How Good Manners Made Me Happier (with Etiquette Expert William Hanson)

You might think etiquette is outdated. Who really needs a dinner with nice napkins and four different forks? Etiquette expert William Hanson disagrees. By observing good manners we show others we respect and care about them - deepening our bonds. William (author of Just Good Manners https://www.williamhanson.co.uk/books and host of the podcast Help I Sexted My Boss https://sextedmyboss.com/) explains the origins of many formal behaviours and how they can make us happier. 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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• 1:52Laurie Santos?

  Pushkin.

• 1:59Laurie Santos?

  There's a long tradition in audio recording. To test someone's microphone, you ask them what they had for breakfast. So I put that question to today's guest, William Hanson.

• 2:08Speaker 03

  I had two poached eggs on some toast.

• 2:11Laurie Santos?

  If that sounds a bit elaborate for a random breakfast at home, you haven't heard the half of it.

• 2:15Speaker 03

  I used a fork and a knife. I put a placemat down, napkin. We did it relatively formally for a Monday.

• 2:22Laurie Santos?

  Placemats, napkins? I can't remember the last time I used a cloth napkin for breakfast. I'm not even sure I own any cloth napkins.

• 2:30Speaker 03

  Does everybody not have a napkin collection? They should. I can strongly advocate for having one because, you know, as anyone knows, in etiquette, we have four different types of napkin size. And I think it's nice to have an array. I think a proper napkin is so much better than a sort of a tatty paper one or a piece of kitchen towel or something like that, which is not pleasant and very coarse on the lips. And when I, years ago, when I was living in a flat, we had a fire that was in the laundry cupboard and the napkins were right next door to the fire. And this is not what we advise people to do in the case of a fire, but I decided to save the napkins and was very carefully moving them out whilst the flat burned around me.

• 3:09Laurie Santos?

  This season of the Happiness Lab is all about the creative coping strategies real people use to get through their lives as joyfully as possible. And don't worry, this isn't a show about using napkins. William Hanson is a self-confessed happy person.

• 3:22Speaker 03

  I think it's better to be happy if you can. It's very easy for me to say that, of course. But for me, I'm quite happy. I'm sort of consistently chipper.

• 3:31Laurie Santos?

  But aside from being a chipper chap, William is a respected expert on etiquette. And he shares that expertise on his podcast, Help, I Sexed My Boss, and in a great new book called Just Good Manners. I usually associate etiquette with prissy rules about which fork to use first at dinner, rules that make the uninitiated feel stupid and small. But reading William's book showed me how wrong I was. Turns out etiquette has more benefits than I realized. Because thinking deeply about how to behave in the company of other people so that you're polite, considerate, and respectful, that can make you feel great, too. William's been thinking about etiquette since childhood. And as you'll hear, it's made his passage through life far smoother and far more enjoyable.

• 4:12Speaker 03

  This will come as no shock to you Laurie, but I think I was probably quite a precocious child and my late grandmother gave me a book of etiquette when I was 12 for Christmas. And not because I was feral, but because she thought I might enjoy it. And I did, and I reluctantly read it because there were more exciting presents to be playing with, but I started to read it. And as well as it being funny, that particular etiquette book, and I think if it had been written sort of deathly seriously, I don't think I'd be sitting here now. But it opened up this sort of framework, most of which, you know, certainly the basics I knew because my parents brought me up very nicely and we sat at the table for breakfast, lunch and dinner. I had to write thank you letters after birthdays and Christmas and we followed this sort of ritual of politesse.

• 4:55Speaker 03

  But there were other rules your average person probably didn't know, probably doesn't need to know. But I found it helped me sort of give structure and confidence that actually in certain situations, some of which aged 12 or 13 when I was reading this book, I mean ludicrous, of course, I'm not going to be dining with an Archbishop tomorrow, but I was ready should that happen. And of course etiquette is not just all about dining with Archbishops and things like that. But it gave me this foot up in a positive way because I had chosen to learn and I bought more books because it posed lots of questions and that's really how my interest started.

• 5:31Laurie Santos?

  Do you think it came to you at a time, I'm just thinking of like, well, I was like at 13 and you know, you're kind of going through awkward puberty and things are weird. Do you think it kind of helped your social anxiety? Like was it kind of coping to kind of dig into those etiquette skills?

• 5:43Speaker 03

  Yes, I think it probably was helping with that and knowing how to behave at 12, 13 for anyone, we're all sort of a little bit all over the shop, our hormones are doing all sorts of things as we grow. For me, there was the gay thing as well. I sort of, I knew at that age I was gay, but sort of hadn't told anyone. It wasn't long after that that I did come out. Now, whether actually etiquette sort of helped me in my head, I probably was like, well, it doesn't matter that I'm gay because I actually know how to behave and I probably know how to behave better than your average person. So I've, I've always got that as a bit of a shield.

• 6:16Laurie Santos?

  And where were you when you decided to come out? If you don't mind, like was that?

• 6:20Speaker 03

  I was at home in the summer between, we would call it. Year eleven, so I was sixteen. In the summer between year eleven and year twelve, we were waiting for my GCC results, which are the exams that you do at that age. And I was not a natural academic. I wasn't at the class dumps, but, you know, I was an average student. And I was very tense, as indeed I'm sure everybody is tense, waiting for exam results. So there was quite a lot of heightened tension as we got closer. And I just sort of finally snapped and just thought, I just tell my parents. I think we were having an argument, which is unusual because I didn't read. I was very, apparently I was quite a placid child, but I think we were having a slight argument and I was losing.

• 7:02Speaker 03

  And I thought, I need something, a grenade to throw in to distract from the fact I'm losing this argument. Oh, I know what. I threw in the gay thing. I forget what the argument was about.

• 7:15Laurie Santos?

  So one of the things we're sort of thinking about in this episode is this idea that like etiquette can be a way to sort of cope when things feel really uncertain. And I feel like the times right now are feeling just incredibly uncertain. I feel like especially in the US right now, but probably all over the world. Do you have this sense that etiquette can be used to kind of give structure when things feel out of control?

• 7:34Speaker 03

  Yes, absolutely. It's parameters. It's just knowing what is expected of us, what is expected of other people. And I think children supposedly like frameworks and they are given a framework at school and at home as to what is expected of them. Not everybody is, but generally most children are. I'm not a child psychologist, but I think child psychologists would agree that most children do thrive with frameworks and guidelines and knowing what is expected of them. And I think the same is true with adults as well. It's a different framework. It's a different form of expectations. It's more advanced in many ways. But I think actually sort of having a rock to cling on to in uncertain times, I don't think that's a bad thing.

• 8:17Laurie Santos?

  And so how do you define etiquette? Because I think a lot of laypeople, people who have not been as well versed in etiquette as you, might kind of misunderstand what it's about.

• 8:25Speaker 03

  Oh, yes. And look, people misunderstand etiquette on a daily basis. It doesn't help that etiquette as a word, as an old French word, it sounds terribly posh and it does go back to the court of Louis XIV. France as a word, but it is just about treating people with respect, tolerance, compassion, civility, charm, grace, whatever similar word you want to put in. And anyone who sort of says that we don't need to do that needs to be very politely just ushered off the planet, really, because it would be a horrible place if we were treating people without any of those.

• 8:58Laurie Santos?

  I mean, I agree that we want to treat people nicely, but maybe just because I'm an American, I feel like at least before I read your book, I had this knee jerk reaction against etiquette. It just sort of felt a way that people were being overbearing or kind of holier than thou. Like, it seems like, okay, we need to treat people nicely. But do we need to care where the fish fork is and where it goes on the plate and stuff? Tell me about the history of why etiquette kind of peaked in the aristocracy and why it started there and why maybe those of us who are maybe not as so aristocratic need to give it a chance.

• 9:30Speaker 03

  I would say that humans back in the days of cave people were forming a social construct as to how you should behave, who got access to the meat first, et cetera. So in terms of being codified and written down, it was Louis XIV and XV, as I mentioned, in France, who really structured it more or less like we have today, or as close as to. However, there it was quite exclusive. It was designed to exclude. And if you didn't follow this code, you were demoted down court life and they would have rules on how many ruffles your sleeves or collars would have, depending on your status and what part of the grand levé, which was Louis's sort of morning ritual, which sounds hideous, basically all these people watched him get out of bed.

• 10:15Speaker 03

  I mean, I don't know about you, but I don't want anyone watching him get out of bed. To be fair, it wasn't him actually getting out of bed. He got out of bed 10 minutes before and then got into another bed, but still there was this sort of ritual. And if you were in that room, you had one of the highest statuses in the court. So there it was exclusive, but as life has progressed and we've sort of finessed it, I would say now good etiquette and manners when practiced are inclusive. They are there to bring people together, to help us so we know what to do and what is expected of us. France don't have a monarch anymore. British Monarchy is a very different monarchy from hundreds of years ago. No royal family anywhere in the world is now making up the rules as to how to behave. I would say now etiquette is quite democratic and we, the people, are discovering through

• 10:57Speaker 03

  trial and error often what we like as a group of people and what we don't like as a group of people. And it will always change. Etiquette will evolve and develop as humans walk the earth. And whoever are doing your and my jobs in 200 years' time will be talking about a completely different type of etiquette than what we're talking about today.

• 11:17Laurie Santos?

  If it's OK with you, we're going to take a short break, but we'll return in a moment so William can explain how following a few rules can help your next social gathering go with the swing. The Happiness Lab will be right back.

• 11:33Laurie Santos?

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• 13:41Laurie Santos?

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• 13:51Laurie Santos?

  If you've listened to recent episodes of the Happiness Lab, you may have heard that sharing meals is a great way to create stronger bonds with the people around you and to feel happier. But a lot of us find organizing a dinner party or entertaining in our homes to be a bit daunting. Etiquette expert William Hanson says a few simple rules can help. And he should know, because his homeland, the United Kingdom, has had quite the history when it comes to table manners.

• 14:14Speaker 03

  We are a tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny country in comparison to, let's say, America, or China, or France. Our nearest country is at least double the size. And thus, we're much closer to the people that we live with. We're all living on top of each other. Thus, we have to get on quite nicely. And, you know, we're very fortunate in this country. Our weather is fairly bland. We don't have hurricanes, we don't have tsunamis, we don't have earthquakes. And so, we don't have anything else to worry about particularly. And we're very fortunate, again, very fortunate that it's generally a nice country. So, yes, we sort of thus have had the time and the headspace to develop this code. And yes, our food was historically, I mean, it has dramatically changed in the last 40

• 14:57Speaker 03

  years, but historically, our food was fairly plain. And so, you can see why you might want to develop a series of rules to slow down how to eat it, because it wasn't the most delicious.

• 15:09Laurie Santos?

  And maybe make it more festive too, hence the exciting napkin collection, I guess, right?

• 15:13Speaker 03

  Well, exactly, yes. And again, there's a logic, particularly with dining, there is, for most things, there is a logic behind them. The knife goes on the right hand side because that was your sword carrying hand historically. That's why most people were right handed and certain religions would say that anything held in the left hand, it was the hand of the devil. So thus forks for many years were considered very suspicious of you using a fork. You used your hand and a knife. And then when various religions realized that actually if you used a fork, there was actually nothing wrong with you. And actually fork was quite helpful. And so, you know, the napkin of whatever size is there to protect your clothing and to take any sort of residue off your lips. So most things have been developed with a logic and it's normally those that don't understand the logic.

• 15:58Speaker 03

  Whose default reaction is, well, it doesn't matter. Well, it does, it's just that it hasn't been explained to you correctly. Or you've had some negative experience where someone else has used etiquette for bad, not for good.

• 16:10Laurie Santos?

  Okay, can I talk to you about some of the things I learned in your book that I want to share with my listeners? Because it was like mind blown, like I had no idea where these things come from.

• 16:17Speaker 03

  Oh, great. Okay, love it.

• 16:18Laurie Santos?

  So one of my favorites, which comes up for me in my own dining as a kid, was the no elbows on a table rule. I just thought this was a completely arbitrary thing that, you know, parents and nannies come up with to like yell at the kids at like the Thanksgiving table. But it turns out no elbows on the table, very functional. Why?

• 16:37Speaker 03

  Yes, so that goes back to sort of medieval dining in the Middle Ages and the sort of 1500s. Where you would have trestle tables with sheets of wood and they were created for the meals that they had. And they only ate twice a day back then, so they weren't having three meals a day. These tables were cleared away and then basically these multipurpose rooms then became bedrooms and you'd sleep on the floor. And so the food, again, we ate, not like we eat now, it was almost sort of a big buffet style. The food was laid down the center of the table, carefully balanced, so the table did not tip. So all the heavy stuff was down the very middle of the table. So if you put your elbows on the table and put particular weight, particularly if you were an adult, the table would probably tip. And so it became the etiquette to not put your elbows on the table. And yes, so.

• 17:19Speaker 03

  Many people think, oh, gosh, I can hear my mother, my father, my grandparents saying that to me. I would also say it's actually terribly difficult to eat with your elbows on the table. If you're using an knife and fork, the angles don't align. Having your elbows on the table at the end of a meal, perhaps if I've come around to your house, Laurie, and we've finished eating, we're having a cup of coffee at the end or a cocktail or whatever. If you've got your elbows on the table as a host, I would say as a guest, that's fair enough. I can put my elbows on the table, but actually during a formal meal, no, don't.

• 17:48Laurie Santos?

  And I have to say, like, even in grad school, I had some tables that might not have been like medieval, but they were cheap things that, you know, could could fall apart. So I love this one. Another thing that I learned from your book makes sense, at least at the right time, was seating charts. This was another thing I never knew as a Yale professor. I sometimes have to go to these formal dinners where everybody has to sit in this specific spot. And I was kind of like, who cares? Then I learned that this too came from important times back in the day because, as you mentioned before, of the swords. So explain why the guest of honor is often sitting in a very specific spot at the right hand side of the table and kind of where that came from.

• 18:24Speaker 03

  Yeah, so it's always to the host's immediate right is where you put the guest of honor. And actually, if you look at the White House, as you said, have the photographs of those two armchairs that are in front of the fire in the Oval Office, the president is always on camera right. And to his right is always the visiting head of state, whoever it is. And that was because your sword was on your left hip. And so if someone was sort of going to attack you, you would draw your sword and protect them. So it would be across your guest of honor or whoever you were protecting. And that's also why, I mean, Britain gets a bad rap for driving on the left, whereas everyone, other countries drive on the right. Should just say that all countries drove on the left historically, and it wasn't driving, it was horse and cart. And you did that because, again, for necessity, because if someone was a highwayman was going to attack you,

• 19:09Speaker 03

  you would take out your sword. And it was Napoleon and the French who thought, well, they hated us, so we'll just switch sides to annoy them. And lots of other countries, shock, didn't like the British either, so they copied suit as well. Everyone else changed it, not us.

• 19:21Laurie Santos?

  Okay, so I didn't know it was driving that was about swords, but I love that it was formal dinners were about swords.

• 19:26Speaker 03

  So much of etiquette is about swords. It's quite violent, actually.

• 19:30Laurie Santos?

  It actually makes so much sense. Okay, the other fancy dress thing that I loved you explaining, which has to do again with formal seating, is why so many of the formal dinners I go to, including weddings, are sat boy, girl, boy, girl, which felt very gendered, very weird. Why do we have to do that?

• 19:44Speaker 03

  Yeah, so sort of at the start of the Georgian period of history in Britain, so George the First, it was all men down one side, all women down the other side of the table. And you didn't have the concept of dating, as we have now, and courtship. And so as life began to progress, they thought, well, actually, let's sort of alternate the genders. Obviously, it was Georgian England, and they assumed that there were just two genders, which we can unpick that another time, but just we're going with what they believed. So it was this boy, girl, boy, girl, which I think is probably preferable to all men down one side, all women down another. And the etiquette was that if you were married, you were actually seated apart from each other, not drastically far apart, just a

• 20:26Speaker 03

  little bit. So you can talk to other people, because you do live with them. So you might want a bit of a change, as much as we love our spouses. If you were engaged, we look at Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy in Pride and Prejudice, you know, they weren't going off to the cinema and sitting in an olive garb and having a nice get to know you dinner. There was none of that, really. They just saw each other at balls and might have had tea with the family. And then suddenly, they were going to spend the rest of their life together. So hostesses would put these couples next to each other at dinners. So at least they could have some sort of private conversation. I would say now you don't need to do such gendered strict seating. I would just say just balance it. Try not to have clusters of any particular gender all in one bit, to the detriment of another space on the table.

• 21:08Speaker 03

  I love my husband to pieces, but I don't actually want to sit next to him at a dinner, because I want to be able to, in the car on the way home, go, guess what I learned tonight, and be able to share and swap stories. But equally, if I was going to a dinner where I knew nobody else, other than my husband and the host, actually, then I do want to sit next to my husband, probably, probably, not always. So we can take a lot from where we have come from, in order to sort of work out what we like from back then, what we don't like, and also create our own etiquette as well.

• 21:36Laurie Santos?

  Can I ask it different? I think you mentioned in the book that another reason for the boy, girl, boy, girl. Thing with it, women's dresses were just enormous and that they couldn't fit.

• 21:43Speaker 03

  Yes. So, you know, again, sort of Georgian and and Elizabethan, sort of like Victorian era, your early Victorian era, women's dresses were so voluminous, often with hoops, and they couldn't actually physically get to the table. So you would have to have somebody not wearing such a luminous outfit, i.e. men, to assist you getting in and out of the chair. Yeah, the pulling out of the chair was not because the women were the weaker sex or anything like that. It was just out of absolute necessity because women couldn't physically do it. And then obviously, when dresses became a lot more practical, you sort of still did that as a bit of a nod to where we had come from. Today, some people like it, some people hate it. I would say just pull out a chair for anyone you're sitting next to, however they identify. And actually, I saw the other day, a woman

• 22:26Speaker 03

  pulled out the chair for her husband, who was a man. And I thought, gosh, that's lovely. There's nothing wrong with it. Again, we're still sort of tipping the hat to where we've come from. So yeah, do it for any fellow human being.

• 22:35Laurie Santos?

  And the huge dress thing gets to something we've already talked about, which is the importance of napkins of different sizes. Another thing I didn't realise, with the different sized napkins also actually had a function too.

• 22:46Speaker 03

  Yes. So you had the largest dinosized napkins, which were between 24 and 26 centimetres. I think you work in inches, so apologies. But they were the largest, and so they would sort of be completely over the ball gown, because you were wearing this this huge ball gown. And so you would need a larger napkin to cover it.

• 23:04Laurie Santos?

  Now, if I look through your book and all the domains where we see these etiquette rules popping up, they happen in all parts of life, but they seem to crop up especially at these moments of rites of passage, right? Weddings, funerals, these big scary state dinners. And that seems like exactly the time psychologically where you might want more of the structure to reduce uncertainty. Is that your sense of kind of how these rituals developed? Is that they were kind of during these moments of uncertainty?

• 23:29Speaker 03

  Yes, I think so. And I think probably the hatched, matched and dispatched points of our lives are probably when, you know, we have large groups of people that come together, particularly for the for the wedding one. And you've got lots of different personalities, lots of different family dynamics, and always have done as far as sort of matrimony has been a thing. And so thus, that's why these rules have. Popped up in particular and you know, everyone's got an opinion, particularly on weddings.

• 23:54Laurie Santos?

  I also think you see this just in times where there are these subtle things about the psychology that are hard to understand, but if you just stick a rule in, you can sort of protect people. One of my favorite examples that my colleague, Dave Disteno, the psychologist who studies rituals, talks a lot about is in moments of death and certain rituals that come up during grieving. He talks about a case in Shiva in the Jewish tradition where during the period of mourning, you're supposed to cover up all the mirrors in the house, which kind of seemed like a very strange etiquette rule or ritual. But it turns out that seeing yourself being sad or seeing yourself being anxious in a mirror amplifies that sense of being sad or being anxious. And so the Shiva tradition of covering up the mirrors makes all the grievers not kind of, kind of compound their grief just by seeing how messed up you look

• 24:38Laurie Santos?

  and how sad you look all the time. Any other examples kind of like this that come up in more traditional etiquette moments where it seems like it's about kind of protecting people psychologically in ways that we might not expect?

• 24:49Speaker 03

  Yes, and that fundamentally, I mean, and also a lot of our more traditional etiquette has come from religion, whichever religion that that is. And I would say most religions do share the same core principles. But yes, it is just a consideration for other people before ourselves. And the idea is that I'm putting you first and you're putting me first and it's this nice, homogenous unit. That is the idea. And actually, the Shiva thing reminds me of, for many years, I was really reticent to post videos of myself on social media doing etiquette tips, which is something that's very commonplace now for lots of people in whatever industry.

• 25:29Speaker 03

  But I was really reluctant because I don't think it is healthy to constantly look at yourself, whether you've got an ego or you're insecure or not. I think it can be quite harmful. And so I take away mirrors generally, to be honest, whether we're grieving or not.

• 25:44Laurie Santos?

  So sometimes etiquette comes up in these big scary times, the, what did you say, hatched, catched?

• 25:50Speaker 03

  Hatched, matched and dispatched.

• 25:51Laurie Santos?

  Yes. So etiquette comes up in these hatched, matched and dispatched times. But there are lots of times that are a little bit anxiety provoking when we're engaging in social connection. Big one is the dinner. Talk about some strategies that can reduce uncertainty during moments of dinner. Thinking about well set tables, that kind of thing.

• 26:09Speaker 03

  Well, yeah, I mean, I think when you arrive to eat, whether it's in a restaurant, your friend's house, anywhere, however grand it is. If, you know, if the table and the room look inviting and it's sort of, there's been a little bit of consideration into, into the table setting. You're probably a little bit more relaxed than if actually all the cutlery is in a pot in the middle of the table. Some of it's a bit grubby. There's a few scraps of slightly unattractive kitchen towel on the table. You think, God, do they even want me here? Have they really prepared? Am I being a burden on them? And I think hospitality is, whether you're doing it professionally or you're doing it sort of socially, is about making others feel welcome and relaxed. And thus putting in a bit of effort, if you're going to have friends over, is key.

• 26:53Speaker 03

  If you don't want to have friends over, that's fine. Don't have friends over. Go out to a restaurant or do it another way. And then, yes, if you're eating food and you don't know what to do with it and you're presented with something new, don't be afraid to ask. Ask your host, gosh, this is delicious. How best do you suggest I eat it? Or just sort of slightly hang back and just see what everyone else is doing. May not be correct, but if they're doing it, they're going to think it's correct.

• 27:17Laurie Santos?

  Yeah, I'm, I'm, I'm a big believer in the hang back. As someone who hasn't studied a lot of etiquette and is American, but finds myself in lots of these formal moments. I'm a big hang backer and watch what everybody else does, especially for the like positioning of the thing. Somehow the bread, like little dish, I always, I never know what's going on.

• 27:33Speaker 03

  Okay. Well, with your bread plate.

• 27:35Laurie Santos?

  Yes, exactly.

• 27:36Speaker 03

  What you need to remember is you need to remember BMW motor cars. So as you look at your place setting, B for bread, it's on the left, M for meal, it's in the middle. And W for wine, it's on the right. So as you sort of sit down, you know that your bread plate is on the left. If you start taking bread from the right hand side, that's someone else's bread plate, that's stealing. That's very bad manners. So your bread plate is on.

• 27:55Laurie Santos?

  This happened recently at, I was out giving a talk and we were at a restaurant and they, you know, had the bread plates set up. And I was just like, which side am I, should I be taking it from? Which side should I be taking it from? And I realized they just set the wrong number of bread plates. So there's one too few. And so I was like, I did the math. And I was like, wait a minute. Okay, this is not me. This is, uh, yes.

• 28:13Speaker 03

  This is something that I have more and more frequently as I write about these rules, whether it's in just good manners or doing a video on Instagram or whatever, or teaching. And it's all very well me going, well, this is, this is how glasses are arranged, or this is how cutlery is arranged. But if the restaurant or your friend has not done it properly, you might actually, what I have told you to do, might be complete rubbish.

• 28:34Laurie Santos?

  You're like BMW, but you're like, wait, M W B. I don't know what's going on. It's all very confusing. Yeah.

• 28:39Speaker 03

  Exactly. Yes. So I would always, you know, and I think that's why it's good to sort of know what the etiquette should be. And then you can either choose to apply it or you go, do you know what? Wrong setting here, tear it up and do something else.

• 28:52Laurie Santos?

  I love this idea of just kind of, you know, making the table so beautiful and having all the napkins and so on. But one of the things we've talked about in the show is this idea of sort of scruffy hospitality. The social connection is so important and loneliness is so prevalent that you shouldn't let kind of worries about cleanliness and worries about having the perfect table setting come up. Any advice there of how you can kind of be minimum about the etiquette stuff and like the table settings and the fanciness, but still kind of get the social connection in and still get the hospitality into it?

• 29:19Speaker 03

  Well, one of the things that I see a lot of, particularly if people haven't hosted an awful lot and good on them for trying. And we've all, we've all had our first dinner party and for most of us, it probably went horrifically. But like anything, the more you do it, the better you get. But don't run before you can walk. If your dining table seats four at a push, don't invite five. I mean, it's extraordinary how many, it's happening less now as I'm getting older. But how many friends, dinner parties we've gone to and they've tried to cram it in because we want five. Well, we're not comfortable. Wherever we are eating, we want to be comfortable eating, particularly as we get older. We want chairs that sort of support us and we want to not think, God, thank God I can go home.

• 30:00Speaker 03

  So comfortable environment, the food does not have to be cooked yourself. You can buy it in. You can have cooked and the food can be just passable. It doesn't need to be delicious. So food that's nice, but doesn't need to be phenomenal and you can have bought it in. A clean table, clean cutlery, clean glassware, not glassware.

• 30:20Speaker 03

  Where I can see your thumbprints and your fingerprints as you've placed it down on the table, that's not very appetizing or hygienic. A nice napkin, if you're going to do paper because you can't be bothered to wash napkins, there are some really good sort of three or four ply thicker, proper paper napkins you can get. Most supermarkets or stores that sell napkins will have them, so you can just still throw them out and they can be recycled. And if you're going to have music on in the background, a lot of people get triggered by really loud music. And actually, the best soundtrack to any sort of party is just people chatting and laughing. And actually, so don't spend two days curating the perfect dinner party playlist because we really shouldn't be listening to it. We might hear it at the start when there are a few of us there, but as the party gets

• 31:04Speaker 03

  into the swing of it, we shouldn't be hearing the music. So have it there in the background, but really on very low.

• 31:09Laurie Santos?

  Social gatherings, when they go smoothly, can be a great source of happiness. And observing a set of agreed upon rules without being a jerk about it can help ensure that these interactions go well. But that's not the only benefit of taking etiquette more seriously, which we'll hear more about after the break.

• 31:28Laurie Santos?

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• 32:11Laurie Santos?

  Today, MassMutual is proud of using that knowledge to help people live well, so they can live on. Learn more at massmutual.com/wellness. That's massmutual.com/wellness. What if I told you your skin and your brain are often in conversation? It's true, and that's why what you feel shows up on your skin. Think goosebumps, blushing, and even signs of stress. Tatcha harnesses the skin-mind connection to create skincare rituals that care for both skin and mind. At the heart of Tatcha's formulas is Hadasei-3, their proprietary complex that counteracts visible signs of stress on skin. It's made up of three Japanese ingredients that are double-fermented to harness 400-plus micronutrients.

• 32:56Laurie Santos?

  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. William Hansen's new book, Just Good Manners, taught me that etiquette has a lot of unexpected benefits. And one of my favorite benefits is that etiquette often acts like a break, which can be a good thing when it comes to our happiness. Our lives often pass at lightning speed, but if you organize a dinner party following William's tips, considering the seating plan, or giving thought to the napkins, you have

• 33:41Laurie Santos?

  the time needed to anticipate just how fun it'll be. Research shows that humans get a happiness boost from this sort of anticipation. We also enjoy events way more when we have a chance to savor them, rather than rushing through everything all the time. So does William agree that etiquette can help us find room for pause in our hectic lives?

• 33:58Speaker 03

  Yes, and I think it's about just slowing down life. And I think as life is so fast-paced now compared to how it was in sort of etiquette's heyday, I think it's good just to sort of just pause and take time. And I, you know, let's look at communications, the written communication. We can communicate instantly with people and get a response, and that's fantastic in gosh, so many ways. But if we had to do it like they did in Jane Austen time, where you would write a letter and then you would wait for it to be collected, which might have been the day or the day after that, and then it would go via horse and cart to even somewhere within your city, but it could be two cities away, and then, you know, you might not get a response for a month. So you had time, they had the luxury, it wasn't considered at the time, but they had

• 34:43Speaker 03

  the luxury of time of considering. How are we going to respond? What's the best thing to do? I need to be concise as well because I've got papers expensive as well and we're not, we're going to try and keep it as as short as possible. Whereas now we are expected to sort of have the answers immediately upon sending a message and we have to speak and hope or write and hope that what we say is in some ways comprehensible, not offensive, clear, and it's not always going to be possible.

• 35:11Laurie Santos?

  It also seems like this act of kind of being more present can come from the things that I sometimes, again, as my, you know, etiquette first American background brought me up to be, things like dress codes, right? Whereas I often think of the dress code as something that's like overbearing, that's like constraining by freedom and so on. But you've argued that it's a way, again, of kind of being a little bit more present, maybe even of honoring the people that are throwing whatever event this is. Can you explain what you mean?

• 35:36Speaker 03

  Again, if you have been invited to a party, someone is has spent money presumably or time and effort on looking after you and taking interest in you and wanting you to have a nice time. And so by doing things correctly and honoring it and following what is expected of you, you are honoring them and the friendship rather than this sort of, well, actually, I don't want to do that. I'm just going to ignore that. I'm thinking somehow that someone is above the rules.

• 36:04Laurie Santos?

  And so it seems like one of the ways that etiquette can really help us is doing this sort of honoring, is this kind of other oriented take on how you should behave in these kinds of settings.

• 36:13Speaker 03

  And I would say also treating people with respect is a constant. How we treat people with respect might have changed over time from the time of George the Third to now, and it will always change. Etiquette is a shapeshifter and it would be ridiculous for me to say what's published in Just Good Manners in a hundred years' time. Every single sentence I write is going to be exactly the same. I think the core principles hopefully will be the same, but it will change. Yes, I think just, I think it is important, particularly when the world around us, our social, political, diplomatic life might be incredibly uncertain. It is the easy thing to do would be to sink to that level. Life is not easy. We know that.

• 36:55Speaker 03

  And actually, what we need to do is raise people to a slightly higher standard, particularly those in higher office. And I can see why some people, whichever country, and so many countries have, you know, it's not, it's not peachy for everybody. But I can see why a lot of people think, well, why, why should I be nice? You can be a bit of a brute, or you can be a bit of a bully, or say the wrong thing, and you can get to the highest office in the land. It, it applies to many, many heads of state.

• 37:21Laurie Santos?

  And what we know from the science is that this is very effective in terms of boosting people's happiness. I think we assume with so much in the world right now, talking about self-care and treating yourself, that kind of being as selfish as possible when it comes to food or whatever would make us feel good. But study after study shows that doing nice things for others, whether it's spending money on other people doing kind of like charity acts for other individuals, that makes us feel better than doing for ourselves. So another thing that you talk a lot about in terms of being a good guest, that really resonates with the science, is the importance of expressing gratitude. And you are a big fan, I know, of the thank you letter. Why are thank you letters so important, so powerful?

• 37:57Speaker 03

  I think they're more powerful now in an era where so little is handwritten by hand. Most things are emails. I think actually to have something, I think it shows more effort. I mean, that's it, I'd rather someone emailed me a thank you than literally a void of silence. But for someone to actually put pen to paper and to pay for a stamp, which I'm sure in your country, but it's definitely now as stamps cost rise and rise and rise almost every, every six months. But actually to sort of have taken a moment to put in a little bit of effort to say thank you, especially if, if the effort has been quite considerable on my part.

• 38:38Speaker 03

  Just to squiggle a few lines, I think is, is so nice. And I think it carries more clout and basically gets you brownie points more than if you just send, send a quick sort of DM to go, yeah, thanks so much for dinner. See you soon, kiss, which you've probably written, lying in bed, picking your nose, thinking about what you're gonna have for breakfast in the morning. It's not quite the same.

• 39:01Laurie Santos?

  You've seen the benefit of these brownie points, uh, kind of, I guess, secondhand with your friend. Daphne, tell me the story of Daphne and why her thank you notes were so powerful.

• 39:09Speaker 03

  Daphne is a gorgeous, gorgeous person. She's now in her nineties. Uh, and when I first stayed with Daphne in her early eighties, I was not living in London at the time, but I was working in London a lot. And so if I'd had an early start, I would stay with, with Daphne. And Daphne told me the, the following story, and I should say Daphne's house, beautiful Mary Poppins-esque Chelsea townhouse, gorgeous. And Daphne and her twin sister grew up outside of London, in the north of England. And every Christmas was sent a one pound note. Now, we don't have one pound notes anymore. But back then, ninety five years ago, a one pound note was a lot of money, particularly for two girls to be getting.

• 39:48Speaker 03

  They would each get it and they would sort of, once they got to four or five, they would start squiggling a little thank you note, letter to say thank you to this great aunt who was sending them the money. And sort of as they got older, they'd begun to understand that this great aunt was persona non grata with the family. There was some family feud. You just did not talk about this great aunt. And as Daphne and her sister were now in their twenties, they were living in London. They thought, well, look, we'll put in our thank you letters. Look, we, we don't care what this argument was. We don't know. Can we take you out for lunch, please, to say thank you properly? Never did they get a response. And then one year, Daphne's sister said, look, I'm going to stop writing. Because I, I sort of, it's embarrassing. It's not worth as much as it was. We're earning money. She never, I have no other contact with her. I sort of want her to save her money

• 40:33Speaker 03

  and give it to someone else. So she stopped writing. Daphne continued and still for about five or six more years, they were both sent their one pound note. And shortly after one Christmas, they receive nothing. And, and then after Christmas, Daphne received a phone call to say, I'm so sorry to tell you, but your great aunt has died and in her will, she has left you her Chelsea townhouse. It's because you always wrote a thank you letter. The sister was not left anything. Yeah, exactly. And so I always write to Daphne when I stay with her, because you never know.

• 41:09Laurie Santos?

  That's awesome. I mean, I think that's a case of getting brownie points, you know, like literal brownie points from the person you send a thank you letter to. But psychologically, there's lots of evidence that we get these kind of happiness boosting brownie points just because the act of writing a thank you letter to someone else, especially when researchers looked at this, a by hand thank you letter that you put some detail into, it winds up not just making the person who receives the letter happy, it makes you happy, too. In fact, a study by Marty Seligman and colleagues finds that the boost in happiness you get, small but significant boost in happiness you get lasts for somewhere between one to three months, which is sort of incredible, right? It's like this really longstanding little boost in happiness that we get from a handwritten thank you letter. And so.

• 41:48Speaker 03

  Oh, I love, I love, I love that. That's, that's, that's great to know. And actually, so, so strongly do I believe in the thank you letter thing. When we were doing the book for America, because it came out in Britain last year, I said to, to Gallery, Simon and Schuster, the publishers, I said, look, can I do an appendix, which I should have done for the UK book, but I didn't think of it at the time, of sample thank you letters? Because, because sometimes people say to me, oh, yeah, well, I don't know what to say, which I don't think is much of an excuse. I mean, whisper it quietly. I mean, you can get AI to help you write a thank you letter if you really, really are struggling, you know, an AI helped thank you letters better than nothing. So, yes, I've done this sort of additional appendix of all different scenarios and just things, just to help inspire people

• 42:30Speaker 03

  so they know sort of how long they should be writing and what sort of tone it should take.

• 42:35Laurie Santos?

  It's funny that we have such trouble with thank you letters because I think we don't have that much trouble with the opposite, which is like writing complaint letters or complaint reviews on Yelp or something like that. It seems like the negative part of it comes really easily to us. But you have a little etiquette suggestion here as well. You know that we should try to limit our complaints generally, or at least try to balance our complaints with the positive.

• 42:56Speaker 03

  I think it should be a two to one ratio at minimum.

• 42:59Laurie Santos?

  So we've talked so much about these kinds of traditions that have come, you know, from back in the day, from our time of swords and aristocracy and so on. You've noticed the etiquette is changing and probably will change if we add this podcast in 200 years, none of what we said might be the same. Where are the domains where you think it's, it's changing, especially in some of these spots? Or we might be dealing with kind of new moments of uncertainty or new sort of social times that feel potentially fraught.

• 43:23Speaker 03

  I think attitudes and more enlightened approaches generally to gender, I think, is changing etiquette. Certainly, you know, I've taught etiquette for nearly twenty years and twenty years ago, I would have said socially, in terms of the introduction precedence, deciding who is more important than others in the introduction, you've got to say somebody's name first. Obviously, in a business case, gender is irrelevant, ditto age, but socially, twenty years ago, you would have looked at age and gender. So granny being eighty is lifted beyond Annie, who's eighteen. So you would say granny may introduce Annie because granny is older. But if you had Annie and you had Matthew, you would have gone historically, Annie may introduce Matthew,

• 44:07Speaker 03

  and you would have risen Annie and not Matthew. I think that, I think age is still socially, is still looked at, and that's fair enough. I say it's fair enough. Come back to me in twenty years, I might have had an epiphany and say it's not. But the gender one, we are completely, as we are more accepting and more aware of different genders, we are just revising that and the weight that we give that. And sometimes it will be correct in the introduction to do, to do it that way, but not always. And actually, it's probably moving towards a more business orientated structure of it goes on rank or position. Socially, we don't, of course, have ranks. I mean, we do in Britain because we have the aristocracy, but, but they are infinitesimal in comparison to, to the general population.

• 44:50Laurie Santos?

  Do you think that we're going to be developing new etiquette rules for new technologies? The folks at OpenAI sort of issued this plea, asking, hey, when you talk to ChatGPT, can you not tell them please and thank you? Because just like those words take up so much space in the AI, it's like so much computing power for OpenAI to kind of deal with the thank yous, that if just people just deleted them, it would be faster and it would save, you know, whole rainforest of computing power and stuff. And I just found, oh my gosh, it's so hard for us to shut off these etiquette rules, even when we're talking to an AI. And I, I hope we don't. I hope we keep our please and thank you when we're talking to Claude and ChatGPT and so on.

• 45:24Speaker 03

  Exactly, yes. Ignore what OpenAI say, please. Keep saying please and thank you to your smart speaker. I mean, I still will ask whatever my smart speaker is called. I won't say it now. You know, I'll say, do this, please, which I think is, it's nice. It's, we need to sort of keep, keep the reflex and keep the politeness muscle honed.

• 45:43Laurie Santos?

  Hopefully, we can write her a thank you letter, too, because she does so much for us, our smart speaker.

• 45:48Speaker 03

  Exactly, yes. I'm sure she'd gratefully, gratefully receive it.

• 45:52Laurie Santos?

  And it says a last question, lightning round, top three etiquette tips that you wish everyone knew.

• 45:57Speaker 03

  Well, you, yeah, you don't need to have read Just Good Manners, gone to an etiquette class, or gone, you know, watched an etiquette video on Instagram to know you should be making eye contact with people when you talk to them, especially when you greet them, but also when you talk to them. Have a good handshake. Now culturally, what is a good handshake changes, but in the West, it's basically two pumps, locking the fingers and the thumb. Again, making eye contact, firm but not too firm. And try to use people's names as much as possible because we respond better. The happiness valve is released in us when we hear our own name and when it's used. And we, actually, the opposite valve, the valve gets turned off when someone gets our name wrong. And if I'm allowed a fourth, you cannot say please or thank you enough.

• 46:43Laurie Santos?

  And to honor that spirit of politeness, I'd like to offer my deepest thanks to William Hanson for such an enlightening interview. After chatting with him, I'm going to try to embrace the rules of etiquette a bit more because a little formality does seem to be a great way to show love and respect to the people you care about. You know, I might even go out and find some cloth napkins. In our next episode on creative coping strategies, we'll be moving from the gentility of dining rooms to the wilds of Mother Nature because I'll be talking with someone who finds her comfort in birds.

• 47:17Laurie Santos?

  That's all next time on the Happiness Lab with me, Dr. Laurie Santos.

• 47:25Laurie Santos?

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• 48:29Speaker 04

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