Happiness Break: Who Takes Care of You? With Dacher Keltner

The Science of Happiness

PRX and Greater Good Science Center

Science, Social Sciences

4.4 • 1.9K Ratings

🗓️ 1 June 2023

⏱️ 9 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

When we feel cared for, our cortisol levels drop, we feel safe, and we handle stress better. Dacher leads a meditation to help us focus on the people who make us feel supported.

How to Do This Practice:

Find a comfortable position to start the practice. Focus on taking deep breaths.
Shift your attention to your body, relaxing your jaw, shoulders and face.
Begin to think about a friend who has supported you, or a friend who you feel grateful for.
Reflect on how they have supported you and how that makes you feel. Notice how those feelings manifest within your body.
Try shifting your attention to family members and/or mentors who have supported you in various ways.
Complete the practice by acknowledging the ways these individuals have contributed to your life.

Today’s Happiness Break host:

Dacher Keltner is the host of the award-winning podcast, The Science of Happiness and is a co-instructor of the GGSC’s popular online course of the same name. He’s also the founding director of the Greater Good Science Center and a professor of psychology at the UC, Berkeley.

Check out Dacher’s most recent book, Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life: https://tinyurl.com/4j4hcvyt

More resources from The Greater Good Science Center:

Just One Thing: Feel the Support: https://tinyurl.com/yrfnmwfv

Four Ways Social Support Makes You More Resilient: https://tinyurl.com/2p9zkjpj

Why Your Friends Are More Important Than You Think: https://tinyurl.com/mw2mr5p7

How Friends Help You Regulate Your Emotions: https://tinyurl.com/bdetmjt3

We love hearing from you! How do you feel supported by the people in your life? Email us at [email protected] or use the hashtag #happinesspod.

Find us on Spotify: https://tinyurl.com/2p8kj22u

Help us share Happiness Break! Leave us a 5-star review and copy and share this link: https://tinyurl.com/2p8kj22u

We're living through a mental health crisis. Between the stress, anxiety, depression, loneliness, burnout — we all could use a break to feel better. That's where Happiness Break comes in. In each biweekly podcast episode, instructors guide you through research-backed practices and meditations that you can do in real-time. These relaxing and uplifting practices have been shown in a lab to help you cultivate calm, compassion, connection, mindfulness, and more — what the latest science says will directly support your well-being. All in less than ten minutes. A little break in your day.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi, this is Dacker Keltner. Welcome to Happiness Break, a series from the science of happiness
0:08.0	where we take a few minutes in the day to do a practice that's been supported by science to
0:14.2	find greater meaning and happiness and purpose in our lives. Today we're going to do a practice that
0:20.3	you might call Circle of Care or Support in honor of the philosopher Peter Singer from Princeton
0:26.6	University who wrote about expanding the Circle of Care in 1981. We know from the scientific
0:32.4	literature that a sense of support really brings good things to us in terms of well-being.
0:39.2	Just feeling supported, lowers levels of cortisol, it activates regions of the brain that
0:44.7	bring us a sense of safety, and then it helps us handle stress and feel greater purpose.
0:50.1	And expanding the Circle of Care or Support makes us aware of all the people who are supporting us in
0:58.0	myriad ways from friends to family members to mentors, strangers on the streets acquaintances.
1:05.0	And they do it in different ways and give us different things and this practice is bringing that
1:09.8	into our awareness in this moment given all the scientific benefits of being supported.
1:19.3	What I'd like you to do is to find a place where you feel safe and comfortable and settle into
1:31.4	a posture of ease. You may be sitting or standing but with a nice posture,
1:37.0	rest your hands in a comfortable place. Let's take a nice deep breath in.
1:43.8	Breathing out.
1:49.9	Another nice deep breath in.
1:55.6	Breathing out.
1:56.4	Building on that, let's just shift our awareness around the body.
2:05.2	Breathing in, relax your shoulders and your face, your jaw, your brow.
2:15.7	And breathing out.
2:16.5	Just notice continuing this awareness of the body if you can feel your pulse in your hands.
	...

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