The How of Happiness: Psychologist Sonja Lyubomirsky On Connection, Gratitude, Kindness, MDMA, & Other Tools For Greater Joy

24:45Oh, that's embarrassing. The most popular. Well, that's embarrassing. I think this was at the 25th. There was a survey about like if you want to have dinner with someone in your class. And actually, I voted for my classmate who was one of the co-authors of Freakonomics. I thought that'd be fun. Oh, Dockner? The other one, Steven Lovett. Oh, Lovett. Is a classmate. I don't think he came to the reunion. Now, happiness is a huge deal. So actually, Chip Heath, who actually has lots of great books, who was a classmate at Stanford at the time. He's now a business school professor. But he said, he's like, oh, Sonia, you know, and it was actually really sweet to hear.

25:23He was like, I now see, like, I'm really impressed with what you were doing when you were a grad student. Because when we were grad students, like we weren't kind of aware. I don't know. I don't think I was like, I had such courage. It was just, I don't know. We hit upon this really interesting topic and I stuck with it. I didn't publish anything on happiness in grad school. I didn't get my first job from that. I think my first publication was, let's see, 97. So that was, you know, eight years after that first conversation. Eight years. Yeah. Was there a sense that there was momentum building or was there a tipping point in which it kind of spilled over into mainstream awareness of what you were up to.

26:01So when did that happen? Right. So, of course, already there was mainstream, like, yeah, mainstream awareness in terms of just everyone's interest in happiness. So, so I guess maybe to backtrack while I was still in grad school, I started getting calls from reporters from usually from like women's magazines. And they would say, oh, I'm not sure how they found out about it, maybe from talks that I gave at conferences, because those are public. and then they would ask me questions and they wanted to write an article about my research. So for example, the social comparison, they would say, oh, so you found that happy people, you know, don't compare themselves as much to others.

26:36So what should we tell our readers? Should we tell our readers that they should try not to compare themselves to others, right? So there was that interest. And I would always say, I don't know. And they hate that, right? They hate talking to scientists. Not very satisfying. They hate talking to scientists who say, well, it depends, I don't know. You go on the do not call list after that. Exactly, yeah. But the reason I said, I don't know, is I would tell them it's because it's a correlation. It's a correlation between happiness and social comparison. Just because it's a correlation doesn't mean that if you, Rich, started comparing yourself less with others, you would get happier.

27:08Same thing with anything else. Like if we find that happier people are more grateful, it doesn't mean that if I started being more grateful, I'd be happier. For that, we need to do randomized controlled experiments. And so at the time I thought, I don't know the answer to the question. And I don't think it's a very interesting question. It's an applied question. And I'm a basic scientist. And it took me a while to realize that actually that question, it really came from reporters. Why I do what I do. That is a very interesting and important question. And in order to answer it, you have to figure out or configure a randomized control trial that will eliminate those variables.

27:45Exactly. And that's why I thought I need to do experiments. That's why I thought I need to do experiments. and that's also a very interesting basic science question. How does happiness shift over time? Can we make people happier? And that's where it started. So that was like late 90s, about 10 years later, I thought, oh, I'm gonna start doing experiments. Yeah. This, I don't know if I should call it an obsession, but perhaps at times unhealthy preoccupation with our own happiness feels very postmodern and very American in many, well, post-postmodern, I should say. It's a very American thing. We're obsessed with our happiness.

28:25We can't get enough when it comes to reading articles and books on the subject. Is that your sense as well? Absolutely. And I always thought from the beginning, because even though there's very little research on unhappiness, there was lots of people talking about it. Back then it was sort of magazine articles and now it's videos. And so I always thought that Americans, it's not just Americans, it's like U.S. and like Western Europe and Australia, you know, that we have the luxury to worry about our happiness, right? If your basic needs aren't being met or if you're living with a lot of uncertainty and stability, you don't have as much time sort of in your day to be like thinking like, oh, am I happy?

29:05And what should I do to be happier? I think that's the source, which is sort of good and bad. Right. Good in the sense that we've scaled up Maslow's hierarchy to the point where we can even entertain that idea. Bad in the sense that it drives a level of self-obsession that puts distance between us and the happiness that eludes us, right? Exactly. There's some really beautiful work by June Gruber and Iris Maus where they really lay out, like here are situations in which like you could be too obsessed with happiness. And you can sort of imagine that if you're constantly like monitoring your happiness, Am I happy yet?

29:41Am I happy yet? Am I happy yet? Just kind of like if you weighed yourself all the time, if you check the stock market all the time, right, that would not be good. So self-monitoring too much makes people unhappy. If you're sort of too focused on the goal rather than the journey to get there, which is kind of like a cliche, but it's true. If you're focused on happiness, then you're going to have this sort of criterion. And if you don't hit it, then you might actually get even less happy. Right. Yeah. It becomes like a Rubik's cube or some kind of Zen Cohen in that regard, right? Like you can read all the books.

30:12Here are the pillars. Here are the practices that cultivate these emotions that lead you towards happiness. But if you're doing it with a goal-directed focus, you're kind of missing the point, right? So it's almost like a trick. Yeah, it's like you have to trick yourself. Focus on the, like if I, like let's say gratitude, you know, so there's now lots of research showing that gratitude makes people happier. focus on the gratitude rather than like, I'm doing this so I can be happier. Does your motivation matter? Have you studied that? Like if your motivation is self-serving, like I'm gonna be practicing gratefulness and gratitude for the purpose of getting this thing.

30:51Yeah, I think motivation matters in lots of different ways. Well, first of all, if you have no motivation, right? That nothing's gonna work. Just like if you don't wanna, whatever, not motivated to go to the gym, you're not gonna go to the gym. So you need to have some motivation to just sort of practice these things, but not too much. And I'm a big believer in sort of this Aristotelian like golden mean and like everything in moderation. You want to want to be happy, but maybe just a little, not too much. But you were talking about even something even more subtle, which is sort of like, what's the motivation about?

31:21Is it about being happy or is it about being a better person, right? Or being a more positive person? And I also should, the caveat is, I don't think everyone should be pursuing happiness. Lots of people are happy enough or whatever. They don't want to be happier or they think that there's a cost to the pursuit that they're not willing to pay. Because there's this sort of misconception that people who study happiness think everyone should be happy or everyone should. And I absolutely don't believe that. Yeah, some people find the way they are. Right. That's a bit of a hot take. Clip that one. Oh, is that right?

31:55No, it is because it's sort of counterintuitive on one level, right? Like not everybody wants to be happy. And you just said like, maybe they shouldn't be. Well, it's so funny. Like, I mean, haven't you met people who are just, like they're sort of happy enough? Sure, sure. Well, it gets into this idea of set points that you talk about, right? And whether or not people have a sort of predetermined baseline when it comes to happiness and how much we can, you know, kind of nudge ourselves off of that. That's true. And we can talk about that. But the other thing, if I could get back to my advisor, you know, Lee Ross, who I started doing this research with, he used to say that some people want to be happy and some people want to be right.

32:39And so there's that. There's like some people, I know some of them who like they think that happy people see the world through rose colored glasses, but the world is actually a terrible place. And they would rather kind of be, quote, right about their perception of the world, even at the cost of happiness. I can say a lot about that, including how the world is both a marvelous and a terrible place at the same time. Right. So both of those things are true. And what matters is what you direct your attention. Right. I guess there's a spectrum when it comes to how much people value happiness in their lives.

33:14Yes. Right. It's not for anybody to say it should be different for you than it is. If it's not as important to you, then it's not incumbent upon you, Sonia, to tell that person otherwise. And by the way, we can get into philosophical arguments because you could also kind of in a circular way, some people sort of define happiness as whatever it is you're pursuing. So like if you like to listen to sad music and cry, I could also imagine saying, well, clearly that's what makes you, quote, happy. Because you're doing it. Yeah, because you're doing it. That's an added layer of philosophical layer. We're going to wrap ourselves into a knot we can't untie here if we're not careful.

33:57Exactly. Let's not do that. So Danny Kahneman, who won a Nobel Prize for Behavioral Economics, also went into sort of what he called hedonic psychology towards the latter part of his career. And he once said something at a conference that I wrote down and I thought it was brilliant. And it's one of my most favorite definitions, another kind of definition of happiness, which is I'm happy when I want to continue doing what I'm doing. That's a pretty good rule. Yeah. And so you can imagine, right, the person who's, whatever, crying at satsangs, but they want to continue doing that. And, of course, there's exceptions with, like, addiction or compulsion.

34:30Sure. Yeah, just immediately my mind turns to, you know, the alcoholic or myself. Yes, I would like to continue drinking. Thank you very much. Right.

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39:58Well, let's get into what we do know or what you know or you have discovered that drives happiness. You mentioned connection earlier And that's sort of now becoming a conversation around love. But what are some of the other things that we know move us in the direction of happiness? So there's hundreds of things you can do to be happy. Really, hundreds. And I can give you a long list and it's going to depend on the person. So actually, that's very important to think about is that this idea of fit, right? You need to sort of find what fits your personality. So it could be meditation. It could be going to the gym.

40:30It could be being a more forgiving person. It could be following some kind of goal that's important to you. What my lab focuses on is really three things. So we do gratitude interventions, right? So different ways of expressing gratitude. Does that make people happier and more connected and some other things? We haven't really talked about how doing these practices can lead people to have success in other areas of life, not just happiness. So gratitude interventions is one. Kindness interventions is the second. So we do quite a lot of studies where we ask people to do acts of kindness on a regular basis.

41:03See what happens. And then the third and more recent is just being more social. Just act more social. Just talk to your talk to strangers or talk to your friends. Be more extroverted. We realize that what almost all happiness interventions have in common is that they work by making people feel more connected. So basically anything you can do to make you feel more connected to others or it could be to God or to your pets. It doesn't have to humans kind of work to make people happier. With respect to connection, how does that work when there's a difference between extroverts and introverts? So when the message to an introvert is, you know, reach out and strike up a conversation with a stranger, what are the differences in the findings between those two groups?

41:46Great question. So we did a study where we asked people for one week to act more extroverted for one week. So imagine you're in the study, right. So next week, act more extroverted than you normally act. Then the week after, act more introverted than you normally act, or we kind of counterbalance. We don't actually, we didn't actually use those words because they have connotations in our culture, right? So in American culture, extroversion is more highly valued. And so for extroversion, basically we ask people to act more like energetic and social, talkative, assertive. For introversion, sort of kind of more kind of quiet, deliberate.

42:19And we found it was actually the biggest effect sizes we've ever found in our studies. During the extroversion week, people felt so much happier. More positive affect, more happiness, more flow. Introversion week, difference in the variable, felt a little bit less happy, actually. And that was true. That was the biggest surprise. It was true for both introverts and extroverts. And we were like, wow. Because we had, you know, I had read Susan Cain's book, Quiet. Yeah, I'm thinking of Susan having a panic attack hearing this. Great book. But I suspect that there might be an acclimation period, right?

42:51that one has to go through before there's some kind of settling to a new baseline. So that could be, okay, so she argues that, you know, extroverts are energized by social behavior, right? And introverts are exhausted by it. There's actually very little empirical research to show that. I mean, although it makes so much sense. So one is we need some studies to actually show that there's really almost nothing. Two, we ask people to sort of to choose how to act extrovert, introverted. So if you're an introvert and ask you, can you act more extroverted this week, maybe you just choose to like, and we actually gave some examples, like at lunch with friends, maybe you sort of say, you know, say a little bit more than you normally do, or maybe you call up your friend.

43:31So you don't have to be the life of the party, right? So you're not really changing your personality. And it was only a week too. So maybe they would be exhausted. Maybe the introverts would be exhausted by this if it was more than a week. Yeah. I'm thinking about an experience I had just last week, getting on a plane and having an encounter with a very chatty person in line. And, you know, I'm an introvert who can be temporarily extroverted, but it does take an energy toll on me. Like I have to kind of retreat and recharge the battery. And my worst nightmare is being seated next to an incredibly extroverted person who wants to talk on a very long flight.

44:10Like there's a difference between an appreciation of solitude and loneliness. Like I I don't think I'm a lonely person, but I really like being on a long plane and enjoying that quiet to do. It's such a rare thing, right? I want to have the experience I want to have. And any kind of like person sitting next to me who intrudes upon that is like a threat, right? Like I'm just not the person who wants to. And then I feel guilty about it. Like, oh, I'm a bad person because I don't want to do that. But, you know, I would suspect that this is a common experience among introverts. And there's nothing really bad or negative about that inclination.

44:49Not at all. And interesting. So I'm an extrovert, although I used to be an introvert, long story, but I'm the same way. Like I want to do what I want to do on an airplane. And I'm also very assertive. So when they keep chatting, I will give them lots of clues. Right. It's kind of amazing to me, right? That people just don't pick up on many clues. Like I'm looking at my laptop, you know, and once in a while I'll even say like, I'm really sorry, but I really need to get this, you know, work done. you know, and then they'll stop talking. But it turns out, so Nick Epley, who's a professor at Booth University of Chicago Business School, has done all this research showing with colleagues that actually talking to strangers on an airplane or on a train makes people happier on average.

45:30So by the way, science is all about averages, right? So it's all an average effect. Doesn't mean that it's gonna be true for you or true for every circumstance. I actually argue with him. I'm like, Nick, I saw him at a conference not long ago, and I'm like, I really don't want to chat with the person sitting next to me. And he always does. But once in a while I do, and it does make me happier. So on average, again, sometimes it could be the person who's annoying. But anyway, we should not feel guilty about this. The idea that connection in all contexts is a panacea for happiness. Of course, of course.

46:01When I say social connection is the key to happiness from all these studies, that's kind of what I've kind of landed on this cliche, or love is the key to happiness. Right. It doesn't mean like in every circumstance and all the time, like everyone, the idea of fit is really important to me, right? Do what fits your personality, your lifestyle, your values. So maybe for you, social connection is with your romantic partner or it's with, you know, certain friends or, you know, like really intimate conversation. And for other people, it's chatting with lots of people. Yeah. It's going to depend on the person.

46:33With respect to self-obsession and how that not only leads us towards the negative implications of comparing ourselves to others, it also cuts us off from connection because we're just obsessively thinking about ourselves. An antidote to this, I'm a long time like person in recovery, an antidote to this is service, right? To cure yourself of that self-obsession, you turn your attention and invest in, you know, the needs of another person. And it's pretty reliable. It works really well. And I'm curious about whether there are any studies on this specifically. Well, great question. And I can start with my own studies because exactly what we find, and that's exactly the conclusion that we make, which is that anything you can do to take your mind off of yourself and direct it onto something else.

47:28And usually what we call acts of kindness for others, but that's service. By the way, it could be work or a hobby, right? Redirect your attention from yourself to something outside of yourself. The paradigm that we use is we ask people for a month to do three acts of kindness every week for a month, right? So usually on the same day, so let's say every Monday, so let's say starting next week, every Monday, do three acts of kindness for others. And those could be large or small or medium. And then a comparison condition is do three acts of kindness for yourself, which is a really great comparison because it's also positive.

48:03And by the way, it could be self-care. It could be kind of indulging in something, you know, like take a nap, have a piece of chocolate, whatever, enjoy the sun, get a massage. Right. And we find that even though it might feel good in the moment to do the acts of kindness for yourself, the acts of kindness for others is what is more long lasting. Right. It's that makes people happier, more connected. And it also gets under the skin. So we've also done studies where we collect blood before and after this very same kind of paradigm and we send it to. So I have a collaborator, also another friend from my Stanford days, who we trained as an immunologist and he founded a field called social genomics.

48:42His name is Steve Cole. So his lab analyzes the blood. And what we have found is that people who are asked to do acts of kindness for others show changes in their RNA gene expression. Wow. Okay. RNA gene expression associated with a healthier immune profile. These are immune cells. And so what that means is less pro-inflammatory gene expression. So think more inflammation is bad, right? So you want less reduced pro-inflammatory gene expression. And so we find that we've actually already replicated that. So we have two studies that have shown this. So the people who do acts of kindness for others relative to those who do acts of kindness for themselves.

49:21That's wild. So in other words, it's an epigenetic thing. When you perform acts of kindness, you are literally activating your DNA to reduce inflammatory markers and in turn become healthy. I'm not a biologist, right? I'm not a biologist, so I don't want to, right? I'm not the best person to explain. And I do want to stress this RNA gene expression. It's not health. It's just a marker of health. But we're hoping that - And is this the result of a shift in neurotransmitters? Like, is there something there? Like, what drives that? You don't know the mechanism of that? Yeah, I cannot answer that question.

50:00Yeah, yeah. But there has to be changes in your neurochemistry and in those neurotransmitters specifically with, you know, these various different types of behavior. Right, I mean, certainly, yeah, our behaviors are, you know, and mind over body too, right? Our behaviors are changing what's happening in our body. So it's just very cool to sort of see that very systematically in experiments. But that was sort of to answer that question that doing, you know, sort of directing your attention by helping others. It's sort of a little bit ironic. If you want to make yourself happier and healthier, you need to try to make someone else happier.

50:34Right. It's interesting how it's wired that way, isn't it? And it's evolutionarily adaptive, right? That people who, if we help others, they're going to help us. They're going to reciprocate. We're going to have a tribe, a community. We're going to find mates, right? I mean, you know, when you look at those lists of who are people attracted to, kindness is always at the top of those lists. So it makes sense that it's a desirable quality to have. Speaking of DNA, what do we know or not know about the inheritability or the genetic component that comes into play in terms of our baseline happiness?

51:11Sure. So I would say basically every human trait has a genetic component, everything. And happiness is no different. There's research in the field called behavioral genetics with twins. So identical twins share 100 % of their DNA. Fraternal twins share 50%. That's actually very rough. It's not really true, but it's roughly true. So what researchers find is that identical twins are much more similar in their happiness levels than our fraternal twins. So it's really about similarity. And that suggests that there's a genetic component to happiness. so we can talk about what that means but it doesn't mean that you're fated right to be happy and unhappy but clearly when we look around us or any those of us who have more than one child know some are just happier than others right and with that what is the scope of mutability like how much range does the average person have uh in either becoming more or less happy off of that like genetic preset?

52:12I mean, it's hard to answer that question precisely. I like to think of not of a happiness set point, but a happiness set range. Is that some people's set range is sort of here, like from say two to five, and for others it might be five to eight or, you know, three to six, and that it's easy for us to remain in that range. So we have sort of our life's ups and downs get us sort of, and sometimes we even go like higher, lower than the range, But then we tend to go back after the ups and downs. We get back into that range. But I can't really tell you like how wide that range is. It's a guess. Right.

52:48But there's something that makes us sort of regress to the mean. To our own kind of mean. So exactly. Exactly. And we kind of know this, right? That you can imagine people you know in your life who, let's say someone who's sort of typically kind of not a very happy person, but they experience some successes. And so they seem to be happier, but then kind of eventually they sort of go back. More often it's the other way, right, that people, humans are very resilient. So, you know, we have adversities, trauma sometimes, and people, it's a positive thing. They tend to revert back to their range. How important is struggle, whether it's welcome or otherwise, in terms of driving happiness or unhappiness?

53:30You know, I'm thinking, of course, about the empty experience of receiving something when you didn't actually have to work for it, you know, and with struggle and meeting obstacles and, you know, getting to the other side of them. Of course, we build a certain level of resilience that kind of enhances our self-esteem, et cetera. So what does your research say about this aspect of the human condition? I think there's a couple of ways to answer that question. One is there's research on the pursuit of significant goals. Happy people always are pursuing something. There's always something around the corner.

54:05And so you can think of struggle as part of that, right? Almost any kind of major life goal, whether it's to raise healthy, happy children or career goals or even like losing weight for a lot of people, you know, that's a lot of struggle. So that pursuit is associated with happiness. That's one way to answer that question. Another way is there's a theory in psychology called self-determination theory, which is actually one of my favorite theories. And it talks about really three basic sort of something that we that we all want, which is a sense of competence, a sense of connection or connectedness, and a sense of autonomy or control.

54:41And I would put struggle as part of that sort of sense of competence and autonomy, right? That you, when you're struggling and overcoming, right, it makes you just feel like you have agency and control and a sense of like, right, that you're accomplishing, that you're competent, that you're efficacious. The sense of agency, I would imagine, is pretty important. I think there's a lot of people who feel like they don't have a lot of agency in their lives, and it doesn't really matter what they do or don't do, that they're sort of in a situation that's static, and with that, a sense of powerlessness.

55:16Yeah, a sense of control, so important. In fact, when we think about people who are living in poverty or just certain circumstances, certain kinds of relationships, abusive relationships, like, or children for that matter, right? That they just have the sense of like helplessness, right? That they can't control the situation. And those of us who have control over our daily lives, like we kind of, we really take it for granted. A couple of my students looked at some data that have already been collected on like thousands of people. And they wanted to see like, what predicts happiness? If you sort of, let's say you take like lots of people and you measure everything about them, And then you kind of throw it all into some analyses and then over time also, and then sort of how happy are they?

55:56And one of the big findings is that sense of control was like a huge, like, you know, one of the biggest factors. And that was not surprising. One of Arthur's core tenets or pillars in his recipe for happiness is the key importance of cultivating, developing and having a relationship with the transcendent. In other words, to have, to nourish oneself with a spiritual life. What say you, Sonia? Well, I'm saying - I feel like this is a new, this is the new frontier. Yeah, exactly. Well, again, I'm exploring it myself, my personal life, but no, I mean, it makes a lot of sense. Something, well, first of all, there's research on meaning and purpose, right?

56:39So we can put this in that category that people who feel like they have meaning, like there's something bigger than themselves, right? It's really about, that's what meaning is. it's like you feel like your life is not just about like this thing I'm doing right this moment, but it's something bigger than me, defining it whatever way you want. And so we know that to be true. And then I also really like research on awe, you know, because when you said transcendence, I immediately went to awe. And Dr. Keltner and others have, you know, doing research on this. And that's associated with lots of positive things.

57:13So this, again, this idea that when you're, when you feel awe, it's like the world is, yeah, it's like, yeah, it's bigger, it's bigger than yourself. And some people are scared by it. Because I remember giving, one of my students gave a talk on awe, because we do a little bit of research on awe, and humility too, actually. Turns out that, yeah, humility can lead to awe, and awe can lead to humility. And one of my colleagues said, oh, this is so scary. Like, I'm scared by this. You know, I don't want to feel small. It makes me feel small, and that really scares me. So it could also be scary. Well, this is the flip side of control, right?

57:47When you reflect on somebody who lacks agency in their life and feels like they have no control, obviously that's an unhappy picture. But the other side of that is the person who insists on control and is under the delusion that they are in control of all things, right? And that, of course, lacks a certain level of humility that prevents you from connecting with awe and anything transcendent. And again, it goes into self-obsession when you think you're the center of the universe and you're the movie star in this movie and everybody else is like, you know, an extra. This is not only going to make you unhappy, but make it impossible to, you know, appreciate the magnificence of the universe and the many questions we don't have answers to.

58:33Beautifully said. Beautifully said. There's a great quote, and it's something like that we're all like protagonists are in our own little tawdry dramas, right? Why are our instincts around happiness so often wrong and lead us astray? That's a very interesting question because I've thought about what they are, like sort of what these myths are, these instincts are. But why do we have them despite evidence, sort of despite contrary evidence? So I guess a good example is, well, maybe because they're sometimes true. Maybe that's a good answer because they're part true. So let's take money. Everyone thinks that if they raise their salary 10%, they'd be happier.

59:22Like it's kind of a funny finding, just 10%, no matter what it is, 10 % would be great. But it turns out we adapt and then we just want more. So why don't we learn the lesson? Why don't we know, like we know it's not gonna make us happier. And partly it's because money does make you happy, you know, that at least for a while. And also depending on how you spend it, you actually could spend it in ways like on connection and contribution. And also it's contextual. Like if you're in poverty and 10 % lifts you out of poverty, it makes your life a lot easier. And you are going to be happier. Absolutely.

59:53But what's funny is that finding is also true for people who have a lot more than that. So I guess these misconceptions, like with a lot of kind of like old wives tales or sort of these myths that they're partly true or they're sometimes true or they're true to an extent. we don't appreciate the power of hedonic adaptation, which is that we basically get used to almost anything. And there's lots of research on this. Like we know that when we buy that new Tesla, that it'll make us happy for a while, then we'll kind of get used to it. But we don't really, yeah, it's like we don't think of it. We still want it.

1:00:26We still think that, yeah, it's going to do the trick, no matter how much evidence over the course of our lives have told us otherwise. And so again, and so another answer to your question, it's all about evolutionary psychology, right? So it's evolutionarily adaptive for us to always want more. With like with the Tesla, we're focused on the change, not having it, having it, as opposed to having it like every day. It's evolutionarily adaptive for us to always notice changes in the environment, right? Because a change can be a source of food. It could be a new mate. It could be a threat. Our attention is directed to changes, to novelty, but things that are the same, we kind of don't notice anymore.

1:01:04And that makes sense, right? Because that rock is always there, so we're not going to worry about it. And so it's evolutionarily adaptive, but at the cost of some happiness. And you could also argue if human beings did not experience adaptation and always wanted more, then we would not make much progress. Because we'd achieve a goal and we'd be like, we'd reach that rock and we'd plant those seeds and we're happy. Okay, that's it. We're satisfied. We're not going to try to plant more seeds, reach another goal. And so we wouldn't make progress. We'd stagnate. On some level, I suppose, from an evolutionary adaptive perspective, does it really matter whether these things actually make us happy or just propel us under the delusion of it delivering happiness?

1:01:49Because ultimately, all we have to do is mature to the age of reproduction, reproduce, and then it doesn't matter. So is happiness even really relevant in the context of evolutionary science? It's a great question. I think it is relevant. because surviving and reproducing still takes quite a lot of time. And I guess making sure that our children and grandchildren survive and reproduce too is pretty important too. So it's not like we're done after we have offspring. I mean, happier people, and we haven't really talked about this, sort of like what good is happiness, right? It feels good, but happier people are more successful.

1:02:25So happier people persevere more. They have stronger relationships. They make more money. They're healthier, physically healthier. They live longer. They make better leaders and negotiators. They eat healthier. And so that's all very, very useful when you're trying to survive or when you're trying to find mates. So we are more attracted to people who are happier, right? And in fact, research shows that happier people are more likely to find someone who wants to marry them. There's something funny about thinking about happiness in the context of utility in that way, right? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, but because we think like, oh, happiness is great.

1:03:04It feels good. Like it seems so like, how would I say it? It's aspirational. It's an aspirational state, right? Rather than a tool. Oh, right, right, right, right. And yet it is. But I like to talk about that because some people think that happiness is a luxury or it's just about pleasure. And but this research shows that it's actually a good thing for your family members, your neighbors, your co-workers to be happy in companies, right? So lots is being done and said about like making employees, making sure that they're happier. They're going to be better employees. They're not going to get be sick so often.

1:03:40They're going to be better leaders. They're going to make more money for your company. That is helpful. I find myself at times thinking, I don't know if happiness is really all that important to me. Like I'm fulfilled in what I'm doing and I'm very driven. And I know that this work has meaning for other people and I'm providing for my family. And not that happiness is necessarily a luxury. It just gets a little more deprioritized than it should be as a result. And that not only creates unnecessary suffering for myself, it of course spills out into the people I care about most in ways that is kind of sometimes unnoticeable, but when you do look, it's hard to see.

1:04:26So, okay, interesting. And I'm not a therapist, but this is really fun to talk about. So first of all, one thing I would say is like, if your work is fulfilling, then in some ways you are quote happy, even if you don't use that term. Let's say, you know, that there's certain things you could do in your life to make you happier, like in terms of more positive emotions, you know, on a daily level, right? More joy or calm or enthusiasm or curiosity or affection, like your work will probably be better, even better. And as you say, like your relationships will be better, right? Because you, you know, our children, our partners, our friends benefit when we're happier.

1:05:04Sure. You do it just not, not just for yourself, but kind of for your community. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. In terms of our instincts around or our intuition around happiness, this idea that finances or career achievement. Arthur calls it the striver's dilemma that these things will deliver happiness or relationships seeking happiness in another human being. Yes, I think there are these evolutionary kind of underpinnings to them, but at the same time, these myths are stories that are reinforced by a culture that really wants us locked into them, right? We live in a capitalist society. Everywhere we look, we're just inundated with messaging that either directly or impliedly is telling us that the happiness we lack lives on the other side of this thing we don't have.

1:05:55Okay. Yes, and it could be toxic. But I also want to push back in the sense of like, this was this idea, you know, like this idea that like, oh, no one in their deathbed is going to say, I wish I worked harder, right? Some of that striving accomplishment is really wonderful, right? Like what you're doing, like or certain kinds of jobs, like you're having an impact that's fulfilling, you're changing people's lives. And yes, there's an ego involved too. In fact, it was Arthur Brooks, actually, who helped me think about this better because as academics, we often ask ourselves questions like, would I do this job for free?

1:06:31And he said, no, that's the wrong question. He said the question we should ask ourselves is, would I do this job if my name was not on it, if my name was not on the books or the articles? And that's a really great and hard question, right? And so if your podcast went out in the world, but like your name was not on it, you know, hard to imagine. But, you know, that that that's the idea. So there's an ego involved, but there's also lots of like incredible positive things that come out of all of us doing work and striving. And I'm thinking I had dinner last night with a friend who's this incredible and incredibly successful labor lawyer.

1:07:06And she represents, you know, thousands of people in some lawsuits that you've heard about. She gets a kick out of it. Like she's super successful and I'm sure there's ego involved, but like she's doing incredible stuff, you know, like the world, she's changing the world. She's changing people's lives. So, so we, I don't want to like demean that, you know, derogate that part of it. I mean, if you're only doing something for the ego or for the money, then that probably. I mean, I think it's all in your relationship to it. Right. And that can be healthy or unhealthy. Striving in and of itself isn't necessarily a negative trait or disposition, but it can become so when you're reliant upon external validation or material reward as this delusionary path to happiness.

1:07:51And that's your goal. So, in fact, another way to think about it is extrinsic goals are basically goals like I want to be more beautiful, richer, have more power, be more famous, be famous. So fame, you know, power, beauty, wealth. And people who strive for those things are less happy than those who don't. But people, this is the clincher, but people who have those things are happier than people who don't. It's the striving, right? But if I'm a materialist - But if you get it without striving, then you're - But yeah, it's a little bit of a paradox. Yeah. But yeah, people who are just gifted with that, it's hard to imagine they're happy because there isn't that sense of having earned those.

1:08:35You mentioned that before, right? But if you won the lottery, so there's some mixed data about whether winning lotteries makes people happier because some say no and some say yes. But again, if you spend your money on personal growth, on taking your nephew on a trip to Paris, you know, on philanthropy, like that will make you happy even though you didn't actually work for that money. But all of our instincts and intuitions kick in and that money gets spent on mansions and sports cars. And then, you know, I mean, the cliche, but it's actually the evidence for this is that you lose your friends, right?

1:09:10So people now look at you as a, you know, as a wallet. You become disconnected. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And then you don't, yeah, you don't trust those people who have always been in your life. Exactly. Life. What are some of the other things that erode happiness? Gore Vidal said, for true happiness, it is not enough to be successful oneself. One's friends must fail. It's a great quote. This is not the equation for being a happy person. Exactly. And that's what we started back in 1989 with that, I thought.

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1:11:22One thing that I'm interested in is regret, like what you've learned about regret and the difference between that regret being around having taken an action versus inaction. Right, right. So you know about that research, right? We are more likely to regret things that we haven't done, partly because there's a whole story that we can tell about that, like the girl that got away or that we could have spent that summer abroad that we didn't have taken that job. Whereas things that we did, even when they're negative, again, we tell a story about that. Like maybe we learned a lot from that and we are now more resilient.

1:11:59You know, it's interesting. I've actually been asking friends recently this question. I really like, I hate small talk, so I really like deep questions. Because another way to be happier is to have real meaningful conversations with people rather than like this idea that we all have these walls around us. But so one question I've been asking my friends is, do you have any major life regrets? This is a really good question. And people will sometimes say like kind of surprising things. There's not much research on this, but half of people are less likely to say they have major life regrets. Like I honestly don't have major life regrets.

1:12:35I might regret little things or I regret I said that thing to someone that hurt them. That feels mutable though, because regret is the product of a relationship with something that happened. And that thing is neutral until you layer on top of it a perspective. Regret is a negative perspective on that. I wish I had done this thing. Otherwise, maybe you feel guilt or shame around that, a sense of loss, etc. But I do think, and this is another recovery thing, like we shall not regret the past nor wish to shut the door on it. There is work that you can do to reframe your relationship with that past so that you can overcome that sense of regret.

1:13:20And a lot of that comes with sort of owning it. Like you do an inventory and you can kind of own that. It doesn't hold power over you anymore. But there's this idea that I know you've written about and have studied. I forget what it's called, but it has to do with like a multiverse perspective. Like there are these, these other possibilities that your life could have taken had you made a different choice. And like, that's a rumination thing too, when you're ruminating and like what might have been had you made this other choice. Counterfactuals, I think. Yeah. And by the way, you're talking about choices, right?

1:13:52Like, or behaviors that you have done, not like someone who was traumatized, but that was out of their control, right? That's, you know, when there's some agency and that can be action or inaction. You didn't make that choice. Exactly. What are some of the other myths? Maybe we could talk about aging. Aging. And how happiness, you know, changes as we grow older, what that looks like. It depends how you study it. And I like to sort of look at raw data, like just how happy are people on average at different ages. And ideally you want to look at longitudinal studies. The same people are followed across time.

1:14:25Because if you look at cross-sectional studies with different slices of people, then it could be what are called cohort effects, right? That generation could just be less or more happy. But generally what studies show is that the least happy people are ages 14 to 28. And I kind of love that finding because you're like, oh, I wish I were 28. No, you don't wish you were 28. And for obvious reasons, you know, people, when you're young, right, a lot of insecurity and you haven't found your life partner or your job and your identity yet. And then happiness gets, and it grows depending on the study.

1:15:00Sometimes there's a U-shaped function that it sort of gets better as people get older. And then at some point, like I looked at three studies and the high point was like age 67, 71, 73. And then again, these are all averages. Remember they're all averages. So it's not going to be true for you necessarily for obvious reasons at the end, you know, towards the end of life, people get less happy and less healthy. Interesting, right? So actually, I was the same friend I had dinner with last night. She said she and her family member, one of her 21-year-old son asked everyone at the dinner table, what was your favorite decade?

1:15:36And that was about age, like your 20s. And the adults were like, they're 50s. And she said, I never would have thought that the 50s would be the best. And I said, yeah, me too, except for the fact that you're closer to death, right? Except for the fact that it means if I could just stay in my 50s, that'd be awesome. Stay in the 50s, yeah. Because you're not so far along yet where everything is in the rear view. There's still possibility and you still have your vitality and all of these things. I mean, I would agree, like this is my favorite decade. It's been fantastic. But yeah, at some point you reach that threshold where you feel like your life is something that lives in the past and there isn't a lot of like interesting opportunity ahead of you.

1:16:23And that probably begins to degrade that. Well, I hope that we can have some agency with that. But I mean, we're all going to die. But you're increasingly or less and less, you know, taking things seriously. And there's benefits to having some erosion to your ambition and just sort of chilling out and realizing relationships are really the thing. And in terms of connection, though, So Laura Carstensen, who's a professor at Stanford, has a theory called socioemotional selectivity theory and lots of support for it. And basically she shows that as people get older, they reduce their social connections.

1:16:59They prune their social connections. When you're young, the idea is that you want to meet as many people as possible because who knows, that could be your future business partner or future mate. And as you're older, you don't need to do that anymore. And it's true. It hasn't been true for me or a lot of my friends where we're actually increasing our connections as we get older. That's sort of a fact about older people. So if you look at someone who's a lot older, they kind of know what makes them happy. And they spend time with people that make them happy. So it could be your sister and your best friend.

1:17:28But you also become resistant to doing anything new, which becomes a barrier to potential happiness. I agree. And yet older people are happier. And there's lots of reasons for that, including there might be some actually reasons, some things have, there's some research on the brain that literally that they become more positive. Also, people treat you, even though we say we live in a culture where we don't respect old people, but actually the truth is that we do treat older people more positively than younger people. So certainly strangers or family members. And so that's, that comes into play also.

1:18:03What do you say to the person who says, you can't really appreciate the full extent of your ability to be happy until you have children? Well, you could say like with a lot of things, right? Children can be the source of your greatest joys and your greatest sorrows. And there's that, you know, there's a saying that a Jewish mother is only as happy as her least happy child. and broaden it to, you know, a parent is only as happy. So it could also make you very, very unhappy. So, but I don't know if I would agree with that because you could imagine a romantic relationship that gives you as high of a high that you could have having a child.

1:18:46Yeah, I guess I'm just throwing it out as you can replace child with mate, partner. Right. You know, if you're single, you can't be happy. If you don't have kids, you know, all these sort of, I mean, these play into all of these myths that you've deconstructed. Yeah, I totally agree. I mean, and you also asked about struggle before, right? So there's a lot of struggle, whether it's in romantic relationships or even, or friendships too, and certainly having children, but it's worth it, right? Because the highs are so high. I mean, I have four children, so I know where I speak. For somebody who's performing, you know, a kind of silent inventory on their own happiness right now, listening to this, I think it would be cool to give that person some general guidance on how their happiness quotient might be reliably increased.

1:19:35If it's one answer, if there's anything, if someone is not feeling as happy as they want to be, if there's anything they can do to strengthen their relationships, I think that would make the biggest difference sort of in their happiness. whether it's maybe you have a relationship that needs you know needs improving or making new connections um or somehow reinforcing amplifying so i think that would be that would be my first piece of advice my second is maybe a little bit maybe you wouldn't expect this is that in terms of the biggest value added it's really getting rid of the negatives in your life that even though i don't study this um that's going to be actually it's going to make the most difference right so Like if you're in a bad relationship, like it's going to make the most difference, right?

1:20:22Or if your job is terrible. In fact, in terms of the population level, Felicia Hubbard, who's a researcher at Cambridge, argues that if you want to make the world happier, we should put all our resources into the really unhappy people, like the really depressed people, right? Because that's going to make the biggest difference than trying to make already happy people a little bit happier. So yeah, so somehow dealing with the negatives, increasing social connection. And then after that, figuring out what it is that you enjoy doing. If something that you enjoy doing, it feels meaningful to you, it feels natural to you, whether it's try to savor more your positive experiences or meditate or exercise or practice forgiveness and gratitude and kindness.

1:21:06Um, um, another way to think about it is this also comes from self-determination theory. I mentioned this earlier. This might be one of my favorite theories that there's really three kind of buckets that work best in terms of making people happier. And we already talked about all of them, but it's kind of a nice summary. So the first bucket is connection. So anything you can do to connect with others. The second bucket is help is basically contribution, helping, contributing to society, the world, your neighborhood. And the third is personal growth. So focusing somehow on learning something, you know, growing as a person, evolving.

1:21:41But first get rid, if the house is on fire, you got to deal with the negative stuff first, right? That can wait, let's put out the fire. Exactly. Well, that would make the biggest difference. I mean, you can do it at the same time. So I don't want to say like, some people think, oh, you have to put out the fire for, obviously if it's a fire that's like taking over your life, but you can have negatives and you can still practice the positives at the same time. And Bart Fredrickson, who's a positive psychologist at UNC Chapel Hill, she has a theory of positive emotion. And she shows with lots of data that positive emotions can neutralize negative emotions.

1:22:14And so let's say you have some bad stuff in your life over here, but you also say practice gratitude and you practice, I don't know, whatever else you practice that makes you happier. Those positive emotions today could actually be an antidote to some of that like anxiety or anger or sadness that you feel. So it could help with that. So you don't necessarily have to wait. Have you studied forgiveness specifically? I haven't myself. That's one of the hardest. Why is it so hard? Just people report it's the hardest. Why is it? I mean, I feel like it's hard because... The hardest to do or the hardest to study?

1:22:48The hardest to do. Yeah. Yeah. You know, and I actually, I give a lecture on forgiveness in my Science of Happiness class. And I talk about how, well, first of all, maybe some acts or people shouldn't be forgiven. So I don't think that everything should be. But research shows that it's kind of a cliche again, that it's really about yourself, right? Like you're forgiving. By not forgiving, you're hurting yourself more than anyone else. But it's really hard to do if there's a major transgression in your life by someone. It's very hard to do. Yeah. Yeah. But is there a relationship with happiness such that when you can practice that or that when you do it, that there is a cascade of events that alleviate suffering and lead you towards happiness?

1:23:34Yes, I would say yes. Let's see. I mean, certainly research shows that it reduces like stress, anxiety, like even sort of health wise, like cortisol levels, you know, like your body literally, yeah, it's more like calm when you're forgiven and then you connect better, you know, with, with whether it's that person or other people in your life. So, and again, connections that get happiness. So love, right? So if you can bring more love into your life and less vengeance or grudges, you're going to be happier. What about forgiveness of the self? Is there any research into the distinction between those two forms of forgiveness?

1:24:15Yeah. I mean, I don't usually use that term, everyone understands what that means. You may know there's research on something called self-compassion, which is basically forgiving yourself. It's having compassion for yourself, like realizing that we're human, that we all have sort of common humanity. Like we all, you know, we all have flaws, you know, we're all many things, including bad and good things. So yeah, I think having compassion for yourself is essentially equivalent to what you're talking about. What is the most counterintuitive finding that you've discovered on this, you know, know, multi-decade journey into happiness, like what surprised you the most?

1:24:54Well, first I want to say it's, I kind of hate this question, partly because this is just a psychological process that once you've discovered something, it's no longer, you know, surprising and gratuitous. And like there's hindsight bias and we convince ourselves like we knew it all along. So it's a little bit hard to answer because I have to kind of remember what was surprising. Sometimes it's just a strength of effects, like, like turns out just acting extroverted, makes people so much happier than we thought. More recently, the most surprising finding we had was just having a conversation with a stranger on Zoom on average made people hugely happier.

1:25:31I would not have expected that. I would not want to have a conversation with a stranger on Zoom today. But it's that connection, right? It's that human connection. And again, it's an average. Maybe some of the conversations were boring or frustrating. That is really interesting to me that having meaningful conversations turns out to be really, really important. You know, we had a whole line of research on whether kids make people happier. We were kind of reacting. There's a lot of media attention to like, parents are miserable. And again, as a parent of many kids, I thought, well, that doesn't seem, I mean, yes, of course there's hardship, but it just didn't seem right to me that parents are like a lot more miserable than people who don't have children.

1:26:09And so we did a bunch of research on that, or we have a paper that basically says the answer is it depends. It depends. But I mean, but we lay it out, right? It depends. Like if you're a young parent or an older parent, if your kids are young or old. What is the timeline here? Of course. You know, are your kids problematic? So that some of that was or sort of was not surprising. Yeah. One, that was a surprise. So it turns out fathers are happier than men without children, but mothers are about the same. and you can think about reasons why maybe you know maybe mothers tend to do more of like the child like the boring child care as opposed to playing playing but it turned out that the group that explained it is uh men without children are particularly unhappy because and this comes from like big kind of surveys i don't know you tell me i'm not a man you're the research scientist I'm not a man without children.

1:27:05I don't know. We just emerged from a multi-year situation, lockdown, pandemic, all the like. And it would seem that this created a set of circumstances that are perfect for a social scientist to study and draw conclusions from. So have you looked at that? What do we know about that experience and those that were able to navigate it with a certain quotient of happiness and others who were unable to do that? Yeah, a perfect natural experiment, lots of studies. I remember, you know, we did a bunch of studies during the pandemic. And I remember thinking like everyone in there, every professor like in their cousin or like doing research on COVID.

1:27:45But so interesting. So I mentioned connection. So we found, for example, that on average, people's sense of connection increased during COVID. Again, it's an average. So it really turns out it's like a rule of thirds. So 30 % did very badly, right? And we know this overall kind of in the world, you know, or maybe we'll just say the U.S. 30 % really suffered and are still suffering. 30%, you know, are okay, right? Like there were some ups and downs. And then 30%, and again, I'm kind of just estimating, actually like did well. And in fact, we probably all know people who are like, I hate to say this, but like I love the pandemic, right?

1:28:28You know, my grown kids moved back in with me. My marriage really, you know, flourished. So on average, sense of connection went up. You know, this idea of the COVID divorce, but there were, and that definitely happened, but there are also, you know, more COVID marriages and COVID weddings and also COVID just stronger connections. Yeah. It's been over a decade since your last, most recent book. What have you changed your mind about when it comes to happiness? You know, it's really interesting because my first book, The How of Happiness, I'm supposedly revising, updating. So it's a really good question because I've been thinking about this, that there's nothing that I would really change in it other than there's a lot more research for each chapter.

1:29:18You know, that book was about every chapter was on a different happiness practice, like gratitude or kindness or following significant life goals. And there's some new ones. And so, for example, I guess the thing that how I would answer that question is that there sometimes the pursuit of happiness can backfire. And I don't just mean what we were talking about before, like you don't want to be too focused on happiness. I mean, the certain strategies might actually make make you feel worse. One of the examples is with gratitude. and you think like, well, how could gratitude make you feel worse?

1:29:49Well, it turns out that people who are severely depressed feel like that they're a burden on others. And feeling like you're a burden is a risk factor for suicide, right? Because you feel like, yeah, I'm just too much of a burden. We still haven't done the research. It's going to be very difficult to do. But I talked to a colleague who works with suicidal inpatients in Canada that we don't want to ask them to write gratitude letters, right? That they might imagine, right? You're already suicidal. You already feel like you're a burden. And we're saying, oh, why don't you think about all the different ways your mom supported you, right?

1:30:24Your best friend helped you. And so here's one way that gratitude can backfire. Now, gratitude can be unpleasant at times because it can make you feel indebted or maybe even embarrassed or ashamed. That's not necessarily a bad thing. That's not necessarily a backfiring effect, but because it could lead you to reciprocate. We have a line of research that shows that when people are asked to express gratitude, they feel like they want to pay back. You know, like if you're truly grateful to your mom, right, for taking that second job and paying for your music lessons, right, you want to do well in school, right?

1:30:57Or your math teacher who stayed after school. So that's a positive thing. So feeling indebted might feel unpleasant, but it's a positive thing. Interesting. Yeah. And then with kindness, I have some other example with kindness. I mean, have you ever had the experience where you help someone and it, right, it backfired? And it could be maybe it's just not effective. It could be that maybe you're kind of patronizing. And so there's this really interesting work on what's called invisible versus visible social support or kindness. And so visible kindness would be like you're visiting your elderly parents or grandparents and you're like, oh, mom and dad, I'll go to the grocery store and I'll buy you, you know, I'll do this for you.

1:31:34I'll do this for you. And making them feel like they can't, right? Making them feel like weak and vulnerable. And so that has negative effects. But if you do it in an invisible way, which is just like you just happen to drop by the store, right? As you're walking in, that's beautiful. I would imagine motivation might come into play as well, right? Like if you make a big pronouncement about how you're going to the grocery store, because you want, you know, whether you're aware of it or not, you want to be, you know, validated for that. Like, that's not great. And in the event that they tell you to fuck off, basically it begs the question of motivation, right?

1:32:11Like if you're just, like, if you're doing it out of pureness of heart, it shouldn't matter, right? Like, But if you're doing it for that validation, you're going to feel this affront. Isn't that interesting? That's a theme that we're coming back to, sort of this, the people who are doing things for like social approval, you know, for that extrinsic goal, right? Remember power, influence, fame, which is part of all of that. Just like you just want to be important or viewed positively, that's associated with unhappiness. Where does a sense of authenticity or inauthenticity come into play? Because when you're asking somebody who isn't sort of predisposed to acts of kindness or a practice of gratitude, there is a sort of imposter syndrome that can descend and you feel like you're not really being true to your core self.

1:32:58Yeah, exactly. I'm a big fan of authenticity. This is why we measure what we call fit, which is how natural does this feel to you? Let's say it's meditation. Like, and actually I try meditation. I just can't do it. Yes, you can. Go ahead. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. We can talk about this. I am trying, but it doesn't feel natural to me. Okay. So how natural does it feel? How enjoyable is it? Right. Do you enjoy it? And then how meaningful is it? And those three things are actually kind of different. And sometimes things don't feel natural or authentic at the beginning, just like someone, I don't know, who wants to start to be more healthy, you know, and have a more healthy lifestyle.

1:33:36But over time, they can feel more natural, right? Just like with almost anything. So I guess I would say don't not do something because it doesn't feel authentic or natural necessarily because sometimes, especially if you have a motivation to change and it's something that's meaningful to you because over time it can feel more natural. Within limits though, if you're telling an introvert that they should just go out and be extroverted, they're not gonna convert into an extroverted person. But again, remember that study, they could define that whatever way they want, right? So they could just do just a little bit more, just be a little bit more social in the way that makes them feel comfortable, right?

1:34:15It doesn't have to be, again, being the life of the party. But this is true in so many domains of life. Imagine, remember when you first became a parent, right? You bring home a baby and you feel like a total imposter. You're like, I have no idea what to do with this baby and I don't feel like a father or mother. And then you grow into that role. So most things we do, we grow into those roles and they feel inauthentic at first. And that's part of the resilience piece as well, right? Yes, yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. What is the current kind of frontier of happiness research? Like where is the focus now in terms of like pushing this understanding forward?

1:34:53Maybe that starts with the question of what do we still not know or understand? Maybe that's a better question. Yeah, because the first question is like it's sort of there's all these proverbs about like anyone who tries to predict the future, right? is an idiot or a fool. So I don't want to predict the future. But well, there's so much about, say, the biology of happiness, the genetics of happiness, the neuroscience of happiness that we don't know about yet, just because more research needs to be done, not because it's not possible to do. We really don't know about how to sustain and maintain happiness, right?

1:35:25So once you start feeling more connected or being more kind, expressing gratitude, right? How do you maintain that over the course of your life because we know it's a lifelong process, right? Just like if you want to lose weight, you don't go on a diet for a month and then you're done forever, right? You're basically on a diet for the rest of your life. And so the sort of happiness diet or whatever you call it, like it's for the rest of your life. And there's lots of work on habits and how we can create new habits. But we need like lots of, you know, very long term longitudinal studies. And I'm involved in a project right now where we're, which is kind of like a called a many laps project where we're trying to do these interventions at scale, right?

1:36:08So like many, many people, many countries, cultural differences, another frontier. We already know quite a bit about cultural differences, but lots more needs to be done because right, people define happiness differently in different cultures. They pursue it differently. Maybe in some cultures, people might be harmed by a technique that, you know, Americans, you know, enjoy and benefit from. Do you agree with the kind of conventional wisdom around the sort of blue zones of happiness, places like Finland that are, you know, people seem to be happier than we are here? To some extent, I know Dan Buettner, who writes about blue zones.

1:36:48And yes, yes, in the sense that, I mean, the World Happiness Report, you know, collects or reports surveys of happiness across the world. And so these are just, these are findings. I mean, I would say they're sort of factual, you know, some countries just on average score higher than other countries. What I always complain about is, you know, when Finland is reported, what is it, like the last three or so years as the happiest country, it could be like a difference between like 4.72 and 4.71, right? So it's not really significantly different. I actually was just in, for some reason, I was thinking that you were there, but I was just at a conference in Copenhagen and I was being interviewed by Neil Strauss, who was sort of my moderator.

1:37:26And there were questions that were, they had this technology where you could see the audience's questions on a big board behind you. And I wasn't really looking at the board mostly, but at one point I turned the board and again, this is Copenhagen. And it kept saying, ask the Finland question, ask the Finland question. Like people kept asking, what? Because I guess, because Denmark used to be... Oh, Finland supplanted Denmark? Exactly. Oh, right. Denmark for many years, it's a competition or something. But Denmark for many years was the happiest country. But again, it's like the difference, they're not statistically significant differences.

1:38:01Yeah, but there are sort of, you know, shared sort of communal aspects to those places from which we can extract certain truths. I mean, a sort of safety, a social safety net. Everybody's out, they're riding bikes, they prioritize, you know, being communal in their relationships. Like that's much higher up the scale in terms of how they think about the way they pursue their lives. And then there's this article I read a long time ago that showed that Danish people have lower expectations. So maybe that's the key to their happiness. This is the key. Just like lower your expectations. No, there's a lot of truth to that.

1:38:39And then of course, when you look at all the countries, there's huge differences, you know, and it makes a lot of sense, right? So like at the bottom are countries where there's, you know, Where there's poverty, where there's war, where there's political instability, you understand why they're unhappy. Right, but the United States doesn't fare well in that survey. Well, it just dropped out of the top 20. And you and I just got back from India, so we were exposed to many people living in various states of poverty who nonetheless seem to be quite happy. And it could be about expectations. and it's partly it is about expectations but also about because we always want remember we always want more we always want you know but also about connection and community and uh collectivist you know these are india is a collectivist society and we're an individualist society society so we're more more of a focus on whether i'm happy and my sense of agency as opposed to group harmony and you know collective well-being all of this research this understanding that you have around happiness, what moves us towards us, what pushes us away from it.

1:39:47Has this been a positive or a negative in your own personal relationship with happiness? Yeah, I think I would say positive, certainly not negative. People are always asking me like, are you a happy person? And I certainly, you know, as I explained at the beginning, like it was serendipitous how I got into this field. It wasn't like I was like, oh, I'm not happy. So I want to study happiness. And in fact, sometimes students apply to work for my lab, and they tell me like, I want to work with you because I'm not happy or I'm depressed. I mean, maybe they're great scholars, so I don't necessarily say no to that, but I'm a little suspicious of that, right?

1:40:24Like, and also I think scientists should try to be as unbiased as possible, right? So if I have this huge bias, like I'm a huge believer in gratitude, then I might, you know, my studies, it's like a big pharma company, right? Wanting that drug to work. So this is part of your reluctance to embrace meditation, because if you do and it has tremendous benefits in your life, then you're biased in how you, you know, report back those findings. I would say no, but I'm trying to meditate. I'm really working on it. Yeah, I'm working on it. I'll report back later. Okay. But where are your personal challenges with happiness?

1:40:59Like where do you fail to take your own counsel? Sure, sure, sure, sure, sure. Yeah. So I'm a generally happy person. I think, yeah, like rumination. Yeah. Like I definitely ruminate sometimes. I think that's one of my, I'm really into connection, certainly gratitude. I think I'm a very grateful person. I'm an immigrant and I feel like immigrants are more grateful. I don't know if that's really true. Maybe someone should look at that. Like, I'm like, oh my God. You immigrated from Russia. How old were you when you came to the States? I was nine and a half. Nine and a half. Yeah. Still a slight twang of accent there, but not very much.

1:41:33Well, thank you for noticing. Most people, yeah, you must have a good ear because most people don't notice it. And you grew up in Washington, D.C.? Yeah. From age like 10 to 18. So did I. I think we graduated high school the same year. I think we talked about this. Yeah. I'm from Bethesda. Yeah. And I also grew up in Bethesda. Oh, you went to Walt Whitman? The Landon School. Yeah. And I went to Moray. Yeah. Oh, you just went to Moray. Oh, wow. All right. We have a whole other conversation we can have later. So if we were the same gender, we would have played sports together against each other.

1:42:05That's true. Yeah. Yeah. That's wild. Yeah. That's wild. But being an immigrant, how does that inform, you know, I'm a lot more grateful. I just remember being in college and being like, oh, my God. And people. Yeah, I'm a lot more grateful. And I'm still, of course, critical of the U.S. But I think, oh, my God, you guys like people there. There's a lot worse countries out there. We're so lucky. I mean, you could be grateful and also try to do something to fix problems at the same time. But yeah, I guess rumination is sometimes a problem for me and anxiety. I have this sort of pet theory, which is totally not scientific.

1:42:40You know, like there's three major negative emotions, anxiety, anger, and sadness. And that everyone has kind of like their preferred negative emotion. And mine is anxiety. So I definitely have like sort of more anxiety than maybe the average person, although it's not like clinical. And I actually kind of prefer that to the other two. So, but we all have that. I guess we all have, you know, and negative emotions again, they serve a function. So we all experience them, but we all have kind of like a preference. If it was me, I'm trying to imagine myself as a happiness expert, having to confront my own struggles with happiness.

1:43:20For me, that would set in motion like a domino effect, like this cascade of then self-flagellation because you know better and you know what the solution is. And yet you keep like sort of tripping yourself up on these things. Kind of like a doctor who, say, smokes something and says, oh, I know. Yeah, the dissonance. Yeah, the dissonance. Yeah. I don't think that happens to me. It's more like I find it's useful to remind myself certain things. I don't know. I think maybe I have, maybe I'm pretty good at self-compassion because I think like I know like I ruminate, but I know lots of people ruminate.

1:43:54So I don't really like kick myself for that. Well, it's healthy to not hold yourself to a different standard of happiness simply because you understand it and study it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I don't think I do. What is the study of your dreams? Like if you could basically craft the ultimate, you know, randomized control trial or population study that, that controlled for all variables that would answer all of your questions, what would that look like? You know, this is like a job interview question. Is it? Do people ask you that all the time? Well, not me. Like if you're, if I was interviewing for a professor job, like literally They would say that, yeah.

1:44:29They would say, what's your, if I gave you so much money, like they usually put a number on it. Like I gave you, you know, three million dollars to do it. I mean, I like the idea of like sort of the mini labs. So I would do the interventions that I'm doing. And by the way, now we're studying beyond kindness and gratitude. Like we're studying listening, curiosity and, you know, sort of having conversations, sort of having like making those studies really big and ideally across cultures. And then being able to measure lots of things. So like while people are engaged in a conversation and they're showing curiosity to the other person or they're showing what are called high quality listening behaviors, they're really listening.

1:45:07Maybe they're in a scanner so you can see what's happening in their brain. And maybe we're also hooking them up, their body, so we can see what's happening in their bodies. And then we have all these codes of their like facial expressions and behaviors and sort of having a team, be able to really pay a team of people to do all these things because one person can't do it. So, yeah, to me, it's really more doing bigger studies with a lot more different kinds of measures that are because they're all expensive and take a lot of time. And then also follow people up across, you know, years. Many, many years.

1:45:41Many, many years. How many years? Decades, right? Decades. Decades. What do we know or not know about the impact or the efficacy of psychedelics on happiness? There seems to be a lot of excitement and research happening at the moment. And we're beginning to understand the potential for these powerful compounds to alleviate anxiety or PTSD, et cetera. So I just I'm curious around your stance. Yeah, well, I actually was going to mention psychedelics. I thought, is this cool to mention this on your show? I guess it is. So before COVID, I became obsessed with MDMA, you know, which is otherwise known as molly or ecstasy.

1:46:23It's actually not technically a psychedelic, but it has some psychedelic properties. And the reason was that I was studying connection. And I was also becoming interested in how to induce in the lab a feeling, making people feel understood, loved and appreciated. And I have a colleague who's also my sort of co-author on a book. His name is Harry Reese. And he has a theory that's, I think, actually like the best theory in psychology, which is the key to relationships is for both partners to feel understood, cared for, loved and valued or appreciated. And then I realized that this molecule makes people feel incredibly understood, loved and valued.

1:47:06So I went into like this rabbit hole. Again, this is like before COVID, reading everything I could find about it. And it turned out that there were some experiments where people are, like, say, given Mali versus some comparison drug or placebo. And then they sit at a computer and they ask questions like, how friendly do you feel and how loving do you feel? And then there's the clinical trials that are still going on for PTSD. But there's really no research that actually has people, like, in the lab talking to each other and, you know, and taking Mali versus other compounds. Anyway, so to make a long story short, I wrote a paper where I'm kind of encouraging other scholars to start a new field that I am calling psychedelic social psychology, where we're studying these psychoactive substances for different reasons.

1:47:52One is to sort of to try to understand the psychology, the psychological mechanisms or processes better or the brain pathway. So like if you have someone in the lab, they're on Mali and they're feeling really, really loved and you could look inside there, you could look to see what's happening in their brains. You know, like what are the brain pathways that underlie that feeling, that deep feeling of being loved or gratitude or empathy? Because it's also associated with lots of like positive things. But also you can help people, you can improve people's lives by lots of people, you know, lack social skills or they have all kinds of very social deficits or they're lonely.

1:48:27And maybe with one time administration of this, of certain drugs or substances or maybe some boosters, you can actually help people have better social lives, feel less lonely. So Mali is just a great example because so related to what I'm studying, social connection. But you can think about psilocybin, you know, other substances that you can use in psychology to sort of really uncover, like, important processes. Like, what is the nature of the self? Or, like, can we reduce prejudice with these substances? So, yeah, I mean, I can talk for hours about it. It's a very, very exciting frontier. Yeah, you're seeing this as promising in many ways.

1:49:06Yes. Now, so when I started doing this research, it was still, I should say just the reading, it was still like, consider like, are you crazy? Like, I remember giving a talk in my department on Zoom, actually, because then COVID hit. And yeah, I definitely got like, are you crazy doing this? Like, why are you doing this? Oh, there was on Facebook, I now, when I published my first paper on the topic, one of the comments was, there goes a brilliant career. So that was 2020, about 2021. But so much has happened in like three, four years where it's really in the zeitgeist. And yeah, it's really having the psychedelics are really having a moment and it's becoming a lot more acceptable.

1:49:49So much so that there's worry. I'd say I would worry that is becoming like too much of a fad. I think we need to be cautious. Yeah. I mean, I've said this many times on this show before, but the risk of repeating myself, there is, you know, Certainly something to be said for the benefits that we're seeing and the science that's emerging. And I have personal friends who I think have benefited in many ways from this. But it does concern me the way in which it's being mainstreamed. I mean, there's just like ketamine clinics like all over town here, you know, and it's sort of just you can just book an appointment and go in and do it.

1:50:24And so there's a certain cavalierness about this whole thing that I think is not great. Yeah, and I agree. I think there needs to be a lot more. And there are people there are people who are just being so thoughtful about how to roll out. So like once once MDMA is rescheduled to schedule three, like ketamine, as opposed to schedule one, where it is now, there will be also MDMA clinics. And I don't know what the numbers are like. I don't think the numbers are so high of people who go to these clinics. But I do think the potential is great. But just like with anything new, there's a lot of enthusiasm, excitement at the beginning.

1:51:00there might be some big placebo effects, right? Just kind of like a new educational intervention, right? Happens and then like everyone's super excited about it. And then once it's scaled, suddenly you don't see any big effects, right? Because there was a lot of it was because of the enthusiasm of the first practitioners. The neuroscience research on psychedelics and some of the other randomized controlled studies are like really, really promising, like really powerful. So I'm an optimist. Yeah, and are you an experienced practitioner yourself or is this an academic intrigue? I'll answer that question in two ways.

1:51:33One is, Mike, I have a collaborator who's been studying psychoactive substances for decades. And I actually asked her, I said, what do you do when people ask you, do you actually do these substances? And she says, you're screwed either way. Because if you say you do, people say, well, you're biased. That means you're biased. And if you say you don't, they say, you don't know what you're talking about, right? I have tried them. And I actually, I can't imagine someone who studies something for decades has never actually tried it. Although there's certainly people who study substances that are not, you know, that are toxic.

1:52:09Yeah, yeah, yeah. All right. What did we learn here today, Sonia? We learned that there are many myths when it comes to happiness and how our intuition or instincts around happiness can lead us astray. We understand that connection, love, kindness, gratitude, These are things that can reliably, when practiced, increase our quotient of happiness. Everything, of course, is couched in the context of, quote unquote, it depends. It's very context and individual dependent. We learned that you struggle with meditation, but you are going to now embrace it wholeheartedly. And I also see you as ascending, you know, our friend Scott Barry Kaufman's pyramid of Maslow's hierarchy of needs.

1:52:53at the top of which, of course, is this relationship with the transcendent that Arthur talks about. And this is the mountain that you are about to summit, my friend. Is this true? Have I summarized this accurately? I have to say, you said that Arthur Brooks is a sort of a prodigy at summarizing things, but I think you got that talent there too. So thank you for that lovely summary. Yeah, cool. I agree. I'd say 100 % with what you just said. Uh-huh. And maybe we can just end it with a few kind of closing thoughts to the happiness seeker in our midst. Oh, you mean like just kind of takeaways? Like, hey, maybe, you know, you've made it this far.

1:53:31You know, here's a few little nuggets, you know, a couple little happiness chewables. Oh, interesting. Okay, okay. Take away into your day. Maybe some things we haven't even talked about, huh? Yeah, you've made it this far, so now you have a little bonus for making this far. social connection, right? Key to happiness. That's the big nugget. Anything you can do to strengthen relationships, chat with your barista when you get your coffee tomorrow morning, it'll make you happier on average. I guess the little nugget I would add that we haven't really talked about is don't be so closed off, right?

1:54:03So we all, I kind of alluded to this earlier, we all walk around kind of with a wall, with a shell around us. One reason I study MDMA is because it kind of takes that shell off. It turns out that we feel much more connected to others when we show a little bit more of ourselves to others. So we don't just show like that, that shiny positive part of us to impress, but maybe some more vulnerable, doesn't have to be super negative or like your deep secrets. That's how we forge a connection is by, yeah, having a little bit of a deeper conversation. So I, I often say like, I'm done with small talk. That's it.

1:54:41I'm not engaging in small talk. Are you successful? Well, I mean, obviously, like when you first meet someone, like there are some people and many people need a little small talk kind of like, it's like at the very beginning, but I just find it so boring. Yeah. Like life is too short. Like when you're in your fifties, you know, life is short and it gets shorter every year. So, you know, I want to have meaningful conversations. So I, that makes people feel much more connected. And I would predict it'll make you happier. It'll make you flourish more if you have deeper connections with people. I mean, deeper conversations with people.

1:55:15I love it. That's fantastic. So hopefully if I ever find myself on a flight that is having issues with its engine, you'll be sitting right next to me. That's beautiful. Make me feel more comfortable, all right? That was great. Thank you, Sonia. I really appreciate the work that you do. It's important work and you're changing and improving lives all over the world. Thank you. Pleasure to talk to you. Great question. You are to be recognized for that, my friend. Thank you. Thank you. You too. Cool. Yeah. Peace.

1:55:58That's it for today. Thank you for listening. I truly hope you enjoyed the conversation. To learn more about today's guest, including links and resources related to everything discussed today, visit the episode page at richroll.com, where you can find the entire podcast archive, as well as podcast merch, my books, Finding Ultra, Voicing Change, and The Plant Power Way, as well as the Plant Power Meal Planner at meals.richroll.com. If you'd like to support the podcast, the easiest and most impactful thing you can do is to subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, and on YouTube and leave a review and or comment.

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1:57:20Portraits by Davy Greenberg Graphic and social media assets Courtesy of Daniel Solis Thank you Georgia Whaley for copywriting And website management And of course our theme music was created By Tyler Pyatt, Trapper Pyatt And Harry Mathis Appreciate the love, love the support See you back here soon Peace Plants Namaste

1:57:52Thank you.