Iris Mauss

Thank you so much for having me.

I think forever.

So this was a really big deal for me.

I'd been working toward this for a long time and had been really looking forward to that moment, hoping I would get tenure.

Getting tenure is a big deal, of course.

I would get to be with the most lovely colleagues I could imagine and doing what I love in a beautiful area.

Well, not quite.

It wasn't quite the way that I had imagined.

It's sort of like the saying, wherever you go, there you are.

So I was still the same person somehow.

And worries and stressful things still happened.

Although at first, at least in the sort of year after getting tenure, those sort of small worries hit me almost more than before because they had this element of, wait a minute, shouldn't I be happy all the time?

Is there something wrong with me that I have tenure now and yet I still have worries in my life?

This was the first trip I took in a really long time.

And I was gonna get together with my very oldest childhood friend.

She lives in Germany.

I hadn't seen her in two years.

And we had this trip planned.

I thought, this is just gonna be amazing.

I'm gonna be relaxing.

I'm gonna be happy.

I visualized it almost like one of those Tuscan Italian movies.

You know, we would be on the beach, we would be drinking wine, eating delicious food.

We would go boating around the little island and just floating happily in those beautiful turquoise waters.

So I had every expectation and so much anticipation that it would be just the perfect 10 days.

Well, we had a lovely time, but little thoughts or moments snuck in where I would be thinking about work or I would worry about something going on at home.

So these little thoughts started to appear and I would think,

wait a minute, this isn't right.

This isn't supposed to be here, this thought.

What's going on?

Have I lost the ability to relax?

Is there something wrong with me?

Is there something wrong with the vacation?

Why am I not happy every moment of every day?

I think maybe I drove them a tiny little nutty because I started to suggest sort of all kinds of things to bring about the continuous happy state that I had anticipated.

So I would say, let's go to this other beach today or let's rent a boat and go around this little island or let's go to a different restaurant.

And maybe that was a little bit much for them.

I mean, I always try to make his birthday parties really nice, but this one in particular, I wanted it to be perfect.

And so I had reserved a picnic spot at the local park.

I got a coronavirus pinata, where you sort of bash a pinata that looks like a coronavirus, filled it with candy.

Wow.

Lots of games that I had thought of and decorations, of course.

My friend, who's an amazing baker, made this enormous, stunning cake.

And, of course, we had pizza.

That's exactly right.

Ecstatic the whole time, frolicking, bathed in golden rays of sunlight, exactly like that.

Well, the first thing that happened was that this is in June and it never rains in the Bay Area in June, never, except that one day.

And it was raining the morning of the party.

So we had to sort of switch gears, like sort of texted everybody, come a little later, hoping, crossing my fingers, so it would stop raining.

We still went to the park to set up because my son was very impatient and intent on having his party.

So we go in the rain.

We're setting everything up.

We're getting drenched.

And of course, people, I told them to come a little later.

But my son had the start time of the party in his head, 11 o'clock.

And 11 o'clock comes.

Nobody is there yet.

And he starts to lose it.

And I still sort of have that image in my head of him sort of standing in the rain, getting drenched, falling.

Yeah, I was really upset.

But it did stop raining and we went ahead and other things went wrong, of course.

The piñata, you know, had gotten...

drenched in rain.

And so when the piñata bashing was supposed to happen, it took just one swing and the whole thing just sort of sadly flopped down.

And kids, they didn't want to play the games that I had planned for them.

They did their own thing.

And it was a big disappointment and sort of like

bordering on disaster.

When my son was bawling, standing in the rain, I thought, wow, this is actually the worst birthday party ever.

we found that people who are very intent on being happy, those same people, somewhat ironically, in general, have lower levels of wellbeing, higher levels of depressive symptoms, and paradoxically, lower levels of overall happiness.

So it seems that

the more perhaps the more intent they are on being happy, the less they actually manage to be happy.

High expectations in other life domains can be a good thing, right?

We might strive toward doing really well in school and then we work hard toward getting a good grade.

We might fall short of it, feel disappointed, and that might motivate us to work harder and

But in the domain of happiness, there's sort of a paradox there, right?

In that if we're disappointed when falling short of our goal that we're striving for, the high standard, that disappointment in itself contradicts the very goal.

So the more we strive toward the goal of happiness, the more we undermine our ability to actually get there.

Yeah, that's exactly right.

Yeah, so this was actually for New Year's Eve 2000.

So it was a particularly big one.

And a lot of people had really high expectations for what the big millennial New Year's Eve celebration would bring.

And they asked people ahead of time how happy they expected to be and how much time they spent planning for the New Year's Eve celebration.

First on, they found that 83% of people were actually disappointed with the celebration.

And then the second really interesting thing that they found is that the more enjoyment participants expected having, the more disappointed they actually ended up being.

So it's not like greater expectation and working more toward...

enjoying the party would pay off with greater enjoyment.

Actually, the exact opposite happened.

More expectation, less enjoyment.

That's exactly what they found.

checking how happy we are is very much so bound up with thinking that happiness is an important thing.

And it's also something that we do, I think, very automatically.

In all of the examples, I think, that I gave from my own life, it's very much so that we

the moment I checked in on how happy am I, how is this going, that's when I realized, oh, actually, I'm not quite as happy as I hoped to be.

And various studies allude to

that or have examined that relationship between what's called experiences, hedonic experiences and metaconsciousness.

So that sort of overlay of being self-consciously aware

of how we're feeling.

One domain of research where this has been examined is in the research of flow.

And this is research by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.

He and colleagues have shown that when people are in a state of flow,

they report later on being incredibly happy.

So it's a state of deep happiness.

But what's important is that it's also characterized by being completely unaware of the self.

So it means that the self almost feels like it's dissolved during these states of flow.

And in fact, it's interrupted and destroyed

when you check in with yourself and ask, how am I feeling now?

Yeah, so those ideas have been around for a long time.

John Stuart Mill thought about hedonic experiences, of course, a lot.

And there's another quote that I really like and that gets to the heart of another problem with striving too much to be happy.

And he said, "'Those only are happy who have their minds fixed on some object other than their own happiness.'"

on the happiness of others, on the improvement of mankind, even on some art or pursuit, followed not as a means, but as itself an ideal end.

Aiming thus at something else, they find happiness by the way.

And I really like that quote because it gets at another problem with overvaluing happiness or valuing it in the wrong way.

And that's the idea that if we strive for our own happiness at the expense of what's going on around us, that's when things can go wrong and backfire.

I think that's really right.

Dan Gilbert and others have found that humans are actually pretty lousy at knowing what will make them happy.

And one of the things that makes people most happy is spending time with others and being connected and close to other people.

And sort of this overly intense pursuit of one's own happiness, that can come at the expense of connecting with other people.

We did a study that gets at that question, asking whether if we don't pursue happiness in a way that sacrifices connection with other people, maybe we can get around the paradoxical effects of overvaluing happiness.

And we took advantage of the fact that cultures differ with respect to what happiness tends to mean to people.

And we sampled participants from cultures that are more socially oriented, East Asian cultures, Japan and Taiwan.

all the way to cultures that tend to be more individualistically oriented, less socially oriented, the US.

And then we had two cultures in between, Russia and Germany.

And in each of those samples, we asked participants how much they valued happiness, but also what happiness means to them.

And then we looked at their overall levels of well-being.

And what we found was really interesting because it suggests a way to get around that paradox that we've been talking about.

So in the U.S., we found that valuing happiness was very much...

bound up with a more individualistic, less social pursuit of happiness.

And here we found that exact link that we've been talking about.

The more people valued happiness, the less happy they were.

But then as we went in the social direction on that gradient to Germany, to Russia, to East Asia, we found that pursuit of happiness was more and more connected with helping other people and being close with other people.

So what we found is that the more socially people interpret the value of happiness, the more that valuing happiness was associated with higher levels of well-being.

So like many people, I used to have anxiety about speaking in front of audiences.

And as a psychology graduate student, when I first started to have to give research presentations, this anxiety was actually pretty intense, almost overwhelming at the time.

And I remember particularly clearly, I think this was the first talk I had to give as a graduate student,

to faculty and other students in the area I was part of, so maybe a group of 30 people.

So for weeks before that talk and any talk, I would have all these worries circling through my head about all the incredibly foolish things I would definitely say, how I would freeze, sinking feeling of doom, really, and lots of sleepless nights, which doesn't particularly help.

So

My approach was to think, well, wait a minute.

I need to get rid of this anxiety.

Telling myself, it's just a speech.

Come on, get it together.

Try to ignore it.

But, and I think this is pretty common, the anxiety would always return.

And maybe even stronger than before because it would then return along with anxiety.

the feeling that it confirms there's something wrong about me.

Yes.

So these were what's called negative meta emotions.

So feelings about my feelings.

And those were almost worse, maybe, than the initial round of feelings, because

There's a saying that goes, pain is inevitable, but suffering is optional.

And these meta emotions, that's the suffering that we layer on top of negative emotions.

Yeah, absolutely.

Because giving research presentations is a really big part of the job.

And so it just became so bad that I considered dropping out of grad school.

Yeah, so there's quite a bit of research on this, how suppressing our own emotions can be bad for ourselves, but also especially bad for interpersonal contacts.

So in a recent study, we brought dating couples into the lab.

And we had them carry out two conversations.

The first one, we wanted them to talk about something that is a problem in the relationship.

So things like how often do you visit each other's families, disagreements about finances, disagreements about housework.

And so the couple's

had basically a fight in the lab.

And then we had them carry out a positive conversation where we told them to tell each other how much they appreciated one another and what they loved about one another.

And those were lovely conversations.

Now, after each conversation, we asked them how much they had suppressed their feelings while they had talked with their romantic partner.

And we also asked them how well they thought the conversation went and how connected they felt to one another.

And what we found is that no matter whether we were looking at a fight or at the loving conversations, when people said that they had suppressed their emotions, and that was true for positive and for negative emotions, the more they suppressed them, the less they shared them with their partner,

the less well the conversations went and the less connected they felt to one another.

So that suggests that holding back emotions, even if it's negative emotions, seems to disturb social connection.

Yeah, so when my son was a really little baby, I'd say between six months and maybe it went all the way till three years, he would have what is sometimes called witching hour, which is...

Exactly what it sounds like.

It's long hours of crying and fussiness.

And so he would cry.

It's time to go to sleep.

I needed to rest.

I would rock him back to sleep and really, really gingerly put him in his crib.

And he would instantly wake back up and it would start over, repeating itself over

up to like two hours, maybe even more at a time.

And I remember being really distressed about it just because it's exhausting, unpleasant, but really thinking,

Here's my poor baby.

He ought to sleep peacefully.

What am I doing wrong?

So just asking what's wrong with me, what's wrong with him?

Why can't I get him to be peaceful, comforted?

Why isn't he happy?

And really, the more frantically I'm trying to comfort him, the more upset he and I would become, sort of like a vicious cycle, really.

Yeah.

Yeah, so it kind of came to a head because I read one too many sleep advice books.

You know, they all tell different advice.

Keep a schedule.

Go with the flow.

Hold the baby.

Rock the baby.

Bounce the baby.

Blow a hairdryer on the baby.

Yeah.

Keep it quiet.

Get the baby used to the noise, that kind of thing.

And as a new parent, it really can drive you a little nutty.

I think it just came to a point where I was reading all that and I'm like, I can't do this.

And I realized in a way it was really...

not in my control because trying all these things hadn't yielded the expected hoped for effects.

So in a way, I hit a wall and I had to accept what was.

I didn't do anything differently, but my perspective on it changed.

And I let go of the ought to control it.

He ought to be peaceful.

He ought to go to sleep.

He ought to be happy.

And that perspective change was almost like a little magic because I

The moment I changed my perspective, that very moment, a lot of the tension just left.

he still cried.

So it didn't change anything about the crying per se, but the moments or the times of crying almost became pleasant.

I mean, it's weird to say that, but it was almost pleasant because it wasn't something that I had to make go away that I was layering all this judgment on, but rather it was something that we shared.

And I thought, well, he's

comfortable showing his distress to me.

And it sort of was an experience that we shared together and part of the richness of our relationship in a way, rather than something to try and avoid.

Yeah, so people differ in the degree to which they tend to accept their negative emotions.

So some people naturally do something that I had a hard time doing.

They encounter negative emotions and they don't judge them as good or bad.

Other people have a tendency to do what I did, which is tell themselves, I shouldn't be feeling the way I'm feeling.

This is wrong.

And what we found is that the less people accept their negative emotions, the more depressive symptoms, the more anxiety symptoms they experience, and the less well-being they have.

And this, by the way, tends to be true for men and for women across different ethnic groups.

And in that same study, we also wanted to find out why that is.

And we tackled that question in two ways.

In one study, we brought people into the lab and we had them, ironically, give an impromptu speech that people tend to find stressful.

It's a really common anxiety.

And so we measured how much negative and how much positive emotions they felt.

And people who tend to have an accepting mindset

responded to the stressful speech with less negative emotion.

They, on the whole, felt a little bit less anxious, a little bit less distraught.

And there was another part of the study where we gave people daily diaries.

So every day for two weeks, we asked them, what was the most stressful thing that happened to you today?

And what were your emotional responses to that?

How much sadness, how much distress did you feel?

But also positive emotions.

How much strength, how much hope, how much joy did you feel during your day's most stressful event?

And what we found was that people who have an accepting mindset often

in their daily diaries reported feeling less negative emotions in response to the day's most stressful events.

And in turn, that emotional response explained why six months later, those same people had better mental health.

So these sort of daily emotions in response to daily adversity seem to be a really important active ingredient in that link.

Yes, absolutely.

So many of those ideas have precursors in world religions and philosophies.

And one of the biggest representation of that idea is Buddhism, of course.

And Buddhism is the precursor to mindfulness and acceptance is a really big part

part of the larger philosophy of mindfulness.

And so there's a huge intellectual debt owed to Buddhist scholars as well as Buddhist practitioners and researchers on mindfulness.

That's a great question that we are really concerned about because we wouldn't want people to accept bad, unjust situations, even if it helps them feel better.

And so in the research, we also asked participants about their tendency to accept bad situations in addition to their tendency to accept their own emotions and their own negative thoughts.

And this is really important because these beneficial effects of accepting your own emotions and thoughts were connected with better mental health while accepting bad situations was not.

So it's a separate thing and accepting how you feel does not mean accepting and resigning yourself to bad situations.

Yes, exactly.

And I think actually it might help people in a way.

to address bad things in their lives.

Because if you look your negative feelings in the eye and don't get overwhelmed by them, that might help you more effectively deal with addressing bad, unjust, stressful situations.

I think it's a really common worry and it explains something that's a little bit of a mystery, which is acceptance sounds really easy, right?

You literally don't do anything.

You have your emotions.

They're there.

You don't try to control them.

You don't spring into action, right?

So it sounds incredibly easy, and yet we have a really, really hard time doing that.

Even I myself, I've seen the benefits so often.

I still, my first instinct is often to, ooh, bad, make it go away quick.

And I think the underlying...

Belief is that I'm going to get overwhelmed by it.

And so I need to clamp down on it quickly.

So I think it's a really deeply ingrained belief that many of us have.

And it explains why we don't naturally embrace acceptance.

We don't do it all the time.

I think one overall recommendation is to have an accepting mindset for both our negative and our positive emotions.

Don't monitor as much.

Don't try to avoid.

Don't try to strive too much for something else.

One way to think about this is that it kind of replaces a mindset of I need to be with a mindset of I prefer.

So I think we can still...

Have preferences.

The problems come in where we tell ourselves, I must feel a certain way or else I can't have a good life.

That's, I think, what we need to avoid.

So preferences with a light touch are good for our mental health and well-being.

It's the need and the concern that we want to get away from.

I would tell myself that it's okay to prefer to have a wonderful birthday party, but that I don't need it to be special.

The perfect birthday party where all the kids are completely happy 100% of the time.

And that my son and my life and all the important things are going to be okay, even if it's not.

Yes, I would say that.

Feeling joy, feeling happiness is a universal human preference.

So I'm not saying we should get rid of all of those books and all of the advice, but I do think we need to fine-tune a little bit just how single-mindedly we go about the pursuit.

as well as how we go about that pursuit.

So connecting with other people, engaging in experiences over material goods, those are things that tend to work.

It's actually pretty difficult to do, at least for me, because the way we encounter happiness, the way we encounter positive and negative emotions is really deeply ingrained in our upbringing and in our culture.

So these are deeply ingrained habits of the mind.

And so even though it's literally doing nothing, not judging, not trying to control, it can be really difficult for people to do it.

But I absolutely try to do it.

And one example where I feel like I succeeded is when I reconnected with my childhood friend after...

really long time she actually had gone through cancer and had surgery and chemotherapy she was in recovery but still seeing her physically it was difficult and there were many feelings of sadness and grief for seeing what she had to go through the toll it had taken on her body and

I think I managed to stay with those feelings because I was able to see how the journey of going through cancer, it's a normal reaction.

It's part of life.

And

What it feels like is almost like watching clouds in the sky or watching a peaceful river go by, right?

Where you don't try to control the clouds.

You don't try to control the water.

You don't judge the clouds or the water.

And...

By doing that, viewing your own emotions as, well, like a river that is just flowing by or through you, we're able to accept what it is and let it go and let it flow on.

It was so lovely to talk with you.

Thank you so much.

What would be five things that you would tell a kid to help them grow into being a better conversationalist, especially with some of our kids that have traumas in their past and maybe don't have great conversationalists around them?