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.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Happiness interventions are experiments with human participants.
Over the years, we've done dozens of these experiments, testing whether practices like expressing gratitude or doing acts of kindness or simply acting like an extrovert make people happier.
And they do under the right conditions.
My students and I spent decades doing these experiments.
This work made my career.
And yet I realized that I hadn't really been listening to what the data were trying to tell me.
And then it finally clicked.
it dawned on me that almost all of the interventions that work to make us happier, they work precisely because they help us feel more connected to and loved by others.
So writing a gratitude letter to my mom makes me feel more loved by her.
And doing an act of kindness for my
A colleague makes me feel closer to him.
In other words, what I learned is that to be a better happiness scientist, I had to become a love scientist.
Because as it turns out, the key to happiness is feeling connected and loved.
And I know that sounds like a cliché, but many powerful ideas do, once you distill them.
The real challenge and opportunity is how to put it into practice.
So then how do we connect?
Well, we can connect through touch or dance or eye contact.
But let's face it, in Western culture, in many cultures actually, we mostly connect by talking.
Yet here's the problem with our social world today.
Even when we're talking, we all have walls around us.
Showing 1161–1180 of 1,409 · page 59 of 71
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