Pushkin. This fall marks the fifth birthday of the Happiness Lab. Since 2019, we've put out hundreds of episodes. For our anniversary season, I've asked my producer, Ryan Dilly, to pull my five favorite episodes from the archive to release again, so you can check them out. Ryan, what's our number four episode? This one's called Nerd Out, The Happiness of Being a Fan.
Oh right, I love this one. This is an entire episode about the happiness benefits of being a fan. Something, Ryan, that is my friend, you know, I spend a lot of time doing. That's true. So tell the audience, other than psychology, what do you nerd out over? Well, one thing, as you know, is that I nerd out a lot about Star Wars. In fact, at the most recent comic con in my city, I got to meet Billy D. Williams, the Lando-Kali scene from the Star Wars series with my mom, which is a wonderful memory.
But the show is about a lot more than just being like a Star Wars or Star Trek as we talk about in this episode fan. It's really more about the psychological benefits that you can get from certain kinds of relationships that we have with celebrities and fictional characters and so on. It also talks a lot about the kinds of ways that we can be kinder to ourselves by being open to some of the goofiness that comes from fandom. And it also includes one of my favorite celebrity guests. So here it is, nerd out, the happiness of being a fan.
I blush when I think about this because it's like, oh, it's like remembering. I love it first sight.
This is author Tabitha Carvin. She's telling me how she fell for the man of her dreams. I was getting a takeaway coffee in a cafe, which was a novel experience to me because I had been breastfeeding and pregnant for so long. Like I just felt like I hadn't drunk coffee in a thousand years. Before motherhood, Tabitha enjoyed an active career and lots of interest in hobbies. But after motherhood, Tabitha's two kids became the focus of her entire world. She had no time for herself or her own emotional needs.
I wasn't depressed. I wasn't unwell. I was just preoccupied. I realized I just didn't know who I was anymore. I couldn't hold on to any of the pieces that used to be there. They were completely gone. It was in this moment of personal crisis that he finally appeared.
I was waiting for my coffee and the newspaper was open on a table and I saw an ad. The ad, innocuous enough, was for a new season of the television series Sherlock Holmes, starring the actor Benedict Cumberbatch.
I had seen Benedict Cumberbatch many times before. I had thought not much of him other than he was an unusual looking man who appeared in many shows that I seemed to watch. But Tabitha's reaction to this Benedict photo at this particular moment in her life felt very, very different.
Just the sight of this man pulling on a leather glove. And I had this surprising feeling, which I can only describe as yearning. Like, I want to watch that show. Something's coming. It is Moriarty.
I sat down to watch the latest episode of Sherlock and I just, I found myself at this point completely captivated by this man who I had seen a hundred times before. This time he looked completely different to me. I was mesmerized by his physical appearance.
everything about him just it felt like he shook my bones. I just felt more alive and awake in the moment watching this TV show than I had in the years previous raising my children. And that's a shocking thing to say because you know raising your children is supposed to be it's it is an objectively meaningful thing. But the reality is this sitting down to watch this completely silly
trivial TV show somehow affected me more emotionally than all those years of mothering.
Tabitha watched and rewatched all the seasons of Sherlock. She became engrossed with the actor's many movies. She read and reread Benedict's online interviews, and she scrolled and smiled endlessly at his countless online photos. Nearly all of her free time was soon taken up with that distinctive face of his. Tabitha had become spin with Benedict Cumberbatch.
So the thing about that had to come about is that it starts with the voice like a Jaguar trapped in a cello is how his voice has been described. The next thing is the cheekbones because he has very distinctive cheekbones. And then the eyes actually make him look weird because they are just too far apart on his head. And then I think it's the lips, very full lips, excellent cupid bow, excellent hair. Should I keep going?
But despite the joyful thrill that her new obsession brought, becoming so obsessed with the person she'd never met also made Tabitha feel kind of embarrassed. I feel ashamed is actually, it sounds like an extreme emotion, but it seemed like something.
You should not be proud of. It felt inappropriate. It felt juvenile. It felt like an emotional and emotional regression to a time that you're supposed to be completely done with by the time you're almost 40. And it made me feel profoundly embarrassed to the point that I didn't tell anyone about it for a long time.
Now, it's entirely possible that you've never fallen as hard as Tabitha did for some random celebrity. You may not yet have felt the thrill and embarrassment that comes with being, it's called being kumbabotched. Kumbabotched. Kumbabotch. That's when it goes wrong. That sounds bad.
You may not personally know the thrill and embarrassment that comes with being Cumberbatch'd. But I'm guessing that at some point in your life, you had something that you really geeked out about. That band or book or game or movie that you knew way too much about that you spent far too much money and time on.
The kind of thing you adored so much that it went from being a regular everyday sort of appreciation to a full-blown geeky, guilty pleasure. But could embracing a deep love of a seemingly trivial thing and doing so openly and without guilt be the key to feeling more connected and more present? Would each of us become a lot happier if we two could, at least metaphorically, get Cumberbatch'd?
Our minds are constantly telling us what to do to be happy. But what if our minds are wrong? What if our minds are lying to us, leading us away from what will really make us happy? The good news is that understanding the science of the mind can point us all back in the right direction. You're listening to The Happiness Lab with me, Dr. Laurie Santos.
As Tabitha's excitement over all things Benedict grew, she slowly began revealing her obsession to the people closest to her. Most of her friends admitted to being pretty confused. They find it just inexplicable and it required an entire book for me to explain.
That book is entitled, this is not a book about Benedict Cumberbatch, the joy of loving something, anything, like your life depends on it. And initially, what I thought I was writing about was why did this crazy thing happen to me, this perfectly normal person?
It seemed beneath me. Sounds really snobby, but I mean, that is how I felt about something like a celebrity crush. That it was not the kind of thing that someone like me should fall into. Tabitha experienced a complicated set of emotions, both about Benedict and about her obsession with Benedict. She'd never felt more joyful or alive as she did watching Sherlock. But spending so much time being a fan girl came with a lot of guilt.
I was using my precious free time and precious free brain space to think about this guy. I felt like I should be using that time to either think about my husband or my children, the housework. Wasting her time on something so trivial also made her feel selfish.
It's not about serving the needs of other people. It's not about tending to the needs of your children or your family or your domestic environment. It is something that is just for you." She'd also seen how the actor's hardcore fans, who lovingly refer to themselves as Cumberbitches, were portrayed in the news. The media called the Cumberbitches hysterical, crazed, cult-like, and even terrifying.
You know, I didn't look at that and think, oh, yeah, these are my people. Like, I want to join that community, sign me up. That was a huge stumbling block. I was like, hell no, I'm not going to put my hand up to be the subject of these kind of insults. But Tabitha wasn't just afraid of tears and mockery. Her infatuation with her new crush was so powerful that it scared her. Tabitha hadn't experienced anything that extreme since she was a teenager.
All I was doing was simply pursuing a feeling which made me feel good. It's amazing the extent to which that felt scary. But intense feelings like this are kind of what fandom is all about. I mean, the term fan comes from the Latin, fanaticist, meaning frenzied by the gods. These days, we, of course, use the term for less divinely inspired circumstances. It's just that some things seem normal for us to fan over, and some things don't.
Take sports. No one bats an eye if you spend hundreds of dollars on t-shirts and posters and bumper stickers to show your devotion to a football team. No one calls you hysterical if you scream at the television when your favorite basketball player hits the perfect shot or if you sulk when the home team loses.
I mean, sports fandom is so normalized. You know, it's on the news every single night. That's wonderful. Like, it's a wonderful thing that we have nourished and supported as a society because sports fans get huge return on investment from that kind of dedication. And then actually that is all I was feeling towards back to Cumberbatch was exactly the same thing.
So how can we overcome the stigma that has been historically attached to nerding out and happily embrace our passions no matter what they are? To find out, I tagged in an expert who understands the joys and downsides of unashamed fandom. Good morning. Good morning. Can you hear us? I can. Can you see me? Someone who's had a unique glimpse into both sides of the fandom relationship. Now we can see you.
And with this seeing you comes to like, oh my god, oh my god, oh my god, geeking out, but I'm gonna try to hold it together. You're doing great. It's also a celebrity who turns me into a bit of a fan girl myself. It's weird to introduce myself.
Hi, my name is Will Wheaton. If you're a nerd like me, Will needs no introduction. Will is an author, a blogger, the host of the YouTube board game show Tabletop, and most famously, he played Wesley Crusher on Star Trek The Next Generation. But these days, Will is happy to be known as a geek. In fact, Just a Geek was the title of his first memoir, which chronicled his first step towards fandom.
It was third grade when we went to the library and I got my first sci-fi book. Like I just devoured it. Like I think I finished it that day. And that really started me on the path that I walked for the rest of my life.
Young Will was especially drawn to one particular sci-fi franchise. He fell completely in love with the 1960s TV show, Star Trek. Watching it in syndication over and over and over again, like every time it was on, just everything stopped and I would watch that. That's what I really, really love. So when I was 14 and found out I was auditioning for a new Star Trek series, I was beside myself.
It's pretty rare that a fan gets to become part of the thing they love so much. Will remembers what it felt like to put on his first Starfleet uniform and to walk onto the set of the Enterprise for the first time. When you get there, you cannot see anything else except the reality of the starship that you are on. I loved walking there. I loved being alone there. I loved sitting in that stead and pretending it was all real.
It was a really safe, really happy place for me." But nerding up to Star Trek stuff wasn't Will's only happy place. You see, ever since he was a kid, Will has allowed himself to love lots and lots of nerdy things, all as deeply as any Cumberbatch worship's Benedict. Will geeks out to dungeon the dragons, and old-school arcade machines, and tabletop board games, and action figures, and comic books, and fantasy novels, and Harry Styles.
Do I absolutely adore? And I never would have liked, why would I have listened to a boy band guy ever in my life? That guy is amazing. What a remarkable human being and so talented. As he explains in his new annotated memoir, Still Just a Geek, Will loves having the very intense band-based passion that scared Tabitha so much. Being a nerd is not about the thing you love. It's about the way you love that thing.
I really love the part of me that wakes up and sings when I'm around people who love the things with that kind of unself-conscious, non-judgmental enthusiasm. Will is evangelical about the benefits of just absolutely loving stuff. He's gone from being just a professional geek to becoming a geek evangelist, as it were.
It's totally cool to be a nerd and love stuff. Like I've always said, as long as the thing you love doesn't hurt another person, love it as hard as you can and get as much out of it as you possibly can. And it turns out that the science agrees with Will on this point. Being a geek, loving dorky things like your life depends on it has far more powerful psychological benefits than you might expect. We'll explore why when the happiness lab returns after the break.
So when I was in high school, I was really into party of five. I was really into Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the original Roswell. I have a very long list of all of these shows that I sort of went through one by one. This is my former Yale student, psychologist and New York Times best-selling YA fiction author, Jennifer Lynn Barnes.
And it would always be, I like watching the show, and then it goes into the imaginative, but what if, where you start running out all the scenarios and coming up with theories and thinking about it before the next episode comes? Because that was back when I was watching week to week. And that's sort of my default mode of media consumption and has been my entire life.
Jen is an expert on this kind of fandom. As a young adult fiction author, she's created a few of her own big fan franchises. You should definitely check out her hugely popular inheritance game book series. Like actor Will Wheaton, Jen is also a self-proclaimed nerd. She's seen many of the benefits of geeking out firsthand.
I did a lot of daydreaming about fictional characters. I did a lot of that emotional investment. And it did, I think, make me less lonely. But perhaps most importantly, Jen is also an academic psychologist who publishes on the cognitive and emotional benefits of fandom. Jen has found that if you look at the list of evidence-based happiness boosting strategies that I share with my students, geeking out about your favorite TV show, film, or comic book seems to check a lot of those boxes.
Let's start with one of the best known stress reducers around. Play. Particularly the kind that emerges when fans become so creatively engaged with the characters they care about that they begin to invent new adventures for them to embark on.
I have argued very specifically in specific publications that fan fiction is a form of a imaginary play, that it is parallel to either daydreaming in adulthood or actual pretend play in childhood. Jen and others have argued that when fans get together, especially at big fan gatherings like conventions or cons as they're called, they tend to experience what's known as a shared pretensive reality. It's kind of the adult version of the happiness boosting flow that kids experience when they play together with toys.
That fun, cooperative, imagined reality where you get to joke around, be social, make believe, and create together. This shared playful reality is something that geek evangelist Will Wheaton really savers. At a con, that energy is everywhere.
One of my favorite things at a con is to walk through the artists area and the vendors hall and see the small indie artists who make unbelievably gorgeous works of art and jewelry and paintings and stickers and figurines that just make stuff to celebrate the fandom that brings so much joy into our lives.
But this creative playful side of geeking out is just the tip of the fandom happiness iceberg. A lot of the well-being boost that comes from being a hardcore fan stems from social connection, especially the kind you get from loving the object of your geeky affection through what's known as a parasocial relationship.
So parasocial relationships are what media psychologists call the one-sided relationships that you form with people you don't actually know through consuming media about them. And those relationships can be formed with real people like singers, politicians, actors, anyone you don't know. Parasocial relationships can also be formed with people who don't exist, like Sherlock Holmes or Lieutenant Wesley Crusher.
And psychologically, based on the literature, it doesn't seem to matter that much, whether the person you're forming a relationship with is a real person in your favorite boy band or a fictional character that you've consumed to show about. Either way, these relationships seem to have a lot of the real world benefits of actual relationships.
A lot of the recent work on the benefits of parasocial relationships comes from the University of Buffalo psychologist Shira Gabriel, who proposed what's called the social surrogacy hypothesis.
And this hypothesis basically says that we are very social creatures with a lot of social needs, but that our brains can be very sneaky about how we are fulfilling those needs. Let's say you have a spouse that supports you and friends to hang out with, but you're a busy mom who lacks a sense of adventure in her life. Your brain will probably be on the lookout for someone, anyone who can feel that excitement hole.
And if a surrogate happens to come along, say a fictional character like Sherlock, who's smart and dashing and hangs out with you every night on television, then your brain quickly latches on. But we don't just use specific characters or celebrities to fill our social needs. Let's say you're a geeky kid, like the young Will, who doesn't feel like he belongs.
You might gravitate towards an entire fictional world where nerds like you feel more seen. And the evidence suggests that doing so literally expands your horizons. Star Trek looks through the street and it says there is the place specifically for you in the future. I love that.
I love feeling like I wanted to belong somewhere. I wanted to be special and these people who are not recognizing how special you are are going to be forced to recognize it in the future because it will be undeniable. And the science bears out the importance of the kind of belonging that young Will and other fans get from Star Trek. There's evidence that thinking about a beloved fictional character or world can make you feel less lonely.
And studies show that writing about the target of your parasocial relationship can boost your self-esteem. So all of these sort of social benefits that you can receive from real world relationships, it seems like there's a version of those benefits that you can receive from these fictional relationships as well. When we geek out about our favorite celebrity, we don't only get a social connection boost from parasocial bonds. Fandom can also promote in real life social connection.
So it's often very common for a friendship to start in fandom. You have a mutual interest, you're hanging out at the same spots online, you're reading each other's stories, you're talking about it, you talk when the show is on, but then it goes past that. And these people become your friends, lifelong friends often.
The social connection that comes from communities like these can lead to the kind of well-being bump that Yang will experience firsthand. My childhood was very much defined by loneliness and isolation. I just couldn't find people who I felt safe with.
I had been raised to believe that all these things that were really important to me were weird and kind of stupid. And when I found other people who loved the things that I loved, I actually found people who loved me and accepted me and didn't judge me and welcomed me into the community. But like, all of that was a revelation to me.
And I think that's what fandom does for many people. It gives them not just a community and not just friends, but that sort of deep and very compelling feeling of this is where I belong. Being a fan can also bring a sense of identity. You become a Trekky or a Cumberbatch. You wind up being part of an in-group. Researchers like Jen have argued that identifying as a member of a fan franchise works a lot like being part of any group.
You identify with a bigger collective that can give you a sense of pride and boost your self-esteem. Studies show that fandoms also work like other in groups and that they tend to promote pro-social behavior within the group, doing exactly the sorts of kind and generous things for other people that we know can boost our mood.
But the in-group identity that comes from being a fan can also lead to the same darker psychological processes that are observed in real-world groups, especially when in-group identities get threatened. I mean, think of all the awful atrocities committed by political, religious, or ethnic groups throughout history. In the fan world, that dark side of in-group identity can lead to what's called toxic fandom.
It's important to point out that the vast majority of fans never turn toxic. But when you have a very large fandom, the 1% who has that level of investment and who also maybe has some personality traits or tendencies that would be problematic even outside of fandom, then you can see those problematic things happening. Actor will be in soft just how bad toxic fandom can be.
His next generation character, Wesley Crusher, provoked the ire of many Star Trek fans as a smug teenager who seemed to save the day a few times too often. It wasn't Will's fault that Wesley's character wasn't beloved by the viewers, but the fans aimed their hate directly at the then 18-year-old actor. And it was really rough.
Those years of being harassed so badly contributed to Will's decision to step away from the part. I will throw my body down in front of every single person who is being attacked by toxic fandom right now because I know what it feels like and I know that you don't deserve it.
But despite the toxic behavior he experienced, Will still believes that the benefits of geeking out far outweigh the negatives. Will has also seen that being a fan can literally be life-changing. There were adult fans that hated Wesley Crusher, but Will says that many younger fans were inspired to see a teenager on the Bridge of the Enterprise.
Kids loved that. And I know, because I have met hundreds of thousands of them who became adults, who are scientists, who are researchers, who are engineers, who are parents, who are politicians, who grew up inspired by Star Trek.
So geeking out, provided you play nice, can be hugely beneficial to your connection and your well-being. But throwing ourselves fully into a geeky pursuit is still a thing that many of us are kind of embarrassed about. It can still sometimes feel a bit cringeworthy. So how can we overcome all the guilt and let our proverbial geek flag fly?
After the break, Cumberbridge Tabitha Carvin will share how she was able to throw herself into her obsession wholeheartedly and how the benefits that came from that were far more powerful than she expected. If you find something, anything that sparks the sense in you of fulfilling a want that is just for you, not for anyone else, and if you were able to embrace it then it can lead you places that you couldn't anticipate when you took that first step.
The Happiness Lab will be back in a moment.
This feeling that I had towards him was not something that I was looking for in my life. Author Tabitha Carvin was initially scared by her level of obsession with the actor Benedict Cumberbatch. She eventually came to accept her extreme crush and all the joys that came with it. You know, the thing that is scary about it is that I haven't experienced that sense of wanting something so much and pursuing it so wholeheartedly in a long time. And that's actually not something to be afraid of.
Tabitha's love of the Sherlock star was something she initially enjoyed in isolation from other fans. That is, until she was grabbing a book about the actor, off a shelf at her local library. It fell open onto this page that had a post-it note and an invitation to visit this website to discuss Sherlock and to look at photos of Benedict Cumberbatch. Despite having previous misgivings about joining the ranks of the Cumberbitches, Tabitha's curiosity took over.
I went to the forum and connected with the person who left the night, and she was someone just like me. Suddenly, Tabitha wasn't alone. She found a gateway to her community. I really believed when it first happened to me that I was the first person this could possibly have ever happened to to fall in such a way.
Turns out, no, in fact, there are like millions of women my age and much older in many cases who have just followed the exact same experience. And when I connected with them online, it just generated the most incredible energy. That energy is exactly what the psychologist Jennifer Lynn Barnes saw time and again in her scientific work on fandom. The comfort and joy of belonging to a like-minded crew.
In those online spaces, no one was ashamed or embarrassed or guilty and it just, you know, they were just letting it all hang out. It's just, it was a wonderful shared community experience. The Boost Tabitha got from connecting with the Cumberbatch community and powered her to go fully public. She stopped hiding her love for Benedict. She didn't realize that being so vulnerable would lead to even more opportunities to connect with the people around her.
The thing that struck me the most is when I actually just went for it and stuck up the Benedict Cumberbatch pictures at my desk at work and started wearing the Benedict Cumberbatch memorabilia. People just like it. People are grateful to have something to talk to you about. And far from being a trivial obsession, Tabitha learned that finding Benedict had changed the lives of his other fans in surprising and profound ways.
I was hearing about divorces, new relationships, redirections of sexuality and gender, you know, career changes, every single possible change that you can possibly imagine. And they wanted to talk about this change in the context of Benedict Cumberbatch because in their mind, those things were connected. Of course, Benedict wasn't swooping in and personally convincing people to make these happiness boosting life changes.
But the powerful one-sided parasocial relationship that these fans formed with the actor sometimes allowed them to identify important, unfulfilled needs that they previously hadn't been able to notice. They were at a point in their life where they felt stuck.
just as I felt, you know, they felt in some way that they were not living a life that was representative of who they wanted to be." Fan after Fan explained to Tabitha that allowing themselves to love something as trivial as a television actor, and to do so so enthusiastically and so non-judgmentally, opened a doorway they hadn't anticipated.
If you kind of step through the doorway saying, you know, this is, I like this, you know, this is something that is making me happy. You know, it starts you down a path where you can remember that capacity you have of doing what you want and knowing what you want. You know, you start to maybe remember those feelings that you had when you were younger, when you, you knew who you were or you knew the kind of joy you were capable of.
And once you start to exercise that capability, it seems you start to demand it more. You start to be able to see in your life the ways in which you can change your path to achieve it. But did Tabitha also experience the happiness boosting doorway effect from geeking out over Benedict? God, it made me happier than I was at the time. The doorway effect for me was real. He completely got me out of a very bad place.
Tabitha has clear advice for those who may be into a celebrity, TV series, or film franchise, but are still reluctant to give their passion free rein for fear of being belittled or made to feel self-indulgent. You're entitled to it, you're completely entitled to it, to just put up that kind of block in reaching your own happiness to me now seems crazy. She also has advice for those of us yet to be Cumberbatch, people who still haven't found that thing to geek out over.
I don't like the idea that people will hear this and think, but I don't love anything. I don't have a passion. I understand that reaction entirely because that is how I felt before, but I don't think you need anything else to feel bad about. I think that you just need to be conscious of your interests and facilitate them in your life a little more and also even just to carve out a little bit of mental space for yourself.
And once you give yourself that mental space to notice your interests, you also need to make sure that you're mindfully paying attention. Stay alert to that feeling, that little spark of intriguing and instead of shutting it down, instead of talking yourself out of it, instead of feeling ashamed or embarrassed or redirecting your energy onto something that seems more important.
fan the flame of that spark a little and see what happens next. And as type of the herself is seen, what often happens next is more on bridal joy and play and connection and even happiness than we initially expected.
It seems so trivial. It seems so meaningless. It seems so pointless, you know, that I think that's one of the reasons that so many people cut themselves off at the past when they have these feelings. I'm not going to waste my time on this silly thing, but ultimately it can lead you to extremely meaningful places just by exercising that capability for joy.
When that motivation strikes to dive deeper than you initially feel is appropriate, and to some movie or sci-fi series or celebrity crush, you might feel embarrassed, or like there have to be healthier, more happiness promoting uses of your time. But the science shows that geeking out about something, no matter how trivial it is, can boost your sense of connection and presence. When you become a hardcore fan, you end up harnessing an important psychological trick that can make you kinder, more playful, and more joyous.
So unleash your inner geek. Commit to getting Cumberbatch with your own unique target of joy. You could do a deep dive into a traditional geeky interest, like Star Wars or video games or that hot new TV star. Or you could geek out about a topic all your own. You could become a sourdough bread geek or a croquet geek or a history geek. The key, as Tabitha put it in the title of her book, is to give yourself permission to love something, anything, like your life depends on it.
The happiness benefits that follow might be more profound than you expect.
