March 20, 2024 • 48 mins
The Happiness Lab’s Dr. Laurie Santos brings together other Pushkin hosts to mark the International Day of Happiness. Revisionist History’s Malcolm Gladwell talks about the benefits of the misery of running in a Canadian winter. Dr. Maya Shankar from A Slight Change of Plans talks about quieting her mental chatter. And Cautionary Tales host Tim Harford surprises everyone with the happiness lessons to be learned from a colonoscopy.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin. Hello, and if you're listening to this on March twentieth,
Happy World Happiness Day. On the Happiness Lab, we suggest
you do something to improve your well being every day
of the year, but if the United Nations wants us
all to make a special effort for twenty four hours
(00:35):
in March, then we're on board with that too. The
first International Day of Happiness was celebrated back in twenty thirteen.
The goal was to raise awareness that our well being
can be approved if only more governments enacted policies to
help us all become a little happier. On each International
Day of Happiness, the United Nations also issues the World
Happiness Report, written by scientists and academics. This report examines
(00:59):
different themes, showing what we're getting right when it comes
to happiness and what we still need to work on.
Past reports have looked at happiness and parenting, what living
in cities does for our happiness, and more recently, the
impact that COVID nineteen has had on our well being.
Over the next few episodes of the Happiness Lab, we'll
be talking to the experts behind this year's World Happiness Report.
They're among the best and brightest in the field of
(01:21):
happiness science. So these are going to be some fantastic episodes,
But for the show today, we're doing something a little different.
The Happiness Lab is made by Pushkin Industries, and many
of the network's other hosts have some pretty interesting takes
on what can make us all happier, so I decided
to talk to them about what they would have put
in this year's World Happiness Report. A little later, you'll
(01:41):
hear from revisionist Histories Malcolm Gladwell.
Speaker 2 (01:44):
I'm perfectly happy to suffer, but I will not suffer
for six hours.
Speaker 1 (01:48):
And from Tim Hartford from cautionary.
Speaker 3 (01:50):
Tales, the surgeon would leave the probe in, so to speak,
without wiggling it around.
Speaker 1 (01:55):
But we'll kick it off with an old, old friend
of mine.
Speaker 4 (01:58):
It's worth sharing with folks that I've actually known you
since I was seventeen years old. I was a student
of yours.
Speaker 1 (02:05):
I was full eight years now.
Speaker 4 (02:07):
Now it feels like it's been so how much longer?
Speaker 1 (02:10):
This is Maya Schunker. I taught her back when she
was an undergraduate at Yale, and we kept in touch
after she graduated and went to work at the White House,
where she advised the Obama administration on how behavioral science
can improve government policy. These days, Maya hosts The Pushkin Show,
a slight Change of Plans, a podcast about who we
become when we face big challenges and decisions. Given all that,
(02:31):
she was perhaps the perfect person to ask my question,
if you were writing a chapter of the World Happiness Report,
what would it be about?
Speaker 4 (02:39):
Okay, Well, this one's really easy for me because I
think there is one thing that erodes my happiness more
than anything else, and it's what our psychologist's friend, Ethan
Cross calls mental chatter.
Speaker 1 (02:52):
Oh yeah, so Ethan Cross, he's a professor at the
University of Michigan and he's the author of this wonderful
book Chatter. Yeah exactly.
Speaker 4 (02:59):
And it was really helpful for me when I learned
about this concept because I was like, wow, Ethan, you've
just captured what's been in my brain for decades. So, Laurie,
can you tell us more about what mental chatter is
and how does that relate to the inner dialogue that
we have in our minds all the time.
Speaker 1 (03:16):
Yeah, well, let me start with the inner dialogue, because
in some ways it's a really cool thing that we
do as humans. So inner dialogue, just as it sounds,
is like the self talk that you have going on
in your head, and it could be about all kinds
of things. Right, Our inner dialogue is how we like
make sense of the world and build our own inner narrative.
Our inner dialogue is how we like plan for what
we're going to do after this. You know, when I
(03:37):
was waiting for you to hop on zoom, I'm like, oh,
after this, I'm gonna make dinner. And what do I
have in my fridge? And I oh, I have some
black beans? Like all of that is inner dialogue, right,
But chatter, as Ethan defines, it, is a little bit different.
It's when our inner dialogue goes to the negative. Right,
So it's that inner voice of worry where you're thinking
about the future and feeling anxious about what's to come,
(03:57):
or that inner voice of rumination where you're thinking about
the past and beating yourself up for something that you
did do or that you didn't do, or even just
like our inner voice of self criticism where we just
kind of talk crap about ourselves like all the time,
no matter what's going on. And so while our inner
dialogue itself can be really adaptive, mental chatter is not.
(04:17):
It kind of feels like crap, And then there's lots
of evidence that it affects our performance negatively too.
Speaker 4 (04:22):
I remember so when I had a conversation with Ethan
on a slight change of plans, it was so helpful
for me to even hear this distinction, the distinction between
the inner voice and dialogue and mental chatter, because I
think what happens is in the throes of chatter, you
are so pissed off at your brain. You're like, can
you please stop? You've been ruminating over this thing for
(04:43):
you three hours. You're not making any progress at all,
and you can really start to resent your brain and
resent the fact that it even has this faculty. And
so when Ethan and I did more of this gratitude
moment together where we appreciated our inner voice and to
exactly your point, focused on all the benefits that that
voice affords us in any given day, that alone helped
(05:05):
me have a different relationship with my mental chatter, because
at the end of the I thought, well, I wouldn't
want to do away with my inner voice altogether. I mean,
it's actually miraculous that I can travel in time to
the future or the past in general. I mean, I
might not like it in this moment because I'm perseparating
about something even happened two weeks ago that I can
no longer change. But in general, it's such a cool
feature of our cognition, of human cognition, that we have
(05:27):
the ability to have these internal conversations with ourselves.
Speaker 1 (05:30):
And I think the beauty is that once you understand
what chatter is, you can also find strategies for controlling
it when it goes to the not so great side, right,
And that's the lovely thing about Ethan's work, because he
has all these different strategies that we can use to
like not shut our chatter up, but to use self
talk to be a little bit more productive and a
little bit kinder to ourselves.
Speaker 4 (05:49):
So let's talk about some of those strategies for those
who are in the horrible loop of mental rumination. I
want to give folks hope and help them see that
there is light at the end of the tunnel.
Speaker 1 (06:00):
Well, one of Ethan's best strategies that I love because
it's like so super simple, and in fact, there's lots
of evidence that when you use this strategy, it doesn't
take any cognitive work. It happens super fast. And that
strategy is what he calls distance self talk, which is
just the simple act of using your name and talking
to yourself in the third person. So normally, if I'm
thinking about my own like mental chatter, I'll be using
(06:21):
the first person. I'll be like, oh, why did I
do that? I said that stupid thing, like I should
have thought more. But it's I I me, me, me me, right,
that's a first person perspective, and that's what we often
use when we get like all worrying and ruminative, because
it's all about us. But distance self talk lets you
get a little bit of psychological distance because instead of
talking like that, you say, you know, maybe you messed
(06:42):
up a little bit, Laurie, like, maybe this is something
that you need to think about in the future. Right,
So I'm using the second person you, I'm using the
third person, like my name. And that is really powerful
because the only time in your life you ever hear
the second person you or your name is when somebody
else is talking to you. And so it's this little
cool linguistic device that makes us feel like we're hearing
from some wise mentor we're hearing from some other person,
(07:04):
somebody who is distance from that loop of chatter that
we have going on. And Ethan's found that this simple
act of doing that you don't even have to instruct
subjects to like talk differently to themselves. Just the act
of switching the pronouns that you use in your brain
winds up making you a little bit kinder to yourself.
Has all these wonderful emotional consequences where you're a little
bit anxious over time, and it just lets you kind
(07:24):
of get out of that loop so that you can
perform better. And what's cool is like it doesn't take
any work. It's just a matter of changing the pronouns.
It's not like developing some complicated like cognitive behavior therapy strategy.
It's just like you switch the pronouns and immediately you
get this interesting distance from your normal chatter.
Speaker 4 (07:41):
Yeah. I remember reading in Ethan's book that Malala did this.
Of course, Malala the most sophisticated psychologist of all time
despite never having studied it, because she's such a such
a genius. I really love the fly on the wall
perspective because when I think about how I counsel my
friends or family members, there's a certain objectivity that I
(08:01):
feel I have in that moment where I can see
the situation from a distance. The kind of hormonal fog
is removed, all of those heated emotions are removed from
whatever advice I'm giving, And it feels so useful when
you're diagnosing your own problems to have that objectivity right,
to be able to look at it as more of
an impartial observer the distance.
Speaker 1 (08:20):
Self talk is one way to do that, but even
finds you can also do that like literally taking the
perspective of a distanced observer. You know what would Beyonce do?
Sort of strategy where you just say, you know, oh
my gosh, I said that thing, like that's so terrible. Well,
what would Beyonce do? Imagine not Beyonce? How would I
react to having said that? Like, I wouldn't care. I'd
be Beyonce right, Which sounds silly, but the evidence really
(08:41):
shows that, like taking this third person perspective, like pretending
that you're somebody else, and especially somebody else who has
exactly the skills to deal with whatever situation you're facing,
all of a sudden, like you wind up performing much better,
being less anxious, and you can just kind of shut
up the chatter because you kind of take on this
other perspective. My favorite part of it what would Beyonce do?
Is it turns out Beyonce herself uses a strategy I
(09:03):
guess whenever she's like feeling nervous before shows, she has
this persona that she calls Sasha Fears where she's like,
I'm gonna harness Sasha Fierce, and then she pretends she's
Sasha Fierce and she just like goes out there and
you know, does her Beyonce thing. So what would Beyonce do?
Beyonce would use this form of distant self talk where
you pretend that you're somebody cooler and wiser.
Speaker 4 (09:22):
I mean to imagine someone cooler than Beyonce. But fine,
I guess she needs a different reference point. I'm curious
to know what you think the mechanism is at play.
Do you think it's because we are better at giving
other people advice than we are ourselves, or do you
think it's that we're better at following other people's advice.
Speaker 1 (09:40):
Yeah, my guess is that it's a combination of the two.
Right when we start using second person pronouns like you know, hey,
you need to do a little bit better. I know
that you know this has been hard, but you da
da da da, Like I think we we rarely do
that in like a mean way, like you suck and
you're terrible, right, Like, that's just kind of not what
most of us normally do. So when we apply that
pronoun you to ourselves, I think it naturally makes us
(10:02):
a little bit nicer. So it means the advice we're
giving ourselves feels nicer. But I think hearing that self
talk involving you and third person like you, Laura, you know,
here's what you can do, all of a sudden, it
gets us out of that like mental chatter frame where
we're just talking to ourself and it kind of feels
like we're hearing advice from somebody else. I think we
both give advice differently, but we're more like we resonate
(10:23):
with that advice differently too, We kind of hear it
in a different way, so it's like both parts wind
up making us feel better and perform better.
Speaker 4 (10:29):
One of my favorite strategies that I use when I
am in the throes of mental chatter is temporal distancing.
Can you share a bit more about what that is?
Speaker 1 (10:37):
Yeah, So That is a strategy where you pretend that
you yourself are in the future thinking about whatever ye
it is that you're ruminating about right now. Then I'll think, Okay,
how is ten years from now Lari going to think
about that? And I'm like, oh, she's not going to
care about that at all? Right, Like my emotions kind
of go down because it doesn't feel like it's that
scary anymore. But also, ten years from now, Luria is
(10:57):
going to think about that incident in a totally different way.
She's going to say, oh, I learned something from that.
And so this is this strategy of temporal distancing. You
think about yourself in the future, how they would think
about that this incident, And usually when they think about it,
they're in a different mode than you are. They're not
like feeling all anxious and ruminative about something. They're thinking
from the perspective of this wise future observer who wants
(11:19):
to go through hard things, who wants to grow from them,
who's thinking more in terms of what they're going to
learn rather than how it feels right now.
Speaker 4 (11:26):
So there have been a few times where temporal distancing
has failed for me, and those are in moments where
I'm sitting there ruminating, and I imagine five years from now, Maya,
ten years from now Maya, and I think to myself,
I'm going to be worried about the same damn thing
even then. So for those of you who are listening
who feel like they're very neurotic in this way, you're
(11:46):
not alone. I'm with you, and so I want to
share what I do in those moments. So what I
do is I think back to my past and I
try to think about some topic that sees my brain
that I was absolutely convinced was going to plague me forever,
and then to look at my present self and to say, huh,
you're not actually worried about that issue that you thought
(12:07):
in college was the biggest ever. And so sometimes collecting
personal evidence from your own life that you were just wrong,
you misfecasted the impact that a particular topic was going
to have on you, can give you the confidence that
the current thing will actually resolve in your brain over
the next five or ten years.
Speaker 1 (12:25):
I love that because I do sometimes with that kind
of temporal distancing strategy, like I feel like sometimes I'm
so caught up in the moment with my chatter that
I'm like, oh, yeah, ten years from now, Laura, she's
going to be just as freaked out about this tiny thing.
But then when you look back, you're like, oh, yeah,
I guess I was wrong about those other ones, so
maybe I'm wrong about this one too.
Speaker 4 (12:41):
So Laurie, what are other strategies that we can use
to distance ourselves from that chatter?
Speaker 1 (12:45):
Well, other strategies come from somebody else we've had on
the Happiness Lab, Krista Naff, who really talks about how
we need to shut up the critical side of our
self talk voice. And this is something that I think
I've seen in my students so much, right, Like, I
think my students just are so hyper ambitious. They talk
to themselves in like such harsh ways. And I think
they do that not because they're massochists, because they think
(13:06):
it works, right. They just have this assumption that this
really critic voices what's going to kind of get me
off my butt and I'll actually do stuff and get
motivated to do, you know, and achieve whatever goals I
had in the first place. But a lot of kristin
Neff's evidence suggests that that's absolutely not true. Self critical
voice winds up causing you to procrastinate and it feels
really terrible and you just don't get done what you
need to get done. And she's found that there's a
(13:28):
powerful alternative to this, which she refers to as self compassion. Again,
you're kind of marshaling the compassion that you'd give to
somebody else for yourself. You kind of give yourself the
same kindness that you would an outside observer, but just
to kind of make it concrete. She talks about self
compassion as having these three parts. The first part is
kind of mindfulness. You need to recognize this sucks right now.
(13:48):
I'm having hard time right now, I have failed and
I feel ashamed. So you're mindful about your feelings, the situation,
how bad it is. You're kind of like calling like
the emotional spade a spade, like this sucks right now.
The second part is what she calls calmon humanity, which
I think is super powerful. It's basically saying it's normal.
I'm human, I'm going to screw up, I'm going to
go through shame, I'm going to feel luck sometimes like
(14:10):
this is normative, right, It is common humanity to experience
these emotions that I'm experiencing. And then the third step
is the self kindness part, kind of using the same
strategies we were just talking about with Ethan, where you
talk to yourself ideally using the sort of second and
third person and say, Lauri, what can you take off
your plate? Lauri, how can you be kind to yourself
right now? And she finds this self compassion is this
(14:30):
like super powerful strategy where it can do things like
not just improve your performance and make you feel better,
but also like reduce trauma when individuals are in combat situations.
It can increase the compassion that you give to your
team members and your partner. Right, so do you engage
in self compassion? It boosts your other people compassion too,
And it just like has this enormous effect on people's
(14:52):
performance where you find that people stop procrastinating, they stop
being afraid of the kind of tasks that they have
ahead of them, they can just kind of embrace them
with excitement.
Speaker 4 (15:00):
Yeah. I had so many misconceptions about the self compassion
literature until I dug.
Speaker 1 (15:05):
In totally because it has really crappy brandis right, It
sounds like very woo like self compassion. It doesn't sound
like human performance maximization, but that's like ultimately what it is.
Speaker 4 (15:15):
Yeah, I mean, the minute I learned wait, self compassion
can actually improve performance, I mean, then it just becomes
a no brainer. It no longer feels like this soft
woo woo narrative instead one that feels very productive and
functional and ends up making you feel better, which matters too.
Speaker 1 (15:30):
Yeah, And I think one thing we get wrong when
we hear self compassion, And this is definitely something I've
seen when I teach the strategy to my students is
that they hear it as self indulgence. They think, like,
if you're being kind to yourself, you're going to like
let yourself off the hook or kind of not call
yourself out when you are acting problematically, like when things
are kind of a real problem. And I think that's
why this idea of talking to yourself like you would
(15:50):
a friend is so powerful. Like Maya, you're my friend
and former student. If you were doing something that was
really terrible, I would give you a talking to, but
I wouldn't do it in a mean way and say, ma,
you suck whatever. I would say like, Maya, what is
going on? Like I just want to know how I
can help? What can I do right? And so in
some ways, this self compassion isn't self indulgence, it's not
(16:11):
kind of letting yourself off the hook. If anything, it's
what Kristin f calls fierce, right, Like you are ready
to dive in even for tough problems and not avoid
them because you care about yourself that much. Right. That's
this kind of analogy with a friend. If a good
friend's going through something tough and they're not behaving in
the right way, you're going to check in. But you're
not going to check in in this kind of mean,
drill sergeant way. You're going to check in with kindness
(16:32):
and curiosity and like understanding, right, And that's just kind
of what we need to apply to ourselves too.
Speaker 4 (16:38):
Yeah, and that drill sergeant approach can really backfire.
Speaker 1 (16:41):
I remember.
Speaker 4 (16:42):
One of the freshest insights that I learned from Kristin
is that when you are crippled by shame, right, when
you feel that the thing you did is not just bad,
that you're bad, it actually closes you off to the
idea of improvement because if you're bad, you're irredeemable. There's
no chance at making progress or ameliorating the situation. So
actually self compassion is the instrument by which we can
(17:04):
unlock growth and do better. So it's the opposite of
letting ourselves off the hooktually, the thing that allows our
brains to be open minded enough to think that there
is redemption or at least a path to progress.
Speaker 1 (17:15):
Exactly, Maya. I love that you've brought up like the
self talk and how we can use it better. I
wish that was a chapter in the World Happiness Report.
I think it's super important. Thank you so much for
coming on the Happiness Lab.
Speaker 4 (17:26):
Thank you so much for having me, Laurie.
Speaker 1 (17:28):
A little later we'll be talking to Malcolm Gladwell about
the joy or lack of it, he gets from running.
But next up, the economist and Pushkin podcaster Tim Harford
discusses the famous happiness experiment that echoes in his own
medical history.
Speaker 3 (17:42):
I have to have colorsco is quite often we don't
want to go into too many details, but it's a
whole journey.
Speaker 1 (17:48):
All that after a quick break. If you look back
through previous World Happiness Reports, you'll see that a lot
of effort has been put into investigating why some people
are happier than others, and indeed why some nations seem
happier than their neighbors, but even in our own individual lives,
our happiness tends to ebb and flow. We can be
(18:11):
happy one year and down the next. Over the course
of just an hour, we can experience a whole gamut
of emotions, both good and bad. But there's an interesting
bit of happiness research that shows just how slippery our
grip on happiness can be. And that's the topic that
was picked up by our next guest on this special show.
Speaker 3 (18:28):
I am Tim Harft. I am a senior columnist at
the Financial Times, and I'm the host of Cautionary Tales,
which is a podcast all about the catastrophes of the
past and how we can learn from them.
Speaker 1 (18:42):
Tim admits to being obsessed by the work of Nobel
Prize warning psychologist Danny Kanneman, and especially the work that
Danny did on how we can remember bad experiences fondly
given the right circumstances. In a series of experiments, Danny
found that we can go through some pretty harrowing experiences,
but with a couple of tweaks about how that ordeal ends,
we can look back on even terrible times in a
(19:03):
much more positive way than we expect.
Speaker 3 (19:05):
He emphasizes the difference between remember happiness and experienced happiness,
and you would think happiness is just happiness, right, But
of course Danny Carman gets to be Danny Carman by
drawing these fine distinctions that never occurred to the rest
of us. So let me give you an example that
he ran an experiment where they've got people to hold
(19:26):
their hands in ice water for sixty seconds, and using
a kind of computer mouse, they could register how much
that was hurting holding your left hand in this cold water.
They get a nice warm towel, bit of a break,
and then they got them to put their other hand
in the water, not for sixty seconds, but for ninety seconds.
But for the last thirty seconds the water got slightly warmer,
(19:48):
I mean not warm, but just a little bit less horrible,
And then you got your warm towel. But then the
people participating in this experiment were asked do you want
to do their left handing again or do you want
to do the right hand thing again? In other words,
do you want sixty seconds of pain followed by nice
warm towels or do you want sixty seconds of pain
(20:09):
followed by thirty seconds of slightly less painful pain followed
by nice, warm towels, and people wanted the longer experience.
They wanted the longer, more uncomfortable experience because they didn't
remember it as more uncomfortable. What they recalled was, oh, well,
I put my hand in iced water and it was painful,
or there was that other time I put my hand
in iced water and it wasn't as bad. I didn't
(20:29):
remember it as being as bad. And the reason they
don't remember it as being as bad is because it
didn't end as uncomfortably. So in this particular case, Karnaman
was highlighting, there's a clear irrationality.
Speaker 1 (20:40):
Obviously, it's better to be less time and pain.
Speaker 3 (20:44):
Yeah, less time and pain, like as you're experiencing them,
the only difference between the two experiences was one of
them had thirty extra seconds of discomfort. But as you
remembered them, they're very different. Okay, so what has that
got to do with happiness? Well, it turns out that
this distinction between what you're experiencing as you go through
it and then how you remember it applies to all
(21:04):
sorts of things in our lives. You might experience a
happy relationship, but then it ends in a really messy way,
and then suddenly the whole relationship is like, well that
was a disaster. You might experience a pleasant vacation, but
then you have all kinds of trouble getting home from
the vacation, and then the whole vacation is spoiled. And
so this distinction between the stories we tell ourselves about
(21:25):
our lives, what we remember about our lives, and how
we're actually experiencing our lives as we go along, it
really matters. And I'm not sure I would say that
one of these things is the truth, like the experience
is the truth and the memory is false. I don't
think it's that simple, But there's a distinction there that's
worth exploring.
Speaker 1 (21:40):
Tim is, of course right. That distinction can have a
huge impact on our lives. Twenty years ago, Danny Carneman
conducted a study to see if the medical procedure used
at the time to examine the human bowel for disease
could be made less uncomfortable, at least in our memories.
If it could, then fewer people might duck out of
the exam because of the discomfort, and more lives would
be saved. So, just like in the ice water experiment,
(22:03):
Danny decided to extend the duration of a colonoscopy.
Speaker 3 (22:07):
At the end of the procedure that basically the surgeon
would leave the probe in, so to speak, without wiggling
it around. So it was kind of uncomfortable, but fine.
People rated those colonoscopies as less unpleasant, even though minute
by minute it was clearly worse than the shorter procedure.
The joy is because of a family history, I have
(22:28):
to have colonoscopies quite often. We don't want to go
into too many details, but the whole thing lasts a
couple of days, and it's a whole journey.
Speaker 1 (22:37):
I once presented the colonoscopy study to a group of
medical doctors who chastised me afterwards because they noted that
when Danny did that study and people were in serious
rectal pain during the entire colonoscopy, and we could kind
of vary how it ended. That that was before the
beauty of anesthesia that we have today, And those doctors said,
your colonoscopy won't be nearly as bad. You'll just kind
(23:00):
of get knocked out, have no remembered happiness or experienced happiness,
and then you get a nice little bottle of juice.
Speaker 3 (23:06):
Yeah. So I mean as a connoisseur of of having
cameras shoved whether the sun doesn't shine, Yeah, they're fine. Actually,
don't avoid. Do not avoid your kernoroscopy people that it's fine.
Speaker 1 (23:20):
Yeah. I love the experience versus remembered happiness stuff. I
mean for a couple of reasons. One is that I
love that Danny's figured this out and we can now
start better engineering enjoyably remembered experiences just by making them
kind of end pretty well at the end, right, you know,
if you've had a kind of crappy vacation, you know,
and it hasn't gone so well at the end, you
can just kind of stick in some pleasant thing and
(23:41):
then all of a sudden you can start feeling a
little bit happier. Danny also gives a suggestion that, you know,
if you've had this vacation that's gone really well, and
say that the day that you're flying home, you know,
everything falls apart and terrible things happen. He would say, well,
then you need to kind of reframe the vacation. There
was the vacation, you know, it ended on a high note,
and then there was the kind of crappy travel day home,
but I'm just going to kind of put that into
(24:02):
a different mental slot, and now all of a sudden,
you can remember your vacation pleasantly, even though it sort
of ended on a not so good no. And so
I love this strategy because by using what he calls
this peak end effect, where you're sort of paying too
much attention to the end of events, you can sort
of remember that the end of events matter a lot,
and you just need to make sure that things end well,
and then you'll kind of be happier. It's also funny
(24:24):
to me that I think there's so many natural events
in our lives that end well and we remember them
really fondly, like desserts and orgasms and all these things
that seem to be particularly good at the end, and
now all of a sudden, we remember these things as
the best experience as ever.
Speaker 3 (24:38):
Yeah, although meals, if you go out for a meal,
it doesn't then with dessert.
Speaker 1 (24:43):
Have to end with the bill, ends with the bill, Laurie, It.
Speaker 3 (24:46):
Ends with somebody asking you to pay money. But we
still go out for dinner, and we don't feel that
was a mistake. So I guess we successfully compartmentalize the
bill as being something else. But maybe restaurants should experiment
with getting people to pay up front. If you go
to really fancy restaurant and it has a tasting menu,
you can actually know what the whole thing is going
(25:07):
to cost, and you could pay in advance. Love this,
Maybe that would be in everybody's interest. You just remember
the whole thing more fondly.
Speaker 1 (25:13):
I do think some American restaurants have tried to come
over this. We have a few restaurants in my hometown
in New Heaven that when they bring the bill, they'll
bring you like a little candy or some Swedish fish
or something. So it's kind of this little surprise moment
at the ends. You're paying the bill, but then you
get to have some tasty candy at the end, but
the bill at the beginning will save them the candy cast.
I love this idea.
Speaker 3 (25:31):
Absolutely, But this distinction between what we remember and what
we experience, I think it broadens out beyond this narrow
but important point of we're really influenced by how things end.
I mean, that's important in itself, but if you think about,
for example, the standard question that people are asked when
they're asked to evaluate their happiness, which is like, how's
(25:51):
it going. I mean, I realized there's a little bit
more more formal than that, but I mean that's like
so metrics.
Speaker 1 (25:56):
Folks that might say that is but no, but seriously,
all things considered, you know, how happy were you this week? Right?
That's a remembered judgment. Right. People don't have access to
their experienced happiness during the week at every moment when
you're asking them that question. All they have access to
is that remembered version. And if the remembered version is biased,
either because it pays too much attention to what just
(26:18):
happened or how things ended or whatever, then we're just
not going to get great happiness judgments.
Speaker 3 (26:23):
No, and you've phrased it, how do things go this week?
Which is one question. But you could ask people how
are things going in general? How satisfied are you with
your life? Or you could ask people, tell me about yesterday,
how are things yesterday? Or you can get them to
focus in in more detail. Let's walk through what happened yesterday.
Let's go through the breakfast, the morning commute, you had
(26:44):
these meetings, you had lunch with a friend, all the
different things you did. So these are quite distinct ways
of thinking about measuring happiness. If we're asked, for example,
to evaluate our lives and we were just about to
get married or were recently married, you know, I'm getting
married or I just got married, is that like a
huge deal? But if instead it's like, well, my children
(27:05):
are graduating, they're going to leave home, they're going off
to college. Well that's what you think about. Well maybe
you're ill and that's what you think about. But actually
none of these things are in fact as all encompassing
as they seem to be when you are directing your
attention at them.
Speaker 2 (27:20):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (27:20):
I mean. The good news about these measures, though, is
that one could ask the question like, what are we
really trying to maximize? Right? You know, most of the
stuff we talk about in the Happiness Lab is all
about strategies that you can use to maximize your happiness.
As the question is what are we trying to maximize?
And I think to a certain extent, what we're trying
to maximize is what people say in those remembered judgments. Right.
For example, if I do some sort of intervention, right,
(27:42):
like I get people to scribble in a gratitude journal,
or I get people to engage with more social connection,
and then later on I asked them, hey, you know,
all things considered, how are you feeling with your life
or how are you feeling yesterday? What was your positive
emotion like yesterday? And people say like, oh, it was
pretty good. Then my sense is that that social connection intervention,
or that gratitude intervention, it did actually do some work.
It might just not be doing all the work we
(28:03):
assume it's doing because these judgments are a little bit biased.
Speaker 3 (28:06):
Yeah, I don't entirely disagree, but I would want to
raise a question. So if Laurie, for example, you encouraged
your listeners to maybe go out and have more diverse experiences,
go and meet more people, go to more places, do
more challenging things, take more short vacations rather than fewer
(28:29):
long vacations. Because all of these things are going to
lay down new memories, your life is going to seem
richer and more satisfying. I mean, that's advice I would
give myself, that's advice I would take from you for sure.
And yet, and yet are you not actually minute to
minute potentially subjecting yourself to a lot more stress, more congestion,
(28:50):
more uncomfortable situations, more difficulty, more danger, and actually you're
going through your life potentially having a worse experience moment
to moment, and yet at the end of the year
you look back at it and go, that was great.
Whose side to Thomas Shelling? Economist Thomas Shelling would would
talk about this sort of thing, and he would raise
(29:10):
the question whose side should you be on in that
argument with yourself? Who's right? And I don't think the
answer is entirely obvious.
Speaker 1 (29:18):
Yeah, I think one strategy we can use to get
better at it is to do a better job of
recognizing what's happening in our moment to moment self. I
think the problem with the moment to moment self is
that we're not often doing that evaluation. We're not taking
time to be mindful and to recognize what's going on.
But I think these practices where people engage in a
little bit more mindfulness, even when it is being mindful
(29:39):
about kind of not so great situations, you can kind
of notice what negative emotions you're experiencing. Those kind of
strategies can help us pay a little bit more attention
to the experience self in the moment, so you're kind
of kind of meta aware as you're going through those
kinds of events during your day, and I think that
can help us come up with a little bit of
a better judgment. Right, we can kind of do the
work to realize like, yeah, you know, it was fun
(30:01):
to think about going on that vacation. That was great
in my remembered happiness, but actually I kind of hate
the traffic. I kind of hate going through you know,
the tea essay or whatever. That mindfulness can sort of
help us pay attention, and I think it can also
help us pay attention in the other direction too, Right,
we can start noticing the little good things about our
life that are going well, so that in times that
(30:22):
are kind of sucky, we can go back to our
experienced happiness and notice like, actually, it wasn't that bad.
I mean, this was to a certain extent my experience
during COVID, where you know, in large part I was
just starting some of this happiness work. So I was
doing all this work and in the moment to kind
of be mindful of the taste of my coffee and
be grateful for the small things. And I think my
overall evaluation of how bad it was during COVID is
(30:44):
a little bit less bad than it could have been
in a remembered sense, because I was there noticing mindfully
some of these little things in life that were good,
that didn't go away even in the midst of that
pandemic time.
Speaker 3 (30:55):
One thing I have been doing recently is I have
been keeping what is sometimes called a good time journal.
So at the end of each day, I think back
on what I've been doing and how much fun it was.
And one thing I really noticed was that intense physical exercise.
So going to the gym or kickboxing classes, they were
(31:15):
always great in hindsight, and I know they I mean
they hurt, they properly hurt. At the time, you were
so glad. When they're over three hours later, you're looking
back and going that was the best part of the day.
And I guess that that is part of the weirdness
and the fun of Danny Carnerman's distinction that he's making.
Speaker 1 (31:34):
I love that. I love that, as you'd expect from
a master podcaster. Tim's talk there exercise sets us up
perfectly for the last part of this special show, which
Keen amateur runner Malcolm Gladwell turns a familiar happiness maxim
on its head, it's.
Speaker 2 (31:49):
The journey, not the destination. I just like, no, it's
the destination. Otherwise, what's the point of the journey.
Speaker 1 (31:57):
The Happiness Lab will be right back. Hey, Hey, how's
it going.
Speaker 2 (32:05):
It's going well.
Speaker 1 (32:06):
If I'm asking my fellow Pushkin host to re imagine
the World Happiness Report, there's no way I could leave
out revisionist history. Is Malcolm Gladwell. I knew he was
going to have something interesting and provocative to add.
Speaker 2 (32:17):
All right, we're ready, fire away, all right.
Speaker 1 (32:20):
The question I had for you, Malcolm, is if you
were an author of the World Happiness Report, if you
were doing your own chapter in this big report, what
would you want to talk about?
Speaker 2 (32:28):
I would like to do my argument that the phrase
it's the journey not the destination is backwards. Oh, there's
the whole important class of happiness that's about the destination
and not the journey. And there's a special kind of
deep and enduring I think pleasure fulfillment, where it's just
(32:54):
all it's all about where you end up, and that
getting there is sometimes hard and unpleasant, and that that
makes the ending even sweeter. I've always found something uniquely
kind of troubling about that phrase, it's the journey, not
the destination. I just like, no, it's like it's the destination. Otherwise,
(33:17):
what's the point of the journey.
Speaker 1 (33:19):
Well, well, let's unpack that a little bit, because there
are spots. There are spots where I agree with you,
and there's spots where I think the science might differ
a little.
Speaker 2 (33:28):
Like I think about this all time because I'm a runner.
Every time, I've been running my entire life. So I've
been running. I'm sixty, I've been running for essentially fifty years.
Every time I go running, I have exactly the same
psychological experience, which is I don't really want.
Speaker 1 (33:44):
To do it.
Speaker 2 (33:46):
I mean I make a place for it, and I
kind of formally look forward to it. I packed my
running clothes. I know when I'm going to go running,
I drive to a running place or you know, I
set it all up. But you know, if you told
me I could go home and drink a beer, you know,
there's a powerful temptation every time not to do it.
And then when I'm running, it's not always pleasant. You
(34:09):
know it's going to be. If you're doing a hard
track workout, it's hard, it's daunting. I mean, you're pushing
yourself and it's but then when you're finished, there is
a kind of experience from having finished it that keeps
me going back to it for fifty years. It's thirty
two degrees out there today, I'm going to go running.
(34:32):
I don't want to go running in thirty two degrees,
but I will do it because there's a plasure.
Speaker 1 (34:36):
You know.
Speaker 2 (34:36):
When I'm done and I'm back home and it's warm again,
I'm really really happy that I did it right. But
I wouldn't describe the actual experience. It's not masochism because
while I'm running, I have in the back of my
mind the memory of the feeling of having finished running,
(34:57):
and that makes the effort worth it and in a
certain way pleasurable in this sort of in this sort
of different way, it's like you're testing yourself in this
way that you you kind of appreciate. That's so that's
the argument I think.
Speaker 1 (35:11):
Yeah, I mean, I think it maps on to this
distinction that I feel like it's mountaineering folks who started
this distinction between type one and type two fun. So
type one fun is really just the beer, just sitting
home having the beer, you know, like you know, hot
fudge Sunday's orgasms, Like just like the in the moment
stuff is just good and deeply pleasurable, whereas type two
(35:31):
fun is sort of the opposite. It's like, again, it's
not fun in the moment. It's not fun when you're
like putting your shoes on and that first blast of
the thirty two degree weather when you're running. But the
fact that there's a goal at the end that you're
going to get to means the type two fun winds
up being really interesting. And this is like just a
distinction that like sports nuts and like people who write
in mountaineering blogs make, But it's actually something that the
(35:52):
economist George Lowenstein studied himself. He wrote this paper of
like why climb a mountain? But the idea is like,
why would you ever do something where it's like kind
of again not masochism, maybe not miserable in the moment,
but it doesn't have fun in the actual journey itself.
It just has fun when you hit the end of it. Yeah,
And so he argues that this is like a deep
feature of human pleasure seeking, is that we don't just
(36:14):
seek pleasure kind of in the moment for the journey,
like most of the good, meaningful pleasures we get involve
some hard stuff. I mean, you're talking about running, but
I know you're also a dad and raising a kid,
and that's the kind of thing that in the moment,
the pleasure is not great. But when you get to
these achievement moments like graduates from kindergarten or do these
fun things like those matter a lot more. And so
(36:34):
Lowenstein's argument is that there's so much of human motivation
is motivation not to do the thing kind of in
the moment for the journey, but the motivation kind of
comes from the very fact of there being an arrival
at the end. I think the problem, though, is when
everything's about the arrival at the end, and I think
this is the kind of thing I see maybe with
my students right where they get mistaken about how much
(36:56):
they're going to enjoy the arrival at the end of
I don't know, getting into a super good college, or
getting married, or there's all these big things in life
that we put our happiness only at the arrival at
the end, and sometimes that can set us up for
like kind of mispredicting how good that's going to feel.
When students get into college there's all these videos now
of like the acceptance moment when students click on the
(37:16):
link and they find out did I get into Yale
or did I not get into Yale? And when they
click on the link and they get in, they start
screaming like yeah, that's great. But students will self report
afterwards like five minutes later, well that was a letdown,
Like there's just the next caret to go after in
the next caret, And so I think the challenge is,
like how do we balance both of those. On the
one hand, we want to get the meaningful pursuit from
(37:38):
the big arrival moments in life, but we don't want
to like have those only be the things, or be
picking things where their arrival isn't as good as we expected.
We kind of mispredict how awesome it'll be in the end.
Speaker 2 (37:50):
I think part of the answer is, I'm thinking again
of the running example. Part of the answer is in
understanding that the kind of satisfaction that you get from
the journey is not less, it's just different. So when
I go for a long run, there's always a moment
in a long run where like in the middle, where
(38:13):
you're filled with this sense of awe about what human
It's funny, in fifty years, I've always had this, always,
this moment wherein I think, Holy mackerel, I can't believe people.
It's never personal. It's all about the class of runners.
(38:34):
I can't believe we're capable of doing this, Like, you know,
you might be You're eight miles into a twelve mile run,
so you've been out there for an hour, and you're like,
is it really possible for someone to be a middle
aged man to go out and run twelve miles and
be fine about it? Like it just seems like it
(38:55):
seems incredible to me, Like you're moving, You're not meandering,
You're like moving on. You know. It's sort of a
fairly decent clip. And that's like I was it always.
It fills me this with the same kind of wonder
that I get whenever I see anyone doing something thing
that requires effort and talent and persistence. Right, it makes
(39:16):
me feel better about human beings that we can we
can sort of pull this off.
Speaker 1 (39:22):
I love that and it fits with I mean, there's
this lovely work by Daker Keltner that looks at all
these domains in which people experience awe and wonder, and
I think we assume that that's going to be, you know,
these moments in nature when you connect with the divine.
And he finds that the most common moments of awe
in people's everyday experience is when we experience awe for
the awesomeness of human beings, like human's moral character or
(39:44):
their individual performance and achievement. And so I love that
you get that while you're running, but that's not I mean,
I'm not a runner, but I do, like, you know,
these long, hardcore yoga routines, and that is not my
experience in the moment of the top yoga routine. My
experience is always like why am I doing this?
Speaker 2 (40:01):
Sucks?
Speaker 1 (40:02):
Like I need to figure out, like I need to
find ways to get to these deep moments of awe during.
Speaker 2 (40:07):
Because you know the There's another way in which journeys
differ from destinations, which is that the pleasure that comes
from reaching the destination is I don't want to say fixed,
it's one very specific, singular thing, whereas the satisfaction that
comes from the journey, you're cycling through a series of responses,
(40:28):
so it's thirty two degrees out or whatever. And grew
up in Canada going and running. I've gone rung in
minus twenty before there's that dread, Oh you know, shit,
go ahead. Then there's like ten minutes and you're like
it's not that bad. And then fifteen minutes in your
relax and just sort of running easily and you're not
tired yet. And then there's that all moment like I
(40:49):
can't believe I'm doing this. It's kind of amazing, right,
and then there's that kind of like it's almost over exhilaration.
It's like the journey is six different emotional states. The
destination is one, and it's just and I think whenever
I try to get non runners to run, it's very
difficult to explain them that they're fixated on the first state,
(41:13):
which is, oh man, it's hard, I don't know about there,
and they forget no, no, no, there's like there's there's five
more after that. You just have to get to them.
This is a big deal in Canada because of how
much running you have to do in the cold, that
you have to understand that cold only only is a
problem for the first five minutes.
Speaker 1 (41:32):
And I think that's true for so many experiences that
ultimately give us happiness right, Like I think, you know,
on the show, we talk a lot about social connection,
for example, like just talking to a stranger, which ultimately,
once you're five minutes into it and it's feeling good,
is awesome and you really enjoy it. But the friction
at the start of it, that first question that kind
of awkward or they're going to hate me. All those
(41:53):
predictions are off. And so I think this is like
maybe a deep truth of things that make us like happy,
is that a lot of them start with some friction,
and like the first the first step is sucky, and
you have to overcome the sucky step to get to
the good part. But a lot of times we like
miss miss the sucky I mean, I think that that's
a real problem with so many of our happiness pursuits,
is that, like we have to overcome that moment of friction,
(42:15):
but there's often an opportunity cost of the thing that
has no friction, you know, for you with the run,
it's like instead of getting out in the like thirty
two degree day, sit home and have the beer. Right,
the frictionless thing is always appealing, but to get to
the thing that makes us truly kind of feel great,
we have to kind of overcome those first steps of friction.
Speaker 4 (42:31):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (42:32):
You know, various sports have different relationships to these questions
that we're talking about, and one of the most extreme
is cyclists. I used to listen a lot to still
do to Lance Armstrong's podcast, which is actually really good.
You know, there's always a moment where Lance has one
of his fellow cyclists on and they just talk about
start talking about suffering, and like you realize they don't
(42:55):
mean suffering the way we mean suffering. I don't think
there's anything that's as painful as the Twitter France. I
don't I just nothing. Running a marathon for a world
class athlete, it's like two hours and ten minutes and
then you're done. The Twitter France guys are out there
like all day for like weeks. It's insane. They're like
risking their lives, They're losing twenty pounds, their butts, sore,
(43:17):
their back. I mean, it's just like incredible, Like what
they go through. The whole thing is just nuts. It's
just nuts. I mean it does look to the rest
of us like masochism, but their ability to kind of
reinterpret masochism as something fulfilling and redeeming, and it's just
it's just amazing to me. I remember once Lence was
talking to some guy and they were talking about how
(43:38):
they're trying to teach their kids to suffer in the
way that they liked suffering, and how it was just impossible.
Like it's not a generational thing. It's just that those
cyclists are so singular in their ability to reinterpret pain.
Speaker 1 (43:52):
Well, you'll appreciate that. In fact, one of the most
famous papers on what's known as rosy retrospection, which is
this idea that you look back at an experience that
was kind of sucking, you think that was awesome. I
would totally do it again. It actually looked at competitive
cyclists they oh really yeah, yeah, people's happiness at every
at various moments along the trip. And you know, when
(44:12):
you're going to the trip for cycling, you feel great,
and then you're on the trip and every rating is low,
and then you come back and it's and you say,
what was your average rating on the trip, And that
retrospective average rating on the trip is like many points
higher than the actual average at any point on the trip,
So you kind of think back positively. So maybe it's
they didn't. They didn't look into the individual differences that cyclist,
(44:34):
and they were trying to make a general point about
human nature and rosy retrospect, and they weren't making at
individual differences and cyclists in particular. But maybe they should have.
Maybe cyclists especially I.
Speaker 2 (44:45):
Used to cycle a lot, and I just stopped. I
can't reinterpret my suffering the way they do. Let's go
do a century. You know, you ride by one hundred miles,
so nuts. It's like, I'm perfectly happy to suffer, but
I will not suffer for six hours.
Speaker 1 (44:59):
So how do you get how do you get through
the initial friction on your runs? Right? What's the what's
a tip that our listeners can use to kind of
bust through that friction to get to the happier, longer,
more meaningful journey.
Speaker 2 (45:10):
At the end starts low as the obvious one. In
the beginning, you're trying to distract yourself and you're thinking
about kinds of things. You will eventually as you get
into it, be running associatively where you just be focused
on yourself. And that's very kind of you know, as
runners high whatever they want to call it, but I don't.
I prefer it sounds to me, that makes it sound
very extravagant. It's just a kind of point of equilibrium.
(45:34):
You'll get there eventually. I think a lot of the
problems that beginning runners have is it sounds very paradoxical,
is their runs are too short. So go out for
two miles. No, no, no, no, two miles. I'm sorry,
you're not transitioning to anything if all you're doing is
running two miles, Like there is a kind of I've
always thought many runers with me that there is a
magic about going past an hour that once you get
(45:57):
into hour two, really really lovely things happen. It could
be forty five minutes, but it's certainly not fifteen minutes,
like it's not happening.
Speaker 1 (46:06):
Yeah, this is cool. You've got to get You have
to give yourself the time, and then once you get
into it, the flow start kicking in.
Speaker 2 (46:12):
Yeah. The same thing, by the way, with writing a book,
any kind of long concentrated activity, is just you have
to readjust your time horizons. You're not making sense of
a draft in two days. You know, if you're disappointed
after two days, it's because your time horizon was wrong.
Speaker 1 (46:29):
And this raises a question of like how we can
get to better time horizons. But ironically, some of the
research by Shichi Twang and Jennifer Aker at Stanford suggests
that one way we can get to longer time horizons
is to start thinking about the journey more. They have
all this work on what they call journey mindset. For example,
like I want to lose some weight, I want to
know hit my goal weight. Like no, Actually, what you
want to do is like be it your goal weight
(46:50):
for a really long time. Or I want to like
get this feeling of happiness that comes from like writing
the book. I want to get through the book Like no,
you want to experience the benefit of having written the
book and be able to talk to, you know, the
people who read it and experience those ideas later. Or
for my college students, like I want to get my degree, No,
you want to like get a degree so you can
be a lifelong learner and get the skills you need
to learn in the future. So they find that it's
(47:12):
easier to sustain motivation, for example, for getting a college
degree or writing for the book, if you think of
the kind of thing that you're going to get out
of it that's beyond the achievement, and so ironically you
might have gotten back to the fact that the journey
maybe is good.
Speaker 2 (47:26):
No, Remember I didn't say journy didn't matter. I was
objecting to the phrase it's the journey, not the destination.
Speaker 1 (47:34):
The journey and the destination.
Speaker 2 (47:36):
It's the journey and the destination. Yes, I'll buy that.
Speaker 1 (47:40):
So Malcolm wants to see the destination given a bit
more love in the World Happiness Report, while Tim Harford
would like to add a chapter on our memories of happiness,
and Maya Schunker thinks that tackling our disruptive inner monologues
should be included. But we'll be back to examine what's
in the Real World Happiness Report. We'll talk to its
authors about what they think are the most pressing issues
(48:01):
facing us in twenty twenty four. All that on the
next episode of The Happiness Lab with Me Doctor Laurie
Santo's
Pushkin. Hello, and if you're listening to this on March twentieth,
Happy World Happiness Day. On the Happiness Lab, we suggest
you do something to improve your well being every day
of the year, but if the United Nations wants us
all to make a special effort for twenty four hours
(00:35):
in March, then we're on board with that too. The
first International Day of Happiness was celebrated back in twenty thirteen.
The goal was to raise awareness that our well being
can be approved if only more governments enacted policies to
help us all become a little happier. On each International
Day of Happiness, the United Nations also issues the World
Happiness Report, written by scientists and academics. This report examines
(00:59):
different themes, showing what we're getting right when it comes
to happiness and what we still need to work on.
Past reports have looked at happiness and parenting, what living
in cities does for our happiness, and more recently, the
impact that COVID nineteen has had on our well being.
Over the next few episodes of the Happiness Lab, we'll
be talking to the experts behind this year's World Happiness Report.
They're among the best and brightest in the field of
(01:21):
happiness science. So these are going to be some fantastic episodes,
But for the show today, we're doing something a little different.
The Happiness Lab is made by Pushkin Industries, and many
of the network's other hosts have some pretty interesting takes
on what can make us all happier, so I decided
to talk to them about what they would have put
in this year's World Happiness Report. A little later, you'll
(01:41):
hear from revisionist Histories Malcolm Gladwell.
Speaker 2 (01:44):
I'm perfectly happy to suffer, but I will not suffer
for six hours.
Speaker 1 (01:48):
And from Tim Hartford from cautionary.
Speaker 3 (01:50):
Tales, the surgeon would leave the probe in, so to speak,
without wiggling it around.
Speaker 1 (01:55):
But we'll kick it off with an old, old friend
of mine.
Speaker 4 (01:58):
It's worth sharing with folks that I've actually known you
since I was seventeen years old. I was a student
of yours.
Speaker 1 (02:05):
I was full eight years now.
Speaker 4 (02:07):
Now it feels like it's been so how much longer?
Speaker 1 (02:10):
This is Maya Schunker. I taught her back when she
was an undergraduate at Yale, and we kept in touch
after she graduated and went to work at the White House,
where she advised the Obama administration on how behavioral science
can improve government policy. These days, Maya hosts The Pushkin Show,
a slight Change of Plans, a podcast about who we
become when we face big challenges and decisions. Given all that,
(02:31):
she was perhaps the perfect person to ask my question,
if you were writing a chapter of the World Happiness Report,
what would it be about?
Speaker 4 (02:39):
Okay, Well, this one's really easy for me because I
think there is one thing that erodes my happiness more
than anything else, and it's what our psychologist's friend, Ethan
Cross calls mental chatter.
Speaker 1 (02:52):
Oh yeah, so Ethan Cross, he's a professor at the
University of Michigan and he's the author of this wonderful
book Chatter. Yeah exactly.
Speaker 4 (02:59):
And it was really helpful for me when I learned
about this concept because I was like, wow, Ethan, you've
just captured what's been in my brain for decades. So, Laurie,
can you tell us more about what mental chatter is
and how does that relate to the inner dialogue that
we have in our minds all the time.
Speaker 1 (03:16):
Yeah, well, let me start with the inner dialogue, because
in some ways it's a really cool thing that we
do as humans. So inner dialogue, just as it sounds,
is like the self talk that you have going on
in your head, and it could be about all kinds
of things. Right, Our inner dialogue is how we like
make sense of the world and build our own inner narrative.
Our inner dialogue is how we like plan for what
we're going to do after this. You know, when I
(03:37):
was waiting for you to hop on zoom, I'm like, oh,
after this, I'm gonna make dinner. And what do I
have in my fridge? And I oh, I have some
black beans? Like all of that is inner dialogue, right,
But chatter, as Ethan defines, it, is a little bit different.
It's when our inner dialogue goes to the negative. Right,
So it's that inner voice of worry where you're thinking
about the future and feeling anxious about what's to come,
(03:57):
or that inner voice of rumination where you're thinking about
the past and beating yourself up for something that you
did do or that you didn't do, or even just
like our inner voice of self criticism where we just
kind of talk crap about ourselves like all the time,
no matter what's going on. And so while our inner
dialogue itself can be really adaptive, mental chatter is not.
(04:17):
It kind of feels like crap, And then there's lots
of evidence that it affects our performance negatively too.
Speaker 4 (04:22):
I remember so when I had a conversation with Ethan
on a slight change of plans, it was so helpful
for me to even hear this distinction, the distinction between
the inner voice and dialogue and mental chatter, because I
think what happens is in the throes of chatter, you
are so pissed off at your brain. You're like, can
you please stop? You've been ruminating over this thing for
(04:43):
you three hours. You're not making any progress at all,
and you can really start to resent your brain and
resent the fact that it even has this faculty. And
so when Ethan and I did more of this gratitude
moment together where we appreciated our inner voice and to
exactly your point, focused on all the benefits that that
voice affords us in any given day, that alone helped
(05:05):
me have a different relationship with my mental chatter, because
at the end of the I thought, well, I wouldn't
want to do away with my inner voice altogether. I mean,
it's actually miraculous that I can travel in time to
the future or the past in general. I mean, I
might not like it in this moment because I'm perseparating
about something even happened two weeks ago that I can
no longer change. But in general, it's such a cool
feature of our cognition, of human cognition, that we have
(05:27):
the ability to have these internal conversations with ourselves.
Speaker 1 (05:30):
And I think the beauty is that once you understand
what chatter is, you can also find strategies for controlling
it when it goes to the not so great side, right,
And that's the lovely thing about Ethan's work, because he
has all these different strategies that we can use to
like not shut our chatter up, but to use self
talk to be a little bit more productive and a
little bit kinder to ourselves.
Speaker 4 (05:49):
So let's talk about some of those strategies for those
who are in the horrible loop of mental rumination. I
want to give folks hope and help them see that
there is light at the end of the tunnel.
Speaker 1 (06:00):
Well, one of Ethan's best strategies that I love because
it's like so super simple, and in fact, there's lots
of evidence that when you use this strategy, it doesn't
take any cognitive work. It happens super fast. And that
strategy is what he calls distance self talk, which is
just the simple act of using your name and talking
to yourself in the third person. So normally, if I'm
thinking about my own like mental chatter, I'll be using
(06:21):
the first person. I'll be like, oh, why did I
do that? I said that stupid thing, like I should
have thought more. But it's I I me, me, me me, right,
that's a first person perspective, and that's what we often
use when we get like all worrying and ruminative, because
it's all about us. But distance self talk lets you
get a little bit of psychological distance because instead of
talking like that, you say, you know, maybe you messed
(06:42):
up a little bit, Laurie, like, maybe this is something
that you need to think about in the future. Right,
So I'm using the second person you, I'm using the
third person, like my name. And that is really powerful
because the only time in your life you ever hear
the second person you or your name is when somebody
else is talking to you. And so it's this little
cool linguistic device that makes us feel like we're hearing
from some wise mentor we're hearing from some other person,
(07:04):
somebody who is distance from that loop of chatter that
we have going on. And Ethan's found that this simple
act of doing that you don't even have to instruct
subjects to like talk differently to themselves. Just the act
of switching the pronouns that you use in your brain
winds up making you a little bit kinder to yourself.
Has all these wonderful emotional consequences where you're a little
bit anxious over time, and it just lets you kind
(07:24):
of get out of that loop so that you can
perform better. And what's cool is like it doesn't take
any work. It's just a matter of changing the pronouns.
It's not like developing some complicated like cognitive behavior therapy strategy.
It's just like you switch the pronouns and immediately you
get this interesting distance from your normal chatter.
Speaker 4 (07:41):
Yeah. I remember reading in Ethan's book that Malala did this.
Of course, Malala the most sophisticated psychologist of all time
despite never having studied it, because she's such a such
a genius. I really love the fly on the wall
perspective because when I think about how I counsel my
friends or family members, there's a certain objectivity that I
(08:01):
feel I have in that moment where I can see
the situation from a distance. The kind of hormonal fog
is removed, all of those heated emotions are removed from
whatever advice I'm giving, And it feels so useful when
you're diagnosing your own problems to have that objectivity right,
to be able to look at it as more of
an impartial observer the distance.
Speaker 1 (08:20):
Self talk is one way to do that, but even
finds you can also do that like literally taking the
perspective of a distanced observer. You know what would Beyonce do?
Sort of strategy where you just say, you know, oh
my gosh, I said that thing, like that's so terrible. Well,
what would Beyonce do? Imagine not Beyonce? How would I
react to having said that? Like, I wouldn't care. I'd
be Beyonce right, Which sounds silly, but the evidence really
(08:41):
shows that, like taking this third person perspective, like pretending
that you're somebody else, and especially somebody else who has
exactly the skills to deal with whatever situation you're facing,
all of a sudden, like you wind up performing much better,
being less anxious, and you can just kind of shut
up the chatter because you kind of take on this
other perspective. My favorite part of it what would Beyonce do?
Is it turns out Beyonce herself uses a strategy I
(09:03):
guess whenever she's like feeling nervous before shows, she has
this persona that she calls Sasha Fears where she's like,
I'm gonna harness Sasha Fierce, and then she pretends she's
Sasha Fierce and she just like goes out there and
you know, does her Beyonce thing. So what would Beyonce do?
Beyonce would use this form of distant self talk where
you pretend that you're somebody cooler and wiser.
Speaker 4 (09:22):
I mean to imagine someone cooler than Beyonce. But fine,
I guess she needs a different reference point. I'm curious
to know what you think the mechanism is at play.
Do you think it's because we are better at giving
other people advice than we are ourselves, or do you
think it's that we're better at following other people's advice.
Speaker 1 (09:40):
Yeah, my guess is that it's a combination of the two.
Right when we start using second person pronouns like you know, hey,
you need to do a little bit better. I know
that you know this has been hard, but you da
da da da, Like I think we we rarely do
that in like a mean way, like you suck and
you're terrible, right, Like, that's just kind of not what
most of us normally do. So when we apply that
pronoun you to ourselves, I think it naturally makes us
(10:02):
a little bit nicer. So it means the advice we're
giving ourselves feels nicer. But I think hearing that self
talk involving you and third person like you, Laura, you know,
here's what you can do, all of a sudden, it
gets us out of that like mental chatter frame where
we're just talking to ourself and it kind of feels
like we're hearing advice from somebody else. I think we
both give advice differently, but we're more like we resonate
(10:23):
with that advice differently too, We kind of hear it
in a different way, so it's like both parts wind
up making us feel better and perform better.
Speaker 4 (10:29):
One of my favorite strategies that I use when I
am in the throes of mental chatter is temporal distancing.
Can you share a bit more about what that is?
Speaker 1 (10:37):
Yeah, So That is a strategy where you pretend that
you yourself are in the future thinking about whatever ye
it is that you're ruminating about right now. Then I'll think, Okay,
how is ten years from now Lari going to think
about that? And I'm like, oh, she's not going to
care about that at all? Right, Like my emotions kind
of go down because it doesn't feel like it's that
scary anymore. But also, ten years from now, Luria is
(10:57):
going to think about that incident in a totally different way.
She's going to say, oh, I learned something from that.
And so this is this strategy of temporal distancing. You
think about yourself in the future, how they would think
about that this incident, And usually when they think about it,
they're in a different mode than you are. They're not
like feeling all anxious and ruminative about something. They're thinking
from the perspective of this wise future observer who wants
(11:19):
to go through hard things, who wants to grow from them,
who's thinking more in terms of what they're going to
learn rather than how it feels right now.
Speaker 4 (11:26):
So there have been a few times where temporal distancing
has failed for me, and those are in moments where
I'm sitting there ruminating, and I imagine five years from now, Maya,
ten years from now Maya, and I think to myself,
I'm going to be worried about the same damn thing
even then. So for those of you who are listening
who feel like they're very neurotic in this way, you're
(11:46):
not alone. I'm with you, and so I want to
share what I do in those moments. So what I
do is I think back to my past and I
try to think about some topic that sees my brain
that I was absolutely convinced was going to plague me forever,
and then to look at my present self and to say, huh,
you're not actually worried about that issue that you thought
(12:07):
in college was the biggest ever. And so sometimes collecting
personal evidence from your own life that you were just wrong,
you misfecasted the impact that a particular topic was going
to have on you, can give you the confidence that
the current thing will actually resolve in your brain over
the next five or ten years.
Speaker 1 (12:25):
I love that because I do sometimes with that kind
of temporal distancing strategy, like I feel like sometimes I'm
so caught up in the moment with my chatter that
I'm like, oh, yeah, ten years from now, Laura, she's
going to be just as freaked out about this tiny thing.
But then when you look back, you're like, oh, yeah,
I guess I was wrong about those other ones, so
maybe I'm wrong about this one too.
Speaker 4 (12:41):
So Laurie, what are other strategies that we can use
to distance ourselves from that chatter?
Speaker 1 (12:45):
Well, other strategies come from somebody else we've had on
the Happiness Lab, Krista Naff, who really talks about how
we need to shut up the critical side of our
self talk voice. And this is something that I think
I've seen in my students so much, right, Like, I
think my students just are so hyper ambitious. They talk
to themselves in like such harsh ways. And I think
they do that not because they're massochists, because they think
(13:06):
it works, right. They just have this assumption that this
really critic voices what's going to kind of get me
off my butt and I'll actually do stuff and get
motivated to do, you know, and achieve whatever goals I
had in the first place. But a lot of kristin
Neff's evidence suggests that that's absolutely not true. Self critical
voice winds up causing you to procrastinate and it feels
really terrible and you just don't get done what you
need to get done. And she's found that there's a
(13:28):
powerful alternative to this, which she refers to as self compassion. Again,
you're kind of marshaling the compassion that you'd give to
somebody else for yourself. You kind of give yourself the
same kindness that you would an outside observer, but just
to kind of make it concrete. She talks about self
compassion as having these three parts. The first part is
kind of mindfulness. You need to recognize this sucks right now.
(13:48):
I'm having hard time right now, I have failed and
I feel ashamed. So you're mindful about your feelings, the situation,
how bad it is. You're kind of like calling like
the emotional spade a spade, like this sucks right now.
The second part is what she calls calmon humanity, which
I think is super powerful. It's basically saying it's normal.
I'm human, I'm going to screw up, I'm going to
go through shame, I'm going to feel luck sometimes like
(14:10):
this is normative, right, It is common humanity to experience
these emotions that I'm experiencing. And then the third step
is the self kindness part, kind of using the same
strategies we were just talking about with Ethan, where you
talk to yourself ideally using the sort of second and
third person and say, Lauri, what can you take off
your plate? Lauri, how can you be kind to yourself
right now? And she finds this self compassion is this
(14:30):
like super powerful strategy where it can do things like
not just improve your performance and make you feel better,
but also like reduce trauma when individuals are in combat situations.
It can increase the compassion that you give to your
team members and your partner. Right, so do you engage
in self compassion? It boosts your other people compassion too,
And it just like has this enormous effect on people's
(14:52):
performance where you find that people stop procrastinating, they stop
being afraid of the kind of tasks that they have
ahead of them, they can just kind of embrace them
with excitement.
Speaker 4 (15:00):
Yeah. I had so many misconceptions about the self compassion
literature until I dug.
Speaker 1 (15:05):
In totally because it has really crappy brandis right, It
sounds like very woo like self compassion. It doesn't sound
like human performance maximization, but that's like ultimately what it is.
Speaker 4 (15:15):
Yeah, I mean, the minute I learned wait, self compassion
can actually improve performance, I mean, then it just becomes
a no brainer. It no longer feels like this soft
woo woo narrative instead one that feels very productive and
functional and ends up making you feel better, which matters too.
Speaker 1 (15:30):
Yeah, And I think one thing we get wrong when
we hear self compassion, And this is definitely something I've
seen when I teach the strategy to my students is
that they hear it as self indulgence. They think, like,
if you're being kind to yourself, you're going to like
let yourself off the hook or kind of not call
yourself out when you are acting problematically, like when things
are kind of a real problem. And I think that's
why this idea of talking to yourself like you would
(15:50):
a friend is so powerful. Like Maya, you're my friend
and former student. If you were doing something that was
really terrible, I would give you a talking to, but
I wouldn't do it in a mean way and say, ma,
you suck whatever. I would say like, Maya, what is
going on? Like I just want to know how I
can help? What can I do right? And so in
some ways, this self compassion isn't self indulgence, it's not
(16:11):
kind of letting yourself off the hook. If anything, it's
what Kristin f calls fierce, right, Like you are ready
to dive in even for tough problems and not avoid
them because you care about yourself that much. Right. That's
this kind of analogy with a friend. If a good
friend's going through something tough and they're not behaving in
the right way, you're going to check in. But you're
not going to check in in this kind of mean,
drill sergeant way. You're going to check in with kindness
(16:32):
and curiosity and like understanding, right, And that's just kind
of what we need to apply to ourselves too.
Speaker 4 (16:38):
Yeah, and that drill sergeant approach can really backfire.
Speaker 1 (16:41):
I remember.
Speaker 4 (16:42):
One of the freshest insights that I learned from Kristin
is that when you are crippled by shame, right, when
you feel that the thing you did is not just bad,
that you're bad, it actually closes you off to the
idea of improvement because if you're bad, you're irredeemable. There's
no chance at making progress or ameliorating the situation. So
actually self compassion is the instrument by which we can
(17:04):
unlock growth and do better. So it's the opposite of
letting ourselves off the hooktually, the thing that allows our
brains to be open minded enough to think that there
is redemption or at least a path to progress.
Speaker 1 (17:15):
Exactly, Maya. I love that you've brought up like the
self talk and how we can use it better. I
wish that was a chapter in the World Happiness Report.
I think it's super important. Thank you so much for
coming on the Happiness Lab.
Speaker 4 (17:26):
Thank you so much for having me, Laurie.
Speaker 1 (17:28):
A little later we'll be talking to Malcolm Gladwell about
the joy or lack of it, he gets from running.
But next up, the economist and Pushkin podcaster Tim Harford
discusses the famous happiness experiment that echoes in his own
medical history.
Speaker 3 (17:42):
I have to have colorsco is quite often we don't
want to go into too many details, but it's a
whole journey.
Speaker 1 (17:48):
All that after a quick break. If you look back
through previous World Happiness Reports, you'll see that a lot
of effort has been put into investigating why some people
are happier than others, and indeed why some nations seem
happier than their neighbors, but even in our own individual lives,
our happiness tends to ebb and flow. We can be
(18:11):
happy one year and down the next. Over the course
of just an hour, we can experience a whole gamut
of emotions, both good and bad. But there's an interesting
bit of happiness research that shows just how slippery our
grip on happiness can be. And that's the topic that
was picked up by our next guest on this special show.
Speaker 3 (18:28):
I am Tim Harft. I am a senior columnist at
the Financial Times, and I'm the host of Cautionary Tales,
which is a podcast all about the catastrophes of the
past and how we can learn from them.
Speaker 1 (18:42):
Tim admits to being obsessed by the work of Nobel
Prize warning psychologist Danny Kanneman, and especially the work that
Danny did on how we can remember bad experiences fondly
given the right circumstances. In a series of experiments, Danny
found that we can go through some pretty harrowing experiences,
but with a couple of tweaks about how that ordeal ends,
we can look back on even terrible times in a
(19:03):
much more positive way than we expect.
Speaker 3 (19:05):
He emphasizes the difference between remember happiness and experienced happiness,
and you would think happiness is just happiness, right, But
of course Danny Carman gets to be Danny Carman by
drawing these fine distinctions that never occurred to the rest
of us. So let me give you an example that
he ran an experiment where they've got people to hold
(19:26):
their hands in ice water for sixty seconds, and using
a kind of computer mouse, they could register how much
that was hurting holding your left hand in this cold water.
They get a nice warm towel, bit of a break,
and then they got them to put their other hand
in the water, not for sixty seconds, but for ninety seconds.
But for the last thirty seconds the water got slightly warmer,
(19:48):
I mean not warm, but just a little bit less horrible,
And then you got your warm towel. But then the
people participating in this experiment were asked do you want
to do their left handing again or do you want
to do the right hand thing again? In other words,
do you want sixty seconds of pain followed by nice
warm towels or do you want sixty seconds of pain
(20:09):
followed by thirty seconds of slightly less painful pain followed
by nice, warm towels, and people wanted the longer experience.
They wanted the longer, more uncomfortable experience because they didn't
remember it as more uncomfortable. What they recalled was, oh, well,
I put my hand in iced water and it was painful,
or there was that other time I put my hand
in iced water and it wasn't as bad. I didn't
(20:29):
remember it as being as bad. And the reason they
don't remember it as being as bad is because it
didn't end as uncomfortably. So in this particular case, Karnaman
was highlighting, there's a clear irrationality.
Speaker 1 (20:40):
Obviously, it's better to be less time and pain.
Speaker 3 (20:44):
Yeah, less time and pain, like as you're experiencing them,
the only difference between the two experiences was one of
them had thirty extra seconds of discomfort. But as you
remembered them, they're very different. Okay, so what has that
got to do with happiness? Well, it turns out that
this distinction between what you're experiencing as you go through
it and then how you remember it applies to all
(21:04):
sorts of things in our lives. You might experience a
happy relationship, but then it ends in a really messy way,
and then suddenly the whole relationship is like, well that
was a disaster. You might experience a pleasant vacation, but
then you have all kinds of trouble getting home from
the vacation, and then the whole vacation is spoiled. And
so this distinction between the stories we tell ourselves about
(21:25):
our lives, what we remember about our lives, and how
we're actually experiencing our lives as we go along, it
really matters. And I'm not sure I would say that
one of these things is the truth, like the experience
is the truth and the memory is false. I don't
think it's that simple, But there's a distinction there that's
worth exploring.
Speaker 1 (21:40):
Tim is, of course right. That distinction can have a
huge impact on our lives. Twenty years ago, Danny Carneman
conducted a study to see if the medical procedure used
at the time to examine the human bowel for disease
could be made less uncomfortable, at least in our memories.
If it could, then fewer people might duck out of
the exam because of the discomfort, and more lives would
be saved. So, just like in the ice water experiment,
(22:03):
Danny decided to extend the duration of a colonoscopy.
Speaker 3 (22:07):
At the end of the procedure that basically the surgeon
would leave the probe in, so to speak, without wiggling
it around. So it was kind of uncomfortable, but fine.
People rated those colonoscopies as less unpleasant, even though minute
by minute it was clearly worse than the shorter procedure.
The joy is because of a family history, I have
(22:28):
to have colonoscopies quite often. We don't want to go
into too many details, but the whole thing lasts a
couple of days, and it's a whole journey.
Speaker 1 (22:37):
I once presented the colonoscopy study to a group of
medical doctors who chastised me afterwards because they noted that
when Danny did that study and people were in serious
rectal pain during the entire colonoscopy, and we could kind
of vary how it ended. That that was before the
beauty of anesthesia that we have today, And those doctors said,
your colonoscopy won't be nearly as bad. You'll just kind
(23:00):
of get knocked out, have no remembered happiness or experienced happiness,
and then you get a nice little bottle of juice.
Speaker 3 (23:06):
Yeah. So I mean as a connoisseur of of having
cameras shoved whether the sun doesn't shine, Yeah, they're fine. Actually,
don't avoid. Do not avoid your kernoroscopy people that it's fine.
Speaker 1 (23:20):
Yeah. I love the experience versus remembered happiness stuff. I
mean for a couple of reasons. One is that I
love that Danny's figured this out and we can now
start better engineering enjoyably remembered experiences just by making them
kind of end pretty well at the end, right, you know,
if you've had a kind of crappy vacation, you know,
and it hasn't gone so well at the end, you
can just kind of stick in some pleasant thing and
(23:41):
then all of a sudden you can start feeling a
little bit happier. Danny also gives a suggestion that, you know,
if you've had this vacation that's gone really well, and
say that the day that you're flying home, you know,
everything falls apart and terrible things happen. He would say, well,
then you need to kind of reframe the vacation. There
was the vacation, you know, it ended on a high note,
and then there was the kind of crappy travel day home,
but I'm just going to kind of put that into
(24:02):
a different mental slot, and now all of a sudden,
you can remember your vacation pleasantly, even though it sort
of ended on a not so good no. And so
I love this strategy because by using what he calls
this peak end effect, where you're sort of paying too
much attention to the end of events, you can sort
of remember that the end of events matter a lot,
and you just need to make sure that things end well,
and then you'll kind of be happier. It's also funny
(24:24):
to me that I think there's so many natural events
in our lives that end well and we remember them
really fondly, like desserts and orgasms and all these things
that seem to be particularly good at the end, and
now all of a sudden, we remember these things as
the best experience as ever.
Speaker 3 (24:38):
Yeah, although meals, if you go out for a meal,
it doesn't then with dessert.
Speaker 1 (24:43):
Have to end with the bill, ends with the bill, Laurie, It.
Speaker 3 (24:46):
Ends with somebody asking you to pay money. But we
still go out for dinner, and we don't feel that
was a mistake. So I guess we successfully compartmentalize the
bill as being something else. But maybe restaurants should experiment
with getting people to pay up front. If you go
to really fancy restaurant and it has a tasting menu,
you can actually know what the whole thing is going
(25:07):
to cost, and you could pay in advance. Love this,
Maybe that would be in everybody's interest. You just remember
the whole thing more fondly.
Speaker 1 (25:13):
I do think some American restaurants have tried to come
over this. We have a few restaurants in my hometown
in New Heaven that when they bring the bill, they'll
bring you like a little candy or some Swedish fish
or something. So it's kind of this little surprise moment
at the ends. You're paying the bill, but then you
get to have some tasty candy at the end, but
the bill at the beginning will save them the candy cast.
I love this idea.
Speaker 3 (25:31):
Absolutely, But this distinction between what we remember and what
we experience, I think it broadens out beyond this narrow
but important point of we're really influenced by how things end.
I mean, that's important in itself, but if you think about,
for example, the standard question that people are asked when
they're asked to evaluate their happiness, which is like, how's
(25:51):
it going. I mean, I realized there's a little bit
more more formal than that, but I mean that's like
so metrics.
Speaker 1 (25:56):
Folks that might say that is but no, but seriously,
all things considered, you know, how happy were you this week? Right?
That's a remembered judgment. Right. People don't have access to
their experienced happiness during the week at every moment when
you're asking them that question. All they have access to
is that remembered version. And if the remembered version is biased,
either because it pays too much attention to what just
(26:18):
happened or how things ended or whatever, then we're just
not going to get great happiness judgments.
Speaker 3 (26:23):
No, and you've phrased it, how do things go this week?
Which is one question. But you could ask people how
are things going in general? How satisfied are you with
your life? Or you could ask people, tell me about yesterday,
how are things yesterday? Or you can get them to
focus in in more detail. Let's walk through what happened yesterday.
Let's go through the breakfast, the morning commute, you had
(26:44):
these meetings, you had lunch with a friend, all the
different things you did. So these are quite distinct ways
of thinking about measuring happiness. If we're asked, for example,
to evaluate our lives and we were just about to
get married or were recently married, you know, I'm getting
married or I just got married, is that like a
huge deal? But if instead it's like, well, my children
(27:05):
are graduating, they're going to leave home, they're going off
to college. Well that's what you think about. Well maybe
you're ill and that's what you think about. But actually
none of these things are in fact as all encompassing
as they seem to be when you are directing your
attention at them.
Speaker 2 (27:20):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (27:20):
I mean. The good news about these measures, though, is
that one could ask the question like, what are we
really trying to maximize? Right? You know, most of the
stuff we talk about in the Happiness Lab is all
about strategies that you can use to maximize your happiness.
As the question is what are we trying to maximize?
And I think to a certain extent, what we're trying
to maximize is what people say in those remembered judgments. Right.
For example, if I do some sort of intervention, right,
(27:42):
like I get people to scribble in a gratitude journal,
or I get people to engage with more social connection,
and then later on I asked them, hey, you know,
all things considered, how are you feeling with your life
or how are you feeling yesterday? What was your positive
emotion like yesterday? And people say like, oh, it was
pretty good. Then my sense is that that social connection intervention,
or that gratitude intervention, it did actually do some work.
It might just not be doing all the work we
(28:03):
assume it's doing because these judgments are a little bit biased.
Speaker 3 (28:06):
Yeah, I don't entirely disagree, but I would want to
raise a question. So if Laurie, for example, you encouraged
your listeners to maybe go out and have more diverse experiences,
go and meet more people, go to more places, do
more challenging things, take more short vacations rather than fewer
(28:29):
long vacations. Because all of these things are going to
lay down new memories, your life is going to seem
richer and more satisfying. I mean, that's advice I would
give myself, that's advice I would take from you for sure.
And yet, and yet are you not actually minute to
minute potentially subjecting yourself to a lot more stress, more congestion,
(28:50):
more uncomfortable situations, more difficulty, more danger, and actually you're
going through your life potentially having a worse experience moment
to moment, and yet at the end of the year
you look back at it and go, that was great.
Whose side to Thomas Shelling? Economist Thomas Shelling would would
talk about this sort of thing, and he would raise
(29:10):
the question whose side should you be on in that
argument with yourself? Who's right? And I don't think the
answer is entirely obvious.
Speaker 1 (29:18):
Yeah, I think one strategy we can use to get
better at it is to do a better job of
recognizing what's happening in our moment to moment self. I
think the problem with the moment to moment self is
that we're not often doing that evaluation. We're not taking
time to be mindful and to recognize what's going on.
But I think these practices where people engage in a
little bit more mindfulness, even when it is being mindful
(29:39):
about kind of not so great situations, you can kind
of notice what negative emotions you're experiencing. Those kind of
strategies can help us pay a little bit more attention
to the experience self in the moment, so you're kind
of kind of meta aware as you're going through those
kinds of events during your day, and I think that
can help us come up with a little bit of
a better judgment. Right, we can kind of do the
work to realize like, yeah, you know, it was fun
(30:01):
to think about going on that vacation. That was great
in my remembered happiness, but actually I kind of hate
the traffic. I kind of hate going through you know,
the tea essay or whatever. That mindfulness can sort of
help us pay attention, and I think it can also
help us pay attention in the other direction too, Right,
we can start noticing the little good things about our
life that are going well, so that in times that
(30:22):
are kind of sucky, we can go back to our
experienced happiness and notice like, actually, it wasn't that bad.
I mean, this was to a certain extent my experience
during COVID, where you know, in large part I was
just starting some of this happiness work. So I was
doing all this work and in the moment to kind
of be mindful of the taste of my coffee and
be grateful for the small things. And I think my
overall evaluation of how bad it was during COVID is
(30:44):
a little bit less bad than it could have been
in a remembered sense, because I was there noticing mindfully
some of these little things in life that were good,
that didn't go away even in the midst of that
pandemic time.
Speaker 3 (30:55):
One thing I have been doing recently is I have
been keeping what is sometimes called a good time journal.
So at the end of each day, I think back
on what I've been doing and how much fun it was.
And one thing I really noticed was that intense physical exercise.
So going to the gym or kickboxing classes, they were
(31:15):
always great in hindsight, and I know they I mean
they hurt, they properly hurt. At the time, you were
so glad. When they're over three hours later, you're looking
back and going that was the best part of the day.
And I guess that that is part of the weirdness
and the fun of Danny Carnerman's distinction that he's making.
Speaker 1 (31:34):
I love that. I love that, as you'd expect from
a master podcaster. Tim's talk there exercise sets us up
perfectly for the last part of this special show, which
Keen amateur runner Malcolm Gladwell turns a familiar happiness maxim
on its head, it's.
Speaker 2 (31:49):
The journey, not the destination. I just like, no, it's
the destination. Otherwise, what's the point of the journey.
Speaker 1 (31:57):
The Happiness Lab will be right back. Hey, Hey, how's
it going.
Speaker 2 (32:05):
It's going well.
Speaker 1 (32:06):
If I'm asking my fellow Pushkin host to re imagine
the World Happiness Report, there's no way I could leave
out revisionist history. Is Malcolm Gladwell. I knew he was
going to have something interesting and provocative to add.
Speaker 2 (32:17):
All right, we're ready, fire away, all right.
Speaker 1 (32:20):
The question I had for you, Malcolm, is if you
were an author of the World Happiness Report, if you
were doing your own chapter in this big report, what
would you want to talk about?
Speaker 2 (32:28):
I would like to do my argument that the phrase
it's the journey not the destination is backwards. Oh, there's
the whole important class of happiness that's about the destination
and not the journey. And there's a special kind of
deep and enduring I think pleasure fulfillment, where it's just
(32:54):
all it's all about where you end up, and that
getting there is sometimes hard and unpleasant, and that that
makes the ending even sweeter. I've always found something uniquely
kind of troubling about that phrase, it's the journey, not
the destination. I just like, no, it's like it's the destination. Otherwise,
(33:17):
what's the point of the journey.
Speaker 1 (33:19):
Well, well, let's unpack that a little bit, because there
are spots. There are spots where I agree with you,
and there's spots where I think the science might differ
a little.
Speaker 2 (33:28):
Like I think about this all time because I'm a runner.
Every time, I've been running my entire life. So I've
been running. I'm sixty, I've been running for essentially fifty years.
Every time I go running, I have exactly the same
psychological experience, which is I don't really want.
Speaker 1 (33:44):
To do it.
Speaker 2 (33:46):
I mean I make a place for it, and I
kind of formally look forward to it. I packed my
running clothes. I know when I'm going to go running,
I drive to a running place or you know, I
set it all up. But you know, if you told
me I could go home and drink a beer, you know,
there's a powerful temptation every time not to do it.
And then when I'm running, it's not always pleasant. You
(34:09):
know it's going to be. If you're doing a hard
track workout, it's hard, it's daunting. I mean, you're pushing
yourself and it's but then when you're finished, there is
a kind of experience from having finished it that keeps
me going back to it for fifty years. It's thirty
two degrees out there today, I'm going to go running.
(34:32):
I don't want to go running in thirty two degrees,
but I will do it because there's a plasure.
Speaker 1 (34:36):
You know.
Speaker 2 (34:36):
When I'm done and I'm back home and it's warm again,
I'm really really happy that I did it right. But
I wouldn't describe the actual experience. It's not masochism because
while I'm running, I have in the back of my
mind the memory of the feeling of having finished running,
(34:57):
and that makes the effort worth it and in a
certain way pleasurable in this sort of in this sort
of different way, it's like you're testing yourself in this
way that you you kind of appreciate. That's so that's
the argument I think.
Speaker 1 (35:11):
Yeah, I mean, I think it maps on to this
distinction that I feel like it's mountaineering folks who started
this distinction between type one and type two fun. So
type one fun is really just the beer, just sitting
home having the beer, you know, like you know, hot
fudge Sunday's orgasms, Like just like the in the moment
stuff is just good and deeply pleasurable, whereas type two
(35:31):
fun is sort of the opposite. It's like, again, it's
not fun in the moment. It's not fun when you're
like putting your shoes on and that first blast of
the thirty two degree weather when you're running. But the
fact that there's a goal at the end that you're
going to get to means the type two fun winds
up being really interesting. And this is like just a
distinction that like sports nuts and like people who write
in mountaineering blogs make, But it's actually something that the
(35:52):
economist George Lowenstein studied himself. He wrote this paper of
like why climb a mountain? But the idea is like,
why would you ever do something where it's like kind
of again not masochism, maybe not miserable in the moment,
but it doesn't have fun in the actual journey itself.
It just has fun when you hit the end of it. Yeah,
And so he argues that this is like a deep
feature of human pleasure seeking, is that we don't just
(36:14):
seek pleasure kind of in the moment for the journey,
like most of the good, meaningful pleasures we get involve
some hard stuff. I mean, you're talking about running, but
I know you're also a dad and raising a kid,
and that's the kind of thing that in the moment,
the pleasure is not great. But when you get to
these achievement moments like graduates from kindergarten or do these
fun things like those matter a lot more. And so
(36:34):
Lowenstein's argument is that there's so much of human motivation
is motivation not to do the thing kind of in
the moment for the journey, but the motivation kind of
comes from the very fact of there being an arrival
at the end. I think the problem, though, is when
everything's about the arrival at the end, and I think
this is the kind of thing I see maybe with
my students right where they get mistaken about how much
(36:56):
they're going to enjoy the arrival at the end of
I don't know, getting into a super good college, or
getting married, or there's all these big things in life
that we put our happiness only at the arrival at
the end, and sometimes that can set us up for
like kind of mispredicting how good that's going to feel.
When students get into college there's all these videos now
of like the acceptance moment when students click on the
(37:16):
link and they find out did I get into Yale
or did I not get into Yale? And when they
click on the link and they get in, they start
screaming like yeah, that's great. But students will self report
afterwards like five minutes later, well that was a letdown,
Like there's just the next caret to go after in
the next caret, And so I think the challenge is,
like how do we balance both of those. On the
one hand, we want to get the meaningful pursuit from
(37:38):
the big arrival moments in life, but we don't want
to like have those only be the things, or be
picking things where their arrival isn't as good as we expected.
We kind of mispredict how awesome it'll be in the end.
Speaker 2 (37:50):
I think part of the answer is, I'm thinking again
of the running example. Part of the answer is in
understanding that the kind of satisfaction that you get from
the journey is not less, it's just different. So when
I go for a long run, there's always a moment
in a long run where like in the middle, where
(38:13):
you're filled with this sense of awe about what human
It's funny, in fifty years, I've always had this, always,
this moment wherein I think, Holy mackerel, I can't believe people.
It's never personal. It's all about the class of runners.
(38:34):
I can't believe we're capable of doing this, Like, you know,
you might be You're eight miles into a twelve mile run,
so you've been out there for an hour, and you're like,
is it really possible for someone to be a middle
aged man to go out and run twelve miles and
be fine about it? Like it just seems like it
(38:55):
seems incredible to me, Like you're moving, You're not meandering,
You're like moving on. You know. It's sort of a
fairly decent clip. And that's like I was it always.
It fills me this with the same kind of wonder
that I get whenever I see anyone doing something thing
that requires effort and talent and persistence. Right, it makes
(39:16):
me feel better about human beings that we can we
can sort of pull this off.
Speaker 1 (39:22):
I love that and it fits with I mean, there's
this lovely work by Daker Keltner that looks at all
these domains in which people experience awe and wonder, and
I think we assume that that's going to be, you know,
these moments in nature when you connect with the divine.
And he finds that the most common moments of awe
in people's everyday experience is when we experience awe for
the awesomeness of human beings, like human's moral character or
(39:44):
their individual performance and achievement. And so I love that
you get that while you're running, but that's not I mean,
I'm not a runner, but I do, like, you know,
these long, hardcore yoga routines, and that is not my
experience in the moment of the top yoga routine. My
experience is always like why am I doing this?
Speaker 2 (40:01):
Sucks?
Speaker 1 (40:02):
Like I need to figure out, like I need to
find ways to get to these deep moments of awe during.
Speaker 2 (40:07):
Because you know the There's another way in which journeys
differ from destinations, which is that the pleasure that comes
from reaching the destination is I don't want to say fixed,
it's one very specific, singular thing, whereas the satisfaction that
comes from the journey, you're cycling through a series of responses,
(40:28):
so it's thirty two degrees out or whatever. And grew
up in Canada going and running. I've gone rung in
minus twenty before there's that dread, Oh you know, shit,
go ahead. Then there's like ten minutes and you're like
it's not that bad. And then fifteen minutes in your
relax and just sort of running easily and you're not
tired yet. And then there's that all moment like I
(40:49):
can't believe I'm doing this. It's kind of amazing, right,
and then there's that kind of like it's almost over exhilaration.
It's like the journey is six different emotional states. The
destination is one, and it's just and I think whenever
I try to get non runners to run, it's very
difficult to explain them that they're fixated on the first state,
(41:13):
which is, oh man, it's hard, I don't know about there,
and they forget no, no, no, there's like there's there's five
more after that. You just have to get to them.
This is a big deal in Canada because of how
much running you have to do in the cold, that
you have to understand that cold only only is a
problem for the first five minutes.
Speaker 1 (41:32):
And I think that's true for so many experiences that
ultimately give us happiness right, Like I think, you know,
on the show, we talk a lot about social connection,
for example, like just talking to a stranger, which ultimately,
once you're five minutes into it and it's feeling good,
is awesome and you really enjoy it. But the friction
at the start of it, that first question that kind
of awkward or they're going to hate me. All those
(41:53):
predictions are off. And so I think this is like
maybe a deep truth of things that make us like happy,
is that a lot of them start with some friction,
and like the first the first step is sucky, and
you have to overcome the sucky step to get to
the good part. But a lot of times we like
miss miss the sucky I mean, I think that that's
a real problem with so many of our happiness pursuits,
is that, like we have to overcome that moment of friction,
(42:15):
but there's often an opportunity cost of the thing that
has no friction, you know, for you with the run,
it's like instead of getting out in the like thirty
two degree day, sit home and have the beer. Right,
the frictionless thing is always appealing, but to get to
the thing that makes us truly kind of feel great,
we have to kind of overcome those first steps of friction.
Speaker 4 (42:31):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (42:32):
You know, various sports have different relationships to these questions
that we're talking about, and one of the most extreme
is cyclists. I used to listen a lot to still
do to Lance Armstrong's podcast, which is actually really good.
You know, there's always a moment where Lance has one
of his fellow cyclists on and they just talk about
start talking about suffering, and like you realize they don't
(42:55):
mean suffering the way we mean suffering. I don't think
there's anything that's as painful as the Twitter France. I
don't I just nothing. Running a marathon for a world
class athlete, it's like two hours and ten minutes and
then you're done. The Twitter France guys are out there
like all day for like weeks. It's insane. They're like
risking their lives, They're losing twenty pounds, their butts, sore,
(43:17):
their back. I mean, it's just like incredible, Like what
they go through. The whole thing is just nuts. It's
just nuts. I mean it does look to the rest
of us like masochism, but their ability to kind of
reinterpret masochism as something fulfilling and redeeming, and it's just
it's just amazing to me. I remember once Lence was
talking to some guy and they were talking about how
(43:38):
they're trying to teach their kids to suffer in the
way that they liked suffering, and how it was just impossible.
Like it's not a generational thing. It's just that those
cyclists are so singular in their ability to reinterpret pain.
Speaker 1 (43:52):
Well, you'll appreciate that. In fact, one of the most
famous papers on what's known as rosy retrospection, which is
this idea that you look back at an experience that
was kind of sucking, you think that was awesome. I
would totally do it again. It actually looked at competitive
cyclists they oh really yeah, yeah, people's happiness at every
at various moments along the trip. And you know, when
(44:12):
you're going to the trip for cycling, you feel great,
and then you're on the trip and every rating is low,
and then you come back and it's and you say,
what was your average rating on the trip, And that
retrospective average rating on the trip is like many points
higher than the actual average at any point on the trip,
So you kind of think back positively. So maybe it's
they didn't. They didn't look into the individual differences that cyclist,
(44:34):
and they were trying to make a general point about
human nature and rosy retrospect, and they weren't making at
individual differences and cyclists in particular. But maybe they should have.
Maybe cyclists especially I.
Speaker 2 (44:45):
Used to cycle a lot, and I just stopped. I
can't reinterpret my suffering the way they do. Let's go
do a century. You know, you ride by one hundred miles,
so nuts. It's like, I'm perfectly happy to suffer, but
I will not suffer for six hours.
Speaker 1 (44:59):
So how do you get how do you get through
the initial friction on your runs? Right? What's the what's
a tip that our listeners can use to kind of
bust through that friction to get to the happier, longer,
more meaningful journey.
Speaker 2 (45:10):
At the end starts low as the obvious one. In
the beginning, you're trying to distract yourself and you're thinking
about kinds of things. You will eventually as you get
into it, be running associatively where you just be focused
on yourself. And that's very kind of you know, as
runners high whatever they want to call it, but I don't.
I prefer it sounds to me, that makes it sound
very extravagant. It's just a kind of point of equilibrium.
(45:34):
You'll get there eventually. I think a lot of the
problems that beginning runners have is it sounds very paradoxical,
is their runs are too short. So go out for
two miles. No, no, no, no, two miles. I'm sorry,
you're not transitioning to anything if all you're doing is
running two miles, Like there is a kind of I've
always thought many runers with me that there is a
magic about going past an hour that once you get
(45:57):
into hour two, really really lovely things happen. It could
be forty five minutes, but it's certainly not fifteen minutes,
like it's not happening.
Speaker 1 (46:06):
Yeah, this is cool. You've got to get You have
to give yourself the time, and then once you get
into it, the flow start kicking in.
Speaker 2 (46:12):
Yeah. The same thing, by the way, with writing a book,
any kind of long concentrated activity, is just you have
to readjust your time horizons. You're not making sense of
a draft in two days. You know, if you're disappointed
after two days, it's because your time horizon was wrong.
Speaker 1 (46:29):
And this raises a question of like how we can
get to better time horizons. But ironically, some of the
research by Shichi Twang and Jennifer Aker at Stanford suggests
that one way we can get to longer time horizons
is to start thinking about the journey more. They have
all this work on what they call journey mindset. For example,
like I want to lose some weight, I want to
know hit my goal weight. Like no, Actually, what you
want to do is like be it your goal weight
(46:50):
for a really long time. Or I want to like
get this feeling of happiness that comes from like writing
the book. I want to get through the book Like no,
you want to experience the benefit of having written the
book and be able to talk to, you know, the
people who read it and experience those ideas later. Or
for my college students, like I want to get my degree, No,
you want to like get a degree so you can
be a lifelong learner and get the skills you need
to learn in the future. So they find that it's
(47:12):
easier to sustain motivation, for example, for getting a college
degree or writing for the book, if you think of
the kind of thing that you're going to get out
of it that's beyond the achievement, and so ironically you
might have gotten back to the fact that the journey
maybe is good.
Speaker 2 (47:26):
No, Remember I didn't say journy didn't matter. I was
objecting to the phrase it's the journey, not the destination.
Speaker 1 (47:34):
The journey and the destination.
Speaker 2 (47:36):
It's the journey and the destination. Yes, I'll buy that.
Speaker 1 (47:40):
So Malcolm wants to see the destination given a bit
more love in the World Happiness Report, while Tim Harford
would like to add a chapter on our memories of happiness,
and Maya Schunker thinks that tackling our disruptive inner monologues
should be included. But we'll be back to examine what's
in the Real World Happiness Report. We'll talk to its
authors about what they think are the most pressing issues
(48:01):
facing us in twenty twenty four. All that on the
next episode of The Happiness Lab with Me Doctor Laurie
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