Why Nobody Feels Loved Anymore - Sonja Lyubomirsky - #1115

You've been studying happiness for 36 years. Is there a commonality between all of the most effective happiness interventions that you've found? Yes, well, thank you for aging me, but yes, 36 years. So actually, it was 1998, my lab pioneered happiness interventions. So 98, long time ago, 28 years ago,

Bill Clinton was in the White House. And so I've been doing research on these interventions, testing whether practices like expressing gratitude or doing acts of kindness or being social makes people happier. So interventions are like clinical trials, but instead of testing a vaccine, we're testing like a happiness strategy. And then one day it finally hit me that what all these interventions had in common is the ones that worked. The reason they worked is because they made us feel more connected to and loved by others, right?

So when I write a gratitude letter to my mom, it makes me feel more loved by her, right? When I do an act of kindness for a colleague or a friend, it makes me feel closer to him. So almost all happiness practices, maybe not all, like maybe if you run on the beach or meditate, it's not about connection, but almost all of them are about feeling connected and feeling loved. Why? We I think the human species wouldn't have survived if we did not feel connected and loved.

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