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The Giving Garden® Podcast Season 2 Premier Episode with Dr. Emiliana Simon-Thomas

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Full transcript of Season 2 Premier Episode

Martina Halloran: Welcome to The Giving Garden podcast where we explore how small acts of giving can blossom into lasting change. I'm your host Martina Halloran, founder of The Giving Garden and CEO of Dr. Hauschka Skin Care USA. In each episode, we highlight the power of giving, whether it's time, kindness, or resources, and how these acts can transform both lives and whole communities. Join me as we explore the ripple effect of giving and its lasting one: impact.

In this episode, we welcome Dr. Emiliana Simon Thomas, the science director of the Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley and one of the world's leading researchers on the neuro neuroscience of compassion, gratitude, and pro social happiness. Emiliana's work reveals a truth we often feel but rarely understand scientifically. Joy is not something we stumble into. It is something we cultivate through connection, kindness, and meaningful relationships.

She shares the groundbreaking insights behind the Big Joy Project, a global citizen science initiative, inviting people to complete simple micro acts of joy every day for seven days. These tiny practices take only minutes, yet they change how we feel, how we relate to others, and how we navigate difficult seasons. Emiliana explains how micro joy shifts brain states, interrupts stress cycles, and builds resilience. Together, we explore how communities become healthier when we focus on belonging, contribution, and care. This conversation bridges evidence in humanity.

It is an invitation to reimagine joy, not as a luxury or luck, but as a practice available to everyone. Dr. Emiliana, welcome to The Giving Garden.

Dr. Emiliana Simon-Thomas: Thank you so much for inviting me to participate in this super fascinating and really useful, purposefully applicable conversation.

Martina Halloran: Thank you. It is our honor and our privilege to have you. Your body of work is vast. So I'm gonna jump right in. Doctor.

Emiliana, you began your academic work studying how unpleasant emotions impact decision making. And what made you shift that focus from the negative effect? Cause I think people tend to lean into this happened. This is why I did this to pro social states like compassion and awe. What was that shift?

Dr. Emiliana Simon-Thomas: Yeah, such a great question, Martina. I'll give a little bit of context for why I focused on unpleasant emotions. First, it was largely because the state of research in emotion, it favored negative states. It was easier, people thought, a laboratory to elicit fear or aversion than it was to elicit humor or affection. And so that was kind of why my advisor in grad school was like, okay, you want to know how emotions affect decision making?

Let's look into this ethos that is actually pretty prevalent in society that quote unquote, emotions are the enemy of reason. Now I just felt like that was inaccurate. It can't possibly be true that we were built and we've evolved in a way that we had this basic capacity to respond to the world in a very nuanced and sophisticated multi-dimensional way to all the context that we encounter, and have that be something that leads to poor decisions? Like, it just doesn't make any sense. And so I really wanted to see how emotions shape, influence and impact how we perceive and interpret information.

Again, I started with unpleasant or negative emotions just because it's a little bit easier to elicit in the laboratory setting. Of course, the answer is not that emotions help or hurt, but they do both and they do it in a way that is sensible for the context that we're in. So if you feel afraid, it's really important for your spatial navigation to get better. It's not so important for your sort of fine detailed perception to improve. We don't really need that.

We need to like escape and handle the threat. And so some things get kind of down regulated and some things improve. And that's how exquisite the dynamic is. After I finished my PhD, I was also in a phase of my life where I was starting a family. And I was navigating the complexities of career decisions and being a parent.

And I thought, well, I'm gonna take this opportunity to continue my research at a institution that is an hour and a half drive from where I live, and it'll be fine. This was before I had my child. This will be fine. I will just drop my child off and be gone for however long it takes. And then I will go pick the child up.

And I'm this, you know, pioneering scientist, and this is what is important to me. If anybody else here has ever made that transition from being a very committed professional to becoming a parent, you'll resonate with how things might feel different when you actually have a new infant in your arms. It's a lot more difficult to separate. It doesn't actually make sense to drop your newborn off and then drive away for the better part of the day and then only see them for a small period of time. And I was feeling all of this affection.

I was feeling all of this compassion and nurturance. It was just like so intense. And it was having a huge impact on my decisions. And I thought, okay, there's this whole other part of emotionality that feels really salient. And so I got interested in it.

Also, people would often ask me, oh, okay, so you told us all about negative emotions. What about the positive? And again, academics might understand this explanation also. You kind of have to finish the focus that you have when you're in grad school. And then you go to the next phase and you're like, okay, now I wanna study this other topic.

And so positive emotions, pro social emotions, those really became the emphasis for me when I went into my postdoc. And for pragmatic update, I did not end up sticking with the hour and a half commute each way. I ended up figuring out a way to continue my work locally at UC Berkeley and study compassion and love of humanity and awe with a professor who I was lucky enough to get to know during my graduate degree.

Martina Halloran: I was smiling and just nodding along because being a mother as well, I really feel that deeply. And those are such incredible big emotions when you bring a life into the world. And then when you have to really think about dropping this, this beautiful bundle that you've created off for the better part of the day and not really having the opportunity to spend all the time that you want. That is such a shift for so many people as they continue in different phases in their life. So I understand how that can really shift what you're focusing on and what you're really working on.

With that, obviously, this was a big moment. That's a big moment for you bringing life into the world, becoming a mother and trying to juggle it. I don't want to say do it all because I don't know that you can really do it all. But you can do some of it, some of it really, really well. But when did you realize that kindness, gratitude, and pro social behaviors were not just moral ideas, but more measurable pathways to well-being?

Dr. Emiliana Simon-Thomas: Yeah. I mean, there were two main places, poignant moments for me. One was in just trying to study the global emergence of those qualities and characteristics. Like which societies have more gratitude and generosity and benevolence, and which tend to be more individualistic and self-focused and hyper competitive. And in doing that, you also see the patterns of collective success, prosperity, well-being on average across people in these geographic locations or in these societies and communities.

And yeah, the pattern just is very apparent that in places in the world where people are kinder to one another, where generosity and equity sensibility around opportunities is more prevalent, people do better. Like well-being scores are higher. People live longer. Key metrics that we tend to measure more regularly, like infant mortality and literacy, all those things, educational attainment, all of that gets better. And so I'm scratching my head.

It's partly like, okay, some other places around the world have figured this out. And it's not even about money. It's not about GDP a lot of the time. Some of our listeners may have come across something called the World Happiness Report at some point or another. Every, you know, sixteen months or so, it gives a new ranking of different countries and their happiness level.

And, you know, usually Scandinavian countries top the list. And one of the explanations is that they're very institutionally collective. It's really not easy, but it's welcoming in terms of pursuing ideas, getting educated. It's not cost prohibitive. Healthcare is a little bit more available than it might be in some other places in the world.

But then somewhere like Costa Rica comes up on the list. Quite often, they're top. And what's that about? That's not a place where you think of high access to technology and resources. Right?

It's maybe just physical natural beauty.

Martina Halloran: I was gonna say nature. It nature comes to mind immediately. It's such a beautiful, spectacular place to be.

Dr. Emiliana Simon-Thomas: That's one that's one of the explanations. And then another is a cultural value of familism. And familism isn't just that you only really deeply profoundly care for the people in your household. It's a value that extends to anyone you interact with. There's an assumption of trust or recognition that you are someone's child, sister, aunt, cousin.

And that matters in the way that I care about my own relatives. And so there's an orientation of generosity, of concern, of interest in the welfare of others that is unique. And I think that's a great contribution. So that's one piece. Where in the world are people doing great and what's going on in those places?

What's going on is that they're more pro social. Either at individual cultural levels or at institutional levels. The second part is I teach a class which we launched here at the Greater Good Science Center in 2014 called The Science of Happiness. And I teach it on a learning platform online. It's a massive open online course.

Anybody can take it. We've had more than a million people around the world enroll in this class over the last ten years. And we ask people questions in this class, right? I mean, I'm a scientist and a teacher. And so as a scientist, I wanted to know like, well, who's joining?

Where are you at in your life? How do different ways answer different kinds of questions relate to each other? And what, of course, I ask a question about prosociality, about altruism, about gratitude, about your sense of purpose insofar as it's linked to your sense of contribution or daily activities being of service to others and the community. And there's just really clear correlations across this large sample. The higher people score on these pro social characteristics, the higher they also score on measures of well-being.

And it's not just their own self report. I also, and with colleagues and collaborators, cleverly asked people to nominate someone else who I then reached out to. And I said, hey, you tell me about this person who's taking this class. What are they like? And again, the more the peers said they're generous, they're grateful, they're forgiving, the more that person scored high on measures of well-being.

So, you know, data driven, kind of sociology driven, lots of different indicators that point to the importance of pro sociality for health and well-being.

Martina Halloran: I have the vision that the really prosocial people come to it relatively happy. There's a bit of joy in them. And many people think happiness is a personality trait or something you're born with. What does research tell us about happiness as a skill that can be learned?

Dr. Emiliana Simon-Thomas: They're wrong and they're right. There is a certain degree to which our biology shapes and enables a certain level or what some people call set point for happiness in life. And by happiness in life, I mean generally, you feel pretty good, you're able to handle setbacks and difficulties and failures, and you have a sense that you matter, right? You matter in the world. It's this broader characteristic.

It's not like, I feel really happy that I got a special award for being the best in my workplace, right? That's a momentary emotion. I'm talking about the more broad thing. So yeah, there is some extent to which our biology, and for anyone in any given moment if I were to measure you right now, something about your life history, what's happened to you in the past, has shaped what we might call your set point. But when scholars try to figure out, well okay, is that it?

Is that all we get? That we have the set point, we win the lottery, happiness goes up, and then it kinda goes back down as we get used to it, and then we're back to our set point. We have a loss or an accident, happiness goes down, and then it kinda recovers back up and we're back to set point. Is that it? Turns out, no, it's not.

Actually, that's only about 50% of the variance between two people is explained by their set point. The rest of your day to day happiness has to do with the context that you live in, and the way that you walk the world day to day. And if you were to guess like, okay, let's say this other 50% of variance, is it more context? Or is it more what you do and how you act? I think a common mistake is to think that it's more context.

A common mistake is to think, well, if I just check off my list of goals, I get partner in the company that I work, I get married to an attractive person, I purchase a home, I have a vacation home also, etcetera, etcetera. This is our checklist that we kind of feel like we are obliged to in many industrialized Western countries. If I just do all that, I'll be happy. And that's a very contextual view in that we get from lots of media of smiling people with wonderful material possessions. According to the science, that's only about 10%, the context.

And 40% of the variance in happiness scores between one person and the next is related to what they do, how they behave every day. Whether they're engaging intentionally in experiences and activities that fuel their sense of meaning and purpose. That fuel that idea that they matter, that who they are is valuable to their community and society and humanity and maybe the natural universe depending on a person's orientation. Aristotle called it eudaimonia. The part of well-being or happiness that comes from virtue and moral compass and acting in accordance with your values, like doing what really matters and feels important to you.

That is actually a pretty important part of the ability to shift happiness one way or another in a person's daily life. And, yeah, you absolutely can.

Martina Halloran: Well, when you think about the checklist versus the idea of your social moral compass and how you're living, a checklist is fleeting. The other piece of it is sustainable and rechargeable and refuelable. Often people do from a society perspective, especially in us culture. It is these benchmarks of what society deems as success and success is often tied to happiness. Being in these great, whether it's a job or a partnership or relationship, people tie that to happiness when there's so much more to that.

When I was in one of my toughest moments, I wasn't on a checklist and I wasn't trying to attain things. I thought about what did I have versus what I didn't have. And I had the sun every day. The sun makes me smile every single day. Often the work we do at Dr. Hauschka is about accessibility and how we break down barriers, whether it's barriers to food access, barriers to health and wellness, barriers to joy and happiness. And I always think of those spaces where everybody has access. And in those toughest moments, I always had access to the sun. And it brought me such joy that I think about probably twenty years ago, I probably was operating from a checklist. And now it's a whole different way of showing up in the world and embracing the world.

And that, from my perspective, becomes this very reciprocal relationship with the world and the people that you're engaging with. There is this emerging idea of the value proposition of happiness and where it comes from and how you seek it out versus this checklist of things. Because it's very convoluted in the world when you see the perfect picture, the perfect life, the perfect car, the perfect house. That's just exhausting to me. And happiness is a freedom to me.

When you feel free, you feel almost loose in your own body, whereas in that highly structured, performative list keeps you so tight and wound up. They've got it in their mind, the checklist is going to lead to the happy when in fact, the checklist leads to the next box they need to check off. And it's this vicious cycle that they can't get out of.

Dr. Emiliana Simon-Thomas: Yeah. A couple of responses to your wonderful story. One, I do a lot of teaching for leaders and workplaces. And one of the studies that I like share was done by a scholar named Eva Asselman and her colleagues in Germany. And what they did is they measured happiness and career trajectories over thirty years.

What they were interested in was your question exactly. Like does arriving at a position of leadership or being promoted into a leadership role make you happy? Because yeah, there is evidence that people who are leaders have more happiness. They score higher on measures of happiness. But is it the leadership attainment or is it something else?

And as you can imagine, reason I'm telling this story is because it's something else. The people who arrive into positions of leadership were happier in their late teens and twenties. They already understood something about and were orienting their lives and the way that they behave in the world in such a way that it was fueling their happiness. And it was that happiness that actually made them more likely to reach positions of leadership. And the funny part is while leaders do tend to be a little bit happier than people who don't reach positions of leadership, the paper also showed that the moment of being elected into or promoted into a position of leadership actually sometimes is associated with higher levels of anger.

Right? So there are real challenges with being a leader. Yeah. It takes being a happy person to kinda get to it. And that happiness is actually more than what you could ever need to actually manage the realities of responsibility and agility and dynamicness that you actually have to have in order to successfully lead.

There's lots of data that leaders who score higher on happiness are more well appreciated by their workforces. They're more likely to lead companies that are successful and profitable. I also loved how you talked about appreciation and gratitude. Appreciation and gratitude are both really strong methods for shifting your daily way of walking the world. One of the more formal words for that is comportment.

Right? The way that you just open your eyes and look around. Is it a way that is characterized by what's good? What's out there that is good that is actually buoying me right now without me necessarily having had to ask for it or earn it or work towards it? I'm getting this warm sunlight when it's available.

And wow, how fortunate am I to be the recipient of that. And then the last thing I heard you talk about was time famine. And that is the extent to which people can get into a routine that is so hyper scheduled, and so structured that there's just no room for inner reflection or a moment of spontaneous joy. And those spaces in between are really essential to restorative processes, to our basic cellular health, regeneration of ourselves, all the things that are so central to our lifelong health and well-being.

Martina Halloran: There's these real joyful, happy leaders who emanate a little something different. And then there's really angry leaders because of sometimes it's the pressure. And when I stepped into this role, I really thought about this idea of what has buoyed me, what has made me so appreciative and so grateful in the process of being successful. And in 2018, we bought an old church. We wanted to really stay true to our sustainability.

And as they were taking out all of this beautiful stained glass and replacing it with windows, I recognized that everybody who sat in the office didn't have a window. So I decided that everybody should have a glance to nature at any point in their day. So everybody who sits in our office has a window. It's about this idea of having the opportunity for me to really build a culture that took care of people and nurtured people and fueled ideas and fueled a collaborative environment. And I think at Dr. Hauschka, we try to be I always say good, better, best. We try to be better every single day. But I often come to the table thinking if I was sitting in that chair of the marketing person or the education person or the salesperson or the customer service person that gets wonderful communication with consumers but also gets the unhappy ones because it happens. What would I need to buoy myself in that situation? And I try as a leader to provide that because to your point, happiness in an organization, joy and gratitude and appreciation in organization, when people walk in, they can feel it either way, the polarity of it, it's really positive or it's really negative.

And we want to stay in the positive at Dr. Hauschka. When I talk with other people, it's intentional, which means it's available to everybody. You can choose it. That for me has always been a fundamental difference as a leader.

You can choose. I can choose how I'm going to feel today. Yeah, no matter what's going on. I can choose that. But I think there's practice in that when we talk about relational experiences, because I've often brought a lot of how I've lived my life into the workforce.

One of the central themes you talk about is belonging, caregiving, and cooperation. Those are so important for human beings. I think everybody wants to belong. Why are they so central to lifelong health and joy?

Dr. Emiliana Simon-Thomas: Well, humans are an ultra-social species. Right? It's an evolutionary affordance that has made us as successful as we are on this planet. We succeed because we are exquisitely skilled at coming together, at weaving together communities, societies, at coordinating our effort towards much grander goals than any individual could ever imagine. We have neural pathways and peripheral physiological processes that actually orient us towards one another.

We're reflexively empathetic. We're attuned to understanding each other's emotions and trying to avoid conflict. Are conflict averse by nature. Of course, we experience conflict. Conflict is important to progress and change.

It's inevitable. But we're also way more inclined to avoid escalation or to reconcile in the wake of conflict than we are to escalate or continue to hold a lifelong grudge. In terms of our well-being. We may make that mistake, and many of us do, and there are lots of cultural reasons for that. And that mistake that I'm referring to is deciding to refuse forgiveness and like drag along the trauma and hostility.

Martina Halloran: That sounds exhausting. It sounds exhausting. Exactly.

Dr. Emiliana Simon-Thomas: But it's bizarre. It's a bizarre thing that people do despite its cost. It's very costly. It's a basic biology question. We are equipped and innately inclined or biased to prefer the company of others.

Many of our listeners have probably encountered the headline that there's a loneliness epidemic. So loneliness is actually really not just unpleasant. We might feel sympathetic or compassionate towards somebody that's lonely, but actually people who are not socially integrated are just at much higher risk of all cause mortality. Being lonely, you're at 50% higher risk of all-cause mortality versus somebody who's not lonely. Julianna Lundholstad has been one of the pioneering leaders in this kind of discussion about the perils and ills of loneliness.

So again, that's just more evidence that points to how essential our connections are. A last study I'll mention is the Harvard Study of Adult Development led most recently by Robert Waldinger, who wrote a book about this, but it's like they've been following people for seventy, eighty years, and looking at what's happening in their life. How sick are they getting? How well do they feel emotionally and psychologically? And above all other factors that they were tracking, being part of a close and mutually supportive social relationship was the strongest predictor of health and longevity.

Everything else, you think, oh, it's money, it's a fancy car, it's success in your profession. All those things. All those things matter. I don't wanna say they don't matter, but they're not the thing that we should start with. They're not a thing.

And It's not the basis. Yeah. And people often think they should trade. Like, I'm gonna trade time with the people I love for some opportunity that's going to make me earn me more money when in fact, that's just a bad deal. The money doesn't do as much for the happiness in life as

Martina Halloran: And there's no guarantees. There's no guarantees that you're going to be here in a space and time to be able to enjoy all that money that you've earned. There's no guarantee.

Dr. Emiliana Simon-Thomas: It's even enjoyable. Like that's the I think what you pointed to earlier is that like, yeah, you buy something new and it's great for a second. And then you're worried that it's gonna get scratched, broken, or lost, or you see that somebody else bought one two weeks later and they got a better deal than you did, or they got the next version and it works better than yours, and suddenly this thing that you thought was joyful is just almost a burden. Our relationships are not like that. Our relationships with one another, especially when we invest in them and we lean into kind of having a deeper and authentic heartfelt bond, There's no there's no habituation.

There's no adaptation to friendship.

Martina Halloran: No. Oh my gosh. You know, some of its cultural people drag around bitterness, grudges. And I think there's this beautiful idea in the world today that closeness can come from so many different places. It's not just families that you were born into, there's chosen family.

And there's also this idea of loneliness and being alone are two uniquely different things.

Dr. Emiliana Simon-Thomas: Yes,

Martina Halloran: and being alone with yourself and being able to enjoy your company is super healthy. And while- while we are, for lack of a better word, tribal people, and we want that connection, I think we also have to have that connection with ourselves to really understand how we operate in the world. Understanding yourself really allows your ability to embrace other people in a much deeper way.

Dr. Emiliana Simon-Thomas: Absolutely. Yeah. What I'm hearing you talk about is the importance of solitude. Being an ultra-social species doesn't mean that we're constantly seeking affirmation and validation from things outside of ourselves, whether it's people or contextual details. That's an extreme in the other direction.

People vary in their degree of introversion, right? I often get questions about, what do I do? I'm an introvert. Doing a random act of kindness really feels super stressful to me. But for the extrovert, it's really easy.

Does it help everyone the same? Just spoiler alert, it actually helps the introverts more than it helps the extroverts. And all of us benefit a little bit from doing things that are a little bit uncomfortable. That might sort of push our boundary that maybe we think is strict, but in the social context often, they're malleable. And there's opportunity to have deeper, more meaningful supportive bonds with others that aren't focused again on creating that basic sense of worth.

You're right, you need to have your own sense of worth and connect with yourself in a compassionate and gentle way in order to be able to do that for anyone else. And if you're mired in self-criticism and anxiety, your efforts to approach another in a comforting way are going to fail. So yes, there is a very substantial benefit to self-awareness, to solitude, to the ability to really understand and relate to one's own mental habits and emotional experiences in a clear way.

Martina Halloran: Everybody thinks I'm an extrovert. I am not. I am not. I am such an introvert. So what's happening in the brain when somebody practices kindness, gratitude, or compassion?

How does that start to shift? Because I think when somebody gets really excited, or they're in fight or flight mode, we know what's happening because it always tends to be that fear factor. But when somebody is practicing these more gentle of emotions or actions, what's actually happening in their brain?

Dr. Emiliana Simon-Thomas: I wanna start with what is actually similar across those moments of exciting and those moments of attunement to others' welfare. And then I'll talk about things that might be different. So we all have a pathway in our brain that signals pleasure, right? It's often referred to as the reward pathway. You may have heard of dopamine.

This pathway activates when our nervous system detects that there is an opportunity available. That there's some kind of resource that we should pursue, or perhaps we're even consuming, right? It's involved both in the anticipation and the consummation of a pleasure. And it's usually talked about in the context of, you know, research with primates who get a juice squirt or something, and then you see the activation in their dopamine pathways. The adult corollary would be, you're sitting at a table and you're kind of had a very light early dinner, and it's a little bit later in the evening and somebody brings their absolute favorite dessert.

Right? You're like, oh, this is gonna be so good. I'm so excited. I have the appetite for it. It turns out, while we thought this pathway is really just about pleasure, about self-indulgence, about reward that is self-oriented and self-focused.

When scholars put people into a brain scanner and measure activation in those pathways, in those regions, when a person has to, They're doing a little game, and they can be successful. Maybe they hit the button fast enough or accurately enough, and they win a reward. They win some kind of money or bonus. And sometimes it's for them, and they get this little bank thing. Yeah, you got money or you got bonus.

And sometimes it goes to a charity. It goes to someone else. It goes to a different place. This study actually done about fifteen years ago was a collaboration between economists and neuroscientists. Because they're the ones who are going like, wait, how does this work?

Economists would say we would never be generous. There's no point in it. There's no rationality there. And neuroscientists who are in conversations with psychologists are like, but wait, people do heroic things at their cost to themselves all the time. And people are super generous in unexpected ways.

So what's the deal? Well, the deal is that those reward pathways signal and respond to generosity. So we get the same feeling of warmth and excitement when we know that we've done something that has uplifted or benefited another person that we get if we have that benefit ourselves. If we do something together with another person, and this is a different study, but we do something together with another person to win, and we could have done that thing by ourselves to win, the winning with another person leads to a bigger activation of those reward pathways. So there's this common system that is exquisitely attuned, just to personal rewards, rewards to the self, but also to the detection that you have committed an action that has benefited another, or that has improved the welfare of another person.

So that's one story. The other is, yeah, we have pathways and systems in our brain. The temporal parietal junction, the insular, that are central to what's called social cognition. So detecting what another person's perspective might be. Like, why do they think the way that they are thinking in this moment of conversation?

That's there from birth, right? We have systems that are dedicated to interpersonal experiences. Peripherally, our vagus nerve is the tenth cranial nerve. And it kind of has little processes that go all over the body to different organs. The one that researchers tend to focus most on is its influence on the heart.

So what the vagus nerve does is it slows down your heart rate every time you exhale. This is calming. This is restorative. This keeps you from expiring. Well, turns out that the vagus nerve, when it's more dominant, also turns on all of these affiliative systems.

So there's some braided together biology of being calm in that rest and digest state that is also attend and befriend state. It's also when we feel most inclined to approach others, the systems and sensors in our ears and in our eyes become more sensitive to human communication. We're better at detecting facial expressions. We hear better the frequencies that are characteristic of human speech. So there are all these systems that are there for socializing, that are there for being affiliative and pro social.

And when they're activated, they actually have a benefit to our health and well-being. So remember that the vagus nerve is also about restoration, about calmness, about enabling your body to do the work of repair, of cellular regeneration. That all happens in a way that's on the same road as being in the company of our friends and beloved.

Martina Halloran: That's pretty powerful. The average person out there, to include myself, you know, you don't make that deep connection that your social emotional dynamic is so integrated on so many levels to your biology, which brings me to the big joy project itself. It's incredible and it's powerful. So I want to talk a little bit about that because I'm sure our listeners want to hear more about it. So the big joy project gives participants small daily micro acts of joy.

Why did you choose micro actions as an entry point rather than something bigger or longer? Everybody thinks joy is big. Right? Why did you go there?

Dr. Emiliana Simon-Thomas: Well, there are volumes of human thought dedicated to methods of finding happiness that take a long time. Mhmm. So many spiritual traditions, many self-help thinkers have written volumes. Again, like, just do this every single day or do this for an hour every day. Change something dramatic about your whole life, and then you'll be happier or you'll experience more joy.

And that works for a fraction of people. There are some people who are into it, who are like, okay, I'm gonna take that on. I'm gonna change everything radical. And now I maybe have benefited from it. But for, I would argue a majority of people who are in the routine of their lives and they're actually doing pretty good.

Like a lot of people are doing pretty good, but they're asking themselves, is there more? Could I be better? Where can I grow to? As a species, we also don't like to just sit and be done. We're not like, okay, I've had enough to eat, had enough to drink, I'm warm enough.

I'm just gonna sit in some place and wait till another need happens. We seek novelty. We wanna grow. We wanna understand new things. We try to build big joy for the average person in those shoes, who is already committed to lots of activities and experiences in their day, but maybe has space for just a little shift, just a little like swap this in and swap that out.

And if I had to argue in this moment, what would that swap in out be? It might be like, take out eight minutes of scrolling through whatever social media is your vice, and do a micro active joy instead, and see how that goes for you. We thought a seven day exercise would be long enough to really kinda start to change something. We don't actually know how long it takes to really modify a pathway in the brain that might strengthen an association between pleasure and other people, as opposed to pleasure and material consumer products. But certainly, there's lots of evidence that the more people do, and this comes from just science of learning.

The more practice you do, the better you get at something. And that's because your neural pathways get stronger and more streamlined. So seven days we thought would be good. We tried to make it clever, seven minutes per day. And we tried to offer a variety.

So instead of being like, well, have to meditate now, and you have to meditate every single day. And what if on the first day you're like, wow, this feels really unsensible to me. I can't do it. That's it, you drop off, you lose that person. But what if we give you a little, you know, reflection on one day.

We try to call it something that is not aligned with any particular tradition or belief system other than just the idea that maybe you wanna be happy, which maybe is kinda universal. I don't know. I think so. And then give somebody a different thing the next day, and a different thing the next day. And the whole program, the Big Joy Project, is framed as an exploration.

It's not a promise. It's not come here and you're gonna feel more joy. It's come here and try a few things and see what it feels like. Really notice for yourself.

Martina Halloran: I love that. It's an exploration. It's not a promise. I love Exactly.

Dr. Emiliana Simon-Thomas: And at the end of seven days, we give you a little report. So if you're done all seven micro acts, and you've told us how they've landed for you, and the program asks you, say how you feel, do the micro act, say how you feel, and then we'll nudge you in the evening again to say how you feel. It'll tell you, hey, you know what, the thing that worked really the best for you in terms of immediately increasing your positive emotion and decreasing your negative emotion was watching a three minute video that is awe inspiring. And we know there's great science on the importance of awe in your life. Yeah.

Martina Halloran: So the project is also a citizen science effort. So what are scientists specifically hoping to understand from people's daily emotional check ins?

Dr. Emiliana Simon-Thomas: Yeah. I mean, we really wanna learn what works best for home. So in the canon of positive psychology, or well-being, or happiness science, there's a pretty vast landscape of different exercises and activities and practices. At the Greater Good Science Center, we have made them available to the best of our ability through a website called Greater Good in Action. You can go there and there's a library.

Like if you wanna know what scientists have tested to promote compassion And click the compassion button. You'll see like 10 little thumbnails, and you can click on one of them and we'll give you all the instructions. Very self-serve for the person who is internally motivated. Big Joy, not like that. Big Joy's interactive, and it nudges you and prompts you and gives you seven different choices.

We have a little special interest in the pro social aspects of big joy. So some of our micro acts involve setting an intention to do five things that are kind for other people on a given day. What is one little kind thing you could do? Another one is engaging with somebody who you're likely to encounter in a way that focuses on something positive into their life. So sometimes we get in the habit of like, how are you?

So stressed, I'm so busy. This terrible thing happened. Somebody rear ended my car. I had to go to the insurance. Would do this, like complain y thing.

And our brain doesn't really have a preference for what it holds onto, but it holds onto what we repeat over and over again. And if we're complaining all the time about the hassles, the inconveniences, the frustrations, that becomes the baseline for how we feel in social interaction. So we are really interested in do the big joy practices actually change how people endorse statements like, I'm willing to make sacrifices to my quality of life to uplift the welfare of others. Like, that's a pretty high ask. We're amazed and outrageously gratified that actually, yeah, if people do People do it.

Crazy. They report being more willing to endorse that statement. They're closer to strongly agree than strongly disagree when they engage in these practices. So we're really interested in that. It's a it's a big project.

We have over 100,000 people who have enrolled and done at least part of it. The work is ongoing.

Martina Halloran: Wow. Talk about big joy. A 100,000 That's a lot of joy. What do you personally return to when you need to reset or decompress and reconnect? Because you've been exposed to so many different potential actions that somebody could take in and invoke in their own personal journey.

What do you do?

Dr. Emiliana Simon-Thomas: My go to is either a reflection or an expression of gratitude. And I do it in a particular way that kind of supersizes the impact. When I reflect or choose to express or note gratitude for something, I say thank you, I describe what the other person did. What did the other person do that I'm thanking them for? Acknowledge the effort that they put forth.

So what did they invest in doing this thing that they did? And I describe how it led to goodness. Like what was the benefit? How did I gain? How did this bring goodness to me that they did this?

So I call this gratitude one, two, three, because it helps me to count those

Martina Halloran: I love things that, I love that.

Dr. Emiliana Simon-Thomas: It helps in an email, a text message, a verbal expression, and again, even counts just as a reflection. If you have thirty seconds to look out your window and think about a goodness, and then tie it to a person, and something about what they did and how they put their energy and effort into it and how it is good for you, it's just a really powerful reset, both in terms of your own optimism and sense of goodness in the world and also linking that goodness to other people.

Martina Halloran: That is both powerful and beautiful, and it is such a great place to end. Thank you for joining us today. Spending time with Dr. Emiliana Simon Thomas reminded us that joy is not something fragile or rare. It is something we can choose, even in the smallest ways.

A kind word, a moment of gratitude, a connection shared with someone we love, or someone we have yet to know. These tiny choices add up and shape how we move through the world. If today's conversation spark something in you, I invite you to take one micro active joy into your week. Pay attention to how it shifts your energy, your outlook, and the way you show up for others. As Emiliana shared, joy is not only personal, it has a way of extending beyond us, touching the people around us, and strengthening the communities we call home.

You can learn more about the Big Joy Project and participate in their seven day experience at Greater Good in Action, ggia.berkeley.edu/bigjoy. Thank you for listening and for being part of the Giving Garden community, where every act of care, no matter how small, becomes nourishment. Until next time, may you plant seeds of joy wherever you go, and may they come back to you in ways you never expected. Thank you for listening to the Giving Garden podcast. I hope you're leaving inspired because even the smallest act can spark positive change.

If you've enjoyed today's episode, don't forget to like, subscribe, and share. The Giving Garden podcast is produced by Edwin Batista and edited by Steven West. A special thanks to Helen Polisi for her guidance and generosity. The Giving Garden Podcast is brought to you by Dr. Hauschka Skin Care USA, pioneers in natural skincare for over fifty years in home to The Giving Garden loyalty program.

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