How to be Happier at Work (with Dan Harris)

Right now, they're doing a whole series on a subject that's near and dear to my heart, how to have a better work life balance. So Dan invited me on the show to talk about some science back strategies for heating the reset button at work. We tape the interview live on Facebook a few weeks ago, and today we're bringing that whole full episode to you without further ado. Here it is very happy to be talking to doctor Laurie Santos post of the excellent Happiness Lab podcast, which

I recommend to everybody. Also Yale Professor Laurie. Great to Sue, thanks so much for being on our livestream today. I am always happy to be associated with you in any possible way, soa same same. So we're talking about work and all the glory and suffering therein, and I know one of the subjects you wanted to talk about as it pretends to work is time affluence. What does that mean?

Time affluence is this funny term that social scientists are using these days, which is basically your subjective sense that you have some free time. It's the sense that you're wealthy in time. You know, if somebody calls you to schedule something, it's not like, well, how about never, or how about twenty twenty three or something like that. It tends to be the opposite sensation of what we often experience, which is what's known as time famine. We're literally starving

for time. And the evidence is cool is suggest that time famine works a lot like hunger famine. You're kind of triaging things. There's like evidence of stress on your body, and like time famine has a huge hit on your well being. In fact, some work by the Harvard psychologist Ashley Willins suggest that if you self report being time famished, that's as bad for your well being as if you

self report being unemployed. We know unemployment is a huge hit on people's happiness, but just feeling like you don't have a lot of time can do the same thing. Ashley was on my show. I think she's phenomenal, and every time I talk about this issue, I can feel my nervous system getting activated because this idea of time starvation and it's opposite of time affluence. It's you know, I do not feel affluent in terms of time, but this is one of the reasons you made this recent

job change. I'm not sure you're comfortable sharing, but you just made a big change for your own time affluence is my understanding, right I did. I decided to leave ABC News, where I had been for twenty one years, and I loved ABC changed my life working there that I got to go all over the planet and cover amazing stories. And for eleven years I was the anchor of weekend Good Morning America, which I really loved doing that show, especially it was an am quite attached to

my co hosts. But something had to give because I was working seven days a week, like really working seven days a week, and so I would finish a long week of working for ten percent happier hosting my podcast, and I'm writing a book, which I try to do five six hours a day on that I am helping to run the company. And I would finish a long week of that and then roll right into getting up at three forty five on Saturday and Sunday mornings, which

you know, I just turned fifty. It's you know, it was a bit like taking a flight to Asia every week in terms of having to get up that early and recover, and so something I had to give. And I made a hard decision, which was to leave ABC, which I wasn't really happy about, but I did it. This is the thing that I think so many of us faced, where we're often in positions where our time is just so filled up that something has to give.

And sometimes if you don't make a hard decision, then the thing that gives is something that's really bad for your well being. Like the thing that gives is time with your family, or the thing that gives is that, you know, sleep, or your weekly exercise class or something. Sometimes making an active decision to take time back, the research shows, is like a real path towards happiness, and it gets you off this bad trajectory that's only going to get worse. You know, if this is where you

are when you're fifty. What is it going to look like when you're fifty five, sixty and so on. It's too early for me to know whether leaving ABC is going to be the path to some big bump up and happiness. I mean, I was already pretty happy. It's such a huge change, and I just know that it takes for me. It takes a long time to metabolize something like that, you know, And it's only been a few weeks as we're talking right now since I left

ABC News. And in terms of time affluence, though, all it did was remove a very costly from a physiological and psychological standpoint, habit or hobby on the weekends. So now I have my weekends like a normal person. But my Monday through Friday still feels as jam packed as ever. When somebody calls me and says, hey, can I get on your calendar? That makes me nervous every time that happens. So what are your thoughts about how to deal with that. There's a bunch of strategies you can use to kind

of feel better. I mean, one is really to reframe the time saving things that you are doing. You know, so many of us are often spending our money in subtle ways to get back time. You know. I know my husband and I we get curbside pickup or take out every once in a while. And if you just kind of get your takeout and eat it not mindfully

while you're checking your email, that's one thing. But if you get your takeout and you put a time stamp on it, I just get this burger and fries, that's a regret and need to fry up and potatoes I didn't need to chop and dishes I didn't need to do. That was two hours and forty five minutes of my time that I just saved. Just the act of framing something that way, it's like, oh, it just kind of takes that off your plate. And that's been a really powerful one for me from a quick takeout, you know,

hiring somebody to do unwanted tasks. We often feel guilty about these things, but it can be a way that we're putting act time like into our schedules in a way that can feel amazing. It sounds like you do a thing that most of us do mindlessly, maybe even sheepishly. I'm going to order take out tonight because I don't feel like cooking, but you reframe it and deliberately intentionally savor the time savings. Yeah, and I do that for

like different takeout the burger and fries. You know, maybe that saves me like two hours, but you know, like a good pad tie, I was not going to do that, right, Like, I was not going to figure out where I get pad tie noodles and all that stuff like that would be really hard for me to do. And that's actually a pretty big time savings. And we can do that with other things. People pay for a cleaning service or you know, hire the neighbor's kids to mow the lawn.

These things can feel privileged, but even if you're paying ten bucks to the neighbor's kid to help out, like again, it's a time savings that you get. The problem is most of us have a little bit of discretionary income, but we tend not to spend it to get time back. But when we invest it to get time back, then that discretionary income winds up going further. I interrupted you before you were going to go onto another. Oh yeah,

the second tip, second ship. This second one has been an enormous one for me, which is to make sure that you're using the free time you do have. So one of the many amazing things I learned in Ashley Willen's book that still sticks with me is the fact that if you look at people's time records, we actually have more free time now than we did like fifteen to twenty years ago. That feels shocking to me. It feels like, how could we ever have been more time

famished than we are right now. The problem is that the time budgets looked different. Fifteen years ago. We had more big blocks of free time, So now we have more actual objective amount of time, but it's broken up into these tiny chunks five minutes before this zoom meeting here and ten minutes when your kid falls asleep early. This is what researchers called time confetti. These like little pieces of time that are sort of floating in the ether.

And you have a lot of these, but they feel so small that you never want to do anything good with them. I can find myself like, oh, I got an extra five minutes. I'll scroll through that feed that I just looked through again, you know if I missed something, or you know, I'll put a little extra time into this email or something right, we do these things that don't build us up, and then we feel like we

don't have any time. And so one great recommendation is to make a sort of time confetti to do list, but not a work to do list, like a kind of well being you know, user time wisely to do list. So on mine are five minutes here and there. That's an extra three minutes of deep breaths I can do these days. I've been trying to write in a gratitude app more often, and I don't have a set time to do it. But during my time affluent, it's like my moments of time confetti. That's the moment to do.

It's like up five minutes before that meeting, we pull out my phone and scribble a few things I'm feeling grateful for. These little moments can add up if you use them well. I love that. What about the notion of a four day work week. What does the literature say about whether we can actually get our work done and whether this attractive idea does lead to a boost

in happiness. There's only a few studies coming out, but the ones that there are are really suggesting that it can be a powerful way to boost your well being which like no surprise, that's like research that's published in the journal, Like no kidding, right, you know. But what's more amazing from these studies is it turns out that people on the four day work week wind up being more productive rather than less. They get more stuff done.

And we kind of all get this when you've had the super long day, if you're just kind of dead tired and feeling burned out, you do stuff at work, but you're more kind of like churning. You know, you're like kind of going through emails or like checking stuff. You're doing stuff to tick off your list to feel like you're being productive, but you're not doing like the deep innovative work. You know, for me as academic, I'm rarely doing the deep thinking work. I'm just kind of

getting stuff off my list. And when you chunk out a whole day you got to get to the important stuff, you wind up prioritizing it more so the thing that drops off isn't the important creative work. It's often just the churning. So like, who cares if you're not churning as much, take that day off where you really have some real leisure. This haunts me. This idea, though, because I don't know if I'm going to be able to articulate it. But I have been trying to get better

at not working when I'm exhausted. But I am haunted by guilt when I do that, because I am thinking about all the things I could be getting done even on You know, I have one huge creative project right now, which is the book that I'm writing, and I've been working on it for three and a half years and I've got another six months at least left to go. I know on some level that if I take a day off and do nothing, I will be more productive when I return to the book a day Hence, but

I often struggle to allow myself to do that. Does that make any sense to you what I'm saying, Oh my gosh, it's like you're in my brain. Like this happens to me all the time. And I think that guilt is twofold. Right. One is we have this misconception like, oh, I should be working. You can't be working. Your brain dead, You're not functioning at the same level. You're not going to get the work done that you believe you will.

But the second problem is that sometimes that guilt creeps in because when we finally do take time off, we don't let ourselves do anything that's really engaging, that's flow filled, that's fun. Gotta have this crazy work week, and then I'm feeling totally burnt out, and then I don't have the energy to do something interesting or fun with my friends. I just like PLoP in front of Netflix, honestly, And sometimes I'm so burned out that I can't even pick anything.

I'm so depleted that to just make a choice of which movies, so I literally will spend an embarrassing hour just watching the different you know, documentary scroll by, like not that one, and then I feel gross and nasty afterwards. And yes, it's true. When I'm doing that, the guilt is setting in, which is like I just wasted a half hour scrolling through little blocks on a screen, like I could have been working on my book, or I

could have been working on this project. But if you take a break earlier, when you can really engage and do something that's real fun, that gives you flow, that feels playful, often that involves other people so kind of boost your social connection, these are ways to really take a break, and those are the energizing things. So part of the problem is that we don't take a break.

But part of the problem is that when we do take a break, we don't take like a good break, a nutritious break, something that's going to build us up. We kind of just like PLoP around. First of all, that Netflix moment you described, you were in my brain for that, And to be fair, it's not just Netflix,

it's any Yeah, yeah, exactly, you're all implicated. We're not hating on Netflix here, but yeah, but in terms of having free time that we're using, well, i'll give you an example of something that I came up with recently, and I'll be interested to hear what you're doing to

use your free time. Well, when you actually do that, as you know, as a parent, playing with little children can be incredibly boring and frustrating, and then sometimes you can hate yourself for being frustrated and bored with your children. It could be a real toilet vortex. And I have a six soon to be seven year old and I love playing with him. It's it's better now that he's six than it was when he was three, but sometimes it's still pretty boring. And so what I did was

I got as a drum set. I have been playing drums since I was ten, and he's wanted to play drums for a while, and so we play together and that is really really fun, and I also use it in my downtime when he's not around. This is so funny because so we just finished a podcast episode about fun and about how I don't know how to have fun.

So I tagged in fun expert, the journalist Katherine Price, who has this great new book called The Power of Fun, and she recently actually has decided because you know, we talked about what I like to do and what I have fun with, and I like to do music, but I'm not that great at music. So she has decided. In fact, I have this long text thread from her where she's like, you need to learn how to play the drums, like you will really like the drums, like

you should starting to play the drums. So Dad, this is inspiring me to listen to Catherine and actually learn how to play the drums. But you're exactly on point. I mean, what you're doing is you're finding an activity that's giving you both some playful flow, like connected where you're both playing together. And this is the definition of fun, right. You know, Katherine talks about this idea that fun is playful, connected flow, and you're kind of finding all the parts

of it in that drone practice with your son. I think one of the reasons that kid play feels kind of yucky is that it's sort of boring for adults. It's not really challenging for the adults. But there are lots of things you can do with your kids that

really are challenging for you too. One of the other folks we interviewed for our fun episode is the journalist Tom Vanderbilt, who wrote this book called Beginners, and he had this harrowing moment with his own i think nine year old at the time, where he was taking her to like chess practice and drum practice and swimming lessons and all these things, and she was like learning and having a good time, and he'd sit there while she was doing that and like futs around on some feed

or check his email, feeling bored, and he was like, wait a minute, hang on, I could be doing that fun thing too, Like I could be learning in the same way that she's learning, and in fact, we could do it together and that would be like a huge boost because now you know, we're doing something together. We're having like parent kid bonding time, and I'm learning something

and having fun. And he talks about how you know, this has been amazing for him, both in terms of changing his identity, especially kind of giving him a sense of like he's learning something new. He's not just his job, right, so when the job's feeling stressful and is burning him out, he can feel like, Wamacho's player now, or I'm taking

surfing lessons or something fun. But also it's just a way to like kind of connect with his kids and sort of show up and not be this bad example where your leisure is an adult looks really boring and miserable to the kids. Right, You're showing them adults can learn and have fun too. I love that. I love that starting to take my son to drum lessons, and I'm going to make the lou the amazing drum teacher,

teach me a few things. You'll get to hear more of my conversation with Dan Harris on his podcast Ten Percent Happier After the break, The Happiness Lab will be right back. Okay, so let's let's keep going with some of the tips that you have for how to make work suck less than it does so often for so many of us, you have this notion of job crafting. What does that mean? So job crafting is a term that my colleague year at the Yell School of Management,

Amy Resineski, came up with. And this is the idea that you know, our jobs have like on paper what we're supposed to do, you know, like the list of tasks that we're supposed to get done or so we don't get fired. But within that list of tasks, for pretty much all of us, there's a lot of flexibility around the edges of what we kind of emphasize of how we frame it in terms of what we are actually doing in the day to day. And job crafting is the act of building in more stuff that you

find valuable and fun. She suggests, starting with the kinds of virtues that you care about. Often researchers call these signature strengths. So we all have these things that'll kind of get us a going. Maybe you love to learn, or maybe you love to be social, or maybe you like things that require bravery or it's kind of a challenge, or you take on some risk. Maybe you like doing things that are creative where you're building stuff with your

hands or something. We all have these kind of things, and her ideas with job crafting, you kind of put more of that in your job. It's not necessarily in your job description, but you kind of build in it any way. Now when people sometimes hear about job crafting, they think, well, that might work for some cool jobs like ours, where we're podcasters and we could be really creative, But what about really boring jobs? And that's where Amy's

work is so awesome. She does these lovely studies where she studies folks who have the job that you might not think of as the most creative or flexible job.

She studies hospital janitorial staff members. You know, so these are people who are literally cleaning up vomit and cancer ward not a flexible position, but she finds that a decent number of them say that their job is a calling, that they wouldn't change it for anything in the world, and when she looks at what they do, they're the ones who are using a lot of these virtues, these

signature strengths. She tells us one story and talked about it on my podcast, where she was interviewing one of these janitorial staff members who said that his job he was a person who cleaned up vomit in a chemo therapy award, And he said that his job wasn't to clean him up people being sick. His job was to cheer people up, you know, after they were feeling really crappy. Imagine the situation like you're in chemo, you cancer, you get sick all over the floor. This sucks, you feel awful,

This is a low point in your life. And this staff member would come in and he saw his job as to make you laugh. His standard joke was, you keep vomiting because that's how I get my paycheck. Like, I'll have to do overtime if you vomit extra. So now the patient is laughing. He's laughing, he feels like he's done something genuinely meaningful and good. He's really helps someone.

And Amy's claim is if ganitorial staff members can do this in their work and still get their job done, all of us can do this in our own way. And this is something I talk with my students about. You know, so many of my students are stuck in like majors that they're kind of annoyed by y're getting through premed coursework, and it's like, well, how can you build in the fun parts? There are things that you

find fun. Maybe you want to just be more social and you come up with a quiz bowl to like do your problem sets, or maybe you want you have like a love of learnings on the edges. When you find something cool, you watch extra five minute YouTube video about it. If you take charge of this process that you're stuck in, it can both feel like you have some control, but then you get to exercise these things that you love about life anyway that are going to

build you up. Here from my mind is going with this. So you just say you're at a company, and you are a younger person in a company, and you have a somewhat humdrum job, but there are ways that you could see yourself advancing that would be interesting within that company. But we all know that maybe we don't know, but we should know that the modern workplace was created by white men for white men. And you don't feel comfortable advocating for yourself to do this kind of job crafting

because nothing in your history tells you it will go. Well, what do you say to people like that? Yeah, well, I think you know, when you look at Amy's work, what you find is often the people who are doing the job crafting, we're doing it in ways that their managers didn't necessarily even know about you. So there's job crafting in a way where you're like, if I could really harness my strengths, and that's my move to get promotions and stuff like that. That's kind of one move.

But another move is you don't care about promotions or like getting a raise. Like what you want is just to like not hate your work. You want to not be miserable every Monday morning when you walk in. And that's where these job crafting things I think can be the most powerful. Nobody cares if you see, your job is making sure you chat with folks at the office cooler, or like take an extra step to like, you know, have a five minute conversation with the administrative assistant in

your office. But you're going to do a little bit more creative work on the edges or learn something on the side. That's not stuff to necessarily be moving up. It's just making your life more fun while you're spending literally a third of your life at your job. You know, eight hours a day, we get hopefully eight hours of sleeping if you're following the well being tips and sleeping enough. But then there's another eight hours where you're like at

your job, if not more than that. So finding ways to love it can be really powerful, even if it's not necessarily for career advancement. I'm convinced. Let's talk about another way, And I think this is particularly relevant in a pandemic, where the separation between work and the rest of your life could get very blurry. It was relevant even before the pandemic because we all have our office in our pocket in the form of a phone, But now the physical office is the dining room for many

of us. Still, how do we not take the stress of the day into our interactions with everybody else? Yeah, this is so much more important now, especially for folks who are still working at home. Right because, for better or for worse, there was often a natural separation between the work day and walking home. Yeah, you know, you have your office in your pocket, but there was a moment that you got into your car and like there was a separation of physical separation between where you thought

about work and where you thought about home. Or maybe you hopped on the subway and just kind of left. These things are subtle, but our brain picks up on them because their habits. They're little rituals that we do all the time. That quickly, in March of twenty twenty, a lot of these things kind of went away, And so we need some way to tell our brain, hey, we're shutting things off right now, we're moving away. This was the commute home basically, And so we can figure

out stupid ways to do that. Like the beauty of rituals, our brain doesn't really care what it is. You just have to give it something over and over again. And so I have colleagues who, for example, at the end of their work day shut the laptop and throw like a towel over it, just to be like the towels

over it the day is over. I had another colleague kind of tiny New York apartment type thing where they sat at the kitchen table to work and then they literally flipped the laptop around and sat on the other side of the kitchen table like and that was like leisure, right, And it sounds so dumb, but like our brain prays attention to these little physical cues. So giving your brain some can just sort of have a little separation. I mean we all learned this as kids with mister Rogers.

Where he cuts home, he takes the shoes off, he puts the slippers on. Mister Rogers was deeply wise about well being, and this is just another domain in which he was. So what's your slipper going to be? How do you do just some act that you always shut off for work? And if your kids happen to still be studying from home, I think this can be even more powerful for them. Our brains don't have a separation, but their brains are still growing. They're even more affected

by this kind of clutter in their routine. So giving them some cues that they can use to be like, all right, we're shutting down for the day can be super powerful. One thing that we instituted really during the pandemic that we hadn't done before that has been a great dividing line between the work day and the rest of the day is family dinner, which we had not been doing in a ritual way until we're all confined to this tight space together five forty five six o'clock,

we do dinner together and that has been really helpful. Yeah, I mean, we forget that there haven't been these long standing, often quite ancient traditions that we in the modern world kind of just like a drop off, like oh, family dinner, so silly, or like, oh, you know, putting the slippers

on when you get home, so silly. Right, But these things are doing psychological work, powerful psychological work to get our mind kind of ready for next sorts of steps, right, and so anything we can do to build that in

for the workday can be incredibly powerful. I mean, another one I know you've talked about is that commute home can be a nice time to do a couple deep breaths, or maybe the first thing you do when you walk in before you're bringing your whole work emotionally home to deal with your family is do a quick ten minute meditation, right, Like, these are moments where we can do all kinds of things to separate between the workday and the rest of

our lives. One of the most painful parts of work for me over the last couple of decades, in particular and television news, has been comparing myself to other people and wondering why they're getting this job and I'm not getting it, etc. Etc. Do you have thoughts on this kind of social comparison and how we can surfeit rather than be drowned by it. We're in it. Well. One is recognizing that it's happening, you know, like all things

I think in this space of being mindful enough to notice. Oh, the reason I feel crappy about my salary today is I just heard about Joe's rays in the office. The reason I feel bad about my performance is I just heard someone else get an accolade. These are the things that if we just start noticing them, we can start acting on them. The other thing is you start noticing these things is to recognize that our brains really suck

when it comes to social comparison. There can be a billion people who are doing worse than us, and our brain locks onto the one person in our career or in our life who seems to be doing as good, if not better, and holds onto that and directs all of our attentional resources at that. My favorite example of this is not in the workplace, although I guess it's in the workplace for some folks whose job is to

be an Olympian. It was this famous study that looked at olympians on the stand and what emotion they were experiencing. So you win a gold medal, of what emotions are experiencing generally pretty positive, you're joyous, you're happy, and so on. You win a silver medal, What emotions are you experiencing? You think, maybe not as good as gold, but pretty good. You're like taking home your second best on the planet.

Turns out no, When scientists analyze the facial expressions of silver medalists, what they find is that their emotions are showing things more like contempt, deep sadness, anger. Run the list of negative emotions and you see that expressed in their face. And what's the problem. There's a social comparison. They're not looking at the billions of people who were not good enough to make it to the Olympics or get on the stand. They're looking at the one person

who beat them. But the remedy for that comes with the other person who's standing on the stand, who's the bronze medalist. So you might think if the silver medalist is feeling contempt and disgust and all these things, than the bronze medalist is even more in the dumps. But it turns out that if you analyze bronze medalist facial expressions, they're psyched. In some cases, they're showing expressions of a late that are stronger than the Gold Medalist. And again

here's the you know, social comparison at work. Bronze medalist isn't comparing themselves against the gold Medalist. They were seconds away, you know, multiple people were in between them, right, but they're thinking, oh, man, if I was just two seconds slower, like point two seconds slower, i'd be going home empty handed by the skin of my teeth. I am up

here walking away with the metal. And they're stoked. And the Bronze Medalist is helpful because it makes us realize that with a little bit of cognitive work, we can kind of reframe however we're doing. We can kind of look to the fact that, hey, we've actually done pretty well no matter where we are. We might not have billions of people below us, but there's some folks below us.

The other thing is that you can tend to not just it the other people who are below you, but at yourself kind of be competing against yourself, and that can be a powerful way to kind of feel good because hopefully you're going in a positive direction, and if you're not a means a time for exercising a different thing that I think can make work better, which is

a little self compassion. But you know, competing with yourself and having that competition stick to wherever you were before can be a powerful way to feel a little bit better too. Have you heard of a kind of meditation practice called moodita? No, I don't know this one, t set okay, I'm going to tell the great doctor Laurie Santo something she doesn't know. We can do it now, probably, yeah, So I will teach how to do it. This is

an ancient Buddhist meditation practice. Moodita translates roughly to sympathetic joy. It's kind of the opposite of schadenfreud. You're taking pleasure

and the success of somebody else. Is very hard skill to build, and I think it's not coincidence that the Buddha honed in on building this skill, because it really can shave down on one of the primary sources of our unhappiness as members of Homo sapiens, which is falling into what meditators often call comparing mind this mode that you've just described, or you really can't feel gratitude or take pleasure in anything if you're just constantly trying to

keep up with your brother in law, so Moudita practice. It's going to sound to some, especially the skeptics, and it certainly sounded to me a little hokey at the beginning of Some people have no problem with what some of us will find hokey, but just a name that it's it's a bit forced at the very least. So you can just kind of close your eyes and picture somebody who's doing really well. For the listeners, you can't see that Laurie has her eyes closed out, closed mind too,

So just pick somebody. Don't start with you know, your arch nemesis, who just got some raise that is really burning for you. You can start with somebody really easy. Sometimes I pick my kid, be aforementioned six year old, and our kitten. They play really nicely together and they're having a great time. And so just pick Alexander and

Ozymandias the kitten and imagine them scampering around together. As Laura, you might pick somebody's easy for you and just imagine that, and then you can repeat these phrases, may your happiness increase. You can start maybe with just may you be happy, and then move to May your happiness grow increase, repeating these kinds of phrases, and then you might move to somebody who's a little bit more challenging. Somebody you like at the office or in your personal life, who's had

something good happened to them, may be happy. May this happiness you're experiencing grow and get more intense. Anyway, you get the picture. We don't have to do it for too long, and you can keep moving to more and more challenging people. Maybe not the first time you do it, but over time you can. And the great share in Salzburg one of the first people who she's a meditation teacher, one of the first people who taught me how to

do this. She talks about this fallacy that many of us have, which is that when something good happens to somebody, we feel like whatever accolade or raise they have just had come their way, that it was actually heading to us and they reached out and intercepted the pass. And that's actually not usually the case. And even when it is the case, what do you want to do carry around this resentment or would you like to be able to see the humanity and your rivals and be happy

for them. Isn't that going to free up more bandwidth for you to pursue what you want next without carrying around the boulder of resentment? So does any does that make sense to you totally? I mean, you know, it fits with so much that we know about other practices that are really similar, like loving kindness, meditation right where you can kind of build up your compassion over time. And my guess I'd love to do the studies on this.

Actually I'm doing a related project with the Stanford neuroscientist Jamil Zaki on what we call a zero sum happiness. There's this idea I think that a lot of us are carrying around that you know, there's like a happiness pot somewhere in the universe, and you if good things happen to one person and there's like less in the pot potentially for me. That's just empirically that is not

how well being works. If anything, you know, doing for others winds up increasing the sum, right, you know, when you do nice things for others, you donate money to someone else, for example, you get the happiness bump from that at the same time they do pretty much we know how well being and probably even success and good things work in the world. Is like, this is not zero sum. We kind of all add it up together. I imagine this meditation practice does a really good job

at overcoming that misconception. It's like an intervention we can do to be like, no, no, no, there's not some tiny sum that we're sort of splitting up. We all can do a little bit better. Yes, exactly. Just two things to say about that. I love how many of these names you're invoking, Jamie, Zachie, Catherine Price. These are people who come on both of our shows, and it's interesting to hear you can listen to them being interviewed in two different places because you come at it from

a perspective of actually knowing something. I come at it as the amateur happiness expert who's a journalist and is very very very very interested in training the mind through meditation. So often I think the results are complimentary. So that's just one thing that came to mind. And then just to clarify, moodita practice and loving kindness practice are related. There are In Buddhism, there are what are known as the four Brahma Viharas or divine abodes, hard to reach

states that you can train through meditation loving kindness practice. Actually, you can translate loving kindness into friendliness. That can sound a little less hokey to the skeptics. Loving kindness phrases are like may you be happy, may you be safe,

may you be healthy, may you live with ease. So that's of practice very similar to what we just did with meditai, where you close your eyes and picture usually start with somebody easy, and then you can move to yourself, and then you can move to a benefactor, and then a neutral person, a difficult person, and then everybody. You can run through that same cycle with all of the

Brahma Bharas. So there's loving kindness, there's moodita or sympathetic joy, there's compassion, where you're sending phrases to people who are suffering, May you be free from suffering, may be free from pain. And then there is equanimity, where you're just training in order to reach these states, in order to keep them going,

you need to have some evenness of mind. Especially with compassion, you know where you're you're getting close to suffering, and so we train up the ability to just be steady in the face of whatever comes up in our minds. So these practices, these brahma a horror practices. I don't have all the science at hand, but my understanding is that there's a lot of science to suggest that these

can have physiological, psychological, and even behavioral impacts. And so it's to me the idea that if you aggregate all of these skills under one egis, that egis could be love. Love is not an unalterable factory setting. It is a trainable skill that is incredibly good news. Yeah, And with love and with these kind of trainable skills, you kind of take out of your emotional ether, the bad stuff.

The power of mudita is it takes it. It's not just that you feel good for someone else's success, is that it takes away this horrible burden pain, you know, sadness, anger, frustration that you're walking around with that you don't need to. And so getting rid of some of these negative emotions can be thinking a really important part of this practice

because you don't have to walk around with this. We often on my podcast talk about, you know, and another parable that comes from the Buddhist tradition, this idea of the second arrow. You know, it's one thing to not get the promotion but it's another to be stabbing yourself with this second arrow, pissed off the whole time that you didn't get it. And if you can get rid of that part of your emotional labor, that can be

incredibly powerful. You'll get to hear more of my conversation with Dan Harris on his podcast ten Percent Happier after the break, The Happiness Lab will be right back. You invoked emotions. What are your thoughts on how we handle emotions at work? Because I think a lot of us are conditioned again because, as I said before, the modern workplace was created by white men for white men, and so white men and I can speak with some authority about white men being one, we were not famously in

touch with our emotions. So we didn't design a workplace that was really, you know, conducive to the healthy metabolizing of emotions. So what are your thoughts about how we

can handle our emotions in the workplace? Yeah, I mean, I think because of the structure of modern workplaces and the you know, the sense that they're not necessarily built to be so inclusive, our instinct is to just shut them off, not shut them off in a long equanimity practice where you come to terms and allow your emotions, oh, shut them off, like, can't feel that right now, just going to pretend and keep moving, and you know, keep churning, right,

And I think that's bad for a bunch of reasons. Right. One is, you know, we know from the lovely work by like Stanford neuroscientists James Gross and others, that the act of suppressing your emotions is bad for your performance. You do worse for example on like you know, decision tasks and memory tasks. It's also awful for your bodies. Even in little laboratory tasks where you show people these little emotion suppression tasks, you find that they put their

bodies under cardiac stress. Like, so you're screwing up your performance and your growing up your bodies when you suppress your emotions. The other thing is that you miss out on an incredibly valuable signal. You know, we talk about things like negative emotions, and we have this term that they're like negative, right, you know, they're negative because they

don't feel great. But actually, if you think evolutionarily, these things are awesome because there's signals of something that's going badly that we should probably take some action to fix. You could think of negative emotions like sadness, anger, feeling overwhelmed, like you think of, you know, your hand on a hot stove. If you stick your hand on a hot stove, it's going to hurt, and that feeling doesn't feel great,

but it's there for a reason. Your body wants you to yank your hand away so you can stop burning it. And I think we forget that negative emotions kind of work like that, you know, especially some negative emotions that come up in the workplace these days. A lot of my colleagues are talking about overwhelm, this emotion where you're like you can't do it anymore. You are just burning out, you are getting cynical with your colleagues. You're just not

enjoying what you used to enjoy. That's overwhelmed. And when we experience it's not great because it makes it hard to do our work and it feels unpleasant. So we're like stuff it down, pretend that it's not happening. But then that comes back to bite you. It's like leaving your hand on a hot stove. And so I think the second thing that's bad about suppressing emotions at work is that we're ignoring these very honest signals that we should take action on or things are going to get worse.

You know, stop when you get the first degree emotional burn rather than the third degree and burnt off kind of emotional burn. I really like so many of the things you said there. I think it's really compelling to have it pointed out to us that stuffing your emotions

can have negative psychological and physiological consequences for us. But it's also true, at least in my experience, that stuffing my emotions or not being okay with whatever I'm suffering within the moment, can have negative consequences for anybody who's in my orbit. They can become irradiated by my unmetabolized rage. And I don't know if this is somebody that you've had on your show, but somebody's been very cuential to me. Jerry Colonna. He's a sort of famous in tech circles

that they call him the Yoda of Silicon Valley. As a corporate coach, he was a very successful that your capitalist for many years, had a bit of a life crisis, got interested in Buddhism, changed his whole life, and now works with CEOs and boards of directors to help people be saner and more humane in the workplace. And I've been working with him for several years. Like I said,

he's had a huge impact on me. And he once said to me, and I'm probably gonna mangle this, but something the effect of violence, by which he was not referring to a physical violence, but sort of psychic or psychological violence is what we do and we can't handle

our own suffering. And in the moment he said that, I can interpolate back to my whole professional life and see that all the damage or much of the damage I'd done in the workplace was because I was not up to the task of riding my own emotions and then just lost it with people. Yeah, and it's not just in your workplace, because I know lots of people who you might be able to keep a pressure cooker lid on in your workplace, but then you walk home into your house and you see your spouse and the

dishwashers not put away correctly, and emotions. We think we can hold the lid on, but these things are going to come out. They're going to come out either in our body where our fight or flight system is going to take the brunt and we're going to have cardiac problems and hormonal problems, we're not going to have our digestion working right, or they're going to come out as like much more extreme emotions that they didn't need to get to if you just kind of dealt with them earlier.

But then that raises the question, which is how do we deal with these emotions? And that's why I love practices that you all have on like ten percent happier about this idea of equanimity, where like we can kind of be even keeled in the face of often really negative emotions, especially if we notice them quickly find ways to sort of allow them and investigate what they're doing to our bodies. Yes, I'm obviously a big supporter of the Barahma Viharas, including equanimity own at. I didn't plan

to say this, but it came into my bind. Is something that might be useful for people, and I'm interested to hear your reaction to it. Loris Burnet Brown talks about a little phrase that she and her team use around the office all the time, which is the story I'm telling myself is dot dot dot, because I think so many of us walk around with these paranoid, phantasmagoric projections about what other people are thinking. Often they're not thinking about us at all. It's our own conditioning and

past traumas or whatever that it's creating this story. But if you don't deal with it, it can simmer and then it can reach a boil. So my CEO and I, the CEO of ten percent Happier, got named Ben Rubin, with who I'm very close. We've worked together. It's a kind of marriage really, and we've done couples counseling with the aforementioned Jerry Colonna for years, and one of the things we reached was this agreement that once in a while we will say, can I let my amygdala speak?

Can I just tell you what the sphere center of my brain is doing right now? And then everything I say, even if it's not putting Ben in the most positive light, I've framed it as, Look, this is my paranoia speaking. I'm not accusing you of anything. This is just what the darkest precincts in my mind are offering up right now. That has been hugely helpful to our relationship, and it really also helps me in my own mind sort between fact and fiction. Does any of that land for you totally.

I mean the power of that is, I think twofold run is you have to be aware of what those stories are, so they're not just kind of in the background, like controlling emotions. You kind of call them out, and that can be powerful for the second reason, which is then when you start to say them, when you say, well, my amygdala is really thinking this thing. I mean, guess is that a lot of times as you start saying it, you're like, well, this is awful, Like this is very

black and white thinking, this is catastrophizing. No, you pull the big list that clinical psychologists talk about in cognitive behavioral therapy of all the thinking errors, and your amygdala is making every single one of those thinking errors. And then your rational self can be like, Okay, that seems a little black and white amygdala, let's like kind of rain that in just a tad. But it's only by

that act of articulating it. I mean, sometimes these fears can be so scary to us we can ever say them, but then when we say them out loud, we're like, oh, wait, that's dumb, or that's like extreme, or like even if

that happened, I'd be able to deal with it. You can kind of negotiate with your own ambigduala thinking errors, and that can be super powerful, and it can mean that those emotions that would normally go with it, you can kind of rain them in because you're not as scared anymore, which doesn't lead to the downstream You're not as frustrated anymore, or as pissed off anymore, and so on.

And in my experience, I mean, yes, everything you said, and doing it with somebody else who you actually have a foundation of trust with is even easier for me because I am not trying to sort this all out inside of what David Foster Wallace calls the skull sized kingdom inside of my own head. I'm actually talking about it with somebody else, and for me, that's much easier

to do the processing. Yeah, and it's helpful for them to know where those kind of core triggers and fears are, because if it's somebody that you trust and who wants to see you succeed, they can recognize, oh, when I said that, I didn't realize I was stepping on your core terror or this core thing that's going to trigger you. And that can kind of build relationships for the future too. I have one more area I wanted to explore with you, but before I go there, is there anything else you

want to say about working with emotions within the workplace? No, I want to hear the last area we're going too. Well, it's your idea. I'm just you know, you send me a bunch of things you wanted to talk about, and they were also good that I'm trying to work my way through them, so I don't want to take any credit where it's not due. You sent me a note and you said something to the effect of many of us carry a misperception that we hate work. Why is

that a misperception. One of the things that we talk about a lot on my podcast and then I talk a lot a lot with my Yale students, is this idea that we have all these misconceptions when it comes to our own happiness. We have misconceptions when it comes to what we really like and what we really enjoy,

and I think the workplace is one of these. So there's this lovely study where if you ping people at random times at their work, you know, to set them up with a little smartphone app that dings and says, hey, how are you feeling right now. Generally speaking, people are okay at work usually because they're in flow right kind of doing something. It's kind of taking up your time.

It feels good. It feels better, for example, than what we were talking about before with the Netflix scrolling when you're on like screen number forty seven of different movies that are scrolling by. If you ping me then and say how you're feeling, I feel apathetic. I am not in flow, and though you know that, I'm like, I

feel kind of gross. And the sad thing is that for many of us, when we're at work, we get these moments of flow, we get these moments of connection where we're talking to other people and talking to teammates and figuring out ideas and things. But oftentimes we're so bad at picking our leisure that when you ping us during leisure, we're kind of bored, or we're like half paying attention to our phones or kind of not doing it. Paying people at work they're kind of happy and flow.

Paying people at leisure, they're start of feeling apathetic. How have you ask people when they're at work? Would you rather be at work? Would you rather be in leisure? People are like leisure and if you ping me, you know, when I'm in the middle of my Netflix scrolling and say Laurie, would you rather be at work and be like, no way, dude, I'm home, like I'm taking the day off. And so we are actually happier at work than we think, and maybe more problematically, we're actually less happy be a

leisure than we think. And this is something we really can control. We need leisure that allows us to be more and flow that allows us to be a little bit more present, that allows us to be kind of doing things a little bit more actively, and so finding ways to get in some active leisure can be quite powerful. I'll offer something up here that's been helpful for me, and I resisted because I resist everything because I have

a sort of unhelpful variety sometimes of skepticism. But if something strikes me as at all hokey, I will often get my backup setting intentions. But I have found that setting intentions with some regularity is a really great way to be mindful. Mindful and the purest expression of that word, if you go back to the polly word, that's the ancient language of polly that was spoken at or around

the time of the Buddha. The word is sati, and one of the translations of sati is recollecting or remembering, and that's what we're doing in meditation. We're remembering to

wake up and be awake right here. And so setting an intention like I'm about to go to Disney World with my family, and my intentions will be to disconnect from work and to enjoy my time with my family, and I can while I'm on the wed Way, people mover or whatever with my family, I might notice myself plotting, you know, the overthrow of whatever some you know, some rival, or you know, planning some expletive filled speech I'm going to give to Ben when I get back. Uh, Nope,

that's not what I'm doing right now. I am looking at the joy on my son's face, feeling that warm Florida air against my face, etcetera, etcetera. For work, similar thing, you know, I wake up in the morning and I try to remember to say, well, my intention is to make awesome stuff that helps people do their lives better, and while I'm at it, to have good relationships with

everybody I'm working with. Setting these intentions with some regularity while I still am deeply, deeply fallible has made me better, I think so again, I'll ask you, does any of that land for you totally? I mean, one of the biggest issues I think with our brain, in the way our minds are set up, is that that recollection doesn't happen naturally. We can have goals in these really rational

theories about the kinds of things will enjoy. You know, if you're at Disneyland, you're probably going to enjoy more watching the smile on your son's face than ruminating about some bad decision at work that happened three weeks ago. But our brains don't naturally make the choice correctly. And I think, you know, our systems kind of naturally go to the things that feel easy, that feel negative. Right with this negativity bias, our attention kind of just goes there.

They go to the things that are easy dopamine hits. As much as you might want to look at your child smiling expression, you know your email is going to be yanking on the little dopamine chords in a way that will kind of move your attention in the wrong direction in terms of what will really make you happy

and make you remember the trip well. And so I think this practice of intention setting is just a way to fight all these natural biases of where our negativity is going to take us, where our dopamine hits are going to take us. It kind of pulls us back into the moment. But that has to be sadly, I mean, it's stupid that our brains work this way, but it has to be an explicit practice. It doesn't work like

regular memory. We have to put some work into remembering and reminding ourselves so that we can kind of do it correctly. And that's true in leisure, but it's definitely true at work. Sometimes my intention setting at work is like I wanted to get through this big project, but I also wanted to get through this big project in a way that didn't make my students feel like crap, or like make my colleagues kind of hate me or

push them to the brink. Right, we want to do things, but we want to do things in a particular way, in a particular manner, with a particular kind of emotional stability, and so remembering that that is part of the goal too, can be really quite important. Well said in closing here, can you just plug everything you're doing, because I think

my listeners will get a lot out of it. Obviously you have this amazing podcast in which you can talk about if you want, but anything else you've put out into the universe that might be useful for folks, Yeah, the best is to check out the Happiness Lab podcast where starting new seasons hopefully soon. If you missed to see our last season three, you should check it out. Lots on these errors of our mind and going after dopamine and what you can do to find more fun.

But I also wanted to plug for my folks this fantastic stick thing you have coming up where folks can really sign up to kind of think more about their relationship with work and find more intention. So tell me about the challenge. So we're doing a meditation challenge. We're calling it the Work Life Challenge. It starts on November eighth. You can get it for free if you download the

ten percent Happier app. Every day we'll serve you up a little video that'll be me talking to a meditation expert about some of the challenges we may face at work. And right after the little video ends, it'll slide directly into a guided meditation that will help you sort of as I like to say, pound the lessons into your neurons. So we find this combination of video and then audio guided meditation to be really really effective. And so starting on the eighth, you can do the work Life Challenge

for free on the ten Happier App. I think this is awesome. In fact, I'm publicly committing that I'm going to do this myself. I feel like November eighth is perfect timing because at least in North America, right like, our time is going to change, it's getting dark sooner. This is a time when my brain might naturally go into like hermit low emotion kind of mode and to like take a challenge where I can say, like, no, I'm going to be actively working on positive emotion at work.

This sounds awesome. I'm in Thanks so much for sharing us my pleasure. Thank you. Thanks again to Dan Harris for having me back on his show. It's always great to talk to him. And don't forget to sign up for the free work Life Challenge on the ten percent Happier app. The challenge starts Monday, November eight, and I'll be doing it right alongside you. The Happiness Lab will be back soon with more new episodes, so stay tuned,