September 3, 2025 • 30 mins
Some say the pursuit of it defines our existence. But is there science behind it? Jorge talks to some happy experts about what really makes you happy.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Hey, welcome to Science Stuff, a production of iHeartRadio. I'm
Horey Champ and today we are tackling a question that
is very personal to me and that I imagine is
very personal to you as well. And the question is
what really makes us happy?
Speaker 2 (00:18):
Is it money? Is it love? Is it a sense
of purpose? Or is it random? Believe it or not.
Speaker 1 (00:25):
Science has studied this question and it has come up
with some pretty definitive answers. So we're going to talk
to two scientists today. One is a psychologist who's running
one of the biggest and most unique experiments on human
happiness in history. And we're going to talk to a
neuroscientist who's going to tell us what he thinks is
(00:46):
happening in your brain when you feel happy.
Speaker 2 (00:49):
Now.
Speaker 1 (00:49):
This is the first in a two part series, so
be sure to also check out part two. Okay, get
ready to experience the joy of science as we answer
the question it really makes us happy? Hey everyone, Okay,
before we get started, I want you to take a
second and ask yourself this question, Am I happy? I'll
(01:14):
take a pause so you can think about it.
Speaker 2 (01:18):
Now.
Speaker 1 (01:19):
If you're a skeptical person, you might be thinking, well,
Orge what do you mean by being happy? Or you
might be thinking, well, sometimes I feel happy and sometimes
I don't.
Speaker 2 (01:30):
Happiness is a pretty tricky.
Speaker 1 (01:32):
Subject, which is what inspired our first guest here today,
doctor Matt Killingsworth, to start as a graduate student at
Harvard something called Track Your Happiness dot Org. Well, thank you,
doctor Killingsworth for joining us.
Speaker 3 (01:47):
Glad to be here.
Speaker 2 (01:48):
Please tell us who you are and what you do.
Speaker 3 (01:50):
Sure, my name is Matt Killingsworth. I'm at the University
of Pennsylvania at the Wharton School of Business, and I'm
a researcher who studies human happiness.
Speaker 1 (01:58):
Fantastic, so tell us about Track Yourhappiness dot org.
Speaker 3 (02:02):
So this is a project that I started more than
a decade ago. Track Your Happiness really aims to be
the world's biggest happiness study to try to figure out
the recipe for human happiness and how to spread it
into people's lives. Since this project's been started, hundreds of
thousands of people from around the world have joined across
its different versions. I created it because I wanted to
understand how happy people really feel as they actually go
(02:23):
about their daily lives. What makes our lives enjoyable, fulfilling, interesting, satisfying, Okay.
Speaker 1 (02:30):
Doctor Pilling's Worth study uses a very specific method called
experience sampling, which is based on the idea that how
we answer the question are you happy kind of changes
throughout the day, and it depends on what's happening to
us on any given moment. We'll get to how it works,
but first I wanted to know how he got this idea.
Speaker 3 (02:53):
I really, you know, especially before and during my PhD training,
I really read the scientific literature, hundreds and hundreds and
thousands of papers, so I had a pretty good sense
of all of the things that we discovered up to
that point.
Speaker 1 (03:06):
So what were the things that you learn from the literature?
Speaker 3 (03:09):
Lots of different things. So the idea that happiness might
be important, I mean, you can go back to Aristotle,
you can certainly go back to Jeremy Mintham and John
Stuart Mill and other people kind of arguing some version
of happiness is kind of like the reason we do
everything else. It's the metric or the construct that all
this other stuff that humanity is pursuing is ultimately trying
(03:30):
to achieve. But it really wasn't until you know, the
second half of the twentieth century at least, and even
more so in the last few decades that it's become
quite clear that we can measure happiness pretty well, not perfectly,
but well enough to do really good science. I mean,
that's probably the most essential thing that research is documented,
because if you can't measure it, you can't really do
(03:50):
science with it. But once you measure it, you could
be wrong about basically everything. But if you keep measuring, observing,
you know, refining your thinking, oh, you'll get closer and
closer and closer to the truth.
Speaker 1 (04:03):
What Decker Killingsworth is saying is that happiness, or the
pursuit of it, in a way, kind of defines what
it means to be human. I mean, it's in the
founding Document of the United States that it's one of
our unalienable rights. It's the thing we all strive for
and hope to achieve. And yet it wasn't until the
nineteen fifties that we started studying it scientifically. That's what
(04:27):
psychologist started to look into it.
Speaker 3 (04:31):
Well, a lot of the past research really focused on
what are the characteristics of happy people? Like who is happy?
We knew something about relationship between age and happiness, and
income and happiness, and how different countries differ in their
levels of happiness. You know, lots of these things that
you might collect on a big government survey or you
know personality as well, how to things like the Big
(04:52):
five personality dimensions relate to happiness. And one of the
things that was really missing, I think was trying to
understand like when people are happy.
Speaker 1 (05:02):
So all of these studies since the nineteen fifties made
a lot of progress.
Speaker 2 (05:06):
And trying to figure out the general.
Speaker 1 (05:08):
Factors that affect your happiness, like personality, how much money
you have, what culture or country you live in. But
according to doctor Killingsworth, the data was always a little fuzzy.
That's because of something I think we all know about happiness,
which is said it sort of depends on when you
(05:28):
ask me if I'm happy or not. In other words,
is happiness how I feel in the moment, or is
happiness how I feel when I take a step back
and consider my life in general. If you ask me
if I'm happy in a particularly stressful moment, like if
I'm frustrated with my job, or my kids or my relationships,
I might answer one way.
Speaker 2 (05:50):
Whereas if you ask me while I'm on.
Speaker 1 (05:51):
Vacation, sitting in a beach thinking about my life, I
might answer a different way, not to mention. Sometimes there
are trade offs in life. Sometimes you have to put
up with unpleasant moments or do things we don't really
want to do that might help us in the long run,
like cleaning your COI lit Or exercising or most jobs
(06:14):
for most people. Now, this is something scientists knew, but
they didn't know quite what to do about it. Nobody
had thought to think that houseone responds to the question
are you happy? Depends on when you ask them the question.
Speaker 3 (06:31):
I'm not saying they never thought of it. I think
people were certainly aware those things could be important, but
we really lacked the ability to do it. So, Like
this method of experience sampling that's really the cornerstone of
my research, you know, was invented by a guy Mehi
chicksit me Hai back in like the late nineteen seventies.
But he did it with like radio pages clipped to
someone's belt and then a little paper booklet they filled
(06:53):
out when the beeper went off. Well you can study
like eight people at a time. Later, there were you know,
studies using like pomp pilot for those of us who
are old enough to remember that technology. But literally before
I started this project, I looked in you know, the
flagship journals of the discipline of psychology, and they would
have twenty studies that ever use experience sampling, and they
would have ten or twenty people in them a most.
(07:15):
You know, now I've had hundreds of thousands of people
in the study, and you know, a gigantic number of
variables too.
Speaker 1 (07:22):
Okay, let's get to how Doctor Killing Sports project works.
If you go to track your Happiness dot org, you
can sign up with your phone or your email, and
once you sign up, you become part of the study.
Speaker 3 (07:36):
So you'll first answer some questions about your life, like
your demographics and your personality and kind of your expectations
of how you think you experienced different facets of life.
And then from there, I really want to follow up
in the course of daily life. So you know, maybe
you did that on Monday, and now it's Tuesday. You're
going to start getting some pings from me, some kind
(07:56):
of notifications by email or SMS or or something else,
and hopefully you'll answer one or a few surveys each day.
So I might ask you questions like how do you
feel right now, are you interacting with anyone else? Are
you thinking about something other than what you're doing? You know,
have you exercised in the last twenty four hours? A
bunch of factors, And I'm basically taking the answers to
(08:18):
all of those questions, combining with the signals on happiness,
both in the moment happiness and these longer term measures
of happiness, and trying to sort of figure out, well,
what is the right equation for human happiness in general.
Speaker 1 (08:31):
So the big innovation here is that we all carry
our phones with us all the time, and that gives
doctor Killingsworth a chance to basically pop into your life
and see how happy you are in any moment, because
if someone were to ask you later, your answer might change,
or you might not remember how you felt, or your
(08:53):
memory might get distorted with time.
Speaker 3 (08:57):
You know, we all experience those things. We're kind of
aware of what happening in the moment, but it's surprisingly
hard later to remember what occurred. And that's why tracking
and measuring are so powerful. So the sort of premise
behind this is that if I can watch and see
how happiness goes up and down during people's daily life
across a whole bunch of different people and then put
(09:17):
all that data together to try to understand what drivers
of happiness might explain those shifts up and down. We
might discover some new insights into what really makes the
experience of human life better.
Speaker 1 (09:28):
And what makes people give you an answer at the time, Like,
if I'm in the middle of a difficult moment or
a super happy moment, why would I interrupt it and
answer it.
Speaker 3 (09:37):
It's partly is that it's going to contribute to the
quality of your insight into yourself. So if you're selective
about when you choose to respond, you're going to end
up with an incomplete picture of your own life. You're
not going to understand what your best moments look like,
what your worst moments look like, if you're kind of
leaving those out. So it's not necessarily great for you.
Speaker 1 (09:56):
I feel like it requires a certain openness, But I imagine
it could also be very therapeutic to kind of be
open and to confide in your system.
Speaker 3 (10:03):
I think so, and I mean, honestly, I think there's
real value in kind of the happiness report that people
get back and seeing their data.
Speaker 1 (10:11):
Oh yeah, I forgot to mention when you sign out
to be a part of the study. You also get
a report on your daily happiness. Okay, when we come back,
we're going to find out what doctor Killingsworth found in
this study that, as he mentioned, hundreds of thousands of
people from across the world have participated in. We're going
to find out what affects your happiness the most, and
(10:34):
we're going to find out if money is one of them.
So stay with us, we'll be right back.
Speaker 2 (10:47):
Welcome back.
Speaker 1 (10:48):
Okay, we're answering the question what makes you happy? And
so far we'fer from the scientists who's been running one
of the largest and most unique studies on people's happiness
ever done. The study, led by doctor Matt Killingsworth, thanks
participants at random times during the day and ask them
what they're doing, how they feel, and many other questions
(11:11):
to try to get a sense of what happiness is
and what are the factors that determine whether you're happy
or not.
Speaker 3 (11:20):
It's at random times, and that's the idea. So you
can kind of think of, you know, ordinary like political surveys,
they're trying to get a representative sample of a population. Well,
my job as a scientist is to get a representative
sample of your moments, and so I'm gonna sort of
ping you at a bunch of random moments, and you know,
sometimes those will feel like odd times.
Speaker 1 (11:41):
So might be washing my dishes and I'll get a
pink from you to ask me how I'm feeling. Or
i might be in the middle of like a frustrating
moment with my kids and I'll still get a pin
from you.
Speaker 3 (11:50):
Exactly, It'll happen a bunch of times, and collectively that
kind of gives us this representative series of snapshots of
what do you actually do in your life, how do
you spend your time, what are you thinking about, how
do you feel, and lots of other factors.
Speaker 1 (12:04):
According to doctor Killingsworth, hundreds of thousands of people have
signed up for the study over the years, generating a
huge amount of data on basically how humans live their lives.
So now the question is what does all this data
tell you about happiness? Well, as it turns out, doctor
Killingsworth has studied the data and he's identified several key
(12:28):
factors seem to matter the most when it comes to
your happiness. So at this point you have hundreds of
thousands of people who have signed up for this So
in your studies, What are the factors that contribute to
people's happiness.
Speaker 3 (12:40):
Yeah, I'll tell you some big ones. One of the
first ones that I published from this project was from
a paper called The Wandering Mind is an Unhappy Mind,
And so I just added this question that said, are
you thinking about something other than what you're currently doing?
And people could either say no, I'm just focused on
the present moment on what I'm doing, or yes, I'm
thinking about something else. And then I asked, if you
(13:02):
are thinking about something else, are those thoughts pleasant, neutral,
or unpleasant? And it turned out that people were engaging
in mind wandering almost half the time, and that turns
out to be very robustly correlated with lower happiness.
Speaker 1 (13:16):
Okay, the first thing doctor Killingsworth found when you pink
people at random throughout their day is that many of
us are not really living in the present. About half
the time people were thinking about something other than what
they were doing. And you find that the people that
were distracted tended to be the people that also reported
being unhappy, especially the ones that were distracted thinking about
(13:39):
irrelevant or unpleasant things. In other words, living in the
moment and not letting your mind wonder makes you happier.
Half the time our mind is wondering, and when our
mind is wonder it tends to pull down our experience exactly.
Speaker 3 (13:57):
Partly it's because some of the time we think about
negative things, but I think it also impedes our ability
to enjoy what we're doing. Like, you know, if we're
having this conversation, like, the more the energy and attention
I'm bringing to that, the more I'm probably going to
enjoy it. If you kind of disengage and you're just
kind of partially doing things, You're probably not going to
enjoy it that much either.
Speaker 4 (14:18):
I see.
Speaker 1 (14:18):
There's something inherently pleasurable about being in the moment.
Speaker 3 (14:22):
That seems to be the case even when people are
like cleaning their house, they're much happier when they're just
focused on what they're doing than when they let their
attention stray elsewhere.
Speaker 1 (14:32):
Yeah, so living in the moment is scientifically proven to
make you happier. It's not just something taught by Buddhist Okay,
what else did doctor Killingsworth find in all this data?
All right, so what are some of the other factors
you found?
Speaker 3 (14:47):
So things like what percentage of your life are you
interacting in person with other humans.
Speaker 1 (14:53):
How social you're being in your life.
Speaker 3 (14:55):
How social you really are in person? Exactly. So someone
that spends a lot of their leisure time really engaging
with other people versus folks that get off work and
they go and sit at home alone or you know,
watching television or scrolling on their phone or something.
Speaker 1 (15:08):
Maybe explain to us for work some of the questions
you would ask people.
Speaker 3 (15:11):
Yeah, so I might ask them are you talking or
interacting with someone right now? And they could say yes
or no? And I might say is that in person?
Over video, over text? Which people are those? Friend, spouse, acquaintance, stranger, coworker, boss, child, grandparent,
et cetera. So it turns out interacting in person with
other people is really good.
Speaker 1 (15:32):
Wow. So the more you're interacting with people in person,
greater the happiness in your life.
Speaker 3 (15:37):
That's right. So if you just look at different people's
lives and say, you know, this person interacts ten percent
of the time, this person as interacts forty percent, this
person seventy percent, that percentage is also a very good
predictor of how happy they tend to be. So you
will be transiently happier relative to your own average moment
when you're interacting versus not and the more you accumulate
(16:00):
those moments, the better your life tends to be in
terms of how you feel, in terms of how satisfied
and fulfilled you are.
Speaker 1 (16:06):
Oh, I should tell that to my kids, my teenage
son for sure.
Speaker 2 (16:12):
All right. The second big.
Speaker 1 (16:14):
Factor, like doctor Killingsworth found in all the data that
affects your happiness is interacting with other people. Being social
makes you happier, although there are a few caveats. This
interaction has to be in person. Online doesn't count, and
you have to really engage in it. You can't just
sit at a party and be on your phone the
(16:35):
whole time. Also, the context in which you interact with
people matters. For example, talking with co workers at work helps,
but not that much. Okay, And you said that kind
of how we interact with those people in what context
is important?
Speaker 3 (16:52):
Yeah, So during leisure time is when it seems to
matter the most. So kind of in your free time,
engaging with other people is especially beneficial. So like working
on your own versus with other people, it's somewhat better
with other people, but that's a smaller difference versus like
going out and hanging out with your friends versus like
sitting at home alone. That's extremely different.
Speaker 1 (17:13):
In other words, people who spend more time having meaningful
interactions with other people on their free time in person
tend to report being happier. Now, I think, I know
what a lot of you out there are thinking right now.
But does that mean introverts are a little unhappier?
Speaker 3 (17:31):
Introverts are a bit less happy? So I think my
data also reveal a kind of trap, which is introverts
think they don't benefit much, or some even think that
they're harmed by interacting with other people. But that isn't
actually the reality. The reality is, despite your best intuitions,
speaking as an introvert myself, like, you would actually be
(17:51):
happier if you went out and interacted with other people.
Speaker 1 (17:54):
Amazing, Yes, sorry, introverts, you would be a lot happier
if you make the effort to talk to people for fun.
Science says, so okay, And then there is a third
big factor that doctor Kingsworth's found that has a huge
impact on your happiness. So tell me what are some
of the other factors.
Speaker 3 (18:15):
Then, yeah, so we talked about mental factors, we talked
about social factors, another one or what I would call
like physical factors. Particularly, the biggest one by far is
just being physically active. The number of days of the
week that someone is exercising is a surprisingly strong predictor
of their level of happiness across all these different outcomes.
Speaker 1 (18:36):
Yeah, sorry to you too, couch potatoes, but sitting around
and doing nothing is also making you unhappy. The good
news is that physical activity doesn't have to mean exercise,
and it.
Speaker 3 (18:51):
Doesn't just have to be exercised simply like, the level
of physical activation in your body is a very strong
predictor of happiness. Being more physically in gauge in whatever
is going on is a really good predictor of happiness.
Speaker 1 (19:03):
What do you mean physically engaged?
Speaker 3 (19:05):
Like? Literally, how energized is your body right now? Are
you sitting down and not moving or are you standing
up and moving around? Are you walking? Are you moving
with energy? Kind of the more energy you're expending, the
happier you tend to be.
Speaker 1 (19:19):
What what kinds of questions would you ask people in
this case?
Speaker 3 (19:23):
I literally ask them at this moment, are you lying down, sitting, standing, walking, jogging, running,
you know, being intensely physically active in some other way
and there's basically just a straight line upward. The more
they're kind of physically activated, the better they feel in
the moment and in their lives.
Speaker 2 (19:43):
All right.
Speaker 1 (19:43):
To wecap, these are the three main factors that affect
your happiness, according to an analysis of data from hundreds
of thousands of people that look into their daily lives
and how they feel. Number one live in the moment,
Number two have meaningful in person non work interactions with
other people. And three stay physically active. Now, of course
(20:08):
that's not the full picture of happiness, but as doctor
Killyesworth says, focusing on these three things can go a
long way to making you happier.
Speaker 3 (20:18):
So the way that I kind of think about those
three factors, you know, there's so many other things going
on with happiness. It's not like this is the total story,
but I think it's a set of things that's pretty important.
You can kind of think about a happy life as
a function of being like mentally engaged, socially engaged, and
physically engaged, sort of a life of engagement across those
(20:39):
sort of three pillars. If you're doing pretty well and
all three of those things, you're doing really well, And
if you're really not doing very well in all of
those things.
Speaker 2 (20:48):
You know, you're.
Speaker 3 (20:49):
Probably not doing so great. Like that doesn't get us
all the way from the most miserable person to the
most happy person. But that's going to be a big
set of exponatory factors. Again my data correlation, but I
think it seems likely that if you're able to kind
of flip those levers in your life, that would make
a big difference in your happiness.
Speaker 1 (21:06):
All right, when we come back, we're going to talk
to a neuroscientist to learn what he thinks about all
of this and what exactly is going on inside of
a happy brain. Stay with us, you're listening to sign
stuff and we're back. We're answering the question what really
(21:31):
makes us happy? And we learn there are three factors
that have a big impact on how happy we are,
living in the present, having in person interactions with other people,
and staying physically active.
Speaker 2 (21:44):
So is that it okay?
Speaker 1 (21:46):
I'm going to ask doctor Killingsworth more about what these
other factors are, including the ageless question of whether money
makes us happy. But first I wanted to check in
with my friend, neuroscientist Duane Godwin. I wrote a book
called Out of your Mind, in which we talk about
the brain science of everyday phenomena, including what makes us happy.
(22:08):
Here's my conversation with doctor Godwin. So, first question, Dwayne,
are you happy?
Speaker 4 (22:14):
Well? You know, Hora, that's a complicated question, but I'm
doing well and my cork is floating.
Speaker 1 (22:20):
I mean, like, are you happy that you finally are
regular on my podcast?
Speaker 4 (22:24):
Yeah? I'm just scared that somehow I'll destroy your ratings,
but otherwise I'm pretty happy to be here.
Speaker 1 (22:33):
How do we think of happiness in terms of how
the brain works?
Speaker 4 (22:36):
Well, when I think about happiness and the things that
contribute to happiness, I think about a number of different
areas of the brain. The first, everyone talks about your
brain's pleasure circuitry, So aart of that has to do
with release of dopamine and the perception and feeling of
pleasure you get when that happens. But this idea of
(22:58):
happiness a little more complicated because that has to do
with your assessment that you make about how content you
are about your life. And when we talk about those,
we then have to bring in your frontal lobes, because
that's the place where what is good, what feels good,
what is emotionally satisfying or calculated, and that information then
(23:19):
feeds back into this pleasure circuitry and affects your sense
of well being.
Speaker 1 (23:24):
Right what doctor Godwin is saying is that there is
a part of your brain that basically makes you feel good,
and that can be activated by what we're doing in
the moment, if you're eating a good meal, if you're
having a positive interaction with someone, or if you're having
a good workout, but it can also be activated by
your own thoughts and you use the front part of
(23:46):
your brain to step back and assess your life and
what's going on, that can also trigger the brain areas
that make you feel good, and that has big implications
for our happiness. First of all, it means that what
you think, and more important, how you think about the
things that are going on in your life can affect
how you feel or how happy you are. We'll talk
(24:08):
more about things like stoicism and cognitive therapy a little later,
but the fact that happiness is rooted in the brain
means that how easy it is to be happy can
change from person to person.
Speaker 4 (24:21):
You know, there is a certain baseline level of happiness
that can be attributed to just how genetically predisposed you
are to feeling happy. And what we know about genes
is that genes become proteins. Proteins become the structure of
the brain, and the structure of the brain houses the
activity of the brain. So it's not a very hard
line to draw between a genetic predisposition and the actual
(24:44):
activity that generates these complex emotional states.
Speaker 1 (24:48):
In other words, some brains might be happier than others,
and this is all because of genetics. How do genetics
affect our ability to be happy?
Speaker 4 (24:59):
Sure? You know. One of the studies that we do
cover in some detail in the book is the study
of the Minnesota Twins. And when I say Minnesota Twins,
I don't mean the baseball team. I mean an enormous
study of twins that followed identical twins who have been
raised apart. It was really kind of a natural experiment
(25:21):
in the question of whether happiness is hardwired. One example
of this involved twins that were separated at birth, who,
despite the fact that they never met each other, they
both reported similar levels of happiness, their optimism, and even
overall life satisfaction.
Speaker 1 (25:39):
Okay, this is a pretty cool study. Starting in nineteen
seventy nine, psychologist at the University of Minnesota were able
to survey over one hundred sets of twins that were
separated at birth. These are twins that were born together,
but for some reason we're split apart and raised under
different circumstances. Have you seen the movie The Trapp or
(26:01):
heard the story The Prince and the Popper. These are
real life examples of those stories. It's almost like the
perfect experiment, right, Like if you had a copy of yourself,
which is what identical twin is, and you had one
of you lead one kind of life and the other
lead another kind of life, and then you check them
with yourself and your twin later. You could see whether
life affects your happiness or whether it's something sort of
(26:22):
inherent to your genes.
Speaker 4 (26:24):
Yeah, in a way, it's like the perfect experiment because
you can of count for a lot of the other
confounds and variability that happens in a life.
Speaker 1 (26:34):
All right, But here is a super cool part of
the experiment. The scientist didn't just look at identical twins
that were separated at birth. They also looked at for
eternal twins that were separated at birth. That is, twins
that are basically just siblings and not genetically identical. So
they looked at genetically identical twins basically clones were separated
(26:56):
at birth, and they looked at non genetically identical twins
that were also separated at birth, which is like the
perfect control. Now, the scientists looked into all kinds of
things about these twins, what their personalities ended up being,
how smart they are, what kind of jobs they had,
and they also asked them basically how happy they were
(27:18):
and what did they find.
Speaker 4 (27:19):
What they found was the fifty percent of the areas
and their baseline level of happiness could be attributed to
genetic factors.
Speaker 1 (27:27):
Then, how much of their happiness was correlated with being
fans of the Minnesota Twins?
Speaker 4 (27:34):
Possibly?
Speaker 1 (27:35):
I mean, I don't know how they've they've been doing,
but it sounds like something that might affect your happiness. Yeah.
Speaker 4 (27:40):
I think the major idea here is that twins studies
provide a really important natural experiment.
Speaker 2 (27:47):
Okay.
Speaker 1 (27:48):
What they found was that sets of identical twins would
sort of both report being the same level of happiness
even though they were raised apart, but the fraternal twins
the non identical ones wouldn't always be the same It's
like if you had a clone that led a totally
different life than you, and that clone was happy, chances
are that you would be happy too, Or if your
(28:10):
clone was unhappy, you would probably be unhappy as well.
In other words, about fifty percent of how happy you are,
the scientists found, is due to your genes. That is,
some people are just born to be a little happier
than others. Now, the thing to note here is that
this means some of your happiness is already determined for you,
(28:31):
but it also means a lot of it is not.
Speaker 4 (28:35):
But you know, I think the other thing that's really
important about this is you could look at that and say,
oh my gosh, I really don't have control of how
happy I am. But I think that's the wrong way
to think about it. I think the correct way to
think about it is that, hey, you've got fifty percent
to play with. You know that other half of it
is really stuff that's under your control, circumstances that you
(28:58):
know you may have say over.
Speaker 1 (29:02):
Okay, I still have a lot of questions about happiness,
questions like how does having a purpose in life affect
your happiness? Or how important is money? And how happy
you feel and it's being on your phone all day
making you unhappy. We're going to tackle all these questions
in the second part of this series, so make sure
you subscribe and listen to the second episode next week.
(29:24):
Here's a sneak peak.
Speaker 3 (29:26):
So if you go back to kind of the state
of the scientific literature, the kind of common narrative amongst
happiness researchers is that money doesn't really matter very much
for happiness. I think we actually got that kind of.
Speaker 1 (29:38):
Wrong, all right, Tune in next week for part two
of What Really makes This Happy?
Speaker 2 (29:44):
See then you've been listening to Science Stuff production.
Speaker 1 (29:49):
Of iHeartRadio, written and produced by me or hitchm pndedate
by Rose Seguda, executive producer Jerry Rowland, and audio engineer
and mixer Ksey Pepperm. And you can follow me on
social media. Just search for PhD Comics and the name
of your favorite platform. Be sure to subscribe to Sign
Stuff on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
(30:10):
get your podcasts, and please tell your friends. We'll be
back next Wednesday with another episode.
Hey, welcome to Science Stuff, a production of iHeartRadio. I'm
Horey Champ and today we are tackling a question that
is very personal to me and that I imagine is
very personal to you as well. And the question is
what really makes us happy?
Speaker 2 (00:18):
Is it money? Is it love? Is it a sense
of purpose? Or is it random? Believe it or not.
Speaker 1 (00:25):
Science has studied this question and it has come up
with some pretty definitive answers. So we're going to talk
to two scientists today. One is a psychologist who's running
one of the biggest and most unique experiments on human
happiness in history. And we're going to talk to a
neuroscientist who's going to tell us what he thinks is
(00:46):
happening in your brain when you feel happy.
Speaker 2 (00:49):
Now.
Speaker 1 (00:49):
This is the first in a two part series, so
be sure to also check out part two. Okay, get
ready to experience the joy of science as we answer
the question it really makes us happy? Hey everyone, Okay,
before we get started, I want you to take a
second and ask yourself this question, Am I happy? I'll
(01:14):
take a pause so you can think about it.
Speaker 2 (01:18):
Now.
Speaker 1 (01:19):
If you're a skeptical person, you might be thinking, well,
Orge what do you mean by being happy? Or you
might be thinking, well, sometimes I feel happy and sometimes
I don't.
Speaker 2 (01:30):
Happiness is a pretty tricky.
Speaker 1 (01:32):
Subject, which is what inspired our first guest here today,
doctor Matt Killingsworth, to start as a graduate student at
Harvard something called Track Your Happiness dot Org. Well, thank you,
doctor Killingsworth for joining us.
Speaker 3 (01:47):
Glad to be here.
Speaker 2 (01:48):
Please tell us who you are and what you do.
Speaker 3 (01:50):
Sure, my name is Matt Killingsworth. I'm at the University
of Pennsylvania at the Wharton School of Business, and I'm
a researcher who studies human happiness.
Speaker 1 (01:58):
Fantastic, so tell us about Track Yourhappiness dot org.
Speaker 3 (02:02):
So this is a project that I started more than
a decade ago. Track Your Happiness really aims to be
the world's biggest happiness study to try to figure out
the recipe for human happiness and how to spread it
into people's lives. Since this project's been started, hundreds of
thousands of people from around the world have joined across
its different versions. I created it because I wanted to
understand how happy people really feel as they actually go
(02:23):
about their daily lives. What makes our lives enjoyable, fulfilling, interesting, satisfying, Okay.
Speaker 1 (02:30):
Doctor Pilling's Worth study uses a very specific method called
experience sampling, which is based on the idea that how
we answer the question are you happy kind of changes
throughout the day, and it depends on what's happening to
us on any given moment. We'll get to how it works,
but first I wanted to know how he got this idea.
Speaker 3 (02:53):
I really, you know, especially before and during my PhD training,
I really read the scientific literature, hundreds and hundreds and
thousands of papers, so I had a pretty good sense
of all of the things that we discovered up to
that point.
Speaker 1 (03:06):
So what were the things that you learn from the literature?
Speaker 3 (03:09):
Lots of different things. So the idea that happiness might
be important, I mean, you can go back to Aristotle,
you can certainly go back to Jeremy Mintham and John
Stuart Mill and other people kind of arguing some version
of happiness is kind of like the reason we do
everything else. It's the metric or the construct that all
this other stuff that humanity is pursuing is ultimately trying
(03:30):
to achieve. But it really wasn't until you know, the
second half of the twentieth century at least, and even
more so in the last few decades that it's become
quite clear that we can measure happiness pretty well, not perfectly,
but well enough to do really good science. I mean,
that's probably the most essential thing that research is documented,
because if you can't measure it, you can't really do
(03:50):
science with it. But once you measure it, you could
be wrong about basically everything. But if you keep measuring, observing,
you know, refining your thinking, oh, you'll get closer and
closer and closer to the truth.
Speaker 1 (04:03):
What Decker Killingsworth is saying is that happiness, or the
pursuit of it, in a way, kind of defines what
it means to be human. I mean, it's in the
founding Document of the United States that it's one of
our unalienable rights. It's the thing we all strive for
and hope to achieve. And yet it wasn't until the
nineteen fifties that we started studying it scientifically. That's what
(04:27):
psychologist started to look into it.
Speaker 3 (04:31):
Well, a lot of the past research really focused on
what are the characteristics of happy people? Like who is happy?
We knew something about relationship between age and happiness, and
income and happiness, and how different countries differ in their
levels of happiness. You know, lots of these things that
you might collect on a big government survey or you
know personality as well, how to things like the Big
(04:52):
five personality dimensions relate to happiness. And one of the
things that was really missing, I think was trying to
understand like when people are happy.
Speaker 1 (05:02):
So all of these studies since the nineteen fifties made
a lot of progress.
Speaker 2 (05:06):
And trying to figure out the general.
Speaker 1 (05:08):
Factors that affect your happiness, like personality, how much money
you have, what culture or country you live in. But
according to doctor Killingsworth, the data was always a little fuzzy.
That's because of something I think we all know about happiness,
which is said it sort of depends on when you
(05:28):
ask me if I'm happy or not. In other words,
is happiness how I feel in the moment, or is
happiness how I feel when I take a step back
and consider my life in general. If you ask me
if I'm happy in a particularly stressful moment, like if
I'm frustrated with my job, or my kids or my relationships,
I might answer one way.
Speaker 2 (05:50):
Whereas if you ask me while I'm on.
Speaker 1 (05:51):
Vacation, sitting in a beach thinking about my life, I
might answer a different way, not to mention. Sometimes there
are trade offs in life. Sometimes you have to put
up with unpleasant moments or do things we don't really
want to do that might help us in the long run,
like cleaning your COI lit Or exercising or most jobs
(06:14):
for most people. Now, this is something scientists knew, but
they didn't know quite what to do about it. Nobody
had thought to think that houseone responds to the question
are you happy? Depends on when you ask them the question.
Speaker 3 (06:31):
I'm not saying they never thought of it. I think
people were certainly aware those things could be important, but
we really lacked the ability to do it. So, Like
this method of experience sampling that's really the cornerstone of
my research, you know, was invented by a guy Mehi
chicksit me Hai back in like the late nineteen seventies.
But he did it with like radio pages clipped to
someone's belt and then a little paper booklet they filled
(06:53):
out when the beeper went off. Well you can study
like eight people at a time. Later, there were you know,
studies using like pomp pilot for those of us who
are old enough to remember that technology. But literally before
I started this project, I looked in you know, the
flagship journals of the discipline of psychology, and they would
have twenty studies that ever use experience sampling, and they
would have ten or twenty people in them a most.
(07:15):
You know, now I've had hundreds of thousands of people
in the study, and you know, a gigantic number of
variables too.
Speaker 1 (07:22):
Okay, let's get to how Doctor Killing Sports project works.
If you go to track your Happiness dot org, you
can sign up with your phone or your email, and
once you sign up, you become part of the study.
Speaker 3 (07:36):
So you'll first answer some questions about your life, like
your demographics and your personality and kind of your expectations
of how you think you experienced different facets of life.
And then from there, I really want to follow up
in the course of daily life. So you know, maybe
you did that on Monday, and now it's Tuesday. You're
going to start getting some pings from me, some kind
(07:56):
of notifications by email or SMS or or something else,
and hopefully you'll answer one or a few surveys each day.
So I might ask you questions like how do you
feel right now, are you interacting with anyone else? Are
you thinking about something other than what you're doing? You know,
have you exercised in the last twenty four hours? A
bunch of factors, And I'm basically taking the answers to
(08:18):
all of those questions, combining with the signals on happiness,
both in the moment happiness and these longer term measures
of happiness, and trying to sort of figure out, well,
what is the right equation for human happiness in general.
Speaker 1 (08:31):
So the big innovation here is that we all carry
our phones with us all the time, and that gives
doctor Killingsworth a chance to basically pop into your life
and see how happy you are in any moment, because
if someone were to ask you later, your answer might change,
or you might not remember how you felt, or your
(08:53):
memory might get distorted with time.
Speaker 3 (08:57):
You know, we all experience those things. We're kind of
aware of what happening in the moment, but it's surprisingly
hard later to remember what occurred. And that's why tracking
and measuring are so powerful. So the sort of premise
behind this is that if I can watch and see
how happiness goes up and down during people's daily life
across a whole bunch of different people and then put
(09:17):
all that data together to try to understand what drivers
of happiness might explain those shifts up and down. We
might discover some new insights into what really makes the
experience of human life better.
Speaker 1 (09:28):
And what makes people give you an answer at the time, Like,
if I'm in the middle of a difficult moment or
a super happy moment, why would I interrupt it and
answer it.
Speaker 3 (09:37):
It's partly is that it's going to contribute to the
quality of your insight into yourself. So if you're selective
about when you choose to respond, you're going to end
up with an incomplete picture of your own life. You're
not going to understand what your best moments look like,
what your worst moments look like, if you're kind of
leaving those out. So it's not necessarily great for you.
Speaker 1 (09:56):
I feel like it requires a certain openness, But I imagine
it could also be very therapeutic to kind of be
open and to confide in your system.
Speaker 3 (10:03):
I think so, and I mean, honestly, I think there's
real value in kind of the happiness report that people
get back and seeing their data.
Speaker 1 (10:11):
Oh yeah, I forgot to mention when you sign out
to be a part of the study. You also get
a report on your daily happiness. Okay, when we come back,
we're going to find out what doctor Killingsworth found in
this study that, as he mentioned, hundreds of thousands of
people from across the world have participated in. We're going
to find out what affects your happiness the most, and
(10:34):
we're going to find out if money is one of them.
So stay with us, we'll be right back.
Speaker 2 (10:47):
Welcome back.
Speaker 1 (10:48):
Okay, we're answering the question what makes you happy? And
so far we'fer from the scientists who's been running one
of the largest and most unique studies on people's happiness
ever done. The study, led by doctor Matt Killingsworth, thanks
participants at random times during the day and ask them
what they're doing, how they feel, and many other questions
(11:11):
to try to get a sense of what happiness is
and what are the factors that determine whether you're happy
or not.
Speaker 3 (11:20):
It's at random times, and that's the idea. So you
can kind of think of, you know, ordinary like political surveys,
they're trying to get a representative sample of a population. Well,
my job as a scientist is to get a representative
sample of your moments, and so I'm gonna sort of
ping you at a bunch of random moments, and you know,
sometimes those will feel like odd times.
Speaker 1 (11:41):
So might be washing my dishes and I'll get a
pink from you to ask me how I'm feeling. Or
i might be in the middle of like a frustrating
moment with my kids and I'll still get a pin
from you.
Speaker 3 (11:50):
Exactly, It'll happen a bunch of times, and collectively that
kind of gives us this representative series of snapshots of
what do you actually do in your life, how do
you spend your time, what are you thinking about, how
do you feel, and lots of other factors.
Speaker 1 (12:04):
According to doctor Killingsworth, hundreds of thousands of people have
signed up for the study over the years, generating a
huge amount of data on basically how humans live their lives.
So now the question is what does all this data
tell you about happiness? Well, as it turns out, doctor
Killingsworth has studied the data and he's identified several key
(12:28):
factors seem to matter the most when it comes to
your happiness. So at this point you have hundreds of
thousands of people who have signed up for this So
in your studies, What are the factors that contribute to
people's happiness.
Speaker 3 (12:40):
Yeah, I'll tell you some big ones. One of the
first ones that I published from this project was from
a paper called The Wandering Mind is an Unhappy Mind,
And so I just added this question that said, are
you thinking about something other than what you're currently doing?
And people could either say no, I'm just focused on
the present moment on what I'm doing, or yes, I'm
thinking about something else. And then I asked, if you
(13:02):
are thinking about something else, are those thoughts pleasant, neutral,
or unpleasant? And it turned out that people were engaging
in mind wandering almost half the time, and that turns
out to be very robustly correlated with lower happiness.
Speaker 1 (13:16):
Okay, the first thing doctor Killingsworth found when you pink
people at random throughout their day is that many of
us are not really living in the present. About half
the time people were thinking about something other than what
they were doing. And you find that the people that
were distracted tended to be the people that also reported
being unhappy, especially the ones that were distracted thinking about
(13:39):
irrelevant or unpleasant things. In other words, living in the
moment and not letting your mind wonder makes you happier.
Half the time our mind is wondering, and when our
mind is wonder it tends to pull down our experience exactly.
Speaker 3 (13:57):
Partly it's because some of the time we think about
negative things, but I think it also impedes our ability
to enjoy what we're doing. Like, you know, if we're
having this conversation, like, the more the energy and attention
I'm bringing to that, the more I'm probably going to
enjoy it. If you kind of disengage and you're just
kind of partially doing things, You're probably not going to
enjoy it that much either.
Speaker 4 (14:18):
I see.
Speaker 1 (14:18):
There's something inherently pleasurable about being in the moment.
Speaker 3 (14:22):
That seems to be the case even when people are
like cleaning their house, they're much happier when they're just
focused on what they're doing than when they let their
attention stray elsewhere.
Speaker 1 (14:32):
Yeah, so living in the moment is scientifically proven to
make you happier. It's not just something taught by Buddhist Okay,
what else did doctor Killingsworth find in all this data?
All right, so what are some of the other factors
you found?
Speaker 3 (14:47):
So things like what percentage of your life are you
interacting in person with other humans.
Speaker 1 (14:53):
How social you're being in your life.
Speaker 3 (14:55):
How social you really are in person? Exactly. So someone
that spends a lot of their leisure time really engaging
with other people versus folks that get off work and
they go and sit at home alone or you know,
watching television or scrolling on their phone or something.
Speaker 1 (15:08):
Maybe explain to us for work some of the questions
you would ask people.
Speaker 3 (15:11):
Yeah, so I might ask them are you talking or
interacting with someone right now? And they could say yes
or no? And I might say is that in person?
Over video, over text? Which people are those? Friend, spouse, acquaintance, stranger, coworker, boss, child, grandparent,
et cetera. So it turns out interacting in person with
other people is really good.
Speaker 1 (15:32):
Wow. So the more you're interacting with people in person,
greater the happiness in your life.
Speaker 3 (15:37):
That's right. So if you just look at different people's
lives and say, you know, this person interacts ten percent
of the time, this person as interacts forty percent, this
person seventy percent, that percentage is also a very good
predictor of how happy they tend to be. So you
will be transiently happier relative to your own average moment
when you're interacting versus not and the more you accumulate
(16:00):
those moments, the better your life tends to be in
terms of how you feel, in terms of how satisfied
and fulfilled you are.
Speaker 1 (16:06):
Oh, I should tell that to my kids, my teenage
son for sure.
Speaker 2 (16:12):
All right. The second big.
Speaker 1 (16:14):
Factor, like doctor Killingsworth found in all the data that
affects your happiness is interacting with other people. Being social
makes you happier, although there are a few caveats. This
interaction has to be in person. Online doesn't count, and
you have to really engage in it. You can't just
sit at a party and be on your phone the
(16:35):
whole time. Also, the context in which you interact with
people matters. For example, talking with co workers at work helps,
but not that much. Okay, And you said that kind
of how we interact with those people in what context
is important?
Speaker 3 (16:52):
Yeah, So during leisure time is when it seems to
matter the most. So kind of in your free time,
engaging with other people is especially beneficial. So like working
on your own versus with other people, it's somewhat better
with other people, but that's a smaller difference versus like
going out and hanging out with your friends versus like
sitting at home alone. That's extremely different.
Speaker 1 (17:13):
In other words, people who spend more time having meaningful
interactions with other people on their free time in person
tend to report being happier. Now, I think, I know
what a lot of you out there are thinking right now.
But does that mean introverts are a little unhappier?
Speaker 3 (17:31):
Introverts are a bit less happy? So I think my
data also reveal a kind of trap, which is introverts
think they don't benefit much, or some even think that
they're harmed by interacting with other people. But that isn't
actually the reality. The reality is, despite your best intuitions,
speaking as an introvert myself, like, you would actually be
(17:51):
happier if you went out and interacted with other people.
Speaker 1 (17:54):
Amazing, Yes, sorry, introverts, you would be a lot happier
if you make the effort to talk to people for fun.
Science says, so okay, And then there is a third
big factor that doctor Kingsworth's found that has a huge
impact on your happiness. So tell me what are some
of the other factors.
Speaker 3 (18:15):
Then, yeah, so we talked about mental factors, we talked
about social factors, another one or what I would call
like physical factors. Particularly, the biggest one by far is
just being physically active. The number of days of the
week that someone is exercising is a surprisingly strong predictor
of their level of happiness across all these different outcomes.
Speaker 1 (18:36):
Yeah, sorry to you too, couch potatoes, but sitting around
and doing nothing is also making you unhappy. The good
news is that physical activity doesn't have to mean exercise,
and it.
Speaker 3 (18:51):
Doesn't just have to be exercised simply like, the level
of physical activation in your body is a very strong
predictor of happiness. Being more physically in gauge in whatever
is going on is a really good predictor of happiness.
Speaker 1 (19:03):
What do you mean physically engaged?
Speaker 3 (19:05):
Like? Literally, how energized is your body right now? Are
you sitting down and not moving or are you standing
up and moving around? Are you walking? Are you moving
with energy? Kind of the more energy you're expending, the
happier you tend to be.
Speaker 1 (19:19):
What what kinds of questions would you ask people in
this case?
Speaker 3 (19:23):
I literally ask them at this moment, are you lying down, sitting, standing, walking, jogging, running,
you know, being intensely physically active in some other way
and there's basically just a straight line upward. The more
they're kind of physically activated, the better they feel in
the moment and in their lives.
Speaker 2 (19:43):
All right.
Speaker 1 (19:43):
To wecap, these are the three main factors that affect
your happiness, according to an analysis of data from hundreds
of thousands of people that look into their daily lives
and how they feel. Number one live in the moment,
Number two have meaningful in person non work interactions with
other people. And three stay physically active. Now, of course
(20:08):
that's not the full picture of happiness, but as doctor
Killyesworth says, focusing on these three things can go a
long way to making you happier.
Speaker 3 (20:18):
So the way that I kind of think about those
three factors, you know, there's so many other things going
on with happiness. It's not like this is the total story,
but I think it's a set of things that's pretty important.
You can kind of think about a happy life as
a function of being like mentally engaged, socially engaged, and
physically engaged, sort of a life of engagement across those
(20:39):
sort of three pillars. If you're doing pretty well and
all three of those things, you're doing really well, And
if you're really not doing very well in all of
those things.
Speaker 2 (20:48):
You know, you're.
Speaker 3 (20:49):
Probably not doing so great. Like that doesn't get us
all the way from the most miserable person to the
most happy person. But that's going to be a big
set of exponatory factors. Again my data correlation, but I
think it seems likely that if you're able to kind
of flip those levers in your life, that would make
a big difference in your happiness.
Speaker 1 (21:06):
All right, when we come back, we're going to talk
to a neuroscientist to learn what he thinks about all
of this and what exactly is going on inside of
a happy brain. Stay with us, you're listening to sign
stuff and we're back. We're answering the question what really
(21:31):
makes us happy? And we learn there are three factors
that have a big impact on how happy we are,
living in the present, having in person interactions with other people,
and staying physically active.
Speaker 2 (21:44):
So is that it okay?
Speaker 1 (21:46):
I'm going to ask doctor Killingsworth more about what these
other factors are, including the ageless question of whether money
makes us happy. But first I wanted to check in
with my friend, neuroscientist Duane Godwin. I wrote a book
called Out of your Mind, in which we talk about
the brain science of everyday phenomena, including what makes us happy.
(22:08):
Here's my conversation with doctor Godwin. So, first question, Dwayne,
are you happy?
Speaker 4 (22:14):
Well? You know, Hora, that's a complicated question, but I'm
doing well and my cork is floating.
Speaker 1 (22:20):
I mean, like, are you happy that you finally are
regular on my podcast?
Speaker 4 (22:24):
Yeah? I'm just scared that somehow I'll destroy your ratings,
but otherwise I'm pretty happy to be here.
Speaker 1 (22:33):
How do we think of happiness in terms of how
the brain works?
Speaker 4 (22:36):
Well, when I think about happiness and the things that
contribute to happiness, I think about a number of different
areas of the brain. The first, everyone talks about your
brain's pleasure circuitry, So aart of that has to do
with release of dopamine and the perception and feeling of
pleasure you get when that happens. But this idea of
(22:58):
happiness a little more complicated because that has to do
with your assessment that you make about how content you
are about your life. And when we talk about those,
we then have to bring in your frontal lobes, because
that's the place where what is good, what feels good,
what is emotionally satisfying or calculated, and that information then
(23:19):
feeds back into this pleasure circuitry and affects your sense
of well being.
Speaker 1 (23:24):
Right what doctor Godwin is saying is that there is
a part of your brain that basically makes you feel good,
and that can be activated by what we're doing in
the moment, if you're eating a good meal, if you're
having a positive interaction with someone, or if you're having
a good workout, but it can also be activated by
your own thoughts and you use the front part of
(23:46):
your brain to step back and assess your life and
what's going on, that can also trigger the brain areas
that make you feel good, and that has big implications
for our happiness. First of all, it means that what
you think, and more important, how you think about the
things that are going on in your life can affect
how you feel or how happy you are. We'll talk
(24:08):
more about things like stoicism and cognitive therapy a little later,
but the fact that happiness is rooted in the brain
means that how easy it is to be happy can
change from person to person.
Speaker 4 (24:21):
You know, there is a certain baseline level of happiness
that can be attributed to just how genetically predisposed you
are to feeling happy. And what we know about genes
is that genes become proteins. Proteins become the structure of
the brain, and the structure of the brain houses the
activity of the brain. So it's not a very hard
line to draw between a genetic predisposition and the actual
(24:44):
activity that generates these complex emotional states.
Speaker 1 (24:48):
In other words, some brains might be happier than others,
and this is all because of genetics. How do genetics
affect our ability to be happy?
Speaker 4 (24:59):
Sure? You know. One of the studies that we do
cover in some detail in the book is the study
of the Minnesota Twins. And when I say Minnesota Twins,
I don't mean the baseball team. I mean an enormous
study of twins that followed identical twins who have been
raised apart. It was really kind of a natural experiment
(25:21):
in the question of whether happiness is hardwired. One example
of this involved twins that were separated at birth, who,
despite the fact that they never met each other, they
both reported similar levels of happiness, their optimism, and even
overall life satisfaction.
Speaker 1 (25:39):
Okay, this is a pretty cool study. Starting in nineteen
seventy nine, psychologist at the University of Minnesota were able
to survey over one hundred sets of twins that were
separated at birth. These are twins that were born together,
but for some reason we're split apart and raised under
different circumstances. Have you seen the movie The Trapp or
(26:01):
heard the story The Prince and the Popper. These are
real life examples of those stories. It's almost like the
perfect experiment, right, Like if you had a copy of yourself,
which is what identical twin is, and you had one
of you lead one kind of life and the other
lead another kind of life, and then you check them
with yourself and your twin later. You could see whether
life affects your happiness or whether it's something sort of
(26:22):
inherent to your genes.
Speaker 4 (26:24):
Yeah, in a way, it's like the perfect experiment because
you can of count for a lot of the other
confounds and variability that happens in a life.
Speaker 1 (26:34):
All right, But here is a super cool part of
the experiment. The scientist didn't just look at identical twins
that were separated at birth. They also looked at for
eternal twins that were separated at birth. That is, twins
that are basically just siblings and not genetically identical. So
they looked at genetically identical twins basically clones were separated
(26:56):
at birth, and they looked at non genetically identical twins
that were also separated at birth, which is like the
perfect control. Now, the scientists looked into all kinds of
things about these twins, what their personalities ended up being,
how smart they are, what kind of jobs they had,
and they also asked them basically how happy they were
(27:18):
and what did they find.
Speaker 4 (27:19):
What they found was the fifty percent of the areas
and their baseline level of happiness could be attributed to
genetic factors.
Speaker 1 (27:27):
Then, how much of their happiness was correlated with being
fans of the Minnesota Twins?
Speaker 4 (27:34):
Possibly?
Speaker 1 (27:35):
I mean, I don't know how they've they've been doing,
but it sounds like something that might affect your happiness. Yeah.
Speaker 4 (27:40):
I think the major idea here is that twins studies
provide a really important natural experiment.
Speaker 2 (27:47):
Okay.
Speaker 1 (27:48):
What they found was that sets of identical twins would
sort of both report being the same level of happiness
even though they were raised apart, but the fraternal twins
the non identical ones wouldn't always be the same It's
like if you had a clone that led a totally
different life than you, and that clone was happy, chances
are that you would be happy too, Or if your
(28:10):
clone was unhappy, you would probably be unhappy as well.
In other words, about fifty percent of how happy you are,
the scientists found, is due to your genes. That is,
some people are just born to be a little happier
than others. Now, the thing to note here is that
this means some of your happiness is already determined for you,
(28:31):
but it also means a lot of it is not.
Speaker 4 (28:35):
But you know, I think the other thing that's really
important about this is you could look at that and say,
oh my gosh, I really don't have control of how
happy I am. But I think that's the wrong way
to think about it. I think the correct way to
think about it is that, hey, you've got fifty percent
to play with. You know that other half of it
is really stuff that's under your control, circumstances that you
(28:58):
know you may have say over.
Speaker 1 (29:02):
Okay, I still have a lot of questions about happiness,
questions like how does having a purpose in life affect
your happiness? Or how important is money? And how happy
you feel and it's being on your phone all day
making you unhappy. We're going to tackle all these questions
in the second part of this series, so make sure
you subscribe and listen to the second episode next week.
(29:24):
Here's a sneak peak.
Speaker 3 (29:26):
So if you go back to kind of the state
of the scientific literature, the kind of common narrative amongst
happiness researchers is that money doesn't really matter very much
for happiness. I think we actually got that kind of.
Speaker 1 (29:38):
Wrong, all right, Tune in next week for part two
of What Really makes This Happy?
Speaker 2 (29:44):
See then you've been listening to Science Stuff production.
Speaker 1 (29:49):
Of iHeartRadio, written and produced by me or hitchm pndedate
by Rose Seguda, executive producer Jerry Rowland, and audio engineer
and mixer Ksey Pepperm. And you can follow me on
social media. Just search for PhD Comics and the name
of your favorite platform. Be sure to subscribe to Sign
Stuff on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
(30:10):
get your podcasts, and please tell your friends. We'll be
back next Wednesday with another episode.
Popular Podcasts
NFL Daily with Gregg Rosenthal
Gregg Rosenthal and a rotating crew of elite NFL Media co-hosts, including Patrick Claybon, Colleen Wolfe, Steve Wyche, Nick Shook and Jourdan Rodrigue of The Athletic get you caught up daily on all the NFL news and analysis you need to be smarter and funnier than your friends.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
I’m Jay Shetty host of On Purpose the worlds #1 Mental Health podcast and I’m so grateful you found us. I started this podcast 5 years ago to invite you into conversations and workshops that are designed to help make you happier, healthier and more healed. I believe that when you (yes you) feel seen, heard and understood you’re able to deal with relationship struggles, work challenges and life’s ups and downs with more ease and grace. I interview experts, celebrities, thought leaders and athletes so that we can grow our mindset, build better habits and uncover a side of them we’ve never seen before. New episodes every Monday and Friday. Your support means the world to me and I don’t take it for granted — click the follow button and leave a review to help us spread the love with On Purpose. I can’t wait for you to listen to your first or 500th episode!
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com