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Happiness, 6.01 (V) Week 6, Video 1 - The 7th Deadly Sin - Ignoring The Source Within

[MUSIC] Hi everyone, welcome back. I know I've been saying that I can't believe that it's already the second week, the third week, the fourth week, and so on. But I really mean it this time. I really can't believe that it's already the last week, the sixth week. I'm really gonna miss you guys. I do hope that we can stay in touch, even after the course is over. Later this week, I'll share with you some ideas on how we can do this. And if you have any ideas, I would love to hear them as well. Meanwhile, let's get on with the seventh, and the last deadly happiness sin, and habit and exercise of course. The seventh sin is ignoring the source within. In many ways, this is the most important sin. Since if we knew how to avoid this sin, and it seems that the best or the most reliable way is through the practice of something called mindfulness, then it doesn't matter as much if you commit the other six sins. Bit by bit, you're going to be steered away from those sins. By practicing the seventh habit of the highly happy, mindfulness. We'll see why in a future video. So, in a sense the seventh sin of ignoring the source within is the most significant sin that we commit. But what exactly does it mean to ignore the source within? To answer this question, let me begin by trying to explain what the 7th habit, mindfulness, is. One way to understand mindfulness is that it's a state in which your attention is not distracted by something other than what's happening right now. Here's a New Yorker cartoon depicting a guy who's not mindful. If this guy were mindful, his attention, or mind, would be on golf when he was playing golf and on work when he was at work and so on. What's incredible about mindfulness is that, as I mentioned briefly in week one, you feel happier when you're mindful, even if what you're experiencing is a negative or unpleasant event. Imagine, that your boss has just shouted at you or you're involved in an accident. Even in these types of situations, you're likely to feel better when you're mindful than when you're not mindful. We know this from a paper that was published by Matt Killingsworth and Professor Dan Gilbert. Rather than summarize what they found in the paper, let me play to you a very popular Ted Talk that Matt Killingsworth gave, in which he summarizes the findings for us. Here, listen. » So people want a lot of things out of life, but I think more than anything else they want happiness. Aristotle called happiness the chief good, the end towards which all other things aim. According to this view, the reason we want a big house or a nice car. Or a good job. Isn't that these things are intrinsically valuable. It's that we expect them to bring us happiness. Now, in the last 50 years, we Americans have gotten a lot of the things that we want. We're richer. We live longer. We have access to technology that would have seemed like science fiction just a few years ago. The paradox of happiness is that even though the objective conditions in our lives have improved dramatically, we haven't actually gotten any happier. Maybe because these conventional notions of progress haven't delivered big benefits in terms of happiness, there has been an increased interest in recent years in happiness itself. People have been debating the causes of happiness for a really long time, in fact, for thousands of years, but it seems like many of those debates remain unresolved. As with many other domains in life, I think the scientific method has the potential to answer this question. In fact, in the last few years, there's been an explosion in research on happiness. For example, we've learned a lot about it's demographics. How things like income, and education, gender and marriage relate to it. But one of the puzzles this has revealed is that factors like these don't seem to have a particularly strong effect. Yes, it's better to make more money, rather than less, or graduate from college instead of dropping out, but the differences in happiness tend to be small. Which leaves the question, what are the big causes of happiness? I think that's a question we haven't really answered yet. But I think something that has the potential to be an answer is that maybe happiness has an awful lot to do with the contents of our moment-to-moment experiences. It certainly seems that we're going about our lives. That what we're doing, who we're with, what we're thinking about, have a big influence on our happiness. And yet these are the very factors that have been very difficult, in fact almost impossible, for scientists to study. A few years ago I came up with a way to study people's happiness, moment-to-moment, as they're going about their daily lives on the massive scale all over the world. Something we've never been able to do before. Called trackyourhappiness.org, it uses the iPhone to monitor people's happiness in real time. How does this work? Basically, I send people signals at random points throughout the day. And then I ask them a bunch of questions about their moment to moment experience of the instant just before the signal. The idea is that if we can watch how people's happiness goes up and down over the course of the day, minute-to-minute in some cases. And try to understand how what people are doing, who they're with, what they're thinking about. And all the other factors that describe our day, how those might relate to those changes in happiness. We might be able to discover some of the things that really have a big influence on happiness. We've been fortunate with this project to collect quite a lot of data. A lot more data of this kind than I think has ever been collected before. Over 650,000 real-time reports from over 15,000 people. And it's not just a lot of people, it's a really diverse group. People from a wide range of ages, from 18 to late 80's. A wide range of incomes, education levels. People who are married, divorced, widowed, etc. They collectively represent every one of 86 occupational categories, and hail from over 80 countries. What I'd like to do with the rest of my time with you today is talk a little bit about one of the areas that we've been investigating. And that's mind-wandering. As human beings, we have this unique ability to have our minds stray away from the present. This guy is sitting here working on his computer, and yet he could be thinking about the vacation he had last month. Wondering what he's gonna have for dinner, maybe he's worried that he's going bald. » [LAUGH] » This ability to focus our attention on something other than the present is really amazing. It allows us to learn, and plan, and reason in ways that no other species of animal can. And yet, it's not clear what the relationship is between our use of this ability and our happiness. You've probably heard people suggest that you should stay focused on the present. Be here now, you've probably heard a hundred times. Maybe, to really be happy, we need to stay completely immersed and focused on our experience in the moment. Maybe these people are right, maybe mind-wandering is a bad thing. On the other hand, when our minds wander, they're unconstrained. We can't change the physical reality in front of us. But we can go anywhere in our minds. Since we know people want to be happy. Maybe when our minds wander, they're going to someplace happier than the place that they're leaving. It would make a lot of sense. In other words, maybe the pleasures of the mind allow us to increase our happiness with mind wandering. Well, since I'm a scientist, I'd like to try to resolve this debate with some data. In particular, I'd like to present some data to you from three questions that I ask with Track Your Happiness. Remember, this is from sort of moment-to-moment experience in people's real lives. The three questions. The first one is a happiness question. How do you feel on a scale ranging from very bad to very good? Second, an activity question. What are you doing? On a list of 22 different activities, including things like eating, working, watching TV. And finally, and mind-wandering question. Are you thinking about something other than what you're currently doing? People could say no. In other words I'm focused only only on my task. Or yes, I am thinking about something else. And the topic of those thoughts are pleasant, neutral, or unpleasant. Any of those yes responses are what we called mind-wandering. So what did we find? This graph shows happiness on the vertical axis. And you can see that bar there representing how happy people are when they're focused on the present. When they're not mind-wandering. As it turns out, people are substantially less happy when their minds are wandering than when they're not. Now you might look at this result and say okay, sure, on average people are less happy when they are mind-wandering. But surely when their minds are straying away from something that wasn't very enjoyable to begin with, at least then mind-wandering should be doing something good for us. Nope, as it turns out people are less happy when they're mind-wandering no matter what they're doing. For example, people don't really like commuting to work very much. It's one of their least enjoyable activities. And yet they are substantially happier when they're focused only on their commute than when their mind is going off to something else. It's amazing. So how could this be happening? I think, part of the reason, a big part of the reason, is that when our minds wander, we often think about unpleasant things. And they are enormously less happy when they do that. Our worries, our anxieties, our regrets. And yet even when people are thinking about something neutral they're still considerably less happy than when they're not mind-wandering at all. Even when they're thinking about something they would describe as pleasant, they're actually just slightly less happy than when they aren't mind-wandering. If mind-wandering were a slot machine, it would be like having the chance to lose $50, $20 dollars, or $1. Right? You'd never want to play. [LAUGHTER] So, I've been talking about this, suggesting perhaps that mind-wandering causes unhappiness. But all I've ever shown you is these two things are correlated. It's possible that's the case, but it might also be the case that when people are unhappy then they mind-wander. Maybe that's what's really going on. How could we ever disentangle these two possibilities? One fact that we can take advantage of, I think a fact you'll all agree is true, is that time goes forward, not backward. Right? The cause has to come before the effect. We're lucky in this data we have many responses from each person and so we can look and see. Does mind-wandering tend to precede unhappiness or does unhappiness tend to precede mind-wandering, to get some insight into the causal direction. As it turns out, there is a strong relationship between mind-wandering now, and being unhappy a short time later, consistent with the idea that mind wandering is causing people to be unhappy. In contrast, there's no relationship between being unhappy now and mind-wandering a short time later. In other words, mind-wandering very likely seems to be an actual cause and not merely a consequence of unhappiness. A few minutes ago, I likened mind-wandering to a slot machine you'd never want to play. Well, how often do people's minds wander? Turns out, they wander a lot. In fact, really a lot. 47 percent of the time people are thinking about something other than what they're currently doing. How does that depend on what people are doing? This shows the rate of mind-wandering across 22 activities. Ranging from a high of 65 percent, when people are taking a shower, brushing their teeth. To 50 percent when they're working. To 40 percent when they're exercising. All the way down to this one short bar on the right that I think some of you are probably laughing at. 10 percent of the time people's minds are wandering when they're having sex. But there's something I think is quite interesting in this graph. And that is basically, with one exception, no matter what people are doing, they're mind-wandering at least 30% of the time. Which suggests, I think, that mind-wandering isn't just frequent, it's ubiquitous. It pervades basically everything that we do. So, as you just saw, Killingsworth's findings show two things that are very intriguing. One, mind-wandering is ubiquitous. Roughly half of our time is spent mind-wandering. And two, we are happier, or less unhappy, when our minds are not wandering. And this is true even for unpleasant events, incredibly. Think about what the second fact means. It means that we have a source of happiness right within us. If we could some how figure out how not to let our minds wander. That is if we could some how figure out how to be mindful at every moment, we'd have the ability to be happier than we otherwise might. Of course, I'm not suggesting that we should always be mindful in every moment, and stay in the present at every moment, etc. Sometimes it might be a good idea to let our minds wander. Say, to plan for a future event, or imagine something other than what we are currently experiencing. But having the ability to be mindful isn't the same as forcing yourself to be mindful all the time. Just like as we saw in week four, having the ability to regulate your emotions is not the same thing as forcing yourself to- to be happy all the time. Rather, having this ability means that you have another tool in your happiness toolkit, if you want to call it that. The tool of mindfulness. That can help enhance your overall sense of well-being. But, how do we develop this ability to be mindful? And exactly why does it enhance happiness levels? Those are the questions to which I will get to in the next few videos. Until then, bye-bye. [MUSIC]


[MUSIC] Hi everyone, welcome back. I know I've been saying that I can't believe that it's already the second week, the third week, the fourth week, and so on. But I really mean it this time. I really can't believe that it's already the last week, the sixth week. I'm really gonna miss you guys. I do hope that we can stay in touch, even after the course is over. Later this week, I'll share with you some ideas on how we can do this. And if you have any ideas, I would love to hear them as well. Meanwhile, let's get on with the seventh, and the last deadly happiness sin, and habit and exercise of course. The seventh sin is ignoring the source within. In many ways, this is the most important sin. Since if we knew how to avoid this sin, and it seems that the best or the most reliable way is through the practice of something called mindfulness, then it doesn't matter as much if you commit the other six sins. Bit by bit, you're going to be steered away from those sins. By practicing the seventh habit of the highly happy, mindfulness. We'll see why in a future video. So, in a sense the seventh sin of ignoring the source within is the most significant sin that we commit. But what exactly does it mean to ignore the source within? To answer this question, let me begin by trying to explain what the 7th habit, mindfulness, is. One way to understand mindfulness is that it's a state in which your attention is not distracted by something other than what's happening right now. Here's a New Yorker cartoon depicting a guy who's not mindful. If this guy were mindful, his attention, or mind, would be on golf when he was playing golf and on work when he was at work and so on. What's incredible about mindfulness is that, as I mentioned briefly in week one, you feel happier when you're mindful, even if what you're experiencing is a negative or unpleasant event. Imagine, that your boss has just shouted at you or you're involved in an accident. Even in these types of situations, you're likely to feel better when you're mindful than when you're not mindful. We know this from a paper that was published by Matt Killingsworth and Professor Dan Gilbert. Rather than summarize what they found in the paper, let me play to you a very popular Ted Talk that Matt Killingsworth gave, in which he summarizes the findings for us. Here, listen. » So people want a lot of things out of life, but I think more than anything else they want happiness. Aristotle called happiness the chief good, the end towards which all other things aim. According to this view, the reason we want a big house or a nice car. Or a good job. Isn't that these things are intrinsically valuable. It's that we expect them to bring us happiness. Now, in the last 50 years, we Americans have gotten a lot of the things that we want. We're richer. We live longer. We have access to technology that would have seemed like science fiction just a few years ago. The paradox of happiness is that even though the objective conditions in our lives have improved dramatically, we haven't actually gotten any happier. Maybe because these conventional notions of progress haven't delivered big benefits in terms of happiness, there has been an increased interest in recent years in happiness itself. People have been debating the causes of happiness for a really long time, in fact, for thousands of years, but it seems like many of those debates remain unresolved. As with many other domains in life, I think the scientific method has the potential to answer this question. In fact, in the last few years, there's been an explosion in research on happiness. For example, we've learned a lot about it's demographics. How things like income, and education, gender and marriage relate to it. But one of the puzzles this has revealed is that factors like these don't seem to have a particularly strong effect. Yes, it's better to make more money, rather than less, or graduate from college instead of dropping out, but the differences in happiness tend to be small. Which leaves the question, what are the big causes of happiness? I think that's a question we haven't really answered yet. But I think something that has the potential to be an answer is that maybe happiness has an awful lot to do with the contents of our moment-to-moment experiences. It certainly seems that we're going about our lives. That what we're doing, who we're with, what we're thinking about, have a big influence on our happiness. And yet these are the very factors that have been very difficult, in fact almost impossible, for scientists to study. A few years ago I came up with a way to study people's happiness, moment-to-moment, as they're going about their daily lives on the massive scale all over the world. Something we've never been able to do before. Called trackyourhappiness.org, it uses the iPhone to monitor people's happiness in real time. How does this work? Basically, I send people signals at random points throughout the day. And then I ask them a bunch of questions about their moment to moment experience of the instant just before the signal. The idea is that if we can watch how people's happiness goes up and down over the course of the day, minute-to-minute in some cases. And try to understand how what people are doing, who they're with, what they're thinking about. And all the other factors that describe our day, how those might relate to those changes in happiness. We might be able to discover some of the things that really have a big influence on happiness. We've been fortunate with this project to collect quite a lot of data. A lot more data of this kind than I think has ever been collected before. Over 650,000 real-time reports from over 15,000 people. And it's not just a lot of people, it's a really diverse group. People from a wide range of ages, from 18 to late 80's. A wide range of incomes, education levels. People who are married, divorced, widowed, etc. They collectively represent every one of 86 occupational categories, and hail from over 80 countries. What I'd like to do with the rest of my time with you today is talk a little bit about one of the areas that we've been investigating. And that's mind-wandering. As human beings, we have this unique ability to have our minds stray away from the present. This guy is sitting here working on his computer, and yet he could be thinking about the vacation he had last month. Wondering what he's gonna have for dinner, maybe he's worried that he's going bald. » [LAUGH] » This ability to focus our attention on something other than the present is really amazing. It allows us to learn, and plan, and reason in ways that no other species of animal can. And yet, it's not clear what the relationship is between our use of this ability and our happiness. You've probably heard people suggest that you should stay focused on the present. Be here now, you've probably heard a hundred times. Maybe, to really be happy, we need to stay completely immersed and focused on our experience in the moment. Maybe these people are right, maybe mind-wandering is a bad thing. On the other hand, when our minds wander, they're unconstrained. We can't change the physical reality in front of us. But we can go anywhere in our minds. Since we know people want to be happy. Maybe when our minds wander, they're going to someplace happier than the place that they're leaving. It would make a lot of sense. In other words, maybe the pleasures of the mind allow us to increase our happiness with mind wandering. Well, since I'm a scientist, I'd like to try to resolve this debate with some data. In particular, I'd like to present some data to you from three questions that I ask with Track Your Happiness. Remember, this is from sort of moment-to-moment experience in people's real lives. The three questions. The first one is a happiness question. How do you feel on a scale ranging from very bad to very good? Second, an activity question. What are you doing? On a list of 22 different activities, including things like eating, working, watching TV. And finally, and mind-wandering question. Are you thinking about something other than what you're currently doing? People could say no. In other words I'm focused only only on my task. Or yes, I am thinking about something else. And the topic of those thoughts are pleasant, neutral, or unpleasant. Any of those yes responses are what we called mind-wandering. So what did we find? This graph shows happiness on the vertical axis. And you can see that bar there representing how happy people are when they're focused on the present. When they're not mind-wandering. As it turns out, people are substantially less happy when their minds are wandering than when they're not. Now you might look at this result and say okay, sure, on average people are less happy when they are mind-wandering. But surely when their minds are straying away from something that wasn't very enjoyable to begin with, at least then mind-wandering should be doing something good for us. Nope, as it turns out people are less happy when they're mind-wandering no matter what they're doing. For example, people don't really like commuting to work very much. It's one of their least enjoyable activities. And yet they are substantially happier when they're focused only on their commute than when their mind is going off to something else. It's amazing. So how could this be happening? I think, part of the reason, a big part of the reason, is that when our minds wander, we often think about unpleasant things. And they are enormously less happy when they do that. Our worries, our anxieties, our regrets. And yet even when people are thinking about something neutral they're still considerably less happy than when they're not mind-wandering at all. Even when they're thinking about something they would describe as pleasant, they're actually just slightly less happy than when they aren't mind-wandering. If mind-wandering were a slot machine, it would be like having the chance to lose $50, $20 dollars, or $1. Right? You'd never want to play. [LAUGHTER] So, I've been talking about this, suggesting perhaps that mind-wandering causes unhappiness. But all I've ever shown you is these two things are correlated. It's possible that's the case, but it might also be the case that when people are unhappy then they mind-wander. Maybe that's what's really going on. How could we ever disentangle these two possibilities? One fact that we can take advantage of, I think a fact you'll all agree is true, is that time goes forward, not backward. Right? The cause has to come before the effect. We're lucky in this data we have many responses from each person and so we can look and see. Does mind-wandering tend to precede unhappiness or does unhappiness tend to precede mind-wandering, to get some insight into the causal direction. As it turns out, there is a strong relationship between mind-wandering now, and being unhappy a short time later, consistent with the idea that mind wandering is causing people to be unhappy. In contrast, there's no relationship between being unhappy now and mind-wandering a short time later. In other words, mind-wandering very likely seems to be an actual cause and not merely a consequence of unhappiness. A few minutes ago, I likened mind-wandering to a slot machine you'd never want to play. Well, how often do people's minds wander? Turns out, they wander a lot. In fact, really a lot. 47 percent of the time people are thinking about something other than what they're currently doing. How does that depend on what people are doing? This shows the rate of mind-wandering across 22 activities. Ranging from a high of 65 percent, when people are taking a shower, brushing their teeth. To 50 percent when they're working. To 40 percent when they're exercising. All the way down to this one short bar on the right that I think some of you are probably laughing at. 10 percent of the time people's minds are wandering when they're having sex. But there's something I think is quite interesting in this graph. And that is basically, with one exception, no matter what people are doing, they're mind-wandering at least 30% of the time. Which suggests, I think, that mind-wandering isn't just frequent, it's ubiquitous. It pervades basically everything that we do. So, as you just saw, Killingsworth's findings show two things that are very intriguing. One, mind-wandering is ubiquitous. Roughly half of our time is spent mind-wandering. And two, we are happier, or less unhappy, when our minds are not wandering. And this is true even for unpleasant events, incredibly. Think about what the second fact means. It means that we have a source of happiness right within us. If we could some how figure out how not to let our minds wander. That is if we could some how figure out how to be mindful at every moment, we'd have the ability to be happier than we otherwise might. Of course, I'm not suggesting that we should always be mindful in every moment, and stay in the present at every moment, etc. Sometimes it might be a good idea to let our minds wander. Say, to plan for a future event, or imagine something other than what we are currently experiencing. But having the ability to be mindful isn't the same as forcing yourself to be mindful all the time. Just like as we saw in week four, having the ability to regulate your emotions is not the same thing as forcing yourself to- to be happy all the time. Rather, having this ability means that you have another tool in your happiness toolkit, if you want to call it that. The tool of mindfulness. That can help enhance your overall sense of well-being. But, how do we develop this ability to be mindful? And exactly why does it enhance happiness levels? Those are the questions to which I will get to in the next few videos. Until then, bye-bye. [MUSIC]