This is the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm Dan Harris.

Hey, hey, everybody. How are we doing? Today, we're going to talk to one of the world's leading happiness experts about how to boost your levels of okayness and optimism while turning down the volume on distraction, egosentrism, self-consciousness, and toxic comparison. Pretty good recipe.

Bruce Hood has been the professor of developmental psychology in society at Bristol University

since 1999. He got a PhD in neuroscience at Cambridge, followed by appointments at University

College London, MIT, and a faculty professorship at Harvard.

He researches child development, origins of superstition, self-identity, and ownership.

For the past five years, however, he's really been concentrating on how to make his students happier.

As you'll hear him say here, he noticed a steep decline in happiness levels among his students, which tracks with the overall data on this front. And so he's written a book, I don't want to call it new, but it's his latest book, and it's called The Science of Happiness, Seven Lessons for Living Well. In this conversation, we talk about how do you define happiness? It's a pretty

slippery term, actually. How to be happy when you're in the middle of a shit show. How to shift from

being egocentric or self-focused to alicentric, meaning essentially interconnected. The impacts

of social isolation and how to avoid that. The challenge of optimism and how to overcome it and actually

boost your optimism quotient, finding a flow state through meditation, how to enhance your

social connections, where quote unquote true authentic happiness comes from, controlling your

attention and rejecting negative comparisons, the role of nature, and much more.

By the way, if you want to learn how to reduce your overthinking specifically,

which is a big problem for many of us, myself included,

if you want to learn how to turn down the volume on that,

we have a custom guided meditation for you,

specifically tailored to this episode.

It comes from our teacher of the month, Don Maricio.

Throughout this entire month, we're offering these meditations only to paid subscribers who sign up at

Dan Harris.com. The analogy we like to use is that you can think of this podcast as the lecture,

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