May 1, 2023 • 41 mins
When Marty Seligman started his long scientific career, psychologists concentrated on studying "misery and suffering" and what made people sad. But Marty wanted to discover what made happy people, well, happy. His research laid the foundations of "positive psychology" and the happiness science you hear week after week in this podcast.
Dr Laurie Santos talks to Professor Seligman about his decades of research; the power of optimism; and how he became less of a "grouch" to improve his own personal happiness.
Marty's latest book, TOMORROWMIND: Thriving At Work – Now and in an Uncertain Future, is OUT NOW.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin. I always try to book guests for the show
that I know you'll love, people who I think really
have something to say about the science of happiness. Some
guests have important lived experiences, giving them valuable well being
insights to share. Other guests are leading researchers in my field,
(00:37):
people who've gathered exciting data about what actually does make
us feel happier. Let's go at zoom. I think the
zoom is sounding fine, so I think we should be
all set okay, But the guest you're about to hear
from today is kind of in a different league. Thank
you so much for taking the time to do this.
We've wanted to have you on the podcast for a
long time, so we're very.
Speaker 2 (00:56):
Excited, happy to do it.
Speaker 1 (00:58):
And saying he's in a different league honestly still sort
of under sells his stature, because this scientist didn't just
play the happiness scientist game, he kind of invented it.
I kind of just wanted to enter all the listeners
of the podcast to your story and what it's been
like to have this legacy of creating positive psychology over
these years. So we're going to kind of go pretty broad.
If you're cool with that.
Speaker 2 (01:18):
Okay, Are we ready?
Speaker 1 (01:20):
Yep, We're ready to go. Are you ready ready to
meet the scientist without whom the Happiness Lab probably wouldn't exist.
Speaker 2 (01:27):
Hello, I'm Marty Seligman. I'm professor of psychology at the
University of Pennsylvania, and about twenty five years ago, when
I was president of the American Psychological Association, I had
to look around and ask what did psychology need? And
that was the origin story of positive psychology. Psychology have
(01:49):
been all about misery and suffering, and what it was
missing was the possibility that people could have a good life.
Speaker 1 (01:58):
Marty Seligman's academic career stretches back decades, and he did
do plenty of important research into misery and suffering. He's
the researcher behind a famous experiment that we've talked about before,
the Happiness Lab. In his study, a group of dogs
were given mild electric shocks. Some of the dogs could
press a button to end their pain, but others could
do nothing to halt the shocks. When that unlucky's second
(02:20):
group was finally given an easy way to escape new shocks,
they never learned how to improve their situation. They simply
gave up and took the pain humans, it turns out
act just the same. It was an intriguing pattern of
results that Seligman famously christened learned helplessness. This research alone
would be achievement enough for most scientists, but Marty took
(02:42):
his work in a unique direction. He didn't just concentrate
on what could break our spirits and cause us misery.
He wanted to unlock the opposite, what could allow us
to become more resilient and flourish. In doing so, he
laid the foundation for the scientific study of happiness and
the whole field of research that we cover on this podcast,
a field known as positive psychology. And since Marty's the
(03:05):
guy who invented positive psychology, I thought it'd be fitting
to let him explain what it is.
Speaker 2 (03:11):
I'm not big on definitions, but the way I think
about the subject matter is with the acronym perma eer
m A. These are the five things that I think
positive psychologists measure and build. So P is positive emotion,
subjective wellbeing, happiness, rapture, contentment E is engagement slow when
(03:38):
time stops for you, when you're one with the music,
when you're completely engaged. R is good relationships, M I've
changed my mind about recently. M is usually construed as meaning,
where meaning is something like belonging to and serving something
you think is bigger than you are. But I've come
(04:01):
to believe that there's a different m of mattering, which
is more at the heart of well being. How much
do you matter? What would happen if you vanished? How
much would you be missed? How much would your family
suffer if you vanished? How much would your work suffer?
And A is accomplishment, mastery, competence, achievement. So for me,
(04:28):
the definition of positive psychology, while open ended, revolves around
measuring and building.
Speaker 1 (04:35):
Program So in some ways, it's kind of odd, one
might think, looking at the big history to realize that
you're focused on all these things that built Perma, because
at least at the beginning of your career, you were
known for studying something completely different. You were known for
studying maybe the opposite of Perma, right, which is the
sense of helplessness and animals, And so going way back,
I'm kind of curious how you got involved in that.
(04:57):
What started off your interest in kind of studying learn
helplessness and depression in animals? Where did that come from?
Speaker 2 (05:03):
Well, In fact, I think in retrospect what I always
wanted to study was well being and happiness. But in
the nineteen sixties, when I entered psychology, before you were born, Laurie,
the only game in town that was even close to
it was misery and suffering in clinical psychology. And so
(05:23):
when I entered psychology as an undergraduate, I wanted to
do rigorous work, scientifically replicable, and the only thing around
was to work on misery. And so I was fortunate
enough to be part of a group in the early
nineteen sixties that discovered a phenomenon called learned helplessness. We
found that animals and then people who experienced events that
(05:45):
they couldn't do anything about collapsed and showed a set
of deficits very much like depression. And that's where I began,
and I worked on that for about fifteen years until
it became an established field. So that was the first
fifteen years of my fifty five year academic career.
Speaker 1 (06:06):
So in some ways I've heard you talk before about
how you would studied well being if it was a career.
Were you sort of a happy kid and did that
continue into your professor years or did you resonate more
with some of those helpless animals that you were looking at.
Speaker 2 (06:20):
Oh, I was a pretty unhappy, miserable kid. That didn't
make me want to study misery. It actually made me
want to study happiness. But no one was working on happiness.
And the way learned helplessness gave way to happiness and
positive psychology. And it was when we did helplessness experiments
with people. We found that only two thirds of the
(06:41):
people and two thirds of the animals who got bad
events that they couldn't do anything about collapsed and showed helplessness.
But really interestingly, one third of the people I worked
with I could not make helpless And finally, after about
ten to fifteen years, I said, these are really interesting people.
What is it about them that makes them immune from helplessness?
(07:04):
And that led to the next fifteen years of my work,
which basically that it was optimistic people, optimism and pessimism.
In my way of thinking, means the following. Pessimistic people
are people who, when bad events strike them, believe it's permanent,
it's going to last forever, it's pervasive, it's going to
(07:26):
ruin your whole life, and it's uncontrollable. Nothing you can
do about it, and optimistic people, when they're hit with
bad events, believe temporary justice. One situation and I can
overcome it. Those are the people who never became helpless.
So that takes me thirty years into my career. And
(07:47):
then I began to realize that I wasn't working on pessimism.
I was working on the opposite optimism. And that coincided
with being elected president of the American Psychological Association in
nineteen ninety six. And presidents are supposed to have themes initiatives,
and I didn't know what mine was going to be.
(08:10):
And I had an epiphany which really led to positive psychology.
Speaker 1 (08:14):
And so talk a little bit. If this is the
epiphany I'm thinking of that I've heard you talk about before.
I think it involves your daughter, the famous garden story,
And so walk me through what happened. You know what
she told you and where that epiphany came from.
Speaker 2 (08:26):
Well, it's a beautiful day in the garden and NICKI,
who had just turned five years old, and I were weeding.
I was sweating away and weating and Nicki, damn it,
was having a great time. She was throwing weeds in
the air and dancing and singing, and I shouted at her.
I said, get to work, Nikki, and she walked away
(08:48):
and she came back and she said, this is literally
what happened. Daddy. Can I talk to you? I said, yeah,
what is it, Niki? And she said, well, Daddy, do
you remember before my fifth birthday that had occurred about
two weeks before that I was a whiner, that I
whined all the time. I said, yeah, Nikki, you are
a little horror And she said, well, Daddy, have you
(09:11):
noticed since my fifth birthday? I haven't whined once? Said
oh yeah, I said, well, Daddy, on my fifth birthday,
I decided I wasn't going to whine anymore. And that
was the hardest thing I've ever done. And if I
can stop whining, you can stop being such a grouch.
That hit me like a brick, and it caused me
(09:33):
to rethink in almost an instant three different things. The
first one was that she was absolutely right that I
was a grouch, and worse than that, I was proud
of being a grouch because I thought that anything that
produced success in my life because I could see what
was wrong with every effect And then occurred to me
for the very first time that maybe that got in
(09:54):
the way, and maybe any success I had in life
was because I could see what was right in things.
So I resolved to change. And indeed I'm no longer
a grouch. Nicky, by the way, is still a whining.
Speaker 1 (10:08):
How old is she She's a clinical psychologist.
Speaker 2 (10:12):
She's thirty years old and a very good therapist. But
at any rate, the first thing I realized that I
was a grouch, and I decided to change. The second
thing I realized is that my theory of teaching and
child development was all wrong. My theory was remedial. It
was somehow if you corrected all the errors that your
(10:32):
children made, you'd get an exemplary child. And I realized
how foolish that is, and that the job of a
teacher and a parent is not remedial. It's to find
out what the child is really good at and to
bring that out and to help her lead her life
around it. And Nikki was really good at talking to
(10:53):
adults and understanding what was going on in the world,
and indeed it's what makes her a good clinical psychologist.
Now she's run with that skill. But the third thing
was the reason you and I are talking, Laurie and
that was that psychology was half baked. It was all
baked about misery and suffering. And we've done okay with that,
(11:15):
far from perfectly. But our medications and our therapies were
all about the alleviation of suffering. But what we didn't
touch was a question of what's above zero? Could we
be happy? Could we have a good life. So my
theme became psychologists should be not only interested in what
(11:38):
cripple's life and how to get rid of it, but
rather what enhances life and to try to build more
of it. It really was a momentary epiphany changed my life,
both personally and professionally, and is the founding legend of
positive psychology.
Speaker 1 (11:54):
And so when you introduced the idea at this American
Psychological Association meeting, you know, when you took on the presidency,
what was the reaction Because the field was pretty entrenched
in abnormal psychology and kind of the negative aspects of
human nature and fixing those. How did people react early on?
Speaker 2 (12:10):
Well, it was pretty bimodals on the positive side. When
I started to speak about this, I noticed that people
in the audience were often weeping and would come up
to me afterwards and say, you know this is what
I always wanted to do to work on happiness, but
the only game in town was misery, so I became
a clinical psychologist. On the other hand, died in the world.
(12:33):
Clinical psychologists who saw the world through a pathology lens
were and are threatened by it.
Speaker 1 (12:41):
But Marty wasn't deterred by all those naysayers. He used
his new role as president to embark on a new
and important phase of his career. He wanted to work
out exactly how we could all live better, more fulfilling,
happier lives. And we'll hear more from Marty about what
he learned when the Happiness Lab returns in a moment.
(13:11):
I'd probably need an entire season of shows to go
through all of legendary psychologist Marty Seligman's ideas and discoveries,
but one of his most influential notions is the importance
of what he calls flourishing. Marty has argued that this
is the key to leading a better life. In his view,
we need to do more than just seek out what
we usually think of as happiness.
Speaker 2 (13:32):
For me, happiness is one fifth of positive psychology, so
irma perm P is positive emotion and by and large,
the notion of subjective well being happiness captures it. But
the smiley face and being merry is not even close
(13:53):
to what positive psychology is about. Positive psychology is about
what non suffering, free people choose. And indeed, one of
the things they choose is to feel good, but they
also choose to be engaged, they choose to have good relationships,
they choose to matter and mean in the world, and
(14:14):
very importantly, they choose to accomplish things. So positive psychology
is not just about subjective well being and happiness, but
very often about how you're doing in the world.
Speaker 1 (14:26):
And it's also you've argued about the traits that get
you there, and this connects to a lot of your
work on character strengths. So I'm curious what got you
first interested in this idea of character and how we
could develop it more well.
Speaker 2 (14:39):
When I was doing clinical psychology DSM, the diagnostic and
statistical manual was very important. These were all the traits
that were impeding life, and so when I started to
think about positive psychology, it seems to me we needed
a manual of the sanities, not just the insanities, the
(15:01):
sanities being the traits that built the good life that
led to a field. Chris Peterson was the central person
in that field. When we started to work on a
manual of the sanities, I called Chris. It happened to
be his fiftieth birthday. He is a head of the
clinical program at Michigan at the time, and I said,
(15:21):
what are you going to do for the rest of
your life, Chris? And he said, well, I don't know.
I said, well, what I'd like you to do is
take a three year sabbatical, come to pen and write
a manual of the sanities. And indeed he did because
I raised the money for it. He put my name
on it, and it began a field of positive character traits.
(15:42):
And so very important in positive psychology is measuring what
your highest strengths are and learning how to use those
positive traits more in life.
Speaker 1 (15:53):
So give me a sense of what you mean by strength.
What are some of the common character strengths that people
could try to maximize.
Speaker 2 (15:59):
Well, we settled on twenty four of them. They were
traits like social intelligence, spirituality, humor, bravery, temperance. And the
criteria for these strengths were something that all religions and
political philosophies that we could find across the globe agreed on.
Speaker 1 (16:23):
And so what do you find people who use their
character strengths? What are some of the things that we
see them experiencing in their day to day life.
Speaker 2 (16:30):
Well, in general, we find that when people use their
highest strengths, more life goes better. And so one of
the positive psychology exercises is to everyone listening right now,
I want to do this with you. Close your eyes, Laura,
your eyes are open.
Speaker 1 (16:50):
I know I'm closing the right now.
Speaker 2 (16:51):
Right, think of something that you have to do at
work that you don't like doing. Now, open your eyes.
Now almost everyone can think of things like that. And
now your task is to take the via the twenty
four Character Strengths test. It's free. About four million people
(17:16):
have taken it. It's at Authentic Happiness one word dot org.
And this tells you what your five highest strengths are.
So your exercise is now to take that thing you
don't like doing at work and do it with your
highest strength. For example, one of my students studied in
(17:37):
the library at Penn until midnight and then the worst
part of his day came about the thing he really
didn't like, and that is he had to take an
hour long walk through dangerous West Philadelphia at one in
the morning to get home. So he took the Signature
Strengths test and his highest strength was humor and playfulness.
(18:00):
So his assignment was to take that walk home using
humor and playfulness. Here's what he did. He bought a
pr roller blades and a stopwatch, and he declared it
an Olympic event and timed it every night until he
set the record, and then he would take longer routs
(18:21):
and this became the best part of his day. So
the importance of this is the stuff you're good at,
the stuff you like and be used to a company
and overcome the stuff you don't like, and when that happens,
happiness goes up and work gets better. We have a
(18:41):
culture in which we focus on traits that are wrong,
ways in which we screw up, and it's important to
correct your weaknesses, but even more important is to recognize
the strengths you do have and then to use them more.
Speaker 1 (18:58):
What I love about the character strengths, especially when I've
used exercises like this with my students, is that you
also need to know what your strengths are. I think
we kind of implicitly know it, but when we start
to focus on it, like, you know, I really like
humor or I really love learning. You know, whenever I
take the VIA test, my top to our humor and
love of learning. And I feel like that's helped me
in shaping this podcast. You know, I got to do
goofy things for the podcast, or I got to take
(19:19):
on new topics where I get to learn something. And
so I'm curious, what are your signature strengths.
Speaker 2 (19:24):
My own highest strengths are creativity, appreciation of beauty, and leadership.
And indeed, I take my own medicine and indeed I
try to lead my life around creativity, appreciation of beauty,
and leadership. It helped me to know what my strengths
were to actually say to myself, Hey, how can I
(19:46):
use creativity in the conversation that Laurie and I are
having now?
Speaker 1 (19:51):
And I think this is the thing we forget is
that you know, we can use these in so many
different context right. We can use these at work. If
you're one of my college students, they can use these
when they're studying. Another domain in which I know you've
talked about using these is that we can use these
to build up relationships. One of the homework exercises I
use with students in my happiness class at Yale as
I make them go on a strengths date where they
(20:12):
have to figure out their strengths. You know, pick a
friend or a romantic partner, figure out that person's strengths,
and then find some activity that you can do together
that maximizes both. There's like creativity and love of learning.
You have to go to some new museum where you
do something creative together. Or one of the ones I
loved was a hair of my students came up with
bravery and they did one of these ropes courses together,
(20:32):
and they all say, like, that was so much more
fun than what we would normally do, which is probably
locked down and watch TV together and not do anything
that used your strengths.
Speaker 2 (20:40):
In addition to using your strengths more what you've just
said about sharing them with someone else, Virtually everything that
we like doing goes better when we share with someone else.
And so I think that's a really basic principle of
well being.
Speaker 1 (20:56):
Another thing that you've talked about a lot in your
work is this idea of resilience. So talk about what
resilience is and how you think of it from a
positive psychology lens.
Speaker 2 (21:05):
I think resilience for me, different people define it differently
is coming back from defeat, coming back to normal functioning
from a bad event. So in many ways, resilience for
me is a word out of psychology as usual. It's
not about being super normal or better than you were.
(21:25):
And so for me, things like post traumatic growth are
more interesting than resilience. And indeed, if you look at
people like soldiers who experience bad events like combat, which
one of the worst things we can experience, the response
to very bad events is bell shaped, and on the
(21:45):
left hand side of the bell is post traumatic stress disorder,
people who collapse and become helpless, but in the middle
is resilience, and their resilience means you may have a
tough time in combat, but within three months your back
where you were. And then on the right hand side
of the bell is people who often go through post
(22:07):
traumatic stress disorder, but a year later are physically and
mentally stronger than they were to begin with. So I
guess I would want to contrast the notion of growth
to resilience. So these days I'm more interested in growth
than I am in resilience.
Speaker 1 (22:24):
I'm curious how you got started on that in the
first place. How did that work begin?
Speaker 2 (22:28):
Yeah, it was in the middle of the Iraq War.
General George Casey, the Chief of Staff of the Army,
called me the Pentagon to a meeting of the General Staff.
And I looked around and sitting at the table were
all copies of my books and things like that. General
Casey said, well, Seligman, Professor Seligman, I called him sir.
(22:49):
I went to military school. I know about calling general sir.
He said, post traumatic stress disorder, suicide, drug abuse, panic, divorce.
What does positive psychology say about that? And I went
through the bell shape and I said, I think the
(23:09):
of what we can do in positive psychology is to
move the whole distribution toward post traumatic growth. Whereupon General
cases did two things. He said, First, he said, my
legacy to the United States Army is going to be
to create an army that is as mentally fit as
(23:30):
it is physically fit. And I'm going to allocate one
hundred and forty million dollars to doing that. And so
I said, well, how are you going to do it?
And he said, well, we've read your work in schools
and we see you teach teachers the skills of positive
psychology and resilience, and the teachers teach the students. Well,
(23:51):
we have forty thousand teachers in the army. I said, really,
he said, yeah, the drill sergeants. And so your job,
doctor Seligman, will be to train all forty thousand drill
sergeants in positive psychology and resilience, and they will train
the one point one million soldiers. And so that's how
(24:13):
our work with the military started. And I guess I
should tell you two outcomes of it that your audience
probably doesn't know about their new We created a psychometric
tests called the GAT the GAC that every soldier takes
the first day of joining the army, and these are
psychological tests with the good and bad stuff. Then we
(24:36):
follow people through the army and we've just completed two
major studies. I should say both of these studies are
not samples. This is everybody in the army. So the
first thing we asked was could you predict post traumatic
stress disorder? And so we took everyone who was deployed
(24:57):
to Iraq and Afghanistan, seventy seven thousand people, and we
asked who got post traumatic stress disorder. Three five hundred
of them are diagnosed with post romata stress disorder. And
it turns out you can predict from day one if
you both face serious combat and you're a catastrophizer, you're
(25:18):
three hundred and seventy percent more likely come down with
post traumatic stress disorder. The same exaggeration of post traumatic
stress disorder is true at every level of combat. So
one finding that came out of this we could predict
who is really vulnerable. The second finding is the reverse
and much closer to my interest. It's about success. It's
(25:41):
about who's going to do really well in the army.
This is now nine hundred and ninety thousand soldiers followed
for five years. Day one, they take the gap the
psychological test, and over the next five years, twelve percent
of them win a Heroism of medal or an Exemplary
Work medal. And the question is could we predict who's
(26:05):
going to really succeed in the army by heroism and
untry work? And again the answer was we could robustly
predict it. There were three psychological factors. First, optimistic people,
second people with more positive emotion, and third people with
low negative emotion. Are more likely, we've been able to
(26:27):
predict post traumatic stress disorder by being a catastrophizer, and
who's going to do really well in the army by
high positive emotion, high optimism, and low negative emotion.
Speaker 1 (26:40):
Even the most rigorous researchers struggle to amass data sets
like this. I mean, lots of psychology experiments are run
using dozens or maybe a few hundred test subjects. Marty's
work looked at the lives of tens of thousands of people,
literally a whole army, and his findings speak to the
power of optimism to improve our lives, which is something
(27:00):
we'll explore in a whole lot more detail when the
Happiness Lab returns after the shortbreak. Research shows that being
a hopeful, optimistic person is a great indicator that you'll
flourish in life, even when things go wrong or you
(27:23):
find yourself in awful situations like, for example, military combat.
Marty Seligman's massive research project with the US Army made
this clear. But what exactly is the power of optimism,
how does it work? And is it something that all
of us can learn?
Speaker 2 (27:41):
First and most importantly, optimists try harder, they don't give up,
they're more persistent. Secondly, when bad events hit them, they're
half as likely to get depressed. They're more likely to
come back and be resilient. Third people like them better.
(28:01):
So while misery loves company, company does not like misery
in the workplace. In sports, they come back from defeat better.
So Optimistic pitchers in close games in the major leagues
in the last three innings, their earn run average gets better.
(28:22):
Optimistic hitters in the last three innings in close games,
their betting average goes up. The pessimists go down in
close games and do worse. But at any rate, optimism,
because it produces more trying, by and large, seems to
be a very big advantage in life, and in some
(28:43):
ways the most surprising thing of all is that optimists
live on average between six and eight years longer than pessimists,
and there are now about twenty good studies of this.
Controlling for all the major risk factors, particularly for cardiovascular disease,
Pessimism is probably between smoking two and three packs of
(29:04):
cigarettes a day as a risk factor, and optimism seems
to give between six and eight years of extra life,
probably about twice as important as exercise.
Speaker 1 (29:16):
I mean, all of those are amazing findings, but if
you don't know the literature on optimism and hope, you
might find them kind of depressing because I think many
lay people have this notion that you're either born an
optimist or born a pessimist.
Speaker 2 (29:29):
You know.
Speaker 1 (29:29):
So it's all well and good. If you're born an optimist,
then you're going to live longer and you know, get
through these tough games faster. But if you're not tough
for you. But this seems to be something that your
work has shown too, which is that it's not just
that there's optimism and pessimism, but that there's learned optimism.
It's almost kind of coming full circle from your original
work on learned helplessness. So talk about how optimism can
(29:50):
be learned and what we figured out about how we
can kind of bring it into our lives. If that's
not our natural tendency.
Speaker 2 (29:56):
Well, first we should confirm the unlearned part. So in Twinsburg, Ohio,
every year there's a Twins convention. Ten thy twins show up.
One year, we went to Twinsburg and we gave them
optimism Pessimism questionnaire. Half of them are fraternal twins and
half are identical twins. And we measured concordance, and it
(30:18):
turns out identical twins are much more concordant than fraternal twins.
For optimism or pessimism, it's about fifty percent heritable. Okay,
so people are partly right. Optimism is partly inherited. But
it turns out if you're a pessimist like I am,
you can learn optimism. And the basic skill comes straight
(30:40):
out of cognitive therapy. First, you want to be able
to recognize the most catastrophic thoughts you say to yourself,
and then you want to realistically dispute them. I'm eighty
years old now, and before I got on this call
with you, I said, oh my god, can I really
survive an hour of a I'm really too old to
(31:02):
be doing this kind of thing. And I recognize that thought.
Maybe I should just give up and turn it over
to the young people. Then when we started, I could
recognize the thought and I treated it as if it
was said by someone who a third person whose mission
in life was to make me miserable, and I disputed
(31:25):
it with realistic evidence. So you're not only a good interviewer,
but you smile and laugh and you show real responses
when I'm doing something that really makes sense. So I said, well, look,
Laurie really gets if this is going really well. So
what you do is you realistically dispute your most catastrophic thoughts.
(31:47):
And I become quite skilled of that. I'm a born
pessimist and a born depressive, and I still hear the
voices all the time that tell me I'm a reject,
I'm a loser, but I know how to dispute them now.
And that's the basic skill of learned optimism.
Speaker 1 (32:03):
And if you learn optimism in that way, do you
get Is there evidence that you get as many benefits
as somebody who might come about it naturally.
Speaker 2 (32:10):
I don't think anyone has ever tested that. That's a
really interesting thing. And the difference in many ways is
I think the people who get it heritably don't hear
the voices all the time telling them what a failure
they are, and the people who learn it really have
to work. So learned optimism is work, doesn't become naturally.
Speaker 1 (32:32):
And I think this is in some ways a message
in a lot of positive psychology, right, which is that
we can go above baseline, we can flourish more, but
sometimes it actually does take some work. You need to
put work in. You need to be following your strength
and paying attention to them. You need to fight those
tendencies to talk badly to yourself. If you're a natural pessimist,
you know you can experience hope and optimism in all
(32:55):
these positive rewards, but sometimes you get to put a
little bit of work into. Even if you are the
father of positive psychology himself, Marty Seligman, you have to
put this work in.
Speaker 2 (33:03):
Yeah. I think at the heart of why the positive
stuff has to be learned is that we inherited from
our ancestors a bad weather brain. The most recent geological
epoch was the ice ages, and those of your ancestors
who thought, oh, it's a beautiful day in new Haven today,
(33:23):
A bet it'll be beautiful tomorrow got crushed by the ice.
And it was your ancestors who said, things look okay,
but famine is coming, and ice is coming, and one
tragedy or another is coming. They survive because they were right,
and we got their brain. Unfortunately, if prosperity continues and
(33:44):
it is a nice day in new Haven tomorrow, it'll
be ruined. If all you can think of is how
miserable everything's going to be so now in a world
which is much more prosperous by almost every measure we
have than the world used to be. The pessimistic brain
does not serve you very well, and an optimistic brain
(34:06):
allows you to take advantage of prosperity.
Speaker 1 (34:09):
And so, as you think about prosperity in this field,
what are the things that make you optimistic about where
positive psychology is going to be in the next fifty years.
What are your predictions about how positive psychology will flourish
in the future.
Speaker 2 (34:20):
Well, I've been mapping as people like Steve Pinker have
progress over the last two hundred years, and essentially you
have to be blinded by ideology not to see how
much better the world is now than it was two
hundred years ago. Two hundred years ago, forty four percent
of your children died before the age of five. Now
(34:43):
one percent of children die before the age of five.
Two hundred years ago, the mean human life expectancy was
about thirty five years. Life expectancy across the entire world
has doubled in the last two hundred years. It's not
just these material things that have changed to measure, Women's
(35:04):
rights and racism not perfect, but it's a lot better
than it was two hundred years ago when we had
slavery and women couldn't vote. So by almost every material
and spiritual dimension, life has gotten better over the last
two hundred years. And now the question is will it continue?
(35:26):
And this is a very important question. I mean, we
need to overcome all sorts of stuff, avoid economic collapse,
we need to avoid nuclear war, we need to avoid
climate collapse. But if we do all of those things,
then there's good reason to believe that human innovation and
prosperity will continue. If that is so, we need a
(35:49):
psychology that goes along with it, a psychology that tells
us that everything is wrong and all we can talk
about is reducing misery is not really conducive to producing
more and more prosperity and more and more innovation. So
I think it is vouchsafe to positive psychologists not just
to witness increase prosperity over the next fifty years, but
(36:12):
to actually help more and more prosperity to occur.
Speaker 1 (36:19):
When we look at the work in positive psychology, there's
so many tips and so many changes that people can
make to kind of improve their sense of flourishing. If
you had to boil it down to your three favorite
tips or the three ones that have worked best for you.
What would some of those tips be.
Speaker 2 (36:32):
Well, my very favorite, which I'm often asked by depress people,
is what's the number one thing I can do if
I'm depressed right now? And the answer is to turn
off this seminar, go out and find someone who needs
help and help them. Turns out, our heedonic system is
(36:55):
built to turn on when we help others, So that's
my number one. My number two, I think is that
learning optimism and cultivating optimism will produce more success in
the workplace, less depression, and longer life. And my third
(37:15):
is anything you like doing, do it with someone else,
it'll enhance it.
Speaker 1 (37:21):
Those are some fantastic go tos, easy things that people
can latch onto to go from there. And in addition
to all this fantastic work, you also have a new
book out right now, Tomorrow Mind. So talk to me
about Tomorrow Mind and tell me what it teaches well.
Speaker 2 (37:33):
With Gabriella Kellerman, we've asked the question what skills the
workers today need in a whitewater world in which their
skills get outmoded every six months? And Tomorrow Mind talks
about five skills. The acronym is prism pri FM, where
P is prospection, future mindedness, making people better perspectors of
(37:59):
the future. R is resilience and optimism. I is innovation
and creativity. S is social skills, particularly rapid rap or
and M is mattering and meaning at work.
Speaker 1 (38:16):
And so these are all skills that I think matter
at work, but they're kind of building on the models
of flourishing that you've talked about. Generally, they're the kinds
of things that can help us succeed at work. But
if we master all the things in this prison acronym,
it's also kind of the techniques that will make us
happier generally.
Speaker 2 (38:31):
Indeed, and Gabriella Kellerman is both a psychiatrist and comes
from the world of work and trying to make work
a happier place. So it's been a particular privilege for
me to be second author with Gabriella on how work
can be happier than it is today.
Speaker 1 (38:50):
Well, all my gratitude for starting this field off that
can help all of the slightly younger guns to make
that happen, and to share all this great science with
everybody out there. We've already kept you over time, which
is exactly what I expected what happened, so we should
let you go. But this is really awesome. It's meant
a lot to be able to share this work, and
I feel like telling your story been something I've wanted
(39:12):
to do for a long time, so I'm so happy
we could make it happen.
Speaker 2 (39:14):
Good. Well, thank you, it's wonderful to see you.
Speaker 1 (39:17):
Ditto, Dittoh, thank you so much. I hope you enjoyed
this chat with Marty Seligman as much as I did.
Hearing Marty's story reminds me that it's an honor to
live in the time we do right now, when we've
learned so much about the kinds of things we can
do to live a more flourishing life. So why not
commit to the practices you just heard that you know
(39:38):
will make you feel better. You could start discovering your
character strengths. As Marty mentioned, you can head to his
free website, authentic happiness dot org and take the via
Character Strengths Survey. Once you learn what your strengths are,
you can find ways to put them into practice this week.
Or you could commit to changing your mindset and experiencing
(39:58):
a bit more learned optimism. If you want more tips
on how to do that, you should check out Marty's
new book Tomorrow Mind Thriving at Work with resilience, creativity
and connection now and in an uncertain future. The Happiness
Lab will be back soon with an extra special tree,
not just the usual shows recorded inside my beloved podcast closet,
(40:20):
but two new episodes that we recorded live in front
of a real studio audience of fans just like you.
So I hope you'll join me back again soon for
the next episode of the Happiness Lab with me Doctor
Laurie Santos. The Happiness Lab is co written by Ryan
(40:42):
Dilly and is produced by Ryan Dilly, Jess Shane and
Britney Brown. The show was mastered by Evan Viola and
our original music was composed by Zachary Silver. Special thanks
to Greta Cohne, Eric Sandler, Carl Migliori, Morgan Rattner, Jacob Weisberg,
my agent, Ben Davis, and the rest of the Pushkin team.
The Happiness Lab is brought to you by Pushkin Industries
(41:04):
and by me, Doctor Lariy Santos,
Pushkin. I always try to book guests for the show
that I know you'll love, people who I think really
have something to say about the science of happiness. Some
guests have important lived experiences, giving them valuable well being
insights to share. Other guests are leading researchers in my field,
(00:37):
people who've gathered exciting data about what actually does make
us feel happier. Let's go at zoom. I think the
zoom is sounding fine, so I think we should be
all set okay, But the guest you're about to hear
from today is kind of in a different league. Thank
you so much for taking the time to do this.
We've wanted to have you on the podcast for a
long time, so we're very.
Speaker 2 (00:56):
Excited, happy to do it.
Speaker 1 (00:58):
And saying he's in a different league honestly still sort
of under sells his stature, because this scientist didn't just
play the happiness scientist game, he kind of invented it.
I kind of just wanted to enter all the listeners
of the podcast to your story and what it's been
like to have this legacy of creating positive psychology over
these years. So we're going to kind of go pretty broad.
If you're cool with that.
Speaker 2 (01:18):
Okay, Are we ready?
Speaker 1 (01:20):
Yep, We're ready to go. Are you ready ready to
meet the scientist without whom the Happiness Lab probably wouldn't exist.
Speaker 2 (01:27):
Hello, I'm Marty Seligman. I'm professor of psychology at the
University of Pennsylvania, and about twenty five years ago, when
I was president of the American Psychological Association, I had
to look around and ask what did psychology need? And
that was the origin story of positive psychology. Psychology have
(01:49):
been all about misery and suffering, and what it was
missing was the possibility that people could have a good life.
Speaker 1 (01:58):
Marty Seligman's academic career stretches back decades, and he did
do plenty of important research into misery and suffering. He's
the researcher behind a famous experiment that we've talked about before,
the Happiness Lab. In his study, a group of dogs
were given mild electric shocks. Some of the dogs could
press a button to end their pain, but others could
do nothing to halt the shocks. When that unlucky's second
(02:20):
group was finally given an easy way to escape new shocks,
they never learned how to improve their situation. They simply
gave up and took the pain humans, it turns out
act just the same. It was an intriguing pattern of
results that Seligman famously christened learned helplessness. This research alone
would be achievement enough for most scientists, but Marty took
(02:42):
his work in a unique direction. He didn't just concentrate
on what could break our spirits and cause us misery.
He wanted to unlock the opposite, what could allow us
to become more resilient and flourish. In doing so, he
laid the foundation for the scientific study of happiness and
the whole field of research that we cover on this podcast,
a field known as positive psychology. And since Marty's the
(03:05):
guy who invented positive psychology, I thought it'd be fitting
to let him explain what it is.
Speaker 2 (03:11):
I'm not big on definitions, but the way I think
about the subject matter is with the acronym perma eer
m A. These are the five things that I think
positive psychologists measure and build. So P is positive emotion,
subjective wellbeing, happiness, rapture, contentment E is engagement slow when
(03:38):
time stops for you, when you're one with the music,
when you're completely engaged. R is good relationships, M I've
changed my mind about recently. M is usually construed as meaning,
where meaning is something like belonging to and serving something
you think is bigger than you are. But I've come
(04:01):
to believe that there's a different m of mattering, which
is more at the heart of well being. How much
do you matter? What would happen if you vanished? How
much would you be missed? How much would your family
suffer if you vanished? How much would your work suffer?
And A is accomplishment, mastery, competence, achievement. So for me,
(04:28):
the definition of positive psychology, while open ended, revolves around
measuring and building.
Speaker 1 (04:35):
Program So in some ways, it's kind of odd, one
might think, looking at the big history to realize that
you're focused on all these things that built Perma, because
at least at the beginning of your career, you were
known for studying something completely different. You were known for
studying maybe the opposite of Perma, right, which is the
sense of helplessness and animals, And so going way back,
I'm kind of curious how you got involved in that.
(04:57):
What started off your interest in kind of studying learn
helplessness and depression in animals? Where did that come from?
Speaker 2 (05:03):
Well, In fact, I think in retrospect what I always
wanted to study was well being and happiness. But in
the nineteen sixties, when I entered psychology, before you were born, Laurie,
the only game in town that was even close to
it was misery and suffering in clinical psychology. And so
(05:23):
when I entered psychology as an undergraduate, I wanted to
do rigorous work, scientifically replicable, and the only thing around
was to work on misery. And so I was fortunate
enough to be part of a group in the early
nineteen sixties that discovered a phenomenon called learned helplessness. We
found that animals and then people who experienced events that
(05:45):
they couldn't do anything about collapsed and showed a set
of deficits very much like depression. And that's where I began,
and I worked on that for about fifteen years until
it became an established field. So that was the first
fifteen years of my fifty five year academic career.
Speaker 1 (06:06):
So in some ways I've heard you talk before about
how you would studied well being if it was a career.
Were you sort of a happy kid and did that
continue into your professor years or did you resonate more
with some of those helpless animals that you were looking at.
Speaker 2 (06:20):
Oh, I was a pretty unhappy, miserable kid. That didn't
make me want to study misery. It actually made me
want to study happiness. But no one was working on happiness.
And the way learned helplessness gave way to happiness and
positive psychology. And it was when we did helplessness experiments
with people. We found that only two thirds of the
(06:41):
people and two thirds of the animals who got bad
events that they couldn't do anything about collapsed and showed helplessness.
But really interestingly, one third of the people I worked
with I could not make helpless And finally, after about
ten to fifteen years, I said, these are really interesting people.
What is it about them that makes them immune from helplessness?
(07:04):
And that led to the next fifteen years of my work,
which basically that it was optimistic people, optimism and pessimism.
In my way of thinking, means the following. Pessimistic people
are people who, when bad events strike them, believe it's permanent,
it's going to last forever, it's pervasive, it's going to
(07:26):
ruin your whole life, and it's uncontrollable. Nothing you can
do about it, and optimistic people, when they're hit with
bad events, believe temporary justice. One situation and I can
overcome it. Those are the people who never became helpless.
So that takes me thirty years into my career. And
(07:47):
then I began to realize that I wasn't working on pessimism.
I was working on the opposite optimism. And that coincided
with being elected president of the American Psychological Association in
nineteen ninety six. And presidents are supposed to have themes initiatives,
and I didn't know what mine was going to be.
(08:10):
And I had an epiphany which really led to positive psychology.
Speaker 1 (08:14):
And so talk a little bit. If this is the
epiphany I'm thinking of that I've heard you talk about before.
I think it involves your daughter, the famous garden story,
And so walk me through what happened. You know what
she told you and where that epiphany came from.
Speaker 2 (08:26):
Well, it's a beautiful day in the garden and NICKI,
who had just turned five years old, and I were weeding.
I was sweating away and weating and Nicki, damn it,
was having a great time. She was throwing weeds in
the air and dancing and singing, and I shouted at her.
I said, get to work, Nikki, and she walked away
(08:48):
and she came back and she said, this is literally
what happened. Daddy. Can I talk to you? I said, yeah,
what is it, Niki? And she said, well, Daddy, do
you remember before my fifth birthday that had occurred about
two weeks before that I was a whiner, that I
whined all the time. I said, yeah, Nikki, you are
a little horror And she said, well, Daddy, have you
(09:11):
noticed since my fifth birthday? I haven't whined once? Said
oh yeah, I said, well, Daddy, on my fifth birthday,
I decided I wasn't going to whine anymore. And that
was the hardest thing I've ever done. And if I
can stop whining, you can stop being such a grouch.
That hit me like a brick, and it caused me
(09:33):
to rethink in almost an instant three different things. The
first one was that she was absolutely right that I
was a grouch, and worse than that, I was proud
of being a grouch because I thought that anything that
produced success in my life because I could see what
was wrong with every effect And then occurred to me
for the very first time that maybe that got in
(09:54):
the way, and maybe any success I had in life
was because I could see what was right in things.
So I resolved to change. And indeed I'm no longer
a grouch. Nicky, by the way, is still a whining.
Speaker 1 (10:08):
How old is she She's a clinical psychologist.
Speaker 2 (10:12):
She's thirty years old and a very good therapist. But
at any rate, the first thing I realized that I
was a grouch, and I decided to change. The second
thing I realized is that my theory of teaching and
child development was all wrong. My theory was remedial. It
was somehow if you corrected all the errors that your
(10:32):
children made, you'd get an exemplary child. And I realized
how foolish that is, and that the job of a
teacher and a parent is not remedial. It's to find
out what the child is really good at and to
bring that out and to help her lead her life
around it. And Nikki was really good at talking to
(10:53):
adults and understanding what was going on in the world,
and indeed it's what makes her a good clinical psychologist.
Now she's run with that skill. But the third thing
was the reason you and I are talking, Laurie and
that was that psychology was half baked. It was all
baked about misery and suffering. And we've done okay with that,
(11:15):
far from perfectly. But our medications and our therapies were
all about the alleviation of suffering. But what we didn't
touch was a question of what's above zero? Could we
be happy? Could we have a good life. So my
theme became psychologists should be not only interested in what
(11:38):
cripple's life and how to get rid of it, but
rather what enhances life and to try to build more
of it. It really was a momentary epiphany changed my life,
both personally and professionally, and is the founding legend of
positive psychology.
Speaker 1 (11:54):
And so when you introduced the idea at this American
Psychological Association meeting, you know, when you took on the presidency,
what was the reaction Because the field was pretty entrenched
in abnormal psychology and kind of the negative aspects of
human nature and fixing those. How did people react early on?
Speaker 2 (12:10):
Well, it was pretty bimodals on the positive side. When
I started to speak about this, I noticed that people
in the audience were often weeping and would come up
to me afterwards and say, you know this is what
I always wanted to do to work on happiness, but
the only game in town was misery, so I became
a clinical psychologist. On the other hand, died in the world.
(12:33):
Clinical psychologists who saw the world through a pathology lens
were and are threatened by it.
Speaker 1 (12:41):
But Marty wasn't deterred by all those naysayers. He used
his new role as president to embark on a new
and important phase of his career. He wanted to work
out exactly how we could all live better, more fulfilling,
happier lives. And we'll hear more from Marty about what
he learned when the Happiness Lab returns in a moment.
(13:11):
I'd probably need an entire season of shows to go
through all of legendary psychologist Marty Seligman's ideas and discoveries,
but one of his most influential notions is the importance
of what he calls flourishing. Marty has argued that this
is the key to leading a better life. In his view,
we need to do more than just seek out what
we usually think of as happiness.
Speaker 2 (13:32):
For me, happiness is one fifth of positive psychology, so
irma perm P is positive emotion and by and large,
the notion of subjective well being happiness captures it. But
the smiley face and being merry is not even close
(13:53):
to what positive psychology is about. Positive psychology is about
what non suffering, free people choose. And indeed, one of
the things they choose is to feel good, but they
also choose to be engaged, they choose to have good relationships,
they choose to matter and mean in the world, and
(14:14):
very importantly, they choose to accomplish things. So positive psychology
is not just about subjective well being and happiness, but
very often about how you're doing in the world.
Speaker 1 (14:26):
And it's also you've argued about the traits that get
you there, and this connects to a lot of your
work on character strengths. So I'm curious what got you
first interested in this idea of character and how we
could develop it more well.
Speaker 2 (14:39):
When I was doing clinical psychology DSM, the diagnostic and
statistical manual was very important. These were all the traits
that were impeding life, and so when I started to
think about positive psychology, it seems to me we needed
a manual of the sanities, not just the insanities, the
(15:01):
sanities being the traits that built the good life that
led to a field. Chris Peterson was the central person
in that field. When we started to work on a
manual of the sanities, I called Chris. It happened to
be his fiftieth birthday. He is a head of the
clinical program at Michigan at the time, and I said,
(15:21):
what are you going to do for the rest of
your life, Chris? And he said, well, I don't know.
I said, well, what I'd like you to do is
take a three year sabbatical, come to pen and write
a manual of the sanities. And indeed he did because
I raised the money for it. He put my name
on it, and it began a field of positive character traits.
(15:42):
And so very important in positive psychology is measuring what
your highest strengths are and learning how to use those
positive traits more in life.
Speaker 1 (15:53):
So give me a sense of what you mean by strength.
What are some of the common character strengths that people
could try to maximize.
Speaker 2 (15:59):
Well, we settled on twenty four of them. They were
traits like social intelligence, spirituality, humor, bravery, temperance. And the
criteria for these strengths were something that all religions and
political philosophies that we could find across the globe agreed on.
Speaker 1 (16:23):
And so what do you find people who use their
character strengths? What are some of the things that we
see them experiencing in their day to day life.
Speaker 2 (16:30):
Well, in general, we find that when people use their
highest strengths, more life goes better. And so one of
the positive psychology exercises is to everyone listening right now,
I want to do this with you. Close your eyes, Laura,
your eyes are open.
Speaker 1 (16:50):
I know I'm closing the right now.
Speaker 2 (16:51):
Right, think of something that you have to do at
work that you don't like doing. Now, open your eyes.
Now almost everyone can think of things like that. And
now your task is to take the via the twenty
four Character Strengths test. It's free. About four million people
(17:16):
have taken it. It's at Authentic Happiness one word dot org.
And this tells you what your five highest strengths are.
So your exercise is now to take that thing you
don't like doing at work and do it with your
highest strength. For example, one of my students studied in
(17:37):
the library at Penn until midnight and then the worst
part of his day came about the thing he really
didn't like, and that is he had to take an
hour long walk through dangerous West Philadelphia at one in
the morning to get home. So he took the Signature
Strengths test and his highest strength was humor and playfulness.
(18:00):
So his assignment was to take that walk home using
humor and playfulness. Here's what he did. He bought a
pr roller blades and a stopwatch, and he declared it
an Olympic event and timed it every night until he
set the record, and then he would take longer routs
(18:21):
and this became the best part of his day. So
the importance of this is the stuff you're good at,
the stuff you like and be used to a company
and overcome the stuff you don't like, and when that happens,
happiness goes up and work gets better. We have a
(18:41):
culture in which we focus on traits that are wrong,
ways in which we screw up, and it's important to
correct your weaknesses, but even more important is to recognize
the strengths you do have and then to use them more.
Speaker 1 (18:58):
What I love about the character strengths, especially when I've
used exercises like this with my students, is that you
also need to know what your strengths are. I think
we kind of implicitly know it, but when we start
to focus on it, like, you know, I really like
humor or I really love learning. You know, whenever I
take the VIA test, my top to our humor and
love of learning. And I feel like that's helped me
in shaping this podcast. You know, I got to do
goofy things for the podcast, or I got to take
(19:19):
on new topics where I get to learn something. And
so I'm curious, what are your signature strengths.
Speaker 2 (19:24):
My own highest strengths are creativity, appreciation of beauty, and leadership.
And indeed, I take my own medicine and indeed I
try to lead my life around creativity, appreciation of beauty,
and leadership. It helped me to know what my strengths
were to actually say to myself, Hey, how can I
(19:46):
use creativity in the conversation that Laurie and I are
having now?
Speaker 1 (19:51):
And I think this is the thing we forget is
that you know, we can use these in so many
different context right. We can use these at work. If
you're one of my college students, they can use these
when they're studying. Another domain in which I know you've
talked about using these is that we can use these
to build up relationships. One of the homework exercises I
use with students in my happiness class at Yale as
I make them go on a strengths date where they
(20:12):
have to figure out their strengths. You know, pick a
friend or a romantic partner, figure out that person's strengths,
and then find some activity that you can do together
that maximizes both. There's like creativity and love of learning.
You have to go to some new museum where you
do something creative together. Or one of the ones I
loved was a hair of my students came up with
bravery and they did one of these ropes courses together,
(20:32):
and they all say, like, that was so much more
fun than what we would normally do, which is probably
locked down and watch TV together and not do anything
that used your strengths.
Speaker 2 (20:40):
In addition to using your strengths more what you've just
said about sharing them with someone else, Virtually everything that
we like doing goes better when we share with someone else.
And so I think that's a really basic principle of
well being.
Speaker 1 (20:56):
Another thing that you've talked about a lot in your
work is this idea of resilience. So talk about what
resilience is and how you think of it from a
positive psychology lens.
Speaker 2 (21:05):
I think resilience for me, different people define it differently
is coming back from defeat, coming back to normal functioning
from a bad event. So in many ways, resilience for
me is a word out of psychology as usual. It's
not about being super normal or better than you were.
(21:25):
And so for me, things like post traumatic growth are
more interesting than resilience. And indeed, if you look at
people like soldiers who experience bad events like combat, which
one of the worst things we can experience, the response
to very bad events is bell shaped, and on the
(21:45):
left hand side of the bell is post traumatic stress disorder,
people who collapse and become helpless, but in the middle
is resilience, and their resilience means you may have a
tough time in combat, but within three months your back
where you were. And then on the right hand side
of the bell is people who often go through post
(22:07):
traumatic stress disorder, but a year later are physically and
mentally stronger than they were to begin with. So I
guess I would want to contrast the notion of growth
to resilience. So these days I'm more interested in growth
than I am in resilience.
Speaker 1 (22:24):
I'm curious how you got started on that in the
first place. How did that work begin?
Speaker 2 (22:28):
Yeah, it was in the middle of the Iraq War.
General George Casey, the Chief of Staff of the Army,
called me the Pentagon to a meeting of the General Staff.
And I looked around and sitting at the table were
all copies of my books and things like that. General
Casey said, well, Seligman, Professor Seligman, I called him sir.
(22:49):
I went to military school. I know about calling general sir.
He said, post traumatic stress disorder, suicide, drug abuse, panic, divorce.
What does positive psychology say about that? And I went
through the bell shape and I said, I think the
(23:09):
of what we can do in positive psychology is to
move the whole distribution toward post traumatic growth. Whereupon General
cases did two things. He said, First, he said, my
legacy to the United States Army is going to be
to create an army that is as mentally fit as
(23:30):
it is physically fit. And I'm going to allocate one
hundred and forty million dollars to doing that. And so
I said, well, how are you going to do it?
And he said, well, we've read your work in schools
and we see you teach teachers the skills of positive
psychology and resilience, and the teachers teach the students. Well,
(23:51):
we have forty thousand teachers in the army. I said, really,
he said, yeah, the drill sergeants. And so your job,
doctor Seligman, will be to train all forty thousand drill
sergeants in positive psychology and resilience, and they will train
the one point one million soldiers. And so that's how
(24:13):
our work with the military started. And I guess I
should tell you two outcomes of it that your audience
probably doesn't know about their new We created a psychometric
tests called the GAT the GAC that every soldier takes
the first day of joining the army, and these are
psychological tests with the good and bad stuff. Then we
(24:36):
follow people through the army and we've just completed two
major studies. I should say both of these studies are
not samples. This is everybody in the army. So the
first thing we asked was could you predict post traumatic
stress disorder? And so we took everyone who was deployed
(24:57):
to Iraq and Afghanistan, seventy seven thousand people, and we
asked who got post traumatic stress disorder. Three five hundred
of them are diagnosed with post romata stress disorder. And
it turns out you can predict from day one if
you both face serious combat and you're a catastrophizer, you're
(25:18):
three hundred and seventy percent more likely come down with
post traumatic stress disorder. The same exaggeration of post traumatic
stress disorder is true at every level of combat. So
one finding that came out of this we could predict
who is really vulnerable. The second finding is the reverse
and much closer to my interest. It's about success. It's
(25:41):
about who's going to do really well in the army.
This is now nine hundred and ninety thousand soldiers followed
for five years. Day one, they take the gap the
psychological test, and over the next five years, twelve percent
of them win a Heroism of medal or an Exemplary
Work medal. And the question is could we predict who's
(26:05):
going to really succeed in the army by heroism and
untry work? And again the answer was we could robustly
predict it. There were three psychological factors. First, optimistic people,
second people with more positive emotion, and third people with
low negative emotion. Are more likely, we've been able to
(26:27):
predict post traumatic stress disorder by being a catastrophizer, and
who's going to do really well in the army by
high positive emotion, high optimism, and low negative emotion.
Speaker 1 (26:40):
Even the most rigorous researchers struggle to amass data sets
like this. I mean, lots of psychology experiments are run
using dozens or maybe a few hundred test subjects. Marty's
work looked at the lives of tens of thousands of people,
literally a whole army, and his findings speak to the
power of optimism to improve our lives, which is something
(27:00):
we'll explore in a whole lot more detail when the
Happiness Lab returns after the shortbreak. Research shows that being
a hopeful, optimistic person is a great indicator that you'll
flourish in life, even when things go wrong or you
(27:23):
find yourself in awful situations like, for example, military combat.
Marty Seligman's massive research project with the US Army made
this clear. But what exactly is the power of optimism,
how does it work? And is it something that all
of us can learn?
Speaker 2 (27:41):
First and most importantly, optimists try harder, they don't give up,
they're more persistent. Secondly, when bad events hit them, they're
half as likely to get depressed. They're more likely to
come back and be resilient. Third people like them better.
(28:01):
So while misery loves company, company does not like misery
in the workplace. In sports, they come back from defeat better.
So Optimistic pitchers in close games in the major leagues
in the last three innings, their earn run average gets better.
(28:22):
Optimistic hitters in the last three innings in close games,
their betting average goes up. The pessimists go down in
close games and do worse. But at any rate, optimism,
because it produces more trying, by and large, seems to
be a very big advantage in life, and in some
(28:43):
ways the most surprising thing of all is that optimists
live on average between six and eight years longer than pessimists,
and there are now about twenty good studies of this.
Controlling for all the major risk factors, particularly for cardiovascular disease,
Pessimism is probably between smoking two and three packs of
(29:04):
cigarettes a day as a risk factor, and optimism seems
to give between six and eight years of extra life,
probably about twice as important as exercise.
Speaker 1 (29:16):
I mean, all of those are amazing findings, but if
you don't know the literature on optimism and hope, you
might find them kind of depressing because I think many
lay people have this notion that you're either born an
optimist or born a pessimist.
Speaker 2 (29:29):
You know.
Speaker 1 (29:29):
So it's all well and good. If you're born an optimist,
then you're going to live longer and you know, get
through these tough games faster. But if you're not tough
for you. But this seems to be something that your
work has shown too, which is that it's not just
that there's optimism and pessimism, but that there's learned optimism.
It's almost kind of coming full circle from your original
work on learned helplessness. So talk about how optimism can
(29:50):
be learned and what we figured out about how we
can kind of bring it into our lives. If that's
not our natural tendency.
Speaker 2 (29:56):
Well, first we should confirm the unlearned part. So in Twinsburg, Ohio,
every year there's a Twins convention. Ten thy twins show up.
One year, we went to Twinsburg and we gave them
optimism Pessimism questionnaire. Half of them are fraternal twins and
half are identical twins. And we measured concordance, and it
(30:18):
turns out identical twins are much more concordant than fraternal twins.
For optimism or pessimism, it's about fifty percent heritable. Okay,
so people are partly right. Optimism is partly inherited. But
it turns out if you're a pessimist like I am,
you can learn optimism. And the basic skill comes straight
(30:40):
out of cognitive therapy. First, you want to be able
to recognize the most catastrophic thoughts you say to yourself,
and then you want to realistically dispute them. I'm eighty
years old now, and before I got on this call
with you, I said, oh my god, can I really
survive an hour of a I'm really too old to
(31:02):
be doing this kind of thing. And I recognize that thought.
Maybe I should just give up and turn it over
to the young people. Then when we started, I could
recognize the thought and I treated it as if it
was said by someone who a third person whose mission
in life was to make me miserable, and I disputed
(31:25):
it with realistic evidence. So you're not only a good interviewer,
but you smile and laugh and you show real responses
when I'm doing something that really makes sense. So I said, well, look,
Laurie really gets if this is going really well. So
what you do is you realistically dispute your most catastrophic thoughts.
(31:47):
And I become quite skilled of that. I'm a born
pessimist and a born depressive, and I still hear the
voices all the time that tell me I'm a reject,
I'm a loser, but I know how to dispute them now.
And that's the basic skill of learned optimism.
Speaker 1 (32:03):
And if you learn optimism in that way, do you
get Is there evidence that you get as many benefits
as somebody who might come about it naturally.
Speaker 2 (32:10):
I don't think anyone has ever tested that. That's a
really interesting thing. And the difference in many ways is
I think the people who get it heritably don't hear
the voices all the time telling them what a failure
they are, and the people who learn it really have
to work. So learned optimism is work, doesn't become naturally.
Speaker 1 (32:32):
And I think this is in some ways a message
in a lot of positive psychology, right, which is that
we can go above baseline, we can flourish more, but
sometimes it actually does take some work. You need to
put work in. You need to be following your strength
and paying attention to them. You need to fight those
tendencies to talk badly to yourself. If you're a natural pessimist,
you know you can experience hope and optimism in all
(32:55):
these positive rewards, but sometimes you get to put a
little bit of work into. Even if you are the
father of positive psychology himself, Marty Seligman, you have to
put this work in.
Speaker 2 (33:03):
Yeah. I think at the heart of why the positive
stuff has to be learned is that we inherited from
our ancestors a bad weather brain. The most recent geological
epoch was the ice ages, and those of your ancestors
who thought, oh, it's a beautiful day in new Haven today,
(33:23):
A bet it'll be beautiful tomorrow got crushed by the ice.
And it was your ancestors who said, things look okay,
but famine is coming, and ice is coming, and one
tragedy or another is coming. They survive because they were right,
and we got their brain. Unfortunately, if prosperity continues and
(33:44):
it is a nice day in new Haven tomorrow, it'll
be ruined. If all you can think of is how
miserable everything's going to be so now in a world
which is much more prosperous by almost every measure we
have than the world used to be. The pessimistic brain
does not serve you very well, and an optimistic brain
(34:06):
allows you to take advantage of prosperity.
Speaker 1 (34:09):
And so, as you think about prosperity in this field,
what are the things that make you optimistic about where
positive psychology is going to be in the next fifty years.
What are your predictions about how positive psychology will flourish
in the future.
Speaker 2 (34:20):
Well, I've been mapping as people like Steve Pinker have
progress over the last two hundred years, and essentially you
have to be blinded by ideology not to see how
much better the world is now than it was two
hundred years ago. Two hundred years ago, forty four percent
of your children died before the age of five. Now
(34:43):
one percent of children die before the age of five.
Two hundred years ago, the mean human life expectancy was
about thirty five years. Life expectancy across the entire world
has doubled in the last two hundred years. It's not
just these material things that have changed to measure, Women's
(35:04):
rights and racism not perfect, but it's a lot better
than it was two hundred years ago when we had
slavery and women couldn't vote. So by almost every material
and spiritual dimension, life has gotten better over the last
two hundred years. And now the question is will it continue?
(35:26):
And this is a very important question. I mean, we
need to overcome all sorts of stuff, avoid economic collapse,
we need to avoid nuclear war, we need to avoid
climate collapse. But if we do all of those things,
then there's good reason to believe that human innovation and
prosperity will continue. If that is so, we need a
(35:49):
psychology that goes along with it, a psychology that tells
us that everything is wrong and all we can talk
about is reducing misery is not really conducive to producing
more and more prosperity and more and more innovation. So
I think it is vouchsafe to positive psychologists not just
to witness increase prosperity over the next fifty years, but
(36:12):
to actually help more and more prosperity to occur.
Speaker 1 (36:19):
When we look at the work in positive psychology, there's
so many tips and so many changes that people can
make to kind of improve their sense of flourishing. If
you had to boil it down to your three favorite
tips or the three ones that have worked best for you.
What would some of those tips be.
Speaker 2 (36:32):
Well, my very favorite, which I'm often asked by depress people,
is what's the number one thing I can do if
I'm depressed right now? And the answer is to turn
off this seminar, go out and find someone who needs
help and help them. Turns out, our heedonic system is
(36:55):
built to turn on when we help others, So that's
my number one. My number two, I think is that
learning optimism and cultivating optimism will produce more success in
the workplace, less depression, and longer life. And my third
(37:15):
is anything you like doing, do it with someone else,
it'll enhance it.
Speaker 1 (37:21):
Those are some fantastic go tos, easy things that people
can latch onto to go from there. And in addition
to all this fantastic work, you also have a new
book out right now, Tomorrow Mind. So talk to me
about Tomorrow Mind and tell me what it teaches well.
Speaker 2 (37:33):
With Gabriella Kellerman, we've asked the question what skills the
workers today need in a whitewater world in which their
skills get outmoded every six months? And Tomorrow Mind talks
about five skills. The acronym is prism pri FM, where
P is prospection, future mindedness, making people better perspectors of
(37:59):
the future. R is resilience and optimism. I is innovation
and creativity. S is social skills, particularly rapid rap or
and M is mattering and meaning at work.
Speaker 1 (38:16):
And so these are all skills that I think matter
at work, but they're kind of building on the models
of flourishing that you've talked about. Generally, they're the kinds
of things that can help us succeed at work. But
if we master all the things in this prison acronym,
it's also kind of the techniques that will make us
happier generally.
Speaker 2 (38:31):
Indeed, and Gabriella Kellerman is both a psychiatrist and comes
from the world of work and trying to make work
a happier place. So it's been a particular privilege for
me to be second author with Gabriella on how work
can be happier than it is today.
Speaker 1 (38:50):
Well, all my gratitude for starting this field off that
can help all of the slightly younger guns to make
that happen, and to share all this great science with
everybody out there. We've already kept you over time, which
is exactly what I expected what happened, so we should
let you go. But this is really awesome. It's meant
a lot to be able to share this work, and
I feel like telling your story been something I've wanted
(39:12):
to do for a long time, so I'm so happy
we could make it happen.
Speaker 2 (39:14):
Good. Well, thank you, it's wonderful to see you.
Speaker 1 (39:17):
Ditto, Dittoh, thank you so much. I hope you enjoyed
this chat with Marty Seligman as much as I did.
Hearing Marty's story reminds me that it's an honor to
live in the time we do right now, when we've
learned so much about the kinds of things we can
do to live a more flourishing life. So why not
commit to the practices you just heard that you know
(39:38):
will make you feel better. You could start discovering your
character strengths. As Marty mentioned, you can head to his
free website, authentic happiness dot org and take the via
Character Strengths Survey. Once you learn what your strengths are,
you can find ways to put them into practice this week.
Or you could commit to changing your mindset and experiencing
(39:58):
a bit more learned optimism. If you want more tips
on how to do that, you should check out Marty's
new book Tomorrow Mind Thriving at Work with resilience, creativity
and connection now and in an uncertain future. The Happiness
Lab will be back soon with an extra special tree,
not just the usual shows recorded inside my beloved podcast closet,
(40:20):
but two new episodes that we recorded live in front
of a real studio audience of fans just like you.
So I hope you'll join me back again soon for
the next episode of the Happiness Lab with me Doctor
Laurie Santos. The Happiness Lab is co written by Ryan
(40:42):
Dilly and is produced by Ryan Dilly, Jess Shane and
Britney Brown. The show was mastered by Evan Viola and
our original music was composed by Zachary Silver. Special thanks
to Greta Cohne, Eric Sandler, Carl Migliori, Morgan Rattner, Jacob Weisberg,
my agent, Ben Davis, and the rest of the Pushkin team.
The Happiness Lab is brought to you by Pushkin Industries
(41:04):
and by me, Doctor Lariy Santos,
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