This is hidden brain.
I'm Shankar Vedantam.
How do you cope with unhappiness and distress?
It's a question humans have wrestled with for thousands of years.
It's a foundational issue for many of the world's religions.
It's also what may have kept you up at night this past week.
Lots of us have techniques to deal with pain.
We hang out with friends to make ourselves feel better.
We exercise or turn to music.
Some of us turn to drugs and alcohol.
In recent years, researchers have run experiments to see what works and what doesn't work.
When it comes to dealing with distress, some conclusions of this body of science are counterintuitive, and some dovetail with lessons learned hundreds of years ago.
Today, in the next installment of our happiness 2.0 series, we examine the difficult emotions that often sabotage our well being.
How to deal with distress this week on hidden brain.
When Todd Kashton was growing up on Long island, his mom was the center of his emotional life.
She raised him and his twin brother by herself.
Todd's relationship with his mother has informed the next several decades of his life.
He is now a psychologist at George Mason University, and he studies the science of well being.
Todd Kashdin, welcome to hidden brain.
So good to be here.