How to be happier, with Sonja Lyubomirsky, PhD

Want to be happier? Some of our happiness level is due to genes or life circumstances, but research shows much of it is within our control. Sonja Lyubomirsky, PhD, talks about the habits and mindsets that lead to lasting happiness, the complex relationship between money and happiness, whether technology is making us less happy, and whether it’s possible to worry too much about being happy. Find Dr. Lyubomirsky's newsletter The Happiness Files at https://drsonja.kit.com/newsletter. Take our listener survey at http://at.apa.org/SoPSurvey. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  At Edward Jones, we believe rich is about taking care of what gives your life meaning. That's why your financial advisor personalizes your plan to help you preserve your progress and create something that lasts. Let's find your rich. Edward Jones. Member SIPC.

• 0:15Speaker 01

  New and exclusive holiday decor just launched online at The Home Depot. Check out the viral Grand Duchess collection with smart holiday lights you can control from your phone. Easily customize the twinkle across trees, wreaths, and garlands to match your holiday vibe. Create stunning light effects, then switch it up with the tap of your fingers. Even the man in red will be impressed. Shop the holiday decor you want online only at HomeDepot.com.

• 0:45Kim Mills?

  You know those people who always seem to be happy? Who go through life seeing the sunny side of every situation? Or who seem to be at peace and content even when facing challenging times? Do you ever wonder what is their secret? Today, we're going to talk to a psychologist who has spent decades studying the science of happiness about how much of our own happiness is within our control and what we can do to become happier. Some of the questions we'll discuss: What actually makes us happy? What habits or mindsets make the biggest difference? Why don't success and money always lead to lasting satisfaction? And is the modern world of technology and social media making us less happy, as many people worry?

• 1:28Kim Mills?

  Welcome to Speaking of Psychology, the flagship podcast of the American Psychological Association that examines the links between psychological science and everyday life. I'm Kim Mills.

• 1:42Kim Mills?

  My guest today is Dr. Sonia Lyubomirsky, a distinguished professor of psychology at the University of California, Riverside, where she studies what makes people happy and how happiness can shift over time. She's won many awards, including fellow status from three different scientific societies, an honorary doctorate from the University of Basel, and a Templeton Positive Psychology Prize. Her work has been funded by grants from the John Templeton Foundation and the National Institutes of Health, among others. She's also the author of two bestselling books, The How of Happiness and The Myths of Happiness, and she recently began publishing a newsletter called The Happiness Files. Dr. Lyubomirsky, thank you for joining me today.

• 2:22Speaker 03

  It's a pleasure to be here, Kim. Thank you.

• 2:24Kim Mills?

  Well, let's start by talking about a question I posed in the introduction, which is how much of happiness is really within our control? In your book, The How of Happiness, from 2008, you estimated that about 50% of our happiness level is due to genes, 10% is due to life circumstances, and about 40% to factors we can control. Do you still think that's about right?

• 2:47Speaker 03

  No, and I really never did. I think that pie chart theory of happiness has been widely misinterpreted, although maybe it's my fault. Those numbers were really meant to be very, very not set in stone. And they were based on data that we had at the time in the early 2000s. And I actually wrote an article with my co-author, Ken Sheldon, kind of revisiting the pie chart model. But basically, I guess the bottom line, how I would describe it today is that I would still say there are kind of three main contributors to happiness, kind of like three buckets of contributors to happiness. One is our genetics, for sure. You know, that's very powerful. We all know that as psychologists. The second is our life circumstances, you know, and depending on how good or bad they are,

• 3:32Speaker 03

  they're going to influence our happiness more or less, right? So if you're relatively comfortable, you know, moving to a nicer apartment is going to make you a lot happier. But if you're living in poverty, moving into a nice, safe place is going to, of course, make you a lot happier. And the third kind of bucket or contributor to happiness is what we actually can do, you know, the ways that we behave and the ways that we think in our daily life. So I certainly still believe that those are the three main contributors to happiness. I just wouldn't put numbers on them.

• 4:00Kim Mills?

  Okay, that makes sense. So for people with happy genes, if you will, with the biological component you mentioned, are they blessed with more endorphins or other brain chemicals that are associated with happiness? You know, we know that the reverse can be true, that there are people who are chronically depressed because they have a chemical imbalance.

• 4:20Speaker 03

  Yeah, I'm not a neuroscientist, so I can't speak really specifically to this. I think, yeah, if you're kind of born with a set range for happiness, it's higher than other people. My guess is that there are many contributors, sort of biological contributors and genetic contributors to that. And probably they have some of that have to do with different levels of neurohormones, whether it's serotonin and dopamine and, you know, all the kind of the usual suspects. And or maybe susceptibility to learning or maintaining good kind of happiness habits. You know, so for some people, it's sort of quote, easy to look on the bright side of things, right, sort of be optimistic, express gratitude, you know, be social, sort of extroversion,

• 5:04Speaker 03

  for example, is a personality trait that has a strong heritable component that is very much correlated with happiness. So people who are happier are also more likely to be extroverted. Anyway, so I guess my answer to the question is that this is all very, very complex. And so we don't really know what the biological sort of contributors are, but there are probably many.

• 5:23Kim Mills?

  How do you define and measure happiness in your research? You're looking at momentary, positive feelings, a general sense of life satisfaction, or is it even more complicated than that?

• 5:35Speaker 03

  We look at all of those things. And of course, you know, there's sort of the famous kind of idea that, you know, if you can't measure something, you can't change it, right? You can't really study it. So so we do, I think it is important to study to start with measurement. You know, happiness is something that's really subjective. You can't, there's no thermometer for happiness. Sorry. So we we use self-report as kind of our gold standard. And we really use of, you know, a multiple measures. So the idea is I, I, and many researchers in the well, in well being science, subscribe to Ed Deener's, Ed Deener really founded the field of the science of happiness, sort of his idea that there are really two components of happiness. There's a kind of affective emotional component, and there's also a cognitive or judgmental component. So the affective component is

• 6:17Speaker 03

  how often do you experience positive emotions in your daily life? And so to measure that, we ask people, you know, maybe it's by the minute or hour or day or week, you know, how often do you experience joy, curiosity, you know, pride, serenity, enthusiasm, you know, all, all sort of all the different positive emotions and negative emotions as well. But then the cognitive or judgmental component of happiness is basically the sense that your life is good, that you're progressing towards your life goals at a good pace, that you're satisfied with your life. So so that's sort of measuring life satisfaction is also important. That's something that's not going to be as likely to change minute to minute. But it certainly could change week to week, month to month, year to year.

• 6:55Kim Mills?

  Can you really measure happiness in a lab? Or do you have to have people going about their lives and maybe carrying some sort of a tracker or some way of telling you from minute to minute or hour to hour how they're feeling?

• 7:07Speaker 03

  I think you could do both. There are certainly biases inherent in all of these measurements, you know, in terms of how, you know, in terms of social desirability, you know, some people just appear happy to the experimenter. I really like to measure happiness kind of in daily life as people go about their lives. I think they tend to sort of forget they're in a study. And so maybe some of those biases are a little bit reduced. So, yeah, I guess the way I feel about it, like with measurement in any area of psychology, that there's always going to be, it's never going to be a perfect, kind of perfect science. There's always going to be sort of biases involved, but the more we can triangulate, you know, on this, on this problem, the, the more different ways we can measure. So like measuring, you know, maybe with a tracker, but also, you know, every once

• 7:51Speaker 03

  in a while, asking people to really reflect on their lives. You can also, of course, get peer reports. You can also get kind of more objective or more biological measures. None of them are really better than others. So we try to triangulate by having multiple measures.

• 8:05Kim Mills?

  What can people do to boost their happiness on a day to day basis? I mean, your research, what have you found that actually works?

• 8:14Speaker 03

  That's really the question that I've devoted my career to. I've been studying happiness since, for 36 years, since 1989, but I guess about, basically about 1999. So last 26 years, my lab started doing what we call happiness interventions. And happiness interventions are basically like clinical trials, but instead of testing a new drug, you know, we're testing a happiness strategy or happiness exercise. And there are three types of activities that we focus on studying the most. We've studied, we've done a lot of gratitude experiments. And so these are all, again, these are all randomized controlled trials. We randomly assign a group of participants to express gratitude, say, write a gratitude letter to anyone you want, once a week for a month or for two months.

• 8:58Speaker 03

  And then we have various control groups and we follow people across time. So one, yeah, so one kind of category of happiness strategies we've Is gratitude, another is acts of kindness. And so we ask people to do more acts of kindness in their daily life or their weekly life than they would otherwise do. And we, we all do acts of kindness for others every day. So, but this is where sort of doing, going over and above. And the third sort of set of activities we've been focusing on is just being, is asking people to be more social, engage in more social interactions and conversations. So basically the bottom line, and, and if listeners sign up to my new happiness newsletter, like the first thing that I, I, I tell them is, um, you know, kind of what is my number one happiness tip? Um, and everyone wants to know what that is.

• 9:41Speaker 03

  So basically after, you know, thirty six years of research, my lab, my students and I have landed on a cliche. Which is that what we've discovered is almost everything that works in randomized controlled trials to make people happier, works because it makes them more connected somehow to other people. Although it can be to God or to a pet, right? It doesn't have to be a person. It makes people feel more connected. Not everything. I mean, you could imagine like, physical exercise or meditation, which really has nothing to do with other people, but even that, even meditation, exercise often has, has to do with others as well. But in our studies, basically connection is the key to happiness.

• 10:22Speaker 03

  So anything you can do to strengthen a relationship, to strengthen a connection. In more recent years, my lab and I have started to focus on studying social interactions and conversations. Cause how do we connect to other people in our lives, in our culture? Well, I'll say you could connect by touch. You could connect with dance, you know, there's lots of ways to connect. But the most common way in our culture to connect is by talking. It's just sort of simply talking to others, like what you're doing in this podcast. I actually did a podcast a few months ago where the host said, the reason he started it is that he was missing basically, deeply connecting to people in his life. And so he decided to, to have an excuse to really have sort of deep conversations with people, right?

• 11:06Speaker 03

  Anyway, so now we're studying conversations. We're studying how to, how to have conversations that go well, which kind of conversations make people happier. We're beginning to study listening, you know, cause. High quality listening is one of the keys to having a really great conversation. And finally, my longtime colleague, Harry Reese and I, Harry is a relationship scientist in University of Rochester. We just finished a book called How to Feel Loved, and that book is basically about how to, how to, you know, increase connection, social connection in your life.

• 11:35Kim Mills?

  So you just mentioned it's not just people you could feel connection to God, you could feel connection to your pets. More and more, there are these AI chatbots out there that can be your friend. Is that a good substitute? I mean, can people really feel happiness as a result of interacting with something that is just technology?

• 11:54Speaker 03

  You know, such a fun question. We have a little section about this in our, in our new book. You know, people report they really do feel connected to a, to a chatbot. People report even falling in love with chatbots, as you may know. You know, I mean, the obvious answer is, you know, this is not really a great substitute for real human connection. On the other hand, I, I think it's just so, so much more nuanced. I think it could add be added value to your life if you're a lonely person or you're isolated. So I don't want to say like, let's, you know, not, not allow people to, you know, to connect with chatbots. Because there is something that happens, you know, feels like you have real authentic conversations. For the same reason that we cry at movies, right?

• 12:35Speaker 03

  We also feel like a real, something real with some, something that's not real, right? Like we, we see a movie and we, we know it's not real, we know it's actors, and yet we're sort of, our brain fools us to thinking it is. For, for some similar reasons, and even more powerful reasons, I think a chatbot can, we can have really deep conversations. So I don't know, I think, I think it's a really nuanced question. And it's easy to say like, oh, it's terrible and let's, let's not do this. I, I would love to see a world where chatbots can, can sort of supplement our, our day to day connections and maybe even help us increase it. Like it could be a coach that helps a shy person, you know, have more connection in their everyday life, et cetera, et cetera.

• 13:18Kim Mills?

  You can practice how to interact.

• 13:20Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 13:21Kim Mills?

  In your book, The Myths of Happiness, you challenge the idea that achieving life milestones are guaranteed happiness boosters. You know, the idea that if I just get that promotion or if I get married, I'll be happy. Why do these milestones not always lead to lasting happiness?

• 13:39Speaker 03

  My biggest answer is hedonic adaptation, you know, which is a phenomenon that humans are great at becoming accustomed to any change in their life, especially positive changes. And I would bring a sort of evolutionary theory into this, you know, that, that, you know, you could argue that human beings would never make progress if we were sort of really, really happy with our milestones and then kind of like didn't want to achieve anything more, right? We would, progress would stall, right? We'd kind of get to that mountain or find that, that mate or that friend and then we're done, all right? Because we're just sort of happy. And yet we're, we're not finished, you know, because every time we achieve a goal, we're happy for a little bit and then we are kind of, we now have a newer, you know, even bigger goal in mind.

• 14:24Speaker 03

  So I think that's evolutionarily adaptive. But it has hedonic costs, right? So, so when we get, you know, we want to get that job, we want to have a baby, we want to have a boyfriend, new boyfriend, we want to get a new car, you know, at first it, it makes us happy and it does make us happy. So I don't want to say that those milestones don't make people happy and sometimes they, they actually make us durably happy. Marriage can make us durably happy, really forever, but there's some amount of adaptation. I don't think it is almost ever where there's like no adaptation at all. So I moved into an apartment that has a beautiful view and I think views are something that we don't tend to adapt to as much, maybe again, for evolutionary reasons, we kind of like to see views of mountains or water. But I have adapted to it.

• 15:07Speaker 03

  I haven't adapted to it a hundred percent, maybe I've adapted to it like 50%, right? So it's not as like, wow, you know, as of the day I moved in. And same thing maybe with a, with a good marriage, right? So you're not as excited, not as passionate, you know, the 10th year than the first year. And so, yeah, so I think hedonic adaptation is sort of my biggest answer to that.

• 15:26Kim Mills?

  Why doesn't money make us as happy as we think it will?

• 15:31Speaker 03

  Well, again, it's the same kind of category where we adapt and we always want more. So lots of reasons. Okay, so one is our social comparisons change, right? So we get that new car and suddenly we're comparing ourselves to people who have even nicer cars. One of my, one of the examples I used from a long time ago is that a friend who, you know, kind of got wealthier and built a mansion. And, and then she started talking about how like, and she flies first class. And then she started talking about how her friends, her new friends, they have private jets. And so suddenly she was unhappy because she was flying first class, but they were flying in a private, they were going private. So there's always someone who's better off than you are, always.

• 16:16Speaker 03

  Even when you think about, you know, sort of the richest person imaginable, there's always someone that they can say, oh, but, you know, whatever, their view is a little bit nicer than my view. Anyway, so we always, we always sort of want more. And again, maybe that's adaptive that we always want more because we're, that promotes progress. Um, yeah, so we're getting back to money. There's actually a lot of nuances about money. One of my favorite recent findings is that money does make people happier, but only if you're a happy person to begin with. So happy people who make more money are happier when they make more money. But unhappy people are kind of not that happy when they make more money. And then, of course, the other answer is it depends how you spend it, right? So if you spend your money on, and the kind of the nice way to think about it, sort of

• 16:58Speaker 03

  three basic needs that we have for connection, autonomy and competence, or for personal growth, connection and, you know, contributing to the world. If you spend your money in ways that contribute to those basic needs, then people are happier, right? So if you spend your money on philanthropy, helping others, or taking out your, you know, nephew to the zoo, and you spend your money on personal growth, learning a new language, you know, traveling, you know, doing something, learning something new, and you spend your money on connection, right, taking out your friends to dinner or something like that, then that makes you happy. But if you spend your money on possessions, material things that you just put in the closet or the garage or on your shelf, we tend to adapt to those things so that that doesn't make us happier, we just want more.

• 17:39Kim Mills?

  We're going to take a short break. And when we return, we'll talk to Dr. Lyubomirsky about a new report that finds young people are less happy than they used to be and why that might be.

• 17:52Speaker 00

  At Edward Jones, we believe rich is more than caring about the latest and greatest. It's also taking care of what gives your life meaning. That's why your dedicated financial advisor meets you where you are, with personalized financial strategies that help protect what matters, so you can preserve your progress while creating a path forward. The key to being rich is knowing what counts. Let's find your rich together. Edward Jones. Member SIPC.

• 18:21Speaker 01

  New and exclusive holiday decor just launched online at The Home Depot. Check out the viral Grand Duchess collection with smart holiday lights you can control from your phone. Easily customize the twinkle across trees, wreaths, and garlands to match your holiday vibe. Create stunning light effects, then switch it up with the tap of your fingers. Even the man in red will be impressed. Shop the holiday decor you want online only at homedepot.com.

• 18:52Kim Mills?

  Every year, researchers publish something called the World Happiness Report. And this year, the big headline was that in many countries, young adults are less happy than they used to be. Young adulthood used to be a pretty happy time of life on average. Why do you think that might be changing?

• 19:10Speaker 03

  Interestingly, I think one of the reasons, one of the theories that the US has dropped out of the top like 20 or top 24 countries is because particularly in the US, young people, I think ages 14 to 28 or 14 to 24, are particularly unhappy.

• 19:27Speaker 03

  Well, you know, one obvious answer is social media and screens, and sort of lack of connection. Again, getting back to if social connection is the key to happiness, anyone who has less social connection, greater loneliness, is going to be less happy. We know a lot about how, starting in whatever is it, 2008, you know, with the introduction of the smartphone, with the introduction of the like button on Facebook, young people have been spending more and more time on screens, less and less time, you know, in person with one another. Again, I want to be a little bit, again, more nuanced about this. You know, some people get a lot of connection, you know, through social, you know, through Facebook or whatever, through social media, through texting, um, I through listening to music.

• 20:12Speaker 03

  So I don't want to just say it's all bad. Um, but that that is just kind of an obvious uh answer to that question that they're sort of spending less and less time in person, less, you know, and you know, there's data, Jean Twenge has some great data in her book, I Gen, on how if you compare generations, you know, my generation, you know, basically the what is it that you've shows that the 12th graders today look like 8th graders in our generation in terms of how how much the time they spent, you know, not with their parents, how much time they spend working outside the home, um, driving, uh, and even sort of quote, sort of negative things like alcohol, sexual behavior, um, you know, uh, early sexual behavior, they're just doing it all much, much later. Uh, they're just spending a lot less time in person.

• 20:53Speaker 03

  If you look at weekend activity, um, teenagers are, it used to be that you were kind of an outcast if you spent the whole weekend sort of alone in your room. Um, and now I think I've seen, I've seen, um, stats that are something like 50% or even maybe two thirds sort of don't really like see anyone in person on the weekend uh outside of school, uh, whereas it used to be that almost everyone did. So anyway, that, that to me, that is to my mind, that must contribute to the reduced happiness.

• 21:21Kim Mills?

  Eventually sad things will happen to pretty much everyone. You live long enough, bad things are going to happen. How do happy people handle negative emotions? Are they different in the way that they cope with things going south?

• 21:34Speaker 03

  From my understanding, of course, happy people are ju- are just as hit by negative, you know, events as unhappy. So I guess if I were to draw kind of a visually, they, you know, an unhappy, a happy person, it might take a similar hit. And we've even done studies where we give negative feedback to happy and unhappy people and both the types of participants get that hit, you know, whether it's to their sort of self-esteem temporarily or to their mood. But happy people seem to recover faster, right? So they're basically essentially, they're more resilient. They kind of bounce back faster. You know, how they bounce back, I think there's lots of reasons that there's coping strategies that they might use that are more effectively. Unhappy people tend to ruminate more. I spent ten years studying rumination,

• 22:16Speaker 03

  which is sort of dwelling kind of in circles over and over again and sort of how you're feeling and things are not going well. And that's just contributes, that creates a vicious cycle, which makes you more anxious, more depressed, more sad, more angry. Whereas, as I, as I mentioned, happy people tend to bounce, bounce faster from those negative events.

• 22:35Kim Mills?

  Why study happiness? What, what got you going down this particular path?

• 22:39Speaker 03

  For me, it was happiness is like sort of the holy grail, you know, most of us, most people around the world will say that they, they want to be happy or they want their children to be happy. I'm from the Soviet Union, where, and this is actually part of the answer, where people talk about the importance of suffering, to build character or to gain salvation into the next life. People aren't happy when they, when you pass them on the street. That is not really the full picture. I think that's sort of a public persona. But I actually did a study a long time ago where I went back to, to Russia and asked people, what do you want most for your children? And like Americans, Russians basically gave the same answer, which is that they want their children to be happy.

• 23:22Speaker 03

  So, so maybe kind of depended on how you asked the question. Anyway, so I immigrate to the United States when I'm nine and a half years old. And that was the first thing I noticed, the sort of differences in happiness. So I think I was interested from an early age, like, why are Americans so much happier than Russians? I met with my college advisor a few years ago, after thirty years of, you know, not having seen him. And he told me that in college that I was interested in happiness. I didn't remember that. He said I talked a lot about happiness. Because my, and the reason I say this is because the story I've always told myself and others is that it was really serendipitous, the, the, the research on happiness. The very first day I went to Stanford for my PhD, my advisor was Lee Ross, a really, you know, brilliant thinker who was one of the world's experts on conflict and negotiation.

• 24:07Speaker 03

  You know, nothing to do with happiness. You could even argue maybe kind of the opposite of happiness. And the very, very first day that I met him, we took a walk around campus, and we started talking about happiness. I don't remember who brought it up, you know, it was probably him. But we started asking each other questions like, you know, why are some people happier than others? Kind of the question that you asked, you began the podcast with, you know, what is the secret to happiness? And that first conversation, literally on the very first day of grad school, led me to start doing research on happiness. Back then, Ed Deener was really the only person in the field. And he was studying what he called subjective well-being. I didn't know anyone. There were some books about happiness, but I didn't know anyone else studying it. That was 1989.

• 24:51Kim Mills?

  I understand you've recommended that we do more research into MDMA or ecstasy, to understand how it can lead to more social connection, and by extension, of course, happiness. Why should we be interested in finding happiness and connection through drugs? Isn't that essentially cheating?

• 25:09Speaker 03

  So I started studying MDMA because I thought like, wow, this is like, perfect substance to study, if you're interested in deep connection, because it makes people feel deeply connected, deeply understood, and loved. And then you make, and you're grateful, and you're trusting, and you feel, you see beauty in other people, and then sort of in everything. And so I thought, I thought, it was really for two reasons, that you want to study MDMA. One is, and it's interesting, the MAPS conference right now is going on in Denver, today is the last day, and this is the big conference where psychedelics and all other substances are being discussed. So the one reason is, I

• 25:48Speaker 03

  think it could provide a window into the study of deep connection. It's really, really hard to manipulate that in the lab, you know, how do you, for, you know, an hour and a half an hour, get a participant to feel really, really deeply connected to someone? And using that substance is kind of like, again, it's sort of a shortcut or a window. So the idea is that you get people to feel deeply connected, which we have actually in the lab. I have a collaborator in the University of Chicago, where we give people either MDMA or a control Substance, we did a study where we gave uh some participants methamphetamine as a control because it's actually interestingly a good control to MDMA. Both of them are have amphetamine components. And then and then you can look at, again, I'm not a neuroscientist,

• 26:32Speaker 03

  but you can look at the brain pathways that are involved when you're that are sort of activated, when you're feeling deeply connected. You can look at sort of psychological mechanisms that are operating. And that could, yeah, that could be, as a basic scientist, that could be really revealing. But also, I think it could be used, and again, I'm not a clinician, but I think MDMA could be used sort of clinically or therapeutically. And not like a something that you would necessarily take, you know, once, you know, once a week or once a month. It's possible that, say, you're someone who's lonely and has like never really felt deeply connected. And you take that substance once and you suddenly realize like, wow, this is something that's possible. Or you have some insights into your relationships.

• 27:15Speaker 03

  So maybe you only take it once, you know, or maybe you only you take it several times. And just as you know, there's a sort of resurgence of psychedelic science where people are studying, both neuroscientists and psychologists, clinical psychologists are studying the usefulness of all kinds of substances, psychoactive substances. And MDMA, I think, is one, that's a really, really interesting one. It does, has not shown to have many harms. There certainly, I mean, I would argue, I would very forcefully argue that something like alcohol is much more toxic and harmful than MDMA. It just happens to be legal, MDMA happens to be right now, Schedule I. Anyway, I think it's a fascinating topic to study.

• 27:52Kim Mills?

  Are you only looking at MDMA? I mean, I've talked to psychologists, for example, who are studying psilocybin. And they feel like you can have these experiences that will actually persist for very long times and maybe even for a lifetime. Are you seeing that with MDMA?

• 28:07Speaker 03

  So fascinating, yeah, I personally have not studied psilocybin. Some of these other psychedelics, yes, they produce a feeling of a connection, often not, sometimes with an individual. I'm really more interested in studying relationships with particular, like other individuals in your life and not necessarily sort of grand sense of connection with kind of all living beings or, you know, sort of all. All of, you know, all of earth, the whole universe. I mean, I think that's really fascinating study. That's just not, that's just not my particularly area. I think MDMA, again, we, we need to do more studies, but I, I do think it has the potential to have lasting effects. Certainly people report that have taken MDMA even a few times has changed their lives, has, has

• 28:48Speaker 03

  made them into a more, um, yeah, like in a more loving person, uh, into someone who say, has given up on small talk and only, only has deep conversations with people. What happens with MDMA is that your walls come down. And so one, one way to think about all of society is that we're kind of all walking around with a wall around us. And we really don't share very much, you know, we don't take off those walls very easily. And I think the world would be a better place if, if some of those walls came down.

• 29:17Kim Mills?

  You know, there's a lot of emphasis, I think, in American culture around being happy. It's sort of an expectation, the, you know, the American dream involves ultimately being happy. Is it possible for people to worry too much about being happy and then making yourself unhappy by the constant worrying about, I'm not happy enough?

• 29:35Speaker 03

  Absolutely. And there's really great work by Iris Mouse and June Gruber that are showing how like when people are too preoccupied with happiness that that can backfire. And there's lots of reasons for that, right? So if you're constantly monitoring your happiness, right? It's kind of like when you're trying to lose weight and you're constantly measuring, you know, weighing yourself. Or if you're constantly looking at the stock market, right? You don't want to look every hour. Because it's going to go up and down. So, um, if you're constantly asking yourself, am I happy yet? Am I happy yet? Am I happy yet? Right? That, that is going to backfire. If you're too focused on the end goal, this sounds like a, so, so hokey. But if you're too focused on the end goal as opposed to being focused on the journey to get there, right? That, uh, that can sort of backfire and lead you to be dissatisfied.

• 30:18Speaker 03

  Yeah. If your, if your standard for happiness is too high, right? You're going to be disappointed if you don't reach that standard. And, and really like what the things that make you happy are not like focusing on happiness, but it's sort of focusing on something else that's going to lead to happiness, right? Whether it's, you know, connecting to other people, expressing gratitude, doing. Acts of kindness, you know, meditating, savoring, you know, whatever, you know, following, you know, following really significant life goals like that. That's really what makes you happy and and sort of focusing too much on again on the on the end goal uh might yeah, might backfire, might make it too much of an extrinsic goal, right? Sort of I'm only doing this like I'm only being kind to you because I want to make you happy and I heard that this makes you they'll make you happy. Um, and so I'm yeah, I'm not a big fan of sort of too much of

• 31:02Speaker 03

  a obsession or preoccupation with happiness.

• 31:06Kim Mills?

  So what's left to study? You've obviously been looking at happiness for many years as as you've said, what are the big questions that remain to be answered?

• 31:14Speaker 03

  I guess lots of big questions, including sort of the neuroscience of happiness, which, you know, some people are studying. Um, one major project I'm involved with with Liz Dunn at U B C and others are sort of heading is is a mega study that is looking at, you know, sort of giant happiness interventions across all cultures, because all these studies that we've been talking about are generally small studies. Um, I mean, not necessarily tiny, but they're, you know, we need, we need, we need replicability. We need to be confident in the findings. Uh, we need to look at sort of cross-cultural differences to see if these are sort of universal type of, um, you know, happiness strategies or or they're, I mean, we already know that there are some of them do look different in different cultures. And so that's, that's a huge goal and huge project. Um, that that's, you know, probably going to

• 31:59Speaker 03

  take, you know, quite a few years to accomplish kind of sort of these sort of mega, I think these mega studies are really important to accomplish in our future. And then, you know, you mentioned, you know, chatbots, I mean, AI uh is is going to change everyone's life, you know, maybe a lot sooner than most people think. Um, and so, you know, can we can we harness that technology to promote happiness, to promote flourishing as opposed to sort of create a dystopian reality that some people are worried is are going to happen? So that that is what I'm thinking about a lot these days, sort of in the future, sort of how how do we how do we leverage AI technology to to make sure that it makes people happier as opposed to less happy?

• 32:41Kim Mills?

  Well, Dr. Lee Ramersky, I want to thank you for joining me today. It's been very interesting.

• 32:46Speaker 03

  Thank you. I I love these these questions. It's been a pleasure to speak to you today.

• 32:51Kim Mills?

  You can find previous episodes of Speaking of Psychology on our website at speakingofpsychology.org or on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you have comments or ideas for future podcasts, you can email us at [email protected]. Speaking of Psychology is produced by Lee Weinerman. For the American Psychological Association, I'm Kim Mills.

• 34:01Speaker 00

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