The Science of Happiness: Five Simple Strategies for Reducing Anxiety and Increasing Connection | Sonja Lyubomirsky and Harry Reis

This is the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hey, hey, how we doing everybody? For many people, and this is certainly true for me for many years, when we think about how to get happier, We tend to approach it as an individual pursuit.

We engage in what is sometimes called self-care, exercise, sleep, meditation, etc., etc. All that stuff is great, but the research suggests that the most reliable source of happiness is actually the quality of your relationships. To be clear, relationships are not easy. One of my perhaps overly glib lines about this is that the human curse is that we need other people in order to be happy, and yet other people can be a titanic pain in the ass. And that brings me to today's guests, who have a really empowering approach to this aspect of human happiness, which they describe as how to feel loved.

In fact, that is the title of their book, How to Feel Loved. One of the misconceptions that they're hammering away at in this book is that we often think that feeling loved isn't really in our control. It's up to the other person. But my guests flip this on its head and they argue that there are, in fact, strategies to feel loved, and they're often not the strategies that many of us fall back on.

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