0:15

Pushkin. Hello,

0:22

and if you're listening to this on March twentieth, Happy

0:24

World Happiness Day. On the

0:26

Happiness Lab, we suggest you do something to

0:28

improve your well being every day of the year,

0:31

but if the United Nations wants us all to make a

0:33

special effort for twenty four hours in March,

0:36

then we're on board with that too. The

0:39

first International Day of Happiness was celebrated

0:41

back in twenty thirteen. The goal was

0:43

to raise awareness that our well being can be approved

0:46

if only more governments enacted policies

0:48

to help us all become a little happier. On

0:51

each International Day of Happiness, the United

0:53

Nations also issues the World Happiness

0:55

Report, written by scientists and academics.

0:58

This report examines different themes, showing

1:00

what we're getting right when it comes to happiness and

1:02

what we still need to work on. Past

1:05

reports have looked at happiness and parenting, what

1:07

living in cities does for our happiness, and

1:09

more recently, the impact that COVID nineteen

1:12

has had on our well being. Over the

1:14

next few episodes of the Happiness Lab, we'll be talking

1:16

to the experts behind this year's World Happiness

1:18

Report. They're among the best and brightest

1:20

in the field of happiness science. So these

1:22

are going to be some fantastic episodes, But

1:25

for the show today, we're doing something a little

1:27

different. The Happiness Lab is made by

1:29

Pushkin Industries, and many of the network's

1:31

other hosts have some pretty interesting takes on what

1:34

can make us all happier, so I decided

1:36

to talk to them about what they would have put

1:38

in this year's World Happiness Report. A

1:40

little later, you'll hear from revisionist Histories

1:43

Malcolm Gladwell.

1:44

I'm perfectly happy to suffer, but

1:46

I will not suffer for six hours.

1:48

And from Tim Hartford from cautionary.

1:50

Tales, the surgeon would leave

1:52

the probe in, so to speak, without

1:54

wiggling it around.

1:55

But we'll kick it off with an old, old friend

1:57

of mine.

1:58

It's worth sharing with folks that I've

2:00

actually known you since I was seventeen years old.

2:03

I was a student of yours.

2:05

I was full eight years now.

2:07

Now it feels like it's been so how much longer?

2:10

This is Maya Schunker. I taught her back

2:12

when she was an undergraduate at Yale, and we

2:14

kept in touch after she graduated and went

2:16

to work at the White House, where she advised

2:18

the Obama administration on how behavioral

2:20

science can improve government policy.

2:23

These days, Maya hosts The Pushkin Show,

2:25

a slight Change of Plans, a podcast

2:27

about who we become when we face big challenges

2:29

and decisions. Given all that,

2:31

she was perhaps the perfect person to ask my

2:34

question, if you were writing a chapter

2:36

of the World Happiness Report, what

2:38

would it be about?

2:39

Okay, Well, this one's really easy for me because

2:42

I think there is one thing that erodes

2:45

my happiness more than anything else, and

2:48

it's what our psychologist's friend, Ethan

2:51

Cross calls mental chatter.

2:52

Oh yeah, so Ethan Cross, he's a professor at

2:54

the University of Michigan and he's the author of this wonderful

2:57

book Chatter. Yeah exactly.

2:59

And it was really helpful for me when I learned

3:01

about this concept because I was like, wow, Ethan,

3:03

you've just captured what's been in my brain

3:06

for decades. So, Laurie, can

3:08

you tell us more about what mental chatter

3:11

is and how does that relate to the inner

3:13

dialogue that we have in our minds all the time.

3:16

Yeah, well, let me start with the inner dialogue, because

3:18

in some ways it's a really cool thing that we do as

3:20

humans. So inner dialogue, just as

3:22

it sounds, is like the self

3:24

talk that you have going on in your head, and it could

3:26

be about all kinds of things. Right, Our inner dialogue

3:28

is how we like make sense of the world

3:31

and build our own inner narrative. Our inner

3:33

dialogue is how we like plan for what

3:35

we're going to do after this. You know, when I was waiting for you

3:37

to hop on zoom, I'm like, oh, after this, I'm gonna

3:39

make dinner. And what do I have in my fridge? And I oh,

3:41

I have some black beans? Like all of

3:43

that is inner dialogue, right, But chatter,

3:46

as Ethan defines, it, is a little bit different.

3:48

It's when our inner dialogue goes

3:50

to the negative. Right, So it's that inner

3:52

voice of worry where you're thinking about the future

3:55

and feeling anxious about what's to come, or

3:57

that inner voice of rumination where you're

3:59

thinking about the past and beating yourself up for

4:01

something that you did do or that you didn't do, or

4:04

even just like our inner voice of self criticism

4:06

where we just kind of talk crap about ourselves

4:08

like all the time, no matter what's going on. And

4:11

so while our inner dialogue

4:13

itself can be really adaptive, mental

4:16

chatter is not. It kind of feels like crap,

4:18

And then there's lots of evidence that it affects our performance

4:20

negatively too.

4:22

I remember so when I had a conversation with

4:24

Ethan on a slight change of plans, it

4:26

was so helpful for me to even hear this

4:28

distinction, the distinction between the inner voice and

4:31

dialogue and mental chatter, because

4:33

I think what happens is in the throes of

4:35

chatter, you are so pissed

4:38

off at your brain. You're like, can you please stop?

4:41

You've been ruminating over this thing for you

4:43

three hours. You're not making any progress

4:45

at all, and you can really start to resent

4:48

your brain and resent the fact that it even has

4:50

this faculty. And so when

4:53

Ethan and I did more of this gratitude

4:55

moment together where we appreciated our inner

4:57

voice and to exactly your point, focused

4:59

on all the benefits that that voice

5:02

affords us in any given day, that

5:04

alone helped me have a different

5:06

relationship with my mental chatter, because at the end

5:08

of the I thought, well, I wouldn't want to do away with my inner

5:11

voice altogether. I mean, it's actually miraculous

5:13

that I can travel in time to the future

5:15

or the past in general. I mean, I might not like it in

5:17

this moment because I'm perseparating about something

5:19

even happened two weeks ago that I can no longer change.

5:22

But in general, it's such a cool feature

5:24

of our cognition, of human cognition, that

5:26

we have the ability to have these internal

5:29

conversations with ourselves.

5:30

And I think the beauty is that once you understand what chatter

5:33

is, you can also find strategies for controlling

5:35

it when it goes to the not so great

5:38

side, right, And that's the lovely thing about Ethan's work, because

5:40

he has all these different strategies that we can use to

5:42

like not shut our chatter up, but to use

5:45

self talk to be a little bit more productive and a

5:47

little bit kinder to ourselves.

5:49

So let's talk about some of those strategies for those

5:51

who are in the horrible

5:53

loop of mental rumination. I

5:55

want to give folks hope and help them

5:57

see that there is light at the end of the tunnel.

6:00

Well, one of Ethan's best strategies that I

6:02

love because it's like so super simple,

6:04

and in fact, there's lots of evidence that when you use this strategy,

6:06

it doesn't take any cognitive work. It happens super

6:09

fast. And that strategy is what he calls

6:11

distance self talk, which is just the simple

6:13

act of using your name and talking

6:15

to yourself in the third person. So normally,

6:18

if I'm thinking about my own like mental chatter,

6:20

I'll be using the first person. I'll be like, oh, why

6:22

did I do that? I said that stupid thing, like I should

6:24

have thought more. But it's I I

6:27

me, me, me me, right, that's a

6:29

first person perspective, and that's what we

6:31

often use when we get like all worrying and

6:33

ruminative, because it's all about us. But

6:35

distance self talk lets you get a little bit of psychological

6:38

distance because instead of talking like that, you

6:40

say, you know, maybe you messed up a little

6:42

bit, Laurie, like, maybe this is something that you need to think

6:44

about in the future. Right, So I'm using

6:46

the second person you, I'm using the third person,

6:49

like my name. And that is really

6:51

powerful because the only time in your life

6:53

you ever hear the second person you or your name

6:55

is when somebody else is talking to you. And

6:57

so it's this little cool linguistic device

6:59

that makes us feel like we're

7:01

hearing from some wise mentor we're hearing

7:03

from some other person, somebody who is distance from

7:05

that loop of chatter that we have going on. And

7:08

Ethan's found that this simple act of doing that you don't even

7:10

have to instruct subjects to like talk differently

7:12

to themselves. Just the act of switching

7:14

the pronouns that you use in your brain winds

7:17

up making you a little bit kinder to yourself.

7:19

Has all these wonderful emotional consequences

7:21

where you're a little bit anxious over time,

7:23

and it just lets you kind of get out of that loop so

7:25

that you can perform better. And what's cool is like

7:28

it doesn't take any work. It's just a matter of

7:30

changing the pronouns. It's not like developing

7:32

some complicated like cognitive

7:34

behavior therapy strategy. It's just like

7:36

you switch the pronouns and immediately you get this interesting

7:39

distance from your normal chatter.

7:41

Yeah. I remember reading in Ethan's book that Malala

7:43

did this. Of course, Malala the most

7:45

sophisticated psychologist of all time despite

7:48

never having studied it, because she's such a such

7:50

a genius. I really

7:52

love the fly on the wall perspective

7:55

because when I think about how I

7:57

counsel my friends or family members,

8:00

there's a certain objectivity that I feel I have

8:02

in that moment where I can see the situation

8:04

from a distance. The kind of hormonal

8:07

fog is removed, all of those heated emotions

8:09

are removed from whatever advice I'm giving,

8:11

And it feels so useful when

8:14

you're diagnosing your own problems to have that

8:16

objectivity right, to be able to look at it as

8:18

more of an impartial observer the distance.

8:20

Self talk is one way to do that, but even finds you can

8:23

also do that like literally taking the perspective

8:25

of a distanced observer. You know what would

8:27

Beyonce do? Sort of strategy where you

8:30

just say, you know, oh my gosh, I said that

8:32

thing, like that's so terrible. Well, what would

8:34

Beyonce do? Imagine not Beyonce? How would

8:36

I react to having said that? Like, I wouldn't care. I'd

8:38

be Beyonce right, Which sounds silly,

8:40

but the evidence really shows that, like taking this third

8:43

person perspective, like pretending

8:45

that you're somebody else, and especially somebody else who

8:47

has exactly the skills to deal with whatever

8:49

situation you're facing, all of a sudden,

8:51

like you wind up performing much better,

8:53

being less anxious, and you can just kind of shut up

8:56

the chatter because you kind of take on this other perspective.

8:58

My favorite part of it what would Beyonce do? Is

9:01

it turns out Beyonce herself uses a strategy

9:03

I guess whenever she's like feeling nervous

9:05

before shows, she has this persona that she calls

9:08

Sasha Fears where she's like, I'm gonna harness

9:10

Sasha Fierce, and then she pretends she's Sasha Fierce

9:12

and she just like goes out there and you know, does her

9:14

Beyonce thing. So what would Beyonce

9:16

do? Beyonce would use this form of distant

9:18

self talk where you pretend that you're somebody

9:20

cooler and wiser.

9:22

I mean to imagine someone cooler than Beyonce. But

9:24

fine, I guess she needs a different reference

9:26

point. I'm curious to know

9:28

what you think the mechanism is at play. Do you think

9:30

it's because we are better

9:32

at giving other people

9:35

advice than we are ourselves, or do you think it's that we're

9:37

better at following other people's

9:40

advice.

9:40

Yeah, my guess is that it's a combination of the two.

9:42

Right when we start using second person

9:45

pronouns like you know, hey, you need to do

9:47

a little bit better. I know that you know this has

9:49

been hard, but you da da da da, Like

9:51

I think we we rarely do that in like a mean

9:53

way, like you suck and you're terrible,

9:55

right, Like, that's just kind of not what most of us normally

9:58

do. So when we apply that pronoun you to ourselves,

10:00

I think it naturally makes us a little bit nicer.

10:03

So it means the advice we're giving ourselves feels

10:05

nicer. But I think hearing that self

10:08

talk involving you and third person like

10:10

you, Laura, you know, here's what you can do, all

10:12

of a sudden, it gets us out of that like mental chatter

10:14

frame where we're just talking to ourself and it

10:17

kind of feels like we're hearing advice from somebody

10:19

else. I think we both give advice differently, but

10:21

we're more like we resonate with that advice

10:23

differently too, We kind of hear it in a different way,

10:25

so it's like both parts wind up making us

10:28

feel better and perform better.

10:29

One of my favorite strategies that I use when

10:32

I am in the throes of mental chatter is

10:34

temporal distancing. Can you share a bit more

10:36

about what that is?

10:37

Yeah, So That is a strategy where you pretend

10:39

that you yourself are in the future thinking

10:42

about whatever ye it is that you're ruminating about

10:44

right now. Then I'll think, Okay, how

10:46

is ten years from now Lari going to think about that?

10:49

And I'm like, oh, she's not going to care

10:51

about that at all? Right, Like my emotions kind

10:53

of go down because it doesn't feel like it's that scary

10:55

anymore. But also, ten years from now, Luria

10:57

is going to think about that incident in a totally different way.

10:59

She's going to say, oh, I learned

11:01

something from that. And so this is this

11:04

strategy of temporal distancing. You think

11:06

about yourself in the future, how they

11:08

would think about that this incident, And usually

11:10

when they think about it, they're in a different mode than

11:12

you are. They're not like feeling all anxious and ruminative

11:14

about something. They're thinking from the

11:16

perspective of this wise future observer

11:19

who wants to go through hard things, who wants to

11:21

grow from them, who's thinking more in terms of

11:23

what they're going to learn rather than how it feels right

11:25

now.

11:26

So there have been a few times where temporal

11:28

distancing has failed for me, and

11:31

those are in moments where I'm sitting

11:33

there ruminating, and I imagine five

11:35

years from now, Maya, ten years from now Maya,

11:37

and I think to myself, I'm going to be worried about the same

11:40

damn thing even then. So for

11:42

those of you who are listening who feel like

11:44

they're very neurotic in this way, you're not alone.

11:48

I'm with you, and so I want to share what

11:50

I do in those moments. So what I do is

11:52

I think back to my past and I

11:54

try to think about some topic

11:56

that sees my brain that I was absolutely

11:59

convinced was going to plague me forever,

12:02

and then to look at my present self and to say,

12:04

huh, you're not actually worried about that

12:06

issue that you thought in college was

12:08

the biggest ever. And so sometimes

12:11

collecting personal evidence from your

12:13

own life that you were just wrong, you

12:15

misfecasted the impact that a particular

12:17

topic was going to have on you, can give

12:19

you the confidence that the current thing will

12:22

actually resolve in your brain over the next five

12:24

or ten years.

12:25

I love that because I do sometimes with that kind

12:27

of temporal distancing strategy, like I feel

12:29

like sometimes I'm so caught up in the moment with my chatter

12:31

that I'm like, oh, yeah, ten years from now, Laura, she's

12:33

going to be just as freaked out about this tiny

12:35

thing. But then when you look back, you're like, oh, yeah,

12:38

I guess I was wrong about those other ones, so maybe

12:40

I'm wrong about this one too.

12:41

So Laurie, what are other strategies that we can use

12:43

to distance ourselves from that chatter?

12:45

Well, other strategies come from somebody else we've had

12:48

on the Happiness Lab, Krista Naff, who really

12:50

talks about how we need to shut up the critical

12:52

side of our self talk voice. And this

12:54

is something that I think I've seen in my students

12:56

so much, right, Like, I think my students just are

12:59

so hyper ambitious. They talk to themselves

13:01

in like such harsh ways. And I

13:03

think they do that not because they're massochists, because

13:05

they think it works, right. They just have this assumption

13:08

that this really critic voices what's going to

13:10

kind of get me off my butt and I'll actually

13:12

do stuff and get motivated to do, you know, and

13:14

achieve whatever goals I had in the first place.

13:16

But a lot of kristin Neff's evidence suggests

13:19

that that's absolutely not true. Self critical voice

13:21

winds up causing you to procrastinate and

13:23

it feels really terrible and you just don't get

13:25

done what you need to get done. And she's found

13:27

that there's a powerful alternative to this, which she

13:29

refers to as self compassion. Again,

13:32

you're kind of marshaling the compassion that you'd give

13:34

to somebody else for yourself.

13:36

You kind of give yourself the same kindness

13:38

that you would an outside observer, but just

13:40

to kind of make it concrete. She talks about self compassion

13:43

as having these three parts. The first part is kind

13:45

of mindfulness. You need to recognize this

13:47

sucks right now. I'm having hard time right now,

13:49

I have failed and I feel ashamed. So you're

13:52

mindful about your feelings, the situation,

13:55

how bad it is. You're kind of like calling like

13:57

the emotional spade a spade, like this sucks right

13:59

now. The second part is what she calls calmon humanity,

14:01

which I think is super powerful. It's basically

14:04

saying it's normal. I'm human,

14:06

I'm going to screw up, I'm going to go through shame, I'm

14:08

going to feel luck sometimes like this is normative,

14:10

right, It is common humanity to experience

14:12

these emotions that I'm experiencing. And

14:15

then the third step is the self kindness part,

14:17

kind of using the same strategies we were just talking

14:19

about with Ethan, where you talk to yourself ideally

14:21

using the sort of second and third person and say,

14:24

Lauri, what can you take off your plate? Lauri, how

14:26

can you be kind to yourself right now? And she

14:28

finds this self compassion is this like

14:30

super powerful strategy where it can do

14:33

things like not just improve your performance and make

14:35

you feel better, but also like reduce trauma

14:37

when individuals are in combat situations.

14:40

It can increase the compassion that you give to

14:42

your team members and your partner. Right,

14:44

so do you engage in self compassion? It

14:46

boosts your other people compassion too,

14:49

And it just like has this enormous

14:51

effect on people's performance where you

14:53

find that people stop procrastinating,

14:55

they stop being afraid of the kind of tasks that they

14:57

have ahead of them, they can just kind of embrace them with

15:00

excitement.

15:00

Yeah. I had so many misconceptions about

15:02

the self compassion literature until I

15:05

dug.

15:05

In totally because it has really crappy brandis

15:07

right, It sounds like very woo like self

15:09

compassion. It doesn't sound like human

15:12

performance maximization, but that's

15:14

like ultimately what it is.

15:15

Yeah, I mean, the minute I learned wait, self

15:17

compassion can actually improve performance, I mean,

15:19

then it just becomes a no brainer. It no longer feels

15:21

like this soft woo woo narrative instead

15:24

one that feels very productive and functional

15:27

and ends up making you feel better, which matters

15:29

too.

15:30

Yeah, And I think one thing we get wrong when we hear

15:32

self compassion, And this is definitely something I've seen

15:34

when I teach the strategy to my students is

15:36

that they hear it as self indulgence. They

15:39

think, like, if you're being kind to yourself, you're going to

15:41

like let yourself off the hook or kind of

15:43

not call yourself out when you are acting

15:45

problematically, like when things are kind of a real problem.

15:48

And I think that's why this idea of talking to yourself

15:50

like you would a friend is so powerful. Like

15:52

Maya, you're my friend and former student. If you

15:54

were doing something that was really terrible, I

15:57

would give you a talking to, but I wouldn't do it

15:59

in a mean way and say, ma, you suck whatever.

16:01

I would say like, Maya, what is going

16:03

on? Like I just want to know how

16:05

I can help? What can I do right? And

16:07

so in some ways, this self compassion

16:09

isn't self indulgence, it's not kind of letting yourself

16:12

off the hook. If anything, it's what Kristin

16:14

f calls fierce, right, Like you are ready

16:16

to dive in even for tough problems and

16:18

not avoid them because you care about yourself

16:20

that much. Right. That's this kind of analogy with a friend.

16:23

If a good friend's going through something tough and they're

16:25

not behaving in the right way, you're going to

16:27

check in. But you're not going to check in in this kind of

16:29

mean, drill sergeant way. You're going to check

16:31

in with kindness and curiosity and

16:34

like understanding, right, And that's just kind of what

16:36

we need to apply to ourselves too.

16:38

Yeah, and that drill sergeant approach

16:40

can really backfire.

16:41

I remember.

16:42

One of the freshest insights that I learned

16:44

from Kristin is that when you

16:46

are crippled by shame, right, when

16:48

you feel that the thing you did is not just bad, that

16:50

you're bad, it actually closes

16:52

you off to the idea of improvement because

16:55

if you're bad, you're irredeemable. There's no chance

16:57

at making progress or ameliorating the situation.

16:59

So actually self compassion is

17:02

the instrument by which we

17:04

can unlock growth and do better.

17:06

So it's the opposite of letting ourselves off the hooktually,

17:09

the thing that allows our brains to be open minded enough

17:11

to think that there is redemption or

17:14

at least a path to progress.

17:15

Exactly, Maya. I love that you've brought up

17:18

like the self talk and how we can use it better. I wish

17:20

that was a chapter in the World Happiness Report.

17:22

I think it's super important. Thank

17:24

you so much for coming on the Happiness Lab.

17:26

Thank you so much for having me, Laurie.

17:28

A little later we'll be talking to Malcolm Gladwell

17:31

about the joy or lack of it, he gets

17:33

from running. But next up, the economist

17:35

and Pushkin podcaster Tim Harford discusses

17:38

the famous happiness experiment that echoes

17:40

in his own medical history.

17:42

I have to have colorsco is quite often

17:44

we don't want to go into too many details, but it's

17:47

a whole journey.

17:48

All that after a quick break. If

17:55

you look back through previous World Happiness Reports,

17:58

you'll see that a lot of effort has been put into

18:00

investigating why some people are happier than

18:02

others, and indeed why some nations

18:04

seem happier than their neighbors, but

18:06

even in our own individual lives, our happiness

18:09

tends to ebb and flow. We can be happy

18:11

one year and down the next. Over

18:13

the course of just an hour, we can experience

18:15

a whole gamut of emotions, both good

18:17

and bad. But there's an interesting

18:19

bit of happiness research that shows just how

18:22

slippery our grip on happiness can be. And

18:24

that's the topic that was picked up by our next

18:26

guest on this special show.

18:28

I am Tim Harft. I

18:30

am a senior columnist at the Financial

18:32

Times, and I'm the host of Cautionary

18:35

Tales, which is a podcast

18:37

all about the catastrophes of the

18:39

past and how we can learn

18:41

from them.

18:42

Tim admits to being obsessed by the work of Nobel

18:44

Prize warning psychologist Danny Kanneman,

18:47

and especially the work that Danny did on how

18:49

we can remember bad experiences fondly

18:51

given the right circumstances. In a series

18:53

of experiments, Danny found that we can go through

18:56

some pretty harrowing experiences, but

18:58

with a couple of tweaks about how that ordeal

19:00

ends, we can look back on even terrible

19:02

times in a much more positive way than we

19:04

expect.

19:05

He emphasizes the difference between

19:08

remember happiness and

19:11

experienced happiness, and

19:13

you would think happiness is just happiness, right,

19:15

But of course Danny Carman gets to be Danny

19:17

Carman by drawing these fine distinctions

19:19

that never occurred to the rest of us. So

19:22

let me give you an example that he ran

19:24

an experiment where they've got people to hold

19:26

their hands in ice water for

19:29

sixty seconds, and using

19:31

a kind of computer mouse, they could register how

19:34

much that was hurting holding your left

19:36

hand in this cold water. They get a nice

19:38

warm towel, bit of a break, and then they

19:40

got them to put their other hand in the water, not

19:42

for sixty seconds, but for ninety seconds. But

19:44

for the last thirty seconds the water

19:47

got slightly warmer, I mean not warm,

19:49

but just a little bit less horrible,

19:52

And then you got your warm towel. But

19:54

then the people participating in this experiment

19:56

were asked do you want to do their left handing

19:59

again or do you want to do the right hand thing

20:01

again? In other words, do you want sixty seconds

20:03

of pain followed by nice

20:05

warm towels or do you want sixty

20:07

seconds of pain followed by thirty

20:09

seconds of slightly less painful pain

20:12

followed by nice, warm towels, and people

20:14

wanted the longer experience. They

20:16

wanted the longer, more uncomfortable experience because

20:19

they didn't remember it as more uncomfortable.

20:21

What they recalled was, oh, well,

20:23

I put my hand in iced water and it was painful,

20:26

or there was that other time I put my hand in iced water and

20:28

it wasn't as bad. I didn't remember it as being as

20:30

bad. And the reason they don't remember it as being as bad

20:32

is because it didn't end as uncomfortably.

20:35

So in this particular case, Karnaman

20:37

was highlighting, there's a clear irrationality.

20:40

Obviously, it's better to be less

20:42

time and pain.

20:44

Yeah, less time and pain, like as you're experiencing

20:46

them, the only difference between the two experiences

20:50

was one of them had thirty extra

20:52

seconds of discomfort. But as you

20:54

remembered them, they're very different. Okay,

20:56

so what has that got to do with happiness? Well, it turns

20:58

out that this distinction between what you're experiencing

21:01

as you go through it and then how you remember

21:03

it applies to all sorts of things

21:05

in our lives. You might experience

21:08

a happy relationship, but then it ends in

21:10

a really messy way, and then suddenly

21:12

the whole relationship is like, well that was a disaster. You

21:14

might experience a pleasant vacation, but then

21:17

you have all kinds of trouble getting home from the

21:19

vacation, and then the whole vacation is

21:21

spoiled. And so this distinction between

21:23

the stories we tell ourselves about our lives,

21:25

what we remember about our lives, and how we're

21:27

actually experiencing our lives as we go along,

21:30

it really matters. And I'm not sure I would

21:32

say that one of these things is the truth, like

21:34

the experience is the truth and the memory is false. I

21:36

don't think it's that simple, But there's a distinction there

21:38

that's worth exploring.

21:40

Tim is, of course right. That distinction

21:42

can have a huge impact on our lives. Twenty

21:44

years ago, Danny Carneman conducted a study

21:47

to see if the medical procedure used at the time

21:49

to examine the human bowel for disease could

21:51

be made less uncomfortable, at least in

21:53

our memories. If it could, then

21:56

fewer people might duck out of the exam because of

21:58

the discomfort, and more lives would be

22:00

saved. So, just like in the ice

22:02

water experiment, Danny decided

22:04

to extend the duration of a colonoscopy.

22:07

At the end of the procedure that basically

22:09

the surgeon would leave the probe

22:11

in, so to speak, without wiggling it around.

22:14

So it was kind of uncomfortable, but fine.

22:17

People rated those colonoscopies as

22:20

less unpleasant, even though minute by minute

22:22

it was clearly worse than the shorter

22:25

procedure. The joy is because of

22:27

a family history, I have to have colonoscopies

22:29

quite often. We don't want to go into too many

22:31

details, but the whole thing lasts

22:34

a couple of days, and it's

22:36

a whole journey.

22:37

I once presented the colonoscopy study

22:39

to a group of medical doctors who chastised

22:42

me afterwards because they noted that when Danny did

22:44

that study and people were in serious

22:47

rectal pain during the entire colonoscopy,

22:49

and we could kind of vary how it ended. That

22:52

that was before the beauty of anesthesia

22:54

that we have today, And those doctors

22:57

said, your colonoscopy won't be nearly as

22:59

bad. You'll just kind of get knocked out, have no remembered

23:02

happiness or experienced happiness,

23:04

and then you get a nice little bottle of juice.

23:06

Yeah. So I mean as a connoisseur of

23:09

of having cameras shoved

23:11

whether the sun doesn't shine, Yeah,

23:14

they're fine. Actually, don't avoid. Do

23:16

not avoid your kernoroscopy people that

23:19

it's fine.

23:20

Yeah. I love the experience versus remembered

23:22

happiness stuff. I mean for a couple of reasons. One

23:24

is that I love that Danny's figured this out

23:26

and we can now start better engineering

23:29

enjoyably remembered experiences

23:31

just by making them kind of end pretty well

23:33

at the end, right, you know, if you've had a kind of

23:35

crappy vacation, you know, and it hasn't gone

23:37

so well at the end, you can just kind of stick in some

23:39

pleasant thing and then all of a sudden you can start

23:42

feeling a little bit happier. Danny also

23:44

gives a suggestion that, you know, if you've

23:46

had this vacation that's gone really well, and say

23:48

that the day that you're flying home, you know, everything falls

23:50

apart and terrible things happen. He

23:52

would say, well, then you need to kind of reframe

23:55

the vacation. There was the vacation, you

23:57

know, it ended on a high note, and then there

23:59

was the kind of crappy travel day home, but I'm just going to

24:01

kind of put that into a different mental slot, and

24:03

now all of a sudden, you can remember your vacation

24:06

pleasantly, even though it sort of ended on

24:08

a not so good no. And so I love this

24:10

strategy because by using what he

24:12

calls this peak end effect, where you're sort of paying

24:14

too much attention to the end of events, you

24:17

can sort of remember that the end of events matter

24:19

a lot, and you just need to make sure that things

24:21

end well, and then you'll kind of be happier. It's

24:23

also funny to me that I think there's so many natural

24:26

events in our lives that end well and we

24:28

remember them really fondly, like desserts

24:30

and orgasms and all these things that seem

24:33

to be particularly good at the end, and now

24:35

all of a sudden, we remember these things as

24:37

the best experience as ever.

24:38

Yeah, although meals, if

24:41

you go out for a meal, it doesn't then with dessert.

24:43

Have to end with the bill, ends with

24:45

the bill, Laurie, It.

24:46

Ends with somebody asking you to pay money. But

24:49

we still go out for dinner, and we

24:51

don't feel that was a mistake. So I guess we

24:53

successfully compartmentalize the bill as being

24:56

something else. But maybe

24:58

restaurants should experiment with getting

25:00

people to pay up front. If you go to really fancy

25:02

restaurant and it has a tasting menu, you can

25:05

actually know what the whole thing is going

25:07

to cost, and you could pay in advance. Love

25:09

this, Maybe that would be in everybody's

25:11

interest. You just remember the whole thing more fondly.

25:13

I do think some American restaurants have tried to come

25:15

over this. We have a few restaurants in my hometown

25:17

in New Heaven that when they bring the bill, they'll bring you like

25:20

a little candy or some Swedish fish or something.

25:22

So it's kind of this little surprise moment

25:24

at the ends. You're paying the bill, but then you get to have

25:27

some tasty candy at the end, but the bill at the beginning

25:29

will save them the candy cast. I love this idea.

25:31

Absolutely, But this distinction

25:33

between what we remember and what we

25:35

experience, I think it broadens out beyond

25:38

this narrow but important point of

25:40

we're really influenced by how things end. I mean, that's important

25:43

in itself, but if you think about, for example,

25:45

the standard question that people

25:47

are asked when they're asked to evaluate their

25:49

happiness, which is like, how's it going. I

25:52

mean, I realized there's a little bit more more

25:54

formal than that, but I mean that's like so metrics.

25:56

Folks that might say that is

25:59

but no, but seriously, all things considered,

26:01

you know, how happy were you this week? Right? That's

26:04

a remembered judgment. Right. People don't have

26:06

access to their experienced happiness during

26:08

the week at every moment when you're asking them

26:10

that question. All they have access to is that remembered

26:13

version. And if the remembered version is

26:15

biased, either because it pays too much attention

26:17

to what just happened or how things ended

26:19

or whatever, then we're just not going to get

26:21

great happiness judgments.

26:23

No, and you've phrased it, how do things

26:25

go this week? Which is one question.

26:27

But you could ask people how are things

26:30

going in general? How satisfied are

26:32

you with your life? Or you could ask people,

26:34

tell me about yesterday, how are things

26:36

yesterday? Or you can get them to focus in

26:39

in more detail. Let's walk through what happened

26:41

yesterday. Let's go through the breakfast, the morning

26:43

commute, you had these meetings, you had

26:45

lunch with a friend, all the different things you did.

26:48

So these are quite distinct ways

26:50

of thinking about measuring

26:52

happiness. If we're asked, for example, to

26:54

evaluate our lives and

26:56

we were just about to get married or were recently

26:59

married, you know, I'm getting married

27:01

or I just got married, is that like a huge

27:03

deal? But if instead it's like, well, my children

27:05

are graduating, they're going to leave home, they're

27:07

going off to college. Well that's what you

27:09

think about. Well maybe you're ill and that's

27:11

what you think about. But actually none of these things are

27:14

in fact as all encompassing as

27:16

they seem to be when you are directing

27:18

your attention at them.

27:20

Yeah.

27:20

I mean. The good news about these measures,

27:22

though, is that one could ask the question like, what are

27:24

we really trying to maximize? Right? You know, most

27:26

of the stuff we talk about in the Happiness Lab is all about

27:28

strategies that you can use to maximize

27:31

your happiness. As the question is what are

27:33

we trying to maximize? And I think to a

27:35

certain extent, what we're trying to maximize is what

27:37

people say in those remembered judgments. Right.

27:39

For example, if I do some sort of intervention,

27:42

right, like I get people to scribble in a gratitude

27:44

journal, or I get people to engage with

27:46

more social connection, and then later on I

27:48

asked them, hey, you know, all things considered, how are you feeling

27:50

with your life or how are you feeling yesterday? What was

27:52

your positive emotion like yesterday? And people

27:54

say like, oh, it was pretty good. Then

27:56

my sense is that that social connection intervention,

27:58

or that gratitude intervention, it did actually do

28:01

some work. It might just not be doing all

28:03

the work we assume it's doing because these judgments

28:05

are a little bit biased.

28:06

Yeah, I don't entirely disagree,

28:09

but I would want to raise a question.

28:12

So if Laurie, for example, you encouraged

28:14

your listeners to maybe go out

28:16

and have more diverse experiences,

28:19

go and meet more people, go to more

28:21

places, do more challenging things,

28:24

take more short vacations

28:27

rather than fewer long vacations.

28:30

Because all of these things are going to

28:33

lay down new memories, your life

28:35

is going to seem richer and more satisfying. I

28:37

mean, that's advice I would give myself, that's advice I

28:39

would take from you for sure. And yet,

28:42

and yet are you not actually

28:45

minute to minute potentially subjecting

28:47

yourself to a lot more stress, more

28:49

congestion, more uncomfortable situations,

28:52

more difficulty, more danger,

28:54

and actually you're going through your life potentially

28:57

having a worse experience moment

28:59

to moment, and yet at the end

29:01

of the year you look back at it and go, that was great.

29:04

Whose side to Thomas Shelling?

29:06

Economist Thomas Shelling would would talk about

29:08

this sort of thing, and he would raise

29:10

the question whose side should you be on in

29:13

that argument with yourself? Who's right?

29:15

And I don't think the answer is entirely obvious.

29:18

Yeah, I think one strategy we can use

29:20

to get better at it is to do

29:22

a better job of recognizing what's

29:24

happening in our moment to moment self. I think

29:26

the problem with the moment to moment self is that we're

29:29

not often doing that evaluation. We're not

29:31

taking time to be mindful and to recognize

29:33

what's going on. But I think these practices

29:35

where people engage in a little bit more mindfulness,

29:38

even when it is being mindful about kind of not

29:40

so great situations, you can kind of notice what

29:42

negative emotions you're experiencing. Those

29:44

kind of strategies can help us pay a little bit more

29:47

attention to the experience self in

29:49

the moment, so you're kind of kind of meta aware

29:51

as you're going through those kinds of events during

29:53

your day, and I think that can help us come

29:55

up with a little bit of a better judgment. Right,

29:58

we can kind of do the work to realize

30:00

like, yeah, you know, it was fun to think about going on that vacation.

30:02

That was great in my remembered happiness, but actually

30:05

I kind of hate the traffic. I kind

30:07

of hate going through you know, the tea essay or whatever.

30:10

That mindfulness can sort of help us pay attention,

30:12

and I think it can also help us pay attention in the other

30:15

direction too, Right, we can start noticing

30:17

the little good things about our life

30:19

that are going well, so that in times

30:21

that are kind of sucky, we can go back to our

30:24

experienced happiness and notice like, actually,

30:26

it wasn't that bad. I mean, this was to

30:28

a certain extent my experience during COVID,

30:30

where you know, in large part I was just starting

30:32

some of this happiness work. So I was doing all this work

30:34

and in the moment to kind of be mindful of

30:36

the taste of my coffee and be grateful for

30:39

the small things. And I think my overall

30:41

evaluation of how bad it was during COVID

30:44

is a little bit less bad than it could have been

30:46

in a remembered sense, because I was there

30:48

noticing mindfully some of these little

30:50

things in life that were good, that didn't go away even

30:52

in the midst of that pandemic time.

30:55

One thing I have been doing recently is

30:57

I have been keeping what is

30:59

sometimes called a good time journal. So

31:01

at the end of each day, I think back on what I've

31:04

been doing and how much fun it was. And

31:06

one thing I really noticed was

31:09

that intense physical exercise.

31:12

So going to the gym or kickboxing

31:14

classes, they were always great

31:16

in hindsight, and I know they

31:19

I mean they hurt, they properly hurt. At

31:21

the time, you were so glad. When they're over three

31:24

hours later, you're looking back and going that was

31:26

the best part of the day. And I guess that

31:28

that is part of the weirdness and the

31:31

fun of Danny Carnerman's distinction

31:33

that he's making.

31:34

I love that. I love that, as

31:37

you'd expect from a master podcaster. Tim's

31:39

talk there exercise sets us up perfectly

31:42

for the last part of this special show, which

31:44

Keen amateur runner Malcolm Gladwell turns

31:47

a familiar happiness maxim on its head,

31:49

it's.

31:49

The journey, not the destination. I just like, no,

31:53

it's the destination. Otherwise, what's

31:55

the point of the journey.

31:57

The Happiness Lab will be right back. Hey,

32:04

Hey, how's it going.

32:05

It's going well.

32:06

If I'm asking my fellow Pushkin host to re imagine

32:09

the World Happiness Report, there's no way I could

32:11

leave out revisionist history. Is Malcolm Gladwell.

32:14

I knew he was going to have something interesting and provocative

32:16

to add.

32:17

All right, we're ready, fire away, all

32:19

right.

32:20

The question I had for you, Malcolm, is if you were

32:22

an author of the World Happiness Report, if

32:24

you were doing your own chapter in this big report,

32:27

what would you want to talk about?

32:28

I would like to do my argument

32:31

that the phrase it's

32:33

the journey not the destination is

32:36

backwards. Oh, there's the whole

32:39

important class of happiness that's

32:42

about the destination and not the

32:44

journey. And there's

32:46

a special kind of deep and

32:49

enduring I think pleasure

32:53

fulfillment, where it's just all it's all

32:55

about where you end up, and that getting there

32:57

is sometimes hard and unpleasant, and

32:59

that that makes the ending

33:02

even sweeter. I've always

33:04

found something uniquely kind

33:06

of troubling about

33:08

that phrase, it's the journey, not the destination.

33:11

I just like, no,

33:14

it's like it's the destination.

33:17

Otherwise, what's the point of the journey.

33:19

Well, well, let's unpack that a little

33:21

bit, because there are spots. There are spots

33:23

where I agree with you, and there's spots where I think

33:25

the science might differ a little.

33:28

Like I think about this all time because I'm a runner.

33:30

Every time, I've been running my entire life.

33:32

So I've been running. I'm sixty,

33:35

I've been running for essentially fifty years.

33:38

Every time I go running, I have exactly

33:40

the same psychological experience, which

33:43

is I don't really want.

33:44

To do it.

33:46

I mean I make a place for it, and

33:48

I kind of formally look forward to it.

33:50

I packed my running clothes. I know when I'm going to go

33:52

running, I drive to a running place

33:54

or you know, I set it all up. But you

33:57

know, if you told me I could go

33:59

home and drink

34:01

a beer, you know, there's a powerful

34:03

temptation every time not to do it. And then

34:06

when I'm running, it's not always

34:08

pleasant. You know it's going to be. If

34:10

you're doing a hard track workout, it's hard,

34:13

it's daunting. I mean, you're pushing yourself

34:15

and it's but then when

34:18

you're finished, there is a kind

34:21

of experience from having finished

34:23

it that keeps me going back

34:25

to it for fifty years. It's

34:28

thirty two degrees out there today,

34:31

I'm going to go running. I don't want to go running in

34:33

thirty two degrees, but I will do it because

34:35

there's a plasure.

34:36

You know.

34:36

When I'm done and I'm back home and it's warm

34:38

again, I'm really really happy

34:41

that I did it right. But I

34:43

wouldn't describe the

34:45

actual experience. It's not masochism

34:48

because while I'm running, I

34:51

have in the back of my mind the

34:54

memory of the feeling of having finished

34:56

running, and that makes the

34:59

effort worth it and in

35:01

a certain way pleasurable in this sort of in

35:03

this sort of different way,

35:05

it's like you're testing yourself in this way

35:08

that you you kind of appreciate. That's

35:10

so that's the argument I think.

35:11

Yeah, I mean, I think it maps on to this distinction

35:14

that I feel like it's mountaineering folks

35:16

who started this distinction between type one and

35:18

type two fun. So type one fun is

35:20

really just the beer, just sitting home

35:23

having the beer, you know, like you know, hot

35:25

fudge Sunday's orgasms, Like just like the

35:27

in the moment stuff is just good

35:29

and deeply pleasurable, whereas type

35:31

two fun is sort of the opposite. It's like, again,

35:33

it's not fun in the moment. It's not fun when

35:35

you're like putting your shoes on and that first blast

35:37

of the thirty two degree weather when you're running. But

35:40

the fact that there's a goal at the end that you're going

35:42

to get to means the type two fun winds

35:45

up being really interesting. And this is like

35:47

just a distinction that like sports nuts and like

35:49

people who write in mountaineering blogs make, But

35:51

it's actually something that the economist George Lowenstein

35:53

studied himself. He wrote this paper of like why

35:55

climb a mountain? But the idea is like, why

35:58

would you ever do something

36:00

where it's like kind of again not masochism,

36:02

maybe not miserable in the moment, but it doesn't have fun

36:04

in the actual journey itself. It just has fun

36:07

when you hit the end of it. Yeah, And so he

36:09

argues that this is like a deep feature of

36:12

human pleasure seeking, is that we don't

36:14

just seek pleasure kind of in the moment for

36:16

the journey, like most of the good, meaningful

36:19

pleasures we get involve some hard stuff.

36:21

I mean, you're talking about running, but I know you're also a

36:23

dad and raising a kid, and that's the kind of thing

36:25

that in the moment, the pleasure is not great.

36:27

But when you get to these achievement moments like graduates

36:30

from kindergarten or do these fun things

36:32

like those matter a lot more. And so Lowenstein's

36:35

argument is that there's so much of human motivation

36:38

is motivation not to do the thing kind

36:40

of in the moment for the journey, but the

36:42

motivation kind of comes from the very

36:44

fact of there being an arrival at

36:46

the end. I think the problem, though, is when

36:48

everything's about the arrival at the end, and I

36:51

think this is the kind of thing I see maybe

36:53

with my students right where they get mistaken

36:55

about how much they're going to enjoy the arrival at the

36:57

end of I don't know, getting into a

36:59

super good college, or

37:01

getting married, or there's all these big

37:04

things in life that we put our happiness only

37:06

at the arrival at the end, and sometimes that can

37:08

set us up for like kind of mispredicting

37:10

how good that's going to feel. When students get into college

37:13

there's all these videos now of like the acceptance

37:15

moment when students click on the link and they find out

37:17

did I get into Yale or did I not get into

37:20

Yale? And when they click on the link

37:22

and they get in, they start screaming like yeah, that's great.

37:24

But students will self report afterwards like five

37:26

minutes later, well that

37:28

was a letdown, Like there's just the next caret

37:31

to go after in the next caret, And so I

37:33

think the challenge is, like how do we balance both

37:35

of those. On the one hand, we want to get the meaningful

37:38

pursuit from the big arrival moments in life,

37:40

but we don't want to like have those only

37:42

be the things, or be picking things

37:45

where their arrival isn't as good as we expected.

37:47

We kind of mispredict how awesome it'll be in the end.

37:50

I think part of the answer is, I'm thinking again

37:52

of the running example. Part of the answer

37:54

is in understanding that the kind

37:57

of satisfaction that you get from

38:00

the journey

38:02

is not less, it's

38:04

just different. So when I go

38:06

for a long run, there's always a moment

38:09

in a long run where like in the

38:11

middle, where you're

38:14

filled with this sense of awe

38:18

about what human

38:20

It's funny, in fifty years,

38:23

I've always had this, always, this moment wherein

38:25

I think, Holy mackerel, I

38:29

can't believe people. It's never

38:31

personal. It's all about the class of runners.

38:34

I can't believe we're capable of doing this,

38:37

Like, you know, you might be You're

38:39

eight miles into a twelve mile run, so

38:41

you've been out there for an hour, and

38:45

you're like, is it really possible for

38:47

someone to be a

38:49

middle aged man to go out and

38:51

run twelve miles and be fine about

38:54

it? Like it just seems like it seems incredible

38:56

to me, Like you're moving, You're not meandering,

38:58

You're like moving on. You know. It's sort of a fairly

39:00

decent clip. And that's like I

39:03

was it always. It fills me this with the same kind

39:05

of wonder that I get whenever I

39:07

see anyone doing something thing that

39:10

requires effort and

39:12

talent and persistence.

39:15

Right, it makes me feel better about

39:17

human beings that we can

39:20

we can sort of pull this off.

39:22

I love that and it fits with I mean, there's

39:24

this lovely work by Daker Keltner that looks at

39:26

all these domains in which people experience awe

39:29

and wonder, and I think we assume that

39:31

that's going to be, you know, these moments in

39:33

nature when you connect with the divine.

39:35

And he finds that the most common moments of awe

39:38

in people's everyday experience is when we experience

39:40

awe for the awesomeness of

39:42

human beings, like human's moral character or

39:44

their individual performance and achievement. And

39:47

so I love that you get that while you're running, but that's

39:49

not I mean, I'm not a runner, but I do, like, you

39:51

know, these long, hardcore yoga routines,

39:53

and that is not my experience in the moment

39:56

of the top yoga routine. My experience

39:58

is always like why am I doing this?

40:01

Sucks?

40:02

Like I need to figure out, like I

40:04

need to find ways to get to these deep moments of

40:06

awe during.

40:07

Because you know the There's another way in

40:10

which journeys differ from destinations,

40:12

which is that the pleasure that comes

40:14

from reaching the destination

40:17

is I don't want to say fixed,

40:20

it's one very specific, singular

40:22

thing, whereas the satisfaction

40:25

that comes from the journey, you're cycling through a

40:27

series of responses, so it's

40:29

thirty two degrees out or whatever.

40:32

And grew up in Canada going and running. I've

40:34

gone rung in minus twenty before there's

40:37

that dread, Oh you know, shit,

40:39

go ahead. Then there's like ten

40:41

minutes and you're like it's not that bad. And then

40:44

fifteen minutes in your relax and just sort of running

40:46

easily and you're not tired yet. And then there's that all

40:48

moment like I can't believe I'm doing

40:50

this. It's kind of amazing, right, and then there's

40:53

that kind of like it's almost over

40:56

exhilaration. It's like the

40:58

journey is six different emotional states.

41:01

The destination is one, and

41:03

it's just and I think whenever

41:06

I try to get non runners to run,

41:08

it's very difficult to explain them that

41:11

they're fixated on the first state, which

41:14

is, oh man, it's hard, I don't know about there,

41:16

and they forget no, no, no, there's like there's

41:19

there's five more after that. You just have to

41:21

get to them. This is a big deal in Canada

41:23

because of how much running you have to do in the

41:25

cold, that you have to understand

41:28

that cold only only

41:30

is a problem for the first five minutes.

41:32

And I think that's true for so many experiences that

41:34

ultimately give us happiness right, Like I think,

41:37

you know, on the show, we talk a lot about social connection,

41:39

for example, like just talking to a stranger,

41:42

which ultimately, once you're five minutes into it

41:44

and it's feeling good, is awesome and

41:46

you really enjoy it. But the friction

41:48

at the start of it, that first question

41:50

that kind of awkward or they're going to hate me. All

41:52

those predictions are off. And so I think this

41:54

is like maybe a deep truth of things that make

41:57

us like happy, is that a lot

41:59

of them start with some friction, and

42:01

like the first the first step is sucky,

42:03

and you have to overcome the sucky step to get to the

42:05

good part. But a lot of times we like miss

42:08

miss the sucky I mean, I think that that's a real

42:10

problem with so many of our happiness pursuits,

42:12

is that, like we have to overcome that moment

42:14

of friction, but there's often an opportunity

42:16

cost of the thing that has no friction, you know, for you

42:19

with the run, it's like instead of getting out in the like

42:21

thirty two degree day, sit home

42:23

and have the beer. Right, the frictionless thing is

42:25

always appealing, but to get to the thing that

42:27

makes us truly kind of feel great, we have to kind

42:29

of overcome those first steps of friction.

42:31

Yeah.

42:32

You know, various sports have different relationships

42:34

to these questions that we're talking about, and one

42:37

of the most extreme is cyclists.

42:40

I used to listen a lot to still do to Lance

42:43

Armstrong's podcast, which is actually

42:45

really good. You know, there's always a moment where

42:48

Lance has one of his fellow cyclists

42:50

on and they just talk about start talking about

42:52

suffering, and like you realize

42:54

they don't mean suffering the way we

42:56

mean suffering. I don't think there's anything

42:58

that's as painful as the Twitter France.

43:01

I don't I just nothing. Running a marathon

43:03

for a world class athlete, it's like two hours and

43:05

ten minutes and then you're done. The Twitter France

43:07

guys are out there like all day for

43:10

like weeks. It's insane. They're

43:12

like risking their lives, They're

43:14

losing twenty pounds, their butts,

43:16

sore, their back. I mean, it's just like incredible,

43:18

Like what they go through. The whole thing is just nuts.

43:21

It's just nuts. I mean it does look

43:23

to the rest of us like masochism, but

43:25

their ability to kind of

43:28

reinterpret masochism

43:30

as something fulfilling and

43:32

redeeming, and it's just it's just amazing

43:35

to me. I remember once Lence was talking

43:37

to some guy and they were talking about how they're trying

43:39

to teach their kids to suffer

43:42

in the way that they liked suffering, and how it was just

43:44

impossible. Like it's not a generational thing. It's

43:46

just that those cyclists

43:48

are so singular in their ability to reinterpret

43:51

pain.

43:52

Well, you'll appreciate that. In fact, one

43:54

of the most famous papers on what's

43:56

known as rosy retrospection, which is this

43:59

idea that you look back at an experience that was

44:01

kind of sucking, you think that was awesome. I would totally

44:03

do it again. It actually looked at competitive

44:06

cyclists they oh really yeah, yeah,

44:09

people's happiness at every at various

44:11

moments along the trip. And you know, when you're going to

44:13

the trip for cycling, you feel great, and then

44:15

you're on the trip and every rating is

44:17

low, and then you come back and it's

44:20

and you say, what was your average rating on the trip,

44:22

And that retrospective average rating

44:24

on the trip is like many points higher

44:26

than the actual average at any point on the

44:28

trip, So you kind of think back positively.

44:31

So maybe it's they didn't. They didn't look into the individual

44:33

differences that cyclist, and they were trying to

44:35

make a general point about human nature and rosy

44:38

retrospect, and they weren't making at individual

44:40

differences and cyclists in particular. But maybe

44:42

they should have. Maybe cyclists especially I.

44:45

Used to cycle a lot, and I just stopped. I

44:47

can't reinterpret my suffering the way they

44:49

do. Let's go do a century. You

44:51

know, you ride by one hundred miles, so

44:54

nuts. It's like, I'm perfectly

44:56

happy to suffer, but I will not suffer for six

44:58

hours.

44:59

So how do you get how do you get through the initial friction

45:01

on your runs? Right? What's the what's a

45:03

tip that our listeners can use to kind of bust

45:05

through that friction to get to the happier,

45:08

longer, more meaningful journey.

45:10

At the end starts low as

45:12

the obvious one. In the beginning, you're

45:14

trying to distract yourself and you're thinking about kinds

45:16

of things. You will eventually as you get into

45:18

it, be running associatively where you just

45:21

be focused on yourself. And that's very kind

45:23

of you know, as runners high whatever

45:25

they want to call it, but I don't. I prefer

45:28

it sounds to me, that makes it sound very extravagant.

45:31

It's just a kind of point of

45:33

equilibrium. You'll get there eventually.

45:36

I think a lot of the problems that beginning runners

45:38

have is it sounds very paradoxical,

45:40

is their runs are too short. So

45:43

go out for two miles. No, no, no, no, two miles.

45:45

I'm sorry, you're not transitioning

45:47

to anything if all you're doing is running two miles, Like

45:50

there is a kind of I've always thought many runers with me

45:52

that there is a magic about going

45:54

past an hour that once

45:56

you get into hour two, really

45:58

really lovely things happen. It

46:01

could be forty five minutes, but it's certainly

46:03

not fifteen minutes, like it's

46:05

not happening.

46:06

Yeah, this is cool. You've got to get You have to give yourself

46:08

the time, and then once you get into it, the

46:10

flow start kicking in.

46:12

Yeah. The same thing, by the way, with writing

46:14

a book, any kind of long concentrated activity,

46:18

is just you have to readjust your time

46:20

horizons. You're not making sense

46:22

of a draft in two

46:24

days. You know, if you're disappointed after

46:26

two days, it's because your time horizon was wrong.

46:29

And this raises a question of like how we can get to better

46:31

time horizons. But ironically, some

46:33

of the research by Shichi Twang and

46:35

Jennifer Aker at Stanford suggests that one way

46:37

we can get to longer time horizons is

46:40

to start thinking about the journey more. They have all

46:42

this work on what they call journey mindset. For

46:44

example, like I want to lose some weight, I want to know hit

46:46

my goal weight. Like no, Actually, what you want to do

46:48

is like be it your goal weight for a really long

46:50

time. Or I want to like get

46:52

this feeling of happiness that comes from like writing the book.

46:55

I want to get through the book Like no, you want

46:57

to experience the benefit of having written the book

46:59

and be able to talk to, you know, the people who read it

47:01

and experience those ideas later. Or for my

47:03

college students, like I want to get my degree, No,

47:05

you want to like get a degree so you can be a lifelong

47:08

learner and get the skills you need to learn

47:10

in the future. So they find that

47:12

it's easier to sustain motivation, for example,

47:15

for getting a college degree or writing for the book,

47:17

if you think of the kind of thing that

47:19

you're going to get out of it that's beyond the achievement,

47:22

and so ironically you might have gotten back to the fact

47:24

that the journey maybe is good.

47:26

No, Remember I didn't say journy didn't

47:29

matter. I was objecting to the phrase

47:31

it's the journey, not the

47:33

destination.

47:34

The journey and the destination.

47:36

It's the journey and the destination. Yes, I'll

47:38

buy that.

47:40

So Malcolm wants to see the destination given

47:42

a bit more love in the World Happiness Report,

47:45

while Tim Harford would like to add a chapter on

47:47

our memories of happiness, and Maya

47:49

Schunker thinks that tackling our disruptive

47:51

inner monologues should be included. But

47:54

we'll be back to examine what's in the Real World

47:56

Happiness Report. We'll talk to its

47:58

authors about what they think are the most pressing

48:00

issues facing us in twenty twenty four.

48:03

All that on the next episode of The Happiness

48:05

Lab with Me Doctor Laurie Santo's