Speaker 1: Pushkin, you bet it? Hello made it? Happy birthday, Thank you.
Speaker 1: It's my mom's seventieth birthday, and so she's come to
Speaker 1: visit me at Yale. Tomorrow morning. We're heading off somewhere
Speaker 1: sunny for a short vacation together. But tonight we just
Speaker 1: want to relax a bit. My mom had been on
Speaker 1: the road for a while and so I really wanted
Speaker 1: her to get some food. We want to eat. Where
Speaker 1: can we go? Well, it's New Angrands. We didn't go
Speaker 1: anywhere food. He's love New Haven. It's a town filled
Speaker 1: with gourmet restaurants, funky hipster bars, world famous pizza joints,
Speaker 1: and even food trucks. Whatever you're in the mood for,
Speaker 1: it's usually just a few blocks away. Pizza too cheesy, cheesy,
Speaker 1: Mexican food to spicy. My mom's a picky eater, and
Speaker 1: we don't always have the same preferences, but in New
Speaker 1: Hay we're usually okay sushi, no sushi, carrean fried chicken, no.
Speaker 1: I don't really like Asian food regularly, chicken would be good.
Speaker 1: Fifteen minutes and about one hundred options later, we finally
Speaker 1: find a place that works, a restaurant that does great
Speaker 1: salads made to order, beta tofu, olives, bacon, archokarts, gorgonzola, avocado, walnuts, crazins,
Speaker 1: Crazins dressing on the side. Yep, I usually feel really
Speaker 1: blessed to have such a variety of tasty cuisine on
Speaker 1: my doorstep, and having the ability to customize all the
Speaker 1: ingredients in our order usually feels empowering, like we're in control,
Speaker 1: white fish. But as I scrolled through restaurant after restaurant,
Speaker 1: menu after menu with my mom, I started to feel
Speaker 1: a bit drained, a bit depleted, maybe even a bit defeated.
Speaker 1: All right, that's what you want, Okay, great ordered. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's your birthday, you get to get what you need.
Speaker 1: So what if our obsession with choice isn't all that
Speaker 1: it's cracked up to be. What if all this choice
Speaker 1: is making us less satisfied and more unhappy than we think.
Speaker 1: Our minds are constantly telling us what to do to
Speaker 1: be happy. But what if our minds are wrong? What
Speaker 1: if our minds are lying to us, leading us away
Speaker 1: from what will really make us happy. The good news
Speaker 1: is that understanding the science of the mind can point
Speaker 1: us all back in the right direction. You're listening to
Speaker 1: the Happiness Lab with doctor Laurie Santans. I'm sitting in
Speaker 1: Louise Lunch, which is said to be the birthplace of
Speaker 1: an American classic. It's just down the street from my house.
Speaker 1: Around nineteen hundred, Louie Lasson, Danish immigrant and lunch wagon proprietor,
Speaker 1: was dealing with the difficult customer. According to family legend,
Speaker 1: a regular named Gary Woodmore hurried in and shouted, slap
Speaker 1: a meat puck between two planks and step on it.
Speaker 1: But Louie was out of whole stakes. Trying to placate
Speaker 1: the man, Louie quickly grilled up some ground beef trimmings,
Speaker 1: stuck it between two slices of toast, and handed it
Speaker 1: off With that hurried act. It said that the first
Speaker 1: American hamburger was invented. There's still some controversy about this
Speaker 1: origin story, but what makes Louise Lunch different from the
Speaker 1: other alleged hamburger creators is the fact that they've doubled
Speaker 1: down on the very sandwich that people loved a hundred
Speaker 1: years ago. When you walk into Louise Lunch today, you
Speaker 1: can order the same burger that Woodmore enjoyed, but pretty
Speaker 1: much nothing else. You can add cheese, tomato, and onion,
Speaker 1: but that's it. No bacon, no lettuce, just a straight
Speaker 1: up burger. And never ever ask the staff for ketchup.
Speaker 1: If somebody came in and ask you, guys for ketchup,
Speaker 1: what would you say? We politely decline it most of
Speaker 1: the time. That's Jeff Lassen, Louie's great grandson and the
Speaker 1: current owner. One of the cooks gave us a slightly
Speaker 1: more nuanced reply, what we really do, get the hell
Speaker 1: out of here. It don't come back. Louise unique selling
Speaker 1: point is the fact that you don't have to choose.
Speaker 1: In fact, you can't, which makes walking into Louise Lunch
Speaker 1: a very different experience than entering any other New Haven restaurant.
Speaker 1: Their menus feel like a small book. A lot of
Speaker 1: people and restaurants do have a lot of options and
Speaker 1: they try to cater everybody. But we stick to what
Speaker 1: we do best and what we've been doing for a
Speaker 1: hundred twenty four years, and that's keeping it himple and
Speaker 1: making it easy for not only ourselves but everybody else.
Speaker 1: And when you do that and do what you do best,
Speaker 1: I think you have a better product. But as Jeff
Speaker 1: right do you really have a better product when you
Speaker 1: limit your customers choices. Wouldn't having more options actually make
Speaker 1: our experience better? That's what psychologists Shena Hyangar and Mark
Speaker 1: Lepper set out to test in a famous study. They
Speaker 1: headed to one of Ayangar's favorite shops, the famous Drager's Market,
Speaker 1: a high end store in Menlo Park, California, for two
Speaker 1: Saturday afternoons in a row. A. Yongar and Lepper had
Speaker 1: research assistance dress up Lake store employees near a table
Speaker 1: at the entrance. Customers who stopped by were promised a
Speaker 1: dollar off their purchase of high end Wilkin and Son's
Speaker 1: jam if they tried some free samples. What the researchers
Speaker 1: varied was how many jams people had a chance to taste.
Speaker 1: Some customers could sample six different kinds of jam Kiwi, peach,
Speaker 1: black cherry, three fruits, marmalade, lemon, curd red current, which
Speaker 1: you might think already sounds like a lot. But at
Speaker 1: other times, the researchers increased that jam selection fourfold. People
Speaker 1: had a chance to sample a whopping twenty four different
Speaker 1: kinds of jam. Did the difference in the number of
Speaker 1: jams of the affect people's behaviors. While twenty percent more
Speaker 1: people stopped at the table when twenty four jams were
Speaker 1: on offer, which makes sense, right, more jams to sample,
Speaker 1: more people show up to check them out. But did
Speaker 1: the number of people who bought something increase? After all,
Speaker 1: those customers had a chance to sample nearly all the
Speaker 1: available Wilkins and sun jams in existence, so they surely
Speaker 1: found one they liked. But surprisingly that's not what happened.
Speaker 1: With six jams to taste. About thirty percent of people
Speaker 1: ended up using their coupon, but when shoppers were faced
Speaker 1: with twenty four jams, only three percent made a purchase.
Speaker 1: Ten times more customers bought something when they were given
Speaker 1: fewer options. Paradoxically, giving people more choice made people buy
Speaker 1: less stuff. Everyone has had the experience of walking into
Speaker 1: a store and just wanting to turn around and walk out.
Speaker 1: This is Verry Schortz, a professor at the Host School
Speaker 1: of Business, UC Berkeley. He has written an entire book
Speaker 1: drawing on experiments like that jam study. They pretty much
Speaker 1: all show the same thing. When we're faced with lots
Speaker 1: of options, we become paralyzed by them. So he called
Speaker 1: his book The Paradox of choice. There's a set of
Speaker 1: beliefs that are so deeply embedded in us that I
Speaker 1: don't even think we realized we hold them, and that
Speaker 1: is that if you want to enhance people's wellbeing, you
Speaker 1: want to enhance their freedom. And if you want to
Speaker 1: enhance their freedom, you have to enhance their choice. And
Speaker 1: that seems so obviously true that it didn't occur to
Speaker 1: anyone to investigate it. It occurred to Barry, though, he
Speaker 1: spent decades figuring out how this explosion of choice is
Speaker 1: affecting our well being. He started simply. He just walked
Speaker 1: the aisles of his local supermarket and began counting. There
Speaker 1: were two hundred and seventy five different kinds of cookies
Speaker 1: and one hundred and fifty salad dressings, thirty different kinds
Speaker 1: of aspirin. The only way we get through a trip
Speaker 1: to the supermarket is that ninety of what we buy
Speaker 1: is the same stuff we bought last week, and everything
Speaker 1: else is invisible to us. And if we actually started
Speaker 1: paying attention to everything, we've starved to death. Before we
Speaker 1: finished our weekly shopping trip. Barry got me thinking about
Speaker 1: the seemingly minor choices I face on a daily basis,
Speaker 1: it's dizzy ing take blopping down to watch something on Netflix.
Speaker 1: Even if I just look at what Netflix recommends for
Speaker 1: me personally, it's overwhelming. It can feel like hundreds of options.
Speaker 1: There's some little bit of evidence that what happens when
Speaker 1: you do that is people end up just throwing up
Speaker 1: their hands and watching a movie they've already seen. They
Speaker 1: go for the familiar because they can't figure out how
Speaker 1: to choose among the unfamiliar. I started to do the
Speaker 1: math on just how overwhelming some of these choices are.
Speaker 1: Take a visit to one well known coffee shop, it's Starbucks.
Speaker 1: How many different drink options does that company offer? It
Speaker 1: turns out over eighty eighty thousand. To put that in perspective,
Speaker 1: if I went to that coffee shop with Starbucks three
Speaker 1: times a day, every single day for the rest of
Speaker 1: my life, I'd need to live to one hundred and
Speaker 1: fifteen years old just to try all those permutations. And
Speaker 1: that's not even including the seasonal pumpkin spice drinks. Do
Speaker 1: we seriously need that many choices? And say you do
Speaker 1: discover that perfect coffee and that huge haystack of choice,
Speaker 1: the tragic thing is you won't actually enjoy it all
Speaker 1: that much. Our minds might tell us that finding the
Speaker 1: best of eighty thousand options will feel like an achievement,
Speaker 1: but that's simply not the case. One study had people
Speaker 1: imagine trying to find a greeting card for a coworker,
Speaker 1: either picking from shelf after shelf of cards or just
Speaker 1: a limited selection, who turned out to be the least
Speaker 1: satisfied with their purchase. You guessed it. The shoppers with
Speaker 1: a gazillion choices, it's so easy to imagine that one
Speaker 1: of the options they rejected would have been better than
Speaker 1: the one they chose. The more you compare, the more
Speaker 1: the thing you've chosen suffers. So you end up making
Speaker 1: a good decision and feeling bad about it. And that
Speaker 1: is the cruel irony of all these choices. When lots
Speaker 1: of options are present, Even if we do well, we
Speaker 1: still feel worse. But lack of satisfaction isn't the only
Speaker 1: issue with all these choices. There's a bigger problem. Our
Speaker 1: poor minds just can't handle comparing one hundred greeting cards
Speaker 1: or eighty thousand coffee drinks all at once. Human brains
Speaker 1: simply don't have the capacity to accurately decide whether a
Speaker 1: Ventisoi latte with caramel is tastier than seventy nine, nine
Speaker 1: hundred and ninety nine other options, at least not in
Speaker 1: real time. So we just filter most of the other
Speaker 1: options out. But all that filtering still comes at a
Speaker 1: serious cost to our well being. Just seeing all those
Speaker 1: choices above the counter is cognitively draining, so draining that
Speaker 1: it leads to worst decisions later on, a phenomenon the
Speaker 1: behavioral scientists call decision fatigue. We all suffer from this
Speaker 1: phenomenon to a certain degree, but only some of us
Speaker 1: realize it. Take Barack Obama for example. He clearly got it.
Speaker 1: I don't know if you've noticed it. He always wore
Speaker 1: a white shirt, and he kind of cycled through his suits.
Speaker 1: When asked about his repetitive wardrobe, the President summed up
Speaker 1: decision fatigue perfectly. Obama said, have you got any idea
Speaker 1: how many decisions I have to make in a day?
Speaker 1: Do you think I want to spend time to side
Speaker 1: where forget the important stuff like whether it were a
Speaker 1: blue suit or a gray suit, and worry about the
Speaker 1: trivial things like making sure everyone has healthcare. Obama is
Speaker 1: right about this. We only have a certain amount of
Speaker 1: mental effort to put towards the hard decisions. If we
Speaker 1: waste that effort on, say, ordering coffee or picking out
Speaker 1: a tie, we won't have the mental wherewithal needed for
Speaker 1: the important choices. There's a study shows that when you
Speaker 1: have people make a hundred hypothetical decisions, all trivial, and
Speaker 1: then you give them a task that challenges their self control,
Speaker 1: they give up easily. So choosing is exhausting, even when
Speaker 1: it's about trivial stuff. It just wears you out. But
Speaker 1: it gets worse because it turns out all those decidedly
Speaker 1: non trivial choices in life, they're also set up in
Speaker 1: ways that overload us. We're given too many options there
Speaker 1: as well to raise the stakes. The same thing happens
Speaker 1: with four oh one K retirement participation, and they found
Speaker 1: that the more options you offered, the less likely people
Speaker 1: were to choose any You lost about two percent for
Speaker 1: every ten options. And in many cases, workers were passing
Speaker 1: up matching money from the employer by not signing up,
Speaker 1: So the single worst thing they could do was choose
Speaker 1: none of the above. When people are faced with too
Speaker 1: many retirement plans, they don't know how to make the decision,
Speaker 1: and so they put it off. There had to be
Speaker 1: a decision about which fund. I don't know how to
Speaker 1: make that decision. I'll decide tomorrow. But tomorrow isn't any
Speaker 1: different from today. So it just keeps getting postponed and postponed.
Speaker 1: And I'm sure that everyone thought they were doing employees
Speaker 1: a favor by offering all these options. We'll just lay
Speaker 1: them all out there and you can get exactly the
Speaker 1: set of investments that you want. What a gift, Well, no,
Speaker 1: a curse actually, So why do companies keep cursing us
Speaker 1: like this, especially when people would buy more things if
Speaker 1: there were fewer choices. There's a reason for this. I
Speaker 1: think somebody walks into your store and says, do you
Speaker 1: have Royal Crown Cola? You just have Coco and pepsi,
Speaker 1: And so this person walks out empty handed. Well, that's
Speaker 1: a smack in your face. That's a sale you would
Speaker 1: have made if only you'd had Royal Crown Cola. Someone
Speaker 1: else comes into a store and buys five dollars worth
Speaker 1: of stuff instead of fifteen dollars because you've tortured them
Speaker 1: with so many options. It's invisible to you. You don't
Speaker 1: know the price you're paying by making it more complicated
Speaker 1: than it needs to be. So the crazy thing with
Speaker 1: the choice overload is that I know this work like
Speaker 1: a senior Ted talk write your book, But even I,
Speaker 1: you know, would I rather have a Netflix with ten
Speaker 1: films or ten million films? I still have the intuition
Speaker 1: that I want more choice. I know everybody does. When
Speaker 1: Barry lectures about this work, he gets a lot of pushback,
Speaker 1: especially from his students. I can see they're kind of smirking,
Speaker 1: and I think that what they think is he's old.
Speaker 1: He doesn't know how to take advantage of what the
Speaker 1: modern world offers. And sometimes one of them will actually
Speaker 1: have the nerve to say that, And when they do,
Speaker 1: I'm delighted because I say, you know, I think that's
Speaker 1: really what it is. That must explain why it is
Speaker 1: that eighty five percent of you are clinically depressed and
Speaker 1: nine of you are going to see a shrink because
Speaker 1: you handle this all oh well. Choosing between jams is
Speaker 1: a pain, and picking a good four one K plan
Speaker 1: can have big financial consequences. When I first started thinking
Speaker 1: about this episode, I was focused on these kinds of decisions,
Speaker 1: ones that are having a huge impact on our well being,
Speaker 1: but are largely run of the mill. Personal preference is
Speaker 1: stuff cases where there's no real right decision to be made.
Speaker 1: But as I read more and more of the work
Speaker 1: on Choice Overload, I realized that we're now being asked
Speaker 1: to make decisions and domains that go way beyond shopping.
Speaker 1: The buck also stops with us for decisions that can
Speaker 1: have critical moral consequences, ones that literally involve life and death.
Speaker 1: Maybe you got admitted to the hospital because you felt
Speaker 1: like you felt terrible for a while, and then they
Speaker 1: told you had leukemia and that you could have a
Speaker 1: really aggressive chemotherapy that might kill you and might save
Speaker 1: your life, or chantler chemotherapy that's going to slow down
Speaker 1: this leukemia but never cure you of it. And you
Speaker 1: have to figure out that night which type of chemotherapy
Speaker 1: to start. Hard to think of a harder decision to make.
Speaker 1: The Happiness Lab will be right back. It was spring
Speaker 1: and twenty one year old Karen Anne Quinlin had just
Speaker 1: moved away from home. For the last few days, she'd
Speaker 1: been on a crash diet, hoping to fit into a
Speaker 1: new dress for an upcoming party. After a couple of
Speaker 1: drinks and some valium. Karen felt dizzy, so her friends
Speaker 1: took her home and put her to bed, But then
Speaker 1: Karen stopped breathing in a few minutes. It took her
Speaker 1: housemates to notice her brain suffered huge and irreparable damage.
Speaker 1: Karen wasn't dead, there were tiny signs of brain activity,
Speaker 1: but her doctors were gloomy about the prospect that she
Speaker 1: would ever recover. Karen's play dramatically pitted her parents, Joseph
Speaker 1: and Julia Quinlan, against the medical profession in a way
Speaker 1: never seen before. Karen's parents were devout Catholics. They thought
Speaker 1: the machine that was helping her to breathe should be
Speaker 1: shut off the family. The parents decided it was morally acceptable.
Speaker 1: In fact, the best thing to do would be to
Speaker 1: take the ventilator away, let their daughter die so she
Speaker 1: could be with God. This is Peter Ubel, a physician
Speaker 1: and behavioral scientist at Duke University. And the doctors refused.
Speaker 1: They said that would be killing her, and they didn't
Speaker 1: do that, and it wasn't The parents decision to make
Speaker 1: the argument soon made it to core were the judge
Speaker 1: rule that the treating physician had to make the call.
Speaker 1: Legally speaking, the Quinlan's were not allowed to govern what
Speaker 1: treatment their daughter received, but the couple didn't give up.
Speaker 1: They soon appealed. The New Jersey State Supreme Court said, yeah, no,
Speaker 1: the parents do have the right here. It is their daughter,
Speaker 1: and it's not a medical decision here, it's a moral
Speaker 1: decision and the doctors aren't the ones to decide what's
Speaker 1: right or wrong in that case. Peter thinks this was
Speaker 1: a pivotal moment in a wider generational movement demanding more
Speaker 1: choice in our lives. Around the same time, this is
Speaker 1: around the seventies, you're seeing a lot of people in
Speaker 1: the United States in particular, who are kind of standing
Speaker 1: up to the power, the power that's got people in
Speaker 1: a war they don't want to be in, that's trying
Speaker 1: to keep people from voting that want to vote. And
Speaker 1: I think the patient empowerment movement kind of fit into
Speaker 1: that narrative. And you saw people not only lawyers, but
Speaker 1: theologians and philosophers and enlightened physicians saying we need to
Speaker 1: give patients a bigger role in their decisions. It's their bodies,
Speaker 1: after all, they have a right to know what we're
Speaker 1: doing to them and why. But this level of patient
Speaker 1: choice in medicine was totally new for all of human history.
Speaker 1: Before this, it was doctor knows best. You as a
Speaker 1: patient just trusted this person to tell you what to do.
Speaker 1: Going back to the time of Hippocrity, the physicians were
Speaker 1: told not to burden people with knowledge that wouldn't help them,
Speaker 1: and he typically he might or might not tell you
Speaker 1: what's even wrong with you. Maybe you just were told
Speaker 1: you had a shadow on your X ray, but it
Speaker 1: was really a cancer that doctor knew it but didn't
Speaker 1: want to worry you. In his work, Peter records real
Speaker 1: interactions between physicians and patients, playing them back. It's clear
Speaker 1: to Peter that things have changed a lot. Oh now
Speaker 1: it's a mess. It's pretty common to run into a
Speaker 1: patient who says, well, okay, doctor, what should I do?
Speaker 1: And then the doctor says, well, it's for you to decide.
Speaker 1: I can't tell you what to do. It's your choice.
Speaker 1: That can drive patients crazy. I don't think doctors know
Speaker 1: what we're supposed to do anymore. It's gone from doctor
Speaker 1: knows best to patient knows best. But do patients really
Speaker 1: know best? After all, they don't have decades of medical training,
Speaker 1: constant refresher courses, and new medical journals dropping on their
Speaker 1: doorstep every month. The modern revolution of patient choice has
Speaker 1: given decision power to people who don't often have the
Speaker 1: information they need, and Peter's research shows that doctors try
Speaker 1: to help, but they often do it badly. They know
Speaker 1: one thing, we need to inform the hell out of
Speaker 1: this patient. That's the one thing that doctors have pretty
Speaker 1: universally taken as the lesson from this patient empowerment revolution
Speaker 1: of the seventies and eighties. Patients deserve information. Rarely do
Speaker 1: they know the best way to give them that information,
Speaker 1: how much to give them, And even more rarely do
Speaker 1: they assess patient understanding in a really good way before
Speaker 1: they then work to make a decision with the patient.
Speaker 1: So we have more information, maybe even more options on
Speaker 1: the table, but it's not clear that patients know how
Speaker 1: to make the best choice that's right, or that doctors
Speaker 1: know how to partner with them to make those choices.
Speaker 1: Peters no stranger to these kinds of awful situations. In fact,
Speaker 1: he's faced them in his own family. My wife had
Speaker 1: early stage breast cancer diagnosed about seven years ago. She
Speaker 1: was in her forties, still that's a bad aged. Well,
Speaker 1: there's no good age to be diagnosed with breastcancer, but
Speaker 1: it's especially serious when you're younger. Like that, Peter's wife
Speaker 1: was offered many choices about her treatment, the first being
Speaker 1: whether she wanted her whole breast removed or just the tumor.
Speaker 1: Being a physician, Peter dug into the data on all
Speaker 1: of these options. To his horror, he found out the
Speaker 1: way the choices were being framed didn't accurately reflect the
Speaker 1: risks or rewards of each of the options. Studying the figures,
Speaker 1: Peter found that extending his wife's treatment by a week
Speaker 1: only slightly decreased the chance of her tumor returning, but
Speaker 1: massively increased the chances of his wife's suffering painful and
Speaker 1: disfiguring side effects. And that to me feels like a
Speaker 1: choice that a patient ought to be able to make.
Speaker 1: And yet almost any woman would have walked into that
Speaker 1: situation and just be told that she had a sixth
Speaker 1: week of treatment coming, and not told what the pros
Speaker 1: and cons of that choice are. So, while the doctors
Speaker 1: were placing the weight of the decision making onto the
Speaker 1: couple's shoulders, they seem to have no system in place
Speaker 1: to give Peter and his wife the information they needed
Speaker 1: to make an informed choice. That either means they overinform
Speaker 1: you often about things irrelevant to the decision, to where
Speaker 1: you're so confused you don't know what to do, or
Speaker 1: they selectively inform you, thinking they're telling you what you
Speaker 1: need to know, and maybe they're making the wrong assumption.
Speaker 1: It's a really tough place to make a decision, but
Speaker 1: it got worse. Having made a series of choices, Peter's
Speaker 1: wife finally had an operation, a lumpectomy to remove the cancer.
Speaker 1: As part of the procedure, the team inspected nearby tissue
Speaker 1: to see if her disease had spread, and they found
Speaker 1: one lymphanode that was a centimeter large that was basically tumor.
Speaker 1: And the surgeon calls calls me up. My wife is
Speaker 1: still under anesthesia. They're part way through the operation, and
Speaker 1: so he poses me how many of these lymphnodes you
Speaker 1: want me to go after? And then I'm just like, Okay,
Speaker 1: so my wife's under anesthesia. I have to decide how
Speaker 1: many of our lymphnotes remove and one possibility is I
Speaker 1: say don't remove anymore. And then she wakes up and
Speaker 1: then decides, boy, I wish we'd had and removed and
Speaker 1: do they have to go back into a second surgeon
Speaker 1: or I remove them? And then she's going to wake
Speaker 1: up later and say you had them remove all those
Speaker 1: lymph nodes and I'm going to have all that swelling.
Speaker 1: That was my choice. The surreal exchange went back and
Speaker 1: forth with a heavy heart and fearing the awful side effects.
Speaker 1: Peter said, the lymph nodes should come out. How did
Speaker 1: the doctor not anticipate that this was a possible branch point?
Speaker 1: How did that surgeon not talk to both of us beforehand?
Speaker 1: And now, look there's a possibility. You know they always
Speaker 1: go in and look at lymph nodes. Why didn't he
Speaker 1: tell us, you know, we're going to have to figure
Speaker 1: out what to do if any of them show cancer
Speaker 1: in them, and you face this burden. I mean, it
Speaker 1: would be awful for your wife to face this burden
Speaker 1: because it's a hard choice. But it's not your body.
Speaker 1: It's her body that's right, and to her credit, she
Speaker 1: didn't ever make me feel like it made the wrong choice.
Speaker 1: But it's to never a position I should have been
Speaker 1: put in. Yeah, yeah, very preventable. Working on this episode,
Speaker 1: I've now started noticing all the decisions I'm faced with
Speaker 1: on a daily basis. Luckily I haven't recently faced thing
Speaker 1: as hard as Peter and his wife had to deal with.
Speaker 1: But it still feels like there's no escape from all
Speaker 1: these decisions and that nagging feeling that I'm making the
Speaker 1: wrong choices all the time. And so I started to
Speaker 1: look for some role models, people who had found a
Speaker 1: way out of the trap of too much choice. A
Speaker 1: typical day for me would involve, you know, just so
Speaker 1: many questions, and each answer to those questions was a
Speaker 1: decision that I was making. This is writer and blogger
Speaker 1: Courtney Carver. Back in two thousand and six, she received
Speaker 1: some life shattering news, and she reacted in exactly the
Speaker 1: way that the science of psychology recommends. She stopped treating
Speaker 1: lots of choices as a good thing. Let's get rid
Speaker 1: of these decisions that we make every day that don't
Speaker 1: have a whole lot of impact on our lives. The
Speaker 1: Happiness Lab will be right back. This is clearly a
Speaker 1: very very popular session, So once again, while you are
Speaker 1: welcome to stand along the sides of the room and
Speaker 1: then back, please know that I met Courtney Carver last winter, well,
Speaker 1: we did a panel discussion together at the Massachusetts Conference
Speaker 1: for Women. The main room was completely packed if you
Speaker 1: also want to be, as Hamilton the musical would say,
Speaker 1: in the room where it happened, we certainly welcome you
Speaker 1: to come in and cozy up. The clamor for seats
Speaker 1: didn't surprise me. The topic we were set to discuss
Speaker 1: was burnout and how to avoid it. All right, clearly,
Speaker 1: we have nothing to talk about here, right and burnout
Speaker 1: is not a common problem for any of us, as
Speaker 1: I conceived by the packed house we have here. The
Speaker 1: panel was promoting a really positive goal, but it centered
Speaker 1: on an idea that all of us have to say
Speaker 1: no a little bit more for the sake of our happiness.
Speaker 1: And Courtney Carver is a bit of a rock star
Speaker 1: in the saying no movement. Even on a good day,
Speaker 1: most of us have more decisions than we want to
Speaker 1: deal with to make, like what we're going to wear
Speaker 1: in the morning. That for sure, always seemed to overwhelm
Speaker 1: me as an advertising exect. Having lots of fashion choices
Speaker 1: was important to Courtney, but choosing something cool to wear
Speaker 1: every morning was exhausting, so she made a radical decision.
Speaker 1: I had been simplifying other areas of my life for years,
Speaker 1: but I never considered the closet or shopping because I
Speaker 1: just thought that was an essential part of my life.
Speaker 1: But the simpler the rest of my life got, the
Speaker 1: more chaotic my closet felt, and I thought, I wonder
Speaker 1: what it would be like to dress with less. She
Speaker 1: decided to reduce her wardrobe choices, just like Obama did,
Speaker 1: and so I created a challenge, a minimalist fashion challenge
Speaker 1: that I named Project three thirty three, where I would
Speaker 1: dress with thirty three items for three months, including clothes, jewelry, accessories,
Speaker 1: and shoes, not counting underwear, sleepware like at home loungewear
Speaker 1: or workout clothes. I didn't get rid of everything right away.
Speaker 1: I just boxed it up and got it out of
Speaker 1: sight for three months. I just thought there might be
Speaker 1: a lot to learn from that. So what did you learn? Well?
Speaker 1: So much. The first thing I learned is that my
Speaker 1: clothes and my closet was stressful, and that it sent
Speaker 1: me into the day feeling a bit frazzled, And it
Speaker 1: was just so relieving for me. I felt so good
Speaker 1: that I didn't have to look at all of my
Speaker 1: bad purchase decisions, the clothes that didn't fit me, the
Speaker 1: clothes I didn't enjoy or like, the clothes with tags
Speaker 1: still hanging. You know, I would buy something thinking it
Speaker 1: was such a great deal, and then I would never
Speaker 1: even cut the tags off and wear it. But not
Speaker 1: everyone takes to Project three thirty three straight away. Some
Speaker 1: people are even horrified by the idea. I definitely get
Speaker 1: some pushback from people wondering or challenging. You know, isn't
Speaker 1: that so boring, That's so uncreative. I could never do that.
Speaker 1: I remember the first day before I opened my closet,
Speaker 1: thinking I'm not going to have enough people are going
Speaker 1: to notice. But I remember when I opened the closet,
Speaker 1: all I felt was calm and peace, and here are
Speaker 1: my choices. You know, I don't have to express my
Speaker 1: creativity by what I wear. There wasn't anything I was
Speaker 1: ever really excited about. It was something that I felt
Speaker 1: compelled to do to fit in, and in reality I
Speaker 1: didn't have to work as hard as I did. Courtney's
Speaker 1: realization that she was a slave to her extensive wardrobe
Speaker 1: strikes a chord with many other women, and her Project
Speaker 1: three thirty three idea is catching on. I don't know
Speaker 1: officially how many people have done it, but I suspect
Speaker 1: it's in the tens of thousands. And it's so wonderful
Speaker 1: to see people sharing a lot of the same benefits
Speaker 1: in terms of less stress and anxiety, getting ready on time,
Speaker 1: more peaceful mournings, saving money, saving energy, being more creative
Speaker 1: in other areas of their life. It's fascinating. Courtney is
Speaker 1: a thoughtful and articulate advocate for simplifying our daily routines,
Speaker 1: and her book, Soulful Simplicity provides a lot of helpful advice,
Speaker 1: But it's Courtney's personal story that makes her argument all
Speaker 1: the more compelling, because Courtney was on the same choice
Speaker 1: treadmill as the rest of us until two thousand and six,
Speaker 1: when things started to really go wrong for her. I
Speaker 1: didn't feel well. I had vertigo and some tingling in
Speaker 1: my face. I was very tired, extremely fatigued. As a
Speaker 1: busy professional in mother, Courtney just assumed these unnerving feelings
Speaker 1: were nothing more than the side effects of stress. I
Speaker 1: was behind on a lot of work deadlines, I was
Speaker 1: volunteering at my daughter's school, I was traveling, and just
Speaker 1: trying to do all the things that most of us
Speaker 1: try to fit into a normal day, and it was overwhelming.
Speaker 1: On top of all of this, Courtney was also in
Speaker 1: training for a charity cycling of it in fifty mile
Speaker 1: race to support the Multiple Sclerosis Society. My boss at
Speaker 1: the time had MS and I was riding for him,
Speaker 1: but because I wasn't feeling well, I was in between
Speaker 1: doctor's appointments and tests and so dizzy that I really
Speaker 1: couldn't even ride my bike. I couldn't even walk a
Speaker 1: straight line most of the time. Eventually, she had to
Speaker 1: give up on the race. Her doctors had finally figured
Speaker 1: out what was wrong MS. The very disease that had
Speaker 1: struck her boss's nervous system was also at the root
Speaker 1: of courtney symptoms too. On top of really feeling crappy,
Speaker 1: to get this diagnosis that was terrible. I had nothing
Speaker 1: but fear initially, and in my case, I was diagnosed
Speaker 1: over the phone while I was at work. I said,
Speaker 1: what's next? What should I do? It was just the
Speaker 1: sort of awful phone call that Peter Eubull was telling
Speaker 1: us about. Courtney was immediately asked to make choices. She
Speaker 1: was totally unprepared for She said, why don't you come
Speaker 1: in and pick up some marketing kits for the drugs
Speaker 1: that are available and pick one? Oh my gosh, and
Speaker 1: I just thought, I mean, what's nuts? When I look
Speaker 1: back on it is I just thought, Okay, that's what
Speaker 1: you do, So that's what I did. The entire situation
Speaker 1: was overwhelming, and it forced Courtney to ask a lot
Speaker 1: of hard questions, what are you doing with your life?
Speaker 1: Is this how you want to live? Are these the
Speaker 1: choices that you want to make? I don't, by any
Speaker 1: means think that I caused this disease, but I know
Speaker 1: that the stress in my life contributed to exacerbations and relapses.
Speaker 1: And I started to see all of the things that
Speaker 1: I had built my life around and added to my
Speaker 1: life over the years that were stressful, and so I
Speaker 1: set out to eliminate as much of that stress as possible.
Speaker 1: What's most fascinating is that Project three thirty three hasn't
Speaker 1: just improved Courtney's mood and her bank account. Courtney also
Speaker 1: attributes reducing her choices with making her feel better physically.
Speaker 1: Since reducing her closet choices, Courtney's MS has improved. So
Speaker 1: now I am symptom free. For the most part. I
Speaker 1: feel better than I did even prior to my diagnosis
Speaker 1: because I'm taking so much better care of myself. Courtney's
Speaker 1: story isn't just about fitting out her wardrobe. Courtney's mind
Speaker 1: had lied to her for years and years, but she
Speaker 1: woke up to it and it's made her so much
Speaker 1: happier than she ever expected. I think that we're conditioned
Speaker 1: to believe that more is always the answer, and that
Speaker 1: will be happier with more. Things will be better with more,
Speaker 1: will be more loved if we prove ourselves more. But
Speaker 1: as it turns out, less, at least for me, is
Speaker 1: the answer. You know, less choosing, less doing. I'm much
Speaker 1: happier with doing less making this episode has that a
Speaker 1: real impact on me. Reducing the choice overload in our
Speaker 1: daily lives. It's no easy feat, but I'm trying. I
Speaker 1: recently decided to start my day with the exact same
Speaker 1: breakfast every morning. It's not much, but it's one less
Speaker 1: decision to contend with before I get to the real
Speaker 1: choices that face me in the grind ahead. So look
Speaker 1: for your own little strategies to reduce choices and apply
Speaker 1: them whenever you can and steal some hints from the masters,
Speaker 1: like research or berry shorts. He shared a great tip
Speaker 1: that I'll try next time I sit down at a restaurant.
Speaker 1: I don't even look at the menu. I don't care
Speaker 1: how many options there are. I wait for everyone else
Speaker 1: to order, and then I choose whichever of those dishes
Speaker 1: sounds best to me. So, in effect, I'm choosing from
Speaker 1: three or from five, and not from fifteen. And so
Speaker 1: I'll leave this episode with a final thought, which is,
Speaker 1: don't get bogged down by all the big menus in life.
Speaker 1: Ask yourself, how can I cut down on some of
Speaker 1: the decision in my own life? And how can I
Speaker 1: help my friends get happier doing the same. Here's one
Speaker 1: easy first step. If a friend is looking for a
Speaker 1: new podcast among the seven hundred thousand available, you can
Speaker 1: just tell them, Hey, you should try The Happiness Lab
Speaker 1: with doctor Laurie Santos. The Happiness Lab is co written
Speaker 1: and produced by Ryan Dilley. The show is mixed and
Speaker 1: mastered by Evan Viola and edited by Julia Barton, fact
Speaker 1: checking by Joseph Friedman, and our original music was composed
Speaker 1: by Zachary Silver. Special thanks to Mila Belle, Carl mcgliori,
Speaker 1: Heather Faine, Maggie Taylor, Maya Kanig, and Jacob Weisberg. The
Speaker 1: Happiness Lab is brought to you by Pushkin Industries and
Speaker 1: me Doctor Laurie Santos