Small Steps to Happiness: The Science of Mindful Living with Laurie Santos

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Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Dr. Laurie Santos, a professor of psychology and head of Silliman College at Yale University. She's also the host of the podcast, The Happiness Lab. Dr. Santos is an expert on human cognition and the cognitive biases that impede better choices.

Her course, Psychology and the Good Life, teaches students what the science of psychology says about how to make wiser choices and live a life that's happier and more fulfilling. And that class is Yale's most popular course in over 300 years. She's been featured in numerous news outlets, including New York Times, NBC Nightly News, The Today Show, and many, many more, and is also a winner of numerous awards for both science and teaching from institutions such as Yale and the American Psychological Association.

Laurie has been featured as one of popular science's brilliant 10 young minds and was named Time's leading campus celebrity.

Hi, Larry. Welcome to the show. Thanks so much for having me on. I'm so excited to have you on. You are the creator of a really great podcast called The Happiness Lab, as well as work you do on happiness at Yale and all sorts of things. And we'll get into all that in a minute. But let's start like we always do with the parable. In the parable, there's a grandparent who's talking with her grandchild and they say in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle.

One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love. And the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops and thinks about it for a second and looks up at their grandparents and says, well, which one wins? And the grandparent says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do.

Yeah, I mean, I've heard the parable before, the one you feed. You know, for me, it really shows that happiness and focusing on our mental health takes work and it takes choices, right? And it reminds us not just that happiness takes work, but that there's these interesting opportunity costs, right? That if you're putting your time and your energy, especially your emotional energy into certain kinds of things, you could be doing that at an opportunity cost of the kinds of processes you want to win out, right? And so the wolf metaphor has always been really powerful of me.

enough that you focus on the things that matter, you also have to make sure that you're not also focusing on the things that don't matter. Yeah, and there's a lot in your work that I think we'll get to as we go through that really hits on that parable. So much of your work, I think, orients around an idea of

What we think will make us happy is actually not usually the things that will make us happy. If we think something is going to make us happy, that's where we're going to direct all our energy. And to your point, if all your energy is going there, you don't have enough left to put over on the things that do create happiness. If we had infinite energy, this wouldn't be a problem, right? But it is. And so

Yeah, that opportunity cost is really important. I want to start by going a slightly different direction because I did not know this about you until I started doing deeper research, but you are the director of the Yale's Canine Cognition Lab, which that is so cool.

That is so cool. I'm a huge dog lover. Yeah, the work is relevant in a couple different ways of feeding wolves. We haven't worked with wolves directly, but we have worked with Australian dingoes. This was my kind of day job before I got interested in the science of happiness. I was really interested in this question of what makes humans unique, what makes humans special.

And studying canids is really an important way to answer that question in part because dogs and domesticated dogs in particular grew up alongside humans. So it's path from becoming a wolf to becoming a canid that could be around people is one that really shaped these animals to pay attention to us in a particular way and maybe even shape their cognitive abilities. So canids are a really fantastic comparison point for all the cool and interesting things that humans do if you're interested in questions of uniqueness.

But I sadly don't get to spend as much of my time doing the canine work these days. No, it's just as I was looking at some of your publications after like the second one that had dogs or canines in the title. There's something I'm not understanding about her work here. And so then as I dug a little deeper, I was like, okay, so to that end, if we wanted to translate that work into the happiness work, is there anything about the work that you do or about dog cognition or animal cognition that would point us

in the direction of happiness or any lessons we can sort of, even if we're sort of stretching the analogy a little bit, anything from there that you find interesting? Yeah, I mean, I think there are a couple of things. One is animals are incredibly good at prioritizing some of the stuff that makes them happy, right? I mean, to take, for example, presence, mindfulness, just being in the present moment. I think dogs are a wonderful example of this. I mean, I think one of the benefits we get from hanging out with dogs, in fact, there's scientific work to suggest this, is that

You become more mindful when you're around your dog. You're taking your dog for a walk and he's sniffing the ground and looking at the flowers and paying attention to the sounds. It sort of causes you to do the same thing. It gets you back into your normal sensory experience. And so I think animals can be a great guide for helping us do that. I also think that dogs are a really wonderful way to get social connection.

Especially if you're having a hard time getting some social connection with humans, you can form that meaningful bond with an animal in a way that gives us so many of the exact same psychological benefits. So the work I was doing with dogs wasn't necessarily on happiness, but they've definitely given me a glimmer into some strategies that work.

Yeah, I mean, dogs are one of my great sources of happiness in life for sure. It's funny anytime. If you were to look at my camera roll or you were to look at my gratitude lists, they're always near the very, very top. All right, so let's talk a little bit about an idea that you use a lot, which I think is really important. And if we talk about it on this program, we talk about it in the spiritual habits program, you say a good rule of thumb for all this stuff is little and often.

And I think what I mean by that is, you know, we can really find ways to protect our mental health and boost our well-being through the little things that we do if we kind of keep up the habit of doing them often. You know, so I think when we think about the things that are really bringing us down, it's not usually the one-off thing that we happen to do with our time. It's the things that we're doing persistently over and over again that

Again, you can kind of create this opportunity cost on our happiness. But if you can put in positive habits, even if they're tiny, even if they're baby steps, and you can get yourself to do them more and more, those are the things that are really going to impact your well-being. Oftentimes, more than you expect, you think, oh, it's this little thing, do a five-minute meditation. It's this tiny thing to make sure you're texting the friend and checking in. These things matter more than we think.

Yeah, there's a Tanzanian proverb that I use in the spiritual habits course, which is little by little, a little becomes a lot. And I just love that idea. And I love how you just pointed to this works for both the good and the bad, right? If social media doesn't make you feel good, I'm not cascading it across the board. But if you're one of those people,

and which social media turns into a comparison exercise and leaves you feeling bad about yourself. Little by little that becomes a lot versus just like you're saying text to friends little by little your nurturing and growing connection and so i just think that's such an important idea and we tend to discount it because we think we have to make really big changes and.

Sometimes a big change can be great and can be helpful and depending on what it is. But for most of us, it's the little changes. How do we work a little more of this into our day? I think focusing on the little can allow us to do something that also can improve our well-being, which is to make sure we're harnessing self-compassion. I think sometimes we want to make this huge change.

I'm going to be perfectly happy and I'm never going to mess up again. We're often trying to make that big change with a certain sort of attitude and it's an attitude of perfectionism. If I screw up, the world is over. I think focusing on the little changes means you're giving yourself something you can bite off, something that's actually doable. You're not setting yourself up for a failure. You're doing it in a compassionate way.

I think that's another way that focusing on the little can help us we're doing it with this mindset of compassion and doability as opposed to i must be this perfect robot that gets everything right the first time absolutely and i think there's so much to be said for.

positive momentum, right? So when we start doing little things and we're successful, we feel better about ourselves. We feel more confident. We feel like we have more self efficacy versus when we try and do big things and we fail, you know, you do that long enough that eats away at your sense of your ability to change. You know, I did a lot of behavior coaching for a while and

That was such a big thing was people would say, I'm the kind of person who doesn't finish things. And I'd say, well, you haven't finished things in the past, but I don't know that that's a personality trait, right? But we've got to adjust the way we go after these things. That's exactly right. And I think we forget that the stories we tell ourselves matter a lot.

You know, I'm a person who doesn't finish things. You know, that's a story that you can update, right? That's a story that has some content that may or may not be true that you could challenge, you know, riddled with these cognitive fallacies. And so I think focusing on the small can also help us make sure that those stories are accurate.

We're not trying to come up with a magnum opus story that's going to make sense of everything we've done. We're just talking about, did I get up and do my five-minute gratitude meditation this morning? These tiny things allow us to achieve it, but they allow us to come up with better stories that we can tell ourselves that are stories that are positive ones about growth and so on.

Yeah, Dr. Rick Hansen said something once he said our stories about ourselves are at least six months out of date. And I think actually that number is way underestimated. I think I think our stories about ourselves can be years out of date, you know, and so I like that idea of just adjusting a little bit.

You mentioned gratitude there, and I thought maybe we could turn towards gratitude for a second because it's one of the skills that you talk about in your happiness course as being a really helpful happiness tool. There's lots of studies about how good gratitude is for us in so many different ways. It's prosocial, it tends to make us often

be able to regulate ourselves better, sometimes get more done. I mean, there's a ton of reasons why gratitude is so valuable. So my question to you would be twofold. The first would be, what do you think are some of the most useful strategies for making gratitude part of our life? And then the second question is a little bit more complex, but you talk about hedonic adaptation, which is we get used to things, right? You know, I get a new car and then I get used to having the car. It's no longer special anymore.

Well, I'm curious whether we can have hedonic adaptation in our gratitude work, because this is what I feel like happens to me as I do it. And it's really valuable until I've done it for a while. And now I'm back to the same sort of things. And now all of a sudden it's kind of used to the gratitude work. So question one would be what are some practices you like? And then question two, what would be some ways of keeping it fresh?

Yeah, yeah. Well, in terms of practices that I think work, I mean, part of it is, you know, you got to find what works for you, right? There are practices that might be fantastic for me that you might find cheesy or you might find onerous, you know, as someone who's an expert on behavior change, as you know, the practice that's going to work is the one that we can get ourselves to do, right?

Some that I really like are just the simple act of writing down a few things that you're grateful for. I have a little app that I use to do this. I don't think you need an app. If you're a pen and paper person, use pen and paper, but just commit to three to five things you're grateful for every day. The key, which maybe is going to get to your hedonic adaptation question a little bit, is that ideally those should be different.

It doesn't really work if every day you're like, dog, spouse, coffee, dog, spouse, coffee, dog, like you got to first have to mix it up a bit. And you second have to make sure you're feeling it can't be wrote. I mean, the whole point of gratitude is that it's an emotion and you have to kind of turn it on.

But another practice I really love, which for me felt a little bit easier because it meant I was noticing things I was grateful for throughout the day, was a practice that I learned from the author, Ross Gay, who has this book called The Book of Delights. And his practice is just he tries to notice things that he finds delightful out there in a world.

So it's not like, you know, capital G gratitude of this blessing that came to your life. It's just like, you notice fun things out there. Like, you know, this morning, as I was walking to get coffee, there was a guy who was like parking near me and he was like blasting old school, like Ozzy Osbourne out the window of his car. And he had this big dog that was hanging out. And you know, so I looked over and for a second, I thought the dog was like jamming along to Ozzy Osbourne.

Right? And that was like delight. You know, Roské would put his finger in there and just said, that is a delight, right? And the reason I like the delight practice is first, it's easier than gratitude, right? You don't have to kind of remember this list and write it down. But the second is that it's doing what you want to be doing in the gratitude practice, which is sort of training your attention to the blessings, to the things that are good in life. You're fighting this bias that we know is one that is built in, which is a negativity bias.

Your brains are set to notice the big tigers out there in the world, the anxiety provoking, scary, sad things. It takes some work to train our brains to shift focus and notice the delightful things. So if a gratitude practice seems onerous or like it's going to be to work, commit to noticing the delights. And I like finding a delight buddy where you can like text the buddy like saw a dog hanging out with a car playing Aussie Osborne delight, you know, all caps is

That's a great idea. To get to your hedonic adaptation question, you know, I think this is a tough one because there are studies that suggest that we don't hedonically adapt to certain kinds of emotions as easily. And gratitude is one of these that if you're focused on the right stuff, you can continue that feeling long after you expect. You don't see the same hedonic adaptation curve for gratitude.

But you have to keep feeling it to get there. And I think the problem with a lot of gratitude practices is we turn them into something that we do rote. It's like brushing our teeth again. It's like, you know, spouse, dog, coffee, like every single day, right? And you just stop feeling it. And so one way to do that is you, you know, make a rule with yourself that it has to be something new. You know, it can be my spouse's feet or his smile or, you know, my dog's tail or like my dog, the way she drinks the water.

you have to commit to finding something novel every single time. And that means you're still in the noticing, right? You're still like allowing the gratitude to do what it needs to do, which is like, you gotta feel it. You gotta think like, that is amazing that this universe of all the people this dog could be with, of all the dogs I could have, I have this dog. You have to take a moment to feel that. But if you get there, if you allow yourself to feel it, there is evidence suggesting that you won't adapt to it as much. It still kind of can have its effect, maybe even more so than other emotions, which is

one of the many, many cool things about gratitude. If you're doing it right, you don't hedonically adapt as much. You said a bunch of things there I'd like to just kind of hit on real quick. I think first is, I love that idea of delight. The word I often use is appreciation. Like, what do I appreciate today? Like, to your point, it's smaller than something I'm grateful for. It's just a little flash of a moment that there was something

something that was there. And then the other question I have is about feeling it, because this is an interesting one, right? I've talked on this show a lot about my struggles with depression. Depression, when it comes on me, what it is primarily, is lack of feeling.

Right? Something that you might normally feel just doesn't do it. Right? The song that normally is like, oh, I love that song. It's just like, yeah, it's fine. And so if gratitude is something we need to feel and yet feelings are difficult to come by and yet we know that gratitude is something that may help with depression. Any thoughts on working around that?

Yeah, I think your experiences, of course, really comment. I mean, one of the classic symptoms of depression is, you know, and hedonia, which is literally like, you're not having hedonic, you know, moments, these hedonic experiences. And so, yeah, I mean, I think one way to do that is again, to take this idea of

baby steps and a little self-compassion. If you're going through a terrible episode, the song that moved you before isn't going to do so in the same way. The main thing on your gratitude list, you're not going to feel it. That's a pain. That sucks, but it's something that you need to accept is not going to last forever. I think these statements that you talk to yourself with can be really powerful in those moments.

But that's one of the reasons I think a practice of something like a delight practice can be so powerful is that if you commit to the tiniest thing, you can start noticing again, and that can kind of break through. And I do think that these things sort of snowball. I mean, this is one of the things we know in depression, right?

you're not getting as much of a hedonic burst every time you do something fun. So then you stop doing things that are fun and not you really don't have any hedonic burst. And then you're, you know, it's like, so if you can kind of get the snowballing to go very slowly in the other direction, it can be quite powerful. And in Raski's book, you know, he talks about how this practice of delight has gotten him through, you know, some really tough times. You know, the book is really honest about

issues of racial violence and things like that. And he says, even in the midst of the worst times, you can just notice that one cool thing. It can kind of give you a little, you know, a peak of hope that can help you in a really important way.

Yeah, I think there's a couple things you're pointing to there. One is specificity, right? If I can be more specific in what I'm grateful for, you just named it like the way my dog drinks water, my dog's tail, right? It's the specificity. And then I think the second piece in what you're saying also is that I do think by looking for little moments of even if the word delight is too strong,

Little moments of something that's positive shows that even something that feels as all encompassing as depression has its moments in which it's waxing and waning. It is not this constant thing. It's not always there in the same level with the same intensity. It seems like it, but these noticing of little delights, as you sort of said, sort of allows you to see through these little holes, you know, like, oh, yeah, okay, there's something out there. It's not all clouds. It's not all gray.

And I think another key is to give yourself permission that those things we're supposed to have on our gratitude journal, like our spouse and our dog. But you know, if you can find the goofy things, it's one of the reasons I love Ross's book is, you know, in his big list is like the band elder barge, like purple things, you know, like wise, purple of color, it's such a

I think if you can allow yourself a little bit of the goofiness that can kind of snap you out of it a little bit too. It doesn't have to be, you know, the most meaningful thing in your life. You could just be like, yeah, it's pretty good. It's a good thing. It's like slightly above baseline and just get your brain to notice that stuff.

Yeah, another person who does that well is a guy Neil Passricha. It's called The Book of Awesome, and then he's got other books of awesome, but it's basically that thing. He's been a guest a couple times, and it's just fun. He approaches it in a fun, small way. But again, the thing that I notice about his stuff is it's so specific, and I think that's an important thing. Let's change directions because I have to ask you about an episode of The Happiness Lab, which is your podcast.

And it's about something you've worked on with Dallas Taylor to create the Handbook for Sonic Happiness. Basically, the idea of sound has an enormous impact on happiness and well-being. I am an extraordinarily sound sensitive person. So I'm wondering if you can give us a few tips from the Handbook for Sonic Happiness.

Yeah, it's funny that you're such a sound sensitive person. I feel like in general that, you know, might not be a good thing for a podcaster. That's a fantastic, you know, like you can hear all the tiny things. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, one of the great things about talking with Dallas was realizing that we're not often intervening on sound to promote our happiness and our mental health. What do I mean by that?

We're constantly intervening on our other senses to feel better. If I'm having a bad day, I want to take a warm bubble bath or maybe put on a candle. I want to watch something on TV. I want to buy flowers. We're hacking vision and touch and taste. When I'm having a bad day, I want some ice cream.

We do that quite naturally and many of us have like straightforward go-tos of things in those domains that feel good. But we don't often do that as much with sound. Maybe a little bit with music, right? You know, if I'm having a sad day, maybe I want to enhance the sadness and listen to a sad song or listen to something peppy to get me out of it. But that's pretty limited in the scope of all the sounds we could be engaging with. You know, what Dallas really recommends is making sure that you're as much as you can.

limiting some of the bad sounds instead of noticing them. He talks about even ambient sounds in the room, the hum of a refrigerator that's really annoying or just other sounds around you. Sometimes I notice this too, I'm feeling just grated and I'm like, what's going on? It's like, oh, there's some stupid hum happening in the building next door that's really bugging me.

So kind of finding ways to limit the bad sounds, but really trying to find ways to mindfully notice some of the good sounds, you know, and trying to get beyond music for something that feels nice. You know, for me, it's often very natural sounds kind of sound amazing, right?

take a little hike or go somewhere natural, even if it's like a park in your neighborhood and just be quiet. You notice and you and I are having this conversation. I'm in New England when it's right around the beginning of autumn and the leaves are kind of rustling and sometimes you can hear the acorns fall and things like that. Those are true delights for me. Those are delights in the sound domain.

But I'm often not giving myself permission to engage with them in the same way I would totally give myself permission to engage with the taste of an ice cream cone or the warmth of a warm bath, right? Give yourself permission to engage in positive sounds.

I think the benefit of being a sound sensitive person and a person focused on positivity to some degree is I've really learned to seek those out. I had been on again, off again, meditator for a long time. And then someone said something to me that I had never heard of before. I don't think it's uncommon now, but this is 10 years ago.

They said, go outside, sit outside and just meditate on what you hear. Just follow what you hear. And when your mind gets lost in thought, just ask again, what can I hear? And all of a sudden I was like, this is what I have been trying to get for 20 years from meditation. You know, it just really worked. And then that actually allowed me to settle enough that the other types of meditation became a lot more profound for me.

Um, so it really unlocked something for me. So I love to go outside and listen to sounds, but the downside of a sound sensitive person is sort of like you mentioned, uh, if there's a rattle or a hum or a something, I mean, I am so aware of it. And what I don't know and I can't decide and I'd be curious to see, you know, kind of what your thoughts are and from what you've learned about it is I sometimes worry that I'm making myself more neurotic around it.

Just, it's a rattle. Let it go, Eric. But I don't very well, you know? The other one is, and I think there's an actual name for this, but I don't know what the name is, but it's where the sound of other people eating drives you nuts. And I don't know whether you guys discussed that part at all.

a couple of things there. One is, I think, probably a lot of us are getting rattled by the rattle psychologically, but we're not mindful or aware enough to realize it. I know I'm just like, I'm in a bad mood. I'm going to strike out again. I'm going to say some meat to my husband. But I'm like, oh, wait, it was the refrigerator hunt. Like, it was like, there's a causal arrow from this nasty sound.

So part of being, you know, sound sensitive, you might even say sound mindful, right? I mean, sound sensitive is you're really affected by it, but sound mindful is you're noticing which things are out there. It can just give you some awareness, right? You might be able to do something to shut the rattle off and even if you can't.

You now at least have some awareness, okay, this is going on, right? Yeah. You know, I know you talk a lot on the show about addiction and things like that. You know, it's the same as craving, right? You know, being mindful of the craving, now it's there. It's really present, but now you're aware of it. You can choose to do what you want to do with it. Maybe you're going to allow it. Maybe you're going to non-judgmentally really pay attention to it. You know, and this was one of the things that I've seen in sounds that are annoying is sometimes

If you can get to recognizing them just as sounds, you're just in the same way that you can recognize a craving as it's just a feeling and get really curious about it. Like that rattle, you know, what's the frequency? The bump, bump, bump. Oh, it makes my chest vibrate and things like that. Like now you're just digging into it and investigating it in a way that kind of causes it to lose its power, right? Like you notice it's not just this valence that's like sucky, negative, stop, stop, stop. Like you can sort of see it for what it is and that can disarm it sometimes too.

I like that idea, actually, I had not thought of investigating it more closely. If it's rhythmic, I can capture the rhythm of it, and then it sort of disappears. It's the intermittent ones, but to your point, I'd either try and tell myself, don't be annoyed by it, or I make it go away. I do one of those two, but I have not.

that much now you're saying it turned towards it in a curious way learn more about it how often is it what are its frequencies what you know i think that's helpful or what about being driven crazy by the sound of other people eating can you fix this problem. I think you can get me maybe same technique to get out of the room waiting. It's funny i mean it it's the same with all affective things right you know if you can really investigate your own preferences sometimes you start laughing at yourself right you're like.

I'm really, really annoyed by this guy chewing chips. You know, like, if you can kind of get to a meta awareness of what's really upsetting you, then, again, through this process of kind of allowing it and investigating it, you can sometimes get some purchase on it to be like, wait, that doesn't make any sense. Again, it doesn't make it perfect, and it does take a lot of work, right? But you can kind of get to the other side on things.

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We still have the off-road portion to go. Listen to Escape from Zacostan. And we're losing daylight fast. That's Escape from ZAQA Stan on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Cina McFarland, therapist, light coach, change agent who helps everyone from celebrities, athletes, to ex-king members through their addictions and help them wake up.

At each episode by podcast, we hear inspirational stories. We draw lessons from those who have made it through their addiction and recovery to a better place, including legendary boxer, heavyweight boxing champion Mike Tyson. I feel like there's always been a calling for you, something higher.

I don't know, I feel that way as well. But I guess everybody feels in here for a reason. Yeah, okay. Even if it's the stuff that helps other people understand stuff and it's not as bad as we believe it is. I believe everybody loves them to be each other. Why do you hear anything? To show people that you know anything possible, you don't give up anything possible. Listen to the Cinos Show on iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, wherever you get your podcasts.

Hey guys, I'm Kate Maxx. You might know me from my popular online series, The Running Interview Show, where I run with celebrities, athletes, entrepreneurs, and more. After those runs, the conversations keep going. That's what my podcast, Post Run High, is all about. It's a chance to sit down with my guests and dive even deeper into their stories, their journeys, and the thoughts that arise once we've hit the pavement together.

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Another episode that you had recently, it was about, in essence, on one level, working too much, or how much is too much to work. But the insight that came out of it that I thought was really interesting was that we all want more time. We have this desire, I used to say, I want to be able to do whatever I want, whenever I want, which is, in my case, an unqualified disaster.

when that occurs. But the point of the episode is that there is a sweet spot for how much discretionary time is helpful and that even moving small amounts of discretionary time can be very helpful back to this little unoffent. So can you tell us a little bit more about that one?

Yeah, so this was work that was looking at how much discretionary time do we need. It was an episode with the psychologist Cassie Holmes, who's fantastic. She's got a great new book out on some of these topics. And I think we assume that infinite time is good, right? Like all the free time possible.

But what she finds is that you definitely need some free time, time that you would describe as free, that's not scheduled, but it's really not infinite. It's actually just a couple hours a day. Maybe even the range of two to three hours a day. I think two things there. One is when you realize it doesn't have to be infinite, you're like, okay, this seems much more doable. I think I can move things around to objectively get that much free time, or it's a little easier than if I was going for infinite free time, for example.

But the other thing that she talks a lot about is that we really need to prioritize that free time. And I think look really carefully at what's digging into it. Sometimes what's digging into it is work and paying the bills and yeah, that's a thing. But sometimes what's digging into it is stuff that's just like feeling our time that we don't need.

I know you love parables on the show. She talks about the perhaps apocryphal tale of some professor who was trying to teach his kids about the power of this. And he says, have these ping pong balls? How many ping pong balls can I fit in this class? People say some number of ping pong balls, and he puts them in. And he's like, so is the glass full? And people are like, yeah. And then he brings out these little marbles. And he's like, well, actually, can I put some marbles in? And they're like, oh, yeah, you can. So he fits some marbles in. And he says, well, now is the glass full? And people are like, yeah.

And then he pulls out the sand and he's like, uh-huh, I pour the sand in. The reason this is relevant is he says, you know, your time is this glass. And if you start filling it with the sand first, you won't be able to fit the ping pong walls, which are the things you really want to be doing with your life, the things that really fulfill you.

and build you up. And so I think, you know, with that metaphor, I think we can ask the question, like, what's the sand in our lives that fill things up, you know, and what's the ping pong balls? And sometimes when you do that analysis, you realize, you know, the sand was, you know, every, you know, free 10 minutes I had, I was looking at something stupid on the internet. And the sand was ruminating over and over again when I could have, like, you know, popped out and, you know, done a quick workout or something like that, right? It really allows us to analyze and be more intentional about how we're spending our time.

and recognize that it's a limited resource that we often don't think of as one. Perhaps our most important limited resource. Money, if you blow it, you might be able to get more money someday. But time when you blow it, it's gone forever in your life. It's not coming back.

When we're talking about discretionary time, are we talking about time that we get to choose what we want to do in and we may fill it up? Is it still discretionary time? For example, if I'm like, all right, well, I want to exercise for an hour and I want to meditate for 20 minutes and I'd like to do this, would we still consider that sort of discretionary time because I don't have to do those things? Or would we still say even beyond that sort of thing, I need some amount of time that's just do whatever I feel like.

Yeah. Honestly, I think it kind of depends a little bit on how you frame it. You know, you use the example of like the time to exercise. There's different ways to frame that, right? You know, you could frame it like, I'm done work and I get to do the things that are for me. What's the thing for me? Oh, I'm going to exercise when I have this, you know, amazing yoga session, right? Or you could frame that exercise is like, I have to do it. If I don't do my half hour of exercise, I'm failing at my happiness mission and I'm going to like dive a heart attack. Like there's a sort of half-do-ness, a shouldness to certain kinds of things we do.

Yeah. And, you know, a lot of shouldness obviously comes from work and paying the bills and things, but sometimes we build up that shouldness in our brain for things that aren't a have to, right, that are supposed to be a want to, but now have somehow turned into a weird should have to. You know, and the joke I use with my students is that you don't want to be shoulding all over yourself. Right. But I think we often should all over ourselves in ways that make even the most leisurely things, even the things we would normally be doing,

You know, as a gift to do ourselves is this thing we should savor, you know, this delicious ice cream cone of time that we've spent. And it just feels like crappy, like we're just trying to like push our thrills through it. You know, it feels like the most onerous work task. So I think it's not exactly defined by a particular thing. It's often defined by our attitude towards that thing.

And this is one of the time hacks, I think, can be quite powerful, right? Is that you don't necessarily have to change how you're objectively spending your time to, you know, in some ways subjectively think about your time use differently. If you can kind of change your attitude towards how you're spending your time, that might be enough.

Yeah, I think that is such a powerful intervention is to get to this. I'm choosing to do X. You have to get to. I get to do this. This is amazing. Well, even something like doing work as a parent can very much feel like I have to. I had this realization. I've shared this on the show a number of times when my son was

I don't know how he was nine or whatever, and I was complaining about having to take him to soccer practice again. And I just went like, no, I don't. Like, there's no law that says I have to take my son to soccer practice. Like, I simply don't have to do that. Matter of fact, I could choose not to come home. And his mother would have to take care of him. No, I'd have to pay child support, but I could make that choice.

And just reframing it that way, then caused me to go, okay, so I am taking it into soccer practice. Why am I doing it? And now I'm sort of linking this thing to something I value, you know? And the same thing, as you're saying with exercise, like I can turn it into a have to do it, but I don't actually have to do it. I'm totally in charge of choosing. I'm choosing to do it. Why? Okay, because I know it makes me feel better. I know, you know, blah, blah, blah. So I think

reframing things as choices in our lives. A gets us out of that feeling of obligation, or we have to. It's a trapped feeling for me, right? And then also does get me back in touch with my values, what matters to me. Then I can make a choice. Well, maybe that doesn't matter to me that much. Why am I doing that?

Yeah, no, I think that's really profound, right? In two ways, one is kind of, as you mentioned, getting back to your values, right? So now you can appreciate this thing, right? You can have some gratitude for it. It's like allowing you to harness the things you care about. Yeah. But I think it also gets you back to a sense of agency, which just psychologically is powerful. We don't like to be forced, you know, and helpless and doing things. But I think that choice can remind you that like it's a choice. And, you know, to go back to the metaphor we mentioned, like you can ask yourself, is this the sand or is this the like, you know, big ping pong balls, right? You can really

say, you know, I'm like really assess whether or not this is the kind of thing you want to be doing, because sometimes some of the things we think or have tos in life have moved away from our values, right? They're not serving us in the way that they served us before. That's right. You mentioned our theories of ourselves are several years old. In some cases, I think our kind of meta theories of what our values are might be wrong. When we really introspect, you can be like, I don't have to do this. And in fact, I don't want to do this even in terms of my value. So it can allow us to engage in

behavior changes that really are going to serve us a little bit better. Yeah. You know, a lot of the stuff in your happiness course talks about, you know, there's some very basic things in there that I often am like, I wish I had recommendations that were more interesting than exercise, good sleep and meditate like feels a little bit like each of vegetables, right?

People pay you and they're like, wait, really? This is the rocket science of happiness research right now. One thing I like to tell my students is, yeah, totally common wisdom, but definitely not common practice. One of the reasons I think it's powerful to understand the scientific benefits of these things is I think it sometimes can help us pop over a little bit to behavior change.

When you really reflect on the actual benefits of something like getting a half hour of cardio in, or the actual benefits of getting some sleep for your mental health, you see, in my case, my students, they see these graphs of, do you want to be here on your mental health or here on this big graph? It's like, oh, that can sometimes give you the motivation to kick in the pants to get back in gear with some of these things. There's stuff our societies have been saying, our cultures have been saying, our grandmothers have been saying, for hundreds, if not thousands of years,

But somehow in the modern world we've got away from actually practicing these things.

Yep. So we're talking about this. Don't shoot on yourself or reflecting on choice, right? Which is very valuable. There are still going to be times, you know, with me, I'm like, okay, I know unequivocally the single best thing I can do for my mental health is exercise. Like it is the number one intervention for me. I know that I've internalized that. And yet there are days where I'm like, I just don't want to do this.

So there's a certain amount of like, yes, I want to have agency and I don't want to do this. And there's a certain amount of time where there is a need to sort of push and say, Eric, this is good for you and do something that in the moment I may not be wanting to do. So how do you balance those two sort of, you know, not getting locked into obligation, not making something that's good for us, a chore, knowing that sometimes we have to just go through the motion. I mean, if you only have days when you experience this, you're doing well because I have money. I don't want to go to German art.

I think one of the big insights I think that the research shows us is that a lot of this isn't what the actual activities themselves are, but it's how we talk to ourselves about them. The shooting brain is really this drill sergeant idea of motivation where you just think, if I just scream at myself and be right myself for being such an idiot that I won't want to go to the gym,

then that'll motivate me to go to the gym, right? And that feels like a showed. It feels like it can turn the best thing that you love the most into this thing that feels like an external obligation. But then you also don't want to have the pendulum shift too far in the other direction where you go into like indulgent mode where you're like, oh, do whatever. Just like be this crazy heatiness and hurt yourself, right? Because that can lead down a bad path too.

And so what you're trying to do is to find a happy medium, always hard, of course. But one of the voices to channel, I think, that helps with that happy medium is a voice of self-compassion. Self-compassion in the way that researchers like Kristen Nef at UT Austin talk about it, where you're trying to talk to yourself as a close friend would talk to you. So let's say you haven't been to the gym in a while, you're feeling like crap. Your close friend shows up. What are they going to say to you? They're not going to be like,

Eric, you need to get your act together and get to the gym. What a loser. They're not going to scream at you. They're not going to be like, no, you have tomorrow morning, 8 a.m. You've got to go to the gym. I'm going to beat you up or something. But they're also not going to be like, no, not a problem that you're never going to the gym. Eat more ice cream. Say it on your butt. They're going to be like,

Eric, what's going on? What's going on? Why aren't you going to the gym? They might be curious. They're going to be kind. They're going to try to get to the bottom of it. They're not going to let you indulge. Self-compassion is not self-indulgence, but they're going to try to figure out what's going on. I think that's the attitude we need to take to ourself. When we're feeling that resistance, one move is to actually get curious about the resistance.

and say what's going on. And I've done this. I mean, I definitely have had this specifically with exercise a lot. As I said, it's not days for me. Sometimes it's months. But I find that when I get curious about it, it can help. Like, what's happening? Why does this feel like an obligation? What have I done? And sometimes you analyze and you realize, like,

You know, it's the particular thing I'm compelling myself to do. There are other things that feel like I should in my life. And if I can't harness that time that I was exercising for something else, like there's another thing that I'm missing that I want to get into. But all of that is it's not necessarily which solution I come up with. It's just the fact that being curious about the resistance.

can allow you to stop butting heads against either kind of, you know, plowing through it like a drill sergeant, which doesn't work or ignoring it and letting it continue when the resistance is really not serving you. So again, it's this kind of how you talk to yourself and allowing yourself to kind of get curious and pay attention and investigate what's going on with you.

Yeah, I think that's really good. I think another phenomenon I've noticed in myself is particularly with exercise. It's like I look at exercise and I'm like, okay, my plan is I'm going to do a 60 minute bike ride that day. And I know how much energy a 60 minute bike ride takes. It takes 10 units of energy. And I look inside and I'm like, I have got one. This is not going to happen, right?

So, you know, the other just sort of simple thing to do is to break it down and go like, okay, can I get on my bike shoes? That takes one unit of energy. I got one unit of energy good. I ease myself one step at a time into the thing can be another, just sort of a simple hack for lack of a better word to kind of get over that hump.

but because I don't know what it is about exercise. I've asked, maybe you have a theory on this. I've never gotten a good answer for it or not a complete answer, which is I have exercise, let's say, I don't know, 5,000 times in my life. I don't know what the number is. It's a big number now, right? I'm not a young man. Every single time I've done it, when I'm done, I'm like, that, I'm so glad I did that. That was the right choice. That was awesome. Good to do that. Yeah. Never wants, not wants.

Have I been like, oh man, I wish I didn't do that, right? You would think that it would just be easy to do it, right? It just seems like my brain would learn that's good, do it. And yet, it's still sometimes a big effort. I don't know if it just comes down to conservation of energy as a species. I don't know. You have any thoughts on that? Because it's strange to me.

you're good if it's just exercise for you. I mean, for me, it's like sit down to journal, do your meditation, like tall your mom, like there's so. Yeah. And so one hint that we get from the neuroscience is that you'd like to think that, you know, the brain was organized in the following way. It was good at detecting what I really liked, you know, what drove pleasure. It would notice that really well. And then it would have mechanisms that motivate you to say, Hey, whenever you feel that, you know, that little burst of pleasure, do that more often.

Turns out the brain doesn't have that many pleasure centers. They're like really tiny and hard to find. Even with neuroscience researchers early on, we're looking for them like, we don't have any pleasure centers, meaning we don't often notice what feels good, right? We notice things that really hack into those systems. So, you know, drugs of addiction, like those hack into the system. Great. We notice that those feel good. And those are very hooked up to the motivation systems, you know, sweet things, right? You know, these visceral states we get, but you know, the

nice warm feeling I get from doing a nice gesture to somebody, you know, the warmth I get from social connection, the exercise in Dorphan High, don't notice it as much. However, the brain has lots and lots of neural real estate devoted to what you might call wanting. So if the pleasure systems are like the liking, the brain has lots of wanting stuff. And so you get these systems that like give you lots of craving to do stuff.

that just happened to be a hack in this liking system. Again, whether it's drugs of addiction or things like social media or all these little dopamine hacks, our brain is really ready to go after those. But it has no mechanism to learn about the big highs, the deeper pleasures in life.

That sucks. It's such a stupid way to organize a brain. We probably work for rats great for them, but not for us. How do you combine these systems for wanting and liking better? All the forms of liking, get them to talk to your wanting better. Sadly, there's not an obvious way, but there are hints that one way you can do it is to ramp up your intentional noticing of the rewards you get.

So my colleague, Hetty Cobra, who's a neuroscientist at Yale, she's really interested in mindfulness approaches to addiction and things like that, claims that you can use the same sort of approaches to notice the good things, just as you can, would say, a craving for a cigarette or something, notice like, actually, what I'm craving is kind of gross, you know, like really pay attention to how this makes you feel, which is like not that good.

You can do the reverse for something like exercise and so this is something she practices all the time She's like the annoying friend that always wants to do like the hard yoga or the run or the like, you know She never has the thing that we were just describing But it's in part because she's forced herself at the end of it in that moment you talk about you're like this feels great

to sit there and meditate on it. Like, oh, my chest feels lighter. I feel really good, right? Like she's kind of giving her brain some time to be like, wait, like the reward areas that are kind of slow unless it's like a straight up dopamine hit, they can kind of notice this stuff. And, you know, does that perfectly lock up your wanting and liking systems? No, but I think it can kind of help this sort of mindfulness practice of noticing their rewarding parts. Just in the same way you might notice that the negative things that are not serving you when you sort of notice those consequences and really

attend how they feel they can kind of get into that circuit a bit more too.

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That's a really interesting perspective, the like-in-one in systems, and a lot of the things that these pleasures were describing that come from wholesome activity. They're a subtler thing, and so savoring them is really important. It's just so interesting. Having been somebody who had drugs of addiction, right, as a heroin addict, it amazes me looking back on the amount of pleasure I was getting at the end was so small compared to the price I was paying.

You know, and I've heard people describe some theories of addiction people have is that there's learning disorder associated with it in that your brain is just not updating its prior, so to speak, right? It just, it's stuck on the heroin good signal, even though heroin is clearly not any longer good. My brain is like, it doesn't get it, you know, and so I think that these things are really tricky, that liking and wanting.

think it's really interesting that the brain has a lot of real estate devoted to wanting.

Yeah, and in that the wanting sticks really strongly to certain things, right? You know, again, drugs of abuse, a lot of times are hacking your dopamine system. Yeah. As does the inner and reward of your Instagram feed, you know, as does the like really central pleasures like sugar and, you know, lounging around and things, that that wanting system has nothing to stick onto for these bigger pleasures. And it doesn't update. Well, you know, as you mentioned, you know, I think one of the sad things, you know, if you're really addicted to a particular drug is that you're habituated to it. You're definitely not getting

Not only are the consequences super high, but you're also probably not getting the same pleasure that you're getting in the beginning because your brains kind of used to it, but yet still the wanting systems like one, one, one. If I could go back in evolutionary time and like tweak one thing about the rain, it would probably be to put more.

pleasure zones for the bigger, more meaningful pleasures, and it would be to hook the wanting systems up a little bit better to those. But sadly, I did not get consulted on how brains should be designed, so oh well. So do you think, though, that this is just pure conjecture, that if we, as a species, manage to not exterminate ourselves in the next several thousand years, that will change? Because to your point for rats, it's a very simple system, right? They don't have

meaningful pleasures in the same way that we do, right? Do you think that we might evolve to be a little wiser about these things and to shake off some of this evolutionary baggage, one being like that maybe we would realize like sugar and fat are not always good? Do you think that humans will evolve? And again, this is just conjecture, but I'm curious what you think.

Yeah, yeah, totally. Scientifically speaking, I think these selection pressures have to be pressured to change things around in the brain. If sugar and fat were killing us, then we might, over time, develop adaptations not to like it. And that's kind of true, but not so quickly in real evolutionary time. Evolution always moves towards directions of adaptation, but sometimes it's really slowly. So not in our lifetime and not in a long time for the human species.

That said, I think this is where cognitive hacks can come in. If we can get good at noticing mindfully paying attention to certain rewards, that really seems to be a hack on this system. It takes a tremendous amount of work. We're talking Buddhist meditation levels of commitment to this stuff, but there's a sense in which you're hacking these things. This is one of the things I love about recent neuroscience work that looks at people.

who engage in these ancient spiritual practices is that they are literally hacking their brain. If you look at a long-term meditator, they just have less neural real estate devoted to mind-wandering. If you look at a monk who's done many, many hours of compassionate meditation, their brains just go more quickly to engaging with compassion to other people.

If you look at drug addicts who've used mindfulness practices to overcome craving, when you look at their brain when they're in a craving state, it looks different than a recovering addict who might not have used these mindfulness practices. And so there are hints that we can start hacking the systems through work and so on. That's not as easy as like, you know,

Meteor hits, like only people with certain wanting liking systems stick around be way easier, you know, though maybe more tragic. But the good news is that with effort and intention, there are some hacks that can help this stuff.

Yeah, I think we can change this wiring extensively in my own life just being a testament to that. I've shared this story several times recently on the show, so sorry listeners, if it's getting boring, but I think it's an important one, which is my mom broke her hip and I was picking up all her prescriptions. I was carrying Oxycontin back and forth from my mom's house. The amazing thing is not only did I not want it, I didn't even think about it. It was a month or two into it that I was like, that's incredible.

But I would have robbed somebody at gunpoint for that once upon a time. I think that just speaks to change is really possible if we just keep doing these things. No, I've got a lot of years away from heroin, so it doesn't happen overnight, but it is possible. Yeah, and I think that's important to remember. It gets back to something we were talking about before that little and often, right, that the often is the key, I think, in your case, right? You have to fight that craving or allow it or investigate it.

a lot to get to the point that you're at, but it does get easier over time, for sure. We've been talking a fair amount about behavior change here, and there's lots of techniques and tools for behavior change. But one of them is that the support of other people or a term I've seen you use as cultural or religious structures, you talk about how it seems very clear that your CrossFit gym or your church or these things can help

make behavior change occur. And you then go on to say, well, what's driving it? Is it the beliefs of the organization of the thing? Or is it simply the commitment to it? And I just would love to hear you kind of talk through that again, because I think it's really interesting.

Yeah, yeah, I mean, so you know this better than anyone in your listeners, your podcasts. If they've been listening for a while and know this better than anyone, behavior change is a hard, hard, hard, hard, right? So any hacks that we can figure out to help us can be huge. And I think one of the hacks that we forget about, we love this sort of Protestant work ethic idea that like, I'll just power through it. You know, me, me, me, this individual changing my behavior against the world. But one thing we find is that behavior change often seems a lot easier when you have environments and structures around you.

that are kind of consistent with that change. What do I mean? If you want to exercise, that's much easier if all your friends exercise. That's much easier if you have this padded out home gym. That's amazing. That's much easier if you just happen to live in a place where there's no cars. You got to walk all the time. You're just going to get that in more naturally.

that environments can really help us. And sometimes those environments are physical structures, like lots of walking paths and an elliptical machine in your apartment. But sometimes those structures are really cognitive structures. They're belief systems. They're about the people around me value this, the people around me are committed to this.

And I think both of those kinds of things can really work their magic. Those are both kinds of structures that seem to really help us. But it's often not the kind of beliefs and values we think. So one of the big findings I talk about in my class is that overall religious individuals tend to be happier. People who have a belief in afterlife, belief in God, and so on. And so you could say, well, maybe it's their personal beliefs, right? Like they have this belief in afterlife that gives them meaning and so on.

Turns out not so much. It turns out if you factor certain things out, a belief in a god or something like that doesn't actually matter. What seems to matter a lot more is the practices you engage in. Religious individuals go to services, so they engage in social connections. Religious individuals often are part of organizations that engage in charity, so they do nice things for each other. They pray, and so they get a chance to be mindful and take some time where they're present.

They often engage in practices related to things like gratitude and other prosocial emotions. They're just like physically around other people all the time because they're engaging with these other folks. And so we think structures have to be about our own personal beliefs and like what we believe and what we value.

But sometimes the environments around us can be shaping our behavior in ways that are so much easier. I have a recent episode of my podcast where I interview the inventor of these so-called blue zones, Dan Butner. He's an author who studies places around the world that tend to have these positive practices, either for

like physical health, like places that induce longevity where people live healthily for a really long time or places that induce happiness. And he's fond of saying that like any attempt to individually change your behavior without your environment supporting you is doomed to failure. Like, you know, you could do all these different hacks and download apps and get coaches and whatever. But like, if you just moved to a place that was happier or moved to a place where you exercise more, that would impact your behavior so much more. You know, he's being a little harsh. We know that with work, you can change your behavior.

But it's definitely true that if you can find some environmental support, that helps enormously.

It makes such a huge difference. I mean, I got sober in 12-step communities, and I've had friends of mine who were former heroin addicts say it was harder to quit smoking than stop doing heroin. And there's a variety of reasons for that. But one of them, I think, is simply when we went to get off heroin, we were embedded in a community that was focused on that. And when we stop smoking, primarily most people just simply go, all right, I'm going to stop smoking. And they do it entirely on their own.

I think it makes such a difference. And I think this idea between beliefs and practices, I've often heard people describe Judaism as a religion that's less about belief and more about practices. I often try and tweeze apart, what in 12-step programs worked? What was it that was actually working there? And it's interesting to think about, but I do think that the community aspect of it, that piece of it is really, really important.

In 12 step programs, I talk about unity service and recovery. And I think it's really interesting. The unity or the people, the service is doing something that cares about other people. And then the recovery was some method of personal internal transformation. I think that can just be applied to us generally as humans, you know, those three things are really helpful orienting points.

Totally. And I also think this idea of giving up control, which can be complicated. I think it has certainly just overtones and so on. But ultimately, it's really accepting your common humanity, which is something that people who do work on self-compassion talk about. It's like, I'm not going to be perfect. I'm just going to be human. I'm going to be tempted. I have to come to terms with the fact that I'm not the one who's in control all the time.

And that humility can often ground us in a whole host of attitudes and ways of talking to ourselves that allow us to be a little bit more self-compassionate, right? Like, you know, I'm not gonna be perfect. Maybe let's not put myself in this situation. It's gonna be really hard. Like, I'm not Superman, right? Like I need to ask for help, right? All of these are practices where you're kind of compassionately dealing with yourself, but those are practices that also make behavior change much easier. Yeah. I'd like to turn now towards loneliness.

There's a lot of it out there and it's not such an easy thing to solve. I was talking with someone who is lonely about this and this is a person who's had lots of loss in their life. So everything that they sort of relied on is just kind of gone and they're sharing how, you know, it's one thing when you've got a spouse to go out and find some additional community by joining a club.

But that when you have none of those foundations, it's very, very difficult. So I'm wondering what might you say to someone who's in that position, who's, you know, really isolated and becoming un isolated feels like a tremendous amount of work and is very discouraged by it.

Yeah, I think first, I can recognize that you are not alone. Like a lot of people relate, right? Like loneliness is skyrocketing, even if you don't have people talking to you about it. I mean, even the Surgeon General of the United States, Vivek Marti, has been focusing on loneliness in part because he thinks it's a public health crisis, a public health crisis because of how dangerous it is, but also a public health crisis because of how common it is, right?

And so I think that step number one is like, you're not a loser, there's not something wrong with you. This is something a lot of people are going through. But that also comes with something that's related, which is that if you reach out in a baby step way, you'll often be surprised about how many people will follow up. I think one of our fears of loneliness is, or one of our worries when we're feeling lonely about doing something about it is we're kind of simulating how much work it's gonna take and how much success we're gonna get.

We're like, oh, it's going to be such a pain to call somebody or go to this club or whatever. And we're simulating, if I do reach out, people aren't going to like me. And scientists have looked at this and there's evidence that both of those intuitions are wrong. Our predictions about how much of a pain in the butt, how stressful, how annoying, how maybe awkward it's going to be.

to reach out, they're all wrong. Like our brain is telling us, oh, don't do that. It's going to be a pain, not going to be as much of a pain as you think, right? And our brain is also telling us stuff about how successful it's going to be. And there's so much evidence that we mispredict how many people are going to like us. We mispredict how much people will appreciate our attempt at reaching out, especially if we haven't reached out in a long time. And I think recognizing that those biases are biases, that our intuitions are wrong.

can be really helpful when you're making the decision to try to overcome your loneliness. Because you're like, it feels like it's going to be a lot of work. You can be like, no, science says it's not. Let me just try it. Let me just try it and take a baby step towards it. And then often, if you're paying attention, you'll get some positive reinforcement back. You think, oh, it's going to be so onerous to go to this club, especially if I don't have a spouse I have nobody to talk to. But then when you try it, it actually works. The key though, I think, especially with the sciences, is that you kind of have to try it the right way.

and the right way is really making sure that you're doing that first step to reach out, including when you go to a place. I've seen friends who say, oh, I'm lonely, maybe I should. I'll go to CrossFit or I'll go to a book club or I'll go to this thing. But then they get to the book club and they are on their phone checking their email or they're playing with the cat. It's a book club. They're not actually talking to people.

And what does that do? You know, it's reinforces a cycle where people think, well, you're not interested in them. So they're not going to try to talk to you. And so I think we need to recognize that it's not just putting ourselves in this situation, but it's having our own openness, often solutions to loneliness involve not like someone reaching out to us, but us reaching out to other people, us trying to solve other people's loneliness, us feeling like, you know, we're the ones who are going to talk to somebody. So they feel better. That's what kind of opens things up.

That's a really interesting perspective. And actually, I think my own experience would bear that out in certain cases. One on one, I am pretty fine with people. Put me in a room full of people that I don't know and I hate it. You know, if I could have three glasses of whiskey, I would like it a whole lot more, but I don't. And so what I found though in some of those situations is exactly what you just said is the strategy for me sometimes is look around and see who looks lonely and go approach that person as a starting point.

It's funny when you said that you go to the event and you're on your phone or you're playing with the other people's cat. I am totally that way. Put me in a new social situation. What I've learned about myself is I may not even be able that first couple of times to overcome it. It just may be too strong. But if I keep going, I can find something. I've seen some research talking about it takes a while.

to build a connection or a friendship. And the thing that I've done so many times in my life is show up someplace once and be like, no, not my people, because nothing happened, right? And I just know for myself that the first time I show up, my defenses are just, they're unconscious and they're high enough that I'm either going to think, I don't like these people or they don't like me. One of those two things is going to be going on in my brain.

And I just kind of have to ignore it and go, well, try again. Try a few times. If this seems like it's a place that might offer the kind of community I want, I may have to venture into the space multiple times. And then sooner or later, I find like all of a sudden, my walls start dropping. And so that's a way of doing it, even if you can't quite overcome what you're saying. Like the first time I'm there, all I can do is play with the cat, because I feel so shy.

I'd like your suggestion there. You can also look at it from the other people's perspective, right? Like, why didn't they connect with me? It might not be because, you know, you're a loser and unconnectable. It might be you were playing with that cat the whole, you know? So it's like, I think if you frame it more like, I'm going to help the loneliest person.

at the party. That's super helpful. I mean, I've seen this on one-on-one. If you're feeling anxious, socially anxious, and a party's not the right scene, fine. Look through your phone or your email list and say, I'm going to text or email the person in this list that I think might be the loneliness. I know I'm just going to check in and you'd be surprised how much good work that does.

This is my final question. To what extent does virtual connection, can it be a replacement for in-person connection? Is it 50% is good? 75% is good. Am I asking the wrong question? It's a good question. The answer is sort of it depends on how you do it.

You and I are talking virtually over our favorite podcast app, and it feels pretty good like we're having this nice connection. I see you. That's in part because it's in real time. We're talking using the same things as primates that we built over evolution to do, talking in real time with one another.

I think that virtual connection works less well if you're not doing it in real time. Like, you know, a text thread. We were texting a friend. It just kind of doesn't drive with the way our psychology is used to it. But the cool thing is we have lots of tools now that allow us to do that from like FaceTime and Zoom where you can see each other or just like the old school phone, right? We have these, you know, smartphones that are our cameras and our alarm clocks and all these things and we forget like

you could just use it as a phone. And we know the phone was pretty good for social connection. It was like really all we had for a very long time. And I think the thing that sometimes people will do, and I know I've been guilty of this, is like, well, in-person connections, what's really important. So I won't do Zoom thinking it's somehow inferior, but it's still way, way, way better than nothing.

And I think this for me was, you know, a gift of the pandemic, you know, I could talk about silver linings and blessings in really awful situations was that, you know, I think it got a lot of us to, you know, do these zoom hangouts with the friends or zoom movie or game nights and zoom yoga classes. I was doing zoom yoga with friends and it made me realize like, wait, this is pretty good. You know, there are people that live far away that I won't see in person for a while, but connecting with them over zoom was great. And some of those, you know, zoom

things I was doing, I'm still doing with those friends. My college roommates are scattered all across the country and we still do these like once a month kind of, you know, spa night hangouts over Zoom because we realize like it's better to see them that way than not at all. So I think, you know, listen to those lessons. They can be powerful. Well, Laurie, thank you so much for coming on. It has been such an enjoyable conversation and I'm so grateful that you had time to join us today. Thanks so much for having me on the show.

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