Veritasium: Extreme Stress Makes You Happy ❤️🙂 @Veritasium
Watch on YouTube · 2025-06-10 · 31 min
0:00 Hello, I'm going to be reviewing a video called what the longest study on happiness reveals about what makes for a good life.
[video] 0:07 This video is about one of the most important questions. What leads to a happy life? Realistically money. Being wealthy is definitely a big aspect of it. Save a lot of money. Money. Money. Earning.
0:17 oh my god something that doesn't exist money that's what's gonna make you happy wow this shows you the state of humanity today completely delusional it's very important to be rich it's easy for people to say they don't To be fair, this is also in the US, I assume, probably. People are way more brainwashed there when it comes to money. Still, I expect to get very similar answers in Europe. Outside of Europe, it could differ.
[video] 0:50 People care about having money and that money can't buy happiness, but that's really not true.
0:54 But even all of the people who get rich, as if you could still say the same, at the end of the day, you as a natural being... Okay, don't even think about yourself. Think about a cow. A cow has $1 million in the bank account or $10. Does it make the cow any happier? Now you're going to say, oh, but the cow doesn't understand how to buy something. Yeah, okay. You now trade something for money which doesn't exist because other people believe in it. So what? Or you do whatever you want with it. So what? That doesn't change you. You, the natural animal, you stay the same. Whether you're happy or unhappy, it has nothing to do with it.
[video] 1:42 I would rather cry on a yacht than in a, like, a Subaru. Clearly, having a successful career and financial wealth are important to people. Is there a number in mind? Something you want to get to? At least a million. Yeah. In a survey from 2018 of around 100,000 college freshmen, about 55% said they wanted to be successful in their career, and 83% reported that they wanted to become rich. But do these accomplishments really...
2:07 Yes, because that's what the media is pushing nowadays. A real rich human being has a lot of children, a big family and ideally an abundance of food. He's a good hunter-provider, the man that is. Or the women could also collect some food. Not that there's much edible to collect.
[video] 2:31 Increase happiness. Well, that's what I want to find out in this video. But how do you study what makes people happy? Well, you can ask them.
2:40 Pretty easy. You literally look at people's face expressions. That's more so joy. The two shouldn't be confused. But still, when a human being is happy, when I see somebody who just ate raw meat, they hunted down an animal, they drink the blood, especially if they taught their children how to hunt. And the look, not even on the face, it's just the eyes. when you look into their eyes and they look at you and you just know it and you both look at each other we are successful naturally this is life this is happiness yeah there's nothing much better hunting down an animal it's one of the best feelings experiences in life having children
[video] 3:36 unbeatable nothing compares to it having money doesn't even exist you're a matrix slave your life is a lie what's gonna make you happy um but people aren't really good at judging what will make them happy winning the lottery seems like it should make you happy but numerous studies on lottery winners find that after the initial surge of happiness wears off many are no
4:01 Yeah, but that's what I meant. It's joy. It's not happiness. Happiness is more so the overall state that you're in. You can even be happy and sad technically, but you cannot be joyful and sad because those are emotions. You're really unhappy when you're just done with life. You just don't feel like doing anything. That's basically depression. It's when you have no motivation, no drive for anything. It's basically when you're sick, when you understand biochemically what depression is. And when you're happy, you want to live, you want to experience life. Whether you have sad moments, joyful, it's kind of all the same because you're happy. you're happy overall and none of that really bothers you anyway, because, you know, sad stuff happens. Somebody may even die in your family. But if you're unhappy, you may not be able to deal with that when you're happy. Yes, it's not something that you want to experience.
5:00 You don't want somebody close to you to die, but You understand that it's part of your life. And biochemically, when you're very well nourished and you eat raw liver, just raw organs, ideally you get to drink blood, you're too healthy, too happy biologically to actually let it affect you. Not that it should be a problem anyway. You just know, well, that's part of life. And people die anyway. That's nature. There's nothing really to be concerned about, to think about. You just move on and that's it. That's it. And there's something to it. When you're unhappy, everything bothers you. Your whole life seems like one big problem.
[video] 5:44 Happier than the rest of us. Some are, in fact, more miserable than they were beforehand. You don't see as many people as you used to see. Obviously, you become slightly isolated, I think, in some ways. Yeah, I agree. Another problem is that people's memories aren't reliable. We only detect, encode and store in our brains bits and pieces of the entire experience in front of us. It's called reconstructed memories. It happens to us in all the aspects of our life, all the time. Most studies on happiness find older people and ask them to recall what made them happy. But as we've just seen, memory is unreliable. So a better way to conduct the study would be to follow people... Huh?
6:20 If you would ask most people, they would say when my child was born. For sure, because I know that. I've asked people myself.
6:31 Why can you not rely on that?
[video] 6:32 But there is one study like this that's been running since 1938. Now, 85 years is a long time to run a study. The Harvard Study of Adult Development. At the start of the study, the participants were interviewed and received extensive physical examinations. And as they grew, they entered all walks of life. Some of them became bricklayers and doctors and factory workers and lawyers. And one even became president of the United States.
[video] 6:56 Every two years, researchers ask them questions about their lives, like, if you could stop working without loss of income, would you? What would you do instead?
7:04 How often do you- Obviously, almost everybody would say yes. You only work because of that, and it's an illusion anyway, so you work for nothing anyway.
[video] 7:17 We bring people into our laboratory, we deliberately stress them out, and then see how quickly they recover from stress, looking at heart rate variability, for example, looking at cortisol deposited in hair, because that seems to be a long-term measure of circulating cortisol. But all of these new methods are in the service of studying the same big phenomena of human well-being.
7:43 So what do any... Actually, he just said that
7:47 The less stress you have, the happier you are, which is common sense. I get that, naturally. But it's just interesting that he basically admits that. Huh. Meaning that the less you exercise, the less bad food you eat, the less bad relationships you have, the happier you will be. Which should be common sense, but it isn't. People nowadays stress themselves a lot, do ice baths and believe that they will be happy. That's impossible then, according to him and really according to nature.
[video] 8:21 Five years of research across entire human lives teach us about a healthy and happy life. Two huge takeaways, really. One is no surprise. It's that if you take care of your physical health, it has huge benefits for not just for your longevity, but for how long you stay healthy. Eating well, getting regular exercise, not abusing alcohol or drugs.
8:42 Yeah, of course, getting regular exercise. Then again, to be fair, a lot of people just mean go out for walks, which is not exerting to the body, meaning that it's not exercise. If he would mean run a marathon or go weightlifting, which humans never used to do before the year 2000, the weightlifting, that is, marathons have been around for a bit longer. the first one obviously being the case of somebody getting a heart attack that's where marathon running comes from the word running a marathon you're running to your heart attack i agree of course with the diet and everything not smoking getting preventive health care exercise is hugely important What the fuck? Why do you emphasize it?
9:28 Hugely important, but before, from what it seems like, except if I misunderstood it, he was saying that you should have very little stress and not a lot of cortisol should be released in your everyday life because that would indicate a lot of stress. Not that the cortisol itself really is so much the problem, it's just a symptom really. Point being, exercise is considered to be extreme stress. As in really cortisol spiking activities.
[video] 10:01 A Taiwanese study looked at the medical data of 416,000 healthy people between 1996 and 2008. Eight years later, they followed up with each person to look at the link between exercise and mortality.
10:11 Okay, and none of them exercise, so dumb study. They don't jog, they don't run marathons, it's unheard of. They don't lift weights. None of that ever. The way people exercise in Hong Kong or Taiwan, the other study which he was showing, is nothing compared to the way we exercise in Europe, the US, Canada. It's really just a sedentary lifestyle that they live. Yeah, exactly. This is the study that I meant. This study is about walking, basically. But when people read this, they think, oh, exercise.
[video] 10:53 Who exercised just 15 minutes a day had a 14% reduced risk of dying.
10:58 And by the way, just so you know, these are correlation studies as in not scientific. These are studies when you try to find the correlation. So when they try to find the correlation between exercise and longevity, It doesn't matter what these people eat, what they do in their everyday life, if they socialize with people more, if they are happier or more joyful because of that. It doesn't take anything into account. All that they look at is how long do they exercise, how long do they live. And obviously, I think that this one only followed them for three years or something. You cannot actually know how long they will live anyway. These studies are a joke for the most part.
11:40 and a three year longer life expectancy every additional 50 or three year longer life expectancy if there is something about it that they didn't follow them for long anyway which they cannot even usually you for sure don't follow somebody from birth to death anyway minutes of exercise decreased the risk of dying by an extra four percent I will link you a meta analysis which shows you that working out for 40 plus minutes a week decreases your lifespan. Again, neither of these are actually scientific studies. It's simply the link. But if you want to take something like that serious, there will be links in the description of this video.
[video] 12:23 A large meta-analysis from 2008 confirms that people who are physically active have a reduced risk of dying.
12:29 Wait, 2008? But he doesn't show...
12:35 Which study is this? Let me check one second. The one that I have is from 2022. Must be a different one. But a lot of people also don't look at the charts of the study that I link. Actually, they don't really read all of them. They just read the title, basically. I don't know about this one. I also don't really care about it because I don't care about correlation studies anyway much. But I would strongly assume that this one probably also shows the opposite of what he's saying.
[video] 13:02 During the timeframes investigated in each study, Exercise also protects our cognitive health. A meta-analysis from 2014 found that participants with higher levels of physical activity had a 30%... Yeah, but why look at those kind of studies?
13:14 Why not look at scientific studies of what actually happens in the brain? How stressed and sick you get from it? Just purely biochemically. That's more interesting. Trying to draw links between something is not really that interesting.
[video] 13:30 ...5% reduced risk of cognitive decline and a 14% reduced risk of dementia. And then the big surprising finding is relationships, not just keeping us happier, but keeping us healthier and helping us live longer.
13:45 It's obviously naturally meaning a lot of children and a big family.
[video] 13:50 It's not just the Harvard study. There's now a whole list of studies that show the importance of relationships to human happiness and health. They teach us three main lessons. The first is that relationships are great for our health. In 2010, researchers looked across 148 studies with a total of more than 300,000 participants. They found that on average, people with stronger social connections had a 50% increased likelihood of survival for any given year. Being married in particular has a large impact on how long people live. There's one study I've
14:13 That's sort of true. Usually if one dies, the other one also passes away quickly after because they feel like their life is over because the one that they loved, their life is over. I've seen this oftentimes with older people.
[video] 14:30 Feeling disconnected from others also makes you more prone to disease. A large meta-analysis from 2016 found that poor social relationships were associated with a 29% increase in risk of heart disease.
14:40 You see what I mean? Exactly. That's why you can't take them seriously. Am I saying that you're going to be just as healthy if you're alone, especially in a man-made building? No connections? No, of course not. You're going to be unhappy and unhealthier. But you just find links between something. So obviously, social relationships don't directly actually cause heart disease, which is what he's saying here, I think. But it doesn't even matter because when you look at the exercise and you try to draw a link, a correlation, then again, it's the same thing because you cannot do that.
15:26 Because you can do the same study, look at how many of these people cleaned windows and you will probably come to the conclusion that cleaning windows reduces your risk for heart disease by 20% because coincidentally these people also clean windows. You see what I'm saying? This is not science. You cannot try to link something to something. You need to look at what happens in the body, ideally biochemically. And when you're constantly stressed and your cortisol and adrenaline are super high, then of course it's understandable that it's not good for you because stress is not good for you because stress makes you unhappy and decreases your lifespan.
[video] 16:09 And a 32% increase in risk of stroke. So these have real sort of quantifiable consequences.
16:16 Just in case you still don't get it, what they are saying is that, coincidentally, if you don't go out with other people, you may sit at home more, meaning that you may order in more food covered in seed oils, which increases the plaque in your arteries. And therefore, it's more likely that you will get a stroke or a heart attack. Does it have anything directly to do with these social relationships? No, in no way. Same as the exercise, but you can link anything to anything. You understand? This is not science. I'm not gonna go as far as calling it a religion, but it's not that far from it. Because there's no causation that you can prove this way. And if you would go outside more, you may eat more with your family, or you may cook together or something, and you will eat less seed oils.
17:17 And that's why you will have less of a chance of a stroke or a heart attack. That's it. It's stupid. Once you realize it, you realize that these studies are nothing to take seriously.
[video] 17:26 when we look at studies of thousands of people. One caveat is that most studies on the health effects of loneliness focus on people aged 50.
17:34 You could literally just measure what releases oxytocin in your body. For example, when you hold your child and your child is born and you make a study, childbirth 100% makes you happy. It's proven. That would be easy because that's real. Because that would be a scientific study checking your biochemistry. This is not science what they are talking about. And loneliness is on the rise.
[video] 18:05 The U.S. Surgeon General today declared a new public health epidemic in America.
18:10 Yeah, because everybody's playing video games, watching Netflix, sitting on their phones, as if they don't know what's going on, declaring an epidemic. They fucking caused it.
[video] 18:22 What we're pretty sure happens is that people who are isolated, that they're more likely to stay in a kind of chronic fight-or-flight mode. And what that means is that they have higher levels of circulating cortisol,
18:35 Literally, literally the definition of exercise. That's literally what exercise does to your body. The stress, the inflammation.
[video] 18:45 Air levels of chronic inflammation.
18:48 Yeah, that's exercise. Oh my God.
[video] 18:52 And that those things gradually wear away body systems.
18:56 Yeah, exactly. What the fuck? That's why people die from heart attacks in their 40s when they run marathons. Jesus, man, such a contradictory video. You're going to be miserable after watching this if you listen to this guy.
[video] 19:10 Exercises chronic stress literally by definition.
19:21 Yeah, exactly. Why do you say to exercise then? He says to exercise and then takes populations such as the one from Taiwan where they never exercise their whole life. They do yoga and lift up their arms in a group of people. They have a community with nice music in the sunlight outside. That's how they exercise. It's not exercise, man. None of them run, none of them lift weights. A fucking bullshit video. Fuck.
[video] 19:49 but also arthritis and also type 2 diabetes.
19:52 Yeah, obviously.
[video] 19:55 Because of this common mechanism that breaks down multiple body systems. The key to preventing this breakdown is simple. Just spend a little more time with the people you care about. Unfortunately, we seem to be doing the exact opposite. Before going into why we're doing the exact opposite, this part of the video was sponsored by BetterHelp.
20:13 Of course, because some psychologist online who you don't even meet in real life, no real human connection, that's who's going to help you. It's as delusional as the whole video itself. There is an alarming trend in our society.
[video] 20:28 social engagement with friends decreased from 60 minutes a day in 2003 to just 20 minutes a day in 2020.
20:35 yeah and back in the day it used to be always what else would you do you're all the time with your family and friends all day long it's not as if you sometimes go and say oh i need some time alone to reflect on my life to sit at a tree and just think that doesn't happen in nature you're literally always with people you hunt you reproduce You sleep together. You watch out for each other. There's a strong community bond with everybody. basically the opposite of the way we live today. And then people are surprised why they are unhappy sitting at the computer exchanging man-made symbols with people. Oh, hey, how are you? LOL, smiley face, ha ha ha.
[video] 21:27 The technology has fundamentally changed how we interact with one another and how we communicate with one another. And unfortunately has often replaced what used to be rich in-person connections with online connections, which often are of lower quality. Now, you may say you're an introvert and you don't need to spend much time with people to feel good. And while it's true that introverts and extroverts need different amounts of social stimulation, both need human connection. In 2015, Holt Lundstad and her colleagues looked at the data of 70 independent studies with more than 3 million total participants. Similar to other studies, they found that the subjective feeling of loneliness increased the risk of premature death by 26%.
22:02 Being introverted and extroverted are both biochemical states, both of which are abnormal. When you're introverted, then you're closed off. You're possibly even afraid of people. There's no such thing in nature. But being extroverted is also abnormal because people like that constantly talk about nonsense. You cannot even listen to them because they have nothing to actually say. They just talk, talk, talk about useless, meaningless stuff. Those kind of people are annoying. A real natural human is in the middle because they're always dealing with strange extremes nowadays. of people who completely close off for people who just blabber and blabber about absolute garbage all the time.
[video] 22:49 If you think about it, relationships have been there since before we have memory, right? So they're like the air we breathe. We take them for granted. So you don't think about that as something you cultivate in order to make yourself happy. We don't think about that at all. And yet when we study it scientifically, we find
23:07 It's not scientific. Science has to be testable, repeatable. You cannot do that with correlation studies because they're not scientific.
[video] 23:17 That turns out to be an enormous predictor of happiness as well as physical health. What's going to make you happy? Being wealthy is definitely a big aspect of it. But that loving family is kind of like the foundation of it. You know what I mean? Realistically money, but like building deep connections with people are what's going to make me happy. That's awesome. Having like good relationships with other people. You raise a family, have a family.
23:42 Oh, did they cut out this part or clip it together in a way to make us believe at the beginning of the video that it's all about money that that's what they say. Because maybe people in the US even understand that it's not so.
[video] 24:00 But that's nice to see family and provide friends and family see my family happy. That's all I really care about. giving back to the community where you came from.
24:07 That's interesting because your family is based on many family members. That's what a family is. And when you have children, you become happy and automatically your mother and father, because they become grandparents, also become happier automatically. So it all just goes back to the same thing, family and friends.
[video] 24:31 That's funny that five or six is a ton today. For today's standards, yeah. Back in the day, that would have been very little kids.
[video] 24:47 have a story about one man who really didn't have a good marriage and was kind of distant from his kids didn't have any friends and then when he retired he joined a gym and he found this group of friends that became for the first time a kind of tribe for him this is actually a very good point of course again he has to push the gym fitness and working out it's almost like some kind of
25:13 subconscious advertisement for working out as if you will solve your problems in the gym it will usually cause way more problems especially for your health and it will for sure decrease your lifespan but besides that it's interesting because humans naturally want a so-called tribe a group of people a family Everybody wants this. And this is why we join gym clubs, chess clubs, anything that has to do with sports, especially because it's an imitation of hunting 99% of the time. Maybe really every time. I can't even think of an exception because sports just constantly imitate hunting in every possible way, whether it's throwing something at a target or running together with a group.
26:03 Against a different group when you have some mini wars in nature It's always the same point being You want to join this group because you want to dominate with your group and that's why you do it. That's why You join a music subculture you join these people who all listen to indie rock and And then you wear specific clothes and now you're an indie rock guy. And you want this indie rock girlfriend. Because you naturally want to be part of a group that dominates. That's why people get very... defensive when it comes to their group usually it's not so much based on what they really like although they may actually really enjoy the certain kind of music or sport as much as you can enjoy something unnatural but it's really more so about the attachment to the group Now I'm part of the group.
27:03 I need to win. I need to dominate with this group. Our music is better than yours. You're just posers. This is the real genre. This sport is better. What, you watch basketball? No, football is the best. Or one football club, so-called hooligans, fight against another football club. Humans just need to belong. to some group. But all of this is fake and it's never going to really make you happy. It's an illusion in the slave system.
[video] 27:34 And that's just one example of how our lives take these twists and turns that we usually can't predict, that we don't expect. And many of those turns are in positive directions. The message that the science tells us is don't give up on this aspect of your life because many things can change at any age.
27:56 This wasn't a horrible video. I've seen way worse. But to try to link exercise to happiness and even longevity is complete nonsense. Especially when you look at studies done on people who never exercise, who just walk and do yoga.
28:17 Do as much of that as you want. It's not stressful. It's not exerting. It's irrelevant. As I said, I will link studies which look at actual real exercise and it always decreases your lifespan. Again, those are also just correlation studies for the most part. I'm not saying to take them seriously, but if you want to look at studies, and most of them are more so religious than scientific, then you should look at all of them. And when you look at all studies done on exercise, then you will see that exercise is horrible for you in every possible way. As far as the happiness itself goes, having relationships, as I explained, is very important and natural for human beings. You will always look for somebody, even if you're a so-called loner and introvert, you will try to find somebody online. It's going to fail. It's not the same thing whatsoever. It's not the way it naturally should be. But a lot of people do that. They join chat rooms, some kind of groups, as I said, to be in their own
29:18 cult even sometimes really but that's just what the weak people need to do because they need to follow or they need to at least be part of a community and again part of that is natural but when you do that online in a chat room social media it's bullshit it's nothing it's never going to do anything for you the real connections happen in this real physical reality a nature ideally but for sure not online exchanging man-made symbols voice messages joining some kind of forums chatting with people online it's it's never gonna do anything for you as far as your fulfillment goes the biggest problem with these artificial groups is that they won't be able to give you children which is what you actually want you want to build your own so-called clan family you want to dominate
30:14 Naturally, you cannot do that and the only new members that you will get won't be your children but some new recruits, some people who also feel lonely and want to belong. It's all bullshit. People who have their own families very quickly realize that the groups that they joined in the past were just an imitation of a family. It was bullshit. That's why people always say, when they feel lonely, sad, they have nobody, they find some group, such as in a gym, and then they say, this feels like a family. I at last have my own family. Because that's what you really want. And you're never gonna get it artificially. Thanks for watching.