Why Eating Alone is so Bad for You (An International Day of Happiness Special).

It's the International Day of Happiness https://www.un.org/en/observances/happiness-day! It's a chance to talk about happiness and what we can all do to be happier. March 20th also sees the release of the World Happiness Report https://worldhappiness.report/. A big finding of 2025's report is that more of us are dining alone - and that's bad news. The report's editor Jan-Emmanuel De Neve talks us through the stark figures showing that shared meals are in decline - while Dr Anne Fishel of The Family Dinner Project https://thefamilydinnerproject.org/ gives us her tips on how to dine better with friends, families and colleagues. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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

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• 1:47Laurie Santos?

  Pushkin.

• 1:54Laurie Santos?

  Happy International Day of Happiness. The world has been marking March 20th as a day dedicated to happiness for over a decade, part of a worldwide push to get governments to take happiness more seriously and to enact policies that improve our well-being. International Day of Happiness also marks the release of the World Happiness Report, and Happiness Lab has been given early access to all the new research this report contains. And over the next two episodes, we've got lots of highlights, including things you can do right now to improve your life. The most famous headline-grabbing part of each year's World Happiness Report are the country rankings. People around the world are asked, on a scale of 1 to 10, how satisfied are you with your life? The crown for the happiest people usually goes to a country somewhere in Scandinavia. And this year, the happiest country is...

• 2:38Speaker 03

  Finland.

• 2:39Laurie Santos?

  Finland.

• 2:40Speaker 03

  Again. But closely followed by Denmark, and Iceland, and Sweden, and the Netherlands, I think.

• 2:45Laurie Santos?

  This is Jan Emmanuel Dinev, professor of economics and behavioral science at the University of Oxford, and editor of the World Happiness Report. During the years he's studied these country data, he's noticed some changes. The rankings used to be dominated by the big, rich nations, but all that's changing.

• 3:01Speaker 03

  Mexico and Costa Rica entered the top 10.

• 3:04Laurie Santos?

  Oh, wow.

• 3:05Speaker 03

  Which is hugely exciting, and kudos to them. Eastern European countries continue their ascent, and that goes at the expense of the large industrial powers. So Germany tumbles out of top 20, the UK tumbles out of top 20, and the US drops to 24th.

• 3:18Laurie Santos?

  Wow.

• 3:19Speaker 03

  And then at the very bottom, Afghanistan. Still, and this time, average life satisfaction in Afghanistan is a type 1.34.

• 3:27Laurie Santos?

  Out of...

• 3:28Speaker 03

  10.

• 3:29Laurie Santos?

  Wow. As I said before, the country rankings tend to grab the headlines, but scientists like Jan and I are even more interested in what's causing these differences in life satisfaction. And one of the big factors might involve eating. There's been a ton of discussion about what we eat, but the World Happiness Report takes a different approach. It focuses on who we're eating with. We tend to eat 14 big meals a week. Who are we spending time with during all those lunches and dinners? Well, it turns out that the answer to that question seems to have a big impact on our well-being, because the World Happiness Report found that some people share meals with others, while some folks are going hungry for company. So why focus on sharing meals?

• 4:09Speaker 03

  The extent to which people share meals together as a proxy for the quality of our social connections and the quantity of social connections that we have, essentially our social capital, if you will. In the last seven days, over the past week, how many of your lunches and dinners were shared with somebody else? So about one in six people, approximately in the United States, were dining alone in the early 2000s, 2003 to be precise. And that's got up to one in four people is dining alone in the United States by about 2023. So that's a 53% increase or so in dining alone, but strikingly, mostly youth. To be really precise, youth are almost twice as likely to be dining alone today as compared to two decades ago. And I thought, wow.

• 4:53Laurie Santos?

  These findings are huge because eating alone is pretty bad for you. And a lot of us are finding ourselves having lunch or dinner by ourselves, even when we have families around us at home, colleagues at work, or peers at college. It's so easy to end up eating alone. So I've turned to an experienced clinical psychologist, family therapist, and an advocate for shared meals for advice.

• 5:13Speaker 04

  You could set the clock by my father walking through the door at seven o'clock, and dinner started at 10 after seven.

• 5:19Laurie Santos?

  This is Dr. Anne Fishel, associate professor at the Harvard Medical School.

• 5:23Speaker 04

  He would get out of his suit and put on his play clothes, and we would sit down, my mother, my father, and my sister. We didn't really do any other rituals. We didn't have Thanksgiving, but dinner was sacrosanct. And my mother didn't like to be stuck in the kitchen, so every meal she made was super quick. So quick that years later, when I hosted my first dinner party, I put a chicken, a roast chicken, in and took it out after 30 minutes because I'd never seen her spend more than 30 minutes in the kitchen. And of course, it was a bloody mess. But anyway, those dinners were really important to me as a child.

• 6:03Speaker 04

  And looking back, I realize that a lot of the things that I know now about being a family therapist, I learned around my childhood dinner table. You know, how to diffuse conflict, how even if somebody's quiet, it doesn't mean that they don't have a lot of things on their mind, how important it is to draw everybody out so everybody has a chance to talk, how Fun it is to hear stories about family members, to hear gossip about people in the building or the neighborhood. So all of that I learned at my dinner table.

• 6:35Speaker 05

  And such a believer in the virtues of us all eating together that she helped found the Family Dinner Project. I asked her to explain a little bit about it.

• 6:43Speaker 04

  So I was one of the co-founders in 2010, and the mission is to build on the research-based benefits of family dinner, the benefits that come from regular family dinners that bring nutritional, cognitive, and mental health benefits. I define family really broadly. Family is anybody who makes you feel like home. Family is anywhere that you find community. That could be people who aren't related to you. I'm starting to work with patients with dementia, and I would say part of their family are the other residents in the memory care unit, as well as the caregivers. It can be college-age kids eating together in

• 7:28Speaker 04

  a cafeteria. It can be friends coming over for a tired Wednesday night dinner. And what we found was that 90% of most American families think that family dinners are a great idea, but fewer than 50% of families are eating dinner together. So the Family Dinner Project was designed to bridge that gap, to make it easier, more doable, simpler, more fun, more meaningful, so that more families could harness these research-backed benefits of family dinner.

• 7:59Speaker 05

  And so let's talk about why family dinners are so important, maybe starting with the physical health benefits. How can our physical health benefit from kind of having more family dinners?

• 8:07Speaker 04

  So there are a lot of nutritional benefits that come from home-cooked meals, even if you're not trying that hard. Portion size tends to be smaller than the restaurant equivalents, which may account for lower obesity rates associated with regular family dinners. But also, home-cooked meals tend to be lower in sugar and salt and fat, and higher in fruits and vegetables and other nutrients. It's also associated with better cardiovascular health in young teens, and also associated with lower asthma symptoms, which may be a little puzzling. Maybe it's because sometimes asthma is associated with anxiety, which is lowered if the dinner is relaxing and not so stressful. Maybe it's

• 8:49Speaker 04

  because parents can remind their kids to take medication. So these are some of the health benefits.

• 8:55Speaker 05

  And so your anxiety comment also reminds me that there are lots of mental health benefits to family dinners. What are some of those?

• 9:01Speaker 04

  There really are. I mean, there's so many that as a family therapist, I sort of joke, I could almost be out of business if more families had regular family dinners. So they're associated with, on the part of kids, lower rates of anxiety and depression, lower rates of substance use and teenage pregnancy, lower rates of eating disorders. And on the upside, with more resilience, more self-esteem, and kids reporting that they feel more connected to their parents when they have regular family dinners. And then it turns out there are mental health benefits for adults, too. Lower rates of depression and anxiety for adults who eat with their kids, but also adults who eat with other adults. I can get very, very excited about the mental health benefits.

• 9:46Speaker 05

  Another benefit that was surprising when I first started reading your work is this idea that there are also, especially for kids, these cognitive and academic benefits that come from family dinners. What do we know about those?

• 9:55Speaker 04

  Yeah, so for young kids or preschoolers and toddlers, the language that they hear around the dinner table as their parents are sort of casually catching up about the day, those little stories contain 10 times more unusual or rare words than would be expected for a two-year-old or a three-year-old to know, and 10 times more unusual words than would show up in picture books that kids are read to. I think why that's significant is that kids who have larger vocabularies read earlier and more easily than kids who have slimmer vocabularies. I was just quoting this research to my son, who has a two-year-old grandchild, and she was saying to her parents, "What are you two talking about?"

• 10:40Speaker 04

  And I said, "That's so great. You know, I hope you told her what you were talking about, because that's going to give a little boost to her vocabulary."

• 10:48Speaker 05

  So it seems like there are all these benefits, but it seems like sometimes when families think about figuring out a family meal, it sometimes feels just totally overwhelming. Sometimes families even treat it with dread. Is this the kind of thing that you hear in The Family Dinner Project, too?

• 11:03Speaker 04

  Absolutely. I mean, we are such a busy, tired, harried people. You know, most of our kids are doing so many extracurricular activities that it can just feel like one more thing on the to-do list. And that is the number one challenge or obstacle. You know, we're too tired, our schedules don't mesh up. And so at The Family Dinner Project, we've spent a lot of time talking to hundreds of thousands of families across the country to find out some workarounds for this common challenge.

• 11:34Speaker 05

  So let's talk about some of the barriers you hear about most often. I just think the biggest one is just time.

• 11:38Speaker 04

  Right, time, being too tired, picky eaters, whether that's a partner or a child. You know, what's the point of going to the trouble of making a meal? If not, everybody's going to eat it. I don't want to be a short-order cook and make four different meals. I go to the trouble of making the meal and then all we do is fight or nobody talks, I can't get people to talk. Conflict and tension at the table. Budget worries. Healthy food is so expensive. How do I get my dollar to stretch so that I can feed my children unprocessed, healthy food? Distraction at the table. My kids turn on their gadgets and I guess we do, too. What do we do about technology at the table? So I'd say those are the recurring obstacles that I hear about over and over.

• 12:23Speaker 05

  When we hear these barriers, it seems really like hard to get to dinner. But you've argued that part of the barriers comes from our minds. We have these misconceptions about the things that count as family dinners. And so let's go through some of these misconceptions and see if we can kind of like clear the air, right? One of the misconceptions is this idea that for a family dinner to really count as a family dinner, everybody has to be there. Everybody has to be there for the whole time. Is this really the case? How should we think about this differently?

• 12:46Speaker 04

  First off, I want to say this isn't a nostalgia project. You know, we're not trying to go back to the spotless kitchens of the 1950s where a mother was home all day baking a, I don't know, a pork loin. Fortunately, that ship has sailed. So family dinner is... Less about the food than about what happens once the family gathers around the food. So really best to focus on the atmosphere around the dinner table, conversation, having a good time. And I call that the secret sauce of dinner. And you're absolutely right. Family dinner doesn't have to be the whole family sitting down. As one family said to me, we have a rule. No one eats alone. This was a family with five sons and they did kind of split shift dinners.

• 13:31Speaker 04

  So they would have two people eating and then later on, maybe one of those people would join another and so on. And they would have one meal that could be reheated, maybe a stew or a soup. So that's another myth. It doesn't have to be everybody. It doesn't have to be dinner. For some families, dinnertime is just beyond the pale. It's just too hectic. It could be family breakfast. It could be a fabulous Sunday brunch with extended family. There are really 16 opportunities in a week. Seven breakfasts, seven dinners and two weekend lunches. And then there are also intentional snacks. You know, push away from your computer. Come down to the kitchen table at 10 o'clock and let's have apples and hot chocolate.

• 14:16Speaker 04

  And then it doesn't have to be family. It could be you and a best friend. It could be a Tuesday night group that gets together to talk about books over food. It could be elders at an assisted living breaking bread together.

• 14:29Speaker 05

  It seems like one of the reasons that meeting together to have these meals is so challenging is we put these like ridiculous restrictions on ourselves. We get kind of perfectionistic about it. And it seems like your goal at the Family Dinner Project is just to say, we don't have to do this perfectly. We just should do this a little bit more often. So it's kind of family dinner with a bit more grace than we usually give ourselves.

• 14:46Speaker 04

  I love the way you put that. Perfect is really not our friend here. Dinner with a toddler might be five minutes. That's fine. That's something to build on. You know, the average American dinner is only 22 minutes. Doesn't have to be food made from scratch. It doesn't have to be heirloom tomatoes. Doesn't have to be a perfectly roasted chicken. Doesn't have to be perfect manners. Yes, let go of the perfect and give yourself some more grace.

• 15:12Laurie Santos?

  So eating meals with family, friends and colleagues has a ton of benefits. We're going to take a quick break now, but when we get back, and we'll have more tips on how to overcome all the obstacles that stop us sharing meals.

• 15:26Laurie Santos?

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• 16:55Laurie Santos?

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• 17:38Laurie Santos?

  Before the break, Dr. Anne Fischel took us through a lot of the things that stop us from enjoying shared meals, be that eating with our loved ones at home, having friends over, or sitting down with others during our lunch break at work. I asked Anne to break down those obstacles and offer some concrete solutions.

• 17:53Speaker 04

  For a lot of families, it just feels like another thing on their to-do list. And, you know, partly, I like to, without being too preachy, I hope, to say, family mealtime is really the most reliable time that we have to look eye to eye, to have fun, to relax, to share stories about our day. You know, we don't sit around campfires telling stories. We don't write letters with stories. So, just reminding families what a rich opportunity this is and how it packs really such a punch. And then, you know, really trying to come up with some meals that are very, very easy, that you could almost make

• 18:36Speaker 04

  in your sleep, food that you have in your pantry, like pasta with tomato sauce, or what I call my yoga eggs that I can make when I get off work at 6:00 and have to be out the door by 6:30, that are just quick sauteed vegetables with eggs on top. So, coming up with those and getting a list of meals from your family so that you won't get belly aching. You'll have like a rotating list of meals you know are acceptable to every... maybe they don't all adore every meal, but they'll eat them and you can get on to the more fun things about family dinner. And taking stock of whether dinner is really the best time of day for your family, maybe it's breakfast. Years ago, Cheerios came to us and said, "We know you're the family dinner project, but how about the family

• 19:21Speaker 04

  breakfast project?" And we came up with breakfast that took seven minutes, because that's the amount of time, if you don't press your snooze alarm, you can get seven minutes of your day back. And so, we built easy meals with a game to play at the breakfast table and a conversation starter. And they were all about anticipating the day rather than reviewing it. If you came up with a weather analogy for the day, what would it be? And then we might check it at the end of the day, or what are you most looking forward to, or what are you worried about? Or let's write some notes and put them in each other's lunchboxes or lunch bags. So that's another thing for very busy families is to pivot to something else.

• 20:04Speaker 05

  You've also mentioned the possibility of engaging in what you've called flexible courses. And this is particularly for families that might not have everybody home at the same time. How does this work and why is it so effective?

• 20:15Speaker 04

  Yeah, so I'm thinking about it at different stages of the life cycle. You know, if a family, if a couple has a toddler who goes to sleep at seven and they want to have a family meal, but they're really not ready to eat. So maybe they enjoy some cut up vegetables or some cheese with their toddler where while the toddler has her family dinner, they put their toddler to bed and then they have the rest of their family dinner. Or if you've got kids, as they get older, coming home late from sports practices, you might have a big nutritional snack with them at five o'clock. And that's really the time that one parent and a child plays games, has conversation starters, enjoys that meal. But then when the child comes home at eight o'clock,

• 21:00Speaker 04

  maybe they join in the family dinner and they have dessert with the other family members. So it's the idea of sort of flexible courses, depending on the age and stage of the child and how busy the different schedules are. You can sort of mix and match who eats what with whom, when.

• 21:19Speaker 05

  You've also argued that one of the things we need to do to fight against these busy schedules is to really push back on this culture of commitment. I thought this was a really important one. What do you mean there?

• 21:29Speaker 04

  Yeah, so there's a colleague of mine named Bill Doherty, who's also a family therapist in Minnesota. And he mounted a kind of statewide pushback program where he would organize parents to go together to talk to the coaches or the director of a play and say, we love what you're doing. Our kids love being involved in soccer and Macbeth, but family dinner is really important to all of us for all these different reasons. Could you adjust the rehearsal schedules? Could you make them a little bit later, have them end earlier so our kids can get home for dinner? That was so much more effective than having one squeaky wheel going into, go to the soccer coach to say, please, please change the schedule.

• 22:14Speaker 04

  So, you know, I think that. Parents really have that power to influence extracurricular activities. And I think they don't deploy it very often.

• 22:22Speaker 05

  So those are some strategies we can use to push back against this barrier of time, right? Get a little flexible, maybe have some short breaks, push back against some of these commitments. What about strategies for people who just think that the cooking is too much work? That the overwhelming part is really figuring out the dinner part? How can they deal with that?

• 22:38Speaker 04

  Yeah. So I would say our website, The Family Dinner Project, has a ton of great, easy recipes that are eight ingredients or less, take 30 minutes or less. And families can sign up and get a dinner tonight, which has a recipe and then a conversation starter and a game. And we have budget friendly, which they're about $2.10 per person. So there's that. There's also maybe making double or triple batches over the weekend and freezing half of them or two thirds of them so that next week you have, you can just defrost a stew or a soup and you've got most of your dinner made. You can ask other members of your family to help out.

• 23:22Speaker 04

  You know, that's, I think, a really important part of making dinner more enjoyable is getting help, whether it's with the grocery shopping or cooking part of it or cleaning up or setting the table. Kids and partners, of course, can participate in this. We've done quite a bit of work with military families who tell us about doing dinner swaps when their spouses are deployed and they're single parents. And what they do is they make four times one meal and then they meet and they swap and they come away from the swap with four different meals that they can deploy for the rest of the week. So that's something else.

• 24:00Speaker 05

  I love that idea so much because I feel like this happens when friends have new babies. Like I've been involved in lots of these kind of, oh, someone's really busy. They have a new baby. Let's, you know, I just make an extra batch of my lasagna to give to them. And other families do the same thing. But we forget that we don't necessarily need a newborn to be able to use a strategy like that. Like a bunch of families can do that every single week and get multiple different, interesting meals for like a bunch of families. Yeah.

• 24:23Speaker 04

  Absolutely. Or it could be done, I mean, you maybe have to be a military family to be that organized, but you could do it once a week with a friend or a neighbor. So I think there, there's some sort of lower hanging fruit there.

• 24:36Speaker 05

  This also strikes me as another spot where just kind of giving ourselves grace and maybe not going for the most perfectionist meals possible can be helpful. Like, I think sometimes we end up putting so much pressure on ourselves that we never do the kind of thing that we want to do, whereas if we just agreed to do it, you know, 75% awesome family dinners, we'd wind up doing it much more often than if we were trying to do it perfectly.

• 24:59Speaker 04

  Yes, and doing some shortcuts, you know, getting vegetables that have been precut or a rotisserie chicken, you know, not making a salad, but putting all the different accoutrements for a salad out, plus some tuna fish or some egg salad, and asking family members to assemble their own. And that can be done with tacos, with crepes. That's also a nice strategy for selective eaters. If you've got very different tastes in the families, it's a way to have people be able to customize and choose what they want. But it's also kind of a quick dinner, like a charcuterie board kind of dinner.

• 25:34Speaker 05

  And so those are all ways to kind of fight this barrier that cooking feels like it's too much work. How about the barrier of technology, especially the fact that it's harder and harder for us to put our tech devices away, even for just, you know, 20 minutes over the dinner table? What are some solutions there?

• 25:49Speaker 04

  Yeah. I did a survey a few years ago and found that parents were twice as likely to use their gadgets at the dinner table. So my first bit of advice is to ask the parents to kind of model the good behavior that they want from their kids. Some families have a very strict no-technology policy, you know, everybody put their phones in the middle of the table, and anybody who goes to reach for it has to do the dishes. And then some families have a more flexible version of that, and it might look like we can check our gadgets if it's to check a detail that we're having a fight about, like who won the World Series in 1984. And then some families say, well, I want to be able to

• 26:32Speaker 04

  share a picture I took or a funny email I got. And that seems to have a kind of a different spirit because it keeps the focus on connection at the table. So for those families, the rule is we can't use our phones to connect with people who Who aren't there. So no texting with others or taking phone calls. But it's OK to share things that came up on your phone today, as long as it's to the rest of the table. And then there's even some games that can incorporate technology, like a hot potato selfie. You set the timer and you pass it around. And when the timer goes off, you take a selfie. And then you set the timer and you pass it around until everybody has taken a selfie. And then, you know, you have a funny little collection of photos from that dinner.

• 27:15Laurie Santos?

  It's time for a quick break, but we'll be back with more tips from Anne, including advice on how to diffuse the dinner table disagreements that can mess up so many meals. The Happiness Lab will be right back.

• 27:29Laurie Santos?

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• 28:11Laurie Santos?

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• 29:29Laurie Santos?

  When I think of shared meals with friends and family, my mind usually goes to meal prep. What ingredients do I need? And when should I turn the oven on? But Dr. Anne Fishel thinks we should actually put more thought into preparing the dinner table conversation. Games and prompts are a great way to do this. It could be old favorites like 20 Questions, or Would You Rather? Or a suggestion from Anne's Family Dinner Table Project website, a game of Guess the Ingredients. Just like a meal needs salt and pepper, it also needs playfulness and fun.

• 29:57Speaker 04

  I think we all need more play in our lives, and games are a really great way to do it. I play games in family therapy, often the same games that I play at the dinner table. I don't love competitive games at the dinner table, but games often lead to laughter. They often lead to conversation. Let's go around the table and say a rose, something funny or positive that happened, a thorn, something difficult or unpleasant, and a bud, something we hope will happen tomorrow. Or let's tell two truths and a lie. You know, tell two stories about something that happened this week, and one thing that's just a bold-faced lie, and others will try to guess which is the made-up thing. So, ways to get kids to share more

• 30:41Speaker 04

  without just asking them, "How was your day?" And then I think food itself has so many different properties that we can play with. You know, it can be slippery. It can have different smells. It has different colors. And so, we can play with color. Ask our kids, "What meal could we make that's all red?" Or, "All green?" Or... What's a rainbow meal? And that way, we can eat our colors, which itself is a very nutritious way to eat. Or let's play with space. Let's switch seats because families often sit in the same seats night after night. Or let's have a picnic, or let's have a dinner in bed. Food is to families like Legos are to elementary school kids as music is to adolescents. It's the source of play.

• 31:26Speaker 04

  It's one of the few things that we can do with our hands and all our senses. And we can make something together. How rare is that in 21st century America that we can create something together? And that, to me, is just really fun.

• 31:40Speaker 05

  I think I'm channeling some busy parent friends of mine who have toddlers and little kids. And as you're talking about playing with colors and playing with foods, I'm hearing in my head what they might say, which is like, oh, my gosh, it's going to be messy and I don't have time to clean up. Any advice for kind of making games that avoid the like, kind of cleanup worries too?

• 31:58Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, I tend to have a really high tolerance for mess, which, I mean, so here's just a small example. To have small kids smear olive oil on vegetables that they get roasted at a high temperature will pretty much ensure that those kids will eat those vegetables because they've put their sticky little hands on it. And then the vegetables come out pretty crispy. Young kids tend not to like slimy foods. So, yes, it's going to be messy. Your kids are going to be covered, hopefully just their hands in oil. But think about the trade off. They're going to eat something really delicious and healthy that you can eat too.

• 32:40Speaker 05

  And partly, they're learning how to cook too, right? You're also kind of weaving in a cooking demonstration while they're doing it.

• 32:45Speaker 04

  That's right. This could, this could pay you back big time when they're a little bit older and maybe we'll do a little cooking for you.

• 32:53Speaker 05

  We had a whole series of podcasts about parenting and parenting strategies. And one of the things we often heard is that anthropologists who study parents in other cultures often find that they have kids getting more involved in things like cooking and cleaning and so on. And I think in the US, we sometimes don't want our kids to do that because we think they won't do it perfectly or they'll kind of mess it up. But then we lose these really interesting opportunities for teaching our kids because we don't have them involved. It seems like dinnertime is yet another domain in which we could be doing this a little bit more.

• 33:21Speaker 04

  Absolutely. It reminds me of two parents, Eileen and Mary, who had a little four-year-old boy. And one of the moms really did not like mess at all and didn't really like the idea of playing with food and all of that. And they would get their vegetables from a co-op each week. And one week, they got a squash, they opened it up, and the little boy exclaimed, oh, my goodness, it's so different inside compared to outside. And that was this amazing jumping off point for talking about all the different ways you can't, you know, judge a book by its cover, sort of an analogy, I think, for family dinner, that there are all kinds of surprises that lie around the table. So it can be the launching pad for lots of interesting conversations,

• 34:06Speaker 04

  not just about the food.

• 34:07Speaker 05

  I think this idea of sharing meals as an intimate experience gets to yet another barrier I see coming up, not so much with families, but with maybe single folks or friends who want to get together for meals, which is, I think, we're often worried about having people in our personal space, right? You know, I think about even tonight, having someone over for dinner, and my head instantly goes to like, oh, my gosh, I didn't put that stuff away that's in the living room, or the kitchen is kind of a mess. Like, any ways to give ourselves grace and just allow our people into these intimate spaces so we can get the benefits of sharing meals, even outside the family?

• 34:37Speaker 04

  Yeah. I mean, I think one way is to invite a friend over when you haven't completed making the dinner, so that you're bringing them into the making of the dinner. You know, often, particularly on a casual Wednesday night, a friend would like to help. They'd like to help you cut up those last salad ingredients. And I think that creates more of a feeling of, we're all in this together, and this is a shared meal, rather than you're a guest coming into it. I used to, when I would have guests over and they'd say, what can we bring? And I would say, oh, no, no, no, no, don't bring anything. And then I realized that that was kind of selfish, and kind of controlling, and kind of perfectionistic.

• 35:17Speaker 04

  If I could ask them to bring a course, they already would feel more included. And I would also feel less burdened by having to make a meal. I think there's so many different ways to involve outsiders or friends. I think of a military mother who wrote a book called Dinner with Smilys. And her husband was deployed for a whole year. And every month, they would invite somebody from their neighborhood or community to come to dinner and sit in the father's chair. One week it was a coach, one week it was the governor of Maine. I'm sure they felt the pressure to clean up for those meals. But it added such an interesting variation on their regular family dinner.

• 36:00Speaker 04

  And then I think of a family I worked with, a single mom, who often felt like there wasn't enough liveliness at the table because it was just one adult. And so her friends and her relatives knew that every Wednesday night was an open dinner night. And they never knew who would drop by, and she always made extra for that dinner.

• 36:19Speaker 05

  I've heard a similar suggestion where it's like you just have one night where it's like, you know, Wednesday is the open night, and maybe you don't even make extra dinner. It's like, as a friend, you can come over, but bring your own, like, bring a leftover. You can microwave it. Don't expect me to be perfect, right? You know, but this is a night where, like, doors open and you can show up. It also reminds me of a suggestion that I got from the journalist Oliver Brickman, who talks about all these things we can do to kind of manage our time with less perfectionism. And he has this idea that he calls scruffy hospitality, which is kind of like you were saying, like, you invite people over, but it's like, you're gonna have to do the dishes, you're gonna have to tell me chop these vegetables. The house is not gonna be clean. And we just sort of accept that at the beginning, that like, we're gonna have some hospitality, we're gonna have some shared mealtime, but it's gonna be pretty scruffy.

• 37:00Speaker 04

  Right. Yeah, like, set the expectations where they should be.

• 37:04Speaker 05

  And it seems like that's just a message for all of this work, right? There's so many benefits if we could find more ways to share meals broadly, even beyond our family. But to do that, we really just have to set our expectations a little bit less perfectionistically.

• 37:16Speaker 04

  Yes. One thing that we've been doing for, well, 15 years at the Family Dinner Project is hosting big community dinners. And these are anywhere where families gather. Libraries, military bases, homeless shelters, clinics, teaching kitchens. They're often groups of families who don't know each other, but who come to know each other in a 90-minute dinner where we cook together, we eat together, we play games, we have conversation jars on the tables, and people reach in and ask whimsical or silly or serious things of one another. And then I talk to the parents or the caregivers and say, what do you do well when it comes to family dinner? And what are your obstacles?

• 38:00Speaker 04

  And now let's take some of those obstacles and use the wisdom in this group to share our workarounds and hacks. That's really where I've learned probably the most about how families find ways to have dinner, even though it's really not that easy.

• 38:16Speaker 05

  So another barrier lots of families face is that sometimes around the dinner table, there's tension, you know, maybe big tension, we have, you know, political disagreements, but even like little tension, I'm just like pissy at you, mom, for that thing you said to me. Any strategies for diffusing that?

• 38:29Speaker 04

  Yeah. So I want to start with a piece of research on that, which I conducted during the pandemic. One of the only good things I can say about the pandemic is that it gave a naturalistic opportunity to study what happens when families have more dinner with one another. So something like 60%, 70% of families shared family dinners during the pandemic. And what I found was that as frequency increased, the positive qualities of family dinner also increased. So parents reported that they talked more about gratitude, they laughed more, they talked about their identity as a family. They also shared more conversation about the news and public events.

• 39:14Speaker 04

  They used Zoom to connect with friends and family, but they also had more conflict and tension at the table. And at first I was sort of upset by that finding, and then I thought, Well, of course, if you're spending more time with your family, but dinner is a canvas. It's an opportunity to do what families do. And one of the things they do is have conflict and fight. And I will say that the positive qualities increased way more than the negative ones. So first thing I would say is some conflict and tension is to be expected. And I know, growing up, we had drag out fights about politics. I loved those fights, and I think my parents did too. So, you know, for some families, those kinds of philosophical

• 39:58Speaker 04

  or political fights are really part of their identity as a family. But in general, I think there are ways to minimize conflict. Probably not the best time to bring up topics you know are hot button issues for your kids. Maybe don't talk about that D they got in chemistry. Maybe go easy on teaching table manners. That makes everybody tense. Just focus on the manners that matter, that everybody can do better, you know, not interrupting each other, or maybe not talking with a mouthful of food. But who cares about the elbows on the table? Other things that kind of mitigate against conflict is having fun, playing games, having conversations that make us laugh or think. And yes, there can be guidelines that

• 40:41Speaker 04

  are offered, like, we have a rule at the dinner table. Let's just remember that when one person is talking, other people don't talk over them or interrupt. Gosh, this is getting a little heated. Let's just step away for a moment and take a break. Or let's do a quick breathing exercise and just calm down for a minute. I thought about conflict a lot, and often do at Thanksgiving, which is, of course, after elections. And in 2016, I was worried about my own conflict at the Thanksgiving table. And I came up with a game that I've now played every Thanksgiving that I call the hat game. And as people come in, I have a hat and Post-its at the table, and I have a prompt, and I ask everybody

• 41:26Speaker 04

  to answer the prompt anonymously. So that first year, it was, what character in a children's book did you most identify, or do you most identify with or want to be? Or what toy did you most love as a child, or love now as a child? And people would answer them. And then I brought the hat to the table and pulled out the Post-its and each person tried to guess which person went with which answer. And then that person could expound if they wanted, but it meant that for like 10 or 15 minutes, we had a lighthearted, interesting, conflict-free conversation.

• 42:04Laurie Santos?

  Thanks to Dr. Anne Fischel and Jan Emanuel Denev for walking us through the importance of sharing mealtime with other people. In the next episode, we'll examine another topic raised by the report. Are we becoming less trusting? And what does that mean for our well-being? All that next time on the Happiness Lab with me, Dr. Laurie Santos.

• 42:27Laurie Santos?

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