Pod Insights The Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos How to Lead the Richest Life Possible About this episode To improve your life you might decide to prioritize your own personal happiness, or find meaning in helping the people around you. Few of us consider pushing ourselves well beyond our comfort zones. It might take a lot of effort and risks pain or disappointment.
University of Chicago professor Shige Oishi thinks to live fully we all need to push ourselves to find "psychological richness". He tells Dr Laurie that we should look for daily opportunities to explore, get lost, mess around and have random encounters that challenge our routines and expectations.
Read more about Shige's work in Life in Three Dimensions: How Curiosity, Exploration and Experience Make a Fuller, Better Life https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/740022/life-in-three-dimensions-by-shigehiro-oishi-phd/.
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.
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1:17 Laurie Santos? Pushkin.
1:24 Laurie Santos? Positive psychology, the field that studies the science of happiness, has made a lot of progress in the last few decades. So much so that we've only been able to scratch the surface on all the cool studies out there. Even in the hundreds of episodes I've hosted in the five years of the show, we've spent time looking at the positive effects of treating yourself better and being kind to others. But we haven't talked as much about the happiness boost we can get from getting out of our comfort zones and taking on unfamiliar or even uncomfortable things. Some people seem to love pushing these boundaries. You know, the type, someone who treks across an entire continent, sets up a wildlife sanctuary, patents some new invention, and drops everything to become a novelist. These people can seem larger than life, but they do exist.
2:07 Laurie Santos? And one expert in wellbeing science thinks we should pay more attention to them.
2:10 Speaker 03 So thank you so much for having me. Sorry, I'm just running around today.
2:15 Laurie Santos? Yeah, I really enjoyed the new book.
2:17 Speaker 03 Oh, thank you.
2:17 Laurie Santos? Shige Oishii teaches psychology at the University of Chicago. And he's argued that past measures of happiness have missed something really important, what he calls the psychologically rich life. What is psychological richness? Well, Shige explains this concept in his new book, Life in Three Dimensions: How Curiosity, Exploration, and Experience Make a Fuller, Better Life. Shige's book explains that even if we can't all become globe-trotting inventor poets who hang out with movie stars, we can make some modest changes to mix up our lives a bit. So get ready to hear his strategies as Shige teaches us how to live the richest life possible. Shige first began thinking about psychological richness during about a mid-career self-reflection.
3:00 Speaker 03 I studied happiness since 1995. At the time, there were very, very few labs studying happiness. And we did all kinds of studies about who is happy, what makes people happy. And in 2015, you know, at the time, I already had tenure. I was full professor at the University of Virginia. And it just hit me that, oh, my gosh, I've been studying happiness for 20 years. You know, what did we learn? And what was the biggest debate in the field? And I have to say, I was really sort of sad to realize that we've been debating this. Which one is more important? Personal happiness, to make yourself happy, maybe even at the expense of others sometimes,
3:44 Speaker 03 or to make others happy, even at the expense of oneself? In the end, the result of this 20 years debate was like, of course, both are important, happiness and meaning. And I was like, wow, did I waste my 20 years pursuing this question? But then the next question came up. Am I happy with my life? And I was pretty happy with my wife and kids. And I found my life to be pretty meaningful. I mean, my social psych class was very popular. I played baseball with my kids. I felt like I have some roles in this society. But then when I asked this question of if I'm happy and find my life to be meaningful, is it the complete life?
4:28 Speaker 03 And at that point, I couldn't say yes. So when the semester started, I just asked students, what do you think? If you have happiness and meaning, is it a complete life? And a half of them were like, of course, don't be so greedy. I mean, like, that's a lot. But then the other half was like, yeah, maybe something is missing. And we started to look at those missing parts. And also the reverse, that somebody who doesn't feel their life is happy or meaningful, but maybe still leading good life. And in the end, we were able to find a lot of examples of that, like Oliver Sacks' life or Anthony Bourdain. We decided to call this a psychologically rich life.
5:13 Speaker 03 So my book is entitled Life in Three Dimensions. So we got the first dimension, which is happiness, and the second dimension, which is a meaningful life. And the third dimension, we think, is a psychologically rich life. And essentially, even if you don't have happiness or meaning, perhaps there is a third good life. And if you have happiness and meaning, then richness will add something. And you got it all. You live in three dimensions. So that's the basic trends.
5:44 Laurie Santos? I love that. And so in the book, you started with this comparison between your life and your dad's life. I don't know if you're comfortable sharing that story.
5:51 Speaker 03 Yeah, so my dad is ninety years old. He was born and raised in this small town in southern island of Kyushu. Like his father, grandfather, great grandfathers and all the ancestors, he essentially became a full-time farmer when he was fifteen. And he lived his life in the same town, surrounded by the same people he grew up with. He got married when he was twenty seven. He still lived with my mom. And he loved life on the farm. He loves hot springs, so he goes to hot springs with his wife and family and friends. And it's a really cozy life. And meanwhile, I was born into the same family, obviously. So I was expected to take over the farm.
6:36 Speaker 03 But from Early on, I showed no interest in farming. Indeed, I hated it. So I knew from early on, I gotta get out of here. As soon as I graduated from high school, I left my hometown for Tokyo, which is like seven hundred miles away. So very, very few people from my high school went to Tokyo. So my dad and mom, like when they said, yeah, you can go to college. I think they were expecting me to stay in in that region because there are a lot of good colleges there too. But just I left as far as I can, as quickly as I can. After graduating from college, I got my first job in Minnesota, moved to Virginia, moved to New York City, went back to Virginia, and moved again to Chicago.
7:21 Speaker 03 So, you know, if my dad's life is life of stability, familiality, tradition, probably my life is complete opposite, constant move, move, move on the go. You know, sometimes I really feel like, wow, why did I do this? You know, it's like I could have just stayed there, have sake every night, chat with my old friends. And indeed, I think that's a good life. My dad doesn't have much regret. He is very content. But yeah, it is very, very, very different.
7:51 Laurie Santos? And so I love that story because it so nicely illustrates the sort of distinction of a psychologically rich life. But I want to start by unpacking the sort of first two ideas of like happiness that we've sort of had so far. The first is this idea of happiness.
8:04 Speaker 03 Hmm.
8:04 Laurie Santos? Um, maybe just gonna give me a sense of what we mean by happiness, like or like scholars mean by this.
8:08 Speaker 03 Right. So we don't mean happiness by the just a mood, temporary mood. But it is really about whether you're happy about your life, how it's going, how it has turned out. So it's very similar to a sense of satisfaction with your life. And it turned out that a lot of factors that are associated with happiness are something to do with the stable life. So stable relationship is the number one predictor of happy life. So close relationship with your friend, family, marital satisfaction, so partner satisfaction is extreme.
8:47 Speaker 03 Extremely important. And more and more, the financial securities and stability is very, very important. So this is kind of interesting. Back in nineteen ninety five, correlation between household income and happiness, our life satisfaction was like point one five, which is not that strong. But we looked at historically last fifteen years or so from the nineteen seventies surveys, and we clearly see the correlation going up. So financial stability is very, very important. That actually means that a lot of people are financially struggling. A lot of people have relationship issues. So happiness has become sort of out of reach for them.
9:27 Speaker 03 So that's another reason why I thought maybe there is another way to conceptualize a good life that doesn't rely on this sort of life of stability and comfort.
9:39 Laurie Santos? You've also argued that we sometimes face what you've called the happiness trap.
9:42 Speaker 03 Yeah.
9:43 Laurie Santos? That when we focus on certain aspects of happiness, we get it wrong. What are the parts of this happiness trap?
9:47 Speaker 03 Yeah, I think happiness trap is particularly serient phenomenon in the United States. So when you ask Americans, what do you associate when you hear the word happiness? People often talk about success or reward for all hard work. So when you equate happiness with success, then when you're not happy, you're failing. And this is really unfortunate. And this is something as a cultural side, which I found very puzzling too. When I came to United States, I asked friends, how are you? And everybody say, great. In Japan, when somebody say, how are you? I say, okay, so so. And the conversation goes, yeah, me too.
10:30 Speaker 03 It's like we commiserate and that's the cultural norm. So there is no pressure to be happy, especially when you're not feeling happy. You can say, I'm not happy. But in the States, especially college students, maybe elite college students in particular at your institution like Yale, I think there's tremendous pressure to feel happy. And what I mean by happiness trap is that people think that because happiness is an indicator of success. I shouldn't be feeling these negative emotions. And that's the really the difficult and dangerous part of this this trap. Stuff happens to everyone, right? Bad events happen to the good people. And when things happen, if you don't have this pressure to feel happy,
11:14 Speaker 03 you are just much more naturally accepting of this particular minor bump in the road. Whereas if you feel like you have to be perfect, you have to be successful, you have to be happy all the time, then you really ruminate these little failures. And rumination, of course, is a precursor to depression. So that's what I mean by happiness trap.
11:34 Laurie Santos? So that suggests that kind of solely going for this idea of happiness is sort of feeling good in your life doesn't work. But you've also argued that seeking meaning might not go as smoothly as we often assume either, that there might be some challenges with seeking out a meaningful life too. What do you mean?
11:48 Speaker 03 Yeah, so any graduation speech you hear is like, be great, go out there and change the world, you guys are so smart. Which is true, but when you think about somebody who changed the world, Martin Luther King Junior, Rosa Parks, Gandhi, sure, can I do that? Probably not. I think when we think about the meaningful life, we often think about somebody who made a huge difference. And I think that will set yourself up for the failure that you are not leading a meaningful life. So that's one part. But the other part is that if you look at the people who are actually reporting that they are leading a meaningful life,
12:33 Speaker 03 they are not making that kind of differences. They are really focusing on their neighborhood, their churches, and things that is small and they can go to soup kitchen every Thursday and serve. And of course, you do that over the years, then you make a difference in your communities, which has no bad consequences at all. Just that the study sometimes find that the people who say their life is meaningful, they tend also to say that they endorse right wing authoritarianism, not just the political conservatives, that type of. Right wing authoritarianism comes with a very small in group whom you take care very carefully.
13:14 Speaker 03 But sometimes show huge antagonism against the out group members. So when I say there is a meaning trap. One is that it seems so grand that it seems impossible to achieve. But the second one is actually we tend to go too narrow and focus on the well being of the close others. But we often neglect out group members. So that could be potentially dangerous.
13:41 Laurie Santos? So there's some danger in seeking out happiness. There's some danger in seeking out a life of meaning if you kind of get it wrong. One of the studies you point to, which I think is fun, is sort of asking subjects about the psychologically rich life.
13:52 Speaker 03 So early on, when we just started psychological richness research. We really wanted to see like what might be psychologically rich event. So to a group of students, I asked, okay, what did you do over the weekend? What made you happy? And then they say things like, yeah, I went to my favorite restaurant. Yeah, sure. Going to a favorite restaurant, you know exactly what to order. That's the predictable, reliable joy and happiness. So I asked then, what was the meaningful event? And a lot of people said, oh, I went to church and it felt meaningful. And some said, I helped out my friends who was just struggling writing the paper.
14:35 Speaker 03 Which makes sense because making other people happy is an important part of the meaningful. So I asked then, what was the events where you felt psychologically rich? What I mean by psychological rich here is that it might not have been happy event or meaningful event per se. But something different, something unusual, something novel. One person, Rachel, said there was this guy typing something half naked. And I've never seen a guy typing in public area like shirtless. And the strange thing was it wasn't hot. He wasn't well built, so he wasn't showing off his upper body or anything. And that was kind of interesting, she said.
15:17 Speaker 03 Okay, so there was a novelty, but I thought that's not really rich. And then another person said, oh, I went to professional wrestling match. And she was so surprised that there were so many kids. And then later she learned that WWE does a lot of anti-bullying campaign. And for them, this sort of ridiculous looking pro wrestler is actually genuinely their role model and hero. And then she went through this up and down, you know, emotions and came back with totally different view of professional wrestling. They thought that was sort of the working class thing to do and they went and then they were really moved. And then their stereotypical view of the pro wrestlers completely got shattered.
16:00 Speaker 03 So I thought, okay, this is not just a novel experience, but pretty complex, a lot of different emotions. And also came back with a different perspective. So I think in order for some event to be psychologically rich, it has to be not just interesting, but it has to come with some kind of change and perspective change in particular. So the shirtless guy is not really rich because it didn't change the way you view the world at all. Whereas the latter case is really just, wow, I didn't expect this and I need to change my view about this.
16:35 Laurie Santos? Can you kind of give me a definition of this sort of third way of experiencing life?
16:39 Speaker 03 Yeah, yeah, we define psychologically rich life as a life filled with diverse, interesting experiences. And that often come with the change in perspective. So I often contrast with the materially rich life. Lots of cash, a lot of assets, a lot of things. That's the material richness. What about the psychological richness? It is all about accumulation of interesting experiences or stories that you can tell. So in your psychological bank, you have lots of interesting experiences and stories to tell to others. Whereas if this person doesn't have that many interesting stories to tell,
17:22 Speaker 03 then even if their bank account is huge, maybe psychologically speaking, they are impoverished.
17:28 Laurie Santos? And so how common is living a psychologically rich life? If I recall, you studied this in a pretty clever way.
17:33 Speaker 03 Yeah, I mean, that was the question. And if nobody leads psychologically rich life, what are we studying? So we were a little bit worried. So in one study, we just decided to look at the New York Times obituaries. Essentially, I love reading obituaries. And obituary, I think, is a really great summary of how somebody lived their lives. You know, New York Times always have three or four obituaries every day. So I hired three research assistants. And their assignment was read New York Times obituary every day. And then rate each person's life in terms of happiness, meaning, and psychological richness. And they don't know what I'm trying to look at.
18:18 Speaker 03 I mean, blind to hypothesis. So in the end, we figured out roughly there were thirty two percent essentially of the people were rated as somebody who led the happy life. Another thirty two led a meaningful life. And then the fifteen of them led a psychologically rich life. Some people led happy and the meaningful life. Some people led happy and the psychological rich. And two of them got it all. They were rated as happy, meaningful, and the psychologically rich life. So we did this in Charlottesville local newspaper, Daily Progress. The number of people who were rated to have led the rich life went down to about five percent,
19:02 Speaker 03 which could be due to like New York Times people are sort of very famous people, prominent people, they had more dramatic life than the ordinary Central Virginians, maybe. But another possibility was that New York Times obituaries are a lot more detailed, whereas the local one is very factual and small. So it could be just the information. So we did the third study in Singapore. And in Singapore, something like thirty five percent of them were rated as leading psychologically rich life. But I'm pretty confident that non-trivial number of people do lead psychologically rich life.
19:38 Laurie Santos? If you're not currently among that non-trivial number of people, but want to live more richly, Shige will guide you with his top tips right after the break.
19:48 Laurie Santos? There's nothing quite like having pieces in your closet you love and know you can count on for any occasion, except maybe giving someone else that same feeling. And I have to tell you, when it comes to my go-to gift this season, I think this might be the year of the hoodie, specifically Quince's Mongolian Cashmere Full Zip Hoodie, which I bought for myself and absolutely love. You know when you get something that's so comfortable, so soft, and so easy to throw on that you suddenly want to wear every day? That's where I am with this hoodie. And I started to think that instead of agonizing over what to get everyone on my holiday list, I might just buy them all one of these. I mean, who on my list wouldn't love a gift of perfect coziness? But it's not just hoodies. Quince makes elevated everyday essentials using premium materials
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21:38 Laurie Santos? Psychologist Shige Owishi has argued that there's something many of us have missed in our quest to live a happier life. We need to find a bit more psychological richness. But what if you listened to the first part of this episode and thought, hey, my life isn't nearly as rich as it could be? What should you do about it?
21:54 Speaker 03 Personally, I think the best way is to Find the open friend, the friend who will bring you to new experiences. So imagine if your friend is Samantha from Sex and the City, then you don't have to have an openness to experiences. She'll just drag you to interesting experiences. And if you're an agreeable person, then whenever your friend say, hey Laurie, do you wanna try this new restaurants? Or do you wanna go to hike? And you just say, okay, and then you just try. You might not do it yourself, but you know, if somebody else is doing, you do it. But if you don't have friends like that, then I mean, there are other options. For instance, I think the biggest one is be like playful.
22:38 Speaker 03 Playfulness is, I think, the huge part of leading a psycho-scaricative life. Actually, as an adult, I think it's quite hard to be playful. Playfulness, you have to take a vacation from your obligations and responsibility of daily life, from social and economic reality. And that's when you can be playful and lead the rich life.
23:02 Laurie Santos? You've also argued that playfulness can help us too, in in ways we don't expect. For example, you've argued that playfulness can help protect us from burnout. What are some studies that tell us that?
23:11 Speaker 03 Yeah, I mean, there is this amazing meta-analysis about athletic performance among these super elite athletes. So we are talking about Olympic level athletes. And you know, some people start out pretty early and specialize in one sport, whereas other people play multiple sports before specializing. And the really interesting finding from there is that if you look at the junior level competitions, then the performance is really predicted by how early somebody specialized. But when you look at the final Olympic level competition performance, then it's people who play multiple sports and specialize later in life, they do better.
23:55 Speaker 03 And this playfulness is that world-class athlete who plays some pickup games and some other sports for fun. I mean, those are the people who tend not to burn out and. And to do better. And the crazy thing is that there is a replication in the scientific achievement as well. So highest German scientific award is Leibniz Awards. And some of them went on to, you know, win Nobel Prize. So German researcher looked at the difference between eventual Nobel Prize winners versus Leibniz winners. And this is absolutely my favorite finding. The Leibniz winners became full professor much earlier than the Nobel Prize winner.
24:38 Speaker 03 The Nobel Prize winners actually study multiple things before. And so it took them much longer to get the full professorship. But eventually they made a major discovery. So I think a playfulness, even in a professional arena, is really important. Because you don't wanna be too specialized too early. Keep your curiosity wide open. Because when you just specialize, what you're doing is, okay, this information is irrelevant for me. So don't pay attention. Whereas if you are open, then you're just, oh, that's kind of interesting. And sometimes they help.
25:13 Laurie Santos? So that's kind of embracing playfulness. Your second tip, I think, is very related is that we need to embrace serendipity and spontaneity.
25:20 Speaker 03 Yeah.
25:21 Laurie Santos? What do you mean by serendipity there?
25:22 Speaker 03 Yeah, so serendipity and the spontaneity, I think, is the springboard of interesting experiences. And if you think about like all the interesting experiences you had, probably those are not the things you planned six months in advance. In graduate school, for instance, we didn't have that many required courses. So we had a lot of time. So I would just stop by my lab mate's office. Let's go have coffee. And we talk something random and interesting. And there is some discovery of certain things. So very interesting. And when I got a job at the University of Minnesota, I really wanted to do the same thing. So I knocked on the door, Bob Kruger, fellow assistant professor.
26:05 Speaker 03 And I said, hey, Bob, do you have time for coffee? And then look through his schedule and say. No, whatever in two weeks, we cannot have this cup of coffee spontaneously. And that's what it mean to be a professor. Bob became like so successful, he's very productive. I think he he wrote already three hundred articles. So so you see how how that works. But at the same time, in terms of this spontaneous, random conversations or experiences, when you just schedule and plan everything, you really are deprived from these random things to happen. Random encountering, random conversation, random reading.
26:48 Speaker 03 So over scheduled life that we all live right now is really not great for psychological richness.
26:56 Laurie Santos? This is something I worry a lot about in my elite college students that I work with. Because, you know, they want to over schedule everything. You know, it's from early in high school, they have already planned what job they want. Some students are like, well, I definitely want to get married by the time I'm twenty seven. Like, they want to have everything planned out. And I really worry that they might be leaving some important aspects of their well being kind of uncared for because they haven't given themselves the space to to try new things out.
27:21 Speaker 03 Exactly, that's that's the space and I think that's the pressure they feel. Like, they have to succeed, they have to perform, and they have to perform at the highest level all the time. And it's like academic athletes almost, like, just practice, practice, practice every day. And I think that is really not healthy. You should really have plenty of time for play. College is the best time to be spontaneous. Once you go out of college, your friends don't live around the corner. Everybody is too busy to just have spontaneous meeting and outing.
27:56 Laurie Santos? But you've argued that we really, even as adults, need to find more time to be able to do.
28:00 Speaker 03 Definitely.
28:00 Laurie Santos? Any advice for how to build that serendipity yet?
28:03 Speaker 03 Well, I think you have to be a little bit pushy, just text somebody randomly and just accept a lot of rejections, you know? They cannot do it, okay, next. It is really hard when everybody is so overbooked. But we we we should, we should try to be spontaneous.
28:21 Laurie Santos? So tip number three that you've talked a lot about is something that we've mentioned before on the Happiness Lab. If we want to live a psychologically rich life, we need to find more awe. Talk about how awe plays into psychological richness.
28:33 Speaker 03 Yeah, I think awe is really this sense of you're small and the world is so large and just sort of transcending kind of sense and then emerging between you and the nature or the arts. And a lot of aesthetic experiences that we have when we go to museums, when we go watch movie, read literatures and poems. It's not always awe, but there is this aesthetic experiences that is very different from our everyday life. So if you read Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day, then you are transported into this world of British Lord, Lord Darlington
29:18 Speaker 03 in Darlington Hall with butlers and the twenty some staff members and, you know, in the nineteen thirties. And those kinds of immersions and the mental transportation, I think is really, really important because look at our lives, right? We are privileged to travel anywhere we want. But every day, we get up, eat breakfast, usually just meet the same people, respond emails, et cetera, et cetera. So every day, what we can experience firsthand is pretty limited. Whereas in a matter of one hour, if you read these novels or watch movie, two hours or whatever, you can really experience somebody else's life
30:01 Speaker 03 and go through really dramatic emotional experiences vicariously. So for the matter of a few hours, you often go through somebody's entire life. And the guy who owns this bookstore in Morocco said he read four thousand books. So he says he lived four thousand lives. And that's exactly how I feel about these aesthetic experiences that really expand your horizons and allow you to go through and experience something that you can never, maybe very hard to experience in person.
30:34 Laurie Santos? And so that's kind of finding more awe through aesthetic experiences in other people's lives. But your tip more before argues that we should also explore more ourselves.
30:42 Speaker 03 Sure.
30:43 Laurie Santos? That we should be seeking out new experiences and doing more atypical things.
30:47 Speaker 03 Sure.
30:47 Laurie Santos? Um, any ideas for how to fit that in in a busy life?
30:50 Speaker 03 Yeah, so I think that if you have commute, then I think the change in your commute is really interesting way. I mean, if you're driving, just drive through different town, different neighborhood. If you're taking train, get off in between and explore. So I think there are a lot of things you can do to do new things, even if you're pretty packed in, you know, schedules. And I, you know, try to enjoy, for instance, getting lost in a new town. You know, it's a little bit scary, but you know, I always tell myself, okay, eventually this will be a psychologically rich experience. Of course, when you get lost, you're worried, anxious and so forth.
31:32 Speaker 03 But most of the time you will work out and those are things sort of like you let yourself go, go with the flow. Those attitudes and mindset helps a lot in terms of deviating from your routines and the schedules. And of course, we cannot deviate all the time, but when there is a chance to be able to deviate, just let yourself go and deviate. That's what I want everybody to do if possible.
31:57 Laurie Santos? And it's also a nice reminder of your final tip, which is that we can experience more psychological richness by turning adversity into a psychological rich experience, into a fun story.
32:07 Speaker 03 Right.
32:08 Laurie Santos? Explain why our stories are more under our control.
32:10 Speaker 03 You know, because I grew up in Japan and Japan, of course, has a lot of natural disasters, earthquake, tsunami and things like that. I studied happiness and well-being of these earthquake survivors. And my sabbatical in two thousand thirteen, I spent one year in Kobe, Japan. That's where there was a huge earthquake in nineteen ninety five. Over six thousand people died. That was just devastating. And the sad finding was that in two thousand eleven, even sixteen years after the earthquake, those Kobe
32:44 Speaker 03 Residents who lost their house were still reporting significantly lower level of life satisfaction. They report more physical symptoms, you know, pain than those Kobe residents who did not lose their house. So I thought that was really sad because we thought, you know, time heals everything. But this case, time did not heal everything. But then we looked at the value orientations of these earthquake survivors. And we realized that the people who've been through earthquake, they really become more pro-social altruistic. They don't care about their own accomplishment as much as other Japanese who did not experience earthquake.
33:27 Speaker 03 So definitely there's change. After all, when you are in earthquake, you really see a lot of things that you never imagined before. Neighbors who are not particularly friendly will come out and try to save you and save your dog. And you see a lot of different side of people. So those people, survivors, all talk about like sort of the regained sense of confidence in humanity even. And I think that's the contributing factor to psychological richness. Even if the earthquake doesn't add to life satisfaction, obviously that detract from life satisfactions.
34:06 Speaker 03 And meaning is also very hard to gain from earthquake because this is a random act of the mother nature. So people often struggle to find the meaning after a earthquake. But people have used this earthquake as a springboard for change and growth and learning. And I think there are a lot of signs that some adversity could be a source for psychologically rich life.
34:32 Laurie Santos? Any suggestions for changing maybe some of our less than earthquake level adversity into psychologically rich?
34:38 Speaker 03 Yeah, so we ask college students, just just think about all last year. And what kind of traumatic event, negative event happened? And did you learn anything from this traumatic event? Interestingly, this was random assignment. They later reported that, yeah. Actually, trauma made them change the way they view the world and they view themselves. And the more perspective change they recorded, the higher level of psychological richness they reported as well. And interestingly, the more perspective change they reported, less happy they became. So the perspective change is not great for happiness, but that tend to add psychological richness.
35:19 Speaker 03 So it doesn't have to be a huge trauma, you know, earthquake, tsunami type situation. But even, you know, everyday failures and negative events. If you can construct something positive or something that you learned from the events, that could add the texture to your life and enrich your life.
35:39 Laurie Santos? And it does seem like that texture isn't always psychologically positive.
35:43 Speaker 03 Mm hmm.
35:43 Laurie Santos? You've talked about even things like exploring and getting lost.
35:47 Speaker 03 Yeah.
35:47 Laurie Santos? Having an experience that maybe challenges you and maybe
35:50 Speaker 03 Yeah.
35:51 Laurie Santos? changes some of your assumptions.
35:52 Speaker 03 Right.
35:53 Laurie Santos? It sounds like the big message of a psychologically rich life is like, it might be a little harder than you expect.
35:58 Speaker 03 Yeah.
35:58 Laurie Santos? The rewards might be bigger than you expect.
36:01 Speaker 03 Yeah, yeah, definitely. This is not something easy always and not always positive, obviously. But I think the power of psychological rich life or the mindset to try to maximize richness is that you're not afraid of negative emotions or negative events. Stuff happens. Try to accept those, try to learn from it. And as long as you have that attitude, you don't get into these ruminations and depressions. And it is when you really try to be perfect and try to be super successful and always happy, that these little bump really hurts you. So I am really trying to say that richness is not for everybody, for sure.
36:46 Speaker 03 But when you have richness mindset, I think you're less afraid of failures and negative events and so forth. And I think you become a little more adventurous and actually experience something that you wouldn't thought you would ever experience. And, you know, that really could Change you and the course of your life. So I think uncertainty and unpredictability are part of life and we should embrace it. And to the extent that you embrace it, you're maximizing the possibility of adding the richness to your life.
37:19 Laurie Santos? I think sometimes when people look at the possibility of making their life more exciting, exploring more, getting curious. Honestly, some of the people I know feel trapped, right? They feel incredibly busy. There's this whole host of obligations. It feels like they're kind of really comfortable in their life. It might feel scary to break out of it. Any advice for folks who might be having an experience like that where it feels really hard to go after some of these things that might make their life psychologically rich?
37:43 Speaker 03 Yeah, I I mean, I totally like get that because by nature, I really like familiarity too. But I think the one way, if you are afraid of doing like completely brand new thing. And I think one thing I can suggest is really stick with what you like. If you love Beatles, you can keep listening to Beatles, but try to find something new about the same song you are listening for all these years. And same thing with the literature. If you love Mrs. Darway, you can read like three times, four times, and you find always something new. So if you're afraid of trying something new, actually just going back to your favorite movie
38:26 Speaker 03 or favorite song and favorite bands and things like that, you can actually finding something new from the familia. My favorite story here is I have been married with my wife for a long time. I've known her like twenty years and around two thousand ten, I said, we should buy some painting. And then she goes, okay, I can paint. And it's like, what? I didn't know that you can paint. And then, boy, she can paint. She's just like, paint, paint, paint. Now it's just full of her paintings. So sometimes you just find something new from very familiar person. If you just have opportunity to ask some new questions or chance to talk about some topic that you never talked about with the same old friends.
39:10 Speaker 03 You can actually enrich your life by digging deeper with your familiar objects and person as well. If you are afraid of sort of going all the way out.
39:23 Laurie Santos? For more big and small steps towards leading a psychologically rich life, you should really check out She Gay's new book, Life in Three Dimensions: How Curiosity, Exploration, and Experience Make a Fuller, Better Life. But let's recap the how-to tips we've heard so far. Tip number one: Find ways to be more playful. Take a little break from your responsibilities and try to cultivate a childlike curiosity and sense of fun. Tip number two: Be more open to the random. It's comforting to schedule everything in life, but try to find more moments of serendipity. It could be as simple as stopping by to chat with a coworker. The third tip is to experience psychological richness by proxy. You can visit a faraway place, witness a natural wonder, or hear about some amazing
40:06 Laurie Santos? people just by reading a book, looking at a painting, or watching a movie. Tip number four is to explore. We can easily get in the habit of doing the same things day in, day out. So throw some variety into the mix, even if that's turning left out your front door instead of right. And She Gay's final tip is to see the richness in adversity. Putting yourself out there has its risks. There will be disappointments and setbacks, but those challenges ultimately add to our life story and help us grow. That's it for a psychologically rich life, but our how-to season isn't over yet. Our next installment tackles what changes you should make to motivate and elevate the people around you. In short, we'll be exploring how to become an inspiring person.
40:50 Laurie Santos? That's all next time on the Happiness Lab with me, Dr. Laurie Santos.
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