0:15

Pushkin back.

0:22

In eighteen sixty three, the Russian novelist

0:24

Dostoevsky gave his readers a challenge,

0:27

one which I'm going to argue has a huge

0:30

impact on happiness. Try

0:32

to pose for yourself this task. He wrote, not

0:35

to think of a polar bear. So

0:37

for the next few seconds, let's do it. Let's

0:39

not think of a white bear. Ready,

0:42

go, how'd

0:50

you do? My guess is

0:52

that even though you were trying not to think of a white bear,

0:54

your mind immediately went to thoughts of

0:56

a white bear. That's what Dostoevsky

0:59

realized. He warned that when

1:01

you try not to think of something, you will

1:03

see that cursed thing come to mind every

1:05

minute. The Harvard

1:07

psychologist Dan Wegner was interested

1:09

in these effects, which he referred to as

1:12

ironic processes. Cases,

1:14

were our minds, ironically enough go

1:16

to the exact place where we don't want them

1:18

to go. Witner created a version

1:20

of Dostoevsky's polar bear challenge as

1:22

an experiment with college students. He

1:25

asked them to speak their stream of consciousness for

1:27

five minutes. Living with my

1:29

boyfriend right now, so I didn't have

1:31

to sunburn and I didn't

1:33

want to be out in the sun really

1:36

quieted as creaks me

1:38

out a little bit. Next,

1:40

he asked them to repeat the task, but explicitly

1:43

tells them not to think of a white bear.

1:46

If the bear does pop into their minds while babbling,

1:48

you have to ring the bell. I

1:51

asked my students to repeat the experiment. Here's

1:54

how they did. Of

1:57

course, All right, and now,

1:59

because I was told

2:02

I'm not thinking of right

2:04

now, I'm thinking about my class,

2:09

think about it. Thinking

2:12

about it. Man, it's checkier

2:14

than I thought. It's funny to hear so many

2:16

bells ringing, but everyone does this. On

2:18

average. People in Wegner's original study

2:21

ended up ringing the bell about once per minute.

2:25

Things that we don't want in our heads seem to come

2:27

up all the time. Just think of that song

2:29

you can't stop humming. But

2:37

sometimes the thoughts we don't want to think about are

2:39

a lot more serious than a catchy song

2:41

or a polar bear image. Our

2:44

dumb minds also spontaneously go to lots

2:46

of yucky thoughts that fight

2:48

with our spouse a few weeks back, or

2:50

that mean comment from a coworker you can't

2:52

shake. Even really traumatic memories

2:55

have a knack for popping into our heads when

2:57

we least want them there, which raises

2:59

an important question. Why can't we simply

3:02

get rid of all these unwanted thoughts? What

3:04

strategies should we be using not to

3:06

think of white bears, earworm tunes,

3:09

and those awful memories that hinder our happiness.

3:15

Our minds are constantly telling us what to do

3:17

to be happy. But what if our minds

3:19

are wrong? What if our minds are lying

3:21

to us, leading us away from what

3:23

will really make us happy. The

3:26

good news is that understanding the science

3:28

of the mind can point us all back in

3:30

the right direction. You're listening

3:32

to the Happiness Lab with doctor Laurie

3:35

Santinis. So

3:39

golfers would never use the word, wouldn't

3:42

even wouldn't acknowledge it, But there's

3:45

no question it's well known. You

3:47

know, some of the greatest players in the history of the game. Get it. Colin

3:50

Sheen played for the golf team back in the nineties.

3:53

He's now the head coach. Colin's

3:55

a friend of mine, which is the only reason he's

3:57

willing to talk to me about a topic that's

4:00

usually for Bowen for golfers to speak of,

4:03

the yips, the yips is like where

4:05

you're putting and then your hands

4:07

just twitch and you're

4:10

in a position where you no longer in control

4:12

of the club. It flicks, it twists,

4:15

you are in control of your of your hands,

4:17

and then there you are left broken.

4:21

The yips happen when golfers totally psyche themselves

4:24

out, when they think so much about not

4:26

making a certain type of mistake that they end

4:28

up making exactly that mistake all

4:30

the time. And it's not just a one

4:33

time thing. The yips can return

4:35

at any moment, and that fear plagues

4:37

golfers. The idea of

4:39

it sort of happening, or that it might

4:42

happen, has always been a thing for professional golfers,

4:44

and so you kind of lived in a constant dread of

4:47

this idea, like is today going to be one of those days?

4:49

Or we're gonna have a bad yips day? Or is it gonna

4:51

are we gonna be fairly

4:53

easy? Or and then you get on the course

4:55

and it may not even be on the first hole, and

4:58

then it can come at any moment,

5:01

and it's it's an unnerving aspect,

5:03

it's a it's an embarrassing aspect. It's

5:06

it's it's humiliating, it's it's

5:09

dreadful. Think about what happens

5:11

when you hit a golf ball. Making

5:13

a put involves not only thinking about where

5:15

you want the ball to go, but also

5:17

where you want the ball not to go. This

5:20

act of thinking of the unwanted action, whatever

5:23

you do, don't hit it to the left, seems

5:25

to make that unwanted action more

5:27

likely, not less. It's

5:30

like if you're carrying a glass of wine over someone's

5:32

new white carpet and you think, whatever

5:34

I do, I shouldn't spill this, And then,

5:37

of course, recent

5:39

research shows how common this phenomenon is.

5:42

College students told not to think about a particular

5:45

person before bed end up dreaming

5:47

about that person more often, and

5:49

soccer players told not to shoot a penalty

5:51

kick to a specific location tend

5:53

to look at that exact forbidden spot, which

5:56

is a problem since players tend to aim where

5:58

they look. Den

6:01

Wegner, who devised the white Bear experiment,

6:03

also study these ironic effects on the golf

6:05

course. He had his student's put

6:07

a ball towards a target. Some

6:10

subjects took the put normally, but

6:12

others were told, whatever you do,

6:14

don't overshoot. What happens.

6:16

People then do exactly what they're told

6:19

not to. They overshoot the ball by

6:21

about twenty centimeters. Wegner's

6:23

experiment had found a way to induce the yips,

6:26

and it wasn't that hard. Just have golfers

6:29

tell themselves what not to do, and you

6:31

have a recipe for disaster. Golf

6:33

is a lovely game, and it's a cruel

6:35

game. When it's going poorly, it

6:38

can be devastating. But the most

6:40

devastating thing about the yips is that they

6:42

tend to stick around. One bad shot

6:44

follows another, A whole ruined

6:47

becomes a round ruined, A bad

6:49

week stretches out into a bad

6:51

year. Colin explained that

6:53

this decline without end was famously

6:55

summed up in a classic article by

6:57

Henry Longhurst, the great British

6:59

golf essayist. It's called once

7:01

you've had them, you've got them, because

7:04

there's almost like the ideas there's not a cure, or

7:06

maybe someday there will be

7:09

great to take a pill. It was at this

7:11

point in the interview that Colin suddenly turned

7:13

a bit quiet. He was wrestling with something.

7:16

He stammered for a while and began talking

7:18

about his glory days, I played probably

7:20

my best golf of my life from the time I was about

7:22

twenty five to forty. I had about

7:25

a decade of my life where I was a plus one

7:27

handicap as and I loved

7:30

playing well, and I did it without practicing

7:32

much. And then in the last five

7:34

years or so, my game started to struggle,

7:37

and it went from being just

7:39

a little bit of a tail off to almost a

7:41

precipitous decline. I recently told

7:43

someone, if you wanted to read about my golf game, it's

7:45

over in the obituary section. One

7:48

of my Yale students had told me that Colin

7:50

was an expert on the yipps. I assumed

7:52

his expertise came from coaching so many

7:54

amazing young golfers, But as Colin

7:57

continued, I realized the truth.

7:59

Colin knew about the yips because

8:02

he had him and once you've had

8:04

him, well, The

8:06

crazy thing was that Colin was now confessing

8:08

all this to me in front of alive

8:11

Mike. You get to a point where you wonder, like,

8:13

why me, What did I do? I

8:15

thought it was a good person. What

8:17

did the golfing gods? Why

8:20

that? Why did they pick me? And I didn't grow up Catholic.

8:26

Everybody out there. It's true. Colin

8:28

hadn't really spoken about his struggle with the yips

8:30

to anyone by his wife, and

8:32

that's common for golfers because when

8:34

you've got him, you also want to hide

8:37

him, which makes the yips a form

8:39

of thought suppression overload. Not

8:41

only are you trying to suppress your thoughts

8:43

about what not to do on the golf course, which

8:46

is bad cognitively, but you're

8:48

also trying to hide that you have this shameful condition

8:51

from everyone around you.

8:53

You don't want people to learn your dirty secret.

8:55

Colin even admitted that his wife had pulled him

8:58

aside before he came to the interview. She

9:00

asked him if he was sure that he wanted to talk about

9:02

the awful why word on my podcast, whether

9:05

he wanted to admit it so publicly. Would

9:07

his career suffer if everyone knew about

9:09

it. In the end,

9:12

Colin decided it was finally time to

9:14

confess, and maybe there needs to be

9:16

an opportunity for golfers to come out about it.

9:18

I guess I'm doing it right now. Well,

9:21

it's been part of the stress that

9:23

I've had is that if we're being

9:26

honest. I feel like this is a great place

9:28

to do it. In some ways that should just be like

9:30

on the first tea, I should just introduce myself

9:32

and be like, all right, just let me preface this by saying you might

9:34

see some horrendously bad shots out of me, and

9:36

maybe that would that would that

9:39

might help. I can't stress enough

9:41

how big a sporting taboo Colin has broken

9:43

by talking so openly about suffering

9:45

from the yips. In the golfing world,

9:48

bringing up the subject, it just isn't

9:50

done. One way that the yips are perceived

9:52

is that it's it's because you're mentally weak. Players

9:55

often think the yips can be overcome by just

9:57

working harder to suppress them. Just

9:59

tell yourself more sternly not to lose

10:02

control of your grip on the club. Mentally,

10:04

keep telling yourself not to make a bad shot.

10:07

Golfers don't take kindly to the suggestion

10:10

that all this mental pressure won't help them

10:12

beat the yips, so everyone ends up

10:14

suffering and keeping it a huge secret,

10:17

which makes the next story Colin told me all

10:19

the more unexpected. You see,

10:22

back when he was a young golfer, Colin

10:24

had a chance to meet his hero. I was working

10:26

for the Golfer magazine just six months

10:28

in my very first assignment to interview a pro

10:31

was Bernard Langer, the Rye Hilton, And

10:33

I'm twenty two years old and there's Bernard Langer,

10:36

like two time Master's champion,

10:38

waiting for me in the lobby. And I left

10:40

an hour early and I was still late, and

10:42

of course he's on time, and he was

10:44

gracious to me, and we sat down. We start the interview

10:47

and it's going wonderfully, and he's

10:49

cranking out answers and I'm

10:51

sliding follow ups and it's going wonderful.

10:54

That was when Colin made a huge faux paw

10:56

in front of the greatest player on the planet.

10:59

I felt like I sort of had

11:01

a moment where I could ask him about his yips. A

11:03

typical golfer might have walked out

11:06

of the interview right there, but Colin's

11:08

hero wasn't the usual golfer, and

11:10

he just goes into this answer. In nineteen seventy

11:13

nine, I had my first bout of the yips, and then in nineteen

11:15

eighty two, and he did it. He did

11:17

it perfectly, and so I realized now in

11:19

hindsight. There he was doing

11:21

the opposite of trying to

11:23

obscure the fact that he had it, and it only

11:26

paid dividends for him throughout

11:28

his life. He was forty three at the time, and he

11:30

just continued a meteoric rise just

11:32

by disclosing to some twenty two year old kid,

11:34

it can't hurt, it can't hurt. He wasn't. He clearly

11:37

didn't have a problem acknowledging

11:40

it admitting it. And I think perhaps

11:43

there's a lesson there, Collins,

11:45

right, there is a lesson here, one that's

11:48

really important scientifically. Langer

11:50

was one of the few golfers who was willing

11:52

to speak openly about his yips, and

11:55

that meant that his mind didn't have to harbor

11:57

a shameful secret. It didn't have

11:59

to work really hard to keep the dreaded

12:01

y word hush hush, And that meant

12:04

that Langer's mind could relax a bit. His

12:06

brain didn't have to put so much effort and

12:08

to keep all those unwanted thoughts concealed.

12:11

Because his yip's cat was finally out of

12:13

the golf bag, so to speak. And

12:15

what was the result. Langer had

12:17

a lot more mental energy left for

12:19

doing what professional golfers need to do, namely,

12:22

play golf. Langer was

12:25

able to develop new techniques to improve

12:27

his game because he had finally freed

12:29

his mind. He had let go of

12:31

all those ironic processes, and

12:34

his golf game skyrocketed. Yet

12:36

again. Coming

12:38

up, we'll hear just how powerful that release

12:41

can be, not just for bad golf

12:43

games, but for life changing events.

12:45

Here it was this big secret they've been keeping

12:48

their whole lives, and here was this opportunity

12:51

for them to organize the experience

12:54

and to put it into words in a way

12:56

that they've never done before. The Happiness

12:58

Lab will be right back criminal

13:07

pace for deeps sixty

13:09

one Turney General

13:12

against Adult the son

13:14

of adult Karl Eichmann, aged fifty

13:16

four. Historians argue

13:19

that it took the world nearly twenty years to

13:21

appreciate the true horror of the Holocaust.

13:25

First count nature over

13:27

fence climb against the Jewish

13:29

people and a fence under section

13:32

one one of the Nazis

13:34

and Nazi collaborators. It's April

13:36

eleventh, nineteen sixty one, and Adolf

13:39

Eichmann has just entered his bulletproof

13:41

doc at a special tribunal in

13:43

Jerusalem. Over fence.

13:46

Eichmann was facing fifteen indictments

13:48

for his role in sending millions of Jews

13:50

to their deaths. Nazi

13:52

warker Mills had been publicly tried before,

13:55

but this time was different. This

13:57

time, television cameras were beaming

13:59

the story to every corner of the

14:01

globe, and this time Jews

14:04

who had seen and survived the genocide

14:06

were ready to take the stand of court.

14:08

Please, guy in the courtroom, do

14:11

you speak Hebrew Sir? Yes?

14:13

Please place the skull cap on your head.

14:16

Many of the witnesses had never spoken

14:18

publicly about the horrific cruelty

14:20

they'd endured. Was

14:23

my younger sister, and

14:26

she wanted to live, She prayed with

14:28

a German police interrogator,

14:30

Michael Goldman. Gallad had helped build

14:33

the case against Aikman. His

14:35

own parents and sister had been murdered

14:37

by the Nazis, but like other Holocaust

14:39

survivors at that time, Michael

14:41

had never spoken of his ordeal, assuming

14:44

no one would trust his account. It

14:47

was impossible to believe, he had said, because

14:49

it was so horrible. She asked

14:52

to run naked.

14:55

She went up to the German with one

14:57

of her friends. They were embracing

14:59

each other, and she asked to be

15:01

spared. Standing

15:04

there naked, he looked

15:06

into her eyes and shopped The two of

15:08

them. They fell together

15:11

in their embrace. Michael

15:13

had bottled up his experiences for twenty

15:16

years. After listening to hour

15:18

after hour of awful memories pouring

15:20

from his fellow survivors, he

15:22

realized that the trial had become

15:24

a watershed historical moment. The

15:27

Aikman trial, he said, opened

15:29

our mouths again. But

15:33

unlike those who'd taken a stand against Aikman,

15:35

many Holocaust survivors still felt they

15:37

had no acceptable way to share their

15:39

stories. You know, it's hard to talk

15:42

to your neighbor saying, oh, did I tell you all about

15:45

my holocoust experiences? They learned nobody

15:47

wanted to hear about it because it was just too threatening.

15:50

Jamie Pennybaker is a professor of psychology

15:52

at UT Austin and an expert

15:54

on the power of expressing our emotions.

15:57

By the mid nineteen eighties, many Holocaust

16:00

victims had kept silent about their experiences

16:02

for four whole decades. Jamie

16:05

wondered what told us had taken on them and

16:07

what benefits they might receive by

16:09

sharing their stories instead of suppressing

16:12

them. He joined a project that

16:14

invited survivors to give videotape

16:16

testimony of what they had endured at

16:18

the hands of the Nazis. And here was this

16:20

opportunity for them to organize

16:23

the experience and to put

16:25

it into words in a way that they'd never done

16:27

before. And they came

16:29

in. They were interviewed on camera,

16:32

and the average interview was about an hour an

16:34

hour and a half. The films of the interviews

16:36

Jamie conducted are captain a university

16:38

archive here at Yale. I

16:41

arranged to see some of them. It

16:44

was tougher to hear than even I expect

16:46

it okay to begin

16:48

when it? Could you tell us your name, your

16:50

maiden name, or your friend. My name is

16:52

Rosalie Chief. I was born

16:55

in Kako, Poland, and

16:58

I am a Holocaust survivor. Jamie

17:01

asks Rosalie about the appalling things

17:03

she endured, first in the ghetto

17:05

and then in the camp. I'm

17:07

struck time and again by just how determined

17:10

Rosalie has been to suppress the

17:12

details. I tried so hard

17:14

to push the memories away. Do

17:17

you think you're pretty successful at putting it away?

17:19

Out of your mind, tending you get

17:22

true. I'm finding with myself it's

17:24

not good to start something like this

17:27

and not to bring it out. For nearly

17:30

two hours, Rosalie patiently

17:32

answers question after question,

17:34

occasionally wiping away tears. Having

17:37

suppressed her memories for decades, she

17:40

finally opens up to recount horrors

17:42

which seemed almost unimaginable

17:44

to me. Who were covered

17:46

with lies, who were beaten.

17:50

We had to stay in the camp undressed

17:53

completely like animals,

17:55

and they should every minute

17:57

somebody else. It was an incredibly

18:00

hard video to watch. Every

18:02

act of violence perpetrated by the Nazis

18:05

is more depraved and distressing than the last.

18:08

At one point, describes watching

18:10

the SS slaughter and entire orphanage

18:12

of Jewish children in a frenzied

18:14

massacre that left the street outside

18:17

a wash with blood. It was very

18:19

hot. Talk about

18:21

done an outstanding job. You've

18:23

really really, I

18:28

won't play you the worst parts of rose Lee's testimony.

18:31

I had to stop the tape several times and

18:33

just get up and go for a walk, but

18:35

Jamie had to listen in

18:37

real time. It was the

18:40

most moving experience in my life. I um,

18:43

it's hard to put into words I had

18:45

no I'm not a clinical psychologist,

18:49

and hearing these

18:51

stories was really

18:55

hard on me, and it was almost

18:57

as though it was a traumatic experience for me, and

19:00

just seeing the depths of the

19:02

horrors that these people had endured,

19:05

you know, I had nightmares. I was now, all of a sudden

19:08

a victim of my own research. But

19:10

completing the interviews was only the first

19:13

part of Jamie's work. Jamie

19:15

wanted to know if the process of sharing memories

19:17

would have an impact on the survivors, whose

19:20

lifelong mental strategy had

19:22

been to timp down those thoughts and lock

19:24

them away. What we found was the experience

19:27

had this profound effect on them. A lot

19:29

of them were self reports in terms

19:31

of kind of a greater sense

19:33

of well being and happiness, and also

19:35

we had some health markers that showed

19:38

improvements as well. Immediately

19:40

after telling these awful stories, survivors

19:43

felt better, and survivors

19:46

who shared the most traumatic memories were

19:48

the ones who reported feeling the best. They

19:50

had the lowest heart rates and the lowest

19:53

levels of emotional anguish.

19:55

Talking about the worst possible things

19:58

they'd ever experienced made

20:00

survivors feel calmer and

20:02

happier, but Jamie's

20:04

results were even more amazing than that. One

20:07

year after the interviews, Jamie

20:09

contacted survivors. He asked,

20:12

how are you feeling and have you

20:14

been to the doctor recently. He found

20:16

that survivors who disclosed lots of

20:18

details in their interviews were healthier.

20:21

People who evaded talking deeply about their

20:23

traumas went to the doctor almost twice

20:25

as often. It seemed

20:28

that getting those awful secrets out in the open

20:30

made survivors less sick even

20:32

a full twelve months later. It

20:35

was hard to do a really controlled

20:37

experiment because we didn't have another group of

20:39

Holocaust survivors who did not

20:41

come into the studio. So as

20:43

a control study it wasn't

20:46

that impressive, But as

20:48

a case study, it was a

20:50

profound Really was a profound experience.

20:53

I've become intrigued with this

20:56

notion that if you have something

20:58

that's bad and you

21:00

don't want to talk about it, you

21:02

probably should think about talking about it,

21:04

or at least writing about it. After his

21:07

own tough experience with Holocaust survivors,

21:09

Jamie set out on paper how upsetting

21:11

and unsettling he'd found the interviews.

21:14

He found the writing process so helpful he

21:16

decided to test the effects of sharing bad

21:18

memories in a more controlled way. So

21:20

I thought, well, we just get random college

21:23

students who are taking introductory psychology,

21:25

bring them into the lab. They were either wrote

21:27

about superficial topics or about traumatic

21:29

experiences for four consecutive days.

21:32

And those people who wrote about these

21:34

traumatic experiences, it was

21:36

a profound experience. And they wrote about

21:39

things that anybody would agree was a traumatic

21:41

experience. They weren't kind

21:43

of the classic thing. Some

21:46

were these huge humiliations, were

21:49

things that sounded superficial. Death

21:51

of a person's dog, I

21:53

remember, and every

21:55

night I would go and read

21:58

all of these stories, and they blew

22:00

me away. Both sets of students,

22:03

the ones who'd written the stories that had so moved

22:05

Jamie and the group who just set down

22:07

warm, mundane thoughts. Granted permission

22:09

for their medical records to be tracked for six

22:12

months, and those in the experimental group,

22:14

those who wrote about traumas, ended up going to

22:16

the doctor at about half the rate as

22:18

people in the control conditions. When

22:20

people were asked to write about a deeply

22:22

troubling traumatic experience or upsetting

22:24

experience that they hadn't talked to other people about,

22:27

it was associated with better physical

22:29

health that people went to the doctor lest

22:31

their immune system got better, something

22:33

that has always stuck with me. I

22:36

remember in the months afterwards this

22:38

happened at least a couple of times a student

22:41

would come up and said, you don't

22:43

know me, but I was in your experiment on writing

22:45

and it changed my life. Since

22:48

Jamie's initial research back in the nineteen

22:50

eighties, many scientists have seen

22:52

the same effects of setting traumatic memories

22:55

down on paper. There are easily

22:57

one or two thousand studies that have been done since

22:59

then. Across these studies, it's

23:01

been associated with reductions and symptoms

23:04

of depression and post traumatic stress disorder.

23:06

It's been associated with people

23:10

performing better on creative tasks, doing

23:12

better on a standardized tests

23:14

like SATs or MCATs.

23:16

They're mentally healthier, and

23:19

the biological markers have been quite

23:22

impressive in terms of changes in terms of

23:25

improvements and symptoms of arthritis

23:27

and immune disorders and cardiovascular

23:30

changes and so forth. We often

23:32

tell ourselves not to think about events in our lives

23:34

that are painful. We think dwelling on

23:36

that stuff is not good, and so

23:38

we squash those bad memories down. But

23:41

the science of ironic processes shows

23:43

why that's a bad idea. It

23:45

takes work for us to repress those bad

23:47

thoughts, and that cognitive

23:49

work winds up affecting things like sleep

23:52

and blood pressure and how well we can concentrate

23:54

on a standardized test. Letting

23:56

those bad thoughts out and getting them down

23:59

on paper finally lets our tired

24:01

brains relax. It's like opening

24:03

our little mental pressure cookers to let

24:06

out some suppressed steam.

24:09

But there's a second reason that writing down our bad

24:11

memories makes us happier. Writing

24:13

stuff down helps us make sense of

24:15

things. Our brains finally get

24:18

to process and work through some

24:20

really bad stuff. I've always been

24:22

fascinated how people naturally

24:24

deal with upsetting experience. You know you're

24:26

almost in a car wreck. You come home, you tell

24:28

your spouse, your friend, Oh my god, you were

24:30

not going to believe what happened. By

24:33

putting an upsetting experience into

24:35

words, it forces structure,

24:37

It forces an organization. There's

24:40

a beginning, middle, and end. It's

24:42

not blowing off steam. It's not some kind

24:44

of venting or the

24:47

way many people think about catharsis. Instead,

24:50

you are coming to understand the

24:52

event and also yourself better. Writing

24:55

about your painful emotions can help you organize

24:58

those experiences. You finally

25:00

have a chance to make sense of them because they're not

25:02

bottled up anymore. And once you

25:04

make sense of upsetting experiences,

25:06

you finally get enough perspective to

25:09

from them. And this is something that I find interesting

25:11

about adversity that very often adversity

25:15

having the thing that negative

25:18

certainly sucks, but

25:21

by the same token, it has the

25:23

potential to be healing and to

25:25

make us rethink ourselves and rethink our

25:27

lives. Having

25:30

watched that film of Rosalie Shift breaking

25:32

her decades long silence about the Holocaust,

25:35

I found it hard to put her out of my mind. I

25:37

decided to track her down. It turns

25:39

out she passed away just a couple of years

25:41

ago at age ninety one. But

25:44

as I read her many obituaries, I

25:46

was struck by something. Rosalie

25:49

devoted her final years to telling

25:51

and retelling her terrible story.

25:54

She even helped to write a book about her experiences.

25:57

She and her husband told reporters, quote,

25:59

we have to talk about it.

26:02

Rosalie had tapped into an important psychological

26:05

truth. Putting painful memories

26:07

into words can give us the perspect

26:09

if we need to grow from those events,

26:11

whether those events happened yesterday or

26:14

even fifty years ago. But

26:16

what if there was a way to process those painful

26:18

events while they were actually happening.

26:21

What if we didn't have to shove the tough stuff into

26:23

some mental memory bank and marshal

26:25

the courage to deal with it all later. What

26:27

if we could just work through the pain immediately,

26:31

Just feel all those bad emotions

26:33

in the moment and accept them.

26:36

This might sound like some Zen Jedi master

26:38

stuff, but research shows this

26:40

radical approach to negative emotions is

26:43

possible for every one of us.

26:45

The Dalai Lama simply said to us, if

26:47

we can all sustain a calm mind, any

26:50

emotion can arise and fall

26:53

and not be destructive or hurtful,

26:56

the happiness lab will be right back. I'm

27:09

never going to get rid of emotions, but I think I've gotten

27:11

better at my recovery. Can I return

27:14

back to a calm mind a little

27:16

quicker? I would say yes. Eve

27:18

Ekman is the director of Training at the

27:21

Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley.

27:24

She's an expert on how people feel their

27:26

emotions in the moment and can tackle them

27:28

head on. I remember very well a

27:30

friend and colleague of mine in the UK, and

27:33

her mother said to me, it sounds

27:35

quite interesting what you do, but why aren't

27:37

emotions just better if we don't talk

27:39

about them. I think most people

27:41

believe that, but would never say it

27:44

to me, and with that stiff

27:46

upper lip that we associate with people

27:48

in the UK, I think there is an assumption

27:51

that the more we meddle into our emotions,

27:53

the more trouble we're making. So can't we just

27:55

leave them as they are and hopefully they'll just

27:57

go away on their own. Many people

28:00

would rather just shut their negative emotions off

28:02

before they happen, but science suggests

28:05

that might not be possible. I think the million

28:07

dollar question that everybody want the answer

28:09

to is how do I stop right in the middle

28:11

of my emotion? And to date

28:14

I have not found anyone who's able to

28:16

do that, and has even

28:18

studied the best emotional regulators

28:20

around. Even in my work with His

28:23

Holiness the Dalai Lama, he describes

28:26

the difficulty of feeling angry and responding

28:29

to anger, and he is

28:31

able to have anger come and go, but

28:35

not to stop it right in the middle. None

28:37

of us can shut off what we're feeling midstream,

28:40

not even the Dalai Lama. The

28:42

problem is most of us don't get

28:44

that. We don't realize it's impossible,

28:47

and so we try really hard to shut off

28:49

any bad feelings we're having in the moment.

28:52

And what does all that suppression do? You

28:54

guessed it? Ironic processes

28:56

kick in and make all those unpleasant

28:59

feelings even worse. I think

29:01

what we know from researches, when

29:03

we are suppressing our emotions or trying

29:05

to clamp down on them, they actually

29:07

have a rebound that's even stronger at

29:09

a physiological level, meaning it

29:12

feels more intensely in our body

29:14

when we're trying to not show what we're

29:16

experiencing and trying to

29:18

not feel what we're experiencing. Let's

29:21

take a closer look at the science of this rebound

29:23

effect, an effect that researchers have

29:25

found clever, though sometimes disturbing

29:27

ways to induce in laboratory settings.

29:30

The Stanford neuroscientist James Gross showed

29:33

his poor test subjects graphic medical footage

29:35

of a patient's arm being amputated. Some

29:38

viewers were told to suppress what they were feeling

29:40

and not show any outward sides of emotion is

29:42

the horrific film played. What

29:45

did Gross find? The individuals

29:47

that tried to follow this command were less

29:49

likely to scrunch up their faces in disgust

29:51

when watching the videos, But Gross

29:54

also found that they showed much larger

29:56

internal emotional responses than

29:58

the ones who just watched the video normally. Their

30:01

heart rates spiked, they sweated more,

30:03

and they even showed signs of their blood vessels

30:05

constricting. The act of

30:08

trying to shut off our on the outside

30:10

makes our internal arousal levels shoot

30:12

through the roof. Researchers

30:15

see similar rebound effects when people

30:17

try to suppress physically painful experiences.

30:20

In one study, subjects were asked to

30:22

stick their arms in very, very cold water

30:24

for as long as they could take, and then

30:27

rate the experience on a scale from

30:29

zero no pain at all to ten

30:31

maximum agony. One

30:33

group of subjects was told to ignore their

30:36

pain. What happened. They

30:38

pulled their hands out of the freezing water almost

30:40

a minute before subjects who were just experiencing

30:43

the pain normally. It'd be one thing

30:45

if these rebound effects happen only in

30:47

weird psych studies that involve creepy

30:49

videos and painful tasks. But

30:52

researchers have also shown the power of these

30:54

emotional rebounds in everyday

30:56

situations like in our family

30:58

life. Say you have a stressful day

31:00

at work and you come home to your family still

31:03

feeling a little worked up. Our

31:05

minds often tell us it'd be good to shut those

31:07

feelings down to make sure you're spouse

31:09

and your kids don't know what you're feeling.

31:11

But as researcher Wendy Berry Mendes and her

31:14

colleagues have found out, that's pretty much

31:16

the worst thing we can do. Mendes

31:18

brought moms, dads, and their kids into the

31:21

lab and had parents simulate a

31:23

typical stressful work event. They

31:25

had to pitch an idea to their boss, who

31:27

immediately crushes them with some withering

31:29

criticism. The bruised parents

31:31

were then asked to play legos with their kids.

31:34

Half of the parents were told, try to behave

31:37

in such a way that your child doesn't know that

31:39

you're feeling stressed. What happened

31:41

those parents inadvertently took it out

31:43

on their kids. They were angrier and more

31:46

upset. They were less responsive

31:48

to their kids, gave them less guidance,

31:50

and behaved less warmly. Overall,

31:53

their bad mood deteriorated

31:55

even further when they played with their kids.

31:58

But what's worse, perhaps not surprisingly,

32:01

if that Mendes found the parents rebound effect

32:03

also took a toll on their kids. These

32:06

kids had less fun and did worse on

32:08

the task just because their parents

32:10

were trying to hide what they were feeling. So,

32:13

at the end of a day in which we've been suppressing

32:15

the entire day, we feel emotionally

32:18

exhausted, drained, and depleted.

32:20

We've been efforting our way away

32:23

from these emotions. Eve

32:25

thinks that if we just felt the emotions

32:27

rather than trying to suppress them, we

32:30

might not be as burnt out. After

32:32

all, emotional responses aren't

32:34

in themselves bad from the psychological

32:37

point of view. We would not want to get rid of emotions.

32:39

That would be a very unsafe world for us

32:41

to live in. We wouldn't have the signal of

32:44

fear or feel the motivation of

32:46

frustration to change things. Some of

32:48

our more difficult emotions we'd rather avoid

32:50

can sometimes, be, of course, our greatest

32:52

teachers, if we're willing to look at

32:54

them, and if we have the tools to manage

32:56

them, and a first step to managing them

32:59

seems to be to deal with negative emotions as

33:01

they arise. So let's say, for

33:03

example, yesterday I go

33:06

into the office and I find

33:08

that my is actually

33:10

occupied with a meeting, and

33:13

my first experience is a little

33:15

bit of frustration, but

33:17

I try to avoid that feeling, and I

33:19

instead I'm looking for other places

33:21

to sit and do my work, but I'm

33:23

doing so in this kind of pinched,

33:25

aggravated tight way. And so

33:28

later on that day when I

33:30

find that maybe the public transportation

33:32

on my way home is late, and

33:34

I become very upset. I can't believe

33:36

that this train is late, and what's wrong

33:38

with the city. And then I question to

33:40

myself, why am I so upset about this? And

33:43

maybe I can trace back to not

33:45

having really been with a low level of frustration

33:48

that happened earlier in the day. If I

33:50

could just accept the fact that it

33:53

wasn't the way I wanted it, the rest of

33:55

my day would have felt better, and I could have done

33:57

the exact same thing, which has find somewhere else

33:59

to work, but without this kind of heaviness

34:02

or this out this kind of ongoing

34:04

residue. The process he's

34:06

describing here the act of response,

34:09

rather than reacting to our emotions. It's

34:11

one that scholars have been preaching for thousands

34:14

of years, way before modern

34:16

neuroscience was around. Take

34:18

Buddhism, for example, Buddhist

34:20

teachers have long argued that we're not going to

34:22

be able to get rid of all the bad stuff in life,

34:24

the stress, the pain, the occasional negative

34:27

event. The Buddha himself realized

34:29

that these are not going away. In

34:32

fact, the continued existence of pain,

34:34

or what the Buddhists called duca, is

34:36

so important that it's considered the first

34:39

of the four Noble truths. But

34:41

Buddhists also realized that our reaction

34:43

to the pain is something that can go away,

34:46

that's something we can control. To

34:48

illustrate this concept, the Buddha told

34:51

his famous parable of the second arrow.

34:54

In the story, Buddha explains that when

34:56

something bad happens in life, say

34:58

we get stuck in traffic or get yelled at at

35:00

work, it's like getting hit with an arrow.

35:03

It sucks. But when we respond

35:05

to negative events, we also get

35:07

hit with what he called a second arrow

35:09

our reactions. We automatically

35:12

get really upset, and then we hate

35:14

what we're feeling, so we try to suppress it,

35:17

which makes things even worse in

35:19

life. We can't always control that first arrow,

35:21

but the pain from the second arrow is totally

35:24

under our control. Whether we freak

35:26

out or try to suppress what we're feeling, that

35:28

second arrow is optional. It's

35:31

on us. Eve's gotten

35:33

really good at avoiding second arrows.

35:36

She even had in one off before we started

35:38

our interview. So, actually before this

35:40

call, I received a pretty confronting

35:43

email this morning, one that made me feel

35:45

kind of frustrated and annoyed. And

35:47

I knew we were going to talk, and

35:49

I wanted to feel more clear and

35:52

less kind of triggered emotionally. So

35:54

I did a short meditation for myself,

35:56

and in this meditation, I focused on not

35:59

the story of why I'm right and clearly

36:01

this person is wrong, but I

36:03

focused on just the felt sensation of

36:05

what it was like to be triggered into

36:07

feeling frustration and anger. So I think

36:09

if we can start managing and working with our emotions,

36:12

the opportunities are boundless. Our

36:15

mind thinks that the right way to deal with all

36:17

the unwanted stuff is just to push

36:20

it out. Just don't do it, don't

36:22

think it, don't feel it. But

36:25

science shows us that's just not

36:27

how minds work. Avoiding our

36:29

thoughts and emotions causes them to come

36:31

back with an ironic vengeance. The

36:34

most effective way to deal with the pain of life,

36:36

all those first arrows, is just

36:38

to let them sting. I

36:41

decided to meet again with Colin Shean, my

36:44

friend, the golf coach who confessed earlier

36:46

that his golf game had gone to pieces. The

36:49

science says his frank admission about the yips

36:51

could only have been beneficial. But

36:54

did Colin's golfing form improve? I

36:57

wouldn't go so far as to say smashing, but

37:00

definitely I've

37:02

improved. I can pretend

37:05

to look like a two or three handicap

37:07

now. By confessing he had yips,

37:09

by putting it into words and getting it out

37:12

of his head, Colin was able to

37:14

golf better than he had in years. Maybe

37:16

I should get a bumper sticker I had the yipps.

37:19

Put it catch on. It would help people's game. I

37:22

think you could have a nice cottage industry of having

37:25

golfers with the yips come and pay

37:27

you five hundred dollars to sit down for half an hour. And

37:30

my little Spiller Guts podcast

37:32

recording kouth Golf Confessional. Well,

37:36

if the podcast doesn't go anywhere, I know have

37:38

another career. Nice. I'm

37:41

kind of hoping that I don't have to make a living

37:43

counseling golfers. But if

37:45

you've enjoyed the show and found it useful,

37:48

I'd appreciate you spreading the word. Tell

37:51

your family and friends and even total

37:53

strangers. And if you're not

37:55

keen to share, well, maybe

37:57

this is one time we're suppressing. Your thoughts might

37:59

be okay. So whatever

38:02

you do, don't think about listening

38:04

to the next episode of Happiness

38:06

Lab with me Doctor Laurie santa

38:19

The Happiness Lab is co written and produced

38:21

by Ryan Dilley. The show is mixed and

38:23

mastered by Evan Viola and edited by

38:26

Julia Barton, fact checking by Joseph

38:28

Fridman, and our original music

38:30

was composed by Zachary Silver. Special

38:34

thanks to Miola Belle, Carly mcgliori,

38:37

Heather Faine, Maggie Taylor, Maya

38:39

Kanig, and Jacob Weisberg. The

38:42

Happiness Lab is brought to you by Pushkin Industries

38:45

and Me Doctor Laurie Santos.