September 24, 2019 • 37 mins
How can winning the lottery ruin your life - while contracting an incurable disease feel like 'a gift'? Dr Laurie Santos hears about dreams come true and nightmares realised; and talks with Dr Dan Gilbert about why human happiness isn't defined by these major events in the way we all assume.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin. It was the worst thing that ever happened to me.
These were the words uttered by Billy Bob Harold Junior,
a man whose life had been unremarkable before a fateful
event that ruined everything on June twenty eighth, nineteen ninety seven.
(00:36):
Before that worst thing ever event occurred, Billy Bob was
a relatively happy, middle aged Texan. He was a religious
family man who cared deeply about his parents, his wife,
barbar Jean, and their three children. Billy Bob worked at
the local home depot, stocking shelves with electrical equipment. It
wasn't the most lucrative career, but Billy Bob and his
(00:57):
wife found ways to make ends meet. His life, by
all accounts, was relatively blessed, but one hot summer evening,
everything changed. Within months, his marriage had fallen in apart.
His beloved Barber Jeane filed for divorce. Billy Bob tried
dating younger woman, but still felt terrible. He lost almost
(01:17):
fifty pounds, making him look sickly and gaunt. His children
would later say that his personality completely changed. He switched
from the happy dad they knew into a moody, depressive.
In May of nineteen ninety nine. Less than two years
after that incident, which I've not yet named, Billy Bob
couldn't take it anymore. He locked himself in his master
(01:39):
bedroom and took his own life. So what was that
worst thing ever occurrence, that awful event that destroyed Billy
Bob's family and his entire life. It was this Billy
Bob won the Lotto Texas Jack Bob, Welcome to the
official Lotto Texas drawing. In a split second, he was
(02:02):
thirty one million dollars richer. Now, that probably wasn't the
kind of worst ever event you are imagined. When we
think of tragedies, we imagine the death of a family member,
some disfiguring car crash, or total financial ruin. What Billy
Bob experience is actually something many of us yearn for.
He became a multi millionaire overnight. He was suddenly rich,
(02:25):
beyond his wildest dreams, wealthy enough to quit his job
and to buy whatever he and his family needed for
the rest of their lives. But the wonderful fortune he
literally prayed for is certainly didn't make him as happy
as he expected. I bet you think that wouldn't be
the case for you. Most of us are commenced that
(02:45):
making tons of money would feel good, But as it
turns out, we're probably wrong, and not just about money.
Research shows that we suck at predicting what will make
us happy, generally, both when we're imagining how we'll feel
when we get what we want, the good stuff like
hitting the jackpot, getting the perfect job, being accepted to
our dream school, but also when we envisioned some of
(03:08):
the worst events a person could possibly endure. Why are
we so bad at making these predictions? What's going wrong?
Our minds are constantly telling us what to do to
be happy. But what if our minds are wrong? What
if our minds are lying to us, leading us away
(03:29):
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 Lad the doctor Laurie Santos. If you have
an enemy, go buy them a lottery ticket, because on
(03:51):
the off chance that they win, their life is going
to be really messed up. I'm speaking with Clay Cockrell.
He knows that the misery Billy Bob experienced after winning
the lottery wasn't a one Off Clays a clinical social
worker and psychotherapist. His business address is near Columbus Circle
in New York City, but more often than not he
(04:12):
can be found in Central Park or on the banks
of the Hudson River. I do something unusual in that
I walk with my clients instead of meeting in an office,
walk and talk. I think better on my feet. His
methods is a psychotherapist or novel but Clay also works
with a rather particular clientele. About ten years ago, I
started working with the super wealthy, people in the one
(04:36):
percent of the one percent, and somehow my name got
passed around this very small world as someone who doesn't
bring judgment. So if you're struggling with I can't find
a place to park my yacht, I have no judgment
about that. I'm going to help you. Your problem is
as real as someone else's. Clay finds that providing counsel
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to the richest of the rich generates a certain amount
of hostility from the other ninety nine point nine nine
percent who think the megawealthy have it pretty good being
anxious about yacht parking and play well well with most people. Honestly,
the general public when they find out what I do.
They don't have a lot of sympathy because they bought
(05:18):
into this idea that they have a certain amount of
problems that are related to money, and they have this
belief that if I have money, my problems will go away.
But when they find out that there's somebody out there
that has a lot of money and they still have problems,
it busts that fantasy. So this thing that they're working toward,
I just need a little bit more money is going
to solve my problems. It really challenges that belief system
(05:41):
claims right that most people believe they just need a
little bit more income for their troubles to end. One
study ask people how much money would you really need
to be happy? What's an income level that, if you
got it, you wouldn't need any more. People who are
currently earning thirty thousand dollars a year say they'd need
fifty k to be happier, which makes sense, But do
(06:04):
folks who actually earn fifty k think that was all
that's needed? Not really. People earning twice that much one
hundred thousand dollars said they need a salary of two
hundred and fifty k to truly be happy. This myth.
More money equals happiness. So I just gotta get some more.
(06:24):
I'll get there. I just gotta get some more. We've
all heard that money can't buy you happiness, but is
that really true? Two Nobel Prize winning scientists Danny Kaneman
and Angus Dan teamed up to find out. They tested
how annual salary in the US today affects three different
measures of well being. What did they find well, it
(06:45):
turns out the income does affect well being for people
at lower salary levels. If you earn ten or twenty
thousand dollars, then earning more will make you feel less
stressed and happier. But that effective income on well being
starts to level off, and it does so really quickly.
Based on their estimate, it is much better to earn
(07:06):
seventy thousand than forty thousand. Life is a lot different,
but it's not a lot different from seventy thousand to
one hundred and fifty or two fifty. Kaneman Indian found
that once you're earning an annual income of seventy five
thousand dollars, getting more doesn't help. You don't get less
stressed or happier. You're well being just flatlines even if
(07:27):
you double or even quadruple your salary. That's what the
data suggest, but it's definitely not what most of us believe.
When I first got out of grad school, I made
fourteen thousand dollars a year, and I was, Wow, this
is amazing. So you begin to think, Okay, there's a
correlation here. More money equals a better life, and that
keeps working until you get to round seventy five eighty
(07:49):
thousand dollars and your basic needs are met. But you've
learned a lesson. More money incrementally is going to make
you happier and your life easier. But you start getting
more and more money and more and more money, and
it's not working like it used to. When I went
from fourteen to thirty five. I just need to work
a little harder and get up to two fifty are intuition,
(08:09):
more money equals more happiness means we don't realize the
host of problems that come with being incredibly rich. But
Clay has seen these problems firsthand in his many clients.
They struggle, they're not sleeping at night, they don't have
good relationships. One of the most common problems claycis is guilt.
The wealthy also buy into the idea that money brings happiness.
(08:30):
That cognitive dissonance of being so rich yet so sad
can pitch them into emotional turmoil. My life isn't perfect,
but it should be. I shouldn't complain. I shouldn't seek
psychotherapy to help me deal with my problems because I
really shouldn't have them. And like Billy Bob Harroll, after
hitting the jackpot, the rich often struggle in their close
(08:51):
relations It's hard to trust because they've been burned a lot,
particularly in romantic relationships. And then you get into prenuptial
agreements and are you only getting into this relationship because
I'm going to buy you nice things? Even casual friendships
can be hard to maintain at the one percent for
a reason, there's not a lot of people out there
(09:13):
that have this kind of money, so a majority of
the population, on a fundamental level, you're not going to
be able to relate to. There's a lot of isolation.
Are you being my friend because of my bank account?
If we go out to lunch, am I just expected
to pick up the tab? When you're talking about your weekend.
I had this one client that got to be friends
(09:33):
at the local gym. They were talking about their weekend
that they went out with their wives, and that weekend
he just happened to have taken his private jet to
Paris to try out this new restaurant. So how do
you talk about that without it feel like you're rubbing
your wealth in someone's face. But the biggest problem clacies
is that the rich feel trapped. For most problems we
(09:55):
encounter in life, they are painful but culturally acceptable solutions.
If you're in a bad relationship, you can pack your
bags and leave. You hate your job, so quit. But
if you're loaded and miserable about it, you're not going
to give it away. You're too attached to it. It
gives too much freedom, so you're trapped the golden handcuffs.
(10:15):
So I have a lot of people who say I
can't get rid of it because it's amazing, it's great,
but God, there's so much unhappiness and isolation and guilt
that comes along with having this. Ironically, the rich then
fall prey to the same bias we do. Maybe the
problem isn't the money, Maybe it's just that they need
a little bit more. I've worked with people who've had
(10:38):
fifty million dollars and they say, yeah, but I really
I can't do everything that I want. There's this wonderful
painting that it would really eat into my savings. This
one guy had five hundred million dollars but had a
sense that once I hit that billion, that's when things
really change. And you think that's crazy. You have more
(11:02):
money than you could possibly spend. But they're searching for happiness,
and people don't believe me in and I understand it's hard.
It was hard for me to think that, But after
living in this world, working with these people, I understand
money is not going to buy you happiness. So be
careful what you wish for. Be careful what you wish for.
(11:27):
That's a warning many of us have heard before, but
it fits with a growing body of research showing that
nearly every amazing thing in life, from tons of money
to an amazing house to the perfect grades, those things
simply won't make us as happy as we predict they will.
Almost all of us believe that we would be happy
if we could just get what we want, and the
only impediment to our happiness is that we can't always
(11:49):
get what we want. This is Dan Gilbert. He wrote
one of my favorite books on human psychology. It's called
Stumbling on Happiness. It turns out that when people get
exactly what they want, they're not always happy. When they
get the opposite of what they wanted, they often are.
That's a little bit of a mystery. It's kind of
mystery that attracts psychologists. This puzzle, as Dan's research over
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the last two decades has shown, stems from one of
our most exceptional cognitive faculties, our unique ability to run
mental simulations of the future. This is a brand new
faculty that it's wired into the human brain. No other
animal can do anything vaguely like it. No chimpanzee has
ever thought about whether it's going to look good in
a bathing suit when it retires. But these brand new
(12:33):
abilities are still in beta testing. In a sense, we
have an ability you might call prospection one point z
and it's still being worked on, so it's got bugs.
One of the bugs in prospection one point zero that
ability we have to plan for the future is that
your brain can't simulate all the parts of a given event.
When you're imagining things unfolding over time, you can't imagine
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them unfolding in real time, can you If you could,
then somebody would say, imagine moving to Chicago, and you'd
have to spend four months imagining moving to Chicago. That's
how long it actually takes. So one of the wonderful
things about simulation. It gives you a quick sketch and
then it runs it at hyper speed. But that's also
one of its flaws, because a quick sketch often lacks
important details, and when things run at hyper speed, they
(13:18):
run right over the details that often matter. We miss
the critical details of almost any good event we try
to simulate. But let's look in more detail at the
example we started with earlier, getting rich beyond our wildest dreams.
What kinds of details do you say lottery players miss
when they think about winning all that cash. If you
close your eyes and imagine winning the lottery, most of
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us imagine ourselves in a bathtub full of money, or
on a yacht, or quitting our job, buying a big house,
all the things we can get with money. You're not
thinking about all the things you're going to lose. It's
very unlikely you're going to continue all the same social
relationships you have with people who need money but don't
have any you're underestimating the number of people in relatives
(14:01):
that will come out of the woodwork begging you to
help them over and over. You'll fail to realize that
the social groups to which you would all like to
belong don't want to have anything to do with you
because you got your money the wrong way, and on
and on. None of that is in our mental simulation
of the future. Dan has shown there's a nasty consequence
to missing these important details. It means our emotional predictions
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of how these events will feel are way off track.
Would you rather have a weekend in Paris or gum
surgery is kind of a one item IQ test, and
almost everybody gets that right. What they don't realize is
that the weekend in Paris won't be as good as
they think it will be, and the good feelings won't
last as long as they expect. The same is true,
thankfully for the gum surgery these tumors. Predictions being wrong
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about how intense an event will feel and how long
will feel that way is what Dan has christened impact
by us. In one famous study, he asked young professors
at the University of Texas to forecast how they'd feel
when they got tenure, that permanent position that all new
faculty crave. Dan tested people's predictions using a seven point
(15:07):
happiness scale. Most professors thought they'd be really happy if
they got tenure, around a six out of seven on
that scale, But how did professors actually feel when they
heard good news? They reported only being a five out
of seven. Dan also tested what happened to professors who
got bad news. The ones who found out they didn't
(15:27):
get tenure. They assumed they'd be a three point four
out of seven on that happiness scale, but in reality,
actual professors who got denied tenure were only a four
point seven on average. They felt a whole point better
than anyone expected. I see a similar misprediction all the
time in my college students. At Yale, students are convinced
they'll be ecstatic if they get a good grade, and
(15:49):
are sure they'll feel devastated if they do badly. Psychologists
have now seen the same pattern in many walks of life.
Lovers predict they'll take a long time to recover from
a sad breakup, but bounce back far quicker. Student drivers
believe they'll be devastated if they fail to get their license,
but arenas sad walking out of the DMV empty hand
did as they think. The same is true for job
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applicants who are passed over, and even patients guessing how
they'll feel about a positive or negative HIV diagnosis. Put simply,
the good things won't be as good. The bad things
won't be as bad as your mind leads you to believe.
Dan has shown that this pattern stems from yet another
way our minds lie to us. We don't notice that
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we have a tendency to get used to stuff. Even
when something feels amazing at first, we can't enjoy it forever.
This is a phenomenon the psychologists call hedonic adaptation. You
can't be really, really happy endlessly all the time, or
your emotional system isn't doing its job. It has to
come back to baseline so it can once again guide
(16:54):
you to the next good thing that you, as an organism,
ought to be doing. Hedonic adaptation means that after a while,
we tend to go back to a baseline level of
emotional satisfaction. My students are happy for a while after
getting a perfect grade. For a couple of hours, they
might be a seven out of nine, but after a
day or so they just go back to their usual
set point level of happiness. The good and bad events
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don't move us up or down for as long as
we think. So, it's just a hard and fast truth
that you can't stay at ten forever and ever and ever.
People mistakenly think they can. They think happiness is a
place that if they could get to it, they could
build a house and live there their entire lives. It's
only a vacation destination. It's a place you can visit
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more and more often if you do the right things,
and you can stay longer and longer. But you can't
stay forever. This is an important thing to know because
people often feel that if their happiness has come back
to baseline after something wonderful has happened, something's wrong. Why
didn't this marriage, this child, this promotion give me the
eternal happiness I was seeking? Because there is no such
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thing as eternal happiness, so happily ever after is just
not psychologically realizable. Happily ever after is only true if
you have three minutes to live. But this process also
has an important upside. We get used to all the
bad stuff too, that horrible breakup, the chronic illness, that
worst job with the lower salary. As we hedonically adapt
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to these things, they gradually start to distress us less
and less. The problem is we don't realize it, despite
the fact that two months prior I was sitting in
my bed crying my eyes out, like wishing I would die.
It just shows that like life goes on, it's not
(18:43):
the end of the world. The happiness lab will be
back in a moment. Basically, I remember I was on
Tinder because all these great stories got on Tinder. Raphaela
Guns is telling me how she met the man of
her dreams, a super beautiful, beautiful guy, blue eyes, full laps,
(19:07):
and how he changed her life forever. I really liked him,
I was so in him. After chatting with him for
a while on Tinder, Rafaela agreed to a first date,
something really low key. The couple just walked around getting
to know each other. They didn't even kiss, but things
picked up after that. We were hanging out for hours
(19:27):
and hours, and we decided to go back up to
my neighborhood so we could sit by the river, by
the Hudson River because it's like super pretty, just wash
the sunset over there, and we ended up having sex,
and I thought I did everything right, like I carried
condoms around in my mind. I was doing everything right.
But Rafaela was about to hear the sort of news
(19:49):
that nobody wants to hear. The next day, he sort
of came down with what he thought was like a
cold or something. He had like a sore throat, and
he was feeling very fatigued. And then a couple days
later I started coming down the same thing. Her beautiful
boy with the blue eyes was the first to seek
medical advice, sent a text. I went to the doctor
(20:11):
and they think, all this might be a sign of
herpies and so like that was a weird text message.
So I go into urgent care crying and I'm like,
I need a herpes test. Rafaela got her official diagnosis
soon after those first few days. I remember I was
just sitting in bed crying. You know, I thought my
life or I want us to die. It was the
worst thing in the world. Like, not only was I
(20:32):
like physically uncomfortable, but how am I going to date someone?
How's anyone going to love me? In addition to being
in physical pain with red bumps on her genitals, she
was also an emotional pain. Her dream guy dropped her
in a flash. Yeah, he was like, oh, this changed
my vibe on you. He was like very very distant.
I thought like, okay, we both have this thing, like
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we can go through it together and sort of like
learn about it together and figure us out together. But
he was very much short of like in it for himself.
I felt sort of, I don't know if betrays the
white word, but that's the word was coming to my mind.
Rafaela didn't only you'd betrayed by the man who gave
her herpes and disappeared. Her diagnosis also freaked out the
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people closest to her. She was like one of my
oldest friends. But then when I confided in her, when
I'm like sitting on my did crying because I have
all these itchy red bumps and you know, the guys
ignoring me, now things changed. She's like, I just think,
you know, it would be better for my own sanity
if you use toilet seat covers when you were here,
and you know, if you use hand sanitize our a
(21:37):
lot in this and that. So that was really hurtful.
I mean, this was one of your oldest friends. Yeah,
this was someone I've known since we were in diapers
and she's not supporting you for one of them. It
sounds like one of the most scary times in my life. Yeah,
that just sounds awful. And so that was horrible. Let's
take a second to predict how you would feel in
Rafaela's situation. You contracted an incurable and highly stigmatized disease,
(22:02):
your romantic partner has ditched you, and some of your
oldest friends are shutting you because of what happened. Would
you just scribe all of this overall as a good thing,
as a positive change in your life, as a present
from the universe, Because that's how Rafaella sees it. She
even wrote an article for ravishly dot com which she
titled getting her pies was a gift. Some people were
(22:25):
like what the like how is this a gift? Like
almost angry and like all I mean, like delusional, all
these sorts of things, like how would you possibly think
that's a gift? So why is it a gift? It's
a gift because I'm more knowledgeable. It's a gift because
I've been able to write things like that article that
helps people. Raffaella says, all the fallout from her diagnosis
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has given her insight into the people who really matter.
It's a strong litmus test for those who are actually
going to be there for her. If a friend can't
accept all of you works and all pun intended, they're
they're not really your friend. They're fair weather friends, you know.
But it also gave Rafaela a new filter for her
(23:09):
dating life. It saved her time figuring out which guys
were worth her time and which guys just didn't get it.
He said some dumb shit about, oh am, I gonna
get it if I kiss you, and I'm like, no,
it's not my vagina. Do you think you know? Would
you change anything? Would you do it? I mean it
sounds like you've learned so much from this, Like would
you keep it? Would you do it over again? I'd
keep it. First of all, as much of a dick
(23:29):
as he was, he was really hot, really hot, and
the sex was really good, so I don't regret that. Secondly,
it helped me in my dating life, I feel a
few months after I was diagnosed, I met my current
boyfriend who we've been together for like three years, and
I told him right away and he was fine with it.
(23:51):
So that was nice to know that's like, especially when
you're when you contract something like herpes, you tend to think, like,
all my life's over, no one's every gonna want to
sleep with me again, no one's every gonna want to
date me again, I'm never gonna get married, this and that.
But it was fine, and like, there are people that
have much much worse problems than little red bumps. Getting
herpies was much much better than Raphael and might have predicted.
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And that kind of adaptation to adversity is something Dan
Gilbert has found over and over again. What we find
consistently is that in the face of negative events, people
don't feel as bad as they themselves expected to. Although
we're pretty bad at predicting how we'll feel after a
good event like winning the lottery, Dan has observed we're
worse at predicting how we'll feel after a bad event
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losing a friend, failing to get a job, or even
getting herpies. Our impact bias is even bigger when we
make predictions about negative life circumstances, because we're prone to
overcome bad events more quickly than we think. One of
the things we fail to do when we mentally simulate
is we fail to consider adaptation. We are a remarkably
adaptive animal. We have been born and bred to pick
(25:00):
ourselves up by the bootstraps and soldier on. When the
going gets tough, we get going. Dan calls this capacity
to overcome adversity o psychological immune system. Just as our
physical immune system kicks in when we get sick, our
psychological immune system turns on when we're in mental distress.
And our psychological immune system works really, really well. As
(25:23):
soon as we start to feel bad, our mind deploys
a whole host of mental defenses. If you've ever had
a friend experience a breakup, you know, at first they're
really unhappy, and then pretty quickly they get around the rationalizing.
She was never really right for me. This is really
a chance for me to start my life over. I
don't think we had that much in common in the
first place. She didn't like my mother. When you mentally
(25:44):
simulate a breakup, you mentally simulate the anguish, but you
never mentally simulate the rationalizations. What's amazing about all those rationalizations, though,
is that the happiness we get from rationalizing a bad
event is just as real as the happiness we get
from something objectively good. Well, there's no doubt that when
people rationalize, everybody around them feels that they found some
(26:05):
sort of phony and substandard form of happiness. I don't
believe that for a minute. You know, the happiness you
get when the person you love says yes to the
marriage proposal isn't qualitatively different than the kind you produce
for yourself when she says no. There's absolutely no data
that I know of to suggest that it's an inferior
form of happiness, and indeed, in some cases, it can
(26:27):
be more long lasting. Raphael Is misery about contracting herpes
was very deep and very real, but her misery was
also short lived. But what about situations that are so
horrible there's no way a person can carry on normally.
What about events so profound and so awful that they
change our lives forever. After the break, we'll hear about
(26:50):
the true power of our psychological immune system, how it
can transform the most terrible incidents a human can endure
into a form of joy we'd never expect. Nineteen years old,
I'm in this humpy, I'm thinking I'm going to die.
It felt good to just kind of just close my
eyes and just kind of let it happen. The happiness
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lab will return in a moment. I joined as an
infagrument because I wanted to. I wanted to be in
the action. Jard Martinez had just finished high school in
a small town in the south, the only son of
a single mother from El Salvador. After graduation, he decided
to enlist in the army. It was just after nine
(27:31):
to eleven, and he had a few predictions about how
things would go. You know, my thought process was three
years I would be in it. I would give back
to this country. It would give me an opportunity to
travel to get more discipline, it would give me an
opportunity to give money for college. And I remember one
of my sergeants, you know, one day, sitting down and
talking to me and telling me that I needed to
be prepared because we were going to be deploying sometime soon.
(27:54):
And my response to him was, I'm not going anywhere yet.
I just got out of basic training. Very naive of me,
and he was absolutely correct and right in the sense
of where two months later, I was on a plane
with the rest of the unit heading over to the
Beddle East go into war. Jr. Was part of the
initial invasion of Iraq in two thousand and three. It
was already a tough transition for a nineteen year old,
(28:16):
and within weeks tragedy struck. Here we were, you know,
a few days shy of a month of being in
Iraq and escorting the convoy through a CD car Carbala,
when the front left tire of the humvey that I
was driving run over a roadside bomb. The blast ripped
through the entire truck and everything it was carrying, the AMMO, spear,
fuel and other explosives. It was a fireball. There was
(28:38):
three other soldiers in the vehicle with me. They all
got thrown out of the vehicle, but I was trapped
inside and within a matter of seconds this hubby was
engulfed in flames and I was completely conscious. Jr. Was
pinned inside the burning truck for several minutes. He described
screaming as he watched the skin on his hands melting.
Eventually he was pulled from the vehicle, but the damage
(29:00):
was done. In addition to broken ribs and a lacerated liver,
he had third degree burns over his entire body, and
he'd been gulping flames into his life through the whole ordeal.
He was immediately metavact, first to Europe and then to
the US Army Burn Center in San Antonio, Texas. I
remember coming out of my medical induced coma three weeks
(29:21):
later and my doctor essentially just kind of laying out,
you know, all the cards and saying, this is the circumstance.
You can't feed yourself, you can't walk, you can't sit up,
you can't go to the bathroom by yourself. They also
told me that I would no longer be able to
remain in the United States Army, which was incredibly difficult
and challenging. When this happened. You're nineteen and you spent
(29:43):
like the next three years, twenty one, twenty two in
the hospital. That's amazing. Yeah, you can. Just to be clear,
how much just to get thirty four percent of my
body was burned, and the majority of that was third degree,
so it consisted of for the listeners that can't see me,
it consisted of my head, my face, my arms, my hands,
portion of my back, portion of my legs. There's no
(30:03):
way to really fully describe the pain unless you've been
through it. But what's incredible about being a survivor burned
patient at the time is that the part of your
body that isn't burned still hurts, because they usually use
the areas of your body that are not scarred as
skin to do skin graphs, and usually the a donor
site is more painful than the actual injury itself. But
(30:24):
Jr's physical pain was nothing compared to his emotional anguish.
When he enlisted, he'd been something of a local heartthrob.
You know. It's funny because growing up I always heard,
you know, from like my mom's friends, you know, all
these women, you know, would say, oh my god, he's
so cute, he's so this, he's so bad. And so
I grew up just thinking like that's what I am.
I'm you know, no one ever said he has an
(30:45):
amazing personality, he's funny, he's whatever, articulately nothing. It was cute.
And so suddenly I look at myself and I'm like,
that's not cute. What I see in the mirror, that's
not And that person that I see I do not recognize.
I have no relationship with that individual. The old JR.
Had died, and as you can imagine, I fell into
(31:08):
a deep dark play of I was depressed, I was angry.
I was resentful. I was a victim in every sense
of the word. Deep burns and thick scars over his
entire body, dozens of surgeries, and years of his young
life wasted in the hospital, plus the permanent loss of
his good looks and his military career. Those are some
(31:31):
of the most profound and tragic events a person can endure.
But how does gr think about all these awful events today?
I can tell you right now that what happened to
me is a blessing. That's right as a blessing, considering
the fact that I was trapped inside of a burning
truck for five minutes. I'm fortunate to only have what
I have. I have a lot of friends, and I
(31:51):
know a lot of people that unfortunately have missing limbs,
are you know, are more scarred, you know, or disfigured
you know, So in that sense, incredibly fortunate. It's so
cool to hear you say that you're incredibly fortunate, because again,
I think people who just heard the story, you know,
guys envy explodes. He spends a decent chunk of his
(32:12):
twenties in the hospital, having major, major surgeries, lose with
scars for the rest of his life, and then you're
saying I'm fortunate on the lucky one. Yeah, well I am,
because you know, I think about how I'm blessed to
have a second chance at life. I don't want to
take this second chance for granted. And JR. Did take
every opportunity that came his way. Being a badly injured
(32:33):
vet open doors that JR. Never dreamed of. He became
a mentor for other burn victims, which led to a
few lucrative speaking gigs. Telling his story so openly built
up Jr's confidence, so much so that when a friend
casually mentioned that Jr. Should try out for an acting job,
he decided to go for it. I became an actor
(32:55):
on a soap opera All my Children, and that led
Dancing with the Stars to ask me to be on
the show, and then I acted in some other's shows.
After that, I wrote a book about my life and
my mother's life and my family's life, and it became
a New York Times bestseller. I mean, People Magazine put
me on a cover because of these cars. I have
this incredible ability to get people's attention, the fifteen seconds
(33:19):
of curiosity, right like who is that? What happened to him?
Those fifteen seconds of curiosity that people have. It's my
job mine to take that fifteen seconds and turn it
into thirty seconds, into forty five, into sixty seconds, into
five minutes, ten minutes, a lifetime of actual, educated dialogue.
This is who I am. Everything I thought I wanted
(33:41):
in life. You know, I wanted to be a fresh
professional football player and have fame and have all this
money and be able to do all these things. Like
if I would have accomplished those things, would I be
as happy as I am? Now? Would you change anything?
Would you do it over differently? Now? I wouldn't change
anything mean that, But you wouldn't change like the explosion
(34:04):
of the scars, the surgery. You'd keep all of that. Yeah. Yeah,
Because the life I have, I mean, a beautiful wife
and a beautiful daughter, and the beautiful life that I've
created for myself. I mean, gosh, I mean, I'm blessed.
(34:26):
With bad events, we often don't realize that some good
can come out of them. Dan Gilbert is unsurprised that
people like JR. Seem more positive than negatives, even in
the worst of circumstances. He's seen it time and again
in his work on hedonic adaptation startlingly if you ask
people who've lost a child, which is the single worst
event that people can imagine experiencing, and indeed it is
(34:49):
one of the worst events people can actually experience. If
you ask people have lost a child, they never say,
g I'm glad that happened. But if you ask them
to name the good and the bad things that have
come from it, they tend to name more good than
bad things. That's a very stunning fact that we should
just sit back and marvel at the pas ability that
the worst thing in the world could happen to us
(35:12):
and probably more good than bad will come out of it.
There are awful events that will cause you to feel
pain and hurt and loss, but we're fighters. When push
comes to shove, we are really resilient. The problem is
we don't realize that. I think if you understand the
power of the psychological immune system, our remarkable ability to
(35:34):
rationalize in the face of adversity, it makes you braver.
You realize that you will make mistakes and eat will
be okay. I think there's a lesson there for all
of us. After making this episode, I've become even more
(35:54):
convinced about that lesson. Heatonic adaptation means the lows of
life aren't going to be as awful as you imagine,
just as the highs will be more temporary than you hope.
As a psychologist, I already knew that winning the lottery
and other great circumstances don't bring last happiness, But honestly,
I often forget about the flip side. So I'm going
(36:14):
to make a conscious effort to be a bit braver,
to stop worrying so much, to remember that I have
a kind of emotional superpower, one that can get me
through the worst of circumstances. And I hope you'll do
the same, because even though your mind might tell you otherwise,
joy doesn't come from everything in life working out perfectly.
It comes from adopting better habits and better behaviors. All
(36:38):
strategies will be discussing in coming episodes of The Happiness
Lab with me Doctor Laurie Santos. If you enjoyed the show,
I'd be super grateful if you could spread the word
(36:58):
by leaving a rating end a review. It really does
help other listeners find us, and don't forget to tell
your friends. If you want to learn more about the
science you heard on the show, then check out our
web site Happiness Lab dot fm. You can also sign
up for our newsletter to get exclusive content. The Happiness
Lab is co written and produced by Ryan Dilley. The
(37:18):
show is mixed and mastered by Evan Viola and edited
by Julia Barton, fact checking by Joseph Friedman, and our
original music was composed by Zachary Silver. Special thanks to
Mio La Belle, Carl mcgliorre Heather Faine, Maggie Taylor, Maya Kanig,
and Jacob Weisberg. The Happiness Lab is brought to you
by Pushkin Industries and me Doctor Laurie Sanders
Pushkin. It was the worst thing that ever happened to me.
These were the words uttered by Billy Bob Harold Junior,
a man whose life had been unremarkable before a fateful
event that ruined everything on June twenty eighth, nineteen ninety seven.
(00:36):
Before that worst thing ever event occurred, Billy Bob was
a relatively happy, middle aged Texan. He was a religious
family man who cared deeply about his parents, his wife,
barbar Jean, and their three children. Billy Bob worked at
the local home depot, stocking shelves with electrical equipment. It
wasn't the most lucrative career, but Billy Bob and his
(00:57):
wife found ways to make ends meet. His life, by
all accounts, was relatively blessed, but one hot summer evening,
everything changed. Within months, his marriage had fallen in apart.
His beloved Barber Jeane filed for divorce. Billy Bob tried
dating younger woman, but still felt terrible. He lost almost
(01:17):
fifty pounds, making him look sickly and gaunt. His children
would later say that his personality completely changed. He switched
from the happy dad they knew into a moody, depressive.
In May of nineteen ninety nine. Less than two years
after that incident, which I've not yet named, Billy Bob
couldn't take it anymore. He locked himself in his master
(01:39):
bedroom and took his own life. So what was that
worst thing ever occurrence, that awful event that destroyed Billy
Bob's family and his entire life. It was this Billy
Bob won the Lotto Texas Jack Bob, Welcome to the
official Lotto Texas drawing. In a split second, he was
(02:02):
thirty one million dollars richer. Now, that probably wasn't the
kind of worst ever event you are imagined. When we
think of tragedies, we imagine the death of a family member,
some disfiguring car crash, or total financial ruin. What Billy
Bob experience is actually something many of us yearn for.
He became a multi millionaire overnight. He was suddenly rich,
(02:25):
beyond his wildest dreams, wealthy enough to quit his job
and to buy whatever he and his family needed for
the rest of their lives. But the wonderful fortune he
literally prayed for is certainly didn't make him as happy
as he expected. I bet you think that wouldn't be
the case for you. Most of us are commenced that
(02:45):
making tons of money would feel good, But as it
turns out, we're probably wrong, and not just about money.
Research shows that we suck at predicting what will make
us happy, generally, both when we're imagining how we'll feel
when we get what we want, the good stuff like
hitting the jackpot, getting the perfect job, being accepted to
our dream school, but also when we envisioned some of
(03:08):
the worst events a person could possibly endure. Why are
we so bad at making these predictions? What's going wrong?
Our minds are constantly telling us what to do to
be happy. But what if our minds are wrong? What
if our minds are lying to us, leading us away
(03:29):
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 Lad the doctor Laurie Santos. If you have
an enemy, go buy them a lottery ticket, because on
(03:51):
the off chance that they win, their life is going
to be really messed up. I'm speaking with Clay Cockrell.
He knows that the misery Billy Bob experienced after winning
the lottery wasn't a one Off Clays a clinical social
worker and psychotherapist. His business address is near Columbus Circle
in New York City, but more often than not he
(04:12):
can be found in Central Park or on the banks
of the Hudson River. I do something unusual in that
I walk with my clients instead of meeting in an office,
walk and talk. I think better on my feet. His
methods is a psychotherapist or novel but Clay also works
with a rather particular clientele. About ten years ago, I
started working with the super wealthy, people in the one
(04:36):
percent of the one percent, and somehow my name got
passed around this very small world as someone who doesn't
bring judgment. So if you're struggling with I can't find
a place to park my yacht, I have no judgment
about that. I'm going to help you. Your problem is
as real as someone else's. Clay finds that providing counsel
(04:58):
to the richest of the rich generates a certain amount
of hostility from the other ninety nine point nine nine
percent who think the megawealthy have it pretty good being
anxious about yacht parking and play well well with most people. Honestly,
the general public when they find out what I do.
They don't have a lot of sympathy because they bought
(05:18):
into this idea that they have a certain amount of
problems that are related to money, and they have this
belief that if I have money, my problems will go away.
But when they find out that there's somebody out there
that has a lot of money and they still have problems,
it busts that fantasy. So this thing that they're working toward,
I just need a little bit more money is going
to solve my problems. It really challenges that belief system
(05:41):
claims right that most people believe they just need a
little bit more income for their troubles to end. One
study ask people how much money would you really need
to be happy? What's an income level that, if you
got it, you wouldn't need any more. People who are
currently earning thirty thousand dollars a year say they'd need
fifty k to be happier, which makes sense, But do
(06:04):
folks who actually earn fifty k think that was all
that's needed? Not really. People earning twice that much one
hundred thousand dollars said they need a salary of two
hundred and fifty k to truly be happy. This myth.
More money equals happiness. So I just gotta get some more.
(06:24):
I'll get there. I just gotta get some more. We've
all heard that money can't buy you happiness, but is
that really true? Two Nobel Prize winning scientists Danny Kaneman
and Angus Dan teamed up to find out. They tested
how annual salary in the US today affects three different
measures of well being. What did they find well, it
(06:45):
turns out the income does affect well being for people
at lower salary levels. If you earn ten or twenty
thousand dollars, then earning more will make you feel less
stressed and happier. But that effective income on well being
starts to level off, and it does so really quickly.
Based on their estimate, it is much better to earn
(07:06):
seventy thousand than forty thousand. Life is a lot different,
but it's not a lot different from seventy thousand to
one hundred and fifty or two fifty. Kaneman Indian found
that once you're earning an annual income of seventy five
thousand dollars, getting more doesn't help. You don't get less
stressed or happier. You're well being just flatlines even if
(07:27):
you double or even quadruple your salary. That's what the
data suggest, but it's definitely not what most of us believe.
When I first got out of grad school, I made
fourteen thousand dollars a year, and I was, Wow, this
is amazing. So you begin to think, Okay, there's a
correlation here. More money equals a better life, and that
keeps working until you get to round seventy five eighty
(07:49):
thousand dollars and your basic needs are met. But you've
learned a lesson. More money incrementally is going to make
you happier and your life easier. But you start getting
more and more money and more and more money, and
it's not working like it used to. When I went
from fourteen to thirty five. I just need to work
a little harder and get up to two fifty are intuition,
(08:09):
more money equals more happiness means we don't realize the
host of problems that come with being incredibly rich. But
Clay has seen these problems firsthand in his many clients.
They struggle, they're not sleeping at night, they don't have
good relationships. One of the most common problems claycis is guilt.
The wealthy also buy into the idea that money brings happiness.
(08:30):
That cognitive dissonance of being so rich yet so sad
can pitch them into emotional turmoil. My life isn't perfect,
but it should be. I shouldn't complain. I shouldn't seek
psychotherapy to help me deal with my problems because I
really shouldn't have them. And like Billy Bob Harroll, after
hitting the jackpot, the rich often struggle in their close
(08:51):
relations It's hard to trust because they've been burned a lot,
particularly in romantic relationships. And then you get into prenuptial
agreements and are you only getting into this relationship because
I'm going to buy you nice things? Even casual friendships
can be hard to maintain at the one percent for
a reason, there's not a lot of people out there
(09:13):
that have this kind of money, so a majority of
the population, on a fundamental level, you're not going to
be able to relate to. There's a lot of isolation.
Are you being my friend because of my bank account?
If we go out to lunch, am I just expected
to pick up the tab? When you're talking about your weekend.
I had this one client that got to be friends
(09:33):
at the local gym. They were talking about their weekend
that they went out with their wives, and that weekend
he just happened to have taken his private jet to
Paris to try out this new restaurant. So how do
you talk about that without it feel like you're rubbing
your wealth in someone's face. But the biggest problem clacies
is that the rich feel trapped. For most problems we
(09:55):
encounter in life, they are painful but culturally acceptable solutions.
If you're in a bad relationship, you can pack your
bags and leave. You hate your job, so quit. But
if you're loaded and miserable about it, you're not going
to give it away. You're too attached to it. It
gives too much freedom, so you're trapped the golden handcuffs.
(10:15):
So I have a lot of people who say I
can't get rid of it because it's amazing, it's great,
but God, there's so much unhappiness and isolation and guilt
that comes along with having this. Ironically, the rich then
fall prey to the same bias we do. Maybe the
problem isn't the money, Maybe it's just that they need
a little bit more. I've worked with people who've had
(10:38):
fifty million dollars and they say, yeah, but I really
I can't do everything that I want. There's this wonderful
painting that it would really eat into my savings. This
one guy had five hundred million dollars but had a
sense that once I hit that billion, that's when things
really change. And you think that's crazy. You have more
(11:02):
money than you could possibly spend. But they're searching for happiness,
and people don't believe me in and I understand it's hard.
It was hard for me to think that, But after
living in this world, working with these people, I understand
money is not going to buy you happiness. So be
careful what you wish for. Be careful what you wish for.
(11:27):
That's a warning many of us have heard before, but
it fits with a growing body of research showing that
nearly every amazing thing in life, from tons of money
to an amazing house to the perfect grades, those things
simply won't make us as happy as we predict they will.
Almost all of us believe that we would be happy
if we could just get what we want, and the
only impediment to our happiness is that we can't always
(11:49):
get what we want. This is Dan Gilbert. He wrote
one of my favorite books on human psychology. It's called
Stumbling on Happiness. It turns out that when people get
exactly what they want, they're not always happy. When they
get the opposite of what they wanted, they often are.
That's a little bit of a mystery. It's kind of
mystery that attracts psychologists. This puzzle, as Dan's research over
(12:11):
the last two decades has shown, stems from one of
our most exceptional cognitive faculties, our unique ability to run
mental simulations of the future. This is a brand new
faculty that it's wired into the human brain. No other
animal can do anything vaguely like it. No chimpanzee has
ever thought about whether it's going to look good in
a bathing suit when it retires. But these brand new
(12:33):
abilities are still in beta testing. In a sense, we
have an ability you might call prospection one point z
and it's still being worked on, so it's got bugs.
One of the bugs in prospection one point zero that
ability we have to plan for the future is that
your brain can't simulate all the parts of a given event.
When you're imagining things unfolding over time, you can't imagine
(12:56):
them unfolding in real time, can you If you could,
then somebody would say, imagine moving to Chicago, and you'd
have to spend four months imagining moving to Chicago. That's
how long it actually takes. So one of the wonderful
things about simulation. It gives you a quick sketch and
then it runs it at hyper speed. But that's also
one of its flaws, because a quick sketch often lacks
important details, and when things run at hyper speed, they
(13:18):
run right over the details that often matter. We miss
the critical details of almost any good event we try
to simulate. But let's look in more detail at the
example we started with earlier, getting rich beyond our wildest dreams.
What kinds of details do you say lottery players miss
when they think about winning all that cash. If you
close your eyes and imagine winning the lottery, most of
(13:40):
us imagine ourselves in a bathtub full of money, or
on a yacht, or quitting our job, buying a big house,
all the things we can get with money. You're not
thinking about all the things you're going to lose. It's
very unlikely you're going to continue all the same social
relationships you have with people who need money but don't
have any you're underestimating the number of people in relatives
(14:01):
that will come out of the woodwork begging you to
help them over and over. You'll fail to realize that
the social groups to which you would all like to
belong don't want to have anything to do with you
because you got your money the wrong way, and on
and on. None of that is in our mental simulation
of the future. Dan has shown there's a nasty consequence
to missing these important details. It means our emotional predictions
(14:23):
of how these events will feel are way off track.
Would you rather have a weekend in Paris or gum
surgery is kind of a one item IQ test, and
almost everybody gets that right. What they don't realize is
that the weekend in Paris won't be as good as
they think it will be, and the good feelings won't
last as long as they expect. The same is true,
thankfully for the gum surgery these tumors. Predictions being wrong
(14:46):
about how intense an event will feel and how long
will feel that way is what Dan has christened impact
by us. In one famous study, he asked young professors
at the University of Texas to forecast how they'd feel
when they got tenure, that permanent position that all new
faculty crave. Dan tested people's predictions using a seven point
(15:07):
happiness scale. Most professors thought they'd be really happy if
they got tenure, around a six out of seven on
that scale, But how did professors actually feel when they
heard good news? They reported only being a five out
of seven. Dan also tested what happened to professors who
got bad news. The ones who found out they didn't
(15:27):
get tenure. They assumed they'd be a three point four
out of seven on that happiness scale, but in reality,
actual professors who got denied tenure were only a four
point seven on average. They felt a whole point better
than anyone expected. I see a similar misprediction all the
time in my college students. At Yale, students are convinced
they'll be ecstatic if they get a good grade, and
(15:49):
are sure they'll feel devastated if they do badly. Psychologists
have now seen the same pattern in many walks of life.
Lovers predict they'll take a long time to recover from
a sad breakup, but bounce back far quicker. Student drivers
believe they'll be devastated if they fail to get their license,
but arenas sad walking out of the DMV empty hand
did as they think. The same is true for job
(16:11):
applicants who are passed over, and even patients guessing how
they'll feel about a positive or negative HIV diagnosis. Put simply,
the good things won't be as good. The bad things
won't be as bad as your mind leads you to believe.
Dan has shown that this pattern stems from yet another
way our minds lie to us. We don't notice that
(16:33):
we have a tendency to get used to stuff. Even
when something feels amazing at first, we can't enjoy it forever.
This is a phenomenon the psychologists call hedonic adaptation. You
can't be really, really happy endlessly all the time, or
your emotional system isn't doing its job. It has to
come back to baseline so it can once again guide
(16:54):
you to the next good thing that you, as an organism,
ought to be doing. Hedonic adaptation means that after a while,
we tend to go back to a baseline level of
emotional satisfaction. My students are happy for a while after
getting a perfect grade. For a couple of hours, they
might be a seven out of nine, but after a
day or so they just go back to their usual
set point level of happiness. The good and bad events
(17:18):
don't move us up or down for as long as
we think. So, it's just a hard and fast truth
that you can't stay at ten forever and ever and ever.
People mistakenly think they can. They think happiness is a
place that if they could get to it, they could
build a house and live there their entire lives. It's
only a vacation destination. It's a place you can visit
(17:38):
more and more often if you do the right things,
and you can stay longer and longer. But you can't
stay forever. This is an important thing to know because
people often feel that if their happiness has come back
to baseline after something wonderful has happened, something's wrong. Why
didn't this marriage, this child, this promotion give me the
eternal happiness I was seeking? Because there is no such
(17:59):
thing as eternal happiness, so happily ever after is just
not psychologically realizable. Happily ever after is only true if
you have three minutes to live. But this process also
has an important upside. We get used to all the
bad stuff too, that horrible breakup, the chronic illness, that
worst job with the lower salary. As we hedonically adapt
(18:22):
to these things, they gradually start to distress us less
and less. The problem is we don't realize it, despite
the fact that two months prior I was sitting in
my bed crying my eyes out, like wishing I would die.
It just shows that like life goes on, it's not
(18:43):
the end of the world. The happiness lab will be
back in a moment. Basically, I remember I was on
Tinder because all these great stories got on Tinder. Raphaela
Guns is telling me how she met the man of
her dreams, a super beautiful, beautiful guy, blue eyes, full laps,
(19:07):
and how he changed her life forever. I really liked him,
I was so in him. After chatting with him for
a while on Tinder, Rafaela agreed to a first date,
something really low key. The couple just walked around getting
to know each other. They didn't even kiss, but things
picked up after that. We were hanging out for hours
(19:27):
and hours, and we decided to go back up to
my neighborhood so we could sit by the river, by
the Hudson River because it's like super pretty, just wash
the sunset over there, and we ended up having sex,
and I thought I did everything right, like I carried
condoms around in my mind. I was doing everything right.
But Rafaela was about to hear the sort of news
(19:49):
that nobody wants to hear. The next day, he sort
of came down with what he thought was like a
cold or something. He had like a sore throat, and
he was feeling very fatigued. And then a couple days
later I started coming down the same thing. Her beautiful
boy with the blue eyes was the first to seek
medical advice, sent a text. I went to the doctor
(20:11):
and they think, all this might be a sign of
herpies and so like that was a weird text message.
So I go into urgent care crying and I'm like,
I need a herpes test. Rafaela got her official diagnosis
soon after those first few days. I remember I was
just sitting in bed crying. You know, I thought my
life or I want us to die. It was the
worst thing in the world. Like, not only was I
(20:32):
like physically uncomfortable, but how am I going to date someone?
How's anyone going to love me? In addition to being
in physical pain with red bumps on her genitals, she
was also an emotional pain. Her dream guy dropped her
in a flash. Yeah, he was like, oh, this changed
my vibe on you. He was like very very distant.
I thought like, okay, we both have this thing, like
(20:53):
we can go through it together and sort of like
learn about it together and figure us out together. But
he was very much short of like in it for himself.
I felt sort of, I don't know if betrays the
white word, but that's the word was coming to my mind.
Rafaela didn't only you'd betrayed by the man who gave
her herpes and disappeared. Her diagnosis also freaked out the
(21:14):
people closest to her. She was like one of my
oldest friends. But then when I confided in her, when
I'm like sitting on my did crying because I have
all these itchy red bumps and you know, the guys
ignoring me, now things changed. She's like, I just think,
you know, it would be better for my own sanity
if you use toilet seat covers when you were here,
and you know, if you use hand sanitize our a
(21:37):
lot in this and that. So that was really hurtful.
I mean, this was one of your oldest friends. Yeah,
this was someone I've known since we were in diapers
and she's not supporting you for one of them. It
sounds like one of the most scary times in my life. Yeah,
that just sounds awful. And so that was horrible. Let's
take a second to predict how you would feel in
Rafaela's situation. You contracted an incurable and highly stigmatized disease,
(22:02):
your romantic partner has ditched you, and some of your
oldest friends are shutting you because of what happened. Would
you just scribe all of this overall as a good thing,
as a positive change in your life, as a present
from the universe, Because that's how Rafaella sees it. She
even wrote an article for ravishly dot com which she
titled getting her pies was a gift. Some people were
(22:25):
like what the like how is this a gift? Like
almost angry and like all I mean, like delusional, all
these sorts of things, like how would you possibly think
that's a gift? So why is it a gift? It's
a gift because I'm more knowledgeable. It's a gift because
I've been able to write things like that article that
helps people. Raffaella says, all the fallout from her diagnosis
(22:48):
has given her insight into the people who really matter.
It's a strong litmus test for those who are actually
going to be there for her. If a friend can't
accept all of you works and all pun intended, they're
they're not really your friend. They're fair weather friends, you know.
But it also gave Rafaela a new filter for her
(23:09):
dating life. It saved her time figuring out which guys
were worth her time and which guys just didn't get it.
He said some dumb shit about, oh am, I gonna
get it if I kiss you, and I'm like, no,
it's not my vagina. Do you think you know? Would
you change anything? Would you do it? I mean it
sounds like you've learned so much from this, Like would
you keep it? Would you do it over again? I'd
keep it. First of all, as much of a dick
(23:29):
as he was, he was really hot, really hot, and
the sex was really good, so I don't regret that. Secondly,
it helped me in my dating life, I feel a
few months after I was diagnosed, I met my current
boyfriend who we've been together for like three years, and
I told him right away and he was fine with it.
(23:51):
So that was nice to know that's like, especially when
you're when you contract something like herpes, you tend to think, like,
all my life's over, no one's every gonna want to
sleep with me again, no one's every gonna want to
date me again, I'm never gonna get married, this and that.
But it was fine, and like, there are people that
have much much worse problems than little red bumps. Getting
herpies was much much better than Raphael and might have predicted.
(24:14):
And that kind of adaptation to adversity is something Dan
Gilbert has found over and over again. What we find
consistently is that in the face of negative events, people
don't feel as bad as they themselves expected to. Although
we're pretty bad at predicting how we'll feel after a
good event like winning the lottery, Dan has observed we're
worse at predicting how we'll feel after a bad event
(24:37):
losing a friend, failing to get a job, or even
getting herpies. Our impact bias is even bigger when we
make predictions about negative life circumstances, because we're prone to
overcome bad events more quickly than we think. One of
the things we fail to do when we mentally simulate
is we fail to consider adaptation. We are a remarkably
adaptive animal. We have been born and bred to pick
(25:00):
ourselves up by the bootstraps and soldier on. When the
going gets tough, we get going. Dan calls this capacity
to overcome adversity o psychological immune system. Just as our
physical immune system kicks in when we get sick, our
psychological immune system turns on when we're in mental distress.
And our psychological immune system works really, really well. As
(25:23):
soon as we start to feel bad, our mind deploys
a whole host of mental defenses. If you've ever had
a friend experience a breakup, you know, at first they're
really unhappy, and then pretty quickly they get around the rationalizing.
She was never really right for me. This is really
a chance for me to start my life over. I
don't think we had that much in common in the
first place. She didn't like my mother. When you mentally
(25:44):
simulate a breakup, you mentally simulate the anguish, but you
never mentally simulate the rationalizations. What's amazing about all those rationalizations, though,
is that the happiness we get from rationalizing a bad
event is just as real as the happiness we get
from something objectively good. Well, there's no doubt that when
people rationalize, everybody around them feels that they found some
(26:05):
sort of phony and substandard form of happiness. I don't
believe that for a minute. You know, the happiness you
get when the person you love says yes to the
marriage proposal isn't qualitatively different than the kind you produce
for yourself when she says no. There's absolutely no data
that I know of to suggest that it's an inferior
form of happiness, and indeed, in some cases, it can
(26:27):
be more long lasting. Raphael Is misery about contracting herpes
was very deep and very real, but her misery was
also short lived. But what about situations that are so
horrible there's no way a person can carry on normally.
What about events so profound and so awful that they
change our lives forever. After the break, we'll hear about
(26:50):
the true power of our psychological immune system, how it
can transform the most terrible incidents a human can endure
into a form of joy we'd never expect. Nineteen years old,
I'm in this humpy, I'm thinking I'm going to die.
It felt good to just kind of just close my
eyes and just kind of let it happen. The happiness
(27:11):
lab will return in a moment. I joined as an
infagrument because I wanted to. I wanted to be in
the action. Jard Martinez had just finished high school in
a small town in the south, the only son of
a single mother from El Salvador. After graduation, he decided
to enlist in the army. It was just after nine
(27:31):
to eleven, and he had a few predictions about how
things would go. You know, my thought process was three
years I would be in it. I would give back
to this country. It would give me an opportunity to
travel to get more discipline, it would give me an
opportunity to give money for college. And I remember one
of my sergeants, you know, one day, sitting down and
talking to me and telling me that I needed to
be prepared because we were going to be deploying sometime soon.
(27:54):
And my response to him was, I'm not going anywhere yet.
I just got out of basic training. Very naive of me,
and he was absolutely correct and right in the sense
of where two months later, I was on a plane
with the rest of the unit heading over to the
Beddle East go into war. Jr. Was part of the
initial invasion of Iraq in two thousand and three. It
was already a tough transition for a nineteen year old,
(28:16):
and within weeks tragedy struck. Here we were, you know,
a few days shy of a month of being in
Iraq and escorting the convoy through a CD car Carbala,
when the front left tire of the humvey that I
was driving run over a roadside bomb. The blast ripped
through the entire truck and everything it was carrying, the AMMO, spear,
fuel and other explosives. It was a fireball. There was
(28:38):
three other soldiers in the vehicle with me. They all
got thrown out of the vehicle, but I was trapped
inside and within a matter of seconds this hubby was
engulfed in flames and I was completely conscious. Jr. Was
pinned inside the burning truck for several minutes. He described
screaming as he watched the skin on his hands melting.
Eventually he was pulled from the vehicle, but the damage
(29:00):
was done. In addition to broken ribs and a lacerated liver,
he had third degree burns over his entire body, and
he'd been gulping flames into his life through the whole ordeal.
He was immediately metavact, first to Europe and then to
the US Army Burn Center in San Antonio, Texas. I
remember coming out of my medical induced coma three weeks
(29:21):
later and my doctor essentially just kind of laying out,
you know, all the cards and saying, this is the circumstance.
You can't feed yourself, you can't walk, you can't sit up,
you can't go to the bathroom by yourself. They also
told me that I would no longer be able to
remain in the United States Army, which was incredibly difficult
and challenging. When this happened. You're nineteen and you spent
(29:43):
like the next three years, twenty one, twenty two in
the hospital. That's amazing. Yeah, you can. Just to be clear,
how much just to get thirty four percent of my
body was burned, and the majority of that was third degree,
so it consisted of for the listeners that can't see me,
it consisted of my head, my face, my arms, my hands,
portion of my back, portion of my legs. There's no
(30:03):
way to really fully describe the pain unless you've been
through it. But what's incredible about being a survivor burned
patient at the time is that the part of your
body that isn't burned still hurts, because they usually use
the areas of your body that are not scarred as
skin to do skin graphs, and usually the a donor
site is more painful than the actual injury itself. But
(30:24):
Jr's physical pain was nothing compared to his emotional anguish.
When he enlisted, he'd been something of a local heartthrob.
You know. It's funny because growing up I always heard,
you know, from like my mom's friends, you know, all
these women, you know, would say, oh my god, he's
so cute, he's so this, he's so bad. And so
I grew up just thinking like that's what I am.
I'm you know, no one ever said he has an
(30:45):
amazing personality, he's funny, he's whatever, articulately nothing. It was cute.
And so suddenly I look at myself and I'm like,
that's not cute. What I see in the mirror, that's
not And that person that I see I do not recognize.
I have no relationship with that individual. The old JR.
Had died, and as you can imagine, I fell into
(31:08):
a deep dark play of I was depressed, I was angry.
I was resentful. I was a victim in every sense
of the word. Deep burns and thick scars over his
entire body, dozens of surgeries, and years of his young
life wasted in the hospital, plus the permanent loss of
his good looks and his military career. Those are some
(31:31):
of the most profound and tragic events a person can endure.
But how does gr think about all these awful events today?
I can tell you right now that what happened to
me is a blessing. That's right as a blessing, considering
the fact that I was trapped inside of a burning
truck for five minutes. I'm fortunate to only have what
I have. I have a lot of friends, and I
(31:51):
know a lot of people that unfortunately have missing limbs,
are you know, are more scarred, you know, or disfigured
you know, So in that sense, incredibly fortunate. It's so
cool to hear you say that you're incredibly fortunate, because again,
I think people who just heard the story, you know,
guys envy explodes. He spends a decent chunk of his
(32:12):
twenties in the hospital, having major, major surgeries, lose with
scars for the rest of his life, and then you're
saying I'm fortunate on the lucky one. Yeah, well I am,
because you know, I think about how I'm blessed to
have a second chance at life. I don't want to
take this second chance for granted. And JR. Did take
every opportunity that came his way. Being a badly injured
(32:33):
vet open doors that JR. Never dreamed of. He became
a mentor for other burn victims, which led to a
few lucrative speaking gigs. Telling his story so openly built
up Jr's confidence, so much so that when a friend
casually mentioned that Jr. Should try out for an acting job,
he decided to go for it. I became an actor
(32:55):
on a soap opera All my Children, and that led
Dancing with the Stars to ask me to be on
the show, and then I acted in some other's shows.
After that, I wrote a book about my life and
my mother's life and my family's life, and it became
a New York Times bestseller. I mean, People Magazine put
me on a cover because of these cars. I have
this incredible ability to get people's attention, the fifteen seconds
(33:19):
of curiosity, right like who is that? What happened to him?
Those fifteen seconds of curiosity that people have. It's my
job mine to take that fifteen seconds and turn it
into thirty seconds, into forty five, into sixty seconds, into
five minutes, ten minutes, a lifetime of actual, educated dialogue.
This is who I am. Everything I thought I wanted
(33:41):
in life. You know, I wanted to be a fresh
professional football player and have fame and have all this
money and be able to do all these things. Like
if I would have accomplished those things, would I be
as happy as I am? Now? Would you change anything?
Would you do it over differently? Now? I wouldn't change
anything mean that, But you wouldn't change like the explosion
(34:04):
of the scars, the surgery. You'd keep all of that. Yeah. Yeah,
Because the life I have, I mean, a beautiful wife
and a beautiful daughter, and the beautiful life that I've
created for myself. I mean, gosh, I mean, I'm blessed.
(34:26):
With bad events, we often don't realize that some good
can come out of them. Dan Gilbert is unsurprised that
people like JR. Seem more positive than negatives, even in
the worst of circumstances. He's seen it time and again
in his work on hedonic adaptation startlingly if you ask
people who've lost a child, which is the single worst
event that people can imagine experiencing, and indeed it is
(34:49):
one of the worst events people can actually experience. If
you ask people have lost a child, they never say,
g I'm glad that happened. But if you ask them
to name the good and the bad things that have
come from it, they tend to name more good than
bad things. That's a very stunning fact that we should
just sit back and marvel at the pas ability that
the worst thing in the world could happen to us
(35:12):
and probably more good than bad will come out of it.
There are awful events that will cause you to feel
pain and hurt and loss, but we're fighters. When push
comes to shove, we are really resilient. The problem is
we don't realize that. I think if you understand the
power of the psychological immune system, our remarkable ability to
(35:34):
rationalize in the face of adversity, it makes you braver.
You realize that you will make mistakes and eat will
be okay. I think there's a lesson there for all
of us. After making this episode, I've become even more
(35:54):
convinced about that lesson. Heatonic adaptation means the lows of
life aren't going to be as awful as you imagine,
just as the highs will be more temporary than you hope.
As a psychologist, I already knew that winning the lottery
and other great circumstances don't bring last happiness, But honestly,
I often forget about the flip side. So I'm going
(36:14):
to make a conscious effort to be a bit braver,
to stop worrying so much, to remember that I have
a kind of emotional superpower, one that can get me
through the worst of circumstances. And I hope you'll do
the same, because even though your mind might tell you otherwise,
joy doesn't come from everything in life working out perfectly.
It comes from adopting better habits and better behaviors. All
(36:38):
strategies will be discussing in coming episodes of The Happiness
Lab with me Doctor Laurie Santos. If you enjoyed the show,
I'd be super grateful if you could spread the word
(36:58):
by leaving a rating end a review. It really does
help other listeners find us, and don't forget to tell
your friends. If you want to learn more about the
science you heard on the show, then check out our
web site Happiness Lab dot fm. You can also sign
up for our newsletter to get exclusive content. The Happiness
Lab is co written and produced by Ryan Dilley. The
(37:18):
show is mixed and mastered by Evan Viola and edited
by Julia Barton, fact checking by Joseph Friedman, and our
original music was composed by Zachary Silver. Special thanks to
Mio La Belle, Carl mcgliorre Heather Faine, Maggie Taylor, Maya Kanig,
and Jacob Weisberg. The Happiness Lab is brought to you
by Pushkin Industries and me Doctor Laurie Sanders
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