Pod Insights The Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos How to Feel Truly Loved (with Dr. Sonja Lyubomirsky and Dr. Harry Reis) About this episode Most of us have people in our lives who love us — partners, friends, family — yet many of us still don’t feel as loved as we want to. Why is there such a gap between being loved and feeling loved? And what can we actually do about it?
Dr. Laurie sits down with social psychologists Dr. Sonja Lyubomirsky and Dr. Harry Reis, co-authors of How to Feel Loved https://books.apple.com/us/book/how-to-feel-loved/id6745731712, to unpack the science behind this disconnect. They explain why feeling loved so often eludes us — even in close relationships — and share research-backed insights that can help us change the conversation, strengthen our connections, and feel more loved both now and in the relationships we build in the future.
Resources mentioned in this episode:
How to Feel Loved: The Five Mindsets That Get You More of What Matters Most https://books.apple.com/us/book/how-to-feel-loved/id6745731712
"Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation: The U. S. Surgeon General’s Advisory on the Healing Effects of Social Connection and Community https://www.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/surgeon-general-social-connection-advisory.pdf"
"Social Ties and Susceptibility to the Common Cold https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9200634/"
"Toward Understanding Understanding: The Importance of Feeling Understood in Relationships https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2017-10961-003"
"How to Get Through Hard Times: Principals' Listening Buffers Teachers' Stress on Turnover Intention and Promotes Organizational Citizenship Behavior https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9362686/"
How to Win Friends and Influence People https://books.apple.com/us/book/how-to-win-friends-and-influence-people/id1595609149
How to Win Friends and Influence People for Teen Girls https://books.apple.com/lv/book/how-to-win-friends-and-influence-people-for-teen-girls/id381853375
"Self-Expansion Theory: Origins, Current Evidence, and Future Horizons https://compass.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/spc3.70082"
"Do Unto Others or Treat Yourself? The Effects of Prosocial and Self-Focused Behavior on Psychological Flourishing https://sonjalyubomirsky.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/Nelson-Layous-Cole-Lyubomirsky-2016.pdf"
"Everyday Prosociality in the Workplace: The Reinforcing Benefits of Giving, Getting, and Glimpsing https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28581323/"
"Kindness Counts: Prompting Prosocial Behavior in Preadolescents Boosts Peer Acceptance and Well-Being https://sonjalyubomirsky.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/Layous-et-al.-2012.pdf"
"The Genomic Impact of Kindness to Self vs. Others: A Randomized Controlled Trial https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35905861/"
See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:06 Laurie Santos? Pushkin.
0:13 Laurie Santos? It's February, that time of year when we all feel like we're being bombarded with messages about love. Think lots of red hearts, ads for diamond rings, lingerie, chocolates, and on and on. For those of us with romantic partners, there's pressure to make the perfect reservation, buy the perfect gift, and plan that perfect date night. And if you're single, the season often comes with feelings of loneliness and FOMO. Honestly, this time of year doesn't always feel great. It's like a huge hallmark card being collectively shoved in all of our faces. This whole season is supposed to be about love, but that can raise some pretty big questions, like, is this what love is really about? And if not, how many of us are actually experiencing the kind of deep connection we need to feel
0:58 Laurie Santos? happy, or even just okay?
1:00 Speaker 01 We ask people, you know, how often do they feel loved, and who do they feel loved most or least by? And we find that about 70%, I believe, don't feel as loved as they want.
1:12 Laurie Santos? This is the psychologist Sonia Lyubomirsky, an expert on the science of happiness.
1:17 Speaker 02 They also said that their romantic partners were the people they most wanted to feel more love from. So they weren't getting as much as they wanted, or even in many cases, needed.
1:28 Laurie Santos? And this is the psychologist Harry Reis, an expert on the science of relationships. Sonia and Harry have come together to co-author a new book called "How to Feel Loved: The Five Mindsets That Give You More of What Matters Most." The book explores why so many of us don't feel as loved as we'd like, but it also explores what we can do to change that.
1:47 Speaker 02 I love talking about how to feel loved. The book makes me feel loved, and the experience of writing it with Sonia was definitely a loving experience as well as a literary experience.
2:00 Laurie Santos? You guys do seem like you had like, I don't know if it's bromance is not the right word, but something already.
2:05 Speaker 01 We have great chemistry, right?
2:07 Laurie Santos? Stay tuned, because in today's episode, the first of three shows we're doing on the science of love, Sonya and Harry will share some practical tips for strengthening our relationships, and not just romantic ones. We're also going to tackle how to feel loved in the friendships, family ties, and everyday connections we already have, plus the connections we're planning to build in the future. We'll get into all of Sonya and Harry's tips after some quick words from our sponsors.
2:39 Laurie Santos? This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human. This episode is brought to you by Choiceology, an original podcast from Charles Schwab, hosted by the amazing Katie Milkman, behavioral scientist and author of the bestselling book, How to Change. Choiceology is a show about the psychology and economics behind our decisions. Each episode shares the latest research in behavioral science and dives into themes like the power of self-control, shaping your mindset for success, navigating new beginnings, and why starting over can feel so hard. Katie talks to authors, athletes, Nobel laureates, and everyday people about why we make irrational choices and how to make better choices to
3:20 Laurie Santos? help avoid costly mistakes. You'll learn about tools and strategies to help improve your decision making, and a ton of other fantastic things about the mind. Listen and subscribe at schwab.com/podcast, or find it wherever you listen to your shows.
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4:09 Laurie Santos? So let's start with the big but obvious question, which makes me think of a really bad 90s song. What is love?
4:16 Speaker 02 Well, there are many different definitions of love. Indeed, I think it's one of the most ambiguous words in the English language. You know, we can love chocolate ice cream. We can love the New York Mets and we can love our parents and we can love our partners. So there are many different definitions. The definition that we use in the book is talking about the kind of deep embodied experience that you have when you have affection and caring and warmth for other people in your lives that you are connected to, that your life is intertwined with.
4:49 Laurie Santos? When a lot of people think of love, they think about the thing that you feel for someone else, like I love my partner, I love chocolate ice cream. But you've really focused on the flip side of that, the experience that you have of other people loving you. Sonia, why that focus for the book?
5:04 Speaker 01 As a happiness researcher, I think actually whether or not you feel loved and the extent to which you feel loved by others may be the most important factor in happiness. And by the way, one reason is that we can be loved. You know, we can have all these people in our lives who objectively love us, but we don't actually feel loved by them, or maybe not feel loved by them as much as we want to be. So that's a really important distinction.
5:28 Laurie Santos? Harry, I know this is something you thought about as a kid in your book. You admit how much you were tracking, how much you thought other people loved you. Could you tell us a little bit about that middle school spreadsheeting?
5:39 Speaker 02 I was certainly an insecure kid, particularly in middle school is where I really remember that experience most vividly. I went to summer camp and I was in a bunk with about 10 other boys my age. And I remember waking up one night, the middle of the night, when there was obviously some kind of activity going on where they were planning some kind of a raid on another bunk and they hadn't woken me up to take part in that. And I felt just awful. And I remember just naturally spending a lot of my time tracking other people's behavior. You know, who was hanging out with whom? Who were friends with whom? And were they including me or not including me?
6:22 Laurie Santos? My gosh, I can feel that viscerally. I'm like stuck with you on the bunk at like 10 years old feeling that.
6:27 Speaker 02 Exactly.
6:29 Laurie Santos? This is something that obviously you saw as a kid and I think we can all relate to, but this is something that a lot of people are feeling, not as middle schoolers, but as adults. So this kind of crisis of not feeling loved feels similar to another crisis that Sonia, as happiness researchers, we hear a lot about, this idea of the loneliness crisis. Is not feeling loved the same as loneliness? Are there differences? What do you think?
6:50 Speaker 01 I mean, you could argue that the root of loneliness is a feeling of not feeling loved. Not feeling loved, not feeling like you belong, which really go together. And certainly you can see that more and more people are acknowledging that they are lonely. Or when you ask them, like, how many people do you have to talk to, you know, in a crisis? There are fewer and fewer, less and less of the time. When you think about a lot of other problems in our society, whether it's bullying, or polarization, or violence, you could blame sort of not feeling loved or loneliness for those problems as well. It's really even a bigger problem than we think.
7:25 Laurie Santos? So Harry, what are some of the consequences of not feeling loved psychologically? What happens when we don't feel that?
7:31 Speaker 02 When we don't feel loved, that feeling should not be poo-pooed. It's not something that exists in isolation in us. It goes along with many other kinds of consequences, certainly a lack of emotional well-being and happiness, but it even extends to the body and to our health. There are scores of studies that show that the kind of feeling that Sonia was describing are feelings that relate to just about every health problem you can think of. For example, heart disease is well-known to relate to the feeling of not being loved and feeling lonely. One of my favorite studies is a study that was done in California where they looked
8:12 Speaker 02 at cancer deaths and the absence of meaningful connections, which certainly would be related to loneliness and not feeling loved, predicted premature mortality from cancer and a greater likelihood that once you get cancer, you would die from it.
8:28 Speaker 01 Basically, a lack of connection, that loneliness, the harm of that, or the physical health problems, is equivalent to smoking 15 cigarettes per day. That number is just so compelling, right?
8:40 Speaker 02 I'll just throw in one more set of studies, which I think are incredibly fascinating, because these are experimental studies now. So what they did in these studies is inject people with a cold virus, and then did some very sophisticated work to see who got sick and who didn't get sick. And guess what? It was the people who experienced themselves as cut off from others and isolated were more likely to get sick after having been exposed to the cold virus.
9:10 Laurie Santos? That's so amazing that we see these physical effects of not feeling loved, too. Do we understand the mechanism, Harry?
9:14 Speaker 02 That's a really important question, and it's one that a lot of scientists are devoting their attention to. And the first thing I have to say is, we don't really know. The second thing I would say is, probably, most of the action comes from two places. One is simply happiness and not being anxious, angry, depressed, sad. We know that positive emotions trigger a whole series of biological responses that are health-promoting. We know that negative emotions trigger a lot of biological processes that are harmful and deleterious, especially over the long run. The second kind of way of thinking about it, which is
9:56 Speaker 02 a little trickier, is the idea that we probably have mechanisms within ourselves that are designed by evolution to precisely carry out these connections. They're designed to make us seek out others, to seek positive connections with others, to respond well to them, to reciprocate to them. And these mechanisms are within us, but we don't really understand what they are and where they are. But there are a lot of people trying to track that down, and I suspect we'll know a lot more in the next 20 years.
10:29 Laurie Santos? So the consequences of feeling not loved are huge. But the problem is so many of us are feeling that way. And one of the things I loved about your book is that it walks through why we're feeling that way and all the ways that our mind gets not feeling loved wrong. I think one of the ways we get this wrong is we assume that if we're not feeling loved, then we have to have some sort of personal failure. Like, I'm not attractive enough, or I'm not interesting enough, or I'm not smart enough. If only I could be more lovable, then I would be loved. Sonia, why is this idea a bit wrong?
10:58 Speaker 01 Hmm. And I think you summarized it really well, first of all. Yeah, the idea that if you don't feel loved, we think that the solution is to make ourselves more lovable, sort of more interesting, more attractive, more kind, more funny, or somehow get the other person to love us more. And it sort of just turns out that doesn't work. And actually, it doesn't mean that you need to sort of change yourself. It doesn't mean you need to change the other person to somehow notice and love you more. What we argue in the book is what we need to do is change the conversation, which is much more feasible, much less overwhelming. Because when you think about a relationship, a relationship is really a series of conversations. And we can change the conversation in a way that makes you feel more loved by making the other person feel more loved.
11:41 Laurie Santos? To feel a little bit more loved, we need to make other people feel loved. It almost feels like a little bit of a paradox, or that we get it backwards. What are some of the steps of making other people feel loved?
11:53 Speaker 02 Well, one of the things we argue is that it's the way you approach conversations that makes them result in the kinds of experiences in which you will feel loved and the other person will feel loved. So our argument is that if you approach the conversation with the mindset of helping the other person feel loved, something that is, after all, controllable by you, that will set off a cycle of interaction that will allow you to feel more loved. So the approach, in other words, is to listen carefully, to communicate to the other person that you're really interested in what they have to say. You know, so many of us approach conversations as a,
12:36 Speaker 02 this is my chance to show off what I think and feel. And that's the exact wrong approach. The right approach is to help the other person do that. So when they tell you about something that happened to them, one of the simplest phrases you can use is, tell me more. And mean it, of course. And to do that with genuine curiosity. Because when other people experience that, a little light bulb goes off inside their head, says, wow, this person's really interested. And then they become interested in you as well.
13:06 Speaker 01 Again, our intuition is to make ourselves more lovable, sort of to show off our positive qualities, right? So we want to speak and sort of show how kind and interesting and funny and intelligent we are to impress the other person. And that does work. I mean, it may work to impress them, but it doesn't really forge a connection. It doesn't really make them feel loved or us feel loved. We're too focused on how we are coming across to the other person as opposed to how we're coming forward, which is really like, well, we can actually do to make the other person feel better. There's a kind of famous like dating advice, which is on a first date, you don't want to make yourself feel better about yourself. You want to make them feel better about themselves.
13:44 Laurie Santos? But it's really counterintuitive. I think we assume that what's under our control is showing off how great we are, getting other people to admire us. But what you're saying is, no, no, no, it's under your control. But what's under your control is that you need to be responsive to the other person.
13:57 Speaker 01 Right, that's the first step.
13:58 Laurie Santos? You need to do that first.
14:00 Speaker 01 Yeah.
14:01 Laurie Santos? But what does taking that first step look like in practice? What are the strategies we can actually use to feel more loved? And to strengthen the connections that matter most? We'll dive into all those answers when the Happiness Lab returns in a moment.
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17:06 Laurie Santos? Social psychologists Sonia Lubrimerzky and Harry Reis want to help a lonely world feel more loved, and they have come up with five simple, evidence-based mindsets that can help us do just that. The first mindset is what they call sharing. I asked Harry to describe what that looks like.
17:21 Speaker 02 Sharing is simply the idea that in order to feel loved, you need to open up about yourself. That is, let's say I present a totally curated fantasy view of myself to you. You may be impressed, and when you tell me about how wonderful that sounds, how do I react? Well, it feels hollow, because that's not me. That's not the me that I most feel. So when I hide myself and instead emphasize all my positive qualities, it creates this dynamic where the other person may well actually provide what you're wanting, and yet it won't ring true, because it's not the person who I am.
18:01 Speaker 02 And instead, if you can open up about the person that you really are, then when there is some kind of positive feedback coming, it's much easier to experience it as real, as genuine, and as authentic. Now, it's important to realize that we don't mean dump the story of your childhood on everybody in the first five minutes you meet them. No, that's not what we're saying. What we're saying is that you need to simply be genuine and real in talking about who you are, and over time, you will be able to tell those stories about your childhood, and the weaknesses, and the shortcomings, and the fears that you have. But that's not something you do in the first five minutes, it's something that comes down the road.
18:45 Laurie Santos? So this kind of sharing is really good for us. It makes us feel loved. It makes other people love us. But it can be incredibly scary. It can feel super awkward. And Sonia, this is what you've called the paradox of vulnerability. What's that?
18:59 Speaker 01 Yeah, so to feel loved, we need to be known. If we're not really known to another person, we'll always wonder, would they still love me if they knew me? The paradox of vulnerability is that we think that if we reveal something vulnerable or negative about us, maybe a self doubt that we have, an insecurity that we have, maybe even a trauma from our childhood, that we will be liked less. And actually, it turns out that, again, when done at the right pace, that actually we tend to be liked more when we reveal something a little deeper about ourselves. Like, I actually was just talking to someone about, after the Bay of Pigs, when John F. Kennedy admitted he made a mistake, apparently his approval ratings shot up.
19:38 Laurie Santos? Another thing I think we get wrong when it comes to sharing is that we assume that people already know. People say, how's it going? And you're like, fine. And you kind of assume that people will see through. Well, no, you're not fine. You're having a really tough day. This is, Harry, what you've called the illusion of transparency. I think I can get it from the name, but walk me through what this is.
19:56 Speaker 02 Well, the illusion of transparency is the idea that we think that what's going on in our heads is visible to the people we're interacting with. You know, my wife is fond of saying to me, I can't read your mind. And I want to say, but what do you mean? You know me. You know, we've been together for 41 years. But the reality is that other people can't know what's in your head. They don't know what your day was. And even if they know some of the basic facts about what's going on, they don't know how you experienced it. They don't know what your experience of your life is like. So you really need to be articulate about everything so other people can really get it.
20:37 Laurie Santos? And so we need to share. We need to make things transparent. But what are some practical strategies for doing that well? Any of your favorite tips, Sonia?
20:45 Speaker 01 Really just starting small. If someone asks you how you are, instead of saying, I'm fine, you might say, oh, I had a rough day. Or, you know, I was sort of struggling today a little bit. So kind of starting small and then maybe revealing a little bit deeper and deeper, more of your kind of full self. The idea is that the other person, hopefully, will listen. If they listen well and are responsive to us, they make us feel understood and valued and loved. That would encourage us to open up even more. So that's sort of the cycle that we talk about. And then if we show genuine curiosity and we listen really well with warmth to the other person, they're going to feel even a little bit more safety, more trust, and it'll be easier for them to open up a little bit more.
21:23 Speaker 02 Yeah, and what I would add to it is the idea that in our close relationships, such as with your living partners, it's very easy to build in a ritual of, you know, "How was your day?" But what a lot of people do when they do "How was your day?" is, you know, recount a few facts and then go on to answering their emails. And perhaps most of us are so tired at the end of the day that we don't really want to go into it. But the whole point is that you do have to go into it and, you know, to make that a priority as opposed to the last thing that you do.
21:59 Speaker 01 And to ask each other questions, and I would say the right kind of questions. One of the points we make in our book is that with longer-term relationships, we sort of tend to assume that we sort of know the person. You know, when we first start meeting someone, whether it's a colleague or a friend or a romantic partner, right, we ask them a lot of questions, like we're so curious about them. And then after a while, we just kind of feel like, oh, we now know this person. So we often stop asking, which is actually kind of really sad because everyone's always changing. Like, we're always having new experiences and thoughts and doubts and fears and dreams and wishes, right? And so to keep asking questions, sort of these kind of deeper questions, I think is really important.
22:39 Speaker 02 Let me just make a point, which I think would be really useful. It's not the sharing of information that is the important part of it. It's the conversation that follows from sharing that's important. So if the sharing doesn't lead to a conversation, it's just a monologue or an interview. But when it leads to a conversation that's genuine, that's where the benefit comes from.
23:04 Laurie Santos? And this idea that conversation gets to the second important mindset that's so critical for making other people feel loved. We need to start listening to learn. How is listening to learn different than we normally go about listening?
23:16 Speaker 02 Well, one of the things that's so interesting about listening research is that if you ask people, are you a good listener? Something like 90% of people will say that they are a good listener. If you ask people, do the people around you listen well to you? That number drops to about 8%.
23:35 Speaker 02 It tells you that there's a real gap there.
23:37 Speaker 01 I think most people feel like they're like pretty good listeners, but it turns out that most of us are not good listeners, including myself. When we're listening, we're really like rehearsing our answer that we're gonna give. And I do this all the time. It's like we're waiting for like the mic to be given to us. And so we're sort of listening to respond instead of listening to learn. And so it really requires a kind of retraining of our mind. And one way to do that is to try to listen like you're gonna be tested on it the next day. Harry and I went to a listening workshop. We were divided into dyads, into pairs of two. And we told a story to the other person. And then we were supposed to retell the entire story. I remember I was paired up with this woman and I was listening so hard.
24:20 Speaker 01 I mean, I really was listening very hard, like I'm gonna be quizzed on it. Because I was, because then I was asked to kind of retell the whole story. And I have to tell you, I mean, I think I did a pretty good job, but there were so many things I got wrong. And she was like, no, no, I never said that. Or like, no, no, that's not how it happened. And so the first, first is sort of listening like you're gonna be quizzed on it. But then the second is to ask questions. And ask the kind of questions that show the person you were really listening. Maybe you're even taking it to like the next level. Maybe even better, you had an insight about what they were telling you. Because that, that makes the person feel so seen, like, wow, that person really wants to know about my inner life, right? So ask each other questions.
24:59 Laurie Santos? And so this idea of feeling seen suggests there's all these benefits to being listened to. But Harry, what are some of these benefits? And are there also benefits when you are doing the listening?
25:09 Speaker 02 Well, there are many benefits of feeling listened to. It leads people to feel more trust in you. It improves the relationship. There are wonderful study done by our colleague Guy Itchikoff in Israel shows that burnout is much less of a problem when teachers in particular feel listened to by their principals. Other studies show that in couples, when they feel listened to, conflict goes much better. And it's not necessarily that they are better able to resolve conflict. It's that the conflict becomes less pernicious. People become less defensive. And as a result, they end up feeling better, even if that original issue hasn't been resolved. So it builds trust and connection
25:54 Speaker 02 and a real sense of partnership and interdependence.
25:58 Laurie Santos? It sounds like if you're boosting people's sense of trust, if you're boosting the sense of partnership, then the listener will also get these benefits as well.
26:06 Speaker 01 I have an example, actually. From just recently, I was talking to a friend who basically said that she didn't feel very loved by her adult daughter, who's about like 28 years old. And so she's like trying to figure out how to feel more loved by her. Like, maybe she can talk to her and say, I don't feel loved by you. And I said, well, actually, the thing to do is to listen to her. Start by listening, right? Just by making her feel loved first, sort of to show genuine curiosity and really listen to what she cares about.
26:35 Speaker 02 And to just take that a step further, one of the all-time classics in this area is Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People. If you look at his six rules of how to do that, they're all about listening to the other person. They're all about making the other person feel that you're interested in them, you value them, you care about them.
26:58 Laurie Santos? You had one Dale Carnegie suggestion in the book that I loved, this idea that if you want to make other people feel loved, you should ask questions that the other person will enjoy answering. I love that one.
27:09 Speaker 01 I love Del Carden G. I've read that book like three times. There's like a version for teen girls. And I actually bought that book to give it to my daughters. I have three daughters. And actually, one of my daughters is 12, and she told me just the other day that she remembered one of her friends mentioning some kind of sport that her friend was really, really into. And then a month later, she's like, Mom, I remembered that she really liked this sport. So I asked her, blah, blah, blah, you know, tell me about this sport. And the girl was like so excited and just started going on and on about this passion of hers, right? So it's pretty simple, actually, yet to remember what it is the other person really wants to talk about and then to ask them about it.
27:44 Laurie Santos? So that was mindset number two. We need to listen to learn a little bit better. Mindset three is one that we know benefits our happiness. It is that we need to get really curious. Sonya, you've called this idea radical curiosity. What's the radical part of radical curiosity?
27:59 Speaker 01 Sometimes people have trouble understanding the difference between good listening and curiosity. And so I like to sort of use this example. Imagine listening to a lecture or a podcast for that matter. And maybe you're like, really listening well, you're taking notes, and maybe you're even tested on it, and you get an A plus, but it doesn't mean you're curious, right? So you can be a great listener without actually being curious. To be curious is to be genuinely interested. And sometimes it's to be interested in the topic, and sometimes it's to be interested in the person. So let's say I'm really into basketball, and you're talking about basketball. Like, I may not be interested in you at all as a person, but I'm curious about the topic. I think it's more powerful when you're really curious about the person. Again, kind of like you make a new friend, or you're falling in love, and then you're just sort of curious about anything about their life, right? And so
28:44 Speaker 01 genuineness, when you just sort of want to know more and more, and you're like in the moment, you're experiencing flow, you're not distracted. Those are kind of some of the symptoms of genuine radical curiosity.
28:54 Laurie Santos? I love the basketball analogy, because it fits with a piece of advice that you had in your book that I really enjoyed. This idea of focusing on the person rather than the topic, right? It's one thing to be like, oh, basketball, sounds cool. Like, tell me about the scorers or the court. I don't know, I'm not into basketball, so I don't know that much about basketball, embarrassingly. But rather than do that, you don't even have to worry about not knowing about the topic, because what you care about is the person. How did you get into basketball? How does basketball? All make you feel you're kind of digging into the person rather than the topic, which is a powerful way to activate the social curiosity. And Sonia, I know that you've done some work on the benefits of curiosity. What have you found so far in your lab?
29:31 Speaker 01 Yeah, one of my students, Madison, did her, what we call her second year project, kind of her master's thesis, the intervention on curiosity. She basically asked people over the course of a week to engage in some kind of curious behavior. So we really enjoyed looking at the examples. These are undergraduates. So it was like, oh, I discovered this new kind of dance and I wanted to learn more about this sort of dancer. My friend had a recipe, so I was learning about how to make this dish. It could be anything, right? And so we found that people who actively and intentionally tried to be more curious every day, they showed more positive emotions, they showed fewer negative emotions, greater well-being, greatest sense of self-worth, interestingly, and greatest sense of autonomy or control.
30:11 Laurie Santos? So it seems like curiosity has all these benefits, both maybe to how we're feeling, but also to the relationship and to helping other people feel loved. Harry, are there any best practices for kind of engaging your curiosity in conversation, making other people realize that you are in fact curious?
30:26 Speaker 02 Well, there's in fact a great irony to this idea. Think about how people go about weeding through the many people they see on online dating sites. Most people will have a checklist and they're typically looking for someone who shares their interests. In fact, there are many niche sites. You know, there's a site for mustache lovers, there's a site for farmers, there's a site for baseball fans. And so you're looking for someone who matches the interests that you already have. But the idea of curiosity fits with an important theory we have in relationships called self-expansion theory, which is the idea that one of the reasons we form close relationships is to expand our sense of self. And that can mean learning new things.
31:11 Speaker 02 So, you know, I don't like opera very much, but if I were to pair up with someone who's into opera, if I was curious, I would say, wow, teach me about opera. Let me learn about what's interesting about opera. And you can expand yourself in those ways. So one of the things that's really nice about the idea of curiosity, and when Sonia talks about there being social curiosity and thing curiosity, is sometimes those things are actually merged because you become interested in another person by being interested in what interests them.
31:47 Laurie Santos? So far, we've covered three of the major mindsets Harry and Sonya recommend for feeling more loved: sharing, listening to learn, and radical curiosity. But we still have two more to explore, plus some guidance on what to do when you've tried all these strategies and you still don't feel as loved as you'd hoped. We'll cover all that when the Happiness Lab returns from the break.
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35:12 Speaker 02 An open-hearted mindset means being genuinely caring toward the other person, certainly giving them the benefit of the doubt, simply being as concerned as we can for their welfare, being kind, being generous, being altruistic. For example, when they tell you something that maybe sounds a little bit shady, have the most benign interpretation that you can. Think of what they're doing in the most positive light. And you'll find that when you do that, the other person tends to respond much more positively rather than getting defensive and closed up from it. One of the things that we talk about in the book is the idea of a communal relationship,
35:55 Speaker 02 a relationship that's defined in terms of caring about the well-being of the other and expecting that they care about your well-being. Nearly all of our most satisfying relationships are communal relationships, with our children, with our parents, with our romantic partners, with the people we would call a best friend. Those are the relationships that are most deeply meaningful to people.
36:21 Laurie Santos? It probably seems obvious that being on the receiving end of an open heart mindset feels really good, right? People are caring about you, wanting you to be happy. But Sonia, some of your lovely work has shown the benefits of giving the open heart mindset, kind of extending kindness and compassion. What does the research show about the benefits of that?
36:37 Speaker 01 Yeah, it's one of the most powerful things you can do to improve your own happiness is to show an open heart towards other people. Basically, if you want to be happy, try to make other people happy. And so in our studies, for example, we asked people to do random acts of kindness for other people over the course of, say, four weeks, a month usually. And then one of the most important comparison conditions is we asked people to do acts of kindness for themselves, which is also nice, which also is self-care or self-indulgent acts. It feels good to do something kind for yourself, but that tends to be more fleeting, right? So you get yourself an ice cream, you get a massage, you take a nap. So it feels good in the moment, doesn't necessarily carry over a month later. We actually have a study where we compared givers and receivers in a workplace, where
37:20 Speaker 01 we asked some people to be the givers and others were the receivers. We literally found evidence to support that it's better to give than to receive. The receivers became kind of happier right away, but the givers actually experienced benefits, less stress, less depression, even greater well-being. Four months later, 16 weeks later. So we find that people who do acts of kindness for others, essentially who show an open heart mindset towards others, become happier and also feel more connected in general.
37:48 Laurie Santos? You also have some data showing that it makes people more successful too, right?
37:52 Speaker 01 We have a study with kids, nine to 11-year-old kids, where we asked the kids to do acts of kindness for others. And we find that when they did acts of kindness for others, generally in their family, they came back to the classroom and they actually became more popular. So literally the other kids liked them more when they did acts of kindness at home. So something must have rubbed off on them. So when they came back to the classroom, maybe they just seemed more positive, more confident, maybe they were more helpful in the classroom as well. We also find genomic benefits to acts of kindness for others. So people who do acts of kindness for others relative to, for themselves, they show changes in their RNA gene expression associated with a healthier immune profile. So sort of less pro-inflammatory gene expression, in some studies, greater antiviral gene expression.
38:36 Speaker 01 So these are all associated with better immune health.
38:39 Laurie Santos? So we're feeling better, we're helping our immune systems when we're doing these nice things for other people. Another way that we can become open-hearted towards the people that we are trying to love better is to see them in all of their facets. And that gets to the final mindset that you've talked about as boosting our ability to love others, this idea of multiplicity. Harry, what's multiplicity and why is it so important for making others feel loved?
39:01 Speaker 02 Well, multiplicity is the idea that we all have many selves, many parts to ourselves. Some of these parts are genuinely wonderful, you know, the positive traits we have. And some of them are, shall we say, less terrific. Things that we've been embarrassed by, shortcomings, weaknesses, flaws in our character. We go to great pains to hide these. And one of the things that can really boost a relationship tremendously is the idea of acknowledging those flaws in another person and being accepting of them, even being loving towards them. One part of that is simply coming up with the most benign interpretation that you can for a shortcoming.
39:45 Speaker 02 But another way is simply to recognize, well, I don't like what you did, but I recognize that there's many sides to you. So when we don't focus so much on the negative character attribution for a person's shortcomings and instead focus on, well, you may have done something that wasn't desirable, but that's just one part of you and you've probably done many wonderful things in your life. Part of the importance of that is that allows the other to feel loved and accepted. But the other side of that is that if you start to adopt that idea towards yourself to have compassion for your own shortcomings and your own weaknesses, you make it that much more likely that you will feel loved.
40:29 Speaker 02 If you focus on bad things that you've done and you feel like those things rule out being happy, that they rule out anyone ever expressing love towards you, you make it impossible to feel loved. So acknowledging that humans have multiple sides and we've all done things that we wish we hadn't done will make it that much more likely that we can feel loved.
40:54 Speaker 01 I want to add that it's so hard. I think we are all kind of judgmental. Maybe sort of evolutionarily speaking, that served us well to kind of, you know, when we see someone engage in a bad behavior, that we maybe need to kind of be wary of that person. So it's really, really hard. I actually had the experience recently where I was on Zoom, meeting a new group of people. And we had these prompts to answer. And one of the prompts was, name something that you have changed your mind about. My answer, and I'm kind of regretting that I said this, is that I have a friend who did a very bad thing. And so I said that he did this very bad thing, but I still his friend, you know, I sort of see him in this sort of very messy complexity. He made a mistake. He has lots of other good sides. I have to tell you, I'm not going to say it on air,
41:39 Speaker 01 but I said what he did and people just looked at me like, oh, my God. I feel like they were judging me for not being judgmental enough. So anyway, that's kind of an extreme example. But I mean, think about like all of us at our lowest moment, right? If anyone saw us at our lowest moment, we'd be pretty ashamed. So let's remember that. But again, I also wanted to sort of reiterate what Harry said about turning multiple city mindset, also the open heart mindset onto ourselves and sort of having compassion for ourselves and having self-love for ourselves. It will help us feel loved in part because when you think about, there are people who love us. Imagine them sort of pouring love on us, but it's not getting in. And so it's like a cup of love and there's sort of a lid on it and sort of not getting in.
42:22 Speaker 01 And I think of like self-love and self-compassion as a way to open that opening at the top. When you really love yourself, people see that, by the way. They sort of reflect that appraisal of yourself. And you also see their love as more authentic. If you have self-love for yourself, you're not suspicious of other people's kindness. So but you see as authentic, that person really does love me. You know, when they say that positive thing about me, when they give me that compliment, that's actually real and genuine. So yeah, you're sort of making that opening wider and easier to receive love from others and thus to feel loved by others.
42:55 Laurie Santos? Any practical strategies for increasing your ability to see others? Is there multiple messy selves that can be loved anyway?
43:02 Speaker 02 Well, the most obvious one is no matter what you hear, make your first place to go to be seeing it in a nonjudgmental way. I mean, we all have this tendency that Sonia was describing to respond emotionally, to respond judgmentally. Short circuit it. When you hear about something that someone did, make your first thought be, why might they have done something that they didn't mean to do in that situation?
43:31 Laurie Santos? And that fits with how all these mindsets go together, right? What you're describing in that case is if you're feeling judgmental, try to shut off the judgment and turn on a little bit of curiosity. Then you can listen to learn about why the person really did it.
43:42 Speaker 01 Exactly. Curiosity, actually, curiosity is so useful. Imagine in the middle of a fight with your spouse, they're really angry and you stop yourself and you think, I'm so curious why they're so angry, right? That is a powerful technique. But yeah, again, just like, everything gets better with practice. I used to be, I think, a lot more judgmental. I'm sure that I still am at times. But when I hear, like, a friend will say, can you believe what this guy blah, blah, blah did? Now, more often than not, my first reaction is to think about, like, why that person did that thing. And often I imagine them as a young child. Actually, to see someone as a young child, it often is actually helpful to reduce that judgment.
44:22 Speaker 02 And of course, to just build on this, one of the things that's really important to not be judgmental about is being judgmental. You give yourself permission to be judgmental and then back away from it.
44:35 Speaker 01 I need to be self compassionate about myself when I'm judgmental. Thank you.
44:39 Laurie Santos? And so all these mindsets are super helpful, but you end your book with, I think, one of the most important things that we need to do, which is that we need to start using them first, that we need to apply love to others first before we can get back the love to ourselves.
44:53 Speaker 01 Exactly. You go first. You listen and you show curiosity. You make the other person feel loved first. Your goal is to make the other person feel good, not to make yourself feel good. The second thing, I just wanted to add a caveat that's really important, is that once in a while, or maybe even more than once in a while, you try everything and it doesn't work. And the person still doesn't respond and they still don't share and they don't reciprocate. But reciprocity is a really powerful rule of social behavior. Very powerful. Usually it works, but once in a while it doesn't. And then if it doesn't, maybe that's a time to reconsider the relationship, maybe to pause, maybe to walk away, maybe to kind of accept it as it is. But I did want to sort of add that so that people understand that once in a while it's not going to work.
45:36 Speaker 02 Well, I would add to what Sonia said. This is not a five-minute thing. It's not that you listen for five minutes and you say, see, they're not responding to me. It's not working. Think of it as a long-term investment where you have to do it gradually. Sometimes, as Sonia says, other people will not respond to it. You can make it a topic of conversation to see if that might kickstart the process. But if that doesn't work and it continues, maybe it's time to look elsewhere.
46:03 Laurie Santos? Any final pieces of advice for folks who want to feel loved a bit more?
46:06 Speaker 01 My final word is that if you want to feel more loved, you don't have to change yourself. You don't have to change the other person. You just have to change the conversation. So it is absolutely in your control. I think that's a very, very powerful message.
46:21 Laurie Santos? Love it. Harry?
46:22 Speaker 02 I would say that prior to doing this work, I was not a very good listener. And in particular, I was a pretty judgmental listener. And so one of the things I've learned is to be much less judgmental and to be much more curious about the people I'm talking to. And you'd have to ask my wife if I've been successful at it, but it feels like it's made a big difference to me.
46:47 Laurie Santos? Well, I have to say that reading the book has made a big difference to me. It really does change things. It makes conversations more fun. It makes you feel like you matter more and it makes you feel like you belong more. So thank you so much for sharing all this work with everyone and with my listeners today.
47:01 Speaker 02 It's been delightful chatting with you, Laurie.
47:03 Speaker 01 Yeah, it's been my pleasure, Laurie.
47:05 Laurie Santos? Even though it may not feel like it, the science shows that feeling more loved is under your control. But we don't always know the best way to make that happen. So if you're feeling a little under-loved this Valentine's season, why not try some of the strategies that Sonia and Harry talked about today? You could get just a tad more curious with a friend, or commit to recognizing your partner's multiplicity a bit more authentically. Or why not try a quick act of kindness to boost your connection and your positive mood? And if you want even more research-backed advice about how to feel loved, check out Harry and Sonia's new book, How to Feel Loved: The Five Mindsets That Get You More of What Matters Most, which is out this week. If you have thoughts about today's episode, or the science of love generally, we'd love to hear them.
47:48 Laurie Santos? You can email us at [email protected] to tell us what you liked, or ask a question. You can also sign up to learn more about the science of happiness and join my free newsletter on my website, drlaurisantos.com. That's D-R-L-A-U-R-I-E-santos.com. Coming up on next week's episode of the Happiness Lab, we'll hear from a social scientist turned dating expert about the right way to find your soulmate according to the research.
48:15 Speaker 04 You've tried dating on apps, and there's just this big effort-reward gap that's happening, where you're swiping, and swiping, and swiping, you're messaging, you're rarely meeting up. And it makes sense that you're among the 78% of online daters who report experiencing burnout.
48:34 Laurie Santos? That's the next installment in our series on the science of love on the Happiness Lab, with me, Dr. Laurie Santos.
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