10% Happier with Dan Harris

As humans experience fewer and fewer problems, we don't actually become more satisfied. We basically just lower our threshold for what we consider a problem.

So we end up with the same exact number of troubles, right? But our problems become more hollow over time as the world has improved over time.

And I think we can all agree that today in by most measurements, the world is way better than it was a hundred years ago, even 50 years ago, 200 years ago.

But we don't often stop and appreciate that.

But when you ask the average American, is the world improving? Only 6% of people say that the world is improving.

we had James Nestor on the show author of an incredible book about how many of us it turns out are breathing incorrectly and in many ways to fix that.

each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or on occasion so regretted that people could no more see it developing from day to day than a farmer in his field sees a corn growing. One day it is over his head.

Pleasure results from incomplete and intermittent satisfaction of desires.

I came back from somewhere that is amazing and beautiful, but you know, you long for really dumb things that you're just used to. That six months ago, I'm sure I was bored by, but right now I'm like, my God, avocados are amazing, or I'm so glad I get to go to the gym again. Things that six months ago were sort of what I was trying to escape from, now everything is amazing.

His new book is called, Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life.

I want to congratulate you on your new book.

And I think that I went after those questions why do we have this emotion and what good is it for us in writing this book.

And in fact, this book is in some ways the antithesis to a book you may have heard of called The Secret, which was popular several years ago, which promoted this narrative.

And this is, as I said, the antithesis of this. This is more about how can I be of service and by doing so actually manifest the things that I need, which is oftentimes in contrast to what we think we want.

It was all about what I want, I, I, I. And this is, as I said, the antithesis of this. This is more about how can I be of service and by doing so actually manifest the things that I need, which is oftentimes in contrast to what we think we want.

And it was all about what I want, I, I, I.

And this is the problem for people. Many people will sacrifice everything to achieve the goal and then have left a lot of lives destroyed, ruined, and unhappiness in their wake.

I remember I read the first three Harry Potter books in a weekend when I was in college. And I literally- I finished the third book. I think there were only three at the time. I was mad that Hogwarts wasn't real.

I went on a big journey all over the world. I went from Reykjavik in Iceland to Minneapolis, to Tokyo. I interviewed over 100 of the leading experts on the new weight loss drugs and these wider debates and people have been affected by them in all sorts of different ways. I took the drug myself for a year.

So I could immediately see the case for it. I realized I was about to turn older than my grandfather ever got to be because he died at the age of 44 of a heart attack. Loads of the men in my family have serious heart problems.

But I also immediately thought, come on now, I've seen this story before, right? About every 20 years going right back to the first world war, a new diet drug is announced.

I think of all the moments I had in writing the book, I had some bad moments, some pretty bad moments, a few I'm sure we'll get to them. But the absolute worst was a moment I had, must have been, I don't know, five months into taking Ozempyx.

She said to me, look Johan something is really wrong in our environment that's causing breast cancer one in seven british women get breast cancer one in eight american women get breast cancer that wasn't true in the recent past.

There's something about Meditations that I think is so fascinating because if you were to describe a work of ancient literature you probably would struggle to come up with something that on its face could be more inaccessible right.

The idea that this would be of use to anyone is absurd on its face. And yet when I sort of crack open this book in my college apartment in Riverside California it just immediately speaks to me and it's been speaking to people for centuries because the incredible specificness of it somehow creates a kind of universality and relatability about fundamentally what it means to be a human being in a world that you don't control and to try to make sense of other people try to make sense of your own desires and aversions and urges try to wrestle with one's mortality with one's ambitions with one's self doubt. That's what he's doing in Meditations and I think that's what spoke to me there and why I saw it as medicine.

Marcus Aurelius compares it to this treatment for some eye illness. He says it should be a soothing ointment that should relieve the pain or the distress that you feel.

I've been recommending a lot lately you've all know a Harari's books Sapiens and and homodeous partly because he sees the world through the lens of fiction and he uses that language that we live so much in the world of fiction.

Oliver Berkman is the author of Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals. Former guest Adam Grant has called it, "The most important book ever written about time management."

Tell me about the title 4,000 weeks.

That is very, very roughly the average human lifespan of the average lifespan in the West. . . It's just really a way of driving home my starting point in this book which is it's finite. It's really finite.

You know, in Blue Zones, nobody exercises. There's no CrossFit, there's no yoga class, no Pilates class, nobody's running the... there's no Blue Zone marathon. But they live in communities where every time they go to work, a friend's house, or out to eat, it occasions a walk. They're taking about 8,000 steps a day without even thinking about it.

And so I ended up sending a cold email to Cass Sunstein, who is co-author of the book Nudge and had worked for Obama for four years, and asked if he'd be willing to make an introduction to Obama leadership for me.

Just to say that we had Cass Sunstein's co-author Richard Thaler on the show a couple months ago to talk about their book Nudge, and he uses this term choice architecture and how scientists can create an architecture of choices knowing what they know about the way the human mind makes decisions that Nudge people in the direction of positive outcomes, like getting food to kids who might not otherwise get it.

Ethan Cross is a psychology professor at the University of Michigan and he wrote a book called Chatter.

He's come on the show before and he's done some work that shows that when people use their own names when they're talking to themselves, a fosu, I know you mess that up, but you got this or whatever, that that actually has a meaningful impact and because we're advice giving creatures we generally just don't take our own advice.

And so given that many, if not all of us will have spent time feeling hatred for the other tribe while glancing at our social media, I wonder if you could talk about the utility of the elephant and rider metaphor in this zone?

What socially has done is it has hyper empowered the extremes, but in an unusual way.

Well, in some ways it's a story that fills many profitable volumes of my memoirs, you know, Liars Club Cherry and lit.

My guest today is Thomas Curran, author of The Perfection Trap, Embracing the Power of Good Enough.

I think you have to start with perfectionism. It's very root and it's very root is a sense of deficit, a sense of lack, a sense that we really don't feel like we're good enough.

I think that's where it starts a hundred percent. Bernie Brown describes perfectionism as coming from shame based fears of not feeling enough.

And I think it's so, so important Dan that we start there because we can often confuse perfectionism with related characteristics, things like meticulousness, conscientiousness, these things that come from a very active, optimistic place of wanting to grow, wanting to improve, wanting to do better.

Perfectionism doesn't come from that place. It looks like those things because it has excessively high standards baked in, but it comes from a place of insecurity, a place of lack, a place of shame based fear of not feeling like we're enough.