February 17, 2025 • 38 mins
To improve your life you might decide to prioritize your own personal happiness, or find meaning in helping the people around you. Few of us consider pushing ourselves well beyond our comfort zones. It might take a lot of effort and risks pain or disappointment.
University of Chicago professor Shige Oishi thinks to live fully we all need to push ourselves to find "psychological richness". He tells Dr Laurie that we should look for daily opportunities to explore, get lost, mess around and have random encounters that challenge our routines and expectations.
Read more about Shige's work in Life in Three Dimensions: How Curiosity, Exploration and Experience Make a Fuller, Better Life.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin Positive psychology, The field that studies the science of happiness,
has made a lot of progress in the last few decades,
so much so that we've only been able to scratch
the surface on all the cool studies out there. Even
in the hundreds of episodes I've hosted in the five
(00:35):
years of the show, we've spent time looking at the
positive effects of treating yourself better and being kind to others,
but we haven't talked as much about the happiness boost
we can get from getting out of our comfort zones
and taking on unfamiliar or even uncomfortable things. Some people
seem to love pushing these boundaries, you know the type,
someone who treks across an entire continent, sets up a
(00:56):
wildlife sanctuary, patents some new invention, and drops everything to
become a novelist. These people can seem larger than life,
but they do exist, and one expert in well being
science thinks we should pay more attention to them.
Speaker 2 (01:09):
Thank you so much for having me on. Sorry, I'm
just running.
Speaker 1 (01:12):
Out this stuff. Yeah, I really enjoyed the new book.
Speaker 2 (01:15):
Oh thank you.
Speaker 1 (01:15):
She gay Owishi teaches psychology at the University of Chicago,
and he's argued that past measures of happiness have missed
something really important, what he calls the psychologically rich life.
What is psychological richness?
Speaker 2 (01:28):
Well?
Speaker 1 (01:28):
She Gay explains this concept in his new book Life
in Three Dimensions, How curiosity, exploration, and experience make a fuller,
better life. She Gay's book explains that even if we
can't all become globe trotting and ventor poets who hang
out with movie stars, we can make some modest changes
to mix up our lives a bit. So get ready
to hear his strategies as she Gate teaches us how
(01:49):
to live the richest life possible. She Gay first began
thinking about psychological richness during about of mid career self reflection.
Speaker 2 (01:58):
I studied happiness since nineteen ninety five. At the time,
there are very very few labs studying happiness, and we
did all kinds of studies about happy what makes people happy.
And in twenty fifteen, you know, at the time I
already had ten ure. I was for professor at the
University of Virginia, and it just hit me that, oh
(02:20):
my gosh, I've been studying happiness for twenty years. You know,
what do we learn and what was the biggest debate
in the field, and I have to say I was
really sort of sad to realize that we've been debating
this which way is more important personal happiness, to make
yourself happy, maybe even at the expense of others sometimes,
(02:42):
or to make others happy, even at the expense of oneself.
In the end, the result of this twenty years debate
was like, of course both are important, happiness and the meeting,
and I was like, wow, did I waste my twenty
years pursuing this question? But then the next question came up.
(03:02):
I'm not happy with my life and I was pretty
happy with my wife and kids, and I found my
life to be pretty mean for I mean, my social
psyde class was very popular, I played baseball with my kids.
I felt like I have some roles in the society.
But then when I asked this question of if I'm
happy and find my life to be meaningful, is it
(03:24):
a complete life? And at that point I couldn't say yes.
So when the semester started, I just ask students, what
do you think if you have happiness and meaning is
it a complete life? And a half of them were like,
of course, don't be so greedy. I mean, like that
that's a lot, but then the other half was like, yeah,
(03:45):
maybe something is missing, and we started to look at
those missing parts and also the reverse that somebody who
doesn't feel their life is happy or meaningful, but maybe
still leading good life. And in the end we were
able to find a lot of examples of that, like
Oliver Sacks Life or Anthony bou Ding. We decided to
(04:08):
call this a psychological rich life. So my book is
entitled Life in Three Dimensions. So we got the first dimension,
which is happiness, and the second dimension, which is a
meaningful life, and the third dimension, we think is a
psychologically rich life. And essentially, even if you don't have
happiness or meaning, perhaps there is a third good life.
(04:32):
And if you have happiness and meaning, then richness will
add something. And you got it all you lived in
three dimensions. So that's the basic trends.
Speaker 1 (04:42):
I love that. And so in the book, you started
with this comparison between your life and your dad's life.
I don't know if you're comfortable sharing that story.
Speaker 2 (04:49):
Yeah, So my dad is nineteen years old. He was
born and raised in this small town in southern island
of Qusha. Like his father, grandfather, great grandfathers and all
the ancestors. He essentially became a full time bomber when
he was fifteen, and he lived his life in the
same town, surrounded by the same people he grew up with.
(05:13):
He got married when he was twenty seven. He still
lived with my mom, and he loved life on the farm.
He loves hot Springs, so he goes to Hot Springs
with his wife and family friends and it's a really
cozy life. And meanwhile, I was born to the same
family obviously, so I was expected to take over the farm.
(05:35):
But from early on I show no interest in farming. Indeed,
I hated it. So I knew from early on I
got to get out of here. As soon as I
graduated from high school, I left my hometown for Tokyo,
which is like seven hundred miles away, so very very
few people from my high school went to Tokyo. So
(05:55):
my dad and mom like, when they said, yeah, you
can go to college, I think they were expecting me
to stay in that region because there are a lot
of good college there too, But just I left as
far as I can, as quickly as I can. After
graduating from college, I got my first job in Minnesota,
moved to Virginia, moved to New York City, went back
(06:16):
to Virginia, and moved again to Chicauggle. So you know,
if my dad's life is life of stability, familiarity, tradition,
probably my life is complete opposite, constant move, move, move,
on the go. You know, sometimes I really feel like, wow,
why did I do this? You know, like I could
(06:36):
have just stay there, hubsake every night, chat with my
old friends, And indeed, I think that's a good life.
My dad doesn't have much regret, is very content, but yeah,
it is very, very, very different.
Speaker 1 (06:49):
And so I love that story because it so nicely
illustrates the sort of distinction of a psychologically rich life.
But I want to start by unpacking the sort of
first two ideas of my happiness and that we've sort
of had so far. The first is this idea of happiness,
maybe just going to give me a sense of what
we mean by happiness, like or like scholars mean by this.
Speaker 2 (07:07):
Right, So we don't mean happiness by the just a mood,
temporary mood, but it is really about whether you're happy
about your life, how it's going, how it has turned out.
So it's very similar to a sense of satisfaction with
your life, and it turned out that a lot of
(07:27):
factors that are associated with happiness are something to do
with the stable life. So stable relationship is the number
one predictor of happy life. So close relationship with your friend, family, mairit,
or satisfaction a partner satisfaction is extremely important. And more
(07:47):
and more, the financial securities and stability is very very important.
So this is kind of interesting. Back in nineteen ninety five,
correlation between household income and happiness a life satisfaction was
like zero point one five, which is not that strong,
But we looked at historically it last fifteen years or
so from the nineteen seventy saves, and we see the
(08:09):
correlation going up. So financial stability is very very important.
That actually means that a lot of people are financially struggling,
a lot of people have relationship issues, so happiness has
become sort of out of reach for them. So that's
another reason why I thought maybe there is another way
(08:30):
to conceptualize a good life that doesn't rely on this
sort of life of stabilities and comfort.
Speaker 1 (08:37):
You've also argued that we sometimes face what you've called
the happiness trap. Yeah, that when we focus on certain
aspects of happiness, we get it wrong. What are the
parts of this happiness trap?
Speaker 2 (08:45):
Yeah, I think happiness trap is particularly serient phenomenon in
the United States. So when you ask Americans, what do
you associate when you hear the word happiness, People often
talk about success or reward for all hard work. So
when you equate happiness with success, then when you're not happy,
(09:08):
you're failing. And this is really unfortunate. And this is
something as a cultural site was just I found very
puzzling too. When I came to the United States. I
asked frand how are you, and everybody say great. In Japan,
when somebody said how are you, I say, okay, so so,
and the conversation goes, yeah, me too. It's like we commiserate,
(09:30):
and that's the cultural lam. So there is no pressure
to be happy. Especially when you're not feeling happy, you
can say I'm not happy. But in the state, especially
college students, maybe elite college students in particular at your
institution like Yale, I think there's a tremendous pressure to
feel happy. And what I mean by happiness trap is
(09:51):
that people think that because happiness is an indicator of success,
I shouldn't be feeling these negative emotions, and that's the
really the difficult and dangerous part of this trap. Stuff
happens to everyone, right, that events happen to the good people,
And when things happen, if you don't have this pressure
(10:11):
to feel happy, you are just much more naturally accepting
of this particular minor bump in the world, Whereas if
you feel like you have to be perfect, you have
to be successful, you have to be happy all the time,
then you really ruminate these little failures, and rumination, of course,
is the precursor to depression. So that's what I mean
by happiness tramp.
Speaker 1 (10:32):
So that's just kind of solely going for this idea
of happiness is or feeling good in your life doesn't work.
But you've also argued that seeking meaning might not go
as smoothly as we often assume, either, that there might
be some challenges with seeking out a meaningful life too.
Speaker 2 (10:45):
What do you mean, Yeah, so any graduation speech you
hear is like, be great, go out there and change
the world. You guys are so smart, which is true,
But when you think about somebody who changed the world,
Martin Luther King, Junior Rosa Park Gandhi, Sure can I
(11:05):
do that probably not. I think when we think about
the meaningful life, we often think about somebody who made
a huge difference, and I think that will set yourself
up for the failure that you are not leading a
meaningful life. So that's one part. But the other part
is that if you look at the people who are
(11:28):
actually reporting that they are leaning a meaningful life, they
are not making that kind of differences. They're really focusing
on their neighborhood, their churches and things that is small,
and they can go to soup kitchen every Thursday and serve,
and of course you do that over the years, then
you make a difference in your communities, which has no
(11:50):
bad consequences at all, just that the study sometimes find
that the people who say their life is meaningful, they
tend also to say that they endorsed right wing authoritarianism,
not just a political conservatives. That type of right wing
authoritarianism comes with a very small in group whom you
(12:10):
take care very carefully, but sometimes show huge antagonism against
the outgroup members. So when I say there is a
meaning trap, one is that it seems so grand that
it seems impossible to achieve. But the second one is
actually we tend to go too narrow and focus on
the wellbeing of the close others, but we often neglect
(12:34):
outgroup members, so that could be potentially dangerous.
Speaker 1 (12:39):
So there's some danger in seeking out happiness. There's some
danger in seeking out a life of meaning if you
kind of get it wrong. One of the studies you
point to, which I think is fun, is sort of
asking subjects about the psychologically much life.
Speaker 2 (12:51):
So early on, when we just studied psychological richness research,
we really wanted to see like what might be psychological
rich event. So to a group of students, I ask, okay,
what did you do over the weekend? What makes you happy?
And then say things like, yeah, I went to my
(13:11):
favorite restaurant. Yeah. Sure, going to a favorite restaurant, you
know exactly what to order. That's the predictable, reliable joy
and happiness. So I asked, then what was the meaningful event?
And a lot of people said, oh, I went to
church and he felt meaningful. And some said I helped
out my friends who was just struggling writing a paper,
(13:33):
which makes sense because making other people happy is an
important part of the meaningful. So I asked, then, what
was the events where you felt psychologically rich. What I
mean by psychological rich here is that in my not
have been happy event or meaningful event per se, but
something different, something unusual, something novel. One person, Rachel said,
(13:57):
there was this guy typing something half naked, and I've
never seen a guy typing in public area, like shirtless.
And the strange thing was it wasn't hard. He wasn't
well built, so he wasn't showing off his upper body
or anything, and that was kind of interesting. She said, Okay,
so there was a novelty, but I thought that's not
(14:19):
really rich. And then another person said, oh, I went
to professional wrestling much, and she was so surprised that
there are so many kids. And then later she learned
the WWE does a lot of anti bulling campaign and
for them these sort of ridiculous looking pro wrestler is
actually genuinely their role model hero. And then she went
(14:42):
through this up and down, you know, emotions and came
back with a totally different view of professional wrestling. They
thought that was sort of the working class thing to do,
and they went and then they were really moved, and
then there still a typical view of the pro wrestlers
completely got shattered. So I thought Okay, this is not
just a novel experience but pretty complex, a lot of
(15:04):
different emotions, and also came back with a different perspective.
So I think in order for some event to be
psychologically rich, it has to be not just interesting, but
it has to come with some kind of change and
perspective change in particular. So the shressless guy is not
really rich because it didn't change the way you view
(15:25):
the world at all, whereas the latter case is really
just wow, I didn't expect this, and I need to
change my view about this.
Speaker 1 (15:33):
You kind of give me a definition of this sort
of third way of experiencing life.
Speaker 2 (15:37):
Yeah. Yeah. We define psychologically rich life as a life
filled with diverse, interesting experiences, and that often comes with
the change in perspective. So I often contrast with the
materially rich life. Lots of cash, a lot of assets,
a lot of things. That's the material richness. What about
(15:59):
the psychological richness. It is all about accumulation of interesting
experiences or stories that you can tell. So in your
psycho bank, you have lots of interesting experiences and stories
to tell to others, whereas if this person doesn't have
that many interesting stories to tell, then even if their
(16:21):
bank account is huge, maybe psychologically speaking, they're impublished.
Speaker 1 (16:26):
So how common is living a psychologically rich life? Fire call?
You study this in a pretty clever way?
Speaker 2 (16:32):
Yeah, I mean that was the questions. And if nobody
these psychological rich life, what are we studying? So we
were a little bit worried. So in one study we
just decided to look at the New York Times obituariest Essentially,
I love reading obitualies and obitually I think it's a
really great summary of how somebody lived their lives. You know,
(16:55):
New York Times always have three or four obitualies every day.
So I hired three research assistants and their assignment was
read New York Times obitually every day and then rate
each person's life in terms of happiness, meaning and psychological richness.
And they don't know what I'm trying to look at,
(17:16):
I mean, blind to hypothesis. So in the end we
figured out roughly there were thirty two percent essentially all
the people who raided as somebody who led the happy life,
another thirty two led meaningful life, and then the fifteen
of them led psychological rich life. Some people that happy
(17:37):
and the meaningful life, some people that happy and the
psychological rich, and two of them got it all. They
were raided as happy, meaningful, and the psychological rich life.
So we did this in Charlesville local newspaper Daily Progress.
The number of people who were raided to have let
(17:57):
the rich life went down to about five percent, which
could be due to like New York Times people are
sort of very famous people, prominent people. They had more
dramatic life than the ordinly Central Virginians maybe, But another
possibility was that New York Times obitual is a lot
more detailed, whereas the local one is very factual and small,
(18:18):
So it could be just the information. So we need
the third study in Singapore, and in Singapore something like
thirty five percent of them were rated as leading psychological
ridge life. But I'm pretty confident that non trivial number
of people do lead cyclo sciar ridge life.
Speaker 1 (18:36):
If you're not currently among that non trivial number of
people but want to live more richly, she Gay will
guide you with his top tips right after the break
Psychologists she Gay Owishi has argued that there's something many
of us have missed in our quest to live a
happier life. We need to find a bit more psychological richness.
(18:59):
But what if you listened to the first part of
this episode and thought, hey, my life isn't nearly as
rich as it could be. What should you do about it?
Speaker 2 (19:06):
Personally, I think the best way is to find mind,
the open friend, the friend who will bring you to
new experiences. So I mention, if your friend is Samantha
from Sex and the City, then you don't have to
have an openness to experience. She would just drug you
to interesting experiences. And if you're an agreeable person, then
(19:27):
whenever your friends say, hey, Laurie, do you want to
try these new restaurants? Do you want to go to hike?
And you just say okay, and then you just try.
You might not do it yourself, but you know, if
somebody else says do it, you do it. But if
you don't have friends like that, then I mean there
are other options. For instance, I think the biggest one
(19:48):
is be like. Playfulness is I think the huge part
of leading a psychological ridge life. Actually, as an adult, I
think it's quite hard to be playful. Playfulness you have
to take a vacation from your obligations and responsibility of
daily life, from social and economic reality. And that's when
(20:10):
you can be playful and be the rich life.
Speaker 1 (20:14):
We also argue that playfulness can help us too in
ways we don't expect. For example, you've argued that playfulness
can help protect us from burnout. What are some studies
that tell us.
Speaker 2 (20:23):
That, yeah, I mean, there is this amazing meta analysis
about athletic performance among these super elite athletes. So we
are talking about Olympic level athletes, and you know, some
people start out pretty early and specialize in one sport,
whereas other people play multiple sports before specializing. And the
(20:45):
really interesting finding from there is that if you look
at the junior level competitions, then the performance is really
predicted by how early somebody specialized. But when you look
at the final Olympic level competition performance, then it's people
who play multiple sports and specialize later in life they
(21:06):
do better. And this playfulness is that world class athlete
who play some pickup games and some other sports for fun,
I mean, those other people who tend not to burn
out and tend to do better. And the crazy thing
is that there is a replication in the scientific achievement
as well. So highest German scientific award is Leibnitz Awards.
(21:30):
And some of them went on to win Nobel Prize.
So German researcher looked at the difference between eventual Nobel
Prize winners versus Livelitz winners, and this is absolutely my
favorite finding that Likelitz winners became full professor much earlier
than the Nobel Prize winner, the Nobel Prize winners actually
(21:52):
study multiple things before and so it took them much
longer to get the full professorship, but eventually they made
a major discovery. So I did a playfulness even in
the professional arena is really important because you don't want
to be two specialized too early. Keep your curiosity wide
(22:13):
open because when you just specialize, what you're doing is okay,
this information is irrelevant for me, so don't pay attention.
Whereas if you are open, then you're just oh, that's
kind of interesting, and sometimes you help.
Speaker 1 (22:25):
So that's kind of embracing playfulness. Your second tip, I
think is very related is that we need to embrace
serendipity and spontaneous Yeah. What do you mean by serendipity there?
Speaker 2 (22:34):
Yeah, So serendipity and the spontaneity I think is the
springboard of interesting experiences and if you think about, like,
all the interesting experiences you had, probably those are not
the things you planned six months in advance. In graduate school,
for instance, we don't have that many required courses, so
(22:55):
we had a lot of time. So I would just
stop by my lave made office. Let's go have coffee,
and we talk something random and interesting and there is
some discovery of certain things, so very interesting. And when
I got a job at the University of Minnesota, I
really wanted to do the same thing. So I knocked
on the door Bob Krueger, fellow assistant professor, and I said, hey, Bob,
(23:18):
do you have time for coffee, And then looked through
his schedule and said, no, what about in two weeks
we can all have this cup of coffee spontaneously. And
that's what it means to be a professor. Bob became
like so successful. He's very productive. I think he wrote
already three hundred articles, so you see how that works.
(23:41):
But at the same time, in terms of this spontaneous
random conversations or experiences, when you just schedule and plan everything,
you really are depriving from these random things to happen,
random encountering, random conversation, random reading. So over scheduled life
(24:02):
that we all live right now is really no great
for psychological richness.
Speaker 1 (24:08):
This is something I work a lot about in my
elite college students that I work with, because they want
to overschedule everything. You know, it's from early in high school.
They have already planned what job they want. Some students
are like, well, I definitely want to get married by
the time I'm twenty seven. Like they want to have
everything planned out, and I really worry that they might
be leaving some important aspects of their well being kind
(24:28):
of uncared for. They haven't given themselves the space to
try new things out exactly.
Speaker 2 (24:33):
That's the space and that I think that's the pressure.
They feel like they have to succeed. They have to perform,
and they have to perform at the highest level all
the time. And it's like academic athletes almost like just practice, practice,
practice every day, and I think that is really not healthy.
(24:53):
You should really have plenty of time for play. College
is the best time to be spontaneous. Once you go
out of college, your friends don't live around the corner.
Everybody is too busy to just have spontaneous meeting in outing.
Speaker 1 (25:07):
But you've argued that we really even as adults need
to find more time to be able to define that.
Any advice for how to build that serendividio, well, I think.
Speaker 2 (25:15):
You have to be a little bit pushy. Just text
somebody and just accept a lot of rejections. You know
they you do it, Okay, Next, it is really hard
when everybody is so overbooked, but we should we should
try to be spontaneous.
Speaker 1 (25:33):
So tip number three that you've talked a lot about
is something that we've mentioned before on the Happiness Lab.
If we want to live a psychologically rich life, we
need to find more talk about how all plays into
psychological richness.
Speaker 2 (25:45):
Yeah. I think all is really this sense of your
small and the world is so large and just sort
of transcending kind of sense and then emerging between you
and the nature or the arts, and a lot of
esthetic experiences that we have when we go to a museum,
(26:06):
when we go watch movies, read literatures and poems. It's
not always all, but there is these esthetic experiences that
is very different from our everyday life. So if you
read Coslo Shigurus The Remains of the Day, then you
transported into this world of British Lord Lord Darlington in
(26:30):
Darlington Hall with butlers and the twenty some stuff members
and you know, in the nineteen thirties and those kinds
of immersions and the mental transportation I think is really
really important because look at our lives, right, we are
privileged to travel anywhere we want. But every day we
(26:50):
get up, eat breakfast, usually just meet the same people,
respond emails, et cetera, et cetera. So every day what
we can experience firsthand is pretty limited. Whereas in a
matter of one hour, if you read these novels or
watch movie two hours or whatever, you can really experience
somebody else's life and go through really dramatic emotional experiences icariously.
(27:18):
So for the matter of a few hours, you often
go through somebody's entire life. And the guy who owns
this bookstore in Morocco said he read four thousand books,
so he says he lived four thousand lives. And that's
exactly how I feel about these esthetic experiences that really
expand your horizons and allow you to go through and
(27:41):
experience something that you can never maybe very hard to
experience in person.
Speaker 1 (27:46):
And so that's kind of finding more all through aesthetic
experiences in other people's lives. But your tip Moore before
argues that we should also explore more ourselves, that we
should be seeking out new experiences and doing more atypical things. Sure,
any ideas for how to fit that in in a
busy life.
Speaker 2 (28:02):
Yeah, So I think that if you have commute, then
I think the change in your commute is really interesting way.
I mean, if you're driving, just drive through different town,
different neighborhood. If you're taking train, get off in between
and explore. So I think there are a lot of
things you can do to do new things, even if
(28:23):
you're pifty packed in you know, schedules and I you know,
try to enjoy, for instance, getting lost in a new town.
You know, it's a little bit scary, but you know,
I always tell myself, well, okay, eventually this will be
a psychological rich experience. Of course, when you get lost,
you worry, i'mous and soul forth. But most of the
(28:44):
time you will work out. And those are things sort
of like you let yourself go, go with a flow.
Those attitudes and mindset helps a lot in terms of
deviating from your routines and the schedules. And of course
we cannot deviate all the time, but when there is
a chance to be able to deviate. Just let yourself
(29:04):
go and deviate. That's what I want anybody to do
if possible.
Speaker 1 (29:09):
It's also a nice reminder of your final tip, which
is that we can experience more psychological richness by turning
adversity into a psychological rich experience, into a fun story.
Speaker 2 (29:19):
Right.
Speaker 1 (29:19):
Explain why our stories are more under our control, you.
Speaker 2 (29:22):
Know, because I grew up in Japan, and Japan, of
course has a lot of natural disasters earthquake, tsunami and
things like that. I studied happiness and wellbeing of these
earthquake survivors, and my sabbatical in twenty thirteen, I spent
one year in Kobe, Japan. That's where there was a
huge earthquake in nineteen ninety five. Over six thousand people died.
(29:46):
That was just devastating. And the sad finding was that
in twenty eleven, even sixteen years after the earthquake, those
Kobe residents who lost their house, we're still repoorting significantly
lower level of life satisfaction. They report more physical symptoms,
you know, pain than those Kobe residents who did not
(30:09):
lose their house. So I thought that was really sad
because we thought, you know, time heals everything, but this case,
time did not heal everything. But then we looked at
the value orientations of these earthquake survivor and we realized
that the people who went through earthquake, they really become
(30:30):
more pro social, autruistic. They don't care about their own
accomplishment as much as other Japanese who did not experience earthquake.
So definitely there's change. After all, when you are in earthquake,
you really see a lot of things that you never
imagined before. Neighbors who are not particularly friendly will come
(30:52):
out and try to save you and save your dog,
and you see a lot of different side of people.
So those people survivors all talk about like sort of
that regained sense of confidence in humanity even and I
think that's the contributing fact to psychological richness. Even if
the earthquake doesn't add to life satisfaction, obviously, that detract
(31:16):
from life satisfactions and meaning is also very hard to
gain from earthquake because this is a random act of
the modern nature. So people often struggle to find the
meaning after earthquake. But people have used this earthquake as
a springboard for change and growth and learning and I
(31:38):
think there are a lot of signs that some adversity
could be a source for psychological rich life.
Speaker 1 (31:43):
Any suggestions for changing maybe some of our less than
earthquake level adversity into psychologicality.
Speaker 2 (31:50):
Yeah, so we ask college students just just think about
all last year and what kind of traumatic event negative
event happened, and did you learn anything from this traumatic event? Interestingly,
this was random assignment, they later reported them. Yeah, actually
trauma made them change the way they view the world
and they view themselves. And the more perspective change they recorded,
(32:15):
the higher level of psychloscovichiness they reported as well. And interestingly,
the more perspective change they reported less happy day you can.
So the perspective change is not great for happiness, but
that tend to add psychoscurvichess. So it doesn't have to
be a huge trauma in earthquake tsunami type situation. But
(32:36):
even you know everyday failures and negative events, if you
can construe something positive or something that you learned from
the events, that could add the texture to your life
and enrich your life.
Speaker 1 (32:51):
And it does seem like that texture isn't always psychologically positive.
You've talked about even things like exploring and getting lost,
or having an experience that maybe challenges you and maybe
changes some of your assumptions. Right, it sounds like the
big message of a psychologically rich life is like it
might be a little hard than you expect, the rewards
might be bigger than you expect.
Speaker 2 (33:12):
Yeah, yeah, definitely. This is not something easy always and
not always positive obviously. But I think the power of
psychological rich life or that mindset to try to maximize richness,
is that you're not afraid of negative emotions and negative events.
Stuff happens, try to accept those, try to learn from it,
(33:35):
and as long as you have that attitude, you don't
get into these ruminations and depressions. And it is when
you really try to be perfect and try to be
super successful and always happy, that these little bumps really
hurts you. So I am really trying to say that
(33:55):
richness is not for everybody, for sure, But when you
have richness mindset, I think you're less afraid of failures
and negative events and so forth, and I think you
become a little more adventurous and actually experience something that
you wouldn't holp you would ever experience, and you know
that really could change you and the course of your life.
(34:18):
So I think uncertainty and unpredictability are part of life
and we should embrace it. And to the extend that
you embrace it, you're maximizing the possibility of adding the
richness to your life.
Speaker 1 (34:31):
I think sometimes when people look at the possibility of
making their life more exciting, exploring more getting curious, Honestly,
some of the people I know feel trapped, right They
feel incredibly busy. There's this whole host of obligations. It
feels like they're kind of really comfortable in their life.
It might feel scary to break out of it. Any
advice for folks who might be having an experience like
that or it feels really hard to go after some
(34:53):
of these things that might make their life psychologically really.
Speaker 2 (34:55):
Yeah, I mean I totally like get that, because by
nature I really like familiarity too. But I think the
one way if you are afraid of doing like completely
brand new things, and I think one thing I can
suggest is really stick with what you like. If you
love beatles, you can keep listening to beatles, but try
(35:18):
to find something new about the same song you are
listening for all these years. And the same thing with
the literature. If you love Missus Dorway, you can read
like three times four times and you find always something new.
So if you're afraid of trying something new, actually just
going back to your favorite movie or favorite song and
(35:39):
favorite bands and things like that, you can actually find
in something new from the familiar. My favorite story here
is I have been married with my wife for a
long time. I've known for like twenty years, and around
twenty ten I said we should buy some painting and
then she goes, Okay, I can paint, and it's like
what I didn't know that you can paint? And then boys,
(36:02):
she can paint. She's just like pain, pain, pain. Now
it's just full of her painting. So sometimes you just
find something new from very familiar person. If you just
have an opportunity to ask some new questions or chance
to talk about some topic that you never talked about
with the same old friends, you can actually enrich your
(36:23):
life by digging deeper with your familiar objects some person
as well. If you are afraid of sort of going all.
Speaker 1 (36:32):
The way out for more big and small steps towards
leading a psychologically rich life, you should really check out
Shegay's new book Life in three dimensions how curiosity, exploration,
and experience make a fuller, better life. But let's recap
the how to tips we've heard so far. Tip number one,
find ways to be more playful. Take a little break
(36:53):
from your responsibilities and try to cultivate a childlike curiosity
and sense of fun. Tip number two, be more open
to the random. It's comforting to schedule everything in life,
but try to find more moments of serendipity. It could
be as simple as stopping by the chat with a coworker.
The third tip is to experience psychological richness by proxy.
(37:13):
You can visit a faraway place, witness a natural wonder,
or hear about some amazing people just by reading a book,
looking at a painting, or watching a movie. Tip number
four is to explore we can easily get in the
habit of doing the same things day in, day out,
so throw some variety into the mix, even if that's
turning left out your front door instead of right. And
(37:34):
Chigey's final tip is to see the richness in adversity.
Putting yourself out there has its risks. There will be
disappointments and setbacks, but those challenges ultimately add to our
life story and help us grow. That's it for a
psychologically rich life. But our how To season isn't over yet.
Our next installment tackles what changes you should make to
(37:54):
motivate and elevate the people around you. In short, we'll
be exploring how to become an inspiring person. That's all.
Next time on the Happiness Lab with me Doctor Laurie
Santos
Pushkin Positive psychology, The field that studies the science of happiness,
has made a lot of progress in the last few decades,
so much so that we've only been able to scratch
the surface on all the cool studies out there. Even
in the hundreds of episodes I've hosted in the five
(00:35):
years of the show, we've spent time looking at the
positive effects of treating yourself better and being kind to others,
but we haven't talked as much about the happiness boost
we can get from getting out of our comfort zones
and taking on unfamiliar or even uncomfortable things. Some people
seem to love pushing these boundaries, you know the type,
someone who treks across an entire continent, sets up a
(00:56):
wildlife sanctuary, patents some new invention, and drops everything to
become a novelist. These people can seem larger than life,
but they do exist, and one expert in well being
science thinks we should pay more attention to them.
Speaker 2 (01:09):
Thank you so much for having me on. Sorry, I'm
just running.
Speaker 1 (01:12):
Out this stuff. Yeah, I really enjoyed the new book.
Speaker 2 (01:15):
Oh thank you.
Speaker 1 (01:15):
She gay Owishi teaches psychology at the University of Chicago,
and he's argued that past measures of happiness have missed
something really important, what he calls the psychologically rich life.
What is psychological richness?
Speaker 2 (01:28):
Well?
Speaker 1 (01:28):
She Gay explains this concept in his new book Life
in Three Dimensions, How curiosity, exploration, and experience make a fuller,
better life. She Gay's book explains that even if we
can't all become globe trotting and ventor poets who hang
out with movie stars, we can make some modest changes
to mix up our lives a bit. So get ready
to hear his strategies as she Gate teaches us how
(01:49):
to live the richest life possible. She Gay first began
thinking about psychological richness during about of mid career self reflection.
Speaker 2 (01:58):
I studied happiness since nineteen ninety five. At the time,
there are very very few labs studying happiness, and we
did all kinds of studies about happy what makes people happy.
And in twenty fifteen, you know, at the time I
already had ten ure. I was for professor at the
University of Virginia, and it just hit me that, oh
(02:20):
my gosh, I've been studying happiness for twenty years. You know,
what do we learn and what was the biggest debate
in the field, and I have to say I was
really sort of sad to realize that we've been debating
this which way is more important personal happiness, to make
yourself happy, maybe even at the expense of others sometimes,
(02:42):
or to make others happy, even at the expense of oneself.
In the end, the result of this twenty years debate
was like, of course both are important, happiness and the meeting,
and I was like, wow, did I waste my twenty
years pursuing this question? But then the next question came up.
(03:02):
I'm not happy with my life and I was pretty
happy with my wife and kids, and I found my
life to be pretty mean for I mean, my social
psyde class was very popular, I played baseball with my kids.
I felt like I have some roles in the society.
But then when I asked this question of if I'm
happy and find my life to be meaningful, is it
(03:24):
a complete life? And at that point I couldn't say yes.
So when the semester started, I just ask students, what
do you think if you have happiness and meaning is
it a complete life? And a half of them were like,
of course, don't be so greedy. I mean, like that
that's a lot, but then the other half was like, yeah,
(03:45):
maybe something is missing, and we started to look at
those missing parts and also the reverse that somebody who
doesn't feel their life is happy or meaningful, but maybe
still leading good life. And in the end we were
able to find a lot of examples of that, like
Oliver Sacks Life or Anthony bou Ding. We decided to
(04:08):
call this a psychological rich life. So my book is
entitled Life in Three Dimensions. So we got the first dimension,
which is happiness, and the second dimension, which is a
meaningful life, and the third dimension, we think is a
psychologically rich life. And essentially, even if you don't have
happiness or meaning, perhaps there is a third good life.
(04:32):
And if you have happiness and meaning, then richness will
add something. And you got it all you lived in
three dimensions. So that's the basic trends.
Speaker 1 (04:42):
I love that. And so in the book, you started
with this comparison between your life and your dad's life.
I don't know if you're comfortable sharing that story.
Speaker 2 (04:49):
Yeah, So my dad is nineteen years old. He was
born and raised in this small town in southern island
of Qusha. Like his father, grandfather, great grandfathers and all
the ancestors. He essentially became a full time bomber when
he was fifteen, and he lived his life in the
same town, surrounded by the same people he grew up with.
(05:13):
He got married when he was twenty seven. He still
lived with my mom, and he loved life on the farm.
He loves hot Springs, so he goes to Hot Springs
with his wife and family friends and it's a really
cozy life. And meanwhile, I was born to the same
family obviously, so I was expected to take over the farm.
(05:35):
But from early on I show no interest in farming. Indeed,
I hated it. So I knew from early on I
got to get out of here. As soon as I
graduated from high school, I left my hometown for Tokyo,
which is like seven hundred miles away, so very very
few people from my high school went to Tokyo. So
(05:55):
my dad and mom like, when they said, yeah, you
can go to college, I think they were expecting me
to stay in that region because there are a lot
of good college there too, But just I left as
far as I can, as quickly as I can. After
graduating from college, I got my first job in Minnesota,
moved to Virginia, moved to New York City, went back
(06:16):
to Virginia, and moved again to Chicauggle. So you know,
if my dad's life is life of stability, familiarity, tradition,
probably my life is complete opposite, constant move, move, move,
on the go. You know, sometimes I really feel like, wow,
why did I do this? You know, like I could
(06:36):
have just stay there, hubsake every night, chat with my
old friends, And indeed, I think that's a good life.
My dad doesn't have much regret, is very content, but yeah,
it is very, very, very different.
Speaker 1 (06:49):
And so I love that story because it so nicely
illustrates the sort of distinction of a psychologically rich life.
But I want to start by unpacking the sort of
first two ideas of my happiness and that we've sort
of had so far. The first is this idea of happiness,
maybe just going to give me a sense of what
we mean by happiness, like or like scholars mean by this.
Speaker 2 (07:07):
Right, So we don't mean happiness by the just a mood,
temporary mood, but it is really about whether you're happy
about your life, how it's going, how it has turned out.
So it's very similar to a sense of satisfaction with
your life, and it turned out that a lot of
(07:27):
factors that are associated with happiness are something to do
with the stable life. So stable relationship is the number
one predictor of happy life. So close relationship with your friend, family, mairit,
or satisfaction a partner satisfaction is extremely important. And more
(07:47):
and more, the financial securities and stability is very very important.
So this is kind of interesting. Back in nineteen ninety five,
correlation between household income and happiness a life satisfaction was
like zero point one five, which is not that strong,
But we looked at historically it last fifteen years or
so from the nineteen seventy saves, and we see the
(08:09):
correlation going up. So financial stability is very very important.
That actually means that a lot of people are financially struggling,
a lot of people have relationship issues, so happiness has
become sort of out of reach for them. So that's
another reason why I thought maybe there is another way
(08:30):
to conceptualize a good life that doesn't rely on this
sort of life of stabilities and comfort.
Speaker 1 (08:37):
You've also argued that we sometimes face what you've called
the happiness trap. Yeah, that when we focus on certain
aspects of happiness, we get it wrong. What are the
parts of this happiness trap?
Speaker 2 (08:45):
Yeah, I think happiness trap is particularly serient phenomenon in
the United States. So when you ask Americans, what do
you associate when you hear the word happiness, People often
talk about success or reward for all hard work. So
when you equate happiness with success, then when you're not happy,
(09:08):
you're failing. And this is really unfortunate. And this is
something as a cultural site was just I found very
puzzling too. When I came to the United States. I
asked frand how are you, and everybody say great. In Japan,
when somebody said how are you, I say, okay, so so,
and the conversation goes, yeah, me too. It's like we commiserate,
(09:30):
and that's the cultural lam. So there is no pressure
to be happy. Especially when you're not feeling happy, you
can say I'm not happy. But in the state, especially
college students, maybe elite college students in particular at your
institution like Yale, I think there's a tremendous pressure to
feel happy. And what I mean by happiness trap is
(09:51):
that people think that because happiness is an indicator of success,
I shouldn't be feeling these negative emotions, and that's the
really the difficult and dangerous part of this trap. Stuff
happens to everyone, right, that events happen to the good people,
And when things happen, if you don't have this pressure
(10:11):
to feel happy, you are just much more naturally accepting
of this particular minor bump in the world, Whereas if
you feel like you have to be perfect, you have
to be successful, you have to be happy all the time,
then you really ruminate these little failures, and rumination, of course,
is the precursor to depression. So that's what I mean
by happiness tramp.
Speaker 1 (10:32):
So that's just kind of solely going for this idea
of happiness is or feeling good in your life doesn't work.
But you've also argued that seeking meaning might not go
as smoothly as we often assume, either, that there might
be some challenges with seeking out a meaningful life too.
Speaker 2 (10:45):
What do you mean, Yeah, so any graduation speech you
hear is like, be great, go out there and change
the world. You guys are so smart, which is true,
But when you think about somebody who changed the world,
Martin Luther King, Junior Rosa Park Gandhi, Sure can I
(11:05):
do that probably not. I think when we think about
the meaningful life, we often think about somebody who made
a huge difference, and I think that will set yourself
up for the failure that you are not leading a
meaningful life. So that's one part. But the other part
is that if you look at the people who are
(11:28):
actually reporting that they are leaning a meaningful life, they
are not making that kind of differences. They're really focusing
on their neighborhood, their churches and things that is small,
and they can go to soup kitchen every Thursday and serve,
and of course you do that over the years, then
you make a difference in your communities, which has no
(11:50):
bad consequences at all, just that the study sometimes find
that the people who say their life is meaningful, they
tend also to say that they endorsed right wing authoritarianism,
not just a political conservatives. That type of right wing
authoritarianism comes with a very small in group whom you
(12:10):
take care very carefully, but sometimes show huge antagonism against
the outgroup members. So when I say there is a
meaning trap, one is that it seems so grand that
it seems impossible to achieve. But the second one is
actually we tend to go too narrow and focus on
the wellbeing of the close others, but we often neglect
(12:34):
outgroup members, so that could be potentially dangerous.
Speaker 1 (12:39):
So there's some danger in seeking out happiness. There's some
danger in seeking out a life of meaning if you
kind of get it wrong. One of the studies you
point to, which I think is fun, is sort of
asking subjects about the psychologically much life.
Speaker 2 (12:51):
So early on, when we just studied psychological richness research,
we really wanted to see like what might be psychological
rich event. So to a group of students, I ask, okay,
what did you do over the weekend? What makes you happy?
And then say things like, yeah, I went to my
(13:11):
favorite restaurant. Yeah. Sure, going to a favorite restaurant, you
know exactly what to order. That's the predictable, reliable joy
and happiness. So I asked, then what was the meaningful event?
And a lot of people said, oh, I went to
church and he felt meaningful. And some said I helped
out my friends who was just struggling writing a paper,
(13:33):
which makes sense because making other people happy is an
important part of the meaningful. So I asked, then, what
was the events where you felt psychologically rich. What I
mean by psychological rich here is that in my not
have been happy event or meaningful event per se, but
something different, something unusual, something novel. One person, Rachel said,
(13:57):
there was this guy typing something half naked, and I've
never seen a guy typing in public area, like shirtless.
And the strange thing was it wasn't hard. He wasn't
well built, so he wasn't showing off his upper body
or anything, and that was kind of interesting. She said, Okay,
so there was a novelty, but I thought that's not
(14:19):
really rich. And then another person said, oh, I went
to professional wrestling much, and she was so surprised that
there are so many kids. And then later she learned
the WWE does a lot of anti bulling campaign and
for them these sort of ridiculous looking pro wrestler is
actually genuinely their role model hero. And then she went
(14:42):
through this up and down, you know, emotions and came
back with a totally different view of professional wrestling. They
thought that was sort of the working class thing to do,
and they went and then they were really moved, and
then there still a typical view of the pro wrestlers
completely got shattered. So I thought Okay, this is not
just a novel experience but pretty complex, a lot of
(15:04):
different emotions, and also came back with a different perspective.
So I think in order for some event to be
psychologically rich, it has to be not just interesting, but
it has to come with some kind of change and
perspective change in particular. So the shressless guy is not
really rich because it didn't change the way you view
(15:25):
the world at all, whereas the latter case is really
just wow, I didn't expect this, and I need to
change my view about this.
Speaker 1 (15:33):
You kind of give me a definition of this sort
of third way of experiencing life.
Speaker 2 (15:37):
Yeah. Yeah. We define psychologically rich life as a life
filled with diverse, interesting experiences, and that often comes with
the change in perspective. So I often contrast with the
materially rich life. Lots of cash, a lot of assets,
a lot of things. That's the material richness. What about
(15:59):
the psychological richness. It is all about accumulation of interesting
experiences or stories that you can tell. So in your
psycho bank, you have lots of interesting experiences and stories
to tell to others, whereas if this person doesn't have
that many interesting stories to tell, then even if their
(16:21):
bank account is huge, maybe psychologically speaking, they're impublished.
Speaker 1 (16:26):
So how common is living a psychologically rich life? Fire call?
You study this in a pretty clever way?
Speaker 2 (16:32):
Yeah, I mean that was the questions. And if nobody
these psychological rich life, what are we studying? So we
were a little bit worried. So in one study we
just decided to look at the New York Times obituariest Essentially,
I love reading obitualies and obitually I think it's a
really great summary of how somebody lived their lives. You know,
(16:55):
New York Times always have three or four obitualies every day.
So I hired three research assistants and their assignment was
read New York Times obitually every day and then rate
each person's life in terms of happiness, meaning and psychological richness.
And they don't know what I'm trying to look at,
(17:16):
I mean, blind to hypothesis. So in the end we
figured out roughly there were thirty two percent essentially all
the people who raided as somebody who led the happy life,
another thirty two led meaningful life, and then the fifteen
of them led psychological rich life. Some people that happy
(17:37):
and the meaningful life, some people that happy and the
psychological rich, and two of them got it all. They
were raided as happy, meaningful, and the psychological rich life.
So we did this in Charlesville local newspaper Daily Progress.
The number of people who were raided to have let
(17:57):
the rich life went down to about five percent, which
could be due to like New York Times people are
sort of very famous people, prominent people. They had more
dramatic life than the ordinly Central Virginians maybe, But another
possibility was that New York Times obitual is a lot
more detailed, whereas the local one is very factual and small,
(18:18):
So it could be just the information. So we need
the third study in Singapore, and in Singapore something like
thirty five percent of them were rated as leading psychological
ridge life. But I'm pretty confident that non trivial number
of people do lead cyclo sciar ridge life.
Speaker 1 (18:36):
If you're not currently among that non trivial number of
people but want to live more richly, she Gay will
guide you with his top tips right after the break
Psychologists she Gay Owishi has argued that there's something many
of us have missed in our quest to live a
happier life. We need to find a bit more psychological richness.
(18:59):
But what if you listened to the first part of
this episode and thought, hey, my life isn't nearly as
rich as it could be. What should you do about it?
Speaker 2 (19:06):
Personally, I think the best way is to find mind,
the open friend, the friend who will bring you to
new experiences. So I mention, if your friend is Samantha
from Sex and the City, then you don't have to
have an openness to experience. She would just drug you
to interesting experiences. And if you're an agreeable person, then
(19:27):
whenever your friends say, hey, Laurie, do you want to
try these new restaurants? Do you want to go to hike?
And you just say okay, and then you just try.
You might not do it yourself, but you know, if
somebody else says do it, you do it. But if
you don't have friends like that, then I mean there
are other options. For instance, I think the biggest one
(19:48):
is be like. Playfulness is I think the huge part
of leading a psychological ridge life. Actually, as an adult, I
think it's quite hard to be playful. Playfulness you have
to take a vacation from your obligations and responsibility of
daily life, from social and economic reality. And that's when
(20:10):
you can be playful and be the rich life.
Speaker 1 (20:14):
We also argue that playfulness can help us too in
ways we don't expect. For example, you've argued that playfulness
can help protect us from burnout. What are some studies
that tell us.
Speaker 2 (20:23):
That, yeah, I mean, there is this amazing meta analysis
about athletic performance among these super elite athletes. So we
are talking about Olympic level athletes, and you know, some
people start out pretty early and specialize in one sport,
whereas other people play multiple sports before specializing. And the
(20:45):
really interesting finding from there is that if you look
at the junior level competitions, then the performance is really
predicted by how early somebody specialized. But when you look
at the final Olympic level competition performance, then it's people
who play multiple sports and specialize later in life they
(21:06):
do better. And this playfulness is that world class athlete
who play some pickup games and some other sports for fun,
I mean, those other people who tend not to burn
out and tend to do better. And the crazy thing
is that there is a replication in the scientific achievement
as well. So highest German scientific award is Leibnitz Awards.
(21:30):
And some of them went on to win Nobel Prize.
So German researcher looked at the difference between eventual Nobel
Prize winners versus Livelitz winners, and this is absolutely my
favorite finding that Likelitz winners became full professor much earlier
than the Nobel Prize winner, the Nobel Prize winners actually
(21:52):
study multiple things before and so it took them much
longer to get the full professorship, but eventually they made
a major discovery. So I did a playfulness even in
the professional arena is really important because you don't want
to be two specialized too early. Keep your curiosity wide
(22:13):
open because when you just specialize, what you're doing is okay,
this information is irrelevant for me, so don't pay attention.
Whereas if you are open, then you're just oh, that's
kind of interesting, and sometimes you help.
Speaker 1 (22:25):
So that's kind of embracing playfulness. Your second tip, I
think is very related is that we need to embrace
serendipity and spontaneous Yeah. What do you mean by serendipity there?
Speaker 2 (22:34):
Yeah, So serendipity and the spontaneity I think is the
springboard of interesting experiences and if you think about, like,
all the interesting experiences you had, probably those are not
the things you planned six months in advance. In graduate school,
for instance, we don't have that many required courses, so
(22:55):
we had a lot of time. So I would just
stop by my lave made office. Let's go have coffee,
and we talk something random and interesting and there is
some discovery of certain things, so very interesting. And when
I got a job at the University of Minnesota, I
really wanted to do the same thing. So I knocked
on the door Bob Krueger, fellow assistant professor, and I said, hey, Bob,
(23:18):
do you have time for coffee, And then looked through
his schedule and said, no, what about in two weeks
we can all have this cup of coffee spontaneously. And
that's what it means to be a professor. Bob became
like so successful. He's very productive. I think he wrote
already three hundred articles, so you see how that works.
(23:41):
But at the same time, in terms of this spontaneous
random conversations or experiences, when you just schedule and plan everything,
you really are depriving from these random things to happen,
random encountering, random conversation, random reading. So over scheduled life
(24:02):
that we all live right now is really no great
for psychological richness.
Speaker 1 (24:08):
This is something I work a lot about in my
elite college students that I work with, because they want
to overschedule everything. You know, it's from early in high school.
They have already planned what job they want. Some students
are like, well, I definitely want to get married by
the time I'm twenty seven. Like they want to have
everything planned out, and I really worry that they might
be leaving some important aspects of their well being kind
(24:28):
of uncared for. They haven't given themselves the space to
try new things out exactly.
Speaker 2 (24:33):
That's the space and that I think that's the pressure.
They feel like they have to succeed. They have to perform,
and they have to perform at the highest level all
the time. And it's like academic athletes almost like just practice, practice,
practice every day, and I think that is really not healthy.
(24:53):
You should really have plenty of time for play. College
is the best time to be spontaneous. Once you go
out of college, your friends don't live around the corner.
Everybody is too busy to just have spontaneous meeting in outing.
Speaker 1 (25:07):
But you've argued that we really even as adults need
to find more time to be able to define that.
Any advice for how to build that serendividio, well, I think.
Speaker 2 (25:15):
You have to be a little bit pushy. Just text
somebody and just accept a lot of rejections. You know
they you do it, Okay, Next, it is really hard
when everybody is so overbooked, but we should we should
try to be spontaneous.
Speaker 1 (25:33):
So tip number three that you've talked a lot about
is something that we've mentioned before on the Happiness Lab.
If we want to live a psychologically rich life, we
need to find more talk about how all plays into
psychological richness.
Speaker 2 (25:45):
Yeah. I think all is really this sense of your
small and the world is so large and just sort
of transcending kind of sense and then emerging between you
and the nature or the arts, and a lot of
esthetic experiences that we have when we go to a museum,
(26:06):
when we go watch movies, read literatures and poems. It's
not always all, but there is these esthetic experiences that
is very different from our everyday life. So if you
read Coslo Shigurus The Remains of the Day, then you
transported into this world of British Lord Lord Darlington in
(26:30):
Darlington Hall with butlers and the twenty some stuff members
and you know, in the nineteen thirties and those kinds
of immersions and the mental transportation I think is really
really important because look at our lives, right, we are
privileged to travel anywhere we want. But every day we
(26:50):
get up, eat breakfast, usually just meet the same people,
respond emails, et cetera, et cetera. So every day what
we can experience firsthand is pretty limited. Whereas in a
matter of one hour, if you read these novels or
watch movie two hours or whatever, you can really experience
somebody else's life and go through really dramatic emotional experiences icariously.
(27:18):
So for the matter of a few hours, you often
go through somebody's entire life. And the guy who owns
this bookstore in Morocco said he read four thousand books,
so he says he lived four thousand lives. And that's
exactly how I feel about these esthetic experiences that really
expand your horizons and allow you to go through and
(27:41):
experience something that you can never maybe very hard to
experience in person.
Speaker 1 (27:46):
And so that's kind of finding more all through aesthetic
experiences in other people's lives. But your tip Moore before
argues that we should also explore more ourselves, that we
should be seeking out new experiences and doing more atypical things. Sure,
any ideas for how to fit that in in a
busy life.
Speaker 2 (28:02):
Yeah, So I think that if you have commute, then
I think the change in your commute is really interesting way.
I mean, if you're driving, just drive through different town,
different neighborhood. If you're taking train, get off in between
and explore. So I think there are a lot of
things you can do to do new things, even if
(28:23):
you're pifty packed in you know, schedules and I you know,
try to enjoy, for instance, getting lost in a new town.
You know, it's a little bit scary, but you know,
I always tell myself, well, okay, eventually this will be
a psychological rich experience. Of course, when you get lost,
you worry, i'mous and soul forth. But most of the
(28:44):
time you will work out. And those are things sort
of like you let yourself go, go with a flow.
Those attitudes and mindset helps a lot in terms of
deviating from your routines and the schedules. And of course
we cannot deviate all the time, but when there is
a chance to be able to deviate. Just let yourself
(29:04):
go and deviate. That's what I want anybody to do
if possible.
Speaker 1 (29:09):
It's also a nice reminder of your final tip, which
is that we can experience more psychological richness by turning
adversity into a psychological rich experience, into a fun story.
Speaker 2 (29:19):
Right.
Speaker 1 (29:19):
Explain why our stories are more under our control, you.
Speaker 2 (29:22):
Know, because I grew up in Japan, and Japan, of
course has a lot of natural disasters earthquake, tsunami and
things like that. I studied happiness and wellbeing of these
earthquake survivors, and my sabbatical in twenty thirteen, I spent
one year in Kobe, Japan. That's where there was a
huge earthquake in nineteen ninety five. Over six thousand people died.
(29:46):
That was just devastating. And the sad finding was that
in twenty eleven, even sixteen years after the earthquake, those
Kobe residents who lost their house, we're still repoorting significantly
lower level of life satisfaction. They report more physical symptoms,
you know, pain than those Kobe residents who did not
(30:09):
lose their house. So I thought that was really sad
because we thought, you know, time heals everything, but this case,
time did not heal everything. But then we looked at
the value orientations of these earthquake survivor and we realized
that the people who went through earthquake, they really become
(30:30):
more pro social, autruistic. They don't care about their own
accomplishment as much as other Japanese who did not experience earthquake.
So definitely there's change. After all, when you are in earthquake,
you really see a lot of things that you never
imagined before. Neighbors who are not particularly friendly will come
(30:52):
out and try to save you and save your dog,
and you see a lot of different side of people.
So those people survivors all talk about like sort of
that regained sense of confidence in humanity even and I
think that's the contributing fact to psychological richness. Even if
the earthquake doesn't add to life satisfaction, obviously, that detract
(31:16):
from life satisfactions and meaning is also very hard to
gain from earthquake because this is a random act of
the modern nature. So people often struggle to find the
meaning after earthquake. But people have used this earthquake as
a springboard for change and growth and learning and I
(31:38):
think there are a lot of signs that some adversity
could be a source for psychological rich life.
Speaker 1 (31:43):
Any suggestions for changing maybe some of our less than
earthquake level adversity into psychologicality.
Speaker 2 (31:50):
Yeah, so we ask college students just just think about
all last year and what kind of traumatic event negative
event happened, and did you learn anything from this traumatic event? Interestingly,
this was random assignment, they later reported them. Yeah, actually
trauma made them change the way they view the world
and they view themselves. And the more perspective change they recorded,
(32:15):
the higher level of psychloscovichiness they reported as well. And interestingly,
the more perspective change they reported less happy day you can.
So the perspective change is not great for happiness, but
that tend to add psychoscurvichess. So it doesn't have to
be a huge trauma in earthquake tsunami type situation. But
(32:36):
even you know everyday failures and negative events, if you
can construe something positive or something that you learned from
the events, that could add the texture to your life
and enrich your life.
Speaker 1 (32:51):
And it does seem like that texture isn't always psychologically positive.
You've talked about even things like exploring and getting lost,
or having an experience that maybe challenges you and maybe
changes some of your assumptions. Right, it sounds like the
big message of a psychologically rich life is like it
might be a little hard than you expect, the rewards
might be bigger than you expect.
Speaker 2 (33:12):
Yeah, yeah, definitely. This is not something easy always and
not always positive obviously. But I think the power of
psychological rich life or that mindset to try to maximize richness,
is that you're not afraid of negative emotions and negative events.
Stuff happens, try to accept those, try to learn from it,
(33:35):
and as long as you have that attitude, you don't
get into these ruminations and depressions. And it is when
you really try to be perfect and try to be
super successful and always happy, that these little bumps really
hurts you. So I am really trying to say that
(33:55):
richness is not for everybody, for sure, But when you
have richness mindset, I think you're less afraid of failures
and negative events and so forth, and I think you
become a little more adventurous and actually experience something that
you wouldn't holp you would ever experience, and you know
that really could change you and the course of your life.
(34:18):
So I think uncertainty and unpredictability are part of life
and we should embrace it. And to the extend that
you embrace it, you're maximizing the possibility of adding the
richness to your life.
Speaker 1 (34:31):
I think sometimes when people look at the possibility of
making their life more exciting, exploring more getting curious, Honestly,
some of the people I know feel trapped, right They
feel incredibly busy. There's this whole host of obligations. It
feels like they're kind of really comfortable in their life.
It might feel scary to break out of it. Any
advice for folks who might be having an experience like
that or it feels really hard to go after some
(34:53):
of these things that might make their life psychologically really.
Speaker 2 (34:55):
Yeah, I mean I totally like get that, because by
nature I really like familiarity too. But I think the
one way if you are afraid of doing like completely
brand new things, and I think one thing I can
suggest is really stick with what you like. If you
love beatles, you can keep listening to beatles, but try
(35:18):
to find something new about the same song you are
listening for all these years. And the same thing with
the literature. If you love Missus Dorway, you can read
like three times four times and you find always something new.
So if you're afraid of trying something new, actually just
going back to your favorite movie or favorite song and
(35:39):
favorite bands and things like that, you can actually find
in something new from the familiar. My favorite story here
is I have been married with my wife for a
long time. I've known for like twenty years, and around
twenty ten I said we should buy some painting and
then she goes, Okay, I can paint, and it's like
what I didn't know that you can paint? And then boys,
(36:02):
she can paint. She's just like pain, pain, pain. Now
it's just full of her painting. So sometimes you just
find something new from very familiar person. If you just
have an opportunity to ask some new questions or chance
to talk about some topic that you never talked about
with the same old friends, you can actually enrich your
(36:23):
life by digging deeper with your familiar objects some person
as well. If you are afraid of sort of going all.
Speaker 1 (36:32):
The way out for more big and small steps towards
leading a psychologically rich life, you should really check out
Shegay's new book Life in three dimensions how curiosity, exploration,
and experience make a fuller, better life. But let's recap
the how to tips we've heard so far. Tip number one,
find ways to be more playful. Take a little break
(36:53):
from your responsibilities and try to cultivate a childlike curiosity
and sense of fun. Tip number two, be more open
to the random. It's comforting to schedule everything in life,
but try to find more moments of serendipity. It could
be as simple as stopping by the chat with a coworker.
The third tip is to experience psychological richness by proxy.
(37:13):
You can visit a faraway place, witness a natural wonder,
or hear about some amazing people just by reading a book,
looking at a painting, or watching a movie. Tip number
four is to explore we can easily get in the
habit of doing the same things day in, day out,
so throw some variety into the mix, even if that's
turning left out your front door instead of right. And
(37:34):
Chigey's final tip is to see the richness in adversity.
Putting yourself out there has its risks. There will be
disappointments and setbacks, but those challenges ultimately add to our
life story and help us grow. That's it for a
psychologically rich life. But our how To season isn't over yet.
Our next installment tackles what changes you should make to
(37:54):
motivate and elevate the people around you. In short, we'll
be exploring how to become an inspiring person. That's all.
Next time on the Happiness Lab with me Doctor Laurie
Santos
Popular Podcasts
Las Culturistas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang
Ding dong! Join your culture consultants, Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang, on an unforgettable journey into the beating heart of CULTURE. Alongside sizzling special guests, they GET INTO the hottest pop-culture moments of the day and the formative cultural experiences that turned them into Culturistas. Produced by the Big Money Players Network and iHeartRadio.
40s and Free Agents: NFL Draft Season
Daniel Jeremiah of Move the Sticks and Gregg Rosenthal of NFL Daily join forces to break down every team's needs this offseason.
Crime Junkie
Does hearing about a true crime case always leave you scouring the internet for the truth behind the story? Dive into your next mystery with Crime Junkie. Every Monday, join your host Ashley Flowers as she unravels all the details of infamous and underreported true crime cases with her best friend Brit Prawat. From cold cases to missing persons and heroes in our community who seek justice, Crime Junkie is your destination for theories and stories you won’t hear anywhere else. Whether you're a seasoned true crime enthusiast or new to the genre, you'll find yourself on the edge of your seat awaiting a new episode every Monday. If you can never get enough true crime... Congratulations, you’ve found your people. Follow to join a community of Crime Junkies! Crime Junkie is presented by audiochuck Media Company.