for the nice conversations with great minds i'm joined by dr sonja she's a professor of psychology at the university of california riverside seeder a.b. from harvard university and her ph d. in social personality psychology from stanford university her work in research on happiness has been honored with the john templeton foundation grant science of generosity grant templeton positive psychology prize and a million dollar grant from the national institute of mental health she's also the author of the critically acclaimed book the myths of happiness dr little mercy joins us now from our los angeles studio a little risky walk of the program. it's

a pleasure to be here thank you thank you for joining us let's start out with just the simple stuff what is your definition of happiness well i use the definition that researchers use which is that happiness essentially has two components so the first component is the experience of positive emotions joy serenity curiosity affection and the second component is the feeling of you feel the feeling that your life is going well that you're progressing towards your life's goal so you really need both of those components to be a truly happy person so where it seems like one is is positional kind of static and the other is an arc it's a sense of an arc that's moving in the right direction yeah i mean you could say that way one is i think of it as one is really emotional right it's experiencing emotions which does vary over time and the other is a more of a kind of a cognitive judgment like judgment is your that your life is going well and. what are the you list a number of in fact each chapter of your book is dealing with one of the common

myths of happiness let's go through a few of those what is it what it what do you think it is is probably the most pervasive myth about happiness in american society well you know i like to think of the myths of happiness as kind of in two different categories sort of the two primary mets and the first one is really the idea that you know i'm not happy now but i'll be happy when you know x. y. and z. happen to me when i when i want to get married you know when i get that promotion i've always wanted when i want to have money when i have more money and so and so then that can be kind of divided up into smaller myths and the problem with those beliefs or fallacies is that you know they are true i mean those things do make us happy but they don't make us happy for as long or as intensely as we think they will. lower in the hierarchy of human needs back in the seventy's talked about how there's these you know basic human needs you homeostasis and and the social

needs and and. and then when as you go well as you go up this pyramid you go towards he didn't describe this is happiness of the top he described as self actualization what is self actualization or that. or what are your thoughts on this notion of saw actualization compared with your description of happiness. they're a great question that's the first time anyone's asked me that question. well you know self actualization. is a different construct from happiness not much research has been done on it empirically it's kind of like when you've when you're truly flourishing you know you're at the top of the pyramid of needs you know you sort of have your thriving your flourishing the very way it's very much related to happiness because happier people are more likely i guess i would say i would speculate are more likely to get to the top of that pyramid and i talk about the human needs quite a bit in the midst of happiness because when i talk about is that what happens is

that once we achieve one thing we're not happy you know we want we're not content we want we want the next thing and that's fine that's a good thing you know that's how we progress as we make we make progress. but the problem with that is that we're never quite content you know we're always want the next thing so that's very relevant to that pyramid of needs in your book in the last chapter you talked about. you were surprised by your third pregnancy or your third child as i recall and. you know that that's one of those life things happen and it's you know there's that old cliche of it's not what happens to us it's how we react to what happened what happens to us that determines our quality of life. is that of an expression of that i mean is that is that something that's reducible to that simple notion you know absolutely i think one of the biggest themes of my book is this sort of sadia that is how we frame how we construe how we perceive ourselves in the world and other people around us that perhaps matters

more than what actually happens to us and and so and i talk a lot about attention kind of what do we think what do we direct our attention to you know william james the philosopher has this great quote he says my experience is. i think it's a really amazing insight it basically says that that what we choose to focus on what we do happiness or is happiness the consequence of being more resilient right right

and it clearly is both you know the causal direction probably goes both ways but resilience is very much related to happiness i talk about resilience alive the second kind of myth of happiness that i talk about this idea that you know my god if certain really bad things happen to me i'm going to be forever unhappy if i if i get a divorce if i don't find a life partner if i don't make as much money as i want to make if i get sick but you know people are remarkably resilient and happier people are more resilient but we can learn to be more we can learn coping skills we can learn to be more resilient in fact what i was just talking about learning to read to direct your attention on the things in life that really matter on the things that are sort of more positive the things that you're grateful for is one of the main strategies that resilient people use and your suggestion is learnable. yes a yes it is learnable but it's hard i mean i think there's also probably kind of a trait component certain people we all serve people do seem to be more resilient

than others but we can learn some of these coping strategies you know there was there was a study back and i think it's launched an all study done through the from the days to the seventy's on children and quiet children of great poverty who were severely abused and what they found was rather than the normal you know kind of belsher distribution of resilience moderate resilience and absolute lack of resilience. v there were there were actually more of these children who were highly resilient and more of the more highly not resilient highly fragile and the kind of middle ground vanished to what extent does our childhood affect our adulthood and how can we respond to that in ways that make us more resilient if our childhood left us less resilient wow it's a big question you know clearly our childhood does affect our adulthood you know in my book i talk a lot about kind of how we think about the past. do we have regrets about the past

or we kind of dwell in ruminate about it and i think people who are resilient kind of they get past it you know some of them feel that they have grown as a result of their maybe past adverse or traumatic experiences so maybe you you've had a bad childhood but you were able to overcome it and you were able to find out sort of who your true friends are and what really matters and so they have kind of. like a growth story i mean there's research on redemption they have sort of redemption story that they tell themselves they were redeemed but you know some people kind of dwell in ruminate and they just can't get out of that they get kind of stuck in the past which is not a productive strategy so so a lot of i think. the success of the adult of adults and being resilient is sort of how you think about your past and i have a whole chapter about regrets you know ninety percent of us have regrets and so how do we deal with the regrets to be kind of dwell on them do we let them interfere with our sort of life or do we kind of come to terms with them there's research

that shows that people who are able to kind of confront and accept and kind of integrate their regrets into their identities actually become happier and more complex and even more mature as individuals so that's a matter of. essentially regulating the stories that you tell yourself about yourself like in the quiet study the kids who told themselves that they were victims were more likely to be fragile the child. told themselves that you know stuff happens and i grew out of that i rose above it we're more likely to be resilient and there's been this debate for forty years about whether the stories evolve to produce the resilience of the resilience came out of the stories how how how does that work what's your suggestion to people who may feel like they're a little fragile how do they become more resilient in terms of getting control of their own stories. well you know i actually was just hearing about some new research about the stories that we tell ourselves the sort of shows that you can at we can actually kind of manipulate those stories that we can we can try and

construct war kind of redemptive stories about our life and more kind of growth stories like i have grown as opposed to you know this is a bad experience that sort of you know changed me for the worse forever. and so there is sort of research that shows that we can we have do we can have some control over over the stories that we tell ourselves i should say this this research really is that it's infancy. but i think it's really fascinating and i think we all tell stories about ourselves and about other people they're really really critical to our wellbeing and to our health as well i'm curious what your story what caused you to want to investigate happiness that's a it's a good question actually you know i went to as you mentioned i went to stanford university for my ph d. and the very first day of grad school i met with my advisor who is his name is lee ross and he's one of the world's experts on conflict in the so not very relevant to

happiness but our first meeting we just started and how it happened we just started talking about what is happiness and why are some people happier than others and at that time only one researcher in psychology ed diener was doing research on happiness and it was sort of considered this very fuzzy kind of unscientific field in fact diener didn't even use the word happiness he called it subjective well being it just sort of sounded more scientific and so that's kind of a start it was it was serendip. but you know happiness is really the holy grail i mean most people in the world say they want to be happy most people are interested in happiness and so i'm just been submitted a great field to be in for these for all these years what we what has been your methodology. sure sure well you know first of all we have to measure happiness and there's no point there's no thermometer of happiness so we have to we just ask people whether they're happy and how satisfied they are with their lives and how frequently they experience positive and negative emotions but mostly what i do are called happiness interventions so these are basically experimental studies that are

done over time kind of like clinical trials but instead of testing a new treatment or a new drug we're testing happiness strategies so we might ask people for example do three or four or five or six acts of kindness this week and then we ask them to do the same thing next week in the week after and we show that people get happier when they do acts of kindness or we ask people to write gratitude letters say once a week over a period of six or eight or ten weeks and then we track their happiness over time so we really do what are we i said what are called positive or happiness interventions i had a cab driver last night i said how are you doing and he said i'm great my my for every day starts with thank you and i thought what a great strategy. gratitude is so powerful so much research that shows that people who are more grateful are happier healthier less materialistic and more of us will be back with more of tonight's conversations with great minds with doctors. coming

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for the mag conversations of great minds of dr sonia looper mirsky she's a professor of psychology at the university of california riverside a.b. from harvard university or ph d. in social personality psychology from stanford university and is the author of the critically acclaimed book the myths of happiness let's get back to it you mentioned just as we were about to hit the break there at the last in the last segment how you were suggesting that people write gratitude letters or thanks letters of knowledge thinks things like that i remember enough to remember when the boy scout . i don't mandate i guess it was was that you had to do a good deed every day and i remember finding this particularly difficult that the

definition of a good deed and i think this change probably in the sixty's or seventy's but i was you know boy scout the late fifty's early sixty's was that is something that you do the benefits another person and they never know that you did it. i'm curious your thoughts on how you know what we might have lost by just losing that boy scout and presumably girl scout you know ancient wisdom it seemed to me. well i hope that we haven't lost it i mean there's still a value that we should be kind and generous to others and so as i mentioned before i've done lots of studies showing that people who do acts of kindness become happier and in fact i just finished a study in the vancouver middle schools with fourth fifth and sixth grade children and what's amazing is we found that kids who did acts of kindness every week for i believe for six weeks not only did they get happier but they became more popular with their peers with their classmates even though the acts of kindness were mostly

done at home i. believe somehow it rubbed off on them now i think you know doing anonymous acts of kindness is great it makes you feel like a good person but there's also benefits to doing acts of kindness that are not anonymous because you have great social benefits as well so yeah lots and lots of research shows that these kind of good deeds are really important to do and i hope we haven't lost that value yeah i agree the conventional wisdom in the self-help literature all the way back to deal current use that it takes three weeks to change a habit twenty one if you follow that there is a period of time during which people practice some of the things that you're recommending in your book and after which they become part of you and if you stop before that point it just kind of you just kind of bounce back to where you were and yeah that's a great question and you know i haven't i'm not you know there's researchers who study habits and i actually i read in one place that is that it took i think eleven weeks so i guess different studies find different findings i really think that it

depends on the person and so you have to kind of find out what that critical time period for you to change a habit we have not i guess we have not done enough studies or enough long term studies to really identify kind of that magic number how long does it take but clearly practice over time is really important in fact one of the themes of my research is that you really have to put the work in it you know and to change a habit as we all know is really hard it takes a lot of work energy maybe every day every week for the rest of your life you want to work and maintain that habit dr marty sullivan seligman did some amazing research back in the eighty's some learned helplessness that then led him into a learned happiness in the ninety's and things like this to what extent is in your research is there a flip side to this where you know people people can get into bad habits into self destructive habits into creating. fragility you're losing happiness habits and

those can spiral out of control and when when that happens what should they do. yeah you know i you know it's what i don't study the bad habits i mean i don't manipulate you know it would be unethical for me to kind of get people to try it out you know he was doing about it. you know and that in that state it was an amazing some amazing studies he did those studies could probably could not be done today you know ethical reasons. but yeah but clearly there is a flip side you know you can learn you know in effect you know negative strategies just as well just as easily perhaps as as positive strategies so we have to really watch ourselves you know one one one approach that i take for it when i teach classes on happiness is a ask my students to keep track of what they do kind of keep it diary in a sense and then you can sort of catch yourself like when are you most unhappy during the day you know what are you doing and then try to do less of that one of

the things that surprised me the most as a parent i have three adult children now was. i had always thought the temperament was kind of shorthand for personality of the moment but i've seen kids grow up and seen temperament that seem that was there virtually at birth and sometimes even you know kicking a lot in the womb carry all the way into the into their thirty's to what extent to temper you know how do you define temperament and to what extent does that influence happiness and to what extent do we have control over our own temperament . yeah it's a quite amazing so my first book called the how of happiness actually talks a lot about this so i think of even think of temperament it's essentially as personality and you know just speaking of happiness there's about there's a strong genetic component to happiness you know you know when you have more than.

one kid you notice some of them are just happier than others and some of the moment than others and some of them are more you know open to different kinds of experience than others so there's there's a genetic component to personality and to happiness. and that's a fact now that doesn't mean that we're doomed to be unhappy if our kind of our set point for happiness is lower for doom you know i used to be very very shy i think my that's my kind of genetic contribution but i was with a lot of willpower over the course of many years i became more more and more extroverted i think that's fairly unusual people tend to kind of stay shy throughout their life or stay happy or unhappy but again there's a there's a part of our personality or part of our temperament that we can change through kind of force of will through a lot of work a lot of practice kind of like if you're set point for weight is higher than you like you're not doomed to be a fat person you can lose weight become fit but it just takes a lot more work than if you're kind of

a naturally skinny person so so those of us who are kind of unlucky to have a negative temperament or temperament that we don't like or other people don't like we just have to put more work into changing it but it's still possible that's that's great news i'm curious what you know your research has been done entirely in the united states. that's not true it's not ok then. what have you learned about the impact or the intersection of culture and happiness and well you may find this surprising but we've actually done a quite a few studies especially recently in south korea in japan and most recently in spain and we're not finding major cultural differences i mean we know they're there i mean there are obviously cultural differences so so there's a much more emphasis on happiness for example in the united states we did do one study actually with in the united states with asian americans so these are individuals who are born in asian countries and immigrated here. and we found that

asian americans didn't kind of didn't benefit from our happiness interventions like writing gratitude letters or trying to be more optimistic as much as the european american so maybe there was kind of less cultural support for that so we did find that cultural differences difference but when we've done our studies in south korea and japan spain we have not actually found really many if any differences i mean when we just had a study in spain we had people do acts of kindness in the workplace and it had incredible benefits sort of raise the morale of the entire office same thing in south korea and japan so perhaps you know i think the pursuit of happiness is universal and that the strategies that we study being kind to others being more positive being more grateful are fairly universal as well japanese culture it's been some years and so i've seen the literature of this and correct me if i'm wrong but my understanding is that japanese culture is more alike most of vision is

cultures in that one of the greatest cultural negatives is shame whereas in most european cultures there is cultural negativism embarrassment might that have something to do with. well you know in a little way i haven't studied really shame and embarrassment in my research but we did just find actually we have a finding from from south korea ok not japan but another asian culture where we found that expressing gratitude was a little bit more kind of conflicting or mixed for the south koreans and i think it's i would call it shame but i think there's a feeling of kind of indebtedness others are geisha i mean the genesis of it is an obligation based culture it's right in some asian cultures expressing gratitude can have some kind of have done it costs so we have to be careful and so we have we did find that so maybe that has something to do with what you're talking about well since you brought it up you want to describe adamic at a patient. sure he's done

a kind of titian really important construct concept that i talk a lot about in the midst of happiness and so i have cases basically the phenomenon that human beings are remarkably good at getting used to changes in our lives so you know when we get married we have this boost of happiness on average that boosts lasts for two years for the average person when we when we get more money you know get a salary raise that makes us happy but then we just you know start wanting more so so out of taishan is really important to consider because a lot of people think like oh you know my job isn't what it used to be you know i'm not as excited about it as i used to be or my marriage isn't what it used to be they think that there might be something wrong with their job or something wrong with their marriage when really they're just experiencing a very human kind of ordinary process of head on a kind of titian this is kind of the. conventional story of when the honeymoon is over. right that's right you know the honeymoon is over and that happens for almost

everyone and so again my it what i say in my book is that it doesn't mean there's something wrong with you you know because some people might make poor decisions they might jettison when the honeymoon is over they might think oh gee you know you know because in the media in movies in law in literature and poetry there is this ideal of romantic passionate love and when that doesn't last for us forever we think oh i got a you know maybe there's something wrong with my partner i got to get a new partner so i think that's a just a really important message i'm curious your thoughts on mindfulness on being present it seems that so many people who are caught in unhappiness are either of. them from the past or fear of the future and. have you found that teaching people to bring themselves to the present moment and let go of that past or future can help happiness absolutely i think mindful of the so important very relevant to what i was talking about before about the importance of attention kind of what we can control what we direct our attention to in

a sense of mindfulness is trying to do that and you know when thoughts kind of negative thoughts come into your mind you kind of let them go. and there's lots and lots of research on mindfulness meditation different mindfulness techniques people who use mindfulness techniques become happier they become healthier there's all kinds of other relationships improve i haven't specifically stated mindfulness myself but i also have written about kind of living in the present moment so the importance of kind of as you said you know not focusing too much on the past or the future now of course there are times when we need to focus on the past or the future. but but but focus to savoring the moment makes people happy as well dr sonja lubomir scheme thank you so much for being with us think it's been a pleasure to talk to you and for writing this group thank you to see this in other conversations with great minds. our web site of conversations and great finds dot com. and that's the way it is tonight friday january eleventh two thousand and

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