Conversations on Healing

Introduction Welcome to the Conversations on Healing podcast, where host Shay Beider speaks with renowned healthcare leaders, practitioners, and thought leaders to explore the world of wellness, the incredible powers of self-care, and what it truly means to heal today. Join us on this journey to become more whole healed and connected.

Shay Beider Welcome to the Conversations on Healing podcast. I’m your host, Shay Beider, and today’s episode is a delightful conversation with our guest, Dr. Tal Ben-Shahar. Tal holds a PhD in organizational behavior and a BA in philosophy and psychology from Harvard University. He is a renowned author, lecturer, and expert in positive psychology. Tal is well known for teaching two of the largest classes in Harvard University’s history, positive Psychology and the Psychology of Leadership. His books have become internationally known bestsellers, and his latest works include “Happiness Studies” and “Happier No Matter What”, which we talk about in today’s episode. Tal is the Chief Learning Officer and Co-founder of Potential Life and the Happiness Studies Academy. In 2022, Tal, designed and launched the world’s first Master’s degree in Happiness studies in collaboration with Centenary University. In addition to his academic and professional achievements, Tal is an accomplished sportsman winning both the US Intercollegiate and Israeli National Squash Championships. In today’s conversations on healing episode, we dive into topics including happiness and the barriers to happiness. We review how self- esteem, resilience, goal setting, and mindfulness all can play a role.

And Tal also shares the Spire model, a holistic model of happiness that draws on multiple areas of our lives. We’ll touch on topics like Post-Traumatic Growth, the Arrival fallacy, and how we can strengthen our psychological immune system. Tal speaks so passionately about happiness and how we can constructively increase our skill over a lifetime in developing core happiness. So without further ado, I’m excited for you to listen in.

I am delighted to have you on the show, Tal. So welcome to the Conversations on Healing podcast.

Dr. Tal Ben-Shahar Great to be here, Shay. Thank you for having me.

Shay It’s so cute. I was talking to some friends about that I was going to be doing this interview with you and the way I described you, I think you’ll appreciate it. I was like, this is my version of a rockstar. And what I mean by that is I think your work is so seminal and pivotal and is laying a foundation that has some durability in terms of how we think about happiness, how we educate people around happiness, and really even kind of culturally how we’re framing this in academia and beyond in very, very meaningful ways. So I’m delighted to share this conversation with our listeners.

Tal Thank you, Shay. You know I’m actually going to tell my mom what you just said.

Shay Please do.

Tal Because you see, my mom really believed in us, the children, she was very empowering, positive, but she would always make, she said, Tal, one thing you may want to steer away from is singing. So she’d be delighted to hear that.

Shay She’d be delighted to hear in another way you’re somehow accomplishing that goal. So I want to actually start, because I think it’s kind of an interesting journey for our listeners to go on in that you taught two of the most popular courses that were ever offered at Harvard in this field of positive psychology. So can you explain for some of our listeners who may not be familiar with the field of positive psychology, what is positive psychology?

Tal Yeah, so positive psychology, at least in its modern version, came around through the work of Professor Martin Seligman, who back in 1998 pointed out that psychology historically has really been focusing on what doesn’t work. So on psychopathology, on depression, anxiety, anger, stereotyping, and he said, this is only half the story. Why doesn’t psychology also, not only, but also focus on what is working, love, joy, happiness? Moreover, traditional psychology begins by asking questions about things that don’t work. So if I go to a therapist, the first question that she’s likely to ask me is, Tal, what’s wrong? Why are you here? Or if my wife and I go to a couple’s counselor, what’s not working in your relationship or an organizational psychologist, what are the weaknesses of your company? What’s not working for you? Positive psychology begins with a very different set of questions. A clinical psychology would ask me, Tal, what’s going well in your life? Let’s build on that. A couples counselor, what’s going well in your relationship? You wouldn’t be here if nothing was going well. And an organizational psychologist, what are your strengths as an individual, as a team, as an organization? Let’s build on those. So in a nutshell, positive psychology focuses on the full part of the glass, looking at what is working in one’s life, joy, happiness, success, and looking at what’s working in relationships and organizations.

Shay That’s great. That’s such a wonderful definition for everybody who’s maybe more, some people are very familiar with that term, positive psychology, but I’m sure we have listeners who are just learning about it for the first time. So I want to talk a little about your most recent book, which is called “Happier No Matter What”, and you write in that book that happiness and unhappiness are not fixed or binary conditions, and there isn’t a point before, which we are unhappy and after which we’re happy, but actually that happiness resides on a continuum. And you talk about how in your own life you’ve been able to improve your position on that continuum over the last 30 years. And I want you to share with our listeners what you see as the most important elements that have led to that change that have led to you improving your position on the continuum.

Tal Yeah, Shay, paradoxically, I think the biggest breakthrough for me, and I think for many people when it comes to attaining more happiness is embracing unhappiness. You see, there is a misconception that the good life or the happy life is a life that is devoid of painful emotions where we are exempt somehow from sadness or anger or frustration or anxiety. Well, as I point out to my students and to myself, there are only two kinds of people who do not experience painful emotions, and they are the psychopaths and the dead. So if we experience painful emotions at times, it’s actually a good sign. It means we’re not a psychopath and we’re alive. And paradoxically, it’s when we embrace and accept these emotions that they do not overstay their welcome and it’s when we resist them that they persist.

Shay Yeah, it’s so interesting because in the work that I do through Integrative Touch, the nonprofit organization that I run, we do some very deep healing work. And in those healing intensives, you’re always at some point going into a place of the saddest or scariest or darkest moment often in someone’s life, but where they’re looking for a place of healing or transformation and to help anyone through something so painful and challenging, you have to meet them there. You don’t walk in with a Band-Aid, you walk in with an authentic accompaniment. And what has always fascinated me about that is you can do that level of work. You can accompany people through extraordinary suffering and still be a very happy person yourself. And why is that so right? You could develop that as a contradictory concept that you can’t accompany people through great suffering and still maintain happiness in your own life, but you actually address this concept in your book. I want you to talk a little bit about that idea of how not trying to be happy all the time because it’s something you address in great detail in the book. Share that with our listeners.

Tal Yeah, Shay, what you point out is so important and so central to a happier life. I had like to draw on works by two psychologists or a psychologist and a neuroscientist. One of them is Kirsten Neff.

Shay We’ve interviewed. Yes, I know.

Tal So she talks about how when we deal with difficult emotions, what we need to bring to the fore is compassion. And she says, and this is a mantra that I repeat over and over again, that the only way out is through. Meaning, in order to get out of our predicament again, of sadness or frustration or anxiety, we have to experience it, go through it. And here I want to draw on the work of Mark Williamson, who’s a neuroscientist from Oxford University where he talks about how our best way of getting out he researches depression, of getting out of depression is observing the physical manifestation of the depression or the anxiety or whatever painful emotion we’re going through. And there is always a physical manifestation, I think, where do I feel sadness? Well, I feel it usually in my throat or anxiety in my belly. And what he recommends is to become aware, mindful of that physical representation of our emotional state, and I love his phrase.

And then observe it with friendly curiosity. Observe that place again, whether it’s the belly, whether it’s the throat, whether it’s maybe the shoulders or your forehead. Just observe it. Don’t try and change it with friendly curiosity and Shay through your work. This is exactly what you’re doing. You not pitting the individual against the physical manifestation but uniting them. And if you think about it, this is what Eastern psychology and philosophy has been preaching for thousands of years. What is yoga? Yoga is unity, what is meditation? Observing with friendly curiosity. Now we have the science to demonstrate, to show just how important that is.

Shay Yeah, it’s so great. And another piece you talk about that I really found so relevant in my own life is this idea that we pursue happiness indirectly. And actually I feel the same way about enlightenment. It’s like you pursue enlightenment indirectly. And so you talk about if you wake up in the morning and you say, Hey, I want to be happy. I’m going to be happy no matter what. I’m going to pursue happiness, that this deliberate pursuit of happiness is actually contradictory to creating that outcome that you’re hoping to achieve. And so you discuss that instead of working at happiness itself, that we focus on pursuing the elements that lead to happiness. Just like again, you could say for enlightenment, you focus on the elements that lead to having an enlightened experience so you don’t hit it square on. And so I love how you’re approaching that. I want to hear you speak to that point. And then I also think it would be great to discuss the five core elements that you’ve defined of what happiness is. What are those elements that you’re experiencing?

Tal So we talked about how one of the barriers to happiness is the rejection of unhappiness. Another barrier is the one you’re pointing to now, and that is the attempt to pursue happiness directly, meaning waking up in the morning and saying, I’m going to be happy, or I made a choice to be happy, or happiness is an important value for me. Now, all these things are things that we are told to do. Happiness is a choice. We are told, “Commit to happiness”. It turns out that these recommendations are counterproductive. Why? Because they will actually lead us to be less happy. And I use an analogy that really helped me better understand this idea. So imagine you walk outside beautiful sunny day, and you look up at the sun. Now what happens if you look at the sun directly? You hurt yourself, you tear up. Certainly it doesn’t make you happy.

However, what if you take that same sunlight and you break it down using say a prism, and you break it down to its elements, the colors of the rainbow, and then you look at those, then you can enjoy them, savor them. It’s beautiful. And it’s the exact same thing with happiness. When you pursue happiness directly, just like looking at the sun directly, it actually hurts. But if you take happiness and you break it down into its elements and then pursue those, that is actually something that will make you happier. Now the big question, of course, what are these metaphorical colors of the rainbow? What are these elements of happiness? And here, what my colleagues and I did was essentially delve into the works of the great thinkers throughout history. And that of course includes modern psychologists and positive psychologists like Martin Seligman, like Sonya Luki, like Barbara Frederickson and others.

And we went back, we looked at the works of Aristotle whose document on the Akan ethics I see as the founding document of the field of happiness studies. We looked at the works of Lao Tzu, the Tao Te Ching. We looked at Marianne Evans, 19th century, a British writer. We looked at Helen Keller, who has a thing or two to say about finding happiness. And we integrated the works and we identified five central elements to a happy life. These elements are spiritual wellbeing, physical wellbeing, intellectual wellbeing, relational wellbeing, and finally, emotional wellbeing. These spell the acronym spire, spiritual, physical, intellectual, relational and emotional. Now, it doesn’t mean that we need to address these five all the time. It may be a little bit overwhelming, but if we understand what these five are and at different times reflect on it and then pursue these elements, these metaphorical colors of the rainbow will actually increase our levels of wellbeing.

And lemme give an example or two of what that actually looks like. So when it comes to spiritual wellbeing, spiritual wellbeing of course is something that we can attain through religion and many people do. However, more broadly, spiritual wellbeing is about finding a sense of meaning and purpose in life, a reason for being and about being present. So for instance, if I wake up in the morning and say I want to be happier, that will actually make me less happy. But if I wake up in the morning and I say I’m going to spend five minutes meditating, being present, whether it’s to my breath or to the tree outside my window or asana posture in yoga, that will actually increase my levels of happiness. It’s an indirect way of pursuing happiness. Or if I find work that is meaningful to me or cultivate relationships that are meaningful to me, these are ways of indirectly pursuing happiness. Same with physical wellbeing, the P of Spire, which is mostly about physical activity, about nutrition, it’s about rest and recovery, about touch. If I wake up in the morning and say, I want to be happier, won’t help. But if I say I’m going to start exercising regularly or if I’m going to change my diet even slightly, these are all things that are indirect ways of pursuing happiness. And the same for intellectual, relational and emotional wellbeing.

Shay Yeah, I think that’s very well said. This leads me to want to think about, there’s a couple of other key concepts that I think are so good to introduce to our listeners. So one being the idea of post-traumatic growth. So I want to go into this topic. You also talk about something that you call resilience 2.0, which is how we can go through a traumatic life experience and rebound and even do better after that so that we could actually grow from a trauma rather than have it devastate. There was a woman I saw interviewed who to me embodied this, the epitome of this. She’d gone through the Holocaust, but even after the Holocaust, had a number of losses. Her child had died afterwards. It was like loss after loss after loss. And she was in her maybe eighties and they were doing a video interview of her, and she said, the way she described it, she said, I’m like an Indian rubber ball, those little red rubber balls that are hard and dense. And she said, the harder you throw me to the ground, the higher I shoot up into the sky. And I was like, that’s it. That’s what you’re calling resilience 2.0. Or you also talk about it in the context of being anti-fragile or this idea of anti-fragility. And you can discuss where that idea comes from. But I think this is a very important piece of understanding how a human being actually rises up from horribly difficult and challenging experiences and creates this kind of capacity for resilience.

Tal Yeah, so learning about the term anti-fragility was a real game changer for me in terms of understanding the major main focus and importance and relevance of the science of happiness. So Nasim Talib, the Lebanese scholar, who’s today professor at NYU, introduced the term anti-fragility. And I’ve come to describe it as you mentioned resilience 2.0, and what that means, just to reiterate, so resilience 1.0, traditional resilience is about bouncing back. So for instance, it’s actually a term that comes from engineering. You have certain material and you squish it. You put pressure, stress on it. If it’s resilient, it goes back to its original form, a ball. If drop it and it’s resilient, it bounces back up to where it was before. That’s why we talk about resilient individuals as bouncing back. Resilience 2.0, anti-fragility takes this a step further. You take certain material, you put pressure, stress on it.

When you let go, it doesn’t just go back to where it was before it actually grows bigger, stronger, better, or a ball. And I love the example that she used. You drop it, if it’s resilient, it bounces back up. If it’s anti-fragile, it actually bounces higher than it was before. Now it turns out that there are anti-fragile systems all around us. And within us, I mean, think about our muscles. You go to the gym, you lift weights, you’re putting stress pressure on your muscles, but what happens as a result of it, after 20 days, a hundred days, you actually grow stronger, bigger, healthier as a result of the pressure. So we are anti-fragile systems physiologically. And it turns out that also psychologically, so this to my mind is perhaps the most important work done over the past 20 years in psychology. It was introduced by two scholars, Ash and Calhoun, and they identified an alternative to post-traumatic stress disorder to breaking down after trauma to being fragile. They introduced the term post-traumatic growth, PTG. Now, when I ask my students, and they could be psychology students or others, or when I ask general audience, do you know if you heard of the term PTG? Hardly anyone has. Everyone has heard of PTSD. Very few people have heard of PTG, Post-Traumatic Growth. And that’s unfortunate. Why? Because it turns out that merely knowing about the possibility, the existence of PTG or of anti-fragility or resilience 2.0, merely knowing about it significantly increases the likelihood that it will happen. And if we don’t know about it, we’re foregoing the potential that exists within us to actually grow from hardships difficulties, even traumas.

Second, there are certain conditions that we can put in place in order to significantly increase the likelihood that we will grow from hardships that it will experience post-traumatic growth or anti-fragility resilience 2.0. We can never guarantee it, but we can significantly increase the likelihood that it will happen. And this right here lies the importance and the value of the science of happiness because every single element of SPIRE actually directly translates to our becoming more.

Shay Yeah. Something I have curiosity about, and I don’t know how this relates across the board, I’d be interested to get your take on this. When I look at that SPIRE model and then I look at my own life, I would be somebody that on the scale of trauma, I’ve had very significant amount of trauma on an ACEs score of adverse childhood experiences. I have a nine out of 10 really on a technicality. I don’t have the 10 out of 10, and yet my whole life has been around resilience and learning how to be that rubber ball that bounces even higher. And I know a thing or two about post-traumatic growth. And so I’ve thought deeply about those five core elements that you talk about, the spire model. And for me, the balance is actually all of those matter 100%, all of those matter, and I do all of those all the time. But I have to say the one that for me kept me alive, it’s the S, it’s the spiritual. That is what has kept me alive. And I’m curious if that balance is uniquely different from human being to human being, and I don’t know, I’m curious what you know about that.

Tal Yeah, it’s a very important question. The short answer is yes, very much so. Not only that, it’s also different within a human being. So Shay at 20 is different than Shay at 30. And a person who’s in college will have different weights allocated to each of the SPIRE elements than a person who’s retired and everywhere in between. And that’s important to think about and reflect because there is no one size fits all. Just like we talk about individualized medicine, we need to talk about individualized psychology. For example, you say that for you, spiritual wellbeing is extremely important. Now that doesn’t mean that physical wellbeing isn’t important, and of course you need to be physically active and to exercise regularly and take care of nutrition. It also doesn’t mean that intellectual wellbeing is not important. And indeed, you are exercising intellectual wellbeing when you talk to people and interview and read. These are all ways to enhance intellectual wellbeing. And relational wellbeing of course, is important to all of us. The question is of degree. So if I think about it for me, of course they’re all important, but intellectual wellbeing in particular, and I know that if a week or a month go by and I don’t learn new things or I don’t write or engage in ideas, I feel depleted. So I needed perhaps more than most people, which is why I chose a career as an academic where I do get to read and engage with ideas and think all the time, someone for whom physical wellbeing is central. Well, they may sign up for the next marathon or whatever it is that provides them with greater wellbeing, but we need to be aware of these. And I want to take a step back and describe a way of thinking about what is right for us.

Because when we think about happiness as a whole, we can look at it on three levels. The first level is the universal, which is common to everyone, every place and every time. So a sense of meaning and purpose is important for you. For me, for a person living in Nairobi, Tokyo or Berlin or physical exercise is important for all of us in the context of a happy life. So that’s the universal, the SPIRE elements. Then they’re cultural because what’s meaningful for a person or for most people raised in New York City is different than for people who were raised in Ho Chi Minh City because there really are cultural differences and they’re important.

And then after the universal and the cultural, we have the personal because two people raised the same culture, even in the same household, would find different things meaningful or would engage in different kinds of exercises, or would enjoy different kinds of relationships. So the personal needs to be taken into consideration as well. They would have different weights in terms of how important is spiritual wellbeing for you, how important is relational? And so on. When we talk about the universal and the cultural, we have research, a lot of research in the field of happiness on the universal ideas and on intercultural differences. So you have research on the universal. You have research on the cultural when it comes to the personal, it’s not research, it’s me-search. This is when we need to look inside. This is when we need to explore. This is why a very big part of all of our programs, whether we’re talking certificate in happiness studies or even the master’s degree in happiness studies, yeah, of course there are exposed to the latest research, neuroscience, psychology, the leading thinkers in philosophy and literature. And they engage in a lot of research which includes journaling, looking inside, meditating, reflecting. And it’s by combining the three levels, the universal, the cultural, and the personal, that we are most likely to fulfill our potential for happiness.

Shay That’s great. And in your most recent book, Happier, No Matter What, you actually have a section that’s got these great reflective questions where it is designed to instigate or initiate a process of me search where you’re really delving internally and you also talk about journaling. You talk about other ways that we can engage with our inner self and come to understand more that personal side of exploration. So it’s great. Another area I want to go in with you is this idea of success and happiness, right? So I had mentioned to you previously in a conversation that we had that fortunately when I was very young, I was the VIP massage therapist at the Peninsula Hotel in Beverly Hills. And so I got to work with kings and prime ministers and every celebrity you can imagine and rock stars, and I was seeing everybody. And so I saw some of the wealthiest, most powerful, most famous people in the world, and almost, I mean, it’s almost funny, almost universally, they were some of the least happy people.

There were exceptions, but in many cases it was stunning and such a good education for me at a very early period in my life that was formative around, oh, money, power, fame are not the things that make you happy. And so you talk about in your book this idea of success not being linked to happiness in the way that we think of it. So I actually want us to share something that you write. You write successes do lead you to experiencing highs, which failures lead you to experiencing lows. However, these fluctuations are fleeting and in and of themselves are not the building blocks of a happy or unhappy life. Does that mean there isn’t a relationship between success and happiness? No. In fact, there’s a very strong relationship, but it’s the opposite of what most people think. It’s not success that leads to happiness, rather it is that happiness leads to success. And so I’d love for you to talk more about this relationship and how you actually understand it to be.

Tal Here, you know Shay you hit upon another barrier to happiness, and that is the belief, the mistaken belief that success will lead to happiness. This is how most of us, certainly in the West, increasingly more in the East live our lives. This is how most parents raise the children on the premise that if you succeed, then you’ll be happy. And unfortunately, we are inheriting it from previous generations and sending it to the next generation, perpetuating this misunderstanding. Think about the following scenario similar to your experience in Beverly Hills. So imagine a person whose dream it is to become a movie star and they leave their home and they move to Hollywood for years and years. They wait while they wait tables and they’re unhappy, but they’re driven by the belief that when they make it, when they become a star, then they’ll be happy. And they go through audition after audition, after audition rejection, after rejection, until finally they get a call back and they get a yes, and they make a movie and they become an overnight sensation. Their dream came true. Suddenly they’re famous. People recognize them, they’re wanted, they’re desired. They make a lot of money. They can buy whatever car home thing that they want and they’re truly genuinely happy. And they said, finally, all those years of misery paid off, and now I can live happily ever after, just like the protagonist in the movie I just made. But then three months go by or six months go by, and suddenly they go back to where they were before. They’re not that happy. They don’t understand why, because they did everything. I mean, they checked the boxes that they believed would make them happy.

So they are going back to where they were before and it’s actually worse than before. Why? Because before what they had was the belief illusion, but it was still a belief that when they make it, they’ll be happy. So there was hope there. Now they no longer have that because they realize that there is no there there. So you take away hope and now they’re in trouble because you know what the difference is between sadness and depression? The difference between sadness and depression is that depression is sadness without hope. I mentioned earlier sadness is a natural and pervasive human emotion. We experience it 10 times a day. So what? As it comes, so it goes, but depression kicks in when the sadness is devoid of hope. And that’s exactly where they are. And they ask themselves, what am I going to do now? Where am I going to find happiness?

Happiness must be elusive. I can find it nowhere. So they look for happiness outside of reality. The very reality that let them down what’s outside of reality. And think about it. One place outside of reality to exit reality is through alcohol. That’s why you find so many celebrities, successful people who are struggling with alcohol. Another way is drug use of exiting, temporarily exiting reality. And the ultimate tragic way of exiting reality, of course, is suicide, which is why you find disproportionate numbers of celebrities taking that route. Why? Because they have fulfilled the prescription that was provided them, that society provides us for finding happiness. And they realize that that’s not the way, and that is the tragedy. Again, this is not just a mental model, which is false, but so what? This is a tragic mental model that is controlling the lives of millions and billions of people. And again, from generation to generation. And the sooner we as individuals in a society can rid ourselves of this model, the better. For me personally, this was probably the most important element of my journey towards becoming happier. Again, not happy because happiness resides on a continuum, but happier.

Shay Yeah, it’s so important. You talk about this too, and there’s research done on this, which is what it’s based on, but people who win the lottery or also people on the flip side who become paralyzed, and that there’s for people who win the lottery, a spike in happiness for people who become paralyzed, a drop in happiness. But then what you start to see is just give it a little time and people tend to go back to a level of what they’ve sustained, a sustained level. And I think there’s some things I love this idea of you’re designing your life in a way that if you won the lottery very little would actually change. I think that’s just a beautiful construct for how to design a life that you’ve basically got all the tenets in place, that SPIRE model is working well for you, so that if you won the lottery, not much would actually shift because you’ve already got the core elements in place.

But conceptually, like you said, this idea isn’t very well understood. And I certainly see we have a culture that through many different forms of media, is so deeply embedded in these ideas of externalized happiness. And then this concept that you described so eloquently, if I get the fame or the money or the power, then I will be happy. And then you get it, and then you feel even worse. And then like you said, you described it so beautifully, then you become addicted, or because you’re trying to escape reality. And it’s like we got to pivot that so that people are aware of this sort of catch trap that you can fall into very easily in our culture.

Tal I described this process as the arrival fallacy.

Shay Right.

Tal What is the arrival fallacy? The arrival fallacy is the, again, belief, false belief, the illusion that when we arrive, when we get there to that peak of that mountain, to that house, to that bank account, to that partner, to that picture, perfect life, then we’ll be happy. And it’s a fallacy because it’s simply not the case. And again, the sooner we get rid of that fallacy, the better. You talked about designing your life. One of my favorite thought experiments, again, we do it in our classes as an exercise, which I urge our listeners to try out, is what I’ve come to call the spell of anonymity exercise. So here it goes. Imagine that a spell of anonymity has been cast on you. From now on and for the rest of your life, no one will know what you do. No one will know how great your podcast is. No one will know how great a book you wrote. No one will know how much money you made. No one will know how many people you’ve helped and what a difference you’ve made and how good you are in whatever. Under the spell of anonymity, where no one knows what you do, where only you know what you do. In such a world, what would you do? What kind of life would you lead? Now, this thought experiment, and again, reflecting on it, writing on it, can really help us design our authentic life, the meaningful life. Now, we may come up with ideas and say, okay, I’m going to just continue exactly as I am. Or we may come up with ideas that are very different from the way we live and yet decide to continue living the way we live because we’re not prepared to pay the price or we may change our lives slightly or radically, based on this exercise, regardless the oracle of Delphi told us know thyself. So regardless, this will help us know ourselves better. And we know that with self-awareness comes a deeper sense of being, of existence. And in the long term, a happier, more fulfilled life.

Shay So Tal, one of the challenge questions that you have for yourself around happiness is how do we attain lasting change? And I know that you’re actually working on a new book on this topic of how do we attain lasting change? And as you’re delving into that question, I’m sure as you’re working on this book, you’re thinking a lot about what comprises our capacity to create lasting change. And I’m interested in what are some of the ideas that are coming to you as you’re engaging with that process?

Tal Yeah so in thinking about that, I went back and looked at the work of Aristotle, who wrote a lot about habits or the work of Confucius, who thousands of years ago wrote about rituals because the answer resides there. So let me just share a quick example that I think captures the problem or the challenge when it comes to change. So if I asked you a question or anyone for that matter, the following question, tell me, do you prefer or would you like to appreciate your loved ones or the good things in your life, or would you rather take them for granted? Now, I don’t think anyone would say the latter, of course I would agree. No one would say, okay, I’ve appreciated my loved ones enough time to ignore them a little bit and take them for granted. So while we all know that appreciation is important, while we would all advocate for it for ourselves and for others, it’s still a fact, an empirical fact that most people, most of the time take their loved ones or the good things in their lives for granted. When they do not? When these things are somehow in danger, when we lose someone or there is an illness that threatens to take that person away or some danger looming.

So while we know that appreciation is important, expressing appreciation or being appreciative is not as common. In other words, there is a knowing-doing gap. To know the good, is not necessarily to do the good.

So how do we bridge the gap between knowing and doing so that we appreciate as much as we know appreciation is important. And the answer to this is a very simple one. We create reminders we remind ourselves to appreciate, and we don’t just remind ourselves once or twice. We remind ourselves repeatedly of whatever it is that we want to do to become the better version of ourselves. And after we remind ourselves repeatedly, that’s when we create rituals, habits, automatic behaviors that are second nature to us. So this is where we get to the three Rs of change, reminders, repetition and rituals. Remind ourselves of what it is that we ought to do to become that better version of ourselves. Repeat it again and again. And through repetition, it actually becomes a deeply embedded neural pathway that defines a ritual where it’s automatic.

Shay So one of the guests that we’ve had on the show is Michael Amster, who’s the co-author of the book, the Power of Awe. And this makes me wonder if in your research for your upcoming book, if you’re looking at the whole field of awe and what they’re finding from some of those studies because, and he’s a fascinating man, that was an interesting interview because he talked about he was a long time, that has been a long time meditator and could get into these profound states through extensive practice of meditation. But he saw the practice of awe was like this incredible shortcut to getting him into these states kind of altered states of consciousness that were very positive, that elicited these in incredibly intense, powerful, positive states within his being. And so, yeah, I’m very curious in that idea of how we create lasting change around happiness is some of it about training in getting into these sort of states of consciousness that you can get into through awe, you can get into through gratitude practices as you’re discussing, through ritual, through repetition, et cetera. How do you train in getting yourself there?

And I’ve talked to other individuals about this too, another gentleman who’s done a lot of research with people that have that live in these states like the Dalai Lama or people who have pretty high peak experiences frequently. And the other thing I really learned about that because interviewed people like Mother Teresa and really neat people and found that there is a unique imprint to it too, that we don’t all get there the same way, which I think is fascinating how we bring ourselves into a state of awe or gratitude or just a high, highly positive state of, well inner wellbeing and peace. We don’t all get there exactly the same way. So I’m very curious of as you’re exploring this concept of lasting happiness and the practices that get you there, what you’re learning also at that me-search level, I guess using your language.

Tal Yeah, that’s a great question, Shay, because what you do find among these individuals that you mentioned, whether it’s Mother Teresa, whether it’s the Dalai Lama or meditators in general, is repetition doing these activities over and over again. Mother Teresa said that not all of us can do great things, but we can do small things with great love. And what she’s suggesting here is that small things we can do every day, lending our ear or smiling at someone or helping a person, this is something we can do day in and day out. Small things with great love. And when you do it over and over again, and this is going back all the way to Aristotle, you become it. You become a loving person, you become a kind person, a good person through that activity. And this is why I’m a psychologist, and yet I strongly believe that what is more important than how we feel is what we do.

And the nice thing is that if we do it again and again, we’re actually affecting how we feel. So experiencing awe or kindness or gratitude once, twice, even seven times is nice, but it won’t make a deep difference. But experiencing it day in and day out, experiencing love and gratitude and kindness and joy, appreciation, experiencing these things, even on a small scale day in and day out, that actually changes us and it changes us from within. So it’s the external that affects the internal. There’s a wonderful work being done by Matthieu Ricard who’s considered by many based on brain research, on scanning his brain considered by many to be the happiest person in the world. And I’ve had the privilege of meeting him a few times, and I don’t doubt that research, he is indeed happy and his happiness is contagious. And one of the things that he talks about, he says, when we think about acquiring any skill, whether it’s the skill of playing the piano or playing tennis, we would never say, okay, do it for 30 minutes tomorrow and then you’ll become a pianist.

No, you do a day in and day out, and then you become a better and better pianist over time. He takes work, he takes effort, and he says, why is internal work any different? Why is striving for happiness any different than striving to become a better musician or a better athlete? We need to practice, so we need to set up the reminders so that we do it repeatedly day in and day out. And that’s how we create the rituals, the automatic, deeply embedded neural pathways that determine our happiness levels, that determine how appreciative we are of life that determine how much awe we experience, how kind we are, and so on.

Shay Yeah, so well said. I want to talk a little bit about the idea of the psychological immune system. And I know that one of your mentors, Nathaniel Brandon, put forward the idea of the psychological immune system. And I’ve heard you say that the science of happiness strengthens our psychological immune system. So let’s talk a little bit about what the psychological immune system is.

Tal So when you think about the field of happiness studies, as I’ve mentioned before, it’s not about taking you to a place where you no longer experience sadness or anger or frustration or anxiety. Rather, what it does is it strengthens your psychological immune system. Now, think about it. What does a strong immune system mean? It doesn’t mean that we don’t get sick. It simply means that we get sick less often, and when we do get sick, we recover more promptly. So I experienced sadness just as I did 20 year or 30 years ago when I started on this journey. The difference today is that it does happen less often than it did then. And when I experience sadness, it goes away more promptly. Why? For example, because I don’t fight it. I don’t resist it. I give myself the permission to be human. Why? Because I exercise more regularly. Why? Because I don’t kid myself on telling you, well, when you succeed next, then you’re going to become happier. Because I pursue happiness indirectly day in and day out. So I’m still experiencing the disease of sadness or the anxiety, only less of it because my psychological immune system is stronger. And the key is to understand that we can strengthen our psychological immune system indefinitely throughout our life. It’s a lifelong journey, a journey that ends when life ends.

Shay And I’m so glad you brought in that other idea that you talk about in the book of “Permission to be Human”, that we have to give ourselves permission to feel our feelings in the moment, and that it’s actually very counterproductive to happiness, not to allow that, right, not to give ourselves permission to be human. And I know you’ve shared with me when you experienced the loss of one of your best friends, that you turned to a mentor and a dear friend, and that what they offered in that moment, it sounded to me very much like permission for you to be human that helped you to get through something so hard. So if there’s any part of what you learned in that moment that you want to share with our listeners, we would be open to hearing it.

 Tal So on December 19th, 1997, I lost my best friend in the whole world. Her name is Bonnie. She died in a plane crash. I was living in Singapore at the time. She was on her way to see me from Indonesia and her plane crashed and she and over a hundred passengers and staff died. And I was in obviously devastated. I mean that’s an understatement, meant and felt completely lost. I was 27 at the time, and the first person I called was my mentor teacher, Nathaniel Brandon, who also coined the term psychological immune system. And I called him up for two reasons. First of all, he had met Bonnie, so he knew her, he knew us. And he also, when he was younger, a little bit older than I was at that time, lost his partner in a freak drowning accident and had written about it extensively. So I called him up and I was bawling on the call, and he initially didn’t know what I was talking about, was of course very much taken aback.

And he said to me, the following, after he let me cry for a while. He said to me the following, he said, “Tal, what I’m going to tell you now is not going to make sense at this point, but just hear me out”. He said, “Over the next few months, you are going to go through hell. And then slowly, gradually things are going to get better emotionally, you are going get through it, you’re going to get over it, because we all do. Because if we hadn’t, then God help us all”. And these words through the darkest period, were a ray of life, a bit of hope, if you will. And what he was saying essentially are two things. First of all, give yourself the permission to be human, go through hell. Going back to Kirsten Neff, the only way out is through, and we know it from research.

The people who experience loss, who experience the deep sadness of it, who go through the motion and emotions thereof, actually are more likely to emerge stronger to experience that anti- fragility growth that we talked about. So he gave me that permission, encouraged me in fact, to go through the hell that I was going through, didn’t say, be strong, you can do it. You’ll emerge stronger. He didn’t say these things, he just said “Go through hell”. And then he also depicted that light at the end of the tunnel. A little bit of hope that is that you’ll get over it. We all do, because if we hadn’t, then God help us all. Essentially saying, we have a strong immune system, we recover. He didn’t use these words, but he said, we have the capacity for antifragility, for resilience, or maybe even resilience 2.0. And simply by knowing that, and by hearing that from my mentor, a role model that was more helpful than I can ever describe,

Shay And it’s very much like you said too, just the idea of knowing about post-traumatic growth allows you to be able to do that, right? If you don’t even know that that’s a thing, you don’t know that that’s a thing. And so even the hope that he offered to you helps you to know that that’s a thing you can rise to. So yeah, the mind is so important in how we heal. Which leads me to what I want to ask you next. Through this experience or other experiences that you’ve had in your life, what do you think you have personally? This is kind of more from the me-search kind of side of it in when you reflect internally, what have you personally learned about what healing is?

Tal The word health, the root of it, the Latin root is the word whole, whole, WH whole. And what I’ve learned through learning as well, but even more so through a personal experience, is that health is about becoming whole. And what does that mean? It means embracing it all. It means embracing the sadness and the joy. It means embracing the errors, the mistakes, the failure, as well as the achievement and the successes. It means embracing other people. No person is an island unto him or herself. So it’s about embracing past and present ancient and modern research and science and art, east and west.

One of the exercises that I did in one of the workshops that I attended years ago was the teacher asked us to think of a metaphor that best captures our personal vision as leaders was a leadership workshop. So how do you see yourself or how do you want to see yourself as a leader? And some people talked about, I’m a conductor. Someone in the workshop said, I see myself as a butterfly or as a gardener. Well, the metaphor that up for me then and hasn’t changed since is what I would like to become more than anything on a personal level. And as a teacher is a bridge builder. So to create that ‘whole’, to bridge the ancient and the modern, the sad and the joyful, psychology and philosophy. So whether it’s interdisciplinary, whether it’s inter-emotionality, whether it’s internationally in terms of cultures, this attaining this ‘whole’ for me is the ultimate expression and generator, both an expression and a generator of healing.

Shay And it’s so perfect because that’s also what you’re doing in the field of academia. So you’ve developed master’s level program in happiness. I know you’re also working on, as I understand it, the development of a PhD program. So I want to give you an opportunity because bridge building, right? That’s saying like, wait a minute, how is this whole field of happiness not defined in our academic institutions as a degree that you could achieve either a master’s or PhD, et cetera. And so you’re creating these interesting both certificate programs. And so tell our listeners about what you’re doing to be that bridge builder in academia.

Tal Yeah. So about eight or nine years ago, a question came to mind, which I dunno how it didn’t come to mind 30 years ago, but for each, there is a time and a place. The question that came to mind is how is it that there is a field of studies for psychology, which is what I had been doing, or history or business or geography or medicine or art. How is there a field for all these disciplines, but not so for happiness? Yeah, there is a positive psychology, but that’s just the psychology of happiness. What about what philosophers, again, like Aristotle and Lao Tzu and Helen Keller had to say about happiness.

What about what authors in literature like Mary Ann Evans, like Jane Austen, like Chino had to say about happiness? What about what film or religion has to say about happiness? Why isn’t there? I asked myself a field or an interdisciplinary field of studies that focuses on how we can attain higher levels of wellbeing.

And I resolved then with my colleagues to help create such a field. So we started off with a certificate in happiness studies that was so to speak, the low hanging fruit and it’s still running. And we have thousands of students from, I think as of yesterday, 93 countries who are attending this year long program. And two years ago with Centenary University, we launched the world’s first master’s degree in happiness studies that looks at the SPIRE elements; spiritual, physical, intellectual, relational and emotional wellbeing through the lens of psychology, and philosophy, and theology, and economics, and neuroscience, and film, and poetry, and helps our students attain higher levels of happiness and no less important, helps them help others, whether it’s their employees, if they’re managers, whether it’s their children or family members, whether it’s their coachees or clients, if there are therapists. And this is what I’m spending most of my time and energy on; creating these programs, improving them. And now as you mentioned, working also on a PhD in happiness studies. Why? Because what I’d love to see is a few years from now, just like there are departments or schools of psychology in multiple universities to have departments or schools of happiness studies in multiple universities throughout the world, we need that.

Shay What a wonderful contribution that would be, right? I think we do need it. And I’m so grateful that you’re working on that. I’m so grateful. Is there anything else in our conversation and this discussion around happiness and this massive body of work that you’ve been working on for many years that we didn’t get a chance to touch on, that you feel is important that you want to end with?

Tal Yeah, Shay. There are certain experiences that we all have that are seminal that shift the needle or take us, divert us from our straight and narrow. And in hindsight, they are the experiences that create us. Well, one such experience I’d like to share with you. So the day after my class became the largest course at Harvard, there was an article written about the class in the Boston Globe. And this was the first time when it was made public, so to speak. And that was of course a special and exciting day. Again led to a spike in happiness. Not to long-term happiness. But what moved me most that day was that I received an email from Professor Martin Seligman, the founder of the field of positive psychology, who has been and still is a mentor and a role model to me. And in his email he said, oh, this is great what you’re doing for positive psychology. Congratulations. If you happen to be in Philadelphia anytime soon would be great to meet. Shay, you won’t believe it. I happened to be in Philadelphia. Two days later I created that happened to be of course, of course I took a train from Boston to Philadelphia and I did meet Martin Seligman. And we were sitting in his home. And of course I was so overwhelmed and starstruck, I didn’t talk much. But I so enjoyed listening to him. And one of the things that he said to me was the following, he said, you know what? The biggest problem in psychology is today. And I said, what? Immediately taking out my notebook that I always have on me. He said, the biggest problem with psychology today is that we focus too much on neck up. Where so much of what happens to us is neck down. And hearing about it for Martin Seligman was especially meaningful.

Why? Because of who he is, of course, the founder of, or one of the founders of cognitive psychology, one of the founders of positive psychology, but specifically because of the former cognitive psychology, what’s cognitive neck up? And him saying, pointing out that we haven’t been focusing enough on neck down means that he thought about it a lot. And I heard that as a call because I’d always been attracted to the mind-body connection. I’d already at that time been doing yoga and meditation and interested in acupressure and massage, taking courses in all these. But this in a sense, I felt didn’t just give me permission, but pushed me along to do more in this area. And I have been doing a lot more in this area. And this is another example of the important bridge building that must take place, mind and body. And in our culture in the West, there is not enough of that. And of course, this is exactly what you are doing day in and day out and what you are promoting. So very important.

Shay You made me think, because I recently interviewed Dr. Ellen Langer, who has been at Harvard for many years, and she has a whole theory on this mind-body unity theory. That’s about how there’s no separation, that we’ve created a separation that doesn’t exist. And then you can go down so many interesting rabbit holes, but that are fascinating around, well then how is that operationally in our system? And my hunch is it’s an energetic model, not a biomechanical model in the way we think of it. But yeah, that non-separation of mind and body is critically important. But Tal, I could talk to you forever. However, I want to be respectful of our time. And so something just want to share in gratitude is that probably when I think in my own life, my life purpose as I identify it, is to accompany people into their darkest moments and to bring light, to reveal that even in the deepest suffering, there is light, there is hope, there is a way through very much like what your dear mentor and friend said to you when your best friend died, that you’re not stuck in that point of pain endlessly.

And I feel like your work is creating a foundation upon which people like myself and many, many others that are doing work in domains of tremendous suffering. It’s giving us more tools and understanding that we can work with to apply in those most challenging of situations. So I just want to extend my appreciation for the body of work that you’ve done and for the body of work that you’re continuing to develop with your coming PhD program and the new books that will be on the horizon, I’m sure.

Tal Thank you very much and thank you deeply for the work that you’re doing because it’s the message that you are communicating day in, day out, and even more so. The work that you’re doing with individuals and groups is so important, so meaningful. And as we know, our world needs this healing. Our world, our fragmented world needs to become more whole.

Shay Yeah, so true. Thank you. Thank you so much.

Tal Thank you.

Conclusion We hope you enjoyed this episode of The Conversations on Healing Podcast. If you haven’t yet, please go to Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your preferred podcast platform and subscribe, rate, and review this podcast, it helps so you won’t miss an episode. See you next time.