418. “It Only Takes Six Moments” | The Neuroscience of Fulfillment with Dr. Paul J. Zak

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Paul J. Zak:
If people want to live happier lives, it's really about connecting to others and sharing that joy, being around a positive set of people. And so, by knowing who or what to cut out of your life, you also can make good choices.

Dr. Richard Shuster:
Hello and welcome to The Daily Helping with Dr. Richard Shuster. Food for the brain, knowledge from the experts, tools to win at life. I'm your host, Dr. Richard. Whoever you are, wherever you're from, and whatever you do, this is the show that is going to help you become the best version of yourself. Each episode, you will hear from some of the most amazing, talented, and successful people on the planet who followed their passions and strive to help others. Join our movement to get a million people each day to commit acts of kindness for others. Together, we're going to make the world a better place. Are you ready? Because it's time for your Daily Helping.

Thanks for tuning into this episode of The Daily Helping Podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Richard. And I am beyond excited to invite our guest, Dr. Paul J. Zak, back to The Daily Helping. He is a distinguished university professor at Claremont Graduate University, and he is in the top 0.3% of the most cited scientists in the world. Paul's two decades of research extending the boundaries of behavioral neuroscience have taken him from the Pentagon to Fortune 50 boardrooms to the rainforest of Papua New Guinea. I think we're gonna have to talk about that. 

His book, Immersion: The Science of the Extraordinary and Source of Happiness was an international bestseller. And besides his academic appointment, he is a four-time tech entrepreneur. In 2017, he founded Immersion Neuroscience, a software platform that allows anyone to measure what the brain loves in real time that is used to improve outcomes in entertainment, education, advertising, and emotional health. He's a regular TED speaker and has appeared on Good Morning America, Dr. Phil, Fox & Friends, ABC Evening News, and his work has been reported in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Time, The Economist, Scientific American, Fast Company, Forbes, and countless others. 

He's here today to talk to us about his newest book, which is available everywhere, The Little Book of Happiness: A Scientific Approach to Living Better. Paul J. Zak, welcome to The Daily Helping. Welcome back to The Daily Helping.

Paul J. Zak:
Yes, Richard Shuster, how nice to be here with you again.

Dr. Richard Shuster:
And I wanna say, I didn't wanna do this before we recorded, I wanted to do this on the air. I looked this up this morning. On April 15th, 2016 at 5:57 in the morning, I sent you an email asking you to come on this show. The show had no name. I had no idea what I was doing, I had no guests whatsoever, and you said yes. And so, this show is all about what happens neurologically if we all start doing acts of kindness every day. And your act of kindness, because being totally candid, you had no business being on this show that had no audience, no name or anything else, but you came. And because you came, many other people came. 

And now, eight years later, in fact, this episode is gonna air today, if you're listening to this today, this is probably just about eight years from the date episode one launched. And now, people all over the world in 150 plus countries hear the show, and I have a totally different life than I would have otherwise. So, I wanted to express my sincere gratitude to you because you were the one who started all of this all those years ago.

Paul J. Zak:
You started it, and you know I'm a big fan of yours. So, what a pleasure to spend time with you. Thank you for that. 

Dr. Richard Shuster:
Absolutely. You know, usually, what I do when I have people on the show is we go back in the time machine, and we talk about what got people started on their path they're on today. I'm not going to do that today because I'm going to just redirect everybody. Go listen to episode one and hear the whole Paul J. Zak story. But what you're doing in the world right now is not only remarkably exciting, but it's so important. So, give us kind of just the mini version of some of these salient things that led to what we're doing today. And then, I want to jump in and I want to talk about your book and your technology, which is unbelievable.

Paul J. Zak:
Thank you. Yeah, I think all of us have seen this explosion in mental health disorders in the last decade or so, increasing in loneliness, and we all wanna live happier. Okay, great. What the hell do I do, right? I mean, that's the question. And so, I spent 25 years of my life developing knowledge and technologies to help people live longer, happier, healthier lives. And the book and the technology are the pinnacle of that. So, thrilled to be here to share more.

Dr. Richard Shuster:
So, we talked a little bit offline before we hit the red button, and I know the book is a companion to the technology. So, first, let's talk about the technology because you can go into the app store for iPhone or for Android and there are a gazillion apps helping people, meditation apps, stress relief apps, mental health apps. What makes  what you're doing so unique and different? 

Paul J. Zak:
A couple things. First, you know, we've had this obsession with avoiding stress, but stress is really good for you. Challenge stress is really important. You're not thriving unless you have episodes in which the brain is investing lots of metabolic resources in your activities. And over many years, we identified how the brain values social emotional experiences, and then published research showing how much social emotional value your brain needs to really thrive. 

So, it's the first true, continuous, predictive neurophysiologic measure of thriving. And the app is called SIX. The QR code's on the screen if everybody wants it, it's free. And we've shown you need six of these well-defined high value moments a day to really thrive. So, it gives you a simple goal. I want to have SIX. And because the app links to your calendar and your location, you begin to learn about your own unconscious emotional experiences. 

And here's the rig in the app. Almost every experience to which you add people, a social component, will be more valuable neurologically. We really need to be around other people. So, we're addressing both the loneliness epidemic, but also addressing the social withdrawal that precedes many mental health and physical health disorders. So, because there's a sharing component to the SIX app, if I'm sharing data with my friends, I say, "Oh, Richard's in a red zone for the last three days," I could give you a call, like old days. I text you, call you up, "Hey, buddy. It looks like you're not doing so well." "Oh, well, I got COVID." "Okay, that's okay. Do you need anything?" Or, "Yeah, I don't know why. I'm just kind of down the dumps." "All right, man, let's go grab a coffee. Let's go hang out."

So, it's really thinking about being together on this journey towards emotional fitness so that we support each other, which we should be doing anyway, but we get busy and we forget.

Dr. Richard Shuster:
And isn't it interesting because the data shows that the more we get immersed in our phones and our social media platforms, the less happy we actually are. I recall a study and the scientist eludes me right now who did this, but there's a very… and this has been replicated in other ways, there's a very clear inverse correlation between the amount of time. One is engaging in social media and happiness. 

And so, I think this is like the anti-social media platform because what it's doing is it's creating real connectedness, right? It's not saying to people, "Oh, like my post. Here's a picture of my dog that I put through ChatGPT riding a unicycle." What you're actually doing is you're using people's physiological data to show how fulfilled they are. 

And fulfillment, it's so interesting. That's a topic people don't go around thinking. "You know, Paul, I should be more fulfilled than I'm not." People think about their schedule, how overwhelmed they are. People talk about stress, have I got money, the bills. But nobody talks about fulfillment. So, talk to us a little bit about why fulfillment is so different and important. And then, I want to ask you some more questions about some of the neurobiological goodness we're talking about here.

Paul J. Zak:
Sure, that's the key question. So, why fulfillment? I think of this as the warning you get every time you fly in an airplane. If the plane depressurizes, put on your oxygen mask before you help somebody else. If you are not thriving, if you're not fulfilled, you can't be of service to anybody else. You're not going to be a great partner, a great parent, or a great colleague at work. So, you've really got to take care of yourself. 

Again, we don't do that alone, but we've got to have a way to break through that. So, recent research out of Oxford University showed that about 50% of people's self-reported happiness is due to having a rich social network. Awesome. What's that mean? How many contacts do I have on my phone? I mean, what the heck do I do with that? So, what we did is build this technology that lets you quantify… not lets you, quantifies your unconscious emotional state and captures the value you're getting from social emotional experiences, and then prompts you to do those experiences that are most valuable to you, and potentially cut out the ones that are not. 

So, what we've shown, and everyone knows this intuitively, is that emotional states are contagious. If I'm having a great day, Richard, if you're with me, you're gonna have a great day too. We get to share that. If you are unhappy, if you are disagreeable, I'm gonna absorb that unhappiness. And so, if people wanna live happier lives, it's really about connecting to others and sharing that joy, being around a positive set of people. 

And so, by knowing who or what to cut out of your life, you also can make good choices. "Hey, when I see Aunt Joan, she's always just a cranky, unhappy person. And gosh, she's a family member but I just can't do it anymore. I can't be sucked into her drama. So, I'm going to try to limit my interactions with Aunt Joan. And Bob, awesome friend, I'm going to try to spend more time with Bob."

Dr. Richard Shuster:
We've all got an Aunt Joan and people have talked about this, right? I mean, every self-help book written in the last 50 years has basically said in some way, shape or form, "Hey, if you've got people in your life that are negative, you are who you hang out with," right? We know that there's mirror neurons, which are kind of running below the surface,  just scanning our environment for homeostasis, right? 

So, what's unique about this is this is actually going to give you physiological feedback, right? Actual quantifiable empirical data on what hanging out with Aunt Joan does to your well-being. And I think that's bonkers to me. Like my mind is spinning about this. So, I want to ask you a different question because you've said that this app can get these physiological data points, right? And so, when I think about what does that mean from an app, it means I'm connected to some sort of piece of technology that is actually capturing biometric data. So, how does this all work?

Paul J. Zak:
Yeah. So, we have people wear this really giant helmet and look like an alien. Yeah, that wouldn't work. So, in the laboratory, again, we did 25 years of published research. And by the way, you can go to Google Scholar and download all my research, all peer-reviewed stuff. So, everyone should be skeptical, read it for yourself. Yeah.

So, what we did is once we identified this network that values social-emotional experiences, and that valuation is happening because the brain needs to modulate its metabolic investment. There's only so many metabolic resources. The brain's a very energy hungry organ. And so, it's doing this, essentially, cost-benefit calculation, how much processing power do I put into what's going on here? High processing power, high metabolic investment goes, "Oh, this is valuable to me behaviorally." So, it's all linked to behavior and not to self-report, observable behavior. 

Anyway, long story short, once we identified this network, we used drugs, pharmaceuticals to trace out the pathways from the systems in the brain, which I'll tell you about in a second, that will not surprise you at all, into the cranial nerves. Some of these cranial nerves pass through the heart. So, if you have a standard smartwatch or fitness wearable, and I can get a time series on the beat-to-beat variations of the heart rate, we wrote code that lets us capture or infer the second-by-second variation in this network in the brain, which is a common issue of neural signals. 

So, I called it Immersion, because when people kind of get lost in these peak immersion experiences. And there are basically two components. Again, none of these will surprise you. One, to have a valuable experience, first, I have to be present. Right, if I'm not looking at you, talking to you, I'm distracted over here, well, it's not gonna be a great conversation for either of us, by the way. That's associated with the frontal binding of dopamine. 

And the second is, it's got to generate what I call emotional resonance. Emotions are how the brain tags experiences as valuable. And so, that emotional resonance is driven by oxytocin. Now, dopamine and oxytocin interact with each other, induce electrical activity that we can capture at the level of the brain, but also from the cranial nerves. 

So, you've got to be present, you've got to be emotionally open to have a great experience. But think of the people you want to be around. You want to be around someone who's again, looking at their phone, who's distracted. No, that's not fun. And someone who's like not giving you anything emotionally. My father just passed away. He was 93. He's an engineer and I would call him up and be like, "Hey, dad. How's it going?" "Fine." "What'd you do today?" "Nothing." "How was your lunch?" "I don't know. Whatever." It's like middle schoolers, you know, like one word answers. Like I'm getting nothing from this guy. So, it was hard to have a conversation as he got really old because he just wouldn't kind of open up. 

And so, yeah, the app is meant to train people, and the book, to train us to be essentially better social creatures.

Dr. Richard Shuster:
So, I want to clarify a couple of things because if somebody is listening to this, so you are not going to have to take pharmaceuticals if you use this app. 

Paul J. Zak:
No, no, no.

Dr. Richard Shuster:
All you have to do is put on your smartwatch. 

Paul J. Zak:
Download the free app, right. 

Dr. Richard Shuster:
But it's so interesting to me. So, essentially, you are reading data off of cranial nerves via an algorithm based off of heart rate variability? Is that more or less what I'm hearing?

Paul J. Zak:
So, it's really a third and fourth-order changes in the heart. So, because I'm a behavioral neuroscientist, I don't believe in self-report. I believe in behavior. And if heart rate or heart rate variability measured, HRV, which is a kind of measure of stress, if that predicted behavior, I wouldn't have spent 25 years finding these pathways from dopamine and oxytocin. So, it's really these subtle accelerations and decelerations of the heart that we can capture. 

So, we've got to have enough of a time series to pick that up. So, that's why the app runs continuously. But most watches, Apple Watch, Samsung Galaxy Watch, Whoop, will give you more or less continuous data, more or less because sometimes they go into rest state. But yeah, it took us a long time to map this out. 

And again, everything but the algorithm is published. So, people can certainly follow up on that. But it is an interesting way to have a language about thriving. What's it mean to thrive? Does it mean I'm wrapped in bubble wrap, and I have no stress, and I meditate for 20 hours a day? 

Actually, we've done research with Buddhist monks, and I'm sure you've been around them too. Some of the most present, joyful people. So, to me, meditation is saving bandwidth in the brain, so that when you do have an interaction with somebody, you can be fully neurologically immersed in that. You're completely there. So, that's what I wanna be. My goal is to eventually become a Buddhist monk. Now, I don't know if that's true, but I certainly wanna be present and to be emotionally open to the people around me, and the app helps me with that.

Dr. Richard Shuster:
That's amazing. So, I want to dig a little into the book because the book just came out. The book is a companion piece of the app, but a very important companion piece. So, tell us, why did you write the book? Because many apps, they just have a little, you hit the hamburger bar up in the top right, and you hit the FAQ, and it tells you everything you need to know about running the app and what it does. Tell me about why having this book itself was so important.

Paul J. Zak:
Yeah, the app has an AI assistant, it learns about you. So, it's personalization at scale. So, what's valuable to you is going to be different than what's valuable to me. Awesome. So, that is backward looking. The book is forward looking. If I want to be more present and more emotionally open, what might I do? And it's really investing in relationships. 

So, the book goes through the 45 cardinal virtues. We call these virtues because they mean you're more important than me, right? The opposite virtues are like the seven deadly sins. They're deadly because they are selfish. It's like "Hey, I'm more important than you. I'm gonna hurt you and take something from you." So, if I want to be a better social creature and be happier, even if you're the most selfish person in the world, you have to invest in relationships to be happier and healthier.

So, the book basically goes to these 45 cardinal virtues, defines them, talks about the brain science behind them, and then gives you some background on why they're important, but then gives you three things to do to practice those virtues. So, what the brain values is what people will do. And so, it's training you to value reaching out to help people in their daily lives. So, learning to be more gracious towards others, learning to show more affection to others, right? Just practicing these things. So very, very practical exercises you can do. It's basically a nine-month companion, and literally you check off the box when you're done, "Hey, I practiced doing this thing."

Dr. Richard Shuster:
How did you identify those 45 virtues?

Paul J. Zak:
I stole it from somewhere. Whatever's in the published literature. Yeah, whatever's in the published literature. So, Ben Franklin's on the cover. So, Franklin was the inspiration for this. Ben Franklin, he wanted to be happier. And so, he identified initially 12 virtues and said the same thing, had a big checklist on his wall and just practiced doing those things so he would be a nicer person. 

The funny story on Franklin is that he had this group of guys who would meet once a month at a pub in Philadelphia, called them his junta. And he worked on this for a long time and then he presented this to his junta buddies. And he was so excited. Like we all are, we're excited about something new we've done. And one of his pals after the presentation said, "Hey, Ben, come here." He was a Quaker doctor and said, "You know, I think you left out one of the virtues. You were too proud to tell us what you have done. I think you should add humility to your set of 12 virtues."

And to Franklin's great honor, insight, he said, "Yeah, you're right." So, he added humility. "So, I'm gonna try to be a more humble person." Now, why would we want to do that, right? We're all self-promoting but people who are humble, well, they're centered. They know who they are, they're not insecure, and they're wonderful to be around people who have humility. 

And again, there are reasons, sometimes, you want to promote yourself and brag and whatever, but if you're constantly sitting bragging…I was in the hot tub where I live yesterday and some guy who's 26 years old just nonstop bragging about himself. After all that time, I'm like, "Yeah, nice to meet you, dude. I got to go." It's boring. It's just boring.

Dr. Richard Shuster:
So, I'm loving this. I know we're obviously not going to go through 45. Pick a couple. Pick a couple of virtues to talk to us about today.

Paul J. Zak:
Yeah, I mean, the philosopher Cicero said that gratitude was the mother of all virtues. I think… you know, we both have children, Richard. And children are often not showing gratitude towards their parents. They didn't ask to be here. We decided to have children. And the more I thought about my kids not showing gratitude towards me, the more I thought, that's totally appropriate. Why should they be grateful? We brought them into the world. Now, it would be nice if they had learned to be grateful because that's a good social behavior. So, I think gratitude is really important.

I think love is really important. I think that's one of those cardinal virtues. The Dalai Lama wrote some years ago that not only should we tolerate difficult people, we should celebrate them because they give us a chance to practice true compassion. I thought, "Okay, let me try to work on that as a human being. Let me try to show love to people who are nasty, unhappy," because they're unhappy for a reason. It has nothing to do with me. 

When I first was hired at Claremont, I had a faculty member who's now retired, basically said, "You'll never get tenure here. I will do everything in my power to ensure that your life is hell." I'm like, "Dude." He was insecure. He was an unhappy person. He had a very unhappy home life. It really had very little to do with me. It was that this person was really suffering inside. It took it out on me because I was young. Unfair, but what I learned to do is really show compassion towards him. He was a person who was really unhappy and I'm not gonna get sunk into that. I'm gonna try to show him love as much as I can, in the philia sense, obviously, I mean.

Dr. Richard Shuster:
I love asking authors this question because it usually illuminates really interesting things to talk about. When you were putting this book together, and I know you're a prolific researcher, was there anything that really shocked you that you discovered?

Paul J. Zak:
Oh, that's a great question. I think what shocked me was how few of the virtues I practice on a daily basis. There's an old saying in psychology that all research is me-search. And so, I thought I was writing a book so I and others could be happier, but I think you put your finger on something very profound that I hadn't thought about before, which is I think I have my own shortcomings. And part of the writing of the book was to help me identify and maybe address or improve some of those shortcomings.

Dr. Richard Shuster:
And I know this is a book, it's a companion piece, it's teaching people how to be happy, which is so important. What are kind of the… in your estimation having been in this space for a really long time and having now quantifiable data to this respect, what are the things you should absolutely not be doing  in order to be happy?

Paul J. Zak:
Yeah. I think, again, this avoidance of stress. I mean, the SIX app has a measure we call safety, which is derived from vagal tone. So, if you are anxious, if you're stressed out, if you're having a crisis, you've got to deal with that first. So, I do think there really are five pillars of happiness in the literature–diet, exercise, sleep, having a rich social network, and having a sense of purpose and acting on it. So, diet, exercise, sleep, those are foundational. If those are not working for you, you got to fix that first. 

The SIX addresses the second two. Am I thriving? Am I engaged in life? Do I have a rich social network? That means I've got to invest in relationships. And the second…  the last one, sorry, this fifth one, the sense of purpose almost always involves other people. If I want to be a great tennis player or a great rock climber or whatever, I can't train by myself. I'm going to do that with somebody else. Or I've been wanting to go see the gorillas in Africa for 20 years. I'm finally going to go this year. And-

Dr. Richard Shuster:
Awesome.

Paul J. Zak:
… it's going to be an amazing experience, I'm sure. And I have a dear friend going with me. And that's going to be a pain in the ass to get there, to jump a whole bunch of planes. I'm going to be tired. Why would I do that if I was trying to avoid stress? Or why would you ever work out at the gym if you're trying to avoid stress? That's physiologically stressful. It makes you stronger. 

So, I'm trying to really focus on adding experience to this life. So, my purpose now is I was doing a live event, actually, at Google yesterday, and name dropped. And they said, "Oh, how do you describe yourself?" I said, "Oh, at this stage of my life, I'm a service dog. I want to really be of service to the people around me, and that's my purpose." And so when I feel like I'm giving to others, I feel like I'm fulfilling my purpose. 

And so, again, just identifying that, that I actually discovered using the app, I get so much value out of helping other people. And when you're younger, and you've known me a while, Richard, I'm a pretty damn focused person. Like I get a shit ton done. I got up at 4.30 this morning, I've been grinding since 4.30, right? But I've got to slow down and make sure I'm serving others so that I am fulfilling my purpose.

Dr. Richard Shuster:
Amen to that. Well, Paul, it's exciting and exhilarating to share this space with you again, but I realize we took way too many years off conversing. So, we're gonna have to make a commitment to do this more regularly. The book is called… I'm sorry, you were gonna say something.

Paul J. Zak:
How about a phone call? We can just be friends. We don't have to record anything. I would love to do that, let's do that.

Dr. Richard Shuster:
We will commit to that, absolutely. 

Paul J. Zak:
Perfect.

Dr. Richard Shuster:
I love that. Thank you for that. As I was saying, the book is called The Little Book of Happiness: A Scientific Approach to Living Better. It's available everywhere today. And I know Paul mentioned the QR code for the SIX app. For those of you who are listening to this and not watching this, we got you covered. Every single thing, Paul J. Zak, the book, the SIX app, we're going to have links to all of that in the show notes at drrichardshuster.com. And Paul, you were the first one to ever do this. You get to bring us home with this. As you know, I wrap up every show by asking my guests just this one question, and that is, what is your biggest helping, that single most important piece of information you would like somebody to walk away with after hearing our conversation today?

Paul J. Zak:
Make a point to add love to the world. I try to make every interaction love plus and not love minus. So, yeah, be nice to the people around you, even if they're not nice to you, it's okay.

Dr. Richard Shuster:
I love that. Give us your URL real quick so if somebody wants to dive in right now, they can.

Paul J. Zak:
They can, it's your6.com. And if you're listening to this and you are a fan of Richard's, you must be an interesting person, so you can contact me there as well.

Dr. Richard Shuster:
I love that. Well, Paul, this was amazing. I'm excited about that phone call and many more thereafter. Thank you so much for joining us on The Daily Helping today.

Paul J. Zak:
Thank you, Richard.

Dr. Richard Shuster:
Absolutely. And to each and every one of you who took time out of your day, thank you for listening as well. If you liked it, if you're inspired, if you're going to go download that app right now and find out what's fulfilling you, go give us a follow on a five-star review on your podcast app of choice because this is what helps other people find the show. But most importantly, go out there today and do something nice for somebody else, even if you don't know who they are, and post it in your feeds using the hashtag, #MyDailyHelping, because the happiest people are those that help others.