Cautionary Tales with Tim Harford - Happy World Happiness Day!!!!

Episode Date: March 20, 2024

To mark International Day of Happiness and the release of the annual World Happiness Report, Dr Laurie Santos talks to fellow Pushkin podcasters Dr Maya Shankar, Tim Harford and Malcolm Gladwell about the happiness topics that they would like to see raised on this day of global wellbeing awareness.    The discussion ranges from how to quiet your inner monologue; though the misery of running in a Canadian winter; to the happiness lessons to be learned from a colonoscopy.   See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Pushkin. Hello, and if you're listening to this on March 20th, happy World Happiness Day. On the Happiness Lab, we suggest you do something to improve your well-being every day of the year. But if the United Nations wants us all to make a special effort for 24 hours in March, then we're on board with that too. The first International Day of Happiness was celebrated back in 2013.

The goal was to raise awareness that our well-being can be improved if only more governments enacted policies to help us all become a little happier. On each International Day of Happiness, the United Nations also issues the World Happiness Report. Written by scientists and academics, this report examines different themes, showing

what we're getting right when it comes to happiness, and what we still need to work on. Past reports have looked at happiness and parenting, what living in cities does for our happiness, and more recently, the impact that COVID-19 has had on our well-being. Over the next few episodes of the Happiness Lab, we'll be talking to the experts behind this year's World Happiness Report. They're among the best and brightest in the field of happiness science, so these are going to be some fantastic episodes.

But for this show today, we're doing something a little different. The Happiness Lab is made by Pushkin Industries, and many of the network's other hosts have some pretty interesting takes on what can make us all happier. So I decided to talk to them about what they would have put in this year's World Happiness Report. A little later, you'll hear from Revisionist History's Malcolm Gladwell.

I'm perfectly happy to suffer, but I will not suffer for six hours. And from Tim Hartford from Cautionary Tales. The surgeon would leave the probe in, so to speak, without wiggling it around. But we'll kick it off with an old, old friend of mine. It's worth sharing with folks that I've actually known you since I was 17 years old.

I was a student of yours. A whole eight years. I know. It feels like it's been so much longer. This is Maya Shankar. I taught her back when she was an undergraduate at Yale, and we kept in touch after she graduated and went to work at the White House, where she advised

the Obama administration on how behavioral science can improve government policy. These days Maya hosts the Pushkin Show, A Slight Change of Plans, a podcast about who we become when we face big challenges and decisions. Given all that, she was perhaps the perfect person to ask my question. If you were writing a chapter of the World Happiness Report, what would it be about? Okay, well this one's really easy for me because I think there is one thing

that erodes my happiness more than anything else and it's what our psychologist friend, Ethan Cross, calls mental chatter. Oh yeah, so Ethan Cross, he's a professor at the University of Michigan and he's the author of this wonderful book, Chatter. Yeah, exactly. And it was really helpful for me when I learned about this concept because I was like, wow, Ethan, you've just captured what's been in my brain for decades. So, Lari, can you tell us a bit more about what mental chatter is and how does that relate to the

inner dialogue that we have in our minds all the time? Yeah, well, let me start with the inner dialogue because in some ways it's a really cool thing that we do as humans. So inner dialogue, just as it sounds, is like the self-talk that you have going on in your head and it could be about all kinds of things, right? Our inner dialogue is how we like make sense of the world and build our own inner narrative. Our inner dialogue is how we like plan for what we're going to do after this.

You know, when I was waiting for you to hop on Zoom, I'm like, Oh, after this, I'm going to make dinner and what do I have in my fridge tonight? Oh, I have some black beans. Like all of that is inner dialogue, right? But chatter as Ethan defines it is a little bit different. It's when our inner dialogue goes to the negative, right? So it's that inner voice of worry, where you're thinking about the future and feeling anxious about what's to come,

or that inner voice of rumination, where you're thinking about the past and beating yourself up for something that you did do or that you didn't do, or even just like our inner voice of self-criticism, where we just kind of talk crap about ourselves like all the time, no matter what's going on. And so while our inner dialogue itself

can be really adaptive, mental chatter is not. It kind of feels like crap. And then there's lots of evidence that it affects our performance negatively too. I remember, so when I had a conversation with Ethan on a slight change of plans, it was so helpful for me to even hear this distinction, the distinction

between the inner voice and dialogue and mental chatter. Because I think what happens is in the throes of chatter, you are so pissed off at your brain. You're like, can you please stop? You've been ruminating over this thing for three hours. You're not making any progress at all. And you can really start to resent your brain and resent the fact that it even has this faculty.

And so when Ethan and I did more of this gratitude moment together where we appreciated our inner voice, and to exactly your point, focused on all the benefits that that inner voice affords us in any given day, that alone helped me have a different relationship with my mental chatter. Because at the end of the day, I thought, well, I wouldn't want to do away with my inner voice altogether. I mean, it's actually miraculous that I can travel in time to the future or the past in general. I mean, I might not like it in this moment because I'm perseverating about something

that happened two weeks ago that I can no longer change. But in general, it's such a cool feature of our cognition, of human cognition, that we have the ability to have these internal conversations with ourselves. Yeah, and I think the beauty is that once you understand what chatter is, you can also find strategies for controlling it when it goes to the not so great side, right? And that's the lovely thing about Ethan's work is he has all these different strategies that we can use to like not shut our chatter up, but to like use self-talk to be a little

bit more productive and a little bit kinder to ourselves. So let's talk about some of those strategies for those who are in the horrible loop of mental rumination. I want to give folks hope and help them see that there is light at the end of the tunnel. Well, one of Ethan's best strategies that I love because it's like so super simple. And in fact, there's lots of evidence that when you use this strategy, it doesn't take any cognitive work. It happens super fast. And that strategy is what he calls distant self-talk, which is just the simple act of using your name and talking to yourself in the third person. So normally if I'm thinking about my own

like mental chatter, I'll be using the first person. I'll be like, why did I do that? I said that stupid thing. Like I should have thought more, but it's I, I, I, I, me, me, me, me, right? That's a first person perspective. And that's what we often use when we get like all worrying and rumintative because it's all about us. But distant self-talk lets you get a little bit of psychological distance because instead of talking like that, you say, you know, maybe you messed up a little bit, Laurie. Like maybe this is something that you need to think about in the future, right? So I'm using the second person you, I'm using the third person like my name. And that is really powerful because the only time in your life you ever hear the

second person you or your name is when somebody else is talking to you. And so it's this little cool linguistic device that makes us feel like we're hearing from some wise mentor. We're hearing from some other person, somebody who is distanced from that loop of chatter that we have going on. And Ethan's found that the simple act of doing that, you don't even have to instruct subjects to like talk differently to themselves. Just the act of switching the pronouns that you use in your brain winds up making you a little bit kinder to yourself, has all these wonderful emotional consequences where you're a little bit less anxious over time, and it just lets you kind of get out of that loop so that you can

perform better. And what's cool is like it doesn't take any work. It's just a matter of like changing the pronouns. It's not like developing some complicated like cognitive behavior, therapy, strategy. It's just a matter of changing the pronouns. It's not like developing some complicated cognitive behavior therapy strategy. It's just like you switch the pronouns and immediately you get this interesting distance from your normal chatter. Yeah, I remember reading in Ethan's book

that Malala did this. Of course, Malala, the most sophisticated psychologist of all time despite never having studied it because she's such a genius. I really love the fly on the wall perspective because when I think about how I counsel my friends or family members, there's a certain objectivity that I feel I have in that moment

where I can see the situation from a distance, the kind of hormonal fog is removed, all of those heated emotions are removed from whatever advice I'm giving. And it feels so useful when you're diagnosing your own problems to have that objectivity, right? To be able to look at it as more of an impartial observer. The distant self-talk is one way to do that.

But Ethan finds you can also do that, like, literally taking the perspective of a distanced observer. You know, what would Beyonce do, sort of strategy, where you just say, you know, oh my gosh, I said that thing, like, that's so terrible. Well, what would Beyonce do? Imagine I'm Beyonce. How would I react to having said that? Like, I wouldn't care, I'd be Beyonce, right?

Which sounds silly, but the evidence really shows that like taking this third person perspective, like pretending that you're somebody else, and especially somebody else who has exactly the skills to deal with whatever situation you're facing, all of a sudden, like you wind up performing much better, being less anxious, and you can just kind of shut up the chatter because you kind of take on this other perspective.

My favorite part of what would Beyonce do is it turns out Beyonce herself uses a strategy. I guess whenever she's like feeling nervous before shows, she has this persona that she calls Sasha Fierce, where she's like, I'm going to harness Sasha Fierce, and then she pretends she's Sasha Fierce, and she just like goes out there and, her Beyoncé thing. So what would Beyoncé do? Beyoncé would use this form of distant self-talk,

where you pretend that you're somebody cooler and wiser. I mean, to imagine someone cooler than Beyoncé, but fine. I guess she needs a different reference point. I'm curious to know what you think the mechanism is at play. Do you think it's because we are better at giving other people advice than we are ourselves? Or do you think it's that we're better at following other people's advice?

Yeah, my guess is that it's a combination of the two, right? When we start using second person pronouns, like, you know, hey, you need to do a little bit better. I know that, you know, this has been hard, but you da, da, da, da, da. Like, I think we rarely do that in a mean way. We're like, you suck and you're terrible, right? That's just kind of not what most of us normally do.

So when we apply that pronoun you to ourselves, I think it naturally makes us a little bit nicer. So it means the advice we're giving ourselves feels nicer. But I think hearing that self-talk involving you and third person like you, Laura, here's what you can do, all of a sudden it gets us out of that mental chatter frame where we're just talking to ourself and it kind of feels like we're hearing advice

from somebody else. So I think we both give advice differently, but we're more, we resonate with that advice differently too. We kind of hear it in a different way. So it's like both parts wind up making us feel better and perform better. One of my favorite strategies that I use when I am in the throes of mental chatter

is temporal distancing. Can you share a bit more about what that is? Yeah, so that is a strategy where you pretend that you yourself are in the future thinking about whatever it is that you're ruminating about right now. Then I'll think, okay, how is 10 years from now, Laurie, going to think about that? And I'm like, oh, she's not going to care about that at all, right? My emotions kind of go down because it doesn't feel

like it's that scary anymore. But also, 10 years from now, Laurie is going to think about that incident in a totally different way. She's going to say, oh, I learned something from that. And so this is the strategy of temporal distancing. You think about yourself in the future, how they would think about this incident.

And usually, when they think about it, they're in a different mode than you are. They're not feeling all anxious and ruminative about something. They're thinking from the perspective of this wise future observer who wants to go through hard things, who wants to grow from them, who's thinking more in terms of what they're gonna learn rather than how it feels right now. So there have been a few times where temporal distancing has failed for me and those are in moments where I'm sitting there ruminating and I imagine five years

from now, Maya, 10 years from now, Maya, and I think to myself, I'm going to be worried about the same damn thing even then. So for those of you who are listening who feel like they're very neurotic in this way, you're not alone. I'm with you. And so I want to share what I do in those moments. So what I do is I think back to my past and I try to think about some topic that seized my brain

that I was absolutely convinced was going to plague me forever. And then to look at my present self and to say, huh, you're not actually worried about that issue that you thought in college was the biggest thing ever. And so sometimes collecting personal evidence from your own life that you were just wrong, you misforecasted the impact that a particular topic was going to have on you can give you the

confidence that the current thing will actually resolve in your brain over the next five or ten years. I love that because I do sometimes with that kind of temporal distancing strategy, like I feel like sometimes I'm so caught up in the moment with my chatter that I'm like, oh yeah, 10 years from now, Laura, she's going to be just as freaked out about this tiny thing. But then when you look back, you're like, oh yeah, I guess I was wrong about those other ones, so maybe I'm wrong about this one too. So Laurie, what are other strategies that we can

use to distance ourselves from that chatter? Well, other strategies come from somebody else we've had on the happiness lab, Kristin Neff, who really talks about how we need to shut up the critical side of our self-talk voice. This is something that I think I've seen in my students so much. Kristin Neff, who really talks about how we need to shut up the critical side of our self-talk voice. And this is something that I think I've seen in my students so much, right? I think my students just are so hyperambitious. They talk to themselves in such harsh ways.

And I think they do that not because they're masochist, but because they think it works. They just have this assumption that this really critical voice is what's going to kind of get me off my butt, and I'll actually do stuff and get motivated to do, you know, and achieve whatever goals I had in the first place. But a lot of Kristin Neff's evidence suggests that that's absolutely not true. Self-critical voice winds up causing you to procrastinate and it feels really terrible and you just don't get done what you need to get done. And she's found that there's a powerful alternative to this, which she refers to as self-compassion. Again, you're kind of marshaling the compassion

that you'd give to somebody else for yourself. You kind of give yourself the same kindness that you would an outside observer. But just to kind of make it concrete, she talks about self-compassion as having these three parts. The first part is kind of mindfulness. You need to recognize this sucks right now. I'm having a hard time right now.

I have failed and I feel ashamed. So you're mindful about your feelings, the situation, how bad it is. You're kind of like calling the emotional spade a spade. Like this sucks right now. The second part is what she calls common humanity, which I think is super powerful. It's basically saying, it's normal. I'm human. I'm going to screw up. I'm going to go through shame. I'm going to feel yucky sometimes. Like this is normative, right? It is common humanity to experience these emotions that I'm experiencing. And then the third step is the self-kindness part, kind of using the same strategies we were just talking about with Ethan, where you talk to yourself ideally using the sort

of second and third person and say, Laurie, what can you take off your plate? Laurie, how can you be kind to yourself right now? And she finds that self-compassion is this like super powerful strategy where it can do things like not just improve your performance and make you feel better, but also like reduce trauma when individuals are in combat situations. It can increase the compassion that you give to your team members and your partner, right? So if you engage in self-compassion, it boosts your other people compassion too. And it just like has this enormous effect on people's performance where you find that

people stop procrastinating, they stop being afraid of the kind of tasks that they have ahead of them, they can just kind of embrace them with excitement. Yeah, I had so many misconceptions about the self-compassion literature until I dug into it. Totally, because it has really crappy branding, right? It sounds like very woo, like self-compassion. It doesn't sound like human performance maximization, but that's like ultimately what it is. Yeah, I mean the minute I learned, wait, self-compassion can actually improve performance? I mean, then it just becomes a no-brainer. It no longer feels like this soft woo-woo narrative, but instead one that feels very productive and

functional and ends up making you feel better, which matters too. Yeah, and I think one thing we get wrong when we hear self-compassion, and this is definitely something I've seen when I teach the strategy to my students, is that they hear it as self-indulgence. They think like if you're being kind to yourself, you're gonna like let yourself off the hook or kind of not call yourself out when you are acting problematically, like when things are kind of a real problem. And I think that's why this idea of talking to yourself like you would a friend is so powerful. Like, you're my friend and former student. If you were doing something that was really terrible, I would give you a talking to, but

I wouldn't do it in a mean way and say, Maya, you suck. I would say like, Maya, what is going on? Like, I just want to know how I can help. What can I do? Right? And so in some ways, this self-compassion isn't self-indulgence. It's not kind of letting yourself off the hook. If anything, it's what Kristin Neff calls fierce, right? Like you are ready to dive in even for tough problems

and not avoid them because you care about yourself that much, right? That's this kind of analogy with a friend. If a good friend's going through something tough and they're not behaving in the right way, you're going to check in, but you're not going to check in in this kind of mean drill sergeant way. You're going to check in with kindness and curiosity and like understanding, right? And that's just kind of what we need to apply to ourselves too. Yeah. And that drill sergeant approach can really backfire. I remember one of the freshest insights that I learned from Kristen is that when you are crippled by shame, right? When you feel that the thing you did is not just bad, but that you're bad, it actually closes

you off to the idea of improvement. Because if you're bad, you're irredeemable. There's no chance at making progress or ameliorating the situation. So actually, self-compassion is the instrument by which we can unlock growth and do better. So it's the opposite of letting ourselves off the hook. It's actually the thing that allows our brains to be open-minded enough to think that there is redemption or at least a path to progress. Exactly. Maya, I love that you've brought up like self-talk and how we can use it better. I wish that was a chapter in the World Happiness Report. I think it's super important. Thank you so much for coming on the Happiness Lab. Thank you so much for having me,

Laurie. A little later, we'll be talking to Malcolm Gladwell about the joy or lack of it he gets from running. But next up, the economist and pushkin podcaster, Tim Harford, discusses the famous happiness experiment that echoes in his own medical history. I have to have colonoscopies quite often. We don't want to go into too many details, but it's a whole journey. All that after a quick break. If you look back through previous World Happiness reports, you'll see that a lot of effort has been put into investigating why some people are happier than others,

and indeed why some nations seem happier than their neighbors. But even in our own individual lives, our happiness tends to ebb and flow. We can be happy one year and down the next. Over the course of just an hour, we can experience a whole gamut of emotions, both good and bad.

But there's an interesting bit of happiness research that shows just how slippery our grip on happiness can be. And that's the topic that was picked up by our next guest on this special show. I am Tim Harford. I am a senior columnist at the Financial Times, and I am the host of Cautionary Tales, which is a podcast all about the catastrophes of the past and how we can learn from them.

Tim admits to being obsessed by the work of Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Danny Kahneman, and especially the work that Danny did on how we can remember bad experiences fondly, given the right circumstances. In a series of experiments, Danny found that we can go through some pretty harrowing experiences. But with a couple of tweaks about how that ordeal ends, we can look back on even terrible times in a much more positive way than we expect. Mason- He emphasizes the difference between remembered happiness and experienced happiness. And you would think happiness is just happiness, right? But of course, Danny Kahneman gets to be Danny Kahneman by drawing these fine

distinctions that never occurred to the rest of us. Let me give you an example. He ran an experiment where they got people to hold their hands in ice water for 60 seconds. Using a computer mouse, they could register how much that was hurting holding your left hand in this cold water. They gave them a nice warm towel, a bit of a break, and then they got them to put their other hand in the water, not for 60 seconds, but for 90 seconds. But for the last 30 seconds, the water got slightly warmer. I mean, not warm, but just a little bit less horrible. Then you got your warm towel. But then the people participating in this experiment were asked, do you want to do the left-hand thing

again or do you want to do the right-hand thing again? In other words, do you want 60 seconds of pain followed by nice warm towels? Or do you want 60 seconds of pain followed by 30 seconds of slightly less painful pain, followed by nice warm towels. People wanted the longer experience. They wanted the longer, more uncomfortable experience because they didn't remember it as more uncomfortable. What they recalled was, oh, well, I put my hand in ice water and it was painful. Or there was that other time I put my hand in ice water and it wasn't as bad. They don't remember it as being as bad. The reason they don't remember it as being as bad is because it didn't end as uncomfortably. So in this particular case, Kahneman was highlighting, there's a clear

irrationality. Obviously it's better. To be less time and pain. Yeah, less time and pain. As you're experiencing them, the only difference between the two experiences was one of them had 30 extra seconds of discomfort. But as you remembered them, they're very different. Okay, so what does that got to do with happiness? Well, it turns out that this distinction between what you're experiencing as you go through it and then how you remember it applies to all sorts of things in our lives. You might experience a happy relationship, but then it ends in a really messy way. And then suddenly the whole relationship is like, well, that was a disaster. You might experience a pleasant vacation, but then you

have all kinds of trouble getting home from the vacation and then the whole vacation is spoiled. And so this distinction between the stories we tell ourselves about our lives, what we remember about our lives and how we're actually experiencing our lives as we go along, it really matters. And I'm not sure I would say that one of these things is the truth. Like, the experience is the truth and the memory is false. I don't think it's that simple, but there's a distinction there that's worth exploring.

Tim is of course right. That distinction can have a huge impact on our lives. Twenty years ago, Danny Kahneman conducted a study to see if the medical procedure used at the time to examine the human bowel for disease could be made less uncomfortable, at least in our memories. If it could, then fewer people might duck out of the exam because of the discomfort and more lives would be saved. So just like in the ice water experiment, Danny decided to extend the duration of a colonoscopy.

At the end of the procedure, basically the surgeon would leave the probe in, so to speak, without wiggling it around. So it was kind of uncomfortable, but fine. People rated those colonoscopies as less unpleasant, even though minute by minute, it was clearly worse than the shorter procedure. The joy is because of a family history, I have to have colonoscopies quite often. We don't want to go into too many details, but the whole thing lasts a couple of days and it's a whole journey. I once presented the colonoscopy study to a group of medical doctors who chastised me

afterwards because they noted that when Danny did that study and people were in serious rectal pain during the entire colonoscopy and we could kind of vary how it ended, that that was before the beauty of anesthesia that we have today. And those doctors said, your colonoscopy won't be nearly as bad. You'll just kind of get knocked out, have no remembered happiness or experienced happiness and then you get a nice little bottle of juice at the end. Yeah. So I mean, as a connoisseur of having cameras shoved where the sun doesn't shine. Yeah, they're fine actually. Don't avoid, do not avoid your colonoscopy people. It's fine.

Yeah, I love the experience versus remembered happiness stuff. I mean, for a couple reasons. One is that I love that Danny's figured this out and we can now start better engineering, enjoyably remembered experiences just by making them kind of end pretty well at the end, right? You know, if you've had a kind of crappy vacation, you know, and it hasn't gone so well, at the end you can just kind of stick in some pleasant thing and then all of a sudden you can start feeling a little bit happier. Danny also gives a suggestion that, you know, if you've had

this vacation that's gone really well and say that the day that you're flying home, you know, everything falls apart and terrible things happen, he would say, well, then you need to kind of reframe the vacation. There was the vacation, you know, it ended on a high note. And then there was the kind of crappy travel day home. But I'm just going to kind of put that into a different mental slot. And now all of a sudden you can remember your vacation pleasantly, even though it sort of ended on a not so good note. And so I love this strategy because by using what he calls this peak end effect,

where you're sort of paying too much attention to the end of events, you can sort of remember that the end of events matter a lot and you just need to make sure that things end well and then you'll kind of be happier. It's also funny to me that I think there's so many natural events in our lives that end well and we remember them really fondly, like desserts and orgasms and all these things that seem to be particularly good at the end and now all of a sudden we remember these things as the best experiences ever. Yeah. Although meals, if you go out for a meal, it doesn't end with dessert. It ends

with the bill, Laurie. It ends with somebody asking you to pay money. But we still go out for dinner and we don't feel that was a mistake. So I guess we successfully compartmentalize the bill as being something else. But maybe restaurants should experiment with getting people to pay upfront. If you go to a really fancy restaurant and it has a tasting menu, you can actually know what the whole thing is going to cost and you could pay in advance. I love this. Maybe that would be in everybody's interest. You just remember the whole thing more fondly.

I do think some American restaurants have tried to come over this. We have a few restaurants in my hometown in New Haven that when they bring the bill, they'll bring you like a little candy or some Swedish fish or something. So it's kind of this little surprise moment at the end. So you're paying the bill, but then you get to have some tasty candy at the end. But the bill at the beginning will save them the candy costs. I love this idea. Absolutely.

But this distinction between what we remember and what we experience, I think it broadens out beyond this narrow but important point of we're really influenced by how things end. I mean, that's important in itself. But if you think about, for example, the standard question that people are asked when they're asked to evaluate their happiness, which is like, how's it going? I mean, I realize it's a little bit more formal than that. But I mean, that's easy. Psychometrics folks might say. But no, but seriously, all things considered,

how happy were you this week? Yeah, yeah. That's a remembered judgment, right? People don't have access to their experienced happiness during the week at every moment. When you're asking them that question, all they have access to is that remembered version. And if the remembered version is biased, either because it pays too much attention

to what just happened or how things ended or whatever, then we're just not going to get great happiness judgments. Mason- No. You phrased it, how did things go this week, which is one question. But you could ask people, how are things going in general? How satisfied are you with your life? Or you could ask people, tell me about yesterday. How were things yesterday? Or you could get them to focus in in more detail. Let's walk through what happened yesterday. Let's go through the breakfast, the morning commute. You had these meetings. You had lunch with a friend. All the different things you did. So these are quite distinct ways of thinking about

measuring happiness. If we are asked, for example, to evaluate our lives and we're just about to get married or we were recently married, I'm getting married or I just got married, is that like a huge deal? But if instead it's like, well, my children are graduating, they're going to leave home, they're going off to college. Well, that's what you think about. Or maybe you're ill and that's what you think about. But actually, none of these things are, in fact, as all-encompassing as they seem to be when you are directing your attention at them.

Yeah, I mean, the good news about these measures, though, is that one could ask the question, like, what are we really trying to maximize, right? You know, most of the stuff we talk about in the happiness lab is all about strategies that you can use to maximize your happiness. As the question is, what are we trying to maximize? And I think to a certain extent,

what we're trying to maximize is what people say in those remembered judgments, right? For example, if I do some sort of intervention, right? Like I get people to scribble in a gratitude journal or I get people to engage with more social connection. And then later on I ask them, hey, you know, all things considered, how are you feeling with your life? Or how are you feeling yesterday?

What was your positive emotion like yesterday? And people say like, oh, it was pretty good. Then my sense is that that social connection intervention or that gratitude intervention, it did actually do some work. It might just not be doing all the work we assume it's doing because these judgments are a little bit biased. Mason- Yeah, I don't entirely disagree, but I would want to raise a question. So if, if Laurie, for example, you encouraged your listeners to maybe go out and have more diverse experiences, go and meet more people, go to more places, do more challenging things, take more short vacations rather than fewer long vacations,

because all of these things are going to lay down new memories. Your life is going to seem richer and more satisfying. I mean, that's advice I would give myself. That's advice I would take from you for sure. And yet, and yet, are you not actually minute to minute potentially subjecting yourself to a lot more stress, more congestion, more uncomfortable situations, more difficulty, more danger, and actually you're going through your life potentially having a worse experience moment to moment. And yet, at the end of the year, you look back at it and go, that was great. Whose side – Thomas Schelling, great economist Thomas Schelling, would talk about this sort of thing.

And he would raise the question, whose side should you be on in that argument with yourself? Who's right? I don't think the answer is entirely obvious. Yeah, I think one strategy we can use to get better at it is to do a better job of recognizing what's happening in our moment to moment self. I think the problem with the moment to moment self is that we're not often doing that evaluation. We're not taking time to be mindful and to recognize what's going on. But I think these practices where people engage in a little bit more mindfulness,

even when it is being mindful about kind of not so great situations, you can kind of notice what negative emotions you're experiencing. Those kinds of strategies can help us pay a little bit more attention to the experienced self in the moment. So you're kind of meta aware as you're going through

those kinds of events during your day. And I think that can help us come up with a little bit of a better judgment, right? We can kind of do the work to realize like, yeah, you know, it was fun to think about going on that vacation. That was great in my remembered happiness. But actually, I kind of hate the traffic. I kind of hate going through, you know, the TSA or whatever. That mindfulness can sort of help us pay attention.

And I think it can also help us pay attention in the other direction too, right? We can start noticing the little good things about our life that are going well so that in times that are kind of sucky, we can go back to our experienced happiness and notice like actually it wasn't that bad. I mean, this was to a certain extent my experience during COVID where in large part I was just starting some of this happiness work. So I was doing all some of this happiness work. So I was doing all this work and in the moment to kind of be mindful of the taste of my coffee

and be grateful for the small things. And I think my overall evaluation of how bad it was during COVID is a little bit less bad than it could have been in a remembered sense, because I was there noticing mindfully some of these little things in life that were good that didn't go away even in the midst of that pandemic time. Yeah, yeah. One thing I have been doing recently is I have been keeping what is sometimes called a good time journal.

So at the end of each day, I think back on what I've been doing and how much fun it was. And one thing I really noticed was that intense physical exercise, so going to the gym or kickboxing classes, they were always great in hindsight. I know they hurt, they properly hurt at the time. You're so glad when they're over. Three hours later, you're looking back and going, that was the best part of the day.

I guess that is part of the weirdness and the fun of Danny Kahneman's distinction that he's making. I love that. I love that. As you'd expect from a master podcaster, Tim's talk there of exercise sets us up perfectly for the last part of this special show, in which keen amateur runner Malcolm Gladwell turns a familiar happiness maxim on its head. It's the journey, not the destination.

I just like, no, it's the destination. Otherwise, what's the point of the journey, not the destination. I just like, no, it's the destination. Otherwise, what's the point of the journey? The Happiness Lab will be right back. Hey. Hey, how's it going? It's going well. If I'm asking my fellow Pushkin hosts to reimagine the World Happiness Report, there's no way I could leave out revisionist history's Malcolm Gladwell.

I knew he was going to have something interesting and provocative to add. in the World Happiness Report, there's no way I could leave out revisionist history's Malcolm Gladwell. I knew he was gonna have something interesting and provocative to add. All right, we ready? Fire away. All right. The question I had for you, Malcolm, is if you were an author of the World Happiness Report,

if you were doing your own chapter in this big report, what would you wanna talk about? I would like to do my argument that the phrase, it's the journey, not the destination is backwards. There's a whole important class of happiness that's about the destination and not the journey. And there's a special kind of deep and enduring, I think, pleasure, fulfillment, where it's all about where you end up. And that getting there is sometimes hard and unpleasant,

and that makes the ending even sweeter. I've always found something uniquely kind of troubling about that phrase, it's the journey, not the destination. I just like, no, it's the journey, not the destination. I just like, no, it's like, it's the destination. Otherwise, what's the point of the journey? Well, let's unpack that a little bit because there are spots where I agree with you and there are spots where I think the science

might differ a little. Like I think about this all the time because I'm a runner. Every time I've been running my entire life. So I've been running, I'm 60 So I've been running, I'm 60. I've been running for essentially 50 years. Every time I go running, I have exactly the same psychological experience, which is I don't really wanna do it.

I mean, I make a place for it and I kind of formally look forward to it. I pack my running clothes. I know when I'm gonna go running, I drive to a running place or I set it all up. But if you told me I could go home and drink a beer, there's a powerful temptation every time not to do it. And then when I'm running, it's not always pleasant.

It can be, if you're doing a hard track workout, it's hard, it's daunting. I mean if you're doing a hard track workout, it's hard. It's daunting. I mean, you're pushing yourself and it's. But then when you're finished, there isn't a kind of experience from having finished it that keeps me going back to it for 50 years. It's 32 degrees out there today. I'm going to go running.

I don't want to go running in 32 degrees, but I will do it because there's a play, you know, when I'm done and I'm back home and it's warm again, I'm really, really happy that I did it, right? But I wouldn't describe the actual experience. It's not masochism because while I'm running, I have in the back of my mind the memory of the feeling of having finished running. And that makes the effort worth it. And in a certain way,

pleasurable in this sort of different way. It's like you're testing yourself in this way that you kind of appreciate. So that's the argument, I think. Yeah, I mean, I think it maps onto this distinction that, uh, I feel like it's mountaineering folks who started this distinction between type one and type two fun. So type one fun is really just the beer, just sitting home, having the beer, you know, like, you know, hot fudge Sundays, orgasms, like just like the in the moment stuff is just good and deeply

pleasurable. Whereas type two fun is sort of the opposite. It's like, again, it's not fun in the moment. It's not fun when you're like putting your shoes on and that first blast of the 32 degree weather when you're running. But the fact that there's a goal at the end that you're going to get to means the type two fun winds up being really interesting. And this is like just a distinction that like sports nuts and like people who write in mountaineering blogs make, but it's actually something that the economist George Lowenstein studied himself. He wrote this paper of like, why climb a mountain?

But the idea is like, why would you ever do something where it's like kind of, again, not masochism, maybe not miserable in the moment, but it doesn't have fun in the actual journey itself. It just has fun when you hit the end of it. And so he argues that this is like a deep feature of human pleasure seeking, is that we don't just seek pleasure kind of

in the moment for the journey. Like most of the good meaningful pleasures we get involve some hard stuff. I mean, you're talking about running, but I know you're also a dad and raising a kid. And that's the kind of thing that in the moment, the pleasure is not great. But when you get to these achievement moments,

like graduates from kindergarten or do these fun things, like those matter a lot more. And so Lowenstein's argument is that there's so much of human motivation is motivation not to do the thing kind of in the moment for the journey, but the motivation kind of comes from the very fact of there being an arrival at the end. I think the problem though is when everything's about the arrival at the end.

And I think this is the kind of thing I see maybe with my students, right? Where they get mistaken about how much they're going to enjoy the arrival at the end of, I don't know, getting into a super good college or getting married or there's all these big things in life that we put our happiness only at the arrival at the end. And sometimes that can set us up for like kind of mispredicting how good that's going to feel. When students get into college, there's all these videos now of like the acceptance moment

when students click on the link and they find out, did I get into Yale or did I not get into Yale? And when they click on the link and they get in, they start screaming like, yay, that's great. But students will self-report afterwards like five minutes later. Well, that was a letdown. Like there's just the next carrot to go after

and the next carrot. And so I think the challenge is like, how do we balance both of those? On the one hand, we want to get the like meaningful pursuit from the big arrival moments in life, but we don't want to like have those only be the things or be picking things where the arrival isn't as good as we expected.

We kind of mispredict how awesome it'll be in the end. I think part of the answer is, I'm thinking again of the running example. Part of the answer is, I'm thinking again of the running example, part of the answer is in understanding that the kind of satisfaction that you get from the journey is not less, it's just different. So when I go for a long run, there's always a moment in a long run where, like in the middle, where you're filled with this sense of awe about what human, it's funny, in 50 years,

I have always had this, always this moment where I think, holy mackerel, I can't believe people, and it's never personal, it's all about the class of runners. I can't believe we, and it's never personal, it's all about the class of runners. I can't believe we're capable of doing this. Like, you might be, you're eight miles into a 12 mile run, so you've been out there for an hour, and you're like, is it really possible for someone to be

in a middle-aged man to go out and run 12 miles and be fine about it. Like, it just seems like, it seems incredible to me. Like you're moving, you're not meandering, you're like moving on, you know, it's sort of a fairly decent clip. And that's like, I was, it always, it fills me with the same kind of wonder that I get

whenever I see anyone doing something that requires effort and talent and persistence. Right? It makes me feel better about human beings that we can sort of pull this off. I love that. And it fits with, I mean, there's this lovely work by Dacher Keltner that looks at all these domains

in which people experience awe and wonder. And I think we assume that that's gonna be, you know, these moments in nature, when you connect with the divine. And he finds that the most common moments of awe in people's everyday experience is when we experience awe for the awesomeness of human beings, like human's moral character

or their individual performance and achievement. And so I love that you get that while you're running. But that's not, I mean, I'm not a runner, but I do like, you know, these long hardcore yoga routines. And that is not my experience in the moment of the yoga routine. My experience is always like, why am I doing this? This sucks. Like I need to figure out, like, I need to find ways to get to these deep moments of

awe during the hard yoga. Because, you know, there's another way in which journeys differ from destinations, which is that the pleasure that comes from reaching the destination is, I don't want to say fixed, it's one very specific singular thing. Whereas the satisfaction that comes from the journey, you're cycling through a series of responses. So it's 32 degrees out or whatever, grew up in Canada going running,

I've gone running in minus 20 before. There's that dread, oh, you know, shit, do I have to do this? Then there's like 10 minutes and you're like, it's not that bad. And then 15 minutes in you're relaxed and just sort of running easily and you're not tired yet. And then there's that all moment like,

I can't believe I'm doing this. It's kind of amazing, right? And then there's that kind of like, it's almost over exhilaration. This like, the journey is six different emotional states. The destination is one. And it's just, and I think whenever I try to get non-runners to run, it's very difficult to explain them

that they're fixated on the first state, which is, oh, man, it's hard. I don't want to go out there. And they forget, no, no, no, there's like, there's five more after that. You just have to get to them. This is a big deal in Canada because of how much running you have to do in the cold, that you have to understand that cold only is a problem for the first five minutes. And I think that's true for so many experiences that ultimately give us happiness, right? Like I think, you know, on the show, we talk a lot about social connection, for example,

like just talking to a stranger, which ultimately once you're five minutes into it and it's feeling good is awesome and you really enjoy it. But the friction at the start of it, that first question, that kind of awkward, are they gonna hate me, All those predictions are off. And so I think this is like maybe a deep truth of things that make us like happy,

is that a lot of them start with some friction and like the first step is sucky and you have to overcome the sucky step to get to the good part. But a lot of times we like miss the sucky step. I mean, I think that that's a real problem with so many of our happiness pursuits is that like we have to overcome that moment of friction.

But there's often an opportunity cost of the thing that has no friction. You know, for you with the run, it's like instead of getting out and then like 32 degree day, sit home and have the beer, right? The frictionless thing is always appealing. But to get to the thing that makes us truly kind of feel great, we have to kind of overcome those first steps of friction. Yeah, you know, various sports have different relationships to these questions that we're talking about.

And the one of the most extreme is cyclists. I used to listen a lot to, I'm still do, to Lance Armstrong's podcast, which is actually really good. You know, there's always a moment where Lance has one of his fellow cyclists on and they just talk about, start talking about suffering. And like you realize they don't mean suffering the way we mean suffering. I don't think there's anything that's as painful as the Tour de France. I don't, I just nothing.

Running a marathon for a world-class athlete it's like two hours and ten minutes and then you're done. The Tour de France guys are out there like all day for like weeks. It's insane. They're like risking their lives. They're losing 20 pounds, their butt's sore, their back. I mean, it's just like incredible, like what they go through. The whole thing is just nuts. It's just nuts.

I mean, it does look to the rest of us like masochism, but their ability to kind of reinterpret masochism as something fulfilling and redeeming. And it's just amazing to me. Remember once Lance was talking to some guy and they were talking about how they're trying to teach their kids to suffer in the way that they liked suffering and how it was just impossible.

Like it's not a generational thing. It's just that those cyclists are so singular in their ability to reinterpret pain. Well, you'll appreciate that. In fact, one of the most famous papers on what's known as Rosie Retrospection, which is this idea that you look back at an experience that was kind of sucking, you think, that was awesome. I would totally do it again.

It actually looked at competitive cyclists. Oh, really? Yeah. They kind of measured people's happiness at various moments along the trip. And when you're going to the trip for cycling, you feel great. And then you're on the trip and every rating is low. And then you come back and it's, and you say, what was your average rating on the trip? And the retrospective average rating on the trip is like many points higher than the actual average at any point on the trip. So you kind of think back positively. So maybe it's, they didn't look into the individual

differences that cyclists, they were trying to make a general point about human nature and rosy retrospect, and they weren't making it individual differences in cyclists in particular, but maybe they should have, maybe cyclists are especially- I used to cycle a lot and I just stopped. I can't reinterpret my suffering the way they do. Let's go do a sentry, where you ride bike a hundred miles.

It's like nuts. It's like do a sentry, you know, where you ride bike 100 miles. It's like nuts. It's like I'm perfectly happy to suffer, but I will not suffer for six hours. So how do you get through the initial friction on your runs, right? What's a tip that our listeners can use to kind of bust through that friction to get to the happier, longer, more meaningful journey at the end? Start slow is the obvious one. In the beginning, you're trying to distract yourself and you're thinking of all kinds of things. You will eventually, as you get into it,

be running associatively where you'll just be focused on yourself. And that's very kind of, you know, that's runner's high, whatever you want to call it. But I prefer, it sounds to me, that always makes it sound very extravagant. It's just a kind of point of equilibrium. You'll get there eventually.

Yeah, I think a lot of the problems that beginning runners have is, and this sounds very paradoxical, is their runs are too short. So go off for two miles. No, no, no, no, no. Two miles, I'm sorry. You're not transitioning to anything

if all you're doing is running two miles. Like there is a kind of, I've always said, many runners agree with me that there is a magic about going past an hour. That once you get into hour two, really, really lovely things happen. It could be 45 minutes, but it's certainly not 15 minutes. Like it's not happening. Yeah. This is cool. You have to give yourself the time and then once you get into it, the flow starts kicking in.

Yeah. Same thing, by the way, with writing a book, any kind of long, concentrated activity, is just you have to readjust your time horizons. You're not making sense of a draft in two days. If you're disappointed after two days, it's because your time horizon was wrong. And this raises the question of how we can get to better time horizons.

But ironically, some of the research by Xi-Chi Chuan and Jennifer Acker at Stanford suggests that one way we can get to longer time horizons is to start thinking about the journey more. They have all this work on what they call journey mindset. For example, like, I want to lose some weight. I want to hit my goal weight. Like, no, actually what you want to do is be at your goal weight for a really long time. Or I want to get this feeling of happiness that comes from writing the book. I want to get through the book. No,

you want to experience the benefit of having written the book and be able to talk to the people who read it and experience those ideas later. Or for my college students, I want to get my degree. No, you want to get a degree so you can be a lifelong learner and get the skills you need to learn in the future. So they find that it's easier to sustain motivation, for example, for getting a college degree or writing for the book, if you think of the kind of thing

that you're gonna get out of it, that's beyond the achievement. And so ironically, we might've gotten back to the fact that the journey maybe is good. No, remember, I didn't say journey didn't matter. I was objecting to the phrase, it's the journey, not the destination. It's the journey and the destination.

It's the journey and the destination. Yes, I'll buy that. So Malcolm wants to see the destination given a bit more love in the World Happiness Report, while Tim Harford would like to add a chapter on our memories of happiness. And Maya Shankar thinks that tackling our disruptive inner monologues should be included.

But we'll be back to examine what's in the real World Happiness Report. and Maya Shankar thinks that tackling our disruptive inner monologues should be included. But we'll be back to examine what's in the real-world happiness report. We'll talk to its authors about what they think are the most pressing issues facing us in 2024. All of that on the next episode of the Happiness Lab with me, Dr. Lari Santos.