Making Sense - Sam Harris - #196 — The Science of Happiness

00:00:00.000 welcome to the making sense podcast this is sam harris just a note to say that if you're hearing

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00:00:35.200 listen to the podcast so if you can't afford a subscription there's an option at samharris.org

00:00:40.060 to request a free account and we grant 100 of those requests no questions asked today i'm speaking with

00:00:47.560 laurie santos laurie is a professor of psychology at yale university and she hosts the very popular

00:00:54.220 podcast the happiness lab and she teaches the most popular course at yale which is on the

00:01:00.720 scientific understanding of happiness she also runs the comparative cognition laboratory and the canine

00:01:05.760 cognition center at yale and here we get into what we know or at least have good reason to believe

00:01:13.040 scientifically about the causes and conditions of happiness at this point we talk about the role

00:01:20.620 of expectations and the experiencing self versus the remembered self we talk about framing effects

00:01:28.160 and the importance of social connections the effect of focusing on the happiness of others as opposed to

00:01:34.560 one's own introversion versus extroversion the influence of technology on our social lives our

00:01:42.060 relationship to time the connection between happiness and ethics hedonic adaptation the power of

00:01:49.260 mindfulness resilience the often illusory significance of reaching one's goals

00:01:55.460 and other topics anyway i really enjoyed this i hope you find it useful i now bring you laurie santos

00:02:04.460 i am here with laurie santos laurie thanks for joining me thanks for having me on the show so uh this

00:02:15.640 was a long time coming many people wanted to hear from you how do you describe what it is you do

00:02:20.900 academically and intellectually yeah so i am a professor of psychology here at yale university

00:02:27.540 my day job as a psychologist is is involved in studying what makes the human mind special

00:02:33.640 and i do that by studying non-human primates and domesticated dogs but but most of my time these days

00:02:40.160 is taken up with a different scientific pursuit in psychology i've become super interested in the

00:02:44.620 scientific basis of happiness and well-being and you you have a podcast titled the happiness lab

00:02:50.500 where you go into these issues in depth and the course you teach at yale am i right in thinking this

00:02:57.840 is the the most popular course at the university yeah so in 2018 i taught a new class on this topic

00:03:04.000 called psychology and the good life and the first time i taught it it did become yale's largest class

00:03:08.760 ever just under like 1200 students enrolled which was about one out of every four students at yale

00:03:14.100 since then we put the class online on coursera.org and it's now one of coursera's biggest classes

00:03:19.800 and just in the last month we've had over a million learners enroll wow well that's great happiness really

00:03:26.780 is a paramount concern for everyone whether they think about it in those terms or not let's just focus

00:03:33.680 on the word for a second because happiness at least in english is a somewhat insubstantial concept and

00:03:42.200 people will often say something like you know there's much more to life than happiness mere happiness

00:03:49.560 sounds like a somewhat a feat goal or primary value it seems to grade into something like hedonism

00:03:58.240 or pleasure and then people would will tend to try to balance that in their talk about the goals to

00:04:05.960 which human life could tend with concepts like meaning and virtue and then many of us find ourselves

00:04:12.740 using a word like flourishing which is strangely stilted although not as stilted as using the greek

00:04:19.540 eudaimonia and then i tend to talk about well-being a lot and you actually just use that term

00:04:24.700 so how do you think about the concept i mean mostly i just think i wish we had better terms

00:04:29.420 than that everyone agreed on them so i didn't spend a lot of my time kind of fighting about them

00:04:33.240 i use the term happiness because i think that's what a lot of people think of when they're thinking

00:04:38.900 about concepts like well-being and flourishing i agree that happiness is a much more loaded thing

00:04:43.200 because some people think it's about hedonism and really basic kinds of forms of happiness but i think

00:04:48.300 people kind of get this concept of happiness you know we know it from like the declaration of

00:04:51.940 independence right you know life liberty and the pursuit of happiness right but but scientifically

00:04:56.440 speaking i think social scientists mean a particular thing when they use the term happiness

00:05:00.200 or well-being and this is the definition that i end up using in the course which is that you can

00:05:05.100 basically say you're happy if you have a lot of well-being in your life and for your life and and

00:05:11.080 what we mean by that is that kind of happiness in your life is the sort of you know almost hedonistic

00:05:15.640 kind of positive emotion type stuff right you're happy in your life if you have lots of you know

00:05:20.120 positive emotions and laughter and so on and and not many negative emotions like relatively speaking

00:05:24.700 there's not a tremendous amount of sadness and anger although we can debate about how much of

00:05:28.800 that you want but that's kind of being happy in your life but but there's another feature i think that

00:05:33.240 the social scientists really care about and that's that you're happy with your life and so that's

00:05:37.800 basically your answer to the question all things considered how satisfied are you with your life

00:05:41.860 right now and so i think there are these interesting moments where those dissociate right i have my

00:05:46.960 my academic dean here in my residential college you know just had a newborn baby and you know i think

00:05:52.200 she's very satisfied with her life but in her life right now there's a lot of negative emotions of

00:05:56.500 like you know cleaning dirty diapers and not sleeping and these kinds of things and i think you know i see

00:06:01.160 a lot you know when i go to different talks and things of people you know who are really happy in

00:06:05.840 their life you know they have a lot of hedonistic pleasure but really at their core they're really

00:06:09.840 dissatisfied with their life and so i think i think if you're if in my view if you're able to

00:06:15.000 maximize both of those things you know that winds up encompassing things like flourishing and meeting

00:06:20.000 and all these kind of lesser concepts i think if you're happy in your life and with your life you're

00:06:24.300 doing pretty well right was it that distinction happy in your life and happy with your life to my ear

00:06:31.120 that is more or less identical to danny kahneman's distinction between the experiencing and remembering

00:06:37.720 self is there any daylight between these concepts for you or is that the same division i think there's a

00:06:44.300 little dissociation there i think i think you can have happiness in your life and with your life in

00:06:49.320 the experienced self right and so just as an example you know right now i'm you know experiencing lots of

00:06:54.800 positive emotions just from you know daily things i do and daily activities but i also have a lot of

00:06:59.160 meaning from this happiness work and that feels like it right now like i don't have i have to think

00:07:03.820 back on it you know my it's not my future self kind of looking back and thinking like oh i you know

00:07:08.780 that was the kind of thing i really wanted to enjoy i can experience that life satisfaction in the

00:07:12.680 moment and so i think you can actually have both in the experienced self rather than the remembered

00:07:17.860 self although i it sounds to me what you're doing is something i do naturally and this is a point of

00:07:24.300 disagreement between me and danny i really do think the remembering self is simply the experiencing

00:07:31.040 self in one of its modes it feels like something to have these moments of retrospection when asked

00:07:37.040 what story can you tell about your life how satisfied are you the fact that you know in his

00:07:42.780 paradigm he's able to show that there's a mismatch rather often between who you're talking to when

00:07:49.040 you're you're asking about a retrospective judgment and who you're talking to when you're asking for a

00:07:54.580 moment-to-moment accounting of just how you know what it's like to be you still there really is just

00:08:00.200 a single timeline of life experience and as you say the global assessment of one's life is what i'm

00:08:10.400 doing today actually meaningful is it bringing value to the world are the sacrifices that i'm making or the

00:08:16.940 stress i'm under now is it aimed at some purpose that i feel inspired by and that others feel inspired

00:08:24.820 by i mean all of that is that's where the this remembering self and the experiencing self just

00:08:30.240 in my experience they become indistinguishable and so i wonder if you're just taking however

00:08:36.740 inadvertently my side of the argument against danny here that really if we become very fine-grained about

00:08:42.200 what we mean by the experiencing self it just swallows the remembering self yeah i mean i think you're

00:08:49.700 right on this one and i don't know i think i mean i haven't pushed danny on this directly but

00:08:53.200 my sense is that we don't have what the timeline is for the remembered self right you know if any

00:08:58.520 form of retro if any form of meta-analysis of it is the remember itself as soon as you ask me like

00:09:04.000 hey how's things going how satisfied with you if i ever have to take a global view it's possible that

00:09:09.320 that kind of it's using the mechanisms that i use for the remember itself to some interesting extent

00:09:13.660 right i don't think danny's really specified how far back we have to do the remembering but it might

00:09:18.700 be that any any point where we're kind of going meta and thinking about our own happiness

00:09:22.360 might be partly the remembered self and i think this actually brings up a bigger issue with a lot

00:09:26.800 of the happiness research right is that we want to get at what happiness feels like in the moment

00:09:32.080 but the only way we can do that is to ask people and it's very possible that between the experiencing

00:09:37.700 and the asking in any form we're kind of getting some interesting mismatches there like it could be

00:09:42.780 that just having you reflect on your own positive emotions it's going to change that right that might be

00:09:47.040 different than kind of what i was noticing and what i was experiencing and the sum total of that

00:09:51.180 throughout my day which sucks for happiness researchers right because we have to ask people

00:09:55.000 somehow you know i wish there was a thermometer where we could get at happiness or well-being

00:09:59.140 accurately without asking people but we don't really have that and and we don't it's hard for us to ever

00:10:04.620 know if the act of reporting on your happiness is changing it whether that be what you're experiencing

00:10:09.920 what you're remembering in whatever form yeah i have another question here which relates to this which

00:10:16.140 is the role that expectation plays in determining a person's sense of well-being and with expectation i'm

00:10:23.740 thinking it can also be retrospective right so you know i'm having a certain experience it has a

00:10:30.660 a certain emotional valence which could be negative right it could be stressful but because of my

00:10:37.840 expectations or because of how i can even retrospectively reconceive the stress i was just under or i'm

00:10:46.720 currently under this kind of framing effect can seem to in part or fully determine whether an experience

00:10:56.040 gets scored as pure suffering or one of the highlights of my life let's say you're climbing everest

00:11:02.900 right and you know obviously the physical experience is just more or less a pure ordeal but if you get

00:11:10.080 to the top and you get back down without dying and you don't destroy your ethical code by passing

00:11:15.200 somebody's near corpse on the way down we've all heard those horrible stories so you can have something

00:11:21.640 that if you were sampling each time point along the way just looks like torture and yet retrospectively

00:11:28.360 and for real you know for the rest of one's life it's going to seem like one of the best things

00:11:33.440 you've ever done how do you think about those framing effects oh i think those framing effects

00:11:38.020 are huge i mean i almost think that the way you're framing an experience and i mean that in a variety

00:11:43.320 of ways how you're categorizing it how you frame it retrospectively the expectations you have about it

00:11:48.560 going into it i think that those expectations and those categorizations are more powerful in some

00:11:53.860 cases than the actual experience itself for what what we go through i mean you know just there's so

00:11:59.620 many kinds of cases like this so so take you know really classic work in the history of psychology where

00:12:04.800 you give people a particular physiological response and then them give and give them different kinds

00:12:10.840 of frames for how they make sense of it you know so this was back in the day kind of before ethics

00:12:15.180 and social psychology but you basically unknowingly pump subjects full of like adrenaline

00:12:19.740 basically you could basically give them speed without them realizing it and then you you set

00:12:24.220 a frame for what they could be experiencing they're either in a in a room with other subjects who are

00:12:28.760 acting really aggressively who are really angry or who are kind of partying you know they think the

00:12:32.760 experiment's super fun and they're enjoying it and what you find is that the subject's entire

00:12:36.500 experience of that event depends on the frame of the other people around them you know if they're in a

00:12:40.800 room of people who are partying and they're experiencing these physical sensations that are kind of a little bit

00:12:45.740 you know agitated they think it's really fun whereas if they're around other angry people

00:12:49.500 they find it incredibly negative and they see it as angering and so what this shows us is our the

00:12:54.480 basic physiology of what we're experiencing how we actually feel about it whether that's positive

00:12:59.680 or negatively valenced or whether it's something that might lead to happiness or lead to sadness or

00:13:03.800 anger it's completely based on what our expectations are about that moment in some cases the social

00:13:08.400 contagion of other people's expectations about that moment i mean that's the basic physiology and the

00:13:13.660 example you're getting into is even more complicated you know it's not just a single physiological

00:13:18.220 experience in a moment it's integrating across a whole host of physiological experiences and then

00:13:23.660 looking back on it and so we might have some frame about those you know experiences say before we start

00:13:28.720 on mount everest maybe it's a dream of ours and something we've trained for and so on you know that's

00:13:32.880 going to cause us in the moment to see those actual experiences you know tiredness and you know

00:13:37.500 physiological stress and you know fight or flight response all that stuff like we're going to see

00:13:41.760 those differently and then see them differently retrospectively so so i think it's kind of a mess but

00:13:46.340 in some ways i think that's really powerful though right that means that we actually have the chance

00:13:51.740 to reframe things in our life in these powerful ways right and i think the ancient traditions figured

00:13:57.020 that out and then you know the kahneman and tverskies of the world figured that out in modern times

00:14:01.320 and that's exciting because it means we can use these framing techniques to change around our experience we

00:14:06.500 don't actually have to change our physiology to change whether or not some experience makes us happy or sad

00:14:11.440 right and we we actually don't even have to change the past or have avoided certain negative experiences

00:14:19.720 in the past if we can reframe them in the future and this is the one thing that i pulled from existentialism

00:14:26.860 apart from an appreciation for how much of it didn't make sense it's just the sense that you you are always

00:14:33.360 free to tell yourself a new story about the past so if this humiliating failure that has bothered you

00:14:40.900 up until yesterday can be reframed as the thing that caused you to get the tools that are now you

00:14:47.520 know integral to your success or whatever it is you can actually just change your relationship to

00:14:52.180 something that used to be a source of suffering for you and in that sense reach into the past and put

00:14:57.740 it to some order and the most amazing thing about the human mind is that we can do that prospectively

00:15:02.840 too you know there's lovely work by social psychologists like ethan cross that talk about the power of

00:15:08.060 psychological distancing basically trying to think about an event as your future self would think

00:15:13.220 about the event you know so i'm about to go through you know i don't know like a really i'm going to

00:15:17.100 have a really stressful interview with sam harris right before i start that i could think well how

00:15:21.160 would future laurie want to think about this interview i'd want to think you know we had this

00:15:24.400 great discussion and we you know dealt with these hard-hitting issues and you know this is this is going

00:15:28.880 to be awesome and that when i if i were to think that way even before i started the interview

00:15:33.000 it would frame how the conversation was going you know if i kind of got stressed out in the middle of it

00:15:37.000 you know i'd think like oh this is the hard-hitting part that i really wanted to experience you know

00:15:40.620 and it would kind of feel better later and so you know what ethan's shown is that we don't have to

00:15:45.200 just wait till we get to the future to think back retrospectively in this positive way we can use that

00:15:50.500 as a frame in the present to shape experiences over time too and and he's shown that you can do that

00:15:56.100 simply by you know having a narrative in your own head that uses your future self in the third person

00:16:01.440 you know laurie in the future will want to think this way about you know x y and z experience

00:16:05.360 that can shape it in time in real time as you experience the event well lucky for you you're

00:16:10.740 speaking to future sam who's a real pushover so no problem there so let's start from some kind of

00:16:18.620 ground zero for people psychologically so let's imagine someone comes to you you're you're a happiness

00:16:25.800 expert and they come to you and they say that they are profoundly unhappy in their life

00:16:33.400 what generic advice would you give to a person that really is generic that you think is more or

00:16:40.580 less a good idea for virtually anyone you know barring some strange contraindication what do you

00:16:47.740 recommend to people as a first pass for turning the various dials within reach to improve their sense of

00:16:55.560 well-being well i think the first piece of advice is just that the science suggests you can intervene

00:16:59.740 right i mean i think a lot of people who are not happy at a given time think that there's something

00:17:05.380 about them that's messed up right you know genetically they're just predisposed to be unhappy

00:17:09.680 or they're kind of built to be that way and i think you know the first thing to tell people is just that

00:17:14.600 you know that might be the case to a certain extent you know there's some heritability to most

00:17:18.500 well-being measures but there's a lot you can do to intervene on them and so i think that's kind of

00:17:23.280 message number one is look you can take some action and fix this in terms of the specific actions i would

00:17:29.060 suggest you know if you look at the positive psychology literature one of the hugest effects

00:17:34.040 on our own happiness is our social connection you know there's a famous paper by marty seligman and

00:17:39.360 ed diener that said suggests that social social relationships and strong social relationships are

00:17:45.000 necessary for happiness they're not sufficient for happiness but you can't find happy people that

00:17:50.280 don't have them and so that really suggests that if you want to be like happy people you should focus

00:17:55.080 on your social relationships and that means you know taking a hard look at your priorities to figure

00:18:00.100 out if those social relationships are falling by the wayside and i think in the modern day where we

00:18:05.120 prioritize work and the things that go with work and for my students you know their academic

00:18:10.080 performance often that's coming at the opportunity cost of the time you'd spend on your social

00:18:15.020 relationships and so so that's kind of hit number one is are you making time for the people that you really care

00:18:20.900 about in life and and and a lot of that work also comes from some lovely studies by robert waldinger

00:18:26.460 and his colleagues he's part of this long-running harvard happiness study that it's it's super cool

00:18:31.700 it's been studying it's been studying men from harvard and they were men because the studies started back

00:18:37.000 in the 1930s so men from harvard and also like you know men from lower income boston neighborhoods

00:18:42.620 and they've been tracking them over time and so now their original cohort is in their 90s well and

00:18:47.740 they've been able to look at all kinds of features about their health you know their immune function

00:18:50.900 and whether they get heart disease and diabetes and so on and what's remarkable is that a major

00:18:55.960 predictor not just of mental health like happiness but also physical health is the nature of these men's

00:19:02.280 social relationships they're actually predicting longevity now so that the men who are still alive in

00:19:07.240 this cohort study are the ones that seem to have tended to have the best social relationships and so

00:19:12.380 again kind of doubling down on social relationships is great because it's like doing double duty it's not just

00:19:17.480 good for your mental health it's great for your physical health too right yeah so let's run through

00:19:22.000 the the list of things that come to mind and then i'll come back to some of them because i do want to

00:19:26.660 talk about relationships more yeah so so social connection is a big one being other oriented generally

00:19:32.540 and what i mean by this is the the act of paying attention to other people over yourself so being the

00:19:38.460 kind of person that gives to charity that volunteers your time that that is focused on other people

00:19:43.240 generally seems to be a big one for your your happiness and your health one that sounds silly

00:19:48.020 is the what i tell my students are just healthy habits and by that i mean you know the stuff that

00:19:53.300 we know is good for physical health like making sure you're getting enough sleep making sure you're

00:19:56.780 getting enough exercise making sure you're eating right those physical things seem to have a huge

00:20:01.420 impact on people's mental health much more than we think and then i think there's a whole set of

00:20:05.940 things that are more in in your wheelhouse i know the act of being a little bit more present being

00:20:10.620 mindful and then changing your mindset towards things like having a mindset that's a little bit

00:20:15.360 more grateful and a little bit more compassionate generally and these are mindsets that often come

00:20:21.060 from ancient practices like different forms of meditation and so on so so those would be those

00:20:26.180 would be my top hits we can get into the lesser top hits too like right like being being religious

00:20:31.120 it turns out is actually pretty good for your happiness or at least i should clarify not necessarily

00:20:36.340 believing religious believing in religious doctrine but actually taking part in religious practices

00:20:41.280 it turns out is correlated with happiness and yeah we can go way down the list but we'll see we'll see

00:20:46.580 which ones you want to pick up on yeah okay well let's go back to relationships and i think you know

00:20:51.440 knowing something about your work it's not just one's close relationships it's also one's orientation

00:20:56.980 toward strangers i mean whether you will just talk to people in public on an airplane or in line or

00:21:03.280 this is something you've covered in at least one of your podcasts so this would suggest however that

00:21:09.780 extroverts could be at some kind of advantage here and that shyness could be a real impediment to

00:21:17.500 self-actualization of some kind how do you think about that let's leave aside close relationships let's put

00:21:24.440 someone out in public among strangers how do you think about the variables that determine a person's

00:21:30.880 social experience yeah this one was a shocking one for me when i first started reading the literature

00:21:35.100 mostly because i'm not a very social person when it comes to strangers you know i'm the kind of person

00:21:39.820 that when i hop on a plane i put my huge headphones on in the hopes that no one will speak to me that's

00:21:44.480 what i used to do at least but yeah so there's so much work by folks like nick epley and liz dunn and

00:21:48.680 others that show that the simple like fleeting connections that we have with strangers can be really

00:21:54.940 powerful for our well-being and in this in this sense i really mean the sort of happy in your life

00:22:00.000 kind of well-being it really seems to bump up our positive emotions and so these are things like

00:22:04.640 you know the simple conversation you have with the barista at the coffee shop or you know chatting up

00:22:08.640 your uber driver while you're on your ride these kinds of simple social connections seem to bump up

00:22:14.200 our mood and the absence of them can seem to kind of decrease our mood in some interesting ways and so

00:22:20.320 what's striking about that intervention though is that people really don't think that's the case

00:22:25.320 this is work by nick epley he finds that people make incredibly strong predictions

00:22:28.960 that talking to strangers is going to be weird or awkward or just not very fun and what he finds

00:22:34.240 is that because of that misprediction people tend not to talk to strangers when they have the

00:22:38.060 opportunity to do so and that's true of introverts and extroverts i think the the bigger issue for

00:22:43.760 introverts is that that prediction in introverts is even stronger so if extroverts predict it'll be a

00:22:49.500 little awkward to you know talk with my uber driver for the whole ride introverts end up predicting

00:22:54.020 it's going to be actively awful to talk to my uber driver for the whole ride like it's going to make

00:22:58.220 be completely miserable but both extroverts and introverts nick fines actually get a big bump in

00:23:04.240 well-being from from having that conversation with the stranger and so and this actually is a theme

00:23:09.680 that's worth investigating further because i think this is part of a lot of the stuff we see in the

00:23:13.840 positive psychology work which is that there are these things that we can do to bump up our well-being

00:23:17.900 but by and large our theories about what we should do to bump up our well-being seem to be wrong which

00:23:22.980 is pretty frustrating because it means that like rational people aren't doing the things that they

00:23:27.340 should be doing to improve their happiness because they have misconceptions about the stuff that's going

00:23:31.180 to work right so so by theories you don't mean the scientific theories in the literature you mean

00:23:35.520 each person's personal idea about what they should do to become happier yeah not even in that rich of an

00:23:42.500 explicit sense right you know if i'm standing in line at starbucks to get a latte you know i have some

00:23:47.300 intuitions about what's going to make me happy i probably think the latte is going to you know bump

00:23:50.540 up my mood or bump up my productivity if i decide to talk to somebody it's because at least implicitly

00:23:55.280 i thought that would be a good idea it would kind of feel nice or feel good in that situation

00:23:59.100 and so we constantly have these very low-level automatic intuitions about the stuff that feels good

00:24:04.560 and that controls how we act in the world what's scary is that what the scientific theory suggests

00:24:09.740 that those intuitions are often wrong in other words we're systematically not doing the stuff

00:24:14.680 that could make us happiest yeah yeah so now how do you think about shyness in this context because

00:24:20.280 that obviously is the wall through which many people never push and it keeps them isolated in

00:24:28.600 a social circumstance where even if they accepted your thesis that they would be more or less guaranteed

00:24:36.200 to be happier if they could get to the other side of that wall it feels bad to even attempt it

00:24:43.420 yeah i mean i think i think what what the science suggests you should try if you're an introvert and

00:24:48.320 in that situation is just see if you could try it out like you know just you know take baby steps into

00:24:54.900 having conversations with strangers and then be mindful about how it feels and what nick's data

00:24:59.920 really suggests is that it's probably going to feel better than you expect the problem is that

00:25:04.240 there's a real startup cost to having those conversations because we have this strong intuition that it's going to

00:25:08.920 go really badly but if we can get over that startup cost the the benefits that we experience can be

00:25:13.920 really powerful and that's when i resonate with myself i mean i don't necessarily consider myself

00:25:18.240 an introvert but i'm definitely not the kind of person who just like typically strike up a conversation

00:25:22.780 with a complete stranger right actually my producer on my podcast ryan he's a journalist by nature and

00:25:27.520 every time we go out he's always talking to people and i'm like how do you do that you know it's not

00:25:31.840 yeah but but but the science suggests that i'm totally wrong i need to kind of bust through that

00:25:36.340 initial awkwardness and try it out and you get much more benefit than you'd expect so i'm like you in

00:25:42.280 that respect and it's always amazing to be with a friend who is the exact opposite and just see how

00:25:49.080 different their life is in situations like that i mean i i know people who can walk into a crowded

00:25:54.780 elevator and strike up a conversation with zero awkwardness and it is a kind of superpower

00:26:01.240 which i notice i entirely lack you just realize in those moments that there are people who are

00:26:07.580 walking through the world having a completely different experience because everywhere they're

00:26:11.620 going they're just talking to people and having a self-reinforcing and by and large entirely pleasant

00:26:18.940 encounter with the world whereas i don't know if you have any sense of the percentages here but

00:26:24.080 i would imagine increasingly so and we can talk about how our certain changes in our society

00:26:30.360 technologically have ramified this default setting of kind of eyes down isolation but

00:26:36.700 i would imagine most people at this point are walking through cities more or less ignoring everyone

00:26:43.840 most of the time at least to the limit of what's possible and the people who aren't doing that at all

00:26:50.180 are really they're living a very different parallel track of human experience yeah and and the data

00:26:57.500 suggests it's like a happier track yeah it's nice to see it's nice to know the researchers who study

00:27:02.180 this stuff because they often live it i remember going out to dinner with nick epley recently we were

00:27:06.820 in aspen colorado together and you know we you know went out to dinner and he will just strike up a

00:27:11.680 conversation with everyone you know the waitress is trying to come you know just take our order and

00:27:16.520 he'll end up chatting with her for like 15 minutes to the point that she's kind of having a good

00:27:19.660 time like oh sorry i have to go you know put your order in right or the person next to you and

00:27:23.600 you know it's it's foreign even though i know these data it's foreign to me it's not the thing

00:27:28.020 that i would normally do but i can resonate with them like wow that was so much more of a fun dinner

00:27:33.080 it went by so much faster because we were having all these interesting conversations and you know

00:27:37.280 the people around you are filled with interesting stories interesting ideas like we're social

00:27:41.900 primates we're going to get a lot out of that and so but but the message is that what we have to

00:27:46.740 do is to violate our intuitions and i think this is i mean this is so fundamental and i think it

00:27:51.360 doesn't get talked about enough like it really challenges our our rational approach to improving

00:27:56.140 our own well-being and to getting to eudaimonia if we have all these incorrect theories again

00:28:01.080 incorrect intuitions about the sorts of things that we need to do to be happy that means we could be

00:28:06.180 you know rationally following what our intuitions tell us but actively moving against our what would

00:28:12.460 be best for us in terms of our well-being which is so striking and that's why i find the science so

00:28:16.440 important it's because it doesn't totally cause you to update your intuitions you know i'm not

00:28:20.280 immediately a social person who's talking to the barista all the time but i can kind of put some

00:28:24.780 work in to overcome those and and it does make your life better if you can fight some of these bad

00:28:29.600 intuitions okay so we're having this conversation in the first week in april 2020 in a context where

00:28:38.260 for i would say at least a decade maybe a decade and a half we've witnessed a variety of social and

00:28:45.820 technological changes which again have made people in some ways less isolated but in a face-to-face

00:28:53.240 sense more isolated so the introduction of the smartphone is probably the biggest one you go into

00:28:59.060 public and people tend to close down any opportunity for spontaneous interaction with strangers because

00:29:08.600 they're virtually always looking at their phones whenever they get a chance and i guess on some level

00:29:14.720 they're socializing with somebody else often by doing that but it's not face-to-face and it's a

00:29:20.580 very different experience for social primates and i don't think i'm the only person to feel that we've

00:29:26.300 all been inducted into a psychological experiment to which more or less no one has really consented

00:29:32.540 and we're just rolling the dice with human psychology and seeing what comes of all this and now this is

00:29:39.680 in the context of this conversation especially ramified by the covet 19 pandemic where you have

00:29:46.520 people truly isolated for reasons of epidemiology and isolated under conditions of significant stress

00:29:56.200 if not health stress then economic stress so um i guess let's take both of those pieces how do you see

00:30:04.360 the trade-off between some of the technological advances we've made and they really have created

00:30:10.920 wealth and the ability to even have careers that would be unthinkable and the internet has been

00:30:16.460 you know obviously immensely useful and we're we're not going to get rid of it but it's easy to see how it

00:30:21.820 may have eroded face-to-face social connection for most people most of the time and then let's jump to the

00:30:30.440 current circumstance of the pandemic yeah i mean i worry a lot about what technology is doing to our

00:30:37.080 social connection you know if you if you get back to that barista in the coffee shop scenario you know

00:30:41.460 one of the reasons i don't talk to the barista is you know i'm not totally sure it'll be that fun

00:30:44.840 but also i don't even notice the barista right because i'm staring down at my phone and checking my

00:30:49.540 email or scrolling through my instagram feed or something and most of us are doing that and i think

00:30:55.340 you're right we we've put these devices in the pockets of you know six billion people around the

00:31:00.380 planet and we don't really know their cost there's there's now some good data coming out about the

00:31:05.680 the specific ways that that cell phones in general and technology in general might be affecting our

00:31:10.780 social relationships and they're all striking and really scary so liz dunn who's a professor at the

00:31:15.960 university of british columbia has been doing some of this work and she just does these really simple

00:31:19.580 experiments where she has say subjects sit together in a waiting room either with their cell phones or

00:31:24.400 without their cell phones and they're they're instructed just have the cell phone out so they're

00:31:27.720 not even necessarily using the cell phone it's just basically present and what she finds is that

00:31:32.120 the presence of a cell phone ends up decreasing the smiling between those subjects who are in the

00:31:37.180 waiting room by about 30 percent like just having it out and we see the same thing when we look at all

00:31:42.480 kinds of different social activities right she's another study where she has families going around like 1.00

00:31:47.880 say like a science museum together and she either lets the parents have their cell phones with them or not

00:31:52.940 and what she finds is way less enjoyment on the part of the parents in the science museum when they

00:31:58.120 have their cell phones out with their kids way less feeling like they bonded with their kids but also

00:32:02.020 the kids feel that way too right the kids are feeling less bonded with the parents too and again this is

00:32:07.040 just the mere presence of our cell phone and i think you know we often think you know when we when we

00:32:11.920 talk about technology is there's always like oh social media and facebook you know they're so evil and

00:32:16.100 they destroy connection like for me just as a basic scientist i actually worry more just about

00:32:21.500 what our attentional resources are doing when we're around cell phones right because in some ways like

00:32:27.640 our brain isn't stupid our brain knows what's on the other side of these devices and there's some pretty

00:32:31.960 good interesting you know panic inducing like exciting stuff on the other side of these things

00:32:36.420 and now those devices are competing with the basic social interactions we have like you know yeah i could

00:32:42.560 have a conversation with my husband over the dinner table but if i have my phone there i know that on

00:32:47.140 the other side of that phone is you know every political discussion that's happened you know every

00:32:50.740 cat video in the universe liz dunn i interviewed her for an upcoming season two episode of my podcast

00:32:56.320 and she had this wonderful analogy she said you know when you go to a dinner with your husband

00:32:59.860 imagine instead of bringing your phone you brought this big wheelbarrow and in the wheelbarrow is like

00:33:05.360 you know a printout of every book that's ever been written you know like printouts of every one of your

00:33:09.740 emails since 1992 like you're like a big big stacks of photo albums of all your family pictures

00:33:15.180 you know like every cat video a dvd of every cat video in the universe like you know every you know

00:33:20.380 museum like archive of every you know print that's ever been made in every art gallery all over the

00:33:25.340 world you know porn like like you know big dvd pile of porn he's like if you were sitting next to

00:33:30.340 that wheelbarrow during dinner you'd be distracted like you wouldn't want to talk to your husband

00:33:34.640 because you'd want to like flip through the dvds and see what cat videos were there right

00:33:37.940 and and what she says is like your brain knows that on the other end of that device is all that

00:33:42.640 stuff that wheelbarrow is there and even if you're paying attention to your conversation with your

00:33:46.960 husband at dinner there's a part of your mind that's distracted that you have to keep reeling

00:33:51.160 back from that big wheelbarrow of cat videos and we've put that distraction as i said in six billion

00:33:57.020 pockets around the world and we don't know what it's doing to our attentional resources we don't know

00:34:02.320 what it's doing to our social resources all we know is that it's a huge opportunity cost we haven't been

00:34:07.380 able to measure that cost yet but i think it's it's huge for our social relationships and also

00:34:12.020 you know given what we know about meditation and mind wandering i think it's huge for our well-being

00:34:16.180 too you know we're kind of constantly pulling our attention back from these devices in a way that

00:34:21.060 didn't exist 10 years ago we just didn't have that attentional cost 10 years ago and so so i find it

00:34:26.140 really scary but not for the reasons people typically think of i just think you know there's just an

00:34:30.860 attention suck that exists now that never existed before in human history and we have no idea what it's 0.58

00:34:35.980 doing to our minds and our relationships actually let's linger here before we get to the the pandemic

00:34:41.600 circumstance there's another variable here which is related to what technology is doing to us and how

00:34:49.600 we're essentially addicted to smartphones in particular and that's our our relationship to time

00:34:56.360 and the sense that we have to use it wisely that basically everything is an opportunity cost that

00:35:04.660 you know we're constantly triaging with respect to what we could be paying attention to and for many

00:35:10.900 of us certainly anyone who's a kind of knowledge worker there really is no boundary between the

00:35:18.440 moments where you could profitably get things done and you know any other moment in life wherever you

00:35:25.160 happen to be if i'm laurie santos in a starbucks in line there are many reasons not to look at the

00:35:32.560 barista but one is you can catch up on the emails that you know you're going to have to answer at some

00:35:38.500 point and if you answer a few now that's a few fewer you have to answer later in the day when you get

00:35:43.880 home there's just this fundamental erosion of the boundary between the imperative of getting stuff done

00:35:50.700 and all of these other moments in life and it's a creates a background level of stress for many of

00:35:58.080 us and there's something about our relationship to time that gets changed there i don't know if you

00:36:04.700 have any thoughts on that yeah i think that's really important you know so one of the other

00:36:09.100 things we know is super important for well-being is is our perception of time there's some lovely work

00:36:14.380 coming out of ashley willens lab at harvard business school focused on this concept of time

00:36:18.220 affluence right which is the subjective feeling that you have a lot of free time the opposite is

00:36:22.960 time famine where you feel kind of famished for time hungry for time and ashley's work has been

00:36:27.780 showing that physiologically time famine works a lot like hunger famine where you're kind of triaging

00:36:32.500 it sort of pumps up your stress hormones and so on ashley's also shown that so what's odd about

00:36:37.100 what we what's odd about our sense of time right now is that we assume we have less free time but

00:36:42.260 actually if you look at people's calendars they actually have more free time all told which is kind of

00:36:47.760 surprising we feel like we're so time famished right now the problem is that our time right now

00:36:51.840 is broken up into into what she's called time confetti so we have free time but it's in these

00:36:56.700 like tiny snippets and i think that the the form of those tiny snippets is exactly has the features

00:37:02.260 of exactly what you're saying which is that it's it's hard to use those in a way that promotes our

00:37:07.000 well-being you know it's hard to like you know have a deep conversation with our spouse when we have

00:37:10.660 like five minutes here and there like it's like well let me just get a few emails off the cuff you

00:37:14.660 know if i have this little bit of free time and so even when we have these moments of free time

00:37:18.940 confetti we end up using them kind of for work stuff or or for stuff that's really fast right you

00:37:25.220 know i sometimes when i'm doing kind of exactly what you're saying i'm in line i could get a few

00:37:29.120 emails down but that's anxiety provoking you know i'll just do a quick panic scroll through my social

00:37:33.360 media feed or you know like like look up that news article and so on and so we end up because the time

00:37:38.820 is so cut up and in these tiny bits we end up using it for what feels like the easiest thing

00:37:44.320 right things that have a little bit of a startup cost or things that you know take a little bit

00:37:48.780 of time to get going we tend not to prioritize and that means we're not prioritizing a lot of deep

00:37:54.440 social connection with people because you know that has this kind of startup cost and takes a little

00:37:58.680 time it often means we're not even prioritizing like good leisure either you know the time confetti

00:38:04.420 means we don't want to you know learn a new instrument or learn a new language or even you

00:38:08.580 know dive into like a deep novel you know all those existential novels you were talking about before

00:38:12.560 like i'm not you know picking up a good like you know such novel because it feels too much like i'm

00:38:17.740 just going to scroll through the new york times or i'm just going to like pick up my twitter feed

00:38:20.500 like we kind of only have time for you know like a few characters because the time is so broken up

00:38:26.160 and so i think i think this time confetti has lots of consequences for our happiness and i think you're

00:38:31.940 right that the fact that these technologies are breaking up our time in these ways is having a

00:38:37.820 negative effect but but but the technologies also have a negative effect on time in a completely

00:38:42.320 different way which is that unlike the other important things in our life be it you know social

00:38:47.000 relationships or sleep those things don't nag us as much as our devices do right you know my husband

00:38:52.340 doesn't have a notification ding that like comes up you know in my window when i'm checking my email too

00:38:57.320 long you know but my email does when i'm talking to my husband right and so i think you know the the

00:39:02.560 fact of the matter is is that most parts of our technology most apps in these things you know get

00:39:07.940 get revenue and get money from having eyeballs on them and so you know your iphone wants to kind of

00:39:13.140 remind you to be using your iphone and all the apps on your iphone want to be reminding you to use

00:39:17.420 those apps and that means that they've kind of start bugging you in a way that the other important

00:39:22.960 things in life don't and it's really hard to ignore those things you know because they're built

00:39:27.100 on the latest neuroscience of what grabs your attention of what kind of gives you a little

00:39:31.000 dopamine hit so you feel like it'll be rewarding to jump on that phone and real life doesn't do that

00:39:36.360 you know real life doesn't have teams of designers trying to like mess with our attention and mess with

00:39:40.800 our dopamine and that's problematic because it means that the technology kind of grabs our attention

00:39:46.300 easier and when you add to that the normal time confetti that all of us have where we're kind of

00:39:50.380 just going to go with the easy thing you know it's kind of a recipe for not prioritizing the right

00:39:54.440 stuff in our lives right yeah the technology has changed the way we initiate social contact even with

00:40:01.260 people who are who are our closest friends it used to be that you would just pick up the phone and call

00:40:07.480 someone and that wasn't a surprising intrusion into their solitude which it is now i mean i feel like a

00:40:16.500 cold call even from someone i'm close to with a few exceptions my wife is an exception and maybe there's

00:40:24.060 a couple of other people in my life who i still expect a call from but virtually every other call

00:40:29.100 the default now is to set it up by email or by text and just a cold call is almost analogous to

00:40:36.920 20 years ago how it would have felt if someone just showed up at your house unannounced and rang the

00:40:42.500 doorbell and you know i don't know if you have noticed this in your life but there's been a

00:40:47.240 migration from email to text now and you know it's very short form punctate communication i mean now

00:40:55.480 you know text rather often is a surrogate for maintaining the relationship in the old way which

00:41:01.760 is actually seeing or speaking with each other yeah and we know that i mean obviously the it means

00:41:07.260 those are shorter communications right because you're not kind of having long lingering conversations

00:41:11.120 but but it's also missing all the stuff that we're built as primates to pay attention to

00:41:15.440 right you don't get the right emotion through text as you do through changes to my vocal intonation or

00:41:21.380 subtle changes to my facial expression we haven't as a species gotten good at using text to do that stuff

00:41:27.060 yet long text right you know if you read you know again a fantastic novel you can see pathos in there

00:41:32.180 you can see the emotion but you don't really get that you know in a short text you know about dinner and

00:41:36.640 when dinner is ready kind of thing and so i think we're we're we don't realize what we're missing out

00:41:41.540 on in those interactions yeah and i and i think you know again it's just crazy that we've had this

00:41:49.440 experiment on human psychology and put you know basically changed around six billion social

00:41:54.240 relationships without people's permission and not knowing really how it's going to have long-term

00:41:58.940 effects but i think we're starting to see the long-term effects i mean this is the mental health crisis

00:42:02.740 that we've been seeing exploding in all generations but particularly in young people who've for the most

00:42:08.600 part only ever known these forms of communication you know this is the explosion of loneliness that

00:42:13.020 we've seen you know loneliness has been increasing by double digit numbers in the last decade and you

00:42:18.520 know in some ways it's ironic because these technologies were supposed to be linking us up

00:42:22.280 but in practice they could be they could be failing to allow us to connect in the ways that our primate

00:42:28.760 minds are used to connecting and that can have all kinds of consequences we don't realize

00:42:32.320 so how have you been thinking about the covet 19 experience we're all having in really for most of us

00:42:41.200 in genuine isolation albeit in many cases with our families and many of us are experiencing a silver

00:42:48.420 lining there where we're having more enforced quality time with with our families but it is a

00:42:54.540 generally speaking a surreal upheaval in it's a psychological experiment of a different order

00:43:00.320 now and we've all been inducted into it yeah i think it's i mean i mean first of all it's just

00:43:06.580 surreal and crazy you know this is what it must have felt like to live through other major natural

00:43:11.340 disasters for our species you know i feel like we're dinosaurs watching the meteor hit in some ways but

00:43:15.600 i mean i think the the biggest upheaval as you said is is in our social relationships in our social

00:43:20.500 lives and i think you know if you look at what happens when people are going through a tough stressful

00:43:25.620 time what our species does is we try to hook up with other people like we try to hang out with our

00:43:31.500 friends you know we go to our mom's house and get a hug if that's possible like we we just try to

00:43:35.820 connect as much as we possibly can and in terms of our physical health that's impossible right now

00:43:41.780 like to flatten the curve we just can't do that there's there's an additional feature that's bad for

00:43:46.280 social relationships too which is that if you think about what the threat is in the covet 19 crisis

00:43:50.800 it's other people you know it's that guy that touched my doorknob before i walked out of my

00:43:55.300 house you know it's the person who's panic buying the toilet paper that i need like in addition to

00:43:59.920 not being able to connect with people which is our natural response during a crisis other people are

00:44:05.080 part of the crisis you know they're kind of making the crisis worse and i think those two things

00:44:08.900 together are you know making this an incredibly challenging time is making an otherwise incredibly

00:44:13.900 challenging time even more challenging the good news though is i think this is the time when we can

00:44:18.960 start to harness some of those technologies for social connection in even better ways and i what

00:44:25.760 i mean by that is that it's not just a matter of like hey go on zoom and you know talk to some friend

00:44:30.700 over zoom it's trying to find ways to use these technologies to get the informal social connections

00:44:36.220 that we're missing out on so much you know it's you know many of us as you said you know some people

00:44:40.440 are living in isolation and i think for them you know it's a completely different matter but you know

00:44:44.140 some of us have family members and so on but you know we're missing the chat with our co-workers

00:44:48.420 at the water cooler you know we're missing that quick conversation with the barista at the coffee

00:44:52.180 shop or just the smiles that we give to people when we walk down the street you know those have

00:44:56.300 gone away a little bit over time but they're still there and i think a lot of us are are facing the

00:45:01.440 need the craving that we're getting from not having that stuff there's a new really cool paper by

00:45:06.280 rebecca sachs who's a neuroscientist at mit who'd actually started this work a long time ago but it just

00:45:11.560 got published during covid showing that if you put people in social isolation the the areas of their

00:45:17.520 brain that would normally show craving for things like food and so on start craving social connection

00:45:22.500 so basically the kind of hunger craving that we get for say sugary foods when we stop eating those

00:45:27.220 that's the kind of thing that we get for social connection after a really short period of social

00:45:31.100 isolation and so i think a lot of us are going to be going through that right now but again the good

00:45:35.500 news is that there are these mechanisms of connecting with other people i think we just have to use them

00:45:40.300 to to replicate the informal social social connections too like those are the ones we kind of need

00:45:45.560 like so so for example as i made a in a made a zoom meeting to hang out with a friend of mine

00:45:50.740 who's in new york while i was just chopping vegetables you know for dinner and i was like hey

00:45:54.520 you know just like be there while i'm chopping vegetables and her you know face was on the screen and 1.00

00:45:58.480 i'm talking vegetables and we're chatting but but in that you have a couple things i can see her

00:46:02.320 facial expressions you know she can hear me laughing we can we can hear each other's intonation

00:46:06.540 in our voices i can see her in real time you know it's not face to face but it's it's pretty good

00:46:13.600 for what our primate beings are sucking up or at least it's much better than scrolling an instagram

00:46:17.620 feed or looking at a text thread we just have to kind of build that in but but the problem you know

00:46:22.820 as we talked about is right we have to get over that thing that we have kind of built in through

00:46:26.840 these technologies of like i gotta call somebody and that feels awkward and it's kind of the startup

00:46:31.040 cost but i think you know remarkably our norms changed really fast i mean even just for me personally

00:46:36.340 it felt you know those first zoom calls are like we're gonna play trivia over zoom friends you

00:46:40.540 know felt a little like oh this is kind of weird but you know within three weeks of doing it that's

00:46:44.700 just kind of how we connect now like it it becomes normal surprisingly quickly to use these technologies

00:46:50.200 in these informal social ways i want to recall something you just said about being other oriented

00:46:56.900 and the payoffs of that i mean this is a very buddhist concept if you want to be happier help somebody

00:47:06.000 else essentially the the algorithm or even just intend to help somebody else think positively about

00:47:13.280 somebody else's well-being and you'll find you're gladdening your own mind how do you think about that

00:47:19.780 and the larger framework in which people pursue that so you know we can think about ethics and having

00:47:28.020 some kind of actual conscious conception of the type of person one wants to be the kinds of virtues

00:47:34.060 one wants to actually live out in one's life this is where so-called self-sacrifice becomes the wiser

00:47:41.580 form of selfishness if you really just want to be happy if that's your goal one fairly wide doorway

00:47:49.480 into that is to be very rigorous about using your energy in a consciously pro-social way to improve

00:47:58.840 the lives of others so what do we know about all of that yeah well what we know is i mean the science

00:48:04.380 suggests that you know as usual the buddhists were right you know all these ancient traditions wound up 1.00

00:48:08.340 being confirmed by modern social science and neuroscience but yeah i mean the the happiest

00:48:12.860 folks tend to be on average the folks that give more to charity even equated for income the happiest folks

00:48:18.600 tend to be the ones that on average volunteer more of their time and are just kind of you know as you

00:48:23.280 said kind of ethically oriented to kind of thinking about other people first but i think this is

00:48:27.560 another spot where our intuitions get it all wrong you know if you look at you know any like self-help

00:48:32.920 magazine or any article these days especially during covet 19 it's all about self-help you know

00:48:38.380 self-help you know self-care treat yourself you know this is parks and rec slogan that we need to be

00:48:43.260 treating ourselves i think we think that when push comes to shove the way to get out of a stressful

00:48:47.920 situation is to become more inward oriented like focus on what we ourselves think we need

00:48:53.160 hedonistically or in terms of our you know like meaning and life and leisure and stuff like that

00:48:59.020 and the science suggests that that again is an intuition that's just incredibly wrong you know

00:49:03.960 there's some work by liz dunn and her colleagues and that shows that spending money on yourself

00:49:08.820 actually makes you less happy than spending money on other people you know she does these lovely

00:49:13.500 studies where she just walks up to somebody on a street and hands them money and tells the subjects how

00:49:17.300 to spend it and so some half of the subjects are told spend the money on other people by the end of the

00:49:21.520 day and and some of them are told spend the money on yourself by the end of the day and what she

00:49:25.600 finds is that the people who spend money on other people at the end of the day and even later on like

00:49:30.080 at the end of the week are happier self-reported are happier than those who spent the money on

00:49:34.600 themselves and i think that you know and she also like nick epley does work showing that that's not

00:49:39.580 people's intuitions you know she asks a different group of subjects which of these conditions would

00:49:43.240 make you happier and the subjects are in pretty strong agreement that they want the money for

00:49:47.160 themselves that's the kind of thing that would make them happier and so you know i think it's one of

00:49:50.780 these things that like ethically and in terms of our religious commitments those of us who are

00:49:54.680 religious like people kind of get that you're supposed to do nice stuff for others but but but 0.99

00:50:00.040 often people think about that in a like well that's to be a good person it doesn't necessarily make me in

00:50:05.380 the moment happier to do something nice for somebody else you know it's kind of a sacrifice right

00:50:09.200 but in practice what the science suggests is that that's wrong like if i'm having a really bad day at

00:50:14.440 work i shouldn't go off and buy myself a manicure i should just like get a gift card to give one of my

00:50:18.680 co-workers a manicure and that intuition feels just wrong to me you know maybe it's the right

00:50:23.280 thing to do or a noble thing to do or you know a very ethical thing to do like philosophers would

00:50:27.580 be really proud of me but i don't think that like laurie's own dopamine system is going to respond

00:50:31.820 better to gifting that manicure than getting it myself but that's actually what the data suggest

00:50:36.640 yeah this is where mindfulness can be very helpful because you can notice the hedonic bump when you do that

00:50:44.060 sort of thing and it can become more and more vivid and also you can notice the ways in which

00:50:49.320 giving what in real terms is even more i mean just like you're writing a check to an organization

00:50:55.520 there are ways to do that where you get very little hedonic reinforcement and there are ways to do that

00:51:03.100 where you get much more and it's it's interesting the variables there but it'd be great if there were a

00:51:09.260 truly linear connection between doing good things in the world and moment-to-moment gratification but

00:51:16.240 there's definitely a connection but it's just it requires some intelligent steering of your own

00:51:22.560 attention to extract the reward that is there to be extracted this circumstance of being in economic

00:51:30.740 lockdown offers some unique opportunities to experience this so you know i've noticed that anyone who

00:51:39.000 is fairly well off in this situation who's you know hasn't experienced an implosion economically

00:51:47.180 and who can continue working really the low-hanging fruit here ethically is to continue to support the

00:51:56.260 people in one's life who you know are just being cratered by this change in the economy so take somebody

00:52:04.580 in a service role the first person to come to mind for me was the woman who cuts my hair i get a haircut

00:52:11.840 you know i don't know once every six weeks or so and i had to know that her business was more or less

00:52:18.700 going to zero under these conditions so very early on i had the thought well i'll just buy imaginary

00:52:25.040 haircuts there's no reason why you know she should suffer the fact that i can't physically get those 1.00

00:52:30.700 haircuts and just doing that and a few things like that i mean it wasn't a list of a hundred people

00:52:35.620 like that in my life but taking care of those people when i was truly sacrificing nothing to do it

00:52:42.620 that's some of the most pleasant experience i've had all month just being able to do that and

00:52:48.600 and i would just argue it's a good thing to do it's good for you and it's good for the world

00:52:53.320 yeah totally i mean i want to pick up on two points here one is just i think you've you've kind of

00:52:58.540 completely hit the nail on the head right there i think this is covet 19 is a time where we really

00:53:03.900 feel like we don't have that much agency right i mean the maximally frustrating thing is do you want

00:53:08.220 to help just stay home and don't do anything like just stay home like don't do anything and you know

00:53:12.860 humans don't like that we like to be you know causally effective in the world and i think one way

00:53:17.440 to be causally effective is just to be helping financially if again you're in the privileged position

00:53:22.920 to do that all the people you would have normally helped financially anyway and in some ways

00:53:27.800 as you said there's no cost to it like that money was already spent and i think that's an

00:53:33.080 important framing for this time is that many of us are getting financial windfalls that we're not

00:53:38.420 paying attention to you know i'm not spending you know four bucks on a latte every morning which was

00:53:43.180 my normal practice you know some of us are not paying you know the subway fare or the gas fare for

00:53:48.560 our commutes these are all tiny windfalls that lots of us are getting in so many domains during

00:53:53.480 covet 19 but we can pay those windfalls back to the people that need it right now and even folks

00:53:58.860 who are in not great financial positions because probably a lot of your listeners aren't in the same

00:54:03.280 privileged position that you are you know to know that they still have a job some of them you are

00:54:07.240 working less hours or maybe even have lost their jobs and so on even those folks have a different

00:54:12.240 windfall they have a temporal windfall you know they have time that they might not have had before

00:54:16.780 and again the best use of time in terms of your well-being is time spent on other people you know

00:54:22.720 so you can be making those calls to advocate for say more ppe for health care workers you know you

00:54:27.880 can make a call to an elderly neighbor to kind of check on how they are and those kinds of ways of

00:54:33.520 spending our money and our time during this crisis can have a huge impact on our well-being

00:54:37.920 personally but then also they're just like good for the world because we're like doing good stuff to

00:54:42.440 like protect the economy and protect the vulnerable folks during this crisis but but i also

00:54:46.500 want to pick up on a second thing which is this idea you know you mentioned that to notice the

00:54:50.600 effect that your your good actions have on your own psyche you kind of have to be a little bit

00:54:55.780 mindful and i think this is really powerful this is something that i think neuroscience is just

00:55:00.460 beginning to understand which is how we can use mindfulness to to hack these bad intuitions that we

00:55:06.840 have about stuff you know throughout this conversation i've been saying you know we should be more

00:55:10.000 social but we don't realize that and therefore we don't do it we should be nicer to other people

00:55:13.540 be more focused on other people but we don't notice it so we don't realize we should do it

00:55:17.920 mindfulness the research is starting to suggest is one way to hack those things so that you can

00:55:23.200 start to notice hang on when i actually do this it feels nice and that while it doesn't immediately

00:55:28.660 change your intuitions it can kind of change your reinforcement structure such that you start to

00:55:33.740 realize what these things really look like and this comes from some lovely work coming out of

00:55:38.120 heady cober's lab she's a neuroscientist at yale who uses mindfulness techniques to to do all kinds 0.55

00:55:43.720 of different therapeutic things including working with addicts on their craving and so on and and it's

00:55:48.800 a powerful technique because even even in domains like you know an addict who has craving for say

00:55:53.760 nicotine or heroin or something like that the act of noticing what it's like afterwards can update

00:55:59.240 these circuits that are getting the getting the wanting wrong you know one of the one of the worst

00:56:04.480 things about the mind is like the most one of the most shocking things i ever read in my early

00:56:08.480 psychology training was that there's this interesting disconnect in the brain between

00:56:13.100 circuits that are involved in wanting and sort of craving and circuits that are involved in liking

00:56:18.460 and so the circuit that tells your your body hey go out and crave this thing go get it no matter

00:56:23.720 what cost work work work really hard to get it that's completely different from the circuit that's

00:56:27.680 actually going to like the thing once you get it and you can see these crazy dissociations where

00:56:32.320 like in the case of addiction where we can have incredible craving for something you know work

00:56:37.240 really hard to get it you know take the heroin addict who's addicted to heroin but then when you

00:56:41.240 finally get that reward you don't actually like it that much it's actually not even that rewarding

00:56:45.280 you know the heroin to an addicted heroin addict is just bringing you to baseline it's not even that

00:56:49.540 good anymore yeah and this this i feel like you know is true in addictions but it's so true in so many

00:56:54.780 aspects of my life before i kind of started practicing meditation and mindfulness where it's like there's all

00:56:59.640 these things that my body wants me to go after all the time that i think is going to be really great

00:57:04.420 because my craving's super high for it but then when i get it i'm kind of like if you actually

00:57:08.100 notice you're like well that wasn't that good like that kind of sucked or like that didn't make me feel

00:57:13.360 what i thought it was going to make me feel and then there's stuff like we're talking about about

00:57:16.960 doing nice things for others where at least for me i don't necessarily have the craving for it you

00:57:21.820 know as i said on a bad day i'm not thinking let me give a gift card you know for the manicure to my

00:57:26.040 co-worker i'm thinking let me get the manicure myself but then actually if you're mindful and

00:57:30.600 you pay attention afterwards you could notice even though the craving the wanting wasn't that high

00:57:34.980 the liking is pretty good and it can cause you to start shifting your behaviors and so so heady's

00:57:39.880 starting to do some real work on the actual neuroscience of this like you know what is it

00:57:44.180 about this act of mindfully noticing that can then feed back on your behaviors so you're kind of

00:57:48.960 updating what desires you really do want to have over time yeah yeah that's fascinating

00:57:54.260 mindfulness also can show you that desire doesn't have to be gratified to disappear right if you just

00:58:02.700 become interested in desire itself as a an object of consciousness right and you just become committed

00:58:08.580 to witnessing it arise and persist for a time and then pass away it will in fact pass away and in

00:58:16.440 many cases i mean obviously you can resurrect it again by focusing on on the wanted object yet again but

00:58:23.180 you can sensitize yourself to this full time course of desires arising and subsiding and realize that

00:58:30.700 there's nothing you have to do about it it's almost like the abandoned shopping cart of the mind

00:58:37.360 we've all had this experience that you go to zappos or whatever and you pick out a pair of shoes but then

00:58:42.020 you think better of it and then those shoes follow you around for the rest of your life online but

00:58:47.680 you can abandon the shopping cart and it really can just disappear then one wonders okay well then

00:58:55.200 what is the significance of gratifying any specific desire and then on the other side as you say you can

00:59:03.140 become more mindful of what it's like to gratify a desire and

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Making Sense - Sam Harris - April 10, 2020

#196 — The Science of Happiness

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