Stop Caring What Other People Think About You | Bruce Hood

This is the 10% happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hey, hey, everybody, how are we doing? Today we're going to talk to one of the world's leading happiness expert about how to boost your levels of okayness and optimism while turning down the volume on distraction, egocentrism, self-consciousness, and toxic comparison.

Pretty good recipe. Bruce Hood has been the professor of developmental psychology in society at Bristol University since 1999. He got a PhD in neuroscience at Cambridge, followed by appointments at University College London, MIT, and a faculty professorship at Harvard. He researches child development, origins of superstition, self-identity, and ownership.

For the past five years, however, he's really been concentrating on how to make his students happier. As you'll hear him say here, he noticed a steep decline in happiness levels among his students, which tracks with the overall data on this front. And so he's written a book. I don't want to call it new, but it's his latest book, and it's called The Science of Happiness, Seven Lessons for Living Well. In this conversation, we talk about how do you define happiness.

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