Hacking Joy by Changing the World Around You - Ingrid Fetell Lee - #618

Foreign a state of high performance.

You're listening to Bulletproof Radio with Dave Asprey. Today's cool fact of the day is that researchers are starting to give joy its due. And studying joy is still in its early days, but scientists are figuring out that it has a role in our health. And they're figuring out that there's a connection between gratitude and spirituality and joy. And in order to do this, they develop measures of joy as a temporary state, which is called feeling joyful in the moment or something. That's a personality trait that endures, which is the tendency to experience joy more often or maybe less often than other people. And. And those are moderate to strong predictors of two different kinds of well being, one called hedonic and one called eudaimonic well being. I gave a talk about those at the Bulletproof conference three or four years ago. And it turns out, though other studies have found that joy is caused by a distinct pattern of thinking. Now, keep in mind, you can control your thoughts. You can't really control your emotions very well, but you can think a certain way. So people experience joy when they feel connected or reconnected to someone or something important. Joy predicts increased happiness over time. So you get a little bit more joy, you get more happy over time. And it seems like if you're not experiencing joy or you don't even know if you're experiencing joy, there's probably a way to hack that. And this summary comes from Phil Watkins, who's a professor of psychology at Eastern Washington University, and he's one of the preeminent researchers on gratitude and joy and senior editor at the Journal of Positive Psychology. So if you're thinking about biohacking as this thing about subcellular this, well, it is. It's about changing the environment around you and inside of you so that you have control of your own biology. If you wanted to be happy, remember, happy people generally perform better at almost everything because they're not miserable. Well, then maybe you should figure out how to hack joy, because it appears to be doable and relatively easy. At least the parts of joy that are based on a thought process versus changing the way your physical system responds to the environment around you. You may have predicted that we are going to be talking about joy today, and that's because today's guest is a designer and author whose groundbreaking work reveals how your surroundings influence your emotions, your well being, and, yes, even your joy. The book is called the Surprising Power of Ordinary Things to Create Extraordinary Happiness, and its author, Ingrid Fatoli, is on the show today and has created a website called the Aesthetics of Joy, about how to change the environment around you so that you experience more joy in things. Welcome to the show, Ingrid.

Thank you so much for having me.

I'm going to confess something. I've heard of this company called Ideo, Ideo, and I've read about it in Wired, and I know it's like the coolest designing and branding company out there, but after 20 years of my career, I still don't exactly know what Ideo does, but I do know you were there for 12 years. So tell me about this magic unicorn factory that everyone writes about, but no one knows what they do.

Yes. So actually I was there six years, and Ideo is a really incredible place. It started as a company that solved really difficult design and engineering problems. So designing things like the first Apple mouse, the first laptop computer, really complicated design problems. And then as the company grew and as designed design evolved, ideas started to apply their methods. And the methods really relate to a couple things. One, human centered design. So putting people at the center of the process of design. It sounds obvious now, but when Ideo first started taking this approach, it was pretty radical. Designers often just created things that popped into their minds, and they really weren't that focused on the people using those things. And so Ideo really took this approach of going out, not just saying what do people want? But actually going out and observing people in their natural environment to understand what is it that people need, what are the things that people might need that they're not even expressing, or they're not even capable of expressing because they're just making do with what they happen to have. And then the second piece of it is called rapid prototyping, which basically says, let's make something. We can't make the exact thing. Let's make something that is similar. Let's hack together something that can give us an idea of whether this is the right or wrong solution. So you make crude and early prototypes, you get feedback on them, you watch people try to use them, and then you refine them and refine them until you have a really novel, innovative solution. And so now Ideo takes that approach and applies it to things like, you know, designing an entire emergency room system to make it more efficient and reduce medical errors, or even designing things as large as an entire school system in Peru, for example. So the method of watching people and then making things and iterating on them, that approach is one that no longer has to be about tangible, physical things, but can be about services and Systems and all kinds of bigger problems in the world.

There is something that creates joy in me when I interact with any system that didn't waste one second of time or effort. In fact, a lot of the. There's a Japanese concept around that where there's a certain kind of beauty in that, where it's not just rigidly efficient like a robot, but where it's elegant because it wasn't wasteful, yet it worked as well as it could have. And I've never found exactly the right word for that. Is there. Is there a word for that?

I don't know if there's an exact word for that kind of joy. I think I would probably think about that in the category of harmony, which is one of the ten aesthetics of joy that I talk about in my work. And harmony is really about the joy we find in order and flow and balance and things working just right. When you see things, you know, perfectly organized, that also has. That gives you that feeling of harmony, because it almost feels like, you know, magical, that something could work so. So perfectly, so seamlessly. I think sometimes when we watch Rube Goldberg devices, right, and you see that all those little parts, you know, magically working together in such an unlikely way, you get that. That feeling of harmony as well.

Okay, so maybe harmony is part of it, but you can have harmonious things that aren't also functional. And so I think it's an engineering mindset, but I don't know that normal brains do that. I'm a systems thinker, and you probably are, too, although you probably are more artsy than I am. Does that feeling of, you hop in a car and everything is right where it should be? The controls are intuitive. You didn't have to think you just got in. You didn't have to figure out the windshield wipers, because somehow someone just thought ahead and put everything in the most useful place. Is that something you think most people experience joy from, or is that just snobs?

That's a good question. I don't know if it's snobs much, so much as I think we all. I think we probably all appreciate that, but it becomes easy to take it for granted.

Okay. And if you have an expectation of that and then you don't get it, then it creates unhappiness.

Absolutely. No question.

So we shouldn't expect good design, but when we have it, we should feel joyful, ideally.

I mean, you know, if we can recognize. I think maybe designers. It's funny, maybe designers have both more joy and more angst in the world around us. Because when we see something so elegant, the way that you describe it, we feel an intense sense of joy because we know how much work went into that. When we see something that is lazy or it just doesn't work properly, we feel a great sense of frustration because we know how easily it could have been done differently. So I think sometimes people who really study and pay attention to these things have maybe more attention to that side of things, the functional side of things, than, you know, just when you're using something and you just expect it to do what it's supposed to do.

What's the longest argument you've ever had over a font?

That's a good question. I don't know. I mean, you know, I'm not a graphic designer, so I don't spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about typefaces, but probably a few weeks.

Well, the reason I was asking that is that for people who are not designers, I'm not a professional designer, but I probably pay more attention to it just as an engineer than average. Some people, they just have no idea. You look at that sign. In fact, I walk through a mall with my kids and I said, kids, I want you to look at the fonts on every sign, on every logo. Someone spent weeks thinking about it on that font and that one, that's a mom and pop store. That's a font that came off of your Mac. Do you see the difference? Yeah, we do see the difference, but it's invisible. Unless you're in that industry, you just wouldn't know because it's just part of the fabric of the reality around you. But it was a consciously created one. I think that's fascinating to me. I actually do get some joy from just noticing stuff like that. But I want to dig in with you on your book where you talk about joy versus happiness. Can you walk me and listeners through that nuance?

Sure. I think we often confuse these ideas in our culture, and the words are often used interchangeably. Sometimes scientists even use the words interchangeably. So it can be very confusing to try to pull these two things apart. It was one of the most challenging things when I first started studying Joy was trying to understand exactly what is joy and how is it different from positivity, happiness, and all these other words. But I think broadly speaking, the easiest way to understand it is that happiness is a broad evaluation of how we feel about our lives over time. Scientists often use the word subjective well being. That's the sort of scientific, jargony term that they use. To equate to happiness. And that really has to do with a big range of factors. How we feel about our work, how we feel about our relationships, how connected we feel to others, whether we feel like we have a sense of meaning and purpose in life, how we feel about our health. All of those things go into this complex equation of how happy we are. So in a given moment, if you were to try to think, you know, how happy am I? On a scale of 1 to 10, you don't usually just put your finger in there and go, I'm a seven today. You kind of have to think about all those different things and figure out where you are. It's a more reflective exercise. Whereas joy is much simpler and more immediate. So the way that psychologists define joy, broadly speaking, is as an intense momentary experience of positive emotion. And that's something we can measure through actual physical expression. So smiling, laughter, those are two ways that we can understand whether someone around us is feeling joy. And we can monitor our own reactions for those feelings, for those expressions to know when we're experiencing a moment of joy.

Is there a quantified brain state for joy? Can I hook it? Hook EEGs up to my head and figure out the joy alpha brainwave in the left frontal cortex. Have you come across anything like that when you were doing your research for joyful?

I haven't. I have found that generally the measures are more. They're more direct, they're more. You know, generally when scientists are measuring these. This particular emotion, they're looking at facial expressions. And generally there are two muscles that they look at in the face. They look at the zygomaticus major and the orbicularis oculi. And the zygomaticus major is the one around that contracts the corners of your mouth to lift the corners of your mouth up into a smile that's actually under our conscious control. That's why we can fake a smile, Whereas the orbicularis oculi is not under our conscious control. So that's the one that, when we're looking for genuine joy, that's the one that we can look for and know that that person has to be feeling joy on some level, because you can't fake that expression.

All right, you just gave all the spy agencies out there a really good idea because you probably could learn to put that muscle under conscious control with biofeedback. I'm intrigued.

I think the way that you would, you know, if you wanted to elicit that expression, you would have to. And this is the way actors do It, I'm assuming, is you would have to bring your mindset to something joyful that would then elicit that state.

Interesting. That's so fascinating. So perhaps down the road, 10 years from now, whatever cameras are in your environment will be watching those muscles using algorithmic things, and they'll be doing a little happiness count. And if you don't get enough happiness, or sorry, not happiness, a joyful count. If you don't get enough joyful moments per day, they can give you an electric shock to make sure you stay joyful. This can be a great world.

Maybe, maybe. Or, you know, I mean, I think the other thing about it is, you know, there's research and that, you know, the facial feedback hypothesis is a really interesting sort of field of research which basically says that our facial expressions do influence our emotions. And so when we, you know, make a joyful expression when we smile, even though. Even if we fake a smile, that. That can actually send signals to the brain that tell us that we are feeling joy and can actually make us feel more joy. That research is, you know, there's a. There's. The original research didn't replicate, but now there are certain researchers who believe that it is still valid and that there are reasons why, you know, the original studies on that didn't replicate. But it's an ongoing field of study around this idea of facial feedback. But that is one way that we can actually start to elicit feelings of joy from the outside in.

Okay, so this is a joy hack, which is make yourself smile, even if you don't like it, and it's not going to harm you, and it will probably improve your ability to experience some joy or at least to experience less suffering, which is cool and cheap and easy. All right, so let's dig in on. The main reason that I wanted to share your work with the audience is that You've identified these 10 areas that affect our level of joy. A lot of them are in the environment around us. So the definition of biohacking is changing that environment around you and inside of you, but causing a reflection inside of you from the environment around you. Let's go through at least some of those 10 and talk about what happens in your experience of joy when this happens in the world around you. Let's start with energy. How do you relate energy in the environment to joy in the mind or in the heart, wherever joy lives.

Right. So maybe it would help if I just take a quick step back and just talk a little bit about how our environment does relate to our emotions, because I Think for me, when I first came to this, it was a pretty strange idea. I had grown up with the belief that the stuff around me really didn't matter. It wasn't very important to my emotions or well being and that really, you know, joy is supposed to come from within. And it wasn't until I was in design school and it was at the end of my first year of design school, I had a review. I had laid out everything I had made over the course of the semester. And a professor said that he looked at everything. It was a panel of professors critiquing my work. And one of the professors said, your work gives me a feeling of joy. And all of the professors nodded. And I thought, well, that's really weird because I've been told that things can be, I can create as a designer, things that are beautiful, I can create things that are nice to have, but they, they're not, you know, going to affect us on a deep level because that's supposed to happen from within. And so when he said that, you know, I asked the professors, well then how does that work? You know, what's the, what's the brain science behind how that works? If, if I created something that's joyful, how did I do it and then how do I do it again? And they couldn't answer. And so that's really what got me curious about how the environment influences our emotions. And what I found is that as you said, there, you know, there are 10 different ways, 10 different, almost like triggers or levers that we can build into our environment in an intentional way to influence our emotions from the outside in. And that there's actually a pretty robust base of research. It's just happening in different labs all over the world. And so my work is really about pulling that together so we can understand that our emotions really aren't just about, you know, mindfulness and meditation. And, you know, those are great practices. Therapy, all of those are great practices. Gratitude, all of those are really important. But that actually there's a whole field that has really been overlooked by mainstream psychology and by the sort of self help industry that can help us use our environments to get more out of ourselves from an emotional perspective.

Okay, I completely support all of that perspective, including that sense of wonder from professor saying, we don't really know why we felt that way, but does it translate? I mean, I can hear a certain song that has multiple levels of complexity. I'm like, this is so amazing. I could listen to this forever. And I just like, my brain just likes it and then my dad will listen to it and say, that's not bluegrass or whatever. And the sense of joy isn't there for it. How much of this is individual versus shared by large swaths of people?

This is so important. So, of course, we all have certain things that are personal. They're based on our personalities. And of course, there are different personality attributes that can influence how we perceive the world. And there are things that we find joy in based on our memories. So an example I often give is, um, there's, you know, a certain wallpaper pattern that was in my grandmother's kitchen. And when I see that pattern or something that looks like that pattern, I'll feel this intense spike of joy that, you know, you could be standing right next to me and look at it and be like, it's wallpaper. It's nice, you know, and not have that response. So we all have those individual things that either bring us joy or don't. But what I. When I started to ask this question of where joy comes from, I just started talking to people and I started asking people about the things and places that brought them joy. And I started to notice that certain patterns, that certain things come up again and again and again. And there are things like cherry blossoms and hot air balloons and bubbles and kites and confetti and rainbows. I mean, anywhere you go in the world, if there's a rainbow, people stop. They'll turn their heads to the sky, they'll look at it, they'll tell other people their point. And so there are certain things that seem to bring joy the world over. And that's really where my research comes in, because I'm interested in those universal aspects. And if there are certain, you know, if there are certain elements. So what I found as I started studying those, those things that seem to be universally joyful is that there are certain properties or certain attributes of those things that make them so joyful. And of course, we all have our own individual responses that will interact with this. But broadly speaking, around the world, these 10 aesthetics of joy, these 10 elements are. Are likely to give joy to, if not everyone, to broad groups of people.

Okay, that's interesting. So you did study commonalities there. But what is the single biggest or the most impactful one, if you had to stack, rank, and order these in terms of importance?

Well, you talked about energy, and I always like to put that first, because if we think about joy, joy is a high energy emotion. There's a certain level of arousal associated with it, and there are certain aesthetics that elicit that. And the key elements there are color, bright color, and light. Those are the two things that are associated with this kind of energizing feeling, this joyful, energizing feeling we get now. I should say it's really important because not everyone is going to find all 10 of these aesthetics equally joyful. And they're not necessarily all going to want to go paint their houses bright colors. Some will, but that's why there are 10. Some people will find a lot more joy, for example, in freedom, which is about being out in open spaces, nature having lots of spaciousness around you, having wild textures around you. So it really depends on you and your experience which ones of these you'll find the most joyful.

Okay, so you've created a roadmap saying, okay, here's the 10 quadrants or 10 areas of the roadmap of things that cause joy. And then it's up to each of us to figure out which of those 10 has the biggest impact on us.

Exactly. But I do think there are certain things that are, you know, for example, energy. If we look at the effects of color and light, they tend to be pretty universal. So bright color, if you look at children's drawings, Studies of children's drawings show that when they are drawing pictures of joyful experiences and scenes, they use lots of bright colors. When they draw pictures of sad or angry scenes that use a lot of brown, black, and, like, dark purple. So they use sort of dull, dark colors when they're to. To relate to these negative emotions. And so we find, you know, around the world, you can see it in festivals, that there is always bright color in festivals. So this is, you know, associated with joy wherever we go. And there's a physiological effect to this, too. When people look at bright, saturated colors, their physiological arousal goes up. So we can see that there is a physical effect and an emotional one that correspond.

There's a definite reason that the dominant color for Bulletproof is orange. I like orange, but I wanted it to have some energy in it, and I've gotten a lot of compliments on that. So it seems like people like it, but it also. It resonates with what I wanted it to. There are lots of other brands who choose all sorts of colors across the color palette. Are you finding that those color things are relatively universal? Red means death in some cultures, but excitement in others and things like that. Is this a cultural thing or is this wired into our biology? Because it seems to matter. There's just so much variety around the world. And if you were to say, I want to design my airport this way, and people from all over the world are going to come through. How do you sort that out?

Right, so it's always both. There's always a cultural layer going on and an individual layer and this deeper, universal layer, this evolved layer of how we respond to things. Now, the reason why we have this response to bright color, at least, you know, a possible reason, because with evolutionary explanations, we can never be sure, is that our color vision evolved in part to help our primate ancestors find ripe fruit and young leaves in the treetop canopies that were likely to be more nutritious, rich in sugars. And so, on some level, when we see bright color, the evolutionary argument goes, we're seeing a sign of nourishment. And even though there's no longer any nourishment, it was so predictive over the generations, the thousands and thousands of generations, that our ancestors were evolving in a natural environment that. But that association still stays on some level. And so that's why we would have this evolutionary response. Now, of course, there are cultural associations with colors, and as you mentioned, a few of them. And so I think that's why, for me, it's much more interesting to focus on the brightness and the saturation of a color, how light or dark it is, and how much, how pure the pigment is in that color than on the hue. Because the associations with colors, the cultural associations, are often with a particular hue. And when we focus more on the brightness of the color, then it's less important to think about, you know, we can choose colors that are appropriate for a particular culture and focus less on. On that and focus more on, you know, introducing a pop of vibrant color in whatever shade we love or our culture, you know, says is, you know, corresponds to the need. And. And we can get the joyfulness that way. So it's not necessarily that red is more joyful than blue or yellow more joyful than green, but that actually, as long as you have a color you love, choose a brighter version of it for an application, like painting your front door or putting a coffee mug on your desk in the morning, so that when you drink your morning bulletproof coffee, you're drinking it in something that is. That's bright and vibrant. And if you hate yellow, don't make it yellow, make it a very bright blue, but make it something that will give you that joyful burst.

There are some studies that show that coffee tastes 20% sweeter when you drink it out of white porcelain. And that drives me nuts. Do you know why that is or why the color of your utensils would change the taste of your food.

Yeah. So this is a field of research called crossmodal research, and it's a really interesting field of research which talks about how our senses interrelate and how perceptions from one sense modality like sight might influence a modality like taste. And I think that, again, there's, you know, there are cultural reasons that crossmodal researchers have found and also possibly universal ones that have to do with expectations. So, for example, there are studies that show that when we make a liquid red, it's. We're more likely to taste the same sugar solution as sweeter when it's red versus when it's green. And that might have to do with the fact that as things ripen, they often become more red. Now, it's not to say that some fruits aren't perfectly ripe when they're green, but as a general pattern, things move toward the warmer end of the color spectrum as they ripen. So it may be that there's an expectation there, but that's. That's really speculation at the this point. I think it's interesting how they relate, though.

I think we could just blame kale. That stuff tastes so nasty and it's green that we just associate those two. I'm just kidding. I'm anti kale. I've just decided to come out and tell the world that. You know what I mean? In terms of the color palette, how many sweet green things are there? Not many.

Not many.

Yeah. Just as I think about it, that's the most bitter green thing I could think of off the top of my head. Okay, I buy that. So it's just a bias that's built in to our perception. All right, so color matters. Different people are going to like different colors, but paying attention to that in your environment works. Now, I'm going to put on my computer hacker hat here. My design ethos, especially when I was younger or in college, was probably more like cement rivets and exposed wiring because I thought it was cool. Not necessarily something that brought joy, although seeing a really well put together industrial interior design kind of thing is actually neat. But I wouldn't have had the skills to go out and say, hey, I'm going to build an environment to bring myself joy. How do you recommend people who are listening to the show today who maybe aren't designers, other than going to Ikea and picking up, you know, a blue or an orange pillow or something? Like, how do you actually put this into practice?

I think you're hitting on something so important, which is that a lot of us, most of us, have been made to feel that the way that we're supposed to decorate our environments is a function of good taste, some arbitrary standard of good taste that is often dictated by magazines and by blogs and by, you know, people who are not us. But to me, the most important feature of an environment is how it makes us feel. And so my hope is that by actually understanding that you have within you a natural compass, that when you walk into a room and you say, oh, that feels good, you're gathering information about the kinds of spaces that feel good to you. And by listening to that, by tuning into the visceral feeling of an environment, as opposed to, oh, I think this looks good, it would look good on the COVID of a magazine. By tuning into your own intuition around that, I think it's less about skill and it's more about feeling out how places make you feel and starting to pay attention to that. Now, of course, there are tools that we learn as designers that can help you. One of the things I often say about color is to look at pieces of art that you love. The artist David Hockney always used to, whenever he has a color problem, he says when he's ever he's not sure what colors to use, he looks at Matisse paintings because Matisse is an amazing colorist, Right. So if you, if you find a piece of art that you love, you can feel good about the fact that the colors in that, if you translate them to a space, will probably go together there as well. So there are shortcuts, there are ways that we can approach this. But I think the most important thing is to first tune into what feels good to you.

Okay, got it. I actually, when I go into a space and I notice something really cool, I'll take a picture of it. So I have sort of this spaces that I like, little set of photos and instruments, just little elements, in part because I have coffee shops and I like to bring that into them. And people who have seen my Instagram of my offices, kind of mid century modern with some weird stuff in it. But that came about as a result of just noticing, documenting and then incorporating, even though I am far from an expert in that kind of stuff. But I also have the benefit of being able to hire people who are experts to take those ideas and help me tick off the rough edges and all. But that's something I do. And same thing, one of these days I'll actually start some line of clothing because I notice Weird little details and colors and materials. I'm like, no one does that. I want something that looks like that, so someday that'll happen. But I think it's that same thing. Just noticing what really stands out and kind of keeping a file on that. At least that's my practice for that. Is that a good practice? Is that what. What real designers do?

That's a great practice. It's definitely what real design. I mean, I think on some level, we're all real designers, but, yes, that's certainly. I think a great approach is to use your senses as the guide, and when you find things you love, capture them and then start to notice patterns. What is it about? If you've taken five pictures this week of environments, what is the same about them? Is it that they all have this bright shaft of natural light coming through? Is it that they all have plants? There are certain things that you'll start to notice and be able to bring that into your home or your work environment.

Do you ever see a future where you'd be able to walk into an environment? Note the cool stuff. Press a button on your phone or your augmented reality glasses. Someone says, put this in my cool file. Run all of your cool files through machine learning and artificial intelligence stuff and have it kick out a design for what your living room should look like. Are we going to automate the design process where we can just tease out all the elements? Because you're saying, pay attention. Note the commonalities. It seems like we already have systems today that note commonalities that humans don't note very well. I mean, are we five years out from that, 10 years out from that, or is that never going to happen?

I'm not sure about the technology there. I think for me, it's actually the noticing that's really important.

Yeah, that's the hard part, too.

It is. And I think, you know, it's because my feeling is that we have really become disconnected from our senses in a lot of ways. And part of that is the way that, you know, design has evolved to be very focused on this, you know, perpetuating a certain aesthetic. And modernism is really, you know, I think a lot to blame. This idea that everything should be spare and concrete and not have plants and, you know, very harsh environments. And it's the kind of environment we find when we go through an airport or when we go to a government building or many offices feel like this, where there's just nothing natural, there are no curves. And to me, that, I think, has really disconnected us from our senses. Because to thrive in an environment like that, to focus and to function, we have to kind of turn off our senses. We have to sort of tune out how ugly it is. And not just ugly, how, how, how jarring that is to our, to our sensory perceptive capabilities. And so I think for me, the most important thing is actually just turning that, that loop back on, that feedback loop back on and starting to notice. Because the noticing is what will hone that intuition. And maybe there'll be a time when we can have machines do that for us. But to me, the most important thing is to reconnect the sensory and the emotional systems. Those things are already connected. We're just not consciously aware of it. So we have to start paying attention to the environments that make us feel good so that we can start bringing those things back in. And my work is really about giving us a head start on that. To say, here are some things that universally seem to have evolved to make us thrive. Let's start with those things. But there is an individual piece to it as well.

I absolutely love that. It's the same thing really that I started doing with food. It's like, what is going to give me food high versus just taste good versus just be cheap. So you can do the same thing with everything in your environment. That really resonates with me. Okay, let's talk about abundance, because it seems like that's the opposite of this. In your book Joyful, you talk about how, oh, well, not having stuff around you, the sense of that. Because if it's. Maybe I'm getting this backwards. Sorry, that's freedom, that's open space. And then you have abundance, which is too much sparseness. So you're saying, okay, you're going to feel joy if you don't have too much empty space and you don't have too much stuff. It seems like a very narrow line to dance between abundance and freedom in creating the environment you live in. How do you get that right?

Okay, yeah, let's talk about this. So I think it's interesting because some of these aesthetics do seem like they're intention, but actually I think they're more. It's a little bit more fluid than it sounds. So freedom is very much drawn from the experience of being in nature. And nature can be an extremely abundant experience. So even when you're out in no place, open space, like a meadow, for example, there's an intense sensorial abundance. Because I don't know if you've noticed this, but like, I often find that nature is noisier. Than actually being in a quiet room. You have all the noises of the birds, the insects, right? There's the peepers, the frogs at night. There's. There's. There's a lot of noise, but it's. It's an ordered kind of sound that is really pleasing to us and it's soothing to us on a visceral level. There's movement. There's constant movement in nature, so there's often there is an abundance of sensation. So I think that, you know, when we talk about open space, it's not necessarily a big white box that's empty. It's more about, you know, making sure that there's freedom to move and that you feel, you know, we haven't crammed every inch of our. Of our lives with stuff. Now when we think about abundance, abundance, it's less about material abundance, having lots of stuff, and more about this idea of sensorial abundance. And I think the moment I had this realization was when I went to visit an apartment designed by an artist and a poet couple. So neither of them were architects, but they believed that the kinds of sort of ordinary environments that we move through, our offices and our cities and whatnot, are killing us. That they. That they actually hasten our aging because they don't have enough sensations in them. And so what they built were these environments that have sloping floors. They call this apartment building the Reversible Destiny Lofts. And the idea is that this apartment building could reverse aging. And so the floor slope, they have these little bumps on them. They have, you know, to get around the apartment, you have to kind of hold on to poles that are in the. In the inset into the floor and handles around the apartment. There are bright colors everywhere. The bathroom is actually shaped like a cylinder on its side, so the floor curves instead of being flat. And there's a room that's just a sphere that you can sit in or climb in or do whatever you want in. But. But the whole idea was that, you know, if we don't use our senses, then our minds start to atrophy. And I think there's now an emerging body of research that says that there's. This might be true, that research in animals is starting to suggest that when animals are in sensorially deprived environments, minimalist environments, as opposed to sensorially enriched environments, that they are. That their slide into dementia is faster, that cognitive decline is faster in a sensorially deprived environment. And there's research in people where they've done tests of enriched work environments versus minimalist work environments. Or lean work environments. And what they find is that, you know, those environments that have art and plants and more sensorial stimuli, people are 15% more productive in those enriched environments. So I think there are good reasons to think that by stimulating our senses, maybe not by living in something as wild as the reversible Destiny apartments, we can actually keep our minds younger and more facile and that, but it's less about lots of stuff and more about just stimulating our senses on a regular basis.

The flip side of that reversible Destiny apartment, which I've seen a few science fiction books that took advantage of that idea, you have environments that constantly change around you to keep you young, is in Guantanamo. They have environments where the wall is white, everything is white, the lighting is light, so there's just no visual contrast anywhere. And it's a form of torture and breaking people down. So that's an extreme example on the other end of it going, yikes, it absolutely is.

And I mean, if you think about the environment we evolved in, it had was this natural environment where we had all these sensorial stimuli. And when we move into a man made environment, we've taken a lot of those sensations out. And so if you, probably the most, most robust area of research around the connection between our emotions and mental functioning and the environment is on nature. And when we look at this body of research that has been growing, it shows that our minds function optimally when we're in nature and when we're exposed to nature. Being out in nature quiets the part of the brain that worries and broods over problems. Our sense of time expands. We actually think that a walk takes longer, the same length of walk takes longer when it's in nature versus when it's in an urban environment. Nature restores our cognitive capacity, it makes us more generous. And so there's so many attributes that are heightened. You know, the ways that we want to be in the world are heightened when we're out in nature. And, and to me, that's not necessarily saying that we have to go back to nature, but we have to look at the difference between a natural environment sensorially, between a natural environment and what we have built as humans. These concrete spaces that are really often quite joyless. And we have to think about putting some of that back in.

Okay, so we've kind of got through the first half of your list, which are things that you might expect. Okay, you know, you don't want too much, too much junk around. You don't want an empty environment. You want the right Colors and things like that. But the second half of your list, it sounds like it's pretty much Burning Man. You've got surprise, transcendence, magic, celebration, and renewal. Did you consciously design it? So the first half is like, okay, this is what you would decide to do. But not a lot of people put. At least I wouldn't imagine a lot of people put surprise or transcendence as things that they're looking for in their living room.

Room. Right, right. That's true.

Walk through surprise. What. What's. What do you say about surprise?

Yeah, so I. I do think about these as, you know, the first five, Energy, abundance, freedom, harmony, and play, are things that are very easy to access and understand and easy to build into any kind of space. And then the second half is really, you know, these things are a little bit more specific. They have to do with the relationship between joy and other states. So surprise is its own emotion. It's one of the six primary emotions, like joy, that is universally experienced. And what I have noticed is that joy and surprise often go together. Not always, but there are. There are ways in which the experience of surprise, because surprise can be either positive or negative. But positive surprises can heighten the feeling of joy. And when we think about surprise in a space, it's really about that experience of contrast. So when you come around a corner and you see a really amazing piece of street art, or you see a little flower growing up through the sidewalk where it doesn't belong, those experiences can give us this little joyful burst because we're not expecting it. And that difference of expectations is what can really heighten our joy. So using that principle of contrast, we can bring that into our space in ways that add a little bit more delight to everyday life.

Okay, I got that. So those strange little design elements, although I suppose if you're going into a restaurant or something, but if it's your own house, nothing's going to be surprising because you put it there and it was there yesterday. Well, how do we bring surprise? Indoor houses.

So I think. Yeah, so it's a great. It's a great question. I think what's really interesting to me is to stop thinking about a space as. As a fixed space and think about it more as in terms of time, the way that you move through a space, and the. The pace at which you move through a space. So, for example, one of the things that I did in my house was paint bright yellow cabana stripes on the inside of the hall closet. Now, that's not something I'm going into every minute. But it's something that pretty much once a day or once every couple of days, I have to go in there. And it's not that I necessarily forget that I did that, but I. I'm not thinking about it because my attention is somewhere else. So if you think about the flow of attention and where your attention is in a space when you close things off, if you, you know, have brightly colored drawer liners, is another way to do this. A hall bathroom that you don't use every. All the time, but it's just like a little, you know, you put a really bright colored wallpaper in there. So there are things you can do. Even in your desk drawers is a fun place to do it. Hide something that you can then rediscover later.

You talk about in the. In your book, you said the God of good taste demands sacrifices. And it's always the weird, quirky, awkward parts of ourselves that are first to be thrown on the pyre. Yet that's where the surprises lie. Tell me more about weird, quirky, awkward parts of ourselves and how that translates into stripes in your closet.

Sure. So surprise. I talked about the principle of contrast. I think the other piece of surprise has to do with the offbeat, the disruption, the quirky. The disruption of expectations. So there are all kinds of expectations that we have in life. Some of our expectations are set by, you know, the. The laws of physics and the way things are supposed to behave. Some of them are set by, you know, cultural factors. Some are set by the seasons and the way the sun rises and sets. But some of the expectations that we have are set by norms, cultural norms and ways that we believe people should behave. And so to me, there's often a joy in the. Just, you know, in those quirky things. I mean, I think that's a lot of the. The joy of things you find on Etsy, for example, those. The quirky, handmade things that are a little bit different or offbeat. You know, I often talk about, you know, the flamingo is an example of a bird that really doesn't conform to our expectations of what a bird should look like. Right. So it's a sort of a weird bird. And that is, you know, a very joyful animal. You often see it on, you know, people use it as brand icons and they. And they emblazon it on things because it's so quirky and joyful. So there can be a joy that we find in these quirky things that don't conform to norms. Then that's another. That's Another form of surprise. It's another form of disrupting expectations. And I think that's often the thing that is. You know, I talked before about design and what we put in our spaces is often dictated by, you know, someone else's good taste, someone else's idea of good taste. I think as we start to tune back into ourselves, we start to find, we start to uncover more of those quirky things, quirky collections that we might have that, you know, we would be tempted to just put in a drawer, but would actually bring a lot of joy if we put them on display. So bringing those things out into the open, not only does it personalize the space, but it is a way of, you know, creating that element of surprise, that disruption of expectations.

Okay, what about transcendence? You talk about how having stuff float is really important. That surprised me in Joyful in your book. So how do we bring that into our lives in order to experience more joy? I mean, do you have the magnetic floaty pin on your desk? I couldn't find another way, ways to bring that in.

Right. So if you look, this is another one of those things we see around the world where joy is often described as light or being light hearted and sadness is heavy. So there seems to be a vertical spectrum of emotions. And there are different reasons that that might be the case. But a lot of it has to do with, I think, with gravity. Right. Gravity pulls us down. It makes things heavy and weighty. And, you know, when we, when we, we are able to escape gravity through a hot air balloon or a plane or, or a kite, then, you know, we feel this sense of, of lightness and elevation and this feeling of transcendence that we get. I think that, you know, there are a number of things that can happen. One is that it can give us a sense of perspective. So research has shown when we move upward in space, even just going up through the, the height of a staircase, it actually helps us zoom out. We focus more on the, you know, we focus more on the, the broader conceptual problem and less, we get less bogged down in the details. So that's one of the things that can happen. It can sort of help us zoom out. It can also create feelings of awe, which is again, not the same as joy, but it's an emotion that often overlaps with joy. And that feeling of awe can help create an almost sort of spiritual feeling. I think this is why we often find cathedrals are very tall in proportion because they draw the eye upward. And they have stained glass and flying buttresses that Sort of pull the eye, pull light in up high. That sort of draws the eye up in space and really emphasizes that vertical dimension. So this is not something, you know, if you live in a normal height, you know, if you have normal height ceilings, transcendence might not be something that you are, are going to cultivate in your, in your own apartment or in your house. Although you can certainly do things to draw the eye upward by, you know, hanging decorations, mobiles, you know, things that, light decorations, that pendant lights, things like that, that draw the eye upward. So there are ways to bring in a taste of this. But I think this is also something to, you know, for example, in, in offices, when you have an office that has a double height, being mindful of how you use that difference in height to draw people upward when they're focusing on bigger picture things. Using that space for a brainstorm room, for example, or a conference room, as opposed to just putting desks in it. Thinking about how you use different, different spaces to elicit the right sort of mode of activity or behavior.

Okay, that makes so much sense. Talk about magic. Okay, now we're getting really out there. I mean, this really is straight up from the list of Burning man values. I think you're saying magic plays a pivotal role in fueling innovation and progress. What is magic?

Okay, so this was my question. I was thinking about how joy is, how joy in childhood is so intertwined with magic, right? We are free to believe in anything we want to believe, and, and the adults around us conspire to help us believe that. And if you, if you've ever seen, you know, elf on a shelf, people moving the elf around in the, in their house, and the wonder that kids feel, you know, the wonder that they feel when they, you know, watch superhero movies and all of that, that still feels possible. There's a state of being when we, when we, when the possibilities in our world feel expanded, right? As we get older, the possibilities start to become more constrained. We learn more about the world, it feels more fixed. We have less of that experience of wonder. And I think that can sometimes make it hard to, to have big creative leaps or big scientific leaps. And so, you know, it was really interesting to me when I was doing this research is, is that often it is magical beliefs that were the precursors to big scientific discoveries. So astrology was really the forerunner for astronomy, and it makes so much sense, right? The reason that humans started to develop instruments that were capable of tracking the positions of, of the stars and the planets and looking at them was because they Were because they believed that those planets had an influence on them, and they wanted to know what they were doing. So they, you know, they got. That's what got them curious about it. Or that alchemy, like the father of chemistry was an alchemist. He was trying to turn lead into gold. And it was his experiments in trying to do that that convinced him that there were actually atoms that were, you know, unchangeable at a basic level, that. That, you know, alchemy was actually impossible. So he ended up disproving his, you know, the thing that drew him to it. So so often it is this. This ability to believe that the possibilities of our world are bigger than what we see, than what we can immediately detect. That that pulls us forward, that ignites our curiosity and pulls us forward to discovery.

I love it that you brought up alchemy there. That's the first chapter in my new book. Superhuman is about alchemy and how it's tied even with the field of anti aging now. So I dug really deep on, yeah, pretty much all of modern chemistry and engineering came about from alchemists, which a lot of people don't know. So that's kind of cool.

Totally. And so I think we live in this world where we believe that there's science and then there's everything else. And I think it's important to understand the difference between proven fact and.

The.

Things that we believe in, you know, But I think that there's a space for, you know, we witness something that is so unbelievable. You know, for me, this was the northern lights. When I went to Iceland and I saw the northern lights, it's so unbelievable. And even though, you know, that it's magnetism and that there are forces that are causing it, it feels magical. And that makes you want to learn more about it. And I think cultivating those moments. Starting to notice, you know, when you see fireflies or. You know, for me, right now, I'm actually looking out at my garden, and there's a hummingbird who comes by and just. It's just amazing to watch this creature hovering in midair. You feel, you know, there are things in our environment, especially when they are calling attention to the invisible, to the things that are around us that we don't pay attention to because wind, magnetism, these invisible forces in our lives, that's where the magic lies.

Tell me about joy spotting. What's that?

Joy spotting is something that really started by accident for me. It was. I was going around as I had. As I developed this set of 10 aesthetics and was Walking around, I would notice something joyful and I would take note of it. I would often share it on my blog. My blog is now 10 years old. And so in the beginning, that's really what most of what my blog was, was just I saw something joyful and then I wanted to understand it, I wanted to share it. And as I started to do it, I noticed that it became like a kind of mindfulness practice that made me feel better, that instead of turning inward and necessarily watching my own mental and emotional state, I was turning to my environment and noticing the things in my environment that could lift my spirits. And as I've started to share this practice, I found that there are lots of others who do it as well. There are families who do it on the way to school. It's something, you know, it's very quick. You can do it. You don't have to dedicate time to it because you can do it while you're commuting. You can do it anytime. And it really is just. Just the act of tuning your senses, tuning your attention to something that is joyful in your surroundings, something that lifts you up. And to me, this practice is really powerful because it helps you build the muscle for understanding that your surroundings can be a kind of reservoir for positivity in your life.

It's like a gratitude practice, but it's real time. And you're spotting things that bring you joy. Or are you spotting other people experiencing joy?

Yes, you're noticing, you know, it might be that you notice a couple of dogs playing with each other on the side of the street. It might be that you notice, you know, you look around and you notice someone wearing a really, a colored jacket that you just, you know, lights you up. So you're just tuning your attention to something that lifts your spirits in a moment.

Okay. It's a form of awareness training and. Okay, I like that. That's actually really cool. And it's not something that I've heard of before. I have one more question for you that may seem a little dark after that talk of joy spotting, but it's the question I've been asking all of the guests on the show because they come from really different backgrounds. And I've been pretty public most recently in Men's Health and Wired about this. I'm going to live to at least 180, and I want to get your take on that as a designer, someone who focuses on joy. How long do you think you're going to live? Given where we are with technology, given where the world's going.

It's funny because I don't ever think about this. I really don't. I don't know enough about the technology around aging to give an educated guess.

I think you have to have an expectation, though. Everyone has an expectation.

I. I guess I have a hope. I have a hope that I could make it to my 90s okay. But I have no idea if that's, you know, that's. That would be my hope. If, if I get anything beyond that. I'd be so, so happy and excited. To me, I'm just the kind of person who wakes up every day and I. I'm just so happy to be here on this planet. And so I hope it keeps going as long as I can be healthy and able to enjoy it.

So you've got that joy and gratitude thing already going and you're good with it as long as it lasts. I can understand that. It has been a great pleasure to have you on the show. It has brought me joy. And we got to experience at least nine of the ten things that bring you joy from your book Joyful. And I wanted to say thank you for writing it and paying attention to something that is ephemeral and hard to design. Ingrid, it's been a great pleasure having you on the show.

Thank you so much.

Your website is Aesthetics of Joy. Your book is called Joyful. It's easy to find wherever books get bought. So I would just recommend. If you like today's episode, you should go to the website. Practice joy spotting. Think about reading the book. It'll make you pause and think about things in your environment that are changing your biology and your psychology and your emotions that you probably never noticed. Have a beautiful day.