Speaker 1: Pushkin. Every weekday, at six thirty am, my alarm goes off.
Speaker 1: My first morning moments aren't filled with joy at waking
Speaker 1: up for an exciting new day. Quite the opposite. I'm
Speaker 1: feeling irritated. I don't want to get up and work
Speaker 1: out like I planed to like the day before. And
Speaker 1: that's one of my brain, despite its utter grogginess, transforms
Speaker 1: into the slickst negotiator. Ever, my mind comes up with
Speaker 1: reason after reason that I should really just stay in bed.
Speaker 1: I got to bed pretty late last night. I need
Speaker 1: my sleep. I can exercise in the afternoon or tomorrow,
Speaker 1: or just skip it all together. It's only one workout.
Speaker 1: What's that in the scheme of things. Plus, I don't
Speaker 1: need this kind of pressure in my life. I'm busy.
Speaker 1: I don't really have forty five minutes to waste on
Speaker 1: a workout. Best to sleep it. Just this once, on
Speaker 1: the good days, I managed to shut up all the
Speaker 1: mental back and forth and drag myself out of bed.
Speaker 1: I try to make my morning work out both fun
Speaker 1: and frictionless by using all the scientific tips I've told
Speaker 1: you about in past episodes, like having exercise equipment in
Speaker 1: my house and laying out Jim closed the night before,
Speaker 1: and I follow my copy Katie Milkman's advice about bundling
Speaker 1: my morning exercise with a second, fun and somewhat tempting experience.
Speaker 1: I watch my favorite nineties TV show, Buffy the Vampire
Speaker 1: Slayer and why are you talking to me? And on
Speaker 1: those mornings when I do manage to get myself up
Speaker 1: to exercise, the same thing happens. Long before my Buffy
Speaker 1: episode ends. I realized that all my brain's earlier predictions
Speaker 1: were wrong. I love working out. I step off the
Speaker 1: elliptical feeling great. My body is awake and lighter, I'm
Speaker 1: thinking more clearly, and I'm in a better mood. Exercising
Speaker 1: in the morning was a fantastic idea one that has
Speaker 1: had a clear and measurably positive impact on my happiness.
Speaker 1: But exactly twenty three hours later, get up? Are you kidding?
Speaker 1: Workout suck better to sleep in? Just this wants. Why
Speaker 1: can't my inbed brain remember all the positive rewards that
Speaker 1: my exercising brain has directly experienced. Why can't my mind
Speaker 1: get motivated to hit the elliptical when it's totally clear
Speaker 1: that a morning workout makes me happier The answer, as
Speaker 1: we'll see in this episode, involves a bug in the
Speaker 1: design of our reward circuitry, one that leads to some
Speaker 1: of our biggest happiness mistakes. We'll see that with all
Speaker 1: due respect to the Rolling Stones, the problem isn't that
Speaker 1: you can't always get what you want, is that you
Speaker 1: can't always want what you like. Our minds are constantly
Speaker 1: telling us what to do to be happy. But what
Speaker 1: if our minds are wrong? What if our minds are
Speaker 1: lying to us, leading us away from what we'll really
Speaker 1: make us happy. The good news is that understanding the
Speaker 1: science of the mind can join us all back in
Speaker 1: the right direction. You're listening to the Happiness Lab with
Speaker 1: doctor Laurie Santos. I run sometimes. I'm trying to get
Speaker 1: back into running, and I don't enjoy it while i'm
Speaker 1: doing it, but I enjoy the fact that I am
Speaker 1: doing and that's type too fun. This is my friend
Speaker 1: and former colleague, Paul Bloom, who recently became a professor
Speaker 1: at the University of Toronto. Paul and I are chatting
Speaker 1: about a concept that's become a common topic of conversation
Speaker 1: with my college students, the so called fun scale. The
Speaker 1: fun scale attempts to differentiate between different types of fun.
Speaker 1: Type one fun is fun, which is simply fun. Type
Speaker 1: one fun involves basically no effort or pain whatsoever. It's
Speaker 1: fun that just feels nice. Think hah fudge Sundays, drinking Margarita's,
Speaker 1: jumping into a pool on a warm day, a low
Speaker 1: effort stroll in the sun, gossiping with your close friends,
Speaker 1: a nice orgasm. These things are sort of Darwinian no brainers.
Speaker 1: Animals that have these desires reproduce more than those that don't.
Speaker 1: But Dinner's type too fun. Type too fun is a
Speaker 1: form of fun that doesn't immediately feel fun when we
Speaker 1: first start the activity. Pursuits like my morning elliptical workout,
Speaker 1: a really frustrating puzzle, a super super hot bath that's
Speaker 1: almost painful to step into, a terrifying horror movie, pushing
Speaker 1: through a really hard writing project. Activities like these don't
Speaker 1: actually feel good when we first get started, but we
Speaker 1: often really like them anyway. I want to be clear here,
Speaker 1: this distinction between type one and type two fun isn't
Speaker 1: a scientific one as far as I can tell. The
Speaker 1: concept started as an Internet meme that circulated an outdoor
Speaker 1: adventure and athletic blogs. But it's catchy for psychologists like
Speaker 1: Paul and me because it highlights an aspect of human
Speaker 1: nature that's a bit of a paradox. Why is it
Speaker 1: that some of the best things in life just don't
Speaker 1: feel good when you start doing them. Paul has long
Speaker 1: been fast, sated and sort of puzzled by these kinds
Speaker 1: of type two rewards, as he explains in detail in
Speaker 1: his new book The Sweet Spot, The pleasures of suffering
Speaker 1: in the search for meaning. Pleasures that hurt and feel
Speaker 1: sucky don't make sense from the view that many scholars
Speaker 1: have about human nature that we're built to seek out
Speaker 1: pleasure and avoid pain. And it's not entirely wrong. Anybody
Speaker 1: who said that we don't like pleasures is just crazy.
Speaker 1: But it's incomplete. It's incomplete because we often pursue all
Speaker 1: sorts of difficult and painful activities. I want to have
Speaker 1: a good time, but I also want to do good
Speaker 1: in the world. I want to make the world a
Speaker 1: better place, and that often involves suffering and difficulty. I
Speaker 1: want to have a good time, but I also want
Speaker 1: to engage in meaningful and purposeful activities. I want to
Speaker 1: be able to you know, I want to run a marathon.
Speaker 1: I want to raise my children, I want to write
Speaker 1: a book. None of those are fun in the simple sense.
Speaker 1: It's not you know, orgasms and hot food Sundays, but
Speaker 1: it offers sort of a deeper satisfaction. Paul's book argues
Speaker 1: that what we like is complicated. Take hard work for example.
Speaker 1: You know, for the most part, humans and other animals
Speaker 1: avoid effort. If I have to walk to the refrigerat,
Speaker 1: I'll walk straight to refrigerate. I won't walk around at
Speaker 1: twenty times. Effort is difficult, It takes up calories, takes
Speaker 1: of energy, takes up time. But the parananox is sometimes
Speaker 1: we seek it out. That said, Paul is quick to
Speaker 1: point out that adversity and discomfort only feel pleasurable when
Speaker 1: we willingly decide to engage in them, something Paul refers
Speaker 1: to as chosen suffering. It's critical that you choose to
Speaker 1: do it. These things in the absence of choice are
Speaker 1: just terrible. They're tortured or misery, and there's nothing good
Speaker 1: to be said about them. So that degree of choice
Speaker 1: of control is critical. But what's weird about humans is
Speaker 1: that we often do choose to engage in time consuming
Speaker 1: effortful and even painful activities. Paul's book describes lots of
Speaker 1: surprising cases of seemingly objectively terrible activities that many people
Speaker 1: really enjoy doing. One of his favorite extreme examples comes
Speaker 1: from a famous paper by the economist George Lowenstein about
Speaker 1: the challenges of mountaineering. From the standpoint of type one
Speaker 1: front of pleasure, it's terrible. People describe constant physical pain.
Speaker 1: These are high altitude clients of headache throughout. Sometimes you're
Speaker 1: stuck in a tent per day, going mad with boredom.
Speaker 1: There's real terror because often people are killed or maimed
Speaker 1: in these things. And so Loenstein says, why in the
Speaker 1: world do people do this? Lowenstein came up with a
Speaker 1: few answers, ones that help to explain not just truly
Speaker 1: dire activities like mountaineering, but also the less extreme, more
Speaker 1: routine cases of type two rewards that many of us
Speaker 1: seek out all the time. His first answer is that
Speaker 1: we sometimes choose suffering filled activities because they help to
Speaker 1: bolster our identity. I'm doing that to tell the world
Speaker 1: and maybe to tell myself, look how tough I am.
Speaker 1: Look at my skills, look at my endurance. But a second,
Speaker 1: and maybe even more important reason that we enjoy a
Speaker 1: good heart pursuit is because it gives us a sense
Speaker 1: of meaning. It is a purpose of inactivity that involves
Speaker 1: tremendous difficulty, and so it gives you a great satisfaction.
Speaker 1: But this raises an even bigger question, why does effort
Speaker 1: in suffering wind up feeling good? Paul argues that hard
Speaker 1: work and pain feel good because they take up a
Speaker 1: lot of mental bandwidth. I think dogs and monkeys and cats.
Speaker 1: Maybe I just go for the pleasure. People are complicated,
Speaker 1: and one thing is we have the burden of our consciousness.
Speaker 1: We're conscious of our bodies, we're conscious of our histories,
Speaker 1: of our futures. We worry a lot and it weighs
Speaker 1: on us and it's nice to be relieved from it.
Speaker 1: And this is one function of pain and painful experience
Speaker 1: intense exercises is that it pulls us out of ourselves.
Speaker 1: This psychological state where we get so involved in an
Speaker 1: activity that nothing else seems to matter is what famed
Speaker 1: positive psychologist Me high Cheek set me High called flow.
Speaker 1: You know you're in flow if hours go by and
Speaker 1: you don't even need this time's gone by, You forget
Speaker 1: to eat, you forget to do things, and I wish
Speaker 1: I was in that state more often. She set me
Speaker 1: High first discovered flow in an experiment with teenagers. He
Speaker 1: gave his subjects peepers which went off at different times
Speaker 1: of the day, and subjects had to report what they
Speaker 1: were doing and how they felt. Much of the time,
Speaker 1: the teens reported feeling bored are unhappy, but there were
Speaker 1: a few moments of the day when they felt a
Speaker 1: lot happier. Not when they were watching TV or eating
Speaker 1: something delicious, but when they were going for harder type
Speaker 1: two rewards, especially ones that required a combination of skill
Speaker 1: and effort. Chik scept me high. I also found that
Speaker 1: there's a sweet spot the skill and effort needed for
Speaker 1: flow inducing activities. They aren't so easy that they're boring.
Speaker 1: They're not so incredibly difficult that you're freaking out your stress.
Speaker 1: We just find yourself in the middle, and if you
Speaker 1: do it right, time just flies by. Paul's work on
Speaker 1: the pleasures of suffering has convinced him that we'd all
Speaker 1: be a lot happier if we skipped a lot of
Speaker 1: the easy type one rewards and tried to get a
Speaker 1: bit more flow. In our lives. You read cheeks em
Speaker 1: me high subscription at people's lives are full of flow
Speaker 1: and listaf you're me feel envy. Find it tough. I
Speaker 1: try every morning to engage in flow activities where you
Speaker 1: really fully engage, but the world makes it tough. As
Speaker 1: I do this, I have my Twitter in the background,
Speaker 1: I have my email beinging, and I have texts, and
Speaker 1: if I'm a good person, I shut that all down.
Speaker 1: If I'm away. Normally, I'm like this morning, and the
Speaker 1: distractions are just too much fun. Like Paul, I've seen
Speaker 1: firsthand that flow inducing type two rewards have a real
Speaker 1: startup cost. That's the reason I struggle so much to
Speaker 1: hit the elliptical in the morning. It's often too hard
Speaker 1: to forego the easy type one reward of staying in
Speaker 1: bed in order to reap the type two reward that
Speaker 1: my hard workout eventually provides. But the problem isn't just
Speaker 1: with my morning exercise routeam I'm lucky enough to have
Speaker 1: a profession that requires doing lots of effortful, flow inducing stuff,
Speaker 1: but I also spend a lot of my day doing
Speaker 1: easy things, stuff that doesn't require any effort. Checking my email,
Speaker 1: scrolling to the next screen on Reddit, watching some mind
Speaker 1: numbing reality TV show and spending my time doing all
Speaker 1: this easy stuff as an enormous opportunity cost. There are
Speaker 1: so many hard but rewarding projects I want to engage with.
Speaker 1: I want to write a book. I want to learn Italian.
Speaker 1: I want to watch that important but kind of intense
Speaker 1: movie that's been stuck in my Netflix cue for months.
Speaker 1: I want to build up to do a cropose in
Speaker 1: my yoga practice. All of these activities would give me
Speaker 1: a real sense of satisfaction and a lot of joy.
Speaker 1: But achieving those things are hard and so a lot
Speaker 1: of time I just end up not doing them, and
Speaker 1: research has found I'm not alone. They do these surveys
Speaker 1: where you ask people about flow experiences in your life.
Speaker 1: A lot of people never experience it. A lot of
Speaker 1: people just do easy things, and I think that's the
Speaker 1: bad way to live a life. But I understand it
Speaker 1: because getting from no effort effort is tough. So what
Speaker 1: is keeping us on the sofa? It all comes down
Speaker 1: to an incredibly dumb design feature of our brains, a
Speaker 1: surprising gap between wanting and liking. We'll explore this strange
Speaker 1: glitch in our neural design. When the Happiness Lab returns
Speaker 1: in a moment. I I'm Kent Burriaged. I'm at the
Speaker 1: University of Michigan, and I study how the brain likes
Speaker 1: and wants things. I decided to tag in an expert
Speaker 1: to figure out why I can't choose harder type two rewards,
Speaker 1: and I was so thrilled when Kent agreed to chat
Speaker 1: with me about my dilemma. Kent is one of my
Speaker 1: scientific heroes. I've been reading his papers since I was
Speaker 1: a sophomore in college. He's a world expert on the
Speaker 1: neuroscience of reward and has done some of the best
Speaker 1: empirical work to date on the odd ways our brains
Speaker 1: are hooked up when it comes to making decisions that
Speaker 1: give us pleasure. One of my favorite of his many
Speaker 1: famous neuroscientific discoveries is about how we experience type one rewards,
Speaker 1: specifically the really straightforward sensory pleasures, things like eating a
Speaker 1: hot fudge Sunday or having an orgasm. Research goal was
Speaker 1: to find the brains hedonic hotspots, the neural regions that
Speaker 1: cause us to experience a sense of liking. Ken's goal
Speaker 1: was to figure out where these hedonic hot spots were
Speaker 1: He planned to stimulate a part of the brain known
Speaker 1: as the mesolymbic reward circuit to see which parts of
Speaker 1: that circuit actually produced the experience of sensory pleasure. But
Speaker 1: there was a bit of a problem. Ken was studying
Speaker 1: liking not in humans, but in the usual neuroscience subjects rats,
Speaker 1: and you can't just ask a rodent, hey, on a
Speaker 1: scale of one to ten, how much did your liking
Speaker 1: increase after that injection. There were lots of existing methods
Speaker 1: that scientists could use to ask a rat what it wanted.
Speaker 1: How much would you work for this reward, how eagerly
Speaker 1: would you approach it, how much would you consume? But
Speaker 1: at least for this study, Ken wasn't interested in what
Speaker 1: the rats wanted. His goal was to find the areas
Speaker 1: that registered what rats liked, the brain regions that actually
Speaker 1: experienced pleasure. So Ken capitalized on a technique that human
Speaker 1: parents have used to test their babies experience of liking
Speaker 1: for centuries. He put a small amount of sweet food
Speaker 1: on a rat's tongue and measured how it reacted. When
Speaker 1: infants get something that they like, They kind of show
Speaker 1: it was sort of relaxed mouth movements and sometimes the
Speaker 1: licking of the lips. If they get something they don't like,
Speaker 1: like bitterness, they shake their heads, they move from side
Speaker 1: to side. It's very clear what they like and what
Speaker 1: they don't like. Rats, it turns out, do the same thing.
Speaker 1: Can't play sweet food in his rats mouths and measured
Speaker 1: their reactions. He then repeated that same measurement while microinjecting
Speaker 1: stimulating drugs into different parts of the rats brains. If
Speaker 1: rats like the exact same food more vigorously after the injections,
Speaker 1: that they must have derived even more pleasure from it.
Speaker 1: And if that was the case, then it probably also
Speaker 1: meant that the brain region Kent had stimulated was probably
Speaker 1: a hedonic hot spot. Ken's experiment was a huge success.
Speaker 1: In some cases, he was able to triple the rat's
Speaker 1: liking responses. But Kent was also in for a bit
Speaker 1: of a surprise. He was expecting to find hotspots all
Speaker 1: over the reward areas of the brain, and that's not
Speaker 1: quite what happened. We sort of plotted them on the brain,
Speaker 1: you know, where were the pleasure wants and they were
Speaker 1: all clustered together. Natural selection, it seems, did not build
Speaker 1: in a lot of neural real estate for experiencing type
Speaker 1: one sensory pleasure, just a few surprisingly small clusters. If
Speaker 1: anybody had asked us how we'd like our brains to
Speaker 1: be designed, we'd ask for maybe lots of pleasure mechanisms.
Speaker 1: We'd live a life of hedonic contentment. Evolution had other
Speaker 1: purposes in a sense, I mean, it was aiming for survival,
Speaker 1: and it doesn't perhaps care quite so much about the
Speaker 1: quality of life during the survival, and the propagation of
Speaker 1: genes in a sense, is a luxury. But even though
Speaker 1: liking might be an evolutionary luxury, there was a second
Speaker 1: function that natural selection decided was definitely non negotiable, wanting.
Speaker 1: While the liking parts of our brain cause an experience
Speaker 1: of pleasure, wanting regions cause an experience of craving. Wanting
Speaker 1: regions compel us to take action and to go after
Speaker 1: stuff that feels good, And despite being relatively stingy with
Speaker 1: liking regions, natural selection seems to have really invested in wanting.
Speaker 1: Wanting regions are much bigger than liking regions, and they
Speaker 1: have connections that project all over the brain. The brain
Speaker 1: even has an entire neurotransmitter called dopamine that's largely devoted
Speaker 1: to motivating us to go after stuff. Now, you may
Speaker 1: have heard of dopamine before, often because it's thought to
Speaker 1: be associated with a feeling of reward or pleasure. The
Speaker 1: notion that dopamine is a pleasure mechanism, this is a
Speaker 1: neuroscience mean that is tremendously potent and at once seemed
Speaker 1: tremendously true. I believed that absolutely when I started out
Speaker 1: in the field. But over time Ken's work started to
Speaker 1: chip away at the idea that dopamine equals pleasure. Study
Speaker 1: after study began to show that dopamine isn't about liking rewards,
Speaker 1: it's about wanting them. Can't forgive this out. Initially, in
Speaker 1: a set of clever studies, he found a special neurotoxin
Speaker 1: collectively killed off dopamine neurons while leaving the rest of
Speaker 1: the brain intact. He then injected this toxin into rats
Speaker 1: reward circuits and tested wha they're doing so affected the
Speaker 1: rats liking as measured by their looking behaviors. To his surprise,
Speaker 1: the toxin didn't seem to do anything in terms of
Speaker 1: the levels of pleasure they experienced from sweet food. The
Speaker 1: rats without any dopamine were totally normal. So they had
Speaker 1: normal likes, and they had normal learning of new likes
Speaker 1: and dislikes, but they didn't seem to want any of
Speaker 1: these things that they liked in life. They don't eat
Speaker 1: at all voluntarily. They don't drink at all voluntarily. We
Speaker 1: have to nurse them the way you and I would
Speaker 1: be nursed in intensive care in a hospital, artificially fed
Speaker 1: three times a day. They would voluntarily sit there and
Speaker 1: starve to death unless they were nursed. Ken's dopamine lesion
Speaker 1: rats liked sweet food, but they had no motivation to
Speaker 1: seek these foods out. They had no sense of wanting.
Speaker 1: This study and others helped can't discover that dopamine was
Speaker 1: the key to wanting, not liking. Dopamine is a mechanism
Speaker 1: by which we get motivated to go after the good
Speaker 1: sensory rewards of life. But as Ken doug more into
Speaker 1: the way this doke means system worked, you realize that
Speaker 1: our experience of wanting might not be as uniform as
Speaker 1: most theories of human nature predict. I think you're sort
Speaker 1: of multiple kinds of wanting. You know that we may
Speaker 1: not distinguish really clearly un consciousness. We're in human language,
Speaker 1: but psychologically and from the brain's point of view, there's
Speaker 1: a difference. When people ask us what we want in
Speaker 1: our everyday life, like where we want to go for dinner,
Speaker 1: or which podcast we want to listen to, or what
Speaker 1: we want to be when we grow up, we're usually
Speaker 1: thinking of a conscious desire for a particular outcome, our goal.
Speaker 1: This everyday experience of wanting what can cause cognitive wanting
Speaker 1: is the one we tend to notice, mostly because it's
Speaker 1: a conscious, accessible feeling. But this wasn't the form of
Speaker 1: wanting that Kent observed in his reward regions. Ken's dopamine
Speaker 1: work had tapped into a completely different kind of wanting altogether,
Speaker 1: one that he and others refer to as incentive salience.
Speaker 1: You know, if you're hungry and use smell food, that's
Speaker 1: that kind of want. They're walking down the street and
Speaker 1: you see in the window shop windows something that really
Speaker 1: gets your attention to you'd really love to have. It's
Speaker 1: that kind of want. Incentive salience doesn't feel like the
Speaker 1: normal sort of cognitive wanting because it happens too automatically.
Speaker 1: It's like, all of a sudden, we're compelled to go
Speaker 1: after some goal we weren't even thinking about a moment before.
Speaker 1: And unlike cognitive wanting, which sometimes requires some planning and
Speaker 1: work to act on, incentive salience is often directly linked
Speaker 1: to the action we need to perform to get the
Speaker 1: reward we want, which is why incentive salience can exert
Speaker 1: such a powerful effect on our behavior. We end up
Speaker 1: moving toward a thing before we've even had a chance
Speaker 1: to ask whether it's something we should have cognitively wanted
Speaker 1: in the first place. That's why I can find myself
Speaker 1: five cookies into the very box of Girl Scout cookies
Speaker 1: that my cognitive system had sworn off that very morning.
Speaker 1: I think narrowly. In humans, this incentive salience wanting in
Speaker 1: quotation mark. It usually comes on together with a cognitive
Speaker 1: desire or cognitive want. They go hand in hand. But
Speaker 1: sometimes these kinds of wanting can come apart. Incentive salience
Speaker 1: want in quotation mark can go in a different direction
Speaker 1: than your cognitive desire. And this is what's so problematic
Speaker 1: about being a creature that has two different systems for
Speaker 1: wanting stuff. We sometimes experience an automatic and incredibly strong
Speaker 1: incentive salients want for stuff that we don't cognitively want
Speaker 1: at all. It's a disconnect that's obvious for anyone who's
Speaker 1: known people who are suffering from drug addiction and who
Speaker 1: at least cognitively really really want to quit. They would
Speaker 1: rather not take the drugs ever again. But if they
Speaker 1: encounter these drug cues, especially in drug related contexts, and
Speaker 1: especially in moments of stress, you get a massive sensitius
Speaker 1: dopament reaction that could give this intense urge the successive
Speaker 1: urge of wanting to take the drug again. The disconnect
Speaker 1: between cognitive wanting and incentive salience is particularly problematic in
Speaker 1: people with substance addictions, but it's an issue for the
Speaker 1: rest of us too. All those mornings I cognitively wanted
Speaker 1: to get up and work out, but my urge to
Speaker 1: stay in bed was too strong. All those Girl Scout
Speaker 1: cookies I intended to leave in the box, but a anyway,
Speaker 1: All those times I swore I'd work on this podcast
Speaker 1: but ended up scrolling through Twitter for hours. There are
Speaker 1: so so many type one fun activities that I regularly
Speaker 1: intend not to give into, ones that I have really
Speaker 1: good reasons for avoiding, but I end up doing them anyway.
Speaker 1: That is incentive salience at its worst. It doesn't have
Speaker 1: reasons this kind of wanting. It has mechanisms. So that's
Speaker 1: the first big problem with the way our brain's process rewards.
Speaker 1: There's a disconnect between the liking brain parts and the
Speaker 1: wanting brain parts, which can sometimes cause a powerful and
Speaker 1: even unconscious urge to go after type one rewards that
Speaker 1: we don't even cognitively want, and that means we get
Speaker 1: caught up in easy pleasures more often than we might
Speaker 1: intend to. But so far we've only been talking about
Speaker 1: sensory rewards like sweet foods. What about more complicated pleasures.
Speaker 1: If you would ask me twenty years ago, I would
Speaker 1: have said, well, sensory rewards, yes, but you know, human
Speaker 1: cognitive pleasures or cultural artistic music pleasures, human social pleasures. No,
Speaker 1: No at all. Recent work, though, has shown that the
Speaker 1: mesolimbic hedonic hotspots can't studied in rats also light up
Speaker 1: when people experience more abstract rewards like beautiful music in art,
Speaker 1: So the hotspots aren't just for evolved pleasures like food
Speaker 1: and sex. The same hot spots we see for food
Speaker 1: and rodents also seemed to respond to more complex pleasures
Speaker 1: and humans. I would never have expected that twenty years ago.
Speaker 1: But what about the more effortful type two rewards that
Speaker 1: I want more of in life? Finishing a hard puzzle,
Speaker 1: writing my happiness book, getting to the top of a mountain,
Speaker 1: my morning post elliptical glow. Well, you know, it would
Speaker 1: be marvelous to have a human fMRI study of this
Speaker 1: post exercise satisfaction. I would love to know. Is it
Speaker 1: the same head on a cotspots that are coming on
Speaker 1: for that? The honest answer is that neuroscientists haven't looked
Speaker 1: for type two liking in the Mesolympic reward system all
Speaker 1: that much yet, And the reason is pretty obvious when
Speaker 1: you think about it. Type one pleasures are easy to
Speaker 1: study experimentally. You can feed a rat something sweet or
Speaker 1: have a human listen to music in an MRI scanner,
Speaker 1: but it's hard to brain scan amountain climber that's just
Speaker 1: descended to the top of a peak, or to stick
Speaker 1: a brain electrode in an academic that's just finished writing
Speaker 1: a challenging grant. So that means we don't yet fully
Speaker 1: know whether the same Mesolympic reward regions that can't studies
Speaker 1: code for type two pleasures. But there is one thing
Speaker 1: that is empirically obvious about type two liking. Remember that
Speaker 1: super powerful incentive salience wanting that goes with type one pleasures,
Speaker 1: the pool we get so automatically for the simple rewards
Speaker 1: in life, it doesn't seem to be there for type
Speaker 1: two pleasures. Although we often have a cognitive wanting for
Speaker 1: effort pool rewards like my post workout glow, we rarely
Speaker 1: get an incentive salience craving along with it. Sometimes I've
Speaker 1: been asked by people who study exercising kinesiology departments, such
Speaker 1: why can we create incentive salience want to exercise? That
Speaker 1: would be supers and you know, there may be a
Speaker 1: few very lucky individuals out there who have this kind
Speaker 1: of urge to go out jogging that really, you know,
Speaker 1: I think it can happen, but for most of us.
Speaker 1: For me too, I exercise this morning, but it is
Speaker 1: certainly I didn't jump into it with joy and things
Speaker 1: like say world peace. We'd all want world peace, but
Speaker 1: it doesn't trigger our Mesolympic system. And we might prefer
Speaker 1: that the incentive saliens want followed those cognitive desires to
Speaker 1: give the same urgency to make us want to go
Speaker 1: and jump on the exercise machines. But that's not how
Speaker 1: we are constructed. Yes, that's right. Our dumb brains have
Speaker 1: no automatic method for going after all the effortful, flow
Speaker 1: inducing pleasures in life, the ones that, as Paul Bloom
Speaker 1: pointed out, often make life worth living, experience a cognitive
Speaker 1: wanting for type two pleasures, but they aren't mesoalimbic wants
Speaker 1: that are triggering the incentive saline system that make us
Speaker 1: have this urge to do it. We kind of sometimes
Speaker 1: have to make ourselves do And here in lies the
Speaker 1: second big problem with the way our brains process rewards.
Speaker 1: Even though natural selection was kind enough to give us
Speaker 1: a powerful and very automatic urge to go for sensory
Speaker 1: type one pleasures, even ones we sometimes don't intend to
Speaker 1: go after, we have no such automatic craving for type
Speaker 1: two rewards. For type two pleasures, as can't put it,
Speaker 1: We just got to make ourselves do it, which, if
Speaker 1: you ask me, is a really, really stupid way to
Speaker 1: design a brain. And so we've figured out the neural
Speaker 1: answer to the puzzle of why I can't get up
Speaker 1: to hit the elliptical even though I have concrete evidence
Speaker 1: that it'll bring me joy. Our brains are designed to
Speaker 1: crave type one rewards, even in cases where we don't
Speaker 1: like them all that much. But our brains are not
Speaker 1: designed to experience an automatic wanting for the type two rewards,
Speaker 1: the ones we really will enjoy. As I noted at
Speaker 1: the start of our episode, the problem with our brains
Speaker 1: isn't that you can't always get what you want. It's
Speaker 1: that you can't always want what you like. But if
Speaker 1: you try sometimes, can you fix that? I mean, could
Speaker 1: there be a way to get our brains to actually
Speaker 1: crave type two rewards. When we get back from the break,
Speaker 1: we'll hear from a scientist who's found that there may
Speaker 1: be a way for our minds to get what we need.
Speaker 1: She'll share some new research hinting that there may be
Speaker 1: a workaround for our not so optimally designed reward circuits,
Speaker 1: ones that you can start putting into effect today the
Speaker 1: Happiness Lab. We'll be right back. I actually really don't
Speaker 1: like running and learn behold I do run. This is
Speaker 1: my good friend and colleague, Heady Cobert, a professor of psychiatry, psychology,
Speaker 1: and neuroscience here at Yale. I admire Hetty a lot,
Speaker 1: not just because she's an amazing scientist. But because she's
Speaker 1: really really good at motivating herself to go after effortfull
Speaker 1: but pleasure inducing Type two rewards. The hard workouts that
Speaker 1: I struggle with every morning, Hetty has strategies to hit
Speaker 1: them up with ease. When she's in bed contemplating hitting
Speaker 1: that snooze button, she brings to mind the final bit
Speaker 1: of her daily jog. She imagines the joy she'll feel
Speaker 1: on those few steps leading up to her front door.
Speaker 1: That walk right, a minute of bliss of just like
Speaker 1: I rock, I'm amazing, I just did this thing. It's
Speaker 1: really was good for me. It's what's just it was
Speaker 1: my values of being healthy and being a runner. When
Speaker 1: I think about that, like even right now, I'm like, oh,
Speaker 1: maybe I'll go running later. Hetty is constantly doing the
Speaker 1: sorts of Type two activities that I aspire to engage
Speaker 1: with more often. She's the yoga buddy who always wants
Speaker 1: to do the hardest intensity class, the ones with all
Speaker 1: the handstands. She's the academic colleague who's always happily staying
Speaker 1: up super late to finish a big grant. Hetty engages
Speaker 1: in hard, flow inducing stuff all the time, and she
Speaker 1: seems to do so without any motivational struggle. But Hetty
Speaker 1: also excels at the flip side. She's always avoiding those
Speaker 1: type one pleasures that might not be so good for her.
Speaker 1: Someone brought some cookies to my house over the weekend,
Speaker 1: and I definitely know that they are in the kitchen,
Speaker 1: and I'm aware of that a lot of the time,
Speaker 1: those cookies would already be long gone if they were
Speaker 1: under my roof. Hetty admits the sheaf too, finds the
Speaker 1: box kind of tempting. They think about how teethee it
Speaker 1: would be, and how yumy it would be, and how
Speaker 1: sweet it would be, and like the texture of it
Speaker 1: has like a little bit of a lemon icing on it.
Speaker 1: Despite the strong incentive salience Hetty seems to experience for
Speaker 1: that box of cookies, she's able to resist the temptation.
Speaker 1: She experiences, her reasons not to eat the cookies just
Speaker 1: as vividly as her desire to go after them. Well,
Speaker 1: if I have the cookie now, I can't have another
Speaker 1: one later, and that's a cost to me because I'm
Speaker 1: definitely gonna want one after lunch, and you know, it's
Speaker 1: not consisaing with my values. So I'm actually trying to
Speaker 1: not eat sweets. It's not healthy for me. When I
Speaker 1: eat a lot of sugar, I'd break out. I really
Speaker 1: don't like that, so that's a for me. These examples
Speaker 1: might make you think that Hetty is some superhuman self regulator,
Speaker 1: the kind of person who's born within a Nate knack
Speaker 1: for controlling her dop immune system. But since Hetty's one
Speaker 1: of my closest friends, I know that's not really the case.
Speaker 1: We often say all researches me searched. In my case,
Speaker 1: that's absolutely accurate. I studied craving at least in part
Speaker 1: because I notice craving run my life, and have noticed
Speaker 1: it even more in the past, run my life in
Speaker 1: ways that very often have actually interfered with what I wanted,
Speaker 1: And I really wanted to understand both what craving is
Speaker 1: and also how I might learn to work with it
Speaker 1: in a way that would be helpful for my life.
Speaker 1: Hetty's scientific interest in the neural basis of why we
Speaker 1: want what we want started back in graduate school when
Speaker 1: she was trying to break a very bad habit. Back then,
Speaker 1: Hetty was a cigarette smoker. She tried to quit a
Speaker 1: few times, always unsuccessfully. She realized that to break her
Speaker 1: nicotine addiction, she'd need a strategy for dealing with all
Speaker 1: the wanting and incentive salience that she automatically experienced for cigarettes.
Speaker 1: The solution she found then, and one that she has
Speaker 1: now become a scientific expert on, is a strategy that
Speaker 1: we've talked about before on the Happiness Lab. Mindfulness, in
Speaker 1: this case, the practice of intentionally and non judgmentally paying
Speaker 1: attention to the present moment through a process called urge surfing.
Speaker 1: During urge surfing, you allow a sense of wanting just
Speaker 1: to be there without acting on it. Let's say there's
Speaker 1: some type one reward that you're really drawn to, that
Speaker 1: box of cookies in the kitchen or a pack of
Speaker 1: cigarettes on your desk if you're a smoker like Hetty was.
Speaker 1: Rather than giving into that sense of wanting or even
Speaker 1: trying to fight it, you simply say to yourself, Hey,
Speaker 1: I'm having a craving right now. I'm mindfully noticing that
Speaker 1: my docuan system is really freaking out. But this feeling
Speaker 1: is not going to last forever, and I can deal
Speaker 1: with it for a little while, And the science shows
Speaker 1: it really only will lasted a little while. Research has
Speaker 1: found that urges are a lot like an ocean wave.
Speaker 1: Cravings tend to start off small and then go up
Speaker 1: a bit, but they eventually crest and soon come back down,
Speaker 1: usually in as little as to twenty minutes. Mindfulness to
Speaker 1: manage craving is one just knowing this is a temporary experience,
Speaker 1: that you have the ability to notice it as it
Speaker 1: is right again, that noticing paying attention in the moment.
Speaker 1: This strategy of mindful acceptance not only allowed Hetty to
Speaker 1: surf her cigarette urges for long enough to finally kick
Speaker 1: the habit, It also gave her a treatment idea for
Speaker 1: the addicted participants she worked with in her lab. In
Speaker 1: one study, she and her colleagues found a group of
Speaker 1: hardcore smokers, people who smoked on average an entire pack
Speaker 1: a day, who said they wanted to quit. Hetty and
Speaker 1: her colleagues then assigned the smokers either to a four
Speaker 1: week urge surfing intervention or the standard four week program
Speaker 1: used by the American Lung Association. The results were striking.
Speaker 1: Subjects who had learned to urge surf were five times
Speaker 1: more likely to abstain from smoking three months after treatment.
Speaker 1: Researchers have now seen the urge surfing shows similar positive
Speaker 1: effects in the context of opiate addiction, binge drinking, and
Speaker 1: even healthy eating. I often think of mindfluns is like
Speaker 1: the set of skills that can allow all of the
Speaker 1: other skills to come online more easily, because before you
Speaker 1: even figure out which strategy should I use in the moment,
Speaker 1: you need to know what this moment is like, and
Speaker 1: mind forms in a fundamental way allowed you to connect
Speaker 1: with this moment. Mindfully connecting with the present moment also
Speaker 1: gave Hetty a second tactic for successfully fighting her overactive
Speaker 1: insensive salience, one that I noticed her used earlier when
Speaker 1: she talked about whether or not to eat those cookies.
Speaker 1: You may remember just how eloquently had he described what
Speaker 1: her cookie craving felt like, the yummy taste she expected,
Speaker 1: and how lemony the icing seemed, and so on. That active,
Speaker 1: so carefully and vividly paying attention gave Hetty the mental
Speaker 1: bandwidth to notice that she was focused entirely on the
Speaker 1: good aspects of cookie eating. The long term consequences of
Speaker 1: downing the entire box, the fact that she'd break out,
Speaker 1: or that she was trying to get healthier. Those things
Speaker 1: were completely absent from the feeling of wanting that Hetty experienced.
Speaker 1: Mindfully noticing just how salient the good parts of eating
Speaker 1: were allowed heating to realize that her dopamine system wasn't
Speaker 1: giving her the whole store. Hetty hypothesized that mindfully noticing
Speaker 1: the bad stuff about a type one reward might help
Speaker 1: her nicotine dependent patients reduce their cravings too. She was
Speaker 1: right simply asking smokers to intentionally focus on the long
Speaker 1: term consequences of cigarette use help them reduce their urge
Speaker 1: to take a puff. This result suggests that, somewhat surprisingly,
Speaker 1: that mindfully thinking about the downside of a reward can
Speaker 1: help our brains turn down how much we want that reward.
Speaker 1: Mindfulness can help us stop wanting what we don't really like.
Speaker 1: But Hetty has also discovered that mindfully noticing the present
Speaker 1: moment can help us with the brain's second problem too,
Speaker 1: that we can't always want what we like. As camp
Speaker 1: Barridge explained, our dopamine wanting circuit doesn't seem to fire
Speaker 1: as much for Type two rewards. My morning workout or
Speaker 1: a flow inducing writing project, or a steep mountain climb,
Speaker 1: the kinds of pleasures that Paul Bloom thought made life
Speaker 1: worth living. But Hetty has figured out a way to
Speaker 1: deal with this. Our new research shows we can use
Speaker 1: mindfulness to start wanting type two rewards in a more
Speaker 1: automatic incentive saliency way. It starts with the process of
Speaker 1: mindfully attending to the benefits of an effortful but rewarding
Speaker 1: activity through a process she calls savoring, like really trying
Speaker 1: to actively think about those positive aspects of the experience
Speaker 1: that we have in mind in order to make ourselves
Speaker 1: want it more. Petty has found that savoring is a
Speaker 1: powerful way to achieve more type two pleasures because it
Speaker 1: helps us overcome the main barrier to flow inducing activities
Speaker 1: all the effort. One of the reasons that we avoid
Speaker 1: things that are difficult is because what's really salient about
Speaker 1: them is what is difficult, and not all of the
Speaker 1: other aspects around it. Again, if I use the running example,
Speaker 1: what is really salient to me is that it's really
Speaker 1: hot at and if I go running later, I'm going
Speaker 1: to sweat and it's going to be annoying. In a
Speaker 1: moment of mindfulness, I know that the difficulty is just
Speaker 1: one part of the entire experience, and especially mindfulness in
Speaker 1: the context of our values. You know, my value is
Speaker 1: actually really important to me, my value of being healthy,
Speaker 1: my value of being someone who engages in behaviors to
Speaker 1: increase my health, like running. If I am able to
Speaker 1: be mindful in a moment, even though the thought about
Speaker 1: difficulty is so salient and so strong, I can bring
Speaker 1: on board really the full view of the situation, which is, yes,
Speaker 1: it is difficult and also really consistent with my value
Speaker 1: is really rewarding. And I think we can apply that
Speaker 1: to almost everything. Hetty has used the sort of mindful
Speaker 1: savoring a lot in her own life. She's gotten good
Speaker 1: at intentionally noticing the deeper rewards and meaning that she
Speaker 1: gets from lots of hard type two pleasures that satisfaction
Speaker 1: she gets after writing a big grant, or the pride
Speaker 1: she feels after eating healthy, or the five seconds of
Speaker 1: bliss she gets at the end of her morning run.
Speaker 1: When I really can reflect on that positive aspect, right,
Speaker 1: I'm more likely to do it. And this is the
Speaker 1: key to the power of savoring mindfully. Focusing on the
Speaker 1: benefits of a hard activity doesn't just boost your cognitive
Speaker 1: wanting for that activity, It makes your automatic incentive salients
Speaker 1: wanting go up to One of my favorite of Hetty's
Speaker 1: recent empirical examples of this is a study testing whether
Speaker 1: savoring can get people to eat more vegetables if we
Speaker 1: bring people in and we ask them to actually think
Speaker 1: about how crunchy broccoli is, how healthy it is for them,
Speaker 1: how they might feel really good about themselves when they're
Speaker 1: done eating this broccoli. Loan Behold, people not only report
Speaker 1: more of that craving for broccoli, they're also willing to
Speaker 1: pay more for it. Studies like this show that savoring
Speaker 1: maybe the magical elixir I've needed all along. Mindfully noticing
Speaker 1: the good parts of a flow inducing event might be
Speaker 1: the key to getting the reward circuits of our brain
Speaker 1: to finally start wanting all the stuff we actually like,
Speaker 1: so that we can finally start getting in all the
Speaker 1: type too pleasure we need in life. Hetty credit strategies
Speaker 1: like these and mindfulness practices more generally, with making her
Speaker 1: life a lot happier and a lot more meaningful. I
Speaker 1: think that all of equal I would be a cigarette smoker.
Speaker 1: My brain really loves nicotine. I probably would be a
Speaker 1: regular user of a bunch of other substances if I
Speaker 1: were not making excellent decisions now, I would say that
Speaker 1: I live my life in a way that's really consistent
Speaker 1: with my values. So I exercise regularly, and I eat
Speaker 1: really healthily most of the time, random cookie notwithstanding. And
Speaker 1: I think in that way that mindful's practice has allowed
Speaker 1: me to be the kind of person that I want
Speaker 1: to be in most moments of most days. Talking with
Speaker 1: Hetty has given me hope that I can get my
Speaker 1: brain to want what I actually like. Hetty's research has
Speaker 1: encouraged me that at least with practice, there are ways
Speaker 1: to get my dopamine system to work for me rather
Speaker 1: than against me. The science shows that mindful acceptance can
Speaker 1: help me serve the cravings that tend to lead me astray,
Speaker 1: that urge to hit the box of cookies I'm saving
Speaker 1: for later, or to check my Twitter feed when I
Speaker 1: should be finishing this podcast script. And I'm trying to
Speaker 1: intentionally remember the downside of these short term rewards and
Speaker 1: the opportunity costs they pose for the hard projects I
Speaker 1: want to finish. But mindfulness can also help us explicitly
Speaker 1: notice and savor the good parts of type two pursuits.
Speaker 1: Over the past few mornings, I've tried to more intentionally
Speaker 1: notice all the rewards I get from my morning workout.
Speaker 1: I've started to mindfully pay attention to how light I
Speaker 1: feel halfway through that morning elliptical and how cool it
Speaker 1: is that time totally flies by when I'm watching a
Speaker 1: Buffy episode. I now try to savor that moment of
Speaker 1: bliss when I finally step off the machine, feeling like
Speaker 1: a total badass for doing something I value and that
Speaker 1: boosts my health and happiness. And I've already detected a
Speaker 1: bit of an emotional shift that craving to sleep in
Speaker 1: has it fully gone away, but I am starting to
Speaker 1: automatically become a bit more excited to get my blood
Speaker 1: pumping when that alarm goes off. I hope this episode
Speaker 1: has also given you some strategies for achieving more pleasure
Speaker 1: and to pursue a life with more meaning and type
Speaker 1: two rewards. And I hope at least one of those
Speaker 1: meaningful pleasures will involve coming back here to listen to
Speaker 1: the next episode of The Happiness Lab with me Doctor
Speaker 1: Laurie Santos. The Happiness Lab is co written and produced
Speaker 1: by Ryan Dilley. Our original music was composed by Zachary Silver,
Speaker 1: with additional scoring, mixing, and mastering by Evan Biola. Joseph
Speaker 1: Friedman checked our facts. Sophie Crane McKibbin edited our scripts.
Speaker 1: Marilyn Rust offered additional production support. Special thanks to Miela Belle,
Speaker 1: Carl mcgliori, Heather Faine, Maggie Taylor, Daniella Lucard, Maya Kanig,
Speaker 1: Nicole Morano, Eric Zandler, Royston Reserve, Jacob Weisberg, and my agent,
Speaker 1: Ben Davis. D Happiness Lab is brought to you by
Speaker 1: Pushkin Industries, Emmie Doctor, Laurie Santos