← The Dan Buettner Podcast
The Dan Buettner Podcast
New Year Refresh: The Truth About Being Happy with Sonja Lyubomirsky
01:04:51
Loading summary
Transcript186 lines
- [00:01]
A
The Dan Bueter Podcast is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Financially responsible financial geniuses, monetary magicians. These are all things people say about the drivers who switched their car insurance to Progressive and save hundreds because Progressive offers discounts for paid in full, owning a home and more. Plus you can count on their great customer service to help you when you need it. So your dollar goes a long way. Visit progressive.com to see if you could save on your car insurance, Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Potential savings will vary. Not available in all states and situations. Lemonada. Hello everyone and welcome back to the Dan Buettner Podcast. Or perhaps welcome for the very first time. You know, I just started this last season and it debuted number one in health and fitness. We got to as high as the top 25 of all podcasts in the world. So as we turn the calendar page into this new year, I want to invite you to join me for a focus and inspiring refresh where we're beginning to bring back some of the most impactful and actionable episodes we've ever produced. I put extra emphasis on actionable because if you're gonna spend time listening to me, I want you to take something back that's tangible, you can put to work in your life and evidence shows us it will add good years to that life. We wanna give you every tool you need to make this the best year yet. We're adding a bonus episode every Tuesday this January. You can expect our brand new interviews and insights on Thursdays. But now you'll get a powerful dose of Blue zone wisdom on Tuesdays too. These re release Tuesday episodes distill proven strategies gleaned from the longest lived people in the Blue zones and from world experts throughout the world. All designed to help you build a better life. Not just through theory, but through small manageable steps. So listen every Tuesday and Thursday, take notes and most importantly, let's stop wishing and start doing in 2026.
- [02:19]
B
A lot of us are loved, but don't feel loved. It's as though the cup of love has a lid on it and my expression of love isn't quite getting in the biggest factor. If I had to boil down all of happiness into into two words.
- [02:36]
A
Are there people who are just born unhappy and they're screwed? Or is there is there something you can really do? You know, on this podcast we talk a lot about longevity, but what's the sense of living to 100 if you don't enjoy the journey? So for my next guest I have Sonia Lubomirsky from the University of California Riverside. She's a real scientist. She's a doctor of happiness. She spent her entire career studying happiness, how to get more of it, the myth of happiness. But her true gift is communication. She knows how to take the reams and reams and reams of studies and make it actionable for you. She's going to tell us the five things that work the best for living longer. And for me, I think the most powerful tip is how to have a conversation. So stay with us. I feel so privileged to have you. First of all, we've known each other for over a decade.
- [03:37]
B
20 years at least.
- [03:38]
A
Oh, my God, two decades.
- [03:39]
B
20 years.
- [03:40]
A
And I consider you a great friend. But also, you are one of the rare happiness scientists who does a real research, but you have a real gift for communicating. And as we all know, the great academics who can't get out of the academic jargon of their. And you're such a master at, at making it easy, making it understandable, putting in the books we all like to read, and, and I feel very blessed to have you. So thank you for.
- [04:10]
B
Thank you. Pleasure to be here to see you again. Dan.
- [04:13]
A
Just to sort of start from the beginning, because I think you have such an interesting genesis story of why you even got into happiness. And that relationship with your mother, I just think is instructive for those of us who have complex relationships with our parents.
- [04:27]
B
Well, I'll actually come back to college because my advisor from college visited me a few years ago. So that was like 30 years later. And I said to him, oh, I started to be interested in happiness in grad school. And he said, no, no, I was in college. You used to talk about happiness. You used to talk about your mom and that. You used to talk about how unhappy your mom was and you didn't understand why. And why were some people so much happier than others? So I didn't remember that, that when I was, you know, 18, 19, 20, I was thinking about happiness. I did remember, you know, I was an immigrant from the Soviet Union. I do remember first coming to the US and being really shocked at how people, how happy people looked just walking down the street. So that was another question I had in my mind. How is it that people on the streets in Moscow look all grumpy and gloomy? They weren't necessarily less happy, although, you know, the surveys show that they are less happy than Americans. So, yeah, those interests started. Started early on, you know.
- [05:29]
A
When I started getting deep into science. It was in longevity. And measuring longevity is pretty easy. It's. You look at Their birth, then you look at their death and you do the math. And you can do that at a population level. But happiness is rather spongier, isn't it?
- [05:43]
B
Yes.
- [05:44]
A
So how do we measure happiness? If I tell you I'm happy, how do you know I'm really happy and I'm not just fibby drunk?
- [05:52]
B
I trust you. I know I trust you. And so what happens is. Yeah, it is. It's subjective. You know, you're the only person who really knows how happy you are. Now, we can use all kinds of measures. We can measure how often you smile, whether the smile is authentic. It's a Duchenne smile. I can ask your partner or kids or colleagues how happy you are. And those would be nice sort of quote more objective measures, but they're not any better. Or I could look at your brain. It turns out if you have more activation on the left side of your frontal cortex than the right side, that means you're probably happier. But that's also. That's just a correlate of happiness. So really, there's no thermometer for happiness. Right. So really the best measure is just to ask the person. And you might wonder, well, why. Yeah, do people fib? Maybe some do. But why would they? You know, we find that most people pretty much know if they're a happy person. I mean, maybe if you have some severe pathology and you're in denial, you really don't know how happy you are, or you've lost your memory, but that's pretty rare. So we trust people. And then if I ask you several times in a row, if I ask you repeatedly, then we have a more reliable measure of happiness.
- [07:03]
A
So we have 340 million people in the United States, and there's 200 or so in the Soviet. How do you. How do you. How are you able to say they're actually really happier in the United States than Soviet Union?
- [07:15]
B
Well, I do. I don't do this kind of work. But basically what you do is you sample from a population, right? So you don't have to ask just like. Well, the U.S. census does try to get the whole population, but when we do surveys, like political surveys or any kind of survey, we don't actually ask every single person. We ask a percentage of population. If it's a high enough percentage, then we could be fairly confident that it's representative of the population. And so, like the World Happiness Report, they go around and they give surveys to large numbers of people in different countries, and then they compute the mean. Now, there's still that's still problematic. Right. So what if people in Russia, when they answer, how happy are you? Or how satisfied are you with your life? Or how often do you experience joy or sadness? What if they tend to kind of, I don't know, use the low end of the scale, you know? Or what if they don't like to kind of exaggerate? In other cultures, people like to exaggerate. That is going to happen. So there are biases inherent in these measures.
- [08:09]
A
Yeah, it's like Japanese or they tend to be more so subtle and subdued and Minnesotans, very subtle. But if you're in Texas, you're much better. You're not as good as you're going to say you are.
- [08:22]
B
Right. So I don't really. And I don't often like to compare different countries or even different people. I think it's more. I think it's. I don't know, it's maybe wiser to compare the same person across time. And so in our research, we do what we call happiness interventions where we try to. Where we kind of encourage or assign people to do certain activities to see if that would make them happier. And then we measure a person's happiness over time to see if it changes over time. So there's problems with that as well, but at least you have the same person filling out the same measures. So, yeah, we hope that they're not going to change how they respond to the scale. Across a week or a month or a few months.
- [09:03]
A
In longevity, only about 20% of how, how long you live is dictated by your genes. By looking at populations, what is it for happiness? Are we born happy or unhappy or how do you think about that?
- [09:17]
B
Well, first of all, 20% is a surprising. Surprisingly low. But that's so interesting.
- [09:21]
A
Yeah.
- [09:22]
B
Yeah, surprisingly low. There's lots of research on behavioral genetics research, you know, that where they're comparing identical and fraternal twins and that work. Lots of studies show that basically identical twins are much more likely to be similar in their happiness levels than our fraternal twins. And the heritability coefficient tends to be sometimes as high as 0.5, sometimes from 0.3 and 0.4. So that's higher than 20%. Yeah, so it is higher. But again, I want to make sure that people don't misinterpret that number. It's a number that says something about a population, not a person. Doesn't mean that 50% of your happiness is genetic. It sort of means that when you look at variance in a population, it explains how much variance There is. So one way I try to explain it is like imagine you're sitting in a movie theater of a hundred. There's a hundred people in the movie theater, and they all kind of differ in how happy or unhappy they are. And imagine that we all turn them into genetic clones of each other so their DNA is all the same. They're all like identical twins of each other. They would still vary in their happiness levels, but that variance would be reduced by about 50% or 30 or 40%. That's a very.
- [10:33]
A
That's a great metaphor.
- [10:34]
B
Thank you.
- [10:34]
A
Yeah, it's a great metaphor.
- [10:35]
B
You can do the same thing with longevity, but use 20%.
- [10:37]
A
Yes, yes. Gimmick infringement here. I'm going to take that one. But still, I mean, getting to happiness, and I know your expertise is what science tells us about increasing our happiness, which is something scientists have, you know, psychologists haven't focused on until, you know, Marty Seligman, I think, or thereabout. But are there people who are just born unhappy and they're screwed, or is there. Is there something you can really do if you're. If you just wake up and you just see the world half empty all the time?
- [11:13]
B
Well, again, we were just talking about how part of the variance in happiness is explained by genes. So I do think that there are people, when you look around you, you have friends and neighbors and family members that just seem to be kind of born less happy than others. That it comes. For some people, it seems to come easy to be happy, and for others it doesn't. So I think of it as like a set range, so that some people's set range for happiness is like, between 2 and 7, and for others, this is between like 5 and 10. But it doesn't mean you can't move around that set range. Maybe even could go around, you know, both high and low. It just means you have to put more effort into it if you're kind of unlucky. And that's true for almost any other human trait. Right? I mean, it's true for weight, it might be true for blood pressure. You know, like, almost every human trait has a heritable component. So, again, yeah, So I think some people are, quote, born kind of on the unhappy side. And if they're willing to put in the effort and they have the motivation, they can. They can become happier, but they have to put the work in.
- [12:18]
A
I want to get to how to become happier, but first I want to start with the Myths of Happiness. Do you recognize this author?
- [12:26]
B
Yes, me.
- [12:28]
A
Fantastic book. What should make you happy, but doesn't. What shouldn't make you happy, but does? New York Times bestselling author what are some of the biggest myths?
- [12:42]
B
So many. I think that the book focuses on how a lot of us think that changes our circumstance. Changing our circumstances is going to make us happier. So when I think about, like, oh, I'm not happy now, but I'll be happy when I move to that city I've always wanted to live in, or I have a baby, or I get that boyfriend that I want, or I get that job that I've always wanted, I make more money. Now, those things do make us happy, but they don't make us as happy as we think they will, partly because of our genetic heritage, but also because of sort of everything else we do. So if I'm an unhappy person in LA when I move to Minneapolis, maybe the environment certainly makes a difference, but I'll bring some of those habits and behaviors with me to the other city. And. And so I'll still be a little kind of the same person. And. And the other thing that happens is called hedonic adaptation that we. We tend to adapt pretty quickly to positive changes in our lives, right? So when we get a better job, at first we're really excited. It's wonderful. But then over time, we kind of go back to baseline. So, for example, getting married makes people happier. But there's a big study out of Germany that showed that the average person who gets married, like, they get much happier sort of when they get engaged and then the wedding year, but then they go back to baseline, and it takes an average of two years for people to get back to baseline after they get married. Now, the baseline is probably already pretty high. That's not true for everyone. But the idea is that we tend to adapt to positive changes in our lives. So the lesson is that now, of course, sometimes, like a new relationship or a better job or living in a new place is really going to make a significant, substantial, durable shift in your happiness. But I think we focus too much on those changes in circumstances. We sort of count on them. We depend on them to make us happy. When really, it sounds like such a cliche, happiness is really inside of us more than it's outside of us. I mean, unless we live in a war zone, we're in an abusive relationship, or we're poor, of course those circumstances are gonna make us happier.
- [14:50]
A
You know, I wrote this book, the Blue Zones of Happiness, and I tried to understand the sort of external forces that when people move from Soviet bloc countries To Denmark. Soviet bloc countries are generally unhappy. Denmark is pretty happy place. Or from areas in Africa and Southeast Asia to Canada, which is pretty happy. Within about one year, they, they report the happiness level of their adoptive home. And they don't change as humans. They don't, you know, their sexual orientation doesn't change and their age doesn't change and their religion often doesn't change. But all of a sudden, boom, you sometimes see a doubling of their happiness. And I'm just wondering how much. Yeah, how would, how would you unpack that?
- [15:38]
B
Yeah, no, that's, that's, that's an amazing finding. And I'm not, and it's not surprising at all because you're, and you're talking about pretty extreme situations, right? Like from African countries to Canada. Right. From Soviet bloc to Denmark. But like, I assume most of your listeners aren't in those situations. And I think if you're so, I. So absolutely, if you're changing your environment so that drastically, your happiness is gonna change either up or down. Right. Cause what if you're moving from Canada back to the other to the more, you know, harder, harsher places to live, but your average listener who maybe is already like, you know, sort of comfortable enough, right. So they have basic security and safety and shelter, like they have their basic needs met, and then changing their circumstances may not change their happiness in a durable way again, unless they're living in really poor conditions or in the really bad relationship.
- [16:30]
A
Well, there are, you know, you look at the WBI or the wellbeing index from Gallup, and there's pretty enormous variation between the areas in United States where people support high levels of subjective well being and very low. And you could see very, very pronounced differences in those environments. You know, environments where people report higher levels of happiness, tend to be walkable, you tend to have easy access to nature, easy access to, to good food and.
- [16:59]
B
Yeah, that's not surprising at all. Before, you know, before the podcast, we were talking about, about the importance of community and places where you're just, you know, interacting with other people a lot, you know, all the time. I mean, I think that could really create, produce a substantial difference in happiness if you move to a place where you're more isolated and lonely, to a place where you're interacting with people. Absolutely.
- [17:22]
A
Soulless suburb. To a, you know, Santa Barbara or Boulder where you bump into people all the time. And the other myth is children, right? Like people think, I'm gonna have children, be happier. Does it always turn out that way?
- [17:36]
B
Well, the answer is it depends. But yeah, I think we do have again, most of these myths aren't like, they're not absolute myths, they're more like relative myths. It says, we think I like their relative myths. Yeah, it's like we think that children will make us happier than they actually do. But yeah, children may make us happier and some research shows that they do. But if you look at, if you sort of, if I again, if I go into a movie theater of 100 people and 50 of them have children and 50 don't have children, the ones that have children are not going to be happier than the ones who don't have children. Sort of on average. If I just kind of randomly.
- [18:14]
A
Oh, interesting.
- [18:16]
B
But of course people have children are a little bit different than those who don't. You know, this is all correlational findings. We actually did a study, we find that parents are not happier than non parents, but parents do report more meaning in their lives. So that's interesting. That wasn't a huge study, but that was interesting. But we also have found that basically it depends, it depends, you know, are you, do you have young children, do you have babies or do you have adult children? Do you have teenagers? How much money do you have? Are you married? Are you single? How old are you? Did you have children? When you're young or older, are your children, do your children have a lot of problems? Turns out, not surprisingly, that's huge, right? If you have children with lots of problems, you're not going to be happy. There's a saying, a Jewish mother is only as happy as her least happy child.
- [19:03]
A
That works for the Italians too.
- [19:05]
B
No? Of course it's true for all parents of all ethnicities and religions. Yeah. You have one child who is having, whether it's mental health or physical problems or bullying or you're gonna be unhappy. But that doesn't mean you don't have children. Just kind of like going into a romantic relationship where there's joy and pain. You don't give up on romantic relationships. So yeah, it really, it depends. Depends whether you're going to be happier as a parent depends on a lot of factors and many of them you can't control.
- [19:38]
A
We tend to think that luxury means more. More plans, more movement, more stuff. But everywhere I've gone to study the world's longest lived people, I found the opposite. In the blue zones. The real luxury is, is time. Time to walk instead of rush, time to sit at the table a little bit longer, Time to finish a conversation without checking the clock. That's not indulgence. That's how people stay healthy and happy for decades. When I'm at my lake house in Wisconsin, slowing down happens naturally. Mornings start quiet, meals stretch out, evenings end early. It's not flashy, but it's deeply restorative. When I head back on the road, I like knowing my home doesn't sit still. I host it on Airbnb so someone else can experience that same pause, that same sense of ease. You don't realize you're missing it until you feel it again. Hosting fits seamlessly into my life. It's a simple, practical way to earn extra income while staying connected to a slower, more intentional way of living. Your home might be worth more than you think. Find out how much@airbnb.com host I remember reading something that was attributed to you and Ed Diener, bless his soul, a good man, a happiness. I'm one of the better happiness experts, I think.
- [21:05]
B
Well, he was. He founded the field of the science of happiness.
- [21:08]
A
You know, we tend to think, if we can just get this, we'll be happy. Or can we just, we get that job, we'll be happy. Or if I can just get that, there's this home I want, which is on the perfect street with beautiful trees and no more happy. And it doesn't work that way, does it?
- [21:25]
B
Yeah. Well, again, a couple of reasons. One is I mentioned hedonic adaptation, because once you get that house or that job, you eventually get used to it and then you want a little bit more. Now it's evolutionarily adaptive for humans to always want more, Right? Because if we were sort of satisfied with every, with this job or this, like, garden or this, this house, we would just kind of, yeah, we would sort of relax and we'd be content and we wouldn't make effort towards more progress. But it can lead to unhappiness. It also, but also achieving our goals also leads to us to make different kinds of social comparisons, right? So at first we compare ourselves with people in our current sort of economic kind of status or the other people who have the same job as we do or have houses on our street. But then we moved to the house in a much nicer neighborhood, and now suddenly, the other houses are maybe even nicer than ours. So we also, we kind of always want more. So again, it may be adaptive for us to want more, but it can lead to some unhappiness.
- [22:26]
A
I was just with Maria Shriver yesterday, who just wrote a book of poetry that became a number one New York Times bestseller. And she has all these other achievements news Anchor and first lady and runs a successful Alzheimer organization. I asked her if she's now happy, and she says, you know, well, I feel like I'm checking all the boxes on happiness, but I always seem to have another box at the top. And I wonder how you reconcile this sort of striving for happiness and arriving at happiness. Does it ever really happen?
- [23:06]
B
Yeah, it's such a good question, because I think there needs to be a balance. But, you know, striving is not a bad thing. Striving also makes you happy. So a lot of people thrive on that striving. And actually, in one of my books, I talked about how a happy person is always looking forward to something around the corner. Right. And so that's part of. That could be part of the striving too. So maybe it just involves a reframing so you reach a goal and you're happy to reach the goal. I think gratitude is really important, so you really appreciate that and you really feel gratitude for where you are. But it's great to sort of have a new goal. Maybe you want to make the world a better place, you want to improve people's lives, or you want to make your child happier, and that's your next goal. So as long as, as long as you're not, you know, like, always dissatisfied because you haven't reached the next goal. But you could be sort of full of gratitude for where you are, but also excited to climb that ladder further and reach the next goal, sort of with excitement. It's a challenge, it's opportunity, but it's. Yeah, you're not. Yeah, it's not dissatisfaction, it's more of a challenge and opportunity.
- [24:19]
A
I have this ongoing Fraser vs Ali fight in my brain between my father's life, my dad, bless him, just wonderful man. He's 90 years old. He retired at age 60. So for the past 30 years, he's done little more than focus on his wife, his children, his grandchildren, and his garden, and he's completely content. And I, on the other hand, you know, I biked across five continents. I'm doing blue zones now. I'm doing a happiness thing and a podcast and, you know, always kind of doing something. And I wonder if I should be fueling the sort of ongoing dreams or the, the, the success and the ever receding horizon, or if I had to be taking the same amount of effort and figuring out how to be content with a simpler life. What do you think?
- [25:15]
B
Well, I'll start with saying, my friends say, take the word should out of your life. Right. So there's no shoulds. My intuition tells me there's just so many different. And also the science tells me I used to rely completely on science and now I find that I'm relying on kind of like science based wisdom. Right. Or science based intuition. I think intuition is important too. My intuition tells me there's just so many different ways to be happy. And for your father found a beautiful way to be happy. And you're a different person and you have a different personality and different kind of energy. Right? And so that's beautiful that you have a different way to be happy. Now. Once you find that somehow you become dissatisfied with that, then you might consider changing. But if it's working, it's working.
- [26:02]
A
You know, happiness is just so important. You know, I spend about 20 years of my life identifying parts of the world where people live the longest and in blue zones. And I realized that the same things that are getting them to a healthy age, 98 or 100, are joyous. They grow their own food and they sit down to dinner at the family table. And they have a spiritual dimension. They go up to church or temple. They have friends and they have plenty of time for friends. They walk places, they interact with, with nature. And that's what really. And you were, you've been very generous, by the way, with your time and expertise with me. I just want to publicly thank you again. The importance of happiness. When it comes to longevity, there's actually science that shows that if you can, if you can manage your life into more happiness, it actually adds years to your life expectancy.
- [27:03]
B
Absolutely. Love. Tons of studies show that happier people live longer or have fewer health conditions, you know, or recover faster from surgery or have less pain, have fewer heart attacks if they have lung cancer. If you're happier, you live longer with lung cancer. Now, there's lots of theories and some evidence for why, you know, because I think it's very complicated. There's probably multiply determined why that's the case. So I'm not surprised at all by what you said, which is that kind of the things that have been found to be related to longevity are also things that make people happy. I mean, I would be very surprised if it was the opposite. So yeah. So nature, community, peace, serenity. I assume it's funny because maybe because I'm like you, I'm always doing a lot of things. So for me, a lot of meaning comes from product. I guess you could call it productivity and accomplishment, but you could call it something else, right? Because you could spend time with your children and feel, quote, like productive and accomplished. Right. Because you're, you know, you're teaching them and making them, you know, happier and healthier. So, so is that, is that part of the, is that one of the factors that you have found for longevity, sort of some kind of meaning or like people are involved in something that gives them meaning?
- [28:24]
A
Yeah, they typically all have vocabulary for purpose. There's actually a word that, you know, like Okinawa, ikigai or plan de vida in Costa Rica. So it's, yeah, it's core to their language, not, not peripheral.
- [28:38]
B
Right, right.
- [28:38]
A
It's very clear that their responsibility, purpose isn't just, you know, collecting sports cards or, or your favorite basketball team or you, you, you like to knit. It's almost always has a component of responsibility for the family or responsibility for the community. Yeah, that part is way more important than we give it credit for. You know, the type of things we tend to focus on in longevity supplements, superfoods, rapamycin, they're all kind of short term fixes and they're things with enormous profit making potential and they don't, they don't tend to make your life any better. You know, I think even if these longevity supplements actually worked, and by the way, none of them have proven to work in humans, in many cases they would just prolong a shitty life, you know, working really hard all the time. You know, I think of these longevity bros and Silicon Valley, they're not all bad, but you know, I often think they aim at the wrong target. But the things that really help you live longer and I think make you happier are knowing and living your sense of purpose, connecting socially, contributing, spending time with your kids, which it's hard to make money off.
- [30:04]
B
That the biggest factor, I would say if I had to boil down all of happiness research into two words, I think the biggest factor in happiness is social connection. Sounds like it's one of the biggest, if not the biggest in longevity too. So I guess that would be my answer.
- [30:22]
A
You've done a, a lot of research and experimentation and a lot of it is in sort of the positive psychology of, of all the research that you're, that you've innovated. What are the things that you're most proud of or most you feel have been the biggest contribution into helping others?
- [30:42]
B
Well, for the last about 25 years, my students and I have been doing happiness interventions which are like clinical trials, but instead of testing a vaccine or a medication, we test happiness strategies. And we mostly have focused on gratitude interventions, kindness interventions, and kind of social interaction interventions. So we ask people to express gratitude on a regular basis. See what happens. We ask people to do acts of kindness on a regular basis, and we ask people to just sort of act social and all of those together. So I feel like the biggest contribution of those, first of all. It's nice to validate that. Yeah. Helping others makes people happier. Expressing gratitude, appreciation makes people happier. But really, the bottom line is all of those activities make people feel more connected. Right. So when I write a gratitude letter to my boss, I feel more connected to her. When I do an act of kindness for you, I feel more connected to you. So then we started doing research on just asking people to act more social, just sort of have more social interactions, have a conversation. So I guess I'm really proud of that, that we sort of. That's where we've landed on that, really. The key to happiness is social connection. And what's the key to social connection? How do people feel connected? Well, you can feel connected when you're dancing with someone.
- [32:05]
A
Right.
- [32:05]
B
You can feel connected through touch, you can feel connected through eye contact. But mostly, most people, at least in our culture, feel connected mostly by talking. That's kind of the. Yeah, that's sort of the currency.
- [32:17]
A
Currency, yeah. Yeah.
- [32:18]
B
And so we started studying conversation. So now we're doing studies, we're asking people just to talk to a stranger or talk to a friend. And then we started studying listening. So what's one of the keys to conversations is really good listening. And I have a new book with my colleague Harry Rees coming out and February 2026 called how to Feel Loved. And in that book, we're going even deeper into sort of how to. How to have conversations, how to change your conversations in a way that makes you feel loved and makes the other person feel loved. And that involves one of the keys is really good listening. Another key is curiosity. Showing real, real, genuine curiosity in the other person. I mean, how often does that happen? Actually, doesn't happen that often. When you go, last time you went to a party, when was the last time you went to a party or dinner and someone was so curious about you. Right. They just couldn't wait to hear your story. Right.
- [33:12]
A
Yeah.
- [33:12]
B
It doesn't matter.
- [33:12]
A
You can tell when it's fake, too.
- [33:14]
B
Yeah. But really genuine. You can't really fake the genuine curiosity. And then also sharing, really sharing your full self with people, sharing vulnerably. Because most of the time we try to impress each other. Right. Think of like a first time you meet a colleague, a new colleague, client, or a date. You Know, people are sort of talking about themselves because they want to, you know, they want to come off as kind and funny and smart, but that doesn't forge a connection. Y' all might be impressed when you're telling me about all your accomplishments or making jokes, but I'm not necessarily going to feel connected to you. So what makes me feel connected to you is if you share a little bit more of your sort of real self. Well, I don't like the word real self. Okay. All right.
- [33:53]
A
I want to do a little test here. So make me feel connected. More connected to you.
- [33:58]
B
So we could talk a little bit more vulnerably, I guess, about, you know, our lives or what we're thinking and feeling. So, for example, I might ask you, or I might share with you some things that we're struggling with. So I can start. I'll start.
- [34:12]
A
Yeah.
- [34:13]
B
So one of my biggest struggles, actually, is anxiety. So I'm a very mentally healthy person, but I do have anxiety. It's not like clinical levels, but I definitely have anxiety. And I. And I feel like it's, quote, rational anxiety and that I'm just juggling so many balls in my life. Like, I think almost anyone would be anxious sort of trying to do so many things. But it does sometimes interfere. It interferes with me sort of being fully present sometimes. Right. Because I'm thinking about all the things I have to do. Yeah. So that. What about you?
- [34:45]
A
Well, I'm here in Los Angeles and having this fabulous conversation with you. But, you know, I realized my aging parents are in Minneapolis and my kids, who are adults, but I often have some guilt about not spending more time with. They don't need me, by the way, necessarily, though I often carry around guilt that I should be spending more time with my family, having Sunday dinners every Sunday like I had as a little kid. So I think, well, maybe the most important role I have, I'm. I'm not doing a very good job of it. So that's.
- [35:21]
B
That's.
- [35:21]
A
That's my vulnerability. I think it's such a brilliant title, how to Feel Love. Because you, you know, you'd think a title, you know, how to Love, you know, is more kind of the self help, but. But God just completely flips the script, doesn't it?
- [35:36]
B
Yeah. And. And by the way, I think one reason it's called how to Feel Loved, we're really focusing on feeling loved again as a key to happiness, is that we all want to feel loved. We don't want to. Most people, if you ask them, have at least One relationship in their life where they don't. Where they want to feel more loved than they do. And it could be your adult child, it could be a friend, it could be a colleague, or there are times maybe during the relationship that you don't feel as loved as you want. And a lot of us are loved, but don't feel loved. So you can be loved but not actually feel loved.
- [36:10]
A
And you might, just might not be hearing it right, for whatever reason.
- [36:15]
B
I mean, one thought is you can think of sort of attachment, right? So we have this metaphor that people who are anxiously attached, it's like they have a cup of love that you're sort of trying to fill, right? So let's say you're anxiously attached and I'm like showing a lot of love for you and I'm filling a cup of love, but it has a leak in it and so the love is kind of leaking out. And so you don't ever really feel as loved as you probably would. And if you're avoidantly attached, it's as though the cup of love has a lid on it. And my expression of love isn't quite getting in. And that's just one.
- [36:48]
A
One idea.
- [36:50]
B
Yeah, one idea. But yeah, a lot of people don't sort of feel as loved as they can be. So I think, yeah, obviously, I think it's extremely important. We all want to feel loved.
- [36:59]
A
I think so many Americans right now don't feel alive, especially young men and even, you know, women, this personal impression. But I'd like to bounce them off of you. Number one, the much maligned social media and the handheld device. But also just the corrosive effects of affluence that we're never exposed to discomfort. We're always in a room that's air conditioned or heated to 72 degrees. We're never more than a few steps away from some delicious rich food. We that we, we in our cars about twice as much as we were in the 1980s. We don't have to have a conversation with anybody anymore because we can just pick up our phone and text them or we have our headphones on. And I'm wondering if you think that this affluence is a dangerous thing and if there's a way out of it.
- [37:58]
B
I think my answer is a little bit more nuanced. Right? So starting with like our phones and social media, I mean there's, there are people who would not be connected at all if they didn't have the connection with their phone through their phones or through social media. So I do think that that kind of connection is better than not at all, but. Yeah, but I certainly there are ways that we're a lot less connected to others sort of on a daily basis that is impacting our happiness or the young people just not learning basic skills of how to have a conversation. And maybe we're exaggerating it, but we certainly know plenty of examples. And one of my favorite examples is we used to, you know, when we were kids we would visit each other's houses and we would knock on the door and like the mom or dad would answer, we'd say, oh, hi Mr. Smith, you know, how are you? Is Susie home? And then we would talk to them. And now the kids don't do that. Right. They just text the other kid and they come out of the house. I mean they don't even have the experience of saying hello. Right. So still I meet lots of teenagers who have very good social skills. So it is sad that we're losing some people and then we're going to. And then with AI, we're going to lose even more people. Right. With a. Companions we've already lost I think a lot of young men to pornography. I think there's always going to be a subset of people we kind of lose to devices or to screens. But I'm pretty, I'm optimistic that the rest of us really value actual real life social connections so much and touch and eye contact that we're gonna, we're gonna go back and like find those things again. Yeah.
- [39:36]
A
The loneliness numbers suggest the other the opposite though they tend to, they've been growing since about 2011.
- [39:41]
B
Yeah.
- [39:42]
A
But you know, this is where I think your research is so powerful and, and your ability to put it in an inactionable strategies and one of the things you write about that I really want to highlight here, just go a little bit deeper is the power of conversation and how to have a conversation. I mean we just modeled vulnerability. But what are the other components of people listening or watching us right now? What do you tell them about how to have a good conversation?
- [40:11]
B
Sure. And by the way, I did feel more connected to you when we were talking about our struggles.
- [40:15]
A
Really?
- [40:16]
B
Yeah. It really change the energy. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [40:21]
A
It was hard for me to do that.
- [40:22]
B
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Thank you. I appreciate that publicly, you know.
- [40:26]
A
Yeah.
- [40:28]
B
So. Well actually I'll mention I've gone on a number of first dates, for example, and I know how to have a good conversation and I don't want to blame like men because I'm sure this happens with women. But I just have my experiences with men. And most first dates, they just talk nonstop and they don't ask me a single question. And I'm one of those people who's very authentic and real and honest. So I will, several times I would just say, do you realize that in the last 45 minutes you haven't asked me a single question? And some guys will get really defensive and I never see them again. But then they're like, oh, and they get it. And then there. And one guy said to me, wow. He's like, you're right. You know, I just. I was nervous. You know, when I'm nervous, I talk too much. And that was. That was. That was a vulnerable thing to say. And that actually created a connection. But my point is actually not about men. It's not about dating. The point is that. And I kind of mention this again, that when we're. Especially when we're getting to know people, we want to impress the other person. And we. How do you impress by you? Kind of by talking and sort of showing how impressive you are. But that doesn't forge a connection. So we don't ask each other enough questions. And so. And there's actually studies that show that we. People are afraid to ask questions. They think especially kind of personal questions. We are afraid that we would be nosy or intrusive. And it turns out maybe sometimes we are, but turns out that on average, we actually want people to ask us questions. And so that's one of my main pieces of advice. Ask the other person questions. And even maybe deep questions. Not necessarily about your deepest secrets, right. But about, like, real questions. I mean, they're. So I want people to ask me, like, how is your relationships? How are your relationships going? How's this going? People tend not to ask maybe because they're afraid, they think, oh, she doesn't want to answer that question. So ask questions and ask them with curiosity. Right? To find something that you're curious about. We almost always can find something authentically interesting about the other person.
- [42:25]
A
I meet a lot of people, and sometimes you're sort of stuck with people. Either you're at a dinner party and they're next to you. But I always, in my mind, I always say to myself, you know, this. This guy might sell, you know, state farm insurance or something that I have zero interest in. But I say to myself, there's something interesting about this guy, and I'll dig until and until he. He tells me. I just like to very tell you a brief story. I happen to Be invited to. This is gonna sound braky, but it's truth. I happen to be invited to Buckingham Palace. And I got seated next to this woman who was incandescently interesting, and her name was Mercedes, and she's about 50 years old. And I. I was just drawn in, and she was telling us about the art and going into detail. And I said to her, you are attractive in an intellectual way and. And magnetic. What's your secret? I. I couldn't put my finger on it. And she said, give me a second to think about it, and I'll tell you. And a few minutes later, she tapped me on the shoulder. I said, I think I realized what it is. She said, I'm passionate. And you guys were asking me about what I'm passionate about, which is art. And so I think it's sort of important to have passions in life, I think, and we don't feel those enough all the time.
- [43:42]
B
Yes. And so a couple of things I want to say to that. I love that story. And by the way, also, she wasn't necessarily asking you questions, but she was telling stories in a passionate way. So I do think that's also very compelling and attractive, as you say. So people are passionate, have. I call it positive energy. Right. So we're very attracted to positive energy. I also think positive energy is related to longevity, and I'd love to talk to you maybe at some other time, more about that. I feel like the people that I know who are much older, but they. They carry themselves, they act like a much younger person. They're. They have a lot of positive energy and aliveness. So I read a piece recently about how scientists should study aliveness, and you had mentioned that term as well. Sort of people who just feel alive. Right. You feel vibrant, you have positive energy, you're passionate. And so I completely agree with you. I think it's very attractive, and we need to study it even more than we do.
- [44:34]
A
Yes. And especially, like, you know, I think people tune into this podcast. We almost always deliver that. What exactly to do. There's an ocean of science, and a lot of it is interpretive and so forth or couching this jargon that, you know, nobody can understand except the writer and. And the writer's eight colleagues. But of the actionable things you've discovered or things that you've intuited because you have very good intuition. See, I listen.
- [45:04]
B
What. What.
- [45:05]
A
What besides social connection? We. I think social connection has been kind of heard a lot about that, but you've come up with a number of nuanced things as well.
- [45:15]
B
Right. But I do want to start with that, which is so actually, I have a new newsletter about the science of happiness. And when people sign up, I literally give them my number one happiness tip. And the number one happiness tip is that if you could do one thing today to be happier is go have a conversation with someone. And it could be with a barista, it could be with your mom, or it could be with your neighbor. And so I want to start with social connection. That's my number one happiness tip, is to have a conversation.
- [45:42]
A
I love it in person. Can I do it on text?
- [45:46]
B
You can do it on the phone or video, but in person is best. But I would say not text. I would say phone, video, or in person.
- [45:55]
A
We're gonna bring this up a couple times, but it's called the Happiness Files, which I've been. I think I'm one of the first subscribers. Or anyway, it's at Bit ly Dr. Sonja. That's S O N J. A bit ly Dr. Sonia. And you give me your email address and it's free. And what I love about it, it's clearly written and it's not really long and it comes every two weeks. Yeah. It doesn't overwhelm you?
- [46:25]
B
Yeah, yeah, exactly. Very short. Just. These are kind of my latest insights from the science of happiness. Take home messages. So the first one is, yeah, if you could do one thing today or tomorrow is have a conversation. But we also have some other kind of a little bit more nuanced newsletters, emails.
- [46:40]
A
Well, there was one I read recently that you can. You can be kind of become extroverted by acting extroverted, which I thought was so extroverted, tend to be happier than introverts. But, you know, if you're born an introvert, well, what do you do? Well, it turns out you can act more extroverted.
- [47:02]
B
So we did a study for one week. We ask people to just simply act more extroverted. We actually didn't use the word extroverted because it has connotations in our culture. Kind of more positive connotations. So kind of be more sociable, assertive.
- [47:13]
A
Energetic, and wait, just to drill down. Can you be a little bit more explicit what to do to act and extrovert it?
- [47:21]
B
We kind of had people define it themselves, but yeah, we used examples. So maybe if you're sitting at lunch with friends, like maybe try to say more, sort of speak up more, approach someone, call a friend. So sort of be more sociable, basically. And we found, I guess the surprise was that first of all we got huge effects. People got much happier during the week that they acted more extroverted. We also had a week that people were asked to act more introverted. And I really, I believe in the power of introversion. I think introversion is a beautiful thing. I love Susan Cain's book about introversion. You know, quiet. So we were actually surprised that acting introverted did not make people happy. But the biggest surprise was that introverts got just as happier as extroverts when they were asked to act extroverted because we thought that introverts might, you know, not feel authentic or they might feel kind of exhausted. Now granted, it was only a week and we didn't ask them to like be the life of the party. They could sort of define it themselves. So to act more extroverted, maybe you could just sort of be a little bit more sociable or talkative than usual, a little bit more assertive than usual. But this, again, this is sort of a, this is aligned with the theme that we've been talking about, which is that having more social interactions, more conversations, makes people feel more connected, which leads to more happiness.
- [48:47]
A
I think of a 2 monkeys and 25 year olds and a bucket of heavy bucket of water. Two monkeys will never figure out to each grab the handle and carry it together, but two five year olds will figure that out. I remember there was some study about that which suggested to me the sort of evolutionary hardwiring that we have to be social. And it's when we're retreat into our homes or our devices, we do something that's contrary to the programming we've evolved with over the money.
- [49:28]
B
Actually you're talking about some of the costs of affluence. And one of the costs, I remember listening to an NPR show and they're talking about people living in bigger and bigger houses. And when you ask the average person probably on the street in the U.S. would you like to live in a bigger house than you already live? And they'd probably say, sure, I'd love to have one more bedroom or more square feet footage. And. But these are people who are living in houses where they don't, this is kind of amazing to me, where they sometimes don't run into each other. Can you imagine a family living in a house and you don't run into each other on a daily basis or maybe only once a day as opposed to like, you know, 20 times a day or 100 times a day? Now I, I'm not advocating that we, you know, My, My dad once in the Soviet Union told me he lived his family and other families. I think it was like 18 people lived in one room. And it was horrible. Right? And yeah, no privacy at all. So we're certainly not advocating going back to those kinds of times. But anyway, so that's one cost, right? If you're not, if you cut down social interactions. There's a famous study, Festinger and back where they. After World War II, there are World War II veterans that were living in this MIT dorm in Boston, in Cambridge, and they looked at how many friends and social connections people had depending on where they lived in this dorm and people who lived near the staircase or where they lived, where people kind of walked by to get to their other rooms.
- [50:54]
A
Oh, my God, I love this.
- [50:55]
B
Had more friends. Like, is that great? I mean, it's kind of obvious, but true. So social interactions are so, so important.
- [51:03]
A
Well, you know my thesis, and a lot of people disagree with it, but I argue that most of our longevity, indeed our happiness is the result not of our behavior, because trying to change our behavior for the long run fails for the majority of people almost all the time. But you can reshape your environment so you're nudged into more physical activity, more, more social activity. And you think of people who live in a soulless suburb, who the only time they can bump into a neighbor is to trespass on their yard or walk in the street or drive to the mall. Whereas if you live in a connected, you know, I live in the southern tip of Miami and we have beaches full of people all the time. Every time I go to the beach, I bump into people. Every time I walk down the street. I live on a walkable street. I bump into people. And not every day, but few times a week, it starts a conversation. And then once in a while that conversation blooms into, well, let's get coffee. And then four or five of those. Let's get coffee blooms into, well, let's go biking together. And all of a sudden, the number of friends I have and it's wholly the result of where I live.
- [52:22]
B
Yeah, absolutely. But not everyone can live in. I mean, hopefully we can structure more environments like that. But even if you don't live in a place like that, like, I love parties, so have more parties. Go to a party once a week. And if everyone takes turns having some kind of social gathering and maybe it's a regular thing, or have open houses.
- [52:44]
A
Happiness files party, we'll all come over to your house.
- [52:47]
B
I have parties.
- [52:48]
A
I've been to one of your Parties. It was a blast.
- [52:51]
B
I love parties. In fact, I have a student and a colleague who were planning to write a paper about parties. A scholar.
- [52:58]
A
I love it.
- [53:00]
B
And the idea is that like, we think parties are like a microcosm of life. Almost everything that happens in life happens in parties. Right. There's, there's friendship, there's status, there's belonging, there's rejection, there's, you know, intimacy, there's sex, there's surprise, there's joy, there's jealousy.
- [53:17]
A
There'S everything like in your party.
- [53:20]
B
So it's like it's a microcosm of life itself. So, yeah, I love parties. And of course that's where the social.
- [53:27]
A
Interaction happens and people eat there too.
- [53:31]
B
Right.
- [53:31]
A
I, you know, I'm, I'm being conscious of your time, but I do want to talk about money because it's such a complex idea and I think so many people think that if I could just get rich, I'll be happy. And there's, there's a. That's true to an extent. Right. And then there's this. I hear it all the time and I don't know how true it is anymore. About $150,000 is. If you can make that much money, more money doesn't diminishing returns anymore or doesn't buy much happiness. What's the current state of the science?
- [54:03]
B
Very nuanced question. I'll just give you some tidbits, otherwise it might be a two hour conversation. Yeah. If your basic needs aren't met, more money absolutely makes you happier.
- [54:14]
A
So you need food, shelter, health care, all those things.
- [54:17]
B
Security.
- [54:18]
A
Yeah.
- [54:19]
B
Money makes you happy if it keeps you from being poor or it also serves as a buffer for, you know, adversity or illness. But even at a higher level, more money does make people happier, so. Right. So even at the highest levels, people who are richer are happier, just not that much happier. Sort of. It's kind of a linear, it plateaus a bit. But why is that one is. It depends how you spend the money. Right. So if you spend your money in ways that make you happy, then money absolutely makes you happy. Right. So if you spend your money on helping others. Right. Making a social impact, having experiences, doing social things. Right. Taking your friends on trips with you, that makes you happier. If you spend your money on possessions or things you put on a wall or in your garage, it makes you happier a little bit. And then you adapt and it might actually make you feel a bit empty if you're spending it on just things. And the other thing that's really interesting. This is a more recent finding. It turns out then money makes you happier if you're a happier person. So if you're a happy person already, more money makes you happier. If you're an unhappy person, more money doesn't make you happy, which is really, which is really sad or depressing.
- [55:39]
A
And is there kind of a sweet spot amount that you should sort of shoot for?
- [55:43]
B
Well, there was a famous study that said actually it was $75,000. Sort of after 70.
- [55:47]
A
Yeah, that was.
- [55:48]
B
But that's, it depends completely on where you live. Of course.
- [55:51]
A
Yeah. And inflation, of course.
- [55:53]
B
Of course. So in New York or LA, $75,000 a year is like, isn't going to make it.
- [55:58]
A
You'd be living with 18 other people in a room.
- [56:00]
B
Exactly. So you don't see. I can't tell you what the sweet spot is. But I mean, actually I just heard a talk that talked about how after $10 million people should, you know, we should just. No one should make more than 10 million. Now people, you could argue against that in sort of in a capitalist society. But the idea is that after 10, I mean that's kind of extreme. Right. But after 10 million it's not going to make you happier to have 11 million or you know, a billion or 5 billion. But that's, that's kind of an extreme situation. So I don't, I don't know what the sweet spot is. I think it's more, I think it's more important again how you think about money and how you spend it and what you spend it on.
- [56:40]
A
Well, let me ask you, I'm going to ask you use your, your science informed intuition on this. So after you've had made enough money to have your needs taken care of, food, shelter, healthcare, education, some security rank order to spend your disposable income giving it away to other people, buying a new thing or buying a new experience, pursuing a hobby. How would you rank?
- [57:09]
B
Okay. Okay. And I would also add having a cushion for okay, yeah, it's great A.D. great. You need to have some savings and that'll just give you a sense of security in case something happens. Right. Okay. So I would say the most, what would make you happiest is giving it away to others that are really making the world a better place. And there are studies that show that, yeah, giving money away makes you happier than spending on yourself, giving way to others.
- [57:35]
A
Let's make that point. Yeah, giving money away makes you happier than spending that money on yourself.
- [57:42]
B
Exactly.
- [57:43]
A
Now if you're poor in A shopping mall.
- [57:46]
B
So, yeah. So a famous study found that if they gave people $20 and they said by the end of the day, either spend it on yourself or spend on someone else. And people were happier when they spend it on someone else. Number two, I would say spending it on experiences. Well, hobby. Yeah, those are kind of equally ranked hobby or experiences. Number three, I guess the last would be spending it on a possession, a new possession.
- [58:10]
A
Why don't, why don't possessions make us as happy?
- [58:13]
B
Because we adapt to them. We adapt to them. They do make us happy at first. But you know, people have possessions, they buy a new bag and they. Or they buy new shoes or they buy a new car, but then after a while they want to upgrade or buy a new iPhone, they want to upgrade to even a better. Right. Car, bag, shoes, iPhone. Now if you have enough money and you keep upgrading, then I guess you'll have that boost over and over again.
- [58:34]
A
Like a cocaine addiction.
- [58:36]
B
It's like a dopamine hit. Exactly. And when you think about our identity, our identity is really a sum of our experiences. It's not a sum of our possessions. Like there's a. I think it was Frank Lloyd Wright actually who said that we should be careful of not becoming janitors of our possessions. Right. Like when you think about rich people like this amass a lot of things. So you're basically just the janitor of.
- [58:58]
A
Your possession, cleaning them and keeping them up.
- [59:00]
B
That's just all you're doing is you have all these possessions in your house and you're kind of taking care of them and you're making sure they're there and yeah, that. Is that a meaningful life? Now, of course, when I say experiences, it depends what the experience is.
- [59:13]
A
I just, I would like to highlight that great line you have that our identity is the sum of our experiences.
- [59:19]
B
Not a sum of our possessions.
- [59:20]
A
Not a sum of our possessions. That's. Is that your.
- [59:22]
B
No, I. It's not mine.
- [59:24]
A
Just take credit for.
- [59:25]
B
I'm not sure. Yeah, not sure. Or maybe many people have said that. That it's like when you think about. Yeah. When you think about the self. Right. It's about all the experiences you've had, all the relationships you've had, the things you've done in your life. Right. It's not about the things you've owned.
- [59:36]
A
But the Chanel's of the world and the Gucci's. They want us to think that our identity is the sum of our possessions.
- [59:43]
B
And you know, I don't think, I'm not saying there's anything wrong with having, like, a nice pair of shoes or a nice bag. And some people maybe are really happy by that, but it's just that Sony.
- [59:53]
A
By the way, is wearing very, very stylish sort of sandals.
- [59:56]
B
Shoes. Sandals. Yeah, but they're. They're from Clarks and they're very exp.
- [60:00]
A
But comfortable.
- [60:01]
B
Yeah, but comfortable, exactly. No, I mean, I. Yeah, I like to buy a nice dress sometimes. So I guess. I guess everything in balance, everything in moderation. I love the idea of the Aristotle and, you know, golden mean, you know, everything in moderation.
- [60:17]
A
Yes. I actually don't like that.
- [60:19]
B
You don't like that term.
- [60:20]
A
And I'll tell you why. When it comes to food.
- [60:23]
B
Yeah.
- [60:23]
A
People say, well, I only had two strips of bacon for breakfast and I only had one small burger for lunch and the petite steak for. People don't. First. First of all, not all things. There's some things we shouldn't have or do at all. And secondly, it's so subjective of what is moderation that it's often wrong as.
- [60:43]
B
Well, because even moderation I think you should do in moderation. Okay. Sometimes you should do something to excess. Yeah, of course. I was talking about sort of positive things. I remember once when the Harry Potter books were coming out, you know, they're such great. And I was reading to my, like 6 or 7 year old, and I was just spinning. I started. And it's like a great thing to read to your young child. And we. But I spent so much time reading to her that my husband said, you know, maybe you should, you know, not spend so many hours reading to. Reading Harry Potter to your daughter. To our daughter. Because it was not in moderation. Right. It was. It was sort of too much like I was not doing other things that I should be doing. So. Anyway, good. Anyway, good point. I would love to have that debate with you sometime about moderation.
- [61:26]
A
Yes, that'd be fun. We'll have it at a party.
- [61:29]
B
Yes, definitely.
- [61:30]
A
All right, so we have the Myth of Happiness. We have the how of Happiness. Both fantastic books, consummately readable with real science. With Sonia, we're not with a Instagram influencer, we're with a real professor, University of California, Riverside, one of the great experts in the field of happiness, which when, you know, was barely a field when you got started. The new newsletter, the Happiness Profiles at the. The URL is bit ly Dr. Sonja. That's Sonia with a J. Free and wonderful.
- [62:11]
B
So.
- [62:12]
A
So you're a doctor of happiness. You put on like, A white coat and a happiness stethoscope. And, you know, my.
- [62:18]
B
My kids, when they were little, they called me a professor. Yeah, professor of happiness. I think a happiness professor. So I'm a. I'm a professor, and I teach and I do administrative work, but most of my time is spent doing research. So my students sometimes wear white coats because sometimes we gather biological data, like blood spots or, you know, blood data. So we kind of. We want to wear a white coat. But generally, I spend most of my time in meetings and writing and analyzing, looking at data, analyzing data. I have PhD students and undergraduates who help me with the research. The PhD students are incredibly fantastic, and they do most of the work, but, yeah, most of the time we are running experiments. So we're bringing human subjects in, and then we're assigning them different activities. Like, we'll say once a week, we want you to write a gratitude letter, or we want you to go and have a conversation with someone. We're running a study right now. For example, one of my students is running a study right now where we're asking people to have conversations on Zoom, either with a stranger or with a friend, or we ask them to hang out on Zoom, either with a stranger or a friend. And then we're measuring happiness and other things before and after. But we study lots of things. I have a line of research studying the social connection effects of mdma, which is a substance also called molly or ecstasy, because we find that's very connecting. One study actually compared MDMA to methamphetamine, found that they're pretty much equally connecting. So we do that work as well. So, yeah, we have lots of really exciting projects going on.
- [63:56]
A
It sounds exciting. You know, the plumber often has a leaky faucet as a happiness doctor. Are you happy?
- [64:04]
B
I am happy. I'm not sure if that's a coincidence, because sometimes people who are unhappy study happiness, right. Because they want to figure out how to be happy. Maybe it's a coincidence. I'm not, like, happy all the time. I would say I'm more like maybe an 8 on a scale of 1 to 10. But, yeah, I think I'm happy. And that's partly genetic.
- [64:24]
A
And from what you know of happiness or what you've learned, what do you put to work in your life? That seems to. What's your formula? Personal formula for app.
- [64:33]
B
Right. There's many things we can do to become happy, but you.
- [64:35]
A
I miss asking what you.
- [64:35]
B
Right, sure, sure. And for me, definitely, social connection is the biggest. I have a lot of friends who I love and put a lot of time into. And I already mentioned, I love parties. I love connection, my kids. I'm actually a very physical person. I'm constantly cuddling with them. That really makes me happy. I have certain hobbies and passions that make me happy. Gratitude is also something that I really value. I think I'm a grateful person. And I really. I try to remind myself on a daily basis to really feel authentic gratitude.
- [65:07]
A
You have a gratitude journal.
- [65:09]
B
Well, you know, for a long time I didn't, but then I. And I don't really love. I mean, gratitude can look different for different people, right? Some people count their blessings. Other people write gratitude letters. I started to. I call it a good things jar. It's like at the end of the week, you put sort of good things in your jar, but it's just on my computer, I sort of write down at the end of the week, good things that happen. I actually recently put it into ChatGPT. I put my whole journal of like a few years and asked it sort of, what are the themes that you see? It's actually very fascinating. But, yeah, so that's what I do is I. I keep a kind of a good things journal.
- [65:47]
A
I like that idea.
- [65:48]
B
Yeah.
- [65:48]
A
I recommend that people here love takeaways. What. What they can actually do. So what. What would be the top five things that. That people could do to stack the deck in favor of happiness? Because I know we can't guarantee it, but it'll be more likely they'll be happy.
- [66:04]
B
All right, I hate that question, but I'll answer it anyway. Have more conversations.
- [66:08]
A
It makes me happy.
- [66:08]
B
Yeah, I'll answer it. Because it's like an act of kindness, right? Have more conversations. One, express gratitude. Two, which is also about sort of positive thinking, kind of positive thinking gratitude. Three, help others do acts of kindness for others. Four, have a goal. Do pursue a goal, a passion, something. Five, I'll just say physical exercise.
- [66:33]
A
Oh, perfect. I was hoping you were going to say that one. That's great. I think it's a. You know, it's. There's this giant field of science, big universities, funding you summed up in five consummately human things that everybody can do. So thank you, Sonia. Thank you for your contribution to the world and thank you for my smile right now.
- [66:54]
B
Thank you, Dan. It was a pleasure.