Coming up next on the Jordan Harbinger
show. It's not that circumstances matter 0. If you're in, truly traumatic circumstances, yeah. Changing your circumstances is probably going to help a lot. But for most of us were not in those dire circumstances, right, you know, like not being able to get the newest PlayStation is not like, you know, like the yemeni Like You Know Drama you're talking about right? And so I think we want to be careful. It's not that circumstances don't matter at all. It's that you know, 99.99% of the people listening to this.
Podcast right now are probably in circumstances were changing them. Drastically isn't going to matter for their happiness, as much as they think.
Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger on the Jordan Harbinger show. We decode the stories secrets and skills of the World's Most Fascinating People. We have in-depth conversations with people at the top of their game spies and psychologists, astronauts and entrepreneurs. Even the occasional former Jihadi rocket scientist or extreme athlete, and each episode 2.
Our Guest wisdom into practical advice that you can use to build a deeper understanding of how the world works and become a better critical thinker. If you're new to the show or you're looking for a way to tell your friends about it, we have episodes starter packs. Now, these are collections of your favorite episodes organized by popular topics and that'll help new listeners. Get a taste of everything that we do here on the show. Just visit Jordan, Harbinger.com start to get started or help somebody else get started and I always appreciate it. When you share the show with others. That's what keeps the lights on.
Keeps my kid and fresh diapers today. Dr. Laurie Santos professor of psychology at Yale University. Her expertise is human cognition and the cognitive biases that impede better choices. So right up our alley for the show here. She's best known for her course psychology and the good life, which teaches students, what science says about, how to make wiser choices and live a life. That is more fulfilling. Actually. Yale's most popular course, in over 300 years, which kind of makes me wonder what the last most popular course was the front of like bloodletting.
Something like that. Anyway, she's also the host of the happiness, lab. Many of you. Also listen to that from what I understand today. We'll learn that. Happiness is actually a set of skills as opposed to some ideal state of being. We'll explore the mechanisms by which people become happy, or miserable and gain some tools to hack. Our own happiness. Of course. I also wanted to challenge some of the feel-good crap that we constantly hear about when it comes to happiness, how to become and stay happy. So you can expect some of that in here as well. Nobody get into Happy on my watch and if you're wondering how I managed to
Book. These great authors thinkers creators teachers every single week. It is because of my network and I'm teaching you how to build your network for free. And by the way, being social and having a wide range of social connections helps make you happier. Just saying the course is free. It's at Jordan. Harbinger.com course and most of the guests on the show. They subscribe to the course and contribute to the course. So come join us. You'll be in smart company. Where you belong? Now, here's dr. Laurie Santos. You teach a course on happiness at Yale. And the first thing that
Mr. - is it actually possible to teach happiness? Because it sounds too many. And I sort of put myself in that camp a few years ago. It's not so many. Like this is something you are or you're not it's not skill set. Right?
Yeah. I mean, this is something that so many people think, in fact, so many people think there's that people had to do research on this right here. Is it just the case that some people are just genetically predetermined as happy or unhappy? And it turns out that if you ask, whether happiness is heritable. In other words, there's some part of your jeans that's coding for it. The answer seems to be
be both yes or no. Yes, there is some part of Happiness, that's heritable, you know, so the people okay, if you came from parents who were super happy and grandparents who are super happy. You're more likely to be a little bit happier, but it's not as heritable as most traits, you know, it's probably less heritable than something like your height, or even even your weight and we know that that has obviously a huge influence based on while you're eating and stuff and that's really good news. Right? Because it would suck if happiness was just built in and you were kind of screwed. Well, yeah, so that's kind of one piece of good news. The other piece of good news is that it doesn't seem like happiness also.
Comes from our circumstances, right? Because, you know, maybe you might have some flexibility in terms of your genes, but you're born into poverty or you're born into some yucky circumstance. Right? And so, the good news is that happiness doesn't seem to be just in our genes and it doesn't seem to be just in our circumstances. There seems to be a lot of wiggle room based on our behavior and our mindset. And that's great because it means we can teach it, we can get better. It's good news,
right? It means if we don't have it, then we can change it. Which is great. Especially you look. My Heritage is Jewish. Nobody in my family's happy. Even the heck, even the happy ones aren't happy.
Right. Okay, like my grandma grandpa, if you're happy, they're like, hey, don't do that. You got to knock it off. Like that's part of our culture. Don't get too happy because Something's Gonna go wrong. It's a joke, but it's also kind of not a joke because when your whole family is kind of like, hey don't celebrate now. It's like you learn. I feel like especially in a lot of these old families not just Jewish people but like old sort of old-world families. They kind of, I don't know where your heritage is. I can sort of assume, but there's something with older folks that come from Europe and other places like that. They're kind of like hey, calm down.
It's like the whole vibe when you're a kid is like calm down. You never know. What's going to happen in Asians have the same thing. There are Chinese. Proverbs that are like a man fell off. His horse and broke his leg and they said, oh, it's so terrible, your son broke his leg. And it's like, not yet in the Army comes by, and is recruiting. So, it's like, all these Chinese Proverbs are, like, don't get happy about anything but also don't get sad about anything. Just stay as vanilla as you
can. Yeah. Well, I grew up, I grew up Catholic and they drilled in the y'all not, you know, you're feeling happy. Like now, it's a gilts and you're
going to hell. You're happy. Well, you're screwed now. Yeah.
Yeah, it's from the devil. You also think, like, look at achievements, very apropos. The Olympics that are just wrapping up here. The achievements that people has in life. Can make you happy, right? I remember when I was young. I was like if I just had a girlfriend, I'd be so much happier. And if, you know, when you're broke and you're unemployed, you like, I just need this job. I need this raise. Any this promotion? And the Olympics, right? The gold medal. You see these in, you mentioned this in your work, will get to it in a bit. But like the silver medalist. They're just crushed their life is over, even though they're the second.
In the entire world by one-tenth of a second and whatever they've been training for their whole lives for on there. Just like my life is done. I hate it. Yeah, the achievement thing is weird because it's like you should get Happy from that and then you don't you win the lottery and you're
depressed. Yeah, it's pretty messed up. Right? I mean, cuz I mean, this is the weird thing about happiness. It's not that, we don't like have any theories about how it works. We definitely think there are things that could happen in our lives. That would make us really happy, right? If I think, you know, think if I won the lottery today and I, you know, had eight hundred billion dollars, definitely be happier.
If I was a gold medalist, definitely be happier, right? It turns out, if you go out and you study, people who have had those good things happen, right? We can bring lottery winners into the laboratory and test their happiness. We could study different Olympic medalist. What you find is that the happiness that you predict, you're going to get. It's never as high as you think, but also, more importantly, it's, you're never as happy for as long as you think. I mean, this is a big misconception. We think happiness is like happily ever after, you know, I'll get a girlfriend. I'll be happy forever. I'll win the lottery and be happy.
Over and most of the time people, just go back to their Baseline after circumstantial changes. So you win the lottery, the Tuesday you win. The lottery is a friggin awesome day, right? You know, when you win a hundred fifty million dollars on that Tuesday, that day is an awesome day, but it turns out the researchers studied this. If you go back, six months later to people who've had that happen a year later their happiness, is basically back at Baseline, like it goes back really much more quickly than you, think that's kind of the bad news. But the good news is that the same thing happens for bad.
Add stuff, you know, you might predict find out I had, you know, lung cancer like that would suck. If I lost my job that would suck. You know, if I lost my relationship with that would suck, but it turns out when you study people for whom those bad events, really happen. What you find is that they to go back to Baseline. It might suck. You know that after you find out, you have lung cancer. That's a crappy afternoon, but then, you know, six months later, one year later, you're often happier than you think. And sometimes the crazy thing with the bad events. Is that, sometimes those bad events really convince you?
It's meaningful in your life, what your purpose is, many. Think some of us are going through this. And the pandemic, we were thinking, I've learned something about what I want out of life. I've learned something about. Oh, yeah, what, how much, I really want to be spending time, commuting or things like that. You know, people are making these changes that ultimately will make their life better. But those changes came out of something that we all would describe as traumatic that we wouldn't wish on this Society. I got to be honest, my
lessons from the pandemic are probably pretty pedestrian like I'm never taking travel for granted again, but also I am going to enjoy
Enjoy the shit out of the next trip that I'm able to take. That is fact totally and I think every time I'm on my way to the airport for the next 20 years. I'm going to be like, member when we just couldn't do this. We were all be stuck in a gator on the tarmac, and I'll be like you can't pee for 10 hours and I'll be like, I'm going on a trip, right? I'm going to be so ready for that. Of course, I'll also, what is it hedonic? Lee adapt and go back to Baseline and be like this food sucks on the airplane, but still, I'd like to think that I'm just going to be so ready to get the hell out of my kitchen.
And after all this that I'm never going to forget
it. And I think that this is, you know, I feel the same way about like, concerts and movies, right, you know, the next movie I can go to without worrying that I'm like breathing in some sort of horrible thing. That's gonna kill me. Like that's gonna feel amazing. And I think, you know, this is the power of something that really can change our happiness, not the circumstance. It's not that you're getting this new event, where you're going on a trip. Or you're kind of being in a movie theater? What's changing, is the fact that you're experiencing a different mindset about that event. You are grateful for it, in a way that you never ever.
Ever were before and I think that that's another strange thing to pandemics going to do the first definitely at least the first time we get these things, we're going to experience so much more joy than we ever had before, you know, even during the process of this pandemic, you know, as you get like to a point where things are feeling safer, people are vaccinated and things like the first time I gave my mom a hug, you know, I could see her in person and give her a hug. That felt amazing. The first time I went back to my coffee shop that I love so much and just like walked in. I mean, I'd gotten their thousands of times and taking it for granted, but that first
I'm back felt so good and their techniques we can use to do that more often. Right? One technique. That's actually an ancient technique that the ancient stoics used to suggest that we do. This
are trending right now funnily
enough. Yeah. They're, they're big. They're big. Yeah, and they're smart, right? They suggested this process called negative visualization. This is what the stoics thought. You should do. When you wake up in the morning, you should think you know, my partner is going to leave me. I'm going to lose my job. I'm going to lose my house. I'm going to like break, you know some part of my body that I really need you. I'm going to get you know.
Dated and kicked out of all of society, and then you open your eyes. You're like wait, that hasn't happened. Like that's amazing. Right? And so the idea of negative visualization is like, maybe we don't need to go through 18-month Global pandemic to like, appreciate going to the airport and going to the movies. Yeah, you can kind of imagine it and simulate it and just remember what you really miss in life, you know, just kind of remember what you should be grateful for, but sometimes aren't as much as you should be.
Now. We know where the Catholics and the Jews and all the other folks got their visualization.
Makes right there, their self, talk from the stoics. Let's talk about the silver medalist, right? I kind of touched on this before. I thought this was really interesting. That silver medalists are extremely unhappy on the hold extremely on happy that they didn't get gold. But bronze medal is seem to be super happy and that silver medalist years later. They even die younger, which is so sad, somehow, right? Like, you're usually, you're not totally wrecked by getting a silver. You're behind by like a fraction of it. You slipped slightly when you were diving into the pool and that was the
The end of it. You never had a chance, but you've beaten that time a million other times during practice, right? You're not, you're basically number one. You just weren't that. When particular day the entire trajectory of your life is totally screwed from then
on. Yeah. And surprisingly that is what the science shows. It's really depressing. When you really get silver medalist and any getting, you know, you think of what got them there, right? You know, they had this moment where like they're getting into the Olympics. They're going to represent their country and would be there. They're part of a big team at. Now. You can actually play at the Olympics you be like pretty much everybody every other country.
Treat, you know, except one and you can't enjoy it. And the reason behind that is that, you know, we don't tend to think of the good things in our lives, objectively, like, you might think I want to be, you know, objectively at a certain wealth or objectively at a certain performance level, but our brain, just can't hold onto things objectively. Our brain, has to use what's called a reference point. Like, you know, who can I compare myself to, and see how I'm doing with my income with my looks, or in this case with my performance in the Olympics? And, you know, if you're a silver medalist, there's a very salient.
ER, reference point out there, which is the gold. Like, you almost almost got there. If it weren't for that one other person and rather than feel at the top, when you compare yourself against the one person who's better than you, you feel like, crap, you know, you feel awful and that's why when you look at you can the scientists have done these things. Were they look at videotapes of silver medalist on the stand and kind of analyze facial expressions. And it's not just so much that they're not happy. They're actually showing emotions like contempt disgust deep sadness anger, right, you know,
Miserable. But it's shocking and what they would tell shows you the power of these reference points, is that you might predict given how sad the silver medalists are. If you look at the bronze medalists, that they'd be even more miserable after all, you know, they were many seconds from winning, right? Yeah, like bro, you weren't even close right? He won't even close, but it turns out not. So, in fact in some of the analyses, the bronze medalists look even happier than the gold medalist. And the reason they are again, gets back to reference points. Like what's the bronze medalist reference points? It's not silver or gold, you know, a gold was
Ali far, it's forgotten Into
Obscurity forever, /, you know, like
never. It's like, you know, like two seconds away and I'd be going home. Empty-handed. My whole life was moving up to this moment and I could have walked away with literally nothing. So they are stoked right there. Reference point is telling them that everything is great. And this is such a powerful message. I think, for all of us, right? Because, you know, if you're comparing yourself, you know, money wise against Jeff Bezos, if you're comparing yourself looks-wise against like Beyonce, if you know, if you're picking this reference point that's going to make you feel like crap.
You're going to feel like crap, but there are also lots of other reference points out there that you could be using to feel good about yourself and it's powerful because there's all these cases in which were objectively doing great, you know, so many people listening to this podcast. Are objectively probably pretty healthy objectively doin. Okay, no roof over your head and these kinds of things but we don't tend to compare ourselves to people who are, you know, doing worse than that. We don't tend to recognize it and that means we're missing out on the happiness, that our actual objective circumstances could be giving us but are
not. I want
to get back to comparisons in a second. Although I will say, I do have a better jawline than Beyonce, but what does happy even mean? Maybe we should back up for a second because I think people are going to cool scientist who studies this thing that you can't even measure. Nice, try. You're just trying to make me feel better. So, how do we? I mean, obviously, you've gone through painstaking measures to figure out how to measure this or the whole thing is for not, right?
Yeah. Yeah, and and you know, I wish honestly, I mean this is like a real problem with the field, right? Like I wish we had some sort of thermometer for happiness and I could stick it.
Mouth and Millie poop like your 98.6 on happiness, right? That the honest answer is we don't but we do have great techniques. That researchers have come up with that seemed to be pretty valid. In other words. They're like measuring something that we think is real and they also seem to be pretty reliable. In other words. If I give you different ones of these, I get kind of the same answer, right? If you put your thermometer in your mouth and every time you measured it was a different temperature would be like this thing's broken, right? The happiness instruments. We have these self-report instruments. Like they actually give us the same answer which is really telling
But what this you know, really, you know, important experimental technique is is just to ask people if they're happy, is to ask people to things about happiness. One is kind of, how are you happy with your life, you know, all things considered other, you satisfied with your life. That's kind of one of the sort of questions people use the other thing. They ask you is, if you're happy in your life and that's kind of the emotions, you experience. I literally give you a list of emotions. Happy, sad, angry, sad, whatever. And then you say, you know, on a scale of one to seven. You know, how often do you experience those and that can feel
The silly BuzzFeed quizzes, you know, when I explained it
totally like a Cosmopolitan.
Yeah, exactly. But you know, there's tons of research showing that, you know, your answer to that will predict something like if I measure your stress hormones or if I do like a detailed like text analysis of your journals or your tweets or something like that or if I do like super, super detailed interviews with your family members and ask them, how you're doing these things that sound like, silly quizzes, are actually real scientific instruments and when we use them, you know, we see what kind of moves the needle on those.
Measures
so happy. People tend to experience more positive emotions, obviously, right and do we know what these emotions are. Is it like a specific subset or is it just over arching
happiness? Yeah. Well, I think those two parts of Happiness like this idea of being happy in your life. And with your life, it's important to realize they're different constructs, right? You can be high on one and low on the other, right, you know, my academic Dean who like lives with me here in the college where I live at Yale, you know, she and her wife just had a new baby and she's really happy, you know.
With her life. Oh my gosh. She's a new mom. This is amazing. But in her life, it sucks. I like, you know, the kids screaming, there's poopy diapers and like, you know, it's just not good, right? So you can get that dissociation. I think you also go on Instagram and see the other dissociation, right? People who are you know, really happy in their life, you know, they're on planes and you have all the luxuries but with their life, they're feeling really empty. And so what scientists are trying to do is maximize both and the way you get to both is to kind of focus on what you're mentioning, which is these.
Positive emotions, you know, just things like, you know, laughter Joy Delight, you know, these kinds of things, you'll like, even things like kind of contentment, right? Just kind of work, Chiller emotions. Those are all good. But I think another mistake we make about happiness is that we assume that we have to have those emotions in the absence of the negative stuff. It's not boost up the positive. It's like get rid of the anger and the sadness and the frustration. And and what their research really shows is that that's not necessarily a path to happiness a full.
Happy life. We were sort of satisfied with your life. Actually comes with some negative emotions. They can teach us things there. Many of our negative emotions are really problem-solving emotions. Like when you get sad, it's not just something your body does to like torture you, it's often telling you you're like missing something in your life, you know, like you're maybe missing a person in your life or you're not happy with your job and maybe you should do something to change it. And so again we think of these emotions is just. We're stuck with them and they're torturing us, but they're almost like a little notification on our phones. It's telling us like, hey,
Something's amiss like, you gotta do something about this.
That makes sense. I love the distinction between being happy in your life and being happy with your life. Like right now. I'm happy with my life. My wife's pregnant. I've got a two-year-old. Everyone's healthy. They're super cute. But in my day to day, I get up. I've slept okay because there's a baby crying, not great. You know, I drink and eat a lot of the same stuff. I'm in the same kitchen. I'm in my studio. I can't go on a trip to Greece or anything, like I've been overdue for for five freaking
There's, you know, I mean, like there's it sounds so trite. So I don't even complain about it, especially not in public, on the show usually, because people are like, so I lost my job and my grandma died of covid. And you're whining about not being able to take a cruise to Greece, like, go f yourself Jordan, right? So, I don't say that stuff publicly, but I know a lot of people are feeling it, you know, they're sick of looking at their refrigerator and their laptop that can is trite as it is. It's still a problem for a lot of people, but, like, with my
path, you know, look set for retirement
business going, great family going great. Not a lot to complain about
Out. But a hell of a lack of variety in my day-to-day. And I won't say I'm unhappy, but I'm certainly not like waking up, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, and ready to attack the day. I need a freaking
vacation and I think you're not alone. Right? We can quibble and try to compare our levels of misery during covid, right? Yeah, but this hasn't been a unicorn ride for pretty much most people, right? Even you know, if your circumstances are ostensibly good often your routine has changed, you know, like your ability to go out and do things you enjoyed before his change your social connections.
Trans probably decreased because you haven't seen it yet. I care about and so long, you know, and so, these are real hits to our happiness is not to say that, you know, things would be worse. Obviously, if you lost a family member to covid, definitely. But you know, it sucks and I think one thing we need to do in the pandemic and we often have an allowed ourselves to do is to like, feel the fact that it sucks. Right, you know, take some time to give yourself some self-compassion of like, you know, I just lived through like a worldwide Global. Pandemic. Maybe not even live through because we're still kind of getting through it, you know, the time you and I talking. Yeah.
Where I
Going to say, where are you and the timeline? Yeah,
go. Yeah, and so like, that's crappy, you know, and giving yourself a little bit of Grace about it, being crappy, recognizing your human. And that those things are gonna feel nasty, not running away from the nasty feelings kind of sitting with them and sort of allowing them to be there. Like, those are processes that can help you get through the negative emotions. And then there are other strategies you can use to say. Alright, I can't go on my vacation right now, but how can I build? You know a little bit more fun into my life, given the health constraints?
The endemic poses and they're kind of active things. You can do to feel better
to a lot of people really are down in the dumps or clinically depressed. And not just because of the pandemic just generally, right? So they think that being happy is actually really far away from them and from the emails that I get in my feedback Friday inbox, which is like an advice show that we do a lot of people they assume. So, let's say you stub, your toe, you're unhappy in the moment, kind of, or like you've been having a bad week or you got, you didn't get a promotion. You wanted your sort of like a quick turn to happiness, right? In most.
Paul's mind, but if you're clinically depressed and you can't get out of bed, you view that turn to happiness. That is Miles through this. Unknown Maze of uncharted waters for you. But it seems like the research shows. That's not necessarily true, right? It seems like you're not really any further away from making yourself happy or getting the skills to become happy or putting yourself in a happy place along with treatment. Of course, if you're in psychological distress, it just sort of seems like you're at the bottom of a. Well, when really you're maybe about as far away as anyone else is that,
True to your observation. Yeah, I mean, I think a couple of things with that, you know, one is it is the case that some people are in acute mental health distress, right? And we should recognize that right, you know? Often people will, you know, ask me, you know, about these kinds of things. Who are you feeling acutely? Suicidal are in the middle of a panic attack, right? And then analogy often use, you know, if you go to your doctor and you say, Hey, doctor, I have high blood pressure. What should I do? The doctor might say, hey, hop on the treadmill, eat healthy. If you walk into your doctor's office, you know, clutching your chest and I like, I'm an acute.
React arrest, your doctor's not be like, hey hop on the truck, you know, they're gonna bring out the big guns and whatever. And so I think for some levels of mental health distress, the sort of treatment requires, the big guns, you know, and for those people who are suffering, you know, we could talk about what those treatments look like. You really do need a sort of professional treatment, but for many of us, what we should be focused on is like, you know, the high blood pressure part, so we don't get to that cute level, right? What is the preventive medicine to kind of protect our mental health? And, you know, many of us like think in terms of, you know, preventative medicine for our
The go help. We're trying to eat healthier and more exercise and things. Yeah. I think we have to be just as proactive about our mental health, especially in such a nasty time. Like the time we're living in right now where we're not naturally getting the doses of social connection and the kinds of good feelings that we would normally be getting through vacations and the like you kind of have to put more work in. You just like, you'd put work into your diet and exercise, you get to put work into your mental health. To, let's go
back to lottery winners. Because this is so interesting. I think, for a lot of people, none of us probably who are listening, have one. Well, you know, I'm sure actually.
Lee, I take it back. I think somebody who's listening, this is for sure won the lottery and maybe experienced this, but the bulk of us, haven't lottery winners are often unhappy because as you phrase it in the happiness lab, the episode about the lottery. People only think about what they have gained, or what they will gain, not what they will lose. And that was, that was pretty insightful. Because of course, when I'm thinking about the lottery, and I consider myself like a pretty, I try to mitigate bias,
I would never think, what am I going
to lose? If I end up with a hundred and sixty million dollars, right? That would never even
My mind at all. And if I did it would be like Oh, I'm gonna lose all of the Annoying bills that I have to worry about every merriment. Yeah, I'm gonna lose some like neighbors that I really don't like that much when I move to Bel Air, right. Like come on, but it turns out you lose a lot more than that. It's unforeseen. And that seems like one of the major reasons. These people end up unhappy. I'd love for you to speak to that a little
bit. Yeah. I mean, when you, when you talk to real lottery winners, what happened, the first thing you lose often is like the normalcy of your Social connection, right? Yo, the easiest way to get a lot of weird.
Those to come out of the woodwork, you know, from your, you know, Facebook friends, you don't want to talk to you is to win the lottery. People show up and say, hey this legitimate problem. How are you going to help me right in your like, crap? Like who do I decide to help? How do I decide to help? And I enabling people like, how do I make those decisions? How do I hurt people by sometimes saying? No, right. You forget you can't hang out with your buds anymore in the same way, you know, like that. Like, you know, I don't know that. Your favorite bar coffee shop, you used to go to with your friends, you split the tab, you know, with chicken wings where like, you know, they're looking at you, you're looking at them, right?
Right there, making $400. No, like you made a hundred and sixty million dollars. I am not paying for these fucking chicken wings, man. He's like your chicken
wings and you'll have more opportunities come up, right? You'll you'd probably want to move to a better place, right? Then they crappy apartment, you live in. But now you're far from your friends and they come over and they feel like crap because they're the, you know, their car, their Furniture, there, whatever is not as good as yours. And so you kind of lose this connection and then you also have these kind of moments where you lose time, right? You know, now you got to hire a financial analyst and make sure you're investing.
Get it, right? And so on. I mean, these things don't sound like big losses. But if you look, empirical e, you find that a lot of lottery winners. If you come back a year later or miserable or, or at least just as happy as they were before, right? It doesn't make them happier. But you also find a lot of them that have committed suicide, right? Because things go. So but you know your marriage breaks down because it has so many changes, you know, your kids are upset. And so we sometimes it's going to like know what you want to wish for. Be careful what you wish for. I think the lottery is one of those but the same is true for these awful events, you know, my
As I interview people who've been in accidents and you have been burned over three-quarters of their body or
that guy was amazing. I got to get that guy's email address at the end of the show. He was really
something. Yeah, but I've been in one of the studies is on people who've been in an accident and become paraplegic, you know, so if you're listening to this podcast in your car, you know, imagine, you know, something bad happens, you know horrible accident and now you lose your legs, right? What does that do to your app is again in the moment. It's going to suck. Like if this happened today, this again be a pretty crappy afternoon, but
when you go back to people for whom that's really happened, six months later, one year later. They say, their happiness is as good as it was before, and sometimes they say, it's the best thing that ever happened to them. You know, that Jr. Martinez, the guy you're mentioning in my podcast, who I interviewed who is, you know, in war and like he like had a Humvee blow up. So he's burned over three-quarters of his body. He lost his military career. He lost his looks, he's kind of good-looking guy before, you know, just his whole life was changed and I said, you know, would you change anything? Would you go back and make that Humvee not blow up and he was like, no.
Last like, this has given me so many gifts that I wouldn't have imagined. And like you don't think, you know, getting in a horrible car accident, becoming paraplegic terminal, cancer, diagnosis, all these things. You don't think those are going to change your life for the positive, but the people who've actually experienced those things in, a lot of cases, will say, yeah, more good than bad came of that, which is shocking.
You're listening to the Jordan Harbinger show with our guest. Laurie. Santos, will be right back. This episode is sponsored in part by Cuts clothing. I'm proud of the last three years. I hustled, I rebuilt the business with my team here. I lost like 30 pounds. Became a dad through it all Cuts, who sponsored the Jordan Harbinger show early on help. Keep me feeling good. And looking sharp as sharp as possible. When you're stressed out. You're not sleeping much. I got to say I don't miss those early days. A ton Cuts basically makes the Tesla. Can I say that I'm staying at the Tesla of t-shirts hoodies polos.
Shirts and more. My favorite is the classic Pike approach. Tri-blend T. Which GQ Magazine calls the only shirt worth wearing? I can get behind that. Now that fall is just around the corner. You can also catch me wearing Cuts clothing cozy, hyperloop French, terry, fabric hoodies, which has a temperature controlled material, very fancy and Cutting Edge.
This month marks, the cuts fifth
anniversary and they're doing it big with two collection. Drops, a product launch and a week-long, special
event. Go to Cuts, clothing.com Jordan to get 25% off, site-wide.
During their anniversary sale, that's 25% off, site-wide at Cuts, clothing.com Jordan.
This episode is also sponsored by Peloton. I've been home a lot like a lot, a lot. And there are many perks like watching movies from the comfort of my own couch, so I can pause eat talk. When I want podcasting from my underwear, or in my underwear, maybe right now, you'll never know. Some things are just better at home. Sweet home and Peloton delivers a workout experience. You'd never thought was possible right in your own home and better. Yet. I can create a full body workout that includes stretching yoga cycling.
Meditation whatever Pilates. And way more Jen, loves the dance cardio, which well, frankly, it's hilarious to watch. That's all that is. When you purchase the Peloton bike, you can get access to live classes and thousands on demand plus access to the app to get you moving anytime anywhere with a boot camp between nap times or ride before brunch. You can seamlessly fit Peloton into your
life with the Peloton bike. There's nothing like working out from home. Learn more at one pellet. On.com new members can try Peloton classes free for 30 days at one Peloton.
Cam app terms. Apply that. So any PE lotro n.com
now? Back to dr. Laurie Santos on the Jordan Harbinger show.
People's prediction of what's going to happen when they win the lottery or when a bad thing happens is off. So it happens both. When we predict positive outcomes. And when we predict negative outcomes from the sound of it, we think it's going to be great or we think it's going to be horrible and it turns out to not necessarily really be either of those things but the disparity between what we think and hope will happen in the case of a good thing. And what actually happens is that what's triggering the sadness and Desperation, like if I win the gold medal and it says, I'm still me.
Me, but now there's more expectations, but I'm still like, I'm not rich and famous anymore because it's been a year since the Olympics and nobody remembers my awesome ski jump except for me right in my coach that seems like what it would trigger it that the seems like you really are placing too much pressure on this random singular event, and it just doesn't
work. Yeah, it's a bias that like researchers call focal ISM, right? Okay, when you're thinking about winning the lottery, you're like, oh my God, I'm Gonna Be Rich. You're not thinking, I'm still going to have to like, you know, pay my taxes. I'm still gonna. You might need.
Still going to hurt like you know that like they're just stuff in life. That's kind of a pain in the butt, you know, same thing if your paraplegic, they're still going to be laughter, you know? Spring still going to come around, Pizza. Still going to taste, awesome. Right? Like you just forget that they're still going to be good thing. So, focal is amines. You focus on this one thing you think is going to matter so much, but really the rest of life is going to be the rest of life. In my podcast. I do one episode on my Yale students, you know, Yale is one of these places that, you know, students. Would you give their arm to be able to get into, you know, like it has a school except so few.
People, my students work so hard to get here. And I show these little videos because now students these days post videos of themselves. You're doing embarrassing or sad moment. So students will videotape, you know, when they click on the link, did I get into Yale or not? And they'll post that on YouTube and sometimes and sad and sometimes it's really happy. And so I show these videos of these students who like find out they get into young completely freaked out and are screaming and my students will say, you know, yeah, I freaked out. That was an awesome moment, but about like, 10 minutes later. I was like, and now what like, you know, I was
Only I lost all asleep. I got into this place and like now I just have to be awesome there and get into medical, you know, so I think we place our accomplishments, you know, as this like this is going to happen and I'm happily ever after, you know, I'll just be happy forever. But that's just not how life Works. Dan Gilbert the psychologist, who I interview is fond of saying happily ever after only works. If you have 10 minutes to live, you know, like a job which is a little, a
little dark Dan, a little duck. Yeah. What about impact bias? This is another sort of along.
With hedonic adaptation where we get used to stuff and return to Baseline impact biases and other sort of useful term. Is this. Tell me about
that. Yeah impact bias is kind of the idea that it's not so much that were bad at predicting what we're going to feel when good and bad events happen. You know, I predict watery is going to probably feel good for a little while becoming her play. Jake's. Probably going to feel bad for a little while, right? We kind of get the valence right, but we get the amount of that valence and the duration of that balance wrong. So what do I mean, let's say, you know, you win the lottery, you predict positive.
Once it's going to feel positive, but it doesn't feel as good as you predict. You know, you get into you find out you get into Yale, you predict positive valence, but it's not as good as you thought and the impact doesn't last for, as long as you thought, you know, you thought it was going to be fun, the rest of my life. You know, it was for a couple weeks. When you get to brag to people, you're going Ivy League school, right? And then it kind of gold. So impact bias is this idea that we think the impact is going to be huge and last for a really long duration and it's never as huge or for as long as we think. And again, that sucks in the positive direction.
It means the lotteries and the getting into Ivy League schools of life. Don't feel great. But the same is true in the negative Direction. It means the breakups, and the losing the jobs, and the getting awful medical diagnosis. Those aren't going to hurt for as long as we think either. Or as bad as we think
it takes some life experience to understand this though, right? Because I remember going through things when I was like 18 19 and being like, no, you don't understand. I never gonna get over this and now I'm like, what was that thing again? And you know, even a few years later when someone like stole from me and it was like a close friend, I was so pissed.
It's time that I helped him move. I gave him money and then he like, ended up staying for me and I'm like, I'm never going to be not mad at this person. And what's funny is like a few years later. He texted me and was like, hey, man, I want to catch up with you and I thought I would be so livid. But instead I was like I don't even care about this guy. Like I don't even bother blocking his number. I was just like, what a loser. Next. Like I probably like, went back to eating my lunch. It just didn't even register. And a lot of the things that have made me the most angry or upset in my whole life. Even just a few short years later. I'm like, well, that wasn't such a big deal that actually worked.
It out really well for me, but the older I get the easier it is for me to get there, because my time line is stretched out. Whereas, if I'm 12, and my mom won't buy me a Nintendo. I'm like, my life is definitely going to take a different turn now that I don't have Nintendo, right? And now, it's like I can lose a job in a business, in a relationship and I'm like, I will probably be fine in a couple of
years. Yeah. I think we get better at it. The park is we have experience with it, right, you know, you break up with someone you like. I'm never going to feel good again, and then you know, two years.
Later, you're fine. And then the next breakup happens. You can kind of look back to the other break up and think. Well, I guess with, you know, with Joe it got, you know, better faster than I thought. So, you get little hints. But, you know, for many of us even that Insight doesn't generalize really fully like what it really means is like you're going to be the worst possible thing that you could imagine could happen to you and it's actually not going to be as bad as you think. Many of us don't make that strong a generalization and there's real evidence that even people who have the same thing happen. Again don't generalize as much as they think one of my
My favorite funny studies of this, who's you have to find these moments where bad things happen to people that are not so bad that you can kind of experimental study in one study? Looked at people who failed their drivers test multiple times. So, you know people's going in for the driver's test, your unit lations, like how happy will you feel if you get it how sad will you feel if you don't get it and people predict and then, you know go through the stop sign and you fail and they say well how bad was it? People say that wasn't as bad as I think but those people who fail to probably going to go back a second time. So research has to be like, okay second time how bad are going to predict you're going to feel if you
And they update a little bit, you know, they're like yeah won't be, you know, but they're still not realizing how much resilience they have. And so what you find is that even people who failed several times in a row, they update a tad but not that much. We keep forgetting how resilient we are. We're what's called. This is something that the psychologist, Dan Gilbert calls immune neglect. He says, yeah, we kind of like the psychological immune system right when bad things happen. We have all these things that come in and fight it and say, well, she wasn't good for you anyway, or screw it. I never really wanted.
I need a license or, you know, paraplegic. I didn't need my legs. Like we have these mechanisms to come in and convince ourselves. It's not that bad. But we have immune neglect. We don't realize the psychological immune system is as powerful as it is. We neglect that we're going to do all this stuff to feel better. And that means that we're not taking risks that we could take. You know, you might be scared. Like if I break up this person, you know, I'll never get over the pain of it. Like nah, you'll just be fine. You know you maybe you want to leave that job or take a risk in your business and you think odds
The bad outcome happens. I just won't be able to handle it and the science suggests. You will you just don't realize
it going back to the idea that it's a little bit of a myth and we touched on this before, that one change ahead is going to make us happier. We know that that's not true. What about when your circumstances are? Truly horrible. I assume there's exceptions to this. Like, if I'm born in Yemen to a mother who's a teenager, and we're hiding in an abandoned building because of a war, that's a bad environment, right? A change to a secure environments. Going to
Make us all happier. I assume.
Yeah, that's definitely true. And I'm glad you brought that up. You know, we often say, oh, you know, for example, like money doesn't matter as much as you think, for happiness, but again, like if you can't put food on your table, you can put a roof over your head if you're living in dire, poverty. Yeah. Getting some more money is going to give you the Creature Comforts. You need for happiness. And so it's not that circumstances matter 0. If you're in, truly traumatic circumstances, yeah. Changing your circumstances is probably going to help a lot, but for most of us were not in those dire circumstances.
Right, you know like not being able to get the newest PlayStation is not like, you know, like the yemeni Like You Know Drama you're talking about right? And so I think we want to be careful. It's not the circumstances don't matter at all. It's the most of the, you know, 99.99% of the people listening to this podcast right now are probably in circumstances where changing them drastically isn't going to matter for their happiness as much as they think,
as far as the dramatically poor environments are concerned. Okay, the Yemen thing. Obvious example, what about like an abusive relationship?
Relationship or a bad job which candidly can have a lot of commonalities with an abusive relationship in many ways. Depending on the job. Like if you're bullied at work, you have a terrible boss. Like where does it sort of stopped? You mentioned? Yes, the new is PlayStation, but I assume there's common examples of people in bad environments where you're like, okay, this is a common environment that could be changed because like you said, 99.9% of the people plus listening are not in a yemeni war zone, but a lot of people are in crappy relationships in crappy jobs.
Yeah, and I think, you know, one thing you need to think about is, I think this is where the
Logical immune system can be so powerful, you know, we often have a sense of like, I'm just kind of not happy with it forces. There's something really wrong. You know, I'm getting physically hurt in this situation. I'm getting actually psychologically abused real. All of those cases are ones in which changing things will be good. But if you're kind of just like run-of-the-mill, not excited about stuff, then there's lots of mechanisms you can use to kind of get a little bit better. One of my favorite ones in the context of jobs is what, researcher, Amy, reznitsky at Yale cause job.
Crafting. She does these great studies where she interviews people in a job that you might not think of as like the most glamorous career path. So she interviews Hospital janitorial workers, right? I mean, these are people who are like cleaning up vomit, you know, taking people Linens away and stuff like not great. But what she finds is a certain subset of them. You know, she asked you like your job. Do you feel like your job is a calling? They'll say yeah. My job is a calling. I could not imagine doing anything better in my life. I love it so much. Wow, you're like, what is going on with these people? And what you find is that they're finding ways, even though their job is to be a
Editor to infuse in what they find valuable, you know, so one janitor, for example, talked about how he uses his job to try to make sick patients feel better. He knows his job was like cleaning up the vomit and I like chemotherapy word, like not great, but he'd come in and he'd like, you know, just like laughs around and joke around with the person be like, you know, what? Don't feel bad about vomiting on the floor because that's why I have this job. Like I got a car payment to make you know, and then the person laughs and he last he's like my job isn't you know to clean up the sick. Like my job is to like make this person. Laughs. That's what I
Get value from then you can have all kinds of different values, you know, his was really about doing something nice for people being social. It could be a love of learning. It could be doing something Brave. It could be taking risks. That could be exercising your creativity. You know, she claims that like if janitorial staff can Infuse this stuff into their daily life. Most of us in most professions could do that. She's another example of a woman who a janitorial staff member who worked on a coma Ward and the staff member every day would slightly move the like paintings and the pots and the
And she thought like maybe I think it might be helping these coma patients a little bit. Just to like, notice some changes. Like I don't know if medically that's a thing, but she like had this sense that she was helping, right? She had this sense that she was doing something that she'd come up with that was creative, that was sort of helping her. And so Amy thinks that there are ways we can job craft in every profession now does that mean, you know, I don't know if you like, have some office job that you're like, my job crafting is, I'm just going to play guitar every day. Am I did? I like, but you have to do what's in your job description, but there,
A lots of ways to infuse some creative crafting into that. Yeah. She has lots of suggestions on her website, you know, a little survey, if to brainstorm, how you can do
this. I mean, I know, tax planners and accountants that they sort of play a game. How much money can I save my client on taxes? Because they know if they go, I saved you $89,000 on taxes. The person's going to be like, dang and then if they beat that next year, it's like look they made more money last year, the which is why they were able to save more on tags, but he that's beside the point. The point is
You were going to give this to Uncle, Sam to spend on toilet seats, and now you can spend it on your retirement, or your kids college education, or whatever it is. So that kind of thing is, I guess, probably how he does that, he didn't use that term obviously, but it totally makes sense that, every job has that somewhere even if it's not
obvious, and you just have to kind of get creative with it. Me one thing, you know, we often don't really think a lot about our values, you know, what really gives us joy, you know, is it social connection? Is it doing something? Creative? Is it learning something? Is it being brave? Is it?
You know, think about the values that you have the kind of character strengths that you really believe are like, you know, something, when you exercise them, you feel good. And then figure out ways to bring that into more of our life, you know, our job is one example, but, you know, another thing you can do is to infuse that more into your relationships, you know, you mentioned people who are again, if you're in a terrible abusive relationship, get out of that, that's not great. But, you know, many of us are just in relationships, that feel a little stale because we're not putting work into it. But doing this thing where you think about each other's values, you know, what's one of those things?
I just mentioned that you both like you can you kind of build that up together and have you both like learning go do like look at a new documentary or go on some Museum website or go to a real Museum, you know, if the covid thing is going down right now, if you really like doing things that are brave, you know, take a trip to like some hiking spot, that's kind of hard and like, push yourself a little bit, right? We forget that we can engage our values in an active way that, and that can make us feel really good.
We mentioned before that, having our material needs met, makes us happy and I've seen this number batted around a lot, but
Above, let's say this material needs money. Making more money. Does not necessarily make us more happy. What is the number? Because, you know, we've all seen the study words, like above X, your marginal happiness, doesn't get any bigger. But every time I hear this quoted, the freaking number is different.
Well, I mean, you know, the that number, you know, if I if you looked at a study that was done in like 1920 to write that number probably thousand dollars a year, is what you need. And so the one I often like to quote was a study that was done in 2009, you know, so
Teensy bit out of date already, but the number in that famous paper was around $75,000 ideas. That you pass, $75,000. You're not going to get happier and that's truly was striking. You again, we could adjust the, you know, for inflation. We could figure out what the number is, but what's striking is in the 2009 data. It wasn't just that you don't get happier with more money. Like you could look at people with quadruple that salary and they have no difference in their life satisfaction. Right? And that is just not what we think. Most of the people listening right now, that if I said, I'm
Gonna go like quadruple or quintuple your salary? You'd be like Stone. You'd be like, my life will be the monster bleah better. I'll be way satisfied with my life and that simply is not what's pulled out of the data. And so you might get a little happier, you know, you might be able to buy a few more things but like it's not going to have as much of an impact on your happiness. As say, if you boosted your social connection, or if you drop crafted at work or honestly if you just gave yourself a little bit more free time, you know, so it's not so much that money has zero effect on happiness.
Like the effect on happiness, isn't that big and that amount of work you have to put into it. If you put that amount of work into pretty much any of these other happiness hacks did work, so much better.
By the way, that's ninety. Five thousand dollars in today's money, $75,000 in 2009. So for example, if you're making $40,000 a year, you get a bump to 70k you feel less stress. Maybe that makes me more happy. So we strive for those increments which makes sense. Right? But unfortunately, and you've mentioned this in your work. What that teaches us is. Hey, every time I get an
Terminal salary bump. I'm incrementally happier. But then if it tops off at 95,000 dollars in today's money, when I was a lawyer on Wall Street, I think I started off at a hundred and sixty Grand a year and I get, you know, you get a bonus. Nobody was happy with that. After the first, like, if you didn't get a raise and then your bonus wasn't you would sit there. I know investment bankers back when I worked there. That would be making like, I don't know, 400 thousand dollars a year and they were so pissed off that there. Somebody else got a Bonus that was bigger or that their bonus was
As big as they expected because the 2008 I mean, people were just in pieces about this. So the problem is people keep chasing cash. Well, after there's not really any marginal gain and happiness like a drug addict. Who's like, wait a minute. The first time I tried this, it was
awesome. Let me take more. That's exactly right. And, you know, one of my favorite surveys that looked at this was looking at you because we could ask ourselves like what, what is an annual salary that after that's annual salary about? You wouldn't need any more, right? We could all guess, like, you know, if I got that amount, I just be good.
Right. And so they do this with people at different income levels. They bring people in at the time during the survey. They brought people in earning $30,000 a year and they say, what would be your amounts? The people say, well, not 30,000. But if I got $50,000 a year, I would never need a penny more, but then the same survey looked at people who are earning $100,000 a year. And they said, you know, you good. And in theory, based on what other people said, these people should be like. Yeah, I'm great. And is piling up in my kitchen. I don't need it. Right? But these folks who are earning $100,000, say they need 250 thousand dollars a year to be happy. And so I checked out.
Do the math on this, you get two things. One is like you never get to the goal. But what's worth the gold gets further away as you get more money, you know, so, you know, you're only 20 thousand dollars off if you're at 30 K, but now you're a hundred fifty thousand dollars off of your earning. A hundred K. Like it doesn't make sense. But again, our brains can't be objective, right? You know, when you're earning $100,000 a year, you're hanging out with people who are earning more, you know, all your eye, your investment bankers, you were talking about. They just know people who are getting more than them, and that makes them feel bad, but, you know, unless I am like unless
A literally Jeff base was listening to this right now. Probably somebody who's earning more than you like, right? We're all silver medalists in the salary game except for one person on this planet. And so we shouldn't let other people salary effect. As we should be objectively happy with what we have but we're kind of not
right? This goes back to reference points, right? Happiness can be relative. It's better to be. This is interesting. It's better to be richer than your poor neighbors verse, or at least, then your neighbors in general versus being rich, with other rich people, and that completely checks out like the most
Miserable people? I know are not people that work, two jobs and are struggling to feed their kids. I mean, those people are stressed out but the most absolutely like negative self-talk and even be around them type of people are people that have like 14 million dollars instead of 50, they are insufferable and annoying and just terrible, Genet. Like, you can't even be in the room with them because everything is about how somebody else's plane is bigger or something. It's really
gross on the happiness, live podcast. For my episode on this. I interviewed this guy clay.
A girl who is amazing. So he's a wealth psychologist. A mental health. Professional that only works with the point zero zero zero one percent which is like, you know bracketed like such a good gig. Like, Why didn't it come? Anyway, I should have thought of that but, you know, first shot, he has clients write. All our theories are like, if we had that much money, we'd be fine wouldn't need to be paying somebody to like, you know, Council us, but what shocking? If you look at the things that they're upset about, it is like the stuff that you're like early, you know, like I can't figure out a place to park my yacht. It's too big.
There's no Port near
by you or
More like I'm only in the hundred millions. I can't get to a billion. If only, I could get to be a billionaire, right? Instead of 900 million, you know, and so they're not happy. Right? Like they're struggling with this stuff. And so we assume if we got there that wouldn't be us but the same kind of stuff Creeps in, you know, and so it affects our happiness more than we think. Now I
can I can speak to that a little bit because I remember when I was younger thinking, I just need to make the equivalent of a hundred grand a year. When I thought that when I worked for like five dollars and twenty-five cents at a movie theater, and then I got my job on Wall.
The street and I was like a hundred sixty thousand. This is great. And then two years later I was like, so when do we get a raise and how much is it in, like what is our bonus check going to be and then I started my own business and it was like, I just want to get back to a regular level of income. It doesn't have to be what I learned on Wall Street, and I got past the Wall Street thing or got to the Wall Street thing. And I was like, well, okay, now I want this, and then every time I hit the goal, it's like, you know, it'd be great if I had a slightly rounder number, or another comma in there would be good or like, what if we got from this to that? Then do fancy?
If inflation calculator investment, compound interest, this that, and the other thing we could buy this house or like, but I don't even care about the home or the money. It doesn't affect me. It's almost like an idol. It's like my brain is almost doing it. But my wife and I have routinely talk about how much we actually spend, which is barely any of our like, we live, well, below our means. So it's not I need a Ferrari. It's just like my brain torturing itself
with math. Yeah, and I think, you know, this is something is that we have these theories about what's going to make us happy.
He and one of the things we like to do is to like, work towards things that are measurable, right? You know, if I ask like, you know, how grateful are you today? You know, this year versus last year, hard to know but you know, what's your annual salary this year versus last year's so easy for us to know that number, right? And so that means we end up prioritizing the things we can measure over the things that probably matter more like, you know, how socially connected are you? How grateful are you? How present are you? You know, how much do you feel like you're have a lot of free time and you really wealthy in terms of time. Those are the things.
That probably matter more but it's not like, you know, we have a score in our bank account that's telling us those things. So it's not as easy for us to think about maximizing them or poor work towards maximizing them because we don't as easily notice the rewards as we do, when we're like, fight for a raise and get it, even though it doesn't have an effect on our happiness.
This is the Jordan Harbinger show with our guest. Dr. Laurie. Santos will be right back. This episode is sponsored in part by Blue Nile. Are you getting ready to pop? The question, got a special occasion coming off, whether you're customizing an engagement ring, or you're designing some diamond stud earrings at Blue Nile.com. You can create one-of-a-kind jewelry with more than 200,000 ethically, sourced Gia, graded diamonds in every shape and size with an endless selection of settings at a price. You won't find at a traditional Jeweler. If you're having trouble, your need advice during the process Blue Nile has jewelry experts on hand 24/7 by phone.
Or chat. They can also ship the same day. For those of you that wait to the last minute. A hundred percent satisfaction guarantee guaranteed free shipping and
returns Mark. The moments that matter with jewelry from Blue and al.com and our listeners get $50 off. $500, this podcast, exclusive offer includes engagement rings. Youth code, Jordan. That's code Jordan. Plus every order is. Insured ships, free and arrives in discrete packaging. That won't give away what's inside shop stress-free and find her forever. Peace. Go to Blue Nile.com today and youth code drawer.
Aiden,
this episode is sponsored by ball and Branch. The average person sleeps eight hours a day. Basically, a third of your life is in bed. So if you think about, it's not silly to put some thought and Care into the sheets or sleeping on night, after night, ball and Branch nose, high quality sleep, doesn't stop at your mattress. They're Ultra Soft. Organic sheets are transparent. Lie. Sourced in producing safe, fair condition. So you'll sleep even easier knowing that it's not made by tiny children's fingers and some Sweatshop situation. Although they do, make the softest sheets. We love our ball and branches hundred percent organic cotton white signature, hem sheets. That's their best.
It gets softer with every wash. Yes. I'm laughing at my own joke, they arrived package. So nice. It was like opening a gift to myself and I ended up getting new sheets to my brother-in-law who happened to be over when we were opening the box. He felt some major fomo after feeling the quality can feel that fairtrade quality also. Gifted. My parents asset is in the mineral blue color, which is several notches above with. They're currently using. You don't even want to know to experience the best sheets. You've ever felt choose ball and
Branch to experience the best sheets. You've ever felt choose bowl and Branch. You can try them, worry free for 30 nights with free.
Being and returns and our listeners, get an exclusive 15 percent off. Your first set of sheets with promo code, Jordan at Bolin Branch.com., That's Bolin Branch, Bo LL and Branch.com promo code. Jordan.
This episode is also sponsored in part, by noon. When you work up a sweat from a marathon runner. If you're like me running after my two year old kid, you lose vital electrolytes and minerals that your body needs in order to keep moving and recover. Efficiently, known sport is optimized for hydration and mineral replenishment before during and after a workout. I also use mine on airplanes you.
Drop a fizzy tablet into your water bottle to support your hydration, anytime anywhere. My friends take none tablets to festivals. And I take you in sport with me when I go on a long hike or bike ride. None sport is made with only one gram of sugar carefully. Sourced premium ingredients that are certified non-GMO gluten-free and vegan available in 13, delicious flavors, including fan favorite cherry limeade, which has an extra boost to caffeine to help attack that jet lag
to get your game changing hydration. Visit Nu U n-- dot life, / Jordan and Honor Code, Jordan for 25% off your first
Order. Thanks
so much for listening to the show. I hope you get a lot out of it. We put all of those URLs and codes. You need for all the sponsors in one, easy place. And we've recently remade this whole page to make it easier to navigate on your phone. And on your computer. Jordan, Harbinger.com deals is where you'll find it. I would love it. If you would check the page out. Make sure it works for you. Give us some feedback on it. And ideally you help support those who make this show possible as well. You know, you're looking for a mattress, maybe a little ring, something like that. Some probiotics. We got all that and it's a Jordan harbinger.com.
Each deals. Don't forget. We also have worksheets for many episodes. If you want some of the drills and exercises talked about during the show, all in one easy place. That link is in the show notes at Jordan, Harbinger.com podcast. Now for the rest of my conversation with dr. Laurie Santos. The comparison thing seems like, it could just get so toxic though, right? We'd rather be superior to others, even if we sacrifice money or looks, right? So, it really is all about those reference points. But to your point, we set the target upward because we're productive.
Of achievers, like you mentioned, right? So we set them very high, right? I'm not thinking about friends of mine that have some money. I'm thinking about like my richest friend, right? Who's just obviously an outlier. Okay, and then or my like best-looking friend who is literally a European fashion model. Okay. So what are you like? Are you kidding me? Why would you do that to yourself? And it doesn't make any sense? Yeah, so it's always an extreme alternative which never wins. Right? Because if you think about this from like a almost like a philosophical angle, who's more social,
Active, you or like air quotes other people or who's richer you or someone else? Like anyone the answer is always not you in every category generally
and it's amazing how our brains will like, seek out exactly. The reference point that makes us feel worst about ourselves. Sure. I was doing some Consulting with it, like cannot be named NBA team and I was talking about these things and I was like, putting up like, okay, who are your reference points for this? Like, who's your reference points for free throw and they all screamed?
I like Steph Curry. Who's your reference points for high? It was like, taco feel like who's your reference points for having awesome cars? Like LeBron James. I'm like, well, why is it just you want to pick up just like one? Awesome, NBA player and feel bad? No, you specifically, pick the one. That's going to make. You feel the worst, you know, like no one thinks of height when they're thinking of stuff car and I'm like, wow, I'm taller than stuff, like, I don't care, right? Right there. Specifically picking the people that make them feel worse. And that's like, you know, one case of professional athletes, who are all pretty good at all, those things that I've just talked about, but we all just kind of do this.
See, you know, we pick the person that's, you know, like most attractive if we're thinking about our attractiveness, you know, we've picked the person with the most money for thinking about money if we think about it, how? I wish I had a good relationship. We just like scroll through and find someone, we think is like in a happy marriage. Like, we constantly pick the thing that makes us feel the worst and we're surrounded by structures that make that even harder. It was one thing back in the day when we probably had brains that did this, when you're a hunter gatherers, you know, walking around the planes and we could see like, you know, 18 other people, right? Yo now we just have the
Internet. That's filled with people curating. You know, what, these things feel like to them and curating, how awesome their lives are and that just can make us feel so crappy to see that stuff. This sort
of manufactured bullshit. Right? The alternatives are always on social media. I neglect my Instagram generally only posted like twice a year, but I always answer my DMs and I'll get a DM from somebody with like the blue checkmark and I'll go. Oh, I wonder what this person does and their War photographer. So they've got all these cool foot in them like your life is so exciting. Where are you right now?
Outside Syria. And I'm downloading few episodes of your show because I finally have internet. My God. So cool. And then somebody else is like, my favorite hotel in the Swiss Alps is this one. Here's a bunch of photos of me and an awesome dress, with my husband, just like drinking handcrafted cocktails on a balcony. And I'm like, I'm in my kitchen and I feel kind of fat because I ate Fritos like, you know, like that's where I'm at. So the alternatives are just even worse now because of social media. Like anytime you're feeling good about yourself. Don't worry, crack open Instagram and look,
Look at how shit your life actually is compared to somebody else. But if you talk to these people, the war photographer is like I need to figure out how to make money because I made like three hundred dollars a month from one photo and like I'm spending way more just to exist in this environment by Hotel cause more than that because there's only one in the whole country. That's open has electricity and then the influencer person in the amazing hotel is like yeah. I kind of have to shill Listerine and mattresses like non-stop because I stay at these places for free but I don't have any money. You know, how am I going to
Tire. This is my business and I'm just getting started and look how many followers does other person has. So we're all on the treadmill, but we're all pretending like we're not on the
treadmill. Yeah, and this is one of my favorite studies that I tell my students about just makes this point so well, right? So they bring college students in and they ask, you know, how often do these good and bad events happen to you. So, good events. You got a better grade than you expected or you know, someone you liked asked, you out. Went to a cool party, but he's bad events, right, you know, get a crappy grade felt lonely. Felt really homesick, you know, like really embarrassed Lee some embarrassing time.
Cuz whatever. So you took off, how often that happens to you. And then you say, how often did these events happen to the average college student? So you get this prediction, how often happens to an individual person and how often they predict. But of course, if you ask every individual person, you can get the accurate percentage of how often it's happening in general as so, you look at these. And what you find is that people's predictions are completely wrong. So for the positive events, people think these are happening all the time. Everybody's going to cool party. Everybody's getting grades better than expect. Everybody's getting asked out, and the fact is
That's not really happening to that many people, but that effect of being wrong is even stronger in the negative Direction. You predict zero, people are feeling homesick. Like I am fewer people are feeling fat. Like I'm 0 people got course grades and though like the effects are huge. Like people are off by like 30 percentage points of what they think. And so this is kind of bad. Right? It means not just that we're comparing ourselves against other people, but we're creating this imaginary awesome person who has only good things happen in, no negative things. There's some
quote, I'm not forgetting. You know, I'm like out of names. I forget it
right now where I know exactly where you're going. We compare our blooper reel. Does everybody else's highlight reels? That
it? Exactly. Exactly, you know, and you know, it'd be one thing if we were comparing ourselves against real people and feeling bad, but we always feel worse because we imagined people to be richer and more beautiful than they really are. And so, right? But one thing, this study also showed is that if you ask people, hey, all those good things and bad things that you just talked about. Do you try to boost them on social media, really do try?
Make the good things seem good better and make the bad things seem less true. And people say yeah, I definitely try to hide the bad things. I definitely try to show off the good things. Yeah, and that's bad. We're like all participating in this Collective culture of making, our own reference, point seemed better in a way that makes other people around us, feel
crabby. Yeah. It's kind of a shame but I also totally understand it because even I've talked about this before, even some of the people that you see on social media who say, like, no, I'm gonna post all the real
Stuff. Even that stuff is I mean it's fake, right? Like they're doing a video and they're a cute couple and they accidentally cut each other off. No, you go. No, you go. They planned that shit. I know it because, you know, someone who works for them or whatever in the like, yeah, that's in the script. Like it's totally. The whole thing is BS are like, oh we fought today, but we thought about who loves each other more, and it's like, shut up like the whole thing is nonsense. But, yeah, we're all doing this to one another. That's one of the reasons I opted out as social media because I was just like, you know,
This is just making other people feel fomo and I hate when I feel that. So, why am I going to do that to other people? What am I trying to do? It's a manipulation tactic. And I'm like, do I need to do that in my life? I don't really want to do that. I don't like it when other people do it to me. So I just stopped. I post now and like I have a real big life event, but it's just a normal life event. Like, I had a birthday not like, oh, I'm on a yacht. You know, I just don't share that stuff. No one cares, first of all, and it never makes anyone feel good. It only makes other people feel bad.
Add. So I kind of encourage people to just you know, stop looking at Instagram unless they're looking at Mema counts. Those are funny.
Yeah. I mean, I think you know, it's worth noticing that you know, what you're taking in kind of matters? One of the kind of tips. I give my students is I tell them to hack their feeds right, you know, I'll hack your, if there's somebody who's making you feel bad about yourself, like, get rid of that or maybe kind of fill in the stuff that's like not as good, right, you know, again, you know, we will feel bad about our income if we're comparing ourselves against rich influencers, but if you
In your feed that like, hey there, people starving right now and all these countries and X number of people lost their job in the middle of covid. And you're like, oh, okay, like that's good. You know, you're if you're constantly an Instagram feed, that's making you feel bad about your body's like, put in some realistic bodies into that feed, right? Yo, we in some ways, we forget that we can control and curate that, you know, it's might not be as fun to look at the, like not rich influencers, all the time, but you have to recognize what that's doing to your psychology and recognize that you can kind of control your own reference.
Points. You get some control over that. Once you see it. You can't control it. You might not think it's influencing you but it is if it gets in there if it gets past your eyes, it's going to influence you in a negative way, but you have some control over. What, what you choose to look at. Now.
What are some favorite daily rituals habits, besides feed hacking that you found, increase happiness, and aren't maybe like a huge time suck. Ur commitment.
Yeah, one of my favorite ones, which sounds so cheesy. I mean, it's worth saying at the outset, like, none of these happiness tips. Had a great like,
Team, right? They all sound like kind of hippie-dippie like platitude e, grandmother e stuff. Yeah, but every single one I'm going to tell you about is backed by like some of the latest science. So one of my favorite ones, again sounds cheesy, but works is this idea of gratitude like, you know, counting your blessings. Sure like so cheesy, right? But it totally works turns out that the simple Act of scribbling down three to five things you're grateful for at the end of the day, can significantly improve your well-being in as little as two weeks, but it doesn't just do that. It allows you to be
be kind of happy in your life. Through gratitude is a sort of pro-social emotion. And so it causes you to want to like, give back so grateful. People are more likely to do, nice stuff for other people and like makes you a better person, but it also makes you a more productive person because one of the people gratitude makes you want to give back to is your future self. So it turns out grateful. People are more likely to eat healthier. They're more likely to save more for retirement easily. They're more likely to exercise. It makes it easier to do the thing that like, you know, you know, future you would benefit from but it kind of sucks right now to do.
Grateful people, do that easily, right? And so like it's kind of a win-win, it like feels awesome and it's going to cause you to feel more productive to get to your goal. Right? I mean, it sounds like gratitude but like, no, it's like, you know, it's like productivity hacks because right? Really, what it is, right?
I'm down with that one. I thought it was cheesy for years. Never did it didn't even allow people to mention it on the show because I thought it was so stupid. And then a friend of mine. We shared a room on a hiking trip and he was like, alright, every day. Me and my wife do the three amazing things about today and I was like, I don't
Don't have anything. He's like, no. The idea is you have to stretch and find it and I was like, well, I got a haircut this morning. He's like, great. I was like, well, we're I mean, we're flying to the Himalayas tomorrow. The hiking is like. Yes, that's an obvious one, what else? And so you start thinking about all these things that we really just weren't even thinking about because you never, like, why would you bother right? That's tomorrow. This is the thing I did today earlier. I'm not thinking about it anymore. So it forces you to then think about all these things. We call it three amazing things and it can be like oh our
It was so cute. He was jumping on the couch and he said like daddy's coming or something like and he's never said that before. And then, you know, my wife will go. He said, another thing, that was really funny today too. And it turns into this conversation. That's not about like hated you take out the garbage. Oh, we're out of milk. Why didn't you do that thing? I told you to do the other day that you forgot twice in a row, right? It just changes the whole vibe and it makes a really interesting and fun conversation so I can see that. That actually is a real thing that works and not just a bunch of BS because it
Does sound like influencer Instagram, EBS candidly?
I mean, yeah, if it gets, you know, I agree that it sounds this way, but that means studies that are on it are just like really powerful. And in there people who tended to be more grateful, you know, have these benefits but then you just forced people to be more grateful, like, yeah, force yourself to pay attention to these things in. It helps if gratitude sounds too cheesy, and another one that I've heard which can be also quite powerful is just basically what you're doing is you're training your brain towards the positive. Our brains naturally have this sort of negativity bias where we
You're all the Tigers in the world that are going to come jump out and get us. Like, that's what evolutionarily made sense is to notice the risks and the bad stuff and whatever. But that means that we're missing out naturally on attending to a lot of the things that feel good. And so if gratitude feels too cheesy, you can try a different technique that at that we were talking about in our upcoming season of the podcast, which is to pay attention to Delights. I interview this author Ross gay, who has this book called The Book of delights and he decided that every day for a whole year. He'd write a new essay on something that
Him. So your defined, these Delights every single day and they're kind of funny. They're things like, you know, lilacs are a delight and he is one that's like Trust on planes. Like why don't people steal people's stuff on trains. Like that's kind of a delight, you know, the sort of odd high-fives that strangers give you sometimes, you know, El Debarge like the band like every day. He just comes up with something. And what he talks about is that, you know, throughout the course of this thing. He just now is training his brain to notice this stuff. Mmm, and then he is sharing it with people, right? So now, people know he's doing is, so they tell whom they are due.
It's and that's kind of delightful when you hear like funny and, you know, good things that are happening to other people. And then you get these kind of meta the lights, where you notice like, you know, the series of things make other people delighted. And so it was just a wonderful exercise for him. So that for some people feels better than gratitude, which feels cheesy but just like noticing things that are like awesome, like, your own personal awesome list can be quite powerful. So for the podcast, I've been doing this. I've been noticing things and like, you know, some of my recent things this week. The earlier this week. I had gone to the beach just like a
I'll Beach. And there was this lady there who had a cat on a leash. Like she brought her cat like to the beach and that was just kind of like Delight, you know, another one was you know, I was walking through this, we have this park in New Haven. It's not like the nicest park, like it's not the kind of place that people kind of tend to hang out. But there was this guy there who like this big suitcase and backpack. And he was sitting there with his huge science fiction book like right on the last few pages and I knew I had happened which is like he'd probably been like traveling reviews on a train or movies like at a coffee shop. There's closing or something.
He hadn't finished the book and he's so wide. If it is a book that he's like plopped down in the seat to like read it. And I was like, aw, it's so cute. Like the light. Yeah. Coffee the light. Yeah, so it's so silly but it just trains your brain. Like now you're not thinking about like taxes. Like ohon for the pandemic. Like our time is finite. Our attention is finite and if we can train it on stuff that's going to make us feel good. Then that's a going to make us feel good, but it's going to give us the resilience and the bandwidth to get through the crap of
life. I think that's amazing. I it's a good place to leave it because we do have some
practical exercises and stuff like that from your show. And, of course, we'll link to some of this in the show notes in the worksheet. So I know we're just scratching the surface here Nori. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Really? Appreciate it. Thank you so much for having me.
If you're looking for another episode of the Jordan, Harbinger show to sink your teeth into. Here's a preview trailer of our interview with angel investor, Jason calacanis. If you're a founder or interested in business or ideas, you're going to want to hear this. Check out episode 100 right here on the Jordan Harbinger show.
Hi, but weblog zinc and 18 months after we were growing. It. We were at about a hundred and fifty K in total revenue and AOL came and Robert has 30 million bucks for it. I was negative 10,000 in my bank account. And I was walking my old dog Torah, rest in peace and smoking a cigar with my wife, and we were sitting there in Santa Monica. We had a $2,000, a month apartment. And I said, they offered us 30 million dollars. I can't keep up with our credit card bills.
I'm going to take it and she's like, this is going to be crazy. Like we're going to have over 10 million dollars in our bank account has it yet. I sat there and I just had to have this like really long, what kind of like deep moment? Because I had a very complicated relationship with money and being poor because you'd rather one wanting to be rid. Exactly. And I want it to be powerful and Rich when I was a kid and looking back on it. The reason I wanted to be powerful and richest was because I was poor and I had no power. My wife remembers a story and I remember, like yesterday. I was sitting there refreshing my
Of America, count the corporate account and nothing. Nothing nothing and then boom, 27 million bucks and I start crying. No, my wife is white crying today. I spent the majority of my life broke. I don't have to worry about money ever again ever.
For more with Jason calacanis, including what Venture capitalists are looking for in startup Founders and how to make yourself more marketable, whether you're a founder or an angel investor yourself, check out episode 100 right here on the Jordan Harbinger show.
I love this who doesn't want to know more about happiness and at least get some practical tips that we can move in the right direction, right? I thought it was interesting that we think we feel happy because we have money and friends and a sense of purpose. But actually, the causal arrow goes the other way, we have friends and we get money because we have a sense of purpose, and because we are happy, we're more likely to get married or more likely to get called for a job happier. Kids actually make more money later in life. There's science behind this noun, something like
Percent more talking about negative experiences or writing about them. Also has a massive therapeutic effect. Talk therapy. One of our sponsors, of course better help.com / Jordan this type of therapy is shown to be very good for your happiness level. Even if all you do is get things off your chest. But what is talking about things we're trying to suppress do for us. It opens up that mental pressure cooker. Relieves a little bit of steam helps us make sense of some things and also forces structure when we put things into language and we're forced to articulate things, it gives us
Us a lot of perspective that we can use to grow and it's different than mere catharsis. So there's actually a lot more to this than I previously thought. And of course, don't forget, there's a new season of the happiness lab coming up wherever you. Get your podcasts will link to that in the show notes. Links to all things. Laurie Santos will be linked on our website at Jordan. Harbinger.com. Please use our website links. If you buy anything from our guests, that help support the show, worksheets, for the episodes are in the show notes. Transcripts are in the show notes. There's a video of this interview going up on our YouTube channel at Jordan. Harbinger.com.
YouTube. Our Clips Channel, which is brand-new has cuts that don't make it anywhere else is also on YouTube at Jordan, Harbinger.com Clips. That's where you can find it. And you can find me at Jordan Harbinger on both Twitter and Instagram, or you can hit me on LinkedIn. I'm teaching you how to connect with great people and manage relationships, using systems, and tiny habits. And of course, as you'll recall from this episode, having more social connections is good for the old happiness meter. And our six-minute. Networking course, is free. That should make you happy. So over at Jordan. Harbinger.com course.
Dig the well before you get thirsty, most of the guests on the show, they subscribe to the course. Come join us. You'll be in smart company where you belong. This show is created an association with podcast one. My team is Jen. Harbinger, Jace Anderson, Robert, Fogarty Milly, Ocampo, Ian Baird Josh, Ballard and Gabriel Mizrahi. Remember we Rise by lifting others. The fee for the show is that you share it with friends when you find something useful or interesting if you know people who are into psychology the study of happiness, or maybe they need a couple tips on becoming happy, you know, covid been rough on. A lot of us these days. Then please.
Share this episode with them. Hopefully, you find something great in every episode of the show. We do work very hard on it. Please do share the show with those you care about in the meantime, do your best to apply, what you hear on the show, so you can live what you listen and we'll see you next time.
