Transcript - Bringing Back Summer Fun With Mike Rucker, PhD

Follow along with the transcript below for episode: Bringing Back Summer Fun With Mike Rucker, PhD

[INTRODUCTION]

[0:00:03] PF: Thank you for joining us for Episode 524 of Live Happy Now. Summer officially begins on June 20th, so this is a great time to bring back the Live Happy Summer of Fun.

I’m your host Paula Felps, and this week we’re relaunching the popular Summer of Fun email series to help you make the most of this summer. Today, you’re going to hear from Mike Rucker, Ph.D., who partnered with Live Happy to create this series. We’re going to talk about how to commit to having a summer of fun, why it’s so important for your well-being, and how our eight-week email series can make sure that you’re having more fun over the next few weeks. Let’s have a listen.

[EPISODE]

[0:00:42] PF: Mike, thank you for coming back on Live Happy Now.

[0:00:44] MR: Oh, my goodness. I love being here, so thanks for having me.

[0:00:47] PF: Well, you’re so great to talk to because you’re one of the few people that I know who studies fun and what a great career pursuit that is. It’s like, “I want to study fun.” So, I wanted to find out, I don’t think I’ve ever asked you this question, like what made you realize the importance of prioritizing fun?

[0:01:08] MR: Yes, so my story really is being an early part of the International Positive Psychology Association. When that started in 2000, Csik set me high and Martin Seligman brought all these folks together, was lucky enough to be one of those early folks. Rightfully, we were all looking at happiness, because at the start, I think, as an ideal, trying to figure out how we can make the world happier was a good goal. We ultimately called it thriving because we added elements of subjective well-being, right? Like in academics, we have to make everything so –

I’m working with some academics now with regards to fun, and I feel like in the book, The Fun Habit, I made fun fairly easy. We’ll just get real quick to my definition. It’s essentially anything you find pleasurable, and then I’ll circle back to your question. But now, because we can bring it down to levels, we’re now talking about fun in different contexts and I find that fascinating because again, academics picking up where I left off now, fun has 30 different subcategories and I think that’s great. But because fun in the broad context can, you can start to make it too ambiguous where people are like, “What does that mean for me?” And the good news is you get to define it and we’ll get into that as we talk.

But what happened with happiness is that unfortunately, and we kind of have a term for it now, so, and I’m sure you’ve had podcasts about it, the term being toxic positivity, we turned happiness into an ideal. So, instead of valuing happiness where there’s no problem with that, wanting people to be happy, wanting your family to be happy, wanting to be happy, that’s not problematic, but it’s when we turn folks into being concerned about how can I optimize for happiness?

Paradoxically, what we did was created some of the most unhappy people. And I happen to be one of them. I talk about that in a little bit because I was literally looking for correlations and always ruminating on how I could become happier. When that happens, what we now know is you create a gap between where happiness lives because it’s always out there in the future and where your feet are. So, the short answer to your question is, fun as a construct is really rooted in mindfully being attentive to the pleasurable things that you do. But then also understanding that you have the agency and autonomy to bias your life towards those.

[0:03:38] PF: So, why is it more helpful to pursue fun than to pursue happiness? You kind of touched on that.

[0:03:44] MR: Yes. So, happiness is really this lagging indicator, right? When we are asked, are you happy? It is an act of retrospection, right? We have to think in the rear-view mirror, like, am I happy? Hmm, that’s interesting, right? So, we start comparing ourselves to our neighbors. We think about our life circumstance, which can oftentimes be ephemeral. We might have won the lottery, so in that moment, we’re really happy, right? But then we ask you six months from now because some of that money has gone and you’ve kind of fallen off a cliff. Where fun is something that we have access to in any moment. And so sometimes it’s referred to as contentment, but when you focus away from happiness, so that there’s something to be built or there’s this end goal, or there’s something to be achieved, and then all of a sudden happiness will occur.

The fun, which can really happen in any moment. It’s this product of enjoyment in the things that we do. Once we sort of focus on that, then we do pay attention to where our feet are. Wow, I’m not enjoying what I’m doing. Let me change maybe the environment or the people that I’m with or the activity that I’m doing. We can do that in the moment. The beauty of it is once we start to index these microjoys in our life, that corpus of microjoy starts to remind us that we’re happy. So, happiness is this beautiful byproduct, and we start to become less concerned with being happy, because we know that joy is right in front of us by deliberate design, that we don’t have to wait around for it to happen.

[0:05:22] PF: As kids, we pursue fun. That’s just our natural state. We’re looking for fun things to do and we find them. Somewhere along the way, we get serious and that wears off. Is it hard for people to learn to seek out fun again?

[0:05:39] MR: It’s not hard, that’s the beauty. I think once you kind of wake up to it, it’s clear that when you just do a couple of exercises, like the ones that we’re going to do this summer, and you become mindful that, “Wow, if I enjoy myself, I colorfully call this filling my fun cup.” The rest of my life is better. So, if there are any science nerds listening, I’ll only give a couple quick science lessons. The principle here is the hedonic flexibility principle. As I was creating the book, it was the big light bulb, right? So, similar to what we learned about learned about sleep in the nineties. In the nineties we’re all wearing sleep deprivation as a badge of honor, right? Because it’s how you hustled. It’s how you became more productive. Winners became winners after the kids went to bed.

We now know that’s an asinine assertion. Folks that are in a sleep deficit are some of the least productive folks, and we’re now learning the same about leisure. Folks that don’t live a balanced life, that aren’t finding joy or the least simple pleasures in the things that they do, are also falling victim to burnout. So, under that guise, fixing that becomes important. Once you kind of understand that, once you sprinkle in some of these fun things and just like sleep, it’s not about finding whimsy in 168 hours, right? I’m not prescribing 12 hours of sleep. It’s that most of us aren’t having any fun at all, so we need to figure out how to create that balance by deliberate design.

As I alluded to, it’s really easy. What I found is the folks that do it well are the ones that are going to do the exercises we’re going to get into this summer, just being deliberate. What is it that I find enjoyable? Reframing what fun means to you. For some folks, they’ll say, “I’m just not a fun person.” And then when I dig deeper, it’s because they believe that what’s marketed to us, this high arousal, I must be at a rock concert with all my friends drinking because that’s what fun is, or at least that’s what Instagram tells me.

No, it could be a low arousal activity where the most amazing summer for you is some alone time at the pool, engrossed in a good book, that if I asked you in a couple of weeks, what was it about, you could tell me in rich detail because that’s how meaningful it was for you. So, figuring out what those things are and if they’re not in your schedule, being deliberate about scheduling them in, we’re almost halfway there already.

[0:08:11] PF: Oh, that’s terrific. Summer is marketed as being so much fun, but the reality is it’s not as lighthearted as we want to think. It’s like crazy busy, there’s so much pressure, so many things that we have to get done, and it’s compacted into like this three-month period. Why is that a great time to start doing these exercises and make them habits?

[0:08:32] MR: Yes. So, I think its access would be the biggest one, right? I mean, there is a lot of different reasons, but I have this tool called SAVOR, and it’s essentially just an acronym, and so the O in SAVOR stands for options. When we have better options, we tend to have more fun. And the summer just provides so many options, right? I mean, even for small communities like my own, there are things that are available to us for free that we can engage in and discover, and we’ll learn how to do that, and that becomes a proxy for actually getting it done.

We’re kind of in the winter months and no one’s leaving their homes. It’s so easy to just essentially be in the groove of our habituated life and let that time pass us by. But the extended daylight that summer provides the fact that folks tend to have a little bit more autonomy and agency and then again, just access to activities. Quite frankly, sometimes for us it can be nostalgia because as you mentioned, as kids, a lot of fun in the summer and so wanting to get back there using that as a lure to be like, you know what, summers are meant for fun. All of these can encompass good tailwinds for getting us started.

[0:09:46] PF: You’ve created for us. We partnered with you to do provide this eight-week email course for free and I’m so excited to share it with everybody. Can you kind of talk us through just really briefly touch on these eight steps and what they’re going to learn along the way?

[0:10:03] MR: Yes, so the first thing is really just being aware of what you find fun, right? For adults, oftentimes we do need to reconnect to what is it that I want to integrate? And the issue there is especially folks that find themselves in that sort of inverse view curve of happiness that so many of us talk about. And for folks that aren’t familiar with that, essentially what we know is that because between, let’s say, 25 and 65, let’s cast a wide net. That’s some of the busiest time for us, right? And we’re not in school anymore, so we’ve kind of lost some of the agency and autonomy we had there. So, we need to deliberately integrate some fun into our schedule.

That’s the first step. What is it that I want to do? Because if we allow FOMO and kind of the rhythms of our family to dictate everything, then oftentimes we can feel very passive in that. We want to feel active. Then, it’s pre-committing to those things. So, really early on in this course, we’re going to pick a few things that we want to do and make sure they happen. That doesn’t necessarily mean that we have to pay for them in advance. We’re going to learn some simple tactics to just make sure that we’re actually doing the stuff that we want to do this summer. And then the rest of the course is just an ode to things that can kind of amplify our fun. So, are there opportunities in your schedule to at least get out in nature to some degree? Are you connecting with the people that you love? Because even if you’re an introvert, at least having some pro-social interaction is what we know, great and set, latency, enjoyable.

And then it’s a how do you invite yourself to the local culture, because like I said, summertime is really great because there are all of these opportunities to enjoy your township or the county that you live in, and yet oftentimes if we don’t go looking for it, we don’t know it’s there. Then one of the last modules is about kindness because I think kindness really does pair with fun. We’ll get in – for the folks that want it, I’ll send links to the studies. But really doing that in a joyful way, like how can we play with kindness in a sort of fun way to end this strong? And then the last module will be how can we use all these tools that we learned over the duration of the course to kind of move into fall and continue to benefit from what we’ve learned over the summer.

[0:12:22] PF: We’ll be right back with more of Live Happy Now.

[BREAK]

[INTERVIEW CONTINUES]

[0:12:31] PF: And now, let’s hear more from Mike Rucker.

It’s such a great set of action steps and I was curious how you developed this process because it’s very thoughtful, very measured, it’s so easy to do.

[0:12:47] MR: Well, an ode to one of my collaborators, Haley, who’s a die-hard introvert. So, we would go back and forth because as she was helping me put together, she’s been my blog editor too for like 10 years. The kernel of the idea really started with her because she was like, “Okay, you’ve overemphasized on sort of high arousal activities and certain content that I put out,” and I’m doing this with my friend. So, I started to pick up on that. I was like, “Wait a sec, are you guys doing this in a systematic way?” She’s like, “Yes, we kind of pre-committed to this and we make sure that we do X, Y, and Z.”

For folks that are listening, you might know that movie tag about adults that have kind of committed, enjoying each other’s company every year. As we were putting this together, we realized that folks that did have some sort of program were a lot more successful than folks that did it in an ambiguous way. So, the short answer is, this is really just a reboot of the year of fun, which was a program, to stretch it out an entire 12 months. But because the summer, is so ripe with opportunity for fun, another thing that I think we’re really awakening to is that fun is one of the most useful aspects for engaging in all of these lifestyle changes that we talked about for what the last 50 years.

[0:14:13] PF: Now, get up and move around, healthy behavior.

[0:14:17] MR: Yes. But instead we’ve been talking about quant for the last quarter of a century, right? We get fixated on the World Health Organization and I’m guilty of this too. I have to get that 115 minutes of exercise and yet we’ve never stopped to ask, are the things I’m doing for exercise enjoyable? Am I drawn to them? Do I find them pleasurable? Now, studies are finding if we ask that question first, that’s actually the most successful moderator with regards to anything that we can do with health interventions. So, that one’s just serendipitous for me. The fact that I’ve looked at enjoyment for so long, and oh, it just happens to be the most useful tool when it comes to getting people to engage in healthy behaviors. That’s been such a pleasant surprise for me.

[0:15:02] PF: That’s awesome. So, what do you hope that people will get out of doing the summer of fun, eight-week email course?

[0:15:08] MR: Well, obviously I hope they have a lot more fun. Like I said, these tactics aren’t going to be earth-shattering. Luckily, we’ve made them very bite-sized, right? So, this isn’t going to take much time for people to get through. But the nice thing is these simple nudges really can write that ship. If you feel life has gotten a little bit mundane, you feel a little bit stuck. All the adult life is about habituated behavior. We’re going to kind of unroot that and hopefully sprinkle on some of those microjoys during your summer. So, a few more smiles and a few more hugs and a few more belly laughs.

[0:15:46] PF: Something we can all benefit from.

[0:15:48] MR: Exactly.

[0:15:49] PF: So, fun is one of those things, it doesn’t seem like anybody would be opposed to it, or that there should really be any stumbling blocks to having fun, but I’m sure there are things that keep people from having fun. What are they? What keeps people from practicing fun?

[0:16:03] MR: There are so many that it’s going to be different for each person, but certainly we’re time poor, right? So, it really does require a little bit of deliberate design, and so we’ll get into that. For some, it’s a sense of guilt. A lot of folks, and there’s a gender slant to this,
it certainly skews female, but they feel like they find joy in serving. It’s called the sandwich generation. So, they want to take care of their kids in a very loving way. They have aging parents that they want to make sure they’re okay. And they feel like if they take time off the table. And when I say they, I’m not just talking about females. Again, it’s just we know that there’s a bias towards that data that they tend to be the family caregiver, right? That if they are engaging in some sort of self-care, that they can’t fully be in it because they feel guilty because it’s taking time away.

What we’ll learn in the course is that that’s anything but that to be the best version of yourself so that you can be the most productive and have the bigger and vitality to be that good person when you’re doing those things, does require just a little bit of time for you to enjoy life. Because when you don’t, what happens is you ultimately end up getting depleted. And even the best of us, right?

So, the last chapter in the book, I look at folks that essentially dedicate their whole lives to serving others with regards to nonprofit. And when they’re completely selfless, eventually they won’t have anything left in the tank to give. When you think about it as being a long game, then fun in that sense really does become important. Once you learn that, I think it’s easy to then recalibrate. Wait a second, this isn’t a guilty pleasure, right? Which is such a horrible word anyways. It’s really something that is going to impact me in a positive way where I can bring that to the folks that I love. Then if you want to get even geekier about it, that’s actually contagious.

When you’re happy about what you’re doing, you tend to set ripples, both at work and at home, that will then catch on with the folks around you. Oftentimes, you can create positive upward momentum in really easy ways, by just doing a few things that you have to look forward to. To go one level deeper, the reason is, is that we know that folks that don’t have something to look forward to, even if it’s just an hour out of the 168 that you have in a week, if you have like a really tough three or four days and we all have them and there’s nothing in your schedule that you’re like, “Well, at least” – something as simple as I’m going to go have ice cream with my best friend. If you don’t have that to look forward to, then you really lack one of the significant tools of resilience, because you just then, what your brain starts to feel is this crappy day is just going to be on repeat, right?

But again, just some small form of simple pleasure to kind of root yourself like, okay, I’m in it right now, but I know that something down the pike is going to be fun and I’ll get there soon enough is all it takes.

[0:19:18] PF: We’re big on that in our house, making sure we have at least one fun thing going on. There’s got to be something on that calendar that we’re going to do that we’re really looking forward to. And it does make a difference.

[0:19:30] MR: Yes, I mean, you already inherently know because you’ve been living it for a while, a while, but I think for a lot of busy adults, we just forget that we have some of that control, a study that I bring up all the time. I think you’ve had her on the podcast because she has an amazing book herself called the Happier Hour. Her vacation mindset study, she didn’t do anything, but just remind folks that they have agency and autonomy as they go in and just remind yourself that this is meant to be reprieve and all of the positive benefits. Essentially what they found was they saw some of the benefits you would get from an actual vacation, just having a vacation mindset going in to your weekend.

So, it’s these small reframes, what I call story editing that can be really powerful, but yet so accessible to almost all of us.

[0:20:21] PF: One thing that struck me as I was going through the emails and what you have planned for this course is this would be a great thing to do with an accountability partner, because it’s like, you sign up for it and it’s like, this is going to be fun. But as you said, we have to commit to that time and it can be easy to let it slip away. So, how do we do that? How will that help if we get somebody to do this course with us?

[0:20:44] MR: Well, it will help on multiple levels, right? So, one, especially if you want to do some fun things with a good friend, then that social contract is part of pre-commitment, and so you’re going to get those things done, right? I mean, you start talking about it, it’s much more likely to happen. I would posit that that’s the biggest benefit, but then also you can share ideas. Oftentimes brainstorming is really enriched when you can say, and I’ve actually seen this, which to me is a little bit foreign, so I love when it works, but I don’t quite understand why some people need to do this.

A good friend of mine who I don’t think, I’ll just say his first name so I don’t out him, but I literally had a conversation with a good friend a week ago who wanted to re-go through the play model because he had felt that his life had gotten habituated and he asked his wife, “Where do you see me light up? Where do I have fun because I’ve kind of lost that sense?” Life is so busy because they have two small kids. When can you just tell like in my moment. She gave him those clues because he couldn’t find them themselves and she was spot on. So, sure enough, he implemented that in and I just checked in with them and they’re working. For some folks,
that type of communication with a good friend that can kind of gut-check you and go, “Really?”

Because sometimes too, I think we talked about this last time, you can trick yourself. I meant, at the lowest level, it’s social media use, right? Oftentimes, we’re just escaping frustration and boredom, so we can trick ourselves into thinking like what we’re doing is enjoyable when it’s not really, it’s just something that we’re doing to pass by the time and get away from the garbage. Being a little bit more proactive what in geeky behavioral science we call active leisure can be helpful too, and so having an accountability partner, like is that really fun, or should we go do this because it’s a little bit more challenging, and I think will lead to kind of a richer experience can be helpful.

We call it the fun habit for a reason, right? Might as well turn it into a habit so that this is, again, the long game. Not just something that is episodically done and then moved on from or not meant to just have fun with summer.

[0:23:00] PF: All right. Well, we’ll do it all year long. Mike, thank you so much for sitting down. I’m so excited to share this email course with our listeners.

[END OF EPISODE]

[0:23:11] PF: That was Mike Rucker talking about why and how to have a summer of fun. To learn more and sign up for our summer of fun email series, visit our website at livehappy.com and click on this podcast episode, or follow us on social media.

That is all we have time for today. We’ll meet you back here again next week for an all-new episode. Until then, this is Paula Felps, reminding you to make every day a happy one.

[END]

In this episode, you’ll learn:

Why making a commitment to have fun is so important to your mental health.
How to make room for more fun in your life.
What to expect when you commit to having a Summer of Fun.

Visit Mike’s website here.

Follow Mike on Social Media:

X: @performbetter
LinkedIn: @michaelrucker
Facebook: @mike.rucker.phd

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