Transcription
There's a black hole in my heart, and nothing can fill it up. I'm not quite sure how big it is, but no matter what I put into it, it's never enough to fill it up.
I used to think that once I'd made it—once I fell in love and got married and achieved a certain level of success—then I'd be happy; my heart would be full. But I've had some achievements, and although my heart may be full for a couple of days, I'll just wake up a week later feeling empty again.
And I know that I'm not alone. It's no secret that everyone is struggling with their mental health. The U.S. Surgeon General has called it an urgent public health crisis. One in five Americans will experience a mental illness in a given year. Maybe we'd be better off understanding precisely what happiness is, so we can get better at experiencing it for ourselves.
So I'm setting off on a journey around the world and through the mysteries of science to seek out world experts and figure out once and for all what happiness is all about. Will you tell me your name and what you do?
I'm Tara Theagarajan. I'm the uh, founder and chief scientist of Sapan Labs, and I'm a both a neuroscientist and entrepreneur by background. Dr. Tara Theagarajan conducts one of the world's most important mental health surveys, making her truly one of the only people on the planet who could tell us how [ __ ] up we are and in precisely which ways.
You survey mental health across the world. Yes. And how are we doing? Yeah, not great. The countries that are doing the best with their mental health have attitudes that they're maximizing more for the family group. According to the fourth annual Mental State of the World Report, the top three are Tanzania in third, Sri Lanka in second. A lot of the countries at the top of the list are higher on social collectivism, which means strong communities, strong friendships. And coming in first with the best mental health in the world is the Dominican Republic. And then you have, at the other end of the spectrum, the countries doing the worst are performance-oriented, individualistic [Music] societies.
What is that? What, what is performance orientation? So performance orientation is really like the idea that your individual worth is based on achieving certain um, specific types of successes and productivity, performance, and so on. That that is negatively correlated with mental health. [Music]
Yes. ChatGPT says performance orientation refers to a culture that prioritizes achieving specific goals, targets, or outcomes. But I like the way my friend Ben puts it: win, and you'll be happy. And winning could be financially winning, impact winning, sports winning. But somehow win, and you're going to be happy. I've been around enough people who really won in those arenas to know that that's not true.
Let me back up for a second. Okay, I am in uh, Brooklyn, New York, in Dumbo, and I'm going to visit an old friend of mine, uh, Ben Goldhurst. Who am I, and why am I here? Yeah, it's a question I ask every day. Ben has somewhat of a superhero origin story. When my was a senior in high school, my mother passed away, and I was like, wow, like death is a reality, like this thing ends. My father got sick and got diagnosed with a terminal cancer my freshman year of college, and he also had like a six-month prognosis. So I was like, oh [ __ ], like this guy's going to die also. He fought so hard and was able to live right until I graduated from college. It sort of forced me, like coming out of school, to think about like what's the point, like if this thing's going to end, and I know for sure it's going to end because I just saw it end twice, like I'd really like to not just like blindly follow the way that I had been previously. I just looked for like a noble path, and the noble path for me out of school was like just want to do as much good as possible.
Ben started producing films that had a social impact, like The Messenger, which was nominated for two Academy Awards. He then co-founded Good Magazine, dedicated to highlighting all the stories and people striving to make the world a better place. I shot Ben's thesis, I shot Ben's wedding, and have a long history of convincing him to invest in my project, including getting the new company he's involved in to help support this happiness series. By the way, that shaggy-haired stoner is me, but this time I wanted him to be in it because over the years Ben's orbit has introduced him to wealthy and powerful people, the highest achievers. If our culture was oriented around performance, then theoretically high performers should be happy, and Ben had spent a long enough time in that world to tell me if that were true.
So as I got more into the professional setting, I got excited about winning in that arena. But what was interesting is like, as you climb the ladder, you see all sorts of people doing all sorts of things, you know, whether it's changing the world for good, whether it's building a 10 billion dollar company, and yet you see everyone struggling, that like no one was able to sort of like get to the winner circle and be like, I did it, I'm good. Okay, 'cause a lot of people say, oh, I'm going to be, I'm going to be happy when I make a million dollars, when I sell my company, when I'm, when I'm like have so much money that I don't need to worry about money anymore, right? There's no evidence that that is true. You can't just make enough money, have enough impact to be like, I'm good, I'm just happy.
So while I'm in this sort of like mindblown state of like what actually matters, I meet this scientist, Axel Bojan. He's a neuroscientist, an entrepreneur, and he looks pretty good in a deep V, and I'm interested in happiness, in particular the neuroscientific part of it. Axel's always been a bit of a rebel in the pharmaceutical world, leading departments at Bayer and then Moderna that focused on curing diseases instead of just treating their symptoms. I mean, what other biochemist, you know, gets their own spread in German GQ? But then one day everything changed.
I believe that I was running for the wrong equations of life for 45 years. It started with being in sports where only looking good and being fast was important. Second thing, being in science where it was very, very important to publish high-ranking journals. And then ultimately leading me to the world of finance where I really believed being rich is a fundamental goal. Everything came together in one day, um, in 2014. I was pitching to the board for 25 million, got approval, and was super happy, had an amazing package. I felt, now I made it, and I grabbed the phone, called my wife, she was at the time still in Berlin with the kids in Germany, and the idea was, hey, when I make the money, she comes with the kids and we move to Boston. And while I tell her the story, totally happy, she tells me, oh, I'm so happy for you, but I'm leaving you. That was the moment I felt for the first time as if I would be slammed into the ground. I had to decide within a split second: do I either go back to that boardroom and tell these people, um, I can't be your CEO, or actually not doing a job, taking the next plane and trying to rescue my family? It didn't took me one split second to decide for the kids. I packed my stuff, ran in this ballroom, said sorry, took the next plane. Of course, it was not successful because I was too late. And the most brutal thing of this memory is that I already realized in the second she told me that I was running for the wrong equation again—money instead of family—and that was the starting point of me thinking I have to understand how to quantify happiness because that's what I want to run for. So happiness started when life [Music] started.
The starting point was dopamine. Dopamine creates motivation, primarily to find food. So whoever in evolution had more dopamine was finding more food, and that proliferated more through evolution. You can actually tag the different reward systems to certain forks where something new happened. The split of sexual reproduction came together with the onset of testosterone. Testosterone, as the second reward system together with dopamine, gives you the experience of sexual [Music] desire. And that came together with a third reward system, this called serotonin. Serotonin, together with dopamine, gives you the experience of recognition. And then mammals showed up, a a group of organisms that actually were interested in really taking care of their kids, and that goes with the onset of a fourth molecule called oxytocin. Oxytocin, together with dopamine, provides you family love. Without oxytocin, you would not be excited to take care of your children. [Music] And then a molecule came up that is called cannabinoids that apparently had a very strong benefit because cannabinoids plus dopamine together gives you friendship love—fundamental for something that is entirely new, collaboration. That was more or less the start of the entire world, how we live together today. The last step was a combination of dopamine and opioids is actually create the experience of gratitude and pleasure. So that apparently is so important in terms of where you go in your life that it had been selected as a clear advantage [Music] factor.
The most important piece to understand is these six neurotransmitters by themselves—that's the language of our brain. So just imagine the six neurotransmitters are six cups you can [Music] fill. So every emotion we can consciously experience is a combination of these six molecules. [Music] This may sound like simple, but our challenge is that in our world we have a lot of equations around us that of course portray a certain path to happiness. So in particular in the Western world, there is this um, idea that if you work hard and you are successful, you make a lot of money, and that actually leads you to happiness. If you kind of just look now onto the six neurotransmitters, you realize that actually it's not really triggering all six. Working hard and making a lot of money is only triggering two: what is dopamine and serotonin—motivation and recognition.
So let's go back, back to that, to kind of my pivotal moment where I realized, oh, I was running for money, but actually family would have been the better choice. In essence, I was hammering on dopamine and serotonin for years. I had to spend more and more time to get a little bit of a reward from these two neurotransmitters. I even decided to move to Boston and leave the family at home. That means oxytocin goes to zero. There were no friends at the time, no cannabinoids, there was I think no pleasure either. Let's leave the sex out for a second, most probably not. And the very important thing to understand is that there's no chance of overfilling dopamine and serotonin to an amount that it overflows and it fills also cannabinoids, opioids, oxytocin. This is not possible. What that means is to invest even more time in work and making money is hitting a ceiling, and beyond that there is not more you receive. That money is fundamental to make you happy is the most clear message that you get um, told when you are even very, very young, and up to a certain point that is correct. But beyond a certain point, given the data on how depressed very, very rich people are, it seems to be not correct. If we are not listening to what makes us happy, we have no chance to run for our happiness. Our well-being is deeply relational. A huge part of our being is wired for social relationship; it's been constructed over few hundred thousand years of existence. The family, the friendships, all of these have huge impact on our ability to function, and so the lack of social relationships is very damaging to our biology itself. If you understand what are the triggers and the molecules that can make you happy, understand where your gaps are, then you would have a path towards your happiness.
Ben and Axel have actually started a company together to try and figure out how to bring these new scientific breakthroughs to everyday people. Now that that we can quantify by the neurotransmitters, we have a starting point to understand our gaps and actually fill them systematically. We hope to kind of build something that is giving you at least some quantification: hey, I'm going in the right direction, like a compass for more neurotransmitters. Like I want to move away from feeling pressure to achieve in a way that you might say, wow, Ben, you're doing great, and I want to instead move to a place where I'm like, I'm having a good day. Got to have a cool meeting with Max, someone I really respect and talk about something I'm interested in. Bing! Sadona, dopamine. Going to call my buddy, da, up, tell some jokes about hanging out last night. Cool, got cannabinoids. Going to take Claire on a date. Awesome, testosterone. Going to hang out with my kids, take my kid to Jiu-Jitsu today. Oxytocin, awesome. What else do I got to hit? Opioids? I'm going to do Jiu-Jitsu, that's fun.
What Tara's studies and the latest brain research suggest offers a paradigm shift in how we even conceive of happiness. I wonder if we started to orient our lives around things other than performance or achievement, whether our hearts wouldn't start to feel more full. [Music] [Music] is [Music]