A Stoic Mantra For Your Sh*ttiest Moments (And Other Ancient Wisdom That Holds Up) | Jonathan Haidt

Dan Harris (0:03)

Hey, hey, everybody, welcome to the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm your host, Dan Harris. This whole show, and in fact, my whole post-TV news anchorman career, is based on the mix of ancient wisdom and modern science, which really are two great tastes that taste great together, as they used to say in the Reese's Peanut Butter Cups ads when I was a kid.

And there's so much to be learned at the intersection of these two fields, which is why I was really excited when I heard from Jonathan Haidt, who wanted to come on to talk about his book, The Happiness Hypothesis, which really takes pillars of ancient wisdom and then pressure tests them against modern research. You might know Jonathan Haidt. He is a social psychologist at New York University's Stern School of Business. He has written many, many bestselling books, including The Anxious Generation. But today we're really going to focus on The Happiness Hypothesis, which is actually 20 years old. It's celebrating its 20th anniversary, and he has just put out a revised edition of the book. Jonathan Haidt, welcome back to the show.

Jonathan Haidt (1:05)

Dan, thanks so much for having me on.

Dan Harris (1:06)

Tell me about the idea for this book of, I think I might have given away the headline, but the basic idea, as I said, is let's look at some pillars of ancient wisdom and see how they hold up in light of today's science.

Jonathan Haidt (1:17)

That's right. So the book grows out of my teaching Psych 101 at the University of Virginia. My first academic job beginning in 1995 was there. I was assigned to teach Psych 101

I have to teach a room of 319-year-olds, everything from physiological psychology through love and dieting, everything.

I would often quote Shakespeare or Buddha. So it was clear that there are certain ideas, like for example, there's nothing good or bad, but thinking makes it so from Hamlet. That is the foundation of Stoicism, of Buddhism, of cognitive therapy. That idea. When I was coming up for tenure, I didn't have a lot of experimental publications, and I thought I might not get tenure. If I don't get tenure, I don't want to just transfer to a lower ranked university. You know what? I'll drop out and I'll try to write up this trade book, collect all these ideas and write it up. So I did get tenure, although it was just barely. I happened to know my vote because they made a mistake and revealed it to me accidentally. But anyway, I got tenure at UVA, and I decided to write the book anyway.

It was so much fun. I basically just read every work from ancient China, India, everything that religious texts, anything that had sort of statements about humanity in it. I had a big long word perfect back then, a word perfect file with all these quotes. I organized them, and it turned out they really fell into clusters, and they were all true. If an idea has survived for two or three thousand years, it's not going to be wrong. But in every case, there was nuance you could bring in from psychology. So that was the origin of the book.

Dan Harris (2:49)

If it's cool with you, let's go through some of them. Okay. Let's do it.

Let's start with the one you just mentioned. There's nothing good or bad except thinking makes it so. I think that's chapter two, changing your mind.

Jonathan Haidt (3:01)

That's right. So okay, page 38 So it starts off with a quote from Marcus Aurelius, the whole universe is change, and life itself is but what you deem it. And this is Marcus Aurelius in the meditation, sitting alone in his tent at night, trying to make, trying to improve his own mental health, trying to psych himself up and stop making mistakes. And he's telling himself, like, you know, don't be anxious about this, don't be, it's like, okay, this is under your control to, to frame this. This is not the reality. And then here's a very similar thought from Buddha. What we are today comes from our thoughts of yesterday, and our present thoughts build our life of tomorrow. Our life is the creation of our mind. Exactly the same idea from, you know, many thousands of miles apart, both from, you know, 2000 years ago.

And both of those are the foundation of CBT, and so much modern pop psychology. Two foundational truths of the book are the first one is about the divided self, and the second was this one about appraisal.

Dan Harris (3:57)

Maybe we'll get to the divided self, but let's stay with this one, which is, as you say, appraisal. CBT is cognitive behavioral therapy. I am not an expert in this, but as I understand it, it's really about changing your relationship to your thoughts. What's the practical takeaway if we agree with the Buddha and Marcus Aurelius, and Shakespeare?