Secular Buddhism Podcast

Episode 60: Happiness

Host: Noah Rasheta Guest: Ellen Petry Leanse

Introduction

Hello, and welcome to the Secular Buddhism Podcast. I'm your host, Noah Rasheta. This is episode 60, and today I'm excited to be doing a live interview and discussion on the topic of happiness with Ellen Petry Leanse.

Ellen is a technology pioneer and alumna of Apple, Google, and various entrepreneurial ventures. She works at the crossroads of neuroscience, systems thinking, and mindfulness practices. She teaches at Stanford University and guides individuals and organizations to increase impact and purpose through sustainable mindsets and skills.

If you're new to the podcast, thank you for joining. You can find more information at SecularBuddhism.com. The Secular Buddhism podcast is produced weekly and covers philosophical topics within Buddhism and secular humanism.

I like to start each episode with a piece of advice from Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama. He says: "Do not try to use what you learn from Buddhism to be a Buddhist. Use it to be a better whatever you already are."

Before we begin, I want to thank everyone watching us live today. We're broadcasting on multiple platforms, and we may have a few technical moments along the way, but I'm confident we're going to have a great conversation about happiness.

The Topic of Happiness

Happiness is one of those topics that we're all after, right? We all want to experience it. But I feel like at times, we may not fully understand what it actually is. What does it mean to be happy? I've had this thought recently, actually thinking about love. We all want to be loved or to love, but what does that actually mean? When I spend time thinking about it like that, I realize it's really hard to define.

I think happiness falls into that same category. Maybe it's not what we think it is, or we'll understand it better if we learn about what's really going on in our mind and in our brain—both from an emotional standpoint and from a physiological standpoint. The actual chemicals that cause us to feel the way we feel.

Ellen is the perfect expert to talk to about this topic. I was really excited when I picked up her book, The Happiness Hack: A Brain-Aware Guide to Life Satisfaction. As I read through it and saw the close correlation between the neuroscience of happiness and the mindfulness-based approach to understanding happiness, I thought it was really well done and really well explained.

Ellen has also given a TEDx talk titled "Happiness by Design," which you can find on the TED website. Ellen, before we jump into the deeper topics, tell us a little bit about your journey with the topic of happiness. What led you to be an expert on this?

Ellen's Journey with Happiness

Ellen Leanse: Thank you, Noah. I think I'm still a learner about this because there's so much more to be known about happiness and what creates that feeling that we all crave—something that we think is our set point or maybe our aspiration in the human experience.

But years back, as I talk about in the book, I was living a life that probably, from the outside looking in, seemed like something anybody should be happy with. Mind you, there were many things that brought me deep joy and satisfaction—connection with my family, my sons, the times when I felt really aligned with my personal intention, the work I found satisfaction in doing, and even some of the very simple things like caring for a family and having a home.

But there was this other thing happening on the surface that felt very confusing, and I didn't know what it was about. I really couldn't understand why there was this static between the internal things that I knew made me happy and the things that seemed to be getting validation and approval in the outside world. The validation and approval—I have to say, I saw it probably as much as any other human. But it's kind of about the public-facing persona, the everyday being great, the things we bought or owned or wore. Those were the things that tended to get approval rather than the things that really made me happy.

The highlight of my day might have been sitting with one of my children before he went to bed, reading, or really talking about the day. But the things that got the most validation and celebration in the outside world were completely different than that. I felt confused.

I started reading about life purpose and what it really meant to be a satisfied human and to have a good life. Everything from the Stoics to the sciences. It was when I stumbled upon my first books about neuroscience and began understanding some of the chemical processes in the brain that I started seeing something interesting. I realized there were cycles in the brain that could easily be exploited and validated externally to create a certain type of reinforcement—like checking off a box and saying, "Ah, yes, this is good and it's making sense." But those cycles actually really weren't working for me.

As I thought more deeply about it and learned more, I realized they weren't really working that well for other people either. I started diving deeper into the way the brain works, looking at our emotional and memory systems and the cognitive systems that wrap around those and create our experience of reality.

And then came what I call the icing on the cake: when I started studying the work of the Buddha and the wisdom of Buddhist teaching, I began to realize that 3,000 years ago, under the Bodhi tree, someone came to this incredibly deep understanding—on a mind-blowingly perceptive and deep level—that really explained the human condition of why we so often get happiness wrong.

Defining Happiness

Noah: I loved what you said about how your experience with unhappiness clicked when you started learning about your brain. What I really enjoyed about your book is that it reads like a manual. If you understand what's going on, it's easier to work with what you're experiencing—whether that's suffering, discomfort, or in this case, happiness. You understand what's actually happening when we're experiencing these emotions.

So first, I want to ask: what is happiness? How do you define it? There's the chemical composition of what we feel, but there's more to it. Tell me about your view on the definition of happiness. What are we talking about when we're talking about happiness?

Ellen: That's a great question, and it's one of the things that's really hard to define. I think that happiness, used generically, refers to that feeling that things are making sense and that we're fitting into something bigger—that we are validated for the way we are participating in this fuller reality.

However, I think there's another meaning of happiness that has been hijacked, if you will, by many of the experiences we have in modern life.

If we go back to an evolutionary level, if we look at our biology when we were living a very different type of human life than we're living today, happiness might have been the reward we felt from, say, someone bringing home something from a hunt or from a gather that would allow the clan to sustain itself. In that, there would be a couple of different types of happiness happening.

There would be the reward we'd get from the dopamine cycle. Dopamine flows from motivation to achievement to reward—a loop. We would get that dopamine charge, which was very important for motivating early humans to get through some of the challenges they faced simply in order to survive.

I'd love to talk for a moment about the concept of distraction. Distraction is usually associated with the dopamine motivation-achievement-reward cycle. Distraction served our survival when we were earlier humans. We might walk along paths and see a little grub on a tree, go grab it, and have the satisfaction not only of having nourishment but also of "Aha, I saw it." So that distraction had a certain type of reward.

But also, more than likely, we could get distracted by something rustling in the grass, and we'd say "Ah!" and fire up our amygdala response and flee or fight as needed if something was putting us in peril.

Today, distraction is manufactured. It's manufactured by people who fully understand the dopamine loop and that jolt of happiness it gives us. They know how to exploit it through the images they show us, the buttons they give us to click. All of these different things cause us to be distracted—not just a few times a day to find a little opportunistic nibble to eat or to avoid potential danger, but to do what they want us to do: engage with their products, engage with their experiences, or buy the thing they're selling.

Our dopamine experience has been largely hijacked by this onslaught of media and technology in our lives.

However, if you talk to people, they're not going to tell you that makes them happy. They're going to say, "I wasted hours doing this." I was with a friend over Thanksgiving weekend, and he said, "My gosh, I've been doing this now for 20 minutes. I've completely wasted 20 minutes. Why did I keep doing it?" We've all been there. This posing as happiness is not really what happiness is on a human level.

Human happiness—my book asserts, and as do many psychologists, philosophers, and scientists—is much more about the serotonin cycles. These are what agents call eudaimonic happiness. It's the happiness you work for. It's true satisfaction. It's when you've done something that personally expresses you and your unique talents and purpose in a way that serves others, allows you to grow, or creates this feeling that "I've made a small corner of the world more beautiful than it was before, and thus something that I've done really matters."

Compare this to what I call the tequila shot happiness of dopamine—quick and intense. With dopamine, you get that hit and then you go, "Oh, what was I thinking?" But with serotonin satisfaction, you go, "No, I'm pushing it away. I have friends tomorrow. I have a hike in the morning. Or I have work tomorrow." And you have this feeling of satisfaction, like, "I did the right thing." That's the serotonin satisfaction that I believe is being largely hijacked by these externally created dopamine experiences.

The Role of Awareness

Noah: So it sounds like what you're saying is that part of our problem lies in how we're defining happiness, right? Looking for instant gratification versus the feeling we get when we've accomplished something we set out to do. It sounds like awareness plays an important part in this.

Would you say that when we're not aware, we're going for that instant shot without realizing it's the instant shot? We might be experiencing the gratification of it and not realizing it. You mentioned specifically that moment of "yeah, I do this, and then I'm like, oh, why did I do that?"

But what about scenarios where we don't say that? Where we think what we got was what we wanted, so we stay in that cycle and keep going?

Ellen: Thank you for synopsizing that so well. A really important adage from neuroscience is: your brain will do more of whatever it's doing right now. The brain is constantly updating its hypothesis of what it takes for you to be safe and to survive.

When we ask "What's the purpose of the brain?" nine people out of ten are going to say, "Oh, to think." Well, yes, the brain does think and it's really good at it. But mostly, your brain is going to do whatever it does in service of keeping you safe and alive. That's our evolutionary biology. So your brain will do more of whatever you're doing right now.

A really good word to use here is "normalize." Whatever you're doing, the brain will normalize as part of its hypothesis of what keeps you safe and alive. If you're doing things that are riding that dopamine tide, your brain is going to go, "Oh my gosh, that's what it takes to survive."

Many people say that the brain never evolved to the point where, in the moment, it can tell the difference between a dopamine charge and something that's going to give you the more lasting serotonin feeling. I'm not sure I completely agree with that because if you look at Buddhist thinking—the discussion of an appropriate response—we are going to work with the responsive mind rather than the reactive mind. That's very much why we meditate and why we train the brain in moment-to-moment awareness.

You're going to see that we had some understanding of the reactive work of the fast brain and even of the dopamine loop. And the more disciplined, intentional, aware, and mindful response—which is more serotonin-associated—with consideration, mindfulness, and awareness. They're more associated with each other.

So for example, I might be using my phone, which we all have right here near us. Let's say I go and check how something I posted on Instagram is doing. "Oh, did people like that really great picture I posted last night?" I go in and see what my likes are, respond to my comments or whatever. But then, because of the way dopamine works, I'm very motivated by "What's the next thing below? What's the next thing below?" and I start scrolling, scrolling, scrolling.

But if I've trained myself to say "Ah, look at your dopamine at work," I can find an awareness that brings me back to what really matters more and get off that hijack. If the brain will do more of whatever it's doing right now, we can look at that example and say, "Oh my gosh. The more I stop myself and remind myself to break this biological cycle, the more likely I am to get more of what I'm really seeking on a deeper level and invite in a new biological cycle that's actually much healthier for me and much more in keeping with my purpose in life."

Between dopamine and serotonin are very different chemical responses associated with stress chemicals. Suffice to say that serotonin is much more associated with healthy body physiology and stress management—even stress reduction—than dopamine is, which is very linked to cortisol cycles.

Conditioning and the Normalized Mind

Noah: Yeah, that really resonates. You brought up something that correlates really well with the mindfulness-based approach. You talked about the normalization—the idea that this is what I always do, so it feels normal, so I keep doing it. From the Buddhist perspective, we'd call that conditioning, right? The conditioned mind is the normalized mind, and we become habitually reactive.

I don't just mean reactive in the sense that something happens and I react. I mean my very thoughts can be reactive. A certain thought triggers a certain thought, and that thought triggers another thought. That process itself can be my habitual reactivity.

Now, if I understand that what's happening in my mind is this process of normalization that you're talking about, what I've seen recently is fascinating. Someone was saying, "I'm so grateful for the happiness that I have in my life." And I was listening thinking, "Wait a second. You don't seem like a happy person. I always hear complaining or this or that." But I thought, "How interesting that this person's baseline of happiness seems normal, and in their mind it's up here. It's like, I'm this happy person." Where from another perspective, someone might look at them and think, "No, you're not really a happy person."

Could that be the normalization we're talking about? I think from the mindfulness-based approach, that's what we're saying about everything, not just happiness, but all our patterns—we become habitual in our thought patterns, especially in our thought patterns.

There's a quote often attributed to the Buddha—though it's not really a direct quote—that says we become what we think, right? What we're thinking constantly determines how we are. I think if you apply that to happiness, you can be in a position where you think you're living a happy life, but maybe you're not.

I'm thinking of my own experience I've talked about many times on the podcast. I was looking for Chris, my supplier in China. My assumption was that Chris was a man. When I went to meet with Chris, I couldn't see him because Chris wasn't a him. Chris was a she. I was shocked to discover that wasn't who I had in mind this whole time. I think we do that with a lot of concepts. Happiness is a concept, right? Whatever your definition of happiness is, that may be blinding you from discovering what happiness really is. Does that sound applicable?

Ellen: Oh yes, all that and more. I want to come back to Chris in a moment, but first, the person who said "I'm so grateful for my happiness" but didn't feel happy—two things hit me.

One is that I think there's so much pressure on people to be a happy person right now, which really saddens me. So much of our image of what happiness is comes from billboards, commercials, or these grinning joyful people living a perfect life. Or these highly curated and selected feeds we're exposed to, showing people's family moments and fabulous vacations. I call it the disease of "fabulitis"—contagious fabulousness that we're all supposed to aspire to. And it leaves us feeling short, left out, like we're not quite achieving. We've fallen off, so we strive harder to fill the gap by proving we're as happy and fabulous as that too.

This is largely a chemical hijack, and I think a lot of people are suffering with this. You probably know friends intimately and closely enough to know they have bad days, stumbles, and bad hair days as much as any other human, but we're never going to see this on their social feeds. I have friends who will show the high points—but they're not going to show the 3 a.m. wake-ups and what it felt like to be so tired getting ready for work the next morning.

This whole artificial concept of what the baseline is—if we really think about how that baseline came about—it's really what you were saying about thought triggers thought and the habitually reactive conditioning we get. There's a way we're supposed to be, and if we do these things, we will be it, and finally, we will feel the way we've been hoping to feel.

That was a problem in the time of the Buddha because these were some of the things he really dove into when he was trying to answer these big questions that shaped his life. Even thinking about the skandhas—when he really broke out how the brain responds to these external stimuli and references our long-term memory, our short-term memory, our emotions, all these other things. That's exactly how it works. But it can trick us if we let it.

The way to break through that is to understand that yes, our minds do become conditioned. That's how we survived in the jungle for millions of years of our evolutionary history. We were responding and learning from our environments in ways that shaped our survival. As we advanced as humans and developed these unique forebrains—the prefrontal cortices—new types of thinking came in that created possibilities for us that ironically contend with some of these earlier, more fast-brain, more primitive processing systems in our brain. That tension is our challenge and our opportunity. It's really what the Buddha looked at when exploring react versus respond. It's exactly like Daniel Kahneman's book, which many listeners will have heard of—about the fast brain and the slow brain.

But what Kahneman didn't do that the Buddha does is guide us to ways of shifting gears between these two modalities so we can move toward more of what really brings us happiness.

"I'm so grateful for my happiness, but I don't feel happiness." My heart hurts for that person because she, like so many others, has been conditioned to say, "My life is supposed to be a little bit better or different than it is now" or "If only I had this or that, then finally I'll have happiness." We get messages that say states lead to traits, maybe they do over time. If we think it, we can create it. That's true to an extent, but perhaps underlying those words "I'm grateful for my happiness" is this state that so many of us feel that says, "It's not quite what it should be." And that's the thing that really holds us from finding satisfaction.

The Two Arrows

Noah: Yeah, that really resonates—being caught up in this world of thinking there's a way it should be, and how that thought can rob us of happiness.

I want to touch on something you mentioned with the evolution of the brain and Daniel Kahneman's work on fast and slow thinking. I want to correlate this to the Buddhist teaching of the two arrows. The teaching is that you can get shot by an arrow and you can't do anything about it. You've been shot by an arrow. That's it. But then you can pick up a second arrow and aggravate the wound, right? You get shot, and then you pick up that second arrow and you're like, "Why did you have to shoot me here?" and you're poking at that spot with that second arrow.

I was thinking about this with the more evolved part of the mind. What makes us human is we can think. That's one thing animals do too, but we think about thinking. Maybe that's the second layer—there's what we're experiencing as an emotion or happiness, and then there's that thinking about happiness. Should I be happy? Is this happy enough? Do I need more of it? That's that second layer, that second arrow element that goes beyond just sitting with the original emotion, taking it in, saying "wow, this is great." But instead thinking "maybe I should feel guilty for feeling happy" or something along those lines.

Ellen: You've invited in the perfect entry point: the limbic system. It's at the very core of our brain. The cognitive parts of the brain, the cortex, wrap around it. It's quite deep back in the brain. We can think of an evolutionary model where survival mechanisms evolved first, moving up toward the front of the brain. Then the more cognitive system started to evolve, leading to the prefrontal cortex—right here at the forehead.

Let me give your prefrontal cortex a hug by putting your fingers together and wrapping your forehead like that. That's your PFC.

Now let's tie this into the emotional center of the brain. Anatomically, it really is nestled right in there with all the motor, cognitive, and perception parts. In Buddhism, we don't talk about the senses. We talk about the sense gates or the sense doors and how they bring in information from the outside world where it's simply interpreted by the brain. That's fully integrated with all the cognitive parts and also with our limbic system—emotions and memories. In the book, I talk about it as the rubber band ball. Layer upon layer at the center of the brain.

A teacher of mine once asked me to describe a memory that filled me with a sense of enjoyment or pleasure. I described this really beautiful place, my happy place, and how I loved to visualize it. He asked, "Where is the beauty?" And of course, that was such a beautiful question because the beauty is inside. I mean, it's still in that place on the north shore of Oahu, but I'm not seeing it right now. But the beauty is still there inside.

So the brain always has its maps and perceptions of what you value or enjoy, fear, feel shameful of, or retreat from because of the way cognition works with that core limbic system—that memory and emotion center.

To your question about the two arrows, Noah: you might experience a moment of happiness followed by a sense of "I don't deserve this." There's shame or something like that. That is the limbic system and its entrenched patterns—those more familiar bands around the rubber band ball of your emotional memory and long-term memory experiences. Much of which, by the way, is subconscious. We're not even aware of what those things are. Like the rubber band ball, they're wadded up in the middle, and we don't even know what all the other bands are built around.

But that second arrow is probably the association with subconscious thoughts in the limbic system.

There's a special word for moments like that that I think is really helpful: "information." When we have that second arrow experience, we say, "Ah. I felt good, but then I judged it or I retreated from it or I said I wasn't worthy." What was happening there? "Oh, now I see. I was wounding myself with a second arrow." And then we can remove the judgment or shame we might feel in that moment. We might be tempted to say, "I'm always limiting myself. I won't let myself get happy. What's my problem?" That's a third arrow and maybe even a fourth arrow.

So when we get that second arrow, that's a really great invitation to be grateful for that information so we can say, "Look what I'm doing. Wait. Pause." Move into the responsive, not reactive mind. The responsive brain, and go, "No. Really. I really want to enjoy this happiness" or "It doesn't serve me to wound myself with a second arrow through old judgments that don't even fit into my life anymore." And then we can start to build other patterns.

Remember, whatever the brain is doing right now, the brain will do more of. So we're actually beginning that new pattern.

And then, love your brain and forgive it for that because the brain's job is to keep you safe and alive. To do that, it can only draw on past experiences—whether they're known or unknown, conscious or unconscious. It's still going to draw on those pathways because per the brain's definition, it's done its job perfectly if you're still alive, right? Everything is working perfectly. It loves it if you're wounding yourself with those fourth, fifth, and sixth arrows if that's kept you alive. It's going to tell you to keep doing that until you say, thanks to the prefrontal cortex, "No, there is another way."

The Rubber Band Ball

Noah: I love that. In fact, when I was reading your book, that whole section about the rubber band ball really stood out to me. You describe having an object and then wrapping rubber bands around it, doing that over and over. Eventually, you have this big ball of rubber bands that can bounce and does whatever it does because of what's inside. At some point, you may not even know what's at the core of it.

I had this thought when I was reading that: in Buddhism, there's this idea that there are causes and conditions to all natural phenomena. I think that sometimes puts us in this mindset of "Well, if I can go back far enough and find what's inside the rubber band ball, then it'll fix all my problems." But I don't know that we can always do that. Maybe there's an emotion that was triggered by a memory that was triggered by some other emotion and some other memory. It might be so complex that I'm left with this situation where all I know is I've got this ball of rubber bands, and I know what it does when I drop it—it bounces. I know that happens because of what's inside, but I don't even know what's inside.

Is it enough to conclude: I'll never know what's inside, but at least I understand it now. When I drop it, it bounces, and that's what I have to work with?

Ellen: That's so nice. It's so much fun when there's an idea out there that people come back with ways of building on that really enrich it and add to it. So that was beautiful.

It's true. There are many systems for solving problems in life or self-knowledge and self-awareness that really go back and say: let's dig and dig and dig and try to pry open and see what's in the middle of that rubber band ball. I certainly have no judgment about that. I think it can be a good path and really a necessary path in some situations.

But all of us have the ability to watch our reactions and watch our responses to the things happening around us. On the external layer—and this is a metaphor of that rubber band ball—are the thoughts we're most familiar with and use most often. Those are the things on the outer layer that we access first. If we become aware of what our usual responses or reactions might be, being aware of those, I believe, lets it soften the tension on those. Maybe we look below at the next layer.

If I had a rubber band ball to show you now, you'd see you have to pry something apart and go, "Oh yeah, there's a wide gray one down there. And then there's a red one." You're never going to get to the middle—it would take a lot of time.

But here's the scientific fact hidden under the metaphor: if we're aware of what's happening at a surface level, there are things that are quite easy to do. We can put new bands on top of it so that we go to those responses before we go to the ones we're more conditioned to. That can be done through intentional practices, reflective practices, or even new habit building.

Or we can say, "No. I want to soften that reaction and maybe even remove a band or two." For example, if there's something you're doing that's not serving you—wounding with a second arrow—awareness is a way of saying, "Okay, I can remove that more conditioned or habitual response if I stay committed to it." Or "I can add a new pattern. I'm going to take a deep breath whenever I feel these emotions, so that I have a pause to reflect before I go into a habitual response."

Yes, even awareness of that rubber band ball at a surface level is enough to start navigating your life with a different outlook and set of expectations. I'm completely with you on that.

Identity as Layers

Noah: In my own meditative practice, I feel like that description of prying open the rubber bands—I have certain sensitivities about certain topics or things that I can trace back and say, "It's because of this. This is what's at the core of that." But there are others where I don't. All I know is that it goes somewhere, but I don't know how far back or exactly why. It might be genetic. I may believe or not believe certain things based on experiences my parents had or however many generations back.

And I get that. I don't have to understand the source. I just know that what I think, what I intend to think as the solid way of being, the way Noah is, isn't real. It's not solid. It's layers. Everything that I think and say and do—I'm part of that rubber band of causes and conditions that extend from what I've inherited from my society, from family beliefs, and on and on. It's just helpful to know that even if I can't get to the end of that process.

Ellen: I actually think, Noah, that is the invitation. That is the "Haha, got you" experience of being human—that we're all the product of our genetics, our epigenetics, the very biological response to environment. Genetics, epigenetics, and then our conditioning—that's sort of what makes a human personality.

And knowing that, we can say, "Haha, this is how we are if we leave it to that."

And then something else can rise—something more. I don't know what to call it, but in the book we talk about it as the watcher, using a term some Buddhist practitioners use. We have this invitation for this other thing that seems to be able to separate from simply those chemical reactions and firing pathways. We can start to put our hands on the wheel and drive a little bit. And the first step is exactly that awareness. We all are the products of these forces. Now, what do we do with it? That really is the question.

Is Happiness a Paradox?

Noah: Okay, let's get into that a little more. First, I want to address a topic: is happiness a paradox?

I'll give you a funny story. I'm about an hour away from a good friend who lives down in Salt Lake. He has these weekly meditation groups. One week I was planning to go down there. I planned ahead of time because I knew it would take me an hour to get there on time. It was at a new location. I hadn't been to that spot before, so I put it in the GPS. I get there. It seems like this doesn't seem like the right place. So I switch from Apple Maps to Google Maps to see if it would take me to the same place, and it didn't.

Long story short, I'm starting to feel the emotion of discomfort and frustration. I'm upset because I can't get to where I'm supposed to get so I can sit and relax. That was the big irony. I wanted to go meditate that morning so that I could experience a little bit of peace and contentment. And the very fact that I was trying to get there to do that was the reason I wasn't feeling it because I wasn't getting there. I had this thought in that moment: "Well, I could just be at home, and then I'd be at peace if I didn't want to come here to be at peace, right?"

I think that's the paradox. We do this with concepts like patience too. If I want to be patient, the more I want to, the less I have it, right? I want to be patient, but I want to be patient right now. Well, that's the very reason you can't be patient because the whole point of it is you can't have it right now. You've got to be okay with having it whenever you have it.

I wonder if happiness sometimes fits that same bill. I think marketers know this. This is why they hijack it because they know that happiness, like everything else, is impermanent. If they can convince you that "Yeah, that thing you thought was happy, that's not it. It's going to be this. When you finally have this or finally drive this car," or whatever they're selling. But then they know that's not it. You finally get that and now you've got to have a new one every year or whatever because you're always chasing after it.

I think that's the paradox: you can't have it because you want it. That's the very reason you can't have it. Is that a fair assessment of happiness in general? Is it a paradox?

Ellen: I think paradox is the right word for certain types of happiness. Mind you, I truly think satisfaction, the deeper satisfaction, is a different thing. But if we think about happiness as conventionally described, yes, there is a myth we're told from the time we're very small. It's deeply conditioned into us—probably subconsciously, generationally, epigenetically, and in other ways. Maybe it's simply part of the human condition: "As soon as this happens, I will be happy" or "As soon as I get there, I will be happy." We live our life on this game board, chasing happiness, believing there is a destination out there that when we land on it, boom, it's all there.

But most of us, by this point in our lives, probably know it's not working. We probably thought, "As soon as I get that first job after I graduate from college, then I'll be happy." "As soon as I do this life milestone, own this, acquire that." No. That is the paradox, right?

Part of how that works is a lot of dopamine. People talk about dopamine and serotonin and oxytocin and vasopressin. But these are only the highlight reel of brain chemicals. There are so many more that are woven into our experiences that we don't even know how to describe the subtlety and interaction of all this. And there's other stuff too—the way the currents are flowing, the electromagnetic currents.

The paradox is that when this happens, we will be happy. Well, we might feel for a moment like "The first time we drive that new car" or "When we go on that date," or whatever it is—we do get that jolt or surge of "This is great." But the next day when we go back to things, there's still that "As soon as ... as soon as ... as soon as ..." We start living with that. This is a true paradox in the human experience.

There's one question that I think is really important to invite if we experience that paradox—and I think all of us do. I write about it in my opening chapter: "I've done all the things I was supposed to do. Why don't I feel happy? I did everything that they told me to do and here I am feeling like there's something more. Is there something wrong with me?"

I do think that is part of the human experience. And then the aha moment comes when we realize, "Wait a minute. There's a weird conundrum here. The things that have brought me here are not the things that are going to bring me there if I'm really searching for real happiness."

And then the other realization is this sort of aha: "Wait. I'm already there. All I have is this moment. And it is my relationship with this moment that's going to define how I navigate every other moment that goes forward. And I can choose—it's even more than choose. I can accept that this is what the path is."

Once there is some acceptance of that, the paradox softens a little bit. There is a different type of invitation that we get to really drop in and feel like things make sense, to feel that there is a purpose to this, to feel that I do have some mastery of the path, and to feel that I can find satisfaction punctuated by moments of dopamine-charged happiness on it.

Happiness as a Journey

Noah: I really like that you bring up the idea of the path. In your book, you share a quote from Margaret Lee Runbeck that says, "Happiness is not a station you arrive at, but a manner of traveling."

I think that correlates so well with the mindfulness-based approach too—the path is the goal. The moment that we understand that, like you said, now we can experience whatever life is throwing at us, punctuated by those moments of dopamine, but we realize those weren't the goal. Those weren't the point. All of that is icing on the cake. If you can say what is the cake? It's being alive. That's the cake. You're alive. Everything else is icing on the cake.

So which leads me to this thought: is there a natural state of happiness? Do we get in the way of our own happiness because we don't understand what's going on in our minds and the tricks that our minds play on us regarding happiness?

I'm thinking about the Buddhist perspective here—the idea of Buddha nature. This is the unconditioned mind, your natural state of being. There's a Thai story of a golden Buddha statue at a monastery. The country was being invaded, so the monks covered up this golden statue with clay so the invaders wouldn't take it. Maybe the monks got killed, I'm not sure what happened, but they all disappeared. For years, this statue was there—just a clay-looking statue. Eventually, new monks arrived who didn't know what the originals had done. Someone at some point discovers that under this clay, it really wasn't a clay statue. It's been a golden statue all along.

The correlation of that story is that our essential nature is like the golden statue. It's enlightened. It's awakened. And here's the paradox of awakening or enlightenment: you can't obtain it because you already are it. You're not going to find those sunglasses you're looking for because they're already on your head. That's the big joke of it all.

Is happiness the same? Is there a natural state of happiness? Maybe if we use words like "contentment" or "joy," is that our natural state, and we're not seeing it because we're frantically looking for those glasses, not realizing "Hey, they're already on your head"? What do you think of that?

Ellen: The clay and the golden Buddha is the perfect analogy because I think there is a natural state that is perhaps like Buddha nature. There's no good word for that. It's a beingness or a presence or a feeling of a unique, golden centeredness. But we're so busy looking for happiness that we don't see it because we think that happiness is the clay on the outside of the golden Buddha. But the gold—

Noah: Yeah, from the Buddhist perspective, we call that the conditioning.

Ellen: Exactly. This is true cognitively and psychologically as well. The funny thing is that so many different disciplines align on this concept of how the clay shrouds the gold. The gold is not the feeling of happiness that we've been conditioned to think is the hit of dopamine. That's the clay. That's what's meant to tempt us and draw us away. People can exploit those cycles that we have, saying, "This is how you're going to find it." But the gold is inside all along. It's that sort of dropping in that we've all felt at different moments.

You asked if there's something in our biology. Well, the answer is certainly yes. If we look at relatively intact human cultures that have survived for tens and tens of thousands, sometimes even more, there's one that seems to have survived intact for about 130,000, possibly a little bit more years. All of them have reflective practices that challenge the dopamine cycles.

For example, there's a southern African tribe whose culture has been intact for more than 100,000 years. When someone brings home a kill to the clan—which they're going to share because it's collective—they come back apologizing: "I'm sorry I didn't get a very good one. I didn't do as well as I could have on the hunt." And then get this: the people in the clan come back and go, "You call that an antelope?"

It's all about disrupting this usual striving that the human mind has for "Look at me, I'm the best. I got it" or "I suck because I missed out." It's about disrupting that and coming back to "I'm alive. We're together. There is some purpose to this that I don't understand, and lucky me, I get to be in it." That is the gold of the Buddha.

Gratitude and Contentment

Noah: As you were saying that—"I'm alive"—I was thinking of a quote by Brother David Steindl-Rast. He talks about gratitude, and his quote says, "It's not happiness that makes us grateful. It's gratefulness that makes us happy."

As I think about that in terms of what we're discussing, from the Buddhist point of view, we talk about suffering as arising the moment we want life to be other than it is. It feels like the flip side of that is when we accept things as they are and we're grateful for things as they are, there's this sense of feeling like nothing needs to change. Everything is just fine the way it is.

I think those are the moments where it's beyond this dopamine type of happiness. This is the deep, deep contentment and joy that we experience when nothing needs to be different than how it is—when the moment is perfect just as it is. I think gratitude evokes that. When we're grateful, we're thinking about things as they are, and we experience that feeling of "Hey, I'm glad that it's this way, so therefore it doesn't need to be any different." Maybe that's why happiness arises as a result of gratitude.

Happiness Traps and Hacks

Noah: What I'd love to hear as we wrap up is: what are some of the happiness traps we need to be aware of? And then, what are some specific practices we can do to try to nurture happiness, joy, or contentment—however we want to word it? What are some happiness hacks from your book?

Ellen: Right. Two traps that come to mind would be this: happiness is something you will acquire in the future based on your actions. Do this and you will get that. Happiness is an if-then scenario. And then the other one is simpler than that: happiness is a state that you will reach. It's something external.

To make it simple: it's a future state that you will attain based on actions, and second, it will be shaped by externals. Certainly, happiness can be influenced by externals. When I'm with my friends or family or see one of my sons doing something aligned with his purpose, that's giving me a sense of happiness that is affected by something external. But that's not what's making me happy. It's giving me a feeling of happiness, but that is also temporal and shifting. So happiness is not those things. It's not something you bring in from the outside world that creates happiness.

Noah: Just to emphasize—it's Cyber Monday today, and someone listening might be thinking, "You're saying that getting things won't make me happy? Well, watch how happy I'll be when I land this big deal or this TV doorbuster." I want to emphasize what you just mentioned—the temporal part. We're not saying those things don't make you happy. We're saying that's not the happiness you're looking for. Sure, you'll feel the hit of dopamine, that sense of feeling happy that "Wow, I just got this and I saved this much money." But that's not lasting. That's not the deeper, more meaningful type of happiness we're talking about in this context, right?

Ellen: What an invitation to mindfulness, Noah. If we look at going and getting that TV, do we think deeply about the why? Why does this matter? One of the things I love about my life is when friends really gather to watch a game together or to watch a movie together. This TV might be the way I really create something that I value—a sense of deeper community as we come together. We can be mindful even about buying a TV.

Someone might challenge me and say, "Oh, come on. You can rationalize anything with thinking like that." And they're probably right. But really, if we think about the why—and if we come up with the why and go, "Because I want a TV that's two inches bigger than the one I already have," then we know there's dopamine at work. And we might want to say, "Hey, you know what? The real thing I care about, which is gathering friends together and sharing community, probably isn't going to be that different with a two-inch bigger TV than it is with this one."

Or maybe we're saying, "Because Chris has a TV this size, so I want one this size too." That's information. That's dopamine at work. We've been hijacked. So what we can do at that moment is come back and say, pause for a moment. Get out of reaction. Get into response. Why do I really want this? Come up with a reason we can really sit with and settle with and say, "You know what? It is worth it for me to get it. This really is going to make a difference." Or "You know what? I'm going to do this instead because I already have the thing that's getting me to my why. I just haven't thought about it that way yet."

Noah: It's funny because on Friday, for Black Friday, I went and bought a TV at Walmart. I was thinking about why. From a rational standpoint, I knew I don't need it. My why was: "Well, because I can. At some point I know I want to get a newer TV and right now is a good time because it's cheaper than it would be if I didn't do it right now."

I knew it wasn't going to make me happier. I knew it doesn't make me any better than the me that had the old TV. But I still felt excited that I got a TV. It wasn't the same as before in my life where I would have thought there were other aspects that I was unaware of—like thinking the type of TV I have determines who I am or how people see me. None of those strings were attached to it this time because I felt like it could be an old TV or no TV, and I probably would be just as content. But I can do it. I can afford it right now. So why not?

I bring that up because we're not saying in this interview: "Hey, don't go out and fall for these traps. Don't buy the next thing." You can. It's not inherently wrong to do that. What we're saying is don't do that thinking that's the solution because it's not. If you do it, you're going to do it. Some people will, some people won't, and that's fine. I just wanted to be careful that we're not trying to say, "Oh, people who go out and fall for the dopamine hit, the advertised type of happiness, you guys are silly." We're not saying that at all. I think we're saying: just understand what's happening in your head as you make these choices.

Ellen: It's responding, not reacting. It's doing with awareness and mindfulness and some sort of sense of purpose. You mentioned wanting to get this TV, using a moment to reflect: "Why am I doing this?" Understanding that the things on the surface of your rubber band ball were not the same ones as maybe the last time you bought a TV. Making a conscious decision to say, "This is the right time to do it. It's going to last me for this long. The family will grow with it more," whatever it is. But really doing it because you are the master of your path, not because somebody else's path is mastering you.

Noah: I love that.

Practical Hacks for Happiness

Ellen: So, you asked for some hacks. I can only share what I've heard works for others and the few things that have worked for me. Maybe people listening have things they do in these moments when they feel a sense of angst or unhappiness.

Someone told me recently that they had gone to a meeting they really valued that was about personal growth and communication. They came back feeling like they weren't doing as well as other people.

So the only thing I can say is: in these moments where we feel something is interfering with our happiness, just pause for a moment. Believe it or not, it's a very simple thing that's always available to us: we can take a breath. And it turns out there are two really interesting reasons for this on a neuroscientific level.

First, the brain integrates information differently on an inhale than it does on an exhale. It actually integrates on the inhale. So a slow and intentional breath is actually an invitation for your brain to, on an electromagnetic and blood flow level—which brings oxygen and so forth—just go around and maybe integrate things that might not have been available before. One mindful breath will do that.

The other thing is, when we feel any sense of our happiness being threatened, we do get an amygdala response in the brain. This is the very easily triggered fight-or-flight response. When that happens, there's a chemical reaction that begins instantly in the brain—at 0.003 seconds. Whereas a conscious thought takes at least 0.5 seconds. So there's more than an order of magnitude difference. We get this chemical surge with 30 neuro-modulators that go into the body when the amygdala fires.

At that point, something incredible happens. There's a constriction of blood flow to the prefrontal cortex. Our most advanced human thoughts actually go offline for a moment until either something calms us and brings them back, or until we've done the fighting or fleeing.

When we feel awareness of it happening, we can know that this is an evolutionary response that evolved to keep us alive. We can be grateful for it. And then we can come back and say, "Ah. That is an amygdala hijack." We can hack back on it and come back by using the breath or using a centering in the body.

Or we can even say—two things that I find really useful. One is we can tell ourselves to take a moment. But we can also say, when we're in dialogue with another person or in conflict, we can use two very important words. We can say, "I'm curious. Tell me more about that." The moment we say "I'm curious," we actually are inviting the prefrontal cortex into a different type of consideration, which might be hard in that moment, but once we override it, begins that more integrative access to these higher cognition parts of the brain.

The prefrontal cortex is where we do critical thought, long-term planning, mood regulation, gratitude, thoughtful consideration, meta-thinking—thinking about thinking—and analogical thinking. Exactly the opposite of the fast brain, especially the amygdala-driven responses.

We can use these slow-ourselves-down processes to drop into that moment and then make decisions that at least eliminate regret because if we're reacting, we have a higher probability of regretting, which does remove happiness. Even if we're not moving to a place of happiness, moving to a place of that golden Buddha—that mastery and presence and "I am navigating this mindfully in the moment"—it feels really, really good.

Resources and Final Thoughts

Noah: I love that. Thank you. I want to mention again that Ellen's book is The Happiness Hack: A Brain-Aware Guide to Life Satisfaction. It's very easy to read. I really liked the way it's laid out with little tips and notes. It's really easy to read and digest the information. I'm going to post a link to that on my website, where this video and the audio of this interview will also be posted. I'm going to have this whole conversation transcribed so you can read it as well.

I'd like to include some other links for those of you who would like to learn more about Ellen's work. I'll post a link to her TED talk. Where are some other places, Ellen, where people can learn about you and your work or your book?

Ellen: Yes, thank you so much. I do have a website: ellenleanse.com. Now and again I have a little fun on Twitter with a funny name. It's chep2m—that's C-H-E-P, the number 2, and then the letter M. It's another story. It's a name I was given in rural Kenya, actually. It's probably the worst Twitter handle in history, but it seemed like a good idea at the time. I'll share all of those with you, Noah, so that you have the direct links.

Noah: Great. Well, I want to thank you again for taking the time to not just come on the show and be on the podcast, but to be willing to go live on my Facebook page. I know sometimes the going-live aspect can be a little intimidating. But I think this is a topic that's very relevant for our culture and our society. It's very relevant to those who are practitioners of a mindfulness-based way of living. And I think it correlates really well with the practice of mindfulness and meditation. So thank you for taking the time to be with us.

Do you have any final closing thoughts you want to share with us as we wrap this up?

Ellen: Thank you so much. First of all, what a delight and honor to be with you and with the audience. I will say, if anyone in the audience has any specific questions that they want to add to the thread when Noah posts on Facebook, I will do my best to come in and provide answers to those. So thank you, and may the conversation continue.

Noah: Great. Well, thank you. For those of you who listened live, thank you for joining us. If you want to receive notifications of when these live interviews are taking place, there is a link on Facebook that you can click to be notified when we go live. Thanks again for listening. This will be uploaded later as a video and will be the audio of the next podcast episode.

Ellen, this has been such a pleasure.

Ellen: Thank you, Noah. That was such fun.

Resources

Ellen Petry Leanse's Book: The Happiness Hack: A Brain-Aware Guide to Life Satisfaction

Ellen's Website: ellenleanse.com

Ellen on Twitter: @chep2m

Ellen's TED Talk: "Happiness by Design"

Subscribe to the Secular Buddhism Podcast: SecularBuddhism.com

For more about the Secular Buddhism podcast and to explore additional episodes, visit SecularBuddhism.com.