July 24, 2023 • 40 mins
Recovering from a car crash that smashed her face, listener Rebecca Kaduru stumbled across an episode of The Happiness Lab in which we interviewed wounded Iraq veteran JR Martinez. His story brought Rebecca great solace in her own painful journey to recovery.
Following our recent show talking to Rebecca, we wanted to give you a chance to hear the episode which so touched her - The Unhappy Millionaire - in which we examine the "psychological immune system" that help humans overcome even the toughest experiences.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin. Last time on the Happiness Lab, we brought you
the story of listener Rebecca Kuduru. Rebecca was involved in
an awful car accident while living in Uganda.
Speaker 2 (00:28):
As my husband tried to swer our car ended up
rolling probably seven or eight times and landed in a tree.
Speaker 1 (00:34):
And when she came to a few hours later, her
face was smashed beyond recognition.
Speaker 2 (00:38):
I had broken my nose, I had broken my jaw,
and I had shattered both my eye socket, the external
part and the internal part.
Speaker 1 (00:50):
Her recovery was difficult and painful, with lots of setbacks
and disappointments.
Speaker 2 (00:54):
There was something very weird happening with my left eye
where it really looked like it was kind of sunken.
Speaker 1 (01:01):
Back back in the US and in between reconstructive surgeries,
Rebecca began listening to The Happiness Lab while taking her
daily walk. One day, she heard our episode with an
army veteran JR. Martinez, who was badly burned while serving
in Iraq.
Speaker 3 (01:16):
I look at myself and I'm like, that's not cute
what I see in the mirror. The old Jr.
Speaker 4 (01:20):
Had died.
Speaker 1 (01:22):
His words had an immediate impact.
Speaker 2 (01:24):
Tears just burst out of my eyes and I like
collapsed onto my knees on the sidewalk.
Speaker 1 (01:29):
If you haven't yet listened to the episode telling Rebecca's
story and bringing her together with JR.
Speaker 3 (01:34):
What's that Rebecca, I'm so excited to meet you.
Speaker 1 (01:37):
I'd urge you to go back and check it out
what is up? But today I want to give you
a chance to hear the episode that so touched Rebecca.
It's one of my favorite of the many shows we've made.
It's all about the psychological immune system, which gives humans
the resilience to overcome adversity. Unfortunately, just as bad things
don't hurt us as deeply or as permanently as we fear,
(02:00):
the satisfaction we get from the good things also fades
faster than we'd like. It's a key well being concept
and it's all explained in this episode. So get ready,
it's quite a ride. It was the worst thing that
ever happened to me. These were the words uttered by
Billy Bob Harrold Junior, a man whose life had been
(02:21):
unremarkable before a fateful event that ruined everything. On June
twenty eighth, nineteen ninety seven. Before that worst thing ever
event occurred, Billy Bob was a relatively happy, middle aged Texan.
He was a religious family man who cared deeply about
his parents, his wife, Barber Jane, and their three children.
(02:42):
Billy Bob worked at the local home depot, stocking shelves
with electrical equipment. It wasn't the most lucrative career, but
Billy Bob and his wife found ways to make ends
me His life, by all accounts, was relatively blessed, but
one hot summer evening everything changed. Within months, his marriage
had fallen apart. His beloved Barbergine filed for divorce. Billy
(03:05):
Bob tried dating younger woman, but still felt terrible. He
lost almost fifty pounds, making him look sickly and gaunt.
His children would later say that his personality completely changed.
He switched from the happy dad they knew into a moody, depressive.
In May of nineteen ninety nine, less than two years
(03:26):
after that incident which I've not yet named, Billy Bob
couldn't take it anymore. He locked himself in his master
bedroom and took his own life. So what was that
worst thing ever occurrence? That awful event that destroyed Billy
Bob's family and his entire life. It was this Billy
(03:46):
Bob won the Lotto Texas Jackboon.
Speaker 4 (03:49):
Good evening and welcome to the official Lotto Texas draw.
Speaker 1 (03:52):
In a split second, he was thirty one million dollars richer.
Now that probably wasn't the kind of worst ever event
you are imagining. When we think of tragedies, we imagine
the death of a family member, some disfiguring car crash,
or total financial ruin. What Billy Bob experience is actually
something many of us yearn for. He became a multi
(04:14):
millionaire overnight. He was suddenly rich, beyond his wildest dreams,
wealthy enough to quit his job and to buy whatever
he and his family needed for the rest of their lives.
But the wonderful fortune he literally prayed for this certainly
didn't make him as happy as he expected. I bet
you think that wouldn't be the case for you. Most
(04:37):
of us are convinced that making tons of money would
feel good, But as it turns out, we're probably wrong,
and not just about money. Research shows that we suck
at predicting what will make us happy, generally, both when
we're imagining how we'll feel when we get what we want.
The good stuff like hitting the jackpot, getting the perfect job,
being accepted to our dream school, but also when we
(05:00):
envisioned some of the worst events a person could possibly endure.
Why are we so bad at making these predictions? What's
going wrong? Our minds are constantly telling us what to
do to be happy. But what if our minds are wrong?
What if our minds are lying to us, leading us
(05:21):
away from what will really make us happy. The good
news is that understanding the science of the mind can
point us all back in the right direction. You're listening
to the Happiness Lab with doctor Laurie Santos.
Speaker 4 (05:39):
If you have an enemy, go buy them a lottery ticket,
because on the off chance that they win, their life
is going to be really messed up.
Speaker 1 (05:49):
I'm speaking with Clay Cockrell. He knows that the misery
Billy Bob experienced after winning the lottery wasn't a one off.
Clay's a clinical social worker and psychotherapist. His business address
is up near Columbus Circle in New York City, but
more often than not he can be found in Central
Park or on the banks of the Hudson River.
Speaker 4 (06:08):
I do something unusual in that I walk with my
clients instead of meeting in an office, walk and talk.
I think better on my feet.
Speaker 1 (06:16):
His methods as a psychotherapist or novel But Clay also
works with a rather particular clientele.
Speaker 4 (06:22):
About ten years ago, I started working with the super wealthy,
people in the one percent of the one percent. Somehow
my name got passed around this very small world as
someone who doesn't bring judgment. So if you're struggling with
I can't find a place to park my yacht, I
(06:44):
have no judgment about that. I'm going to help you.
Your problem is as real as someone else's.
Speaker 1 (06:49):
Clay finds that providing counsel to the richest of the
rich generates a certain amount of hostility from the other
ninety nine point nine nine percent, who think the mega
wealthy have it pretty good. Being anxious about yacht parking
doesn't play well with well with most people.
Speaker 4 (07:04):
Honestly, the general public. When they find out what I do,
they don't have a lot of empathy because they bought
into this idea that they have a certain amount of
problems that are related to money, and they have this
belief that if I have money, my problems will go away.
But when they find out that there's somebody out there
that has a lot of money and they still have problems.
(07:25):
It busts that fantasy. So this thing that they're working toward,
I just need a little bit more money is going
to solve my problems. It really challenges that belief system.
Speaker 1 (07:34):
Clay's right that most people believe they just need a
little bit more income for their troubles to end. One
study asks people, how much money would you really need
to be happy? What's an income level that, if you
got it, you wouldn't need any more. People who are
currently earning thirty thousand dollars a year say they'd need
fifty k to be happier, which makes sense, But duke
(07:56):
folks who actually earn fifty K think that was all
that's needed. Not really. People earning twice that much one
hundred thousand dollars said they need a salary of two
hundred and fifty k to truly be happy.
Speaker 4 (08:11):
This myth more money equals happiness. So I just got
to get some more. I'll get there. I just got
to get some more.
Speaker 1 (08:20):
We've all heard that money can't buy you happiness, but
is that really true? Two Nobel Prize winning scientists Danny
Konnoman and Angus Dean teamed up to find out. They
tested how annual salary in the US today affects three
different measures of well being. What did they find Well,
it turns out that income does affect well being for
(08:40):
people at lower salary levels. If you are in ten
or twenty thousand dollars, then earning more will make you
feel less stressed and happier. But that effect of income
on well being starts to level off, and it does
so really quickly. Based on their.
Speaker 4 (08:56):
Estimate, it is much better to earn seventy thousand than
forty thousand. Life is a lot different, but it's not
a lot different from seventy thousand to one hundred and
fifty or two fifty.
Speaker 1 (09:07):
Connoment and Dean found that once you're earning an annual
income of seventy five thousand dollars, getting more doesn't help.
You don't get less stressed or happier. Your well being
just flat lines, even if you double or even quadruple
your salary. That's what the data suggests, but it's definitely
not what most of us believe.
Speaker 4 (09:28):
When I first got out of grad school, I made
fourteen thousand dollars a year, and I was Wow, this
is amazing. So you begin to think, Okay, there's a
correlation here. More money equals a better life, and that
keeps working until you get to around seventy five eighty
thousand dollars and your basic needs are met. But you've
learned a lesson. More money incrementally is going to make
(09:48):
you happier and your life easier. But you start getting
more and more money and more and more money, and
it's not working like it used to when I went
from fourteen to thirty five. I just need to work
a little harder and get up to two fifty.
Speaker 1 (10:00):
Our intuition that more money equals more happiness means we
don't realize the host of problems that come with being
incredibly rich. He has seen these problems firsthand in his
many clients.
Speaker 4 (10:12):
They struggle, they're not sleeping at night, they don't have
good relationships.
Speaker 1 (10:16):
One of the most common problems class is guilt. The
wealthy also buy into the idea that money brings happiness.
That cognitive dissonance of being so rich yet so sad
can pitch them into emotional turmoil.
Speaker 4 (10:29):
My life isn't perfect, but it should be. I shouldn't complain.
I shouldn't seek psychotherapy to help me deal with my
problems because I really shouldn't have them.
Speaker 1 (10:39):
And like Billy Bob Harrell after hitting the jackpot, the
rich often struggle in their close relations.
Speaker 4 (10:45):
It's hard to trust because they've been burned a lot,
particularly in romantic relationships. And then you get into prenuptial
agreements and are you only getting into this relationship because
I'm going to buy you nice things?
Speaker 1 (10:58):
Even casual friendships can be hard to maintain.
Speaker 4 (11:01):
They call it the one percent for a reason. There's
not a lot of people out there that have this
kind of money, so a majority of the population and
on a fundamental level, you're not going to be able
to relate to. There's a lot of isolation. Are you
being my friend because of my bank account? If we
go out to lunch, am I just expected to pick
up the tab? When you're talking about your weekend. I
(11:23):
had this one client that got to be friends at
the local gym. They were talking about their weekend that
they went out with their wives, and that weekend he
just happened to have taken his private jet to Paris
to try out this new restaurant. So how do you
talk about that without it feel like you're rubbing your
wealth in someone's face.
Speaker 1 (11:42):
But the biggest problem class is that the rich feel trapped.
For most problems we encounter in life, they are painful
but culturally acceptable solutions. If you're in a bad relationship,
you can pack your bags and leave. You hate your job,
so quit, But if you're loaded and miserable about it, you're.
Speaker 4 (12:02):
Not going to give it away. You're too attached to it.
It gives too much freedom, so you're trapped the golden handcuffs.
So I have a lot of people who say I
can't get rid of it because it's amazing, it's great,
but God, there's so much unhappiness and isolation and guilt
that comes along with having this.
Speaker 1 (12:19):
Ironically, the rich then fall prey to the same bias
we do. Maybe the problem isn't the money. Maybe it's
just that they need a little bit more.
Speaker 4 (12:29):
I've worked with people who've had fifty million dollars and
they say, yeah, but I really I can't do everything
that I want. There's this wonderful painting that would really
eat into my savings. This one guy had five hundred
million dollars but had a sense that once I hit
that billion, that's when things really change and you think
(12:52):
that's that's crazy. You have more money than you could
possibly spend, but they're searching for happiness, and people don't
believe me, and I understand it's hard. It was hard
for me to think that, But after living in this world,
working with these people, I understand money is not going
(13:12):
to buy you happiness. So be careful what you wish for.
Speaker 1 (13:17):
Be careful what you wish for. That's a warning many
of us have heard before, but it fits with a
growing body of research showing that nearly every amazing thing
in life, from tons of money to an amazing house
to the perfect grades, those things simply won't make us
as happy as we predict they will.
Speaker 5 (13:35):
Almost all of us believe that we would be happy
if we could just get what we want, and the
only impediment to our happiness is that we can't always
get what we want.
Speaker 1 (13:43):
This is Dan Gilbert. He wrote one of my favorite
books on human psychology. It's called Stumbling on Happiness.
Speaker 5 (13:50):
It turns out that when people get exactly what they want,
they're not always happy. When they get the opposite of
what they wanted, they often are. That's a little bit
of a mystery it's kind of mystery that attracts psychologists.
Speaker 1 (14:02):
This puzzle, as Dan's research over the last two decades
has shown, stems from one of our most exceptional cognitive facultyties,
our unique ability to run mental simulations of the future.
Speaker 5 (14:13):
This is a brand new faculty that it's wired into
the human brain. No other animal can do anything vaguely
like it. No chimpanzee has ever thought about whether it's
going to look good in a bathing suit when it retires.
But these brand new abilities are still in beta testing.
In a sense, we have an ability you might call
prospection one point oh, and it's still being worked on,
(14:34):
so it's got bugs.
Speaker 1 (14:36):
One of the bugs in prospection one point oh. That
ability we have to plan for the future is that
your brain can't simulate all the parts of a given event.
Speaker 5 (14:45):
When you're imagining things unfolding over time, you can't imagine
them unfolding in real time?
Speaker 6 (14:50):
Can you.
Speaker 5 (14:51):
If you could, then somebody would say, imagine moving to Chicago,
and you'd have to spend four months imagining moving to Chicago.
That's how long it actually takes. So one of the
wonderful things about simulation is that it gives you a
quick sketch, and then it runs at at hyper speed.
But that's also one of its flaws, because a quick
sketch often lacks important detail, and when things run at
hyper speed, they run right over the details that often matter.
Speaker 1 (15:14):
We miss the critical details of almost any good event
we try to simulate. But let's look in more detail
at the example we started with earlier, getting rich beyond
our wildest dreams. What kinds of details do you say
lottery players miss when they think about winning all that cash.
Speaker 5 (15:30):
You close your eyes and imagine winning the lottery. Most
of us imagine ourselves in a bathtub full of money,
or on a yacht, or quitting our job, buying a
big house, all the things we can get with money.
You're not thinking about all the things you're going to lose.
It's very unlikely you're going to continue all the same
social relationships you have with people who need money but
don't have any. You're underestimating the number of people in
(15:53):
relatives that will come out of the woodwork begging you
to help them over and over. You'll fail to realize
that the social groups to which you would low like
to belong don't want to have anything to do with
you because you got your money the wrong way, on
and on and on. None of that is in our
mental simulation of the fe.
Speaker 1 (16:10):
Dan has shown there's a nasty consequence to missing these
important details. It means our emotional predictions of how these
events will feel are way off track.
Speaker 5 (16:18):
Would you rather have a weekend in Paris or gum
surgery is kind of a one item IQ test, and
almost everybody gets that right. What they don't realize is
that the weekend in Paris won't be as good as
they think it will be, and the good feelings won't
last as long as they expect. The same is true,
thankfully for the gum surgery.
Speaker 1 (16:37):
These tumorous predictions. Being wrong about how intense an event
will feel and how long will feel that way is
what Dan has christened impact bias. In one famous study,
he asked young professors at the University of Texas to
forecast how they'd feel when they got tenure, that permanent
position that all new faculty crave. Dan tested people's predictions
(16:58):
using a seven point happiness scale. Most professors thought they'd
be really happy if they got tenure, around a six
out of seven on that scale, But how did professors
actually feel when they heard good news, they reported only
being a five out of seven. Dan also tested what
happened to professors who got bad news, the ones who
found out they didn't get tenure. They assumed they'd be
(17:21):
a three point four out of seven on that happiness scale,
but in reality, actual professors who got denied tenure were
only a four point seven on average. They felt a
whole point better than anyone expected. I see a similar
misprediction all the time in my college students. At Yale.
Students are convinced they'll be ecstatic if they get a
good grade, and are sure they'll feel devastated if they
(17:44):
do badly. Psychologists have now seen the same pattern in
many walks of life. Lovers predict they'll take a long
time to recover from a sad breakup, but bounce back
far quicker. Student drivers believe they'll be devastated if they
fail to get their license, but aren't as sad walking
out of the DMV empty handed as they think. The
same is true for job applicants who are passed over,
(18:06):
and even patients guessing how they'll feel about a pause
or negative HIV diagnosis quit simply.
Speaker 5 (18:13):
The good things won't be as good. The bad things
won't be as bad as your mind leads you to believe.
Speaker 1 (18:20):
Dan has shown that this pattern stems from yet another
way our minds lie to us. We don't notice that
we have a tendency to get used to stuff. Even
when something feels amazing at first, we can't enjoy it forever.
This is a phenomenon the psychologists call hedonic adaptation.
Speaker 5 (18:37):
You can't be really, really happy endlessly all the time,
or your emotional system isn't doing its job. It has
to come back to baseline so it can once again
guide you to the next good thing that you, as
an organism ought to be doing.
Speaker 1 (18:51):
Hedonic adaptation means that after a while, we tend to
go back to a baseline level of emotional satisfaction. My
students are happy for a while after getting a perfect grade.
For a couple of hours, they might be as seven
out of nine, but after a day or so they
just go back to their usual set point level of happiness.
The good and bad events don't move us up or
(19:12):
down for as long as we think.
Speaker 5 (19:14):
So it's just a hard and fast truth that you
can't stay at ten forever and ever and ever. People
mistakenly think they can. They think happiness is a place
that if they could get to it, they could build
a house and live there their entire lives. It's only
a vacation destination. It's a place you can visit more
and more often if you do the right things, and
you can stay longer and longer, but you can't stay forever.
(19:37):
This is an important thing to know because people often
feel that if their happiness has come back to baseline
after something wonderful has happened, something's wrong. Why didn't this marriage,
this child, this promotion give me the eternal happiness I
was seeking, Because there is no such thing as eternal happiness.
Speaker 1 (19:53):
So happily ever after is just not psychologically realizable.
Speaker 5 (19:56):
Happily ever after is only true if you have three
minutes to live.
Speaker 1 (20:02):
But this process also has an important upside. We get
used to all the bad stuff too, horrible breakup, the
chronic illness, that worst job with the lower salary. As
we hedonically adapt to these things, they gradually start to
distress us less and less. The problem is we don't realize.
Speaker 6 (20:22):
It, despite the fact that two months prior, I was
sitting in my bed crying my eyes out like wishing
I would die. It just shows that like life goes on,
it's not the end of the world.
Speaker 1 (20:37):
The Happiness Lab will be back in a moment.
Speaker 6 (20:44):
Basically, I remember I was on Tender because all these
great stories throned on Tender.
Speaker 1 (20:49):
Rafaela Guns is telling me how she met the man
of her dreams.
Speaker 6 (20:54):
A super beautiful, beautiful guy, blue eyes, full lips.
Speaker 1 (20:59):
And how he changed her life forever.
Speaker 6 (21:02):
I really liked him, I was so in him.
Speaker 1 (21:05):
After chatting with him for a while on Tinder, rafael
agreed to a first date, something really low key. The
couple just walked around getting to know each other. They
didn't even kiss, but things picked up after that.
Speaker 6 (21:18):
We were hanging out for hours and hours, and we
decided to go back up to my neighborhood so we
could sit by the river, by the Hudson River because
it's like super pretty to just wash the sunset over there.
And we ended up having sex. And I thought I
did everything right, like I carried condoms around in my mind.
I was doing everything right.
Speaker 1 (21:39):
But Rafaela was about to hear the sort of news
that nobody wants to hear.
Speaker 6 (21:43):
The next day, he sort of came down with what
he thought was like a cold or something. He had
like a sore throat and he was feeling very fatigued.
And then a couple days later, I started coming down
the same thing.
Speaker 1 (21:57):
Her beautiful boy with the blue eyes was the first
to seek medical advice. He sent a text.
Speaker 6 (22:02):
I went to the doctor and they think, all this
might be a sign of her fees and so like
that was a weird text message. So I go into
urgent care crying and I'm like, I need a herpes death.
Speaker 1 (22:12):
Rafaela got her official diagnosis soon after.
Speaker 6 (22:16):
Those first few days. I remember I was just sitting
in bed crying. You know what I like thought my
life was, Oh I wanted to die. It was the
worst thing in the world. Like, not only was I
like physically uncomfortable, but how am I going to date someone?
How's anyone going to love me?
Speaker 1 (22:30):
In addition to being in physical pain with red bumps
on her genitals, she was also in emotional pain. Her
dream guy dropped her in a flash.
Speaker 6 (22:38):
Yeah, he was like, oh this changed my vibe on you.
He was like very very distant. I thought like, okay,
we both have this thing, like we can go through
it together, and sort of like learn about it together
and figure us out together. But he was very much
sort of like in it for himself. I felt sort
of I don't know if betrayed the white word, but
that's the word that was coming to my mind.
Speaker 1 (23:00):
Rafaela didn't only feel betrayed by the man who gave
her herpes and disappeared. Her diagnosis also freaked out the
people closest to her.
Speaker 6 (23:08):
She was like one of my own as friends. But
then when I confided in her, when I'm like sitting
on my diack crying because I have all these itchy
red bumps and you know, the guy is ignoring me.
Now things changed, She's like, I just think, you know,
it would be better for my own sanity if you
use toilet seat covers when you were here, and you know,
if you use hand sanitizer a lot, and this and that.
(23:30):
So that was really hurtful.
Speaker 1 (23:32):
I mean, this was one of your oldest friends.
Speaker 6 (23:35):
Yeah, this was someone I've known since we were in Diverse.
Speaker 7 (23:38):
And she's not supporting you for one of them.
Speaker 1 (23:40):
It sounds like one of the.
Speaker 6 (23:41):
Most scary times in my life. Yeah, it just sounds awful.
And so that was horrible.
Speaker 1 (23:46):
Let's take a second to predict how you would feel
in Rafaella's situation. You contracted in incurable and highly stigmatized disease,
your romantic partner has ditched you, and some of your
oldest friends are shunning you because of what happened. Would
you describe all of this overall as a good thing,
as a positive change in your life, as a present
(24:08):
from the universe, Because that's how Rafaella sees it. She
even wrote an article for ravishly dot com which she
titled getting herpes was a gift.
Speaker 6 (24:17):
Some people were like what the like, how is this
a gift? Like almost angry and like calling me like delusion,
all all these sorts of things like how would you
possibly think that's a gift?
Speaker 1 (24:27):
So why is it a gift?
Speaker 6 (24:29):
It's a gift because I'm more knowledgeable. It's a gift
because I've been able to write things like that article
that helps people.
Speaker 1 (24:38):
Rafaella says, all the fallout from her diagnosis has given
her insight into the people who really matter. It's a
strong litmus test for those who are actually going to
be there for her.
Speaker 6 (24:48):
If a friend can't accept all of you warts and
all upun intended, they're not really your friend. They're fair
weather friends, you know.
Speaker 1 (24:59):
But it also gave Rafaela a new filter for her
dating life. It saved her time figuring out which guys
were worth her time and which guys just didn't get it.
Speaker 6 (25:07):
He said some dumbest shit about, oh am, I gonna
get it if I kiss you, and I'm like, no,
it's on my vagina.
Speaker 7 (25:12):
Do you think you know?
Speaker 1 (25:13):
Would you change anything?
Speaker 6 (25:14):
Would you do it?
Speaker 7 (25:14):
I mean it sounds like you learn so much from this, Like.
Speaker 1 (25:16):
Would you keep it? Would would you do it over again?
Speaker 6 (25:18):
I'd keep it. First of all, as much of a
dick as he was, he was really hot, really hot,
and the sex was really good, so I don't regret that. Secondly,
it it helped me in my dating life, I feel
a few months after I was diagnosed, I met my
current boyfriend, who've been together for like three years, and
(25:40):
I told him right away and he was fine with it.
So that was nice to know. That's like, especially when
you're when you can track something like herpes, you tend
to think like all, my life's over and no one's
every gonna want to sleep with me again, no one's
every gonna want to date me again. I'm never gonna
get married, this and that, but it was fine, and
like there are people that have much much worse problems
than little red bumps.
Speaker 1 (26:02):
Getting herpes was much much better than Raphael and might
have predicted. And that kind of adaptation to itsity is
something Dan Gilbert has found over and over again.
Speaker 5 (26:13):
What we find consistently is that in the face of
negative events, people don't feel as bad as they themselves
expected to.
Speaker 1 (26:20):
Although we're pretty bad at predicting how we'll feel after
a good event like winning the lottery, Dan has observed
we're worse at predicting how we'll feel after a bad
event losing a friend, failing to get a job, or
even getting herpies. Our impact bias is even bigger when
we make predictions about negative life circumstances, because we're prone
(26:40):
to overcome bad events more quickly than we think.
Speaker 5 (26:43):
One of the things we fail to do when we
mentally simulate is we fail to consider adaptation. We are
remarkably adaptive animal. We have been born and bred to
pick ourselves up by the bootstraps and soldier on. When
the going gets tough, we get going.
Speaker 1 (26:58):
Dan calls this capacity to overcome adversity our psychological immune system.
Just as our physical immune system kicks in when we
get sick, our psychological immune system turns on when we're
in mental distress. And our psychological immune system works really,
really well. As soon as we start to feel bad,
our mind deploys a whole host of mental defenses.
Speaker 5 (27:20):
If you've ever had a friend experience a breakup, you know,
at first they're really unhappy, and then pretty quickly they
get around to rationalizing, Ah, she was never really right
for me. This is really a chance for me to
start my life over. I don't think we had that
much in common in the first place. She didn't like
my mother. When you mentally simulate a breakup, you mentally
simulate the anguish, but you never mentally simulate the rationalizations.
Speaker 1 (27:43):
What's amazing about all those rationalizations, though, is that the
happiness we get from rationalizing a bad event is just
as real as the happiness we get from something objectively good.
Speaker 5 (27:53):
Well, there's no doubt that when people rationalize, everybody around
them feels that they found some sort of phony and
substandard form of happiness. I don't believe that for a minute.
You know, the happiness you get when the person you
love says yes to the marriage proposal, isn't qualitatively different
than the kind you produce for yourself when she says no.
(28:14):
There's absolutely no data that I know of to suggest
that it's an inferior form of happiness, and indeed, in
some cases, it can be more long lasting.
Speaker 1 (28:23):
Raphael's misery about contracting herpes was very deep and very real,
but her misery was also short lived.
Speaker 5 (28:30):
But what about.
Speaker 1 (28:31):
Situations that are so horrible there's no way a person
can carry on normally. What about events so profound and
so awful that they change our lives forever. After the break,
we'll hear about the true power of our psychological immune system,
how it can transform the most terrible incidents a human
can endure into a form of joy we'd never expect.
Speaker 3 (28:53):
Nineteen years old, I'm in this humvey. I'm thinking I'm
going to die. It felt good to just kind of
just close my eyes and just kind of let it happen.
Speaker 1 (29:03):
The Happiness Lab will return in a moment.
Speaker 3 (29:08):
I joined as an vitument because I wanted to. I
wanted to be in the action.
Speaker 5 (29:13):
J R.
Speaker 1 (29:13):
Martinez had just finished high school in a small town
in the South. The only son of a single mother
from El Salvador. After graduation, he decided to enlist in
the army. It was just after nine to eleven, and
he had a few predictions about how things would go.
Speaker 5 (29:28):
You know.
Speaker 3 (29:28):
My thought process was three years I would be in it.
I would give back to this country. It would give
me an opportunity to travel to get more disciplined, it
would give me an opportunity to give money for college.
And I remember one of my sergeants, you know, one day,
sitting down and talking to me and telling me that
I needed to be prepared because we were going to
be deployed sometime soon. And my response to him was,
(29:49):
I'm not going anywhere yet. I just got out of
basic training. Very naive of me, and he was absolutely
correct and right in the sense of where two months later,
I was on a plane with the rest of the
unit head over to the Beddleis go into war.
Speaker 1 (30:02):
Jr. Was part of the initial invasion of Iraq in
two thousand and three. It was already a tough transition
for a nineteen year old, and within weeks tragedy struck.
Speaker 3 (30:12):
Here we were, you know, a few days shy of
a month of being in Iraq and escort in the
convoy through a city car Carbala when the front left
tire of the humvey that I was driving ran over
a roadside bomb.
Speaker 1 (30:22):
The blast ripped through the entire truck and everything it
was carrying, The AMMO spearri of fuel and other explosives.
It was a fireball.
Speaker 3 (30:30):
There was three other soldiers in the vehicle with me.
They all got thrown out of the vehicle, but I
was trapped inside and within a matter of seconds this
hovey was engulfed in flames and I was completely conscious.
Speaker 5 (30:41):
Jr.
Speaker 1 (30:41):
Was pinned inside the burning truck for several minutes. He
described screaming as he watched the skin on his hands melting.
Eventually he was pulled from the vehicle, but the damage
was done. In addition to broken ribs and a lacerated liver,
he had third degree burns over his entire body, and
he'd been gulping flames into his lungs through the whole ordeal.
(31:03):
He was immediately metavaced, first to Europe and then to
the US Army Burn Center in San Antoo, Texas.
Speaker 3 (31:10):
I remember coming out of my medical induced coma three
weeks later and my doctor essentially just kind of laying out,
you know, all the cards and saying, this is the circumstance.
You can't feed yourself, you can't walk, you can't sit up,
you can't go to the bathroom by yourself. They also
told me that I would no longer be able to
(31:30):
remain in the United States Army, which was incredibly difficult
and challenging.
Speaker 7 (31:33):
When this happened, you were nineteen and you spent like
the next three years.
Speaker 3 (31:37):
I turned twenty, twenty one, twenty two in the hospital.
Speaker 7 (31:41):
It's amazing, you can just to be clear, how much
just to get.
Speaker 3 (31:43):
Thirty four percent of my body was burned, and majority
of that was third degree, so it consisted of For
the listeners that can't see me, it consisted of my head,
my face, my arms, my hands, portion of my back,
portion of my legs. There's no way to really fully
describe the pain unless you've been through it. But what's
incredible about being a burn survivor a burn patient at
the time is that the part of your body that
(32:05):
isn't burned still hurts. Because they usually use the areas
of your body that are not scarred as skin to
do skin grafts, and usually the donor site is more
painful than the actual injury itself.
Speaker 1 (32:17):
But Jr's physical pain was nothing compared to his emotional anguish.
When he enlisted, he'd been something of a local heart throb.
Speaker 3 (32:24):
You know. It's funny because growing up I always heard,
you know, from like my mom's friends, you know, all
these women, you know, would say, Oh my god, he's
so cute, he's so this, he's so that, And so
I grew up just thinking like, that's what I am.
You know, no one ever said he has an amazing personality,
he's funny, he's whatever, articulate and nothing. It was cute.
And so suddenly I look at myself and I'm like,
(32:47):
that's not cute. What I see in the mirror, that's
not And that person that I see I do not recognize.
I have no relationship with that individual. The old JR.
Speaker 4 (32:57):
Had died, and.
Speaker 3 (32:58):
As you can imagine, I fell into a deep, dark
place of I was depressed. I was angry, I was resentful.
I was a victim in every sense of the word.
Speaker 1 (33:10):
Deep burns and thick scars over his entire body, dozens
of surgeries, and years of his young life wasted in
the hospital, plus the permanent loss of his good looks
and his military career. Those are some of the most
profound and tragic events a person can endure. But how
does JR. Think about all these awful events today?
Speaker 3 (33:31):
I can tell you right now that what happened to
me is a blessing.
Speaker 1 (33:35):
That's right, as a blessing.
Speaker 3 (33:37):
Considering the fact that I was trapped inside of a
burning truck for five minutes. I'm fortunate to only have
what I have. I have a lot of friends, and
I know a lot of people that unfortunately have missing limbs,
are you know, have are more scarred, you know, or
disfigured you know. So in that sense, I'm incredibly fortunate.
Speaker 7 (33:56):
It's so cool to hear you say that you're incredibly fortunate,
because again, I think people who just heard the story,
you know, guys, m VY explodes, he spends you know,
the decent chunk of his twenties in the hospital having major,
major surgeries, loves with scars for the rest of his life.
And then you're saying I'm fortunately, Like on the last.
Speaker 3 (34:12):
Line, yeah, well I am, because you know, I think
about how I'm blessed to have a second chance at life.
I don't want to take this second chance for granted.
Speaker 1 (34:21):
And JR. Did take every opportunity that came his way.
Being a badly injured vet open doors that JR. Never
dreamed of. He became a mentor for other burn victims,
which led to a few lucrative speaking gigs. Telling his
stories so openly built up Jr's confidence, so much so
that when a friend casually mentioned that Jr. Should try
(34:41):
out for an acting job, he decided to go for it.
Speaker 3 (34:45):
I became an actor on a soap opera All my Children,
and that led Dancing with the Stars to ask me
to be on the show, and then I'd acted in
some other shows. After that, I wrote a book about
my life and my mother's life and my family's life,
and it became a New York Times bestseller. I mean,
People Magazine put me on a cover because of these scars.
I have this incredible ability to get people's attention, the
(35:10):
fifteen seconds of curiosity right like, who is that? What
happened to him? Those fifteen seconds of curiosity that people have.
It's my job mine to take that fifteen seconds and
turn it into thirty seconds, into forty five, into sixty seconds,
into five minutes. Ten minutes a lifetime of actual, educated dialogue.
(35:31):
This is who I am. Everything I thought I wanted
in life. You know, I wanted to be a pro
professional football player and have fame and have all this
money and be able to do all these things. Like
if I would have accomplished those things, would I be
as happy as I am? Now?
Speaker 7 (35:47):
Would you change anything? Would you do it over differently?
Speaker 2 (35:51):
Now?
Speaker 3 (35:51):
I wouldn't change anything. I one percent mean that.
Speaker 7 (35:55):
But you wouldn't change like the explosion and the scars,
the surgery, You'd keep all of that.
Speaker 3 (35:59):
Yeah, yeah, because the life I have, I mean, the
beautiful wife and the beautiful daughter, and the beautiful life
that I've created for myself. I mean, gosh, I mean
I'm blessed.
Speaker 5 (36:19):
With bad events. We often don't realize that some good
can come out of them.
Speaker 1 (36:23):
Dan Gilbert is unsurprised that people like JR. See more
positive than negatives even in the worst of circumstances. He's
seen it time and again in his work on hedonic adaptation.
Speaker 5 (36:35):
Startlingly, if you ask people who've lost a child, which
is the single worst event that people can imagine experiencing,
and indeed it is one of the worst events people
can actually experience. If you ask people have lost a child,
they never say, gee, I'm glad that happened. But if
you ask them to name the good and the bad
things that have come from it, they tend to name
more good than bad things. That's a very stunning fact
(36:58):
that we should just sit back and marvel at the
possibility that the worst thing in the world could happen
to us and probably more good than bad will come
out of it.
Speaker 1 (37:09):
There are awful events that will cause you to feel
pain and hurt and loss, but we're fighters. When push
comes to shove, we are really resilient. The problem is
we don't realize that.
Speaker 5 (37:22):
I think if you understand the power of the psychological
immune system, our remarkable ability to rationalize in the face
of adversity, it makes you braver. You realize that you
will make mistakes and it will be okay. I think
there's a lesson there for all of us.
Speaker 1 (37:44):
After making this episode, I've become even more convinced about
that lesson. Heatonic adaptation means the lows of life aren't
going to be as awful as you imagine, just as
the highs will be more temporary than you hope. As
a psychologist, I already knew that winning the lottery and
other great circumstances don't bring lasting happiness, But honestly, I
often forget about the flip side. So I'm going to
(38:07):
make a conscious effort to be a bit braver, to
stop worrying so much, to remember that I have a
kind of emotional superpower, one that can get me through
the worst of circumstances. And I hope you'll do the same,
because even though your mind might tell you otherwise, joy
doesn't come from everything in life working out perfectly. It
comes from adopting better habits and better behaviors. All strategies
(38:31):
will be discussing in coming episodes of The Happiness Lab
with me Doctor Laurie Santos. If you enjoyed the show,
I'd be super grateful if you could spread the word
by leaving a rating and a review. It really does
(38:53):
help other listeners find us, and don't forget to tell
your friends. If you want to learn more about the
science you heard on the show, then check out our
website Happiness Lab dot fm. You can also sign up
for our newsletter to get exclusive content. The Happiness Lab
is co written and produced by Ryan Dilly. The show
is mixed and mastered by Evan Viola and edited by
(39:14):
Julia Barton, fact checking by Joseph Friedman, and our original
music was composed by Zachary Silver. Special thanks to Mio
La Belle, Carl mcgliori, Heather Fain, Maggie Taylor, Maya Knigg,
and Jacob Weisberg. The Happiness Lab is brought to you
by Pushkin Industries and me Doctor Laurie Santos. I hope
(39:40):
you enjoyed that blast from the past. Next time on
the Happiness Lab, we'll share another story from our listeners.
Thirteen women in a New England town inspired by this
podcast have teamed up to bring more playfulness and joy
into their lives by staging fun interventions or funterventions. I
traveled to meet them and joined in the fun. Hannah Montana,
(40:02):
oh uh Bileay syr So. I hope you'll come back
to hear the next episode of The Happiness Lab with
me Doctor Laurie Santos. Oh, Ryan Gosling, Brad Pitt, wasn't
he in the Magic Mind
Pushkin. Last time on the Happiness Lab, we brought you
the story of listener Rebecca Kuduru. Rebecca was involved in
an awful car accident while living in Uganda.
Speaker 2 (00:28):
As my husband tried to swer our car ended up
rolling probably seven or eight times and landed in a tree.
Speaker 1 (00:34):
And when she came to a few hours later, her
face was smashed beyond recognition.
Speaker 2 (00:38):
I had broken my nose, I had broken my jaw,
and I had shattered both my eye socket, the external
part and the internal part.
Speaker 1 (00:50):
Her recovery was difficult and painful, with lots of setbacks
and disappointments.
Speaker 2 (00:54):
There was something very weird happening with my left eye
where it really looked like it was kind of sunken.
Speaker 1 (01:01):
Back back in the US and in between reconstructive surgeries,
Rebecca began listening to The Happiness Lab while taking her
daily walk. One day, she heard our episode with an
army veteran JR. Martinez, who was badly burned while serving
in Iraq.
Speaker 3 (01:16):
I look at myself and I'm like, that's not cute
what I see in the mirror. The old Jr.
Speaker 4 (01:20):
Had died.
Speaker 1 (01:22):
His words had an immediate impact.
Speaker 2 (01:24):
Tears just burst out of my eyes and I like
collapsed onto my knees on the sidewalk.
Speaker 1 (01:29):
If you haven't yet listened to the episode telling Rebecca's
story and bringing her together with JR.
Speaker 3 (01:34):
What's that Rebecca, I'm so excited to meet you.
Speaker 1 (01:37):
I'd urge you to go back and check it out
what is up? But today I want to give you
a chance to hear the episode that so touched Rebecca.
It's one of my favorite of the many shows we've made.
It's all about the psychological immune system, which gives humans
the resilience to overcome adversity. Unfortunately, just as bad things
don't hurt us as deeply or as permanently as we fear,
(02:00):
the satisfaction we get from the good things also fades
faster than we'd like. It's a key well being concept
and it's all explained in this episode. So get ready,
it's quite a ride. It was the worst thing that
ever happened to me. These were the words uttered by
Billy Bob Harrold Junior, a man whose life had been
(02:21):
unremarkable before a fateful event that ruined everything. On June
twenty eighth, nineteen ninety seven. Before that worst thing ever
event occurred, Billy Bob was a relatively happy, middle aged Texan.
He was a religious family man who cared deeply about
his parents, his wife, Barber Jane, and their three children.
(02:42):
Billy Bob worked at the local home depot, stocking shelves
with electrical equipment. It wasn't the most lucrative career, but
Billy Bob and his wife found ways to make ends
me His life, by all accounts, was relatively blessed, but
one hot summer evening everything changed. Within months, his marriage
had fallen apart. His beloved Barbergine filed for divorce. Billy
(03:05):
Bob tried dating younger woman, but still felt terrible. He
lost almost fifty pounds, making him look sickly and gaunt.
His children would later say that his personality completely changed.
He switched from the happy dad they knew into a moody, depressive.
In May of nineteen ninety nine, less than two years
(03:26):
after that incident which I've not yet named, Billy Bob
couldn't take it anymore. He locked himself in his master
bedroom and took his own life. So what was that
worst thing ever occurrence? That awful event that destroyed Billy
Bob's family and his entire life. It was this Billy
(03:46):
Bob won the Lotto Texas Jackboon.
Speaker 4 (03:49):
Good evening and welcome to the official Lotto Texas draw.
Speaker 1 (03:52):
In a split second, he was thirty one million dollars richer.
Now that probably wasn't the kind of worst ever event
you are imagining. When we think of tragedies, we imagine
the death of a family member, some disfiguring car crash,
or total financial ruin. What Billy Bob experience is actually
something many of us yearn for. He became a multi
(04:14):
millionaire overnight. He was suddenly rich, beyond his wildest dreams,
wealthy enough to quit his job and to buy whatever
he and his family needed for the rest of their lives.
But the wonderful fortune he literally prayed for this certainly
didn't make him as happy as he expected. I bet
you think that wouldn't be the case for you. Most
(04:37):
of us are convinced that making tons of money would
feel good, But as it turns out, we're probably wrong,
and not just about money. Research shows that we suck
at predicting what will make us happy, generally, both when
we're imagining how we'll feel when we get what we want.
The good stuff like hitting the jackpot, getting the perfect job,
being accepted to our dream school, but also when we
(05:00):
envisioned some of the worst events a person could possibly endure.
Why are we so bad at making these predictions? What's
going wrong? Our minds are constantly telling us what to
do to be happy. But what if our minds are wrong?
What if our minds are lying to us, leading us
(05:21):
away from what will really make us happy. The good
news is that understanding the science of the mind can
point us all back in the right direction. You're listening
to the Happiness Lab with doctor Laurie Santos.
Speaker 4 (05:39):
If you have an enemy, go buy them a lottery ticket,
because on the off chance that they win, their life
is going to be really messed up.
Speaker 1 (05:49):
I'm speaking with Clay Cockrell. He knows that the misery
Billy Bob experienced after winning the lottery wasn't a one off.
Clay's a clinical social worker and psychotherapist. His business address
is up near Columbus Circle in New York City, but
more often than not he can be found in Central
Park or on the banks of the Hudson River.
Speaker 4 (06:08):
I do something unusual in that I walk with my
clients instead of meeting in an office, walk and talk.
I think better on my feet.
Speaker 1 (06:16):
His methods as a psychotherapist or novel But Clay also
works with a rather particular clientele.
Speaker 4 (06:22):
About ten years ago, I started working with the super wealthy,
people in the one percent of the one percent. Somehow
my name got passed around this very small world as
someone who doesn't bring judgment. So if you're struggling with
I can't find a place to park my yacht, I
(06:44):
have no judgment about that. I'm going to help you.
Your problem is as real as someone else's.
Speaker 1 (06:49):
Clay finds that providing counsel to the richest of the
rich generates a certain amount of hostility from the other
ninety nine point nine nine percent, who think the mega
wealthy have it pretty good. Being anxious about yacht parking
doesn't play well with well with most people.
Speaker 4 (07:04):
Honestly, the general public. When they find out what I do,
they don't have a lot of empathy because they bought
into this idea that they have a certain amount of
problems that are related to money, and they have this
belief that if I have money, my problems will go away.
But when they find out that there's somebody out there
that has a lot of money and they still have problems.
(07:25):
It busts that fantasy. So this thing that they're working toward,
I just need a little bit more money is going
to solve my problems. It really challenges that belief system.
Speaker 1 (07:34):
Clay's right that most people believe they just need a
little bit more income for their troubles to end. One
study asks people, how much money would you really need
to be happy? What's an income level that, if you
got it, you wouldn't need any more. People who are
currently earning thirty thousand dollars a year say they'd need
fifty k to be happier, which makes sense, But duke
(07:56):
folks who actually earn fifty K think that was all
that's needed. Not really. People earning twice that much one
hundred thousand dollars said they need a salary of two
hundred and fifty k to truly be happy.
Speaker 4 (08:11):
This myth more money equals happiness. So I just got
to get some more. I'll get there. I just got
to get some more.
Speaker 1 (08:20):
We've all heard that money can't buy you happiness, but
is that really true? Two Nobel Prize winning scientists Danny
Konnoman and Angus Dean teamed up to find out. They
tested how annual salary in the US today affects three
different measures of well being. What did they find Well,
it turns out that income does affect well being for
(08:40):
people at lower salary levels. If you are in ten
or twenty thousand dollars, then earning more will make you
feel less stressed and happier. But that effect of income
on well being starts to level off, and it does
so really quickly. Based on their.
Speaker 4 (08:56):
Estimate, it is much better to earn seventy thousand than
forty thousand. Life is a lot different, but it's not
a lot different from seventy thousand to one hundred and
fifty or two fifty.
Speaker 1 (09:07):
Connoment and Dean found that once you're earning an annual
income of seventy five thousand dollars, getting more doesn't help.
You don't get less stressed or happier. Your well being
just flat lines, even if you double or even quadruple
your salary. That's what the data suggests, but it's definitely
not what most of us believe.
Speaker 4 (09:28):
When I first got out of grad school, I made
fourteen thousand dollars a year, and I was Wow, this
is amazing. So you begin to think, Okay, there's a
correlation here. More money equals a better life, and that
keeps working until you get to around seventy five eighty
thousand dollars and your basic needs are met. But you've
learned a lesson. More money incrementally is going to make
(09:48):
you happier and your life easier. But you start getting
more and more money and more and more money, and
it's not working like it used to when I went
from fourteen to thirty five. I just need to work
a little harder and get up to two fifty.
Speaker 1 (10:00):
Our intuition that more money equals more happiness means we
don't realize the host of problems that come with being
incredibly rich. He has seen these problems firsthand in his
many clients.
Speaker 4 (10:12):
They struggle, they're not sleeping at night, they don't have
good relationships.
Speaker 1 (10:16):
One of the most common problems class is guilt. The
wealthy also buy into the idea that money brings happiness.
That cognitive dissonance of being so rich yet so sad
can pitch them into emotional turmoil.
Speaker 4 (10:29):
My life isn't perfect, but it should be. I shouldn't complain.
I shouldn't seek psychotherapy to help me deal with my
problems because I really shouldn't have them.
Speaker 1 (10:39):
And like Billy Bob Harrell after hitting the jackpot, the
rich often struggle in their close relations.
Speaker 4 (10:45):
It's hard to trust because they've been burned a lot,
particularly in romantic relationships. And then you get into prenuptial
agreements and are you only getting into this relationship because
I'm going to buy you nice things?
Speaker 1 (10:58):
Even casual friendships can be hard to maintain.
Speaker 4 (11:01):
They call it the one percent for a reason. There's
not a lot of people out there that have this
kind of money, so a majority of the population and
on a fundamental level, you're not going to be able
to relate to. There's a lot of isolation. Are you
being my friend because of my bank account? If we
go out to lunch, am I just expected to pick
up the tab? When you're talking about your weekend. I
(11:23):
had this one client that got to be friends at
the local gym. They were talking about their weekend that
they went out with their wives, and that weekend he
just happened to have taken his private jet to Paris
to try out this new restaurant. So how do you
talk about that without it feel like you're rubbing your
wealth in someone's face.
Speaker 1 (11:42):
But the biggest problem class is that the rich feel trapped.
For most problems we encounter in life, they are painful
but culturally acceptable solutions. If you're in a bad relationship,
you can pack your bags and leave. You hate your job,
so quit, But if you're loaded and miserable about it, you're.
Speaker 4 (12:02):
Not going to give it away. You're too attached to it.
It gives too much freedom, so you're trapped the golden handcuffs.
So I have a lot of people who say I
can't get rid of it because it's amazing, it's great,
but God, there's so much unhappiness and isolation and guilt
that comes along with having this.
Speaker 1 (12:19):
Ironically, the rich then fall prey to the same bias
we do. Maybe the problem isn't the money. Maybe it's
just that they need a little bit more.
Speaker 4 (12:29):
I've worked with people who've had fifty million dollars and
they say, yeah, but I really I can't do everything
that I want. There's this wonderful painting that would really
eat into my savings. This one guy had five hundred
million dollars but had a sense that once I hit
that billion, that's when things really change and you think
(12:52):
that's that's crazy. You have more money than you could
possibly spend, but they're searching for happiness, and people don't
believe me, and I understand it's hard. It was hard
for me to think that, But after living in this world,
working with these people, I understand money is not going
(13:12):
to buy you happiness. So be careful what you wish for.
Speaker 1 (13:17):
Be careful what you wish for. That's a warning many
of us have heard before, but it fits with a
growing body of research showing that nearly every amazing thing
in life, from tons of money to an amazing house
to the perfect grades, those things simply won't make us
as happy as we predict they will.
Speaker 5 (13:35):
Almost all of us believe that we would be happy
if we could just get what we want, and the
only impediment to our happiness is that we can't always
get what we want.
Speaker 1 (13:43):
This is Dan Gilbert. He wrote one of my favorite
books on human psychology. It's called Stumbling on Happiness.
Speaker 5 (13:50):
It turns out that when people get exactly what they want,
they're not always happy. When they get the opposite of
what they wanted, they often are. That's a little bit
of a mystery it's kind of mystery that attracts psychologists.
Speaker 1 (14:02):
This puzzle, as Dan's research over the last two decades
has shown, stems from one of our most exceptional cognitive facultyties,
our unique ability to run mental simulations of the future.
Speaker 5 (14:13):
This is a brand new faculty that it's wired into
the human brain. No other animal can do anything vaguely
like it. No chimpanzee has ever thought about whether it's
going to look good in a bathing suit when it retires.
But these brand new abilities are still in beta testing.
In a sense, we have an ability you might call
prospection one point oh, and it's still being worked on,
(14:34):
so it's got bugs.
Speaker 1 (14:36):
One of the bugs in prospection one point oh. That
ability we have to plan for the future is that
your brain can't simulate all the parts of a given event.
Speaker 5 (14:45):
When you're imagining things unfolding over time, you can't imagine
them unfolding in real time?
Speaker 6 (14:50):
Can you.
Speaker 5 (14:51):
If you could, then somebody would say, imagine moving to Chicago,
and you'd have to spend four months imagining moving to Chicago.
That's how long it actually takes. So one of the
wonderful things about simulation is that it gives you a
quick sketch, and then it runs at at hyper speed.
But that's also one of its flaws, because a quick
sketch often lacks important detail, and when things run at
hyper speed, they run right over the details that often matter.
Speaker 1 (15:14):
We miss the critical details of almost any good event
we try to simulate. But let's look in more detail
at the example we started with earlier, getting rich beyond
our wildest dreams. What kinds of details do you say
lottery players miss when they think about winning all that cash.
Speaker 5 (15:30):
You close your eyes and imagine winning the lottery. Most
of us imagine ourselves in a bathtub full of money,
or on a yacht, or quitting our job, buying a
big house, all the things we can get with money.
You're not thinking about all the things you're going to lose.
It's very unlikely you're going to continue all the same
social relationships you have with people who need money but
don't have any. You're underestimating the number of people in
(15:53):
relatives that will come out of the woodwork begging you
to help them over and over. You'll fail to realize
that the social groups to which you would low like
to belong don't want to have anything to do with
you because you got your money the wrong way, on
and on and on. None of that is in our
mental simulation of the fe.
Speaker 1 (16:10):
Dan has shown there's a nasty consequence to missing these
important details. It means our emotional predictions of how these
events will feel are way off track.
Speaker 5 (16:18):
Would you rather have a weekend in Paris or gum
surgery is kind of a one item IQ test, and
almost everybody gets that right. What they don't realize is
that the weekend in Paris won't be as good as
they think it will be, and the good feelings won't
last as long as they expect. The same is true,
thankfully for the gum surgery.
Speaker 1 (16:37):
These tumorous predictions. Being wrong about how intense an event
will feel and how long will feel that way is
what Dan has christened impact bias. In one famous study,
he asked young professors at the University of Texas to
forecast how they'd feel when they got tenure, that permanent
position that all new faculty crave. Dan tested people's predictions
(16:58):
using a seven point happiness scale. Most professors thought they'd
be really happy if they got tenure, around a six
out of seven on that scale, But how did professors
actually feel when they heard good news, they reported only
being a five out of seven. Dan also tested what
happened to professors who got bad news, the ones who
found out they didn't get tenure. They assumed they'd be
(17:21):
a three point four out of seven on that happiness scale,
but in reality, actual professors who got denied tenure were
only a four point seven on average. They felt a
whole point better than anyone expected. I see a similar
misprediction all the time in my college students. At Yale.
Students are convinced they'll be ecstatic if they get a
good grade, and are sure they'll feel devastated if they
(17:44):
do badly. Psychologists have now seen the same pattern in
many walks of life. Lovers predict they'll take a long
time to recover from a sad breakup, but bounce back
far quicker. Student drivers believe they'll be devastated if they
fail to get their license, but aren't as sad walking
out of the DMV empty handed as they think. The
same is true for job applicants who are passed over,
(18:06):
and even patients guessing how they'll feel about a pause
or negative HIV diagnosis quit simply.
Speaker 5 (18:13):
The good things won't be as good. The bad things
won't be as bad as your mind leads you to believe.
Speaker 1 (18:20):
Dan has shown that this pattern stems from yet another
way our minds lie to us. We don't notice that
we have a tendency to get used to stuff. Even
when something feels amazing at first, we can't enjoy it forever.
This is a phenomenon the psychologists call hedonic adaptation.
Speaker 5 (18:37):
You can't be really, really happy endlessly all the time,
or your emotional system isn't doing its job. It has
to come back to baseline so it can once again
guide you to the next good thing that you, as
an organism ought to be doing.
Speaker 1 (18:51):
Hedonic adaptation means that after a while, we tend to
go back to a baseline level of emotional satisfaction. My
students are happy for a while after getting a perfect grade.
For a couple of hours, they might be as seven
out of nine, but after a day or so they
just go back to their usual set point level of happiness.
The good and bad events don't move us up or
(19:12):
down for as long as we think.
Speaker 5 (19:14):
So it's just a hard and fast truth that you
can't stay at ten forever and ever and ever. People
mistakenly think they can. They think happiness is a place
that if they could get to it, they could build
a house and live there their entire lives. It's only
a vacation destination. It's a place you can visit more
and more often if you do the right things, and
you can stay longer and longer, but you can't stay forever.
(19:37):
This is an important thing to know because people often
feel that if their happiness has come back to baseline
after something wonderful has happened, something's wrong. Why didn't this marriage,
this child, this promotion give me the eternal happiness I
was seeking, Because there is no such thing as eternal happiness.
Speaker 1 (19:53):
So happily ever after is just not psychologically realizable.
Speaker 5 (19:56):
Happily ever after is only true if you have three
minutes to live.
Speaker 1 (20:02):
But this process also has an important upside. We get
used to all the bad stuff too, horrible breakup, the
chronic illness, that worst job with the lower salary. As
we hedonically adapt to these things, they gradually start to
distress us less and less. The problem is we don't realize.
Speaker 6 (20:22):
It, despite the fact that two months prior, I was
sitting in my bed crying my eyes out like wishing
I would die. It just shows that like life goes on,
it's not the end of the world.
Speaker 1 (20:37):
The Happiness Lab will be back in a moment.
Speaker 6 (20:44):
Basically, I remember I was on Tender because all these
great stories throned on Tender.
Speaker 1 (20:49):
Rafaela Guns is telling me how she met the man
of her dreams.
Speaker 6 (20:54):
A super beautiful, beautiful guy, blue eyes, full lips.
Speaker 1 (20:59):
And how he changed her life forever.
Speaker 6 (21:02):
I really liked him, I was so in him.
Speaker 1 (21:05):
After chatting with him for a while on Tinder, rafael
agreed to a first date, something really low key. The
couple just walked around getting to know each other. They
didn't even kiss, but things picked up after that.
Speaker 6 (21:18):
We were hanging out for hours and hours, and we
decided to go back up to my neighborhood so we
could sit by the river, by the Hudson River because
it's like super pretty to just wash the sunset over there.
And we ended up having sex. And I thought I
did everything right, like I carried condoms around in my mind.
I was doing everything right.
Speaker 1 (21:39):
But Rafaela was about to hear the sort of news
that nobody wants to hear.
Speaker 6 (21:43):
The next day, he sort of came down with what
he thought was like a cold or something. He had
like a sore throat and he was feeling very fatigued.
And then a couple days later, I started coming down
the same thing.
Speaker 1 (21:57):
Her beautiful boy with the blue eyes was the first
to seek medical advice. He sent a text.
Speaker 6 (22:02):
I went to the doctor and they think, all this
might be a sign of her fees and so like
that was a weird text message. So I go into
urgent care crying and I'm like, I need a herpes death.
Speaker 1 (22:12):
Rafaela got her official diagnosis soon after.
Speaker 6 (22:16):
Those first few days. I remember I was just sitting
in bed crying. You know what I like thought my
life was, Oh I wanted to die. It was the
worst thing in the world. Like, not only was I
like physically uncomfortable, but how am I going to date someone?
How's anyone going to love me?
Speaker 1 (22:30):
In addition to being in physical pain with red bumps
on her genitals, she was also in emotional pain. Her
dream guy dropped her in a flash.
Speaker 6 (22:38):
Yeah, he was like, oh this changed my vibe on you.
He was like very very distant. I thought like, okay,
we both have this thing, like we can go through
it together, and sort of like learn about it together
and figure us out together. But he was very much
sort of like in it for himself. I felt sort
of I don't know if betrayed the white word, but
that's the word that was coming to my mind.
Speaker 1 (23:00):
Rafaela didn't only feel betrayed by the man who gave
her herpes and disappeared. Her diagnosis also freaked out the
people closest to her.
Speaker 6 (23:08):
She was like one of my own as friends. But
then when I confided in her, when I'm like sitting
on my diack crying because I have all these itchy
red bumps and you know, the guy is ignoring me.
Now things changed, She's like, I just think, you know,
it would be better for my own sanity if you
use toilet seat covers when you were here, and you know,
if you use hand sanitizer a lot, and this and that.
(23:30):
So that was really hurtful.
Speaker 1 (23:32):
I mean, this was one of your oldest friends.
Speaker 6 (23:35):
Yeah, this was someone I've known since we were in Diverse.
Speaker 7 (23:38):
And she's not supporting you for one of them.
Speaker 1 (23:40):
It sounds like one of the.
Speaker 6 (23:41):
Most scary times in my life. Yeah, it just sounds awful.
And so that was horrible.
Speaker 1 (23:46):
Let's take a second to predict how you would feel
in Rafaella's situation. You contracted in incurable and highly stigmatized disease,
your romantic partner has ditched you, and some of your
oldest friends are shunning you because of what happened. Would
you describe all of this overall as a good thing,
as a positive change in your life, as a present
(24:08):
from the universe, Because that's how Rafaella sees it. She
even wrote an article for ravishly dot com which she
titled getting herpes was a gift.
Speaker 6 (24:17):
Some people were like what the like, how is this
a gift? Like almost angry and like calling me like delusion,
all all these sorts of things like how would you
possibly think that's a gift?
Speaker 1 (24:27):
So why is it a gift?
Speaker 6 (24:29):
It's a gift because I'm more knowledgeable. It's a gift
because I've been able to write things like that article
that helps people.
Speaker 1 (24:38):
Rafaella says, all the fallout from her diagnosis has given
her insight into the people who really matter. It's a
strong litmus test for those who are actually going to
be there for her.
Speaker 6 (24:48):
If a friend can't accept all of you warts and
all upun intended, they're not really your friend. They're fair
weather friends, you know.
Speaker 1 (24:59):
But it also gave Rafaela a new filter for her
dating life. It saved her time figuring out which guys
were worth her time and which guys just didn't get it.
Speaker 6 (25:07):
He said some dumbest shit about, oh am, I gonna
get it if I kiss you, and I'm like, no,
it's on my vagina.
Speaker 7 (25:12):
Do you think you know?
Speaker 1 (25:13):
Would you change anything?
Speaker 6 (25:14):
Would you do it?
Speaker 7 (25:14):
I mean it sounds like you learn so much from this, Like.
Speaker 1 (25:16):
Would you keep it? Would would you do it over again?
Speaker 6 (25:18):
I'd keep it. First of all, as much of a
dick as he was, he was really hot, really hot,
and the sex was really good, so I don't regret that. Secondly,
it it helped me in my dating life, I feel
a few months after I was diagnosed, I met my
current boyfriend, who've been together for like three years, and
(25:40):
I told him right away and he was fine with it.
So that was nice to know. That's like, especially when
you're when you can track something like herpes, you tend
to think like all, my life's over and no one's
every gonna want to sleep with me again, no one's
every gonna want to date me again. I'm never gonna
get married, this and that, but it was fine, and
like there are people that have much much worse problems
than little red bumps.
Speaker 1 (26:02):
Getting herpes was much much better than Raphael and might
have predicted. And that kind of adaptation to itsity is
something Dan Gilbert has found over and over again.
Speaker 5 (26:13):
What we find consistently is that in the face of
negative events, people don't feel as bad as they themselves
expected to.
Speaker 1 (26:20):
Although we're pretty bad at predicting how we'll feel after
a good event like winning the lottery, Dan has observed
we're worse at predicting how we'll feel after a bad
event losing a friend, failing to get a job, or
even getting herpies. Our impact bias is even bigger when
we make predictions about negative life circumstances, because we're prone
(26:40):
to overcome bad events more quickly than we think.
Speaker 5 (26:43):
One of the things we fail to do when we
mentally simulate is we fail to consider adaptation. We are
remarkably adaptive animal. We have been born and bred to
pick ourselves up by the bootstraps and soldier on. When
the going gets tough, we get going.
Speaker 1 (26:58):
Dan calls this capacity to overcome adversity our psychological immune system.
Just as our physical immune system kicks in when we
get sick, our psychological immune system turns on when we're
in mental distress. And our psychological immune system works really,
really well. As soon as we start to feel bad,
our mind deploys a whole host of mental defenses.
Speaker 5 (27:20):
If you've ever had a friend experience a breakup, you know,
at first they're really unhappy, and then pretty quickly they
get around to rationalizing, Ah, she was never really right
for me. This is really a chance for me to
start my life over. I don't think we had that
much in common in the first place. She didn't like
my mother. When you mentally simulate a breakup, you mentally
simulate the anguish, but you never mentally simulate the rationalizations.
Speaker 1 (27:43):
What's amazing about all those rationalizations, though, is that the
happiness we get from rationalizing a bad event is just
as real as the happiness we get from something objectively good.
Speaker 5 (27:53):
Well, there's no doubt that when people rationalize, everybody around
them feels that they found some sort of phony and
substandard form of happiness. I don't believe that for a minute.
You know, the happiness you get when the person you
love says yes to the marriage proposal, isn't qualitatively different
than the kind you produce for yourself when she says no.
(28:14):
There's absolutely no data that I know of to suggest
that it's an inferior form of happiness, and indeed, in
some cases, it can be more long lasting.
Speaker 1 (28:23):
Raphael's misery about contracting herpes was very deep and very real,
but her misery was also short lived.
Speaker 5 (28:30):
But what about.
Speaker 1 (28:31):
Situations that are so horrible there's no way a person
can carry on normally. What about events so profound and
so awful that they change our lives forever. After the break,
we'll hear about the true power of our psychological immune system,
how it can transform the most terrible incidents a human
can endure into a form of joy we'd never expect.
Speaker 3 (28:53):
Nineteen years old, I'm in this humvey. I'm thinking I'm
going to die. It felt good to just kind of
just close my eyes and just kind of let it happen.
Speaker 1 (29:03):
The Happiness Lab will return in a moment.
Speaker 3 (29:08):
I joined as an vitument because I wanted to. I
wanted to be in the action.
Speaker 5 (29:13):
J R.
Speaker 1 (29:13):
Martinez had just finished high school in a small town
in the South. The only son of a single mother
from El Salvador. After graduation, he decided to enlist in
the army. It was just after nine to eleven, and
he had a few predictions about how things would go.
Speaker 5 (29:28):
You know.
Speaker 3 (29:28):
My thought process was three years I would be in it.
I would give back to this country. It would give
me an opportunity to travel to get more disciplined, it
would give me an opportunity to give money for college.
And I remember one of my sergeants, you know, one day,
sitting down and talking to me and telling me that
I needed to be prepared because we were going to
be deployed sometime soon. And my response to him was,
(29:49):
I'm not going anywhere yet. I just got out of
basic training. Very naive of me, and he was absolutely
correct and right in the sense of where two months later,
I was on a plane with the rest of the
unit head over to the Beddleis go into war.
Speaker 1 (30:02):
Jr. Was part of the initial invasion of Iraq in
two thousand and three. It was already a tough transition
for a nineteen year old, and within weeks tragedy struck.
Speaker 3 (30:12):
Here we were, you know, a few days shy of
a month of being in Iraq and escort in the
convoy through a city car Carbala when the front left
tire of the humvey that I was driving ran over
a roadside bomb.
Speaker 1 (30:22):
The blast ripped through the entire truck and everything it
was carrying, The AMMO spearri of fuel and other explosives.
It was a fireball.
Speaker 3 (30:30):
There was three other soldiers in the vehicle with me.
They all got thrown out of the vehicle, but I
was trapped inside and within a matter of seconds this
hovey was engulfed in flames and I was completely conscious.
Speaker 5 (30:41):
Jr.
Speaker 1 (30:41):
Was pinned inside the burning truck for several minutes. He
described screaming as he watched the skin on his hands melting.
Eventually he was pulled from the vehicle, but the damage
was done. In addition to broken ribs and a lacerated liver,
he had third degree burns over his entire body, and
he'd been gulping flames into his lungs through the whole ordeal.
(31:03):
He was immediately metavaced, first to Europe and then to
the US Army Burn Center in San Antoo, Texas.
Speaker 3 (31:10):
I remember coming out of my medical induced coma three
weeks later and my doctor essentially just kind of laying out,
you know, all the cards and saying, this is the circumstance.
You can't feed yourself, you can't walk, you can't sit up,
you can't go to the bathroom by yourself. They also
told me that I would no longer be able to
(31:30):
remain in the United States Army, which was incredibly difficult
and challenging.
Speaker 7 (31:33):
When this happened, you were nineteen and you spent like
the next three years.
Speaker 3 (31:37):
I turned twenty, twenty one, twenty two in the hospital.
Speaker 7 (31:41):
It's amazing, you can just to be clear, how much
just to get.
Speaker 3 (31:43):
Thirty four percent of my body was burned, and majority
of that was third degree, so it consisted of For
the listeners that can't see me, it consisted of my head,
my face, my arms, my hands, portion of my back,
portion of my legs. There's no way to really fully
describe the pain unless you've been through it. But what's
incredible about being a burn survivor a burn patient at
the time is that the part of your body that
(32:05):
isn't burned still hurts. Because they usually use the areas
of your body that are not scarred as skin to
do skin grafts, and usually the donor site is more
painful than the actual injury itself.
Speaker 1 (32:17):
But Jr's physical pain was nothing compared to his emotional anguish.
When he enlisted, he'd been something of a local heart throb.
Speaker 3 (32:24):
You know. It's funny because growing up I always heard,
you know, from like my mom's friends, you know, all
these women, you know, would say, Oh my god, he's
so cute, he's so this, he's so that, And so
I grew up just thinking like, that's what I am.
You know, no one ever said he has an amazing personality,
he's funny, he's whatever, articulate and nothing. It was cute.
And so suddenly I look at myself and I'm like,
(32:47):
that's not cute. What I see in the mirror, that's
not And that person that I see I do not recognize.
I have no relationship with that individual. The old JR.
Speaker 4 (32:57):
Had died, and.
Speaker 3 (32:58):
As you can imagine, I fell into a deep, dark
place of I was depressed. I was angry, I was resentful.
I was a victim in every sense of the word.
Speaker 1 (33:10):
Deep burns and thick scars over his entire body, dozens
of surgeries, and years of his young life wasted in
the hospital, plus the permanent loss of his good looks
and his military career. Those are some of the most
profound and tragic events a person can endure. But how
does JR. Think about all these awful events today?
Speaker 3 (33:31):
I can tell you right now that what happened to
me is a blessing.
Speaker 1 (33:35):
That's right, as a blessing.
Speaker 3 (33:37):
Considering the fact that I was trapped inside of a
burning truck for five minutes. I'm fortunate to only have
what I have. I have a lot of friends, and
I know a lot of people that unfortunately have missing limbs,
are you know, have are more scarred, you know, or
disfigured you know. So in that sense, I'm incredibly fortunate.
Speaker 7 (33:56):
It's so cool to hear you say that you're incredibly fortunate,
because again, I think people who just heard the story,
you know, guys, m VY explodes, he spends you know,
the decent chunk of his twenties in the hospital having major,
major surgeries, loves with scars for the rest of his life.
And then you're saying I'm fortunately, Like on the last.
Speaker 3 (34:12):
Line, yeah, well I am, because you know, I think
about how I'm blessed to have a second chance at life.
I don't want to take this second chance for granted.
Speaker 1 (34:21):
And JR. Did take every opportunity that came his way.
Being a badly injured vet open doors that JR. Never
dreamed of. He became a mentor for other burn victims,
which led to a few lucrative speaking gigs. Telling his
stories so openly built up Jr's confidence, so much so
that when a friend casually mentioned that Jr. Should try
(34:41):
out for an acting job, he decided to go for it.
Speaker 3 (34:45):
I became an actor on a soap opera All my Children,
and that led Dancing with the Stars to ask me
to be on the show, and then I'd acted in
some other shows. After that, I wrote a book about
my life and my mother's life and my family's life,
and it became a New York Times bestseller. I mean,
People Magazine put me on a cover because of these scars.
I have this incredible ability to get people's attention, the
(35:10):
fifteen seconds of curiosity right like, who is that? What
happened to him? Those fifteen seconds of curiosity that people have.
It's my job mine to take that fifteen seconds and
turn it into thirty seconds, into forty five, into sixty seconds,
into five minutes. Ten minutes a lifetime of actual, educated dialogue.
(35:31):
This is who I am. Everything I thought I wanted
in life. You know, I wanted to be a pro
professional football player and have fame and have all this
money and be able to do all these things. Like
if I would have accomplished those things, would I be
as happy as I am? Now?
Speaker 7 (35:47):
Would you change anything? Would you do it over differently?
Speaker 2 (35:51):
Now?
Speaker 3 (35:51):
I wouldn't change anything. I one percent mean that.
Speaker 7 (35:55):
But you wouldn't change like the explosion and the scars,
the surgery, You'd keep all of that.
Speaker 3 (35:59):
Yeah, yeah, because the life I have, I mean, the
beautiful wife and the beautiful daughter, and the beautiful life
that I've created for myself. I mean, gosh, I mean
I'm blessed.
Speaker 5 (36:19):
With bad events. We often don't realize that some good
can come out of them.
Speaker 1 (36:23):
Dan Gilbert is unsurprised that people like JR. See more
positive than negatives even in the worst of circumstances. He's
seen it time and again in his work on hedonic adaptation.
Speaker 5 (36:35):
Startlingly, if you ask people who've lost a child, which
is the single worst event that people can imagine experiencing,
and indeed it is one of the worst events people
can actually experience. If you ask people have lost a child,
they never say, gee, I'm glad that happened. But if
you ask them to name the good and the bad
things that have come from it, they tend to name
more good than bad things. That's a very stunning fact
(36:58):
that we should just sit back and marvel at the
possibility that the worst thing in the world could happen
to us and probably more good than bad will come
out of it.
Speaker 1 (37:09):
There are awful events that will cause you to feel
pain and hurt and loss, but we're fighters. When push
comes to shove, we are really resilient. The problem is
we don't realize that.
Speaker 5 (37:22):
I think if you understand the power of the psychological
immune system, our remarkable ability to rationalize in the face
of adversity, it makes you braver. You realize that you
will make mistakes and it will be okay. I think
there's a lesson there for all of us.
Speaker 1 (37:44):
After making this episode, I've become even more convinced about
that lesson. Heatonic adaptation means the lows of life aren't
going to be as awful as you imagine, just as
the highs will be more temporary than you hope. As
a psychologist, I already knew that winning the lottery and
other great circumstances don't bring lasting happiness, But honestly, I
often forget about the flip side. So I'm going to
(38:07):
make a conscious effort to be a bit braver, to
stop worrying so much, to remember that I have a
kind of emotional superpower, one that can get me through
the worst of circumstances. And I hope you'll do the same,
because even though your mind might tell you otherwise, joy
doesn't come from everything in life working out perfectly. It
comes from adopting better habits and better behaviors. All strategies
(38:31):
will be discussing in coming episodes of The Happiness Lab
with me Doctor Laurie Santos. If you enjoyed the show,
I'd be super grateful if you could spread the word
by leaving a rating and a review. It really does
(38:53):
help other listeners find us, and don't forget to tell
your friends. If you want to learn more about the
science you heard on the show, then check out our
website Happiness Lab dot fm. You can also sign up
for our newsletter to get exclusive content. The Happiness Lab
is co written and produced by Ryan Dilly. The show
is mixed and mastered by Evan Viola and edited by
(39:14):
Julia Barton, fact checking by Joseph Friedman, and our original
music was composed by Zachary Silver. Special thanks to Mio
La Belle, Carl mcgliori, Heather Fain, Maggie Taylor, Maya Knigg,
and Jacob Weisberg. The Happiness Lab is brought to you
by Pushkin Industries and me Doctor Laurie Santos. I hope
(39:40):
you enjoyed that blast from the past. Next time on
the Happiness Lab, we'll share another story from our listeners.
Thirteen women in a New England town inspired by this
podcast have teamed up to bring more playfulness and joy
into their lives by staging fun interventions or funterventions. I
traveled to meet them and joined in the fun. Hannah Montana,
(40:02):
oh uh Bileay syr So. I hope you'll come back
to hear the next episode of The Happiness Lab with
me Doctor Laurie Santos. Oh, Ryan Gosling, Brad Pitt, wasn't
he in the Magic Mind
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