- How should we think about the relationship between emotions and this thing that we call cognition? Because I think a lot of where we're going today is to distinguish between feelings, thoughts and behaviors. And as neuroscientists, psychologists, et cetera, we have to understand the difference between emotions and cognition and maybe where they overlap.

So if you could educate us a bit on that, I think that will set the stage nicely for understanding happiness. - Yeah, well, I'm glad you started there, actually, because the very definition of happiness, I think, as social scientists tend to think about it, includes both of these parts, right?

So I think social scientists tend to think about happiness as being happy in your life and being happy with your life. So being happy in your life is sort of the emotion side, right, a decent number of positive emotions, maybe slightly less negative emotions. Like you existing in your life feels good.

That's kind of an emotional part, right? But then there's also kind of how you think your life is going. Do you have purpose? Are you kind of happy with how things are going? It's how you think about your life, which is sort of a cognitive thing. And so even the earliest social scientists who started thinking about happiness, at the time they call it subjective well-being, 'cause I think psychologists were like, "Ooh, happiness sounds too wooey.

"We'll call it something else." But it means exactly the same thing. It means subjective well-being, right? When they started thinking about subjective well-being, they divided it into this sort of affective emotional part, which is like how you feel in your life, but also this cognitive part, how you think your life is going.

So that basic dichotomy has been there since the very beginning of folks studying happiness scientifically. - I'm already struck by this distinction between how things are going in your life versus with your life. One requires a kind of first-person experiencing of life in your life. Do you wake up feeling good?

Are you feeling good with your, inside of your friendships and other relationships, family, romantic relationships, school, work? The other involves a bit of a third-personing of self, of looking at one's CV, either actual CV or reflected CV through the lens of other people and kind of getting a sense like, am I doing well?

Am I not doing well? I think this is a really important distinction because it seems like ultimately the goal, if I may, is to be happy in your life, regardless of the third-personing, provided that you're not doing damage to somebody else's happiness in life. - Yeah, well, I think ideally it'd be nice to do both, right, and I think there are moments when these things dissociate, right?

So, you know, you interact with lots of interesting, rich people out here in California. I think a lot of them have, kind of in their life feels pretty good, right? They have lots of hedonic pleasures, they're drinking nice wine, hanging out at the beach. - Oh, you'd be amazed.

You'd be amazed at how much suffering they report. - Oh, that's interesting. - Right, how much suffering they report. - So this is the question, is this sort of cognitive part the third-person part or is it the reporting part? And I think when the psychologists are thinking about it, they really think about it as the reporting part, right?

And this gets tricky, right? Because, you know, I see folks having their nice glass of wine on the beach and I'm thinking, like, that's coming with lots of positive emotion. Like, I bet if I tested them and could have a direct look at their sensory experience, it'd probably be pretty positive.

It's only when they reflect on their life and they're asking, well, how's it going, that they say, oh, you know, I don't know, my stocks went down or like-- - When I hear about lack of happiness, let me think of some of the kind of bullet point ones that seem to come up repetitively.

They are indeed not related to lack of resources. I don't hear that. What I've heard, and this is also true for where I spend part of my time and where I grew up, which is in Silicon Valley, which is also not everyone, but there are people there who have accrued tremendous amount of wealth.

The mean has shifted very high and hence the cost of living. But it's often concerns about their kids or their mother is ill. Their child is struggling in a particular way. Very often that's what it is. They're concerned about the lack of wellbeing in their kids related to mental health or physical health or other relatives, mental health, physical health, or they're upset about something politically.

But we won't go there. - We won't go there. Yeah, no, I think this is true, right? So much of our happiness is made up of the happiness of other people, right? Both kind of how they're doing and how we think they're doing cognitively, but literally just emotionally, right?

If you've ever been around a family member or a spouse who was incredibly pissed off, really sad, it's incredibly hard not to catch those emotions yourself. And we as psychologists know how these processes work, right? These processes are emotional contagion where you're literally catching the emotions of other people.

And so oftentimes the things that you most worry about to be happy yourself is focusing on the happiness of the people around you, because that literally becomes your happiness at a very fundamental level. - Now, I'm pausing just to think about this a little bit more as we grow up.

And I realize it varies by place and lots of circumstances, but as we grow up, we are taught to pay attention to how our life is going a bit from the outside, where you gain evaluations starting really young, little stars on our pictures, or good job, or nowadays they say great effort in drawing, or this whole thing, the growth mindset language.

But I don't know that in the United States, we are taught to think about being happy in our life, right? As kids, I think all kids, all mammals seem to gravitate towards joyful experiences for them, playing is almost always an innate, joyful experience. But then as the evaluations start coming in, we get better and better at assessing our performance and where we are relative to the sort of standard goals of the third grade, the fifth grade, the 12th grade.

But at the same time, I don't think anyone ever sat me down and said, how are you going to evaluate if you're feeling good in your life? Like that you're savoring your soccer game, that you're savoring your time with friends. That was never taught to me. - Yeah, and I think there's a real danger of these kind of extrinsic rewards, as you might call them, all the stuff outside, the grades, the performance measures and so on, literally stealing your intrinsic rewards.

There's this funny phenomenon in psychology where if you have something that's intrinsically rewarding, so let's say exercise, right? Like I want to go out and run a bunch, right? I love running, I get this intrinsic reward from running. Now I get some sort of tool, whether it's my watch or something I'm scribbling down in a phone app, and I have to log my running, now it becomes a sort of extrinsic reward.

It's not just like the feeling of running, but it sort of takes on this extrinsic idea. And then what happens is sometimes we end up going for that reward anyway. The fiction writer David Sedaris has this wonderful article called "The Fitbit Life," where he talks about how he wanted to get fit, it's intrinsic reward of exercising more, and he got the Fitbit, and then it was all about the Fitbit, and he would set the level higher and set the level higher, and he himself was miserable and no longer enjoying running, to the point that at some point he just would walk around shaking his arm just to get up to those final steps, right?

That's a really terrible case where your extrinsic reward winds up taking over. But so many of the cases you just talked about are ones in our real life where that comes up much more insidiously than with a Fitbit or something like that. You talked about play in mammals, the easiest thing that little kid animals do all over the place.

Little kid humans don't do that as much anymore, because even from really young ages, they're in toddler university where they're kind of learning things to get into the next grade and get the perfect grade so they can get into institutions like ours, right? It all becomes about extrinsic rewards.

And so I think you're really right. We're kind of extrinsic sizing all the rewards to the point that we're not getting to internal happiness. It was hard already to pay attention to that stuff because I think we'll probably talk about this. It's hard to be mindful about your emotions.

You really have to pay attention to what's going on. But I think it's gotten even harder because we have these metrics. They're all over the place in our culture, but they're just not the intrinsic thing. There's some extrinsic marker that could make the intrinsic thing even less fun. - For people that grow up or live in areas where, well, let's just say that have less disposable wealth, is there must be data on sort of relationship to intrinsic versus extrinsic forces on happiness.

I mean, I can make up all sorts of stories in my head about how people starting out from very different circumstances would be more or less happy, but what do the data say? - Yeah, so these effects of kind of resources on happiness are really interesting and they're nuanced, right?

So if you look at the lower end of the kind of income spectrum, you would obviously say that money affects happiness, right? If you can't put food on the table, if you can't put a roof over your head, definitely getting a little bit morning is gonna affect your happiness in a positive way.

And the data sort of bear this out. There's a very famous study by the Nobel Prize winning economist, Danny Kahneman, RIP. Back in 2010, he did this cool study where he looked at the correlation between income and happiness as reported in how much stress you have, how much positive emotion you experience and so on.

At the low end of the income scales, it just goes up and up and up, right? More money just almost linearly gives you more happiness. But what Danny found and is the second part of this nuanced picture is that that slope kind of levels off and it levels off in 2010 dollars at around $75,000.

What does that mean? That means if you get more than $75,000, you're not gonna feel any less stress, you're not gonna experience any more positive emotion. Even if I double or triple or quadruple your income, on those metrics, you're not gonna see any increase. - Then those are pre-tax 2010.

- Yeah, they didn't get into like the real, 'cause you're like, "Oh my God, well, I live in California." Like if you live in Iowa, maybe it's not so bad. But like, and those numbers will change, but the upshot is there's probably some number in like 2025, 2024 numbers that might be like, you know, maybe $100,000, $120,000, whatever it is.

The point is that there's some number at which getting more is not gonna increase your happiness at the same slope. Now there's been nuanced fights about this as there is a lot in kind of real research, but well, is that really true? Does the slope really ever go up?

And now the picture seems to be, well, the slope might go up a teeny tiny, like negligible bit, but it doesn't go up as much as say, getting an extra 10 minutes of exercise in or another 20 minutes of sleep or scribbling the things you're grateful for. All those things will impact your happiness much more than like quintupling your income.

And so do your resources affect happiness? Yeah, if you ain't got any resources, you definitely will feel happier if you can get them. But if you have a lot, getting more really isn't gonna help. - Sorry to interrupt, but lately I've been saying on the basis of those findings about this then 75K per year, probably now, like you said, 100 to 125K, or let's just say something like that, would be the equivalent amount that money indeed cannot buy happiness, but it can buffer stress.

Do you think that's true? You're making me rethink that statement. Maybe it doesn't buffer stress past a certain amount. - Yeah, I mean, I think in the original Kahneman data, he found that it doesn't, right? I mean, how much stress you report on a daily basis was literally one of the measures they were using for happiness.

But I think you're right, the risk around it can buffer it, right? I think if you're at a certain set of means, you know that like, if a bad thing happens, you're going to be okay. So it can allow you to make riskier decisions. It can allow you to do things that you might not do if you're right at that boundary or losing some money, it might pop you back down.

I think the problem is that one of the ways we evaluate our financial situation, but pretty much every situation, I think this goes back to the neuroscience, is that we don't do it objectively, we do it relative. And when you think about your relative financial status, there's lots of other folks around to whom you're comparing yourself.

I think one of the reasons that rich folks don't necessarily think they're less stressed when they have very high levels of wealth and so on is because they're looking around and everyone's doing much better than them. Like, and this is just a fundamental feature of the way we evaluate stuff, right?

Is that we don't evaluate in objective terms, we evaluate relative to these reference points. And honestly, as you get richer, you're kind of going up the sort of logarithmic scale where the reference points are getting even further away from you. And I think that that can have a huge hit on people's perception of their own happiness and their perception of their stress levels, right?

Because they're working towards a goal that's probably not gonna make them that much happier, but they haven't kind of abandoned this intuition that more money will make me happy. On my podcast, "The Happiness Lab," I had this guy, Clay Cockrell, who was really fun. He's a wealth psychologist. So he's a mental health professional that only works with the 0.0001%.

And already we should say, well, if wealth made you happy, he should be out of a job. But no, he has lots of clients, lots of, I guess, very well-paying clients. He looked like he was doing well for himself. But he talks about how those folks haven't abandoned this notion that more money will make them happy.

They set some standard, like oh, as soon as I become, as soon as I get 50 million, I'll be happy, or as soon as I become a billionaire. But then they get to that point, they're not feeling any more positive emotion, they're not feeling less stressed. And rather than saying, well, hang on, maybe that hypothesis was wrong, more money doesn't work.

They say, ah, the hypothesis, it's all right, more money will make me happy. I just get a, it wasn't 50 million, now it's 100 million or whatever it is. And so I think that that's a lot due to the fact that folks are comparing their wealth levels against others.

And our comparison system sucks because we constantly compare ourselves against others. But we never pick people that are doing worse than us. We always pick people who are doing better than us. - I know a fair number of very happy, wealthy people. I know a fair number of very miserable, wealthy people.

I know a fair number of happy, non-wealthy people, and a fair number of miserable inside, where they report feeling miserable, unwealthy people. - Well, it fits completely with what a lot of the happiness research suggests, right? Which is that it's much less about our circumstances than we think when it comes to who's happy and who's not, right?

We often think, if I could get more money, or if I could get more accolades at work, or if I could get a new partner, if I could move somewhere, I'd be happier. But exactly what you're saying. If you look at people with all those different life circumstances, both the good version and the bad version, you find some happy folks and some not so happy folks.

Now what researchers are starting to think is that it actually doesn't involve our circumstances as much as we think. Again, I would bracket it, unless those circumstances are really dire. Circumstances don't matter as much as we think. It tends to be the kind of stuff that's much more under our control than our circumstances.

It tends to be how we behave, what thought patterns we use, the emotions we seek out, the social connection we experience. Those things matter much more. And so I think your experience with the happy and not so happy rich folks, and the happy and not so happy poor folks kind of bear out what we think.

Like, it's just not your circumstances that doesn't matter as much as you assume. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music)