Search Results for: rick hansen

Episode Transcript:

Eric Zimmer  02:10

Hi, Laurie, welcome to the show.

Dr. Laurie Santos  02:11

Thanks so much for having me

Eric Zimmer  02:12

on. I’m so excited to have you on you are the creator of a really great podcast called The happiness lab, as well as work you do on happiness at Yale and all sorts of things. And we’ll get into all that in a minute. But let’s start like we always do with a parable and the parable, there’s a grandparent who’s talking with their grandchild. And they say in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love. And the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops and thinks about for a second looks up to their grandparents as well, which one wins? And the grandparent says, the one you feed. So I’d like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life. And in the work that you do.

Dr. Laurie Santos  02:56

Yeah, I mean, I’ve heard the parable before, you know, when you feed, you know, for me, it really shows that happiness and focusing on our mental health takes work, and it takes choices, right. And it reminds us not just that happiness takes work, but that there’s these interesting opportunity costs, right? That if you’re putting your time and your energy, especially your emotional energy into certain kinds of things, you could be doing that at an opportunity cost of the kinds of processes you want to win out, right. And so the wolf metaphor has always been really powerful to me, it’s not enough that you focus on the things that matter, you also have to make sure that you’re not also focused on on the things that don’t matter.

Eric Zimmer  03:32

Yeah. And there’s a lot in your work that I think we’ll get to, as we go through that really hits on that parable, so much of your work, I think oriented around an idea of what we think will make us happy is actually not usually the things that will make us happy. If we think something is going to make us happy. That’s where we’re going to direct all our energy. And to your point, if all your energy is going there, you don’t have enough left to put over on the things that do create happiness. If we had infinite energy, this wouldn’t be a problem, right? But it is. And so, yeah, that opportunity cost is really important. I want to start by going in a slightly different direction, because I did not know this about you until I started doing deeper research, but you are the director of the Yale’s canine cognition Lab, which that is so cool. That is so cool. I’m a huge dog lover.

Dr. Laurie Santos  04:24

Yeah, the work is relevant in a couple of different ways. Feeding wolves. Yeah, we haven’t worked with wolves directly. But we have worked with Australian dingoes. This was my kind of, you know, day job before I got interested in the science of happiness. I was really interested in this question of what makes humans unique, what makes humans special. And studying canids is really an important way to answer that question, in part because dogs and domesticated dogs in particular grew up alongside humans, right, you know, so its path from becoming a wolf to becoming a canid that could be around people is one that really shaped these animals to pay attention to us in a particular way and maybe even shaped their cognitive abilities so canids are real A fantastic comparison point for all the cool and interesting things that humans do if you’re interested in questions of uniqueness, but But I sadly, don’t get to spend as much of my time doing the canine work these days. So no,

Eric Zimmer  05:11

it’s just as I was looking at some of your publications after like the second one that had dogs or, you know, canines in the title, and there’s something I’m not understanding about her work here. And so then as I dug a little deeper, I was like, okay, so to that end, you know, if we wanted to translate that work, into the happiness work, is there anything about the work that you do, or about dog cognition, or animal cognition that would point us in the direction of happiness or any lessons we can sort of, even if we’re sort of stretching the analogy a little bit, anything from there that you find interesting?

Dr. Laurie Santos  05:44

Yeah, I mean, I think there, you know, a couple of things. One is, animals are incredibly good at prioritizing some of the stuff that makes them happy, right? I mean, take, you know, for example, presents, right, you know, mindfulness just being in the present moment. You know, I think dogs are a wonderful example of this. I mean, I think one of the benefits we get from hanging out with dogs. And in fact, their scientific work to suggest this is that you become more mindful when you’re around your dog, you’re taking your dog for a walk, and he’s, you know, sniffing the ground and looking at the flowers and paying attention to the sounds sort of causes you to do the same thing, it gets you back into your normal sensory experience. And so I think animals can be a great guide for helping us do that. I also think that dogs are a really wonderful way to get social connection. Especially if you’re having a hard time getting some social connection with humans, you can form that meaningful bond with an animal in a way that gives us so many of the exact same psychological benefits. So the work I was doing with dogs wasn’t necessarily on happiness, but they’ve definitely give me a glimmer into some strategies that

Eric Zimmer  06:44

work. Yeah, I mean, dogs are one of my great sources of happiness in life, for sure. It’s funny, anytime, if you were to look at my camera roll, or your to look at my gratitude lists, they’re always there near the very, very top. Alright, so let’s talk a little bit about an idea that you use a lot, which I think is really important. And we talked about it on this program we talked about in the spiritual habits program, you say, a good rule of thumb for all this stuff is little and often.

Dr. Laurie Santos  07:14

And I think what I mean by that is, you know, we can really find ways to protect our mental health and boost our well being through the little things that we do, if we kind of keep up the habit of doing them often, you know. So I think when we think about the things that are really bringing us down, it’s not usually the one off thing that we happen to do with our time, it’s the things that we’re doing persistently, over and over again, that, again, can kind of create this opportunity cost on our happiness. But if you can put in positive habits, even if they’re tiny, even if they’re baby steps, and you can get yourself to do them more and more, those are the things that are really going to impact your well being oftentimes more than you expect. You think, Oh, it’s this little thing, you know, do a five minute meditation, or it’s this tiny thing to like, make sure you’re texting a friend and checking in, you know, these things matter more than we think.

Eric Zimmer  08:03

Yeah, there’s a Tanzanian proverb that I use in the spiritual habits course, which is little by little a little becomes a lot. And I just love that idea. And I love how you just pointed to this works for both the good and the bad, right? You know, if social media doesn’t make you feel good, I’m not castigating it across the board. But if you’re one of those people, in which social media turns into a comparison exercise, and leaves you feeling bad about yourself, you know, little by little, that becomes a lot versus just like you’re saying, text to friends, little by little, you’re nurturing and growing connection. And so I just think that’s such an important idea. And we tend to discount it, because we think we have to make really big changes. And sometimes a big change can be great and can be helpful, and depending on what it is, but for most of us, it’s the little changes, you know, how do we work a little more of this indoor day,

Dr. Laurie Santos  08:55

and I think, you know, focusing on the little can allow us to do something that also can improve our well being right, which is to make sure we’re harnessing self compassion. You know, I think sometimes when we want to make this huge change, like, Yeah, I’m gonna be perfectly happy, and I’m never gonna mess up again. We’re often trying to make that big change with a certain sort of attitude. And it’s an attitude of perfectionism. Like, if I screw up, you know, the world is over. And so I think focusing on the little changes means you’re giving yourself something, you can bite off something that’s actually doable. You’re not setting yourself up for failure, you’re kind of doing it in a compassionate way. And so I think that’s another way that focusing on the little can help us we’re doing it with this mindset of compassion and durability, as opposed to I must be this perfect robot that gets everything right the first time.

Eric Zimmer  09:38

Absolutely. And I think there’s so much to be said for positive momentum, right? So when we start doing little things, and we’re successful, we feel better about ourselves. We feel more confident, we feel like we have more self efficacy, versus when we try and do big things and we fail you do that long enough that eats away Get your sense of your ability to change. And I did a lot of behavior coaching for a while. And that was such a big thing was people would say, I’m the kind of person who doesn’t finish things and say, Well, you haven’t finished things in the past. But I don’t know that that’s a personality trait, right. But we’ve got to adjust the way we go after these things.

Dr. Laurie Santos  10:17

That’s exactly right. And I think, forget that the stories we tell ourselves matter a lot, right? You know, I’m a person who doesn’t finish things. You know, that’s a story that you can update, right? That’s a story that has some content that may or may not be true that you could challenge, you know, riddled with these cognitive cognitive fallacies. And so I think focusing on the small can also help us make sure that those stories are accurate, right, we’re not trying to come up with a magnum opus story that’s going to make sense of everything we’ve done. We’re just talking about, you know, did I get up and like, do my five minute gratitude meditation this morning, right? You know, these tiny things allow us to achieve it. But they allow us to come up with better stories that we can tell ourselves that are stories that are positive ones about growth, and so on.

Eric Zimmer  10:58

Yeah. Dr. Rick Hansen said something once he said, our stories about ourselves are at least six months out of date. And I think actually that numbers way underestimated, I think, I think our stories about ourselves can be years out of date, you know, and so I like that idea of just adjusting a little bit. You mentioned gratitude there. And I thought maybe we could turn towards gratitude for a second, because it’s one of the skills that you talk about in your happiness course, as being a really helpful happiness tool. There’s lots of studies about how good gratitude is for us in so many different ways. You know, it’s pro social, it tends to make us often be able to regulate ourselves better sometimes get more done. I mean, there’s, there’s a ton of reasons why gratitude is so valuable. So my question to you would be twofold. The first would be, what do you think are some of the most useful strategies for making gratitude part of our life? And then the second question is a little bit more complex. But you talk about hedonic adaptation, which is we get used to things right, you know, I get a new car, and then I get used to having the car, it’s no longer special anymore. Well, I’m curious whether we can have a Donek adaptation in our gratitude work, because this is what I feel like happens to me as I do it. And it’s really valuable until I’ve done it for a while. And now I’m back to the same sort of things. And now all of a sudden, it’s kind of used to the gratitude work. So question one would be what are some practices you like? And then question two, what would be some ways of keeping it fresh?

Dr. Laurie Santos  12:29

Yeah. Well, in terms of practices that I think work, main part of it is you got to find what works for you, right? There are practices that might be fantastic for me that you might find cheesy, or you might find onerous, you know, as someone who’s an expert on behavior changes, you know, the practice is going to work is the one that we can get ourselves to do. Right, right. Some that I really like, are just the simple act of writing down a few things that you’re grateful for, you know, I have a little app that I use to do this, I don’t think you need an app it can if you’re a pen and paper person use pen and paper, but just commit to you know, three to five things you’re grateful for every day. And the key which maybe is gonna get to your head on adaptation question a little bit is that ideally, those should be different. Your doesn’t really work if every day you’re like, dog, spouse, coffee, dogs, bows, coffee dogs, like you got to first have to mix it up a bit. Yeah. And you second have to make sure you’re feeling it can’t be wrote. I mean, the whole point of gratitude is that it’s an emotion and you have to kind of turn it on. But another practice I really love, which for me felt a little bit easier, because it meant I was noticing things I was grateful for throughout the day, was a practice that I learned from the author Ross gay, who has this book called The Book of Delights. And his practice is just he tries to notice things that he finds delightful out there in a world. So it’s not like you know, capital G gratitude of this blessing that came to your life. It’s just like, you notice fun things out there. Like, you know, this morning as I was walking to get coffee, there was a guy who was like parking near me and he was like, blasting old school like Ozzy Osbourne out the window of his car, and he had this big dog that was hanging out. And so I looked over and for a second, I thought the dog was like jamming along to Ozzy Osbourne. Right? And that was like, delight, you know, Ross galas, put his finger in there and just said, that is a delight, right? And the reason I like the delight practice is first, it’s easier than gratitude, right? You don’t have to kind of remember this list and write it down. But the second is that it’s doing what you want to be doing in the gratitude practice, which is sort of training your attention to the blessings to the things that are good in life you’re fighting this bias that we know is one that is built in which is a negativity bias. Our brains are set to notice the big Tigers out there in the world the anxiety provoking scary sad things. It takes some work to train our brains to shift focus and notice the delightful thing so if a gratitude practice seems onerous, or like it’s going to be to work, commit to noticing the delights and I like finding a delight buddy where you can like text the buddy like saw a dog hanging out. Carpooling Ozzy Osbourne delight, you know, all caps is that’s a great Good idea to get to your heat on an adaptation question. You know, I think this is a tough one, because there are studies that suggest that we don’t heed authentically adapt to certain kinds of emotions as easily. And gratitude is one of these that you’re, if you’re focused on the right stuff, you can continue that feeling long after you expect you to see the same hedonic adaptation curve for gratitude. But you have to keep feeling it to get there. And I think the problem with a lot of gratitude practices is we turn them into something that we do rote, it’s like brushing our teeth, again, you know, it’s like, you know, spouse, dog coffee, like every single day, right, and you just stop feeling it. And so one way to do that is you make a rule with yourself that it has to be something new, you know, it can be my spouse’s feet, or his smile, or you know, my dog’s tail or like my dog, the way she drinks the water, you have to commit to finding something novel every single time. And that means you’re still in the noticing, right, you’re still like allowing the gratitude to do what it needs to do, which is you got to feel it, you got to think like that is amazing that this universe of all the people, this dog could be with all the dogs that could have this dog, you have to take a moment to feel that. But if you get there, if you allow yourself to feel it, there is evidence suggesting that you won’t adapt to it as much it still kind of can have its effect, maybe even more so than other emotions, which is, you know, one of the many, many cool things about gratitude. If you’re doing it right. You don’t heat authentically adapt as much.

Eric Zimmer  16:24

You said a bunch of things there. I’d like to just kind of hit on real quick. I think first is I love that idea of delight, the word I often use is appreciation. Like what do I appreciate today? Like, to your point, it’s smaller than something I’m grateful for. It’s just a little flash of a moment that there was something, something that was there. And then the other question I have is about feeling it because this is an interesting one, right? I’ve talked on the show a lot about my struggles with depression, depression, when it comes on me, what it is primarily is lack of feeling, right? Something that you might normally feel just doesn’t do it, right, the song that normally is like, Oh, I love that song is just like, it’s fine. And so if gratitude is something we need to feel, and yet feelings are difficult to come by. And yet we know that gratitude is something that may help with depression. Any thoughts on working around that?

Dr. Laurie Santos  17:20

Yeah, I think your experience is, of course, really common. I mean, one of the classic symptoms of depression, as you know, Anhedonia is literally like, you’re not having hedonic, you know, moments, these hedonic experiences. And so, yeah, I mean, I think one way to do that is, again, to take this idea of baby steps and a little self compassion, right? You know, if you’re going through a terrible episode, yeah, the song that moved you before isn’t going to do so in the same way, you know, the main thing on your gratitude list, you’re not going to feel it. And you know, that’s a pain that sucks, right? But it’s something that you need to accept is not going to last forever, right? I think this sort of statements that you talk to yourself with can be really powerful in those moments. But that’s one of the reasons I think a practice of something like a delight practice can be so powerful is that if you commit to the tiniest thing, like you can start noticing again, and that can kind of break through. And I do think that these things sort of snowball, I mean, this is one of the things we know and depression, right is that you’re not getting as much of a hedonic burst every time you do something fun. So then you stop doing things that are fun, and now you really don’t have any hedonic bursts. And then you’re, you know, it’s like, so if you can kind of get this snowballing to go very slowly in the other direction, it can be quite powerful and, and in ROSS Gay’s book, you know, he talks about how this practice of delight has gotten him through, you know, some really tough times, you know, the book is really honest about issues of racial violence and things like that. And he says, even in the midst of the worst times, you can just notice that one cool thing, it can kind of give you a little, you know, a peek of hope that can help you in a really important way. Yeah, I

Eric Zimmer  18:55

think there’s a couple things you’re pointing to there. One is specificity, right? If I can be more specific and what I’m grateful for you just named it like the way my dog drinks water, my dog’s tail, right. It’s the specificity. And then I think the second piece in what you’re saying also is that I do think by looking for little moments of, even if the word delight is too strong, the little moments of something that’s positive shows that even something that feels as all encompassing as depression has its moments in which its waxing and waning. It is not this constant thing. It’s not always there in the same level with the same intensity. It seems like it but these noticing of little delights, as you sort of said, short of you allows you to see through these little holes, you know, like, oh, yeah, okay, there’s something out there. It’s not all clouds. It’s not all gray.

Dr. Laurie Santos  19:47

And I think another key is to give yourself permission that those things we’re supposed to have on our gratitude journal, like our spouse and our dog, but you know if you can find the goofy things, it’s one of the reasons I love Ross’s book is you know, In his big list is like the banned el DeBarge. Like purple things. Why is purple color? It’s such a weird color. I think if you can allow yourself a little bit of the goofiness that can kind of snap you out of it a little bit too. It doesn’t have to be, you know, the most meaningful thing in your life. It could just be like, Yeah, it’s pretty good. That’s a good thing. It’s like slightly above baseline, and just get your brain to notice that stuff.

Eric Zimmer  20:21

Yeah, another person who does that? Well, as a guy, Neil, past reacher, it’s called the Book of Awesome. And then he’s got other books of awesome, but it’s basically that thing. He’s been a guest a couple times. And it’s just fun. He approaches it in a fun, small way. But again, the thing that I noticed about his stuff is it’s so specific. And I think that’s an important thing. Let’s change directions, because I have to ask you about episode of the happiness Lab, which is your podcast. And it’s about something you’ve worked on with Dallas Taylor to create the handbook for Sonic happiness. Basically, the idea is sound has an enormous impact on happiness and well being. I am a extraordinarily sound sensitive person. So I’m wondering if you can give us a few tips from the handbook for Sonic happiness.

Dr. Laurie Santos  21:10

Yeah, it’s funny that you’re such a sound sensitive person. I feel like in general, that, you know, might not be a good thing for for a podcast, or that’s a fantastic to hear all that tiny thing. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, one of the great things about talking with Dallas was realizing that we’re not often intervening on sound to promote our happiness and our mental health. What do I mean by that? You’re we’re constantly intervening on our other senses to feel better. You know, if I’m having a bad day, I want to take a warm bubble bath, or maybe put on a candle, like I want to watch something on TV, I want to buy flowers, right? We’re hacking, vision and touch and like taste right? You know, when I’m having a bad day, I want some ice cream, right? We do that quite naturally. And many of us have like straightforward go twos of things in those domains that feel good. But we don’t often do that as much with sound maybe a little bit with music, right? You know, if I’m having a sad day, maybe I want to enhance the sadness and listen to a sad song or listen to something peppy to get me out of it. But that’s pretty limited in the scope of all the sounds, we could be engaging with you what Dallas really recommends is making sure that you are as much as you can, limiting some of the bad sounds so tired of noticing them, you know, he talks about even ambient sounds in the room like you know, the hum of a refrigerator. That’s really annoying, or, you know, like just other sounds around you. Sometimes I noticed this too, like I’m feeling just graded. And I’m like, what’s going on? It’s like as some stupid hum like happening in the building next door that’s like really bugging me, right? So kind of finding ways to limit the bad sounds, but really trying to find ways to mindfully notice some of the good sounds, you know, and trying to get beyond music for something that feels nice. You know, for me, it’s often very natural. Sounds kind of sound amazing, right? Like, take a little hike, or go somewhere natural, even if it’s like a park in your neighborhood and just be quiet. Yeah, notice, and, you know, you and I are having this conversation. You know, I’m in New England when it’s right around the beginning of autumn, and the leaves are kind of rustling and sometimes you can hear the acorns fall and things like that, you know, those are true delights for me, you know, those are delights in the sound domain, but, but I’m often not giving myself permission to engage with them. In the same way, I would totally give myself permission to engage with the taste of an ice cream cone, or the warmth of a warm bath, right, give yourself permission to engage in positive sounds.

Eric Zimmer  23:28

I think the benefit of being a sound sensitive person and a person focused on positivity to some degree is I’ve really learned to seek those out. I had been a on again off again meditator for a long time. And then someone said something to me that I had never heard of before. I don’t think it’s uncommon now. But this is 10 years ago, they said go outside, sit outside and just meditate on what you hear. Just follow what you hear. And when your mind it gets lost in thought, just ask again, what can I hear. And all of a sudden, I was like, This is what I’ve been trying to get for 20 years from meditation, you know, it just really worked. And then that actually allowed me to settle enough that the other types of meditation became a lot more profound for me. So it really unlocked something for me. So I love to go outside and listen to sounds. But the downside of a sound sensitive person is sort of like you mentioned, if there’s a rattle or a hum or a something, I mean, I am so aware of it. And what I don’t know and I can’t decide and I’d be curious to see you know, kind of what your thoughts are and from what you’ve learned about it is I sometimes worry that I’m making myself more neurotic around it just it’s a rattle, let it go, Eric, but I don’t very well, you know, the other one is and I think there’s an actual name for this, but I don’t know what the name is, but it’s where the sound of other people eating drives you nuts. And I don’t know whether you guys discussed that part at all.

Dr. Laurie Santos  25:00

Couple of things there. One is, I think, probably a lot of us are getting rattled by the rattle psychologically, but we’re not mindful or aware enough to realize it. I know I’m just like, I’m in a bad mood, I’m gonna strike out some meat to my husband. And I’m like, Oh, wait, it was the refrigerator hot. Like it was like, there’s a causal arrow from this nasty sound. So part of being, you know, sound sensitive, you might even say sound mindful, right? Maybe sound sensitives you’re really affected by about sound mindful, as you’re noticing which things are out there, it can just give you some awareness. Right, you might be able to do something to shut the rattle off. And even if you can’t, you now at least have some awareness. Okay, this is going on? Right? Yeah, you know, I know, you’ve talked a lot on the show about addiction and things like that, you know, it’s the same as craving, right? You know, being mindful of the craving, and now it’s there, it’s really present. But yeah, now you’re aware of it, you can choose to do what you want to do with it, maybe you’re going to allow it, maybe you’re going to non judgmentally really pay attention to it. You know, and this was one of the things, you know, that I’ve seen in sounds that are annoying is sometimes if you can get to recognizing them just as sounds, you just in the same way that you can recognize a craving as it’s just a feeling and get really curious about it like that rattle, you know, what’s the frequency of the bump, bump, ah, it makes my chest vibrate and things like that, like now you’re just digging into it and investigating it. Yeah, in a way that kind of causes it to lose its power, right? Like, you notice, it’s not just this valence. That’s like sucky, negative Stopstopstop. Like, you can sort of see it for what it is. And that can disarm it sometimes, too.

Eric Zimmer  26:25

I like that idea. Actually, I had not thought of investigating it more closely. If it’s rhythmic, I can capture the rhythm of it, and then it sort of disappears. It’s the intermittent ones. But to your point, I’d either try and tell myself, don’t be annoyed by it or make it go away. I do one of those two, but I have not that much now that you’re saying it. Turn towards it in a curious way. Learn more about it, how often is it? What are its frequencies? What you know, I think that’s helpful. All right. What about being driven crazy by the sound of other people eating? Can you fix this problem?

Dr. Laurie Santos  26:59

I think you can. Yeah, maybe same technique, like get out of the room or eating? Yeah. I mean, it’s the same with all effective things, right? You know, if you can really investigate your own preferences, sometimes you start laughing at yourself, right, you’re like, I’m really, really annoyed by this guy. Chewing chips, you know, like, if you can kind of get to a meta awareness of what’s really upsetting you, then again, through this process of kind of allowing it and investigating it, you can sometimes get some purchase on it to be like, Wait, that doesn’t make any sense. Again, it doesn’t make it perfect. And it does take a lot of work, right. But you can kind of get to the other side on things.

Eric Zimmer  28:01

Hi, everyone, I want to personally invite you to a workshop that we are offering at the end of October at the Omega Institute, which is in the Hudson Valley in New York. And it is really beautiful this time of year, it’s going to be a great chance to meet some wonderful people recharge and relax while learning foundational spiritual habits that will allow you to establish simple daily practices that will help you feel more at ease and more fulfilled in your life. You can find details at one you feed dotnet slash omega, I’m really looking forward to meeting many of you there. Another episode that you had recently, he was about, in essence, on one level working too much, or you know how much is too much to work. But the insight that came out of it that I thought was really interesting was that we all want more time we have this desire, I used to say I want to be able to do whatever I want whenever I want, right, which is, in my case, an unqualified disaster, when that occurs. But the point of the episode is that there is a sweet spot for how much discretionary time is helpful. And that even moving small amounts of discretionary time can be very helpful back to this little and often. So can you tell us a little bit more about that one?

Dr. Laurie Santos  29:12

Yeah, yeah. So this was work that was looking at kind of how much discretionary time do we need? It was an episode with the psychologist Cassie Holmes, who’s fantastic. She’s got a great new book out on some of these topics. And I think we assumed that like infinite time is good, right? Like all the free time possible. But what she finds is that you definitely need some free time time that you would describe as free. That’s not scheduled. But it’s really not infinite. It’s actually just a couple hours a day, you know, maybe even the range of like two to three hours a day. And I think two things there. One is like when you realize it doesn’t have to be infinite. You’re like, Okay, this seems much more doable, right? Like I think I can move things around to objectively get that much free time or it’s a little easier than if I was going for infinite free time, for example. But the other thing that she she talks a lot about is that we really need to prioritize that free time. Right and I think look really carefully at what’s digging into it, you know, sometimes what’s digging into it is work and paying the bills. And you know, yeah, that’s the thing. But sometimes what’s digging into it is stuff that’s just like, filling our time that we don’t need. You know, I know you love parables on the show, you know, she talks about the perhaps apocryphal tale of some professor who was trying to teach his kids you know, about the power of this. And he says, like, you have these ping pong balls, how many ping pong balls? Can I fit in this class? People say some number of ping pong balls, and he puts them in. And he’s like, so is the glass full? And people are like, Yeah, you know, and then he brings out these little like, marbles. And he’s like, Well, you know, actually, can I put some marbles in? And they’re like, oh, yeah, you can use a fit some marbles. And he says, well, now is the glass full, and people are like, yeah, and then he pulls out the sand. And he’s like, uh, huh, I pour the sand in. The reason this is relevant is he says, you know, your time is this glass. And if you start filling it with the sand first, you won’t be able to fit the ping pong balls, which are the things you really want to be doing with your life, the things that really fulfill you and build you up. And so I think, you know, with that metaphor, I think we can ask the question, like, what’s the sand in our lives that fill things up? You know, and what’s the ping pong balls. And sometimes when you do that analysis, you realize, you know, the sand was, you know, every free 10 minutes I had, I was looking at something stupid on the internet. And the sand was ruminating over and over again, when I could have like, you know, popped out and you know, done a quick workout or something like that, right? It really allows us to analyze and be more intentional about how we’re spending our time, and recognize that it’s a limited resource that we often don’t think of as one perhaps our most important limited resource, you know, money, if you blow it, you might be able to get more money someday, but time when you blow, it has gone forever, you know, in your life, it’s not coming back, when we’re

Eric Zimmer  31:42

talking about discretionary time, are we talking about time that we get to choose what we want to do in and we may fill it up? Is it still discretionary time? For example, if I’m like, alright, well, I want to exercise for an hour, and I want to meditate for 20 minutes, and I’d like to do this, would we still consider that sort of discretionary time? Because I don’t have to do those things? Or would we still say even beyond that sort of thing? I need some amount of time, that’s just do whatever I feel like,

Dr. Laurie Santos  32:12

Yeah, honestly, I think it kind of depends a little bit on how you frame it, you know, use the example of like, the time to exercise. There’s different ways to frame that, right. You know, you could frame it, like I’m done work, and I get to do the things that are for me, what’s the thing for me, I’m going to exercise when you have this new, amazing yoga session, right? Or you could frame the exercises like I have to do it. If I don’t do my half hour exercise, I’m failing at my happiness mission, I’m going to like die of a heart attack. Like there’s a sort of half junus assuredness to certain kinds of things we do. Yeah. And you know, a lot of shadiness obviously comes from work and paying the bills and things. But sometimes we build up that sharpness in our brain for things that aren’t a half, two, right, that are supposed to be a one, two, but now have somehow turned into a weird should have to, you know, and the joke I use with my students is that you don’t want to be shooting all over yourself, you know, but I think we often should all over ourselves in ways that make even the most leisurely things, even the things we would normally be doing, you know, as a gift to do ourselves as this thing we should savor, you know, this delicious ice cream cone of time that we’ve spent, and it just feels like crappy, like, we’re just trying to, like push ourselves through it, you know, it’s feels like the most onerous work task. So I think it’s not exactly defined by a particular thing. It’s often defined by our attitude towards that thing. And this is one of the time hacks I think can be quite powerful, right, is that you don’t necessarily have to change how you’re objectively spending your time to, you know, in some ways subjectively, think about your time, use differently, if you can kind of change your attitude towards how you’re spending your time. That might be enough.

Eric Zimmer  33:42

Yeah, I think that is such a powerful intervention is to get to this, I’m choosing to do X, you know,

Dr. Laurie Santos  33:50

even do get to, you know, get to do this is amazing. Yeah, well, even

Eric Zimmer  33:54

something like doing work as a parent can very much feel like I have to, you know, I had this realization, I’ve shared this on the show a number of times when my son was, I don’t know how old he was nine or whatever. And I was complaining about having to take him to soccer practice again. And I just went like, No, I don’t like there’s no law that says, I have to take my son to soccer practice, like, I simply don’t have to do that. Matter of fact, I could choose not to come home. And his mother would have to take care of No, I’d have to pay child support. But I could make that choice. And just reframing it that way then caused me to go okay, so I am taking him to soccer practice, why am I doing it? And now I’m sort of linking this thing to something I value, you know, and the same thing, as you’re saying with exercise. Like, I can turn it into a half to do it, but I don’t actually have to do it. I’m totally in charge of choosing. I’m choosing to do it. Why? Okay, because I know it makes me feel better. I know, you know, blah, blah, blah. So I think reframing things as choices in our lives, a gets us out of that feeling of obligation, or we have to do that. feel it’s a trapped feeling for me, right? And then also does get me back in touch with my values, what matters to me, then I can make a choice? Well, maybe that doesn’t matter to me that much. Why am I doing that?

Dr. Laurie Santos  35:11

Yeah, no, I think that’s really profound right in two ways. One is kind of, as you mentioned, getting back to your values, right, so now you can appreciate this thing, right, you can have some gratitude for it’s like allowing you to harness the things you care about. Yeah, I think it also gets you back to a sense of agency, which just psychologically is powerful. We don’t like to be forced, you know, and helpless and doing things. But I think that choice can remind you that like, it’s a choice. And you know, to go back to the metaphor, you mentioned, like, you can ask yourself, Is this the sand? Or is this the like, you know, big ping pong balls, right, you can really say, you know, like, really assess whether or not this is the kind of thing you want to be doing. Because sometimes, some of the things we think are have tools in life have moved away from our values, right? They’re, they’re not serving us in the way that they served us before. It’s right here, you mentioned, our theories of ourselves are several years old. In some cases, I think, our kind of meta theories of what our values are, might be wrong, when we really introspect, you can be like, I don’t have to do this. And in fact, I don’t want to do this even in terms of my value, so it can allow us to engage in behavior changes that really are gonna serve us a little bit better.

Eric Zimmer  36:14

Yeah, you know, a lot of the stuff in your happiness Course talks about, no, there’s some very basic things in there that I often am like, I wish I had recommendations that were more interesting than exercise, good sleep, and meditate, like feels a little bit like eat your vegetables, right?

Dr. Laurie Santos  36:31

People pay you and they’re like, Wait, really, this is the rocket science of happiness research right now? Yeah. Yeah, one thing I like to tell my students is like, yeah, totally common wisdom, but definitely not common practice. Right? Yeah, that’s good. One of the reasons I think it’s powerful to understand the scientific benefits of these things, is I think it sometimes can help us pop over a little bit to behavior change, right? When you really reflect on the actual benefits of something like getting a half hour of cardio in, or the actual benefits of getting some sleep for your mental health. You know, you see, like, in my case, my students, like they see these graphs of like, do you want to be here on your mental health? Or here? You know, this big graph? It’s like, oh, like, yeah, you know, that can sometimes give you the motivation, that kind of kick in the pants to get back in gear with some of these things. But yeah, I mean, there’s stuff our societies have been saying, our cultures have been saying, our grandmothers have been saying, you know, for hundreds, if not 1000s, of years, but somehow in the modern world, we’ve got away from actually practicing these things.

Eric Zimmer  37:28

Yep. So we’re talking about this, don’t shoot on yourself, or reflecting on choice, right, which is very valuable, there are still going to be times, you know, with me, I’m like, Okay, I know, unequivocally, the single best thing I can do for my mental health is exercise. Like it is the number one intervention for me, I know that I’ve internalized that. And yet, there are days where I’m like, I just don’t want to do this. So there’s a certain amount of like, yes, I want to have agency and I don’t want to do this. And there’s a certain amount of time where there is a need to sort of push and say, Eric, this is good for you and do something that in the moment, I may not be wanting to do. So how do you balance those two sort of, you know, not getting locked into obligation, not making something that’s good for us a chore? Knowing that sometimes we have to just go through the motion.

Dr. Laurie Santos  38:18

I mean, if you only have days, when you experienced this, you’re doing well, because I think one of the big insights I think that the research shows us is that a lot of this isn’t what the actual activities themselves are. But it’s how we talk to ourselves about them. Right? So the shooting brain is really this kind of drill sergeant kind of idea of motivation, where you’re just think if I just scream at myself and berate myself for being such, you know, idiot, that I won’t want to go to the gym, then that’ll motivate me to go to the gym. Right. And that feels like a should it feels like ah, it can turn the best thing that you love the most into this thing that feels like an external obligation. But then you also don’t want to, you know, have the pendulum shift too far in the other direction, where you go into like indulgent mode, where you’re like, Oh, do whatever, just like be this crazy hedonist and hurt yourself, right? Because that can lead down a bad path too. And so what you’re trying to do is to find a happy medium, always hard, of course. But one of the voices to channel I think that helps with that happy medium is a voice of self compassion and self compassion in the way that researchers like. Kristin Neff at UT Austin, talk about it, where you’re trying to talk to yourself as a close friend would talk to you. Right? You know, so let’s say you know, you haven’t been to the gym in a while you’re feeling like crap. your close friend shows up. What are they going to say to you? They’re not going to be like, Eric, you need to get your act together and get to the gym. What a loser like they’re not going to scream at you. They’re gonna be like, No, you have tomorrow morning. 8am you gotta go to the gym like I’m gonna beat you up or something. Right? But they’re also not going to be like No non-problem That you’re never going to the gym, like eat more ice cream, like sit on your butt like, yeah, they’re gonna be like, Eric, what’s going on? What’s going on? Why aren’t you going to the gym right? They might be curious. They’re going to be kind, they’re going to try to get to the bottom of it, they’re not going to let you indulge just, you know, self compassion is not self indulgence. But they’re going to, you know, try to figure out what’s going on. And I think that’s sort of the attitude we need to take to ourselves when we’re feeling that resistance. One move is to actually get curious about the resistance and say, what’s, you know, going on? And I’ve done this, I mean, I definitely have had this specifically with exercise a lot. As I said, it’s not days for me, sometimes it’s months. But I find that when I get curious about it, it can help like, what’s happening? Why does this feel like an obligation? What have I done, and sometimes you analyze and you realize, like, you know, it’s the particular thing I’m compelling myself to do. There are other things that feel like a showed in my life. And if I can’t harness that time that I was exercising for something else, like there’s another thing that I’m missing that I want to get into. But all of that it’s unnecessarily which solution I come up with, it’s just the fact that being curious about the resistance, can allow you to Stop butting heads against either kind of, you know, plowing through it like a drill sergeant, which doesn’t work or ignoring it, and letting it continue when the resistance is really not serving you. So, again, it’s this kind of how you talk to yourself. Yeah. And allowing yourself to kind of get curious and pay attention and investigate what’s going on with you.

Eric Zimmer  41:14

Yeah, I think that’s really good. I think another phenomenon I’ve noticed in myself is particularly with exercise, it’s like, I look at exercise, and I’m like, okay, my plan is I’m going to do a 60 minute bike ride that day. And, and I know how much energy a 60 minute bike ride takes, it takes 10 units of energy, and I look inside, and I’m like, I have got one, this is not going to happen. Right? So you know, the other just sort of simple thing to do is to break it down and go like, Okay, can I get on my bike shoes, that takes one unit of energy, I got one unit of energy, good, I ease myself one step at a time into the thing can be another, just sort of a simple hack, for lack of a better word to kind of get over that hump. Because I don’t know what it is about exercise I’ve asked maybe you have a theory on this. I’ve never gotten a good answer for it, or not a complete answer, which is, I have exercised, let’s say, I don’t know, 5000 times in my life. I don’t know what the number is. It’s a big number now, right? I’m not a young man. Every single time I’ve done it when I’m done. I’m like that. I’m so glad I did that.

Dr. Laurie Santos  42:20

That was a choice to do that. Yeah. Never once

Eric Zimmer  42:23

not once have I been like, Ah, man, I wish I didn’t do that. Right? You would think that it would just be easy to do it right? It just seems like my brain would learn. That’s good. Do it. And yet, it’s still sometimes a big effort. I don’t know if it just comes down to conservation of energy as a species. I don’t know you have any thoughts on that? Because it’s strange to me,

Dr. Laurie Santos  42:43

you’re good. If it’s just exercise for you mean, for me, it’s like, sit down to journal, do your meditation like call your mom like there’s so yeah. So one hint that we get from the neuroscience is that you’d like to think that, you know, the brain was organized in the following way, it was good at detecting what I really liked, you know, what drove pleasure, it would notice that really well. And then it would have mechanisms that motivate you that say, Hey, whenever you feel that, you know, that little burst of pleasure do that more often. Turns out, the brain doesn’t have that many pleasure centers, they’re like really tiny and hard to find, even with neuroscience researchers, early on, we’re looking for them, like we don’t have any pleasure centers, meaning we don’t often notice what feels good, right? We notice things that really hack into those systems. So you know, drugs of addiction, like those hack into the system. Great, we noticed that those feel good. And those are very hooked up to the motivation systems. Yeah, you know, sweet things, right? You know, these visceral states we get but you know, the nice warm feeling I get from doing a nice gesture to somebody you know, the warmth I get from social connection, the exercise endorphin high, don’t notice it as much. However, the brain has lots and lots of neural real estate devoted to what you might call wanting. So if the pleasure systems or like the liking the brain has lots of wanting stuff. And so you get these systems that like give you lots of craving to do stuff that, you know, just happened to be a hack in this liking system. Again, whether it’s drugs of addiction, or things like social media, or, you know, all these like little dopamine hacks, our brain is really ready to go after those. But it has no mechanism to learn about, you know, the big highs, the, you know, kind of like deeper pleasures in life. And that sucks is such a stupid way to work for rats, great for them, but like not for us, you know? So how do you kind of combine these systems for wanting and liking better, you know, all the forms of like and get them to talk to your wanting better? Sadly, there’s not an obvious way. But there are hints that one way you can do it is to kind of ramp up your intentional noticing of the rewards you get. So my colleague, Hedy Cobra, who’s a neuroscientist at Yale, she she’s really interested in mindfulness approaches to addiction and things like that, you know, claim that you can use the same sort of approaches to notice the good things just as you can, let’s say a craving for a cigarette or something. Notice like actually what I’m craving is kind of gross, you know, like really paid Tension how this makes you feel, which is like not that good. You can do the reverse for something like exercise. And so this is something she practices all the time. She’s like the annoying friend that always wants to do like the hard yoga or the run or the like, you know, she never has the thing that we were just describing. But it’s in part because she’s forced herself at the end of it in that moment you talk about really like, This feels great to sit there and meditate on it, like, Oh, my chest feels lighter, I feel really good, right? Like, she’s kind of giving her brain some time to be like, Wait, like the reward areas that are kind of slow, unless it’s like a straight up dopamine hit, they can kind of notice this stuff. And you know, does that perfectly lock up your wanting and liking systems? No, but I think it can kind of help this sort of mindfulness practice of noticing they’re rewarding parts, just in the same way, you might notice that the negative things that are not serving you, when you sort of notice those consequences, and really attend to how they feel, they can kind of get into that circuit a bit more too.

Eric Zimmer  46:47

That’s a really interesting perspective, the like in wanting systems and a lot of the things that these pleasures were describing that come from wholesome activity, there are subtler thing. And so savoring them is really important. It’s just so interesting, having been somebody who had drugs of addiction, right, as a heroin addict, it amazes me looking back on the amount of pleasure I was getting at the end was so small, compared to the price I was paying. You know, and I’ve heard people describe some theories of addiction people have is that there’s a learning disorder associated with it in that your brain is just not updating, its prior so to speak, right? It, it just it’s stuck on the heroin, good signal, even though heroin is clearly not any longer good. My brain is like, a doesn’t get it, you know. And so, I think that these things are really tricky that liking and wanting, it gets really interesting that the brain has a lot of real estate devoted to wanting

Dr. Laurie Santos  47:44

Mm hmm. Yeah. And and that the wanting sticks really strongly to certain things. Right. You know, again, drugs of abuse, a lot of times are hacking your dopamine system. Yeah, as does the intermittent reward of your Instagram feed, you know, as does the like, really central pleasures like sugar and you know, lounging around and things that wanting system has nothing to stick on to for these bigger pleasures, and it doesn’t update. Well. You know, as you mentioned, I think one of the sad things that you know, if you’re really addicted to a particular drug is that you’re habituated to it, you’re definitely not getting not only at the consequences super high, but you’re also probably not getting the same pleasure that you’re getting in the beginning because your brain is kind of used to it, but yet still the wanting systems like Wanwan, that’s if I could go back in evolutionary time and like, tweak one thing about the rain, yeah, it would probably be to put more pleasure zones for the bigger, more meaningful pleasures, and it would be to hook the wanting systems up a little bit better to those. But sadly, I did not get consulted on how brands should be designed. So Oh, well.

Eric Zimmer  48:43

So do you think though, that this is just pure conjecture that if we as a species, managed to not exterminate ourselves in the next several 1000 years, that will change? Because to your point for rats, it’s a very simple system, right? They don’t have meaningful pleasures in the same way that we do. Right? Do you think that we might have evolved to be a little wiser about these things and to shake off some of this evolutionary baggage one being like that, maybe we would realize like, sugar and fat are not always good. Do you think that humans will evolve and again, this is just conjecture, but I’m curious what you think.

Dr. Laurie Santos  49:21

Yeah, no, totally. Scientifically speaking, I think these selection pressures have to be pressured to change things around in the brain, you know, if sugar and fat were killing us, you know, then we might over time develop adaptations not to like it. And that’s kind of true, but but not so quickly. You know, like real evolutionary time, like, evolution always moves towards the directions of adaptation, but sometimes it really slowly right, you know, so die in our lifetime and not in a long time for the human species. That said, I think, you know, this is where cognitive hacks can come in. Right? You know, if we can get good at noticing mindfully paying attention just earn rewards. You know, that really seems to be a hack on the system, it takes a tremendous amount of work. I mean, this is like, you know, we’re talking like Buddhist meditation levels of, you know, commitment to this stuff. But there’s a sense in which you’re kind of hacking these things. And this is one of the things I love about, you know, recent neuroscience work that looks at people who engage in these ancient spiritual practices is that they are literally hacking their brain, you know, if you look at a long term meditator, they just have less neural real estate devoted to mind wandering, you know, if you look at a monk who’s done, you know, many, many hours of compassionate meditation, their brains just go more quickly to engaging with compassion to other people. If you look at drug addicts, who’ve used mindfulness practices to overcome craving, when you look at, you know, their brain, when they’re in a craving state, it looks different than you know, a recovering addict who might not have used these mindfulness practices. And so there are hints that we can start hacking these systems through work and so on. That’s not as easy as like, you know, meteorite hits. Only people with certain wanting like existence, stick around be way easier, you know, though, maybe more tragic. But yeah, yeah. But the good news is that with effort and intention, there are some hacks that can help this stuff. Yeah, I think

Eric Zimmer  51:11

we can change this wiring extensively my own life, just being a testament to that I’ve shared the story several times recently on the show, so sorry, listeners, if it’s getting boring, but I think it’s an important one, which is, my mom broke her hip, and I was picking up all her prescriptions, I was carrying oxycontin back and forth from my mom’s house, the amazing thing is, not only did I not want it, I didn’t even think about it, it was a month or two into it that I was like, that’s incredible. But I would have robbed somebody at gunpoint for that once upon a time. You know, I mean, I think that just speaks to change is really possible if we just keep doing these things. Now, I’ve got a lot of years away from heroin. So it doesn’t happen overnight. But it is possible.

Dr. Laurie Santos  51:53

Yeah. And I think that’s important to remember, you know, it gets back to something we were talking about before that little and often, right, that often is the key, I think in your highest right, like you have to fight that craving, or allow it or investigate it a lot to get to the point that you’re at, but it does get easier over time. Yeah,

Eric Zimmer  52:10

for sure. We’ve been talking a fair amount about behavior change here. And there’s lots of techniques and tools for behavior change. But one of them is that the support of other people, or a term I’ve seen you use as cultural or religious structures, you talk about how it seems kind of very clear that like your CrossFit gym, or your church, or these things can help make behavior change occur. And you then go on to say, Well, what’s driving it? Is it the beliefs of the organization have the thing? Or is it simply the commitment to it? And I just would love to hear you kind of talk through that again, because I think it’s really interesting.

Dr. Laurie Santos  52:50

Yeah, I mean, so you know, this better than anyone who you’re listening to your podcasts, if they’ve been listening for a while know this better than anyone, behavior change is a hard, hard, hard, hard, right. So any hacks that we can figure out to help us can be huge. And I think one of the hacks that we forget about, we love this sort of Protestant work ethic idea that, like, I’ll just power through it, you know, me, me, me, this individual changing my behavior against the world. But one thing we find is that behavior change often seems a lot easier. When you have environments and structures around you, that are kind of consistent with that change, you know, what do I mean? Like, if you want to exercise that’s much easier if all your friends exercise, right? Like, that’s much easier if you have like, you know, this like padded out home gym, that’s amazing, right? Like, that’s much easier, if you just happen to live in a place where you know, there’s no cars, you got to walk all the time, you’re just going to get that in more naturally, so that environments can really help us. And sometimes those environments are physical structures, you know, like lots of walking pads, and, you know, an elliptical machine in your apartment. But sometimes those structures are really like cognitive structures, their belief systems, right? You know, they’re about the people around me value this, right, the people around me are committed to this. And I think both of those kinds of things can really work their magic, those are both kinds of structures that seem to really help us. But it’s often not the kind of beliefs and values we think, you know, so one of the big findings I talked about in my classes that overall religious individuals tend to be happier people who have a belief in afterlife, belief in God and so on. And so you could say like, Well, maybe it’s their, their personal beliefs, right? Like they’ve, you know, have this belief in afterlife that gives them meaning and so on. Turns out not so much. It turns out if you factor certain things out a belief in you know, a god or something like that doesn’t actually matter what, what seems to matter a lot more is the practices you engage in religious individuals go to services, so they engage in social connections. religious individuals often are part of organizations that engage in charity, so they do nice things for each other. They pray and so they get a chance to be mindful and take some time where they’re present. They often engage in practices related to things like gratitude and other pro social emotions. You know, they’re just like physically around other people all the time because they’re engaging with these other folks. So we think structures have to be about our own personal beliefs and like what we believe and what we value. But sometimes the environments around us can be shaping our behavior in ways that are so much easier. And a recent episode of my podcast where I interview, the inventor of the so called Blue Zones, Dan Buettner, he’s an author who studies places around the world that tend to have these positive practices either for like physical health, like places that induce longevity, where people live healthily for a really long time, or places that induce happiness. And he’s fond of saying that like any attempt to individually change your behavior, without your environment supporting you, is doomed to failure. Like, you know, you could do all these different hacks and download apps and get coaches and whatever. But like, if you just moved to a place that was happier, or move to a place where you exercise more, that would impact your behavior so much more, you know, he’s being a little harsh, we know that with work, you can change your behavior. But it’s definitely true that if you can find some environmental support, that helps enormously,

Eric Zimmer  55:58

it makes such a huge difference. I mean, I got sober and 12 Step communities and you know, I’ve had friends of mine who are former heroin addicts say it was harder to quit smoking than stopped doing heroin. And there’s a variety of reasons for that. But one of them, I think, is simply when we went to get off heroin, we were embedded in a community that was focused on that. And when we stopped smoking, primarily, most people just simply go, Alright, I’m going to stop smoking, and they do it entirely on their own. You know, I think it makes such a difference. And I think this idea between beliefs and practices, I’ve often heard people describe Judaism as a religion that’s less about belief and more about practices, you know, I often try and tweeze apart what in 12 Step programs worked, what was it that was actually working there. And, you know, it’s interesting to think about, but I do think that the community aspect of it, that piece of it is really, really important, in 12 Step programs to talk about unity service and recovery. And I think it’s really interesting, the Unity or the people, the service is doing something that cares about other people. And then the recovery was some method of personal internal transformation, I think that can just be applied to us generally, as humans, you know, those three things are really helpful orienting points.

Dr. Laurie Santos  57:18

Totally. And I also think this idea of, you know, giving up control, you know, which, which can be complicated, I think it has certain religious overtones, and so on. But, you know, ultimately, it’s really accepting your common humanity, you know, which is something that people who do work on self compassion, talk about, right? It’s like, I’m not going to be perfect, I’m just going to be human, I am going to be tempted, right, you know, like, I have to kind of come to terms with the fact that I’m not the one you know, who’s in control all the time. And that humility can often ground us in a whole host of attitudes and ways of talking to ourselves that allow us to be a little bit more self compassionate, right? Like, you know, I’m not going to be perfect, maybe let’s not put myself in this situation, it’s gonna be really hard. Like, I’m not Superman, right? Like, I need to ask for help. Right? Yeah, you all of these are practices where you’re kind of compassionately dealing with yourself. But those are practices that also make behavior change much easier.

Eric Zimmer  58:10

Yeah, I’d like to turn now towards loneliness. There’s a lot of it out there. And it’s not such an easy thing to solve. I was talking with someone who is lonely about this. And this is a person who’s had lots of loss in their life. So everything that they sort of relied on is just kind of gone. And they’re sharing how, you know, it’s one thing when you’ve got a spouse to go out and find some additional community by joining a club, but that when you have none of those foundations, it’s very, very difficult. So I’m wondering what might you say to someone who’s in that position, who’s, you know, really isolated and becoming an isolated feels like a tremendous amount of work and is very discouraged by it?

Dr. Laurie Santos  58:56

Yeah, I think first that can recognize that you are not alone. Like a lot of people relate Right? Like loneliness is skyrocketing, even if you don’t have people talking to you about it. I mean, you know, even the Surgeon General of the United States, Vivek Murthy has been focusing on loneliness, in part because he thinks is a public health crisis, a public health crisis because of how dangerous it is, but also a public health crisis because of how common it is, right? And so I think that’s step number one is like, you know, you’re not a loser, there’s not something wrong with you like, this is something a lot of people are going through. But that also comes with, you know, something that’s related, which is that if you reach out in a baby step way, you’ll often be surprised about how many people will follow up. I think one of our fears of loneliness is or one of our worries when we’re feeling lonely about doing something about it. It was we’re kind of simulating how much work it’s going to take and how much success we’re gonna get. Right? Or suddenly, it’s gonna be such a pain to like, Call somebody or go to this club or whatever. And we’re simulating, you know, if I do reach out, people aren’t gonna like me, right? And scientists have looked at this and there’s evidence that Both of those intuitions are wrong, right? Our predictions about how much of a pain in the butt and how stressful how, you know, annoying how maybe awkward it’s going to be, to reach out, they’re all wrong, like our brain is telling us Oh, don’t do that it’s gonna be a pain not gonna be as much of a pain as you think. Right. And our brain is also telling us stuff about how successful it’s going to be. And we there’s so much evidence that we miss predict how many people are going to like us, we miss predict how much people will appreciate our attempt at reaching out, especially if we haven’t reached out in a long time. And I think recognizing that those biases, our biases that our intuitions are wrong, can be really helpful when you’re making the decision to try to overcome your loneliness, because you’re like us feels like it’s gonna be a lot of work. You can be like, nope, sciences is not let me just try it. Right, let me just try it and take a baby step towards it. And then often, if you’re paying attention, you’ll get some positive reinforcement back, right, you think, oh, it’s gonna be so onerous to go to this club, especially if I don’t have a spouse or you know, nobody to talk to you, then when you try it, it actually works. The key though, I think, you know, especially with the sciences, that you kind of have to try it the right way. And the right way, is really making sure that you’re doing that first step to reach out, you know, including when you go to a place, you know, so, you know, I’ve seen friends who say, you know, I’m, you know, lonely, like maybe I shall, I’ll go to CrossFit, or you know, I’ll go to a book club, or I’ll go to this thing. But then they get to the book club, and they like, you know, are on their phone, checking their email, or they’re like playing with the cat, you know, to book club, right? Like, they’re not actually talking to people. And what does that do? You know, it’s reinforces this cycle where people think, Well, you’re not interested in them, so they’re not going to try to talk to you. So I think we need to recognize that it’s not just putting ourselves in this situation, but it’s having our own openness. Often, solutions to loneliness involve not like someone reaching out to us, but us reaching out to other people as trying to solve other people’s loneliness, us feeling like, you know, we’re the ones we’re going to talk to somebody so they feel better. That’s what kind of opens things up.

Eric Zimmer  1:01:52

That’s a really interesting perspective. And actually, I think my own experience would bear that out in certain cases, one on one, I’m pretty fine with people put me in a room full of people that I don’t know. And I hate it. You know, if I could have three glasses of whiskey, I would like it a whole lot more. But I but I don’t. And so what I found, though, in some of those situations is exactly what you just said is the strategy for me sometimes is look around and see who looks lonely, and go approach that person as a starting point. But it’s funny when you said that, like you know, you go to the event and you’re on your phone, or you’re playing with the other people’s cat, you know, I am totally that way put me in a new social situation, what I’ve learned about myself is, I may not even be able that first couple times to overcome it. Like it just may be too strong. But if I keep going, I can find something. And I’ve seen some research talking about, you know, it takes a while to build a connection or a friendship. And the thing that I’ve done so many times in my life is show up someplace once and be like, No, not my people, because nothing happened. Right? Yeah. And I just know for myself that the first time I show up my defenses, they’re just, they’re unconscious, and they’re high enough that I’m either going to think I don’t like these people, or they don’t like me, one of those two things is going to be going on in my brain. And I just kind of have to ignore it and go, well try again, you know, try a few times, if this seems like it’s a place that might offer the kind of community I want, I may have to venture into the space multiple times. And then sooner or later, I find like, all of a sudden, my walls start dropping. And so that’s a way of doing it. Even if you can’t quite overcome, you know what you’re saying like the first time I’m there, all I can do is play with a cat because I feel so shy. I like

Dr. Laurie Santos  1:03:38

your suggestion there. You can also look at it from the other people’s perspective, right? Like, why didn’t they connect with me it might not be because you know, you’re a loser and uncollectable. It was made when you were playing with the cat, the whole you know, so it’s like, yeah, I think if you if you if you frame it more like, I’m going to help the loneliest person at the party. That’s super helpful. I mean, I’ve seen this on one on one, you know, if you know if you’re feeling anxious, socially anxious, and a party is not the right scene, fine. Look through your phone or your email list and say, I’m gonna, you know, text or email the person in this list that I think might be the loneliness. And I’m just gonna check in. And you’d be surprised how much good work that does.

Eric Zimmer  1:04:12

This is my final question. To what extent does virtual connection can it be a replacement? For in person connection? Is it 50%? As good 75% as good? Am I asking the wrong question is a good question.

Dr. Laurie Santos  1:04:26

And the answer is sort of it depends on how you do it. Right. You know, you and I are talking virtually over the our favorite podcast app, and it feels pretty good. Like Robin, it’s nice connection. I see you. Yeah. And that’s in part because it’s in real time, right? We’re talking using the same things as primates that we were built over evolution to do, right, we’re talking in real time with one another. I think that virtual connection works less well. If you’re not doing it in real time. Like, you know, a text thread where you’re texting a friend it does kind of doesn’t jive with the way our psychologies used to. But the cool thing is we have lots of tools now that allow us to do that from like FaceTime and zoom where you can see each other, or just like the old school phone, right? We have these smartphones that are our cameras and our alarm clocks and all these things. And we forget, like, you could just use it as a phone. And we know the phone, you know, it’s pretty good for social connection. It was like really all we had for a very long time. So

Eric Zimmer  1:05:14

yeah, yeah. And I think the thing that sometimes people will do, and I know I’ve been guilty of this as like, well, in person connections, what’s really important, so I won’t do zoom, right, thinking that somehow inferior but it’s still way, way, way better than nothing.

Dr. Laurie Santos  1:05:30

And I think this for me was, you know, a gift of the pandemic. You know, I could talk about the whose silver linings and blessings and really awful situations was that you I think it got a lot of us to, you know, do these zoom hangouts with the friends or Zoom movie or game nights and zoom yoga classes, I was doing zoom yoga with friends. And it made me realize like, Wait, this is pretty good. You know, there are people that live far away that I won’t see in person for a while but connecting with them over zoom was great. And some of those, you know, zoom, things I was doing, I’m still doing with those friends or by call my college roommates are scattered all across the country. And we still do these like, once a month, kind of, you know, spa night hangouts over zoom, because we realize like, it’s better to see them that way than not at all. So I think, you know, listen to those lessons, they can be powerful.

Eric Zimmer  1:06:14

Well, Laurie, thank you so much for coming on. It has been such an enjoyable conversation, and I’m so grateful that you had time to join us today.

Dr. Laurie Santos  1:06:22

Thanks so much for having me on the show.

Episode Transcript:

00:00:00 – Florence Williams
Your brain doesn’t really make the distinction between being rejected by love and being sort of cast out of the klan to lie on the savannah and be circled by hyenas. You know, your body registers this as a very threatening state, like a physically threatening state.

00:00:24 – Chris Forbes
Welcome to the one you feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts. We have quotes like garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think ring true. And yet, for many of us, our thoughts don’t strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don’t have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it’s not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf, thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is a repeat guest at the one U Feed podcast. It’s Florence Williams, a journalist, author, and podcaster. She’s a contributor, contributing editor at Outside magazine and a freelance writer for the New York Times, Slate, Mother Jones, National Geographic, and many, many others. Today, Florence and Eric discuss her new book, a personal and scientific journey.

00:01:44 – Eric Zimmer
Hi, Florence. Welcome to the show.

00:01:46 – Florence Williams
Hi, Eric. So great to be here. Thank you.

00:01:48 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah, it’s wonderful to have you back on. We had you on, I don’t know the date. It’s been years at this point. We talked about your last book, which was all about nature. Your current book is called a personal and scientific journey. And you’re just such a great writer. It’s such a well written and beautiful book.

00:02:07 – Florence Williams
Thank you.

00:02:07 – Eric Zimmer
So we’re going to talk about that, but before we do, let’s start like we always do with a parable. There’s a grandparent who’s talking with their grandchild, and they say in life there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops and thinks about it for a second and looks up at their grandparent and says, well, which one wins? And the grandparent says, the one you feed. So I’d like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do.

00:02:45 – Florence Williams
I’ve thought so much through this project about the power of negative emotions. So I had never experienced heartbreak before. And when it happened, it so knocked me off my socks, changed the way my body felt, changed my health, changed the way my cells were functioning. And that’s what really drove me to write this book. So, you know, I had to confront, why is it that uncomfortable emotions are so difficult to deal with? Why do we avoid them? And so the one you feed, you have to make a choice sort of on a daily basis. Like, how are those negative emotions going to play you, and how are you going to play them? And I think it really became a driving kind of pursuit while writing this book.

00:03:30 – Eric Zimmer
I love, are you going to play the emotions or the emotions going to play you? I really like that take because it doesn’t say anything about that. You have to get rid of the emotion, right? Which, you know, it’s not a repression, it’s a relationship. You know, it’s how are you relating to and working skillfully with these difficult things?

00:03:49 – Florence Williams
And, in fact, I would say one of the profound and surprising lessons for me through this process was to sort of embrace the negative emotions while not letting them exactly play me. But they’re the ones who teach you, you know, and they’re sort of what you have to move through in order to grow. And I think I had been living my life pretty differently, you know, before that.

00:04:13 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah. So I’m going to ask you to tell a little bit of your story of heartbreak, but I’m curious, were you looking into this at all before it happened to you? Was this on your radar in any way as a writer, as a person who’s looking at different things? Or did it emerge wholly from, like, oh, my God, I’m right in the middle of this, and it’s terrible? What do I do?

00:04:34 – Florence Williams
I have to admit, it wasn’t really on my radar.

00:04:37 – Eric Zimmer
Okay.

00:04:37 – Florence Williams
And in some ways, I feel badly about that, because I have friends, you know, who went through heartbreak at various times, and I don’t think I was the best friend to them. I think I tended to sort of dismiss heartbreak as being sort of the realm of melodrama, a little bit overwrought, you know? Okay, so you got dumped by someone. You know, obviously that person was a loser. Move on.

00:05:00 – Eric Zimmer
That’s right. They’re not the right fit for you. Lots of fish in the sea come on.

00:05:04 – Florence Williams
Yeah. Pick yourself up. Don’t be so dramatic.

00:05:08 – Eric Zimmer
Yep, yep. So tell us a little bit about the events that led you kind of into this.

00:05:14 – Florence Williams
Sure. Well, I met the man who would be my husband when I was 18 years old. It was literally my first day of college, and we dated for seven years, and then we got married, and we were married for 25 years, two kids. And I think, like a lot of long marriages, I mean, there are moments of connection and there are moments of disconnection. And I guess I always had this sort of bedrock faith in it, and I had a desire, really, for it to work. I mean, there were so many things I was attached to about my life, but, you know, he didn’t really feel the same way, unfortunately. And I think often with heartbreak, when there’s a separation like this, a romantic split, one person wants it more than the other, and I was the one who didn’t want it. I was afraid of it. And it also kind of surprised me, honestly. So, you know, at one point, he told me that he wanted to go find his soulmate, you know, and that I wasn’t. It.

00:06:10 – Eric Zimmer
Ouch.

00:06:11 – Florence Williams
Ouch, right? Big ouch. And so I felt that rejection, and I felt that pain really deeply, you know, in my heart, in my stomach, in my pancreas, in my body. I had always thought that heartbreak was something that was in your head. There was a lot of sadness, and that heartbreak was sort of a metaphor. But as I kind of launched my investigation into what was happening to me and why I felt this way, I learned that our bodies really register this kind of pain in ways that I don’t think really get acknowledged or talked about enough.

00:06:46 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah. And we’ll go into that. I certainly like you. I have a history, I guess, unlike you. You’ve got sort of the one heartbreak. I’ve got a whole string of them.

00:06:56 – Florence Williams
I’m sorry.

00:06:57 – Eric Zimmer
You know. Well, it’s interesting. The biggest one was to my ex wife, mother of my son. And I look back on that as both the most difficult period of my life and perhaps the most fertile period of my life for so many things. There was so much opportunity for transformation in it. I wouldn’t wish it on anybody.

00:07:19 – Florence Williams
Yes, I. I can really relate to that. Do you think, Eric, that it gets easier, that heartbreak gets easier the more you go through it? Or does it get harder? Is it cumulative? I’ve only had one big heartbreak, so I still don’t know the answer to that.

00:07:30 – Eric Zimmer
That’s a great question. I don’t think it gets easier. Well, no, I don’t think it gets easier. I do think there is a cumulative nature. You talk about this in the book, which is that the problem with heartbreak, unlike, say, death. Right. That kind of grief that comes from that is there is a element of I must not be lovable. That’s embedded in it. And when that happens multiple times, it’s almost as if you’re like, well, see more evidence. You know, I’ve got. I’ve got multiple pieces of evidence to back up this theory. Yeah. And it’s so interesting. I have been in a really good relationship with Ginny listeners. I’ve heard her on the show, and it’s been, I think, six plus years, and it’s been really good, and they’ve been six great years for me as far as my own development and all that. And I kind of wonder, like, how would I handle heartache now, heartbreak now? And I think the answer is it would still be extraordinarily painful, regardless of beast. I just don’t think it’s something that you evolve past.

00:08:32 – Florence Williams
I wonder, though, I guess the hope would be that at some point you don’t buy that story anymore of not being good enough.

00:08:39 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah, I think there’s that, and I think there’s the other element. That is an interesting question to think about, which is how much of how strongly I am affected by heartbreak has to do with things that have happened to me in the past that haven’t been healed.

00:08:56 – Florence Williams
That’s right. That’s right. I think that’s one of the things you learn. Yes, yes. It all comes back around.

00:09:03 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah. So I’d like to think if it happened again, I would be in better shape because I had healed a lot of things. But I still think, based on the way we’re wired up, that it would be very painful. So let’s talk about that. You know, one of the things you said you thought heartbreak or sadness was something that was in your brain as if it didn’t exist. But what we know, and you point out, I’m going to let you elaborate on, is that that sort of pain triggers the same places in the brain that actual, real physical pain does.

00:09:30 – Florence Williams
Yeah, that’s right. I set out to talk to neuroscientists and immunogeneticists and psychologists to find out sort of why our bodies get so kind of implicated in our emotions. And one of the things I learned, there’s been so much research on people who fall in love and the neurotransmitters associated with falling in love. I think it’s kind of probably a fun research area.

00:09:54 – Eric Zimmer
Your subjects are all happy.

00:09:56 – Florence Williams
You know, your subjects are happy. It’s all sunny. But I spoke early on to Helen Fisher, who is a biological anthropologist, and she has scanned the brains of dumped people. And while they’re looking at pictures, actually, of their sort of rejecting departing beloved. And she found that the parts of the brain that get activated are similar. Not exactly similar, but basically the same, you know, very similar to where we process physical pain. And also parts of the brain light up that are associated with craving and addiction.

00:10:31 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah.

00:10:32 – Florence Williams
You know, just because someone stops loving you doesn’t mean you stop loving them. And your body on some level, kind of misses them and notes their absence and registers that absence. And you sort of want that back. You want those brain chemicals back, if not the person itself.

00:10:47 – Eric Zimmer
Right. And in the book, you mentioned multiple times, there’s this profound feeling of not being safe.

00:10:54 – Florence Williams
Yes.

00:10:55 – Eric Zimmer
That happens when you’re dumped. The early stages of it, for me, they feel a little bit like panic.

00:11:01 – Florence Williams
Absolutely.

00:11:02 – Eric Zimmer
I wouldn’t call it a full panic attack, but it is a, to use a word you’ve got in the book, hyper vigilance. Right?

00:11:07 – Florence Williams
Yeah. You feel deeply imperiled. And it makes sense because if you think about sort of how we evolved as mammals, we are supposed to feel safety in numbers. We form deep attachments that drive our every sort of behavior. And when your primary attachment partner takes off, you literally feel alone. Your brain doesn’t really make the distinction between being rejected by love and being sort of cast out of the clan to lie on the savannah and be circled by hyenas. You know, your body registers this as a very threatening state, like a physically threatening state. And so that starts this cascade of stress hormones, norepinephrine, you know, that. Then talk to our cells, talk to our organs, talk to our immune systems where white blood cells get made in our bone marrow. And they’re designed to be very responsive to our environment and it turns out to our social state. One of the researchers I talked to said, you know, our cells listen for loneliness, and when they detect it, boy, they really kick into high gear because it’s not a place where we are supposed to live for a long time.

00:12:18 – Eric Zimmer
Right. So let’s talk about some of the things that heartbreak slash loneliness does to the body. You know, we know how it feels. We can register the pain, but there are changes throughout the body that occurred. You notate a lot of them in the book. So I wonder if you could just elaborate on a couple of them.

00:12:37 – Florence Williams
Yeah, I mean, that feeling of sort of near panic or hypervigilance sets off some very specific symptoms. For example, sleeplessness, agitation, difficulty digesting, because your body’s sort of gearing up for some kind of, you know, fight or flight. For me, it was a lot of weight loss. My blood sugars were sort of messed up. I mean, deeply messed up. My gut bacteria was messed up. I ended up with an autoimmune diagnosis some months after the split. That was type one diabetes. And what I learned from talking to researchers is that sometimes these autoimmune diseases do, in fact, have an emotional trigger. They are made worse by inflammation. And inflammation is kind of the key. So when I talked to a psychologist at the University of Arizona, David Spara, he said to me, you know, the story of divorce is an inflammation story. You know, I had never heard that before. And so then I met with a researcher at UCLA, and we actually analyzed my genetic markers, my transcription factors, which are basically signatures for inflammation. And we did this at various time points after the separation. And that became kind of one of the central threads of the book, kind of looking at how my cells were responding to loneliness and how they were responding to different science based interventions that I was very eager to try in this sort of urgent bid to feel better, to feel healthier.

00:14:02 – Eric Zimmer
I love that aspect of the book. You’ve got biomarkers that you’re trying to sort of pay attention to to see what’s working, what’s not, in addition to just the. The correlation and making the correlation to how I’m actually feeling. Right. And I think that naturally, a lot of us will emerge from heartbreak and hopefully start going, all right, what’s this next phase of my life look like? And we start adding and building things in which I think is a natural process, and you go through it. And I just love that you’re also bringing the science along with it. You know, it’s interesting, when you said that the story of divorce is an inflammation story, there’s also. You’re talking about heart health at a different point in the book. One of the people you quote, the tragedies of life are largely arterial. So there’s actual heart aspects to this also.

00:14:51 – Florence Williams
Yeah. It’s so fascinating to me that, you know, for millennia, cultures across time have known that the heart is in some ways the seat of the emotions, probably because it’s, you know, one of the few organs we can actually feel. We can feel it pumping.

00:15:05 – Eric Zimmer
I.

00:15:05 – Florence Williams
We know it stops sometimes, you know, during crises. And people have known for a long time, too, that, you know, of course, husbands and wives sometimes die within a couple of days of each other or within months of each other because their heart stop. But it was only in the 1990s that researchers in Japan were able to start imaging the heart during heart failure to see that people were coming into the hospital with sort of symptoms of heart attack, but there was no sign of an arterial blockage, which is. Is kind of the standard cause of a heart attack. Instead, these people were experiencing this weird distension of the left ventricle quadrant of the heart. So it was like ballooning out and then being unable to pump correctly. And they named it Takeatsubo, after a lobster pot, which has this very bulbous head and a narrow neck. So it looked like this quadrant of the heart. So it’s the stress hormones, like adrenaline, landing on receptors in the heart and causing it to just literally balloon out like that and sort of freak out. So we know now that takeotsubo makes up about 5%, probably, of all heart failures, you know, showing up in the hospital. About 5% of those cases will result in death. Another 20% will result in, you know, continued sort of cardiac risk. And we know that especially middle aged, postmenopausal women are about 80% of the patients, which is kind of interesting. So there seems to be something protective about the estrogen sort of counteracting that adrenaline. But we know that people suffer this kind of heart failure after the death of a spouse or the death even of a pet. Sometimes it’s after the death of a sports team that you’re particularly. There are cases in the literature men suffering this when their sport team loses the World cup. And sometimes it just seems to happen, you know, for no known reason. But this is really interesting. There are cases that really spike after natural disasters when there’s a lot of, you know, adrenaline that makes sense. And there’s just recently a new study showing that cases have spiked during the pandemic, during COVID Interesting, especially in women.

00:17:16 – Eric Zimmer
Interesting. So do we know of any things that make any factors that make us more susceptible to the really damaging effects of heartbreak or of having, like, heartbreak tear us up more? Is there anything that sort of says, like, people like this or have had this happen or this sort of thing are more likely to have, like, just heartbreak, to feel catastrophic versus people who might say, well, you know, yeah, I mean, again, I’m not saying anybody’s gonna be like, well, big deal, right. But I seem to be one of those people. For whatever reason, it was earth shattering to me.

00:17:53 – Florence Williams
Yeah, right.

00:17:54 – Eric Zimmer
And I had friends who, yeah, it was painful, but it did not seem to just devastate them in the same way it did me. And I just don’t know. Is there anything that explains that sort of difference?

00:18:06 – Florence Williams
Yes, you know, we know that there are personality traits that seem to make people both more resilient and a little bit less resilient. You know, the data is not destiny here. But in general, people who, on personality tests, you know, sort of register as being a little bit more neurotic, a little bit more introspective, a little bit more anxious, you know, sort of tend to ruminate and cognitively engage, you know, with their emotions, are going to be harder hit, you know, by some of these emotional blows. And also, we know that people who’ve had early life traumas and childhood traumas are going to be more susceptible, you know, to future challenges. But I was so encouraged to talk to Florence Williams at the University of Utah, who said, you know, yes, we know heartbreak is really hard, and we know that especially, you know, people who split up after these long term relationships and divorces. Do you have higher risk for early death? They have higher risk for depression. They have higher risk for metabolic disease, for cardiac disease? I mean, it’s kind of a grim litany, frankly. But we also know that there are certain traits that make you more resilient. And this was the really heartwarming news to me. You can actually cultivate some of those traits and try to become better at them. And the one that was surprising to me and changed the trajectory of my whole reporting over the two or three years of this book was, she said, the people who can really engage with beauty, people who can experience awe on a regular basis, who can cultivate awe, these are the people who seem to be able to make more meaning and sense of their tragedies. They can create more connections between their frontal cortex, which is kind of their seat of their self concept, and their sensory and motor parts of their brains, in a way that that helps them create meaning, helps them find perspective, helps them experience conflicting emotions like, yes, utter pain, but also, wow, joy and beauty and possibility. The people who might be able to find a kernel of optimism in that, that became true for me during the course of my journey. So I just glommed onto that as life saving advice. Not only could I experience beauty, but she was telling me that I could get a. Get better at it.

00:21:02 – Eric Zimmer
The trait you’re describing is often considered on a standard personality test. How open are you to new things? Right. How open are you in general?

00:21:11 – Florence Williams
Yes.

00:21:11 – Eric Zimmer
And there’s a lot of people that say, you know, where you land on that personality test is sort of where you are. Like, these things don’t move. Right.

00:21:19 – Florence Williams
They don’t tend to move much.

00:21:21 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah. You’re stating that you’re either introverted or you’re not right? Yeah. And so, you know, openness to new experience and the ability to find beauty, you’re saying, is trainable. What are some of the ways to do that?

00:21:34 – Florence Williams
Well, she’s a huge fan of starting early. So, for example, childhood art education. You know, it’s just tragedy, really, that we don’t have more of this, you know, in our schooling system in the United States. But this kind of developing an appreciation for art and for beauty is a lifelong gift that’s going to help you survive totally the blows of life. And so, you know, wonderful if we could start that early. But with things like awe and beauty, you know, it’s sort of like a mindful practice. You can go out, you know, around your block and you can say, okay, I’m going to find some things that are beautiful on this walk around my block, and I’m going to look at this flower. There’s a way to sort of, and I love this micro dose awe that I learned about from a study that I participated in where there’s an acronym for awe, awe, where the a is attention. So, you know, on your walk or as you’re going through life or even inside your house, you know, if you have a house plant or you have an incredible meal or you’re looking at your baby, you know, attend. Right? Just pay attention to that. And of course, philosophers talk about this all the time, that attention is love and love is attention. You know, don’t space out while you’re looking at this beautiful blossom. And then the w is for weight, so stay with it. Stay with that attention. And the e is just exhale just two breaths.

00:23:02 – Eric Zimmer
Say that last one again.

00:23:04 – Florence Williams
Exhale, exhale. You know, so you may be staying with this moment of Beauty for a couple of breaths. You know, it’s like a 1 minute practice. And if you do it a couple times a day, there is some emerging data showing that it really does improve people’s well being. It improves their moods. It improves their feeling of purpose in their lives. It gives them some perspective. We know that the science of awe is so interesting also relatively new field of study. But in the presence of something beautiful, we are kind of naturally pulled out of our own thoughts. Our rumination sort of stops dead for a minute when the moon comes up or when we notice the owl in front of us on the path or whatever it is. And I’ve had that experience where I’ve been just so lost in some kind of conversation that I’m thinking about that I had. And then this owl jumped out in front of me on the trail, and it was like, whoa. Completely stopped thinking about what I was thinking about. I felt the presence of something beyond myself. Right. And that in itself is an incredibly helpful just feeling of connection and perspective.

00:24:13 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah. I love that acronym usage. And I love the idea of the weight and the exhale. Reminds me of Rick Hansen, who talks about a practice taking in the good, which is pretty much the same thing. If you’re HavInG a good experience, stay with it a little bit. Give it. Savor it. Give it a little more attention. There are other attentional exercises that I think can be very helpful in this regard, too, which is things like, you know, I often play with seeing the edges of everything.

00:24:46 – Florence Williams
What would be an example of that?

00:24:48 – Eric Zimmer
Well, if I’m looking out my window right now, I mean, I’ve looked out this window 10,000 times. Right. And what we know, you know, about the brain’s sort of predictive nature, right. Is that there are. Some people believe that I’m not even really registering what’s out there at some level. Right. My brain is sending down a prediction of what it expects to see. My senses are sending up what they do see, and if they match, I never have to process it. So something like looking at the edges would just be like, let me look at the edge of everything I see. Where are the edges of that building? Where are the edges of that tree? It just causes me to have to actually look.

00:25:26 – Florence Williams
That’s interesting.

00:25:27 – Eric Zimmer
Or you could do this with color. You know, let me see all the green that’s out there. It’s a way for me of. I think, of actually looking.

00:25:36 – Florence Williams
Yeah. And it pulls you into some kind of process that’s not about your head, your thoughts.

00:25:42 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah, that’s right. Now, the thing that you’re talking about, though, is the element that goes a little bit beyond that, which is how do you then go from that sort of mechanical thing into a little bit more of a state of almost appreciation. Right. But as they say, I think Mary Oliver said it best. Right. That attention is the beginning of devotion. Right.

00:26:05 – Florence Williams
There you go. Yep.

00:26:06 – Eric Zimmer
You know, so how do we devote ourselves to something? We pay attention to it. And I think, you know, my Zen training talks so much about this, about just the ordinary thing. If you give it enough attention, it will come alive.

00:26:17 – Florence Williams
And I think you do get better at it the more you do it.

00:26:21 – Eric Zimmer
Yes.

00:26:22 – Florence Williams
For example, I’m during the pandemic, one of my little rituals, when I, you know, we all felt so housebound and isolated, and I would walk every night to go look at the sunset. And it just became, you know, this automatic part of my day. It’s like, oh, time for the sunset. I’m gonna run, run down the street and go look at the sunset. And it’s, when you do that, it’s impossible not to sort of drink it in, you know, like this bomb it just, you. You become better at doing it, I think.

00:26:49 – Eric Zimmer
So you found over that time that you began to develop the skill of appreciating the sunset more.

00:26:55 – Florence Williams
Yeah. And really trying to sort of access the awe in it as well.

00:26:59 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah.

00:27:00 – Florence Williams
To find myself stilled by that beauty.

00:27:03 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah.

00:27:04 – Florence Williams
And then the other interesting thing that happened is that there were a number of my neighbors doing the same thing. And so, you know, I would see the same people every night and I felt closer to them. You know, I didn’t know them, but pretty soon I did and we would say hello. And so it became not just this personal awe experience, but it became a collective awe experience, which was incredibly comforting and, you know, a really nice anecdote to loneliness. If you can experience that kind of unselfing in the presence of other people, it sort of amplifies it, I think.

00:27:39 – Eric Zimmer
So it sounds like you had a location that multiple people agreed was an optimal place to watch a sunset from. Is that accurate? Yeah.

00:27:47 – Florence Williams
So I live in Washington, DC, and I’m about, I don’t know, five blocks or so from the bluffs overlooking the Potomac river. So it’s one of the few places where you actually can get a little bit of a vista.

00:27:59 – Eric Zimmer
Got it.

00:27:59 – Florence Williams
It looks west and there’s the sunset. Wow. I mean, it just, you know, some nights it was. It was lame, but usually it was pretty great.

00:28:06 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah. Yeah. So let’s move into. Now we’ve talked about what heartbreak is, how difficult it is for us, the things it does to us. Let’s talk about where did you start to turn for healing? I don’t think we’re going to get through all of it, but maybe, you know, highlight a few key places.

00:28:26 – Florence Williams
Sure. I became so motivated to try to do what was kind of science based in my kind of urgent bid to get healthier. And so I turned, per this conversation with Florence Williams, I turned to spending a lot of time in nature trying to focus on beauty. I went on a wilderness trip to even try to kind of crank up the volume on the awe and the immersion. So I embarked on a 30 day wilderness trip. I did half of it alone, which had kind of some unexpected results, I would say. Actually it was good in some ways. It was not as helpful in other ways. I did some EMDR therapy, which is supposed to be good for emotional trauma, and there’s some interesting emerging research about that. And I did some psychedelics, actually working with a clinician in a therapeutic setting, again, to, I would say, heightened the awe kind of dose that I was trying to go for. And there’s a lot of science there, of course, and it was really helpful to me.

00:29:23 – Eric Zimmer
So let’s start with nature. You wrote a book called the Nature Fix, which was all about how nature is healing for us and critical for us as humans. Did you find yourself naturally just. I guess that’s a funny sentence, naturally turning into nature, like you just kind of knew it and you went to it? Or was it a case of sort of having to rediscover that?

00:29:43 – Florence Williams
I was so primed already to think that nature could be helpful. Having written the nature fix, I felt like I was leaning on every lesson I learned from that book, not just because, you know, the subtitle of that book was how to be health, happier, healthier, and more creative. Now I felt like I needed it to survive. You know, it was a whole different level of kind of need. And so it was an intuitive place for me to try to seek help. But in that book, I only talk about sort of the dose curve of nature immersion up to three days. Like, I end the book with the so called three day effect. It talks about the interesting things that happen to your. Your brain and your body after three days outside. And I felt like, okay, but I feed a lot more than three days because this is a really big heartbreak. I’m going to go for 30 days.

00:30:32 – Eric Zimmer
So what were the aspects of that that felt really healing? And what were the aspects of that that felt more challenging?

00:30:38 – Florence Williams
Well, I did half of the trip with other people and half of the trip alone. So the first half was the half with other people. And, you know, for me, I loved the planning the trip. Even the logistics of an expedition can actually pull you out of kind of the limbic parts of your brain and force you to sort of be really cerebral in a way that’s helpful. Right. To deep emotions. And then I also just wanted to spend good times with my friends and family. I felt so much comfort from being surrounded by them. I had all of these friends and family who signed on, and so I felt very supported by them. They were helping me kind of self actualize, but also, they just also really liked being on the river. And so it was kind of a lot of jolly times. Say it was sort of jolly and fun.

00:31:25 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah.

00:31:25 – Florence Williams
And then everyone disappeared and it was like, okay, now I’m going to do the really deep work here. I’m going to learn how to be alone because I have not ever in my life been alone since I met my husband when I was 18. I’m going to learn to access bravery since I’m scared of this future that looks so different and so feel so insecure. I wanted to feel the metaphor of paddling from one destination to another tell.

00:31:55 – Eric Zimmer
Listeners about what the trip was real quick.

00:31:57 – Florence Williams
Yeah, so it was 30 days down the green river in Utah, starts in southwestern Wyoming, and then flows through a lot of Utah to merge with the Colorado river in Canyonlands National park. It’s one of the sort of premier river trips you can do in the United States where you can be on the river for that long. You know, most of it is through public land. So you need a series of permits to go through these different canyons. There are different permitting agencies, including indian reservation. So it’s, you know, it’s logistically complicated for the solo piece. I was in Canyonlands National park for most of that. Also some Bureau of Land Management land. And so there’s only one resupply point in that two weeks, one road that goes in. So I had to sort of line that up, you know, plan the food. And I felt like I just needed to mark this passage in my life by doing something kind of grand and something that would carry me through this passage into what I thought would be kind of a better story of myself as literally the pilot of my own boat. Metaphors were just irresistible to me.

00:33:11 – Eric Zimmer
And so what were the good and bad parts of those 15 days?

00:33:15 – Florence Williams
I think that I did access a lot of bravery. I think I felt like, okay, I can be alone. I can take care of myself. I can be self reliant. But I also had this realization that I don’t want to be, that I don’t want to be alone. I don’t want to take care of myself. I learned that. And it’s just through the absence of having other people around me that the value of having other people around you is to help you not feel so bad about yourself. You know, that if you tend to go down these dark rabbit holes, it’s the company of people you love who help pull you out of that. You know, it’s one of the tremendous values of our social, you know, instincts. But, you know, beyond that, we are healthiest when we don’t just rely on ourselves. It’s kind of our cellular superfuel as a species that we do help each other. And so if we deny ourselves that opportunity, we’re just not going to kind of hit our real potential, I think. And those were all big revelations for me because I don’t think I had wanted to rely on other people so much. I think I did want to kind of embrace this kind of self reliance. You know, this is the myth that we’re all sort of fed from such an early age. I also wanted to connect with people through dark emotions. You know, I think I had been taught that dark emotions aren’t necessarily something you want to share with other people. Nobody’s comfortable with them. Let’s just put on a happy face and keep going. And I found myself so resisting that and wanting to sort of have more authentic connections with people in my life that necessarily involved expressing that.

00:35:18 – Eric Zimmer
I think earlier on, and this is certainly my journey also in this, which was earlier on my view of spiritual development, of getting healthier, of being psychologically well, all that was kind of. There was an element of self reliance in it, and there was an element of psychologically healthy people don’t need other people. Right. Sort of a codependency. Right. The opposite of codependency. Codependency was saying, you know, you lean on other people too much, you care too much what they think, it’s what rules your life. That’s a problem. And certainly it can be. But more and more, I’m seeing people talking about the fact that we are social creatures that do need each other, and there is a healthy way to do that. Not only is there a healthy way to do it, it is healthier for us to do it, to find connection and that we thrive best in connection with other people. And it just seems that that is a theme that is coming up more and more.

00:36:25 – Florence Williams
I love it that people are talking about this more. And in some ways, I think one of the silver linings of the pandemic is that we have realized the value of connection more, and we’ve kind of fallen on our knees a little bit and said, yeah, this is a hard time. Let’s talk about mental health. I think those are really, really positive developments, but I also worry about, especially younger people now who do consider themselves the loneliest demographic, which is so interesting. They’re the most anxious, they’re the most lonely. They’re the most concerned about their mental health. I worry about them, and I think that they live in very challenging times where they are not making the authentic connections, maybe that we sort of grew up with in the absence of the Internet, in the absence of social media.

00:37:13 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah. I think there’s another element to that that I think is interesting, which is there’s an idea out there that stress becomes stress when you perceive it to be harmful to you. Or let me say that differently, stress becomes harmful when you perceive it to be harmful. Harmful. Right.

00:37:30 – Florence Williams
Right.

00:37:30 – Eric Zimmer
And I’m going to make another analogy, which is sleep, right? I’ve rebelled a little bit in my own head and with people close to me a little bit with what I refer to as the sleep police, right. Because now everybody is saying, like, you’ve got to get 8 hours of sleep or, you know, you’ll, you’ll get the bubonic plague next week, right? Which I get the over correction saying, look, this is really important, but I have restless leg syndrome. And when it kicks in, I don’t sleep well. Well. And so now I’m not sleeping well. And all I’m hearing all the time is how destructive it is to me that I’m not sleeping well. And I worry that all this research about how bad it is to be lonely could be doing the same thing to people who are already lonely. And now they’re being added to that is, oh God, how bad is it for me to be lonely? And to the extent that any of those things help us take positive change, to the extent that the sleep police help somebody to go, you know what? This 5 hours of sleep nonsense I’m doing isn’t really a good idea. I should put more effort into getting sleep really positive. To the extent that knowing how destructive loneliness is to us helps us move towards positive direction, I think it’s helpful. But I worry about a tipping point with all this stuff.

00:38:51 – Florence Williams
I think you’re right, but loneliness is such an interesting emotion because it’s subjective. So you can be in a marriage and feel lonely. You can live in a house full of people and feel lonely. And yet it seems to have a very highly adapted reason, which is that it is a signal. The feeling of loneliness tends to make us feel like there’s something we don’t have that we want. There’s a disconnect between what we want and what we have. And by noticing that and feeling it, it actually is supposed to, I think, propel behavior drives us to seek a little bit of comfort or a little bit of connection. The irony though, is that if you feel lonely for too long, it kind of does the opposite. It makes it harder for you to have connection because you’re more suspicious of other people. You maybe feel worse about yourself. It’s one of these emotions, sort of like heartbreak, that I think exists for a reason, but it can also kind of morph into something more destructive if it lasts for too long.

00:39:54 – Eric Zimmer
That’s a really great point. It turns into something that’s harder to get out of the longer you’re in it.

00:39:59 – Florence Williams
Right.

00:40:00 – Eric Zimmer
And what I find really interesting is, you know, you just stated something, which is that kids these days, you know, teenagers, are considered the loneliest. Now, forever, it’s been senior citizens. Right. Senior citizens were, you know, it was just very clear they were the loneliest. And we understand why. Right. Their partners are passing away. Their friends are passing in a way. They don’t have a job. Right. They’re isolated in ways. But it is sort of stunning that kids feel that way now. I’m not even sure what to do with that information.

00:40:30 – Florence Williams
I don’t know either, but I think we need to pay attention to it. I’m really concerned about it.

00:40:34 – Eric Zimmer
Me, too. I’m concerned that the people who generally have the most energy to solve that problem don’t feel like they can solve it. You know, youth does have an energy of, I feel like, the ability to make things happen. And I get. When you’re 70, it’s much harder to be like, all right, I’m going to go to three social events today. Right. You’re tired, but when you’re 18, that’s a different thing. And so, yeah, I’m with you. I find it somewhat alarming.

00:41:02 – Florence Williams
Yeah. It’s why I feel, frankly, so motivated to talk about the things that can help build resilience, such as authentic connection to other people, but also to the natural world. You know, I really do believe that by helping young people connect to nature, by helping them get out of their own anxieties a little bit, you know, I do very strongly feel that it’s part of the solution.

00:41:26 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah, I do, too, 100%. I remember my last bad heartbreak, and I remember exactly what I did. I just made a last minute decision to go to this nature retreat in Ohio for, like, four days. And it’s basically. It’s entirely off grid. You’re by yourself more or less, except meals are provided for you. And it was transformative for me. It kicked off something really valuable in my life. And, you know, nature was certainly a big part of that. So I think that is one path. And did your research lead you into other paths out of loneliness for people?

00:42:00 – Florence Williams
Yes. So, you know, I told you that we did this experiment where we looked at my white blood cells for markers of inflammation and also for markers of virus fighting ability, which is something you really want when you’re going into a pandemic.

00:42:15 – Eric Zimmer
Yes.

00:42:17 – Florence Williams
With this researcher, Steve Cole, who has, in fact, done a lot of interventions with populations where he’s looked at their immune cells and how they may improve after, for example, they try Zen meditation or after they try volunteering in schools. And what he has found is that where he sees the best improvements in people’s immune cells immune profiles is not necessarily when they report feeling happier or kind of more mirthful or they’re able to seek more pleasure. He says that he sees the biggest improvements when they feel like they have meaning in their lives and purpose in their lives. And that’s not the same thing as waking up every morning, you know, feeling amused, totally, and sort of, you know, calm. It’s this kind of larger. Right. North Star. And so I thought that was fascinating and also not something that we hear of as an antidote to heartbreak or an antidote to loneliness. You know, it’s not necessarily being with other people. It’s feeling like you’re doing something worthwhile, like, there is a why that you are answering in your life. And eventually, ideally, that will lead to feelings of connection with other people.

00:43:26 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah. My experience. I mean, I have sort of a close, firsthand experience with that, which was in AA, which was a big part of my life for a long time. That was the foundational element. Right. Which was to work with other people who were struggling with what you were struggling. And that’s not exactly what you’re saying, but what it was was purpose, it was service, and it was connection.

00:43:49 – Florence Williams
Exactly.

00:43:50 – Eric Zimmer
The line that I remember was nothing. So much ensures immunity from drinking than working with another alcoholic. There’s some AA people out there who are gonna be like, you didn’t quite get that. But it’s close. It’s close. And so, yeah, I agree. I think that’s so important. The other thing I’ve been thinking about, I think a lot about how do people build community? How do people go from being lonely? You know, how does this happen? And one of the things I’ve realized recently is that it’s not that I realized. I found some research recently that said, you know, in order to make connection with a new person, right? So if you’ve already got existing connections, right. Nurture them. Right. But if you need to make new ones, you’re just like, I just don’t have any in my life, or I have very few, and I need to make new ones. It takes a lot of time it does, yeah. And so what I see a lot of people doing, and I’ve done this in the past, is I go, all right, you know what? I got to find some connection. I’m going to go to the local meditation group because I’m interested in meditation. There’ll be people there that are like me, and that’s how I’m going to do it. And I go once or twice and I don’t feel connected because that’s not how it works. And so then I go, this isn’t working, and I give up. Or I do a volunteer thing that only happens once or twice, and that’s not enough time either. So one of the things that I’ve been talking with people about is really saying, you know what? Pick a couple things. But it’s going to take a commitment. It’s going to take, I’ve got to keep going even when I’m uncomfortable, even when I feel like I don’t fit in even in the beginning, because it just takes a certain number of hours. The research is different on how long it is, and I’m always skeptical of, like, 21 days to a new habit. Right. It’s so variable. So it takes more than seeing somebody twice for an hour.

00:45:35 – Florence Williams
That’s right. And I think that there are other ways to connect and to feel connection. I mean, you know, face to face with other people is one way. It’s a great way. But you can have a meaningful connection with a pet. You can have meaningful connection. And I’m really big on this with nature. You know, if you have a sort of favorite spot or a couple of spots where you can go where you get to know the seasons and you get to know the birds and you get to know, you know, the patterns of the water or the rocks. You know, it sounds a little goofy to say it, but I think there’s some compelling research here showing that when people can feel connected to the natural world, it can be a great antidote, actually, for loneliness.

00:46:16 – Eric Zimmer
Yes. I think that’s a really important point to kind of keep coming back to. It’s not only other people. There are lots of ways to connect. And even back to what we were talking about earlier around beauty and art, I have deep connections to pieces of art, pieces of music, things that do feel like connection, they are valued.

00:46:36 – Florence Williams
So I guess, like the great trifecta, you know, to sort of sum it up, the great trifecta of kind of heartbreak antidote or loneliness antidote seems to be this sort of beauty plus connection plus purpose. I think it’s very hard to rely too much on one of those over the other. It seems to be, you know, in combination seems to be sort of a pathway into ultimately feeling a sense of belonging, feeling like the things that you do matter, and ultimately, of course, increasing your capacity for love, which is really what it’s all about.

00:47:11 – Eric Zimmer
Well, I can’t think of a more beautiful place to just kind of wrap up. That was a great summary there. Beauty, purpose and connection. I want to take a second and let you share a little bit about. There’s an audio version of your book, which I think is really exciting. One of the things that’s so great about so many of these books like yours is you talk to so many interesting people and we get you sort of giving us that in the writing, but I think in the audiobook, we can actually hear these people, right?

00:47:40 – Florence Williams
Yeah. Thanks so much for asking about that. I’m really proud of this audiobook that we made. That’s very unusual. As I went around reporting the research for this book, I had my tape recorder and I taped everyone I talked to. I also taped myself in an audio journal. I taped my friends. I taped my therapist. And so when we made the audiobook, we decided to actually pull that tape into the book. So it’s not just me reading the text, it’s actually these real conversations layered in as well as really beautiful music and sound design. And so it feels like a very immersive, I think, audio experience, and I hope people will check it out.

00:48:19 – Eric Zimmer
And it sounds like a lovely companion for being heartbroken.

00:48:24 – Florence Williams
I hope so. You know, I really wanted the book to be hopeful because I think that heartbreak is, you know, as difficult as it is, it is a path to transformation and how lucky that we can get that 100%.

00:48:37 – Eric Zimmer
Well, Florence, thank you so much for coming back on. It is always a pleasure to talk with you.

00:48:42 – Florence Williams
You too, Eric. Thank you so much for having me.

00:49:00 – Chris Forbes
If what you just heard was helpful to you, please consider making a monthly donation to support the one U Feed podcast when you join our membership community. With this monthly pledge, you get lots of exclusive members only benefits. It’s our way of saying thank you for your support. Now, we are so grateful for the members of our community, we wouldn’t be able to do what we do without their support, and we don’t take a single dollar for granted. To learn more, make a donation at any level and become a member of the One U feed community, go to oneyoufeed.net Slash join the One U Feed podcast. Would like to sincerely thank our sponsors for supporting the show.