Welcome to feel better live more bite-sized, your weekly dose of positivity and optimism to get you ready for the weekends. Today's episode is brought to you by AG one from athletic greens. One of the most nutrient-dense Whole Food supplements, that I've come across. It contains vitamins, minerals prebiotics, probiotics, digestive enzymes and so much more and I myself take it regularly go to
It greens.com, /live more to access, a very special offer. They are giving my listeners five, fantastic travel packs and one year supply of vitamin D, free of charge with your first order, see your details and athletic greens.com, /live more, today's clip is from episode 150, one of the podcast with Laurie Santos, professor of psychology at Yale University.
This clip, she explains why our happiness is so important for our health. Our well-being, and our longevity, and shares the results of some surprising research that could help us live a happier life.
It'd just be nice. If our brain was like pointing us towards the things that were really going to make us happy. If we went after the stuff that we were really going to like, but the data suggest that that's just not.
The case, they're all these domains, where we think, if I could only get X, then I would be happy. But then we get that X and it just doesn't work. I just, sometimes joke with my students that our minds lie to us about happiness. And I think it's almost like the way our minds lie in these other contexts. Like if you're looking at, you know, one of these visual illusions that go around on the internet, right? You see it one way and it's really strong intuition you have. But actually the way that what will really matter for your happiness, might look like the opposite. Might look like, just something that doesn't fit with your intuition.
And that's bad because it means we're systematically going after stuff to improve our happiness. That's not going to work. You know, it'd be one thing if we just weren't working at if we just like, I'll just see what happens. Maybe I'll get happy. The problem is, like, we're putting a ton of energy and effort into becoming happier or just doing it wrong, you know, many of us think, oh, if I could just get that beach house or that new car or even just, you know, at a local level. I'm just going to buy these new shoes. It'll make me happy the data suggested. Yeah, makes you happy for like, you know a split second. It doesn't kind of give you lasting happiness. It doesn't even.
Of your happiness that lasts for as long as we think. And so there's all these ways where we think that changing our circumstances going to boost happiness. But in fact, it just doesn't work. The flip side though is there's all these different interventions we can do to boost our
happiness. All, that is some Universal practices that really you can say, without knowing an individual circumstances. You can say with a high degree of certainty. That, if you do this, you are likely to improve your well-being score and your
happiness. Yeah, I mean
We know this. Now. We know lots of these practices for exactly that for the with the idea that these are things that you won't just help a few people. But that really pretty much universally are going to help if you engage with them the right way. And it's worth noting kind of where we get the this evidence from. I mean the evidence starts because positive psychologist go out and they really study happy people. And then researchers try to ask like what are these folks doing differently. Like how do they behave differently? Do they spend their time differently? And then you get some hints about behaviors, that might be working for improving happiness. And then, the next step is that you do.
Intervention, you bring in the not-so-happy, folks, you make them do the behavior that the happy people are doing, and then you measure whether happiness goes up and in lots of cases, we have examples of, you know, kinds of behaviors that we know, really, really works. One of the biggest behaviors, that works super well for improving well-being, is social connection. One of the most famous papers in positive psychology by the psychologist. Martin Seligman and Ed Diner, say that social connection and feeling socially connected is a necessary condition.
For very high happiness. You just simply, don't find highly happy people who don't also feel socially connected. But we also know from the intervention work that improving your social connection making new social connections. Even talking to strangers on your commute, can actually boost up your well-being and ways, we really, really don't expect and these types of effects hold across personality variables. So you get the same sort of boosts of happiness for social connection for introverts. And for extroverts. It seems to work in ways. We don't
expect. What does the research say about?
But talking to strangers and talking to people, we don't know because I think there's some quite nice research. There. Isn't there showing us? Just how impactful those interactions are.
Yeah, and just how wrong we are about those interactions. You know, this is another domain where at least my intuition is that? Yeah. Maybe it'll make me feel, okay, but like, you know, it's not a major force in our happiness. In fact, a few, you know, plot me on a train, you know, going to work in the morning, you know, maybe I'd talk to somebody but usually I put my headphones on and listen to a podcast or, you know, get
I'm work done or try to get through some email and it turns out that this is a mistake. When it comes to maximizing your happiness. There's some lovely work by the University of Chicago psychologist. Nick athle, who Did direct studies on this, where he found some subjects, who are commute about to do their daily, commute on a train, what he tells subjects is either for the rest of the train ride. Don't talk to some anybody. Please try to enjoy your Solitude or for the rest of the train ride. Just do what you normally do is kind of the control condition or for the rest of the train ride. I want you to try.
Make a meaningful social connection with somebody like talk to someone. And don't just talk about the weather like really try to get to know them. What do people predict because he has one group of subjects, predict ahead of time, which is going to make people feel happy. And people predict that the enjoyer Solitude condition is going to feel awesome. Right? They predict that that's going to maximize their happiness and they don't just predict that the social connection condition is going to feel neutral. They predicted that it's going to actively Sacco. Just going to take them down from Baseline and what Nick finds is just the opposite. It's that Solitude good.
Condition that feels yucky, the social connection condition, makes you feel great. And I think this is a problem, right? This is another domain where we have these bad intuitions about what makes us happy. And what's worse is, it doesn't just affect our Behavior. It changes the structures that we create. You know, I'm sure, you know, in the UK they have the, you know, quiet cars on trains and things like that, you know, Nick's evidence suggests that that's not necessarily a way to maximize packing passenger experience, right? We would maybe be better off with like a chatty car where you go on the car and everyone's like, talking.
Interacting and getting to know one another. But, you know, those are not the systems we build in because we have these incorrect theories about what's going to make us feel good. Like the simple kinds of interactions. We have with, you know, the grocery store teller or the person who works at the coffee shop, like even those weak ties, the research show. Matter for happiness. We need to build in a lot of that, social connection that we've lost and we need to do it more intentionally because it's not happening as naturally as it used to.
We think about health as dog says,
but actually a lot of it has to do with happiness as well. So if people don't have that feeling of happiness or well-being in their life, whether it's a lack of social connection, whether it's that they haven't had any interaction with any other human beings where they helps loosen up. Whatever it is, then they start to engage in other behaviors, that start to affect their health, like their physical health, and
It's quite obvious when we say it like this, but it was, it was like, a penny dropping moment for me, but I thought, actually, if Society was happier, then there'd be less patience for me to see because they'd be engaging in different ways. And they'd have less harmful physical habits, the end up in front of me, to know what I mean. I mean,
it's and in fact, there's, there's lovely data on this, really, I mean, I think this is another spot where we get happiness wrong. We assume, you know, if I like this dance is go. Well, if we're healthy, for example,
You know, healthy in terms of our like, diet and the stuff, then we'll be happier. But actually, the data suggests that the causal Arrow, might go the other way. If you look at people's cheerfulness levels, if you look at their positivity, if you look at their happiness, you actually see effects on people's health and on people's longevity. So, one famous study actually looked at whether or not people who are happier had like stronger immune function. So, the way the study worked as they bring subjects into the lab and they either kind of do some intervention where they're kind of feeling happier or not. They can do.
These Simple Things by just like asking people. Are you tend to be positive or they could even kind of give people like a positivity kind of intervention where you watch some funny movie or something like that, but I want Study they just measured people's positivity in general. Like, are you positive person or not so much and then they shot people's nostrils up with rhinoviruses. Rhinoviruses are the viruses that cause the common cold? And so everybody's exposed question is who gets sick and what they find is it three times the number of people get sick in the kind of not. So positive food category is in the positive.
Food category, which is kind of striking, right? That, like just your general mood state is probably affecting your happiness, is probably not mood directly as probably through all the behaviors you suggest, which is like, if you're in a bad mood, you don't get out and get social. Maybe you don't exercise like, you probably, you know, eat some like comfort food or whatever. Like, but it's really affecting it. There's also evidence suggesting that your happiness levels, really affect longevity. This is another very famous study that tried to figure out if they have researchers could find a population. That was sort of like had the same sort.
Health risks, basically the kind of lived a sort of very similar lifestyle and they converged on studying nuns in part because nuns, you know, they're not off like bungee jumping or doing, you know, really, you know, risky things like driving motorcycles and stuff. They tend to eat the same sorts of things and so on. And so these researchers went back and looked at nuns Diaries, when they're in their 20s, I guess in some nunneries, when nuns kind of begin their profession for the church. They're asked to kind of Journal a lot and serve talk about their experiences and why they wanted to do it. And so researchers,
Went back to these and just coated. How many positive words were there, right, you know, do some machine analysis and how many positive words? You see. Then they look at these nuns who are now quite old. And look at how long each of the nuns are living. And what they find is that statistically more nuns, who had more happy words live into their 70s, statistically more nuns. That had happy words live into their 80s and statistically more nuns. That had the happy words live into their 90's. And what's striking about this is this wasn't their happiness, at the time. This was their happiness in their 20s, which is predicting their longevity.
In their 90's. And so I think this is another spot where we get happiness around. We can kind of think of happiness is like, oh, it's this ephemeral thing. Like we'll worry about that. Once we sort out your peoples, high blood pressure and people's, you know, whatever like cancer risk, but it could be that we have the model backwards, right? That if you're just experiencing, a lot of positive emotion in your life. If you're satisfied with your life, it might make it easier to make choices that allow you to protect your health in a way that can make you healthier and allow you to even live
longer.
What does the science tell us about gratitude and our happiness?
Yeah, this is another spot yet again where we get it wrong. Right? I mean, if I had my intuitions and you asked me gratitude, I'm like that kind of sounds cheesy. I would go with griping, right, you know, you and I hop on Zoom call we say oh, you know, 2021. It's been so crappy. How is all this stuff happening? Blah blah, blah. My intuition is that is what would make me feel better, right, you know kind of complaining about things you have in common ground over the bad stuff, you know, getting it off my chest, right?
Data suggests, just the opposite to happy. People tend to be more grateful and grateful. People tend to be happier. Happy people tend to spontaneously Count Their Blessings. They tend to spontaneously notice all the good things, not the bad things in life and research shows that if you just engage in practices of gratitude, you know, just the simple Act of at night scribbling down three to five things that you're grateful for research, shows that that can start significantly. Boosting your well-being, in as little as two weeks. Just the simple Act of sort of experience.
Gratitude. And if you want a super charge, it you can kind of combine gratitude with some of the other things. We've just been talking about things like social connection and doing nice things for others, you know, one of the things if I look at my own gratitude list, one of the things I'm often really grateful. For is other people, you know, my husband, the fact that my students did this nice thing for me or, you know, the fact that someone at work, you know, stepped off and like, you know, helped out so that you took something off my plate. We often experience thankfulness for the things that other people do including just existing, but we rarely
Ali. Tell the other people around us that, which is kind of sad because the act of saying, you know, hey, like honey, I really appreciate what you did or I just appreciate you. Your Justice is such a gift that you're in my life. Like, you know, I feel that but I rarely Express that say to my husband, but if I were to express it to him, that is a way that I'm like. Now I'm talking to my husband, right? I'm not like scrolling Instagram anymore. We're like having a conversation but also it's a way of being nice to my husband because knowing that someone thinks you're a gift and that you've done something great like that feels really good. And so there is evidence.
Suggesting that the act of expressing our gratitude to other people can be incredibly important for boosting our happiness. One study by Marty Seligman and his colleagues had people write gratitude letter. So write a letter to somebody that you really should have thanked a long time ago, but you haven't had a chance to and then show up and like, read that letter to the person like meet with them in person and read it. And what he finds is not only that the act of doing this boosts up. Happiness, for the person who writes the letter, he finds in his one study that you can see,
Signatures of boosted, wellbeing for over a month after people do this gratitude visit, right? Like even like a month later, you on a survey, you're saying you're a happier person which to me feels crazy, you know, if I knew there was an intervention, I could do to like boost my well-being. That would keep me for over a month. I'd be like, yeah, sign me up. That's the power of gratitude. Gratitude in this context of really expressing it and sort of doing something nice for other people.
People strikes me Lori, is that a lot of the things you're talking?
Talking about a very simple. I always look to lead my listeners with some practical tips, things that they can think about applying immediately into that life to improve their happiness level. So, I wonder if you could leave my listeners with some of your top
tips. Yeah, so the first would be to get Social right right now set up a time that you can talk like really talk with someone, whether that's somebody who lives in your flat who you would connect with. Bye.
I phone who have to set up a zoom call with, like, set it up and try to be present. And when you are there, you know, shut off all the other, you know, those screens that are open, put your phone away. Really, try to connect, second thing is, what can you do right now to help someone else, you know, could you donate some money? Could you text a friend who might need to connect with? You? Could you just do something nice for someone in your flat? Like how can you get more other oriented? The third is that you should just take a little bit of time for gratitude. Like what's one thing right now that you feel grateful for right think of it?
Now, that thing you feel grateful for and kind of take a moment to notice it. And then if that felt good, maybe just stay in that present moment of noticing a little bit longer do that right now. And maybe even engage in some practices where you can really be a bit more present in mindful that will be a way to boost up your well-being in this really evidence-based way.
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not go back and listen to the original full conversation with my guest. Now just a quick reminder in my brand new book. Happy Minds, happy life 10, simple ways to feel great every day is available to order. Now. If you like my podcast, I really think you're going to enjoy this book. It contains loads of simple and practical strategies to help you look after your mind and enhance your mental well-being. This in turn is going to have a transformative impact on your happiness and your
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