#196 — The Science of Happiness

The stuff that we know is good for physical health, like making sure you're getting enough sleep, making sure you're getting enough exercise, making sure you're eating right, those physical things seem to have a huge impact on people's mental health—much more than we think.

Social relationships and strong social relationships are necessary for happiness. They're not sufficient for happiness, but you can't find happy people that don't have them.

There's some work by Liz Dunn and her colleagues that shows that spending money on yourself actually makes you less happy than spending money on other people.

Being religious, it turns out, is actually pretty good for your happiness—or at least, I should clarify, not necessarily... believing in religious doctrine but actually taking part in religious practices...

Loneliness has been increasing by double digit numbers in the last decade ... In some ways, it's ironic because these technologies were supposed to be linking us up, but in practice, they could be failing to allow us to connect in the ways that our primate minds are used to connecting—and that can have all kinds of consequences we don't realize.

The happiest folks tend to be, on average, the folks that give more to charity, even equated for income. The happiest folks tend to be the ones that, on average, volunteer more of their time...

You can basically say you're happy if you have a lot of well-being in your life and for your life.

If you look at the positive psychology literature, one of the hugest effects on our own happiness is our social connection.

The simple, fleeting connections that we have with strangers can be really powerful for our well-being ... It really seems to bump up our positive emotions.

If you put people in social isolation, the areas of their brain that would normally show craving for things like food and so on start craving social connection.

We've put these devices in the pockets of six billion people around the planet, and we don't really know their cost.