Moment 151: Neuroscientist Reveals The 3 Things You Need To Do For A Fulfilling Life: Tali Sharot

In this moment, neuroscientist, Professor Tali Sharot, discusses why happiness is not the most important thing in life, and actually it is just 1 of 3 critical factors for a complete life. Most people think that the meaning of life for humans is to try and find the maximum amount of happiness, however this just factor one. Tali says that the second factor is meaning. Often in your life you do a task not because it will give you happiness but because it gives you a sense of completeness that comes from meaning. Finally, Tali says that we need what is called a ‘psychological rich life’, which is basically a varied life. She says that this diversity in life is absolutely crucial as humans have evolved to have a desire to explore and face uncertainty. Listen to the full episode here - Apple - https://g2ul0.app.link/UxbjZ8pxAHb Spotify - https://g2ul0.app.link/gfyuxwlxAHb Watch the Episodes On Youtube - https://www.youtube.com/c/%20TheDiaryOfACEO/videos Tali: https://affectivebrain.com/?page_id=161 You can pre-order Dr. Sharot’s new book, ‘Look Again: The Power of Noticing What was Always There’, here: https://amzn.to/3SEbVp5 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.

• 0:03Steven Bartlett?

  You know, when you started studying neuroscience and psychology, were there some like fundamentals about the nature of life and the nature of human beings? That, I'm sure there's so many of them, but were there any like real fundamentals that were debunked or reversed as it relates to your own personal perspective? Whether it's about personal responsibility or about, I don't know, agency or autonomy, about how much control we have, about how much influence we have over our happiness? Were there anything foundational that had a real impact on your personal life?

• 0:31Speaker 01

  You know, there's one thing that recently is just, it's just something that I recently changed my mind on. And that was actually while writing the current book that I'm writing, which I'm writing together with Cass Seinstein, who is the co-author of Nudge. And it was actually in fact about happiness, because, and I remember this clearly. I was in a workshop at the LSC and they did a survey. They asked, who thinks that happiness is the most important thing, right? That everything you do is for happiness. And, you know, everyone had to stand on a scale. If you think like it's all about happiness, stand here. And if you think it's not at all, stand here. And I was standing here. I was thinking, anything that we do, we do for happiness and that, all that, and that matters.

• 1:12Speaker 01

  And while writing this book, actually, we both came to the conclusion, and for me it was a change of mind, that happiness is actually one of three factors that matter.

• 1:25Speaker 01

  So one is happiness. The second is meaning. A lot of things you do because it gives you meaning and it doesn't necessarily give you happiness. Sometimes the two go hand in hand, right? But sometimes it doesn't. So you could do work that's meaningful and it doesn't necessarily give you happiness and sometimes it does. And then there's a third factor that's also really interesting, which is called a psychological rich life, which is basically variety. A lot of people just do things for diversity, for variety, to try a lot of different things. And again, sometimes it goes hand in hand with meaning and happiness, but sometimes it doesn't. And that kind of explains why many times we make choices that we understand is not necessarily going to gain us more happiness,

• 2:09Speaker 01

  but it will gain us some other thing, one of these two other things, that together, I think, is what brings a good life, right? And that, that is something I think I changed my mind on, that it's, we're not actually motivated for happiness, probably defined as a good feeling.

• 2:28Speaker 01

  Kind of joy.

• 2:30Steven Bartlett?

  Why variety? Why do humans care about having variety in their life?

• 2:34Speaker 01

  Um, I mean, there's kind of the unconscious evolutionary reason.

• 2:38Steven Bartlett?

  Give me that one.

• 2:39Speaker 01

  Um, so I think it's exploration, right? To move forward, both as an individual and as a society, we have to explore a lot of different things. Some of these things are not necessarily going to give you happiness immediately or for you at all. But a lot of times, if you explore a lot of things, you will find something that is going to be very important. Maybe for yourself, maybe for our species. I always give kind of, you know, the really simple example of um our ancestors leaving Africa to explore the rest of the world, right? They had, I mean, why would they do that? I mean, either they thought there was something better for them to find, right? And it was probably very hard to do.

• 3:22Speaker 01

  But that's just kind of an example of exploration, right? You're trying different things. Um, and I I can see it in my own life, right? I often do something and then I kind of, okay, I had enough with this, let's try something else. And so variety is kind of a factor that I'm trying to maximize. It's kind of a balance, right? It's exploration and exploitation, right? So you need to do a little bit of exploitation because if you found something that works and something that you're good at, you don't want to just leave it be. But on the other hand, if you just stick with one thing, you may be missing a whole other, a lot of different things.

• 3:55Steven Bartlett?

  It's like farming and hunting. It's like the analogy from that book, Who Moved My Cheese? When I think about um variety, my brain was going, well, I know some people that get so caught up in their comfort zones that they never go exploring. And so the the the thought that we'd be motivated or fulfilled by variety, by new things, by adventure, seems to sit in conflict with a lot of people that I know that are like stuck in a situation and um maybe not happy. But they're more confident in the known than they are leaving that place and and venturing out.

• 4:28Speaker 01

  Right, because exploration is risky because there's uncertainty. You don't know what's going to happen. Risk means that there's a high likelihood of both good and bad, and you just don't know where it's going to go. And so that can cause fear. Um, uncertainty is a state that usually people don't like and don't enjoy. And that's definitely something that keeps you in place. And in fact, one of the kind of points that we make is that it seems that people are not making enough change in their life. That a lot of times if people think about changing something in their life, maybe it's a relationship, maybe it's a profession, it could be something stupid like, you know, the color of your hair or something like that.

• 5:09Speaker 01

  There is a great fun little study that was conducted by the Freakonomical, Stephen Levitt. What he did, he wanted to see if, on average, making a change, when you think you might want to make a change, this is not just like, oh, I think you should get divorced when you're not even thinking about it, but when you're thinking about a specific change, on average, are you more likely to be happy if you go ahead with a change or not? Right? And this is a tricky thing to study because normally you could say, well, let's test people. Let's ask them how happy they are before and after they decide to make a change, after they made a change. And then also, let's do the same for people who didn't make a change and see who's happier. That's not going to work because people who just to go on and make a change, they probably had more reason to do it, right?

• 5:53Speaker 01

  So it's not kind of a good experimental design. So he wanted to randomize whether people are going to make changes or not. So what he did is he had people go online and he asked them, are you thinking about a change? And it could be small and it could be big. And they said what the change was. And then he had them flip a virtual coin. So heads, you go with a change, you know, you take the new job. Tails, you don't. The likelihood that people would change if they got the heads, the change, was 25% more than the people who didn't. So basically, people were thinking about a change, they did it, they flipped the coin. If they got the change, they're more likely to have a change.

• 6:34Speaker 01

  And indeed, people who went actually and committed and did the change were happier than people who didn't. So that kind of suggests that we're probably not making enough changes than we should be, potentially because it's scary, right? Trying something new is scary and sometimes it's not going to work.

• 6:52Steven Bartlett?

  I think that so much in friends of mine and like lots of DMs from young people who are in a situation where they're, it's certain, but it's miserable. And they have a, they have a potential option to like go through that dark. Chasm to this potentially better place, but they're choosing to stay in that certain miserable situation, whether it's a relationship, a job, whatever it might be. And I've always felt that our relationship with uncertainty has a huge sway on our overall outcomes. And what I mean by that is people who are okay with jumping into that sort of dark hole, where there isn't certainty about their outcomes and just persisting because they'd rather not be in certain misery, end up having better lives. But I don't know how to get people to have a better relationship with uncertainty. I mean, that's a compelling argument.

• 7:37Steven Bartlett?

  I can say to them, but you know, just stats and facts, because I've read your books, aren't enough. There needs to be some kind of emotional pitch to them to get them to dive nose first into uncertainty. Any advice?

• 7:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's a really good question. First of all, I mean, you're absolutely right. There's individual differences on how comfortable we are with uncertainty, how comfortable we are with taking risks. So I think probably it would be something like, to some extent, helping them through the change. So it might be difficult to change people's relationship with uncertainty in a global general way, but perhaps every single time when there's a specific issue in front of them of what they want to change, kind of like helping them along the way with that change, holding their hand and, you know, so to speak, is probably the only thing that you could do, right?

• 8:36Speaker 01

  To be like, I'm here for you, whether it's a friend or a mentor.

• 8:39Steven Bartlett?

  In their mind, in that moment, the thing that's causing the resistance, you describe it as fear, right?

• 8:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:46Steven Bartlett?

  So what's the opposite of fear? Is it hope?

• 8:48Speaker 01

  You know, it's not an opposite.

• 8:50Steven Bartlett?

  Okay.

• 8:51Speaker 01

  But I think it is something that will Be likely to drive you to take that step. And it's not so much just hope, it's optimism, which kind of takes us to some of my research. So, okay, what's the difference between hope and optimism? So, hope is you want something to happen in the future, right? I want to get that job. I want to find that relationship. Optimism is believing that I'm likely to get that job. I'm likely to find that wonderful relationship. And it's absolutely true that if you're optimistic, you think this is going to go somewhere good, then you're more likely to go ahead and try that, which makes sense, right?

• 9:36Speaker 01

  Because my expectation is going to change my actions. And my actions is going to change my outcomes, right? Because if I think, well, I am gonna, I'm gonna try for this competition because I think I'm likely to get something, then I go ahead and I try. If I think, well, there's no, no chance, I don't try. And so, of course, I'm not going to get it. So it's a bit of a self fulfilling optimism. And so then the question becomes, if I go back to your question, then the question becomes, well, how do I enhance optimism? Right? So there's actually, and that's, it's a good idea because enhancing optimism will cause you to take more risk.

• 10:13Steven Bartlett?

  I want to know how to enhance optimism in all of my team members, all of my companies.

• 10:18Speaker 01

  So there's a few ways to do it. One way is a sense of control. We do have, we are more optimistic about things that we believe we have control over because we do think that when we have control, that means we can steer the wheel in the right direction. Right?

• 10:36Speaker 01

  And so if we can cause people to get a sense that they have control, and if it's about your team, is for example, let's say they, there's a project that you want someone to work on. So you can just tell them to do that project, or you can have them choose to do that project, right? And you can guide them to the choice that you think is correct. But if they believe that they made the choice, that enhances a sense of agency, enhances the change of the sense of control, and they become more committed to that option. So you can give them, oh, well, there's two options, two projects you can work on. Which one do you prefer? And again, you can frame it in a way that maybe perhaps will make them more likely to choose one over the other. But once they made the choice, it's amazing.

• 11:19Speaker 01

  We've done studies on this, where we give people options. For example, going on holiday. Do you want to go to France or Rome, right? Thailand or Hawaii? If they make a choice, there are two things that are exactly, they want it the same. They really want to go Hawaii. They really want to go to Florida. But once they make a choice, seconds after making a choice, they now believe that Hawaii is much better than they did just a few seconds ago before making a choice, and that Florida is not that great, right? Because once you make a choice, immediately, your preferences change. You rationalize why that choice was great, and now you're more committed to it. So that's true for holidays, but it can be true for work as well, right? Should I go work on Project A or B?

• 12:03Speaker 01

  If I make the choice, I become more committed. And it doesn't work if someone else makes a choice for you. If someone else makes a choice for you, don't get into this rationalization mode, where you have to rationalize your choice because it wasn't your choice. And once I feel I have control, then kind of that also enhances my expectations of how good it's going to be.

• 12:23Steven Bartlett?

  But it also boosts your happiness, right?

• 12:25Speaker 01

  Oh, yes.

• 12:25Steven Bartlett?

  Because I read about the study in care homes, where they had an agency floor and the other floor, where people didn't feel like they had a lot of agency and choice over their lives. And there was a pretty significant impact on levels of happiness, right?

• 12:37Speaker 01

  Yes, so what they did is they gave them some plans. Is that the study?

• 12:40Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 12:40Speaker 01

  Yes, yes, yes, absolutely. So when we feel we have control, we have agency that enhances well-being. When we feel our agency has been restricted, that causes anxiety, right? And this is one of the reasons that people are quite anxious on planes. It's not just because we fear the worst, but because we have no control at all, right? No control about when are we, where are you gonna get there? What are we gonna eat, right? And that causes a lot of anxiety. So by enhancing agency and control, you are lifting people's well-being, happiness, and reducing stress and anxiety. Yeah, and those, you know, that study with the plants, it works with kids as well, right? You can give kids some plants to take care of, or have kids make their own salads. They'll be more likely to eat it.

• 13:24Speaker 01

  So that's just, you know, a few examples.