SPECIAL EDITION: CORONAVIRUS: Emiliana Simon-Thomas on the Science of Happiness During Difficult Times

resources and so much needed inspiration. Today I'm joined by Emiliana Simon Thomas. Miliana is the science director of the Greater Good Science Center at the University of California, Berkeley. She's the co instructor of the Science of Happiness course and helps run its exp Ending Gratitude Project. Ameliana, thanks so much for joining us. It's a pleasure. Thanks for inviting me to be on your show. Your topic of expertise is extremely important right now. Happiness. UM really going

through a very difficult period in our history. UM, so very grateful for you joining the show. Ameliana. How do you define happiness and does it differ from person to person depending on I suppose their personality. Yeah, I'm so glad you asked that question, because that's one of the

first mistakes that many people make when they think about happiness. UM. I define happiness as an overarching characteristic of one's life, and it is described as feeling good most of the time, being able to handle life setbacks, and a graceful and forward UM learning manner, and being well connected, feeling like you trust other people. UM. The mistake that people make is thinking that happiness means pleasure, or that happy its means cheerfulness or enthusiasm or gratifying a desire, when in

fact those are positive emotional states. Positive emotional states matter, but they don't equal happiness. And if we strive for sea happiness by trying to string together a perpetual sequence of positive emotions, we actually feel less happy. I'm so glad you said that, because that is also what we sort of believe, is that happiness is not the sort of happy face emoji, but this sort of longer state of UM well being. And so I think you're right.

I think everyone's chasing that happy face all the time, and it's not a very realistic, uh pursuit and actually leads on yeah yeah, and the quickly addressed the second part of your question. Absolutely, happiness feels different. Individuals who have a more shy or um nervous disposition or personality might experience happiness in a way that feels really different and been a very extroverted and in social social individual. That doesn't mean that the benefits of being happy are

any different. It just means that the expression and the behaviors and the particular activities that might be the best fit for fostering happiness might differ between individuals. So I'm going to ask the very obvious question, Um, how does a person stay quote unquote happy during very challenging times? What are you saying to people or what are you

hearing that is helping people get through this difficult moment? Yeah, I mean, I think one of the most valuable things in this in this particular time of the COVID nineteen pandemic, is to first develop some skills of managing stress and anxiety. Stress and anxiety are very, very natural and real, and the reason is because this time is particularly uncertain. The circumstances are ambiguous, We don't know the answers. Humans don't

like ambiguity. The human nervous system is designed to try to find patterns and to predict what's coming and to be good at it, and just having a situation whether there is no possible answer that we can rely on, is inherently stressful, and because of that, the first thing we need to do is develop some skills for just finding some ease and balanced day in and day out, and for many that can come from practices that fall

into the category of mindfulness. This maybe just a deep breath where you inhale deeply and exhale slowly, and put your hand on your heart and try to not think about the future or the past, or you're to do list, or the harm that you know is happening in the world.

That instead just maybe the warm sun on your shoulders, maybe the delicious beverage that you enjoyed with your breakfast, just the things that bring you comfort and ease for even a moment, it can really benefit that pervasive stress and anxiety that we're handling or grappling with these days.

After you've gotten that under your belt, really prioritizing moments of connection and connection where you feel like you're actually a source of support is a valuable way to um to manage time in a way that will be beneficial, that will fuel your sense of meaning and purpose. I think many of us are struggling, particularly those of us who are not on the front line, who are not considered essential, because we're not out there actually actively finding

the vaccine or treating people who are suffering UM. There's a sense of guilt or shame around our inability to be of service, and we need to recognize that we are of service just by staying home. We are of service by reaching out to others who are alone, who are isolated. We are service by connecting with our friends in the ways that we still can despite the expectations

for staying physically distant from one another. We are of service by just being present and aware and caring and caring about the issue and keeping ourselves praise of how we can be helpful outside of just trying to fix

the problem or expecting ourselves to fix the problem. So important what you're saying, I mean, how we can each be of service and and it seems like in this time of being at home with our loved ones, probably being of service also means to really be thoughtful about your relationships and and be kind to the people in

close proximity to you absolutely. I mean, if we have issues that we've been able to kind of put under the pillow because we are so busy in our regular lives that are now becoming more evident to us as we're spending time closer and longer with our families, it's a perfect time to set aside UH and the opportunities for real, heartfelt conversations and emotional sharing and spending time together.

I think for parents who are home with school aged children, UM, this is a remarkable uh and yet strange opportunity to get to know each other in a different way than perhaps we were able to when our lives were busier and involved more time doing separate things out of the house. So relationship skills like expressing gratitude can be a really neat way to strengthen our bonds and UH convey our

sense of commitment and interdependence with one another. Expressing gratitude can seem really easy and sort of flippant, but research shows that when we get good at it, and when we're specific about it, it can be a really powerful asset to our health and well being. And what I mean by specific is instead of just saying hey, thanks, thanks for in the dishes, or thanks for helping me carry the groceries inside the house. Um, we say something like, um, hey,

thanks for doing the dishes. I mean, you could have done a bunch of other things instead, you could have watched TV or um taking a shower, but you helped me, and you're doing that allowed me to do, um, what I really wanted to do instead, which is have a phone call with my mother who I hadn't been able to talk to earlier today. So what I did was express what the person did, acknowledge their effort, and explain how it helped me. And it took us a few

seconds longer. But those aspects of gratitude are really important to share, and when we share them, the gratitude has a much greater impact on a sort of sense of closeness and and shared bond. That's super powerful. Um, Like you said, being specific, that's a really great piece of advice. On the other side of the spectrum, where there are a lot of people who are home alone, and you know, dealing with socializolation is very difficult for a lot of people.

What's your advice for people who are dealing with loneliness or even depression? Right now. Yeah, Loneliness and depression are a huge problem in this pandemic time. I can only encourage those of you who are by yourselves to use the tools that are available to you through technology to connect with people. UM. There are many many organizations who are providing live events, or people all join a called together on Zoom and talk about what is going on

in their lives, get to know each other. I've participated in several of them, both as a expert perspective and also just as a member of the community. UM. There are lots of little ways to engage with people online through games and having some levity during these difficult times

is of great value. Walking outside if you're able to, if you got the right protective equipment and your a location where that's acceptable, is a really powerful way to Even if you have to see someone at this six foot distance, it's still meaningful to see another human being and make eye contact, not or smile. Those little signals

are really important. Having phone calls with people who you know and care about who also care about you is a really valuable way to remind yourself that you're still connected, remind yourself that you're still a human, that belongs to a particular community. These reminders are essential. Humans really suffer when put in a position where they're deprived of social contact and loneliness becomes the feeling we'll be back after

this break. So what's the difference between moment terry happiness and this deep, lasting happiness that you're talking about, and what is the key to that? Yeah, I mean a momentary positive emotion, and I'm being really deliberate about using that word because I think it's a mistake to call that happiness. You might feel happy in a moment, and

that is fine, but it's not very specific. We're actually equipped to experience this vast array of very particular emotions that we've been into the category of happy, that that feel good, and they can again be feeling of pride, a feeling of inspiration, the feeling of elevation, the feeling of amusement, a feeling of sheer pleasure, a feeling of anticipation,

uh so many, a feeling of closeness and affection. All of these specific feelings are evolutions way of orienting us towards opportunities, towards meaningful opportunities, and they galvanize us too to furnish the response that makes that opportunity most available and most accessible to us, And so that response is pretty quick, like, oh, I have a an anticipatory sort of enjoyment sensation because of the smell of chocolate chip

cookies baking. What that does is quickly make me want to walk towards the direction where that fragrance gets stronger. And then that's the end of that feeling. Right, that feelings over it served its purpose. If I was like, Okay, that feeling is so nice that I'm going to try to keep feeling it all day long, I would actually not be able to do that. Right. If I smell chocolate chip cookie for seventy two hours, I would soon not be able to smell it anymore, and or even

find it quite aversive, right as you might. You know, think of people who work in occupations where they experience something that might be pleasurable once in a while or even regularly, but not all day long as sort of ordinary and normal. Are nervous systems habituate and adapt to stimulate that that are regular and readily available without any change. So because of that, our punts of emotions aren't meant to last and go on and be repeated over and

over all day. Instead, they're meant to occur in births and to be dynamic and to come up and then recover, as it's the case with our negative emotions, and our negative emotions are as important as our positive emotions to our survival and our overall happiness in life. Oftentimes, the most meaningful experiences that we have involved negative emotions, those moments in life where we are moved to change something about who we are, or moved to take an action

that might be particularly challenging or difficult. Those emotions and those actions are really important to our sense of meaning in life, to our sense of purpose, and those are both instrumental to what we're calling happiness, what I'd like to refer to its happiness in life. We have to

be able to experience positive emotions. That we're the kind of person who can never feel joy when good things are happening, we're probably not going to end up in the category of a person who has high happiness in life. Same for someone who isn't able to recover from life difficult moments, who isn't skilled in the domain of resilience, they're also unlikely to fall into the category it's very happy in life. So there are these elements, are these

components that really help us arrive at happiness. But it's not exclusively or even predictably just trying to feel positive emotions all the time. That actually doesn't work. In fact, those researches shows that when people try that, when that's their approach to striving for happiness, they're less happy. That expectation is impossible to fulfill. Yeah, like curse of high

expectations is real. Um. Yeah, when we when we were doing the research for our book, we did see and and our experience is this that you know, having that sort of larger purpose um, and trying to find purpose across your life and and getting outside yourself kind of creates that halo of happiness um, that feeling that you're talking about, which unfortunately we're confusing with the word happiness.

So I I really appreciate everything that you've said. And you actually now have a course um that helps people think about how to practice happiness. Yeah. So actually since two thousand and fourteen, we've been running a Science of Happiness course. It's some d X platform e d x dot org. You can just search for Science of Happiness. It's modeled after an undergraduate introductory level course, so there's

eight modules of it. Each module has videos and readings and what we call happiness practices, and these are exercises that we've drawn from empirical studies that have shown that they have impact on happy net and people try them, and there's also exams and problem sets and the hope is and actually our own internal data has shown that when people complete the course, when people learn these ideas, invest in the practices and try them and exercise them,

they actually grow. Their happiness goes up, their loneliness goes down, their stress goes down, their sense of meaning in life goes up, their sense of common humanity increases. This is all learnable. It's just a matter of putting in the time and and deciding that this is something that matters. Can you give us one example? I know it's a it's a whole course, but is there one example that we can take away from this conversation. Yeah, so the one that I shared earlier, the specific gratitude is a

great example. Another example which is always fun and interesting to offer from from Berkeley being someone from Berkeley, California, because it's a common bumper sticker. It's called random acts of kindness. What random acts of kindness means is just the fighting on a given day or maybe for a sequence of three to five days, just perform three to five kind acts for somebody else. It can be holding the door open, It can be UM paying for their coffee. It can be calling them out of the blue and

sharing UH an uplifting story, any number of things. Turns out that when people engage in this practice random acts of kindness and sort of shifts the tenor of your orientation towards other people, we think and think about and see other people in a more benevolent and friendly and trusting light. And it reduces stress and um strengthens bonds and increases our own happiness. So that's another example of activity that could be particularly beneficial in these times when

we are grappling with the COVID nineteen pandemic. The more we preserve our sense of care and concern towards others, towards the world around us, and the more we act on that sense of care and concern, the better off we're going to be. What makes you optimistic or hopeful in this moment? For me, this moment is unprecedented in its in the degree of of global uh commonality that

we're all witnessing. We have more in common with people around the world today than we've ever had in my life course, at least, we're all experiencing this remarkable event that will shift humanity in a way that that I can't really predict. But I think what we've learned through a hard lesson is that the less we cooperate, the less we coordinate our effort, the less we share resources and information, the more suffering and pain we are going

to have to endure. And so I am optimistic that in the wake of this experience, our approach to many many different endeavors, from political to science to education, will be much more collective, will be able to understand and prioritize a more common approach to managing the challenges that we're facing, and maybe that will inspire to come together around other huge challenges that are on the on the road map for us, like climate change. I've douts what

brings me optimism? Well, I have to thank you so much for this interview. I mean, you gave us such great advice from from the random acts of kindness and and sort of getting outside of yourself to create that halo of happiness to actually learning about ourselves through these difficult times. So we really appreciate your taking the time to be on the show and we hope to have you back. Thank you so much for including me, and thank you for doing the show, and onward onwards. Thank you.

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