#42: Laurie Santos & The Happiness Lab: Exploring The Science Behind Happiness

Come on this journey with me each week when you join me, we are going to chase down our goals, overcome adversity, and set you up for a better tomorrow.

I'm ready for my close up.

Hi, and welcome back. I'm so glad you're here. You have no idea how exciting it is for me, truly. It's really kind of ridiculous how excited I get, but it's true. It's real. Keeping it real for you today. In the spirit of keeping it real, I had this big plan for my week. Always on Sundays. I sit down, I map out the week. I do it for my son and his school, his tests, his games, et cetera. And then I do it for me and what I want to accomplish, what is potentially out there. I take my to do list from the prior week, I go through to see if there's anything still pending, anything that I need to follow back up on. I really try not to let balls drop. And it's just a good exercise for me. Sundays, just the night that I or the afternoon that. I really like to get on top of everything and have that plan. Granted, the plan changes. Oh, my gosh, the plan does change. So it was so funny. There was two big things. Well, one really big thing I have to share with you. First, I wrote my second book, and I did that over the past year. And I did it in different waves, like when I was. Which is so different than my first book, Confidence Creator, which I forced myself to sit down right when I got fired and just write every day. I did it differently this time. I don't think there's a right or wrong way for anyone to do it. But, you know, this time I would. If I was feeling the vibe, like I wanted to write, I would sit down and write. And then I might not write for two months. And then I was getting my hair bleached blonde, which means a lot of hours in a chair, and I said, you know, why don't I write right now? So it was just a different approach this time. Bottom line is I got the book done, or at least semi done, and I thought, I want to do this with a partner. I don't want to do this alone. Alone is so much work. I want to try the traditional publishing route, even though I didn't do that my first time, just to see if I could compare, like, which situation's better. And everyone has different opinions on it, but I can't speak to it because I hadn't done it yet. So I googled who is Rachel Hollis's agent? Cuz she's the biggest in the personal development game right now. I find the woman online, I get her email address, I send her a pitch on me. She comes back to me and says, no, you're not the right fit for me. However, you are probably the right fit for my partner. My partner skews heavier on the business side and I don't. So she connected me to her partner. This is probably six months ago. We hit it off and she said, yes, send me a proposal. Well, I said, I don't know, I have a book. I don't have a book proposal. Hello, rookie author Heather. And she said, okay, why don't you talk to this guy Peter? He's done a lot of book proposals. I think that you will enjoy working with him. Great. So I reach out to Peter, we begin working together, I hire him, and before you know it, we have a book proposal. I sent it off to her. This is probably September of last year. It's a long process. Writing the book proposal has actually taken me more effort, time and work than writing the book. Which is so weird. I didn't know that would be the case. I don't know if that's the case for everyone. Definitely was for me. It's really different. Okay, so anyhow, not going to kill you too much about the whole writing world, but which is even bizarre. I am an author and bizarre. I'm even talking to you about this because I never ever saw myself this way. I always saw myself as a sales leader and in corporate America. And now here I am sitting at my kitchen table recording my show and talking about writing books and book proposals.

Holy cow.

I'm still shocked about this. Okay, I get the book proposal over to her and you know, she comes back with, wow, you need a lot of work on this. Your marketing and sales section is amazing. Shocker. That's my expertise. So that was good. You know, she said, we get the why you? But she said, I actually don't like the chapter summaries that you've done. I don't, I don't see the key takeaways. I don't see this from a perspective that I can definitely sell this. You need to refine this. Well, when I heard that, and it was in September, it was August or September of last year, I had my TED Talk was coming up and I just thought, you know what, I got to tune this out right now. Shut this down. I put the book proposal on a back burner. I did not want to jump into something else when I needed to focus intently on my TED Talk because I really wanted to kill it. So I put it on a back burner and forgot about it initially. And then about a month ago, I got a DM from one of my listeners, one of, one of you saying, hey, what's up with the second book? When will it be out? And I thought, oh, my gosh. I literally put this proposal on a shelf and haven't dusted it off. I gotta get on this. So I appreciate when you guys remind me of things that I need to be working on because it really got my attention. I immediately jumped right back on. I got a hold of Peter, we reworked the proposal, and within two weeks we had a new version done, brought it back to Jill, the agent, and she came back with me. Hey, this is really coming along nicely. However, I'd really like it to be from the vantage point of the reader. And I'd like you to retool the beginning of the proposal, which now we're six months after the last time we were reworking this together. She had different thoughts on it versus how she had seen it last time. But she did say the work that we did on the chapter summaries, the key takeaways, et cetera. She loved it. Okay, great progress. Anyhow, right now I'm sitting on version nine of the book proposal. Still has not been approved yet. But I believe that this next one that we send into her will be. I'm just waiting on Peter to get back with me. So that's just to give you a little insight into the work that goes into a book proposal. Again, this is my first one I've ever done. It's really arduous, but. But hopefully well worth it. Hopefully we make enough money off the book deal that I say, happy to write 10 versions of any book proposal. Okay, so that was there going into this week. I felt that was my number one goal, getting the proposal approved by Jill and getting out to pitch the publishing houses together. Cause that's a new and exciting experience for me, however it sails. So I feel really confident, you know, hopping on a plane and going with her to these meetings to pitch the.

The.

The book for a book deal. Come to find out, Peter is swamped right now. Had prior commitments this week, and the book proposal is getting delayed a little bit, even though I had everything done on Friday. And to him, you know, I have to respect that he had other commitments previously. And so we're going to wait now. Hopefully by the end of this week we'll have it done so we can send it into Jill, get it approved, and then see what those next steps are. So I'm learning as I go and trying to work with the people that I've, I've picked and hoping that this process can accelerate because it's dragging a little bit right now. So that big thing I was waiting for this week didn't happen, however, so interesting on social media and wow, thank goodness for social media. Somebody had posted about my show and ironically I was speaking at the University of Miami Law School last week and my good friend is the instructor and, and after the class we were outside talking and she said, hey, did you see my friend posted about your show? And I said, no, I didn't. Well, I went home and saw that this person had an extremely high position at a company that represents talent. And I have been, as you know, for sure, I've been wanting to get my book made into a movie. I've been, I have so many different ideas around a TV show, a Netflix special special around empowering others. And so I DM'd him asking if he could connect me to someone, which he did. And this was not on the plan for the week. So, and I'm sharing this just to I want you to be hopeful because I want me to be hopeful because we never know what's happening next. And this is such a great example of that. So I sent him a DM and he wrote back immediately, hey, yeah, would love to help. I will connect you to the woman in charge of that. And so by Monday, this thing that I had not planned on, I now had a meeting for. And the meeting went great. And I don't know where it's going to go yet, but that was something that wasn't on my radar, wasn't on my to do list, wasn't even there. And it all happened because I created content that someone found online on social media. They consumed it, liked it, and posted about it. And I replied and so you know, it's about showing up, putting yourself out there, creating content and responding to people when they do post about you, message about you. You know, I always like to retweet, repost on instastory and share on LinkedIn. Cause you just never know whose attention you might get. But again, back to I try to plan everything out. And every week I am constantly reminded that my plans never turn out the way that I think they are. The big moments that I'm hinging on don't happen. However, sometimes really amazing things do show up. Okay, so that's kind of the craziness so far this week and we're very early in on the week, so who knows what's going to happen the rest of this week. I'm actually very excited to see, hoping the proposal gets done. Okay, So I get a message yesterday from a friend of mine from back in the media business and he's gone out on his own and has his own agency now. And he said, hey, I really appreciate if you would look over an email that I'm going to be sending out to solicit business. I said, yeah, of course, I'm happy to. He sends me this email that was completely about him, about his track record of success, about the businesses he's grown, about him, him, him, him. And all I could think of, I was trying to put myself in the shoes of the prospective clients that he's trying to close is I would delete that email if somebody sent it to me. So I got right back to him and I said, whoa, my friend, no, no and no. Send this to no one because you're not going to get an answer anyways. They're going to delete it. It, first of all was so long, it's going via email, which so much email goes to junk email or clutter and never gets seen anyway. And it's all about you. So this is what I suggested to him and I suggest to you, and I suggest to myself too, when we make it about the other person, they're more inclined to listen, they're more inclined to read the message, read the email, or, you know, at least pay attention for a moment. But when we're making it about you and they don't even know who you.

Are, why would they care?

Right? So my suggestion to him was make it all about them. Research them online, find out how their business is growing, find out some of their challenges, find out something about their industry or about them and lead with that.

Lead with that.

You did your homework, lead with that, you did your due diligence and, and how you're going to help them reach that next milestone, that next goal that they have, but make it all about them. Hey Bob, I saw that your industry has been in decline in the last 12 months and I know how challenging that is with you having just opened your new location in Miami or whatever it is, but, you know, get specific about that. I've got a million dollar idea that I have successfully implemented for clients just like you and I feel like this timing is, is ideal with the challenge you're facing. Can I come in for 15 minutes to share the idea? With you, keep it short, be brief, make it about them, do your homework, and offer a solution for their problem. And that's really one of the things that I do when I'm looking to get big guests is. And I just sent out an email, actually, to a huge guest I'm really excited to get. And he said yes. And I can't. I'm not gonna tell you who it is yet, but I sent this blind email all about him. Why I'm such a fan of his, how I'm super excited for him, how I think he's so funny and sarcastic and, you know, noted different times I've seen him that I really grabbed value and how I loved his book and, you know, I made it all about him. And in the end was my ask. You know, I'd so appreciate, you know, unfortunately, the whole world doesn't know about you yet, and I'm on a mission to help change that. So I would so appreciate if you could give me 40 minutes of your time for an interview, which he said yes to. But again, we've gotta separate ourselves. And one of the ways to do that is to recognize the greatness in other people. People love that. Who doesn't love that? And I always go back to this one woman who interviewed me for her podcast. The way she got me, she sent me private videos to my DM on Instagram, and we weren't connected. And one day I just saw I was getting all these videos and it was her, and it was just her in her face saying, I'm such a.

Fan of yours, Heather, and it would.

Mean the world to me.

And it was so cute and different and nice that I felt compelled to say, yes, I would love to. And actually, she's become a friend. And now when I go to California, I make time to see her. And it's just so interesting that there are an unlimited amount of ways that we can get people's attention, that we can reach them in a different and unique manner. And when we do that coming through as our real selves, people sense that, they feel it, and that's when you start connecting those dots. So just don't forget we're all in sales. Whether you're an author writing a book, you need to sell said books, Whether you're a vacuum cleaner salesman going door to door, clearly in sales, or you're a lawyer. And I talked about this at, um, this past week. Part of a lawyer's job is to sell people on their services and bring new business in. You know, so when you think of a lawyer, you think of someone with a red pen out, you know, going through documents or going into court and arguing a jury or presenting to a jury. But really none of that starts until they land the client and everyone's in sales. It doesn't matter what business you're in. For me, I've got to sell people. Coming on as a guest onto my show, we all have to sell ourselves. And I really believe when you make it about the other person, when you find the greatness in them and share that with them and then solve a problem they have or potentially have, that's when the dots start connecting and that's when we start bringing it all together. So hopefully that helps. Hopefully that helps you this week in your business and your life and whatever it is that you're trying to sell or accomplish. I hope that that insight might help you connect those dots.

All right.

And I'm so excited for my guest this week because it's all about happiness. It's all about positivity. And when we're in a better, more positive mindset and an attitude and outlook, things start really clicking for us. Momentum starts picking up, and we bring some sunshine and brightness to the world. So I'm really hoping to do that for you. And hang tight. You're about to get excited.

Welcome back to Creating Confidence. I'm really excited for you to meet my guest, Lori Santos. She's a professor of psychology and the head of Silliman College at you got it, Yale University. After observing a disturbing level of unhappiness and anxiety among her students, she began teaching a course entitled Psychology and the Good Life, which quickly became the most popular course in Yale's history and has also reached over 350,000 people from all.

Over the world through an online version on Coursera.

Although she's now best known as a happiness expert, Santos research explores the much broader question of what makes the human mind unique and often includes comparing the cognitive capacities of non human animals to humans. Oh, my gosh. I have so many questions. Thank you so much for being here, Laurie.

Thanks for having me.

This is so exciting. So, first of all, you just launched a new podcast launched September 17th of this year, the Happiness Lab. And that's essentially very similar to the course you've been teaching with great success at Yale.

I mean, so we have a sort of short online version of the class I teach at Yale. But, like, you know, being real, not everybody is going to sign up for a Yale class online and have time to, like, you know, take the class and do the quizzes and so on. The Happiness Lab is a podcast version of trying to give all these insights about the science of well being to people who are busy but, you know, have a half hour or so to listen to a podcast.

And you have your doctorate in psychology.

And this is really where the fundamentals.

For your course and the podcasts are stemming from.

That's right.

Yeah.

It's really thinking about this question of what does science say about how we can achieve well being. You know, there's lots of different kinds of approaches, but the scientific approach really says, okay, scientifically, what do we know about what causally makes people happier? What are happy people really doing? And what can you steal from what happy people are doing, put into effect in your own life to become a little bit happier? And so it's a scientific approach. It's kind of not a lot of woo or that kind of stuff. It's really like, scientifically, what does it say? And I feel like it's a cool approach because it resonates with a lot of people who want to do something to be happier, but they don't want to dive into the self help section or they want empirical answers. These are the kind nerds, like the people I hang out with who really want, like, what does the science say about what we can be doing better?

And what drove you? I know that we said that you saw a lot of anxiety in the university within the students.

Was that really what pushed you to do this?

Yeah, about four years ago, I started this new role at Yale. So before I was just kind of a normal professor, like up there in front of the classroom. And I saw students that way, by.

The way, a normal Yale professor.

The normal Yale professor, you know, as.

One does exceptional, but okay.

But it's kind of, you know, like the stereotypical version. Like, I don't know if it's this big lecture class in front of some podium. Like, I didn't get to know students or student life very much. But four years ago, I took on this new role at Yale where I became one of their heads of college. And so this requires some explanation. So Yale's kind of like Hogwarts in Harry Potter where it's got. It's like Gryffindor and Slytherin. It's got these, like, colleges within a college. And so I became head of the Yale version of one of those, Silliman College. But that means I live on campus with students. Like, my house is in the middle of all of their dorms. Like, I eat with them in the Dining hall. And that was a completely new experience because now I'm seeing students up close and personal and I wasn't expecting what I saw. What I was seeing was this so called student mental health crisis where, you know, not just at Yale, but nationally, we see cases where like 40% of students report being too depressed to function. Over 60% say that they're anxious a lot of the time. So it was really scary what I was seeing.

Does that have something to do with the generational issue or does that stem.

From a lot of different things? Technology?

And the honest answer is we actually don't know where it's coming from. I think technology plays a huge role. This is something I see where my students, rather than talking to their friends, are sitting there with big bows, headphones on, you know, Skyping with somebody, and then they report that, you know, 70% of them feel lonely a lot of the time. I think it stems from, you know, the kinds of pressures that students face of trying to get into a place like Yale. You know, all my students were probably depressed and anxious, many of them on the way getting here because of the pressures they face, feeling like they needed to get into a place like Yale. We can only look to the College of Student Admissions scandal and see the kinds of lengths that people are willing to go to get their students into school. And so I think we're facing all kinds of new pressures. But what's crazy is how much the mental health crisis has changed just in the last decade. So there's research suggesting that we have twice the number of young people who are depressed than we did 10 years ago, like twice the number. We've doubled the number of young people who are in serious psychological distress in like less than years, which is really scary.

But can I ask you this? So to me, we were just talking about age and whatnot. So I'm 45, and when I was younger, nobody talked about this. I might have been depressed in college, but no one asked me how I was feeling. So I wonder, what is that Delta from? If the same conversations were happening 20 years ago versus now, is it more similar or am I way off?

Yeah, I mean, I think this is a challenge, I think, for social scientists to figure out, like, how much is this a real change in what's happening in terms of people's mental health and how much is a change in reporting. It's just easier to admit that you're depressed now than it was, say, in the 70s or maybe even in the 90s. The trick comes when we see such rapid change in 10 years. Was it that tough to admit you were depressed and anxious in 2009? Probably not that much different than right now. And we're still seeing twice the number of individuals. So some of it might be reporting and stigma is less. But I think a lot of it is a real change and the kind of climate that we see on college campuses and even beyond.

But you Even bringing up 2008, 2009 was the recession, right. So I would think more people would be depressed back then than would be today.

Yeah, I mean, that's the striking thing. And particularly when you see these kinds of levels in like an Ivy League school.

Right.

Like in some ways these students have kind of hit the life lottery. I mean, for me, right, like they're 19, they're at Yale University, you know, they're healthy, they have their whole life ahead of them. And you get, you know, so many of them reporting these like horrible mental health statistics. Another really scary one is that over 10% of college students nationally report seriously considering suicide in the last year. Like more than one in ten you take your college classroom and one out of every ten of them is seriously contemplating suicide. Like something's wrong, something big is wrong.

So you've taken this initiative on and you not only are you teaching, you taken science to back up specific steps that your students can take to create more happiness, which obviously has made this course such a success and now is creating this amazing podcast. So I want to get into some of these specifics so we can share with everyone some of the keys that you're providing for the students, our listeners, to take away to impact their lives and create positive change.

Yeah, and that's one of the great things from the science is, you know, you might think like, oh, I'm just going to learn all these scientific findings and things. But really what the science teaches us is that happy people are happy because they just engage in a suite of behaviors that all of us can copy that seem to have a causal impact on your well being levels. In other words, it's not like happy people are like genetically born happy or they have special circumstances. Like, you know, they're all millionaires and live in wonderful houses and things. Like happy people are happy because of how they behave. And so if you're not feeling so happy, if you just copy the behaviors of some of these happy folks, you too in theory can increase your well being levels.

But even beyond theory, because you've studied it and it works.

That's right. It's like, you know, study after study shows how easy it is to change your happiness levels through just like some simple changes in behavior. And that's what we prescribed our students. You know, the typical, like Ivy League class has homework that's like, you know, a quiz or read this paper and so on. Our homework was what we called rewirements and that they were, it's kind of a play on requirements. It's this idea that you can rewire your own habits and your own behaviors to increase more well being. And so students were literally prescribed these behaviors that we know help them. So to take time for social connection, like students were prescribed today, call someone you haven't talked to in a long time or just strike up a conversation with the barista at the coffee shop. Like, try to make a new social connection. And that comes from lots of research suggesting that first of all, happy people tend to be more social. They tend to talk to more people and just be around people more often. But more, there's research suggesting if you kind of force people to be more social than they want to be, it actually improves their mood. One of my favorite studies that looked at this was a study by this researcher, Nick Epley, who's a professor in Chicago at Chicago Business School. And he forced commuters to talk to the passengers next to them on a commuter train. So he does this on the L train in Chicago. He has people who are commuting. They get a little $10 Starbucks gift card for participating. He says, in this study, I want you to spend your train ride talking to the person next to you. And really don't just talk about the weather. Really try to make a social connection. So that's kind of one group of subjects. The other group, he says, during this train ride, don't to anybody, really. Just try to enjoy your solitude as much as possible.

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What do people predict? Well, people predict that this act of talking to strangers is going to be just, like, maximally awkward and super weird and just like, you know, I'm sure their faces fall like, are you kidding? You want me to talk to someone next to me? But what really happens is when they engage in this behavior, it feels really good. Like, they report that it's much more positive than they expect. And this is true for extroverts, Android for introverts. And so that gets to like one of the themes of this podcast, which is there's super simple things we can do to feel better. You know, strike up a conversation with somebody on your commute. But we don't predict that those things are going to work. Like, one of the challenges to engaging in these habits is, like, when we think about it, you're like, maybe for some people, but not for me. Like, I'm not going to do the talking to strangers thing. But it turns out all of those things will work better than we expect. And so one of the big themes is that a challenge is, like, our minds are lying to us about the kinds of things that will work. You know, I think, like, oh, just like, you know, scrolling through my Instagram feed for the rest of this train ride is going to feel great. Turns out that feels kind of crummy. I predict, like, talking to this random stranger who I've never met next to me is going to be super awkward and weird. Turns out it's actually way more positive than we think.

That's so surprising to me because I. For two decades, I've been traveling for work every week, and I always throw in my earbuds and either read a book or start working on my computer for fear that someone might talk my ear off and be annoying. And, I mean, I totally shut down when I'm on flights. And now I have no choice, but I'm going to have to. I'm on a flight. I'm going to make myself talk to the person next to me. I got to try.

Well, this is.

I mean, but this is. The challenge is like, I have to make myself do it, too. Like, my. I know the science. I mean, I've literally read these papers, these empirical papers, and my intuitions don't change. Like, whenever I'm on a flight, I sit down. You know, I'm like, all right. I know it's going to make me happier to talk to this person, but really seems kind of weird. But then every time I do it afterwards, you're like, actually, that was better than I. Than I thought. And it's the kind of thing where you get a lot of pushback. Like, I talked about these results once when I was on television and Twitter just started, like, flaming me. People were like, talk to strangers. Are you crazy? Or, like, didn't your mama teach you anything? Like, this lady's crazy. She's gonna get shot. And it was like, I think people have incredibly strong intuitions. What the science shows is that some of them are just wrong. So even your listeners who heard that and just made this face of like, I am so not talking to the person on the train. Try it, you know, baby steps. Or try, you know, talk to someone in a coffee shop. Just, like, strike up a casual conversation and then take time to be mindful, to be like, well, was that good? Did that feel better? My guess is it might kind of just bump your mood up more than you expect.

Well, it's also an interesting point that you brought up, which is somewhat questioning these things that we were told or taught when we were younger, which we just accept as that is the way it is. You're not supposed to talk to strangers. You're supposed to focus on you and pay attention to what's happening around you. But maybe that was true when you were 3 and 4 and 5 years old. But now as an adult, maybe you're better equipped to actually engage with others.

And again, it's, you know, we're not saying, like, you know, walk into the middle of, like, you know, Central park at 2 in the morning and talk to a stranger. Like, the person we're suggesting is, like, you know, the guy who's next to you on the flight. Like, that person's probably not a psychopath or some, you know, crazy person. Like, that person's probably just, you know, another person who's going somewhere interesting. Especially people who are on your commute to work. You know, in Nick Epley's study, you know, these are people who lived in the same Chicago neighborhood as the other people in the study and are going into the city. You actually probably have more in common with these folks than you sometimes think. So it's not just talk to any old stranger or people who, you know, clearly have some mental illness or something like that. It's talk to, you know, the people around you in your spaces. We forget just those little kind of happiness moments can feel better than we tend to expect.

All right, I'm on it.

So I'm going to speak to a stranger this week. It's going to make you happy and hopefully me too.

Okay.

I want to dive into your second episode, which is really interesting to me personally, because it's this concept that we mispredict what certain situations and occurrences might, how that impact might result, how we feel and might be negative or positive. And I thought that was really interesting that for me, I thought getting fired would be horrific, life changing, negative event. It definitely was in that moment. However, it's played out differently over the last two years. But we're definitely trained to respond to certain situations very negatively.

That's right. And I think we're constantly. I mean, this is just the thing our human minds do.

Right?

We're constantly making predictions about things that will make us happy and things that won't. Right. You know, so if I ask you, would you rather have a root canal or a nice vacation to Paris? Like, you can do that simulation really fast. Like you're gonna go with nice vacation to Paris. So we get the valence right. You know, being fired is yucky. But what we get wrong are two things. First, we get wrong the magnitude of how bad or how good things are gonna be. You know, we think getting fired is gonna be like 100 on the bad scale. But it's not immediately as bad as we think. But the bigger thing that we get wrong is the duration of how we're going to feel bad. Because sometimes when we think about bad things, we think that's going to feel bad forever or for years or for much longer than it actually is going to feel bad. And that's because we forget that we as humans are pretty resilient. You know, like once you get fired, you immediately start looking for other jobs, other options, new things open up, and it's never kind of as bad as we think. And so from the psychologist perspective, it's kind of fascinating, like, why are we so bad at predicting? But from like a real person perspective, this matters a lot because we make plans based on our predictions. You know, if you were thinking about, should I leave this job, you know, should I take this risk that might get me fired? You might choose not to do those things and stick in a job because you think, well, if I got fired, you know, the world would be over. Like, definitely can't do that. But in practice, we're much more resilient than we think. And that means we're not taking the risks we should be taking. We're not taking the kinds of chances we should be taking. We're not getting out of situations that are bad because we think that transition might be worse. But in some ways it's not. Just not as bad as we expect. In some ways it can be fantastic. It can be life changing in a positive way. We just don't realize that.

So that's so interesting. I interviewed Sarah Blakely last week who happens to be a billionaire inventor of Spanx, and that was her number one business tip, is take massive risks. Nothing massive and huge and successful happens unless you take that leap. However, we're also trained not to do.

It out of fear. Yeah.

And I think the fear is one side of the coin. The other thing is that we sometimes put the positive things in the same way. Right? We're sometimes fearful because we're like, well, we have to go after the perfect salary or the perfect relationship and so on. We put these positive things out there with, like a huge thing too. Like, it has to go perfectly or else, you know, I'm gonna be miserable and so on. I think that's really critical as well. It's not just that we're avoiding the bad things. Sometimes we put these positive things in our life on such a high pedestal that we never reach them. And that can be potentially problematic too. It's not just about being kind of going for the risky thing and going for the awesome thing. Sometimes if we don't get that, it's going to be better than we expect.

So it's lowering expectations on those really perfect idealing, you know, with how our life could be this amazing perfect way and then kind of pulling off this fear on the other side of how bad it could actually be somewhere in the middle is probably more realistic.

Yeah. I think that the main takeaway is that, you know, our life circumstances, both good and bad, don't impact us as much as we think. And that means that getting fired, it's going to be bad for a while, but only for a while. You're just going to get better from it. But the flip side is that perfect marriage that you think is out there, that perfect relationship or that perfect job, it might be good for a while, but you're also going to return back to baseline from the good things. And that means we can't keep putting our life on hold till these wonderful things come about. Like, you know, life is going to turn back to Life, even when this thing you've dreamed of occurs, and that's good, too. The way that often plays out is I think people kind of have these expectations about how certain life events will go. So they think, when I get married, I'll be happy, or when I move to a new city, I'll be happy. And then they're lucky enough that that happens, and they're not as happy as they think. So they think something went wrong. They think, you know, I predicted I was going to be, you know, 100 happy, like when I got into this new relationship. And I'm happy, but I'm not as happy as I thought. Maybe something's wrong with this relationship. And it's like, no, something was bad, Something was wrong with your prediction. Like, that's what went wrong. And so if you kind of understand how the mind works, you can make more accurate predictions. And that causes you to be, you know, less kind of overachieving in ways you don't need to be for the good stuff, but it causes you to be more resilient in the face of some of the bad stuff, too.

So what is that, self awareness?

It's partly self awareness. It's. It's in the kind of nerdy scientific parlance. It's what my colleague Dan Gilbert calls kind of overcoming your impact bias. Impact bias is this idea that you think things are going to have this much bigger impact than you think. And so you can kind of overcome that just by simulating, like, okay, what's really going to happen if I move to a new city? Like, you know, that'll be great for a little while, but, like, there's still going to be laundry. You know, there's still going to be bad weather. Like, you kind of put it in perspective so you get a better set of predictions and the same thing, you know, if something bad happens, you know, I'm going to be fired. You're thinking, like, oh, my God, my life is over. It's like, no, if you get fired, there's still gonna be sunny days, you're still gonna have your friends. Like, there's still, you know, mundane things kind of continue. And so what you get is a more accurate set of predictions which allow you to make choices that really lead to your, well, being a little bit more efficiently.

Interesting. So you have some very cool guests on this, on the season and some of your episodes. Michelle Kwan is one of your guests, Correct?

Yeah. Which is so humbling and crazy to get to talk to Michelle Kwan. I mean, when I started this journey, I'm good at, like, knowing the different signs of happiness. You know, that's what the class was about. But when I thought about the podcast, I thought, like, I really want to meet people who are putting these things into practice, like, in their own lives. Like, who are the people who are getting it right? You know, so many of us are getting it wrong. Like, who can we really learn from? And Michelle Kwan is really a great example of this, I think. She obviously is an incredibly successful figure skater and so on, but by certain standards in the field, the only way you measure success is, say, by getting a gold medal. She never really made it there. She got her silver when she was release slated to win the gold and got a bronze later. But what does that do to an athlete like her? She kind of constantly craving this thing she didn't get. And it turns out that even though lots of silver medalists do that, turns out some silver medalists are often some of the most unhappy people because they kind of miss this one goal that's out there. But she never kind of fell for that. And that was in part because, turns out Michelle Kwan was really good at paying attention to the journey. She was really good at finding happiness in the small moments. And I love telling her story in this podcast because, again, her story is not one about being this elite athlete. It's one about taking pleasure in the small things and kind of paying attention to the journey and not the final outcome.

That sounds so easy to do. I personally find that very hard, you know, to find this amazing time in the journey. Well, I have these goals that I want to achieve, and every time I achieve one of those milestones, I'm off. You know, I'm going crazy. I'm so happy. So to find that happiness in those daily struggles, I find really challenging. How do we change that to make that a more enjoyable experience? Experience?

Well, part of it is just to kind of be mindful of it. I mean, Michelle talks a lot about this in her episode where she talks about, like, paying attention to the simple things in the grind that she enjoyed. You know, paying attention to, like, how her skates sounded on ice as she was going, and making sure that every time she looked in that Olympic stadium, she paid attention to what it felt like to, like, skate over the Olympic rings and see the color under her feet. Right. But beyond the just kind of the moment, she was really paying attention to the grind. Like, she had parts of it that she liked you know, every day, you know, hearing her tell her story, it doesn't sound super awesome to like, get up really early and go out to the ice every single day. But she was like, oh, there are parts of that part that I really like too. And I think we can forget this. You know, oftentimes we have these goals for ourselves, whether they be in career or personal life, and we kind of get obsessed with the goal. But often there's stuff along the way we could dig too. We just have to find better ways to remember that we dig it and kind of invite, enjoy it over time.

That's an excellent point.

But it is very hard.

Yeah, it's not easy.

Yeah, it's retraining. So I also like that you had Michael Phelps coach on your show as well.

Yeah. And so that was for a special episode about whether or not it makes sense to think positive. I think this is another spot where sometimes self help gurus can lead us astray. You know, there's a lot of this idea like, well, if only you think positive, everything will work out and it'll happen swimmingly. But if you really look at the way some of, like the athletes play best, it's not often by thinking positively and imagining these positive futures. Like, sometimes we get really ahead in life by imagining the obstacles, you know, making a good plan for when things come up. And so Michael Phelps Colts told us a story of one particular race in question where Michael was swimming in a gold medal matchup and his goggles flew off in the middle of this, which would probably throw off even the most elite of athletes. But Michael was fine. He swam it perfectly, even won the gold medal and made a world record time. And he was like, really upset. And his coach was like, well, how did you do that? What did you do? And it turned out that Michael had gotten so good at the typical imagine the positive scenarios where you kind of imagine the perfect race. He got so bored with that, he started imagining terrible races. You know, what would happen if I, you know, missed my dive time and I dive like a little bit, I jumped in a little bit late. Or what would happen if my goggles flew off? Or what would happen if I hurt my foot when I first dove in. And he would actually practice how he would get through these bad scenarios. And this is critical. It's not just like ruminating about these bad things. It's like, if obstacle, how would I solve it? And it turns out that what the science suggests is that that kind of goal setting, that kind of goal setting where you're really paying attention to the obstacles is actually really powerful. It might even be be more powerful than Just these positive fantasies, because it allows you to figure out whatever you want to do to ground it in the gritty reality of how it's actually going to play out. And so in that episode we talked about, okay, how can you apply this to say, you know, I don't know, going to the gym more often or getting ahead in your workplace and so on? If you just think about the positive outcome, you know, that's fun and you can kind of fantasize, but you don't get necessarily get any insight into, okay, what is holding me back? Like, what are the inner and outer obstacles that I'm really going to need to get through if I actually want to achieve this? And once you start thinking of those, you can say, oh, yeah, there is that obstacle for me going to the gym, which is like, you know, I like to sleep in. It's like, okay, how can I fight that? You know? Or there's that obstacle of, like, I got to make my kids lunches earlier if I'm going to do that. Okay, how can I fight that? And so thinking about purely the positive outcome doesn't work as well as we think. And so Michael Phelps, in addition to being, you know, crazy elite athlete, which is amazing physical form, he also mentally kind of had this insight about, you know, sometimes thinking positive doesn't work as well as we think.

Do you think there's. Because I personally, anytime I'm doing something really big, that I'm going to that next level, I haven't, you know, gone there yet. In my mind, I go through. It's gonna go great. I play music that I is like my theme song that gets me so fired up that I know it's gonna go great. I start to seeing it go great in my mind, and I always visualize that, you know, days leading up to the event, so that when I get there, I know it's going to go great. When I walk on stage or, you know, there's. I'm not nervous. I'm not, you know, flipping out the way that maybe I would be if I hadn't seen it already played through. However, when you were talking about Michael Phelps, I thought to myself, the other thing I'm also playing through is I remember the first time I walked on stage and the AC went out and it was 110 degrees out, and people started sweating and complaining. And I also remember that when I'm going through that, I survived that, and I have people laughing, and that's still in my theme song. It's part of the images that come to my mind. So I guess I am always playing through that ideal situation, but I also play through the other challenges that I overcame. And maybe that's similar in some regards to that strategy that you just described.

That's right. And so, you know, if you only play through the perfect version of your talk, then when the AC goes out, you're like, wait, what should I do? What should I do? But if you add in those options, obstacles, then you can kind of see it. It's not so much that you want to copy the worst thing ever happening, but you're kind of like, oh, if those. If this goes down, I'll kind of automatically know what to do. And so you have the kind of perfect version, but also, like, if this goes badly, how am I going to fix this? And this is a technique that folks train on. In fact, in one of our episodes, we talked to a Navy SEAL who has told us she was, like, a planner in the seals, where she would, like, have literally had these tables filled with sand where they have these little kind of action figures and figure out, like, okay, what happens if the enemy comes this way? Or what happens if we're cut off and we can't get to our supplies? Like, they play through all these bad scenarios, and that way they know what to do as soon as it comes up. You know, they don't have to kind of figure it out on the fly. And so the advice would be, you know, as much as possible. Yes, imagine it going smoothly, but then add in these subtle little obstacles about how you're gonna kind of figure it out. And sometimes as you do that, as you do that imagining, you're like, oh, wait, I have to remember to put that into place. Mine, when I'm giving talks somehow, is often like, the shoes I'm wearing. You know, I'm, like, walking up to the stage. I'm like, wait a minute. That's like a step with a hole in it. If I have heels on, like, I'm gonna fall, you know.

Oh, yeah, because we all fall one day.

Because we all fall. Like, why do they have, you know, floorboards that have, like, big holes? But anyway. But the point is, like, that only came through imagining. Like, oh, wait, if that happens, then I just won't weigh feels or, you know, that's a silly example. But the point is that if you're not thinking of the obstacles, if you're not thinking of the real things in your way, it's really easy to just pretend they're not there. But if there's a real obstacle, it's not going away. So the more you can practice dealing with that, all the better.

But it's so funny that you just used the heel example, because I was walking out onto stage, I had my big heels on, and one of my shoes got caught and my foot came out, so my heel went flying. So it was just one of those fumble moments, grab a shoe and kept going. But, yeah, for sure about knowing that I've seen that movie before. I've gone through other obstacles before. It didn't. It didn't deter me.

That's right. That's right. Whereas if you'd never, you know, if you never even conceptualize that or even thought of that before, it might throw you off. But if you're like, nope, that's in my repertoire, and this is one of the beauties of being a human, right, is that, you know, our repertoire doesn't have to be every real experience of your hero falling off. You can just imagine it. And that was the power of Michael Phelps's approach. He just imagined these bad things happening, and it was as though his mind solved it. He had it in his kind of mental rolodeck of what to do when things go wrong without having had to go through that negative experience in real life.

That's great. I love that advice.

Thank you for sharing that. One of your episodes that I'm really interested in is about being around negative people, taking on negative people's feelings and. Or what is it like when you're around positive people? How much effect does that have on our happiness?

Much more than we think. I think we, you know, we often think that, you know, the people around us, we can choose to pay attention to them or not. But this episode really deals with the automatic contagion we get from other people. Like, we're literally catching other people's emotions, like the common cold. And I think we forget how powerful that can be and how much it's affecting us in our daily life. We hear from a researcher who did a study with Facebook on how much other people's emotions on Facebook are kind of contagiously affecting us. And the answer is much more than we think. It turns out if your feed has a bunch of negative posts in it, you're more likely to start posting negatively. Whereas if I engineer your feed to have a little bit more positive posts, you're going to end up posting more positively than yourself. And this is crazy, because this isn't like, you know, people around you in your workplace whose emotions you're catching. These are like randos Online and random advertisements that you're kind of picking up, you know, if they're powerful enough to affect our emotions, you know, what about people in our teams? Like, what about the people in our jobs and so on? And so the message of that episode is really not to kind of be, you know, sad about this and say, oh, God, I'm never going to interact with anyone again. So to protect my kind of emotional, like, register the message is that that means that we can have a much huger effect on the emotions of the people around us than we think. Because just as we're affected by other people, so too can we be the one that's the positive comment. In the middle of the meeting, we can sort of start what researchers call a positive affective spiral. You know, we can be the first step in other people catching our positive emotions. And if we don't pay attention, we can also be the, like, you know, the negative, nilly, as my, you know, kids around in school say, like, causing negativity in ways that we don't really expect either.

So this is interesting to me, especially with political season approaching. You know, there's so much negative ads around politics and just people being negative in regards about politics in general and opinions and whatnot. So is the strategy unfollow those people or, you know, how do you best protect yourself knowing that we're in that space?

Yeah, I think two things. I think one is knowledge is power, right? You know, and I think this, you know, I experienced this too myself, where, like, you know, sometimes I'll be like, oh, I have like a little break in email. You know, let me just hop on Twitter. And then I do that for 10 minutes and I leave feeling like, oh, my gosh, like, my chest is tense. Like, what's happened? And it's like, wait, I just caught that stuff, you know, and so next time I go on Twitter, I can go in there knowing, right? Like, you know, am I in a space where I can deal with this stuff right now or maybe I want to do something else for my break, right? A second thing you can do is to again, remember that you have control over it, right? You know, all that negative stuff is out there. But you can post a positive comment. You know, as I tell my students, you can share the wholesome meme, right? You can be a comment that's going to affect other people and in some ways, kind of just contributing in a positive way. Like, you can start changing the culture around. So we're not necessarily as trapped as we think by knowing a Little bit about how this works. We can kind of be the change that we want to see in our Twitter feeds, in our Instagram feeds, in our office, you know, wherever we are.

Be the change we want to see.

I love that.

So I'm interested in this. This caught my eye when I was going through your episodes, the Unhappy Millionaire. So, so many people. And I know you mentioned you touched on this briefly. Oh, if I had enough money, if I was living in that bigger house, my life would be happier. But in fact, that is not always the case.

Yeah, and this episode was really fun. We meet with this psychotherapist, Clay Cockrell, who's a psychotherapists for the insanely wealthy. So all his clients earn more than $50 million. And you might at first glance say, like, why do those folks need a therapist? Like, their life should be perfect. But it turns out not at all. You know, not only do they face the kind of mental health problems of the rest of us, they face their own very specific mental health problems, like kind of guilt, right? You know, they're sitting on $50 million, but they're not happy. And that's like, you know, what am I doing wrong? It's like a special form of guilt. You know, unlike us, you know, they can't fantasize about how awesome their life would be if they made $50 million because they have it and they're still kind of not there. They also face lots of social problems. It turns out, you know, they call it the 1% for a reason. You know, it's hard to relate when everybody you know isn't necessarily as rich as you. So that can also cause disconnection and guilt and so on. The main message of the episode is again, this idea that there's certain things that we put up there, like, if only I could get to that level of wealth, then I would be happy. But the research just suggests that that's simply not the case. It is the case that more money will make you happier if you are below the poverty line. You know, if you really can't put food on the table or a roof over your head, then yes, earning more is going to help. But for most middle class Americans, like, getting more just isn't going to help in the way we think. One of the estimates suggests that once you're earning about $75,000 in the US right now, even doubling or tripling your salary is just not going to have an effect on your well being on the ground. It's not going to decrease your stress. It's not going to increase your positive mood. We definitely don't expect that. You know, many of us really look forward to our annual, you know, bonus checks, thinking it's going to make us happy. Many of us pick our job with the one with the highest salary because we think that's going to influence our happiness. Though all of those things seem to be mistakes.

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Yeah, so I definitely chased a paycheck.

For the majority of my career and.

I'm definitely, you know, I'm the best poster kid for it. It did not pay off in the end. I didn't feel fulfilled. I didn't have a purpose driven life. And I was seeking more, but still almost addicted to that page. I love that. And I used to tell people I'm hand, I have golden handcuffs. I can't leave. I truly in my mind believed I couldn't leave. And I'm not saying it was easy getting fired and leaving and starting over.

It was hard.

However, I had closed my mind off to any, any other potential out there than that one I was living. And it's so easy to look back and see that now. And I see it in so many of my friends, past colleagues. Well, I'm not like you, Heather. I can't reinvent myself. And I'm like, what do you, wait a minute, what are you talking about? I was just like you two years ago. What do you mean? And it's frustrating to, you know, I'm starting to get on, on that other side. But to look back and see how those blinders we put on ourselves are really shocking.

And I love that you said you kind of get addicted to it, right? Because I think this is what we saw in the episode for some of these rich folks is they think I have $50 million. I'm not happy right now. What's wrong? It's like, well, I must not have enough money. Maybe once I get $100 million or maybe once I make super partner or something. You know, he, Clay talked about, you know, how, you know, he sees a lot of people who have like $500 million and they think, well, as soon as only I could get to a billion, if only could be a billionaire, then I'd be happy. And so they don't. These Rich folks who are unhappy don't generalize. Well, maybe it's not money. Maybe I need something else. Maybe I need meaning or a huge change. They just think, maybe I just don't have enough yet, which is, you know, really kind of jarring.

But I actually. I never made anywhere near $500 million or 50 million. So I'm not claiming that I did, but I sort of do understand that in that I did very well financially. And I would think, okay, if I could just get it, too, so I can take my son for a month to Europe. That was something we never did. Or if I can land the seats for the Super Bowl. You know, expensive things that are really. Those bucket lists. You know, I would think those things. We did go to the super bowl, and it was unbelievable and a great memory, but it only lasted for a shorter period of time. And I put a bigger value on how that would change my life or his life, maybe then it was really worth.

Yeah. And we also talk in that episode about sometimes these awesome experiences, even kind of these really unique experiences can be tough because they sometimes alienate you. You know, he talks about cases of, you know, people who get the front row seats at the Super Bowl. But then, you know, you go to your friend and, like, how do you talk with your friend? You know, it's like, kind of can alienate you from the normal person because not everybody is going to get those. And then that can make you feel guilty. And so it again, just gets back to this big problem that we have tough time predicting what's really going to make us happy. And we think material possessions, we think the kinds of things that money can buy are going to do it. By and large, they just don't work as well as we think they're going to work.

Yeah, I definitely. You got my vote on that one, sadly.

Okay, so what about choice overload? This is something that I've never heard of before.

Yeah. So choice overload kind of plays on another bias that we have, which is most of us think that the best way to happiness is to have lots of freedom of choice. You know, do you want just like, you know, three Starbucks drinks or like, 800,000 Starbucks drinks? Like, we think that, like, actualizing our preferences requires a lot of freedom of choice, like, from what we buy in terms of what we wear to what we eat and so on. But it turns out that in reality, that level of choice can sometimes make us feel crummy. Like, first of all, it can make us feel really overwhelmed. Right. Like, the act of, you Know, I feel like this even, you know, sometimes the act of like, you know, going to Starbucks, like, literally, where it's like, which size do you want? Do you want foam or venti or whatever? And you're like, ah, like, I just want a coffee to get out of here. Right. You know, same with, like, choice of clothes. Like, oh, my gosh, there's so many different styles and this and so on. And so we think more choice will make us feel better, but in practice, it's sometimes exhausting, and it also sometimes makes us feel crummy because even when we get an option, we, like, part of us is thinking like, ah, like, well, there were so many other styles. Like, maybe I would have liked this other one better. And so we think that we want to have as many choices as possible, but in practice, that's like, that sometimes makes us more miserable than we think. And in this episode, we learn from a woman, Courtney Carver, who is kind of like a lifestyle specialist who just decided to limit her choices. And she said she started this project called Project 333, where she only wears 33 items of clothing for three months. So she just cleans her closet out. There's only 33 things. And most people, when they hear that, think that is, you know, completely crazy. Like, there's no way I'm going to pare my whole wardrobe down to 33 pieces. But what she finds is that people who do that feel this overwhelming freedom. Like, they go to their closet, and there's not this moment of choice overload when they open the closet. It's not like so many choices, you feel exhausting. You can just kind of pick, and it's easier than we think. And so choice overload is this idea of having way too many choices. And it turns out we're happier when we sometimes restrict our choices more than we expect.

So what's the difference then?

Because I don't disagree with what you're saying. And I relate to, like, the coffee thing. I'm so sick of hearing about 17 kinds of milk. Like, just whatever, give me the latte, whatever you have. I don't want to pick macadamia almond or whatever. Okay, so I get that. But to the clothes point, sometimes I'll get it. What I think is a rut, I don't want to think about anything. And I just keep wearing that same black jeans with a blazer and whatever. And people start seeing me. Every time I see you, you're in the same uniform. And then I start thinking, I think I'm in A rut. Because I don't even want to put the effort into it, and I don't think that's necessarily good either.

Yeah. So I think this kind of project, 333 ideas sort of in between, like, the rut. Sometimes cons. I mean, I can kind of feel this myself, where it's like, you open it and you're like, oh, my God, this is just overwhelming. I'm just gonna reduce this to the problem I figured out yesterday, because I just don't have the mental effort to do that. Right. And that's actually what a lot of busy people choose to do. There's. There's a bunch of kind of, like, you know, famous business exec types that have done this, have picked a uniform.

Steve Jobs.

Steve Jobs. President Obama would wear the same, like, tie all the time. And it's like. And Obama, when he was interviewed about it, said, you know, I have to decide so. So many things in a day. Like, why am I going to waste my emotional energy on, like, you know, picking what I'm going to wear in the morning? And so I think what you want to do is if you narrow it down ahead of time, then it's not so exhausting. You can kind of almost get out of the rut because you can pick a few things that seem manageable to make a choice about. You know, we can make choices. It's just like, a choice set of 10 things is not as exhausting as a choice set of, like, thousands of things, which, you know, sadly, many of our wardrobes end up being. And because often the way we try to solve the rut is we don't think I need less choices. We think I need more. You know, I need to go online and shop and get five different dresses. And I think, like, oh, that's going to make the choice easier tomorrow. But actually, it just makes it even harder.

Yeah.

So maybe it's paring down what we currently have, and it's a time to do a cleanse of the closet again.

Exactly, exactly. Yeah. She kind of inspired me to do a bit of a jewelry cleanse for myself. I have lots of different, like, necklaces and things, and many of them I don't even wear, but they're there, and it's like, kind of cotton, just like, I can't. But if you pare it down to just, like, a couple items that you really, really love, then it kind of just. It's just much more relaxing in the mornings.

All right, I'm giving that a shot.

Okay.

What about the don't think of a white bear. This was interesting to me.

Yeah. So this is an episode where we're looking at this phenomenon of what's called thought suppression, you know, so that title, Don't Think of a White Bear, is from a famous study which literally told subject for the next 30 seconds, don't think of a white bear. What happens when you tell people to do that? Instantly you're thinking of a white bear. Right. Turns out all of our mind works that way. We have really bad mechanisms for shutting thoughts off. And that means that whenever there's a thought that you don't want to think about that, you're like, don't think about this, don't think about this, don't think about this. It means you're much more likely to think about it. Or if there's, like, some emotion that you don't want to feel, where you're like, don't feel that. Don't feel that. Don't feel that. It kind of comes back with a vengeance. And so what this episode is teaching folks is that if there are kind of unwanted feelings or unwanted thoughts that you have, really the way to deal with those is not to kind of try to force them out of your mind. It's to actually come up with some acceptance of them, to kind of be mindful and accept them and just kind of be with them, which I think in the emotional domain can be incredibly powerful. You know, sometimes we think, you know, if there's sadness or guilt or fear, like, I'm just gonna, like, you know, shut that down at all costs. And what we don't realize when we're doing that is that our emotions almost work like a pressure cooker. Like, the more you kind of shut them down, the more they're gonna come out eventually. And so a better strategy that we learned from talking to scientists like Eve Ekman, one of the scientists at the Berkeley School for Greater Good, is like, if you just kind of take some time to, like, accept your emotions and just be with them and realize they're not that bad, kind of feel how they feel, it actually works much better. This is true for anxiety. You know, I'm actually feeling a little fearful right now, or I'm actually a little bit angry. Like, by actually feeling your emotions and not trying to, like, squish them and shut them down, you can kind of process them appropriately and get a sense of what you need rather than kind of squashing them in a way where they sort of come back with a vengeance later.

So it's interesting because I definitely have been one of those people that I'm too busy and I can't deal with this right now. So I'm gonna, I call compartmentalize, right? Like this is going over here and I'm shutting that door for right now because I'm going back to work and I can't deal with this sadness from a relationship or whatever is going on. However, what I've noticed over the years is I would take that trend and it would start showing up in other parts of my life. So I suddenly wasn't happy at work, remember, because I had to focus on work, but now I wasn't happy there.

So I would.

I'm just gonna ignore that part of work and keep doing my job. And then you start ignoring all of these different things in your life that, you know, some things start really getting your attention and you're forced to say, oh my gosh, I'm creating this pattern.

Yeah. And I think you see that crop up in so many different areas, right. What you forget is that the negative emotions from one area, if you're trying to squash them down, they come out in another. We talk about this one study of parents where you bring parents into the lab, you kind of give them negative feedback about something at work, and you say, well, you know, you're gonna go play with your kids now. Whatever you do, like try to squash down your emotions, your kids don't know that you're stressed right now. And what you find is that those parents inadvertently act the worst with their kids. Like they kind of are like more short tempered with their kids and so on. And then if you look at how the kids play, the kids play worse. They play less creatively with say, a block group of Legos or something. And then the kids show more negative emotions. And so the idea is we think we're squishing it down, but it doesn't. It comes out more than we think. And it can come out in the worst of circumstances for us.

So this is right in line with Amy Morin, who is a therapist and author of 13 Things Mentally Strong People Don't Do. It's the exact same direction that she gave me, which is. And she suffered the loss of a husband. And it was about sitting with that sadness and feeling that sadness instead of picking right back up and going back to work or, you know, going on dates or whatever it might have been. But to allow that sadness to exist for as long as it needed to until she could process it and move forward even though it wasn't, you know, that Was tough.

Yeah. It's not fun like sitting with your emotions. There's a reason we're motivated to squash them. Problem is it just doesn't work. Like, it makes it worse. You know, it's like scratching the mosquito bite. Like it's itchy, but you're only gonna make it more itchy in the future kind of. Emotions work a little bit like that. You know, our instinct is to just get rid of them, but that's not how they work. You know, in the podcast we talk about researchers who've worked with the Dalai Lama and they're like, even the Dalai Lama, when he's angry, he can't just like shut off his anger. Right. Let's just say even he can't do that, but he can be with it and notice it and just kind of accept it. Like, oh, I'm angry. And then it stops affecting you. Right. Because you can kind of be there with it and process it.

Speaking of a Dalai Lama.

So do you dive into meditation or. And the effect that has on people?

Yeah, and in some of our future episodes, we talk a lot about this idea of mindfulness and what you can do to kind of be with your present moment, whatever that is, if it's negative or something like that, and just take this kind of non judgmental attitude towards accepting it. A lot of what we talk about in that White Bear episode is sort of about that. What can you do to be with your emotions and accept them? Turns out one of the best kind of strategies you can do to train up on that. What the gym is for accepting your emotions is actually meditation, mindfulness meditation.

And so what do you suggest in regards to meditation? Does it have to be so much time allotment per day or how does it work?

Yeah, really what you find is that especially for novices, it's really just the act of doing it. It doesn't take a lot of time, five minutes a day or here and there, just like, you know, give yourself a little ping on your cell phone to say, hey, take a mindful pause. Like non judgmentally. Just pay attention to what you're feeling right now. And even like, you know, scattered across the day in a couple quick moments. Like it's just the act of kind of getting into this habit of being more mindful. And those things can have an impact on our emotion regulation, on how we kind of process emotions. They also can have impacts on our concentration and also our overall well being.

How about sleep? Do you dive into that?

Yeah. So sleep is one of the things I prescribe for my undergrads a bunch. We forget sleep is as powerful as it is. I actually think we could solve most of my college student mental health crisis by just, like, getting them to sleep more often. If you look at the data, there's one study suggesting that after about a week of impaired sleep, and by impaired sleep, they don't mean like zero hours of sleep. They mean like five hours of sleep instead of eight hours of sleep, you can see, like, significant reductions in overall mood and mental health functioning after just a week of less sleep. Given that my college students, on average get about four or five hours of sleep a night, that's what many college students are averaging. I actually think if we could just get them to sleep more, we might solve a lot of this crisis on campuses.

And what are you suggesting? Seven to eight hours of sleep?

That's typical. I mean, again, it kind of depends. There's a lot of, you know, individual, like, needs there. But, you know, by and large, if you're getting about four or five, you probably want to bump it up a bit.

All right, I'm going to work on that as well.

Lori, I'm so excited for the Happiness Lab to be out and for everyone to check it out. I'm cheering you on. How do they find the Happiness Lab podcast?

It is available wherever you get your podcast. So Apple, Spotify, Stitcher, just log in and just type in the Happiness Lab and you should be able to find it.

And how can people find you?

They can check me out on the Happiness Lab website, which is HappinessLab FM. Or they can just Google Yale Happiness lady and can find out more about the online class and the podcast.

I love that. The Yale Happiness Lady. Thank you so much, Lori, for being here. I'm so excited for your show and I really appreciate your time today.

Thanks so much for having me.

I asked you to try to find your passion. Hi and welcome. Welcome back. I hope that you love that interview and feeling a little bit more sunshine in your life. I definitely am. Okay, so I've gotten a bunch of DMS lately with questions, so keep them coming. I love to answer your questions. Here's one that I got on LinkedIn. Heather, what advice would you give me in this situation? I went through an interview process and was offered a position. The offer was low, but I took the offer offer without countering because I was just so excited to have received an offer. Now I'm feeling underpaid and kicking myself for not countering. When is too early to ask for a raise is six months too soon? I feel like an idiot for taking the job without countering. All right, wait a minute. First of all, do not beat yourself up, right? We all live and learn, so this is an opportunity to live and learn and grow from something. So do not call yourself an idiot like that. That's baseline, ground zero. This is where we're starting. We need to call ourselves brilliant from being willing to learn from the experience and grow from it. So talk to yourself the same way you would a child or someone you love. Be kind to you. Let's start there. Okay? We're gonna roll it back and say we're brilliant for looking into this. All right, let's go next. It is never too soon to ask for a raise. Now. Now, while you might be frustrated, your employer doesn't know what's going on in your mind, right? So people can only respond to and react to things they're aware of. If they don't know you're upset and feeling undervalued, they can't do anything for you, which is terrible. So you need to have an honest conversation. And the way that I would do it is I'd first get honest with myself. I would write down what the expectations were for the job when I took them. I would compare my performance and results to what the expectations were. Right. You want to evaluate, are you worthy of a raise right now in the company's eyes, have you done and gone above and beyond what they expected of you? Because if you have, they're going to be loving you. They're going to see your value. And there is a tremendous opportunity cost. When a good employee leaves, not only is there the cost of that person no longer being there and the revenue they were were creating or of the value they were bringing, but there's also a window of time where you have to search for someone, probably pay a recruiter. Then you have to take a chance. Well, then you have to interview and interview and interview, which takes a lot of time. But then you also have to take a chance on somebody that is not. They're not proven in your building. They might have done well in other companies. They might not mesh in your company. So there. There's so much cost involved in losing a good idea employee. And so often employees think, oh, you know, I'm lucky to have the job, and I'm lucky to have this. The reality is the company's lucky to have you. Never have. I realized this so much now since I got fired. I just have to sidebar right now. The company that I was working for, that I was fired from that. Mind you, in the 14 year time that I was leading the revenue side of the business, we had more than and doubled our revenue from 100 million annually when I joined to in excess of 200 million annually when I was fired. That stock was trading at double digits the day that I was fired. And I just looked and it's trading at $3 now. So if you don't think that there is an impact when you take your greatness elsewhere, let me tell you with experience, there is an impact. So don't devalue that. And, and you have no idea what series of events could happen, what domino effect you leaving would have in an organization and how crippling that can be to a company. So come at it from that perspective. So the first thing we do is we lay out why we deserve a raise. We look at the facts, the, you know, statistics, the, the performance evaluations, whatever it is that you have that is proof positive that you know you've accomplished what you set out to do. And you call a meeting and you sit down and you explain to that person you report to what's going on. Hey Bob, I want to sit today to go over a few different things. Number one, I want to talk about my performance. I feel really proud of the job I've done this far in six months time. Here's what I set out to do, here's what I have accomplished. I wanted to confirm that you feel really positive about this too and feel like I've exceeded expectations.

Right.

You want to get the information from this person that yes, you are doing a great job. Yes, we are super happy with you here because that's going to set your conversation up for success on where you want to take it. So you lead with showcasing what you've done, what was expected of you, what you've accomplished. You ask these probing questions to find out and confirm that yes, the company loves having you there. They're happy that they hired you, you know, that you, you're showing up beyond what they thought, the potential that you have. Then we're going to take the conversation to be honest and let them know. I've got to be honest with you. I was so excited about coming to work here. I didn't counter your offer and that was my fault. And I want to explain to you why. And then you want to give them some insight. One of the things that really gets people's attention is when you share I had another offer for more money or, or recently so and so approached me for more money. I know that the value that I bring is worth more in other places, but I never gave you the opportunity to make it worth more here because I was so excited just to take the job, and I regret that. And I want to find a way to stay here. I love being here. I love working for you. I love my job, whatever it may be. However, I also need to fill this. This gap in the discrepancy and pay from what I'm making here versus what I could be making if I left here, which I do not want to do. How can you and I figure out a solution so that I can make the potential money that. That I should be making? And there's a lot of different ways to go about that. You know, you can look at bonus structures. You can. Things like that don't cost the company anything. And that was really how I made a lot of money in my last job, is I got them to really double down on if I overachieve your budget numbers. So beyond the numbers you've planned for, then I want a percentage of that because it costs you nothing. It just makes you and your shareholders more money. So when I could show that I would over deliver beyond expectations, over deliver what they had planned for, they were happy to give me a cut of that. So there's a lot of different ways you can look at this and approach this, but it's critical to have the computer conversation. You don't want to just ignore this and stay frustrated because that's not going to be good for you or your employer. So take action now. Shoot an email and ask for the meeting and get the ball rolling. Okay. I've been asked a lot lately about going to networking events, going to dinners for business, and, you know, how do you connect with people? Well, I always believe in doing research on people ahead of time whenever you can, because then you can say it them. Oh, my gosh, you went to University of Ohio. And my family's from Ohio. You know, you're always looking for points of connection and commonality that really makes people feel excited and comfortable. And, you know, it's you making the conversation about them, which people love. But I also have a couple of games that I am known for playing at big business dinners when people are, you know, coming together with vendors, clients, whatever, and no one really knows each other. I like to break the ice and do a game where I say, all right, let's go around the table. If you weren't a podcast host, Heather, what would you be? So if you weren't in the job that you're currently in what would be the one job that you wish you, you could have had or you, you know, you would have gone for instead? And it always opens up super interesting conversations because you could be sitting there with a CFO who's knee deep in finances and they, they say, I would have been a singer. And you say, what? Where is this coming from? Oh my gosh. And they'll tell you a super interesting story about their life. Okay, so that's a super fun game that always gets conversations spinning up into totally different directions that you didn't expect. The other one is what one thing about you does no one at the table know? And that's a super interesting one too, because it can be ridiculous. Like I had braces for five years and I was a nerd in high school. Or it could be I was arrested, or it could be, you know, anything. But it starts again. A conversation around a topic nobody ever expected. And it makes a conversation exciting that people are really engaged and want to hear. I also like to do an MVP award and I like to set the expectation for with everyone. Listen, we're going to be naming an MVP at the end of tonight. It's going to be all about who's shining their light, who's bringing more value in making things fun, whatever it is, but it just makes it. It's a funny, cute thing that you award someone at the end of a night or the end of a, you know, retreat weekend with the MVP player. It's just kind of a cool way to recognize people and keep people interested, paying attention, and enrollment involved. So those are a couple of tips for some networking and business type events that you might not be excited about. Trying to put a spin on it to make it more exciting for you to attend and for the people around you. And of course, the key is put down the phone. That's the number one. Nothing's going to happen until you put that phone down. You know, put it on vibrate, turn it face down, and start showing up for the people that are sitting there with you. They took the time to be there. Why not really be there? And you never know what great things can happen. So wishing you the greatest week, hopeful for so much goodness to come your way and excited to report back next week on some of the major progress I'm hoping is going to happen. Until next time, keep creating your confidence. I decided to change that dynamic. I couldn't be more excited for what you're gonna hear.

Start learning and growing.

Inevitably something will happen. No one succeeds alone.

You don't stop and look around once in a while. You could miss it.

Come on this journey with me.