Harnessing People Around us to Feel Happier (Live with Ethan Kross)

Hell is other people. They can upset us, depress us and infuriate us. Their bad moods can bring us down. And their achievements can make us feel like failures. But it doesn't have to be this way. Psychologist Ethan Kross says there are simple things we can do to make our daily interactions a source of fulfilment and joy. Ethan's the author of Shift: Managing Your Emotions So They Don't Manage You https://www.ethankross.com/and founder of the Emotion and Self Control Lab at the University of Michigan Recorded before a live audience of teen students at Choate Rosemary Hall. 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.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:04Speaker 01

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• 0:32Laurie Santos?

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• 1:17Laurie Santos?

  Pushkin.

• 1:25Laurie Santos?

  Hey, Happiness Lab listeners. Today, you're in for a special treat. If you're a regular listener of this podcast, you've probably already gotten a chance to hear from my good friend, the psychologist Ethan Cross. In fact, Ethan just visited the show as part of our recent how-to season, where he gave us his top tips for hacking negative emotions. Lots of these ideas come from his new book, Shift: Managing Your Emotions So They Don't Manage You. But in that interview, we only got to scratch the surface of the cool work that Ethan does in his Emotion and Self-Control Lab at the University of Michigan. So to mark the publication of his new book, Ethan asked me to join him onstage for a live recording of this podcast at Choate Rosemary Hall, an independent school not too far from my hometown in New Haven, Connecticut. In front of an audience of teen students, Ethan and I got to chat not about hacking our emotions,

• 2:10Laurie Santos?

  but about the effect that other people can have on our feelings and the big effects we can have on other people, too. I definitely learned a lot from this conversation, and I think you will, too. Welcome to the Happiness Lab Live, where we are coming Coming in from Rosemary Hall. We have a fantastic audience of folks here for a really fun conversation with one of my favorite psychologists, Ethan Kross.

• 2:37Laurie Santos?

  So Ethan is a professor at the University of Michigan, both in the psychology department and at the Roth School of Business. He's the director of the Emotion and Self-Control Lab. He's an expert on strategies we can use to control our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. As you might guess with an expertise this cool, Ethan's a sought-after consultant and speaker. He's worked with famous CEOs, professional basketball teams, and has even been hosted at the White House, all to help leaders and folks who need it regulate their feelings and emotions. Ethan is the author of the national and international bestselling book Chatter, The Voice in Our Head: Why It Matters and How to Harness It. This book was chosen as one of the Best New Books of 2021 by Washington Post, CNN, and USA Today. But he's just written a fabulous new book.

• 3:22Laurie Santos?

  It's so exciting. We're here on launch day today. A fabulous new book entitled, Shift: Managing Your Emotions So They Don't Manage You. Ethan is already a regular on the Happiness Lab. I'm super psyched that he's agreed to help me out with this live episode today because we're going to be exploring an important topic: how we can harness the people around us to feel happier. Please join me in welcoming to the Happiness Lab Live, Ethan Kross.

• 3:52Laurie Santos?

  All right, Ethan. So today, we're talking about a bit of a paradox when it comes to our happiness and our emotions. You and I talk a lot about things we can do to be happier. And one of the biggest pieces of advice that we often give is just that we can use other people to improve our happiness. Social connection is such a huge predictor of the way we feel. Often, it's a thing that we can do to make ourselves feel good. But if we're paraphrasing Jean-Paul Sartre, hell is other people. Like, other people can also be a little bit of a pain in the butt.

• 4:25Laurie Santos?

  As an expert in emotion, can you resonate with this?

• 4:29Speaker 03

  Completely. You know, other people can be our greatest ally or our worst enemy when it comes to managing our emotional lives. And what's really interesting to me about this issue is we don't get a user's guide for how to steer our interactions with other people. So I'm curious, and I think the rules here are no hands, but if you agree with something, clap. How many people here sometimes go to someone else to chat about a problem and find that it just makes you feel worse?

• 5:03Speaker 03

  Often not our intention, but sometimes this happens with people we really care about. Sometimes it's our loved ones. I often joke, but mean this quite seriously. There are many people in my life that I am exceptionally close to. DNA determines those close connections, if you know what I mean. I don't talk to them about problems because I know that when I do, it's just gonna take me down the wrong path. And so I think it is critically important to understand how to harness your relationships with other people, and also the way you interact with others, to make sure those interactions contribute to fulfillment, happiness, and so forth, rather than push you in the opposite direction.

• 5:43Laurie Santos?

  So let's take a deeper look at some spots where we get it wrong. One of the pieces of psychology that I think is really relevant here is some work on what's called emotional contagion. What's emotional contagion? And why can it kind of take us off track when we're dealing with other people?

• 5:58Speaker 03

  So we are a social species. We are constantly looking to other people for how to understand ourselves. And what we have learned is that we actually catch feelings from other people quite easily. So when you enter a room and you see people with a glum look on their face, sadly, as professors, I think this may happen more often than we'd like to admit, right? You go into the room and you see everyone. This immediately gives me information about what the temperature in the room is like, and I experience that emotion. And that could be adaptive, right? It signals to me, maybe I've got to loosen things up. But we know that emotions cause what we call a ripple effect.

• 6:43Speaker 03

  They very quickly cascade into our own lives. And if you're not aware of this, like, you can catch the wrong set of feelings. And so we're all vulnerable to this, for better or worse.

• 6:55Laurie Santos?

  And I think one of the ways that I've seen this play out is that it's not just a, like, one-on-one contagion. It's not just like, I might catch the emotions that you have, or I might catch the emotions from the audience. But then, we tend to kind of transmit that, like, to other situations, too, almost like a virus, right? So, say I have a conversation with Ethan. This has never happened with Ethan, because obviously Ethan's a very happy person, who's never glum. But let's say I have a conversation with Ethan, and he's feeling really frustrated, he's feeling really down. I leave that conversation, and then I go teach my class, and then I transmit that to my class. Or I go on social media and I post something that's kind of frustrated and glum or angry. Like, you can see what researcher Seegol Barsaid calls these affective spirals, where it's like, not just like, one person catches one person's emotion, but it's kind of a spiral

• 7:39Laurie Santos?

  that can almost transmit to a community. So it sounds like this can be really bad when it comes to the sort of emotions that are kind of naturally free-floating around if we're dealing with negative emotions.

• 7:48Speaker 03

  Well, with negative emotions, it can certainly be the case, and I think that's particularly true with social media, where we see the viral spread of negative emotions happening really, really fast. You come across news, and it affects you. You see someone else displaying a negative reaction, you feel it as well, and then you quickly pass it on to someone else on the feed. And then it just cascades further and further and further. And so, this is where I think knowledge is power. So, knowing about how this works, I think, for me, in my experience as a human being, is very powerful. So if I enter a room and I see one or two people are, you know, conveying facial expressions

• 8:30Speaker 03

  that I don't particularly think are conducive to the kinds of interactions I want to have, I'll try to loosen those people up and try to turn the, you know, frown around.

• 8:41Laurie Santos?

  And I think it's important to, this idea of knowledge is power. I think in part when we're often in these social situations where we're around other people, it can be important to remember how affected we are by them, right? I think about this a lot in like workplace settings, right? Where like you go to work and like the people on your team might be kind of feeling optimistic or they might be feeling not so happy and like you're gonna catch that. But here we are at Choate today, I think this is so important in school context, right? Whether it's like on your athletic team, whether it's in your classroom, like the emotions of one person are gonna kind of transmit in this way that can be, again, sort of dangerous if they're negative emotions that we're dealing with.

• 9:17Speaker 03

  Absolutely. How many people here have been told, "Don't compare yourselves to other people"?

• 9:27Speaker 03

  So, uh, it sounds beautiful, that piece of advice, but easier bleeping said than done, right? Like, is that easy to do, just stop comparing yourself to other people? So, talking about the way that other people can affect us, I'm reminded of a time that my daughter asked, my daughter who's, you know, in high school, wanted more screen time one night and was like, really, really Supreme Court level, like litigation here, arguing for more screen time. And I was like, "No", you know, and I said, "Well, no other families give their kids more screen time", and then she comes back and goes, "I thought you said we don't compare ourselves to other people",

• 10:11Speaker 03

  it's pretty slick, huh? I mean, I was proud inside, but I did not show it. I regulated that emotion and I just held true. But what I realized in that moment was, that directive I gave, "We don't compare ourselves to other people", probably the worst advice I could ever give because it is not possible not to reference other people. We are constantly looking to others to make sense of who we are, right? This is called social comparisons, that's how we operate. And I think the more we embrace that, the better because then there's an opportunity to make social comparisons wiser, right? To steer those comparisons so that they don't maybe negatively affect us.

• 10:54Speaker 03

  There's also the opportunity to benefit from this emotional contagion effect, right? Like, earlier on, when everyone else was clapping, did that feel good to folks here? I felt great. I loved it. I remember I was telling Laurie this story earlier. When I was in college, one of the most memorable classes I ever took was a class on communications. And the instructor said, "There is an art to being a good audience member." I'm scanning you all right now to see who's gonna get an A versus an F. Couple of Fs here, right? So, so the art to being a good audience member involves a gentle kind of raising your cheekbone, smiling.

• 11:37Speaker 03

  Not, "You're good. I love it. Keep going."

• 11:40Laurie Santos?

  Ethan's pointing at one too today. It was like really kind of kindly smiling and looking very compassionate.

• 11:46Speaker 03

  And you know, it's fine to do that. In your head, you could say, "This is terrible. I can't wait to go back to what I'm doing." Doesn't matter for us up here, because we're catching these signals from you. You're conveying information to us. And so you can use that, if you know how this works, you can use it to your benefit to make other people feel better, or not, right? And so that's where the knowledge is power for how I think all this works. And we'll talk more about social comparisons, I'm sure, but likewise.

• 12:13Laurie Santos?

  Yeah, well, let's dive into it now, because I think, you know, we were just talking about emotional contagion as one way that we catch other people's emotions in person and also online, as you mentioned. I think especially online, but also in person, another way that other people negatively affect our emotions is through social comparison. And that can feel ridiculously frustrating, because sometimes even in a situation where you feel like you're like objectively kind of doing okay, if you see somebody doing better than you, it can make you feel kind of crappy. Whether that's, "Oh, they had a better vacation than me," or, you know, again, here we're in high school. They're getting better grades than me. They perform better than me. They're doing better at work, making more money, you know, for folks in the adult world. It just seems like all of it makes you feel kind of bad about yourself.

• 12:53Speaker 03

  And it's always possible to find someone who's outperforming you. I mean, it's remarkable. We can always find that person. Sometimes, I mean, a lot of people describe the experience of being on social media. A lot of people here on social media. Okay. So, anyone ever feel like when you're on Instagram, or whatever platforms you're on that, it's kind of like navigating landmines? Like, you're going through it, you're feeling good, you're seeing the funny movie, great, great, great, and then you catch something that, oh crap, I suck. Like, does anyone ever have that experience, or is it just me? Yes? So you don't know when it's gonna happen. And we do know from lots of research that most of the social comparisons we make,

• 13:38Speaker 03

  and we are doing these comparisons all the time, do tend to push us in the negative direction. So, we make comparisons against people who are outperforming us in some way, we don't feel great about our lives. You can actually reframe those comparisons to your benefit. And up until I knew about the science here, I was just a victim of these comparisons. I'd feel kind of glum, you know, I'd go lay on the couch, maybe put some washcloth on my head, oh, I'm such a failure, haven't lived up to my ex, you know, blah, blah, blah.

• 14:09Laurie Santos?

  That was a joke, folks, he was trying to make a joke.

• 14:11Speaker 03

  Yeah, we won't even try that one again, because that was just straight... I like this, where you could just edit it out.

• 14:17Laurie Santos?

  You just edit it out, if the joke doesn't work, it never happens.

• 14:19Speaker 03

  Yeah, this is good. So here's what you do, you can flip it. So now, when I come across that situation, I think, wow, they achieved this, so can I. And now it's not competition, now it's, this is information that I can use to try to aspire to reach that goal. That's a little, little reframe, we call it, that is powerful, because it neutralizes that negative social comparison, which is inevitable. And now that I know how to do it, and you know, this was a big reason for writing this book, is if you have the tools to push your emotions around, it becomes really easy to do it. It doesn't have to be super complicated. You can also do it in the negative direction.

• 15:02Speaker 03

  You come across someone who is doing a lot worse than you, and maybe you think to yourself, oh my god, what if this happens to me? Right? That makes people feel really anxious sometimes. Rather than thinking about making a comparison and feeling that way, you could flip it. Wow, I'm so grateful. This hasn't happened to me. Simple switch puts you in a totally different direction. Do you ever do this when you make social comparisons? Like, tell the world, Lori, you have been silent on you making the comparisons. It's been just about me so far.

• 15:33Laurie Santos?

  Yeah, I think, so this is one of the studies I teach in my class. It's just like so profound at how, not only how bad social comparison makes us feel, but how much like, sometimes when we're socially comparing, we just like don't have any justification for it at all. And it's a study that happened, a very famous study in sports. Researchers went and they looked at Olympians who were on the stand. So these are people who won gold, silver, and bronze medals at the Olympics, standing on the stand. And what they did was they videotaped their facial expressions to see who was kind of, who was feeling which emotions, right? And so first the gold medalist, what are they feeling? Well, they're feeling like happy, elated, they're smiling, it's fine, right? They're best in the world, right?

• 16:16Laurie Santos?

  Now we cut to the silver medalist, what are they feeling? They're second best in the world, like literally better in whatever their sport is than billions of other people. What emotions are they experiencing? If you analyze their facial expressions, it's not happiness. It's emotions like contempt, deep sadness, grief. Like, they're not even in the positive camp anymore. They're just experiencing only negative emotions. Why? There's a really obvious social comparison there. When you won the silver medal, you really almost got gold, but you didn't get it. So what are you feeling? You're not feeling like, you know, slightly less happy than the best in the world. Even though you are the second best in the world, you're feeling awful, right? But the reason I like this study is that it also points to a way that we can do better.

• 16:59Laurie Santos?

  Because those researchers also measured the emotions of the bronze medalist, the person who did third, right? Now, you might think, well, if the silver medalist is feeling really terrible and contemptuous and experiencing grief, then the bronze medalist is going to be doing even worse. Like, they're going to be totally miserable, right? Turns out not so. The bronze medalist is showing incredible elation, huge smiles, sometimes even huger smiles than the gold medalist, which is weird. So you ask the question, what's going on? Well, what's going on? Again, is social comparison. Who's the bronze medalist comparing himself against to? Not gold, because that was like several seconds or several points or whatever away. The bronze medalist is saying, oh my gosh, you know, if I was just a little bit slower,

• 17:41Laurie Santos?

  if I perform a little bit worse, I wouldn't be getting any medal at all. Like, I would just be clapping from the back of the stands, going home empty-handed. I feel awesome. The bronze medalist comparison makes him feel good. And this is why I always joke with my students that when you're trying to fight social comparison, you shouldn't look for the silver lining. You should look for the bronze lining.

• 18:04Laurie Santos?

  That one felt almost like it was a good joke, thank you.

• 18:07Speaker 03

  But Laurie, like, the way you just described it, so completely agree with that route to harnessing social comparisons. But when you describe the silver medalist as, hey, you are number two out of seven billion people on the planet right now? That's a reframe too, that the silver medalist can use, that is really powerful. And, you know, if there's one big picture lesson that I would love all of you to take away from this conversation with us about managing your emotions, it is that you can be proactive in how to do it. Oftentimes, we just stumble into emotional reactions. We make the comparison, it leads us in a particular direction, and then we just kind

• 18:51Speaker 03

  of ride it out until it peters out. But you can get in there strategically, doing the kinds of things that Laurie and I are talking about, to nip those reactions in the bud, or extend them, or lengthen them, and increase their intensity, whatever you want to do, if you understand the specific tactics that exist. And there are lots of them.

• 19:12Laurie Santos?

  And so when we get back from the break, we're going to talk about some tactics we can use to deal with not just the way other people affect our emotions, but the way other people affect our behavior. The Happiness Lab will be right back.

• 19:30Laurie Santos?

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• 20:15Laurie Santos?

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• 21:00Laurie Santos?

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• 21:45Laurie Santos?

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• 22:30Laurie Santos?

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• 22:58Laurie Santos?

  All right, we're coming back from the bake, the Happiness Lab at Choate, Rosemary Hall, live! Is returning.

• 23:06Laurie Santos?

  Okay, so before the break, we were talking about ways that other people affect our emotions. Now I want to get into ways that other people affect our behavior, what we're actually doing. And there's a long history of this in the field of psychology, right?

• 23:19Speaker 03

  Other people are in a position to push us around in all sorts of ways. They can affect the way we think. They can affect the way we feel. They can affect the way we behave. Okay, so just look at Lori and I right now. Anyone notice something similar? Like, there are all different ways we could have chosen to sit. Like, I could have done this. I was gonna do a lotus position, yoga, I can't actually do it. But like, I could be like this.

• 23:48Laurie Santos?

  Like, your hands sort of popped over.

• 23:49Speaker 03

  Yeah, I could, you know. But we're like this.

• 23:52Laurie Santos?

  We're mimicking. Crossed knees, both looking exactly the same.

• 23:55Speaker 03

  Right. Kind of upright. So there is this chameleon effect where if you are in the presence of someone, in particular, at your level or above someone you admire, you tend to automatically mimic their behavior. So if you've ever been in an interaction where someone starts doing this, you cross your hands, and then the person next to you crosses your hands. Anyone ever witnessed this kind of mimicking that occurs? This is endemic to how we function. And, interestingly enough, it can improve rapport between people because there's this matching between us.

• 24:32Laurie Santos?

  In fact, one thing they often tell you to do if you want to become friends with somebody, get to know people, let somebody else know that you're listening to them, is to, what's called, mirror their behavior. So not like perfectly copy it, but kind of do it. Turns out, this is actually a podcaster technique when you're doing it live. It's for me to copy your actions.

• 24:50Speaker 03

  Oh, so you've been doing... I feel very welcome in your presence. Warm cup of tea.

• 24:58Laurie Santos?

  But what are some of the consequences of this? It means that naturally, without realizing it, we're like soaking in the behaviors of others and copying it.

• 25:05Speaker 03

  Other people... Look, the world is messy. The world is unpredictable. We are constantly, as human beings, striving to make sense of how to optimally navigate this world. You, as someone who I can trust, someone I admire, you're giving me all sorts of information. So I'm taking that in, and I'm using it to guide my own behavior unconsciously. Because I could count on you. Now, if it's someone else who I don't know and I don't trust, I'm not gonna mimic them as much. Now, you can have fun with this effect if you want. Like, you might be talking to someone, and you could push its limits.

• 25:47Speaker 03

  You know, like Lori does this when she interviews new graduate students.

• 25:51Laurie Santos?

  No, I don't.

• 25:52Speaker 03

  I'm just joking.

• 25:54Speaker 03

  That's gonna be in edit. But you could, you can do a little bit of experimenting to see how this actually operates. It is a powerful, powerful phenomenon. And if you see someone mimicking you, I think it's a sign of a flattery. Like, they actually hold you at some level of esteem. Now, if you're not mimicking, don't take that the wrong way. If you're not being mimicked, right, you could reframe it, so.

• 26:18Laurie Santos?

  But that's kind of the behavioral copying we do, just kind of unconsciously. Sometimes when we see other people's behavior, it affects the way we think about things and reason about things. This is a phenomenon that's often been called social benchmarking. What's that?

• 26:32Speaker 03

  This is this wonderful study where, I don't think you could actually do this nowadays in the lab. This was done maybe 60 years ago, this study. And participants came into the lab and they were actually injected with adrenaline. But they didn't actually know it was adrenaline. I think they were told it was vitamins or something to that effect. And so they've got these kinds of arousal symptoms, right? They're like energized physiologically. But they don't quite know where this energization, is that a word?

• 27:08Laurie Santos?

  Awesome.

• 27:08Speaker 03

  We're gonna run with it. Sounds okay? Okay. Energization is coming from, it's definitely not a word, that energized feeling. They don't know where it's coming from. And what the experimenters do, in one condition, they have this actor come into the room and he acts like euphoric. Like, he's just super, super happy. And in another condition, you have an actor come in and he's really angry. And what the experimenters wanna see is... Does the subject who's been shot up with this adrenaline, does the behavior of the other person change the way that they behave? So you've got all these feelings, but you're not sure how to make sense of it.

• 27:51Speaker 03

  And so what they end up finding is that when you're in the presence of someone acting really angry, you start acting more angry as well. If you're in the presence of someone who is acting euphoric, you kind of start behaving happier too. So it's another example of how other people have the potential to powerfully shape the way we ourselves respond and in this case behave. And that is particularly true when you are not sure of how to behave or you are not sure how to make sense of what is going on inside you.

• 28:26Laurie Santos?

  And I think that particularly fits with this study, right? You know, these subjects are shot up with this chemical. Like they thought they took a vitamin and now all of a sudden they're just feeling like this sense of energy. Like they don't know what's going on. And so they look to this other person to be like, "Oh, we're angry now. We're angry at the experiment," or "Oh, we're euphoric." And that happened in this weird, strange, you know, possibly unethical now, experiment. But this happens all the time when we have an experience that we're kind of not sure how to make sense of. We have to look to other people.

• 28:54Speaker 03

  So this reminds me of a story with my oldest daughter. And a couple of years ago, she transitioned to a new school. It was a lot more demanding academically than the school she was in before. And I go up into her bedroom one night and I notice she is physically distressed. She's really getting worked up. She seems very, very anxious in a way I've never seen her experience that emotion before. I go, "Sweetie, what's going on? What's wrong?" And she goes, "She's like breathing heavy and like, "I don't know what's happening. Like I'm feeling these things in my stomach and what's going on?" And so then that's my opportunity to get in there

• 29:38Speaker 03

  and help her interpret this uncertainty.

• 29:42Speaker 03

  Sweetie, that's your body doing exactly what it's supposed to be doing right now. You've got a really important test tomorrow. And you're experiencing this response that's saying, hey, you need to do a little bit more studying before you go to bed. That's it. You're actually lucky. You're fortunate you're experiencing this. Because it's like a little internal cue telling you to prepare. And the moment I gave her that interpretation, her entire demeanor changed, right? The anxiety went way down and she got into studying. So what I've done there is I reframed the experience for her. I reframed her bodily reaction. This is taking a page straight out of research where you tell people to either make sense

• 30:25Speaker 03

  of their physiological symptoms of anxiety either as a threat, oh my God, something may be wrong, versus a challenge, like this is your body rising to the occasion. And it worked like clockwork. And so that is one powerful potential that other people have for us. Other people are often in a position to help us reframe our circumstances in ways that can really put us on the right trajectory.

• 30:53Laurie Santos?

  Or the problem is that or put us on the wrong trajectory. And I'm cognizant we're having this conversation in front of a high school audience, you know, students, how many times have you, you know, gotten a bad grade on something, not really sure how to take it, but you show your parents or you show your friends and they either react like, that's fine, it's like just one paper, or they're like, oh my gosh, like you got that grade, I don't know how that's going to affect your college, like what does that do to you? And so I think, you know, it's great that your daughter had a parent who's so careful to help her kind of rethink that emotion in a way that's good. I worry so often we do this in a way that's like, that's not great, that like, as parents, as mentors, our first reaction is to kind of feel upset at someone's failure rather

• 31:37Laurie Santos?

  than say like, oh, this is great, this is a cool opportunity. But our reaction is changing how somebody else might be feeling about a particular situation they find themselves in.

• 31:47Speaker 03

  I worry about it too. And that's why I think conversations like this, all the, you know, this aside with you all are exceptionally important because...

• 31:58Speaker 03

  What knowing about how this works gives you the opportunity to do is number one. When people come to you, when your friends, your siblings, later on in life, other colleagues come to you for support, you are now mindful of the powerful role that you exert on their emotional lives. You should take that, really, that's a serious responsibility that you have to do good for other human beings. And if you know how to steer their ways of thinking, you can really help them. But it also gives all of you the opportunity to be a lot more selective about who you talk to about the issues that you are struggling with.

• 32:38Speaker 03

  I think a lot of us don't think twice about who to go to for support. We just feel like we've got to talk to other people, let's find someone and let it out. And sometimes it's like flipping a coin. Who's going to push you down the wrong path or the right one? And it doesn't have to be that random.

• 32:58Laurie Santos?

  And so I think this is sometimes the thing that's about other people affecting us that's so frustrating is like people who are trying to do good, trying to give advice, trying to help, sometimes wind up messing us up. And you've actually seen this in a new domain, in a new paper that just came out, where the kind of advice that people are giving, maybe even about the benefits of social connection and talking to people, can sometimes go awry. Tell me about the new loneliness study.

• 33:22Speaker 03

  So this is some really exciting research. It's led by a graduate student in my lab, Michaela Rodriguez. And let me start by just asking all of you, how many of you here have heard quite frequently this messaging that being alone is bad for you?

• 33:43Speaker 03

  It's toxic, like you want to stay away from those experiences. This is a pervasive message right now. There's a huge amount of attention within this country and several others as well. There's, I think, a Minister of Loneliness in the UK and Japan. There's a huge amount of attention trying to help people combat experiences of being alone and the feelings of loneliness that accompany those states.

• 34:09Speaker 03

  Being lonely has been compared to smoking cigarettes in terms of its impact on your health. And so what we've done across a series of studies is try to understand how the messaging that we are giving to society about this might help or hurt folks. And so here's what we've learned. Number one, there's actually nothing intrinsically bad about being physically alone for, you know, circumscribed periods of time, not This is not forever. Not chronic isolation, but being alone. How many people here actually find value in being alone sometimes?

• 34:48Speaker 03

  It can be, it can be kinda great. It can be restorative. It can be a source of creativity. So what we've seen in lots of research is how you think about being alone, is it good for me or bad for me? Directly impacts how you experience that state. If you think being alone is bad for you, if you're sitting at the lunchroom and you're eating by yourself one day and you think, oh, boy, not good. That's gonna lead you to feel lonelier. If you think this is an opportunity to rest and restore, be alone with my thoughts, this could be a good thing, you actually feel better when you spend time alone. Okay, and we see that over and over again. Here's why this is really important. We did this analysis where we went back several years and we looked at every major news article

• 35:33Speaker 03

  that talked about being alone. And we coded it rigorously for, are you describing this experience of being alone as something that's good for you or bad for you? Overwhelmingly, the media describes experiences of being alone as bad for you, as toxic. Why that matters? We've shown if you give people news articles in one condition, they describe being alone as bad for you, and in another condition, being alone is good for you, what information you are exposed to there directly impacts how you think about this, what this state does for you. So if you're reading these articles, being alone is really bad for you, you think it's bad for you. And that in turn makes it bad.

• 36:18Speaker 03

  It's almost a self fulfilling prophecy.

• 36:21Laurie Santos?

  So it's again, it seems like another situation where hearing how other people are talking about it is affecting how we might think about it. Maybe we're kind of in between of like, you know, good points and bad points. But you hear other people saying, oh, this is so bad. It becomes a social benchmark, which affects your own emotions when you're in that state.

• 36:37Speaker 03

  That's right. And what's really tragic about this phenomenon is I genuinely think the folks who are behind this messaging are pushing it out there to help people. But what we are learning is that their attempts to help society may be actually backfiring.

• 37:00Laurie Santos?

  And so we want to avoid these moments where being around other people winds up backfiring. We want to avoid these moments when other people's emotions make us feel bad or other people's behaviors make us do something that might not fit with our goals. But how do we do that? Luckily, when we get back from the break, Ethan is going to help us out. The Happiness Lab live from Short Rosemary Hall. Good luck.

• 37:28Laurie Santos?

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• 38:13Laurie Santos?

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• 38:58Laurie Santos?

  that are double-fermented to harness 400-plus micronutrients. These micronutrients synchronize your skin's natural renewal cycles and boost resilience to daily stressors for visibly firmer, smoother, breathtaking skin. Visit tatcha.com and use code HAPPINESS for 15% off your first purchase. That's T-A-T-C-H-A dot com and use code HAPPINESS for 15% off. If I could permanently delete one thing from my brain, I think it would be the memory of all those little awkward interactions that my brain insists on replaying at 2:00 a.m. You know the ones. You said something mildly embarrassing during a dinner party, and suddenly your brain decides it's time for a full cinematic replay. As a psychologist who studies happiness,

• 39:42Laurie Santos?

  I know that our minds aren't always great at deciding what deserves our attention. We tend to give these awkward moments way, way more mental real estate than they deserve. But knowing that intellectually doesn't mean it's easier to let them go. And that's one of the reasons that therapy can be so valuable. Therapy gives you a chance to step back and to understand the patterns that you're stuck in so that you can find healthy ways to move forward. If you're thinking about trying therapy, you should check out BetterHelp. BetterHelp will connect you with a licensed, experienced therapist, and they do the initial matching work for you based on your needs and preferences. And if your first match isn't right, BetterHelp will let you switch therapists at any time. BetterHelp is now in-network with more than 125 health plans, with many copays as low as $15 for eligible members.

• 40:28Laurie Santos?

  And if you don't have eligible insurance or live outside the U.S., you can still get 20% off your first month. Sign up and get 20% off at betterhelp.com/Laurie. That's better H-E-L-P dot com slash Laurie.

• 40:46Laurie Santos?

  We are back to Happiness Lab Live from Chalk.

• 40:54Laurie Santos?

  So now we're going to do the fun part of our conversation because we're going to talk about how we can kind of use other people in a way that really does make our emotions feel better, that does allow us to achieve our behavioral goals and so on. A kind of set of like, social hacks that can be these powerful tools for shaping our happiness ultimately. So let's go back to one of the things we talked about before, emotional contagion. What are some hacks that we can use to kind of have other people, what are some hacks that we can use to catch other people's emotions in ways that are good for us versus bad for us?

• 41:26Speaker 03

  I think number one, this, more than any phenomenon that we talked about today, this is where knowledge is power is so unbelievably relevant. So I did a little bit of intervention a little bit earlier where I shared with all of you how your facial expressions can impact us up here. And some of you are, have responded very nicely. Others, I think, there's still some room for improvement. Maybe a lot.

• 41:51Laurie Santos?

  Some are falling asleep. We're having this conversation a little early. That's cool.

• 41:55Speaker 03

  It's all good. So I'm joking. But knowing how this works can be really powerful. So as someone who leads different groups and teams, I'm exceptionally sensitive to the the kind of emotional displays in the group and the demeanor in the group. And if I find that one or two people are consistently showing up in a way that is cascading and impacting everyone else, I intervene right away. I do it with compassion. I often explain how this works. And that is often enough. But it is really important to do it because the entire spirit of the lab or the group can easily nosedive

• 42:40Speaker 03

  if I don't address this right away.

• 42:43Laurie Santos?

  And I love this suggestion so much because I think sometimes when we hear about these effects of emotional contagion, we're like, oh my gosh, we're just totally at the mercy of the people around us and I'm just like, my emotions are stuck. But what you have to understand when you hear those effects is like, that also means you have agency, right? If you roll into your team and everybody's kind of feeling down, you have to remember like, wait, I have the agency that if I place a seed of a little bit of optimism, a little bit of humor, a little bit of something, a little bit more positive energy, whatever you need, that seed is gonna spread. And what's really cool about the fact that there are these ripple effects, these so-called affective spirals, is like, if you plant that seed, and even if it's a little forced, even if you're kind of trying a little bit, if other people catch it, they're gonna catch

• 43:26Laurie Santos?

  that a little bit authentically and then they'll feed it back to you, right? So you can kind of be the seed that starts this spiral of something much more positive.

• 43:34Speaker 03

  And you can leverage a lot of the other effects that we've been talking about. So I'll often purposefully over-correct in positivity and happiness, like, don't I look ridiculous now?

• 43:44Laurie Santos?

  He's smiling, he's smiling really jokingly. The students, if you see their faces, they're like, why is he making that expression?

• 43:49Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's true. Yeah, but there we go, we got the laugh. So like, I'll often focus in on the one person who maybe isn't showing the right kind of attitude and either not directly by, through these kind of chameleon effects, try to loosen them up, or maybe I'll ask them, so, hey, so, you know, what's going on? Anything good happen this weekend? Try to shift their mood deliberately.

• 44:12Laurie Santos?

  So that's sort of emotional contagion. We talked a little before about sort of venting, this idea that sometimes we wanna share our emotions with other people, or share our troubles with other people, but often sometimes there are people out there that don't necessarily mirror back to us what we wanna hear. They kind of can hype us up, or get us even more upset, or more frustrated. How do we do a better job picking people we should vent to more successfully than others?

• 44:40Speaker 03

  So this, it turns out, is actually pretty simple to do. And when I think about like all the science I've written about in this book, this is top five pieces of information that I use in my own life and really benefit from it quite a bit. So I think about who are the people in my life that when I go to to talk to them about a problem, they don't just listen and demonstrate that they support me and have my back, but essentially egg me on, which is what happens when you co-ruminate with someone else. So here's the situation, like something bad has happened to you and you go to talk to someone else about it. So I have a difficult interaction, let's say, with a colleague. And I call Lori, Lori, can you believe what this person did? And you say,

• 45:25Laurie Santos?

  Oh, my God, I can't believe they did that. They suck. Why are you even in that university? It sucks. Like, you need to get rid of all your... Like, you see what I'm doing? I'm just like fueling the fire, right? I haven't gone into problem-solving mode. I haven't tried to de-escalate the situation.

• 45:37Speaker 03

  And when you do that for me, I love it. I love it in the moment. It is indulgent. It is, yes, Lori's on my side. She hears me. She feels me. So that's really good for our relationship, to do a little bit of that, kind of back and forth, expression and venting. Ideally, though, at some point in this conversation, Lori says to me,

• 46:00Laurie Santos?

  Oh, man, that sounds tough. But like, how are we gonna deal with the situation? Like, you know, like, what should we do to shift your emotion? Let's play "Don't Stop Believing", because that's a really fun song and you'll feel better. Like, we just do whatever to kind of get back to a good...

• 46:13Speaker 03

  She's playing. That is one of my favorite emotions.

• 46:15Laurie Santos?

  He wanted to play that coming out, but we had nipped that in the bud. But, and that's important because, as you said, the venting, the co-ruminating, as we call it, it's really good for our relationship, but it's really bad for both of our emotions ultimately.

• 46:32Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 46:32Laurie Santos?

  Because if I leave the conversation, that terrible interaction with the colleague didn't even happen to me, but now I'm having a terrible day too. And I haven't helped what I think Ethan probably wanted out of this conversation, which is a way to shift his emotions back.

• 46:44Speaker 03

  I mean, I had a conversation. Sometimes like I'm a... You catch the emotion. A friend called me up and they just... They didn't even give me a chance to help shift their perspective. They just rapid-fire launched in a...

• 46:58Speaker 03

  And then they like hung up, "Okay, I gotta go." And for the next three hours, I'm just going over in my head what happened to them. Yeah. And I'm taking on all the emotional baggage. So those are not the best kinds of conversations to make you feel better. The best conversations do two things. First, the person you're talking to, they listen, they empathize, they normalize what you're going through. Lori, you're not alone. Yeah, this is a common human experience. A lot of people have this bad day with colleagues. It doesn't mean every day is gonna be bad with your colleagues. And so you start broadening the perspective. That is the art of being a good emotional advisor. And so my advice to everyone here is to, like, when you're done, if you care about this, make a little table. Personal problems, school problems.

• 47:42Speaker 03

  List out all the people you talk to about those different kinds of problems. Some of you may have the same names of people on each column. Like, you talk to the same people about personal stuff and school stuff. Others may have different names. Some of you may have no names. Doesn't matter. I'm just doing an audit here. Who is your emotional advisory board? Once you have those names, then I want you to think to yourself, okay, who are the people on this list who do two things when I go to them? First, they listen, they empathize with me, but then they help broaden my perspective. They help shift the way I think about. That wasn't, that wasn't purposeful. That was just slipped in there. His book is called Shift, and he's pointing at the book. Yes, that was terrible. Not intended.

• 48:27Speaker 03

  But who are the people who help you reframe how you're thinking about your circumstances to ultimately allow you to move on? Those are your emotional advisors. Circle those names. For all the names you didn't circle, you've got two choices. Number one, go get a red Sharpie and cross their names off your list. Something kinda cathartic about doing that. Satisfying.

• 48:53Speaker 03

  It's a legitimate option. There are some people who you can be super close, you love them. Talk to them about other stuff, but not the big problems in life. If they're not serving you well there. The other opportunity you have is to educate those people who aren't serving you well in this capacity by sharing with them what you've learned. And, you know, I feel like it's important to give you a disclaimer. There's an art to doing that well. I would not advise you to pull those people aside and say, "Hey, I just went to this presentation, you know what I learned? You suck as an advisor. Like, you really, you make me feel bad. I know you love me, but it doesn't help, so quit it, okay? Can do this instead."

• 49:35Speaker 03

  Probably not the most elegant way of intervening. A better way is, "Did you know that..." Actually, just sharing out stuff and just getting me to rehearse things doesn't actually help. I had no idea that actually if you really want to help someone, you need to look at that bigger picture. Or if you don't want to do that, you can say, "I just listened to this awesome live taping of the Happiness Lab."

• 49:59Laurie Santos?

  That was at my school.

• 50:01Speaker 03

  It was at my school. And I think you'll find it really interesting. I learned all these things I never knew about. And then you hope they get to the end of the podcast. How many people get to the end of the podcast?

• 50:12Laurie Santos?

  Everybody, obviously.

• 50:17Laurie Santos?

  That wasn't even a joke, that was just... Alright, so that's kind of dealing with sort of fighting emotional tension, how we can sort of get people to help us vent better, vent more effectively. How do we deal with the social comparison? We talked a little bit before about kind of using it more productively, but what are our go-to social hacks there?

• 50:37Speaker 03

  So, social comparison. So, number one, if you do it, there's nothing wrong with you. I can't tell you how many people I encounter who they feel bad about themselves because they're making these social comparisons. It's as though it's a sign of weakness that you're referencing other people. This is not a weakness. This is how you are wired. It is how we are built. And simply recognizing that should be liberating to some degree. It certainly is for me. Like, I do it, I can't help it. It's how we function. So, number one, recognize that. That will help. Number two... If you find yourself making a comparison against someone

• 51:21Speaker 03

  who is outperforming you in some way, flip it, right? It's no longer, "Oh, my God, they're doing so much better." They did it, so can I. Use it as a source of motivation, as fuel to propel you. It's showing you what is actually possible, what you are capable of achieving. We tend to feel worse about the comparisons we make to people who are like us, right? So you're, like, you'd be a great example for me. You are like me in many ways. If you are outperforming me in some way, that's really gonna sting. But the fact that you are like me also means that what you've achieved is something that I can do too. I think you will be amazed

• 52:04Speaker 03

  at how quickly this little reframe can totally reroute your emotional experience.

• 52:10Laurie Santos?

  There's also an interesting way that you can use the sort of social benchmarking with that too, which I find can be really powerful, right? You think like, "Oh, that person's like me. I can achieve that too." But then you also then ask the further question of like, "Well, what are they doing that like I'm not doing?"

• 52:25Speaker 03

  Absolutely.

• 52:26Laurie Santos?

  I had this good friend of mine who was like, "I'm not a very fit person." She was also not a very fit person, but kind of she'd gotten a little bit sick and then just like really devoted herself to fitness and just started going to the gym all the time and so on. And I found myself doing the like, "Man, she's getting so fit. Like, she's just like doing so well." And feeling that social comparison, that envy. But with this hack, I could do the following. I was like, "Well, she was just like me before. She was also unfit." But then I asked myself the question, "Well, what's she doing?" I'm like, "Well, she's going to the gym every day. She's really paying attention to what she eats. She's going really hardcore with it." And then I had this realization of like, "Well, I could do that too, but I also have to do all the other hard stuff that she's doing." And then you could ask the question reasonably, "Do I want to do that hard stuff or not?" Right? I think this can be powerful, right? Because you remember like,

• 53:09Laurie Santos?

  it's not just by, you know, some accident often that people are doing better, especially if they've made a change, especially if they started like you. Often, you know, they're putting some work into this. They're making choices that maybe you are not making now, but you could do it better.

• 53:24Speaker 03

  I experienced the very similar phenomenon. It was not with someone who was like me per se. It was with President Obama.

• 53:32Laurie Santos?

  Okay.

• 53:32Speaker 03

  And so, not like me. And, but I remember it was like I was just starting as an assistant professor and, you know, it was, it was hard being assistant professor. I was grinding away and I wasn't exercising regularly. And I came across an article about how Obama exercised every day. And immediately I come across this information. Now I'm, I'm really feeling bad about myself. Like my pants aren't fitting to begin with. And now I'm finding out that the president of the free world, right? Like is, is able to do this, like.

• 54:04Laurie Santos?

  Yeah.

• 54:05Speaker 03

  Not good. So what did I do? And, and back then, it took me a while to reframe this because it wasn't top of mind as it is now. But eventually I did and I thought to myself, you know what? If that guy who's a lot busier than me and a lot more important can find time to exercise each morning, so can I. And to this day, that is a guiding motivation I use to get me to the gym.

• 54:32Laurie Santos?

  It's so funny because I have this similar thing when I'm at the gym and I have this trainer who is trying to help me, but you know, it's tough for him. But sometimes he'll make me do planks and I hate doing planks. But I remember hearing that the Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the former Supreme Court Justice, did like three minutes of planks every day. And she was like 80. And so when I hate this, I'm like, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who's so much older than me and she could do this, then I feel like I should be able to do it too.

• 54:59Speaker 03

  What we are talking about here is weaponizing these social comparisons to your benefit. Right? We stumble into them and like, don't wait to stumble into it. Jump in there and do it. And the quick flip side, I think we're, we're winding down here, is it works the other way too. If you find yourself coming across a case, someone or a group of people. Tragedy has befallen them. And you instantly interpret that as, oh, my God. What if that happens to me? I was just recently in DC, for example, when the plane crash occurred. I actually flew in like a half hour after that happened.

• 55:42Speaker 03

  And many people that I was around were really overcome with negativity because they were thinking about, oh, my God, what if this had happened to me? You can flip it, right? If you don't want to feel that way, oh, my God, how lucky am I that this didn't happen to me? It's a very easy switch. So I'll say one more thing. 15 seconds and I'll throw it back to you. A lot of people think that managing our emotions is hard. It has to be hard. It sometimes is hard. But it doesn't always have to be. There are lots and lots of tools that we can use

• 56:25Speaker 03

  that make emotion regulation easy. And I think the more you can familiarize yourself with those easy-to-use effortless shifts, and thank you to you for helping share these things with the world in your podcast, I think the happier we all will be, so.

• 56:41Laurie Santos?

  Well, Ethan, thank you so much for helping us figure out how we can use these social hacks to shift our emotions. I think I speak for all the folks in the room and listening at home and say you're really feeling like shifting is going to be a little bit easier. And we'd like to thank you for all your work. Thank you so much.

• 57:14Laurie Santos?

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