June 9, 2025 • 39 mins
Is it possible to become happier? How much of your happiness has to do with genetics, social connection, comparison to other people, your balance of optimism vs pessimism, and whether it would be useful to keep a journal of your life? Join Eagleman this week with Bruce Hood, experimental psychologist and author of “The Science of Happiness”.
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Speaker 1 (00:05):
Is it possible to become happier? What does the science
say about this? How much of your happiness is your genetics?
And what does any of this have to do with
social connection or comparison to other people, or your balance
of optimism versus pessimism, And why it would be useful
to keep a journal of your life. Welcome to Intercosmos
(00:32):
with me David Eagleman. I'm a neuroscientist and author at
Stanford and in these episodes we sail deeply into our
three pound universe to uncover some of the most surprising
aspects of our lives. Today's episdis is about what's known
(01:01):
about happiness from a scientific point of view. Everyone since
time immemorial has asked themselves what is going to make
me happy? And they've often speculated what can I tell
other people about what's going to make them happy? But
in a sense, I view this the same way that
people once approached disease. They said, Hey, maybe if I
(01:22):
sprinkle salt over my shoulder, or boil some bones, or
eat a lizard's tail, that's going to work. There were
endless theories and rituals and folk beliefs, some of which
were passed down for generations. Many of these things were
totally made up, but they persisted because there wasn't a
better option. The world of disease changed with the arrival
(01:45):
of the scientific method. With observation and experimentation and replication,
the community slowly was able to replace guesswork and superstition
with reproducible knowledge. We stopped tossing salt and started testing antibiotics.
We stopped blaming spirits and started understanding microbes, and as
(02:09):
a result, we eradicated smallpox and polio. We developed fixes
for fever and diarrhea and diabetes. And if you ever
feel skepticism about our progress, just note that we have
added decades to the average human life. So the key
question I want to ask today is can we bring
that same level of rigor to the question of happiness.
(02:33):
Now that might sound strange because happiness seems so personal,
it's so subjective. Is it really something you can study
in a lab? Do we really understand what it is
we're chasing? Happiness? It turns out is a remarkably slippery concept.
You ask three people to define it, you're going to
get four answers. Is it pleasure contentment?
Speaker 2 (02:57):
Meaning?
Speaker 1 (02:58):
Is it a spike of joy or a slow and
steady hum of well being. We're probably talking about all
these things. And I'll note that even the ancient Greeks
made distinctions. They distinguished between the pursuit of pleasure, which
they called hedonia, and a life of meaning and virtue,
which they called you'd ammonia. And in modern psychology we
(03:21):
have all kinds of similar distinctions, asking whether happiness is
more about fleeting moods or lasting satisfaction. But here's the thing.
Even once we settle on definitions, we are not always
so good at predicting what will make us happy. The
general lesson from psychology is that people make systematic errors
(03:44):
in forecasting their own happiness. We think that a new
car will do it, or a bigger house, or finally
getting that promotion, And when those things happen, we do
feel a little jolt of joy, but it doesn't last
apt we return to our baseline. Psychologists call this the
(04:05):
hedonic treadmill. You keep running, chasing the next thing, but
you never really get ahead. And by the way, even
our memories deceive us. We misremember what made us happy
in the past, and we make plans for the future
based on those flawed recollections. We compare ourselves to others constantly.
(04:26):
We overvalue the extraordinary and overlook the ordinary. We confuse
excitement with fulfillment. So what does this all mean. It
means our internal compass is often misaligned, and yet there's hope.
And this is because over the past decades, researchers have
begun to untangle the mystery of happiness by using tools
(04:49):
like longitudinal studies, which follow people across decades or even
across their entire lives. Other studies use brain imaging to
map emotional states, or behavioral experiments that track the choices
people make and then how they feel about it later,
or cross cultural research that looks at how different societies
(05:10):
define and pursue joy. What emerges from this growing body
of work is a more nuanced, more evidence based understanding
of what makes life feel worthwhile and good. And the
answers provide something useful, a map. It's not a guarantee,
it's not a formula, but it's a way to navigate
(05:32):
toward a deeper, more lasting sense of well being. So
today we're going to explore that map. We'll talk about
what practices actually seem to make a difference. Based not
on wishful thinking, about on data to guide us through
this territory. I called up my friend and colleague, Bruce Hood.
He's an experimental psychologist and philosopher at the University of
(05:55):
Bristol in England, and he recently wrote a book called
The Science of Happiness. Together, we're going to try to
get a clearer view of what the science tells us,
what works, what doesn't, and how we can apply these
findings in our own lives. Here's my interview with Bruce. So, Bruce,
(06:16):
I know at the back of your office there's a
junior high playground and you're always hearing the laughter and
the squealing of children. So what did that make you wonder?
Speaker 3 (06:27):
Well, in my day job, I see a lot of
my students and I'm their tutor, and I've just come
out of a tutoring session where they were really quite
miserable and unhappy and really worried, and I just heard
this laughter coming from the playground. I thought, what goes wrong?
Where are we going wrong?
Speaker 1 (06:46):
Well?
Speaker 3 (06:47):
How how do they ended this position at the end
of the education system where they're so preoccupied with their
performance and they've got mental health issues? And I kind
of reached the end of my tether to some extent,
I wanted to try and do something.
Speaker 1 (07:01):
So you thought, look, kids are happy, young adults are
not so happy, and so you started looking into the
science of happiness. And what did you find.
Speaker 3 (07:11):
Well, we had reached a bit of a crisis point
at Bristol University, and I felt I needed to do something.
And I looked around and discover that a former student
of mind, Laurie Santos, who had I taught as an
undergraduate when I was at Harvard, had also encountered a
problem at Yale, and she put on a course that
had been remarkably successful. So this really inspired me to
try and do a version of it myself. So I
(07:32):
contacted Laurie and her typical generous nature, She shared all
her notes, and I put together a version of her course,
and I call it the Science of Happiness. I think
was called Psychology and the Good Life. And I focused
a little bit more on critical thinking, my own spin
on stuff. And I just ran it as a pilot
to see if anyone would turn up to it. It
(07:52):
wasn't credit bearing, it wasn't official course. It was just
here's a lunchtime seminar series I'm running for ten weeks
and I was price six hundred people turned up, even
though they weren't getting credit for it. So this told
me that this was something that was in demand, and
the universes were very pleased with this, so they gave
me the green light to go ahead and create a
(08:13):
course which was credit bearing, and we launched it the
following year and we've been doing it every year with
about six hundred students enrolling. And what makes it, I
think unique, is that to me, it's a large experiment
because we actually get the students to fill in their
own sort of levels of happiness and various psychometric tests,
and every year we've run the course, we find a
(08:34):
significant improvement of about fifteen percent on all these measures.
So it's not just an educational course because they have
to actually do things and we discover that actually it
seems to make some impact.
Speaker 1 (08:46):
So before we get into the framework of the science
of happiness, I want to ask you a few rapid questions. First,
do you think that students are changing from let's say
when you first started teaching.
Speaker 2 (08:58):
Yes and No?
Speaker 3 (09:00):
My first paper done back in nineteen eighty six. I
think it came out the full year eighty seven was
on the transition to university, and I was already interested
in the fact that students, way back when I was
an undergrad were experiencing homesickness and this sort of temporary
period of uncertainty. So I think that's actually a common
experience for all students when they leave the you know,
(09:22):
the confines and the familiarity of their home environment, and
they go to in new, new campus, but very soon
they get used to it and they kind of adapt
to that. I think the difference now is that students
are already coming to university with mental health issues, and
I think the nature of discussing these things that's normalized
a lot more now, and it seems to be more pervasive.
(09:43):
It certainly seems to feature as an issue that students
want to talk about. So I think that I don't
think there's any fundamental difference in the human mind, if
you like, but the way that we discuss and talk
about these things and the way it impacts on students,
I think has changed.
Speaker 1 (10:01):
How much of a person's happiness comes down to the
genes that they inherit.
Speaker 3 (10:05):
Actually we do have a pretty good idea about that,
and that comes from behavior genetic studies where they compare
identical and non identical twins, and it's roughly the same
as intelligence around about heritability is about forty to fifty percent.
So yes, some people are very much like their parents
and some are very unlike their parents. But on average,
if you look across a big population, that heritability is
(10:27):
around about forty to fifty percent.
Speaker 1 (10:29):
And if I can ask you a personal question, Bruce,
tell us about your childhood, as I understand that your
father wasn't particularly happy and well adjusted and you are.
Speaker 3 (10:41):
Yeah, I came from well I'm laughing about it now
because I can look back with some degree of wisdom,
but at the time it was a very impoverished childhood,
tenerant if we moved from household to hustle. We never
had any money, and he was a very abusive alcoholic. Yeah,
it was a painful childhood, but you know, I think
(11:02):
I learned to cope, and certainly this course has helped
a lot for me. What I've learned on this past
has actually changed my outlook. I used to be very,
very driven and maybe too driven, and that to the
exclusion of people around me. Now I'm a lot more
mindful and thoughtful about you know, what I'm doing, and
(11:23):
that might just be age and wisdom, but I also
think that there is there are things that you can
do to change your life for the better. So I've
you know, I used to be skeptical about all this stuff.
I felt it was very soft psychology and you know,
a little bit wishy washy. And now I'm much more
of a convert to it. That and if it does
make the students better, then you know, whether or not
(11:44):
we can argue about the mechanisms. I still think it's
a valid endeavor to try and alleviate some of this
problem that seems to be so pervasive.
Speaker 1 (11:53):
Great, so in your book, you boil this down to
seven lessons. Well, I call.
Speaker 3 (11:58):
Them lessons to capture the nature that a book that
was originated from a course, and so it felt like
an educational process. But yeah, and they all actually bleed
into each other, and it says they're all interrelated. But
there is a fundamental premise throughout the book that it's
happiness is about becoming less self centered and that's the
kind of underlying theme.
Speaker 1 (12:19):
Great, so let's dive into the seven lessons. I think
it's a good way to structure. This so less than
one you call alter your ego. So tell us about that.
Speaker 3 (12:29):
Well, this comes from my training as a developmental psychologist
and from the work the works of Jean Piage and others.
And what Page noted is that children are very egocentric.
And what he meant by that is that they view
the world from their own perspective, from themselves. Literally, they
think the world is an extension of their sensory systems,
so that if they're not looking at something, it.
Speaker 2 (12:51):
Ceases to exist. So they really do believe.
Speaker 3 (12:54):
We have a term in philosophy called salism that the
world is literally an extension of your mind. They have
to learn to differentiate themselves from that physical world and
understand that objects have their own kind of identity and
permanence and uniqueness. And this is captured in a lot
of his demonstrations that should behave as if objects cease
to exist when they're not being looked at, or they're
a product of the child's actions. Now that's happening in infancy.
(13:18):
Over time, they start to learn that there is a
physical world that is separate to them, and they start
to realize that other children have different thoughts, but they
still think of themselves very egocentrically. So initially, for example,
they think that other people understand things the way they do,
They see the way the world they do, and they
lack what's called a theory of mind in the sense
(13:38):
that they don't necessarily understand that others can have completely
different opinions or completely different.
Speaker 2 (13:44):
Thoughts to their own.
Speaker 3 (13:45):
But around about three or four years of age, they
start to learn to become less egocentric and more what
I call alocentric, which means other focused. It's not that
children don't interact with others, but that interaction is very
much uni direction or one direction when they're very very young.
But if you want to become a functioning member of
society as a child, and this is what childhoods are for,
it's socialization. They've got to learn to become cooperative, communicate, integrate.
(14:10):
So when we tell ch'am to behave, we're trying to
teach them the rules of socialization in order to be
accepted by the rest of the tribe, as it were.
So we start off with a very ecocentric perspective, and
we've become more other focuses we get older. But like
many aspects of the human mind. We never entirely abandoned
these kind of primitive ways of thinking, and I think consciousness,
for example, is a very egocentric experience. It's from the
(14:32):
first person perspective. We don't instantly take a theory in mind,
We don't instantly and for other people's thoughts and purses, unless,
for example, they behave in a way that we make
questions why they've done it, and we might then try
and figure out what's on their mind. But in general,
we're on autopilot. We're kind of seeing everything from the
first person perspective, and that's okay. But when it comes
(14:53):
to happiness, this is where I think it can be
a problem because left to our own devices, we have
a tendency to turn in on our ourselves, to ruminate,
to consider our perspectives, and we can blow things up
of proportion. Whereas if you start to see yourself as
more interconnected or alocentric, first of all, you're more contributing
member of society, but also you can start to get
a sense that other people have things going in their
(15:14):
lives which actually may be more paramount or more important
to them, or worse. And then once you understand that
actually we're all interconnected and other people have things going
on their lives. It starts to put your own things
into perspective. So I think there's been a language or
focus on self and identity, politics and all about me,
me me for the past ten years. I think we've
(15:36):
been hearing that, and I'm just sort of saying, maybe
that's the wrong way to think about it. Maybe focusing
on yourself is directing your energies in the wrong way.
I think we should try and ritualize of others. And
this comes from younemonia, which is an ancient concept from Aristotle.
Speaker 1 (15:51):
Unpack you.
Speaker 3 (15:52):
Aemonia for us, Pneumonia is the technical term for flourishing,
which means that rather than directing your effort to make
yourself happy, what you should be trying to do is
enrigin the lives of other people around you. So it's
a more altruistic, gregarious, other focused way of energy. What
Aristotle said to it. You know, anyone can be self centered.
(16:14):
Animals are self centered and they can seek gratification. But humans,
we have moral grounds, we have moral perspectives. We can
put our efforts into making other people's lives better. Altruism
and so on. And if you do that, that will
make society better and you will benefit from that indirectly.
So he argued that we shouldn't be focusing our energies
on ourselves, but rather trying to improve the lives of others.
Speaker 1 (16:50):
Yeah. One of the things you argue, if I understood
this correctly, is you're saying what you really want to
hit is a balance between egocentric and alocentric. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (16:59):
Yeah, yeah, Because obviously, if you're so selfless, then human
nature is that people will take advantage, so you need
to kind of get the balance correct. The other thing
about being self less is if you're so empathic, then
there is a danger that you can kind of become
a super EmPATH or take on all the suffering and
pain of others around you, which means you can't function either.
(17:20):
So it's really trying to get things into perspective and
get the balance right. If you're too allocentric or too
other focus, you're probably not going to look after yourself well.
If you're too selfish, you're going to be rejected, possibly
and ostracized. So it's about becoming what we evolve to be,
which is a socialized, integrated animal.
Speaker 1 (17:38):
So let's go to the second lesson, which is avoid isolation.
Tell us about that.
Speaker 3 (17:43):
Well, that's the flip side of being ostracized. So yes,
we're a social animal, and the way we've evolved is
through our capacity for what I call well, I didn't
coin the term. Mike Thomas elo coined it.
Speaker 2 (17:55):
It's ratcheting, cultural ratcheting.
Speaker 3 (17:57):
In other words, we have communication and we cooperate, and
the information that we learn in one generation we pass
on to the next. And this is a way we've
been able to accumulate and build sequentially on the knowledge base,
which is allowed technology to rise exponentially. So yeah, that
all comes from the fact that we evolve such sort
of a social life. If you think about it, we
(18:18):
spend the largest proportion in childhood of any species. You know,
it could be to the teenage years. Some adults who
argue that they've still got kids in their twenties. It's
still at home as children. But if you look at
it in terms of our life expectancy, a large proportion
of that is spent in periods of being dependent on others.
So those long childhoods come at a cost, and that's
(18:38):
why we have all the emotions of being included, all
the joys and the pains.
Speaker 2 (18:43):
And sorrows and so forth.
Speaker 3 (18:45):
The flip side of it is if you're ostracized, that
is really detrimental to not only your mental health but
your physical health. So we know, for example, loneliness, chronic
loneliness has a higher morbidity risk than many other well
known factors such as moderate smoking and drinking and obesity.
But if you look at the longitudinal studies of how
long people live, those who have the best social connections
(19:07):
live longer and are happier. And that's based on these
studies of Harvard, for example, They've got studies to be
following people up for sixty years. So social connection is
paramount to our well being and social isolation is problematic.
And this, of course is a big concern at the moment,
the way that technology is actually is creating I think,
(19:30):
pockets of isolation and more increased loneliness because the technology
is so absorbing that people just focusing on their phones
all the time and they're not engaging in the other
things that they could be doing. And I'm not one
of these people saying, you know, social media's you know,
rotting the brains of our kids. I think what's really doing.
Is it's just taking away all that time that in
the past we used to have speaking to each other
(19:50):
and doing those other things, and I think that's its
real danger.
Speaker 1 (19:53):
On the flip side, when people are looking at their phones,
they're often interacting with their friends and colleagues on there,
there's a set in which for people who grew up
in very isolated environments like I grew up in the
mountains in New Mexico, I didn't have folks around, but
kids now always have folks around. Do you think that
is useful in terms of avoiding isolation.
Speaker 3 (20:14):
Yes, I do, And the last survey by the Pew
Center showed that actually teenagers really don't see the same
problems that the adults do, so they actually think it's
improved their social interactions and their opportunities for interaction. I
would argue, though, however, it's the nature of that interaction.
I think there's something about doing everything through a screen.
(20:34):
It doesn't really produce the same level of social interactions.
I mean, for example, body movements, our ability to read
body language. These are things which we've evolved over thousands
of years, and now if you take it away or
you produce artificial interactions. Everyone knows how awkward zoom can be.
It's not the same as as if we were in
kind of a spontaneous, more informal situation. So yeah, I'm
(20:58):
not a what's the word, these are called them the luodites.
I'm not going to get rid of the technology. And
by the way, it's actually amazing and and it does
so many things. It allows people to Education is incredible,
podcasting is incredible. So these are all great, they're all upsides.
But I do think we need to think about how
is changed the nature of our off time as it were,
(21:20):
so I can see the concerns quite right.
Speaker 1 (21:23):
Okay, so your third lesson is reject negative comparisons. So
let's unpack that well.
Speaker 3 (21:29):
As you probably know, the brain always, by its default,
the way it's calculating anything is by comparison. Nerve impulses
are a signal is real as a relative comparison to
the baseline. So from the very basics of how our
brain cells are working right up to the complexity of
conceptual thinking, we're always drawing comparisons. So, for example, you
(21:53):
can see this in the sensory systems. If you come
in from a bright day out and going to a room,
it takes a long time to see anything because you've
adapted to the brightness and the outside, so your system
has to calibrate to the darkness. And likewise, if you
go from a dark area out into somewhere bright, you're
startled initially. So what the brain's always doing is doing
relative comparisons. The trouble with us is that when you
(22:16):
look at the sources of information we pay attention to,
it seems that we have a bias to pay more
attention to negative information. So, for example, if you get
people to read a newspaper and you don't tell them
that you're actually monitoring their eye movements, if you look
at where they're focusing, they're focusing on all the negative stories,
all the negative information. So this is a strategy of
(22:37):
the so called negativity bias. It's called that we've evolved
this special bias to pay attention to things which are
potentially threatening. And the reason is is because that if
you can anticipate and avoid potential threats, you'll survive longer.
There's no point resting on your laurels and just paying
attention to where everything's going fine. Rather strategically, from an
(22:57):
evolutionary point of view, it's much better to actually focus
on things which are likely to eliminate you from the
gene pool.
Speaker 1 (23:04):
So this is.
Speaker 3 (23:05):
Why we spot frowns, quicker and sea of faces. It's
why screams are more poignant than laughter, although sometimes they
sound the same. But this is we have a bias
really to pay attention to the sorts of negative information.
Speaker 1 (23:20):
So given this, how does somebody take that on to
work on increasing happiness.
Speaker 2 (23:25):
Well, I think it's drawing the right comparisons.
Speaker 3 (23:27):
So going back to social media that we mentioned briefly,
one of the issues that I think is somewhat problematic
is it presents unrealistic measures of success and what people
or what is normal. And if you focus just on
if you just look at other people's lives and assume
that that's what you should be comparing yourself to, then
you're going to feel inadequate because generally everyone posts their
(23:50):
best holiday snaps, the best pictures of themselves, the best food,
whatever it is, and so it looks like everyone's having
an incredibly good time. By comparison, you feel inadequate. I
think it's it's important to recognize that the comparisons that
we draw typically are unrealistic, and I think this has
been one of the problems of social media because everyone
seems to have a much more interesting life, and if
(24:11):
you ask a bunch of people, for example, who goes
to more parties, you are other people. What happens is
that people will imagine or typically think of a very
sociable person and draw a relative comparison. But of course
not everyone can be below the average, because by definition,
the average is the norm. But this is what we
typically do when we're thinking about our happiness or our
(24:33):
success or how we're going on in life. We are
drawing the wrong comparisons by identifying those who are the
most obvious.
Speaker 1 (24:40):
So this leads us nicely less than four, which has
become more optimistic. Let's unpack that.
Speaker 3 (24:47):
Okay, So, given that we have a negativity bias and
the information around us and the media tends to focus
on negative information because that's frankly what people pay more
attention to to hear, then we have to learn to
recognize that there we're in a sea of negativity, and
(25:07):
we have to learn to try and become more optimistic.
And the way to do that is to recognize the
way that we interpret and process events so this is
working Marty Seligmann amongst others, but they recognize that there's
a different way of what he called attributional style, which
is how you make sense or explain situations. And there
are three sorts of dimensions which typically differ between a
(25:28):
pessimist and an optimist. Pessimists tend to think setbacks are
permanent and never going to change or is an optimist
is much more likely to think them as transitory. A
pessimist is much more likely to take a setback and
extrapolate or overgeneralize, where saying you, I bet I've failed
an examin of failure at everything I do in my life,
whereas an optimist is much more likely to sort of
(25:50):
ring fence and say, well, there are other things going on.
And finally, when it comes to sort of who's responsible
for setbacks, the pessimist is much more likely to internalize it,
or as it is more likely to deflect or not
accept responsibility. Now, whilst that's okay, you don't want to
be overly optimistic, because if you're overly optimistic, you'll never
(26:11):
change or learn or try to adjust. You don't want
to be overly pessimistic because then you're going to become
a little bit hopeless. So you need to again try
to err towards more optimism, which is to find the
silver lining in the cloud, as it were. And you
can do that, and it just takes time to sort
of write down your setbacks and as much detail as
you possibly can and then reinterpret them from a more
(26:31):
optimistic view. And by the way, when I say optimists
and pessimists, you can be actually quite nuanced. You can
be pessimistic in some aspects of your life, but more
optimistic in others. So I don't think it's so simple
that either one or the other. But if something is
impacting on your life negatively, then it's a case of
just trying to reinterpret it and process it in a
much more positive way, and through effort and time that
(26:54):
comes more naturally excellent.
Speaker 1 (26:55):
So less than five is control your attentions to tell
about that.
Speaker 3 (27:01):
So I have found this probably the most insightful and
fascinating area of work, and this really stems from the
work of mind wandering. So this is Matt Killingsworth's work
and Dan Gilbert, my old coolague who discovered that mind
wandering is incredibly common and it's not always associated with
pleasant daydreaming. A lot of the time when it's neutral
(27:22):
or need negative, obviously people are not particularly happy. So
they did these studies where they contacted people at random
points of the day and they said what are you
thinking about?
Speaker 2 (27:30):
What are you doing? And by the way, how happy
you are.
Speaker 3 (27:33):
It turns out that people's minds are wandering about fifty
percent of the time and they tend to be less happy,
And I think, what's going on there is It strikes
me that this is probably rumination where people are focusing
on things that haven't gone right, or they're worrying about
the future, or they got some unresolved conflict.
Speaker 2 (27:52):
And so this has been associated with.
Speaker 3 (27:53):
Activation of the default mode network that seems to kick
in when you're not task focused, and that is very
common experience for people. And when you're not task focused,
I think then you tend to sort of turn in
ecocentrically to sort of view your situation. And that's why
I think at least the sort of unhappy thinking because
of this sort of tendency to focus on things when
they're not going well.
Speaker 1 (28:30):
Tell us about lesson six, which is connect with others.
Speaker 3 (28:34):
So probably the most powerful and the most successful positive
psychology intervention are those which really encourage you to form
social connections. So Nick Keppley, for example Chicago, has done
these really incredible studies where he forces people to strike
up conversations with strangers, and he also gets other people
(28:57):
to predict how awkward that will be.
Speaker 2 (29:00):
Terribly.
Speaker 3 (29:00):
What people predict is it's going to be incredibly awkward
having a conversation with another person, say if you're commuting,
for example. But if you actually force people to strike
up a conversation in those circumstances, they typically will find
it much more rewarding and satisfying than the other group.
We thought it'd be very awkward. And this was done
originally in Chicago, and it's now been replicated in London,
(29:22):
of all places. I don't know if you've been there recently,
but Londoners are not the most gagariously chatty people. But
I think the point is is that it is in
our nature to be social animals, and unfortunately modern life
tends to get in the way of that, especially when
people are on their phones and not engaging with each other.
But if you actually are in a situation where you
do have to strike a spontaneous conversation, it can be incredibly,
(29:45):
really rewarding. So I think this is the recommendation I
make for people, is to try and have that conversation
with your barista or the person who's serving you in
the shop, and you'll discover that actually you probably have
a lot more common and the awkwardness that we think
is going to happen never really materializes. So I really
(30:06):
am a strong advocate of trying to reach out and
connect alicentrically.
Speaker 1 (30:11):
Excellent, and this leads nicely into the last lesson seven,
which is get out of your own head.
Speaker 2 (30:18):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (30:19):
Well, that was always going to be a bit of
a controversial chapter because in the beginning of that I
talk about my own experience with psychedelics when I was young,
And by the way, I'm not advocating this, but I
did want to at least acknowledge that this is a
burgeoning area of research. It's particularly fascinating the work coming
out John Hopkins and Imperial College for people who have
(30:41):
intractable depression that doesn't respond to psychopharmacology. Turns out that
a psychedelic experience can actually have long term, profound benefits,
so they just need to do it once. And I
find that very interesting because obviously psychedelic experiences are intense,
and it's most.
Speaker 2 (31:00):
People report an altered sense of self.
Speaker 3 (31:04):
And what's commonly reported is the feeling of greater connectivity
with nature, with humanity. So I think that's interesting and fascinating.
And by the way, you can also get those sorts
of experiences in more natural ways, so trans states, and
for example, I talk about the Worthing dervishes who induce
trans states where they feel like connectedness. And if you
(31:27):
ever I don't know that you may have the opportunity, David,
but if you ever get the opportunity to go into
outer space, maybe see business might be listening in. One
of the common reports of anyone of going into out
of space looking back on the Earth is the so
called overview effect, where you have this profound sense or
perspective when you see the planet against the fast, the
vastness of the cosmos, and people often say they feel
(31:50):
this connection with humanity. So I think this is really
forcing you into the ultimate decentralized allocentric perspective, because your
problems might be big, but when you see them in
the context of our civilization, our planet against the universe,
then certainly everything seems a little bit more balanced.
Speaker 1 (32:09):
So let me ask you this. I think people have
been working on the topic of happiness for millennia, and
the question is what is different now, What do we
get from the scientific studies on this? Where are we
with scientific study and what still remains to be done.
Speaker 3 (32:28):
So I think there's a number of avenues where it
seems to be making advances. I think there's been a
lot of weak work done, a lot of weak research
in the past, but I think we're getting a little
bit more rigorous now. I think psychology is getting more
rigorous in its approach to studies. For me, I'm interested
in the default mode network. I'm interested in the concept
of self and how that our understanding of how that's generated.
Speaker 2 (32:51):
By our brain.
Speaker 3 (32:52):
I think that's particularly interesting. Hence that's why I talked
about this new work on psychedelics. But I think the
the progress is that we're now understanding why happiness is
so difficult to attain. In a sense, it needs to
be elusive, it needs to be this sort of transient
state because you can't be permanently happy all the time,
(33:13):
and in a sense it's foolish to try and seek
a permanent state of happiness. But what you can start
to do is understand why we get used to emotional situations,
why we readily adapt, and then just try to get
the context right. Ultimately, you know, everything we do is
motivated by our emotional systems. Emotions and motivation have the
(33:33):
same origin and Latin meaning to move us to move,
And so once we understand why we are pursuing and motivated,
then I think that can help in so many ways,
not just in terms of our personal well being, but
also some of our decisions that we're making. I think,
you know, to use this term wisdom, I think is
important that we have to understand the consequences of our lifestyles,
(33:55):
why we pursue certain things, and ultimately, for example, materialism,
the says that people think they're going to be happier
if they.
Speaker 2 (34:01):
Own more and more things.
Speaker 3 (34:02):
We need to tell, you know, we need to calibrate
that or temper that with the appreciation that well, you know,
you might think that's the path of happiness, but actually
the research suggests that it's not. So. I think that
we're starting to get a much clearer picture of what
actually drives human behavior and also our susceptibility to messaging
and marketing and just become a little bit more wary
(34:24):
about that.
Speaker 1 (34:24):
So, given all your research on this, what practical tips
would you give a listener?
Speaker 3 (34:30):
Okay, So I have a couple of practical tips, and
actually one of them's old tech, and it's really just
buying a journal, buying a book with a paper and pen,
and keeping a record of your life, both the good
and the bad, but particularly the bad, and writing it
down because left you owned devices. When you're trying to
sort things out in your head, first of all, you're
(34:52):
operating from a real awkward position because you're biased and
you're blowing things up a portion. But by documenting it,
the process of writing things down, and I think writing
it rather than putting it down on a computer is
really important because it requires effort and processing. Any setback
in that tangible way works because I think it gives
you the time and the perspective to get things more
(35:12):
accurate as it were. But moreover, you then have accumulating
record of your life. And when you look back over
your old journals or your old diaries and you can
suddenly realize that life does get better. You might be
in a situation where you think things can never improve.
But when you've got the luxury of looking back over
your life and seeing how things have changed, I think
(35:34):
that's an incredible insight and powerful way of documenting that.
You know, it's not what happens to you, it's how
you react that matters.
Speaker 1 (35:42):
Excellent any other tips.
Speaker 3 (35:44):
Don't underestimate the power of connection. I think it's really
important to show humanity, to always err on the side
practice active listening. This is something you do well obviously
as a podcaster, which is when you're in a conversation,
really listen to other people say and figure a question
you can ask them because first of all, that makes
(36:05):
the experience and the conversation more enjoyable on authentic, but
also signals to the other person that you have been
paying attention to them, which is an incredibly gratifying experience.
That really will generate a real sense of connection, and
I think that is the best way to get productive interactions.
Speaker 1 (36:25):
That was my interview with psychologist Bruce Hood as we
talked about the science of happiness and Bruce's book by
that title. So where does that leave us? Well, one
takeaway from today's conversation is this, happiness isn't something you
stumble on by winning the lottery or getting that car.
It's not something you can buy or collect or win
(36:47):
once and for all, like crossing a finish line. It's
more like a direction you choose to walk in, and
you can take small steps to get you moving the
right way. The ideas that Bruce talked about suggests that
happiness isn't so much about what happens to us, but
more about how we engage with the world, how we
(37:08):
connect with others, how we frame our experiences, how we
find purpose in what we do. It's shaped by our
biology in part, but also by our habits, our attention,
and the stories that we tell ourselves. And yes, there
are things we cannot control. Life's always going to throw curveballs,
but it turns out that how we respond to those
(37:31):
challenges makes a big difference, whether we cultivate optimism, whether
we stay socially connected, whether we avoid negative comparisons, how
we control our attention. So we'll just remind us that
the Constitution in the United States doesn't promise anybody happiness,
but instead freedom for the pursuit of happiness. And I
(37:52):
think that tells us that the nation's forefathers had a
view consistent with the lessons here today, which is that
happiness is not a finish line to cross, but it's
more like a practice, something that can be nurtured and
strengthened over time. In other words, happiness is a pursuit
and it is shaped by the choices we make every
(38:14):
single day. There's no single formula, but there are patterns,
there are clues, and there's growing scientific data about what
actually matters. So wherever you are on that path, I
hope that today's conversation brought a little more light to it.
Thank you for joining me. Go to eagleman dot com
(38:35):
slash podcast for more information and to find further reading.
Check out my newsletter on substack and be a part
of the online chats there. You can watch videos of
Inner Cosmos on YouTube, where you can leave comments. Until
next time, I'm David Eagleman, and this is Inner Cosmos.
Is it possible to become happier? What does the science
say about this? How much of your happiness is your genetics?
And what does any of this have to do with
social connection or comparison to other people, or your balance
of optimism versus pessimism, And why it would be useful
to keep a journal of your life. Welcome to Intercosmos
(00:32):
with me David Eagleman. I'm a neuroscientist and author at
Stanford and in these episodes we sail deeply into our
three pound universe to uncover some of the most surprising
aspects of our lives. Today's episdis is about what's known
(01:01):
about happiness from a scientific point of view. Everyone since
time immemorial has asked themselves what is going to make
me happy? And they've often speculated what can I tell
other people about what's going to make them happy? But
in a sense, I view this the same way that
people once approached disease. They said, Hey, maybe if I
(01:22):
sprinkle salt over my shoulder, or boil some bones, or
eat a lizard's tail, that's going to work. There were
endless theories and rituals and folk beliefs, some of which
were passed down for generations. Many of these things were
totally made up, but they persisted because there wasn't a
better option. The world of disease changed with the arrival
(01:45):
of the scientific method. With observation and experimentation and replication,
the community slowly was able to replace guesswork and superstition
with reproducible knowledge. We stopped tossing salt and started testing antibiotics.
We stopped blaming spirits and started understanding microbes, and as
(02:09):
a result, we eradicated smallpox and polio. We developed fixes
for fever and diarrhea and diabetes. And if you ever
feel skepticism about our progress, just note that we have
added decades to the average human life. So the key
question I want to ask today is can we bring
that same level of rigor to the question of happiness.
(02:33):
Now that might sound strange because happiness seems so personal,
it's so subjective. Is it really something you can study
in a lab? Do we really understand what it is
we're chasing? Happiness? It turns out is a remarkably slippery concept.
You ask three people to define it, you're going to
get four answers. Is it pleasure contentment?
Speaker 2 (02:57):
Meaning?
Speaker 1 (02:58):
Is it a spike of joy or a slow and
steady hum of well being. We're probably talking about all
these things. And I'll note that even the ancient Greeks
made distinctions. They distinguished between the pursuit of pleasure, which
they called hedonia, and a life of meaning and virtue,
which they called you'd ammonia. And in modern psychology we
(03:21):
have all kinds of similar distinctions, asking whether happiness is
more about fleeting moods or lasting satisfaction. But here's the thing.
Even once we settle on definitions, we are not always
so good at predicting what will make us happy. The
general lesson from psychology is that people make systematic errors
(03:44):
in forecasting their own happiness. We think that a new
car will do it, or a bigger house, or finally
getting that promotion, And when those things happen, we do
feel a little jolt of joy, but it doesn't last
apt we return to our baseline. Psychologists call this the
(04:05):
hedonic treadmill. You keep running, chasing the next thing, but
you never really get ahead. And by the way, even
our memories deceive us. We misremember what made us happy
in the past, and we make plans for the future
based on those flawed recollections. We compare ourselves to others constantly.
(04:26):
We overvalue the extraordinary and overlook the ordinary. We confuse
excitement with fulfillment. So what does this all mean. It
means our internal compass is often misaligned, and yet there's hope.
And this is because over the past decades, researchers have
begun to untangle the mystery of happiness by using tools
(04:49):
like longitudinal studies, which follow people across decades or even
across their entire lives. Other studies use brain imaging to
map emotional states, or behavioral experiments that track the choices
people make and then how they feel about it later,
or cross cultural research that looks at how different societies
(05:10):
define and pursue joy. What emerges from this growing body
of work is a more nuanced, more evidence based understanding
of what makes life feel worthwhile and good. And the
answers provide something useful, a map. It's not a guarantee,
it's not a formula, but it's a way to navigate
(05:32):
toward a deeper, more lasting sense of well being. So
today we're going to explore that map. We'll talk about
what practices actually seem to make a difference. Based not
on wishful thinking, about on data to guide us through
this territory. I called up my friend and colleague, Bruce Hood.
He's an experimental psychologist and philosopher at the University of
(05:55):
Bristol in England, and he recently wrote a book called
The Science of Happiness. Together, we're going to try to
get a clearer view of what the science tells us,
what works, what doesn't, and how we can apply these
findings in our own lives. Here's my interview with Bruce. So, Bruce,
(06:16):
I know at the back of your office there's a
junior high playground and you're always hearing the laughter and
the squealing of children. So what did that make you wonder?
Speaker 3 (06:27):
Well, in my day job, I see a lot of
my students and I'm their tutor, and I've just come
out of a tutoring session where they were really quite
miserable and unhappy and really worried, and I just heard
this laughter coming from the playground. I thought, what goes wrong?
Where are we going wrong?
Speaker 1 (06:46):
Well?
Speaker 3 (06:47):
How how do they ended this position at the end
of the education system where they're so preoccupied with their
performance and they've got mental health issues? And I kind
of reached the end of my tether to some extent,
I wanted to try and do something.
Speaker 1 (07:01):
So you thought, look, kids are happy, young adults are
not so happy, and so you started looking into the
science of happiness. And what did you find.
Speaker 3 (07:11):
Well, we had reached a bit of a crisis point
at Bristol University, and I felt I needed to do something.
And I looked around and discover that a former student
of mind, Laurie Santos, who had I taught as an
undergraduate when I was at Harvard, had also encountered a
problem at Yale, and she put on a course that
had been remarkably successful. So this really inspired me to
try and do a version of it myself. So I
(07:32):
contacted Laurie and her typical generous nature, She shared all
her notes, and I put together a version of her course,
and I call it the Science of Happiness. I think
was called Psychology and the Good Life. And I focused
a little bit more on critical thinking, my own spin
on stuff. And I just ran it as a pilot
to see if anyone would turn up to it. It
(07:52):
wasn't credit bearing, it wasn't official course. It was just
here's a lunchtime seminar series I'm running for ten weeks
and I was price six hundred people turned up, even
though they weren't getting credit for it. So this told
me that this was something that was in demand, and
the universes were very pleased with this, so they gave
me the green light to go ahead and create a
(08:13):
course which was credit bearing, and we launched it the
following year and we've been doing it every year with
about six hundred students enrolling. And what makes it, I
think unique, is that to me, it's a large experiment
because we actually get the students to fill in their
own sort of levels of happiness and various psychometric tests,
and every year we've run the course, we find a
(08:34):
significant improvement of about fifteen percent on all these measures.
So it's not just an educational course because they have
to actually do things and we discover that actually it
seems to make some impact.
Speaker 1 (08:46):
So before we get into the framework of the science
of happiness, I want to ask you a few rapid questions. First,
do you think that students are changing from let's say
when you first started teaching.
Speaker 2 (08:58):
Yes and No?
Speaker 3 (09:00):
My first paper done back in nineteen eighty six. I
think it came out the full year eighty seven was
on the transition to university, and I was already interested
in the fact that students, way back when I was
an undergrad were experiencing homesickness and this sort of temporary
period of uncertainty. So I think that's actually a common
experience for all students when they leave the you know,
(09:22):
the confines and the familiarity of their home environment, and
they go to in new, new campus, but very soon
they get used to it and they kind of adapt
to that. I think the difference now is that students
are already coming to university with mental health issues, and
I think the nature of discussing these things that's normalized
a lot more now, and it seems to be more pervasive.
(09:43):
It certainly seems to feature as an issue that students
want to talk about. So I think that I don't
think there's any fundamental difference in the human mind, if
you like, but the way that we discuss and talk
about these things and the way it impacts on students,
I think has changed.
Speaker 1 (10:01):
How much of a person's happiness comes down to the
genes that they inherit.
Speaker 3 (10:05):
Actually we do have a pretty good idea about that,
and that comes from behavior genetic studies where they compare
identical and non identical twins, and it's roughly the same
as intelligence around about heritability is about forty to fifty percent.
So yes, some people are very much like their parents
and some are very unlike their parents. But on average,
if you look across a big population, that heritability is
(10:27):
around about forty to fifty percent.
Speaker 1 (10:29):
And if I can ask you a personal question, Bruce,
tell us about your childhood, as I understand that your
father wasn't particularly happy and well adjusted and you are.
Speaker 3 (10:41):
Yeah, I came from well I'm laughing about it now
because I can look back with some degree of wisdom,
but at the time it was a very impoverished childhood,
tenerant if we moved from household to hustle. We never
had any money, and he was a very abusive alcoholic. Yeah,
it was a painful childhood, but you know, I think
(11:02):
I learned to cope, and certainly this course has helped
a lot for me. What I've learned on this past
has actually changed my outlook. I used to be very,
very driven and maybe too driven, and that to the
exclusion of people around me. Now I'm a lot more
mindful and thoughtful about you know, what I'm doing, and
(11:23):
that might just be age and wisdom, but I also
think that there is there are things that you can
do to change your life for the better. So I've
you know, I used to be skeptical about all this stuff.
I felt it was very soft psychology and you know,
a little bit wishy washy. And now I'm much more
of a convert to it. That and if it does
make the students better, then you know, whether or not
(11:44):
we can argue about the mechanisms. I still think it's
a valid endeavor to try and alleviate some of this
problem that seems to be so pervasive.
Speaker 1 (11:53):
Great, so in your book, you boil this down to
seven lessons. Well, I call.
Speaker 3 (11:58):
Them lessons to capture the nature that a book that
was originated from a course, and so it felt like
an educational process. But yeah, and they all actually bleed
into each other, and it says they're all interrelated. But
there is a fundamental premise throughout the book that it's
happiness is about becoming less self centered and that's the
kind of underlying theme.
Speaker 1 (12:19):
Great, so let's dive into the seven lessons. I think
it's a good way to structure. This so less than
one you call alter your ego. So tell us about that.
Speaker 3 (12:29):
Well, this comes from my training as a developmental psychologist
and from the work the works of Jean Piage and others.
And what Page noted is that children are very egocentric.
And what he meant by that is that they view
the world from their own perspective, from themselves. Literally, they
think the world is an extension of their sensory systems,
so that if they're not looking at something, it.
Speaker 2 (12:51):
Ceases to exist. So they really do believe.
Speaker 3 (12:54):
We have a term in philosophy called salism that the
world is literally an extension of your mind. They have
to learn to differentiate themselves from that physical world and
understand that objects have their own kind of identity and
permanence and uniqueness. And this is captured in a lot
of his demonstrations that should behave as if objects cease
to exist when they're not being looked at, or they're
a product of the child's actions. Now that's happening in infancy.
(13:18):
Over time, they start to learn that there is a
physical world that is separate to them, and they start
to realize that other children have different thoughts, but they
still think of themselves very egocentrically. So initially, for example,
they think that other people understand things the way they do,
They see the way the world they do, and they
lack what's called a theory of mind in the sense
(13:38):
that they don't necessarily understand that others can have completely
different opinions or completely different.
Speaker 2 (13:44):
Thoughts to their own.
Speaker 3 (13:45):
But around about three or four years of age, they
start to learn to become less egocentric and more what
I call alocentric, which means other focused. It's not that
children don't interact with others, but that interaction is very
much uni direction or one direction when they're very very young.
But if you want to become a functioning member of
society as a child, and this is what childhoods are for,
it's socialization. They've got to learn to become cooperative, communicate, integrate.
(14:10):
So when we tell ch'am to behave, we're trying to
teach them the rules of socialization in order to be
accepted by the rest of the tribe, as it were.
So we start off with a very ecocentric perspective, and
we've become more other focuses we get older. But like
many aspects of the human mind. We never entirely abandoned
these kind of primitive ways of thinking, and I think consciousness,
for example, is a very egocentric experience. It's from the
(14:32):
first person perspective. We don't instantly take a theory in mind,
We don't instantly and for other people's thoughts and purses, unless,
for example, they behave in a way that we make
questions why they've done it, and we might then try
and figure out what's on their mind. But in general,
we're on autopilot. We're kind of seeing everything from the
first person perspective, and that's okay. But when it comes
(14:53):
to happiness, this is where I think it can be
a problem because left to our own devices, we have
a tendency to turn in on our ourselves, to ruminate,
to consider our perspectives, and we can blow things up
of proportion. Whereas if you start to see yourself as
more interconnected or alocentric, first of all, you're more contributing
member of society, but also you can start to get
a sense that other people have things going in their
(15:14):
lives which actually may be more paramount or more important
to them, or worse. And then once you understand that
actually we're all interconnected and other people have things going
on their lives. It starts to put your own things
into perspective. So I think there's been a language or
focus on self and identity, politics and all about me,
me me for the past ten years. I think we've
(15:36):
been hearing that, and I'm just sort of saying, maybe
that's the wrong way to think about it. Maybe focusing
on yourself is directing your energies in the wrong way.
I think we should try and ritualize of others. And
this comes from younemonia, which is an ancient concept from Aristotle.
Speaker 1 (15:51):
Unpack you.
Speaker 3 (15:52):
Aemonia for us, Pneumonia is the technical term for flourishing,
which means that rather than directing your effort to make
yourself happy, what you should be trying to do is
enrigin the lives of other people around you. So it's
a more altruistic, gregarious, other focused way of energy. What
Aristotle said to it. You know, anyone can be self centered.
(16:14):
Animals are self centered and they can seek gratification. But humans,
we have moral grounds, we have moral perspectives. We can
put our efforts into making other people's lives better. Altruism
and so on. And if you do that, that will
make society better and you will benefit from that indirectly.
So he argued that we shouldn't be focusing our energies
on ourselves, but rather trying to improve the lives of others.
Speaker 1 (16:50):
Yeah. One of the things you argue, if I understood
this correctly, is you're saying what you really want to
hit is a balance between egocentric and alocentric. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (16:59):
Yeah, yeah, Because obviously, if you're so selfless, then human
nature is that people will take advantage, so you need
to kind of get the balance correct. The other thing
about being self less is if you're so empathic, then
there is a danger that you can kind of become
a super EmPATH or take on all the suffering and
pain of others around you, which means you can't function either.
(17:20):
So it's really trying to get things into perspective and
get the balance right. If you're too allocentric or too
other focus, you're probably not going to look after yourself well.
If you're too selfish, you're going to be rejected, possibly
and ostracized. So it's about becoming what we evolve to be,
which is a socialized, integrated animal.
Speaker 1 (17:38):
So let's go to the second lesson, which is avoid isolation.
Tell us about that.
Speaker 3 (17:43):
Well, that's the flip side of being ostracized. So yes,
we're a social animal, and the way we've evolved is
through our capacity for what I call well, I didn't
coin the term. Mike Thomas elo coined it.
Speaker 2 (17:55):
It's ratcheting, cultural ratcheting.
Speaker 3 (17:57):
In other words, we have communication and we cooperate, and
the information that we learn in one generation we pass
on to the next. And this is a way we've
been able to accumulate and build sequentially on the knowledge base,
which is allowed technology to rise exponentially. So yeah, that
all comes from the fact that we evolve such sort
of a social life. If you think about it, we
(18:18):
spend the largest proportion in childhood of any species. You know,
it could be to the teenage years. Some adults who
argue that they've still got kids in their twenties. It's
still at home as children. But if you look at
it in terms of our life expectancy, a large proportion
of that is spent in periods of being dependent on others.
So those long childhoods come at a cost, and that's
(18:38):
why we have all the emotions of being included, all
the joys and the pains.
Speaker 2 (18:43):
And sorrows and so forth.
Speaker 3 (18:45):
The flip side of it is if you're ostracized, that
is really detrimental to not only your mental health but
your physical health. So we know, for example, loneliness, chronic
loneliness has a higher morbidity risk than many other well
known factors such as moderate smoking and drinking and obesity.
But if you look at the longitudinal studies of how
long people live, those who have the best social connections
(19:07):
live longer and are happier. And that's based on these
studies of Harvard, for example, They've got studies to be
following people up for sixty years. So social connection is
paramount to our well being and social isolation is problematic.
And this, of course is a big concern at the moment,
the way that technology is actually is creating I think,
(19:30):
pockets of isolation and more increased loneliness because the technology
is so absorbing that people just focusing on their phones
all the time and they're not engaging in the other
things that they could be doing. And I'm not one
of these people saying, you know, social media's you know,
rotting the brains of our kids. I think what's really doing.
Is it's just taking away all that time that in
the past we used to have speaking to each other
(19:50):
and doing those other things, and I think that's its
real danger.
Speaker 1 (19:53):
On the flip side, when people are looking at their phones,
they're often interacting with their friends and colleagues on there,
there's a set in which for people who grew up
in very isolated environments like I grew up in the
mountains in New Mexico, I didn't have folks around, but
kids now always have folks around. Do you think that
is useful in terms of avoiding isolation.
Speaker 3 (20:14):
Yes, I do, And the last survey by the Pew
Center showed that actually teenagers really don't see the same
problems that the adults do, so they actually think it's
improved their social interactions and their opportunities for interaction. I
would argue, though, however, it's the nature of that interaction.
I think there's something about doing everything through a screen.
(20:34):
It doesn't really produce the same level of social interactions.
I mean, for example, body movements, our ability to read
body language. These are things which we've evolved over thousands
of years, and now if you take it away or
you produce artificial interactions. Everyone knows how awkward zoom can be.
It's not the same as as if we were in
kind of a spontaneous, more informal situation. So yeah, I'm
(20:58):
not a what's the word, these are called them the luodites.
I'm not going to get rid of the technology. And
by the way, it's actually amazing and and it does
so many things. It allows people to Education is incredible,
podcasting is incredible. So these are all great, they're all upsides.
But I do think we need to think about how
is changed the nature of our off time as it were,
(21:20):
so I can see the concerns quite right.
Speaker 1 (21:23):
Okay, so your third lesson is reject negative comparisons. So
let's unpack that well.
Speaker 3 (21:29):
As you probably know, the brain always, by its default,
the way it's calculating anything is by comparison. Nerve impulses
are a signal is real as a relative comparison to
the baseline. So from the very basics of how our
brain cells are working right up to the complexity of
conceptual thinking, we're always drawing comparisons. So, for example, you
(21:53):
can see this in the sensory systems. If you come
in from a bright day out and going to a room,
it takes a long time to see anything because you've
adapted to the brightness and the outside, so your system
has to calibrate to the darkness. And likewise, if you
go from a dark area out into somewhere bright, you're
startled initially. So what the brain's always doing is doing
relative comparisons. The trouble with us is that when you
(22:16):
look at the sources of information we pay attention to,
it seems that we have a bias to pay more
attention to negative information. So, for example, if you get
people to read a newspaper and you don't tell them
that you're actually monitoring their eye movements, if you look
at where they're focusing, they're focusing on all the negative stories,
all the negative information. So this is a strategy of
(22:37):
the so called negativity bias. It's called that we've evolved
this special bias to pay attention to things which are
potentially threatening. And the reason is is because that if
you can anticipate and avoid potential threats, you'll survive longer.
There's no point resting on your laurels and just paying
attention to where everything's going fine. Rather strategically, from an
(22:57):
evolutionary point of view, it's much better to actually focus
on things which are likely to eliminate you from the
gene pool.
Speaker 1 (23:04):
So this is.
Speaker 3 (23:05):
Why we spot frowns, quicker and sea of faces. It's
why screams are more poignant than laughter, although sometimes they
sound the same. But this is we have a bias
really to pay attention to the sorts of negative information.
Speaker 1 (23:20):
So given this, how does somebody take that on to
work on increasing happiness.
Speaker 2 (23:25):
Well, I think it's drawing the right comparisons.
Speaker 3 (23:27):
So going back to social media that we mentioned briefly,
one of the issues that I think is somewhat problematic
is it presents unrealistic measures of success and what people
or what is normal. And if you focus just on
if you just look at other people's lives and assume
that that's what you should be comparing yourself to, then
you're going to feel inadequate because generally everyone posts their
(23:50):
best holiday snaps, the best pictures of themselves, the best food,
whatever it is, and so it looks like everyone's having
an incredibly good time. By comparison, you feel inadequate. I
think it's it's important to recognize that the comparisons that
we draw typically are unrealistic, and I think this has
been one of the problems of social media because everyone
seems to have a much more interesting life, and if
(24:11):
you ask a bunch of people, for example, who goes
to more parties, you are other people. What happens is
that people will imagine or typically think of a very
sociable person and draw a relative comparison. But of course
not everyone can be below the average, because by definition,
the average is the norm. But this is what we
typically do when we're thinking about our happiness or our
(24:33):
success or how we're going on in life. We are
drawing the wrong comparisons by identifying those who are the
most obvious.
Speaker 1 (24:40):
So this leads us nicely less than four, which has
become more optimistic. Let's unpack that.
Speaker 3 (24:47):
Okay, So, given that we have a negativity bias and
the information around us and the media tends to focus
on negative information because that's frankly what people pay more
attention to to hear, then we have to learn to
recognize that there we're in a sea of negativity, and
(25:07):
we have to learn to try and become more optimistic.
And the way to do that is to recognize the
way that we interpret and process events so this is
working Marty Seligmann amongst others, but they recognize that there's
a different way of what he called attributional style, which
is how you make sense or explain situations. And there
are three sorts of dimensions which typically differ between a
(25:28):
pessimist and an optimist. Pessimists tend to think setbacks are
permanent and never going to change or is an optimist
is much more likely to think them as transitory. A
pessimist is much more likely to take a setback and
extrapolate or overgeneralize, where saying you, I bet I've failed
an examin of failure at everything I do in my life,
whereas an optimist is much more likely to sort of
(25:50):
ring fence and say, well, there are other things going on.
And finally, when it comes to sort of who's responsible
for setbacks, the pessimist is much more likely to internalize it,
or as it is more likely to deflect or not
accept responsibility. Now, whilst that's okay, you don't want to
be overly optimistic, because if you're overly optimistic, you'll never
(26:11):
change or learn or try to adjust. You don't want
to be overly pessimistic because then you're going to become
a little bit hopeless. So you need to again try
to err towards more optimism, which is to find the
silver lining in the cloud, as it were. And you
can do that, and it just takes time to sort
of write down your setbacks and as much detail as
you possibly can and then reinterpret them from a more
(26:31):
optimistic view. And by the way, when I say optimists
and pessimists, you can be actually quite nuanced. You can
be pessimistic in some aspects of your life, but more
optimistic in others. So I don't think it's so simple
that either one or the other. But if something is
impacting on your life negatively, then it's a case of
just trying to reinterpret it and process it in a
much more positive way, and through effort and time that
(26:54):
comes more naturally excellent.
Speaker 1 (26:55):
So less than five is control your attentions to tell
about that.
Speaker 3 (27:01):
So I have found this probably the most insightful and
fascinating area of work, and this really stems from the
work of mind wandering. So this is Matt Killingsworth's work
and Dan Gilbert, my old coolague who discovered that mind
wandering is incredibly common and it's not always associated with
pleasant daydreaming. A lot of the time when it's neutral
(27:22):
or need negative, obviously people are not particularly happy. So
they did these studies where they contacted people at random
points of the day and they said what are you
thinking about?
Speaker 2 (27:30):
What are you doing? And by the way, how happy
you are.
Speaker 3 (27:33):
It turns out that people's minds are wandering about fifty
percent of the time and they tend to be less happy,
And I think, what's going on there is It strikes
me that this is probably rumination where people are focusing
on things that haven't gone right, or they're worrying about
the future, or they got some unresolved conflict.
Speaker 2 (27:52):
And so this has been associated with.
Speaker 3 (27:53):
Activation of the default mode network that seems to kick
in when you're not task focused, and that is very
common experience for people. And when you're not task focused,
I think then you tend to sort of turn in
ecocentrically to sort of view your situation. And that's why
I think at least the sort of unhappy thinking because
of this sort of tendency to focus on things when
they're not going well.
Speaker 1 (28:30):
Tell us about lesson six, which is connect with others.
Speaker 3 (28:34):
So probably the most powerful and the most successful positive
psychology intervention are those which really encourage you to form
social connections. So Nick Keppley, for example Chicago, has done
these really incredible studies where he forces people to strike
up conversations with strangers, and he also gets other people
(28:57):
to predict how awkward that will be.
Speaker 2 (29:00):
Terribly.
Speaker 3 (29:00):
What people predict is it's going to be incredibly awkward
having a conversation with another person, say if you're commuting,
for example. But if you actually force people to strike
up a conversation in those circumstances, they typically will find
it much more rewarding and satisfying than the other group.
We thought it'd be very awkward. And this was done
originally in Chicago, and it's now been replicated in London,
(29:22):
of all places. I don't know if you've been there recently,
but Londoners are not the most gagariously chatty people. But
I think the point is is that it is in
our nature to be social animals, and unfortunately modern life
tends to get in the way of that, especially when
people are on their phones and not engaging with each other.
But if you actually are in a situation where you
do have to strike a spontaneous conversation, it can be incredibly,
(29:45):
really rewarding. So I think this is the recommendation I
make for people, is to try and have that conversation
with your barista or the person who's serving you in
the shop, and you'll discover that actually you probably have
a lot more common and the awkwardness that we think
is going to happen never really materializes. So I really
(30:06):
am a strong advocate of trying to reach out and
connect alicentrically.
Speaker 1 (30:11):
Excellent, and this leads nicely into the last lesson seven,
which is get out of your own head.
Speaker 2 (30:18):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (30:19):
Well, that was always going to be a bit of
a controversial chapter because in the beginning of that I
talk about my own experience with psychedelics when I was young,
And by the way, I'm not advocating this, but I
did want to at least acknowledge that this is a
burgeoning area of research. It's particularly fascinating the work coming
out John Hopkins and Imperial College for people who have
(30:41):
intractable depression that doesn't respond to psychopharmacology. Turns out that
a psychedelic experience can actually have long term, profound benefits,
so they just need to do it once. And I
find that very interesting because obviously psychedelic experiences are intense,
and it's most.
Speaker 2 (31:00):
People report an altered sense of self.
Speaker 3 (31:04):
And what's commonly reported is the feeling of greater connectivity
with nature, with humanity. So I think that's interesting and fascinating.
And by the way, you can also get those sorts
of experiences in more natural ways, so trans states, and
for example, I talk about the Worthing dervishes who induce
trans states where they feel like connectedness. And if you
(31:27):
ever I don't know that you may have the opportunity, David,
but if you ever get the opportunity to go into
outer space, maybe see business might be listening in. One
of the common reports of anyone of going into out
of space looking back on the Earth is the so
called overview effect, where you have this profound sense or
perspective when you see the planet against the fast, the
vastness of the cosmos, and people often say they feel
(31:50):
this connection with humanity. So I think this is really
forcing you into the ultimate decentralized allocentric perspective, because your
problems might be big, but when you see them in
the context of our civilization, our planet against the universe,
then certainly everything seems a little bit more balanced.
Speaker 1 (32:09):
So let me ask you this. I think people have
been working on the topic of happiness for millennia, and
the question is what is different now, What do we
get from the scientific studies on this? Where are we
with scientific study and what still remains to be done.
Speaker 3 (32:28):
So I think there's a number of avenues where it
seems to be making advances. I think there's been a
lot of weak work done, a lot of weak research
in the past, but I think we're getting a little
bit more rigorous now. I think psychology is getting more
rigorous in its approach to studies. For me, I'm interested
in the default mode network. I'm interested in the concept
of self and how that our understanding of how that's generated.
Speaker 2 (32:51):
By our brain.
Speaker 3 (32:52):
I think that's particularly interesting. Hence that's why I talked
about this new work on psychedelics. But I think the
the progress is that we're now understanding why happiness is
so difficult to attain. In a sense, it needs to
be elusive, it needs to be this sort of transient
state because you can't be permanently happy all the time,
(33:13):
and in a sense it's foolish to try and seek
a permanent state of happiness. But what you can start
to do is understand why we get used to emotional situations,
why we readily adapt, and then just try to get
the context right. Ultimately, you know, everything we do is
motivated by our emotional systems. Emotions and motivation have the
(33:33):
same origin and Latin meaning to move us to move,
And so once we understand why we are pursuing and motivated,
then I think that can help in so many ways,
not just in terms of our personal well being, but
also some of our decisions that we're making. I think,
you know, to use this term wisdom, I think is
important that we have to understand the consequences of our lifestyles,
(33:55):
why we pursue certain things, and ultimately, for example, materialism,
the says that people think they're going to be happier
if they.
Speaker 2 (34:01):
Own more and more things.
Speaker 3 (34:02):
We need to tell, you know, we need to calibrate
that or temper that with the appreciation that well, you know,
you might think that's the path of happiness, but actually
the research suggests that it's not. So. I think that
we're starting to get a much clearer picture of what
actually drives human behavior and also our susceptibility to messaging
and marketing and just become a little bit more wary
(34:24):
about that.
Speaker 1 (34:24):
So, given all your research on this, what practical tips
would you give a listener?
Speaker 3 (34:30):
Okay, So I have a couple of practical tips, and
actually one of them's old tech, and it's really just
buying a journal, buying a book with a paper and pen,
and keeping a record of your life, both the good
and the bad, but particularly the bad, and writing it
down because left you owned devices. When you're trying to
sort things out in your head, first of all, you're
(34:52):
operating from a real awkward position because you're biased and
you're blowing things up a portion. But by documenting it,
the process of writing things down, and I think writing
it rather than putting it down on a computer is
really important because it requires effort and processing. Any setback
in that tangible way works because I think it gives
you the time and the perspective to get things more
(35:12):
accurate as it were. But moreover, you then have accumulating
record of your life. And when you look back over
your old journals or your old diaries and you can
suddenly realize that life does get better. You might be
in a situation where you think things can never improve.
But when you've got the luxury of looking back over
your life and seeing how things have changed, I think
(35:34):
that's an incredible insight and powerful way of documenting that.
You know, it's not what happens to you, it's how
you react that matters.
Speaker 1 (35:42):
Excellent any other tips.
Speaker 3 (35:44):
Don't underestimate the power of connection. I think it's really
important to show humanity, to always err on the side
practice active listening. This is something you do well obviously
as a podcaster, which is when you're in a conversation,
really listen to other people say and figure a question
you can ask them because first of all, that makes
(36:05):
the experience and the conversation more enjoyable on authentic, but
also signals to the other person that you have been
paying attention to them, which is an incredibly gratifying experience.
That really will generate a real sense of connection, and
I think that is the best way to get productive interactions.
Speaker 1 (36:25):
That was my interview with psychologist Bruce Hood as we
talked about the science of happiness and Bruce's book by
that title. So where does that leave us? Well, one
takeaway from today's conversation is this, happiness isn't something you
stumble on by winning the lottery or getting that car.
It's not something you can buy or collect or win
(36:47):
once and for all, like crossing a finish line. It's
more like a direction you choose to walk in, and
you can take small steps to get you moving the
right way. The ideas that Bruce talked about suggests that
happiness isn't so much about what happens to us, but
more about how we engage with the world, how we
(37:08):
connect with others, how we frame our experiences, how we
find purpose in what we do. It's shaped by our
biology in part, but also by our habits, our attention,
and the stories that we tell ourselves. And yes, there
are things we cannot control. Life's always going to throw curveballs,
but it turns out that how we respond to those
(37:31):
challenges makes a big difference, whether we cultivate optimism, whether
we stay socially connected, whether we avoid negative comparisons, how
we control our attention. So we'll just remind us that
the Constitution in the United States doesn't promise anybody happiness,
but instead freedom for the pursuit of happiness. And I
(37:52):
think that tells us that the nation's forefathers had a
view consistent with the lessons here today, which is that
happiness is not a finish line to cross, but it's
more like a practice, something that can be nurtured and
strengthened over time. In other words, happiness is a pursuit
and it is shaped by the choices we make every
(38:14):
single day. There's no single formula, but there are patterns,
there are clues, and there's growing scientific data about what
actually matters. So wherever you are on that path, I
hope that today's conversation brought a little more light to it.
Thank you for joining me. Go to eagleman dot com
(38:35):
slash podcast for more information and to find further reading.
Check out my newsletter on substack and be a part
of the online chats there. You can watch videos of
Inner Cosmos on YouTube, where you can leave comments. Until
next time, I'm David Eagleman, and this is Inner Cosmos.
Host
David Eagleman
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