Stop Caring What Other People Think of You (Bruce Hood on 10% Happier with Dan Harris)

Bruce Hood was a mentor of Dr Laurie early in her academic career and now teaches a course on happiness based on her famous Yale class. Hear him discuss his top tips on 10% Happier with Dan Harris.  

Find out more about Dan Harris and 10% Happier at https://www.danharris.com

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin. The Happiness Lab's summer break is almost over. After
Labor Day, we'll be bringing you a new season with
a back to school reading list featuring some of my
favorite psychology books of the year. As usual, this new
season will be packed with happiness tips that I'm sure
you'll love, and our list includes some of my personal heroes.

(00:38):
So get ready for your favorite podcast host to be
nerding out of it. But before all that, I want
to share a conversation between two longtime friends of The
Happiness Lab. Today you'll get to hear a recent episode
of the ten Percent Happier podcast where the amazing Dan
Harris interviews my former mentor, Professor Bruce Hood. Bruce teaches
the same happiness class I teach at Yale to his

(01:00):
own students at the University of Bristol in England. If
you liked the episode, and really, why wouldn't you be
sure to add ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris to
your podcast?

Speaker 2 (01:15):
Hey? Hey, everybody, how we doing Today? We're going to
talk to one of the world's leading happiness experts about
how to boost your levels of okayness and optimism while
turning down the volume on distraction. Ego centrism, self consciousness,
and toxic comparison. Pretty good recipe. Bruce Hood has been

(01:36):
the Professor of Developmental Psychology in Society at Bristol University
since nineteen ninety nine. He got a PhD in neuroscience
at Cambridge, followed by appointments at University College London, MIT
and a faculty professorship at Harvard. He researches child development,
origins of superstition, self identity, and ownership. For the past

(01:57):
five years, however, he's really been concentrating on how to
make his students happier. As you'll hear him say here,
he noticed a steep decline in happiness levels among his students,
which tracks with the overall data on this front. And
so he's written a book. I don't want to call
it new, but it's his latest book, and it's called
The Science of Happiness. Seven Lessons for Living Well. In

(02:19):
this conversation we talk about how do you define happiness
it's a pretty slippery term, actually, How to be happy
when you're in the middle of a shit show. How
to shift from being egocentric or self focused to allocentric
meaning essentially interconnected, The impacts of social isolation and how
to avoid that, the challenge of optimism and how to
overcome it and actually boost your optimism quotient, finding a

(02:42):
flow state through meditation, How to enhance your social connections
where quote unquote true authentic happiness comes from controlling your
attention and rejecting negative comparisons, the role of nature, and
much more. By the way, if you want to learn
how to reduce your overthinking, specifically which is a big
problem for many of us, myself included, if you want

(03:03):
to learn how to turn down the volume on that,
we have a custom guided meditation for you, specifically tailor
to this episode. It comes from our teacher of the month,
Don Mauricio. Throughout this entire month, we're offering these meditations
only to paid subscribers who sign up at Dan Harris
dot com. The analogy we like to use is that
you can think of this podcast as the lecture like

(03:23):
when you were in school, and the guided meditations are
like the lab where you pound the wisdom of the
conversation into your neurons. You can get all the meditations,
plus add free versions of this podcast and access to
my live video sessions where I guide meditation. You can
get all of that and much more over at Dan
Harris dot com. Join the party, Professor Bruce Hood, Welcome

(03:45):
to the show. Hello, Don, I'd love to get a
little backstory on this book on happiness. I understand it,
and you'll correct me if I run a foul of
the facts here. But you spend much of your career
as a neuroscientist studying childhood development and also teaching, and
you started to notice a change in your college students

(04:09):
which prompted you to pivot into looking at happiness. Am
I roughly in the zone here?

Speaker 3 (04:17):
Yeah? Absolutely. I mean I've had a long and varied
career and i have a bit of a magpie. I'm
really interested in anything which stimulates my curiosity, and I've
always been fascinated by the human mind and how it develops.
So that was my interest in the neuroscience of child development,
and I've studied everything babies as young as twenty three

(04:40):
minutes up in the majority hospital, all the way up
into adulthood. But about twenty eighteen we had a tragic
set of events at Bristol University with a loss of
several students, and this was really the peak of a
rising tide in student mental health issues. And I was
feeling quine of desperate with all these unhappy young adults,

(05:03):
because for me, university should be the best time of
your life, the most rewarding, and yet they were so
preoccupied with their mental health and their performance that they
were becoming almost impossible to teach because they were really
so distressed. And by coincidence, I was looking around I
discovered that a former student of mine, Laurie Santos, who

(05:25):
I believe is a good friend of yours. Laurie had
encountered a very similar problem at Yale, and this led
me to think, well, it wasn't Bristol per se, It's
actually a sector wide issue. A whole generation of students
are increasingly unhappy. And she put together a course I
think it was called Psychology and the Good Life. And
I contacted Laurie, so this sounds really, really great, and Laurie,

(05:47):
being typically generous as she is, sent me in her
notes and some slides, and I put together my version
I called the Science of Happiness. I really just did
it on the off chance that might make some difference.
It wasn't a credit bearing course, it was just offered,
and I was at lunchtime. I remember it vividly. Six
hundred turned up and I didn't even have to advertise it,
so clearly there was a demand for this sort of information.

(06:10):
So that's how it started. And then the university were
so delighted by the response they said, look, can you
turn this into a credit bearing course, and that became
the unit that I now teach since twenty nineteen, and
like Laurie's course is very.

Speaker 2 (06:25):
Popular and now a book, and now a book.

Speaker 3 (06:28):
I mean, I've written a number of books, and as
I said, my interests are really in the human mind.
I'm fascinated by aspects of human thought that at first
glance doesn't seem more surprising, and then when you drill
down into it, it can be really interesting. And I'm
really fascinated by the theory behind the mechanisms. So there's

(06:50):
more than enough happiness books out there, but I thought
I could contribute something from my perspective, which is more
about why, more about the mechanisms of what generates or
gets in the way of achieving happiness, And that's what
I felt was the contribution to the literature.

Speaker 2 (07:06):
Do you have a definition of happiness?

Speaker 3 (07:07):
A question I'm often asked for me. I just simply say,
it's a sense of things being comfortable. I mean that
in a very general term, it's emotionally comfortable, a sense
of fear being comfortable, just that sense of not complacency,
but comfort. Things are okay. That's what I mean by happiness,

(07:29):
though of course people use it in different ways. Sometimes
they're referring to your mood and your relation or your joy.
Sometimes it's people are referring to success, they're content. But
for me it's comfort.

Speaker 2 (07:42):
Comfort Or would you say okayness would be a synonym okayness.

Speaker 3 (07:47):
Yeah, if that was a word, yeah, it would be okayness.
Things are just going okay. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (07:52):
Can you have okayness and happiness and comfort even in
the midst of life's inevitable ups and downs.

Speaker 3 (08:01):
Well, that's the interesting thing, isn't it. I mean, in
many ways it could have been the size of unhappiness,
because that's more or less the default. Our lives are
full of challenges, and it's the extent to which we
can address these challenges and rebound back for them, I
think is really what marks the difference between someone who
regards their life as being relatively happy compared to someone
who feels unhappy, someone who's unhappy tends to feel that

(08:23):
they're not progressing, they're uncomfortable, they're feeling stressed, they're not
joying many aspects of it, and very often it's because
they're unable to address whatever obstacles are happening to them.
And we all face them and on the course, that's
what we kind of teach. It's really how to process
those negative events, how to deal with them, how to
resolve them, how to build resilience. And I think that's

(08:46):
really what we're trying to achieve.

Speaker 2 (08:48):
In the dharma and Buddhism by which I'm deeply influenced.
The word that's coming to mind is equanimity, which I
think of as like an okayness in the face of
life's catastrophes.

Speaker 3 (09:02):
Yeah, I think that captures it very well. And the
other thing, of course, is that there's no such thing
as permanent happiness. That would be a very awkward and
weird state of mind. In many ways, you have to
experience the negative in order to appreciate when things are
going well for you. But again, it's this stability to
overcome this in the speed at which you can do that,
it's when you're wallowing in misery and wallowing in those

(09:25):
negative thoughts. That's generally what um happiness is to me
at least.

Speaker 2 (09:28):
Yeah, I'm just thinking of my own life. I've been
very public about this. I went through a three plus
year divorce from my former co founders of a meditation
app that I co founded, and it was very traumatic
for me. That's not to cast dispersions at my former
co founders. It took two to tango in this separation,
but the amount of anger and anxiety that I felt

(09:50):
in those years was intense, probably the most difficult thing
I've gone through as an adult. And yet I was
generally happy during the whole thing. Yes, my relationships are
really good, and my outlook was reasonably positive, and there
were challenges in my life insomnia, anger, anxiety, and also

(10:11):
they were great years in my life.

Speaker 3 (10:14):
Yeah, And I think it reflects the effort you put
into that business and the personal attachment to it, and
those are exactly the sorts of situations where you can
feel really, you know, not so much desperate, but it
really can impact on you more than you would imagine.
I've done a startup in the past, and it's your
little child, it's your baby. You know you want it
to grow, and you want it to thrive, and you're

(10:34):
very protective of it, and of course when it starts
to be threatened or taken away from you, it's a
separation anxiety, a separation loss. So I totally get it.

Speaker 2 (10:42):
Yeah, my point was less about the loss and more
about the fact that you can be happy if you're
working on the skills that we're going to talk about
that you describe in your book. One can be happy
in the midst of a shit show.

Speaker 3 (10:54):
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, No, I agree with that as well.
I mean, we all have facets of our life and
sometimes it's not always working perfectly. But in general, going
back to that opening statement, it's a general sense that
things are okay as it were on balance.

Speaker 2 (11:07):
Yes, the book is rctured around seven lessons. Let's walk
through them. I don't know if we'll get through all
of them, but they're really interesting. Lesson one is alter
your ego, which I really like as a phrase. What
do you mean by that?

Speaker 3 (11:22):
So one of the problems I think is that most
of us live inside our heads. What I mean by
that is our conscious awareness and our feelings, our emotions
are the contents of our minds, and so we start
off as a very egocentric individual. As children, we literally
have difficulty conceiving other people's minds and imagining what other
people are thinking about. And that's actually one of the

(11:44):
major developmental processes over childhood is learning to appreciate that
other people have different thoughts and have different feelings and
reading other people and then learning to cooperate and communicate
and interact with them in a way. But we never
lose the egocentric bias or dominance, so we still tend
to see things from our own perspective. That can be

(12:05):
okay unless you start to turn in on yourself and
start to become your own word critic. And I think
this is the point, because children are very egocentric. They
think they're the fastest runners, and they're there. They always
kind of tried to show up to their parents. But
as they start to become unculturated and mix with other children,
then a lot of the anxieties and social statuses start
to enter into that kind of those thought processes, so

(12:26):
they start to develop aspects which are threatening self esteem,
and we start to become more aware of our status
and our standing and hyper sensitive to criticism. And that's
why adolescence is very much typlified by a sense of
wanting to belong, wanting to be accepted, and why rejection
is so painful because we're such a social animal, and

(12:46):
I know you've talked about this on previous podcasts, that
is absolutely imperative to kind of get on with everyone,
because the worst thing you could do is isolate ostracize.
So when I say alter your ego, I think you
should shift from a kind of very sod inward looking
sense of self to considering and integrating with other people.
So I call it shift from egocentric to allocentric thinking.

(13:07):
And the reason that really helped is I think it
reduces the pain or the pressure that you feel when
you see things in context, because you can start to
see other people have things going on in their lives.
And when you become more appreciative of other people's lives,
then I think it puts yours into perspective. And of
course you get the benefits of social connection or the

(13:28):
support that others can give you. If you're just dealing
with your own shit show, as you say, then it
can be incredibly isolating and amplified. And that's why I
think we need to become more integrated, and all the
evidence is totally in support of the notion of social connection.

Speaker 2 (13:42):
So how does one move from egocentrism to allocentrism.

Speaker 3 (13:46):
Well, many of the positive psychology interventions that people typically
do are effectively doing that. So if you think of
expressing gratitude or acts of kindness where you're actually force
fully taking into consideration other people's circumstances. If you're doing
an active kindness, you're literally reaching out to other people
and trying to help them, so you kind of have
to be a bit mindful of what their thoughts are about.

(14:06):
If you're writing gratitude, you're starting to see yourself in
the context of not only how lucky you are, but
the way that other people have helped you along the way,
and therefore you're sort of expressing that connectedness with others
around you. So those are two simple ways you can
do that. One of the techniques I like, and I
use it often in my public lectures is Ethan Cross's
work on psychological distancing, where you use language literally to

(14:30):
get out of your head. So most of us think
in the first person, you know, I, me, and so on.
But if you start talking about yourself in the third person,
like Bruce is having this conversation with Dan. That linguistic
shift tricks the mind of this ecocentric perspective, and one
of the benefits of that is it reduces sort of
the impact of negative thoughts. But we never, unless we're royalty,

(14:50):
we never talk about ourselves in the third person. It's
very unusual thing to do. So it's a kind of
neat little party trick that I use to show that
if you think about a problem and I say, okay,
imagine something that's gone really terribly wrong for you at
the moment I talk about it using IE and express
your feelings using I and me, people will then feel
pretty rubbish. But if I say, now, repeat that, but
talk about as Bruce is having this discussion and he

(15:12):
thinks it's not going so well and he's worried about.
When you distance yourself using language, then somehow it doesn't
seem to affect you as much. So that's another kind
of simple trick you can do. But yeah, a lot
of the things that we do are social interactions by
their very nature take us out of this very inwardly
looking way in order to kind of interact and communicate
with other people.

Speaker 2 (15:33):
Hard to do in an era of increasing isolation driven
by rampant individualism and technology. I want to pick up
on and elaborate upon. You had three suggestions when it
comes from moving from ecocentrism to allocentrism, and I want
to just expand on two of them. The list was
acts of kindness, expressing gratitude and psychological distancing. So in

(15:55):
terms of acts of kindness, one little hack within a
hack comes from my meditation teacher, Joseph Goldstein, who I
quote all the time to the point of closing in
on plagiarism, except for I do give him credit. One
of his little techniques is if you have a thought
to do something generous. These thoughts come to us all

(16:15):
day long, but mostly we squelch them. Ah, they may
not want it, or I don't have time to do that,
or actually that's too expensive. But we have these thoughts.
If you can try to make a practice of tuning
into the thoughts and not getting suckered by the second thoughts.
So when you have a thought to give, do the thing.

(16:36):
Joseph's been practicing this for many, many years, and I'm
more recently started. I don't always follow through, but when
I do follow through. It's incredibly useful. Like walking down
the street in New York City and I see somebody
asking for money, but like, you know, my spare changes
in my backpack and I'm gonna rush, and then like
I'll get ten feet down the street and be like,
you know what, fuck it. Let me just get the

(16:57):
money out and go back and do it. And it
always feels good. Yeah, And then the other thing to
pick up on on psychological distancing. Ethan Cross has been
on the show several times. I'm deeply influenced by this
note of psychological distancing, especially in moments of suffering where
you can use your own name or I'll say dude,
like dude, yeah, this is a brutal situation. I use

(17:21):
it a lot with insomnia. You're likely to get two
hours of sleep tonight, and you are likely to be
reasonably unhappy most of tomorrow. But you have been through
this a million times. You will be fine and the
next night, you know you will get sleep. So you're good.
You're good, and it's enormously powerful.

Speaker 3 (17:39):
Yeah, I agree entirely. And it's like, rather than being
a critic, it's like being your coach, yes, and hearing
that support from someone else is just what you need
sometimes to get perspective. But left to our own devices,
we have this kind of tendency to spiral inward and
blow everything out of proportion. So that's really what that
kind of chapter is trying to unpick. And also the
whole sense of self is something that's fascinating me. If

(18:01):
you're a Buddhist, then you'll be fairly aware of the
kind of controversy of the whole issue what is the self?
And for me, I love the idea it's constructed, which
means can change. And so I really embrace the Buddhist
approach on that, which is to see ourselves as a
story unfolding and a story which can be rewritten and
change over time, which means that nothing is inevitable. And
I think that's a hopeful message because very often when

(18:22):
you speak to people who are in the depth of despair,
one of the things they think is that things can
ever change. But they do change.

Speaker 2 (18:30):
Yes, I think that is enormously powerful, enormously powerful. Just
on a definitional tip, I should have asked this earlier,
but can you define alocentric versus egocentric? I'm guessing that
egocentric is that your sense of self really is based
in your own ego, and alocentric is based in a

(18:51):
sense of all.

Speaker 3 (18:53):
Yeah, so if you imagine we call them sociograms, if
you imagine yourself at the center and then all the
people around you and your spheres that were, and you
represent that as a series of arrows and how you're
connected to people. Someone who's overly egocentric will first of
all represent themselves as big and large and everyone else
is more diminutive, and it's all going in one direction.

(19:13):
It's all about me. We call them narcissists and sometimes
are very successful and rise to positions of power. But yeah,
we're not going to go there. That's all very well,
But unfortunately we can't all be narcissists because if that
was the case, then nothing would ever get done. You need,
as a social animal, we need to interact with each other.
Alocentric again, you can represent that as a socioground. But

(19:35):
now you can see the connections between the people outside
of your circle. You start to see that it's all
reciprocal and it all requires give and take, and you
see yourself as more interconnected with others around you. So
it's really that kind of distinction between yourself at the
center of your own universe, and anyone with a kind
of a young child will know what they're like. They
can be incredibly ecocentric, shifting from that kind of natural

(19:58):
developmental tendency to one where you're starting to take into
consideration the impact you have on others and also reciprocally
interact with them. And I think that's what I mean
by alo. It means other other folks are alcentric. So yeah,
that's the kind of general story that I think is
But we never lose the egocentric view, is what I'm saying.
We've got to keep fighting that, We've got to keep
working on that, and that's why I think a lot

(20:20):
of the positive psychology interventions work. Even something like meditation,
you know that works because it tries to quell the
disturbed mind. As you well know, if you're focusing on
your breath, you're shifting it away from the internal dialogue.
You're monitoring either your breathing or you're monitoring external sources,
So you're shifting the attentional focus away from the inner monologue,
is what I'm saying.

Speaker 2 (20:41):
Yeah, just a slight tweak, it's not so much quelling
the disturbing mind. It's accepting the disturbing mind, which then
leads to a kind of calming or dissipation, because you're
seeing that it consists of fluxing constituent parts.

Speaker 3 (21:01):
That's right, the form of callague of mind. Dan Wagner
used to talk about this ironic thought suppression. So if
you try to stop your thoughts, so you try to
suppress them, then you get a stronger rebound effect because
the act of trying to stop yourself having a thought
makes it paradoxically stronger. So that's why the acceptance is
a better way of dealing with it, rather than drawing
attention towards them.

Speaker 2 (21:21):
I want to go back to your social graph. Is
that what you were calling it social sociogram sociogram?

Speaker 3 (21:27):
So, Dan, if you were to draw a sociogram, it
would include obviously your nearest and dearest, and you'd have
the strength of your relationship there, and then there'd be
people on the further away from you in your circle
of friends, and then there'd be the people that you
encounter on a daily basis. So you can represent these
as interconnections. You can represent the strength of that as
the thickness of the line if you like, but as

(21:48):
the extent to which you feel that you're reciprocating. So
you might feel this very strong reciprocal relationship with your
spouse hopefully, or you're near some dearest, but then if
it's others outside of that, you could see as being
weaker or stronger, more reciprocal or not. So it's really
how you kind of visualize our interactions. It's used by
psychologists and sociologists to represent our map out the networks

(22:10):
that we engage in.

Speaker 2 (22:11):
The reason why I went back to it is that
thinking in visual analogies, and I'll run one by you.
The self in the era of social media seems to
exist in a hall of mirrors where everything reflects back
upon you. If you're looking at other people, you're comparing
yourself to them, and if you're posting things, you're waiting

(22:32):
for people to like it. It really reinforces, and I think
a quite insidious way, egocentrism. Whereas in the Dharma, the
analogy they use is Indra's net, where you are a
node in a vast web, and at each node of

(22:54):
that web there is a mirror that reflects all the
other nodes. So basically your head is pulled out of
your ass. You're not stuck in sollabsism, you are embedded
in a larger universe. That view is really soothing.

Speaker 3 (23:11):
Yes, I agree with that entirely. I think your comments
about social media are spot on. In many ways. It's
antisocial because it's this sort of compare and despair phenomena
that we keep hearing about. That people are only validating
themselves or seeking validation the entire time, which is like
a very needy child. So I go back to this
sort of ecocentric bias that a lot of us are

(23:32):
born with. Well, we're all born with it. It's the
extent to which we can relinquish it and let go
of that and see ourselves as more interconnected is really
the path of becoming a happier person, because otherwise you're
always going to be comparing and you're always going to
feel inadequate, and it doesn't matter on whatever dimension you're
thinking about, there's always someone who's doing better than you.
And if you succumb to social media and try to

(23:55):
measure up to all these unrealistic measures of success, you're
just never going to really do. So that's why it's
really not the best place to spend your time. I
think people are kind of wising up to it. But
you know, I look around around on Metropolis, So you
go through a city, everyone is staring at their phones.
They're taking away what were the basic niceties of exchanging information,

(24:17):
like asking for directions or whatever. All the sorts of
things which required us to have those little subtle communications
have disappeared. And that's why I think we're becoming increasingly isolated.

Speaker 2 (24:28):
As you say, it's counterintuitive because you would think the
best way to get happy is to focus on yourself,
and yet that's only partly true.

Speaker 3 (24:37):
Yeah, and I think there is a generational thing here.
I mean this whole identity thing which was driving a
lot of the younger generations focusing on the self, prioritizing
self care. I mean, yeah, sure you should look after yourself,
but not to the exclusion of others around you. And
I think it's getting the balance right. What I'm not suggesting,
by the way, I should just say, is not that
you become self less. I think that's equally bad. You

(24:59):
need to get the balance right because it's the interconnection
of things which is the importance. I think we talked
about that in the later chapter, which we're not there yet.

Speaker 2 (25:07):
But yeah, I just put up button on this first lesson.
I have a little tattoo that says for the benefit
of all beings, and that is not a call for
calamitous altruism because all beings includes me, So it really
does speak to a balance. Yeah, you did use the
word isolation, and that does bring us to lesson number two,

(25:28):
which is to avoid isolation. Can you say more about that?

Speaker 3 (25:32):
It stems from this well established finding that of all
the things which contribute to our earlier deaths, it turns
out that isolation loneliness seems to play one of the
most important factors, which I think was really striking when
this data started to merge. It's not just our physical
but it's our mental. Health depends on our social connections,

(25:52):
and that's why we're so sensitive to any potential threat
of being isolated or ostracized or rejected. That's why we
feel it emotionally. Emotions have the same word as motivation
that come from the Latin meaning to move, So emotions
drive us to do things. They move us to do things,
and one of the things we're driven to do is
avoid being isolated because it's so critically important to us

(26:17):
in our evolution. No old people, by the way, I mean,
I would say whenever I've said those people say, well,
I kind of like my isolation, So I would say,
of course, there are moments of solitude which can be
very beneficial, but in general, most of our behavior is
driven towards our social interactions. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (26:35):
Look, there's a spectrum introversion, extraversion spectrum, and if you're
further along the introversion spectrum, you don't need as many
social interactions or close friends, but you do need some.
And also there's a question of agency. Are you isolated
because you've chosen in a healthy way to get some
alone time, or are you isolating because you've chosen in

(26:56):
an unhealthy anger or fear based way, or because you've
been shunned or excommunicated by your own personal tribe. That
agency factors matters a lot.

Speaker 3 (27:09):
Yeah. Nelson Mandela wrote about it in his autobiography The
Long Walk to Freedom. He talked about his time on
Robin Island when he was put into solitary confinement, and
he said it was the worst. People prefer to be
physically tortured rather than isolated, So that just speaks to
the power of that is for people who require.

Speaker 2 (27:25):
That you have some data in the book about the
impact of social isolation on pain tolerance and reaction to stress.
Can you say a little bit more about that.

Speaker 3 (27:34):
Yeah, this is not my work directly. I'm referring to
a series of Actually, there's a bunch of researchers doing this.
There's work with his epidemiology work looking at morbidity risks. Famously,
loneliness has a morbidity risk which is equivalent to fifteen
spooking fifteen cigarettes today. I think it is a famous biteline.
But then there's more experimental studies looking at inducing pain. So,

(27:57):
for example, you can give people electric shocks and people
will tolerate much higher levels of pain if they're with
somebody with her with a partner. All of these sort
of speak to the beneficial effect of having the support
around you. I know you were speaking to Robert Woldinger.
I think there's some evidence from the Harvard study showing
again that social isolation is a really major contributing factor

(28:19):
to earlier death. So I think these are all pointing
along the same lines that there's a real benefit to
having good, strong social relationships. And now, of course social
support provides the law practical things as well, you know,
just looking after your health, having someone tell you, you know,
maybe you shouldn't be doing this, maybe you shouldn't be
doing that. So I think there's lots of benefits.

Speaker 2 (28:40):
Yeah. Waldinger's work has been very influential on mine. For
those who don't know him, he's the latest director of
the Harvard Study for Adult Development. It's one of the
longest running studies in the history of science and following
many generations of families in the Boston area trying to
get a sense of what are the variables that lead
to a long and healthy life and dumb most important

(29:00):
variable is the quality of your relationships. And I often,
you know, wag my finger at people and say, look,
we're in an era of optimization. Everybody's tracking their steps,
tracking their sleep, trying to achieve kotosis, whatever it is.
But this is the thing to optimize, and very few
people are talking about this on social media. So let
me put it to you. If lesson number two in

(29:21):
your book is to avoid isolation, what are the practical
steps we can do to get there?

Speaker 3 (29:26):
Well, I think reaching out to people in a way
that doesn't necessarily involve technology. I mean a phone, of
course is a good way to connect, but basically reconnect
with people in a way which is meaningful, rather than
just sending a text or something which is cursory. People
generally don't do that because they're kind of fearful that
maybe it'll be awkward, maybe they don't want to impose.

(29:48):
But I think I'll talk about this in a lated chapter.
It turns out, and this is Nick Apley's work from Chicago,
that actually people really enjoy the spontaneous connections. Other things
I've talked about in the book are all about joining
a choir, finding the third place, which is disappearing. It
used to be the sort of opportunities just to spontaneously
meet other people. So you know, you get a dog,

(30:09):
go for a walk with the park of the dog,
and you soon start talking to other dog owners. This
is phenomenon that when you've got a shared interest, then
you can start interacting with other humans. So I think
it's just recognizing every opportunity you can to forge those
social connections and take it and speaking exchange and a
compliment with a barista or whoever's ser You know, very

(30:31):
often their days are very mundane, and people are not
talking to them, but make the effort just to reach
out to others because they will probably enjoy it more
than you imagine.

Speaker 2 (30:40):
Barbara Fredrickson, who's been on this show, has done a
lot of good work around what are called micro interactions,
talking to the barista, the mailman, people you're passing in
the hallway on the street, and that's like an under tapped,
overlooked source of happiness in your daily life. But just
want to go back to something you said about third places.
What can you define that for people?

Speaker 3 (31:00):
Well, the third places were basically not work and not home.
And they used to be the bars or the clubs
or all those social gatherings that where people could meet.
They didn't necessarily have to be their spouse or their
work colleagues. It was other people where they could talk
about things that they wouldn't necessarily talk about with their
spouse or with their work colleagues. And I think that
is rapidly disappearing, the Bowling Alley culture. I can't remember who.

Speaker 2 (31:23):
It's a Robert Putnam bowling alone.

Speaker 3 (31:25):
That's right, Yeah, I think he coined that term. It's
what's fast disappearing in a world of technology, where you
can immerse yourself entirely in virtual worlds, and so a
lot of the third spaces are disappearing. I mean they're disappearing.
In the UK, we used to have youth holes and
places where the kids were hanging out and doing things,
but now that seems to be rapidly evaporating. So yeah,

(31:47):
it's those places which facilitate communications with people who aren't
necessarily your immediate family or your work colleagues.

Speaker 2 (31:54):
Yeah. The Surgeon General are now former Surgeon General of
the THEI Murthy. His recommendation here is volunteer. You know,
if there's no bowling league near you, just volunteer at
a soup kitchen or a had adoption agency or whatever.
It is a great way to meet other people and
also it's ennobling.

Speaker 3 (32:13):
Yeah, my wife does that now. She was a physician
and she retired several years back. For the past year
now she's been volunteering with a soup kitchen. It's one
of her most enjoyable experiences. She just loves to talk
to people anyway, so it's a real opportunity to kind
of connect. So yeah, it's surprisingly rewarding.

Speaker 2 (32:34):
Coming up, Bruce Hood talks about how to control your
attention and reject negative comparisons, the challenge of optimism and
how to overcome that challenge finding a flow state through
meditation and much more lesson number three is reject negative comparisons.

Speaker 3 (32:58):
Yeah, well, this is because we have a brain which
has really evolved pay special attention to negative information. And
the argument is along the lines that it's much better
from a active evolutionary point of view to sort of
attend to things which may potentially eliminate you from the
gene pool. So that's why you paid more attention to
bad news or threats than sitting on your laurels and

(33:21):
just thinking life is going fine, because only takes one
really bad thing to take you out of the equation.
So this is a line of work which fits with
a series of really quite different studies showing that we
seem to focus more on negative information. So if you're
listening to stories or you're reading the paper. There's one
great study where they got people to they thought they

(33:42):
were actually doing a study of reading papers, but they
were looking at the eye movements and they were noticing
that people were focusing on all the negative information. So
there is this sort of bias in our brains to
really pay attention to that. Visually, we spot people sprowning
more than we spot smiling, and screens are more attentive
than so everything is wired from a very sensory basic

(34:03):
level to pay attention to negative information, and then of
course at a more cognitive thought pro level, we tend
to ruminate and fixate on things when they've gone wrong
more than when they're going right. And as a writer,
I assure you, you know, I can't stop myself, you know,
looking at that negative review, despite the fact that everyone
thinks it's a great book apart from that one person,
and that will just niggle and either way at me,

(34:25):
and I've got to really use that third person distance
they stop yourself. That's just silly. But yeah, that's part
of the reason we seem to be specially attentive. Also,
we form impressions are stronger when we hear negative information,
and it's really difficult to overcome something when we've heard
something bad about somebody. So being balanced is quite a challenge.

Speaker 2 (34:44):
So what can we do about this?

Speaker 3 (34:47):
Well, being mindful of it is good, as I said,
and also trying to deliberately avoid well see social media,
I think is also I think a recipe for it's
at least a solution to some expent, especially if you
are a sensitive to criticism. Just be mindful of what's
going right in your life and focus on that. I
think that's what I would suggest, and I really should
probably mentioned this earlier. But the act of writing things down,

(35:10):
I think is an incredibly powerful exercise. And one of
the things we recommend is actually writing down things which
have gone well for you. So this is the writing
of the Three Good Things. Now, I don't know, it's
probably Sonny a little bit Merski or one of these
other guys who've done this as well, but the Three
Good Things. Marty Siligman will doubtedly have done work on this.
But it's the proactive behavior of writing things down in

(35:31):
a journal. And the reason that's very powerful is, first
of all, it gets you off your phone and secondly,
it allows you to keep a record, and I think
that's a very important device keeping a diary. Keeping a
journal is a very tangible bit of evidence or data
to see and review you. In a month's time, you
can review your life and you can see how things

(35:53):
are actually going a lot better than you often imagine.
So I'd do it for recommending writing down three good things,
but also for processing when things are not going right
for you. And I think keeping that external journal takes
it out of your mental space, as it were, and
it makes it a kind of piece of evidence that
you can reve you and it gives you a real
context that you often lose if you're just trying to

(36:13):
remember how things were all the time.

Speaker 2 (36:15):
I love that Lesson four. Become more optimistic.

Speaker 3 (36:22):
Well, that is a challenge these days, isn't it, especially
given the fact that we tend to focus on negative information.
Optimism can be partially tweaked. Like happiness. I think there
are dispositions to being optimistic or pessimistic, but I would
also point out that you know, you can be optimistic
in one facet of your life and pessimistic in another.

(36:43):
So it's not as if it's kind of just generically
you're one or the other class half full or half empty.
That said, I think there are ways in which you
can start to be more balanced, because you know, getting
back to lesson three about the focusing on the negative,
if you start to try to deliberately reappraise your life
in a more positive way over time, and this is
Marty Siligman's work. Over time, this will tend you to

(37:07):
be a lot more flex in the way you processing
negative information rather than going to the worst case scenario.
If you actually spend the time processing it in a
way which is more balanced or indeed looking for the
silver lining on every cloud, then over time you will
eventually sort of that will become the default way of
thinking rather than always going to the worst case scenario.

(37:27):
So the event suggests that that actually will change. And
again I would go back to recommending journaling, writing a
situation down if you're having a terrible day or something's
on really wrong, rather than being pessimistic about the consequences
of that, try and review it in a way which
looks for the best possible outcome. That will be a
way of actually sort of shifting the needle away from
pessimism to a more optimistic view.

Speaker 2 (37:49):
So, if you've just been laid off, just to take
an example, and you're having trouble summoning any optimism, writing
about it while deliberately trying to consider a more optimistic
view can nudge you in that direction.

Speaker 3 (38:07):
Yeah. So in the ceiling technique, it's called ABCDE. There
are two parts to ABC and then ABC stands for
adversity belief in consequences. So in that first phase, you
write down what happened. So you've just been laid off
at work. What do you believe that reflects. You might think, oh,
that means I'm not good at my job. And what
do you think the consequence as well, I'm not going

(38:28):
to have any money and i might lose my house.
And so you're right down everything and you articulate every
worst case scenario. And the reason you do that is
because you're laying out on the table if you like
every scenario possible. Having exhausted that, all right, you then
switch gear and go to the dispute and DN is
dispute or defend and energize. And so what you're supposed

(38:50):
to do in this phase is you supposed to look
at this and say, look, okay, look, you're not the
only one who was laid off. It's not you alone.
You've been in the situation before. This might be an
opportunity to reskill, it might be an opportunity to look up. So,
in other words, you step out of yourself. You've become
like an attorney or a defense lawyer and say okay,
you say this, but actually another way of looking at
is X, Y and Z, and with a lot of

(39:11):
creativity and imagination, you can start to find some glimmers
of positive outcome even in the worst case scenarios. And
then having done that, this leads to you to be
energized to realize that something that was really obsessing you
and compelling you for you know, fifteen minutes ago, that
you were so concerned about you should feel a bit
better about. So it shows that you can change in

(39:31):
the space of fifteen minutes just by reviewing the situation
and thinking about more positively. It's a case of trying
to process information in a much more adaptive way rather
than just resorting to the worst case.

Speaker 2 (39:42):
What is the WOP technique?

Speaker 3 (39:45):
Whooping It sounds for wish outcomes obstacles processes. It's Gabrielle
Ottogen's work, her research. I mean, most of us would
like to lead better lives, we'd like to better habits,
we'd like to do things better, but very often we
don't actually follow through with it. And part of the
reason is is because just wishing for something to be
better isn't good enough. You actually have to make a plan,

(40:07):
and that's what this technique is about it's called mental contrasting.
And so what you do is, if you want to
change your lifestyle, if you want to develop a healthier
lifestyle or eat more healthy, or give up smoking or
drinking whatever, you have to have that wish at the
beginning to motivate you so that you imagine the best
case scenario, saying, Okay, I'm going to be a healthier
person if I do exercise. Okay, having done that, that's

(40:28):
not enough. You then have to consider what are going
to be the obstacles. So you got your wish, what
you want, what is the outcome you're hoping for, But
then what are the obstacles that get in the way
of that. So it might be well I kind of
eat at McDonald's all the time and it's really convenient
and that sort of thing. Well, then you have to
sort of make a contingency plan. Say, well, if that
comes to mind, then what you do is you get
rid of your loyalty car from McDonald's. I'm not sure

(40:50):
if they have one, by the way, but you avoid
the circumstances which lead to that sort of behavior. So
you make a contingency plan to overcome or bypass the
obstacles again your way. So that is a combination of
kind of wishful thinking, positive energy to drive you towards
a goal. But then actually, what do you need to
do in order to achieve it? So that's what's meant
by whoop, wish outcome, obstacles and plan.

Speaker 2 (41:14):
Just one last question on an optimism, is it possible
that we can take it too far?

Speaker 3 (41:19):
Yeah, that's when you become reckless. So there are three
dimensions by which optimism and pessimism differ. Okay, so what
is the extent to which you think situations are never
going to change? The tendency to overgeneralize, and the tendency
to internalize. So, for example, if you fail an exam,
you might sort of say I failed in an exam,
I'm never going to be able to pass. So that's

(41:40):
where you think things can ever change. And then if
you ever generalize that, you say I failed an exam,
I'm bad at everything I do. That's where you generalize, extrapolate,
and you might internalize that and say I failed in
an exam, It's my fault. An optimist would say, Okay,
I failed one exam, but I'll get better next time.
Or they then might say, oh, I failed one exam,
but I'm good at other things, or they might sort

(42:02):
of externalize and say, I failed an exam, but it
wasn't me. It's that professor hood. He thinks he's a
great lecture. Wasn't my fault, it's his fault. So you
can see how you can deviate on how you make
attributions to the situation. But if you never take responsibility,
if you never actually appreciate that maybe the exams are
really quite important and maybe you do need to pay attention,
you do need to change, then you're never going to

(42:23):
actually adapt or pass your exams. So you can become
reckless if you don't actually take into consideration reality, So
being overly optimist that can turn into unrealistic expectations and
reckless behavior.

Speaker 2 (42:37):
Okay, so less than number five is to control your attention,
please say more to me.

Speaker 3 (42:43):
And I think this has been one of the most
remarkable areas of research that I've become incredibly interested in it.
And this is the reality that we spend a lot
of the time not actually being aware of our circumstances
or our minds are wandering remarkably a lot of the time.
This comes from a former colleague in mind, Dan Gilbert.

(43:04):
Collingsworth and Gilbert did this study where they just randomly
contact people at different points of the day using an
app and so, what are you thinking about, what you're doing?
Are you happy now? And what they discovered that people
were mind wandering actually fifty percent of the time effectively,
so they weren't thinking about what they were doing. Their
minds were off. And what was remarkable about the swinding

(43:26):
was that a lot of the time, even though they
were just thinking neutral thoughts, they were relatively unhappy. And
so that was kind of surprising. So when we're mind wandering,
you might think it's pleasant daydreaming, but actually a lot
of the time we're kind of ruminating over things, you know,
we're worrying about unresolved conflicts or thinking about problems up
and coming. We just recently ran a study of our

(43:48):
students and that we found mind wandering sixty percent of
the time, so it's happening a lot. And actually, just
like Killingsworth and Gilbert, we found that when their minds
were wandering, they were generally relatively unhappy compared to when
they were fixated and focused on a task. So our
default appears to be drifting all the time. Paying attention

(44:08):
is really tough, and I think that's one of the
reasons that social media is so pernicious and so powerful,
because it captures our attention, and that's why you can
be sucked into this sort of vortex of information overload,
and we tend not to be very mindful of the
things that we're doing. And that's unfortunate because when you
do draw your attention or you do focus your attention

(44:29):
on a task, or a task is so engrossing that
it really requires you to pay attention. Then you get
those moments of flow, which is this very positive state
where time appears to elapse and you just you feel
very content as you're kind of drawing your attention and
your resources onto the task. So, yeah, control your attention
because otherwise it's going to be captured.

Speaker 2 (44:50):
We've talked about flow a million times on this show,
and I always find it a little bit maddeningly elusive,
because I don't know how often I get into flow personally,
or what I could do to make that happen more frequently.

Speaker 3 (45:04):
It's probably most likely in those circumstances our activities which
match your skill set. So this is the kind of
definition that if there's something that you're pretty good at
doing and you're in a situation where you have to
really deploy that expertise, that will then become absorbing. So
for me, it's writing. I'm a relatively good writer, and

(45:24):
I can write for hours and hours, and I forget
sometimes to you know, have wasted or not waste spent
so much time writing. Sports athletes can find moments of
flow when the challenge is sufficiently good that it gets
them into it. Lots of hobbies, I would argue, could
be inducing that sense of flow. It's really tapping into
competence and matching your ability with the circumstances or the

(45:47):
requirements of the situation. If you are overwhelmed by a challenge,
then it can be an anxiety reducing. If it's not challenging,
then it's boring. The equation is really to find those
situations which really stimulate your ability to address them.

Speaker 2 (46:01):
Yeah, I'm just trying to think of my own life, Like,
I write a lot, but I hate it. I exercise
a lot. I don't hate it, but it's rarely in flow,
I think, except for maybe when I'm exercising with a
big group of people. And we're all kind of moving through. Yeah,
maybe there are a few moments there. But the one
place where I realized maybe I'm in flow is I like,

(46:22):
I give a lot of speeches, and I don't like
the beginning part of it, where I have to do five, ten, fifteen, twenty,
sometimes thirty minutes of a rehearse speech. But the Q
and A is almost always I think a flow state
for me.

Speaker 3 (46:36):
Yeah, I know what you're talking about. I love lecturing
as well, and when it's going really well, that time
just disappear as evaporates. It seems very fluid, and that
is you're thinking on your feet. You literally are havn't
you use your brain in a way that you wouldn't
normally be doing, So I think I would call that flow. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (46:53):
Yeah, So my friend George Mumford, who teaches meditation to
elite athletes he worked with Michael Jordan Kobe to this
day is working with professional athletes. He often describes meditation
as a way to get you flow ready.

Speaker 3 (47:07):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (47:08):
Would you agree with that?

Speaker 3 (47:09):
I would, indeed. And one of the things I didn't
mention earlier I should address this is that we now
know that when you're not focused on a task, there's
a state of the mind called the default mood network
which kicks into action. This is discovered by chance, by
the way. It was a network in the brain. They
discovered when they started the first imaging studies where you
measure blood flow in the brain using magnetic resonance imaging

(47:31):
from RYE and they ask the various participants just lie
in the scanner and don't move, because we need to
get some baseline measures before we get you to do anything.
And so they assumed that basically the brain would shut
down or go into a steady state. Paradoxically, what they
found was actually an increase of activation in the front
of the back of the brain as a network, and
that's why they call it default mode network. That's the

(47:52):
default when you're not actually doing something. Now, the reason
that's relevant is that when your mind is wandering, your
default mode network is actually active. And also the default
mood network is related to being relatively unhappy. And I
think the linking explanation and going back to what I
said that I love explanations of mechanism, is that when
you're not engaged in the task or in flow and

(48:13):
you're just simply your mind's wandering, your default mode network
is kicking in, and that is sort of I think rumination.
And by the way, there are studies by Brewer showing
that if you meditate meditators you put them in a scanner,
they don't have activation of the default moon network, or
at least it's not as much. So I think what's
going on in the meditation it's turning off that internal

(48:36):
story that we're telling ourselves or that criticism that we're
telling ourselves. So that's how I see it as a
kind of it's a mechanism of explanation here.

Speaker 2 (48:43):
Yeah. Doctor Judson brow as a friend and freaking flyer
on the show, and it's really interesting. My understanding of
his work is that the untrained mind has a default
mode network that can be quite unpleasant. You're comparing yourself
to other people, ruminating about your past mistakes, worrying about
things that might happen in the future. Yeah, Whereas if

(49:07):
you've got some meditation under your belt, you have a
new default mode, which is being awake and aware in
the present moment.

Speaker 3 (49:15):
Yeah, exactly. So the network is also associated representation of
self in relation to others, so that ties it back
into this kind of rumination about how you're measuring up
and what's going on in your comparisons.

Speaker 2 (49:27):
Yeah, coming up, Bruce talks about the role of nature,
how to enhance your social connections, where quote unquote true
authentic happiness comes from, and much more. One of the

(49:47):
other ways you list to control your attention. So we've
talked about getting into flow states, you know, doing things
that are engrossing. That's one way to control your attention.
Another is to meditate, which can redound positively toward your
capacity to get into flow. And then another thing you
mentioned is nature.

Speaker 3 (50:08):
This is an interesting slo the controversial one because I
think the data on it is a bit mixed. But
I'm a convert to. I think it's it's definitely something too.
I live in the countryside, and I certainly really enjoy
the countryside, but not as much as people who've never
seen the countryside when they come out to visit me.
They really do. They do love it. And I think
probably why it works is that our environments. And I

(50:32):
haven't got the data yet to prove it, but my
hypothesis is urban environments are very much the same. They're organized,
they're structured, and you can navigate them on autopilot. You
literally can just kind of go through your daily commute
and very often, you know, you don't even remember how
you got where you are because we're so used to
the routine of travel and commuting. When you're in nature,
unless you live there all the time, you follow the

(50:52):
same path. It's much more unpredictable. It's also esthetically more
pleasing because it's full of, you know, very interesting sites
and so on. But I think what it forces you
to do is actually be mindful of where you're stepping
and where you're walking, and just really engaging with the environment.
So that would be my my understanding what's going on
in nature. And of course there are some studies showing

(51:12):
that if you look at brain imaging, looking at the
default moon network, it's subdued when you're out in nature
compared to going around the urban environment. So I suspect
the urban environments because they're very predictable and they're structured
in such a way is that you literally go on
autopilot when you're navigating them.

Speaker 2 (51:29):
Also, you're surrounded by advertisement, which is inducing toxic comparison. Yeah,
so less than six is connect with others and I'm
just wondering lesson two is avoid isolation? Is this the
same thing said differently?

Speaker 3 (51:43):
Yeah, I guess. So what I was trying to do
in less than six is really kind of talk about
some of the really fascinating research talking about synchronicity, talking
about the studies which are revealing our brains literally do
become synchronized whether're doing group activities. Also, I try to
emphasize how to enhance your social connection, talking about active

(52:03):
listening and just really kind of learning to trust others.
So this is a child which is it goes back
to work by a bunch of people with Nick Eppley
comes to mind, showing that we tend not to engage
in social connection because we think it will be awkward,
We misjudge it in many ways, and we under estimate
how important and how satisfying it will be for not

(52:25):
just ourselves but other people as well. So it's really
a cul to action to try and get people to
go out there and start to actively engage with others
in a way which is beneficial. It's the flip side
of avoiding loneliness, but with much more kind of focused
activities on what you can do to actually stimulate those
sorts of positive interactions.

Speaker 2 (52:46):
What is synchronicity.

Speaker 3 (52:48):
Well, synchronicity is just the natural timing of brain waves.
You can now do imaging studies where you actually get
two people experiencing the same thing. It could be listening
to a story or some other and you can find
out that the brains start to synchronize as if they're
resonating in the same frequency as it were. So it
sounds a bit spooky and supernatural. I don't think think
it's anything like that, but it does fit with the

(53:09):
findings that we are kind of we're biological computeris in
any ways, and so when we're processing things in unison,
it tends to amplify the experience. So people who like
each other tend to walk and step. Conversations are extremely synchronized.
We're having a synchronized activity. Now I'm talking and then
you're responding, and if we were both talking at the
same time, that wouldn't work well. And I think you know,

(53:30):
when you're getting on with somebody, you feel that natural
rapport that synchronicity reflects. They ease a conversation, which is
this sort of give and take. So I think that's
what I mean by synchronicity.

Speaker 2 (53:42):
You also mentioned active listening. What is that so?

Speaker 3 (53:45):
Active listening is paying attention to what someone is saying
and then asking them questions relative to what they've just said,
rather than just nodding away and kind of, you know,
looking at them. I mean, you can listen to someone
but not really pay attention. Active listening is really processing
what they're saying then coming up with something which reflects
the fact that you've actually understood what they've said. And

(54:06):
when people have that, they really enjoy. That creates a
really strong bond between the recipient. If they're having someone
who's clearly been listening to what they're saying, it's very
satisfying when you're talking to someone who really clearly understands
what you're talking about.

Speaker 2 (54:20):
Yeah. It's a benevolent manipulation technique.

Speaker 3 (54:22):
It is, Yeah, and very good politicians and interviewers will
know how to do it very effortlessly.

Speaker 2 (54:31):
You also mentioned learning to trust other people. What are
you pointing at there?

Speaker 3 (54:36):
Well, actually, in one of the lectures, I make a
virtue of talking about failure. To me, failure is a
really important thing to disclose vulnerability. We're fearful sometimes of
being judged negatively by others, and so we always want
to put on a very impressive best face, as it were.
But actually when people disclose information which reveals that they're

(54:56):
human in many ways and they also have vulnerabilities, we
like them more. We can appreciate them more, we can
identify with them more, because I think it shows a
level of trust, and trust is really important. Going back
to Rob Putton work, looking at those nations which seem
to have really good levels of happiness if you like,
or social connectedness, what they really have is trust. They

(55:17):
trust each other. They have community systems which are much
more open to interconnectedness. So the Nordic countries typically have higher
social trust than more individualistic societies like the UK and
the US, where we tend to be a little bit
more fearful and aware or frightened of others, whereas those
countries which have good social trust tend to have overall

(55:38):
general better happiness, as it were.

Speaker 2 (55:40):
So you're saying we should take some risks, trust people,
and be willing to fail.

Speaker 3 (55:46):
I think all those things are good. I think failure
is and this is something which is very obvious in
the younger generation, certainly in my students. They are really
risk adverse. They will take the easiest path. They won't
challenge themselves, and they get overly upset if they thinks
they'll go according to plan. They tend not to put
themselves in situations where they could actually advance by challenging

(56:07):
themselves more. And I think that's fortunate when it comes
to education, because that's really what we need. We need
people who are willing to take risks, and so I
think failure is something that we should disclose. They look
at me and they think, oh, you've never failed, you're
a successful professor and so on. But what they don't realize,
of course, I have a history, as we all do,
of setbacks and failures, and I think when you learn

(56:28):
about that, and you'll know this, Dan, you've talked about
your startup. I think when people hear about that, I
think it makes you much more personable. It makes people
much more real. When you're presented with someone who seems
never to have had any setbacks, then I don't particularly
trust someone like that. So that's why I think trusts
enamors ourselves to other people.

Speaker 2 (56:48):
What is the liking gap?

Speaker 3 (56:50):
It's basically it's a misjudgment about how we're perceived. When
you ask people to have conversations and then you ask
them afterwards, how much do you think this person liked you,
people will typically underestimate the degree to which the other
person likes them. So again, it's one of the reasons
why people are reluctant to enter into conversation because they
think they're not going to be liked or they think

(57:11):
it will be awkward, and so again it's a miscalculation
based on an assumption that interactions are not going to
be as pleasant as they generally turn out to be.
And I think that's got worse, possibly because of technology,
and we've lost the art of conversation. We've lost the
opportunities for interacting on a much more regular basis. And
I think that all of that comes with practice, and

(57:31):
once you start to become more comfortable with those interactions,
then you're probably a bit more accurate about how they're
going to go.

Speaker 2 (57:38):
What is the spotlight effect?

Speaker 3 (57:40):
Okay, the spotlight effect is the assumption that everyone notices
your weaknesses and flaws, and so we all think, because
we're so egocentric, we've got this kind of obvious gaping
flaw on our personality or how we look and whatever.
So we assume everyone notices our weaknesses and flaws, but
in fact people generally don't. They don't know when we're

(58:01):
screwing up. We think we're doing worse than we really
are in conversations, but actually it's going a lot better
than you imagine. So again it's a bias to assume
everyone thinks worse of you than they really do.

Speaker 2 (58:11):
Helpful to name this lesson seven, Get out of your
own Head.

Speaker 3 (58:16):
Yeah, well that's the kind of ultimate chapter in the book.
It's all a story about becoming less egocentric. I talk
about some of the recent work where you literally are
experiencing altered states of consciousness, and this is the work
on Duke and University College London on hallucinogenics, which have
found out to be actually reasonably good for people who

(58:37):
have intractable depression. Now I'm not advocating everyone breaks the
law or starts going taking hallucinogenics. Well, what is interesting
about them is the impact directly on the default mode network,
their serotodinergic activities. And for people who've never had an
alter consciousness like that, one of the things they commonly
report is their sense of self is deconstructed. You don't

(58:59):
have to do something like that to have an altered
sense of self. You can get that from all sorts
of experiences, from communal experiences, all experiences, if they're One
of the most powerful things you can do is if
you're wealthy enough. I don't know about you, dam but
if you can go out into the space and look
back of the earth people and often kind of report
that there a sense of self is It's not diminished.

(59:20):
It's more a sense of connectivity with humanity, a sense
of belonging. And that's what I mean by getting out
of your head. It's becoming interconnected with those around you
in a way which is meaningful because the happiness that
you experience is more authentic when it's directed towards others
and derived from others than the happiness that you try

(59:41):
to turn in on yourself. You could treat yourself to
I know, you could go on a shopping spree and
you have some retail therapy, and that'd make you a
little bit happy, but that happiness isn't authentic and it
will soon dissipate. Whereas if you use your energies to
enritual lives of others around you, well, you'll benefit from
the fact that they'll like you a lot more. But
also it's more authentic and it's going to last a

(01:00:03):
lot longer because the reason is if you're the instigator, purveyor,
and recipient of your own acts of kindness, well you
know when they cease to give you any benefit, whereas
if you direct it towards others, you never know when
they get fed up of it. So you can always
kind of reflect the fact that, yeah, that guy Bruce
is a really good guy. He just bought a whole
round of coffees on my sky is and then you
can walk away thinking they think well of me.

Speaker 2 (01:00:24):
One of my little brants that I've gone on before
on this show many times and will go on many
times in the futures. But I say this with some
sheepishness or apologeticness, if that's even a word, to the
frequent listeners who have heard me say this before. But
as you point out in the book, making other people

(01:00:45):
happy makes you happy. And in my view, I'm like
fifty one nine percent optimistic about the future of the species,
so not like overwhelmingly optimistic, but slightly more optimistic than pessimistic,
and that optimism is based on this design feature in

(01:01:06):
the human operating system that doing good makes you feel good.

Speaker 3 (01:01:10):
Yeah, and I think that's a lesson that we learned
too late in life. You know, once you've kind of
satisfied the initial drives for success and wealth and whatever,
and you've got spare capacity, then you realize, actually, why
was I wasting all that? Especially when you're reaching the
end of your life and you realize you haven't got
much more in front of you. Then people suddenly have
this epiphany that actually, wow, you know, I wish I'd

(01:01:32):
spend more time with other people and making their lives better.
So this is, you know, younemonia, the old concept from
Aristotle and the Greek philosophers that really the value of
the worth of life is the extent to which you
enriched the lives of others around you.

Speaker 2 (01:01:45):
I've definitely learned it later in life and in my
late forties and fifties. But I actually am of the
view that I would have been more successful earlier if
I had had this insight.

Speaker 3 (01:01:58):
I think that's true, and that goes back to what
I was saying, is that when you do take the
time and effort to enrichual lives of other people around you.
That makes you liked, and that has a feed forward
or an amplifying effect on your success because people like
to be around people who are like that. Nobody really
wants to be around someone who's so narcissistic and selfish
and self focused, because they're just drawing all the energy

(01:02:21):
you need. People who are brilliant and efforescent and you know,
full of energy, impulsitive. That's who we like to be around,
and that's generally directed towards others.

Speaker 2 (01:02:30):
Yes, yeah, Joseph Goldstein to quote him again. In Buddhism,
there's this concept of enlightenment, which can be it's controversial
in many ways. Joseph says that one way to think
about enlightenment is lightening up and lightening up, meaning you're
taking yourself less seriously, and we like to be around

(01:02:51):
people who are allocentric in that way.

Speaker 3 (01:02:55):
I agree.

Speaker 2 (01:02:56):
Okay, so we've gone through the seven lessons, yeap. My
understanding is you've done some research on the students to
whom you've taught these seven lessons, and I'd be curious
what did you find.

Speaker 3 (01:03:08):
What we found is it's really the title of your work,
ten percent Happier that's roughly what we find when they've
done our course. They're ten to fifteen percent happier, depending
on which measure as part of the course. And I
think this course is fairly unique in that as part
of their engagement. First of all, there's no exams in
our courses, but they have to undertake all the sorts
of activities, and they have to document it, and they

(01:03:28):
have to keep a journal, and they have to beet
in small groups. So we practice what we preach. Okay,
they literally have to do all these positive activities and
if they do that for ten weeks on average, they're
about ten to fifteen percent happier. We use different measures,
but that's very reliable. We find that every year we've
run it, and there's good and bad news. That's the
good news. The bad news is after about six months

(01:03:48):
of a lot of them have gone back down to baseline. Again.
The good news is that if you follow them up
up to two years, those who've kept up with the
activities maintain their elevated levels of happiness. So it's like
physical wellbeing, mental will being requires consistent effort. It has
to become a habit. There's no silver bullet, there's no
simple thing you can do and then you're happier forever after.
It's a stay to mind as an approach to life.

(01:04:10):
It's a way of dealing with things. As I said earlier,
I think that explains why some people are just happier
because they process things more effectively, whereas the ones that
go back down the baseline, I think they resort back
to their kind of all the biases that we've been describing.

Speaker 2 (01:04:24):
Yeah, so I take from that that happiness is a
skill and that you need to practice in order to
hone that skill. And if you ignore these lessons, you'll
stay at baseline and good luck with that. I'm wondering
would you agree with me? You may not agree with me,
but my view. Having made up this ten percent happier

(01:04:45):
number completely, you know, as a joke or partially as
a joke, I now argue that the ten percent compounds annually,
which is also somewhat tongue in cheek, but that if
you keep practicing these skills, actually you will over time
be significantly more than ten percent happier at the point
of origination.

Speaker 3 (01:05:04):
Right, well, compound interests that ten percent annually would be
exponential rise. This is a call but yeah, I certainly
think it does strengthen over time, and I think the
mechanism is not only addressing all your own setbacks, and
we all face things over the course of our life,
but as you become a more settled person, I think

(01:05:24):
then you start to carve a path through life which
is less difficult. And it also means that you're someone
that people navigate or migrate towards because you seem to
be comfortable. There's a number of ways in which it
can work. But I would agree with you. I think
that it can accumulate, and I would call that practical wisdom.
Some of us get it indirectly. It used to come
through the church, It used to come through a lot

(01:05:45):
of our spiritual leaders. But in a world which is
increasingly becoming fractionated because of technologies, we got to keep
working on it. We've got to keep trying it.

Speaker 2 (01:05:54):
Bru said, this has been a pleasure. Let me ask
you my two habitual closing questions. One is is there
something you were hoping we would get to that we
failed to get to.

Speaker 3 (01:06:02):
No, I think we covered most of the territory pretty adequately.
I'm good.

Speaker 2 (01:06:06):
Can you remind everybody of the name of your new
book and your older books, your website, your social media handles,
et cetera, et cetera.

Speaker 3 (01:06:13):
The book I'm promoting is The Size of Happiness, Seven
Lessons for Living Well. And my previous books are The
Super Sense, which is all about supernatural thinking, The Self Illusion,
which is a very Buddhist inspired book about the illusion
of self. Then I wrote a book called The Domesticated Brain,
which is about the evolution of sociality and humans. And

(01:06:34):
then my second last book was Possessed, Why We Want
More Than We Need, which is all about relentless consumerism
and the psychology of ownership.

Speaker 2 (01:06:42):
And do you have a website?

Speaker 3 (01:06:43):
Ah, yeah, you, I've got Bruce food dot com. I
managed to get that, So I've got a very egocentric
kind of tag, which is kind of ironic given what
I've been promoting.

Speaker 2 (01:06:54):
Yeah, well, I have Dan Harris dot com in my email,
and that of everybody who works for me is you know,
fill in the blank at Dan Harris dot com. So
it's keep eccentric. I think we're going to change that eventually.
Bruce great to meet you. Thank you so much.

Speaker 3 (01:07:09):
I appreciate it. Thank you, don.

Speaker 2 (01:07:15):
Thank you a Bruce Great to talk to him. As
you may remember, we talked about the problem of overthinking,
with which I am deeply familiar. We've got a guided
meditation designed specifically for you to use after you listen
to this conversation to help you deal with overthinking. It
comes from our teacher of the Month, Don Mauricio. We're
now in this mode where we're releasing guided meditations with

(01:07:35):
all of our full length Monday Wednesday episodes. As I
said earlier, you know, it's all about helping you to
take the great stuff you hear on the show and
actually get it into your mind in an abiding way.
So if you want that meditation, head on over to
Dan Harris dot com and check it out. If you're
a subscriber, you get lots of benefits, including live guided

(01:07:55):
meditations on video with Me and the ad free version
of the show and much more. Before I let you go,
I just want to thank everybody who works so hard
to make this show. Our producers are Tara Anderson, Caroline
Keenan and eleanor vision A. Recording and engineering is handled
by the great folks over at pod People. Laurence Smith
is our managing producer. Marissa Schneiderman is our senior producer.

(01:08:17):
DJ Kashmir is our executive producer, and Nick Thorburn of
the band Islands Rhode Ar theme