Welcome to trained a podcast, exploring, The Cutting Edge of holistic Fitness. I'm Ryan Flaherty, senior director of performance at Nike. For now. I'm still recording from home. Calling up some of the world's leading experts in mindset movement nutrition recovery, and sleep to discuss all the ways. You can train your body and mind today. I'll be talking with a psychologist whose groundbreaking research on what makes us happy and what doesn't has caught the world's attention at just the right time.
Think of all the good and bad things that could happen to you in life, you know, even like, you know, big versions of those and those are your circumstances question is, how much does that affect your happiness? Well, you know, in the moment to moment, it's affecting it a little bit, but it turns out that most of those big changes in the long run, don't really matter for happiness that much because we go back to Baseline. And so researchers estimate that that could be, you know, as little as like, 10% of our happiness.
That was dr. Laurie Santos telling us something that might be a little hard to hear that. All those things that we've been chasing after getting that raise winning that big game. Getting 1,000 likes on Instagram. They aren't likely to do much for overall happiness. And this isn't motivational poster. Psychology Santos is approach, is based on rigorous meta research. She actually has proof that a new car, won't make you happy. The news might seem discouraging at first, but it turns out that the things that do affect our happiness are much more within our
Roll mindfulness, practice, expressing gratitude, taking that daily walk. These are things that we can make happen without waiting for them to happen to us. And if Santos is data is any indication, we can see immediate effects, but what does this mean for athletes trainers or anyone with her eyes on a goal? That's just one of the topics that dr. Santos and I got
into
Hey Ryan, how's it going? I'm good. How are you? I'm good. Thanks. Thanks for having me on the
show Lori. Thank you so much for taking the time. I really appreciate it. Would you mind just sharing who you are? What you teach, and what your best known for.
I'm a professor of psychology at Yale University where I also have a different role as ahead of college on campus. And so, Yael is one of these weird schools, like Hogwarts and Harry Potter, where there's like these, like colleges within a college, like the Gryffindor Slytherin kind of thing. So, I'm head of Silliman college. And that means I live on
This was students. I'm kind of hanging out with them up close and personal like I eat with them in the dining hall and hang out with them in the coffee shop. And I took this role on about four years ago. And honestly, I didn't expect to see what I was going to be seeing. I was saying this Mental Health crisis, among students up close and personal where so, many of my students just report being depressed all the time or just kind of anxious or honestly, just stressed enough to be fast-forwarding, whatever they're going through, you know, a students, like how's it going? And it's like, oh I'm if I can just get through midterms if I can just get to the summer and it's like, you know, your night.
19, you shouldn't be fast forward in your life, you know, six months ahead of time. And so I was really upset by what I was seeing, and I just decided to do something about it. And because I'm a psychology Professor. I thought, well, what do we know about how we can fix this so-called Mental Health crisis? What do we know about the science of flourishing and the science of happiness? And so, I kind of quickly retrained in some of those topics and decided to teach students a whole class on this. It was called psychology in the good life. And, you know, I was expecting 30 or so students to take the class. I was shocked to find over.
Was in students who enrolled one out of every four students at? Yeah, we're trying to get into the class. We had to teach the class in a huge Concert Hall, which was a little logistical nightmare, but it taught me. The students are really voting with their feet. Like they don't like this culture of feeling overwhelmed and stressed and anxious and they really wanted to do something about it. And so that was kind of one's real thing about the classes that it really went viral on campus. But what was more surprising? Is that then the colors went viral be on campus. We had a New York Times article about the class halfway through
And then after that article, every single lecture, I had a major national or International press junket. That was like filming me while I was teaching the class. And I think the international interest was really just people thinking, you know, these yell kids have it made, you know, they're 19, like, they've got everything going for them. They're going to graduate from Ivy League school, but they're also unhappy and they're getting this wonderful class, but kind of what about the rest of us, you know, like the rest of us really need this too. And so that was when we decided to put a version of the class online
Totally for free. So it's up there right now on coursera.org. It's called the science of well-being and anybody can take it and so before March of 2020, we had about half a million Learners, which is already really humbling like most professors get, you know, like 30, right? But what was shocking? Was that in the first few weeks of covid, we had over two million people sign up for the class which again I think shows us that people are really trying to figure out what to do to protect their mental health, right now, which I think is cool. Alright, we know what we're supposed to do to protect.
Our physical health, but I think a lot of us are really struggling with what we can do to protect our well-being during this time. And I think the class provided at least some folks, and answer for that.
Funny, my wife and I were laughing because we signed up your class and then I found out you're gonna come on, I'm like, yes, so excited to talk to her just a set of Baseline. Before we get into the science of Happiness, Are we more unhappy than we've ever been? Is the fact that you're getting so much interest in your class, just a sign that we as a society. As parents. Maybe you've done something wrong.
Yeah, unfortunately, I think it really is a big reflection of kind of where we are right now and and the data really bear this out, especially among young people, you know, the probably my college students and maybe a lot of the athletes you're working with. What we know is that rates of depression and anxiety have just skyrocketed and even just in the last few years, which is really kind of strange. I mean, there's lots more reason why people might be paying more attention to mental health, right? There's less stigma, which is great, you know, an athlete can go on Twitter and talk about their depression, in their anxiety, and they're not kind of blacklisted forever, right? That's a
Eight thing, but the stigma alone doesn't explain the rise that we're seeing. I mean, one statistics suggest that among College age folks, you know, kind of 18 to 21 year olds. We've seen depression double in the last nine years. I like, I don't think the stigma is gone down that much since like 2011, right? Every graph. I see of these rates just keep going up and up, my colleague, who runs the mental health treatment center here at Yale says, you know, as we get these kind of exponential increases at some point. It's going to stop but that's not because the
Orders are stopping that's because we've had 100% capacity of people who are using the services, right? That's really disturbing, and it raises exactly the question you asked, which is like, as a parent, you know, what's going on, right? Like, are we doing something wrong? Are we doing something wrong as a society? And I think that's currently the million-dollar question. Right? Is like, how have we gotten here? And I think, you know, there's lots of different things going on that. I'm sure we'll get a chance to talk about. But, you know, one of the big ones that we talk a lot about in the class and on my podcast, is this idea that we don't really
Have the best theories of what makes us happy. Like, again many people are looking to your athletes and seeing them, you know, at the top of their Sport and with all these accolades and money and thinking that's it. If I could just get that check. I'd be happy forever, right? But in practice, when you meet with those folks, you realize that's not it right. We're just we're wrong. Often times about the kinds of things, we think are going to work. And so it's not like we're not working towards our happiness. We're really putting all ton of effort and we're doubling down. We're just kind of doing it the wrong
way. There's a pie chart that I've seen recently around.
What makes up our happiness and the small sliver really is our circumstance, right? Like, I mean how much money we have our job or status all that. It really goes into a much bigger areas. Can you talk a little bit about what makes up like that pie chart of Happiness? Like what, how would you break that
up? What researchers tend to look at? Is? How much of it has to do with something like our circumstances? Right? Like how much money you have, you know, your accolades your health? Like, you know think of all the good and bad things that could happen to you in life, you know, even like, you know, big versions of those and those are your circumstances question is, how much does that affect your hat?
Penis, well, you know, in the moment to moment, it's affecting it a little bit, but it turns out that most of those big changes in the long run, don't really matter for happiness that much because we go back to Baseline. And so researchers estimate that that could be, you know, as little as like 10% of our happiness, the second kind of part of the pie chart is many people think about is sort of our kind of innate happiness, right? Like what do we get in terms of our well-being from our genetics, right? You know, somebody who works with athletes all the time, you can get a sense that some people are just genetically wired to be, you know, football star.
Soccer Star you as then dirty chubby kid. I was not genetically wired for that, you know, no judgment, right? And so we might think the same thing is going on with well-being, right? Maybe some people are just like genetically wired to be optimistic or genetically wired to be happier. Is that really true? Well, the data they're pretty mixed. There is definitely a genetic component to happiness, but it's much smaller than we think. Like in terms of what's called heritability, which is sort of how much of your traits you get from your kind of ancestors. It seems like heritability.
Leti is that around? 40% for happiness, right? What you could say, like, wow, that's a lot. But that means that, you know, more than half of your happiness, has nothing to do with what you're built for has a lot to do with something else that's leaving. Like a huge part of our happiness, probably around, 40 percent, researchers. Guess that's kind of under your control that really is has nothing to do with your circumstances or what you're born with has to do with how you act, it has to do with your behavior and your mindset. And that's cool because you can't control were born with and oftentimes can't control our circumstances.
We can really dig into those behaviors and those mindsets.
Absolutely. Yeah, what are the biggest movers that are causing those statistics Arise? My guess not knowing the data would be the Advent of social media, the cell phone really, becoming a major part of our life. I think, when I look at my athletes, it's really interesting. The recently passed five years going to dinner with athletes will go out there to have a conversation, talk about goals, how we're going to work together, what that would look like, what are some of the things I can do to help them? And 80% of the conversation. They're on their cell phone, in the conversation between they'll be looking up and looking down is the cell.
An end social media, part of the problem,
a lot of the correlation suggests that social media is doing something right? Like, if you look at those spiking rates of depression and anxiety, the kind of kink in the curve of these things, going up seems to happen around the same time that the iPhone was introduced and started to go viral. If you look at correlational data on people who use social media, a lot that tends to correlate with things like depression and anxiety. It's worth noting. There's lots of individual differences there. So some people can use social media not be as affected by it.
Some people really get a kind of well being hit through the use of it, you know, it might be worse for some people than for others, but I actually think that it's interesting, that the spike in the curve is not just around the time of social media, but around the time of smartphone specifically. And I think for a lot of our presence and mindfulness smartphones are really affecting that in negative way is for all the reasons you just mentioned. When you're, you know, out to dinner with your athletes, which is that we really just had this finite attention, right? Like people can't pay attention as well as they think.
The amazing thing is like our phones are an incredible distractor, right? You know, we all feel it a little bit but, you know, when you think about it, your brain is not stupid your brain, you know, could be paying attention to the dinner. You're having like with a friend of yours or it knows that on the other side of that phone is every baseball statistic ever invented, you know, the contents of every album and museum in the world. Every political quote. Every tweet porn cat video is right. Like your brain knows that there's a really exciting alternative that it could be paying attention.
To it anytime. And I think that that's taking a hit on our attention and ways, we absolutely don't realize. There's lots of data showing, it's taking a hit on our social interaction, one, lovely, study by the psychologist, Liz done at the University of British Columbia shows that if you stick, people say in a waiting room and you give them access to their cell phones, even if they're not necessarily using them they smile at the people around them 30% less than if they didn't have their cell phones around them 30% less, you know, and you kind of get it right, you know, if you're aware.
With somebody, but you got your phone out, you're paying attention to your phone. You're not doing the normal, simple human interactions, that matter a lot. And so I think if you multiply that times, every family dinner that's happened, since the invention of the iPhone, those can be huge hits on our well-being. And I think those are disproportionate hits to the young people who have way more cellphone addictions. And I do on my iPhone. I mean, I feel the pull of my iPhone, and I only use it mostly to, like, check my email and, like, stuff on the internet, right, but there is is, you know, so much.
More of their social life. So much more of their culture is having a huge hit on really subtle things that we don't even notice about our own attention and well-being.
It's human nature to compare yourself to other people. And then we go on social media, right? In everything that people are posting on social media is the best version of themselves. And I think that idea of comparison is what's really to the outfit. I've worked with. I found like their labeling that as a bit of what's contributing to some of the issues that they feel like they're having is that everybody seems to be so happy and I'm the one that's not happy in comparison to what people post on social.
Social media.
It's one of the main reasons that our circumstances don't bring us happiness. Right? Because we don't ever think about our circumstances and these objective ways. We think about them relative. So if you're an athlete who gets like first out rookie salary, right, you could compare that about with what you are earning before, which would be like a huge. Like, oh my gosh. That seems great. But no. We tend to compare against the best other possible, starting salary, and then you feel crappy. Right? One of my favorite famous studies on social comparison. Actually looked at Olympic athletes and will.
Medal winners. And what they did was they looked at? You know, who's the happiest on the Olympic medal stand and what they find which is surprising is the person who wins the bronze is actually much, much happier than the person who wins the silver, and what the researchers figured out is that it's about the comparison, you know, if you're the bronze, you're not comparing yourself against gold. The most Salient. Other alternative is like, you might have messed up even worse and not be up there at all. So you're just like that. You're on the podium, right? You're not 45. You're like, this is amazing. Where is the Salient comparison?
For the silver obviously is the gold and these researchers went through and they analyzed, you know, they do these careful techniques where they analyze facial expressions on the stand and what they find is that silver medalist. They aren't just not expressing happiness, or expressing less happiness than the bronze person or their gold person. They're actually expressing emotions, like deep sadness and contempt and disgust. And so, you know, if you think about somebody who trains, who gets the opportunity to be the second place in the world, and they're not experiencing happiness.
Experiencing like contempt and disdain, you know, our brains are messed up. Right? Like they're looking for the wrong information. And the scary thing about social media is that we are, you know, we don't have to be an athlete on the stand where there's a sale, any alternative. We are feeding our brains Salient Alternatives. That our life is suckier than everyone else is all the time, you know, just in a scroll through Instagram, you, I feel like I'm not rich enough or pretty enough or successful enough for having enough fun. Right? And in some weird ways. We're kind of willingly doing that to ourselves because
The more shocking thing too, is that there's evidence to suggest that even though we kind of rationally, get that. That's the case. I mean like, you know, I know that if I go on Instagram, I'm going to see people's best vacation photos and best bikini body photos and whatever. Like, even though we know that rationally, the data suggest that that doesn't get into the mechanism. That's really getting hit on our happiness. We're still affected by those images in ways. We don't expect. And that's the kind of really scary thing. Is that even if we know like II know that this is affecting me, we don't really like our
Rain is soaking up this input in ways that we can't control.
Yeah, in your opinion. Is there a way to use social media and in an effective way that still doesn't take away from your happiness or cause you to go down the rabbit hole of like, you know, escapism or comparison?
Couple suggestions. I think one is, you know, to try to find people that are really authentic, you know, there's like real movements to kind of have more body positivity and more intensity on social media. I think those things are really powerful. I think they're especially powerful when athletes Embrace that stuff, you know, there been
Couple cases of famous athletes volleyball players, who show the picture of the cellulite on their bottom, right? And I think that can be like, you know, we're not photoshopping everything. We're not showing the perfect stuff. We're kind of, you know, I'm real. I work out all the time, but I still have this, right? And so, I think that's a spot where I think athletes can really lead the charge of kind of giving a little bit more honesty. But another strategy we can use with social media, is just to kind of pay attention to how it's making us feel. Not just use the rational God and it's not messing me up. But kind of pay attention, when I talk to students a lot, I use this analogy.
G of nutrition a lot when I'm talking about happiness, right? Because ideally, you're eating all nutritious stuff, but sometimes you eat a little bit of the junk food and the key is to just pay attention to what it's doing to your body. And I think, when we engage in activities that affect our happiness, we want to do the same thing.
After the break Lori and I will get into gratitude how exercise impacts your well-being and what ancient Traditions can teach us.
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The one thing I've talked to a lot of math. It's about a neuroscientist. I've worked with in the past. It's, you know, our brains are wired for survival. We're constantly looking for problems around us. Am I safe? Am I comfortable? Which I run like that dialogue in her head is just non-stop. And I think what a lot of people don't realize is that to stop that or to reverse that it requires you to come up with some things that you could just, like, repeat to yourself that reframe where your brains trying to go in a given moment and it takes practice. It's a skill. And it's something that for a lot of my younger athletes. We work on all the time. So I'll give them a little script of like, just be where your feet are.
What? Now? What are just some like, really quick little lines. That just means something to you that allow you to look to the present moment or just be non-judgmental. Be your own best friend. How much do you see like self talk or just that ability to kind of stop the internal dialogue impacting our happiness.
It's incredibly huge. One of the big things that we know about meditation is that it actually switches what the default mode of our brain is. And so if you're a normal human that default mode is self-talk, that's not super awesome. Right? Like self-talk. That's kind of
Ruminative about yourself, you know, or even just like planning for the future when you should be like present with whatever you're doing today, whether that's a golf swing or whatever, right? And the research suggests that the act of training, your brain to focus on the present moment switches that default. So in other words, instead of using the parts of your brain that you tend to use to kind of ruminate or think about the future, you're switching to parts of your brain that are present in the moment and that's really powerful because that's which is true. Not just like while you're doing the meditation. It's true like later when
Having dinner with your kids or, you know, when you're stepping up to bat, the fact that we can switch, the defaults of our brain, is really powerful and the analogy. I use with my students, when I'm talking about meditation is one with exercise, you know, like a, an elite athlete who goes into the gym and is his, you know, lifting a bunch of Weights. They're not doing it to lift weights. They're doing it so they can throw a ball better or run faster or so on. It doesn't matter that. You're really strong in the gym. You got to be really strong leader. And that's the power of meditation, right? Like your training, that default of your brain, in a different way.
Not so that you can be really awesome and meditation so that you can use that skill later on, in your life. It's like, it's like the gym for your mind.
Yeah. I've heard you also talk about like sharing your gratitude with others is really beneficial for happiness to.
Yes, just experiencing gratitude. So like counting your blessings. Feeling thankful huge effects on your well, being the active scribbling down, three, to five things. You're grateful for can significantly improve your well-being in as little as two weeks, like really striking finding, you know, and if you're like, most people, the things you're grateful for our other.
People, you know, your partner or your friends, like your athletes, you know, the meaning they give you like those are the things you're grateful for. Right? But we pretty rarely express it, which it turns out is bad because the act of expressing gratitude has a whole host of positive effects. And one of the positive effects is expressing. Gratitude can really increase the performance in the person that were expressing gratitude towards one. Famous study by Francesca, Gino, and Adam Grant to psychologist. They had people in a call center, kind of making calls to like get money from people, right? They had a super
visor come in and just Express gratitude to the folks who are working there just sincerely say, you know, like the fact that you're working so hard really has an impact on this business. Thank you so much. He finds that those call center employees, increased their productivity by 50%, just for the simple Act of someone thanking them. This could be a huge thing, you know coaches who Express gratitude, having opportunities for fans to Express gratitude, like just athletes hearing that. The data really suggest, not only feels good, but can have positive effects on your performance, which is great.
But the most powerful effective expressing gratitude. Actually happens to the person who's doing the expressing, which is kind of counterintuitive, but really quite powerful. The data really suggests. It's the act of boosting your own well-being and I think one of the explicit techniques that research shows we can use to do that is is a form of meditation. Practice known as loving kindness. It sounds a little cheesy. If you're not used to these sort of techniques, but basically what you do in loving kindness is rather than to do a practice where you focus on your breath, you actually focus on feelings of
Compassion, and you try to extend that compassion to other people. And so often people start the practice by finding, you know, some person or some creature that they love a lot of people pick a pet because they're kind of uncontroversial. You just love them and then just kind of extend compassion. So you think may, you be happy, may you be safe, may you experience Joy, you know, think that about your dog or your cat and then you kind of extend it to people you care about. So then maybe pick a spouse or a really close friend and so on, you kind of expand the circle, bigger and bigger, but at some point in that Circle, you put yourself in use.
May I be happy, may I be safe. My experience joy and the data suggests that the act of doing that can really build up the reserves. We have to be a little compassionate for ourselves, whatever that means. And sometimes self compassion means force yourself to get off the couch and, you know, get a run in because that's important and sometimes self-compassion means you just have to take a break right now because that's what you and your body
need. Yeah, that's great advice. So why does exercise have such an impact on mental well-being and happiness?
I think this is another
Our misconception is that people think of exercise for physical health, right, but what the data really suggests is that exercise can have a huge impact on your mental health and ways, we don't even expect. So there's one study that suggested a half hour of regular cardio exercise, every day can be as effective as a prescription of Zoloft for improving your mental health. There's also evidence that exercise can have a long-standing effect on your well-being. So you do have say a half hour of cardio, Monday morning, the data suggests that that little bump in endorphins that sort of boost that you kind of feel after you finish exercise.
That will still be there with you. If you do it. Monday at 9 a.m. Till around Tuesday at like 1:00 p.m., Right? So it's get this long-lasting way to kind of bump up your well-being. And I think a really powerful way to do it is to do it in a way, where you're really trying to use exercise to feel better and even to get flow, right? So you're kind of in the zone, you're not worried about some statistic or like reaching some Benchmark. You're really there just to kind of do it to feel
it. Mmm. Yeah, they're going to be more. There's so many athletes, I talk to where, you know, they always talk about how which is become this job.
And how difficult it is another, you'll love it anymore. I'll have them sometimes. Just think about themselves as little kids. Imagine being that little kid seeing yourself right now, how happy that little kid be to like, get one day in that uniform to go practice like with the New York Giants, put yourself in that state of mind, almost as much as you can. And you'll stop kind of like getting caught up in the what you've kind of normalized and start to recognize like all the reasons. You should just be so grateful. We're just being out here and I do little things like that can be so
helpful. Those mind shifts are also a form of kind of ancient happiness.
This meditation and things come from the Buddhist and Buddhist Traditions, but that form of mental practice is a technique that the ancient stoics talked about. So folks, like Epictetus and so on. They had this concept of what's called - visualization, where whatever you're doing right now. Imagine what life would be like, in the counterfactual where you don't get to do that, you know, so if you're an elite athlete, imagine you don't get to do that anymore. You were injured, you can't do it anymore. And just that little mindset shift, causes you to have so much appreciation.
You know, if every athlete right now, he's feeling frustrated. It's like imagine this week that you broke your knee, you fractured your patella, you're out. And it's like okay, actually never mind. Your Patel is fine, right? And instantly you get this gratitude. It's funny but a data really suggests that - visualization can be a powerful mechanism for breaking. The complacency that comes with your happiness. Like, you know, you kind of get bored with these wonderful opportunities we have in life. It's one of the reasons, our circumstances don't make us happy as we get adapted to them, but - visualization can break us.
Of
that. It reminds you a little bit of another technique. I have my athletes use, which is using visualization and going through defensive pessimism, really great tools to reduce stress or anxiety.
Yeah, when we practice mentally it's just as though in a lots of ways that we're practicing physically, especially when we're coming up with strategies to deal with failures Michael Phelps. Allegedly. Apparently was quite good at this mentally and one of the things he did was like play almost like a videotape, all terrible things that could happen. It is races and one of those terrible things.
Actually did happen and the Beijing Olympics is goggles flew off. And not only was he not messed up by it, but he actually won Gold in that event and made a record time and he said it was because his head, he practice. Well, if I can't see, I'll do whatever. It is 19 strokes and then I'll turn around and his body knew exactly what to do. And I think the power of that is think sometimes in athletics, we can get to this mode of thinking, like you practice the play perfectly and like, you know, visualize it perfectly turns out, the research shows that if we practice the things that can go wrong, turns out, we're basically,
Training our brain. That when that happens, it's like a habits like something we've practiced over and over. Even if we didn't do it in real
life. One of my earliest, mentors was a track and field coach. I've been coaching for like 20, something years of an athlete himself. Multiple and being he said something I really has always stuck with me. Is this idea that he looked at things that have been around for a very long period of time? If not thousands of years, things like acupuncture yoga or meditation. Can you just talk about the things that have been around the longest? And now science is finally catching up to actually put some data behind this show. The efficacy of those.
Tools
and love this topic. Actually, we're doing a bonus season of our podcast, the happiness, lab on this, like ancient secrets to happiness because I think, you know, as a scientist we've been like humbled honestly because it's like we think we made this stuff up and then we like him is like know the Greeks thought of that. Like, ribosomes years ago. I mean, I think a couple of them one is, you know, if you really look at like the old Greek philosophers, I think they had lots of insights into stuff, but one of the big ones, was this idea of the sort of disconnected Soul, which I think is something that we come up with a lot. And the idea is that
You know, we are these beings that have these conflicting desires, you know, like many of your athletes might want to be the best possible in their sport, but they also don't really want to get up at 5:00 in the morning. Right? Like, yeah, we have these things. We know would be good for us in the long run. But there's this like tension and we kind of want to do this opposite thing. But the Greeks also figured out how you deal with those inner conflicts, right? And the way they figured it out was through something we talked about before which is sort of habit, right? You know, the more you prepare your mind and make it really easy. You have a schedule. You just do the same thing.
I'm every day, the data suggests that it just isn't like it's making a decision. So your inner conflict. You never get the moment of like, well, am I going to train today or am I not? It's just like, it's Thursday, you train today, rightly? It's just easy. And that was the inside. The Aristotle, came up with Aristotle. Believed you thought about being a moral person, but also being kind of a happy person. It actually comes from kind of getting your situations, right? So that you've set up the same habits. The Greeks often talked about this in terms of, you know, you're a charioteer and you're trying to steer these wild horses and Aristotle. Realize the way you steer the horses is
Like talk horse language and horse language is the language of habits. And I think a second kind of big Insight that many of the Ancients had, that can be so powerful in sports, has ideas along the lines of control, what you can control. So the ancient stoics Epictetus talked about the fact that they're, these are two things out there. They're all the things that you can control in life and the things that you can't and if you confuse them, you're going to be really unhappy, but if you try to control what you can control and the big one is your thoughts, your attitudes towards things your acceptance.
Of things. Then you can actually be quite happy. And this is an Insight that's borne out and lots of ancient texts. One of my favorite examples of this comes from the Buddhist notion of the second Arrow. The story of the second arrow goes like this. So Buddha is talking his followers and he's asking you're walking down the street and you get hit with an arrow. Is that bad and his father say yeah, that sucks to get hit with an arrow. You know, you wouldn't want that to happen. Buddha says, all right, if you're walking down the street and you get hit with the first arrow and then you get hit with a second. Arrow is the second Arrow even worse and his followers? Say yeah, that would be even worse to get hit with two.
Rose. So Buddha goes on to say, we can't always control the first arrow and life. That's just our circumstances, but we can always protect ourselves from the second Arrow because the second arrow is our reaction to it in the Athletics domain. I think this can be great. You know, like you're going to have bad days, you're going to have injuries, you're going to have times when the team messes up, you're going to have times, when things just don't go your way. Those are the first arrows, we can't control those, but we can always control the second era. We can control whether we get pissed off by it, whether we reframe it quickly, and in a way,
That makes us feel better. All of those are under our control. And so the biggest ancient wisdom is like, don't stab yourself with the second Arrow.
I got it. Yeah, what you just said, I something, I talked to my athletes about all the time. It's the idea of, you know, the event doesn't do anything to you that the response to the event, that creates the outcome and the longer the time is between that event and your response. The better, you know, the outcome ends up, being it rather than it being short that is a reaction. And when you just give yourself that internal dialogue of that, little bit of time, generally, the outcome is much better. That is if you react
That s arrows on that same point,
right? Yeah, totally. And that actually was what the stoics you know, we're trying to do. I think people here this term stoics and they think they were boring like they didn't want to have emotion and they just want to be like stoic, but what they were fighting wasn't just a motion in general. It was exactly those emotions you're talking about. It's those uncontrolled reactions that are probably - to something that's going to make the situation worse. Yeah, and those were the emotions they want to control and they did it, you know? And exactly the way the Buddhist talk about a lot which is like, hey, recognize that in
That moment you have a choice, you could pause. It's kind of like the first step to controlling that second Arrow as like, we have this instinct to just immediately stab ourselves with a, but even if you hold the arrow for a second and ask, like, good to stab myself for not so good, like just the pause can, sometimes get you to the right
action. So it's not about apathy and it's not about turning off the emotions. Is it just more about recognizing what's going on? And then taking the time to respond appropriately,
the stoics actually loved emotions, they love things like joy and pleasure and so on, you know, they're naturally going to choose them, right? And so they focused on
Shutting off the stuff that they didn't want to choose. People have this misconception that, you know, striving for happiness, putting in this kind of work to improve your well-being and your mental health can make you kind of weaker, you know, that there's this Edge to being kind of angry and, you know, having negative emotions and so on. And I think the misconception comes from the fact that, you know, folks aren't trying to get rid of negative emotions all together. They're just trying to have a choice about them and trying to have a choice about their reactions to them. And in fact, a lot of these practices are about sitting, with and being with negative emotions,
Oceans, right? You know, this is something I talk to people a lot about these days in the context of covid. It's like, you know, we're not getting rid of these threats, you know, all these threats of 2020 that we talked about there there, and that means you're not going to not feel uncertain. You're not going to not feel scared or anxious. But what can you do to kind of be with those emotions and practices that allow you to feel things and accept them can be quite powerful in part because usually what happens when you really analyze an emotion and sit there and accept it, is it kind of just goes away on its own these -
Things. Absolutely. One of the major kind of pillars. We talked about at night. Gala time is sleep. How does our sleep make us happier
sleep? I think is you know, one of these things that we absolutely don't realize how critical it is. There's so much data that lack of sleep contributes to mental health, dysfunction one famous study had subjects data normal sleep for two days. Then deprived sleep for a week. Deprived wasn't zeros of hours of sleep. It was five hours of sleep, and then you go back to normal sleeve. And what you find is that, during those that week of deprived.
If subjects mental health tanks, like almost to the point that it looks like their mood levels of hit clinical depression after a week of this, right, you know, we think sleep obviously is important but we forget that it's really critical and I think that this is something that athletes really need to hear. Like, I actually think for your mental health recovery time, but also for your physical health recovery time. Sleep is really important, you know, I tell my students, you know, if you're getting an hour less studying time in because you're sleeping more, you're actually gonna do better on tests. And the research Bears me out. You know, I so students this that students who get
Killer sleep, who go to bed and get up at around the same time actually have higher gpas and kind of sleep. Deprivation can yield memory deficits right and concentration deficits. And so I think we have this note like, you know, we have to push, push push and I'll sleep. I'll sleep when I'm dead and you this is kind of an attitude of a lot of young people, but the data suggests. It doesn't work that way.
One of the two to three things, the biggest movers when it comes to your happiness that you can do every
day. One way. I like to answer questions like this because I get this question for my Yale students a lot, right? Yeah, you know their type A they're like
I heard all the stuff said, give me the three things I did is I just version. Yeah, so I think, you know, as your listeners were listening to this. There are some things that we probably talked about. They'll be like, yeah, I do that all the time. Like exercise. I'm good. Like I'm training all the time, right? And there are other things that they like who social connection, like putting my phone away, maybe being mindful, you know, second Arrow. I got to work on those things. I think you get the most impact for your kind of Happiness, time Buck. If you try to work on the things that feel like you're not doing them already, you know, if you're already really socially connected person investing in more social connections, not going.
Take you that much higher. But if you're you know, really a misanthrope and you have a hangout with people in a long time and you'll rather just plop down a Netflix, then call a friend, then bumping up. Your social connection will feel really good. And so, you know, as you hear these tips, the ones that you're kind of like, uh, that's not me. I should do more of that. Those are the ones that you'll get the best impact for perfect.
Awesome. Well, this has been amazing talking to you. I love your class, and I think just everything you're bringing to the world is pretty incredible. So, thank you for everything you do and thanks for taking the time today. Appreciate it.
Thanks so much for having.
A on the show.
So before the episode I was asking rhetorically what do dr. Santos has ideas mean for athletes. It looks like we have an answer. They provide a whole range of powerful effective models for progress and she knows it listening to her talk. You want to head straight to that gym for your mind and get some meditation reps in? You want to start looking for that second Arrow. The next time you have a setback. And me personally, every time I hear her speak, I feel like running out there and thinking every Mentor who's ever.
Me on my own journey and I might as well start with the obvious and thank Lori for an incredible episode. And since this has been our season closer. I'd also like to take a minute and thank all of our listeners you've sent in so many amazing letters and messages and shared so much support on Instagram. Letting us know how much the podcast is meant to you this year. It's meant a lot to me too. Thank you for listening. Thank you for writing and thank you for putting all this advice to work out there and you know, maybe making the world a little bit better next month. We'll be kicking off our new season with a special.
Hello audience, Q&A episode all those letters you've been writing and comments. You've been sending in there's a lot of great questions in them and I'll be doing my best to throw some answers at a few. These are some of my favorite episodes to do and so I'm really looking forward to it.
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Thanks for listening to trained. Just a reminder always talk with your doctor before starting any training or nutrition program. The information we provide, it's not a substitute for medical advice, diagnosis or treatment, and the individual opinions expressed. Here are just that opinions. They shouldn't be taken as fact.
