Kelly McGonigal
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Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard · Kelly McGonigal (on joy)
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What Is Collective Joy?
Kelly McGonigal says collective joy is people feeling something positive together and showing it in a way that pulls everybody into a sense of being bigger than self. Her favorite version is a concert, when the crowd holds up phone lights or the confetti drops. Sports can do the same thing. People in the stands feel as if they won the game even though they never played.
A close connection with one person feels like a small bubble: safe, trusting, and drawing the two people closer. Joy shared with a lot of people at once does something else. It makes you feel that you belong to a society that is good, and that you are accepted just because you are human. At a concert, at a sporting event, or
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Why Do Moments With Strangers Challenge Cynicism?
Kelly McGonigal says a moment of connection with a stranger challenges cynicism, because it lets a person sense the good in themselves. When she started teaching a class on joy and asked people for joy reports, she was shocked by how many peak moments were connections with strangers. She did not even believe that some of the stories had happened, or that people had felt what they described. They said the moment made them glad to be alive, gave them hope, and filled them with joy.
She calls that feeling elevation, one of her favorite forms of joy. Something good in the world resonates with the good in you, and you allow yourself to feel good about it. People do not have to keep guarding the
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How Did Childhood Pain Change Kelly McGonigal's View of Joy?
Kelly McGonigal says joy does not depend on holding onto success, reaching a specific goal, or curing an illness. She came to that view because she grew up with chronic pain that went underexplored. Her parents were not interested in the medical system, so she learned early that she was going to be in pain all the time and that, on their account, nothing could be done. The question she was left with was what else there was.
She is not describing a person who has a success and then has to make the success feel permanent. Things will still go wrong. What someone can appreciate in a moment might be the success, or it might be a small connection with a stranger, and either one can be just as va
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How Did Newspaper Ads Recruit People for a Psychopath Study?
Kelly McGonigal says an undergraduate psychopathy study recruited people with newspaper ads, not by asking who was a psychopath. About 30 years ago she was the research assistant, working with one graduate student, and the ads ran on the back page of magazines and of newspapers that no longer exist. The lines asked whether you are smarter than everyone you know, and whether people have a hard time keeping up with you. The ad did not ask whether you are a psychopath. She does not remember the exact questions.
People who showed up still had to be tested. One task had them trace a picture, then redo it after a distraction, to see what stayed in memory. Another measured electrodermal activity w
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What Is a Mirror Twin?
Kelly McGonigal says she and her sister are mirror twins. Kelly is left-handed and her sister is right-handed, and their moles sit as if the two of them had been pressed together in the womb. She sometimes wonders whether their brains developed differently because of that. She got interested in meditation because she was always trying to make the present moment better, including when she was suffering and needed a way to be okay right then.
They grew up with parents who were educators, strict about some things and loose about others. The sisters were often home alone and were not allowed to cross the street. They could watch any movie and read any book. They were the only two students in th
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Can You Lie to Yourself?
Dax Shepard does not believe you can lie to yourself. You can lie to other people, and you can be in denial, but you know the truth. The same stretch brings up Paul Bloom, who does not believe in uncovered memories and does not believe in repressed memories.
Monica Padman treats denial as a lie you tell yourself about not knowing. She has been in that place, waiting to acknowledge what she already knows, still pretending she can pull it off, and feeling the moment approach. Dax's reply is that you have not surrendered to the truth, and you already knew it. Otherwise you could never surrender to it, because the truth would have nowhere to be.
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What Does Dax Shepard Love About Amanda Seyfried?
Dax Shepard is obsessed with Amanda Seyfried in the documentary and loves her for calling it like she sees it, with no bullshit. She is not afraid to attack the man and ask what he is talking about. She got under the man's skin so quickly that he totally lost control. The man knew losing control was not what he should do in the documentary, and he could not resist.
The dust-up is part of the appeal. A power trip blips up when she says she wants to play the woman again, the same way personal power needs and wants blip up for everyone. She offers that she can play the woman, and the reply is that playing the woman is not the point, because the aim is the woman herself. She allows that want to
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How Do Venture Capitalists Bet on Companies?
Dax Shepard says venture capitalists follow a specific bet. They invest in 70 companies, they know 65 of them are going to fail, and they know five are going to hit so big that the result is still a net win.
He uses a founder as the example. She got into Stanford, saw that a machine did not produce the results she was hoping for, and bought Siemens machines to cover the miss. She did everything to hide the failure. He does not think she believes the machine has worked. He thinks she believes it has the capacity to work, and that anything has the capacity. A man in the same story says everyone is lying about their products and claiming a product can do something it cannot do right now.
On h
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Why Is Disneyland a Place to Study Joy?
Kelly McGonigal says you cannot study joy without going to Disneyland. Something much bigger than the amusement park is going on, and the park itself is spectacular.
All 30,000 people there have decided they are going to have a great day. The energy is infectious. The grounds stay clean and well run, and there is a reason the place works as it does. The feeling still lands for someone with no tie to the Disney properties and no wish to feel childlike.
The rest of the world does not exist inside the park by design. Highways and the outside stay out of view. If a building would show, a tree was planted, so people stay encapsulated in a separate world. Sitting in the middle to watch the crowd
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What Did 100,000 Uplifting Moments Reveal?
Kelly McGonigal read almost all of 100,000 uplifting moments crowdsourced by Megagon Labs, and the largest category was affection, at 34,200. Affection means a moment of connection with people you are already close to, such as family, close friends, or pets. It does not have to be physical. It is a moment of feeling close to someone you care about.
Achievement came second, only 160 behind. People described running a marathon and getting out of bed. The category means doing something you value, something that mattered, or something hard you are glad you did. It is an action, and getting a promotion is not the example. Enjoying the moment, also called appreciation, took third place with about
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How Does Joy Compare With Stress?
Kelly McGonigal calls joy one of the most biologically consequential emotions a person can have, in the same category as stress. A moment of joy changes brain activity, brain chemistry, blood chemistry, and the immune system. Joy is as potent as stress and often works in the opposite direction.
The brain turns on the reward system and the meaning system together. Reward makes the moment feel good. Meaning gives it significance, including a glad-to-be-alive feeling, and the brain shores up the sense that life is worth living. Excited joy releases endorphins and adrenaline, raises heart rate, and brings energy and vitality that counter feeling anxious, withdrawn, or overwhelmed. Joy from conn
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What Is the Difference Between Happiness and Joy?
Kelly McGonigal separates happiness from joy by scope and timing. Happiness is a global assessment of whether life is going well. Joy is brief, happens in the moment, points at something good, and works like a signal, much as pain does.
Ask how happy someone is and the reply usually covers the whole of life: home, work, health, politics, and money. People call themselves pretty happy when they do not have a ton of worries and have not recently suffered a major disaster, crisis, or change. In the way many people talk about it, happiness means things are going well. Wanting to be happy often means wanting life to be easier. Joy arrives when something good happens. Someone thanks you and you f
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Why Do People Fear Admitting They Are Happy?
Kelly McGonigal says people fear admitting they are happy because they believe the universe will punish them. The universe is not going to snatch away love, success, or a healthy body as a gotcha for feeling grateful. Impermanence is real, and the voice expecting punishment is a shadow voice.
Old warnings already circle the same fear, including flying too close to the sun and Midas. While she was writing her book, her father and one of her pets died. Both play special roles in the book as favorite memories and the things she loves most. She thought someone would say she had admitted too much about how much she cares. Being willing to talk about joy meant getting to know the shadow voices. A
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Why Do People Fear the Pleasure in Joy?
Kelly McGonigal says people fear the pleasure in joy because they confuse pleasure that can get them into trouble with the pleasure built into joy itself. Joy activates the pleasure circuitry of the brain, and you feel it in the body as pleasure. A lot of people still treat pleasure as sinful, wrong, immoral, or shameful, and some take a puritanical view of it.
The same protection shows up around good emotions, not only around pleasure. When you felt really good, that was sometimes when your heart got broken, when you were taken advantage of, or when you got disappointed. Feeling grateful, hopeful, or good about yourself can start a kind of immune response. It feels like putting your guard
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Why Doesn't Joy Require a Happy Life?
Kelly McGonigal says joy does not require a happy life. Joy is the ability to find moments that make life worth living, independent of the wider context of your life. You can still laugh or smile, do things that matter, admire beauty, and feel close to someone.
She cannot imagine a life of being happy all the time, or a future where everything works out for herself and everyone she cares about. A lot of people aspire to get everything they want and to have everything turn out okay. She does not share that aspiration. It does not seem like a reasonable prediction or a reasonable goal.
The moments she cares about carry a feeling that one thing is good, or that you are okay, or that there is
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How Does Breathing Through the Heart Sync Two Brains?
Kelly McGonigal says breathing through the heart puts awareness in the chest and can drop a person into a state where two people's hearts start beating in a similar rhythm and their brains start affecting each other.
The brain monitors signals from the heart area: the skin of the chest, the muscles in the chest, the rhythms of the heart, and blood pressure. The body always tracks the signals so the heart does not stop, but the part of the brain that processes sensory information so a person feels it does not always pay attention. Research finds that when more information comes from that sensory system, the sense of self feels located in the chest rather than behind the forehead and the eyes
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How Did Kelly McGonigal Sneak Compassion Into Her TED Talk?
Kelly McGonigal sneaked compassion into her TED Talk after the organizers told her they were already covered on compassion. For a couple of years they asked what she would speak on, and she wanted to present her compassion research. They said they had already had a good talk on compassion and would check back in a year. Around the third year the theme was think again, and they asked what she wanted people to reconsider. She offered the stress lecture from Introduction to Psychology at Stanford. She puts the talk at something like 30 million views. It started as an attempt to reframe stress.
Robert Sapolsky used to give that Psych 1 lecture right before finals, to mostly freshmen. His resear
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Why Did Kelly McGonigal Study Psychology?
Kelly McGonigal studied psychology because she has always been curious about what it is like to be another person. She got her PhD in psychology at Stanford. She thinks all the time about what it is like to be in somebody else's head, what people are feeling, what people are thinking, and what it would be like to have that life.
When she went to college, she was not there for psychology. She thought she was going into some communication field, even though she had been reading pop psych books all her life. She was taking psychology classes and kept getting amazing grades with no effort, because all the work was thinking about how other people think.
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What Pandemic Simulation Did Kelly McGonigal Join?
Kelly McGonigal remembers joining her identical twin for a respiratory pandemic simulation she places around 2008. The twin designs alternate reality games to help predict the future and help people adapt to it. When the 2020 pandemic arrived, earlier role play had already shown which gatherings would get people in trouble for contagion.
The twin is a game designer. World Without Oil had people all over the world living as if there was an oil shortage, growing their own food and changing daily life. She is one of the inventors of games where you enter a simulation. In the respiratory pandemic simulation, players mapped the behavior that would spread illness. Church and weddings came up, the