179. Finding Positive in Negative Emotions: Communication, Happiness & Wellbeing

[00:00:01] Laurie Santos: I think of negative emotions as kind of like the engine light on our dashboard in our car. It's sort of a pain in the butt, but if you don't deal with that, then, you know, worse things are going to happen later when you're on the highway and negative emotions work the same way. 

[00:00:15] Matt Abrahams: Hi, Matt here. The New Year gives all of us an opportunity to reflect and focus on who we are, who we want to be, and our wellbeing. To help you chart your course and write your story, I'm excited to invite you to our four part mini series on communication, happiness and wellbeing sponsored by BetterHelp. Every January brings us three hundred and sixty-five blank pages waiting to be filled. This year, maybe you're ready for a plot twist. Or maybe there's a part of your story you've been wanting to revise or explore further. Think of therapy as your editorial partner. Helping you craft new chapters and create the meaningful story you deserve to live. Therapists from BetterHelp can help you write your story. I believe in you. Everyone should leverage the support of therapists and coaches. Visit BetterHelp.com/ThinkFast to get ten percent off your first month. That's BetterHelp, H E L P dot com slash ThinkFast. 

[00:01:21] Matt Abrahams: How we communicate with others and ourselves has a direct connection with our sense of wellbeing and happiness. My name is Matt Abrahams, and I teach strategic communication at Stanford Graduate School of Business. Welcome to Think Fast, Talk Smart, the podcast. Today I look forward to speaking with Laurie Santos. Laurie is a professor of psychology at Yale University, where she teaches the highly popular course The Science of Wellbeing. She's also the host of the very instructive The Happiness Lab podcast. Laurie's work focuses on understanding the cognitive biases that impair happiness and how people can implement strategies to lead more fulfilling lives. Laurie, welcome. 

[00:02:05] Laurie Santos: Thanks so much for having me on the show. 

[00:02:07] Matt Abrahams: Shall we get started?

[00:02:07] Laurie Santos: Yeah, let's do it. 

[00:02:08] Matt Abrahams: So to set the table, can you share for us your definition of happiness and perhaps distinguish it from fulfillment and satisfaction? 

[00:02:16] Laurie Santos: Yeah, these definitions are always so tricky because I think we have these lay definitions of happiness and joy and satisfaction, fulfillment, you know, there's so many different ways we refer to it. I like to follow what many social scientists use as the definition of happiness, which thinks of it as having these two parts. You're both happy in your life and happy with your life. So being happy in your life is this idea that you have a decent amount of positive emotions, right? And a decent ratio of positive to negative emotions. So your life is filled with joy and laughter and gratitude and all these good feelings. Importantly, it's not having no negative emotions. I think that's another confusion that comes up, but you, you want the ratio of the positive to negative to be decent. That's sort of the being happy in your life part.

[00:02:56] There's also being happy with your life, which I think gets closer to things like fulfillment and purpose. Being happy with your life is the fact that you think your life is going well. If I ask you the question, you know, how are things in your life on a scale of one to ten, all things considered, you say, you know, close to a ten, right? And I like these two definitions because they encompass both the like affective part of happiness and the kind of cognitive part of happiness, the way you feel your life is going and the way you think your life is going. 

[00:03:21] Matt Abrahams: I really appreciate that distinction with happy in your life and with things in your life. You mentioned the notion of negative emotions, and I think a lot of people just want to be happy that this negative stuff should be put away, non-existant, and et cetera. Help me understand the importance of negative emotions. 

[00:03:37] Laurie Santos: Yeah, I think this is so critical, honestly, especially with the groups I work with the most, right? Like I work with college students where, just culturally right now, we have these conversations about good vibes only, and you know, you experience any frustration or like mild sadness or fear before a test, and you're like, I have to get clinically evaluated, something's wrong. And so I think, yes, it is important that we have negative emotions, like an appropriate good life with lots of goals and values is going to have some negative emotions. And they're there to do something that's really evolutionarily important, which is that they signal how we should behave. We know evolutionarily we have these bodily sensations that don't feel good, but that they're really important, right? You put your hand on a hot stove, you know, that's going to be painful, but it's a pain that's telling you to do something, right?

[00:04:20] It's telling you, hey, move your hand. And I like to think of negative emotions the same way, right? If you're feeling sad or feeling lonely, that means you might need to make changes in your life that kind of deal with that loneliness or sadness. If you're feeling angry, that's often a sense that there's some sense of justice is being violated that you need to fix. A big one, if you're feeling overwhelmed, right, that's an honest signal that you need to take something off your plate. And so, I think of negative emotions as kind of like the engine light on our dashboard in our car. It's sort of a pain in the butt, but if you don't deal with that, then, you know, worse things are going to happen later when you're on the highway and negative emotions work the same way.

[00:04:54] Matt Abrahams: I love that analogy of it's a warning light. So it implies, given that you said it's really about the ratio of negative to positive, that there are two ways to fix that ratio. One is to reduce the things that are making you feel bad or negative and to increase the things that are positive. Is that right? Is there advice on either side of that? 

[00:05:13] Laurie Santos: Yeah, and I think we talk a lot about, especially in psychology, a lot about emotion regulation. And usually we mean negative emotions, right? We want to kind of decrease the anxiety, you know, take some deep breaths. But I often think we forget about the increasing the positive emotions part, which is where I think communication and social connection generally comes in. We can feel more connected to people. We can increase our laughter. We can increase our sense of gratitude. Or, you know, there's so many kinds of positive emotions we could be boosting. And we kind of forget that we can do that part too. So I think the message is that we want to be working on both. 

[00:05:45] Matt Abrahams: Right. And many of us focus on reducing the negative and not so much increasing the positive. You brought up this notion of communication. So how does positive communication, both in how we speak to others and internally to ourselves, impact our happiness? 

[00:05:58] Laurie Santos: Yeah. Well, I think the first thing to say is that pretty much every available study of happy people suggests that happy people are more social, right? They spend time with the people they care about, have close communication with the people they care about. But they also really work to communicate and connect with people that are maybe not such deep ties, right, the sort of weak ties, right, chatting with the barista at the coffee shop, connecting with the person who lives on your street. You don't necessarily have to spend time with a best friend to get the psychological benefits of social connection. And I think for that, really, communication is key. It's very hard to socially connect if we're not actually having successful communication with the people around us. So I think that's one big part.

[00:06:35] But you mentioned this internal communication, there's lots of evidence that that really matters a lot. You know, one of the main forms of communication we have is to ourself, inside our head. And for many of us, it's a really negative form of communication, criticizing ourselves, you know, kind of just like being mean to ourselves, a sort of terrible drill instructor that's in our head all the time. And I think working on that form of self talk, there's lots of evidence that shows that that can be incredibly powerful, too. What can you do to talk to yourself with a bit more compassion? What can you do to talk to yourself in a distanced way, so you're not so focused on the problems of the here and now, but you talk to yourself as a friend or a mentor might talk to you, which kind of gives you better advice. And so I think this self talk and the sort of self communication is pretty critical also. 

[00:07:18] Matt Abrahams: Yeah, I want to go back to the social talk in a second, but self talk can be so noisy and so negative. I first encountered this in the work and research I do on anxiety management around speaking. And when you ask people, what do you say right before you give a speech or you're about to speak up in a meeting? It's awful stuff. It's like I'm not prepared. I don't have value. People, people are going to think I'm stupid. First we have to hear it. We have to hear what we're saying and then we have to work to change it. And one thing that the research and at least in public speaking anxiety says is, having some form of positive mantra or something you say that snaps that heuristic pattern we have. I use this myself before I teach. I'll often say to myself, I have value to bring to the students, and that helps me get out of that, I should have prepared more. Is this engaging enough? Are there specific things we can do to quiet or turn down that negative self talk? 

[00:08:10] Laurie Santos: Yeah, one of my favorite strategies comes from the work of Ethan Kross at the University of Michigan. He talks a lot about what he calls distanced self talk. And it's basically just the way of speaking to yourself instead of talking to yourself in the first person like, oh, I'm not prepared for this. It's talking to yourself using the second or third person, even referring to yourself with your name. So I might say, Laurie, you know, you're going into this podcast interview. You got this, right? It's such a silly seeming switch, but it does something powerful psychologically, which is that when I hear the phrase hey, Laurie, you blah blah blah. I don't usually say that to myself. It's kind of like a nice friend or a good mentor is talking to me. And what that does is it gives me some psychological distance. 

[00:08:49] I'm also practiced when I'm using the third person and the second person of talking to people a little bit more nicely, you know, I usually don't talk to people in the same way I talk to myself in my head. I'd probably get fired and never have a grad student again. It'd just be terrible if I did that. But what that means is that when we talk to ourself using the third person, we naturally use the kinds of phrases, the sorts of turns of speech and the kind of advice that we would be giving to a good friend. And that kind of distance can mean when we're talking to ourselves, we're not just kind of focused on the rumination and all that stuff. We actually give ourselves great advice, like, Laurie, you should remember to take a breath. That's a hack that I've actually used a lot because it's so simple is just kind of talk to yourself in the third person.

[00:09:28] Another one is to really use temporal distance to talk to yourself. And just use phrases that imply, well, how am I going to feel about this in three years time or ten years time? Like probably this talk isn't going to matter that much. And that can just take you out of the temporal here and now and sort of give you a sense of big picture. So both of those are hacks from Ethan Kross's work that I love and I use a bunch. 

[00:09:50] Matt Abrahams: I really appreciate you sharing those. I can see how the distancing both from yourself using second or third person, but also the temporal distance can be really helpful. I think taking the time to actually identify the negative self talk and then finding one of these tools as an aid to help you get through it, and, or coming up with a positive mantra, I think can really be helpful. Do you have any tools that you particularly rely on to help get conversations to be more deep? 

[00:10:17] Laurie Santos: Yeah, I like this technique that I've heard Charles Duhigg talk about, which is what's called looping for understanding. I think it goes by a bunch of different names, but it's basically just what you've said. It's asking questions. But then when you get the answer, trying to kind of paraphrase, but then also don't just stop there. Ask kind of, did I get that right? So people get to kind of clarify the points that you didn't maybe get right. And I think this can be incredibly critical in close relationships, right, where we often make this mistake of perspective taking our spouses or our close work colleagues, assuming that we know what they mean and what they think. But we rarely really ask whether or not we've gotten it right, and so this idea of looping for understanding I think can be an incredibly powerful technique for, not just asking the right questions and making sure we've heard what other folks are thinking, but also making sure we've actually heard whether we got it accurately.

[00:11:04] Matt Abrahams: We've talked about typical conversations, I'd like to chat more about difficult conversations, ones that we know will be challenging. They can be a source of stress and anxiety in the moment and actually leading up to them. What strategies do you recommend for approaching these conversations in a way that prioritizes our wellbeing and perhaps the wellbeing of the others involved?

[00:11:25] Laurie Santos: Yeah, I love that you framed it as prioritizing our wellbeing and other people's wellbeing because I think sometimes it's our wellbeing that's really doing the worst damage in these difficult conversations, right? We're feeling anxious about getting into them. We're sort of really worried about what's going to happen. Maybe our frontal lobes are working a little over time because we're analyzing what we're saying before we're saying it. And so I think that kind of rumination that we sometimes bring to these difficult conversations is one where if we could do some work ahead of time, we'd wind up doing a lot better.

[00:11:54] One of the strategies I like to bring to it is just to do some emotion regulation on those negative emotions ahead of time. First of all, just recognizing that it's happening. I'm feeling really scared about this conversation. It's not going to go well. I'm worried I'm going to be perceived wrong, right? But then to bring to that some common humanity. It's normal in a tough conversation like this for me to be scared. That's not a sign that something's bad. This is normative to go into this feeling this way. And then kind of what can you do to be kind to yourself? Maybe I need to take five minutes to do some deep breaths ahead of time, or even something silly like watch a stupid cat video on the internet to just kind of like bring my emotion down. Those simple emotion regulation strategies can be incredibly important so that you wind up at that conversation with your emotions as in check as is normal for a conversation that's that difficult. 

[00:12:39] Matt Abrahams: Again it's a distancing technique where you put yourself outside of yourself and in that space that you give yourself, you can do something about it because we can be swept away with those emotions. And I think it's also important to look at the other side of that equation, the other person, and really think about what they feel like and what that means for them. I know you talk a lot about and have thought about gratitude and its ability to enhance happiness. How can we better communicate appreciation to others in ways that strengthen our relationship and boost our overall wellbeing?

[00:13:11] Laurie Santos: Well, I think we just first need to recognize that we need to do it much more often than we think. Again, citing some of the work of Nick Epley, he shows that people think and assume that everyone knows they're grateful for them. You know, I assume that my partner knows I'm really thankful that he emptied the dishwasher in the morning. I assume my kids know that I'm proud of them. I assume my co workers think that I'm happy for what they did at work. But in practice, like, nobody knows this unless we say it. And so Nick finds that we're kind of chronically under sharing what we're grateful for. And so one way to deal with that is just to give compliments, to express gratitude to people, to kind of give thanks.

[00:13:46] Whether that's communicating in person, just saying at a work meeting, you know, I just want to make it really clear that I'm so thankful that you did that, I really appreciate it. Or even through writing, which can be even more powerful, some of the research says, right? Like giving somebody what positive psychologists have called the gratitude letter, but I think is more colloquially known as just like a thank you card, right? Those things matter and they can live on maybe even longer than a conversation. And I think we know this when we reflect on cases where people have thanked us. If somebody thanks us in a work meeting, that feels really good. If somebody writes us a genuine thank you letter, a thank you card, you probably still have that in your drawer, like somewhere at home or somewhere at work. We know when it comes to us, how meaningful it is. But we forget that we can give that meaning to others. And so I think, you know, a big one is just like express it, you know, in whatever form feels most authentic to you. 

[00:14:33] Matt Abrahams: People who I've shared this notion of gratitude with say, yeah, I get it. I just don't want to sound like it's a trick or it's a gimmick or I'm doing it too much. How do we do it genuinely, authentically without it being perceived as a trick or a ploy? 

[00:14:46] Laurie Santos: Well, I think it has to be authentic. You know, if you're not feeling it, don't say it. But I think it can come off as less of a trick if you do that second step where you kind of give reasons, right? I'm grateful because here's how what you did affected me positively. And I think, again, in part because, you know, we forget the importance of communicating more deeply. We just kind of throw off a quick thank you without the reason. But if you add the reason in, it can start to feel more authentic. 

[00:15:10] Matt Abrahams: Thank you for that answer. It actually gave me some good insight. I appreciate that.

[00:15:13] Laurie Santos: It's making your podcast better. 

[00:15:15] Matt Abrahams: There you go. Yes. I want to talk a little bit about technology and its impact on our wellbeing and happiness. And I want to ask two different questions together. So many of us are now communicating virtually. You and I first met in a virtual communication. We're now sitting in a room together. And a lot of people use social media, which is another form of virtual communication. What are your thoughts on the impact of that and wellbeing, both the, the Zooms, Teams, Meets of the world, but also the social media of the world. How does that affect us? Are there rules, guidelines? What do you think? 

[00:15:47] Laurie Santos: Yeah, well, I think it's always important to start by recognizing that like technology is just a tool, right? We could use that tool for very effective communication, maybe even going beyond what we're capable of doing face to face. Or we could use that tool in ways that make us feel more disconnected, that kind of mess up, you know, what effective communication looks like. And I think in the case of technology, we often use it for both. On the effective side, you know, I think back to, you know, moments in the pandemic where I just literally couldn't see people face to face. You and I, when you were in California and I was on the East Coast, if we didn't talk over email or, you know, FaceTime, we just wouldn't have been able to connect. And so it's important to recognize that we do use it in these powerful ways to overcome the physical limits that would prevent us from connecting.

[00:16:31] However, we also use our technologies in lots of ways that make our communication worse, I think, by not recognizing what are the parts of in person communication that we've evolved to do best. And I think we've obviously evolved to do face to face communication because we're kind of recognizing, you know, I'm chatting with you now, I'm seeing your subtle gestures and your facial expressions and so on. But we also have evolved to do that really in real time, and I think these are the forms of communication that wind up messing us up when we're using, uh, like text messages or email or a Slack chat or a group chat, right? These things often don't happen in real time in the same way as, say, a Zoom call or a phone call, right, where I'm talking to you one on one.

[00:17:11] I think those are the domains where we really have to ask, are we communicating accurately? Right? Did I really convey my message? Am I sure that I got the message that you conveyed? And I think this is important because we can use technology better. Take a case of like remote work where, you know, you might need the Slack channel to kind of communicate quickly. I think if there's something that's at all ambiguous, that might be a time to hop on a Zoom call or a Team's call or something, or just literally pick up the phone. We're so funny because we have these smartphones that were originally designed as phones. But we so rarely use them these days as phones. We can communicate through these technologies but it's really best done whenever possible in real time.

[00:17:50] Matt Abrahams: One important point that you made there that I think I need to think about and I'm hoping everybody considers is, what's the purpose of the communication? If it's just to get information across, maybe some of these tools can actually be really effective at it. But if it's about connection, if it's about really making sure that something is understood, more real time, connective communication is better. You have responded to several of the questions with this notion of taking a step back and reflecting, distancing yourself. And I think that plays out here in the virtual world too. Take a step back and think, what's the purpose of this? Prior to the communication, I'm also hearing you say, after the communication reflect, did that land? Is there a possibility for miscommunication? 

[00:18:33] Before we end, I like to ask three questions of all my guests. One I create just for you, and then the other two are similar to everybody I interview. Are you ready for that? 

[00:18:41] Laurie Santos: Yeah, let's do it. 

[00:18:41] Matt Abrahams: Excellent. You teach and share a lot of ideas and hacks to feel better, to feel happier. What are the ones you rely most on to help you? You seem to be a generally affable, no, I don't, I don't think that's true. What do you rely on to help you? 

[00:18:56] Laurie Santos: I think the biggest one for me has been to make sure I'm protecting my time and noticing that negative emotion of overwhelm. That feeling that my plate is too full right now. That is the alert light on my car dashboard that I need to listen to a lot. And I can tell when I'm not. And so, and that is hard, right? I mean, saying no to really cool opportunities and potentially disappointing people and so on, that's the one that I try to pay attention to the most. But if I'm not paying attention to it, I think I reap the worst effects in terms of my own mental health.

[00:19:26] Matt Abrahams: I need to learn from you because I am really bad at that. When I see that dashboard light about overwhelm come on, I just sort of cover it with, I cover it with a post it. Yeah, that's a really hard one for me. So, yeah. I appreciate that you are showing me that it is possible. Thank you. Question number two. Who is a communicator that you admire and why? 

[00:19:46] Laurie Santos: I think, you know, if I had to pick someone for my personal life who I really admire, it's my husband, Mark. He's just an incredibly good listener. Everyone feels heard by him. Everyone tries to talk to him, I think, from kind of randos in the coffee shops to like, you know, his friends and so on. But yeah, he's just really good at listening. It's something I want to get better at and something I really admire in him. 

[00:20:05] Matt Abrahams: I love that you pick somebody not only who's close to you, which is sweet, but also somebody who's a listener, right? Many of us, when we think of communicators, we think of orators and people who are transmitting and broadcasting, but listening is critical and not surprising from somebody who looks at wellbeing and happiness. Final question. What are the first three ingredients that go into a successful communication recipe? 

[00:20:27] Laurie Santos: Well, I think I have to bring up listening since we just mentioned that, the importance of that one. But no, I think it's not about kind of saying what you want. It's about listening to what others are there. And often we forget how powerful listening can be for getting our own point across. You know, for this, I even think back to practices like deep canvassing, which is this practice in political communication where you're trying to make a point, like you want to convince somebody about, you know, kind of immigration and it's a really important and you first ask them cases about when they felt marginalized or when they felt like they didn't fit in or they didn't belong. And then from that, you sort of bring that back to the broader issue. I think that's a powerful technique in part because it involves listening first and connecting on those deep values. 

[00:21:07] Second thing I would say is compassion. Compassion for yourself in these hard conversations and compassion for the people that you're talking to. That's just a skill and an emotion that I think you can bring in. And I guess the third thing would just be regulating your negative emotions. So often, it's not what we're trying to say, but it's how we're feeling when we say it that comes in. And that can have a huge effect on all kinds of subtle things like the ease with which we're listening because we're ruminating about something else or the kind of emotion we're conveying in the conversation, which might have nothing to do about the content of the conversation, but how we're feeling about it. So those kind of positive emotion regulation strategies first, I think can be so critical. 

[00:21:43] Matt Abrahams: I really, really appreciate all three of those. Listening is critical as you said, having compassion, not just for the other person, but yourself in that moment. And this notion of it's not so much what you're saying, but how you feel while you say it, I think is something we all need to reflect on. Because those emotions can directly impact us and how we approach it, and how the other person perceives us.

[00:22:06] Laurie, this has been wonderful. Thank you for your time. I am so excited that we got this opportunity to chat. You are doing such good in the world with your teaching and with your podcast. I think all of us can benefit by reminding ourselves that we can work to increase our happiness by focusing on the things that make us feel happier, but also reducing the things that make us feel less happy and this notion of taking a step back and reflecting that distance can help us. Thank you. 

[00:22:33] Laurie Santos: Thanks so much for having me. 

[00:22:35] Matt Abrahams: Thank you for joining us for one of our Think Fast, Talk Smart, Communication, Happiness, and Wellbeing mini series episodes. To continue to learn more about this important topic, please tune in to our other three episodes in this series.

[00:22:50] This episode was produced by Jenny Luna, Ryan Campos, Aech Ashe, and me, Matt Abrahams. Our music is from Floyd Wonder. With thanks to Podium Podcast Company and our sponsor, BetterHelp. We recorded this episode at HBR in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and we're grateful for the help of Anne Saini. Please find us on YouTube and wherever you get your podcasts. Be sure to subscribe and rate us. Also follow us on LinkedIn and Instagram and check out fastersmarter.io for deep dive videos, English language learning content, and our newsletter. Please consider our premium offering for extended DeepThinks episodes, AMAs, Ask Matt Anything and much more at fastersmarter.io/premium.