Hey, welcome to Science Stuff, a production of iHeartRadio. I'm Horey Champ and today we are tackling a question that is very personal to me and that I imagine is very personal to you as well. And the question is what really makes us happy?
Is it money? Is it love? Is it a sense of purpose? Or is it random? Believe it or not.
Science has studied this question and it has come up with some pretty definitive answers. So we're going to talk to two scientists today. One is a psychologist who's running one of the biggest and most unique experiments on human happiness in history. And we're going to talk to a neuroscientist who's going to tell us what he thinks is happening in your brain when you feel happy.
Now.
This is the first in a two part series, so be sure to also check out part two. Okay, get ready to experience the joy of science as we answer the question it really makes us happy? Hey everyone, Okay, before we get started, I want you to take a second and ask yourself this question, Am I happy? I'll take a pause so you can think about it.
Now.
If you're a skeptical person, you might be thinking, well, Orge what do you mean by being happy? Or you might be thinking, well, sometimes I feel happy and sometimes I don't.
Happiness is a pretty tricky.
Subject, which is what inspired our first guest here today, doctor Matt Killingsworth, to start as a graduate student at Harvard something called Track Your Happiness dot Org. Well, thank you, doctor Killingsworth for joining us.
Glad to be here.
Please tell us who you are and what you do.
Sure, my name is Matt Killingsworth. I'm at the University of Pennsylvania at the Wharton School of Business, and I'm a researcher who studies human happiness.
Fantastic, so tell us about Track Yourhappiness dot org.
So this is a project that I started more than a decade ago. Track Your Happiness really aims to be the world's biggest happiness study to try to figure out the recipe for human happiness and how to spread it into people's lives. Since this project's been started, hundreds of thousands of people from around the world have joined across its different versions. I created it because I wanted to understand how happy people really feel as they actually go
about their daily lives. What makes our lives enjoyable, fulfilling, interesting, satisfying, Okay.
Doctor Pilling's Worth study uses a very specific method called experience sampling, which is based on the idea that how we answer the question are you happy kind of changes throughout the day, and it depends on what's happening to us on any given moment. We'll get to how it works, but first I wanted to know how he got this idea.
I really, you know, especially before and during my PhD training, I really read the scientific literature, hundreds and hundreds and thousands of papers, so I had a pretty good sense of all of the things that we discovered up to that point.
So what were the things that you learn from the literature?
Lots of different things. So the idea that happiness might be important, I mean, you can go back to Aristotle, you can certainly go back to Jeremy Mintham and John Stuart Mill and other people kind of arguing some version of happiness is kind of like the reason we do everything else. It's the metric or the construct that all this other stuff that humanity is pursuing is ultimately trying
to achieve. But it really wasn't until you know, the second half of the twentieth century at least, and even more so in the last few decades that it's become quite clear that we can measure happiness pretty well, not perfectly, but well enough to do really good science. I mean, that's probably the most essential thing that research is documented, because if you can't measure it, you can't really do science with it. But once you measure it, you could
be wrong about basically everything. But if you keep measuring, observing, you know, refining your thinking, oh, you'll get closer and closer and closer to the truth.
What Decker Killingsworth is saying is that happiness, or the pursuit of it, in a way, kind of defines what it means to be human. I mean, it's in the founding Document of the United States that it's one of our unalienable rights. It's the thing we all strive for and hope to achieve. And yet it wasn't until the nineteen fifties that we started studying it scientifically. That's what psychologist started to look into it.
Well, a lot of the past research really focused on what are the characteristics of happy people? Like who is happy? We knew something about relationship between age and happiness, and income and happiness, and how different countries differ in their levels of happiness. You know, lots of these things that you might collect on a big government survey or you know personality as well, how to things like the Big
five personality dimensions relate to happiness. And one of the things that was really missing, I think was trying to understand like when people are happy.
So all of these studies since the nineteen fifties made a lot of progress.
And trying to figure out the general.
Factors that affect your happiness, like personality, how much money you have, what culture or country you live in. But according to doctor Killingsworth, the data was always a little fuzzy. That's because of something I think we all know about happiness, which is said it sort of depends on when you ask me if I'm happy or not. In other words, is happiness how I feel in the moment, or is happiness how I feel when I take a step back
and consider my life in general. If you ask me if I'm happy in a particularly stressful moment, like if I'm frustrated with my job, or my kids or my relationships, I might answer one way.
Whereas if you ask me while I'm on.
Vacation, sitting in a beach thinking about my life, I might answer a different way, not to mention. Sometimes there are trade offs in life. Sometimes you have to put up with unpleasant moments or do things we don't really want to do that might help us in the long run, like cleaning your COI lit Or exercising or most jobs for most people. Now, this is something scientists knew, but they didn't know quite what to do about it. Nobody had thought to think that houseone responds to the question
are you happy? Depends on when you ask them the question.
I'm not saying they never thought of it. I think people were certainly aware those things could be important, but we really lacked the ability to do it. So, Like this method of experience sampling that's really the cornerstone of my research, you know, was invented by a guy Mehi chicksit me Hai back in like the late nineteen seventies. But he did it with like radio pages clipped to someone's belt and then a little paper booklet they filled out when the beeper went off. Well you can study
like eight people at a time. Later, there were you know, studies using like pomp pilot for those of us who are old enough to remember that technology. But literally before I started this project, I looked in you know, the flagship journals of the discipline of psychology, and they would have twenty studies that ever use experience sampling, and they would have ten or twenty people in them a most.
You know, now I've had hundreds of thousands of people in the study, and you know, a gigantic number of variables too.
Okay, let's get to how Doctor Killing Sports project works. If you go to track your Happiness dot org, you can sign up with your phone or your email, and once you sign up, you become part of the study.
So you'll first answer some questions about your life, like your demographics and your personality and kind of your expectations of how you think you experienced different facets of life. And then from there, I really want to follow up in the course of daily life. So you know, maybe
you did that on Monday, and now it's Tuesday. You're going to start getting some pings from me, some kind of notifications by email or SMS or or something else, and hopefully you'll answer one or a few surveys each day. So I might ask you questions like how do you feel right now, are you interacting with anyone else? Are you thinking about something other than what you're doing? You know,
have you exercised in the last twenty four hours? A bunch of factors, And I'm basically taking the answers to all of those questions, combining with the signals on happiness, both in the moment happiness and these longer term measures of happiness, and trying to sort of figure out, well, what is the right equation for human happiness in general.
So the big innovation here is that we all carry our phones with us all the time, and that gives doctor Killingsworth a chance to basically pop into your life and see how happy you are in any moment, because if someone were to ask you later, your answer might change, or you might not remember how you felt, or your memory might get distorted with time.
You know, we all experience those things. We're kind of aware of what happening in the moment, but it's surprisingly hard later to remember what occurred. And that's why tracking and measuring are so powerful. So the sort of premise behind this is that if I can watch and see how happiness goes up and down during people's daily life across a whole bunch of different people and then put all that data together to try to understand what drivers
of happiness might explain those shifts up and down. We might discover some new insights into what really makes the experience of human life better.
And what makes people give you an answer at the time, Like, if I'm in the middle of a difficult moment or a super happy moment, why would I interrupt it and answer it.
It's partly is that it's going to contribute to the quality of your insight into yourself. So if you're selective about when you choose to respond, you're going to end up with an incomplete picture of your own life. You're not going to understand what your best moments look like, what your worst moments look like, if you're kind of leaving those out. So it's not necessarily great for you.
I feel like it requires a certain openness, But I imagine it could also be very therapeutic to kind of be open and to confide in your system.
I think so, and I mean, honestly, I think there's real value in kind of the happiness report that people get back and seeing their data.
Oh yeah, I forgot to mention when you sign out to be a part of the study. You also get a report on your daily happiness. Okay, when we come back, we're going to find out what doctor Killingsworth found in this study that, as he mentioned, hundreds of thousands of people from across the world have participated in. We're going to find out what affects your happiness the most, and we're going to find out if money is one of them. So stay with us, we'll be right back.
Welcome back.
Okay, we're answering the question what makes you happy? And so far we'fer from the scientists who's been running one of the largest and most unique studies on people's happiness ever done. The study, led by doctor Matt Killingsworth, thanks participants at random times during the day and ask them what they're doing, how they feel, and many other questions to try to get a sense of what happiness is and what are the factors that determine whether you're happy or not.
It's at random times, and that's the idea. So you can kind of think of, you know, ordinary like political surveys, they're trying to get a representative sample of a population. Well, my job as a scientist is to get a representative sample of your moments, and so I'm gonna sort of ping you at a bunch of random moments, and you know, sometimes those will feel like odd times.
So might be washing my dishes and I'll get a pink from you to ask me how I'm feeling. Or i might be in the middle of like a frustrating moment with my kids and I'll still get a pin from you.
Exactly, It'll happen a bunch of times, and collectively that kind of gives us this representative series of snapshots of what do you actually do in your life, how do you spend your time, what are you thinking about, how do you feel, and lots of other factors.
According to doctor Killingsworth, hundreds of thousands of people have signed up for the study over the years, generating a huge amount of data on basically how humans live their lives. So now the question is what does all this data tell you about happiness? Well, as it turns out, doctor Killingsworth has studied the data and he's identified several key factors seem to matter the most when it comes to
your happiness. So at this point you have hundreds of thousands of people who have signed up for this So in your studies, What are the factors that contribute to people's happiness.
Yeah, I'll tell you some big ones. One of the first ones that I published from this project was from a paper called The Wandering Mind is an Unhappy Mind, And so I just added this question that said, are you thinking about something other than what you're currently doing? And people could either say no, I'm just focused on the present moment on what I'm doing, or yes, I'm
thinking about something else. And then I asked, if you are thinking about something else, are those thoughts pleasant, neutral, or unpleasant? And it turned out that people were engaging in mind wandering almost half the time, and that turns out to be very robustly correlated with lower happiness.
Okay, the first thing doctor Killingsworth found when you pink people at random throughout their day is that many of us are not really living in the present. About half the time people were thinking about something other than what they were doing. And you find that the people that were distracted tended to be the people that also reported being unhappy, especially the ones that were distracted thinking about
irrelevant or unpleasant things. In other words, living in the moment and not letting your mind wonder makes you happier. Half the time our mind is wondering, and when our mind is wonder it tends to pull down our experience exactly.
Partly it's because some of the time we think about negative things, but I think it also impedes our ability to enjoy what we're doing. Like, you know, if we're having this conversation, like, the more the energy and attention I'm bringing to that, the more I'm probably going to enjoy it. If you kind of disengage and you're just kind of partially doing things, You're probably not going to enjoy it that much either.
I see.
There's something inherently pleasurable about being in the moment.
That seems to be the case even when people are like cleaning their house, they're much happier when they're just focused on what they're doing than when they let their attention stray elsewhere.
Yeah, so living in the moment is scientifically proven to make you happier. It's not just something taught by Buddhist Okay, what else did doctor Killingsworth find in all this data? All right, so what are some of the other factors you found?
So things like what percentage of your life are you interacting in person with other humans.
How social you're being in your life.
How social you really are in person? Exactly. So someone that spends a lot of their leisure time really engaging with other people versus folks that get off work and they go and sit at home alone or you know, watching television or scrolling on their phone or something.
Maybe explain to us for work some of the questions you would ask people.
Yeah, so I might ask them are you talking or interacting with someone right now? And they could say yes or no? And I might say is that in person? Over video, over text? Which people are those? Friend, spouse, acquaintance, stranger, coworker, boss, child, grandparent, et cetera. So it turns out interacting in person with other people is really good.
Wow. So the more you're interacting with people in person, greater the happiness in your life.
That's right. So if you just look at different people's lives and say, you know, this person interacts ten percent of the time, this person as interacts forty percent, this person seventy percent, that percentage is also a very good
predictor of how happy they tend to be. So you will be transiently happier relative to your own average moment when you're interacting versus not and the more you accumulate those moments, the better your life tends to be in terms of how you feel, in terms of how satisfied and fulfilled you are.
Oh, I should tell that to my kids, my teenage son for sure.
All right. The second big.
Factor, like doctor Killingsworth found in all the data that affects your happiness is interacting with other people. Being social makes you happier, although there are a few caveats. This interaction has to be in person. Online doesn't count, and you have to really engage in it. You can't just sit at a party and be on your phone the whole time. Also, the context in which you interact with people matters. For example, talking with co workers at work helps,
but not that much. Okay, And you said that kind of how we interact with those people in what context is important?
Yeah, So during leisure time is when it seems to matter the most. So kind of in your free time, engaging with other people is especially beneficial. So like working on your own versus with other people, it's somewhat better with other people, but that's a smaller difference versus like going out and hanging out with your friends versus like sitting at home alone. That's extremely different.
In other words, people who spend more time having meaningful interactions with other people on their free time in person tend to report being happier. Now, I think, I know what a lot of you out there are thinking right now. But does that mean introverts are a little unhappier?
Introverts are a bit less happy? So I think my data also reveal a kind of trap, which is introverts think they don't benefit much, or some even think that they're harmed by interacting with other people. But that isn't actually the reality. The reality is, despite your best intuitions, speaking as an introvert myself, like, you would actually be happier if you went out and interacted with other people.
Amazing, Yes, sorry, introverts, you would be a lot happier if you make the effort to talk to people for fun. Science says, so okay, And then there is a third big factor that doctor Kingsworth's found that has a huge impact on your happiness. So tell me what are some of the other factors.
Then, yeah, so we talked about mental factors, we talked about social factors, another one or what I would call like physical factors. Particularly, the biggest one by far is just being physically active. The number of days of the week that someone is exercising is a surprisingly strong predictor of their level of happiness across all these different outcomes.
Yeah, sorry to you too, couch potatoes, but sitting around and doing nothing is also making you unhappy. The good news is that physical activity doesn't have to mean exercise, and it.
Doesn't just have to be exercised simply like, the level of physical activation in your body is a very strong predictor of happiness. Being more physically in gauge in whatever is going on is a really good predictor of happiness.
What do you mean physically engaged?
Like? Literally, how energized is your body right now? Are you sitting down and not moving or are you standing up and moving around? Are you walking? Are you moving with energy? Kind of the more energy you're expending, the happier you tend to be.
What what kinds of questions would you ask people in this case?
I literally ask them at this moment, are you lying down, sitting, standing, walking, jogging, running, you know, being intensely physically active in some other way and there's basically just a straight line upward. The more they're kind of physically activated, the better they feel in the moment and in their lives.
All right.
To wecap, these are the three main factors that affect your happiness, according to an analysis of data from hundreds of thousands of people that look into their daily lives and how they feel. Number one live in the moment, Number two have meaningful in person non work interactions with other people. And three stay physically active. Now, of course that's not the full picture of happiness, but as doctor Killyesworth says, focusing on these three things can go a long way to making you happier.
So the way that I kind of think about those three factors, you know, there's so many other things going on with happiness. It's not like this is the total story, but I think it's a set of things that's pretty important. You can kind of think about a happy life as a function of being like mentally engaged, socially engaged, and physically engaged, sort of a life of engagement across those
sort of three pillars. If you're doing pretty well and all three of those things, you're doing really well, And if you're really not doing very well in all of those things.
You know, you're.
Probably not doing so great. Like that doesn't get us all the way from the most miserable person to the most happy person. But that's going to be a big set of exponatory factors. Again my data correlation, but I think it seems likely that if you're able to kind of flip those levers in your life, that would make a big difference in your happiness.
All right, when we come back, we're going to talk to a neuroscientist to learn what he thinks about all of this and what exactly is going on inside of a happy brain. Stay with us, you're listening to sign stuff and we're back. We're answering the question what really makes us happy? And we learn there are three factors that have a big impact on how happy we are, living in the present, having in person interactions with other people, and staying physically active.
So is that it okay?
I'm going to ask doctor Killingsworth more about what these other factors are, including the ageless question of whether money makes us happy. But first I wanted to check in with my friend, neuroscientist Duane Godwin. I wrote a book called Out of your Mind, in which we talk about the brain science of everyday phenomena, including what makes us happy. Here's my conversation with doctor Godwin. So, first question, Dwayne, are you happy?
Well? You know, Hora, that's a complicated question, but I'm doing well and my cork is floating.
I mean, like, are you happy that you finally are regular on my podcast?
Yeah? I'm just scared that somehow I'll destroy your ratings, but otherwise I'm pretty happy to be here.
How do we think of happiness in terms of how the brain works?
Well, when I think about happiness and the things that contribute to happiness, I think about a number of different areas of the brain. The first, everyone talks about your brain's pleasure circuitry, So aart of that has to do with release of dopamine and the perception and feeling of pleasure you get when that happens. But this idea of happiness a little more complicated because that has to do with your assessment that you make about how content you
are about your life. And when we talk about those, we then have to bring in your frontal lobes, because that's the place where what is good, what feels good, what is emotionally satisfying or calculated, and that information then feeds back into this pleasure circuitry and affects your sense of well being.
Right what doctor Godwin is saying is that there is a part of your brain that basically makes you feel good, and that can be activated by what we're doing in the moment, if you're eating a good meal, if you're having a positive interaction with someone, or if you're having a good workout, but it can also be activated by your own thoughts and you use the front part of your brain to step back and assess your life and what's going on, that can also trigger the brain areas
that make you feel good, and that has big implications for our happiness. First of all, it means that what you think, and more important, how you think about the things that are going on in your life can affect how you feel or how happy you are. We'll talk more about things like stoicism and cognitive therapy a little later, but the fact that happiness is rooted in the brain means that how easy it is to be happy can change from person to person.
You know, there is a certain baseline level of happiness that can be attributed to just how genetically predisposed you are to feeling happy. And what we know about genes is that genes become proteins. Proteins become the structure of the brain, and the structure of the brain houses the activity of the brain. So it's not a very hard line to draw between a genetic predisposition and the actual activity that generates these complex emotional states.
In other words, some brains might be happier than others, and this is all because of genetics. How do genetics affect our ability to be happy?
Sure? You know. One of the studies that we do cover in some detail in the book is the study of the Minnesota Twins. And when I say Minnesota Twins, I don't mean the baseball team. I mean an enormous study of twins that followed identical twins who have been raised apart. It was really kind of a natural experiment
in the question of whether happiness is hardwired. One example of this involved twins that were separated at birth, who, despite the fact that they never met each other, they both reported similar levels of happiness, their optimism, and even overall life satisfaction.
Okay, this is a pretty cool study. Starting in nineteen seventy nine, psychologist at the University of Minnesota were able to survey over one hundred sets of twins that were separated at birth. These are twins that were born together, but for some reason we're split apart and raised under different circumstances. Have you seen the movie The Trapp or heard the story The Prince and the Popper. These are
real life examples of those stories. It's almost like the perfect experiment, right, Like if you had a copy of yourself, which is what identical twin is, and you had one of you lead one kind of life and the other lead another kind of life, and then you check them with yourself and your twin later. You could see whether life affects your happiness or whether it's something sort of inherent to your genes.
Yeah, in a way, it's like the perfect experiment because you can of count for a lot of the other confounds and variability that happens in a life.
All right, But here is a super cool part of the experiment. The scientist didn't just look at identical twins that were separated at birth. They also looked at for eternal twins that were separated at birth. That is, twins that are basically just siblings and not genetically identical. So they looked at genetically identical twins basically clones were separated at birth, and they looked at non genetically identical twins that were also separated at birth, which is like the
perfect control. Now, the scientists looked into all kinds of things about these twins, what their personalities ended up being, how smart they are, what kind of jobs they had, and they also asked them basically how happy they were and what did they find.
What they found was the fifty percent of the areas and their baseline level of happiness could be attributed to genetic factors.
Then, how much of their happiness was correlated with being fans of the Minnesota Twins?
Possibly?
I mean, I don't know how they've they've been doing, but it sounds like something that might affect your happiness. Yeah.
I think the major idea here is that twins studies provide a really important natural experiment.
Okay.
What they found was that sets of identical twins would sort of both report being the same level of happiness even though they were raised apart, but the fraternal twins the non identical ones wouldn't always be the same It's like if you had a clone that led a totally different life than you, and that clone was happy, chances are that you would be happy too, Or if your clone was unhappy, you would probably be unhappy as well. In other words, about fifty percent of how happy you are,
the scientists found, is due to your genes. That is, some people are just born to be a little happier than others. Now, the thing to note here is that this means some of your happiness is already determined for you, but it also means a lot of it is not.
But you know, I think the other thing that's really important about this is you could look at that and say, oh my gosh, I really don't have control of how happy I am. But I think that's the wrong way to think about it. I think the correct way to think about it is that, hey, you've got fifty percent to play with. You know that other half of it is really stuff that's under your control, circumstances that you know you may have say over.
Okay, I still have a lot of questions about happiness, questions like how does having a purpose in life affect your happiness? Or how important is money? And how happy you feel and it's being on your phone all day making you unhappy. We're going to tackle all these questions in the second part of this series, so make sure you subscribe and listen to the second episode next week. Here's a sneak peak.
So if you go back to kind of the state of the scientific literature, the kind of common narrative amongst happiness researchers is that money doesn't really matter very much for happiness. I think we actually got that kind of.
Wrong, all right, Tune in next week for part two of What Really makes This Happy?
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