Welcome to Nobody Told Me. I'm Jan Black. And I'm Laura Owens. And we are very happy to welcome our guest for this segment, Ellen Petri Leance, who is a leading expert on technology

and happy living and the author of the book The Happiness Hack, How to Take Charge of Your Brain

and program more happiness into your life. Ellen, thank you so much for joining us today.

I'm so happy to be here, Lauren, Jan. Thank you. Well, talk to us a little bit about your background

and what made you write the happiness hack. Well, you know, I've been involved in the world of

technology since 1981, 10 years at Apple, several years as an entrepreneur, some time at Google.

And so I've been very close to the way that technology affects people and affects our lives in all sorts of ways.

And I noticed ways that people were turning over the years that I was in tech more and more into technology.

Well, I don't mean people were turning into technology.

That may happen in a future episode, but it hasn't happened yet.

But looking more and more at their technology.

And I started to

see some of the changes in our thinking and in our behavior that seemed to me to be associated with it.

And this is going back a few years before we had the body of research we have now that shows

that there really is a correlation between our relationship with tech and our relationship

with ourselves and other people and our well-being.

Tell us more about that. You know, everything we do affects our brain and everything that

affects our brain affects the way that we perceive and interact with the world. And like anything,

our relationship with tech has an impact on our neurochemistry, our brain chemistry,

and the brain patterns that run on a neurochemistry, our brain chemistry, and the brain

patterns that run on a day-to-day basis. And the more we turn to any one behavior, the more

that behavior becomes a dominant threat in our life. So the time that we spend turning into

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