# How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols | Dr. Laurie Santos - **Show:** Huberman Lab - **Published:** 23 Dec 2024 - **Source:** https://www.hubermanlab.com/episode/dr-laurie-santos-how-to-achieve-true-happiness-using-science-based-protocols - **Transcript:** https://podcasts.opennash.com/shows/huberman-lab/how-to-achieve-true-happiness-using-science-based-protocols-dr-laurie-santos-90e3bd/ - **Provider:** OpenNash Podcasts (machine-generated) ## In brief Yale psychologist Laurie Santos argues that lasting happiness depends far less on circumstances such as money or status than on behaviors and thought patterns. Real-time social connection, presence without a phone, noticing small delights, helping others and using your strengths all raise happiness. Our instincts and cravings, shaped by evolution and modern technology, steer us toward quick hits that feel rewarding but do not deliver it. The central tension is that our minds mispredict what will make us happy. We expect social contact to feel awkward and more money or arrival to feel great, but we adapt to good things and are hit by comparison. Santos and Huberman explore fixes: spacing out pleasures, imagining loss, looking for the bronze lining, valuing the journey, and treating negative emotions as useful signals rather than failures. ## Key insights 1. **Money stops raising happiness past a threshold** Santos cites Kahneman's 2010 study, where daily positive emotion and low stress flattened out around $75,000. Comparing yourself with richer people keeps the chase going, so she says extra income buys much less happiness than ten minutes of exercise or some extra sleep. 2. **We underestimate how good social contact feels** In studies by Nick Epley, people paid to chat with strangers felt better than they predicted, and introverts were surprised too. Because we expect it to be awkward, we avoid it and never correct the prediction, which can start a cycle of loneliness. 3. **Having a phone nearby quietly drains attention** Santos cites Princeton work showing double-digit performance gains on tests when the phone is in another room. She also cites a study finding 30% less smiling between strangers when phones were present, so presence takes some deliberate effort. 4. **Adaptation fades joy, so manufacture contrast** People return to baseline after both lottery wins and paralysis, so good things stop feeling good. Santos suggests spacing out pleasures, imagining losing what you have (negative visualization), and finding a bronze lining by comparing yourself with people doing worse. 5. **Negative emotions are signals, not malfunctions** Santos compares sadness, overwhelm and loneliness to dashboard warning lights that tell you to change something. Data she cites also suggest that happier people take more action on causes like climate change, not less. ## Questions this episode answers ### Does making more money make you happier? Only up to a point. Santos describes Daniel Kahneman's 2010 study, where stress and positive emotion stopped improving beyond about $75,000 in 2010 dollars. Beyond that, she says small habits like exercise, sleep and gratitude matter more than a bigger income. ### Why does talking to people feel better than I expect, and why don't I do it more? Santos says that in studies by Nick Epley, people predicted that talking to strangers would be awkward but reported feeling better afterward, and this included introverts. Evolution never gave us a strong craving for social contact, so we skip it and never test the prediction. ### What does it mean to be happy in your life versus with your life? Santos explains that happy in your life is the emotional side: how good your day-to-day experience feels. Happy with your life is the thinking side: whether you believe things are going well and feel purpose. ### What is hedonic adaptation and how can I get around it? It means we get used to things, so both good and bad events lose their emotional punch over time. Santos suggests spacing out pleasures, imagining losing what you have, and shifting your comparisons toward people who have less. ### Is it bad to feel sad or angry, or should I always stay positive? Santos argues against what she calls toxic positivity, the idea that you should only feel good. She says negative emotions carry useful information, like a car warning light, and ignoring them for too long can cause bigger problems later. ## Facts - **Laurie Santos** [0:13:03]: "the fiction writer David Sedaris has this wonderful, uh, article called The Fitbit Life, where he talks about how he wanted to get fit." - **Laurie Santos** [0:15:54]: "And it levels off in 2010 dollars at around $75,000. What does that mean? That means if you get more than $75,000, um, you're not gonna feel any less stressed." - **Laurie Santos** [0:23:53]: "they offer people like $10 Starbucks gift card to just talk to somebody. Um, usually talk to a stranger like that they don't know on the train." - **Laurie Santos** [0:36:31]: "He wrote this really cool article in, um, called Eliminating the Human, where he made the claim that pretty much every technological invention of the last twenty years has been" - **Laurie Santos** [0:39:21]: "young people today report being lonely at rates of, like, seventy, 75%, right? More people are lonely, extremely lonely than not right now." - **Laurie Santos** [1:06:43]: "a math test or a studying test with your phone there versus a phone in the other room, and you see like double digit increases in performance just to have your phone away." - **Laurie Santos** [1:07:53]: "she finds that there's 30% less smiling at the other people in the waiting room when your phones are present, 30% less." - **Laurie Santos** [1:08:37]: "the national, worldwide sale of gum has gone down, and it's gone down on the same slope as the iPhones have gone up." - **Laurie Santos** [1:19:20]: "Sonja Lyubomirsky has this lovely study where if you scribble down 3 to 5 things you're grateful for, or 3 to 5 delights, in as little as 2 weeks, you significantly improve your overall satisfaction with life, right?" - **Andrew Huberman** [1:28:03]: "Robert Heath, a very controversial neurosurgeon from the, um, like 70s and 80s, did these experiments of stimulating in different parts of the brain, allowing people to self-stimulate different parts of their brain." - **Laurie Santos** [1:33:19]: "And he finds that the people who are really climate anxious, they tend to have less positive emotions. You're really worried about climate change, you tend to be more on the depressed, anxious side." - **Laurie Santos** [1:37:34]: "the US, for a very wealthy country, is, like, not very happy. We're pretty low on the scale." - **Laurie Santos** [1:45:00]: "a field site called Cayo Santiago. It's this island off the coast of Puerto Rico, and it's home to 1,000 free-ranging rhesus monkeys." - **Laurie Santos** [1:59:33]: "Meta-analyses showing, you know, half hour of cardio exercise a day is as good as an antidepressant medication for reducing symptoms of depression." - **Laurie Santos** [2:02:45]: "That's as big a hit on your well-being as if you self-report being unemployed." - **Laurie Santos** [2:03:07]: "Her theory is a lot of that actually has to do with time." - **Laurie Santos** [2:06:34]: "these little chunks of time are what the, uh, journalist Bridget Shulte calls time confetti, which I think is such a great image of it." - **Laurie Santos** [2:18:41]: "if you code their facial muscles, they're showing expressions like contempt, deep sadness." - **Laurie Santos** [2:24:34]: "there's evidence from Gabrielle Oettingen's lab at NYU that, like, you actually get less motivated to do stuff." - **Laurie Santos** [2:28:08]: "He ran it, and then within, like, 2 months, somebody else broke the 4-minute mile." - **Laurie Santos** [2:32:53]: "the Danes have this idea of Jante's Law, I'm probably pronouncing this poorly, but J-N-T-E's Law, which is the idea is like, you aren't really supposed to be better than anybody else." - **Laurie Santos** [2:54:52]: "She studies signature strengths in hospital janitorial staff workers, um, who are, you know, these are people who are cleaning the linen in a hospital room or mopping the floors and stuff." - **Laurie Santos** [3:00:39]: "One study, uh, by Lara Acquananno and colleagues did this study where they walk up to people on the street and hand them 20 bucks." ## Transcript **[0:00:00] Andrew Huberman:** Welcome to the Huberman Lab podcast, where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. My guest today is Dr. Laurie Santos. Dr. Laurie Santos is a professor of cognitive science and psychology at Yale University. She is a world expert in happiness and in the science of emotions generally. Today, we talk about true happiness, not in any kind of loose and aspirational way, but instead what the research really tells us about how to create lasting happiness for ourselves. **[0:00:40] Andrew Huberman:** We talk about relationships and happiness, that is, relationships of all kinds, between friends, between romantic partners, between family members, and, of course, with ourselves. We talk about all of that in the context of what to do, what not to do, and how to frame your whole notion of what happiness is and how to attain it in the context of daily to-dos. For instance, most all of us by now have heard about the power of gratitude and gratitude practices. **[0:01:05] Andrew Huberman:** In fact, I've done an entire episode about gratitude and the science of gratitude. But Dr. Laurie Santos today explains that by shifting our orientation toward gratitude, towards something more aligned with what delights us, we are able to better tap into the mechanisms that enable us to feel happier in a more pervasive way. We also discuss topics such as hedonic adaptation, that is how our pursuit of things and our whole experience of pleasure sets the stage for what's going to feel like a meaningful pursuit and pleasureful in the days and weeks to follow. **[0:01:36] Andrew Huberman:** This is very important for everyone to hear, especially in this modern age of so-called dopamine hits, easy to achieve dopamine, highly processed foods, and the various things that you can find online. And, speaking of online, we also discuss the role that smartphones and social media play, not just in our happiness, but in our cognition. You'll be shocked indeed, I was shocked to learn that just having your phone in the room where you are trying to learn something significantly diminishes your performance on things like mathematics and the learning of other topics. **[0:02:06] Andrew Huberman:** We get into all of that today, the interrelated parts, and I promise that it's all made extremely clear and actionable thanks to doctor Laurie Santos's incredible expertise, and she is an incredible teacher. In fact, the course that she has taught at Yale University, entitled Psychology and the Good Life, is the most popular course ever taught at Yale over the course of 300 years. And that popularity will not come as a surprise, as you now get to learn from doctor Laurie Santos directly. **[0:02:35] Andrew Huberman:** This was a remarkable episode, I must say. I learned so much and I'll just highlight one big takeaway that I've implemented in my own life and that you can frame in the back of your mind as you listen to today's episode is the difference between being happy with one's life as opposed to in one's life, and indeed, how to achieve both. Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. **[0:02:57] Andrew Huberman:** It is, however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast. Our first sponsor is Eight Sleep. Eight Sleep makes smart mattress covers with cooling, heating, and sleep tracking capacity. 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I've been sleeping on an Eight Sleep mattress cover for nearly four years now, and it has completely transformed and improved the quality of my sleep. Eight Sleep has now launched their newest generation of the pod cover, the Pod four Ultra. The Pod four Ultra has improved cooling and heating capacity, higher fidelity sleep tracking technology, and even has snoring detection that will automatically lift your head a few degrees to improve your airflow and stop your snoring. **[0:04:13] Andrew Huberman:** If you'd like to try an Eight Sleep mattress cover, go to eight sleep dot com slash huberman to save up to $350 off their Pod four Ultra. Eight Sleep currently ships in the USA, Canada, UK, select countries in the EU, and Australia. Again, that's eight sleep dot com slash huberman. Today's episode is also brought to us by ExpressVPN. ExpressVPN is a virtual private network that keeps your data secure and private. It does that by routing your internet activity through their servers and encrypting it so that no one can see or sell your data. **[0:04:44] Andrew Huberman:** Now, I'm familiar with the effects of not securing my data well enough. Several years ago, I had one of my bank accounts hacked, and it was a terrible amount of work to have that reversed and for the account to be secured. When that happened, I talked to my friends in the tech community, and what they told me was that even though you think your internet connection may be secure, oftentimes it's not, especially if you're using Wi-Fi networks, such as those on planes, in hotels, at coffee shops, and other public places. **[0:05:09] Andrew Huberman:** Surprisingly, even at home, your data might not be as secure as you think. To make sure that what I described before would never happen to me again, I started using ExpressVPN. The great thing about ExpressVPN is that I don't even notice that it's running since the connection it provides is so fast. I have it on my computer and on my phone, and I keep it on whenever I'm connected to the internet. With ExpressVPN, I know everything is secure. **[0:05:31] Andrew Huberman:** My web browsing, all my passwords, all my data, and, of course, anything that's behind an account wall, like a bank account. It can't be tracked, and no one can access or steal your data, which is terrific. If you'd like to start protecting your internet activity using ExpressVPN, you can go to ExpressVPN dot com slash huberman, and you can get an extra three months free. Again, that's E X P R E S S V P N dot com slash huberman to get an extra three months free. **[0:05:57] Andrew Huberman:** And now for my discussion with doctor Laurie Santos. Doctor Laurie Santos, welcome. Thanks so so much for having me on the show. I want to talk about this thing that everyone seems to want, but most everyone has trouble keeping themselves in a state of happiness, which raises the question of whether or not we should even be seeking to constantly be in a state of happiness. But just to sit back from that question for a moment, how should we think about the relationship between emotions and this thing that we call cognition? **[0:06:29] Andrew Huberman:** Because I think a lot of where we're going today is to distinguish between feelings, thoughts, and behaviors, and as neuroscientists, psychologists, et cetera, we have to understand the difference between emotions and cognition and maybe where they overlap. So if you could educate us a bit on that, I think that will, uh, set the stage nicely for understanding happiness. Yeah. Well, I'm glad you started there, actually, because, you know, the very definition of happiness, I think, as social scientists tend to think about it, includes both of these parts, right? **[0:07:58] Andrew Huberman:** So I think social scientists tend to think about happiness as being happy in your life and being happy with your life. So being happy in your life is sort of the emotion side, right? I have decent number of positive emotions, maybe slightly less negative emotions, like you existing in your life feels good. That's kind of an emotional part, right? Um, but then there's also kinda how you think your life is going, do you have purpose? Are you kind of happy with how things are going? **[0:08:06] Andrew Huberman:** It's how you think about your life, which is sort of a cognitive thing. And so even the earliest social scientists who started thinking about happiness at the time, they call it subjective well-being. Cause I think psychologists were like, ooh, happiness sounds sounds too wooey. Like, we'll call it something else, but it means exactly the same thing. It means subjective well-being, right? When they started thinking about subjective well-being, they divided it into this sort of affective emotional part, which is like how you feel in your life, but also this cognitive part, how you think your life is going. **[0:08:16] Andrew Huberman:** So that basic dichotomy has been there since the very beginning of folks studying happiness scientifically. I'm already struck by this distinction between how things are going in your life versus with your life. Um, one requires a a kind of first-person experiencing of life in your life. You know, do you wake up feeling good? Are you, um, feeling good with your inside of your friendships and other relationships, family, romantic relationships, school, work? The other, um, involves a bit of a third-personing of self. **[0:08:26] Andrew Huberman:** Yep. I'm looking at one's, um, CV, either actual CV or, um, reflected CV, uh, through the lens of other people and kind of getting a sense like, Am I doing well? Am I not doing well? Um, I think this is a really important distinction, um, because it seems like ultimately, the goal, if I may, is to be happy in your life, regardless of the third-personing, provided that you're not doing damage to somebody else's happiness in life. **[0:08:47] Andrew Huberman:** Yeah. Well, I think ideally, it it'd be nice to do both, right? And I think there are moments when these things dissociate, right? So, you know, you interact with lots of interesting rich people out here in California. I think a lot of them have it kind of in their life feels pretty good, right? They have lots of hedonic pleasures, they're drinking nice wine, hanging out You'd be on the beach. But amazed. You'd be amazed but then but at how much how much, uh, I'm how much suffering they report. **[0:09:10] Laurie Santos:** oh, that's interesting. **[0:09:10] Andrew Huberman:** Right? How much suffering they Well, so this is report. **[0:09:11] Laurie Santos:** the question is, is is this sort of cognitive part the, like, third-person part, or is it the reporting part? And I think when the psychologists are thinking about it, they really think about it as the reporting part, right? And and this gets tricky, right? Because, you know, I see folks having their nice glass of wine on the beach, and I'm thinking like, that's coming with lots of positive emotion. Like, I bet if I tested them and could have a direct look at their sensory experience, it'd probably be pretty positive. **[0:09:34] Laurie Santos:** It's only when they reflect on their life and they're asking, Well, how's it going? that they say, Oh, you know, I don't know, my stocks went down, or, like **[0:09:40] Andrew Huberman:** When I hear about, um, lack of happiness, let me think of some of the kind of bullet point ones that come seem to come up repetitively. Are they are indeed not related to lack of resources? I don't hear that. What I've heard, and this is also true for where I spend part of my time and where I grew up, which is in Silicon Valley, which is also not everyone, but there are people there who have accrued tremendous amount of wealth. **[0:10:04] Andrew Huberman:** The mean has shifted very high, uh, and hence the cost of living. Um, but it's often concerns about, um, their kids or their mother is ill. Their child is struggling in a particular way. Um, very often, that's what it is. They're concerned about the lack of well-being in their kids related to mental health or physical health or other relatives' mental health, physical health. Or they're upset about something politically. But we won't Yeah. We go there. **[0:10:37] Laurie Santos:** won't go there. Yeah. No, I think this is true, right? You know, so much of our happiness is made up of the happiness of other people, right? Um, both kind of how they're doing and how we think they're doing cognitively, but literally just emotionally, right? You know, if you've ever been around a family member or a spouse who was incredibly pissed off, really sad, it's it's incredibly hard not to catch those emotions yourself. And we as psychologists know how these processes work, right? **[0:11:03] Laurie Santos:** These processes are emotional contagion, where you're literally catching the emotions of other people. And so oftentimes, the things that you most worry about to be happy yourself is focusing on the happiness of the people around you because that literally becomes your happiness at a very fundamental level. **[0:11:18] Andrew Huberman:** Now, I'm pausing just to think about this a little bit more as we grow up, um, and I realize it varies by place and lots of circumstances. But as we grow up, we are taught to pay attention to how our life is going a bit from the outside where you gain evaluations starting really young. Little stars on our pictures or, good job, or nowadays, they say great effort in drawing, or, you know, you don't want this whole thing, the growth mindset, uh, language. **[0:11:47] Andrew Huberman:** Um, but I don't know that in the United States, we are taught to, um, think about being happy in our life. Right? As, uh, as kids, I think all kids, all all mammals, uh, seem to gravitate towards, um, joyful experiences for them playing is almost always an innate, um, joyful experience. But then as the evaluations start coming in, we we get better and better at as assessing our performance and where we are, um, relative to the sort of standard goals of the third grade, the fifth grade, the twelfth grade. **[0:12:23] Andrew Huberman:** Um, but at the same time, I don't think anyone ever sat me down and said, um, how are you going to evaluate if you're feeling good in your life? Like that you're savoring your soccer game, that you're savoring your time with friends. Uh, that was never, never taught to me. **[0:12:40] Laurie Santos:** Yeah. And I think there's a real danger of these kind of extrinsic rewards, as you might call them, all the stuff outside the grades, you know, the performance measures and so on, literally stealing your intrinsic rewards. Um, there's this funny phenomenon in psychology where if you have something that's intrinsically rewarding, so let's say exercise, right? Like, I wanna go out, you know, and and, like, and you run, like, a bunch, right? I love running. I get this intrinsic reward from running. **[0:13:03] Laurie Santos:** Now I get some sort of tool, whether it's my watch or something I'm scribbling down in a phone app, and I have to, like, log my running. Now it becomes a sort of extrinsic reward. It's not just, like, the feeling of running, but it sort of takes on this extrinsic idea. And then what happens is sometimes we end up going for that reward anyway. Um, the fiction writer David Sedaris has this wonderful, uh, article called The Fitbit Life, where he talks about how he wanted to get fit. **[0:13:28] Laurie Santos:** It's interest intrinsic reward of, you know, exercising more, and he got the Fitbit, and then it was all about the Fitbit. And he would set the level higher and set the level higher, and he himself was miserable and no longer enjoying running. To the point that, like, at some point, he just would walk around, you know, shaking his arm just to get up to those final steps, right? That's a really terrible case where your extrinsic reward winds up taking over. **[0:13:48] Laurie Santos:** But so many of the cases you just talked about are ones in our real life where that comes up much more insidiously than, like, a Fitbit or something like that. You talked about play in mammals, the easiest thing that little kid animals do all over the place. Little kid humans don't do that as much anymore because even from really young ages, they're, you know, in toddler, you know, university, where they're kind of learning things to get into the next grade and get the perfect grades so they can get into institutions like ours, right? **[0:14:13] Laurie Santos:** It all becomes about extrinsic rewards. And so I think you're really right, we're kind of extrinsicizing all the rewards to the point that we're not getting to internal happiness. It was hard already to pay attention to that stuff because I think we'll probably talk about this. It's hard to be mindful about your emotions. You really have to pay attention to what's going on. But I think it's gotten even harder because we have these metrics. They're all over the place in our culture, but they're just not the intrinsic thing. **[0:14:37] Laurie Santos:** There's some extrinsic marker that could make the intrinsic thing even less fun. **[0:14:43] Andrew Huberman:** For people that, um, grow up or live in areas where, well, let's just say that that have less, um, disposable wealth. Um, is there there must be data on sort of, um, relationship to intrinsic versus extrinsic, um, forces on happiness? I mean, I can make up all sorts of stories in my head about how people starting out from very different circumstances would be more or less happy, but what do the data say? **[0:15:10] Laurie Santos:** Yeah. So these effects of kind of resources on happiness are really interesting and they're nuanced, right? So if you look at the lower end of the kind of income spectrum, you would obviously say that money affects happiness, right? If you can't put food on the table, if you can't put a roof over your head, definitely getting a little bit more money is gonna affect your happiness in a positive way. And the data sort of bear this out. **[0:15:31] Laurie Santos:** Um, this very there's a very famous study by the, uh, Nobel Prize winning economist, Danny Kahneman, RIP. Um, back in 2010, he did this cool study where he looked at the correlation between income and happiness, as reported in how much stress you have, um, how much positive emotion you experience and so on. And the low end of the income scales, it just goes up and up and up, right? More money just almost linearly gives you more happiness. **[0:15:54] Laurie Santos:** But what Danny found, and is the second part of this nuanced picture, is that that slope kinda levels off. And it levels off in 2010 dollars at around $75,000. What does that mean? That means if you get more than $75,000, um, you're not gonna feel any less stressed. You're not gonna experience any more positive emotion. Even if I double or triple or quadruple your income on those metrics, you're not gonna see any increase. **[0:16:18] Andrew Huberman:** And then those are, um, pre-tax 2010 **[0:16:22] Laurie Santos:** Yeah, they didn't get into, like, the real cause. It's cause you're like, Oh my god. Well, I live in California. Like, if you live in Iowa, maybe it's not so bad. But, like, and those numbers will change, but the upshot is there's probably some number in, like, twenty, twenty-five, twenty, twenty-four numbers that might be, like, you know, maybe $100,000, $120,000, whatever it is. The point is that there's some number at which getting more is not gonna increase your happiness at the same slope. **[0:16:45] Laurie Santos:** Now there's been nuanced fights about this as there is a lot in, kind of, real research about, well, is that really true? Does the slope really ever go up? And now the picture seems to be, well, the slope might go up a teeny, tiny, like, negligible bit, but it doesn't go up as as much as, say, getting an extra ten minutes of exercise in or another twenty minutes of sleep or scribbling the things you're grateful for. **[0:17:06] Laurie Santos:** All those things will impact your happiness much more than, like, quintupling your income. And so do do your resources affect happiness? Yeah, if you ain't got any resources, y- you definitely will feel happier if you can get them. But if you have a lot, getting more really isn't gonna help. **[0:17:22] Andrew Huberman:** Sorry to interrupt, but lately, I've been, um, saying on the basis of those findings about this then seventy-five, uh, K per year, probably now, like you said, a hundred, 125 K. Or let's, let's say something like that, um, would be the equivalent amount, uh, that money indeed cannot buy happiness, but it can buffer stress. Do you think that's true? You're making me rethink that statement. Maybe it doesn't buffer stress past a certain amount. **[0:17:52] Laurie Santos:** Yeah. I mean, I think in in the original Kahneman data, he found that it doesn't, right? I mean, how much stress you report on a daily basis was literally one of the measures they were using for happiness. But I think you're right, it can the risk around it can buffer it, right? I think if you're at a certain set of means, you know that, like, you know, if a bad thing happens, you're going to be okay. **[0:18:13] Laurie Santos:** So it can allow you to make riskier decisions. It can allow you to do things that you might not do if you're right at that boundary where losing some money might pop you back down. I think the problem is that one of the ways we evaluate our financial situation, but pretty much every situation, I think this goes back to the neuroscience, is that we don't do it objectively. We do it relative. And when you think about your relative financial status, there's lots of other folks around to whom you're comparing yourself. **[0:18:38] Laurie Santos:** I think one of the reasons that rich folks don't necessarily think they're less stressed when they have very high levels of wealth and so on, is because they're looking around and everyone's doing much better than them. Like, and this is just a fundamental feature of the way we evaluate stuff, right, is that we don't evaluate in objective terms. We evaluate relative to these reference points. And honestly, as you get richer, you're kind of going up the sort of logarithmic scale where the reference points are getting even further away from you. **[0:19:03] Laurie Santos:** And I think that that can have a huge hit on people's perception of their own happiness and their perception of their stress levels, right? Because they're working towards a goal that's probably not gonna make them that much happier, but they haven't kinda abandoned this intuition that more money will make me happy. Um, on my podcast, The Happiness Lab, I had this guy Clay Cockrell, who was really fun. He's a, uh, a wealth psychologist, so he's a mental health professional that only works with the point zero zero zero one percent. **[0:19:29] Laurie Santos:** And already we should say, well, if if wealth made you happy, he should be out of a job. But no, he has lots of clients, lots of, I guess, very well-paying clients. He looked like he was doing well for himself. Um, but he talks about how those folks haven't abandoned this notion that more money will make them happy. They set some standard like, I'll, if as soon as I become, as soon as I get 50 million, I'll be happy, or as soon as I become a billionaire. **[0:19:49] Laurie Santos:** But then they get to that point. They're not feeling any more positive emotion. They're not feeling less stressed. And rather than saying, well, hang on, maybe that hypothesis was wrong. More money doesn't work. They say, Ah, the hypothesis, it's all right. More money will make me happy. I just gotta. It wasn't 50 million. Now it's 100 million or whatever it is. And so I think that that's a lot due to the fact that folks are comparing their wealth levels against others and our our comparison system sucks because we constantly compare ourselves against others, but we never pick people that are doing worse than us. **[0:20:15] Laurie Santos:** We always pick people who are doing better than us. I know a fair number of very happy, wealthy people. I know a fair number of very miserable, wealthy people. I know a fair number of, um, happy, uh, non-wealthy people, and a fair number of miserable inside, f- where they report feeling miserable, um, un- unwealthy people. Well, it fits completely with what, you know, a lot of the happiness research suggests, right? Which is that it's much less about our circumstances than we think when it comes to who's happy and who's not, right? **[0:20:48] Laurie Santos:** You know, we often think, you know, if I could get more money, or if I could get more accolades at work, or if I could get a new partner, if I could move somewhere, I'd be happier. But exactly what you're saying, if you look at people with all those different life circumstances, both the good version and the bad version, you find some happy folks and some not so happy folks. And now what researchers are starting to think is that it actually doesn't involve our circumstances as much as we think. **[0:21:09] Laurie Santos:** Again, uh, like, with bracketed, unless those circumstances are really dire, circumstances don't matter as much as we think. It tends to be the kind of stuff that's much more under our control than our circumstances, right? It tends to be how we behave, what are what thought patterns we use, the emotions we seek out, the social connection we experience, those things matter much more. And so I think, you know, your experience with the happy and not so happy rich folks and the happy and not so happy poor folks, kind of bear out what we think, which is like, it's just not your circumstances that doesn't matter as much as you assume. **[0:21:39] Andrew Huberman:** Let's talk about this relationship between feelings, thought patterns, and behaviors in the context of happiness. I think anyone listening to this or watching this probably wants to be happy as much as possible. I mean, I suppose there are a few songwriters, poets, and I've got some friends in in, uh, in those, uh, domains of life, and they do seem to derive a lot of, um, insight and inspiration and have done amazing things, um, through the kind of depths of, uh, unhappy human emotion. **[0:22:11] Andrew Huberman:** Um, we can get back to that later because I do think there's something about the contrast of moving from these more painful emotions to happiness. That's very different than moving from a state of immense happiness to slightly less, but we can get back to that. But most people would like to be happy as much as possible. Uh, I certainly would. Uh, who wouldn't? And one, of course, can ask, Well, should I work on my feelings? Like, think about my feelings, try and shift my feelings, let my feelings move through me in a cathartic way. **[0:22:43] Andrew Huberman:** Um, should I work on the thought patterns? Should I work on the behaviors? I'm a big believer from from my own experience that behaviors are powerful in setting the general trajectory of thought patterns and feelings. But I've also experienced it going the other way, too. So what does the research say about this? And what what can we do? Cause everyone wants to be happier. **[0:23:04] Laurie Santos:** Yeah, well, we just talked about the thing you're not supposed to do. You don't have to change your circumstances, and that's great, cause, like, quintupling your income is tricky, you know, moving is tricky, you know, switching your life around all over the place is hard, right? And the good news is the science shows you don't have to do that. That doesn't work as well as you think. But you can hack your behaviors and your thought patterns and your feelings to get some good results, right? **[0:23:26] Laurie Santos:** Let's let's take behaviors, right? One of the biggest behavioral changes you can make to feel happier is just to get a little bit more social connection. Like psychologists do these fun studies where they look at people's, like, daily usage patterns. So how much time are you spending sleeping or exercising or at work or whatever? And the two things that predict whether or not you're happy or not so happy is how much time you spend with friends and family members and how much time you're just physically around other people. **[0:23:53] Laurie Santos:** Like, the more of that you do, the happier you're gonna be. Um, and, you know, that's just a correlation, right? So your savvy listeners are thinking right now like, Well, is it that hanging around with other people causes you to be happier, or do you tend to, like, hang out with other people more if you are happy? Like, which direction does the causal arrow go? And here we have these lovely studies by psychologists who do these kind of funny experiments where they offer people like $10 Starbucks gift card to just talk to somebody. **[0:24:18] Laurie Santos:** Um, usually talk to a stranger like that they don't know on the train. Some lovely work by Nick Epley and others have done this where is you force people to get social, and what people predict, especially with strangers, is like, ooh, that's gonna feel awkward and kinda weird. But what you find across the board, and this includes an introverts and extroverts, is that talking to somebody actually feels good. It increases your positive emotion, it gives you a sense that your life is going better, you feel less lonely. **[0:24:42] Laurie Santos:** It just has these positive outcomes that we don't expect. **[0:24:46] Andrew Huberman:** I love social connection. The problem I have with social connection is that if I drop in with somebody for, you know, thirty minutes or a couple of hours, when that's done, I usually have so much that I need to tend to that I end up staying up later than I need to in order to complete that, diminishing my sleep. And then I I feel like there's a underlying kind of, like, sinking ship sense to my physiology, and then I have to recover my sleep. **[0:25:12] Andrew Huberman:** So it, you know, everything's a trade-off. Um, what's interesting about the study you just mentioned is that it's just a brief coffee, presumably, so and maybe one doesn't need to spend quite as much time, um, with people. But I think, uh, you know, I think like even years ago, actually, he's dead now, but there was a a, I guess it's okay to say even though he's dead, he he was a somewhat, uh, eccentric professor at UC Berkeley. **[0:25:38] Andrew Huberman:** I took a class from him when I was a graduate student there named Seth Roberts. He's known for some kind of bizarre theories about eating, and if people want to look this up, I mean, like, really, really kind of different stuff, but I I applaud his bravery and just, uh, you know, being out there. But he was an eccentric guy, and he told us in this class when I was there that that it was very important to see faces, um, at least once a day. **[0:26:01] Andrew Huberman:** Real faces, not on a screen. This was before social media, but, um, and that it was important at some point to leave your apartment and and, like, see the barista and say hello and thank you and say see people on the street. And, um, and now knowing what we know about these dedicated areas of the brain like the fusiform face gyrus and Nancy Kanwisher's work and about the about these brain areas, like, we are hardwired for seeing faces and recognizing faces. **[0:26:26] Andrew Huberman:** Now, that alone doesn't mean that seeing faces is a requirement for being happy on a consistent basis, but I think they were onto something. I th- I think Seth was onto something, even though he had some also just, like, completely crazy ideas. This idea doesn't seem crazy. This has been my experience, even though I spend a lot of time alone. If I go a few days without seeing a face, something happens inside that that shifts the way my internal kind of, um, set point for well-being. **[0:26:54] Andrew Huberman:** And then you see somebody, and it's like it's like delightful, even if it's just a hello Yeah. And I kinda thing. Yeah. **[0:26:58] Laurie Santos:** think, you know, s the reason why social connection matters so much is it's building off this basic neural circuitry, right, for seeing faces and so on. And I think that gives us real insight into the kinds of social connections that work best, right? Which has been characterized in the field as sort of in real time social connection, right? Which we're kind of moving away from. So, what do I mean by in real time? You know, you and I are sitting in a studio right now chatting, and we're kind of chatting in real time. **[0:27:22] Laurie Santos:** I can see your face, we're live. But we might have been able to do this, like, over some sort of video chat. It wouldn't be as good, you know, but but it's pretty good, and the reason it seems to be pretty good is we're doing it in real time, right? Our auditory system, our visual system, all these systems that are used to as primates processing things with other folks around you, it works reasonably well. What doesn't work so well is how we often communicate, which is like over Slack, over text. **[0:27:46] Laurie Santos:** I text you, Voomp, a few minutes later, Voomp, it comes out. Like, our primate brain is just like that, that's just not the way communication is set to work. And so I think sometimes when I bring up social connection, people think like, Oh, I gotta see people in person and my friends gotta live far away and I'm, like, at work all day. It's like, no, no, no, you can connect, not necessarily live and in person, but as much as possible, try to do it in real time. **[0:28:08] Laurie Santos:** And I think that's in part, be and if possible, try to do it with video, I think, for the reason that you were just talking about is it's faces activate us. But, you know, we're primates that are also really good at language and paying attention to the voice. I think it's one of the reasons that, like, an old school phone conversation, no video chat with your friend, can be some of the most emotional connective conversation, sometimes better than in person, cause when we're in person, we're pulling out our phones and checking and paying attention to other stuff. **[0:28:33] Laurie Santos:** But but we gotta get back towards in real time. The other stuff just doesn't have the same psych- uh, psychological oomph. **[0:28:39] Andrew Huberman:** Is there any evidence that texting actually drives more of a desire for more social connection and thus leaves us feeling less well than prior to a text exchange? I I g- is I realize it's very hard to separate out the variables about what's the nature of the text exchange? Um, how often do you see this person in, um, in real life, et cetera? But I could imagine that texting the woomp, I don't do the sound effect as well as you do, but I I like that. **[0:29:08] Andrew Huberman:** Uh, but that texting could be the equivalent of getting crumbs of nourishment, not full nourishment. I could also imagine that it's like putting nourishment just out of reach. And and I'm asking this really at a neurological level. Do we know does is the reward circuitry that's triggered by s in real life social connection triggered, but to a lesser degree by text exchange or by Zoom exchange? There's not Um, or there's not uh, this would be an important, uh, study to do, I think. **[0:29:36] Laurie Santos:** yeah. There's not great evidence for it, but my intuition is that the way it works is almost like it's, uh, texting, sort of the NutraSweet of social connection, right? I was feeling this motivation for social connection, and I did it, and and I got something that was sort of social. I got some information, but, like, psychologically, I'm missing the, like, nutritious part of it, right? So it kind of fakes you out into thinking that it's social connection, but it kinda doesn't really work. **[0:29:59] Laurie Santos:** And I worry that that's what we're all getting a lot of right now, right? It's just so much easier to participate in the NutraSweet version of social connection. Because, as political scientists and sociologists and others have pointed out, it's harder to meet with people in real life. We don't have these so-called third spaces where we can get together easily anymore, right? There's so many draws of just being on your screen, being alone inside. Um, I think we're kind of missing out, and so so a lot of us are kind of starving nutritionally when it comes to social connection cause we're going for the wrong stuff. **[0:30:29] Andrew Huberman:** So schedule some, if possible, in real life time with somebody. **[0:30:34] Laurie Santos:** Or in real time, right? You know, call that friend that you haven't talked to. And recognize, cause this is clear from the psychological research that your brain is not telling you to do that. Probably even when you're listening right now, you're like, Yeah, I guess that would be helpful for me, but you're not kind of having a craving to talk to your friend. And I think this is the problem with a lot of the behaviors that map onto happiness is that if you think of the evolutionary pressures for those behaviors, natural selection never had to build in, like, the goal of feeling social. **[0:31:04] Laurie Santos:** Cause we were just like in these small bands, it was really easy, right? Natural selection had to build in a kind of craving for sweet, fatty food, cause those were hard to find. Didn't have to build in the craving for, like, you know, a bunch of greens, cause they were everywhere. I think the same thing is true with social connection. We just don't have a strong motivation to seek people out because it was just kind of there. **[0:31:22] Laurie Santos:** And so I think our motivation, our reward systems don't cause us to kind of crave it. But in the modern day, where there's so many substitutes and we're kind of more isolated, I think many of us are kind of experiencing the negative effects of loneliness. But then when we think, well, what could I do to get out of it? There's not this, like, I'm starving for connection. We don't have this sort of motivational goal to go out and get it. **[0:31:43] Laurie Santos:** And so what that can lead to is people making the prediction in their head of like, Yeah, I just heard Laurie say that this is a good idea, but like, I don't know, probably not for me, or maybe not as important. I think we just don't have systems that tell us to go out and get this stuff. So even if your brain is saying, that's not that important, try it. Do your own personal experiment and get a little bit more in real time social connection and just take a moment to notice immediately after how it made you feel. **[0:32:06] Laurie Santos:** And I bet it'll be like, you know, all the kind of fitness hacks and nutrition hacks that you talk about on the show where you're like, Oh my god, that made me feel so much better than I really expected it to. **[0:32:16] Andrew Huberman:** I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge our sponsor, AG1. AG1 is a vitamin mineral probiotic drink that also includes prebiotics and adaptogens. AG1 is designed to cover all of your foundational nutritional needs, and it tastes great. Now, I've been drinking AG1 since 2012, and I started doing that at a time when my budget for supplements was really limited. In fact, I only had enough money back then to purchase one supplement, and I'm so glad that I made that supplement AG1. **[0:32:43] Andrew Huberman:** The reason for that is even though I strive to eat most of my foods from whole foods and minimally processed foods, it's very difficult for me to get enough fruits, vegetables, vitamins and minerals, micronutrients and adaptogens from food alone. And I need to do that in order to ensure that I have enough energy throughout the day, I sleep well at night, and keep my immune system strong. But when I take AG1 daily, I find that all aspects of my health, my physical health, my mental health, and my performance, both cognitive and physical, are better. **[0:33:11] Andrew Huberman:** I know that because I've had lapses when I didn't take AG1, and I certainly felt the difference. I also notice, and this makes perfect sense given the relationship between the gut microbiome and the brain, that when I regularly take AG1, which for me means a serving in the morning or mid-morning, and again later in the afternoon or evening, that I have more mental clarity and more mental energy. If you'd like to try AG1, you can go to drinkag one dot com slash huberman to claim a special offer. **[0:33:36] Andrew Huberman:** Right now, they're giving away five free travel packs and a year supply of vitamin D three K two. Again, that's drinkag one dot com slash huberman to claim that special offer. If seeing faces, uh, and I don't have evidence for this, but if Seth Roberts was right and, uh, what we're talking about here is clearly, um, based on existing data, if seeing faces somehow triggers the reward system in a healthy way, that reinforces this social connection thing, like fills the vessel, that, like, we're connected because we no longer live in small small village and tribe-like formats, most of us don't anyway. **[0:34:13] Andrew Huberman:** That if we plop down onto the couch and kinda like assume the classic C C-shaped position of, uh, somebody who's about to go on their phone and and you can scroll and see faces. You talked about that as a bit of, like, an artificial sweetener giving the illusion of some sort of nourishment. And then, you know, you see some stuff, you respond to stuff, you can see someone kinda dunk on somebody, maybe hear a joke, maybe make a joke, and then go into your DMs and, like, read a few, check a few. **[0:34:39] Andrew Huberman:** And then, um, you basically got no real social connection. Correct. Um, you didn't have to move to do it. Um, and in a lot of ways, this has parallels to the ease of, um, highly processed foods or something like that. And I think we're starting to understand this a bit through Jonathan Haidt's work and other people's work, uh, including your own, but I don't know that it's anything but really dangerous and bad. I don't want to sound alarmist, but I I am really concerned that, um, certainly for the younger generation, but that if we don't have an intrinsic drive to go do something, **[0:35:20] Laurie Santos:** We stop doing it. **[0:35:20] Andrew Huberman:** we stop doing it. And then the brain is pretty plastic throughout the entire life, especially for these low-grade m m like many times repeated behaviors. I mean, we can just slowly, the you know, the it's like a dri- there's drift. And then we wonder why we don't feel so good. **[0:35:39] Laurie Santos:** Yeah. I mean, you know how the dopamine system works, right? Like it has these mechanisms to crave stuff that's quick, quick hits, right? Our instant, you know, when we go on Reddit or go through on Instagram and scroll through a feed, we're getting these kind of quick hits. Another thing that is rewarding is new information. You know, you're a Stanford colleague, Jamil Zaki's done these lovely neuroscience studies that just finding out some interesting social information feels rewarding. **[0:36:02] Laurie Santos:** And kind of for the first time, we've been able to separate the reward value that comes from interacting with live human people and faces and social rewarding information that comes at us quickly at this dopamine hit that we crave a lot, but we don't have the craving mechanisms for the in real life connection. And yeah, I think that's causing a lot of problems, and it means we're kind of building more tools to do just that. Uh, I had the musician David Byrne on on my podcast, um, and Talking Talking heads Heads David Byrne, during. **[0:36:31] Laurie Santos:** who cares a lot about these issues. He wrote this really cool article in, um, called Eliminating the Human, where he made the claim that pretty much every technological invention of the last twenty years has been, you know, dealing with actual people is kind of frictiony. So let's just get rid of them, right? Well, you know, have Uber or Lyft or a car company where I don't have to talk to the driver, I just plug it into the phone. **[0:36:54] Laurie Santos:** We don't have to have a conversation, we go away, right? We have music and streaming mechanisms. I don't know your and your Andrew, you're like, uh, my age, so you probably remember that you used to have to go into a record store to flip through CDs or tapes, even if you're old really old school, to figure out music. And often when you do that, you'd run into humans or talk to the cashier guy, or somebody would see you flicking through, like, Oh, you like Talking Heads? **[0:37:16] Laurie Santos:** I like Talking Heads. Now we just go to an algorithm, right? From food delivery apps to kind of education, right? I have an online course where students don't have to sit in a real classroom with other students, they could watch it directly. So many of our technological innovations are assuming that what we want to get rid of is the friction part. That's what we're kind of motivated to get rid of. But ultimately, we're getting rid of, like, the human in these interactions, and our primate brains are left, you know, with the, like, little NutraSweet dribbles of connection when what we really need is something in real life and in real time. **[0:37:46] Andrew Huberman:** It's interesting because I think just but ten fifteen years ago, our knowledge of most all humans was based on in real life experience, except for, I guess, famous humans, and then it was not in real life. Now, most people's knowledge about most humans is based on not in real life interactions. Which means that most people's knowledge about humans generally is kind of accruing through non in real life electronic experiences, and so that has to change our entire schema of, like, what human experience is. **[0:38:21] Andrew Huberman:** I'm not trying to, you know, like, ratchet up to something too abstract here, but, um, I I think it's a it's a powerful notion that what Byrne is saying, that we're kind of dehumanizing ourselves, um, through, you know, getting essentially fragments of of in real life experience. Maybe of and video is so captivating as, you know, as somebody who was a vision scientist for a long time. I mean, if a if a picture is worth a thousand words, a a video is worth 10 billion pictures. **[0:38:50] Andrew Huberman:** It's just, li- and the number of videos that you can access, uh, in in an Instagram feed or even on an X feed is just astonishing. And then, of course, the high emotional salient stuff is gonna be the the stuff that you you hover on, and then the algorithm knows your dwell time, as it's called, and then your f- your basic feed and discovery is set by that. And and it, you know, I don't think it there's anything really inherently diabolical about it. **[0:39:16] Andrew Huberman:** I don't take that stance. It's just they figured out some good neuroscience based on behavioral foraging. **[0:39:21] Laurie Santos:** Yeah. I mean, the diabolical part is is having a real consequence for our happiness. It's certainly having a real consequence for loneliness. You look at rates of loneliness in young people who've grown up with these technologies, and you see things like, you know, young people today report being lonely at rates of, like, seventy, 75%, right? More people are lonely, extremely lonely than not right now. **[0:39:41] Andrew Huberman:** How do we rate loneliness? I'm not d I'm not dismissing what they're saying, but since they grew up that way, I'm not this is sounds very this r- sounds very I mean, I mean, cross-generational your judgment, but, like, how do they know they're lonely? **[0:39:51] Laurie Santos:** I mean, your point is well taken, right? If anything, they grow up lonely. So if they're self-reporting being lonely now, it might be even worse than it might be kind of getting worse over time. Yeah. And so, I mean, it's all self-report data, right? So people, you know, on a scale of one to ten, how lonely are you feeling? But the fact that 75% of people are saying, Yeah, I feel extremely lonely, that's sad. I mean, for our primate ancestors, if they could look at us, it'd be like, What are you doing? **[0:40:14] Laurie Santos:** These wonderful social They were probably like, brains right now? **[0:40:16] Andrew Huberman:** I want to go hide behind that rock for a little bit to get a little bit of space. I'll never forget years ago when I, uh, uh, there was this time when I worked with ferrets. I don't miss it. And and, uh, they would have these huge litters, and there were, eh, these in these, um, pens, they the, um, the the mom could climb up and get up on top there, and so she'd have these huge litters, and she'd kick the litter off at some point, and she'd go up there and sleep. **[0:40:38] Andrew Huberman:** And, um, and you'd go in there to take to take out the moms and, um, and, uh, they did not that was the only time when they didn't want to be bothered, right? Because they they love they love to be held and things like that, but they did not want to be bothered because they just needed some peace because they had like sixteen ferret And I'm kits, you know? Uh, so I think that nowadays, right, if if there's, uh, if there's a lot of loneliness, um, and people that are growing up in these, uh, electronic formats f- report feeling lonely, and I believe them, then what it speaks to is a yearning. **[0:41:09] Andrew Huberman:** And to me, a yearning is a neurological drive, the same way that a room that's too warm, you want to get to a cooler space. If it's too cold, you want to get to heat. So the loneliness speaks to an underlying yearning for something that they're not getting. I'm just stating the obvious, but it it says that we're or they are doing something that's inherently against the grain of their healthy neurology. **[0:41:32] Laurie Santos:** The problem is, I think th- what loneliness is a recognition of is, you know, you kinda don't like this state, but I'm not sure that loneliness is causing people to seek out more social connection. Or if it is, you're seeking out the thing that is the easiest, fastest social connection you can get, This is just like which food. which we talk about We're we're not is the Nutrients, you're not craving yeah. **[0:41:51] Andrew Huberman:** vegetables because they were in a presumably in abundance at one time in our evolutionary history, as opposed to meat or sweets or things like that, fruit and meat. **[0:41:59] Laurie Santos:** A and I think this is a problem with social connection, but I think it's a problem generally with the kinds of things that make us happier because, like, we just don't have mechanisms to seek those things out. They just kind of don't code in our reward system in the same way as, you know, the nutra-sweetie stuff of the world. **[0:42:16] Andrew Huberman:** So what is the the term, if there is one, um, or could you come up with one? I don't want to put you on the spot for a, um, a fundamental, uh, desire that's healthy for us that we are not driven to pursue a a resolution to like like like for everything else, you know, there's, like, the hypothalamic circuits for the desire to mate, to seek warmth when it's cold, cold when it's, uh, you know, when it's too warm. **[0:42:43] Andrew Huberman:** Um, you know, we know what hunger is, right? Um, but there must be something about the I don't want to get too technical here for for those that are are tracking this, what w- or not tracking this. What I'm trying to say is, you know, for so many of the, um, reward punishment pathways in the human brain, it's you you're trying to avoid the feelings of pain and move toward the feeling of either neutrality or pleasure. **[0:43:05] Andrew Huberman:** But here you're talking about being in a in a sort of place of low-level pain, being able to meet that pain with a truly low-level pleasure that then it doesn't mask the pain, but it it fills the vessel just enough that then you drive yourself into a place of, uh, essentially more pain. **[0:43:21] Laurie Santos:** But I think that this is the kind of thing that happens when you have easy outs for all these cravings, right? I mean, take processed food, right? You know, you probably have a tr- a craving for certain nutritional requirements, right? You wanna get vitamins or healthy stuff, but that stuff's easy. It's frictionless, right? You know, I run to McDonald's, and that's much faster than cooking up a really healthy vegetable filled meal. I think the same thing happens with social connection, right? **[0:43:41] Laurie Santos:** Like, you're a lonely person at your house, sitting on the couch. You have this negative bodily state of you feel lonely. Maybe it kind of manifests as a craving, but what's the fastest thing for you to do? I'm gonna scroll through my friends' Instagram feeds, um, or I'm gonna get a kind of little mini hit of social connection that's not as nutritious. Honestly, I mean, not to diss our respective fields, but I actually think this is one reason that people love podcasts so much, right? **[0:44:05] Laurie Santos:** It's a frictionless way to feel like you're part of this interesting conversation. But ultimately, it doesn't work as well as picking up the phone and calling a friend, connecting with someone in real life. I think we have too many outlets for things that kinda feel socially, but don't give us social nutrition. And it's true. I mean, we should be honest, like, really connecting with actual people in real life takes more friction than pulling out your phone and scrolling through your Instagram feed. **[0:44:29] Laurie Santos:** It just the Instagram feed doesn't work as well, ultimately, when it comes to what's really gonna end up being rewarding. And I think this is true for just like a lot of the way the reward system works. The things that we have craving for, that we seek out, that, like, we've really strong mechanisms to go after, sometimes those things don't work to get us towards real likability. Um, you know, drugs of addiction are a real obvious answer to this, right? **[0:44:51] Laurie Santos:** You know, if you, uh, have a a kind of heroin problem, you're gonna really seek out that drug, but ultimately, it's not bringing you towards something. I mean, it will f- maybe feel good in the moment, but it's, you know, no, you're not nutri-sweetie, but it's not getting you towards something that evolutionarily would be really awesome for your survival and reproductive success. **[0:45:06] Andrew Huberman:** Well, I try my best not to speak in tweets, which I guess they now call X posts. But, um, I've been saying a lot, and I'll say it again now that I think, uh, one, everyone should be aware any dopamine that is not preceded by effort in order to achieve it. Uh, in other words, any fast, high inflection of dopamine that does not require effort to achieve it is gonna put you in a trough and on a, you know, a metaphorical lever pressing cycle that will drive your trough deeper and deeper over time. **[0:45:40] Andrew Huberman:** And that peak will just never go as high as it did or could again unless you take a period of abstinence from that behavior or substance and then introduce effort prior to a adaptive behavior to get the dopamine. The other thing is I've, um, tho- I like to think of addiction as a progressive narrowing of the things that bring you pleasure, um, and I don't speak to enlightenment, but happiness or enlightenment seems like a progressive, um, broadening of the things that bring you pleasure. **[0:46:12] Andrew Huberman:** And I'm glad we're talking about reward circuitry because we know how to reset that reward circuitry, and it doesn't require these dopamine fasts, although that's one approach, and I that makes sense why people do it. But I think this notion of having to spend effort to engage in what we know is a hardwired source of reward, not just dopamine, but other neurochemicals as well, of course, in the form of social connection. So this higher friction thing of having to call somebody or drive someplace or deal with traffic, deal with traffic on the way home, well worth it if it was a good social interaction, but maybe it wasn't. **[0:46:46] Andrew Huberman:** Meh, social interaction, in which case you're like, Oh, that was that was a lot of driving today. I've now all this other stuff to do. Other times, a great social interaction can set you in an amazing, uh, emotional plane for days, if not weeks. So, you know, I think, um, what you're bringing up is really important. How how do we, um, introduce these behaviors? Not asking you to put it into a standardized protocol too much, but since we started with this issue of behaviors being a path to more happiness and social connection being the, uh, in real life social connection, or by phone in real time, as you said, being one of the main paths to behavioral happiness, behaviorally derived **[0:47:26] Andrew Huberman:** happiness, excuse me, then what are the data on sort of the frequency of this? Does it vary for introverts versus extro- extroverts? This question's getting very long, but maybe we could define introverts and extroverts, and then if you would, if you could give us some sense of, you know, how often should people seek out an in real life interaction? **[0:47:43] Laurie Santos:** Yeah. Probably way more than you think you should, right? We have good data on what people predict, which is that people predict social interaction is just not gonna be that fun. Um, it's not gonna be worth it, right? This seems to be a spot where our predictions about how good something is gonna be don't necessarily match how good it ultimately will gonna be, right? And I I put it in the context of, like, other the the reverse of something like processed food, where I think for a lot of people, you predict this is gonna be amazing, and you taste it, and you're like, No, I feel kinda gross. **[0:48:09] Andrew Huberman:** Processed food. Processed food, right? That's Yeah. **[0:48:11] Laurie Santos:** a case where your prediction is like, Ooh, this is gonna be awesome, but your actual likability is like, Eh, I feel kinda yucky. Where social connection, I think we predict we'll be all right, but maybe not that good, but when we get it, we feel really great. Um, the the the University of Chicago psychologist Nick Epley has this term he uses, under sociality, where he thinks we just kind of don't get the right reward benefit of social connection. **[0:48:36] Laurie Santos:** Uh, uh, writ large, right? He talks about examples of, you know, expressing gratitude to people, giving somebody a compliment, even things like asking for help, right? All these domains where we can kind of connect with another person. We sort of like, yeah, it may be net good if I was rating it on some scale, but it winds up being way better than we predict in all these contexts. Um, he does these studies where he has people, you know, predict how good something will be. **[0:48:57] Laurie Santos:** You know, giving a gift to somebody brings he's in Chicago, right? So he's like, here's a hot chocolate. How how good will it feel to, like, you know, give that guy over there, a stranger, the hot chocolate? And people say, you know, I don't know, three out of ten, but then they do it, and then they feel, oh, it was like more like a six out of ten. It was much more rewarding for me, the giver, than I thought. **[0:49:12] Laurie Santos:** Same thing with compliments, expressing gratitude, calling a friend you haven't talked to in a long time, reaching out to somebody that you care about but you haven't connected with. All these spots are ones where our predictions are off. It's not the valence that's off. We know it'll be good, but we just don't realize how good. And his argument is that if we don't realize how good, then we never seek it out. So it's kind of the opposite of what you might think of as the processed food problem, where our prediction is like, Oh my god, that cupcake's gonna be so good. **[0:49:37] Laurie Santos:** We have all these mechanisms that are like, go get it, go get it. But then we actually get it. We're like, that wasn't as good as we thought. I think that the problem is that we have all these things that work like the processed food that interfere with social connection. Going on the Reddit feed, you know, plopping down and watching Netflix, just kind of being by yourself, right? There's all these alternative behaviors that we're predicting are gonna feel nice, but then we get there, they feel kinda yucky. **[0:50:00] Laurie Santos:** They just, um, yeah. This is a problem in the happiness space where I know you talk a lot about the reward system, but the happiness space is one where the reward the cravings we have, the rewards we seek out, the predictions we're making about what feels good, we're often just really wrong with them. You know, my podcast, we talk a lot about, like, our mind lies to us when it comes to happiness. You know, we go for more money, we go for accolades, you know, we go for the quick dopamine hits without any work. **[0:50:24] Laurie Santos:** But really, it's more like social connection. It's all these things that we kinda don't expect are gonna feel good. And so I actually don't know what that means evolutionarily. Like, my theory is like, you didn't need to build in craving mechanisms, cause the things that really matter for our happiness, we just kind of got for free in the evolutionary environment. But it means it's hard to go after them. You mentioned introverts and extroverts, and just to get back to your longer question, this is something that's been studied in them. **[0:50:47] Laurie Santos:** So so introverts versus extroverts is typically thought of as a personality distinction, often thought of as sort of something that's built in, although there's lots of evidence that over time, you can sort of change these things around. You can become a little bit more extroverted if you're introverted. Um, but introverts tend to value deeper, close conversations, one-on-one kinds of things, and a lot of alone time. They get a lot of benefit from alone time. Whereas extroverts tend to be more energized by being around other people, especially bigger crowds of people. **[0:51:14] Laurie Santos:** Um, and so introverts tend to be a little bit more deliberate, a little bit more thoughtful, a little bit more kinda wanna have my own personal chill time, whereas extroverts tend to like people. And so you might think that everything I've just said applies to extroverts, but not to introverts. Folks have gone out and tested this, and what they find is there is a big difference between introverts and extroverts, but it's in that prediction error. You know, extroverts predict, Ah, social connection will be all right, not that great. **[0:51:40] Laurie Santos:** Introverts predict it's gonna be terrible. It's gonna be awkward. I'm gonna hate it. But when you actually force people, as in these studies where you say, take $10 Starbucks gift card, you gotta talk to somebody. When you force the introverts to be social, what they wind up doing is self-reporting, you know, a level of happiness that's, like, better than they expected. So the problem seems to be that introverts have a prediction error. I'm gonna say this. **[0:52:00] Laurie Santos:** You're gonna, we're I promise you, cause I've said this on my podcast. Tons of hate mail, lots of the comments will be like, not me, not this introvert. **[0:52:06] Andrew Huberman:** Or maybe they don't they don't quite understand. So I wanna make sure that, um, it's crystal clear for people. Introverts anticipate a less than great or even eh, um, interaction, maybe even a negative interaction. It's usually negative, usually Then you they anticipate negative. a negative interaction. Um, you so it's like saying we're gonna go to a restaurant and the food here **[0:52:25] Laurie Santos:** Seems terrible. like, is is it Yeah. **[0:52:26] Andrew Huberman:** sucks. They go in, they have a decent to maybe a great interaction. So introverts are are, um, positioned to derive more s more pleasure from social interactions **[0:52:38] Laurie Santos:** Than they expect. **[0:52:39] Andrew Huberman:** than ex- extroverts who enter social situations thinking it's going to be great. Their their anticipation is high, and therefore they require much bigger dopamine inflection, um, in order to come away from that interaction saying it was great. **[0:52:51] Laurie Santos:** Although the one kind of update to the framework that you just presented that I'd add is that you said, you know, well, if you don't you go to the restaurant, you predict it's gonna be not that good, and you go and you're like, Oh, it was all right. I think the problem with introverts is they so predict that social connection is gonna be awkward, that they don't engage in it. And now this becomes a learning cycle, right? **[0:53:09] Laurie Santos:** You predicted it was gonna be crappy. You never got any evidence. Oh, maybe I was wrong. And so you keep doing that over time. And so I think that this can lead to cycles of loneliness in introverts. Um, and there are these lovely accounts of, like, introverts who try to become a little bit more extroverted. I had this lovely woman, Jessica Pan on the show, who's this book called Sorry, I'm late I didn't wanna come. Uh, Colin, **[0:53:30] Andrew Huberman:** I I love that term. Colin. I'm actually pretty social, but I'm late to everything cause I'm an academic. Noon means noon ten, which means starting at twelve fifteen, which means at one fifteen, when the s when the lecture was supposed to end at one, you're still going and half the room is But this is still **[0:53:45] Laurie Santos:** not to just like she had a reason any academic to like **[0:53:47] Andrew Huberman:** knows what I'm talking about. **[0:53:47] Laurie Santos:** Yeah. No. So I'm with you, I'm with you. But dude, sorry I'm late. I didn't wanna come. Colin in Introvert's Guide to Extroverting. So she did this year where as a super hardcore introvert, she talked to people, joined an improv comedy group, like, went to these social networking kind of businessy, nasty social connection events, just did all this stuff. And what she found was two things. One is that she actually did enjoy it a lot more than she thought. **[0:54:08] Laurie Santos:** The end of the year, she was much happier than she expected, but she also watched her habits changing too. And and this is a thing I think that we also get wrong about introverts and extroverts is we assume I'm born that way, you know, never gonna change. And it is true that there are predispositions towards this stuff. But the data suggests that if you can maybe, like, update your reward value of this, you t you're as an introvert, try a little social connection. **[0:54:30] Laurie Santos:** Don't go to, like, the hugest party ever or jump into improv comedy. Just try call a friend that you haven't talked to in a while, right? Notice how that felt. Like, Oh, I was, I was a prediction error, right? I actually felt better than I expected. And you might update your prediction and get, and so you can kind of update your introversion in part by trying things out and noticing the reward value you get. I think the thing that is different for introverts is, like, you definitely need your alone time, right? **[0:54:53] Laurie Santos:** So you wanna balance any social connection you get with a little bit of time by yourself. But but the research really shows that if you're predicting right now, like, I just don't like the social connection, you might actually like it more than your prediction is suggesting. **[0:55:05] Andrew Huberman:** I don't wanna micro-dissect social interactions to the point of becoming artificial, but I'm fairly introverted. I love New York City, and I love London, I love busy cities. Um, so I don't mind being surrounded by people, but one byproduct of being surrounded by people in a big city is you're not interacting with everybody, you're seeing lots of faces. So is it the case that introverts are really uncomfortable in big social interactions? Or, you know, to me, um, the most mentally demanding social interaction would be one where I go to a party where I know there's gonna be like 20 people. **[0:55:41] Andrew Huberman:** Everyone's gonna have to go around the room and introduce themselves, goodness. Um, clearly, I don't have a problem with public speaking, but that, to me, just, like, spikes my cortisol immediately. Um, and then there's sort of an expectation of of, like, real connection. The the expectation of real connection oftentimes undermines real connection. Sometimes it serves it. But is it the case that introverts want to avoid people, or they want to avoid, um, the requirement to really engage in a in a deep way? **[0:56:08] Andrew Huberman:** And I like engaging in a deep way, one to one, or maybe with two or three people, you know, maybe a few more. But I'm I I don't know that it's the number of people that becomes overwhelming or daunting or the punishing feature. It's more, you know, the the sort of requirement to, like, be pulled out of oneself. **[0:56:25] Laurie Santos:** yeah, I think it might be all of the above. I mean, I think what we know about introverts is that they often self-report being better in these sort of one-on-one kind of thing. So as an introvert, it's like you're gonna have a coffee date with your friend. That often doesn't cause as much social anxiety as, like, you know, the dinner party with a bunch of people, right? And so that's the claim. It's not like, well, jump into the dinner party with a bunch of people, or join an improv comedy group, or talk to everyone on the street. **[0:56:46] Laurie Santos:** It's like just a one-on-one little mini conversation can be great. Um, and much or not necessarily great, but much better than you expect, and will kind of have this happiness benefit that kind of sustains you over time. Um, Nick Epley, who does all this work, talks about your happiness. The the best metaphor for happiness is that it's kind of like a leaky tire, like it sort of goes out a little bit. And each one of these little conversations, whether it's chatting with the barista, calling a friend, giving someone a compliment, whatever kind of fills up the tire, and then it kinda goes down. **[0:57:15] Laurie Santos:** And so you can sort of use these little mini microdoses of social connection to boost your happiness, tire. **[0:57:22] Andrew Huberman:** I'd like to take a quick break and thank one of our sponsors, Function. I recently became a Function member after searching for the most comprehensive approach to lab testing. While I've long been a fan of blood testing, I really wanted to find a more in-depth program for analyzing blood, urine, and saliva to get a full picture of my heart health, my hormone status, my immune system regulation, my metabolic function, my vitamin and mineral status, and other critical areas of my overall health and vitality. **[0:57:49] Andrew Huberman:** Function not only provides testing of over a hundred biomarkers key to physical and mental health, but it also analyzes these results and provides insights from top doctors on your results. For example, in one of my first tests with Function, I learned that I had two high levels of mercury in my blood. This was totally surprising to me. I had no idea prior to taking the test. Function not only helped me detect this, but offered medical doctor-informed insights on how to best reduce those mercury levels, which included limiting my tuna consumption because I had been eating a lot of tuna, while also making an effort to eat more leafy greens and supplementing with NAC and acetylcysteine, both of which can support **[0:58:26] Andrew Huberman:** glutathione production and detoxification and worked to reduce my mercury levels. Comprehensive lab testing like this is so important for health. And while I've been doing it for years, I've always found it to be overly complicated and expensive. I've been so impressed by Function, both at the level of ease of use, that is getting the test done, as well as how comprehensive and how actionable the tests are, that I recently joined their advisory board. And I'm thrilled that they're sponsoring the podcast. **[0:58:52] Andrew Huberman:** If you'd like to try Function, go to functionhealth. com slash huberman. Function currently has a waitlist of over 250,000 people, but they're offering early access to Huberman Lab listeners. Again, that's functionhealth. com slash huberman to get early access to Function. Today's episode is also brought to us by LMNT. LMNT is an electrolyte drink that has everything you need, but nothing you don't. That means the electrolytes sodium, magnesium, and potassium, all in the correct ratios, but no sugar. **[0:59:21] Andrew Huberman:** Proper hydration is critical for optimal brain and body function. Even a slight degree of dehydration can diminish cognitive and physical performance. It's also important that you get adequate electrolytes. The electrolytes sodium, magnesium, and potassium are vital for the functioning of all the cells in your body, especially your neurons or your nerve cells. Drinking LMNT dissolved in water makes it extremely easy to ensure that you're getting adequate hydration and adequate electrolytes. To make sure that I'm getting proper amounts of hydration and electrolytes, I dissolve one packet of LMNT in about 16 to 32 ounces of water when I wake up in the morning, and I drink that basically first thing in the morning. **[0:59:55] Andrew Huberman:** I also drink LMNT dissolved in water during any kind of physical exercise that I'm doing, especially on hot days when I'm sweating a lot and therefore losing a lot of water and electrolytes. They have a bunch of different great-tasting flavors of LMNT. They have watermelon, citrus, et cetera. Frankly, I love them all. And now that we're in the winter months in the Northern Hemisphere, LMNT has their chocolate medley flavors back in stock. I really like the chocolate flavors, especially the chocolate mint, when it's heated up, so you put it in hot water. **[1:00:21] Andrew Huberman:** And that's a great way to replenish electrolytes and hydrate, especially when it's cold and dry outside, when hydration is especially critical. If you'd like to try LMNT, you can go to drinkelement. com slash huberman to claim a free LMNT sample pack with the purchase of any LMNT drink mix. Again, that's drinkelement. com slash huberman to claim a free sample pack. So you're talking about engaging in social connection in real time, and perhaps even in in in real life. **[1:00:48] Andrew Huberman:** Um, yes, in real life as well, with some effort to engage in it, which might just be built into modern living now, as one of the primary drivers for behavioral approaches to improve what we're calling happiness. So could we say and I know we don't wanna set up strict protocols around this, you know, make the effort to schedule in real time over the phone or Zoom or in real life interaction with somebody maybe once a week? **[1:01:20] Andrew Huberman:** Minimum? **[1:01:21] Laurie Santos:** I think more than you're doing now. If you're not feeling so happy, add some in. And and again, as you mentioned before, these are all kind of trade-offs, right? You don't wanna add so much in that now you're not sleeping or exercising or all that other stuff. But, like, one more interaction than you're getting now, and check how it feels over time. **[1:01:37] Andrew Huberman:** Given how busy people are, and given that we've established that some effort that's required to engage socially is going to be beneficial toward the the reward and all this. And we're not trying to hack the dopamine system here, folks. We're just trying to figure out what is going to be rewarding given that everyone has constraints on their time. And everyone seems to have a device in their pocket that allows them to get the, um, the illusion of nourishment that leads to either same levels or less happiness overall. **[1:02:05] Andrew Huberman:** Um, you know, what's going to be most effective? And it seems to me I was thinking about this during one of your answers. I wasn't paying attention, but I was thinking about this, that my memory of prior social interactions as really great is a useful tool. So, for instance, one of my best memories of time with my girlfriend was driving back from her grandmother's house with the dog in the car. And we had no phone reception, so we couldn't be interrupted by our devices. **[1:02:35] Andrew Huberman:** She actually had some work to do, so she was doing some work on her computer at one point. She may have taken a nap at one point, and the dog kept jumping back and forth between our laps. And that, to me, was, like, one of the best days ever. Just ever. It was just an awesome day. Um, that memory occurred to me now, and I think could serve me well in thinking, Okay, so, like, going on a road trip with somebody. **[1:03:00] Andrew Huberman:** But it was the it was the lack of, um, kind of structure around it. It was just imposed on us. We had a drive to complete. There's a dog in the car, there's some work to do, there was no phone reception. And of, you know, we've had many great interactions, but that would be the one that I'd highlight as, like, that was an awesome interaction, for whatever reason. And so can one use memories of great social interaction as kind of a, um, as a compass for how to construct these, um, these social plans? **[1:03:30] Andrew Huberman:** Um, because I think it can be a little bit, um, mystifying to people, like, Oh, how do I get this thing called happiness? By meeting up with a friend, we enjoy hiking or something like that, but maybe that's not accessible. And I don't want people to underthink or overthink it. But to me, it seems like, okay, like road trips, everyday things. We needed to go up there, there was some things to tend to. So, like, tending to life things, t life requirements together. **[1:03:53] Laurie Santos:** yeah. I mean, if you wanna ask yourself a question that can highlight good memories, I recommend the one that, uh, the journalist Catherine Price uses a lot. She does a lot of studies on fun. Ask yourself the question, what was 3 times that you just had the most fun? The last 3 times you would describe as, Oh my god, that was the most fun, right? And this is a helpful question because usually the answer, my guess is, at least 2 out of 3, probably all 3 will have someone else in it. **[1:04:17] Laurie Santos:** Like, there'll be you'll have, like, another person involved, or a dog, sometimes some other energetic being, right? Oh, no, I completely It wasn't you by yourself, agree. Yeah, it probably didn't involve a screen, right? And so that's kind of like **[1:04:27] Andrew Huberman:** definitely not. **[1:04:28] Laurie Santos:** and and that actually gets back to your your road trip, you know, you're talking about. I think the the social part was really important, but but it seems like that road trip also tapped into a sort of thought pattern that we know is really good for happiness, which is presence, right? Just being kind of mindful. You're paying attention to the dog flopping on you, you're seeing the scenery, right? You're not in a rush to do something, so your mind could kind of be on that drive and how it felt. **[1:04:52] Laurie Santos:** Um, and we know so much about how kind of these moments of mindfulness really paying attention to your sensory experience, how that how much that matters for happiness. And one of the biggest hacks you can use to get more presence is to do exactly what you accidentally did driving through these parts of the world that where you don't get phone receptions, which is to get rid of our phones. Um, you know, our phones are just like the biggest attention stealers ever. **[1:05:16] Laurie Santos:** And it makes a lot of sense because what grabs our attention, um, things that are really interesting and provide a little gloss, like quick dopamine hits, right? Or just kind of scream at us with information and announcements and so on. This is what our phones do really well, and our brains aren't stupid. Our brains know that on the other side of our phone is, like, such rewarding content, and it becomes, you know, really distracting. Um, my my colleague, Liz Dunn, uh, has this kind of analogy she uses that is, like, you know, imagine, you know, instead of this kind of conversation we're having right here, maybe I'll I'll do with my husband at a dinner party where I'm sitting my **[1:05:49] Laurie Santos:** husband at dinner and we're chatting, and I have my phone out. And my husband's a philosopher, he's a very smart guy, we have great conversations, but I know on the other end of that phone is, like, really interesting stuff. And Liz said, Imagine the comparison is instead of having your phone there. I have this big wheelbarrow next to me and my husband at our dinner table. And in that wheelbarrow is, uh, photo albums of every photo I've taken since 2016, physical printouts of my emails and news articles and stuff that I could get, you know, like videotapes of cat videos and porn and everything, just like piled up really high in this wheelbarrow. **[1:06:21] Laurie Santos:** If we were trying to have a conversation, that wheelbarrow was there, I'd be like, Oh, I just wanna take a quick look at the photo or do something. It'd be so distracting, it'd be so interesting. Your brain's not stupid. Your brain knows, even though your phone is much tinier than that wheelbarrow, that all that interesting, dopamine rich, exciting stuff is on it. And it makes it hard to pay attention to my husband. Again, an interesting philosopher, we have great conversations. **[1:06:43] Laurie Santos:** And so there's lots of evidence showing that even the act of having your phone out is subtly stealing your attention from other people, from the tasks that you're doing. One of the biggest pieces of advice I give my college students is to study without your phone near you. Because Princeton studies have looked at this, where you have somebody do, say, a math test or a studying test with your phone there versus a phone in the other room, and you see like double digit increases in performance just to have your phone away. **[1:07:09] Laurie Santos:** And you might ask, like, Well, why would that be? It's like, well, part of your frontal lobe is like, No, no, no, don't look at the phone, don't look at the phone, don't look at that big wheelbarrow of delicious, interesting stuff. Stay on task. And that's this kind of constant moment of multitasking where we're kind of yanking our brain back onto task. And so a big hack if you wanna be more present is to find ways to do activities without your phone. **[1:07:30] Laurie Santos:** I guess if we go back to that fun question, if I said, you know, those 3 times you were having the most fun, you weren't in the middle of it, pulling out your phone to, like, look at your Instagram feed, you were just there. **[1:07:39] Andrew Huberman:** And what you just described was a dramatic performance enhancement on mathematics by not having this opportunity for distraction in the room, which is incredible. **[1:07:53] Laurie Santos:** Yeah, I mean, the the when you look when you dive deep into the effects of having your phone around you, they're striking. Es- especially when getting back to social connection, especially social connection. Liz Dunn has this paper where she, um, puts 2 people in a room, just kind of a waiting room together, and you either have your phone or you don't. You're you're not allowed to look at it, it's just present. And she finds that there's 30% less smiling at the other people in the waiting room when your phones are present, 30% less. **[1:08:16] Laurie Santos:** Um, I mean, I actually think of this when I think of the, you know, the loneliness crisis. You know, I walk, uh, I was a ahead of college on campus, which is a faculty member at Yale, meant that I lived on campus with students. And you'd walk through the courtyard, and everybody's walking through the courtyard, but they're not looking at you, they're looking down at their phone, right? Um, there's these, like, subtle interactions that we're missing because our phone is stealing us. **[1:08:37] Laurie Santos:** That's the social case, but I think there's a real performance case too, right? If you wanna pay attention and learn something, if part of your brain is inhibiting that urge to look at all the interesting stuff on your phone, which we don't notice, um, then that's gonna be affecting your performance. Has good benefits too. There's this lovely, um, finding that people are buying less gum and less candy in checkout aisles now. Um, the like, the national, worldwide sale of gum has gone down, and it's gone down on the same slope as the iPhones have gone up. **[1:09:07] Laurie Santos:** So as number of iPhones in pockets goes up, sales of gum and checkout lines has gone down, and you can see why that is. They're not looking around No, because **[1:09:14] Andrew Huberman:** as much. **[1:09:14] Laurie Santos:** look, you're not looking like, ooh, that, you know, like, double mint looks really good. You're staring at your phone and looking at your Instagram. **[1:09:19] Andrew Huberman:** Soon, the ads are gonna pop up on, uh, they'll know you're in the aisle, That's cause they can know you're proximity true, that's to a lot of devices. I have a friend who's a very accomplished songwriter and musician, um, and someone does his Instagram and other social media for him. He do he's not on there. And we met for dinner the other day, uh, with a couple other people, and I got there. And I started telling him about something I had seen, uh, online. **[1:09:44] Andrew Huberman:** And he said, Um, I won't use it. I usually will do his voice, but I won't do his voice cause I don't wanna give it away. Uh, people might know who he is. Um, but he said, I don't wanna talk about what's on Instagram. In fact, I don't wanna talk on about what's on the Internet. Let's just have dinner. And I was, and at first, I was kinda like, dude, I was like, kinda, and I thought, great, like, th- he's exactly right. **[1:10:11] Andrew Huberman:** Like, it's not just having the phone there, it's not just being on the device. It's also that you're talking about things that you saw in the world, um, some of which are very interesting and important, um, at times. But what he was saying was, I don't wanna talk about things that s that you experienced about somebody else's experience. That wasn't really an experience that you had today. That's an experience that of an someone else's experience that you had today. **[1:10:38] Andrew Huberman:** It wasn't about a news article or something. So we we're playing the telephone bucket brigade game of social connection m many, many degrees away from the the actual interactions that we were kind of hardwired to experience ourselves. **[1:10:53] Laurie Santos:** yeah. And those are the ones that really influence our our happiness in the world, right? You know, one of the great ways to increase your presence, in addition to kinda getting rid of your phone, is to just go back to your senses, right? What are you? what are you looking at right now? what do you see right now? I'm in this room, there's, like, really nice kind of cool black lighting, and I'm sitting there, I'm hearing your voice. **[1:11:12] Laurie Santos:** There's, like, a subtle hum in the room that I hope the podcast is not picking up that I hear in the audio, right? It's a little cool. That grounding, I can watch my breath completely change around. It's like a quick way to just kind of be embodied. And I think so often we're just not doing that as much, you know, in our discourse, but but definitely, like, even when we're by ourselves, you know, we just wind up distracting ourselves from the very sensory experience that, like, literally is the experience that we have of the world. **[1:11:40] Laurie Santos:** Just not noticing it as much. **[1:11:42] Andrew Huberman:** Now, I will say that, um, a memory of a really terrific time I had alone was around this time of year, actually, around the holidays. Typically, I would be in my office, um, organizing papers, maybe **[1:11:55] Laurie Santos:** Yeah, we academics. **[1:11:55] Andrew Huberman:** dealing with some end of end of year stuff, as it for academics, you know, my life's a lot different now with the podcast, even though I still teach at Stanford. But the but end of year is a time when you kinda get your office organized, everyone every academic notices. And, um, over the holidays, I tended to have a lot of time in my office alone. It was a great time to come in, like parking was everywhere. **[1:12:15] Andrew Huberman:** You'd go in, and and I used to listen to TED talks, or I would listen to podcasts. And these days, I'm trying to do more physical things, not just exercise, but, um, working on some, like, lighting stuff in my house. And and I like to listen to podcasts or books, sometimes music, but podcasts or books while I do that. And I I do feel that when when we're alone, sometimes it's nice to have other voices in the room that are not just the voices in our head. **[1:12:41] Andrew Huberman:** And, uh, it could be music, podcasts, books, movies, et cetera that people seem to find that soothing. I certainly do, and that doesn't feel like it's diminishing from my experience of being present. In fact, it allows me to just really tend to what I'm doing mechanically. Um, and I have some plans to do some more, like craft, drawing type projects in the new year. And I look forward to being able to hear those conversations, but not have to participate in them. **[1:13:06] Andrew Huberman:** So is this? Would you consider that sort of healthy? Or, um, am I diminishing my experience and, uh, the depth of my, uh, my crafts? **[1:13:13] Laurie Santos:** yeah. Well, I think it, you know, there's, eh, there's some nuance there, right? You're talking about your craft in a very embodied way. Even as you're talking to me, you're describing how, you know, your hands are moving in these motor ways as you're doing it. You're talking about kind of what it felt like. It felt like you, your senses were activated for the physical stuff you were doing. Um, but you also mentioned that your mind was wandering and maybe you were ruminating and stuff like that. **[1:13:35] Laurie Santos:** So it sounds like what you did was have a really nice emotion regulation strategy of, like, you could kind of fill your head with something so that you can work on the physical stuff. But it didn't impede your experience of the physical stuff. The way you described it shows that you were there, you were present when you were doing it. I think the problem was is when it impedes our presence doing it. And I think it kinda depends on the activity we're doing, right? **[1:13:57] Laurie Santos:** Um, you know, take driving, probably some of you who are listening right now are sitting in your car as you're driving, doing this other interesting motoric activity. And that's one where it's like, you're not missing out on that much on the drive by, like, listening to us. It's probably a positive kind of experience that you're having, learning something and so on. But, you know, you wouldn't wanna listen to podcasts in some physical situations, right? Um, where we can kind of come you wouldn't. **[1:14:20] Laurie Santos:** You know, if you're ballroom dancing, for example, you wouldn't wanna necessarily be listening to a podcast then, right? Um, you know, if you're really experiencing art and sort of engaging with art in an art gallery, you wouldn't wanna also be listening to a podcast at the same time. And so I think the thing to think is, you know, are you listening to this in a way that you're missing something in the real world, that your presence of it would matter, make you feel really good? **[1:14:43] Laurie Santos:** Um, or are you kind of just like, you know, K- killing some other free time and maybe using this as a nice emotion regulation strategy to stop what would otherwise be a really ruminative drive? Now you get to listen to me and Andrew, and that's probably better. But but there's nuance there. I think our tendency is to move away from the rumination is to run away from it. And I think if you find yourself kind of avoiding your thought patterns altogether, that probably might be the pendulum swinging a little too far in the other direction. **[1:15:11] Laurie Santos:** Noted. Noted. **[1:15:12] Andrew Huberman:** So we've got in real time and or in real life, well, in real life is always in real time, but, uh, in real life and or in, uh, real time social interaction. And if it requires some effort to plan or get to organize, all the better. You stand to gain more from those interactions. So that's really key presence, obviously. Try and get the phone out of the room, at least off and put away, but ideally Out of sight, out of the out of **[1:15:35] Laurie Santos:** better out of sight. **[1:15:36] Andrew Huberman:** sight, out of sight. Love that. Um, and shared experience, presumably, you know, actually maybe doing something, but it could even just be talking. I guess it depends on what people enjoy doing, right? So these are powerful levers for shifting s one level of happiness up, uh, using behavior. What about leading with thought patterns or feelings? Seems like it's a a more challenging, but, um, certainly tractable entry point. **[1:16:04] Laurie Santos:** yeah. And I think it's re it's important here to remember, like, what are our natural evolutionary patterns towards thought patterns? Um, cause some of them aren't necessarily built for our happiness. You know, to take what's a kind of common evolutionary thought pattern, which is a negativity bias, right? We're just built to notice all the scary stuff, all the bad stuff, all the potentially risky stuff. Our brains instantly go there, and that makes fabulous evolutionary sense. Like, if there's a possibility that there's a tiger that's gonna jump out or some sort of risky thing, you want your brain to lock onto it. **[1:16:35] Laurie Santos:** Not as evolutionary beneficial to notice all the blessings in life, just all the good things. It doesn't really give you that much of a survival benefit to notice, Hey, there's the absence of a tiger. We don't really know, there's no tigers around, right? **[1:16:46] Andrew Huberman:** In fact, it it probably helps drive, um, more motivation to go pursue resources. I mean, you could imagine an adaptive feature to, um, lacking satisfaction. I mean, you could gain more resources in a a time where resources were presumably shared more in these small village formats. I don't know, do monkey troops share resources? This gets a little depends on the monkey, complicated. Depends on but yeah, the monkey, yeah. But just like humans but humans, yeah, depends on the humans, **[1:17:10] Laurie Santos:** that's true, that's true. **[1:17:10] Andrew Huberman:** depends on the monkey. **[1:17:12] Laurie Santos:** Yeah. But but I think you're you're making a really critical point, right? Which is like, if we're noticing the negative, if we're noticing the bad stuff, we tend to fix it. But also if we're craving, if we're wanting, if we're kind of constantly in search of something, we get off our butts and go do stuff, I mean, Steve right? **[1:17:27] Andrew Huberman:** Jobs in his parting words were Stay hungry, stay foolish. Or some maybe it was Stay foolish, stay hungry, but stay hungry was definitely in there. And I realize he's not going to represent the epitome of what to strive for for everybody, but he certainly held up as somebody who, uh, changed the world, um, through the development of certain technologies. So we revere these people that are, um, that are hungry for more, right? **[1:17:50] Laurie Santos:** and it makes great evolutionary sense, doesn't make as good happiness sense, right? What's one of the best ways to be happy? To just appreciate what you have, to notice and appreciate the blessings out there. But it we gotta push against this natural negativity bias to do that. So how do we do that? Well, it turns out that this is a spot where harnessing attention in the way we were just talking about can be really helpful. Just taking time to notice the blessings, notice kind of all the good stuff. **[1:18:15] Laurie Santos:** Um, it's often talked about in terms of a gratitude practice, although gratitude sounds kind of cheesy, I don't know. Um, uh, my uh, friend Catherine Price, who I mentioned earlier, she has this practice that she calls a delight practice. We just notice delights in the world, I love the word right? You know, delight. I walked into your studio, you had a picture of your bulldog, and I was like, That's a delight. That's so cute. It just, Thank you for like, made me feel **[1:18:34] Andrew Huberman:** delighting in him. I delight in him too, even though he's dead several years now. Um, delight is a wonderful word. **[1:18:40] Laurie Santos:** Yeah. And we can train our brain to notice them, right? You can literally have a practice where, you know, put in your notes app on your phone, like, list of delights. Or even better, pick a friend like I have with Catherine, where you can just, like, text them delight, you know? At the end of this, I'll, you know, text like, Saw a really cute dog delight, or heard this really funny song delight. Then you get the social connection and the gratitude. **[1:18:58] Laurie Santos:** But what that does is, if you have this practice where you gotta write down the delights, your brain starts to automatically be on the lookout for them. It becomes rewarding cause you get to write this thing down. Now, all of a sudden, it can be a practice that you're sort of shifting your negativity bias to notice more of the good things that are out there. Um, and there's so much evidence suggesting that people who naturally notice the blessings in the world are happier. **[1:19:20] Laurie Santos:** Um, if you do one of these kind of gratitude or delight practices, you wind up happier. Sonja Lyubomirsky has this lovely study where if you scribble down 3 to 5 things you're grateful for, or 3 to 5 delights, in as little as 2 weeks, you significantly improve your overall satisfaction with life, right? I love It's like super that. So free. **[1:19:35] Andrew Huberman:** much so that I end because I accidentally interrupted. The comments always tell me I interrupt too much. It's out of interest, it's out of interest, I promise. If I could interrupt myself, I would, um, and I probably do from time to time. Could you repeat what the it's 3 to 5 things? **[1:19:47] Laurie Santos:** Yeah, 3 to 5 things you're grateful for. I'm not sure if the number really matters, but it's committing to kind of noticing the good things in life and really trying to take a moment to notice how they felt, right? You know, so if I look at, I do delight practices sometimes or gratitude practices, and it's things like my husband, you know, these big things in life. But then sometimes it's like my morning coffee, or like, probably, you know, seeing your cute dog. **[1:20:07] Laurie Santos:** Like, it's funny to see the picture of the for folks that don't know Andrew's studio, it's a picture of his dog on a microphone. It's just very funny. Giant It's a giant microphone. giant high quality Yes, good. **[1:20:15] Andrew Huberman:** photograph. He was actually standing on the table that I do my solo podcast Aw. from, with the at the microphone, and his tag just happened to rotate a few degrees toward the camera just at that moment, um, so you could see his name, Costello, you know? **[1:20:29] Laurie Santos:** And and I invite listeners to pause right now and notice what's happening to their face. As you hear Andrew say that, probably you're just smiling, right? You didn't even see this really cute photo, uh, um, but you're also smiling. That's the power of delights, right? Not just noticing them yourself, but potentially sharing them too. And so this is another thought pattern practice that we can engage in, which is like, just train your brain to find these things. **[1:20:51] Laurie Santos:** And what you'll find is that, you know, there's a s there's a limited ratio of the stuff we can focus our attention on. And if we start shifting towards the delights from the hassles and the yucky stuff in life, now we're just kinda filling our brain with stuff that gives us a little more positive emotion. **[1:21:05] Andrew Huberman:** What I love about this conversation about gratitude is I must say I do like the word delight more than gratitude. **[1:21:11] Laurie Santos:** Gratitude sounds cheesy. It sounds a little hippy-dippy, I gotta say, yeah, **[1:21:13] Andrew Huberman:** Well, I'm from Northern California, so I'm cool with hippy-dippy even though I'm not a hippie. I'm pro-cracker, not a hippie. you're you're Berkeley But, uh, yeah, roots are coming I don't know, I'm out. from the other end of the the peninsula. I love, I love the East Bay, but anyway, this is getting but the point is, um, it's not that the word feels soft. I need to think about this a little bit more. It's that, um, maybe it's just that delight is such a powerful, unselfish word. **[1:21:40] Andrew Huberman:** Like, it's not taking anything from anybody. It's not requiring a, uh, a shift away from one's sort of, um, intrinsic self. I feel like gratitude requires this, like, Okay, I'm gonna now be grateful. It's like, kinda like pulling if if you're not already already in a state of gratitude, it I feel like there's more effort involved. And we've been saying effort that precedes reward is good. But with delight, it feels like it's just very much, um, in concert with almost like who one is, you know? **[1:22:09] Andrew Huberman:** And and like, I delight in Costello. I don't expect everyone to delight in Costello. People who did, I delighted in their delight. So it was just, you know, amplifying all the delight. But the thing that really strikes me about delight is that every example you gave, it's very rapid time scale. Like, you, you know, like, d I will say I. I normally drink yerba mate during these things, which I delight in. But today, I decided I haven't had it coffee in a while. **[1:22:36] Andrew Huberman:** Took a little break from it for no particular reason. And I had a single shot of espresso, and I was thinking to myself, This is This is really good. So this delightful. is a this is a fast timescale. Maybe it was the fact that I haven't had it in a little while, um, and it's just really fast. N no one suffers. It's all gain, and so it runs a little bit countercurrent to what we were talking about before, which is the requirement for effort to precede the reward. **[1:22:58] Andrew Huberman:** Delight feels like a like a very smooth road, um, to a reward that's, n- all net positive. And as you said, these are these delights are available throughout the day, and it doesn't. It requires just noticing something inside and outside. Whereas I feel like with gratitude, I love gratitude practices. The data are incredible. It is anything but but but squishy. It is like a real power tool for shifting one's one's state of mind. That's clear from the literature. **[1:23:28] Andrew Huberman:** But the gratitude thing, I I feel like, requires an almost like a a formalization, like, Okay, I'm gonna be grateful now. Whereas delight, you're just kind of on the lookout for things that spark you and make you, um, eh, reflexively smile. yeah. And I And like, and think it's, and the few things are better than that. **[1:23:42] Laurie Santos:** yeah. And I think it's really sensory, you know, in the way we were talking about before, right? It gets you back into being present. Most of these delights are something you taste, or you experience, or you see, that's funny. Um, there's a really lovely book by the author Ross Gay, called The Book of Delights, and and he used a delight practice where every day he not only had to find a delight, but write a short essay about it, cause he's an author. **[1:24:02] Laurie Santos:** And it's just hilarious. It's like one of my favorite books, and you just kind of go, and it's really strange things. It's like, one is he, you know, noticed the flowers, he noticed his lilacs, and he has this whole idea of one delight is purple flowers. Why are there so many purple flowers? There's purple flowers everywhere. He also has a delight in music. He really likes the 80s band El DeBarge, you know, from the beat of the original I I'm not band. **[1:24:23] Laurie Santos:** Yeah, yeah, so vaguely familiar so it's like, **[1:24:24] Andrew Huberman:** with it. **[1:24:24] Laurie Santos:** and he talks about his love of DeBarge. And you can kind of have this connection with other people's delights and it and it's silly, they're just silly things. But the fact that we've noticed them, I mean, again, as a listener's probably experiencing right now, if you pay attention, little bit of positive emotion, right? If you're driving around in your car, feeling a little stressed out in traffic, you can kinda take a breath. And so that's the power of the practice. **[1:24:44] Laurie Santos:** You're c- you're shifting your emotions, cause you're noticing these good things. You're noticing the good things, which is great, cause you're sort of training your attention to get there, and you're sort of forming this habit to shift that negativity bias that sort of built in, but isn't really making you as happy as you could be. **[1:25:00] Andrew Huberman:** I'd like to take a quick break and thank one of our sponsors, David. David makes a protein bar unlike any other. It has 28 grams of protein, only 150 calories and 0 grams of sugar. That's right, 28 grams of protein, and 75% of its calories come from protein. These bars from David also taste amazing. My favorite flavor is chocolate chip cookie dough, but then again, I also like the chocolate fudge flavored one, and I also like the cake flavored one. **[1:25:26] Andrew Huberman:** Basically, I like all the flavors, they're incredibly delicious. For me personally, I strive to eat mostly whole foods. However, when I'm in a rush or I'm away from home or I'm just looking for a quick afternoon snack, I often find that I'm looking for a high-quality protein source. With David, I'm able to get 28 grams of protein with the calories of a snack, which makes it very easy to hit my protein goals of 1 gram of protein per pound of body weight each day. **[1:25:50] Andrew Huberman:** And it allows me to do that without taking in excess calories. I typically eat a David bar in the early afternoon or even mid-afternoon if I wanna bridge that gap between lunch and dinner. I like that it's a little bit sweet, so it tastes like a tasty snack, but it's also giving me that 28 grams of very high-quality protein with just 150 calories. If you would like to try David, you can go to Davidprotein. com slash huberman. **[1:26:12] Andrew Huberman:** Again, the link is Davidprotein. com slash huberman. I've long been interested in shifting one's emotions and when that feels good, when it is good, and when it doesn't feel good. Um, I asked our friend Ethan Cross about this too. Um, I'm not gonna compare your answers as a as a template for, uh, who's right, who's wrong. I think there there are a lot lot of differing opinions on this. But, um, I know from the time we are young kids, but we don't like to be shifted, like we don't like people to impose an emotional requirement on us. **[1:26:51] Andrew Huberman:** In fact, my niece, when she was little, I was telling her this. She's 18 now. She was not amused, um, which, which delighted me that she was not amused. But when she was little, she was, um, a pretty h- healthily stubborn kid. And, um, you'd ask her to do anything, like, Hey, let's go downstairs for a walk. And she loved going outside for walks. And she'd say, No, push me. And then she would get her stuff and then you'd go for a walk. **[1:27:14] Andrew Huberman:** But I I loved her, like, No, push me. I I love this. It was as if Costello was like, a Don't push me, you couldn't. Um, that so there was this, like, immediate vocalization from the time she could speak, really, was like, No, I'm gonna decide how I feel. Such a healthy thing, too, such a healthy thing. You're not gonna shift me. It's like, we're going out for a walk, it's gonna be fun. And she'd say, No, push me, and then she'd go for the walk. **[1:27:36] Andrew Huberman:** Most of the times, it was a fun walk. But I think that we we don't like to be shifted and, in some ways, we don't really like to shift ourselves. Like when we're in a given emotion, uh, when people are feeling upset, like they don't wanna be told they should feel happy, um, and yet no one really wants to be upset. Although there's this, do you know this result? I don't wanna, um, spin off into a a long discussion about this. **[1:28:03] Andrew Huberman:** But Robert Heath, a very controversial neurosurgeon from the, um, like 70s and 80s, did these experiments of stimulating in different parts of the brain, allowing people to self-stimulate different parts of their brain. And all, there were only 3 subjects cause it's a in vivo human neurostimulation experiment. All 3 subjects, by far, their favorite area to, uh, stimulate was this midline central nucleus, midline, the midline thalamic nucleus, rather, all 3 of them reported that the the sensation that they would lever press the most for was frustration and mild anger. **[1:28:36] Andrew Huberman:** Humans like that shit. Excuse my language. no, negative, negative Why **[1:28:40] Laurie Santos:** look. The horror movie industry would not exist if we didn't like fear, right? The the honestly, like, Twitter, X, whatever we're calling it now, would not exist if we didn't like outrage, right? These are kind of complicated negative emotions that have some positive benefit to us. And I think that this is something that people get wrong when they hear my line of research. You know, I tell people like, Oh, I teach this class about happiness at Yale, and people will say, like, Oh, you just want everybody to be happy. **[1:29:07] Laurie Santos:** You sort of embrace this toxic positivity, and I'm like, No No, toxic no, toxic positivity. **[1:29:11] Andrew Huberman:** positivity? **[1:29:12] Laurie Santos:** Yeah, it's this idea, I mean, you kind of see it in our culture right now. It's this sort of good vibes only, right? It's this idea that anything that feels, you know, mildly frustrating or like, hard to do, it's like, Oh, no, no, don't do that. It's like good vibes only, right? And there's this idea that if you're experiencing negative emotions, if you feel sad, or you feel a little lonely, or you feel a little upset at politics, whatever it is, that something's wrong, or you gotta take a pill, or you gotta do something to fix it, right? **[1:29:38] Laurie Santos:** I think that's a really dangerous idea, right? Because it's getting rid of this signal that we've been built to experience evolutionarily, that's really important, right? If you're experiencing outrage, that's telling you something super crucial. If you're experiencing kind of frustration, overwhelm is a big one. If you're kind of feeling, Oh, I'm so overwhelmed at work and I'm burned out, that's a really useful signal about behavioral changes you should make. Um, in class, I often tell my students that negative emotions are like that that dashboard on your car. **[1:30:08] Laurie Santos:** You know, you go in your car and you're like, you know, sometimes your drive, and the tire light comes on, or the engine light comes on. And and that's a pain in the ass, honestly, cause you're like, well, I gotta deal with it. But so it's not fun when these lights come on, but it's super useful information that if you actively ignore it for months and months, is gonna cause a much bigger problem later on. And I think this is how all of our negative emotions work. **[1:30:28] Laurie Santos:** You know, if you're feeling that, you know, negative emotion of loneliness means you need more social connection. If you're feeling overwhelmed, it means probably gotta take something off your plate before you burn out or get sick. If you're feeling sad, like, that's probably because there's some, you know, stimulus that matters, that is like, kind of, you're not there anymore, or if you're feeling grief and so on. I think too often we just like, wanna get rid of those, they we don't like them, so we wanna suppress those emotions. **[1:30:51] Laurie Santos:** Um, but that but suppressing our emotions is giving up useful evolutionary information that probably means we can take action to to fix and feel better. **[1:31:00] Andrew Huberman:** Americans might be surprised to hear this, but, um, I learned this from my father, who's from South America, he's from Argentina, went to British schools when he was young. And he told me when I was probably 10 or 12, I can't remember exactly how old, he said, you know, in, um, in the British formal school system, if you act too happy, people accuse you of being stupid, you know, to be to be gleeful or happy. Um, and I said, Uh, now I would say, well, they're perfectly fine being happy when they're drinking. **[1:31:30] Andrew Huberman:** I will say that the after-work, um, A alcohol culture in the London, 5:00, 14:00 PM crowd that they drink a is a yeah, like, I don't know if it's still the case, but they drink a lot and then they get very, like, gl- outwardly happy. But there's this idea, um, and and this was true when I came into academia, um, that if somebody wasn't super serious, that they might be stupid. Um, and I think in the United States now, we tend to celebrate, uh, more expressions of glee, um, but that's usually in the context of, like, celebrity and wealth, like these people getting on their private planes or something. **[1:32:06] Andrew Huberman:** But I think there's still some elements to this that that we internalize that, um, if you're happy, that you're not worrying about something. If you're not worrying about something, then you're ignoring the woes of the world. Maybe even the euro th- the threats that are all around you. And so we're some in some ways, we are conditioned to always wanna be happy. That does seem to be one message, but then we also get the conflicting message that to be happy is to be ignorant of what's really happening, if not to you, then to other people. **[1:32:32] Andrew Huberman:** And therefore, you're not fulfilling your role in society. So, who are you to be happy all the time? yeah, and There's a lot of judgment written into this thing around happiness, I'm realizing. **[1:32:39] Laurie Santos:** yeah, totally. And and I think you're you're bringing up something that I actually worry about a lot, right? Which is, is that hypothesis correct? Is it the case that if you're feeling happy, you just ignore the woes and all the terrible stuff in the world? Because then I'm creating, like, you know, a whole generation of Yale students who are gonna not fix the bad problems of life. And so it turns out there's a researcher at Georgetown, Constantine Kouchlef, who's tested this. **[1:32:58] Laurie Santos:** He actually asked the question, you know, is it the case that people who are experiencing more positive emotion, more satisfaction with life, do they ignore the problems of the world and not act, or are they the ones kind of going out and doing stuff? And so he did this in a couple different contexts. He looked for social justice causes. I'll tell the the climate version. So he looked at how many people are taking climate action. So do you go to a protest? **[1:33:19] Laurie Santos:** Do you put solar panels on? Are you donating money to climate causes? And he finds that the people who are really climate anxious, they tend to have less positive emotions. You're really worried about climate change, you tend to be more on the depressed, anxious side. But if you're doing stuff about it, then you tend to have more positive emotion. Um, I think he assumes the causal arrow goes in the other way, that, like, if you're happier, if you're experiencing lots of delights and positive emotion, you kinda have the bandwidth to do stuff, right? **[1:33:44] Laurie Santos:** You can go to that protest, where if you're super depressed, you're just gonna, like, lie in bed with your duvet. You don't have the bandwidth to do this stuff. And so this old kind of, like, Pollyannish hypothesis about happiness, I it makes complete intuitive sense. But if you look at the data, it's actually the opposite, which is a good thing because I think it gives us a mandate not to stay depressed about everything in the world, pissed off about what's happening. **[1:34:06] Laurie Santos:** Yes, those negative emotions are good to to notice and experience and act on, but, like, we can take care of ourselves, and it's okay. It doesn't mean we're gonna stop doing good stuff in the world. **[1:34:16] Andrew Huberman:** I have a family member, she's wonderful, she saves animals constantly, um, and she knows that she has an excessive number of animals, um, but she's from the East Coast, she's from New Jersey. And the other day, she told me she goes, You know, I like your podcast, but, you know, sometimes you have these guests on that are clearly from the West Coast, and you guys get into this real, like, West Coast, California, squishy stuff, and I just can't listen to those. **[1:34:38] Andrew Huberman:** And I said, I won't say her name, but, um, for sake of privacy, but, uh, and she said, But you know, I I really like it when, um, even if the topic is about, um, something kind of, uh, squishy. If the person's from the East Coast, then, like, you know, like, I believe what they're saying. And I said, and she goes, Yeah, you know, out there, you're into this and that. And I said, Well, out there in New Jersey, you know, language is kind of a weapon. **[1:34:59] Andrew Huberman:** She goes, It's absolutely a weapon, you know? So I do think there are these even local cultural things, like people from the Midwest. To me, I don't wanna, you know, stereotype, but they that there's a every time I go to the M the Midwest, I must say that there's this, there's an etiquette. People are just so polite and kind. So the d the level of of sort of mean level of decency is much higher than it is, say, in California. **[1:35:20] Andrew Huberman:** In California, there's some other things that are wonderful that are lacking elsewhere and on the East Coast and so forth. But yeah, I I think one can overgeneralize, but I think that the reason I raise this is that maybe we all need to pay a little bit of attention to the messages that we internalized in our family and our culture growing up. And ask ourselves whether or not our degree of happiness or lack thereof is, you know, by some programming, literally social programming that we've internalized. **[1:35:49] Andrew Huberman:** Cause I I grew up in a home where, um, cynical humor was rewarded, and I've learned over the years, in part, um, through discussions with Jamil Zaki and and others, like, Um, I'm working on it. Uh, not all my humor is cynical, but I don't like cynicism. It bums me out. It it it doesn't feel good, and I realize it doesn't feel good. I love delight, but I don't like cynicism. That's just me. And for the cynics out there, like, Cool, do you do you? **[1:36:14] Andrew Huberman:** But, um, I think we have to pay attention to kind of, like, where our set point is with this stuff. Cause some people are like, sitting real in the no push me and they wanna be unhappy, right? We're heading up on the holidays here, so, like, Scrooge, right? And other people, they're not feeling good, they wanna be happy. And then other people really are just like, no worries. I mean, down in Australia, it's all no worries. **[1:36:38] Andrew Huberman:** And what do they say in, um, Costa Rica? I always **[1:36:40] Laurie Santos:** oh, uh, Pura Vida, yeah. which means It's like, like, the, you know, good life, you know, chill life, everyone's just kinda, yeah, telling each other, like, yeah, **[1:36:46] Andrew Huberman:** how great life should be all day long, **[1:36:48] Laurie Santos:** yeah. I mean, I think y- y- you're getting at a a really important issue, right? Which is like, do we have a happiness set point? And kind of, if we do, where does it come from, right? In your example, you know, of kind of growing up cynically and having these kind of cynical messages. It could be that that was some sort of, you know, maybe epigenetic thing, right? You're around all these people that are cynical, and you learn how to do it, right? **[1:37:07] Laurie Santos:** But it it could be more of the like, genetic side. Maybe there's some pre-programmed, you know, sense of your negativity bias or something. You know, we don't have great answers to those things, but it's definitely true that our place really shapes kind of a lot of our tendencies that matter for happiness. Um, we know this from some of the like local kind of place things that you said. I think, you know, my my in-laws are from the Midwest, and, like, yeah, I totally. **[1:37:28] Laurie Santos:** They're just like, great, decent, kind, happy people. If they're listening right now, like, I don't know you, d I'm trying to train to be like you, **[1:37:34] Andrew Huberman:** they're wonderful. **[1:37:34] Laurie Santos:** right? Um, but but we also know from, like, even more macro level, right? So for now, for decades, the World Happiness Report, in collaboration with the Gallup Survey, has been surveying happiness of people across the world, right? And they come up with these, like, really consistent country-level differences in happiness. Um, the US, for a very wealthy country, is, like, not very happy. We're pretty low on the scale. And in fact, in the most recent World Happiness Report, we dipped like below, like the top 10, like, we d kind of had this major kind of dive for the first time. **[1:38:05] Andrew Huberman:** We're the happiest. **[1:38:05] Laurie Santos:** Um, uh, Scandinavians, so it's Oh, my stepmom's usually Denmark, Norway. Danish. I love going Yeah, Denmark. to Denmark. They're very Yeah, exactly. Um, yeah, they're very, very so so c- very happy they tend to be people. happy. And so we can ask the question, what's the difference? Maybe it's, you know, the great Scandinavian genes, probably not. It's actually a lot of their cultural practices, which build on the sorts of things we're talking about, you know, take social connection, right? **[1:38:25] Laurie Santos:** There's, um, a lot less work hours, so people can go home and hang out with their family. There's a huge culture of clubs, for example, in Denmark, where people go off and do sporting things. A lot of fitness, right? Um, and the structures to kinda get that fitness, right? Like, nobody expects you to be at work, so you can go, you know, ski or work out or hang out. I will say But **[1:38:43] Andrew Huberman:** they're very effective when they work, they're very proficient. I mean, I'm struck by the like average level of, um, operational and intellectual intelligence of somebody like the person. Y- your waiter in Denmark is an awesome waiter. Like, your and oftentimes has very interesting things to say. Like, the the level of proficiency and the level of focus when they are working is immensely high. So they're not just like kicking back all day. **[1:39:07] Laurie Santos:** no. And I and I think in part, it's a different attitude towards work, that there's a time for work, but you d don't let your work e- kind of, like, leak into other things. Um, there's this woman, Helen Russell, uh, who wrote a book about the happiness in Denmark, or The Danish Path to Happiness, I think, is the name of the book. Um, and she had this quote of like, she was talking to people in Denmark, um, and there's often a thing that will happen where your manager has to talk to you at work and give you feedback. **[1:39:31] Laurie Santos:** And it's in part because you're not leaving work on time, you're there overtime and they wanna have a conversation with you. Like, what's your problem? Why can't you finish your work in the allotted hours? Which, again, to American ears is like, what your manager would never say that. **[1:39:43] Andrew Huberman:** I love it, I love Um, but but it. **[1:39:44] Laurie Santos:** but that's that's the social thing. But but country-level, uh, happiness is also affected by some of the thought patterns we talked about. Like the, you know, the Scandinavians, even though it's like cold and dark and nothing like it's here in California with you right now, they take joy in these tiny moments. The this idea of hygge, right? H-Y-G-G-E hygge, where you notice the warmth of your coffee or have these candles or things. It's a it's a society that's really focused on presence in a really rich way. **[1:40:10] Andrew Huberman:** Love that. My like, I said, my father's Latin, he's from Argentina, and he married a Danish woman. And and I would say much of their life is about, um, cherishing and delighting in these these these small things, um, and the everyday things. Um, I think that's, dare I say, I think that's one of their major points of convergence, I know I'm sure there are others, but that's a major point of convergence. I think, you know, growing up in the United States, I sort of internalized this idea that, you know, you're supposed to figure out who, you know, who you are and go do big things. **[1:40:46] Andrew Huberman:** You know, like, um, that was the message that I internalized. Part of that was the high school I went to. It was super competitive high school, and, um, kind of people I tended to surround myself by. But, um, yeah, I think for some of us, the effort is in trying to learn to appreciate the little things. Having a dog and, um, we have to talk about **[1:41:02] Laurie Santos:** yes, please. **[1:41:02] Andrew Huberman:** dogs because you you've actually studied dogs, um, extensively. Dogs and non-human primates in in a natural setting, and, um, and the other, uh, old world primates, humans, um, you know, people talk about how dogs are just present. They're not thinking about the past, they're not thinking about the future. I'd like to challenge that just for a second. This isn't the cynic in me, this is the the scientist in me, and I'm genuinely curious. How do we know that dogs aren't thinking a little bit about the past or the walk they're gonna take later that afternoon? **[1:41:33] Andrew Huberman:** Do do we know? I mean, they have a prefrontal cortex that can anticipate things. They have a memory system, they have a hippocampus and a cortex that can remember things. So how do we know that our dog isn't sitting there, you know, yes, trying to glean as much sunshine as they can on their belly through the through the, uh, through the window. But maybe they're thinking like, Gosh, like, when are they gonna finish doing whatever it is they're doing so we can go outside and play ball? **[1:41:55] Laurie Santos:** yeah. It's such a hard question. It's such a hard question. And I mean, I think it's one that every dog owner has really wondered about, right? Um, I mean, I've thought about this question actually more in the monkeys, right? Who, you know, we can fight about dog neurobiology, and they've got some of this stuff, but, like, they're kinda distinct, the tiny, you know, walnut brains rather than like, Yeah, dogs primate size brains. **[1:42:14] Andrew Huberman:** have, uh, I will just say that well, first of all, dogs have, as far as I know, one of the most dramatic ranges in body size within a given, uh, species of animal. So Chihuahua, Great Dane. I think it's the dosing of IGF-1 that regulates body size in dogs. It's got a beautiful cover of Science magazine that we can put a link to with a Chihuahua and a Great love it, Dane, and it's just like, whoa, same species. **[1:42:34] Andrew Huberman:** Um, they have relatively small brains relative to their body weight size, regardless. **[1:42:39] Laurie Santos:** And if you look at the what the brain's doing, a lot of it is sensory. I mean, a lot of it's olfactory, right? It's not the ruminative thinking about stuff that we kind of have, like, expanded a lot in the primate brain, you Not a know, we **[1:42:51] Andrew Huberman:** lot of front prefrontal cortex. **[1:42:52] Laurie Santos:** not a lot of prefrontal cortex. **[1:42:53] Andrew Huberman:** Stuff right before behind your forehead, folks, is this is the part that allows, um, you to say shh to your impulses, to quiet your impulses, suppress them, and also, um, context-dependent learning and planning. So what to do, what to say, what not to do, what not to say in the given environment. There's a lot in your brain about that that is, you know, controlled by so-called executive function, the sort of conductor of the whole thing. And you're saying, dogs dogs have a pretty limited they're limited, real estate there. **[1:43:22] Laurie Santos:** they're limited. And if you think about what that real estate does, you know, it can kind of do that shush, you know, it can take you out of the moment. But they're kind of related parts of, you know, kind of cortex close by. That's doing a lot of the work of thinking about past episodes, thinking about what other people are thinking, thinking about counterfactuals, like not In this is what you. This **[1:43:41] Andrew Huberman:** humans are doing. is what humans are Yeah, yeah, **[1:43:42] Laurie Santos:** doing, like the human big version of this, right? Um, and this is the kind of stuff that gets us into trouble when it comes to presence. I think the dog's walking around. It's like, you know, I don't know what it's sniffing, like, hydrant, hydrant, hydrant, you know, like, dog, dog, person, person. And I think it's there because it doesn't have as much circuitry to be like, well, this hydrant's not exactly as good as the other hydrant I smelled before. **[1:44:02] Laurie Santos:** Like, what would, you know, Bob, the other dog, be thinking of this hydrant right now? I think, **[1:44:05] Andrew Huberman:** or they're still laughing at so and so from the dog park incident two weeks ago, right? So much of human, um, negative interaction is like, um, humans exchanging good and bad information about other humans. And it's like, kind of the basis of not all, but a lot of social media. **[1:44:23] Laurie Santos:** yeah. And a lot of our rumination is us thinking about the other information that people have about us, right? You When, know, kind of **[1:44:29] Andrew Huberman:** in fact, we have no ruminating. Exactly, idea what people are thinking. **[1:44:31] Laurie Santos:** exactly, yeah. And so, you know, I I often think about this. So in in Buddhist circles, um, there's this discussion of the monkey mind, by which they mean the part of your mind that when you're trying to be present and focus on the moment, especially in practices like meditation, kind of runs off somewhere. That's your monkey mind running off, and you just kind of yank it back by the tail or something. And I've always thought that was a real kinda unnecessary diss to monkeys, because my sense is, at least at least the rhesus monkeys, which is the species I worked with, they seem a lot more like dogs than humans, you know? **[1:45:00] Laurie Santos:** I I work with this group of monkeys on a a field in a field site called Cayo Santiago. It's this island off the coast of Puerto Rico, and it's home to 1,000 free-ranging rhesus monkeys. So we can do our studies and just kind of walk around with these monkeys who are kind of living freely, and you see them. And they just, you know, I'll sometimes sit near a monkey. And he's like, sitting there, looking out at to the ocean and just sitting there. **[1:45:20] Laurie Santos:** And I'm like, I bet what's going on in his head is not that human Buddhist version of the monkey mind, where he's like, What about this ocean? When do I have to go home? I have to cook something. Oh, what did my husband say to me? Blah, blah, it's not that. I think the monkeys version is just like, Ocean, ocean, like, it's just, it's just there. And Or even so, **[1:45:36] Andrew Huberman:** or even better, like Costello, I used to look at him and and think, what's going on in that brain of his? And then I realized it's probably, and this is a neurophysio, um, I wouldn't consider myself a neurophysiologist, but I've done some certainly a fair number of recordings from the the live brain. And I'm guessing most of what was in there is what we call hash, not the drug, but it's just it's background white noise, that's the sound you hear on the audio monitor when there's no clean signal to noise. **[1:46:00] Andrew Huberman:** I'm guessing it just hash, like, I I wonder if the term monkey mind well here, I'll just come clean. I always thought that monkey mind was this image of a little monkey swinging from tree to tree. And that it's the, um, adjective, uh, uh, sort of superimposed on the human brain. So, excuse me, it's the it's the verb of the of the moving monkey, um, uh, transformed into an adjective, um, judgment about the human brain. **[1:46:29] Laurie Santos:** But it's so, so sad if you're a monkey. Like, I think if monkeys had frontal cortex and could talk to us, we'd be like, don't blame us for your like, it's the human brain, part of the brain that's Well, it's like just gearing up. bird brain, So yeah, exactly, **[1:46:39] Andrew Huberman:** you know, somebody who really appreciates raptors and, um, diving birds. Think about the computations diving birds have to do. They have to adjust for the refractive index of the water, so where they see the fish is not where the fish is. And, um, you know, so when people say bird brain, I'm oh yeah. Don't like, Well, listen, **[1:46:52] Laurie Santos:** get me started on COVID bird, yeah, cognition. You guys are so the smartest, yeah, smartest so guys I've ever met. **[1:46:57] Andrew Huberman:** monkeys. But. But you're making me realize I, I always thought rhesus macaques, which are old world primates like us, or we're like them, that they had a fair amount of prefrontal real estate in their brain such that they could think and strategize and plan. I mean, if one just watches one episode of that Netflix special, which I love, um, which is Chimp Empire, there's all this stuff about who's in power. And then they're gonna team up, and then they're gonna wait a few days until that one's injured, and then they're not gonna groom the other one. **[1:47:31] Andrew Huberman:** And boom, there's an over. I mean, like, very complicated. It it's chess, not checkers for for old world primates. **[1:47:39] Laurie Santos:** yeah. I think there could be a big distinction between what chimpanzees are doing. I mean, they're our closest, you know, tied with bonobos, our closest living relative, you know, that was what, like, 30 million, you know, like, it was wasn't so long, right? Whereas rhesus monkeys are pretty far off, right? I think there could be a lot of things that happened, um, in between. And and we know that, not necessarily from the neurobiology, cause it's hard to ask kind of functional neurobiology questions with animals. **[1:48:04] Laurie Santos:** You can't kind of put them in a fMRI where they're doing behavior as easily as you can with a human. Um, but we know it from cognition studies that look at things like, you know, how good are, say, rhesus monkeys at perspective taking, at kind of taking on someone else's beliefs, knowing, Oh, somebody's thinking Theory of mind, something. Theory of mind, yeah, thinking something different than I'm thinking. Um, and they're not so hot at it. They really use their own perspective to make judgments pretty well. **[1:48:30] Laurie Santos:** Same thing when we look at cases of, like, counterfactual thinking, you know, do you do you have regret over an outcome that you didn't get right? Something that rhesus monkeys find kinda hard, right? So it seems like they're very good at sophisticatedly planning in the present moment, right? You know, you and I are talking here right now. If you're watching the video, you can see I have a cup, like I might be planning to pick up the cup, right? **[1:48:50] Laurie Santos:** But the cup's here, everything. I'm not simulating, What if this was a lovely martini, right? That that's the kinda thing that probably a human can do really well, but a monkey can't. So they can kind of plan and take next-step actions when there's the around the world that they experience, but they can't simulate worlds that are totally different. And that includes the kind of complicated stuff going on in somebody else's head. **[1:49:11] Andrew Huberman:** so they're good at short-term strategy. This fits with, um, what a friend of mine who studies behavior in macaques told me, which is that you can set up a really nice, complicated, on-paper, perfect experiment where the monkey is going to inform you about some important feature of how the brain works in terms of behavioral economics or something. But then what you realize is, or what the monkey realizes, even if it doesn't consciously realize, is that no matter what, they're gonna get reward 50% of the time on average, and they'll just hit the lever or give an answer as fast as they can, so they get that day's ration of reward, and just that's the end of the day. **[1:49:51] Andrew Huberman:** And so they're not cheating, they're just like, Why would I work any harder than this to actually do the experiment you want me to do? And so what many primate behavioral researchers end up becoming are monkey trainers. **[1:50:05] Laurie Santos:** Oh, yeah. I mean, the bane of every animal researcher's existence. This is whether you test dogs, monkeys, rodents, whatever, is what are called side biases. What's a side bias? It's you're giving an animal a choice between A and B. One A's on the left, B's on the right. And rather than think through these complicated things, you want them to think through, they're just like, Whatever, A left, I'll go left left. And you're like, No, I know you get reward 50% of the time, but I had this really creative question I wanted you to pay attention, and they just don't care. **[1:50:32] Andrew Huberman:** They don't care. Well, eh, Or or they're they're or they're **[1:50:34] Laurie Santos:** no, or they're getting rewarded enough at 50% that you have to do something like, what, what's researchers in the field? I mean, now we're getting really in the trenches, called breaking a side bias. We're like, No, I'm gonna give more reward at B. If you're only going to left, then I'm gonna give more reward at right. We move them and stuff. But it does often seem to be the case that the monkeys are training us more than we're training the monkeys, so **[1:50:55] Andrew Huberman:** I delight in that a little bit. I confess, just a little bit, just a tiny bit. Um, I mean, I, I **[1:51:01] Laurie Santos:** I'll I'll I'll share one study that that kind of gets at, you know, this sort of perspective taking, how good they are, that they are good when it's kind of what's in the here and now, right? Um, we were doing these studies, um, on the island, which involved sort of showing monkeys some food, and we had these, these eggplants in a box that we were making the monkeys look at for various reasons. And we couldn't find a monkey to test. **[1:51:19] Laurie Santos:** On this island, you have to kind of hike around till you find a monkey who's kind of chilled out and whatever. And we hiked around the whole mount, the whole island. It was taking forever, and we get back to our starting location, and there's there's an eggplant that's sitting there, and we're like, Where'd that where'd that eggplant come from? And we're like, and it's got, like, bite marks out of it. We're like, How did that? And I was like, Wait a minute, somebody must have stolen my eggplant, and we're like, Well, how did that happen? **[1:51:42] Laurie Santos:** Like, we were w- like, we were paying attention to the monkeys the whole time. We realized, like, No, no, no, they must have stolen it when we weren't. Like, we probably put it down for a second and, like, they took it, like, we didn't drop it. It was like and so it was like, we realized, like, Oh, not only are they good at stealing, but they can tell, like, if we're looking at it. But looking is something that, you know, all animals pay attention to gaze, like, you know, this is the kinda thing that even, you know, insects pay attention to, right? **[1:52:04] Laurie Santos:** That's why they have these kind of markings that look like eyes, so that birds won't eat them and stuff. Gaze following is really robust, but that's different than that monkey thinking, I bet that person's not looking. It's probably, like, No eyes, I can grab it, right? But if you look kind of more sophisticatedly, they're not good at it. But this was another case of realizing, like, Oh, the monkeys are actually a lot smarter than than we give them credit for, and maybe us too. **[1:52:26] Andrew Huberman:** yeah, so what we're talking about is they are good at, um, figuring out the basic rules. Maybe even up to the level of what you call in computer programming and gates. If this and that are happening, then I go right. If that and that are not happening, then I don't do anything. And if that n- and a third option are happening, well, then I go left. Um, and if all 3 are happening, it doesn't matter. Like, they can probably figure out, you know, 2 or 3 levels of and gates, Um, but what but, eh **[1:52:58] Laurie Santos:** they can do is simulate all these various situations. I mean, the amazing thing about being a human is I could, you know, I could imagine any scenario. Imagine, like, 700 podcast listeners jumped on this table right now, you know? Imagine if the table was orange, like, imagine if you were, I don't know, another podcaster, you're Malcolm Gladwell or whatever, **[1:53:14] Andrew Huberman:** More hair. **[1:53:15] Laurie Santos:** like, I can't more hair, or, I mean, I. I can simulate all these infinite different things to try to program that so hard, but it comes to us as humans in seconds. It's so fast, and it's the kind of thing that we use all the time. Honestly, it's it's the basis of a lot of our happiness. Look at, you know, the fiction that we engage in, right? You know, we're constantly paying deep and close attention to fictional worlds. **[1:53:36] Laurie Santos:** I've cared more about some fictional worlds than I've cared about my own family members. Sorry, family members, but it's true, right? Like, you're reading a novel and you're like, I am crying, I'm bawling, I'm cheering for these people that I know are completely made up. Because our brains just kind of dive into these sort of fake worlds, these alternative worlds so easily and so quickly, so powerfully. **[1:53:58] Andrew Huberman:** definitely. Wanna continue along the dimension of how we construct our happiness. But I just wanna make sure that I ask again about dogs. Um, and and, you know, let's let's just do this, cause, you know, I know it's so politically dangerous, but let's talk about the dog versus cat thing. You know, my sister loves cats. I don't dislike cats, but that doesn't mean I like them. I once rented a place where there was a big cat, I think it was one of these Maine Coon cats. **[1:54:28] Andrew Huberman:** His name was Balu, **[1:54:29] Laurie Santos:** They're basically dogs. **[1:54:30] Andrew Huberman:** and he's basically a dog, and Costello had certain cat-like qualities, like he just wanted to lounge all day. He could really move like a dog, but most of the time, he was kinda like a cat at home, and it was frustrating for me, but I mean, what do what do you think it is? You know, you have these feline people and you have dog people, and I'm definitely in the dog camp. But one of the reasons I love dogs is I assume they're in the present, but mostly it's the unconditional love. **[1:54:55] Andrew Huberman:** But what do you think it is, this dog-cat thing? I mean, cats are presumably in the present as well. Um, they don't make long-term plans, and if they do, they don't actualize those plans. So why is it that some people feel that cats are, like, nasty animals that are plotting against them, and some people delight in cats? **[1:55:12] Laurie Santos:** Yeah. Uh, they don't have great data on it, but my sense is it gets back to the unconditional love idea. The cat, like, if you're the kinda person who craves the unconditional love, you wind up being more of a dog person. But if you like the what was it that your your, uh, was it your niece? **[1:55:26] Andrew Huberman:** yeah, my niece, yeah. **[1:55:27] Laurie Santos:** What was it that your niece said this, like, **[1:55:29] Andrew Huberman:** No push me. She used to hold her finger up. Yeah, yeah, cats are like you could say, we're going **[1:55:33] Laurie Santos:** cats are a lot more no-push-me **[1:55:34] Andrew Huberman:** yeah, unless we said we were than going for ice cream, it was no push me. And I remember, and I still delight in it, thinking, like, awesome. She had just, I mean, like, she had such a strong spirit from the time she was you might little. **[1:55:46] Laurie Santos:** like cats, cause cats are a lot like no-push-me. And I think I think this is that, I don't want no. Well, I **[1:55:53] Andrew Huberman:** a cat. **[1:55:53] Laurie Santos:** think I think the like removal of the sort of no-push-me might be one of the last stages of evolution and domestication of dogs. And I know this because in my dog work, we also did some very fun work with dingoes, which are the Australian wild dogs. And we don't fully know their history. Our sense is like, those dogs kinda, like, got pretty close to humans, pretty tolerant of humans, but didn't go, like, all the way to Costello in terms of the bond. **[1:56:15] Laurie Santos:** Um, and one of the amazing things we get interacted with this group at a sanctuary for dingoes out in Australia, um, one of the only sets of genetically pure dingoes in the world. We have this wonderful privilege to work with, but we kinda had to, like, k- do our keep at these field stations. So we kinda went in and, you know, helped cleaned up with the dingoes and so on. And, uh, every morning, you'd go out and you'd give the dingoes their food, which are these big kind of chickens, um, and they would just, I mean, they'd just kind of eat raw chickens, not live chickens, but they'd just, like, chomp it in one gulp, just, like, bones and all. **[1:56:44] Laurie Santos:** And you're like, whoa. And then right after that, they'd wanna be kinda, Oh, come on, nudge me, be nice. It was like a cat in its best mood, but then at a certain point, they were just like, No, like, I'll stop. They just had, like, such their own will in this really amazing way, and it just felt incredibly cat-like. I'm like, you look like a dog, but your behavior is so much more cat-like, so so, I don't know. **[1:57:04] Laurie Santos:** No great studies on this. It'd be great to kinda figure it out, but my sense is distinction between dog people and cat people might be the unconditional love, no-push-me ratio of one people. Like, **[1:57:15] Andrew Huberman:** So interesting. And, um, I like to think, did not take us too far off course in our discussion about happiness because we clearly delight in this, and hopefully people do too, is that we think about the different the different brain architectures and the different capabilities the different brain architectures have across species. Um, and the fact that we live in such close proximity to some of these species is wild. When I was growing up, not everyone had a dog unless they had the space for it. **[1:57:38] Andrew Huberman:** Now I feel like dogs are everywhere. **[1:57:40] Laurie Santos:** Yeah, I mean, it's like such an enormous billion-dollar industry to have dogs. And it raises a question that kinda gets us back to some of the happiness work, like, which is, is that a good idea, right? All these people are investing their time, their energy, their spaces in dogs. You know, you could ask the question, Do they make us happier? And I know you've they do, yeah, don't I'm not gonna break everybody's heart, like, that. We've killed the cat people and the the cat no dog people. **[1:58:01] Laurie Santos:** people. No pet dogs in particular, but pets in general, um, wind up making us happier. Pet owners are statistically happier. Um, and I think it's for a couple of reasons based on the stuff we just talked about, you know, take the behavioral pattern that matters, social connection, for sure. Dogs provide that social connection themselves, you know, we just talked about, they tap into your caregiving system and so on. But as you talked about in your interactions with, like, you know, bulldog pleading, you know, like, bulldog, you know, what was the phrase you used? **[1:58:27] Laurie Santos:** Or what was it when you see a bulldog and you say, Bulldog something? **[1:58:31] Andrew Huberman:** oh, I when I see somebody with a bulldog, I just say, Um, excuse me, there's a bulldog tax, and then bulldog tax, I and then I sorry, yeah, and then I pet their bulldog. yeah, good. Let me And if you're gonna back. meet a bulldog, just understand they're they're shaped like a beer keg, so they can't scratch themselves on their on their hindquarters. So if you give them a scratch there, they're like, Thank you, because it's gotta be, uh, just awful. **[1:58:49] Andrew Huberman:** It's like having that scratch in the middle of your back, and you can't reach it. **[1:58:52] Laurie Santos:** So you do y- you you do the bulldog tax, and you have this nice social connection with the bulldog. But my guess is, and cause you're using verbal language, you also connected with the person. You probably say, Oh my gosh, what's his name? Oh, when did you get him? Blah, blah, blah. That's chatting with the barista at the coffee shop, right? That's doing the, you know, Nick Epley experiments we just talked about before. Pets wind up bringing us social connection. **[1:59:13] Laurie Santos:** Um, and one of the pieces of advice if you're feeling lonely is get a animal, not just so that the animal will give you some comfort. But, you know, particularly with a dog, you get to walk that animal, and then people talk to you. It's much easier to connect with people when you have dogs, so social connection is huge. Um, second thing is, you know, particularly again for dogs, um, what are people doing? They're getting out and walking, right? **[1:59:33] Laurie Santos:** So we're getting some people who never had a lot of physical exercise before are at least getting the kind of walks they need to do in for the dog. And even if they won't choose to do it for themselves, they often choose to do it for their dog. So you get, you know, exercise in, which is good for physical health, and we haven't talked about, but is enormously good for happiness. Meta-analyses showing, you know, half hour of cardio exercise a day is as good as an antidepressant medication for reducing symptoms of depression. **[1:59:56] Laurie Santos:** So just that walk with your dog is great. But beyond that, I think they help our thought patterns, right? And this is true for dogs, I think, and cats, right? Where, you know, as you were saying, we're wondering what they're doing. Sometimes if they're sitting there and we're just petting them, what we're doing is we're sitting there and we're petting them. So they give us these wonderful sensory experiences, and I think they cause us to be a little bit more present, especially when we're kinda interacting with them. **[2:00:17] Laurie Santos:** You know, we're interacting with our dogs, unless you're taking the Instagram pictures of the dog. But usually, when you're playing with the dog or whatever, it's you're just there. You're not on your phone. You're just kinda mindfully experiencing life with your dog. Kinda like when you talked about your road trip, you know, part of what probably brought you into the present moment, especially if your girlfriend was working, was like that the dog was interacting with you. **[2:00:35] Laurie Santos:** So the dogs help us, not cause they're inherently kind of happiness-inducing. They help us tick these boxes of better behaviors for happiness, better thought patterns for happiness, and they're kind of a delight, so they kind of give us some positive emotion too. **[2:00:49] Andrew Huberman:** I love all of that. Uh, just want it, um, double-click, uh, if it were on this idea that they can be a bridge for social connection, that's really powerful. A friend of mine who used to smoke cigarettes, who doesn't any longer, um, in fact, I remember when I was a postdoc at Stanford, that, like, the mostly the foreign postdocs. But they used to gather outside and have cigarette cigarette breaks all the time. Now you're not allowed to smoke on the medical school campus, and I think probably on the main campus, too. **[2:01:16] Andrew Huberman:** Most places you're Yeah, most not allowed to smoke outdoors, **[2:01:17] Laurie Santos:** universities, yeah. **[2:01:18] Andrew Huberman:** right, because of secondhand smoke, any any, in any case. But, um, but he said to me, you know, it used to be that, um, before, people either knew or f- fully internalized how bad smoking was is that asking for a cigarette or sharing a cigarette side-by-side with somebody was a way that people engaged in casual interaction. Not just outside of bars, not just to meet potential mates, et cetera, but it was just it was a bridge. **[2:01:43] Andrew Huberman:** You know, you could walk up to somebody and say, you know, like, we used to call it like bumming a smoke, like, you, you ask for a cigarette, or you you if someone was smoking, you could go stand by them and you also smoke. And so it was this terribly health-diminishing habit, but it served as a lot of social lubricant. **[2:01:57] Laurie Santos:** yeah. It also it also gives you another behavior that we know is really important for happiness, which is time. Um, there's a lot of social science research on this phenomenon that's called time affluence, which is a sort of subjective sense that you feel wealthy in time. You kind of just have a break, right? You get a, like, a smoking break is one of these, right? You get a break. And often people, you know, back in the day when smoking was allowed, one of the ways that you got your breaks, often in not-so-great workplaces, was like, you could ask for a smoke break. **[2:02:23] Laurie Santos:** My mom talks about this, she was a a teacher educator for super long time where you don't get a lot of breaks. But, you know, back in the 70s, if you were a smoker, they'd let you go outside for 10 minutes, and that was a sort of break, right? So I think this other unhealthy habit kind of gave us the opportunity to take breaks, which we know are great for happiness and so great for happiness that if you don't have any of the so-called time affluence, this sense that you have some free time. **[2:02:45] Laurie Santos:** If you experience what researchers call time famine, where you feel like almost starving for time, it's a huge hit on your well-being. If you self-report in these surveys being time famished, So I don't have time to meet up with my friends, I never have time for the stuff I wanna do. That's as big a hit on your well-being as if you self-report being unemployed. You know, listeners, if you lost, you have a job and you lost it tomorrow, you'd probably think of that as a big hit on your happiness. **[2:03:07] Laurie Santos:** Just not having any time for the little breaks in life is as bad. Um, and th- this gets back to our earlier discussion about money and happiness, which is researcher Ashley Wilens at Harvard Business School has kinda pushed the idea that what's going on with these, you know, low-income folks who have a real hit on happiness, right? Not having a high income hurts your happiness. Her theory is a lot of that actually has to do with time. **[2:03:29] Laurie Santos:** Because if you have a really low income, you don't have a car to get to work, so you're taking the bus and it's taking you forever, you're working multiple jobs, right? That a lot of the reason that money affects happiness and not having money affects happiness is that it covaries with not having time. And the real hit on our happiness is just the time part, more so than the money part. **[2:03:46] Andrew Huberman:** So we need to be in pursuit of things, we need to work, um, but we also need some free time. We can't have too much free time or too much work, basically, and the sweet spot is often hard to maintain or even know what what that sweet spot is. **[2:04:01] Laurie Santos:** Yeah, I think this this term kind of time affluence and what researchers mean by it is helpful here, right? It's the subjective sense that you have some free time. It's not I objectively go into your calendar and you show me how many open blocks there are. It's your sense that you have a break, and this provides an interesting hack that we can use to get more of it, right? Which is that we can kind of just frame things as having more time. **[2:04:23] Laurie Santos:** Um, you know, cause sometimes when you get a break that you don't expect, it can feel like a lot. Um, I teach this, uh, class about happiness on Yale's campus, and I talk about time affluence. It's one of the topics in my class. And I always felt that was really ironic cause our young people today, especially at, you know, elite college institutions, are so time famished. They're running from thing to thing, they have a million extracurriculars and so on. **[2:04:43] Laurie Santos:** So I feel weird, like, I'm gonna lecture them for an hour on time affluence and tell them all these studies. And so what I did was, uh, they in the syllabus, it said, there's a lecture on time affluence, and they come to class, and I have my teaching assistants that are handing out little flyers that say, Today's, you know, like, lecture is about time affluence, and to teach you what that is, I'm gonna give you some no class today. **[2:05:02] Laurie Santos:** So you didn't know you walked to class, and now you got a free hour and a half. And it just happened to be one of these unusually warm, you know, like, California-esque days in New Haven, where it was, like, sunny out. So kids, you know, got a bubble tea with their friend, or some of them went on a hike near the, like, local, you know, state park. And one of the students, I remember, burst into tears when she got this this form, and she said, Uh, this is the first free hour and a half I've had for, like, the last 3 months, you know? **[2:05:28] Laurie Santos:** Wow, they're Um, the one **[2:05:29] Andrew Huberman:** that stressed. **[2:05:30] Laurie Santos:** they're that stressed. But what I find interesting about this is, like, I didn't give them a month off vacation, right? I gave them an hour back unexpectedly, and it felt like it was huge. And it and I don't know your schedule, but sometimes my schedule can be so overwhelmed and so packed that, you know, there's a half hour meeting that gets canceled. I'm just like, Oh, and, like, the relief, I feel like I could learn a new language. **[2:05:49] Laurie Santos:** I could, you know, like, you just feel like, but it's a half hour, right? And I think this is a hack we can use for ourselves, right? You know, listeners, right now, go in your calendar a few months from now and just, like, you know, take, like, you know, months, months away, pick an hour period and just write in, like, Huberman Lab Time Affluence, and just don't put anything in that. And my guess is when you get to that hour that you've scheduled months later, you'll just be like, Oh my gosh, this feels great. **[2:06:12] Laurie Santos:** We can kind of gift ourselves these little windows of time. Um, another hack we can do is to make good use of the free time we do have, and this is kind of a puzzle. Something that I found unexpected when I saw the data on this, which is that turns out we actually have more free time now than we did, like, 10, 15 years ago, if you add it up. Not just, kind of, post-COVID, but in general, we've been getting more free time. **[2:06:34] Laurie Santos:** However, the free time we have is cut up differently. It's in smaller chunks. It's like 5 minutes when that Zoom meeting ends a little earlier, 10 minutes if your kid falls asleep early, or whatever it is. And we don't think it's that much, so we just kinda blow it. But if you add it up, it winds up more than people in past decades have had, and probably, like, good time that we could use for stuff. And so these little chunks of time are what the, uh, journalist Bridget Shulte calls time confetti, which I think is such a great image of it. **[2:07:01] Laurie Santos:** It's this little, you know, 5 minutes here and there, but you can do a lot with those minutes if you add them up. Um, we just have to use them a little bit more intentionally, right? And that could be, you know, for some of the stuff you talk about on this podcast a lot. Like, use that 10, do the 7 minute New York Times workout, you know, do do the kinds of things we're talking about, you know, that's the time you text your friend and have a delight Get some sunlight or get some in there, mini sunlight, walk outside, walk, yeah, walk in right? **[2:07:23] Laurie Santos:** Um, sunlight, huge. Or just the problem so you can is, what do we **[2:07:25] Andrew Huberman:** face the sun. **[2:07:25] Laurie Santos:** do when we get the time confetti? Or, what I mean, what do I do when I'm in a bad moment? Pull out our phone, check our email, scroll through. It's like, again, this sort of bittersweet dopamine hit that's not being effective. So if you feel really overwhelmed and you objectively don't have a lot of time, remember that the time confetti that you already have, it's already sitting there, can be really valuable if you use it well. **[2:07:46] Andrew Huberman:** super important, um, because I think the filling of those spaces with what I love the, uh, analogy to NutraSweet or artificial sweeteners is it's gonna taste like it's providing some sort of nourishment, but it's, um, probably just creating a more sense of craving and want on some level. Would really like to talk about reward circuitry, just thematically, um, listeners of this podcast, and even if they've never heard one of these podcasts before, um, are probably familiar with the word dopamine. **[2:08:16] Andrew Huberman:** We've talked about it a bit, and as we were talking about earlier, everything about the dopamine reward circuitry, which, of course, includes other chemicals too, is based on prior experience relative to current experience, relative to anticipated outcome. What sometimes refer to as reward prediction error. Think something great's gonna happen, something great happens, great. Think something great's gonna happen, something less than great happens, sucks way more than you would anticipate. Think that something not so great's gonna happen, something so-so or great happens, huge reward. **[2:08:51] Andrew Huberman:** Novelty surprise brings the bri- positive novelty and ru- and surprise brings the biggest rewards. And this is what I would like to kind of paint as the backdrop. Think of it as a conceptual mural behind us as I ask the question, maybe, just maybe, we're not supposed to be happy all the time, or maybe even all that often. And when we're feeling not so great, or even lousy, provided it's not dangerous levels of depression, maybe we should frame that as the backdrop for the greater happiness that will come when we start to emerge from that lousy state. **[2:09:33] Andrew Huberman:** Now, some people could say, Well, now you're just kind of using neurobiology to, you know, twist around what would otherwise be a lousy experience and tell me that it's good for me. No, uh, what I'm trying to say is, you know, people want to be happy. I think we'd all love to be happy all the time, but we're not wired to be happy all the time. And maybe the feelings of happiness can't exist unless they have contrast with these neutral or negative emotion states that we call, I don't know, feeling lousy, feeling anxious, etcetera. **[2:10:02] Andrew Huberman:** And just I realize I can pose long questions, but I just wanna provide a little bit more context for the moment, which is that every circuit in the brain, our ability to see light, literally depends on the contrast with the so-called off circuitry, which is the circuitry in our visual system that perceives darkness. We need contrast to be able to see light. Everything's push-pull, hunger, satiety, cold, heat perception, um, go, no-go, it's all push-pull circuitry in there. **[2:10:34] Andrew Huberman:** Why wouldn't happiness have a push-pull relationship with unhappiness, or at least neutral affect? **[2:10:41] Laurie Santos:** Yeah, well, I think it does. I mean, you're giving a neurobiological explanation for what psychologists in this field of positive psychology have referred to as what's called hedonic adaptation, which is a fancy way of saying we get used to stuff. Um, you know, you, like, grab the, you know, delicious ice cream cone or I don't know, or a Cuban meal, we do delicious salad, really healthy, but it's tasty, healthy, tasty salad, right? Start eating it. First bite is like, This is awesome. **[2:11:07] Laurie Santos:** I'm so into it. It's great. Bite number 2, little bit less awesome. Little bit less. By the 10th bite, it's not cause you're full or you're, like, you know, feeling disgusted. It's just like that sensory experience, you've gotten used to it, right? It's just no longer as interesting. **[2:11:19] Andrew Huberman:** I walk into a bakery. Mm, smells amazing. Spend 5 minutes in the bakery, 10 minutes in the bakery, you attenuate, you habituate. **[2:11:26] Laurie Santos:** yeah, which is great. I mean, you wouldn't maybe you wanna be firing, your, you know, neurons would get all exhausted and stuff, but it's in in one way terrible for happiness, in another way very good for happiness, but in in a major way terrible for happiness, which is the following. Every good thing in life, if it sticks around, becomes kinda boring over time. You just kind of used to it. Um, I use the example sometimes of, you know, the last time you the first time your partner said, I love you, or if you had a kid, the first time your kid said, Mommy or Daddy, that feels amazing, right? **[2:11:58] Laurie Santos:** But, like, you know, last week, my husband said, I love you. He's like, whatever, I'm just used to it, right? You know, last week when your kid was like, I love you, mom, like, you know, Mommy, like, you don't care, right? The most amazing thing in life, if it gets repeated, just becomes boring, and that sucks because, you know, you like the most amazing things in life to kind of keep being awesome. It's pretty sad that we don't have it, right. **[2:12:20] Laurie Santos:** This has a flip side, though, which is very good for happiness, hedonic adaptation, which is the most terrible thing in life can happen, and over time, you get used to that too, you know? So your partner breaks up with you, um, you find out you have a chronic disease, right? Just something like really bad happens. Day 1, when you find out that piece of information, it is awful. But day 2, yeah, it's still awful, but that's just your life, and then over time, it kind of gets better. **[2:12:45] Laurie Santos:** Um, there's a very famous study in the field of happiness science that tried to look at this with, um, people who experienced a really great event in theory, uh, winning the lottery, um, and people who experienced really bad events, real events in life, um, becoming paraplegic. So you, you used to be able to walk, and now you've lost the use of your legs. You survey happiness, um, in people who haven't had these experiences, and you ask, predict how bad it would be to have this. **[2:13:08] Laurie Santos:** And people say, you know, day 1 of winning the lottery would be really great, and, you know, a year from now, a year from that point, winning the lottery would still be just as great. It'd be awesome. Same thing with paraplegic, you know, year, you know, moment you become paraplegic, that day is a really crappy Thursday, but a year from then is still just as crappy. And what you find is people, you know, on the day you become paraplegic or the day you win your lottery, like, that is a big shift in your contrast, right? **[2:13:32] Laurie Santos:** You know, the day you win the lottery is an awesome Thursday. Day you become paraplegic is terrible. But a year from then, it turns out your happiness is no different from baseline from the day before that event happened, right? Statistically, um, and that is shocking, right? Like, I know these results, I can quote the paper, but, like, if you told me today, Laura, you, you know, you walk out of this studio, you get hit by a car, you're paraplegic. **[2:13:53] Laurie Santos:** How would you feel in 2026? I'd be like, my life is still really crummy. Um, but statistically, that's just not gonna happen. What does that mean? That's kinda good news about hedonic adaptation for happiness. That means the worst thing possible could happen to you, and you have all these processes that are just gonna get used to it over time, and it's gonna be okay. And I think this is an important aspect of our psychology that we forget. **[2:14:15] Laurie Santos:** I think sometimes we have opportunities to do things in life that are a little risky, something we might try out that we might screw up or fail at, or that we'll be bad at at first. And we don't do it because we're scared. We're making a prediction of, like, Oh, well, if I failed, or if I screwed that up, you know, I'd just be unhappy. But actually, all these mechanisms that we have of hedonic adaptation means those things aren't gonna affect you for as long as you think. **[2:14:37] Laurie Santos:** So, I think the contrast hypothesis about happiness is real. Um, good things don't stay good things over time, um, but the bad things don't either, and so, but we still want the good things to stay good over time. And so that raises a question of how we can do that. Um, and Liz Dunn, whose work I've mentioned before, she likes to use this phrase that scarcity engineers happiness, right? Um, one thing we can do is space out the good things in life, you know? **[2:15:02] Laurie Santos:** So if I was having that really delicious, healthy salad with the avocado and whatever, if I had that every day, it would stop being good, um, but if I had it very, very infrequently, it would still be good every time I come back to it. And so so sometime sometimes, oddly, the way we make ourselves happier is to kind of remove positive experiences, especially extreme positive experiences, um, and kinda space them out so we can kinda come back to them over time. **[2:15:26] Andrew Huberman:** I definitely agree with that. I also and forgive me, folks, but I think I understand why, um, dogs are so awesome. They don't attenuate to reward. You tell them they're gonna get this little piece of amazing, whatever beef jerky or something, and they're like, Yes. Then 2nd trial, yes, 3rd trial, yes. I mean, presumably at some point, they reach satiety or fatigue, but the there's something about their reward pathways that they don't seem **[2:15:55] Laurie Santos:** it's interesting. to attenuate much. And Yeah, **[2:15:56] Andrew Huberman:** there's a if there's feedback to us on that, it's like, Okay, okay, you know, it's great. They they'll keep, um, delighting in the simple little things. It seems like almost as much as the the first time. yeah, I mean, it's We are not like that. **[2:16:11] Laurie Santos:** it's interesting. No, to my knowledge, people haven't studied hedonic adaptation in dogs, but it's a really good question. But but we are not like that for most things. Um, and this is this, this sucks, right? I mean, it, it, it's also the case that in addition to kind of getting used to stuff over time, um, it's also showing a different feature, which is this sort of more particular contrast feature you're talking about. So we over time, we kind of habituate. **[2:16:33] Laurie Santos:** That's one sort of neural mechanism. But another is the one that you mentioned, which is about the contrast, right? And that's what you see, kind of, you see both of them say in the light perception, right? If I show you the same light over time, you're gonna habituate. That's hedonic It literally, d adaptation. **[2:16:46] Andrew Huberman:** for folks listening, f- uh, it literally disappears. If I set up the right experiment, um, Russ and Karen DeViLoY at Berkeley years ago did these, uh, beautiful experiments. You you look at like a grating of light projected onto a wall, and if you can stabilize the eyes so that they're not moving around, the it literally will disappear. And same thing with an odor, same thing with touch, right? Like, I wasn't thinking about my contact yeah, same thing or the chair, with happiness, my same thing with the **[2:17:10] Laurie Santos:** deliciousness of salad. **[2:17:10] Andrew Huberman:** habituation, attenuation, these these are technical terms when you really get down into it. And the push-pull antagonism between, um, light and dark, this smell, yes, no, on, off, push, all of it, go, no-go, every single aspect of the nervous system functions this way. Flexor, and flexor, extensor in your muscular yeah, but skeletal system. **[2:17:29] Laurie Santos:** that gets to maybe what I would think of as different, so hedonic adaptation is the same stimulus over time, like, almost like habituation. There's a different thing that happens when you get what you might call a contrast, um, and there's all kinds of visual illusions that sort of function on this. If you've ever seen the one where it's like, you know, is it the same color over here, over here? I mean, if you throw this on your show page to show people, and it's like, Oh, it looks different. **[2:17:50] Laurie Santos:** It's like, No, no, no, that's because of the the kind of contrast between the two things. You see something that's really bright over here, it makes something else look a little darker, right? Um, that's a different negative effect on our happiness a lot of the time. This is the comparison effect, right? This is like, you know, my $50,000, 000 seems kinda crappy cause I hang out with people who, you know, have $100,000, 000. Objectively, I have a tremendous amount of money, but I feel bad cause I'm kind of comparing against something else. **[2:18:16] Laurie Santos:** And so oftentimes, when we're evaluating different rewards, we're kind of comparing them against what other people had or what we've had in the past. And that means that being in an objectively good situation might feel really crappy if you just have somebody else that has a slightly better objectively good situation. My favorite example of this actually comes from the sports world. Um, so researchers asked this interesting question, like, How happy are you when you win, uh, an Olympic medal, right? **[2:18:41] Laurie Santos:** You're on the stand, you won an Olympic medal, and also, who's happiest? So gold medalist is up there, best in the world, you might assume they're the happiest, right? And they are, they're smiling. The researchers analyze this by looking at facial expressions and kind of code the muscles and so on, but turns out they're not the happiest, right? Who's the happiest? Well, let's look at the silver medalist. Are they happiest? No. In fact, actually, if you code their facial muscles, they're showing expressions like contempt, deep sadness. **[2:19:06] Laurie Santos:** This is the same expression you'd make, like, if your parent died or, like, you know, a real terrible grief moment. **[2:19:11] Andrew Huberman:** This is the I I don't adhere to this, but this is the quote unquote, second place is first loser kind of mindset. **[2:19:17] Laurie Santos:** cause the idea is, like, you know, who's your major comparison point if you're in silver, you know, point 2 seconds or something, you would've gotten gold, and you're not feeling objectively like you're the 2nd best on the planet. You've beat, you know, every but all but one of billions of people on the planet. No, you just feel terrible, so that's silver medalist. But what's going on with the bronze medalist, right? There's another person on the stand, what's their comparison point? **[2:19:38] Laurie Santos:** It's not gold. They were multiple people, multiple seconds away. Their salient comparison is like, By the grace of God, like, I'm up here at all. I almost, like, you know, 2 seconds the other direction, I would've never gotten up here. And when you analyze the bronze medalist's facial expressions, they're sometimes even happier than the gold medalist, definitely happier than the silver, who's objectively better, but sometimes even happier than the gold medalist. Cause they're like, Ugh, relative to my comparison point, I'm doing amazing. **[2:20:03] Andrew Huberman:** And the gold medalist is expected to get gold the next year, or else it's pure reward prediction error. Um, especially if they internalize the expectations of the audience, uh, the the spectators, excuse me, um, because if they come back the next year and they're 2nd or 3rd on the podium or not on the podium, it's seen as falling from a higher place. **[2:20:22] Laurie Santos:** exactly. This is a point that I make with my Ivy League students who've been perfect in their grades and perfect at everything to get into a place like Yale, which is, like, turns out that's a terrible recipe for happiness. **[2:20:32] Andrew Huberman:** The only way forward is d stay stay there down or create Yeah, stay a new upward **[2:20:36] Laurie Santos:** there, you don't notice, right, cause you're habituated to it, just like the pattern down feels really bad, like, that's a terrible comparison. Um, I often play my students that DJ Khaled song, All I Do Is Win. All I do is win, win, win. And I was like, All you do is win, win, win. Would be a terrible way to experience success in life, cause you'd just stop noticing it over time if you won. And that's messed up because it means when you get, when you finally hit the success that you were striving for, if you just stay at that level, just stops being good, which sucks. **[2:21:08] Laurie Santos:** And so that raises a different question, which is like, what is a hack that we can do to get away from that? Um, one is to not look for the silver lining, but to look for the bronze lining, but I'm, which is, you know, you kind of think of reference points that are lower than I love your usual a good conceptual pun, but, uh, yeah, **[2:21:22] Andrew Huberman:** especially when it's framed in an experiment, so thank you for that. **[2:21:25] Laurie Santos:** yeah, it was like, right, science **[2:21:26] Andrew Huberman:** Yeah, no, that's just especially **[2:21:27] Laurie Santos:** experiment, that's good. Yes, yeah, **[2:21:28] Andrew Huberman:** gratifying to me. **[2:21:28] Laurie Santos:** so look for the bronze lining, which means find a reference point that's not as good. And for most of the things you're comparing, whether that's your looks, your fitness level, your finances, y- you can look and find somebody that's doing worse than you. Um, another great hack for this and this is more one that's a kind of a hack for hedonic adaptation getting used to stuff, um, actually comes from the ancient traditions. I know you talk a lot about, you know, the smart, you know, folks back in the day who came up with this stuff, right? **[2:21:52] Laurie Santos:** This is one from the Stoic tradition, a practice called negative visualization. So Stoics, like Marcus Aurelius, thought, when you wake up in the morning, you should have the following thought pattern. You should think, Today, I will lose my success. I will be exiled. I'll lose my partner. I will lose my health. I won't be able to walk. It it doesn't say ruminate on that for forever, but just like a little, and then stop and say, Ha! **[2:22:13] Laurie Santos:** I'm not exiled. I still have my success. I still have my partner and so on. This is a technique called negative visualization, um, where you just imagine you don't have to live it in real life, you just imagine you lose something. Um, if you've ever lost something you're hedonically adapted to, you know how quickly you recognize the value of it. This happens to me with my phone all the time. I'm a chronic phone loser, and I'm like, you know, and I'm like, Oh my god, my phone is gone. **[2:22:36] Laurie Santos:** I left it in the airport. All my contacts are there, da-da-da. And then I'm like, Oh, it's in the car, and you have this, I love my phone, like, it's so There's that line in valuable to me. **[2:22:44] Andrew Huberman:** Pulp Fiction where he says, like, Um, what is it? It's like, it's, um, finding it was at some point, I think it was Travolta says something someone will know it where, you know, uh, finding finding it almost made, uh, losing it worth it. Like, because you you appreciate it in a way that you didn't before, because it was taken away from you. **[2:23:01] Laurie Santos:** and that sucks to really lose your phone sometimes, in my case, you really lost the phone, right? But negative visualization, you don't have to do that, you just use your imagination, right? And so, uh, if you're listening right now and you have a kid, um, let's do this negative visualization. The last time you saw your kid was the last time you ever saw them. You're never gonna see them again. Nope, didn't happen. You don't have to ruminate about it, but my guess is the next time you hug your kid, you'll hug just just that 2 seconds of rethinking about what things would be like without it can break through hedonic adaptation. **[2:23:31] Laurie Santos:** So one of my favorite hacks for hedonic adaptation. You can use scarcity really space things out, but for the things you can't space out, you can't, like, have a kid and get rid of a kid for 2 weeks and come back to your kid, right? You can use your imagination, and it doesn't take much to start to realize what you have and appreciate it more. So, **[2:23:49] Andrew Huberman:** I love this one, mostly because I think most people, including myself, really, um, we want to avoid thinking negative stuff, especially on purpose. But what you're telling us is that it provides a a wonderful contrast point to kind of trampline off into the reality that is our current reality, which is far better than the these horrible scenarios. **[2:24:07] Laurie Santos:** a, and I think this gets to, you know, another domain in which I see kind of toxic positivity playing out a lot, which is kind of in this sort of domain of like, you know, how do we do this stuff better, right? Like, how do we, you know, kind of get good things in life? And so there's a lot of talk in some circles about this idea of like, manifesting, right? I'll just think about, you know, I'm f- feeling lonely, I'll just think about what it's like to have friends, or I'm not fit right now, I'll just imagine, you know, my fit future and fantasize about what it's like to, you know, run marathons and things like that. **[2:24:34] Laurie Santos:** Um, turns out this can have, like, a this can be a case where you're using imagination in a bad way. Because what happens when you really deeply imagine, say, the rewards of, like, being super fit, you start to get, like, your brain's like firing the reward cylinders for, like, what it feels like to be super fit. And there's evidence from Gabrielle Oettingen's lab at NYU that, like, you actually get less motivated to do stuff. She does this in the context of fitness. **[2:24:58] Laurie Santos:** She has people who, you know, wanna run a 5K or wanna lose some weight, for example. They talk about, like, you know, imagine how great it would be to do this, and they're less motivated to put on their running shoes and practice because they've already imagined the fantasy future. Turns out, instead of manifesting, a better technique if you have some habit that you wanna engage in is to imagine the obstacles, the bad stuff that's coming up, right? **[2:25:20] Laurie Santos:** So, oh, I wanna get out and run this 5K. Well, what's the obstacle to that? I'm gonna be in bed, alarm's gonna go off. What's gonna happen? Like, Oh, I'm gonna be, you know, too warm, like, maybe I put my running clothes on, or, oh, like, I'm not gonna wanna, it's gonna be cold out, like, oh, I should get a nice, you know, fuzzy hat to be able to do this. This Oettingen's work shows that if you actually imagine the negative things again, not ruminating about them, freaking out, but imagine particularly the obstacles for a habit you wanna engage in, um, you kind of naturally come up with solutions to those obstacles, which makes it easier. **[2:25:49] Laurie Santos:** So sometimes thinking about the bad stuff can be helpful. We just have to regulate when we do it. **[2:25:55] Andrew Huberman:** I have a friend who's a cardiologist from UCSF, and he says, you know, the danger of telling people that you're going to write a book, or that you're going to start a podcast, or that you're gonna start a company, is that if you have very supportive friends and if you tend to be a pretty high-agency person, you'll get a lot of praise and a lot of reward. And there's a lower probability that You're you'll actually do the not doing it thing because you've yet. **[2:26:15] Andrew Huberman:** derived some of the reward. Whereas if people tell you, you know, yeah, that seems kind of unlikely given that this and that, you know, it feels, um, doesn't feel so good. And, obviously, we we want to encourage each other. This is the complicated thing. It's a, you know, it's a, it's a, it's a very narrow beam to walk on. You wanna encourage people, but you don't wanna give them so much reward that then it undercuts their their motivation, and you certainly don't wanna discourage them to the point where they give up on themselves prior to even trying. **[2:26:41] Laurie Santos:** that's right. **[2:26:42] Andrew Huberman:** But, you know, at least in the United States, probably in other countries too. Goodness, do we love a story about somebody who was told, like, they couldn't do it, and they did it. You know, I think about the about the enormous popularity of David Goggins, who is, you know, had a truly difficult childhood and internalized all these messages of how terrible he was. And, um, and then used those voices, other people's and his own, in his head to push himself to do tremendously difficult things, and then to continue to do tremendously difficult things, and to self-publish one of the most, you know, popular self-published books of all time. **[2:27:18] Andrew Huberman:** And then to go off and become a a medic, and now he's, uh, s effectively doing the training of somebody going to medical school for his new train, like, he just refuses to stop. Um, and it's, according to him, he sat in that very chair and said, It's fueled by an internal voice of you of you can't do it. And then he fights back against that voice, which is, oh, so different than manifesting, uh, this image of success. **[2:27:42] Laurie Santos:** exactly. And and and there's again, this is a case where there's nuance. You have to believe it's possible, right? Those negative voices can't tell you it's impossible, because something else we know about motivation is that believing something is possible, um, which requires lots of effort, but it is possible, is quite helpful for you. Um, the best example of this comes from another sort of sporting case. Uh, I don't know if you know the case of Roger Bannister, who's the first guy to run the 4-minute mile, right Break under break the **[2:28:08] Andrew Huberman:** break the 4 minute. **[2:28:08] Laurie Santos:** 4-minute mile. Um, and before he did that, people thought it was, like, physiologically impossible, like, the human body cannot do this. And he was like, No, the human body can do this. And everyone was like, Roger, you're crazy, whatever. But then he, you know, trained and trained and probably had to overcome his obstacles. He ran it, and then within, like, 2 months, somebody else broke the 4-minute mile. Like it had not been broken in all of human history. **[2:28:28] Laurie Santos:** But as soon as people had evidence of, like, Oh, people can do that, like, now everybody does it. Now, I don't know. I mean, I'm, as you can see, not a fit person, but, like, lots of people run 4-minute miles. It's not like the hugest high schoolers thing. run it, which Yeah, is crazy. I mean, but the point is that they're falling, they're probably helped out by this thing called the Bannister effect, like they know it's possible, right? **[2:28:46] Laurie Santos:** So, like, if you train, if you run into obstacles, if you don't get that time, you're not like, Well, I guess it's, you know, physiologically, I just can't do it. You can kind of do it. And so so there there's this idea with the Bannister effect. You kind of have to be optimistic enough to think that it's doable. But when you think that it's doable, it's really helpful to ask the question, Okay, what are the things that are gonna come in the way of my doing it? **[2:29:06] Laurie Santos:** And maybe imagine them really, kind of vividly, so you get a sense, um, it can super help it. **[2:29:11] Andrew Huberman:** one of the things that contrasts a country like Denmark, for instance, um, compared to the United States, um, and I know this from discussions with my stepmother is that, you know, in this country, we have this notion because we have a lot of examples of people that went from absolutely nothing to these, uh, tremendously quote unquote, high places financially, reputationally, et cetera, performance in whatever domain, um, sometimes overnight. Um, you know, this last year, I would say, uh, 2 events stick out in my mind as, like, whoa, like, wow. **[2:29:44] Andrew Huberman:** Um, the first was seeing, um, the SpaceX, um, rocket get captured by the quote unquote chopsticks. That was just a rocket landing of all things, so as it was a so cool. Everybody, regardless of what else was going on with, you know, people's opinions of of, uh, SpaceX or Elon or whatever, were just like, Whoa, that was just an awesome feat of engineering, just a undeniably awesome feat of engineering. So it sets a, um, an up a bigger upper ceiling on what we thought was possible. **[2:30:15] Andrew Huberman:** We're seeing something that we hadn't seen before, um, at least not like that, not at that scale and resolution. So that changes what one conceptualized about what's possible at in different aspects of life, and, um, and I think that's important, it, uh, lifts the ceiling. The other, uh, was, um, very different example was the overnight, um, the Hockteua girl, right? Who nobody knew of, right? Made a comment in a passing, um, you know, video on the street, you know, one of these, like, whatever spontaneous interview things. **[2:30:45] Andrew Huberman:** And then now has a quite successful podcast was ranked one of the highest, um, new podcasts of the year. Um, has a, as far as I understand, has a a staff and a thriving business now. And, like, you know, took, you know, s this is a very American thing, right? To go from an unknown to 1 or 2 quick comments to all of a sudden, um, being a famous and presumably famous and somewhat wealthy person as well. **[2:31:11] Andrew Huberman:** And, um, you know, wish her nothing but luck in in evolving that, Good luck that, that her show. **[2:31:15] Laurie Santos:** talking to you. **[2:31:16] Andrew Huberman:** Yeah, good good luck. Yeah, sure, like, I I lo- I love to see people win, you know? Like, okay, it was it was an unusual trajectory, but but not so unusual for the United States in some sense. Because we also have the people who, you know, climb the staircase, or the people that climb the staircase, fell, then came back, you know? We we love, and we, um, cherish these stories, um, in this country, and I think it, I think it frames the the young mind in an interesting way. **[2:31:41] Andrew Huberman:** It sets this anything is possible. Oftentimes, it takes clearly a ton of hard work, oftentimes at the expense of other aspects of one's mental or physical health or life, you know, um, life enrichment, family, et cetera. But it it's a very American thing for people to be like, anything's possible. What do you think that does to our level of happiness if we're somebody that, you know, is looking for happiness, w- wants a good life, wants resources, but doesn't, um, like, so maybe they feel a little guilty that they're not, as quote unquote, ambitious as everybody else. **[2:32:19] Andrew Huberman:** But then you contrast that with a country like Denmark, where people are very happy. They're certainly ambus- ambitious Danes, but they're actually I was told that the word ambition has a is a little bit of a pejorative, little bit. Because you're not supposed to, you know, it's a very, um, you you're not supposed to get that far ahead of anybody without acknowledging that you're still part of the pack. Um, forgive me, Danes, but, um, they're nice people, so they'll likely go easy on me. **[2:32:40] Andrew Huberman:** And I have Danish no, I think I relatives. So so think you're, uh, w- like, how do we how do we take what's out and around us, address who we are, and reconcile those things so that we're we're good with what we've got and know that we are good with what we feel? **[2:32:53] Laurie Santos:** yeah, yeah. I mean, I think this is a spot where, you know, culture plays a big role. I think you're exactly right about Denmark. In fact, the Danes have this idea of Jante's Law, I'm probably pronouncing this poorly, but J-N-T-E's Law, which is the idea is like, you aren't really supposed to be better than anybody else. Or, like, kind of showing off, or, like, pushing yourself, or thinking you're better, or even kind of maybe striving specific not to be you can strive to be better, but to strive to be better than other people is kinda it's like a no-no. **[2:33:19] Laurie Santos:** It's sort of culturally frowned upon, um, in this way that I think is completely the opposite in the US right now, where, like, that's seen as an awesome thing. Um, I think the problem is that these kind of rags-to-riches stories, um, you know, you you've given cases of, like, ones that there's like a moment, right? With SpaceX, they do this wonderful thing, and you're like, Yeah, they kinda got there. And, you know, Hockteua's still doing her thing. **[2:33:39] Laurie Santos:** But there was this moment of, like, Oh my gosh, she kind of achieved this success. There's this idea that we kind of think that there's a end destination for something. Um, you know, I'm gonna, you know, get $50 million, or I'm gonna get married, or I'm gonna get that promotion at work, right? My for my students, I'm gonna get into, like, a really elite college or something like that. Um, we don't put our emphasis on the journey part, we put our emphasis on the destination part, and we assume that the destination is gonna come with a lot of happiness. **[2:34:06] Laurie Santos:** Um, this is a bias that researchers have called the arrival fallacy. I'll be happy when, you know, it's almost like the happily ever after, I'll be happily ever after if I get that promotion, or happily ever after when I meet that person. And what we know from hedonic adaptation is that thing that's awesome in the moment when you arrive there, quickly becomes the other thing. Um, you mentioned briefly the gold medalists who have this moment where it's like they won the gold medal, and that's awesome, but now everything else is downhill, or I just gotta do it again, right? **[2:34:31] Laurie Santos:** We we arrive at the best possible place we could've fantasized, and instantly it's like, I just have to start chasing the next carrot. So sometimes when we find ourselves, I think, as Americans, you know, chasing after the thing. I think it's important to remember that, first of all, that chase is gonna involve lots of ups and downs. It's not gonna be a linear path, it's probably not gonna be overnight. Even the ones you mentioned, maybe except with the exception of Hockteua girl, it's really extreme case, um, required some kind of work and ups and downs and these kinds of things, right? **[2:34:59] Laurie Santos:** Um, we don't see those, but more the happiness that we're gonna get, it's better off if we're going not for the end result, that arrival and falling prey to the arrival fallacy. It's better if we can see some happiness, um, in the journey. Um, this has often been called this idea of sort of finding a journey mindset, which is sort of what can you take from the process of getting there, right? So, you know, you wanna run your 5K, but, like, what can you do to try to enjoy the process of, you know, those runs that go along the way? **[2:35:27] Laurie Santos:** And noticing the kind of ups and downs and sort of paying attention to the journey, it's the one way to kinda break out of falling prey to this arrival fallacy. **[2:35:33] Andrew Huberman:** Requires a serious frame shift. **[2:35:35] Laurie Santos:** Totally. And I think one that, you know, is not culturally accepted in the US. Um, and I think this causes a lot of, you know, it causes a happiness hit, not just cause, like, sometimes we don't get there, sometimes there's a reason, you know, if say, if you s you set your heights super high, you know, you wanna be Roger Bannister or whatever. Like, not all of us are gonna get there, whether that's a four-minute mile or success at work or $50,000, 000 or whatever it is. **[2:35:57] Laurie Santos:** So sometimes if you set your sights too high, you just don't get there, and so that's a happiness hit. Um, but a bigger hap- and and sometimes when you do get there, it's a happiness hit, cause you get there and there's a happiness for a moment. But then, you know, that the hit doesn't keep coming. Um, I think we also just lose out on something when we're not in that journey mindset, cause there's a lot of cool stuff along the way if we can kind of pay attention. **[2:36:18] Laurie Santos:** But, yeah, I think it's a big cultural shift from the way Americans usually think. But if it's one that if we can achieve that, we'll start feeling a lot better. And it means even the failures in life are kinda good cause you were enjoying yourself along the way. For my podcast, I did an episode about these sort of Olympic medals where I talked about, um, that that, uh, you know, the bronze lining effect and things. Um, and I had Michelle Kwan, um, who, you know, Olympic medalist, we all remember her, but mostly just won silver. **[2:36:44] Laurie Santos:** And I talked to her about, you know, what that felt like, and she said, It didn't matter to me. The things I loved about being Olympics wasn't the medal stand. It was when she first she talked about putting her skates on and seeing the rings in the ice and recognizing, As soon as I tie these laces, I'm gonna get to skate over those. And I fantasize. That's the journey mindset, right? You're not looking at the thing at the end. **[2:37:03] Laurie Santos:** You're paying enough attention to the stuff along the way, even some of the stuff that's a pain in the butt, that you kind of get some joy, um, on the ride. **[2:37:12] Andrew Huberman:** I certainly have learned to relish in the failures as well as the successes, and, um, I don't know, I think some of that also just comes with age. I've always wanted to say that. Yeah, it's true, though, it you're old kinda comes with **[2:37:24] Laurie Santos:** enough now, Andrew. age. Yeah, You can you can jump into it. **[2:37:27] Andrew Huberman:** You accrue enough experiences, good and bad and neutral, and you kinda go, like, the other day, I was having, like, this w- kinda weird state of mind. I was like, Wait, I've been here before. I like this shifts, like, no worries, like, this shifts, and then, sure enough, it shifted, you know? Like, the I think the 1st time we find ourself in a place, or we find ourself back in a place, and we forget we've been there before, um, for whatever reason, or we try and pretend we haven't been there before. **[2:37:51] Andrew Huberman:** It's like, and then you w- you go through enough of those cycles, like, Okay, this is part of a larger trajectory. This is the amazing thing about the brain I never understood, I still don't, which is that when we're feeling happy, we don't tend to think, Gosh, this feeling is gonna go away. Sometimes a little bit of that, but when we're feeling lousy, it does seem to do something to our sense of time, our time perception, that makes it seem, especially in the real lows and the real trenches, that it's gonna go on forever. **[2:38:17] Andrew Huberman:** We can't imagine feeling differently. The this too shall pass is very hard to internalize when we're in those states. **[2:38:23] Laurie Santos:** totally. But it can make you feel a lot if you can get that distance from your current state. And this is, kind of, you know, you had Ethan Cross on the show, and he talks a lot a lot. If you can kind of get that distance of, well, how's this gonna feel in 5 years? how's this gonna feel in 10 years? You can sometimes feel a lot better. Interestingly, even when the happy stuff, if we can get some sense that, like, this isn't going to last forever, that can sometimes boost the happiness. **[2:38:46] Laurie Santos:** Cause we're kind of almost doing, like, a negative visualization in the forward direction, right? Um, so a scarce experience, if you're having it, it's useful to remember, like, you know, this is limited, right? This is temporary. I should enjoy this now while it's happening. Um, the most extreme version of this, of course, is with our own lives, right? Contemplating our mortality. Um, there's this idea of, uh, memento mori, which is a common phrase. I actually have my my ring has memento mori on it, um, which is morbid, right? **[2:39:14] Laurie Santos:** I'm gonna die, I'm not gonna be here. But when you recognize that, you know, the old school folks thought, and I think it's true, like, you realize, like, I can't take any of this stuff for granted. I have to pay attention now. This is not, you know, the kind of thing that's gonna last forever. And so I think moments like that for positive experiences can feel like that, you know, if you're, I don't know, tasting a delicious glass of pinot noir, sitting yesterday, I was, and, you know, while I'm here, you know, w- took a walk on Santa Monica Beach and was like, you know, my brain was like, Oh, I have to, you know, Andrew, coming. **[2:39:43] Laurie Santos:** I was like, No, no, I I'm gonna, like, fly back to cold, you know, East Coast tomorrow. I need to pay attention, right? So thinking that this is finite can actually help you. There's a very funny study on this with, um, college students where they did this sort of funny framing technique where they brought senior college students into lab, um, you know, kinda halfway through, you know, the spring semester and told them, you know, you either have this many hours left of your time, which maybe is is a big number, you know, it makes it seem like thousands of hours, or you have only this many days left before you graduate, just like just a reminder. **[2:40:14] Laurie Santos:** And what they found was the one that got the days manipulation where it felt kinda short, they wound up doing more things, like, kind of getting in those things that they thought, Oh, I'll get around to it eventually, um, and wound up kind of feeling happier. So recognizing that things are short sometimes, uh, has a benefit. Um, maybe both for negative emotions like this, this too shall pass, but also the positive stuff, like this too shall pass. **[2:40:35] Laurie Santos:** So I gotta enjoy it while it's, while it's around. **[2:40:37] Andrew Huberman:** It's so interesting because it's kind of counterintuitive that realizing that something positive is also fleeting allows us to savor it more because from a uninformed perspective, one could imagine, Okay, so you're you're at a great meal with people you love, and it's been a let's let's even say it's been a a rough month before, and you're like, really in it. And someone says, Well, you know, like, this too is gonna pass, and you're like, that sounds like kind of a downer, right? **[2:41:04] Andrew Huberman:** But then if it allows you to savor it more, that's key. So, yeah, there does seem to be this inverse relationship between sad states and happy states, where when we are in sad states, we feel like it will go on forever, and we'll do almost anything to get out of those unless they've completely collapsed us. In our happy states, we don't want to be reminded that it will pass. And this is why, I think, in part, not the only reason why people will take, um, mood-altering drugs. **[2:41:33] Andrew Huberman:** You know, I'm talking about this in the recreational sense, like to to sort of forget everything else and forget that whatever they're experiencing is gonna wear off. **[2:41:40] Laurie Santos:** yeah, yeah. And I think, you know, i is du- it's not nice to think that these good states are gonna pass, but I think it is helpful cause it forces us to pay attention to them. I'm having this a little bit now where, you know, we're coming up on the holidays, that at the time, you and I are having this conversation, and, um, you know, I'm getting ready to do the holidays with the in-laws, who, you know, which there's lots of positives to. **[2:41:59] Laurie Santos:** So I was like, Oh, God, I don't wanna. But because my my in-laws, my my mom is getting up there. I'm kinda like, Oh, recognizing that there's not infinite holidays left with these people that I care about, that it's kind of more finite, and maybe more finite than it's been, um, it's causing me to be more excited about it than I would've been. And so the the and that's morbid thought, right? Memento mori is meant to be a really bittersweet emotion, right? **[2:42:23] Laurie Santos:** That we we are finite, right? But it can kind of give you this appreciation. It can cause you to savor in a special way. So, sometimes the morbid is good. A little bit a little bit morbid. **[2:42:32] Andrew Huberman:** It's the contrast, again. It's the contrast, and maybe it's why people watch horror movies. I'm not into horror movies, but so that, you know, maybe you feel safer. I don't know, that stuff always made me feel terrified if I was, you know, watching Some of that late at night. **[2:42:44] Laurie Santos:** High amygdala reaction, me too, me too. I hate horror movies, but it's worth noting that, like, we, you know, a lot of people like em, you know, huge industry, um, and even if you don't like horror movies, you might like, you know, maybe, uh, spicy food that feels, not not even good, it feels awful in the moment, or super hot bath, or, you know, cold pl- like, a really cold plunge, right? **[2:43:02] Andrew Huberman:** I like getting out of the cold plunge for exactly the reason we're Talking about. **[2:43:05] Laurie Santos:** Yeah, or even, you know, honestly, for me, like, I'm not a super fan of exercise, but, like, a really, really hard workout that feels miserable. When you finally stop, it feels I do a lot of yoga, and my favorite thing is at the end when they're like, And now you can do shavasana. And shavasana is always good if you've worked the Worst. Like, you're just really like, Ha, you know, we it's helpful to kinda have these moments to, like, have this contrast, and so building the contrast in where you kind of give yourself some negative emotion, you know, whether it's a kind of imagined negative emotion, like negative visualization, or a fictional one. **[2:43:36] Laurie Santos:** A lot of our favorite fictional experiences are pretty terrible. Like, a novel's really boring if the protagonist, like, there's nothing bad happens, just kinda coasts along, and things are just mildly positive. No, we want them to go through some terrible stuff, even when we really associate with them and sort of see them as ourselves, and so, yeah, these, like, fictional worlds where we can play with negative emotions a little bit, um, are super interesting psychologically cause, like, why would we do that? **[2:44:00] Laurie Santos:** But, you know, as you were saying, even when you get, you know, these, like, neural stimulation, we kinda want some of the negative stuff, so, um, there there's a a interesting paper about what's the right ratio of positive to negative emotions, um, and it's not 100% positives for hedonic adaptation and so on, but I think really the recipe for a rich life is is varied for these contrast reasons we've been talking about. **[2:44:22] Andrew Huberman:** So, what's the ideal ratio? **[2:44:23] Laurie Santos:** They don't know. Yeah, they **[2:44:24] Andrew Huberman:** Oh, they don't know. **[2:44:24] Laurie Santos:** Didn't figure it. They didn't Figure it was like like, boom, it's like exactly Sixty This. **[2:44:27] Andrew Huberman:** Forty, positive negative. Uh, you're obviously anticipating a number. Uh **[2:44:33] Laurie Santos:** And and I think it's also worth remembering that, um, you know, we're talking as though they're negative emotions and positive emotions. You know, a lot of the most interesting emotions are more complex than that. You talked about this, you know, SpaceX kind of chopsticks moment. My guess is the emotion you're experiencing there is one that researchers like Dacher Keltner and colleagues would call awe, right? This sense of, Oh, my gosh, that is amazing, there's something bigger than me that, like, is able to do this thing. **[2:44:58] Laurie Santos:** And one of the reasons awe is such an interesting emotion is it's usually destabilizing, right? There, like, things that are better than I ever expected. You know, humankind is so masterful, space is so big, nature is so vast, right? It kind of feels a little destabilizing when you e- experience awe, but we also see it as positive. And so I think kind of if you're feeling a little bored in your emotional life, trying to find moments where you can get these emotions that are not so obviously positive or negative, but are a little bit of both, can be, um, really inspiring. **[2:45:29] Laurie Santos:** It's one of the reasons, you know, we talk a lot about, sort of psychedelics and these sort of altered experiences, um, those experiences t tend to be thought of as being really consistent with moments of awe, but they again are not universally positive, but they kinda expand you and take you a little further. **[2:45:43] Andrew Huberman:** I can attest that they're not universally positive. Eh, sometimes they're terrifying, um, even in their clinical application. The thing I appreciated about the rocket landing was that, indeed, I I feel awe looking up at the stars at night or just thinking about how we're having this conversation in a room and, well, and then expanding out to, like, we're a little Little object floating in the universe, and that can be a bit overwhelming. What's, I think, incredible is that through the harnessing of engineering and physics, SpaceX was able to create something that was so, uh, well controlled at a scale that we're I'm normally accustomed to thinking about things. **[2:46:19] Andrew Huberman:** Sure, I've seen planes, and we landed on the moon, et cetera. Some people debate that, but we were on the moon. I wasn't, but somebody was. To see control and harnessing of physics and engineering at a scale that is certainly not at the scale of the entire galaxies, but is starting to approach outer Space and back again, clearly. And in such a, um, I think it was the slowing of of that enormously large object, Um, and the capture that that felt so gratifying. **[2:46:47] Andrew Huberman:** I also think, and this, um, can explain a fair amount of human technological evolution, is that the human brain either delights in or at least, um, marvels in creating action at a distance. I mean, think About what went into creating that amount of action in a in an object with that much mass at a distance. Right? And, um, you and then you can layer through all the things where we're looking at our phones, on our screens. **[2:47:11] Andrew Huberman:** I mean, all That technology is relatively recent. And To think that us, human beings, as opposed to m macaque monkeys, could do that. Like, we are the primate species that is so far ahead in terms of technological Development compared to every other species on the planet. The only other species of of life that might be besting us - and we don't know - is I've I've heard this theory, and it's it's, uh, rather entertaining, which is that all these trillions of microorganisms that live in our gut microbiome, What if we're just vehicles for them to get around and pass to one another? **[2:47:44] Andrew Huberman:** Um, and they're just, uh, they have us a a sort of a, uh, consciousness that is all about just propagating and that we Think that we're doing all this stuff for some evolution, but it's just to keep the microbiota They're like, Going. I don't We, yeah, Really believe that, Finally, we By the way. **[2:47:56] Laurie Santos:** Could get to space where we could really evolve the Right. And they Microbiota. We think **[2:47:59] Andrew Huberman:** Just want more microbiota. **[2:47:59] Laurie Santos:** It's us doing. Yeah, yeah. **[2:48:00] Andrew Huberman:** So, you know, that that we're being hijacked. I d I I chuckle at that theory. I don't actually think that's Yeah, there's The way it is. **[2:48:06] Laurie Santos:** There's we talked about too few studies of dog in primate cognition, way too few studies of microbiota cognition, unfortunately. **[2:48:13] Andrew Huberman:** Uh. This is probably the right time to say that we are a storytelling species. This is what we're doing right now, we're creating story around these things that we can't quite explain, and during the course of today's conversation, I I realized that this thing that we call happiness, um, has at least 3 levels or layers that we filter it through when we ask ourselves, Are we happy? How do I be happier? Um, this LMNT of contrast with negative experiences seems to be a repeating theme, momentumori Being, uh, negative Sort of dark cloud from which we're supposed to see the light and and act in the light. **[2:48:52] Andrew Huberman:** This exists in religious narratives, philosophical narratives, um, and scientific reality. I could imagine 3 layers. The 1st is sensory experience. The reason to take a cold shower, folks, in addition to the fact that it'll save you on your heating bi- bill, is that the warm shower that follows, fact, that's how I do it, feels so good. 10 times better than it would if you had just gotten into the warm shower, I promise. Same thing about getting out of the cold plunge. **[2:49:19] Andrew Huberman:** You know, there's a lot of debate about these things, but this is just pure sensory experience and contrast of the sort that we're talking about today. Hunger and then eating a delicious piece of food, or eating a not so delicious piece of food, but you're hungry, and so it's that Much more delicious. Okay? Million examples we could spiral towards. So, there's sensory experience, there's raw sensory perception and experience, from which the contrast creates this thing that we, like, feel better. **[2:49:43] Andrew Huberman:** AKA happiness, sort of. Then there's story, like, God, last year was a tough year. This year was better. There's also, and I've seen this before, like, we were killing it for 2 years, and then this year was kind of a meh year. This is not the case, by by the way, but, um, very fortunate that the podcast has continued to grow and expand. But for some people, they they're not as happy with their whatever salary this year, because even though it's spectacular by somebody else's standards, By their standard, it's down from previous Years. **[2:50:12] Andrew Huberman:** So, there's the story that we create that has it's not sensory experience, it's perception based on dopamine, and it's perception based on reward and punishment, etcetera. And then there's this 3rd layer, which is meaning. Like you said, yeah, you know, spending time with in-laws, like, okay, every moment of it might not be as awesome as you might like, but there's meaning in spending time with people that are extended family, especially, uh, when elders and very, uh, and younger are in the same room, there's Something really it's it's a it it it layers on story to create this sort of, um, uh, other level, what we call meaning, and so what I'm realizing is that these are 3 timescales. **[2:50:51] Andrew Huberman:** So, we have the immediate timescale of happiness, we have the kind of intermediate one where we introduce a story, and then we have meaning, which is kind of, like, this whole picture. So, it seems to me that we need to approach happiness from all 3 levels. That it's not enough to just be, like, a dog, Which are in the sensory experience, presumably, of of happiness. If they Or you Tell stories, they don't tell them to us, and If they have meaning, I don't know, but they they seem to, like, nail the 1st level. **[2:51:21] Andrew Huberman:** So, i and they're probably **[2:51:22] Laurie Santos:** And they probably don't have the Finer Capacity to do the other 2, so it's not like they're not doing it and kind of missing out, they kind of have brains that don't let them notice they're missing out. But we, unfortunately, have brains that would feel like we were really missing out if we just had the sensory experiences, you know, without the good stories. I think you're sort of pointing to this idea, that's sort of being happy in your life and being happy with your life. **[2:51:40] Laurie Santos:** The with your life part has the kind of medium time scale stories, but also the really big ones, right? You know, is my life, am I doing anything really meaningful with my life? Am I finding purpose? And so on. Um, the funny thing, though, is to get to that big time scale, to find a sense of purpose and stuff like that, sometimes it pays to do stuff at the local level, at the medium and shorter term time scale. **[2:52:02] Laurie Santos:** Um, and one of the things researchers have found is that if you're engaging in activities at the short time scales that kind of fit with your values or what these positive psychologists have often called your strengths, um, that can be a way to sort of achieve purpose. So so, what are strengths? So, researchers do this thing where they wanna look at, like, all the valuable things people can do out in the world, right? And so, what are the things that you value? **[2:52:23] Laurie Santos:** Um, and folks like Chris Peterson and colleagues have come up with this list of what they call different character strengths, and there are things that, like, you know, you can actually, if you Google online character strengths, you'll get the big list. There often people talk about there being 24, but they're just universally good things, like being brave, be you know, citizenship, humor, like, you know, social intelligence, love of learning, right, you know, kind of empathy, fairness, right? **[2:52:44] Laurie Santos:** These kind of sets of values that we have. People differ in how much they value one or the other, you know, so I could ask you, Andrew, like, what's better, like, bravery or humor? Probably both pretty high for you, I would imagine, but, like, about prudence versus love of learning, I have a guess. **[2:52:59] Andrew Huberman:** Yeah, I mean, if I had to pick between bravery and humor, I I think bravery is probably more important **[2:53:05] Laurie Santos:** I see. **[2:53:05] Andrew Huberman:** To me. **[2:53:05] Laurie Santos:** I'm more humor, yeah. So **[2:53:06] Andrew Huberman:** Yeah, I mean, I love humor, but if I had to pick, It's sort of like, you know, steak and coffee, I'm going steak. Yeah, okay, well, You know? The point is, we Yeah. **[2:53:13] Laurie Santos:** There are individual differences in this, um, and there are formal tests you can do online. If you go to VIA Character Strengths Test, you'll see these 24, and you can do one of these very systematic, you know, kind of tests to do it. But really, just starting to think about, like, what are the values that you value? Um, and the ones that come to mind as being particularly about you, the ones that you resonate with, are what somebody like P Chris Peterson would call your signature strengths. **[2:53:35] Laurie Santos:** They're the ones that when you execute them, you kind of feel like things are meaningful and purposeful and so on. And so the idea is that a re one recipe for a pers- a purposeful life at the local level, um, is trying to engage in behaviors that allow you to use more of these values or strengths. Um, and one of my favorite pieces of research that looks at both the power of this and how even though if it seems like that those are hard things to bring in, like, you should bring them in more, um, is some work by this woman, Amy Reesinensky, who's a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, and she does these studies on what she calls **[2:54:09] Laurie Santos:** job crafting, um, which is a practice where you take your normal job description, as whatever your job is, and figure out ways that you can infuse your signature strengths into them. You know, so, you as a podcaster, if your signature strength was bravery, you could bring in guests that made me feel a little bit intimidating to you, probably, like me, I imagine, no, but but or like, you could take on topics that are a little bit harder, right? **[2:54:30] Laurie Santos:** That kind of push you a little bit, right? If your signature strength was humor, you'd add more comedy or make more jokes. If it was love of learning, you'd pick topics that, like, you didn't know anything about, but you kinda dive in, right? You take whatever your normal job description is, and you find a way to build in your strengths. And the reason I love Amy's work so much is that she studies signature strengths not in academics like us, who have very flexible jobs, or podcasters. **[2:54:52] Laurie Santos:** She studies signature strengths in hospital janitorial staff workers, um, who are, you know, these are people who are cleaning the linen in a hospital room or mopping the floors and stuff. Not a job where you think there's lots of flexibility or you could build in things like, you know, humor and love of learning and this stuff. But she finds, interestingly, that, like, around a quarter to a third of these janitorial staff workers say that their job is a calling. **[2:55:15] Laurie Santos:** They love it, they get a lot of purpose from it, and they're the ones that are naturally building in their signature strengths. And she tells it in her story in her work, she tells these lovely stories. There's a story of a janitorial staff worker who worked, uh, in a chemotherapy ward, and if you've been unlucky enough to have cancer and had to have chemotherapy or know someone who did, you know that people tend to get really sick cause the medicine makes people really nauseous. **[2:55:36] Laurie Santos:** So, a big part of this guy's job was, like, cleaning up vomit, basically. But he said, You know, my job isn't to clean up vomit. My strengths are, like, humor and social intelligence, and what I do is I make a joke. This is somebody's having a really crappy day, and I'm gonna do something that's gonna make them laugh, and if I do that, then I won it's not my paycheck. And I guess he had a standard joke, which was like, Oh my god, look at the big pile of vomit. **[2:55:56] Laurie Santos:** Overtime, like, for me, and, like, you know, you're laughing, listeners probably laughing. He's like, That's my job. Um, I talked to another worker who worked in a coma ward, so this, um, individual couldn't talk to the patients because they're in comas, but her strength was creativity, and so every day, she, like, moved the artwork and the plants around, you know, just kinda created some changes, and she thought maybe that would pop people out of their coma. **[2:56:19] Laurie Santos:** I don't know if that's medically plausible, probably not, but it doesn't matter. To her, she felt like she was executing her creativity. And so the moral of this job crafting work is, no matter what your job is, there's probably some room to build in some more purpose. If you take some time to think about, like, what are the strengths? What are the things that get you going? If you need a tip, you can kinda Google these things, but then how could I infuse that into my normal job description? **[2:56:43] Laurie Santos:** And there's probably a lot more flexibility than you think. You don't need to quit your job and become a podcaster to, like, get this flexibility. Probably, whatever you do, there's some window where you can build that in. **[2:56:54] Andrew Huberman:** That's awesome. Those are awesome stories. Um, I also was just thinking about the janitor cleaning up the vomit, like to, like like, restore some dignity to these people that Clearly know they're making a mess, and, like, you know, and humor being the ultimate bridge, and, um, and, uh, darn it, why'd you make me have to choose between humor and the other thing? But cause humor Sorry, no, Is so awesome, You're, like, humor's That was my Pretty good, he's Thinking. **[2:57:16] Andrew Huberman:** My answer Very, he's very But, yeah. **[2:57:17] Laurie Santos:** Brave to clean up vomit As well, I think, right? Yeah, Yeah, and to Yeah, yeah. **[2:57:19] Andrew Huberman:** And to bring humor to a place where, you know, some people might presume humor's not allowed, but it goodness. Um, the signature strengths and the and the list of, you said 24, uh, of Them, where can people learn more about these signature strengths? I think this would be a really powerful exercise, and, uh, we can always find the link and put it in the show note captions, but is there, like, a Yeah, there's Place that people can There's a, uh, the Find this stuff? **[2:57:42] Laurie Santos:** Values in Action is VIACharacterStrengths.org. Um, so I can share the link and you can stick it in your show notes, but, yeah, people can go on there for free and do one of these kind of, you know, formal psychometric tests where you measure your strengths, see what they are. And it's a fun website, too, because you get to, kind of they give you some suggestions. Cause some of these, you know, values are, like prudence is one of them, it's like, Well, how do I exercise prudence? **[2:58:03] Laurie Santos:** And they'll have, you know, these are different things. Um, they also make the suggestion - this is a a homework assignment I give in my happiness class - of suggesting you do this with a good friend or a romantic partner, have each of you do this and find strengths that you share together. Um, and then you can go on what what researchers call a strength date, where, you know, if you both have bravery, then that means you guys should do the, I don't know, the obstacle course or do some really scary hike. **[2:58:26] Laurie Santos:** If you both have humor, now you go to a a comedy show, if you both love learning, now you go to a museum or something, so you find the thing that's, like, your convergent strengths, and you do something that exercises them. So that means you can use your strengths to get purpose, not just in your work, but in your leisure, too. And I think this is another spot where we get stuff wrong. I think a lot of us have work that tends to use our strengths. **[2:58:46] Laurie Santos:** We tend to gravitate towards careers, many of us, where we can use our strengths. A lot of folks aren't that lucky. But in our leisure time, we don't often do that so much, right? Uh, often our leisure time is, like, plop down, you know, watch Netflix. For a lot of folks, like, if you think about how you can build your strengths into your leisure time, it gets even more exciting. So, you know, you're talking about working with your hands and doing all this stuff, like, you know, build the bravery and the humor into that somehow. **[2:59:09] Laurie Santos:** Now you get your leisure time doing double duty for giving you a sense of purpose and meaning, too. **[2:59:13] Andrew Huberman:** I love doing stuff with my hands, and I also love doing things that are useful to other people. And years ago, I used to go set up fish tanks for people at their homes, and I I don't know why, but I just kept setting up all these fish tanks for all these people. I delighted in it, and, um, it makes me realize that I think for everybody, not certainly not just me, that we get tremendous pleasure from being useful to others in ways that really resonate with Kind of who who we feel we are and that these Strengths. **[2:59:40] Andrew Huberman:** I think that's kind of the ultimate situation, really. Yeah, and If and if we're getting paid for it also, great, but you're saying work it into, um, your recreational time as well. **[2:59:48] Laurie Santos:** Yeah, and I'm glad you brought up this idea of doing for others because we haven't talked about that, but this is another behavioral hack that's huge for happiness, and I think one that we get wrong as a culture in the US, but kind of broadly, there's all this talk about self-care or treat yourself. If you look at any kind of article about happiness, that's maybe not so evidence-based, talk about self-self, self, self. If you look at happy people, though, happy people don't spend a lot of time on themselves, they tend to be very other-oriented. **[3:00:12] Laurie Santos:** So, controlled for income, happier people donate more money to charity than not-so-happy people. Um, controlled for the amount of free time peop- people have, pe- happy people tend to volunteer for others, broadly construed, whether it's, you know, helping formally or kind of donating time, like, they tend to help more than not-so-happy people. Um, that again, correlation, it could be happy may doing nice stuff for others helps you become happy, it could be that if you're happy, you do nice stuff for others, and for sure that link is true, there is this thing called the feel-good, do-good effect. **[3:00:39] Laurie Santos:** Um, but lots of experiments have sort of forced people to do nice stuff for others and found that it winds up making them happier. One study, uh, by Lara Acquananno and colleagues did this study where they walk up to people on the street and hand them 20 bucks. It's a awesome study to be in if you're some undergrad walking around campus, like, Oh, cool, 20 bucks. But then, you'll be told how to spend it. You either have to spend the 20 bucks to treat yourself, do something nice for yourself, or spend the 20 bucks on someone else, do something nice for s other people. **[3:01:03] Laurie Santos:** And people at the end of the day, even kind of at later time scales, report being happier when they spend the exact same amount of money on someone else versus themselves. And I think this has a big message, cause sometimes, I don't know if you're gonna I don't know if you like you, but if you're having a bad day, it's like, I'm gonna treat myself to something, I might buy something or spend some money on myself, buy myself a kinda cool experience. **[3:01:22] Laurie Santos:** But if you gifted that experience to your brother or your good friend or your coworker or your spouse, it might actually make you happier than having that experience yourself, which is really counterintuitive, but that's what the data show. **[3:01:33] Andrew Huberman:** I've discovered this in recent years. I love, love, love giving gifts. It just, um, it's the best feeling. It's the best feeling. **[3:01:41] Laurie Santos:** Here's here's another hack you can do to help uh, to kind of help others, oddly, is to ask for help, which is something we forget is quite powerful. Um, think about the last time somebody asked you for advice. Advice that you could give. Probably felt pretty good, it probably made you feel a little competent and whatever. Um, probably liked helping that person. You get the happiness boost from helping that person. We forget that asking other people for help, especially when we know they can kind of do it, um, can be a way to sort of give them a little bit gift and make them happy. **[3:02:10] Laurie Santos:** Um, this is one that can be hard for me cause I like to, you know, think about my competence all the time, and I don't wanna be a burden on people, I don't Self-sufficiency Like feeling vulnerable, yeah. Self-sufficiency. Um, but it turns out, especially if you're a particularly self-sufficient person, when you ask people for help, it can be really useful. So, um, so that's another one, you know, cause I know some folks listening right now might not have the financial means to be donating money or the, you know, time, affluence, and wherewithal to be doing gifts and these things, but remember that asking for help can be a gift to someone else, and it's a little social connection too. **[3:02:40] Andrew Huberman:** That's awesome. I will also say your suggestion that people, um, fill out the signature strengths site and then use that as a first date incentive. I look forward to the day when a comment comes through on YouTube that, uh, People were married as a consequence of a first date. Yeah, Tinder's That, uh **[3:02:56] Laurie Santos:** Going out of business if we start doing these strength dates, I bet. So, yeah. **[3:02:59] Andrew Huberman:** Every once in a while, someone will, um, contact me and say that they, um, watched the fertility episode and, uh, did a male and female fertility episode, and, um, that they now have, uh, a child on the way. Um, I don't ask questions about when the child was conceived, like, What the relationship to the fertility episode was. I'm assuming it was the information in the fertility episode, but the, um, but I always I'm like, Whoa, that's wild. **[3:03:24] Andrew Huberman:** So, I I bet you that at some point in the future, I'm creating a little bit of a time capsule Here. Um, you'll get contacted, or something will, um, legitimately fall into the comments about people deciding to spend their life together as a consequence of having done the Signature Strengths 1st date. You heard it here first. Um, Dr. Laurie Santos. And in all seriousness, um, Lori, Dr. Santos. I just wanna say thank you so much for doing the work you do. **[3:03:49] Andrew Huberman:** It's awesome, awesome work. I mean, what's more important than our emotional state? And to strive to be happy, but to understand happiness so that we're not pursuing something that either doesn't exist or that, um, it is an illusion that's been created for us. Like, really, f- I think one of the amazing things about what you do is you you realistically frame happiness as attainable, but you frame it in the science of how to actually get It, um, and what it means. **[3:04:20] Andrew Huberman:** And as people could probably detect, I love, love, love that you've studied this thing that we call happiness and and other aspects of of emotion and social cognition in the context of not just humans, but our non-human friends, cats and dogs, and use that knowledge, like building up from basic understanding of how neural circuits and psychology work to a place that humans can really act on. And you've given us a tremendous number of actionable tools today. **[3:04:47] Andrew Huberman:** I mean, too many to list off here all at once, we'll put them in the timestamps as as tools so that people can get right to them and review them. But the social connection piece, obviously, the understanding of the contrast with difficult things to arrive at better states, um, and different time scales, and doing for others, and and just so much. There's too much here for me to to list off without adding another 30 minutes to this, uh, podcast, and no one wants to hear me, um, speak anymore. **[3:05:11] Andrew Huberman:** Um, so I'm just gonna say thank you for the research that you have done and continue to do. Thank you for doing your podcast. I'm gonna start listening to your podcast. I love these issues, and I think they're super super, uh, timely and important, uh, for everybody. And thanks for taking time out of your schedule to come here and educate us today. **[3:05:29] Laurie Santos:** Thanks so much. It was a blast. **[3:05:31] Andrew Huberman:** Let's do it again. Definitely. Thank you for joining me for today's discussion with Dr. Laurie Santos. To learn more about her laboratory's work, her teachings, and to find a link to her excellent podcast, please see the show note captions. If you're learning from and or enjoying this podcast, please subscribe to our YouTube channel. That's a terrific, zero-cost way to support us. Please also click follow for the podcast on both Spotify and Apple, and on both Spotify and Apple, you can leave us up to a five-star review. **[3:05:57] Andrew Huberman:** Please also check out the sponsors mentioned at the beginning and throughout today's episode. That's the best way to support this podcast. If you have questions for me or comments about the podcast or topics or guests that you'd like me to consider for the Huberman Lab podcast, please put those in the comment section on YouTube. I do read all the comments. And if you're not already following me on social media, I am Huberman Lab on all social media platforms. **[3:06:19] Andrew Huberman:** So that's Instagram, X, formerly known as Twitter, Facebook, Threads, and LinkedIn. And on all those platforms, I discuss science and science-related tools, some of which overlaps with the content of the Huberman Lab podcast, but much of which is distinct from the content on the Huberman Lab podcast. Again, that's Huberman Lab on all social media platforms. For those of you that haven't heard, I have a new book coming out. It's my very first book. It's entitled Protocols: An Operating Manual for the Human Body. **[3:06:45] Andrew Huberman:** This is a book that I've been working on for more than 5 years, and that's based on more than 30 years of research and experience, and it covers protocols for everything from sleep to exercise to stress control, protocols related to focus and motivation, and of course, I provide the scientific substantiation for the protocols that are included. The book is now available by pre-sale at protocolsbook.com. There you can find links to various vendors. You can pick the one that you like best. **[3:07:13] Andrew Huberman:** Again, the book is called Protocols: An Operating Manual for the Human Body. And if you haven't already subscribed to our Neural Network newsletter, the Neural Network newsletter is a zero-cost monthly newsletter that includes everything from podcast summaries to what we call protocols in the form of brief 1 to 3 page PDFs that cover things like how to optimize your sleep, how to regulate your dopamine. We also have protocols related to deliberate cold exposure, get a lot of questions about that, deliberate heat exposure, and on and on. **[3:07:41] Andrew Huberman:** Again, all available at completely zero cost. You simply go to hubermanlab.com, go to the menu tab in the top right corner, scroll down to newsletter, and enter your email. And I should mention that we do not share your email with anybody. Thank you once again for joining me for today's discussion with Dr. Laurie Santos. And last but certainly not least, thank you for your interest in science.