Best Practice to Significantly Improve Life Satisfaction | Dr. Laurie Santos & Dr. Andrew Huberman

00:00:00.000 | What's one of the best ways to be happy?

00:00:04.180 | To just appreciate what you have, to notice and appreciate the blessings out there.

00:00:08.480 | But we've got to push against this natural negativity bias to do this.

00:00:11.560 | So how do we do that?

00:00:12.560 | Well, it turns out that this is a spot where harnessing attention in the way we were just

00:00:16.120 | talking about can be really helpful.

00:00:18.360 | Just taking time to notice the blessings, notice kind of all the good stuff.

00:00:22.600 | It's often talked about in terms of a gratitude practice, although gratitude sounds kind of

00:00:26.300 | cheesy.

00:00:27.300 | I don't know.

00:00:28.400 | My friend, Catherine Price, who I mentioned earlier, she has this practice that she calls

00:00:31.840 | a delight practice.

00:00:32.840 | We just notice delights in the world.

00:00:34.420 | I love the word delight.

00:00:35.420 | You know, I walked in your studio, you had a picture of your bulldog, and I was like,

00:00:39.240 | that's a delight.

00:00:40.240 | That's so cute.

00:00:41.240 | Thank you for delighting him.

00:00:42.240 | I delight in him too, even though he's dead several years now.

00:00:45.960 | Delight is a wonderful word.

00:00:47.080 | Yeah.

00:00:48.080 | And we can train our brain to notice them, right?

00:00:49.540 | You can literally have a practice where, you know, put in your notes app on your phone,

00:00:53.160 | like a list of delights, or even better, pick a friend like I have with Catherine where

00:00:56.840 | you can just, like, text them delight.

00:00:58.480 | You know, at the end of this, I'll, you know, text like, saw a really cute dog, delight,

00:01:01.560 | or heard this really funny song, delight.

00:01:03.480 | Then you get the social connection and the gratitude.

00:01:05.400 | But what that does is, if you have this practice where you got to write down the delights,

00:01:09.600 | your brain starts to automatically be on the lookout for them.

00:01:12.000 | It becomes rewarding because you get to write this thing down.

00:01:14.880 | Now all of a sudden, it can be a practice that you're sort of shifting your negativity

00:01:18.800 | bias to notice more of the good things that are out there.

00:01:22.180 | And there's so much evidence suggesting that people who naturally notice the blessings

00:01:25.140 | in the world are happier.

00:01:27.340 | If you do one of these kind of gratitude or delight practices, you wind up happier.

00:01:30.960 | Sonia Lubomirsky has this lovely study where you scribble down three to five things you're

00:01:34.540 | grateful for, three to five delights, in as little as two weeks, you significantly improve

00:01:38.560 | your overall satisfaction with life, right?

00:01:40.400 | It's super free.

00:01:41.400 | I love that.

00:01:42.400 | So much so that, and because I accidentally interrupted, the comments always tell me I

00:01:45.760 | interrupt too much.

00:01:46.760 | It's out of interest.

00:01:47.760 | It's out of interest.

00:01:48.760 | I promise.

00:01:49.760 | If I could interrupt myself, I would.

00:01:50.760 | And I probably do from time to time.

00:01:52.120 | Could you repeat what the, it's three to five things?

00:01:54.320 | Yeah.

00:01:55.320 | Three to five things you're grateful for.

00:01:56.320 | I'm not sure if the number really matters, but it's committing to kind of noticing the

00:01:59.960 | good things in life and really trying to take a moment to notice how they felt, right?

00:02:04.120 | You know, so if I look at, I do delight practices sometimes or gratitude practices and it's

00:02:07.940 | things like my husband, you know, these big things in life.

00:02:10.840 | But then sometimes it's like my morning coffee or like probably, you know, seeing your cute

00:02:14.000 | dog.

00:02:15.000 | Like, it's funny to see the picture of the, for folks that don't know Andrew's studio,

00:02:17.840 | it's a picture of his dog on a microphone.

00:02:20.040 | It's just very funny.

00:02:21.040 | It's a giant microphone.

00:02:22.040 | Giant, high quality photo.

00:02:23.040 | Yeah.

00:02:24.040 | And he's standing on the table that I do my solo podcast from at the microphone.

00:02:29.080 | And his tag just happened to rotate a few degrees toward the camera just at that moment.

00:02:34.660 | So you could see his name, Costello, you know?

00:02:36.920 | And I invite listeners to pause right now and notice what's happening to their face

00:02:40.240 | as you hear Andrew say that.

00:02:41.640 | Probably you're just smiling, right?

00:02:42.720 | You didn't even see this really cute photo, but you're also smiling.

00:02:46.980 | That's the power of delights, right?

00:02:48.580 | Not just noticing them yourself, but potentially sharing them too.

00:02:52.000 | And so this is another thought pattern practice that we can engage in, which is like, just

00:02:56.200 | train your brain to find these things.

00:02:58.080 | And what you'll find is that, you know, there's a limited ratio of the stuff we can focus

00:03:02.240 | our attention on.

00:03:03.400 | If we start shifting towards the delights from the hassles and the yucky stuff in life,

00:03:08.640 | now we're just kind of filling our brain with stuff that gives us a little more positive

00:03:11.440 | emotion.

00:03:12.560 | What I love about this conversation about gratitude is that, I must say, I do like the

00:03:16.400 | word delight more than gratitude.

00:03:18.080 | Gratitude sounds cheesy.

00:03:19.080 | It sounds a little hippy dippy, I gotta say, yeah.

00:03:20.720 | Well, I'm from Northern California, so I'm cool with hippy dippy, even though I'm not

00:03:24.100 | a hippy.

00:03:25.100 | Punk rocker, not a hippy.

00:03:26.840 | You're Berkeley roots, sir.

00:03:28.320 | Yeah.

00:03:29.320 | I'm from the other end of the peninsula.

00:03:30.320 | I love the East Bay, but anyway, this is getting...

00:03:32.880 | But the point is, it's not that the word feels soft.

00:03:36.720 | I need to think about this a little bit more.

00:03:38.820 | It's that maybe it's just that delight is such a powerful, unselfish word.

00:03:47.200 | Like it's not taking anything from anybody.

00:03:49.680 | It's not requiring a shift away from one's sort of intrinsic self.

00:03:54.880 | I feel like gratitude requires this like, "Okay, I'm gonna now be grateful."

00:03:59.280 | It's like kind of like pulling...

00:04:00.880 | If you're not already in a state of gratitude, I feel like there's more effort involved.

00:04:04.960 | And we've been saying effort that precedes reward is good.

00:04:08.160 | But with delight, it feels like it's just very much in concert with almost like who

00:04:14.320 | one is.

00:04:15.320 | Yeah.

00:04:17.120 | And like I delight in Costello.

00:04:18.240 | I don't expect everyone to delight in Costello.

00:04:20.480 | People who did, I delighted in their delight.

00:04:21.840 | So it was just amplifying all the delight.

00:04:24.680 | But the thing that really strikes me about delight is that every example you gave, it's

00:04:31.160 | very rapid timescale.

00:04:36.640 | I will say I normally drink yerba mate during these things, which I delight in.

00:04:40.120 | But today I decided I haven't had coffee in a while, took a little break from it for no

00:04:43.800 | particular reason.

00:04:45.200 | And I had a single shot of espresso and I was thinking to myself, "This is really good."

00:04:48.720 | This is delightful.

00:04:49.720 | Yeah.

00:04:50.720 | So this is a fast timescale.

00:04:51.720 | Maybe it was the fact that I haven't had it in a little while.

00:04:54.440 | And it's just really fast.

00:04:56.360 | No one suffers.

00:04:58.140 | It's all gain.

00:04:59.140 | Yeah.

00:05:00.140 | And so it runs a little bit counter-current to what we were talking about before, which

00:05:02.400 | is the requirement for effort to precede the reward.

00:05:05.880 | Delight feels like a very smooth road to a reward that's all net positive.

00:05:15.000 | And as you said, these delights are available throughout the day.

00:05:19.160 | And it doesn't...

00:05:20.160 | It requires just noticing something inside and outside.

00:05:23.760 | Whereas I feel like with gratitude, I love gratitude practices.

00:05:26.760 | The data are incredible.

00:05:27.760 | Yeah.

00:05:28.760 | It is anything but squishy.

00:05:29.760 | It is like a real power tool for shifting one's state of mind.

00:05:33.880 | That's clear from the literature.

00:05:35.460 | But the gratitude thing, I feel like requires an almost like a formalization, like, "Okay,

00:05:39.520 | I'm going to be grateful now."

00:05:40.880 | Whereas delight, you're just kind of on the lookout for things that spark you and make

00:05:44.320 | you reflexively smile.

00:05:46.800 | Yeah.

00:05:47.800 | And I think it's...

00:05:48.800 | And the few things are better than that.

00:05:49.800 | Yeah.

00:05:50.800 | And I think it's really sensory, you know, in the way we were talking about before, right?

00:05:52.800 | It gets you back into being present.

00:05:54.420 | Most of these delights are something you taste or you experience or you see that's funny.

00:05:59.600 | There's a really lovely book by the author Ross Gay called "The Book of Delights."

00:06:03.480 | And he used a delight practice where every day, he not only had to find a delight, but

00:06:06.960 | write a short essay about it because he's an author.

00:06:09.720 | And it's just hilarious.

00:06:11.160 | It's like one of my favorite books.

00:06:12.480 | And you just kind of go with...

00:06:13.480 | And it's really strange things.

00:06:14.960 | It's like, one is he, you know, noticed the flower as he noticed his lilacs.

00:06:18.400 | And he has this whole idea of...

00:06:19.960 | One delight is purple flowers.

00:06:21.360 | Why are there so many purple flowers?

00:06:22.600 | There's purple flowers everywhere.

00:06:24.360 | He also has a delight in music.

00:06:25.640 | He really likes the '80s band El DeBarge, you know, from the "Beat of the Rhythm" and

00:06:29.200 | all that.

00:06:30.200 | Yeah.

00:06:31.200 | Am I vaguely familiar with it?

00:06:32.200 | So it's like...

00:06:33.200 | So you have this connection with other people's delights.

00:06:35.680 | And it's silly.

00:06:36.680 | They're just silly things.

00:06:38.320 | But the fact that we've noticed them...

00:06:39.840 | I mean, again, as a listener is probably experiencing right now, if you pay attention, a little

00:06:43.360 | bit of positive emotion, right?

00:06:44.800 | If you're driving around your car, feeling a little stressed out in traffic, you can

00:06:48.000 | kind of take a breath.

00:06:49.040 | And so that's the power of the practice.

00:06:51.680 | You're shifting your emotions because you're noticing these good things.

00:06:55.480 | You're noticing the good things, which is great because you're sort of training your

00:06:58.400 | attention to get there, and you're sort of forming this habit to shift that negativity

00:07:02.680 | bias that's sort of built in, but isn't really making you as happy as you could be.

00:07:06.560 | Yeah.

00:07:07.560 | Yeah.

00:07:08.560 | Yeah.

00:07:09.060 | Yeah.

00:07:09.560 | Yeah.

00:07:10.060 | [MUSIC PLAYING]

00:07:13.420 | you

Best Practice to Significantly Improve Life Satisfaction | Dr. Laurie Santos & Dr. Andrew Huberman

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