Dr. Nicholas Epley

speaker

1,223 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 15 Jul

Dr. Nicholas Epley’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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The Liz Moody Podcast · The One Habit That Will Instantly Make You More Likeable · 15 Jul 2026 podcast

I mean, I think that, I think a lot of the self-help world, at least in the United States, has gotten things very backward.

They try to encourage you to turn inward to make yourself have a good day, right?

So go out and pamper yourself, get the massage, whatever.

Iris Mouse, who's at Berkeley, your alma mater, she finds that when she asks people to go out and try to make themselves happy, they often come back feeling worse because they go out and do the wrong things.

They focus on themselves.

Liz Dunn, who's a fabulous researcher at University of British Columbia, finds that when she gives people money and asks them to go out and spend it on other people, they come back feeling better than when they spend it on themselves.

The way to have a good day is to go out and make somebody else have a good day.

That's a way to very consistently do that.

I think you take some of the pressure off if you shift your focus to other people rather than on yourself.

I do think research enables you to be a little wiser at times.

No research has changed the way I live my life more than the stuff I talk about in A Little More Social in the book.

And even my advisor, Tom Gilovich's work on the spotlight effect, for instance, changed the way I live my life.

You realize other people just don't judge you so hard.

If you go into a social situation with your interest on other people, it's going to make you a lot more at ease and likely make you enjoy the experience a lot more because you're not so self-focused.

Psychologists in the, like in the 70s and 80s,

If they were running an experiment and they wanted to make people feel bad, like they were interested in what negative mood does to people, they had a very reliable way to do this, which is they would sit you down in front of a mirror and ask you to think about yourself.

And usually that made people feel like crap because they weren't living up to their ideals or their best self, right?

Focusing on other people is a pretty good way to feel good.

And it takes some of the pressure off yourself and is going to make a lot of those social experiences, I think, better too.

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