0:15

Pushkin. Every

0:23

weekday, at six thirty am, my alarm

0:25

goes off. My first morning moments

0:28

aren't filled with joy at waking up for

0:30

an exciting new day. Quite the

0:32

opposite. I'm feeling irritated.

0:34

I don't want to get up and work out like I planed

0:37

to like the day before. And that's

0:39

one of my brain, despite its utter grogginess,

0:41

transforms into the slickst negotiator.

0:43

Ever, my mind comes up with

0:45

reason after reason that I should really just

0:47

stay in bed. I got to bed pretty

0:50

late last night. I need my sleep. I

0:52

can exercise in the afternoon or tomorrow,

0:55

or just skip it all together. It's

0:57

only one workout. What's that in the

0:59

scheme of things. Plus, I don't

1:01

need this kind of pressure in my life. I'm busy.

1:03

I don't really have forty five minutes to waste on a

1:05

workout. Best to sleep it.

1:08

Just this once, on

1:13

the good days, I managed to shut up all the mental

1:15

back and forth and drag myself out of bed.

1:18

I try to make my morning work out both fun

1:20

and frictionless by using all the scientific

1:22

tips I've told you about in past episodes, like

1:25

having exercise equipment in my house and

1:27

laying out Jim closed the night before, and

1:30

I follow my copy Katie Milkman's advice

1:32

about bundling my morning exercise with

1:34

a second, fun and somewhat tempting experience.

1:37

I watch my favorite nineties TV show, Buffy

1:39

the Vampire Slayer and why are

1:41

you talking to me? And

1:45

on those mornings when I do manage to get myself

1:47

up to exercise, the same thing happens.

1:50

Long before my Buffy episode ends. I realized

1:53

that all my brain's earlier predictions were

1:55

wrong. I love working out. I

1:57

step off the elliptical feeling great. My

2:00

body is awake and lighter, I'm thinking

2:02

more clearly, and I'm in a better mood. Exercising

2:05

in the morning was a fantastic idea

2:08

one that has had a clear and measurably positive

2:10

impact on my happiness. But exactly

2:13

twenty three hours later, get

2:16

up? Are you kidding? Workout suck better

2:19

to sleep in? Just this

2:21

wants. Why

2:26

can't my inbed brain remember all

2:28

the positive rewards that my exercising

2:30

brain has directly experienced. Why

2:33

can't my mind get motivated to hit the elliptical

2:35

when it's totally clear that a morning workout

2:38

makes me happier The

2:40

answer, as we'll see in this episode, involves

2:43

a bug in the design of our reward circuitry,

2:46

one that leads to some of our biggest happiness

2:48

mistakes. We'll see that with

2:50

all due respect to the Rolling Stones, the problem

2:53

isn't that you can't always get what you want, is

2:55

that you can't always want what you like.

2:59

Our minds are constantly telling us what to do to

3:01

be happy. But what if our minds are wrong?

3:03

What if our minds are lying to us, leading

3:05

us away from what we'll really make us happy. The

3:08

good news is that understanding the science of the mind

3:10

can join us all back in the right direction. You're

3:13

listening to the Happiness Lab with doctor Laurie

3:15

Santos. I

3:23

run sometimes. I'm trying to get back into

3:25

running, and I don't enjoy it while i'm doing it,

3:27

but I enjoy the fact that I am doing and

3:29

that's type too fun. This

3:31

is my friend and former colleague, Paul Bloom, who

3:34

recently became a professor at the University

3:36

of Toronto. Paul and I are chatting

3:38

about a concept that's become a common topic

3:40

of conversation with my college students, the

3:42

so called fun scale. The

3:45

fun scale attempts to differentiate between

3:47

different types of fun. Type

3:49

one fun is fun, which

3:51

is simply fun. Type one fun

3:53

involves basically no effort or pain whatsoever.

3:56

It's fun that just feels nice. Think

3:58

hah fudge Sundays, drinking Margarita's,

4:01

jumping into a pool on a warm day, a

4:04

low effort stroll in the sun, gossiping

4:06

with your close friends, a nice orgasm.

4:09

These things are sort of Darwinian no brainers.

4:11

Animals that have these desires reproduce

4:14

more than those that don't. But Dinner's

4:16

type too fun. Type too fun

4:19

is a form of fun that doesn't immediately

4:21

feel fun when we first start the activity.

4:24

Pursuits like my morning elliptical workout,

4:26

a really frustrating puzzle, a super

4:28

super hot bath that's almost painful to

4:30

step into, a terrifying

4:32

horror movie, pushing through a

4:35

really hard writing project. Activities

4:38

like these don't actually feel good when

4:40

we first get started, but we

4:42

often really like them anyway. I

4:44

want to be clear here, this distinction between

4:46

type one and type two fun isn't a scientific

4:49

one as far as I can tell. The concept

4:51

started as an Internet meme that circulated

4:54

an outdoor adventure and athletic blogs. But

4:56

it's catchy for psychologists like Paul and me because

4:59

it highlights an aspect of human nature that's

5:01

a bit of a paradox. Why is

5:03

it that some of the best things in life just

5:05

don't feel good when you start doing them. Paul

5:08

has long been fast, sated and sort of puzzled

5:10

by these kinds of type two rewards, as

5:12

he explains in detail in his new book The Sweet

5:15

Spot, The pleasures of suffering in the search for

5:17

meaning. Pleasures that hurt and feel

5:19

sucky don't make sense from the view that

5:21

many scholars have about human nature that

5:23

we're built to seek out pleasure and avoid

5:25

pain. And it's not entirely wrong.

5:28

Anybody who said that we don't like pleasures is just

5:30

crazy. But it's incomplete. It's

5:32

incomplete because we often pursue

5:35

all sorts of difficult and

5:37

painful activities. I want

5:39

to have a good time, but I also want to do

5:41

good in the world. I want to make the world a better place,

5:43

and that often involves suffering and difficulty.

5:46

I want to have a good time, but I also want

5:48

to engage in meaningful and purposeful activities.

5:51

I want to be able to you know, I want to run a marathon.

5:53

I want to raise my children, I want to write

5:55

a book. None of those are fun in the

5:57

simple sense. It's not you know, orgasms

5:59

and hot food Sundays, but it offers sort of

6:01

a deeper satisfaction. Paul's

6:04

book argues that what we like is

6:06

complicated. Take hard work for

6:08

example. You know, for the

6:10

most part, humans and other animals avoid effort.

6:13

If I have to walk to the refrigerat, I'll walk straight to

6:15

refrigerate. I won't walk around at twenty times.

6:17

Effort is difficult, It takes up calories,

6:20

takes of energy, takes up time. But

6:22

the parananox is sometimes we seek

6:24

it out. That said, Paul

6:26

is quick to point out that adversity and discomfort

6:29

only feel pleasurable when we willingly

6:31

decide to engage in them, something Paul

6:33

refers to as chosen suffering. It's

6:36

critical that you choose to do it. These

6:39

things in the absence of choice are

6:41

just terrible. They're tortured or misery,

6:43

and there's nothing good to be said about them. So that degree

6:45

of choice of control is critical. But

6:47

what's weird about humans is that we

6:50

often do choose to engage in time consuming

6:52

effortful and even painful activities.

6:55

Paul's book describes lots of surprising

6:57

cases of seemingly objectively

7:00

terrible activities that many people

7:02

really enjoy doing. One of his favorite

7:04

extreme examples comes from a famous

7:06

paper by the economist George Lowenstein about

7:09

the challenges of mountaineering. From

7:11

the standpoint of type one front

7:13

of pleasure, it's terrible.

7:15

People describe constant physical

7:17

pain. These are high altitude clients

7:19

of headache throughout. Sometimes you're stuck

7:22

in a tent per day, going mad with boredom.

7:24

There's real terror because often

7:26

people are killed or maimed in these

7:29

things. And so Loenstein says, why

7:31

in the world do people do this?

7:34

Lowenstein came up with a few answers, ones

7:37

that help to explain not just truly dire

7:39

activities like mountaineering, but also

7:41

the less extreme, more routine cases of type

7:43

two rewards that many of us seek out

7:45

all the time. His first answer

7:48

is that we sometimes choose suffering filled activities

7:50

because they help to bolster our identity. I'm

7:53

doing that to tell the world and

7:56

maybe to tell myself, look how

7:58

tough I am. Look at my skills, look at my

8:00

endurance. But a second, and maybe

8:02

even more important reason that we enjoy a good

8:04

heart pursuit is because it gives us

8:06

a sense of meaning. It is a purpose of

8:09

inactivity that involves tremendous difficulty,

8:12

and so it gives you a great satisfaction.

8:14

But this raises an even bigger question, why

8:17

does effort in suffering wind up feeling good?

8:20

Paul argues that hard work and pain feel

8:22

good because they take up a lot of mental

8:24

bandwidth. I think dogs and monkeys

8:26

and cats. Maybe I just go for the pleasure. People

8:29

are complicated, and one thing is we have the

8:31

burden of our consciousness. We're

8:33

conscious of our bodies, we're conscious of our

8:36

histories, of our futures. We worry a

8:38

lot and it weighs on us and it's nice

8:40

to be relieved from it. And

8:42

this is one function of pain and

8:45

painful experience intense exercises

8:48

is that it pulls us out of ourselves.

8:51

This psychological state where we get so

8:53

involved in an activity that nothing else seems

8:55

to matter is what famed positive psychologist

8:58

Me high Cheek set me High called flow.

9:01

You know you're in flow if hours go by

9:03

and you don't even need this time's gone by, You forget

9:05

to eat, you forget to do things, and I wish I

9:07

was in that state more often. She set

9:10

me High first discovered flow in an experiment

9:12

with teenagers. He gave his subjects

9:14

peepers which went off at different times of the day,

9:16

and subjects had to report what they were doing and

9:19

how they felt. Much of the time, the teens

9:21

reported feeling bored are unhappy, but

9:23

there were a few moments of the day when they felt a

9:25

lot happier. Not when they were watching

9:27

TV or eating something delicious, but

9:30

when they were going for harder type two rewards,

9:33

especially ones that required a combination

9:35

of skill and effort. Chik

9:37

scept me high. I also found that there's a sweet

9:39

spot the skill and effort needed for flow

9:41

inducing activities. They aren't

9:43

so easy that they're boring. They're

9:45

not so incredibly difficult that you're freaking out your

9:47

stress. We just find yourself in the middle, and if you

9:49

do it right, time just flies by.

9:52

Paul's work on the pleasures of suffering has

9:55

convinced him that we'd all be a lot happier

9:57

if we skipped a lot of the easy type one rewards

10:00

and tried to get a bit more flow. In our lives.

10:03

You read cheeks em me high subscription

10:05

at people's lives are full of flow and listaf

10:07

you're me feel envy. Find it tough.

10:10

I try every morning to engage

10:12

in flow activities where you really fully

10:15

engage, but the world makes it tough.

10:17

As I do this, I have my Twitter in the

10:19

background, I have my email beinging,

10:22

and I have texts, and if

10:24

I'm a good person, I shut that all down. If I'm

10:26

away. Normally, I'm like this morning, and

10:29

the distractions are just too much fun. Like

10:31

Paul, I've seen firsthand that flow inducing

10:34

type two rewards have a real startup

10:36

cost. That's the reason I struggle

10:38

so much to hit the elliptical in the morning. It's

10:40

often too hard to forego the easy type

10:43

one reward of staying in bed in

10:45

order to reap the type two reward that my hard

10:47

workout eventually provides. But

10:49

the problem isn't just with my morning exercise

10:51

routeam I'm lucky enough to have a profession

10:54

that requires doing lots of effortful, flow

10:56

inducing stuff, but I also spend

10:58

a lot of my day doing easy things, stuff

11:01

that doesn't require any effort. Checking

11:03

my email, scrolling to the next screen on

11:06

Reddit, watching some mind numbing

11:08

reality TV show and spending

11:10

my time doing all this easy stuff as

11:12

an enormous opportunity cost. There

11:14

are so many hard but rewarding projects

11:17

I want to engage with. I want to write

11:19

a book. I want to learn Italian. I want

11:21

to watch that important but kind of intense movie

11:23

that's been stuck in my Netflix cue for months.

11:26

I want to build up to do a cropose in my yoga

11:28

practice. All of these activities

11:30

would give me a real sense of satisfaction and

11:32

a lot of joy. But achieving those things

11:35

are hard and so a lot of time

11:37

I just end up not doing them, and

11:40

research has found I'm not alone.

11:43

They do these surveys where you ask

11:45

people about flow experiences in your life. A

11:47

lot of people never experience it. A lot of

11:49

people just do easy things, and

11:53

I think that's the bad way to live a life. But I understand

11:55

it because getting from no effort

11:57

effort is tough. So

12:00

what is keeping us on the sofa?

12:02

It all comes down to an incredibly dumb design

12:04

feature of our brains, a surprising

12:07

gap between wanting and liking. We'll

12:10

explore this strange glitch in our neural design.

12:13

When the Happiness Lab returns in a moment.

12:24

I I'm Kent Burriaged. I'm at the University

12:26

of Michigan, and I study how the brain

12:28

likes and wants things. I

12:30

decided to tag in an expert to figure out

12:32

why I can't choose harder type two rewards,

12:35

and I was so thrilled when Kent agreed to chat with

12:37

me about my dilemma. Kent is

12:39

one of my scientific heroes. I've

12:41

been reading his papers since I was a sophomore in

12:43

college. He's a world expert on

12:45

the neuroscience of reward and has done

12:47

some of the best empirical work to date on

12:49

the odd ways our brains are hooked up when it

12:51

comes to making decisions that give us pleasure.

12:54

One of my favorite of his many famous neuroscientific

12:57

discoveries is about how we

12:59

experience type one rewards, specifically

13:02

the really straightforward sensory pleasures,

13:05

things like eating a hot fudge Sunday or having

13:07

an orgasm. Research

13:09

goal was to find the brains hedonic hotspots,

13:12

the neural regions that cause us to experience

13:15

a sense of liking. Ken's

13:17

goal was to figure out where these hedonic hot

13:19

spots were He planned to stimulate a

13:21

part of the brain known as the mesolymbic reward

13:23

circuit to see which parts of that

13:25

circuit actually produced the experience of

13:27

sensory pleasure. But there was a bit

13:29

of a problem. Ken was studying

13:31

liking not in humans, but in the usual

13:34

neuroscience subjects rats, and

13:36

you can't just ask a rodent, hey, on a

13:38

scale of one to ten, how much did your liking

13:40

increase after that injection. There

13:43

were lots of existing methods that scientists

13:45

could use to ask a rat what it wanted. How

13:48

much would you work for this reward, how eagerly

13:50

would you approach it, how much would you consume?

13:52

But at least for this study, Ken wasn't interested

13:54

in what the rats wanted. His goal was

13:57

to find the areas that registered what rats

13:59

liked, the brain regions that

14:01

actually experienced pleasure. So

14:03

Ken capitalized on a technique that

14:05

human parents have used to test their babies

14:08

experience of liking for centuries. He

14:10

put a small amount of sweet food on a rat's

14:12

tongue and measured how it reacted. When

14:15

infants get something that they like, They kind

14:17

of show it was sort of relaxed mouth movements

14:20

and sometimes the licking of the lips. If they

14:22

get something they don't like, like bitterness,

14:24

they shake their heads, they move from side

14:26

to side. It's very clear what

14:28

they like and what they don't like. Rats, it turns

14:30

out, do the same thing. Can't

14:33

play sweet food in his rats mouths and measured

14:35

their reactions. He then repeated

14:37

that same measurement while microinjecting

14:40

stimulating drugs into different parts of the

14:42

rats brains. If rats like

14:44

the exact same food more vigorously after

14:46

the injections, that they must have

14:48

derived even more pleasure from it. And

14:51

if that was the case, then it probably

14:53

also meant that the brain region Kent had stimulated

14:55

was probably a hedonic hot spot. Ken's

14:59

experiment was a huge success. In

15:01

some cases, he was able to triple the rat's

15:03

liking responses. But Kent was

15:05

also in for a bit of a surprise. He

15:08

was expecting to find hotspots all over

15:10

the reward areas of the brain, and

15:12

that's not quite what happened. We sort

15:14

of plotted them on the brain, you know, where were the pleasure

15:16

wants and they were all clustered

15:18

together. Natural selection, it

15:21

seems, did not build in a lot of neural

15:23

real estate for experiencing type one sensory

15:25

pleasure, just a few surprisingly

15:28

small clusters. If anybody had

15:30

asked us how we'd like our brains

15:32

to be designed, we'd ask for maybe lots

15:34

of pleasure mechanisms. We'd live a life

15:36

of hedonic contentment. Evolution

15:39

had other purposes

15:41

in a sense, I mean, it was aiming for survival, and

15:43

it doesn't perhaps care quite so much about

15:45

the quality of life during the survival, and the propagation

15:48

of genes in

15:50

a sense, is a luxury. But

15:52

even though liking might be an evolutionary luxury,

15:55

there was a second function that natural selection

15:57

decided was definitely non negotiable,

16:00

wanting. While the liking parts

16:02

of our brain cause an experience of pleasure, wanting

16:05

regions cause an experience of craving.

16:09

Wanting regions compel us to take action

16:11

and to go after stuff that feels good, And

16:13

despite being relatively stingy with liking

16:16

regions, natural selection seems

16:18

to have really invested in wanting. Wanting

16:21

regions are much bigger than liking regions,

16:23

and they have connections that project all over

16:25

the brain. The brain even has an

16:27

entire neurotransmitter called dopamine that's

16:30

largely devoted to motivating us

16:32

to go after stuff. Now, you may

16:34

have heard of dopamine before, often

16:36

because it's thought to be associated with a feeling

16:38

of reward or pleasure. The notion that

16:40

dopamine is a pleasure mechanism, this is

16:43

a neuroscience mean that is tremendously

16:45

potent and at once seemed tremendously

16:47

true. I believed that absolutely when

16:49

I started out in the field. But over

16:51

time Ken's work started to chip away at the

16:54

idea that dopamine equals pleasure. Study

16:56

after study began to show that dopamine isn't

16:59

about liking rewards, it's

17:01

about wanting them. Can't

17:04

forgive this out. Initially, in a set of clever studies,

17:07

he found a special neurotoxin collectively

17:09

killed off dopamine neurons while leaving

17:11

the rest of the brain intact. He then

17:13

injected this toxin into rats reward circuits

17:16

and tested wha they're doing so affected the rats

17:18

liking as measured by their looking behaviors.

17:22

To his surprise, the toxin didn't

17:24

seem to do anything in

17:27

terms of the levels of pleasure they experienced from sweet

17:29

food. The rats without any dopamine

17:31

were totally normal. So they had

17:33

normal likes, and they had normal

17:36

learning of new likes and dislikes,

17:39

but they didn't seem to want any

17:41

of these things that they liked in life. They

17:43

don't eat at all voluntarily. They

17:45

don't drink at all voluntarily. We

17:47

have to nurse them the way you and I would be nursed

17:49

in intensive care in a hospital, artificially

17:52

fed three times a day. They would voluntarily

17:55

sit there and starve to death unless they were nursed.

17:57

Ken's dopamine lesion rats liked sweet

17:59

food, but they had no motivation to

18:02

seek these foods out. They had no

18:04

sense of wanting. This study

18:06

and others helped can't discover that dopamine

18:08

was the key to wanting, not liking. Dopamine

18:11

is a mechanism by which we get motivated to

18:14

go after the good sensory rewards of life.

18:18

But as Ken doug more into the way this doke means

18:20

system worked, you realize that our experience

18:22

of wanting might not be as uniform

18:24

as most theories of human nature predict.

18:27

I think you're sort of multiple kinds of wanting.

18:29

You know that we may not distinguish really clearly

18:31

un consciousness. We're in human language, but psychologically

18:34

and from the brain's point of view, there's a difference. When

18:36

people ask us what we want in our everyday life,

18:39

like where we want to go for dinner, or

18:41

which podcast we want to listen to, or what

18:43

we want to be when we grow up, we're

18:45

usually thinking of a conscious desire for a

18:48

particular outcome, our goal. This

18:50

everyday experience of wanting what can

18:52

cause cognitive wanting is the

18:54

one we tend to notice, mostly

18:56

because it's a conscious, accessible feeling.

18:59

But this wasn't the form of wanting that Kent

19:01

observed in his reward regions. Ken's

19:04

dopamine work had tapped into a completely

19:06

different kind of wanting altogether, one

19:09

that he and others refer to as incentive

19:11

salience. You know, if you're hungry

19:14

and use smell food, that's that kind

19:16

of want. They're walking down the street and you

19:18

see in the window shop windows something that really

19:20

gets your attention to you'd really love to have. It's

19:23

that kind of want. Incentive

19:26

salience doesn't feel like the normal sort of

19:28

cognitive wanting because it happens too

19:30

automatically. It's like, all of a sudden,

19:32

we're compelled to go after some goal we weren't

19:34

even thinking about a moment before. And

19:37

unlike cognitive wanting, which sometimes

19:39

requires some planning and work to act on,

19:42

incentive salience is often directly linked

19:44

to the action we need to perform to get the reward

19:46

we want, which is why incentive

19:49

salience can exert such a powerful effect

19:51

on our behavior. We end up

19:53

moving toward a thing before we've even had a chance

19:55

to ask whether it's something we should have cognitively

19:58

wanted in the first place. That's

20:00

why I can find myself five cookies into

20:02

the very box of Girl Scout cookies that

20:04

my cognitive system had sworn off

20:06

that very morning. I think

20:09

narrowly. In humans, this incentive

20:11

salience wanting in quotation

20:13

mark. It usually comes on together with

20:15

a cognitive desire or cognitive

20:17

want. They go hand in hand. But

20:20

sometimes these kinds of wanting

20:22

can come apart. Incentive salience

20:24

want in quotation mark can go in a different direction

20:27

than your cognitive desire. And

20:30

this is what's so problematic about being a creature

20:32

that has two different systems for wanting stuff.

20:35

We sometimes experience an automatic

20:37

and incredibly strong incentive salients

20:40

want for stuff that we don't cognitively

20:42

want at all. It's a disconnect

20:44

that's obvious for anyone who's known people who

20:46

are suffering from drug addiction and who

20:49

at least cognitively really really want

20:51

to quit. They would rather not take the

20:53

drugs ever again. But if they encounter these drug

20:55

cues, especially in drug related contexts,

20:58

and especially in moments of stress, you

21:00

get a massive sensitius dopament

21:03

reaction that could give this intense urge

21:06

the successive urge of wanting to

21:08

take the drug again. The disconnect

21:10

between cognitive wanting and incentive salience

21:12

is particularly problematic in people with substance

21:15

addictions, but it's an issue for the rest

21:17

of us too. All those mornings

21:19

I cognitively wanted to get up and work out, but

21:22

my urge to stay in bed was too strong. All

21:24

those Girl Scout cookies I intended to leave in the

21:26

box, but a anyway, All

21:28

those times I swore I'd work on this podcast

21:31

but ended up scrolling through Twitter for hours.

21:34

There are so so many type one fun

21:36

activities that I regularly intend

21:38

not to give into, ones that I have really

21:40

good reasons for avoiding, but I end

21:43

up doing them anyway. That is

21:45

incentive salience at its worst. It

21:48

doesn't have reasons this kind of

21:50

wanting. It has mechanisms. So

21:54

that's the first big problem with the way our brain's process

21:56

rewards. There's a disconnect between the

21:58

liking brain parts and the wanting brain parts,

22:01

which can sometimes cause a powerful and even

22:03

unconscious urge to go after type one rewards

22:06

that we don't even cognitively want, and

22:08

that means we get caught up in easy pleasures

22:10

more often than we might intend to. But

22:13

so far we've only been talking about sensory

22:15

rewards like sweet foods. What

22:17

about more complicated pleasures. If

22:19

you would ask me twenty years ago, I would have said, well,

22:21

sensory rewards, yes, but you know, human

22:24

cognitive pleasures or cultural

22:26

artistic music pleasures, human social

22:28

pleasures. No, No at all. Recent

22:31

work, though, has shown that the mesolimbic hedonic

22:33

hotspots can't studied in rats also

22:35

light up when people experience more abstract rewards

22:38

like beautiful music in art, So the hotspots

22:40

aren't just for evolved pleasures like food and

22:42

sex. The same hot spots we see

22:44

for food and rodents also seemed to

22:46

respond to more complex pleasures and humans.

22:49

I would never have expected that twenty

22:51

years ago. But what about

22:53

the more effortful type two rewards that

22:55

I want more of in life? Finishing a hard

22:57

puzzle, writing my happiness book, getting to

23:00

the top of a mountain, my morning post elliptical

23:02

glow. Well, you know, it would be marvelous to

23:04

have a human fMRI study of

23:06

this post exercise satisfaction.

23:09

I would love to know. Is it the same head on a cotspots

23:11

that are coming on for that? The honest

23:14

answer is that neuroscientists haven't looked for type

23:16

two liking in the Mesolympic reward system

23:18

all that much yet, And the reason

23:20

is pretty obvious when you think about it. Type

23:22

one pleasures are easy to study experimentally.

23:26

You can feed a rat something sweet or have a

23:28

human listen to music in an MRI scanner,

23:30

but it's hard to brain scan amountain climber that's

23:32

just descended to the top of a peak, or

23:35

to stick a brain electrode in an academic that's

23:37

just finished writing a challenging grant. So

23:39

that means we don't yet fully know whether the same

23:41

Mesolympic reward regions that can't studies

23:44

code for type two pleasures. But

23:47

there is one thing that is empirically obvious

23:49

about type two liking. Remember

23:51

that super powerful incentive salience

23:53

wanting that goes with type one pleasures, the

23:56

pool we get so automatically for the simple

23:58

rewards in life, it doesn't

24:01

seem to be there for type two pleasures. Although

24:04

we often have a cognitive wanting for effort

24:06

pool rewards like my post workout glow, we

24:09

rarely get an incentive salience craving along

24:11

with it. Sometimes I've been asked

24:14

by people who study exercising kinesiology

24:16

departments, such why can we create incentive

24:19

salience want to exercise? That would be

24:21

supers and you know, there may be a few

24:23

very lucky individuals out there who have

24:25

this kind of urge to go out jogging

24:27

that really, you know, I think it can happen,

24:30

but for most of us. For me too, I exercise

24:32

this morning, but it is certainly I didn't

24:34

jump into it with joy and things

24:36

like say world peace. We'd all

24:39

want world peace, but it doesn't

24:41

trigger our Mesolympic system. And we

24:44

might prefer that the incentive saliens want

24:46

followed those cognitive desires to give the same

24:48

urgency to make us want to go and jump

24:50

on the exercise machines. But

24:53

that's not how we are constructed.

24:57

Yes, that's right. Our dumb brains

24:59

have no automatic method for going after

25:02

all the effortful, flow inducing pleasures

25:04

in life, the ones that, as Paul Bloom

25:06

pointed out, often make life worth living,

25:09

experience a cognitive wanting for type two

25:11

pleasures, but they aren't mesoalimbic

25:14

wants that are triggering the incentive saline system

25:16

that make us have this urge to do it.

25:18

We kind of sometimes have to make ourselves

25:20

do And here in

25:22

lies the second big problem with the way our

25:24

brains process rewards. Even

25:26

though natural selection was kind enough to give us

25:28

a powerful and very automatic urge

25:31

to go for sensory type one pleasures, even

25:33

ones we sometimes don't intend to go after, we

25:36

have no such automatic craving for type

25:38

two rewards. For type two pleasures,

25:41

as can't put it, We just got to make

25:43

ourselves do it, which, if you ask

25:45

me, is a really, really stupid way to design

25:47

a brain. And so we've

25:50

figured out the neural answer to the puzzle of

25:52

why I can't get up to hit the elliptical even

25:54

though I have concrete evidence that it'll bring me

25:56

joy. Our brains are designed to crave

25:58

type one rewards, even in cases where

26:00

we don't like them all that much. But

26:03

our brains are not designed to experience an

26:05

automatic wanting for the type two rewards,

26:07

the ones we really will enjoy. As

26:10

I noted at the start of our episode, the problem

26:12

with our brains isn't that you can't always

26:14

get what you want. It's that you can't always

26:16

want what you like. But

26:18

if you try sometimes, can

26:21

you fix that? I mean, could there

26:23

be a way to get our brains to actually crave

26:25

type two rewards. When

26:27

we get back from the break, we'll hear from a scientist

26:30

who's found that there may be a way for our minds

26:32

to get what we need. She'll

26:34

share some new research hinting that there may

26:36

be a workaround for our not so optimally designed

26:39

reward circuits, ones that you can start

26:41

putting into effect today the

26:44

Happiness Lab. We'll be right back. I

26:57

actually really don't like running and learn behold

26:59

I do run. This is my good friend

27:01

and colleague, Heady Cobert, a professor

27:03

of psychiatry, psychology, and neuroscience

27:05

here at Yale. I admire Hetty a lot,

27:08

not just because she's an amazing scientist. But

27:10

because she's really really good at motivating

27:12

herself to go after effortfull but pleasure

27:15

inducing Type two rewards. The

27:17

hard workouts that I struggle with every morning,

27:19

Hetty has strategies to hit them up with ease. When

27:22

she's in bed contemplating hitting that snooze button,

27:25

she brings to mind the final bit of her daily

27:27

jog. She imagines the joy she'll feel

27:29

on those few steps leading up to her front door.

27:32

That walk right, a minute

27:34

of bliss of just like I rock,

27:37

I'm amazing, I just did this thing.

27:39

It's really was good for me. It's what's just

27:41

it was my values of being healthy and being a

27:43

runner. When I think about that, like

27:45

even right now, I'm like, oh, maybe I'll go running later. Hetty

27:48

is constantly doing the sorts of Type two activities

27:51

that I aspire to engage with more often. She's

27:54

the yoga buddy who always wants to do the hardest

27:56

intensity class, the ones with all the

27:58

handstands. She's the academic colleague

28:00

who's always happily staying up super late

28:02

to finish a big grant. Hetty engages

28:05

in hard, flow inducing stuff all the time,

28:07

and she seems to do so without any motivational

28:10

struggle. But Hetty also

28:12

excels at the flip side. She's always

28:14

avoiding those type one pleasures that might

28:16

not be so good for her. Someone brought some

28:19

cookies to my house over the weekend, and I

28:21

definitely know that they are in the kitchen, and I'm

28:23

aware of that a lot of the time, those

28:25

cookies would already be long gone if they were

28:27

under my roof. Hetty admits the

28:29

sheaf too, finds the box kind of tempting. They

28:32

think about how teethee it would be, and how

28:34

yumy it would be, and how sweet it

28:36

would be, and like the texture of it

28:38

has like a little bit of a lemon

28:40

icing on it. Despite

28:42

the strong incentive salience Hetty seems

28:45

to experience for that box of cookies, she's

28:47

able to resist the temptation. She

28:49

experiences, her reasons not to eat the

28:51

cookies just as vividly as her desire

28:54

to go after them. Well, if I have the cookie

28:56

now, I can't have another one later, and that's a cost

28:58

to me because I'm definitely gonna want one after lunch, and

29:01

you know, it's not consisaing with my values. So I'm actually trying

29:03

to not eat sweets. It's not healthy for me.

29:05

When I eat a lot of sugar, I'd break out. I really

29:07

don't like that, so that's a for me.

29:10

These examples might make you think that Hetty is

29:12

some superhuman self regulator, the

29:15

kind of person who's born within a Nate knack

29:17

for controlling her dop immune system. But

29:19

since Hetty's one of my closest friends, I know

29:21

that's not really the case. We often

29:23

say all researches me searched. In my case,

29:26

that's absolutely accurate. I studied craving

29:28

at least in part because I notice craving

29:31

run my life, and have noticed it even more

29:33

in the past, run my life in ways

29:35

that very often have actually interfered

29:37

with what I wanted, And I really wanted to understand

29:39

both what craving is and also

29:41

how I might learn to work with it in a way that

29:44

would be helpful for my life. Hetty's

29:46

scientific interest in the neural basis of why

29:48

we want what we want started back in graduate

29:50

school when she was trying to break a very bad habit.

29:53

Back then, Hetty was a cigarette smoker. She

29:56

tried to quit a few times, always unsuccessfully.

29:59

She realized that to break her nicotine addiction,

30:01

she'd need a strategy for dealing with all the wanting

30:03

and incentive salience that she automatically

30:05

experienced for cigarettes. The

30:08

solution she found then, and one that she has

30:10

now become a scientific expert on, is

30:12

a strategy that we've talked about before on the Happiness

30:14

Lab. Mindfulness, in this

30:17

case, the practice of intentionally and non

30:19

judgmentally paying attention to the present

30:21

moment through a process called urge surfing.

30:24

During urge surfing, you allow a sense of

30:26

wanting just to be there without acting

30:29

on it. Let's say there's some type one

30:31

reward that you're really drawn to, that

30:33

box of cookies in the kitchen or a pack

30:35

of cigarettes on your desk if you're a smoker like Hetty

30:37

was. Rather than giving into that sense

30:39

of wanting or even trying to fight it, you

30:42

simply say to yourself, Hey, I'm having

30:44

a craving right now. I'm mindfully noticing

30:46

that my docuan system is really freaking

30:48

out. But this feeling

30:50

is not going to last forever, and I

30:52

can deal with it for a little while, And

30:55

the science shows it really only will

30:57

lasted a little while. Research has

30:59

found that urges are a lot like an ocean wave.

31:02

Cravings tend to start off small and then go up

31:04

a bit, but they eventually crest and

31:06

soon come back down, usually in as little as

31:09

to twenty minutes. Mindfulness

31:11

to manage craving is one just

31:13

knowing this is a temporary experience, that

31:15

you have the ability to notice it as it

31:18

is right again, that noticing paying

31:20

attention in the moment. This strategy

31:22

of mindful acceptance not only allowed Hetty

31:24

to surf her cigarette urges for long enough to

31:26

finally kick the habit, It also gave

31:28

her a treatment idea for the addicted participants

31:30

she worked with in her lab. In

31:32

one study, she and her colleagues found a group of

31:34

hardcore smokers, people who smoked

31:36

on average an entire pack a day, who

31:38

said they wanted to quit. Hetty and

31:40

her colleagues then assigned the smokers either

31:42

to a four week urge surfing intervention

31:45

or the standard four week program used by the American

31:47

Lung Association. The

31:49

results were striking. Subjects who

31:51

had learned to urge surf were five times

31:53

more likely to abstain from smoking three months

31:56

after treatment. Researchers have

31:58

now seen the urge surfing shows similar

32:00

positive effects in the context of opiate

32:02

addiction, binge drinking, and even healthy

32:04

eating. I often think of mindfluns

32:06

is like the set of skills that can allow

32:09

all of the other skills to come online

32:11

more easily, because before you

32:13

even figure out which strategy should I use in the moment,

32:16

you need to know what this moment is like, and mind

32:18

forms in a fundamental way allowed you to connect with

32:20

this moment. Mindfully

32:22

connecting with the present moment also gave Hetty

32:24

a second tactic for successfully fighting

32:26

her overactive insensive salience, one

32:29

that I noticed her used earlier when she talked about

32:31

whether or not to eat those cookies. You

32:33

may remember just how eloquently had he described

32:36

what her cookie craving felt like, the yummy

32:38

taste she expected, and how lemony the icing

32:41

seemed, and so on. That active,

32:43

so carefully and vividly paying attention

32:46

gave Hetty the mental bandwidth to notice that she

32:48

was focused entirely on the good aspects

32:50

of cookie eating. The long term

32:52

consequences of downing the entire box, the

32:55

fact that she'd break out, or that she was trying to get

32:57

healthier. Those things were completely

32:59

absent from the feeling of wanting that Hetty

33:01

experienced. Mindfully noticing

33:03

just how salient the good parts of eating were

33:06

allowed heating to realize that her dopamine system

33:08

wasn't giving her the whole store. Hetty

33:12

hypothesized that mindfully noticing the

33:14

bad stuff about a type one reward might

33:16

help her nicotine dependent patients reduce their

33:18

cravings too. She was right simply

33:21

asking smokers to intentionally focus

33:23

on the long term consequences of cigarette use

33:26

help them reduce their urge to take a puff.

33:28

This result suggests that, somewhat surprisingly,

33:30

that mindfully thinking about the downside

33:33

of a reward can help our brains turn

33:35

down how much we want that reward. Mindfulness

33:38

can help us stop wanting what we don't

33:40

really like. But

33:43

Hetty has also discovered that mindfully noticing

33:45

the present moment can help us with the brain's second

33:47

problem too, that we can't always

33:49

want what we like. As camp

33:51

Barridge explained, our dopamine

33:54

wanting circuit doesn't seem to fire as

33:56

much for Type two rewards. My morning

33:58

workout or a flow inducing writing project,

34:00

or a steep mountain climb, the kinds

34:03

of pleasures that Paul Bloom thought made life

34:05

worth living. But Hetty has figured

34:07

out a way to deal with this. Our new research

34:09

shows we can use mindfulness to start wanting

34:12

type two rewards in a more automatic

34:14

incentive saliency way. It

34:16

starts with the process of mindfully attending

34:18

to the benefits of an effortful but rewarding

34:21

activity through a process she calls

34:23

savoring, like really trying

34:25

to actively think about

34:28

those positive aspects of the experience

34:30

that we have in mind in order to make ourselves

34:32

want it more. Petty has found that savoring

34:35

is a powerful way to achieve more type two pleasures

34:38

because it helps us overcome the main barrier

34:40

to flow inducing activities all

34:42

the effort. One of the reasons that

34:44

we avoid things that are difficult is because

34:47

what's really salient about them is what

34:49

is difficult, and not all of the other

34:51

aspects around it. Again, if I use the running

34:53

example, what is really salient to me is that

34:55

it's really hot at and if I go running later,

34:57

I'm going to sweat and it's going to be annoying. In a moment

34:59

of mindfulness, I know that the difficulty

35:02

is just one part of the entire experience,

35:05

and especially mindfulness in the context of

35:07

our values. You know, my value

35:09

is actually really important to me, my value of being healthy, my

35:11

value of being someone who engages in behaviors

35:13

to increase my health, like running. If

35:16

I am able to be mindful in a moment, even

35:18

though the thought about difficulty is so

35:20

salient and so strong, I can bring

35:22

on board really the full

35:25

view of the situation, which is, yes, it is difficult

35:27

and also really consistent with

35:29

my value is really rewarding. And I think we can apply

35:31

that to almost everything. Hetty

35:34

has used the sort of mindful savoring a lot

35:36

in her own life. She's gotten good at

35:38

intentionally noticing the deeper rewards

35:40

and meaning that she gets from lots of hard type

35:42

two pleasures that satisfaction

35:45

she gets after writing a big grant, or

35:47

the pride she feels after eating healthy, or

35:49

the five seconds of bliss she gets at the

35:51

end of her morning run. When I really

35:54

can reflect on that positive aspect,

35:56

right, I'm more likely to do it. And

35:59

this is the key to the power of savoring

36:02

mindfully. Focusing on the benefits of a hard

36:04

activity doesn't just boost your cognitive

36:06

wanting for that activity, It makes your

36:08

automatic incentive salients wanting go

36:10

up to One of my favorite of Hetty's

36:13

recent empirical examples of this is

36:15

a study testing whether savoring can get

36:17

people to eat more vegetables if

36:19

we bring people in and we ask them to actually

36:21

think about how crunchy

36:24

broccoli is, how

36:26

healthy it is for them, how

36:28

they might feel really good about themselves

36:30

when they're done eating this broccoli. Loan Behold,

36:33

people not only report more of that

36:35

craving for broccoli, they're also willing

36:37

to pay more for it.

36:39

Studies like this show that savoring maybe

36:42

the magical elixir I've needed all along.

36:45

Mindfully noticing the good parts of a flow

36:47

inducing event might be the key to getting

36:49

the reward circuits of our brain to finally

36:51

start wanting all the stuff we actually

36:54

like, so that we can finally start

36:56

getting in all the type too pleasure we need

36:58

in life. Hetty credit

37:00

strategies like these and mindfulness

37:02

practices more generally, with making her

37:04

life a lot happier and a lot more meaningful.

37:08

I think that all of equal I would be a

37:10

cigarette smoker. My brain really loves nicotine.

37:12

I probably would be a regular user of a bunch

37:14

of other substances if I were not

37:17

making excellent decisions

37:19

now, I would say that I live my life

37:21

in a way that's really consistent with my values. So

37:23

I exercise regularly, and I eat

37:25

really healthily most of the time, random

37:28

cookie notwithstanding. And I

37:30

think in that way that mindful's practice has

37:32

allowed me to be the kind of

37:34

person that I want to be in most moments

37:37

of most days. Talking

37:40

with Hetty has given me hope that I can get

37:42

my brain to want what I actually like.

37:45

Hetty's research has encouraged me that at

37:47

least with practice, there are ways to get my

37:49

dopamine system to work for me rather

37:52

than against me. The science

37:54

shows that mindful acceptance can help me serve

37:56

the cravings that tend to lead me astray, that

37:59

urge to hit the box of cookies I'm saving for later,

38:02

or to check my Twitter feed when I should be finishing

38:04

this podcast script. And

38:06

I'm trying to intentionally remember the downside

38:09

of these short term rewards and the opportunity

38:11

costs they pose for the hard projects I want

38:13

to finish. But mindfulness

38:16

can also help us explicitly notice and savor

38:18

the good parts of type two pursuits. Over

38:21

the past few mornings, I've tried to more intentionally

38:23

notice all the rewards I get from my morning

38:25

workout. I've started to mindfully pay

38:28

attention to how light I feel halfway through that

38:30

morning elliptical and how cool it is

38:32

that time totally flies by when I'm watching

38:34

a Buffy episode. I now try to savor

38:36

that moment of bliss when I finally step

38:38

off the machine, feeling like a total badass

38:41

for doing something I value and that boosts

38:43

my health and happiness. And I've already

38:45

detected a bit of an emotional shift that

38:47

craving to sleep in has it fully gone away,

38:50

but I am starting to automatically become a

38:52

bit more excited to get my blood pumping when

38:54

that alarm goes off. I

38:57

hope this episode has also given you some strategies

39:00

for achieving more pleasure and to pursue

39:02

a life with more meaning and type two rewards.

39:05

And I hope at least one of those meaningful pleasures

39:08

will involve coming back here to listen to

39:10

the next episode of The Happiness Lab

39:12

with me Doctor Laurie Santos. The

39:19

Happiness Lab is co written and produced by Ryan

39:21

Dilley. Our original music was composed

39:23

by Zachary Silver, with additional scoring,

39:25

mixing, and mastering by Evan Biola. Joseph

39:28

Friedman checked our facts. Sophie Crane

39:30

McKibbin edited our scripts. Marilyn

39:33

Rust offered additional production support. Special

39:36

thanks to Miela Belle, Carl mcgliori,

39:38

Heather Faine, Maggie Taylor, Daniella

39:41

Lucard, Maya Kanig, Nicole

39:43

Morano, Eric Zandler, Royston

39:45

Reserve, Jacob Weisberg, and my agent,

39:48

Ben Davis. D Happiness Lab is brought

39:50

to you by Pushkin Industries, Emmie Doctor,

39:52

Laurie Santos