The Science of Happiness: Five Simple Strategies for Reducing Anxiety and Increasing Connection | Sonja Lyubomirsky and Harry Reis

This is the 10% happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hey, how are we doing everybody? For many people, and this is certainly true for me for many years, when we think about how to get happier, we tend to approach it as an individual pursuit. We engage in what is sometimes called self-care, exercise, sleep, meditation, etc., etc., all that stuff is great, but the research suggests that the most reliable source of happiness is actually the quality of your relationships. To be clear, relationships are not easy. One of my perhaps overly glib lines about this is that the human curse is that we need other people in order to be happy, and yet other people can be a Titanic painting the ass. And that brings me to today's guests, who have a really empowering approach to this aspect of human happiness, which they describe as how to feel loved. In fact, that is the title of their book, How to Feel Loved. One of the misconceptions that they're hammering away at in this book is that we often think that feeling loved isn't really in our control. It's up to the other person. But my guests flip this on its head, and they argue that there are, in fact, strategies to feel loved, and they're often not the strategies that many of us fall back on. In other words, we're looking for love in all the wrong places. My guests are Sonia Lubamirski, distinguished professor at the University of California, and Harry T. Reese Deans professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Rochester. In this conversation, we talk about what it means to feel loved, and why many people who are loved don't feel it. We talk about an antidote to loneliness, a broader definition of love beyond romantic love, why feeling loved may actually be the true key to happiness. We talk about their concept of the relationship CISA. I'll let them explain that. The power of curiosity, listening and reciprocity, why dropping your armor is necessary, although difficult, some practical tools for feeling more loved, and some tips on asking better questions. Real quick, before we dive in here, don't forget to check out my new app. It's called 10% with Dan Harris. You can get it if you go to DanHarris.com. There's a free 14-day trial if you want to try it before you buy it. We've got a growing body of amazing guided meditations from extraordinary meditation teachers, like Jay Michaelson and Jeff Warren and Joseph Goldstein. I could go on. I also do weekly live meditation and Q&A sessions on video. We do them every Tuesday at 4 Eastern. You should come check that out. DanHarris.com. Join the party. Okay, we'll get started with Sonya Luby-Mirsky and Harry Reese right after this. You know my views on sleep. It's incredibly important. And as a lifelong insomniac, I am always interested when there's a way to improve my sleep. 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OK, Sonia, I'll start with you since you're the returning ringer or veteran. The book is How to Feel Loved in this context. What do you mean by Loved? Well, we define love very broadly. It's not just romantic love. It's, uh, you can love your colleague, your family member. Sometimes you even have a moment of love with a stranger. And we argue that many people are loved, but they don't always feel loved. And feeling loved is actually maybe the most important thing. It's maybe the, really maybe the key to happiness. Harry and I started talking about this years ago. He's a relationship scientist. I'm a happiness scientist. Those two feels don't often talk to one another. And we realize it may be, uh, yeah, that feeling loved is the key to happy life. It's crazy to me that those two fields don't often talk to each other because that would indicate at least to me that happiness researchers view happiness as an individual pursuit as opposed to a team sport. Yeah, you could say that. I think, but, but certainly happiness scientists talk a lot about the importance of relationships, right? The importance of having social connection. And, and in fact, one way that I kind of came to this topic, the purpose book is that I spent my career doing what I, what I called happiness interventions. We're basically clinical trials, but instead of testing a vaccine or medication, we're testing happiness practice like expressing gratitude or doing acts of kindness. So we do experiments to test these practices. And after 28 years, basically, I'm doing this, this work and hit me one day that almost all of the interventions that work to make people happier. The reason they work is they make us feel more connected and more loved, right? So if I write a gratitude letter to my mom, it makes me feel more loved by her, right? If I do an act of kindness for a colleague, it makes me feel closer to them. So almost all happiness practices, I really are about feeling connected and feeling loved. Now you could argue maybe like meditation or physical exercise could be just solely individual, but it's really fairly rare. Harry, you want to jump in on any of this? I couldn't agree more with what you said, Dan, you know, the idea that happiness researchers and relationship researchers weren't talking to each other is crazy. They're so interlinked as something was describing what makes happiness interventions work is almost always something about being more connected to other people. And yet nobody was making that connection and by the same token relationship researchers were all focused on having happy relationships and they were not talking about how those happy relationships affect the individuals while being. So when Sonia and I realized this, that's where the idea of the book came into being that we wanted to have that conversation on the page. You know, I've done 10 years worth of interviews on the show hundreds and hundreds of happiness researchers, relationships experts, meditation gurus, celebrities, and often I get people who are in one camp or another there on the self care. Let's call it that that could be your meditation practice, your exercise practice, your gratitude practice, your relationship to your own demons, whatever it is. And then I have lots of people who talk about relationships, how to skillfully communicate, how to set boundaries, how to diagnose a narcissist in your life, all of that. And this is coming screaming out of the pages of your book too. I've started to think about this over recent years is these two buckets are indivisible. We're doing a lot of damage by keeping them in separate buckets. And they're actually in a mutually reinforcing double helix, like a kind of positive upward spiral. The more you take care of your own nervous system, the more you are available to other people relationships are so crucial to our happiness. And therefore, when you have positive relationships, you get even happier than your relationships get even better and up you go. Does all of the hammering I just did make sense to either or both of you makes total sense to me then the idea that you build happiness by building relationships. And when you build relationships, you build happiness. We know from a lot of different approaches that these upward spirals are what makes life worth living. And one of my favorite examples is people often say things like you really need to learn to love yourself before you love others. And that's not true. I mean, it's a kind of a bite as you said, like a bright directional, she-like situation like yes, like being compassionate and loving yourself is going to help you have healthy relationships. And yet you learn to love yourself through feeling loved and having healthy relationships as well. So it's really kind of a bite directional dynamic. It's really a fascinating process. Yeah, I mean, one great example of that is what do you do if you're lonely? We're in the middle of a lonely as epidemic globally. What's the advice? One piece of advice is volunteer. So that is, it does a lot of things for you. But one of the things it does is remind you of your own nobility. The fact that you have something to offer. It's a kind of self love, although not an obvious one in our individualistic culture. And so that's an example that you can access the upward spiral from either side. Yeah, Brooke, we actually, we talk a little bit about loneliness because it's so important. One can argue that feeling lonely is essentially not feeling loved, not feeling like you belong. And people have tried to sort of do loneliness interventions. They're incredibly hard to do. You can't just kind of throw friends at lonely people because they tend to be suspicious of that. And the like, why does this person really want to do with me? And so prompting lonely people to do acts of kindness, like you said, to volunteer is actually in my mind, maybe like the only kind of successful sort of loneliness intervention that we have. Yeah, and to take that one step further, you can look at all the implement as interventions that have been posed, for example, in the surgeon general's book, he provided quite a number of interventions for loneliness. They all involve simply getting yourself in the presence of other people in a productive and constructive way. Yeah, well, let's go back to this word loved. I've been, it's not done yet. I'm on toward the final stages. I hope of finishing this eight year long book project that I myself have been on. I have a lot of jealousy of the two of you having given birth. My books about love and I totally agree with your broad definition of love. We do it a disservice in our culture. I mean, by the way, other languages have many words for love. We've got one word to describe everything from romantic relationships to how we feel about cookies. And that I think is doing a real disservice to it. And the fact that you guys are taking this innate capacity, this mammalian capacity, we have to give a shit. It's like anything kind of north of neutral for a stranger momentarily for somebody you see on the news for whom you wish compassion to your spouse, your kids, to your family. To me, all of that seems like love. Does that job with how you're seeing things? Well, to be fair, we're defining love in a very broad way, as you suggest, it can be almost any kind of caring affectionate feeling for another person. We don't want it to be a grab bag for any kind of positive sentiment you might have, you know, you might feel admiration for somebody else. You might feel respect for them. You might feel that somebody was fun and exhilarating to be with. We're not talking about that kind of thing. What we're talking about is caring concern affection for another person's well-being. Yes, I think Plato said love is to will the good of the other. That's a great quote. We should have used that in the book. Basically, we are wanting the other person to be happy, feeling like they matter in your life, feeling like you matter in their life. And again, our focus on our book is really not on loving the other, but on feeling loved because that's really what we all want, feeling like you matter to the other person and your boss. And your well-being matters to them. You said before that that's the key to happiness. Is it more to say so on you on that score? Because I don't think if you stop people on the street and say, what's the key to happiness that most people in our consumerist, capitalist competitive, clout seeking, selfie taking culture would say that, but I could be wrong. Yeah, I think a lot of people say think that it's about those external things. We call extrinsic goals, money, fame, beauty, power. As researchers, we kind of know that's not true. And it's constantly surprising to us that people still kind of believe that many of us are sort of continue to pursue those things. So more success, more accomplishment, yeah, popularity, status, power. I see that all the time. And yet, you know, lots of people kind of the grandmother's wisdom is sort of relationships, connection, love really is critical. You know, on your deathbed, that's kind of what people say this is most important to them. Yeah, so we really focused on how to help people feel more loved and that it's sort of not, it's actually not as, not as sort of difficult as we think because it seems like it would be very important. It's just like it would be really hard like it would be like out of your control, right? Like how do I get someone else to love me more? Like maybe I need to make myself more loveable or I need to change myself in some way or I need to change the other person in some way. In our book, we actually provide a really like empowering message, feeling like the is really in your control because it's not about changing yourself. It's not about changing the other person. It's about changing the conversation. And you think about a relationship is basically a series of conversations. And so our book is really about like what takes place during those conversations, how you can make yourself and the other person feel more loved in those conversations, which seems a lot more like tractable, a lot more feasible, right to accomplish. So along those lines, now that you've taken us to the practical aspects of the book, one of the central metaphors in the book and maybe Harry, you can tackle this is the relationship CSA. Right. We came up with the idea of the relationship CSA because we wanted to capture the back and forth that goes on when people engage in the kind of conversations that let them feel loved. So the idea of the CSA is that you can begin the process by lifting the other person up. Now what do we mean by lifting the other person up? We mean elevating their sense of self elevating the parts of them that they normally would keep hidden so that they're encouraged to talk about themselves to really open up to show curiosity, to listen with a genuine interest in the other person. Not to listen and you know, just waiting for your turn to enter the conversation. And the beauty of this is that when you lift the other person up just like when you're sitting on a CSA, that in turn gives them the opportunity to lift you up on your end of the CSA. So our approach to this idea of feeling loved is very much of a back and forth. You feel loved by helping another the other person feel loved, which encourages them to help you feel loved. And so there's a back and forth that builds up. It's a cycle that one of our colleagues calls a broad and build cycle you broaden yourself by listening to the other person with curiosity and you build a connection with them. Another way to think about it is like we're all walking around with walls around us and we don't really show that much. You know, when you realize it, it's sort of you see it everywhere, you know, everywhere like people just walking around and they're kind of they're only showing the tips of their self, the kind of shiny, positive parts. And you can't really feel loved if you have this wall around you because you'll always wonder if that person really knew me, you know, what's behind that wall, what they love me. So the key to feeling loved is really lowering those walls and becoming known to the other person, you know, maybe not 100% now, but like no more than before. And to really truly know the other right to help them lower the walls and how do you do that as Harry said, you showed genuine curiosity in the other person, you really listen to them, which gives them a sense of sort of safety and trust and you know how often does it happen that someone is so excited to hear your story. So excited to know more about your inner life or the details of your day, right, that doesn't happen very often, you know, most of us are just engaging in small talk really. And so when that person like shines that light on you, you feel safe to kind of like lower that wall a little bit to go up from that he saw. And then you reciprocate because reciprocity is incredibly powerful, compelling, right. Harry often says that it's most right you say this most one of the strongest principles, right, of social behavior. And then you're trying to light back at them. Yeah, I believe reciprocity is probably the strongest most potent norm that we have in social relations when one person does something good to you, you tend to do good thing for them when one person treats you badly, you tend to treat them badly. So the idea is that if you show genuine curiosity in another person, they're going to show genuine curiosity in you. And then the implication of this is if you want to feel more loved, what you need to do first is try to make the other person feel more loved. And I mean, I've thought about this in my relationships when there's been a time when in most people by the way acknowledge there's at least one relationship in their life where they would like to feel more loved by so if we all kind of consider that I've thought like how do I get this person to love you more. So it's a little counterintuitive to actually start by myself by listening more to them and show curiosity in them to sort of lift them up first. So actually the ball is in my court. Yeah, so I get that the ball is in our courts and it can feel like a bit of a tall order because I'm walking around feeling unloved whether I'm aware of that or not. And you're saying I need to do two things that are both of them difficult. One is really reach out and engage with somebody that I might have some resentment towards and hear them out. And the second is drop my armor and display a willingness to be known. I can see a lot of these these suggestions jabbing at our stinginess, the stinginess that some of us might feel emotionally. Yeah, lots of times people feel like I'll show interest in you, but I want you to show it to me first. And the problem is of course how do you get someone else to show interest in you? How do you get someone to be curious about you? You know, you can't just sit there and say, okay, be curious about me. What is in your control? And this is a point we bring up often in the book. What's in your control is the idea that you can show interest in another person. You can start the cycle. That is in your control. And so it does take a bit of what you might call altruism to say I'm going to start this by helping you feel more loved. But that's how the cycle works and that's the most effective way that you can actually make it happen. And you know reporter recently I was talking about this said to me, oh well, you know, this is so much work. You know, and my readers are going to rebel and they're going to say, look, I'm already like so overwhelmed. And now you're asking me to do all this work and to sort of show curiosity in another person and listen to them when I'm the one who's feeling unloved. And yes, that's exactly right. You know, relationships do take work. But I would argue that it's a beautiful kind of work. Right. When you have that connection with someone and you're you're really interested in what they have to say and they're interested back in you, hopefully, like, that's a beautiful moment. Right. So I wouldn't even call it work, although it does take initiative. Brief illustrative aside, I have an 11 year old son and sometimes hard to get him talking and he and I were having lunch right before this taping and I was asking him a bunch of questions and he was being not communicative. And so I just kind of backed off and ate my lunch and let him come to me. And he did. He actually said, what do you've been working on today? And I told him I've been mostly just kind of fretting a little bit about this book project that I keep talking about. And he said, well, what are you worried about? I said, well, I've been thinking today about the subtitle and then it goes off the rails is like, you should make the subtitle your mom joke. It's like, okay. Yeah, that was as far as we're going to get in a constructive conversation. But it is a good example of like I did express some curiosity in him. It didn't quite work because he's, you know, you know, 11 year old boy in there, unpredictable. But then I kind of backed off. I made my bed. I didn't press it too hard and then he came to me. Well, if it's any consolations you then I spent the past week with my daughter who's 30 and same, same dynamic exactly the way you describe. It is amazing how rare the kids say to the parent, you know, what are you thinking about? You know, what's going on in your life lately? But it's, yeah, it's so compelling, right? It's so powerful when someone shows it interest in us, you know, and it's so hard, I would say, to do the opposite, to show genuine curiosity, you can't fake it, right? You really have to find something. I have four kids and sometimes they're talking about something really interested in like video games or something. I just really honestly have no interest in the details of the video game. But you know, our job really, if we want to feel more love by them, is to try to find something that we can share. You know, we fortunately have found like TV shows that we watch together and one of my 14 year old and I are obsessed with mad men right now. And so we watch episode every night and we read the recaps and we discuss it. So we found something, right? So we can share, but you can't fake that genuine curiosity in the other person's inner life. Yes. Coming up, Sonia and Harry talk about some practical tools for feeling loved, tips on asking better questions and why genuine curiosity, reciprocity and emotional pacing, deep in connection more than performative listening. I had a meeting at my house the other day with three of my team members, Caroline, Abby and Ben. And it was a great meeting and I was thinking as I was in the middle of the meeting, how important it is to hire well. 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I can't tell you how often I'm scrolling and I get served ads for stuff I have no interest in. So when you want to reach the right professionals use LinkedIn ads. LinkedIn has grown to a network over a billion professionals including 130 million decision makers. And that's where it stands apart from other advice. You can target your buyers by job title, industry, company roles, and already skills, company revenue. So you can stop wasting budget on the wrong audience. It's why LinkedIn ads generates the highest B2B return on ad spend of all major ad networks. Seriously, all of them. Spend $250 on your first campaign on LinkedIn ads and get a $250 credit for the next one. Just go to LinkedIn.com slash happier that's LinkedIn.com slash happier terms and conditions apply. Okay, so let's talk about some more practical tools here. You've got these five mindsets that you recommend in terms of helping us to operate the CSA. The first is the sharing mindset. So you want to take that one? Sure, sure, sure. So we were talking about how important it is to show more of yourself sort of a deeper, fuller version of yourself to the other person because you can't really feel loved. If the other person doesn't know you, if you always wonder if they knew me that they wouldn't love me, and that's a really hard one for a lot of people. A lot of people have whole things close to the best. They have these walls and we have these walls to protect ourselves and that's important. You know, they sort of function. But when they're too high, you know, we can't really connect with other person if we don't like lower our walls a little. Now, how do you do that? Pacing is really important. You know, you don't just reveal your deepest secret and trauma right away to the other person. You have to really read the room. I often say I wish high schools and colleges had courses on emotional intelligence or social skills, right? Because that's something that's really hard to teach. Like, at what moment do you reveal that one particular thing about yourself to that person? Right, you really have to kind of read that person and do it at the right time. So I would start small, you know, if someone asks you how are you instead of saying I'm fine, maybe you say, oh, I had a rough day today or Dan, as you said, I've been fretting about something today, right? So that's just like to really starting small. And then if you get a good response, you can go a little bit deeper and a little bit deeper. See how they react, allow them to ask questions and to respond to you. You've kind of answered this, but I just want to put a fine point in it. I've had Brunei Brown on the show many times. I love her and she talks a lot about vulnerability or disarmament, you know, bringing down the walls that we think protect us, but actually make us miserable, you know, lock us in. And yet the question is always like, how do you do it without, as you say, trauma dumping or bleeding all over the place? Right, starting small, you kind of kind of know that it's really magical when it happens, you know, I had a Zoom actually once where I was pitching, giving a talk, you know, I had a talk to give. And it was just like professional zoom and we were kind of talking, but I was talking about this book actually because it was about a year ago, we were ready this book and about the importance of sort of sharing and the guy who was pitching to who sort of the organizer of this conference said, yeah, I just had a baby and it's really been hard on our relationship, you know, since we had a baby, which by the way is very common. And just the way he said it was like, it just kind of broke the fourth wall. And I think we've all had this experience where we're kind of engaging the sort of small talk or middle talk or kind of very like professional. And suddenly someone says something that's just a little bit like piercest of the surface, right. And then it's like a magical moment where you suddenly forge a connection, right, because most of the time, we're trying to impress the other person. It's like, Dan, we're talking to you now, we want you to know that we're smart and funny and kind and interesting, right? Like we're trying to impress you. And maybe you'll be impressed, but it doesn't forge a connection if we only stay on that level. What really forges a connection is that if we share something a little bit about ourselves, you share something about yourself, we puncture that kind of small talk. The second of the five mindsets and Harry I'll throw this to you is the listening to learn mindset. What's that about? Well, the listening to learn mindset says that one of the ways to approach conversations is to listen to the other person as if there was going to be a quiz tomorrow. Most people listen to prepare their response that is most people listen waiting for their turn to enter the conversation and oh, here's what I'm going to say next listening to learn means that you have a genuine curiosity about the other person that you really want to know not only what they're telling you, but you want to know more about it. So one of the most powerful things you can say to a person in conversation is tell me more. It's really easy and sometimes people will be astounded that you ask that and they'll really go into opening up in a much more vulnerable and deeper way. So the idea of listening to learn is that when we listen to another person we're listening to connect we're listening to find out what that person is really all about what makes them tick and we want to find out as much as possible. And so we approach the conversation with that kind of a mindset not the mindset of you know I'll wait till they finish talking smile nicely and then tell them about myself. Aside from telling me more you recommend something called level three questions. What's that? I think asking questions is really important because when people think of listening they think of like you're just sort of like making like a you kind of staring at the other person and you're doing the nonverbals and you're you look like you're really engaged. I actually don't love that when people do that to me because I'm like are they really listening or they just sort of being performative listening right and so but asking when you ask questions that's when you can really tell the person is really listening and so one of my favorite examples is actually my best friend lives in Barcelona and so we leave each other voice memos all the time because of the time difference. And so I will tell a story about my life or something I'm thinking about and then she'll ask questions and the level three questions the level what it's kind of like oh what happened you know level three is when you're asking a question that shows that you really understand and then you're kind of taking what they said to a new level so my friend will make an observation and then you're asking me a question that gives me a new insight you know that I've never had before that's not easy to always do but it's sort of that's what really shows me that she's listening right it's not the kind of looking like you're listening you know like making eye contact it's the showing that she's really like going to like a deeper level that maybe even I considered so that's beautiful that happens agreed. Let me just add it one thought to that you know listening is an idea that gets a lot of attention in the media today and in some ways that attention is exactly the wrong kind of attention because what many of those programs do they talk about smile six times lean forward paraphrase what the other person says they give you a bunch of tools that you can artificially apply in a conversation that don't necessarily allow you to really figure out what is the way to do that. What is this person telling me how can I help them go deeper with it how can I elaborate on it and that requires attending to them and really tuning what you do and say to you know where they're going and what they're saying if they're telling you about something happy then you know you can try to share their excitement and talk about what a wonderful thing it is and if they're talking about something sad you can try to help them more deeply understand what they're feeling. So let's get to the next mindset I'll leave it to the two of you who tackles it it's called the radical curiosity mindset. I'll start because I thought a lot about kind of distinguishing listening from curiosity and so my favorite example is imagine you're sitting in a lecture like your student you're sitting in a lecture and you're listening really well to the lecture and you're taking great notes and you're even asking these level three questions about the lecture and then there's a test down the lecture and you get a plus. So you're great at listening but you know what you could be completely not curious at all about the topic of the lecture and still get it a plus and so curiosity is really something that's beyond that it's an enthusiasm I think Harry you're the one who sort of talks about the importance of sort of enthusiasm and excitement and energy that comes with curiosity it's when you're not just sort of listening is really more of a process and curiosity it's more of an enthusiasm it's something that's not going to be a good thing. So that's the enthusiasm and something is that we said that you can't fake that you want to know more and you know it when you see it right and it's not that comment what was the last time you're like at a dinner party or reception or you know something with people and someone was so excited to hear your story right there like leaning in and there are is our bright and they're smiling and they just can't wait for you to finish your story right that doesn't actually happen that often and it's rare and it's so powerful. And it's so powerful and compelling indeed how do you operationalize that advice if you can't fake it if it's not a skill you can develop well it is a skill you can develop because enthusiasm involves being genuinely curious about what the other person tells you Sony is example of listening to a lecture is a good idea you know you can memorize everything that you're told and get a plus on the exam but do you really care about it but if you take a class where you really care about what the topic is and you really want to learn that wanting to learn comes across and it allows you to incorporate the information so much better and you're not going to forget it the day the exam is over when people do this in conversations when you show enthusiasm it's a remarkably powerful experience one of the places we see this most clearly is in teaching teachers who are enthusiastic about the process of teaching and about the subject matter that they're teaching. Are the ones who communicate that to their students and their dozens of studies that support that idea and it's true it is hard to teach curiosity but I think we all can find something of interest in something maybe not always right there's been times where I've been I've actually tried to do this in my life where I used to go to these kids birthday parties where you kind of you have to talk to these other parents that you have no issues in talking to you right and I'm trying to find something and I'm talking to some dad and I'm saying well tell me about a recent trip you took oh I'm not going to talk to you. Well you want to grease well I've never been to Greece you tell me the most interesting thing about that so you can find something of interest in most topics you know but it does take sort of effort and energy like we've done studies actually did it one of my students did a study where we she asked people sort of every day engage at least like one curious behavior and people didn't have any trouble doing that I mean that was very broad so these said things like oh I learned about this new sort of type of dance and so I was interested in it so I decided to go online. I was curious about this recipe and so everyone people didn't seem to have trouble finding something to be curious about every day or we're also doing a study with conversations where we're going to ask people to like in a conversation with a friend or a partner to ask them some questions about something that you're curious about and I think we all can do that to find something of interest to talk about. So one aspect of this I do think is trainable the enthusiasm part the genuinely being happy for somebody else there's a ancient 2600 year old Buddhist technique it's called mu-dita practice MUD ITA and it's sometimes translated as sympathetic joy or just I think of it as the opposite of shot and Freud taking happiness and other people's happiness and there are these meditation practices where you are going to be in the middle of the world. You envision people happy and you send phrases like may actually you're having this increase and this can make you the type of person that other people want to call when they have good news. Exactly. Yeah like charismatic people right or another type of people who are who show enthusiasm about whatever you have to say, compulsion I think is another word in English for that from would it that right that's that being happy for someone else's happiness. Okay, yeah there's an adage that appears in many different forms that says happiness shared as a happiness doubled and we've done a lot of research on that actually that shows when you relate good news to another person. And they show that kind of enthusiasm about your happiness your happiness grows and their happiness grows so when you can share good news. If the other person can really me saying that's that's nice good for you that doesn't get anything but wow that's the best thing I ever heard. You know that's the best thing that's happened this week that produces this kind of building up for both people. You can actually think enthusiasm at the beginning and then it becomes real it's kind of like laughter when you start laughing and you force yourself to laugh and then you actually keep laughing for real. So actually we haven't really we didn't talk about this in the book but I actually think there's something to that where you sort of can kind of look and seem enthusiastic and actually that will turn it to real enthusiasm. The other thing I want to mention is that there are cultures and I'm from Russia myself you know I was born in the Soviet Union where there's sort of a notion of the evil eye and I think there's some cultures where. It's hard this idea of the happiness shared is a happiness you know doubled i think it's a little bit hard to experience or it's not as common right because showing happiness to others sometimes is perceived as having sort of detrimental effects or could bring bad luck to you so that's kind of a very interesting little side note. Coming up to Tonya and Harry talk about the final two mindsets plus their beef with the whole concept of the five love languages. 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Okay so fourth mindset of five and again just to reset for the listener these are mindsets that can help you operate the relationship see saw that is kind of one of the controlling metaphors for this book that Harry and so you have written the fourth mindset is the open-hearted mindset I'll make that a jump ball whichever one of you wants to take it you can take it. Well i'll take it but to say basically one way to think about the open-hearted mindset is open-hearted is basically feeling kindness and warmth and bonding towards another person wishing them well wanting their dreams to come true and one way to think about that mindset as I think most relationships that are kind of stable and sort of reasonably healthy. Are characterized by the open-hearted mindset in fact it's almost like a definition of a relationship like if you don't have. Warmth and kindness towards someone you know what's the point right like you're not going to probably be in a relationship with them you know with some exceptions you know with maybe a family member you don't you're on the choice to be around. And so i think open-hearted in some ways yeah it's the most common character is a lot of relationships but when you lack it you have very little yet there's really huge costs right when you're not showing warmth and. And kindness towards the other person it's really unhealthy would you be with that Harry totally agree and there's a lot of research that shows and some of the best studies are Sonya studies that shows that when you. Do something kind for another person you benefit. You know perhaps the other person benefits if what you do is effective enough but you benefit from the act of doing it there studies that even show that. This produces an increase in dopamine in the brain by doing something kind if you can do one kind thing every day that's just a small and easy way to increase your happiness and you know we have studies that compare. Doing acts of kindness for others to doing acts of kindness for yourself right so then you mentioned self care before and so self cares is wonderful you know i'm a big fan. And yet it might make you feel good in the moment but doesn't necessarily translate to how happy you are a week later month later and so we find the do acts of kindness for others is more happiness inducing the do acts of kindness for yourself more than that we've done studies of maybe two or three studies now where we collect blood. From participants before and after they do acts of kindness for others or for themselves and we find that only in the group that does acts of kindness for others do we see changes in RNA gene expression so we're talking about immune gene expression we see. Reduced pro inflammatory gene expression so more inflammation is bad right so you want to have less. Pro inflammatory gene expression so that's associated with a stronger immune profile so not only does it do acts of kindness for others make people happier more connected but also there's a suggestion that it makes you healthier they boost your immune health. Pretty cool very this is why the dollar llama calls it wise selfishness you know if you want to be selfishly you should do it the right way because kindness is what actually will. Make you happier okay final mindset the multiplicity mindset i'll take that one the multiplicity mindset is the idea that. We all have parts of ourselves that are desirable and admirable and we all have parts of ourselves that are less desirable and perhaps even. Repulsive on some level acknowledging that it's okay to have weaknesses it's okay to have shortcomings is a major part of being able to feel loved with another person now this cuts both ways. In terms of your connection with another person you have to acknowledge and recognize that they have parts of themselves with that are not really that good you know they. They may have shoplifted when they were younger they may have done something even worse than that that doesn't make them a bad person it means that they have a part of themselves that is something that they're not particularly proud of. The interesting part of the multiplicity mindset is that it also gives you permission to have weaknesses and shortcomings so one of the reasons that we hide our vulnerabilities is that we're afraid that you're going to think that I really am. An undesirable person but if I understand the idea of multiplicity then I realize that I can have weaknesses and letting you know about them isn't that. I'm not necessarily going to turn you off to me so you know what Whitman expressed this idea in his poem you know I contain multitudes we all contain things that we're proud of and we all contain things that we're less than proud of and acknowledging that a full person has all of these is one important way of allowing yourself to feel loved and allowing you to feel love toward another person. I think I think that this is a really hard one to embrace because I think at heart we're all kind of judgmental about other people and we're judgmental about ourselves you know one of my pet peeves is have you noticed that everyone's exes and narcissists like everyone's exes and narcissists and you know what we're all narcissists we're all narcissists it's a continuum I'm a little bit narcissistic and so both of you and sometimes I'm kind and sometimes I'm selfish and sometimes I'm loyal and sometimes I'm not right so we all have those qualities now we don't want to again dump those on the ground. Some others right away you know so timing matters but I think it's just something that's just really important to keep in mind to embrace and try to be one of my actually new years resolutions is to try to be less judgmental you know when you hear someone doing something that new kind of approach that I'm taking is if I hear about a bad behavior you know friend will say OK can you believe this guy did this right. And I first, I'm like, oh my god, yes, I can't believe it. That's so awful. But my second reaction, after I've kind of like calmed down, is I see the little boy inside that man who did that bad thing, and that little boy is maybe threatened or insecure or whatever. And so you can always find a charitable or some explanation set it in context of that. That really helps us all, I think, to recognize everyone's humanity and how all of us have these sort of messy, complicated insights. Yes. And an essential part of this is that recognizing the multitude in another person opens the door to forgiveness. If someone has wronged you in a pretty significant way, if you're going to be judgmental about it and say, oh, they're just a bad person for that, that makes it impossible for the relationship to continue. But if you recognize that there may have been some reason they did this bad thing that can help explain it, it opens the door to forgiving them and moving on with the connection. I think it's crucial to point out that there's a difference between explanation and excusing. Yes, absolutely, right? Yes, and I would also say there's an important difference between forgiving and forgetting. Forgiving means not forgetting. Right, so forgiving is not forgetting. Forgiving is not condoning. Forgiving is not excusing. Forgiving is not partiting or rationalizing. It's something you do for yourself, actually, not for the other person. Okay, so we've just gone through these five mindsets that can help us operate the aforementioned relationships. CISA, you have thoughts about how to apply these mindsets in different contexts because as we establish at the beginning of this conversation, you're talking about love in a capacious way, inclusive of romantic relationships, parenting relationships, workplace strangers, et cetera. We have a chapter where we talk about sort of applying mindsets in sort of different kinds of relationships, for example, whether it's with your kids or with your colleagues versus your romantic partners, and obviously it's going to look a little different, although I think less different than one thinks. I mean, some obvious examples sharing mindsets, right, with your kids, you're not going to want to share some parts of yourself with your children, because they might scare them. It just might not be healthy for your relationship with them. You might not want to share everything with your boss, right? But it doesn't mean that you don't share it all, that you have to sort of be wise about it. So that's just one example. But something like listening curiosity, I think applies to pretty much any context, any relationship I can't really think of a context where it's sort of bad to listen, right, Harry? When is it ever unhealthy to listen or be curious? Right. Except for when you're doing it too much, you know, moderation, right? I'm a big fan of moderation. We should do everything in moderation, including moderation, right? So maybe if you're too curious, and we know people, for example, with high functioning autism, become so curious about certain topics, right? Special interest that they, that could actually take them away from other sort of things that they need to be doing in their life. So maybe sometimes curiosity can kill the cat, right? It could be a little too much, everything in moderation. And by the same token, I would add, I can't think of a situation in which having an open-hearted mindset would be a bad thing. It's always a good thing, even in a competitive world, you know, in the world of competitive sports, for example, the athletes who have a warm-hearted approach to their competitors. It doesn't make them compete any less, but it makes them not want to hurt the other, and it makes them feel like the competition is a joy because you're bringing out the best in each other. I'd like to argue to bring open-heart mindset more to work contexts. We talked about sort of love in a very broad sense. We don't use the word love enough, I think, at work. It just seems like it's inappropriate, right? And yet, loving your colleagues, being really warm towards your colleagues, people who work for you, who supervise you, I think it's beautiful. I think the world will be a better place. If we use that word love more often, my friends and I say, we love each other all the time, and sometimes I'll be on the phone, and I'll be like, I love you so much, and my kids are confused, they're like, who are you talking to? Like, I'm talking to my friends. Why don't we say we love you more to each other? That's one of my goals is try to get the world to use that word more often. Well, I was in North Carolina over the holiday, and we were riding the shuttle bus to pick up our rental car, and I got to talking with the bus driver. I was showing some curiosity toward him, and eventually he talked about how he loved his colleagues. Now, this is a shuttle bus driver working for a rental car company, and yet he loved the people he worked with. And he actually used that word. Harry, let me stay with you for a second. The whole goal here is to help us feel loved, the whole goal of your project. What are some of the principal barriers in this room? We've been talking about the some of the skills we can develop, but what are the barriers we might bring to the table, and then how do we work with them? I think the primary barrier that we bring to these situations is that we approach the conversation with the wrong mindsets. We assume that the way to get love from another person is to talk about your many accomplishments. How many awards have you won? How many articles have you published? Even how many charitable acts have you done over the holiday? We believe that we need to impress the other person with our desirability. And the irony is that we think this goes in exactly the wrong direction, that this creates a wall, a barrier of sorts between yourself and the other person, because it sets up an ideal that the other person, perhaps they'll be impressed, but they can't connect to it. It can't be effort. Again, I don't want to use the word work because I think it's a positive, kind of beautiful kind of work. It does take effort to sort of switch your mindset off of maybe off of yourself onto another person to try to make someone else feel loved first. It needs to be intentional, it needs to be effortful. But one huge caveat I think we haven't really talked about is once in a while, you will do everything right. You'll embrace the five mindsets and you will do the dynamic reciprocal thing that happens on the seesaw and it's not gonna work. And once in a while, that person is not gonna respond. You know, maybe when you tell your story, they're not gonna really listen and be curious or maybe they're not gonna share. And once in a while, that's gonna happen. And maybe you haven't chosen well the person to feel loved by, that's something important. You have to choose well. Maybe that person is just not gonna make you feel loved and so you need to maybe put a pause on that relationship, maybe walk away from it or maybe just accept that you're not gonna feel loved by that person. So we do want to sort of bring in that caveat that once in a while, that's gonna happen. So are there other ways to diagnose the viability of your various relationships? Well, one way to diagnose the viability of this whole approach is to experiment with it, to try it and not plunge right in deeply, but rather take baby steps into it and see if the other person responds. You know, the idea of the seesaw is not that I support you for half an hour and then you support me for half an hour. It's much more of a, I support you for, you know, a brief moment in a conversation, how do you respond? If you don't respond in a supportive enthusiastic way toward me, maybe that's a sign that is not gonna work. You know, you can sort of experiment with it at a relatively safe and basic level to see if it's working. And you know what, we actually had a very interesting experience when we were writing the book and we had sort of our initial drafts, we sent a few friends and acquaintances and we were surprised like I had two guy friends read the book and they wrote me and they said, you know, your book led me to break up with my girlfriend. So two different people actually used the book and used the mindsets in a way that we did not intend but we actually now think it's very useful is they used the mindsets as a diagnostic tool of their relationships. And so one friend said, you know, your book made me realize that my girlfriend really doesn't share and she really doesn't listen. And another guy said, you know, your book made me realize that my girlfriend just sort of ceased to show any curiosity in my work or in my life. And so they ended up breaking up. I mean, I assumed that they had discussions first. And so that's another way to sort of think about it is that like to what extent are these five mindsets being embraced in your relationship? And if they're not, how can you fix that? And if you can't fix that, then maybe that's telling you something important. Yeah, a common feeling that people have and this is especially true for couples who go into couples therapy is that one person feels like they're doing all the lifting. So they're in the seesaw and they feel like they're lifting the other person and they feel like they're not getting lifted back. And one of the best ways to check on that is to have a conversation about it to ask the other person to do more lifting, ask them why they're perhaps they're not doing the lifting. And that can not only be a diagnostic tool but it can also be a therapeutic tool. And we actually created a quiz where it's on our website, howtofeellove.com where people can kind of gauge the extent to which they are embracing the five mindsets in a particular relationship. And then they get feedback to say, you know, maybe you're really good at sharing but you're not so good at listening and here's some tips. So I think that's, again, I think that we hope that people will find that useful. But there's an important thing to keep in mind and what Sonya said just brought this up from me. You know how much you're lifting the other person because you're doing it, right? You're actively involved in it. Sometimes you don't know that the other person is actually trying to help lift you up but for some reason it's not getting across because you don't know what's in the other person's head. You don't know what their motivation is, you don't know what their intention is. So by checking it out such as on our quiz or by simply conversing about it, you can find out, well, maybe there were times that the other person was doing the lifting and you weren't quite open to it. You weren't quite realizing it and that can be an important part of this process also. I believe in the book you talk about if only myths, is it worth discussing what some of those are? Yeah, absolutely. And we already talked about them a little bit. Harry had said that one of the problems is people kind of embraced the wrong mindset or sort of thinking away that it's not helpful about their relationships and why they don't feel loved or how to feel more loved. And the only myths are basically what he had said earlier, which is that many of us believe that I will be more loved if only the other person knew about all my accomplishments and all my positive qualities. Or I would feel more loved if the other person didn't know about some of my weaknesses and flaws and sort of bad behaviors. Or I'd feel more loved if I were more successful, if I had more money, fame, power, beauty, we think that that's the solution. And it's not the solution, right? So I think that we make pretty clear. One of the things I believe you take on, one of the, this is one of the, if only myths that I believe you talk about is that our relationship would work if only our partner spoke our love language. And you guys take a hard run at the concept of love languages. Sure, I'll take that one. The concept of love languages is flawed because it makes the assumption that if only my partner spoke the love language that is most important to me then I would be happier. And research shows that that's just not the case. For one thing, the basic elements that everybody wants in their relationship, expressions of affection, kindness, are true regardless of whether that's your primary love languages or not. Also, the research very clearly shows that if your partner tries to speak your love language, your particular love language, the thing you say that you value most in a love relationship, that doesn't make the relationship any better than if they speak one of the other languages. There's just not a lot of evidence that this kind of primary importance makes all that much of a difference. And I want to jump in. First of all, I love the idea of love languages. I mean, it becomes so popular everywhere if you go on dating apps, you know, people say what their love languages are. And now, I think they're great heuristic to talk about sort of how we give and express love. It just turns out that, you know, it's Harry kind of alluded to, this was a five love languages, right? For us, our information, quality time, gifts, physical touch, and acts of service. Okay, so there's a five. But it turns out that really there's two of them that like everyone prefers. So that's one kind of myths about the love languages. It's not that like we all have these different ones and we have to match. So we all want quality time and words of affirmation, right? So those are the two that researchers that everyone prefers. It also turns out that of course, there's lots more than five. There's many more love languages, right? One of my favorites is giving your partner freedom is sort of another love language. But there's this many, many, many others. It turns out that matching in the love languages doesn't predict how good your relationship or how long it's gonna last. And then really my favorite finding is it turns out your relationship is better off with like the higher number of languages, the other person expresses their love in, right? So it turns out like the more the better. So it's not the fit issue. Actually, one of my top ones is physical touch. You know, it's not that it has to be physical touch is just the more the better. So if I still love the idea, so I don't want to kind of reject it as a heuristic it just has some flaws. Before I let you go, is there anything either of you or hoping we would get to that we haven't gotten to? Well, one of the things that many people have asked us about is the idea of whether you can feel loved by a chatbot. That's certainly a timely idea. And either the popular media has had numerous examples of this kind of thing. And our take on it is kind of a mix take, but the bottom line is probably not. The positive side of it is that if you're not feeling much love in your life, a chatbot can fill that void. If you're starving, McDonald's burger will probably help you not feel hungry. Will it provide much nutrition? No. The chatbots are trained on models that include a lot of the research that we're talking about and most chatbots by now are pretty darn good at validating and understanding, at showing curiosity, adopting a multiplicity mindset, even at adopting an open-hearted mindset. So a chatbot can do that. And if you're hurting, if you're missing it, that is a powerful experience. And it certainly explains why a lot of people feel that way when they're talking to their chatbot. On the other hand, at some point, you have to realize that it's an algorithm talking to you. It's not another person who has decided that they're really interested in you. It's a chatbot that has been programmed to show interest in you. So on some level, it starts to become an empty experience. Now, there probably are some listeners to this podcast who are going to rebel against this idea because they're gonna say they love talking to their chatbot. And I would argue there are a lot of people who love McDonald's burgers too. Well, I would also add, for the same reason that we're so moved and we feel great grand emotions and we'd love, say, going to movies, right? We're kind of fooled that the movies are actually real when they're not real for the same reasons. We find it very powerful and compelling, right? And we want to chat about, it shows curiosity in us a way. It's not real curiosity, but it certainly feels real. And AI companions certainly are the best listeners that we'll ever have in our lives, right? They remember everything. I also wanted to add in terms of, you had asked about what we hadn't touched on is, when you think about relationship failures and like breakups and problems and relationships, again, I'm not a therapist, so this is really more my kind of opinion based on lots of research. I think it's often about not feeling loved. It's often about the other person is doing all these things and I'm still not feeling loved. When you do have a problem in relationship, like I had a relationship where the person was not texting me often enough or fast enough, right? And I realized the problem wasn't the texting, it wasn't making me feel loved when they weren't texting fast enough, right? So it's often a lot of these kind of relationship problems are symptom of not feeling loved. And you'll the show, Couples Therapy, which is a great show where there's like, real couples in New York and they kind of forget the cameras there. And it strikes me watching that show how often they're fighting and fighting about this and this and you don't do this enough and you did this to me. And often the underlying issue is like, I'm not feeling loved enough by you. So that just sort of struck me as we were writing the book. Is that a thing you would recommend saying in a conversation with your partner? Yeah, perhaps I would be pretty powerful to say that. You know, our book comes out around Valentine's Day and almost all Valentine's Day cards say, I love you, right? They all say I love you, right? And so we wanted to change that to you make me feel loved. So that's the positive side of it, right? That's really beautiful. Like you make me feel loved. And it's about you and not about me. But in a conversation and I don't know, Harry and a deep conversation with a partner when you're having problems to say, I'm not feeling loved enough by you. I mean, maybe that'll be a very powerful thing to say. Yeah, and I would phrase it differently. I would say I would feel more loved if you. So, you know, don't put it into it. I don't feel loved because that's very likely to get a defensive response. But I would feel more loved if you answered my text messages within 10 minutes. Oh, like sure, I can do that. You know, it's much easier to respond to that kind of more hopeful framing. Yes, or you can put it through the five mindsets. I would feel more loved if you were, you know, a more open about what's happening for you or I would feel more loved if you, you know, asked me real questions about my day or showed any interest or happiness for me when I'm happy, et cetera, et cetera. Yes, absolutely. Okay, final question. Can one or both of you just plug the shit out of the new book and the website and everything else? So, I think this book, how to feel loved is the best work I've ever done in my career. And I know that sounds like hyperbole, but it's true. I think Harry has said the same thing. I really think it's gonna resonate with a lot of people. Our website is called howtofeellove.com and we have a quiz that I think people will really find useful, which is just five questions. And it's gonna tell you what your sort of best kind of highest ranked mindset is and what your, the mindset is that needs the most improvement and you'll get feedback on that and then we'll give you some tips on how to sort of embrace those mindsets even more. And I would add that I also think this is the best thing that I've done in my career. And one of the things I like about it is that it makes all of the research we've done real. This is taking the research and presenting it to the world in a way that really feels real and it just validates all the things that we've done for so many years. And there's this idea of giving psychology away, making it something that helps people deal with the most important challenges they face in their lives. So I'm really excited about the book making a difference in people's lives. And I also wanted to add that it's really, again, I may have said this before, that the book really has an empowering message that feeling loved is actually under your control. That it's not about like, oh, I have to change myself to be more lovable. It's not about I need to change the other person to somehow love me more. It's about changing the conversation, changing how I act and what I show in a conversation in the next set of conversations, which is really, really something that's feasible, workable, tractable, under everyone's control. So I hope that people will take that as an empowering message. Thank you both. Pleasure to talk to you. Congratulations on the new book. Thank you. Good luck with your book, Dan. Yeah, about love too. Yeah, thank you. It was a pleasure to talk to you. Thank you again to Sonia Luvamiriski and Harry Reese. Great to talk to them. Don't forget to check out my new app, 10% with Dan Harris. We've got a growing body of guided meditations for extraordinary teachers. And we do these weekly live meditation and Q&A sessions. Super fun, danharis.com. Check it out. There's a free trial. Finally, thank you very much to everybody who worked so hard on this show. Our producers are Tara Anderson and Eleanor Vasilie. Our recording and engineering is handled by the great folks over at Pod People. Lauren Smith is our managing producer, Marissa Schneider-Min is our senior producer, DJ Kashmir. Is our executive producer and Nick Thorburn of the band, Islands, wrote our theme.