Why You Don’t Feel Loved (even when you are) - Sonja Lyubomirsky - #1115

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
You've been studying happiness for 36 years. Is there a commonality between all of the most effective happiness interventions that you found?

**Sonja Lyubomirsky** (0:08)
Yes. Well, thank you for aging me, but yes, 36 years. So actually, it was 1998, my lab pioneered happiness interventions. So 98, long time ago, 28 years ago, Bill Clinton was in the White House.
And so I've been doing research on these interventions, testing whether practices like expressing gratitude or doing acts of kindness or being social makes people happier. So interventions are like clinical trials, but instead of testing a vaccine, we're testing like a happiness strategy. And then one day, it finally hit me that what all these interventions had in common is the ones that worked, the reason they worked is because they made us feel more connected to and loved by others. So when I write a gratitude letter to my mom, it makes me feel more loved by her. When I do an act of kindness for a colleague or a friend, makes me feel closer to him. So almost all happiness practices, maybe not all, like maybe if you run on the beach or meditate, it's not about connection, but almost all of them are about feeling connected and feeling loved.

**Chris Williamson** (1:04)
Why?

**Sonja Lyubomirsky** (1:07)
I think the human species wouldn't have survived if we did not feel connected and loved, and it's an extremely strong signal. So what I concluded is the key to happiness is feeling connected, which sounds like a cliche.
When you think about in our ancestral past, if we did not feel connected and loved, we wouldn't survive, we wouldn't find mates, like we wouldn't pass on our genes. So it's incredibly important. It's one of the most important tasks of human beings is to maintain connection.

**Chris Williamson** (1:36)
Okay. So to take a bit of an evolutionary lens. Yeah.
If you are not belonging to the tribe, mattering to the tribe, understood by the tribe, and a part of that, a human on its own, 20,000 years ago, isn't going to last very long. Therefore, it's important for you to get back into connection. It doesn't seem to me, though, that unhappiness necessarily drives people back to connection and love. It can often make people behave in ways, have habits and a demeanor that actually makes them kind of hard to love.

**Sonja Lyubomirsky** (2:04)
Right. So it's not really unhappiness that drives them back to connection. It's not feeling loved or feeling lonely, which actually is very similar to feeling unloved. I think actually a lonely moment and a moment where you don't feel loved are almost identical.
There again, there is signal to us humans that something's a rise, something's a miss. I need to regain, reconnect that connection. I actually was feeling a little lonely a few weeks ago. I actually, I don't usually feel lonely. I have lots of friends and family who love me. I left a message for a friend and she just actually just left me a message back yesterday. She said, I feel so sorry for you, feel so bad, I wish I were there. She's like, Sonja, feeling lonely is a signal that you need to put more effort and energy into reconnecting.

**Chris Williamson** (2:51)
Lots of people spend their entire lives trying to be lovable. Is that the wrong goal entirely?

**Sonja Lyubomirsky** (2:58)
Yes. Well, there's a part of it that's not a bad thing, which is if you want to be a better person, working on yourself, wonderful.
But I think when you don't feel loved, to conclude that, I don't feel loved, I need to make myself more lovable, like I need to sort of somehow broadcast how wonderful I am, or maybe I need to get richer or more famous or more beautiful to people who would love me more. That's the part, that's a myth, and it does not actually get you to feel more loved.

**Chris Williamson** (3:28)
Is it a supply of love problem or an acceptance of love problem?

**Sonja Lyubomirsky** (3:35)
I think it's an, or not necessarily acceptance, but it's not a supply of love problem. So many of us are loved, but we still don't feel loved. So why is that maybe somehow we don't trust it, we don't see it, it's not somehow getting in. I think of it as like a cup of love, this cup of love, and you're pouring love, you're showing love to me, but maybe it has a leak in the bottom, and the love is leaking out. Or maybe it has a lid, it doesn't have much of a place to get in. That's one way that that happens.