The Science of Happiness | Emiliana Simon-Thomas

(upbeat music) - From ABC, this is the 10% happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hey guys, in this episode at this fraught moment in our history, we're bringing on a leading scientist to help us tackle one of the most pernicious misconceptions that humans have ever fostered. The very roots of the word happiness reflect our assumption that happiness is something that happens to us rather than something that we can actually cultivate for ourselves. Happ, HAP, that's the same root of such words as hapless or haphazard, it implies luck. But again, happiness is actually a skill that we can cultivate. Emiliana Simon Thomas helps people learn this skill for themselves. She got an online course called The Science of Happiness that has reached more than half a million people across the world. She's the science director of the Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley. And in this interview, we discussed how to make ourselves happier through generosity, which is literally part of our biology, how the pleasure of caring for other people means we'll do it again, how empathy fatigue, however, is real, and then we debate a little bit the meaning of selfishness, and how we've got love wrong. Before we dive in, I want to flag that this is a conversation we recorded late last year, prior to the pandemic and the recent racial justice protests here in America, but the insights in this interview are as vital as ever. So here we go with Emiliana Simon Thomas. Nice to meet you in person. I don't know if you remember this, but when I was writing Kempersen happier, I used to call you to make sure I was correct on my research on a few things. - I do remember that, but it was a long time ago, and I'm glad I was able to be helpful. - I was just gonna say, my memory was that you were really helpful and it's always willing to hop on the phone with me. So thank you, belatedly. - You're quite welcome, it's a pleasure. It's a pleasure to have you on the show. Your parents were Buddhists? - Well, so my parents grew up in the Midwest, and one of them came from an Italian family and the other from an Irish family, and they were not Buddhists as young people, but I think they're sort of early life spiritual experience, left something to be desired for them, and they wanted to see the world in a different way, and they got in the car with their minimal belongings and came to California. And as young people here, they found a community and that community were people with a Buddhist leaning. And yeah, so I grew up going to teachings, to temples. I remember kind of crawling all over my parents while they were sitting still and keeping this sort of serene demeanor. I remember trying to take the sweets off of the alters. - I think that's a no-no. - And I heard that when you would throw temper tantrums over not getting enough dessert, your parents would say life is suffering. - Yeah, I don't know if the Buddha would have endorsed the usage of his signature phrase. - I totally agree, it's a little hard on a little kid, but I fought back and then a strange way. It's fueled this lifelong quest for understanding like real happiness in life, so. So, how would not getting enough dessert play into understanding real happiness? - You know, I just didn't buy the notion that we had to always look through a lens of the potential for harm or disappointment or let down. And I think that was the message I was getting that hey, you know, I don't get enough dessert. I didn't get as much of a toy as someone else got or we don't have as nice of a house as someone else. And even those people in their comforts are probably disappointed by various things in their lives and struggling in ways that I can't imagine. I don't think I picked all that up though. I was like, no, sometimes I feel great. You know, sometimes I'm having so much fun. I can't even like get ahold of myself and it's just laughter and excitement and I'm not suffering in those moments. - How do you define compassion? - So I define compassion. When I was studying in the laboratory, I defined it in an emotional way. It was a specific state. It was the experience that you have when you encounter suffering, it can be in person or even in your mind, you think about some suffering and you feel the urge and you have an intention to do something about it, to help, to alleviate the suffering that you encounter. That's the experience of compassion as an emotion. - So that separates it from empathy, which is who misses the action piece. - Yeah, I mean, empathy I think of as kind of necessary, but not sufficient for compassion. Empathy is really more simple and it is our ability to resonate with each other and our ability to understand the meaning of another person's emotional expressions. But if you only have empathy, you have a lot of other paths. You can go down that are not compassion, right? You can feel distressed yourself. You can feel, oh, I'm overwhelmed. There's, I'm upset in being confronted with this suffering. You can kind of suppress any emotional experience that you have that is sort of mirrored from another person and sort of look apathetic or you can kind of meander down the road towards compassion. And that means you're not really thinking about yourself anymore, right? You're not focused on the potential for something to threaten you or the extent to which your physical experience is recognizable or familiar as your own pain or suffering. But you sort of channel whatever feeling you have into activating your care and nurturing systems, right? You're actually orienting yourself as a care provider, as a nurture rather than sort of frenetically worried about the possibility that something could go wrong in your own right. - So this sounds and is altruistic. - Yeah. - But it's also selfish in, as the Dalai Lama says, in the wisest possible way because compassion is a enobling, empowering, invigorating state. - That's the way I think about it. You can imagine I bristle a little at the same that the compassion is selfish. - Well, you can blame the bad Dalai Lama for that. (laughing) - Your issue is not with me, now that it kind of is. - It's interesting. There are other ways that somebody might make the same claim because the last piece of compassion, really at a biological level, is that it involves anticipating your potential to feel good about helping. That's a piece of compassion. We know from more recent work by Tanya Singer in Germany, she's brought people into the laboratory and taught them to meditate, or had other meditation teachers teach people from the community for, you know, six, eight months. And she's varied whether it's like an attentional focus kind of meditation or an empathizing kind of meditation where you're just really trying to feel what another person is. Or if it's a compassion kind of meditation where you're really orienting towards alleviating their suffering, you're taking it upon yourself to be the hero and support the other. And those different practices do something different to the brain. And the main difference for the compassion practice is that you see a greater activation and reward pathways when people are given the chance to extend compassion. - The same pathways that might light up when we get a lollipop. - That's right. - Yeah, that's right. - Not that I've had a lollipop person, but I do have a four-year-old. - Well, they like lollipops. - They do. - So yeah, and that's similar to other research showing that when we're given the chance to be generous, so Bill Harbott, the University of Oregon, did this study like nine years ago, showing that when he forced people to pay taxes, right? He made them win something, or win money in a little computer game. Sometimes they got to keep it for themselves. Sometimes they had to give it away to charity, or sometimes it was going to pay taxes, and he measured what happened in the brain. This was, he's actually an economist, and he was working with neuroscientists, because economists are always really bummed out that humans aren't more rational, right? That we don't just act in total selfishness. - There's a reason why it's called the dismal science. - Yeah. - But what they found in it was reported in science, is that when people are giving to others their reward pathways act up, or light up. So it's kind of like, what does that mean? Being generous is selfish. I mean, at some point it just becomes like a weird, circuitous, semantic conversation. What it means to me is that we're evolved for generosity. Like we have evolved as an ultra social species, and it is in our biology, that we find opportunities to be generous, to care for others, to feel compassion, and extend it to others intrinsically reinforcing. And it's pleasurable so that we will do it again, right? That's how the brain and the body work, things that go together that make us feel good, we want to do again. Of course we can learn other associations, and we can have experiences that kind of dampen affordances in particular ways, but I don't think it means we're selfish. Or it's maybe selfish, just not in the majority of. Fair, fair. I think that the Dalai Lama calls it wise selfishness. Great, I'll take it. It's like the ninth, you could add it on to like the eightfold path. It's like the ninth pillar in the eightfold path, like right selfishness would be just not, I paradoxically and ironically, not so focused on yourself. Yeah, exactly, exactly. Breaking out of what he calls self-charishing. Yep, that sounds right to me. So if we are wired to be helpful and generous and caring, why are we the opposite so often? I think that there are a lot of other habits of thought that we get into. I think part of it is early experience in our families and our communities. I think we live in a very individualistic culture now, where ideas around self-interest and self-promotion and competition are biased to be stronger than is actually really representative of what humans are able to do. I think that sometimes, and there's actually an interesting new science, or not new science, but new conversation about what goes wrong, what ends up leaving us in a place that we might not be compassionate, where we might have wished we had been, or we see someone else, and we wish they had been compassionate, and they haven't. One of my favorite researchers, Darryl Cameron, has coined this compassion collapse. And the way he's figured this out is that if you show a person a suffering victim, vulnerable suffering victim, that's usually a way to readily elicit compassion. You can then ask him, how compassionate do you feel and how willing are you to help, and you get these numbers. And then you can do the same thing, but instead of one victim, you can show six victims. You can do it again and show 18 victims. And if we were rational, as economists might prefer, our compassion would go up each time. The suffering is going up, our compassion would go up. That's not what actually this team found. As the numbers of victims goes up, compassion wanes off and becomes flat asymptotically. And in further delving into why and what goes on, what the researchers find is that people don't feel compassion in those situations where the numbers of victims are really high, because they don't feel like they can do anything about it. They feel unempowered. They feel like the expectation to fix it, right? We hold ourselves to a high standard when we want to help someone. But if we feel like, oh, I can't meet that standard, there's nothing I can do for eight or 15 or 10,000 people, I'd rather not feel anything at all. Yeah, the most modern example that I here invoked is the Syrian refugee crisis, about which very few people were deeply concerned until we saw a picture of a little boy who had washed up on the shores, who was no longer alive. And that picture went global. And then all of a sudden, we had all of a sudden, my boss sent me to Greece. And that's just the way we're wired. And it seems like a design flaw. It's not just that there might be too many people for me to handle. It's also like an expectation that I'm going to fix it. And I bring this up because I think this is one of the challenges that people in health care providing positions deal with, having this training that leaves them with a sheer and objective expectation to fix the problems that they face day in and day out. And what we know is that there are a lot of issues that humans struggle with that aren't fixable in short term and that don't go away with some of the miracles of modern Western medicine. And it's just really hard if you expect yourself to fix something and then you can't, right? You can't over and over again. And so people don't like having to behave in ways that are different than what they believe. This is classic cognitive dissonance. And so when you have to behave in a way that is different from what you believe to be the case about yourself or about the world around you, you tend to shift not even very consciously what you believe. And so you believe, well, I don't feel compassionate anymore because I'm unable to fix this, which means I must not be compassionate because I can only be compassionate if I can actually fix the problem that is in front of me. And I think that's a weird sort of circular problem around some of the situations where people aren't able to feel compassionate anymore or somehow block themselves from feeling compassion. So how do we train our capacity for compassion? Gosh, I mean, for many, it starts with mindfulness. That starts with cultivating a greater awareness around what tends to happen in your mind when you encounter suffering. So what do you see yourself doing? Are you the kind of person who, when you see another person suffering, immediately judge them is somehow less worthy or deserving of their suffering? Or do you judge yourself as unable to do anything about it? Do you make some kind of quick cost-benefit analysis and go, it's going to take too much work and too much effort for me to be of service in this moment. So I'm just not going to do anything at all. If we start to kind of interrogate those kind of reflexive judgments about other people in ourselves, there comes an opportunity to maybe unravel some of them and shift how we think about other people, how we see other people. I think just practicing one of the most powerful-- and it took me a long time to understand why it worked, because it's a little bit out there. One of the most powerful practices for compassion training is called Tong Leng. And this is the exercise of kind of visualizing suffering that's happening out in the world. And visualizing yourself as sort of like an existential vacuum cleaner, you're like pulling in that suffering and sort of bring it into yourself. And then on the opposite end, sort of shedding it back out, shining it back out in the world. But somehow in your own self, you've transformed it from suffering to love and affection. And support and caring, these more affectionate types of sentiments. So just to stop here for a second, so Tong Leng is a Tibetan meditation practice. As I understand it, on the in-breath, you're breathing in the suffering of either the world writ large or a specific group. Maybe anybody who's going through chemotherapy or a refugee or whatever, you're breathing in their suffering. You may be even envision it as like a black smoke or something like that. And then on the out-breath, and you're just breathing, naturally, is my understanding. The out-breath, you've kind of transformed it into some sort of healing thing. I got to say, the me of 12 years ago would have had a little bit of vomit collected in his mouth now. But and yet, there's evidence not only from the historical fact of centuries of practice, but also, as I understand the lab, too, to suggest that this is actually has a lot of benefit. Yeah, I had a real hard time with it, too. And I felt like it was to sort of woo-woo. I felt like, well, what's the point? If you're going to sit around in a cave and just wish goodness for other people, all you're doing is really helping yourself. I think the practice ends up doing something really powerful to change your habit of thinking about yourself in those moments when you actually do encounter suffering. So instead of going, hey, there's nothing I can do for this person. Or there's too many people for me to concern myself with. I'm shutting it off. We go, oh, yeah, I matter. I have this urge and this heartfulness that makes me want to do something about it. And that motivation is more powerful. So really, I think it's an exercise in motivation and intention setting. And that's actually pretty important. If you're going to have competing motivations in any opportunity to be of assistance to another person, if you're practicing the one which is focused on service and helping and support, that's the one that's going to win in real life in those real moments. And so I think that's what Tonglin's doing. Let me just go back to selfishness. I know you don't like the word, which gives me extra pleasure. Maybe the opposite of compassion. But two things. One, you yourself said that even though you just said that in those moments, you can stop thinking about yourself. Previously, if I was hearing you correctly, you said that there is a cognitive piece around compassion, which is you get to kind of tell yourself a hero story. If it feels good, it boosts your self-regard. And the other thing is, well, it is, I guess, on very important levels, thinking about other people, it makes you feel good doing this. So there are, for lack of a better term, no, there aren't no better terms. Selfish reasons to do this. You know, if that makes it more attractive, I'll go with it. But isn't that our job you're a scientist on a journalist? But we should be making this attractive for you. Yeah, no, I totally agree. And I like that you're framing it this way also, because I often am talking about the topic of compassion fatigue, because there's this notion that compassion is somehow like a limited resource, and that we have to kind of guard how many times we can sort of draw from our capacity to care about other people. And at a certain point, we just won't be able to anymore. Like it'll be empty, and then we have to go, I don't know, get a massage or have a fancy meal or an ice cream sundae, and then maybe we'll have some more compassion to give. I don't think that's how it works. And maybe it's precisely because of this kind of actual selfish quality to it. I think compassion is indefatigable. We can keep being compassionate, because it's actually something that is fulfilling and sort of solubrious in our own right. Maybe we don't have to use the word selfish. Maybe we just say there are benefits. Yeah. That's invigorating. It's healthy. It feels good with lots of other ways to say there are less compassion. Well, yeah, Emma, it's doing all this stuff to your social dynamics. It's creating meaningful social bonds with other people. If you're out in the world being generous and kind and supportive of others, that's your source of support later. It's not that we do everything for the expectation of reciprocity, but certainly some of our relationships are really close bonds are reciprocal. And when we're supportive to others, they were of higher regard in their view. And we can count on them and they can count on us. And that social support is really, really, really important. It also turns out that thinking about it, you would think on some level that the way to happiness is to think about yourself more. But thinking about yourself actually kind of sucks. Yeah. And it definitely doesn't make you happy and compassion in a way because of that early step. So we started to talk about what would you do to train compassion? And I talked about mindfulness. And I talked about tongue-line. And that's kind of one piece of it. But there's another or a few other important parts. And one of them is regulating your own distress, really becoming more intelligent about the meaning of what goes on in your body when you encounter another person's suffering. Because it is a little ambiguous. If I were across from you and you were very angry, my body is going to activate in a particular way that is pretty similar to how your body is. I'm going to have a sort of increase in the tension in my shoulders. My heart rate might go up. And in my own brain, it's real easy to think, oh, I'm angry, too. I'm angry. Something unjust has happened to me. And that's not accurate. Nothing unjust has happened to me. It's happened to you. But if I get angry, too, and even worse, what if I'm angry because you're angry? And that made me angry. And then we have a conflict about something that really isn't there. There's no actual lack of understanding between us. There's only my lack of understanding of my own emotional kind of experience. And so being able to identify that physical state connect it to really what's going on around me, which is not-- this reminds me of the last time I was angry. And my brain understands that this means anger. But oh, I'm like physiologically aroused, but it's Dan who's angry. And I'm here. And there's nothing making me angry. And so what can I do to help? How can I be part of your fight against injustice? Or how can I help you channel your feelings to something constructive? That's hard to do. It's hard to get into that experience and regulate it in a way that allows you to be that person instead of more reflexively get angry and not be the person that you want to be in that moment. And so exercises and regulating your own emotions, understanding your own emotions, are part of what it means to be compassionate. And I don't think anybody would argue that that is like a harm, or that there's not benefit to that. There's a whole science of emotional intelligence. And what I think is that again, it's buried in practicing compassion, being more emotionally intelligent. You said you don't think there is compassion fatigue. Is there empathy fatigue? Oh, yeah. I mean, if you're empathizing in a way that simply you're sort of sponging emotions all day long and you're not relating to them in a healthy way, right? If I am a social worker and my greatest respect to people who do that kind of work, but if I am one of them, and I'm hearing about deep and profound unfair suffering all day long, but I don't have kind of the training and the skills to manage my own sort of physical response to that and reflexive thoughts about it, I'm very vulnerable to burnout. I end up in a situation where I just feel emotionally distressed all day long, and yeah, that's not healthy. So the way to relate to it in a healthy way is instead of just feeling it is to put yourself in the mode of, I'm going to try to help. Yeah, I'm here. I'm a human. My presence alone is a help, number one. And that's again, a little bit of the tongue line. Like just being here as a human, looking at you, sharing your presence, nodding my head and looking in your eyes, conveying availability as a person, that's beneficial. And pending the dynamic and the cultural agreement, and maybe I put my hand on your shoulder and offer you sort of a comforting touch. There's lots of controversy about touch and the meaning of touch, but one may argue fairly that in the US, we are pretty touch deprived culture and we're not using touch in the intelligent and pro-social ways that we could to be as supportive to each other as we could. More of my conversation with Emiliana Simon-Thomas right after this. Hey, it's Dan. I've got a quick and I hope very exciting announcement. We're thrilled to announce our new meditation app. It's called 10% with Dan Harris. I never thought I would do another meditation app, but I've been listening to all of you, and I've gotten the message. You want a place to easily access guided meditations from your favorite teachers, and you want to engage with one another, with the teachers with me. So we built a new app with this kind of connection in mind, although if you're an introvert, don't worry, you can just lurk. On the 10% with Dan Harris app, you'll get a library of guided meditations to help you with stress, anxiety, sleep, focus, self-compassion, annoying people, and more. You'll get access to our weekly live Zoom community sessions where we meditate and take questions. And you'll get all episodes of the 10% happier podcast without ads. We're offering a 14 day trial. So if you want to see if it's right for you, you can go to DanHarris.com for all the details on how to download the app and sign up. See you there. It's a new year, and I want to recommend a podcast to you hosted by a friend and somebody I really admire. It's called the Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos, and she's got a whole series running right now that I think will be very useful for anybody interested in using the beginning of this year to start healthy habits or end unhealthy ones. Many of us feel stuck right now, caught in routines, habits, and thought patterns that are just not working. On the latest season of the Happiness Lab, they're diving into the science of getting unstuck, improving your energy, embracing change, sparking creativity, and finding more meaning in everyday life. Each week features a different expert, Dr. Diana Hill, on using your energy wisely, Maya Shankar, on navigating change, David Brooks, on the power of connection, George Newman, on creative breakthroughs, and Bill Burnett, and Dave Evans on designing a more purposeful year. If you want 2026 to feel different, listen to the Happiness Lab, and start the new year with a fresh mindset. (upbeat music) - I heard something interesting recently in terms, I started to think about when you talked about, when we pivoted into the development of compassion, the training of compassion, and by the way, we skipped over the fact that training, that is possible in this area is incredible. I mean, that's a huge headline that we know compassion and connection makes you happy, and you're not stuck with whatever you think your levels of compassion are, that you can get better at this. That's a life altering realization. My parents, who I've always loved, my parents were in our grade, but they've had some health issues of late, and it's forced my brother and I to force, maybe the wrong to, but it's provoked my brother and I to lean in and do to really get involved. And I noticed that my level of love for them, while always high, seems higher, to me. There's just more tenderness there, I think, for lack of a less syrupy term, and it just seems to be an example of how this can work. - Yeah, I think that's a great example. And your experience, there's probably ways that we could measure that change in your experience because of some biological things that happen when you're being a caregiver, when you're in the presence of somebody who is alleviated by your presence, right? So we don't just empathize with other people suffering. We empathize with relief, it feels good when you know that something that you have done, alleviates somebody else's pain, and when they're grateful to you, that's a whole other topic that we could talk about. But we kind of cement our connections by having those caring and supportive interactive experiences and what's going on? Well, both of our bodies are releasing oxytocin. Oxytocin is this neuropeptide that makes us feel trusting and affectionate and pleasure around each other. So we're basically strengthening these linkages between the reward pathways and the social cognitive pathways that sort of tell us what this relationship means. So yeah, I think that's absolutely right. It's kind of a practice makes perfect. - You guys can't see your face, but she really lights up when she's talking about peptides and the reward pathways. - Yeah, sorry. - You're like a love nerd, that's awesome. So I said before that love, I think is too narrowly defined in our culture as often thought of as sort of romantic love or maybe parental love. But well, I'd love to hear you riff on that in and of itself, but also to talk a little bit about, so we have clear terms in sort of the lexicon of positive behavior. Like what's the difference between kindness and compassion? What is niceness to what does that even mean? What does love mean? Do you have a sense of how we can use these words with some precision? - Yeah, I do, although I can't claim to have the perfect taxonomy of distinction between emotion terms. I do work with Dacker Keltner, who's a professor here at UC Berkeley and he has spent his career sort of exploring the space of emotions. And there are clear ways to differentiate different states. Love is different from kindness in that it really isn't necessarily about a generous behavior so much as an affectionate relationship between people. And I would even wonder if kindness is an emotion. It's not really an emotion, it's more of a behavior, right? I'm being kind to you. Love is different from compassion in the kinds of circumstances that arouse those two different states or those two different experiences compassion really is a response to suffering, right? Love, you can feel love towards someone suffering but it doesn't necessarily mean you want to help, right? And it's helpful to distinguish them so that we can study them, right? You know, semantically or poetically, there's a lot of overlap, right? I'm not going to get into big argument with a songwriter about what's different or similar about them. - Oh, Rumi. - Yeah, exactly, exactly. But I do think for scientific purposes, differentiating compassion as being a specific response to suffering as opposed to love being about a response to sort of an opportunity for collaboration, for a relationship, for forming a relationship on, or as you suggested earlier for, you know, a reproductive experience, but it's not very romantically. (Ruby laughs) You know, there are variants of love. You know, one of my favorite love thinkers is Barbara Friedrichsen. I don't know if he's spoken with her, Barbara. But I know I'm really-- - She's incredible. And she wrote her book, Love 2.0. And basically, her point is like, we've got love all wrong. Love is not this like, you know, flowers and chocolate and, you know, lingerie thing. Love is anytime, you're with another human and you're just having a trusting, biologically resonant moment, right? Or you're exchanging goodwill and understanding and benevolence, like that is a moment of love. And it doesn't mean as much as we like to think it means to have those moments of love. - It can, but it-- - It can, yes. - Absolutely. And I think her argument is like, in a similar way that I like to say that we're indefatigable in terms of compassion, I think her claim is that, we also have an unlimited capacity for an opportunity to experience love. Like we could experience love all day long with the range of different people that we interact with, just by not assuming when we encounter someone that somehow they're a threat or, you know, they're somebody we need to compete with or defend ourselves against. And we have so many opportunities to interact with each other in ways that can leave us with the benefits of an experience of love that we don't necessarily exploit. - But aren't there pitfalls here where we could get walked all over or don't we need to have our guard up at times 'cause there are people out there who mean us, mean to do us harm, et cetera, et cetera? - You know, none of this is like a, this is the only thing you should ever do, kind of position. Kail is really good for you, but you shouldn't exclusively and solely eat kale for the rest of your life. Compassion and love, really great. You know, how much can you get into your day? It's gonna help you exercise, sleep, like healthy levels of sleep, but you don't go then and sleep 24 hours a day, right? So yeah, there are situations where we need to be discerning, right? Compassion doesn't mean that we just excuse malevolent behavior, right? We don't not hold someone accountable because we feel for their suffering that might come from having to hold themselves accountable or being held accountable, having to face the punishment tied to their unethical behavior. Compassion doesn't mean that we just like throw it all out and let everyone get away with everything so that they don't feel sad. That's not what it is, right? There's still a discerning quality to it and the same is true of love. Yeah, if somebody is threatening you or if you can tell just by being in front of someone and that they mean to do you harm and we're pretty good at that, that is not the right person to try to engage with in a way that puts yourself at risk. I just think that we tend to error on the other side of the realm of possibility. We tend to not look up at people. We tend to see others as getting in our way and feel exasperated by the things we have to wait for because of other people more often than is helpful. I don't think that there's as much out there around people getting hurt because they try to start up a friendly conversation with somebody in line at the grocery store. You can get hurt if you trust the wrong person but that again just goes back to the fact that we're not saying just trust everybody blindly but striking up a friendly conversation in the elevator is unlikely to be super risky. Exactly, exactly. And a long-term relationship dynamics have a lot of other moving parts and pieces to them and trusting somebody who isn't our ideal match is tricky. And I do think that part of compassion, this is a whole another topic and we don't have to go deeply into it. But part of compassion is kind of 360 and that is really applying the same concern about suffering to your own life circumstance. So-- Self-compassion. Yeah, self-compassion. We don't always have to be around other people. We don't always have to be serving others. There are times when we're reflecting on our own accord and it's important to be attuned to what it is that is causing us harm. Maybe it's our own choices. Maybe it's our priorities. Maybe it's another person who we're choosing to spend time with or share space with. And it's important to instead of being self-critical or blaming ourselves for things that might be going wrong to honor the fact that we deserve not to suffer as much as we hope other people won't suffer. This is an interesting topic that comes up in kind of like our selfishness discussion around whether selfishness is OK or not or whether it's wise selfishness. Self-compassion is hard for the Buddhist contemplatives to kind of embrace. They're like, what do you mean? No, that's about the self. We shouldn't have self-compassion. Compassion is about other people. But when we explain that in the West, there are people who-- their inner voice is really hostile. There are people. Are there people for whom that's not the case? Yeah, exactly. I think many of us, and particularly again, in our kind of individualistic competitive culture, come up with a sense that if we've done wrong, it's something that reflects some core error in our being, some deficit that we should be ashamed of. And I think self-compassion is a way to kind of reorient and not necessarily apply that hostile self-critical voice. But instead, recognize what out in the world is not helping us flourish. And what in our own mind is also potentially harmful. Sometimes that's other people. Because I am compassionate, and I want to see you happily nerding out on science. I do want to get back to science at some point. But just what's been on my mind since we brought it up earlier in the conversation is just kind of how to position this. So I'm writing a book about kindness, compassion, love. I don't know whatever you want to call it. It's a pro-social book. I'm never going to call it that. And I've been thinking a lot about how to position this. How to sell it. Now, I was really intrigued by the fact that you did a whole course available to the public, which is called the science of happiness. That's right. But it was really about pro-social behavior and emotions. But I think accurately, but cleverly, positioned it as happiness. There was a period of time when there are still people who believe that this book that I'm writing should be called 10% nicer. And I remember my brother saying in a meeting, my brother was in a editorial meeting about this. He's like, it's a dumb idea, because nobody wants to be nicer really. We want other people to be nicer. We all want to be happier. And I may not be entirely true that some of us do-- I personally do want to be nicer. But that's largely because I understand that he will make me happier. I mean, it's hard, because I think people aren't turned on by a title that makes them have to admit a deficit in themselves. So if I'm buying a book called 10% nicer, I have to kind of like divulge to the person who I'm paying for the book to that I'm not a nice enough person. And I think most of us do like this. You just go up to the register and say I'm buying this. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. This is a gift, this is a present for someone else. So what could it be? How could you make a title that is aspirational, but not an admission of being incompetent in some way that you don't want to be? That's not called happiness. And why wouldn't you call-- I guess you've already written 10% happier? A friend of mine has-- seriously, somebody I really respect said, actually, the book should be called 20% happier, because this will actually make you happier than just straight up mindfulness. Yeah, I don't disagree. I think it's just a higher number. Yeah, but it's legit. I mean, I think what it does, which is kind of neat, is it perpetuates the notion that there's never an end point to it. There's never a like, oh, I'm done. I've gotten 10% happier. Now I'm just going to stop working on it. That's not how humans work to begin with, but it's also not the kind of totality of our potential. We just got to kind of keep working at it. And that's the only way to sort of continue that upward trajectory. So I think that might be your best bet. It's to sort of convey that through the title and say, yeah, 10% isn't the end. 10% is the beginning. I think maybe that's something that resonates with a lot of people that were just kind of stuck in this very boring inner dialogue. And the idea that we can jar ourselves out of that, I think, is attractive to people? I think so. I think people like being entertained for better, for worse. And I think it's more entertaining to have something interactive than to just be on your own. What we know is that, well, intentional solitude can be a beautiful thing and can be very fulfilling and uplifting. Forced solitude is not so much. That was solitary. I've done stories on the solitary confinement. I mean, you could make an argument as torture. Yeah, it's the worst. And I spent 48 hours locked up in solitary confinement. Oh my goodness. The baseline is actually to be social. Humans want to be together. When we are together, the world is an easier place to be. Simone Schnaul did this great study where she stopped people in front of this grassy hill. And I was like, how steep do you think this hill is? She asked people walking alone. She asked people who were walking together with friends. People walking together with friends thought the hill was less steep than people walking alone. And the friends not going to carry you up the hill, right? There is no reason for that other than that we basically consider each other a resource. When we're with others, the world is an easier place to navigate. So I think that foundational knowledge is not necessarily obvious. There's not a lot of people who go, oh, yeah, I knew that. They might go, oh, yeah, I guess I like being around my friends. But there's still a strong, like, pull yourself up by your bootstraps. I can do it myself. I'm in charge of my own destiny. And whatever I can do on my own is the most important. You talk about how key component, the happiest people all have social connections and social support, I believe you said before, what if you have social anxiety? What if you have trouble making friends? What if you're listening to this and you're thinking, well, I don't actually have that many close friends. What do you do about that? Yeah, well, it's not a quantity thing. It's a quality thing. And I get this question a lot, but framed a little bit differently, which is, what if you're an introvert, and how do introverts do this? And isn't it unfairly easier for extroverts? Well, extroverts tend to score higher in happiness on average. That's just what we see. They tend to look back and consider their life as something that they put on a higher number when you ask, you know, one to seven, how happy are you? And then the good part of the story for introverts is that when they do stuff that we know is good for happiness, it has a bigger effect on them than it does for extroverts. So for example, random acts of kindness, right? Great, it's a bumper sticker all over Berkeley. But it's also really a scientifically demonstrated impactful happiness practice. You can just decide, hey, for the next 10 days, I'm going to open that door for the person who I see who's carrying two bags. I'm going to say thank you in a more specific and kind of extended way to my spouse. I'm going to offer help to somebody who I see who looks like they need it, whatever it is, little things, little random acts of kindness. I'm going to tell a joke to a colleague, it can be pretty simple. It increases happiness. But it's a lot harder for an introvert to go out and do that. In the world, especially the socially interactive ones, but once again, when they do them, they get more out of it than the extroverts do. So yeah, being socially anxious, your road is a little bit harder, but you get more out of doing it. The other term or phrase that often comes up in this kind of conversation is the whole fake it 'til you make it, can you fake it 'til you make it? Can you go out there and just say stuff? No, not if you don't mean it, not if you don't really want to. Nobody's going to force a person to be happier. If you want to and it's hard and it puts you a little bit out of your comfort zone, yeah, then it totally works. Then it's really helpful. I say go for it. More often than not, it's going to help and lead to a bigger upswing of happiness than it would for somebody who already kind of does this stuff. Final question for me, I think. The fundamental proposition here is that it feels good to be kind, to be compassionate. Doesn't it sometimes feel good to be a little mean? Yeah, that's a great question. I mean, I think there's something called the cheaters high, and that is that one of the reasons we might cheat or might do something ethically questionable or immoral is just a sheer kind of, I did something that nobody knew about and got a reward for it. Like getting the law, yeah, yeah, that's real. I know that feeling from when I was a kid. I mean, I used to break things and including the law all the time and it felt it was fun. Yeah, it's kind of fun until you have to face the consequences and then over time facing the consequences repeatedly, you realize, I'm not sure that that short-term buzz was worth the long-term consequence. Well, even if you don't get caught, there's somebody, it's a great meditation teacher who said that karma, I mean, you don't really get away with anything. Your mind is keeping score and some level it feels bad to hurt other people. Yeah. And so that is a consequence in and of itself. I believe that to be true. I don't know that there's empirical research that necessarily backs that up yet. I don't know. I mean, so there's survivors guilt. That's a known phenomenon where if you and I went to battle together and you were killed and I wasn't, I might spend a long time feeling really terrible about the fact that you suffered or you lost your life and I don't know why I didn't, it doesn't seem fair. We don't like unfairness. And I think that could be the kind of real nugget behind feeling badly about getting away with cheating. Is it ultimately, we perceive that yet to be unfair and we don't like unfairness. Humans really are bothered by inequality, by unequal distribution of resources. It's not like the normative circumstance for such a social species where we need to be collaborating and coordinating effort to be successful. So I think even when we get the windfall of a cheat, the unfairness does end up kind of still in there and it still does chip away at our sense of ease in the world, may take a long time. Some people may die before they ever really struggle with it. - Do you have time for one more? - Yeah, for sure. - It's a small one, it's super easy. - Okay. - Are human beings fundamentally good? - I think so. I think we're born good. I think-- - Is there evidence for that? - Well, so researchers who study infants and toddlers will show them puppets and some puppets act really nice and some puppets don't act nice and the infants like to look at the ones that are nice. You get a little older and you bring nonverbal toddlers into a laboratory setting, this is Felix Horniken and videotape them kind of interacting with an environment where there's an adult in there who's not really playing with them but who's also kind of moving stuff around. If that adult can't quite do what they're trying to do, like maybe they have a carrying a stack of books and they walk over to a cabinet and they can't open the door. Kids will come and open the doors for 'em, like spontaneously. The adult doesn't have to look at 'em. Nobody's like, "Good job!" or, "Hey, you should open the door." Like they're not getting directed or reinforced. They're seeing that there's someone who needs help and they're helping and they do it all the time. Over and over again, there's tons of videos from this lab showing kids helping over and over again. That's not to say that humans don't have self-interest as part of their repertoire. Humans need to protect themselves if there's a real threat and there is a calculus and a decision that goes on between what am I doing and make sure that I am gonna survive and how am I going to best contribute to this collective that is also really important to my survival? I think that humans are more good than evil and I think a lot of what we end up doing in the world has to do with habits, has to do with culture and practice and education and experience. But really whenever we can kind of channel and strengthen those abilities that I would call prosocial, that tendency to attune to others, to be responsive, to concern ourselves with the welfare of others, to find delight in the pleasure and enjoyment of others, the better off we are, the healthier we are, the longer we live, the happier we see ourselves. So being good is really the route to a better life. So I kind of think humans have to be good. And you know, it has consequences. Your happiness has global consequences. In other words, the more kinder you are, the happier you are, also by the way, the world's a better place. Yeah, absolutely. It's all intertwined. It feels that way. It's been a real pleasure to sit and talk to you. Is there anything you've got, like all these notes in front of you? Is there something that you wanted to talk about that I didn't give you a chance to? You've like math equations there. Oh, it looks that way. It's not really, I think it's just-- That says plus and equal. Oh, you know, yeah, I do. Well, when I talk about stress and resilience, it's one of the opportunities for me to really showcase compassion. Because what I think happens with stress is that one of the paths is-- and this is one of my plus signs-- is stress plus. And then there's a circle. And inside that circle, it says roomination, self-criticism and stoicism. So these are ways that we relate to our own anxiety or stress or feeling that we don't have the resources to handle whatever challenges we're facing. And when we relate to that experience, again, by thinking about it a lot and worrying about what the implications are or by just coming down on ourselves in a harsh way and saying, we're never going to mount to anything. Everybody hates us. We're always going to be hated by everyone. Or we're just like, forget it. I'm not going to feel anything. I'm just going to hold this down because I'm fine. Everything's fine. Just stifle it all. That way of being really is like the secret to chronic stress. Because that just extends it out, keeps it in there, and keeps it going. And I don't have to go into the consequences, negative consequences of chronic stress. We know how closely tied it is to cardiovascular disease and unpleasantness and unhappiness in life and dysfunction in relationships. It's not a good thing. Alternatively, can you relate to your own stressful experiences with compassion? If you can, you're likely to be of the mindset that you feel a sense of efficacy and agency and control, because that's part of what it is to be compassionate. You're likely to be concerned about the suffering that the stress is causing you and to actually anticipate the pleasure of relieving that stress, which is a way of being motivated to do something different than what you're doing now. So my argument again is that by practicing an upskilling compassion, we end up being a person who can handle adversity, who can rebound from setbacks, and deal with difficulties in life. It's not about trying to shove them away or avoid them, but instead facing them with compassion. And when we do that, we're actually ramping up our own resilience. So that's my little equation that I have written down there. I also have a list of things that I think people do when they-- that I call mistakes about compassion. People think that compassion is taking on somebody else's pain. I think we already talked about this. I call that empathic distress. That's when I really-- I'm like a sponge. And I just-- instead of relating to your experience and understanding mine in an accurate way, I'm kind of getting lost in my own fantasy about the feeling that's occurred in my own body that really doesn't have anything to do with my own suffering. It's really your suffering. Some people think that compassion means you have to endorse the other person's actions. So I might think that the reason you fell was because you did something dumb. And so I don't want to be compassionate towards you, because that means that I am saying it's OK to do what you've done. That's not necessarily true, right? People make mistakes all the time. People make poor choices. It doesn't mean that we don't have to feel compassion towards their suffering and address to the extent that we can. The causes of their suffering, again, it doesn't mean that we absolve them of their poor for choice or misdeed. But maybe there are other ways to help that choice not get made, again, that we can contribute to people think compassion is weakness. I don't think that's true. And I think actually people who are most compassionate are actually the most courageous, right? Because we're willing to be there to put ourselves out there as agents of support for others. That can be hard. That can be much harder than walking away. So I don't think that's true. The idea that compassion is somehow like costly, that it's this big sacrifice, that it's this big drain. Again, that's a very short-sighted rendering of the realm of possibility. Like when we're compassionate, we're actually acting in a way that will give us the most benefit, right? Both from a relationship standpoint, from a good feeling/worm-glow standpoint. And from knowing that we've done something that matters. There's so much of it that is actually an advantage to ourselves. And on the costly thing, this is where self-compassion comes into. Because obviously you can't just be vomiting, compassion all the time for everybody to the detriment of yourself. So it needs to take that wisdom. They need to have that wisdom as part of it. I don't think compassion is politeness or courteousness. Compassion is much more fundamental than that. We come into the world with it. Infants cry when they hear other infants cry. That's really is arguably empathy. But in a way, that is like the seat. That's the beginning of our sensitivity to other suffering. Compassion's definitely not pity, right? Pity means that, yeah, we're bummed that somebody else is going through something hard. But we also think that they deserve it. Or it's somehow they're inferior to us. So it's not something we're concerned about. I don't know if we've covered all of your beautiful mind, renderings everywhere, but probably enough. Before I go, this just argues for bringing you back, by the way. But before I let you go off to viciously support your children's sports success at the expense of their competitors, if we want to learn more about you, where can we do that? Tell us about greater good, et cetera, et cetera. Yeah. So you can go to greatergood.berkeley.edu and there you'll find daily articles. And what we do is we scour the literature on how important our connections are, how valuable it is to be generous and cooperative, and how much we gain from our belonging in community and our contribution to something greater than ourselves. And we write about these scientific articles in a way that somebody who hasn't gone to graduate school or hasn't studied these disciplines can still access and utilize. We also have a website called ggeia.berkeley.edu and ggeia stands for greater good in action. And what it is is basically a library of research-backed practices that we've kind of pulled out of papers and then written in really simple terms like, hey, you want to try mindful awareness practices? There's one up there. You want to try a gratitude practice. There's three or four for that. There's a few for compassion. There's a few for empathy. A few for relationships or connecting. So again, we're just trying to bring the scientists insights and practical tools to anyone who wants to sort of improve their own lives and do so in a way that we think is a little more promising than some of the other ideas that are out there. Oh, one more thing. Of course, if you want to get deep and you want to hear more and see more, you can find the science of happiness on edx.org. It's our flagship course. And we go into great detail on all the topics that we've been talking about in this hour edx.org. You can search for happiness. Science of happiness is one. We also have three courses focused on happiness at work and we can talk about those in another time. You definitely have to come back. Okay. I can't force you to love to have you back. I'd be glad to. It's an honor. And as you can tell, I love talking about the stuff. Yes. It's the well, the peptides only came up once, but next time we'll talk about the biggest nerve. Oh, awesome. Biggest nerve. Okay. Wait. Thank you. Yeah. Thank you so much. It's been a lot of fun. Big thanks to Emiliana. And I want to point out that if you're interested in cultivating compassion, we've got plenty of meditations on that subject on the 10% happier app with world class teachers. You can download it at 10% dot com that's 10% one word all spelled out dot com. Big thanks to the team who works so hard to make this podcast, the reality Samuel Johns is our senior producer, Marissa Schneiderman is our producer. Our sound designers are Matt Boynton, Anja Sheshik, both from ultraviolet audio, Maria Whartell is our production coordinator. We get a ton of extremely valuable input from our TPH colleagues, such as Jen Poyant, Toby, Liz Levin, Ben Rubin, and of course, big thanks to my guys at ABC Ryan, Kessner and Josh Kohan. We'll see y'all on Wednesday for another episode.