Reconciling Ambition with Mental Health

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Audible and IHart Audioobook Club, on the IHart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts On Happiness Lab, we talk a lot about how real happiness isn't moments of joy It's about creating security and peace For small business owners, a big part of that well being comes from helping to protect the livelihood you've worked so hard to build. The Hartford has been doing that for more than two hundred years And today, they insure over one million small businesses nationwide. They make it simple to get a customized quote the Heartford. com slash small businessus. 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Pushkin Hey happainess, Lou listers We're taking a break from our Happiness Hot Take series to bring you a special treat If you listen to last week's episode, you know that I recently got to interview happiness historian Darren McMahon who told me all about the history of the idea of the pursuit of happiness Well, in this episode, I'll be continuing my conversation with Darren, but this time, he'll be interviewing me You'll get to hear a live conversation that we had at Darren's home Institution of Dartmouth College as part of the Nelson A. Rockefeller Center at Dartmouth's public cononversations on the Pursuit of happappiness. We talked about all things happiness science like what practices we can do to really feel better, and some thoughts I've had about new technologies and AI It was a wide ranging and super fun conversation, so I couldn't wait to share it with all my podcast fans So enjoy this special episode of my conversation with Darren McMahon at Dartmouth College Our minds are constantly telling us what to do to be happy, but what if our minds are wrong? What if our minds are lying to us, leading us away from what will really make us happy? The good news is that understanding the science of the mind can point us all back in the right direction You're listening to the Happiness Lab with Dr. Lauri Santos This is the second in our series on dealing with the pursuit of happiness, both in the past and the present and maybe the future. Today we have Luri Santos, and I'm just delighted to have you here, Laori. Last week, Lauri very kindly invited me to be on the podcast and to talk about happiness in the eighteenth century. Today I think we're going to talk about the pursuit of happiness in the twenty first, but feel free to bring history into it if you feel so moved. Oh yeah, we're going forefath So Laurie is known as an authority on the science of happiness and the pursuit of happiness. But you cut your teeth as a psychologist and researcher studying animal behavior, I think, particularly dogs. And I'd love to hear, I mean, I get as a dog lover the link between dogs and the pursuit of happiness. But I'd love to hear if there's a link between the study of animals and the pursuit of happiness or how you got from one to the other Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think the biggest link between animals and happiness is that animals definitely dogs make us really happy. they keep us moving, they make us mindful. lotots of evidence showing that dog owners are happier. So if you need one quick happiness tip, get a dog make you happy. Not a cat.s less research on cats, interestingly, but definitely cats make you happier as well. Psychological connection is one of the reasons I was studying animals is that I've long been interested in the kinds of ways that our minds lead us astray. Most people study animals to try to figure out whether or not animals are as smart as humans. But I spent a lot of my time studying whether or not animals were as dumb as people were and some of the ways that people are dumb. I did this with monkeys studying the economic errors that we have and trying to see whether monkeys show those too With dogs, we are really focused on social errors. Do dogs imitate to the point that they're doing really irrational things in some of the same ways as humans do? And the connection between that and the happiness work is that my take on happiness has always been that one of the reasons we're not as happy as we can be isn't that we're not working towards it. We're working very hard towards becoming happier, but we're often doing it in the wrong way Because our minds are lying to us about the kinds of things that we need to do to be happier. And so in some ways, this work on animals, which is really about what it is that makes our minds go awry. It's very similar to the way I think about happiness. That's so interesting. Is there actually work on the wellbe of animals? I I always point out that Darwin writes about some horses that are sort of ill tempered and some that are cheery. and he begins to speculate along those lines and I don't know if's in the lab. Yeah, there's lots of we're trying to look at what animals feel, right? This is really important even for animal researchers who are trying to make animals' lives better and think about animal welfare and so on The problem with animals and thinking about animal happiness is that the way I know even if you, Darren, are happy, is that I ask you often in some very formalized psychometric survey where I ask you about your life experiences and your life satisfaction and so on. But ultimately, I don't really have a way objectively to find out if you're happy, You have to tell me. And the problem with animals is as much as we ask them, they tend not to tell us directly. Lacking verbal language, it's really hard for us to find out whether or not animals are happy. And so I think that's been the main limitation of why there's not a whole field of animal wellbe research that's as robust as the research in humans It's very hard for them to tell us. But if I know a psychologist, I won'top them. That's's true. That's true So you begin with animals and then I think it's in twenty eighteen you launched this great course, Psychology in the Good Life. I'm sure you've answered this a million times, but I'm curious how that came about. Had you taught on wellbeing prior to that point? What was the impetus? and then I' particularly interested to know how the cours has changed as you've taught it because I believe you're still teaching it now. Yeah, that's right. The pivot to thinking about wellbe came with a pivot in my role at Yale. So for most of my time at Yale, I was a professor at the front of a classroom, much like this. I interacted a lot with students, but I was a little bit distant from them. I was kind of know teaching them didn't really see closely what was happening in student life That all changed when I became what's called a head of college on Yale's campus. These are faculty members who live functionally in the dorm communities with students. Yale is kind of like one of these weird colleges like Hogwarts and Harry Potter, where there's like Gryffindor and Slytherin. Th like many colleges within a college. I was head of Syilliman Coege, no relation to Slytherin, even though it sounds very similar. But that meant that as a faculty member, I for the first time was seeing student life really closely I was eeting the students in the dining hall. I was hanging out with them in the coffee shop. And I just didn't like what I was seeing. I was seeing this so called college student mental health crisis up close in Persado, where the stats when I first started were that in twenty eighteen, more than forty percent of college students reported to being too depressed to function most days, not just Yale students, but nationally. moreore than sixty percent said that they were overwhelmingly anxious More than one in ten had seriously considered suicide in the last six months. This was a staggering amount of suffering that was happening on campus and it was happening in my community, right? I'm this benevolent aunt who's hanging out with students trying to make this community great. and I was just watching my students suffer from panic attacks or worse And that made me really question what my institution was doing in terms of mental health. I was kind of like You know, we as faculty members assume that you students are learning, you know, computer science or Chaucer or whatever we're teaching you How can that be true if more than two thirds of you are too anxious to function most days, or if you or your teammate or your roommate is seriously considering suicide? It just seemed like there was this disconnect between what we were expecting students to be learning and the real level of suffering that I was seeing in the community. I was just like, I have to take action. And being a nerdy psychologist, there were limited ways that I could take action, but I could teach a new class. And I had already had a little bit of experience in this field of happiness science or what psychologists call positive psychology. I had done some work with Marty Seligman, who's often thought of as like the leader of the field. so I had a bit of background in it. so I thought, I teach a an intro class. I'll just make a new class about this stuff. But the difference with this class that I was teaching is that I wanted it to be practical. I wanted it to be a skills learning class where students were learning strategies they could use if they were feeling burned out or stressed and so on. It was a new class on campus though, so I thought I'd show up in forty students would be in a classroom, which is typical for a Yale site class did expect The only place to teach it on campus would be our concert hall. There was also the football stadium, but to be fair, January football stadium is not an awesome spot to teach a Ticebody class. Yeah. Yeah, so that's the history. It really came out of seeing this need on campus and recognizing that we as I don't know, University prores it felt we weren't doing our job. We were just like pretending it was fine and kind of holding it aside. and I really wanted to give students skills they could use It's so interesting. know It's funny, my late godfather was close friends with Lorraine Siggins, who was director of Mental Health at Yale for years. And I remember Lorraine saying at one point, her office was seeing more than half the undergraduates, and that one had told her that he had mortgaged his childhood in order to get into Yale. And you know that realization of the stress that we put our young people through and the stress they take on, it's just overwhelming know you make a point that I often try to highlight and that is that all this talk about happiness in the news and elsewhere is not necessarily a good sign,? It reflects a kind of underlying anxiety and unhappiness, which is I think says a lot about our time Has that course changed? I mean, so that's the initial impetus, but has it evolved? Have things gotten better? Yeah, a bit. One of the things that's changed is the focus that I've had, right? The nice thing about having a quarter of the entire Yale student body in your classroom is that you can see what works, what they resonate with, and what's working less well One of the things I consistently hear from my students about the stuff that they take away with them in the course, what I'm most interested in is like, what are the strategies you're going to use? You heard about all these different strategies, kind of menu of different tools you can use to feel better. Which are you actually using? Which are you putting into effect in your own life? And the ones I consistently heard that students were using all the time were strategies that we had regully and navigate self talk. the stuff in your head. I'm not good enough. I'm screwing up. I should be doing more. That like hustle culture voice that's out there in society that gets embedded in your head. That's the thing that I think my students needed some help with. And so we talk a lot about strategies you can use to gain more self compassion, strategies you can use to get some psychological distance from the problems that are coming up in your life. And those were the tools that I think my students were using more and more. And so the class has shifted to focus more on some of those things. I think when people classically hear about the work in positive psychology, they hear things like meditate or write in your gratitude journal. and those things are great But I think what my students really needed help with was like, when I'm beating myself up, how can I talk to myself in a healthier way? And those really resonated. So some basic cognitive behavioral therapy basically. I mean, what we do in the class really is the kind of skills building that you learn with a good therapist.? Cognitive behavior therapy is really changing your thought patterns, changing your relationship to your thought patterns, finding ways to regulate your emotions better. That's functionally the tools that we're teaching in the classroom And I think that's important. It is the case that sometimes for certain issues in life, you need a one on one therapy session to gain these skills. These skills are also I don't wan to say they're not hard because they're hard to put into effect in the moment, but they're pretty straightforward. And this is one of the insights that I've had teaching this stuff is like we should be teaching this stuff earlier and earlier because none of this stuff is rocket science. L These basic emotion regulation strategies are ones that I think we should be teaching Definitely in middle school, but maybe even earlier. I mean, Yale's done wonderful work introducing these kind of emotional skill building into elementary schools, right? And I think it can come earlier and earlier There's been so many cool opportunities that came from teaching this course that I didn't expect. but one of the most cool ones was that I got to work with Sesame Workshop, which is the group that runs Sesame Street and think about how we can get these strategies out to little little kids And what I realize is like, oh my gosh, mean one of the strategies I teach students is this idea of affect labeling, which is like, just give a label to what you're feeling. I'm feeling frustrated. I'm feeling overwhelmed. I'm feeling sad, I'm feeling lonely, whatever it is. A word can help you get some insight into exactly what you're feeling, and it can also help you get some insight into how to fix it The fix for when you're feeling lonely is totally different than the fix for when you're feeling overwhelmed. But if you're just like I don't feel good, then you don't know what to do That's a strategy that you can teach a three to five year old. mayaybe not with big words like overwhelmed and frustrated, but you can try. In fact, Elmo was teaching kids about frustrated. That was one of the words that Elmo was learning. So it's like if we could just have that stuff in earlier, we'd be giving people tools they could use You know, my five year old daughter then taught me and I got that education a little raate perhaps, but still got it nonetheless, so thank you. We human beings are really bad at Knowing what will make us happy, and we make bad choices accordingly, and you lawyer are not shy at all at pointing out what people do wrong in terms of pursuing happiness. And while we have you, can you give us a few quick tips on what not to do? Yeah, because I'm staring out at a bunch of undergrads. it looks like I'll give the one that my college students get wrong the most, which is the connection between money and happiness Most of you are here at a place like Dartmouth College because you want to like earn a lot of money later on. And T turns out there is a connection between money and happiness, but that connection only exists if you really don't have any money. If you are currently living below the poverty line and I give you more money, yes, that's going to make your life a lot easier. You will be happier But this connection between money and happiness seems to level off. Researchers fight about exactly where it levels off. Back in a very famous paper in twenty ten, folks thought it leveled off around seventy five thousand US dollars in modern day money that probably is equivalent of like one hundred ten thousand dollars. People fight about whether the slope after that point is totally flat or whether it goes up a minuscule amount over time. But the point is like just isn't helping your happiness that much to get more money after a certain point And that's one that I just feel like is so hard to take into account. I'm looking at a room of students that I imagine some of you are seniors and thinking about different job offers. Maybe you're lucky enough to have multiple ones. And my guess is the first thing you look at is what's the salary? And you're twittdling about like, ooh, which one should I pick? and maybe I'll get five thousand extra dollars or whatever? And it's just not going to matter at all. What will matter? What is your social connection going to look like at work One of the biggest predictors of happiness overall and happiness at work is the yes or no answer to the question, do you have a best friend at work? Another big predictor of your happiness at work is whether or not you have a lot of free time. This is some lovely work by Ashley Willins at Harvard Business School on the power of what's called time affluence, the sense that you feel wealthy in time so much more important to have time wealth than monetary wealth Even interestingly at lower incomes, actually because we're talking with so many folks at public policy here, Ashley has pushed the policy that one way to solve the kind of happiness crisis and so many other crises that come up in low income populations is actually to give low income individuals more time back Because if you're thinking about what happens if you're low income, you're driving Uber, or maybe you don't even have a car or you're commuting two hours to work and so on. if we could solve the time crisis, we might actually help them psychologically and maybe even monetarily down the line too. But this isn't how we think. We're not like, if I want to be happier, let me find a life that gives me lots more time. We're just like money, money, money, achievement, achievement, achievement, and it's not going to move the needle in the way we think So money Unimportant, but not as important as people think. It's so insidious for the way our mind works, right? Because it is important for a while. Like if you're undergrad and you're not making any money, or like me when I was like a poor grad student, it was the case that in grad school I was earning enough that I was not below the poverty line, but more money was definitely making me happier. I wasn't at that threshold yet So you learn that reward relationship, you're like, oh my gosh, more money, more happy But then when it levels off, you stop realizing that that's the case. And so what happens when you're getting more money and it's not moving the needle? You don't think, oh, I must have been wrong about that relationship between money and happiness. You just think, o, I was wrong about the amount of money I need. I need way more money to be happy. In fact, one of my favorite surveys, this is Sony Luubrmersky cites this in her book You ask people who are earning thirty thousand dollars, you know is that enough to be happy? Those folks say no. They say, okay, what amount of money would you earn that? Like you werere getting that amount youd just be happy. And this was years ago, but folks that earning thirty thousand dollars say, Well, if I could just get fifty thousand dollars, then I'd just be happy. I wouldn't ever need another pennymore. But you do the same survey with people who are earning one hundred thousand dollars, you ask them, is that enough? They say no. You say, how much do you need? Th folks say, I need two hundred fifty thousand dollars to be happy. Now I'm looking at smart Darbin students who can do the math in their head and you realize, wait, it's not like you get there. It's like the ratio, the difference between what you think you need and what you have is going up as you get more money. It's not going less, right I think this is the insidiest thing about money is we don't realize like, oh, I was wrong. It must be something else that I need. We think like, it's still money. I just need way more than I think It's time to take a quick break, but Darren and I will be back with more conversation when the Happiness Lab returns in a moment Th summer pieces are the ones you end up wearing on repeats For me, that means clothes that feel comfortable, versatile, and somehow look right for every occasion That's why I love Qints. 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Make your summer wardrobe feel easier Go to quintince dot com slash happppiness for free shipping on your order and three hundred and sixty five day returns, now available in Canada too That's QUInCE dot com slash happiness for free shipping and three hundred and sixty five day returns Qince d. com slash happiness If you're always on the lookout for a great audioobook or just want help figuring out what to listen to next, there's a podcast you should know about It's called Earsay the Audible and IHire Audiobook Club hosted by CowPet Each episode takes a closer look at some of the most talked about new audio books on Audible sppanning a wide range of genres fromom sci fi and literary fiction to Romcs, thrillers and comedy Pal is joined by guests who dig into what these stories are about, what makes them stand out as audiobooks, and why they're connecting with listeners right now If you're looking for your next lesson, this is a great place to start Listen to EarsSay, the Audible and IHart Audioobook Club, on the IiHart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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It's the card that gives back all you put in Learn more at chase. com forward slash reseserve businessus Chase for business, make more of what's yours. acccounts subject to credit approval, restrictions and limitations apply. Cards are issued by JP Morgan Chase Bank NA Memember FDIC So pursuing happiness through money maybe doesn't quite work. That's one of the wrong Pursuits, right What shouldould we be doing? How should we? Yeah Well here's one that I think with your focus on the eighteenth century, you will love, whichich is another thing we get wrong about happiness is we think happiness is about us It's about me, me me. And I think this is especially true in the modern individualist culture where we find ourselves. And at a school like this, to be honest, many of you students are here because you focused on your studies and what you needed and getting your stuff up. wasnt What are you doing to help the country? What are you doing to help the world? What are you doing to help your brothers and sisters? It was like, you, you, you. And the research just consistently shows us that this is not the path to happiness. And I think this is something that modern culture gets so wrong. If you go on TikTok, you will see somewhere something about self care or treat yourself, or me, me, me, right? But if you look at the happiness research, that's just not what predicts people's happiness. Happiness is about being other oriented So controlled for income people who donate more money to charity are happier than those who self report not donating anything. Same with volunteering for your time, controlling for the amount of free time you have. It just seems like doing stuff for others makes you happier. Those are correlations. So you could be like, well, maybe it's that doing nice stuff for other people makes you happy, but it could also be that just if you're happy, you do nice stuff for other people. And we know that's an effect what's called the feel good do good effect. if you're like in a good mood, you want doing nicer stuff for other people. But there are also studies that they're very cute. They force people to do nice stuff for others. and then they test what happens to your happiness. And what you find is that even when you're forced to do something nice for other people, you wind up feeling better after doing that And so I think this is one that we consistently get wrong in the modern day. And as I said, Darren, this is one that I think you'll appreciate because of the forefathers,, they were good about individual pleasure, but they also got that even just the whole concept of happiness was about everyverybody's happiness. and this is something we really miss today Yeah, one thing that comes very clear is when people in the eighteenth century talk about the pursuit of happiness, they don't mean the pursuit of quanta of pleasure. They mean the pursuit of a life well lived. in order to sort of access that, they draw really deeply on wisdom traditions. So in their case, Greek and Roman philosophy, as well as religious traditions, right? And while you were speaking, I was thinking of that Wonderful Chinese proverb, and I won't get it quite right, but it's something the fact that if you w to be happy for an hour, take a nap, if you want to be happy for a day, go fishing, and if you want to be happy for a lifetime, then help others gets at the way in which So many of the world's wisdom and spiritual traditions have deep lessons about how to pursue happiness embedded in them. And I've heard you say a little bit like John Ht, who talks about the kind of modern truth and ancient wisdom that You know, much of what positive psychologists do is to reaffirm or validate insights that we've already known, but they've just put a modern kind of scientific and premature on them, which is important, but nonetheless, the knowledge itself may not be new Yeah. And I think that that's a really important thing to do, right? I think my scientist hat sometimes is embarrassed, right? because it's like, we positive psychologists and psychologists and behavoral scientists in general have got out and tested all these things Scholars have been talking about, since the time of Aristotle, were like, o Ohh my gosh, it turns out that habits' really good to form. Were doing nice things for other people, makes you happy. Mindfulness and being present, that's awesome. Folks have been saying that for like thousands of years. And so on the one hand, it's like, really, this is the modern science. is like you're just showing us what these folks were saying forever that's now true But I think it's important to do because it didn't necessarily have to be that way. And sometimes the ancient traditions were just wrong. Think of your favorite ancient tradition. you'll realize some of it we just don't really subscribe to in the same way today. And so I think that that stuff is really important is asking the question, are we doing it right? And sometimes when we look, we realize we're doing it wr. And this one isn't so much an ancient tradition, but it's another thing that's really popular in the culture right now and it just drives me so crazy is the TikTok trend about manifesting You all the undergrads are nodding, like, oh, I'm just gonna like, I want to get good breads this semester. so I'm just gonna to manifest it. I'm just going envision it, right? It T turns out it's not just that manifesting is neutral or that it doesn't work, it actively causes the thing that you want to get further away How does it do that? What does that through a funny trick of the mind? It does that through the way your mind images different rewards and the way your reward system works. So let's say I want to get fit,? Is is something I've thinking about I've been trying to go with my trainer, go once a week. I want to get a little bit fitter, right? So I manifest, I think like, oh, how awesome it would be if I was fit, Oh my gosh, my clothes would fit better. and like I'd have stronger muscles What I'm doing there is I'm vividly imagining that I've already gotten the reward, that I've already put in all the work I need to put in and I have that good thing already And a funny thing about our minds is like When we image stuff really closely, there's part of our brain that thinks we already got that There's a wonderful study by Kerry Morwege and colleagues that tests this directly with food. He either has you imagine carefully putting quarters into a slot like you're going to do your laundry or imagine slowly eating one M and M at a time. And you do this for a while And then the experiment is that you come out and there's a bowl of M andMs. And the question is, how many M andMs do you eat And what you find is that when you've already imagined really carefully eating all these M andMs, the last thing you want to do is eat more M andMs. You kind of have envisioned what that reward would feel like, so you don't need it anymore. You don't need to take the action to get it And research by Gabrielle Ottingan and colleague finds that the same thing happens when manifesting If you manifest, oh my gosh, I want to get great grades, part of your brain thinks you got those great grades. So you don't take as much time to study. You don't work as hard. She finds that students who manifest getting fitter actually go to the gym less often. So it's not just that manifesting is like, o, it doesn't work. It's like this woooo thing. It's actively bad. But the good thing is that there's a way you can do it better. Gabrielle Otingham shows how this works whichich is just in addition to kind of thinking very vividly about the reward, you also think, hm, what are the obstacles that are getting me to that reward? And you imagine that, and you're like, oh, I don't have gym shorts or I like don't have my books to study or like there's four parties this weekend and' gonna to have time to read the book I need to read That causes you to think about how you can overcome those obstacles. You can use manifesting well. It's just that like the TikTok version drives us a straight. So the whole point of that is that it is the case that sometimes science goes out and they study things that are out there in the public ether or that scholars have been thinking about for a while, and they're like, yeep, everybody was right. But sometimes we look and we realize that the popular wisdom is just wrong And that's where I think science can help us get on a better path That's wonderful, and it's a perfect segue to where we're want to go next. This last autumn in October, Pfessor Danny Blenchflau, who is here in the audience and colleagues put together this wonderful conference with the United Nations around the crisis in youth well beinging. And as Danny has shown and others like Genan Twangy and John Hight, who are also at the conference, that crisis is real. And moreover, it shows up in the data at right the same time that the cell phone becomes kind of broadly accessible And so I'm wondering if you might want to comment and I'm hoping you're not sponsored by Meta and hoping we're not sponsored by Meta. It' one thing we had meta sponsorship, But yes. So I think it's important when talking about technology and social media and cell phones and how they're affecting our wellbeing to remember that cell phones are just a tool It's just a technology. We could use it in all kinds of different ways. We could use our phones to call a friend, to donate money to a good cause, to do a meditation app. It could be used for good stuff. It's just the problem is we don't tend to use it for good stuff. Basically all the different strategies I talk about about how to feel happier. if you look at how we tend to use technology It leads us astray. Let's take the one that I find most ironic, which is social connection. Every available study of happy people suggests that happy people are more social. Quickest intervention other than getting a dog you could do to be happier is to get a friend or talk to a human or be socially connected in any way. Our phones were built to literally do that. It's a phone. The whole purpose of a phone is to call someone How do we normally spend it? Staring at it while ignoring the people in real life around us. The deep irony that these tools that were meant to help us connect often help us not connect. And there's some lovely work by folks like Liz Dunne and others showing just how much phones steal our attention when we're around other people. Liz does this lovely study where she puts people in a waiting room., imagine Darren and I who were sitting up on the stage. We're in a waiting room together We could just chat with each other But if we have our phones out, what are we going to do? We're not going to chat with one another. We're going to look at our phones. And Liz just does this clever study where she measures how much smiling happens between people in a room together, know maybe the basic tiniest unit of social connection. And she finds like a thirty percent reduction in smiling when people have their phones available to them in this waiting room, right? Imagine that thirty percent multiplied by our whole society walking around on campus and this kind of stuff We socially connect less. Another big one, especially for young people, you sleep less because you have your technology out. I think the most evil thing cell phone companies ever did was to put an alarm clock in cell phones because it gives us an excuse to have it right near us in bed. And then when we wake up in the middle of the night, we look at it and we are tempted by it and so on. I think it also makes us way less present over time. but the mindfulness, kind of noticing where you are, just being in your space, so much evidence that this boosts our happiness We never have moments to be mindful. You probablyrobably even some of you walking over here, Darren you and I are talking on this beautiful spring day where Dartmouth's campus is just gorgeous right now. guessing some of you didn't even notice that why because you were staring at whatever was going on in your phone, right? Not to mention all the anxiety provoking information about the news and everything else. It's just the technology 's just one that we tend to use in ways that make us miserable And the coolest finding that I've heard most recently, this actually I learned on a podcast with Mamouush Zamaruti, who's a journalist who has been thinking a lot about the effects of technology. in the ways people typically thought about about attention and all this stuff But recently, she's become interested in the way technology shapes our physical body, not like what we're thinking in our mental health, but our physical health And she talks about research showing this connection between our core muscles and our adrenal glands, like our stress system. And if you think of the way we often sit when we are on our phone, I will demonstrate for those of you who are not on your phone right now, it is like this. is I'm hunching over in what's called the casw posture It turns out that this is a posture that is literally stimulating our stress system And Zomarudi actually claims that like maybe a lot of the mental health crisis that we're getting with our phones is actually just the way we're sitting in our physical bodies and our physical presence Everyone in the room right now is now straightening up. and like getting into the right position. But yeah, she argues that We might be able to solve some of this if we think about the way technology is changing our very posture. Neither of us are policy people. I'm a historian, you're a psychologist, and yet we're here under the auspices of the Rockefeller Center of Public pololicy. Our director is right here. But I feel obligated to ask a question about public policy. If you were advisor to a King for the day, what would you tell them about things we could do at the macro level to improve wellbe in the United States I'm so glad you asked me that because sometimes a lot of this work comes off as saying the following thing. Here are these strategies you can use as individuals to feel happier, write in your gratitude journal. you use these self talk strategies And that's it, good. We can ignore the fact that there's many structures around us and governments and companies and institutions that are ively making it harder to be happier And I think that that's just a misnomer. It is the case that we can use individual strategies to get happier, but it would be so much easier to employ those individual strategies if we had the institutions and governments around us helping us. And we as psychologists don't often get to pontificate about that. So I'm excited to pontificate about that. Whaty do we know about the policy implications of what we've learned in happiness We talked about this connection between money and happiness, where money after a certain level doesn't make you happy, but money under a certain level really, really, really doesn't make you happy. I think the happiness science is super clear about the powerful impact that a universal basic income could have on both levels. If you give low income people more money, it will necessarily make them happy If you have to tax higher income people to get that money, it's going to have absolutely no effect on their happiness. It's just super, super clear Another big policy implication is that social connection really matters for happiness. I think there's many ways that public policy can influence social connection. Here I'm channeling great folks like Robert Putnam and others who've long talked about the power of things like third spaces, literal spaces that aren't work or school or something or home, places where you can get together with other people These are things that governments can do is just make it easier for people to have these spaces. And in empirical cases where people have done that, we've seen huge impacts in terms of more connection, more happiness, but I think even like more conversations across the political line, which can help a lot Finally, we talked a lot about the power of time and the importance of time affluence. I think this is a lever that public policy can use that it often doesn't think about because we forget the importance of time. But even things like a four day work week, which even economists are now telling us, wow, a four day work week makes workers more productive. They get more of the bottom line stuff done and they also have time to rest and do other things can be super powerful. Finally, I'll say that I think one of the things we forget is that Being happy leads to doing nice things for others and kind of doing what the forefathers wanted, which is like being good in terms of your civic life, living a good life not for yourself, but for everyone else There's lots of new work just showing that a really great way to get people to fight for what's good in the world, to fix the structures around them is just to make sure they're in a positive mood and feeling happier. This is some lovely work by Kushleeff at Georgetown that asks the question of, well, who's going out and like doing the stuff? Who's going to like climate protests, or he was doing this work around the time of the Black Lives Matter. He' like, who's going to those protests and fighting for social justice And what he finds is it's not what you think. You might assume like, who's going to a climate protest? It must be somebody who's really anxious about climate. Turns out no, the people who are at least anxious, the people who have the most positive mood. They're the ones getting out to do the stuff And in some ways, you didn't need to know that study to know that effect. Like if you think of when you're just feeling overwhelmed and in a really bad space, you're not out there trying to fix the world. you're just like trying to deal It does mean that this connection between individual happiness and civic happiness is an important one. But if we give people the tools and the skills to promote their individual happiness, it's going to give them the bandwidth to fix the bigger stuff. And so I think policymakers need to realize that It's not just that welfare at the individual level is a policy goal It might be a policy tool to help people to do better more broadly. It's time for a break, but Darren and I will be back with more conversation when the happappiness Lab returns in a moment Always on the lookout for a great audio book or just want help figuring out what to listen to next, there's a podcast you should know about It's called ERSay, the Audible and IHart Audiobook Club hosted by CowPet Each episode takes a closer look at some of the most talked about new audioob books on Audible Spanning a wide range of genres fromom sci fi and literary fiction to Romcs thrillers and comedy Pal is joined by guests who dig into what these stories are about, what makes them stand out as audiobooks, and why they're connecting with listeners right now. If you're looking for your next lesson, this is a great place to start Listen to eararsaay. Audible and IHart Audioobook Club on the IiHart Radio app Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. When you own your own business, you own every decision Now own the card that rewards you for it. 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I was wondering, what do you think the relationship is between comparison and happiness and To what extent can you really separate your happiness from evaluating it in comparison to someone else's can a college student derive their own happiness without thinking, oh, I'll be happier if my life looked like so and so's. Totally So here's anotherumb feature about how the mind works when it comes to happiness. And how the mind works just in general is not just true of happiness, It iss just like human mind writ large We don't don Th think about anything in objective terms. We only think about stuff relative. We're here in this room with kind of brightish artificial lights. When you walk outside into the slightly darker hallway, you'll feel like, oh my gosh, it's so dark. It's not that the hallway is dark, it's just it's brighter in here. You don't think of the light in terms of its objective properties, you think of it relative to another space, right This is just how we think about everything, including our own level of whatever our grades, our beauty, are a salary. We can't even understand them in objective terms. We only can think about them in relative terms and our brains have this other insidious property, which is that we tend never to do that relative comparison towards things that we're better at. So we tend to look at the person that makes us feel worst about ourselves. My favorite and nerdy example of this is a sports example researchers looked at Olympic medalists on the stand and their emotional expressions. So the gold medalists super happy, really excited, right? What about the silver medalist? They're not just like ever so slightly less happy than the gold medalists. If you do analyses of their facial muscles, what you find is that silver medalists are showing emotions like contempt deep sadness. They're not like a little less happy. They're miserable. Wh They just feel like a total loser. They're just looking to the gold medalist and feeling awful, right? You can be in objectively the best circumstances in life And if your mind finds the one person that's better than you, it's going to look to that person and do it. I consulted very briefly for a NBA team with basketball players, which is funny because like I don't know anything about basketball or anything about sports in general and so I have to figure out ways to talk to basketball players. But we were talking about the insidiousness of social comparison, even at the highest level in the NBA And I was asking them who their comparison points were. I was like, whoo's your comparison point for like salary right now And at the time they' like, Oh, it's Steh Cry. And I was like, who's your comparison point for like three point shots and And they're like, Steh Curry. And I was like, who's your comparison for height And they're like, oh, it wass like taco fail or something. I was like, why is it notough Steh Curry for height? Because if you know basketball, Steh Curry is pretty sure. And they're like, well, I didn't think about him for that. but like you thought about him for every other comparison. whyy is that not? So like even at the highest level, we picked the awful stuff, right So I think one way to deal with comparison is just to have some grace about it. It's just the way your mind works for everything. Of course, you're going to compare But you need to realize that you can shift that process a little. And this is why I love to nerd out and tell this Olympian story because there's a third data point that I haven't mentioned. I talked about the gold medalist and the silver medalist. I didn't mention the bronze medalist. Researchers analyze their facial expressions, and it turns out they're ecstatic. They often in some of the analyses are showing more positive expressions than the gold medalist. Why? Their comparison point isn't gold, they were like multiple seconds or multiple points away. Their comparison is like, o my gosh, if I just messed up a little bit more, I would be going home empty handed.. And so the joke is you have to find not the silver lining, but the bronze lining. You literally have to look at, could it be worse? Is there another comparison I could find And that intentional energy takes work, but it's possible. So little grace, everybody does it just the way your mind works. But if you look carefully, you can detect that objectively you're not doing so bad Strive in life for third place. Yeah, exactly Professor Blch Fl. Thank you. Danny Blanfra. That's exactly the theme I was going to try and think about Darren and I were in Scotland for the three hundredth anniversary of Adam Smith's Birth And if you read the first page of Ethereum Moral sentiments He says what you just said He actually says Actually, we compare ourselves to others and we care about the well beinging of others for the guy who wrote about markets. So the relative thing is really important Even I think in macro sense, it's really important. I'll just tell you a Nobel Prize winner who remained nameless called me one day and I'd written about relative things and he said I can buy anything that I like But I still care about the salaries of my colleagues. So this is a big deal, right? So if you think in macro terms, we've seen GDP rising, income with the nation rises. And if you look at happiness as flat as a pancake. Well what happens is people compare themselves to others. If I get a BMW, this is of colleagues of our hs. If I get a BMW, it makes me happy. But if you get one, I'm not happy anymore. I mean, this is literally true. and there's evidence Lutm's famous paper finds that if I get a ten percent rise in income, that's fine But if I get no rise in income and everybody in the neighborhood gets a ten percent rise, I'm worse off So these comparators are really important. And I know you talked about it on an individual level, but I obviously I think it's really important for us to think perhaps to your connection on smartphones When I was a kid and I was twelve, I'm old now, I was twelve, I compared myself my sister and my school colleagues Maybe what we've got here is the smartphone does changed the comparator group The comparative groups are not real. right? If I'm comparing myself to my sister or to Darren or something, that's fine. But in a sense the connection of the real things and the smartphones is the smartphones change the comparor group. And until we can do that, the individual things you've talked about full flat. So I'm just trying to think about how do we actually get people to compare themselves to real things cause if I've learn anything about the happiness work I've done, it's what you said, relative things matter. Now, I think this is such an important point, right? It's comparing yourself, you know, if you're a student here to everyone at Dartmouth, but it's also comparing yourself to literally everyone on the internet. And of course, what's happening on the internet is completely curated, especially when it comes to beauty and physical looks and so on, it's like all bed up. And I think in the age of AI sllop, which we're moving towards, we're gonna to have even more comparisons that don't even exist, right And so it raises this interesting question of what we can do. Again, being a psychologist, I think of the individual strategies that we can use. And the idea is like, you have some agency over whether you pick up that phone and look at TikTok. You can mindfully notice how is it making me feel when I do that? If I leave TikTok, hating my body and demanding I go to the gym and feeling bad about my grades Try to notice when are these comparisons coming up and are they really real This is a strategy that journalists like Katherine Price writays this really lovely book, How to Bak U with your phone where she argues you don't necessarily have to break up with your phone, but you need to take it to couples counseling to figure out health a relationship with it, you. And she has a strategy that she uses, it's an acronym WWW, which stands for what for, why now, and what else? right? Why did I pick up my phone