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 in 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, we can come up with so called operational definitions of happiness, operational definitions, are basically agreed upon terms were 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 to something like happiness can be micro divided and sliced and diced into as many things as we decide. Today, we're really going to focus on three main things. First, we're 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're 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. And 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 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, etc, etc. 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 an 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 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, is 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, etc. 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, etc. 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 five to 20 minutes depending on how cloudy it is, in the early part of the day, absolutely outsized effects on mood and focus during the day and quality of sleep at night. Now there's another 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 10pm to 4am. Now leaving shiftworkers aside, and we have an entire episode devoted to shiftwork, 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 10pm and 4am. 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 10pm and 4am 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 an effect. So that's a reason to dim the lights or avoid bright lights between 10pm and 4am. However, I and many others need to use artificial light and screens, sometimes even between the hours of 10pm and midnight or even midnight to 3am. 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 using artificial lights between the hours of 10pm and 4am. 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 10pm to 4am, but also in the evening hours from six to 10pm, 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're 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 6pm until bedtime, or if you can't do that then maybe the As soon as you get home from about 8pm, until bedtime, and then dim them way, way down between 10pm and 4pm are off entirely. That's going to be a far better pattern for your sleep wake cycles, focus, mood, et cetera, then 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 sun set, you don't actually have to see the sun crossed down below the horizon, but facing the sun around that time, for anywhere from five 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. Okay, 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 six or seven o'clock, 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, we're in the late afternoon, go outside, take your sunglasses off, don't try and do this through windshield or through 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 realized 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, or I would say that 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 neuro chemistry 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 phosphor deitel serine 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 new tropic for clarity. I use that before cognitive work often, and I like their new tropic for energy and often use that before workouts in particular workouts that are especially intense. To get your own personalized nootropic starter kit go online to take thesis.com/ubermann Take their three minute quiz and thesis will send you four different formulas to try in your first month. Again, that's take thesis.com/ubermann 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 you 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 inside tracker, you can visit inside tracker.com/ubermann to get 20% off any of inside trackers plan again, that's inside tracker.com/huberman to get 20% off. Today's episode is also brought to us by helix sleep helix makes mattresses and pillows that are 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 onto 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 of 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 us k mattress, which for me was not too firm not to soften 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 helix sleep.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 helix sleep.com/superman 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 upon 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 Carl 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, etc. 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 grin on my face, I can't seem to wipe off my face. Well, then you might get a sense of how much happier I am then 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 neuro chemicals 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 neuro 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, we're trying to avoid taking methamphetamine. With a Parkinson's patient who has fewer dopamine neurons, because they degenerated. Those individuals do tend to be more depressed, they tend to have lower aspects, they are less happy, at least that's how they report themselves to be emotionally. And that's what we observe. When we look 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, aka bipolar disorder. So if you'd like to learn more about that, please check out that episode, that in all other episodes of the podcast, of course, you can find it Huberman lab.com, and 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 some kind of 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, you know, two parts dopamine to one part serotonin to one part, acetylcholine, that we can say, equates to happiness, and D, 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, it's etc. 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 into kater 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 neuromodulator 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 effect and have lower mood and less episodes have happiness per day, per week, per month per year, etc. 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 neuro chemistry. As we wade into the discussion about the psychology of happiness, and in particular about the controlled experiments that had 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 the 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, or 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 involves Harvard College sophomores, and other individuals were incorporated in this study, as well. It's a study that initially had more than a couple of 100 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 also 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's 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, 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 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 at finding, because I agree that, well, 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 appreciate when I was a student and postdoc, 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 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 experienced 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 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.