Podcast

The passion paradigm and the great resignation (E106)

15/03/2022 by Marie

Happiness for Cynics podcast

Join Marie and Pete as the discuss the passion paradigm, and how it could be contributing to the great resignation we are currently experiencing.

Show notes

Transcript

Coming soon

The wholebeing approach – Interview with Tal Ben-Shahar (E105)

08/03/2022 by Marie

Happiness for Cynics podcast

Join Marie this week as she interviews happiness advocate Tal Ben-Shahar who shares his insights on happiness and the wholebeing approach.

Transcript

[Happy intro music -background]

M: Welcome to happiness for cynics and thanks for joining us as we explore all the things I wish I’d known earlier in life but didn’t.

P: This podcast is about how to live the good life. Whether we’re talking about a new study or the latest news or eastern philosophy, our show is all about discovering what makes people happy.

M: So, if you’re like me and you want more out of life, listen in and more importantly, buy in because I guarantee if you do, the science of happiness can change your life.

P: Plus, sometimes I think we’re kind of funny.

[Intro music fadeout]

Marie: Welcome back to our show, I am so excited about our guest. Tal Ben-Shahar is an author and lecturer.  He taught two of the largest classes in Harvard University’s history, “Positive Psychology” and “The Psychology of Leadership.”  His books have been translated into more than thirty languages, and have appeared on best-seller lists around the world.  His latest books are “Happiness Studies” and “Happier, No Matter What.”

Tal consults and lectures to executives in multi-national corporations, the general public, and at-risk populations.  The topics he lectures on include leadership, education, ethics, politics, happiness, self-esteem, resilience, goal setting, and mindfulness.  He is the co-founder and chief learning officer of The Happiness Studies Academy and Potentialife.

An avid sportsman, Tal won the U.S. Intercollegiate and Israeli National squash championships.  He obtained his PhD in Organizational Behaviour and BA in Philosophy and Psychology from Harvard.

Tal Ben-Shahar: Hi.

Marie: Hello. How are you?

Tal Ben-Shahar: I’m doing okay, thank you. How are you?

Marie: Good. Thank you so much for joining us on the Happiness for Cynics podcast. We’ll get right into it. I’ve been a fan, a huge fan of your work, and you’ve definitely been instrumental in the positive psychology movement and all the way back in 2007 when you published Happier, which went on to become a New York Times bestseller. In the preface you wrote,

“People are sensing and have been sensing for a while that we’re in the midst of some sort of revolution, and they’re not sure why.” [Happier – Tal Ben-Shahar]

So that was almost 15 years ago. And unfortunately for many people, the study of positive psychology hasn’t revolutionised their lives, and it seems to have remained the world’s best kept secret. So, I’m wondering, why do you think the science of happiness and wellbeing hasn’t had a bigger impact on humanity yet?

Tal Ben-Shahar: Thank you, Marie. First of all, for having me here, and second for the question because it is an important one. You know, when you look at change, the way it happens is usually that it’s slow, slow, slow and then very fast. In other words, at some point there is… it tips, as, as Malcolm Gladwell puts it, it hasn’t tipped yet for the science of happiness.

However, I think we’ve gone through at least a few of the slow, slow, slow, which gets us closer to the very fast. And unfortunately, it seems like things need to get worse before they get better. And what the pandemic has done is it has made things worse in terms of mental health, whether it’s stress and anxiety, whether it’s depression and what we’re beginning to see. And I can certainly feel, there is much more interest, whether it’s from politicians or teachers, parents, businesses, much more interest in the field. So, I suspect that we’re getting a lot closer to that tipping point.

Marie: I hope so. As you can probably tell from the title of this podcast. I was a cynic for so many years. I saw the T-shirt slogans and I didn’t understand the science behind it, and it’s been revolutionary in my life, and I just I want to scream from the rooftops to everyone else. “This stuff matters and it makes a difference!”

So, what do you think, as we’re reaching this tipping point, will need to happen in the next few years for us to pick up the speed of adoption and buy in from people?

Tal Ben-Shahar: Yes. So, the key is really to connect this field to tie it to science. You know, the self-help or New Age movement has been around for a long time. People are talking about, preaching about, the good life. That’s been going on for millennia.

The difference now is that we have a… we really have a science of happiness. You know, it’s imperfect as every scientific endeavour is. But the nice thing or the important thing rather about science is that you get closer and closer to, to getting the results, the sought-after results, which, when it comes to positive psychology, it’s higher levels of wellbeing.

So, as long as we stay committed to the scientific pursuit of happiness, then the progress initially maybe a little bit slower than it could have been if we had reverted to the self-help, new age, relying on charisma and promises. So, we are going a little bit slower, but I think it’s a much healthier route to pursue.

Marie: So, what do you think needs to change apart from awareness of the science. Are we talking changes at schools in organisations, you know, the systemic ways that we organise our countries and our governments that needs to change next? What’s the future of this movement look like?

Tal Ben-Shahar: As far as I’m concerned, the most important thing is education and for that to change, universities need to recognise the importance of the science of happiness. Schools need to recognise it, and governments need to recognise it, [and] politicians, because most of the schools are public schools and the curriculum is determined often by politicians or their aides. So, it’s all about educational. You know, Janusz Korczak, the famed Polish educator, said almost 100 years ago,

“If you want to reform the world, you must first change education.” [– Janusz Korczak]

And it certainly applies to the science of happiness. Now how do we do that? I’ll share with you a quick anecdote when we created our program for schools and we tried to get schools to buy in and when I say buy in, I just meant they didn’t even have to pay for it, so it was just to give us the time, which was an hour or two to a week.

We had real difficulties doing that, because Principles said you know, we don’t have time, you know, we need every minute. We need it to do extra math classes or writing classes or… and so on. And it was really challenging. And then I ended up, you know, basically asking friends of mine to introduce it. You know, friends of mine who were school Principals. And there were three of them and they introduced it in their schools. You know more, I mean, they liked the content. They knew the content, but more as a favour to me than anything else.

Marie: Mmm hmm.

Tal Ben Shahar: But there was… This was enough for us to actually do research. And we did research on these on these three schools and over 1000 students. And what we found, the results we found were remarkable. So, we saw levels of resilience went up. Happiness, of course, went up. Anxiety and depression went down and interestingly, not surprisingly, I must add for us. But interestingly, grades went up.

Now as soon as we showed that grades went up and we published this in a couple of the top educational journals, as soon as people read that we had a long, we have still, a long line of schools vying for the program.

Marie: Mmm hmm. Yes.

Tal Ben-Shahar: So, you know, it wasn’t about anxiety, depression, happiness, resilience. It was mostly about grades. And frankly, I don’t care.

Marie: Mmm hmm.

Tal Ben-Shahar: If this is why schools come, then that’s fine. If organisations introduce a program in happiness because it increases profits, that’s great. Whatever it takes. Just introduce this program.

Marie: Sure. All right, I have to admit, I recently finished the Happiness practitioner certificate at the Happiness Studies Academy, and I am a huge fan and I particularly love how you teach modern Western hard science and fact, alongside philosophy, religion, history, Eastern thinking. And the whole time was taking your course, I was thinking, I’m really getting an arts degree here, not just a social science psychology degree. But in your course, everything is really anchored around what you call the SPIRE model.

So, I wonder if you could tell our listeners a little bit more about SPIRE? In particular, starting with what the acronym stands for, and maybe some examples of how to put it in practise.

Tal Ben Shahar: Yes. So, SPIRE, the acronym stands for the Five elements of happiness.

The first, S is the spiritual wellbeing.
P is physical wellbeing.
I stands for intellectual wellbeing.
The R is relational wellbeing.
And finally, the E is emotional wellbeing.

So, spiritual, physical, intellectual, relational and emotional. All of them are important for happiness but we don’t need to focus on all of them all of the time. In fact, it would be near impossible to do so. But at different times either throughout the day or throughout the week, we need to spend some time at least cultivating all five.

So, Spiritual wellbeing. Of course, it can come from religion, and it does for many people. But spiritual wellbeing is about a sense of meaning and purpose, first and foremost. And you can find that in a church, synagogue, or a mosque. Or you can find it in important work that you do or spending time with your loved ones or saving the world or enhancing the wellbeing of one person. You know, this is about finding meaning and purpose, which is important for spiritual wellbeing, which is important for happiness.

Another aspect of spiritual wellbeing is presence, being in the here and now. You know, if I pay attention to a tree that I walk by or to a person sitting across from me or to the fact that we’re alive and can, can hear or see or walk. These are all miracles if you think about it. You know, Albert Einstein once reportedly said that,

“There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.” [– Albert Einstein]

And being present, uh, certainly brings out the miraculous in our in our life. So that spiritual wellbeing is about purpose and presence.

Physical wellbeing is about nutrition and about exercise and sleep, and recovery in general. For example, regular physical exercise has the same effect on our psychological wellbeing as our most powerful psychiatric medication. Working in the same way, releasing norepinephrine, serotonin, dopamine, the feel-good chemicals in the brain. So, physical wellbeing is a very important part of overall happiness.

Intellectual wellbeing is about curiosity, about learning. You know that people who learn who are constantly asking questions or curious; are not just happier, they’re not just more successful, they also live longer. So, curiosity may kill the cat, but it does the opposite for us humans.

Under intellectual wellbeing is about deep learning, spending time, whether it’s reading a book, engaging in a text or observing and studying a work of art or walking in nature. Again, being present to it and exercising our rational faculty, our intellectual faculty and really learning about the world around us. So, [that’s] intellectual wellbeing.

Then there is, under Relational wellbeing. Number one predictor of happiness, quality time we spend with people we care about and who care about us. And that can be a romantic partner, it can be family, it can be friends, it can be colleagues at work. It actually doesn’t matter, as long as we have close, intimate, supportive relationships. Number one predictor of happiness.

Under relational wellbeing is kindness and generosity. One of the best ways to help ourselves, is to help others. Two sides of the same coin. You know, there’s a lot of talk around, you know, selfishness or selflessness. One is bad, the other is good. Well, I don’t buy either. What we need is not selfishness or selflessness. What we need is self-fullness, because when we help, others were also helping ourselves. When we help ourselves, we’re also indirectly helping others more likely to help others. So that’s relational wellbeing.

And finally, Emotional wellbeing is about embracing painful emotions, accepting them, giving them, giving ourselves the permission to be human. And why, Because of a paradox that if we reject or when we reject painful emotions, they simply intensify and grow stronger. And then it’s about embracing pleasurable emotions like gratitude, like joy, like love, like excitement.

And happiness is about all of these. And as I said earlier, we don’t need to do it all, all the time. But we do need to pay attention to all of them at different times.

Marie: I love E [Emotional wellbeing]. It came late in the course because it’s the last one, but something that really stuck with me that you said, was that,

“There are no bad emotions, only bad behaviours.” [– Tal Ben-Shahar]

And I’ve said that too many people and discussed the learnings, which I think is part of the I [Intellectual] of SPIRE, is taking what you’ve learned and having those deep discussions with others is part of my joy of learning. And when I’ve mentioned that to people, it’s one thing that they really stop, and they take it in, and they think about it. And there were so many nuggets throughout the year and my friends have gone, “Oh, that’s really deep.” They have prompted some wonderful discussions as well.

So, there are lots of different life satisfaction or wellbeing or happiness models out there. And probably the most famous is Martin Seligman’s PERMA model. I’m interested to know when it comes to SPIRE versus PERMA or other models. Is it all just supporting the cause? Or are there differences in SPIRE and PERMA that you particularly wanted to focus in on that you think matter more or less?

Tal Ben Shahar: Yeah, the key with happiness and that I always, even, you know today in a in online weapons are with students. I emphasise with the students that how you define happiness is up to you, meaning there are many ways there isn’t one right way, and you need to find a definition that works for you. So, Seligman uses the PERMA model. You know, the P being Positive emotions, the E is for Engagement for being in the here and now for being in flow, R is for Relationships, M is for Meaning and A is for accomplishments or Achievements.

And the key is to… First of all, obviously, they’re all valid and important elements of happiness and the SPIRE model that I came up with, with my colleagues focuses on other things. For instance, PERMA doesn’t have the physical wellbeing element in it, which I think is critical for a happy life. You know, if I don’t exercise for more than two days. I feel it.

Marie: Mmm hmm.

Tal Ben-Shahar: I mean, I feel more anxious, you know, less calm. You know, I feel like I’m not my best self. Far from it. We know that physical exercise effects our wellbeing. And also, when it comes to accomplishments and achievements, which is part of PERMA. I don’t see it as that important. In fact, it’s one of the biggest myths that people believe that the path to happiness lies in the achievement. Now, if you if you’re working towards something that is personally meaningful to you, where you’re finding you’re exercising your best self and your path to your purpose, that’s a different story. That’s not about the accomplishment or the achievement itself.

So, you know, we differ. We disagree. We’re still friends and supporting one another’s work. And I point out to my, to my students, you know if PERMA is more suitable for your temperament, by all means. If you want to, you know, create another model which will be, you know your own, then by all means [do that]. The key is to identify what’s important for us and then, more importantly, to cultivate that element.

Marie: So, on that note, you taught hundreds of students at Harvard, so you’ve got firsthand experience with how people have implemented your teachings. Is there one thing that stands out above the rest that made the biggest impact in your student’s life? One intervention or area that you saw across the board came out on top more often. Even though everyone has a subjective understanding, and everyone is different. Is there something that stands above the rest?

Tal Ben-Shahar: There are a couple with your permission.

Marie: Mmm hmm. Of course.

Tal Ben Shahar: So probably if I had to choose one, it would be what you mentioned earlier, which is the notion of the permission to be human. In other words, there are no good or bad emotions. There can be good or bad behaviour, but not emotions. Emotions are amoral.

So, you know, feeling, experiencing envy towards my friend does not make me a bad or immoral person. If I act on that envy and hurt my friend, that’s a whole different story.

Marie: Mmm hmm.

Tal Ben-Shahar: And paradoxically, it’s when we accept and embrace painful emotions that we have most control over our behaviour. In other words, saying to myself, I should not experience envy not only intensifies that emotion, it’s also more likely to control me then similarly with fear. You know, experiencing fear doesn’t make me a coward. It simply makes me a human being. And courage is not about, not having fear, but about having the fear and then going ahead anyway. And then the paradox works in the same way here, when I reject fear when I say to myself, well, I shouldn’t be afraid, shouldn’t be anxious. The anxiety and the fear only intensify, and then they are more likely to impact my actions and rather induce lack of action.

Marie: Mmm hmm.

Tal Ben-Shahar: So, I think that’s the, that’s the main thing. Other big ones would be the importance of physical exercise and physical exercise certainly during challenging times. And I would always ask my students, so when is the time you’re least likely to exercise? And inevitably they would say exam period, and I would emphasise and that this is the most important time to explode. Just like today, people say, “well, I’m not exercising because of lock down or because my favourite gym is closed.” And my response is, now is the most important time when their stress levels are at an all-time high.

And I’ll just say one more thing, which is more general. I talk a lot about, as you know, about emotions and the importance of permission to be human and about the importance of cultivating gratitude and love and the pleasurable emotions. And yet, I also emphasis that behaviour is more important than feelings, that what we do matters more than what we feel. In other words, it’s okay to experience fear, not the end of the world. It’s natural. It’s okay to experience envy. It’s okay to experience sadness and anxiety. We can still choose to act in a way that is most appropriate or most moral or most helpful and beneficial to us and the world.

“So, behaviour trump’s emotions.”

Marie: I think what I love most about that is it also addresses what the naysayers say about the toxic positivity movement. We’re really saying it’s okay to feel anger and pain and sadness and all of those, and in fact, it is encouraged and human to do so. And this model addresses that.

Tal Ben-Shahar: And it’s one of the central myths around happiness, namely, that a happy life is a life devoid of pain or frustration or disappointments. And in fact, the first step towards happiness is allowing in unhappiness.

Marie: All right, so I think I know where this is going, but you might surprise me. So, I’ve asked what has been impactful in others. I’m interested to know what happiness habit you always personally prioritise in your week.

Tal Ben-Shahar: Yeah. You know, the happiness habit that I prioritise in my week is prioritising happiness. And what I mean by that is prioritising doing the things that contribute most to what I’ve come to call life’s ultimate currency, the currency of happiness. Specifically, it’s about, you know, first thing I do when I wake up in the morning, I meditate. I exercise three times a week during regular times and over the past year and a half have not been regular times. I do it five times a week. I put time aside for family and friends. And when I mean aside, it means that I disconnect from technology so that I can connect to people. You know, I keep a journal, regularly. You know, I do all the things that I teach, practise yoga, you know, three times a week. So, all these things I prioritise, and they help me then be a better version of myself, which is, you know, a kinder, more generous calmer version.

And, you know, I said that behaviours trump emotions. I don’t always feel great. Just like anyone, anyone else. I feel anxiety, I feel, you know, fear, frustration, anger like everyone else. The difference, though, between you know, where I was 20, 30 years ago and today is that I realised that I first need to accept these emotions and then second ask, “What is the kind of person that I would like to be in the world?” and then act accordingly.

Marie: I love that You said you practise what you teach. A lot of people don’t and again going back to this being a field where you’ve got to find what works for you. I think it was a real wake up moment when I read that Sonja Lyubomirsky doesn’t have her own gratitude journal, laugh, even though she teaches about the importance of gratitude.

Tal Ben-Shahar: Laugh.

Marie: I’m sure she practises gratitude in other ways.

Tal Ben-Shahar: She does it in other ways, and she’s very authentic about it. And she said, “Look, I saw the results in my studies. I personally cannot connect with it. I’ve tried.” And she has tried. I know that and she does other things, whether it’s meditation or she exercises regularly, she cultivates relationships in her life. Yeah, she gets an A for, for more than effort.

M: Laugh. Okay, so before we go, I want to acknowledge no one is perfect and new habits are not easy to form. So, I do want to. We normally end on what are your recommendations for introducing a new happiness habit? Or what’s the one piece of advice? But you do spend some time talking about forming new habits in your course and I’d love you to in part some final words of wisdom for someone who’s found a nugget in our discussion and would like to implement that in their lives for how they can successfully do that. What are your tips and helpful advice?

Tal Ben-Shahar: So, the first thing is to recognise that that many of the things that we know will make us happy, are right in front of us. They’re accessible, and yet we don’t do them. Why? It’s because what I’ve come to call the rhetorical choices in our life.

So, if I if I said to you Marie, tell me, you have a choice, do you want to be grateful and appreciative of all the good things and the good people in your life? or do you or would you like to take them all for granted? Now it’s a rhetorical choice, you know, you and eight billion other people around the world, of course, I want to appreciate rather than take things for granted. And yet, and yet most people, most of the time, take the good things in their lives for granted.

So, we have a rhetorical choice here, and yet we choose unwisely. Why? Not because we don’t think it’s important, but because we forget, because we neglect, because we’re distracted and therefore the first step in introducing change. Based on many of the changes that we know, we want to introduce many of the choices that we know we want to make.

The first thing we need to do is create reminders and reminders can come in the form of a bracelet that I wear that will remind me to be appreciative or to be present in the here and now, rather than always distracted. Or to be kind and because we all want to be kind and generous, it’s a rhetorical choice to be so. And yet we forget, so we need a reminder. It could be a bracelet. It could be a screen saver. It could be a picture on the wall that symbolises the value that we want to incorporate or whatever it is. The first is reminder.

Then we need to think about repetition. It’s not enough to do something once or twice. We need to do it over and over again. If we want to have it become part of who we are, quite literally second nature, just like in sports. You want to become a better tennis player. you have to hit that ball, repetitively. The Coach may need to remind you how to hit it, but after that you need to hit it over and over again. And after you repeat that action after you play that Piano sonata after you hit that ball after you exercise gratitude repeatedly, then comes the ritual.

Ritual is, quite literally, neural pathways that have been formed and that make an activity automatic, habitual. But in order to do that, we need many repetitions, you know, whether it’s 30 repetitions or 21 repetitions or 80 repetitions. But we need repetition before it becomes second nature, whether it’s repetition of brushing our teeth before it became second nature, a ritual in our life, whether it’s the repetition of hitting a tennis ball before it becomes second nature, or whether it’s repeating, expressing gratitude or being kind.

So, we have the three R’s of change, first Reminders, then Repetition and finally Rituals.

Marie: Thank you very much. Is there anything that you would like to add in that I haven’t asked you? I think we’ve covered quite a broad spectrum of happiness questions.

Tal Ben-Shahar: Yes, one thing. And that is to pick one thing or maximum two things from what you’ve heard, either in this podcast or elsewhere that you would like to introduce into your life, not more. Not over doing it. And pick that one or two things and create reminders around it. Repeat it often and much until it becomes a ritual. And only then you can move on to the second thing or the third thing that you want to introduce, gradually, slowly.

Marie: Perfect. Well, thank you so much for your time and for talking to our listeners. It’s been truly a pleasure. And I know that you have a very busy schedule full of happiness habits, so really appreciate. And I’m grateful for the time that you spent with us today.

T: Thank you, Marie.

M: Thank you.

[Happy exit music – background]

M: Thanks for joining us today if you want to hear more, please remember to subscribe and like this podcast and remember you can find us at www.marieskelton.com, where you can also send in questions or propose a topic.

P: And if you like our little show, we would absolutely love for you to leave a comment or rating to help us out.

M: Until next time.

M & P: Choose happiness.

[Exit music fadeout]

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9 Ways to improve your mindset (E104)

01/03/2022 by Marie

Happiness for Cynics podcast

Join Marie and Pete this week as they discuss 9 ways to improve your mindset and live a longer, happier, and more productive life.

Show notes

Sleep deprivation and genes

Study reveals sleep deprivation is associated with lower DNA repair gene expression and more breaks in DNA. The damage to DNA may explain the increased risk of cancers and neurodegenerative diseases in those who are sleep deprived.

Sleep is your superpower – Matt Walker

Transcript

[Happy intro music -background]

M: Welcome to happiness for cynics and thanks for joining us as we explore all the things I wish I’d known earlier in life but didn’t.

P: This podcast is about how to live the good life. Whether we’re talking about a new study or the latest news or eastern philosophy, our show is all about discovering what makes people happy.

M: So, if you’re like me and you want more out of life, listen in and more importantly, buy in because I guarantee if you do, the science of happiness can change your life.

P: Plus, sometimes I think we’re kind of funny.

[Intro music fadeout]

P: Hi!

M: Welcome back.

P: Here we are.

M: Here we are again!

P: Laugh, and again and again and again.

M: Every week, laugh.

P: Encore une fois. [Once more] Laugh!

M: So, what are we talking about today, Pete?

P: Ooh! What are we talking about today? The nine ways to build a positive mindset.

M: Are you sure we have nine?

P: I’ll invent one, laugh. I’ll create one.

M: Laugh.

P: Just give me five minutes, laugh.

M: Love it. All right, positive mindset.

P: Mmm.

M: What are the reasons why you want a positive mindset?

P: Because unhappy people die?

M & P: Laugh!

M: I don’t know why we laugh so hard.

P: Laugh, it’s our catchphrase!

M: It’s not really appropriate, laugh. [But] yes, they tend to not live as long, how about that.

P: But a positive mindset also has positive implications for your health.

M: Yes.

P: There’s a lot of studies that support that outwardly positive and, um, uh –

M: Optimistic.

P: – optimistic was the word I was looking for. People live better quality of lives and have better health outcomes.

M: Absolutely. And the research shows that you can train your brain to think more positively.

P: Yes.

M: So, if you balance negative thoughts with positive thoughts, then you can change your mindset. So, really, this is about creating those neural pathways in your brain again that we’ve talked about to counterbalance.

P: Mmm.

M: What is a natural tendency to think things are bad in a lot of people? Some people are just natural optimists, and they born that way. Or they grow up and learn that.

P: Yep.

M: A lot of us do tend to spend a lot of time ruminating over things or thinking about all the negatives. And we’ve seen a huge increase in anxiety and depression in all people around the world since, you know over the last 20 years or so. And so actively and proactively, creating a positive mindset or balancing your negative thoughts with positive thoughts is so important to learn how to do.

P: It also creates opportunity.

M: Yes, if you see a door opening and someone else sees the door shutting. You know, there’s two outcomes.

P: There are, yeah.

M: Two very different outcomes from that.

P: Yep. It’s a positive feedback loop.

M: Yeah, absolutely. So, you mentioned that they live healthier and longer. So, we do know that research shows that optimists tend to have healthier lives and lower risk of chronic diseases like diabetes and heart disease as the pessimists.

P: Yep.

M: And on the flip side, pessimists tend to have shorter telomeres.

P: Ah ha ha ha. What are telomeres?

M: Laugh.

P: Shorter bracelets!

M: Laugh. As we discussed a few episodes ago, that means that pessimists age faster.

P: Yes.

M: So, cells with shorter telomeres circulate and release large amounts of inflammatory proteins that contribute to inflammation, which is a mechanism of ageing.

P: So, if you don’t want wrinkles, you want long telomeres.

M: Yes.

P: Add some more beads to your bracelet.

M: By changing your mindset and becoming more positive.

P: Yes.

M: All right, what else we got?

P: Oh. I’m leading? I’m going on this one.

M: So, Pete hasn’t done his homework.

P: Oh, rude!

M: Laugh.

P: Laugh, so rude.

M: You’ll be less stressed. So, people who have positive mindsets cope with the day-to-day turmoil of life better, and they’re also less anxious and less likely to suffer from depression. And so, I think throughout Covid, there have been two very different yet typical responses.

P: Mmm.

M: There are those who have thrived throughout Covid, who have had the skills and the knowledge and the self-awareness to find ways to be positive and proactive about their mental health and their physical health and everything that their body needs. And you’ve had a lot of people who floundered.

P: It’s the same is dealing with crises in general, really, isn’t it?

M: Mmm hmm.

P: There are those people that deal with crisis better or deal with it in a proactive way in a positive.

M: Rise to the challenge.

P: Yeah, and it is. It’s the way you interpret it, as we’ve talked about before, stress is an interpretation. And some people will see a crisis as an opportunity to exercise their brain muscles or their opportunistic, outwardly going selves… don’t know where I was going with that.

M: Laugh.

P: I was reaching, totally reaching.

M & P: Laugh!

P: But yeah, it’s about looking at the situation going right, ‘I’m going to take this. I’m going to drive with this challenge and see where I end up’, as opposed to those who were running away from the tidal wave going, ‘No! Don’t come at me!’

M: Or those who don’t know that they have to take action and therefore end up in a situation that they didn’t know they needed to avoid.

P: Yes, they’re not enabled.

M: Yep, absolutely. And then, lastly, do you want to go now?

P: Yeah. I’m up to the page now, laugh.

M: You’re reading your notes.

P: I was reading Harry Potter before.

M & P: Laugh!

M: If you’re not going to be interested in our show, no one else will be.

P & M: Laugh!

P: You’ll be more successful, yay!

M: Yay, third benefit of a positive mindset. So, tell us what the science says here.

P: Well, compared to pessimists, optimists are more successful. They create social connections. They create communities, they engage with people which allows for more opportunities. They’re also more successful in issues such as marriages –

M: Marriage is an issue?

P: Issues? Yeah.

M: Laugh!

P: It’s an issue. Sure, why not?

M: I’m going to tell my husband he’s an issue. Laugh.

P: There’s a cat next to me. Of course, I’m getting flustered.

M & P: Laugh.

M: So, they’re more successful. There’s a great book by Shawn Achor that makes the case and shows the science behind optimists being more successful in school, at work and in athletics. So, people who are more positive just do better at life.

P: Mmm.

M: Not only at issues like marriage.

P: Laugh! Well, some marriages are an issue.

M & P: Laugh!

M: Very true. Maybe you don’t want to be successful at those.

P & M: Laugh.

M: Alright, so how can you build a positive mindset? Let’s get to our nine, our nine steps.

P: Oh, can we get to number nine first? Because that’s the fun one.

M: How about we leave that right for the end?

P: Aww, but it’s so good!

M: Laugh.

P: Stay tuned, folks. It’s gonna get better!

M: All right, number one, no brainer. It’s get good sleep.

P: Yes, we talked about this a lot. Just one hour of sleep deprivation has big impacts on our genetics on our ability to re-create cells, our regeneration, all those big things.

M: On our genes.

P: On our genes?

M: Not our genetics, they’re set from birth.

P: Uh, no, they do have some impact on … our genetic code.

M: On our genes.

P: Yes… Oh, I see I’m sorry. OK, I got it wrong, I’m just going to be quiet now.

M: Laugh! But we understand what you’re trying to say here.

P: Mmm hmm.

M: It impacts you right down to the cellular level.

P: There we go. Keep talking.

M: Yeah, also, I don’t know about you, but I am just grumpy as all get up after a bad night’s sleep.

P: Laugh.

M: I’m not fun to be around. And I find it really hard to be an optimist if I haven’t gotten enough sleep.

P: Mmm, yeah. Resilience is always low when you don’t have enough sleep as well. You’re just not firing on all cylinders. You’re not seeing opportunities. You’re not seeing those. You’re not resilient enough to actually turn things into an opportunity rather than going, ‘Oh my God, my life sucks!’

M: Yep, or falling apart. You lose your resilience. So global consulting firm McKinsey, has done a bit of work on this in the past few months, and they’re arguing that sleep is an important organisational topic that requires specific and urgent attention.

P: Mmm hmm.

M: And it is so true. We have this hyper connected, always on world and this expectation now that everything has gone digital, that people can answer a call or an email 24/7 and that constant low-level stress is impacting our sleep. And also, people are sending messages and emails at all times of the day and night.

P: Mmm yeah.

M: And we need to change that work culture in order to enable people to have better sleep.

P: Yeah, there’s a really good Ted talk on this by Matt Walker. If anyone wants to look it up, it talks a lot about sleep being your superpower.

M: Mmm,

P: Really good on this topic.

M: Absolutely. All right, number two.

P: Number two.

M: Limit social media.

P: Ooh, I love this one.

M: Yeah, you do. This is your favourite, isn’t it?

P: Yeah. Get off Facebook people.

M: Laugh.

P: It’s evil!

M: Even before Covid social media was well ingrained in most societies around the world. So, in Australia in January 2019, there are 18 million active users of social media websites. Facebook is the most popular with 16 million monthly users in the US, about 70% of adults say they use Facebook, and YouTube. And Instagram and Snapchat are growing in popularity.

P: Mmm.

M: It is such an important part of modern life, and I think people definitely feel FOMO [Fear of Missing Out]. They feel like they’re missing out if they’re not on these channels that everyone around them is using. But the problem is excessive social media use leads to increased depression, anxiety, loneliness, sleeplessness, and many other mental health issues.

P: Yep.

M: And so, if you want to be an optimist and positive, you really need to take control of that social media use and not let it control you and your moods.

P: Be an active user and not a passive user.

M: Yeah, absolutely. All right number three of ways to change your mindset.

P: [Mickey Mouse voice] Surround yourself with positive people, yay!

M: I think we’re doing well on this one.

P: Laugh! Like attracts like they say.

M: Yes.

P: So, bringing positive people into your sphere of influence means that you’re going to be more inclined to pick up on those vibrational, energetic connections. Oh, she’s getting down!

M & P: Laugh.

M: Talking energy.

P: Here we go, we’re going there. Cough-meditation-cough!

M: Laugh!

So, speaking about positive people, one of the best things that you can do with positive people is laugh.

P: Ah, yes. Laughter is contagious.

M: It is, it is. In a recent New York Times article, researchers found that people laugh five times as often when they’re with others, as when they’re alone.

P: Mmm hmm.

M: So, you’ll find if you’re watching a funny movie by yourself, you won’t laugh as much as if you’re watching a funny movie with friends or in a movie theatre. Because, as you mentioned, laughter is contagious.

P: See I’m the person that laughs out loud on his own.

M & P: Laugh!

M: But you won’t laugh as much as when other people are around.

P: True. I also laugh on public transport.

M: Laugh!

P: Maybe that’s my public laughter. I’ll just burst out… usually into song, but laughter as well.

M: Pete believes he’s in a musical.

P: My life is a musical.

M & P: Laugh!

M: The other thing to think about also is humour and the appreciation of humour. So, humour is one of the few things that is observed in all cultures and at all ages. And a lot of research has gone into humour more recently. And it’s one of the top five strengths of happy people, actually.

P: Ahh.

M: So, if you look at Martin Seligman and his work on strengths, you can actually do a lot of that online for free and work out what your strengths are. But if humour is one of your top five, you’re more likely to be happier and more likely to be an optimist.

P: So, Patch Adams was right.

M: Absolutely.

P: Humour is the best medicine. Or was that laughter is the best medicine?

M: Both? Both is fine.

P: We’ll take it.

M & P: Laugh.

M: All right. The next one is really important I think, especially when we talk about happiness and the importance of happiness. Really important, though number four, don’t suppress negative emotions.

P: Yep, they’re there for a reason.

M: Mmm hmm. One of the biggest misconceptions about the positive psychology movement is that people should always aim to be happy, and negative emotions are to be avoided. It’s a load of rubbish.

P: Yep, no. Can’t avoid them. They’re going to be there. They’re going to come up. You have to process them.

M: Absolutely. So, firstly, being happy all the time is impossible. We don’t live in a trouble-free world. And secondly, trying to suppress negative emotions can be really detrimental for mental health. So, the reality is, life is messy and sad and not what we expect and disappointing as well as good and beautiful and all of the other positive emotions. And we really need to make sure that we’re having an appropriate reaction to the situation.

P: Mmm yeah, that’s a good word. Appropriate.

M: Yeah, and that means processing negative events and emotions in a healthy way so you can move forward.

P: And having the skills to do that. And sometimes to have those skills, you need to do a little bit of work behind that.

M: Yep.

P: You actually need to spend some time contemplating, reading around it, going ‘how do I feel about grief? How do I feel about death? How am I going to process that when it comes to call or when it affects my life?’ And if you’ve done a little bit of that background work, it becomes a little bit easier to process your negative emotions and then by processing you get to the other side a little bit more easily.

M: Yeah, and two really good ways to help processes, journaling and talking to people, talking about it.

P: Yeah.

M: Number five.

P: Let’s exercise. [Starts singing] Let’s get physical, physical.

M & P: [Singing] I want to get physical.

P: [High pitched singing] Let’s get into physical!

M: Laugh!

P: There we go, musical theatre degree. Olivia was right.

M: Laugh, oh dear.

P: Movement and exercise if you didn’t get what that was about people.

M & P: Laugh.

P: Moving is good.

M: Absolutely.

P: Motion is lotion. Boom, Boom! Laugh. Thank you, Dan Horne.

M & P: Laugh.

M: So not only are there physical benefits to moving in exercise, but it’s great for your mood and your mental state. So, if you want to increase your positive vibes, if you want to become more of an optimist or increase your positive mindset, go get some exercise into your week or your day. And it doesn’t have to be a lot.

P: Nope.

M: But exercising releases dopamine nor-adrenaline and serotonin, and they’re all the happy drugs.

P: Happy drugs, laugh.

M: So, if we’re talking mindset and positive mindset, this is the fastest way to trick your brain into being happy.

P: Absolutely. You can do that really simply by getting yourself up and shaking the crap out of yourself, literally getting up and vibrating and throwing your arms around and getting really, really elevated with your heart rate.

M: Dance.

P: Actually, dance is one of the best ones. I wasn’t gonna go there because, you know I’m biased towards dance. But yeah, literally jumping up and down for 30 seconds is enough to actually get those endorphins going.

M: Yep, absolutely. All right, number six,

P: Learn something new.

M: I’ve got a quote.

P: Oh.

M: Einstein.

P: Mmm.

M: Mmm hmm. So, he famously said,

“The important thing is to never stop questioning.”

– [Albert Einstein]

M: And he was really smart.

P: Laugh! He was a scientist.

M: Don’t know if he was happy.

P & M: Laugh!

M: But I love the quote.

P: Laugh, he had crazy hair.

M: It is so important to add new things into your environment. So novel things. We’ve spoken about this before and learning a new skill or giving yourself something where you have autonomy and ownership over getting deeper experience and better skills at something is a great way to do that.

P: Mmm.

M: So, when we say learning, you could simply read a book or watch a documentary, you could listen to Ted talks. You could join a class. Or a course, you don’t have to go to a university degree there’s plenty of free classes out there and lots of micro learning nowadays as well. So, you could learn how to put floating shelves on your wall. Or you could go to your local TAFE and do a mechanics course and everything in between.

P: Yep, totally agree. I’m there, laugh.

M: And you know, you’ve just started back at university again, late life haven’t you.

P: Yep.

M: Does that –

P: Oh, huge amounts of mission and purpose.

M: Yep.

P: When we talk about mission and purpose is being one of the pillars of our happiness building. It’s so true because you wake up and you’ve got somewhere to go and somewhere to be, laugh.

M: I found one of the best parts of UNI was just the conversations you have. You have these new ideas running through your head and you’re wrapping your head around your values and how they fit into these new ideas and whether you believe them or not, and you’re forming your own ideas and bouncing them off other people.

It was one of the favourite things was sitting out in the quad on the grass, sometimes with the beer.

P: Laugh.

M: Often with a beer.

P & M: Laugh.

M: And debating these new ideas that we were discovering every day.

P: Yeah, I like the idea of it being reflective. It’s around your values and beliefs. I mean, that’s a great thing, because it does challenge your values and beliefs as well. And that’s a really great way to provide self-reflective practise.

M: Yep, and there are multiple studies and pieces of research that suggests that consistent curiosity goes hand in hand with happiness.

P: Yep.

M: Yep. All right, number seven.

P: Getting outdoors.

M: Ahh.

P: [Singing] Forest bathing.

M: Laugh. It’s the little things right. Taking a walk can have such a huge impact on your mental health and make you happier.

P: Yep, yeah. Go out and hug a tree. Sniff a leaf.

M: Yep. So, the studies show that brain structure and mood improved when we spend time outdoors, and this has positive implications for concentration, memory and overall psychological wellbeing. Also, when you get outdoors, it’s not only the trees and the air, but it’s also the light. So having more sunlight in your day has been shown to improve sleeplessness and mood. So, if you have insomnia, get outside.

P: Yeah, definitely.

M: Number eight.

P: Oh, you take this one. This is yours.

M: Gratitude!

P: Laugh.

M: Practise gratitude. And as we said before, it’s about rewiring your brain so that it’s not constantly focusing on the negative, and the science is really clear on this one. Practising gratitude makes you happier and less stress… Less stressed.

P: Laugh.

M: It leads to higher overall wellbeing satisfaction with your life and social relationships, so making it part of even just a weekly practise can give you all of those benefits and help you balance that negative way of thinking with some more positive and over time, that reinforces, and you start seeing more positive things in your day to day.

P: Yeah.

M: All right, Pete, and what’s your made up number nine?

P: It’s not made up, it’s backed by science.

M & P: Laugh.

P: Drink champagne! Laugh!

M: I think, I think this is my favourite way to improve your mindset.

P: So, a recent study came out in The Guardian in the UK that was talking about when we reach the alcohol, what it is that we’re doing. And studies showed that most people will have a drink when they’re actually feeling happier. So, alcohol can actually lead us to being a little bit more contented. Sure, there is the flip side of that where we do reach for the bottle as a negative coping mechanism for depression or grief or whatever.

But on the whole, most people will have a glass of wine or a beer in the day to increase their happiness.

M: Sorry. Just to be clear, the study showed that people are more likely to drink when they’re happy.

P: Yes.

M: Not the other way around. Not the flip way. So, there’s no causality. Yeah, there’s no causality here.

P: Champagne makes me happy.

M: Laugh.

P: I hear a pop and I’m ready, laugh.

M: Unless you’re Pete.

P & M: Laugh!

P: We don’t want to be encouraging people to be alcoholics.

M: No. [meaning yes] And if you’re feeling sad, reaching for the bottle isn’t going to make you happy.

P: No, that doesn’t work. If you’re already negative, then no.

M: So, I guess what we’re saying is, if you’re happy, you’re more likely to have a drink.

P: Don’t berate yourself if you’re going to have a glass of wine out in the sunshine when you’re out sniffing the trees or being in the ocean whilst expressing gratitude and having a sleep.

M & P: Laugh.

P: All the nine steps above. It’s okay, laugh.

M: And on that note, we’ll finish up for the week. Thanks for joining us again.

P: Have a happy week.

M: And stay cynical.

[Happy exit music – background]

P: And if you like our little show, we would absolutely love for you to leave a comment or rating to help us out.

M: Until next time.

M & P: Choose happiness.

[Exit music fadeout]

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How to remain youthful and resilient despite stress (E103)

22/02/2022 by Marie

Happiness for Cynics podcast

Join Marie and Pete this week as they discuss a recent scientific article on how to remain youthful and resilient despite stress.

Show notes

Telomeres and telemerase

Telomeres, the specific DNA–protein structures found at both ends of each chromosome, protect genome from nucleolytic degradation, unnecessary recombination, repair, and interchromosomal fusion. Telomeres therefore play a vital role in preserving the information in our genome.

Telomerase is the enzyme responsible for maintenance of the length of telomeres by addition of guanine-rich repetitive sequences.

Good stress

During the podcast Marie and Pete discuss a great ted talk on good stress (eustress) by Kelly McGonigal: How to Turn Stress Into an Advantage

Hayflick Limit

The Hayflick Limit is a concept that helps to explain the mechanisms behind cellular aging. The concept states that a normal human cell can only replicate and divide forty to sixty times before it cannot divide anymore, and will break down by programmed cell death or apoptosis.

Transcript

[Happy intro music -background]

M: Welcome to happiness for cynics and thanks for joining us as we explore all the things I wish I’d known earlier in life but didn’t.

P: This podcast is about how to live the good life. Whether we’re talking about a new study or the latest news or eastern philosophy, our show is all about discovering what makes people happy.

M: So, if you’re like me and you want more out of life, listen in and more importantly, buy in because I guarantee if you do, the science of happiness can change your life.

P: Plus, sometimes I think we’re kind of funny.

[Intro music fadeout]

M: Three! Two! One! Go!

P: A hoy, hoy.

M: A hoy, hoy.

P: And here we are.

M: Yeah.

P: We’re back and here for another week of happiness.

M: Yay! I need happiness tonight I’m feeling a bit flat.

P: Are you? Aww.

M: My day was so full of happiness, but I’m just over happy.

P: Laugh, this is the natural ebb to your flow. Laugh!

M: It is. I woke in a good mood, slept well, I played with the cats a little bit, made my coffee. Got straight to work which is unusual for me, I normally do some writing and stuff like that. I was just like, ready to tackle the day.

P: Here I go!

M: And then we popped out for a bit of sun in the pool.

P: We did, we had a little happiness date today. That was lovely.

M: We did.

P: Yeah.

M: And then I was just in the zone all afternoon and feeling really productive. And yeah, it was a good day, good day. And I think also summer does this to me because I get out more with friends, which is that social side of things. But also, I do more physically. I’m just out and about and moving more.

P: See I’m the opposite, I do more in winter. I know I’m weird. I’m much more motivated to do physical activity and the sporty. Laugh, don’t pull a face at me like that!

M & P: Laugh!

P: I just got, like, the most judgmental face you’ve ever seen from Marie Skelton folks, laugh.

M: It was confusion.

P: Yeah, no. I get really motivated for that in winter, which is odd as well. Like summer is like, ‘Oh, I just want to sit down.’

M: Nah, nah. I’m the opposite.

P: Really.

M: Anyway. So, I am at the moment just in a really positive mood, which is excellent.

P: But an exhausted positive.

M: Now I’m tired.

P: Laugh.

M: It’s like the kid who was on a sugar rush and is now like, “now I’m cranky.”

P: Laugh! And now is like, “I wanted it to last forever!”

M & P: Laugh.

M: So, what are we talking about today?

P: Well, good segway. We’re talking about being youthful today and remaining youthful. We’re talking about beauty, people. Hair, nails, lips. What’s the next one? I can’t remember the next one.

M: I have no idea what you’re talking about.

P: It’s in a song somewhere. There’s always a song. [Nails, Hair, Hips, Heels by Todrick Hall]

But now we’re looking at an article written by a Jolanta Burke and Padraic Dunne in the conversation, ‘How to remain youthful and resilient.’

M: And they’re both from RCSI University of Medicine and Health Sciences.

P: Mmm, scientists.

M: Mmm hmm.

P: We’re going to get sciency, laugh.

M: That’s why we’re here.

P & M: Laugh.

P: So, what? What’s people’s impressions of youthfulness?

M: Not dying!

P: Laugh!

Okay, but if someone was youthful, what characteristics would they have? What would they be doing?

M: Well, they wouldn’t have done what I did earlier today, which was wander around my house thinking, where did I put my glasses?

P: Laugh.

M: Where on earth did put glasses. And I told you before we got on this podcast that was just feeling particularly old, wandering around the house, squinting at things, looking for my glasses, to the point where I looked across the room was like, oh, is that my glasses? And as I got closer, I realised it was a spoon.

P: Laugh!

M: Not my glasses…

P: Laugh!

M: And that made me feel even more old because I think during covid a lot of people that I work with in particular, who have spent hours sitting at computers and a lot less time getting up to go to the bathroom or interacting with colleagues, et cetera. We really are spending a lot more uninterrupted time in front of screens, since covid.

P: Yeah, yeah.

M: A lot of people that I work with have noticed a decline in their eyesight.

P: Laugh.

M: So that’s making me feel a bit old.

P: Laugh.

M: The grey hairs.

P: Oh yeah.

M: The random hairs.

P: Laugh, in different places.

M: That starts in your thirties, I will say for any women out there, you know, the hair that springs up in a place that shouldn’t. You’re like, how did that get there?

P: Laugh.

M: Why is that there? So, you pluck it. And then, the wrinkles.

P: Okay, so these are all things that young people don’t have?

M: That’s the bucket for me. Yep.

Also, the aches in the muscles.

P: Laugh.

M: They have flexibility, young people.

P: Laugh.

M: There’s a lot that young people have that I’m missing.

P & M: Laugh.

P: Ok.

M: Stamina.

P: Laugh.

Ok, well let’s turn that frown upside down.

M: Healthy liver.

P: Laugh.

There is a way –

M: You asked!

P: Yeah, well I did. I opened Pandora’s box. I’ll give you that.

M: Laugh.

P: So, there is a way to… I guess what the authors are talking about here is there is a way to retain that youthfulness or that… it’s not all about the doldrums of feeling arthritic and grey hairs and wrinkles and so forth, but in our mental health, maintaining a youthful exuberance for life or a youthful perspective on buoyancy and resilience.

M: So definitely perspective and how you view yourself plays a factor. But what the article that we’re talking about today is about is about stress.

P: Mmm.

M: It’s about how stress can impact your DNA all the way down to your core. So, there’s good stress, which is:

P: Eustress.

M: And bad stress, which is:

P: Distress.

M: Yes.

P: As in dis – ease.

M: Yes. So, eustress and distress. And if you’re in a heightened state of distress for too long. So, if you work in a job like our healthcare workers right now have spent two years in a heightened state of stress.

P: Mmm, yep.

M: A lot of people have. People who are dealing with financial insecurity are just in a constant state of stress. So, we’re talking about prolonged amounts of distress, and that impacts you all way down to your DNA and can make you… die!

P & M: Laugh!

M: It can impact your longevity.

P: Absolutely.

M: Let’s not be so dramatic.

P: Laugh, well it is reasonably dramatic, and I guess this is what the science is behind, and this is what the movement of positive psychology is doing for us now. Is that we’re paying more heed to our mental health and so forth.

M: Mmm hmm.

P: And this just proves that, those sort of situations where you are under emotional distress are just as bad as being under physical distress.

M: Yes.

P: And they have the same impact going down to our DNA at a cellular level that ages us or makes us less buoyant or less resilient.

M: Absolutely. So, studies, because we like studies, –

P: Laugh.

M: – have shown that people who aren’t good at managing their stress can increase their risk of dying prematurely by 43%.

P: Mmm hmm, yep.

M: So, you’re 43% more likely to die prematurely.

P: And this is partly –

M: 43%!

P: Laugh.

M: That’s huge.

P: It is, [almost] half. Yeah.

M: And so, these wonderful researchers have done a lot of research into the effects of stress on our DNA and we’re going to talk about a little bit of more scientific stuff Pete. So, I’m going to hand to you.

P: We’re gonna try. We’re going, we’re going to give this a go. It’s going to be really basic.

M: Laugh.

P: So basically, when we’re talking about DNA, there are these little things called telomeres, and they’re like little barriers that stop the DNA from replicating too much basically. Whenever we have cell damage it reorganises itself, we can do that around 60 times.

M: If you think of your DNA as the bracelet, the telomere as the bead on the end.

P: Okay, Yeah, we can go with that.

M: So, it’s a sequence of beads, right?

P: Yeah, we’ve got about 60 of them let’s say.

M: Yep.

P: And we can reproduce, and we could lose them. We lose a bead every time we [the cell] reproduce.

M: 60 reproductions?

P: Yeah, around there.

M: Before a cell dies.

P: That is called the Hayflick Limit.

M: Yes.

P: Of telomere reproduction.

M: Yes.

P: And if we have short telomeres, if we’ve only got a few beads left on the bracelet, these are the sorts of things that make us less resilient, less buoyant, getting grey hairs, getting wrinkles, showing the signs of ageing.

M: In the cell.

P: Yes.

So, there is a molecule in our DNA, which has telomerase, which can put beads back on the bracelet. So, we had this and these are things like our immune cells and if we didn’t have that our immune cells would die, and we wouldn’t be able to defend ourselves against bacteria or pathogens. So, these telomerases [stop, extend and may] reverse the ageing process. And there are things that we can do that increase that telomerase being active in our body. And these are a lot of things that we talk about with positive psychology.

M: So why don’t we all just drink telomerase every day?

P: Laugh, good question. I don’t think we’ve been able to bottle it, to be honest.

M & P: Laugh.

M: This is the elixir of life.

P: Yeah, I guess so. Yeah. The fountain of eternal youth. I guess that would, that would work if you can do that.

M: Sure. And look, it does sound like the solution to ageing. But telomerase does stop working properly when people reach about their eighties. So even immune cells, which produce a lot of telomerase, the molecule telomerase stop producing that and begin to age.

P: Yep.

M: So, my lovely grandma, shout out. She just turned 97.

P: Oh, wow.

M: She had shingles last year, and they said not to worry about getting the vaccine for shingles. She’s 97, it’s not going to make any difference.

P: No.

M: So, as you get older things still do… We still have a shelf life, unfortunately, laugh.

P: Yeah, we do. There’s a used by date on all of us, laugh.

M: So unfortunately, there are things that we can do in our environment and as habits and behaviours that have the opposite effect from telomerase, which are things like smoking, drinking too much alcohol, being overweight and stress.

P: Yep.

M: And all of those things impact or are associated with telomere loss.

P: Mmm hmm.

M: And telomerase not working as effectively.

P: Yep. If you’re losing beads at a high rate, no matter how many beads you put back on, you’re still losing beads.

M: Yeah, so the solution here is to manage your stress.

P: It is. And how do we do that, Marie?

M: Well, I’m glad you ask.

P: Laugh.

M: So, obviously adopting a healthy lifestyle. So, not only [are you] going to have a better quality of life, you’re going to have a longer life as well by doing a lot of things we talk about.

P: Yeah.

M: In particular, it’s worth noting that in today’s day and age, we are experiencing more low-level stress in our life and more high impact stress more often. We are more likely to divorce. We are more likely to move interstate or overseas. We are more likely to lose our jobs nowadays as well.

P: Yep.

M: And the list goes on and on. And then there’s that low level stuff like climate change, something that’s completely out of a lot of our control.

P: But ever present.

M: Always there… Political unrest right now. This whole debate about the media and who can say what and whether we can lie and how much lying is happening.

P: Access to information.

M: And how dumb our relatives are.

P: Laugh.

M: Anti-vaxxer’s and QAnon and all of that’s going on in the background and is just creating this high level of stress. And that’s what I think we’ve talked about before, I refer to it as the change storm. We’re just in the middle of this storm of stuff and what we can do and what we’re learning now and is critical in this new world is for us to be far more diligent about controlling what we allow to impact us. So, as we’ve discussed before, turning off your notifications on your social media, not being on every single social media channel and feeling that you have to participate on them all.

P: Gosh yes. I’ve been off social media for a long while, I feel so good. Laugh.

M: Really time blocking your use of things and being deliberate about it.

P: A client did that recently, shout out to Dimitry. We had a conversation about social media use, and he actually put a timer on his usage, and now he’s gone from six hours down to an hour and he’s loving it.

M: Yep.

P: He said, it’s just that constant information coming at me that I don’t need and processing of that information, that’s low-level stress.

M: Mmm hmm. Yep, absolutely. Particularly because a lot of it is talking about negative things in our environment that we have no control or influence over.

P: Mmm. And sensationalism.

M: Yep. You know, if you remember the watermelon and the orange and the M&M.

P & M: Laugh.

M: It’s the big stuff that you just no matter what you do, you can recycle, and you can do a whole lot of things. But really, it’s not going to change what happens in the news every day.

P: Mmm.

M: So, all of that is in our environment right now. So, listening to the news less.

P: Yep.

M: Controlling your social media, controlling how your technology that you use during the day, a lot of us spend a lot of time in meetings and on email and being contactable by people at work, really saying no and being okay to say no to a lot of these things in our lives as well as the other side that we talk about so controlling stress. It’s going to happen.

P: Mmm.

M: You could go live under a rock and stress would still find you nowadays.

P: Laugh.

M: Yeah, so it’s about then managing things when they do go bad as well.

P: It is, and in that way, and along those lines, let’s talk about eustress a little bit here. Let’s talk about the positive stress.

M: Yes.

P: Sometimes stress is good for us. We can take it and we can use it to actually benefit ourselves. And the authors talk about this in terms of the psychology of embracing stressful events, leading to matters that make us more resilient and resourceful, such as seeking out friends when we need help or creating resources within ourselves so that when stress comes at us, we have the tools to be able to deal with it a little bit more.

M: Yep. So, mindfulness is a great one.

P: Mmm.

M: So, when you can feel your heart racing or you’re not sleeping well at night, or there’s too much going on, and it’s just out of your control to fix it because you’ve got a deadline coming up or something like that, or, you know something is going wrong or bad in your life at that point. Deep breathing. I’m saying it, there you go.

P: Laugh.

M: Meditation has been proven. Yoga, Pilates, a lot of these lighter exercises or going for a walk, getting out in nature and getting some sun. Those kinds of things are really good for balancing out the negative stress.

P: Yeah.

M: And then, as you just said, then the good stress. So, we had spoken way back early on in our podcast episodes about Kelly McGonigal, who has a great Ted talk talking about good stress. So, if you google Kelly McGonigal and Good Stress and Ted X, you’ll find her.

P: It’s really worth a listen.

M: Yes, and she looks at how, studies actually that point to how we perceive stress. And if we see stress as good. Like if you’re gearing up for your grand final on sports day and you’re a bit nervous and a bit stressed, but you’re excited by that your body responds differently, and it’s exactly the same physiological response to that deadline at work.

P: Mmm.

M: But how we frame it in our minds and how we see it, is how our bodies react to it.

P: Yep definitely, and that actually has a link to telomerase in actually getting those beads back on the bracelet we can actually influence that response. And we can do that via intense exercise as well.

M: Yes.

P: So, it can be a good or it can be bad. It depends on how you frame it and how you use it.

M: Yep. So, Kelly McGonigal talks about a study where they tracked 30,000 adults in the US for eight years, and they started by asking people how much stress have you experienced in the last year?

And I don’t know anyone in the world today who hasn’t experienced higher than usual levels of stress over the last two years, right?

P: Mmm.

M: So, how much stress have you experienced in the last year? And they also asked, do you believe that stress is harmful for your health? And then they used public death records to find out who died.

P: Laugh. What a lovely thing to do a study about.

M: I love how blunt she is as well, right?

P: Laugh!

M: I think we’d be friends.

P & M: Laugh!

M: And so, people who experienced a lot of stress had that 43% increased risk of dying that the study that we’re looking at today mentions.

P: Yep.

M: But it was only truth people who also believe that stress is harmful for your health. So, really important thing to note there. If you’ve got high levels of stress, you don’t want to die. You want to live forever.

P: Laugh.

M: At least into your eighties, there’s two things you can do:

Reframe how you see that stress in your life.
And secondly, learn some of those techniques that are going to help you control the bad stress.

P: Yep.

M: And bad stress will happen. And there’s some things that you can’t refrain. Grief is probably one of… divorce again is one of the most stressful times, and they suck and they’re bad.

P: Yep. And getting through those and recognising the down in the negative. Getting through those is what we’re talking about.

M: Yep.

P: Read a book, play a computer game, go for a walk.

M: Play your favourite music in the morning.

P: Get through it.

M: Yep, put some put some habits in place that bring some joy into your life as well.

P: Use your tools, and then come to the other side and then you can… Then you can do the reinterpretation and reframing.

M: Well, if it’s appropriate. There’s some stuff that I acknowledge, you can’t refrain. It’s crap.

P: Laugh.

M: To use a PG word.

P: Laugh. So, there we go. If you want to be youthful and do well with your telomere length and have good ageing qualities. Be a model for long term, get into some distressing stuff.

Reframe,
meditate,
mindfulness.

And dance a little bit in your underwear.

M: Laugh. The cynic in me is like, I can’t believe we’re spouting this shit.

P: Laugh!

M: But it is science.

P: It is science, yep. Look it up.

M: That’s why we’re here.

P: Laugh!

M: It is all convincing me that one day I will need to do some meditation.

P & M: Laugh!

P: It’s alright, just run around in your underwear, and that’s just as good.

M: I can do that, laugh!

P: And on that note, laugh!

M: Have a happy week.

P: And stay cynical.

[Happy exit music – background]

P: And if you like our little show, we would absolutely love for you to leave a comment or rating to help us out.

M: Until next time.

M & P: Choose happiness.

[Exit music fadeout]

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What makes you optimistic? – Interview with Victor Perton (E102)

15/02/2022 by Marie

Happiness for Cynics podcast

This week Marie interviews Victor Perton the founder of The Centre for Optimism, who asks the question, what makes you optimistic?

Show notes

The Centre for Optimism – Victor Perton (Founder and Chief Optimism Officer)

We ask “what makes you optimistic?”

We believe the times call for realistic and infectiously optimistic leaders. We are a movement supporting realistic and infectiously optimistic leaders to be beacons in the fog of pessimism and cynicism. We believe the leader is the person in your mirror.

Transcript

M: Thanks for joining us on Happiness for Cynics. Today I’m here with Victor Person, who is the Chief Optimism Officer at the Centre for Optimism. The offspring of stateless refugees from the Baltics, Victor’s early working years were spent in the law, politics and public policy, culminating in 18 years in the Victorian Parliament.

After politics, Victor worked as Commissioner to the Americas working across North and South America on Foreign Direct Investment and Export Promotion.  This was followed by service as Senior Advisor to the Australian G20 Presidency.

Returning to Melbourne, Victor was surprised by the negativity around Australian leadership and increasing levels of anxiety and depression in our community.  

This led to the founding of The Australian Leadership Project and, after a eureka moment at the Global Integrity Summit 2017, the founding of its offspring, The Centre for Optimism, which has grown through COVID with 5000 members in 82 countries.

Today Victor’s work centres on asking people the question “What makes you Optimistic?

M: Well, I will start by saying welcome to Happiness for Cynics. Welcome to the show and it is such a pleasure to have you here. I’ve been watching from up in Sydney and wondering why all the great positive psychologists and optimist leaders and happiness leaders are all down in Melbourne. What’s going on down there, Victor?

V: It’s because people dress in black.

M: Laugh.

V: Tommy Hilfiger said ‘If only Melbourne women would put a little dash of yellow or orange on, doesn’t matter whether it’s earrings or a necklace. So, we’re so surrounded by black and whenever I go to Sydney, I’m amazed on the streets, you know, ladies wearing white suits and white dresses. And I think that’s the difference between Sydney and Melbourne, you’ve got that warmer climate, the humidity. We’ve got to find the happiness in a colder climate.

M: Mmm hmm. Well, it’s definitely working. Maybe we need a bit more black and we can borrow some of the Melbourne experts you have there. So, thank you for joining us. I’d like to start by digging a little bit into your journey if you’re willing to share and letting the snow how you became a proponent of optimism and what led you personally to this life philosophy?

V: Yeah, sure. So, it really… when I’m waxing lyrical, um, it really goes back three or four generations. So, my parents were refugees from Latvia and Lithuania.

And I’m a stereotype, if you actually have a look at all of the research, the most optimistic people in any country are the refugees and the Children of refugees.

And there was a University of Melbourne study that reported a couple of years ago that said that the kids of refugees in Australia 90% of them felt they belonged. 88% of them were confident about their future profession, compared to 55% of native-born Children.

M: Mmm hmm.

V: So, I’m that stereotype. And if I go back to that generation of my grandparents. My grandfather, he was a soldier in World War One, he had gone to Saint Petersburg in 1905, he helped to build a country. And in 1940 he was captured by the Soviets and tortured to death. My grandmother was sent to the gulag with her daughter and, you know, 12 years in the gulag, and then when you come back from the gulag, you’re black marked, people don’t like you.

M: Mmm.

V: But in 1987 she said to me, come over I’m going to the first rally of … and she said, “Look, I’m going to outlive communism.”

M: Laugh.

V: And you know this woman, a woman who’s been in the gulag. She’s in a walking frame. But she took part in the million hands across Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia and in 1991 of course, she not only lived to see the end of communism but celebrated the end of communism. So, she was a great example to me, almost in some senses, that we go to [Viktor] Frankl’s, Man’s Search for Meaning.

M: Mmm.

V: You know, she’s almost the stereotype. And then my other grandparents, you know, my grandfather had gone through the Depression, had built a business [and in] 1940 everything [was] seized by the Soviets, arrives in Australia, working in a factory, but never complained.

M: No.

V: Never complained. And then my father died when I was pretty young. My mother worked three jobs. She died in October last year, teaching yoga for 51 years.

M: Wow.

V: And again, you know, always the optimist, always lifting other people. And a week before she died, she said to me, “Victor, you’ve done lots of interesting things in your life, but this asking people what makes them optimistic, you’ve never done anything more important.”

So, on this personal journey, I was in politics for 18 years, and in 2006 I could just feel Australian politics becoming ever more negative.

M: Mmm hmm.

V: And it just wasn’t filling me full of joy anymore. So, I quit. And then out of the blue, the other side of politics asked me to go to America as Trade Investment Commissioner, working across North and South America. And everywhere I went, there was this astonishing positive stereotype of Australians and Australian leadership, and our work was made easier by that one chairman of a major corporation who said to me, “Victor, you Aussies remind me of the Americans of 100 years ago. Nothing is impossible.”

M: Mmm hmm.

V: The truck driver who would hear your accent on Route 66 would say, “Oh my God, I love that Fosters of yours!”

M: Laugh.

V: And so, you know, the work was easy, you know, through that positive stereotype. And then after that, I worked on the Australian presidency of the G 20.

M: Mmm hmm.

V: And at that super elite level of Presidents, Prime Ministers, Finance Ministers, Central Bank Governors, it was exactly the same. You know, this complete trust in us as Australians and then I came back to Melbourne in 2015 and I know I had changed, you know, from living in San Francisco. Flowers and what was left in my hair –

M: Laugh.

V: – and dancing in the street as the Mamas and the Papas would recommend. But something had also changed in Australia, and I was astonished by the negativity of language. You know, you say, “How are you?” and 65% of people say not bad or not too bad. And we never say Oh my God, what’s wrong?

M: Mmm hmm.

V: It’s a sort of negative take and the news had moved from 50-50 good/bad, to 95% bad. You know, this 24 by seven assault on the brain. And then when you ask people about leadership in a country where real incomes have grown 30%, we’re a peaceful country, a healthy country, this scoffing about leadership –

M: Mmm hmm.

V: – just astonished me and I, you know, scoffing about political leadership, you do it. And even in China and North Korea, people have got jokes about politicians. But here was this deeper antipathy towards leadership.

M: Yep.

V: So, we started the Australian Leadership Project and we interviewed 2500 people on the qualities of Australian leadership and the science, and our research showed that the three qualities are:

Egalitarianism,
Self-effacing humour, and
No bullshit.

Plain speaking.

M: Mmm hmm.

V: Now when you and I think of our circles, we know hundreds of people like that.

M: Absolutely.

V: We could probably walk down Pitt Street, Sydney or Collins Street, Melbourne and still be hitting 50% of people with those qualities.

M: Mmm hmm.

V: So, at the end of the project, I was still left bewildered at why people were so negative. And then I was fortunate enough to be on the final panel of the Global Integrity Summit in 2017.

And my eureka moment came. It’s actually not so much the leadership, it’s the fog of pessimism.

M: Yeah.

V: Hence my pursuit. And you know, your listeners can’t see the posters behind me, but they are light houses.

I realised what we needed to foster, were beacons of optimism in the fog of pessimism.

That’s a long answer to a simple question, but I often say to people it goes back four generations of, of suffering, of resilience and coming through at the end because of it.

M: I will never, ever stop a long answer that is as engaging as what you just gave us. So, thank you and thank you for sharing your history as well as optimistic as you’ve made it. There’s a lot of hard times in there as well. So, I think there’s a lot to be said for people who’ve grown up in Australia and who haven’t had those hard times and who are still struggling for ways to be thankful and find optimism versus when we talk about post traumatic growth as well as being a good catalyst for finding happiness and optimism.

V: Marie, I did a radio interview during Covid, and the journalist said, you know, “Australian business has never had it this tough.” And I said, “Give me a break!”

M: Laugh.

V: Thinking about Australian business, people have lost their business in bushfires, people have lost their business in floods. All the refugees, you know, whether they’re Iraqi or Somali, who lost their businesses blown up.

M: Mmm hmm.

V: You know there’s lots of people and we need to tap their wisdom, tap their experience because they have then come to Australia, and they’ve built the country.

M: Mmm hmm. Absolutely.

So, is it just leaders that need this kick up the butt with optimism or is it all Australians? I know you focus on leaders but do all of us need to really take a step back?

V: This was a great debate with my mother and me for almost 30 years.

M: Laugh.

V: Because I, in all my speeches, I tell people to go and graffiti their mirror. So, everyone who is listening if you use red lipstick, it’s really ideal. If you can borrow red lipstick, it’s good, but if not a marker pen, go and write on the mirror at work in the toilet, mens/ladies, ‘The leader looks like the person in your mirror.’

So that’s my philosophy that everyone’s got to lead at some point now. Now my mother’s view was always, you know, sort of to be a good leader, you need good followers. Where, as I say, it’s everyone. And it’s one of the really interesting parts of the research. You know, when you use the word leader in Australia, it’s often a ‘them’.

M: Mmm hmm.

V: The word boss actually, is more resonant here. If you want to ask people about leadership at work, using the word leadership actually doesn’t seem to resonate in Australia as it does in the United States or Canada, you know where a lot of these books are written, leadership and self-leadership. Here, there’s a nuance of language, where leadership is them, not us. So, for me, the Centre for Optimism came out of the Australian leadership project, and someone who put it really well for me was Dominic Barton, who was then the head of McKinsey and now the Canadian ambassador to China had to negotiate the release of the Canadian hostages who were being held for the Huawei executive. And he said to me,

“Every great leader I have ever met is infectiously optimistic. But it’s not the big man or woman standing at the front of the stage. It’s the person who can unlock the optimism in the team from the youngest to the oldest from the least experienced to the most experienced.” [Dominic Barton]

V: I was actually in Sydney, I was having a coffee by circular key at six in the morning, and, you know, there’s not so much company and there was this other bloke reading the paper on the table next to me. You know, I’m a bit chatty and garrulous, so he wasn’t reading his paper three minutes later.

M: Laugh.

V: But he was from Singapore, and we got talking about the impact of optimism and he said, “Look, every Monday morning, I give my sales team a rev up speech, and by Monday afternoon it seems to have worn off”, and I said to him, “Have you ever asked them what makes them optimistic?”

M: Mmm hmm.

V: And in fact, he took it on board. And every month now, the start of the sales meeting on the first day of the month is, ‘what makes you optimistic?’ And the funny little nuance. I did an event for Saint Ives Rotary a couple of days before we recorded this on the North Shore of Sydney, and there was a scientist there who talked about his experience, and he had been a teacher, and when he left teaching, he moved into an educational institution helping salespeople. And it was that classic Seligman sorry where he was actually driven nuts by the optimistic belief of the salesman.

M: Mmm hmm.

V: But he said the more optimistic the salesman was, the more they kept confounding him by being right.

M: Laugh.

V: When they come back, having met the unrealistic sales figures they’ve given them at the beginning of the month. So, for me, it is everyone.

M: Mmm hmm.

V: But it’s complicated, and particularly in Australian language, where leadership is sort of them and oftentimes conflated with political leadership.

M: Yeah.

V: So, if you ask people, what do Australians want of their leaders? I’ve really got to give an explanation that says, well, I’m actually thinking of your boss or your manager rather than the Prime Minister.

M: Mmm hmm. You’ve touched on language differences in Australia. Are there any other differences from a cultural point of view in Australia when it comes to optimism? You know, I talk about how we’re optimistically cynical as a bunch, laugh. I won’t say that we’re necessarily not optimistic, but we are a cynical bunch, and we like to have a bit of a gripe at times. And you know, we have that tall poppy syndrome that everyone talks about as well. Is there anything that is stopping us as a country from being more optimistic?

V: Well, it’s actually going backwards, we’re actually regressing. It’s a bit like our maths results. We’re actually regressing. So, in a country that has so much so if you have measured optimism in Australia, both optimism for self and optimism for country. Twenty years ago, in 2000, Australia and our sister country, New Zealand, were the two most optimistic countries in the Western world. Today we are down around the middle. It’s actually going backwards, and there’s some really concerning statistics around. We were talking earlier about mental illness.

M: Mmm hmm.

V: The Victorian Royal Commission into Mental Health Treatment, published a statistic that showed that we have doubled the rate of medicated anxiety and depression since 2016. Now if that’s happening in Victoria, it’s happening in New South Wales as well. Now, are doctors prescribing medication for the ordinary anxieties of life. You know, grief, loss of job, the teenagers are driving me nuts, or the teenager is being driven nuts.

M: Laugh.

V: So, are we medicating stuff? So, if we look at that that deeper Australian culture, if we look in the colonial period and you know that the settlement you know, the choice of people who came here originally were the prisoners and the political prisoners. So, what mindset did they have? Look, if there’s one thing they brought with them it was humour.

M: Mmm hmm.

V: Laconic humour, which I often refer to as self-effacing. But there’s a friend of mine runs a company called, John Cole runs Team Leadership in Washington. He says Australian humour is so dry that Americans don’t even understand you’re telling a joke.

M: Mmm hmm.

V: You know, they think you’re having a go at them or you’re having a go at yourself and “Oh, my God, what’s wrong with you that you can tell this joke against you?”

M: Laugh.

V: So Australian humour, similar to New Zealand humour, but there’s a uniqueness about it. We have not… On the verge of doing a project on Aboriginal optimism because when you think, you know, living 30,000, 40,000, however many years it was in this tough land.

M: Mmm hmm.

V: You know, tasting new foods, adapting to new foods and alike. You know, there must have been a lot of optimism in the Aboriginal community as they settled this land. And so too for the Europeans and the Asians who came here post 1788, a lot of adaption. And so, my mother describes it, you know, they came here as refugees, you know, and, you know, they were ribbed mercilessly. My father’s original surname was Petronitis, right?

M: Mmm hmm.

V: Of course, he got ribbed mercilessly about peritonitis.

M: Laugh.

V: And ultimately, you know, before I was born, changed the name to Perton.

M: Mmm hmm.

V: But again, it was an affection, you know, people actually liked it. So, you know, those Australian characteristics of egalitarianism and plain speaking and dry humour, as you call it, is very attractive to people.

M: Mmm hmm.

V: And you know. I came back and I was a bit bewildered by the negativity of language, much of which is, I think, to be blamed on the news. You know, we just get this 24 by seven assault on our well-being by being told we’re hopeless.

M: Mmm hmm. Social media is just an echo chamber for that as well, unfortunately.

I’m really keen to understand, we’ve talked about immigrants and resilient Aussies, and we do talk about resilience quite a bit as well and bonding Australians together. But do you think that maybe we’ve had it too good for the last few decades? Is that why we’re losing that self-effacing humour or that resilience? Or that… the optimism? Is that perhaps part of it? Life has become too easy.

V: Yeah, and there’s some really interesting work that’s been done by UNICEF and others and even the Dalai Lama. I was fortunate to be in an audience with him seven weeks ago. This younger generation, these teenagers may be the most resilient generation since World War II, because I’ve actually been locked up.

M: Mmm hmm.

V: They’ve actually been under threat from a disease that threatened to wipe out hundreds of thousands of people. So, those kids may in fact be the most resilient for a long time. And you know, I had someone talking to me yesterday about this problem that in Australian business and American business that from really 1990 onwards you were in constant growth.

M: Mmm hmm.

V: You could write a budget and you would always hit it.

M: Yep.

V: Because the country was getting there. What was interesting was, I’m sorry, that person was talking about America [USA], because America got hit by the GFC in 2008. But Australia didn’t.

M: Yep, we didn’t.

V: And the extraordinary thing was, you know, the Australian media talking about the GFC as if it was something terrible. But in fact, Australia never stopped growing. So yes, so we’ve had it too easy. And this notion that there’s always something wrong, there’s nothing wrong with being self-critical.

M: Mmm hmm.

V: There’s nothing wrong with wanting to be better. But when everything the government does, or everything a corporation does, is analysed for the bad news. The zeitgeist of our contemporary news services is as pessimistic and miserable.

M: Yep, yep.

V: You look at the Australian News services now, you know, if there’s a good news story, it runs once. Remember recently there was a debate about, ‘we’ve stopped flights from India because of the Covid outbreak in India’, and it was just out of control. And they interviewed the head of the Indian community in Melbourne.

M: Yep.

V: And they said, what do you think? And she said, “Well, make sense to me! –

M: Laugh.

V: – if India is going through, you know, an absolute plague of covid, and we can’t work out who’s got it. I’d stop the flights too.” Well, of course, that interview never got repeated.

M: Well, the poor journalist was like, ‘Oh, this isn’t news anymore.’ Laugh.

V: Yeah! Well, they managed to find other people who said that the government was stupid –

M: Mmm hmm.

V: – and this was racist and xenophobic, and those are the people that ran.

M: Yep.

V: Rather than the logical leader of the Indian community who said, “Makes sense to me as an Indian Australia.”

M: So, we’ve talked about all the negativity out there and how that is obviously linked to Australia’s decrease in optimism. The answer, it seems, is that we all need to bring a bit more optimism into our lives, and we all need to be asking the question and leading when it comes to optimism. But what do you say to people who are afraid of or fight against toxic positivity?

V: Every time I see an article on toxic positivity, it’s someone trying to sell the negativity industry.

M: Mmm hmm.

V: You know, it’s actually a nonsense term. The only person I think who really gets it is David Kessler, and I’ll quote him exactly.

“Toxic positivity is positivity, given in the wrong way in the wrong dose at the wrong time.” [- David Kessler]

V: So, three factors.

M: Mmm hmm.

V: Right? And, you know and so, for instance, the Centre for Optimism.

The science says, look, what really benefits your health? What really benefits your leadership? What should underpin strategy, innovation and resilience is realistic and infectiously optimistic leadership.

So, for most of the population, positive thinking does work, and that’s why we have a project on grief and optimism. But one of our members, it is a mother whose son was killed in a car crash.

M: Yeah.

V: Another member at the Centre for Optimism is a woman who has conducted hundreds of funerals as the celebrant. And so, when we do our guide to grief and optimism, we say, look, you know the optimist when they’re comforting someone listens.

M: Mmm hmm.

V: You know. And if the person says something positive, you help to reinforce it. If they say something negative, you listen to it. And there’s a brilliant book which has inspired lots of other authors in the last couple of years, and I recommend to all of your readers is Hans Rosling’s, Factfulness.

M: I haven’t read that one. It’s not on my bookshelf.

V: It’s F-a-c-t-f-u-l-n-e-s-s, and he’s really interesting. So, when he writes about journalists, he says, don’t be angry at journalists for writing negatively or pessimistically. It’s their lens. It’s their world frame, you know, they are sent out to catch a story that’s a gotcha.

M: Mmm hmm.

V: If it’s a prime minister or, you know, if it’s a drug scandal at a football club, you know it’s not the good stuff. And if I summarise his position, he says, most of us have a worldview that’s based on what our Grade four teacher taught us. So, when we think of world hunger, or we think of Ireland for instance, we did and hour of optimism on Ireland recently.

M: Mmm hmm.

V: And you know, when I think of Ireland, you know, I think of the land that sent away millions of migrants to America and Australia from the potato famine or British colonial rule. And yet you know that Ireland is now number two on the United Nations Development Index. Right?

M: Laugh.

V: But it’s this red hot, high tech, egalitarian society, you know, we’re average lifespans have increased, you know, 30 years and absolutely fantastic country. But, you know, my stereotype of Ireland is still, you know, the Irish nuns.

M: Laugh.

V: You know, who left Ireland to come to Australia to teach us and the other person who really I love on this is Steven Pinker.

M: Yep.

V: The head of Psychology at Harvard, and I don’t remember what it was in his book, Enlightenment [Now], or one of his interviews. But he said, “Anyone who remembers a wonderful past has got a really short memory.”

M: Laugh

V: You know, you go back 100 years, and you look at infant mortality rates and, you know, women dying in childbirth and people even in Melbourne and Sydney, dying of cholera and waterborne diseases. And even we did an event the other day for Central Africa. Even if you look at the advances in Central Africa, all we see on the Australian News is someone being blown up or, you know, girls or boys being kidnapped from a school. But in fact, you know there are great centres of innovation and new tech in Lagos and Nairobi and great things happening.

M: Not everything is like the Simpsons portrays it, right?

P: I’m not a big fan of the Simpsons. I’m a simpler man. I’m a more you know, Mister Ed. And you know, my favourite book is still The Magic Far Away Tree, and The Enchanted Wood by Enid Blyton and kids should be studying humour to laugh, shouldn’t they?

M: Yeah.

V: They should be studying poetry, to love beautiful poetry. But we’ve now got… Critical analysis has almost replaced the Bible as the font for education.

M: I will throw in. There is another Melbourne based group called Future Crunch that I am such a fan of who tell the happy news. And I make sure that they’re part of my news cycle on a regular basis because they pull together for those out there who don’t know them. They pull together the best news around the world, the progress that we’re making and is so heart-warming to put that against the normal news that we read and see that we are making huge strides in so many areas of human rights and the environment, and that it’s not all doom and gloom.

V: Yeah, but everyone can do that. I mean, we had a Future Crunch of great friends of ours, and we’ve had them on our show. But everyone can be a Future Crunch.

M: Mmm hmm.

V: You know, if there’s something good happening in your workplace or in your neighbourhood, you don’t need to wait for the newspaper to publish it, take a photo or do a two-minute interview of the person.

We went out to a town called Kaniva, in the West Wimmera. And it’s a town that’s got so many things running against it, you know, it’s a highway town. They’ve had the shutdowns. They’ve been stuck with South Australian refugees who can’t get across the border, the last bank branch is closing, because there was no highway traffic. The favourite cafe is closing. But you know, Marie, I went door knocking in that town, and I asked people, what makes you optimistic? And they ended up getting kids to do little videos, two-minute videos of what makes them optimistic about Kaniva.

And then we were going to have a town dinner and I was to be the guest speaker and, of course, what happened in the soviet socialist state of Victoria. We got locked down. I couldn’t go and be the guest speaker. So, I said, “Well, I trust you guys. You do it.”

M: Mmm hmm.

V: And they had 12 locals as the guest speaker, and at the end of the dinner they declared themselves to be the most optimistic town in Australia.

M: I love that story, I really do.

V: Every person out there listening, make this your homework today, so I’ll jump ahead of your last question. So, I’ll give you another hint, Marie, because you’re an expert on this. But what I would love everyone to think about is change your greeting for one day. If it works, change it for a week.

So, in Australia, you say “Hello, how are you?” Or “G’day how are you?” 65% of people will say, “not bad…” or “not too bad.”

M: Laugh.

V: And of course, we never say ‘Oh my God, what’s wrong?’

M: Mmm hmm.

V: We just ignore it, you know, it’s a wasted question. Wasted answer. So, we’ve done this in prisons. We’ve done this in all sorts of organisations. Today, I’d like you to say, “G’day, what’s been the best thing in your day?” or if it’s Friday, “What’s been the best thing in your week?” or Monday, “What was the best thing on your weekend?”

Now your language will get it right. That’s my language, but it works. The other day I was in the supermarket. I have a beautiful orange mask Marie, that says, “what makes you optimistic?” And the lady behind the checkout counter said, what do you do? And I said I run the Centre for Optimism. And I said, why don’t you try this for the day?

M: Mmm hmm.

V: Well, she looked a bit doubtful, and I said, well, let’s try it with the people behind us. So, there was a mother and a daughter about 10 or so and I said, Look, we’re just experimenting, tell us what’s the best thing in your day so far? And the girl said, I got 82 for my test and the mother lit up and the other two queues lit up and the other check out people lit up. And then the teller I said, well, what was the test?

M: Mmm hmm.

V: And in fact, I actually heard the business coach of the All Blacks in a radio interview say, “Well, I’ve been plagiarising Victor Perton for the last year.”

M: Laugh.

V: And that’s exactly what he’d been plagiarising that every one of his customers knows that when he comes in, he doesn’t want to hear a tale of woe to start with. He wants to hear a story of hope and optimism and opportunity, and Disney has got some great research on this Marie, Disney, Coke, Nike. All of the customer research they’re doing shows that people are yearning for stories of hope and optimism.

So, when we come back to who’s the leader and who’s got to change? As Gandhi said, the only person I can change is myself. So, for each and every one of your listeners, just for the rest of today or tomorrow, get rid of ‘how are you?’ and try ‘what’s the best thing in your day?’ Now, the first time you ask it, people will stare at you.

M: Laugh!

V: Because it’s so out of sync, and it’s like an Australian trying to order at McDonald’s in Louisiana. You know, you look like them, but they don’t understand what you’re saying.

M: Laugh.

V: So, you might have to repeat it. You know, ‘what was the best thing in your day’ or modified a little, but 80% of the time people will then share a little story of hope and optimism with you. And it might be ‘I had a beautiful breakfast’, or ‘my daughter made me a cup of tea’ or ‘God isn’t the sunshine beautiful.’ And the interesting thing Marie, coming back to that toxic positivity stuff is, in fact, if something’s wrong, if they say f-ing nothing, then you know there’s a question you need to ask them to help them with their well-being and for you to do the right thing.

M: Yeah.

I will if you’ll permit me, ask you one last question. Which is what has made you optimistic this week? Since it is a Friday.

V: So, this week. Yesterday I was at the University of Melbourne working with the staff of one of the Colleges.

M: Mmm hmm.

V: And going around the circle and asking each and every one of them, ‘what makes you optimistic?’ As you can imagine, there was one beautiful psychologist there who said, “Oh, this is a very difficult question.”

M: Laugh.

V: And we went through this, and it was just beautiful. And then the night before that, the Saint Ives Rotary meeting. And you know, there was one 85-year-old guy and he just lit up and he said, “Oh, Victor. You’ve made me more optimistic with the scientific evidence you’ve given me on the value of optimism. I’m 85, I now know I’ve got another at least seven years of optimistic living.

M: Laugh.

V: So, for me, it’s asking that question. What makes you optimistic? And I ask at least one person every day, whether it’s a President or a Prime Minister or women digging ditches in India.

M: Yeah.

V: And so, if your listeners want to do something that they will find quite interesting is, you know when you’re lying on the pillow tonight next to your partner or you’re at the dinner table, ask them what makes them optimistic, and they may stare at you at first, so you might have to define it for them.

M: Mmm hmm.

V: So, optimism is a belief that good things will happen and that things will work out in the end. And, of course, if your relative is a John Lennon fan, you can say John Lennon said,

“If it hasn’t worked out, it’s not the end.” [- John Lennon]

M: Mmm hmm.

V: But optimism is not, everything is rosy, everything is fantastic. Optimism is belief that things will work out in the end. And Marie, for those of you, are for your listeners who are students of history. There’s this wonderful Woman who lived through the black plague called Mother Julian of Norwich and she was an English mystic. And her book is said to be the oldest surviving book in English by a woman, called the Revelations. But in it is a famous phrase, ‘All shall be well, all shall be well, all manner of things shall be well.’

V: And that has spawned poetry and music. So, if there’s one thing people remember from this rich conversation, Marie is:

All shall be well, all shall be well, all manner of things shall be well.

M: I think that’s the perfect end to this fabulous conversation. Thank you so much for your time, Victor.

V: Thanks, Marie.

[Happy exit music – background]

P: And if you like our little show, we would absolutely love for you to leave a comment or rating to help us out.

M: Until next time.

M & P: Choose happiness.

[Exit music fadeout]

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Ways to improve your wellbeing and happiness (E101)

08/02/2022 by Marie

Happiness for Cynics podcast

Join Marie and Pete this week as they discuss a recent study that shows the best ways to improve your wellbeing and happiness.

Show notes

During the podcast, Marie and Pete discuss a few cartoons but are unsure of some of the details. Here is some information on those topics.

Mighty Mouse (1942)

Mighty Mouse is an American animated anthropomorphic superhero mouse who was originally called Super Mouse, and made his debut in the 1942 short The Mouse of Tomorrow. The name was changed to Mighty Mouse in his eighth film, 1944’s The Wreck of the Hesperus. He also appeared in the British nursery comic Bimbo circa 1968, in what appear to be brand new stories created for the pre-school readers of that title.

Roger Ramjet (1965)

Roger Ramjet was an animated children’s comedy series created in the United States and first running in 1965, but frequently in syndication since. Starring Roger Ramjet and the American Eagle Squadron, the show was known for its crude animation as well as its references to popular culture.

Wacky Races (1968)

This cartoon was referenced but not named during the podcast with mentions of Penelope Pitstop and Dick (not Dan) Dastardly and his dog Muttley.

Wacky Races is an American animated television series produced by Hanna-Barbera Productions for Saturday mornings. The series features 11 different cars racing against each other in various road rallies throughout North America, with all of the drivers hoping to win the title of the “World’s Wackiest Racer”.
Racers:

Dick Dastardly and Muttley in the Mean Machine
Penelope Pitstop in the Compact Pussycat
The Slag Brothers in the Boulder Mobile
Lazy Luke and Blubber Bear in the Arkansas Chuggabug
Professor Pat Pending in the Convert-a-Car
The Gruesome Twosome in the Creepy Coupe
Sergeant Blast and Private Meekly in the Army Surplus Special
The Ant Hill Mob in the Bulletproof Bomb
Rufus Ruffcut and Sawtooth in the Buzzwagon
The Red Max in the Crimson Haybaler
Peter Perfect in the Turbo Terrific

Transcript

Coming soon

Why every neighbourhood needs a wellbeing hub (E100)

01/02/2022 by Marie

Happiness for Cynics podcast

Join Marie and Pete as they celebrate Happiness for Cynics’ 100th episode by looking at wellbeing hubs and why your neighbourhood needs one.

Show notes

Gross Domestic Product (GDP) vs. Herald/Age Lateral Economics (HALE) – Wellbeing index

The GDP in Australia was worth 1370.00 billion US dollars (1939.10 billion AU dollars) in 2021, according to official data from the World Bank. The gross domestic product (GDP) measures of national income and output for a given country’s economy. The gross domestic product (GDP) is equal to the total expenditures for all final goods and services produced within the country in a stipulated period of time.

The Herald/Age Lateral Economics – Wellbeing index looks at changes in education, health, work-life, social inequality and environmental degradation. According to the HALE Wellbeing index Australians overall wellbeing has suffered a significant decline since the start of the pandemic and the financial value of this decline is estimated at 9.4 billion US dollars (13.3 billion AU dollars). That is approximately 0.7% of the GDP.

Thinker in Residence – Martin Seligman 2012-13

Each Thinker is a world leader and exemplar in their field. They come and live and work in Adelaide for a period of time. The Thinker focuses on contemporary, complex challenges, recognised as important to the future of the state.

Wellbeing hubs

Wellbeing SA is partnering with the City of Playford and Naracoorte Lucindale Council to co-invest in local Wellbeing Hubs, through which a range of targeted initiatives are being implemented to support community physical, mental and social wellbeing

Transcript

[Happy intro music -background]

M: Welcome to happiness for cynics and thanks for joining us as we explore all the things I wish I’d known earlier in life but didn’t.

P: This podcast is about how to live the good life. Whether we’re talking about a new study or the latest news or eastern philosophy, our show is all about discovering what makes people happy.

M: So, if you’re like me and you want more out of life, listen in and more importantly, buy in because I guarantee if you do, the science of happiness can change your life.

P: Plus, sometimes I think we’re kind of funny.

[Intro music fadeout]

M: [Singing] Happy birthday to us,

P: Laugh!

M & P: [Both singing] Happy birthday to us,

P: Happy birthday, Happiness for Cynics,

M: Happy birthday to us!

P: We are on 100! Yay!

M: Whoop, 100 episodes.

P: Woo hoo, welcome, welcome, welcome! Who would have thought, gosh.

M: I know. It was really just, “want to do a podcast? On zoom?”

P: [Excited voice] “Sure!” Laugh. Does it mean I get to hang out with you? Sure, I’m in, laugh.

M: I was like, you’re kind of happy, this could be fun.

P: Laugh! Annoyingly so.

M: Happy and not a cynic. And now look at us.

P: I know.

M: I’m so not a cynic and you are.

P: Laugh. What have you done to me? Laugh.

M: I’d like to think that it is the act of going back to school that has made you appreciate sources and understanding quality information.

P: Mmm, yeah.

M: I’d also like to think that the shit show that’s going on in America has made us all questions sources.

P: Laugh. I hope they’re questioning sources; I really do. Laugh.

M: Questioning the reliability of sources.

P: Yes, yes, it’s great explanation of social media induced news and information and we need to have those filters on. And be really mindful of what we’re putting in and filter out the crap from the stuff that’s worth investigating.

M: Yep, and happiness is [worth investigating] as we know.

P: Laugh.

M: So, this is what really started as us exploring you know, what makes people happy, and noting that I tripped over a lot of this stuff because I never really believed in it.

P: Mmm, mmm.

M: And now look at us.

P: We’ve almost reversed. Laugh.

M: We talk about Amygdala’s.

P: Ha ha ha!

M: And what else have we talked about? We’ve talked about a lot of pretty scientific stuff.

P: We have. We brought the science.

M: Neuroscience.

P: Yes, yes. Even a little bit of vagal tone in vegus nerve stimulation.

M: Mmm hmm. That was the breathing stuff.

P: Yeah.

M: I still have no idea what you were on about that day.

P: Laugh! One day you will get there. One day I’ll explain it.

M: We were talking about the muscles and the ribs. Gotcha. That’s breathing right there.

P: Laugh.

M: And I was like, wha??? how does this all fit together?

P: Laugh.

M: But we got there. And I do ramble on about a whole lot of other stuff where you’re just like, “Mmm hmm, you just, you go girl.”

P: Laugh. I’m right behind you, cheer squad.

M: Laugh.

P: Right here. We all need our cheer squads.

M: We do, yes, we do. Build each other up.

P: Yes.

M: Not tear each other down.

P: And applaud the investigation. Applaud the moving forward and finding things out and going, “Sure there’s something to forest bathing. Sure, let’s investigate that.”

M: Mmm hmm. Unless you’re Josh Frydenberg (Treasurer of Australia) and then… I can’t say that on air.

P: Laugh!

M: But today, what we want to talk about is wellbeing hubs.

P: Now, this is a particular passion of yours, Marie. We’ve had many discussions about this. We’ve driven through industrial estates in the back of Sydney, looking at venues and these dilapidated housing places. And your first thought always goes, ‘that could be a happiness centre!’

M: Yes, yes! And you know it really is the next evolution out of the book that we wrote.

P: Mmm.

M: What was the name of the book we wrote?

P: Laugh!

M: Selfcare is Church for Non-Believers. You know, we used to all get together on a Sunday and create that community and talk about service and kindness to others.

P: Mmm mmm.

M: And really rally around the community that really brought people together.

P: Absolutely, yeah.

M: With fewer and fewer people going to church and believing in God. There isn’t that thing that brings people in a community together.

P: Yes.

M: I didn’t even know my neighbours. I live in a high rise, and the other day I got off on the lift and they were like, “Oh, no, this is our floor.” And I was like, “No, no, no, it’s mine, too.”

P: Laugh.

M: That’s a typical city persons story.

P: Yes, it is.

M: We need these wellbeing hubs to replace that community that we used to have.

P: Absolutely. These are the new churches. Is that what you’re saying?

M: Yep.

P: New old churches?

M: Yes.

P: Yeah. I like it.

M: The role the church played in society was so much more than just religion and bringing people together around religion.

P: Oh yeah, definitely. Community so much more important. And this is where the change happens as well, when you’ve got people bringing in new ideas and being supportive and creating those social connections.

M: So anyway, back to Josh Frydenberg, who I really want to trash on the show today.

P & M: Laugh!

P: Poor Josh.

M: So, this all came about out of a Sydney Morning Herald article, an opinion piece, which pretty much said a few weeks ago, our treasurer in Australia here, was patting himself on the back of the GDP growth in the midst of a pandemic.

P: Yeah. Mmm, well done you… whoo.

M: All the old white men standing around paying themselves on the back.

P: Laugh.

M: Anyway, went we’ve done our job as elected officials in this country. GDP went up a couple of percent. Wow we’re good, right.

P: Mmm, yeah.

M: But what they didn’t take into account and what The Sydney Morning Herald was looking at. So, there’s an annual Herald/Age Lateral Economics (HALE) wellbeing index.

P: That’s quite a mouthful.

M: It is. They need a better name. They really do.

P: They need an acronym or something, laugh.

M: So, you think the media would know –

P: The LEWI index? See there we go, I’m good.

M: There we go 😊

M: – about the index. So, this index, rather than just GDP, shows Australians have suffered negative impacts to the wellbeing during coronavirus.

P: Mmm.

M: So, unfortunately, these impacts are largely overlooked by traditional economic indicators like GDP, which is really singularly focused, right.

P: Very much so. Very narrow.

M: What I argue, and many other people argue around the world and many countries have already started implementing. Bhutan is probably the most famous.

P: Ahh.

M: So, they have G… Gross Domestic Happiness (GDH).

P: Oh my.

M: Yes, and there’s a range of measures that go into that. A couple of years ago, now, New Zealand launched their wellbeing plan.

P: Yeah, that was such a good thing, a defining moment.

M: Scotland, Germany, you know a few countries, [whispers] mostly women run countries –

P: Hmm, interesting.

M: – have realised that GDP is not the sole measure for whether or not you’re doing a good job when running a country.

P: It shouldn’t be the sole measure, no. The health and wellbeing of your people.

M: Mmm hmm.

P: Uh-peoples as King George used to say.

M: Uh-peoples, yes, are the peoples happy?

P: Laugh, yeah. And that should be the focus that should be.

M: Yeah.

P: We should be putting measures in place where we can start to collect data around this sort of statistics so that we can then have measurable, quantifiable numbers that we can use in arguments.

M: Yes.

P: To say this approach is working, people’s happiness, people’s content. We’re getting better social commentaries or social engagement.

M: Health!

P: Oh, health is a huge one.

M: Mental health, and all of those measures have been going backwards over the last decade. And unless we do something differently, they’re going to continue getting worse. We’re going to have higher rates of suicides, higher rates of depression, anxiety, obesity, diabetes.

P: Yeah.

M: You name it, things are falling apart from the mental health perspective.

P: And they are linked. Like mental health is one of the biggest indicators for obesity in Australia.

M: Mmm hmm.

P: And globally, it makes a big difference.

M: A lot of other countries are looking not only at GDP, but other measures to say whether or not… You know, on their report card at the end of the year when they pat themselves on the back.

P: Laugh, yeah.

M: It’s not only an A in economics, it’s an A in social sciences and all the other things.

P: Wealth distribution.

M: Yes, let’s not even talk about that.

P: Laugh!

M: This Herald/Age Lateral Economics Wellbeing Index looks at changes in education, health, work-life, social inequality and environmental degradation.

P: Mmm.

M: It doesn’t matter if you’re healthy and happy if you’ve got no world to live on.

P: Exactly.

M: And the results for overall Australian wellbeing are not good.

P: Mmm.

M: So, we’ve had a decline in the pandemic, and here’s… Let’s put some dollar values on it since we are talking GDP, a lot of time.

P: Ok, yep.

M: Worth $13.3 billion AU.

P: Sounds like a lot of money.

M: It’s a lot of money. You could fund a lot of wellbeing hubs with 13.3 billion dollars.

P: Yes, you could, definitely. Yeah.

M: Laugh.

P: Where does that sit, in terms of our, in terms of our GDP? As a percentage?

M: Oh, I should have looked into it.

P: Maybe I’ll look that one up. Leandra will look that up.

M & P: Laugh.

P: Thanks Lea.

M: So, 13.3 billion dollars is the value of the decline in our mental health since the pandemic started.

P: Mmm.

M: And we’re sitting around talking about how well we’re doing.

P: Yeah.

M: We’re not.

P: No.

M: We’re not. And look, to be fair, this is, this is kind of new. We’re a little behind the eight ball in Australia. As we’ve said, there’s other countries leading the way. But for the last 100 years there was a really good correlation between GDP, you know, in growth and financial security, and how prosperous and healthy population was.

P: Or contented the population was. The population was happy when we were earning money.

M: Not necessarily contentment, that didn’t factor in. But health measures and things like housing, water, electricity, etcetera go up as the country gets richer.

P: Yep.

M: And there’s a direct correlation to social impact and wellbeing impact when people start getting fresh water, right?

P: Yep.

M: When they have access to housing rather than living in slums.

P: Access to basic human rights.

M: So, there’s definitely a direct impact. When you’re talking poorer countries increase the GDP, you’ll increase your people’s basic access to what we think of basic human rights, right?

P: Well, they are. Water, sanitation, nutrition –

M: But we’re long past that in Australia, America, most European countries that haven’t been…

P: The developed nations.

M: Right? They have all been happily drinking water from a tap, pretty much getting their housing right, feeding their population in general etcetera.

P: Yep.

M: And so, for a while GDP has continued to grow, but we haven’t seen those increases in wellbeing in the population. And it’s because once you get to a certain point of development in your country, we need new measures then. So, I will give a little bit of slack to our government.

P: Laugh.

M: I think we’re very much a lucky country.

P: Sure.

M: But it’s time for change.

P: It’s time for new measures.

M: It’s time.

P: It’s time to look at other things. So, what are the other things that we do look at when we’re looking at wellbeing, Marie?

M: Well, maybe let’s talk about what is wellbeing? When we’re talking about wellbeing.

P: Ok.

M: So, wellbeing and happiness are a little bit different. So, it is definitely multifaceted, and it includes your mental, emotional and physical wellbeing.

P: Yep.

M: So, all three of those, and really it includes having meaning and purpose in your life. So that’s again, very closely tied to a sense of identity and self.

P: Yeah.

M: And factors into your emotional health.

P: Very clearly. If you can wake up and be excited for doing a job or a task or having something to wake up for huge amounts of physical impacts, with that.

M: Yep, and on top of that, if you can have autonomy and agency in those things, we talked about those before. It’s about also having something to get you out of bed in the morning again back to that lovely start that we always talk. About 40% of people who retire are depressed within a year.

P: Yes.

M: It’s something that gives you something to look forward to. Plan for, feel good about doing and achieving and accomplishing.

P: Yep.

M: So that’s the first one. Second, one community and connection again –

P: This is the social?

M: Yeah.

M: – and we’ve seen very much during Covid that a lot of people have been suffering from loneliness and social isolation.

P: Mmm.

M: The third, which I kind of bucket in with the fourth here as well, so physical health and mental health.

P: Mmm.

M: So, are you getting outside, exercising, eating well, sleeping well?

P: Yep.

M: And mental health? Do you prioritise mental health, are you practising kindness and gratitude? Do you manage your negative thoughts?

P: Mmm.

M: And do you actively work on your resilience, stress and positive mental health?

P: Yes.

M: Right, which is the bit that I didn’t know we had to do. I just thought happiness was a natural state.

P: Laugh! Well, I think this is what society has been prioritising a little bit more, and this has come from a lot of government led initiatives back in the 2000’s, with governments going we need to start thinking about wellbeing and having those ideas out there. New Zealand was the one that really jumped on top of it from my memory in terms of putting into policy. And that’s where Jacinda Ardern has been so proactive.

M: Mmm.

P: But these are the things that people of our mother’s generation didn’t consider. But we’re really lucky, as you said and we’re in the position where we don’t have to worry about clean running water and a roof over our heads, we can actually start considering things like resiliency, mental wellbeing, emotional intelligence.

M: Mmm hmm. What do we want out of life? Following your passions, not just trying to put food on the table.

P: Yeah.

M: Yeah, we are very privileged in that way.

P: Mmm.

M: So, that is what wellbeing encompasses. But it’s also about balance. It’s also about understanding that you need to put time into being happy and resilient and managing your mental health, your physical health, having meaning and purpose, contributing to community and connection with others. And the more that comes at you, redundancy, illness in the family, coronavirus.

P: Yep.

M: The more stresses that come at you, the more you gotta double down on those things, right?

P: Yeah, they’re more important.

M: To a certain point, when, unfortunately, your seesaw is going to get a bit out of balance. If, for instance, we have two years of Global Pandemic.

P: Mmm.

M: And maybe on top of that, if you’re in America two years of a global pandemic and a lot of political turmoil, right?

P: Yes.

M: And that will send anyone even if they’re doing the best they can to look after their physical and mental wellbeing and to reach out to people, etcetera, etcetera, that amount of change and…

P: Crises.

M: Crises will break even the most resilient person.

P: Absolutely.

M: So, wellbeing is about having the balance there and on any day we go through a lot of change and a lot of turmoil.

P: Yep.

M: And so, that’s why it’s so important nowadays compared to our parents’ generation to be putting the time in. But we’ve been through a tough couple of years, and another really good example of where you can’t help that balance is a war zone for instance.

P: Yeah.

M: When you’re just constantly in fright or flight.

P: Mmm, yeah.

M: So, that’s wellbeing. It’s about putting all the work in on those three to four things. But then also understanding that at any one point in your life things might throw that balance out of whack. And it’s about balancing the challenges with the good stuff.

P: Yep. So then, in terms of putting that into practise, this is the idea of the wellbeing hubs which is a particular passion of yours. And there was an article by Martin Seligman, our friend Martin.

M: Oh, not an article. He was a Thinker in Residence in South Australia in 2013. I love that job title.

P: Laugh! Thinker in Residence.

M: “I’m a Thinker in Residence.” Laugh.

P: Go South Australia for taking the initiative on that, to have a Thinker in Residence, to have a philosophical person up there.

M: And to have someone from the positive psychology field come and be a Thinker in Residence.

P: Yeah.

M: So, he came up with the idea of wellbeing hubs and look for many, many, many years, we have known that people are more successful in life when they practise these positive psychology interventions.

P: Yep, mmm hmm.

M: And activities, when they do the things that we talked about.

P: Yes.

M: That is our wellbeing activities, right? People are more successful. They contribute more in their jobs and to the economy.

P: Yeah.

M: And so, you want your GDP to go up?

P: You want people to be happy.

M: Right. Yeah.

P: A happy worker is a good worker. That’s a Chinese thing.

M: Very true. They’re very smart, Chinese. So many years ago, we worked out that it’s better to have happy people and our schools went okay, this is great. And all over Australia we are really quite advanced in the world with how we’ve implemented positive psychology into our curricula.

P: Like in our education?

M: Yes, we’re doing some really good things. So, I was online, and obviously South Australia took the Wellbeing hubs concept and they’ve got their kids and wellbeing programmes they’ve got resources, the Australian federal government has a bunch of resources and information. Podcasts for teachers, teacher guides, classroom activities, all of that kind of that kind of stuff to bring it into the classrooms, these concepts and ideas and to help train kids.

P: Ok.

M: But no one’s really doing much out there for everyone else.

P: So once you get out of school, it kind of falls away a little bit.

M: Like, we’ve had to do all our research here, you and me.

P: Yep.

M: And if you’re under 18 [great]. Where are people getting their information about how to live a good life? We missed the boat, right?

P: These new kids coming through great, good on you. A wonderful idea, yeah.

M: And in New South Wales there is a wellbeing framework for school kids as well. So, a lot of our state governments are on top of this, But that’s only 0- to 18-year-olds.

P: Yeah.

M: What about the rest of us?

P: Where does the rest of the population go to?

M: I’m glad you asked, Pete.

P: Laugh! Was that a nice little feed there, laugh. There you go, off you go.

M: My solution.

P & M: Laugh.

M: And Martin, Dr Martin Seligman’s solution is these wellbeing hubs.

P: Ok.

M: And essentially, they will do a lot of the same things that churches do, right? It is a space, a physical space, but also a virtual space where you can run programs and get people involved in their community.

P: And any number of diverse programs as well. It can be more than just a sporting thing or a sporting association or a knitting class or an orchid club.

M: Yeah, yeah, you can have pregnant yoga in the mornings and book club at lunch for the… anyone, anyone really, let’s be honest and…

P: Creative contemporary dance in the afternoon.

M: Mmm hmm, and then gardening in the evenings. So, whatever it is and it’s just a way to pull together a variety of activities that are all based in positive psychology research.

P: Yeah.

M: And not only give meaning, so whether you’re learning a new skill or you’re giving back or contributing or volunteering at the centre.

P: Yep.

M: Or doing something more meaningful, like teaching a class right?

P: Yep.

M: Or doing it with a group of friends or meeting new friends as you learn these new skills and then also, you know, wherever possible, building in physical health activities and elements to that as well.

P: It’s also a great screening tool as well, getting people who maybe are in social isolation for whatever reason, sometimes my personal choice.

M: Mmm hmm.

P: These are the people that miss out on engaging with other people who go, “oh, are you OK today? You’re looking a little bit lacklustre?”

M: Mmm hmm.

P: And that, that’s really important for health and mental health as well. The possibility that someone may not be processing a death in the family very well or not reaching out might be suffering from something that’s ill health, and they haven’t realised it until someone makes a comment about it. “Are you losing a little bit of weight? Have you been eating okay?”

M: Mmm hmm.

P: Or, “Have you been sleeping well?” And these are all factors that build into us being able to recognise and look out for each other, which then results in better health outcomes and wellbeing outcomes.

M: It’s a community. When you see someone every week for an hour, that’s all it is.

P: Yeah.

M: Then you look out for that person, you know, you start to build a relationship, and it’s not necessarily super awkward, like networking. Where you go just to talk, you’ve got something to do, and you can build relationships as you’ve seen [or heard] through our episode on making friends as adults.

P: Yes.

M: Yeah, it really helps to deepen those bonds.

P: Yeah.

M: As we know through volleyball.

P: Hugely.

M: All right, so wellbeing hubs. That’s my thing.

P: Laugh.

M: So, the good news is South Australia have partnered with the Playford and Na-ruh-coot (Naracoorte) Lucindale Council to co invest in some local wellbeing hubs.

P: Na-ruh-kawt (Naracoorte) for our Adelaide listeners.

M: Sorry about that.

P: Laugh.

M: Na-ruh-coot, na-ruh-kawt.

P: In Canberra, they recently launched a wellbeing hub. They got the minister out there to plant some seedlings, good photo op.

P: There we go. Shake some hands.

M: Yep.

P: Kiss some babies.

M: So, they’re starting to pop up now. My challenge to you out there is how will you get involved and make it happen, because I think around the country every neighbourhood should have a wellbeing hub.

P: Yeah, yeah. I think that would be good.

M: That, I think is the future. So –

P: As common as a library. Every suburb should have a library. Every suburb should have a wellbeing hub.

M: Absolutely, with programs to bring people together.

P: There we go.

M: All right, that’s it, we’ve had our rant.

P: Laugh!

M: 100th episode! Again, thank you so much for listening everybody. And we really appreciate hearing from you and knowing that you’re out there. So, thank you for your support. And hopefully we can make the next 100 just as interesting.

P: And in the meantime, stay happy,

M: and cynical 😊

[Happy exit music – background]

P: And if you like our little show, we would absolutely love for you to leave a comment or rating to help us out.

M: Until next time.

M & P: Choose happiness.

[Exit music fadeout]

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The Importance of Living with Negative Emotions (E99)

25/01/2022 by Marie

Happiness for Cynics podcast

This week, Join Marie and Pete as they discuss toxic positivity and the importance of living with negative emotions.

Show notes

Men’s Shed

The modern Men’s Shed is an updated version of the shed in the backyard that has long been a part of Australian culture. Men’s Sheds are found in many cities and towns around Australia and continue to spring up internationally.

Most men have learned from our culture that they don’t talk about feelings and emotions many do not take an interest in their own health and well-being. Becoming a member of a Men’s Shed provides a safe and busy environment where men can find many of these things in an atmosphere of old-fashioned mateship. And, importantly, there is no pressure. Men can just come and have a yarn and a cuppa if that is all they’re looking for.

Dadirri – Deep listening

The Aboriginal people of Australia have long practiced deep listening or dadirri, an almost spiritual skill, based on respect. Deep listening is inner, quiet, still awareness and waiting.

“Australia needs to know that Dadirri can help you slow down, stop, and help you realise who you are, what you’re about, where you’re going, where you belong.” – Miriam Rose Ungunmerr-Baumann

Transcription

[Happy intro music -background]

M: Welcome to happiness for cynics and thanks for joining us as we explore all the things I wish I’d known earlier in life but didn’t.

P: This podcast is about how to live the good life. Whether we’re talking about a new study or the latest news or eastern philosophy, our show is all about discovering what makes people happy.

M: So, if you’re like me and you want more out of life, listen in and more importantly, buy in because I guarantee if you do, the science of happiness can change your life.

P: Plus, sometimes I think we’re kind of funny.

[Intro music fadeout]

P: Welcome back.

M: So?

P: Bright and bushy tailed.

M: So, what are we talking about today, Pete?

P: So, today is about living with negative emotions. Toxic positivity.

M: Not toxic positivity.

P: We’re talking about toxic positivity, but not enjoying toxic positivity. So, it’s the reverse.

M: We are being cynical of toxic positivity.

P: [Gasp] Cynics, yay! The cynic is back.

M: It’s even in the name.

P: Mmm.

M: Toxic.

P: Yes. Oddly enough, this came up in my lecture this week with my tutor.

M: Oh, nice.

P: Yes, and I felt very, very, very empowered by saying, you know the definition of toxic positivity is blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

M & P: Laugh.

P: I thought I’d gotten the record when I pulled out the word thoraco-abdominal fascia.

M: Wrong podcast.

P: Laugh.

M: But what is toxic positivity then, Pete?

P: According to Andrée-Ann Labranche, who is a candidate of psychological doctorate at the University of Quebec in Montreal,

“Toxic positivity [words] are dismissive comments focused on happiness, and “all is well” that denies emotional validation.”

M: And I think this is really important because we speak so much about happiness, joy, subjective wellbeing, whatever you want to call it, and the power of that to really transform lives.

P: Mmm, oh yes. Empowering and getting in touch with it and doing all the work to encourage it and be aware of it.

M: And personally, it has changed me. It’s the flourish and thrive argument. We’ve spoken about that as well.

P: Mmm.

M: The difference between just having life happen to you and taking life by the balls –

P: Laugh!

M: – and running with it and loving life.

P: Yeah.

M: And with that kind of rhetoric, people looking in from the outside can often think, ‘Well, my life’s going… I’m going through divorce, retirement, redundancy, big life changes and things aren’t good.’

P: Mmm.

M: Grief.

P: Yes. ‘And I just can’t be happy right now.’

M: Yeah.

P: [Whispers] But that’s okay.

M: Well, we’re here to say that’s okay, but a lot of the slogans on the T-shirts and the really short, sharp, ‘nine ways to be happier’ articles that don’t go into the science or only present one-sided view of positivity can create this environment of toxic positivity.

P: Which is really negative for you and really creates trauma and depression and anxiety. And really debilitating emotions come about because of that.

M: Absolutely, and really something that a lot of men’s groups are finding –

P: Mmm, yes.

M: – over the last 10, 20 years, we’ve discussed this as well, is… Men’s Health, I know there’s a lot of articles now about mental health.

P: It’s so in the current mode of thought, because of the [high] rates of suicide for men.

M: Absolutely. So, I know that one in five people experience mental health issues in any one year. What we do know also is that when men attempt suicide when women attempt suicide, men are more successful.

P: Yeah.

M: So, what we’re saying here is that it is impossible to live in a world where everything is happy.

P: Those things are just annoying, aren’t they?

M: Laugh.

P: These really happy people, I’m just like, “Can I pinch you on the arm or something? Just give you something to deal with.” Laugh.

M: And things go wrong constantly. And it’s all well and good when things are going well and life is happy and you’ve got a lot to be grateful for.

P: Yep.

M: But that is not sustainable.

P: Mmm.

M: There is no way to avoid pain and trauma and grief and at the same time experience happiness. You could go crawl into a hole and do nothing, but you’ll experience no joy as well as no pain.

P: Mmm. This is what Labranche is talking about. She’s talking about owning your negative emotions and confronting them and giving them space.

M: Yes.

P: Actually going, it is permissible for you to feel low to feel down, and that’s really important because that emotional validation is so vital for us. If we don’t get these negative emotions, she says in the article, they keep coming back and they come back with more velocity and more intensity.

M: Absolutely. It’s like spending on a credit card, you keep making transactions and eventually you’ve got to pay the bill.

P: Yes, yes! Oh, I like that analogy.

M: Eventually, you know someone’s going to come knocking on your door and the time will come. You pay it, or you do the work, and you feel the pain and you do the processing, and you do the self-growth or it comes out in really unhealthy ways, like anger and violence.

P: Oh yes. Labranche talks about that being the externalised symptoms of delinquency, violence, defensiveness, disrupted miss and impulsive behaviours.

M: And a lot of that comes from perhaps being around a toxic positivity environment where people haven’t felt that they could be sad or angry or mad, or also where they don’t have the tools, the language.

P: Mmm.

M: Or society hasn’t allowed them, particular again with men, to feel that they can have a cry or that they can have a vent to a friend and a lot of the times they’re told to suck it up.

P: Yep.

M: We’ve really got that culture, that Aussie bloke culture here in Australia. But there are similar, similar pressures, societal pressures with a lot of Western men.

P: Mmm.

M: Now there are some other cultures around the world where men are encouraged to have tantrums and cry and throw plates and show their emotion and again there’s a difference between a negative emotions and negative behaviours.

P: Yes.

M: We’re not at all condoning violence, but to show that emotion and that is seen as a sign of strength.

P: Mmm, yeah

M: Our country is not like that.

P: I think it’s changing.

M: It is.

P: I do think the conversation is changing in Australia. We are an inheritor of the British stiff upper lip.

M: Mmm hmm.

P: I think that there’s a lot more conversations, a lot more awareness about it now, anyway. And there are things like the Men’s Shed, for example, which is encouraging that conversation and encouraging that safe space for emotional expression and for emotional intelligence to come forward.

M: Absolutely. Before the show, when we were doing our research, we were talking about what happens when people approach life with a toxic positivity mindset.

P: Mmm.

M: So, the reason you want positivity to balance out negativity is that we are wired and hardwired to look for the negative. If we finish a project, what do we do? We call them PIR’s, in the corporate world, you go and look at everything that went wrong so you can not do it again next time.

P: Laugh.

M: It’s continuous improvement.

P: Yeah.

M: You finish a sports game and the coach says, “All right, here’s what we didn’t get right this time. That’s what we’re going to work on in the gym next week.”

P: Mmm.

M: We mess something up and we berate ourselves and we think, ‘Why didn’t I do X, Y and Z,’ so that is natural evolutionary, biological hard wiring in us. The people who are better at looking out for the dangers around them lived, right?

P: We’re hard wired to see the negative.

M: And so also adding in the positive isn’t about over indexing on the positive and not seeing the negative. It’s about balancing out what we’re naturally doing with the negative.

P: Yeah, and giving space to both.

M: Yep.

P: That’s the, that’s the good part.

M: Balancing it, balancing it.

P: For sure.

M: And when it becomes toxic is when it becomes the only thing.

P: Mmm.

M: Just like only being negative, only being positive and not allowing yourself or others to have space to experience those negative feelings –

P: I did some work around this. Sorry, sorry about cutting you off there. I did some work around this with a therapist a few years back, and I found it very difficult to give voice to that negative… that, that sort of negative area. Sorry for the positive side of the negative.

M: Mmm hmm. The silver lining?

P: Yeah, it was It was really difficult. And I remember being in the corner of the room and actually physically I was like that little black spot, it needs a voice you need to give it a voice. And I was like, “I can’t allow it to come out.” So, it took a lot of work and a lot of imagery and physical-isation to actually even acknowledge that.

M: Yeah.

P: And I think that, that’s something that maybe a lot of people do struggle with is going, “No, there is something, there is something in the negative that you’re allowed to actually express.”

M: Yep.

P: And get it out there and talk to a friend to talk to a trusted one. Talk to a loved one about it.

M: Or find a psychologist.

P: Yes.

M: Or psychiatrist you can talk to.

P: Yeah.

M: All right. So, the reason that toxic positivity, you know, it’s at the wrong end of the spectrum there. You want to be in the middle with a good mix of positive and negative emotions and experiences. You want to be able to look at the negative emotions and find the positive out of them and look at the positive and in a way to better yourself in the situation.

P: Mmm.

M: Also, be able to pull back and have a look at things that didn’t go right or could have been done better so that we can learn.

P: To help you move forward.

M: Yep. And that’s, that’s not going to change. Let’s be honest.

P: Laugh.

M: But where toxic positivity can be really harmful is when someone comes to you and wants to express negativity, something that’s gone wrong, whether it’s grief or shame, or any raft of negative emotions, and we emotionally invalidate what they’re saying.

P: Yeah, yeah. That’s the, “Oh, can’t you just be happy?”

M: Yes.

P: “Can’t you look at the positive? Can’t you see what you’ve got that’s brilliant?

M: Mmm hmm. “That’s really sad, but I’m sure it won’t be that bad.”

P: Yeah, that’s what we don’t want to do.

M: “What do you want for dinner?”

P: Laugh. “Let’s have a cup of tea.”

M & P: Laugh.

M: Yep.

P: That’s definitely what we don’t want to happen. So, if you’re dealing with someone who has that need or desire to express some negativity, the first thing you need to do is to acknowledge it.

M: Validate their emotions. You don’t also have to understand their emotions. So, if it’s real for them, it’s real.

P: Exactly.

M: And so, we teach a lot of this in my company. Actually, if someone is going through a tough time, even if it wouldn’t even rate on your scale of tough to not tough, even if it’s not even on there. If they’re not coping, if they’re having a hard time, then they’re going through something that requires validation.

P: Yes.

M: And requires, you know, the person on the other end to stop and listen.

P: Yeah.

M: So, there’s some great examples from a study by American psychologists, and they looked at two examples. So, one in the aftermath of a breakup. A young man feels anger, sadness and confusion. His friend listens to him and validates him. The man then normalises his conflicting feelings and understands the feelings will not last forever.

P: Hmm.

M: So, amongst that he would also not feel alone as well, which is really important.

P: Mmm.

M: In contrast, we look at another man who is going through the same type of breakup and doesn’t understand his feelings, feels ashamed and fears losing control of his emotions. His friends invalidate him and won’t listen to him. The man then tries to suppress his emotions, which creates anxiety and can even lead to depression.

P: Yeah, definitely.

M: And as hard as it is to rock up to your mates at the pub after a few beers and ball your eyes out and be like, “I just don’t know why she left me. She was the love of my life, and I feel bad, or I messed up or it was all her fault.”

P: Laugh.

M: Whatever it is, being able to have some friends listen and go, “that sucks, mate. Yeah, I’m on your side. She was horrid, I never liked her in the first place.”

P: Laugh.

M: “Let me buy you another drink.”

P & M: Laugh.

P: Having friends who will do that for you and let you vent and process.

P: Yeah.

M: Process as well, is so important to healing.

P: Yeah.

M: The other thing we want to talk about was avoidance reaction.

P: Well, that’s the whole thing of doing everything possible to avoid negative emotions. Like the minute you feel something you go “La la la la, I’m going to go with the here and jump up and down and pretend to be a unicorn, and everything will be fine!”

M: [High pitched, shrill voice] Fine! It’s the word fine, isn’t it? I’m fine!

P: Laugh, yes. We know what that stands for? Did we maybe want to look that up because I don’t know if we’re allowed to say that on air, laugh… F’d up, Insecure, Neurotic, and Emotional.

M: Mmm hmm. Fine. Okay, fine. Just fine.

P: Laugh! And this is this is this is where those negative emotions, if we don’t address them and don’t give them the space they do return more often and with greater intensity. And the Labranche talks about that in the article that we read for this week, it really is important to give those negative emotions space. It’s like the universe just keeps going, “Oh, you didn’t learn the lesson? Here it is again.”

M: Laugh.

P: “And here it is again.” “And here it is AGAIN!” Laugh.

M: So, I’ve been reading this book called Reasons to Stay Alive, and it is that macabre I will say.

P: Mmm.

M: It is also based on the science behind the idea of talking about suicide, depression and anxiety and how if done right and sensitively, it can actually help people to not commit suicide. So, opening up these conversations there’s another great Netflix series called 13 Reasons Why.

P: Ahh.

M: Where the main protagonist kills herself and leaves behind a range of tapes for the people in her life to listen to.

P: Wow.

M: Yep, and when done sensitively and with the appropriate disclaimers and next steps of people who may be struggling, it’s really important to broach these conversations in appropriate ways. So, the books by Matt Haig, his a famous author, and he’s written a bunch of other stuff. But he has struggled through his life since his twenties with anxiety and depression, and I just love this quote of his. So, he says, “You need to feel life’s terror to feel it’s wonder.”

P: Oh. Mmm. It’s like experiencing both sides of the seesaw.

M: Absolutely. So, he talks about depression and anxiety through his book and what that means to him acknowledging fully that that means something completely different to other people, everyone experiences that differently. But he also talks about how you don’t appreciate the sun rise until you’ve thought about ending it all.

P: Mmm.

M: You don’t appreciate toast and coffee on the porch with your wife until you’ve been so low that you thought you couldn’t go on. So, there is something about that negative emotion that can have a silver lining.

P: Yep.

M: It can, once you get through it, make the life on the other side that much more meaningful and precious. And again, definitely with me since the accident.

P: Mmm.

M: Just feel that there’s so much in this world, in this life, to explore and that brings joy and satisfaction and laughs and happiness and all of that, that we’ll never get through it all in a lifetime.

P: Yeah.

M: And so, every second spent pursuing it is a blessing.

P: I’m with you there.

M: Yeah. Alright, we’re starting to run out of time, so we might just skip into negativity bias.

P: Yes, it’s the vocabulary for negative experiences, so many words that we have for… We have more words in our vocabulary… It’s so much easier to describe negative experiences than it is to describe positive experiences, so it’s easier to go negative. It’s easy to look for something that confirms your negative belief.

M: Mmm hmm.

P: Sometimes they said, this is about reframing it’s about “Okay, well, maybe I need to do that for my positive experiences as well”, learning to recognise the positive experience, but then dive a little bit deeper into it and go, “Okay, well, was I happy or was I elated? Was I euphoric?” It’s giving that little bit more of a descriptive label, if you like, so that you actually spend some time dwelling on how –

M: Good?

P: – bloody fabulous it was! Laugh.

M: And again, negative bias is another scientific word which just pretty much says what we spoke about earlier this episode. We are geared to notice the negative and dwell on the negative.

P: Mmm, yep.

M: So, we have a bias towards negative. If you’re not proactively looking for that silver lining or being grateful, practising gratitude is a great way to be re-wiring the brain for the positive. Such a simple exercise to add the balance back in, then your natural evolutionary self, the… is it the limbic? Which part of your brain?

P: That’s the emotional brain, yep.

M: The ah… fight or flight old school. Amygdala. [pronounced uh-mig-dar-la]

P: Laugh! Amygdala. [pronounced uh-mig-duh-luh] Laugh!

M: We will forever disagree on this.

P: Laugh.

M: But if you’re not taking control of those centres of the brain or balancing them out and letting them run rampant through your head. Then you will most likely be in that negative area forever.

P: Yeah, yeah so true. So, filter your negativity bias, get some positivity bias in there every now and then as well.

M: Yep. All right, so we had to tips to finish up. So, tip number one. When people come to you and they’re going through bad times, it might feel like you’re helping them to help them see the positive. But really, what you need to do is take a breath, validate what they’re saying. Yes, I hear you. Yes, I understand that sounds tough, sad, etcetera. And also listen.

P: Mmm.

M: Rather than jumping straight into solving motion, which is where my head goes, just sit and listen and let them know it’s all right and you’re there.

P: There’s a thing you can reference called deep listening, and it actually dates back to traditional aboriginal culture. But yeah, that ability to listen in Western society particularly, we don’t listen well. We are not good with silence. Asian cultures are better at it.

M: It just feels so awkward, doesn’t it?

P: That’s the thing. It is awkward for us. So, it’s a little tip.

M: And then the next thing is for you. You and me, is to learn to recognise negative feelings and talk about them, obviously in an appropriate way. I see a lot of people who are struggling with this part of their lives who post rants on Facebook, and that’s a place that’s going to make you more lonely.

P: Yep.

M: People don’t respond or know what to do with a lot of those posts.

P: Yeah.

M: But reach out to someone. Reach out to someone and go have a coffee with them and let them know what’s going on your life and again just ask them just to listen, right.

P: Mmm.

M: There will be time for solving stuff later or working out a plan forward later. But to begin with, you need someone who can listen or pay a professional. And then eventually, though, you do want to stop just talking over and over and over and over about the negative thing and start taking steps to –

P: – Action something.

M: Yeah, to bring some of that positivity back in and to start balancing that out, but only when you’re ready.

P: Yeah, mmm.

M: Alright and on that note,

P: have a happy week.

M: And stay cynical.

P: Laugh!

[Happy exit music – background]

P: And if you like our little show, we would absolutely love for you to leave a comment or rating to help us out.

M: Until next time.

M & P: Choose happiness.

[Exit music fadeout]

Please note that I get a small commission if you buy something from my site. Your support helps to keep this site going at no additional cost to you. Thanks!

How to be Your Best Possible Self (E98)

18/01/2022 by Marie

Happiness for Cynics podcast

Join Marie and Pete as they discuss being your Best Possible Self and the exercise that may be your key to happiness.

Show notes

Want the science? Check out these studies

King, A. (2001). The health benefits of writing about life goals. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 27, 798-807.

Layous, K., Nelson, S. K., & Lyubomirsky, S. (2013). What is the optimal way to deliver a positive activity intervention? The case of writing about one’s best possible selves. Journal of Happiness Studies, 14(2), 635-654.

Meevissen, Y., Alberts H., & Peters, M. (2011). Become more optimistic by imagining a best possible self: Effects of a two-week intervention. Journal of Behavior Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry. 42, 371-378

Carrillo, A., Rubio-Aparicio, M., Molinari, G., Enrique, Á., Sánchez-Meca, J., & Baños, R. M. (2019). Effects of the Best Possible Self intervention: A systematic review and meta-analysis. PloS one, 14(9).

First Calendar

Who Made the First Calendar? Historians believe timekeeping goes as far back as the Neolithic period, but actual calendars weren’t around until the Bronze Age in 3100 BC. The Sumerians in Mesopotamia made the very first calendar, which divided a year into 12 lunar months, each consisting of 29 or 30 days.

Transcript

[Happy intro music -background]

M: Welcome to happiness for cynics and thanks for joining us as we explore all the things I wish I’d known earlier in life but didn’t.

P: This podcast is about how to live the good life. Whether we’re talking about a new study or the latest news or eastern philosophy, our show is all about discovering what makes people happy.

M: So, if you’re like me and you want more out of life, listen in and more importantly, buy in because I guarantee if you do, the science of happiness can change your life.

P: Plus, sometimes I think we’re kind of funny.

[Intro music fadeout]

M: Happy New Year!

P: Happy 2022! Woo, woo, woot!

M: Laugh.

P: I’m sure there’s something numerical about 2022 that’s going to be fabulous really. 2-0-2-2. What is that? that’s 2 and two 2’s are 4 and it’s 6… but it’s all 2’s, tea for two?

M: Laugh, we’re starting the year on a high here.

P: Laugh. Tea for two, there we go, it’ll be teatime. Laugh.

M: I never asked, have you been drinking Pete? Laugh.

P: …Maybe. No, I haven’t. I’ve been working all day. I’ve had a very busy day, but that’s good for the new year.

M: Yes, it is.

P: Yes, in honour of the God Janice.

M: …Wah??

P: The New Year was started by Caesar in 45 B.C. It was the first New Year’s Day.

It was named January in honour of the God Janice, who has two heads, one looking forward and one looking backward.

M: Ahh…

P: Which is why New Year is such a great time to project and look forward to what is to come but also reflect and look back on what was.

[Starts talking in an ethereal prophetic voice]

And use that as a launching pad to launch yourself forward into your new domain and [voice better louder] New dominion as ruler of the world!

M & P: Laughter!

M: All right, on that note.

P: Laugh.

M: We are here today –

P: Still Laughing.

M: – to look forward.

P: Look forward. How cool it be, though, to go, “Meh, don’t like this calendar. I’m going to make a new one. Everybody, you gotta start on this. We could have 364 days.”

Everyone: “It doesn’t work.”

P: “Oh, all right, all right. I’ll do a quarter day every year.” Laugh.

M: That kind of was probably the first calendar that was built on a bit of science. Astronomy?

P: Mmm. I don’t know, but I’ll give it to you.

M: Well, it must have been, because they got it kind of right, didn’t they?

P: Yeah.

M: We’re just guessing here now.

P: Yeah.

M: We’re just having a conversation.

P: Yeah, but 45 B.C. that’s yeah… But apparently the New Year’s Day goes back 4000 years.

M: Oh.

P: So, there were, ancient Egyptians used to celebrate a New Year’s Day. So, it wasn’t the Romans.

M: Well, a lot of other cultures, non-Western cultures, have this idea of cyclic time and things happening around seasons. And obviously there was collecting of grains and seeds.

P: Harvesting.

M: …Well, harvesting kind of requires a little bit more organisation rather than just gathering.

P: Laugh, yeah.

M: But you would have an idea of the seasons, definitely.

P: Hmm.

M: So, that cyclical idea of time, I think –

P: – was always present in ancient cultures? Yes.

M: I think in some way, particularly in Eastern culture and the cultures that believe in reincarnation or the ecosystems and everything coming and going, but just being movements of energy.

P: So, the hippies had it right. The celestial dancers were onto something. Let’s get naked in the full moonlight.

M: Laugh. So, what we’re talking about today really is a good time of year to be looking at. We’re talking about ‘Best Possible Self’, activity or exercise, and this is probably one of the most popular, or most prescribed or widely used positive psychology interventions.

P: Oh, what is it, Marie? What is it? What is it? What is it? Tell me. Tell me now!

M: Laugh. So, uh, okay. We’ll get there, we’ll get there. We’ve got 20 minutes.

P: I can’t handle the suspense!

M: Laugh. And so, the ‘Best Possible Self’. You can probably already kind of guess where we’re going with this. This is one of those topics that is really borderline for me, though.

P: Oh, oh we love that because you sort of sit there and get a little twinkle in your eye and you start twitching.

M: Laugh.

P: I can do this, really I can grr, grr, grr.

M: There are few things in my journey of self-discovery, when it comes to positive psychology, that I’m still really on the fence about.

P: Laugh.

M: So, meditation.

P: Yeah, we know. Laugh.

M: Mindfulness exercises and positive affirmations are probably three of the ones that we’ve discussed in the past that I’m like, eh?

P: So, is ‘Best Positive Self’ a positive affirmation? Or is this something slightly different?

M: It’s along the same lines as positive affirmations.

P: Mmm.

M: Definitely, mindset exercise and coming back to new year – new you. A lot of people are setting new year’s resolutions.

P: Yep

M: By this point in the year, a lot of people have given up on their new year’s resolutions.

P: Laugh! I’ll start again next week. It’s fine.

M: Laugh. And maybe you did set some new year’s resolutions that you haven’t been able to keep for a variety of reasons. A lot of us do that. And maybe you’re looking for something to replace that already in week three of January as we kick off our year.

P: Mmm.

M: And maybe ‘Best Possible Self’ is a new activity that you might be able to stick with.

P: Okay, okay, let’s dive in. What are we doing?

M: Essentially, it’s a mindset exercise, but it’s in writing.

P: Ok.

M: So, pretty much what we’re trying to do is increase optimism.

P: Oh, okay. Yep.

M: As a personality trait, optimism has been shown to increase well-being and leads to greater physical well-being and longevity.

P: Oh, yes, yes, yes, yes, that’s been proven heaps. And it is so obvious. Happier people get better stuff.

M: Yep.

P & M: Laugh.

P: Scientific language there.

M: And they don’t die.

P & M: Laugh!

M: Okay, well, they do. Everybody dies.

P: They do, yep.

M: Taxes, they get taxed too, but they’re happy about it.

P: Laugh.

M: So… laugh.

M: So, optimists are people who look forward to the future and believe things will work out. So, there’s a great quote often attributed to [John] Lennon, which is,

“Everything will be OK in the end. If it’s not okay, it’s not the end.”

P: Oh, I like that. Oh, that’s great, I’m going to put that on my wall. Laugh.

M: And it’s very much the mantra of optimists. So just because you’re an optimist doesn’t mean that you are practising toxic positivity.

P: Eeuggh, yeah.

M: It’s important to make this distinction, and a lot of people who don’t understand past the T-shirt slogan, like to throw this at psychologists and researchers.

P: Yep, yep.

M: But what we’re saying here is that it doesn’t mean that bad things don’t happen to optimists or that they don’t feel the appropriate negative feelings.

P: Mmm. When necessary, yeah.

M: Like sadness or frustration or anger, because that’s natural and healthy when things go wrong.

P: Yes.

M: Instead, optimists have a level of resilience that allows them to work through their feelings and move forward quickly.

P: Quickly being the operative word?

M: It allows them to move through and out the other side.

P: Mmm.

M: Now, sometimes some things take longer.

P: Mmm, yep. Major life events.

M: And some things will always impact you forever more. Definitely. People who are dealing with grief, a lot of them would say they’ll never be the same.

P: Yep.

M: And that’s fair and fine.

P: Mmm.

M: But people who are optimists will find a way to keep living and to work through that.

P: Yes.

M: And move forward often quicker, I won’t say quicker, but in a more constructive way. They won’t get stuck.

P: And it’s more than just looking for the positive, isn’t it? When you’re an optimist, it’s not about looking at the glass half full.

M: It is. It’s about that resilience as well.

P: Yeah.

M: So, when things go bad, you know how to process it.

P: Yep.

M: So, that comes with a certain level of EQ or emotional intelligence,

P: Yes.

M: that is needed in order to move through that. So, the most optimistic person with no emotional intelligence would still probably hit a roadblock.

P: Yeah.

M: That’s where you bury things rather than process.

P: Yes, yes, yes.

M: But you need both. But with both the world is your oyster. All the research shows that you’re going to have a far more successful life. You’ll earn more, you’ll amass more wealth, which is not a measure of happiness. But who’s going to say no to more money.

P: Laugh, true. Is it because it enables you to do other things?

M: Exactly. You’ll have more friends, and deeper friendships with friends. You’re more likely to get married, have successful relationships. All of the stuff that we’ve discussed on this show.

P: Yeah.

M: So, optimism is worth striving for.

P: Mmm.

M: Now, what we’re talking about here with ‘Best Possible Self’ is a way to learn optimism.

P: Ooh. Get your study hats on people. Red pencils and blue biros out please.

M & P: Laugh.

M: [whispers] We don’t use red pens anymore, that’s seen as negative.

P: Oh, but aren’t we hardwired to focus on the negative? I confused!

M: We are. So, we want blue pen or… anyway, that’s a whole other thing.

P: Just give me a box of crayons, I’m ready.

M & P: Laugh.

M: So, the great news is that research has shown ever since, way back in 2001, there was a study by… King. Mr King.

P: Mr King, laugh.

M: Of ‘The health benefits of writing about life goals, personality and social psychology.’

P: Oh, okay.

M: So, all the way back in 2001, was probably one of the first articles about this. And since then, quite a few people, including our one of our favourites, Sonja Lyubomirsky, has looked into it.

P: Yes.

M: And all of them are finding that this ‘Best Possible Self’ exercise, which really focuses on increasing positive mindset and optimism, is beneficial and works.

P: Okay.

M: So.

P: Laugh, so do it people.

M & P: Laugh.

M: So, let’s dive into some of those studies. So, in one study researchers asked participants to write about their best self across three different dimensions. Personal, relational, and professional for five minutes a day over two weeks.

P: That’s, yeah.

M: Anyone can do that.

P: It’s surprisingly hard to do five minutes of that intense reflection. Like that’s challenging for a lot of people. It’s shining –

M: Even if it’s across three different areas?

P: Yeah.

M: It’s kind of like meditation, right? The first time you do, you might stare out the window for four minutes and go, aahhh!

P: Laugh.

M: And then have 60 seconds of really intense writing.

P: But it is a training exercise, and that’s why I think what they’re saying here is that it’s not enough to do it just once a week. It has to be consistent over two weeks to get these effects, yes?

M: Yep, but only five minutes a day. That’s so doable. The busiest of busy people can normally fit five minutes into their day. But the one thing I’d say do not forget to schedule in downtime and rest so important. And that doesn’t mean just eight hours of sleep.

P: Oh no, no, no, no. It’s like, you gotta have your hour of you time.

M: Yep. So, five minutes a day over two weeks. And then the researchers measured the effects on optimism and mood after one day, one week and two weeks. And the results showed that participants had significantly larger increases in optimism compared to the people who simply wrote about daily activities.

P: Ok.

M: And the best part is they saw that both after only one session and over two weeks. So, it only takes one session of writing and thinking about ‘what could my best future look like’ to have profound impacts on your day.

P: Mmm. It’s the same thing with self-talk. If you’re always going ‘Oh, the sky is grey, the cat is black, you know, the toilet’s not clean.’ Laugh.

M: Laugh.

P: You’re constantly reinforcing that, that down.

M: Eeyore.

P: The Eeyore moment, exactly. A.A. Milne had it right, laugh.

M: All right, so that was the first study. The second study, again there are many, many studies, and we’ll put a few of them in the show notes for you. If you’re interested in the real science, the hard science.

P: Laugh.

M: Which I hope some of you are, cause otherwise I’m talking to no one, laugh.

P: [Whispers] Don’t trust us, we don’t know what we’re talking about. Laugh.

M: So, the second study was led by Sonja Lyubomirsky.

P: Ah, Sonja, we love her.

M: And this one lasted four weeks, and they played with a variety of factors to see what might increase optimism even more, or what might detract from the exercise. So, a couple of things they did… So, not surprisingly, in the study it supported previous research that validated the ‘Best Possible Self’ exercise. It significantly boosted affect, positive affect, and flow. And, of course, flow is something we’ve also spoken about before.

P: Yep.

M: But sitting down and writing is a great way to finding flow.

P: Accessing that really beautiful spot where everything just happens.

M: Yep, so additionally, though, they found… They got some people to do this exercise online and other people to do it in person.

P: Online, as in writing it down online.

M: Yes.

P: Oh, okay.

M: And we’ve spoken before about the difference between handwriting and typing.

P: Yes.

M: What they found for this exercise was there’s no difference in results when completing the exercise online versus in person.

P: Oh! That means there’s no excuses.

M: No excuses. And then the other thing they looked at was how pre-positioning the exercise might impact on outcome. So, students who were at a testimonial about the benefits of ‘Best Possible Self’ had the best gains and well-being compared to those who read neutral information about a control task. They say –

P: Setting them up for success?

M: – the results lend legitimacy to online self-administered happiness, increasing activities and highlight the importance of participants belief in the efficacy of such activities for optimal results. So, you can’t come in being a sceptic –

P: Mmm, yeah.

M: – for all you cynics, you’ve got to understand the science, understand why this impacts your brain and how in a way we say you’re tricking your brain. But really, what you’re doing is retraining.

P: I think training is a better word. Yeah, I like that word when you’re talking about changing things up.

M: And when you understand that that’s how this works and that there is science behind it, and you go do it yourself then you see the benefits.

P: Mmm, yeah. The brain is easily… it’s not easily manipulated, but we can manipulate it.

M: Yes.

P: We can project. And that projection factor. It’s not hippie nonsense and poppycock.

M: We can adjust.

P: Yeah.

M: We can adjust for that negative bias.

P: Yeah, definitely. It’s looking for the red car when you buy a red car and all of a sudden you see red cars, you put it out there in front of you and I think that’s the underlying principle of this.

M: Mmm hmm.

P: If you actually write it down, what your best possible self is when someone says to you, “What do you want to be?” You’re like, “I want to be a fireman!” because you thought about it. You’ve imagined it. You’ve imagined yourself in that outfit with the great calendar and the puppy dog and yeah, the big truck that goes ‘Beep, beep!’ Who doesn’t want to be a fireman?

M: Be a fireman? Or be with a fireman?

P: Laugh.

M: Alright, so how do we do the Best Possible Self?

P: Oh, here we go. Now we’ve got to the work people.

M: You’ve got to do the work. The good news is it’s really simple. All you need is a pen and a paper or a journal.

P: Ok.

M: And I’m going to bump it up to about 10 to 15 minutes.

P: Oh! Quelle dommage.

M: For just two weeks. So, the Lyubomirsky study, was a four week study and they went, I think, all the way up to 15 minutes.

P: Ok.

M: The first study we mentioned was five minutes for two weeks. I’m going to kind of go somewhere in between, two weeks and say, let’s put some time, 10 minutes, put 10 minutes into it.

P: Ok.

M: So, simple exercise with profound impacts. Find somewhere quiet or peaceful to sit and write continuously about your imagined, best possible future. You want to let all ideas come freely, Don’t sensor anything.

P: Mmm.

M: And don’t even worry about grammar or spelling. Just let it all out.

P: Yes, I bought it.

M: You wanna. You wanna let that flow find you.

P: Yep.

M: So, the first thing to do is step one, block sometime in your diary or calendar to dedicate to this activity over the period you’re going to do it. Lock it in so it happens.

P: Mmm.

M: If you don’t have the alarm going off or the reminder reminding you, it won’t become a habit and you’ll forget.

P: You’ll forget.

M: Plain and simple.

P: Yep.

M: So, lock it into your diary and set a reminder on your phone. Secondly, decide how you want to organise what you want to write about. So you could try, like Lyubomirsky’s study, four different areas, which are social, health, academic and career.

P: Mmm hmm.

M: Some people may not have a career. There might be students. Some people may not have an academic life, they’re just working.

P: Yep, it could be anything.

M: Yeah.

P: It could be losing weight. It could be eating better.

M: Well, social and health would probably cover those as well. So, find what works for you. The three from the first study were personal, relational and professional.

P: Ok.

M: So, group what you’re going to write about so that you can consistently right about these things over time and dig into them. Or you can come up with your own dimensions, as you mentioned. All right, so group them and then sit somewhere quiet, distraction free and set your time of 10 to 15 minutes. So, what you want to do is write about your realistic, best possible future self for each category.

P: Ok.

M: So, imagine that you’re happy and have all that you want in your social category, right? So, what does it look like to have the friends and the family that you want to have the interactions that you want to have? You’ve worked hard, opportunities have presented themselves and you’ve taken them.

P: Mmm.

M: So, you’ve achieved all that you imagined possible. So, think about the steps that would be needed to get there. How you would feel making that positive progress.

P: These are good things to write down on a white board or something, so that if you are finding yourself stuck in this righting moment, you’ve got those little prompts to platform launch you into more writing. If you’re getting stuck, that might be a really good idea.

M: Just remember to be specific as you can. Who would be there with you? What would you be doing? How would you be doing it? What would you see? Hear? Taste, Smell?

P: Yep.

M: Be descriptive and imaginative. And really put yourself into a day in the life of your best possible future self. And it might change over time. So, what you write about on day one may not be the future that you land on.

P: Mmm. That’ll be interesting to see.

M: But you want to be as specific and imaginative and descriptive as possible. Now, you then repeat the exercise the next day and the next and the next, and stick with it for at least two weeks. That’s it.

P: Okay.

M: Before we go, though, two things I just want to call out about what we just spoke about. The first one was a realistic, best possible self. So, you might be tempted to write about a future in which you win the lottery or marry your already married high school sweetheart.

P: Laugh.

M: Well, that ain’t going to happen, right?

P & M: Laugh.

M: So be careful to be realistic about your best possible future self. If you spend too much time wanting something that simply cannot happen. Then that can often have the opposite effect. It can have a negative mental health impact.

P: Yeah, right. Cause it’s unattainable.

M: It’s wishing.

P: And then [you think], ‘I’ll never be good enough.’ Yeah, and all that negativity comes back.

M: You know, ‘I wish I had gone to university. Maybe my life would be better.’ That type of thinking is not going to help you in the slightest. And in fact, it’s going to make you feel worse.

P: Yeah, yeah.

M: So, realism, realistic expectations and realistic, best possible future self is really important. And then the second thing is focusing on the future. So again, just like before, you don’t want to be thinking, ‘I wish I’d gone to university. My life would have been so much better if I had.’ You want to be thinking about the future. So, another trap is to spend too much time worrying about what you did or didn’t do in the past.

P: Yeah.

M: That will prevent your best possible future self from being realised. Again, where are you now? Where could you get to in the future? And then it’s about setting the goal so that hopefully at some stage you start actually taking steps to get there.

P: Towards it, yeah. Projection.

M: Mmm hmm. Yeah, so that’s it. Be realistic. Focus on the future and then paint your life the way you think it.

P: Laugh. [Singing] You can paint with all the colours of the wind. Laugh.

M: And hopefully then you realise your best possible future self. And don’t forget to do it every year or two because our goals and dreams and wants change over time.

P: True, yeah. I like it, I’m all enthused now. I think I’m gonna get my ‘Best Possible Self’, my BPS book.

M: Good topic for the 1^st…

P: Kick off 2022.

M: Definitely and we have some great guests coming up as well on the show. So, changing the format a little this year.

P: Woo hoo!

M: Yes. So, I hope you tune in, share it with your friends and we’ll see you next week.

P: Have a happy week

[Happy exit music – background]

P: And if you like our little show, we would absolutely love for you to leave a comment or rating to help us out.

M: Until next time.

M & P: Choose happiness.

[Exit music fadeout]

Please note that I get a small commission if you buy something from my site. Your support helps to keep this site going at no additional cost to you. Thanks!

Talking to Strangers (E97)

13/12/2021 by Marie

Happiness for Cynics

On today’s episode Marie and Pete discuss talking to strangers and the surprising mental health benefits of sharing a deep and meaningful conversation.

Transcript

Coming soon

Podcast

Happiness for Cynics podcast

Show notes

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Happiness for Cynics podcast

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“People are sensing and have been sensing for a while that we’re in the midst of some sort of revolution, and they’re not sure why.” [Happier – Tal Ben-Shahar]

“If you want to reform the world, you must first change education.” [– Janusz Korczak]

“There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.” [– Albert Einstein]

“There are no bad emotions, only bad behaviours.” [– Tal Ben-Shahar]

“So, behaviour trump’s emotions.”

Want to learn more about the science of happiness? Make sure to subscribe to my podcast Happiness for Cynics and weekly email newsletter for regular updates and news!

Happiness for Cynics podcast

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Sleep deprivation and genes

Sleep is your superpower – Matt Walker

Transcript

“The important thing is to never stop questioning.”

– [Albert Einstein]

Want to learn more about the science of happiness? Make sure to subscribe to my podcast Happiness for Cynics and weekly email newsletter for regular updates and news!

Happiness for Cynics podcast

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Telomeres and telemerase

Good stress

Hayflick Limit

Transcript

Want to learn more about the science of happiness? Make sure to subscribe to my podcast Happiness for Cynics and weekly email newsletter for regular updates and news!

Happiness for Cynics podcast

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Transcript

And my eureka moment came. It’s actually not so much the leadership, it’s the fog of pessimism.

I realised what we needed to foster, were beacons of optimism in the fog of pessimism.

“Every great leader I have ever met is infectiously optimistic. But it’s not the big man or woman standing at the front of the stage. It’s the person who can unlock the optimism in the team from the youngest to the oldest from the least experienced to the most experienced.” [Dominic Barton]

“Toxic positivity is positivity, given in the wrong way in the wrong dose at the wrong time.” [- David Kessler]

The science says, look, what really benefits your health? What really benefits your leadership? What should underpin strategy, innovation and resilience is realistic and infectiously optimistic leadership.

“If it hasn’t worked out, it’s not the end.” [- John Lennon]

All shall be well, all shall be well, all manner of things shall be well.

Happiness for Cynics podcast

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Mighty Mouse (1942)

Roger Ramjet (1965)

Wacky Races (1968)

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Gross Domestic Product (GDP) vs. Herald/Age Lateral Economics (HALE) – Wellbeing index

Thinker in Residence – Martin Seligman 2012-13

Wellbeing hubs

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Happiness for Cynics podcast

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Men’s Shed

Dadirri – Deep listening

Transcription

M: There is no way to avoid pain and trauma and grief and at the same time experience happiness. You could go crawl into a hole and do nothing, but you’ll experience no joy as well as no pain.

Happiness for Cynics podcast

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Want the science? Check out these studies

First Calendar

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About Marie

Podcast: Happiness for Cynics

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