October 11, 2021 • 29 mins
Dr Laurie Santos doesn't have so much fun these days - which is really bad for her health and wellbeing. So Catherine Price (author of The Power of Fun: How to Feel Alive Again at http://howtohavefun.com/) is staging an emergency fun-tervention which will take Laurie to the beach and totally out of her comfort zone.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin for So, I just have so many questions to
ask you about what you've been up to for this
past month. This is Katherine Price. Over the last few weeks,
she's become my new guru. I need a guru because
I'm on a mission, a mission to have fun. As
(00:36):
a kid, I used to have fun all the time.
I spent all day playing with friends, goofing around and
just doing lots of random activities that I enjoyed. But
as an adult, not so much. That's why I've turned
to Catherine. You see, Catherine is the author of a
new book called The Power of Fun, How to Feel
Alive Again, and I've asked her to use her expertise
to give me an emergency fun intervention or fun intervention
(01:00):
for short. So far, Catherine's taught me that fun, by definition,
requires a combination of playful, connected flow, and that those
three parts of an experience are wrecked when you're feeling distracted.
So my homework was to train my brain to focus
better by finding delights, those funny, beautiful, delightful things that
are out there all the time but we tend not
to notice. But today I'll be tackling a different problem
(01:23):
embarrassingly enough, even when I have time to focus and
be present, I often just can't think of anything fun
to do. I've sort of forgotten the kinds of things
I like and enjoy. Plus I'm often so exhausted these
days that a lot of the time I kind of
just want to vege on the couch. So today I'll
be rediscovering what feels fun and learning, as Catherine puts it,
(01:44):
to feel alive again. But even though that's the goal,
I'm worried there's a decent chance that my attempts at
finding fun might actually kill me. What's the worst that
can happen? Well, I guess you could give you actually
something No, no, I think like getting concussed, dying, But yeah,
or at the very least, might kill my voice to
do the heart and your to blame. You give loop
(02:07):
a bad name, and you play. So, with those slight
spoilers out there, welcome to Doctor Laurie Santos's Extreme Funtervention
Part two. Our minds are constantly telling us what to
(02:28):
do to be happy. But what if our minds are wrong?
What if our minds are lying to us, leading us
away from what will really make us happy? The good
news is that understanding the science of the mind can
point us all back in the right direction. You're listening
to the Happiness Lab for doctor Laurie Santos. I live
(02:52):
in Philadelphia, relatively close to the School River, which is
a famous rowing river, and I had a neighbor who
had been telling me how she'd been taking rowing lessons
and there were baby turtles in the river, and I'm like, what,
that sounds interesting. So a couple of years ago I
decided to try to learn to row. And her quest
to have fun enjoying guitar classes, drum practices, and swing
dancing workshops. She's an expert on pushing her boundaries in
(03:15):
order to experience more fun, and getting out on the
water was her most recent attempt. So I spent a
summer biking up to Boathouse Row every Thursday morning and
taking lessons from this guy named Brian, who was this
very funny rowing coach, very playfully sarcastic. Those mornings out
on the water were full of playfulness and connection with
coach Brian constantly joking with her through a ridiculous megaphone.
(03:38):
Somebody by the megaphone, like, I just loved it. Rowing
also gave Katherine lots of flow. She was consistently present
on the water, paying attention to her movements, so she
didn't tip over. With these three elements of playfulness, connection
and flow in place, rowing was fun, but don't be fooled.
Fun isn't always about bright skies and perfect sailing. Consider,
(04:00):
for example, the time Catherine went ahead with a row
despite the dark clouds forming, which was a dumb move.
There was nobody else on this river. Torrential downpour started,
but Catherine kept heading over to the spot where her
beloved baby turtles hung out. But there were no turtles
that day, because they're not idiots. Her oars were extra
slippery that day, and all of a sudden she tipped over.
(04:22):
One of those things where you know what's happening and
you cannot do anything about it. And I was like,
I am going into the school, which side note is like,
not a river you really want to swim in. The
occasional body fished out of this thing is not ideal.
Taking a front somersault, fully clothed into very cold, filthy
water in the middle of a huge storm sounds like
my absolute nightmare. But the thing was I actually was
(04:43):
having fun. Like in retrospect, I'm like, I was just
giddy when we got back to the dock and I
started announcing to everyone that I had fallen into the river.
As I cringed at the idea of looking stupid in
front of complete strangers, Catherine got to the moral of
her story. There's a lot of moments in life where
if you can embrace the absurdity of the objectively unpleasant situation,
it's actually pretty fun. For the next step of my
(05:06):
fun intervention, Catherine wanted me to follow her lead try
out a new hobby, ideally one that I'd be reasonably
bad at, in order to ensure that I experience those
juicy moments of absurd unpleasantness. And I reacted to this
suggestion with terror. As a busy adult, I haven't tried
out something completely new and challenging in a very, very
long time. And I'm guessing I'm not alone here. But
(05:29):
I also tend to beat myself up when I'm not
immediately good at something. Turns out, this combination of terror
and self criticism is yet another fun killer. I mean,
if you're self conscious, you can't let yourself go, and
you can't really be playful and it's harder to be connected.
But the biggest way our self judgment can impede fun
is by reducing our flow. Negative self talk clogs up
(05:52):
our brains inner monologues, with all those rapid fire thoughts
of oh my god, I suck so badly at this.
That's gonna not make it possible for you to be present.
And again, if you're not present, you can't be in flow.
And if you're not in flow, you can't have fun.
I did want to have more fun, so I reluctantly
agreed to Catherine's challenge. But I needed a way to
overcome all my angst about starting a new hobby from scratch.
(06:14):
So I decided to tag in a different kind of expert,
someone who's a pro at being a beginner. This frightening
email comes over from the elementary school. We're having an
apparent talent day. You know, can you come in and
do something? One fateful day, journalist Tom Vanderbilt got a
request that changed his whole approach to life. What you
need talent? Could you show off to a room of
(06:34):
twenty five first graders at his daughter's school. He was
a best selling author, But I couldn't really go in
and write a paragraph in front of a bunch of
kids in a class. We all have our job resumes,
but if you step away from you just your career achievements,
as important as they are, you know, what else are
you doing in your life? And I felt a little bit,
a little bit sparse. Tom had the painful realization that
(06:57):
he hadn't learned anything new in a long time, which
was ironic since Tom spent a lot of his time
chauffeuring his daughter from chess class to swim practice and
then piano lessons. While she was off having fun and
bill new skills, Tom sat there waiting for her class
to finish, feeling bored and mostly screwing around on his laptop.
Here I was taking her to all these sorts of lessons,
(07:19):
instilling in her you know how important it was, I thought,
to learn new things, to be as wide raging as
you can. And in my own life I had kind
of frozen in terms of learning these ambitious new skills.
You know, sometime many decades ago, you know, sort of
too late. Why bother, I'm never going to be that great.
Sort of felt like it was a bit hypocritical of
me to be telling her this, and not doing it myself.
Tom realized that, like many of us, he was suffering
(07:42):
from what Harvard psychologists Dan Gilbert calls the end of
history illusion. I think people often think they are the
finished person they are going to be at any moment.
Gilbert and his colleagues found that if you ask people, hey,
how much do you think your personality, your preferences, and
your core values are going to change in the next
ten years, most people say they're not going to change
(08:04):
all that much. They assume all these really core things
about their identity are fixed, that they're history in a sense,
has ended. But if you ask the same people, hey,
if you look back at yourself ten years ago, how
much have your values, personality, and preferences changed, People usually
admit that they're really different than they were a decade ago,
that they've changed a lot. This is the end of
(08:25):
history illusion. We don't think we're going to change and
grow much, but we're wrong. I don't have to be
stuck as this person that doesn't know how to do X,
Y and Z. I can start to try to do
those things even though I'm middle aged. That's why Tom
decided to devote the next few years to becoming a
professional beginner to picking up all the tricky new skills
(08:47):
he never got around to learning before. It's also why
he's going to try to convince me that face planting
into the water over and over again might just be
the thing I need for the next step of my
funtervention surveys. One of those great things where even the
whiteouts are quite fun. The happiness Lab will be right back.
(09:12):
I use the example of the movie The Queen's Gambit,
which I thought was a great film, very popular film
on Netflix. It seems like everyone saw that. Tom Vanderbilt
finds it a bit sad that people devoted hours and
hours to watching a drama about someone who learns to
play chess instead of watching The Queen's Gabbitt. If you
tried to take five or six hours of chess instruction,
you could actually pick up a fair amount of the game.
(09:35):
After years on the sidelines watching his daughter learned stuff,
he decided to get involved too. I signed up a
coach of all things to try to teach her to
play chess, and then I jumped on, which was a
bit strange. You had these two beginners that were separated
by four decades. Tom didn't stop there He learned how
to sing, how to draw, how to deep water swim,
how to juggle, how to surf, and, since he ended
(09:58):
up losing his wedding ring wall surfing, how to make jewelry.
He chronicled all this in a book called Beginners, The
Joy and Transformative Power of Lifelong Learning. Tom says it's
less of a how to book and more of a
why too book, and the why has a lot to
do with the fact that learning can make us feel
way more present. Being a beginner is almost by definition mindful,
(10:20):
because you go into an activity really knowing nothing. You know,
you're you're lost, You're you're sort of clueless, and that demands,
you know, almost total attention. And that also felt very
powerful to me, because you know, this idea, especially in
contemporary society, of being so endlessly distracted. You know, I
would draw for three hours and it felt like ten minutes,
(10:41):
and just that having that sense of deep engagement was
also really refreshing. Being an amateur also brought Tom the
excitement that comes from novelty. He had to learn about
ocean waves and musical scales and the bendable properties of metals.
The freshness of all these new topics made it really
easy to focus. I equated in the book to sort
(11:01):
of falling in love. Fittingly, the word amateur comes from
the Italian amatore to love, and even that more pujoy
worative sounding term for a beginner, dilettante, comes from the
Latin delectate to delight. And if you listen to my
last episode, you know experiencing delight is pretty good for
your happiness. You're just plunging into this new world with
(11:22):
new lingo, new equipment. You're moving your body in new
ways that you're thinking in new ways, and I feel
like your brain is sort of on fire. And the
science shows that firing up your brain in this way
is probably a good thing. Research by the psychologist Denise
Park has found that learning new skills may help prevent
the usual cognitive decline that comes as we age. She
had groups of adults learn a skill collectively in a class,
(11:45):
and she had other groups of adults get together and
just socialize. The older adults who took a class on
photography or quilting did significantly better on tests of memory
and processing speed than adults who merely got together. I
find these results really striking. I mean, you wouldn't think
that learning a specific skill like how to stitch or
when to adjust a shutter speed would have a big
(12:05):
effect on more important general cognitive abilities. We mostly just
start new things because we think they'll be fun, But
becoming a beginner and a random activity seems to give
us a bigger cognitive leg up than we realize. But
hobbies like these don't just boost our brains. Tom found
that his new pursuits also had a surprisingly positive effect
on his sense of personal identity. There's this interesting thing
(12:27):
that happens when you take up these skills that in
the beginning you're thinking of them purely as a verb.
I'm trying to surf. I'm trying to do this. But
then at some point feel comfortable to shift to the
noun phase and you say, you know, I'm a singer,
I'm a surfer. I've expanded instantly the sensation of who
I am, and the science shows that this self expansion
can enhance something else that's known to boost our happiness,
(12:50):
our relationships. Couples who participate in novel challenging activities together
experience boosts in relationship satisfaction. The fun that comes from
being a beginner seems to be contagious. But the biggest
benefit of becoming a beginner was something I really needed
for my own funder mention. Learning a new skill is
a great way to fight all our self judgment and perfectionism.
(13:12):
I like to quote the writer GK. Chesterton has said,
anything worth doing is worth doing badly. Tom's book chronicles
lots of cases when we learn best when we're doing
activities that teeter just on the edge of what we
find impossible. He saw this firsthand when he started hanging
out with a population that finds lots of things impossible,
a group you might consider to be the ultimate beginners, babies.
(13:34):
I spent some time with doctor Karen Adolph at NYU
studying how infants learn to walk and to move, and
one of the keys to this learning process is failure.
I mean, they fail a lot. Kids have been photographed
falling up to seventy times an hour, so we should
just embrace failure. The problem, of course, is that failure
doesn't really feel good, which is why Tom practices self compassion,
(13:57):
that act of recognizing that you're human and talking to
yourself compassionately instead of like a critical drill sergeant Larger
than the physical obstacle is that mental obstacle. I think
positive self talk is a key strategy in all this.
As I heard Tom talk more about cultivating positive self
talk and the benefits that come from embracing failure, I
decided to choose a hobby for my funtervention that, at
(14:20):
least for me, really felt like it was on the
edge of impossible, something I thought I definitely have no
possible way of being good at. And since it was summertime,
I also liked the idea of an activity that involved
hitting the beach, and so I decided that I am
middle aged, mostly out of shape, i'vey towered dwelling professor
with bad knees and no coordination, was going to try surfing.
(14:45):
I announced my decision to Tom, explaining how sure I
was that I would absolutely suck at the sport. Have
you ever actually tried to surf before? Like? So, no?
Why like this race as an interesting point that you're
you're saying you know you're going to be bad at it,
which is already that negative self talk coming up? All right, touche,
(15:06):
I was already admitting defeat in my head, or i'd
even gott and started. You really don't know how you're
going to be because you don't know what that thing is.
But you may actually try it and discover that you're
actually adept at it, or that you take to it
more than you thought you could. Maybe Tom was right.
Maybe I would be better at this than I expected.
Maybe I'd be so good at surfing that I dropped
(15:28):
the whole podcasting thing and just become a full time
beach bunny. Maybe I'd be a total natural on the board.
That's probably how it's going to go, right Tom, I
wasn't able to get up on the board on my
first afternoon out. I spent a lot of time on
my knees, you know, sort of almost standing. I spent
a lot of time falling. Your surfing is a very
difficult activity. The ocean is very dynamic place. You are
(15:51):
probably going to fail. That wasn't the rounding endorsement I
was expecting. I'm not going to lie, I'm not going
to sugarcoat it. You're going to look fullish. You might
get hurt, but we have the ability to get back
up and move on. Apparently I'd picked an activity that
really would test my ability to be self compassionate in
the face of sucking badly, but Tom still thought I
(16:11):
should go for it because sucking badly was kind of
the point. What do you have to lose? In fact,
you have to gain quite a bit, I would argue.
Surfing badly is still a very fun activity that will
bring you joy. You don't have to be amazing at it.
Immediately after my chat with Tom, fate seemed to intervene.
My college friend Lucy texted me her family was headed
(16:34):
to a nearby beach house. Beach, of course, meant waves
and waves were just the thing I needed for the
next step of my Funtervention. I asked Lucy if she
joined me for a surf lesson, let me think about it.
That was her noncommittal response. Actually, she followed up, my
husband says I have to do this, so I'm in.
(16:55):
Before she could change her mind, I went online and
found the Little Compton Surf Shop, a small, family run place.
What I liked most about this particular surf shop was
the huge quote on their web page that read, the
best surfer out there is the one that's how the
most fun. I was ready to be just that best surfer.
I booked a lesson for two Operation fun Intervention surfing
(17:17):
Safari was on, and you'll get to hear test how
it went when the happiness lad returns in a Mormentos
(17:41):
aren't too big. Yeah. One warm August morning, I headed
to Rhode Island with my good friend from college, Lucy Bisignano,
armed with her social support, a beach towel, a wetsuit,
and the strongest hair band I own. I was ready
to become the embodiment of the immortal words of George
Bernard's shaw that man progresses in all things by making
(18:04):
a fool of himself. Yeah, truck, she's recording. Oh, it's
like really bad. Actually feel We met our surf instructors
(18:24):
for the day, and I handed my recording gear off
to Lucy's daughter, Alice, who agreed to act as my
guest producer, or at least to try to. The wind
wasn't really helping us all that much. Perfect. After some
safety instructions, warm up jumping jack's, and practice pop ups
on the shore, we grabbed our boards and paddled out
(18:47):
into the sea. My lesson was amazing, not because I
caught a bunch of killer waves Like Tom Vanderbilt. I
didn't really figure out how to stand up on the board.
During that first lesson, I also wiped out pretty badly tried.
(19:09):
I got more salt water up my nose in that
hour and a half lesson than I have in my
entire life. These things should have felt unpleasant, but they didn't.
The whole experience was so fun. Unlike with most other
activities I've done, I was able to focus not on
the product being able to catch a huge wave, but
on the process. How it felt to be lying on
(19:31):
the board, how I was balancing better and better as
the waves rolled by, how fun it was to chat
with my surf instructor, and just how nice it felt
to be in the sun and the waves on a
perfect summer day. I expected my arms and legs to
be sore afterwards, and they were for days actually, But
the thing that hurt the most after my lesson was
my face from smiling and laughing so much. I was
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excited to tell my guru, Catherine Price, about my fun
interventions surfing success, that I did something that I was
really bad at and that at times was absurdly unpleasant,
but that it wound up being one of the most
fun things I've done in a long time. But Katherine
didn't want me to rest on my laurels. She thought
it was now time to move on to the final
step of my fun intervention, discovering ways to find more
(20:20):
everyday fun. My first surfing lesson was a total blast,
but as a busy professor, I probably couldn't spend every
day driving across state lines to hit the waves, which
raised a question, how could I start finding more fun
each and every day. So the universal definition of fun,
I would argue, is that it's a state of playful,
connected flow. But each of us find that state through
(20:41):
different things, and something that you find fun, I might
not find fun at all, and vice versa. That is
the purpose of what Catherine calls the fun audit, examining
your own personal fun history. Catherine recommends getting a notebook
and journaling about pastimes in which you experienced true fun.
What were those so fun moments that you treasure, list
(21:01):
them out and analyze them in detail. Who was there,
what was the setting, what were you doing? Dig into
them like a private investor to gator. And once you
have that, once you have a sense of the people
and the activities in the settings that often are associated
with fun for you, you can go to the next level,
which is what I call figuring out your fun factors,
and those are the characteristics of those people, or those settings,
(21:23):
or those activities that are in some way responsible for
the fun. Doing my own personal fun audit with Catherine
was perhaps not surprisingly kind of fun. I told her
about goofy Halloween parties that I had with my grad
school roommates, trips to a Boardwalk video arcade with my husband,
the time my producer Ryan and I were unexpectedly given
(21:43):
a rental sports car and got to drive around San
Francisco listening to Duran Duran on repeat, and one of
my most treasured so fun memories, which happened when I
traveled to Texas for a conference a few years ago.
So there's this movie theater in Austin called the Alamo Drafthouse.
They have a whole set of things called Eighties Singalongs
where they play music videos from the eighties that they've
(22:05):
edited to have the text. So it's kind of like
carrio y where you can see what the lyrics are,
but you're supposed to sing over the music videos, and
they give you like eighties gear and glow sticks and
like inflatable microphones and all these things and this is
like the most fun I've had in my life. So
these are just like, oh my gosh, she's got pictures,
(22:26):
some images. So these are my grad students. You can
see the costumes, inflatable mics and things like that. This
is me, you see because a green inflatable guitar and
a pink hair bow. Yes, that looks amazing. Analyzing the
common features of all these events, looking for what Catherine
calls the fun factors, I noticed a few important commonalities.
(22:46):
All these fun times were social, and most of them
had an active element, like dancing or moving my body.
There was also a lot of spontaneity involved, like trying
something new or traveling to a new place my so
fun activities also involved a healthy dose of absurdity, think
inflatable microphones or getting a ridiculous sports car, or the
(23:07):
crazy costumes I had eighties sing along. But there was
one specific fun factor that really surprised me. It seems
like one of my fun factors that I wouldn't have
expected actually is music, which is surprising because I'm not
musically inclined at all. I don't play an instrument. I
don't think of myself as a good singer. But when
I think to moments of peakue fun, they have this
element of music. Finding surprises like these is just the
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sort of insight a fun audit can bring, and everyone's
audit it's going to look different. You might detest music
in costumes, but might really love being physical, or being
out in nature or taking risks. The key is to
figure out the specific fun factors that make up your
own personal recipe for fun. But Catherine's found that we
also need to analyze are anti fun factors. They're characteristics
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that if those characteristics are present in an experience, you're
probably not going to have fun. And I think it's
very important to put some attention into identifying them because
in a lot of cases, other people might find them fun,
and you might find yourself getting drag belonged to these
experiences and then wondering why you never had fun. Thinking
about my own experiences, I realize that one of my
key anti fund factors is competition. If there are games
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that we're playing that are cooperative or that are just
about the absurdity of the game or something, I'm really
into it. But when a game has like obvious winners
and losers, it's like less fun. For me. Just as
with fun factors, your own anti fund factors are going
to be really personal. You might love competition, but to
test the beach or getting dirty, or any activities that
(24:36):
involve a lot of preparation or equipment. There are lots
of things that could be an anti fun factor. And
that's why it's so important to put time into thinking
about what you liked and didn't like in the past,
because the better you understand these things, the easier it
will be for you to spend your time wisely, frankly.
And if you can understand that, then you can make
different choices about how you're going to spend your leisure time,
which well we do have I think more available to
(24:58):
us than we realize, because we're wasting a lot of
it right now, it is limited. I thought back to
how I often spend my own free time. When I
get a break, I tend to do something passive, like
plopping down on the and watching Netflix or reading a book.
Leisure activities like that are relaxing, but they're definitely not
fun in the playful, connected, flow inducing sense, and they
(25:19):
usually don't involve almost any of the fun factors I
just identified my fun audit revealed that to get more
everyday fun, I need to be doing more stuff that
involves music, or having friends around, or taking part in
activities that feel a bit more physical or spontaneous. I
also need to find ways to recreate that sing along
from my Texas trip, which was a fun factor that
(25:40):
Catherine supported more than I had expected. You and I
clearly share a lot of fun factors, like a lot
of them, because that looks like my dream fun as
I want to be there right now. And that's when
Catherine got the idea for the final step in my
fun intervention. Since eighties sing along seemed to be the
magical confluence of all my fun factors at once. Catherine
(26:00):
thought it would be good, purely for scientific purposes, of course,
to experience that true fun moment right there in my house.
Luckily happened to have some old inflatable microphones from that
trip lying around. I just want to be with you.
We were both a little rusty, but our impromptu sing
along was awesome. What says You've been got our spur
(26:22):
of the moment sing along only last an hour or so,
but having that moment of true fun right in the
middle of my day wound up, making me feel totally
alive for days. Oddly enough, taking a short break to
privately croon like a rock star made me feel even
more productive through the rest of my work week, never
(26:49):
realizing my love of sing alongs also took me right
back to where the story began. As a kid, I
was obsessed with singing songs from the Peter Pan Musical.
Back then, I thought I'd never grow up. I believed
I'd never turn my back on fun. I never thought
adult me would prioritize work and productivity over the delights
of moving around. Turns out that wise fun loving kid
(27:10):
wasn't entirely lost. She was just hidden below the surface.
All it took was a fun intervention and an inflatable
microphone to set her free. I hope hearing about the
power of fun inspires you to figure out some ways
that you can increase playfulness, connection, and flow. Why don't
you take some time to think about the moments you
remember is so fun? Do your own fun audit, and
(27:33):
make sure you also pay attention to activities that currently
pass for fun in your life but don't actually feel
all that good. By taking time to identify your own
personal fun factors, no matter how surprising, you can better
understand what they are and proactively seek them out in
your daily life. You can even find some new hobbies
that make you feel a little bit more alive. And
(27:53):
the science shows that getting more fun in your life
isn't justest going to be fun. It can also increase
your productivity. And as I saw firsthand during my surf lesson,
making more time for fun can also help you be
a little bit more compassionate with yourself, which is something
we all need these days. And so that's a rap
for Season three of The Happiness Lab. But we'll be
(28:14):
back in a few months with more science based tips
that you can use to feel better. In the meantime,
I'll be setting aside my podcast Mike to get in
some quality time with my inflatable mic instead. Catherine. Let's
do this than do you you? Now? I get? Three?
(28:36):
First A Soloman Yeah, yeah, thanks to you. Thanks to you,
Now I get Yeah. You should know now I get.
The Happiness Lab is co written and produced by Ryan Delley.
Our original music was composed by Zachary Silver, with additional scoring,
(28:59):
mixing and mastering by Evan Biola. Joseph Fridman checked our
facts Sophie Crane mckibbon edited our scripts. Emily Anne Vaughan
offered additional productions for it Special thanks to Miela Belle,
Carl mcgliori, Heather Faine, Maggie Taylor, Daniella Lucarne, Maya Kanig,
Nicole Morano, Eric Sandler, Royston Berserve, Jacob Weisberg, and my
(29:21):
agent Ben Davis. That Penus Lab is brought to you
by Pushkin Industries and me, Doctor Laurie Santos
Pushkin for So, I just have so many questions to
ask you about what you've been up to for this
past month. This is Katherine Price. Over the last few weeks,
she's become my new guru. I need a guru because
I'm on a mission, a mission to have fun. As
(00:36):
a kid, I used to have fun all the time.
I spent all day playing with friends, goofing around and
just doing lots of random activities that I enjoyed. But
as an adult, not so much. That's why I've turned
to Catherine. You see, Catherine is the author of a
new book called The Power of Fun, How to Feel
Alive Again, and I've asked her to use her expertise
to give me an emergency fun intervention or fun intervention
(01:00):
for short. So far, Catherine's taught me that fun, by definition,
requires a combination of playful, connected flow, and that those
three parts of an experience are wrecked when you're feeling distracted.
So my homework was to train my brain to focus
better by finding delights, those funny, beautiful, delightful things that
are out there all the time but we tend not
to notice. But today I'll be tackling a different problem
(01:23):
embarrassingly enough, even when I have time to focus and
be present, I often just can't think of anything fun
to do. I've sort of forgotten the kinds of things
I like and enjoy. Plus I'm often so exhausted these
days that a lot of the time I kind of
just want to vege on the couch. So today I'll
be rediscovering what feels fun and learning, as Catherine puts it,
(01:44):
to feel alive again. But even though that's the goal,
I'm worried there's a decent chance that my attempts at
finding fun might actually kill me. What's the worst that
can happen? Well, I guess you could give you actually
something No, no, I think like getting concussed, dying, But yeah,
or at the very least, might kill my voice to
do the heart and your to blame. You give loop
(02:07):
a bad name, and you play. So, with those slight
spoilers out there, welcome to Doctor Laurie Santos's Extreme Funtervention
Part two. Our minds are constantly telling us what to
(02:28):
do to be happy. But what if our minds are wrong?
What if our minds are lying to us, leading us
away from what will really make us happy? The good
news is that understanding the science of the mind can
point us all back in the right direction. You're listening
to the Happiness Lab for doctor Laurie Santos. I live
(02:52):
in Philadelphia, relatively close to the School River, which is
a famous rowing river, and I had a neighbor who
had been telling me how she'd been taking rowing lessons
and there were baby turtles in the river, and I'm like, what,
that sounds interesting. So a couple of years ago I
decided to try to learn to row. And her quest
to have fun enjoying guitar classes, drum practices, and swing
dancing workshops. She's an expert on pushing her boundaries in
(03:15):
order to experience more fun, and getting out on the
water was her most recent attempt. So I spent a
summer biking up to Boathouse Row every Thursday morning and
taking lessons from this guy named Brian, who was this
very funny rowing coach, very playfully sarcastic. Those mornings out
on the water were full of playfulness and connection with
coach Brian constantly joking with her through a ridiculous megaphone.
(03:38):
Somebody by the megaphone, like, I just loved it. Rowing
also gave Katherine lots of flow. She was consistently present
on the water, paying attention to her movements, so she
didn't tip over. With these three elements of playfulness, connection
and flow in place, rowing was fun, but don't be fooled.
Fun isn't always about bright skies and perfect sailing. Consider,
(04:00):
for example, the time Catherine went ahead with a row
despite the dark clouds forming, which was a dumb move.
There was nobody else on this river. Torrential downpour started,
but Catherine kept heading over to the spot where her
beloved baby turtles hung out. But there were no turtles
that day, because they're not idiots. Her oars were extra
slippery that day, and all of a sudden she tipped over.
(04:22):
One of those things where you know what's happening and
you cannot do anything about it. And I was like,
I am going into the school, which side note is like,
not a river you really want to swim in. The
occasional body fished out of this thing is not ideal.
Taking a front somersault, fully clothed into very cold, filthy
water in the middle of a huge storm sounds like
my absolute nightmare. But the thing was I actually was
(04:43):
having fun. Like in retrospect, I'm like, I was just
giddy when we got back to the dock and I
started announcing to everyone that I had fallen into the river.
As I cringed at the idea of looking stupid in
front of complete strangers, Catherine got to the moral of
her story. There's a lot of moments in life where
if you can embrace the absurdity of the objectively unpleasant situation,
it's actually pretty fun. For the next step of my
(05:06):
fun intervention, Catherine wanted me to follow her lead try
out a new hobby, ideally one that I'd be reasonably
bad at, in order to ensure that I experience those
juicy moments of absurd unpleasantness. And I reacted to this
suggestion with terror. As a busy adult, I haven't tried
out something completely new and challenging in a very, very
long time. And I'm guessing I'm not alone here. But
(05:29):
I also tend to beat myself up when I'm not
immediately good at something. Turns out, this combination of terror
and self criticism is yet another fun killer. I mean,
if you're self conscious, you can't let yourself go, and
you can't really be playful and it's harder to be connected.
But the biggest way our self judgment can impede fun
is by reducing our flow. Negative self talk clogs up
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our brains inner monologues, with all those rapid fire thoughts
of oh my god, I suck so badly at this.
That's gonna not make it possible for you to be present.
And again, if you're not present, you can't be in flow.
And if you're not in flow, you can't have fun.
I did want to have more fun, so I reluctantly
agreed to Catherine's challenge. But I needed a way to
overcome all my angst about starting a new hobby from scratch.
(06:14):
So I decided to tag in a different kind of expert,
someone who's a pro at being a beginner. This frightening
email comes over from the elementary school. We're having an
apparent talent day. You know, can you come in and
do something? One fateful day, journalist Tom Vanderbilt got a
request that changed his whole approach to life. What you
need talent? Could you show off to a room of
(06:34):
twenty five first graders at his daughter's school. He was
a best selling author, But I couldn't really go in
and write a paragraph in front of a bunch of
kids in a class. We all have our job resumes,
but if you step away from you just your career achievements,
as important as they are, you know, what else are
you doing in your life? And I felt a little bit,
a little bit sparse. Tom had the painful realization that
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he hadn't learned anything new in a long time, which
was ironic since Tom spent a lot of his time
chauffeuring his daughter from chess class to swim practice and
then piano lessons. While she was off having fun and
bill new skills, Tom sat there waiting for her class
to finish, feeling bored and mostly screwing around on his laptop.
Here I was taking her to all these sorts of lessons,
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instilling in her you know how important it was, I thought,
to learn new things, to be as wide raging as
you can. And in my own life I had kind
of frozen in terms of learning these ambitious new skills.
You know, sometime many decades ago, you know, sort of
too late. Why bother, I'm never going to be that great.
Sort of felt like it was a bit hypocritical of
me to be telling her this, and not doing it myself.
Tom realized that, like many of us, he was suffering
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from what Harvard psychologists Dan Gilbert calls the end of
history illusion. I think people often think they are the
finished person they are going to be at any moment.
Gilbert and his colleagues found that if you ask people, hey,
how much do you think your personality, your preferences, and
your core values are going to change in the next
ten years, most people say they're not going to change
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all that much. They assume all these really core things
about their identity are fixed, that they're history in a sense,
has ended. But if you ask the same people, hey,
if you look back at yourself ten years ago, how
much have your values, personality, and preferences changed, People usually
admit that they're really different than they were a decade ago,
that they've changed a lot. This is the end of
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history illusion. We don't think we're going to change and
grow much, but we're wrong. I don't have to be
stuck as this person that doesn't know how to do X,
Y and Z. I can start to try to do
those things even though I'm middle aged. That's why Tom
decided to devote the next few years to becoming a
professional beginner to picking up all the tricky new skills
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he never got around to learning before. It's also why
he's going to try to convince me that face planting
into the water over and over again might just be
the thing I need for the next step of my
funtervention surveys. One of those great things where even the
whiteouts are quite fun. The happiness Lab will be right back.
(09:12):
I use the example of the movie The Queen's Gambit,
which I thought was a great film, very popular film
on Netflix. It seems like everyone saw that. Tom Vanderbilt
finds it a bit sad that people devoted hours and
hours to watching a drama about someone who learns to
play chess instead of watching The Queen's Gabbitt. If you
tried to take five or six hours of chess instruction,
you could actually pick up a fair amount of the game.
(09:35):
After years on the sidelines watching his daughter learned stuff,
he decided to get involved too. I signed up a
coach of all things to try to teach her to
play chess, and then I jumped on, which was a
bit strange. You had these two beginners that were separated
by four decades. Tom didn't stop there He learned how
to sing, how to draw, how to deep water swim,
how to juggle, how to surf, and, since he ended
(09:58):
up losing his wedding ring wall surfing, how to make jewelry.
He chronicled all this in a book called Beginners, The
Joy and Transformative Power of Lifelong Learning. Tom says it's
less of a how to book and more of a
why too book, and the why has a lot to
do with the fact that learning can make us feel
way more present. Being a beginner is almost by definition mindful,
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because you go into an activity really knowing nothing. You know,
you're you're lost, You're you're sort of clueless, and that demands,
you know, almost total attention. And that also felt very
powerful to me, because you know, this idea, especially in
contemporary society, of being so endlessly distracted. You know, I
would draw for three hours and it felt like ten minutes,
(10:41):
and just that having that sense of deep engagement was
also really refreshing. Being an amateur also brought Tom the
excitement that comes from novelty. He had to learn about
ocean waves and musical scales and the bendable properties of metals.
The freshness of all these new topics made it really
easy to focus. I equated in the book to sort
(11:01):
of falling in love. Fittingly, the word amateur comes from
the Italian amatore to love, and even that more pujoy
worative sounding term for a beginner, dilettante, comes from the
Latin delectate to delight. And if you listen to my
last episode, you know experiencing delight is pretty good for
your happiness. You're just plunging into this new world with
(11:22):
new lingo, new equipment. You're moving your body in new
ways that you're thinking in new ways, and I feel
like your brain is sort of on fire. And the
science shows that firing up your brain in this way
is probably a good thing. Research by the psychologist Denise
Park has found that learning new skills may help prevent
the usual cognitive decline that comes as we age. She
had groups of adults learn a skill collectively in a class,
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and she had other groups of adults get together and
just socialize. The older adults who took a class on
photography or quilting did significantly better on tests of memory
and processing speed than adults who merely got together. I
find these results really striking. I mean, you wouldn't think
that learning a specific skill like how to stitch or
when to adjust a shutter speed would have a big
(12:05):
effect on more important general cognitive abilities. We mostly just
start new things because we think they'll be fun, But
becoming a beginner and a random activity seems to give
us a bigger cognitive leg up than we realize. But
hobbies like these don't just boost our brains. Tom found
that his new pursuits also had a surprisingly positive effect
on his sense of personal identity. There's this interesting thing
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that happens when you take up these skills that in
the beginning you're thinking of them purely as a verb.
I'm trying to surf. I'm trying to do this. But
then at some point feel comfortable to shift to the
noun phase and you say, you know, I'm a singer,
I'm a surfer. I've expanded instantly the sensation of who
I am, and the science shows that this self expansion
can enhance something else that's known to boost our happiness,
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our relationships. Couples who participate in novel challenging activities together
experience boosts in relationship satisfaction. The fun that comes from
being a beginner seems to be contagious. But the biggest
benefit of becoming a beginner was something I really needed
for my own funder mention. Learning a new skill is
a great way to fight all our self judgment and perfectionism.
(13:12):
I like to quote the writer GK. Chesterton has said,
anything worth doing is worth doing badly. Tom's book chronicles
lots of cases when we learn best when we're doing
activities that teeter just on the edge of what we
find impossible. He saw this firsthand when he started hanging
out with a population that finds lots of things impossible,
a group you might consider to be the ultimate beginners, babies.
(13:34):
I spent some time with doctor Karen Adolph at NYU
studying how infants learn to walk and to move, and
one of the keys to this learning process is failure.
I mean, they fail a lot. Kids have been photographed
falling up to seventy times an hour, so we should
just embrace failure. The problem, of course, is that failure
doesn't really feel good, which is why Tom practices self compassion,
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that act of recognizing that you're human and talking to
yourself compassionately instead of like a critical drill sergeant Larger
than the physical obstacle is that mental obstacle. I think
positive self talk is a key strategy in all this.
As I heard Tom talk more about cultivating positive self
talk and the benefits that come from embracing failure, I
decided to choose a hobby for my funtervention that, at
(14:20):
least for me, really felt like it was on the
edge of impossible, something I thought I definitely have no
possible way of being good at. And since it was summertime,
I also liked the idea of an activity that involved
hitting the beach, and so I decided that I am
middle aged, mostly out of shape, i'vey towered dwelling professor
with bad knees and no coordination, was going to try surfing.
(14:45):
I announced my decision to Tom, explaining how sure I
was that I would absolutely suck at the sport. Have
you ever actually tried to surf before? Like? So, no?
Why like this race as an interesting point that you're
you're saying you know you're going to be bad at it,
which is already that negative self talk coming up? All right, touche,
(15:06):
I was already admitting defeat in my head, or i'd
even gott and started. You really don't know how you're
going to be because you don't know what that thing is.
But you may actually try it and discover that you're
actually adept at it, or that you take to it
more than you thought you could. Maybe Tom was right.
Maybe I would be better at this than I expected.
Maybe I'd be so good at surfing that I dropped
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the whole podcasting thing and just become a full time
beach bunny. Maybe I'd be a total natural on the board.
That's probably how it's going to go, right Tom, I
wasn't able to get up on the board on my
first afternoon out. I spent a lot of time on
my knees, you know, sort of almost standing. I spent
a lot of time falling. Your surfing is a very
difficult activity. The ocean is very dynamic place. You are
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probably going to fail. That wasn't the rounding endorsement I
was expecting. I'm not going to lie, I'm not going
to sugarcoat it. You're going to look fullish. You might
get hurt, but we have the ability to get back
up and move on. Apparently I'd picked an activity that
really would test my ability to be self compassionate in
the face of sucking badly, but Tom still thought I
(16:11):
should go for it because sucking badly was kind of
the point. What do you have to lose? In fact,
you have to gain quite a bit, I would argue.
Surfing badly is still a very fun activity that will
bring you joy. You don't have to be amazing at it.
Immediately after my chat with Tom, fate seemed to intervene.
My college friend Lucy texted me her family was headed
(16:34):
to a nearby beach house. Beach, of course, meant waves
and waves were just the thing I needed for the
next step of my Funtervention. I asked Lucy if she
joined me for a surf lesson, let me think about it.
That was her noncommittal response. Actually, she followed up, my
husband says I have to do this, so I'm in.
(16:55):
Before she could change her mind, I went online and
found the Little Compton Surf Shop, a small, family run place.
What I liked most about this particular surf shop was
the huge quote on their web page that read, the
best surfer out there is the one that's how the
most fun. I was ready to be just that best surfer.
I booked a lesson for two Operation fun Intervention surfing
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Safari was on, and you'll get to hear test how
it went when the happiness lad returns in a Mormentos
(17:41):
aren't too big. Yeah. One warm August morning, I headed
to Rhode Island with my good friend from college, Lucy Bisignano,
armed with her social support, a beach towel, a wetsuit,
and the strongest hair band I own. I was ready
to become the embodiment of the immortal words of George
Bernard's shaw that man progresses in all things by making
(18:04):
a fool of himself. Yeah, truck, she's recording. Oh, it's
like really bad. Actually feel We met our surf instructors
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for the day, and I handed my recording gear off
to Lucy's daughter, Alice, who agreed to act as my
guest producer, or at least to try to. The wind
wasn't really helping us all that much. Perfect. After some
safety instructions, warm up jumping jack's, and practice pop ups
on the shore, we grabbed our boards and paddled out
(18:47):
into the sea. My lesson was amazing, not because I
caught a bunch of killer waves Like Tom Vanderbilt. I
didn't really figure out how to stand up on the board.
During that first lesson, I also wiped out pretty badly tried.
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I got more salt water up my nose in that
hour and a half lesson than I have in my
entire life. These things should have felt unpleasant, but they didn't.
The whole experience was so fun. Unlike with most other
activities I've done, I was able to focus not on
the product being able to catch a huge wave, but
on the process. How it felt to be lying on
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the board, how I was balancing better and better as
the waves rolled by, how fun it was to chat
with my surf instructor, and just how nice it felt
to be in the sun and the waves on a
perfect summer day. I expected my arms and legs to
be sore afterwards, and they were for days actually, But
the thing that hurt the most after my lesson was
my face from smiling and laughing so much. I was
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excited to tell my guru, Catherine Price, about my fun
interventions surfing success, that I did something that I was
really bad at and that at times was absurdly unpleasant,
but that it wound up being one of the most
fun things I've done in a long time. But Katherine
didn't want me to rest on my laurels. She thought
it was now time to move on to the final
step of my fun intervention, discovering ways to find more
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everyday fun. My first surfing lesson was a total blast,
but as a busy professor, I probably couldn't spend every
day driving across state lines to hit the waves, which
raised a question, how could I start finding more fun
each and every day. So the universal definition of fun,
I would argue, is that it's a state of playful,
connected flow. But each of us find that state through
(20:41):
different things, and something that you find fun, I might
not find fun at all, and vice versa. That is
the purpose of what Catherine calls the fun audit, examining
your own personal fun history. Catherine recommends getting a notebook
and journaling about pastimes in which you experienced true fun.
What were those so fun moments that you treasure, list
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them out and analyze them in detail. Who was there,
what was the setting, what were you doing? Dig into
them like a private investor to gator. And once you
have that, once you have a sense of the people
and the activities in the settings that often are associated
with fun for you, you can go to the next level,
which is what I call figuring out your fun factors,
and those are the characteristics of those people, or those settings,
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or those activities that are in some way responsible for
the fun. Doing my own personal fun audit with Catherine
was perhaps not surprisingly kind of fun. I told her
about goofy Halloween parties that I had with my grad
school roommates, trips to a Boardwalk video arcade with my husband,
the time my producer Ryan and I were unexpectedly given
(21:43):
a rental sports car and got to drive around San
Francisco listening to Duran Duran on repeat, and one of
my most treasured so fun memories, which happened when I
traveled to Texas for a conference a few years ago.
So there's this movie theater in Austin called the Alamo Drafthouse.
They have a whole set of things called Eighties Singalongs
where they play music videos from the eighties that they've
(22:05):
edited to have the text. So it's kind of like
carrio y where you can see what the lyrics are,
but you're supposed to sing over the music videos, and
they give you like eighties gear and glow sticks and
like inflatable microphones and all these things and this is
like the most fun I've had in my life. So
these are just like, oh my gosh, she's got pictures,
(22:26):
some images. So these are my grad students. You can
see the costumes, inflatable mics and things like that. This
is me, you see because a green inflatable guitar and
a pink hair bow. Yes, that looks amazing. Analyzing the
common features of all these events, looking for what Catherine
calls the fun factors, I noticed a few important commonalities.
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All these fun times were social, and most of them
had an active element, like dancing or moving my body.
There was also a lot of spontaneity involved, like trying
something new or traveling to a new place my so
fun activities also involved a healthy dose of absurdity, think
inflatable microphones or getting a ridiculous sports car, or the
(23:07):
crazy costumes I had eighties sing along. But there was
one specific fun factor that really surprised me. It seems
like one of my fun factors that I wouldn't have
expected actually is music, which is surprising because I'm not
musically inclined at all. I don't play an instrument. I
don't think of myself as a good singer. But when
I think to moments of peakue fun, they have this
element of music. Finding surprises like these is just the
(23:30):
sort of insight a fun audit can bring, and everyone's
audit it's going to look different. You might detest music
in costumes, but might really love being physical, or being
out in nature or taking risks. The key is to
figure out the specific fun factors that make up your
own personal recipe for fun. But Catherine's found that we
also need to analyze are anti fun factors. They're characteristics
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that if those characteristics are present in an experience, you're
probably not going to have fun. And I think it's
very important to put some attention into identifying them because
in a lot of cases, other people might find them fun,
and you might find yourself getting drag belonged to these
experiences and then wondering why you never had fun. Thinking
about my own experiences, I realize that one of my
key anti fund factors is competition. If there are games
(24:14):
that we're playing that are cooperative or that are just
about the absurdity of the game or something, I'm really
into it. But when a game has like obvious winners
and losers, it's like less fun. For me. Just as
with fun factors, your own anti fund factors are going
to be really personal. You might love competition, but to
test the beach or getting dirty, or any activities that
(24:36):
involve a lot of preparation or equipment. There are lots
of things that could be an anti fun factor. And
that's why it's so important to put time into thinking
about what you liked and didn't like in the past,
because the better you understand these things, the easier it
will be for you to spend your time wisely, frankly.
And if you can understand that, then you can make
different choices about how you're going to spend your leisure time,
which well we do have I think more available to
(24:58):
us than we realize, because we're wasting a lot of
it right now, it is limited. I thought back to
how I often spend my own free time. When I
get a break, I tend to do something passive, like
plopping down on the and watching Netflix or reading a book.
Leisure activities like that are relaxing, but they're definitely not
fun in the playful, connected, flow inducing sense, and they
(25:19):
usually don't involve almost any of the fun factors I
just identified my fun audit revealed that to get more
everyday fun, I need to be doing more stuff that
involves music, or having friends around, or taking part in
activities that feel a bit more physical or spontaneous. I
also need to find ways to recreate that sing along
from my Texas trip, which was a fun factor that
(25:40):
Catherine supported more than I had expected. You and I
clearly share a lot of fun factors, like a lot
of them, because that looks like my dream fun as
I want to be there right now. And that's when
Catherine got the idea for the final step in my
fun intervention. Since eighties sing along seemed to be the
magical confluence of all my fun factors at once. Catherine
(26:00):
thought it would be good, purely for scientific purposes, of course,
to experience that true fun moment right there in my house.
Luckily happened to have some old inflatable microphones from that
trip lying around. I just want to be with you.
We were both a little rusty, but our impromptu sing
along was awesome. What says You've been got our spur
(26:22):
of the moment sing along only last an hour or so,
but having that moment of true fun right in the
middle of my day wound up, making me feel totally
alive for days. Oddly enough, taking a short break to
privately croon like a rock star made me feel even
more productive through the rest of my work week, never
(26:49):
realizing my love of sing alongs also took me right
back to where the story began. As a kid, I
was obsessed with singing songs from the Peter Pan Musical.
Back then, I thought I'd never grow up. I believed
I'd never turn my back on fun. I never thought
adult me would prioritize work and productivity over the delights
of moving around. Turns out that wise fun loving kid
(27:10):
wasn't entirely lost. She was just hidden below the surface.
All it took was a fun intervention and an inflatable
microphone to set her free. I hope hearing about the
power of fun inspires you to figure out some ways
that you can increase playfulness, connection, and flow. Why don't
you take some time to think about the moments you
remember is so fun? Do your own fun audit, and
(27:33):
make sure you also pay attention to activities that currently
pass for fun in your life but don't actually feel
all that good. By taking time to identify your own
personal fun factors, no matter how surprising, you can better
understand what they are and proactively seek them out in
your daily life. You can even find some new hobbies
that make you feel a little bit more alive. And
(27:53):
the science shows that getting more fun in your life
isn't justest going to be fun. It can also increase
your productivity. And as I saw firsthand during my surf lesson,
making more time for fun can also help you be
a little bit more compassionate with yourself, which is something
we all need these days. And so that's a rap
for Season three of The Happiness Lab. But we'll be
(28:14):
back in a few months with more science based tips
that you can use to feel better. In the meantime,
I'll be setting aside my podcast Mike to get in
some quality time with my inflatable mic instead. Catherine. Let's
do this than do you you? Now? I get? Three?
(28:36):
First A Soloman Yeah, yeah, thanks to you. Thanks to you,
Now I get Yeah. You should know now I get.
The Happiness Lab is co written and produced by Ryan Delley.
Our original music was composed by Zachary Silver, with additional scoring,
(28:59):
mixing and mastering by Evan Biola. Joseph Fridman checked our
facts Sophie Crane mckibbon edited our scripts. Emily Anne Vaughan
offered additional productions for it Special thanks to Miela Belle,
Carl mcgliori, Heather Faine, Maggie Taylor, Daniella Lucarne, Maya Kanig,
Nicole Morano, Eric Sandler, Royston Berserve, Jacob Weisberg, and my
(29:21):
agent Ben Davis. That Penus Lab is brought to you
by Pushkin Industries and me, Doctor Laurie Santos
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