Dr. Laurie Santos

Hi guys, it's Tony Robbins.

You're listening to Habits & Hustle.

Crush it.

That's right.

Yeah.

I'm glad it finally worked out.

Definitely.

I think it's a skill and it's something that you have to practice, right?

I mean, it makes sense, you know, as a fitness influencer, you know this, right?

It's like you can know what you need to do, but unless you actually get out to the gym and do that stuff, nothing is going to change.

And this is exactly the way our mental health works, right?

There are things that we know we need to do to feel a little bit better, but unless you actually get out and you practice that and you build your skills up, you're not going to end up feeling any better.

Yeah, well, what some of the studies show is that there is part of our happiness that seems to be kind of built in.

This is what researchers call it being heritable, right?

Some of the differences we see across people out there in the world in terms of how happy they are, they're just based on like something about their biology, right?

Okay.

And we know this because if you look at identical twins, their happiness levels tend to be a little bit more similar than like regular siblings who aren't perfectly genetically related.

Right.

But if you look at how much happiness is heritable, it's kind of a small amount.

So it's about the same amount of like genetic basis as you might see for like religiosity, like are you religious or not?