Q: "Can You Be Happy Alone?"

so much better. Social interaction is usually available all around us, but many of us, even in the busiest cities, can go a whole day without properly engaging with another human being. I'll admit I sometimes hide away from social situations too. I skip work gatherings to stay at home. I eat by myself when I'm on a train or plane. I often check emails on my phone rather than starting a

conversation with a stranger. I repeatedly fall for the lie of the mind that talking to people will be awkward, annoying, or just training. So when I put out a call for listener questions, I was really glad to see that so many of you were also looking for ways to master the art of becoming more socially connected and making new friends. I was also thrilled that I'd have a chance to bring in an expert on empathy who just happens to be one of my favorite Happiness Lab all stars.

I'm Jamie Zackie. I'm a professor of psychology at Stanford and author of the War for Kindness. Jamie's going to give us a crash course on how to be better at building meaningful social connections. If you're struggling to connect with an abrasive coworker, or if you're feeling like your social skills have atrophied a bit during lockdown, or if you're worried about taking on someone else's misery, never fear,

Jamil as always has some great advice. So sit back, relax, and learn how to get out there and interact in the social world. You're listening to the Happiness Lab Listener Questions Special Edition with Me Doctor Laurie Santos. Jimmie, I'm so excited that we have you on the Happiness Lab today because when we put out these questions to listeners, the main thing that we get questions about art how we can deal with social relationships and social connection, how

we can increase empathy. It was exactly the stuff that's up your alley, so hopefully that you can help all of us like figure this stuff out. I mean, I feel like for me, the pandemic has put into stark relief both the importance of social connection but also how fraught it can be, Like how out of practice I got very quickly living in the pandemic, because is something you've experienced art seeing the work? Oh my goodness, yeah,

I still remember. It's been several months, but my first in person talk and conference after being locked away mostly at home for a year and a half. And I love that stuff. I mean, that's part of why I got into this field, because I love the community. And yet going back it was the most terrifying thing. I literally have fun stage and I actually thought I was going to faint and had to hold on to the podium just to keep myself upright, which is not something

that I've ever experienced. I think for so many of us, our social muscles have just atrophied, and it's like taking a cast off. You know, if you've been in a cast for six months, you don't take it off and

then immediately try to lift weights. But that's what a lot of us are doing, and I think it's critical for us to be gentle with ourselves and understand that we need to restrengthen, we need to reacclimate to this social world that we have been part of for all of our lives but then abruptly taken out of for

a super long time. And so I love this idea of being gentle with ourselves because I think that's what a lot of our questions involve, is this idea of how can we face the challenges that come with resocializing but also be gentle with ourselves in the process. And one of the listeners that we got a question from was really struggling with this idea of connection, especially during the pandemic and some of the changes that happened during

the pandemic. And she had a question that I found really sad, and so I'm hoping we can help her out. This is Evannah Cole who asked this on Instagram. Avana asks, the pandemic has made it difficult to start a new life in a new country or city. It seems impossible to make meaningful friendships. Loneliness seems inevitable in this post pandemic era. So my question is, can you be happy alone,

which was a very sad question. Is I want to pivot from that question and maybe ask kind of what she implied, which is loneliness inevitable right now or are their paths out well? I think it's, first of all, loneliness is totally normal right now, and I resonate completely with what this person is saying. You know what's more

boring than water? Water is the most boring beverage on the planet, unless you're thirsty, in which case it is the single most interesting thing on Earth right and I think that we have gone from sort of having water all around us to being in a drought, a social drought, and so it's totally normal to feel lonely. You know.

One of my favorite parts about the Happiness lab out of many is this theme that you come back to a lot that our minds lie to us, and that those lies make it harder for us to find fulfillment and happiness, and a lot of the lies you talk about pertain to ourselves what will make us feel good

or bad in the future. I think that it's important to know that our minds also allied to us about other people, so we systematically think that other people are more judgmental, less friendly, and even more extreme than they really are. We even think that people are way more selfish than they really are. I think. I think Jean Paul Sartre said that hell is other people. I think maybe hell is our imagination of what other people are.

But here's the problem. We often interact not with the people who are really out there, but with the people in our minds. And in many cases, instead of interacting with the people in our minds, we stay by ourselves because the scariest thing on earth is to get in an argument or even worse like ask someone out, even on a friend date, and have them reject us out of hand. Right, those experiences are so terrifying that we just stay home because we want to avoid again the

mean people we imagine. Here's the even worst part. When we avoid the mean people we imagine, we don't get the data we need to realize that our minds were playing tricks on us all along. We don't get to meet the actual friendly people who might have turned into our new bestie or colleague or business partner, even our new love of our life, well maybe the only love of our life. No, but this is such an important point, right,

it's not so much that we're doomed to loneliness. We're doomed maybe to be worried about loneliness or worried about the kinds of things that might make it scary for us to interact with other people. But so much of the data suggested if we could just try it, if we could just take some baby steps and talk to someone. You ask someone out on a friend date. You'll just make that first connection with a stranger where you talk about the weather. It's probably going to go a lot

better than we expect. And then we'll start getting the data that you talk about. Right, you can say, oh, that wasn't so bad. Yeah. You know, as a kid, I was terrified of the ocean because I always thought that I would get attacked by a shark. You know. Shark attacks turned out to be basically the least common way you can die ever, you know, except don't getting struck by lightning four times in a row. But I

didn't know that. And shark attacks loom large in our imagination and change our behavior in a way that we don't really need to change. I think that rejection and mean people are like the shark attacks of the social world, we think way more about them than we need to, and so we adjust our behavior because we think rejection

is everywhere. When it turns out, if we just take, as you're saying, that little leap of faith, that little step to put ourselves out there and try to connect, we might be shocked by how accepting and friendly people are, and that might then empower us to take that next step to pull ourselves slowly but surely out of loneliness. And I think one thing, if you're hearing this and you're still feeling like, oh my god, it's the shark

attack of rejection is looming really large. I think one thing to know is that the social scientists have data on this right, like they've really looked at when you reach out to somebody and talk to a stranger for the first time, are they going to reject you? Are they going to think it's awkward? Are they going to be annoyed with you? And by and large, I mean, you correct me if I'm wrong, to be able, but my read of the data is no, it's just going

to go fine better than okay. Our friend Nick Epley talks about this all the time that when you ask people what would it be like to talk to a stranger today, or even to talk with a friend, but instead of just discussing your day, actually going deep with them and asking what matters to them, what they're struggling with, and telling them what you're struggling with any of those social risks. You ask people what it will be like, and they say, oh, my goodness, it will be the

most frightening, worst part of my day. It will be so awkward, it'll be horrible. And then Nick actually gets people to do these things and he says, well, what was that like? And they say, oh, my goodness, was the best part of my day, the most meaningful and connected that I felt in weeks. So again, the data

are exactly opposite to our intuitions. And this is one of the cases where I think knowledge is power, because when you know that, hey, I'm scared of that social shark attack, but there aren't that many sharks in the water at least, you know, not right near the beach in Cape Cod, which is where I was always terrified, then you can use that information as fuel to take those little steps. But I think another thing that feels scary about connecting right now is that the world socially

feels like kind of a fraud place. We all have these really distinct identities that feel very salient, that feel different than a lot of other people's identities. You know, politically, we're super polarized, and that on top of everybody who's kind of out of practice with social stuff, and so I think it can feel especially scary when you're trying to connect in ways that might involve contacting somebody who

has really a different perspective than you. And that was another set of questions that we got a lot about. I'll just read them. Another from a listener on Twitter, Nomfundo Nomfundo says, Hey, Laurie, First, thank you for an amazing podcast. Thank you, Nomfundo. I'm super keen to hear how to build healthy relationships with friends and colleagues and even in the romantic context, especially across social, economic and

political differences. Jimmie, I know this is a spot where you've done a lot of work in terms of what we can do to build up empathy, and so how can we build these healthy relationships across what feels like a scary divide. Well, first of all, I totally resonate with what no Fundo is saying here. If it's hard to connect in general, it's especially hard to connect when

we feel like we're different from someone else. I think one issue here and again, another social trick our minds play on us is that we focus on other people's statistics instead of their stories. It's almost like, instead of seeing someone as a person, you see them as a baseball card. I don't know, Laurie, if you ever collected baseball cards. I did, and you see every season a player had played, and what their batting average was, how

many runs they batted, and all that stuff. And I feel like these days we look at each other as though we're reading statistics off of a baseball card, and sometimes those statistics can be super misleading, especially when they make someone seem different from ourselves. I'll give you one example from the political domain. So it's true that people see folks on the other side of the political divide as extreme and evil and all that stuff. They also

just don't know who they are as people. So there was one statistic that was incredible where Democrats believed that thirty eight percent of Republicans earn more than a quarter million dollars a year. The actual percentages too and likewise, Republicans believed that thirty two percent of Democrats identified as LGBTQ plot and the actual percentage is six. So right, it's not just that we think the other side is bad. We literally don't know who they are because we're thinking

about what they're doing. We're over relying on statistics and their associated stereotypes to figure out who's there. At quick salve for this is to try, at least temporarily, to forget about statistics. Now they do matter. It matters that we're different from each other. I'm not saying that we should be blind to those differences or act like we're

all the same. In fact, I think we should understand that we're all different, not just from people on the other side of a divide or difference, but from people on our own side. Right when we ask people about their individual stories, we don't pretend that they're similar to us. We realize that they're different from every other person on

the planet. And it turns out that when people can access each other's biographies, when they can understand and also feel heard telling their own stories, it's not that differences melt away, but we find points of commonality that would shock us or surprise us if we were to keep

in this baseball card model of social interaction. One of the ways I know you've talked about doing that is to really make sure you're getting access to the stories, right, because that can be a little bit hard if you're not really trying to connect with people and hear their side of some perspective. Right, Absolutely, it feels hard to get other people's stories, but in fact it's extremely easy. People, including people who are different from ourselves, often will open

up very quickly if you show any genuine curiosity in them. Now, if that curiosity feels like it's going to be weaponized in like five seconds, then maybe people will clam up, and maybe they have a right to. But you know, I think this is one lesson from work that we've

talked about before on deep canvassing. This is work by Josh Kella and David Brookman where they show that when people go door to door talking about political issues, but start out asking people what's your story, Like, what's the time that you felt like people were rejecting you or like you felt judged for who you were, people are more than willing to share those stories. And then after sharing those stories, they're more than willing to hear other

people's stories. It turns out, if you want someone to listen to you, one of the best things you can do is listen to them first. Because we are a highly reciprocal species, right, we tend to pay back what other people give us. So if we judge people guess what, they're probably gonna do the same to us. And if we listen to people and invite their stories, they'll probably

want to hear ours too. So far, we've talked about lots of wonderful ways that we can connect with people and maybe even find new friends across the political divide. When we get back from the break, we'll take all of these challenges one step further to figure out how we can deal with people who really disagree with us. We'll tackle that big challenge when the Happiness Lab returns

in a moment. So far, we've been talking about what we can do to make new friends in this strange post pandemic era where we're all feeling a little bit socially out of practice. Now I want to turn to the question of how we can navigate some of the challenges that have come up in the friendships that we've

had for a long time. A lot of our listeners had a question about how they can support people who are going through some tough times during the pandemic, because again, this has not been a cake walk for most of us. A lot of people are really struggling right now. And we had one question from a listener that I want to get the producers to play now because I thought it was really powerful. So, producers, can you play at Megan's clip for us? Hi, Laurie, my name's Megan Kan.

I live in Omaha, Nebraska. I've been listening to the show for a long time and I love it. And my question is how can we contribute to the happiness of our friends when they're suffering without acting like their happiness is our responsibility. I have a lot of friends who have mental illness or come from a trauma background,

and it's really hard to see their suffering. You can watch that mental illness eroding their happiness, and especially when those friends don't seek therapy, it starts to feel like I'm their therapist and I'm not trained to be a therapist. I can start feeling like this friendship has been com toxic for me. It's really draining a lot of my energy and a lot of my happiness, and so I want to be able to support those friends, to be there for them, to be mindful of their happiness without

compromising my own. So, Jamille, this feels like a really tricky one. Any thoughts on how we can navigate this? Yeah, lots of thoughts. I mean, first of all, I think many of us have been through what Megan is describing here, feeling as though we care for someone and can't do anything, and that helplessness can be a real killer. It can

be so difficult and painful. Unit study empathy a whole bunch, and one of the pieces of empathy that we talk about in this world is empathic concern, the desire to improve somebody else's well being. Empathic concern is a desire, and like any other desire, it produces a goal in our mind, an assignment to fix this other person. And it's very easy to feel as though empathy has failed if you're not able to change somebody else. Now, that can be dreadful for everyone involved, right, It can be

really difficult for the person experiencing empathy. And in the worst of cases, and I see this a lot in healthcare workers people can start to decide, well, if I can't change other people, if I can't fix them, if I can't make them happier, then I've failed at empathizing. So I'm a bad empathizer, I'm a bad caregiver, and I'm going to stop. I've literally seen people pull back from their entire profession, like social workers, because they don't

feel like they're able to fix other people. But guess what, the job of empathy is not actually to fix other people, because other people are not in our control. Megan said that she's not trained as a therapist. Neither am I, but my wife is, and I asked her about this very issue, and she says, you know that one of the most important things is to realize that when we try to show up for other people, all we have

control over is what we bring to the situation. Can we be as attentive, as supportive, as non judgmental as possible. If we do that, then I would say that our empathy has succeeded, irrespective of how it lands with the other person, because we've done what we can. There's a lot of talk about this in the world of self compassion, and you know, I have to shout out Kristin Neff and Christopher Germer, who have excellent resources online that you

can look for here. One of their practices is known as equanimity, and it's this practice of understanding that we want the best for other people. We want to express our good will for them and to be there for them, but that we cannot control whether our help actually makes a difference for them. We can't even control whether they accept our goodwill. All we can do is provide to

them what we can. Now. The other side of this, and some good news here for Megan and the rest of us, is that oftentimes that's all people really want from us. I think oftentimes we overestimate how much people want us to solve their problems. In fact, when people think about giving support to others, another trick that their mind plays on them is that they think that they'll be bad support providers if they don't know the exact

right thing to say. In fact, if you ask support receivers what they want, oftentimes it's not for someone to fix their problems. It's just for someone to be there. So, Megan, even without fixing your friend's problem, you might be doing a lot more than you realize. You are just by being a friend to that individual, And I think that's so important, especially when you're in that position, you know,

because of course we've all been there. I've been there too, of feeling like, oh, I'm not making the difference that I'm hoping to make. Just remembering that the listening is the difference and that matters more than we can often realize. I think that was super helpful advice. Is there any point at which you think you might need to step back?

I think sometimes we can feel and pathetically beholden to people, but then there's sometimes when we're struggling ourselves where we might need to take a break and really focus on our own health. Is that the kind of thing that we need to consider when we're thinking about empathy one hundred percent? I think equanimity allows us to realize that, Okay, I can bring the best version of myself to this situation to this other person that I can, but it's

not my responsibility to fix them. Along with that, it's also important to practice self compassion. Being around somebody that we care about who is really struggling is its own type of suffering for us as well, and so I think it's important to also turn that compassionate lens that we have for a Megan's case for her close friend and point it back at ourselves and realize that we too suffer when we're around people who suffer, and that we need to care for ourselves during those times too.

Megan's case is kind of particularly extreme, right. It's a case where you have a close friend that's really going

through a tough time that you're trying to help. I think a lot of us also have peripheral people in our lives that are either going to a tough time or just have the kind of personality where they're not, let's say, as consistent with our happiness goals as we might let right, yes, our next listener's question is really asking a question about this, How can we navigate people whose moods and whose goals for happiness might not be as consistent with ours. This question comes from mass com

eighty four on Twitter. Mass com asks, good afternoon, Laurie. Do you have any advice on how to stay happy or focused even though sometimes you're in an environment where the individuals around you don't share the same mood or the same goals, especially in a work environment. So I think this is something that Jimmy Lee, you're a uniquely qualified to answer, and part because you're just like a

super happy person. I feel like your mean happiness is much higher than everyone else, so you're constantly in a position where people's mood is worse than yours. But also, since I know you've been thinking a lot about how we can navigate the moods of other people and stay empathic and try to help folks even when their moods

and their goals might differ from ours. Yeah. Well, you know, Laurie, if you don't mind, let me first say that I appreciate that positive sentiment, but I think it's way off base, which is not your fault. But I don't consider myself someone who's happy all the time by any stretch of

the imagination, including over the last two years. I think it's been a really hard time, And you know, I try to emphasize the positive when I'm out in public, especially when I'm thinking about the science, because I think that the science, especially the science that I study, the sunny side of human nature, gives us all this information that people are really wonderful in all these ways, and I do believe those data in my mind, that doesn't mean that that doesn't mean that I believe those data

in my heart all the time. You know, Yeah, like when you're stuck in traffic and like looking at the person next to you or any people in San Francisco just not use turn signals that never knows. There are so many there's so many times that I've struggled in so many different ways, And so I don't want anyone out there to think that just because we study this stuff that makes us natural experts at being awesome at

I don't all the time and just feeling terrific. But I think that we, like everybody else, hope that tools from psychology can help all of us access happiness just a little bit more than we would have otherwise. So to get back to Mascom's question, which I think is a really good one, we all have that person in the office or you know, our apartment building or whatever who maybe is a little bit gloomier or maybe has

a bad attitude. Pro tip if you don't have that person around you, you might be that person for other You got to listen to extra episode. So yeah, stay tuned for more of the Happiness Lab. But I think one to remember is that oftentimes, just because someone comes off as unhappy doesn't mean that they don't want to be happy. Just because someone comes off as a little bit mean doesn't mean that they don't want to be friendly or kind. I think that people buy and large

share our goals and values. The issue is that a lot of the times they feel disconnected from them. So I often try to get past the way that people present and try to be curious about what's underneath that. You know, so often anxiety shows up as anger or boredom, sadness might show up as frustration. People don't always perform

outwardly what they're feeling inside. So the first thing that I would encourage someone to do if they have someone around them who seems to not share their happiness goals is to really ask yourself, are you sure? Because maybe they do share your goals, but there's something getting in their way. Yeah. I think that there's also a couple of techniques that we can all use, but also encourage others to use to get a little bit more happiness

and meaning. For instance, in the workplace, there's a great study that came out just a couple months ago on burnout in the workplace, which I mean goodness, what is more common these days? I feel like burnout is just like the vibe of the twenty twenties. So far, it's like vibe of the decade burnout, but you know the decade is not over yet by a long shot, but nonetheless super common experience. And it turns out that there are different ways that compassion can help us overcome burnout.

The first is in order to know how, we need to know that burnout actually is more than one piece. There is exhaustion, just a sense of being totally overwhelmed by what we have to do. And there's also cynicism, a sense of depersonalization and disconnection from the people around us. So if you have someone around you who seems really unhappy, I might start by saying, well, in what way are

they unhappy? And might I make a difference in helping them get on board with those goals or even become happier If people are really exhausted, it turns out that self compassion and self care matter a lot, right just giving yourself that time to recharge. But interestingly, if people feel cynical and connected, sometimes what they need is not

to binge. Watch ted Lasso and eat a box of bond bonds, which I mean are two excellent activities, especially it's fair to be fair, you know, especially when performed together. But it turns out that one of the best salves or treatments for depersonalization, for cynicism, for that sense of disconnection, is not to retreat into ourselves, but rather to help other people. When we express compassion for others, we often end up feeling well, like there's more meaning to our

connections with them. So I guess for mass com I would say, think about what your co worker is going through and maybe ask yourself what could they do to feel better? And you know, if you express compassion to them, you might feel better too. That's the beauty of so many of these social strategies, as are like this wonderful win win. You do this nice thing for somebody else, You extend them compassion, you try to help with them in the workplace, and then you feel better too. It's like,

it's such a wonderful thing. I think we're so many of us are locked in this vicious cycle where we imagine people are worse than they are, so we interact with them as we imagine them to be, and we miss out on connections, but just flipping the switch on our behavior can change that vicious cycle into a virtuous one where beliefs turn into positive actions and positive outcomes.

So far, we've been talking about ways that we can re envision humanity is, you know, the kind of thing where a lot of people are fighting with us rather than against us, and ways that we can hear people's stories. We get back from the break, we'll take this one step further to how we can do that with people who are really in a spot where they're disagreeing with us. We'll tackle the challenges of that kind of social connection. When the Happiest Lab returns in a moment, the Happiness

Lab will be right back. We were chatting before the break, we were talking about how to manage people who weren't feeling so happy. I think our next two questions really fit nicely with that there again kind of how can you navigate people who seem to think and have a mindset that's different than yours. But a lot of our listeners wrote in about a mindset of what you might call past simism, or this idea of feeling cynical like you were talking about. So one of the questions we

got comes from Brandon Harris. Brandon writes, I'd love more insights on how to help people that are prone to focusing on what's wrong or thinking too critically or negatively, basically, how we can turn an extreme pessimist into an optimist. Brandon goes on to say that his wife tends to focus on what isn't right, or what hasn't been done,

or all the negatives. He says that she's aware and wants to be better about focusing on the positives, but it's just hard to be thankful because it's kind of ingrained. And we got a similar question from another person who jowned in from the Happiness Lab classroom on Facebook. This is from Katie Canning, who writes specifically about how to do with the same kind of thing, but with kids.

So Katie asks how to help children work towards happiness when they feel utterly despondent due to life events and can't see anything to be grateful for. I think this comes up a lot right where it's easy, when times feel tough, to focus on all the negatives to just be into the gripe thing rather than the focusing on the blessings and I know this is something that you've been thinking about more and more because I know you have this cool ted talk about cynicism, which everyone should

check out. But yeah, any advice for how to get people out of this pessimism trap, this kind of griping trap. Yeah, I mean, it's such a great set of questions. And the first thing I would say is that things are really screwed up in a lot of ways. So it's not all in our heads, you know, Laurie, both you and I are a psychologists, so we love thinking about people's minds and in particular, you know some of the

tricks that our minds play on us. But if you think things are bad, it might not be your mind playing. That's things really, you know, along a bunch of dimensions are really tough right now. So the first thing I want to say is just to validate people who are having a hard time seeing the bright side. You know, I don't think that right now what we have is

only an optimism deficit. I think that we have a world in which pessimism, it can be a really natural reaction to what's out there, and especially what's out there that we hear about in the news. Right because there's this disproportionate focus on negative information that we receive when we're doom scrolling, you know, at least for me at like eleven thirty PM, when I need to wake up at six am, right, So it's it's totally natural response

to a topsy turvy world. That said, you know, one of the things that I come back to over and over again is this idea that people are better than we realize they are. Right. So, yes, horrible things happen and people do awful, awful things, and it's easy, very easy to focus on those. I mean, those are the shark attacks of the social world that are actually worse than real shark attacks. Oftentimes, what we see people doing the horrible things that we hear about in the news,

but that's not representative of most people. In fact, one of the books that I've been reading to my own kids, who are six and five, is this book called Most People, and it's really beautiful. It's about the idea that the vast majority of people want to help one another, want to connect with others, want to have a positive impact on the world. And I know that's a book for six year olds, but honestly, the last time I read it, I've started crying because I think it's so easy to

forget that. But really it's true when you look at opinions around what people want from the world, whether they want to be rich and famous or whether they want to be part of community. People think that others around them want to be rich and famous, but in fact, the vast majority of people are much more interested in connection and community. So again, we've got it backwards, and I think that turning that upside down perception right side

up can be really empowering. I mean that not just in terms of optimism, like a complacent view that everything is actually great when things are really messed up. I mean that when we realize that most people around us want what we want, a peaceful and connected world, that actually can make us the opposite of complacent. It can help us agitate for change because it can be really paralyzing to think I'm the only one who wants things to change for the better. That can make us pessimistic

if we feel alone. Optimism doesn't have to be the same as thinking everything is great. Optimism can mean wanting a better future and understanding that most people want it with us, and so fighting for that even more fiercely. Now I want to tackle a different challenge that a lot of listeners asked about how we can manage not se eye to eye with the people in our lives, particularly where there might be disagreements. So we had a

couple questions that came up about this. One that comes from Suva I Am on Twitter, asks how can we better create happy teams at work? Specifically, how can we disagree and still work happily together. Similarly, we get a question from Samir that asks can we talk about disagreements and reasoning with others because naturally I'm right one hundred percent of the time. I think Samir is being a little facetious. War maybe, but he says, I find it demoralizing when the people I talk to do not see

things the way I do. And then Samir goes on to explain that he grew up in Pakistan but has since traveled the world and he finds himself constantly struggling to explain where he learned about these new experiences. He finds it hard to kind of connect with people because he's had these new experiences, and his experiences make it

really hard to see eye to eye. And one of the reasons I'm so happy we have you here in particular to answer this question is that you've written an entire book about strategies we can use to increase our empathy. For listeners who haven't checked out, they should definitely check out The War for Kindness because it's amazing. But any tips for Suva, Samir and all the others who might be NAVI getting this challenge of dealing with people they disagree with. I mean, it's the challenge of our age,

or at least one. I put it in the top five. It's in the conversation for a challenge of our age. It's so common and so difficult at a number of levels. I mean, I think that it sounds like these folks are talking about two different types of challenge and disagreement. So let me take those one at a time. Forsuva's great question around conflict at work, but I think this

also pertains to conflict outside of work. I think that one of the most productive things we can do when we disagree with someone is be really clear right off the bat about what we disagree on and what we agree on, because oftentimes I think that disagreement raises people's walls, right, It sort of raises their defenses to such a degree that they start to think in zero sum terms about the other person full stop, right Like, if you disagree with me about this thing at work, then I must

just like not like you and we must disagree on everything else, And that's probably not true. In fact, usually conflicts at work are very local about how a particular project should get done, and oftentimes people share if you just zoom out a little bit, they're big picture goals. They are working together on a team. So one of the big differentiators here in the sort of organizational psychology

world is between task conflict and relational conflict. So task conflict is where you just have a different opinion about how something should get done. Relational conflict is where, well, you kind of don't like each other, for lack of a better term. I think we often confuse the first of those for the second, because when we are threatened by task conflict, we start to think this is scary. I don't like it, and so I don't like the

person who's here with me right now. It's critical when we can to not extrapolate or overgeneralize in that way, but instead to have open conversations about, well, we disagree about this, but let's refocus. Let's just back up a little bit and zoom out what do we agree on? And oftentimes starting with that common ground makes discussion of task conflict of what you disagree about feel much less

dangerous and therefore go much more productively. I've even heard this as a strategy in work meetings, right where you start with okay, let's start with where we're all on the same page, we all agree on this, we all agree on this, I'll be all be honest. And sometimes if you zoom out, that could that could be a long part of the meeting where you're listings like if there's this one tiny spot where we don't agree, and that can make like, oh, we're all on the same page.

We just have to deal with this one tiny task conflict, and it can feel completely different than we are at odd completely I mean, I think that it's sort of a group meeting version of the compliment sandwich, you know, but much more authentic though, right, because oftentimes people really do agree on I don't know, eighty ninety percent of things in a workplace context, and yet it's so easy to focus on the ten percent until it becomes a

hundred right, So just interrupting that process is critical. And then to Samir's question, I think that I mean, which was hilarious by the way, Samir, Yes, I too, am right one hundred percent of the time, which I imagine means Sameir that you and I would agree one hundred percent of the time as well. So what happens if we disagree? My goodness, one of us is in an existential pickle, aren't there? Or maybe both of us? You know?

This is something that Adam Grant writes beautifully about and think again right around the idea of intellectual humility, which is how do we face challenges to what we know or what we think? Do we view them as threats to who we are? Or do we view them as

chances to grow and learn? And I think that oftentimes we do the first, because we confuse our opinions with our self worth, right, And I think that oftentimes, especially in a social media environment where people are very uncharitable and waiting to pounce on any inconsistency or whole in somebody else's argument, it makes sense to be very protective of our opinions. But that's probably not the world we

want to live in. I don't know about you, but if Twitter was somehow turned into a three dimensional space, I would try to get as far away from it as possible. Right Instead, I think we want to live in a world where we can support each other at a broad level and challenge each other at a specific level, again getting at that idea of task versus relational conflict,

but at a bigger picture level. So I mean, oftentimes with my own students and in my own lab, we love to disagree because disagreeing is one of the ways that we can test our own assumptions and become a little bit less wrong in the future. There's an element of intellectual bravery to being open to your assumptions being challenged. The thing is, and this is what I think a lot about as well, is that it's not enough to be intellectually brave in conversation, because that's not always our default.

In order to cultivate that bravery, we need to feel as though we are socially safe. So empathy, compassion, and mutual support, shared values. Conversations about all of these things and about our connections to each other lay the foundation for a more open minded and productive disagreement. Ell of ending on this idea of bravery because I think that it really underlies a lot of what we've been talking about today. We kind of need to be brave to

challenge our assumptions about what other people are like. If we want to reconnect and make friends, we kind of have to be brave and face the fact that we might not be able to fully help somebody who's feeling like they're in a difficult spot. But you know, we are brave enough to kind of take those first steps and listen. And if we want to deal with the disagreements we're facing, we kind of need to be intellectually brave and allow ourselves to feel challenged, but do that

with a bit of a growth mindset. And all these cases, we're just taking the research on social connection and sort of bringing it to the four But do you think that understanding these things better can really make us brave in that way? Like, do you think that knowing the science has helped you become braver in terms of your social connection and in terms of your empathic concern I

think that it has when I can apply it. There are so many cases when we really feel like we're under a lot of threat and it's really hard to do much of anything except try to survive. But I think when I'm able to have the patience with myself to slow down and remember what the science tells me, then yeah, I have found it to be extremely helpful, and I think a lot of your listeners have as well.

You Know, one thing that I want to say about bravery is that oftentimes we think of expressing bravery as doing something brand new that we've never done before. It's like the psychological equivalent of being Alex Hanald and you know, and climbing the face of Al Capitan with no rope. But a lot of us have been in a giant valley over the last two years, we've lost altitude, and so one thing that I want to emphasize to everybody is that it's also brave to return to where we were.

It takes a lot of work to get back to that sense of connection, that sense of togetherness that we had before the pandemic. And I hope people give themselves credit not just for being brave and trying new things, but for being brave and trying old things too well. A lovely way to end as usual, Jamie, You're amazing. Thank you so much for reminding me about the importance of being brave and being self compassionate as we all return to the old normal new one of the normals

that we're all going back to. You've been fantastic. Thank you so much for coming on Happiness Lab today. Oh Laurie, my friend, it is always such a delight to talk with you. Thank you so much for having me. Thanks again to our rockstar guest Jamil Zaki. For more wonderful wisdom from Jamille, check out his book The War for Kindness, Building Empathy in a Fractured World. And thanks so so much to all of you who roll in with questions for this episode. If you have a question we didn't cover,

then send us an email. You can reach us at THHL Voice at Pushkin dot fm. That's tl v O I c E at push ki n dot fm. You can also contact me on Twitter or Instagram and I hope you'll be back really soon for the next episode of The Happiness Lab. Listener Questions Special Edition with Me Doctor Laurie Santos. The Happiness Lab is co written and produced by Ryan Dilley, Emily Ann Vaughan and Courtney Guerino. Our original music was composed by Zachary Silver, with additional scoring, mixing,

and mastering by Evan Viola. Special thanks to Meilabelle, Heather Faine, John Ours, Carl Migliori, Christina Sullivan, Brant Haynes, 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 me, Doctor Laurie Santos. To find more Pushkin podcasts, listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your podcasts,