Part 1: Breaking Free from “Unhappiness Habits” with Ashish Kothari

Welcome to the Happiness Squad Podcast. Your weekly dose of practical tips and inspiration to help you operate at your fullest potential, integrating the science of flourishing into how you live, work and lead. I'm your host, Ashish Kothari, the founder and CEO of Happiness Squad and author of the bestselling book Hardwired for Happiness. I will be your personal guide on your journey to explore the many facets of happiness, wisdom, well being and flourishing, from personal growth to building more positive environments at work. In each episode we will share powerful insight, tips and stories from our guests who are leading experts, company executives, and flourishing solution providers that you can implement right away to make happiness your competitive edge. Whether you're looking to overcome life's challenges, to go from good to great, or to enhance your team's performance through flourishing, this podcast is the place for you to find more joy, health, love and meaning in everything you do. Join us every week as we rewire for happiness together.

Hi dear friends. Welcome to a new series that I'm launching on on our Happiness Squad podcast and this one is around Habits that are Making us unhappier. You know, I was reflecting that we in the US are living in a country at a time in our generation that is more prosperous than it's ever been. We are the number one GDP country in the world. We are living longer every day. There are new breakthroughs that find miraculous cures for the diseases that get us. We are more connected than any other generation. And you know, most things that we can do today, we can do almost 90% faster. In fact, what I would say is it jumped again a year and a half ago with ChatGPT and AI. And yet we are busier than ever. We are lonelier than ever. We are struggling with the years that we have won back because so many of us struggle with chronic ailments that are lifestyle related. But worst of all, we are more stressed, we are more anxious, we are less satisfied with life. I don't know if you saw the recent report from Gallup, the World Happiness Report. They publish it every year. You'd be shocked to know, or maybe you won't, that in the US we are down to number 23rd, down from 15th in 2023 in the 2024 report. And what's really dragging that down actually is how unhappy or less satisfied with life our younger adults are. Specifically those between 15 and 24, that number in terms of our ranking around life satisfaction and happiness. For that group, we are number 62. And so I started getting curious about how we are living in this world, which is at complete opposites to kind of, you know, we are so prosperous and yet we are struggling. And I started getting curious about in what way might we be making unhappiness a habit rather than habits that make us happier. And so in this series, what I want to do is cover two, three habits, which I'm calling the unhappiness habits that we have picked up over the last 20, 25 years that are really at the heart, I find, of so much lower life satisfaction, the driver of stress in our lives and unhappiness. So let's start with the first one. Now, if you are listening, think about this. How many of you use your phone as an alarm clock or sleep with your phone right next to you? Now, if you are like the average American, 89% of you check the phone within 10 minutes. In fact, 66% of you probably sleep with your phone somewhere very close to you. Now what happens and why is this a habit that is an unhappiness habit? Well, let's think about how we have really changed and overridden the natural rhythms of nature of how we go to sleep and when we wake up. So first let's look at the ill effects of actually what happens when we check phone the first time, first thing when we wake up, right when we wake up. Most people use it to check their emails or go to Instagram or check news. Well, what is filled in news today, Negative news, a war here, a killing there, inflation data that's worrying us. The news is filled with sensational because negativity sells. If you go to Instagram, we are instantly brought to face to face with people's near perfect life. Rainbows, unicorns, perfect beaches, perfect bodies and we wake up feeling not that good about ourselves. Or maybe you're like most corporate where the first thing you do is you look at your email and right away you let all the troubles of your work and others people agenda for you enter into your brain minutes after waking up from a deep restorative, hopefully sleep. We have put ourselves into a fight flight or freeze response, a sympathetic nervous systems that get activated and that continues throughout the day. Now think about this friends, that moment when we wake up is so precious and proven by so much research that it's this liminal period between the unconscious when we are deep asleep to the conscious when we wake up. It's this beautiful period of creativity because you know, it's the time when things are just starting to spark and these lateral ideas come to us. In fact, it is one of the my most creative periods. And we just give that power away. We give away that opportunity to be creative and to gently let nature wake us up from a deep restorative space to where we want to be. So my invitation, dear friends, is to try this experiment for a week or two weeks. Leave your phone outside of your bedroom, maybe even on one floor below, maybe in your living room. Get a normal alarm clock, the old ones, which are digital. And when you wake up, see if you can just lie in bed for five minutes. Just be in that beautiful stage between sleepiness and wakefulness, and notice what happens for you when you wake up. See if you can set an intention for how you want to meet that day. Maybe you want to decide to meet it with gratitude. Maybe you can meet it with curiosity. Maybe you can decide to meet it with love. Maybe you can choose to meet it with compassion. But set an intention for how you want to be and then go about your day. And notice at the end of the day, at the end of the week, at the end of two weeks, how are you feeling? What's present for you? Are you noticing any reduction in stress and improvement in life satisfaction? So that's habit number one. Now think about this, friends. It is such a new habit because 25 years ago these cell phones didn't exist, which had email. So it's something that we all have picked up over the last 15, 20 years. And now we say we can't live without them. But we can. And only when we go back to living in rhythm with nature, only when we can take control back for those beautiful period in the morning, can we rewire away from fear and keeping these fight flight freeze circuits in our bodies A bit more at rest. Till this time, Egos.

We hope you're enjoying this episode. If you'd like to start building habits and integrating the hardwired for happiness practices into your life, come check out Rewire our program on the Happiness Squad website. Rewire contains 35 minute micro practices that can help you truly build habits for a happier, healthier life filled with more love and meaning. The program uses the science of habit formation and the power of community to support you in moving from knowing to doing to being. Now back to the episode.

Now let me talk about the second habit that we have picked up or accentuated in the modern times. And that's the habit of of comparison. Now look, we've always compared ourselves to others. I'm sure cavemen looked at the person next to them and saw if his cave was bigger, had more things in it because back then it was a survival instinct. And if he had more than you, the chances of him finding a mate and passing on the genes were higher. Fast forward. We started comparing ourselves to our neighbors. And there's this research that shows that it doesn't matter how much money you make, it matters. You compare yourself to how much money or how big of a house or the latest car that your neighbors get that immediately bring on this comparison. So we always had that. It's been in our periods. But what's happened now? We went from the person next door cave to the neighborhood to who are we comparing ourselves to now? With our addiction to social media, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube. We are constantly comparing ourselves not just to our neighbors, but to the whole world. We are constantly seeing what others have versus what we don't have. In those moments, we forget that Instagram life is not life. It is the most perfect version of the life. Those people who are posting the best times that they are having also have the worst times or not so good times. They all have struggles, but they're not posting about that, dear friends, they are not posting about those because they make us feel less than they're posting their best moments to portray a picture. But we take that as reality and we feel less than we feel. Not smart enough, rich enough, thin enough, fair enough, you pick your number. But in effect, we feel unworthy. And how do we make up for for that unworthiness? We make up for it by pushing ourselves to work harder. We push ourself towards being busier. We live from that place of satisfaction, dissatisfaction. Then we convince ourselves that this is actually doing us good. We should want more, more and more. But friends, recognize this for a moment. Think about your own life and your own experiences and notice that our desire within, our hunger within is not for more, it's for all. And if we have to find happiness, if we have to find satisfaction, we have to control our wants. If we start to control our wants, focusing on where we are and what we have around, rather than continuously looking at the next person, we're not going to be happy. Even though we have so much more than every generation that lives before. We have more than our parents and our grandparents. The comforts and the luxuries we enjoy were not even enjoyed by kings and queens of yesteryears. And by the way, if you are going to compare yourself, here's a different habit to try. Compare yourself to those who are less than you. If you feel that your house is not big enough or comfortable enough, compare yourself to Those who are in Gaza or in Ukraine, who don't even have a house, who are living in tents. If you find yourself in a space where do you feel that you don't have the best school and that if you had money, you could send your kids to a better school? Think about how many in the world have no access to school at all. If your leg is hurting or if you've broken your leg, think about all those who in service so many servicemen and others who don't have legs at all, who lost them trying to protect us. So we can always find friends, so many around us who are less blessed, who have less than ours, less than us in so many aspects. So if you have to compare, I invite you to compare those who have less than you and feel grateful for how much you do have. Now here's my third practice, the third unhappiness habit. And this is our addiction that we have built over the last 20 years to our phones, these smartphones. You know, I'm reminded there was this movie that came out. It was a Batman movie. It was a terrible Batman movie, but. But it had the character Riddler. And Riddler had created this device that used to go on top of that used to go on top of the TVs, and it used to literally suck the brainwaves out of people and take all of their intelligence. I think the smartphones are a version of that. In a recent study that was published in CBS, it was done by reviews.org when they looked at American usage of cell phones, they found in 2023 that on average, we check our phones 144 times a day. Now think about that number. If you assume we wake up at six and go to bed at nine. So approximately 16 hours, right? Six to 10, about 16 hours. That means we're checking our phone nine times every hour. That's like once every six minutes. That's how much we are addicted to our phones. You know, 15 years ago, if you were waiting in Six Flags, I remember it was about 20 years ago, actually, that I first went to a Six Flags. I had moved to the U.S. in 97, around 99, 2000, I had a chance to go to Six Flags and I loved it. But you know, one thing that was very clear when I was there, I reflect back to that moment. There were long queues. And what did we do when we were standing in queues? You know, we looked around, we talked to the neighbors behind. We exchanged stories. We connected. We noticed the beauty around us. When we went for a hike outside yes, we had to carry extra cameras because our phones didn't have cameras, but we were present when we went out to restaurants. We could connect to our spouses, to our kids because there were no iPads and there were no iPhones. That took our attention away. But now, even when we wait for two minutes in an elevator light up, we pick out our phones. When we wait at a red light, we pick up our phones. In fact, most a large number of adults actually, and teenagers are so anxious if the phone is not with them. It's almost like they've become like our oxygen breathing devices. We can't survive without oxygen. But friends, we can survive without phones. Now let me tell you why it's a big deal and why we need to rewire and reprogram and break this habit and actually create a habit of more breaks. A recent study done by Microsoft showed the effects of when we are in back to back meetings, or in effect when our mind is not getting a break at all, how stress accumulates, how our focus diverts our brains, just like our bodies are not meant to be constantly on. If we don't create breaks, we don't give a chance for our parasympathetic systems to come back online to tamp down and create rest recovery that we so badly needs. Because think about when we are on the phone, what are we taking in? Again, majority of the news that is negative. And we're not giving the brain a chance to relax, it's overheating. The cost of all that is, it's not wandering enough. The cost of all that is loss in creativity. The cost of all that is the level of exhaustion that we feel at the end of the day. So instead of constantly checking your phone, I invite you to create, even if it's one or two minute breaks throughout your day, maybe every couple of hours. If you can make it 5 minutes break, put your phone away, close your eyes and take four or five deep breaths. Breathe for a minute, two minutes, five minutes. Just notice breath going in through your nose, going out through your nose, or go for a mindful walk. If focusing on breath is hard for you, take every step mindfully. Notice things around you. Notice the different colors of green, notice the flowers, notice things around. Just start to present, start to train your brain to be more in the present moment. By the way, if you start to do that one, you're starting to override your dopamine addiction. But you're also through this cycle creating more rest and recovery, recharging yourself throughout the day. There's one other hack that I picked up that I wanted to share with you that has helped me a lot. There is a setting in almost all smartphones where we can actually make the screen black and white. See, the behavioral scientists working at the tech companies are really, really smart about colors and notifications and pings. Try putting your phone back in gray mode and see if it results in you wanting to pick up the phone less. It did for me, hopefully. Friends, these tips were helpful and you share my perspectives on how these habits that we have picked up are making us unhappy. I would love to hear from you. I would love to hear your thoughts on these unhappiness habits or other unhappiness habits like these that are making you that are the source of your unhappiness. These are things that are making you unhappy. These are ways in which you are making unhappiness a habit. I would love to hear from you. We usually post these on LinkedIn, comment on those, share this podcast and episode with others. I think we have to break together these habits that are making us unhappy and instead build happier habits and I hope you'll join me in this journey. I'll release more of these short series where I highlight more and more of these unhappiness habits, but I would love to hear from you on which are your habits that are making you unhappy. Thank you and have a great day.

That wraps up another episode of the Happiness Squad podcast. We hope you found the insights actionable to enhance your journey towards happiness and fill your life with with more joy, health, love and meaning. Please consider leaving us review and share the podcast with anyone in your professional or personal life who you feel will benefit from some of these very insights. It's a really simple way to extend support and spread positivity. Take care and remember happiness is a choice that's available to you moment to moment in the here and now. Take care and see you next week.