
Dr. Sonja Lyubomirsky discusses the psychology of feeling loved and how it can be cultivated through conversation and mindset shifts.
Why is it that so many of us are loved... and yet don’t actually feel loved? Dr. Sonja Lyubomirsky is a Professor of Psychology at UC Riverside and one of the world’s leading researchers on happiness. Her newest book, How to Feel Loved , co-authored with relationship scientist Harry Reis, lands at a strange moment: a time when more people than ever say they are connected, and more people than ever say they don’t actually feel it. In this conversation with Dr. Michael Gervais, Sonja offers a quietly radical reframe. After 36 years of studying what makes a life happy, she has come to believe the answer lies in this: Feeling loved. And here is where it gets interesting. Sonja’s research is showing that feeling loved is not something we have to wait for. It’s something we can help create. Most of us, when we sense the absence, default to one of two strategies. We try to be more lovable. Or we try to change the person on the other side. Sonja argues that neither one actually works. What changes a relationship is changing the conversation. She walks Mike through the five mindsets at the heart of the book: the sharing mindset, listening to learn, radical curiosity, open heart, and…
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