How to be Happier at Work (with Dan Harris)

Dan Harris was working seven days a week - and knew something had to give. He reluctantly left his ABC News job to concentrate on the Ten Percent Happier podcast.

To mark his career move, Dan and Dr Laurie Santos trade tips on how to find greater happiness in the workplace - from making better use of your time, to finding meaning in even the worst aspects of your job. Dan and Laurie also try out a meditation to help deal with those awful feelings of jealousy when a co-worker gets a raise or wins some praise from the boss.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin. Hey, they're Happiness Lab listeners. Today, I have a
really special treat for you. You see, there's this amazing
podcast called ten Percent Happier, hosted by Dan Harris. In
case you're not yet a listener, here's a deal on
ten Percent Happier. Dan interviews researchers, celebrities, and meditation teachers

(00:38):
about how to train your brain. And there's a lot
of crossover with the things we talk about on the
Happiness Lab, things like mindfulness, staying present, and well happiness.
Right now, they're doing a whole series on a subject
that's near and dear to my heart, how to have
a better work life balance. So Dan invited me on
the show to talk about some science back strategies for
heating the reset button at work. We tape the interview

(01:00):
live on Facebook a few weeks ago, and today we're
bringing that whole full episode to you without further ado.
Here it is very happy to be talking to doctor
Laurie Santos post of the excellent Happiness Lab podcast, which
I recommend to everybody. Also Yale Professor Laurie. Great to Sue,

(01:22):
thanks so much for being on our livestream today. I
am always happy to be associated with you in any
possible way, soa same same. So we're talking about work
and all the glory and suffering therein, and I know
one of the subjects you wanted to talk about as
it pretends to work is time affluence. What does that mean?

(01:42):
Time affluence is this funny term that social scientists are
using these days, which is basically your subjective sense that
you have some free time. It's the sense that you're
wealthy in time. You know, if somebody calls you to
schedule something, it's not like, well, how about never, or
how about twenty twenty three or something like that. It
tends to be the opposite sensation of what we often experience,
which is what's known as time famine. We're literally starving

(02:03):
for time. And the evidence is cool is suggest that
time famine works a lot like hunger famine. You're kind
of triaging things. There's like evidence of stress on your body,
and like time famine has a huge hit on your
well being. In fact, some work by the Harvard psychologist
Ashley Willins suggest that if you self report being time famished,
that's as bad for your well being as if you

(02:23):
self report being unemployed. We know unemployment is a huge
hit on people's happiness, but just feeling like you don't
have a lot of time can do the same thing.
Ashley was on my show. I think she's phenomenal, and
every time I talk about this issue, I can feel
my nervous system getting activated because this idea of time

(02:46):
starvation and it's opposite of time affluence. It's you know,
I do not feel affluent in terms of time, but
this is one of the reasons you made this recent
job change. I'm not sure you're comfortable sharing, but you
just made a big change for your own time affluence
is my understanding, right I did. I decided to leave
ABC News, where I had been for twenty one years,
and I loved ABC changed my life working there that

(03:08):
I got to go all over the planet and cover
amazing stories. And for eleven years I was the anchor
of weekend Good Morning America, which I really loved doing
that show, especially it was an am quite attached to
my co hosts. But something had to give because I
was working seven days a week, like really working seven
days a week, and so I would finish a long

(03:28):
week of working for ten percent happier hosting my podcast,
and I'm writing a book, which I try to do
five six hours a day on that I am helping
to run the company. And I would finish a long
week of that and then roll right into getting up
at three forty five on Saturday and Sunday mornings, which
you know, I just turned fifty. It's you know, it

(03:49):
was a bit like taking a flight to Asia every
week in terms of having to get up that early
and recover, and so something I had to give. And
I made a hard decision, which was to leave ABC,
which I wasn't really happy about, but I did it.
This is the thing that I think so many of
us faced, where we're often in positions where our time
is just so filled up that something has to give.

(04:10):
And sometimes if you don't make a hard decision, then
the thing that gives is something that's really bad for
your well being. Like the thing that gives is time
with your family, or the thing that gives is that,
you know, sleep, or your weekly exercise class or something.
Sometimes making an active decision to take time back, the
research shows, is like a real path towards happiness, and
it gets you off this bad trajectory that's only going

(04:30):
to get worse. You know, if this is where you
are when you're fifty. What is it going to look
like when you're fifty five, sixty and so on. It's
too early for me to know whether leaving ABC is
going to be the path to some big bump up
and happiness. I mean, I was already pretty happy. It's
such a huge change, and I just know that it
takes for me. It takes a long time to metabolize
something like that, you know, And it's only been a

(04:51):
few weeks as we're talking right now since I left
ABC News. And in terms of time affluence, though, all
it did was remove a very costly from a physiological
and psychological standpoint, habit or hobby on the weekends. So
now I have my weekends like a normal person. But
my Monday through Friday still feels as jam packed as ever.

(05:12):
When somebody calls me and says, hey, can I get
on your calendar? That makes me nervous every time that happens.
So what are your thoughts about how to deal with that.
There's a bunch of strategies you can use to kind
of feel better. I mean, one is really to reframe
the time saving things that you are doing. You know,
so many of us are often spending our money in
subtle ways to get back time. You know. I know
my husband and I we get curbside pickup or take

(05:34):
out every once in a while. And if you just
kind of get your takeout and eat it not mindfully
while you're checking your email, that's one thing. But if
you get your takeout and you put a time stamp
on it, I just get this burger and fries, that's
a regret and need to fry up and potatoes I
didn't need to chop and dishes I didn't need to do.
That was two hours and forty five minutes of my
time that I just saved. Just the act of framing

(05:55):
something that way, it's like, oh, it just kind of
takes that off your plate. And that's been a really
powerful one for me from a quick takeout, you know,
hiring somebody to do unwanted tasks. We often feel guilty
about these things, but it can be a way that
we're putting act time like into our schedules in a
way that can feel amazing. It sounds like you do
a thing that most of us do mindlessly, maybe even sheepishly.

(06:17):
I'm going to order take out tonight because I don't
feel like cooking, but you reframe it and deliberately intentionally
savor the time savings. Yeah, and I do that for
like different takeout the burger and fries. You know, maybe
that saves me like two hours, but you know, like
a good pad tie, I was not going to do that, right, Like,
I was not going to figure out where I get
pad tie noodles and all that stuff like that would

(06:37):
be really hard for me to do. And that's actually
a pretty big time savings. And we can do that
with other things. People pay for a cleaning service or
you know, hire the neighbor's kids to mow the lawn.
These things can feel privileged, but even if you're paying
ten bucks to the neighbor's kid to help out, like again,
it's a time savings that you get. The problem is
most of us have a little bit of discretionary income,

(06:58):
but we tend not to spend it to get time back.
But when we invest it to get time back, then
that discretionary income winds up going further. I interrupted you
before you were going to go onto another. Oh yeah,
the second tip, second ship. This second one has been
an enormous one for me, which is to make sure
that you're using the free time you do have. So
one of the many amazing things I learned in Ashley

(07:20):
Willen's book that still sticks with me is the fact
that if you look at people's time records, we actually
have more free time now than we did like fifteen
to twenty years ago. That feels shocking to me. It
feels like, how could we ever have been more time
famished than we are right now. The problem is that
the time budgets looked different. Fifteen years ago. We had
more big blocks of free time, So now we have

(07:43):
more actual objective amount of time, but it's broken up
into these tiny chunks five minutes before this zoom meeting
here and ten minutes when your kid falls asleep early.
This is what researchers called time confetti. These like little
pieces of time that are sort of floating in the ether.
And you have a lot of these, but they feel
so small that you never want to do anything good
with them. I can find myself like, oh, I got

(08:03):
an extra five minutes. I'll scroll through that feed that
I just looked through again, you know if I missed something,
or you know, I'll put a little extra time into
this email or something right, we do these things that
don't build us up, and then we feel like we
don't have any time. And so one great recommendation is
to make a sort of time confetti to do list,

(08:23):
but not a work to do list, like a kind
of well being you know, user time wisely to do list.
So on mine are five minutes here and there. That's
an extra three minutes of deep breaths I can do
these days. I've been trying to write in a gratitude
app more often, and I don't have a set time
to do it. But during my time affluent, it's like
my moments of time confetti. That's the moment to do.
It's like up five minutes before that meeting, we pull

(08:45):
out my phone and scribble a few things I'm feeling
grateful for. These little moments can add up if you
use them well. I love that. What about the notion
of a four day work week. What does the literature
say about whether we can actually get our work done
and whether this attractive idea does lead to a boost
in happiness. There's only a few studies coming out, but

(09:06):
the ones that there are are really suggesting that it
can be a powerful way to boost your well being
which like no surprise, that's like research that's published in
the journal, Like no kidding, right, you know. But what's
more amazing from these studies is it turns out that
people on the four day work week wind up being
more productive rather than less. They get more stuff done.
And we kind of all get this when you've had

(09:29):
the super long day, if you're just kind of dead
tired and feeling burned out, you do stuff at work,
but you're more kind of like churning. You know, you're
like kind of going through emails or like checking stuff.
You're doing stuff to tick off your list to feel
like you're being productive, but you're not doing like the
deep innovative work. You know, for me as academic, I'm
rarely doing the deep thinking work. I'm just kind of

(09:50):
getting stuff off my list. And when you chunk out
a whole day you got to get to the important stuff,
you wind up prioritizing it more so the thing that
drops off isn't the important creative work. It's often just
the churning. So like, who cares if you're not churning
as much, take that day off where you really have
some real leisure. This haunts me. This idea, though, because
I don't know if I'm going to be able to

(10:10):
articulate it. But I have been trying to get better
at not working when I'm exhausted. But I am haunted
by guilt when I do that, because I am thinking
about all the things I could be getting done even
on You know, I have one huge creative project right now,
which is the book that I'm writing, and I've been
working on it for three and a half years and
I've got another six months at least left to go.

(10:31):
I know on some level that if I take a
day off and do nothing, I will be more productive
when I return to the book a day Hence, but
I often struggle to allow myself to do that. Does
that make any sense to you what I'm saying, Oh
my gosh, it's like you're in my brain. Like this
happens to me all the time. And I think that
guilt is twofold. Right. One is we have this misconception like, oh,
I should be working. You can't be working. Your brain dead,

(10:54):
You're not functioning at the same level. You're not going
to get the work done that you believe you will.
But the second problem is that sometimes that guilt creeps
in because when we finally do take time off, we
don't let ourselves do anything that's really engaging, that's flow filled,
that's fun. Gotta have this crazy work week, and then
I'm feeling totally burnt out, and then I don't have
the energy to do something interesting or fun with my friends.

(11:16):
I just like PLoP in front of Netflix, honestly, And
sometimes I'm so burned out that I can't even pick anything.
I'm so depleted that to just make a choice of
which movies, so I literally will spend an embarrassing hour
just watching the different you know, documentary scroll by, like
not that one, and then I feel gross and nasty afterwards.
And yes, it's true. When I'm doing that, the guilt
is setting in, which is like I just wasted a

(11:38):
half hour scrolling through little blocks on a screen, like
I could have been working on my book, or I
could have been working on this project. But if you
take a break earlier, when you can really engage and
do something that's real fun, that gives you flow, that
feels playful, often that involves other people so kind of
boost your social connection, these are ways to really take

(11:58):
a break, and those are the energizing things. So part
of the problem is that we don't take a break.
But part of the problem is that when we do
take a break, we don't take like a good break,
a nutritious break, something that's going to build us up.
We kind of just like PLoP around. First of all,
that Netflix moment you described, you were in my brain
for that, And to be fair, it's not just Netflix,
it's any Yeah, yeah, exactly, you're all implicated. We're not

(12:20):
hating on Netflix here, but yeah, but in terms of
having free time that we're using, well, i'll give you
an example of something that I came up with recently,
and I'll be interested to hear what you're doing to
use your free time. Well, when you actually do that,
as you know, as a parent, playing with little children
can be incredibly boring and frustrating, and then sometimes you

(12:42):
can hate yourself for being frustrated and bored with your children.
It could be a real toilet vortex. And I have
a six soon to be seven year old and I
love playing with him. It's it's better now that he's
six than it was when he was three, but sometimes
it's still pretty boring. And so what I did was
I got as a drum set. I have been playing
drums since I was ten, and he's wanted to play

(13:04):
drums for a while, and so we play together and
that is really really fun, and I also use it
in my downtime when he's not around. This is so
funny because so we just finished a podcast episode about
fun and about how I don't know how to have fun.
So I tagged in fun expert, the journalist Katherine Price,
who has this great new book called The Power of Fun,
and she recently actually has decided because you know, we

(13:27):
talked about what I like to do and what I
have fun with, and I like to do music, but
I'm not that great at music. So she has decided.
In fact, I have this long text thread from her
where she's like, you need to learn how to play
the drums, like you will really like the drums, like
you should starting to play the drums. So Dad, this
is inspiring me to listen to Catherine and actually learn
how to play the drums. But you're exactly on point.
I mean, what you're doing is you're finding an activity

(13:48):
that's giving you both some playful flow, like connected where
you're both playing together. And this is the definition of fun, right.
You know, Katherine talks about this idea that fun is playful,
connected flow, and you're kind of finding all the parts
of it in that drone practice with your son. I
think one of the reasons that kid play feels kind
of yucky is that it's sort of boring for adults.

(14:09):
It's not really challenging for the adults. But there are
lots of things you can do with your kids that
really are challenging for you too. One of the other
folks we interviewed for our fun episode is the journalist
Tom Vanderbilt, who wrote this book called Beginners, and he
had this harrowing moment with his own i think nine
year old at the time, where he was taking her
to like chess practice and drum practice and swimming lessons
and all these things, and she was like learning and

(14:32):
having a good time, and he'd sit there while she
was doing that and like futs around on some feed
or check his email, feeling bored, and he was like,
wait a minute, hang on, I could be doing that
fun thing too, Like I could be learning in the
same way that she's learning, and in fact, we could
do it together and that would be like a huge
boost because now you know, we're doing something together. We're
having like parent kid bonding time, and I'm learning something
and having fun. And he talks about how you know,

(14:53):
this has been amazing for him, both in terms of
changing his identity, especially kind of giving him a sense
of like he's learning something new. He's not just his job, right,
so when the job's feeling stressful and is burning him out,
he can feel like, Wamacho's player now, or I'm taking
surfing lessons or something fun. But also it's just a
way to like kind of connect with his kids and
sort of show up and not be this bad example
where your leisure is an adult looks really boring and

(15:14):
miserable to the kids. Right, You're showing them adults can
learn and have fun too. I love that. I love
that starting to take my son to drum lessons, and
I'm going to make the lou the amazing drum teacher,
teach me a few things. You'll get to hear more
of my conversation with Dan Harris on his podcast Ten
Percent Happier After the break, The Happiness Lab will be

(15:35):
right back. Okay, so let's let's keep going with some
of the tips that you have for how to make
work suck less than it does so often for so
many of us, you have this notion of job crafting.
What does that mean? So job crafting is a term

(15:55):
that my colleague year at the Yell School of Management,
Amy Resineski, came up with. And this is the idea
that you know, our jobs have like on paper what
we're supposed to do, you know, like the list of
tasks that we're supposed to get done or so we
don't get fired. But within that list of tasks, for
pretty much all of us, there's a lot of flexibility
around the edges of what we kind of emphasize of
how we frame it in terms of what we are

(16:16):
actually doing in the day to day. And job crafting
is the act of building in more stuff that you
find valuable and fun. She suggests, starting with the kinds
of virtues that you care about. Often researchers call these
signature strengths. So we all have these things that'll kind
of get us a going. Maybe you love to learn,
or maybe you love to be social, or maybe you
like things that require bravery or it's kind of a challenge,

(16:37):
or you take on some risk. Maybe you like doing
things that are creative where you're building stuff with your
hands or something. We all have these kind of things,
and her ideas with job crafting, you kind of put
more of that in your job. It's not necessarily in
your job description, but you kind of build in it
any way. Now when people sometimes hear about job crafting,
they think, well, that might work for some cool jobs

(16:59):
like ours, where we're podcasters and we could be really creative,
But what about really boring jobs? And that's where Amy's
work is so awesome. She does these lovely studies where
she studies folks who have the job that you might
not think of as the most creative or flexible job.
She studies hospital janitorial staff members. You know, so these
are people who are literally cleaning up vomit and cancer
ward not a flexible position, but she finds that a

(17:21):
decent number of them say that their job is a calling,
that they wouldn't change it for anything in the world,
and when she looks at what they do, they're the
ones who are using a lot of these virtues, these
signature strengths. She tells us one story and talked about
it on my podcast, where she was interviewing one of
these janitorial staff members who said that his job he
was a person who cleaned up vomit in a chemo
therapy award, And he said that his job wasn't to

(17:43):
clean him up people being sick. His job was to
cheer people up, you know, after they were feeling really crappy.
Imagine the situation like you're in chemo, you cancer, you
get sick all over the floor. This sucks, you feel awful,
This is a low point in your life. And this
staff member would come in and he saw his job
as to make you laugh. His standard joke was, you
keep vomiting because that's how I get my paycheck. Like,
I'll have to do overtime if you vomit extra. So

(18:05):
now the patient is laughing. He's laughing, he feels like
he's done something genuinely meaningful and good. He's really helps someone.
And Amy's claim is if ganitorial staff members can do
this in their work and still get their job done,
all of us can do this in our own way.
And this is something I talk with my students about.
You know, so many of my students are stuck in
like majors that they're kind of annoyed by y're getting

(18:27):
through premed coursework, and it's like, well, how can you
build in the fun parts? There are things that you
find fun. Maybe you want to just be more social
and you come up with a quiz bowl to like
do your problem sets, or maybe you want you have
like a love of learnings on the edges. When you
find something cool, you watch extra five minute YouTube video
about it. If you take charge of this process that
you're stuck in, it can both feel like you have

(18:47):
some control, but then you get to exercise these things
that you love about life anyway that are going to
build you up. Here from my mind is going with this.
So you just say you're at a company, and you
are a younger person in a company, and you have
a somewhat humdrum job, but there are ways that you
could see yourself advancing that would be interesting within that company.
But we all know that maybe we don't know, but

(19:09):
we should know that the modern workplace was created by
white men for white men. And you don't feel comfortable
advocating for yourself to do this kind of job crafting
because nothing in your history tells you it will go. Well,
what do you say to people like that? Yeah, well,
I think you know, when you look at Amy's work,
what you find is often the people who are doing

(19:30):
the job crafting, we're doing it in ways that their
managers didn't necessarily even know about you. So there's job
crafting in a way where you're like, if I could
really harness my strengths, and that's my move to get
promotions and stuff like that. That's kind of one move.
But another move is you don't care about promotions or
like getting a raise. Like what you want is just
to like not hate your work. You want to not
be miserable every Monday morning when you walk in. And

(19:51):
that's where these job crafting things I think can be
the most powerful. Nobody cares if you see, your job
is making sure you chat with folks at the office cooler,
or like take an extra step to like, you know,
have a five minute conversation with the administrative assistant in
your office. But you're going to do a little bit
more creative work on the edges or learn something on
the side. That's not stuff to necessarily be moving up.

(20:11):
It's just making your life more fun while you're spending
literally a third of your life at your job. You know,
eight hours a day, we get hopefully eight hours of
sleeping if you're following the well being tips and sleeping enough.
But then there's another eight hours where you're like at
your job, if not more than that. So finding ways
to love it can be really powerful, even if it's
not necessarily for career advancement. I'm convinced. Let's talk about

(20:32):
another way, And I think this is particularly relevant in
a pandemic, where the separation between work and the rest
of your life could get very blurry. It was relevant
even before the pandemic because we all have our office
in our pocket in the form of a phone, But
now the physical office is the dining room for many
of us. Still, how do we not take the stress

(20:55):
of the day into our interactions with everybody else? Yeah,
this is so much more important now, especially for folks
who are still working at home. Right because, for better
or for worse, there was often a natural separation between
the work day and walking home. Yeah, you know, you
have your office in your pocket, but there was a
moment that you got into your car and like there
was a separation of physical separation between where you thought

(21:16):
about work and where you thought about home. Or maybe
you hopped on the subway and just kind of left.
These things are subtle, but our brain picks up on
them because their habits. They're little rituals that we do
all the time. That quickly, in March of twenty twenty,
a lot of these things kind of went away, And
so we need some way to tell our brain, hey,
we're shutting things off right now, we're moving away. This

(21:37):
was the commute home basically, And so we can figure
out stupid ways to do that. Like the beauty of rituals,
our brain doesn't really care what it is. You just
have to give it something over and over again. And
so I have colleagues who, for example, at the end
of their work day shut the laptop and throw like
a towel over it, just to be like the towels
over it the day is over. I had another colleague
kind of tiny New York apartment type thing where they

(21:58):
sat at the kitchen table to work and then they
literally flipped the laptop around and sat on the other
side of the kitchen table like and that was like leisure, right,
And it sounds so dumb, but like our brain prays
attention to these little physical cues. So giving your brain
some can just sort of have a little separation. I
mean we all learned this as kids with mister Rogers.
Where he cuts home, he takes the shoes off, he

(22:19):
puts the slippers on. Mister Rogers was deeply wise about
well being, and this is just another domain in which
he was. So what's your slipper going to be? How
do you do just some act that you always shut
off for work? And if your kids happen to still
be studying from home, I think this can be even
more powerful for them. Our brains don't have a separation,
but their brains are still growing. They're even more affected

(22:41):
by this kind of clutter in their routine. So giving
them some cues that they can use to be like,
all right, we're shutting down for the day can be
super powerful. One thing that we instituted really during the
pandemic that we hadn't done before that has been a
great dividing line between the work day and the rest
of the day is family dinner, which we had not
been doing in a ritual way until we're all confined

(23:03):
to this tight space together five forty five six o'clock,
we do dinner together and that has been really helpful. Yeah,
I mean, we forget that there haven't been these long standing,
often quite ancient traditions that we in the modern world
kind of just like a drop off, like oh, family dinner,
so silly, or like, oh, you know, putting the slippers
on when you get home, so silly. Right, But these

(23:23):
things are doing psychological work, powerful psychological work to get
our mind kind of ready for next sorts of steps, right,
and so anything we can do to build that in
for the workday can be incredibly powerful. I mean, another
one I know you've talked about is that commute home
can be a nice time to do a couple deep breaths,
or maybe the first thing you do when you walk
in before you're bringing your whole work emotionally home to

(23:45):
deal with your family is do a quick ten minute meditation, right, Like,
these are moments where we can do all kinds of
things to separate between the workday and the rest of
our lives. One of the most painful parts of work
for me over the last couple of decades, in particular
and television news, has been comparing myself to other people

(24:05):
and wondering why they're getting this job and I'm not
getting it, etc. Etc. Do you have thoughts on this
kind of social comparison and how we can surfeit rather
than be drowned by it. We're in it. Well. One
is recognizing that it's happening, you know, like all things
I think in this space of being mindful enough to notice. Oh,

(24:26):
the reason I feel crappy about my salary today is
I just heard about Joe's rays in the office. The
reason I feel bad about my performance is I just
heard someone else get an accolade. These are the things
that if we just start noticing them, we can start
acting on them. The other thing is you start noticing
these things is to recognize that our brains really suck
when it comes to social comparison. There can be a

(24:46):
billion people who are doing worse than us, and our
brain locks onto the one person in our career or
in our life who seems to be doing as good,
if not better, and holds onto that and directs all
of our attentional resources at that. My favorite example of
this is not in the workplace, although I guess it's
in the workplace for some folks whose job is to
be an Olympian. It was this famous study that looked

(25:06):
at olympians on the stand and what emotion they were experiencing.
So you win a gold medal, of what emotions are
experiencing generally pretty positive, you're joyous, you're happy, and so on.
You win a silver medal, What emotions are you experiencing?
You think, maybe not as good as gold, but pretty good.
You're like taking home your second best on the planet.
Turns out no, When scientists analyze the facial expressions of

(25:28):
silver medalists, what they find is that their emotions are
showing things more like contempt, deep sadness, anger. Run the
list of negative emotions and you see that expressed in
their face. And what's the problem. There's a social comparison.
They're not looking at the billions of people who were
not good enough to make it to the Olympics or
get on the stand. They're looking at the one person

(25:48):
who beat them. But the remedy for that comes with
the other person who's standing on the stand, who's the
bronze medalist. So you might think if the silver medalist
is feeling contempt and disgust and all these things, than
the bronze medalist is even more in the dumps. But
it turns out that if you analyze bronze medalist facial expressions,
they're psyched. In some cases, they're showing expressions of a

(26:08):
late that are stronger than the Gold Medalist. And again
here's the you know, social comparison at work. Bronze medalist
isn't comparing themselves against the gold Medalist. They were seconds away,
you know, multiple people were in between them, right, but
they're thinking, oh, man, if I was just two seconds slower,
like point two seconds slower, i'd be going home empty
handed by the skin of my teeth. I am up
here walking away with the metal. And they're stoked. And

(26:31):
the Bronze Medalist is helpful because it makes us realize
that with a little bit of cognitive work, we can
kind of reframe however we're doing. We can kind of
look to the fact that, hey, we've actually done pretty
well no matter where we are. We might not have
billions of people below us, but there's some folks below us.
The other thing is that you can tend to not
just it the other people who are below you, but

(26:53):
at yourself kind of be competing against yourself, and that
can be a powerful way to kind of feel good
because hopefully you're going in a positive direction, and if
you're not a means a time for exercising a different
thing that I think can make work better, which is
a little self compassion. But you know, competing with yourself
and having that competition stick to wherever you were before
can be a powerful way to feel a little bit

(27:13):
better too. Have you heard of a kind of meditation
practice called moodita? No, I don't know this one, t
set okay, I'm going to tell the great doctor Laurie
Santo something she doesn't know. We can do it now, probably, yeah,
So I will teach how to do it. This is
an ancient Buddhist meditation practice. Moodita translates roughly to sympathetic joy.

(27:37):
It's kind of the opposite of schadenfreud. You're taking pleasure
and the success of somebody else. Is very hard skill
to build, and I think it's not coincidence that the
Buddha honed in on building this skill, because it really
can shave down on one of the primary sources of
our unhappiness as members of Homo sapiens, which is falling

(27:57):
into what meditators often call comparing mind this mode that
you've just described, or you really can't feel gratitude or
take pleasure in anything if you're just constantly trying to
keep up with your brother in law, so Moudita practice.
It's going to sound to some, especially the skeptics, and
it certainly sounded to me a little hokey at the

(28:19):
beginning of Some people have no problem with what some
of us will find hokey, but just a name that
it's it's a bit forced at the very least. So
you can just kind of close your eyes and picture
somebody who's doing really well. For the listeners, you can't
see that Laurie has her eyes closed out, closed mind too,
So just pick somebody. Don't start with you know, your

(28:42):
arch nemesis, who just got some raise that is really
burning for you. You can start with somebody really easy.
Sometimes I pick my kid, be aforementioned six year old,
and our kitten. They play really nicely together and they're
having a great time. And so just pick Alexander and
Ozymandias the kitten and imagine them scampering around together. As Laura,

(29:04):
you might pick somebody's easy for you and just imagine that,
and then you can repeat these phrases, may your happiness increase.
You can start maybe with just may you be happy,
and then move to May your happiness grow increase, repeating
these kinds of phrases, and then you might move to
somebody who's a little bit more challenging. Somebody you like

(29:26):
at the office or in your personal life, who's had
something good happened to them, may be happy. May this
happiness you're experiencing grow and get more intense. Anyway, you
get the picture. We don't have to do it for
too long, and you can keep moving to more and
more challenging people. Maybe not the first time you do it,

(29:46):
but over time you can. And the great share in
Salzburg one of the first people who she's a meditation teacher,
one of the first people who taught me how to
do this. She talks about this fallacy that many of
us have, which is that when something good happens to somebody,
we feel like whatever accolade or raise they have just

(30:06):
had come their way, that it was actually heading to
us and they reached out and intercepted the pass. And
that's actually not usually the case. And even when it
is the case, what do you want to do carry
around this resentment or would you like to be able
to see the humanity and your rivals and be happy

(30:26):
for them. Isn't that going to free up more bandwidth
for you to pursue what you want next without carrying
around the boulder of resentment? So does any does that
make sense to you totally? I mean, you know, it
fits with so much that we know about other practices
that are really similar, like loving kindness, meditation right where
you can kind of build up your compassion over time.
And my guess I'd love to do the studies on this.

(30:48):
Actually I'm doing a related project with the Stanford neuroscientist
Jamil Zaki on what we call a zero sum happiness.
There's this idea I think that a lot of us
are carrying around that you know, there's like a happiness
pot somewhere in the universe, and you if good things
happen to one person and there's like less in the
pot potentially for me. That's just empirically that is not
how well being works. If anything, you know, doing for

(31:09):
others winds up increasing the sum, right, you know, when
you do nice things for others, you donate money to
someone else, for example, you get the happiness bump from
that at the same time they do pretty much we
know how well being and probably even success and good
things work in the world. Is like, this is not
zero sum. We kind of all add it up together.
I imagine this meditation practice does a really good job
at overcoming that misconception. It's like an intervention we can

(31:31):
do to be like, no, no, no, there's not some
tiny sum that we're sort of splitting up. We all
can do a little bit better. Yes, exactly. Just two
things to say about that. I love how many of
these names you're invoking, Jamie, Zachie, Catherine Price. These are
people who come on both of our shows, and it's
interesting to hear you can listen to them being interviewed
in two different places because you come at it from

(31:51):
a perspective of actually knowing something. I come at it
as the amateur happiness expert who's a journalist and is
very very very very interested in training the mind through meditation.
So often I think the results are complimentary. So that's
just one thing that came to mind. And then just
to clarify, moodita practice and loving kindness practice are related.

(32:11):
There are In Buddhism, there are what are known as
the four Brahma Viharas or divine abodes, hard to reach
states that you can train through meditation loving kindness practice. Actually,
you can translate loving kindness into friendliness. That can sound
a little less hokey to the skeptics. Loving kindness phrases

(32:31):
are like may you be happy, may you be safe,
may you be healthy, may you live with ease. So
that's of practice very similar to what we just did
with meditai, where you close your eyes and picture usually
start with somebody easy, and then you can move to yourself,
and then you can move to a benefactor, and then
a neutral person, a difficult person, and then everybody. You
can run through that same cycle with all of the

(32:53):
Brahma Bharas. So there's loving kindness, there's moodita or sympathetic joy,
there's compassion, where you're sending phrases to people who are suffering,
May you be free from suffering, may be free from pain.
And then there is equanimity, where you're just training in
order to reach these states, in order to keep them going,
you need to have some evenness of mind. Especially with compassion,

(33:14):
you know where you're you're getting close to suffering, and
so we train up the ability to just be steady
in the face of whatever comes up in our minds.
So these practices, these brahma a horror practices. I don't
have all the science at hand, but my understanding is
that there's a lot of science to suggest that these
can have physiological, psychological, and even behavioral impacts. And so

(33:35):
it's to me the idea that if you aggregate all
of these skills under one egis, that egis could be love.
Love is not an unalterable factory setting. It is a
trainable skill that is incredibly good news. Yeah, And with
love and with these kind of trainable skills, you kind
of take out of your emotional ether, the bad stuff.

(33:57):
The power of mudita is it takes it. It's not
just that you feel good for someone else's success, is
that it takes away this horrible burden pain, you know, sadness, anger,
frustration that you're walking around with that you don't need to.
And so getting rid of some of these negative emotions
can be thinking a really important part of this practice
because you don't have to walk around with this. We

(34:17):
often on my podcast talk about, you know, and another
parable that comes from the Buddhist tradition, this idea of
the second arrow. You know, it's one thing to not
get the promotion but it's another to be stabbing yourself
with this second arrow, pissed off the whole time that
you didn't get it. And if you can get rid
of that part of your emotional labor, that can be
incredibly powerful. You'll get to hear more of my conversation

(34:38):
with Dan Harris on his podcast ten Percent Happier after
the break, The Happiness Lab will be right back. You
invoked emotions. What are your thoughts on how we handle
emotions at work? Because I think a lot of us
are conditioned again because, as I said before, the modern

(34:59):
workplace was created by white men for white men, and
so white men and I can speak with some authority
about white men being one, we were not famously in
touch with our emotions. So we didn't design a workplace
that was really, you know, conducive to the healthy metabolizing
of emotions. So what are your thoughts about how we
can handle our emotions in the workplace? Yeah, I mean,

(35:22):
I think because of the structure of modern workplaces and
the you know, the sense that they're not necessarily built
to be so inclusive, our instinct is to just shut
them off, not shut them off in a long equanimity
practice where you come to terms and allow your emotions, oh,
shut them off, like, can't feel that right now, just
going to pretend and keep moving, and you know, keep churning, right,
And I think that's bad for a bunch of reasons. Right.

(35:43):
One is, you know, we know from the lovely work
by like Stanford neuroscientists James Gross and others, that the
act of suppressing your emotions is bad for your performance.
You do worse for example on like you know, decision
tasks and memory tasks. It's also awful for your bodies.
Even in little laboratory tasks where you show people these
little emotion suppression tasks, you find that they put their

(36:05):
bodies under cardiac stress. Like, so you're screwing up your
performance and your growing up your bodies when you suppress
your emotions. The other thing is that you miss out
on an incredibly valuable signal. You know, we talk about
things like negative emotions, and we have this term that
they're like negative, right, you know, they're negative because they
don't feel great. But actually, if you think evolutionarily, these

(36:25):
things are awesome because there's signals of something that's going
badly that we should probably take some action to fix.
You could think of negative emotions like sadness, anger, feeling overwhelmed,
like you think of, you know, your hand on a
hot stove. If you stick your hand on a hot stove,
it's going to hurt, and that feeling doesn't feel great,
but it's there for a reason. Your body wants you
to yank your hand away so you can stop burning it.

(36:48):
And I think we forget that negative emotions kind of
work like that, you know, especially some negative emotions that
come up in the workplace these days. A lot of
my colleagues are talking about overwhelm, this emotion where you're
like you can't do it anymore. You are just burning out,
you are getting cynical with your colleagues. You're just not
enjoying what you used to enjoy. That's overwhelmed. And when
we experience it's not great because it makes it hard

(37:11):
to do our work and it feels unpleasant. So we're
like stuff it down, pretend that it's not happening. But
then that comes back to bite you. It's like leaving
your hand on a hot stove. And so I think
the second thing that's bad about suppressing emotions at work
is that we're ignoring these very honest signals that we
should take action on or things are going to get worse.
You know, stop when you get the first degree emotional
burn rather than the third degree and burnt off kind

(37:33):
of emotional burn. I really like so many of the
things you said there. I think it's really compelling to
have it pointed out to us that stuffing your emotions
can have negative psychological and physiological consequences for us. But
it's also true, at least in my experience, that stuffing
my emotions or not being okay with whatever I'm suffering

(37:55):
within the moment, can have negative consequences for anybody who's
in my orbit. They can become irradiated by my unmetabolized rage.
And I don't know if this is somebody that you've
had on your show, but somebody's been very cuential to me.
Jerry Colonna. He's a sort of famous in tech circles
that they call him the Yoda of Silicon Valley. As

(38:16):
a corporate coach, he was a very successful that your
capitalist for many years, had a bit of a life crisis,
got interested in Buddhism, changed his whole life, and now
works with CEOs and boards of directors to help people
be saner and more humane in the workplace. And I've
been working with him for several years. Like I said,
he's had a huge impact on me. And he once

(38:38):
said to me, and I'm probably gonna mangle this, but
something the effect of violence, by which he was not
referring to a physical violence, but sort of psychic or
psychological violence is what we do and we can't handle
our own suffering. And in the moment he said that,
I can interpolate back to my whole professional life and
see that all the damage or much of the damage
I'd done in the workplace was because I was not

(38:58):
up to the task of riding my own emotions and
then just lost it with people. Yeah, and it's not
just in your workplace, because I know lots of people
who you might be able to keep a pressure cooker
lid on in your workplace, but then you walk home
into your house and you see your spouse and the
dishwashers not put away correctly, and emotions. We think we

(39:19):
can hold the lid on, but these things are going
to come out. They're going to come out either in
our body where our fight or flight system is going
to take the brunt and we're going to have cardiac
problems and hormonal problems, we're not going to have our
digestion working right, or they're going to come out as
like much more extreme emotions that they didn't need to
get to if you just kind of dealt with them earlier.
But then that raises the question, which is how do

(39:40):
we deal with these emotions? And that's why I love
practices that you all have on like ten percent happier
about this idea of equanimity, where like we can kind
of be even keeled in the face of often really
negative emotions, especially if we notice them quickly find ways
to sort of allow them and investigate what they're doing
to our bodies. Yes, I'm obviously a big supporter of

(40:02):
the Barahma Viharas, including equanimity own at. I didn't plan
to say this, but it came into my bind. Is
something that might be useful for people, and I'm interested
to hear your reaction to it. Loris Burnet Brown talks
about a little phrase that she and her team use
around the office all the time, which is the story
I'm telling myself is dot dot dot, because I think
so many of us walk around with these paranoid, phantasmagoric

(40:26):
projections about what other people are thinking. Often they're not
thinking about us at all. It's our own conditioning and
past traumas or whatever that it's creating this story. But
if you don't deal with it, it can simmer and
then it can reach a boil. So my CEO and I,
the CEO of ten percent Happier, got named Ben Rubin,

(40:46):
with who I'm very close. We've worked together. It's a
kind of marriage really, and we've done couples counseling with
the aforementioned Jerry Colonna for years, and one of the
things we reached was this agreement that once in a
while we will say, can I let my amygdala speak?
Can I just tell you what the sphere center of
my brain is doing right now? And then everything I say,

(41:07):
even if it's not putting Ben in the most positive light,
I've framed it as, Look, this is my paranoia speaking.
I'm not accusing you of anything. This is just what
the darkest precincts in my mind are offering up right now.
That has been hugely helpful to our relationship, and it
really also helps me in my own mind sort between
fact and fiction. Does any of that land for you totally.

(41:28):
I mean the power of that is, I think twofold
run is you have to be aware of what those
stories are, so they're not just kind of in the background,
like controlling emotions. You kind of call them out, and
that can be powerful for the second reason, which is
then when you start to say them, when you say, well,
my amygdala is really thinking this thing. I mean, guess
is that a lot of times as you start saying it,
you're like, well, this is awful, Like this is very

(41:50):
black and white thinking, this is catastrophizing. No, you pull
the big list that clinical psychologists talk about in cognitive
behavioral therapy of all the thinking errors, and your amygdala
is making every single one of those thinking errors. And
then your rational self can be like, Okay, that seems
a little black and white amygdala, let's like kind of
rain that in just a tad. But it's only by
that act of articulating it. I mean, sometimes these fears

(42:11):
can be so scary to us we can ever say them,
but then when we say them out loud, we're like, oh, wait,
that's dumb, or that's like extreme, or like even if
that happened, I'd be able to deal with it. You
can kind of negotiate with your own ambigduala thinking errors,
and that can be super powerful, and it can mean
that those emotions that would normally go with it, you
can kind of rain them in because you're not as

(42:31):
scared anymore, which doesn't lead to the downstream You're not
as frustrated anymore, or as pissed off anymore, and so on.
And in my experience, I mean, yes, everything you said,
and doing it with somebody else who you actually have
a foundation of trust with is even easier for me
because I am not trying to sort this all out
inside of what David Foster Wallace calls the skull sized

(42:52):
kingdom inside of my own head. I'm actually talking about
it with somebody else, and for me, that's much easier
to do the processing. Yeah, and it's helpful for them
to know where those kind of core triggers and fears are,
because if it's somebody that you trust and who wants
to see you succeed, they can recognize, oh, when I
said that, I didn't realize I was stepping on your
core terror or this core thing that's going to trigger you.

(43:14):
And that can kind of build relationships for the future too.
I have one more area I wanted to explore with you,
but before I go there, is there anything else you
want to say about working with emotions within the workplace? No,
I want to hear the last area we're going too. Well,
it's your idea. I'm just you know, you send me
a bunch of things you wanted to talk about, and
they were also good that I'm trying to work my
way through them, so I don't want to take any
credit where it's not due. You sent me a note

(43:35):
and you said something to the effect of many of
us carry a misperception that we hate work. Why is
that a misperception. One of the things that we talk
about a lot on my podcast and then I talk
a lot a lot with my Yale students, is this
idea that we have all these misconceptions when it comes
to our own happiness. We have misconceptions when it comes
to what we really like and what we really enjoy,
and I think the workplace is one of these. So

(43:56):
there's this lovely study where if you ping people at
random times at their work, you know, to set them
up with a little smartphone app that dings and says, hey,
how are you feeling right now. Generally speaking, people are
okay at work usually because they're in flow right kind
of doing something. It's kind of taking up your time.
It feels good. It feels better, for example, than what
we were talking about before with the Netflix scrolling when
you're on like screen number forty seven of different movies

(44:18):
that are scrolling by. If you ping me then and
say how you're feeling, I feel apathetic. I am not
in flow, and though you know that, I'm like, I
feel kind of gross. And the sad thing is that
for many of us, when we're at work, we get
these moments of flow, we get these moments of connection
where we're talking to other people and talking to teammates
and figuring out ideas and things. But oftentimes we're so
bad at picking our leisure that when you ping us

(44:39):
during leisure, we're kind of bored, or we're like half
paying attention to our phones or kind of not doing it.
Paying people at work they're kind of happy and flow.
Paying people at leisure, they're start of feeling apathetic. How
have you ask people when they're at work? Would you
rather be at work? Would you rather be in leisure?
People are like leisure and if you ping me, you know,
when I'm in the middle of my Netflix scrolling and
say Laurie, would you rather be at work and be like,

(45:00):
no way, dude, I'm home, like I'm taking the day off.
And so we are actually happier at work than we think,
and maybe more problematically, we're actually less happy be a
leisure than we think. And this is something we really
can control. We need leisure that allows us to be
more and flow that allows us to be a little
bit more present, that allows us to be kind of
doing things a little bit more actively, and so finding

(45:21):
ways to get in some active leisure can be quite powerful.
I'll offer something up here that's been helpful for me,
and I resisted because I resist everything because I have
a sort of unhelpful variety sometimes of skepticism. But if
something strikes me as at all hokey, I will often
get my backup setting intentions. But I have found that

(45:42):
setting intentions with some regularity is a really great way
to be mindful. Mindful and the purest expression of that word,
if you go back to the polly word, that's the
ancient language of polly that was spoken at or around
the time of the Buddha. The word is sati, and
one of the translations of sati is recollecting or remembering,

(46:02):
and that's what we're doing in meditation. We're remembering to
wake up and be awake right here. And so setting
an intention like I'm about to go to Disney World
with my family, and my intentions will be to disconnect
from work and to enjoy my time with my family,
and I can while I'm on the wed Way, people
mover or whatever with my family, I might notice myself plotting,

(46:25):
you know, the overthrow of whatever some you know, some rival,
or you know, planning some expletive filled speech I'm going
to give to Ben when I get back. Uh, Nope,
that's not what I'm doing right now. I am looking
at the joy on my son's face, feeling that warm
Florida air against my face, etcetera, etcetera. For work, similar thing,
you know, I wake up in the morning and I

(46:45):
try to remember to say, well, my intention is to
make awesome stuff that helps people do their lives better,
and while I'm at it, to have good relationships with
everybody I'm working with. Setting these intentions with some regularity
while I still am deeply, deeply fallible has made me better,
I think so again, I'll ask you, does any of
that land for you totally? I mean, one of the

(47:06):
biggest issues I think with our brain, in the way
our minds are set up, is that that recollection doesn't
happen naturally. We can have goals in these really rational
theories about the kinds of things will enjoy. You know,
if you're at Disneyland, you're probably going to enjoy more
watching the smile on your son's face than ruminating about
some bad decision at work that happened three weeks ago.
But our brains don't naturally make the choice correctly. And

(47:27):
I think, you know, our systems kind of naturally go
to the things that feel easy, that feel negative. Right
with this negativity bias, our attention kind of just goes there.
They go to the things that are easy dopamine hits.
As much as you might want to look at your
child smiling expression, you know your email is going to
be yanking on the little dopamine chords in a way
that will kind of move your attention in the wrong

(47:47):
direction in terms of what will really make you happy
and make you remember the trip well. And so I
think this practice of intention setting is just a way
to fight all these natural biases of where our negativity
is going to take us, where our dopamine hits are
going to take us. It kind of pulls us back
into the moment. But that has to be sadly, I mean,
it's stupid that our brains work this way, but it
has to be an explicit practice. It doesn't work like

(48:09):
regular memory. We have to put some work into remembering
and reminding ourselves so that we can kind of do
it correctly. And that's true in leisure, but it's definitely
true at work. Sometimes my intention setting at work is
like I wanted to get through this big project, but
I also wanted to get through this big project in
a way that didn't make my students feel like crap,
or like make my colleagues kind of hate me or
push them to the brink. Right, we want to do things,

(48:29):
but we want to do things in a particular way,
in a particular manner, with a particular kind of emotional stability,
and so remembering that that is part of the goal too,
can be really quite important. Well said in closing here,
can you just plug everything you're doing, because I think
my listeners will get a lot out of it. Obviously
you have this amazing podcast in which you can talk
about if you want, but anything else you've put out

(48:51):
into the universe that might be useful for folks, Yeah,
the best is to check out the Happiness Lab podcast
where starting new seasons hopefully soon. If you missed to
see our last season three, you should check it out.
Lots on these errors of our mind and going after
dopamine and what you can do to find more fun.
But I also wanted to plug for my folks this
fantastic stick thing you have coming up where folks can

(49:11):
really sign up to kind of think more about their
relationship with work and find more intention. So tell me
about the challenge. So we're doing a meditation challenge. We're
calling it the Work Life Challenge. It starts on November eighth.
You can get it for free if you download the
ten percent Happier app. Every day we'll serve you up
a little video that'll be me talking to a meditation
expert about some of the challenges we may face at work.

(49:33):
And right after the little video ends, it'll slide directly
into a guided meditation that will help you sort of
as I like to say, pound the lessons into your neurons.
So we find this combination of video and then audio
guided meditation to be really really effective. And so starting
on the eighth, you can do the work Life Challenge
for free on the ten Happier App. I think this

(49:55):
is awesome. In fact, I'm publicly committing that I'm going
to do this myself. I feel like November eighth is
perfect timing because at least in North America, right like,
our time is going to change, it's getting dark sooner.
This is a time when my brain might naturally go
into like hermit low emotion kind of mode and to
like take a challenge where I can say, like, no,
I'm going to be actively working on positive emotion at work.

(50:17):
This sounds awesome. I'm in Thanks so much for sharing
us my pleasure. Thank you. Thanks again to Dan Harris
for having me back on his show. It's always great
to talk to him. And don't forget to sign up
for the free work Life Challenge on the ten percent
Happier app. The challenge starts Monday, November eight, and I'll
be doing it right alongside you. The Happiness Lab will

(50:41):
be back soon with more new episodes, so stay tuned,