Pushkin.
Good afternoon, folks.
Thanks, yes, thank you so much for coming out to the podcast. If you've listened to the last few episodes of The Happiness Lab, you know that I've been trying to get out of my tiny apartment podcast closet and into the real world so that I can meet listeners just like you. And to do that, I've been hosting a series of Happiness Lab live shows recorded in front of live audiences. Today's episode comes from the thirtieth anniversary
Hot Dogs Festival in Toronto. At the event, I got to chat with someone you've met on the show before, best selling author and fellow podcaster Gretchen Ruby.
Hello, Hello, Hello, Hello. We're so happy to be here, of course no.
Gretchen recently joined me on The Happiness Lab for a special double episode about her new book Life in Five Senses, How Exploring the Senses got Me out of my head and into the world. At the Hot Dogs event, Gretchen and I spoke more about how to awaken our senses and followed up on what we'd both learned since we last talked.
It almost became unmanageable because I was like anything I was thinking of I would immediately start thinking of new things to try.
You can hear our full and very fun conversation if you're a Pushkin Plus subscriber or by signing up at Pushkin dot fm forward slash joined Pushkin. But what you'll hear right now is what happened after Gretchen and I finished our initial chat. Because our event didn't end there. Gretchen and I both wanted to hear what fans just like you wanted to know about happiness and how we could better use our five senses to improve our well being.
So we put out a call to the Hot Dogs audience for all their burning questions, and the folks in Toronto really stepped up. As you'll hear, it turned into one of the most engaging live Q and A sessions that I've had a chance to take part in in years.
Well, and Laurie, I think the first I'm going to give you the first one ye yeah, okay? For someone going through a really tough time right now, who describes them in survival mode? What is the one thing or the first thing you would suggest they do to preserve well being?
Good question?
How many people not did you ask this question, but feel like that could have been their question the fee. You feel like you're in survival mode right now?
Show U yeah. Clap, clap, clap, show hands. Yeah.
So it seems like about a quarter of the audience is clapping. And this gets to one of the strategies I would suggest, which is what the psychologist Kristen f calls kind of feeling your common humanity. Right, So there's a sort of strategy you can use for self compassion because, like, I think a lot of us feel like we're struggling right now and we're in survival mode, and in some ways that's like normative.
Right.
The economy is falling apart, Like climate change is scary, political polarization is scary. We've just kind of maybe gotten out of a three year pandemic, but maybe not. I don't know if it's really safe to be in this big on, you know, but like there's a lot of stuff that's making us feel uncertain and overwhelmed and scared and tired. And that's for folks who are just like at the regular baseline. If you in that climate go through something really tough, you're definitely going to feel like
you're struggling and you're in survival mode. It's normative, And so that's kind of strategy number one is to remember you're not feeling you're not screwing up. That's what emotions you're supposed to be feeling right now. I think this is a problem is that sometimes and I worry sometimes
that podcasts like ours contribute to this. Right, there's so much talk about happiness and positive emotions, and you can sometimes feel like you're if you're in survival mode, you're doing something wrong, right, But it's worth remembering that negative emotions are normative. We're supposed to feel frustrated and angry and scared and anxious at a lot of different times.
And so first of all, don't beat yourself up. Your body and your mind is doing something that it's supposed to be doing, and it's doing something that a lot of us are going through right now. So that would be kind of strategy number one for common humanity. But then strategy number two would be like allowing yourself to experience those emotions, which is something that I think people tend not to like to do.
I mean, I know I don't like to do it.
Right. If I'm feeling those things, it's kind of like, uh, it both feels like something's wrong, but it also feels like something I should just like suppress and run away from. But practices where you find ways to allow those emotions. On the podcast, we shared one by the meditation teacher Tara Brock, which is this meditation practice called RAIN, which
stands for Recognize, Allow, Investigate, and nurture. Do you like recognize I'm feeling like I'm in survival mode right now, But then you sit and you say, okay, step number two Allow, I'm going to just allow that feeling and you investigate. You notice what is my body doing when I'm in survival mode? Like I am tense, my neck is tense, I'm you know, or maybe I like have all these cravings. I want to eat something, I want to check my email, whatever, notice and pay it to
like five ten minutes, just sit and watch. And the sitting and watching works because sometimes when you actually pay attention to these negative emotions they can kind of subside a bit, but you don't end there. The last step of Tara Brack's meditation practice is this end nurture, where you kind of do something nice for yourself. What can you take off your Can you call a friend? Can you make a connection. Can you dive into your five senses?
Maybe this is a time when you want to curate a particular sense that you really like a nice candle or something right. Practices like that research suggests can really reduce negative emotions and feels like palliated care workers and so on. So it's a powerful strategy. So those will be my two things. One is like, you are not alone.
What you're experiencing is normal. Everyone goes through this. But then give yourself a strategy not to suppress and ignore that emotion, but to kind of hang out with it enough that you can get through it.
Here's a funny one too for stress is to schedule time to worry, so that you put aside time and like maybe it's once a week you're gonna worry, or maybe it's every day you're gonna worry, but it's like, don't do it right before you go to sleep, And if you start to worry outside that time, it's like, well, don't worry about that right now, because you've got your
time to worry. And what it does is it lets you be feel free during the time when you're not scheduled to worry, and then when you do, because it is useful. Like anxiety, worry, anger, frustration. These are all have positive roles to play. But it's like you're sitting down and you're like, now is the time when I worry, and like you can get out your pad of paper and make a list of things to do, or you
can just you know, think it through. But I just think that's so funny that you just put it on your calendar, like a dentist appointment schedule.
Time to worry.
Okay, and this one is related, So I'm going to kick it off to you too. How do you overcome negative thoughts and patterns of overthinking?
So rumination, Yeah, rumination one of the biggest things that I think comes up for my students in my class, right, you know, these negative thought patterns that you can kind of get into, and the overall hack there is to try to get out of these sort of self focused thoughts.
A lot of our rumination is about me, me, me.
It's really about oh my gosh, I'm struggling, I'm not doing enough, and really self critical.
I screwed up, I screwed.
Up, right, But it's also about you, And there's lots of evidence that if you can just perspective, take a little bit right, make it not about me, me me. But even like third person, like Laurie, you're going through a tough time, for example, that can actually take some
of the pain of that overthinking away. It sounds really silly just changing the pronouns that you use to talk to yourself, but there's evidence that speaking in the first person, I'm messing up, I'm doing et cetera, versus like, hey, Laurie, you got a tough thing going on, right, third person,
second person. If you think about it, when when you hear you refer to yourself and you hear your name, it's usually somebody else saying it, right, it's often a mentor or a friend, right, and your brain doesn't know the difference. Your brain is like, oh, a wise counsel is you know, someone who really cares about me is explaining to me what I should do. And it means when you use that third person to talk to somebody else.
You know, if I was talking to my husband Mark and I said Mark blah blah blah, like I'm often in wise counsel mode, I'm often in the mode of comforting, right, And so just the act of switching your head.
I think another way to say this is we're much better giving advice to other people than taking it ourselves. And so it's a way to fake yourself out.
Yeah, it's a way to fake yourself out so that you talk to yourself like a friend, which we don't normally do. And if you really want to up the ante, you can use the favorite strategy that I love from Ethan Cross, who's a professor who talks a lot about overthinking. If you want a great book on overthinking, check out his book Chatter. He often uses the sort of what would so and so do? It is a very famous study with kids where you asked kids, what would Batman do?
You don't have to use Batman, you know, but you can use you know, what would Beyonce do?
What would my mom do? What would you know?
Like a why pick the wise person in your life and use that phrase and so getting out of the self self self by using your name in third person, or if that's not working, jump to a different very wise third person.
Lots of evidence that that helps a lot.
That's great.
All right, So now I have one for you you it's actually.
For both of us.
But I'm ali like Wratch answer right, So you focused on the importance of human connection as a critical component of creating happiness, something that we've both talked a lot about, but this message wasn't highly discussed that much pre pandemic. So what do we think the impact of the US
Surgeon General's recent social connection framework will be? Will inspire people to take this issue more seriously and so just bracketed for folks that don't know our surgeon general will be big murthy just issued this huge on his new priority right now, which is fighting loneliness and social disconnection.
And he wants to.
Do that both with sort of individual strategies and sort of changing public infrastructure to make people less lonely. It's kind of his big push, which is kind of cool, right that, Like on the yields of a pandemic, the push that the Surgeon General is going for is not, you know, fighting future disease and so on. He's really
focused on loneliness, which is pretty cool. But Gretchen and I wanted to ask you this question because I think when you heard it, you kind of disagreed with the premise a little bit.
If I recall, Yeah, I think.
People have been very focused on loneliness for a while. Like, I think it's wonderful that he's shining a spotlight on it in particular right now. But I do think it's something that, because it is so well established how important human connection is to us, that I think even pre pandemic people were very aware that we needed to think about people who were isolated, think about people who were drifting away, people who had no friends or few friends.
The role of relationships to the work place, Like when they do studies of people at work who are happy, often those are people who people who say they have a friend at work, not just like an acquaintance, but a friend, like somebody that they could confide an important secret to, or that they feel like has their back, or like they're direct the person they directly report to.
Does that person really care.
About them and want to see them succeed in their
own aims for themselves. So I think there was a lot of awareness, There was a lot of research, and I think there was a lot of popular awareness of it, But I think you almost can't focus on it too much because it is kind of the centerpiece for a happy life, and so anything that helps us either broaden our connections or deepen our connections or improve the quality of our connections is something that is going to be good for the individual and good good for society.
Yeah, and I think it's worth saying good for the individual, both in terms of your mental health, but also in terms of your physical health.
That is astonishing. The physical consequences of loneliness.
Yeah.
I mean two of my favorite stats, one that you might have heard on the podcast before is that saying that you're lonely is the equivalent health effect on your longevity of smoking fifteen cigarettes a day, And it has twice to three times the negative effect that saying your obese has. Right, So these are like truly public health
issues that we're dealing with. I think on the podcast when I talked about it, I said it should if we loneliness should have one of those health warnings like on those like you know, pharmaceutical ads where it's like may cause like premature death and cancer and all these says like and like lack of sleep and so on.
It's because really it's actually a health issue. So in some ways it makes sense that the Surgeon General's focused on it because loneliness might actually be killing more people than.
We and I think the new workplace is something that we're only starting to grapple with now. How it's going to trickle down and affect people's relationship and I think for some people it's going to be very positive and that for some people it could be quite negative, and it could it could increase loneliness and isolation, and so again, I think it's something that we really need to think through and how as we confront new issues, how they're going to affect loneliness for better or for worse.
And just a little advertisement.
Our next season that we haven't announced yet is on what we're calling fighting under Sociality.
Under Sociality is.
Our install I cannot wait to listen our.
Instinct that, you know, when we're having a tough day, we definitely don't want to hang out with a friend. We want to like go plopped out and look at a screen by ourselves. So how can we, you know, fight our urge to not be social when we most need to.
Oh my gosh, I cannot wait to listen. That is that's well you heard it here first we got yeah, no, Well but so okay, okay, let's take a minute and talk about this though. This is something I want you to talk about in your podcast, because I think on the one hand, people know, yeah, I'm happier when I get out there A lot of times I don't want to go, but then when I show up, I'm glad that I went.
Yes. But on the other hand, I think.
Now more than ever, people are saying, hey, be kind to yourself, don't push yourself.
If you need to take take it easy, take it easy.
But sometimes that means that we're staying home in our sweats instead of like gearing up to go out, even though in the end probably the going out would make us happier. How do we know the difference between like healthy attention to our own you know, sense of energy, and when we need to push ourselves to engage with others because that is such a source of happiness.
Yeah, I'm so glad you asked this question because it's one of the episodes that I'm most excited about. In this Undersociality series, we interview this wonderful woman, Jessica Pan who's a self proclaimed introvert, and she has this lovely book called Sorry I'm Late. I didn't want to come.
Colon I seen the T shirt.
An introverts Guide to saying yes, and so Jessica's stories that she moved with she's American. She moved with her partner to the UK and realized she just didn't have friends, and she just was like, I have to go out and make friends.
I'm an introvert, I.
Hate social I hate being social, but like I need to do something. And so she in a very Gretchen kind of, you know, all or nothing way, it was like, all right, I'm going to go full extrovert. I'm going to like give speeches. She went to the Edinburgh Comedy Festival and did stand up. She just went like full extra I aim extrovert, and what she found was that as she did it more and more, it worked easier.
Like she had very strong predictions that this was going to be terrible in all these forms, even like talking to a stranger or talking to someone at a networking event, and what she found was it was always better than she expected. And this is completely consistent with their research. Researchers like Nick Epley at the University of Chicago and others have found that we mispredict social connection.
He's the one.
If you remember the Happiness Lap episode that forced people to talk on trains. You know, You're taking your commuter train home and Nick comes up to you with a ten dollars Starbucks gift card and says, hey, do you want,
you know, to be in the study. You get the gift card and you say yes, because ten dollars Starbucks gift cards are the engine of all of social science research where you get nothing done if it wasn't but you say yeah, and Nick says, hey, for the rest of the train ride, I want you to make a connection with someone, or for the rest of the train ride, I want you to enjoy your solitude. He has you
predict you know, whether you're going to enjoy that. Everybody across the personality spectrum says the talking is going to be awkward and weird. Introverts say it's going to be extremely awkward and weird. I think the scale doesn't go low enough for what they want to rate it. But
everyone gets a happiness benefit from it. And this was what Jessica saw time and time again, is that even these scary things that she thought were going to feel awful, when you really are connecting with another person, it feels
better than you expect. And so her advice is to really notice that you have this misprediction, right, you might totally have had a tough day at work, and you might really have exactly the prediction you were saying Gretchen, which's like I just want self care, I need to know my energy levels, blah blah blah. But recognize that your own calibration of that is off, and if you could just push yourself like fifteen percent more, you might end up happier.
He donic prediction, right, This is people are not We're not very good at predicting what's going to make us happier, which is too bad. Okay, So here is a question for you, Laurie. I've been listening to your podcast now for three years. I assume you have been teaching your course for at least that long. Have you noticed whether your student body has noticeably changed in terms of level of happiness. I realize the pandemic has impacted a lot of us mentally, and students in particular.
Yeah, and so the first time I taught my class was back in twenty eighteen, when it was probably a little prescient to be thinking about mental health and happiness. Because I think in the years that have transpired since then, it's been sort of a dumpster fire for happiness, right, and so the right comparison isn't like, you know, have things gotten better in the whole student population because of
these kind of external factors. But one thing we have been looking at is whether or not the Corsera class online it's called Signs of well Being. We have a new one called Signs of well Being for Teens, so make sure you get your teenagers to take it. That's a spot where we've been able to carefully calibrate whether or not people are feeling happier from before to after.
And in studies, in collaboration with another researcher, Bruce Hood who's at the University of Bristol, who's been doing it in his students, he's actually been able to look longitudinally at students who take a version of the happiness class that he teaches at Bristol. And what we're finding is that it kind of works. It at least works, you know, from before to after you either get a small but
significant boost and happiness. Usually it's on like imagine like a ten point happiness survey usually go up about a point that's a small but significant and that those effects seem to last at least three to six months out, which is the longest we've kind of looked. It's really hard to do these longitudinal studies because like you got
to track people over time. And so the answer seems to be if you teach people these things and you give them like homework and you kind of train them up to put it into practice, it can stick with them for how long.
We don't know.
As Gretchen said that you can change, but to have changes that stick is really tricky. So it does seem like, you know, we're getting these small but significant effects.
We've got a head to a quick break.
But worry not, because Gretchen and I will be answering even more audience questions when we return. The Happiness Lab will be right back. Welcome back to the special live Q and A that I hosted at the Hot Dogs Festival alongside podcaster and best selling author Gretchen Rubin. So far, the Toronto fans have probed us on how to feel happier when you're in survival mode and how to engage in happier social connection. But our curious audience wasn't done there.
In fact, their next question went much bigger asking how the fight for our individual happiness can help heal our ailing world.
How can happiness also be turned into creating a more equitable, socially just world when we are living in a time of great polarities, greed and lack of democracy.
Yeah, I'm so glad whoever asks us.
So I don't know who you are, but thank you for whoever asked this question, because I think this comes up. This comes up a lot in my work and in Gretchen's work. Right, Like a lot of the strategies we're talking about are at.
The individual level.
Right, Individually, you can engage with your senses more individually, you can make a little bit more social connection and doing so, oh, you know, the data seemed to suggest can give you a small but significant boost and happiness. And I think folks really worry about that, right, Folks say, like, Okay, that's great for that one individual, but have you just made that person you know more pollyannish or those people
you know happier and they're good with their lives. But that means they're not going to engage with all the problems of the world. Like in some ways is like reinforcing people's individual happiness sort of at odds with the structural changes I think we all know we need to
make to make ourselves happier and a happier society. And this is a spot where researchers are starting to look in a little bit more detail, right, kind of asking that question, if you become happier yourself, does that mean you do less good stuff for other people in the world and so on? And the answer so far seems to be no, just the opposite, Like when you are feeling happier usually measured if you're in a more positive mood, you wind up doing more nice stuff for other people.
There's this thing called the feel good do good effect, whereas like, if you're in a good mood, you kind of do nicer stuff for other people. But there's evidence from folks like Constantin kush Lef at Georgetown that this actually impacts the world too. So he looks at things like who's taking action towards climate change by like, you know, I don't installing solar panels or going to a climate protest.
Who's engaging in Black Lives Matter movement not just saying they're worried about social justice stuff, but actually doing things, And what you find is that the people who self report having the highest positive mood, right, and.
We kind of get it right.
You know, if you're feeling down in the dumps, if you're in that struggle mode, if you have no bandwidth yourself, you can't face on head on the problems of the world. And so that means that in some ways, my hope is that these individual solutions are at least kind of and can be used in conjunction with a lot of these structural changes, that it'll make it easier for people to engage in some of the stuff that we all need to engage with to fick the stuff that we
know is wrong with the world. And I especially love that for my Yale students. You know, I look at the stats right now nationally for college students, where forty percent of college students report being too depressed to function most days, almost seventy percent say that they're overwhelmingly anxious, more than one in ten has seriously considered suicide in
the last six months. And I look to this generation, I'm thinking, you're the ones that have to fix all the stuff that my generation messed up, Like they're not going to be able to do that unless they have some way to kind of deal with a lot of that negative emotion, a lot of those mental health issues. And so I love this question because it shows we can create a more equitable, just society if we all start.
Putting our own oxygen masks. Onto leave it.
At that, ditto, that's enough.
Okay, good, that's enough. Yeah, good?
Living on, let me drop mic.
How do we be real and honest with our emotions. Let's say we're grieving, We're truly sad from a major life event, yet be truly present in our lives and see the beauty. How can we actually do that, like experience happiness in the moment of these kind of times of grief.
How can we be real with what we're going through?
Well?
I think that again, I think that so many aims within happiness.
There's a way to think about it through the five senses.
And I think the five senses is a great might be a great solace here because even when let's say you're experiencing some kind of deep grief, of course you wouldn't wish that away.
I mean negative.
I think sometimes people think that a happy life is a life with no negative emotions, and that's not possible.
And it wouldn't even be a good life. So you want to you don't want to deny.
Your grief or or wave it aside, or or cover it, you know, pretend that it's not there. But I think that through the five senses it can give you solace and comfort. And you know, certainly one way many people experience this is through nature, because there is something so timeless and so impersonal about like the great patterns of nature and the and the great cycles of nature that a lot. You know, this is a classic thing that people will think about, is trying to put grief into the context.
Of the natural world.
And the more that you can see here, smell, tastes, touch it, really try to it can take you out of yourself. And I experienced this at the MET because I mean, when they talk about happiness, one thing that clearly makes people happier is sort of moments of transcendence
and awe. And I really experienced that at the MET and a sense of timelessness because it put everything in such a sense of perspective, like we were going through the pandemic, but there was all this art from hundreds of years ago, thousands of years ago that was people dealing with the plague like this is not a new thing. I mean back to this idea of identifying with other people you know, and just to see this is all,
this is just the deep patterns of time. And so I think through the five senses you can you can find that the transcendence and the awe that can help give you a respite from your own you know, the pain in your own life, not to deny it, but to get out of it.
And I think another kind of way that you do that with the five senses is you kind of get tiny. I feel like I experienced this a lot in the pandemic, when everything else felt so overwhelming, it was like, ah, the taste of my morning coffee mug, it's warm, right.
Or just the little pleasures, the little sensation.
And those are even in the midst of the worst grief, those are always there if you can kind of train your intention to look.
Yeah, like the feel of a hot shower or yeah, now absolutely.
Okay, here's a good one.
Because I don't actually know the answer to this question is for Gretchen, what are what's some of the most fascinating research that you looked at or you conducted that you weren't able to include in your book.
Well, I tried ayahuasca. That was pretty weird.
I thought, Okay, this is going to be like five cents of psychedelic experience. I almost thought like, oh, was this going to be cheating because you know, it's like, you know, artificially amplified. But and it was a whole thing which I wrote about and then but so what actually happened was so I'm a real morning person and this was all happening very very very late at night. The whole it was a whole journey, very late at night. So I took the ayahuasca, immediately, threw up three times,
fell asleep, and woke up totally normal. So as like a five census experience. It was a complete bus So I wrote this whole thing in my from my like this happened, then that happened, and then this other thing happened, and my editor was like, but you know, in the end, really nothing did happen.
Let's leave it out.
And so it was a huge experience for me, and it was definitely a huge Uh if one of the things that makes us happier, it's realizing that we can put ourselves out of our comfort zone, and we could truly surprise ourselves and do something that we did not think that we could do. I definitely did do that. So it was a huge appinist booster in that respect. But from a five census perspective, nothing. Here's another piece of fascinating research that I just moved around. I kept
trying to stick it into the book. This my agent calls this no note card left behind, which is when you just want to get every fact into a book. So we're our senses are more sensitive at the low level than at the high level. Like you're much better at judging the sweetness of crackers than the sweetness of cinnamon buns. And you're much better at gauging the weight of a mixing bowl than of a bowling ball.
How does this fit in? No, it does not. I was fascinated by this. I don't know why. It's just interesting.
It doesn't appear in the book because I just as much as I tried to jam it in there, I could not make it relevant.
But it does suggest that your taste party more crackers, less cinnamon.
That's right, that's right, And that's right.
We tried apples, yeah, not chocolate, chocolate chip ice crept.
Yeah, and your ayahuasca experience can.
So I challenge you to consider placebo effect with the all the new research on psychedelics.
Yeah, and some of the.
Negative effects too, because it turns out I didn't know this statistic, but even in these very controlled clinical settings, there's a lot of clinical folks who are using psychedelics now potentially as treatments. Between ten to twenty percent have a really awful trip and awful experience. Did you read an patch it's essay, Yeah, yeah, so it's like it's
higher than people think. So anyway, we're winding down, and we both liked the following question as a final question, so I'll ask it to Gretchen first and then she can ask it to me.
What do people get wrong about happiness?
Yes?
I think that one thing people get wrong about happiness is that they think that there's one right way, and they think there's one best way, and they think that research shows that this is the way that you should do it, and I'm right and you're wrong, or maybe you're right and I'm wrong. And what I find is
that there is no one right way. It's only what works for the individual, and that each of us has to create our own happiness project for ourselves, taking into account our own nature, our own interests, our own values, our own idiosyncrasies, our own five senses, and that if somebody says to you things like, well, you know, if something's important to you, you should get up and do it first thing, before you start your day, because that's when
you're going to be at your freshness. So if something's important to you, you should do it first thing. It's like, well, that's good advice if you're a morning person, but it's terrible advice if you're a night person, because your most
creative and productive and energetic later in the day. Or maybe people will say, well, you know, if you want to concentrate, you really need to have silence once you don't have any business listening to music if you're trying to do high mental work, and it's like, well, that's just not true. Some people like silence. Some people like a busy hum like a coffee shop. Some people like
music with words, some people like music without words. Some people like white noise, brown noise, pink noise, green noise. It all depends on what we're few. I did this with my daughters. I would say to them, if you're gonna work, you have to be at a desk. I would have a desk in the bathroom. I have to have a desk, and they didn't. They would sit on the floor, they'd sit on their bed. And then I realized a lot of people just don't use a desk. There is nothing magic about a desk.
This is why it's fun to have Gretchen and I up here because I think in many we both study happiness and know the research and stuff. But in many respects, I think personally we have very different preferences. I need incredible noise.
You do, absolutely can what kind of music, din anything.
When I took my exams in college, which is in Boston, I actually went to the T station and sat against a dirty wall and just did my work there because I needed that much noise. Sometimes at Yale, when I had to write a very important grant, I would go to the Mohegan Sun casino and not.
Gim oh my god.
I would just sit in the loudness, like in the corner and with my laptop and write a grant. So like, the more I have to concentrate, the more crazy noise. I need no desk either, just sitting kind of curled up in a corner.
But you can see how this becomes a problem, like with somebody in an office, because if I'm the boss and I'm like, a clutter does mean it's a cluttered mind.
Everybody's got to have.
A clean desk. And silence is how people concentrate. So let's bring the noise down. I mean, who's to say? And like, I could show you research showing sixty percent of people need silence, but it doesn't matter data point of one, most important data point, data point of you.
And so I think that a.
Lot of times people have this search for the best way, the right way, and I think sometimes they turn to science or they justify it with science, saying, well, this is what science shows. But in the end, it's like, but what's your experience, When have you succeeded in the past, what works for you, what appeals to you, what helps you do what you want to do, and what matters to you? Because people have such different things that matter
to them. So I feel like the I feel like that's the part that people often overlook, is that we've all got to figure it out for ourselves.
So how about you, what do you think people get wrong about happiness.
So my answer winds up with the same I think like final answer, which is that we've kind of got to figure it out for ourselves, that doing our own experiment is important. But I think what people get wrong about happiness is so many things. I mean, I think the thing we just have our minds lie to us, right, this is the whole premise of the happiness lab. And I think our minds lie to us about so much. Right,
we just talked about social connection. Our minds think, oh, just plopping down and looking at the screen is going to feel great, when gutting out and talking to somebody would feel better. Like, that's just the tip of the misconception, Iceberg, there's a billion you know, changing my circumstances. If I want to be happier, I need a new job, I need to change these things, when in fact, subtle changes
to our behavior and our mindset matter more. And so for me, this is the big one, right, It's that we're walking around with these brains that have all these misconceptions that are telling us motivating us, Hey, go out and do these things and you'll feel happier and buy
and large. A lot of those intuitions are wrong, Like some of the inductionsis you get wrong because the science are these like kind of these platitudes and things, but some are just our own intuitions about this is going to feel good, and it just does it.
I have a great example for you people.
A lot of people say, I've trained myself to get by on five hours of sleep.
Oh yes, but talk to my undergrads about that one.
We're on average, on average, all those horrible mental health statistics I just mentioned to you about college students, I actually think we could solve most of them if students got more sleep and they weren't sleeping five hours.
Yeah, it's true for adults too. Though it's true for adults too.
Yeah.
No, people say that they've trained themselves to get by on very little, on like four or five hours, and then research shows that people are actually very very significantly impacted and you don't adjust to it and you can't get by without it, and so your mind is saying, oh, everything's fine, all I need is my cup of coffee, but you really are off your game.
And so that's a good example.
So this is where I do think the science and some of these averages can help is that you sometimes hear like, oh, the science isn't talking to somebody on the streen feels good, or that five hours of sleep isn't good for anyone, right, And then it can cause you to just try and change your behavior a little bit. You know, we mentioned Jessica Pan before, and you know, she just like tried to change your behavior a little bit, and what she discovered was really striking.
And I think that's that's the big.
Thing that I've learned most from the sort of enterprise of studying happiness is that even my intuitions are wrong a lot of the time, and recognizing that they're wrong, can you just tweak things a little bit and you can start to notice yourself do the experiment yourself to notice, actually, that didn't feel as bad as I thought. Or that's a great hack for when things are really tricky, right,
and that can be really really powerful. Recognizing that your mind isn't telling you the right way to go can help you come up with more creative solutions about what might really be the right way to go well.
And that's what we try to do with on the Happier podcast is like just suggest idea after idea after idea for people, because some stick and some don't, Some feel right and some don't aren't relevant, But it's like sometimes just having these concrete ideas and knowing that they've worked for somebody can help you get ideas for the kinds of things that you would try for yourself and that can make you happier.
And so I hope you all are leaving with lots of ideas for things that you can do to promote your happiness, both with your five senses and beyond.
Can we give it up for Gretchen Reuven war House.
The Happiness Lab will be on a brief summer break, but we'll be back in July with a whole new series on listener stories, sharing how they put the science of happiness into practice.
I hope you'll be back to join us then,