final word on how to find it happiness is a must we need to exercise it. we all have a heritable baseline we can move up from. the coming economic crisis everybody was a lot poorer and a lot of people were surprised to find national happiness level didn't go down very much because it seemed to have to be everybody we're all in this together plus. easy way to get the brain trying to connect to others all next on larry king. in the syrian setting the beautiful boat house in the middle of central park in the

heart of new york city what a perfect place to do larry king now today to discuss happiness our guests. then why use stern school of business. hypothesis in which he explores different ideas about to happen is exposing them to scientific research paul zak is a neuro economist and the founding director of the center for neuro economic studies at tramline graduate university and he studies the role of hormone toes and and how it would have made us what is the hypothesis. this is the title of the publishers made up for my book as i was writing it and i don't know what that is by the time i finished the book i realized actually there are three. obvious one is we get happy when we get what we want but everyone knows that's not true you succeed and then almost right away you're on to what's in.

thing the deeper one which you find buddhist stoics all over the ancient world is happiness comes from within it does not sound wise and to some extent it is you're not going to become happy by making the world conform to your wishes so work on yourself be more accepting and that's there's a lot of truth to that. by the end of the book is that the best way to say it is that happiness comes from between from getting the right relationship between yourself and others yourself and your work and yourself and something larger than yourself and that's why you know our work is really headed that way that relationships are the key is even though guys episodes are you can't have a happy morning in a bed afternoon can't you have see a great movie and you're happy when you come out and the meal is bad and you're not happy right so this is super cute response we're talking this long term what really drives a pleasure what gives me happiness in my life in the sense of long term sometimes you're going to get very much both things are interesting some people have a chronically high level they're just they start here and then they move up and

down from here others start low and just move up and down a little bit but does it might relate to might i be happy if i may go out of money you'd be happy if you just had a nice day driving the bus it's definitely true that we respond to different things but the key thing that is above all i have found is that is that it it really comes down to relationships relatedness being connected so money itself doesn't get you happiness unless you use it in ways that improve your relationships but money can also deflect unhappiness you certainly can't and has no soap on being poor. stressed somebody simply because the biological factors people will be happy in particular to respond to towson as you mentioned will call me a publish the happiness report and apparently america is ranked eleventh in the world of the happiness index i love those that do that the happiest country in the world is denmark and we are number eleven. other how they do that well there's

a model where you talk to a guy in des moines well i know you talk to a thousand guys in des moines a thousand women in des moines another so these are mostly based on self report and it turns out that while people can't see a lot of things about them how happy you are is actually something that people do know and these studies cross national studies of happiness they tend to find that the nordic countries tend to be the happiest but basically the wealthy western nations including the u.s. tend to be the happy as well pretty much bunched up at the top of eleven doesn't mean we're way behind we're sort of bunched up at the top socialist countries to be happier if they're taking care of your needs that's right and you see these countries also very high levels of interpersonal trust. trust countries and also a country that's growing in terms of prosperity so we have to start. moving up somehow and then mark you do see this consistent growth in incomes not dramatic but consistent in a very tight community where we really know each other. names right so how can you

not be happy with all your brothers and cousins around but outside of the couldn't countries you go to war a lot make it's feeble and that tends to boost happiness quite a lot. if you're being bombed that's different but things that unify things that bring people together things that foster tight relatedness and trust tend to boost happiness one of the early studies done by social scientists but in the nineteenth century suicide found that when countries go to war the suicide rate plummets. basically anything that brings you together and so you couldn't be happy post nine eleven that's how this actually spike in trust among americans remember this larry this sign of the cubs game we love new york what did you ever see that so the sense that we need to come together as a community and i think that's really where happiness comes from so aristotle said it was really the key to happiness he said there were better than communities there's communities in our relation to them that make us happy so when we. talk

about is happy is a feeling on nine eleven and twelve we weren't feeling oh i'm so overjoyed but that whole period for many of us was a really rich time of life not one that we look back on and feel joy but in many ways it did in which our lives about events first up we have an economic crisis can you be happy not very much so. much like more likely be depressed and happiness is a must we need to exercise it so we can talk later about specific things people can do. but again when you're paying the mortgage or losing your house and i know you're not going to be happy so we're going to try to counter the one one pointing to bring in here is that we don't really notice the absolute levels of things which we notice how we're doing relative to others and how we're doing relative to ourselves in the past when the economic crisis hit and everybody was a lot poorer and a lot of people were out of work the surprising finding was that the national happiness level didn't go down very much because it seemed to be having to everybody we're all in this together so envy leads to unhappiness and. that's

right and so we need to do is work on building those relationships so i envy you i might say what are you doing what makes you so happy how can we become better friends so should we reveal the big secret that we actually had before the talk so . everybody because we saw the touch lisa's oxytocin and i can only give you that gift i can make my brain release that i can give it to you so this connection is very important happiness and your book is called them are all molecules a source of love and prosperity and you are a neuroeconomics studies right what is right here all at the moment so we measure brain activity while people make decisions or some of his visions of money just a way to see what people value but we do decisions in which you can share money with a stranger and ask why would you ever do that if you share money with a stranger i would never return it to you as we showed that someone is trusted tangibly with money their brains release oxytocin and it motivates them to reciprocate so this is the biological basis with the golden rule which exists in every culture on the planet we found. very recently married that in fact the

individuals released the most oxytocin when there are happier or more satisfied their lives why better romantic relationships and friends closer to their family members and they're even nicer strangers are sure the money task in a capitalist society isn't money because that was the number one ingredient in the gordon days gordon gekko happy. well gordon gekko if his motto is greed is good and if he has a lot of money but relationships then no he would not be people win the lottery ted as it tends not to make them happier for one thing it ruins the relationship suddenly everyone around you things the only piece of it but part of it gotta make them happy among earned success makes people happy so if you work hard and people respect you for it so you work hard people esteem you you feel you're moving up and it doesn't damage your relationships people actually admire you for it that does make you happy so rich people are happier on average but if you make your money by winning the lottery you know so that's called meaning so it's really whether your

life has meaning you have a purpose you want to do something important for the world if you do you're going to be happy and if you do that and have strong person relationships you're going to made but the one thing hard to pin down is you could be. the dean of wall school at harvard and be unhappy or you could be a bus driver on addison avenue and be have a. relative of not just back from the jungles of your d.n.a. you were actually did a study taking blood from these images peoples no electricity no running water no bathrooms very primitive sort of spend a week there and i found these and there's to be extraordinarily happy i got there larry nothing to do i have to wait for the equipment or the post touching me and they're looking in my eyes i felt so close to my village my village right i've adopted them and they've adopted me because they have the time to build social relationships people happy in phoenix before there was a. condition when they didn't know there was

a condition so the one of the big so there are two big surprises in happiness research that really launched the field the first is that your average level of happiness is really heritable so the bus driver who's happier than the millionaire that's most likely because his genes made his brain his brain is very approach very relational oriented so your inherited personality traits are actually a bigger part of explanation than anything happens in your life the second amazing finding was that when people began studying had been is the one nine hundred eighty s. and ninety's they found that things like live in cow beautiful sunny california versus snowy buffalo to make any difference money made less difference than they thought even being healthy vs sick doesn't make very much difference if it's a chronic thing because we adapt to things we adapt to discomforts shows if usage so as fully steals something. get away with it. let's put the question the seven deadly sins forget the afterlife the seven deadly sins deadly

because they separate us from others and say it's all about me i'm stealing i'm taking from others i'm most important i'm selfish i'm lazy if i do to others what i get return relief from them or sorry larry you're great and you're great to be around i love being around your john so then giving is selfish giving his selfish so if you're a selfish person like you win the lottery you need to give it away and so look at the gates one nine hundred eighty s. he was being pursued by the federal government now he's a wonderful human being a philanthropist and warren buffett and the. all giving should be anonymous and that's a recipe for much much lower levels of giving. one of the great things about philanthropy is that you get esteem from others people respect you i study morality i study moral psychology my view is we're not deeply neatly takes that we just want to make the world a better place we do want to help people but that's in part because we. evolved to

be cooperative we want to get the credit for it we want people to like us and trust us before getting caught. was bernie made of happy people with thanking him bernie and they'd be a fortune thank you please let me ever invest with you but then what did you do he confessed to his son he was. a year before that he wanted to be if you really happy when he had a wonderful meal but he wasn't satisfied he was and that is definitely true even if need be believe. he was a human being with a shred of conscience then he must have actually been i would guess he was anxious and thinking this is god on ravel some day and feel very good i don't know that he feels that i don't know that he's a normal human being with a conscience the exceptions are psychopaths who really don't have a conscience and they just don't care so we find there are still some dysfunction these individuals coming from under survival mode they will still only will take think advantage of i don't care because their brains are not wired for this my bad with is terrific jonathan hide in paul's. we'll find out if a pill can make you happy don't go away.

hunting down as terrorists they hide in the woods and prepare to become suicide bombers only their mothers still believe these young men can be saved. oh you've gotten so thin. the mothers won't sleep at night they'll follow the sons into the woods find them and return them to a peaceful life they killed almost everybody. had been able to take him away from them maybe that was by chance. how does it feel to be a terrorist mother. if you have even the slightest chance come home. my son takes terrorist on o.t. .

that was a new alert animation scripts scare me a little bit. there is breaking news tonight and we are continuing to follow the breaking news the. alexander family cry tears of joy and a great things rather that there has to be adequate rigor and a court of law on the ground allowed there's a story made for movies playing out in real life. he's searching for that magic ingredient being at the we're at the boathouse in central park with john of the hyped and paul zak both best selling authors both first in the field and a film like yeah baby. well prozac and the antidepressants stream the well i've tried to myself i've seen marriages saved by people who took them but then there's

this puzzling fact that the research findings do show some effect but often not much and often not much more than placebo i think what research is showing is that these drugs really do relieve anxiety they're quite effective at that so if if you tend to be anxious and worrying you're kidding yourself and punishing yourself a lot these drugs will shut that off so is the absence of anxiety happiness again if you think of happiness as a feeling then yes it's if you're anxious you're much less likely to be happy especially if you feel that there's some sort of threat if you just sort of anxious like there's the wonderful thing that my wedding is coming off that kind of anxiety doesn't make you unhappy but if you feel threatened then yes that certainly causes pain makes you happy you can give you an acute reward sensation sure but. you'll pay for it why not use it because you burn out this reward system of the brain that makes you feel happy when you see your daughter supplier makes you feel happy when you know accomplish something you want to do it works. infusing oxytocin into

individuals and we can get them to be more generous more compassionate more caring for others give more money to charity and they're actually happiness doesn't change but they leave the lab with less money so it's interesting that they're reaching out more but they really don't have a strange happiness delivering of good news when you expect an idea that would be the two happiest words to ever hear are it's but nine it's. not true that you are your you are you're told it's we're not doing a word that you're not sick we should just seems there's a bunch of interesting psychological states here and one of them that isn't mentioned enough is relief because a lot of what happens is we're focused on something we're focused on something we get the good news release we don't jump up and down for joy and so one of the most interesting findings to me as i was studying. happiness is a distinction between the pleasures as you're making progress towards a goal and the pleasure when you reach the goal and the pleasure when you reach

a goal is very short lived it actually is better described as relief you feel good . now i can relax and by the next day usually there's not much residue the pleasure of making progress towards your goals that can go on for years this is a type person is more inclined to be on them they are actually there's a never satisfied that's right they're never going to be socially subordinated they're anxious so i think one of the big breakthroughs in. is that you can actually train your brain to really connect better to people so they're easy exercise you can do it discuss them. they tell you actually how you can be a good person you've done this to myself you didn't do things exercise to make it so. martin seligman has a book authentic happiness and is a website to do a lot of research there. you simply ask people the end of each day to make a list of three things that went well that day and why and what it seems to do is the first night it's not much in effect but from then on during the day you get

your think. you know so and so just help me we got this thing done together let me remember that night and you notice all the ways that people help you all the little pleasures and advantages you have in life it makes you more when you stop taking things for granted and it's as effective as prozac in raising people's mood. such things as messages people who want to be happy. there are unfortunately and so these individuals are kind of pathological. where it's more than that they serve endure the pain and i think you know your response is. so really you know relationships and having a sense of purpose or meaning i think it also the nurse science says that this is being driven by. and so you know the greeks. but the sort of sense of. the. john i love you i really care about you and i mean that we notice that for many years i would have almost anything he asked me to do to help him and i'm really concerned about him being

a happy person just saying that to the people around you is enough to start stimulating this kind of response a little bit of a clip oh oh how nice what about living in a world where most things are happy for example most headlines are bad. bad headline can secured polio cured once in a while. but most headlines are negative but not a reason is that which is local it doesn't really matter to us what's going on in the world what matters it's what's going on very very locally so for example when you plot how happy republicans and democrats are and you see how it changes republicans a little bit happier on average than democrats and when the white house changes hands and your party loses on average no change people don't get less happy they say they will this is what's called forecasting predicting your own happiness people say you know if that guy wins i'm moving to canada oh i'll be miserable for four years but it's not true you don't you know how the election day but a couple days later you're back to so i have been is is in your both of your

opinions attainable. we have to make ourselves happier we all have a set point we all have a heritable baseline we can move up from that and live permanently higher but it doesn't mean that a person is born somewhat depressive and anxious can become an extremely happy person for the rest of their lives. they're the bends in trying to overcome all right you lose a child so can you ever be happy so for example we've studied sexually abused women reproduce actually abused women and we found about half of them this system for connection oxytocin shuts down so the abuse is so. egregious that you just can't get beyond it and they have very poor lives apart one lady in our sample actually committed suicide. the other half actually were resilient and so that resilience could be a sense of you know what i would overcome this i'm going to start a. to focus on women's issues i want to do other things that give my life meeting does a wonderful term called post-traumatic growth and i. know that's right but it's just

as just terrible things can change your brain and permanently make you more more anxious it can damage you but if you cope with it well you discover new skills new abilities new strengths you had and also tragedy health crises these tend to bring people to your aid is to strengthen relationships many people grow from tragedy does meditation help so we studied that from nurse scientific perspective people have never meditated before and taught them two different kinds of meditation stanford relaxation mindfulness meditation and other called metta meditation which translates to loving kindness where you both focus on your breathing but you begin to think of other people close to you how you care about them and then people further and further away. and maybe someone who is difficult in your life we found that individuals who practice mental meditation had lower brain activity in areas associated things like anxiety they were more altruistic after six weeks of training and they were happier so it gives really about other people what happens

when you meditate. what happens when you meditate. and try to think of nothing i cannot think of well it's a skill you have to practice it it's what i learned we have yes absolutely in that we have a running soundtrack in our in our minds one of my favorite psychological lines comes from homer simpson who once said shut up brain or i'll stab you with a q-tip. meditation is an alternative to your brain with a q-tip lot of people ruminate especially problem for women more than men but. all of us have this problem we can't let go of something meditation makes it really easy to even a negative thought of critical thought you just sort of learn to let it go drifting away buddhism is it we've actually found that praying. to meditate in churches or going to churches and take. in fact people. release oxytocin they feel closer to motive than i did i meditate so i know it's a learned process simple lesson so meditation sounds like something very

complicated i used close silence so we're going to group one giant mind that's going to get one hundred million people around the world to engage in twenty minutes of silence anyone can do it what is it doing for me so part is reducing the sensory input that you're getting this is why the eyes close and forward in the silence is important because living you kind of get back this homeostatic state where your your heart rate will reduce or you don't have the stress of digest your food better you'll feel calmer i think of eating a meal in italy which you've done many times right through five courses over the course of three or four hours it's very calm you eat slowly and you feel comfortably for a lot you're having a conversation versus the american might just as you can get done so meditation is kind of you tell you in dining experience thing down to happen people deal with anger. anger is actually in a technical sense a positive emotion in that you look at the brain some emotions are about approach others about withdrawal sadness fear anxieties about withdrawal. anger does not

make you less happy now if it damages relationships it forces you to ruminate then it can but some interesting research on political partisans shows that extreme liberals and conservatives were generally more angry are happier than people in middle anger can motivate you to act it can bind you to other people to address an injustice happy people and the bad news that. they change and they do that by since you're looking at the long run view so something terrible happened to me what do i do about it so for example and my wife was diagnosed with cancer three years ago and actually get a shell shock it really brought her family together ok what do we do to help her get healthy and so it's very important to use these emotions to look at the long run and actually this improve our relationship our families much closer. all religious. yes they are that's one of those things and you know it turns out most of the effect is the community are so religious so prayer just how often you pray

or whether you believe in god that is what matters is do you go to church regularly do you participate in religious community regularly it's the fellowship is the community that seems to be the main active ingredient so atheists would tend to be on that we know it's funny there are atheist communities which i've spoken to and they have one in boston recently they meet on sundays they meet in the hall. it's like a vision of what is it wanted to be when i was staying or you need is love the beatles are talking about hugging and so i recommend larry the day very simple thing people can do to increase our stores release and those around them because once an hour walk while you're out of the house it's great you have today you see a way to get the brain trained to connect to others when there's no suggestion of time a simple thing to try to go to dinner. very timely to double the tip to give the server to be generous and then leave before he or she sees it and just train yourself that you know what i can just reach out to make someone's day happy or why

do i always feel better when i give something over search on helping shows that. people who give help get more of a psychological benefit than people who receive help and if you need help the person who helps you on average is going to get more of a boost and then you look for receiving the help again it's about connection human beings have always lived in these really intense tight communities sometimes suffocating so beginning of the modern era couple hundred years ago we can begin to break out the twentieth century even more now most of us live alone many people live alone we where we're sort of deficient we sort of need more connection i'm fortunate to have. three or four great friends this is that a plus in a very much so so these rituals relationships these individuals are going to always call on any time they have shared memories absolutely spent a lot of time with them. really chair about unite in an important way there can be painful to it when you're suffering you're going to suffer because you really care about these people at the same time the. suffering is not nearly as and that's true

it's not as bad so you're there for each other was aging of both. needs to be happy when you're teaching well the research me is that the happiest people are people the sixty's and seventy's everybody assumes that young people should be happy because they're so healthy and attractive but they're actually the least people teenagers really caught up in all sorts of social drama anxiety and shame so happiness doesn't change a lot with age but it actually goes up in the sixty's and seventy's now by the eighty's it begins to go down the health problems get more severe and you lose relationships you lose friends are always happy when we see that smiling face right if one person smiles the part of in the brain of another person that would cause miling is actually activated and here's a little brain research you can actually make your brain happier by forcing yourself to smile so next time you're an uncontrolled situation the target an airplane remember put a smile on in your brain thinks that you're happy and you reduce your physiology to swami tell me that i wake up and smile for smile you didn't even know that they

received your gift and so gratitude very important thank you guys this was terrific and i think you're going to do more whether you want to do this three times a year happiness are subject jonathan hyde and paul zak from beautiful boathouse in central park and larry king join us on twitter at kings things as for another edition of larry king show.

crosstalk rules in effect that means you can jump in anytime you want. i know c.n.n. the m s n b c news have taken some not slightly but the fact is i admire their commitment to cover all sides of the story just in case one of them happens to be accurate oh yeah that was funny but it's closer to the truth and might think. it's because when full attention and the mainstream media works side by side the joke is actually on we're going to be coming back. at our teen years we have

a different approach to the good because the news of the world just is not this funny i'm not laughing dammit i'm not ok. if. you guys stick to the jokes i will handle the stuff that i've got to. well you know i beg you please but your father and your brother are all here or who would think of your wife and children think of your family will you please come out i promise you that not a hair on your head will be harmed you would come out into the yard raise your hands take off your jacket and show them that you're not wearing a bomb belt i'll just walk slowly towards our people and let them search you do you understand me.