Are We Supposed to Be Happy All of the Time? | Dr. Laurie Santos & Dr. Andrew Huberman

00:00:00.000 | I would really like to talk about reward circuitry just thematically.

00:00:07.820 | Listeners of this podcast, and even if they've never heard one of these podcasts before,

00:00:12.580 | probably familiar with the word dopamine.

00:00:14.180 | We've talked about it a bit.

00:00:16.140 | And as we were talking about earlier, everything about the dopamine reward circuitry, which

00:00:20.220 | of course includes other chemicals too, is based on prior experience relative to current

00:00:26.340 | experience relative to anticipated outcome.

00:00:30.140 | What's sometimes referred to as reward prediction error.

00:00:32.380 | Think something great is going to happen, something great happens, great.

00:00:36.660 | Think something great is going to happen, something less than great happens, sucks way

00:00:40.500 | more than you would anticipate.

00:00:43.660 | Think that something not so great is going to happen, something so-so or great happens,

00:00:47.260 | huge reward.

00:00:48.940 | Novelty surprise brings the...

00:00:51.060 | Relative novelty and surprise brings the biggest rewards.

00:00:56.600 | I would like to kind of paint as the backdrop, think about it as a conceptual mural behind

00:01:01.180 | us.

00:01:02.180 | As I asked the question, maybe, just maybe, we're not supposed to be happy all the time

00:01:10.800 | or maybe even all that often.

00:01:14.980 | And when we're feeling not so great or even lousy, provided it's not dangerous levels

00:01:20.660 | of depression, maybe we should frame that as the backdrop for the greater happiness

00:01:27.340 | that will come when we start to emerge from that lousy state.

00:01:30.340 | Now, some people would say, "Well, now you're just kind of using neurobiology to twist around

00:01:35.300 | what would otherwise be a lousy experience and tell me that it's good for me."

00:01:39.100 | No, what I'm trying to say is people want to be happy, I think we'd all love to be happy

00:01:44.660 | all the time, but we're not wired to be happy all the time.

00:01:47.580 | And maybe the feelings of happiness can't exist unless they have contrast with these

00:01:53.740 | neutral or negative emotion states that we call, I don't know, feeling lousy, feeling

00:01:59.180 | anxious, et cetera.

00:02:00.380 | And just, I realize I can pose long questions, but I just want to provide a little bit more

00:02:05.340 | context for the moment, which is that every circuit in the brain, our ability to see light,

00:02:11.100 | literally, depends on the contrast with the so-called off-circuitry, which is the circuitry

00:02:16.320 | in our visual system that perceives darkness.

00:02:18.900 | We need contrast to be able to see light.

00:02:22.660 | Everything's push-pull, hunger, satiety, cold, heat, perception, go, no-go, it's all push-pull

00:02:30.920 | circuitry in there.

00:02:32.240 | Why wouldn't happiness have a push-pull relationship with unhappiness or at least neutral affect?

00:02:38.740 | Yeah.

00:02:39.740 | Well, I think it does.

00:02:40.740 | I mean, you're giving a neurobiological explanation for what psychologists in this field of positive

00:02:45.280 | psychology have referred to as what's called hedonic adaptation, which is a fancy way of

00:02:49.980 | saying we get used to stuff.

00:02:53.460 | You know, you, like, grab the, you know, delicious ice cream cone or I don't know, or Cuban,

00:02:57.940 | we do a delicious salad, really healthy, but it's a tasty, healthy, tasty salad, right?

00:03:01.940 | Start eating it.

00:03:02.980 | First bite is like, this is awesome.

00:03:04.540 | I'm so into it.

00:03:05.540 | It's great.

00:03:06.540 | Bite number two, a little bit less awesome, a little bit less.

00:03:08.860 | By the 10th bite, it's not because you're full or you're, like, you know, feeling disgusted.

00:03:12.060 | It's just like that sensory experience, you've gotten used to it, right?

00:03:15.640 | It's just no longer as interesting.

00:03:17.320 | Walk into a bakery.

00:03:18.320 | Yeah, exactly.

00:03:19.320 | Mmm, it smells amazing.

00:03:20.760 | Spend five minutes in the bakery, 10 minutes in the bakery, you attenuate, you habituate.

00:03:24.400 | Yeah, which is great.

00:03:25.400 | I mean, you wouldn't maybe want to be firing your neurons when you get all exhausted and

00:03:28.880 | stuff, but it's in one way terrible for happiness, another way very good for happiness, but in

00:03:33.320 | a major way terrible for happiness, which is the following.

00:03:36.600 | Every good thing in life, if it sticks around, becomes kind of boring over time.

00:03:41.720 | You're just kind of used to it.

00:03:43.880 | I use the example sometimes of, you know, the last time, the first time your partner

00:03:47.820 | said I love you or if you had a kid, the first time your kid said mommy or daddy, that feels

00:03:53.620 | amazing, right?

00:03:56.300 | But like, you know, last week my husband said I love you, it's like whatever, I'm just used

00:03:59.580 | to it, right?

00:04:00.580 | You know, last week when your kid was like I love you, mommy, like, you don't care, right?

00:04:04.160 | The most amazing thing in life, if it gets repeated, just becomes boring.

00:04:09.260 | And that sucks because, you know, you like the most amazing things in life to kind of

00:04:13.940 | keep being awesome, it's pretty sad that we don't have it, right?

00:04:17.980 | This has a flip side though, which is very good for happiness, hedonic adaptation, which

00:04:22.180 | is the most terrible thing in life can happen and over time you get used to that too, you

00:04:28.140 | know?

00:04:29.140 | So your partner breaks up with you, you find out you have a chronic disease, right?

00:04:32.500 | Just something like really bad happens, day one when you find out that piece of information,

00:04:36.860 | it is awful.

00:04:37.860 | But day two, yeah, it's still awful, but that's just your life and then over time it kind

00:04:42.140 | of gets better.

00:04:43.140 | There's a very famous study in the field of happiness science that tried to look at this

00:04:47.320 | with people who experienced a really great event in theory, winning the lottery, and

00:04:52.460 | people who experienced really bad events, real events in life, becoming paraplegic.

00:04:56.100 | So you used to be able to walk and now you've lost the use of your legs.

00:04:59.580 | You survey happiest in people who haven't had these experiences and you ask, predict

00:05:04.140 | how bad it would be to have this.

00:05:05.540 | And people say, you know, day one of winning the lottery would be really great and a year

00:05:09.980 | from now, a year from that point, winning the lottery would still be just as great,

00:05:13.720 | it'd be awesome.

00:05:14.720 | Same thing with paraplegic, you know, moment you become paraplegic, that day is a really

00:05:18.780 | crappy Thursday, but a year from then it's still just as crappy.

00:05:22.500 | And what you find is people, you know, on the day you become paraplegic or the day you

00:05:26.100 | win your lottery, like that's a big shift in your contrast, right?

00:05:29.980 | The day you win the lottery is an awesome Thursday, day you become paraplegic is terrible.

00:05:34.340 | But a year from then, it turns out your happiness is no different from baseline from the day

00:05:38.220 | before that event happened, right?

00:05:41.020 | Statistically.

00:05:42.020 | And that is shocking, right?

00:05:43.100 | Like I know these results, I can quote the paper, but like if you told me today, "Laura,

00:05:47.180 | you know, you walk out of the studio, you get by a car, you're paraplegic, how would

00:05:50.860 | you feel in 2026?"

00:05:51.860 | I'd be like, my life is still really crummy.

00:05:55.220 | But statistically that's just not going to happen.

00:05:57.620 | What does that mean?

00:05:59.180 | That's kind of good news about hedonic adaptation for happiness.

00:06:02.000 | That means the worst thing possible could happen to you and you have all these processes

00:06:06.380 | that are just going to get used to it over time and it's going to be okay.

00:06:09.220 | And I think this is an important aspect of our psychology that we forget.

00:06:12.620 | I think sometimes we have opportunities to do things in life that are a little risky,

00:06:17.100 | something we might try out that we might screw up or fail at, or that we'll be bad at at

00:06:21.060 | first.

00:06:22.060 | And we don't do it because we're scared, we're making a prediction like, "Oh, well if I failed

00:06:25.300 | or if I screwed that up, you know, I'd just be unhappy."

00:06:28.380 | But actually all these mechanisms that we have of hedonic adaptation means those things

00:06:32.220 | aren't going to affect you for as long as you think.

00:06:34.620 | So I think the contrast hypothesis about happiness is real.

00:06:39.900 | Good things don't stay good things over time, but the bad things don't either.

00:06:45.340 | But we still want the good things to stay good over time and so that raises a question

00:06:48.260 | of how we can do that.

00:06:49.980 | And Liz Dunn, whose work I've mentioned before, she likes to use this phrase that scarcity

00:06:53.660 | engineers happiness, right?

00:06:56.380 | One thing we can do is space out the good things in life, you know, so if I was having

00:06:59.980 | that really delicious, healthy salad with the avocado and whatever, if I had that every

00:07:04.500 | day, it would stop being good.

00:07:06.860 | But if I had it very, very infrequently, it would still be good every time I come back

00:07:11.340 | to it.

00:07:12.340 | And so sometimes, oddly, the way we make ourselves happier is to kind of remove positive experiences,

00:07:18.060 | especially extreme positive experiences, kind of space them out so we can kind of come back

00:07:22.700 | to them over time.

00:07:23.900 | I definitely agree with that.

00:07:26.500 | I also, and forgive me folks, but I think I understand why dogs are so awesome.

00:07:32.540 | They don't attenuate to reward.

00:07:35.500 | You tell them they're going to get this little piece of amazing whatever beef jerky or something

00:07:39.980 | and they're like, "Yes."

00:07:41.580 | Then second trial, "Yes."

00:07:43.740 | Third trial, "Yes."

00:07:44.740 | I mean, presumably at some point they reach satiety or fatigue, but there's something

00:07:50.740 | about their reward pathway is that they don't seem to attenuate much.

00:07:54.100 | And if there's feedback to us on that, it's like, "Okay, okay, it's great that they'll

00:07:59.300 | keep delighting in the simple little things."

00:08:03.780 | It seems like almost as much as the first time.

00:08:06.900 | We are not like that.

00:08:08.540 | It's interesting.

00:08:09.540 | To my knowledge, people haven't studied eudonic adaptation in dogs, but it's a really good

00:08:12.540 | question.

00:08:13.540 | But we are not like that for most things.

00:08:16.420 | And this sucks, right?

00:08:18.380 | I mean, it's also the case that in addition to kind of getting used to stuff over time,

00:08:24.020 | it's also showing a different feature, which is the sort of more particular contrast feature

00:08:27.060 | you're talking about.

00:08:28.060 | So over time, we kind of habituate.

00:08:30.860 | That's one sort of neural mechanism.

00:08:32.940 | But another is the one that you mentioned, which is about the contrast, right?

00:08:35.740 | And that's what you see kind of, you see both of them, say, in the light perception, right?

00:08:38.940 | If I show you the same light over time, you're going to habituate.

00:08:41.940 | That's eudonic adaptation.

00:08:42.940 | Literally, for folks listening, it literally disappears.

00:08:46.140 | Yes.

00:08:47.140 | And if you set up the right experiment, Russ and Karen DeValloy at Berkeley years ago did

00:08:50.880 | these beautiful experiments.

00:08:52.620 | You look at like a grating of light projected onto a wall, and if you can stabilize the

00:08:56.740 | eyes so that they're not moving around, it literally will disappear.

00:09:01.820 | Same thing with an odor, same thing with touch, right?

00:09:04.360 | Like I wasn't thinking about my contact with the chair.

00:09:05.700 | Same thing with happiness.

00:09:06.700 | My deliciousness.

00:09:07.700 | It's so sad.

00:09:08.700 | Habituation, attenuation, these are technical terms when you really get down into it.

00:09:12.340 | And the push-pull, antagonism between light and dark, the smell, yes/no, on/off, push,

00:09:19.220 | all of it, go/no-go.

00:09:21.100 | Every single aspect of the nervous system functions this way.

00:09:23.860 | It's a flexor extensor in the musculoskeletal system.

00:09:26.860 | But that gets to maybe what I would think of as different.

00:09:28.360 | So eudonic adaptation is the same stimulus over time, like almost like habituation.

00:09:33.300 | There's a different thing that happens when you get what you might call a contrast.

00:09:37.100 | And there's all kinds of visual illusions that sort of function on this.

00:09:40.300 | If you've ever seen the one where it's like, "Is it the same color over here, over here?"

00:09:43.660 | And we throw this on your show page to show people, and it's like, "Oh, it looks different."

00:09:47.620 | It's like, "No, no, no.

00:09:48.620 | That's because of the kind of contrast between the two things."

00:09:51.660 | You see something that's really bright over here, it makes something else look a little

00:09:54.740 | darker, right?

00:09:56.820 | That's a different negative effect on our happiness a lot of the time.

00:09:59.700 | This is the comparison effect, right?

00:10:01.300 | This is like my $50 million seems kind of crappy because I hang out with people who

00:10:06.540 | have $100 million.

00:10:07.540 | Objectively, I have a tremendous amount of money, but I feel bad because I'm kind of

00:10:11.540 | comparing against something else.

00:10:13.580 | And so oftentimes when we're evaluating different rewards, we're kind of comparing them against

00:10:18.660 | what other people had or what we've had in the past.

00:10:22.020 | And that means that being in an objectively good situation might feel really crappy if

00:10:26.940 | you just have somebody else that has a slightly better objectively good situation.

00:10:30.620 | My favorite example of this actually comes from the sports world.

00:10:33.740 | So researchers asked this interesting question like, "How happy are you when you win an

00:10:37.740 | Olympic medal?"

00:10:38.740 | Right?

00:10:39.740 | You're on the stand, you won an Olympic medal.

00:10:40.740 | And also, who's happiest?

00:10:41.900 | So gold medalists is up there, best in the world.

00:10:44.660 | You might assume they're the happiest, right?

00:10:46.460 | And they are.

00:10:47.460 | They're smiling.

00:10:48.460 | Researchers analyze this by looking at facial expressions and kind of code the muscles and

00:10:51.220 | so on.

00:10:52.220 | But it turns out they're not the happiest, right?

00:10:54.580 | Who's the happiest?

00:10:55.580 | Well, let's look at this silver medalist.

00:10:56.580 | Are they happiest?

00:10:57.580 | No.

00:10:58.580 | In fact, actually, if you code their facial muscles, they're showing expressions like

00:11:01.620 | contempt, deep sadness.

00:11:03.380 | It's the same expression you'd make like if your parent died or like, you know, a real

00:11:07.220 | terrible grief moment.

00:11:08.560 | This is the, I don't want to adhere to this, but this is the "second place is first loser"

00:11:13.780 | kind of mindset.

00:11:14.780 | Because the idea is like, you know, who's your major comparison point if you're in silver?

00:11:18.100 | You know, 0.2 seconds or something and you would have gotten gold.

00:11:21.020 | And you're not feeling objectively like you're the second best on the planet.

00:11:24.140 | You beat, you know, all but one of billions of people on the planet.

00:11:27.220 | No, you just feel terrible.

00:11:28.940 | So that's silver medalist.

00:11:29.940 | What's going on with the bronze medalist, right?

00:11:32.460 | There's another person on the stand.

00:11:33.860 | What's their comparison point?

00:11:35.180 | It's not gold.

00:11:36.260 | They were multiple people, multiple seconds away.

00:11:38.940 | Their salient comparison is like, by the grace of God, like I'm up here at all.

00:11:43.380 | I almost like, you know, two seconds the other direction, I would have never gotten up here.

00:11:47.340 | And when you analyze the bronze medalist facial expressions, they're sometimes even happier

00:11:50.860 | than the gold medalist.

00:11:52.180 | Definitely happier than the silver, who's objectively better, but sometimes even happier

00:11:55.420 | than the gold medalist because they're like, "Oh, relative to my comparison point, I'm

00:11:59.580 | doing amazing."

00:12:00.580 | And the gold medalist is expected to get gold the next year or else it's pure reward prediction

00:12:05.500 | error.

00:12:06.500 | Yes.

00:12:07.500 | Especially if they internalize the expectations of the audience, the spectators, excuse me,

00:12:13.180 | because if they come back the next year and they're second or third on the podium or not

00:12:17.220 | on the podium, it's seen as falling from a higher place.

00:12:19.900 | Exactly.

00:12:20.900 | This is a point that I make with my Ivy League students who've been perfect in their grades

00:12:24.300 | and perfect at everything to get into a place like Yale, which is like, turns out that's

00:12:28.340 | a terrible recipe for happiness.

00:12:30.140 | The only way forward is stay there, down, or create a new opportunity.

00:12:34.020 | Stay there, you don't notice, right?

00:12:35.020 | Because you're habituated to it, just like the pattern.

00:12:37.660 | Down feels really bad.

00:12:38.660 | Like, that's a terrible comparison.

00:12:40.900 | I often play my students that DJ Khaled song, "All I do is win, all I do is win, win, win."

00:12:45.700 | And I was like, all you do is win, win, win would be a terrible way to experience success

00:12:50.100 | in life because you just stop noticing it over time if you won.

00:12:54.420 | And that's messed up because it means when you get, when you finally hit the success

00:12:59.100 | that you were striving for, if you just stay at that level, it just stops being good, which

00:13:04.980 | sucks.

00:13:05.980 | And so that raises a different question, which is like, what is a hack that we can do to

00:13:08.620 | get away from that?

00:13:10.660 | One is to not look for the silver lining, but to look for the bronze lining, ba-dum-bum,

00:13:15.420 | which is, you know, you kind of think of reference points that are lower than you.

00:13:18.860 | I love a good conceptual pun, especially when it's framed in an experiment, so thank you

00:13:22.420 | for that.

00:13:23.420 | Yeah, it's like a big science experiment.

00:13:24.420 | No, that's especially gratifying to me.

00:13:25.420 | So look for the bronze lining, which means find a reference point that's not as good.

00:13:30.000 | And for most of the things you're comparing, whether that's your looks, your fitness level,

00:13:33.540 | your finances, you can look and find somebody that's doing worse than you.

00:13:38.760 | Another great hack for this, and this is more one that's a kind of a hack for hedonic adaptation,

00:13:42.340 | getting used to stuff, actually comes from the ancient traditions.

00:13:45.380 | I know you talk a lot about, you know, smart, you know, folks back in the day who came up

00:13:48.980 | with this stuff, right?

00:13:49.980 | This is one from the Stoic tradition, a practice called negative visualization.

00:13:53.660 | So Stoics like Marcus Aurelius thought, when you wake up in the morning, you should have

00:13:57.340 | the following thought pattern.

00:13:58.660 | You should think, "Today, I will lose my success.

00:14:01.260 | I will be exiled.

00:14:02.740 | I'll lose my partner.

00:14:03.740 | I will lose my health.

00:14:04.740 | I won't be able to walk."

00:14:05.740 | And he doesn't say ruminate on that for forever, but just like a little, and then stop and

00:14:09.860 | say, "Ha, I'm not exiled.

00:14:11.660 | I still have my success.

00:14:12.660 | I still have my partner," and so on.

00:14:14.180 | This is a technique called negative visualization, where you just imagine, you don't have to

00:14:18.860 | live it in real life, you just imagine you lose something.

00:14:22.660 | If you've ever lost something you're hedonically adapted to, you know how quickly you recognize

00:14:28.220 | the value of it.

00:14:29.220 | This happens to me with my phone all the time.

00:14:30.220 | I'm a chronic phone loser, and I'm like, you know, and I'm like, "Oh my God, my phone is

00:14:33.620 | gone.

00:14:34.620 | I left it in the airport.

00:14:35.620 | All my contacts are there," and then I'm like, "Oh, it's in the car," and he goes, "I love

00:14:39.140 | my phone.

00:14:40.140 | Like, it's so valuable to me."

00:14:41.140 | There's that line in Pulp Fiction where he says like, what is it?

00:14:43.660 | It's like it's finding – at some point, I think it was Travolta says something, someone

00:14:49.060 | will know it, where finding it almost made losing it worth it.

00:14:54.940 | Exactly.

00:14:55.940 | Because you appreciate it in a way that you didn't before because it was taken away from

00:14:58.740 | you.

00:14:59.740 | Yeah, and that sucks to really lose your phone.

00:15:00.740 | Sometimes, in my case, you really lost the phone, right?

00:15:03.060 | Sure.

00:15:04.060 | But negative visualization, you don't have to do that.

00:15:05.060 | You just use your imagination, right?

00:15:07.260 | And so if you're listening right now and you have a kid, let's do this negative visualization.

00:15:12.740 | The last time you saw your kid was the last time you ever saw them.

00:15:15.260 | Oh, goodness.

00:15:16.260 | Never going to see them again.

00:15:17.260 | No, it didn't happen.

00:15:18.260 | So I'm a little intimidated about it.

00:15:19.260 | But my guess is the next time you hug your kid, you'll hug – just that two seconds

00:15:24.780 | of thinking about what things would be like without it can break through hedonic adaptation.

00:15:28.740 | So one of my favorite hacks for hedonic adaptation, you can use scarcity, really space things

00:15:33.540 | out.

00:15:34.540 | But for the things you can't space out, you can't like have a kid and get rid of a kid

00:15:37.020 | for two weeks and come back to your kid, right?

00:15:39.140 | You can use your imagination, and it doesn't take much to start to realize what you have

00:15:44.300 | and appreciate it more.

00:15:45.340 | [Music]

Are We Supposed to Be Happy All of the Time? | Dr. Laurie Santos & Dr. Andrew Huberman

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