Hello, it's or Hee. Before we get started, I wanted to tell you that my new book, Oliver's Great Big Universe Evolution Changes Everything, is coming out September sixteenth. It's a great read for smart kids and smart adults with lots of science, humor and heart. Check it out at Great Big Universe dot net. Thanks a lot. Hey, welcome to sign Stuff. Reproduction of iHeartRadio. I'm Poritchhim and Doday were answering the question does money make you happy? Now?
This is the second part of a two part series on happiness, so be sure to listen to part one. In this episode, we're going to continue our conversation with a couple of experts about what science says are the factors that affect our happiness. We're going to talk about purpose, stoicism and money. Does money make you happy? Or is it the case as they say that more money means problems? The answer is coming up. Hey everyone, all right. In the last episode, we talked about some of the main
factors that affect our happiness. Genetics is one of them, and in a study that tracked the happiness of hundreds of thousands of people, doctor Matt Killingsworth at the University of Pennsylvania found three main factors that play a role in how happy we feel. One living in the moment, two having in person interactions with others, and three staying physically active. But these are not the only things that make us happy. Here's more of my conversation with doctor Killingsworth. Now,
I wonder these three factors you mentioned. Are those the three main factors because they have the highest impact on our happiness? But do you mention these because these are three that we have some control over.
It's some of both, but I think those are some of the biggest and most unified things I see, And there are things that we could conceivably control. But you know, there's other stuff that matters too.
Okay, we're going to spend the rest of the episode talking about some of the other factors that affect our happiness, starting with having a purpose in life? Does that make you happy? Here's my friend and co author of the book Out of Your Mind, Professor Dwayne Godwin of Wake Forest University. Let's talk about purpose, this idea that finding purpose in your life will somehow lead to your happiness. What do we know from psychology about purpose?
Well, purpose is important to a sense of well being. For the most part, our psychology is wired to seek purpose. There is a story about Victor Frankel, and Victor Frankel
famously wrote A Man's Search for meeting. He was in a concentration camp during World War Two, you know, held captive by the Nazis, and while he was imprisoned there, he noticed that the people who survived often had some reason, some purpose in their life to live, whether it was taking care of a loved one, taking care of unfinished business,
or you know, their spiritual beliefs. And he wrote that those who have a why to live can bear almost me How so, you know that idea of being able to find purpose even in the context of suffering is important.
How would you define purpose as it'sychology.
You know, helping others, you know, working on projects that I find personally very satisfying. From a neuroscience perspective, purpose activates again the brain's reward system. It does so more
consistently than something like a fleeting pleasure. Purpose driven individuals tend to show higher activity in the prefrontal cortex because again that's the place where you're doing these sorts of assessments of positive emotional valance, and that's associated with things like long term planning, moral reasoning, and overall levels of satisfaction.
In other words, the idea of purpose, when your actions align with a greater goal that you think has value, is one way to activate your brains reward center, because that's kind of how your brain is wired. This doctor Garmin speculates probably came from how our brains evolved. But I think what you're saying is that somehow our brain evolved to need purpose to be happy.
Well, our brain found a way to be happy when we were being purposeful. You know, it could be that from an evolutionary perspective, that having purpose. If you think about now communities of early humans, Now that was a trait that was selected for because having a purpose and contributing to the community was obviously a great survival benefit for the collective. And you can imagine that the opposite of that, not having a purpose, would be somewhat counterproductive to the community.
But I guess sometimes in our modern lives we can get kind of stuck because we don't have a purpose.
I think that's right. I think that a real danger in our society when we have become so disconnected from one another. You're not going to, you know, be scrolling through Facebook and necessarily find your purpose.
I asked doctor Killingsworth if purpose was something he's seen in the data from the thousands of people who sign up on Track Yourhappiness dot org. People mention things like purpose a lot. Does that volunteer your non objective category.
Yeah, I mean I think to me, that's almost more
like an outcome than a predictor. I think a lot of the things that bring us happiness, like living a purposeful life, for a meaningful life, for all kinds of other things to some degree or kind of satisfying fundamental human needs because we're a social species, and so you know, when you engage with other people, when you feel respected by them, when you have all of these other like social features, that would show up on all these other different forms of happiness outcomes as well.
What doctor Killingsworth is saying is that a happy life, in a way will have its own purpose. Meaning you can think of having a purpose or aligning your actions to your values as making you happy, or you can think that finding things that make you happy aligns your actions with your values, giving you a purpose. It's all a feedback loop in your brain, so you can look at it both ways. And this brings up another factor that affects your happiness, which is how your brain reacts
to events. Let's talk about stoicism. What is that.
Yeah, Stoicism is one of my favorite philosophical concepts. It was popularized by Marcus Aurelius, and for people who don't know, he was the emperor in Gladiator, So at the beginning of Gladiator he was the guy that was in charge of Rome. So he was a Roman emperor. Russian here, not Russell Crowe. They were buddies, you know, at least
that's my memory of Gladiator. Marcus Aurelius was a Roman emperor and he was a Stoic philosopher, and he was very much into self regulation and how to regulate his own emotions and his responses to things, because he felt, hey, I have this important position. I need to be on top of my game. And so he wrote down a lot of reflections in the form of a journal. He to remind himself how to deal with the world, how to accept pain, how to accept change, and how to
deal with things like loss. He lived during a time of plagues war, he lost several of his children that his writings are filled with reminders to welcome challenges and to focus on what is within one's own control.
Okay, you might be wondering what does ay Roman philosopher have to do with science, and the answer is that Stoicism and Marcus Aurelis's writing have become the base is for something called cognitive behavioral therapy.
Yeah. Kinditive behavioral therapy is really one of the most popular, i would say, and most widely subscribed counseling therapies where you assess the world and what happens in the world somewhat dispassionately, and negative self talk is diminished in your perception. I think we an example. You know what happens if you lost one hundred dollars out, Well, if I lose this money, you know, there are two responses to it. One is, oh, I'm stupid. I shouldn't have lost that money.
I really needed that money. I'm not going to be able to make my rent, or I'm not going to be able to buy those shoes that I really wanted. Those sorts of things, those sorts of negative self talk bits that can help to really drive our mood and our emotions to a negative place. But the other way to look at it is, hey, you know it is money. It's replaceable in the ground scheme of things. You will probably get that one hundred dollars back through some way
or another. And yes, I lost one hundred dollars, but someone else, perhaps someone who really needed that money, will will find that money. Now, it doesn't really blunt the fact that you lost a hundred bucks. But what it does do is allows you the emotional space to process that and not allow it to drive your total emotional response.
It's about taking a step back and that that gives you the power to kind of choose how you're going to interpret what happened.
I think that's a good way to put it.
If you've been to therapy, this idea of changing the way you look at things might be familiar to you. And this is important because you might remember from the Happiness Tracking project that mind wandering, especially mind wandering negative thoughts, is highly correlated with unhappiness. Well, according to doctor Godwin, the solution is not to stop having negative thoughts, but to train your brain to change how you view those thoughts.
You know, if you talked about the neuroscience of cognitive behavioral therapy. I think that there are two elements to it. One is engaging these sort of logical based areas of the brain, areas like prefrontal cortext but it's also the process of slowing things down so that you have time to process. We know from the neuroscience literature that activity and patterns of activity actually are capable of rewiring the brain.
So learning to take a step back and providing different thought patterns that can effectively change your response should the same set of circumstances arise in the future.
In other words, you can train your brain to see things on the bright side, which the data shows will make you happier. All right, Now, we're going to get to the question of money. And here I'm going to guess you believe one of two things, One that money doesn't really make you happy, or two that money does make you happy, but only up to a certain point. Well, if you believe either of those things, I'm here to tell you that the size of happiness says you're wrong.
We're going to get into that after the break, will be right back and we're back right. We're talking about the different factors that affect your happiness, and now we get to the topic of money. Does money make you happy? Well, According to doctor Killingsworth, for a long time, the conventional wisdom in scientific circles was that the answer was no.
So if you go back to the state of the scientific literature, I think the kind of common narrative amongst happiness researchers is that money doesn't really matter very much for happiness, like especially given how much people seem to care about it. While there's something that's true about that that I'll mention in a minute, I think we actually got that kind of wrong. It turns out that people
who make more money are pretty consistently happier. You know, on average, people who earn more tend to be happier. You could be rich and miserable, you could be poor and very happy, but on average, flipping the money switch up without making other things worse probably is going to nudge you in a positive rather than a negative direction. Least, that's kind of the shape of the correlation that I observe.
Now I know what you're thinking at this point, which is yes or Hey, of course money helps make you happy. He need some money to survive, to have something to eat, and to have a roof over your head. But surely at some point money stops being useful, And that's what I thought too, So I asked doctor Killyesworth this question. Is there an amount after which money will not make you happier? Or is having more money always better?
Well, that's a good question. You've hit on one of kind of the key topics here. Starting around twenty ten, there's this very famous paper by Dannykanneman and ingus student where they found that while cognitive aspects of well being seemed to keep rising with income, they argued that the emotional component of happiness rises up to around seventy five thousand
dollars a year in income, and then it plateaus. And when I run into regular people, if they know like one thing about the signs of happiness or what is the data show, it's probably that finding. That's like the one thing that probably the most people know.
Yeah, you might have heard about it in the news. The study from Dustin and ten supposedly found that making more money makes you happier, but only up to about making seventy five thousand dollars in income a year, and after that it doesn't make you any happier. And this finding was very popular, I think because it confirms what we all want to believe, which is that money isn't everything, that rich people are not necessarily happier than the rest
of us. But actually, when doctor Killingsworth looked into it, this turned out to be not quite true.
One of the things that I've been working on in the last few years is kind of unpacking this relationship. So I've now run this big set of using experience sampling a really really great way to measure how people are actually feeling. And it turns out in my big study, when I look at the relationship between how much money people earn and how happy they really feel in the moments of their lives, happiness in the moment just keeps going up. There wasn't an inflection point at seventy five
thousand dollars or any other particular level of income. There didn't seem to be any threshold where that relationship change. It just sort of kept going modestly but steadily.
Upward, meaning people with more money have fewer negative in the moment happiness.
Yeah, just kind of their average moment gets a little bit better and a little bit better the more money they tend to be earning. So people are more satisfied and more fulfilled and find life more meaningful on average to a modest degree. When they earn more money, I see and their day to day experiences seem to be better as well.
So more money, not more problems, More money, fewer problem on average. What doctor Klein'sworth found was that an average, having more money always makes you happier. That's true if you're poor or if you're already rich. Getting more money in general will make you even happier. This doesn't just show up in doctor Kleinsworth data. There have been natural experiments that prove this.
Money is hard to experiment with compared to lots of other things, but we have pretty good evidence that when people are like randomly assigned more money, they actually become substantially happier as well. There are some nice natural experiments, for example, called lotteries, So there are some great studies that have been done where they've looked at people who play the lottery a similar amount. But then some people
win and some people don't. Uh, and when you follow those people up later, the people who want and got more money actually turn out to be happier and sometimes quite a bit and sometimes for quite a long time. There was a great study I think it was in Sweden where they looked at people ten years later after they won. It's a pretty decently sized effect.
Now, to be fair, one thing that doctor Kellingsworth found that doesn't get better with more money is stress.
However, when I look at like, what is like the emotional profile of people who are earning more money, they're not necessarily less stressed. That's kind of the one emotion that doesn't really get better when you earn more and more and more money. So if you think, hmm, it'll be great, you know, when my income is doubled, you might not be any less stressed. But pretty much every aspect of kind of your emotional life, at least my data would predict, are probably going to be better.
In other words, if someone offers you money, you should take it. On average, having money will only increase your happiness, even if it doesn't make you less stressed. Now, of course, there are several caveats here. Number one, this relationship between money and happiness is on average, having more money doesn't guarantee you're going to be happier. And number two, money isn't everything. It's just one of the many things that contribute to your happiness.
It's just one of the many leavers. So I think the part that's really true and importantly true is that tons of things matter for happiness, and money and income is just one of them. So if you sacrifice all kinds of other sources of happiness and make more money, you're probably going to be less happy, even if money is helpful.
Now, one interesting fact about money and happiness is said having more money on average will make you happier, but having friends or neighbors that make more money than you will tend to make you unhappier. In one study, researchers from the London School of Economics look at data from a survey of Americans from nineteen seventy two to two thousand and eight that ask three questions, how happy are you? How much money do you make? Do you think you
make more or less money than other Americans? The analysis found that people who tended to think they made less money than others also tended to be unhappier, no matter how much money they actually made. In general, making more money than your friends and neighbors will make you happier, and making less will make you unhappier. There is good news, though, which is what happens when you think about why money brings us happiness.
When I look at why is there this positive relationship between money and happiness, and what I find is that about eighty percent of that relationship, even for that emotional component, can be explained by the fact that as people earn more money, they feel more in control of their lives. So if you have someone with a low income but feels very in control of their life, they psychologically look a lot like a very well off.
Person Whoah, it comes down to control and not having to worry about the future.
I haven't necessarily looked at it in terms of like the future in quotes, but yeah, the more money you have, the more you tend to feel in control of your life, and that seems to be uniquely able to explain this relationship.
In other words, doctor Killingsworth also asks people, how in control of your life do you feel? And the people who said they felt more in control of their lives tended to be the people who had more money, and they also tended to be the people who were happier, which tells you that most of the value of having money is just having more control of your life.
So I looked at lots of other factors as well, and it's kind of fueling in control of your life. That's the biggest one. Another one is the simply the more money you earn, the less likely you are to have trouble paying bills. So when I look at the lowest income people in my study, almost half of them say, yeah, I had trouble paying a bill in the last two weeks, Whereas if you go to the people with very high incomes,
it's like seven percent of them. So you get a seven x difference in the likelihood that bills are a source of uncertainty and riskiness for you. So those two things together are at least within the set of things that I measured, those were kind of the biggest expl natory factors.
Now, this is probably not surprising to you. If you have money, you don't have to worry as much about what's going to happen to you or how are you going to pay your bills. But the point doctor Killingesporre says is that once you know that's the real reason money affects your happiness, you can work around it.
However, and I think this is part of what is a little bit empowering. While if you look at this relationship between money and happiness, about eighty percent of that can be explained by people who earn more money feel more in control of their lives, but the flip side of that is that only about twenty percent of how in control of you feel of your life is due to money.
What what do you mean? What do you mean?
What I think that points to is the fact that, well, what money brings us perhaps is control over our life. There are ways that we can get control over our life that have nothing to do with money. And so you could kind of have a workaround for money itself by finding ways to kind of take control of your life, like what kind of life do you want to live? And how could you reorient your life to live that life?
And so the more you find the ways to do that, perhaps suggestively, speculatively, it might be possible that you could end up kind of getting the life of someone who's richer without necessarily having to earn more money.
What doctor Killy Sporth is saying is that, yes, having more money will make you happier. That's mostly because it gives you the feeling of being in control of your life. So if you can figure out other ways to get that feeling, then maybe you don't need as much money. All Right, when we come back, we're going to tackle the last piece of the happiness puzzle, and then I'm going to ask each of our experts if they're happy. So stay with us, we'll be right back. Welcome back.
One thing that we should talk about is depression. There are certainly a case of individuals with treatment resistant depression. And as much as we can affect the way our brains work by how we think, there are individuals who cannot do that or are their brains are not wired in such a way that will allow them to take
these tools and do something with them. So that we have to really step back a little bit to say that disorders of brain circuits, like disruptions in how areas like the frontal lobes or the amygdala and the hippcamp is how they communicate. If those are disrupted, then it's really difficult for you to think your way out of that and to think yourself into a happy set of circumstances. Right, So there's a limit to which these things can be
very helpful and effective. But I think if you have treatment resistant depression, then that's something that you have to go and get seen about by professional all.
Right, the lassie slip puzzle we're going to tackle here is what does this all need? And to do that, I want to go back to the question of what happiness is and whether it's what we feel in the moment or what we feel when we take a step back to think about how our lives are going. Because as we learn, how you answer the question are you happy can be different depending on when you're asked that question, but according to our experts, that difference is not totally random.
One of the things that I've seen to some degree is that I think happiness is simpler than we realize, and its causes are more complex than we realize.
What do you mean by that?
So you've hit on I think one of the key sort of features of all of this. There's one element of this that's really how good or bad our moments are, But then there are also these other more kind of slower moving elements, like is your life fulfilling and meaningful and satisfying? Overall? When I look across all the different things that matter, for happiness. It turns out pretty similar
things matter for all the different flavors. You know, a fulfilling life overall is also tends to be produced by the kinds of things. Things that you know, drive good experiences in the moment, and I think the reality to some extent is that both of those things are going
to come together. Those stable factors that we think of as affecting things like how satisfied you are, tend to affect your moment, and having good experiences in the moment that you have over and over again also produce kind of a good life in the overall sense.
So when I told you that my cork is floating, that's the best analogy that I can come up with, because you can kind of imagine your emotional life as a quirk bobbing on the ocean, and every wave that lifts that cork, maybe it's a moment of joy or pleasure. It's like a little burst of dopamine, and then the troughs of disappointment or sadness could reflect some kind of dip in the brain's reward circuitry.
Okay, what doctor Killing's Worth and doctor Gotwyn are saying is that there's a certain simplicity about the experience of happiness. If you're having a lot of good moments in your life, your brain is wired to recognize that and tell you, hey, things are going well, keep it up, and you feel happy. Or if you're having a lot of bad moments, your brain is wired to tell you, Hmmm, something's not right here and you feel unhappy. And I think this tells
you two things about happiness. The first is that variations in how happy you feel are inevitable.
So even people that are pretty happy will have some really miserable moments, and even people that are pretty unhappy, you'll have some really great moments, like how can someone who's so unfulfilled have such a happy moment? Or if I'm supposedly living such a great life, why am I having this moment where I feel so terrible? But I think that's just kind of a feature of being human, is that we have this dynamic element of happiness that really does change.
Into the words nobody has a perfect life. We all have our ups and downs. And the second thing I think all of this tells is is that if there is something wanted to change about your life and your happiness, a good place to start is to pay attention to those day to day moments. Happier people do have ups and downs, but according to doctor Killingsworth's data, those ups
and downs are better quality. So you can look at your own moments and see what's costing them and potentially change them, or if you can't change them, maybe you can work around them. Because as we've learned in these episodes, there are a lot of things that affect your happiness, and I.
Think that's emblematic of kind of a general tactic and strategy for thinking about happiness is if there's some part of it that you're kind of blocked on, Like I want to have the happiness that that thing would give me, but maybe that's a hard thing for me to change. I'm in a job that has some future, but for whatever reason, I can't really change that job. Or you know, I earn this amount of money and you know I'm a teacher. There's just no way I'm going to start
earning six hundred thousand dollars a year. Or I have a challenging relationship with this family member. I'm not going to stop interacting with them. It's important enough for me to sustain that. Can we find workarounds for the things that we maybe can't change by understanding the kinds of happiness and the ways that they might bring us happiness if they were different. I see, you know, how can we be the river flowing around the rock?
I see? I see sometimes in our lives we find that there's this lever that we just can't pull, and so, understanding more about the whole picture, let's just work around that by pulling other levers.
Absolutely, when I was saying earlier that measuring happiness is simpler than we think, but the causes of happiness are more complicated than we realize. There's a downside to that, which is there's no one silverable to happiness. But the upside is it gives us a lot of options for how we pursue it. There are all of these different levers we can pull. So if for you one of those levers is really sticky you can't move it, that's okay, just find a different one.
There. Are you happy now? I mean, are you happy? That we're coming to the end of the k So I thought i'd end things by asking our two experts if they're happy? All right, Matt, thank you so much. Last question, are you happy.
I am pretty happy.
You know.
Like I said, happiness is a wiggly line. So I have moments that are amazing and moments that are challenging, and lots of moments in the middle. But overall, I love my life. I love getting to work on this problem. I also get to take all the things that I learn and try to apply them myselves.
And think your happiness changed before and after this project.
Definitely, I mean, I've learned a lot from it. One of the biggest warnings for me was the very first one that I talked about and discovered, which was this relationship to mind wandering by nature. I think and spend a lot of time thinking and in my head, and honestly, wasn't until I both collected the data and looked at all of the results that I started to recognize when that was helpful and when that wasn't so helpful.
All right, that was pretty good, Dwayne. Do you feel pretty happy about that conversation?
I'm content with it.
Well, well, don't get too excited there.
Well that's my wife saying. You know, this is what I did. So I went to a restaurant my wife, and it was a new restaurant that we hadn't eaten at before, and at the end of it, it's like, you know, what did you think? And my standard response is I wasn't too bad. I have this sort of glitch where I can't like fully invest in it. And it was great. It was hash Browns and an omelet and it was wonderful. But my normal response is I
wasn't bad. I'm sort of like a Larry David. I guess pretty pretty, pretty good.
Well, I think we make a good team then, because my wife tells me I'm too positive all the time.
Oh really, so you're you would say, wow, that was the best ever.
I love everything. I love every mine of air I read.
Well, that's a good way to be. That's true happiness if you can reach that state.
Well, I'm also a cartoonist. I think that helps. All right. Thanks for joining us. See you next time. And hey, if you want to join doctor Killingsworth's Study of Happiness, just go to track your Happiness dot org. And if you want to read the book Doctor Godwin and I Rode, just search for Out of your Mind The Biggest Mysteries of the Human Brain in your favorite bookstore. Thanks for
joining us, See you next time. You've been listening to Science Stuff the production of iHeartRadio, written and produced by me or Ycham, edited by Rose Seguda, executive producer Jerry Rowland, and audio engineer and mixer Kasey Peckram. And you can follow me on social media. Just search for PhD Comics
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