of the road, and two or three people walked past and didn't help this person.

33:05And then the person you wouldn't think would help this person, the Samaritan, is the one who actually helped them. So they are giving a sermon on taking care of people that other people don't see, and they have to do it across campus. And they have a couple different conditions. One of them is they tell them, you're running late. You have to get over there as quickly as possible. The other one is you have plenty of time. There's a Confederate who's an undercover researcher who is coughing and leaning like he's injured or sick or something's wrong with him, maybe having a heart attack in a dorsal on the path to give the sermon on the Good Samaritan.

33:39It's literally the Good Samaritan story. And what they found was that people, when they felt like they had time, stopped and helped them. But the vast majority of the people who felt like they were in a time-constrained position, that they were too busy, don't help the person. So they believe, I do not have enough. I do not have enough time. And because of it, it changes our fundamental core values about the world. These are people who have dedicated their life to God, who are giving a sermon on helping people that other people don't see. but just a time constraint, believing I don't have enough time, changed how generous and kind they were.

34:17So what we're looking at is when people start to feel like I have nothing, then they do nothing. If they're like, I don't have a million dollars to give to a charity, then they might not give$5, right? If they feel like they don't have time to go out to dinner with all their friends, they might not send them a two-minute text. But when people feel like I have something to give, you're telling your brain, I do have some resources. which means my behavior matters, I matter in these situations. You start to see how these beliefs start to reinforce one another. It's time for another quick break. But stay tuned, because Sean and I still have more core beliefs to unpack.

34:54We'll also talk about what you can do to change the beliefs that might be holding you down. The Happiness Lab will be back in a moment.

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37:35so belief number five is something else we talk a lot about on the happiness lab this importance of connection we need to believe that we're not alone what's some of the evidence that this belief helps us perform better so one of my favorite studies is one i'm sure you're familiar with these researchers out in virginia the perception study where they if you look at a hill while standing alone and you're told you're going to climb it that hill looks 15 steeper compared to if the participant is standing next to someone else who they're told will climb the hill with them. And there's different versions and variations on that.

38:07You see both physical spaces, but also emotional spaces, right? It validates the role of mentors or parents, or if someone's going through depression, having a friend in those places. And my father was a perception researcher at Baylor. He was a neuroscientist there. And when I told him about the study, it was amazing because in many ways, he knew that this was the case, that our perception of the world is subjective, not objective. Somebody can objectively be surrounded by friends who care about them and love them, but if they believe that they're alone and people really don't like them, the perception of that social support changes the impact upon it, which is part of the problem of depression sometimes, is we lose that ability to see that social connection or perceive the world like other people do.

38:50But the reason I like this is if If a hill looks steeper to me when I'm feeling alone, when I believe that I'm alone, then my likelihood of wanting to climb that hill declines. I might not take that next challenge. I might not apply for that next job. I might not apply for that college or for that scholarship, which means that the world is being warped, but unconsciously. We don't even know that it's happening. And warping sounds like it's negative, but if you could have a corrective lens, those hills start to collapse. or my likelihood of being able to move forward rises or my ability to overcome depression rises.

39:25The other study that I pulled was not on humans, it was an entomology study, but at MIT, these researchers found that fireflies, when they light up individually and randomly, their success rate of reproduction per night is 3%. That's where it caps out. But two separate species on opposite sides of the globe separately evolved to have this where they can time their pulses of light to the millisecond using these neurotransmitters. So instead of lighting up individually and randomly, they all light up together and they all go dark together, which is beautiful, but not that smart, right? Because we live in a survival of the fittest world.

39:56You gotta be the fastest, brightest, light shining. Otherwise you'll never be successful. Then you'll never be rich, then you can never be happy. That's what Darwin was talking about. What I would argue is that I think we're not living in this world of survival of the fittest. We're living in a world of survival of the best fit. Best fit with the ecosystem we find ourselves in. And what happens is that when these bugs started to light up together, their success rate goes from 3 % to 82 % per bug. It's not like one bug does better. The entire group of them starts to do better. I don't know what a group of lighting bugs is called.

40:27There's probably a fun word for it. But when they lit up together, the light became brighter. You can see them further away. This is exactly what we've seen in human studies. You're finding a way of lighting up together and you take the cap off your potential. So when people feel like they're alone, not only do they not take steps forward, but they're underperforming the potential they have. And those moments shape the long-term outcomes from everything from longevity to their business outcomes. The penultimate belief you recommend involves how we think about our work. You've argued that we need to think about it as a bit more meaningful.

40:57Share some of the results showing that the meaning we have behind our work seems to matter for our productivity. When someone perceives that their work is meaningful, their engagement with the task rises dramatically, they feel like they matter. I might believe that my behavior matters, but I might be doing things that I feel like are not meaningful. And if I take two employees and give them both the belief that their behavior matters, but only one believes that this work is meaningful, you'll get a split in their engagement levels, their retention rates, their success rates long-term, their ability to succeed, not just in the business space, but students feel this.

41:31So one of the studies that I pulled into the book showed that if you have low-income students that were struggling, if you could make the connection between the work that they're doing right now and why it's meaningful to an outcome later in their life, like a job or an income level or stability later in life, once you made that connection, their grades start to improve compared to the control group that you just left at neutral. So seeing that pathway of why this is meaningful makes me take the next step forward. And it also causes such a negative drop when we feel like this work is not meaningful.

42:04We feel drained, right? That's one of the fastest ways to fatigue the brain. It's just to remind them this is a repetitive action that has no long-term meaning. And as soon as you do that, you get a negative outcome. There's so many different examples of this. In the midst of high levels of burnout in the hospital systems we were working with in the middle of COVID, one of the things that one of the groups decided to do was when kids would have to go for these transfusions, they would wheel them down the hallway in the wheelchair. They're hunched over they're going for this painful event. They read through some of this literature, they talked about it, and one of the things that they decided to do is to get motorized Jeeps, and they spray paint on them orange, and the kid could drive this motorized Jeep down the hallway to what is inherently a negative and traumatic event that most kids don't have to deal with and they do.

42:50But the pathway to it is different. They're smiling, they're honking at the other nurses and staff. But while the nurses and staff are seeing this, they're seeing this meaningful impact that's happening there. And one of the things we found is when people saw meaning in their work, patient safety and satisfaction rates improved dramatically. So it wasn't just my life is meaningful and it's a self-indulgent response to the world. Feeling like your work is meaningful actually improved patient care. And that gets to the final belief you say is so important for flourishing and for our productivity.

43:22We need to believe that it's not all about us. We need to find some belief in the transcendent. Why does this belief especially help us in the worst of times? So the belief I framed that as is a belief that there's something greater than me. And so when somebody hears me frame it like that, they might be like, well, Sean, you just mean a God, right? That you believe in a God or you don't. But someone might believe that there's something greater than them and it's justice or nature or karma or genuine connection or energy or the universe. They might be completely framed differently. But when they believe that there's something greater than them, it does some pretty important things.

44:00One of the things we kept finding is that from both religious and non-religious academics, they found this to be one of the greatest predictors of human flourishing. A belief that there's something greater than them, their longevity improves dramatically, their happiness levels rise, altruism rises. All those other six beliefs, you find being impacted by this final belief. That when you believe that there's something greater than you, you feel like, maybe I'm not alone. Maybe my behavior matters. Maybe I matter. I have things to be grateful for, and it shapes what happens next. So all of these beliefs seem to have these big effects on our performance, but is there actually any evidence that we can change our beliefs?

44:38How do we know that that's really possible? Beliefs can change instantaneously, overnight. When our daughter Zoe was born three months early, my beliefs about what was important and what I wanted to be doing changed radically. I've talked to doctors who said, you know, they'll see somebody who's negative and selfish. And then they go through a car accident in their fifties, a traumatic car accident. And one person walks away from is like, this is exactly what I expected to happen in life. And I never want to get into a car again. I'm afraid to drive. And then somebody else who is negative or self-centered, they get into a traumatic car accident.

45:12And then for some reason on the backside of this, they feel like I have a whole new lease on life. They become more altruistic. They invest more in their kids. They do more meaningful things at work. But the change there was a traumatic event. How much more so could a positive event create a positive impact upon people's lives? And that's one of the things I looked at early on in the book was I went on a hike with our son. It was a long eight-hour hike, and we got stuck up on a mountain in New Hampshire with nothing. We didn't know we were going to get stuck. We started an eight-hour hike at 9 a.m., and we finished at 11 the next day.

45:44And we found an emergency hut, and it was 34 degrees on top of this mountain. And I'm actually more of a helicopter parent, although the story doesn't sound like it. It sounds like somebody should call Child Protective Services. But I would always like, watch out for this. I padded our whole house within an inch of its life, right? Like everything is padded. And the next day we hiked back down and we got back to our rental place. And there was this little board that went over this creek at this rental house that we had. And before the hike, I had told my son multiple times, every time he crossed it, I'd be like, hey, be careful when you cross that board because it's going to tip and you're going to fall into that creek.

46:19And my brain instantaneously thought he had 40 ,000 steps on his Fitbit over uneven ground, spent overnight in freezing temperatures and made it down a mountain. And my brain shifted and it was like, he's going to be fine. He walked across and he was fine. And we went back to school. His beliefs had changed. And he told the teacher, I'm a hiker. We've been on dozens of hikes before. But this one, he's like, I'm a hiker now. My beliefs about parenting, my son's beliefs about who he was as a person, my beliefs about what I felt like I was missing out on and what I was grateful for changed overnight with a single event, just like with a car accident.

46:59I'm guessing lots of listeners don't necessarily want to get trapped on the mountain to change their beliefs. Are there things we could do at the local level to start shifting some of these things around today? So I went back and looked at how do people get people to believe something politically or in religion. And I found that there was a series of patterns that I kept seeing over and over again. They had a common text. So whether that common text is a U.S. Constitution or is the Quran or the Bible or Plato, right? They share the same language. If you want to change beliefs, in short, you change the text, you change the language that people hold about the world, you change the sources of information, right?

47:38So you You get a completely different belief system if you're watching CNN versus New York Times versus Fox versus you're on X or Twitter, right? Completely different outcomes based upon those sources. From the psychology side, you change what part of the brain is processing the world. And you change what actions create that virtuous cycle, that repetitive behavior that leads to some sort of interaction that creates a ripple effect into the community. So something very practical and easy to do is about language. So where our words go, our brains go as well. And we can shape and prime oftentimes outcomes based upon what we're saying.

48:13Some people do positive mantras. They feel sometimes hokey to people. But I found that we were actually doing a lot of negative mantras. I was doing some in my life. Every time I get a phone call, someone would hire me to talk about happiness. I'd be like, I'm so busy. I'm so sorry. I'm so swamped. I've got so much going on. My head's barely above water. And I was repeating this mantra of how I do not have enough time, which is one of the core beliefs we talked about, but in negative form. And what I realized was that we do this in multiple ways. When my kids get sick, they don't tell me they're sick once.

48:41They tell me over and over again. I'm sick. I'm sick. My throat hurts. My head hurts. I'm sick. And what happens is we need to be authentic and being able to share with someone what we're experiencing. But at some point, there's a tip over where the repetition of negative language causes a negative outcome. It causes symptoms to become more acute. We feel sicker. We feel busier. We feel more fatigued in those moments. So one of the easiest ways to shift beliefs is to shift the language we're using and cut out some of those negative mantras that we're using within our life. So what we're looking for is, are there things we could do that change our lens long term?

49:16But also, what are those things we could start to do that have an effect very quickly in our life that shift from, I'm going to this talk and I don't matter, to I'm going to this talk and I do matter, right? or I'm going to help this patient and this work is meaningful versus I see the same thing every day and it doesn't seem to help. Completely different outcomes, same world, but different beliefs and a different outcome. Beliefs aren't just abstract feelings about politics or religion. They fundamentally guide the things we notice, the choices we make, how we respond to setbacks, and how we shape our future.

49:51Sean has shown that it's natural to let negative core beliefs cloud your perception. But he's also learned that beliefs aren't fixed. Small shifts in language, attention, gratitude, and connection can change the way you move through the world and the outcomes that you create for yourself. If you'd like to learn more about how beliefs affect happiness and success, check out Sean's new book, The Power of Beliefs, which is out now. And finally, for those who are curious, a group of lightning bugs is called a sparkle. If you have thoughts about today's episode, we'd love to hear them. You can email us at happinesslab at pushkin.fm and leave a review to tell us what you think.

50:28You can also sign up to learn more about the science of happiness and join my free newsletter on my website, drlarisantos.com. That's D-R-L-A-U-R-I-E-S-A-N-T-O-S dot com. Next up in our series on spring cleaning your well-being, we're breaking down how to refresh your relationship with negative emotions. What is told to us by society about emotions, in what ways does that narrative actually not serve us? In fact, completely counter to making us strong and more resilient, it actually makes us more fragile. That's all next week on The Happiness Lab with me, Dr. Laurie Santos.

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51:52Listen to Earsay, the Audible and iHeart Audiobook Club, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. A BetterHelp ad? May is Mental Health Awareness Month, a reminder that whatever you're going through, you don't have to do it alone. Right now, most Americans are struggling. Nearly two-thirds report feeling anxious. More than half say financial stress is a major source. And even though 85 % of people believe seeking support is important, many still don't take that step. That's where BetterHelp comes in. With BetterHelp, you can connect with a licensed therapist who's there with you to listen, understand, and support you on your terms.

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