EXPERTS ON EXPERT: Tal Ben-Shahar

Welcome, welcome, welcome to armchair experts expert on experts. I'm Dax Shepard. That's who you are. In your Monica Padman.

Yeah. Today we have a very, very fun and interesting guest. He was a lecturer at Harvard University and a writer in the areas of positive psychology and leadership. He taught two of the largest classes in Harvard University history, positive psychology and the psychology of leadership.

His name is tall Ben Shahar and he has some real tips to getting into action on being happy. He's written the joy of leadership as well as choose the life you want, the mindful way to happiness and being happy. The latest book short cuts to happiness, life changing lessons from my barber should be checked out by everyone. He had so many wonderful things to say.

He did. I wish I could have taken his class. Oh, it made me really feel regret about not going to Harvard and taking his class. I know I wasn't even regretting not going to Harvard, but then when I found out about his class, I was like, I shouldn't have thought about it.

I shouldn't have thought about it. Yeah, I didn't do it. Well, he brought his class here. That's right.

So we now pass it on to you. Please enjoy tall Ben Shahar. He's an untracked man. This is my respite from video.

I think she'll wear you away from here and make up this. You say that no video is your your away from the screen. Well, mine is writing writing is my way from teaching. And we all need these recoveries.

Right. So we also probably share that I've written probably more than I've acted over the last 15 years and I've quit writing for two years and I've never been happier. You quit writing. Or let's just say I have not written for two years intentionally and I can't believe how much happier I am in general.

I'm stressed. Yes, the pending homework that is always on your mind, like your own vacation, yet all you can think of is something that's due or do you suffer from that? Yeah. I think it has to do at least for me with perfectionism.

So as I let go of perfectionism, it becomes easier, less stressful. It does. Now, there's a great story that really helps me with writing. It's Samuel Hutchison was a philosopher, 18th century, even of the 19th century.

He had an influence on Emerson, on Nietzsche, and on many others. And he was a perfectionist and he couldn't write. So what he said to himself at some point, he said, look, everything that I'm going to write now is a rough draft. At the end of my life, I'm going to write my magnum opus.

Until then, it's rough draft. Now, he never got you writing his magnum opus. But in the interim, he wrote amazing prose poetry. That is really interesting because Monica has heard me saying a million times when I talked to other writers, my mental trick is I give myself permission to write something shitty.

I'm allowed to write something terrible. The objective isn't to write something great. It's simply to write. And then I give myself room to rewrite.

And then inevitably, as I look at it yesterday's work, it's not nearly as bad as I gave myself permission to be. But it's all mental hurdles, right? It really is. I like that you use the word permission.

You know what? It's all the positive information to be human. My mental gymnastics. And I know many of my students are actually using it.

Yeah. So let me give a brief introduction. It is important, I think, for people to understand where you come from, how you came to all of this. In short, the headline for you is that you were teaching a class at Harvard on happiness and that it was the most attended class in the history of Harvard.

So I taught the class no longer. There are actually now in New York, Columbia. It was the largest class at Harvard, not in its history. When I taught it, it was the largest, but there have been larger.

There have been larger. Okay. Great. So you just passed the integrity test.

You could have just rolled on through. That was my error, not yours. And you could have just benefited from it in any way you want to do it. But yes, you yourself have a PhD from Harvard in organizational behavior.

You also have a BA in psych, right? Philosophy. Yeah. And you have a lot of people to talk to seem to come from the philosophic background.

I know. Yeah, it's true. Makes sense. A lot of our heroes.

And then you taught there and you've written a couple of bestselling books. I'm being happy. You don't have to be perfect to lead a richer, happier life. And then happier, learn the secrets of daily joy and lasting fulfillment.

That was in 2007. And then of course, you speak a lot. And you, as you said, you now live in New York and you're not teaching at Harvard anymore, which interests me greatly how one steps away from something that seemingly is the apex of fulfillment and then prestige and esteem and all those things. So I imagine that was a difficult decision.

Yeah. Family decisions. Right. Okay.

So I came in 1992 for my undergrad. That was the age of 22 after completing my military service. Oh, right. Because you guys have conscription there.

Yeah. Is it two years or one? Three years. Three years.

Okay. Fun and games. Right. Did you pick up any lifetime skills that you are grateful for?

Yeah. I think patience is an important skill appreciation. I remember when my fellow students were complaining about the food at Harvard. And I said, really?

We have ice cream every day you're complaining. Yeah. Yeah. It's a nice little foundation of perspective probably.

How did you do with following orders that you couldn't have possibly always agreed with? It seems to be what would be hard for me. Yeah. It is hard.

And I think if I was in the Army 2 day, I wouldn't have been able to do it. I think there was a reason why kids go to the Army at 18, right? And adults. Yeah.

Yeah. So you came here and was it how we understand it as nearly impossible to get into Harvard. So how was one? We were also obsessed with fancy universities.

We come up with a term unifile. Yeah. We are kind of unifile. We decided we went to lowly universities.

Georgia and UCLA. So we, you know, we fetishize certain ones. Yeah. But how do you get into Harvard from Israel?

So my childhood was essentially all about squash. Oh, the game. I was a squash player. I played the professional circuit just before serving in the military.

My goal was to become the world champion. Of course. It was my dream. And then when I was in the Army, I got injured and had to give up my professional aspirations.

I could still play, but not at the highest levels. I met the Harvard squash coach and he said, you know, we recruit for squash and why don't you come play college squash? So I looked into it and I thought, wow, this is a great plan B. Because what dream really was for, I remember at the age of 16 thinking, what am I going to do with my life when I no longer play squash?

Right. So we've had a great career at the planes. Yes. Now, just to help us is squash is big.

What would you compare it to in Israel? Is it as big as the NHL here? No, I guess squash would be like like lacrosse perhaps here. Okay.

Could you have made great riches, plain squash? Well, not great riches financially, but it provided me great riches in the ultimate currency of happiness. Okay. But at that time, do you even have an awareness of that or probably not yet?

No, I just was so passionate about it and loved it. And this is what I, you know, trained for six hours a day and I stopped because my body stopped and I thought because I wanted to. Right. So you come to Harvard and do you play or are you in a coaching position there?

No, no. So I played there. I gave back all the prize money I earned, which wasn't that much. Fortunately, or unfortunately, to regain my amateur status.

And I played for the team and it was really an amazing experience because it was the first time for me really being on a team. I was an individualist and I'd been playing for myself all those years and suddenly I was part of a team. So that was both a challenging and a enlightening experience for me. Well, they say I've watched a bunch of different documentaries on professional athletes that retire and there's a pretty predictable slope of depression that follows retirement from a professional sport.

And then people on the outskirts of that situation had traditionally thought, oh, it's because they're losing fame and they're losing the amount of money that they're making. But now it's quite conclusive. It's the camaraderie that really elevates one's quality of life, right? That's the whole that needs to be plugged somehow.

Yeah, it's a lot of things that come with athletics with sports in general. The first thing is actually the physical exercise per se. So one of the best predictors of happiness is how much we exercise. Two at a point, you can of course overdo it.

But physical exercise has the same effect on our psychological well-being as our most powerful psychiatric medication. So when I stopped playing at least professionally, I didn't want to play anymore. I stopped doing sports, which was a big mistake. It's a big mistake that many ex-professional athletes make.

So sports is important psychologically as well. Right. So I'm not going to be a therapist, but if I were a therapist, the first question I'd ask my clients would be, do you exercise regularly? So, okay, you and I are in lockstep because I'm sober.

I've been sober for 15 years. I've sponsored a million guys over the years. And my first question when they call with a problem with their wife, problem with their job is, when's the last time you exercise? Go do that for one hour and then call me back.

And we'll see if this problem has the same weight as it does. Yes, exactly. You know, and even more than that with my kids, we have three kids, I never asked them about school work. I never asked to look at the report card.

You know, there's a problem the teacher will call. Right. So, I'm not going to ask them about their sports, whether it's their dance, my daughter, or their basketball, my sons. Uh-huh.

Ooh, I need to do adopt that. Yeah. I'm in that, um, that rut of they get home and I'm like, how is school? Of course they don't give a shit to tell me.

Fine. What did you do? I mean, they can't remember a single thing that happened. Yeah, maybe I'll focus more on how they physically got down that day.

Actually, Delta is quick to talk about the monkey bars. That's true. That's the favorite topic. That's true.

That's true. I think you're members. Yeah. So when you graduate, do you know immediately that you want to be an academia or do you think you're a philosopher or one of the many important philosophers?

Yeah, I was overwhelmed with offers. Yeah. So, no, initially I went into industry. I actually worked in a shipping company of all places in Singapore, which was an amazing experience because what I did there was I worked in the area of organizational development.

So I would spend months on ships with 30 other crew members, very often 30 from 10 different nationalities. In many ways was a lab for me to understand, to explore whether it's culture, whether it's you're getting to real intimate conversations when you spend two weeks away from shore just by yourself. So this was a fantastic experience for me. And then I did that for a few years.

Can I just have something really quick about that specifically? I would just be guessing I've never gone out to see with any men. But I would imagine the things that we anchor our identity to quickly erode as we physically leave all the places that those roots exist. That absolutely happens.

And the other thing that happens is also just the space. So the sea and the nothingness really opens our minds and hearts. It's meditating for two weeks at a time and the intimate conversations. Well, there's a heightened sense of mortality when you're out at sea, isn't there?

Yes. And I remember also experiencing my first typhoon. So we were just outside of Taiwan and in the captain, you know, sure me, there's nothing to worry about, but I worry. Yeah, understandably.

So invulnerability, you know, it's also big and it's like looking up at the sky when you're in nature or in the desert. If you'll a sense of proportion. Yeah. I also imagine all the little comforts that you have that normally can distract you from any kind of self-reflection, introspection, all that stuff, they're just not there.

Yeah, right. And I was there also at a time when there was no internet today. It's probably internet on most ships. So it's really a detaching once in a while you would get a telex from shore saying, you know, we're changing your course or something like that.

Other than that, you're on a retreat, a real retreat. And was there one thing that leapt out at you the most from that experience? Yeah. So I think the thing that leapt out most, and I didn't think about it until years into my research and teaching is the similarity or the universality of people.

So human condition. Human condition. You know, we were people on one ship. We were, you know, I'm from Israel.

There were people from Turkey, India, Philippines, England, Croatia. And ultimately we all seek the same thing. We fear the same things. We crave the same things.

There's much more in common among us. Yeah. Human being is a human being. And then also I would imagine you are getting a real immediate in your face experience with the layers of culture.

So there's probably all this sameness you're observing. And then you're also probably witnessing like, Oh, wow, these layers of culture are pretty profound. Did that happen or? Yeah, it did happen.

So for example, you know, we were, I come from Israel, you know, educated in the US and England and, you know, individualistic cultures. And they are much more from collectivist family culture. So for instance, you know, I spend a lot of time with Indians and for them, you know, family comes first and they're always, you know, thinking and talking to me. I was a psychologist on board, so to speak, you know, talking to me first and foremost about their families.

Yeah, career is important and they need to make money to provide for their families. You know, it's all about family. I thought about this, you know, in contrast with our individualistic society. What do we think about?

What are our values? You know, when I spent time at Harvard and with other very successful business people who, you know, graduate from top universities and they're not happy. They focus less on the real important things. And again, there are cultural differences in terms of focus.

And yet the need is universal. Mm hmm. Yes. Well, we can only escape our biology to such a degree, right?

We are a social animal. These are facts. We are social animals. We have in general, we cohabitate with at least 100 people.

We have a pretty predictable family structure, right? So you could transcend that, but there's going to be some sense that you're off course a little bit, right? We can feel it. Yeah, you know, for about 500 years ago, the British philosopher Francis Bacon said, nature to be commanded must be obeyed.

Nature to be commanded must be obeyed. We need to obey our nature. Our instinct is as you pointed out, you know, we are first and foremost social animals, you know, babies when they were born, they already displayed empathy, the connection to others. Okay.

So you get interested in organizational behavior. And then so you go to graduate school to learn more about that. One of the most interesting interviews we've heard in a long, long time was with an organizational behaviorless psychologist. Yeah.

On Sam Harris's podcast. Yeah. What was this? Adam.

Adam Grant. Yes. Yes. Yes.

So Adam Grant was my student. Oh, no way. He was an undergraduate, one of my favorite all-time students. Oh, how cool.

And yeah, and he's done a lot of amazing work in the area of organizational development. Well, I was noticing, we were parallel is that he seems to be mildly obsessed with Thomas Edison. And then you've written a children's book about Thomas Edison. Yeah.

Yeah. So maybe you infect him with your love for Thomas Edison? I don't know, but I talk a lot about Thomas Edison, you know, one of the soundbites that I repeat over and over again in my classes to my kids to myself is learn to fail or fail to learn. Yes.

And Thomas Edison is the role model because, you know, he's probably, you know, probably he has painted it more inventions than anyone else in history, you know, one thousand and ninety three or something. So he certainly deserves a place in the Hall of Fame of inventors. Very few people recognize or appreciate that he's also the number one failure in the world. He has failed more times than anyone else we know of.

You know, there's some very interesting research by Dean Simonton from UC Davis. And he talks about how one of the characteristics among those we refer to as geniuses of, you know, the great inventors and producers and creators is that they fail a lot more than other people. Yet to me, the very encouraging subtext of all that was that genius is a game of quantity, not quality in some regards, which I find comforting because people can get busy and people can't sit down and have the most profound idea or artistic explosion of all time. But if they do many, many artistic endeavors or thought endeavors, they will come across some good ones.

I just think that's a democratizing view of genius in some way. Yeah, very much. You know, this is an old come glad we'll talks about about this idea on a ten thousand hour investment. And in anything, I remember having this aha moment when I was a fourteen and aspiring squash player and I was in a tournament and looking at my role models, people who I wanted to be like, I looked at them and I said, I understand how I can actually get there.

I mean, there were a lot better than I was, but I could see the trajectory or I could see the path. The path is hard work. Yes, of course, coaching and learning and understanding ultimately boils down to hard work and yes, it is democratizing and it's liberating because while hard work is hard, there's also a part that says it's accessible, accessible to all of us, which makes it easy. Yes.

Yes. So you came into this field during an era where in the eighties, I'm guessing I want to say 88 or something like this, some savvy psychologist, star or psychiatrist, I'm not sure what you would label them, they start just kind of doing a data analysis of all the different papers that have been written on psychology. And in this period between 1967 and 2000, there are 6,000 articles written about anger, there's 41,000, these are peer reviewed academic articles written about anxiety. There's 54,000 written about depression while there was 415 written about joy, 1700 on happiness and life satisfaction at 2500.

So the ratio is 21 to one negative studies versus positive studies. And tell us why that is an intriguing observation. You know, it's both an intriguing observation and important observation. And here is why.

So first of all, new people who are depressed or experiencing anxiety, they are desperate. They need help and very often psychologists who go into these areas studying depression, go there either for personal reason themselves or people close to them or because society calls and duty calls, we need to help those people who are suffering. Whereas other people who are doing okay, they're not doing great, but they're doing okay. I mean, that's not urgent.

And you know, the distinction that Stephen Covey makes between urgent and important, you know, urgently studying depression, though it is important to study happiness. And it's important for a few reasons. One reason is because one of the best preventative measures we can take against depression, against anxiety is to work on happiness. That's how we become more resilient.

You know, essentially when we work on happiness or relationships or focusing on our strength or cultivating, join our life, what we're essentially doing, we are strengthening our psychological immune system. Now, it's psychological immune system doesn't mean that we don't get sad or angry or envious or anxious. It simply means that we do so less often. And when we do we recover more promptly, just like a physical immune system, we still get sick, but we recover more promptly.

Yeah. And there's a really interesting parallel happening. It appears to me at least with that thought process. And the same thought process going into medicine in general.

So we're drawn to pathologies, right? I remember when I took a psychology class, I couldn't wait to get to the fucking cycle path part with the serial killers. Like, give it to me. I want to know that.

Yeah. Yes. I want to know about the pathologies. I don't really want to know about someone who's like, you know, pretty darn happy, good content run.

It's just not as interesting. And then also, if you're a doctor, the notion of identifying pathogens and then fighting them, there's something that's just very, I can see why people are drawn to it. But now I see more and more people in medicine taking this approach of, well, hold on, instead of blasting cancer, figuring out how to kill cancer, let's look at how fertile the organs are to host cancer. But we can embolden those organs so that they themselves would fight off the cancer.

We don't need to get in there and carpet bomb this whole thing with all kinds of radiation and whatnot. So this parallel seems kind of correlated. Yeah. Very much so.

In the West, whether it's Western medicine or Western psychology, the focus has mostly been on dealing with illness as opposed to preventing illness or promoting health and promoting health is important. Now, there's also no danger that we will fail to experience hardships and difficulties. We will, you know, minimize them, especially the young ones come to me after about a month into the chorus and you know, they really like positive psychology and they tell me that and they say, you know, we're even thinking about this as our career, our calling, but we're a little bit concerned. I asked them why?

And they said, look, you know, you talk also about the importance of hardships and difficulties and how we grow from those. But what if I become so good at positive psychology that I won't have these difficulties and hardships and serious challenges that you talk about? And my answer is always they say, my say to them, don't worry. Life will take care of you.

Life always takes care of us. Yeah. Everyone goes through a spin in the washing machine. There's really no way around it.

We have pretty pandemic depression in this country and mental health issues. And so this is a very big, big problem, right? That is probably affecting more people than I would imagine any other illness that we confront. It's pretty pervasive.

Yeah. Depression is pervasive. The trends are also not looking good. So there's more depression every year.

It's also spreading around the world, even looking at historically very happy places like Latin America. They're seeing more depression. You know, straight, depression levels are skyrocketing as they are in China. One reason is because today we measure better.

So there's higher levels of awareness, but that's not the main reason is because there are many, many more people who are objectively depressed. There are more people who are committing suicide. You know, obviously, you know, I often ask myself in the field as a whole, we ask ourselves, why? Why is it?

There are a few reasons. You know, one reason. Let me share with you data. This is a report by San Diego professor Jean Twengi.

And what she does is every five years, we get a measure of the mental health state of teenagers. Every five years, you know, you look at anxiety, loneliness, suicide. And every five years, you know, it's, you know, 1% up, 1% down. Well, the most recent findings is that levels of depression have gone up by over 30% levels of suicide over the last five years have gone up by more than 30%.

We have never seen anything like it before. Now Jean Twengi, come through the data. And there's a lot of days on very extensive study. She come through it and her conclusion was, and I quote, it is about the ascendance of the smartphone.

Yeah. I was just going to say, as a lay person, I can't imagine ignoring the correlation between the cell phone news technology. And again, you know, I'm certainly not against technology technology. It's amazing when people are listening to us.

Thanks to technology. Now I just met my best friend from when we were 12, thanks to social media. The thing that was moderation. Yeah.

To me, those impossible to do. Yeah, that's the most elusive word in my vocabulary. I'm all or nothing on everything. Yeah.

But you know, there are certain things that we can do. You know, I recently gave a talk to a group of managers and their spouses. So you know, the couples were sitting there in the room and you were a couple of hundred of them. And then I said to them, we're talking about technology and I said to them, so think about it.

Don't tell me, but think about it. What's the first thing that you turn to in the morning when you open your eyes? Is that your amazing spouse who's sitting right now next to you and everyone? You know, chuckles, of course.

And the first thing that most people turn to is their cell phone. You know, maybe it's the message that had been waiting for their whole lives is right there on there or the world has come to an end and they need to find out. We found your lost lottery too. Yeah.

And then I said to them, technology today for most people is an addiction, quite literally an addiction, meaning in their brains, there are neural structures that look exactly as alcohol addiction or a drug addiction would look. Now imagine this. So you are addicted to alcohol and every night you go to bed with a bottle of whiskey right next to you in the terms. Yeah.

I mean, you would never do such a thing, would you? And it's exactly the same thing when we go to sleep and the smartphone is right next to us. So the first simple thing we should do is keep it away from us. You know, have a, have a some boundaries boundaries, exactly.

In terms of timing, in terms of space. Yeah. Boy, that's great advice because to just be honest and own all my imperfections, the only reason I don't reach for my phone first is because I'm even more addicted to nicotine. So step one is the nicotine step two, I'm more addicted to caffeine.

But then once I have those two addictions satiated, I then turn right to that phone. It's such a, it has to be, I think a societal shift because with work and stuff as an adult when you're working, people expect a response within 10 seconds. And if you don't get it, you're in trouble or you're ruining the rest of everyone else's job and it feels like you must be the first person on your email responding at 8 a.m. Or like your abdominal in a chain of dominoes and they're all waiting for you to continue on this.

Yeah. Yeah. That's why you know it's important. I talk a lot to, to managers about it because you need to introduce a different culture in most workplaces.

If you want your employees to be creative, if you want them to be productive, if you want them to be at their best, you need to help them set boundaries or lead by example and set boundaries yourself. Yeah, I would say that looking at that thing for me is antithetical to daydreaming, wandering, anything that would launch creativity is actually offline for me when I'm consuming that stuff. It's just all reward center. Quick information.

If I don't like that piece of information, I'm on the next one and it's yeah, I'm the little Reese's monkey and the cocaine distributor in the cage. Stay tuned for more armchair expert if you dare. Generally, if we could differentiate positive psychology from negative psychology, when you would normally sit down with a therapist, the normal question name would go, what are you struggling with lately? Or if you're in couples therapy, what issue are you guys wrestling with?

And tell us how positive therapy is different from that. So first of all, there is an issue with named positive psychology because it implies that the rest of psychology is negative. So I would, you know, with traditional psychology. So traditional psychologists would first, you know, ask me, no, what's wrong?

What's not working? Why are you here? Or couples counselor would ask, you know, what is the problem in your relationship? And organizational consultant would first ask what's not working in your company?

What are your weaknesses as a manager as a leader? In contrast, the positive psychologists would begin by focusing on what works. So what's going on? Well, in your life, let's build on that.

Or what's going on? Well, in your relationship, you wouldn't be here if nothing was going well. Or it's going well in your organization. What are your strength as a leader as a manager?

And it turns out that when we start with a positive question, we get a lot more done and we get it done better. Managers or employees who focus on strength actually not only are more creative and productive, they're better able to deal with difficulties when these arise. Same in a relationship. If you focus on what's working in your relationship, you're in a better place to deal with inevitable challenges of a relationship.

Yeah, I have to say, I just imagine myself, I have been to couples therapy with my wife and I love our therapist. So there's nothing against him. But the notion of what was first asked is what is great about this relationship or what do you love about it or what's working? And I got to hear my partner start with some kind of gratitude for me.

I just feel like my defenses would melt. I too would think, oh, this is something worth fighting for. So we just put me in such a different mind space that I think could be very productive for change. I learned a technique from a close friend of mine.

I was a psychologist, which my wife and I have taken on. So when we're in the midst of it, you know, in fighting and real conflict, then we take a time out or a time in where each of us would tell the other what we appreciate in the other. And sometimes, you know, we tell the other one we appreciate screaming at them, but we still tell them. I was going to say that.

I got to say that. You're good with the kids. You are good with the kids. I got to give you that.

And it actually works. First of all, because sometimes it's so ridiculous that it's funny once you start laughing, that of course changes the equation and also reminds you of the bigger picture, because you know, what happens when we get angry? What is road rage? Road rage is that when we get the only thing in the world we can see is that, you know, idiot, you just cut us off.

Nothing else matters. Oh, yeah. And it gives us perspective. This is what Barbara Fredrickson, who was the president of the International Positive Psychology Association, she talks about the idea of positive emotions, helping us to broaden and build, broaden and build.

It's a very important concept because if you think about painful emotions like anger or sadness, they narrow and constrict. When I'm sad, when I'm depressed, the only thing I'm thinking about is how terrible things are right now for me. And if I'm able to even experience one pleasurable emotion like gratitude, like love, then I broaden and build and I look at my life from a different perspective. I see different things that are happening.

That's another fun hack and AA is also many people advise you. First, write it gratitude list. Just write 10 things you're grateful for. Then call me back and let's talk about this.

That's great. You see this in kids, I remember reading when we first had our children that, you know, if they get into a really hysteric place, one great move is to put them in a swing because the area of your brain requires you to regulate your equilibrium, requires so much attention that they won't have a choice but to focus on that, even though they're unaware of it, but they will have to stabilize their equilibrium as they swing and it can be a shift enough to just take them out of that so much that you think we just need to kind of stop honing in or spiraling over these specific things. Exactly. You know, this is also the why meditation, for example, can be so important.

I'm not even talking about meditating for, you know, two hours or even 30 minutes at a time, just sitting down for a minute or five minutes and focusing on the breath going in and out. I can put many things in perspective and in healthy perspective. Yeah, and that's more under, I would say, the heading of mindfulness now, right? Yes, so mindfulness and it's important to keep in mind that all mindfulness is present moment awareness.

So, you know, many of my students can't even say, you know, I find it difficult to concentrate on my breath. I say, how about music? Oh, I love music. Okay, so listen to music and just do that.

So, not music in the background, but lie down, eyes closed and listen to your favorite piece of music. Yeah. And that's mindfulness, presence, that's meditation. Well, and then there's some really compelling data because one of the things I heard you speak about earlier was studying kids who are from, you know, the poverty, trauma, broken families, all these things that would disadvantage a young kid.

There's many, many groups to be studied and traditionally you're studying what are the causes of that trauma or what are the causes of this and that and you cited a study which focused instead on, well, let's look at the few people that are succeeding in these situations. Can you, you know, so this is really the foundation of the field of positive psychology, the science of happiness. It's learning from what works. And, you know, as we talked about that could happen in therapy or couples counseling or organizational consulting as well as in research.

So traditional research looks at the average. It looks at the majority, whereas positive psychology says, yeah, it's important to learn from the average. Learn from the best. Let's also learn from things that are working for instance.

If you want to learn about teaching, would you go and learn from the average teachers or would you learn from the best teachers or if you want to learn how to meditate for that matter, would you go and learn from the average meditator on the streets of Los Angeles or from the Tibet and monks who've dedicated their whole lives to it? You know, same applies with relationships. You know, if you want to improve your relationship, who do you learn from? You would learn from your, from the best relationships.

You know, I think about my grandparents, you know, relationship 53 years together in love after 50 years as they were, I'm assuming when they were in their 20s. I learned a great deal from them and I apply what I learned from them to my relationship. Learn from what works also with at risk population. If you look at these areas, things don't look great.

And yet there are individuals who've made it and made it big or leading full and fulfilling lives, they're thriving, they're flourishing. Why not learn from them? What, why not learn from what they have done? What they have done differently?

What they have done right? And then apply what you learn from them to others. And the more positive psychology has researched this, the more prescriptions it has provided for the general public because when you study the average, you're describing when you're studying the best, potentially you're pre-scribing. So what happened here?

There was an extensive study by the United Nations, UNESCO in particular, looking at intervention programs in at-risk population areas in 32 countries over 50 years. So whether it's in the US, in India, in China, Australia, around the world between the year 1950 and 2000. And what they found, sadly, was that the intervention programs that were introduced that didn't make a difference in the long term. Despite the fact that a lot of resources went in certainly good intentions, very smart people involved, there was no impact.

And then what changed since was that instead of focusing on the problems on what's not working, we started focusing on what is working, what is working in individuals, what is working in those areas, what is working in the few programs that are making a difference. And just that shift of focus, which seems in retrospect, commonsensical, even obvious, just that shift of focusing on what is working, not on the average on what is the best. That made all the difference. Yeah, well, there is something almost counterintuitive about that proposition.

So I would just think conventionally you're like, okay, well, this trauma or this situation is causing this behavior. So I want to get at not the symptom, but the cause. And if I can treat the cause, I can fix the symptom where in this case, it looks like maybe it was better to have a good downstream treatment for it. I've done a lot of thought about my childhood, and I think it's useful and helpful to unravel trauma and this and that.

But also there's a voice in my head that goes, okay, but what's the game plan? So what were those kids doing, the ones that persevered and overcame? Yeah, so that's fascinating. And the results actually have implications, not just for kids in these neighborhoods.

It has implications for all kids. And in fact, for all adults, because fundamentally the difference between the kids who were successful and those who weren't, despite their difficult circumstances was resilience. And resilience is important for all of us because, you know, as I mentioned earlier, we all experienced difficulties and hardships. They're inevitable.

So resilience, the ability to bounce back. What are the antecedents of resilience? What leads to resilience? A few things.

One is a sense of meaning and purpose. So you find it with young kids, teenagers today, there is, in the words of Stanford professor William Damon, there is an existential vacuum. They don't have a sense of meaning and purpose. You know, you ask, what do you want to be when you grow up?

No, many would say, I want to be rich. I want to be famous. Nothing wrong with being rich and famous, but that doesn't contribute to happiness. That's not enough in terms of meaning.

Sense of meaning is, you know, what difference can I make? We've seen a lot of rich and famous people go down the substance abuse whole suicide. So it would be pretty evident that's not actually. And yet you ask many of the young kids today, that is what for them is meaningful.

So a real sense of meaning and purpose, volunteering, giving, of course, connected to a sense of meaning contributes a great deal to resist to happiness overall and in particular to resilience. So people who give are much stronger psychologically than people who don't. Physical exercise, it turns out that there is a real connection between physical toughness and mental toughness. So again, today when kids are sitting in front of the screen for hours and hours a day, it's unhealthy because they're not physically active and it's unhealthy for another reason because the number one predictor of resilience, of happiness for children and adults, relationships, face to face real, not virtual relationships.

Well, we've had an expert in here talk about what is happening on a biochemical level when you're actually not face to face with a human being, right? So if you're communicating solely through these devices, that medium rules out you getting an oxytocin release. There's all kinds of chemicals that happen when we have sustained eye contact, even sustained hugs, all these things. Right.

There's a lot of chemistry that requires actual intimate situations. Exactly. And there's something else that doesn't develop when we are online and that is empathy. When empathy is the moral sentiment, it's arguably the most important emotion that keeps us together as a society, as a moral sane society.

And levels of empathy are going down because the time people spend together is going down. Yeah, they're faceless and they're anonymous themselves and the other person's anonymous. Now, when we talk about happiness, it's also important, again, I probably should have said at the beginning, but here we are on this windy road. It would be easy to miss construct what you mean by happiness, right?

You're not saying that a state of elation is obtainable or sustained elation. That's not your definition of happiness, is it? Right. When I first started teaching the class that first year I had eight students, two of them dropped out.

Which left me with six and a broken ego, I must say. So, not for perfectionists. I was having lunch one day, one of the undergraduate dorms, and a student who wasn't taking my class came over and he said to me, I tell her you're teaching a class on happiness and I said, yeah, positive psychology. And he said, my roommates are taking your class.

And I said, that's great. There were two of the six. And it really had to be nice to him. And then he said, but not all.

You've got to be careful. And he said, tell you've got to watch out. And I said, why? And he said, because if I see you unhappy, I'll tell my roommates.

And I actually use that in class the following day when I address my students, all six of them, I said to them, you know, the last thing in the world I want you to think is that I'm always happy or that you by the end of the semester will experience a constant high. There are only two kinds of people who do not experience painful emotions, such as sadness, anxiety, anger, envy, frustration, two kinds of people who don't experience these painful emotions. One, the psychopaths and two, dead people. So experiencing painful emotions, it's actually a good sign.

It means, you know, we're not psychopaths and we're alive. The problem in today's culture is that we don't give ourselves the permission to be human, the permission to experience these painful emotions. And they intensify when we reject them. Well, here's the real paradox in conundrum, in my opinion, mental health, which is on one side I am pro medication that can help people.

I think there's many, many people that require it. Their life will be miserable without it. I am pro that yet there's also increasing depression and anxiety as we see in every single statistic that comes out. So I think two things are happening.

One is we now have this notion that we can make everyone the same or everyone, you know, normal. And so that's encouraging a lot of people to think that they're normal. Maylays and discomforts as a human are indeed a pathology that needs medical treatment. So it's this really tricky thing to make a statement on because I think some people definitely need it.

I also think we're starting to pass on this perspective that you should always feel good in that that's not part of life. And if you are depressed for three days, that might be a perfect thing for you to be doing at that moment. And you don't need to freak out and think you have a terminal mental health issue, right? It's kind of a tricky thing to navigate.

It's a very tricky thing to navigate. And it's also very difficult for psychologists, for parents to think about when is the right time to medicate because obviously there are people whose lives were so much more than they were saved thanks to medication. Medication is going to get a lot better over the next five years or other interventions that play around with our neural pathways and synaptic connections. That's all going to change over the next 10 years and we're going to get a lot better at it.

At the same time, there's real value to painful emotions. There's real value in terms of our ability to experience happiness in the long term, our ability to be empathic and to feel with and for other people. And we'd be losing our contribution to creativity. A lot of it comes from difficult experiences.

So it would be a tragedy if we can do away at some point with painful emotions. Yes, and you make a great delineation, which is reading oneself of anxiety and depression doesn't then equal happiness. It would be easy to assume that, oh, if I didn't have anxiety and depression, I would then be happy. It's not a binary thing or in the absence of that, you will have the other, right?

So even without those things, you would still need to be proactive in achieving happiness. That's exactly right. I think this is also one of the mistakes that psychologists have made throughout the years. And again, I'm one of those psychologists.

And that is that just getting rid of depression, that's enough. That's sufficient. That's get you from the negative to the zero. And no, it's not enough.

It's not enough for two reasons. We can have more. We can experience excitement and joy and love. And that's not just the negation of depression, anxiety or frustration.

And beyond that, when we cultivate those emotions that we associate with a positive, we're also in a much better position to deal with the painful emotions when they arise. So in a sense, I'm filling up my resilience bank when I cultivate love and joy. Yeah, it's like if you're a boat and you're taking on water and now there's a storm, obviously the boat that had not taken on all that water can ride that storm out a lot better. If you do have these other things, of course, it's going to make dealing with them infinitely harder.

I have over the years been pretty critical of self-help books in that I happen to read one study that said in general, when you look at the data, people who read self-help books often feel worse after reading them because it lays out a strategy that's nearly impossible for anyone to follow. And now they just feel like they've also failed at that thing. And then on the other side, you have academia, which has numbers and studies and empirical evidence, but completely inaccessible to 99% of us. No one's going to go look through the journals of psychiatry.

And so tell me the difference between what you do in self-help and academia. How are you somehow in the middle of those two things? When I was in my early 20s and basically miserable, I turned to self-help literature. And I remember reading those books and initially feeling the high and buying into the promise of the happily ever after.

Because can I interrupt you for one second? One component of happiness is optimism. So it can elicit for a period, this model that you buy into. And then so now you're broadcasting in the future.

Yes, this is going to be a nice existence because this is what I'm promised. So you can live off of that fantasy firm in it. Yes. So this is also an important distinction that academic research psychology makes between detached optimism and realistic optimism.

Ooh, tall. Detached hope and realistic hope. And then you're going to be a detached optimism. Oh, everything is going to be great no matter what.

Or, you know, if you think positive, everything will be positive. Or whatever you see. Right, right. And, you know, there's a lot of research showing how our beliefs do become self-fulfilling prophecies.

But to an extent, you know, beyond believing and hoping, you also need to work very hard. You need to struggle. But Michael Phelps didn't become Michael Phelps because he believed that you could be the best swimmer in the world. You know, he spent, you know, beyond his natural talent, obviously.

He spent many, many hours in the pool working hard and struggling. The same with happiness. It's ludicrous to think that all you need to do to be happy is have a positive mindset. You know, it takes work.

Just like playing the piano takes hard work. Just like any skill takes hard work. The comparison I always make is for some reason everyone has a pretty good grasp on the fact that anyone who's dieted recognizes that a diet for two weeks won't cure the problem forever. That it is going to have to be a daily reprieve, right?

Or exercise. Anyone who's gotten in shape at one time knows that it didn't just sustain itself, right? All these things are going to require work, unfortunately. Or, fortunately, our mental health is no different than our physical health.

Exactly. And look at also the, you know, the research on diet or eating a healthy lifestyle. The people who succeed are usually the ones who do not succeed the first time or the second or even the third time. It's fail fail again.

And the reason why it's that way is because each time we try, we make an attempt, something happened to our neural pathways. Something is reinforced and we may not be ready to persist the third time, but maybe the seventh time. This is when the neural pathway is etched enough. It's embedded enough for us to create a new ritual, a new habit, a new way of living.

So even there struggling failure are an inevitable part for most people of success. Yeah. In my own anecdotal experience, I had seven attempts at getting sober. And for me, the difference was each time I came back, I was a little more receptive to the things I didn't previously want.

I was like, let me see what you got here. I thought you got 20 suggestions. I'm thinking I could buy with 10 of those. I don't want to deal with the other 10.

I would fail. I'd come back. I was open to trying the 11 of the 20. And then by God, I found a, you know, I'd not claiming that I've taken on all 20 of the suggestions, but I found a number and I was available enough for instruction that I finally it was the tipping point and I could hold on to sobriety.

You know, there's some great work by a Jeff Rish warts, who's from your alma mater from UCLA on dealing with OCD. Mm. And one of the things that he talks about was so let's say you have this urge to go back and check the door again. And he says, even if you resisted for one second or for, you know, five seconds, think of something else and then go and check the door, then one second, those five seconds over time make a difference because the next time you can resist it for six seconds and then on and on.

So in other words, what he's saying is don't undervalue the importance of failure. Sure. It's inevitable. Or the incremental steps.

Yes. Yeah. And so one of the things you said about self-help books that I like was it's basically most of them and I'm sure there are many exceptions, but most of them lay out something that's going to basically require great willpower. And please use your brush and your teeth example because I think this is brilliant.

I was asked my students in class. So I'd like you to put your hand up if you've set New Year's resolutions over the years and you fulfilled all of them. So virtually no one's hands. No one's hands.

You know, maybe one in 2000 put their hand up maybe. And then I asked them a second question and I asked them, okay, now put your hand up if you brush your teeth this morning. And of course, everyone puts their hand up and I said, why the difference between the two? Why nobody fulfills New Year's resolutions and everyone brushes their teeth every day.

And the difference is that brushing your teeth relies on habits on rituals. Whereas what you need with New Year's resolutions or birthday resolutions, you need self-discipline and willpower and we have very little self-discipline and willpower. We are creatures of habit of rituals and setting rituals while setting them require some self-discipline. If we take on small steps at a time, so you know, just so this month over the next four months, all I'm going to introduce into my life is regular physical exercise or a regular gratitude exercise.

Just one ritual at a time, not two, certainly not five. That's doable and once it becomes a ritual, it's easy. You don't need willpower to brush your teeth. You don't need motivation in order to do it.

You just do it. Yeah, certainly on a diet, you can feel that anyone who's taken on some kind of exercise. I have had many different diets because of arthritis and always the first 10 days are just misery. Then I kind of just look up week three and realize, oh, I ate that way for a week and a half and I didn't really even think about it.

That's like the sweet spot. Then of course I will stupidly break it and put my toe back in the water. The interesting thing though is even after you break it, it's easier to go back because by then you already have going back to the brain, neural pathways that are associated with that. It's almost like riding a bike or coming back from vacation after you have an exercise.

If you exercise before getting back on track, it doesn't take that long. Well, I can tell you in my own case, I had a failed New Year's resolution for a couple years which was no more road rage and I just couldn't achieve that. I failed at it. Then I had to go, okay, this year you're just not allowed to get out of your car.

That's how bad my road rage was. I said, you can do everything but you can't step out of your car. That was year one and I was able to do that. Then the next year was no more honking.

I'm allowed to honk if something's about to hit me but I'm not allowed to honk just to let someone on piss. That was fucking hard but I got through it. Then it became then the next year I was like, okay, no more yelling anyone. I can be a mad, I can be upset but I'm not going to yell at in my car.

Then I've worked it down to no staring. I got to say now after about five years of doing this, I do drive around pretty peacefully but fuck, it took me breaking it up into all these little things. I just tried to block step to do all of it. I couldn't do it.

I have a trick, a technique that I learned from my barber. My barber says every time someone cuts him off, he imagines that instead of an SUV cutting him off, a cow just cut him off. That's his mental gymnastics. I've actually started using it.

You start laughing when you do it and your mind can't hold two contradictory emotions at the same time. Immusement and anger don't go hand in hand. Stay tuned for more armchair expert. If you dare.

Can you tell me why we should resist this notion of the binary of happy or sad or happy or depressed or how is that not helpful to us? Ever since I got into this field of happiness studies and people hear my story, I came in for personal reasons because I was unhappy. Can I ask you really quick? What things do you think were leading to your unhappiness?

It was the illusion that success leads to happiness. This is the illusion that I did when I was a professional swashman. I said once I win this championship, then I'll be happy. Once I get this title, then I'll be happy.