PODCASTThe Science of Happiness

Scroll down for a transcription of this episode.

Episode summary:

Whether it’s news notifications or work emails, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed by the stresses of our time every moment of every day. But what if there was something we could do to rekindle the greatest joys of our childhood? How might that shift how we feel in the present moment? Simply reflecting on happy memories, especially when they include others who are meaningful to us, has been shown in a lab to reduce stress, activate the reward center in our brain, and uplift our mood. This week, Palestinian-American poet and author Naomi Shihab Nye reminisces on happy memories from her youth and finds the practice soothes her and sparks joyfulness. We also hear from neuroscientist Mauricio Delgado about how the practice changes the way we think and feel.

Practice:

For one week or more, spend 5-10 minutes each day writing in response to the following prompt:

Please think about your childhood and the good memories you have from it. Write a few paragraphs describing them and one event that you still remember to this date. Please provide as many details as possible so that another person reading what you wrote could understand how you felt at that time.

Today’s guests:

Naomi Shihab Nye is a Palestinian-American poet and author. Her new book of poetry, Grace Notes, will be available May 7. 

Order Grace Notes: https://tinyurl.com/st3w6n8t

Check out Naomi’s children’s book about a child visiting her Palestinian grandmother, Sitti’s Secrets: https://tinyurl.com/5embjxuj

Follow Naomi on Instagram: https://tinyurl.com/5hddcf8k

Mauricio Delgado is a psychology professor at Rutgers University who studies social and cognitive neuroscience.

Learn more about Mauricio’s work: https://tinyurl.com/4tt7bp2d

Follow Mauricio on Twitter: https://tinyurl.com/27kvv6j7

More episodes like this one:

Why We Should Look Up at the Sky - https://tinyurl.com/4xs88sye

Why We Need Friends with Shared Interests - https://tinyurl.com/bdesh3he

Happiness Break (a short, guided practice by The Science of Happiness):

A Meditation to Connect to Your Roots, With Yuria Celidwen - https://tinyurl.com/3ae3w3z3

Where Did You Come From? Guided Writing, With Lyla June - https://tinyurl.com/ytypxn5t

Tell us about your happiest childhood memories, and what they bring to you now. Email us at happinesspod@berkeley.edu or use the hashtag #happinesspod.

Help us share The Science of Happiness!

Leave us a 5-star review on Apple Podcasts and share this link with someone who might like the show: https://tinyurl.com/2p9h5aap

NAOMI SHIHAB NYE My father had this conviction that if you make hummus at home, which of course all Arabs do, he said even if you used canned garbanzo beans, chickpeas, you had to boil them down in a pan for them to have the best taste and the best consistency in your hummus. My father was so convinced that unless you did that, they wouldn't have the richest flavor they could possibly have. And he always did it while playing classical music at top volume. 

[classical music]

And he's happy. He's happy. He's smiling. That memory, it holds comfort, enormous comfort, because you know you're gonna have this delicious plate of hummus to eat together afterwards, and of course he was always happy eating his original food, and it made my mom happy because he was cooking, and the house smelled good, you know, that combination of smell and hearing, at the same time, the music, there was just a sense of hope, of uplift.

SHUKA KALANTARI Hi, everyone. Welcome to The Science of Happiness. I'm Shuka Kalantari, the executive producer of the show, filling in for Dacher Keltner. Today on The Science of Happiness we're digging up happy memories with Palestinian-American poet and author Naomi Shihab Nye. For our show, Naomi tried a practice where she wrote about her own good memories every day for one week, with a focus on her childhood.

Studies show thinking about positive memories makes us more likely to feel a sense of satisfaction in life. It can also help change negative thought patterns, making us better at focusing on the things good happening now.

We'll hear from Naomi, and also psychologist Mauricio Delgado will break down why carving out time to think about happy memories is such a good exercise for the brain. And also which kinds of good memories serve us best.

MAURICIO DELGADO They tended to activate the reward systems of the brain. Specifically, this area called the striatum. which is important for feeling rewarded,  and just, in general, positive feelings.

SHUKA KALANTARI Welcome back to The Science of Happiness, I'm Shuka Kalantari. Thinking about good memories is good for us. And we're talking about why and how today.

For our show, poet and author Naomi Shihab Nye wrote about her own happy memories from childhood. And actually her latest book, Grace Notes, is about memories of her own mother.  Grace Notes will be available May 7 of 2024. I recommend you check it out.

Naomi joins us today from her hometown of San Antonio, Texas, to share how her journey to the past went. Here's part of our conversation.

SHUKA KALANTARI Naomi, thank you so much for joining us on the Science of Happiness today. 

NAOMI SHIHAB NYE Thank you for inviting me, Shuka. I'm so happy to be here.

SHUKA KALANTARI I want to get into the details of the practice and your memories in a moment, but one thing that made me personally happy when you chose to do this practice for our show is that, many communities have a tricky relationship with memories because of trauma. And so I wonder, what was your own family's relationship to memories? And how did that affect your relationship to that?

NAOMI SHIHAB NYE Well, my father was a refugee his neighborhood and his best friend, and I think it was always very hard for my father to get too nostalgic about his own memories, whether we were in the United States or in Palestine, he would start remembering something, he would get choked up, he would have to walk outside. It was very painful for him. My mother also had a hard time with memories because although she was a brilliant person, born in America, and she was the first full time art scholarship Washington University ever gave to their fine arts school. I mean, she was like a young prodigy. But she suffered from depression and people who have suffered childhood depression have a really hard time with their memories too. You know, they were always doing their best to have good times, fun times. But if I would interrogate them about their own childhoods, they were both very sketchy in what they would report.

So I had been thinking about her memories and how different it is if you are a person of a certain nature to go back to those really, really hard early times.

SHUKA KALANTARI Coming from a place of not just trauma within your own family but generational trauma.

NAOMI SHIHAB NYE Right. 

SHUKA KALANTARI You almost defiantly chose a practice where you do go and explore memories, but the positive ones. What I love about this practice is that the instructions are so simple: find a positive memory, write about it. There's no wrong way to do it. Can you share one of those positive memories?

NAOMI SHIHAB NYE So we had just moved to Texas, and I entered an art class in my public high school, and the art teacher gave us an interesting challenge. She said, "When you come in here tomorrow, I want you to have selected a word. And that word will be with you this entire year in my class, and you will be using it in a lot of different ways. So pick a word that you really like, that you can stand to live with, that is your word." And I went home and meditated on it, took a walk, and I picked, "simple."  

And there were ways in which this teacher brilliantly had us weave our word into all these different projects we did. Like, I remember silk screening the word "simple" on a large curtain. And I'd never silk screened anything in my life. It was just a really magical class, and we kind of knew each other in that class by our words, not by our given names, which was also fun. Like, we would call each other by these words. I really believed the world could feel simple all of your life. But I hadn't really focused on the word "simple" in a long time, because the world has not felt that simple to me for a while. 

Henry David Thoreau would say, "Let your affairs be as two or three, not 200 or 300." Well, you're an adult and you feel all the time because of this grievous endless email box that everyone has now that everybody's asking you to do a million things, and you have so many messages you haven't answered yet, and you cannot get away from that. You know, we have really entered into a bizarre mental space where we feel obligated to be on call at all times to our email boxes. And you know, you say you're not going to read the news, but trust me, your phone's going to give it to you whether you like it or not. It feels like too-muchness all the time.

But meditating on that word again made me think, "Well, who says I have to look at an inbox every single day? So what if I don't answer those people for a few days? I'm not even looking at it." And that was helpful. Just that feeling of, "Why do I have to turn on my phone just because I woke up? Maybe I won't turn it on until noon today." And so, it was a change, you know?  

SHUKA KALANTARI Amazing. There's research from psychologist Maurizio Delgado and his colleague Megan Spear, they did this experiment where they had people put their hands in ice while in an fMRI machine. And then they had some people recall positive memories and other people neutral memories. And the people that recalled the positive memories, they experienced less stress. It just didn't bother them as much.

NAOMI SHIHAB NYE Wow.

SHUKA KALANTARI And not just childhood. Any positive memories in the past. How do you think reflecting on these memories has affected your own stress levels these past few weeks?  

NAOMI SHIHAB NYE Oh, I think I've been much better off these past few weeks. I'm glad you didn't tell me I had to put my hands in ice though! But, that's so interesting. I think we're habitual animals. We get into these habits. And so, like, thinking about "simple" for one day, I didn't just think about it for one day. It kept coming back to me every day. I started thinking, "Wait a minute, this isn't simple behavior. Why am I, why am I feeling this?" 

You know, years ago, Shuka, I gave up the word busy. And I guess that would apply to the word stress, too. I try not to use those words. I don't like them because I don't think they help us in any way to think of ourselves, you know, to apply the word busy to yourself does not help you get anything done. And so just the language that you choose to apply to yourself or your day has a lot to do with how you feel about it.

SHUKA KALANTARI How do those memories affect your sense of self today? 

NAOMI SHIHAB NYE Well, you know, I think when we're children, if we're lucky, if we have involved caring parents and mine for all their, um,  unique and wondrous habits and propensities, we're always caring. I never doubted for one moment that they loved us. That's a precious thing. And then, you know, you're an old person and everybody who cared for you, parent-wise, or grandparent-wise, they've all died. And so the nurturing is up to you and you know, your partner if you're lucky, or your friends if you're lucky. 

And so, "How do we nurture one another?" That was a question I really thought about during this practice. And, "How did I feel nurtured as a child that now, as an adult, we're required to do it for ourselves?" 

SHUKA KALANTARI Childhood memories aren't something that's new to you. You've shared that much of your poetry is inspired by your own childhood memories and your travels. and a lot of your prose goes back to childhood. And you, nearly 30 years ago, made a children's book called Sitti's Secrets. And Sitti's Secrets tells this beautiful story of an English-speaking kid who goes back to Palestine and connects with her Arabic-speaking grandmother. And the story is how they come together and how they connect through something beyond language. Tell us about that book.

NAOMI SHIHAB NYE In my own life I was 14 when I actually went and met my Palestinian grandmother for the first time and my family planned to live there in Palestine. It was our intention. So that's a little different from the book. In the book, little Mona, who's around seven, is just going to visit her grandma. But we actually moved there to live next to my grandma. And we only stayed a year because the Six Day War came. And, that's when we ended up coming to Texas.

But this book was written in one night. I was distraught over the invasion of Iraq that was about to happen. I couldn't sleep at night, we had a five-year-old son at the time. And I just kept thinking about all the children and grandmas who were going to be impacted by a war. And even though we were invading Iraq, not Palestine, I just kept thinking of my grandma. So I kept wondering how the news was coming through to her, too. And so in one night, I sat and wrote this book.

I've been hearing from a lot of parents and grandparents who tell me that Sitti's Secrets is, again, important to them because it stresses ordinariness. It's not really about politics. It's about childhood and grandmotherhood. And yes, there is a letter in the book that Mona writes to her president at the time and he says she's voting for peace, which I certainly have been all my life, and there are so many people in the world voting for peace. And actually doing your childhood practice helped me remember how many of us there are: Arabs, Jews worldwide, Swedes, Hawaiians, people of all different backgrounds who are protesting this nightmare in Gaza. 

So your project helped remind me who I was as a child, someone who was aware of news, but it didn't take over my whole entire mood every day. I was aware there were all these sad, terrible, hard things happening in the world, but they didn't dominate everything. 

I think feeling, you know, emphasizing to yourself that you have this body of memory still inside you, you know, those people genetically are still with you, and spiritually are still with you. And you know, as it went on from day to day, I kept trying to think of different things. So what's something else I would do as a child to have that sense of nurturing or that sense of safety? And I like how when you think in a certain vein, how you keep thinking of more things. And kids have always told me this when, when they write. You know, "Oh, I didn't realize I had that much of that memory. But when I was writing, I started remembering all these other details about it." And that's what happens. If you focus on these positive, these positive things you know, a lot will be given. I don't know, it just helped remind me, who was I as a child? You know, what did we think about the world then? And that was very beneficial. 

SHUKA KALANTARI Naomi, Thank you so much for being a guest on the show. It's been such an honor to speak with you.

NAOMI SHIHAB NYE Thank you so much. Keep hoping for peace with all your might.

SHUKA KALANTARI Up next, we're going to hear more about the research behind what happens when we think about positive memories, and which types of happy memories are best for us to think about.

MAURICIO DELGADO So one of the first studies that we did is we first showed that if people recall positive memories, it kind of puts them in a positive mood. It made them feel good, and recruited brain regions involved in reward processing. And the next step that we did was then see, could this be useful for actually helping people cope with the stress in their lives?

SHUKA KALANTARI Welcome back to the Science of Happiness, I'm Shuka Kalantari. And that was psychologist Mauricio Delgado. He discovered thinking about positive memories can support us with coping skills, and our response to acute stress.

MAURICIO DELGADO We also found that the people who had the higher count of memories that were deemed as social, and memories of close others, those were the individuals who were the best at buffering their response to stress. Highlighting this idea that the value of these social memories is really apparent here specifically in terms of being able to know that somebody's there to help you get through the difficult times.

SHUKA KALANTARI Delgado wanted to know what was going on in our brains when we were thinking about these great memories with other people. So in another experiment, he recruited 37 people to reminisce on either a social or not social positive memories -- all while in an fMRI machine.

MAURICIO DELGADO We were interested in exploring their brain activity when they were reminiscing about these positive memories. And what we observed is that when participants were reminiscing about memories that were high in social context, memories with our close others, that they tended to activate reward systems of the brain. Specifically, this area called the striatum, which is important for anticipating rewards, feeling rewarded, and just, in general, positive feelings.

SHUKA KALANTARI Thinking about happy memories involving other people also activated a network of the brain called the "Mentalizing Network, the regions involved in thinking about others, and also what we attribute others beliefs and attitudes to be towards us.

MAURICIO DELGADO We are wired to be social, right? We crave social interactions. We want to be around others and we're often pursuing social opportunities. And we have evolved this need to belong. And situations when we're faced with stress, your friends may not always be there for you at that time, but that's just having that memory that somebody's there if you need, right? This perceived social connection can help you during those times. 

So, I think the practical idea is that it feels good to remember the past, to remember the good times, right? Sometimes it might be something as simple as, maybe you're a little stressed and you pick up your phone and you look at some pictures of something you did a few weeks ago, or a trip you took. And that elicits a little bit of a positive mood and gives you a boost that maybe allows you to get on with your day if you're experiencing some stress. 

Maybe it gives you the idea of reconnecting with friends that you haven't talked to in a while, which promotes social connection, which we know has very strong social, very strong health benefits for our well-being. So I think the message would be: try to cherish some of those moments that you have,  especially with close others. And because those memories will come in handy in the future. 

SHUKA KALANTARI On our next episode of The Science of Happiness, Drew Ackerman of Sleep With Me podcast returns to our show to try another practice to help with his insomnia…

[birdsong]

SHUKA KALANTARI … listening to recordings of birdsong.

DREW ACKERMAN A lot of times it's like, "Man, if I don't feel like I'm going to get some sleep. It's not going to feel safe and secure." But listening to the bird songs kind of took me there. It definitely helped me feel more relaxed and almost a sense of like, mild security, like, "He, this is a nice place to be."

SHUKA KALANTARI I’m Shuka Kalantari, executive producer of The Science of Happiness, filling in for Dacher Keltner. Our producer is Haley Gray.  Sound design is from Jennie Cataldo of Accompany Studios. Our executive director is Jason Marsh. The Science of Happiness is a co-production of UC Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center and PRX. Have a great day.