What We Still Get Wrong About Happiness (Live at Dartmouth)

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24:45So, pursuing happiness through money maybe doesn't quite work. That's one of the wrong pursuits, right? What should we be doing? How should we pursue happiness? Well, here's one that I think with your focus on the 18th century, you will love, which is another thing we get wrong about happiness is we think happiness is about us. It's about me, me, me. And I think this is especially true in the modern individualist culture where we find ourselves. And at a school like this, to be honest, many of you students are here because you focused on your studies and what you needed and getting your stuff up.

25:16It wasn't what are you doing to help the country? What are you doing to help the world? What are you doing to help your brothers and sisters? It was like you, you, you. And the research just consistently shows us that this is not the path to happiness. And I think this is something that modern culture gets so wrong. If you go on TikTok, you will see somewhere something about self-care or treat yourself or me, me, me, right? But if you look at the happiness research, that's just not what predicts people's happiness. Happiness is about being other oriented. So controlled for income, people who donate more money to charity are happier than those who self-report not donating anything.

25:51Same with volunteering for your time, controlling for the amount of free time you have. It just seems like doing stuff for others makes you happier. Those are correlations. So you could be like, well, maybe it's that doing nice stuff for other people makes you happy, but it could also be that just if you're happy, you do nice stuff for other people. And we know that's an effect. It's what's called the feel good, do good effect. If you're in a good mood, you want doing nicer stuff for other people. But there are also studies that, you know, they're very cute. They force people to do nice stuff for others.

26:17And then they test what happens to your happiness. And what you find is that even when you're forced to do something nice for other people, you wind up feeling better after doing that. And so I think this is one that we consistently get wrong in the modern day. And as I said, Darren, this is one that I think you'll appreciate because the forefathers, you know, they were good about individual pleasure. But they also got that even just the whole concept of happiness was about everybody's happiness. And this is something we really miss today. Yeah. one thing that comes very clear is when people in the 18th century talk about the pursuit of happiness, they don't mean the pursuit of quanta of pleasure.

26:51They mean the pursuit of a life well lived. In order to sort of access that, they draw really deeply on wisdom traditions. So in their case, Greek and Roman philosophy, as well as religious traditions, right? And I was, while you were speaking, I was thinking of that wonderful Chinese proverb, and I won't get it quite right, but it's something to the effect that if you want to be happy for an hour, take a nap. If you want to be happy for a day, go fishing. And if you want to be happy for a lifetime, then help others. And that gets at the way in which so many of the world's wisdom and spiritual traditions have, you know, deep lessons about how to pursue happiness embedded in them.

27:26And I've heard you say a little bit like John Haidt, who talks about the kind of modern truth and ancient wisdom that, you know, much of what positive psychologists do is to reaffirm or validate insights that we've already known, but they've just put a modern kind of scientific and premature on them, which is important, but nonetheless, the knowledge itself may not be new. Yeah. And I think that that's a really important thing to do, right? I think my scientist hat sometimes is embarrassed, right? Because it's like we positive psychologists and psychologists and behavioral scientists in general have gone out and tested all these things that scholars have been talking about, you know, since the time of Aristotle.

28:02We're like, oh my gosh, it turns out that habit's really good to form or doing nice things for other people. It makes you happy. Mindfulness and being present. That's awesome. Folks have been saying that for like thousands of years. And so on the one hand, it's like, really, this is the modern science is like, you're just showing us what these folks were saying forever. That's now true. But I think it's important to do because it didn't necessarily have to be that way. And sometimes the ancient traditions were just wrong. Think of your favorite ancient tradition. You'll realize some of it we just don't really subscribe to in the same way today?

28:32And so I think that that stuff is really important is asking the question, are we doing it right? And sometimes when we look, we realize we're doing it wrong. This one isn't so much ancient tradition, but it's another thing that's really popular in the culture right now. It just drives me so crazy is the TikTok trend about manifesting. You all, the undergrads are nodding like, oh, I'm just going to like, I want to get good grades this semester. So I'm just going to manifest it. I'm just going to envision it, right? Turns out it's not just that manifesting is neutral or that it doesn't work. It actively causes the thing that you want to get further away.

29:07How does it do that? Well, it does that through a funny trick of the mind. It does that through the way your mind images different rewards and the way your reward system works. So let's say I want to get fit, right? This is something I've been thinking about. I've been trying to go with my trainer, go once a week. I want to get a little bit fitter, right? So I've manifest, I think like, oh, how awesome it would be if I was fit. Oh my gosh, my clothes would fit better. And like, I have stronger muscles. What I'm doing there is I'm vividly imagining that I've already gotten the reward, that I've already put in all the work I need to put in and I have that good thing already.

29:40And a funny thing about our minds is like when we image stuff really closely, there's part of our brain that thinks we already got that. There's a wonderful study by Kerry Morwedge and colleagues that test this directly with food. He either has you imagine carefully putting quarters into a slot like you're going to do your laundry, or imagine slowly eating one M &M at a time. And you do this for a while. And then the experiment is that you come out and there's a bowl of M &Ms. And the question is, how many M &Ms do you eat? And what you find is that when you've already imagined really carefully eating all these M &Ms, the last thing you want to do is eat more M &Ms.

30:15You kind of have envisioned what that reward would feel like, so you don't need it anymore. You don't need to take the action to get it. And research by Gabrielle Oettingen and colleague finds that the same thing happens with manifesting. If you manifest, oh my gosh, I want to get great grades, part of your brain thinks you got those great grades. So you don't take as much time to study. You don't work as hard. She finds that students who manifest getting fitter actually go to the gym less often. So it's not just that manifesting is like, oh, it doesn't work. It's like this woo thing. It's actively bad.

30:44But the good thing is that there's a way you can do it better. Gabrielle Oettingham shows how this works, which is just in addition to kind of thinking very vividly about the reward, you also think, hmm, what are the obstacles that are getting me to that reward? And you imagine that and you're like, oh, I don't have gym shorts or I like don't have my books to study or like there's four parties this weekend and I'm not going to have time to read the book I need to read. That causes you to think about how you can overcome those obstacles. You can use manifesting well. It's just that like the TikTok version drives us astray.

31:14And so the whole point of that is that it is the case that sometimes science goes out and they study things that are out there in the public ether that scholars have been thinking about for a while. And they're like, yep, everybody was right. But sometimes we look and we realize that the popular wisdom is just wrong. And that's where I think science can help us get on a better path. That's wonderful. And it's a perfect segue to where we want to go next. This last autumn in October, Professor Danny Blanchflower, who is here in the audience, and colleagues put together this wonderful conference with the United Nations around the crisis in youth wellbeing.

31:45And as Danny has shown and others like Jean Twenge and John Hite, who are also at the conference, that crisis is real. And moreover, it shows up in the data right at the same time that the cell phone becomes kind of broadly accessible. And so I'm wondering if you might want to comment. And I'm hoping you're not sponsored by Meta. I'm hoping we're not sponsored by Meta. I don't think we have Meta sponsorship, but yes. So I think it's important when talking about technology and social media and cell phones and how they're affecting our well-being to remember that cell phones are just a tool. It's just a technology.

32:18We could use it in all kinds of different ways. We could use our phones to call a friend, to donate money to a good cause, to do a meditation app. It could be used for good stuff. It's just the problem is we don't tend to use it for good stuff. Basically, all the different strategies I talk about about how to feel happier, if you look at how we tend to use technology, it leads us astray. Let's take the one that I find most ironic, which is social connection. Every available study of happy people suggests that happy people are more social. Quickest intervention, other than getting a dog, you could do to be happier, is to get a friend or talk to a human or be socially connected in any way.

32:54Our phones were built to literally do that. It's a phone. The whole purpose of a phone is to call someone. How do we normally spend it? Staring at it while ignoring the people in real life around us. Deep irony that these tools that were meant to help us connect often help us not connect. And there's some lovely work by folks like Liz Dunn and others showing just how much phones steal our attention when we're around other people. Liz does this lovely study where she puts people in a waiting room. Imagine Darren and I are sitting up on the stage. We're in a waiting room together. We could just chat with each other.

33:26But if we have our phones out, what are we going to do? We're not going to chat with one another. We're going to look at our phones. And Liz just does this clever study where she measures how much smiling happens between people in a room together. You know, maybe the basic, tiniest unit of social connection. and she finds like a 30 % reduction in smiling when people have their phones available to them in this waiting room, right? Imagine that 30 % multiplied by our whole society walking around on campus and this kind of stuff. So we socially connect less. Another big one, especially for young people, you sleep less because you have your technology out.

33:57I think the most evil thing cell phone companies ever did was to put an alarm clock in cell phones because it gives us an excuse to have it right near us in bed. And then when we wake up in the middle of the night, we look at it and we are tempted by it and so on. I think it also makes us way less present over time, but the mindfulness, kind of noticing where you are, just being in your space, so much evidence that this boosts our happiness. We never have moments to be mindful. You know, probably even some of you walking over here, Darren, you and I are talking on this beautiful spring day where Dartmouth's campus is just gorgeous right now.

34:26Guessing some of you didn't even notice that. Why? Because you were staring at whatever was going on in your phone, right? Not to mention all the anxiety-provoking information about the news and everything else. So it's just a technology. It's just one that we tend to use in ways that make us miserable. And the coolest finding that I've heard most recently, this actually I learned on a podcast with Mamush Zamorudi, who's a journalist who has been thinking a lot about the effects of technology in the ways people typically thought about, about attention, all this stuff. But recently she's become interested in the way technology shapes our physical body, not like what we're thinking in our mental health, but our physical health.

35:03and she talks about research showing this connection between our core muscles and our adrenal glands like our stress system and if you think of the way we often sit when we are on our phone I will demonstrate for those of you who are not on your phone right now it is like this it is in what I'm hunching over and what's called the cashew posture it turns out that this is a posture that is literally stimulating our stress system and Zamorudi actually claims that like maybe a lot of the mental health crisis that we are getting with our phones is actually just the way we're sitting in our physical bodies and our physical presence.

35:39So everyone in the room right now is now straightening up and like getting into the right position. But yeah, she argues that we might be able to solve some of this if we think about the way technology is changing our very posture. Neither of us are policy people. I'm a historian, you're a psychologist, and yet we're here under the auspices of the Rockefeller Center of Public Policy. Our director is right here. So I feel obligated to ask a question about public policy. If you were advisor to a king for the day, what would you tell them about things we could do at the macro level to improve well-being in the United States?

36:12I'm so glad you asked me that because sometimes a lot of this work comes off as saying the following thing. Here are these strategies you can use as individuals to feel happier. Write in your gratitude journal. You know, use these self-talk strategies. And that's it. Good. We can ignore the fact that there's many structures around us in governments and companies and institutions that are actively making it harder to be happier. And I think that that's just a misnomer. It is the case that we can use individual strategies to get happier, but it would be so much easier to employ those individual strategies if we had the institutions and governments around us helping us.

36:47And we as psychologists don't often get to pontificate about that. So I'm excited to pontificate about that. What do we know about the policy implications of what we've learned in happiness? We talked about this connection between money and happiness, where money after a certain level doesn't make you happy, but money under a certain level really, really, really doesn't make you happy. I think the happiness science is super clear about the powerful impact that a universal basic income could have on both levels. If you give low-income people more money, it will necessarily make them happy. If you have to tax higher-income people to get that money, it's going to have absolutely no effect on their happiness.

37:23It's just super, super clear. Another big policy implication is that social connection really matters for happiness. I think there's many ways that public policy can influence social connection. Here I'm channeling great folks like Robert Putnam and others who've long talked about the power of things like third spaces, literal spaces that aren't work or school or something or home, places where you can get together with other people. These are things that governments can do is just make it easier for people to have these spaces. And in empirical cases where people have done that, we've seen huge impacts in terms of more connection, more happiness, but I think even like more conversations across the political line, which can help a lot.

38:03Finally, we talked a lot about the power of time and the importance of time affluence. I think this is a lever that public policy can use that it often doesn't think about because we forget the importance of time. But even things like a four-day work week, which even economists are now telling us, wow, four-day work week makes workers more productive. They get more of the bottom line stuff done and they also have time to rest and do other things can be super powerful. Finally, I'll say that I think one of the things we forget is that being happy leads to doing nice things for others and kind of doing what the forefathers wanted, which is like being good in terms of your civic life, living a good life, not for yourself, but for everyone else.

38:47There's lots of new work just showing that a really great way to get people to fight for what's good in the world, to fix the structures around them, is just to make sure they're in a positive mood and feeling happier. This is some lovely work by Kuchleff at Georgetown that asks the question of, well, who's going out and like doing the stuff? Who's going to like climate protests? Or he was doing this work around the time of the Black Lives Matter. and he's like, who's going to those protests and like fighting for social justice? And what he finds is it's not what you think. You might assume like, who's going to a climate protest?

39:16It must be somebody who's really anxious about climate. Turns out, no, it's the people who are least anxious, the people who have the most positive mood. They're the ones getting out to do this stuff. And in some ways you didn't need to know that study to know that fact. Like if you think of when you're just feeling overwhelmed and in a really bad space, you're not out there trying to fix the world. You're just like trying to deal. But it does mean that this connection between individual happiness and civic happiness is an important one. But if we give people the tools and the skills to promote their individual happiness, it's going to give them the bandwidth to fix the bigger stuff.

39:49And so I think policymakers need to realize that it's not just that welfare at the individual level is a policy goal. It might be a policy tool to help people to do better more broadly. It's time for a break, but Darren and I will be back with more conversation when The Happiness Lab returns in a moment.

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44:48Well, I have more questions than I have time, and I'm mindful I want to open it up to folks. The Dartmouth tradition is that a student asks the first question. And so if there's a bold student. Hi, thank you for being here. My name is Mia. I'm a first year student. I was wondering, what do you think the relationship is between comparison and happiness? and to what extent can you really separate your happiness from evaluating it in comparison to someone else's? Like how can a college student derive their own happiness without thinking, oh, I'll be happier if my life looked like so-and-so's? Totally.

45:26So here's another dumb feature about how the mind works when it comes to happiness and how the mind works just in general is not just true of happiness. It's just like human mind writ large. We don't think about anything in objective terms. We only think about stuff relative. We're here in this room with kind of brightish artificial lights. When you walk outside into the slightly darker hallway, you'll feel like, oh my gosh, it's so dark. It's not that the hallway is dark. It's just it's brighter in here. You don't think of the light in terms of its objective properties. You think of relative to another space, right?

45:57This is just how we think about everything, including our own level of whatever, our grades, our beauty, our salary. We can't even understand them in objective terms. We only can think about them in relative terms. And our brains have this other insidious property, which is that we tend never to do that relative comparison towards things that we're better at. So we tend to look at the person that makes us feel worst about ourselves. My favorite nerdy example of this is a sports example. Researchers looked at Olympic medalists on the stand in their emotional expression. So the gold medalist, super happy, really excited, right?

46:38What about the silver medalist? They're not just like ever so slightly less happy than the gold medalist. If you do analyses of their facial muscles, what you find is that silver medalists are showing emotions like contempt, deep sadness. They're not like a little less happy. They're miserable. Why? They just feel like a total loser. They're just looking to the gold medalist and feeling awful, right? You can be in objectively the best circumstances in life. And if your mind finds the one person that's better than you, it's going to look to that person and do it. I consulted very briefly for a NBA team with basketball players, which is funny because like, I don't know anything about basketball or anything about sports in general.

47:17And so I have to figure out ways to talk to these basketball players. But we were talking about the insidiousness of social comparison, even at the highest level in the NBA. And I was asking them who their comparison points were. I was like, who's your comparison point for like salary right now? And at the time they were like, oh, it's Steph Curry. And I was like, who's your comparison point for like three point shots? And they're like, Steph Curry. And I was like, who's your comparison for height? And they're like, oh, it was like taco fail or something. I was like, why is it not Steph Curry for height?

47:40Because if you know basketball, Steph Curry is pretty short. And they're like, well, I didn't think about him for that. But like, you thought about him for every other comparison. Why is that not? So like, even at the highest level, we pick the awful stuff, right? So I think one way to deal with comparison and is just to have some grace about it. It's just the way your mind works for everything. Of course, you're going to compare. But you need to realize that you can shift that process a little. And this is why I love to nerd out and tell this Olympian story, because there's a third data point that I haven't mentioned.

48:09I talked about the gold medalists and the silver medalists. I didn't mention the bronze medalists. Researchers analyze their facial expressions, and it turns out they're ecstatic. They often, in some of the analyses, are showing more positive expressions than the gold medalist. why their comparison point isn't gold they were like multiple seconds or multiple points away their comparison is like oh my gosh if i just messed up a little bit more i would be going home empty-handed and so the joke is you have to find not the silver lining but the bronze lining you literally have to look at could it be worse is there another comparison i could find and that intentional energy takes work but it's possible so a little grace everybody does it just the way your mind works.

48:51But if you look carefully, you can detect that objectively you're not doing so bad. Strive in life for third place. Yeah, exactly. Professor Blanchflower. Thank you. I'm Danny Blanchflower. That's exactly the theme I was going to try and think about. Darren and I were in Scotland for the 300th anniversary of Adam Smith's birth. And if you read the first page of the theory of moral sentiments, he says what you just said. He actually says, actually, we compare ourselves to others and we care about the well-being of others for the guy who wrote about markets. So, the relative thing is really important.

49:29Even, I think, in macro sense, it's really important. I'll just tell you, a Nobel Prize winner who's remained nameless called me one day and I'd written about relative things and he said, I can buy anything that I like, but I still care about the salaries of my colleagues. So, this is a big deal, right? So if you think in macro terms, we've seen GDP rising, income of the nation rises. And if you look at happiness as flat as a pancake, well, what happens is people compare themselves to others. If I get a BMW, this is work of colleagues of ours, if I get a BMW, it makes me happy. But if you get one, I'm not happy anymore.

50:04I mean, this is literally true. And there's evidence, also Luttman's famous paper finds that if I get about 10 % rise in income, that's fine. but if I get no rise in income and everybody in the neighborhood gets a 10 % rise, I'm worse off. So these comparators are really important and I know you talked about it on an individual level but I obviously, I think it's really important for us to think perhaps to your connection on smartphones. When I was a kid and I was 12, I'm old now, I was 12, I compared myself to my sister and my school colleagues. Maybe what we've got here is the smartphone has changed the comparator group.

50:41The comparator groups are not real, right? If I'm comparing myself to my sister or to Darren or something, that's fine. But in a sense, the connection of the real things and the smartphones is the smartphones change the comparator group. And until we can do that, the individual things you've talked about fall flat. So I'm just trying to think about how do we actually get people to compare themselves to real things? Because if I've learned anything about the happiness work I've done. It's what you said. Relative things matter. Yeah. No, I think this is such an important point, right? It's comparing yourself, you know, if you're a student here to everyone at Dartmouth, but it's also comparing yourself to literally everyone on the internet.

51:20And of course, what's happening on the internet is completely curated, especially when it comes to beauty, you know, physical looks and so on. It's like all made up. And I think in the age of AI slop, which we're moving towards, we're going to have even more comparisons that don't even exist, And so it raises this interesting question of what we can do. Again, being a psychologist, I think of the individual strategies that we can use. And the idea is like, you have some agency over whether you pick up that phone and look at TikTok. You can mindfully notice, how is it making me feel when I do that?

51:50If I leave TikTok hating my body and demanding I go to the gym and feeling bad about my grades, try to notice when are these comparisons coming up and are they really real? This is a strategy that journalists like Catherine Price has this really lovely book, How to Break Up with Your Phone, where she argues, you don't necessarily have to break up with your phone, but you need to take it to like couples counseling to figure out like a healthier relationship with it, you know? And she has a strategy that she uses. It's an acronym, WWW, which stands for what for, why now, and what else, right? Why did I pick up my phone?

52:21What am I using it for? What else could I be doing? But the reason I like this WWW strategy is it's a moment to be mindful. Why did I pick up the phone? How am I feeling when I'm using it? If it's making you feel totally crappy, if you have all these social comparisons, it's a hint to like maybe pop off that stuff. Or take a moment to even realize like a crappy thing about our mind is that we don't have a lot of control over what other reference points, these social comparison points we use. We just soak up any that we get and especially ones that make us look bad. And that means that we're constantly affected by other folks.

52:56And when those other folks are real and around us in our peer group, that's one thing. When those other folks are fake people on the internet with photo filters and whatever, it's just so much worse. Question right here. I was wondering, because I'm a cognitive science major, given that people started using AI, sometimes as a substitute for mental health counselors, AI can lead. as long as you prompt in the way, it can lead you to do self-harm? Do you have any suggestions? Because even when you Google something, it's usually AI-based answers to, I don't know, your perspective. Yeah. No, I love this question because I think more and more we're going to be needing to think about how these emerging technologies like AI and LLMs are affecting our happiness on the chatbots and advice or chatbots and therapy or even chatbots and friendship, chatbots and relationships.

53:57I just did an episode with Jean Twenge and she was talking about how it's likely that most like middle schoolers will have their first romantic relationship with a chatbot because it's just easy. It's frictionless. You can talk to them about sexy stuff without having to talk to a real person. And we just haven't thought carefully about this stuff at all. But on chatbots and therapy and chatbots and friendship, I think you've identified a lot of the problems, which is that these tools aren't necessarily so hot at distinguishing between good advice and bad advice. And sometimes, especially since a lot of the tools are built to kind of agree with you a little bit, you know, if you say, oh, I want to do this terrible self harmy thing, sometimes they're prone to kind of, oh, that sounds great.

54:42I think these tools are getting better, especially as awful as these incidents are coming out. But yeah, it's dangerous. I worry too about the idea that social connection can seem a little frictiony. It can be hard. Many of us are feeling lonely and that people are really turning to these tools just for friendship, advice, companionship. And there's some new work coming out of Liz Dunn's group that finds that at first that's helpful. Like in the moment, it makes you feel less lonely, but long-term, it makes it harder. It makes you more lonely. So I think it's a kind of like a nutra suite of connection where it feels good.

55:18It feels sweet in the moment, but it's not giving you the nutrition you need. Another thing I'll say, just because I'm in a room of lots of students that I worry about a lot with AI that I think we're not thinking about, is the impact that cognitive offloading is having. That you let your chatbot just do your response paper because it's a little faster, or you let your chatbot like kind of write your essay or do that hard thing because you kind of feel the friction of doing the hard thing, you're having some resistance and you just offload it to that. There's lots of work by folks like Mickey and Select and others showing the power of effort.

55:50The effort feels good. We don't like to do it, but once we get through it, it feels nice. We like to have our own ideas. We like to push through things. And that's why for those of you who do the New York Times Wordle in the morning, you don't just like look on one of the many sites that just has the Wordle answer and type the Wordle answer in. You try to push through it that feels good, right? But we are not thinking of the consequences of this kind of offloading for an entire generation's academic work, for an entire generation's stuff, where there are cognitive benefits of pushing through something on your own.

56:23And I think we're not tracking the happiness cost of that. I see it a little bit in my students. Professors can tell when you use the LLM, they're like, okay, this was LLM written. And I'll be like, oh, what did you think of paper? How is the idea? They're just not as into it. They just don't engage with it in the same way. There's something interesting being lost about that connection. There's obviously a learning cost and other kinds of costs. I'm really interested in that little happiness boost, the little flow boost that you get from working hard on something. I think more and more over time, we're going to lose that.

56:53And I worry that that's dangerous. What's true of Wordle, by the way, is also true of learning the conjugations of irregular Latin verbs, just so folks know. So let's see. We are almost out of time, but I think we could probably take one more question if somebody wants to fight it out. Yes. It seems like comparison is this thief of joy, but we're taught that ambition is really important. And economically, ambition and productivity are kind of these things that our society prioritizes. So how do you reconcile that mindset of it's okay to be a bronze medalist with the idea that we want people striving towards being gold medalists.

57:39One way to reframe your question is to ask, well, what are the things that get us to be gold medalists in whatever field? What are the things that cause us to be A plus students, the best worker, like whatever achievement you want to pick, how do I get there? And I think our minds have this assumption, which is like, you just worked to the point of absolute burnout and kill yourself and push yourself and hustle hustle hustle and you'll get there. And I think that what we're learning is like, that's just not how it works. Even if your goal is just achievement at all costs and you don't care about your mental health, it might be that by prioritizing your mental health, you get to that achievement more.

58:15And we see this in the context of our physical health, I think a little bit better, right? You're at Dartmouth, so I know a lot of you are athletes and you probably, if you're on a team or you work out, have heard about concepts like active rest, where like, if you just kill yourself and keep practicing and push yourself 110 % for working out all the time, you're going to get an injury. Like your body's not going to be able to handle it. If you want to be optimal, you have to have moments of rest and scale back and this kind of thing. My read of what's happening in the performance literature is that we're learning the same thing about mental health and burnout and so on.

58:51That if we just push, push, push all the time, even if your goal is just the like full performance goal, you're not going to get there as effectively by doing that. Four day work weeks, people perform better than the five day work week, like taking time off, sleeping and resting makes you perform better. There's lots of evidence for the power of sleep and grades that if you take an hour off of studying to sleep, you'll probably do better and perform better over time. There's also evidence that like a different achievement bottom line, which is just a capitalism achievement bottom line of like make as much money as possible, where researchers are learning that, in fact, the act of taking rest, focusing on happiness, doing the stuff that I'm talking about, seems to matter.

59:32My favorite study of 2025, people have like the Spotify rap from 2025, but I always say nerdy researchers want their favorite, like, it would be great if an app gave us our list of our favorite studies. But my favorite study of 2025 was by the Oxford researcher, Jan-Emmanuel Denev. And he partnered with the job website Indeed, which I'm sure some of you know, to ask the following question. He's like, Like, you know, on Indeed, they have 15 million rankings of all this stuff about people's workplaces, like their salary and all this stuff. But one of the rankings they have is people's happiness at work.

1:00:01And he's like, oh, these are rankings across 5 ,000 different publicly traded companies, right? And so what we could do is the following. We could take per company the average happiness at work and look at whether or not that predicts the stock performance of a company. And we could imagine this goes different ways. We could have the theory that like, well, the way you get good stock performance is like you exploit the heck out of your workers. You make them really miserable. You push and push. But that's how you get to good performance. What Yann Emanuel Denev finds is just the opposite. Super strong correlation between the happiest companies and the best stock performance.

1:00:36Just a perfect, beautiful correlation. In fact, the correlation was so high that Denev has now made a stock index of the happiest companies. You know, like the S &P 500 where it's like you can invest in this and it'll get you money. you can invest in, you can look on his website and see this, the top 100 Indeed companies and invest in that. And he's found that at every time in the market from 2021 until I think the last data set was like in 2025, this will being 100 out for forms like the Dow Jones and S &P 500. It's a little investment tidbit from the happens. You didn't think you got that, but a little tidbit to take with you.

1:01:08Which is why you came tonight. But my point is we have an incorrect theory about performance, whether it's for companies, as individuals, we think push, push, push. That's the way to achieve more. But it might be that the way to achieve more is to rest, to focus on your positive mood, to take some time off. I think even if all you care about is your output, you need a different theory about how to do that well. And so that would be the idea is like, ask the question, what gets the gold medalist to be the gold medalist, right? It might be rest. It might be time off. Look at Alyssa Liu, who we do, you know, we've just had this wonderful Olympics.

1:01:41Everybody watched her video. I think that's beautiful. but if you know her story, you know what happened was she was feeling burned out. So she took time off. She had people tell her that's stupid. You're, you're never going to be a good skater. Like you're never going to be a good athlete, right? What happened? She took the time off. I mean, her own kind of account of it is that's why she was able to win. Right. So I think that's the message. Even if what you want is to hustle, hustle, hustle and achieve as much and be the gold medalist and the perfect Dartmouth college student, you might do that by focusing on your well-being more than you expect.

1:02:13Wow, that was wonderful, Lori. Please join me in thanking her for Buckworn Fit.

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