People are often asked, are they glass half empty or glass half full people? You may have wondered why some people just seem to have a more positive outlook on life, why some people always just seem to be happier than others. Take my little brother, Sunil, for instance. He's about 10 years younger than me. He's in his mid-forties. For as long as I can remember, he's been this happy-go-lucky guy. Even at a young age, he just always seemed to have a sunny disposition. Position. Frankly, he still like that today. Now, the thing is, I consider myself to be a pretty happy person, but compared to him and our family, I was always more the curmudgeon. It made me wonder, was he born that way? I mean, we have the same parents. We grew up pretty much the same. And yet this particular thing, how happy we are by default, seems to be different.

Some people are just happier than others. They don't have to work at it, right? They just are.

That's social psychologist Sonja Lubomersky. She's been studying happiness for over 35 years. She's a professor of psychology at the University of California Riverside, where her research and her lab focus on understanding various aspects of happiness. She's also written a few books on the topic. But what really interests me is the professor's hands-on data-driven research on happiness. For years now, she's been doing studies to see what exactly makes people happier. She calls them happiness interventions. So today on Chasing Life, a question I've often wondered about, are some people just you show less pro-inflammatory gene expression. So more inflammation is bad. So you have less pro-inflammatory gene expression. And we compare that to a group where we ask people to do acts of kindness for themselves, like treat yourself to something. So that feels good, but doesn't make you happy long term, doesn't get under the skin.And then we started thinking, what is it about kindness that is so positive? Maybe it's because when you're kind to others, it usually forces you to connect with and engage with other people. Because usually, acts of kindness are to other people. They're not usually anonymous. And so then we started looking at social behavior. It turns out that just being social, just chatting with a stranger, just connecting with a friend, but having a Zoom conversation with a stranger, turns out to make people, on average, super happy. So I've really become convinced that just any way you can connect with others is the secret to happiness. So that's what I would advise. If anyone wants to be happier, if you could do anything this week, this month, to connect with others. It could be reach out to old friends. It could be send someone a gratitude letter, chat with your barista when you go get your coffee. Any connection seems to be associated with happiness on average.Okay. I will accept that homework assignment. I will do that. I think I generally do that. I found myself, as I've gotten older, sending emails. They're totally sincere, by the way. I'm not doing it just to go through an act of being a complementary of someone to someone else or kind to someone else. But if I see something nice that someone has done, to send them an email just highlighting that and saying that I notice that and I appreciate it. I do notice that I feel better when I do that. Again, it's not the reason that I do it, but there's no mistaking that I feel better when I do that. I think it's good for everyone to hear.Yeah, we don't do that enough. I'm a big proponent of when you see someone doing a good job, you just say it. I'll do this at a grocery store, and I'll say, You are so good at your job. You're so fast. Thank you so much. You made my day. And they're shocked. I think they don't often get that compliment. Or I'll tell someone, I think you're really beautiful, just like you. It's completely sincere, but why don't we say things like that to each other more often? Why do we hold it in? It's as though we're walking around with these walls around us. I wish we could take those walls down a little bit.Maybe there's not an answer to this, but why do you think we don't do that more often? Did we evolve into this position? Did we used to do it, now we don't, or are we suspicious of each other?What do you think is going on? There's a guy, a friend of mine at University of Chicago, Booth. His name is nick Eppley, and he does a ton of research that basically showing that this is happening. We think that reaching out to an old friend would be awkward, and they wouldn't receive it so well. It turns out people love it when you reach out to them. The famous study he did was in Chicago, he had people chat with people sitting next to them on a train, and people were like, Oh, I don't want to do that. It turns out people were happier when they chatted to the person next to them. So we miscalibrate. We have the wrong prediction about whether these would make us happy. Now, your question is deeper than that. You're like, Why do we have that? It seems like it would be adaptive for us to have the right prediction. I'm not sure I know the answer to that question. A lot of people are on the shy side, especially now that we live in these huge communities and cities where we don't know our neighbors, that we don't have that practice of talking to everyone.I think we just need more practice, right? Yeah.I really think if people take nothing else away from the podcast today, just exactly what you said, just incorporating some of that into your life in a sincere way. I mean, don't make a mockery of it, but be genuinely kind to people. You wrote an interesting article, or you're part of an interesting article during the pandemic, which I remember reading at the time, and it was surprising. It was basically about the fact that extroverts were faring surprisingly well, even in the midst of people mostly being at home. You did two, I guess, somewhat related studies around this where you were looking at feelings of social connection, how they might have changed from 2020, midwinter to early April. College students, adults. I wonder if you can tell us a little about the study. What were you looking for?We were wondering whether there was a lot... With the pandemic, a lot was being said about how, Oh, this is great for introverts, right? Now they're not forced to chat with people at work every day because they could stay home. Interestingly, we didn't find really many changes in connection in general. But of course, what happens is that extroverts then were reaching out more on Zoom to their friends, and they were able to... So there's two things happened. I'm an extrovert, and it was terrible. It was terrible for me. But then, of course, I adapted. We all adapted. Amazingly, how we all adapted, the entire world adapted, not everyone, but to some extent on average. But yeah, so the extroverts that were able to make up for that loss of connection by reaching out more digitally. And then to some extent, the introverts, some of them certainly self-reported that in some ways that they were happy not to have to engage in ways that they didn't enjoy.When you come back to this idea of social connection being such a critical ingredient, Even being kind to other may facilitate that social interaction, as you were saying earlier. But what about for introverts? People who are listening right now and say, I really actually may consider myself happy, but I'm not particularly social. What do you tell them? Do they need to fake it till they make it?Great question. First of all, the first big study we did on this topic, we asked people for one week to just simply act more extroverted. Now, we didn't use the word extroverted because it has connotations. We asked people to basically be more sociable, talkative, energetic, assertive. Then for another week, we asked people to act more introverted, more deliberate, thoughtful. The surprise was that we found the biggest effect sizes we've ever had at any intervention. For both introverts and extroverts. So the introverts, just as much as the extroverts, got happier when they acted more extroverted. Now, that was surprising. There's at least one study that didn't show this. So we replicated at least once. But why did we find this? So first of all, it was only for a week. So it could be that even if you're an introvert, if you try to be extroverted for a week, then it's not so hard. But we also let people define how to be extroverted. So you don't have to go to a party and be the life of the party to try to be an extrovert that week. You could just be a little tiny bit more social.Maybe say something at lunch with colleagues that you don't normally say. Maybe speak up a little bit more or reach out to an old friend. And so introverts are not a They're absolutely they are social. We're all social creatures. We're all social animals. They're just social in different ways. They're just not necessarily wanting to be at parties surrounded by lots of people. They might just as much like to enjoy a lunch with a friend. If you're an introvert, just remember the idea of fit that I mentioned before? Just find the way to practice to be more connected in a way that fits your personality. Whatever way it makes you feel more connected. By the way, some people feel connected to their pets, some people feel connected to God, so it doesn't even have to be another human.Yeah, it's interesting. As you're talking, I'm reflecting, and I think probably everyone is that's listening. I think I'm social. But as you can tell from our conversation, we got deep really quickly, and I like that. The other stuff where you're the idol chatter, things like that seem more fake to me. So it's not that I don't like people, but I think a lot of times big parties and things like that, you end up having a lot of idle chatter, which I think can be a little maddening after a while.I couldn't agree with you more. I feel like I'm done with small talk. Life is too short for small talk. I never want to have small talk again. I understand sometimes when you first meet someone, it's like a little bit of a glue that needs to happen before you get deeper. I'm a firm believer in deep conversation. We actually are studying in my lab, deep conversations, where we ask people to... We give them basically conversation cards and where they can go deeper. But by deep, it doesn't have to be revealing your deepest secrets. It could just be just meaningful, something that you're truly interested in. That's what makes people happy. And also that's what or just a connection.You mentioned some of these takeaways for people to try and develop more happiness in their life. How universal is that, would you say? I'll say in medicine, you may recommend a certain medication for something, and you know it's not going to work for everybody. Maybe it's going to work for the largest percentage of people with the lowest side effects. But practicing gratitude, being kind, developing social connection, are those pretty much surefire ways for everybody, or are there people who are just going to be resistant?My answer is yes. In some ways, these are fairly universal. I was asked recently, 100 years ago, would you have given the same advice? I'd say probably yes. I often get emails that say, not often, but once in a while, I get an email that says something like, Everything you study is in the Bible. Kindness, gratitude, forgiveness, relationships. Sure, yes, that's true because they're universal themes.Were they minimizing your 35 years of work on this?No, because what we're doing is we're trying to systematically test these right practices. We certainly didn't invent the concept of gratitude or forgiveness. They're universal, but how we practice them and when under what situations is going to differ for different people. Actually, there's some companies that are trying to do this now where they're trying to match people. Ai is going to be probably great at this someday. The vision is that at any point in time, our AI coach is going to know, you're experiencing a little drop in mood right now. For you, Sanjay, you might really enjoy a cat video right now to cheer you up, but maybe I would enjoy a walk in the park or a little gratitude statement. That's the vision for the future.That's wild to think about, that the platform will know me so well that it could be predictive about my drop in mood, and not only that, but know how to best intervene to maybe try and address that. And maybe it's a snippet of music, maybe it's a beautiful scene that I look at on my phone, whatever. That's really interesting. After 35 years, Professor, of you studying this, are there questions that you're still trying to answer? What are the big unanswered questions for you?Lots of questions. Really, the sustainability question is the biggest. How do we sustain happiness for a really long time? Because all these studies that we've done, and most people do a pretty short term. How do I become happier and then stay happier for the next 10 years, 30 years? Now I'm really interested in connection. How do we foster connection and how do we feel loved?To love and to be loved. That is a That's probably a pretty good way of looking at happiness.Absolutely. I said that connection is the key to happiness, and it's really love. I think we should talk about love more often in a very broad sense. It's really what it's all about. I think people think it's hokey. I think we should all bring more love into our daily lives.I know that things like connecting with others, showing kindness, being grateful, they may sound like common sense, but here's the thing. Seeing it backed up by solid research adds a whole new dimension. We do have scientists like Professor Lubomersky to thank for that. Because happiness isn't just about feeling good. It does have real impact on our lives. We need to keep exploring to understand what makes us happy. Life is about discovering those keys and then applying the ones that resonate with each of us individually. It might be connecting with others. It might simply be finding gratitude in small moments. Every step towards happiness matters. Now, before we go, I wanted to share some more thoughts from all of you about how you chase life. And today comes from a listener named Alice.How do I chase life?By chasing away loneliness, volunteering, in my grandkids's schools and in my community. I have happy hour with neighbors and friends, and we eat and drink a little, and we sit and talk and reminisce.I love that, Alice. Thank you so much for sharing. And I love that you're chasing away the loneliness and being so intentional about building and maintaining connection. I hope that we can all find time to foster more connection in our lives. After all, as you just heard, it can truly make us happier. We'll see you next Tuesday. Chasing Life is a production of CNN Audio. Our podcast is produced by Erin Matheison, Jennifer Lye, Grace Walker, and Jesse Remedius. Our Senior Producer and Showrunner is Felicia Patinkin. Andrea Cain is our Medical Writer, Dan DeZula is our Technical Director, and the executive producer of CNN Audio is Steve Ligtai. With support from Jamis Andrest, John Dianora, Haley Thomas, Alex Manasari, Robert Mathers, Lainey Steinhart, Nicole Pessereau, and Lisa Namarot. Special thanks to Ben Tinker, Amanda Sealy, and Nadia Konang of CNN Health, and Katie Hinman.

you show less pro-inflammatory gene expression. So more inflammation is bad. So you have less pro-inflammatory gene expression. And we compare that to a group where we ask people to do acts of kindness for themselves, like treat yourself to something. So that feels good, but doesn't make you happy long term, doesn't get under the skin.

And then we started thinking, what is it about kindness that is so positive? Maybe it's because when you're kind to others, it usually forces you to connect with and engage with other people. Because usually, acts of kindness are to other people. They're not usually anonymous. And so then we started looking at social behavior. It turns out that just being social, just chatting with a stranger, just connecting with a friend, but having a Zoom conversation with a stranger, turns out to make people, on average, super happy. So I've really become convinced that just any way you can connect with others is the secret to happiness. So that's what I would advise. If anyone wants to be happier, if you could do anything this week, this month, to connect with others. It could be reach out to old friends. It could be send someone a gratitude letter, chat with your barista when you go get your coffee. Any connection seems to be associated with happiness on average.

Okay. I will accept that homework assignment. I will do that. I think I generally do that. I found myself, as I've gotten older, sending emails. They're totally sincere, by the way. I'm not doing it just to go through an act of being a complementary of someone to someone else or kind to someone else. But if I see something nice that someone has done, to send them an email just highlighting that and saying that I notice that and I appreciate it. I do notice that I feel better when I do that. Again, it's not the reason that I do it, but there's no mistaking that I feel better when I do that. I think it's good for everyone to hear.

Yeah, we don't do that enough. I'm a big proponent of when you see someone doing a good job, you just say it. I'll do this at a grocery store, and I'll say, You are so good at your job. You're so fast. Thank you so much. You made my day. And they're shocked. I think they don't often get that compliment. Or I'll tell someone, I think you're really beautiful, just like you. It's completely sincere, but why don't we say things like that to each other more often? Why do we hold it in? It's as though we're walking around with these walls around us. I wish we could take those walls down a little bit.

Maybe there's not an answer to this, but why do you think we don't do that more often? Did we evolve into this position? Did we used to do it, now we don't, or are we suspicious of each other?

What do you think is going on? There's a guy, a friend of mine at University of Chicago, Booth. His name is nick Eppley, and he does a ton of research that basically showing that this is happening. We think that reaching out to an old friend would be awkward, and they wouldn't receive it so well. It turns out people love it when you reach out to them. The famous study he did was in Chicago, he had people chat with people sitting next to them on a train, and people were like, Oh, I don't want to do that. It turns out people were happier when they chatted to the person next to them. So we miscalibrate. We have the wrong prediction about whether these would make us happy. Now, your question is deeper than that. You're like, Why do we have that? It seems like it would be adaptive for us to have the right prediction. I'm not sure I know the answer to that question. A lot of people are on the shy side, especially now that we live in these huge communities and cities where we don't know our neighbors, that we don't have that practice of talking to everyone.

I think we just need more practice, right? Yeah.

I really think if people take nothing else away from the podcast today, just exactly what you said, just incorporating some of that into your life in a sincere way. I mean, don't make a mockery of it, but be genuinely kind to people. You wrote an interesting article, or you're part of an interesting article during the pandemic, which I remember reading at the time, and it was surprising. It was basically about the fact that extroverts were faring surprisingly well, even in the midst of people mostly being at home. You did two, I guess, somewhat related studies around this where you were looking at feelings of social connection, how they might have changed from 2020, midwinter to early April. College students, adults. I wonder if you can tell us a little about the study. What were you looking for?

We were wondering whether there was a lot... With the pandemic, a lot was being said about how, Oh, this is great for introverts, right? Now they're not forced to chat with people at work every day because they could stay home. Interestingly, we didn't find really many changes in connection in general. But of course, what happens is that extroverts then were reaching out more on Zoom to their friends, and they were able to... So there's two things happened. I'm an extrovert, and it was terrible. It was terrible for me. But then, of course, I adapted. We all adapted. Amazingly, how we all adapted, the entire world adapted, not everyone, but to some extent on average. But yeah, so the extroverts that were able to make up for that loss of connection by reaching out more digitally. And then to some extent, the introverts, some of them certainly self-reported that in some ways that they were happy not to have to engage in ways that they didn't enjoy.

When you come back to this idea of social connection being such a critical ingredient, Even being kind to other may facilitate that social interaction, as you were saying earlier. But what about for introverts? People who are listening right now and say, I really actually may consider myself happy, but I'm not particularly social. What do you tell them? Do they need to fake it till they make it?

Great question. First of all, the first big study we did on this topic, we asked people for one week to just simply act more extroverted. Now, we didn't use the word extroverted because it has connotations. We asked people to basically be more sociable, talkative, energetic, assertive. Then for another week, we asked people to act more introverted, more deliberate, thoughtful. The surprise was that we found the biggest effect sizes we've ever had at any intervention. For both introverts and extroverts. So the introverts, just as much as the extroverts, got happier when they acted more extroverted. Now, that was surprising. There's at least one study that didn't show this. So we replicated at least once. But why did we find this? So first of all, it was only for a week. So it could be that even if you're an introvert, if you try to be extroverted for a week, then it's not so hard. But we also let people define how to be extroverted. So you don't have to go to a party and be the life of the party to try to be an extrovert that week. You could just be a little tiny bit more social.

Maybe say something at lunch with colleagues that you don't normally say. Maybe speak up a little bit more or reach out to an old friend. And so introverts are not a They're absolutely they are social. We're all social creatures. We're all social animals. They're just social in different ways. They're just not necessarily wanting to be at parties surrounded by lots of people. They might just as much like to enjoy a lunch with a friend. If you're an introvert, just remember the idea of fit that I mentioned before? Just find the way to practice to be more connected in a way that fits your personality. Whatever way it makes you feel more connected. By the way, some people feel connected to their pets, some people feel connected to God, so it doesn't even have to be another human.

Yeah, it's interesting. As you're talking, I'm reflecting, and I think probably everyone is that's listening. I think I'm social. But as you can tell from our conversation, we got deep really quickly, and I like that. The other stuff where you're the idol chatter, things like that seem more fake to me. So it's not that I don't like people, but I think a lot of times big parties and things like that, you end up having a lot of idle chatter, which I think can be a little maddening after a while.

I couldn't agree with you more. I feel like I'm done with small talk. Life is too short for small talk. I never want to have small talk again. I understand sometimes when you first meet someone, it's like a little bit of a glue that needs to happen before you get deeper. I'm a firm believer in deep conversation. We actually are studying in my lab, deep conversations, where we ask people to... We give them basically conversation cards and where they can go deeper. But by deep, it doesn't have to be revealing your deepest secrets. It could just be just meaningful, something that you're truly interested in. That's what makes people happy. And also that's what or just a connection.

You mentioned some of these takeaways for people to try and develop more happiness in their life. How universal is that, would you say? I'll say in medicine, you may recommend a certain medication for something, and you know it's not going to work for everybody. Maybe it's going to work for the largest percentage of people with the lowest side effects. But practicing gratitude, being kind, developing social connection, are those pretty much surefire ways for everybody, or are there people who are just going to be resistant?

My answer is yes. In some ways, these are fairly universal. I was asked recently, 100 years ago, would you have given the same advice? I'd say probably yes. I often get emails that say, not often, but once in a while, I get an email that says something like, Everything you study is in the Bible. Kindness, gratitude, forgiveness, relationships. Sure, yes, that's true because they're universal themes.

Were they minimizing your 35 years of work on this?

No, because what we're doing is we're trying to systematically test these right practices. We certainly didn't invent the concept of gratitude or forgiveness. They're universal, but how we practice them and when under what situations is going to differ for different people. Actually, there's some companies that are trying to do this now where they're trying to match people. Ai is going to be probably great at this someday. The vision is that at any point in time, our AI coach is going to know, you're experiencing a little drop in mood right now. For you, Sanjay, you might really enjoy a cat video right now to cheer you up, but maybe I would enjoy a walk in the park or a little gratitude statement. That's the vision for the future.

That's wild to think about, that the platform will know me so well that it could be predictive about my drop in mood, and not only that, but know how to best intervene to maybe try and address that. And maybe it's a snippet of music, maybe it's a beautiful scene that I look at on my phone, whatever. That's really interesting. After 35 years, Professor, of you studying this, are there questions that you're still trying to answer? What are the big unanswered questions for you?

Lots of questions. Really, the sustainability question is the biggest. How do we sustain happiness for a really long time? Because all these studies that we've done, and most people do a pretty short term. How do I become happier and then stay happier for the next 10 years, 30 years? Now I'm really interested in connection. How do we foster connection and how do we feel loved?

To love and to be loved. That is a That's probably a pretty good way of looking at happiness.

Absolutely. I said that connection is the key to happiness, and it's really love. I think we should talk about love more often in a very broad sense. It's really what it's all about. I think people think it's hokey. I think we should all bring more love into our daily lives.

I know that things like connecting with others, showing kindness, being grateful, they may sound like common sense, but here's the thing. Seeing it backed up by solid research adds a whole new dimension. We do have scientists like Professor Lubomersky to thank for that. Because happiness isn't just about feeling good. It does have real impact on our lives. We need to keep exploring to understand what makes us happy. Life is about discovering those keys and then applying the ones that resonate with each of us individually. It might be connecting with others. It might simply be finding gratitude in small moments. Every step towards happiness matters. Now, before we go, I wanted to share some more thoughts from all of you about how you chase life. And today comes from a listener named Alice.

How do I chase life?

By chasing away loneliness, volunteering, in my grandkids's schools and in my community. I have happy hour with neighbors and friends, and we eat and drink a little, and we sit and talk and reminisce.

I love that, Alice. Thank you so much for sharing. And I love that you're chasing away the loneliness and being so intentional about building and maintaining connection. I hope that we can all find time to foster more connection in our lives. After all, as you just heard, it can truly make us happier. We'll see you next Tuesday. Chasing Life is a production of CNN Audio. Our podcast is produced by Erin Matheison, Jennifer Lye, Grace Walker, and Jesse Remedius. Our Senior Producer and Showrunner is Felicia Patinkin. Andrea Cain is our Medical Writer, Dan DeZula is our Technical Director, and the executive producer of CNN Audio is Steve Ligtai. With support from Jamis Andrest, John Dianora, Haley Thomas, Alex Manasari, Robert Mathers, Lainey Steinhart, Nicole Pessereau, and Lisa Namarot. Special thanks to Ben Tinker, Amanda Sealy, and Nadia Konang of CNN Health, and Katie Hinman.