Move to Your Happy Place

in London for twelve years as a journalist. I was editor of mary Clad UK and I had no intention of leaving my busy city life until one day out of bloom, my new husband came home and told me he'd been offered his dream job working for Lego. The problem was that the dream job was a rather long way away. It wasn't just a few subway stops from Helen's London apartment. The job offer required that the couple

pick up their lives and move to rural Denmark. We couldn't have pointed out Denmark to you on a map of Denmark. But as well as sort of feeling like we were living this glossy, glamorous life. We were just tired and stressed and burnt out. Helen wasn't exactly living the sex in the city life. London was filled with bustling clubs and bars and restaurants, but Helen wasn't getting to enjoy them much. It felt like she and her busy friends never had time to connect. Helen also kept

getting sick. She had recurrent headaches, She suffered from insomnia, and self medicated with more white wine than she was proud of. Despite her fantasies of an idealized London life, she had to admit she wasn't all that happy. So when this other life possibility was sort of dangled in front of us, we were intrigued. But Denmark. As a

brit Helen didn't really know anything about Danish life. I started researching and looking into it and learned that Denmark had been voted the happiest country in the world and studies going back to the nineteen seventies. Take, for example, how Denmark did in the prestigious United Nations World Happiness Report. The World Happiness Report began back in twenty twelve and ranks over one hundred and fifty countries based on factors

like healthy life expectancy, livable incomes, trust, and generosity. In the decades since the report started, Denmark has repeatedly topped the happiness chart, which is pretty impressive. I mean the United States. In the UK, where Helen lived, they never made it into the top ten. And I became fascinated by this. How had a tiny country of just five point six million people managed to pull off the happiest

nation on Earth title? For a stress journalist like Helen, the possibility of moving to the happiest country on the planet sounded better than she initially thought, And I thought, well,

I can't get happier there where can I? Like Helen, many of us have fantasized that a healthier, happier life might be just around the corner if we could only get away from our current environment, that if we just up and moved somewhere greener or sunnier, or less traffic filled or beachier, that we'd finally be able to drop

all the bs and live the good life. But is the hope that a new place can fix everything just a fantasy, or could being in a fresh spot actually cause us to form healthier habits could a drastic decision like Helen's to uproot your life and move to a country you've never visited before make you magically eat better and get fit and stay off social media? And if a new environment can actually make you happier, should we

all start packing our bags pronto? Or are there ways we can get the same happiness benefits that new surroundings afford without the moving van. Our minds are constantly telling us what to do to be happy. But what if our minds are wrong? What if our minds are lying to us, leading us away from what will really make us happy. The good news is that understanding the science of the mind can lead us all back in the

right direction. You're listening to the Happiness Lab. Would meet doctor Laurie Santos at an age when you were off Laurie doing useful and productive things with your lives. I bicycled from Alaska, Argentina, around the world and across Africa. But it turns out that was a very good foundation for later career as an explorer. I'm chatting with Dan Butner, an adventurer, a best selling author, a documentary filmmaker, a national geographic expedition leader, and a triple world record holding

endurance cyclist and otherwise a professional truant. But Dan's favorite thing to do is to figure out the solutions to big scientific questions. He even founded a company that sends out teams of experts to solve such puzzles. And every year we were striking off somewhere in the world to solve some mystery. So we were actively looking for mysteries

to solve. And in two thousand I came across a World Health Organization report showing that this archipelago in Southeast Asia add the longest disability free life expectancy in the world. The surprising archipelago was in Japan, about a thousand miles south of Tokyo. It's the Okinawan Islands. The residents of Okinawa live a really long time. In two thousand, the islands boasted three times more centenarians, that is, people who

live past a hundred years than North America. And the islanders didn't just live for a long time, they remained surprisingly healthy well into old age. Relative to Americans, older Okinawans had four times fewer breast and prostate cancer diagnoses, a five times lower rate of heart disease, and nearly a third the ray of dementia. So why were the residents of this chain of islands, often in the Pacific

Ocean living such long and healthy lives? I said, Aha, Now that's a good mystery, and so Dan was on the case. Working with National Geographic and the National Institute of Aging. He assembled a team of demographers, doctors, and

scientists to travel to Okinawa. But the project got Dan wondering whether there were other places in the world that enjoyed similar longevity centenarian hotspots that hadn't yet been identified, and if so, whether he could use what the residents in those places were doing to reverse engineer the factors that lead to a longer, healthier life. And thus was

born this whole idea of blue zones. Blue zones are what Dan calls places on the planet where people are statistically likelier to live healthily well past a hundred years. Dan's team wound up identifying a few such blue zones, like the island of Sardinia off of Italy, one small peninsula of Costa Rica, and the town of Lomo Linda and California, And despite being thousands of miles apart, Dan found that the daily lives of the people living in

these longevity blue zones had some striking similarities. They mostly a plant based, whole food diet. They did not exercise in the way we think of exercise, but rather they lived in environments where they were nudged into moving every twenty minutes or so. They had strong social life, very little loneliness. They had intentional social circles, they curated the four or five people they surrounded themselves with, and they

had strategies to keep from overeating. As you might guess, all of these tendencies are great strategies for avoiding disease. They're the kinds of behaviors that we make New Year's resolutions about, or that our doctors plead with us to prioritize. But the blue zone dwellers didn't seem to be working hard to achieve these healthy behaviors. The resident's biggest secret was that they seemed to engage in all these positive habits naturally. Dan found that the key to the blue

zone residents success was simply location, location, location. The real aha here was that longevity seemed to ensue from the right environment. In other words, these people had no special discipline or no special regimen. They weren't conscious of their behaviors and weren't trying to restrict them or amp up their physical activity or diet or any of the things

we do to pursue health and longevity. It ensued, you don't need to force yourself to get to the gym when you've got start Indian hells to keep your cardio up, and you don't need a meatless Monday when literally everyone you know is eating a healthy, plant based diet, as the Seventh Day Adventist community of Lomo, Linda does Dan's Blue Zone Project had discovered that the key to longevity

is the environment and community we find ourselves. In his book The Blue Zones, Lessons for Living Longer from the people Who've lived the longest was a bit of a shock to scholars who'd long invested in the idea of personal improvement that we could each individually live longer no matter where we are, if we just committed to the right gym, workout, or healthy diet. That's right. I'm a heredtic in that I think trying to modify behavior for the long term is a bad investment. If you look

at the recidivism curves of diets and exercise programs. There's some pretty good research that suggests they work for weeks or months, but when you start looking out more than a year, it's very hard to find anything that works for more than single digit percentages of people that tried it. So we live in a country where seventy percent or

a beast or overweight. We spend billions, hundreds of billions of dollars a year on diets and exercise and supplements and all these sort of proactive gimmicks and regimends, and they've been on the aggregate and unmitigated failure. So I've made my professional lights work focused on optimizing the environment.

Are surroundings, the equal system around us. But it's one thing to optimize environments that promote a healthier life, should we also be optimizing environments that promote feeling happier too. I've found that people were really interested in living a long time, but then you get to thinking, well, what's a long life worth if you're not enjoying the journey? So I got very interested in happiness. Dan began the hunt for happiness hotspots, the places in the world that

ranked highest on four distinct aspects of well being. Lots of instances of positive emotions, relatively few instances of negative emotions, a high level of purpose, and a rich satisfaction with life. The first spot on his happiness Blue Zones list, it was Denmark, But the other two countries Dan identified we're far from the Scandinavian nations that usually top happiness lists. Costa Rica and Singapore both scored highly on Dan's scale.

When I first tried to write about Singapore for National Geographic, the n editor rejected it because she didn't believe Singapore could be a happy place. But the biggest surprise wasn't where the happiness blue zones were. It was just how much of a person's well being sprung from where they lived. Something as a lucif his happiness could be determined by the zip code you call home, His new happiness findings

mirrored exactly what Dan had learned about longevity. I look at this pursuit of happiness a lot like a game of black jack. You get to stack the deck. You can have a deck full six and sevens, or you can stack that deck with aces and jack's. And there's now a big enough body of evidence that tells exactly what those aces and jacks look like, and if you want to get happier, don't waste your time changing your behavior,

change your surrounds. For someone who teaches a class promoting individual positive psychology interventions, chatting with Dan was a wake up call. It's not that the happiness strategies I share with students don't work, it's just that you don't need them if you live somewhere where those well being boosting behaviors are just part of the shared culture. I just think so many of the things that are marketed to us, it just makes my eyes roll, all these apps and

coaches and there's just not good evidence. But there's great evidence for the environmental factors that seem to be producing higher levels of well being and experience happiness, and we ought to be paying more attention to them and less attention to the marketers. Dan thinks we ought to consider the same drastic strategy that Sad London or Helen Russell chose. If you're not living a happy life where you are, then it might be time to move. People kind of

pooh pooh, this oh, I can't move. But actually, if you look at census data, the average American moves ten to eleven times after age eighteen every time they move or provide, it's another opportunity to pick a neighborhood that will produce higher levels of happiness. Helen had picked what many say is the most happiness inducing place on Earth as her new home, but she quickly learned that swapping a great metropolis for the unfamiliar Danish countryside might not

immediately be a perfect recipe for joy. We moved to Denmark in the middle of winter, and I didn't know anyone. I didn't speak the language. We had no friends, no family. Then I certainly worried to begin with that I'd made the biggest mistake of my life. The happiness lab will be right back. I thought maybe I could give it a year. I told him this year of seeing if I could learn what it was that Danes did differently

and change my life as a result. When Helen Russell's husband was offered his dream job at the birthplace of Lego, the tiny town of bill It in rural Denmark, she was excited to find out what it'd be like to live in one of the world's east countries. So I quit my job and people said terms like career suicide. But yeah, we packed all of our belongings into one hundred and thirty two boxes and shipped them across the North Sea. Helen's happiness quest didn't get after the best start.

She arrived in the dead of a snowy Scandinavian winter. It was the coldest I have ever been. You know. I came from the city, so there's always that nice insulating layer of smog, and you're always dashing between buildings, so you never get that kind of cold to your bones. And also I came from working in glossy fashion world magazines, so I didn't have any practical clothes at all. I was soaked my core from the near constant rain. The sky was perpetually slate gray, and it was just freezing.

It was so cold at first winter that the Fiord Froze was just like something out of the beginning of a film before things go very badly wrong. But as a writer, she figured she could at least get a good story out of it, so Helen decided to chronicle her experience in a memoir entitled The Year of Living Danishly and the Secrets of the World's Happiest Country. As she dove into the book, she came to admire Danish culture more and more. It was just a very very

different way of life. I had to completely reassess my priorities. Take, for example, the importance of free time. You've probably heard me talk about the concept of time affluence, that subjective sense that you have the free time you need. Countless studies show that feeling famished for time is a recipe for reduced well being, and this is something that Danes try to avoid at all costs. So I think in the UK and the US we have fought for more money,

whereas in Scandinavia they have fought for time. In Denmark, the official working week is thirty seven hours, but the average Dane is only putting in. I discovered thirty three hours a week, so far fewer than I was used to back home for Helen workweeks that short took a while to get used to. Coming from London and having grown up in Margaret that she's Britain, you know. In Ronald Reagan era, I was very much of the mindset that all this is great for these little mystical Scandinavians,

but product ativity can't be very high. I presumed that this made Dane's vasset slackers, but no. In fact, a study from Warwick University shows that workers are twelve percent more productive when they're in a more positive frame of mind. Denmark has the happiest workforce in the world and as a result is the second most productive country in the EU. So they are working less, but they're getting more done. Many companies in the US have a need those of presentism.

There's an expectation that the bars will be thrilled to see you in the office working well, passed closing time well. In Denmark, the opposite is true. I heard of a colleague who was still at their desk at around seven pm and got given a lecture about time management and a leafless about efficiency. There's this assumption that you should be able to get your work done within the working day. Danes also think very differently about how to balance your

career and family life. There's this assumption that family comes first before your work. So it's perfectly acceptable for both men and women to leave a meeting at say four pm, because they have to go and pick up their kid from daycare and then make dinner. It's perfectly normal to expect balance of work life and home life, and everybody does it. But it's not just family that takes precedence.

Dane's value all forms of social connection. There's this idea that stopping together to have a cup of coffee and a chat is valued. It's not just a frippery, it's an integral part of life. And with their extra free time, Danes also have the bandwidth to invest in hobbies. The average Dane is a member of two point eight clubs I discovered, and this will range from everything from rollerblading

to running club or cycling. And because people aren't so defined by their work status in Denmark, the club aspect becomes really important as well, because it could be that Olas he's a cyclist rather than O Lars is a CEO. You are what you care about, what you love, rather than your job title. Club culture keeps Dan's physically active and socially connected, but it also encourages Dans to prioritize something else we know as critical for happiness and stress reduction. Play.

And it should be no surprise in the country of Lego and Hands Christine Anderson, but play is considered a worthwhile occupation at any age, experiencing lots of playful connection with the people they care about It's also how Scandinavians make it through the coldest, darkest months of the year. So the Danish winter is not something to be trifled with. It reliably lasts from around October to March, and to

get through that you do need some coping strategies. And I think the Danish huga, this word that has become known around the world in recent years, is this idea of having a warm, cozy time with people that you care about, often with cake or coffee or beer involved, and it's really about togetherness. This concept of huga is deeply woven into all parts of Danish society. You hear the term used in every second sentence that a Dane will say. They'll say tech phone, hugli tea, thank you

for a huga time. And when I first started writing about huga, many Danes were perplexed. They just couldn't understand why this was of interest, or that other countries might not have an equivalent. These days, you see Huger talked about everyone in Instagram posts and magazine articles about self care. But Helen worries the americanized version is missing many of the critical elements. I think around the world, it's been co opted for commercial gain a little bit. You see

huga candles or Huga blankets. It shouldn't cost anything. Unlike trendy Americans, the Danes don't spend their time trying to out hugo one another. In fact, the very idea of social comparison works differently in Denmark. I think in Denmark there is something called Yante's law, but the main tenets I guess is that you're not to think you're special,

You're not to think you're better than anyone else. And this sort of runs like a red thread through all areas of Scandinavian life, and in Denmark in particular, So showing off or being too flashy is very much round on the Jante's law ethos don't imagine you're better than other people. Fits well with the fact that inequality is so much of a thing in Denmark, which is also important for happiness, as research shows that unequal societies tend

to be unhappier and less cohesive. Inequality even makes it harder for you to trust your fellow citizens, and the Danes are amazingly trusting. Take for example, Danish childcare. You see all these enormous Mary Poppins esque prams outside coffee shops and there are babies in them asleep. And this is because Danes trust each other so much they're happy

to let their babies sleep outside. That's right. Danish mothers are totally cool leaving their babies on the street, completely unprotected, where any freak could just show up and snatch them away. But infant snatching isn't something that trusting Danes spend much time worrying about. Helen says. There's even a common national saying nobody steals babies in Denmark. This is because seventy nine percent of Danes trust most people, a statistic I

found extraordinary. I don't trust seventy nine percent of my immediate family in London. Helen would probably get reported to the police or social services if she abandoned her babies on the street. I wonder now that she had become a mother of twins herself, if she'd picked up on this Danish habit of trusting strangers. Did start leaving your pram outside with the twins and things? I did? Yes, I mean honestly terrifying to start with. And a twin stroller.

I mean you're not getting that through any doors, So yes, I left it outside in the cold, and they are healthy and have some good lungs on them, so yeah, I am a fan of that. Now Helen's now a fan of lots of Danish customs, which fits with what the science shows. There's evidence that simply by moving to Denmark, Helen probably couldn't help but absorb the ways of her

new home. Studies have shown that people arriving from low trust countries quite swiftly within just a few years, end up taking on the Danish levels of trust, which I found fascinating. But it's the same also true for happiness. Researchers at the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia studied what happens to immigrants when they moved to a happier nation, like going from the UK to Denmark. According to Dan Butner,

the results were striking. Within one year they start reporting the happiness level of their adoptive home, which in some place just can mean almost a doubling of their level of happiness. So there's no positive psychology intervention that's anywhere near as powerful as that. By immersing herself and the happiness inducing Danish lifestyle, Helen hardly had to think about altering her own behaviors. She didn't decide to reduce her work week or prioritize socializing. She just had to go

with the flow and reap the happiness benefits. And she didn't stay in Denmark just for that trial year. Her family found real happiness there, so they made it their permanent home. When we talked over Zoom, she was still sitting in the same home she'd found that cold winter over a decade ago, which looked very stylish and hugo to me. I mean, don't judge my background here, but

it looks very Danish to me, honestly. But yeah, but what does Helen's success mean for those of us horrified by the prospect of a Danish winter who can't move across the world to a happiness hotspot anytime soon? When we get back from the break, we'll meet someone who argues that we don't need to pack our bags. If we're committed to changing the home we have now for the better, the happiness lab will return in a moment. Visitors to Paris are often delighted by the food or

mesmerized by the grand architecture it. Consultant and lifelong Texan Jason Roberts was struck by something else. These little small shops and the little bakers, and the cafes, and the string lights, and the and the fruit and vegetable stands, and young people and old people, and the bicycle infrastructure of people riding bikes everywhere. Jason's European honeymoon was an

eye opening experience. I would see, you know, ladies that were like in their seventies or eighties, and they'd have a bicycle, and they'd have a baggett sticking out the back and then puppy in the front, and so just that idea of traversing through space seemed so beautiful and so life affirming. It was also different from Jason's back home. Everyone was out in the streets. The streets were alive and just the opposite of what I saw where I lived in Dallas. Jason City had miles and miles of

hideous strip malls. Bikes weren't a possibility on the huge, multi laned concrete freeways that he drove on to get to his windowless I office. Shopping for groceries back home didn't involve smiling elderly ladies with baguettes, chatting and enjoying the sun a tiny fruit stands. Eventually the honeymoon ended, Jason flew home and went back to work in his lonely, cinder blocky office, but he couldn't stop thinking about the

lifestyle he witnessed back in Europe. I was frustrated with the idea that we'll spend fifty weeks out of our lives working and they will spend two weeks flying to go somewhere we would rather be, you know, So I thought, well, how do you transform that and flip that on his head and they maybe make it to where, you know, the place that you are is the place you want to be at all times. Jason had just moved to

the Oak Cliff neighborhood of Dallas. The area was unloved, shabby looking, not the sort of place you'd happily hang out in, you know, empty buildings and boarded up here and broken lights. And I'm trying to figure out, well, where do you start on something like that? And I think that's where a lot of us begin. We look and we're like, well, you know, I don't have the money. I'm just you know, a person in my neighborhood, you know, with the little kids, and just trying to struggling to

pay my mortgage like everybody else. Jason spoke with lots of people about improving the area, but many weren't that optimistic. First of all, people said, that's crazy. These things are too expensive and problems too large, and it's going to take, you know, decades. The conventional wisdom was that oak Cliffe's only hope would be to entice a big restaurant chain to open there, but Jason thought the answer should come from inside the community, not outside. But how Jason decided

to hit the books. I called myself an amateur historian. I love to go to the library and look at the old photos and you know, look up what were the old kind of you know, markets and farmer's markets that we had, and just kind of discovering those things and then telling people about what that was. And that's what led to a radical idea. Jason's attention was drawn to one of oak Cliffe's most historic buildings, the Texas Theater.

The theater had been a huge deal back in the nineteen thirties, but it's better known nowadays for being the spot where Lee Harvey Oswald was arrested after JFK's assassination, and so it had this very infamous history. The theater had been shuttered for over ten years, but Jason had a plan to bring it back to life. Why don't I just do a big event in the theater. I

want to throw a big show. He gathered a bunch of musicians and local artists, and one Friday night, his crew descended on the building, cleaned it up, and set out some easels, turning the interior into a studio space, already for a charity art auction. Before we about to open the doors, we started thinking, man, this is a horrible idea. But when we opened the doors, we had seven hundred people show up. They just kind of flooded

in the building. We had people saying like, man, we were waiting for someone to open this old building, And I thought, man, I was waiting for someone to open the old building too. Jason's ragtag event raised over ten thousand dollars for good causes, and it was the first step in a successful effort to revive the defunct theater. Today, it's a spot where Oak Cliff residents of all ages can meet up and hang out. It even hosts its

own film festival. We went from this thing being an eyesore that nobody wanted to pay a talk about, even city was avoiding to. Now, if you go to City Hall, there's a mural of the Texas Theater in City Hall, which is amazing because we were literally told, why would we want to fix that area? Just a place where a crazy guy got arrested. The project proved to Jason that his community could come together to improve their neighborhood.

It was emblematic, and it also laid the pathway for everything else I did afterwards, which follow a similar formula. Next came a bigger transformation. Jason knew that parts of Dallas did look in function more like the streets he loved in Europe, little corners with a good bookstore and a cute cafe. They weren't big. They were often like maybe a block or two, and I thought, it's interesting, you can just have this great block that people love

to go to. So Jason found an abandoned block in oak Cliffe to revive a one way street with a few abandoned storefronts, and he soon discovered why it had become so neglected. His city had tons of weird zoning rules that made setting up businesses difficult. Think parking regulations or ordinances prohibiting crowds gathering or flower planting, or creating

bike lanes. And the thing is that nobody knew all these rules when I started asking people about that, and nobody knows zoning, and so I said, well, to go weekend. We broke all of these rules because nobody knows these rules exist. The locals spent two days transforming the block. They painted bike lanes and open pop up cafes with outdoor seating. They added flower pots, string lights, and fun

games for kids. Jason's crew had made the block so attractive that huge crowds turned up, including the mayor and city leaders, who wanted to make the transformation permanent. When Jason explained that what they'd done was technically illegal, the town's council members agreed to adjust the zoning laws to attract real business. Soon, the block had permanently transformed from yet another isore to a social anchor for Jason's entire neighborhood.

It's now Jason's mission to help other communities retrofit They're not So Happy spaces. His new nonprofit, the Better Block Foundation, helps local residents to collaborate and build similar pop ups any neighborhood that wants to can receive a shipping container filled with outdoor seating, lights, kids, games, and other stuff

to make their block feel more inviting. His goal is to help communities transform their outdoor spaces in ways that convince local governments to make those happiness inducing changes permanent. Fixing up one tiny part of town won't address all the things that make some places unhappier than others. Viclanes and cafe tables won't challenge wage inequalities or cut people's

working hours. The small changes made in oak Cliffe certainly didn't immediately shoot Dallas onto the list of Happiness Blue Zones, but Jason still believes that small improvements are worth trying since they bring local people together to help other people on the outside of things this crazy, This will never work, and that almost inspired the neighborhood even more and me as well, because I thought, well, I don't care if I fail. I'm going to meet my neighbors, I'm going

to learn some stuff, I'm going to get involved. In fact, becoming part of a community so committed to helping one another was quite literally a lifesaver for Jason. In twenty twelve, I was diagnosed with the stage three cancer, and when I was at my absolute worst and chemotherapy and can barely move, the neighbors that I had brought together to do better blocks started knocking on my door and saying like, Hey, can I take your daughter to go shopping at the

mall or take your son to go fishing. Jason credits his recovery, at least in part to the social support he received from the other residents of oak Cliffe, who we got to know through his campaigning. What I got out of all of that was a neighborhood, and I think that's what I was looking for. I think that's what we're all looking for. We like to believe that we're individually in control of our own happiness, that with the right level of effort, we can work to develop

better habits, and we can do this. But the science shows that being in the right environment can make those changes much much easier, and so Blue Zone discoverer Dan Butner says, if you're unhappy, it's a no brainer. Just pack your bags. If you want to get happier, don't waste your time changing your behavior, change your surroundings. But projects like Jason's show that if our spaces aren't as happiness inducing as we like, then we can change them.

We can fix the environment around us so that it helps rather than hurts, our enjoyment of life. I hope these stories have given you some idea about ways you can make all your zones a little bluer, and I hope you'll come back again. For the next episode of The Happiness Lab would be Doctor Laurie Sandos. The Happiness Lab is co written and produced by Ryan Dilley, Emily Ann Vaughan, and Courtney Guerino. Joseph Fridman checked our facts.

Our original music was composed by Zachary Silver, with additional scoring, mixing, and mask dring by Evan Viola. Special thanks to Milabelle Heather Fame, John Schnars, Carli Migliori, Christina Sullivan, Maggie Taylor, Eric Sandler, Nicole Morano, Royston Preserve, Jacob Weisberg, and my agent, Ben Davis. The Happiness Lab is brought to you by

Pushkin Industries and Nate Doctor Laurie Santos. To find more Pushkin podcasts, listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your podcasts.