How can changing our relationship to pain transform our lives? In this reflective episode, Jerry is joined by George Loewenstein, Professor of Economics and Psychology at Carnegie Mellon University and author of The Opposite of Happiness. Alongside meditation teacher and author Sharon Salzberg, they explore the roots of human misery, blending insights from behavioral economics, psychology, and Buddhist wisdom.
They share honest stories about depression, insights into why our “feelings about feelings” can be so overwhelming, and why hope isn’t always as helpful as we think. Sharon brings a Buddhist perspective, breaking down ideas like the “second arrow” and wise hope, while George shares fascinating findings from his research on how we relate to pain and how we get stuck, or unstuck.
Show Highlights
“A big theme of the book is that I do think that psychic suffering has a very close connections to these other forms of misery, things like pain and discomfort. And these are all kind of different motivational states that evolved to and they evolved to help us survive and reproduce. And the point of evolution isn’t to make us happy; it’s to make us survive and reproduce. Happiness is just a mechanism that the brain uses to get us to do what we what it wants us to do. And misery is also a mechanism.” – George Loewenstein
“It’s not just that misery or suffering is inevitable, which was relieving for me, but it’s that it actually creates a benefit in our ability to survive.” – Jerry Colonna
“Misery and suffering play very important roles in our day-to-day functioning nowadays. But I think a really important insight for understanding current misery is that we evolved in very different times. We’re effectively kind of walking around with a prehistoric brain that evolved for extremely different times.” – George Loewenstein
“Understanding your negative emotions helps you to feel fewer of these kinds of emotions squared. These second emotions, meta emotions..” – George Loewenstein
“When you’re experiencing pain, a common prescription is to try to distract yourself from it, and that’s exactly the opposite of what you should do. When you focus on the pain, it actually makes pain less bad.” – George Loewenstein
“If we feel pain or misery, but we’re not compounding it through shame and embarrassment, then certainly it would seem our actions would be different. You know, we don’t withdraw as much, or we don’t, you know, pile on ourselves in a way that limits our interactions totally.” – Sharon Salzberg
“For me, the opposite of my own suffering has been wholeness, has been to actually take it all in, to lean into the sharp edges, to sit with somebody who might be miserable. And to work with the misery that it might induce in me, not to make it go away.” – Jerry Colonna
