What makes us happy? The warm feelings of closeness that we have with family and friends are rooted in the neurochemical oxytocin–the love hormone, if you will. Oxytocin facilitates social engagement, encourages bonding, and just makes us feel happier.
My guest today, neuroscientist Paul Zak, has done decades of research into the role of oxytocin and discovered that this feel-good chemical motivates us to engage with others. Not only that, but immersing ourselves in social circles, among people who are nice to us, increases oxytocin and improves our mood. (High stress, on the other hand, inhibits oxytocin and makes us feel unhappy.)
Find out how to harness the power of oxytocin to live a happier, healthier, life.
Plus…the impact of low empathy and excessive empathy on mental health.
Phil Stieg: Today, we are fortunate to welcome Paul Zak, Professor of Economics, Psychology, and Management at Claremont Graduate University. Paul’s decades of pioneering research on the role of oxytocin and human behavior have taken him from the Pentagon to Fortune 50 boardrooms, to the rainforest of Papua New Guinea.
His newest book is Immersion: The Science of the Extraordinary and Source of Happiness. Today, we’ll dive into the concept of immersion, exploring how extraordinary experiences can lead to greater wellbeing. Paul, thank you for being with us today.
Paul Zak: Thank you so much, Dr. Stieg.
Phil Stieg: Can you tell us all what oxytocin is?
Paul Zak: Oxytocin is a neurochemical made in the brain of mammals, that my lab was the first to characterize behaviorally about twenty years ago, that classically is associated with those key mammalian behaviors: birth, breastfeeding, care for offspring.
What we showed starting in the early 2000s is that in both men and women, oxytocin is a motivation, a signal to socially engage and actually help other people. It reduces physiologic arousal. So it’s calming. I see someone that seems nice, or I know, or is friendly, and I reduce that arousal level of fear. This person-I don’t know this person. That could be dangerous. And so, again, that’s part of the motivation to engage with others.
Phil Stieg: Let’s end the suspense. What is, in your mind, immersion?
Paul Zak: I’m going to give you a little backstory on that.
Post 911, we were tasked by the Department of Defense to help them give soldiers a new superpower called persuasion. Their idea was to use words rather than weapons to try to get our allies, and potentially our enemies, to cooperate with U.S. goals. We spent millions of dollars of taxpayer money identifying how to effectively communicate and influence others, and almost incidentally, identified how the brain values social-emotional experiences.
And once you have that network characterized in the brain, then many interesting questions come about. As you know, Dr. Stieg, the brain’s a very lazy organ, right? So energy hungry that when we see this neurologic state called immersion, a peak immersion moment is highly metabolically costly. It’s like the brain goes, “Wow, I really love this thing!”
Phil Stieg: You described what immersion is, but what is the connection between an immersive experience and happiness?
Paul Zak: That’s a great question. We have looked at the underlying neurochemicals associated with living a satisfied life. And we found that, about half of our satisfaction of life is a function of our rich social networks. If we have rich social networks we’re happier.
So, what do we do to have a rich social network? Well, we’ve actually got to invest in relationships.
We found that individuals who invest more in relationships, release more of this neurochemical oxytocin, and so this immersive state really is the interplay between dopamine, which is binding to prefrontal cortex. Let’s talk about being present. So if I’m not present for this experience, if I’m distracted, it’s not going to be a great experience. And the oxytocin part is where I’m getting emotional value from that. So when I have those two things, then that experience is more immersive, that is more neurologically valuable to me, and I want to do more of it, and it creates this craving to repeat it.
So some of the recent work we’ve done, Dr. Stieg, is really characterizing thresholds for peak immersion moments so that people have positive mood, have high energy, and then showing, conversely, that when you don’t get enough social emotional value in your life, you have depressive symptoms. You have low energy, you have low mood. And so we’re publishing these thresholds so that people have goals to actually engage enough in life so that they actually are emotionally healthy.
Phil Stieg: So technically what you’re doing is you’re creating an immersive experience that creates happiness or a depressing episode. Are you just measuring the blood levels of dopamine and oxytocin? How are you measuring it?
Paul Zak: Yeah, that’s the key question. And this is where the 20 years of research comes in. I work slow. It takes me 20 years to figure stuff out (laughs).
Phil Stieg: Good ideas are worth it.
Paul Zak: Thank you. Once we identified these signals neurochemically by doing repeated blood draws, then we identified where the receptors for those neurochemicals are. And we picked up signals with big machines, up to a thousand times a second.
For the Department of Defense, they had to use this technology potentially in theater in Iraq, in Afghanistan. And so we couldn’t use half-million dollar machines. And so we found is that we can get these nice network signals from the cranial nerves. We can actually infer central brain activity from these very subtle rhythms in the cranial nerves that we’re picking up through heart rate. So we created a technology that pulls data from smartwatches and fitness wearables that lets us infer this state I’m calling immersion. How much I value the experience I’m having, second by second, and release this in the wild so people can measure.
Phil Stieg: Isn’t it going to be amazing how the wearables are going to change the way we predict our healthcare situation moment to moment.
Paul Zak: Yeah you know, when we look at an Apple Watch and compare it to a medical grade electrocardiogram, they correlate at 0.9. I mean, it’s almost a perfect device. I think for listeners, if you really want to increase the length of life, your health span, and your happiness, there’s basically four pillars that you can push on. Diet, exercise, sleep, and having a rich social network. Diet, exercise, sleep, easily measured in all kinds of devices. What we’re showing is that if you can measure the richness, the value of your social networks, you have a huge lever to live a more effective, happier, healthier life.
Phil Stieg: Earlier, you referred to oxytocin. I would hope a lot of people understand. It’s commonly referred to around childbirth and lactation for females. I don’t think that it’s as commonly understood in regard to its role in the male. So can you highlight what oxytocin does? The parts of the body that it actually affects?
Paul Zak: Yeah, it’s a great question. In the late ’90s, I started looking at neurocorrelates for prosocial behaviors. Why are we ever nice to anybody? Isn’t nature tooth and claw? Shouldn’t we just steal stuff all the time and hurt people? But in fact, for humans, we see a lot of really good behavior, contrary to what we see in chimpanzees and many other primates. The question was why?
So oxytocin is a neurochemical and as you said, classically associated with childbirth and breastfeeding in mammals. So a couple of questions, why do men’s brains make this and what are the central effects? We started looking at the release of oxytocin. So again, this very weird, evolutionarily old neurochemical. Very short half life, three minutes. So we had this what we call cowboy phlebotomy. Very rapid blood draws on a stimulus we thought might induce the release of oxytocin and then gave individuals an opportunity to do something prosocial, usually share money with a stranger in some setting.
And we found indeed that the more someone intentionally was nice to you, shared money, helped you, the more your brain released oxytocin, then the more you reciprocated. And so those receptors are found throughout the brain, but primarily the ones we’re looking at are in frontal cortex, the subgeneral cortex in particular, that feeds back into the midbrain dopamine system. So now we have not only a system that says, hey, this person in front of me seems to be safe or trustworthy or someone to want to interact with, release oxytocin. But that dopamine response says, oh, and by the way, you should keep doing this. This is actually valuable to you.
Phil Stieg: Do you think there’s been an evolution over time in humans in in terms of the effects of oxytocin? Meaning that originally it was just the primary stuff of childbearing, bonding between the mother and the child and lactation. And for men, it’s very involved in arousal and sexual function. So survival of the beast, and now it’s evolved into this emotional thing as well?
Paul Zak: There seems to be evidence, I would say it’s a little bit dicey, but around 200,000 years ago in Homo sapiens, there was a mutation in which humans got many more receptors for oxytocin, particularly in the frontal cortex. So it became super sensitive to social information. And that difference in anatomy relative to other primates and other mammals tells us why we’re so super sensitive to social information.
So if I may, my favorite example of a weird neurologic phenomenon in healthy people is people crying at the end of movies, which I talk about in my book. What’s that about? You’re cognitively intact. You’re aware, you’re in a theater. You know these are paid actors. It’s a fictional story. But at the end of the movie, when the boy dies, people cry. That just tells us that we’re so sensitive to social information that we transport ourselves into other environments, other worlds.
And that’s a wonderful thing to me. It means I can understand people’s experiences, even if I don’t experience them directly myself, by reading a book, by watching a film. It really allows us to connect to the entire human planet because we have the neuroarchitecture of social connection, largely driven by oxytocin.
Phil Stieg: You refer to oxytocin as the “moral molecule.” What does that mean to you and what should it mean to us?
Paul Zak: So moral, to me, is a small “m” so no philosophical or religious thing. It just means, are we pro-social? Are we doing things that basically every society agrees is correct?
And so we find is that oxytocin radically increases our empathy towards other individuals. So this opens up two interesting questions. Why do we have bad behavior? So we can look at factors that inhibit the release and/or binding of oxytocin, for example, high levels of testosterone. And for whom is this system not functioning?
So I’ve done work with criminal psychopaths and indeed we find, not only do they classically lack empathy, but they lack a functional oxytocin system. Even though they will tell you, “oh, yes, I always worry about people who are suffering.” No, they don’t have it physiologically.
So that opens a lot of interesting questions, right? If you don’t have this empathy response, are you responsible for hurting people? I don’t know.
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Narrator: Have you ever spoken with someone who had an accent different from yours and you found yourself changing your accent to match?
For British author Joanna Cannon, who has hyper-empathy, this happens unconsciously. Her sensitivity to other people is so acute that she literally feels their pain as if it were her own.
Empathy is using your imagination to vicariously experience someone else’s feelings. If that person is happy, you identify with their happiness. If they’re hurting, you remember what it’s like to be hurt.
People with hyper-empathy have too much of a good thing. Their imagination amplifies the emotions of other people, so hyper-empaths truly experience those feelings. To them, a stranger’s joy or grief feels personal and “real.”
Low empathy is associated with certain psychological conditions, such as narcissistic personality disorder. It has also been linked to childhood trauma, culture and genetics. Far less is known about what causes hyper-empathy, but scientists are increasingly interested in how excessive empathy can affect mental health.
Joanna Cannon says that since she was young, she couldn’t help feeling what others were feeling. Hyper-empathy even affected her speech; as a child, she briefly adopted accents from different regions in the UK after traveling there with her family.
Cannon’s hyper-empathy persisted into adulthood. As she trained and practiced as a medical doctor and psychiatrist, she often found herself swept up in the intense emotions of her patients, leaving her upset and emotionally exhausted.
Over time, Cannon learned to rein in her hyper-empathy without sacrificing her compassion. Writing fiction became an important coping strategy for her. It provided a much-needed escape from the tsunami of emotions and helped keep her grounded.
Accents, however, are still a challenge. After a recent visit with an Australian neighbor, Cannon said goodbye with an Australian accent. “I wasn’t taking the mickey,” Cannon said. “I’m just…quite absorbent.”
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Phil Stieg: Are there populations where they are low in oxytocin, or people that are post-traumatic or post-stroke, or animal models where you’ve knocked out the production of oxytocin? Are those individuals, those animals more hostile, and they don’t have meaningful warm relationships?
Paul Zak: Yeah. In fact, most animals do not have that strong oxytocin response that we do that facilitates positive social behaviors. So as you mentioned, oxytocin is associated with sex, with any positive social interactions, hugging, touching, petting your dog.
We’ve done work with dogs and cats. Of course, dogs release more oxytocin than cats do. No surprise there, but you have to still have to show it. When these neurochemicals and the larger network that they activate are active, we find individuals are much more agreeable, empathic, and prosocial.
So there’s a wide distribution when we look at the release of oxytocin on stimulus. We have some super-responders. There are other people who just don’t release as much. They’re not as warm, they’re not as empathic, and that’s okay. We want that distribution. They may be better in jobs that are more mechanical and less human-focused.
Then we have people who have real dysfunctions who tend to be violent. We’ve done research using synthetic testosterone, and we can take absolutely healthy people and turn them into very aggressive individuals. They give you supra physiologic doses, right? And so that inhibits the release of oxytocin.
So who are going to be the least empathic people on the planet? Teenage boys, which both of us used to be at one point, and we would expect that. You’re testosterone-poisoned, and I can tell an evolutionary story on why that occurred. But if you don’t kill yourself by the time you’re 23, then, yeah, you probably got good enough genes to reproduce with.
Phil Stieg: Maybe you’re going to provide us with the scientific evidence for the controversial behaviors between boys and girls. And we just have to over time, we’ll understand that people are going to be more empathic and compassionate when their oxytocin levels go up.
Paul Zak: And/or testosterone goes down. So it’s really changes in levels of oxytocin. If you’re in a committed relationship, your testosterone falls. When you have children, your testosterone falls. And Dr. Stieg, I only have my own experience, but if you have girl children, you pick out little frilly dresses every day, you become–
Phil Stieg: Your oxytocin goes up.
Paul Zak: Yeah, oxytocin goes up. So think of how nature has set this up. So I’m raising all this oxytocin with my kids, and I’m less aggressive. So just to, now, not to be serious for a minute, we see most crime done by males under age 30. Males over age 30 almost never start on criminal careers. Now, if you’ve already been a criminal, you may continue, but it really tells us that these underlying neurochemicals–which may be valuable. 80% of the US military’s male. Guys like doing those physical things.
Phil Stieg: I’ve got to ask, are you being asked to testify in a lot of court cases now?
Paul Zak: I’ve just been asked to testify in a couple, but it’s complicated because we have a lot of parallel systems in the brain. And I don’t want to say, oh, this person on stimulus doesn’t release oxytocin the two times I tested him. Doesn’t mean he’s necessarily dysfunctional.
So high levels of stress inhibit oxytocin release as well. And so we know that, right? You’re stressed out. You’re not your best self. So I think this is why we don’t have a neurologic lie detector, in my view. There’s too much variation within a person and across individuals to really say, for you as an individual, I’m sure your brain is dysfunctional.
Phil Stieg: So you’ve looked at oxytocin in a myriad of different subjects, business, health care, movies, marketing, walking into the grocery store. I love that story about grocery stores and how it was designed to attract you to high volume, high dollar products within the store. Can you describe what’s going on there?
Paul Zak
Right. So this area is known as narrative retail. So we talked how important that story is to increase immersion. But you can design stores, retail stores, grocery stores, so that there’s also a storytelling component. And you want to put the most important items in the back of the store, like milk. So you have to go through the whole store to get there. We show that the most immersion increasing item in a grocery store is liquor. Go figure. And so you want to think about putting that liquor in the beginning, either in the beginning so that it increases your mood or in the end, so that you have this peak experience like, “oh, my gosh, liquor.” I’m imagining all the fun I’ve had when I’ve been drinking with my friends. Not that we should drink too much.
Phil Stieg When I read that, I went, my God, that’s the Costco that I go to. The liquor store is right there, then you go in and buy everything and you get your liquor on the way out. It’s amazing.
Despite all of these huge advertising firms that have made great ads, I was shocked at the percentage of movies and TV shows that fail, given all that experience. And now you’ve made it a more scientific process whereby you can determine that this should be a success. Explain that to us.
Paul Zak: Right. My least favorite word in the marketing content creation space is ”liking”. Do you like this? Compared to what? Compared to my kids? My kids talk back to me, my dog, my dog’s perfect, right? But how do I compare my dog to a movie or a movie trailer or a commercial? But as you know, neural firing is comparable across individuals, right? If I’m seeing this high metabolic firing rate that says this is important within this network that we found. So if that’s the case, then I can test the content I’m creating to ensure that it shakes up your brain. You go, “wow, I love it. I want to see this movie. This trailer is amazing.” And so, yeah, we work with movie studios and ad agencies because we don’t really consciously are able to report this liking response, except in the extremes. I know if I really hate something or really love it, but second by second, how do I edit this piece of content so it creates a really great experience? That could just be, by the way, there’s no brainwashing, as you know.
Phil Stieg: That’s what I was wondering. Are we going to that? Am I going to end up being programmed because guys like you are so smart, you’re going to get the company to just – “Phil, this is what you better like” and I’m going to like it.
Paul Zak: So as you know, there’s a whole chapter in the book on the ethics of this. And so as long as you’re not coerced, you have time to say no. You have time to look at opportunities. The example I like to give is my kids are in their early 20s now. If you show me a commercial for diapers or the babies with those big eyes, they’re so cute, I’ll enjoy it, and I’ll have a little peak immersion moment. I’m not in the market for diapers, so I’m just going to flush this out of my brain because it’s not relevant to me. So it’s got to be relevant. It’s got to be in the right time. So if we’re going to communicate, which we are, we might as well do it as well as possible. Again, as long as we’re not coercing you to buy right now. Operator standing by, you have to buy now. Well, just think about it for a little bit.
Phil Stieg: Given COVID, and now everybody’s at home, and all the meetings are Zoom, and you’re not going into the office, have you had to adapt your message and create ways that immerse people via Zoom?
Paul Zak: Yeah, so we did research pre-COVID because I’m brilliant. I figured all these ideas in advance (laughs). No, we’re just we’re curious about–
Phil Stieg: Nobel Prize is on the way.
Paul Zak: That’s right. Mail it to me. I was interested on the video conferencing stuff. So we actually did research showing that video conferencing gives you between 50-80%, depending on the person of the immersion response as being there in person. So first of all, that’s pretty good. 50 to 80%? I mean, that’s great. Texting, you get about 25 or 30% versus meeting in person. So we’re still getting that social interaction. Even if I’m posting on social media, I still feel like I’m connecting to my people neurologically, which I think is weird and interesting
Phil Stieg: Can you give an example of how your immersive strategies have changed social interaction or mental health outcomes?
Paul Zak: Sure. I live in the only blue zone in the United States. These are regions where people regularly live past 100. So the city is called Loma Linda, California. It’s a blue zone because it’s a company town. The company is a medical center. The medical center is run by a religious group called Seventh Day Adventists. They’re a Protestant group, but they’re also vegetarian. They don’t drink, they don’t smoke, they exercise, and they tend to be in helping professions.
And so what we’ve seen, for example, in National Institutes of Health-funded research, is that even retired individuals in Loma Linda are very active from a volunteering perspective. They’re engaged in life. And by identifying these thresholds, the amount of social emotional engagement you need, we’ve shown that these individuals, by giving them a goal, a ring to close, like you have for steps, were more active in their residential communities, were more likely to engage with people outside their communities, because now they had a goal.
And so I think for the large number of people who are lonely now, who are more isolated, it’s a real call to action both from a physical health perspective, but also a mental health perspective, to really get out there and be part of the world.
By the way, it’s a free app that we’ve made. We made a decision to make this free. Anyone can use it, and you just have this ring to close every day. It’ll link to your calendar and tell you which are the best times of your day and which are the worst times, and you can begin to curate your life for better happiness.
Phil Stieg: Last question. What’s the future? Where are you going with all this?
Paul Zak: The future is really proactive mental health. I think we have developed the first digital bio-assay in psychiatry that we’re releasing for free. The app is called Tuesday. It’s in the app store. Anyone can download it. It gives you goals for emotional health.
In this published research, we identify when people are in these immersion troughs, where they’re just not engaged in life. I think we’re talking now to health centers and digital health platforms about just having someone check on you.
If you agree to share your data with your clinician, if you’re vulnerable to say mental health disorders, have someone call you up, a social worker. “Hi, Mr. Smith. I’m from Dr. Stieg’s office. You shared your data. It looks like you might not be doing so well. We want to see if you’re okay.” And just having that phone call can be enough to keep people from getting into depression. So I want to be ahead of the curve from a mental health disorder.
As you know, Dr. Stieg, many medical disorders are preceded by small steps of social withdrawal. Parkinson’s, autoimmune disease, heart failure. Where a wife brings in a husband and says, “my husband says he feels fine, doesn’t want to go to dinner, doesn’t want to see a movie.” So that husband doesn’t know that he’s socially withdrawing. He just knows he’s not functioning as well, but doesn’t know why.
Phil Stieg: Professor Paul Zack, thank you so much for being with us and enlightening us on the concept of immersion and the many avenues where immersive experiences can occur, from health care, to going to the movies, to going to a store. It’s incredible how important this is and how beneficial it will be in living long and full lives. So thank you for taking the time to explain all this to us. It’s been a great pleasure.
Paul Zak: It’s my pleasure as well. Thank you.