The Science Behind Why Religion Actually Works | David DeSteno

People who are genuinely engaged in spiritual practice live longer, experience 30% lower all-cause mortality, report more meaning, and suffer less depression. The data are remarkably clear. And yet, more people are leaving organized religion than at any point in modern history. So what happens when we walk away from the institutions but still carry the hunger for what they provided?

David DeSteno is a professor of psychology at Northeastern University who has spent his career studying the mechanisms behind moral behavior, social emotions, and what he calls spiritual technologies — the rituals and practices baked into faith traditions that science is now showing work on our minds and bodies in measurable, powerful ways, whether or not we believe in God. He is also the author of How God Works: The Science Behind the Benefits of Religion.

We explore what the research actually shows about why religious engagement improves health outcomes so dramatically, the Hindu concept of vana prastha and why midlife may be the exact moment to shift from accumulating to sharing wisdom, how rituals like contemplating death, practicing gratitude, and moving in synchrony with others change our brains and behavior, why extracting spiritual practices from their original containers can sometimes backfire, and what it might look like to build a new kind of spiritual life if you’ve left the one you were raised in. A rare conversation that takes both science and the sacred seriously — without asking you to choose between them.

You can find David at: Website | Bluesky | Episode Transcript

Next week, we’re sharing our conversation with Linda Clemons about how your body is speaking for you before you ever open your mouth. Be sure to follow Good Life Project wherever you get your podcasts so you don’t miss any upcoming episodes!

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Episode Transcript:

Jonathan Fields: [00:00:00] What would happen if you took the world’s major religions, set aside the theology for a moment and studied just the rituals, the meditation, the chanting, the prayers of gratitude, the contemplation of death, the communal meals, the mourning practices. Study them as technologies. Technologies designed to work on your mind and body in specific, measurable ways. That’s what my guest today, David Desteno, has done. He’s a professor of psychology at northeastern and the author of How God Works. And he runs a social emotions group where his lab studies the mechanics behind compassion, gratitude, moral behavior, and increasingly, why the data on people who are engaged in spiritual practice and often who believe in God are so striking. We’re talking a 30% lower all cause mortality, less depression, greater sense of meaning, better health outcomes across the board. And here’s what makes this conversation land differently than most conversations about faith. David is not here to tell you to believe in God. He’s not here to tell you not to. He’s here to say that whether these practices were divinely inspired or figured out through thousands of years of human trial and error, they work and we are walking away from them at the exact moment we may need them most. In this conversation, we go into what he calls spiritual technologies, the rituals hiding in plain sight inside every major faith tradition that science is now revealing to be remarkably effective at helping us deal with loss, find meaning, build connection, and navigate the exact season of life that most of us listening are in right now. We talk about a Hindu concept called vanaprastha, the midlife pivot from accumulation to sharing wisdom, and why making that shift earlier might actually be the single most important thing you do for your happiness. And we sit with the honest question of what it looks like to build a spiritual life if you’ve left the one you were raised in. This one really made me think and feel and want to just sit quietly afterwards. So excited to share this conversation with you. I’m Jonathan Fields and this is Good Life Project.

Jonathan Fields: [00:02:10] I have been somebody who’s been fascinated by the role of spirituality, of faith, of religion in our lives for a long time. I remember a chunk of years ago stumbling upon a bit of research that effectively said that if you are somebody who is a person of faith, that you’re more likely to experience positive experiences and outcomes, whether that makes you happier or healthier, potentially even more, quote, successful. Is this true?

David DeSteno: [00:02:48] I think it depends on exactly how you define those terms. So the data on Religion and spirituality show a few things. One, I want to make it clear that what the data really look at is what’s called religious or spiritual engagement. So it’s not just saying, I believe in God, okay? It is. Are you actually going to services? Are you if you’re a person who is following a more eastern philosophy, are you actually meditating? Are you doing the things that you’re supposed to do in a faith? You know, most of the world, religion is really about more of what you do than what you believe. But in the US, we have this notion because of Christianity that it’s just about creed. But if you look at people who are actually engaging in some type of spiritual life, their health outcomes are far better. Lower all-cause mortality 30% lower over a 15-year period, uh, lower deaths due to cardiovascular disease and cancer, greater, um, sense of meaning and flourishing in life, less depression. That’s not always the same thing as being happy. I mean, on average, they’re happy, right? And I’m sure you and your listeners have talked about this a lot. Being happy doesn’t mean always being happy and never having kind of downturns or never suffering for the right reasons. But in general, their physical and mental health outcomes and just general well-being and sense of flourishing are higher. I haven’t seen any data that link it to success in particular, though.

Jonathan Fields: [00:04:15] It is interesting, right? Because you made this immediate distinction between believing in God, whatever tradition you are, whatever that entity, that being that experience, um, you made a distinction between the just the rote belief in something versus the practices, the rituals, the things built around it. Are, are you aware of any research that looks specifically just at that first question, which is, is there a change in outcome based purely on the belief in something bigger than yourself that you might whatever your version of God is?

David DeSteno: [00:04:52] Yeah, there is, and I’m glad you brought that up. Let me just clarify what I’m saying. It’s not that belief doesn’t matter at all in terms of people’s overall health outcomes. It doesn’t seem to matter that much. But there are a few places it matters. Um, one is around anxiety, around death. It matters a lot. So, um, if you look at how anxious are you about dying, it’s kind of a, an upside down U that is on, on one side of the U are people who are have a deep faith that that there is a pleasant, joyous afterlife. And then on the other end of the U. A little bit lower than that first group are the ardent atheists who are like, yeah, I’m going to end up in the ground as worm food, but that’s it. I can’t do anything about it. So fine. The people who have the worst time of it all and the greatest anxiety around death are the people who aren’t sure because they’re thinking, well, I’m not sure what’s going to happen, but if there is something, maybe I’m not doing what I need to be in that good place. And so they have a lot of anxiety there. So it belief matters around death. Belief also matters in the sense of helping people deal with certain types of problems.

David DeSteno: [00:06:02] So there is a big literature on on addiction. And this is why folks who are involved in 12 step programs and, you know, for the most part, the data shows they work, they don’t work for everybody. And there are some problems. But belief in a higher power helps people deal with issues of overcoming addiction of many types. Um, it also offers a sense of mattering and meaning in the world. That is, a lot of people feel that they don’t have a purpose. Maybe they don’t have as, as supportive a social network as they would like, but to the extent that they have faith that there is some force, however they conceive of it in the universe that values them and cares about them, it does offer a sense of of meaning and that your life matters. And so in those ways, belief can play a role. But where we really see the benefits are when you combine that belief with, with some type of, of practice, because those practices, as I’m sure we’re going to talk about, work on our minds and bodies in ways that help us meet many of the challenges life throws at us.

Jonathan Fields: [00:07:07] Yeah. I mean, as you’re describing that, what popped into my mind, I’ve had this conversation with a number of artists, writers often. Um, and the question revolves around where do you place the muse? You know, is this something that emanates from within you? You’re generating your, you are the source of it, you’re responsible for it, and you get to take credit for it. Or does this exist out in the ether? Um, and your job is just to prepare yourself to receive it, you know, like when it drops into you. And it’s interesting, right? Because on the one hand, you have a sense of agency. If you say it comes entirely from me, but also a huge sense of burden and responsibility that sometimes you become crippling. And when you place it outside of yourself and say like, you know, this is a, this is a, this is a force that exists outside of me. My job is to become a vessel, to open to it, to show up every day and receive it when and if I’m ready to receive it. On the one hand, you have a lack of agency there, which you would feel is disconcerting. But there’s also a sense of surrender that says, like, my job is not to be genius on that level. It’s just to set myself up to receive it. I wonder if there’s something similar to play in what we’re talking about here.

David DeSteno: [00:08:19] I think so, and I think so. There is a lot of work on this notion of surrender and people who are willing to kind of surrender to a higher power do tend to show a lot less stress in life. I mean, stress about the big things, but even daily decision making. I mean, we all know the, the tyranny of choice. We have to make so many decisions each day. And we’re in an optimizing culture, right, where we want to optimize every possible outcome. And that takes a lot of work. Um, and so people who, who surrender do have less stress, less anxiety around those issues. Now I want to be clear that surrendering doesn’t mean like, well, that’s it. I’m giving it up to God. I’m not doing anything right. It’s not that it means. It means doing the best you can. But at a certain point, realizing that you only have so much control. And once you’ve done the best you can, then you put the rest in a higher power’s hands. And so people call it surrender, even in scientific literature. But I like to think about it as more of a collaboration between a junior and a senior partner.

David DeSteno: [00:09:23] You know, that is that is we have, as the junior partner, have a role that is to do the best we can. But we realize that it’s not all resting on our shoulders all the time, nor do we have all that control. And so at a certain point, that acceptance comes in, in offering it up. And to the extent that you offer it up and believe there’s a force of some type, however you conceive of it out there that has your best interests in mind, that can be a comforting thought. Um, and people say, well, Dave, isn’t that just the opiate of the masses? And I’m like, mm, I don’t think so. I mean, as a scientist, I can’t tell you if God exists. It’s not my job as a scientist. There is no experiment that can prove it one way or the other. So I’m not advocating that you should believe or you shouldn’t. But for those who who do, there is that type of benefit of not having this sense that you have to be able to control everything.

Jonathan Fields: [00:10:16] I’ve had conversations with people where, you know, we’ve been talking about similar topics and people who are would say, I’m a non-believer. Um, but I really wish I did believe because it’s clear to me that there are some very real benefits, um, in some way of both belief and also the practices in the community that often get wrapped around it, which we’ll drop into shortly. Um, so we exist in this time now where participation in organized religion is declining. The number of people who identify as spiritual but not religious, the quote nones is rising. Um and at the same time, many of the indicators of connection, um, happiness or contentment, meaning that could be positively affected by participating. We’re seeing less and less of this. We’re experiencing less connection, less meaningfulness, less of a sense of purpose. Um, mental health outcomes are in a disastrous state right now. Physical health outcomes are really being challenged. So it’s strange to me that, you know, on the one hand, we know that there are certain things that we can say yes to that would make a meaningful difference. And yet at scale, people seem to be moving away from that. What’s your sense of what’s actually happening here.

David DeSteno: [00:11:39] It’s a complicated landscape. And you’re right, the data do show that people are leaving traditional faiths at an increasing rate. Um, I think a lot of that is it comes from a dissatisfaction with the institutions themselves. Religious institutions are human made organizations, and many of them have had moral failures. Many of them have built within them discriminatory practices based on gender or sex or other types of things. Um, and then there is this notion too, that, you know, oh, religion is this superstition. Um, that last part, I don’t believe there are, there are many, many scientists who are persons of faith. And yes, if you’re going to be a true fundamentalist, like you’re going to interpret everything in these texts as, um, truth, which some people do, then it becomes to square with what we know to be true in the modern world. But I know many scientists, you know, Francis Collins, who basically argues that we have. God gave us the power of the human mind so that we can learn about and celebrate God’s creation. So I put that issue of kind of fundamentalism to the side. But I think a lot of people are leaving institutions because they’re not speaking to them in ways. It’s interesting. I’ve I’ve never gone to Burning Man, but I have friends who do. And one of them is a is a scientist and at Burning Man. Sure. For some people it is a debaucherous party, but for other people, they’re having these tremendous spiritual experiences there, because it’s this place where your outcomes depend so much on the kindness of others.

David DeSteno: [00:13:24] There’s no money allowed. And so it’s kind of the giving economy. And so people are in this harsh environment. And it’s in this it’s also this liminal environment where, you know, you’re not wearing your normal clothes. People take different names. And I’ve heard people say that like, I’ve never felt the presence of the spiritual so palpably as when I’m there and see the beauty of humanity. And I think people are looking for more visceral experiences of, of goodness in the spiritual. It’s also why we’re seeing the rise in psychedelic use. Psychedelics offer a quick and dirty way to get the brain in a state that would otherwise take years and years of deep, meditative practice. And for those who do it and do it right, they feel their self slip away. And this growing sense of connection and love. And so I think people are leaving institutionalized churches and temples and synagogues because they feel they’re kind of calcified and not speaking to them. But most of those people, if you look at data from Pew, they’re not saying, I don’t think there’s anything spiritual in the world, or I know it’s not that I don’t think God doesn’t exist. I’m just leaving faith. And they’re looking for other ways to find that awe and on wonder that that spirituality often provides.

Jonathan Fields: [00:14:38] Yeah. So it sounds like they’re really what they’re really leaving is the institutions, the trappings, the sort of the human made things that we wrap around.

David DeSteno: [00:14:45] The problem is when you leave those. The other thing that religion provides often is, is community, right? And so if you leave these and you’re like, oh, well, I’m going to find my own path and I’m going to mix this idea from Buddhism that I like with this idea from Islam. And I’m going to sprinkle in a little New Age stuff. Maybe that only works for you. And so then you don’t have community. And so that’s, that’s the danger. I worry that people are going to move into a too much individualized sense of spirituality. There are benefits to private practices, but there are benefits to community too. And that’s going to be the difficult needle to thread, I think, as people move forward.

Jonathan Fields: [00:15:22] I’ve always looked at almost no matter what the tradition is, when you really deconstruct it, the ones that are, quote, successful, that have continued to thrive and flourish for often generations and generations, generations, if not thousands of years. You know, you can you can identify at least three commonalities. One is a set of teachings. You know, the dharma, the dogma, but also community like Sangha, the congregation. Um, and then very often there is a spiritual figurehead, you know, there’s the teacher, the teachings and the community. They pretty much show up across every tradition.

David DeSteno: [00:15:56] That’s the thing, you know, people don’t realize as most people don’t realize this, that Buddhism originally meditation was done in a sangha, which is in a community, but now we’re all sitting home with our little mindfulness apps, listening to them. And, you know, does it help? Yes. And so, but it’s not the same. And so, you know, what I always tell people is we have to be careful when we try to extract from these traditions, certain parts of them, like take meditation and make it entirely secular. Things can go wrong. They might not work as well. Sometimes they actually warp. I mean, there are people I know in Silicon Valley, a friend of a spouse of a friend of mine who will say things like, yeah, I’m really into mindfulness and meditating. And there’s this great new app because I can compare how much meditating I’m doing to my friend and see if I can beat him. And I’m like, no, that’s, that’s not what it’s about.

Jonathan Fields: [00:16:50] I’m so guilty of that, by the way. I, I’ve used an app for years where it’s gamified. You get stars like, and you have a streak and stuff like this. Yeah. And I’ve caught my, I remember I’m like a year into a streak and I missed a day because I was sick or something like that. And I was distraught, you know, like my number went to zero. My stars got all messed up. And it’s like, this is not what it was supposed to be.

David DeSteno: [00:17:15] No. You know, I mean, and that’s an example of the kind of the, the optimizing or gamification culture we’re in. And when people ask me sometimes since I run this, this show and wrote this book, um, how God works, they often say, so what’s what’s the common element of all these faiths? I say, well, the one common element that they all say is it’s not all about you, right? It is. What do we owe to each other? And I think that’s what oftentimes gets lost in some of the ways we’re interpreting some of these, some of these old spiritual techniques and trying to make them fit the modern world.

Jonathan Fields: [00:17:54] Yeah, that lands really powerfully. Um, remember a conversation I had a few years back with Parker Palmer, who spent a lot of time in a Quaker community. And I love his reframe around this, which is so many of us spend time really pondering, like, what do I want from the world? Um, and we never create the space to listen and see if we can tease out what does the world want from me? Um, or for me, you know, at the same time it is, we drop into that sort of like adolescent sense of ego so regularly without even thinking about it. And I’m sure there’s value in that too, you know? But, you know, you were describing earlier, you know, the, the common experience so many people report with, with psychedelics. Now, whether you’re doing it therapeutically or on your own, is this sense of ego dissolution. That is the magical part that so many people say. Like, I literally felt like my, I was, I was either completely dissociated or my ego dissolved. And it felt more freeing. And I felt more alive than I’ve ever felt in the last 50 years of my life. And we, when we feel that it feels like this is the way like this, I’ve just been shown something that is profound and transcendent. And yet we wake up every morning and we open our eyes, and we tend to run in the exact opposite direction.

David DeSteno: [00:19:13] We are human. We didn’t evolve to be good or to be bad. We evolved to be adaptive. And since we’re social species, we depend on each other. There are times we have to care about each other. We have to support each other. We have to be fair, because if we were always just self-interested, no one would want to work with us, cooperate with us, marry us, etc. but when the mind perceives a way to have your cake and eat it too, when it perceives a way to be selfish without paying the reputational costs, that’s very adaptive. And so we will, you know, it will push us that way. And what I think these faith traditions do is they build on those innate impulses, these moral sentiments of, of wanting to care for others, of compassion, of, of gratitude, of wanting to pay back our debts or even even pay them forward. And they allow us to take those out of just being controlled by biological instinct and to allow us to tune them toward moral goals that, that we, that we value. And so, you know, a lot of these religious practices, what the science is showing is the rituals aren’t just superstitious things, they actually affect what we’re doing. So. So take meditation. When we meditate or when we say the rosary, if you’re Catholic or if you’re Hindu and you chant, recite certain mantras, it alters our breathing rate.

David DeSteno: [00:20:38] And what it does is it typically slows it down to about six breaths a minute, and it increases the exhalation rate. What does that do? It sends signals back up to our brain that we are in an environment that is safe, and one in which we should care about other people. Because think about it. When you you know, Jonathan, if you get anxious, you can feel your heart rate go up. If you’re angry, you get tense, your breathing increases. That’s your brain telling you, get ready for something. But the vagus nerve, which connects the brain to the heart and lungs, is a two way street. And so if we take control of that breathing, we send a message back up to the brain, that is, it’s okay. You’re among people who care for you. You should care back. And so it puts you in a situation where when you then get the teaching, either from the Buddhist teacher who is giving you things to think about while you’re meditating, or from the prayers that you recite when you’re saying the rosary that are you should be good. You should be care. You should care for others. You should be grateful. The brain is already in a position to be receptive to that, right? And so it becomes, uh, it’s more likely to be embraced and to be acted upon.

Jonathan Fields: [00:21:56] And we’ll be right back after a word from our sponsors. So I have been in meditating situations. I’ve been in a lot of sort of like ritualistic chanting situations. Um, I’ve spent many hours in kirtan and where, where I’m, you know, there’s a community of sometimes hundreds of people, um, listening to beautiful music and, you know, it’s often Sanskrit phrases, ancient, you know, thousands of years old. It’s there’s a, you know, an old tabla drum or harmonium, like things where it’s a, it’s a, it’s a beautiful, powerful rhythmic experience also. Mhm. And it is a call and response format. So kirtan. Voila. The singer is the chant master. The leader is chanting something. And then hundreds of people sometimes will chant it back and it becomes this call and response type of experience. But the thing is, you know, like most of these have been in a roomful of. Middle class Americans in a major city in the United States. We have no idea what we’re actually hearing or saying. Mhm. Like we, we we hear it. We’re moved by it. We chant it back. We have no idea what we’re saying. And yet it still moves me deeply.

David DeSteno: [00:23:11] Well, yeah, there are there are a few things going on there. So one first, that that simple action of what’s called motor synchrony that is doing similar actions, saying similar words to other people. If we strip that down to its barest elements, we’ve done that in my lab. We bring people in and we have them listen to tones on headphones, and they have a sensor in front of them. We tell them, tap that sensor when you hear the tones, and we rig it so that these two people who have never met are either tapping their hands in unison, right? So they’re in sync, or it’s random tones and they’re out of sync, and then they make a long story short, we have this situation we create where one of them needs help doing something simply by having someone tap in time with you, it triples the rate at which others are willing to say, you know what? I’m going to help you solve this problem. And they report having more compassion for this person, and they feel more connected to them, even though they’ve never ever, you know, encountered them before. And so it’s an ancient mechanism to bring people together. But the part that I found really interesting that you mentioned is you don’t know the words.

David DeSteno: [00:24:18] And it reminds me, I was talking to a rabbi once and she was telling me that, you know, a lot of Jews know the words to prayers, but for some of the more esoteric ones, they’ve forgotten what they mean. These these are American Jews. Um, and so she went to she was in Israel for a service and they were starting to say some prayers. And then they stopped saying the words and they started just using, um, non-verbal syllables to basically chant them out, kind of like, no, no, no, not like that. And she said to the rabbi later, why, why did you not use the words? He said, well, unlike you Americans, he said, we know what all these words mean. And sometimes the words can kind of get in the way of what you’re really feeling. You know, they can be they can be archaic, they can be gendered, they can not be hitting. Right. And sometimes just the tones themselves allow you to express a feeling that you couldn’t easily put into words. And so sometimes not having the words is actually a way of speaking to the divine in a way that you know only the heart understands.

Jonathan Fields: [00:25:34] Yeah. That’s so interesting. It’s like if maybe you even have prior association with those words or phrases that would take you out of just a more open, um, connection with whatever you’re seeking to experience in the moment. Because it’s sort of like, you know, that you’re associating it with something else, a different experience, a different moment in time, or different meaning that was assigned to those words.

David DeSteno: [00:25:58] In Judaism, there’s this, this whole, um, way of praying that’s called nigunim. And it’s basically that, right? It is.

Jonathan Fields: [00:26:06] Like our family has this thing that’s been passed down.

David DeSteno: [00:26:09] Through.

Jonathan Fields: [00:26:10] Generations and generations and like on the High holidays. You know, like when all the family was gathered, everyone would sing it. Um, and again, it was similar to what you were just saying. There’s no, it’s not words. It’s just sort of like a couple of syllables, you know, in a melodic way. And, you know, you really get lost in it.

David DeSteno: [00:26:27] Yeah. I think it, you know, not having ever done this practice myself, but people who’ve done it say it’s, it just feels like a way to express things and to get into a contemplative space that trying to put it into words would basically just get in the way of.

Jonathan Fields: [00:26:45] Yeah. So we’ve got the synchrony is a really big element of this. There’s something about, um, like music and rhythm, like the sonic experience, just that part of it that is playing into the nature of the experience probably.

David DeSteno: [00:27:01] Um, there is a lot of work on the psychology of music and the neuroscience of music, and there is this suggestion that It can put you in somewhat of an altered state at times in a state that allows for deeper feeling. You know, one time on my show, we we interviewed the pastor of the church and this is a real church. It’s called the Church of Saint John Coltrane.

Jonathan Fields: [00:27:28] And that sounds like a.

David DeSteno: [00:27:29] California and Coltrane himself. I mean, I’m no Coltrane scholar, but Coltrane himself talked about music as a spiritual experience. You know, instead of a sermon, they listen to his jazz. And for many of them, they describe it as a deeply moving experience. And again, I’m I’m a terrible musician. I can’t play anything to save my life. But when you look at people and know people who are really into jazz, they start to enter this space when they’re playing and improvising where it is not really the conscious mind that’s doing it anymore. It is just this kind of non-conscious feeling state that takes over. And in some ways, I would argue, you know, that’s a contemplative state. When we when I said there were contemplative, when most people picture kind of Buddhist monks sitting cross-legged on the ground or, or, um, you know, monks in Christian monasteries and deep meditation, but there are, there are active, uh, contemplative practices you can think of, of Sufis, which are a version of Islam where they twirl in circles to put themselves in altered states. Speaking in tongues is kind of like that. It can be a very active state, but that increased activity can sometimes rev the mind so much that up so much that it then begins to enter this altered state to quiet itself back down. So, um, I think music can do that for people.

Jonathan Fields: [00:28:52] Yeah, I know it does it for me. It’s like the closest to truly transcendent experience I’ve, I’ve had probably all, if not most, if not all have been wrapped around music at every part of my life. Um, it, it literally takes me somewhere that feels like at times I’ve just left my body and I’m like, this is the state that I want to experience on a regular basis. It’s kind of magical.

David DeSteno: [00:29:17] Well, and think about, you know, beautiful architecture, many cathedrals or other places of worship. They have these beautiful vaulted ceilings. And when you go in, if there’s a service, there’s a choir singing, beautiful music. What does all of that do? It evokes this emotion that we call awe of, of being overwhelmed at something’s power, feeling small yourself in the face of this, but also connected. And what we know about awe, the emotion itself is, and there’s been studies on these, some great studies by, by Dacher Keltner and at UC Berkeley, where when people feel awe, um, it makes them want to actually be a better person, they become more generous, more kind and work by a colleague of mine, Pier Carlo Valdes. Solo shows them people feel awe. They actually slightly become more open to spiritual explanations from things. It’s not going to make a hardcore atheist, you know, suddenly a believer. But when you feel that emotion on you, ask them how likely is it that there’s something greater than yourself in the universe? Those odds go up a little bit.

Jonathan Fields: [00:30:23] Oh that’s interesting.

David DeSteno: [00:30:24] That emotion is, again, you can think of it as a spiritual technology. Right. If you want if you want people to feel that beautiful feeling of transcendence, what can you do in the environment to help them feel it? Music and architecture, right, are two ways to help put the brain in that state.

Jonathan Fields: [00:30:42] Yeah. So let’s talk about that phrase spiritual technology a little bit more. It’s something that you use, um, as it feels like almost a proxy for the, the more the rituals and the practices that we tend to associate with religion, but that, that give us very powerful beneficial experiences. Take me into this and what you mean by it a little bit more.

David DeSteno: [00:31:01] Sure. Spiritual technologies are exactly that. They are practices that work on our minds and bodies. And I want to be clear when I say when I use this term, I’m not trying to be reductive, right? I can’t tell you if the rituals and practices of certain faiths were divinely inspired by a God who cares for its creations and wants to give them a way to live a better life, or they’re the result of people figuring stuff out through trial and error over millennia. I don’t know. Um, but in some senses, that’s not we don’t have to answer that question to study how they work and how and how they affect people. So, you know, for example, we talked about meditation, but you know, what’s another spiritual technology? One is contemplating your own mortality. Almost every faith does this, um, you know, in, in Judaism, even on, on new year, the year that you’re supposed to be celebrating what’s, what’s going to come part of the service is, is a prayer called Tokyo. In Christianity, there’s Ash Wednesday and Buddhism. There is having meditations on death, even some where the monks. These are hugely intense. Will actually meditate in front of a decaying corpse to actually really see what happens when you die. So why is this a good thing? Well, when you meditate on death, what it does is it increases the sense that your end could come at any time. And when that happens, science shows it reorients people’s values.

David DeSteno: [00:32:33] That is suddenly what you care about isn’t, um, getting the new iPhone or where you’re going to go on vacation or, you know, are you going to get a raise? It really becomes focused on, um, finding people you care about and sharing experiences with them, engaging in some type of service. Science shows that these are the things that bring the most happiness to people. And so this simple practice of not doing it in a morbid way, but of contemplating a little bit. Your death daily is a way of constantly reorienting your values to the things that actually brings joy. And, you know, another one is what all religions do. They have prayers of gratitude or rituals of gratitude. What does gratitude do? Well, in my lab, we study gratitude a lot. And when we make people feel grateful, either by counting their blessings or by doing lots of other shenanigans that we do to make them feel grateful, um, they not only become more likely to repay favors, they become more likely to pay them forward to help others. They become more generous, they become more honest, they will cheat less when we give them opportunities to do that. Right. All things that basically increase, um, your virtue and I can go on and on, but there are all these practices that by altering our mental states and our bodies push us toward the things that help us lead more fulfilling and meaningful lives.

Jonathan Fields: [00:34:00] Yeah. I mean, which at the end of the day, I think is what so many of us are looking to religion for. You know, it’s like when we’re not drawn to religion just because we want to be seen as a religious person. Well, maybe, maybe some people are. Maybe there’s a certain perception of piety or positioning or status in a community that you feel is associated. But my sense is like more writ large. Like people, they look to religion because they’re in a moment of their life, um, a moment often where there’s, you know, point of inflection, moment of fear or loss or concern or hardship. And they want to know how to be able to breathe through it as much as possible.

David DeSteno: [00:34:39] Let’s touch on that. I mean, you mentioned loss. That’s one thing that cuts across everybody. No matter what your SES is or where you live, you will probably lose somebody you love at some point. And what’s one thing that all religions do when people die? We eulogize them. Right. And that seems normal. But if you think about it, it’s really weird because if my wife, who I love just left me or I, I lost a job that I love, I wouldn’t want to spend a lot of time thinking about how great that was because it would increase the pain all the more. But there’s work by George Bonanno, who’s one of the nation’s leading bereavement researchers at Columbia that shows one of the biggest predictors of how well we can move through grief and by how well I mean, can we move through it quickly enough and with not too much intensity so that we experience but experienced it, but it doesn’t become debilitating to us the ability to consolidate a positive memory of the person who has passed is one of the biggest predictors of whether or not you can do that.

Jonathan Fields: [00:35:43] Well, tell me what you mean by consolidate.

David DeSteno: [00:35:45] Most people, when you think about them, if you know them well, have good parts and bad parts, things that they have done that you value, things that they have done that you don’t. But to the extent that you can take the good parts of the memories of someone who you, who you value, who has passed and create a story and a narrative for them as being a good person, being a valuable part of your life, dealing with those negative interactions you may have had with them, coming to peace with them and seeing them as valuable and positive predicts you coming to peace with their departure. And so in eulogizing, that’s what we do. But another great way to understand this is if you look at the the Jewish ritual around Shiva, it is a beautiful practice, right? When someone passes for seven days, people come to your home. You are never alone. They bring you food, they follow your lead. And do you want to talk about it? Do you not want to talk about it? You have what’s called instrumental support, which is not like sending you a like on Facebook, but actually being there when people need you. Um, people are instructed not to focus on their own appearance. Right. And so, um, if you’re a man, you don’t have to shave, you know, you don’t worry about are you wearing the best clothes, etc..

Jonathan Fields: [00:37:07] The mirrors are all covered. Yeah. Yeah.

David DeSteno: [00:37:09] And there’s research showing that to the extent you decrease self-focus at times of grief, it decreases your tendency to ruminate on that grief. And the covering the mirrors is really interesting because whatever, there’s scientific work from the 70s or 80s showing that whatever emotion you’re feeling when you look in a mirror, um, it intensifies it. So if you’re happy and you look in the mirror, you’ll feel happy. If you’re sad, you look in the mirror, you’ll feel sad. So covering a mirror right at a time of, of grief actually is another way to cut down on that grief. And so all of these practices that we may think, why are people doing that? They’re working on our minds and bodies to help us deal with the challenges that we’re facing.

Jonathan Fields: [00:37:53] Yeah. And as you described, you know, these practices for for big moments like this, they exist in pretty much every tradition. I would imagine you could point to almost every one and say, and they would have, this is what you do when this happens.

David DeSteno: [00:38:08] They do. And there’s a lot of commonality, even even the covering mirror, some Hindu ceremonies, they cover mirrors, some Irish wakes, they cover mirrors, all for different theological reasons. But I think they serve the same purpose. Um, and so that’s exactly, that’s exactly right. And, you know, even in, even in a lot of the Christian traditions, in the Jewish traditions, there are meditative, contemplative practices. For whatever reason, they’ve kind of been hidden away more so than in, in the Buddhist practices that, that we see now. And so I think you’re right, these are practices that, again, if there is a divine creator, it has given to all of its all of its creatures, or if not, we all inhabit the same bodies on this earth. And so we’re all iterating to similar solutions to deal with them.

Jonathan Fields: [00:38:56] And we’ll be right back after a word from our sponsors. These tend to be things that are focused on a moment in time, which is a big moment, a deeply emotional moment, whether it’s loss. Um, you also you have interesting thoughts on the notion of rituals, practices that sort of help us just get through seasons of life. Um, midlife I think is, you know, like, and it’s interesting because oftentimes we hit midlife, you know, and I think it’s being described very differently by different people these days, like anywhere between 30 and 60.

David DeSteno: [00:39:31] Yeah, yeah.

Jonathan Fields: [00:39:32] Who knows? 45, 50.

David DeSteno: [00:39:33] Is the usual. But yeah, it’s.

Jonathan Fields: [00:39:34] Kind of Gen X. So I’m kind of like, all right, 45 to 60. But, um, it’s this moment in life where sort of culturally just in Western society, it doesn’t feel like there are a lot of actual quote rituals or practices. And I feel like it’s a time in life where a lot of us walk away from them, even if we had them earlier. Um, and yet we’re going through really big moments and learnings and being dropped to our knees and feeling really high highs. Um, talk to me a little bit about the notion of rituals and practices that may in some way have, have derived from or still be based in faith, but that serve a meaningful practical role as we navigate midlife.

David DeSteno: [00:40:16] Well, yeah, it’s a good point. I mean, traditionally, if you looked at happiness across the lifespan, it kind of is U-shaped and it hit its nadir, its bottom around 45 and 50. And it’s a difficult time in life because it’s a time when your kids might be moving out and moving on. If your parents are still around, the generation ahead of you is starting to face health crises and maybe passing. And it’s it’s a very tenuous time. It’s also a time of life when if you’re if you’re a person who’s working. I don’t know about you, but it’s. It’s hard to keep up that intensity. I can’t do what I. I’m 57. I can’t do now what I did when I was 35. Um, and so when I started thinking about this, um, uh, Arthur Brooks had this wonderful article in the Atlantic where he was saying, how do you, how do you find meaning in midlife? And he pointed me to something in that article that that spoke well to me, which is this in, in Hinduism, they have these four stages of life. Uh, the first stage is the student where you’re learning what you need to do to basically be, um, be successful in the world. The second is the householder where you got a good job, you’re earning money, you’re, you know, buying a home, getting married, having kids, you’re enjoying in some ways the, the, the central materialistic pleasures of life.

David DeSteno: [00:41:40] But around 50, they say when, when the hair starts to gray and your skin starts to wrinkle. You’re supposed to move to a new phase, which I forget the English translation, but the Hindu word for it is vanaprastha. And it’s where you pivot from being the person who’s going all out to keep your career going, and to get ahead and to earn more money to the sharer of, of wisdom. And so what that means in life is, okay, maybe I don’t have to be the person who’s like working, you know, 16 hours a day, but what do I have to offer? I have experience, I have wisdom that the younger folks around me don’t have. And to the extent that you can pivot and see yourself as a sharer of wisdom, and to start on that road of not accumulating, but starting to de accumulate. At this stage, you’re not ready to give away your worldly possessions, but you’re ready to give away your wisdom, your experience, to help raise others up than trying to climb the ladder yourself. Um, people who can do that suddenly find more meaning in life.

David DeSteno: [00:42:51] And it’s funny, you know, I was saying before the the curve of happiness is like you, it starts going up again in the 60s and then keeps going up until the 80s until unless you start to hit really, really serious health issues. And what happens is people again, are looking toward what brings them happiness, which is helping others, sharing experiences, positive emotional experiences with others. And so the idea behind Vanaprastha that Hinduism has figured out was, if you can make that pivot earlier, if you can make that pivot in your 50s, you’re not going to have that bottom out in happiness. And in some ways, that’s what contemplating death does. You know, now you’re not waiting till you’re like 65, 70 where you’re really feeling it. It’s on death’s door. If you start contemplating in your 50s, you can reorient your values earlier in life. And so I think that’s where some of the wisdom comes around. These practices of life does have its seasons. You know, in, in, in America, the season now is keep working till you die. Because who knows if there’s going to be Social Security or enough money or anything for you and your value is economically determined. But if we can change that, I think our happiness as a society will actually increase.

Jonathan Fields: [00:44:07] But but let’s not gloss over that, though, because what you just shared is this is really practical and it’s on a lot of people’s minds right now. A lot of people are in that season of life where they’re like, I would love they’re listening along, they’re watching us have a conversation. This all makes sense. And they’re like, well, yeah, I would love to actually like move into that season. And yet I’m not where I need to be. I’m worried that the health system won’t be here, that Social Security won’t be here, that all these things. And I don’t ever I, I would love to kick back. I would love to not actually have to work as hard as I’ve been working, but from a practical standpoint, they’re looking at their lives and saying, I don’t see when this is going to be available to me. Like, I feel like I’m going to have to keep my head down and keep in this building phase and working phase and accumulating phase indefinitely, maybe into my 70s, maybe longer. When do I get like, or maybe, maybe the question I’m asking is if, if you’re that person, right, and you’re listening to this, nodding along saying, this sounds awesome, I wish I could experience this. And yes, if I can accelerate that and do it younger, I would love to be able to do that. The practical realities of my life right now are I don’t see a way to do that now. Maybe you’re in your 50s, and I don’t see a way for me to do that for the next ten, 20 years. Are there practices or rituals even given that that maybe I can dip into now, that would at least let me taste that a little bit?

David DeSteno: [00:45:34] Yeah. I mean, this is this is a long standing debate in some senses is is the spiritual life a luxury life? Right? That is in some sense that you have to have your material needs met before you can focus on this. And that’s why, you know, many people went to monasteries traditionally because that’s where they had.

Jonathan Fields: [00:45:53] Just become an ascetic.

David DeSteno: [00:45:54] Become an ascetic because. And you went around with a begging bowl, right? Because that that’s where you had the ability to do this. And I completely agree with what you’re saying. Many people, because of the way society is structured and, and incentivized, don’t have a way to do that. And you and I don’t have a way to change that by flipping a switch. If you can engage in that element of service with other people. Right. Service has been shown to be one of the biggest predictors of happiness. People. People completely mispredict how much it’s going to make them happier. You know, one of the things that data show is we often don’t reach out to I don’t mean service like volunteer in a soup kitchen. I mean, like to friends or other people who are facing issues. We often don’t reach out to them because we think they’re not going to want the help, or it’s going to make it feel weird, or I don’t know what to say. But the data show on these studies that when people are assigned basically to go and do this as part of an experimental protocol, not only are the people who they engage, who they give service to happy, but the givers are also happier. And so I would say to people, whatever stage of life you’re at or in your if you’re in midlife and having these issues and you feel like I’m trapped, how do I find some of that peace or taste some of that peace? Finding an opportunity for service is a way to do it because all the data show it’s good.

David DeSteno: [00:47:23] Now, the one thing about services you might be saying, sure, Dave, again, that’s easy for you to say. I don’t have the luxury to do this. I’m always feeling stressed or I don’t have time. You have to find a balance between inner life and outer life. And so what I’m telling you about service is kind of outer life. Do this in the world. But the way to be able to do that is to carve out time for yourself, for quiet meditation, quiet prayer. If you’re a person of faith, these are the things that recharge your inner life, that help you sit with the stress, the anxiety, the anger, the frustration. To sit with it, to place it aside so that you can then go into the world and be productive in helping others and not be swallowed up by that anger and that frustration. And so finding a practice of contemplation that allows you to have that renewal is what allows you to feel like you can go into the world and engage in that service. And that brings people more meaning than they expect. And it may not make it easier to pay your bills. It may not make it easier to meet some of the challenges you’re facing, but it will give you a taste of of sharing that wisdom that that Vanaprastha emphasized.

Jonathan Fields: [00:48:45] Yeah, I love that. And also this notion that, um, it doesn’t have to be a grand gesture, you know, like we, I think sometimes we get caught in that trap of thinking if it’s not big, if it’s not like it doesn’t really move the needle, it’s not worth it for them and it’s not worth it for me. I’m not going to get the feeling I want. It’s not going to make a difference for them. And what you’re offering here is really, it sounds like it’s like it’s going to be the tiniest little thing. This is literally built into most faith based systems. You know, you’re, you’re part of a community and you show up on a regular basis and in the tiniest little ways. There are always opportunities to offer a little bit of yourself, even in the simplest way, whether it’s physical labor, whether it’s intellectual like what or emotional support. Whatever it may be. It may be just showing up there for people who are struggling just to be a person in a room next to them. And, and, you know, I think a lot of this conversation is circling back to this notion of like, okay, so these things have been built into these systems that are, that derive from religion, often for thousands of years. We’re walking away from those institutions and structures. But what you’re sharing is that there’s a lot of science showing. A lot of the individual rituals and practices have standalone value, whether you do or don’t believe in God. So how can we recreate those in our own lives?

David DeSteno: [00:50:05] Exactly. And like you’re talking about giving, you know, we all tend to think about, oh, my church, my rabbi, my priest, my imam wants me to give. And it’s great to help other people. But what people don’t realize is the givers help just as much as the giving. And you know, that sounds like pie in the sky stuff, but look, I’m a scientist. We do these experiments. I can point you to the papers where they randomly select people like Jonathan, who say, I want to be in a study, and they say, okay, Jonathan, here’s $50 today. You can either spend it on yourself, some people or other people today, you have to spend it on other people. Guess who’s happier? At the end of the day? The people who spend it on other people. Um, and so there’s data to back this up and you’re hitting on a real important point there. These practices are baked into these faiths to help us and to help the other people around us. Um, the question of course, is how much can we extract without losing benefits, right. Or without having those techniques warped? And so I’ll give you one example that worries me. You know, a lot of, um, indigenous faiths use psychedelic psilocybin or ayahuasca. Um, now you can go do psilocybin or ayahuasca with your Brooklyn hipster friend in an apartment, right? Um, a lot of those trips. Not a lot. 25% of them, on average, are bad trips. 8% of them can be so bad that people need mental health treatment afterward. Why is that? Well, it’s because we are removing these chemicals from the guardrails that are usually around them that the shamans use to kind of put you in the right state to have this happen.

David DeSteno: [00:51:54] When I was talking to Michael Pollan, he said to me, you know, when I tried psilocybin, the one thing that I realized is you have to feel supremely safe when you take it. Because when that moment of ego dissolution comes, it can be beautiful or it can be terrifying. Right. And then you’ll see these visions and some of them can be very disturbing. You need someone to help you reintegrate and understand what they mean. And even at Johns Hopkins that is doing some of the greatest research on psychedelics right now. They have a. They don’t call him a shaman, but they have a person who is there with you while you go on the trip. Who is there for you to reach out to if things get scary? Who is there to help you make sense of what happened? It’s kind of like a modern day shaman, and that’s how they ensure things are going well. And so the danger when we extract some of these practices from their original containers is that maybe they don’t work as well, or maybe there’s even some danger to it. I mean, if you think about religion as a as a spiritual technology, something that moves hearts and minds, it can move it for good or it can move it for bad. We’ve all seen religion harnessed to, you know, justify lots of acts of violence. And so I think we have to be careful about how we extract things.

Jonathan Fields: [00:53:13] Yeah, I so agree with that. And, and you referenced this very early in our conversation. There’s a risk of being too reductionist also and saying, yes, okay, so now we have a whole bunch of research. Your lab is doing a bunch of research on when we split some of these practices and rituals out and just do them in a, like a, a dissociated way from the religion. Um, it has certain benefits. We can see it, we can measure it, we can report on it. It’s real. And yet at the same time, you know, my sense is it’s not just about the, the larger construct, um, being a way to help potentially ameliorate the risk of harm. But also, I don’t want to just say that these are that there isn’t necessarily a, a bigger something going on, a mystical element of some of these. And of course, this is nothing that we can ever prove or disprove. As you shared earlier, we can’t actually measure the existence of a negative, you know, so but you know, and people will be following along this conversation saying, yes, I’ve tried all these things. It makes a difference. And I’ve also done this as part of like a faith based tradition. And it’s profoundly different when it’s when, when I participate in that context, because I believe there’s something bigger happening beyond the ritual or the practice itself.

David DeSteno: [00:54:35] No, I think I think that’s right. And kind of my mission is to actually show that there is a wisdom to a lot of these practices that we can study scientifically, but in no way to suggest that those higher elements aren’t there. You know, the psychologist William James is the father of modern psychology. He studied religious experience a lot. And ultimately the people asked him, you know, do you believe there’s something greater? He struggled with that. But then he came down to this notion of of what he called an overbelief. And the Overbelief logical argument goes like this. If there’s something that I can do for which there is no hardcore data. And I’m paraphrasing here. Um, but it feels true intuitively and it leads to better positive outcomes then it’s logical to believe in it and to follow it. What’s the harm? And so, you know, for me that that rings true. It is we don’t know if God exists. If God exists, I’m sure it’s a it’s in a form that none of us can conceive of. And there’s certainly no empirical test that we can apply to it if it’s not causing harm. And I know religion, the institutions of religion have caused harm to people. I’m not in no way diminishing that. But in general, the data suggests that it’s good if you’re having those amazing transcendent experiences and you’re feeling this connection to something else and it’s enriching your life. I think the notion that you have to logically reject it because there’s no empirical data to support it as misguided, you know? I mean, even Richard Dawkins, the world’s most famous atheist, will say, if push comes to shove, he can’t entirely 100% be sure that God doesn’t exist. So why are we like, having these debates? You know, why are we telling people God must exist or you’re a fool if you think he does. You know, I think be open to what we don’t understand. And as long as it’s rewarding and enriches your life, that’s a good thing.

Jonathan Fields: [00:56:49] Yeah, I don’t disagree there. So people are following along. They’re kind of nodding along. They’re like, this sounds really interesting. Okay, so where do I go from here? Where do I take all of these insights? And it seems like, and you’ve written and spoken about this, there are a couple of different directions we could go. Like one, um, reclaiming a sense of faith or returning to it if it’s been a part of your practice and centering a lot of these practices. We’ve been talking about the second, um, letting go of faith, but maybe holding on to the rituals and practices that we’ve been talking about because they have their own standalone value. And this, this other interesting third option, which is like, what if we actually explored? What would it look like to create a new, a different spiritual path or framework that just resonates with us?

David DeSteno: [00:57:34] The first two are relatively easy, and I know many people who have, who have, who have done both. It’s actually interesting right now, there’s actually a resurgence among young men. I’m sure your listeners have heard about the crisis of meaning young men are facing, certainly not the majority, but there is a sizable minority of young men who are turning back toward traditional faith, especially Christianity, to try and find meaning. Um, the third one has been tried lots of times, um, but often without any spiritual elements. So people will come together and they’ll try and agree on a certain set of, of principles and virtuous outcomes and things, but those tend to fall apart because they don’t have the rituals there that bind them together. And the way that we’re talking about, whether it’s things like synchrony, cultivating gratitude, working toward empathy. They don’t have those things that reinforce group bonds. And so the question for us really is, can we take some of these practices and not just kind of ethical or philosophical beliefs and create new rituals around them? And I haven’t seen that ever be tried. Um, but I think there’s a chance that it could work. The hardest part again, though, is getting people to agree on what those will be, right? You know, and that’s where the idea of kind of social consensus and sacrifice comes in. That it’s not just your way or the highway, right. That you have to find a community. I mean, we all those of us who have been parts of religious communities recognize It’s like we don’t always agree with everything, right? But you have to find meaning in enough of it that that it you want to continue with it. And I think that’s, that’s the trick. If you’re not born into a faith or if you’re not converting to a faith that’s there, but trying to create one, how do you get that committee to agree on what it is?

Jonathan Fields: [00:59:32] Yeah. And it could I could just see that be feeling so contrived so easily.

David DeSteno: [00:59:37] It’s interesting. I was I was talking to a scholar who studies new religious movements and she shocked me. She said, you know, every year there’s, there’s in the U.S. and Canada, there’s probably 50 to 100 new religious movements that start now. You know, that that could be someone who’s saying, I’ve heard the Word of God and follow me. Right? And they’re typically small, right? And most of them are like flashes in the pan and fade away. The ones that stick are the ones that to people’s needs in the current moment. So the question, where is that going to be? And there are a lot of reasons people are leaving traditional faiths, but one is, I think, because they’re not offering that as much, people are yearning to fill that kind of proverbial God shaped hole in their heart. They want to feel that connection to something bigger, and they’re going to look for different ways to do that. And so, you know, the question is, are our current traditions going to adapt to give them that, or are they going to be replaced by newer things?

Jonathan Fields: [01:00:38] Mhm. That is the question.

David DeSteno: [01:00:41] Yeah.

Jonathan Fields: [01:00:41] Feels like a good place for us to come full circle as well. So in this container of Good Life Project., if I offer up the phrase to live a good life, what comes up?

David DeSteno: [01:00:49] I think to live a good life is to make life better for other people. And I know it sounds trite, but I, you know, for the longest time, I never appreciated the value of that. And maybe it’s because I’m in my sharing wisdom phase of life where I’ve realized it’s not about me and I only have a certain number of years left. Um, and from the work that I do, which basically gives me data that shows me what I’m saying is borne out. It means making life better for other people, not at not at the total cost of yourself. It doesn’t mean you have to give away everything you own, but it means remember that everybody is facing their own difficulties and hardships. And if you can do anything to help, even at a small scale, at the end of your life, when you look back, you’ll be the happier for it.

Jonathan Fields: [01:01:45] Mm. Thank you. Hey, before you leave, be sure to tune in next week for our conversation with Linda Clemons about how your body is speaking for you before you ever open your mouth. Be sure to follow Good Life Project wherever you get your podcasts so you don’t miss any upcoming episodes. This episode of Good Life Project was produced by executive producers Lindsay Fox and me, Jonathan Fields. Editing help by, Alejandro Ramirez, and Troy Young. Kris Carter crafted our theme music. And of course, if you haven’t already done so, please go ahead and follow Good Life Project wherever you get your podcasts. If you found this conversation interesting or valuable and inspiring, chances are you did because you’re still here. Do me a personal favor. A seven-second favor and share it with just one person. If you want to share it with more, hey, that’s awesome, but just one person even then, invite them to talk with you about what you both discovered to reconnect and explore ideas that really matter. Because that’s how we all come alive together. Until next time. I’m Jonathan Fields signing off for Good Life Project.

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