Create a Custom Billing Format for Life Sciences with airSlate SignNow

Custom billing format for Life Sciences

ANDREW HUBERMAN: Welcome to the Huberman Lab podcast, where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life. [MUSIC PLAYING] I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. Today we are discussing happiness. We're going to discuss the science of happiness, because indeed, there are excellent laboratories that have worked for many decades to try and understand what is this thing that we call happiness and what brings us happiness in the short and long term. In fact, we could probably point to happiness as one of the most sought-after states or commodities, or emotions. Whatever you want to call it, happiness is what many people are seeking in work, in relationships, and in general. And yet most of us can't really define exactly what happiness is or means for us. We can point to certain experiences, we can try and describe our states of mind and body, but most people recognize the feeling when we have it, and we certainly recognize the feeling of not being happy. Whether or not that means simply not being happy as the absence of happiness or all-out depression. Now one of the key problems in trying to understand happiness and, indeed, the science and psychology of happiness is that it does indeed involve other similar things. Things like joy, and gratitude, and meaning. And indeed, many scientists and psychologists have argued for many, many decades about what happiness really is. Now we can come up with so-called operational definitions of happiness. Operational definitions are basically agreed-upon terms or agreed-upon definitions and conditions that will define something such as happiness. Much in the same way that we can all probably come up with an operational definition of milk. But of course, milk can be cow's milk, it can be oat milk, it can be soy milk, et cetera, et cetera. So too, something like happiness can be micro-divided and sliced and diced into as many things as we decide. Today we are really going to focus on three main things. First, we are going to define happiness as a brain state and as a state of mind and body. We're going to take a look at what the science says about all of that. Second, we are going to talk about tools and practices for placing ourselves into states of happiness. And while for most of us, we think of happiness as something that only arrives through the acquisition of some goal or some thing external to us, and of course, that is true. There is also something called synthetic happiness or synthesized happiness which turns out to be at least as powerful and perhaps even more powerful. Now I'll just say right off the bat that I'm not going to tell you that all you have to do is sit in a chair and imagine being happy in order to feel happy. Synthesize happiness actually involves some very concrete steps that have been defined by excellent labs in psychology, so we're going to talk about synthesize happiness as it relates to what you can do to obtain happy states more readily or more frequently. And then, third, we're going to talk about some of the misconceptions or what I would call the contradictions of happiness research. And what I mean by that is most of you have probably heard about the general conditions for obtaining happiness. And they always seem to circle back to some of the same basic features of get great sleep, have great social connection, pursue meaning, don't focus to any overextend on things like pursuing money because there are indeed these studies that show that the amount of money that people make does not necessarily scale directly with happiness. We'll talk about those studies in some detail a little bit later. And while all of that literature is very powerful and informative, there is what I see as a contradiction. Which is for instance, that for many of us, including myself, especially in the years when I was in graduate school and a postdoc, there were times in which pursuing and being involved in work and pursuing degrees and finding meaning in my vocation actually separated me from the opportunity to have quite as many social connections, or quite as much sleep, or quite as much exercise, or even quite as much sunshine, for that matter. So all of the things that we're told that we need in order to access happiness on a regular basis oftentimes contradict with the pressures and the requirements of not just daily life but in building a life that allows us to have the kind of resources that we need in order to have things like quality social connection, and the time and opportunity to get regular exercise and great nutrition, et cetera, et cetera. So, again, while this isn't necessarily a complaint with any of the research out of the fields of psychology on happiness, it is important that we acknowledge these contradictions that exist in the discussion around happiness. In particular, the popular discussions around the science of happiness. So today, what we are going to arrive at, what you will finish this episode, with is a set of tools and a framework for understanding the pursuit of happiness in the short and long-term as it relates to the research from psychology but also the neuroscience. And my goal today is really to try and place that all into a structured framework so that you can know where you are in your journey or the landscape around happiness in your pursuit of happiness. And what I won't tell you is that you need to abandon all goals in terms of pursuing money, career, et cetera, and simply focus on relationships. But we will talk about what constitutes an excellent social bond or even in excellent conversation. There's excellent research that points to the fact that even rather shallow connections, that is, connections between people that you happen to just see in the hallway on a regular basis, not even requiring close bonds of any kind, can be built into close bonds that can deliver a tremendous amount of feeling and genuine social connection provided certain conditions are met. So today, again, it's really about understanding the science of happiness, understanding the mechanisms underlying what we call happiness. And providing you a framework by which you can pursue and achieve happiness not just as a long-term goal and not just as a day-to-day goal of little micro exercises of gratitude, et cetera, but rather as a way to think about happiness as a state that you have control over, at least in terms of your ability to access what I would call the algorithms that enable us or open the opportunity to experience happiness. Now before we begin today's episode, I'd like to talk about a very specific tool that applies yes to our pursuit of happiness but actually to our pursuit of everything, including quality sleep and ongoing motivation, et cetera. I've talked many, many times before on this podcast and on other podcasts, and on social media about the critical value of getting regular bright light, ideally sunlight, in your eyes within the first hour of waking. Or if the sun isn't out when you wake up in the morning, to turn on a lot of bright artificial lights and then get sunlight in your eyes for anywhere from 5 to 20 minutes, depending on how cloudy it is in the early part of the day. Absolutely outsized effects mood and focus during the day and quality of sleep at night. Now there's another sort of central tenet of getting great sleep and improving mood and focus throughout the day. And that's to avoid bright artificial light exposure to your eyes between the hours of about 10 PM to 4:00 AM. Now leaving shift workers aside, and we have an entire episode devoted to shift work, most people are asleep at night and awake during the day. And you would be wise to avoid exposure of your eyes to bright artificial light between the hours of 10:00 PM and 4:00 AM. If you're going to use screens or artificial lights, dim them down as far as you can. Now there are several studies that point to the fact that one of the major issues with getting bright light in your eyes between the hours of 10:00 PM and 4:00 AM is that it has a negative impact on the so-called dopaminergic or dopamine circuits of the brain and body, which can enhance depression. That is lead to ongoing lower mood and affect. So that's a reason to dim the lights or avoid bright lights between 10:00 PM and 4:00 AM. However, I and many others need to use artificial light and screens sometimes, even between the hours of 10:00 PM and midnight or even midnight to 3:00 AM, depending on what's going on in my life or your life. That may include you as well. Now it turns out that there are powerful ways to offset some, not all, but some of the negative effects of viewing artificial lights between the hours of 10:00 PM and 4:00 AM. And one of the most powerful ways to do that is to simply adjust the overall brightness of your artificial lighting throughout the day and in the evening. So one of the issues nowadays that we're really facing is that people are simply not getting enough bright light in their eyes from sunlight or from other sources during the daytime, and they're getting far too much bright light in their eyes largely from artificial sources, of course, in the evening and at night. Not just from 10 PM to 4:00 AM, but also in the evening hours from 6 to 10 PM and so on and so forth. So a very simple yet powerful solution that supported by peer-reviewed research in humans is to try and make your indoor working and/or home environment during the day as bright as possible. Now, if you can achieve that through direct sunlight, terrific. If you can get outside a lot during the daytime, terrific. But many people simply cannot. But most people do have some windows in their environment. I realize some don't but, most people do. And as a consequence, most people are using rather dim artificial lighting indoors during the day and then very bright artificial lighting indoors in the evening, and at night, that's a problem. And if you think about it, logically, you want to do the exact reverse. So it's been shown that if you simply increase the amount of bright artificial light that you were exposed to during the day, and remember this is not an excuse to not get your morning sunlight viewing, but in addition to that, to make your indoor artificial lights very bright, bright, bright, bright, bright throughout the day. And then much dimmer from the hours of 6:00 PM until bedtime. Or if you can't do that, then maybe as soon as you get home from about 8:00 PM until bedtime. And then dim them way, way down between 10:00 PM and 4:00 AM or off entirely. That's going to be a far better pattern for your sleep-wake cycles, focus, mood, et cetera than what most people do, which is to have a few windows in their indoor working environment during the day and keep the indoor lights rather dim at a time when they need more photons, more light energy. And then in the evening, when they get home because it's dark outside, they tend to turn the lights much brighter. You actually want to do the reverse. Now there's an even simpler solution, which is to get some bright sunlight in your eyes right around the time of sunset. It doesn't have to be exactly at sunset, it could be in the late afternoon and evening. But it's been shown now in studies on humans, and I'll provide a link to at least one of those studies, that by getting some bright light in your eyes, ideally from sunlight, in the late afternoon and evening. And, of course, the timing will vary depending on time of year and where you are located on the planet. But facing the sun around sunset, you don't actually have to see the sun cross down below the horizon, but facing the sun around that time for anywhere from 5 to 10 minutes or even less, even two to five minutes, can adjust the sensitivity of neurons in your retina that communicate light information to the brain and make it such that in the evening when you use artificial lights, they aren't going to have as much of a detrimental effect on your dopamine system and for impairing your sleep. So the idea is as much bright light, ideally from sunlight but also from artificial sources, from the time you wake up in the morning until the evening. Maybe around 6:00 or 7:00. Maybe in the summer months, a little bit later. And then really try and get as little bright light in your eyes as you can in the evening and nighttime hours. And ideally, you would also get some sunlight exposure right around the time of sunset or in the late afternoon. Go outside, take your sunglasses off. Don't try and do this through a windshield or through a window. It will not work. You have to get outside. If you're under an overhang, at least try and get some direct sunlight in your eyes at that time. And that will adjust the sensitivity of your retina such that bright artificial lights or artificial lights of any kind that you're exposed to in the evening and in the late hours of the night won't have as much of a detrimental effect. That said, if you go to the bathroom in the middle of the night, try and keep the lights dim. Many people have asked whether or not, for instance, a nightlight or a flashlight is going to have as much of a negative effect. This is very straightforward. If you think about it, if you shine a light at something, you can see into your environment. If you've ever been camping or you've walked with a flashlight, you can see things around you that you wouldn't otherwise, of course. But if you were to shine that light in your eyes, it would be far brighter. So yes, of course, if you get up in the middle of the night and you can use your phone flashlight to illuminate the environment that you're in so that you can safely go to where you need to go and then back to bed, that's going to be far better than turning on the lights or, of course, shining light in your eyes, right. So the idea is bright, bright, bright in the morning and throughout the day. And as dim and dark as possible at night. And that afternoon light viewing provides, sort of, what I call a Netflix inoculation that will allow you to adjust your retinal sensitivity and give you a little bit more flexibility in terms of allowing some nighttime light exposure without the detrimental effects. Now I realize today's episode is about happiness, it's not about sunlight or dopamine. And yet, as we'll talk about more in just a moment, if you're not optimizing your sleep and if you are using or being exposed to light rather at the wrong times of the day/night cycle, that is going to make it very hard for the other sorts of practices that relate to happiness to have their full impact. So the backdrop, where I would say the kind of landscape of your chemicals and your hormones, is powerfully controlled by not just the brightness of light but the timing of light and your exposure to light. In particular, your exposure to light to your eyes is something that you have a lot of control over. You don't have absolute control, but you have a lot of control over. And it's been proven that even these small steps, which are completely cost-free. They require just a few minutes of time, but no purchase a product or anything else can allow you to greatly adjust your neurochemistry and your hormones in the direction of better mood, better sleep, and happiness. Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is, however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science-related tools for the general public. In keeping with that theme, I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast. Our first sponsor is Thesis. Thesis makes custom nootropics. And as I've said many times before on this podcast, I am not a fan of the word nootropics because it means smart drugs. And frankly, there are no specific neural circuits in the brain or body for being quote-unquote smart. Thesis understands this, and they've developed custom nootropics that are designed to bring your brain and body into the state that's ideal for what you need to accomplish. They use the highest quality ingredients, things like phosphatidylserine, alpha GPC, many ingredients that I've talked about before on this podcast and that I happen to use myself. I've been using Thesis for over a year now, and I can confidently say that their nootropics have been a game changer. For me, I like their nootropic for clarity. I used that before cognitive work often. And I like their nootropic for energy. And I often used that before workouts. In particular, workouts that are especially intense. To get your own personalized nootropic starter kit, go online to takethesis.com/huberman. Take their 3-minute quiz, and these will send you four different formulas to try in your first month. Again that's takethesis.com/huberman. And use the code Huberman at checkout to get 10% off your first box. Today's episode is also brought to us by InsideTracker. InsideTracker is a personalized nutrition platform that analyzes data from your blood and DNA to help me better understand your body and help you meet your health goals. I've long been a believer in getting regular blood work done for the simple reason that many of the factors that impact your immediate and long-term health can only be analyzed with a quality blood test. One of the problems with a lot of blood tests and DNA tests out there, however, is that you get information back about lipids and levels of hormones and levels of metabolic factors and so on, but you don't know what to do with that information. InsideTracker has a very easy-to-use online site where you can monitor your levels. And you can click on any specific marker, any specific hormone, or metabolic factor, and it will tell you the behavioral tools, for instance, exercise, the nutrition tools, and the supplementation-based tools that you can use in order to bring those numbers into the appropriate ranges for your immediate and long-term health goals. If you'd like to try InsideTracker, you can visit insidetracker.com/huberman to get 20% off any of InsideTracker's plan. Again that's insidetracker.com/huberman to get 20% off. Today's episode is also brought to us by Helix Sleep. Helix makes mattresses and pillows that are of the absolute highest quality. I started sleeping on a Helix mattress well over a year ago, and it's been the best sleep that I've ever had. One of the things that makes Helix mattresses so unique is that they match the design of the mattress to your unique sleep needs. So, for instance, if you go on to their website, you can take a brief quiz. It's only takes about two or three minutes. And you'll answer questions like do you tend to run hot or cold throughout the night. Or whether or not you sleep on your back, your side, or your stomach, or maybe you don't know. Regardless, they will match you to the custom mattress that's ideal for your sleep needs. For me that was the dusk D-U-S-K mattress. Which, for me, was not too firm, not too soft, and was ideal for my sleep patterns. You take the quiz, and you'll find out what mattress is ideal for your sleep patterns. So if you're interested in upgrading your mattress, go to helixsleep.com/huberman, take their brief sleep quiz, and they'll match you to a customized mattress. And you'll get up to $200 off any mattress order and two free pillows. They have a 10-year warranty. And you get to try out the mattress for 100 nights risk-free. Again, if you're interested, you can go to helixsleep.com/huberman for up to $200 off and two free pillows. Let's talk about happiness. This thing that everybody seems to want, and yet not everybody can agree on what exactly it is or how to get it. Now I want to start by quoting a previous guest on the Huberman Lab podcast. And that is a colleague of mine at Stanford School of Medicine, Dr. Karl Deisseroth, who's both a bioengineer and a clinician. That is, he's a psychiatrist who spends a lot of his time both running a laboratory and seeing patients, human patients, of course. And I once was at a meeting where I heard Karl say something to the extent of we don't know what other people feel. In fact, most of the time, we don't even really know how we feel. And while that statement was meant to report several different things about the way that the brain works and emotions, et cetera, one of the things that he was emphasizing, and I know he was emphasizing it because he confirmed this for me, was the fact that language. Things like the word happiness, or joy, or meaning, or pleasure, or delight, are actually not very precise when it comes to describing our brain and body states. So, for instance, if I tell you I'm feeling pretty happy. I know what that means for me, at least in this moment, but you don't really know whether or not it means the same thing as what pretty happy means for you. If I say I'm extremely happy and I have a big grin. I have a grin on my face that I can't seem to wipe off my face. Well, then, you might get a sense of how much happier I am than pretty happy. But it's still hard to calibrate my level of internal state or happiness, and the same is true for you and for everybody else. And it's important for us to acknowledge this because at this point in human history, 2022, we don't really have a measurement like body temperature or heart rate or heart rate variability or even a way to measure neurochemicals in the brain and body that give us anything better than a crude correlate or an estimate, at best, of what happiness is. So that's really important to understand and to keep in mind throughout this episode. It doesn't mean that we cannot have a strong data-driven conversation about happiness and what brings us to a state of happiness. But it's very important to understand that language is not an ideal and maybe even a deficient tool in terms of describing our emotions and our states of mind and body. Now equally important is to understand that while we do have neurotransmitters, that is, the chemicals that are released between neurons, nerve cells that allow neurons to communicate, things like glutamate and gaba, for instance. And we have what are called modulators. These are chemicals also released by neurons that impact the electrical firing and chemical release of other neurons. Things like serotonin, and dopamine, and acetylcholine, and epinephrine. Neuromodulators and neurotransmitters are always present in a cocktail in our brain and body. That is, they are present in different ratios and at different levels. So we need to completely discard with the idea that any one neurotransmitter or any one neuromodulator is solely responsible for a state of happiness or for a lack of state of happiness, for that matter. That said, it is true that for people that tend to have lower baseline levels of, for instance, dopamine, their levels of happiness, or we should say their self-reported levels of happiness, tend to be lower than for those that have greatly elevated baseline levels of dopamine. Now, this can be best appreciated at the extremes where, for instance, in conditions like Parkinson's disease or other conditions where people's levels of dopamine in their brain is severely depleted. Mind you, we also see this in drug-addicted individuals that are in a withdrawal state because they're trying to quit or they don't have access to the drug that normally stimulates release of dopamine. Think the cocaine addict who can't get cocaine. Or the methamphetamine addict that can't or is trying to avoid taking methamphetamine. Or the Parkinson's patient who has fewer dopamine neurons because they degenerated. Those individuals do tend to be more depressed. They tend to have lower affect. They are less happy. At least, that's how they report themselves to be emotionally. And that's what we observe when we look at them behaviorally in terms of the amount of smiling, the amount of energy they seem to have. At the opposite extreme. And while still focusing on the kind of pathology of neurotransmitter and neuromodulator systems, an individual who is in a manic phase of bipolar will tend to have very elevated levels of dopamine. And those people will talk a mile a minute, and they won't require sleep. And at least to them, every idea is an exciting idea and one that they want to pursue. We did an entire episode about bipolar depression, A.K.A. Bipolar disorder. So if you'd like to learn more about that, please check out that episode. That and all other episodes of the podcast, of course, you can find it hubermanlab.com in all formats. But the point here is that very low levels are very high levels of dopamine are correlated with certain states of, for instance, low happiness or the absence of happiness. We could even call it depression in some cases. Or extreme happiness or even euphoria. Sometimes even inappropriate euphoria, as is the case with bipolar depression or sometimes called bipolar mania or bipolar disorder. Now, of course, there's a range in between depressed and manic. And most people, fortunately reside somewhere in that range. And it is indeed a continuum. And I think it's safe to say that levels of dopamine probably do correlate with levels of happiness. But there is no one single chemical nor chemical signature, that is, no specific recipe of two parts dopamine, to one part serotonin, to one part acetylcholine that we can say equates to happiness. Indeed there's now tremendous controversy as to whether or not, for instance, having lower levels of serotonin is actually the cause of depression or merely correlates with depression or maybe doesn't even correlate with depression, at all. This became especially controversial because, in the last year, the so-called serotonin hypothesis of depression has been called into question. And indeed, it does seem to be the case that for individuals that are depressed, their levels of serotonin can sometimes be normal. However, and this is an important however, that does not mean that administering drugs that increase levels of serotonin in depressed people does not sometimes and indeed often help ameliorate some of their symptoms. And I should mention that many of the selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors. So-called SSRIs such as Prozac and Zoloft, et cetera, are still considered excellent treatments for conditions like OCD and so on and so forth. But what I'm trying to do is make two important points. First of all, that language is not a great indicator of internal state. Especially when trying to understand other people's internal state. And that is especially true for things like happiness. And that there is no one chemical signature of happiness. There's no one neural modulator or combinations of neuromodulators that we can say is the cocktail for happiness. But, and it's a very important, but when levels of dopamine and serotonin tend to be chronically low for an individual below their typical baseline, they will, yes, tend to be lower in affect and have lower mood and less episodes of happiness per day, per week, per month, per year, et cetera. Conversely, when an individual has elevations in dopamine and serotonin levels, in particular dopamine levels and the other so-called catecholamines, which include epinephrine and norepinephrine. So the catecholamines are dopamine, epinephrine, and norepinephrine. They're all very similar biochemically. They all lead to states of elevated motivation, energy, and so on. When those chemicals are elevated above baseline, people do tend to have elevated sense of mood and well-being, and in particular sense of possibility about what they can do in the world and what the world can offer them. So we need to acknowledge those two features of language and neurochemistry as we wade into the discussion about the psychology of happiness. And, in particular, about the controlled experiments that have been done in excellent laboratories focused on the psychology of happiness and what brings happiness and what does not. There have been some excellent studies on happiness. And these come in two forms generally. One form of these studies is individuals come into a laboratory. They participate in an experiment over the course of a day or months. And then, data are collected analyzed, and the papers are submitted, and published, and discussed. The other form is so-called longitudinal study. Where individuals come into the laboratory, and they are studied over a very long period of time. Ranging from months to years and sometimes even decades. And then, the variables of age, life circumstances, and other factors can be incorporated into the data. And typically, there are multiple papers, there's data published throughout the longitudinal study, or sometimes it's just one paper at the end of the longitudinal study. Let's talk about one of the more famous and perhaps the longest-running longitudinal study on happiness. This is a study that was initiated or conceived in 1938 at Harvard University. The so-called Harvard Happiness Project. Some of you probably heard about this. It involved Harvard College sophomores and other individuals who were incorporated into this study as well. It's a study that initially had more than a couple of hundred subjects. But because some have either dropped out and not been able to be contacted and monitored over time or died, or for whatever reason, are no longer participating in the study, they're very few of these individuals left. And yet there's tremendous power to a study like this. It's such an impressive study, and we're all so grateful that laboratories at Harvard decided to initiate and continue this study because it is one of the few studies, perhaps the study that has allowed us to understand happiness in our species over a very long period of time. Like any study, it's not perfect. It didn't include a lot of matching by sex or matching by vocation, or matching by income and background. And back then, there was also a lot less discussion about trauma and histories around trauma, as well as positive episodes in people's lives. Nonetheless, there's a lot of power in a study like this. And there are some very basic takeaways, some of which you may have heard before but some of which may be surprising those of you who haven't. So one of the key things about the study is people in the study, at least those who still have intact memory, which many of them do, are able to think back on not just their previous year or week but 10 years ago, 20 years ago, 50 years ago and compare what makes them happy at one age versus another age. A number of things have emerged from that conversation. So I just want to discuss some of the highlight points then we'll get into a little bit more of the nitty-gritty of the data. First of all, it's been discussed many, many times that the total amount of income that an individual makes or has, and again, this could be income from work, or it could be money that they inherited, does not seem to directly relate to their level of happiness. Now a lot of people take that point and think, oh, money doesn't matter. Other people hear that point and think to themselves, yeah, right, easy to say if you have a lot of money. We'll talk about the interpretation of those data in just a few minutes. But I do want to earmark that finding. Because I agree that while money or total resources itself does not predict happiness in any kind of direct way, that is not the same thing as saying having very few resources will make you happier, of course. I don't think anyone would imagine that. But it also tends to overlook an important point, which is something that I certainly have learned to appreciate in my life and something that I especially appreciated when I was a student and post-doc, which is the following. People will say money can't buy happiness. And we'll talk about the buy aspect of that in a moment. And indeed, that's true. If you look at this longitudinal study or you look at other studies that are done on a more short-term basis. Once people get past a certain level of income relative to their cost of living, the amount of happiness does not scale with that income. That is, for every additional $1,000 or $10,000 that they earn, they don't report being that much happier on a daily basis. Now that said, I venture the argument that while money truly cannot buy happiness, it absolutely can buffer stress. And in particular, it can buffer stress in the form of the ability to purchase or pay for goods and services, and in particular services. You're not going to tell me that having children doesn't involve some increase in the demands on your life, less sleep, and more demands. And it certainly is the case that if you can hire help to clean. You can hire nannies if that's your thing. You can hire help to assist with babysitting or even night nurses if you're having trouble sleeping that will literally allow you to sleep while they take care of your child in the middle of the night. Often give excellent care. One hopes excellent care. That that won't offset some of the stress associated with lack of sleep. So there are a million different examples one could give of this, but I certainly experienced this during graduate school. In fact, I experience both sides of the equation here. I made very little money as a graduate student. I had essentially no savings when I started graduate school, and I made very little money. The amount doesn't matter at this point, but I could just barely afford rent and my food. I actually opted to live in the laboratory a lot of the time. And by doing that, I had more money to spend on other things that were important to me. Now I did not have a family at the time, and so I was able to do that. Something that not everyone can do. But I made very little money, but at the same time, I was in laboratory all the time, and that's where I wanted to be. And so my level of stress was actually pretty low because I was investing all my time and energy into the very thing that I knew would eventually help bring me more resources. When I moved from being a graduate student to a postdoc, for instance. A postdoc is generally a three to five-year period. It's sort of like residency in medicine, where you're no longer taking courses, but you continue to do research. In fact, entire new lines of research and prior to getting a professorship. My income went up slightly, went up by about 30% to 40%. But because of where I moved and because of the times, my cost of living went way, way up and I was extremely stressed. So it wasn't my absolute income, it was my absolute income relative to my cost of living. The other thing that one needs to consider when considering income versus cost of living is there's also this notion of peer group. And we're going to talk more about social bonds and connections later. But one thing that I noticed when I moved from being a graduate student to a postdoc was I was a graduate student in a small town where I had access if I chose to participate in most, if not all, of the social gatherings because they were all very low cost. People tended to aggregate at the farmer's market on Saturday. Most people wouldn't even purchase anything, at least not the graduate students wouldn't purchase anything. It was just a place to aggregate. People sometimes play pickup games of soccer or just hang out have a cup of coffee. There was a volleyball game on Fridays. Sometimes people would go out to eat that evening, which of course, costs money, et cetera, but it was relatively low cost of living. And social connections and peer group interactions were all generated around the same fairly low-cost activities. When I transitioned to being a postdoc, I made more money, but cost of living went up. But in addition to that, my peer group tended to want to engage in the same kinds of activities that people in that larger city were engaged in. So peer group has a tremendously powerful influence on whether or not we gauge the amount of money that we have as bringing us happiness or not. And that really speaks to the critical importance of social interactions and certain kinds of social interactions, in particular. Now, if any of that was unclear, what I'm basically saying is it's not just about being able to pay your rent. It's also about being able to access the kinds of social interactions that you deem are quote-unquote correct for you at that stage of life and in the place where you happen to be living. Because if you can meet all the demands of costs of rent and paying your power bill and food, et cetera, but you are socially isolated because your peer group, or those around you that you want to engage with, are engaging in activities that you either don't have time for, literally, because you're doing other things or that you don't have the financial resources for, then that can actually severely impact this rating of what we call happiness. Why am I parsing this so finally? Well, I'm parsing and finally because I think that most of us have heard the outcome of this study from Harvard or the more short-term studies, also many of which are from Harvard. We'll talk about the just phenomenal work from Dan Gilbert's laboratory and other laboratories who have focused on issues like these. And I certainly don't want to take anything away from those results. They're very powerful and important results that really point over and over to the fact that people's happiness does not necessarily scale with income. In fact, it tends not to past a certain level, and yet I think we'd be remiss, I think actually it would be inappropriate for me to say that the amount of income that one makes is not important. Because if the amount of money that you happen to have or are making does not allow you to meet your basic needs of shelter, health care, et cetera. And/or doesn't allow you to access the kind of social interactions that can renew and reset or, I would say, directly enhance the kind of neurotransmitter systems and hormones that lead us to feel that we are happy in our life and we're having quality social connections, well then that's very stressful. And this brings me back to the statement I made earlier, which is, indeed, money cannot buy happiness, but it certainly can buffer stress. And one of the ways that it buffers stress is by allowing options of different kinds of social interactions. Options of different types of recreation that one can engage in to access new forms of social interaction and so on and so on. So we need to be a little bit careful or at least nuanced about this statement that money can't buy happiness and that the data support the fact that wealth doesn't determine happiness. I think there is a truth to that but there's another side to that, I think is less often acknowledged and that certainly I've experienced and that I think many of you out there have probably experienced as well. One other major finding of the Harvard longitudinal study on happiness, as well as shorter-term studies on happiness, is that much as you've heard, perhaps that no one on their deathbed says they wish they had worked more, well indeed, the total amount of time that one spends working does not seem to determine one's happiness. And yet I also want to earmark that result as one that we need to parse a bit more carefully. Because work, last time I checked and certainly for me, is the way typically that people earn an income. And as we just talked about a moment ago, income is often a way that people have access to or provide access for their family to things like recreation that opens up the opportunity for more social connection, right. So we have to be careful with how we interpret these blanket statements that have become very popular that money doesn't determine happiness and that the amount that you work isn't going to determine happiness. It certainly is the case that if you earn more money from working more and that money is devoted to things that bring more opportunities for social connection or for buffering stress in other areas of your life, including health care, care for your children, care for yourself, recreation, other things that you enjoy, well then I think it's a little bit naive to assume that work itself is somehow counter to happiness. Which, of course, it isn't. And it especially isn't if we combine that feature of work with another important feature of the human psyche, which is this notion of meaning. Now in the not-too-distant future, we will do an episode of this podcast on meaning and what constitutes meaning in a given endeavor, work or otherwise. But much of the psychology of the last century, and still today, focuses on this feature of meaning as a critical one in terms of what makes us happy and what doesn't make us happy, certainly in the long term. And I can certainly say for myself that learning and teaching, and doing research in my laboratory brings me tremendous feeling of meaning and happiness. Some people consider their work simply a way to gain a paycheck, and other people find that they would do the very work they do regardless of whether or not they were paid. In fact, many people will do volunteer work and other forms of work for zero money. So this idea that money isn't important or that work is not as important as we deem it to be, that also needs to be considered from a number of different perspectives. And again, by no means am I trying to undermine the data of these impressive studies, both the longitudinal and short-term studies, but I think we do have to be cautious in our discussion of results like these because the internet is replete with conversations about the big factors that determine happiness. It's going to be social connection, not income. It's going to be the amount of time that you are able to have open thinking and creativity, which I think is an essential feature of happiness, by the way. Physical health. In particular, one's ability to stay mobile and to be able to access the kind of daily activities that one needs to accomplish unassisted is a strong correlate of happiness and so on and so on. And, of course, there are the basic physiology factors. The things that feed back onto our overall feelings of well-being. And I've talked about these before, and we'll just put these quickly into a bin. You can think of this as a toolkit of things that you and everyone really should be constantly trying to access, if not optimize, on a regular basis because they raise the tide or what I would call the buoyancy of your overall system, meaning your brain and body. And that would be getting sufficient deep sleep at least 80% of the nights of your life. And ideally, the remaining 20% you're not getting deep sleep or as much of it because of positive events. Quality nutrition. Quality social interactions. And we will define that a little bit better. In fact, we will define that in a lot of detail later in this episode and actually how to get better at creating quality social interactions, even very brief social interactions. So we have sleep, we have nutrition, we have social interactions. We have purposeful work, whether or not it's paid work or non-paid work. And, of course, there are things like exercise and maybe relationships to pets and things of that sort. And there are a few others as well. All of those are known to increase your overall state of well-being, that puts you in a position to access more meaning and happiness, et cetera. But for most people, I think it's fair to say that earning a living. And earning a living by working is the typical way in which we spend most of our time. So I think we need to put a special bracket around those activities. And it's something we will return to a little bit later in terms of trying to understand how periods of life in which there are big or extensive work demands or extensive family demands on us are indeed compatible with states of happiness or frequent states of happiness and how better to access those. Rather than simply say money isn't important or the amount of time at work really isn't important. That's not what people are going to pay attention to. In fact, I don't know how I will feel on my deathbed. How could I? Human beings are pretty good about understanding how they feel in the present. If not describing it, they are pretty good at feeling it if they have any sense of internal state. That is interception. And you could have some idea of how you feel in a moment. We're pretty good about describing our past feelings, at least in broad contour, but we are not very good at projecting how we will feel in the future. And in fact, that's a theme that's going to come up again and again today. Nonetheless, what we do know on the basis of really solid data are that certain aspects of our well-being tend to change across our lifespan. Now lifespan is something that we need to consider from also a bit of nuance because humans are indeed living longer and longer. And if we look at the data on happiness across the lifespan dated maybe 30 or 40 years back or even 20 years ago, it is consistently described in that literature as a so-called u-shaped function. Where people in their 20s report being very, very happy, but as time goes on and they acquire more responsibility. So typically, getting married and having children in their mid to late 20s and 30s and into their 40s. Having more work demands, et cetera, happiness tends to be rated lower and lower, at least in those previous studies. And then happiness tended to increase as people approach their 50s and 60s. And they tended to retire, and their work demands were shed from them, and they were able to enjoy the small things of life despite the fact that, in general, I would say almost always people's health is not as vigorous when they're 70 as it is when they're 20. There are exceptions to that, of course. Of course, you can adjust the rate of cognitive and physical decline. But in general, people in their 20s feel more physically and mentally vigorous than they do in their 60s and 70s, in general. That u-shaped function that I just described still holds true today, but of course, there have been some major shifts to the general life stages and when people undergo those life stages. For instance, many people are getting married much later. Many people are opting to not have children. In fact, if you look at the data on whether or not people have children or not and how that relates to happiness, everyone will tell you that their kids are their greatest source of joy, at least most people will tell you that and are a tremendous source of happiness. It's obvious. Kids are delightful, and raising kids while hard is a wonderful experience. If you look at the ratings of happiness among people that elected to not have children versus those that had, most people who have children report their overall levels of happiness as lower than that of people who opt not to have children. Now there are a lot of ways to interpret those findings. And by no means am I encouraging people to not have children. That's a issue that you have to resolve for yourself, of course. But we could imagine, for instance, that people who opt not to have children have more income to devote to things more focused on themselves or their partner or other aspects of their life. We don't know if that's the underlying reason. We could perhaps conclude that people who opt not to have children are getting more sleep on a regular basis or have more time for exercise or the other sorts of things that elevate states of mood and well-being. Again we do not know what the underlying reasons are for this finding. But it does seem that despite most every parent reporting that their kids are their greatest source of joy and quote-unquote happiness in life that people who opt not to have children are at least as happy or report being at least as happy or even happier than those that opt to have children. And, of course, I want to be very clear that I'm not trying to settle any arguments about whether or not people should have children or not. I happen to find children and animals delightful. And I'm always happy when people opt to have children provided they are taking good care of their children or doing their very best to take good care of their children. So that's my stance. But of course, you're all entitled to your own stance on this. There are also the general arguments that people like to have about whether or not the population of the Earth will be sustained or not sustained based on current birth rates, et cetera. Indeed many areas of the world, birth rates are going down. It is actually something that just as a perhaps point of interest has been studied from the somewhat unusual but logical perspective of whether or not child diapers are selling at the same rate as they were some years ago and whether or not adult diapers for the elderly are being sold at the same rate or greater. If you think about it is one indirect measure of whether or not people are living longer and/or opting to have children. Definitely in discussion for another time, probably for another podcast entirely. I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge one of our sponsors Athletic Greens. Athletic Greens, now called AG1, is a vitamin-mineral probiotic drink that covers all of your foundational nutritional needs. I've been taking Athletic Greens since 2012, so I'm delighted that they're sponsoring the podcast. The reason I started taking Athletic Greens, and the reason I still take Athletic Greens once or usually twice a day, is that it gets me the probiotics that I need for gut health. Our gut is very important. It's populated by gut microbiota that communicate with the brain, the immune system, and basically all the biological systems of our body to strongly impact our immediate and long-term health. And those probiotics and Athletic Greens are optimal and vital for microbiotic health. In addition, Athletic Greens contains a number of adaptogens, vitamins, and minerals that make sure that all of my foundational nutritional needs are met. And it tastes great. If you'd like to try Athletic Greens, you can go to athleticgreens.com/huberman, and they'll give you five free travel packs that make it really easy to mix up Athletic Greens while you're on the road, in the car, on the plane, et cetera. And they'll give you a year supply of vitamin D3K2. Again that's athleticgreens.com/huberman to get the five free travel packs and the year supply of vitamin D3K2. So this u-shaped function of people being happier earlier in life and then reporting feeling far less happy and then happiness returning to them, that is, the rising of the u again in their later years, is something that I do believe should be repeated in modern times. And repeated in a way that takes into account that you might be shifted to the right. That is, I am certainly aware that people are tending to get married later. Many are opting to not have children. So, for instance, the question arises whether or not that u-shaped curve should have a bump down at the bottom of the u among those that opt not to have children. Because the argument was made in the discussion of those papers that the reason why happiness is lower when people are in their 30s, 40s, and 50s is because they're devoting more time to raising their children and devoting more time to work. I would hope people would enjoy their work, but not everybody really enjoys their work. And many people, even if they do enjoy their work and they find meaning in it, still find it stressful, which certainly can run counter to happiness. Nowadays, you could imagine that because a number of people are opting perhaps to work less or to not have children or both, where they find tremendous meaning from their work that there would be a bump at the bottom of that u among those that decided to simply not take on these additional responsibilities. That would be an interesting test, I think, of whether or not the total load of responsibility is really what's correlating with reported happiness or not. Now one very consistent finding that has absolutely stood the test of time, and it's kind of an interesting one. It's a little bit of a pop psychology finding, but I think it points to something interesting that we will return to again and again is that people tend to report feeling lower levels of happiness, believe it or not, on their birthday. And the argument for why this is the following. That typically, we go through our year not comparing ourselves to our peers terribly much. We might do that a little bit more when we're in elementary school, high school, et cetera. We're sort of age match, maybe even college as well. But an evaluation of ourselves to our age-match peers is not typically something that we do on a daily basis. Whereas on our birthday, we get a snapshot of where we are in the arc of time, or at least in our life. And many people report feeling rather low on their birthday because they use that as a benchmark or a window into the things that they have not accomplished. The things that, despite being age blank, they still haven't accomplished. And so that's interesting because what it really points to is two things. One the extent to which much of our feelings of happiness are relative, in particular, relative to our peers. So there's that social aspect again. And the fact that most of the time, we are not very good at orienting ourselves in the longer arc of time. We're pretty good at knowing where we are in the arc of a day, or the arc of a week, or the arc of a month, or even a year, but that most of us are not very good at reflecting on where we are in our life arc. And, of course, most of us don't know how long we will live anyway, but we do have some general sense. I mean, very few people live past the age of 100. Many people live to be 70 or 80. And again, life span is extending as far as we know from year to year. But, in general, people report that on their birthdays. And I should say these are for birthdays aged 25 or later, at least in the studies I was able to access. I don't think that a lot of three-year-olds sit around comparing themselves to other three-year-olds and how well they're doing or 12-year-olds. You can imagine some people might do that at 18, et cetera. But it's really by the mid-20s that people start evaluating themselves to their peers in terms of life progression and so-called milestones. It's been argued that that's one of the reasons why people report lower affect, lower levels of happiness on their birthday. Something that's a little bit counterintuitive. And, of course, there are things that are anti-correlated with happiness. I'd be remiss if I didn't mention a few of these. That's longitudinal study, the Harvard happiness project has reported, for instance, that people that are chronic smokers of nicotine and chronic consumers of alcohol, in particular alcoholics. That is, people who suffer from alcoholism or what sometimes is called alcohol use disorder that is strongly anti-correlated with happiness. And I should also mention that the family members, and in particular, the romantic partners of people who are chronic smokers and the partners of people who are chronic alcohol users, often will report lower levels of happiness. Especially if they themselves are not chronic smokers or regular consumers of alcohol. So we've done episodes on nicotine in particular, and that touched on smoking, of course. And we've done an episode on alcohol and the effects of alcohol on health. Again, you can find those at hubermanlab.com. This study from the Harvard happiness project really has strong data supporting the fact that avoiding being a nicotine smoker. There are positive health effects of nicotine that are discussed in the episode nicotine. But being a-- but smoking nicotine, in particular, is counterproductive for people's at least self-reported happiness and certainly overall health. I think there's zero question that smoking increases cancers of different kinds. And that alcohol consumption. And in particular, alcohol consumption beyond two drinks per week. Two drinks being the typical volume of a beer, a glass of wine or cocktail, et cetera, is detrimental for various aspects of health. And, of course, there are other things that you could imagine would relate to a lack of happiness. For instance, a major trauma. Physical or emotional trauma. That could include the loss of a major relationship, a death of a close one. Being the victim of a violent crime and things of that sort. And yet it's been argued, in fact, strongly argued that when you look at people's levels of happiness after a trauma, that if you wait about a year or so, sometimes is even as short as three months after a trauma, that people self-reported levels of happiness are not significantly lower than they were prior to the trauma. Now I very much want to highlight, underline, and bold and asterisks that statement as one that we really need to explore carefully. Because there are other data that strongly point to the fact that major life traumas can severely disrupt one sense of happiness and well-being. And I think as long as we're going to have this discussion, we should point to a useful definition of trauma. And the definition that I'll paraphrase is one that was supplied by a former guest on the Huberman Lab podcast, Dr. Paul Conti, who's a psychiatrist who's written a book called Trauma. I personally think it's the best book on trauma and tools for alleviating trauma. It's incredibly thorough, easy to read, and well-informed. And here again, I'm paraphrasing, but Dr. Conti describes trauma as something that fundamentally changes the way that our brain and body function in a way that makes other aspects of living more challenging. Again, an event, either emotional or physical, or both, that fundamentally changes the way that our brain and/or body, our nervous system, and other organs function in a way that prevents us from enjoying daily activities. And that could even be ongoing distraction. Traumas can create rumination, or they can create obsessive thought, or they can create dissociation. Any number of different things. Again check out that episode with Dr. Paul Conti if you'd like to learn more about trauma and how it manifests. But the idea that's been put forth by a number of researchers in the field of happiness that three months after a major trauma, people aren't reported that they are feeling any less happy than before the trauma, that was surprising to me. So I went into this literature a bit more deeply. One of the basis of that general line of thinking is a-- what I consider a now classic and very important and frankly excellent talk that was given by Professor Dan Gilbert on the science of happiness. You can find this on YouTube. I say a classic one because it was done some years ago. It's received millions of views. And one of the points that he makes in that talk which is grounded in research carried out by his laboratory and other laboratories is that-- he poses a question. He says you know, let's do a quiz. Would you rather be someone who wins the lottery and he shows a picture of somebody who just won, I think it was several hundreds of millions of dollars in the lottery, or was recently made paraplegic lost use of their legs? And then goes on to state that one year after people have won the lottery, this major monetary windfall versus have become paraplegic is that their self-reported levels of happiness are the same. Which I think is incredibly surprising. I heard this, and I immediately thought of an experience that I've had where I teach a course at Stanford School of Medicine on neural regeneration. And it's actually a course that I attended some years ago when I was a post-doc at Stanford, so well over a decade ago. And we had-- excuse me. We had an individual come into the course. This was an older gentleman. So older meaning he was in his early 70s. And he had become paraplegic fairly late in life from a cycling accident. And he was and is an expert in what it is to become a paraplegic, of course, because he had that experience, but also because he spends a lot of his time doing volunteer work with people who have become paraplegic and have become paraplegic at different ages. And what he described to me was that the overall outcomes for people that are rendered paraplegic in terms of their mental health and their physical well-being and their management of general life skills scales with how early they had that injury and how long they had the use of their limbs. So it's not straightforward. When I heard this result described by Dr. Dan Gilbert, that winning the lottery and becoming paraplegic basically don't impact your levels of happiness to any different degree when people look back a year later, I was pretty surprised given my experience of hearing this lecture at Stanford. So I thought, wow, from what I understand. Indeed, there are people who are rendered paraplegic and manage that transition very easily. It doesn't seem to disrupt their feelings of well-being, et cetera, but for other people, it can be severely disrupting to their sense of well-being and so on and so forth. I went back and examined these data. And in fact, a subsequent talk, it's actually a podcast that was given by Dr. Dan Gilbert some years later. So this would be just a few years ago. I think in 2019-- there is a specific date in which it was recorded but just a few years ago. And indeed, he corrects himself in that podcast. What he says is that he misspoke in that earlier talk. That the difference in self-reported levels of happiness for those that have been rendered paraplegic for versus those who've won the lottery is not as great as one would expect. I think most people would expect that being rendered paraplegic would make people far less happy. That's the expectation, I think, anyway. And that people would win the lottery, at least for some period of time, would be far happier than they were prior to winning the lottery. And especially given the tremendous amount of money. And again, the fact that money can't buy happiness, but that money does indeed enable the ability to buffer stress provided people were responsible with that money and just didn't blow it or spend it all right away. That they could start to afford things that they couldn't afford, not just in terms of luxury items but also the ability to hire help that would free up time that would allow them to do anything from travel that they couldn't access before to meditate if that was something that they didn't have time to do before. And so on and so forth. So the result quote unquote that winners of the lottery and recent paraplegics have the same levels of happiness is actually not true. At least ing to the author of the original study. Now what he did not point to is the degree to which that is not true, but he did point to the direction of the result. And the fact that people who are rendered paraplegic, in fact, are reporting thems