Free Happiness Hacks

We forget that we can extend that kind of compassion to ourselves. And there's evidence that this practice, in addition to kind of helping you not kind of burn out when you're dealing with other people's issues, can also help you not burn out as much when.

You'Re kind of taking care of yourself, too. Hello, everyone. I'm Kaya Perowne, one of the producers of the Doctors Pharmacy podcast. Happiness doesn't have to be something you have or you don't. Just like our health, it's something we can work on. And research shows that many happiness hacks are widely accessible and don't cost a thing. Earlier this year, Dr. Hyman sat down with happiness expert, Laurie Santos, to discuss clinically proven methods for improving happiness.

Now more than ever in this time of COVID-19, I think a lot of us are struggling. And you talked about simple practices like gratitude, for example. Talk about gratitude and why that is so much better than commiserating. Like, oh yeah, our life's miserable. Like, misery loves company, that whole thing. I think how does gratitude provide an antidote to that? And how do you How do you even practice gratitude?

Yeah, I mean, I love bringing up this idea of misery loves company. 'Cause I think when we hear that quote, we think it's about like, well, you know, when you get misery, you kind of love it. But I think it's the opposite. It's like when one person's miserable, there's emotional contagion, right? Like other people pick up your misery. So, and you probably felt that if you're around somebody who like gripes all the time, you know, that can feel depleting when you're around someone like that. Yeah. And so gratitude is kind of the opposite. It's just this emotion where you're taking time to count your blessings, just feeling thankful for the good things in your life. And happy people, the research suggests, do that naturally. So people with high self-reported happiness tend to spontaneously bring to mind all the things that they're grateful for, which suggests that it could be powerful. And so now you need an experiment. You need to force people to experience gratitude and to think about things they're grateful for. And the research shows that if you get people to do that, they just like scribble down three to five things they're grateful for at the end of the day, all of a sudden their happiness starts to increase. In fact, you can get significant increases in happiness within about two weeks. And so then there's a question of why does it work? And I think it works for a couple reasons. One is that gratitude feels really good, but there's also evidence that as a social emotion, it's kind of doing something evolutionarily. I think this is something we forget that our emotions aren't these like annoying things that kind of stick around and make us feel good or bad. They're like for something. And the research suggests that gratitude is for what like researchers call self-regulation, right? It's there because you want to like help someone. It's there for cooperation, which sometimes means forgoing your own benefit to help someone else. And there's studies suggesting that people who feel more grateful or if you can make someone feel grateful, they're more likely to do things that benefit their future selves. So they're more likely to save for retirement in these little experimental scenarios. They're more likely to choose things that allow them to eat healthier over time because it feels like less of a sacrifice. Gratitude gets us to be a little bit more future-oriented. So not only does it feel good and boost our well-being, It also helps us make healthier choices in general in life too. And it's totally free. Another thing I love about all these interventions is you don't have to buy anything. You don't have to buy a gratitude app or something like that. It's just you just think stuff and it just can be completely free and a nice boost for your well-being. Like a little gratitude journal, one of the three things. Yeah, you can get a nice notebook, but you can also just scribble it down on scrap paper, just think about it. And so yeah, I think that's another kind of way that a lot of this work is sort of anti-capitalist, right? if you really understand what the science is telling you, no one's going to make money off this stuff. Most of these tips are just completely free.

Yeah, it's not about buying more stuff to be happy. It's about being and noticing. And you also talk a lot about stress and how that impacts us. And it's sort of the antithesis of happiness, right? When there's high stress, your happiness goes down. And you talk about how do we use simple tools to enhance our happiness and well-being? being like meditation.

Yeah, I think there's different ways to hack our stress, right? There's getting rid of the stressors, which in daily life I think is a good thing to do. If you have a stressful job or you're going through a stressful period, there are ways to get rid of those, but that's not always possible. And I think for the main stressor that a lot of us are going through right now, we can't snap our fingers and get rid of COVID-19, and it's probably gonna be with us for longer than any of us really wanna admit, right? And so we need to find ways to hack our stress response that don't involve getting rid of the stressor. And the good news is that biology gives us one good way to do this, which is through our breath, surprisingly. And so, you know, quick, quick like a primer on the autonomic nervous system for folks out there, right? You know, we have this sympathetic nervous system that's basically our fight or flight response. That's us freaking out to the uncertainty of the virus and its scariness. It's causing our chest to get tight and, you know, our breathing to move around and our muscles. to kind of clench and basically shutting off all these functions we need, like immune function and sleep and digestion and things like that. We can't get rid of the stressor that's causing this fight or flight response, but we can trick our bodies in some ways to thinking that it might have gone away. And we do that through our breath, right? So if you're running from a tiger that's attacking you in full fight or flight mode, you're not going to stop and take a deep belly breath. Like you're just not going to be able to do that, right? But if you stop and take a deep belly breath during Corona 19, which we all can do, your body's like, well, hang on. Maybe we don't need the fight or flight system anymore, your vagus nerve kind of kicks in and that can activate the parasympathetic nervous system, which is sort of the rest and digest, right? So it's one kind of, we don't have many hacks on our autonomic nervous system because it's mostly unconscious. Thank goodness it's like helpful that it kind of goes on its own. This is one hack we can all use and I've been telling listeners just a lot to just make sure, especially if you're kind of in panic frame, take time to just do three deep breaths. Like when you're upset, it can sound pedantic for somebody to be like, just take a deep breath, but like there's science to it and it really can make a difference. It's especially a tip that I've been giving first responders, right, who I think they're so busy, they can't do much to kind of hack their happiness right now, but a deep breath in between working with patients in a scary time can be really powerful.

Yeah, you just made me take a deep breath.

That's good.

I once heard Tony Robbins speak and he talked about this concept of changing your state to change your mind. And I really focused on that a lot in my own life and I found all kinds of ways to do that. One is meditation, one is exercise, one is yoga. Another one I use is hot and cold treatments, whether it's just a hot shower and a cold shower, or it could be, I have a steam shower in my house and a bathtub and I fill it with ice cold water and I go hot and cold, that changes your state and your physiology. It discharges the stress. Avoiding actually foods that cause a stress response. So most people don't understand that sugar increases adrenaline, and cortisol, which are the stress hormones. So even if you're relaxed and happy and you eat sugar, your body thinks of it as a danger, as a stress response. So changing your diet to lower your stress response is important. So I focus on all these ways to change your state, and I do it on a regular basis because I like everybody else, I get stressed. But I've learned over the years how to discharge my stress and change my state. And I think it's a really important practice now, whatever works. And maybe it's just Laying down on the couch with your spouse and snuggling, you know, just cuddling is a great stress reducer.

If you have people in your house, a hug can be an incredible powerful.

Like, you know, state changer. Yeah, you also talk about this idea of meta meditation, which is sort of a Buddhist concept of loving kindness meditation and how powerful it is. It is a different type of meditation than we normally think of. Can you talk a little bit about what that is and how it connects to happiness, compassion, and not being overwhelmed?

Yeah, yeah. So this is, it's a practice that's basically, it's called meta or loving kindness, which I, I, I wish there were better terms for this stuff because especially scientific minded people can be like, this sounds really cheap.

Like a loving kindness meditation is what we're doing.

Yeah, you're not gonna lose your tenure at Yale if you say that too much. Yeah, they didn't do the branding right. But what this meditation is, is it's a practice where you're trying to exercise your compassion muscles. Functionally what you do is you sit, you know, and I do the same thing. Sit, close your eyes in a nice quiet space. And you think about the people in your life you really care about and you just extend them kindness and compassion. One way of doing it is to just, you know, think of a person and think, may you, that person, be happy. May you be safe. May you care for yourself joyfully. Just extend these kind of positive things. And the goal is to kind of feel what it feels like to do that. Some people describe kind of having a warmth in their chest. Some people don't feel anything, but the key is to do this And the typical practice is you start with individuals that are really easy for you, like a kid or a pet sometimes is super easy for folks to extend kindness to. And then you kind of gradually work up to folks that are harder and harder, that annoying coworker. Go slow and get there. You also have to put yourself into the mix at some point. And for some folks, extending compassion to themselves is easy. Sometimes that's hard. But the idea what the research shows is that there's amazing effects of this practice where it basically is building up your muscle of compassion. and allowing you to turn it on and off really systematically so that if you kind of need to have this other oriented emotion, you can turn it on. And the research also shows that the emotion of compassion is interestingly different than the emotion of empathy. So empathy is really kind of feeling other people's pain. But if you're constantly taking on other people's pain, you can get really burnt out, which is especially true for people who are first responders or health care professionals. Yeah. Especially in this time of COVID-19, you know, if you're experiencing the suffering of these people who are, you know, dying alone on ventilators, like, that's gonna burn you out really fast. Whereas if the emotion is compassion, which kind of like gratitude a little bit is like other oriented. It's like, let me sacrifice myself so I can really make sure you're gonna be healthy and safe. It turns out that people who practice these kinds of people in healthcare who experience compassion rather than empathy end up burning out less. So this loving kindness meditation is used now as an intervention to prevent compassion fatigue and burnout among healthcare professionals. There's also wonderful evidence that people who are expert practitioners at this technique, like say Buddhist monks who do this training for hours a day, there's work suggesting that if you look in areas of the brain that feel other people's pain and feel other people's compassion, they can turn it on and off almost linearly. So you can give them instructions like feel 40% compassion for the people in this sad video and you can see their brain response titrating linearly. this is some work by Tanya Singer and her colleagues. So it's a really powerful practice and I think it's useful during COVID-19 for a couple reasons. One is even if we're not first responders, a lot of us are taking care of people, you know, who require some help, right? You know, like kids in our house, you know, who we're experiencing the compassion fatigue of teachers for the first time or elderly relatives who need our care, people who are actually sick. We also need to extend some compassion to ourselves. I think one of the strangest things about this time is that a lot of us are just beating ourselves up, you know, like we're not, you know, we lost our job or we're not doing well at the work we do have or we're not really great parents or we're not cooking as healthy during this time or we're not, you know, like-- Being productive or-- Being productive, right? Like, you know, we're not at our max. And I think, you know, it's one thing to kind of feel that way, but it's another to like beat yourself up. You know, like if you had a compassionate friend, they would be like, dude, give yourself the benefit of the doubt. Like we're in a global pandemic, like chill, right? But we forget that we can extend that kind of compassion to ourselves. And there's evidence that this practice, in addition to kind of helping you not kind of burn out when you're dealing with other people's issues, can also help you not burn out as much when.

You'Re kind of taking care of yourself too. We know that it's more important than ever to take care of ourselves. And we also know there's a feedback loop between our bodies and brains, which is why mindset and behavior are so powerful for creating the reality we desire. Deciding to focus on your emotional health as much as your physical health will have big payoffs for your wellness and happiness throughout life. If you'd like to learn more about how to promote happiness in your life, I encourage you to check out Dr. Hyman's full-length conversation with Laurie Santos. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider sharing it or leaving us a comment below. Thanks for tuning in to this mini.

Episode of the Doctor's Pharmacy.