January 13, 2025 • 43 mins
As children we think we're at the center of the world - but as adults we need to learn to see the perspectives and problems of other people. It helps us connect with those people, but also makes us realise that our own problems aren't unique or especially awful. In short, to be happy you need to know ... How to Get Over Yourself.
Dr Laurie hears how to stop being egocentric and start being allocentric from Bruce Hood - a professor at the University of Bristol and the author of The Science of Happiness: Seven Lessons for Living Well.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin. If you're hoping to make big changes to your
life in twenty twenty five, you're probably viewing those goals
through a lens that's very much focused on yourself. I
want to achieve this, or I want to become like that.
The whole idea of self improvement involves centering ourselves, putting
(00:36):
our own hopes and worries in the spotlight. But if
you're feeling this self improvement bug in the new year,
you may need to get over yourself. And I mean
that in the nicest way possible, because the science shows
that checking your ego may be a faster path to
happiness than you think. But how can you get over yourself?
And what are some strategies for taking yourself out of
the spotlight? Today we'll get some tips from Bruce Hood.
(01:00):
Bruce is a professor at the University of Bristol in
England and the author of the Science of Happiness, Seven
Lessons for Living Well Like Me. Bruce turned to happiness
science after seeing the mental health crisis that his students
were going through. But Bruce and I share a bond
that goes beyond our shared study of well being.
Speaker 2 (01:16):
You know I've reached twenty five years at Bristol University here,
and I've just been applying for teaching fellowship where they
asked you to reflect upon your career and how you
felt you've made an impact. I always say I talk
about this new, recent kind of change into the work
on happiness, and I attributed that to you, Laurie, and
I make a big point of saying that this is
an interesting situation where the student is now mentoring the
(01:38):
tutor because we met when I was visiting MIT and
you were coming from Harvard as this kind of fiery
young undergraduate working in comparative psychology at the time, and
then I applied for a job at Harvard. It ended
up being one of the professors there. And I don't
know if you remember this, Laurie, but you were an
undergraduate at the time, but I let you take my
graduate course. And the reason I did is I told
(01:59):
people later on it Laurie had a much better way
of explaining difficult concepts than I did. But six years
ago is when things really changed, I think is when
that was a terrible time. I'm at Bristol University. It
was twenty eighteen and we had a spate of tragic suicides,
and I realized that we needed to do something to
help these students. And I looked around, and by coincidence,
you have put on this amazing course at Yale Psychology
(02:21):
in the Good Life.
Speaker 3 (02:22):
And so I.
Speaker 2 (02:22):
Contacted you, and in your typical generous and selfless way,
you shared all your notes and I put together my
version of the course, but with my perspective on it,
and I called the Science of Happiness. And I've never
looked back ever since then. It's like your course has
become very impactful, influential.
Speaker 3 (02:39):
I'm really really loved by the students.
Speaker 2 (02:42):
So I've now kind of dedicated my remaining time to
trying to become an advocate and promote a change in
higher education, actually not just the general public, but trying
to change the way we.
Speaker 3 (02:53):
Educate students, because you know, I think there's a lot
to be done for them.
Speaker 1 (02:57):
So funny that you bring up that graduate class that
I took with you, because I do I definitely remember that.
Not only do you remember that, but I was cleaning
out my Yale office recently and I still had the
binder of all the readings that we did for that
course that was still in my office. You know, twenty seven,
twenty eight years later. So good lord, I definitely remember.
Speaker 2 (03:16):
It and made a big im and we published a
lot of papers together as well. We did some really
cool work, really fondly remembered.
Speaker 1 (03:22):
And so thanks to my next question, because you and
I both share this kind of strange career path where
we were studying something else and got interested in happiness.
And one of the things that I recall you studying,
and you've been wrote one of your early books about
was this idea of the self. What got you interested
in the idea of the self and kind of why
is it so important?
Speaker 2 (03:40):
Yeah, So in one of my first books, I wrote
about the way that we as adults have these misconceptions
that really emerge early in childhood, and I had to
throw away statement in this first book about their being
no self, and an editor picked up on this, So
what do you mean by that? And it never occurred
to me that this was an issue in question because
I'd been trained in your physiology and the whole neuroscience
(04:04):
for approach and cognitive science, where we talked constantly about
there being subsystems and generated experiences. So this self is
a constructed notion in your science and that's something that
no one really argues there's a little you inside your
head as such. Rather, it's the story that our brain
weaves that pulls together all the various components which make
up our experience. And so that got me thinking that
(04:26):
maybe a book about the self illusion would be valuable.
I really had trouble convincing people that this was going
to be a worthwhile book, but it's been one of
those slow burners which has done really really well over
the years. It's actually my most successful book, and I
think it's because it just gets you to kind of
think differently about our common day experience because we never
question ourselves. We feel we're the same person from day
to day, but of course we're constantly changing, and that's
(04:48):
something I know you've mentioned in your podcast. But the
reality is, yeah, where you were rewriting ourselves every day
and you which is slightly worrying, but also I think deliberating,
because it means you can change and you can become
a different person if you recognize that you're not cast
in stone.
Speaker 1 (05:02):
But I think it was this idea that you had
that the self is an illusion and that we need
to pay attention to the self to really understand human
cognition and human behavior. That really allowed you to have
a different take on kind of what was going wrong
when you think about happiness, because you've really argued that
the self really needs to kind of come into the
fore when we try to figure out how to become
happier and how to engage with our well being better.
(05:23):
What do you mean there?
Speaker 2 (05:24):
I think it's generally a true statement to say that
children are born very self centered. And this is something
that Page the great Swiss developmental Psychologist's achnology. He described
the world of the child as being egocentric. In other words,
they couldn't really conceive of an external reality and they
had to discover that through their interactions, and that also
includes discovering other people. So this is generally true in
(05:45):
the sense when you do research studies with very young children,
they do seem to have a very self centered view
of the world. They think other people think the same
things they do, see the world the same way exactly
as they do. And there's lots of these funny demonstrations.
I love the one about hide and seek. If you
play hide and seek with a preschooler, don't be surprised
if they run over to the corner of the room,
pick up the waste paper baskets, stick over their head,
(06:06):
and stand there because they think if they can't see you,
when you can't see them. So I think that's a
beautiful demonstration of kind of the self centered view of
the world. But in order to become a functioning, contributing
member of society, you've got to relinquish that self centeredness
and learn to become more cooperative and more social. Now
there are buds of this early in infancy, in early childhood,
(06:26):
and clearly children are sociable, but they still have a
very self centered view of the world. And I think
that's the default position. And like many aspects of development,
we change over time, but many of the residual things
stay with us, and I think that's the default mode
of thinking. We see everything from the first person's perspective,
from our own stream of consciousness, and whilst we can
understand that someone might have a different point of view,
(06:48):
it takes effort sometimes to think about that and consider
their perspective on things. Now, the reason that's important for
happiness is that if you are so self centered that
you can only see your own situation, well, first of all,
that lacks perspective, so there's a tendency to blow your
own problems out of proportion. And secondly, if you're very
self centered and somewhat self absorbed, then you're not really
(07:09):
are they going to be able to integrate with those
and share the social support that they can give you.
If somebody in their group is so self centered they
never contribute, you know, we're less inclined to help them
out in many ways. So I think we're doing ourselves
a disservice by focusing only on our own problems because
we're blowing them out of context and actually not really
engaging in a cooperative social interaction with those around us.
(07:30):
And also, when you start to see that other people
have problems in their lives which are insurmountable compared to ours,
it really helps to calibrate things. So I think happiness
is all about learning to become less ecocentric. We're never
going to abandon it, but just learning to kind of
become more connected with others around us.
Speaker 1 (07:49):
Once you realize that this path to self improvement requires
you to become less self centered, you'll be surprised how
quickly you can feel happier and more connected. It just
takes a little reframing. But more on that after the break.
(08:11):
If I had to pick one popular phrase that makes
my eyes roll, it's the phrase self care. Now, don't
get me wrong, I'm all for folks treating themselves with
kindness and compassion, but I do worry that combining the
words self and care often gets us turning inwards. Phrases
like self care seem to imply that a long spa
day will give you a bigger well being boost than
(08:31):
volunteering for a cause you care about. The happiness expert
Bruce Hood says, we have that vision of self care
all wrong.
Speaker 2 (08:38):
If we can recognize that we can be kind to ourselves,
and I've heard you use that phrase, it sort of
suggests that we can kind of reflect upon ourselves and
consider ourselves from a different perspective. That kind of self
care is fine. But if you're taking self care to
be a case of well, I must really only look
after myself and I must treat myself and have a
bit of retail therapy and really just focus on my
(08:59):
own immediate gratification, well that's misguided. That will produce obviously
some joy if you're buying yourself something or treating yourself
to something. That joy is short lived in comparison, because,
first of all, it's not a surprise because you've instigated it.
You've decided to spend money on yourself, so it's hardly
a surprise. Moreover, you're kind of fully aware when it
(09:20):
ceases to provide any sort of satisfaction, because well, you
know when you've had enough DV and you know when
something's dull and no longer interesting. But if you were
to turn all that effort and energy into enriching lives
of others around you, then you get a much better sustained,
authentic sense of happiness and joy, because first of all,
they're generally surprised and they're really delighted, and that's tangible.
And moreover, they can kind of reflect upon what a
(09:42):
good person you are, and you never really truly know
whether they like it or not, but you can bask
and reflect the glory that at least they feel very
grateful that you've done something for them. So I think
they both generate aspects of happiness, but one is very
short lived and the other, I think is more authentic
and sustained and enriches the lives of others, which ultimately
is what we should be doing.
Speaker 1 (10:01):
And I think this is something that we get wrong
so much. You know, we can think about happiness as
self care, but I think if we really wanted to
kind of give a definition to happiness that was more
accurate based on the data, we might instead be talking
about other care or being more alocentric. How do you
define being alocentric and walk me through some of the
ways that we can do that a little bit better.
Speaker 3 (10:20):
Well.
Speaker 2 (10:20):
Alicentric is simply taking stock and be mindful of other
people's perspectives. As I said, it's something that we have
to learn. We call it developing a theory of mind,
but that's really the capacity to understand that maybe someone
has a different opinion than yours, different beliefs and attitudes.
So I think that's the first thing to do if
you want to have a constructive interaction and conversation. The
(10:41):
first thing to do is to listen, which is something
that we tend not to do. So listening, I think
is one of the important things to sort of forge
that initial connection to other people. But when you start
to listen to other people's lives, you soon discover that
the things that preoccupied you are in no way as
bad as they generally seem when you.
Speaker 3 (10:59):
Start to hear other people's stories.
Speaker 2 (11:01):
And I think that's one of the reason podcasts are
so successful and why people want to hear stories. We
are a social animal, and this is how we evolved.
We're a narrative animal. We tell stories, and that's why
we like stories, because we relate them to our own lives.
And if you are so self centered that you generally
don't pay attention to what's going on around in other
people's lives, and I think you're missing out on a
really important component of psychology, as it were, So our
(11:23):
eccentrics can be sort of indirect, just kind of listening
to others, but then you can actually put the effort
into changing other people's lives. You can volunteer, you can donate,
you can help. You know, one of the surprising things
is that people feel awkward. And this is a well
known phenomenon that when offered the opportunity to engage other people,
most people shy away from that because they think it
(11:43):
will be a really negative experience. But all the data
is very clear is that it's an incredibly positive experience,
both for the person helping and the person being helped.
So again, this just demonstrates that our intuitions can sometimes
be you know, off center when it comes to what's
really good for us. So, yeah, you can actually practically
help other people out, and to do it in a
selfless way, which is not expecting reciprocity or something in return,
(12:06):
I think is really important because then it loses its genuiness.
It becomes obviously a transaction, which is there's not a
recipe for happiness. All of these things helping, donating, volunteering,
just paying attention and listening to other people are all
the sorts of things I'm talking about when I say
becoming more eccentric.
Speaker 1 (12:23):
Another thing you've talked about is just to become more
social in general. Explain some of the studies that show
just kind of being around other people and just connecting
with them generally can be good for our happiness.
Speaker 2 (12:33):
Well, there's a bunch of highlight in the book, and
some of these are kind of familiar, like you know,
obviously joining a club. Other ones are a little bit
more surprising. Choirs turned out to be incredibly strong, powerful
social situations where literally the sum exceeds that you know,
the component parts. Now, anyone who's ever sung in a musical,
sung in a choir will know that moment where there's
(12:55):
a perfect harmony between things. It just sounds magnificent, but
literally what's going on in the brain is quite remarkable.
There's a whole lot of synchronization going on between brain activations.
The emotional systems are coming into sync, and I think
that's a good exact ample where both the mind and
the brain are really kind of coming together in a
really wonderful experience. So that's one example of social interactions.
(13:16):
Anything done as a team is going to be a
situation where you really have to coordinate and pay attention
to what other people are doing. So again, I think
team sports are a good example, but also sharing spaces together,
and that's something that I know you've talked about on
your show, and a number of people commented on the
lack of the third places that were I think that's
a really important development which is disappearing, and that's partly
(13:40):
to do with the success of technology and social media,
which is stealing our opportunities to have real life interaction.
It seems like it's social, but in many ways it's
antisocial because we're not really having that sustained formative experience
with the people.
Speaker 1 (13:53):
And you've argue that that in real life social connection
can actually explain some of the differences we see across
countries when it comes to happiness. I'm thinking of things
like the Nordic country is doing really well. Oh yeah,
you know, maybe how much of that do we think
is actually kind of this sort of becoming a little
bit more aleccentric in order.
Speaker 2 (14:09):
Countries are a fascinating case, and they've really confounded and
really intrigued researchers for some decades now. Indeed, the whole
new political distribution of happiness is something of great interest.
But I'm coming down to the belief that Robert Putman
and the others economists are right that it comes down
to the issue of trust. I recently gave a talk
in Portugal and the Finnish ambassador was there, and that
(14:30):
time came out as the top country and I said, that,
isn't it amazing? And she said, well, people don't go
around with big smiles on their faces. It's not like
they're deliriously grinning all the time. And I said, but
they keep coming up tops on the happiness And it
really comes down to the fact that they feel secure,
they don't feel as competitive against each other. There's certain
unwritten rules about what is considered etiquette, not to show
(14:52):
off too much, not to brag too much, not to
try and draw attention to the differences of people, but
really to support each other. And of course they have
a very strong social support system for various members of society,
and they trust their politicians and they trust their authorities.
In the UK, we have a very poor li level
of trust. Certainly for the past sixteen years, it's been
very bad, and I think that's contributed to our kind
(15:13):
of low levels of happiness.
Speaker 1 (15:15):
And I think that that trust sort of gets built
up by the sort of usual interactions with people in
real life. So this kind of disconnect that we're seeing
in terms of our social fabric, in terms of some
of these third places that you're mentioning, that's probably why
we're not seeing the same trust levels that we saw before.
Speaker 2 (15:30):
Yes, and you know, during the various election campaigns and
during anything where there are these parties and positions, it
seems to fractionate. And that's one of the reasons that
they're often associated with levels of kind of being unhappy
and fearful and concerned, and we had that situation in
the UK with a vote about whether we should stay
in Europe, and it was one of the most divisive
campaigns I've ever seen. It really turned families against each other,
(15:53):
and it was really just because of the lack of
trust and lack of communication. And unfortunately, that's a mechanism
that many politicians use to you know, further their position,
and that's one of the unfortunate aspects of modern technologies
as well.
Speaker 1 (16:07):
So interesting is last year we had a few folks
political scientists on the show who are talking about kind
of what we can do to build up civics, and
they are arguing that one of the things you can
do as an individual to fight kind of authoritarian politics
is to actually just make friends, is to volunteer, is
to join a choir, because those simple actions allow you
to make the connections that build the trust that can
(16:27):
kind of fight against some of those authoritarian regimes.
Speaker 3 (16:30):
Yeah, but it is important not to join an echo chamber.
Speaker 2 (16:33):
I think technology these days allows us to create these
very siloed groups. I call them echo chambers for an
obvious reason, because you keep hearing the same message back
upon yourselves and that I don't think is healthy. Rather,
you need to have a broadened view, which is why
on Twitter I or EXOSUS now called I, actually make
a point of following different viewpoints just to see and
it's remarkable how different the opinions can be.
Speaker 3 (16:55):
So yeah, I think.
Speaker 2 (16:56):
Everything really about your own personal happiness comes down to
trying to see your connectedness to others. And another point,
and this gets into my hobbies, is really seeing yourself
in the big picture.
Speaker 3 (17:08):
And what I mean by that is the big picture in.
Speaker 2 (17:10):
Terms of how insignificant we really all are when it
comes to the size of the universe and how long
our lives last, but also appreciating the magnificent contributions of humanity,
the longevity of civilizations over durations of time that we
never really truly think about. And that's why one of
the recommendations I say is that people should definitely go
(17:30):
out look at the world around them and start ask
why questions, ask why is anything at what it is?
And when you approach life like that, you become more
mindful of it. But also you get a sense, a
profound sense of being connected to a species that have
been on this planet for a very long time.
Speaker 1 (17:47):
And I think that that gets to the idea that,
in addition to becoming a little bit more alocentric, this
idea that we need to connect with people, maybe do
nice things for other people and so on, we also
at the same time need to become a little bit
less ego centric. Right, we need to kind of squish
our own idea that we're sort of at the center
of the universe, and getting experiences of OWZ you've talked
about can be really important. But in the book you
(18:08):
talk about the other way that we can do this
kind of make ourselves seem maybe less significant, and that
can be through the practice of meditation. Yeah, how does
meditation sort of fight sort to some of these egocentric biases.
Speaker 2 (18:20):
Yeah, you would imagine that meditation would make you focus
on yourself, but actually it doesn't because most meditative processes
train you to control your attentional spotlights. So our attention
is a little bit like I use the metaphor of
a spotlight. You can shine it onto different information and
it seems more distinct and stronger, or you can direct
it elsewhere and something else will pop into your mind.
(18:41):
What meditations generally do is they take you out of
a floating sense of attention because when you're not focused
on a task, as you well know, Laurie, there's a
mode a network in the brain called the default mode network,
which is the default mode of thinking when you're not
task focused. Now, mind wandering is all very well, and
it happens a lot, and sometimes it's mind wandering into
pleasant things. But we know from various studies that when
(19:02):
you're not focused on a task and you're not thinking
about something pleasant, the tendency is to think about negative things.
Our brain evolved to solve problems, so it spends a
lot of its offline time running simulations of past encounters
and future possibilities, and very often it's in an attempt
to avoid any negative situation, which is why we focus
on negative information and negative news more so than anything positive.
(19:25):
What meditation does is it trains you to direct that
attentional spotlight away from the internal thought processes. And in
for example, mindfulness meditation, you're asked to concentrate on, for example,
physical sensations, or you're breathing, or you might recite a mantra.
All of these are strategies to divert your attention away
from the internal dialogue that you're having with yourself in
(19:47):
your mind. What's remarkable is that if you do that
over a long period of time, then you can soon
develop a habit of not defaulting to the default mode network,
as it were, and the activation in that network is
subdued in those who are very experienced at meditation. The
other thing about meditation is it trains you not to
put too much emphasis on particular thoughts. So I don't
(20:08):
know if you've every read that issue. When you've been
thinking about something, you say, I gotta stop thinking about it.
You know you're tossing and turning in bed at night,
I gotta stop thinking about the interview with Laurie Santle's.
Speaker 1 (20:16):
All the morning and a really terrible stressor.
Speaker 3 (20:19):
I'm sure stressor joo Chris.
Speaker 2 (20:23):
But the more you try to stop yourself doing it,
the more profound and important that thought becomes. This is
called ironic thought suppression. The reason that happens is because
in the effort of trying to stop a thought, you're
actually paradoxically making it stronger, and that's why it pops
into your head. So meditation teaches you not to ascribe
any intention or purpose or any weight to any thoughts.
(20:44):
In particular just to accept them, allow them to flow
in and flow out and thereby avoid the problem.
Speaker 3 (20:49):
Of ironic thought suppression. So there's a number of things
going on.
Speaker 2 (20:52):
It controls your breathing, so obviously you're moving from a
kind of more arouse stateing to one which is more placid.
And all these things I think are conducive to more
positive thinking.
Speaker 1 (21:02):
And forgetting yourself kind of outside your own thoughts. It
sounds like mean, so.
Speaker 2 (21:06):
Yeah, yeah, absolutely, So that's another aspect. I mean, many
of these not just meditation, but flow. Of course, I
know a lot of your listeners will have heard about
Mahali Chick sent me.
Speaker 3 (21:16):
High is the.
Speaker 2 (21:17):
Point where you are you're working on a task which
is just enough taxing to your ability, so you feel
that sort of compression of time. You don't notice things,
and you lose your sense of self. So again flow moments,
and if you're wealthy enough to go out into space
on a spacecraft and look back at the Earth from
the universe, these overview effects, they all have a form
(21:39):
of ego dissolution, this sort of sense of loss of self,
and I describe that exactly as a mechanism talking about
becoming less self focused.
Speaker 1 (21:47):
You've also talked about yet another way that we can
become a little bit less self focused, maybe have some
ego dissolution, and this one may be a little bit
more controversial. You've argued that this might be a benefit
that we can get from psychedelics, having psychedelic experiences explain
how psychedelics can kind of make us a little bit
less egocentric.
Speaker 2 (22:04):
Okay, Well, I first caveat by saying, I'm not advocating
that everyone should take psychedelics, and I would only recommend
this from the clinical evidence of those individuals who have
intractable depression, because the evidence, in my opinion, is quite
clear that this is really a potential game changer. These
are people who have not responded to either the psychopharmacology
or intensive clinical practice. In these situations, there is not
(22:28):
enough studies, but the sizes that have been done show
that they can experience a profound shift in their sense
of self and that also produces benefits to depressive symptompology. Now,
the reason that happens, there's a number of reasons for us.
All psychedelics operate on the serotonin system, which is the
system which is part.
Speaker 3 (22:48):
Of the default mode network.
Speaker 2 (22:49):
So my hunch is that what's going is you're altering
this automatic fixation on the sense of self. Certainly, anyone
who has taken psychedelics, and I have certainly done with
so myself, will attest that there is a complete distortion
of reality. You do feel that you are no longer
that kind of ego person, and there's a strange, profound
sense of connect in this with the cosmos.
Speaker 3 (23:10):
The important point.
Speaker 2 (23:11):
Is after that psychedelic experience or trip has disappeared, months afterwards,
people have still seeing the benefits of that early experience.
So I'm not suggesting that this should be an ongoing
course of treatment for people, but for some it does seem.
Speaker 3 (23:24):
To have a long and lasting effect.
Speaker 2 (23:27):
So the other thing I would just finally say is
that anyone considering that really does need to seek out
advice on this, because there are certain personality characteristics who
should not be dabbling with something like a psychedelic because
in that situation you can get ego dissolution, but in
a very negative way. This is when you can experience
depersonalization where you don't feel anything is ever going to
(23:47):
be real again, and that I think is an equally
disturbing mindset, so yes, they're controversial, but more and more
research has been conducted, and even in the UK, we
are starting to relinquish some of our concerns of it.
Speaker 3 (24:01):
I foresee it being away of the future, but we.
Speaker 1 (24:03):
Don't necessarily need to go to drugs to get these
sort of moments of ego dissolution. You alluded to your
hobby a little bit earlier, you didn't actually say what
it was, and I think that this is actually not
the psychedelic hobby, other kinds of hobbies.
Speaker 2 (24:17):
Yeah, you have an international audience, so I'm sure some
people will have watched the BBC show The Detectorists, and
if they have an opportunity to watch it, I strongly
recommend it. It's very empowering view of a very peculiar
hobby typically conducted by very strange individuals. We call them nerds,
but basically it's metal detecting. I live in a country
(24:39):
which has had thousands of years of continuous occupation in history.
I'm very fortunate to be living in the countryside and
around me I'm surrounded by fields which were occupied by
Romans and Celts and all the sorts of history that
Hollywood brings to the screen. I actually live in the
lands where that happened, and so I go out with
my metal detector and I spend hours just scanning the fields.
(25:00):
It's a little bit like fishing on land. I call
it listening for that signal. And you dig a lot
of holes and there's a lot of junk, but every
so often you find something which is quite remarkable and precious.
Precious in the sense rare, not necessary. Sometimes it is precious. Actually,
sometimes people find gold and silver and all these things.
But in the book, I talk about a particular episode,
(25:20):
which could coincidentally was on my birthday, and this is
a true story. I was digging in a field and
I've uncovered a coin from the second century of Marcus Rulius.
Now I'm a big fan of the Stoic philosophers, who
teach that you can't really change life, but you can
change the way you think about life to get things
into a perspective. So I dug out this coin. It's
(25:41):
nearly eighteen hundred years old, and it's got Marcus Aurelius.
I recognize his portrait immediately, and I thought, isn't that amazing?
Speaker 3 (25:47):
You know?
Speaker 2 (25:48):
And who dropped this coin was a Roman centurion who
was that person? So that goes back to what I
was saying earlier on kind of making that feeling of
connectedness with humanity over the centuries. And you know, what
would they make of us in two thousand years from now?
You know, people going around with sticks trying to find
coins under the ground.
Speaker 3 (26:06):
What are coins?
Speaker 1 (26:06):
I mean, it strikes you I love this story, and
it strikes me that it showing a couple of different
features that are relevant for happiness.
Speaker 3 (26:12):
Right.
Speaker 1 (26:12):
One is this idea of connectedness. Right, You're connecting not
just to Marcus Aurelius and these old ideas, but these
people that walked on your land outside your barn thousands
of years ago. It also seems though that like you
get a tremendous amount of flow from walking around listening
to these beaps. Is that really like? Is it kind
of like like your own walking meditation?
Speaker 3 (26:31):
Is it is like walking meditation?
Speaker 2 (26:33):
So and you know, if I suddenly have a trade
of thought, it will soon be interrupted immediately by a
signal going off, So you are constantly you can't spend
your time, you know, contemplating your own problems. So it's,
as I say, it's a little bit like fishing on
land fishermen also experienced the same thing, and there is
a study out Denmark, and so there's only one study,
but I've shown that metal detectorists experience much elevated levels
(26:55):
of happiness and it's really good for PDST as well.
So it seems to be a hobby which is absorbing
and it achieves that flow. And certainly I have been
out for literally six hours and forgotten that time has
passed and I get a call saying a better I'm home.
So yeah, it's one of those things I really enjoy.
Writing is the other thing I really enjoy as well,
and that's actually one of my recommended activities for people
(27:17):
who have the ability to write.
Speaker 3 (27:18):
I think it's really important to do.
Speaker 1 (27:20):
As Bruce says, writing can be a flow boosting activity.
I often lose myself when I'm working on one of
these podcast scripts or digging into an academic paper. But
if writing is it something that comes naturally to you,
there is one form of composition that you really ought
to try out. I'll let you and on that tip
for getting over yourself after the break, This Knew How
(27:46):
two season of the Happiness Lab is all about condensing
the wisdom my guests provide into a series of practical
bite sized tips. So what are some practical bite sized
strategies for how to get over yourself? Professor Bruce Hood's
first tip is to start a journal.
Speaker 2 (28:00):
I teach a course based on your course called The
Size of Happiness, and the course is unique in that
there's no graded examination, but they have to engage with
the course. So one of the requirements is they first
of all, they have to come to my lectures, and
they have to come to the seminars, but they also
have to keep a journal over the ten week period.
And the reason I ask them to do that is
because keeping a diary or writing a journal is a
(28:22):
very powerful way to take stock of situations and to
process them much more effectively rather than trying to deal
with something inside your head. I recommend that you buy
literally one of those old paper and pencil ones and
get a pen and do it by hand. Don't do
it on your phone because that's just not the same
level of processing. And what you do is when you
keep a journal, write down whatever is in your mind
(28:43):
and what's concerning you and if it's a problem, articulating
in as much detail as possible, how it makes you feel,
and so on, And in doing that that actually helps
to process it. If it's a bad event, writing it
down makes it much more objective, so I think is
a really good way of dealing with it. Moreover, you
now have a record of an event. And what I
find very valuable is asking people to go back and
look at their old diaries and their old journals, and
(29:06):
you soon discover that the things that the time, which
the most paramount possible situations that you thought you'd never
get over, suddenly you realize, actually, I got over that,
and things move on. So it's really a tangible evidence
that life does move on and get better.
Speaker 1 (29:21):
I love that last point, especially because I too have
had these sort of moments where I'm dealing with something
that feels intractable and then my brain will just suddenly
go to like, oh wait, there was a thing that
was intractable like two weeks ago that you felt like
you couldn't do it, and like just remembering that can
give you some grace to remember, hey, the perspective is
bigger than you, Like, you've been through this before, right,
And so I think that's super powerful. Any great insights
(29:42):
that you've gotten from your students, like when they've done
their journals or kind of good stories from them.
Speaker 2 (29:47):
Well, we also keep track of the journals just as
a pure precaution for anyone who might be experiencing some
trauma or some issues. So we also use it as
a way of preventive you know, because these students are
first year students. They are often arriving and they're kind
of anxious and they don't know what they're doing. So
we monitor their journals to see if there's any evidence
that maybe we should be stepping in and offering a
(30:08):
helping hand. Don't read the journals, It's done by one
of our clinical people, but that means that they don't
reach a crisis point.
Speaker 3 (30:14):
As to insights.
Speaker 2 (30:15):
Yeah, I mean I still get emails from students who
graduated some years after the course and they tell me
they're still keeping the journal.
Speaker 3 (30:21):
It's not for everyone. It requires effort.
Speaker 2 (30:23):
But again, a lot of the benefits of psychology are
all about creating routines and creating structure. It's when you
don't feel there's a structures, when you feel you're spiraling
out control, that I think things seem worse than they
really are. So journals by their nature and committing to
doing on a regular basis provide a structure which is valuable.
I mean, I've certainly discovered things in my journals from
(30:44):
decades ago which just I don't even seem to be
the same person. But that goes back to what we
were talking about earlier on. Everyone can remember they were different.
It doesn't manage they're going to change in the future,
but of course we're constantly changing.
Speaker 1 (30:55):
So strategy number two for getting things into perspective is
that we need to find a little bit of gratitude. Yeah,
how can gratitude get us to be less ecocentric and
more alcentric?
Speaker 2 (31:05):
Well, gratitude Sisera, or the Roman essayist, discs right gratitude
is the father of all virtues, and what he meant
was that the act of showing gratitude in genders so
many positive aspects. First of all, it gets you to
recognize that your situation is not necessarily as bad as
other people's situations, so you're forced to focus on what's
going well. So you're drawing the relative comparisons in the
(31:28):
right direction, looking at other people who are not as
fortunate as you. It's all too easy these days to
compare ourselves upwards. Because of the way social media works,
we see all these highly successful people with these unbelievable lives.
Anyone would feel inadequate by comparison. But when you express gratitude,
you are acknowledging that you are in a good place
and a good situation generally, and very often that gratitude
(31:50):
involves other people as well. So again it's forging a
less ecocentric view and recognizing that you're in your situation
today because other people have helped you out. I know
Marty Cieligmann has the gratitude letter, and that's a very
profound exercise. That's where you write a letter and you
thank someone specifically and delivered to them.
Speaker 3 (32:08):
I haven't done that yet.
Speaker 2 (32:09):
I think that's quite challenging, but I certainly in my
emails as much as possible, I try.
Speaker 3 (32:14):
To express my gratitude towards other people.
Speaker 2 (32:16):
So it allows you to get perspective, and it allows
you to acknowledge way others have helped you, and in
turn that forges I think, more positive bonds.
Speaker 1 (32:25):
So that's tip number two. Now we're turning to tip
number three that can help us get perspective, and this
one is like literally getting perspective. It's trying to find
ways to in yourself talk, engage in more perspectives so
you can coach yourself through a crisis. What are some
practical ways we could do this?
Speaker 2 (32:41):
So this is my party trick that I do during
one of my talks, where I get people to imagine
a situation, a real situation, a dilemma for them which
is upsetting them, and it has to be a personal thing,
not a world problem.
Speaker 3 (32:54):
And I get them to talk about it in the.
Speaker 2 (32:55):
First person, saying I am worried about whatever it is
and this upsets me. And then I get them to
imagine a scale of zero to ten and where they
think they score in that. And then I repeat the
process and I say, Okay, I want you to talk
about this problem, but use the third person, use your name,
I use pronouns like he, him, she, her, and talk
about as if you were talking to yourself like a friend.
(33:18):
Do exactly the same thing, and again, how does that
make you feel on the zero to ten scale? And
invariably you find almost over ninety percent people find that
the process of talking about yourself and the third person
attenuates those negative feelings. But it's all the idea that
if you can step out of yourself why using language,
then you can get a more objective viewpoint. Because we
never talk about ourselves in the first person, not unless
(33:40):
we're royalty in this country if one does.
Speaker 3 (33:42):
Not say that normally.
Speaker 2 (33:44):
But when you use language, it forces you to take
a third person perspective. It's as if you are looking
back at yourself, and that seems to attenuate negative responses.
It can also be used to strengthen positive ones. You
can say, hey, Bruce, that interview you gave with Laurie's amazing.
You know, you're doing really well, So you can use
it both ways to bolster or attenuate the experiences.
Speaker 1 (34:06):
I love this tip because it's literally using language to
be less ecocentric. We're literally kind of making ourselves like
a different person and using that to kind of gain
the perspective that matters. And of course we've had Ethn
on the show.
Speaker 2 (34:19):
A bunch and you know, Yeah, although I would suggest
you don't talk about yourself in the third person all
the time because then people look weird.
Speaker 1 (34:26):
Yeah, it's either like royalty or like macho man, Randy
Savage or something very strange. So that was to number three,
we can kind of reframe our perspective by using our language,
switching to third person language. Tip number four is that
we need to reframe setbacks with a more positive attributional style.
Speaker 2 (34:46):
What do you mean there, Yes, So this comes again
from the workingmodi Seeligman and his colleagues when they were
looking at the way that optimists differ from pessimists, and
they realized that there was a characteristic attributional style which
tended to treat problems as permanent, pervasive in other words,
generalizing to other situations and personal feeling responsible for your
(35:08):
set whereas optimists tend to not think about these things
as being permanent the transitory, and they're not pervasive, they're
specific to a situation, and then not taking personal responsibility
saying it wasn't my fault.
Speaker 3 (35:19):
Really.
Speaker 2 (35:20):
Now, I'm not suggesting you should be overly optimistic. I
think it's important to pay attention to when you are
responsible for things. But you can think about your problems
by reframing them towards a more optimistic view by adopting
the more positive attributional style. So, again going back to
the journaling situation, if you've had a situation or an
event which is upset you, you should detail it in
(35:40):
as much detail evidence as possible, and then you know,
examine your beliefs in what you think is going to happen,
and then switch gear and then challenge each point that
you've made by becoming almost like a barrister or a
lawyer or a defense lawyer, saying, Bruce, you know, you
thought that was a terrible interview you gave for Laurie,
but actually she was smiling, and actually you made some
really good points and she didn't notice that you stumbled
(36:02):
over a few words. You know, you're not so bad,
So you basically just become this kind of cheerleader for yourself.
Doing so over time you eventually start to become a
little bit more optimistic when these things occur.
Speaker 1 (36:14):
This is a fabulous It is a suggestion in part
because I think rather than being our own defense lawyer,
as we often spend a lot of time being our
own prosecutory right looking for the evidence that we kind
of screwed up, and so kind of taking that tactic
and sort of flipping it on its head and actively
going for a more positive attributional style, actively going sorry
to look for the spots where we did better. Yeah,
it can kind of help.
Speaker 2 (36:35):
The thing, The amazing thing is that if you put
enough effort, any little creative, you can take any really
bad setback and reframe it in a much more For
every cloud has a silver lining, literally, so that's what
you do.
Speaker 3 (36:45):
You kind of ignore the cloud and you go for
the silver lining and then you focus on that.
Speaker 1 (36:48):
Okay, so that was tip number four, So switch our
attributional style. Now we get to your final tip, which
I totally thought was going to be metal detecting. Metal
detecting all day, all the time, but in fact it's
to find other structural ways to connect to with others.
What are some ideas that you think people can put
into practice here?
Speaker 2 (37:06):
Well, I suspect a law of listeners or maybe we
are you doing this, But something I took up just
very recently is I joined supporters club for Bath rugby team.
Now I live in Bath in England, and they're actually
a really good rugby team. They are enjoying quite a
successful period at the moment. So you don't have to
join a successful team. I think any local team is good.
And I've been an academic for all of my adult
(37:28):
life and I generally have not taken part in these
sorts of activities because I was stuck in my books
and I didn't go to matches and things like that.
But there's something very automatic and profound when you are
in a crowd that erupts in applause and emotions. Is
very contagious, and you suddenly feel like you're part of
something a bit bigger than yourself. So any activity which
(37:51):
is kind of hopefully arrange around something positive, like sports
or something like that, I think is a very simple
way to enjoy the connection and feeling of purpose that
everything which is against the loneliness thing, which I think
is obviously the big problem of our current era. Getting
off your phones, going out and physically being present an
(38:13):
event or rally or a game. These are the sorts
of things which can create automatic feelings of alecentrism and connection.
Speaker 1 (38:21):
Well that's strategy too, because often for many of the
kinds of things that we're fans of or that we enjoy,
we're engaging with them anyway, we're just not doing it
in a social way. And you know here in the US,
you know a fan of the Celtics basketball team, you
can just like sit at your house and watch the
Celtics game, or you could join a group that's doing
that kind of connect with friends to do that better.
And it's like, in some ways it's not adding more
(38:42):
to our time, right, Sometimes we're kind of you might
be watching those rugby things anyway. It's just like if
you join a supporters club or join something where you're
connecting with other people. Now all of a sudden, you're
doing it in a way that's getting you social. You're
part of something much bigger than yourselves. It's not it's
doing the same thing you're already going to do. I'm
doing it a little bit more social. Well.
Speaker 2 (39:00):
Emily Parmen to some wonderful stuff years ago showing that
when people think they're watching a recorded match as to
when they think they're watching it live, I have a
totally different experience. Of course, perception is exactly the same thing,
but there's something about feeling that you are in the
moment live that that generates a completely different psychologically experience.
(39:22):
And that's why when you go to a live match
or you go to a live concert, even though the
sound may not be that good and you might not
get the best view, there's something about being immersed in
that environment, which is really something that cannot be captured
by VR or any technology that goes back to our
origins as a social animal that grew up really interacting.
Speaker 1 (39:44):
And just to say, if you're not really that into sports,
of course, there are other ways you can do this
kind of thing too. We talk to concerts, choirs, even
book clubs for the nerdy academics like us who like
we can kind of do not enjoy books privately, but
kind of get together and do that.
Speaker 3 (39:57):
Well, I think, going how are your comfort zone?
Speaker 2 (39:59):
We tend to migrate to those areas and we don't
challenge ourselves. I never used to imagine myself at a
rugby match, but now, you know, I look forward to it,
and so I think that life is full of opportunities
and new experiences to try and just give it a go.
Speaker 1 (40:13):
So one of my favorite things about these five tips
and just your work in general, is that you really
have put these tips into effect in your life. For
so many of these tips, you said, well, I journal,
you know, I go to these rugby matches. Now I
now talk to myself, you know, I'm the third person.
How do you think this has changed your own psychology?
Has all this made you happier? Has it caused you
to get perspective?
Speaker 2 (40:31):
I've been that'ked that a number of times, and it's
very difficult to be objective about your mental state because
you are the preveyor of your own mind. But I've
asked people around me and they say, Hi, I've definitely
changed from what I was six years ago. I'm more
engaged now. I'm more committed now to my students. I'm
coming to the final years at my time at Bristol University,
but I want to use that time really to try
(40:51):
and change the educational experience of my students. I feel
that the new generations are so preoccupied by themselves. They're
so worried about performance, they're not enjoying it. If you're
a student who doesn't enjoy what you're studying, then you're
never going to learn anything. And so I am trying
to get the universities and the systems to wrecktognize the
importance of having content, happier, resilient students, because then they're
(41:15):
much easier to teach, they're more inspirational, they're just generally
having a better time and that impacts on the faculty
as much as the students, so I think we really
need to embed this in society. This is true also
of workforces. Happier workforces are more productive and so on.
So I think we've got to kind of really make
this a cultural change and find ways to make it recognized,
not as a kind of a last minute thought, but
(41:36):
something which is central to the way that we can
mark our lives as usual.
Speaker 1 (41:40):
I agree with Bruce on this one. I'd also love
for the lessons of positive psychology to become more embedded
in our daily lives. Happiness should be just as much
a part of college life as say, test scores, and
just as important to bosses as quarterly reports. But what
are some steps we can all take to become a
bit more allocentric. Let's recap Bruce's main points. Tip number
(42:01):
one keep a journal. Old fashioned pen and paper is best,
but however you get your thoughts down, try to be
as detailed as possible. Tip number two. More grateful. Think
about all the great things in your life, and remember
to thank the people who've helped you along the way.
Tip number three alter yourself. Talk to get some distance,
discuss your worries and triumphs in the third person. Lauri's
(42:22):
feeling underprepared to give this talk. Well done, Laurie, that
talk went great. Tip number four is to become more optimistic.
Remember that most of your problems aren't permanent, and even
if you messed up once, it doesn't mean you'll mess
up again. And Bruce's final tip for becoming less self
centered get your club on, join a choir, attend a concert,
stand in the bleachers at a football game, or wherever
(42:45):
they sit during those British rugby matches. Putting our problems
in perspective is a major part of getting over ourselves.
But I know firsthand that putting big feelings aside can
sometimes feel really tough. So that's the how to topic
we'll tackle in the next episode. How can we hack
our negative emotions? All that? Next time on the Happiness
Lab with meet doctor Lauriy Santos
Pushkin. If you're hoping to make big changes to your
life in twenty twenty five, you're probably viewing those goals
through a lens that's very much focused on yourself. I
want to achieve this, or I want to become like that.
The whole idea of self improvement involves centering ourselves, putting
(00:36):
our own hopes and worries in the spotlight. But if
you're feeling this self improvement bug in the new year,
you may need to get over yourself. And I mean
that in the nicest way possible, because the science shows
that checking your ego may be a faster path to
happiness than you think. But how can you get over yourself?
And what are some strategies for taking yourself out of
the spotlight? Today we'll get some tips from Bruce Hood.
(01:00):
Bruce is a professor at the University of Bristol in
England and the author of the Science of Happiness, Seven
Lessons for Living Well Like Me. Bruce turned to happiness
science after seeing the mental health crisis that his students
were going through. But Bruce and I share a bond
that goes beyond our shared study of well being.
Speaker 2 (01:16):
You know I've reached twenty five years at Bristol University here,
and I've just been applying for teaching fellowship where they
asked you to reflect upon your career and how you
felt you've made an impact. I always say I talk
about this new, recent kind of change into the work
on happiness, and I attributed that to you, Laurie, and
I make a big point of saying that this is
an interesting situation where the student is now mentoring the
(01:38):
tutor because we met when I was visiting MIT and
you were coming from Harvard as this kind of fiery
young undergraduate working in comparative psychology at the time, and
then I applied for a job at Harvard. It ended
up being one of the professors there. And I don't
know if you remember this, Laurie, but you were an
undergraduate at the time, but I let you take my
graduate course. And the reason I did is I told
(01:59):
people later on it Laurie had a much better way
of explaining difficult concepts than I did. But six years
ago is when things really changed, I think is when
that was a terrible time. I'm at Bristol University. It
was twenty eighteen and we had a spate of tragic suicides,
and I realized that we needed to do something to
help these students. And I looked around, and by coincidence,
you have put on this amazing course at Yale Psychology
(02:21):
in the Good Life.
Speaker 3 (02:22):
And so I.
Speaker 2 (02:22):
Contacted you, and in your typical generous and selfless way,
you shared all your notes and I put together my
version of the course, but with my perspective on it,
and I called the Science of Happiness. And I've never
looked back ever since then. It's like your course has
become very impactful, influential.
Speaker 3 (02:39):
I'm really really loved by the students.
Speaker 2 (02:42):
So I've now kind of dedicated my remaining time to
trying to become an advocate and promote a change in
higher education, actually not just the general public, but trying
to change the way we.
Speaker 3 (02:53):
Educate students, because you know, I think there's a lot
to be done for them.
Speaker 1 (02:57):
So funny that you bring up that graduate class that
I took with you, because I do I definitely remember that.
Not only do you remember that, but I was cleaning
out my Yale office recently and I still had the
binder of all the readings that we did for that
course that was still in my office. You know, twenty seven,
twenty eight years later. So good lord, I definitely remember.
Speaker 2 (03:16):
It and made a big im and we published a
lot of papers together as well. We did some really
cool work, really fondly remembered.
Speaker 1 (03:22):
And so thanks to my next question, because you and
I both share this kind of strange career path where
we were studying something else and got interested in happiness.
And one of the things that I recall you studying,
and you've been wrote one of your early books about
was this idea of the self. What got you interested
in the idea of the self and kind of why
is it so important?
Speaker 2 (03:40):
Yeah, So in one of my first books, I wrote
about the way that we as adults have these misconceptions
that really emerge early in childhood, and I had to
throw away statement in this first book about their being
no self, and an editor picked up on this, So
what do you mean by that? And it never occurred
to me that this was an issue in question because
I'd been trained in your physiology and the whole neuroscience
(04:04):
for approach and cognitive science, where we talked constantly about
there being subsystems and generated experiences. So this self is
a constructed notion in your science and that's something that
no one really argues there's a little you inside your
head as such. Rather, it's the story that our brain
weaves that pulls together all the various components which make
up our experience. And so that got me thinking that
(04:26):
maybe a book about the self illusion would be valuable.
I really had trouble convincing people that this was going
to be a worthwhile book, but it's been one of
those slow burners which has done really really well over
the years. It's actually my most successful book, and I
think it's because it just gets you to kind of
think differently about our common day experience because we never
question ourselves. We feel we're the same person from day
to day, but of course we're constantly changing, and that's
(04:48):
something I know you've mentioned in your podcast. But the
reality is, yeah, where you were rewriting ourselves every day
and you which is slightly worrying, but also I think deliberating,
because it means you can change and you can become
a different person if you recognize that you're not cast
in stone.
Speaker 1 (05:02):
But I think it was this idea that you had
that the self is an illusion and that we need
to pay attention to the self to really understand human
cognition and human behavior. That really allowed you to have
a different take on kind of what was going wrong
when you think about happiness, because you've really argued that
the self really needs to kind of come into the
fore when we try to figure out how to become
happier and how to engage with our well being better.
(05:23):
What do you mean there?
Speaker 2 (05:24):
I think it's generally a true statement to say that
children are born very self centered. And this is something
that Page the great Swiss developmental Psychologist's achnology. He described
the world of the child as being egocentric. In other words,
they couldn't really conceive of an external reality and they
had to discover that through their interactions, and that also
includes discovering other people. So this is generally true in
(05:45):
the sense when you do research studies with very young children,
they do seem to have a very self centered view
of the world. They think other people think the same
things they do, see the world the same way exactly
as they do. And there's lots of these funny demonstrations.
I love the one about hide and seek. If you
play hide and seek with a preschooler, don't be surprised
if they run over to the corner of the room,
pick up the waste paper baskets, stick over their head,
(06:06):
and stand there because they think if they can't see you,
when you can't see them. So I think that's a
beautiful demonstration of kind of the self centered view of
the world. But in order to become a functioning, contributing
member of society, you've got to relinquish that self centeredness
and learn to become more cooperative and more social. Now
there are buds of this early in infancy, in early childhood,
(06:26):
and clearly children are sociable, but they still have a
very self centered view of the world. And I think
that's the default position. And like many aspects of development,
we change over time, but many of the residual things
stay with us, and I think that's the default mode
of thinking. We see everything from the first person's perspective,
from our own stream of consciousness, and whilst we can
understand that someone might have a different point of view,
(06:48):
it takes effort sometimes to think about that and consider
their perspective on things. Now, the reason that's important for
happiness is that if you are so self centered that
you can only see your own situation, well, first of all,
that lacks perspective, so there's a tendency to blow your
own problems out of proportion. And secondly, if you're very
self centered and somewhat self absorbed, then you're not really
(07:09):
are they going to be able to integrate with those
and share the social support that they can give you.
If somebody in their group is so self centered they
never contribute, you know, we're less inclined to help them
out in many ways. So I think we're doing ourselves
a disservice by focusing only on our own problems because
we're blowing them out of context and actually not really
engaging in a cooperative social interaction with those around us.
(07:30):
And also, when you start to see that other people
have problems in their lives which are insurmountable compared to ours,
it really helps to calibrate things. So I think happiness
is all about learning to become less ecocentric. We're never
going to abandon it, but just learning to kind of
become more connected with others around us.
Speaker 1 (07:49):
Once you realize that this path to self improvement requires
you to become less self centered, you'll be surprised how
quickly you can feel happier and more connected. It just
takes a little reframing. But more on that after the break.
(08:11):
If I had to pick one popular phrase that makes
my eyes roll, it's the phrase self care. Now, don't
get me wrong, I'm all for folks treating themselves with
kindness and compassion, but I do worry that combining the
words self and care often gets us turning inwards. Phrases
like self care seem to imply that a long spa
day will give you a bigger well being boost than
(08:31):
volunteering for a cause you care about. The happiness expert
Bruce Hood says, we have that vision of self care
all wrong.
Speaker 2 (08:38):
If we can recognize that we can be kind to ourselves,
and I've heard you use that phrase, it sort of
suggests that we can kind of reflect upon ourselves and
consider ourselves from a different perspective. That kind of self
care is fine. But if you're taking self care to
be a case of well, I must really only look
after myself and I must treat myself and have a
bit of retail therapy and really just focus on my
(08:59):
own immediate gratification, well that's misguided. That will produce obviously
some joy if you're buying yourself something or treating yourself
to something. That joy is short lived in comparison, because,
first of all, it's not a surprise because you've instigated it.
You've decided to spend money on yourself, so it's hardly
a surprise. Moreover, you're kind of fully aware when it
(09:20):
ceases to provide any sort of satisfaction, because well, you
know when you've had enough DV and you know when
something's dull and no longer interesting. But if you were
to turn all that effort and energy into enriching lives
of others around you, then you get a much better sustained,
authentic sense of happiness and joy, because first of all,
they're generally surprised and they're really delighted, and that's tangible.
And moreover, they can kind of reflect upon what a
(09:42):
good person you are, and you never really truly know
whether they like it or not, but you can bask
and reflect the glory that at least they feel very
grateful that you've done something for them. So I think
they both generate aspects of happiness, but one is very
short lived and the other, I think is more authentic
and sustained and enriches the lives of others, which ultimately
is what we should be doing.
Speaker 1 (10:01):
And I think this is something that we get wrong
so much. You know, we can think about happiness as
self care, but I think if we really wanted to
kind of give a definition to happiness that was more
accurate based on the data, we might instead be talking
about other care or being more alocentric. How do you
define being alocentric and walk me through some of the
ways that we can do that a little bit better.
Speaker 3 (10:20):
Well.
Speaker 2 (10:20):
Alicentric is simply taking stock and be mindful of other
people's perspectives. As I said, it's something that we have
to learn. We call it developing a theory of mind,
but that's really the capacity to understand that maybe someone
has a different opinion than yours, different beliefs and attitudes.
So I think that's the first thing to do if
you want to have a constructive interaction and conversation. The
(10:41):
first thing to do is to listen, which is something
that we tend not to do. So listening, I think
is one of the important things to sort of forge
that initial connection to other people. But when you start
to listen to other people's lives, you soon discover that
the things that preoccupied you are in no way as
bad as they generally seem when you.
Speaker 3 (10:59):
Start to hear other people's stories.
Speaker 2 (11:01):
And I think that's one of the reason podcasts are
so successful and why people want to hear stories. We
are a social animal, and this is how we evolved.
We're a narrative animal. We tell stories, and that's why
we like stories, because we relate them to our own lives.
And if you are so self centered that you generally
don't pay attention to what's going on around in other
people's lives, and I think you're missing out on a
really important component of psychology, as it were, So our
(11:23):
eccentrics can be sort of indirect, just kind of listening
to others, but then you can actually put the effort
into changing other people's lives. You can volunteer, you can donate,
you can help. You know, one of the surprising things
is that people feel awkward. And this is a well
known phenomenon that when offered the opportunity to engage other people,
most people shy away from that because they think it
(11:43):
will be a really negative experience. But all the data
is very clear is that it's an incredibly positive experience,
both for the person helping and the person being helped.
So again, this just demonstrates that our intuitions can sometimes
be you know, off center when it comes to what's
really good for us. So, yeah, you can actually practically
help other people out, and to do it in a
selfless way, which is not expecting reciprocity or something in return,
(12:06):
I think is really important because then it loses its genuiness.
It becomes obviously a transaction, which is there's not a
recipe for happiness. All of these things helping, donating, volunteering,
just paying attention and listening to other people are all
the sorts of things I'm talking about when I say
becoming more eccentric.
Speaker 1 (12:23):
Another thing you've talked about is just to become more
social in general. Explain some of the studies that show
just kind of being around other people and just connecting
with them generally can be good for our happiness.
Speaker 2 (12:33):
Well, there's a bunch of highlight in the book, and
some of these are kind of familiar, like you know,
obviously joining a club. Other ones are a little bit
more surprising. Choirs turned out to be incredibly strong, powerful
social situations where literally the sum exceeds that you know,
the component parts. Now, anyone who's ever sung in a musical,
sung in a choir will know that moment where there's
(12:55):
a perfect harmony between things. It just sounds magnificent, but
literally what's going on in the brain is quite remarkable.
There's a whole lot of synchronization going on between brain activations.
The emotional systems are coming into sync, and I think
that's a good exact ample where both the mind and
the brain are really kind of coming together in a
really wonderful experience. So that's one example of social interactions.
(13:16):
Anything done as a team is going to be a
situation where you really have to coordinate and pay attention
to what other people are doing. So again, I think
team sports are a good example, but also sharing spaces together,
and that's something that I know you've talked about on
your show, and a number of people commented on the
lack of the third places that were I think that's
a really important development which is disappearing, and that's partly
(13:40):
to do with the success of technology and social media,
which is stealing our opportunities to have real life interaction.
It seems like it's social, but in many ways it's
antisocial because we're not really having that sustained formative experience
with the people.
Speaker 1 (13:53):
And you've argue that that in real life social connection
can actually explain some of the differences we see across
countries when it comes to happiness. I'm thinking of things
like the Nordic country is doing really well. Oh yeah,
you know, maybe how much of that do we think
is actually kind of this sort of becoming a little
bit more aleccentric in order.
Speaker 2 (14:09):
Countries are a fascinating case, and they've really confounded and
really intrigued researchers for some decades now. Indeed, the whole
new political distribution of happiness is something of great interest.
But I'm coming down to the belief that Robert Putman
and the others economists are right that it comes down
to the issue of trust. I recently gave a talk
in Portugal and the Finnish ambassador was there, and that
(14:30):
time came out as the top country and I said, that,
isn't it amazing? And she said, well, people don't go
around with big smiles on their faces. It's not like
they're deliriously grinning all the time. And I said, but
they keep coming up tops on the happiness And it
really comes down to the fact that they feel secure,
they don't feel as competitive against each other. There's certain
unwritten rules about what is considered etiquette, not to show
(14:52):
off too much, not to brag too much, not to
try and draw attention to the differences of people, but
really to support each other. And of course they have
a very strong social support system for various members of society,
and they trust their politicians and they trust their authorities.
In the UK, we have a very poor li level
of trust. Certainly for the past sixteen years, it's been
very bad, and I think that's contributed to our kind
(15:13):
of low levels of happiness.
Speaker 1 (15:15):
And I think that that trust sort of gets built
up by the sort of usual interactions with people in
real life. So this kind of disconnect that we're seeing
in terms of our social fabric, in terms of some
of these third places that you're mentioning, that's probably why
we're not seeing the same trust levels that we saw before.
Speaker 2 (15:30):
Yes, and you know, during the various election campaigns and
during anything where there are these parties and positions, it
seems to fractionate. And that's one of the reasons that
they're often associated with levels of kind of being unhappy
and fearful and concerned, and we had that situation in
the UK with a vote about whether we should stay
in Europe, and it was one of the most divisive
campaigns I've ever seen. It really turned families against each other,
(15:53):
and it was really just because of the lack of
trust and lack of communication. And unfortunately, that's a mechanism
that many politicians use to you know, further their position,
and that's one of the unfortunate aspects of modern technologies
as well.
Speaker 1 (16:07):
So interesting is last year we had a few folks
political scientists on the show who are talking about kind
of what we can do to build up civics, and
they are arguing that one of the things you can
do as an individual to fight kind of authoritarian politics
is to actually just make friends, is to volunteer, is
to join a choir, because those simple actions allow you
to make the connections that build the trust that can
(16:27):
kind of fight against some of those authoritarian regimes.
Speaker 3 (16:30):
Yeah, but it is important not to join an echo chamber.
Speaker 2 (16:33):
I think technology these days allows us to create these
very siloed groups. I call them echo chambers for an
obvious reason, because you keep hearing the same message back
upon yourselves and that I don't think is healthy. Rather,
you need to have a broadened view, which is why
on Twitter I or EXOSUS now called I, actually make
a point of following different viewpoints just to see and
it's remarkable how different the opinions can be.
Speaker 3 (16:55):
So yeah, I think.
Speaker 2 (16:56):
Everything really about your own personal happiness comes down to
trying to see your connectedness to others. And another point,
and this gets into my hobbies, is really seeing yourself
in the big picture.
Speaker 3 (17:08):
And what I mean by that is the big picture in.
Speaker 2 (17:10):
Terms of how insignificant we really all are when it
comes to the size of the universe and how long
our lives last, but also appreciating the magnificent contributions of humanity,
the longevity of civilizations over durations of time that we
never really truly think about. And that's why one of
the recommendations I say is that people should definitely go
(17:30):
out look at the world around them and start ask
why questions, ask why is anything at what it is?
And when you approach life like that, you become more
mindful of it. But also you get a sense, a
profound sense of being connected to a species that have
been on this planet for a very long time.
Speaker 1 (17:47):
And I think that that gets to the idea that,
in addition to becoming a little bit more alocentric, this
idea that we need to connect with people, maybe do
nice things for other people and so on, we also
at the same time need to become a little bit
less ego centric. Right, we need to kind of squish
our own idea that we're sort of at the center
of the universe, and getting experiences of OWZ you've talked
about can be really important. But in the book you
(18:08):
talk about the other way that we can do this
kind of make ourselves seem maybe less significant, and that
can be through the practice of meditation. Yeah, how does
meditation sort of fight sort to some of these egocentric biases.
Speaker 2 (18:20):
Yeah, you would imagine that meditation would make you focus
on yourself, but actually it doesn't because most meditative processes
train you to control your attentional spotlights. So our attention
is a little bit like I use the metaphor of
a spotlight. You can shine it onto different information and
it seems more distinct and stronger, or you can direct
it elsewhere and something else will pop into your mind.
(18:41):
What meditations generally do is they take you out of
a floating sense of attention because when you're not focused
on a task, as you well know, Laurie, there's a
mode a network in the brain called the default mode network,
which is the default mode of thinking when you're not
task focused. Now, mind wandering is all very well, and
it happens a lot, and sometimes it's mind wandering into
pleasant things. But we know from various studies that when
(19:02):
you're not focused on a task and you're not thinking
about something pleasant, the tendency is to think about negative things.
Our brain evolved to solve problems, so it spends a
lot of its offline time running simulations of past encounters
and future possibilities, and very often it's in an attempt
to avoid any negative situation, which is why we focus
on negative information and negative news more so than anything positive.
(19:25):
What meditation does is it trains you to direct that
attentional spotlight away from the internal thought processes. And in
for example, mindfulness meditation, you're asked to concentrate on, for example,
physical sensations, or you're breathing, or you might recite a mantra.
All of these are strategies to divert your attention away
from the internal dialogue that you're having with yourself in
(19:47):
your mind. What's remarkable is that if you do that
over a long period of time, then you can soon
develop a habit of not defaulting to the default mode network,
as it were, and the activation in that network is
subdued in those who are very experienced at meditation. The
other thing about meditation is it trains you not to
put too much emphasis on particular thoughts. So I don't
(20:08):
know if you've every read that issue. When you've been
thinking about something, you say, I gotta stop thinking about it.
You know you're tossing and turning in bed at night,
I gotta stop thinking about the interview with Laurie Santle's.
Speaker 1 (20:16):
All the morning and a really terrible stressor.
Speaker 3 (20:19):
I'm sure stressor joo Chris.
Speaker 2 (20:23):
But the more you try to stop yourself doing it,
the more profound and important that thought becomes. This is
called ironic thought suppression. The reason that happens is because
in the effort of trying to stop a thought, you're
actually paradoxically making it stronger, and that's why it pops
into your head. So meditation teaches you not to ascribe
any intention or purpose or any weight to any thoughts.
(20:44):
In particular just to accept them, allow them to flow
in and flow out and thereby avoid the problem.
Speaker 3 (20:49):
Of ironic thought suppression. So there's a number of things
going on.
Speaker 2 (20:52):
It controls your breathing, so obviously you're moving from a
kind of more arouse stateing to one which is more placid.
And all these things I think are conducive to more
positive thinking.
Speaker 1 (21:02):
And forgetting yourself kind of outside your own thoughts. It
sounds like mean, so.
Speaker 2 (21:06):
Yeah, yeah, absolutely, So that's another aspect. I mean, many
of these not just meditation, but flow. Of course, I
know a lot of your listeners will have heard about
Mahali Chick sent me.
Speaker 3 (21:16):
High is the.
Speaker 2 (21:17):
Point where you are you're working on a task which
is just enough taxing to your ability, so you feel
that sort of compression of time. You don't notice things,
and you lose your sense of self. So again flow moments,
and if you're wealthy enough to go out into space
on a spacecraft and look back at the Earth from
the universe, these overview effects, they all have a form
(21:39):
of ego dissolution, this sort of sense of loss of self,
and I describe that exactly as a mechanism talking about
becoming less self focused.
Speaker 1 (21:47):
You've also talked about yet another way that we can
become a little bit less self focused, maybe have some
ego dissolution, and this one may be a little bit
more controversial. You've argued that this might be a benefit
that we can get from psychedelics, having psychedelic experiences explain
how psychedelics can kind of make us a little bit
less egocentric.
Speaker 2 (22:04):
Okay, Well, I first caveat by saying, I'm not advocating
that everyone should take psychedelics, and I would only recommend
this from the clinical evidence of those individuals who have
intractable depression, because the evidence, in my opinion, is quite
clear that this is really a potential game changer. These
are people who have not responded to either the psychopharmacology
or intensive clinical practice. In these situations, there is not
(22:28):
enough studies, but the sizes that have been done show
that they can experience a profound shift in their sense
of self and that also produces benefits to depressive symptompology. Now,
the reason that happens, there's a number of reasons for us.
All psychedelics operate on the serotonin system, which is the
system which is part.
Speaker 3 (22:48):
Of the default mode network.
Speaker 2 (22:49):
So my hunch is that what's going is you're altering
this automatic fixation on the sense of self. Certainly, anyone
who has taken psychedelics, and I have certainly done with
so myself, will attest that there is a complete distortion
of reality. You do feel that you are no longer
that kind of ego person, and there's a strange, profound
sense of connect in this with the cosmos.
Speaker 3 (23:10):
The important point.
Speaker 2 (23:11):
Is after that psychedelic experience or trip has disappeared, months afterwards,
people have still seeing the benefits of that early experience.
So I'm not suggesting that this should be an ongoing
course of treatment for people, but for some it does seem.
Speaker 3 (23:24):
To have a long and lasting effect.
Speaker 2 (23:27):
So the other thing I would just finally say is
that anyone considering that really does need to seek out
advice on this, because there are certain personality characteristics who
should not be dabbling with something like a psychedelic because
in that situation you can get ego dissolution, but in
a very negative way. This is when you can experience
depersonalization where you don't feel anything is ever going to
(23:47):
be real again, and that I think is an equally
disturbing mindset, so yes, they're controversial, but more and more
research has been conducted, and even in the UK, we
are starting to relinquish some of our concerns of it.
Speaker 3 (24:01):
I foresee it being away of the future, but we.
Speaker 1 (24:03):
Don't necessarily need to go to drugs to get these
sort of moments of ego dissolution. You alluded to your
hobby a little bit earlier, you didn't actually say what
it was, and I think that this is actually not
the psychedelic hobby, other kinds of hobbies.
Speaker 2 (24:17):
Yeah, you have an international audience, so I'm sure some
people will have watched the BBC show The Detectorists, and
if they have an opportunity to watch it, I strongly
recommend it. It's very empowering view of a very peculiar
hobby typically conducted by very strange individuals. We call them nerds,
but basically it's metal detecting. I live in a country
(24:39):
which has had thousands of years of continuous occupation in history.
I'm very fortunate to be living in the countryside and
around me I'm surrounded by fields which were occupied by
Romans and Celts and all the sorts of history that
Hollywood brings to the screen. I actually live in the
lands where that happened, and so I go out with
my metal detector and I spend hours just scanning the fields.
(25:00):
It's a little bit like fishing on land. I call
it listening for that signal. And you dig a lot
of holes and there's a lot of junk, but every
so often you find something which is quite remarkable and precious.
Precious in the sense rare, not necessary. Sometimes it is precious. Actually,
sometimes people find gold and silver and all these things.
But in the book, I talk about a particular episode,
(25:20):
which could coincidentally was on my birthday, and this is
a true story. I was digging in a field and
I've uncovered a coin from the second century of Marcus Rulius.
Now I'm a big fan of the Stoic philosophers, who
teach that you can't really change life, but you can
change the way you think about life to get things
into a perspective. So I dug out this coin. It's
(25:41):
nearly eighteen hundred years old, and it's got Marcus Aurelius.
I recognize his portrait immediately, and I thought, isn't that amazing?
Speaker 3 (25:47):
You know?
Speaker 2 (25:48):
And who dropped this coin was a Roman centurion who
was that person? So that goes back to what I
was saying earlier on kind of making that feeling of
connectedness with humanity over the centuries. And you know, what
would they make of us in two thousand years from now?
You know, people going around with sticks trying to find
coins under the ground.
Speaker 3 (26:06):
What are coins?
Speaker 1 (26:06):
I mean, it strikes you I love this story, and
it strikes me that it showing a couple of different
features that are relevant for happiness.
Speaker 3 (26:12):
Right.
Speaker 1 (26:12):
One is this idea of connectedness. Right, You're connecting not
just to Marcus Aurelius and these old ideas, but these
people that walked on your land outside your barn thousands
of years ago. It also seems though that like you
get a tremendous amount of flow from walking around listening
to these beaps. Is that really like? Is it kind
of like like your own walking meditation?
Speaker 3 (26:31):
Is it is like walking meditation?
Speaker 2 (26:33):
So and you know, if I suddenly have a trade
of thought, it will soon be interrupted immediately by a
signal going off, So you are constantly you can't spend
your time, you know, contemplating your own problems. So it's,
as I say, it's a little bit like fishing on
land fishermen also experienced the same thing, and there is
a study out Denmark, and so there's only one study,
but I've shown that metal detectorists experience much elevated levels
(26:55):
of happiness and it's really good for PDST as well.
So it seems to be a hobby which is absorbing
and it achieves that flow. And certainly I have been
out for literally six hours and forgotten that time has
passed and I get a call saying a better I'm home.
So yeah, it's one of those things I really enjoy.
Writing is the other thing I really enjoy as well,
and that's actually one of my recommended activities for people
(27:17):
who have the ability to write.
Speaker 3 (27:18):
I think it's really important to do.
Speaker 1 (27:20):
As Bruce says, writing can be a flow boosting activity.
I often lose myself when I'm working on one of
these podcast scripts or digging into an academic paper. But
if writing is it something that comes naturally to you,
there is one form of composition that you really ought
to try out. I'll let you and on that tip
for getting over yourself after the break, This Knew How
(27:46):
two season of the Happiness Lab is all about condensing
the wisdom my guests provide into a series of practical
bite sized tips. So what are some practical bite sized
strategies for how to get over yourself? Professor Bruce Hood's
first tip is to start a journal.
Speaker 2 (28:00):
I teach a course based on your course called The
Size of Happiness, and the course is unique in that
there's no graded examination, but they have to engage with
the course. So one of the requirements is they first
of all, they have to come to my lectures, and
they have to come to the seminars, but they also
have to keep a journal over the ten week period.
And the reason I ask them to do that is
because keeping a diary or writing a journal is a
(28:22):
very powerful way to take stock of situations and to
process them much more effectively rather than trying to deal
with something inside your head. I recommend that you buy
literally one of those old paper and pencil ones and
get a pen and do it by hand. Don't do
it on your phone because that's just not the same
level of processing. And what you do is when you
keep a journal, write down whatever is in your mind
(28:43):
and what's concerning you and if it's a problem, articulating
in as much detail as possible, how it makes you feel,
and so on, And in doing that that actually helps
to process it. If it's a bad event, writing it
down makes it much more objective, so I think is
a really good way of dealing with it. Moreover, you
now have a record of an event. And what I
find very valuable is asking people to go back and
look at their old diaries and their old journals, and
(29:06):
you soon discover that the things that the time, which
the most paramount possible situations that you thought you'd never
get over, suddenly you realize, actually, I got over that,
and things move on. So it's really a tangible evidence
that life does move on and get better.
Speaker 1 (29:21):
I love that last point, especially because I too have
had these sort of moments where I'm dealing with something
that feels intractable and then my brain will just suddenly
go to like, oh wait, there was a thing that
was intractable like two weeks ago that you felt like
you couldn't do it, and like just remembering that can
give you some grace to remember, hey, the perspective is
bigger than you, Like, you've been through this before, right,
And so I think that's super powerful. Any great insights
(29:42):
that you've gotten from your students, like when they've done
their journals or kind of good stories from them.
Speaker 2 (29:47):
Well, we also keep track of the journals just as
a pure precaution for anyone who might be experiencing some
trauma or some issues. So we also use it as
a way of preventive you know, because these students are
first year students. They are often arriving and they're kind
of anxious and they don't know what they're doing. So
we monitor their journals to see if there's any evidence
that maybe we should be stepping in and offering a
(30:08):
helping hand. Don't read the journals, It's done by one
of our clinical people, but that means that they don't
reach a crisis point.
Speaker 3 (30:14):
As to insights.
Speaker 2 (30:15):
Yeah, I mean I still get emails from students who
graduated some years after the course and they tell me
they're still keeping the journal.
Speaker 3 (30:21):
It's not for everyone. It requires effort.
Speaker 2 (30:23):
But again, a lot of the benefits of psychology are
all about creating routines and creating structure. It's when you
don't feel there's a structures, when you feel you're spiraling
out control, that I think things seem worse than they
really are. So journals by their nature and committing to
doing on a regular basis provide a structure which is valuable.
I mean, I've certainly discovered things in my journals from
(30:44):
decades ago which just I don't even seem to be
the same person. But that goes back to what we
were talking about earlier on. Everyone can remember they were different.
It doesn't manage they're going to change in the future,
but of course we're constantly changing.
Speaker 1 (30:55):
So strategy number two for getting things into perspective is
that we need to find a little bit of gratitude. Yeah,
how can gratitude get us to be less ecocentric and
more alcentric?
Speaker 2 (31:05):
Well, gratitude Sisera, or the Roman essayist, discs right gratitude
is the father of all virtues, and what he meant
was that the act of showing gratitude in genders so
many positive aspects. First of all, it gets you to
recognize that your situation is not necessarily as bad as
other people's situations, so you're forced to focus on what's
going well. So you're drawing the relative comparisons in the
(31:28):
right direction, looking at other people who are not as
fortunate as you. It's all too easy these days to
compare ourselves upwards. Because of the way social media works,
we see all these highly successful people with these unbelievable lives.
Anyone would feel inadequate by comparison. But when you express gratitude,
you are acknowledging that you are in a good place
and a good situation generally, and very often that gratitude
(31:50):
involves other people as well. So again it's forging a
less ecocentric view and recognizing that you're in your situation
today because other people have helped you out. I know
Marty Cieligmann has the gratitude letter, and that's a very
profound exercise. That's where you write a letter and you
thank someone specifically and delivered to them.
Speaker 3 (32:08):
I haven't done that yet.
Speaker 2 (32:09):
I think that's quite challenging, but I certainly in my
emails as much as possible, I try.
Speaker 3 (32:14):
To express my gratitude towards other people.
Speaker 2 (32:16):
So it allows you to get perspective, and it allows
you to acknowledge way others have helped you, and in
turn that forges I think, more positive bonds.
Speaker 1 (32:25):
So that's tip number two. Now we're turning to tip
number three that can help us get perspective, and this
one is like literally getting perspective. It's trying to find
ways to in yourself talk, engage in more perspectives so
you can coach yourself through a crisis. What are some
practical ways we could do this?
Speaker 2 (32:41):
So this is my party trick that I do during
one of my talks, where I get people to imagine
a situation, a real situation, a dilemma for them which
is upsetting them, and it has to be a personal thing,
not a world problem.
Speaker 3 (32:54):
And I get them to talk about it in the.
Speaker 2 (32:55):
First person, saying I am worried about whatever it is
and this upsets me. And then I get them to
imagine a scale of zero to ten and where they
think they score in that. And then I repeat the
process and I say, Okay, I want you to talk
about this problem, but use the third person, use your name,
I use pronouns like he, him, she, her, and talk
about as if you were talking to yourself like a friend.
(33:18):
Do exactly the same thing, and again, how does that
make you feel on the zero to ten scale? And
invariably you find almost over ninety percent people find that
the process of talking about yourself and the third person
attenuates those negative feelings. But it's all the idea that
if you can step out of yourself why using language,
then you can get a more objective viewpoint. Because we
never talk about ourselves in the first person, not unless
(33:40):
we're royalty in this country if one does.
Speaker 3 (33:42):
Not say that normally.
Speaker 2 (33:44):
But when you use language, it forces you to take
a third person perspective. It's as if you are looking
back at yourself, and that seems to attenuate negative responses.
It can also be used to strengthen positive ones. You
can say, hey, Bruce, that interview you gave with Laurie's amazing.
You know, you're doing really well, So you can use
it both ways to bolster or attenuate the experiences.
Speaker 1 (34:06):
I love this tip because it's literally using language to
be less ecocentric. We're literally kind of making ourselves like
a different person and using that to kind of gain
the perspective that matters. And of course we've had Ethn
on the show.
Speaker 2 (34:19):
A bunch and you know, Yeah, although I would suggest
you don't talk about yourself in the third person all
the time because then people look weird.
Speaker 1 (34:26):
Yeah, it's either like royalty or like macho man, Randy
Savage or something very strange. So that was to number three,
we can kind of reframe our perspective by using our language,
switching to third person language. Tip number four is that
we need to reframe setbacks with a more positive attributional style.
Speaker 2 (34:46):
What do you mean there, Yes, So this comes again
from the workingmodi Seeligman and his colleagues when they were
looking at the way that optimists differ from pessimists, and
they realized that there was a characteristic attributional style which
tended to treat problems as permanent, pervasive in other words,
generalizing to other situations and personal feeling responsible for your
(35:08):
set whereas optimists tend to not think about these things
as being permanent the transitory, and they're not pervasive, they're
specific to a situation, and then not taking personal responsibility
saying it wasn't my fault.
Speaker 3 (35:19):
Really.
Speaker 2 (35:20):
Now, I'm not suggesting you should be overly optimistic. I
think it's important to pay attention to when you are
responsible for things. But you can think about your problems
by reframing them towards a more optimistic view by adopting
the more positive attributional style. So, again going back to
the journaling situation, if you've had a situation or an
event which is upset you, you should detail it in
(35:40):
as much detail evidence as possible, and then you know,
examine your beliefs in what you think is going to happen,
and then switch gear and then challenge each point that
you've made by becoming almost like a barrister or a
lawyer or a defense lawyer, saying, Bruce, you know, you
thought that was a terrible interview you gave for Laurie,
but actually she was smiling, and actually you made some
really good points and she didn't notice that you stumbled
(36:02):
over a few words. You know, you're not so bad,
So you basically just become this kind of cheerleader for yourself.
Doing so over time you eventually start to become a
little bit more optimistic when these things occur.
Speaker 1 (36:14):
This is a fabulous It is a suggestion in part
because I think rather than being our own defense lawyer,
as we often spend a lot of time being our
own prosecutory right looking for the evidence that we kind
of screwed up, and so kind of taking that tactic
and sort of flipping it on its head and actively
going for a more positive attributional style, actively going sorry
to look for the spots where we did better. Yeah,
it can kind of help.
Speaker 2 (36:35):
The thing, The amazing thing is that if you put
enough effort, any little creative, you can take any really
bad setback and reframe it in a much more For
every cloud has a silver lining, literally, so that's what
you do.
Speaker 3 (36:45):
You kind of ignore the cloud and you go for
the silver lining and then you focus on that.
Speaker 1 (36:48):
Okay, so that was tip number four, So switch our
attributional style. Now we get to your final tip, which
I totally thought was going to be metal detecting. Metal
detecting all day, all the time, but in fact it's
to find other structural ways to connect to with others.
What are some ideas that you think people can put
into practice here?
Speaker 2 (37:06):
Well, I suspect a law of listeners or maybe we
are you doing this, But something I took up just
very recently is I joined supporters club for Bath rugby team.
Now I live in Bath in England, and they're actually
a really good rugby team. They are enjoying quite a
successful period at the moment. So you don't have to
join a successful team. I think any local team is good.
And I've been an academic for all of my adult
(37:28):
life and I generally have not taken part in these
sorts of activities because I was stuck in my books
and I didn't go to matches and things like that.
But there's something very automatic and profound when you are
in a crowd that erupts in applause and emotions. Is
very contagious, and you suddenly feel like you're part of
something a bit bigger than yourself. So any activity which
(37:51):
is kind of hopefully arrange around something positive, like sports
or something like that, I think is a very simple
way to enjoy the connection and feeling of purpose that
everything which is against the loneliness thing, which I think
is obviously the big problem of our current era. Getting
off your phones, going out and physically being present an
(38:13):
event or rally or a game. These are the sorts
of things which can create automatic feelings of alecentrism and connection.
Speaker 1 (38:21):
Well that's strategy too, because often for many of the
kinds of things that we're fans of or that we enjoy,
we're engaging with them anyway, we're just not doing it
in a social way. And you know here in the US,
you know a fan of the Celtics basketball team, you
can just like sit at your house and watch the
Celtics game, or you could join a group that's doing
that kind of connect with friends to do that better.
And it's like, in some ways it's not adding more
(38:42):
to our time, right, Sometimes we're kind of you might
be watching those rugby things anyway. It's just like if
you join a supporters club or join something where you're
connecting with other people. Now all of a sudden, you're
doing it in a way that's getting you social. You're
part of something much bigger than yourselves. It's not it's
doing the same thing you're already going to do. I'm
doing it a little bit more social. Well.
Speaker 2 (39:00):
Emily Parmen to some wonderful stuff years ago showing that
when people think they're watching a recorded match as to
when they think they're watching it live, I have a
totally different experience. Of course, perception is exactly the same thing,
but there's something about feeling that you are in the
moment live that that generates a completely different psychologically experience.
(39:22):
And that's why when you go to a live match
or you go to a live concert, even though the
sound may not be that good and you might not
get the best view, there's something about being immersed in
that environment, which is really something that cannot be captured
by VR or any technology that goes back to our
origins as a social animal that grew up really interacting.
Speaker 1 (39:44):
And just to say, if you're not really that into sports,
of course, there are other ways you can do this
kind of thing too. We talk to concerts, choirs, even
book clubs for the nerdy academics like us who like
we can kind of do not enjoy books privately, but
kind of get together and do that.
Speaker 3 (39:57):
Well, I think, going how are your comfort zone?
Speaker 2 (39:59):
We tend to migrate to those areas and we don't
challenge ourselves. I never used to imagine myself at a
rugby match, but now, you know, I look forward to it,
and so I think that life is full of opportunities
and new experiences to try and just give it a go.
Speaker 1 (40:13):
So one of my favorite things about these five tips
and just your work in general, is that you really
have put these tips into effect in your life. For
so many of these tips, you said, well, I journal,
you know, I go to these rugby matches. Now I
now talk to myself, you know, I'm the third person.
How do you think this has changed your own psychology?
Has all this made you happier? Has it caused you
to get perspective?
Speaker 2 (40:31):
I've been that'ked that a number of times, and it's
very difficult to be objective about your mental state because
you are the preveyor of your own mind. But I've
asked people around me and they say, Hi, I've definitely
changed from what I was six years ago. I'm more
engaged now. I'm more committed now to my students. I'm
coming to the final years at my time at Bristol University,
but I want to use that time really to try
(40:51):
and change the educational experience of my students. I feel
that the new generations are so preoccupied by themselves. They're
so worried about performance, they're not enjoying it. If you're
a student who doesn't enjoy what you're studying, then you're
never going to learn anything. And so I am trying
to get the universities and the systems to wrecktognize the
importance of having content, happier, resilient students, because then they're
(41:15):
much easier to teach, they're more inspirational, they're just generally
having a better time and that impacts on the faculty
as much as the students, so I think we really
need to embed this in society. This is true also
of workforces. Happier workforces are more productive and so on.
So I think we've got to kind of really make
this a cultural change and find ways to make it recognized,
not as a kind of a last minute thought, but
(41:36):
something which is central to the way that we can
mark our lives as usual.
Speaker 1 (41:40):
I agree with Bruce on this one. I'd also love
for the lessons of positive psychology to become more embedded
in our daily lives. Happiness should be just as much
a part of college life as say, test scores, and
just as important to bosses as quarterly reports. But what
are some steps we can all take to become a
bit more allocentric. Let's recap Bruce's main points. Tip number
(42:01):
one keep a journal. Old fashioned pen and paper is best,
but however you get your thoughts down, try to be
as detailed as possible. Tip number two. More grateful. Think
about all the great things in your life, and remember
to thank the people who've helped you along the way.
Tip number three alter yourself. Talk to get some distance,
discuss your worries and triumphs in the third person. Lauri's
(42:22):
feeling underprepared to give this talk. Well done, Laurie, that
talk went great. Tip number four is to become more optimistic.
Remember that most of your problems aren't permanent, and even
if you messed up once, it doesn't mean you'll mess
up again. And Bruce's final tip for becoming less self
centered get your club on, join a choir, attend a concert,
stand in the bleachers at a football game, or wherever
(42:45):
they sit during those British rugby matches. Putting our problems
in perspective is a major part of getting over ourselves.
But I know firsthand that putting big feelings aside can
sometimes feel really tough. So that's the how to topic
we'll tackle in the next episode. How can we hack
our negative emotions? All that? Next time on the Happiness
Lab with meet doctor Lauriy Santos
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