Science-Based Tools for Increasing Happiness | Episode 98
Huberman Lab
Scicomm Media
4.8 • 26.2K Ratings
🗓️ 14 November 2022
⏱️ 144 minutes
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to the Huberman Lab podcast where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life. |
| 0:08.6 | I'm Andrew Huberman and I'm a professor of neurobiology and |
| 0:12.2 | Ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. Today we are discussing |
| 0:16.1 | Happiness. We're going to discuss the science of happiness because indeed there are excellent laboratories that have worked for many |
| 0:23.6 | Decades to try and understand what is this thing that we call happiness and what brings us happiness in the short and long term. |
| 0:31.2 | In fact, we could probably point to happiness as one of the most sought after states or |
| 0:36.8 | Commodities or emotions. Whatever you want to call it, happiness is what many people are seeking in work in relationships and in general. |
| 0:45.3 | And yet most of us can't really define exactly what happiness is or means for us. |
| 0:50.9 | We can point to certain experiences. We can try and describe our states of mind and body. |
| 0:56.0 | But most people recognize the feeling when we have it and we certainly recognize the feeling of not being happy. |
| 1:03.0 | Whether or not that means simply not being happy as the absence of happiness or all-out depression. |
| 1:09.2 | One of the key problems in trying to understand happiness and indeed the science and psychology of happiness is that |
| 1:16.0 | It does indeed involve other similar things, things like joy and gratitude and meaning and indeed many scientists and psychologists have argued for many many decades about what happiness really is. |
| 1:31.2 | We can come up with so-called operational definitions of happiness, operational definitions, or basically agreed upon terms, |
| 1:38.2 | or agreed upon definitions and conditions that will define something such as happiness. Much in the same way that we can all |
| 1:45.2 | probably come up with an operational definition of milk. But of course milk can be cow's milk, it can be oat milk, it can be soy milk, etc., etc. |
| 1:53.7 | So too something like happiness can be micro divided and sliced and diced into as many things as we decide. |
| 2:00.3 | Today we are really going to focus on three main things. First we are going to define happiness as a brain state and as a state of mind and body. |
| 2:09.0 | We're going to take a look at what the science says about all of that. Second, we are going to talk about tools and practices |
| 2:14.6 | for placing ourselves into states of happiness. And while for most of us we think of happiness as something that only arrives through the acquisition of some goal or some thing external to us. |
| 2:27.4 | And of course that is true. There is also something called synthetic happiness or synthesized happiness which turns out to be at least as powerful and perhaps even more powerful. |
| 2:37.8 | I'll just say right off the bat that I'm not going to tell you that all you have to do is sit in a chair and imagine being happy in order to feel happy. |
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