Dr. Dorianne Cara Weil
Post Traumatic Growth and the Science of Happiness

Dorianne Cara Weil and Justin Cohen | Post Traumatic Growth and the Science of Happiness | 06.02.22

- Okay, Justin, thank you very, very much. It’s great to have everybody on board. I see that your people are coming in. Hi, Dori. Good morning.

• Hello, good evening.

• Good morning, hi, Justin. It’s an overcast morning here in, no, it’s midday in LA so here we are. So very, very warm welcome, welcome to everybody, and a very, very warm welcome back to our psychologist Dori Weil, who you’ve all met before. So I’m not going to do a full introduction of Dori again, but I just want to remind you of the quote from Nelson Mandela who said, “I don’t know if you’re aware of the hope and inspiration you offer Dori and the difference you make to so many lives. Dori, thank you for the great contribution you make to building our nation.” And Dori, thank you too, that comes from Nelson Mandela. And I wanted to say to you, thank you too for being such a great friend and contributor to Lockdown University. Justin Cohen, a very, very warm welcome to you, Justin is a new presenter on Lockdown University. He is a best selling author and global speaker along with Harvard professor Matt Killingsworth, he was the positive psychology expert on the global Joy Takes You Further Happiness Campaign. Justin hosted Gurus on a CNBS Africa where he interviewed some of the world’s leading experts on success. He’s a speaker, he is a speaker hall of fame inductee and was the host and coach for MS, the single wives. Justin is a doctoral candidate at Middlesex University in human transformation. Thank you very much. I’m sorry, I had a little bit difficulty reading that and I’m just trying to juggle things. So Justin, we’ve so excited to have you today in conversation with Dori.

• So can I just say, when you said that Justin is a doctoral candidate, Justin is just about really on the brink of receiving his awaited and erstwhile doctorates. And so congratulations to you for that. I mean, you’ve really done some transformational work. It’s just great to have you with us. So hello everybody. And I know that there are a lot of friends and people that I know out there want to say hello from a very cold South Africa. It’s freezing. Winter has come, you know, quite quickly and with a bit of a vengeance. But I’m sitting here talking to you and feeling very warm about what we are going to be talking about tonight because actually we are going to be essentially talking about the science of happiness. And it was just really a pleasure to invite, Justin and I have shared many platforms over the years in the media, television, radio, on stage. And just so lucky that you were available to do this because I always call Justin a PDRG. He doesn’t even know that I call him that. We also talking about PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder, but Justin is a personal development research guru and that’s my acronym for you because you are one of the things that I love in talking with Justin and in listening to him is that he is so versed in really in-depth research and in science, which informs what he says, which gives it gravitas and a great deal of credibility. And I think that that’s something that really differentiates you in an academic sense as well from the kind of run of the mill either inspirational, motivational speakers. And I appreciate that side of it very much.

I don’t know how you remember all the research that you talk about. So just to start, I’ve been on this platform before, right at the beginning of the pandemic, I think was the first time, towards the beginning of Lockdown University, and we spoke about the pandemic and the uncertainty that was overtaking the world. And as certain doctors that I was working with described, they said, “this is going to be the differentiator between this and most other crises or devastating experiences that we’ve had to deal with. The uncertainty, we are not sure how long, we are not sure what it is, we are not sure how to treat it. There are so many, we have to step in and be families for people where we’ve never had to play that role before. And so there was a great deal of that and that kind of panic and what we have referred to ever since was that in fact we not only sort of slightly emerging out of a major health crisis, but also there’s been a mental health pandemic in the world. The explosion of anxiety and depression has been just been spilling over and really seen everywhere. And the fear about that, Justin and everybody, is that we are going to be landed up with a huge pop, huge, huge numbers of people suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. So the thing is, is this true? Is it going to be like that? And of course if it is, how do we deal with it?

So I just want to say a couple of words about that first. And that is that actually we believing that it isn’t as going to be as prevalent as people anticipated with post-traumatic stress in the beginning. And one of the reasons of it is that there’s been so much, much more openness and destigmatization of mental health and talk about mental health. That people in some way and in some ways may be even too much interestingly enough, have been given permission to recognise what they’re going through, to name it, in order to tame it, to accept a little bit more of the fact that they’re members of the human race and vulnerable, not being weak, but being authentic. And there’ve been all of these platforms and media focus on mental health. And when I say a bit too much, there has been some thought the people are capitalising a bit on it to in a way. Celebrities, sports people and so on, were very openly talking about their mental health challenges in a really recognised and positive way but I’ve been in companies with where a certain, where the leaders and the managers of the company say, "you know, every time somebody wants to take a day off these days they’re saying, I’ve got mental health problems and actually jumping on the bandwagon.”

I think that that doesn’t dismiss the fact that these problems are very, very real and have to be dealt with. So there could be a fear, but if you have leaned into it, if you’ve owned the story, you prevent the story to a large extent from owning you and manifesting as PTSD, which means that it interferes with your life and that some of the feelings that were originally elicited have prevailed and can be triggered by certain external and internal triggering factors such that it interferes with your life and is sustained. That’s a kind of very, very broad definition of it. And so what we wanting in the prevention of it is the recognition of it, the working, the kind of only way out is in with PTSD. And if you’ve done the journey, you may be able to do a lot together with some support in preventing an inevitable kind of destination. So what we are saying is, okay, that’s what we are not doing a lot about post-traumatic stress. Now that’s sort of in a nutshell, but Justin, as you and I have been talking about, there’s been something else that’s emerged from the pandemic and that’s been post-traumatic growth. And it’s something that a lot of people haven’t initially focused on, but when we say to people, what have been the major effects of the pandemic, lot of them will talk about mental health issues, challenges, losses, whether they’re financial, whether they’re people, whether it’s losses of connection or certain, you know, a degree of self-confidence.

But people are also saying, you know, there’s been a priority shift. There’ve been lessons. Nobody said, thank you Lord for this wonderful learning opportunity. But people are saying, I’m thinking about things differently. There’s a revaluing of relationships and the importance of connection, maybe even people who you’ve lived with for a long time, but who were kind of just there and who’ve stuck with you and seen you through a hard time and vice versa. One guy said to me the other day, you know, “one thing that I learned is that they’re not just a few short people in my house. They’re called children and I’m going to ever value that and I’m going to invest much more time in the priority, for me, of being a father” and people who have learned things about gratitude and the kind of a humility perhaps that the rug can be pulled out from under you in a heartbeat that’s precipitated saying, you know what, the future is now, it’s today, not tomorrow. And the practising of a little bit of self-compassion. So these kind of things of being more of member of a human race, being more patient, wanting to be more connected, focusing more on other things, recognising that, you know, life isn’t forever. Those kind of things have been learned. And so Justin, I want to introduce you now because my question is how do you not let those lessons leave you? How do you not let suffering go to waste in a way? And how can those lessons be sustained such that they influence your present and your future positively?

So here we are talking about being fulfilled and happy, integrating some lessons of the pandemic that I’ve just highlighted, but also asking you, why do you say that there’s a science of happiness when everyone thinks of it as a state, not only of mind, but of heart, an emotional state. And is there anything that we can do to sustain realisations and promote our own happiness?

• Hmm, all right, well let’s get stuck in there. We got some nice challenging questions to get round there. I mean, firstly, Dori, you know, yeah, I mean it’s been a crazy couple of years. You know, global epidemic, economic meltdown, no more shaking hands. Some people led to the virus, for others that was running out of toilet paper. I mean, it’s been pretty crazy out there. But you know, like many of us, I’ve lost loved ones to this virus, but the best thing that ever happened to David was Goliath. And if Covid was Goliath, boy did the world become David, right? I mean, we developed a vaccine in under a year. The shortest that ever taken was five years. And the tech in this vaccine is predicted to become a cure for forms of cancer. We got to go to work without going to work, that raised our productivity, our efficiency. We got to spend more time with family. You decide how you feel about that last one. You know, there were so many dividends from this and as much as this as an epidemic, you know, let’s just compare it. We call this a counter negative to the last epidemic. The Spanish flu killed 60 million. The bubonic plague killed two-thirds of Europe. You know, has killed 6 million. We wish that it hadn’t killed that much, but you know, back then they never had Netflix and they never had Lockdown University.

And so adversity is, you know, the way that life educates us. Pain is what really produces the kind of innovation. What Covid has done is it’s put rocket boosters on the future. And the reason that I’m dwelling on this, this isn’t all about Covid this evening, is because I think it’s a very clear example of how instructive challenge can be. You know, as the Dalai Lama says, “when you lose, don’t lose the lesson,” right? And there are phenomenal lessons. And by the way, we could do the same thing about what is going on in Ukraine right now. Now, again, that’s not to diminish the suffering, the immense suffering, but it is clear that you were talking about post-traumatic growth. We know that people, and by the way, I think this is also very important, Dori, is that when people think about trauma, they often think that you will automatically have PTSD post-traumatic stress disorder, right? Which are the symptoms of trauma, could be flashbacks or intense anxiety. In fact, only 20% of people on average, 20 to 25% of people, will develop PTSD symptoms. And so I think we need to be careful about not creating a kind of contagion effect, right? Instead of setting up an expectation that one will, you know, experience PTSD because in fact it’s a minority.

That’s not to say that even people who don’t have PTSD might not have, you know, some negative emotional effects, right? But the PTG, that post traumatic growth, these are people who come out of an adversity, come out not without some difficulty, but emerge often saying, and we first started seeing the evidence of this actually was post 911, where people started saying, you know what, I actually feel great appreciation of life, you know, because we came so close to losing it. My relationships are stronger. But the people who go to PTTG, there are certain attributes and one of them is optimism, right? That positive expectation that things will be okay if not now, if not next week, if not next month. You know, this is not naive optimism, that it’s all going to be okay. This is not expecting to get the best of everything. It’s seeing the best in everything that you get, right? Even if you’re not getting that straight away, right? So the people who have that optimistic vision of a better tomorrow, however deep into the distant future that might be, those are the ones who have, you know, far less anxiety and could be described as being in a state of PTG.

• So can I just say something about that, ‘cause I want to get to the components of what we can do, if anything, to help promote and create sustainability of these lessons and what we kind of loosely label as happiness. Because I know that you’ve done and are very well versed in the research all about that. You know, I just want to make a distinction quickly 'cause you’ve brought it up about optimism and positivity. And I think that there’s a very big distinction. Optimism is hope for the future. It’s almost believing in a realistic way. We need cautious optimism. We read realistic optimism, you know, based on reality. But it’s like, I know that I’m not going to remain like this forever because I’m still in touch with what I was. And I believe that there is light at the end of the tunnel that is not necessarily the lights of an oncoming train. In other words, this too shall pass. And it’s that kind of belief that we know sustained people like Viktor Frankl through the concentration, you know, when he stood up and addressed a whole lot of people, he said, “I’ve never met you before. I’ve never seen you before, but in my dreams I said these words a thousand times and I know that I had to tell the story of the Holocaust,” and I happened to be in that audience, which was a great privilege many, many years ago, many years ago.

Positivity, on the other hand, can be blind, it can be unrealistic, and it can also have a negative effect. And I do want to say that because, you know, at the beginning of the pandemic, it was ridiculous. After the end of every email and the end of every WhatsApp, it always ended with stay positive or be positive and there were so many people who could not relate to that. They couldn’t see the dolphin swimming in the canals of Venice, or they didn’t really mind if the skies were clearer and you could see many thousands of more birds. They knew what they were going through and it made them feel even more inadequate because their experience wasn’t positive and they needed the permission to own what they were feeling like. And that’s when we were saying, seeing that there were psychological effects, emotional effects, behavioural effects and physical effects, migraine headaches, lower back pain, sleep disturbances, appetite problems, excessive frustration, more aggression, definitely more 'cause what they were feeling on the inside, they weren’t able to express on the outside maybe for fear of judgement or for fear of losing it. So for optimism, very important, Positivity if it’s real, not meaning that I’m in denial of what I’m talking about. So what we, that’s a very, very important distinction, but what we want to hear from you is what the research says about any possibility of not only reacting to external circumstances, but being able to control our level of wellbeing and fulfilment in a better way.

• Absolutely and now you’re getting me all excited 'cause this is, to me, you know, what more is there, right? Raising the emotional wellbeing, you know, 'cause we can have everything else. And by the way, we live in the most unprecedented comforts and safety in the history of humankind. And I know that we’ve just come out of an epidemic. But if we look overall, Bill Gates has marshalled incredible body of research, you know, reductions in childhood mortality, reductions in poverty, but we’ve also seen these increases in anxiety and depression and that tells you that it’s got less to do with what’s going on out there and more to do with what’s going on in here. And we are going to have a look at why it is that we find ourselves. But let’s first just set the scene here because when it comes to happiness, it’s useful to think of each one of us as having a baseline level of happiness, right? And that baseline will vary depending on what happens to us. Now Sonya Labamosku has done a lot of this research from California University. She would say that about 50% of our happiness is genetic. So if you’re unhappy, you can blame your parents for half of it. And that leaves the other 50%. Now, the other 50%.

• Wait, can I stop you for a minute? Can you blame your parents’ for half of it because of the kind of parents that they were, they were unhappy parents or because of their genes?

• Well great point and trust the psychologist, to point out that of course ‘cause then it becomes a lot more, right, because you’re talking about childhood upbringing as well. So I’m just talking about the genetic component. Of course, you fine.

• Okay, I’ll leave you with that, go on.

• No, good, good point, thank you. And I’m going to answer it indirectly, because let’s talk about the other 50%. Now, when people think of the other 50%, they would generally say life circumstances. You know, were you part of the lucky sperm club? What was that parenting about? What were those life circumstances? But according to “Mamurski,” only 10% of our emotional wellbeing actually has to do with life circumstances. And the other 40%, what I call the golden 40, well that’s within our control and that’s got to do with our thoughts and actions. Now again, you could say the thoughts and actions that you choose may also be somewhat genetically determined. And so when you actually start to parse this research, you know, you can get stuck in the weeds. But overall, I think it’s useful to think of this 40%, right, this particular sort of category, and that’s what I want to address in this session, right? What can we do to raise that baseline? What can we do? And as I like to say, happiness is spelled with five Ps because there are five principles, five practical things that we can all do to raise that baseline and the first one is physiology. You know, when we think about happiness, we think about, you know, this kind of ephemeral sort of mind vapour. But you know, the mind is connected to the brain. The brain is connected to the body. And you know, this is, what is so extraordinary is the effect of exercise. You know, you so firstly, when we look at drugs like Prozac or even an illegal drug like ecstasy or interestingly ecstasy MDMA, which will probably be legalised for therapeutic use, but that’s probably something for another one pass.

But the point is, what does MDMA and Prozac do? They activate serotonin, rats who exercise on a treadmill for 90 minutes, don’t ask me how they got them to do that. Maybe they put on a Jane Fonda video. These rats doubled their serotonin level, doubled their serotonin. We see research showing that if a depressed person gets into an exercise programme, they get on average as much benefit as if they take an SSRI, that’s a serotonin reuptake inhibitor drug like Prozac. Now, some of this research is controversial and I’m not, you know, against psychiatric drugs per se, I’m just saying that if we look at serotonin, which is one of the players, it is not the be all and end all, it’s one of the players. We see significant decreases when we sit still in front of our computers all day, which is actually why I have a standing desk and I would be standing ordinary tonight, but for all this morning, this afternoon, wherever you are in the world watching this. But that is actually one of the reasons why on the phone I pace up and down. I wish I don’t exercise for my body. Primarily I do exercise for my body, but primarily I do it for my mind. And so we really, you know, I think we’ve almost done ourselves a disservice by thinking of exercise purely in terms of losing weight say. It has enormous benefits, it changes how we feel. So that’s just one of the things. Now of course our time is a little bit limited, so perhaps we should move on to some of the other Ps. But I’m finding myself unable to watch just one more and breathing. And you’re thinking, Justin, how did I live this along without you?

• Justin, I’m just going to ask you something of this before you do this because you know, during the pandemic, which I did is work a lot with doctors on the frontline. And what they were saying is, you know, you talk about exercise and we know about the research probably as much as anyone else. But when you’re sitting there, you know, and you’ve got an emergency situation whatever and your head starts turning around, ruminating, catastrophizing, you start reacting, it comes out of the reactive primitive brain. And instead of being able to think properly and respond, it’s what if, what if, I dunno what to do? What if, what if, how do I calm myself? There’s no way that I’m going to lie down and do some pushups, you know, in that moment. And that’s when I know that I’ve heard you. We’ve spoken about this before where you say stop, but you know, you kind of see a big red stop sign. And that’s when the value of breathing can come into play. Not only when, but also in those very reactive moments, which is an immediate response that you can do. So tell us about the breathing.

• Absolutely, so let’s, I’m going to get to that. Let’s just talk a bit about stress. Stress is not the bad. Stress is just arousal, right? Stress is just right and you need a certain amount of stress around. Think of them as the same word. Think you need a certain amount of stress arousal to be alive, right? The Yerkes Dodson curve, it’s a pity we don’t have this, it’s a very simple curve. So I think that’s the y axis, X axis and it’s like that. And that’s performance. As we get more arousal, performance goes up, performance goes up. We need arousal, we need stress, it’s a beautiful thing, right? Then too much stress arousal and starts to go down. Now the brain is complex, but for our purpose, think of yourself as having two brains, exactly as you’ve said, lower brain, reptilian, high brain prefrontal neocortex. We’ve got creativity, focus, morality, all the things that we associate with being human. When we are in that hyper state, we are in fight or flight. Now we go to primitive brain, it’s all about lions coming at me. There’s no time to think, right? If you’re going to think about what to do here, you’re going to be that big cat’s dinner. It’s straight into, what did we say? When we lose our temper, we lose our higher brain. I need to go straight into fight or flight. It’s survival mode.

Now unfortunately, the brain doesn’t distinguish well between a physical threat like a lion or a car or an attacker and an emotional or social threat like a deadline, a work deadline or my boss who just frowned, right? And does that mean that, you know, I’ve got to, you know, I’ve got to, you know, watch out, you know, for another job. Right, or you know, he’s probably, you know, he’s probably just got a hemorrhoid, right, or there’s something else that’s going on that I know nothing about. But the brain will generally go to what’s wrong, right? And this is a critical point, Dori, this is a critical point. Your brain doesn’t care about happiness nearly as much as it cares about survival. And that is why you go to people and you say what’s wrong and you don’t say what’s right because the brain figures what’s right will take care of itself. What’s wrong could kill me. And yes, the brain can be a bit of a drama queen, right, because it overestimates threats. It overestimates threats because here’s the thing, right? Caveman, caveman ancestors, by the way, this is an operating system. This is a human operating system evolved to deal with a very different environment. The environment of our cavemen ancestors had to do two things. Number one, get lunch. Number two, avoid being lunch. If you failed at number two, you’d never get to enjoy number one again. And so there’s a fundamental algorithm underlying the human brain. Overestimate threat, right? Overestimate threat because that’s how you survive. It’s like an overreactive alarm detector, right?

Nine times out of 10, the alarm goes off. It’s unnecessary. It’s that one time that it save your life and that’s how the brain works. And this means, that’s why no matter how great your life is, it always this, you know, if it’s not your relationship, it’s your business, not your business it’s the money. It’s not the money, it’s the stain on the curtain. It’s the car, it’s something, right? Because the brain’s always going, what’s wrong, what’s wrong? We’re going to learn how to counteract that. We have to counteract it because if I came in and says it was great, then that was good. That was important. If this is, by the way, called an evolutionary mismatch. So we all understand an evolutionary mismatch in terms of sugar and fat. Our caveman ancestors had very little sugar and fat. They need lots of that stuff and so they craved it. We have an abundance of it, but we still have the same craving. And that’s why we have this obesity epidemic. Same evolutionary mismatch idea with threats. Back then, lots of threats, you needed to be hyperactive. Today, very little threat. We live into, most of us live into old age, right? So we got to take care of this operating system and we need to counteract some of that natural instinct.

• So the question is, how. Can you give us those tips along those keys that you were talking about.

• Absolutely, so when the line is there or the deadline, right, you will start to go into some hyperventilation, slow, short, sharp breaths 'cause that’s the best way to run away from a lion, okay? And so you’ll notice when you are anxious or stressed, you hyper aroused, performance down 'cause you’re in lower brain. What can you do right there and then? What can you do right there and then, down a shot? Why do we go for alcohol with stress? Because it activates a relaxant. The problem is alcohol does some other things and that’s why you often regret and you land up feeling worse. So we don’t want to do that. I mean, nothing wrong with the drink now again, right? But that’s why people are running to alcohol. Or by the way, anti-anxiety drugs, which are highly addictive and operate very similar to alcohol. So what can we do? We want to do belly breathing. So this is stress breathing. So think of stress, not a bad thing. Accelerator, too much accelerator, you need the break. How you put on the break, belly breathing, we call this diaphragmatic breathing. And if you want to try this Dori, and I really, I would encourage all you do this because research shows three of these breaths can actually put on the brake, reduce the arousal, and actually we see a shift of glucose, oxygen, nutrients, from the lower to the higher brain, literally making us smarter. Three of these.

So what is it? Hand on tummy. As you breathe in, tummy goes out. I know we do everything to keep our tummies in, which is why we’re not, we’re often stressed 'cause we’re just breathing in this hypervigilant state. So we want to breathe in. Tummy goes out, it expands like a balloon slightly displacing our internal organs. I’m just going to lower the computer so you can see, tummy goes out and we breathing, we go breathe out, tummy goes in, that’s diaphragmatic breathing. You don’t quite have it now, when you go to sleep tonight, when you lie down, you’ll do this naturally. Now when you breathe in, you feel more stressed or relaxed, a little bit more stressed, right? When you breathe out, you feel a little bit more relaxed. And so there’s a natural relaxant effect on the breath. So knowing this, we’re going to double the out breath. We’re going to breathe in on the count of two, tummy goes out and out on the count of four, but instead of just counting out on four, we’re going to count out on the word calm. We’re going to use a little bit of self hypnosis here to calm ourselves down. So here we go. Breathing in on two, out on calm. And in on two, out on calm. In on two, out on calm Now you’re feeling calmer, right?

But in the middle of a stressful situation, conflict with partner, bosses, whatever it is, you can’t exactly say, just hold on a second. I need to do my two four slow, deep, rhythmic belly breathing technique that I learned from Justin and Dori last night. What you can do is just slow down your breathing. So what we see is even if we can just slow down our breathing we are going, to some degree, deactivate the stress response, activate the relaxation response and activate the higher brain. So slow the breathing and yes, as little as three of these breaths and we see a significant difference in our physiology.

• So that is a huge difference when you’re in that kind of stress response. What we also talking about is generally, and I know that your other points are going to address this, raise your kind of sense of fulfilment and satisfaction. You know, generally you’ve given us something that you can do in a specific stressful moment and you’ve highlighted the importance of physical exercise, certainly in terms of the raising of certain neuro transmission for transmittance like serotonin. What, in terms of generally saying, I want the rest of my life to be the best of my life. I want to experience lessons, integrated and sustainable lessons through any adversity. I want to be able to handle my relationships better. I want to be able to, you spoke about handling some stress levels better. I want to be able to get deeply in touch, perhaps with my own inner drum beat and what I want and what is going to make me feel fulfilled rather than perhaps all the good, good, bad, right, wrong, should, shouldn’t, must, mustn’t.

I’ve found Justin, that people who are really only outer directed and not in touch with themselves very deeply and what is going to bring them that sense of personal fulfilment, you know, aren’t obviously are not as fulfilled. Sometimes people feel bad or indulgent. And what is interesting is, I know that you’ve often said that happier people, you know, actually serve others in a far better way. Which is why I sometimes say, listen, take care of your husband’s wife, take care of your children’s mother, which is kind of easier for people than to say take care of yourself. You can frame it in terms of what you are able to give to other people when you personally feel more happy and fulfilled. It’s not a selfish, self-indulgent thing at all. So perhaps you can talk about how you raise that kind of sense of fulfilment even when you’re not in.

• Firstly, I’m so glad you brought that up because I think people sometimes see happiness as an indulgence. You know, well that’s this thing and really, should I be taking my own happiness? Look, here’s what we know Dori, you know, most of our work, I think I speak for both of us, is in the business world, you know, and the Parnassus Workplace Fund, only invests in happy companies. It has a 7% higher return than average, right? So I would say to my clients, you know, if you’re not interested in happiness, you know, because you don’t like people, you know, be interested in happiness 'cause you like profit. Because you know, we can see a very happy people sell 56% more. They 31% more productive, 19% more accurate.

So there are these tremendous, and just ask yourself, how well can you sell, serve or lead when you’re depressed, frustrated, anxious and distressed? Have you noticed that when you are feeling good, you are doing good? Have you noticed that you become more compassionate? That you become kinder? Have you noticed that you know, people who are difficult, you know, difficult people, how happy do they look? You know, do they look like they’re having fun those difficult people? Hurt people, as they say hurt people, right? So your happiness sows innumerable benefits on the world. Now having said that, we need to be careful because we don’t want to, you know, I think this is what you’re alluding to at the start, and I know there’s this concept that’s doing the rounds of toxic happiness, right? Where we’ve got to be happy all, no, that’s not the case. And Dori, this brings me to our second P. I said there’re five Ps, the second.

• I wanted to know the how before you,

• Exactly, and that the how’s here. And you might not love this one 'cause you were dissing it a little bit at the start. But it is positivity. Now let me just be very clear. Barbara Frederickson, also wonderful, positive psychology expert at Yale, has found if you are positive all the time, you are either, you know, deranged, you’re in an asylum, you know, or you’re in heaven and that means you’re dead, right? Because it’s, that’s not life. So you cannot, so in fact, she’s come with a ratio and the ratio, if I’m not mistaken, it’s about one to seven, I think it’s one to seven of negative to positives. And you need those negatives. Those negatives are telling you there’s something wrong that needs attending to. It’s also the human experience, grief, sadness, anger, frustration but we’re not trying to do away with all of these. But you know, when people say to me, oh, you know, they bring up this debate, I say, look, telling, you know, giving people tools to be happier and saying that that’s going to, you know, erase the human experience is like telling, you know, an obese person that they shouldn’t drink diet coke because they’re going to become anorexic. You know, we are all so far from really raising that baseline. We are not talking about erasing the human experience. So as long as we’ve got that clear, let’s get to some of the practical here.

So, Dori, the positivity, you’re right. If it’s this idea that we have to be positive, no, that’s not helpful. But how do we rate, and I’ll tell you why this is so important, again, let’s go back to this human operating system. There are twice as many words in the English language to describe negative emotions as positive emotions, twice as many. Negative news activates much more of the brain than positive news. If you want to understand disinformation, fake news, what I believe is the greatest threat to human civilization today, understand it as to do with this brain. Fakebook and Insta Share, they make their money out of your eyeballs. And your eyeballs go to the negative way more than the positive and that’s why fake news, it’s a lot more exciting to hear about what’s wrong than what’s right 'cause remember, that brain is looking for threat, right, and that’s very important to understand. That’s why it often feels the world is a lot worse than it is because we’re being fed that negative stuff so that they can make money out of advertising. And I’m not saying that they’re all cynical. I think they have, they’re well-intentioned most of those, you know, the people who run these organisations, but they make money and that’s how you do that. So if we have, and Rick Hanson calls this a negativity bias, the brain is like Velcro for the negative and Teflon for the positive, right? Something bad happens, you talk about it, you think about it, you make it very else depressed about it. Something good happens.

Yeah, you’re happy very quickly. You forget about it. We are all like that, if you like that don’t, I used to think that was something wrong. I was teaching positivity, but I still have a fair amount of negativity. Then I understood it’s a human operating system. So with that in mind, how do we cultivate more positivity? Because we do know that if we cultivate, you know, realistic positivity, right, we’re still acknowledging the negatives when they’re there. We’re not in denial about them. Here’s a tool, two tools, and I want to share with you, Dori, firstly, I’m going to give you a way to boost your happiness more than winning the lottery. And that’s not particularly difficult if you just won the lottery now, I couldn’t compete with your excitement, but six months later, most people who win the lottery go back to the same emotional state they were in before they won the lottery. And you’re thinking, Justin, put me in that research and I’ll prove myself the exception. Here’s how I’ll prove that you will not be the exception. Are you still excited about your birthday presents from last year? No, right? You were excited, you’re not anymore, right? What happened?

You became habituated, psychologists called us the hedonic treadmill. It feels like you think if I get that promotion, if I get that raise, if I get that girl, if I get that guy, if I get that extra million dollars and yes, it boosts temporarily and then you go back to baseline, good news is when you don’t get the promotion, you lose the million dollars, you get a financial smack in the face as I did last year with the tech dip, you, it does go down, but it goes back to baseline. So it’s like all these things that happen, our lives shift us around baseline. What can we do?

• To raise the base.

• It’s going to sound like an episode of Oprah, but this comes from Robert Emmons, highly esteemed professor at Stanford University. A little thing called gratitude, a little thing called gratitude. And you know, this was Ben Franklin who is rich, he rejoices in his lot. It is not what we have, it is our appreciation of what we have and that is why money does not have the impact on well beyond middle class. We do not see the increases on emotional wellbeing. We simply don’t, by the way, some researchers start to contradict this, but as the psychologist Daniel Kahneman, whose actually won the Nobel Prize for economics, an incredible academic, has found that even that research, it’s present based. If you ask people when they’ve got money they say that they’re happier, but in the moment we don’t see any increases, right? So it’s remembered happiness and present happiness. So why, because we become desensitised. And so now you stay in five star hotels every day. You’re used to staying in five star hotels every day. It just doesn’t have the same impact, right? So gratitude, and this is what we can do right now, this is what I do.

I call, this is a micro habit by the way, research shows we much more likely to take on micro habits, small little habits rather than big habits. And here’s all the micro habits. When I switch off my lamp to go to bed at night, I focus on five things that I’m really grateful for that have happened that day. Now this is very important because that means it’s different things every day. You don’t want it to be a shopping list. Oh, I’m grateful for my health and my no, no every day. So when I go to bed tonight one of them will be, I was on Lockdown University with Dori, we got to talk about something that I’m so incredibly passionate about. I got to meet Wendy, I’ve heard so much about and got to share these ideas right? That is, so I’m enjoying this now, but when I go to bed tonight and I think about that, it’s going to put the smile on my face. By the way, you’ve got a problem with insomnia. Research shows this also helps in terms of falling asleep 'cause why can’t you fall asleep? You’re focusing on everything that’s wrong with your life, right? And so this is a way to focus on what’s right. So gratitude, bring it into your life. It is, psychologists have a real problem. They could not find almost anything in external world that’s sustainably increased happiness and yet gratitude does. And it’s not out there, it’s in here. You can do it starting now.

• It’s amazing and I just want to reinforce that because in fact, that was one of the things that actually almost led to the whole huge movement of positive psychology where, you know, what we were looking at is instead of the therapeutic psychology mode, which will always be in fashion because there’s always problems and people need to be as partner in becoming more functional just at the baseline function. So we’ve definitely got that, but also there’s been a huge movement looking at people who are not only really dysfunctional. How can you raise, how can you become, move from survival to thrival? What are the aspects that increase your feeling of wellbeing and happiness? Not necessarily in a therapeutic modality, but just in a kind of making yourself say, you know, whatever it is. But maybe the future is now, but we’ve got a limited time and I want to make it work in the, I want to squeeze the juice out of it in the best possible way. And certainly gratitude. And you’ve mentioned some of the research people who really can connect with that kind of sense of appreciation and gratitude certainly are doing at least one important thing to develop that.

• So let me add to that. And we are still talking about positivity here. There’s another one. And I want to just circle back to adversity. So, you know, this is life. You’re either in a problem, emerging from a problem, robotic, go into a problem. And you know, the reward for solving problems is, you know, you live your purpose hopefully to a greater degree. You stretch your problem solving muscles, you tend to become more successful. By the way, successful people solve problems. That’s what they do. And guess what happens once you do that? You get bigger problems to solve. And so this is actually the work that I’m doing with my doctorate at the moment is about, it’s these questions and I’m going to share one of them now about how we deal with challenge. So this process called the breakthrough, the five master question breakthrough coach and how we breakthrough challenge using positivity. So first we have to acknowledge this is what’s happened, right? You can’t change what you don’t acknowledge. Then we ask ourselves this question. And some of, you know, out there, you know, might think that this sounds a little crazy, but stay with me on this. The question is what is good about this? What is good about this?

Now I want to take a moment here because that question has been asked and answered about the Holocaust by Jews. So it does not mean that the Holocaust was a good thing. And I’m not saying whatever challenge you’re facing in your life right now is a good thing but I’m saying if we can answer that question about the genocide, we can all answer that question. Maybe not immediately, but I want to really encourage you to answer this question. And here’s how we can answer it. What can I learn from this? How can I grow from this? How can this make me a better person? Yeah know Bill Gates says “success is a lousy teacher, it seduces smart people into thinking that they can’t lose.” Yeah, failure, you know, I would say failure is a sage, right, if we are prepared to learn from the sage. Failure is feedback, right? Failing forward. And we, if we willing to ask what’s good about this? So that is a question I really want to encourage. You know, if anybody out there who has challenge to.

• I just need to put a caveat on it because what I find when people hear this, and so I want to kind of wave a red flag a little bit, is my worry, Justin, you know, that I think like this, I think that people might do it too soon. I think first it’s the timing of it, you know, those kind of lessons and what’s good in it emerge. They emerge, and I think that it’s a good question to ask. I’m certainly agreeing that it is. But when, if you don’t let people lean into what they’re going through and to recognise that actually, you know, the biggest problem is yours. We don’t want comparative suffering too much. Look, there’s starving children in India. Well, you’re not doing much about them unless you send them food parcels. And yes, that’s also good because I think one of the things we’re going to talk about is the results of being a giver and how that increases your own happiness because you feel of value. You’re making a huge contribution to the world and you see the response in people. So there’s a huge result of that. But I think that it’s really important to do what is kind of commonly called, allow yourself to lean into it, shine a light on it, deal with whatever it is, not prematurely. Say, I’m not allowed to, as we’ve said this, feel like this. And then ask the question when the time, when it comes, I’ve acknowledged it. Now the questions that you’ve asked.

• Dori, absolutely, and that’s why the first question is what is it right? And so there’s, these are these five questions that I do. The first is acknowledging and sitting in it, and feeling it, you know? So this is not again about erasing it, but it’s, yes, this is something that we come to. So I’m glad that you pointed that out.

• You’ve got three more Ps.

• We’ve got three more.

• And not much time so I wanted you to share.

• Let’s move on to P number three before we all need to go for a P. So your third P is presence, presence. Now you were talking about thinking. Now let’s just be very clear about something. Thinking is the superpower that has enabled us to master the universe. But if you are looking for a cause, and it is multi causal, but if you’re looking for the single most pernicious cause of anxiety, it is a particular kind of overthinking called worrying. And if you’re looking for a cause of depression, it’s a particular kind of overthinking called rumination. And that’s where you go round and round in your head. Analysing causes and consequences. Overthinking is like inflammation. It’s an adaptive immune response gone rogue. You know you’re in overthinking. When it’s compulsive, repetitive, it feels kind of addictive and it doesn’t get you anywhere. And by the way, if anybody out there thinks, but Justin, Dori, when I worry, it helps me to figure out what to do. Women who worry about a lump in their breast are less likely to have the checked out then those who are not big worriers than those are not bit worriers. In a massive UK study, one of the biggest of its kind fact, now how’s this? And I’m know childhood, early childhood adverse effects. Of course they have an impact on later outcomes. Of course they do.

But guess what has a bigger outcome? If you are a big ruminator or worrier. In the California earthquake, we saw afterwards coming out of that earthquake, you were more likely to have PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder, not if you were directly affected by the earthquake, but if you were big on rumination. So hopefully we’ve, you know, and by the way, if you’re big on this, we’re all big on it. It’s, again, it’s part of our human operating system. It’s, we all tend to think, overthink more. So what can we do in the last few minutes that we have available? So what I mean by presence, we want to find moments to be in the moment. We want to smell the proverbial roses. We want to look at the sky. We want to look out at the trees. We want to feel those beautiful sensations on our body. One of the ways we can do it is with that breathing technique we did at the start. So if you just go into breathing, yes, meditation does it too. We want, it doesn’t have to be meditation, right? And you know, mindfulness. If anybody’s familiar with that, yes, that can be a way, but these are not the only ways. What we want to do is get into our bodies, into the sensory experience of our bodies. And you can do it right now. You can do it right now. You can feel your feet on the floor or your back on the chair or the air going in and out of your lungs. You are in presence. And when you are in there, we actually see shifts, neurological shift in the brain.

Most of the time we are in overthinking mode. So let me give you another quick tool. Harvard professor Matt Killingsworth, who was on this campaign with me, developed an app. And I really want to suggest people download this app. It’s called Track your Happiness, Track your Happiness. And the way it works is it goes off randomly through the day, a little beeping sound goes off. And you’ve got to say what you’re doing, what you’re thinking and what you’re feeling. Now this is incredible, right? Because you think that you know what makes you happy and what it doesn’t. But what we see is that actually people don’t realise what makes them happy or they don’t realise what doesn’t make them happy. And you start to look at this day and go, wow, whenever I’m with this person, I’m not that happy. Oh, I’m married to them. I better work on this relationship, right? Or whenever I’m in the garden, I’m really happy. Wow, I need to spend more time in the garden, right? I need to, you know, discover, do an audit on my emotional wellbeing. But what’s beautiful Dori, is that we’ve now, you know, collated all this data from tens of thousands of people around the world and we can actually see what makes people happiest. There’s a whole list, right?

But number one, wild guess, while people take a while to get there, making love, maybe a little less so when you’re interrupted by a smartphone app but without going into the whole list, because I know we’re short on time, here’s what Killingsworth and his team found. Most of the time, whatever people are doing, they’re thinking about something else. And if they’re thinking about something else, they’re less happy. If they are immersed in the moments, as the great Ron Doss said, if they are really here now, even washing the dishes, amazingly, right? If they’re actually just experiencing the sensations that Thich Hahn has spoken about of the soapy water, the warm water, the cloth on our skin, now enjoying it, yes, before you go and tell your partner how much they’ll enjoy the dishes if they were only more present, try it for yourself. This really works, right? If we can just quieten down and be in the moment. So that is presence. Are we going to go to number four, given that we have five minutes left, or any questions from our esteemed interview? Can I go to number four?

• Yeah, yeah. I just want to make a comment about that. I think that what happens when you’re not in presence is that you’re acting on quite a lot of assumption. And the assumption, as you said, is often negative. So that you are assuming things either based on the past, past experiences, or your mood of the day, which you’re projecting into the future, which might have no real basis on reality. And I think that the being in the present also makes you question your assumptions a lot and say, look, you know, this is what’s going on in my head. It might not be in the present moment at all. So I think that being in the present moment sort of grounds you in a way that you’ve said, let’s talk about the others. 'Cause as you say, just a few minutes left.

• So when we think about happiness, often we think about hedonic happiness, hedonic from a Greek pleasure. But as Aristotle pointed out, there is not just pleasure based happiness. There’s also eudaimonic happiness. And what is eudaimonic happiness? Eudaionic happiness is meaning and purpose. And that is why, if you have the choice between going to the bedside of your dear beloved dying aunt versus going and having sex, drugs and rock and roll, even if you particularly like sex, drugs and rock and roll, you’re probably going to go to your dying aunt if you love her, and you’re going to have a happy experience. Now that seems almost counterintuitive, right? Well, it probably doesn’t seem counterintuitive. It makes sense to people, but from a pure pleasure point of view. And that’s because of eudaimonic happiness and this, you brought up Viktor Frankl. You know, Dori, I didn’t know if you knew this. I didn’t know this until recently. Viktor Frankl did not have to go into the concentration camps. He had the choice. He had the choice to get free passage to America. There was a ship going out there, he could have been on it. And he had a dream. He had a dream.

And in this dream he, it was a symbolic dream, but the import of the dream was that he could go to pleasure, to safety or he could go to meaning and meaning was to be with his family. And of course he lost all of his family, but he was there with them and for them, and that of course was a lot more meaningful and brought him ultimately a lot more joy and brought us the world a lot more joy. Think about it, we’re talking about him right now. And this is the power of purpose, right? So purpose is your fault to be. How do you get in touch with purpose? Oh man, okay. Quick question. And I love questions. To do this, ask yourself every interaction, how are people going to be better because of me? I go into a business meeting, how are they going to be better because of me? I go to client, how’s that client going? How’s my family going to be better? But how’s my kids going to be? Purpose of service. Purpose of service. And so when we serve others, and that brings us to our fifth and final P, which is people, and you mentioned it, random acts of kindness, service, giving. Again, beautiful neurotransmitter in the brain called oxytocin. Oxytocin is emitted in mother’s milk, creates a lovely warm bond between mother and baby. Oxytocin is also a natural anti-inflammatory that protects the heart against stress related damage.

First, the bad news, if you’ve had a major stressor such as bankruptcy or divorce, you’ve got a 30% increased chance of dying over the next year. Now, the good news, if you’re somebody who regularly serves, helps others, your increased chances of dying are zero. Scientists believe it’s because of oxytocin, this natural anti-inflammatory. How do we get the oxytocin flowing? You do not need to look for a breastfeeding mother. What you need to do is go out and find someone to support and help and connect and empathise with, and you’re going to get this natural oxytocin boost. Another wonderful psychiatrist, Karl Menninger said, you know, if he was asked the question, if somebody’s depressed, what do you tell him? He said, go across the railway track, find somebody in need and help them. Now, back then, they didn’t know about oxytocin, but he had a real good point, right? Because when we serve others, we serve ourselves. Our fifth P is people. And again, if some of this sounds a little bit folksy, let me just share this one last study 'cause you know that I’m, that’s what I, I’m a little addicted to these studies, but this is a goodie and this is probably the longest longitudinal study of all time. It’s the Harvard Study of Grants, huge study of human thriving. Dori, I know you’re all about thriving, and I know that you know the study, but it’s so important that people know about the study. It’s just a.

• It started in second with Harvard students. Of course, they were all men at that stage 'cause all the Harvard students were many, many years ago. And actually only quite recently, relatively recently, the woman put up their hands, the wives and the daughters and said, “aren’t you going to ever ask us a question?” And they came into it. But the results of that study are worth sharing. Absolutely, so please do.

• Well thank you for sharing that. I wasn’t aware of that. I guess, you know, white male that I am, you know, I clearly need to be informed here. And of course that’s right. I mean, it was a very male dominate institution, but as you say, it’s now, you know, it’s now on the children and grandchildren. Now, what was expected was that it would be your IQ, whether you were at Harvard or not. Even originally it was Harvard students and the kids of blue collar workers from Boston. And here’s the thing, this one factor, people who measured highest on this factor earned on average $150,000 more a year than those who are lowest. And for our purposes, they were the happiest. The happiest. What was this one factor? Now, the phrase they used in the research is really interesting Dori, the phrase is the warmth of their relationships, the warmth of their, if you had warm, loving, connected relationships, you see this massive increase in your earnings, right? Because, and we see this of course, in the corporate world, right?

We see it all, we see these geniuses who go nowhere because they alienate people, because their social skills don’t go right. And then you’ll see people who are not necessarily the technically best, but they rise up because they’re able to build these relationships. And you only have to think about your own life when you are fighting with your partner, your kids, or your colleagues, your clients. How happy are you right? And so it is incumbent on us to raise our social skills. And you can do that. You know, this is not definitely, this is what I, this is not rocket science. This is, you know, this, you could probably, if you’re committed, you can really get this right. And there’s wonderful books. You know, how to win friends and influence people. Dale Carnegie “Winning with Relationships.” Justin Cohen. I mean, and really, you know, we didn’t, I didn’t invent this stuff. I’m a reporter, but pulled it together and you, it just, the bang for your back in just taking more care of your social skills of your relationships, feeding them with generosity yes.

And the other big one, Dori, is appreciation. Be liberal with appreciation. The number one reason people leave a job, lack of appreciation, the number one complaints spouses have about one another. Lack of appreciation. Why, because the brain goes to what’s wrong with you, not what’s right with you. So ask every, just make a commitment every day, like a couple friends of mine every day as a standard, they send an SMS to the other saying something they appreciate about the other. And this, by the way, is one of the happiest couples that I know. By the way, that’s also gratitude because when you say thank you to someone for some attribute or something they’ve done for you, you are given gratitude for having this person in your life. So you feel better. It’s the most beautiful, selfish thing you can do.

• Absolutely. So what we say, I mean, I remember there was a little groundbreaking book, it was written in the seventies, I think it as long ago as that, by Ken Blanchard called “The One Minute Manager.” And he made the statement, if you want people to reach their full potential, catch them doing something right. So we spoke about real, real appreciation for an act or for a look. I remember just before we came on, I looked at you and I said, geez Justin, you looking so good. Now that’s true. You know, it’s not as a, if it’s done as in a gimmicky way or as a technique, it’ll absolutely fall flat. But what we don’t do is say what we appreciate. Say, you know, think of two people in your life. Think of two things about each of them that you appreciate. When was the last time you told them? When was the last time you told them? So you can think about the things, but we tend not to say it. And the benefit of saying it both to them and to you and them recognising it actually has to, you know, multiplies tenfold on you.

So, absolutely, and I think what that study showed us was that the quality of your life depends a great deal on the quality of your relationships. And I think that’s the one big lesson that we’ve learned, again, coming out of the pandemic, the revaluation of that kind of connection and relationship as being very, very central. And we know that there are lots of books. There’s one by the Dean of Medicine, and he was the Dean of Medicine many years ago at the University of California in Irvine, actually a cardiologist called Dean Ornish, who wrote a book called “Love and Survival, the Scientific Basis for the Healing Power of Intimacy.” And the research in that book showed the people who had that kind of connection or love in their life experienced the healing power of support, that got less sick less often, and better, more quickly, such as almost as if science was catching up. So I think that you’ve given us, you know, really a lot of things to think about and I wonder if there are any questions in the box just before we.

• There actually are, I see there’s a whole bunch of questions. And Dori, I dunno if you can see them. There’s some wonderful points coming in from Betty, from Neville, Nanette, Elliot. Should we do, can you see? Do you want me to put one?

• I can see them. I’m just looking what to kind of expect.

• [Wendy] Please read them. Sorry.

• I will, I’m just choosing one first and then I’ll read it out. Nanette.

• Bobby.

• Sorry you go ahead Justin. You go ahead.

• I’m just looking at Bobby’s points about to agree about toxic positivity and our present culture. There’s a tremendous social pressure to always be positive about everything. There’s little tolerance for the realistic acknowledgement to the other side of things. I see it as disingenuous and harmful. And you know, Bobby, thank you for that. And I think we have addressed it, but it’s such a prominent issue, you know, maybe it’s something that we should just, you know, reiterate here. You know, I’m not, we’re not advocating, I’m certainly not advocating, you know, for denial, for, you know, not acknowledging when we are in pain, when we are struggling, when there’s challenge. In fact, the process that I’ve developed is about confronting challenge. It is facing challenge, why? Because when you don’t, in fact, a study I just saw last week, people who are, who suppress negative emotions have high rates of depression. They have high rates of depression than people who acknowledge negative emotions and then process them and deal with them. So here’s the paradox. If we want to be happier, we actually need to be more accepting of when we are not okay right? Like, it is okay to not be okay what we want, what we don’t want to do is stay in that state indefinitely, right? And so this is, you know, this is a process of transformation. This is not a process of, you know, erasing, you know, or pretending that something is not there. We’ve got to face it. So I hope that.

• You said, you know, it’s those cliches, but they’re cliches for a reason. If you name it, you can tame it? If you face it, if you embrace it, you can face it. You know, that’s sort of, there are cliches, but they, well.

• But Dori, I want to add this to that. So this is, so what I like to say is on what you dwell, you will swell. And so if you’re constantly talking about it, and even see this sometimes with, you know, with a friend, you’re co ruminating and you’re going round and round, then we know that’s counter.

• [Wendy] And Justin, Justin, with that, you can go down the well.

• [Dori] Yes exactly.

• Absolutely Wendy.

• Then there was just one comment here, which, because I am aware of Dr. Albert Ellis’s ration emotional thinking, actually long years ago I did, It was fortunate enough to do a course with him. It says, are you aware? Thanks Betty Ray for this question. Are you aware of Dr. Albert Ellis’s ration emotional thinking as a means to control distressful feelings and emotions, whereby this is what he’s saying and I hope that this has come through in what we are talking about. Outside events and happiness do not really create the distress, but rather it’s our attitude and resulting self talk, maybe that ruminating self-talk about these events, that create our negative feelings and distress. We cannot always control outside events as we well know, but we have a great deal of control of our thoughts and self-talk about the stress will happen. So, you know, it’s not, it’s how you play the cards, not the cards that you do. It’s just that, Justin, I’d like you to comment on this. We all know this. We’ve heard this lots of times. I just feel that it’s easier said than done. When you are in the midst of all these outside events that are impinging on you, of course they’re going to affect you. And the challenge is how do you, they will affect you and they should affect you because we are reactive people. But how do you then access, you have to access the ability as we’ve given some tips, an optimistic worldview, gratitude, the development of relationships, appreciation, stress management by being in the present, not always thinking about the future or the past negatively. All of these things are very important in saying there is the 40, you started off with a big 40 of being able to have some control over our own wellbeing without just being leaf in the breeze kind of people.

• Well, you know, Dori, I love Betty Ray’s point there about the self talk. And you know, one of the things we often don’t realise how much we talk to ourselves. Now, you do not have to be psychotic to hear voices in your head, right? We all have a voice, right? And we are talking ourselves all the time. And it’s important to become aware of that self-talk. Now, what we don’t want to do is, is try and you know, beat ourselves up because we’re getting, you know, beating yourself up because you’re negative is not a good way to become more positive. But what we can do is using the rational emotive therapy of technique of Ellison, of course, this is cognitive behavioural therapy, which is pretty much the most effective form of treatment for depression and anxiety, which is all about when we change our thoughts, we change our emotions, right? That’s why we talk about becoming more optimistic or positive in a realistic sense. And so what we can do is we want to become aware of that, but sometimes we can change, sometimes we can just say, hey, you know what? Don’t believe everything you think, you know. Don’t believe what you think.

You know, we, and I came on from quite a negative pessimistic family. You know, we’ve got family, you know, we lost them in the Holocaust, you know, as Jews. I think we have high rates of anxiety and pessimism probably because we have this generational trauma, you know? And you know, my grandmother, I loved absolutely dear. And you know, she would start talking about, you know, the news of the day. My grandfather, you know, in his Lithuania, thick Lithuanian accent would say, oh, here comes the black blind, here comes the black blind. Because everything would always have this, oh, you know, and you know, the other thing they’d say, good times are not normal times. You know, good times are not normal times, but you know, these are people who came from real threats, right? But when we carrying that into a very unthreatening world where we actually live into old age, we have in healthcare and beautiful, you know, places to live and we go to sleep without, you know, then there’s a mismatch here, right? So what is, when challenges arise, what is good about this? And another one I love Dori, is what can I do about it? Now we get into this, you know, real kind of victim mentality of it’s the government, it’s the epidemic, it’s my boss, it’s my, I get it. There are other forces impinging. We do not control everything.

Totally, I get it. But I think too often we are relinquishing our, you know, self control here. And a question like, what can I do? But I like to write down five solutions. You only need one, write down five. Because it’s often that crazy solution that you weren’t prepared to kind of put down. When you put it down, you go, Hey, you know what, I think I could use that with a bit of tweaking. So we want to get solution oriented. And I found that question wants to shift.

• And I think just thinking about it, you know, already empowers you. Just highlighting you to the fact that there could be something that is under your control. And then just thinking about what it is, you know, it’s that kind of journey of first starting with a belief, a little touch of little slice of optimism that I don’t have to be stuck in this forever. You know, I can access this. What is it that I can do? What is it that I need? So I think that even that process, and then Justin, 'cause we’ve gone quite a long over time and I’m aware of it, but there’s three people here who’ve said, could you please very succinctly summarise the five Ps again? Harriet wanted that. Patricia wanted that, and a few people have asked for that.

• Okay, number one, physiology. When you go to the doctor, what does she say? You need to exercise, eat healthily and get sleep. Guess what, that’s good not just for your body, for your mind and your emotional wellbeing. Number one is physiology. Number two is positivity. As Dr. Diaz said, it is not about being positive all the time. And it’s not about ignoring the negatives, right? But it’s when those challenges come, you confront them and say, okay, this is tough. It’s sore, it’s hard. Yes, it’s painful. That’s okay. Embrace the suck as they say in hell week in the Marines. But what is good about it now? What can I learn from it? How, what can I do about it? How, what can this teach me? How can I grow from this right? Adversity, obstacles are said not to obstruct but instruct. This is how we learn and grow. Positivity. Number three, presence. Presence, being in the moment.

Be here now, take moments. Yes, meditation is a way to do this. Deep relaxation, that breathing technique we did earlier. The sunset, right? The tree is just taking a moment to be with your cat. Yeah, that’s being in the moment. Number four is purpose, right? That’s what I call higher grade happiness. This is meaning. This is about the impact that we have on others. This is about how people are going to be better off because of me. Purpose is not lived in the future. It’s lived today, right? That’s what’s so beautiful about it, is that every moment you have with another person, leave them in one of three ways, better, worse off or neutral. If you leave them better off, you’ve lived your purpose. And that could be as simple as a smile, as a checking in with them. Hey, how are you doing? Giving isn’t just giving money. It’s not just giving things. It’s giving time. It’s giving attention. That’s the most valuable currency on the planet. Attention being present with another person, people is fulfilling purpose, right? It’s all interconnected. And of course number five is purpose. That’s our relationships. And how can you boost those relationships, by being a giver. Adam Grant’s from Wharton Business School written a wonderful book about this, “Givers, Takers and Matches.” Givers are happier, but we can also just give appreciation. Yeah, give some love.

• So I just want to say, just to close, and there are lots more questions that we could go into maybe just to say the last little statement. Thank you very much, Susan. Our mom, Lou, who lived to 104 and a half, had a life slogan. And the life slogan was both of gratitude and attitude. So thanks for reminding us of that. And I just want to say, you know, it’s really an honour to be here with Wendy in the Lockdown University and to bring people like Justin, you know, to you all and to hear some of this. But Wendy, just to acknowledge you, and everybody who is here knows about Wendy. Wendy is one of the happiest people. She’s, oh god, she’s optimistic, she’s upbeat, but also I can’t leave without saying the ultimate giver, her generosity in every way of spirit, not only materially, but in every way in time, in caring, in presence, actually, you know, she is the research that underscores what you’ve said and it translates into how she is and what she does. So we want to just say that and acknowledge that in you. And just thank you for doing, even this Lockdown University. It’s about giving and about creating something of interest and purpose to a lot of people. And the reward that you get is immeasurable. And that’s also contagious. So thank you for the invitation. Thank you to Justin for being here with us.

• I’d like to say thank you for that enormous compliment for saying such lovely things about me. And thank you Justin. Thank you both for being on Lockdown University. It really, today’s presentation was so informative and so inspiring and I just wanted to say that, you know, I’ve been through a lot of my own trauma myself, be many due to relocation. And I always found that extremely, extremely difficult. When I was 10 years old, nine years old, I went to boarding school, I was very low and I found my, I, you know, I come from a family of music so I channelled my loneliness and my depression and my anxiety into the music and I thrived. And at a very young age, I learnt when I’m in difficult situations, find the one thing that is going to make me happy. And so every time I’ve had to relocate, you know, first I went to live. I lived, when I went to, I’ve lived in London, I’ve lived in New York, I’ve lived in Tehran, I’ve lived in, even though it was very short while, I’ve relocated and I’ve found that the one thing, find one thing a day that you can look forward to. And I think I just trained myself.

Maybe I’ve got this optimistic personality, I feel lucky to have that. But also I’m trying to find my happiness. And also by acknowledging people, what you say is correct, you smile at somebody, it’s so easy. You give them a smile, you acknowledge them, they acknowledge you back and that is appreciation and gratitude for everybody. So I would like to ask you please, Dori and Justin, if we could have a few more presentations on happiness and positivity and thought processes and exercises and we can talk offline. I truly, thoroughly enjoy today and a million thanks. And Justin, what a pleasure to have you with us. Welcome to the Lockdown University family, another astonishing South African. So on that note, I’m going to say thank you to all of you for joining us today and enjoy the rest of your day, afternoon, and night.

• Thank you. Bye bye.

• Thanks Justin.