Laurie's Personal Tips

from Warton Business School. You may remember Katie from one of our New Year's episodes where we focused on the fresh Start effect, but Katie also hosts a fantastic podcast called choice Ology, which is all about the ways our minds lead us astray during decision making. Katie wanted me to be a guest on choice Ology so that we could chat about strategies for protecting our collective well being

during this challenging time. This was a bit of a change for me, since, as you know, I'm usually the one asking the questions, and so I decided to share that episode with you. I hope you enjoy it. Laurie, thank you so much for joining me. I really appreciate it. Thanks so much. I mean, this is important stuff to be talking about today. I actually wanted to start by asking if you could tell me a little bit about what originally inspired you to create a course on the

science of happiness. I know, it was a somewhat unusual career move for an expert on canines and primates. Yeah, it was a little strange. About four years ago, I took on a new role as a head of college on campus. So Yale's one of these strange schools like Hogwarts where it has Griffin door and slitherin, like these weird colleges within a college. I became head of Silliman College, which is one of the residential colleges, and it was in that role that I started really being in the

trenches with college students. My house is in the middle of their dorm. I ate with them in the dining hall and hung out with them in the coffee shop. And it was then that I really started to see this mental health crisis that I'd kind of heard about on the news, but I hadn't really seen up close

and personal. I mean, I was dealing with students who were suicidal, students who were just like incredibly depressed or often just really really anxious and just kind of stressed out about the future all the time, and it just made me sad. I mean, this was like my community of students who I was really close with, and so the class started as an attempt to give them actionable

tips for how they could do something about this. And so I slapped this class together like a new professor, does you know, thinking like, oh, fifty students or so we'll take it because it's kind of this new class, and was completely blindsided by the fact that over a thousand students at Yale wanted to take it. We had to figure out how to teach the class in a concert hall because that was the only spot on campus

where all the students fit. And it was all a little surreal to realize how much students were excited about learning this content of what they could do to feel happier. On that note, I actually wanted to just start by asking you a little bit about what our listeners should know if they're trying to figure out how to improve their own emotional well being at this very scary and uncertain time. What insights from that class do you think are most important to the current crisis. Yeah, well, lots

of things. I mean, I think the first most important insight is just that this science gives us interventions we can do to improve our well being in any time, but especially in a time that's as stressful as what we're going through in COVID nineteen. I mean, I don't know about you, Katie, but I'm watching my anxiety levels

shoot through the roof. I'm dealing with lots of uncertainty, Like I'm constantly trying to figure out if my chest is tight because I've developed symptoms of COVID nineteen, or if I'm just incredibly anxious and feeling stressed right now. I think so many of us are just kind of realizing that unless we do something, our mental health is

going to really suffer. And I feel like that can be really frustrating because we know exactly the things we're supposed to be doing right now to help our physical health, right you know, we wash our hands, you know, stay six feet from everybody, you know, shelter in place kind of thing. But I don't think the CDC and the government and all these folks are giving us strong things we can do to protect our mental health right now. And I think that's why droves of people are coming

to this course now. They're like they want actionable tips that they can do to make things better. And so I think one good thing is that the science really shows us. There are actionable tips you can do. There are simple interventions that all of us can be doing right now to feel better, but they take some intention and they take some work, just like you know, washing your hands a little bit more than you normally would, or washing them more carefully or for longer than you

normally would. I think that science gives us tips about what we can do to improve our well being, but you know, you have to put some work into them, and it could feel foreign when you start these new habits. But the biggest thing I think that the science suggests is that we have to be taking care of our social connections right now. And I think that's for two reasons.

One is, you know, we have to worry about our immune function, and we know if there's one thing scientifically that completely takes immune function, it's feeling lonely and feeling socially isolated. But the one thing we have to do to protect our physical health right now is to socially distanced. It's like not to go do what we normally do when things feel threatening and scary, which is like go to the pub with our friends, or like go to

our mom's house and get a hug. Like what we have to do is just like shelter in place and kind of be by ourselves. So I think being socially connected right now means being very intentional about it. It means using the technologies we have, from phone to FaceTime to Zoom to actually get those informal interactions that we're all missing right now. And that can look like checking in on your elderly parents, you know, once at night. It can look like, you know, calling friends more often

than you would normally. But it can also look like doing the fun things we do socially together just over these technologies, which has been really fun for me. I've reached out to a number of friends I haven't seen in a while, Like I did a spa and night with my college roommates where we all did mud masks on Zoom. You know. I've been getting dinner with friends across different time zones. I did a dinner with a friend in Seattle who I hadn't seen in a long time.

And even just like silly things that you'd never do socially over technology before, like share a yoga class online with a friend at the same time. You know, we wouldn't do that normally, but right now we need to be doing those things to have the same social connection we normally would. So advice I'd gave to my podcast folks is think about the social connections you had, you know, a month ago before all this started, and figure out how you can build exactly those same things in with

these technologies. My research team is doing virtual water cooler meetings at noon every day to sort of try to simulate that experience. And Angela Duckworth and I were just talking and she told me that they're having family dinners with a guest every night propped on the table, a family member who can't be with them, like an uncle or an aunt or a grandparent. So I love all the ideas you had and curious about the various ways that your listeners and our listeners are coming up with

creative solutions to this. I love that you use the water cooler example, because I think those are the things we need to replicate right Like we know how to formally have like a conference call over zoom, we do that for work all the time. Well, we don't know how to replicate well yet. Is the informal things you know, like Joe was dropping by the house and it's like, oh, stay for dinner like that kind of simple thing we

don't know how to replicate. Or I'm walking by your office and I just want a chit chat for five minutes. We need to find ways to do those intentionally over these technologies too, and I think that's going to make or break our feelings of social connection. I'm actually hopeful that this COVID nineteen crisis and the ways we're using technology right now might form new habits that end up

helping us even when this whole crisis is over. Because that's another thing to remember is that it feels like this is going to go on forever, but in fact, you coronavirus is going to go away, will go back to normal life. But I'm hopeful that some of these social things we're doing now I can do later when

all this is over. I hadn't seen my college roommates all in the same room in like years, right, but now because of COVID nineteen, I'm having the spawn night with them and catching up with them and seeing their kids over zoom, Like I kind of want to do that when things go back to normal, like that would help my normal social connection and to help me feel less lonely in like the normative kind of typical data.

I think we'd never do that before because it kind of just felt so weird to like call somebody up and have a zoom spawn night. But now that we're kind of breaking the barrier to do these things, I think we can keep doing them in the future too. Yeah,

that's a really optimistic note. And I guess one of the things I've been thinking about is these wonderful moments we've seen captured on social media where like all of Italy comes out onto their balconies and everyone's flapping or singing together to celebrate healthcare workers and these kinds of moments. You know, how can we find more of those after the crisis would be helpful as well, I think, yeah, exactly.

I mean, we should be thanking our healthcare workers all the time, right, you know, we should be kind of coming together as communities all the time. And I think, I mean, as you know from all your work on habits, like, once we start doing this stuff, once it becomes part of our behavioral repertoire, we'll be able to do that more often once this is over too. I love all these suggestions about how we can maintain our social ties.

I know there are some other things we can do too, outside of maintaining social ties to maintain our well being. One thought that I had was that a lot of our mutual friends in the scientific community have been advocating for something called the Three Gratitudes exercise. In normal times, that's something that can be helpful, and I thought maybe it would be helpful if you could talk our listeners through how that works and why it might be valuable

to try. I know, yeah, I think this idea is so critical right now, where we can just get in the mode of woe is me, everything is terrible, like complaining about everything from staying inside to like what we have in our pantry, to you know, the small things, to like the really big awful things, like you know, people's family members are dying, right like this could be a time when we really got in everything is awful mode.

But what research shows is that that doesn't help us as much as we think, and that we really can benefit from taking an approach that involves being a little bit more grateful, so counting our blessings, even right now when it feels like there aren't that many blessings to be counted. There's lots of work suggesting that the simple act of scribbling down three to five things you're grateful for can significantly bump up your mood in some studies

as quickly as within a couple of weeks. And so this is an exercise that all of us can be doing. It's completely free. It takes, like, you know, five to ten minutes a day. You know, for me, I've been trying to do this sort of informally myself, and you know, the list is a little bit crazy. It's like, you know, I have the tea that I really liked in the

back of my cupboard and I found it. Neither me nor my husband are sick, and I can still hug him right now, which which is something I want to savor now because who knows how long that's going to last. Right again, those seem like silly things, and they're against a backdrop of a lot of bad stuff. But just remembering that I have these enormous blessings does two things. One is it makes me feel grateful, which can boost

my well being in the moment. And so those moments that you appreciate can cause you to savor the things that you really care about now and can appreciate them, you know, even though some of them are really fragile. So we're talking a lot about things that are bringing us hope about after this crisis. I also want to talk about what's giving you hope and the way people are behaving during the crisis. Are there things that you're seeing about this crisis that are bringing out good in

people and that you think will have benefits on society immediately. Yeah, and that too is the thing that I've seen. But it also takes work. You know, if you're not putting intention in and you just go on your Facebook news or go on Google News, it doesn't look like the world is a happy place. It's a very woe is Me kind of time right now. But if you dig a little deeper and you look for where there are people doing amazing things. As I think it was mister

Rogers said, you know, go look for the heroes. That was one of his quotes during tragedy. If you look for the heroes, there are heroes there, and there are heroes that are doing amazing things. One of the things I've been doing is on Twitter, there's this wonderful hashtag

called covid kindness. And whenever I find myself panic scrolling, like I've kind of been on Twitter looking at the awful stuff from like, let me do the search for COVID kindness, and whenever you do that, you just see these wonderful stories of people who are doing things in their community to help vulnerable individuals or healthcare workers that are just you know, being incredibly brave to help the community.

Just like wonderful stories of just human kindness and compassion that just pop to the four And when you see those, you realize that, you know, all the panic buying and the toilet paper stealing, like that's not actually the norm. What does happen when people are in crisis is that people come together in these incredibly beautiful ways. But you

have to be a little intentional to notice that. I've been trying to do the same thing, to look and see where people are doing these generous acts, and I've been totally blown away. One thing that I've been thinking about is I've read about many of the generous acts that we're seeing, is that not only are they helping other people, but they're actually probably helping the people who are doing them. Right, So for those of us who are trying to figure out how to maintain well being

at this time. One of the things I've been thinking is we should all be trying to find a way to contribute in a small way from home. You know, maybe the way we can contribute as just by staying home, but finding a purpose and finding a way to be generous has benefits. Could you talk a little bit about the research on pro social behavior and how that affects well being? Yeah, I mean there's so much work suggesting it. If we want to be happier, we need to be

other oriented rather than self focused. And I think this goes against the kind of standard cultural line right now, you know when we think of like, oh, we need to treat ourselves or like self care you know during the pandemic. What the research suggests is that that doesn't

work as well as other care during the pandemic. Tons of lovely work by folks like Mike Norton and Liz Done show that the simple act of doing something nice for others, whether spending money on others or spending your time on other people, can boost your well being more than if you spent that money or time on yourself. And again, that violates our intuitions about what we need, but it's what the research suggests, and I think right

now that becomes all the more important. I think one of the frustrations people are feeling about staying inside is that they see so many people in need. There's so many vulnerable people, there's so many sick people who need help, and you say, well, what can I do to help? And people say, just stay home, Like do nothing, like just stay home, which kind of violates our agency, Like

we want to take active steps to be helpful. But then when you look at what people are doing, you realize that, like, so many of us can do really simple things right now. And I think it's particularly useful right now, not just because we all need this bump in well being that can come from pro social behavior, but also because we all have these windfalls that allow us to do that more easily. You know, so many of us are experiencing a bit of a time windfall

right now. You know, some of us aren't working as much. Some of us, even who are still working at our normal jobs, don't have the normal commute time that we spend. We can use that time windfall to help, whether that's you know, calling and advocating for people in need, or doing chores and stuff for people in need, whether that's you know, like going on social media and writing gratitude letters for the healthcare workers, like we can use that

time in specific ways to help others. Some of us are even experiencing what we don't expect, but which is a sort of financial windfall. And I've seen this in myself.

It's small and so we might not notice it, but you know, those cups of coffee that I'm not buying at my coffee shop every morning, you know, that's three bucks a day that I'm saving that I could be using to do something nice for other people, whether that's again buying groceries for someone in need, or you know, buying gift card to a local restaurant that you needs the support right now, and it helps the folks that are really in need, but it also helps us, like

this kind of wonderful win win situation that doing nice stuff for others right now is going to boost our well being in a time when we really really need it right And I think that's one of the most fascinating findings from research on happiness of late is how we get this virtuous cycle we're giving helps the giver and the recipient, and it feels really important right now.

I've also been thinking about how we find meaning in these moments, and I think looking for ways that we can be purposely helpful is probably going to help us all find meaning in this madness exactly. And I think that is a scary part of this is that it feels so uncertain. You know, many of us are facing our own mortality or the close mortality of the people we care about, and that can launch us into this

deep search for a meaning. And I think the act of realizing that our purpose in this crisis is to do whatever we can to help other people and to make other people's lives better in this yucky time, that can curb that existential anxiety, which I think can be really really powerful. Okay, I want to pivot from the existential to the super practical and talk a little bit about a couple of other things that people might want to focus on and think about doing just to make

themselves feel better on a daily basis. We talked a little bit about three blessings or the three gratitudes. Exercise. I want to talk about physical exercise as well. Where does that fit into maintaining well being, and how are

you finding ways to do it while you're social distancing. Yeah, I think one kind of scary thing about this crisis is that the normal things that we do for our well being, like our daily yoga practice, it's hard to maintain that habit in this new situation, mostly just because

we're in a totally new situation. We're all like in our houses, we might not be able to get to our gyms or our yoga studios, and so we need to be very intentional about making sure the normal things we did in our daily lives to promote well being, like exercise, that we still seem to fit those in.

And exercise is a really really critical one. We know exercise is super important for our physical health, right It's another thing that contributes to healthy immune function, which we all need right now to protect ourselves from this virus, but it completely contributes to a healthy mental health as well. You know, a half hour of cardio on Monday morning, there's research that suggests that the kind of endorphin while being boost you get from that can last till Tuesday

at two pm. And so I think we need to find ways to prioritize it, but that means hacking our new habits to figure out how to fit it in. And one of the tips that I've been giving my listeners or the podcast actually comes Katie from your work, which is on all this work on fresh starts. Right. So, one of the bad things about this crisis is that we all are stuck in this new situation of being inside our house. But for many of us, that's a

really unprecedented situation. And what we know is that we can use those new situations and these new kind of temporal boundaries to set up fresh habits. And so this is something that I've been trying to do where I'm like, Okay, I'm not working in the mornings, I'm not having my normal meetings. That means mornings are for cardio right now.

And so almost like you might treat a new year as a new moment, as a new time horizon, as a good new start, I'm kind of using social isolation as that It's like, well, now I'm sheltering place new situation, let me set up these new habits. I think we also have to get really intentional about how we do that exercise, especially if you're a person who's gone to the gym a lot. I think you just need to

get creative. And one of the creative ways to do that, I think is to harness exercise which bumps up your well being, and being social, which bumps up your well being, and to try to find ways to do exercise via these technologies with friends. And so I've done this a lot with different yoga classes. You can actually learn from some of the best yogis in the country for free, because people are doing these wonderful nice things where they're sharing this stuff. But don't just do that yourself on

your yoga mat. Do that with a friend over zoom, you know, book a class together and meet with a friend in a different time zone who can work out with you. And I think that allows you both to get your work out in, but it also can let you have that social connection time that we're all creating right now. It's also a nice commitment device, by the way, to throw out another thing we've actually talked about on on this show, and Mabe you've talked about on yours too.

By committing with someone else to do something, it ensures you'll actually fall through at a higher rate. Right, So if you how your friend, you'll meet them at this class online. It's sort of like telling someone you'll meet them at the gym, because if you don't show up,

then you're a jerk. So exactly. You know, you'd never go to an online yoga class with your mom before this crisis, But now this is this new way that we can connect with the people we care about who we may not see as much, and hopefully that can

be a thing that sticks into the future. You know, hopefully this fresh start of this crisis, if you can harness it to do better habits, whether that be exercise or these new forms of social connection or even things we haven't talked about yet, like meditation or breathwork, like hopefully those habits will stick beyond the time that we're stuck in our houses. I hope you'll like the tips

that you've heard so far. We'll take a quick break, but Katie and I will be back in just a second with even more practical ways you can focus on your well being during this challenging time. The next thing I wanted to ask you about was patient and what you think that can do for people at this time

and in general. You know, it's something we hear about all the time, and I always wonder, you know, is it just overhyped or con meditation really be helpful and sort of how does it relate to mindfulness and how can we use both at this moment to boost our well being. Yeah, I think this stuff is so critical right now. Both meditation and then all just different attempts to kind of chill out our sympathetic nervous systems, you know,

fast biology lesson. You know. One of the reasons we're all feeling so hyped up and anxious right now is that coronavirus is the kind of threat, like a tiger lurking in the bushes, that's going to set our sympathetic nervous system going a little bit crazy. And so this is the fight or flight system. It's the system that says, oh my god, shut off everything else about the way the body works so that we can run away really

quickly from this threat. The problem with coronavirus is that it's chronically on, you know, possibly it's going to be a threat that we're all facing for months and months and months, and it's really wigging our sympathetic nervous systems out. For lack of a better way to phrase it. We're not meant to turn these systems on, but the constant threat is making us feel anxious. It's causing our bodies to be flooded with stress hormones, and that has a

number of really awful physical consequences. First, it's really bad for our immune system, so again, at this time that we need our immune function to be working at its optimal level, we're flooding our bodies with hormones that are it's making that not the case. But the second thing is it's awful for our digestion, it's awful for our sexual health and functioning. It's just not good to be turning this system on for a long time. The good news is that the body has a stop gap, which

is the parasympathetic nervous system. That's the like rest and digest system. And normally you would turn that on by shutting off the threat, which we can't do right now. But the great news is that the body gives us an awesome way to activate the parasympathetic nervous system, and that's actually through our breath. If you ever notice when you have like a horrible threat, or if you've been attacked by a tiger or even if you're like running

a marathon or running on a treadmill. When you're breathing in the time when your body's like activating all its muscles, you tend to breathe really shallowly and through your chest, the kind of thing that people experience in say, panic attacks too. But the parasympathetic nervous system is activated not by shallow chest breathing, but by this deep sort of belly breathing. You know, these deep breaths that we take where we take the air in through our stomach and

then let it out really slowly. The awesome news is that this is a way that science suggests we can activate our parasympathetic nervous system just through our breath. And so just taking time to do two to three minutes of deep belly breathing this is an even meditation per se. It's just kind of getting your breath right can give your parasympathetic nervous system a moment to kind of jump in and react. You know, this is a spot where

the ancient wisdom was just spat on. The simple act of taking time to focus on your breath means a couple of things. One is that you're kind of training your brain to focus on something, you're training your brain to focus in some sense on what you want. And so when your mind might go to ruminating about COVID or what's happening with your elderly grandparents, all these things that you might not be able to control at that time, that kind of sucks and it's going to active your

sypathetic nervous system. But the simple act of focusing on your bath means you're kind of like a muscle retraining your mind to go to the stuff that you want it to. And every moment that you spend kind of focusing on your breath or a mantra is one that you're not freaking out about COVID statistics right now, And it can have these incredible effects. The simple act of meditating a few minutes a day can increase your concentration, It can increase your focus, It can decrease things like

craving and like things like your addictive tendencies. It can be really helpful for sort of promoting the healthy behaviors you need to get over addictions and things like that. But it can really regulate your emotions. It can really help with things like depression and anxiety. Again, I think in part because you're kind of training your mind not to ruminate on the bad stuff but to focus on

the good stuff. That's really helpful. And for those like me who are a little bit new to the world of meditation, do you have any advice on great tools we can use to get up to speed. Would you just google meditation or do you think there's some Yeah, there's some offerings out there that are better than others. Yeah,

there are lots of different ones. If you look at you know, beginner meditations or especially beginner mindfulness based stress reduction, which is one of the most secular and scientifically based versions of meditation, those tend to be really good. Other folks really like calm an app or headspace. But honestly, even if you just google beginner mindfulness based meditation, you can get started. Another thing that I often tell people who are new to it is to not focus on

the amount of time. I think sometimes you think, oh my god, I to meditate for twenty minutes and so on, like start with a minute. Dan Harris, who is like a big new proponent of meditation, he wrote a book called a Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics, he's a big proponent of just do it for a minute, because we all have a minute where you can just sit there, and you'd be surprised that just sitting and following your breath

for a minute can be really powerful. I also think it's useful to think about the particular kinds of meditation because they're different sort of flavors of meditation that you can try out. Whether you're focused on your breath, in some meditation cases, you're focused on gratitude, so actually kind of using that meditation time account your blessings in some sense.

But a really powerful one that can be particularly helpful right now is a form of meditation known as loving kindness or meta meditation, which sounds so cheesy in syrup be sweet and so bear with me if you're the kind of person who's not like into this stuff naturally, But what loving kindness meditation is is it's the act of trying to control your compassion muscles. Basically, during the meditation, you sort of think about people in your life and

you sort of wish them well. You'll often use phrases like may you be happy, may you be healthy, may you be free from harm, things like that, but Practitioners of this practice often report that in the act of thinking those thoughts, they kind of feel these warm compassion feelings in their chest, and the research suggests that practicing

these things can be incredibly powerful. One piece of research suggests that loving kindness meditation can really help with burnout, and the way this is thought to work is that, you know, burnout is when you kind of over feel people's pain too much. Think of these healthcare workers right now who are dealing with these awful situations, you know, seeing people and suffering, watching young people die like it's awful.

Practicing compassion through these techniques allows you to experience the care that you want to give for other people without necessarily experiencing their pain. So it's a little different than empathy and kind of feeling people's pain. You're kind of feeling motivated to help them and what The research suggests that these practices can allow you to engage with the suffering of other people in a way that doesn't mess

you up. One study by Tania Singer and her colleagues show that if you give subjects these kind of nasty videos of people suffering, but you have them do this practice of loving kindness meditation, they experience those videos not with negative emotions like ah, I feel sad and I feel angry about this situation. They actually experience those videos

with more positive emotions, and particularly more affiliative or caregiving emotions. So, in other words, you see human suffering and rather than wanting to run away from it, you want to do something about it and help. And I think in this time where we need to kind of oh with the suffering of other people and not fall apart, but also in a time when we need to focus our energies on more pro social actions, this particular kind of meditation

can be really powerful. One thing I've been thinking a lot about, and you mentioned earlier, is how much time we're all spending on social media and the news, and how hard it is to rip ourselves away from that. For me, one of the biggest challenges actually is that at night, right before bed, I sort of get on my phone and start reading all the latest statistics, and it doesn't seem like that's probably the best thing to do. So I'm wondering if you would suggest other routines. In particular,

how can we rip ourselves away from these statistics? When is it most harmful in fact to be looking at them, and what other routines should we have if we want to make sure that we sleep well, for instance. Yeah, so I think the social media one is a big one.

Many of us are in a new situation or feeling anxious, We're feeling a little bored, and in our normal life, many of us have a habit that we do when we're feeling that way, which is like we quickly go on Facebook or Instagram or Twitter and like do a quick check. The problem is that while those quick checks might have worked and bumped up our dopamine in the past, right now they're not filled with happy cat videos or baby pictures. It's filled with like these scary coronavirus statistics

that are going to spike our anxiety. I think one of the things I've been trying to do is when I do those things. In other words, when I do the quick Twitter check, I try to be really mindful and pay attention to how it's feeling in my body. Did that help or did that kind of make me

feel worse? And inevitably, whenever I've done that check lately, I've been like, this was a really dumb idea, Like why did I just spike my anxiety unnecessarily again right before bed, right when I was going to bed, and so I've kind of just put a moratorium on any social media after around six pm. I've made a little spot in my room where I put my phone and I keep it really far away. And the things I do before bed now usually i'd read on my kindle.

I've only brought out physical books ahead of time, so that even if I'm planning to just read on my kindle, I don't have the urge to kind of do the quick social media check. And that's been so helpful for my anxiety levels, particularly before I sleep, right because another thing that spiking your sympathetic nervous system does, it makes it really hard to go to bed. It makes it really hard to rest and relax. So that's been really powerful.

I mean, I think it's incredibly important to be informed, right, and some amount of anxiety about what's going on is important because we have to plan and act on it. But I've been trying to figure out, like, what's the optimal level right now? How many times a day do I actually have to check in to be informed rather than to be totally freaked out, And what I've realized is that, like you know, one half hour check in the morning is probably good for the day. Anything else

is going to be superfluous. And so that's been really powerful to realize I don't have to do it, and also to realize that doing that is an opportunity cost on other stuff that could really be helping me. When I get the urge to go on social media now to do a quick check, I've been trying to harness that into a new behavior, which, as you know, to replace habits, it's helpful to have the other new behavior

you go to. So I've been trying, instead of going on social media to say, oh, this is a time when I should text a friend, who should I text, I'll text my dad, or I'll text you know, a friend who's like up the street, like And so it's still like going to my phone and doing something when I have that moment, a momentary anxious feeling that I have this queue that I want to act on, but instead of acting on it in a way that's going to bump up my anxiety, hopefully it's acting on it

in a way that will help with social connection. Right now, I love that habit replacement that's a fantastic one. Use that queue of a social media craving and instead text a friend or you know, make a donation or find out way you can help someone. Exactly the same with going to bed too. I think, you know, if I didn't have the other queue of a physical book that I was excited to read, even if I put my phone somewhere, I would just get up and go look

at my phone right like. But having this other thing that I'm looking forward to, that's an alternative behavior that I can just slot in. It's been really powerful, that's great, So I have to be really disciplined about replacements. On the note of sleep, you mentioned your sleep routine, which is fabulous, and I'm going to emulate. Are there any other things we should be thinking about doing to ensure that we're able to sleep well or as well as

possible at this very stressful time. What does the research say about how we can ensure we get the sleep we need for our systems and our emotional well being. Well. I think one thing is to just realize how critical sleep is for our mental health. Right now, the data on sleep and mental health are like shocking that you basically can spike your mood and your emotions to basically almost be at a clinical level where you need treatment simply by getting like, you know, three to four hours

a night of sleep for a week or so. There's some studies suggesting this right, So finding ways to prioritize sleep, it's really critical, and I think you hit the nail on the Headwick. We just have to be really intentional about it. We have to form new habits. The good news is we're in this crazy new situation where we can start to form those new habits. We're in the

house in a different way than we were before. You know, we're not going out, say at night, to go get drinks with friends or doing what we would normally do, and I think that allows us a novel situation where we can set up these new habits. The last thing I was thinking about is these stressors that are very real and aren't just in the media, but things like losing a job or being afraid that you were going to be out of a job, or knowing someone who's

sick and being very worried about them. When we have these very real concerns that we can't ignore, like social media, which we really could live without. What advice do you have on how we can handle that? I guess there

are two pieces of advice. One is if you're dealing with that situation happening to someone else, someone you care about, right you know, this is happening with me in my own life, you know, finding out that students in my college are presumed COVID, you know, and they're really, really sick right now. And this is one of the worst things about this crisis, is like I can't do what I would normally do, which is like show up at their door, give them soup, like, you know, wish them well.

I think we have these thwarted moments of wanting to help where we can't do it. And what I've been trying to do is to harness those thwarted altruism moments to a different kind of altruism. Right Like, every time I get an email from a six student, I'm like, let me donate some money to a cause that's really good right now, or let me call an elderly neighbor and check out on them, right So you kind of take the altruistic urge that you have to help the person in need who you might not be able to

help directly. And sort of channel that into something else. I think if you're facing these problems yourself, right you've personally lost a job or you've personally started to feel sick, I think the key there is to do the kinds of things that we know can be really powerful for promoting resilience, and a lot of them have to do with realizing that this situation, as awful as it is,

is temporary. And it's the kind of thing where we know that people who've gone through really awful life circumstances and have come out the other side often report that it was ultimately a good experience. Okay, so it'll be hard in the moment when you're dealing with a crisis to see that, but it sounds like the key advice is, yes,

this may be the low point in your life. We don't want to take anything away from that, but research shows that you will come out of it and that six months later a lot of people are able to be back just as happy as they were before. So know that there is a light at the end of the tunnel and look for opportunities to grow. Yeah, and you can speed that light up by kind of taking

this future oriented processing yourself. So if you're experiencing something awful, just gribe how you're going to deal with that setback a year from now. You know, So if you've lost your job, sit down and be like, all right, a year from now, me, what am I thinking? Actually I got through it, things are going to be okay. It can kind of just get you to have all like a more meta view of what's going on, and you

can realize that it's it's in the moment. Things that seem really awful in the scheme of things are often going to be okay in sometime. Laurie, No, we're about at a time, and I just wanted to ask if you have any final words of wisdom or any final things you think we should cover so that our listeners can get through this very difficult time. You've given so much great advice, but is there any last word that you want to share? I think I guess the last

words two words, but just self compassion. It really is an awful time. Like there's a reason we're calling this crisis unprecedented. There's a deadly virus that's incredibly scary and incredibly uncertainty provoking. And I think one thing to realize is it's okay to feel crappy, Like it's okay to not be working. It's okay to give yourself and your family members a little bit more self compassion and a little bit more of a benefit of the doubt than

you usually would. But part of that is to realize that science gives you intentional things that you can do to feel better. So yeah, like feel crappy and lick your wounds, but as soon as you have the space, try some of these things out that we've been talking about, because all the research suggests they can help a lot. Thank you, Laurie, this was so great. I really appreciate you taking the time. No, no problem, this is one

I hope you enjoyed this special episode. If you liked what you heard, you should subscribe to Choiceology wherever you get your podcasts. And I also hope that you'll come back to hear the next episode of The Happiness Lab with me doctor Laurie Santos