PNTV: The Myths of Happiness by Sonja Lyubomirsky (#355)

Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to another episode of Philosopher's Notes TV Today we've got another great book, the Myths of Happiness by Sonia Lyubomirsky. The Myths of Happiness subtitle which should make you happy, but doesn't. And what shouldn't make you happy, but but does. Sonya is one of the world's leading researchers on the science of well being. Her how of Happiness, which we featured years ago, is one of my favorite books of all time where she unpacks the specific scientific hows of happiness. This book we talk about the myths of happiness which we're gonna talk about a bit now. As always, we've got a philosopher's note. Bunch of my favorite big ideas and five of them here, some. So let's start at the top. Hedonic adaptation. Sonia is one of the world's leading researchers in the science of wellbeing and specifically in gratitude, kindness and hedonic adaptation. What is hedonic adaptation? The short story there is. We think that getting certain things will make us basically happy once and for all. You get married, you're happy, right? You just live happily ever after. You make a certain amount of money, you're happy ever after, right? Well, not so fast. It's not quite how it works. The reality is we adapt very quickly. Two things that we thought would make us happy for a really long time. Hedonic adaptation. Researchers in behavioral economics call this poor effective forecasting. We have a poor ability to forecast our emotional well being in, in the future after we achieve certain things. Now, thankfully it works on the other side as well. If we adapt to the positive things, we also adapt to the negative things. That's called psychological immunity. So you think losing your job or having your business go under or getting a divorce or whatever will leave you at a certain state of perpetual unhappiness? Well, it doesn't work that way. You kind of go back up psychological immunity style the same way you come back down here. Hedonic adaptation style. Simply knowing that is a really powerful thing because then you quit pretending that you're going to do something that gets you to a state of never ending bliss. It's not quite how the world works. We adapt, then we show up and we do the work today, the day after that, the day after that. As the tools guys say, we are never exonerated from the work of showing up. So remember hedonic adaptation, psychology, immunity and our often poor effective forecasting abilities. Some other favorite ideas. Second one here, Optimism. Sonya said in the book that the most robust Strategy to boost optimism is keeping a journal on a regular basis, as little as two minutes a day. When you're thinking about and contemplating your hopes and your dreams and your vision, then you're thinking about and feeling into what you need to do, visualizing how that would feel, then what you'd need to do to actually make that happen is a really, really robust way to boost your optimism. And we know that optimism is one of the strongest predictors of well being. Again, not a deluded divorce from reality positive thinking idea, but a functional optimism of seeing the opportunities that exist in any challenge and in life, moment to moment to moment. And again, journaling is a really powerful way to do that. Now when I read these books, especially by conservative scientists, and I see lines like the most robust anything, I sit up even straighter and I take note. Now a lot of self help teachers talk about the power of journaling, et cetera, but I tend to put special emphasis on the scientifically, rigorously tested stuff that we know empirically leads to boost in happiness. So since then I have been much more regularly, basically every day journaling for at least two minutes on my hopes, my dreams, my visions, and on the virtues that I strive to embody, those eulogy, virtues that I'm committed to embodying on a day to day basis and who I'm committed to being. We talk about this a lot in Journaling 101, where I go through these ideas and then I share what I call the Five Minute Journaling Foundation. The Five Minute foundation where I walk through 10 different scientific principles that we know lead to boosts in well being and we can capture in a matter of a few minutes these different ideas. For example, we have this idea of optimism. Why quickly, every morning, look into the future. The first thing I look at is me celebrating my 50th anniversary with my wife. That's my most important personal goal, right? I want to be 82 years old, she's going to be 78 years old. I draw little stick figures. This is actually what I draw. So I draw this, right? One of my big creative goals is to inspire over a million people in our membership, right? So I draw that. And then I draw 1, 2, 3, 4 little stick figures. You can probably tell that is me. This is what I write A, E1 and E2. The only times I refer to my kids as E1 and E2 is when I'm journaling Emerson and Eleanor, right? Then I say, I want to see me. Here's me right now, right? Go like that. I'm not going to get stopped in the middle. I'm not going to go into all the detail, but basically I start here and I see, look, I want to celebrate our 50th wedding anniversary. I'm going to be 82, she's going to be 78. My son, who's 5, is going to be 44 and my daughter's going to be 40. And I just for a moment, it takes me literally a certain 10, 15, 20 seconds to do that. I feel into the fact that my 5 year old and my 9 month old are going to be adults, they're going to be human beings and what do I want with them? They are human beings obviously, but they're going to be their own mature adults with their own families in the future and I want to be best friends with them when they're at that stage. Therefore I better be living like that right now. So this quick check in 2 minutes, 5 minutes, 10, 20 minutes, whatever it is, is a great way to prime your optimism tank to go out there and have a great day. Check out Journaling 101 for more on that. For now, we're on to our next big idea. Ultradian rhythm. So Sonya talks about something we talk about all the time. Usually we run into ultradian rhythms in the context of peak performance. Right? So when we're looking at sports psychology and how we can go out and do our best, a lot of those teachers talk about the fact that we need to remember that we operate in cycles. Well, Sonya echoes this wisdom. She says that our bodies naturally run on 90 to 120 minute cycles that are known as ultradian rhythms. Again, circadian is around a day, ultradian is more than that, more often than that, which is 90 to 20 minutes. And you'll notice when you become, and you may already notice that you start tapering off your performance after around 90 minutes, right? And you hit a gap, the ultradian gap, where you need to take a 15 to 20 minute break after your 90 to 120 minute of on cycle. Then the off cycle. Training, recovery is a theme that I've been coming back to more and more and more, getting really good at this phase. And again, that phase requires you to be all the way off. Research shows unequivocally that if you want to come back strong, you can't go online. You can go deep for 90 minutes and do great deep work, but then if you go online and check your email or check social notifications or whatever else, the news, etc. You didn't give your mind the chance to really recover, to come back fresh the next time. This is something I'm having a lot of fun experimenting with. Turn off your technology, go outside for a walk, go play with your little baby. Which is what I literally just did as I took a break filming a bunch of these today. Find a way to oscillate, honor your ultradian rhythms and make it a game. Another little side note, my thing is I want to create three of these really on peak, deep work blocks. Right. Anders Ericsson, another leading researcher in the science of wellbeing, says the best performers put in 4.5 hours of deliberate practice. To use his language, right? It's expensive, it's hard work to go that all in. You do three 90 minute sessions, what do you have? 4.5 hours. Then you recover, you get ready and you hammer it the next day. So finding that level of consistency by structuring our masterpiece days is a fun game that I like to play. Fourth big idea is the Affluenza virus. The Affluenza virus, what is that? That is a phrase that researchers use to describe people who get too caught up in. In going after material things. Going after money. Right. So what's the science around money? Well, Sonia tells us the short story is it's complicated, right? So there's no easy answer to that. Money is important to a certain extent. There's no question about that. And beyond that, there's a diminishing return point where if we're too focused even in pursuit of that, if we're too focused on the material, we're. We're going to miss out on all the things that actually lead to happiness, connection being present time, affluence, et cetera. And she makes the interesting point that if you ask people, let's just say you had a group of two different people, some have a lot of money, some don't have as much money, then of course there's in between, Right? And you ask them, how do you feel about your life in general? The people who have more money than those who don't will report higher levels of satisfaction. Right? That's what the science shows, again, to a certain extent. But what's interesting is if you just happen to randomly ask them at say 9am or noon or 3pm, how are you feeling right this moment? There's no difference. How they're feeling in that moment has nothing to do with how much money they have. That's only going to be relevant when they report their subjective sense of life satisfaction. So interesting stuff. Again, longer conversation. But but the science is clear. If you're extrinsically motivated, predominantly, and we're not talking about being completely selfish, obviously money is important. You need to take care of yourself. But if that's your predominant occupation, those external signals, right? Acquiring money, the wealth, the fame, the hotness, et cetera, you will be less psychologically stable than those who are focused on the intrinsic. So four things that Sonya tells us to think about is in terms of money include. Number one, she says, don't spend your money on stuff when you have a choice. Spend your money on opportunities to grow, opportunities to create experiences with people you love, right? Much wiser to do that than to acquire stuff. The second thing is, if you bring people into a lab, you give them 20 bucks, right? And you split them into two groups. One group spends $20 on themselves, the other group spends $20 on someone else. What you'll find is the group that spent the 20 bucks on someone else is actually happier than the group that spent 20 bucks on themselves. We are wired to be generous. So that's a good use of our money. Find ways to give back. Find ways to give to others in meaningful ways. The third thing she says about money is use it to buy more time. So wealth isn't as well correlated to happiness as time. Affluence is if you have an abundance of time, which a lot of people trade their time to try to get money, and they wind up not being as happy as they would be if they wisely use their resources to create more time and to create more autonomy, those things are shown to correlate well with happiness. So use your money to create more time for. For yourself and spaciousness to go through your life. That's the third big idea. And our fourth is an interesting one. Let's say that you want to go on a vacation, right? Buy the vacation, invest in the experience, right? Good use of your funds now and then use the time between the time you book it until it happens to experience anticipatory joy. Enjoy the event and the experience, right? Whatever you do. And then afterwards, savor it. It's kind of a cool way to think about how to use money well and avoid the affluenza virus. So, again, money is important. We don't want to make it our predominant function. I'm excited. I'm going to be teaching a class on Abundance 101 soon as well, and take a new take on that and integrate a broader sense of what abundance and affluence and prosperity really looks like. So, fifth big idea myths of happiness. We think that intense moments of joy and happiness and hitting the big payout or whatever, in whatever sense, is where our happiness lies. But the research shows it's actually frequency that's greater than intensity. So frequency is greater than intensity. Right. You want to create little micro moments of happiness that the research shows leads to higher levels of happiness than waiting for that big hit. And this is similar to what we talked about in what Teresa Amabiel found in her research out of Harvard Business School. The progress principle. Right. What was it? It was small wins. It was micro wins. We want to find little micro moments of happiness throughout our days. That's what leads to true sustainable happiness. More than always waiting for that thing that's going to come in the future. So there you go. Frequency is greater than intensity. The Affluenza virus. How to fight it. We had our four little ideas there. Ultradian rhythms train your recovery. Optimism. The most robust way to boost it. Journaling. We went through a little quick aside family portrait here. Hope you enjoyed that. And again, journaling 101. If you want to learn more about how I journal and what I think makes sense to create a foundation for your life on a consistent basis, check that out. Members get access to that, etc. And then our primary myths here are hedonic adaptation. We think that when something great happens, we're going to be happy for a long time. Not quite how it works. We adapt. But the good news is we also have psychological immunity. The things we think are going to make us upset for a long time. In fact, don't. We recover much quicker than we think. And if we do it right, we come back even stronger. So there you go. Myths of happiness. I'm a huge fan of Sonya and her work in her lab, which I've had the honor to visit. Bunch of super passionate, super smart doctoral candidates who are out there doing great work and looking forward to seeing more of what comes out of that lab. For now, what was the idea that landed? Get on that and make today another awesome day. See you. Isn't it a bit odd that we went from math to science to history, but somehow missed the class on how to live? For some wacky reason, optimal living 101 never made the schedule. Of course, it's too late to go back and change that and you're too busy to read full time to catch up. But if you're like us, you're all about optimizing your life so you can actualize your potential. So imagine this. Imagine having someone read the best books on how to optimize your life and pull out the big ideas that can really change your life. You know those sections? You underline an asterisk and mark all up. Then imagine that guy me connecting those awesome ideas to other great books and helping you actually apply the wisdom to your life today. Well that's what I do with something we call Philosopher's Notes where I've distilled hundreds of great books into 20 minute super practical summaries. Then imagine me taking the absolute best big ideas from those great books and sharing them with you in hour long Optimal Living 101 classes on everything from productivity, purpose and confidence to nutrition, goal setting and conquering procrastination. Helping you optimize every facet of your life so you can actualize your potential. You've got a personal trainer. I'm kind of like your personal philosopher. Ancient wisdom, modern science and practical tools. That's what our optimized membership program is all about. If you're feeling it, we'd love to have you join us.