Sonja Lyubomirsky
speaker
1,409 appearances
3 recordings
3 series
first heard Feb 2026
last heard 25 Jun
Sonja Lyubomirsky’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Yes.
Well, thank you for aging me, but yes, 36 years.
So actually it was 1998, my lab pioneered
happiness interventions.
So 98, long time ago, 28 years ago, Bill Clinton was in the White House.
And so I've been doing research on these interventions, testing whether practices like expressing gratitude or doing acts of kindness or being social makes people happier.
So interventions are like clinical trials, but instead of testing a vaccine, we're testing like a happiness strategy.
And then one day it finally hit me that what all these interventions had in common is the ones that worked, the reason they worked is because they made us feel more connected to and loved by others.
So when I write a gratitude letter to my mom, it makes me feel more loved by her.
When I do an act of kindness for a colleague or a friend, it makes me feel closer to him.
So almost all happiness practices, maybe not all, like maybe if you run on the beach or meditate, it's not about connection, but almost all of them are about feeling connected and feeling loved.
I think the human species wouldn't have survived if we did not feel connected and loved.
And it's an extremely strong signal.
And so what I concluded is the key to happiness is feeling connected, which sounds like a cliche, right?
And when you think about in our ancestral past, if we did not feel connected and loved, we wouldn't survive.
We wouldn't find mates.
We wouldn't pass on our genes.
So it's incredibly important.
It's one of the most important tasks of human beings is to sort of maintain connection.
Right.
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