Episode
The Psychology Of Feeling Loved | Dr Sonja Lyubomirsky
- Published
- May 20, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 3811
- Processing state
not_requested- Canonical source
- https://findingmastery.com/podcasts/sonja-lyubomirsky
Actions
POST https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/finding-mastery-with-dr-michael-gervais-4955/episodes/the-psychology-of-feeling-loved-dr-sonja-lyubomirsky/transcription-requests
Idempotently request low-priority transcript generation for this episode.GET https://stenobird.com/podcast/finding-mastery-with-dr-michael-gervais-4955/the-psychology-of-feeling-loved-dr-sonja-lyubomirsky.md
Read the agent-friendly Markdown representation of this episode resource.
Summary
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 multiplicity. Along the way, they explore why most of us are listening to respond instead of listening to learn, the three words people actually want to hear (hint: it’s not I love you ), and why ‘tell me more’ might be one of the most loving phrases in the English language. Sonja shares her foggy glass metaphor for why being known is the prerequisite to being loved, the Michelangelo effect, and a striking line the Dalai Lama once said to her about how we hold each other. The conversation also gets honest about the harder edges. Bridging political divides at the dinner table. Staying curious about a…