The Purpose of Emotions and Why We’re Not Wired for Happiness with Anders Hansen

Episode Transcript:

00:01:31 – 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 your 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 Anders Hansen, a psychiatrist, and popular TV show host with his own docu series about the mysteries of the human brain. Anders has published several bestselling books and is arguably Sweden’s favorite expert on the topic of brain and health matters. His books have sold over 3 million copies and have been on bestseller lists in Sweden, Japan, and numerous other countries, and many of them now will be available in the United States. Enjoy this incredible interview.

00:02:58 – Eric Zimmer
Hi Anders, welcome to the show.

00:03:00 – Anders Hansen
Hi. My pleasure.

00:03:01 – Eric Zimmer
I’m excited to have you on. You are releasing a bunch of books in the United States this fall One of which we are going to really focus on today, and that is called the happiness cure. Why you’re not built for constant happiness and how to enjoy the journey. But before we get into that, we’ll start like we always do, with the parable. In the parable, there’s a grandparent who’s talking with their grandchild. 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 they think about it for a second. They look up at their grandparent and they say, well, which one wins? And the grandparent says, the one you feed. So I’d like to start off by asking you, what does that parable mean to you in your life and in the work that you do?

00:03:56 – Anders Hansen
Well, first of all, it’s a fantastic little story. I love it. To me, it means that we humans adapt to our world, to our environment. We’re not blank slate, but we do adapt. Our brains are plastic. And if we live in a world which is dangerous, filled with threats, we will adapt to that. We will be vigilant and perhaps aggressive. And if we are surrounded by kindness and gratitude, we will adapt to that. And those sides of our personality will be amplified. That’s how I see it.

00:04:27 – Eric Zimmer
And I think that ties into, to some degree what you talk about in the Happiness Cure. You start off by talking about we are the survivors. Talk to me about what you mean by that and why that’s important to happiness.

00:04:42 – Anders Hansen
Well, the most important thing I never learned in med school is that the brain has not changed for 10,000 years. And the second most important thing I never learned in med school is that half of all humans died before they became teenagers during 99.9% of our history. And you and I and all of your listeners are, of course, the lost generation of an unbroken line of survivors, because our ancestors did not die before they reached adulthood. Otherwise, we wouldn’t exist. Right? So what then was it that humans had to survive? Well, the thing that killed the most humans during our history was infection, bleeding, murder, starvation, dehydration. And since we are the descendants of the survivors, we are very, very good at surviving infections, bleeding, murder, dehydration, and accidents. However, today, we don’t die from these things. Today, we die from cardiovascular disease, cancer, and stroke. But that has just been the case for a couple of generations, and that means that we are not very good at surviving those things. They have not had time to shape us. So from this perspective, you understand so much of human psychology, I think, and particularly human mental health. We never evolved to be happy. We evolved to survive. The brain is a survival machine that evolves to regulate the body. And the main goal of the brain is not to be creative or smart. It is to take us to tomorrow alive. And as I said, the brain has not changed for the last 10,000 years. So that basically means that we are driven by brains, which are survival machines for the savannah. And today we live in a completely different environment. And we are driven by instincts that help survive on the savanna, and those instincts don’t make us happy in a world of overabundance. And one concrete example is our crave for calories. In the world where we evolved, calories was very hard to get by, and we had to eat everything when we found them. If we found sweet berries or fruit, something like that, we should eat everything at once, because tomorrow they may be gone, then someone else have taken them. Now, that craving for calories made a lot of sense in a world where there was little food. But that does not make sense at McDonald’s. When you take the crave for calories that evolution has built into us during hundreds of thousands, millions of years where calories were hard to come by, we take that crave into our world where calories are basically free, well, then it’s not surprising that you get the problems that you see today in terms of overweight, obesity, and type 2 diabetes.

00:07:38 – Eric Zimmer
So when you say we are driven by these things, say a little bit more about what you mean, because we obviously are driven by many different things. We have different motivations of all sorts. But what are you speaking about when you say the word driven in this case?

00:07:56 – Anders Hansen
Yes, that’s a good point. The brain does not have one inner voice. There’s no little miniature version of myself in my brain. The brain has several different motivation systems that compete against one another. But a concrete example is the following. The world that shaped us was incredibly dangerous. And as I said, half of all humans died before they became teenagers. That means that the ones of our ancestors who saw danger everywhere, who prepare for the worst, planned for a catastrophe around every corner. They probably had better chances of survival than the ones who thought, ah, that’s probably fine, I don’t have to worry about anything. So that means that we are the descendants of the anxious ones. And it’s not surprising that people have anxiety due to this. And about 40% of your risk of suffering from anxiety actually comes from your genes. It’s set in you when you are born. A difficult childhood can amp up the anxiety. Of course, the risk of it, but partly of it is genetic. And if you think about it, that means that the ones who have genes that increase your risk of anxiety, they actually have a strong brain because they have a brain that wants to protect them against disasters, against accidents, against the things that killed us in the past. And I often say to my patients with anxiety that it’s not strange that there are people who have anxiety. What is strange is that there are people who don’t have anxiety and maybe they are the ones who should be diagnosed. And you know, when you present it that way, you reframe it, I think, and you stop looking at yourself as damaged, as broken. And that is very, very important. And I always say to my patients, that strong pair of arms, they could lift heavy things and a strong pair of legs can run fast. But a strong brain is not the brain that goes through periods of stress unaffected. It’s a brain that wants to keep you alive at all costs, even though it means that you see danger everywhere. I think this reframing of the perspective is important because how we view ourselves is so important of how we view our future. We are always looking for explanations, identities for ourselves. And I have seen how psychiatric diagnosis can become such an identity. People think, oh, I could not have a normal relationship because I have an anxiety disorder. I can’t have a normal job because I have adhd, et cetera. And that is just so sad because these diagnosis are not meant to be that. So they can be self fulfilling in a way. And that’s why you need to change the perspective and look at it from the perspective of the brain and then you’ll realize that you are actually functioning. However, I don’t want to trivialize the damage that anxiety can cause because it can be hell, it wrecks people’s lives. If you suffer from it, you should seek help. Absolutely. But you should not view yourself as broken.

00:10:57 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah, we talk on this show a lot about this idea of diagnosis and labels, like when are they useful and when are they not. Right. And I think being able to hold them pretty loosely and trade them in and out like, okay, it’s useful to think about having a person who has anxiety right now, but it’s not useful necessarily. Maybe think of myself as an anxious person or it’s just this ability to be flexible.

00:11:22 – Anders Hansen
Yeah, absolutely. But it’s surprising how often they become self fulfilling prophecies. We are incred incredibly complex. If you take ADHD for instance, it’s a diagnosis that is based on hyperactivity, impulsivity and difficulties of concentrating. Everyone has those problems more or less. So we are all on an ADHD scale. That doesn’t mean that everyone has adhd. That means that we have more or less of these traits. At the same time, we also have more or less autistic traits and we have more or less bipolar traits. Not saying that everyone is bipolar or autistic, just that we have more or less of these traits. And if that sounds complicated. Complicated, that’s because it is complicated. Human nature is incredibly complex.

00:12:06 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah.

00:12:06 – Anders Hansen
So you should not generalize too much. And as a psychiatrist, these diagnoses, their function is to guide treatment so that you get the best treatment. That’s what they are there for. They are not there to give you an explanation for your whole life. And they are certainly not there to cause harm in the sense that they become self fulfilling prophecies.

00:12:28 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah. Let’s talk about feelings. Emotions and feelings. You use those words early on in the book. First let’s delineate between what is an emotion and what is a feeling like when you use those two words, what do you mean by each?

00:12:43 – Anders Hansen
Emotions is the bodily reactions that happens when you get afraid. For instance, your heart will beat faster, you will breathe faster, and your adrenal glands will pump out cortisol. All of these things that happen are part of an emotion. And a feeling is a subjective feeling that you feel when this is happening to you. That’s a normal distinction between them. And what’s so important to understand is that feelings is all about actions. That’s what they are there for. They are not there to give us a rich inner life. They are there to tilt our behavior in ways that made us survive and reproduce in the past. So you can’t really say what’s the purpose of this feeling today. You must instead ask the question, was it important to have this feeling in our mental repertoire in the world that shaped us? And for instance, negative feelings such as anxiety and depression was probably very important because they helped us survive danger, they helped us avoid danger. And they should also be easily triggered. The negative feelings. And the negative feelings out triumphs the positive ones. If you’re anxious, you can’t think of anything positive. And that’s because your brain is telling you to look out for danger. And then it can’t think of any other thing else. That’s survival. Right. And if you look at what’s happening in the brain when you’re feeling something, there’s a part of the brain called the insular cortex. And the insular cortex is tucked inside your temporal lobes. And the insular cortex receives signals from the body and the senses. So in the insular cortex, your inner world and your outer world is combined. And based on that, the brain creates a subjective experience, a feeling, in order to tilt your behavior in such a way that helped us survive in the past. And again, since we are the descendants of the humans who did not die, we have an unbroken line of survivors behind us as our ancestors. I look at feelings as whispers from previous generations of humans who against all odds, survived starvation, dehydration, bleeding, accidents, and murder.

00:15:01 – Eric Zimmer
So it’s easy to see how anxiety could have an evolutionary purpose. It’s harder to see the evolutionary purpose of depression. Yes, let’s talk a little bit about that. What do we think the evolutionary purpose behind depression was or is?

00:15:19 – Anders Hansen
Well, first of all, a depression is a state where everything feels worthless. Things that you normally like to do, meet your friends or cook or play the guitar, or watch a movie or whatever you like, those things feel worthless. And it’s not like that for a day. Everyone has those days. This goes on for months now. It’s a standstill, basically. As a psychiatrist, I have seen that what often triggers depressions, most of them are triggered by long term stress. And by that I don’t mean a day or a week long periods of stress. Now, the stress system that we have in our bodies evolves to protect us against danger. When we get stressed, our heart beats stronger and faster because we are in a state where we should go to attack or run away, fight or flight. And we use the same system for modern stressors. Now that means that when the stress system is turned on constantly, the brain probably gets a signal that you are in a dangerous world, because that was having stress all the time, meant for our ancestors. And then the brain tries to steer you away from that world. How will it do that? It makes you want to withdraw and it down regulates motivation. So you basically want to hide in your bed, you don’t want to go out. Everything feels worthless. What we also know is that inflammation plays an important part. And inflammation is the body’s response to many things. If I scratch myself like this, it becomes slightly reddish here. That’s a slight inflammation. If I have a cardiovascular insult, which can be deadly, of course that causes inflammation in my heart. So inflammation is a reaction in the body that is normal, but that can also be very dangerous. Now, there is always a certain Level of systemic inflammation in the whole body, that’s perfectly normal. When we get an infection, let’s say by influenza or Covid or something, the level of inflammation in the body rises. That causes a number of chemicals called cytokines to be released. And the brain registers the cytokines. It basically registers aha, there’s an infection going on. The brain then down regulates mood and drive. We feel blue, we want to go home and tuck ourselves into bed. We feel sick, basically we don’t want to do anything. Now why is that? Well, that’s probably because the immune system uses a lot of energy. About 20% of the body’s energy goes to the immune system. And when the immune system must amp up its activity, which it must during an infection, the body must save its energy. So you can’t go around running and doing other things. You have to save your energy. That’s why your brain wants to keep you still when you have an infection. Now this makes perfect sense. However, modern lifestyle factors such as sitting too much, sleeping too little, stressing too much, eating too much processed food also causes inflammation. And here comes the main point. The brain cannot distinguish what caused that inflammation. It sort of figures inflammation as inflammation and downregulates mood and drive. So our current lifestyle is triggering an old defense system against infections. And that might sound speculatory, but during the last decade it’s been shown in many studies that inflammation is behind a third of all depressions. They have an inflammatory origin. So I think in a way that the current lifestyle that we live with, long term stress, where we eat too much processed food, where we don’t exercise, they trigger this alarm in us, this defense mechanism. And it’s actually from that perspective it’s not so, so strange that so many are suffering from depression. In Sweden, more than one in eight adults are on antidepressant medication.

00:19:24 – Eric Zimmer
So I’ve got a couple follow on questions to that idea. The first is there are measures of inflammation that we can take in the body. C reactive proteins, other ones I believe. If somebody is showing normal levels of inflammation in that way, is it reasonable to assume that inflammation is not what’s driving a depression? Or is it more subtle than that? Or do you know?

00:19:52 – Anders Hansen
I’m not sure. I know that there’s been many studies that have looked into whether you can have inflammatory markers guiding antidepressant medication. And the studies that I have read has not been conclusive.

00:20:06 – Eric Zimmer
Okay.

00:20:07 – Anders Hansen
Anti inflammatory medications seem to have an antidepressant effect. Effect if, but only if depression comes from inflammation.

00:20:16 – Eric Zimmer
Right.

00:20:17 – Anders Hansen
And it doesn’t seem to be so strong that you could just use that. You have to use antidepressant as well. And a big point I want to make here is if you’re on any medication at all, you must consult your doctor before you change anything.

00:20:28 – Eric Zimmer
Yes, yeah. Depression is one of those things that it’s hard to wrap your head around because it seems to be multicausal, multivariate. Right. It’s sort of like addiction in that way. Like, we’ve got a lot of good theories, but it seems to be sort of a constellation of different things often.

00:20:48 – Anders Hansen
Absolutely. But I think that we view depressions from a purely psychological perspective. We think a depression must come from something in my private life, my relationships or my work, my boss, something like that. But we underestimate the part that is biology. We must also look at depression from the perspective of physiology as a consequence to long term stress and as a consequence of inflammation. And as you say, depressions are incredibly complex. But what is interesting, I think, is that one has looked at hunter, gatherer tribes and tried to estimate how many of them that are depressed and there seems to be very few. There are many caveats to this science because it’s difficult to measure this. Sometimes people hide their problems, they don’t want to talk about them, and sometimes they externalize their problems. So a depression could be sort of maybe an aching knee or aching back is actually a depression and so on. So it’s difficult. But having said that, the studies that have been done indicate that depression seems to be rare among hunters and gatherers. And that gives you a possible clue that maybe depressions were very rare among our ancestors. Maybe actually our ancestors felt better than we do. That’s quite possible. And I visited a tribe in Kenya last year and I asked them, you know, how often do you see people that are depressed? And they said, it’s very, very rare, Very, very rare. It does happen when most of them had lost a child because child mortality was so high in this group, they were sad, but they seldom got depressed. So I think psychiatry is not just advanced medicine and cool molecules. It’s also about taking a step back and looking at our past and trying to understand what shaped us and what are the brain’s Achilles heels, so to speak.

00:23:12 – Eric Zimmer
The other question you wonder in the scenarios you are about, you know, thinking about hierarchy of needs, like if you’re focused on survival, do you have time to contemplate things on a deeper level? In the book you really tried to dig into whether we’re seeing more depression. Than we used to. Are people more depressed today? And you ended with the studies. The data just is unclear. But you did say, I feel pretty comfortable saying that. What is remarkable is that the number of cases of depression clearly is not going down.

00:23:47 – Anders Hansen
Exactly.

00:23:48 – Eric Zimmer
And that’s even with us giving lots of people medication and therapy. So it’s hard to know if overall they’re going up. But you would expect the trend to be sharply downward if what we were doing was working.

00:24:01 – Anders Hansen
Exactly. And if you take one step back and think about it, since the 90s, our economy has basically doubled. We become twice as rich, and if we can’t say that we feel better, why then should we have this economic progress? You could ask the hardest capitalist you could find, you know, why should we have economic progress? And they will say, well, so that we could have it better, of course. And then if you naively ask, well, why should we have it better? They will say, so that we could feel better. And we obviously don’t do that. The main point here is that we can’t really say whether we are worse off than we were 10, 20 years ago. We know that teenagers feel worse now than they did 20 years ago. That’s a fact. But for adults, it’s very difficult to say. But you can’t say that we feel better. And that is actually the question you should ask, why aren’t we doing that?

00:24:53 – Eric Zimmer
Right. Another thing in the depression area that you talked about that I’d love to have you elaborate a little bit on is something that you called the analytical rumination hypothesis. Can you share what that is?

00:25:07 – Anders Hansen
Yeah, it’s something that I have seen in many, many patients that when they are depressed, do you have a big decision in your life that you’re facing? And often they say, yes, I do. And they could be ruminating about whether they should leave their partner or whether they should leave job or perhaps try a new career or something like that. And I had such a period myself. I went into economics after high school and I studied, and this was just not for me. But I just kept going because I thought it was the right thing to do. And I did an internship at investment banks and stuff like that. And then when I was about 23, I had this period where I felt really blue and down and I withdrew and I sort of ruminated on this problem, should I switch? And then eventually I just decided to do that. And then I switched into medicine, and I never looked back. And I’m so happy that I took that decision. But there is a theory that in some cases of depression, the brain downregulates mood and drive so that you should be able to withdraw and really ponder a difficult question, a really difficult decision that you should not take lightly. It’s a theory, and I’m very certain that all the depressions does not have to do with that, but maybe a subset of them actually has something to do with that. And personally, I was glad that I had this period because I don’t think that I would have made this decision to go into medicine unless I had done that, unless I’d been through that.

00:26:40 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah, it’s really interesting. I am a person who has had challenges with depression, and I find myself pulled between often two things. Right. And one is, should I be looking for things in my life that are not going right or that aren’t the right fit for me, or is there something I need to be paying attention to or to the earlier point, is this more of a physiological thing, that it should be treated by better exercise and diet and sleep? And of course, the answer for me is always both. It’s both those things. But the question of whether I need to be looking deeper is an interesting one because, like, when I get the flu, to your point earlier, when I have the flu and I feel down and depressed and life seems kind of crappy, I just go, don’t listen to your thoughts for a couple days because you don’t feel good. You’re going to feel better. There’s no need to make a big deal out of this. Right. And the same thing sometimes I think can be effective for depression. Like for me, sometimes it’s a matter of just saying, all right, you know what? For whatever reason you go through these cycles, just keep doing the things you know that are good. You’ll come out the other side. But then there’s a part of you that goes, well, should I be looking more closely at am I deeply fulfilled? Those sort of things? Curious how you work with clients on that sort of thing.

00:28:02 – Anders Hansen
Yeah, it’s hard to generalize, but the brain is constantly trying to explain why we’re feeling the way we’re feeling. It gives post hoc rationalizations or post hoc answers to these questions. And I have seen many times in patients, they come and they have a depression, and they think these existential thoughts, you know, is life worth living? Things like that, really dark. And then you see that they have too little of thyroid hormone, which regulates your metabolism, and when you give them medication, these things vanish. So there’s so much that goes into the part of the brain that creates feelings and part of it. It’s your internal state in the body. And then the brain tries to think of a reason why we feel this way. And it often thinks of things outside and it doesn’t have to be like that. I have never heard someone coming in and having existential thoughts and saying, maybe my thyroid hormone is too low. No, they never say that. Yeah, but of course, at the same time, it’s very, very hard to generalize. And I think that depression is a very, very powerful state and it can be very dangerous, even deadly. Suicides are often due to due depression, so you should attack them from as many fronts as possible. You should definitely exercise and you should definitely go into therapy. And if it’s severe, you should definitely try medication. And you should not do one of these things. You should do all of them. Same with anxiety. It must be attacked from many fronts.

00:29:33 – Eric Zimmer
I couldn’t agree with you more on that. I had food poisoning a couple weeks ago and I became like, as existentially dark as, like, you know, coug. I mean, it was just a. It’s so funny. And then a couple days later I felt better and, you know, the world looked normal again. It just. It’s so funny how we are so affected by how our body feels. And it’s. Why to me, cognitive behavioral therapy is a very useful tool. But it’s not the only tool, because it’s not just that thoughts cause emotions. It seems like feelings cause thoughts too. It’s a two way street, right?

00:30:07 – Anders Hansen
Yeah, absolutely. I have the same experience as you have. This darkness can be so overwhelming. I mean, you talk about it like this, it’s a bit abstract, but when you experience this. I saw patients who had vaccination that caused inflammation and some really felt dark. And that was just a couple of hours afterwards and then it was gone.

00:30:27 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah.

00:30:27 – Anders Hansen
So these states can be so powerful. And you must then think that this is just my brain playing tricks on me. This will pause. It doesn’t feel like that, but it will pause because feelings are short term. Why is that? Well, that’s because we had to change our behavior all the time. As I said, the feelings are there to tilt our behaviors in certain ways that helped us survive. And since we had to do many things, they soon go up in smoke. If our ancestors were lucky enough to, you know, find a big pile of banana or hunt down the biggest deer or something, how long could they be happy about that? Well, a couple of hours, maybe a day or so. But if they were happy for two weeks and didn’t do anything, well, then they would die from starvation. And we all know that, that positive feelings are supposed to be short term. They will soon go up in smoke and they will be replaced by wanting some more. And this is not because we’re damaged. This is because we’re built this way. The same with negative feelings, they will disappear. And if they don’t, you should seek help. But in these cases, one must try to call the bluff of the brain, so to speak, which is very difficult.

00:31:36 – Eric Zimmer
Right. Because the very tool you’re trying to use to do it is the tool that’s not functioning very well in that moment. It’s a conundrum. But say early on you’re talking about this idea that good feelings should always last. And I think we do live in a culture that seems to push that narrative. And you say basically that expecting to always feel great is about as unrealistic as expecting that the banana on the kitchen counter will keep us full for the rest of our lives. Like it doesn’t work that way. And I think a lot of what you do in this book, and you do a really good job of, is showing us that just because our feelings come up and they come down and there’s negative parts of it, that’s what they were designed to do.

00:32:18 – Anders Hansen
Yeah. If you expect to feel good all the time, I mean, happiness first, it’s such a difficult topic. I always avoid it because everything you say sounds like cliches. But if you think that happiness is feeling good all the time, then you will be disappointed because we’re not built that way. And that may sound obvious, but the picture we get on social media is that we should go around feeling happy all the time and that we, we feel good all the time. And if we put our expectations on that, then we will be underwhelmed, so to speak. In science, the definition of happiness is that you are content with the long term direction of your life. And if you agree to that definition, and that’s up to everyone, of course, then the most important things for happiness seems to be relations. Relations. And relations. That’s the main thing. That’s not something that sounds good. That’s the result of a best study on this, which has been going for more than 90 years now at Harvard.

00:33:11 – Eric Zimmer
It’s funny, I was exchanging emails with Robert Waldinger earlier when I came across you referencing his study, this Harvard study that’s so clear on how critical relationships are for our overall well being. I want to hit a few other things kind of around these ideas. I want to talk a little bit about Memory. And you have a phrase where you say memory is a guide to the future.

00:33:38 – Anders Hansen
Yes.

00:33:38 – Eric Zimmer
Tell us what you mean by that.

00:33:40 – Anders Hansen
We view memory as a recollection of the past. Exactly what happened. When I think of my graduation, I think of the day and whether it was sunny or what I was doing, meeting my friends, my parents were there, etc. But it turns out that memory has nothing to do with our past. Memories are there to guide us in the present, in every moment of our lives. The brain pulls up the memories that it thinks is most relevant to what we’re experiencing right now. And what we do know is that every time we pull up a memory, it becomes malleable, it can change, and the situation in which we bring it up rubs itself off on the memory. So if I think of my graduation when I’m very sad, the memory itself will become slightly more sad. And if I think about it, when I’m happy, the memory will become happier. And that may sound strange, but the reason is probably that if you’re in a forest, for instance, and then you get attacked by a wolf and you survive, you get away from there. But it’s a very close call. Every time you come back to the same place, you will feel anxious, and perhaps you will feel anxious just by going in any forest or just seeing a tree. That’s not strange. If you were to come back to the same place in the forest again and there is no wolf, and again and again and again, and there’s no wolf, the memory of the wolf attack will start to change from being very unpleasant to being slightly less threatening. And that is probably because if you have been there 100 times and you have been attacked by a wolf one time, it’s probably very low chance that there will be a wolf attack the 101st time you get there. So memories are constantly updated in order to be as good a guide for the present as possible. And this is exactly what you are using in therapy. If you have experienced something traumatic and then you talk about it in a state where you feel calm and safe, for instance, at the therapist office, that feeling of being safe will rub itself off on the memory and it will become slightly less hostile to you.

00:35:54 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah, I love that idea of thinking of the purpose of memories and their purpose being like everything else that’s happening, to guide what we’re going to do next in order to survive. And when you think about a memory as not being there for a pleasant reminiscence, but as a way of telling us what’s important now, it really Reframes how you think about them as a whole.

00:36:20 – Anders Hansen
Exactly. Elisabeth Loftus, who’s a famous memory researcher, she said that we experience memories as YouTube clips, something that we could look at and then put back and look at again and they will be identical. But in reality, they are more like Wikipedia pages, something that can be edited by ourselves and by others around us. Every time we bring up a memory, it becomes a bit unstable, and the present situation where it’s brought up rubs itself off on the memory. Memory. And it’s a very functional mechanism, but it goes against how memories are perceived.

00:36:58 – Eric Zimmer
Right. If you have a memory as bad as mine, you years ago realized, like, okay, don’t trust this thing. You know? I guess that’s the one thing about having a memory that’s so bad. You’re like, all right, that’s an interesting.

00:37:09 – Anders Hansen
Point, because every time I run around in my apartment looking for my keys, I curse my bad memory. And I thought that my memory hasn’t worked because it forgot where I put the keys. And neuroscientists looked at memory in the same way that it was a failure of the brain to register what’s going on. But then, in 2019, a group of Japanese researchers discovered brain cells in mice, and humans also have them. That down regulates the activity in the hippocampus, which is the memory center of the brain. Mother Nature has put cells in us that down regulates memory. Why is that? I mean, that’s very strange. And there are some cases of people who have been unable to forget things. One of them was a Russian journalist in the 30s, and he had one of the best memories that’s been ever recorded in a human. He could hear poems in languages he didn’t speak, and he could quote them regardless of how long they were and even remember them 15 years after. Now, this guy. That sounds like a superpower, but it was terrible for me.

00:38:10 – Eric Zimmer
Oh, it sounds terrible.

00:38:11 – Anders Hansen
Yeah, yeah. Because it was bogged down by all these details, since the brain can’t remember everything we experienced, because it would mean that it had to go through too much information in any given moment of our lives to pull up the important stuff. It would be bogged down by irrelevant stuff if it remembered too much. So this person was actually very dysfunctional. He had difficulties thinking in an abstract way because it was just too much details. So it seems that forgetting is actually an important part of our memory.

00:39:03 – Eric Zimmer
I lost my wallet yesterday, and as I mentioned to you, I’m overseas. It’s difficult, but I’m going to file away that my bad Memory could be a good thing. You know, I heard somebody recently talking about absent mindedness and I loved the way they described it because they said, like, literally your brain is absent from where you are. It’s on something else. And I like to think of it that way. Like, okay, well, yeah, I’m absent minded because I’m thinking about, you know, something else. Not always so bad.

00:39:32 – Anders Hansen
Yeah. And that’s absolutely true that the bridge between what we experience and our memory is focus. When we focus on something, we tell our brain, this is important, keep this. And if we’re not focused, well, it doesn’t get that signal and then we tend to forget it. And with your keys and wallets and stuff, that can be disastrous. Of course.

00:39:52 – Eric Zimmer
Yes.

00:39:52 – Anders Hansen
I hope it turns out okay.

00:39:53 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah, I’ve more or less sorted it out. Thankfully my passport wasn’t with it, so that’s the only.

00:39:58 – Anders Hansen
Oh, good.

00:39:59 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah. So I want to talk a little bit about loneliness. It’s become a fairly common trope that we’re experiencing a loneliness epidemic. You actually say you’re not sure if that’s really the case, but that loneliness is deeply problematic for us as individuals. We recently asked people who are on our text list to share kind of what’s going on with them, like what their biggest challenge was. And loneliness was a really big one. And so I wanted to talk about something that you say that I think is really important. I’m going to just read what you said and then ask you to elaborate on it. You say that when researchers compiled the results from multiple studies that compared different approaches to beating loneliness, it emerged that the most effective method was to learn systematically and in therapy how loneliness affects our thought patterns and our perceptions of ourselves. What are those thought patterns and perceptions and why is understanding them a good antidote to loneliness?

00:41:03 – Anders Hansen
So loneliness is, as you may know, something that has attracted a lot of medical studies during the last decade. And we know now that loneliness is dangerous. And by that I mean long term involuntary loneliness because we have different social needs. But long term loneliness increases the risk of several forms of cancer. And the prognosis for all forms of cardiovascular disease is actually worse if you experience too much loneliness. And that is very strange. I mean, why is that? And the reason is probably that during almost our entire history, to be isolated, to be lonely meant that you would die to be part of the group. There you were safe by yourself, you were gone. So to be part of a group was as important as having food. And when you are isolated, you are in a state that historically meant that no one can save, there’s no one there to help you. And then your stress system is activated. You get more alert to danger. If you are a state when you’re isolated. And that actually makes sense. We’ve seen in studies that people who are isolated, who normally sleep with a partner and are isolated and sleep by themselves, they sleep more shallow, they have less deep sleep and wake up more often during the night. And that is strange. I mean, why would you wake up if you don’t have anyone tossing and turning in your bed? You sleep nice, right? The reason is probably that if you were isolated during our history and no one that was there to help you, no one that was there to warn you for danger, so you could not afford to get as much deep sleep. And we also know that people who experience loneliness, they look at others people as more hostile than they actually are. Neutral faces become slightly hostile. If you’re lonely, slightly hostile faces become very hostile. So the brain’s sensitivity to danger increases. When you are isolated, you see the world as more dangerous because there was no one there to help you in our past. That doesn’t make sense today. It does not make sense if you want to sort of reconnect with your friends to see them as hostile. And therefore it’s. One has shown that if you are isolated or lonely and learn about this, you will realize that I perceive the world as more threatening and dangerous than it actually is. And even more importantly, if you have people in your surroundings who experience loneliness, they might be slightly edgy, standoffishly, but that may be a symptom of loneliness. That may not be because they don’t like you. And this is not a sign of them not functioning. It’s actually a sign of them functioning exactly as they should.

00:43:50 – Eric Zimmer
Right. It’s a cruel irony, you know, it is a cruel irony, or even said differently, it’s a cycle that can perpetuate itself, right? That the more you’re alone, the more you distrust other people, which causes you to be more alone, which causes you to distrust more people. And it feeds on itself. And I think the point you’re making is if we know that we can work to actively, consciously counter that.

00:44:15 – Anders Hansen
Yes, exactly. And it’s very difficult, of course, and to understand this is how we’re built, this is how I function. Maybe that could be the first step to stopping this vicious cycle.

00:44:27 – Eric Zimmer
We addressed lifestyle factors just a little bit earlier talking about depression. And you have said that as you’ve learned more about this mind body connection, it’s caused you to sort of double down on sort of the old fashioned advice like eat your vegetables and get enough sleep and exercise. And I am similar. The more I’ve learned about how we function and the more I’ve paid attention to myself, the more I’ve realized how important those things are. And yet it’s such boring advice to give. Right? It’s much better to have some new neuroscience hack. But let’s connect some of the dots here for why these things that seem sort of basic actually are as important as they are.

00:45:09 – Anders Hansen
I mean, exercise is important, everyone knows that. But most people don’t know how incredibly important it is. It’s not just important for the body, but it’s also incredibly important for the brain. And the brain actually seems to be the organization that benefits the most from exercise. All of our cognitive functions, memory, creativity, the ability to focus, even intelligence, actually seems to be increased if we exercise, if we are physically active. And as a psychiatrist, the most interesting part is that we get protected from depressions and anxiety if we exercise. And exercise has been shown to be as effective an antidepressant as antidepressant medication. But for that, you need to raise your pulse three times a week for five minutes every time. And it will take five to six weeks before you get that effect. And that is often unrealistic. If you’re very depressed, you’re not going to go for a run. That’s not going to happen. So I think the role of exercise is more in protecting us against depressions and anxiety. And as you said, that’s not a new advice. People have known this for ages. But when you learn the science behind it, you might take it more seriously. I have certainly done that, and many of my patients have. And an interesting paradox is, if exercise is so good for the brain and for the body, then why are we lazy? I mean, that’s very strange, right?

00:46:31 – Eric Zimmer
Why would it be very strange? Yeah, I’ve asked that question a thousand times.

00:46:35 – Anders Hansen
Yes, and why is the brain actively avoiding doing something that is so good for itself? The answer is that during almost our entire history, we were threatened by starvation. And that meant that we should eat all the calories that we could find. However, the amount of energy that we have in our bodies is not just dependent on how much food we eat, it’s also dependent on how much energy we use. And it costs energy to move. That’s why we’re lazy. That’s why we want to stay in the couch. Almost all previous generations of humans had to pay for every step they took by getting new calories and they could not find the calories at the grocery store. They had to hunt them down. So it made a lot of sense to never use any energy in vain, so to speak. And I think if we could tell our ancestors that we go for a run and then we come back to the same place and then we start lifting heavy things up into the air and put them down again without achieving anything, they would say that you are crazy. To do something like that must be as crazy as throwing food into the ocean. So my point here is that we don’t want to exercise. We are lazy by nature, and not because there’s something wrong with us, but because we’re built that way. And that is an Achilles heel that we must try to overcome. And I was once, many times actually, by people who said that, you know, if you’re overweight, you obviously have excess calories, there’s no risk of starving. Why do you still want to be in the couch? And that’s a great question. And the answer is that we have never been overweight or obese during human history. So that has been a non existent problem. And therefore the brain interprets all weight loss, even if it’s from a high level, as threatening starvation. And it wants to avoid that, so it wants to keep us in the couch.

00:48:25 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah, yeah. That question used to drive me crazy because I’m like, if you understand reward learning, you would think, because literally every time I exercise, every single time, and it’s thousands and thousands of times now, I get done, and I’m like, I’m glad I did that. Like, oh, every time, you would think if reward learning was the only thing at work, that I would run to exercise. But obviously there’s more to it than that. And I think knowing this thing about exercise and how beneficial it is to our brain, like immediately for me, has been one of the keys to getting very regular at doing it, because I’m not doing it for a future reward. Although it’s great that I will get a future reward, it’s great that my chances of cardiovascular disease are lower. I’m doing it because I know that in an hour, when I’m done, I’m going to feel better than I feel now. And that for me actually helps me often get over that inbuilt laziness is because I’m not trying to connect the dots on something way out in the future, which we’re not very good at.

00:49:28 – Anders Hansen
Exactly. We are mammals for here and now. If we learn that if we exercise, the role of cardiovascular disease, two or three or four decades in the future is bumped down by 20 percentage point or something. We say, okay, that’s interesting. Will we change behavior because of that? Absolutely not. We don’t change behaviors for those things. And that’s why the effects on the brain of exercise are so important, because they are here and now. You will become more creative now if you exercise, Your memory will be boosted now if you exercise.

00:49:58 – Eric Zimmer
So I’d like to wrap up here with kind of where you wrap up, where you talk about the happiness trap. You say that we expect an unrealistic state. Right. And we’ve, we’ve evolved to map every experience against our expectations. There’s an old phrase out there that I’ve heard, something like, happiness is expectations divided by reality or something. Talk to me about how do we have realistic expectations around how happy we might be? How do we readjust these? As soon as you hear lower expectations, people think, well, that’s not good. So give me some framework on this.

00:50:38 – Anders Hansen
Yes, by advertising it meant and social media, we are led to believe that we should feel good all the time. And we are not built that way. And I always say to my patients that you are comparing your inner self to everyone’s exterior self and you don’t know what they are feeling. And they are certainly not feeling so well that they, they show often on social media. So I think we are putting a goal that is very, very difficult to achieve. And then we go around feeling broken all the time. And there’s actually been studies that shows that the more money is poured into advertisement in a country, the less satisfied its inhabitants are. Two years later, it’s very difficult to do such studies. There are many caveats to this, but maybe it gives you that the modern view of happiness that is given to us is causing us to be less happy because we’re comparing ourselves to something that isn’t possible. As I said, the best study on happiness was done at Harvard by Robert Waldinger. And I visited him a couple of months ago. And he is, I think, the sixth or seventh director of this study, which started in the 30s and there was Harvard students and there was people from Boston area and they were recruited in the 1930s, so it’s 90 years ago. And they did all number of medical tests and interviews and so on. And when they got children, the children got tested and did interviews and they had grandchildren. And now it’s, I think, the third or fourth generation. So there have been tons of data compiled. And the result is that what makes people happy long term is relationships close relationships, not superficial ones. And maybe you don’t need science to understand that. Maybe that is obvious. But I think these things exercise, sleep and meeting people in real life, you know, they are so obvious that we tend to forget them. And that’s why we need to learn more about the brain. Because when you understand what they do to the organ in which your experience of existence is being created, well, then you will take them more seriously. When you understand that you are lazy, not because you’re broken, because that’s how we build. You will sort of build your way around that Achilles heel. When you understand that social media presents us a picture that is toxic to us in the sense that we are comparing ourselves to something that is unrealistic, well, perhaps you will not expose yourself so much to that. Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So the more we learn about our biology, I think the freer we become from our biology, the better we could work around these Achilles heels.

00:53:10 – Eric Zimmer
Well, wonderful. I think that’s a great place to wrap up. I really enjoyed your book and as I mentioned, it’s being released in the States. Several the year books have come out. So Americans, good news, more of his books will be available. They’ve only been available in European countries, largely up till now. So Anders, thanks so much for coming on.

00:53:31 – Anders Hansen
My pleasure. I hope you find your wallet.

00:53:34 – Eric Zimmer
I think that’s a lost cause, but I appreciate the optimism.