Real Self-Care Tips From Dr. Laurie Santos

(breeze rustles) (birds chirp) (soft ethereal music) Hello, Dr. Laurie Santos here, your guest host for the week. Welcome to "Radio Headspace." This week is all about how to find happiness. Today, I'm gonna talk about self-care. When we think of self-care, long baths and drinking tea can come to mind. But research shows that leisurely activities often don't make us feel as good as trying things that challenge us. So stay tuned as I share some tips on how to take on a self-care routine that's more engaging and beneficial in the long run, even when we just feel like relaxing. (soft ethereal music) I think our minds really mispredict the sorts of things that are gonna give us pleasure, and this includes when we're trying to relax. I think that there's a distinction between relaxing activities and ones that we'll really enjoy, ones that we'll really find fun. There's lots of evidence, for example, that the kinds of activities we enjoy the most are the ones that give us something that's known as flow. Flow is the state where you're feeling in the zone, where you're kind of feeling engaged but also challenged. And we often get those, you know, from activities in which we're learning something, learning a new language, or, you know, doing something that's a little bit tricky. You know, making sourdough bread or even like coding if you're a programmer, right? These things aren't necessarily the huge definition of relaxation. But if you look at an engaged life, it often involves a little bit more flow-based activities than just kind of chilling out. But I think it can be hard to remember that when you're really exhausted. Sometimes when you're exhausted, what you need is rest. But if you're trying to do something that's fun, if you're trying to engage in an activity for leisure, often, challenging yourself a little bit more is the kind of thing that will bring you the most joy. (soft ethereal music) So another thing you can do to engage in your own self-care is to think about ways that you can care for others. There's lots of evidence that we get more of a happiness boost for doing something for somebody else than we do for ourselves. Often when we think of self-care, we think of, you know, buying ourselves a nice chai latte or getting a massage for ourselves. But there's evidence from researchers like Elizabeth Dunn and her colleagues that if you just bought that nice chai latte for a friend, or you gifted a massage to a co-worker, you'd actually get more of a happiness boost for that than you would for engaging in these practices yourself. The one caveat to that, though, is that these kinds of other-oriented behaviors need to be voluntary. You know, if you're engaging in a job where you feel like you're forced to help other people, if you're starting to feel burned out, if you're starting to get cynical about...