You said that we need to throw our idea of happiness out the window. And I thought, Dr. Judith, what has gotten into? You are like the smiliest, most joyful person. What do you mean throw happiness out the window?

Well, in my practice and in the research that I'm doing, I'm seeing that this idea of what we thought happiness was is just not possible. It's not attainable. People are walking around feeling blah or meh or just feeling numb. And then to give them this impossible idea of happiness to then go ahead and try to obtain, it's just not right. It's unattainable.

And when you say this impossible idea of happiness, is it the, I don't know, Is it this popular culture notion that happiness is about doing more? It's about achieving something. It's about go, go, go, and all of us are just freaking exhausted? Is that what you're talking about?

Happiness is not a state. It's about increasing the points, the moments of joy joy. It's about becoming happier and not being happy. So there are small things you can do every day to increase the points of joy in your life, to add up to being happier. It's not just one moment in time. It's not this picture-perfect ideal because that is impossible to reach. And that's why people feel unsatisfied. That's why they feel like they can't reach it. And so when you shift the way you think about happiness as like, okay, there are points of joy today that I could have or not have, versus I need to happy today. It's such a mind-blowing shift, and it's attainable when you think about it as points of joy.

Okay, so I got to get my mind to be on the same level as Dr. Judith here. So maybe I should ask you this. As a researcher, how do you even describe happiness? If you were talking, let's say, to your seven-year-old, right? How would you explain happiness to your It's interesting because you don't have to teach children how to play.

It just seems as if they naturally know how to play. You put it, just do an experiment. You're going to be a researcher with me. Have a toddler, give them a box. They will find ways to enjoy that box. They may put it in their mouth. They may toss it in their hands. They may throw it to someone else. They may look at it. They may inspect it. They're using their senses to explore a box, something that most of us just discard. Along what line At what point do we lose the ability to play? And after a certain while, seeing children and adults in my practice, I'll have a 50-year-old man sit on my couch, and then I look at him like a five-year-old. I'm like, at what point did this five-year-old stop playing? And then you trace back to their childhood, you trace back to their trauma. And at some point, they stopped prioritizing fun, joy, play. They just stopped. And they don't know. So it's my job to figure out, where did they lose that? And I'm seeing this lack of feeling and lack of validation and lack of processing in our society.

If we don't know how we feel, how can we identify what to do with this feeling, this emotion? How do we trace back to the thought, to the experience that led to this present state? So because of a lack of feeling and processing, I'm learning that this is leading to a lack of joy, which I have helped my patients to name as Anne Hedonia.

Wait, okay. Hold on. You just Anne Hedonia An. How do you- Say it with me. An.

An. H. H.

Donia. Donia. An. H. Donia.

Did I say it? Perfect.

What the hell is Anne Hedonia? Say I'm going to do a who. I'm already laughing at myself.

Anne is a lack of So lack of hedon is hedonism or joy pleasure. Okay. So lack of joy. An. Hedonia.

I've never heard this word. Is this actually a clinical term?

It is. It's a very old medical term, and it's throughout the research, but it's not in the typical vocabulary. I'm trying to change that. I educate my patients that anhedonia is something that we all, at some point, probably experience, but not in long stretches. And if you ever think back to a time in life where you were really busy and you weren't really processing what you're going through, maybe you were feeling meh or blah, or people asked, How are you doing? I'm okay. But you really felt like nothing? Mm-hmm. Guess what? That's Anne Hedonia.

So I'm just going to speak on behalf of, I think, the vast majority of people who are listening right now who basically are going through life feeling a little empty inside. And you've already woven through a number of topics. And when I hear you describe that feeling of, well, I don't really know how I'm feeling. I'm checked out. I'm going through the motions. I feel like, I'm not really connected to anything right now. A lot of people have the experience of going, there's a different way to live, and you're here to say there is?

There is. I think a lot of people don't even recognize what that is. There's something called affect labeling. If you name the way you feel, you're less stressed. I mentioned I treat children, some as young as four, and adults, some as old as 90. And the interesting thing is that when you're seeing a child in preschool, if you walk into any preschool or kindergarten, you'll see a face chart. You'll see a sign that says, this is happy. This is sad. This is angry. This is hurt. Children are taught the importance of labeling the feeling. Why? Because let's say a child feels hurt. They know, Oh, my tummy hurts. That means I have to go to the bathroom. If I don't go to the bathroom, I'm going to wet my pants, right? You don't want the kid wetting the pants. At some point in adulthood, we'd stop training adults to identify and label their feelings. Maybe it's because of the state of society. I have this biopsychosocial theory about anhedonia.

Okay, that was a whole lot of words. What was it? Biosocial?

Biopsychosocial.

What does that mean?

In medical school, you learn that all disease models or symptoms have a biopsychosocial component. Bios represents your body, your biology. So for example, we went through a pandemic. Who knows how the virus affected our brains? Some numbers say that 70% of us got infected. Also, there are genetic risk factors in the bio. Some of us have a family history of mental health conditions. The food that we eat, there's a lot of growing literature in nutritional psychiatry that the foods are causing inflammation and the environment and so forth. So that's the bio part of the biopsychosocial model. The psychological component, this is interesting because in our society, trauma is not processed. And people have a way of labeling victims as being the blame for the trauma. The just world theory that we all harbor in our brains.

What is the just world theory?

Well, good things happen to good people. Bad things happen to bad people. So you may read these terrible stories of a woman running through the park, and you're like, what was she doing in the park that night? She shouldn't have been attacked. But in our minds, we think, well, if she did this, if she did that, she should have been okay. But it's just not the case. Bad things happen to good people, and they happen to them. It wasn't their fault. But But in our society, we label trauma as a blaming thing, a shame thing. So it really deters people from talking about their feelings, talking about their pain. It's true. And as a society, we went through a lot of trauma. We had the pandemic. We had all these bad things happen. It's like when I take my daughter to the beach and I say, watch out for the waves, and she runs right into the wave, she gets hit, catches her breath, then catches her breath, then she like, nose-dives into the sand. Well, we, as a society, did not get a chance to catch our breaths. We got hit with a pandemic.

Then we had all these terrible news news reports about police brutality. Then we saw uprisings with political issues. We saw wars. I mean, it was just news after news. We never caught our breath. But as a society, there's no COVID-19 memorial. We don't have a holiday, so there's no way to process that trauma. We're just supposed to push, push, push through it. And when you push and you don't feel, that sounds like anedonia, right? You get numb. And that's been our coping mechanism. That's just the psycho part. I haven't even gotten to the social part.

Well, let's do the social part. And then I have a bunch of questions about the state of where the average person is given the last three to four years that we have collectively experienced. So let's talk about the social part because you've done two of them of the bio, psycho, and now social.

Now the social, we all identify with this. One minute we were told, humans are dangerous. Don't touch. Don't go to their house. Stay alone. And then the next minute we were told, okay, humans are safe. If you can congregate, then we're told, again, don't do that. You're going to get hurt. Children, if you think about children, because I treat children and adults, if you tell them that they've had trauma, and then you tell them they're safe, and that it wasn't their fault, and that this is the routine, they do better. They have a better outcome than if they think it's all their fault and that they're not safe, and there's no routine, there's no plan. Adults have the same type of thinking. If you tell us that we're safe, then we're safe again, then we're not. It just does something. It's trauma, and we never got to heal from that. So the isolation, that's the social part. We lost that connectivity. Then how do we connect? Online. We use social media. And if you look at the CDC reports. Children are online and their mental health has declined. So they really got connected to each other online, and it replaced that meaningful interaction.

Children need sensory input. Their brains, your brain supposedly develop until you're 25. They lost all of that. So they just cope by being online and excessively using social media. And we're learning now that these studies are showing that this is dangerous for their brains. I don't even know what it's going to show for the adult brain, right? So that's a social And for the part, there were other things we saw a rise in of binge drinking in populations that were typically protected because people were soothing that way. We saw things like unhealthy sexual habits online, developing consumerism. We've had more online shopping than ever before. So there's this human condition to soothe in ways that are excess. So we do, do, do. We don't feel, feel, feel. And when you don't feel, you feel blah, blah, blah, right? And hedonium. And a lot of the research is overlapping with anadonia. From what we know, when Riba, who's a French psychologist, first identified anedonia back in the day, in the 1800s, what he found was a correlation between depression, substance abuse, and schizophrenia. But given the collective trauma and the soothing with excess in a culture that is very capitalistic, where the rich are just getting richer, the poor are getting poorer, people are consuming, the rich are consuming money, power.

And the rest of us are just trying to keep up. We're consuming. Our dollars stretch a lot less far than they used to. We have this really excessive consumerism culture that is not the proper way to soothe. It's not processing. We're not feeling.

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