Stop Caring What Other People Think About You | Bruce Hood

A happiness expert explains how to alter your ego, reduce self-consciousness, and boost "okayness". Bruce Hood https://brucehood.com/ has been a Professor of Developmental Psychology in Society at Bristol University since 1999, and for the past 5 years he has been concentrating on how to make students happier. He undertook his Ph. D. in neuroscience at Cambridge followed by appointments at University College London, MIT and a faculty professorship at Harvard. In this episode we talk about: How to define happiness How to be happy in the midst of a shitshow How to shift from being egocentric (self-focused) to allocentric (interconnected) The impacts of social isolation (and how to avoid it) The challenge of optimism (and how to overcome it) Finding a "flow state" through meditation  How to enhance your social connections Where "true, authentic happiness" comes from Controlling attention and rejecting negative comparisons The role of nature And much more Join Dan's online community here http://www.danharris.com/ Follow Dan on social: Instagram https://bit.ly/3tGigG5, TikTok https://bit.ly/3FOA84J Subscribe to our YouTube Channel https://bit.ly/3FybRzD Additional Resources: The Science of Happiness: Seven Lessons for Living Well https://www.simonandschuster.co.uk/books/The-Science-of-Happiness/Bruce-Hood/9781398526372 To advertise on the show, contact [email protected] or visit https://advertising.libsyn.com/10HappierwithDanHarris.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:04Dan Harris?

  This is the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm Dan Harris.

• 0:20Dan Harris?

  Hey, hey, everybody. How we doing? Today, we're going to talk to one of the world's leading happiness experts about how to boost your levels of okayness and optimism while turning down the volume on distraction, egocentrism, self-consciousness, and toxic comparison. Pretty good recipe. Bruce Hood has been the professor of developmental psychology in society at Bristol University since 1999. He got a PhD in neuroscience at Cambridge, followed by appointments at University College London, MIT, and a faculty professorship at Harvard. He researches child development, origins of superstition, self-identity, and ownership. For the past five years, however,

• 1:04Dan Harris?

  he's really been concentrating on how to make his students happier. As you'll hear him say here, he noticed a steep decline in happiness levels among his students, which tracks with the overall data on this front. And so, he's written a book. I don't want to call it new, but it's his latest book, and it's called "The Science of Happiness: Seven Lessons for Living Well." In this conversation, we talk about how do you define happiness? It's a pretty slippery term, actually. How to be happy when you're in the middle of a shit show? How to shift from being egocentric or self-focused to allocentric, meaning essentially interconnected? The impacts of social isolation and how to avoid that? The challenge of optimism and how to overcome it and actually boost your optimism quotient? Finding a flow state through meditation?

• 1:49Dan Harris?

  How to enhance your social connections? Where "true, authentic happiness" comes from? Controlling your attention and rejecting negative comparisons? The role of nature, and much more. By the way, if you want to learn how to reduce your overthinking specifically, which is a big problem for many of us, myself included, if you want to learn how to turn down the volume on that, we have a custom guided meditation for you, specifically tailored to this episode. It comes from our Teacher of the Month, Dan Mauricio. Throughout this entire month, we're offering these meditations only to paid subscribers who sign up at danharris.com. The analogy we like to use is that you can think of this podcast as the lecture, like when you were in school, and the guided meditations are like the lab where you pound

• 2:32Dan Harris?

  the wisdom of the conversation into your neurons. You can get all of the meditations, plus ad-free versions of this podcast, and access to my live video sessions where I guide meditation. You can get all of that and much more over at danharris.com. Join the party. We'll get started with Bruce Hood right after this.

• 2:50Speaker 01

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• 3:21Speaker 02

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• 3:56Dan Harris?

  Professor Bruce Hood, welcome to the show.

• 3:58Speaker 03

  Hello, Dan.

• 3:59Dan Harris?

  I'd love to get a little backstory on this book on happiness. As I understand it, and you'll correct me if I run afoul of the facts here, but you spent much of your career as a neuroscientist studying childhood development and also teaching. And you started to notice a change in your college students, which prompted you to pivot into looking at happiness. Am I roughly in the zone here?

• 4:29Speaker 03

  Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I've had a long and varied career and I'm a bit of a magpie. I'm really interested in anything which stimulates my curiosity. And I've always been fascinated by the human mind and how it develops. So that was my interest in the neuroscience of child development. And I've studied everything, babies as young as 23 minutes, up in the maternity hospital, all the way up into adulthood. But about 2018, we had a tragic set of events at Bristol University with the loss of several students. And this was really the peak of a rising tide in student mental health issues.

• 5:11Speaker 03

  And I was feeling quite desperate with all these unhappy young adults because for me, university should be the best time of your life, the most rewarding. And yet, they were so preoccupied with their mental health and their performance that they were becoming almost impossible to teach because they were really so distressed. And by coincidence, I was looking around, I discovered that a former student of mine, Laurie Santos, who I believe is a good friend of yours.

• 5:39Dan Harris?

  Yes.

• 5:39Speaker 03

  Laurie had encountered a very similar problem at Yale. And this led me to think, well, it wasn't Bristol per se, it's actually a sector-wide issue. A whole generation of students are increasingly unhappy. And she put together a course, I think it was called Psychology and the Good Life. And I contacted Laurie, I said, this sounds really, really great. And Laurie, being typically generous as she is, sent me her notes and some slides. And I put together my version, I called The Signs of Happiness. And I really just did it on the off chance it might make some difference. It wasn't a credit-bearing course, it was just offered. And it was like lunchtime, I remember it vividly, six hundred turned up. So and I didn't even have to advertise it. So clearly, there was a demand for this sort of information. So that's

• 6:23Speaker 03

  how it started. And then the university were so delighted by the response. They said, look, can you turn this into a credit bearing course? And that became the unit that I now teach since twenty nineteen. And it's like Laurie's course is very popular.

• 6:39Dan Harris?

  And now a book.

• 6:40Speaker 03

  And now a book. I mean, I've written a number of books. And as I say, my interests are really in the human mind. I'm fascinated by aspects of human thought that at first glance doesn't seem unsurprising. And then when you drill down into it, it can be really interesting. And I'm really fascinated by the theory behind the mechanisms. So there's more than enough happiness books out there. But I thought I could contribute something from my perspective, which is more about why, more about the mechanisms of what generates or gets in the way of achieving happiness. And that's what I felt was the contribution to the literature.

• 7:18Dan Harris?

  Do you have a definition of happiness?

• 7:20Speaker 03

  Uh, it's a question I'm often asked. For me, I just simply say it's a sense of things being comfortable. I mean that in a very general term, it's emotionally comfortable, a sense of fear being comfortable, just that sense of not complacency, but comfort. Things are okay. And that's what I mean by happiness. Though of course, people use it in different ways. Sometimes they're referring to your mood and your elation or your joy. Sometimes it's people referring to success, they're content. But for me, it's comfort.

• 7:55Dan Harris?

  Comfort, or would you say okayness would be a synonym?

• 7:58Speaker 03

  Okayness. Yeah, if that was a word, yeah, I'd be okayness. Things are are just going okay. Yeah.

• 8:05Dan Harris?

  Can you have okayness and happiness and comfort even in the midst of life's inevitable ups and downs?

• 8:13Speaker 03

  Well, that's the interesting thing, isn't it? I mean, in many ways, it could have been the science of unhappiness, because that's more or less the default. Our lives are full of challenges, and it's the extent to which we can address these challenges and rebound back from them, I think is really what marks the difference between someone who regards their life as being relatively happy compared to someone who feels unhappy. Someone who's unhappy tends to feel that they're not progressing, they're uncomfortable, they're feeling stressed, they're not enjoying many aspects of it. And very often, it's because they're unable to address whatever obstacles are happening to them, and we all face them. And on the course, that's what we kind of teach. It's really how to process those negative events, how to deal with them, how to resolve them, how to build resilience.

• 8:57Speaker 03

  And I think that's really what we're trying to achieve.

• 9:01Dan Harris?

  In the Dharma and Buddhism, by which I'm deeply influenced, the word that's coming to mind is equanimity, which I think of as like an okayness in the face of life's catastrophes.

• 9:14Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think that captures it very well. And the other thing, of course, is that there's no such thing as permanent happiness. That would be a very awkward and weird state of mind. In many ways, you have to experience the negative in order to appreciate when things are going well for you. But again, it's this ability to overcome this and the speed at which you can do that. It's when you're wallowing in misery and wallowing in those negative thoughts. That's generally what unhappiness is, to me at least.

• 9:41Dan Harris?

  Yeah, I'm just thinking of my own life. I've been very public about this. I went through a three-plus-year divorce from my former co-founders of a meditation app that I co-founded. And it was very traumatic for me. That's not to cast dispersions at my former co-founders. It took two to tango in this separation, but the amount of anger and anxiety that I felt in those years was... Intense, probably the most difficult thing I've gone through as an adult. And yet I was generally happy during the whole thing.

• 10:12Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 10:12Dan Harris?

  My relationship's really good and my outlook was reasonably positive. And there were challenges in my life, insomnia, anger, anxiety. And also, they were great years in my life.

• 10:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think it reflects the effort you put into that business and the personal attachment to it. And those are exactly the sorts of situations where you can feel really, you know, not so much desperate, but it really can impact on you more than you would imagine. I've done a startup in the past and it's your little child, it's your baby, you know, you want it to grow and you want it to thrive and you're very protective of it. And of course, when it starts to be threatened or taken away from you, it's a separation anxiety, a separation loss. So I totally get it.

• 10:54Dan Harris?

  Yes, my point was less about the loss and more about the fact that you can be happy. If you're working on the skills that we're going to talk about, that you describe in your book, one can be happy in the midst of a shit show.

• 11:07Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, no, I agree with that as well. I mean, we all have facets of our life and sometimes it's not always working perfectly. But in general, going back to that opening statement, it's a general sense that things are okay, as it were, on balance.

• 11:19Dan Harris?

  Yes. The book is structured around seven lessons. Let's walk through them. I don't know if we'll get through all of them, but they're really interesting. Lesson one is alter your ego, which I really like as a phrase. What do you mean by that?

• 11:34Speaker 03

  So one of the problems, I think, is that most of us live inside our heads. What I mean by that is our conscious awareness and our feelings, our emotions are the contents of our minds. And so we start off as a very egocentric individual. As children, we literally have difficulty conceiving other people's minds and imagining what other people are thinking about. And that's actually one of the major developmental processes over childhood is learning to appreciate that other people have different thoughts and have different feelings and reading other people and then learning to cooperate and communicate and interact with them in a way. But we never lose the egocentric bias or dominance. We still tend to see things from our own perspective.

• 12:16Speaker 03

  That can be okay unless you start to turn in on yourself and start to become your own worst critic. And I think this is the point, because children are very egocentric. They think they're the fastest runners and they're the, you know, they're always kind of trying to show up to their parents. But as they start to become enculturated and mix with other children, then a lot of the anxieties and social statuses start to enter into that kind of the thought processes. So they start to develop aspects which are threatening self-esteem. And we start to become more aware of our status and our standing and hypersensitive to criticism. And that's why adolescence is very much typified by a sense of wanting to belong, wanting to be accepted. And why rejection is so painful because we're such a social animal.

• 12:58Speaker 03

  And I know you've talked about this on previous podcasts, that is absolutely the imperative to kind of get on with everyone. Because the worst thing you could do is isolate or ostracize. So when I say alter your ego, I think you should shift from a kind of very self inward looking sense of self to considering and integrating with other people. So I call it a shift from egocentric to allocentric thinking. And the reason that really helps is I think it reduces the pain or the pressure that you feel when you see things in context, because you can start to see other people have things going on in their lives. And when you become more appreciative of other people's lives, then I think it puts yours into perspective. And of course, you get the benefits of social connection or the support that others can give you.

• 13:42Speaker 03

  If you're just dealing with your own shit show, as you say, then it can be incredibly isolating and amplified. And that's why I think we need to become more integrated. And all the evidence is totally in support of the notion of social connection.

• 13:54Dan Harris?

  So how does one move from egocentrism to allocentrism?

• 13:58Speaker 03

  Well, many of the positive psychology interventions that people typically do are effectively doing that. So if you think of expressing gratitude or acts of kindness, where you're actually forcefully taking into consideration other people's circumstances, if you're doing an act of kindness, you're literally reaching out to other people and trying to help them. So you kind of have to be a bit mindful of what their thoughts are about. If you're writing gratitude, you're starting to see yourself in the context of not only how lucky you are, but the way that other people have helped you along the way. And therefore, you're sort of expressing that connectedness with others around you. So those are two simple ways you can do that. One of the techniques I like, and I use it often in my public lectures, is Ethan Cross's work on psychological distancing, where you use language, literally, to get out of your

• 14:42Speaker 03

  head. So, most of us think in the first person, you know, I, me, and so on. But if you start talking about yourself in the third person, like Bruce is having this conversation with Dan, that linguistic shift tricks the mind of this egocentric perspective. And one of the benefits of that is it reduces sort of the impact of negative thoughts. But we never, unless we're royalty, we never talk about ourselves in the third person. It's a very unusual thing to do. So it's a kind of neat little party trick that I use to show that if you think about a problem, and I say, okay, imagine something that's gone really terribly wrong for you at the moment, and talk about it using I, and express your feelings using I and me, people will then feel pretty rubbish. But if I say, now, repeat that, but talk about, as Bruce is having this discussion, and he thinks it's not going so well, and

• 15:26Speaker 03

  he's worried about it, when you distance yourself using language, then somehow it doesn't seem to affect you as much. So that's another kind of simple trick you can do. But yeah, a lot of the things that we do, our social interactions, by their very nature, take us out of this very inwardly looking way, in order to kind of interact and communicate with other people.

• 15:45Dan Harris?

  Hard to do in an era of increasing isolation, driven by, you know, rampant individualism and technology. I want to pick up on and elaborate upon, you had three suggestions when it comes from moving from egocentrism to allocentrism, and I want to just expand on two of them. The list was acts of kindness, expressing gratitude, and psychological distancing. So in terms of acts of kindness, one little hack within a hack comes from my meditation teacher, Joseph Goldstein, who I quote all the time, to the point of closing in on plagiarism, except for I do give him credit. One of his little techniques is, if you have a thought to do something generous, these thoughts come to us all day long, but mostly we squelch

• 16:30Dan Harris?

  them, ah, they may not want it, or I don't have time to do that, or actually, that's too expensive. But we have these thoughts. If you can try to make a practice of tuning in to the thoughts... And not getting suckered by the second thoughts. So when you have a thought to give, do the thing. Joseph's been practicing this for many, many years and I'm more recently started. I don't always follow through, but when I do follow through, it's incredibly useful, like walking down the street in New York City and I see somebody asking for money, but like, uh, you know, my spare change is in my backpack and I'm in a rush. And then like, I'll get 10 feet down the street, like, you know what? Fuck it. Let me just get the money out and go back and do it. And it always feels good.

• 17:13Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 17:13Dan Harris?

  And then the other thing to pick up on on psychological distancing. Ethan Cross has been on the show several times. I'm deeply influenced by this notion of psychological distancing, especially in moments of suffering, where, you know, you can use your own name or I'll say, dude, like dude, yeah, this is a brutal situation. I use it a lot with insomnia. You're likely to get two hours of sleep tonight and you are likely to be reasonably unhappy most of tomorrow, but you have been through this a million times.

• 17:43Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 17:43Dan Harris?

  You will be fine and the next night you know you will get sleep. So you're good, you're good. And it's enormously powerful.

• 17:51Speaker 03

  Yeah, I agree entirely. And it's like, rather than being a critic, it's like being your coach.

• 17:55Dan Harris?

  Yes.

• 17:55Speaker 03

  And hearing that support from someone else is just what you need sometimes to get perspective. But left to our own devices, we have this kind of tendency to spiral inward and blow everything out of proportion. So that's really what that kind of chapter is trying to, to unpick. And also the whole sense of self is something that's fascinating me. If you're a Buddhist, then you'll be fairly, fairly aware of the kind of controversy of the whole issue. What is the self? And for me, I love the idea it's constructed, which means it can change. And so I really embrace the Buddhist approach on that, which is to see ourselves as a story unfolding and a story which can be rewritten and change over time, which means that nothing is inevitable. And I think that's a hopeful message because very often when you speak to people who are in the depths of despair,

• 18:37Speaker 03

  one of the things they think is that things can never change, but they do change.

• 18:42Dan Harris?

  Yes, I think that is enormously powerful, enormously powerful. Just on a definitional tip, I should have asked this earlier, but can you define allocentric versus egocentric? I'm guessing that egocentric is that your sense of self really is based in your own ego and allocentric is based in a sense of all.

• 19:05Speaker 03

  Yeah, so if you imagine, we call them sociograms. If you imagine yourself at the center and then all the people around you in your sphere, as it were, and you represent that as a series of arrows and how you're connected to people. Someone who's overly egocentric will first of all represent themselves as big and large and everyone else is more sort of diminutive and it's all going in one direction. It's all about me. We call them narcissists and sometimes they're very successful and rise to positions of power. But we're not going to go there. That's all very well, but unfortunately we can't all be narcissists because if that was the case, then nothing would ever get done. You need, as a social animal, we need to interact with each other. Allocentric, again, you can represent that as a sociogram, but now you can see the connections

• 19:49Speaker 03

  between the people outside of your circle. You start to see that it's reciprocal and it all requires give and take and you see yourself as more interconnected with all that's around you. So it's really that kind of distinction between yourself at the center of your own universe and anyone with a kind of young child will know what they're like. They can be incredibly egocentric. Shifting from that kind of natural developmental tendency to one where you're starting to take into consideration the impact you have on others and also reciprocally interact with them. And I think that's what I mean by allo, it means other, other focus or allocentric. So yeah, that's the kind of general story that I think is, but we never lose the egocentric view is what I'm saying. We've got to keep fighting that. We've got to keep working on that. And that's why I think a lot of the positive psychology interventions work, even something

• 20:34Speaker 03

  like meditation. You know, that works because it tries to quell the disturbed mind, as you well know, if you're focusing on your breath, you're shifting it away from the internal dialogue. You're monitoring either your breathing or you're monitoring external sources. So you're shifting the attentional focus away from the inner monologue is what I'm saying.

• 20:53Dan Harris?

  Yeah, just a slight tweak. It's not so much quelling the disturbing mind, it's accepting the disturbing mind, which then leads to a kind of calming or dissipation.

• 21:08Dan Harris?

  Because you're seeing that it consists of fluxing constituent parts.

• 21:13Speaker 03

  That's right. A former colleague of mine, Dan Wagner, used to talk about this ironic thought suppression. So if you try to stop your thoughts, you try to suppress them, then you get a stronger rebound effect because the act of trying to stop yourself having a thought makes it paradoxically stronger. So that's why the acceptance is a better way of dealing with it, rather than drawing attention towards them.

• 21:34Dan Harris?

  I want to go back to your social graph. Was that what you were calling it? Social?

• 21:37Speaker 03

  Sociogram.

• 21:38Dan Harris?

  Sociogram.

• 21:39Speaker 03

  So Dan, if you were to draw a sociogram, it would include obviously your nearest and dearest. And you'd have the strength of your relationship there. And then there'd be people on the sort of further away from you in your circle of friends. And then there'd be the people that you encounter on a daily basis. So you can represent these as interconnections and you can represent the strength of that as a thickness of the line, if you like. But it's the extent to which you feel that you're reciprocating. So you might feel there's a very strong reciprocal relationship with your spouse, hopefully, or your nearest and dearest. But then if it's others outside of that, you could see as being weaker or stronger, more reciprocal or not. So it's really how you kind of visualize our interactions. It's used by psychologists and sociologists to represent our map out the networks that we engage in.

• 22:24Dan Harris?

  The reason why I went back to it is that I like thinking in visual analogies, and I'll run one by you. The self in the era of social media seems to exist in a hall of mirrors where everything reflects back upon you. If you're looking at other people, you're comparing yourself to them. And if you're posting things, you're waiting for people to like it. It really reinforces, in I think a quite insidious way, egocentrism. Whereas in the Dharma, the analogy they use is Indra's net, where you are a node in a vast web.

• 23:04Dan Harris?

  And at each node of that web, there is a mirror that reflects all the other nodes. So basically, your head is pulled out of your ass. You're not stuck in solipsism. You are embedded in a larger universe and that view is really soothing.

• 23:24Speaker 03

  Yes, I agree with that entirely. I think your comments about social media are spot on. In many ways, it's antisocial because it's this sort of compare and despair phenomenon that we keep hearing about, that people are only validating themselves or seeking validation the entire time, which is like a very needy child. So I go back to this sort of egocentric bias that a lot of us are born with. Well, we're all born with it. It's the extent to which we can relinquish it and let go of that and see ourselves as more interconnected is really the path to becoming a happier person. Because otherwise, you're always going to be comparing and you're always going to feel inadequate. And it doesn't matter on whatever dimension you're thinking about. There's always someone who's doing better than you.

• 24:04Speaker 03

  And if you succumb to social media and try to measure up to all these unrealistic measures of success, you're just never going to really do so. So that's why it's really not the best place to spend your time. I think people are kind of wising up to it, but you know, I look around, I walk around a metropolis, so you go through a city, everyone is staring at their phones. They're taking away what were the basic niceties of exchanging information, like asking for directions or whatever, all those sorts of things which required us to have those little subtle communications have disappeared. And that's why I think we're becoming increasingly isolated, as you say.

• 24:41Dan Harris?

  It's counterintuitive because you would think the best way to get happy is to focus on yourself and yet that's only partly true.

• 24:49Speaker 03

  Yeah, and I think that is a generational thing here. I mean, this whole identity thing, which was driving a lot of the younger generations, focusing on the self, prioritizing self, self-care. I mean, yeah, sure, you should look after yourself, but not to the exclusion of others around you. And I think it's getting the balance right. What I'm not suggesting, by the way, I should just say, is not that you become self-less. I think that's equally bad. You need to get the balance right because it's the interconnection of things which is the importance.

• 25:16Dan Harris?

  Yes.

• 25:17Speaker 03

  I think we talk about that in a later chapter, which we're not there yet, but.

• 25:20Dan Harris?

  Yeah, just to put a button on this first lesson, I have a little tattoo that says for the benefit of all beings and that is not. A call for calamitous altruism because all beings includes me. So it really does speak to a balance.

• 25:37Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 25:37Dan Harris?

  You did use the word isolation and that does bring us to lesson number two, which is to avoid isolation. Can you say more about that?

• 25:44Speaker 03

  It stems from this well-established finding that of all the things which contribute to our earlier deaths. It turns out that isolation loneliness seems to play one of the most important factors, which I think was really striking when this data started to emerge. It's not just our physical, but it's our mental health depends on our social connections. And that's why we're so sensitive to any potential threat of being isolated or ostracized or rejected. That's why we feel it emotionally. Emotions have the same word as motivation. They come from the Latin meaning to move. So emotions drive us to do things. They move us to do things.

• 26:23Speaker 03

  And one of the things we're driven to do is avoid being isolated because it's so critically important to us in our evolution. Not all people, by the way. I mean, I would say whenever I've said this, people say, well, I kind of like my isolation. So I would say, of course, there are moments of solitude, which can be very beneficial. But in general, most of our behavior is driven towards our social interactions.

• 26:47Dan Harris?

  Yeah, look, there's a spectrum, introversion, extroversion spectrum. And if you're further along the introversion spectrum, you don't need as many social interactions or close friends, but you do need some. And also there's a question of agency. Are you isolated because you've chosen in a healthy way to get some alone time? Or are you isolating because you've chosen in an unhealthy anger or fear-based way? Or because you've been shunned or excommunicated by your own personal tribe? That agency factor matters a lot.

• 27:21Speaker 03

  Yeah, Nelson Mandela wrote about it in his autobiography, The Long Walk to Freedom. He talked about his time on Robben Island when he was put into solitary confinement. And he said it was the worst. People would prefer to be physically tortured rather than isolated. So that just speaks to the the power of that as for people who require that.

• 27:38Dan Harris?

  You have some data in the book about the impact of social isolation on pain tolerance and reaction to stress. Can you say a little bit more about that?

• 27:47Speaker 03

  Yes, this is not my work directly. I'm referring to a series of, actually, there's a bunch of researchers doing this. There's work, which is epidemiology work, looking at morbidity risks. Famously, loneliness has a morbidity risk which is equivalent to fifteen, smoking fifteen cigarettes a day, I think is the famous bite line. But then there's more experimental studies looking at inducing pain. So for example, you can give people electric shocks and people will tolerate much higher levels of pain if they're with somebody, with a with a partner. All of these sort of speak to the beneficial effects of having the support around you. I know you were speaking to Robert Waldinger. I think there's evidence from the Harvard study showing again that social isolation

• 28:29Speaker 03

  is a really major contributing factor to earlier death. So I think these are all pointing along the same lines that there is a real benefit to having good, strong social relationships. And now, of course, social support provides a lot of practical things as well, you know, just looking after your health, having someone tell you, you know, maybe you shouldn't be doing this, maybe you shouldn't be doing that. So I think there's lots of benefits.

• 28:52Dan Harris?

  Yeah, Waldinger's work has been very influential in mine. For those who don't know him, he's the latest director of the Harvard Study for Adult Development. It's one of the longest running studies in the history of science and following many generations of families in the Boston area, trying to get a sense of what are the variables that lead to a long and healthy life. And the most important variable is the quality of your relationships. And I often You know, wag my finger at people and say, look, we're in an era of optimization. Everybody's tracking their steps, tracking their sleep, trying to achieve ketosis, whatever it is, but this is the thing to optimize. And very few people are talking about this on social media. So let me put it to you. If lesson number two in your book is to avoid isolation,

• 29:35Dan Harris?

  what are the practical steps we can do to get there?

• 29:38Speaker 03

  Well, I think reaching out to people in a way that doesn't necessarily involve technology, I mean, a phone, of course, is a good way to connect. But basically reconnect with people in a way which is meaningful, rather than just sending a text or something which is cursory. People generally don't do that because they're kind of fearful that maybe it'll be awkward. Maybe they don't want to impose. But I think I talk about this in the later chapter. It turns out, and this is Nick Epley's work from Chicago, that actually people really enjoy the spontaneous connections. Other things I've talked about in the book are all about joining a choir, finding the third place, which is disappearing. It used to be the sort of opportunities just to spontaneously meet other people. So, you know, get a dog, go for a walk in the park with a dog

• 30:23Speaker 03

  and you soon start talking to other dog owners. There's this phenomenon that when you've got a shared interest, then you can start interacting with other humans. So I think it's just recognizing every opportunity you can to forge those social connections and take it in speaking. Exchanging a compliment with a barista or whoever is serving. You know, very often their days are very mundane and people are not talking to them. But make the effort just to reach out to others because they will probably enjoy it more than you imagine.

• 30:52Dan Harris?

  Barbara Fredrickson, who's been on this show, has done a lot of good work around what are called microinteractions, talking to the barista, the mailman, people you're passing in the hallway on the street. And that's like an undertapped, overlooked source of happiness in your daily life. But just want to go back to something you said about third places. What, can you define that for people?

• 31:12Speaker 03

  Well, the third places were basically not work and not home. And it used to be the bars or the clubs or all those social gatherings that where people could meet, they didn't necessarily have to be their spouse or their work colleagues. It was other people where they could talk about things that they wouldn't necessarily talk about with their spouse or with their work colleagues. And I think that is rapidly disappearing. The bowling alley culture, can't remember who it's a.

• 31:36Dan Harris?

  Robert Putnam, Bowling Alone.

• 31:37Speaker 03

  That's right. Yeah, I think he coined that term. It's this what's fast disappearing in a world of technology where you can immerse yourself entirely in virtual worlds. And so a lot of the third spaces are disappearing. I mean, they're disappearing in the UK. We used to have youth halls and places where the kids were hanging out and doing things. But now that seems to be rapidly evaporating. So yeah, it's those places which facilitate communications with people who aren't necessarily your immediate family or your work colleagues.

• 32:06Dan Harris?

  Yeah, the Surgeon General or now former Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, his recommendation here is volunteer. So, you know, if there's no bowling league near you, just volunteer at a soup kitchen or a pet adoption agency or whatever. It is a great way to meet other people and also it's ennobling.

• 32:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, my wife does that now. She was a physician and she retired several years back. For the past year now, she's been volunteering with a soup kitchen. It's one of her most enjoyable experiences and she just loves to talk to people anyway. So it's a real opportunity to kind of connect. So yeah, it's surprisingly rewarding.

• 32:46Dan Harris?

  Coming up, Bruce Hood talks about how to control your attention and reject negative comparisons. The challenge of optimism and how to overcome that challenge. Finding a flow state through meditation and much more.

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• 33:31Dan Harris?

  Lesson number three is reject negative comparisons.

• 33:35Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, this is because we have a brain which has really evolved to pay special attention to negative information. And the argument is along the lines that it's much better from an adaptive evolutionary point of view to sort of attend to things which may potentially eliminate you from the gene pool. So that's why you pay more attention to bad news or threats than sitting on your laurels and just thinking life is going fine. Because it only takes one really bad thing to take you out of the equation. So this is a line of work which fits with a series of really quite different studies showing that we seem to focus more on negative information. So if you're listening to stories or you're reading the paper, there's one great study where they got people to, they thought they

• 34:19Speaker 03

  were actually doing a study of reading papers, but they were looking at the eye movements. And they were noticing that people were focusing on all the negative information. So there is this sort of bias in our brains to really pay attention to that. Visually, we spot people's frowning more than we spot smiling and screams are more attentive than. So everything is wired from a very sensory, basic level to pay attention to negative information. And then, of course, at a more cognitive thought process level, we tend to ruminate and fixate on things when they've gone wrong more than when they're going right. And as a writer, I assure you, you know, I can't stop myself, you know, looking at that negative review despite the fact that everyone thinks it's a great book, apart from that one person. And that will just niggled and eat away at me. And I've got

• 35:02Speaker 03

  to really use that third person distancing. Stop yourself. That's just silly. But yeah, that's part of the reason we seem to be specially attentive. Also, we form impressions are stronger when we hear negative information. And it's really difficult to overcome something when we've heard something bad about somebody. So being balanced is quite a challenge.

• 35:21Dan Harris?

  So what can we do about this?

• 35:23Speaker 03

  Well, being mindful of it is good, as I said, and also trying to deliberately avoid, well, see off social media, I think, is also, I think, a recipe for, or it's at least a solution to some extent, especially if you are sensitive to criticism. Just be mindful of what's going right in your life and focus on that. I think that's what I would suggest. And I really should probably mention this earlier, but the act of writing things down, I think, is an incredibly powerful exercise. And one of the things we recommend is actually writing down things which have gone well for you. So this is the writing the three good things. Now, I don't know, it's probably Sonia Lubomirsky or one of these other guys who have done this as well. But the three good things, Marty Sivikman will undoubtedly have done work on this. But it's the proactive behavior of writing things down in a journal.

• 36:08Speaker 03

  And the reason that's very powerful is, first of all, it gets you off your phone. And secondly, it allows you to keep a record. And I think that's a very important device. Keeping a diary, keeping a journal is a very tangible bit of evidence or data to see and review when you, in a month's time, you can review your life and you can see how things are actually going a lot better than you often imagined. So I do it for recommending writing down three good things, but also for processing when things are not going right for you. And I think keeping that external journal takes it out of your mental space, as it were, and it makes it a kind of piece of evidence that you can review. And it gives you a real context that you often lose if you're just trying to remember how things were all the time.

• 36:52Dan Harris?

  I love that. Lesson four, become more optimistic.

• 36:59Speaker 03

  Well, that is a challenge these days, isn't it? Especially given the fact that we tend to focus on negative information. Optimism can be partially tweaked, like happiness. I think there are dispositions to being optimistic or pessimistic. But I would also point out that, you know, you can be optimistic in one facet of your life and pessimistic in another. So it's not as if it's kind of just generically, you're one or the other, glass half full or half empty. That said, I think there are ways in which you can start to be more balanced because, you know, going back to lesson three about the focusing on the negative. If you start to try to deliberately reappraise your life in a more positive way, over time, and this is Marty Seligman's work, over time, this will tend you to be a lot more

• 37:45Speaker 03

  flexible in the way you're processing negative information rather than going to the worst case scenario. If you actually spend the time processing it in a way which is more balanced, or indeed looking for the silver lining on every cloud, then over time you will eventually sort of, that will become the default way of thinking, rather than always going to the worst case scenario. So the evidence suggests that that actually will change. And again, I would go back to recommending journaling, writing a situation down of, if you're having a terrible day or something's gone really wrong, rather than being pessimistic about the consequences of that, try and review it in a way which looks for the best possible outcome. That will be a way of actually sort of shifting the needle away from pessimism to a more optimistic view.

• 38:26Dan Harris?

  So if you've just been laid off, just to take an example, and you're having trouble summoning any optimism, writing about it while deliberately trying to consider a more optimistic view can nudge you in that direction.

• 38:44Speaker 03

  Yeah, so in the Seligman technique, it's called A, B, C, D, E. There are two parts to A, B, C, and then D and E. A, B, C stands for adversity, belief and consequences. So in that first phase, you write down what happened. So you've just been laid off at work. What you believe that reflects, you might think, oh, that means I'm not good at my job. And what do you think the consequences, well, I'm not going to have any money and I might lose my house. And so you write down everything and you articulate every worst case scenario. And the reason you do that is because you're laying out on the table, if you like, every scenario possible. Having exhausted that, all right, you then switch gear and go to the dispute. And D and E is dispute or defend and energize. And so what you're supposed to do in this phase is you're supposed to look at this and say, look, okay,

• 39:29Speaker 03

  look, you're not the only one who was laid off. It's not you alone. You've been in the situation before. This might be an opportunity to to reskill. It might be an opportunity to look at. So in other words, you step out of yourself. You become like an attorney or a defense lawyer and say, okay, you say this, but actually, another way of looking at it is X, Y, and Z. And with a lot of creativity and imagination, you can start to find some glimmers of positive outcome, even in the worst case scenarios. And then having done that, this leads you to be energized to realize that something that was really obsessing you and compelling you for, you know, 15 minutes ago, that you were so concerned about, you should feel a bit better about. So it shows that you can change in the space of 15 minutes, just by reviewing the situation and thinking

• 40:10Speaker 03

  about it more positively. It's a case of trying to process information in a much more adaptive way, rather than just resorting to the worst case.

• 40:19Dan Harris?

  What is the W O O P technique?

• 40:21Speaker 03

  Looping. It stands for Wish, Outcome, Obstacles, Processes. It's Gabrielle Ottingen's work, her research. I mean, most of us would like to lead better lives, we'd like to develop better habits, we'd like to do things better, but very often, we don't actually follow through with it. And part of the reason is, is because just wishing for something to be better isn't good enough. You actually have to make a plan. And that's what this technique's all about. It's called mental contrasting. And so what you do is, if you want to change your lifestyle, if you want to develop a healthier lifestyle, or eat more healthily, or give up smoking or drinking, whatever, you have to have that wish at the beginning to motivate you. So that you imagine the best case scenario, saying, okay, I'm going to be a healthier person if I do exercise. Okay, having done that, that's

• 41:05Speaker 03

  not enough. You then have to consider what are going to be the obstacles. You know, so you got your wish, what you want, what is the outcome you're hoping for, but then what are the obstacles that get in the way of that? So it might be, well, I kind of eat at McDonald's all the time, and it's really convenient, and that sort of thing. Well, then you have to sort of make a contingency plan, saying, well, if that comes to mind, then what you do is, you know, you get rid of your loyalty card from McDonald's. I'm not sure if they have one, by the way. But you avoid the circumstances which lead to that sort of behavior. So you you make a contingency plan to overcome or bypass the obstacles that get in your way. So that is a combination of kind of wishful thinking, positive energy to drive you towards a goal. But then, actually, what do you need to do in order to achieve it? So that's what's meant by whoop. Wish, outcome, obstacles, and plan.

• 41:50Dan Harris?

  Just one last question on optimism. Is it possible that we can take it too far?

• 41:56Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's when you become reckless. So there are three dimensions by which optimism and pessimism differ, okay. So one is the extent to which you think situations are never going to change, the tendency to overgeneralize, and the tendency to internalize. So for example, if you fail an exam, you might sort of say, I failed an exam, I'm never going to be able to pass. So that's where you think things can never change. And then if you overgeneralize that, you say, I failed an exam, I'm bad at everything I do. That's where you generalize, extrapolate, and you might internalize that and say, I failed an exam, it's my fault. An optimist would say, okay, I failed one exam, but I'll get better next time. Or they then might say, oh, I failed one exam, but I'm good at other things. Or they might sort

• 42:39Speaker 03

  of externalize and say, I failed an exam, but it wasn't me. It's that professor who he thinks he's a great lecturer. It wasn't my fault, it's his fault. So you can see how you can deviate and how you make attributions to the situation. But if you never take responsibility, if you never actually appreciate that maybe the exam's really quite important, and maybe you do need to pay attention, you do need to change, then you're never going to actually adapt or pass your exams. So you can become reckless if you don't actually take into consideration reality. So being overly optimist, that can turn into unrealistic expectations and reckless behavior.

• 43:14Dan Harris?

  Okay, so lesson number five is to control your attention. Please say more.

• 43:20Speaker 03

  To me, I think this has been one of the most remarkable areas of research that I've become incredibly interested in. And this is the reality that we spend a lot of the time not actually being aware of our circumstances. Our minds are wandering remarkably a lot of the time. This comes from a former colleague of mine, Dan Gilbert, Cummingsworth and Gilbert did this study where they just randomly contacted people at different points of the day using an app. And so what are you thinking about what you're doing? Are you happy now? And what they discovered is that people were mind wandering actually 50% of the time effectively. So they weren't thinking about what they were doing, their minds were off. And what was remarkable about this finding was that a lot of the time, even though they

• 44:05Speaker 03

  were just thinking neutral thoughts, they were relatively unhappy. And so that was kind of surprising. So when we're mind wandering, you might think it's pleasant daydreaming. But actually, a lot of the time, we're kind of ruminating over things, you know, we're worrying about unresolved conflicts or thinking about problems up and coming. We just recently ran a study of our students and we found my wandering sixty percent of the time. So it's happening a lot. And actually, just like Killingsworth and Gilbert, we found that when their minds were wandering, they were generally relatively unhappy compared to when they were fixated and focused on a task. So our default appears to be drifting all the time. Paying attention is really tough. And I think that's one of the reasons that social media is so pernicious and so powerful

• 44:50Speaker 03

  because it captures our attention. And that's why you can be sucked into this sort of vortex of information overload. And we tend not to be very mindful of the things that we're doing. And that's unfortunate because when you do draw your attention or you do focus your attention on a task, or a task is so engrossing that it really requires you to pay attention, then you get those moments of flow, which is this very positive state where time appears to elapse and you just, you feel very content as you're kind of drawing your attention and your resources onto the task. So yeah, control your attention because otherwise it's going to be captured.

• 45:26Dan Harris?

  We've talked about flow a million times on this show and I always find it a little bit maddeningly elusive because I don't know how often I get into flow personally or what I could do to make that happen more frequently.

• 45:40Speaker 03

  It's probably most likely in those circumstances are activities which match your skill set. So this is the kind of definition that if, if there's something that you're pretty good at doing and you're in a situation where you have to really deploy the expertise, that will then become absorbing. So for me, it's writing. I'm a relatively good writer and I can write for hours and hours and I forget sometimes to, you know, I've wasted, or not wasted, I've spent so much time writing. Sports athletes can find moments of flow when the challenge is sufficiently good that it gets them into it. Lots of hobbies, I would argue, could be inducing that sense of flow. It's really tapping into competence and matching the, your ability with the circumstances or the requirements of the situation.

• 46:25Speaker 03

  If you are overwhelmed by a challenge, then it can be anxiety inducing. If it's not challenging, then it's boring. The equation is really to find those situations which really stimulate your ability to address them.

• 46:38Dan Harris?

  Yeah, I'm just trying to think of my own life. Like, I write a lot, but I hate it. I exercise a lot. I don't hate it, but it's I'm rarely in flow, I think. Except for maybe when I'm exercising with a big group of people and we're all kind of moving through. Yeah, maybe there are a few moments there, but the one place where I realized maybe I'm in flow is I like. I give a lot of speeches and I don't like the beginning part of it where I have to do five, 10, 15, 20, sometimes 30 minutes of a rehearsed speech. But the Q and A is almost always, I think, a flow state for me.

• 47:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, I know what you're talking about. I I love lecturing as well. And when it's going really well, the time just disappears, evaporates. It seems very fluid. And that is that you're thinking on your feet. You literally are having to use your brain in a way that you wouldn't normally be doing. So I think I would call that flow. Yeah.

• 47:29Dan Harris?

  Yeah. So my friend George Mumford, who teaches meditation to elite athletes, he worked with Michael Jordan, Kobe, to this day is working with professional athletes. He often describes meditation as a way to get you flow ready.

• 47:44Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 47:44Dan Harris?

  Would you agree with that?

• 47:46Speaker 03

  I would indeed. And one of the things I didn't mention earlier, I should have addressed this, is that we now know that when you're not focused on a task, there's a state of the mind called the default mode network, which kicks into action. This is discovered by chance, by the way. It was a a network in the brain. They discovered when they started the first imaging studies where you measure blood flow in the brain using magnetic resonance imaging, fMRI. And they asked the various participants, just lie on the scanner and don't move because we need to get some baseline measures before we get you to do anything. And so they assumed that basically the brain would shut down or go into a steady state. Paradoxically, what they found was actually an increase of activation in the front of the back of the brain as a network. And that's why they call it default mode network. That's the default when you're not actually doing something.

• 48:31Speaker 03

  Now, the reason that's relevant is that when your mind is wandering, your default mode network is actually active. And also, the default mode network is related to being relatively unhappy. And I think the linking explanation and going back to what I said, that I love explanations and mechanism. Is that when you're not engaged in the task or in flow and you're just simply your mind's wandering, your default mode network is kicking in and that is sort of, I think, rumination. And by the way, there are studies by Brewer showing that if you meditate meditators, you put them in a scanner, they don't have activation of the default mode network, or at least it's not as much. So I think what's going on in the meditation is it's turning off that internal story that we're telling ourselves or that criticism that we're telling

• 49:15Speaker 03

  ourselves. So that's how I see it as a kind of, it's a mechanism of explanation here.

• 49:20Dan Harris?

  Yeah, Dr. Judson Brewer is a friend and frequent flyer on the show and it's really interesting. My understanding of his work is that the untrained mind has a default mode network that can be quite unpleasant. You're comparing yourself to other people, ruminating about your past mistakes, worrying about things that might happen in the future.

• 49:42Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 49:42Dan Harris?

  Whereas if you've got some meditation under your belt, you have a new default mode, which is being awake and aware in the present moment.

• 49:52Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly. So the network is also associated in representation of self in relation to others. So that ties it back into this kind of rumination about how you're measuring up and what's going on in your comparisons.

• 50:04Dan Harris?

  Yeah.

• 50:08Dan Harris?

  Coming up, Bruce talks about the role of nature, how to enhance your social connections, where quote unquote, true authentic happiness comes from, and much more.

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• 51:24Dan Harris?

  One of the other ways you list to control your attention. So we've talked about getting into flow states, you know, doing things that are engrossing. That's one way to control your attention. Another is to meditate, which can redound positively toward your capacity to get into flow. And then another thing you mentioned is nature.

• 51:44Speaker 03

  Mm hmm. This is an interesting, slightly controversial one, because I think the data on it is a bit mixed. But I'm a convert to, I think it's, it's definitely something to, I live in the countryside and I certainly really enjoy the countryside, but not as much as people who've never seen the countryside. When they come out to visit me, they really do. They do love it. And I think probably why it works is that our environments, and I haven't got the data yet to prove it, but my hypothesis is urban environments are very much the same. They're organized, they're structured, and you can navigate them on autopilot. You literally can just kind of go through your daily commute. And very often, you know, you don't even remember how you got where you are because we're so used to the, the routine of travel and commuting.

• 52:27Speaker 03

  When you're in nature, unless you live there all the time, you follow the same path, it's much more unpredictable. It's also aesthetically more pleasing because it's full of, you know, very interesting sights and so on. But I think what it forces you to do is actually to be mindful of where you're stepping and where you're walking and just really engaging with the environment. So that would be my, my understanding what's going on in nature. And of course, there are some studies showing that if you look at brain imaging, looking at the default moon network, it's subdued when you're out in nature compared to going around the urban environment. So I suspect that urban environments, because they're very predictable and they're structured in such a way, is that you literally go on autopilot when you're navigating them.

• 53:06Dan Harris?

  Also, you're surrounded by advertisement, which is inducing toxic comparison.

• 53:10Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 53:10Dan Harris?

  So lesson six is connect with others. And I'm just wondering, lesson two is avoid isolation. Is this the same thing said differently?

• 53:19Speaker 03

  Yeah, I guess so. What I was trying to do in Lesson Six is really kind of talk about some of the really fascinating research, talking about synchronicity, talking about the studies which are revealing our brains literally do become synchronized whether doing group activities. Also, I tried to emphasize how to enhance your social connection, talking about active listening, and just really kind of learning to trust others. So this is a chapter which is, it goes back to work by a bunch of people, what Nick Epley comes to mind, showing that we tend not to engage in social connection because we think it will be awkward, we misjudge it in many ways, and we underestimate how important

• 54:00Speaker 03

  and how satisfying it will be for not just ourselves, but other people as well. So it's really a call to action to try and get people to go out there and start to actively engage with others in a way which is beneficial. It's the flip side of avoiding loneliness, but with much more kind of focused activities on what you can do to actually stimulate those sorts of positive interactions.

• 54:23Dan Harris?

  What is synchronicity?

• 54:25Speaker 03

  Well, synchronicity is just the, is the natural timing of brainwaves. You can now do imaging studies where you actually get two people experiencing the same thing. It could be listening to a story or some other, and you can find out that the brains start to synchronize as if they're resonating in the same frequency as it were. So it sounds a bit spooky and supernatural. I don't think it's anything like that, but it does fit with the findings that we are kind of, we're biological computers in many ways. And so when we're processing things in unison, it tends to amplify the experience. So people who like each other tend to walk and step. Conversations are extremely synchronized. We're having a synchronized activity now. I'm talking and then you're responding. If we were both talking at the same time, that wouldn't work well. And I think you know,

• 55:07Speaker 03

  when you're getting on with somebody, you feel that natural rapport, and that synchronicity reflects the ease of conversation, which is this sort of give and take. So I think that's what I mean by synchronicity.

• 55:19Dan Harris?

  You also mentioned active listening. What is that?

• 55:22Speaker 03

  So, active listening is paying attention to what someone is saying and then asking them questions relative to what they've just said, rather than just nodding away and kind of, you know, looking at them. I mean, you can listen to someone but not really pay attention. Active listening is really processing what they're saying, then coming up with something which reflects the fact that you've actually understood what they've said. And when people have that, they really enjoy that. It creates a really strong bond between the recipient, if they're having someone who's clearly been listening to what they're saying. It's very satisfying when you're talking to someone who really clearly understands what you're talking about.

• 55:56Dan Harris?

  Yeah, it's a benevolent manipulation technique.

• 55:59Speaker 03

  It is, yeah. And very good politicians and interviewers will know how to do it very effortlessly.

• 56:08Dan Harris?

  You also mentioned learning to trust other people. What are you pointing at there?

• 56:12Speaker 03

  Well, I actually, in one of the lectures, I make a virtue of talking about failure. To me, failure is a really important thing to disclose, vulnerability. We're fearful sometimes of being judged negatively by others, and so we always want to put on a very impressive best face, as it were. But actually, when people disclose information which reveals that they're human in many ways, and they also have vulnerabilities, we like them more. We can appreciate them more. We can identify with them more, because I think it shows a level of trust. And trust is really important. Going back to Rob Putten's work, looking at those nations which seem to have really good levels of happiness, if you like, or social connectedness, what they really have is trust. They trust each other. They have

• 56:55Speaker 03

  community systems which are much more open to interconnectedness. So, the Nordic countries typically have higher social trust than more individualistic societies like the UK and the US, where we tend to be a little bit more fearful and aware or frightened of others. Whereas those countries which have good social trust tend to have overall, general, better happiness, as it were.

• 57:18Dan Harris?

  You're saying we should take some risks, trust people and be willing to fail?

• 57:22Speaker 03

  I think all those things are good. I think failure is, and this is something which is very obvious in younger generations, certainly in my students, they are really risk adverse. They will take the easiest path, they won't challenge themselves and they get overly upset if they think they'll go according to plan. They tend not to put themselves in situations where they could actually advance by challenging themselves more. And I think that's unfortunate when it comes to education because that's really what we need. We need people who are willing to take risks. And so I think failure is something that we should disclose. They look at me and they think, oh, you've never failed, you're a successful professor and so on. But what they don't realize, of course, I have a history, as we all do, of setbacks and failures. And I think when you learn about that, and you'll know this, Dan, you've talked

• 58:07Speaker 03

  about your startup, I think when people hear about that, I think it makes you much more personable. It makes people much more real. When you're presented with someone who seems never to have had any setbacks, then I don't particularly trust someone like that. So that's why I think trust enamors ourselves to other people.

• 58:25Dan Harris?

  What is the liking gap?

• 58:27Speaker 03

  It's basically, it's a misjudgment about how we're perceived. When you ask people to have conversations and then you ask them afterwards, how much do you think this person liked you? People will typically underestimate the degree to which the other person likes them. So again, it's one of the reasons why people are reluctant to enter into conversations because they think they're not going to be liked or they think it'll be awkward. And so again, it's a miscalculation based on an assumption that interactions are not going to be as pleasant as they generally turn out to be. And I think that's got worse, possibly because of technology and we've lost the art of conversation. We've lost the opportunities for interacting on a much more regular basis. And I think that all of that comes with practice. And once you start to become more comfortable with those interactions, then you're probably

• 59:12Speaker 03

  a bit more accurate about how they're going to go.

• 59:15Dan Harris?

  What is the spotlight effect?

• 59:17Speaker 03

  Okay, the spotlight effect is the assumption that everyone notices your weaknesses and flaws. And so we all think, because we're so egocentric, we've got this kind of obvious gaping flaw in our personality or how we look or whatever. So we assume everyone notices our weaknesses and flaws. But in fact, people generally don't. They don't know when we're screwing up. We think we're doing worse than we really are in conversations, but actually it's going a lot better than you imagine. So again, it's a bias to assume everyone thinks worse of you than they really do.

• 59:48Dan Harris?

  Helpful to name this. Lesson seven, get out of your own head.

• 59:53Speaker 03

  Yeah. Well, that's the kind of ultimate chapter in the book. It's all a story about becoming less egocentric. I talk about some of the recent work where you literally are experiencing altered states of consciousness. And this is a work on Duke and University College of London on hallucinogenics, which have found out to be actually reasonably good for people who have intractable depression. Now, I'm not advocating everyone breaks the law or starts going, taking hallucinogenics. But what is interesting about them is they impact directly on the default mode network, their serotonergic activities. And for people who've never had an altered state of consciousness like that, one of the things they commonly report is their sense of self is deconstructed.

• 1:00:36Speaker 03

  You don't have to do something like that to have an altered sense of self. You can get that from all sorts of experiences, from communal experiences, awe experiences, if there are, one of the most powerful things you can do is, if you're wealthy enough, I don't know about you Dan, but if you can go out into outer space and look back at the earth, people often can report that their sense of self is, it's not diminished, it's more a sense of connectivity with humanity, a sense of belonging. And that's what I mean by getting out of your head. It's becoming interconnected with those around you in a way which is meaningful. Because the happiness that you experience is more authentic when it's directed towards others and derived from others than the happiness that you try to turn in on yourself. You could treat yourself to, I don't know, you could go on

• 1:01:21Speaker 03

  a shopping spree and, you know, have some retail therapy and that'd make you a little bit happy. But that happiness isn't authentic and it will soon dissipate. Whereas if you use your energies to enrich the lives of others around you, well, you'll benefit from the fact that they'll like you a lot more, but also it's more authentic and it's going to last a lot longer. Because the reason is, if you're the instigator, purveyor and recipient of your own acts of kindness, well, you know when they cease to, you know, give you any benefit. Whereas if you direct it towards others, you never know when they get fed up of it. So you can always kind of reflect on the fact that, yeah, that guy Bruce is a really good guy. He just bought a whole round of coffees, what a nice guy he is. And then you can walk away thinking, they think well of me.

• 1:02:01Dan Harris?

  One of my little rants that I've gone on before on this show many times and will go on many times in the futures, but I say this with some sheepishness or apologeticness, if that's even a word, to the frequent listeners who've heard me say this before. But as you point out in the book, making other people happy makes you happy. And in my view, I'm like 51, 49% optimistic about the future of the species. So not like overwhelmingly optimistic, but slightly more optimistic than pessimistic. And that optimism is based on this design feature in the human operating system, that doing good makes you feel good.

• 1:02:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, and I think that's a lesson that we learn too late in life. You know, once you've kind of satisfied the initial drives for success and wealth and whatever, and you've got spare capacity, then you realize, actually, why was I wasting all that? Especially when you're reaching the end of your life and you realize you haven't got much more in front of you. Then people suddenly have this epiphany that actually, wow, you know, I wish I'd spent more time with other people and making their lives better. So this is, you know, eudaimonia, the old concept from Aristotle and the Greek philosophers. But really, the value of the worth of life is the extent to which you enrich the lives of others around you.

• 1:03:22Dan Harris?

  I've definitely learned it later in life and in my late 40s and 50s. But I actually am of the view that I would have been more successful earlier if I had had this insight.

• 1:03:35Speaker 03

  I think that's true. And that goes back to what I was saying is that when you do take the time and effort to enrich the lives of other people around you, that makes you liked. And that has a feed forward or an amplifying effect on on your success, because people like to be around people who are like that. Nobody really wants to be around someone who's so narcissistic and selfish and self-focused, because they're just drawing all the energy. You need people who are buoyant and effervescent and, you know, full of energy and positive. That's who we like to be around, and that's generally directed towards others.

• 1:04:07Dan Harris?

  Yes, yeah, Joseph Goldstein, to quote him again, in Buddhism, there's this concept of enlightenment, which can be. It's controversial in many ways. Joseph says that one way to think about enlightenment is lightening up.

• 1:04:22Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:04:22Dan Harris?

  And lightening up, meaning you're taking yourself less seriously. And we like to be around people who are allocentric in that way.

• 1:04:32Speaker 03

  I agree.

• 1:04:33Dan Harris?

  Okay, so we've gone through the seven lessons.

• 1:04:34Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:04:35Dan Harris?

  My understanding is you've done some research on the students to whom you've taught these seven lessons. And I'd be curious, what did you find?

• 1:04:45Speaker 03

  What we found is really the title of your work, 10% happier. That's roughly what we find when they've done our course. They're 10 to 15% happier, depending on which measure. As part of the course, and I think this course is fairly unique in that as part of their engagement. First of all, there are no exams in our courses, but they have to undertake all the sorts of activities and they have to document it. And they have to keep a journal and they have to meet in small groups. So we practice what we preach. Okay. They literally have to do all these positive activities. And if they do that for 10 weeks, on average, they're about 10 to 15% happier. We use different measures, but that's very reliable. We find that every year we've run it. And there's good and bad news. That's the good news. The bad news is after about six months, a lot of them have gone back down to baseline again.

• 1:05:28Speaker 03

  The good news is that if you follow them up up to two years, those who have kept up with the activities maintain their elevated levels of happiness. So it's like physical well being. Mental well being requires consistent effort, has to become a habit. There's no silver bullet. There's no simple thing you can do and then you're happier forever after. It's a state of mind. It's an approach to life. It's a way of dealing with things. As I said earlier. I think that explains why some people are just happier because they process things more effectively. Whereas the ones who go back down to baseline, I think they resort back to their kind of all the biases that we've been describing.

• 1:06:01Dan Harris?

  Yeah. So I take from that, that happiness is a skill and that you need to practice in order to hone that skill. And if you ignore these lessons, you'll stay at baseline and good luck with that. I'm wondering, would you agree with me? You may not agree with me, but my view. Having made up this 10% happier number completely, you know, as a joke, or partially as a joke, I now argue that the 10% compounds annually, which is also somewhat tongue in cheek, but that if you keep practicing these skills, actually, you will, over time, be significantly more than 10% happier at the point of origination.

• 1:06:41Speaker 03

  Right. Well, compound interest at 10% annually would be exponential rise as an economist. But yeah, I certainly think it does strengthen over time. And I think the mechanism is not only addressing all your own setbacks, and we all face things over the course of our life. But as you become a more settled person, I think then you start to carve a path through life which is less difficult. And it also means that you're someone that people navigate or migrate towards because you seem to be comfortable. There's a number of ways in which it can work, but I would agree with you. I think that it can accumulate. And I would call that practical wisdom. Some of us get it indirectly. It used to come through the church. It used to come through a lot of our spiritual leaders.

• 1:07:23Speaker 03

  But in a world which is increasingly becoming fractionated because of technologies, we've got to keep working on it. We've got to keep trying it.

• 1:07:31Dan Harris?

  Bruce Hood, this has been a pleasure. Let me ask you my two habitual closing questions. One is, is there something you were hoping we would get to that we failed to get to?

• 1:07:39Speaker 03

  No, I think we covered most of the territory pretty adequately. I'm good.

• 1:07:43Dan Harris?

  Can you remind everybody of the name of your new book and your older books, your website, your social media handles, et cetera, et cetera?

• 1:07:50Speaker 03

  The book I'm promoting is The Science of Happiness: Seven Lessons for Living Well. And my previous books are The Supersense, which is all about supernatural thinking. The Self-Illusion, which is a very Buddhist-inspired book about the illusion of self. Then I wrote a book called The Domesticated Brain, which is about the evolution of sociality in humans. And then my second last book was Possessed: Why We Want More Than We Need, which is all about relentless consumerism and the psychology of ownership.

• 1:08:19Dan Harris?

  And do you have a website?

• 1:08:20Speaker 03

  Ah, yeah, I've got brucehood.com. I managed to get that. So I've got a very egocentric kind of tag, which is kind of ironic, given what I've been promoting.

• 1:08:31Dan Harris?

  Yeah, well, I have danharris.com in my email. And that of everybody who works for me is, you know, fill in the blank, @danharris.com. So it's pretty egocentric. I think we're going to change that eventually. Bruce, great to meet you. Thank you so much.

• 1:08:46Speaker 03

  I appreciate it. Thank you, Dan.

• 1:08:52Dan Harris?

  Thank you to Bruce. Great to talk to him. As you may remember, we talked about the problem of overthinking, with which I am deeply familiar. We've got a guided meditation designed specifically for you to use after you listen to this conversation to help you deal with overthinking. It comes from our Teacher of the Month, Dan Mauricio. We're now in this mode where we're releasing guided meditations with all of our full-length Monday/Wednesday episodes. As I said earlier, it's all about helping you to take the great stuff you hear on the show and actually get it into your mind in an abiding way. So if you want that meditation, head on over to danharris.com and check it out. If you're a subscriber, you get lots of benefits, including live guided meditations on video with me,

• 1:09:35Dan Harris?

  and the ad-free version of the show, and much more. Before I let you go, I just want to thank everybody who worked so hard to make this show. Our producers are Tara Anderson, Caroline Keenan, and Eleanor Vassili. Our recording and engineering is handled by the great folks over at Pod People. Lauren Smith is our managing producer. Marissa Schneiderman is our senior producer. DJ Cashmere is our executive producer. And Nick Thorburn of the band Islands wrote our theme.