Happiness 101 with Tal Ben-Shahar

Sam, Hi. Welcome. I'm delighted to have the opportunity today to share with you some ideas from Positive psychology, the scientific study of optimal human functioning. The science of happiness. I first started thinking about happiness when I was an undergraduate at Harvard. I was a computer science major, doing well academically. I was doing well socially. I was a varsity squash athlete. And I wasn't happy. And it didn't make sense to me because looking at my life from the outside, I should have been happy. Everything externally was going well, but internally it wasn't. I remember one day during my sophomore year waking up and walking straight to my academic advisor and telling him, I'm switching my major. I switched from computer science to philosophy and psychology. I actually did become happier taking some of these classes and then went on to graduate studies in the area of positive psychology. And after completing my PhD, I wanted to share what I've learned with others. And that's when I started to teach. That first year, when I taught, I had eight students in my positive psychology class. Two of them dropped out. The next year, through word of mouth, the class grew slightly and I had over 300 students. And then the third year I taught it, I had close to 900 students, making it, at that point, the largest course at Harvard. And at that point, the media became interested. Why? Because they wanted to understand how it is that there is a class that's larger than Introduction to Economics. So I was invited for newspapers, radio, television. And in these interviews, I started to notice a certain pattern. So I would walk into the interview, we'd have the interview, and subsequently the interviewer or the producer would walk me out and say something to the effect of, Tal, thank you for doing the interview. But, you know, I expected you to be different. And I would ask as nonchalantly as I could, of course, as if I didn't care how different. And he or she would say, well, I expected you to be more outgoing. Next interview, same thing. Thank you, Tal, for doing the interview. But, you know, I expected you to be different. And once again, nonchalantly, of course, I would ask how different? And they would say, well, more. More extroverted. Next interview, same thing.

How different?

Well, less shy. You know, I get nervous in interviews. I am shy. Next interview, same thing. How different? Well, less introverted, more extroverted, more outgoing, more cheerful, and on and on interview after interview. But here is the best one. So this is an interview in one of the local Boston channels. We have the interview, which was quite long and I actually thought was quite good. But at the end of the interview. The interviewer walks me out and as I'm about to leave the usual comes Tal. Thank you for doing the interview with us. But you know, I expected you to be different now, just so that you understand. By this time my self esteem is shot. But still, still with some semblance of nonchalance, I ask how different? And the interviewer looks at me and he says, I don't know, Tal, I expected you to be taller. Taller? What, five, seven or okay, five, six and a half is not enough to teach happiness. And I thought about these responses and this pattern and I think I understand why they expect someone different. You see, they had to explain to themselves, their viewers, their listeners, a certain phenomenon. Here is a class that's larger than Introduction to Economics. So how do you explain this phenomenon? Of course, by looking at the teacher, who must be extremely outgoing, very cheerful, unbelievably charismatic and tall. Right? Otherwise why would the students attend the class? The problem though, is that they were looking in the wrong place. They were looking at the messenger. Where they needed to look at was at the message. Positive psychology is being taken up by hundreds of organizations globally. Why is it so popular? Because essentially for the first time, we have a science of happiness. Until very recently, this whole realm of happiness, of well being, has been dominated by the self help movement. What do we have in the self help movement? We have books, hundreds and thousands of books coming out each year. They're interesting, they're accessible. We have thousands of workshops being offered every week around the world. But many of these workshops, many of these books, not all, but many, lack substance, over promise and under deliver. On the other hand, we have academia. What do we have in academia? A lot of rigor, a lot of substance. Things are analyzed, reanalyzed and meta analyzed. Things that work, good stuff, but not accessible to most people. In fact, the head of my PhD program once estimated that the average academic journal article is read by seven people. And that includes the author's mother. I say it in jest, but I'm an academic. I want that stuff to be read. Good stuff, important stuff, not accessible. And this is where positive psychology comes in. Positive psychology explicitly tries to bring the rigor from academe and and merge it with the accessibility of the self help movement. And this explains its popularity. So what I want to do today is introduce you to the greatest hits of positive psychology. The first topic is what I've come to call the permission to be human. I was having lunch one day in Leverett House, one of the undergraduate dorms, when A student came over and asked, tal, may I join you? And I said, sure. Please sit down. Matt brought over his tray and said to me, tal, I hear you're teaching a class on happiness. I said, yes, I'm teaching a class on positive psychology. He said, you know, my roommates are taking your class. They were two of the six students, so I had to be nice to him. So I said to him, that's wonderful. And he said, but you know, Tal, you've got to watch out now. And I said, why, Matt? And he said, tal, you've got to be careful now. And I said, why? And he said, because if I see you unhappy, I'll tell them and actually use that as a teaching opportunity. The next day in class and I told my students, the last thing in the world that I want you to think is that I experience this constant high. Or that you, by the end of the semester or year, will experience this constant high. There are two kinds of people who don't experience painful disappointment or anger or envy or sadness. First, the psychopaths. The second group of people are dead. Exactly. So if you experience these painful emotions, it's actually a good sign. It means that you're not a psychopath and you're alive. And yet, in our culture today, we think, well, there must be something wrong with me, when in fact, there is something wrong with us if we don't experience these emotions at times. The problem is that when we don't give ourselves the permission to be human, when we don't allow ourselves to experience the full myriad of human emotions, we're preventing ourselves from also experiencing the positive emotions. You see, all emotions flow through the same emotional pipeline. And when we block the flow of one set of emotions, we're inadvertently also blocking the other set of emotions, the positive ones. When we block the painful emotions, they simply intensify. As children, we give ourselves the permission to be human. But then we get to a certain age when the facade kicks in, and when we say, okay, I can't show these emotions something bad, we ignore it, we suppress it, and we pay a price. I want to show you a quick video clip of someone who gives himself the permission to be human. Okay? So I'm not saying we need to look like this, but what I am saying is that we need a space, a place in our lives for unconditional acceptance, a place where we give ourselves the permission to be human. You know, the best advice that Tommy, my wife, and I got after having our first kid, David, was about five years ago, was from our Pediatrician, he says to us, over the next few months, you're going to be experiencing every single kind of emotion to the extreme. You're going to experience extreme joy, bliss, and you're going to experience frustration and fatigue. It's normal. It's natural. We all go through it. So after about a month, I started to feel some envy toward David. Why? Because for the first time since Tommy and I had been together, here is someone who's getting more attention than I was, no matter how much I cried. But then, five minutes later, I would experience this most intense love toward David. Now, normally, I would say to myself, what a hypocrite. How is this possible? But because I had our pediatrician's voice in the back of my mind giving me the permission to be human, I said to myself, oh, it's natural. It's normal. I experienced the emotion that I didn't like and then was able to fully experience the wonderful emotion of intense love. You see, there is a paradox at play here. The paradox is that when we suppress these painful emotions, they intensify, they become stronger. They prevent us often from experiencing positive emotions. When we give ourselves the freedom to experience the full range of human emotions, we're being fully human. Let's do a quick experiment. So, I'm a psychologist. I like doing experiments. This is an easy one. Don't worry. For the next 10 seconds, do not think of a pink elephant. You know the one I'm talking about from Dumbo with the big ears? Do not think of a pink elephant for the next few seconds. And I'm sure nobody thought of a pink elephant. Right? Easy. Well, not really. Why? Because when we try to suppress a natural phenomenon, such as thinking about the word that we utter, the phenomenon intensifies. Same with painful emotions that are a natural phenomenon. When we try to suppress them, they just intensify. The paradox is when we accept them, that's when they weaken. When I started to teach, the biggest challenge that I had to face was my introversion, the fact that I am shy, that I get very nervous standing in front of a large audience. And for me, a large audience is anything above 5. That first year when I taught the class was a real stretch for me, but I managed to. And at the beginning, when I started to teach, I would give myself positive mental attitude. Talk. Okay, Tal, you can do it. No anxiety today. No nervousness today. Come on, Tal. And what happened? Pink elephants all around. The anxiety, the nervousness just intensified. But after reading research by Harvard professor Daniel Wagner on ironic processing or reading Viktor Frankl, the author of Man's Search for Meaning on Paradoxical Intentions. And now, because I give myself the permission to be human, allow the anxiety and the nervousness to flow through me, it goes away after as little as three hours, which is why we're staying here till midnight. But no, it doesn't go away. But it's manageable. It. It's excitement now, as opposed to a debilitating form of anxiety. Imagine this. Imagine waking up every morning and saying to yourself, I refuse to accept the law of gravity. You know, this law of gravity. I've had enough of it. It would be so much nicer, so much more graceful, to get up in the morning and just float to work instead of walking down the stairs and then walking up the stairs. So clumsy. Imagine leading that kind of life, refusing to accept the law of gravity. Well, for one, you may not survive for long if you truly refuse to accept the fact that things, people being no exception, fall when left in midair. But even if you did survive, even if you did survive, what kind of life would you lead? A life of constant frustration. Instead, what do we do with the law of gravity? We accept it. We may not like it, but we accept it. More than that, we even create games around the law of gravity. Imagine the Olympics without the law of gravity. Imagine a baseball game without the law of gravity. Meaningless. So we play with it. Not so for painful emotions. Painful emotions are as much part of human nature as the law of gravity is part of physical nature. And yet we accept the latter and reject the former. And we pay a very high price for it. When I talk about unconditional acceptance, when I talk about the permission to be human, I'm not talking about passive resignation. I'm not talking about, okay, so I'm jealous, or I'm anxious, and there's nothing I can or want to do about it. Rather, what I'm talking about is active acceptance, accepting the painful emotion and then choosing the most appropriate course of action. There's nothing wrong with feeling envy. There may be something wrong with my behavior following on that envy. There's nothing wrong with feeling fear, nothing cowardly about it. In fact, courage is not about not having fear. Courage is about having fear and then going ahead anyway. When we suppress these emotions, they control us. And if I don't accept that, I sometimes get angry or am sometimes envious. I begin to see anger, envy and anger all around, even though it is not there. And here is the question that we need to ask. Do we give ourselves and others, whether it's Our children, whether it's our colleagues, whether it's our friends, our partners, do we give ourselves and others the permission to be human? This, to my mind, is the foundation, the most important pillar of a happy, fulfilling life. I want to move on now to a second topic, another of positive psychology's greatest hits, dealing with stress. Stress has become a global epidemic. Our college students are suffering from this epidemic. Let me share with you a quick excerpt from an interview with Dr. Richard Cadison, who's the head of mental health services at Harvard University. Here. He's talking about a national survey of mental health. There's a national survey called the National College Health Assessment. And in the survey, year after year, 45%, roughly of students report being depressed to the point that it's difficult to function. And I think 80% feel overwhelmed. Now, not everyone is clinically depressed, but, you know, if there's that many people in distress, things need to be done about that. And most campuses don't have enough resources to reach out to those students. And they also don't want to come in because there's lots of stigma attached. This is troubling. 80% feeling overwhelmed, 45% depressed to the point of not feeling functioning. So what is going on there? When I was a resident tutor, one of my roles with undergraduates was to look over the resumes to help them get a better job. And one of the things that initially really impressed me was that each year, these resumes became more impressive. The fonts became smaller, the margins became narrower, the titles became more grandiose. And it really impressed me until I realized the price that these students were paying for these narrower margins and smaller fonts. These students were overwhelmed. They were stressed. They had too much to do, trying to do more and more things in less and less time. Here is how it works. When we have too much to do, naturally, we feel stressed. And then over time, if this stress persists, and there's a lot of research showing this, it leads to depression or can potentially lead to depression. And it doesn't start in college. It starts much earlier. You know that in the 1960s, the average age for the onset of depression was 29. Today, the average age for the onset of depression is 14. Why? Because the stress begins so much earlier. There's also the physical cost. Ask any doctor, one of the primary causes of physical ailment is stress. Why? Because our immune system weakens. It's no coincidence that very often after a very stressful period at work or in school or in a relationship, we become sick. People lose Their levels of creativity as a result of stress, thinking narrowly as opposed to broadly. When we're more relaxed, being overwhelmed, having too much to do is so prevalent. Some of our comedians even use it as part of their routine.

I believe that someday sitcoms will be 30 seconds long because that's all we'll need. And that's all our attention span can take, because our attention span is shot. We've all got attention deficit disorder, ADD or ocd, or one of these disorders with three letters because we don't have the time and patience to pronounce the entire disorder. That should be a disorder right there. Tbd, Too busy disorder.

I'm looking at the Pop Tarts box and I notice they have directions on there. Microwave directions. Listen, if you need to zap fry your Pop Tarts before you head out the door, you might want to loosen up your schedule. So what do we do about this stress thing? What do we do about it on the personal level? What do we do about it as a culture, as a community? The first thing we need to do is simplify. We need to do less rather than more. Let me share with you some research done in this area. So this is a study done by Professor Daniel Kahneman from Princeton. He's also a Nobel Prize winner in economics. What Kahneman did was wanting to understand the emotional experiences of women. The study, the results apply as much to men. So he evaluated women's emotional experiences when they were at work, when they were having lunch, when they were with their romantic partners, when they were with their children, when they were shopping, working leisure. The most surprising result of that study was that these women did not particularly enjoy spending time with their children. This was very surprising. So they probed further, and what they found was that it wasn't the fact that these women did not love their kids. For most of these women, their children were the most important, most meaningful part of their lives. It was that these women were not really with their kids. They were physically there. They were physically present, but at the same time, they were on the phone or doing email or thinking about what they did earlier or what they have to do later. So while they were physically present, they were not really there. Now, individually, discreetly, they may have really enjoyed being on the phone with a friend or doing work or thinking about work or thinking about home. May have really enjoyed all these things separately, but when all these things came together, it was too much of a good thing. Quantity affected quality. Think about the following analogy. Think about your favorite piece of music. You're listening to Whitney Houston's and I Will Always Love youe. It really is my favorite piece of music. And then you rate it on a scale of 1 to 10 and you give it a straight 10. And then you listen to your second most favorite piece of music, the chorus piece from Beethoven's Ninth. And once again you rate it on a scale of 1 to 10. And it's not quite and I will always love you, but it's a nine and a half. It's pretty good. And then for maximal effect, you play them together and what do you get? A nineteen and a half, right? No, not a ten, not even a five. It's noise. That's modern life for you. Simplify. We pay a very high price for trying to do too much. Quantity affects quality. Nothing will happen if when we come home in the evening, we switch off our cell phone for a few hours when we spend time with our family and friends. This also applies in the workplace. Now, in the workplace today, it's impossible, unrealistic to eliminate multitasking, but it's certainly at times possible to reduce it. How many of you have your email on while you're doing other work that requires concentration? Just a quick show of hands. It's most people in our culture. I used to do that too, until I heard about this study. This study was run at the University of London and what they found was that people who had their email on while doing work that requires concentration, it is the equivalent of losing 10 IQ points. Now, I don't know about you, but I can't afford 10 IQ points. It's a lot. Just to give you a sense of how much it is, if you haven't slept for 36 hours, you've been up all night, you lose 10 IQ points. Another point of comparison, if you smoke marijuana grass, you lose four IQ points. But don't inhale. We pay a very high price for it. Leslie Furlow, professor at Harvard Business School, showed that knowledge workers who took as little as an hour and a half a day of focus, time, time without distractions, not only were happier at work, they were also more creative and more productive overall. So it's a win, win all around. There's a lot to be gained for the individual as well as for the organization if we introduce that as a ritual. There's a lot of research showing the relationship between money and happiness. And what we know is, is that money is a very poor predictor of well being, except for at the extremes. So of course, if you have a person who is homeless and that person suddenly gets an extra $2,000 a month. Of course it will affect their levels of well being. But once basic needs are met, the need for shelter, for education, for food, additional money makes very little difference to our overall well being. What does make a difference to our well being? Time. Affluence. This is simply the feeling that we're not constantly chasing something, running away from something. It's the feeling, the knowledge that we have time to savor, to enjoy, to appreciate the things in our lives, whether it's work, whether it's our family and friends. Family and friends. The number one predictor of, of well being. The number one predictor of what I call the ultimate currency, the currency of happiness. Time we spend with people we care about and who care about us. Do we take that time to savor, to appreciate, to love and to be loved? How basic, how simple, how important and how missing from our culture today. Growing up in Israel, I remember my parents having their friends over. They would laugh a lot and they would talk a lot. They'd have a swell of a time. It looks very different from even the way my generation visits friends. So when we visit friends, we're on the phone or doing our email, distracted, not savoring, not enjoying, not making the most of the number one source of the ultimate currency. Let me show you a clip with one of the leading positive psychologists in the world, professor of psychology, Sonja Lyubomirski from UC Riverside.

Friends and family is incredibly important. In fact, many researchers, I think if you ask them, they would say that social relationships are the biggest factor in happiness and well being. And social support has been shown to be important in coping with loss, coping with illness, with negative events, and also just with anything with achieving goals. You know, having, having supportive friends or family that kind of, you know, that inspire you, that cheer you, that motivate you, that give you tangible support.

Your most important source of happiness may be sitting next to you right now, right here. Do you appreciate that person? Do you make the most of that source of the ultimate currency? To my mind, the most surprising result in the area of stress research is that stress is not the problem. What psychologists have shown is that stress is often good for us. It makes us tougher, stronger, more resilient and more receptive to happiness, to well being. Think about the following analogy on the physical level. So what happens to your muscles when you go to the gym and lift weights? You're stressing your muscles. What happens to the muscles as you're doing it? The muscles actually break down when they stress. But is That a bad thing? It's not a bad thing. Because if you lift weights and then the following day you lift the same weights again, and then you lift the same weights again and again, day after day, after six months and then a year, and then after two years of lifting weights and working hard, you begin to look like me, more or less. Well, hopefully a little bit more. So it's not a bad thing. Strat is actually good for us. When do the problems begin? The problems begin when we lift weights and then a minute later we lift the same weights again, and then again and again and again. That's when we get injured, that's when we get over trained, that's when we get enervated rather than energized. So the problem is not the stress. The problem is the lack of recovery on the physical level as well as on the psychological, emotional level. People who are successful, who thrive and who are also happy are not people who don't experience stress, especially in the 21st century. Stress is part of being alive. They ritualize their recoveries throughout the day, throughout the week, throughout the year, throughout a lifetime. What we need if we are to thrive in this fast paced world is to strategically place recoveries on a few levels. First of all, on the micro level, what we need to do is introduce 15 minute breaks after an hour or two hours of work. That could be talking to our loved one, it could be meditating for 15 minutes, it could be having lunch with our phone off and email off. These mini recoveries make a big difference to our well being as well as to productivity and creativity. It's a win win. We need these recoveries. On the mezzo mid level, a good night's sleep is a very good investment. Lot of research tying good sleep to well being, lower levels of depression, higher levels of happiness, as well as to creativity and productivity. It's a good investment to sleep or taking a day off during the week. Even God needed a day off. People who take a day off or two days off a week actually report being more productive, not to mention happier. And then we also need those macro level breaks, those vacations, the month off, the week off every few months. J.P. morgan, one of the leading entrepreneurs in the history of American business, once said, I can do the work of a year in nine months, but not in 12. Now most of us don't have the luxury of taking three months off, but the point is that we need that time off. It is no coincidence that there is an etymological connection between the words create and recreate we need to engage in recreation if we want to be at our best. So introduce these rituals into your life. Those 15 minute breaks that our gym a few times during the week. That quiet lunch where you savor a friend or the meal itself. Get a good night's sleep, take a day off, take those vacations without taking your computer along or being on the phone constantly, because that's not a real vacation. That's just more stress this time about being on vacation. The next point that I want to introduce is the mind body connection, the connection for mental health between the mind and the body. Over the last few decades, there has literally been an explosion of research in this area where psychologists are realizing more and more how important it is to think about when what happens neck down. The first topic that I'd like to discuss is the importance of physical exercise. So this is a study done by Michael Babyak and his colleagues out at Duke Medical School. What they did was bring in a group of 156 patients with major depression. I mean, these are people who are really struggling. Many of them have insomnia, eating disorders, many of them suicidal. Very difficult challenges that they are facing. So he brings in a group of 156 individuals with major depression and divides them randomly into three groups. The first group, the exercise group, three times a week, 30 minutes of aerobic exercise. Second group are put on psychiatric medication. Third group gets the exercise and the medication. He looks at these three groups over four months and what they find is that all three groups improve to the same extent. Over 60% of participants get better. There is no significant difference among the three groups. Now, this does not mean that we can or should do away with psychiatric medication. For people who are experiencing major depression, it often takes medication to get them to the point where they can start exercising. But this study and many others show is that we need to start taking exercise seriously as a psychiatric intervention because it works. There was a follow up to this study. So after four months, they looked for six more months. What happens later? What happens after they stop taking the medication? What happens after they stop pushing the participants to exercise this one more time this week. And they were interested in the relapse rates. So how many people went back to being depressed from those who improved? And what they found was that in the medication group there was relapse rate of 38%. So 38% of the 60 plus percent who got better went back to being depressed. In the exercise and medication group, relapse rates of 31%. In the exercise only group, relapse rates were 9%. These are remarkable results. There are hundreds and thousands of studies showing the effects of exercise when dealing with depression, when dealing with anxiety, helping with ADD and adhd. When I first heard of this study, I thought to myself, wow, this is incredible. This is amazing. So exercising is like taking an antidepressant. But when I thought about it some more, I realized it's not that exercise is like taking an antidepressant, it's rather that not exercising is like taking a depressant. And this is more than just a semantic difference. Because we weren't made to be sedentary. We weren't made to sit in front of the computer all day long or to just engage in discussions all day long in meetings. We were made to run after an antelope for lunch or run away from a lion so that we don't become lunch. And yet today we're mostly sedentary. You know that our fore parents used to walk more than eight miles a day on average. How many miles a day do we walk today? Well, that depends where we parked our car. It has become a need to exercise. We've all got a God given or genes given level of well being that we can work on and improve or it can go down. So if my God given or genes given level of happiness is here, if I don't exercise, what happens? It goes down. It's like taking a depressant. When I exercise, I simply am raising my level of well being to where it is supposed to be, to its natural level. Now, I'm not a therapist. I don't work one on one with clients. But if I were a therapist, one of the things that I would focus on first would be to get my clients to start exercising. I want to work with nature and build on it. As Francis Bacon, the British philosopher, once said, nature to be commanded, must be obeyed. And our nature dictates that. We need the movement, we need the exercise. We are so sedentary, we are so lazy. Our comedians make fun of us.

There's no physical activity attached to anything anymore, even the garage door opener. We used to have to get out of the car and open up the garage door. Now there's a button you push, you know, and the car window. This became too much. I don't want to churn butter, I just want fresh air.

I just prefer the easy way in life. I do. I see an escalator, I get excited. I'm like, sweet. All I gotta do is keep my balance. We're lazy. And to combat that, what we need is nothing short of an exercise revolution. In his wonderful new book, Spark, Harvard psychiatrist John Ratey talks about the research that shows the benefits of exercise. So let me give you some examples. This is research done in schools, in school districts. So schools that introduced regular daily exercise, 30 minutes, 45 minutes a day of exercise, showed a marked decrease in obesity. So if levels of obesity are around 30% national average in high school, these schools dropped to 3%. Now imagine the ramifications, the benefits in the long term as well. What they found surprisingly, to some people, their academic performance improved significantly. And this was true for schools who were performing below average, as well as for the top schools who performed better when they introduced regular physical exercise. Why? Today we know why. Exercise actually changes the functioning of our brain. It helps us form more connections in our brain, so it has the cognitive benefits as well. What they also found is that regular exercise significantly reduced bullying and levels of violence in schools. Now think about it. How much money do we as a society spend on trying to reduce bullying and violence and increase school performance? And here we have an intervention so accessible, so easily used, with so many benefits. Do we use it? Do we use it enough? The benefits of exercise are not just for the young, for our kids in schools. The benefits of exercise are for all ages. Here is John Ratey talking about some of these benefits for the older population. We know, for instance, if you're middle aged and you haven't been exercising, if you begin to exercise 30 to 40 minutes a day for four to five days a week, you can push back cognitive decline by 10 to 15 years. And some studies show that you can cut the incidence of Alzheimer's disease by 50% even if you haven't begun yet. In many ways, exercise can be looked at as the unsung hero of psychological interventions. Let me quote you from John Ratey about the effects of exercise and how it works. In a way, exercise can be thought of as a psychiatrist's dream treatment. It works on anxiety, on panic disorders, and on stress in general, which has a lot to do with depression. It generates the release of neurotransmitters, norepinephrine, serotonin and dopamine. These are the brain's feel good chemicals, very similar to our most important psychiatric medicine. Having a bout of exercise is like taking a little bit of Prozac and a little bit of Ritalin, right where it is supposed to go without the side effects, or rather with positive side effects. The next intervention that I'd like to talk about is something that has been researched for the last few decades, but has been practiced primarily in the east for thousands of years. And that is mindfulness meditation. The benefits of meditation are immense. And when we talk about meditation, it can be yoga or sitting meditation, Just deep breathing, mantra meditation, repeating the same word over and over again. Prayer with focus is a form of meditation. Tai chi, qigong, and on and on. Basically, there are three components that one can say are common to just about all forms of meditation. The first component is the one pointedness. Focusing on one thing, focusing on the breathing, going in and out, focusing on that mantra, on that word, focusing on the posture, on the movement, on the prayer, whatever it is. The second component of most meditative practices is the deep breathing. This is the belly breathing, breathing all the way into our stomach and then slowly breathing out and repeating that over and over again, common to most meditative practices. And finally, the third common component of meditation is, is that there is no good or bad meditation. Meditation is about giving ourselves the permission to be human. So if I'm focusing on a word and lose my concentration, all I do is gently, calmly bring it back to focus. If I lose my concentration again, I bring it back to focus again. There is no good or bad meditation. There simply is meditation, the permission to be human. It's in practice. Let me share with you some of the fascinating studies done on, quote, unquote, professional meditators. These are people who have been meditating for decades, have been doing it for hours each day. And what psychologists were interested in was using modern technology, whether it's EEG or fmri, looking at their brains. So they brought in some of the Dalai Lama's right hand men and scanned their brains. And what they found was remarkable. So one of the things that they looked at was the left to right prefrontal cortex ratio. What that means is that they were looking at the ratio of activation between this side of the brain, the left side, and the right side of the brain, the front part. People who have more activation on the front side of the left brain tend to be happier. In contrast, people who have more activation on the right side prefrontal cortex, compared to the left side, tend to be more broody, more depressed. We've known this for many years. We've known this long before there were FMRIs or EEGs. How did we know it? Well, doctors noticed that sometimes when people experience brain damage, they got a blow to their brain when the blow was to the left side, Very often with other side effects, they also became more depressed. Whereas where people got a blow to the right side along with other side effects, they very often became more cheerful, happier. Now, I don't recommend that as an intervention, so. So don't use it at home without a doctor. However, if you happen to walk in the street and fall down, it's always better to fall this way rather than this way. But other than that, don't use it. Now, when we look at the population as a whole, we can create a bell curve. Most people somewhere in the middle, about equal ratio between left and right prefrontal cortex. The happier people, more activation on the left. Less happy people, more activation on the right. When they brought these meditators in and looked at their brain, what they found was that they were quite literally off the chart. Extremely high ratio between left to right prefrontal cortex, suggesting high susceptibility to positive emotion and extreme resilience in the face of painful emotions. They studied some more things. For example, they studied the startle response. The startle response, when there is a loud bang, we flinch. Even marksmen and women in the military who shoot guns every day still flinch slightly, ever so slightly when the gun goes off. Impossible to suppress it. Or so they thought. When they brought in these meditators and they asked them to keep complete calm, complete peace, and then they startled them, it didn't affect them at all. Lama Osser and many other meditators were able to suppress their startled response. First time in recorded history when someone was able to do that. And that says a lot. Here is a quote from Daniel Goleman's wonderful book, the Destructive Emotions. Given that the larger someone's startle, the more intensely that person tends to experience upsetting emotions, Osteros performance had tantalizing implications, suggesting a remarkable level of emotional equanimity. Now, some of you may not be sure what the startle response is. So let me demonstrate. Don't worry, I'm not going to startle you. But here are a few clips of the startle response in action. So this is great. This is remarkable results. But how does it help me? How does it help most of us? Are you prepared to go off to the Himalayas and meditate for 30 years? Maybe most people are not. Fortunately, we don't have to introduce radical change into our lives in order to benefit from meditation. Some very important work done by people like Herbert Benson and John Kabat Zinn shows the benefits of meditation, of meditating for as little as 15 minutes a day. Let me share with you a study that done by Jon Kabat Zinn and Richie Davidson. So what they did was they Brought in a group who was interested in a course on meditation. They randomly divided them into two subgroups. The first group got an eight week meditation course where they were asked to meditate for 45 minutes a day. The second group, the control group, was waiting for their course and they compared the two. The first thing that they found was that the group that meditated enjoyed far lower levels of anxiety than their control group. Second, their mood improved significantly. They actually became happier as a result of that eight week program. So this is great. But they went a step further, they went deeper and they actually scanned their brains. And what they found was that after eight weeks, their brains actually changed. Their brains were quite literally transformed. They had higher levels of activation on the left side compared to the right side. This is amazing, especially given the fact that until about 10 years ago, we thought that the brain doesn't change after the age of three or so. Now we know that it changes until the day we die. And, and one of the ways of positively changing our brain is through meditation. Then they injected participants in both groups with cold bacteria. They wanted to see how their immune system would react. And what they found was that those who meditated, their immune system was a lot stronger. So we become more resilient physically as well as psychologically. We become happier and healthier through meditation. Here is A clip by Dr. Jon Kabat Zinn, one of the people most responsible for bringing meditation to our part of the world. One of the take home messages of our study is that you do not actually have to be a Buddhist monk and move to the Himalayas in order to benefit from these kinds of very, very powerful meditative practices. That it can be done in the workplace, in a regular life. And that one's brain will actually change in response to it. One's immune system will actually change in response to it. However, not everyone feels comfortable doing yoga or taking the time to meditate. But here is one thing that I recommend. Something that is very, very important. That you all breathe. Don't stop breathing. It's very important. But of course, what I mean is the deep breathing, breathing like a baby does, all the way into our belly, and then exhaling slowly and gently. We don't do that enough in our culture and we pay a price. What we know is that when we're stressed, when we're anxious, our breathing actually becomes shallower. It stops here. And then when our breathing stops here, we become even more stressed and anxious, making our breathing yet shallower, and so on and so on in a downward spiral, or what psychologists call the Fight or flight response. Something that we experience so much of the day in our modern 21st century world. Fortunately, though, what psychologists and physiologists have shown is that it's quite simple to reverse the fight or flight response and, and create instead what Herbert Benson calls the relaxation response. And sometimes it takes as little as three deep breaths to reverse the cycle. Because what we also know is that when we're feeling good, our breathing is deeper. And when our breathing is deeper, we feel even better, leading to deeper breathing and on and on in an upward spiral of well being. There's a wonderful book out by Thomas Crumb called Three Deep Breaths where he talks about the importance of introducing the practice of three deep breaths throughout the day as a ritual. So the first thing when you wake up in the morning, take those breaths. First thing as you walk into your office and sit down, take three deep breaths just after coming back from lunch or just as you're about to enter home in the evening. Three deep breaths. He recommends that each time we get to a red light, we take three deep breaths. Now, I learned how to drive in two Israel and in Boston. Yep. Now the Israeli drivers and the Bostonian drivers were, are not world renowned for their calm and peacefulness on the road. I am sad to say, no exception. So each time I used to get to a red light, I used to really get anxious, especially if I just missed the green light. Whereas now I see it as an opportunity for deep breathing. Imagine if everyone use that as an opportunity for deep breathing and everyone, especially in Israel and Boston, used it as an opportunity. We'd have better drivers, calmer drivers, less road rage. Perhaps. Introducing these three deep breaths throughout the day can transform our day because in many ways these breaths are a form of a mini recovery. In fact, one of the leading mind body practitioners, doctors, researchers in the area, Dr. Andrew Weil, has this to say about if I had to limit my advice on healthier living to just one tip, it would be simply to learn how to breathe correctly. So breathe. The nice thing about breathing is that you can do it anywhere, anytime, even while you're listening to a lecture. So we talked about the permission to be human, we talked about ways of dealing with stress, and we talked about some mind body interventions. The last thing that I want to talk about is considered one of the central pillars of positive psychology and that is quite simply focusing on the positive. We have treasures of happiness all around us and within us. One of the problems is that very often we fail to appreciate these treasures. Appreciate. Think of the word it has two meanings. The first meaning of the word appreciate is to say thank you for something. And saying thank you for something, being grateful for something, appreciating it, is a nice thing to do. Cicero called gratitude the highest of virtues. But there is also a second meaning to appreciate. And the second meaning is to increase in value. It doesn't just happen to material things. It also happens to spiritual things. So when we appreciate the good in our life, the good appreciates. Unfortunately, the opposite is also the case. Meaning when we don't appreciate the good in our life, when we take it for granted, the good depreciates. And that, unfortunately, is what very often happens in our lives, in our relationships, in our schools, in our country. Erwin Yalom, a Stanford psychiatrist, has conducted research on terminally ill patients. These are people who have three to six months to live. And one of the things that he found time and again was that these individuals would say something to the effect of for the first time in my life, I feel that I'm alive. For the first time in my life, I feel that I'm alive. Why? Because for the first time, they're appreciating a breath. For the first time in their lives, they're appreciating a walk in the park. The people whom they care about and who care about them, and they finally feel that they are alive. So the question is, do we need to wait? Do we need to wait for something extraordinary, external, usually tragic to happen? For us to appreciate the ordinary, for us to appreciate the treasures of happiness that are all around us and within us? And the answer is no, we don't need to wait if we cultivate the habit of gratitude. There's a lot of wonderful research done in this area of gratitude, a lot of it by Robert emmons and Mike McAuliffe. What they did in one seminal study was bring in a group of people and randomly divide them into four subgroups. The first group was asked every night before going to sleep to write down at least five things for which they're grateful. They can be big things or little things. Second group, every night before going to sleep, was asked to write about at least five hassles in their lives, five bad things that happened to them. The third group, every night before going to sleep, had to write at least five things at which they were better than others at superior to others. And the fourth group, the control group, had to write any five things that happened to them during the day. They looked at the following measures, the following variables. They looked at how happy they were over the Period of the study. They looked at how optimistic they were. They looked at how likely they were to achieve their goals, how successful they were during that period. They looked at how physically healthy they were during that time. And finally they looked at how generous and benevolent these people were. What they found was that the group that performed the worst was the group that every night wrote five hassles in their lives. The group that performed the best, the group that was happiest, most optimistic, most likely to achieve their goals, most generous and benevolent toward others, and healthiest was the group that every night before going to bed wrote a at least five things for which they're grateful. What effects and how simple. How long does it take? 2 minutes, 3 minutes? With such remarkable results. I've been doing this exercise regularly, religiously, every night since the 19th of September, 1999, three years before the actual study was published. I started doing it after Oprah on one of her programs told me to do it. And I've been doing it ever since. It works. And now we also have the scientific basis to show that it works. I also do it with my son David. Every night before he goes to sleep, I ask him, david, what was fun for you today? And then he asked me, abba, Daddy, what was fun for you today? And I tell him, my wife and I do it on a regular basis where we tell one another what we appreciate about each other. The beginning, when we started doing it, I naturally initiated it. She thought it was weird, but she said, well, you know, I knew what I was getting into when I married the guy, so she put up with me. And now it comes natural to us. Why? Because it's about not taking for granted the most important things in our lives. When we appreciate the good, the good appreciates. So there are both psychological as well as physical benefits to doing this very simple exercise. The key, though, when doing this exercise is to maintain freshness by being mindful of what we are writing down. Because one of the things that tend to happen after we've done it many times is, is that we begin to take this exercise for granted, which of course defeats the purpose. So when writing down, for example, mom, to really think about mom, when writing down a meal experience or re. Experience that meal, it's to experience what Barbara Fredrickson calls in her book, positivity, heartfelt positivity. Let me share with you what I wrote last night. So I have this little notebook that I write it down and every once in a while I transcribe it to a file on my computer and it's terrific to go back and look at the things I was grateful for back in 99 or 2005. So here is what I wrote last night. God, Tammuzh, Tami, my wife, David, Shirail, Eliav, my three. Three children, Udi and Jeff, two friends I met yesterday and a salmon dish. I had a wonderful salmon last night. Big things, little things, things that repeat themselves every day, and things that are peculiar, unique to that day. It makes a big difference. Here is another clip by Sonja Lyubomirsky about the importance of gratitude. The importance of appreciation.

Gratitude is really critical, was one of the critical strategies to being happy and maintaining happiness. And gratitude is really a thankfulness or appreciation or even kind of a wonder at life. But there's different kinds of gratitude and there are different ways to express gratitude. So for example, being grateful for a particular individual in your life. So in my. Is one type of expression of gratitude. So in my studies, I've had people write gratitude letters as a way. As a kind of a technique to make themselves happier. Counting your blessings is another way to express gratitude, which is basically listing either writing down or telling someone else the things in your life that you're grateful for, but also just savoring and appreciating your life, sort of as it happens when you're with your kids. Are you really just sort of savoring that positive experience with them, or are you thinking about something else?

So take these few extra minutes to savor to appreciate the treasures of happiness. Many of the things that I talked about today are commonsensical. Of course, we know how important it is to give ourselves and others the permission to be human, for us to take time to recover. We know how good we feel after we. We go for a walk or a run. We know that we feel great when we take in a deep breath. And we know how important it is not to take for granted the things that are so important for us in life. We know all these things. It's common sense. But as the French philosopher once said, common sense is not that common, especially when it comes to application. So this is what I ask you today to make common sense more common. Peter Drucker, who is considered by many to be the father of modern management studies, worked with hundreds and thousands of leaders around the world in the education sector, in the business sector, in government. And he used to go to organizations and give talks or give public lectures. But toward the end of his life, he was too weak and too frail to go out and teach. So he had those leaders come to him and spend the weekend. And here is how he would start every weekend on a Friday, he would tell the participant, whoever it was, the on Monday, I don't want you to tell me how great it was, how great this weekend was on Monday. I want you to tell me what you're doing differently. Why? Because Peter Drucker, with his 60 or more years of experience, knew what change is about. He knew that real change does not come from experiencing a high or from being inspired. That real change comes only with action. So this is what I'm asking you now. Introduce these ideas in your life. Create a circle around you, friends, family, where you give one another the permission to be human. Give yourself time to recover. The 15 minute recovery, the good night's sleep, the vacation. Start a training regime tomorrow morning. Don't wait three times a week of 30 minutes. It's not a lot. It has consequences for your entire life. It's a good investment. Go to a meditation class. Start yoga. See if it works for you. And breathe throughout the day, especially when you get to that red light. And finally, savor. Appreciate. There are so many treasures all around us, within us. And if we appreciate them, we'll have even more. Tonight, as every night, I'm going to be writing down the five things or more for which I'm grateful. And one thing which I'm certainly going to write down tonight is the opportunity and the privilege of having spent time with you. So thank you, Sam. Sa.

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