Welcome to the happiness podcast. I'm Dr. Robert Puff. I want to ask you a very important question and how you answer it will actually shape how well your life goes.

There's a story I heard recently about a man who had to sit before the US Congress and answer some questions. He was caught in a lie in a previous time of his life, and the congressman that was interviewing

him said, sir, you lied lied so that makes you a liar. Do you agree with that?

Or let me put it another way. If someone does something nefarious, say they attack someone, say they rob from someone, say they

hurt someone, does that make them an attacker, does that make them a robber, does that make them a hurtful person?

Well, if you answered yes to any of these questions,

then unfortunately I have to say

there's a high probability that you probably will struggle in life.

But you may be asking why would calling someone else who does something really

awful towards another person like saying raping them or killing them and calling them a rapist or a killer, why would that impact my life?

I didn't do that to anyone.

Here's the big difficulty.

When you label someone or label yourself there's a strong possibility that you're going to

reinforce whatever that label is. After all, someone who lies and is a liar probably will continue to lie because they're a liar and

they're going to hear that in their head and people may be telling them that and

that will reinforce our behavior. For example there's been studies done on prisoners who get released from here in the United States.

And what they found was, within three years, two out of three of the former prisoners are

re-arrested and more than 50% are incarcerated again.

This process of previously convicted criminals being re-arrested is known as recidivism. Now the question is why does this happen? Why do they keep ending

up in prison? I believe here in the US at least we are very harsh on people that commit crimes.

If you know someone who's perhaps been in prison or maybe have been in prison yourself, you'll know or you will have seen how harshly these men

and women can be treated. It's very sad, but what's happening is

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