Speaker 1: Pushkin. Hey, they're Happiness Lab listeners. Today, I have a
Speaker 1: really special treat for you. You see, there's this amazing
Speaker 1: podcast called ten Percent Happier, hosted by Dan Harris. In
Speaker 1: case you're not yet a listener, here's a deal on
Speaker 1: ten Percent Happier. Dan interviews researchers, celebrities, and meditation teachers
Speaker 1: about how to train your brain. And there's a lot
Speaker 1: of crossover with the things we talk about on the
Speaker 1: Happiness Lab, things like mindfulness, staying present, and well happiness.
Speaker 1: Right now, they're doing a whole series on a subject
Speaker 1: that's near and dear to my heart, how to have
Speaker 1: a better work life balance. So Dan invited me on
Speaker 1: the show to talk about some science back strategies for
Speaker 1: heating the reset button at work. We tape the interview
Speaker 1: live on Facebook a few weeks ago, and today we're
Speaker 1: bringing that whole full episode to you without further ado.
Speaker 1: Here it is very happy to be talking to doctor
Speaker 1: Laurie Santos post of the excellent Happiness Lab podcast, which
Speaker 1: I recommend to everybody. Also Yale Professor Laurie. Great to Sue,
Speaker 1: thanks so much for being on our livestream today. I
Speaker 1: am always happy to be associated with you in any
Speaker 1: possible way, soa same same. So we're talking about work
Speaker 1: and all the glory and suffering therein, and I know
Speaker 1: one of the subjects you wanted to talk about as
Speaker 1: it pretends to work is time affluence. What does that mean?
Speaker 1: Time affluence is this funny term that social scientists are
Speaker 1: using these days, which is basically your subjective sense that
Speaker 1: you have some free time. It's the sense that you're
Speaker 1: wealthy in time. You know, if somebody calls you to
Speaker 1: schedule something, it's not like, well, how about never, or
Speaker 1: how about twenty twenty three or something like that. It
Speaker 1: tends to be the opposite sensation of what we often experience,
Speaker 1: which is what's known as time famine. We're literally starving
Speaker 1: for time. And the evidence is cool is suggest that
Speaker 1: time famine works a lot like hunger famine. You're kind
Speaker 1: of triaging things. There's like evidence of stress on your body,
Speaker 1: and like time famine has a huge hit on your
Speaker 1: well being. In fact, some work by the Harvard psychologist
Speaker 1: Ashley Willins suggest that if you self report being time famished,
Speaker 1: that's as bad for your well being as if you
Speaker 1: self report being unemployed. We know unemployment is a huge
Speaker 1: hit on people's happiness, but just feeling like you don't
Speaker 1: have a lot of time can do the same thing.
Speaker 1: Ashley was on my show. I think she's phenomenal, and
Speaker 1: every time I talk about this issue, I can feel
Speaker 1: my nervous system getting activated because this idea of time
Speaker 1: starvation and it's opposite of time affluence. It's you know,
Speaker 1: I do not feel affluent in terms of time, but
Speaker 1: this is one of the reasons you made this recent
Speaker 1: job change. I'm not sure you're comfortable sharing, but you
Speaker 1: just made a big change for your own time affluence
Speaker 1: is my understanding, right I did. I decided to leave
Speaker 1: ABC News, where I had been for twenty one years,
Speaker 1: and I loved ABC changed my life working there that
Speaker 1: I got to go all over the planet and cover
Speaker 1: amazing stories. And for eleven years I was the anchor
Speaker 1: of weekend Good Morning America, which I really loved doing
Speaker 1: that show, especially it was an am quite attached to
Speaker 1: my co hosts. But something had to give because I
Speaker 1: was working seven days a week, like really working seven
Speaker 1: days a week, and so I would finish a long
Speaker 1: week of working for ten percent happier hosting my podcast,
Speaker 1: and I'm writing a book, which I try to do
Speaker 1: five six hours a day on that I am helping
Speaker 1: to run the company. And I would finish a long
Speaker 1: week of that and then roll right into getting up
Speaker 1: at three forty five on Saturday and Sunday mornings, which
Speaker 1: you know, I just turned fifty. It's you know, it
Speaker 1: was a bit like taking a flight to Asia every
Speaker 1: week in terms of having to get up that early
Speaker 1: and recover, and so something I had to give. And
Speaker 1: I made a hard decision, which was to leave ABC,
Speaker 1: which I wasn't really happy about, but I did it.
Speaker 1: This is the thing that I think so many of
Speaker 1: us faced, where we're often in positions where our time
Speaker 1: is just so filled up that something has to give.
Speaker 1: And sometimes if you don't make a hard decision, then
Speaker 1: the thing that gives is something that's really bad for
Speaker 1: your well being. Like the thing that gives is time
Speaker 1: with your family, or the thing that gives is that,
Speaker 1: you know, sleep, or your weekly exercise class or something.
Speaker 1: Sometimes making an active decision to take time back, the
Speaker 1: research shows, is like a real path towards happiness, and
Speaker 1: it gets you off this bad trajectory that's only going
Speaker 1: to get worse. You know, if this is where you
Speaker 1: are when you're fifty. What is it going to look
Speaker 1: like when you're fifty five, sixty and so on. It's
Speaker 1: too early for me to know whether leaving ABC is
Speaker 1: going to be the path to some big bump up
Speaker 1: and happiness. I mean, I was already pretty happy. It's
Speaker 1: such a huge change, and I just know that it
Speaker 1: takes for me. It takes a long time to metabolize
Speaker 1: something like that, you know, And it's only been a
Speaker 1: few weeks as we're talking right now since I left
Speaker 1: ABC News. And in terms of time affluence, though, all
Speaker 1: it did was remove a very costly from a physiological
Speaker 1: and psychological standpoint, habit or hobby on the weekends. So
Speaker 1: now I have my weekends like a normal person. But
Speaker 1: my Monday through Friday still feels as jam packed as ever.
Speaker 1: When somebody calls me and says, hey, can I get
Speaker 1: on your calendar? That makes me nervous every time that happens.
Speaker 1: So what are your thoughts about how to deal with that.
Speaker 1: There's a bunch of strategies you can use to kind
Speaker 1: of feel better. I mean, one is really to reframe
Speaker 1: the time saving things that you are doing. You know,
Speaker 1: so many of us are often spending our money in
Speaker 1: subtle ways to get back time. You know. I know
Speaker 1: my husband and I we get curbside pickup or take
Speaker 1: out every once in a while. And if you just
Speaker 1: kind of get your takeout and eat it not mindfully
Speaker 1: while you're checking your email, that's one thing. But if
Speaker 1: you get your takeout and you put a time stamp
Speaker 1: on it, I just get this burger and fries, that's
Speaker 1: a regret and need to fry up and potatoes I
Speaker 1: didn't need to chop and dishes I didn't need to do.
Speaker 1: That was two hours and forty five minutes of my
Speaker 1: time that I just saved. Just the act of framing
Speaker 1: something that way, it's like, oh, it just kind of
Speaker 1: takes that off your plate. And that's been a really
Speaker 1: powerful one for me from a quick takeout, you know,
Speaker 1: hiring somebody to do unwanted tasks. We often feel guilty
Speaker 1: about these things, but it can be a way that
Speaker 1: we're putting act time like into our schedules in a
Speaker 1: way that can feel amazing. It sounds like you do
Speaker 1: a thing that most of us do mindlessly, maybe even sheepishly.
Speaker 1: I'm going to order take out tonight because I don't
Speaker 1: feel like cooking, but you reframe it and deliberately intentionally
Speaker 1: savor the time savings. Yeah, and I do that for
Speaker 1: like different takeout the burger and fries. You know, maybe
Speaker 1: that saves me like two hours, but you know, like
Speaker 1: a good pad tie, I was not going to do that, right, Like,
Speaker 1: I was not going to figure out where I get
Speaker 1: pad tie noodles and all that stuff like that would
Speaker 1: be really hard for me to do. And that's actually
Speaker 1: a pretty big time savings. And we can do that
Speaker 1: with other things. People pay for a cleaning service or
Speaker 1: you know, hire the neighbor's kids to mow the lawn.
Speaker 1: These things can feel privileged, but even if you're paying
Speaker 1: ten bucks to the neighbor's kid to help out, like again,
Speaker 1: it's a time savings that you get. The problem is
Speaker 1: most of us have a little bit of discretionary income,
Speaker 1: but we tend not to spend it to get time back.
Speaker 1: But when we invest it to get time back, then
Speaker 1: that discretionary income winds up going further. I interrupted you
Speaker 1: before you were going to go onto another. Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: the second tip, second ship. This second one has been
Speaker 1: an enormous one for me, which is to make sure
Speaker 1: that you're using the free time you do have. So
Speaker 1: one of the many amazing things I learned in Ashley
Speaker 1: Willen's book that still sticks with me is the fact
Speaker 1: that if you look at people's time records, we actually
Speaker 1: have more free time now than we did like fifteen
Speaker 1: to twenty years ago. That feels shocking to me. It
Speaker 1: feels like, how could we ever have been more time
Speaker 1: famished than we are right now. The problem is that
Speaker 1: the time budgets looked different. Fifteen years ago. We had
Speaker 1: more big blocks of free time, So now we have
Speaker 1: more actual objective amount of time, but it's broken up
Speaker 1: into these tiny chunks five minutes before this zoom meeting
Speaker 1: here and ten minutes when your kid falls asleep early.
Speaker 1: This is what researchers called time confetti. These like little
Speaker 1: pieces of time that are sort of floating in the ether.
Speaker 1: And you have a lot of these, but they feel
Speaker 1: so small that you never want to do anything good
Speaker 1: with them. I can find myself like, oh, I got
Speaker 1: an extra five minutes. I'll scroll through that feed that
Speaker 1: I just looked through again, you know if I missed something,
Speaker 1: or you know, I'll put a little extra time into
Speaker 1: this email or something right, we do these things that
Speaker 1: don't build us up, and then we feel like we
Speaker 1: don't have any time. And so one great recommendation is
Speaker 1: to make a sort of time confetti to do list,
Speaker 1: but not a work to do list, like a kind
Speaker 1: of well being you know, user time wisely to do list.
Speaker 1: So on mine are five minutes here and there. That's
Speaker 1: an extra three minutes of deep breaths I can do
Speaker 1: these days. I've been trying to write in a gratitude
Speaker 1: app more often, and I don't have a set time
Speaker 1: to do it. But during my time affluent, it's like
Speaker 1: my moments of time confetti. That's the moment to do.
Speaker 1: It's like up five minutes before that meeting, we pull
Speaker 1: out my phone and scribble a few things I'm feeling
Speaker 1: grateful for. These little moments can add up if you
Speaker 1: use them well. I love that. What about the notion
Speaker 1: of a four day work week. What does the literature
Speaker 1: say about whether we can actually get our work done
Speaker 1: and whether this attractive idea does lead to a boost
Speaker 1: in happiness. There's only a few studies coming out, but
Speaker 1: the ones that there are are really suggesting that it
Speaker 1: can be a powerful way to boost your well being
Speaker 1: which like no surprise, that's like research that's published in
Speaker 1: the journal, Like no kidding, right, you know. But what's
Speaker 1: more amazing from these studies is it turns out that
Speaker 1: people on the four day work week wind up being
Speaker 1: more productive rather than less. They get more stuff done.
Speaker 1: And we kind of all get this when you've had
Speaker 1: the super long day, if you're just kind of dead
Speaker 1: tired and feeling burned out, you do stuff at work,
Speaker 1: but you're more kind of like churning. You know, you're
Speaker 1: like kind of going through emails or like checking stuff.
Speaker 1: You're doing stuff to tick off your list to feel
Speaker 1: like you're being productive, but you're not doing like the
Speaker 1: deep innovative work. You know, for me as academic, I'm
Speaker 1: rarely doing the deep thinking work. I'm just kind of
Speaker 1: getting stuff off my list. And when you chunk out
Speaker 1: a whole day you got to get to the important stuff,
Speaker 1: you wind up prioritizing it more so the thing that
Speaker 1: drops off isn't the important creative work. It's often just
Speaker 1: the churning. So like, who cares if you're not churning
Speaker 1: as much, take that day off where you really have
Speaker 1: some real leisure. This haunts me. This idea, though, because
Speaker 1: I don't know if I'm going to be able to
Speaker 1: articulate it. But I have been trying to get better
Speaker 1: at not working when I'm exhausted. But I am haunted
Speaker 1: by guilt when I do that, because I am thinking
Speaker 1: about all the things I could be getting done even
Speaker 1: on You know, I have one huge creative project right now,
Speaker 1: which is the book that I'm writing, and I've been
Speaker 1: working on it for three and a half years and
Speaker 1: I've got another six months at least left to go.
Speaker 1: I know on some level that if I take a
Speaker 1: day off and do nothing, I will be more productive
Speaker 1: when I return to the book a day Hence, but
Speaker 1: I often struggle to allow myself to do that. Does
Speaker 1: that make any sense to you what I'm saying, Oh
Speaker 1: my gosh, it's like you're in my brain. Like this
Speaker 1: happens to me all the time. And I think that
Speaker 1: guilt is twofold. Right. One is we have this misconception like, oh,
Speaker 1: I should be working. You can't be working. Your brain dead,
Speaker 1: You're not functioning at the same level. You're not going
Speaker 1: to get the work done that you believe you will.
Speaker 1: But the second problem is that sometimes that guilt creeps
Speaker 1: in because when we finally do take time off, we
Speaker 1: don't let ourselves do anything that's really engaging, that's flow filled,
Speaker 1: that's fun. Gotta have this crazy work week, and then
Speaker 1: I'm feeling totally burnt out, and then I don't have
Speaker 1: the energy to do something interesting or fun with my friends.
Speaker 1: I just like PLoP in front of Netflix, honestly, And
Speaker 1: sometimes I'm so burned out that I can't even pick anything.
Speaker 1: I'm so depleted that to just make a choice of
Speaker 1: which movies, so I literally will spend an embarrassing hour
Speaker 1: just watching the different you know, documentary scroll by, like
Speaker 1: not that one, and then I feel gross and nasty afterwards.
Speaker 1: And yes, it's true. When I'm doing that, the guilt
Speaker 1: is setting in, which is like I just wasted a
Speaker 1: half hour scrolling through little blocks on a screen, like
Speaker 1: I could have been working on my book, or I
Speaker 1: could have been working on this project. But if you
Speaker 1: take a break earlier, when you can really engage and
Speaker 1: do something that's real fun, that gives you flow, that
Speaker 1: feels playful, often that involves other people so kind of
Speaker 1: boost your social connection, these are ways to really take
Speaker 1: a break, and those are the energizing things. So part
Speaker 1: of the problem is that we don't take a break.
Speaker 1: But part of the problem is that when we do
Speaker 1: take a break, we don't take like a good break,
Speaker 1: a nutritious break, something that's going to build us up.
Speaker 1: We kind of just like PLoP around. First of all,
Speaker 1: that Netflix moment you described, you were in my brain
Speaker 1: for that, And to be fair, it's not just Netflix,
Speaker 1: it's any Yeah, yeah, exactly, you're all implicated. We're not
Speaker 1: hating on Netflix here, but yeah, but in terms of
Speaker 1: having free time that we're using, well, i'll give you
Speaker 1: an example of something that I came up with recently,
Speaker 1: and I'll be interested to hear what you're doing to
Speaker 1: use your free time. Well, when you actually do that,
Speaker 1: as you know, as a parent, playing with little children
Speaker 1: can be incredibly boring and frustrating, and then sometimes you
Speaker 1: can hate yourself for being frustrated and bored with your children.
Speaker 1: It could be a real toilet vortex. And I have
Speaker 1: a six soon to be seven year old and I
Speaker 1: love playing with him. It's it's better now that he's
Speaker 1: six than it was when he was three, but sometimes
Speaker 1: it's still pretty boring. And so what I did was
Speaker 1: I got as a drum set. I have been playing
Speaker 1: drums since I was ten, and he's wanted to play
Speaker 1: drums for a while, and so we play together and
Speaker 1: that is really really fun, and I also use it
Speaker 1: in my downtime when he's not around. This is so
Speaker 1: funny because so we just finished a podcast episode about
Speaker 1: fun and about how I don't know how to have fun.
Speaker 1: So I tagged in fun expert, the journalist Katherine Price,
Speaker 1: who has this great new book called The Power of Fun,
Speaker 1: and she recently actually has decided because you know, we
Speaker 1: talked about what I like to do and what I
Speaker 1: have fun with, and I like to do music, but
Speaker 1: I'm not that great at music. So she has decided.
Speaker 1: In fact, I have this long text thread from her
Speaker 1: where she's like, you need to learn how to play
Speaker 1: the drums, like you will really like the drums, like
Speaker 1: you should starting to play the drums. So Dad, this
Speaker 1: is inspiring me to listen to Catherine and actually learn
Speaker 1: how to play the drums. But you're exactly on point.
Speaker 1: I mean, what you're doing is you're finding an activity
Speaker 1: that's giving you both some playful flow, like connected where
Speaker 1: you're both playing together. And this is the definition of fun, right.
Speaker 1: You know, Katherine talks about this idea that fun is playful,
Speaker 1: connected flow, and you're kind of finding all the parts
Speaker 1: of it in that drone practice with your son. I
Speaker 1: think one of the reasons that kid play feels kind
Speaker 1: of yucky is that it's sort of boring for adults.
Speaker 1: It's not really challenging for the adults. But there are
Speaker 1: lots of things you can do with your kids that
Speaker 1: really are challenging for you too. One of the other
Speaker 1: folks we interviewed for our fun episode is the journalist
Speaker 1: Tom Vanderbilt, who wrote this book called Beginners, and he
Speaker 1: had this harrowing moment with his own i think nine
Speaker 1: year old at the time, where he was taking her
Speaker 1: to like chess practice and drum practice and swimming lessons
Speaker 1: and all these things, and she was like learning and
Speaker 1: having a good time, and he'd sit there while she
Speaker 1: was doing that and like futs around on some feed
Speaker 1: or check his email, feeling bored, and he was like,
Speaker 1: wait a minute, hang on, I could be doing that
Speaker 1: fun thing too, Like I could be learning in the
Speaker 1: same way that she's learning, and in fact, we could
Speaker 1: do it together and that would be like a huge
Speaker 1: boost because now you know, we're doing something together. We're
Speaker 1: having like parent kid bonding time, and I'm learning something
Speaker 1: and having fun. And he talks about how you know,
Speaker 1: this has been amazing for him, both in terms of
Speaker 1: changing his identity, especially kind of giving him a sense
Speaker 1: of like he's learning something new. He's not just his job, right,
Speaker 1: so when the job's feeling stressful and is burning him out,
Speaker 1: he can feel like, Wamacho's player now, or I'm taking
Speaker 1: surfing lessons or something fun. But also it's just a
Speaker 1: way to like kind of connect with his kids and
Speaker 1: sort of show up and not be this bad example
Speaker 1: where your leisure is an adult looks really boring and
Speaker 1: miserable to the kids. Right, You're showing them adults can
Speaker 1: learn and have fun too. I love that. I love
Speaker 1: that starting to take my son to drum lessons, and
Speaker 1: I'm going to make the lou the amazing drum teacher,
Speaker 1: teach me a few things. You'll get to hear more
Speaker 1: of my conversation with Dan Harris on his podcast Ten
Speaker 1: Percent Happier After the break, The Happiness Lab will be
Speaker 1: right back. Okay, so let's let's keep going with some
Speaker 1: of the tips that you have for how to make
Speaker 1: work suck less than it does so often for so
Speaker 1: many of us, you have this notion of job crafting.
Speaker 1: What does that mean? So job crafting is a term
Speaker 1: that my colleague year at the Yell School of Management,
Speaker 1: Amy Resineski, came up with. And this is the idea
Speaker 1: that you know, our jobs have like on paper what
Speaker 1: we're supposed to do, you know, like the list of
Speaker 1: tasks that we're supposed to get done or so we
Speaker 1: don't get fired. But within that list of tasks, for
Speaker 1: pretty much all of us, there's a lot of flexibility
Speaker 1: around the edges of what we kind of emphasize of
Speaker 1: how we frame it in terms of what we are
Speaker 1: actually doing in the day to day. And job crafting
Speaker 1: is the act of building in more stuff that you
Speaker 1: find valuable and fun. She suggests, starting with the kinds
Speaker 1: of virtues that you care about. Often researchers call these
Speaker 1: signature strengths. So we all have these things that'll kind
Speaker 1: of get us a going. Maybe you love to learn,
Speaker 1: or maybe you love to be social, or maybe you
Speaker 1: like things that require bravery or it's kind of a challenge,
Speaker 1: or you take on some risk. Maybe you like doing
Speaker 1: things that are creative where you're building stuff with your
Speaker 1: hands or something. We all have these kind of things,
Speaker 1: and her ideas with job crafting, you kind of put
Speaker 1: more of that in your job. It's not necessarily in
Speaker 1: your job description, but you kind of build in it
Speaker 1: any way. Now when people sometimes hear about job crafting,
Speaker 1: they think, well, that might work for some cool jobs
Speaker 1: like ours, where we're podcasters and we could be really creative,
Speaker 1: But what about really boring jobs? And that's where Amy's
Speaker 1: work is so awesome. She does these lovely studies where
Speaker 1: she studies folks who have the job that you might
Speaker 1: not think of as the most creative or flexible job.
Speaker 1: She studies hospital janitorial staff members. You know, so these
Speaker 1: are people who are literally cleaning up vomit and cancer
Speaker 1: ward not a flexible position, but she finds that a
Speaker 1: decent number of them say that their job is a calling,
Speaker 1: that they wouldn't change it for anything in the world,
Speaker 1: and when she looks at what they do, they're the
Speaker 1: ones who are using a lot of these virtues, these
Speaker 1: signature strengths. She tells us one story and talked about
Speaker 1: it on my podcast, where she was interviewing one of
Speaker 1: these janitorial staff members who said that his job he
Speaker 1: was a person who cleaned up vomit in a chemo
Speaker 1: therapy award, And he said that his job wasn't to
Speaker 1: clean him up people being sick. His job was to
Speaker 1: cheer people up, you know, after they were feeling really crappy.
Speaker 1: Imagine the situation like you're in chemo, you cancer, you
Speaker 1: get sick all over the floor. This sucks, you feel awful,
Speaker 1: This is a low point in your life. And this
Speaker 1: staff member would come in and he saw his job
Speaker 1: as to make you laugh. His standard joke was, you
Speaker 1: keep vomiting because that's how I get my paycheck. Like,
Speaker 1: I'll have to do overtime if you vomit extra. So
Speaker 1: now the patient is laughing. He's laughing, he feels like
Speaker 1: he's done something genuinely meaningful and good. He's really helps someone.
Speaker 1: And Amy's claim is if ganitorial staff members can do
Speaker 1: this in their work and still get their job done,
Speaker 1: all of us can do this in our own way.
Speaker 1: And this is something I talk with my students about.
Speaker 1: You know, so many of my students are stuck in
Speaker 1: like majors that they're kind of annoyed by y're getting
Speaker 1: through premed coursework, and it's like, well, how can you
Speaker 1: build in the fun parts? There are things that you
Speaker 1: find fun. Maybe you want to just be more social
Speaker 1: and you come up with a quiz bowl to like
Speaker 1: do your problem sets, or maybe you want you have
Speaker 1: like a love of learnings on the edges. When you
Speaker 1: find something cool, you watch extra five minute YouTube video
Speaker 1: about it. If you take charge of this process that
Speaker 1: you're stuck in, it can both feel like you have
Speaker 1: some control, but then you get to exercise these things
Speaker 1: that you love about life anyway that are going to
Speaker 1: build you up. Here from my mind is going with this.
Speaker 1: So you just say you're at a company, and you
Speaker 1: are a younger person in a company, and you have
Speaker 1: a somewhat humdrum job, but there are ways that you
Speaker 1: could see yourself advancing that would be interesting within that company.
Speaker 1: But we all know that maybe we don't know, but
Speaker 1: we should know that the modern workplace was created by
Speaker 1: white men for white men. And you don't feel comfortable
Speaker 1: advocating for yourself to do this kind of job crafting
Speaker 1: because nothing in your history tells you it will go. Well,
Speaker 1: what do you say to people like that? Yeah, well,
Speaker 1: I think you know, when you look at Amy's work,
Speaker 1: what you find is often the people who are doing
Speaker 1: the job crafting, we're doing it in ways that their
Speaker 1: managers didn't necessarily even know about you. So there's job
Speaker 1: crafting in a way where you're like, if I could
Speaker 1: really harness my strengths, and that's my move to get
Speaker 1: promotions and stuff like that. That's kind of one move.
Speaker 1: But another move is you don't care about promotions or
Speaker 1: like getting a raise. Like what you want is just
Speaker 1: to like not hate your work. You want to not
Speaker 1: be miserable every Monday morning when you walk in. And
Speaker 1: that's where these job crafting things I think can be
Speaker 1: the most powerful. Nobody cares if you see, your job
Speaker 1: is making sure you chat with folks at the office cooler,
Speaker 1: or like take an extra step to like, you know,
Speaker 1: have a five minute conversation with the administrative assistant in
Speaker 1: your office. But you're going to do a little bit
Speaker 1: more creative work on the edges or learn something on
Speaker 1: the side. That's not stuff to necessarily be moving up.
Speaker 1: It's just making your life more fun while you're spending
Speaker 1: literally a third of your life at your job. You know,
Speaker 1: eight hours a day, we get hopefully eight hours of
Speaker 1: sleeping if you're following the well being tips and sleeping enough.
Speaker 1: But then there's another eight hours where you're like at
Speaker 1: your job, if not more than that. So finding ways
Speaker 1: to love it can be really powerful, even if it's
Speaker 1: not necessarily for career advancement. I'm convinced. Let's talk about
Speaker 1: another way, And I think this is particularly relevant in
Speaker 1: a pandemic, where the separation between work and the rest
Speaker 1: of your life could get very blurry. It was relevant
Speaker 1: even before the pandemic because we all have our office
Speaker 1: in our pocket in the form of a phone, But
Speaker 1: now the physical office is the dining room for many
Speaker 1: of us. Still, how do we not take the stress
Speaker 1: of the day into our interactions with everybody else? Yeah,
Speaker 1: this is so much more important now, especially for folks
Speaker 1: who are still working at home. Right because, for better
Speaker 1: or for worse, there was often a natural separation between
Speaker 1: the work day and walking home. Yeah, you know, you
Speaker 1: have your office in your pocket, but there was a
Speaker 1: moment that you got into your car and like there
Speaker 1: was a separation of physical separation between where you thought
Speaker 1: about work and where you thought about home. Or maybe
Speaker 1: you hopped on the subway and just kind of left.
Speaker 1: These things are subtle, but our brain picks up on
Speaker 1: them because their habits. They're little rituals that we do
Speaker 1: all the time. That quickly, in March of twenty twenty,
Speaker 1: a lot of these things kind of went away, And
Speaker 1: so we need some way to tell our brain, hey,
Speaker 1: we're shutting things off right now, we're moving away. This
Speaker 1: was the commute home basically, And so we can figure
Speaker 1: out stupid ways to do that. Like the beauty of rituals,
Speaker 1: our brain doesn't really care what it is. You just
Speaker 1: have to give it something over and over again. And
Speaker 1: so I have colleagues who, for example, at the end
Speaker 1: of their work day shut the laptop and throw like
Speaker 1: a towel over it, just to be like the towels
Speaker 1: over it the day is over. I had another colleague
Speaker 1: kind of tiny New York apartment type thing where they
Speaker 1: sat at the kitchen table to work and then they
Speaker 1: literally flipped the laptop around and sat on the other
Speaker 1: side of the kitchen table like and that was like leisure, right,
Speaker 1: And it sounds so dumb, but like our brain prays
Speaker 1: attention to these little physical cues. So giving your brain
Speaker 1: some can just sort of have a little separation. I
Speaker 1: mean we all learned this as kids with mister Rogers.
Speaker 1: Where he cuts home, he takes the shoes off, he
Speaker 1: puts the slippers on. Mister Rogers was deeply wise about
Speaker 1: well being, and this is just another domain in which
Speaker 1: he was. So what's your slipper going to be? How
Speaker 1: do you do just some act that you always shut
Speaker 1: off for work? And if your kids happen to still
Speaker 1: be studying from home, I think this can be even
Speaker 1: more powerful for them. Our brains don't have a separation,
Speaker 1: but their brains are still growing. They're even more affected
Speaker 1: by this kind of clutter in their routine. So giving
Speaker 1: them some cues that they can use to be like,
Speaker 1: all right, we're shutting down for the day can be
Speaker 1: super powerful. One thing that we instituted really during the
Speaker 1: pandemic that we hadn't done before that has been a
Speaker 1: great dividing line between the work day and the rest
Speaker 1: of the day is family dinner, which we had not
Speaker 1: been doing in a ritual way until we're all confined
Speaker 1: to this tight space together five forty five six o'clock,
Speaker 1: we do dinner together and that has been really helpful. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, we forget that there haven't been these long standing,
Speaker 1: often quite ancient traditions that we in the modern world
Speaker 1: kind of just like a drop off, like oh, family dinner,
Speaker 1: so silly, or like, oh, you know, putting the slippers
Speaker 1: on when you get home, so silly. Right, But these
Speaker 1: things are doing psychological work, powerful psychological work to get
Speaker 1: our mind kind of ready for next sorts of steps, right,
Speaker 1: and so anything we can do to build that in
Speaker 1: for the workday can be incredibly powerful. I mean, another
Speaker 1: one I know you've talked about is that commute home
Speaker 1: can be a nice time to do a couple deep breaths,
Speaker 1: or maybe the first thing you do when you walk
Speaker 1: in before you're bringing your whole work emotionally home to
Speaker 1: deal with your family is do a quick ten minute meditation, right, Like,
Speaker 1: these are moments where we can do all kinds of
Speaker 1: things to separate between the workday and the rest of
Speaker 1: our lives. One of the most painful parts of work
Speaker 1: for me over the last couple of decades, in particular
Speaker 1: and television news, has been comparing myself to other people
Speaker 1: and wondering why they're getting this job and I'm not
Speaker 1: getting it, etc. Etc. Do you have thoughts on this
Speaker 1: kind of social comparison and how we can surfeit rather
Speaker 1: than be drowned by it. We're in it. Well. One
Speaker 1: is recognizing that it's happening, you know, like all things
Speaker 1: I think in this space of being mindful enough to notice. Oh,
Speaker 1: the reason I feel crappy about my salary today is
Speaker 1: I just heard about Joe's rays in the office. The
Speaker 1: reason I feel bad about my performance is I just
Speaker 1: heard someone else get an accolade. These are the things
Speaker 1: that if we just start noticing them, we can start
Speaker 1: acting on them. The other thing is you start noticing
Speaker 1: these things is to recognize that our brains really suck
Speaker 1: when it comes to social comparison. There can be a
Speaker 1: billion people who are doing worse than us, and our
Speaker 1: brain locks onto the one person in our career or
Speaker 1: in our life who seems to be doing as good,
Speaker 1: if not better, and holds onto that and directs all
Speaker 1: of our attentional resources at that. My favorite example of
Speaker 1: this is not in the workplace, although I guess it's
Speaker 1: in the workplace for some folks whose job is to
Speaker 1: be an Olympian. It was this famous study that looked
Speaker 1: at olympians on the stand and what emotion they were experiencing.
Speaker 1: So you win a gold medal, of what emotions are
Speaker 1: experiencing generally pretty positive, you're joyous, you're happy, and so on.
Speaker 1: You win a silver medal, What emotions are you experiencing?
Speaker 1: You think, maybe not as good as gold, but pretty good.
Speaker 1: You're like taking home your second best on the planet.
Speaker 1: Turns out no, When scientists analyze the facial expressions of
Speaker 1: silver medalists, what they find is that their emotions are
Speaker 1: showing things more like contempt, deep sadness, anger. Run the
Speaker 1: list of negative emotions and you see that expressed in
Speaker 1: their face. And what's the problem. There's a social comparison.
Speaker 1: They're not looking at the billions of people who were
Speaker 1: not good enough to make it to the Olympics or
Speaker 1: get on the stand. They're looking at the one person
Speaker 1: who beat them. But the remedy for that comes with
Speaker 1: the other person who's standing on the stand, who's the
Speaker 1: bronze medalist. So you might think if the silver medalist
Speaker 1: is feeling contempt and disgust and all these things, than
Speaker 1: the bronze medalist is even more in the dumps. But
Speaker 1: it turns out that if you analyze bronze medalist facial expressions,
Speaker 1: they're psyched. In some cases, they're showing expressions of a
Speaker 1: late that are stronger than the Gold Medalist. And again
Speaker 1: here's the you know, social comparison at work. Bronze medalist
Speaker 1: isn't comparing themselves against the gold Medalist. They were seconds away,
Speaker 1: you know, multiple people were in between them, right, but
Speaker 1: they're thinking, oh, man, if I was just two seconds slower,
Speaker 1: like point two seconds slower, i'd be going home empty
Speaker 1: handed by the skin of my teeth. I am up
Speaker 1: here walking away with the metal. And they're stoked. And
Speaker 1: the Bronze Medalist is helpful because it makes us realize
Speaker 1: that with a little bit of cognitive work, we can
Speaker 1: kind of reframe however we're doing. We can kind of
Speaker 1: look to the fact that, hey, we've actually done pretty
Speaker 1: well no matter where we are. We might not have
Speaker 1: billions of people below us, but there's some folks below us.
Speaker 1: The other thing is that you can tend to not
Speaker 1: just it the other people who are below you, but
Speaker 1: at yourself kind of be competing against yourself, and that
Speaker 1: can be a powerful way to kind of feel good
Speaker 1: because hopefully you're going in a positive direction, and if
Speaker 1: you're not a means a time for exercising a different
Speaker 1: thing that I think can make work better, which is
Speaker 1: a little self compassion. But you know, competing with yourself
Speaker 1: and having that competition stick to wherever you were before
Speaker 1: can be a powerful way to feel a little bit
Speaker 1: better too. Have you heard of a kind of meditation
Speaker 1: practice called moodita? No, I don't know this one, t
Speaker 1: set okay, I'm going to tell the great doctor Laurie
Speaker 1: Santo something she doesn't know. We can do it now, probably, yeah,
Speaker 1: So I will teach how to do it. This is
Speaker 1: an ancient Buddhist meditation practice. Moodita translates roughly to sympathetic joy.
Speaker 1: It's kind of the opposite of schadenfreud. You're taking pleasure
Speaker 1: and the success of somebody else. Is very hard skill
Speaker 1: to build, and I think it's not coincidence that the
Speaker 1: Buddha honed in on building this skill, because it really
Speaker 1: can shave down on one of the primary sources of
Speaker 1: our unhappiness as members of Homo sapiens, which is falling
Speaker 1: into what meditators often call comparing mind this mode that
Speaker 1: you've just described, or you really can't feel gratitude or
Speaker 1: take pleasure in anything if you're just constantly trying to
Speaker 1: keep up with your brother in law, so Moudita practice.
Speaker 1: It's going to sound to some, especially the skeptics, and
Speaker 1: it certainly sounded to me a little hokey at the
Speaker 1: beginning of Some people have no problem with what some
Speaker 1: of us will find hokey, but just a name that
Speaker 1: it's it's a bit forced at the very least. So
Speaker 1: you can just kind of close your eyes and picture
Speaker 1: somebody who's doing really well. For the listeners, you can't
Speaker 1: see that Laurie has her eyes closed out, closed mind too,
Speaker 1: So just pick somebody. Don't start with you know, your
Speaker 1: arch nemesis, who just got some raise that is really
Speaker 1: burning for you. You can start with somebody really easy.
Speaker 1: Sometimes I pick my kid, be aforementioned six year old,
Speaker 1: and our kitten. They play really nicely together and they're
Speaker 1: having a great time. And so just pick Alexander and
Speaker 1: Ozymandias the kitten and imagine them scampering around together. As Laura,
Speaker 1: you might pick somebody's easy for you and just imagine that,
Speaker 1: and then you can repeat these phrases, may your happiness increase.
Speaker 1: You can start maybe with just may you be happy,
Speaker 1: and then move to May your happiness grow increase, repeating
Speaker 1: these kinds of phrases, and then you might move to
Speaker 1: somebody who's a little bit more challenging. Somebody you like
Speaker 1: at the office or in your personal life, who's had
Speaker 1: something good happened to them, may be happy. May this
Speaker 1: happiness you're experiencing grow and get more intense. Anyway, you
Speaker 1: get the picture. We don't have to do it for
Speaker 1: too long, and you can keep moving to more and
Speaker 1: more challenging people. Maybe not the first time you do it,
Speaker 1: but over time you can. And the great share in
Speaker 1: Salzburg one of the first people who she's a meditation teacher,
Speaker 1: one of the first people who taught me how to
Speaker 1: do this. She talks about this fallacy that many of
Speaker 1: us have, which is that when something good happens to somebody,
Speaker 1: we feel like whatever accolade or raise they have just
Speaker 1: had come their way, that it was actually heading to
Speaker 1: us and they reached out and intercepted the pass. And
Speaker 1: that's actually not usually the case. And even when it
Speaker 1: is the case, what do you want to do carry
Speaker 1: around this resentment or would you like to be able
Speaker 1: to see the humanity and your rivals and be happy
Speaker 1: for them. Isn't that going to free up more bandwidth
Speaker 1: for you to pursue what you want next without carrying
Speaker 1: around the boulder of resentment? So does any does that
Speaker 1: make sense to you totally? I mean, you know, it
Speaker 1: fits with so much that we know about other practices
Speaker 1: that are really similar, like loving kindness, meditation right where
Speaker 1: you can kind of build up your compassion over time.
Speaker 1: And my guess I'd love to do the studies on this.
Speaker 1: Actually I'm doing a related project with the Stanford neuroscientist
Speaker 1: Jamil Zaki on what we call a zero sum happiness.
Speaker 1: There's this idea I think that a lot of us
Speaker 1: are carrying around that you know, there's like a happiness
Speaker 1: pot somewhere in the universe, and you if good things
Speaker 1: happen to one person and there's like less in the
Speaker 1: pot potentially for me. That's just empirically that is not
Speaker 1: how well being works. If anything, you know, doing for
Speaker 1: others winds up increasing the sum, right, you know, when
Speaker 1: you do nice things for others, you donate money to
Speaker 1: someone else, for example, you get the happiness bump from
Speaker 1: that at the same time they do pretty much we
Speaker 1: know how well being and probably even success and good
Speaker 1: things work in the world. Is like, this is not
Speaker 1: zero sum. We kind of all add it up together.
Speaker 1: I imagine this meditation practice does a really good job
Speaker 1: at overcoming that misconception. It's like an intervention we can
Speaker 1: do to be like, no, no, no, there's not some
Speaker 1: tiny sum that we're sort of splitting up. We all
Speaker 1: can do a little bit better. Yes, exactly. Just two
Speaker 1: things to say about that. I love how many of
Speaker 1: these names you're invoking, Jamie, Zachie, Catherine Price. These are
Speaker 1: people who come on both of our shows, and it's
Speaker 1: interesting to hear you can listen to them being interviewed
Speaker 1: in two different places because you come at it from
Speaker 1: a perspective of actually knowing something. I come at it
Speaker 1: as the amateur happiness expert who's a journalist and is
Speaker 1: very very very very interested in training the mind through meditation.
Speaker 1: So often I think the results are complimentary. So that's
Speaker 1: just one thing that came to mind. And then just
Speaker 1: to clarify, moodita practice and loving kindness practice are related.
Speaker 1: There are In Buddhism, there are what are known as
Speaker 1: the four Brahma Viharas or divine abodes, hard to reach
Speaker 1: states that you can train through meditation loving kindness practice. Actually,
Speaker 1: you can translate loving kindness into friendliness. That can sound
Speaker 1: a little less hokey to the skeptics. Loving kindness phrases
Speaker 1: are like may you be happy, may you be safe,
Speaker 1: may you be healthy, may you live with ease. So
Speaker 1: that's of practice very similar to what we just did
Speaker 1: with meditai, where you close your eyes and picture usually
Speaker 1: start with somebody easy, and then you can move to yourself,
Speaker 1: and then you can move to a benefactor, and then
Speaker 1: a neutral person, a difficult person, and then everybody. You
Speaker 1: can run through that same cycle with all of the
Speaker 1: Brahma Bharas. So there's loving kindness, there's moodita or sympathetic joy,
Speaker 1: there's compassion, where you're sending phrases to people who are suffering,
Speaker 1: May you be free from suffering, may be free from pain.
Speaker 1: And then there is equanimity, where you're just training in
Speaker 1: order to reach these states, in order to keep them going,
Speaker 1: you need to have some evenness of mind. Especially with compassion,
Speaker 1: you know where you're you're getting close to suffering, and
Speaker 1: so we train up the ability to just be steady
Speaker 1: in the face of whatever comes up in our minds.
Speaker 1: So these practices, these brahma a horror practices. I don't
Speaker 1: have all the science at hand, but my understanding is
Speaker 1: that there's a lot of science to suggest that these
Speaker 1: can have physiological, psychological, and even behavioral impacts. And so
Speaker 1: it's to me the idea that if you aggregate all
Speaker 1: of these skills under one egis, that egis could be love.
Speaker 1: Love is not an unalterable factory setting. It is a
Speaker 1: trainable skill that is incredibly good news. Yeah, And with
Speaker 1: love and with these kind of trainable skills, you kind
Speaker 1: of take out of your emotional ether, the bad stuff.
Speaker 1: The power of mudita is it takes it. It's not
Speaker 1: just that you feel good for someone else's success, is
Speaker 1: that it takes away this horrible burden pain, you know, sadness, anger,
Speaker 1: frustration that you're walking around with that you don't need to.
Speaker 1: And so getting rid of some of these negative emotions
Speaker 1: can be thinking a really important part of this practice
Speaker 1: because you don't have to walk around with this. We
Speaker 1: often on my podcast talk about, you know, and another
Speaker 1: parable that comes from the Buddhist tradition, this idea of
Speaker 1: the second arrow. You know, it's one thing to not
Speaker 1: get the promotion but it's another to be stabbing yourself
Speaker 1: with this second arrow, pissed off the whole time that
Speaker 1: you didn't get it. And if you can get rid
Speaker 1: of that part of your emotional labor, that can be
Speaker 1: incredibly powerful. You'll get to hear more of my conversation
Speaker 1: with Dan Harris on his podcast ten Percent Happier after
Speaker 1: the break, The Happiness Lab will be right back. You
Speaker 1: invoked emotions. What are your thoughts on how we handle
Speaker 1: emotions at work? Because I think a lot of us
Speaker 1: are conditioned again because, as I said before, the modern
Speaker 1: workplace was created by white men for white men, and
Speaker 1: so white men and I can speak with some authority
Speaker 1: about white men being one, we were not famously in
Speaker 1: touch with our emotions. So we didn't design a workplace
Speaker 1: that was really, you know, conducive to the healthy metabolizing
Speaker 1: of emotions. So what are your thoughts about how we
Speaker 1: can handle our emotions in the workplace? Yeah, I mean,
Speaker 1: I think because of the structure of modern workplaces and
Speaker 1: the you know, the sense that they're not necessarily built
Speaker 1: to be so inclusive, our instinct is to just shut
Speaker 1: them off, not shut them off in a long equanimity
Speaker 1: practice where you come to terms and allow your emotions, oh,
Speaker 1: shut them off, like, can't feel that right now, just
Speaker 1: going to pretend and keep moving, and you know, keep churning, right,
Speaker 1: And I think that's bad for a bunch of reasons. Right.
Speaker 1: One is, you know, we know from the lovely work
Speaker 1: by like Stanford neuroscientists James Gross and others, that the
Speaker 1: act of suppressing your emotions is bad for your performance.
Speaker 1: You do worse for example on like you know, decision
Speaker 1: tasks and memory tasks. It's also awful for your bodies.
Speaker 1: Even in little laboratory tasks where you show people these
Speaker 1: little emotion suppression tasks, you find that they put their
Speaker 1: bodies under cardiac stress. Like, so you're screwing up your
Speaker 1: performance and your growing up your bodies when you suppress
Speaker 1: your emotions. The other thing is that you miss out
Speaker 1: on an incredibly valuable signal. You know, we talk about
Speaker 1: things like negative emotions, and we have this term that
Speaker 1: they're like negative, right, you know, they're negative because they
Speaker 1: don't feel great. But actually, if you think evolutionarily, these
Speaker 1: things are awesome because there's signals of something that's going
Speaker 1: badly that we should probably take some action to fix.
Speaker 1: You could think of negative emotions like sadness, anger, feeling overwhelmed,
Speaker 1: like you think of, you know, your hand on a
Speaker 1: hot stove. If you stick your hand on a hot stove,
Speaker 1: it's going to hurt, and that feeling doesn't feel great,
Speaker 1: but it's there for a reason. Your body wants you
Speaker 1: to yank your hand away so you can stop burning it.
Speaker 1: And I think we forget that negative emotions kind of
Speaker 1: work like that, you know, especially some negative emotions that
Speaker 1: come up in the workplace these days. A lot of
Speaker 1: my colleagues are talking about overwhelm, this emotion where you're
Speaker 1: like you can't do it anymore. You are just burning out,
Speaker 1: you are getting cynical with your colleagues. You're just not
Speaker 1: enjoying what you used to enjoy. That's overwhelmed. And when
Speaker 1: we experience it's not great because it makes it hard
Speaker 1: to do our work and it feels unpleasant. So we're
Speaker 1: like stuff it down, pretend that it's not happening. But
Speaker 1: then that comes back to bite you. It's like leaving
Speaker 1: your hand on a hot stove. And so I think
Speaker 1: the second thing that's bad about suppressing emotions at work
Speaker 1: is that we're ignoring these very honest signals that we
Speaker 1: should take action on or things are going to get worse.
Speaker 1: You know, stop when you get the first degree emotional
Speaker 1: burn rather than the third degree and burnt off kind
Speaker 1: of emotional burn. I really like so many of the
Speaker 1: things you said there. I think it's really compelling to
Speaker 1: have it pointed out to us that stuffing your emotions
Speaker 1: can have negative psychological and physiological consequences for us. But
Speaker 1: it's also true, at least in my experience, that stuffing
Speaker 1: my emotions or not being okay with whatever I'm suffering
Speaker 1: within the moment, can have negative consequences for anybody who's
Speaker 1: in my orbit. They can become irradiated by my unmetabolized rage.
Speaker 1: And I don't know if this is somebody that you've
Speaker 1: had on your show, but somebody's been very cuential to me.
Speaker 1: Jerry Colonna. He's a sort of famous in tech circles
Speaker 1: that they call him the Yoda of Silicon Valley. As
Speaker 1: a corporate coach, he was a very successful that your
Speaker 1: capitalist for many years, had a bit of a life crisis,
Speaker 1: got interested in Buddhism, changed his whole life, and now
Speaker 1: works with CEOs and boards of directors to help people
Speaker 1: be saner and more humane in the workplace. And I've
Speaker 1: been working with him for several years. Like I said,
Speaker 1: he's had a huge impact on me. And he once
Speaker 1: said to me, and I'm probably gonna mangle this, but
Speaker 1: something the effect of violence, by which he was not
Speaker 1: referring to a physical violence, but sort of psychic or
Speaker 1: psychological violence is what we do and we can't handle
Speaker 1: our own suffering. And in the moment he said that,
Speaker 1: I can interpolate back to my whole professional life and
Speaker 1: see that all the damage or much of the damage
Speaker 1: I'd done in the workplace was because I was not
Speaker 1: up to the task of riding my own emotions and
Speaker 1: then just lost it with people. Yeah, and it's not
Speaker 1: just in your workplace, because I know lots of people
Speaker 1: who you might be able to keep a pressure cooker
Speaker 1: lid on in your workplace, but then you walk home
Speaker 1: into your house and you see your spouse and the
Speaker 1: dishwashers not put away correctly, and emotions. We think we
Speaker 1: can hold the lid on, but these things are going
Speaker 1: to come out. They're going to come out either in
Speaker 1: our body where our fight or flight system is going
Speaker 1: to take the brunt and we're going to have cardiac
Speaker 1: problems and hormonal problems, we're not going to have our
Speaker 1: digestion working right, or they're going to come out as
Speaker 1: like much more extreme emotions that they didn't need to
Speaker 1: get to if you just kind of dealt with them earlier.
Speaker 1: But then that raises the question, which is how do
Speaker 1: we deal with these emotions? And that's why I love
Speaker 1: practices that you all have on like ten percent happier
Speaker 1: about this idea of equanimity, where like we can kind
Speaker 1: of be even keeled in the face of often really
Speaker 1: negative emotions, especially if we notice them quickly find ways
Speaker 1: to sort of allow them and investigate what they're doing
Speaker 1: to our bodies. Yes, I'm obviously a big supporter of
Speaker 1: the Barahma Viharas, including equanimity own at. I didn't plan
Speaker 1: to say this, but it came into my bind. Is
Speaker 1: something that might be useful for people, and I'm interested
Speaker 1: to hear your reaction to it. Loris Burnet Brown talks
Speaker 1: about a little phrase that she and her team use
Speaker 1: around the office all the time, which is the story
Speaker 1: I'm telling myself is dot dot dot, because I think
Speaker 1: so many of us walk around with these paranoid, phantasmagoric
Speaker 1: projections about what other people are thinking. Often they're not
Speaker 1: thinking about us at all. It's our own conditioning and
Speaker 1: past traumas or whatever that it's creating this story. But
Speaker 1: if you don't deal with it, it can simmer and
Speaker 1: then it can reach a boil. So my CEO and I,
Speaker 1: the CEO of ten percent Happier, got named Ben Rubin,
Speaker 1: with who I'm very close. We've worked together. It's a
Speaker 1: kind of marriage really, and we've done couples counseling with
Speaker 1: the aforementioned Jerry Colonna for years, and one of the
Speaker 1: things we reached was this agreement that once in a
Speaker 1: while we will say, can I let my amygdala speak?
Speaker 1: Can I just tell you what the sphere center of
Speaker 1: my brain is doing right now? And then everything I say,
Speaker 1: even if it's not putting Ben in the most positive light,
Speaker 1: I've framed it as, Look, this is my paranoia speaking.
Speaker 1: I'm not accusing you of anything. This is just what
Speaker 1: the darkest precincts in my mind are offering up right now.
Speaker 1: That has been hugely helpful to our relationship, and it
Speaker 1: really also helps me in my own mind sort between
Speaker 1: fact and fiction. Does any of that land for you totally.
Speaker 1: I mean the power of that is, I think twofold
Speaker 1: run is you have to be aware of what those
Speaker 1: stories are, so they're not just kind of in the background,
Speaker 1: like controlling emotions. You kind of call them out, and
Speaker 1: that can be powerful for the second reason, which is
Speaker 1: then when you start to say them, when you say, well,
Speaker 1: my amygdala is really thinking this thing. I mean, guess
Speaker 1: is that a lot of times as you start saying it,
Speaker 1: you're like, well, this is awful, Like this is very
Speaker 1: black and white thinking, this is catastrophizing. No, you pull
Speaker 1: the big list that clinical psychologists talk about in cognitive
Speaker 1: behavioral therapy of all the thinking errors, and your amygdala
Speaker 1: is making every single one of those thinking errors. And
Speaker 1: then your rational self can be like, Okay, that seems
Speaker 1: a little black and white amygdala, let's like kind of
Speaker 1: rain that in just a tad. But it's only by
Speaker 1: that act of articulating it. I mean, sometimes these fears
Speaker 1: can be so scary to us we can ever say them,
Speaker 1: but then when we say them out loud, we're like, oh, wait,
Speaker 1: that's dumb, or that's like extreme, or like even if
Speaker 1: that happened, I'd be able to deal with it. You
Speaker 1: can kind of negotiate with your own ambigduala thinking errors,
Speaker 1: and that can be super powerful, and it can mean
Speaker 1: that those emotions that would normally go with it, you
Speaker 1: can kind of rain them in because you're not as
Speaker 1: scared anymore, which doesn't lead to the downstream You're not
Speaker 1: as frustrated anymore, or as pissed off anymore, and so on.
Speaker 1: And in my experience, I mean, yes, everything you said,
Speaker 1: and doing it with somebody else who you actually have
Speaker 1: a foundation of trust with is even easier for me
Speaker 1: because I am not trying to sort this all out
Speaker 1: inside of what David Foster Wallace calls the skull sized
Speaker 1: kingdom inside of my own head. I'm actually talking about
Speaker 1: it with somebody else, and for me, that's much easier
Speaker 1: to do the processing. Yeah, and it's helpful for them
Speaker 1: to know where those kind of core triggers and fears are,
Speaker 1: because if it's somebody that you trust and who wants
Speaker 1: to see you succeed, they can recognize, oh, when I
Speaker 1: said that, I didn't realize I was stepping on your
Speaker 1: core terror or this core thing that's going to trigger you.
Speaker 1: And that can kind of build relationships for the future too.
Speaker 1: I have one more area I wanted to explore with you,
Speaker 1: but before I go there, is there anything else you
Speaker 1: want to say about working with emotions within the workplace? No,
Speaker 1: I want to hear the last area we're going too. Well,
Speaker 1: it's your idea. I'm just you know, you send me
Speaker 1: a bunch of things you wanted to talk about, and
Speaker 1: they were also good that I'm trying to work my
Speaker 1: way through them, so I don't want to take any
Speaker 1: credit where it's not due. You sent me a note
Speaker 1: and you said something to the effect of many of
Speaker 1: us carry a misperception that we hate work. Why is
Speaker 1: that a misperception. One of the things that we talk
Speaker 1: about a lot on my podcast and then I talk
Speaker 1: a lot a lot with my Yale students, is this
Speaker 1: idea that we have all these misconceptions when it comes
Speaker 1: to our own happiness. We have misconceptions when it comes
Speaker 1: to what we really like and what we really enjoy,
Speaker 1: and I think the workplace is one of these. So
Speaker 1: there's this lovely study where if you ping people at
Speaker 1: random times at their work, you know, to set them
Speaker 1: up with a little smartphone app that dings and says, hey,
Speaker 1: how are you feeling right now. Generally speaking, people are
Speaker 1: okay at work usually because they're in flow right kind
Speaker 1: of doing something. It's kind of taking up your time.
Speaker 1: It feels good. It feels better, for example, than what
Speaker 1: we were talking about before with the Netflix scrolling when
Speaker 1: you're on like screen number forty seven of different movies
Speaker 1: that are scrolling by. If you ping me then and
Speaker 1: say how you're feeling, I feel apathetic. I am not
Speaker 1: in flow, and though you know that, I'm like, I
Speaker 1: feel kind of gross. And the sad thing is that
Speaker 1: for many of us, when we're at work, we get
Speaker 1: these moments of flow, we get these moments of connection
Speaker 1: where we're talking to other people and talking to teammates
Speaker 1: and figuring out ideas and things. But oftentimes we're so
Speaker 1: bad at picking our leisure that when you ping us
Speaker 1: during leisure, we're kind of bored, or we're like half
Speaker 1: paying attention to our phones or kind of not doing it.
Speaker 1: Paying people at work they're kind of happy and flow.
Speaker 1: Paying people at leisure, they're start of feeling apathetic. How
Speaker 1: have you ask people when they're at work? Would you
Speaker 1: rather be at work? Would you rather be in leisure?
Speaker 1: People are like leisure and if you ping me, you know,
Speaker 1: when I'm in the middle of my Netflix scrolling and
Speaker 1: say Laurie, would you rather be at work and be like,
Speaker 1: no way, dude, I'm home, like I'm taking the day off.
Speaker 1: And so we are actually happier at work than we think,
Speaker 1: and maybe more problematically, we're actually less happy be a
Speaker 1: leisure than we think. And this is something we really
Speaker 1: can control. We need leisure that allows us to be
Speaker 1: more and flow that allows us to be a little
Speaker 1: bit more present, that allows us to be kind of
Speaker 1: doing things a little bit more actively, and so finding
Speaker 1: ways to get in some active leisure can be quite powerful.
Speaker 1: I'll offer something up here that's been helpful for me,
Speaker 1: and I resisted because I resist everything because I have
Speaker 1: a sort of unhelpful variety sometimes of skepticism. But if
Speaker 1: something strikes me as at all hokey, I will often
Speaker 1: get my backup setting intentions. But I have found that
Speaker 1: setting intentions with some regularity is a really great way
Speaker 1: to be mindful. Mindful and the purest expression of that word,
Speaker 1: if you go back to the polly word, that's the
Speaker 1: ancient language of polly that was spoken at or around
Speaker 1: the time of the Buddha. The word is sati, and
Speaker 1: one of the translations of sati is recollecting or remembering,
Speaker 1: and that's what we're doing in meditation. We're remembering to
Speaker 1: wake up and be awake right here. And so setting
Speaker 1: an intention like I'm about to go to Disney World
Speaker 1: with my family, and my intentions will be to disconnect
Speaker 1: from work and to enjoy my time with my family,
Speaker 1: and I can while I'm on the wed Way, people
Speaker 1: mover or whatever with my family, I might notice myself plotting,
Speaker 1: you know, the overthrow of whatever some you know, some rival,
Speaker 1: or you know, planning some expletive filled speech I'm going
Speaker 1: to give to Ben when I get back. Uh, Nope,
Speaker 1: that's not what I'm doing right now. I am looking
Speaker 1: at the joy on my son's face, feeling that warm
Speaker 1: Florida air against my face, etcetera, etcetera. For work, similar thing,
Speaker 1: you know, I wake up in the morning and I
Speaker 1: try to remember to say, well, my intention is to
Speaker 1: make awesome stuff that helps people do their lives better,
Speaker 1: and while I'm at it, to have good relationships with
Speaker 1: everybody I'm working with. Setting these intentions with some regularity
Speaker 1: while I still am deeply, deeply fallible has made me better,
Speaker 1: I think so again, I'll ask you, does any of
Speaker 1: that land for you totally? I mean, one of the
Speaker 1: biggest issues I think with our brain, in the way
Speaker 1: our minds are set up, is that that recollection doesn't
Speaker 1: happen naturally. We can have goals in these really rational
Speaker 1: theories about the kinds of things will enjoy. You know,
Speaker 1: if you're at Disneyland, you're probably going to enjoy more
Speaker 1: watching the smile on your son's face than ruminating about
Speaker 1: some bad decision at work that happened three weeks ago.
Speaker 1: But our brains don't naturally make the choice correctly. And
Speaker 1: I think, you know, our systems kind of naturally go
Speaker 1: to the things that feel easy, that feel negative. Right
Speaker 1: with this negativity bias, our attention kind of just goes there.
Speaker 1: They go to the things that are easy dopamine hits.
Speaker 1: As much as you might want to look at your
Speaker 1: child smiling expression, you know your email is going to
Speaker 1: be yanking on the little dopamine chords in a way
Speaker 1: that will kind of move your attention in the wrong
Speaker 1: direction in terms of what will really make you happy
Speaker 1: and make you remember the trip well. And so I
Speaker 1: think this practice of intention setting is just a way
Speaker 1: to fight all these natural biases of where our negativity
Speaker 1: is going to take us, where our dopamine hits are
Speaker 1: going to take us. It kind of pulls us back
Speaker 1: into the moment. But that has to be sadly, I mean,
Speaker 1: it's stupid that our brains work this way, but it
Speaker 1: has to be an explicit practice. It doesn't work like
Speaker 1: regular memory. We have to put some work into remembering
Speaker 1: and reminding ourselves so that we can kind of do
Speaker 1: it correctly. And that's true in leisure, but it's definitely
Speaker 1: true at work. Sometimes my intention setting at work is
Speaker 1: like I wanted to get through this big project, but
Speaker 1: I also wanted to get through this big project in
Speaker 1: a way that didn't make my students feel like crap,
Speaker 1: or like make my colleagues kind of hate me or
Speaker 1: push them to the brink. Right, we want to do things,
Speaker 1: but we want to do things in a particular way,
Speaker 1: in a particular manner, with a particular kind of emotional stability,
Speaker 1: and so remembering that that is part of the goal too,
Speaker 1: can be really quite important. Well said in closing here,
Speaker 1: can you just plug everything you're doing, because I think
Speaker 1: my listeners will get a lot out of it. Obviously
Speaker 1: you have this amazing podcast in which you can talk
Speaker 1: about if you want, but anything else you've put out
Speaker 1: into the universe that might be useful for folks, Yeah,
Speaker 1: the best is to check out the Happiness Lab podcast
Speaker 1: where starting new seasons hopefully soon. If you missed to
Speaker 1: see our last season three, you should check it out.
Speaker 1: Lots on these errors of our mind and going after
Speaker 1: dopamine and what you can do to find more fun.
Speaker 1: But I also wanted to plug for my folks this
Speaker 1: fantastic stick thing you have coming up where folks can
Speaker 1: really sign up to kind of think more about their
Speaker 1: relationship with work and find more intention. So tell me
Speaker 1: about the challenge. So we're doing a meditation challenge. We're
Speaker 1: calling it the Work Life Challenge. It starts on November eighth.
Speaker 1: You can get it for free if you download the
Speaker 1: ten percent Happier app. Every day we'll serve you up
Speaker 1: a little video that'll be me talking to a meditation
Speaker 1: expert about some of the challenges we may face at work.
Speaker 1: And right after the little video ends, it'll slide directly
Speaker 1: into a guided meditation that will help you sort of
Speaker 1: as I like to say, pound the lessons into your neurons.
Speaker 1: So we find this combination of video and then audio
Speaker 1: guided meditation to be really really effective. And so starting
Speaker 1: on the eighth, you can do the work Life Challenge
Speaker 1: for free on the ten Happier App. I think this
Speaker 1: is awesome. In fact, I'm publicly committing that I'm going
Speaker 1: to do this myself. I feel like November eighth is
Speaker 1: perfect timing because at least in North America, right like,
Speaker 1: our time is going to change, it's getting dark sooner.
Speaker 1: This is a time when my brain might naturally go
Speaker 1: into like hermit low emotion kind of mode and to
Speaker 1: like take a challenge where I can say, like, no,
Speaker 1: I'm going to be actively working on positive emotion at work.
Speaker 1: This sounds awesome. I'm in Thanks so much for sharing
Speaker 1: us my pleasure. Thank you. Thanks again to Dan Harris
Speaker 1: for having me back on his show. It's always great
Speaker 1: to talk to him. And don't forget to sign up
Speaker 1: for the free work Life Challenge on the ten percent
Speaker 1: Happier app. The challenge starts Monday, November eight, and I'll
Speaker 1: be doing it right alongside you. The Happiness Lab will
Speaker 1: be back soon with more new episodes, so stay tuned,