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Happiness for Cynics

In this week’s episode, we talk to Dr Mike Rucker about the importance of having fun in your life and how it improves your overall wellbeing.

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One of the narratives that I like to talk about is productivity porn or hustle porn. We get caught up in this notion that we have to devote our lives to work and that should be our purpose. And we’re just not wired for that.

Mike Rucker

About Dr Mike Rucker

Mike Rucker is a thought leader in the field of health and wellness, specifically regarding tactics to attract and motivate people towards healthier behaviours. He has worked with Universal Studios, Sony, Red Bull, and Better Homes and Gardens Real Estate, among others.

In 2016, he was named one of the top 50 influencers in digital health by Onalytica. He has a Ph.D., is a charter member of the International Positive Psychology Association, and a member of the American Psychological Association.

Find Mike at:

• Website: MichaelRucker.com
• Instagram: TheWonderOfFun
• Twitter: @PerformBetter

Keep an eye out in 2021 for Mike’s new book!

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Transcript

M: You’re listening to the Podcast Happiness for Cynics. Each week we will bring you the latest news and research in the world of Positive Psychology otherwise known as happiness. I’m Marie Skelton a writer and speaker focused on change and resilience my co-host Pete is a bundle of joy but he’s off doing something fabulous I’m sure because today’s episode is all about bringing fun into your life and to discuss that we went straight to the source with an interview with Dr. Mike Rucker who has the coolest title ever, he is a fun expert. So, let’s get to this.

[Intro Music]

M: Mike Rucker is a thought leader in the field of health and wellness, specifically regarding tactics to attract and motivate people towards healthier behaviours. In 2016 he was named one of the Top 50 influencers in Digital Health by Onalytica. He has a PhD, is a Charter member of the International Positive Psychology Association (IPPA) and a member of the American Psychological Association. He’s worked with Universal Studios, Sony, Red Bull and Better Homes and Gardens Real Estate, among others. And although he’s passionate about many more things than I can fit into this short bio; today he joins us to talk about having fun and improving people’s overall well-being. Thanks, Mike, for joining us on happiness for cynics. I’m so excited to have you on the show.

Mike: Thanks so much for having me.

M: So, I’m keen to start by asking you how you got involved in studying the science of fun.

Mike: So… so as you mentioned in the bio at the onset of the positive psych movement, I mean, I guess, Csikszentmihalyi and flow and all of that kind of thing predated the IPPA. But when Marty Seligman’s book Authentic Happiness came out, that was really the onset of, you know, popular psychology, becoming popular, Sorry excuse me positive psychology, becoming popular.

Mike: And I was caught up in that movement. So I became a Charter member of the IPPA and study diligently Seligman, Csikszentmihalyi and others and a lot of the things that you discuss on your podcast, things like gratitude and kindness and so you know, I have been practising those tools for quite some time, but in 2016 kind of a trifecta of bad news came my way. I’ve been a lifelong runner and found out that I was going to need a hip replacement. My little brother unexpectedly passed away from a pulmonary embolism and then my wife got a job offer that was going to take us out of state. So that kind of uprooted us from family and friends. And so a lot of what I had learned, you know, taking gratitude and things of that nature just weren’t working, you know, I was really trying to use mindset and the other things too and I found that there were a few things right, so I had used them for so long that it kind of, you know, they weren’t effective.

And then two, especially with the passing of my brother. I didn’t necessarily want to be happy. I didn’t feel like, you know, happiness was the right thing for me. It wasn’t part of my identity in that moment, but and I was also in the throws of finishing my dissertation. So, like any good academic went to the literature and started seeing if there was anything that I had missed and what I did find was a big research gap in this idea of fun and the fact that we have agency in any given moment to, you know, add positive valance, positive emotion to an experience, even if we’re not necessarily feeling like we want to be happy in that moment, so those two can co-exist or can exist separately.

Obviously you add enough indexing of fun experiences, and it tends to pull you out of despair, which is great. But I think the reason that I like looking at it as a separate construct from happiness is that it points to the fact that we have agency in any given moment to enjoy ourselves and find enjoyment. Even if you’re dealing with a loss or divorce or, you know, stress somewhere you don’t necessarily need to identify as happy to go and have fun. And then another thing I like about it in the context of positive psychology is that it’s action oriented.

I think happiness, you know, we’ve quantified it to some degree in psychology and so therefore we kind of use it as a measure, right? And we know from things like the Hedonic treadmill and Perceptual adaptation that a lot of our happiness is kind of based on circumstance, where we are in life and our comparison to our… socioeconomic class. Where fun really transcends a lot of that, but certainly people can use resource is to have fun if they have a lot of money. But often times, especially with children, we’ll see that completely transcend socioeconomic classes. Two puppies don’t really need to know each other to start playing. Two children, you know on the playground, don’t need to know each other’s background in the context, you know, to enjoy kicking the ball around. And as we grow older, we lose sight of that because we’re such victims to the judgement habit.

One of the things. One of the interventions that I like to talk about. I can’t take credit for it. It’s from IDL[?]. But it’s this idea where you take a bunch of people in a room and you have them pair up with strangers and you have them do caricatures of each other, which is a really fun assignment, right? Like everyone in the video, you can see is smiling and enjoying themselves, and then you’re asked to share that with your partner. And then you see this anxiety and fear almost instantly, right and no one cares, like there was no assumption that you are an artist, right? But this idea that now you’re going to be judged by someone that you don’t know. Even though the assignment was completely fun and whimsical sucks it out. And so if you practise having fun you can start to get some of that back. You can realise that you’re not being judged as much as you think you are. And so I have just really taken a liking to it. Not as making it overtly important, but something that we don’t think about enough.

M: Absolutely. I’d say that as an adult where, I don’t know, from childhood where we’re trained that growing up involves taking fun out of our lives and becoming serious. And so I find this idea fascinating. So happy to be talking to you about it.  

So what does the science say about what fun can do in our lives?

Mike: So, I think there’s a whole host of things, right? So we know that in fact, there’s a recent study that shows the more spontaneous we are, the more that we kind of look for the spices of life can lead to happiness. Another thing about having a deliberate fun is I think you are able to circumvent the Hedonic treadmill if you do it mindfully, right. A lot of things that we pursue are based on keeping up with the Joneses and things that we think are fun or we’re kidding ourselves. But when we take a more mindful approach to it, fun, pure elation and really enjoying something that is true to your soul is [it] ads gains to our life like episodically we have these indexes that we can relish were sort of chasing happiness.

I think we’re starting to see more of that it can lead to negative outcomes because what happens is especially if you’re doing it in the context of a clinical setting. You take these assessments like the PERMA or whatever it is and it says ‘Oh, you know, you’re not where you want to be’, and so that then becomes part of your identity, right? As soon as you get the results, you’re like, ‘Oh, I’m not happy’ where fun is so immersive that, you know, almost anybody can do it. And so in that context, that’s why I believe it’s important.

M: So can I can paraphrase and correct me if I’m wrong here.

Mike: Yes.

M: You can’t chase happiness, but you can chase fun and fun will bring you happiness, at least in the short term.

Mike: Yeah, and I would be careful because chasing happiness can lead to escapism. And there’s good escapism and there’s bad, right? And so you know, bad is coping and certainly, you know, we all need to cope and so having a bit of fun, It’s not necessarily chasing it, but there are people. I have interviewed a gentleman by the name of Chip Conly and he’s, are you familiar?

M: No, not with Chip. I’ll have to look him up.

Mike: He might be more U.S. centric, but he, he’s an entrepreneur by trade, he started a hotel chain called Joie de Vivre. But he’s also he either is or was on the governing body of Burning Man. And so we talked about this idea, folks that chase festivals. I’m sure you have the same phenomenon in Australia. And so that really is chasing fun, right? And that can lead to, you know some really bad things. And so the idea is that that fun is all encompassing like a lot of times when I have these discussions, especially because some of my earlier work, you know, I have blogged things like optimise fun, things of that nature, which when I find the time, I’ll rewrite because the idea there wasn’t necessarily to say that we should have a life full of fun. It was that we’re facing, you know, burnout at rates that we’ve never seen before, right? The World Health Organisation has now categorised it as a global epidemic. And after Covid, who even knows, right? Because that was in 2019. So, like, you know, we know people are losing their asses right now.

[Laughter]

Mike:  So, idea is you know, to add it [fun] back into your lives to loop back to something that you said a lot of us as adults have moved away from it because social norms or especially one of the narratives that I like to talk about is productivity, porn or hustle porn. You know, we get caught up in this notion that, you know, we have to devote our lives to work and that should be our purpose. And we’re just not wired for that. We need downtime and leisure.

It’s extremely important, I think in oceana you guys take it a little bit better than us. I remember I did a stint at Christ Church at Lincoln University and you could actually major in leisure which I thought was awesome.

M: Ha ha.

Mike: But, you know, I think everywhere, certainly here in the U.S. But I think everywhere we’re just finding that people aren’t using their paid time off. They have a sense of duty. So they think, especially folks in my age range that are caught in what it was called the sandwich generation. Or you have kids and you have to look, look after your parents that, you know people will feel guilty even if they are engaging in a night out, which is just not right.

So you know you have 168 hours in a week, and I think if you can’t find one or two where you’re actually finding pleasure out of that, that’s meaningful to you, that isn’t [good], You know at the sake of, you know like playing with your children and then kind of, you know, even though that could be fun, I think a lot of people are doing it out of a sense of duty and are on their phone really the whole time. So they think they’re playing with their kids, but if they look at it critically, they’re not really having fun there. Half of their brain is at work and the other half is treating that hour as obligation yet they’ll kind of log it in their brain as play.

M: Yep. Or it, it’s another list item that you’ve got to check off in the week, you know. It becomes a stress to have fun.

Mike: Yeah

M: So what are some tips then for listeners for how to introduce more fun into their lives? How do you do it? So it’s not just another thing that you’ve got to add into your week and another expert telling us ‘here’s something else you need to do to make your life more full and meaningful.’

Mike: Yeah, I’m glad you asked that question because… I’m writing a book right now called The Fun Habit. It’s coming out next year, and I think in the original manuscript you were exactly right. Like we realised, I’m working with a development editor, and it was, this is just, a lot of these tactics are giving people just another thing to do and that certainly was implied. And so we’re reworking it because you’re right. If it’s a burden than it’s the scenario with childcare. It’s the same thing.

So what I suggest is you know 168 hours isn’t a lot right to really be mindful on any given week. And so I suggest taking a look, doing a really general time audit, you don’t have to be completely thorough but investigating in one week’s time, what you’re doing and kind of logging it within four different categories.

I call it the PLAY model, so it’s:

• Pleasing;
• Living;
• Agonising; Or
• Yielding.

And without going too deep into it, you can often find those opportunities where you think that you’re having fun but changing things up just a little bit. You can actually enjoy yourself. So in the scenario with the child you commit to that hour and that you might do something using self-determination theory, where you both have some autonomy on what it is, right. So both the child and the adult will agree because, it’s funny I talk about it in the book, but sometimes if you don’t do that extra step and you  do it, something that the adult thinks the child will have fun that could backfire. I did that one time. I took my daughter to a lantern festival. It was kind of a father daughter date, and I really wanted to sort of be this reflective spiritual experience. And she really just wanted to light as many lanterns off as possible, right?

M: [Laugh]

Mike: So that’s where I failed at my own advice, because I was looking to have fun. But I didn’t. It wasn’t really inclusionary. It was more prescriptive, right? So, but you can also do that. I don’t want this to all be parent centric. I think, you know, let’s say you’re a single individual. If it could be making sure that you sit down at lunch and use that opportunity to reconnect with a friend or whatever it is.

But often times what people think you know is leisure, like binge watching a show that they don’t really care about can be replaced with something more meaningful. And so I want to be careful there, too, because it certainly is meaningful if you’re watching it with, you know, it’s something that you really enjoy on. You can think back on it, but a good litmus test for that is, you know, any sort of activity that if you went back to savour or relish it, would you remember what it was about? You know, a lot of times if people are being honest with themselves. You know, social media viewing or TV doesn’t fit in that category. A lot of times it does. I always like to preface it because I’ll get emails that say ‘Why are you demonising media?’ And I don’t think that’s the case. I think a lot of people do have fun, you know, engaging with content and things of that nature. But a lot of us do it to kind of placate to you know, to distract us from other things.

M: And I think again it comes back to mindful viewing and being mindful about what you choose to spend your time on.

Mike: Or if you’re in the company of a good partner, you know, enjoying that time you might not remember the show but you’ll remember that you guys laughed and drank wine and whatever it is, you know.

M: Yeah, definitely. So your acronym there and again I don’t want to give away the book. We want our readers to actually go and buy the book. The acronym you used was PLAY to take that a little bit further and move away from the acronym. How are play and fun interlinked? Or are they? Have you done any research into how they’re tied?

Mike: Yes, they’re definitely different. And so, but obviously they come up right, because you’re going to have fun doing a whole gambit of different things and not necessarily playing, but play therapy, engaging in various types of play. [Dr] Stuart Brown is kind of a godfather of that I’m not sure if you’re familiar with his work.

But because even that, you know, since it’s not really my expertise but reading his book, you know the amount of ways that you can slice and dice play. I found fascinating, right?

There’s child play.

There’s, you know, improv[ization] play.

There’s sport play;

So, you know play, you could fill up a few of these podcasts with just what play is because we often just think about it as being childlike with either other adults or with kids. But play as sort of a, you know, construct. Wellbeing is multifaceted, but fun can be, you can enjoy things outside of place, so that’s where the two are delineated.

M: Okay, great. So you mentioned your book. Is there anything else that you can give our listeners a sneak peek about, about what the book is about or the dust cover overview?

Mike: Sure. Well, it’s really just a comprehensive look at fun the way we described it, I think reintroducing folks to the fact that they do have some agency. And then one of the things that we didn’t really talk about, but I think is important is this idea of time affluence, right? You know, we talked about affluence and, you know, personal brand and money, especially in you know, the context of the Internet, right?

Everyone is always trying to sell you the next hustle, but time affluence is something that’s really important and people take for granted right, because often times, especially if you go back and do that time audit, you’ll realise that you’re giving away a lot of your time that you don’t really need to, you know, one of things that we talked about in the book certainly is things like email where just a couple of strategies there, you know, and I don’t go too deep into productivity, but there are a lot of things that you think are yielding some sort of output and it ends up just really making yourself believe that you’re busy and it’s not really contributing, so those are opportunities that you could put on pause or potentially take away from your day to day and implement better uses of time.

M: Great. I’m looking forward to seeing it come out. Now you have such an impressive bio and such a broad sweep of experience, and I know that you’re also heavily involved in the health and tech or health-tech and product design areas. Do you know of any apps that you could recommend to help adults bring more fun or play into their lives?

Mike: So there are a couple, I don’t have any that I’m affiliated with. I play with them all the time as you alluded to, right. So the one that my kids are having just a great time with right now is called Marco Polo, are you familiar with it?

M: No and look I’m really personally interested in the answer to this question as well. So Marco Polo?

Mike: Yeah, it’s a way where you can kind of, it’s similar to TikTok, but more personal, where you do something silly and then you kind of send it over to your friend and they can respond. So it’s a great way, especially during Covid for family members that are whimsical or silly to sort of, you know, just like the Marco Polo game kind of bounce stuff back and forth. So that’s a great one for having fun. And then the one that I’ve been enjoying right now is out of Duke [Behavioural Economics Lab] called Fabulous and it’s a habit changing app. So it’s a little outside the bounds of fun, per se, but it has a bunch of really cool sort of interventions and one of the you know, it’s got to slick UI [User Interface], I’m having a lot of fun with it [laugh].

M: Thank you so much. So thank you for all of your time. We’re almost at the 20 minute mark. But before we go, how can people find out a bit more about you? And where should we look out for your book?

Mike: Thank you for this Opportunity.

So my website’s michaelrucker.com

And then I’m also on all the social channels on Instagram under the wonder of fun. And on Twitter under perform better.

It’s kind of an old handle, but I didn’t decide not to switch it up yet, He he.

M: Sure, no worries. And where will you be launching your book?

Mike: Yes. So it got picked up by Simon and Schuster and they’re looking for a cue for 2021 pub date. So in about a year and a half it should come out.

M: No worries. Okay, we’ll keep an eye out for it then. Thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate you talking to us.

Mike: This was great. Thank you for having me.

[Exit Music]

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