Best Way to Ease Loneliness & Feel Happier | Dr. Laurie Santos & Dr. Andrew Huberman

00:00:00.000 | I mean, I suppose there are a few songwriters, poets, and I've got some friends in those

00:00:05.360 | domains of life, and they do seem to derive a lot of insight and inspiration and have

00:00:11.960 | done amazing things through the kind of depths of unhappy human emotion.

00:00:20.000 | We can get back to that later because I do think there's something about them that's

00:00:22.800 | kind of intriguing.

00:00:23.800 | The depth of unhappy human emotion, we can get back to that later because I do think

00:00:29.600 | there's something about the contrast of moving from these more painful emotions to happiness

00:00:34.640 | that's very different than moving from a state of immense happiness to slightly less, but

00:00:38.960 | we can get back to that.

00:00:40.880 | But most people would like to be happy as much as possible.

00:00:45.280 | I certainly would.

00:00:47.000 | Who wouldn't?

00:00:48.480 | And one, of course, can ask, "Well, should I work on my feelings?

00:00:52.880 | Should I think about my feelings, try and shift my feelings, let my feelings move through

00:00:56.800 | me in a cathartic way?

00:00:59.520 | Should I work on the thought patterns?

00:01:00.920 | Should I work on the behaviors?"

00:01:01.920 | I'm a big believer from my own experience that behaviors are powerful in setting the

00:01:08.720 | general trajectory of thought patterns and feelings, but I've also experienced it going

00:01:14.160 | the other way too.

00:01:15.580 | So what does the research say about this, and what can we do because everyone wants

00:01:19.760 | to be happier?

00:01:20.760 | Yeah.

00:01:21.760 | That's another thing you're not supposed to do.

00:01:22.760 | You don't have to change your circumstances.

00:01:24.360 | And that's great because, like, quintupling your income is tricky, you know, moving is

00:01:28.000 | tricky, you know, switching your life around all over the place is hard, right?

00:01:32.080 | And the good news is the science shows you don't have to do that.

00:01:34.360 | That doesn't work as well as you think.

00:01:36.200 | But you can hack your behaviors and your thought patterns and your feelings to get some good

00:01:40.760 | results, right?

00:01:41.760 | Let's take behaviors, right?

00:01:43.600 | One of the biggest behavioral changes you can make to feel happier is just to get a

00:01:47.680 | little bit more social connection.

00:01:49.160 | Like, psychologists do these fun studies where they look at people's, like, daily usage patterns.

00:01:54.040 | So how much time are you spending sleeping or exercising or at work or whatever?

00:01:58.960 | And the two things that predict whether or not you're happy or not so happy is how much

00:02:03.640 | time you spend with friends and family members and how much time you're just physically around

00:02:08.160 | other people.

00:02:09.160 | Like, the more of that you do, the happier you're going to be.

00:02:13.340 | And you know, that's just a correlation, right?

00:02:14.920 | So your savvy listeners are thinking right now, like, well, is it hanging around with

00:02:18.440 | other people causes you to be happier or do you tend to, like, hang out with other people

00:02:22.240 | more if you are happy?

00:02:23.240 | Like, which direction does the causal arrow go?

00:02:25.720 | And here we have these lovely studies by psychologists who do these kind of funny experiments where

00:02:29.400 | they offer people, like, a $10 Starbucks gift card to just talk to somebody, usually talk

00:02:35.160 | to a stranger, like, that they don't know on the train.

00:02:37.360 | Some lovely work by Nick Epley and others have done this, because you force people to

00:02:40.760 | get social.

00:02:41.940 | And what people predict, especially with strangers, is like, ooh, that's going to feel awkward

00:02:45.640 | and kind of weird.

00:02:47.280 | But what you find across the board, and this includes an introvert and extroverts, is that

00:02:52.120 | talking to somebody actually feels good.

00:02:53.800 | It increases your positive emotion.

00:02:55.040 | It gives you a sense that your life is going better.

00:02:57.040 | You feel less lonely.

00:02:58.540 | It just has these positive outcomes that we don't expect.

00:03:02.040 | I love social connection.

00:03:03.280 | The problem I have with social connection is that if I drop in with somebody for, you

00:03:08.320 | know, 30 minutes or a couple of hours, when that's done, I usually have so much that I

00:03:14.480 | need to tend to that I end up staying up later than I need to in order to complete that,

00:03:19.600 | diminishing my sleep.

00:03:20.680 | And then I feel like there's an underlying kind of like sinking ship sense to my physiology,

00:03:25.880 | and then I have to recover my sleep.

00:03:27.800 | So, you know, everything's a trade-off.

00:03:31.280 | What's interesting about the study you just mentioned is that it's just a brief coffee,

00:03:35.600 | presumably.

00:03:36.600 | So maybe one doesn't need to spend quite as much time with people.

00:03:40.500 | But I think, you know, I think, like, even years ago, actually, he's dead now.

00:03:47.520 | But there was a – I guess it's okay to say even though he's dead.

00:03:50.880 | He was a somewhat eccentric professor at UC Berkeley.

00:03:54.160 | I took a class from him when I was a graduate student there named Seth Roberts.

00:03:57.280 | He's known for some kind of bizarre theories about eating and if people want to look this

00:04:01.640 | up, I mean, like, really kind of different stuff.

00:04:03.960 | But I applaud his bravery and just, you know, being out there.

00:04:07.360 | But he was an eccentric guy, and he told us in this class when I was there that it was

00:04:13.160 | very important to see faces at least once a day, real faces, not on a screen.

00:04:19.260 | This was before social media.

00:04:21.800 | And that it was important at some point to leave your apartment and, like, see the barista

00:04:25.880 | and say hello and thank you and see people on the street.

00:04:30.640 | And now knowing what we know about these dedicated areas of the brain, like the fusiform face

00:04:34.360 | gyrus and Nancy Kanwisher's work and about these brain areas, like, we are hardwired

00:04:39.960 | for seeing faces and recognizing faces.

00:04:42.680 | Now, that alone doesn't mean that seeing faces is a requirement for being happy on

00:04:46.580 | a consistent basis.

00:04:48.380 | But I think they were onto something.

00:04:50.160 | I think Seth was onto something, even though he had some also just, like, completely crazy

00:04:55.240 | ideas.

00:04:56.240 | This idea doesn't seem crazy.

00:04:57.240 | This has been my experience.

00:04:58.240 | Even though I spent a lot of time alone, if I go a few days without seeing a face, something

00:05:02.960 | happens inside that shifts the way my internal kind of set point for well-being.

00:05:09.960 | And then you see somebody and it's, like, delightful, even if it's just a hello kind

00:05:13.520 | of thing.

00:05:14.520 | Yeah.

00:05:15.520 | I mean, I think the reason why social connection matters so much is it's building off this

00:05:18.520 | basic neural circuitry, right, for seeing faces and so on.

00:05:21.520 | And I think that gives us real insight into the kinds of social connections that work

00:05:25.160 | best, right, which has been characterized in the field as sort of in real time social

00:05:30.000 | connection, right, which we're kind of moving away from.

00:05:32.680 | So what do I mean by in real time?

00:05:34.000 | You know, you and I are sitting in a studio right now chatting, and we're kind of chatting

00:05:38.000 | in real time.

00:05:39.000 | I can see your face.

00:05:40.000 | We're live.

00:05:41.000 | But we might have been able to do this, like, over some sort of video chat.

00:05:43.800 | It wouldn't be as good, you know, but it's pretty good.

00:05:46.280 | And the reason it seems to be pretty good is we're doing it in real time, right.

00:05:49.640 | Our auditory system, our visual system, all these systems that are used to, as primates,

00:05:54.240 | processing things with other folks around you, it works reasonably well.

00:05:57.720 | What doesn't work so well is how we often communicate, which is, like, over Slack, over

00:06:02.000 | text.

00:06:03.000 | I text you.

00:06:04.000 | Vroom!

00:06:05.000 | A few minutes later.

00:06:06.000 | Vroom!

00:06:07.000 | It comes back.

00:06:08.000 | Like, our primate brain's just, like, that's just not the way communication is set to work.

00:06:10.520 | And so I think sometimes when I bring up social connection, people think, like, oh, I've got

00:06:14.040 | to see people in person, and my friend's going to live far away, and I'm, like, at work all

00:06:17.440 | day.

00:06:18.440 | It's like, no, no, no.

00:06:19.440 | You can connect, not necessarily live and in person, but as much as possible, try to

00:06:23.680 | do it in real time.

00:06:24.680 | And I think that's in part, and if possible, try to do it with video, I think, for the

00:06:28.120 | reason that you were just talking about, is that faces activate us.

00:06:31.480 | But, you know, we're primates that are also really good at language and paying attention

00:06:35.400 | to the voice.

00:06:36.400 | I think it's one of the reasons that, like, an old-school phone conversation, no video

00:06:39.720 | chat with your friend, can be some of the most emotional connective conversation, sometimes

00:06:43.900 | better than in person, because when we're in person, we're pulling out our phones and

00:06:47.300 | checking and paying attention to other stuff.

00:06:49.160 | But we've got to get back towards in real time.

00:06:51.800 | The other stuff just doesn't have the same psychological oomph.

00:06:55.520 | Is there any evidence that texting actually drives more of a desire for more social connection

00:07:03.880 | and thus leaves us feeling less well than prior to a text exchange?

00:07:08.480 | Yeah.

00:07:09.480 | Because I realize it's very hard to separate out the variables about what's the nature

00:07:12.220 | of the text exchange, how often do you see this person in real life, et cetera.

00:07:17.880 | But I could imagine that texting, the whoop, I don't do the sound effect as well as you

00:07:22.880 | do.

00:07:23.880 | I like that.

00:07:25.060 | But that texting could be the equivalent of getting crumbs of nourishment, not full nourishment.

00:07:30.680 | I could also imagine that it's like putting nourishment just out of reach.

00:07:35.560 | And I'm asking this really at a neurological level.

00:07:39.580 | Do we know?

00:07:40.580 | Is the reward circuitry that's triggered by in real life social connection triggered but

00:07:45.160 | to a lesser degree by text exchange or by Zoom exchange?

00:07:50.520 | This would be an important study to do, I think.

00:07:52.560 | Yeah.

00:07:53.560 | There's a lot of evidence for it.

00:07:54.560 | But my intuition is that the way it works is almost like texting is sort of the NutriSuite

00:07:58.960 | of social connection.

00:07:59.960 | I was feeling this motivation for social connection, and I did it, and I got something that was

00:08:05.080 | sort of social.

00:08:06.080 | I got some information.

00:08:07.080 | But psychologically, I'm missing the nutritious part of it.

00:08:10.720 | So it kind of fakes you out into thinking that it's social connection, but it kind of

00:08:13.940 | doesn't really work.

00:08:15.320 | And I worry that that's what we're all getting a lot of right now.

00:08:19.660 | It's just so much easier to participate in the NutriSuite version of social connection

00:08:24.400 | because as political scientists and sociologists and others have pointed out, it's harder to

00:08:27.840 | meet with people in real life.

00:08:29.240 | We don't have these so-called third spaces where we can get together easily anymore, right?

00:08:33.800 | There's so many draws of just being on your screen, being alone inside.

00:08:38.560 | I think we're kind of missing out.

00:08:39.820 | And so a lot of us are kind of starving nutritionally when it comes to social connection because

00:08:43.760 | we're going for the wrong stuff.

00:08:45.600 | So schedule some, if possible, in real life time with somebody.

00:08:50.360 | Or in real time, right?

00:08:51.360 | You know, call that friend that you haven't talked to.

00:08:54.540 | And recognize, because this is clear from the psychological research, that your brain

00:08:59.100 | is not telling you to do that.

00:09:01.340 | Probably even when you're listening right now, you're like, "Yeah, I guess that would

00:09:04.020 | be helpful for me."

00:09:05.020 | But you're not kind of having a craving to talk to your friend.

00:09:07.740 | And I think this is the problem with a lot of the behaviors that map onto happiness is

00:09:13.020 | that if you think of the evolutionary pressures for those behaviors, natural selection never

00:09:17.380 | had to build in, like, the goal of feeling social, because we were just like in these

00:09:20.860 | small bands.

00:09:21.860 | It was really easy, right?

00:09:22.860 | Natural selection had to build in a kind of craving for sweet, fatty food because those

00:09:26.260 | were hard to find.

00:09:27.260 | It didn't have to build in the craving for, like, you know, a bunch of greens because

00:09:30.060 | they were everywhere.

00:09:31.060 | I think the same thing is true with social connection.

00:09:33.260 | We just don't have a strong motivation to seek people out because it was just kind of

00:09:38.180 | there.

00:09:39.180 | And I think our motivation and our reward systems don't cause us to kind of crave it.

00:09:43.260 | But in the modern day where there's so many substitutes and we're kind of more isolated,

00:09:47.820 | I think many of us are kind of experiencing the negative effects of loneliness.

00:09:52.140 | But then when we think, "Well, what could I do to get out of it?"

00:09:54.260 | There's not this, like, "I'm starving for connection."

00:09:56.540 | We don't have this sort of motivational goal to go out and get it.

00:09:59.660 | And so what that can lead to is people making the prediction in their head of, like, you

00:10:02.700 | know, "I just heard Laurie say that this is a good idea, but, like, I don't know, probably

00:10:06.740 | not for me or maybe not as important."

00:10:09.060 | I think we just don't have systems that tell us to go out and get this stuff.

00:10:11.940 | So even if your brain is saying, "That's not that important," try it.

00:10:15.100 | Do your own personal experiment and get a little bit more in real time social connection

00:10:19.060 | and just take a moment to notice immediately after how it made you feel.

00:10:22.740 | And I bet it'll be like, you know, all the kind of fitness hacks and nutrition hacks

00:10:26.780 | that you talk about on the show where you're like, "Oh my God, that made me feel so much

00:10:29.540 | better than I really expected it to."

00:10:32.160 | If seeing faces, and I don't have evidence for this, but if Seth Roberts was right and

00:10:38.140 | what we're talking about here is clearly based on existing data, if seeing faces somehow

00:10:44.380 | triggers the reward system in a healthy way that reinforces the social connection thing,

00:10:50.080 | if it, like, fills the vessel that, like, we're connected because we no longer live

00:10:53.540 | in small village and tribe type formats, most of us don't anyway, that if we plop down onto

00:11:00.460 | the couch and kind of, like, assume the classic C-shaped position of somebody who's about

00:11:05.420 | to go on their phone and you can scroll and see faces, you talked about that as a bit

00:11:10.580 | of, like, an artificial sweetener giving the illusion of some sort of nourishment, and

00:11:14.620 | then, you know, you see some stuff, you respond to stuff, you can see someone kind of dunk

00:11:18.620 | on somebody, maybe hear a joke, maybe make a joke, and then go into your DMs and, like,

00:11:23.060 | read a few, check a few.

00:11:24.060 | And then you basically got no real social connection.

00:11:28.580 | Correct.

00:11:29.580 | You didn't have to move to do it.

00:11:33.380 | And in a lot of ways, this has parallels to the ease of highly processed foods or something

00:11:38.460 | like that.

00:11:39.460 | And I think we're starting to understand this a bit through Jonathan Haidt's work and other

00:11:43.900 | people's work, including your own, but I don't know that it's anything but really dangerous

00:11:52.340 | and bad.

00:11:53.340 | I don't wanna sound alarmist, but I am really concerned that certainly for the younger generation,

00:12:00.740 | that if we don't have an intrinsic drive to go do something...

00:12:04.900 | We stop doing it.

00:12:05.900 | We stop doing it.

00:12:07.140 | And then the brain is pretty plastic throughout the entire life, especially for these low-grade,

00:12:12.780 | like many times repeated behaviors.

00:12:14.260 | I mean, we can just slowly, you know, it's like there's drift.

00:12:19.620 | And then we wonder why we don't feel so good.

00:12:23.700 | Yeah.

00:12:24.700 | I mean, you know how the dopamine system works, right?

00:12:26.380 | Like it has these mechanisms to crave stuff that's quick, quick hits, right?

00:12:31.140 | Our instant...

00:12:32.140 | You know, when we go on Reddit or go on Instagram and scroll through a feed, we're getting these

00:12:35.820 | kind of quick hits.

00:12:36.820 | And another thing that is rewarding is new information.

00:12:40.020 | You know, your Stanford colleague, Jamil Zaki, has done these lovely neuroscience studies

00:12:43.140 | that just finding out some interesting social information feels rewarding.

00:12:47.460 | And kind of for the first time, we've been able to separate the reward value that comes

00:12:51.380 | from interacting with live human people and faces and social rewarding information that

00:12:56.200 | comes at us quickly at this dopamine hit that we crave a lot, but we don't have the craving

00:13:00.500 | mechanisms for the in real life connection.

00:13:03.380 | And yeah, I think that's causing a lot of problems.

00:13:06.420 | And it means we're kind of building more tools to do just that.

00:13:10.820 | I had the musician David Byrne on my podcast.

00:13:14.740 | Talking heads.

00:13:15.740 | Talking heads, David Byrne.

00:13:16.740 | Cool.

00:13:17.740 | Who cares a lot about these issues.

00:13:18.740 | He wrote a really cool article called Eliminating the Human, where he made the claim that pretty

00:13:23.540 | much every technological invention of the last 20 years has been, you know, dealing

00:13:29.420 | with actual people is kind of friction-y.

00:13:32.020 | So let's just get rid of them, right?

00:13:33.780 | We'll, you know, have Uber or Lyft or a car company where I don't have to talk to the

00:13:37.460 | driver.

00:13:38.460 | I just plug it into the phone.

00:13:39.460 | We don't have to have a conversation.

00:13:40.580 | We go away.

00:13:41.580 | Right?

00:13:42.580 | We have music and streaming mechanisms.

00:13:43.580 | I don't know.

00:13:44.580 | Andrew, you're like my age, so you probably remember that you used to have to go into

00:13:48.620 | a record store to flip through CDs or tapes even if you're really old school to figure

00:13:54.300 | out music.

00:13:55.300 | And often when you do that, you'd run into humans or talk to the cashier guy or somebody

00:13:58.740 | would see you flicking through like, "Oh, you like talking heads?

00:14:00.820 | I like talking heads."

00:14:02.140 | Now we just go to an algorithm, right, from food delivery apps to kind of education, right?

00:14:07.580 | I have an online course where students don't have to sit in a real classroom with other

00:14:10.980 | students.

00:14:11.980 | They could watch it directly.

00:14:13.260 | So many of our technological innovations are assuming that what we want to get rid of is

00:14:17.020 | the friction part.

00:14:18.020 | That's what we're kind of motivated to get rid of.

00:14:19.620 | But ultimately, we're getting rid of the human in these interactions and our primate brains

00:14:23.700 | are left with the little NutriSuite dribbles of connection when what we really need is

00:14:28.180 | something in real life and in real time.

00:14:30.580 | [music]

Best Way to Ease Loneliness & Feel Happier | Dr. Laurie Santos & Dr. Andrew Huberman

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