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Rainn Wilson and happiness expert Laurie Santos had a Zoom call to talk about the secret to happiness. What are the tips and tricks to cultivating happiness that most people might not know about? May is Mental Health Awareness Month, so we hope to share some useful information for people taking care of their health during this month, and always.
Transcript provided by YouTube:
00:00
– All this extra stuff over the last few decades
00:03
hasn’t given us one iota of increased happiness.
00:11
– Hi Dr. Laurie, how are you?
00:13
– Hey I’m great, thanks for having me on.
00:14
– I wanna get started right off the bat,
00:16
here we go. – Let’s do it.
00:17
– Are you happy?
00:18
– I am happy.
00:19
I’m happier than I used to be.
00:21
I’m not naturally a happy person.
00:23
I’m kind of naturally a mopey gripey person.
00:25
But I feel like these days I’m doing more
00:27
of the things that tend to make you happier.
00:29
– Are you happy right now?
00:31
– Well I’m happy I get to talk to you.
00:33
I’ve got good tea.
00:35
– I’ve got good tea.
00:36
So I wanted to share with you this quote
00:38
by Nathaniel Hawthorne.
00:39
“Happiness is a butterfly which when pursued
00:43
“is always just beyond your grasp.
00:46
“But which, if you will sit down quietly,
00:49
“may alight upon you”.
00:52
Thoughts on this quote?
00:53
– I think that’s right.
00:54
I mean I think the quote about happiness
00:56
that’s my favorite comes from my colleague Nick Epley
00:58
who’s a professor at University of Chicago.
01:00
And he has this quote where he says,
01:01
“Happiness is like a leaky tire”.
01:04
Like it’ll stay inflated for awhile but gradually
01:07
it’ll kind of deflate over time
01:08
and you have to kind of put more air in.
01:10
And it’s not end of the world to put more air in.
01:12
You just kind of gotta pump it up a little bit.
01:14
– I like the Nathaniel Hawthorne quote a lot more
01:16
than your friend’s quote about the leaky tire frankly.
01:19
And you said earlier you’re not actually
01:21
a naturally happy person.
01:23
I’m the same way.
01:24
I am morose, cynical and negative in my natural state.
01:28
Which I think for people like us
01:30
can help us with happiness because it’s something
01:33
we need to focus on.
01:35
Or something we need to look at
01:37
and pay some attention to don’t you think?
01:39
– Yeah no totally.
01:40
I think for people for whom it comes easy,
01:42
it’s not always gonna come easy.
01:44
There’s gonna be some challenging times.
01:46
And if you’re not naturally happy,
01:48
then you end up building skillsets in
01:50
to kind of deal with that over time.
01:51
And that can help you when times get rough.
01:54
– So how do you develop your sense
01:57
in terms of developing your happiness muscles?
02:00
– There are practices you can do.
02:02
You can set a timer on your phone that says ding
02:04
and every hour you’re like oh,
02:05
I was supposed to just think of three good things right now.
02:07
Just three awesome things in my life.
02:09
It’s an exercise called the three blessings.
02:11
And it sounds so silly but it just shifts
02:14
your attention that’s naturally looking
02:16
for all the tigers out there in the world.
02:18
To like hey, I just got some awesome tea right now.
02:20
Like the tea’s pretty good.
02:21
Like hey, I’m breathing, I’m above ground.
02:24
Any day above ground is a good day right?
02:26
So it sounds so silly but it’s just a matter
02:29
of kind of retraining your attention.
02:31
And it takes so work but if you can kind of
02:33
force yourself to do it,
02:34
you start noticing all the good stuff too.
02:36
– So boom, there’s an instant thing you can do.
02:39
A tangible exercise you can do, the three blessings.
02:42
– At some point in the day scribble down three good things.
02:45
Three awesome things in your life.
02:47
You can do it at night before you go to bed.
02:49
You can just scribble on your phone
02:51
or a piece of paper near your bed.
02:52
You can also do it when you’re doing some other habit
02:54
which protects you from forgetting it.
02:56
I like to do it when I’m brushing my teeth in the morning
02:59
so it’s like you’re just brushing your teeth.
03:01
You’re gonna be there for whatever it is,
03:02
a minute or two minutes anyway.
03:04
– For me it’s like six seconds.
03:07
– I’ve been trying to be better.
03:10
– Done.
03:11
– You can do one good thing if it’s the
03:12
six second toothbrushing.
03:14
But yeah just kind of harness another habit
03:16
and just use that.
03:17
That would be otherwise kind of dead toothbrushing time
03:19
to think about a few things that are really important.
03:23
– Pooping.
03:24
– Pooping is another domain, maybe that’s longer.
03:27
– That’s a little more time.
03:29
For me that’s like 27 seconds.
03:31
– You’re giving me awesome ideas for a bathroom book
03:33
about gratitude, it’s like untapped territory right?
03:38
– That’s fantastic.
03:39
In the shower, a gratitude waterproof chalkboard.
03:46
So you can be in the shower and you can write down
03:49
what you’re grateful for in the shower.
03:50
Let’s put that together and market it together,
03:52
what do you say? – I love it,
03:53
I’m in, we’ll talk after the call.
03:55
– Okay call me, awesome.
03:58
So you are teaching the most popular course
04:01
that Yale has ever had.
04:03
It’s called Psychology and The Good Life.
04:06
So that’s 300 years of courses in Yale.
04:09
And you are teaching the most popular class.
04:12
Why do you think that is and what is the good life?
04:16
– It is a little surreal.
04:17
I mean I think honestly the students are voting
04:20
with their feet.
04:20
I mean this generation is the most honestly
04:24
psychologically messed up generation
04:26
since we’ve been measuring psychological messed up-ness.
04:29
We see rates of like 40% of college students today
04:33
report being too depressed to function most days, over 40%.
04:37
Over 60% say that they feel overwhelmingly lonely
04:40
and anxious most of the time.
04:42
Over 10% say that they’ve seriously considered suicide
04:45
in the last year.
04:46
These are national statistics.
04:48
There’s a lot of talk about oh snowflakes or whatever.
04:50
But I think on the ground,
04:52
this is a real mental health issue
04:54
that students are facing.
04:56
And so I think one of the reasons
04:57
that students are drawn to the course is it was like
04:59
here are evidence-based strategies,
05:01
practical stuff you can use to overcome some of this stuff.
05:04
And I think students are really into that
05:06
Which is kind of cool because I think this generation,
05:08
they don’t like the platitudes as much,
05:10
you know what I mean?
05:11
They really are like show me the evidence,
05:13
show me the graphs.
05:14
And if the graphs looks good, I’m gonna buy-in,
05:16
I’m gonna do that.
05:18
It’s hard to have them not fall prey
05:20
to the thing we mentioned earlier
05:22
which is going after happiness in the type A way
05:24
that Yale students go after everything.
05:26
It’s like no, no, no, no,
05:27
we’re gonna scale back the craving and the desire here.
05:30
I think they also hated the fact
05:31
that the class teaches them
05:33
that happiness is not what they think.
05:35
They come in thinking I wanna be an Instagram influencer
05:37
and get all this money and get perfect grades.
05:39
And I’m like tick no, no, no, no.
05:42
Just be present, just be mindful.
05:45
– Breathe. – Express your gratitude.
05:47
They’re like wait what?
05:49
It’s what the science of happiness teaches
05:51
is really counter cultural right now.
05:53
You don’t have to spend a lot of money to get happy
05:56
based on what the science is telling you.
05:59
– Does it partially have to do with the kind
06:02
of collapse of the idea that material goods
06:07
will make us happy?
06:08
– Yep yeah there’s a incongruous correlation
06:11
between materialism and happiness.
06:12
Meaning the higher you are on materialism,
06:14
so the more you go after material stuff,
06:17
on average the less happy you are.
06:19
Which already is telling you something.
06:21
But we also can look across history
06:23
and see that basically happiness,
06:25
if anything has gotten slightly worse over history.
06:28
You know our houses were really tiny.
06:30
When you go to the old houses you’re like wow,
06:31
they had such tiny rooms and they only had one bathroom.
06:34
How could they live and blah blah blah.
06:35
And then you realize we have all this extra stuff
06:38
and all this extra space today
06:40
and it’s actually making us if anything less happy
06:43
but definitely more susceptible
06:45
to things like depression and anxiety and so on.
06:47
So all this extra stuff over the last few decades
06:51
hasn’t given us one iota of increased happiness.
06:54
– So one of the worst paths to try and get happiness,
06:57
what you’re saying, is to try and get lots of money
07:00
and accrue lots of stuff.
07:02
And yet, that’s what we’re being told over and over again
07:06
that that will make us happy.
07:08
And in actuality, happiness comes from it’s opposite.
07:13
So there’s a huge lie that’s being perpetrated
07:17
on Western culture which is that happiness
07:20
comes from having stuff, comfort and status.
07:24
– I think I mean again with some caveats.
07:26
If you can’t put food on the table,
07:28
if you’re living in your car.
07:29
Money will make you a little happier
07:31
if you don’t have enough to eat
07:32
or put a roof over your head.
07:34
Then bumping up your income matters.
07:35
But once you get the basics covered,
07:38
getting more stuff isn’t gonna make you happier.
07:41
If anything the data actually suggests
07:43
that it can slightly make it worse.
07:45
There are all these funny paradoxical effects
07:46
that when you get more stuff,
07:48
you actually get less happy.
07:49
It’s like once we get the good things,
07:52
we actually set a new reference point.
07:53
And then it makes the normal real world
07:55
not look as good anymore.
07:58
– So you started observing animals.
08:02
Have you learned anything about happiness
08:05
from observing monkeys or dogs?
08:08
– Yeah, I wasn’t necessarily studying happiness in animals
08:11
but I think they teach you a lot about it.
08:13
If you’re out there in the field watching monkeys,
08:15
which is what I kind of did in my day job
08:17
before I started studying happiness.
08:18
They are the most present savoring individuals ever.
08:23
They’re just in the moment in this way
08:25
that we never are.
08:26
Which is kind of, there’s this term in meditation.
08:29
I don’t know if you do meditation
08:30
but it’s called the monkey mind.
08:32
Which is this idea that our mind is kind of going
08:34
all over the place and we have to tame the monkey mind.
08:36
I feel like the monkey should be
08:37
super insulted by this term.
08:39
– Yeah. – Because they are not
08:40
like mind wanderers. – They’re chill.
08:42
– They’re chill and present.
08:43
They’re zen all the time. – You see them,
08:44
they got a stick and they’re like grooming someone
08:47
and they’re just hanging out.
08:48
And there’s a moth and they go like that
08:50
and they’re just completely in the moment right?
08:53
– I once in my field study sat for about an hour
08:56
with a monkey who was just staring off on this beach
08:59
just staring at the water.
09:00
And I’m antsy, I’m ready to check my phone.
09:02
I’m like come on monkey, do something.
09:03
Like I’m watching you, do something.
09:05
But it’s like no he’s just zen.
09:07
He’s just there, he’s not craving anything.
09:09
He’s not seeking, he’s just present and there.
09:12
– And they’re so socially connected too aren’t they?
09:15
– Yeah and it matters to them.
09:18
It matters for humans too.
09:19
But basically not being a good social monkey
09:22
that’s cooperating and being present
09:24
with other individuals means the difference
09:26
between life or death.
09:27
I mean it does for us too but we still
09:29
are picking up these things
09:30
and avoiding actually being social in real life.
09:34
Because we forget how bad loneliness is for you.
09:36
There’s evidence that loneliness could be as bad
09:38
for physical health as smoking 15 cigarettes a day.
09:41
We should put kind of warnings on behaviors
09:44
that lead to loneliness because they might be as bad
09:46
for us as nicotine, it’s crazy.
09:48
– Wow, and what about service?
09:51
Can sacrificing your own time and comfort
09:54
for the sake of someone else or someone
09:56
who’s in a worse position than you?
09:59
Does that have an effect on happiness?
10:01
– Yeah there’s a huge huge boost in happiness
10:03
from being what researchers often call other oriented.
10:06
It’s basically the opposite of what we often think
10:08
about for self-care.
10:10
If you look at any women’s, I don’t know if you read
10:12
women’s magazines but women’s magazines right now
10:14
it’s like self-care, treat yourself.
10:16
Self, self, self.
10:17
And it’s like that is the opposite
10:19
of what the happiness research suggests.
10:21
Happiness comes from being other oriented.
10:23
It comes from other care.
10:25
It’s experiments where you walk up to people
10:27
in the street and you hand them money
10:28
and you tell them how to spend it.
10:30
And the people who are told to spend that money
10:31
on someone else at the end of the day are happier
10:33
than the people who get to treat themselves
10:35
and buy something for themselves.
10:37
– Wow. – Which again was not
10:38
what we predict.
10:39
We predict spending the money on ourself is gonna feel good.
10:42
But the data suggest spending money on yourself
10:44
is not as great as spending money on other people.
10:47
Spending time on yourself is sometimes not as great
10:49
as focusing your time on other people.
10:51
And folks who volunteer more hour by hour
10:54
tend to be on the happier side
10:55
than folks who tend not to volunteer any of their time.
10:58
But when you start thinking about other people,
10:59
all of a sudden you’re like no I gotta help.
11:01
It kind of gives you meaning, it gives you motivation.
11:04
And it just makes you happier.
11:05
And it’s like a huge win win for society.
11:08
Where if more people were not focused on self-care
11:11
but focused on other care,
11:12
we’d probably be a happier society.
11:14
Maybe with less inequality
11:15
and less bad stuff going on.
11:18
– There’s actually a word called other-ish
11:20
and it’s the opposite of being selfish, it’s other-ish.
11:23
Maybe that’s something we need to focus on
11:25
is not being selfish but being other-ish.
11:28
– Yeah which is kind of funny too right
11:30
that most of us haven’t ever heard that word.
11:33
I think it already signals something’s wrong
11:35
if otherishness is making us very happy
11:37
and nobody’s heard of the term.
11:41
– And tell us a little bit about your podcast.
11:42
This is what your podcast is about.
11:44
You interview other happiness experts.
11:48
– Yeah, it’s called The Happiness Lab
11:49
and basically we’re trying to sleuth out all the ways
11:52
our minds lie to us about what makes us happy.
11:54
All the things we were just talking about.
11:55
That we wanna be selfish,
11:57
we wanna be focused on our time on ourselves.
11:59
We wanna kind of gripe about things and complain
12:02
and that must feel really good.
12:03
Basically we have all these theories
12:05
about what’s gonna make us feel awesome
12:07
and most of those theories are wrong.
12:09
And so The Happiness Lab tries to talk
12:11
to the experts to say okay why is that the case
12:14
that griping doesn’t feel good?
12:15
Why doesn’t getting lots of money
12:16
and being an influencer feel good?
12:17
Why is helping others and being more other-ish,
12:21
why does that make our happiness go up?
12:22
And so each week we kind of pick a different topic.
12:26
And hopefully folks who listen leave
12:27
with really practical tips that they can use today
12:30
and do something to feel better.
12:33
– So what are some other practical tips?
12:35
And is there a practical tip that’s just out of the box
12:38
that when you look at the studies you’re like
12:39
I can’t believe that juggling bananas
12:43
five minutes a day will actually make you happier?
12:45
Or something like that.
12:46
– Yeah, not much empirical research on the banana juggling.
12:49
But the one there’s the most empirical research on
12:52
is being a little bit more social.
12:54
Like the simple act of calling a friend,
12:57
talking to a stranger when you’re in a situation
12:59
that it’s safe to do that.
13:01
We just predict that so many other things would feel better.
13:04
But simple social connection of connecting
13:06
with another human just feels really good.
13:09
If you had to do one thing today
13:11
that would make you feel better,
13:12
contact somebody you haven’t talked to in awhile
13:14
and just reconnect with them.
13:15
And again afterwards kind of do the mindfulness thing.
13:17
Like does that feel nutritious?
13:19
I guarantee afterwards you’re like that felt
13:21
so much better than being on Reddit
13:23
for a half hour or something like that.
13:25
– And probably if you reached out to someone
13:28
just to connect with them
13:29
And you knew that they were kind of
13:30
in a worse place than you and you reached out to them
13:32
in order to cheer them up,
13:34
then it’s a win win.
13:36
It’s a double win you know?
13:38
You’re making a social connection
13:39
and you’re being of service to someone else.
13:42
– And if you do that and express some gratitude to them.
13:45
Like your friends having a bad day
13:47
and you’re like I just wanted to use this time
13:49
to tell you how much you mean to me
13:50
and how thankful I am that you’re in my life.
13:53
You get the triple threat,
13:54
the triple happiness threat. – Wow.
13:56
Wow, win place show, that’s it.
13:59
It’s a hat trick, when you score three goals.
14:03
So make a social connection,
14:06
someone who’s worse off than you
14:08
so you’re uplifting them and giving them of service.
14:10
And expressing to them how grateful you are for them
14:14
and to them, doesn’t get better than that.
14:17
– It’s pretty good yeah it’s pretty good.
14:18
– Wow, okay well Dr. Laurie Santos,
14:21
thank you so much for joining me here on this chat.
14:25
And amazing, I’ve learned so much about happiness.
14:29
And you know what honestly, I feel happier now
14:32
than when I started this interview
14:34
a half an hour ago.
14:35
Thank you doctor.
14:36
– Thank you so much, bye.
14:38
– Thank you happiness doctor.
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